THE
OXFORD
E N C Y C L O P E D I A
OF
A R C H A E O L O G Y IN T H E N E A R E A S T
EDITORS
William G. Dever
Ca...
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THE
OXFORD
E N C Y C L O P E D I A
OF
A R C H A E O L O G Y IN T H E N E A R E A S T
EDITORS
William G. Dever
Carol L. Meyers
Dennis Pardee
James D . M u h l y
James A. Sauer
CONSULTING
EDITOR
Paul Corby Finney
ASSISTANT
EDITOR
J o h n S. J o r g e n s e n
ASOR
P i e r r e M . Bikai
CONSULTANTS
Seymour Gitin
Stuart Swiny
ADVISERS
David E. A u n e
Ofer Bar-Yosef
Ghazi Bisheh
Annie Caubet
Trude Dothan
Oleg Grabar
William D . Kingery Ernst Pernicka
Siegfried M i t t m a n n D o n a l d B. Redford
Javier T e i x i d o r
Giorgio Buccellati William W . Hallo P . R . S. M o o r e y
David Stronach
Richard L . Zettler
THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE NEAR EAST PREPARED U N D E R T H E AUSPICES OF
THE
A M E R I C A N S C H O O L S OF O R I E N T A L R E S E A R C H
Eric M. Meyers E D I T O R IN
CHIEF
VOLUME 1
New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1997
Oxford University Press Oxford Athens Bombay Dar es Salaam Karachi
New York
Auckland
Bangkok
Bogota
Buenos Aires
Calcutta
Cape T o w n
Delhi
Florence
Kuala Lumpur Mexico City
Nairobi
Taipei
Hong K o n g
Madras
Madrid
Paris
Tokyo
Istanbul
Melbourne
Singapore
Toronto
and associated companies in Berlin
Ibadan
Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, N e w York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford encyclopedia of archaeology in the Near East / prepared under die auspices of the American Schools of Oriental Research; Eric M . Meyers, editor in chief, p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.
) and index.
1. Middle East—Antiquities—Encyclopedias. 2. Africa, North—Antiquities— Encyclopedias. I, Meyers, Eric M . II. American Schools of Oriental Research. DS56.09
1996
96-17152
939'4—dc20
CIP
ISBN 0-19-506512-3 (set) ISBN 0-19-511215-6 (vol. 1) Many photographs and line drawings used herein were supplied by contributors to the work. Others were drawn from the archives of the American Schools of Oriental Research, from commercial photographic archives, and from the holdings of major musettms and cultural
institutions.
The publisher has made every effort to ascertain that necessary permissions to reprint materials have been secured. Sources of all photographs and line drawings are given in the captions to illustrations. EDITORIAL AND PRODUCTION
STAFF
COMMISSIONING EDITOR: Elizabeth Maguire DEVELOPMENT EDITOR: Mark D . Cummings M A N A G I N G E D I T O R : Jeffrey P. Edelstein ASSISTANT PROJECT EDITOR: Paul Arthur COPYEDITORS AND PROOFREADERS: Roberta Maltese, Sandra Buch, Karen Fraley, Donald Spanel, Leslie Watkins BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND TECHNICAL RESEARCHERS: Stephen Goranson, John S. Jorgenscn, Eric C. Lapp, Philomena Mariani INDEXER: Cynthia Crippen, A E I O U , Inc. CARTOGRAPHER: Philip Schwartzberg, Meridian Mapping MANUFACTURING CONTROLLER: Michelle Lcvesque BOOK DESIGNER: Joan Greenfield Printing (last digit): 9
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Editorial Board vol. 1 p. vii 3
Preface ix
Abbreviations XV
THE
OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF
A R C H A E O L O G Y IN T H E NEAR E A S T
Appendix i: Egyptian Aramaic Texts vol. 5, p . 393 Appendix 2: Chronologies 411
Appendix 3: Maps 417
Directory of Contributors 431
Synoptic Outline of Contents 45i
Index 461
E D I T O R I A L BOARD
E D I T O R IN
Ofer B a r - Y o s e f
CHIEF
Eric M . M e y e r s Professor of Religion and Archaeology,
Duke
University
McCurdy
Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology,
Harvard
University
Peabody
Museum,
G h a z i Bisheh EDITORS
Director-General,
Department
of Antiquities
of Jordan
William G . D e v e r Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology
and Anthropology,
University
Giorgio Buccellati
of
Professor Emeritus
Arizona
California,
Carol L. Meyers
of the Ancient Near East and of History,
University
of
Los Angeles
Annie Caubet
Professor of Biblical Studies and Archaeology,
Duke
University Keeper, Departemenl
des Antiquitis
Orientates, Musee du Louvre,
Paris
James D . M u h l y Professor of Ancient Histoiy, elect, American
University
School of Classical
of Pennsylvania;
Studies,
and
Trude Dothan
Director-
Eleazar L. Sukenik
Athens
Professor Emerita of Archaeology,
Hebrew
University
of Jerusalem
Dennis Pardee Professor of Northwest
Semitic Philology,
University
Oleg G r a b a r
of Chicago
Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced
James A. Sauer Research Associate, Semitic Museum,
Harvard
Aga Khan Professor Emeritus
University
of Islamic Art, Harvard
Study;
and
University
William W . Hallo CONSULTING
EDITOR
William M. Laffan Professor of Assyriology
and Babylonian
and Curator, Babylonian
University
Collection,
Yale
Literature,
Paul Corby Finney Associate Professor of Histoiy St.
and History of Art, University
of
William D . K i n g e r y
Missouri,
Professor of Anthropology
Louis
Systems, ASSISTANT
EDITOR
Duke
ASOR
Instructor, Department
of
of Technology and
Production
Eberhard-Karls-Universitdt
Tubingen
Religion,
P . R. S. M o o r e y Keeper of Antiquities,
CONSULTANTS
Ashmolean
Museum,
University of Oxford
Senior Researcher in Analytical
Geochemistry
and Archaeometry,
Planck-Institut
fur Kernphysik,
Heidelberg; and Professor of
Geochemistry,
Universitdt
E r n s t Pernicka
Pierre M . Bikai Center of Oriental Research,
Amman
S e y m o u r Gitin Dorot Director and Professor of Archaeology, Archaeological
and Archaeology Arizona
Professor of Biblical Archaeology,
and Graduate
University
Director, American
of
Siegfried M i t t m a n n
J o h n S. J o r g e n s e n Doctoral Candidate
University
Research,
W. F. Albright Institute
Heidelberg
D o n a l d B. Redford
of
Jerusalem
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director, Akhenaten
S t u a r t Swiny
Project, University
Past Director, Cyprus American Archaeological
Research
Max-
Analytical
Institute,
Temple
of Toronto
David Stronach
Nicosia Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, ADVISERS
Javier T e i x i d o r
David E. A u n e Professor of New Testament
University of California,
Professor of Semitic Studies, and Christian
Origins, Loyola
College de France
University,
R i c h a r d L . Zettler
Chicago
Associate Professor of Anthropology,
vii
University of
Pemnylvania
Berkeley
PREFACE
T h e genesis of this w o r k was in 1988 w h e n t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A S O R ) m o v e d its h e a d q u a r t e r s from Philadelphia t o t h e c a m p u s of t h e J o h n s H o p k i n s University i n Baltimore. A s first vice p r e s i d e n t for publications I was e n c o u r a g e d by t h e A S O R B o a r d of T r u s t e e s to establish a closer working relationship w i t h the J o h n s H o p k i n s University P r e s s . I n t h a t context I d e v e l o p e d a project entitled The ASOR Handbook of Biblical Archaeology, w h i c h w a s to b e a n authoritative o n e - v o l u m e reference w o r k o n all aspects of t h e material culture of t h e lands of t h e Bible in antiquity. T h e geographical region t o b e c o v e r e d was Syria-Palestine, or t h e m o d e r n territories of Israel, J o r d a n , Syria, a n d L e b a n o n . T h e chronological r a n g e w a s to h a v e b e e n t h e Early B r o n z e A g e to the Byzantine p e r i o d . T h e idea w a s t o m a k e available a n d easily accessible t h e results of m o d e r n archaeological scholarship to readers interested in t h e ancient N e a r E a s t a n d b i b lical studies. A m a j o r motivating factor w a s t h e a b s e n c e of s u c h a w o r k in t h e existing literature. T h e m o d e l for t h e A S O R h a n d b o o k was a G e r m a n classic in t h e field, K u r t Galling's Biblisches Reallexikon, largely unavailable to English readers a n d l o n g ago o u t of p r i n t . F r o m t h e outset, t h e A S O R h a n d b o o k w a s to have e n d e a v o r e d to b r i n g t o g e t h e r t h e results of archaeological fieldwork, e p i g r a p h y , a n d literary-historical studies. Archaeological fieldwork w a s also u n d e r s t o o d as s o m e t h i n g m o r e t h a n site reports. R a t h e r , it was viewed as a m e a n s of securing data t h a t w o u l d lead to a better u n d e r s t a n d i n g of aspects of everyday life s u c h as agriculture, family life, m e d i c i n e a n d p u b l i c health, clothing, diet, a n d a r c h i t e c t u r e ; it w a s a w a y of e x a m i n i n g h o w different sorts of material culture s h a p e d a n d w e r e s h a p e d by t h e e n v i r o n m e n t . Similarly, a major c o n c e r n was to have b e e n t h e e c o n o m y of the p e o p l e s of t h e L e v a n t ; their industries, such as t h e p r o d u c t i o n of agricultural c o m m o d i t i e s , glassmaking, shipbuilding, metallurgy, a n d so forth, were to b e considered. T h e m o r e familiar q u e s t to d e t e r m i n e t h e social world as well as t h e political setting of t h e p e o p l e s a n d cultures of t h e ancient N e a r East r e m a i n e d a basic a i m from t h e outset. I n addition, t r u e to t h e tradition of W . F . A l b r i g h t — p r e e m i n e n t archaeologist a n d orientalist, f o r m e r professor of N e a r E a s t e r n Studies at t h e J o h n s H o p k i n s University a n d long-term director of A S O R ' s Jerusalem s c h o o l — t h e h a n d b o o k would deal w i t h t h e full range of written materials t h a t h a v e survived f r o m Syria-Palestine, from t h e origins of alphabetic writing to t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of elaborate scribal practices a n d varied literatures. Finally, the p r o j e c t w o u l d e m b r a c e t h e challenge of explaining archaeological t e c h n i q u e s / t h e o r y , m e t h o d s , a n d practice including all m a t t e r s p e r t a i n i n g to science a n d archaeology. It s o o n b e c a m e a p p a r e n t t o m e a n d m y c o u n t e r p a r t s at t h e J o h n s H o p k i n s University Press t h a t s u c h a n u n d e r t a k i n g was far t o o ambitious for A S O R a n d H o p k i n s a n d t h a t w h a t I envisioned fell squarely into t h e area of encyclopedic reference works. It was t h e n , in seeking a publisher with a strong reference d e p a r t m e n t , t h a t A S O R a n d Oxford U n i versity P r e s s c a m e together. After a few consultations with m e m b e r s of t h e reference d e p a r t m e n t it b e c a m e a b u n dantly clear t h a t t h e r e w e r e m a n y c o n c e p t u a l issues to b e resolved before s u c h a project could c o m m e n c e . T h e first issue to b e considered w a s t h a t of length. After several meetings I w a s c o n v i n c e d t h a t t h e 'only w a y t h a t t h e wide variety of issues t o b e covered could b e p r o p e r l y a c c o m m o d a t e d was t h r o u g h a m u l t i v o l u m e a p p r o a c h . T h e idea of bringing texts
ix
X
PREFACE into dialogue with archaeological realia was appealing t o all of u s . N o less i m p o r t a n t w a s the h o p e that this project w o u l d b r i n g scholars from all countries of the region into dialogue with o n e another for t h e first time. G i v e n t h e reality, at t h a t t i m e , of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which separated Israel from t h e rest of t h e A r a b world, this w a s to b e o n e of t h e greatest challenges b u t o n e that A S O R , with its historic position of neutrality in political matters a n d with research centers i n b o t h worlds, a n d Oxford University Press were p a r ticularly capable of meeting. In organizing t h e editorial b o a r d I w a s mindful of all of these c o n c e r n s . T h e inclusion of J a m e s A. Sauer, with his long experience in J o r d a n a n d the rest of t h e A r a b world a n d knowledge of the sites there, w a s i n t e n d e d to ensure t h e participation of scholars from those countries w h e r e A m e r i c a n s have h a d only limited experience a n d even less famil iarity with t h e data u n c o v e r e d . T h e c o m b i n a t i o n of William G . D e v e r ' s extensive field experience in Israel with m y o w n work there as well as m a t of C a r o l M e y e r s w a s designed to attract o u r distinguished Israeli colleagues. J a m e s M u h l y ' s expertise i n several i m p o r t a n t a r e a s — a n c i e n t history, the archaeology of the Aegean, a n d aspects of scientific a p p r o a c h e s to t h e discipline—was d e e m e d valuable to the project. D e n n i s P a r d e e s e e m e d u n i q u e l y qualified to h a n d l e matters c o n c e r n i n g ancient N e a r E a s t e r n languages a n d literatures, especially Semitics, linguistics, a n d epigraphy. Carol M e y e r s ' s participation w a s enlisted in addition to h e r work in Israel, for h e r particular interest i n m e t h o d o l o g y , theory, a n d social science aspects of t h e archaeological enterprise. M y o w n focus o n t h e classical periods a n d on t h e history of t h e discipline were considered beneficial a n d sufficient to guide u s t h r o u g h those areas. W h e n t h e editorial b o a r d first m e t , w e were of course aware t h a t w o r k w a s p r o c e e d i n g o n t h e Israel Exploration Society's New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land; indeed, those of us w h o h a d c o n t r i b u t e d to t h e society's previous encyclopedia, published i n English in 1975-1978, h a d b e e n asked to revise a n d u p d a t e o u r articles. T h e anticipated publication of their project was hardly a deterrent t o u s in o u r p l a n n i n g b e c a u s e theirs was to b e strictly a n encyclopedia of sites, virtually all of w h i c h a r e in Israel. A s the d e v e l o p m e n t of o u r table of c o n t e n t s progressed, we learned t h a t a n o t h e r m u l t i v o l u m e work, titled Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, was being p l a n n e d . A l t h o u g h c o m p r e hensive in its i n t e n d e d coverage of the region a n d its ancient cultures, t h e w o r k w a s t o b e a collection of a b o u t t w o h u n d r e d lengthy a n d s o m e w h a t idiosyncratic topical essays, thematically organized, w h i c h w o u l d m a k e it far less useful as a reference w o r k t h a n a s t a n d a r d encyclopedia, with its m o r e specific, alphabetically a r r a n g e d articles. B o t h works eventually were published, t h e f o r m e r in 1993 (English edition) a n d t h e latter in 1995. As t h e editorial t e a m b e g a n t h e serious work of laying o u t a general plan, it b e c a m e clear t h a t w e did n o t w a n t to limit o u r geographical locations to t h e L e v a n t . R a t h e r , w e w e r e interested in t h e archaeology of t h e entire N e a r East, from t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n to I r a n , from Anatolia to t h e A r a b i a n Peninsula; w e also w a n t e d to include E g y p t , C y p r u s , a n d p a r t s of N o r t h a n d East Africa. Because of A S O R ' s particular role in t h e archaeology of C y p r u s there was hardly any a r g u m e n t there. W h a t soon b e c a m e a very real p r o b l e m for all of us was t h e classical world a n d t h e question of sites relating to t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t . I n thinking a b o u t t h e Hellenistic world or t h e R o m a n E m p i r e it b e c a m e very difficult to limit o u r scope to the territories associated with t h e N e a r East. W h a t w o u l d w e d o with R o m e o r A t h e n s , the Italian Peninsula a n d Greece? If we w o u l d deal only with sites relating t o t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t world h o w w o u l d t h a t section stand u p vis-a-vis t h e o t h e r c o n c e p tual categories in t h e encyclopedia? In t h e e n d , w e opted for t h e geographical principle a n d a d d e d places s u c h as M a l t a a n d Sardinia where Semitic culture h a d b e e n strong since antiquity, t h e A e g e a n w o r l d , a n d N o r t h Africa as far as M o r o c c o . Anatolia w o u l d b e o u r n o r t h e r n b o u n d a r y , I r a n o u r eastern b o u n d a r y , a n d Ethiopia a n d t h e A r a b i a n Peninsula o u r s o u t h e r n limits. I n a w a y w e a d o p t e d Albright's inclusive geographical view of t h e ancient N e a r East a n d d e c i d e d t o e m p l o y a b r o a d e r chronological r a n g e as well. Since so m u c h i m p o r t a n t n e w a r c h a e o -
PREFACE logical w o r k is b e i n g d o n e in periods prior t o t h e B r o n z e A g e , w e felt t h a t any n e w ar chaeological reference w o r k could n o t fail to treat t h e n e w e s t discoveries i n prehistory. A t t h e o t h e r e n d of the chronological s p e c t r u m it s e e m e d less a n d less acceptable to e n d our studies in t h e Byzantine period, especially given t h e recent u p s u r g e of interest a n d discoveries in t h e field of Islamic archaeology. I n t h e e n d w e d e c i d e d to e x t e n d o u r cov erage t h r o u g h t h e C r u s a d e s while allowing for individual authors to discuss s o m e sites a n d s o m e aspects of material culture of even later periods w h e r e a p p r o p r i a t e . It should b e n o t e d , h o w e v e r , t h a t m a n y subjects a n d sites d o n o t fall easily into t h e categories or p a r a m e t e r s of t h e project. I n s o m e regions or countries certain p e r i o d s of h u m a n history simply h a v e n o t received as m u c h attention as o t h e r s . Islamic archaeology is stronger, as m i g h t b e e x p e c t e d , in t h e A r a b world. I r o n A g e archaeology is s t r o n g e r i n Israel b e c a u s e of interest i n t h e Bible a n d t h e ancient k i n g d o m of Israel. M o r e extensive digging i n Israel, for e x a m p l e , h a s resulted in t h e fact t h a t m o r e is k n o w n a b o u t its antiquity titan a b o u t m o s t o t h e r a n c i e n t societies. C o r r e s p o n d i n g l y , t h e relatively fewer excavations in Arabia a n d E a s t Africa a n d t h e c u r r e n t political situation i n those areas m e a n s t h a t o u r knowledge of their a n c i e n t cultures is m o r e limited. O u r coverage of individual countries t h u s varies considerably. F o r all areas w e have tried to engage scholars with firsthand k n o w l e d g e of the site, region, o r t o p i c to p r e s e n t available data w i t h the idea of b e i n g as c u r r e n t a n d a c c u r a t e as possible. N e e d l e s s to say w e h a v e b e e n m o r e successful i n s o m e cases t h a n in others. G i v e n t h e major reconceptualization of t h e project after o u r initial meetings with t h e O x f o r d University P r e s s reference editors, it w a s impossible for u s t o title o u r project a n y t h i n g b u t w h a t w e in t r u t h h a d b e c o m e , a n encyclopedia of N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology. W h i l e s o m e of u s h a d s o m e nostalgic feelings for titles such as Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Biblical World or s o m e variant of that, in t h e e n d we w e r e all m o r e comfortable with t h e m o r e descriptive, geographical n o m e n c l a t u r e , w h i c h w e also believed w a s m o r e a p p r o p r i a t e , less political, a n d m o r e inclusive: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East. W i t h o u r larger geographical a n d chronological s c o p e t h e r e was n o disposition or r e a s o n w h a t e v e r t o u s e t h e t e r m Syro-Palestinian i n the title of w h a t w a s t o b e a m u l tivolume w o r k . A l t h o u g h Syria-Palestine remains very m u c h at t h e core of these v o l u m e s , it is largely t h e result of t h e fact t h a t t h e r e has b e e n m o r e historic interest, a n d c o n s e quently, m o r e fieldwork in t h a t area. T h e cultures of b o t h ancient E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a , w h i c h h a v e held s u c h places of p r i d e in W e s t e r n consciousness since t h e b e g i n n i n g of the n i n e t e e n t h century, especially after t h e d e c i p h e r m e n t of hieroglyphics a n d c u n e i f o r m (see " H i s t o r y of t h e F i e l d , " over view article), p r e s e n t e d u s with special p r o b l e m s as w e p l a n n e d o u r coverage. B o t h cultures h a v e e n o r m o u s literatures a n d c o m p l e x histories t h a t c a n n o t b e comprehensively p r e s e n t e d e v e n in a five-volume work s u c h as this encyclopedia, w h i c h includes so m a n y individual site entries. N o n e t h e l e s s , w e h a v e a i m e d to p r o v i d e sufficient coverage of these cultures so t h a t t h e interested s t u d e n t o r scholar can u s e o u r entries a n d their a c c o m p a n y i n g bibliographies as suitable entry p o i n t s for further study. Similarly, given t h e limited access of W e s t e r n e r s , especially English speakers, to I r a q a n d Iran, w e h a v e only b e e n able to highlight t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t sites t h e r e , a l t h o u g h w e h a v e also i n c l u d e d b r o a d e r entries on all t h e significant historical peoples a n d cultures i n those countries. I n p o i n t i n g o u t s o m e of t h e p r o b l e m s e n c o u n t e r e d in dealing w i t h different ancient cultures, I m u s t also m e n t i o n o t h e r factors t h a t have led to w h a t m i g h t a p p e a r to b e a n u n e v e n n e s s in t h e a m o u n t of coverage a n d n a t u r e of the material p r e s e n t e d for the various regions a n d cultures covered. M a n y subfields h a v e their o w n a u d i e n c e s , a n d individual scholars in t h o s e fields d o n o t necessarily k n o w t h e w o r k of o t h e r scholars engaged in similar projects i n a n e a r b y c o u n t r y . Egyptologists, for e x a m p l e , focus closely o n their o w n subject. T h a t is n o t to say t h a t E g y p t i a n archaeologists are u n i n f o r m e d a b o u t neigh b o r i n g cultures or t h a t a specialist i n hieroglyphics is i g n o r a n t of Semitic languages, b u t in g e n e r a l t h e crossover from E g y p t o l o g y to o t h e r fields is limited. Similarly, biblical ar-
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PREFACE chaeologists in general are n o t well informed a b o u t t h e larger ancient N e a r E a s t e r n e n v i r o n m e n t , in p a r t because of c o n t e m p o r a r y regional politics b u t p e r h a p s o w i n g m o r e t o the tradition of scholarship t h a t favors t h e Bible over t h e literatures of other N e a r E a s t e r n cultures. M e s o p o t a m i a n archaeologists, especially those working in I r a n or Iraq, are still struggling t o establish chronologies for certain periods; in o t h e r regions such efforts are n o longer essential. It is only very recently that J o r d a n i a n s a n d Israelis h a v e h a d c o m p l e t e access t o each other's published research or enjoyed t h e possibility of visiting e a c h other's sites; despite t h e proximity of o n e area to t h e next there has b e e n very little collaboration a m o n g local scholars in t h e region. I n 1990 n o n e of us h a d a n y inkling t h a t m a n y age-old political barriers that h a d so h i n d e r e d synthetic thinking a b o u t t h e N e a r East region i n t h e past w o u l d c o m e t u m b l i n g d o w n in t h e mid-1990s. T h e s e v o l u m e s d o n o t in a n y sense reflect t h e scholarly fruits or potential benefits t h a t will ultimately e m e r g e as a result of the recent breakthroughs in t h e p e a c e process. I n this c o n n e c t i o n it is i m p o r t a n t t o n o t e also that different countries have different standards a n d laws for archaeological p r e s e r vation a n d for reporting of data t o t h e g o v e r n m e n t antiquities authority. T h e s e variations h a v e perforce affected t h e n a t u r e of the discipline of archaeology as practiced i n individual countries or regions; it is t h e p u r p o s e of n u m e r o u s entries in t h e encyclopedia t o e x a m i n e the implications of this reality (see, for e x a m p l e , " N a t i o n a l i s m a n d A r c h a e o l o g y " ) . O n e of t h e major areas of complexity has b e e n t h e q u e s t i o n of periodization a n d its n o m e n c l a t u r e . A n y serious reader in N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology knows h o w h e a t e d d e b a t e s can b e over matters of chronology a n d period n a m e s . T h o u g h t h e editorial b o a r d consid ered developing its o w n neutral or c o m m o n terminology t h a t m i g h t b e utilized b y all c o n t r i b u t o r s , it ultimately d e c i d e d t o allow t h e traditions of particular scholarly g r o u p s or specializations t o stand. F o r e x a m p l e , t h e s u b p e r i o d s for t h e I r o n A g e u s e d i n C y p r u s a n d in the Aegean reflect t h e longtime involvement a n d continuing influence of classical a r chaeologists. I n general, t h e A r a b world has eschewed certain classifications or designa tions t h a t are c o m m o n in Israel. F o r e x a m p l e , i n t h e A r a b world o n e w o u l d n o t e n c o u n t e r s u c h expressions as First Temple period (a reference to S o l o m o n ' s T e m p l e f r o m its c o n struction in t h e t e n t h century until its destruction in 587/6 BCE) or Israelite period, w h i c h refers t o t h e period of Israelite political a u t o n o m y . F o r obvious r e a s o n s it is m o r e c o m m o n in t h e A r a b world t h a n elsewhere t o designate t h e p e r i o d after t h e t i m e of t h e p r o p h e t M u h a m m a d as t h e Islamic period a n d t o label t h e field that specializes in t h o s e p e r i o d s Islamic archaeology. Similarly, t h e u s e b y s o m e scholars of t h e t e r m Crusader period t o designate t h e nearly t w o centuries of medieval history greatly influenced b y t h e C r u s a d e s d o e s n o t necessarily m e a n t h a t it is a p p r o p r i a t e to u s e s u c h a t e r m for t h e N e a r E a s t as a whole. T h e reader is thus alerted t o s u c h divergences a n d inconsistencies a n d s h o u l d consult the chronological charts i n v o l u m e 5 for assistance in terminology a n d t h e relevant i n d i vidual entries for t h e distinctive chronological t r e a t m e n t s by c o u n t r y , culture, or region. S o m e of t h e disagreements a b o u t n o m e n c l a t u r e , it m u s t b e said, arise o u t of different scholarly trends in t h e c o u n t r y of the researcher rather t h a n of t h e area being studied. S o , for e x a m p l e , t h e British treat t h e transition b e t w e e n t h e Early B r o n z e A g e a n d t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e in their o w n way, referring t o it as the Intermediate Bronze Age. S o m e A m e r i c a n a n d Israeli scholars w o u l d call this p e r i o d Middle Bronze I, others Early Bronze IV. H e n c e the reader is cautioned t h a t w h a t m i g h t b e designated late Early Bronze Age in o n e culture m a y n o t b e so designated in a n o t h e r setting. T h e F r e n c h , w h o s e p r e s e n c e h a s b e e n e s pecially strong in Egypt, N o r t h Africa, Syria, a n d Iraq, h a v e their o w n scholarly traditions in this regard as well. T h e reader is referred t o t h e regional survey entries (e.g., " P a l e s t i n e , " " T r a n s j o r d a n , " " C y p r u s " ) a n d their n u m e r o u s sections organized b y p e r i o d s , a n d t o t h e article " P e r i o d i z a t i o n " for assistance i n u n d e r s t a n d i n g this issue. T h e attentive reader will also n o t e t h a t t h e r e are wide discrepancies i n t h e periodization of w h a t w e call prehistory, roughly from t h e S t o n e Age t o t h e Chalcolithic period. T h e s e discrepancies reflect t h e various levels of sophistication a n d refinement in establishing t h e
PREFACE chronologies of prehistoric archaeology in different countries. Like t h e ones already n o t e d , the differences are indicative of t h e developing n a t u r e of t h e discipline a n d should serve as a n incentive to further serious inquiry. T h e p r e s e n t a t i o n of sites stands at t h e very core of t h e p r e s e n t w o r k a n d represents t h e first t i m e t h a t site r e p o r t s of t h e archaeology of t h e entire N e a r E a s t h a v e b e e n b r o u g h t t o g e t h e r i n a single work. It h a s of c o u r s e b e e n necessary to b e selective in choosing which sites w o u l d receive t r e a t m e n t in i n d e p e n d e n t entries; despite this selectivity, site entries n u m b e r a l m o s t 450 of t h e 1,100 entries in t h e encyclopedia. T h e editors h a v e e n d e a v o r e d to include entries o n all of the m o s t significant sites; others a r e discussed within t h e c o n t e x t of t h e m o r e general entries o n regions, countries, or peoples. A careful u s e of t h e i n d e x together w i t h t h e s y n o p t i c outline of c o n t e n t s (both at t h e back of v o l u m e 5) s h o u l d lead the interested s t u d e n t or scholar t o t h e discussion of the site in q u e s t i o n even if it is n o t the subject of a s e p a r a t e entry. H o w e v e r , readers m a y n o t find coverage within t h e e n cyclopedia o n relatively o b s c u r e sites, information o n w h i c h is likely t o b e f o u n d only i n m o r e specialized scholarly literature. S o m e m i g h t w o n d e r a b o u t the illustrations p r o g r a m a n d its rationale. T h e editorial c o m m i t t e e relied first o n the submissions of individual contributors a n d s e c o n d o n t h e A S O R p h o t o g r a p h i c archives. W e particularly wished to illustrate places a n d sites t h a t a r e n o t well k n o w n , especially i n s u c h areas as Syria, J o r d a n , a n d t h e A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a . A l t h o u g h w e ultimately h a d to a b a n d o n o u r efforts to illustrate certain articles, particularly those for w h i c h c o n t r i b u t o r s w e r e u n a b l e to p r o v i d e materials, in t h e e n d w e f o u n d t h a t w e h a d i n c l u d e d 650 drawings, plans, a n d p h o t o g r a p h s , a significant increase over t h e 450 originally p l a n n e d . I n addition, t h e r e is a separate series of regional m a p s in v o l u m e 5 t h a t are d e s i g n e d t o assist t h e reader in locating all sites that are the subject of i n d e p e n d e n t entries; t h e less detailed m a p s a c c o m p a n y i n g individual entries o n e m p i r e s a n d peoples enable t h e r e a d e r t o u n d e r s t a n d individual cultural a n d political entities (e.g., ' A b b a s i d Caliphate, Arameans, R o m a n Empire). J u s t as archaeologists from different countries a n d different scholarly traditions have different s t a n d a r d s a n d m o d e s of c o m m u n i c a t i o n s , so t o o d o o u r colleagues in t h e fields of linguistics, l a n g u a g e , literature, a n d epigraphy. T h o u g h w e h a v e a t t e m p t e d to r e n d e r their p r e s e n t a t i o n s s o m e w h a t m o r e accessible t o t h e nonspecialist r e a d e r t h r o u g h certain editorial c o n v e n t i o n s , w e h a v e n o t a t t e m p t e d to alter their f u n d a m e n t a l m o d e of scholarly discourse, w h i c h for s o m e m a y s e e m a b i t technical in places. N o n e t h e l e s s , this practice is entirely i n k e e p i n g with t h e editorial policy of inviting state-of-the-art presentations from experts i n t h e field. I n a n age of specialization it s h o u l d c o m e as n o surprise t h a t b o t h archaeologists a n d linguists h a v e their o w n technical m o d e s of discourse. It h a s b e e n especially difficult to develop a c o m m o n system of spelling. W h e r e a p r o p e r n a m e is u s e d c o m m o n l y in t h e literature w e have a d o p t e d t h e m o s t frequently u s e d spell ing. S o , for e x a m p l e , i n H e b r e w w e h a v e preferred Beth-Shean to t h e m o r e precise Beth She'an. W h e r e a strict transliteration r e n d e r e d a w k w a r d or unfamiliar a fairly c o m m o n G r e e k n a m e , s u c h as Seleukos following G r e e k convention r a t h e r t h a n t h e m o r e frequently e n c o u n t e r e d Seleucus, w e o p t e d for t h e m o r e familiar latinized f o r m , as we did for sites a n d individuals b e a r i n g Semitic n a m e s . F o r p l a c e n a m e s in Israel w e t e n d e d to b e strict i n utilizing diacritical m a r k s w i t h c o n s o n a n t s , t h o u g h w e e s c h e w e d u s i n g m a c r o n s a n d other indications of vowel length. T h i s general r u l e of t h u m b , however, w a s n o t a d h e r e d to for s u c h c o m m o n place n a m e s as Bethlehem ( m o r e p r o p e r l y Beth-Lehem). F o r H e b r e w site n a m e s t h a t i n c l u d e the e l e m e n t tell, t h e spelling tel w a s e m p l o y e d t o reflect the H e b r e w spelling, while for those places within Israel b e a r i n g Arabic n a m e s t h e spelling tell w a s u s e d . I n this w a y w e were able t o r e m a i n sensitive t o b o t h Arabic a n d H e b r e w conventions rather t h a n leveling t h r o u g h a n d o p t i n g for o n e spelling over t h e o t h e r (e.g., Tell Beit Minim vs. Tel Miqne). W e d i d try t o b e c o n s i s t e n t in r e n d e r i n g t h e H e b r e w sade u s i n g s, t h o u g h t h e r e a r e instances w h e r e w e u s e d z following a m o r e c o m m o n spelling from t h e p r i m a r y publications (e.g., Nazareth,
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PREFACE 'Ein-Zippori), F o r t h e c o m m o n e l e m e n t m e a n i n g "spring/well" in H e b r e w place n a m e s w e chose t h e construct state spelling 'Ein with t h e d i p t h o n g ei to indicate t h e long sere vowel as o p p o s e d t o t h e alternate spelling 'En, which is m o r e frequently u s e d b y Israeli scholars; t h u s , w e have preferred t h e spellings 'Ein-Besor a n d 'Ein-Gedi to 'En Besor a n d 'En Gedi. T h i s we contrast with t h e absolute state spelling, 'Ayin. W h i l e as a rule w e d i d n o t indicate aspiration of t h e begadkepat c o n s o n a n t s (e.g., 'Atlit r a t h e r t h a n 'Athlit), w e m a i n t a i n e d t h e c o m m o n spelling Beth- as in Beth-Shean a n d Beth-Shemesh, a n d so forth. F o r technical t e r m s , we have usually included indications of vowel length as well, for e x a m p l e , masseba, bamd. In deciding on spellings for A r a b i c place n a m e s we generally deferred t o t h e spellings utilized in t h e p r i m a r y publications (i.e., t h e formal excavation r e p o r t s ) , since w e d i d n o t wish t o create conflicts with officially accepted forms, t h o u g h again, as with t h e H e b r e w n a m e s , normally we did n o t include indications of vowel length. W e w e r e p e r h a p s less innovative here t h a n in o u r choice for H e b r e w place n a m e s . As w i t h H e b r e w place n a m e s , where a c o m m o n spelling existed w e m a i n t a i n e d t h a t spelling, as in San a (contrast w i t h die m o r e p r o p e r San'a'). N o t e that i n this context we spell " s p r i n g / w e l l " 'Ain (e.g., Ain c
Ghazal). Since T u r k i s h is written i n L a t i n characters with only slight modifications, w e tried as best as possible t o adhere t o s t a n d a r d T u r k i s h spellings. F o r instance t h e site n a m e Boghazkoy is spelled Bogazkoy. W e e m p l o y e d t h e dotless i (z) w h e r e a p p r o p r i a t e ; a n y i n c o n sistency in its u s e is inadvertent. F o r personal n a m e s , w e generally t e n d e d simplify t h e n a m e s w i t h little u s e of diacriticals. T h u s , for instance, although w e u s e d t h e spelling AHur for t h e Assyrian capital, w e u s e d Ashurbanipal for t h e n a m e of the Assyrian king. T h i s rule applies to m o s t p e r s o n a l n a m e s . Finally, since it w a s nearly impossible t o b e completely consistent i n o u r spellings, w e often provided variant spellings parenthetically in t h e o p e n i n g lines of a site article or o n first m e n t i o n of a n a m e in a n article. R e a d e r s should b e aware of t h e frequency of n a m e changes for sites t h r o u g h t i m e , resulting in a single location h a v i n g a n ancient n a m e , a R o m a n n a m e , a n d m o d e r n n a m e s (sometimes b o t h H e b r e w a n d A r a b i c ) . Variant spellings a p p e a r in t h e index; w e h a v e a t t e m p t e d to be t h o r o u g h in linking these variant spellings so t h a t readers will find all m e n t i o n s of a particular site, regardless of t h e spelling u s e d . R e a d e r s seeking information a b o u t a particular subject are referred t o t h e i n d e x a n d synoptic outline of the w o r k in v o l u m e 5; as m e n t i o n e d above, specific sites for w h i c h w e h a v e i n d e p e n d e n t entries m a y b e generally located on t h e regional m a p s . S u c h topics as scientific techniques a n d archaeology, biographies of p r o m i n e n t archaeologists n o w d e ceased; histories of all t h e major archaeological institutes a n d organizations in t h e N e a r East; a n d discussion of peoples, places, a n d languages as well as individual artifacts a n d their decoration a n d industries m a y b e readily located b y utilizing o n e of these reference tools. I n locating t h e discussion o n certain specialties s u c h as glassmaking (see " V i t r e o u s M a t e r i a l s " ) or shipbuilding (see " U n d e r w a t e r A r c h a e o l o g y , " " S e a f a r i n g , " or " S h i p s a n d B o a t s " ) t h e reader will h a v e t o p a y attention t o o u r system of internal cross-referencing, which is designed t o m a k e t h e encyclopedia user-friendly, leading readers from a particular entry into a vast network of related topics. T h e r e are several kinds of specialty article in this work that distinguish it from all o t h e r presentations; t h e issues involved i n these articles are at the cutting e d g e of t h e field of N e a r E a s t e r n a n d world archaeology. I n t h e area of theory or history of t h e discipline I w o u l d call attention to t h e m u l t i p a r t entry " H i s t o r y of t h e F i e l d , " which, following a general overview, is organized as t e n articles t h a t cover all t h e countries a n d regions of t h e N e a r East (Syria, Israel, J o r d a n , M e s o p o t a m i a , Persia, t h e Anatolian Plateau, E g y p t , C y p r u s , t h e Aegean Islands, a n d t h e Arabian Peninsula). T h e special role of "biblical a r c h a e o l o g y " b e c o m e s clear within t h e larger context of N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology. T o r o u n d o u t t h e b r o a d geographical perspective t h e reader should consult t h e entries " E t h i o p i a , " " N u b i a , " a n d " N o r t h Africa." O t h e r entries s u c h as " N e w A r c h a e o l o g y , " " U n -
PREFACE d e r w a t e r A r c h a e o l o g y , " " S u r v e y , A r c h a e o l o g i c a l , " a n d "Salvage E x c a v a t i o n " will also indicate t h e rich diversity of archaeological t h e o r y a n d m e t h o d . W h i l e t h e r e h a v e been n u m e r o u s w o r k s o n t h e history of archaeology, there is n o t h i n g in t h e existing literature t h a t c a n q u i t e c o m p a r e to this t r e a t m e n t , w h i c h has t h e benefit of b e i n g site specific a n d u p to d a t e in t e r m s of actual fieldwork while treating archaeology historically a n d in general terms. It is only i n t h e b r o a d e r N e a r E a s t e r n c o n t e x t a n d setting t h a t w e also m a y fully a p p r e ciate t h e distinctive c o n t r i b u t i o n s of specialists w h o h a v e written o n " C e r a m i c s , " " B o n e , Ivory, a n d S h e l l , " o r " B u i l d i n g Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s . " I n this b r o a d e r context, t o o , t h e role of various l a n d s of settlements or a particular k i n d of fortification or w e a p o n m a y b e better a p p r e c i a t e d a n d u n d e r s t o o d . I w o u l d also like t o m e n t i o n a n u m b e r of special entries p l a n n e d within t h e category of T h e o r y a n d Practice: " D e v e l o p m e n t a n d A r c h a e o l o g y , " " M u s e u m s a n d M u s c o l o g y , " "Ethics and Archaeology," "Ideology and Archaeology," "Nationalism and Archae ology," a n d " T o u r i s m a n d A r c h a e o l o g y . " E a c h of these articles is d e s i g n e d t o call attention t o t h e p l a c e a n d plight of archaeology in t h e individual countries in w h i c h it is practiced. M o r e o v e r , t h e s e entries focus o n t h e results of archaeological w o r k a n d t h e influence t h o s e results h a v e o n b o t h t h e national c u l t u r e a n d consciousness of p e o p l e at h o m e a n d a b r o a d . H o w t h e stories of p e o p l e s a n d places of long ago are r e c o v e r e d a n d told a n e w brings us closer t o t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y issue of h o w m o d e r n nation-states define t h e m s e l v e s a n d their cultures in t h e multicultural universe of c o n t e m p o r a r y society. T h e s e articles allow t h e reader to reflect o n t h e i m p a c t of t h e field of archaeology o n t h e citizens of t h e m o d e r n countries l o c a t e d in t h e territories of a n c i e n t civilizations, o n t h e tourists w h o visit there, a n d o n t h e s t u d e n t s w h o r e a d their a n c i e n t literatures. W h e n E d w a r d R o b i n s o n , t h e U n i t e d States's p i o n e e r explorer a n d first historical g e o g r a p h e r of a n c i e n t Palestine, a n d D a v i d R o b e r t s , E n g l a n d ' s p r e m i e r l a n d s c a p e artist, set o u t to e x p l o r e a n d illustrate t h e H o l y L a n d in 1839, neither individual h a d a n inkling of h o w his scientific a c h i e v e m e n t or artistic genius w o u l d so c a p t u r e t h e imagination a n d hearts of t h e W e s t . Y e t t h e e n t h u s i a s m t h a t they g e n e r a t e d at h o m e a n d t h r o u g h o u t E u r o p e was only a p r e l u d e t o w h a t w a s to c o m e in t h e latter p a r t of t h e n i n e t e e n t h century: the b e g i n n i n g of a systematic a n d scientific exploration of all t h e countries of the region. T h e canvas of t h e artist w a s ultimately r e p l a c e d b y t h e lens of the c a m e r a , w h i c h ironically also c a m e to Palestine in 1839 w h e n t h e first l a n d s c a p e pictures of Palestine w e r e taken with t h e d a g u e r r e o t y p e p r o c e s s by t h e F r e n c h painter H o r a c e Vernet. T h e b e g i n n i n g s of t h e scientific e x p l o r a t i o n a n d excavation of t h e N e a r E a s t followed closely t h e establishment of t h e n a t i o n a l schools of archaeology (see " A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h , " " E c o l e B i b l i q u e et A r c h e o l o g i q u e F r a n c a i s e , " " I n s t i t u t F r a n c a i s d ' A r c h e o l o g i e d u P r o c h e O r i e n t , " " I s r a e l E x p l o r a t i o n S o c i e t y , " "British School of A r c h a e o l o g y in J e r u s a l e m , " "British S c h o o l of A r c h a e o l o g y in I r a q , " " D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesellschaft," etc.), which were ultimately t h e leading s p o n s o r s of actual fieldwork in nearly all of t h e countries of t h e region. T h e b r e a k u p of t h e O t t o m a n E m p i r e a n d the a s s i g n m e n t to individual c o u n tries of " m a n d a t e s " to administer vast territories only s t r e n g t h e n e d t h e forces of national interest, w h i c h are reflected in tire archaeology of t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y M i d d l e E a s t even today. B r i n g i n g t o g e t h e r t h e w o r k of a w i d e array of scholars from all o v e r t h e world h a s b e e n a real challenge; b y t h e t i m e we h a d c o m p l e t e d t h e c o m m i s s i o n i n g of articles, w e h a d enlisted 560 c o n t r i b u t o r s from m o r e t h a n two d o z e n countries. T h e encyclopedia contains m o r e t h a n 1,100 entries, a n d t h e sheer logistics of c o m m u n i c a t i n g in a variety of languages with individuals from so m a n y countries h a s b e e n e n o r m o u s l y c o m p l i c a t e d . D u r i n g t h e c o u r s e of t h e evolution of this project t h e editors h a v e witnessed t h e electronic mail rev olution. U n f o r t u n a t e l y , a l t h o u g h in t h e later stages of t h e project this i m p r o v e d c o m m u nications w i t h o u r A m e r i c a n c o n t r i b u t o r s considerably, it has n o t y e t b e e n established in m o s t of t h e countries of t h e M i d d l e East, n o r is it y e t widely u s e d in E u r o p e . T h u s w e
xv
have h a d to rely o n mail, p h o n e , a n d fax for m o s t of our c o m m u n i c a t i o n s . T h e efforts of t h e dedicated staff of the Scholarly a n d Professional Reference D e p a r t m e n t at O x f o r d University Press have enabled t h e editors to o v e r c o m e m a n y of these logistical barriers. It has b e e n a privilege to work with t h e m . T h i s project could n o t have b e e n l a u n c h e d a n d completed w i t h o u t t h e e n c o u r a g e m e n t , s u p p o r t , a n d w i s d o m of Oxford's C l a u d e C o n y e r s , whose i n p u t a t t h e c o n c e p t u a l p l a n n i n g stage was essential a n d determinative. Also involved at the earliest stage a n d extraordinarily helpful in conceptual matters w a s M a r k C u m m i n g s , w h o served as t h e encyclopedia's d e v e l o p m e n t editor until his d e p a r t u r e from t h e press in J u n e 1991. It was at t h a t p o i n t that Jeffrey Edelstein a s s u m e d direct administrative a n d editorial responsibility as project editor, later m a n a g i n g editor. Jeffrey's indefatigable work ethic, keen eye, a n d versatile editorial skills enabled the project to progress with great efficiency a n d care. I h a v e b e n efited in so m a n y ways from collaboration with these editors t h a t it is almost impossible to offer words t h a t can express a d e q u a t e appreciation. N o n e t h e l e s s , I d o so o n a p e r s o n a l level a n d o n behalf of all t h e m e m b e r s of the editorial b o a r d . O u r assistants in N e w York a n d D u r h a m , P a u l A r t h u r of O x f o r d University Press a n d J o h n S. J o r g e n s e n of D u k e University, have also helped greatly i n a variety of m a t t e r s , b u t especially in locating illustrations a n d p r e p a r i n g captions, checking spellings a n d bibli ographies, a n d assisting in t h e p r e p a r a t i o n of m a p s , charts, a n d o t h e r s u c h materials. R o b e r t a M a l t e s e , bringing to the project valuable editorial experience w i t h t h e writings of archaeologists, served as principal copyeditor, a d d i n g a level of clarity a n d consistency a n d establishing standards for t h e presentation of information t h a t w e could n o t otherwise have achieved. All of us are i n d e b t e d to t h e m for their tireless efforts. Eric M . Meyers Durham,
North
February
1996
Carolina
A B B R E V I A T I O N S AND S Y M B O L S
ACOR
American C e n t e r of Oriental
BSAJ
Research AD
AH
anno Domini, (our) L o r d
in t h e year of the
B.T. c.
anno Hegirae, in t h e year of the
CAARI
Hij rah AIA AIAR
Archaeological Institute of America ( W . F.) Albright Institute of Archaeological Research
AJA
American Journal
Akk.
Akkadian
Am.
Amos
of
Archaeology
J. B . Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near East in Pictures
ANBT
J. B . Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern
APES
American Oriental Society
'Arakh.
chapter, chapters
Research
Col.
CTA
BSAE BSAI
3
Batra
before Christ before t h e c o m m o n era
Bikkurim
BP
Schools
DAI diss. Dn.
C o r p u s Inscriptionum Semiticarum centimeters Centre National de la R e c h e r c h e Scientifique
British School of Archaeology in Egypt British School of Archaeology in Iraq
expanded Ezckiel
ff.
Colossians I
fig. fl.
floruit,
ft.
2
ED
flourished
feet fragment, fragments
dissertation Daniel
Deuteronomy Early Bronze Ecclesiastes
EEF
Egyptian Exploration F u n d
e.g.
exempli gratia, for example
xvii
Geographica
GIS
Geographic Information Systems
Gk.
Greek
Heb. Hg.
Genesis hectares Hebrew Haggai
Hist.
H e r o d o t u s , History
Hirt.
Hittite
Has.
Hosea
Hur.
Hurrian
IAA
Israel Antiquities Authority
ibid.
ibidem, in the same place (as the o n e immediately preceding)
editor, editors; edition Early Dynastic
Ptolemy, German
ha
D e u t s c h e s Archaologiscb.es Institut
gallon, gallons
Ger.
Gn.
D o c t o r of Science
ed., eds.
Geog.
Corinthians
A. H e r d n e r , Corpus des tableltes en cuniifonnes alphabetiques
D e u t c h e Orient-Gesellschaft
Eccl.
gal., gals.
Corinthians
D.Sc.
EB
and following figure
column, columns
DOG
Dt.
before the p r e s e n t
et sequens, and t h e following Exodus
feminine
CIS
died
Bik.
exp.
Ethiopie
fascicle
d.
Berakhot
Ex.
et cetera, and so forth
fern.
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecamm
Babylonian
Ber.
Eth. et seq.
et alii, and others
fasc.
CIG
Bab.
Bekhorot
etc.
Ezra
cubic
Behh.
et al.
Ezr.
cu
BCE
enlarged especially
Chronicles
Bachelor of Arts
BC
enl. esp.
2
born
Bulletin of the American of Oriental Research
English
2 Chr.
2 Cor. Zarah
Enoch
Chronicles
i Cor.
Assyrian
BaTja'
Eng.
i
B.A.
B.B.
Elamite
En.
i Chr.
col., cols.
American Schools of Oriental
BASOR
Egyptian
Elam.
frag., frags.
Aramaic
b.
Council of American Overseas Research Centers
Egyp.
Ez.
'Arakhin
'Avodah
computer-aided design/drafting
confer, c o m p a r e
CNRS
Aram.
A.Z.
Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute
cf.
cm
ASOR Assyr.
circa, about, approximately
of the c o m m o n era
American Palestine
Arabic
Babylonian T a l m u d
CE
Texts
Exploration Society Ar.
CAORC
chap., chaps.
ANEP
AOS
CAD
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem
IDA(M) i.e.
Israel D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities (and M u s e u m s ) id est, that is
xviii
ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS IBS
Israel Exploration
IES
Israel Exploration Society
IFAPO Is. IsMEO
Meg.
Journal
Megillah
mi.
Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Prochc-Orient Isaiah
miles
Mh.
Mark
mm
millimeter
mod.
Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente
Mt. Mt.
Supplementum Graecnm
SEG ser.
modern Mount
singular
*•
Song of Songs Shabbath
Shab. S.J.
Matthew
Jer.
Jeremiah
Jgs.
Judges
n. NAA Nat.
John
>• Jon.
Jonah
Jos.
Joshua Journal of the Palestine Society
JPOS
Oriental
JRA
Journal of Roman
J.T.
Jerusalem T a l m u d
KAI
H . D o n n e r and W. Rollig, Kanaandische imd aramaische Inschrift.cn
Kel.
Archaeology
Kelim
Kel. kg
Hist.
n.d.
no date
Nm.
Numbers
no., nos. n.p. n.s.
new series O r d o Praedicatorum, O r d e r of Preachers (Dominicans)
paragraph
kilogram
PEF
Palestine Exploration F u n d Persian
Kings
Pers. Ph.D.
kilometers M . Dietrich a n d 0 . Lorentz, Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit liter
1., 11.
line, lines
Lat.
Latin
lb. LB
pounds Late Bronze
lit.
literally
Lh.
Luke
LM Lv. m
Phil. pi. PN PPm PPN Pw. Ps. pt., pts.
r. RCEA
Saint, Saints Sumerian supplement Syriac Ta'anit Theologicae D o c t o r , D o c t o r of Theology
Ti.
Titus
Tk.
Turkish
Tm.
/
Timothy
2 Tm.
2
Timothy
trans.
translated by
Ugar.
Ugaritic
v. viz. vol., vols. vs.
verse videlicet, namely volume, volumes versus Yadayim
Yad.
Zeitschrift Palastina-
Zee.
Zechariah hypothetical; in bibliographic citations, English language pages in H e b r e w journals
}
uncertain; possibly; p e r h a p s
reigned, ruled
degrees minutes; feet
It
seconds; inches plus
rev.
revised
-
minus
Ru.
Ruth
SBF SBL
S t u d i u m Biblicum Franciscanum Society of Biblical Literature
des Deutschen Vereins
*
part, parts
Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie arabe
square
Revelations
Malachi
Master of Divinity
Psalms
Samuel
Ta'an.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic Proverbs
/
2 Samuel
+
Rev.
M.Div.
parts per million
Societas Jesu, Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
Th.D,
0
masculine
Maccabees
Pottery Neolithic
2 Peter
masc.
Mc.
plate; plural
/ Peter
Master of Arts
Middle Bronze
Philippians
2 Pt.
meters
MB
Syr.
Philosophiae Doctor, D o c t o r of Philosophy
IPI.
M.A.
Mai.
supp.
ZDPV
Late M i n o a n Leviticus
Sum.
i
Ketubbot
i
sq
page, pages
para.
2 Kings
1
no place
Sm.
St., Sts.
number, n u m b e r s
O.P.
p., p p .
i
2 Sm.
Pliny, Naturalis Historia (Natural History) nola bene, note well
i Kgs.
KTU
N e u t r o n Activation Analysis
n.b.
2 Kgs. km
note
series
sg-
Job
Jb.
Epigraphicum
plus or minus
=
equals; is equivalent to
X
by
—»
yields
A C
A B B A S I D C A L I P H A T E . As t h e result of a revolu tion t h a t c u l m i n a t e d in 750 CE in t h e defeat of t h e last U m a y y a d caliph, M a r w a n i b n M u h a m m a d , o n t h e River Z a b in n o r t h e r n Iraq, t h e ' A b b a s i d family c a m e to p o w e r . T h i s real revolution s t e m m e d from t h e p r o f o u n d social stresses of t h e U m a y y a d period: t h e i m p o s i t i o n of n e w cultural values o n t h e M i d d l e East, t h e privileged position of A r a b M u s l i m s over o t h e r s , t h e p e r c e i v e d irreligious lifestyle of t h e U m a y y a d s , exemplified b y their desert castles, a n d finally t h e c o n stant in-fighting of t h e A r a b tribes. L i k e all revolutions, t h e constitution of t h e n e w state did n o t initially differ m u c h from t h e old b u t was r a t h e r affected b y e n v i r o n m e n t a l fac tors. A l t h o u g h t h e ' A b b a s i d family h a d lived at H u m e i m a in J o r d a n , t h e revolutionary a r m y , t h e K h u r a s a n i y a h , was r e cruited o n t h e frontier in eastern I r a n , a n d t h e ' A b b a s i d s f o u n d their s u p p o r t in t h e f o r m e r territories of t h e S a s a n i a n e m p i r e , n o t a b l y in Iraq.
A l t h o u g h t h e state's prestige was reestablished u n d e r t h e regent al-Muwaffaq (d. 891) a n d his son a l - M u ' t a d i d , w h o settled again at B a g h d a d in 892, t h e disastrous reign of alM u q t a d i r (d. 932) led to a complete loss of p o w e r b y t h e regime from 937 a n d a takeover of B a g h d a d b y an Iranian Shi'i tribal d y n a s t y , t h e B u y i d s , in 945. T h e 'Abbasids r e m a i n e d virtual p r i s o n e r s in their palaces even after the S u n n i r e c o n q u e s t b y the Seljuks in 1055. Nevertheless, the idea of a unified Islamic world d i d n o t disappear, a n d t h e A b b a s i d s gave legitimacy to i n d e p e n d e n t dynasts. N o t a b l y u n d e r alM u q t a f i (1136-1160) a n d al-Nasir li-Din Allah ( 1 1 8 0 1225), a n i n d e p e n d e n t ' A b b a s i d state r e e m e r g e d in cemral Iraq, only t o b e extinguished finally b y t h e M o n g o l s u n d e r Hiilegu in 1258. E v e n s u b s e q u e n d y , t h e M a m l u k s installed a n ' A b b a s i d p r i n c e as caliph in t h e C a i r o Citadel, a line that c o n t i n u e d until t h e O t t o m a n c o n q u e s t in 1517. T h e 'Abbasids n e v e r controlled t h e extensive territories lightly g o v e r n e d b y t h e U m a y y a d s ; t h e 'Abbasid empire e x t e n d e d from T u n i s i a to S a m a r k a n d . T h e p r o b l e m of control over far distant p r o v i n c e s w a s solved at t h e beginning of t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y b y h e r e d i t a r y dynasties of a u t o n o m o u s gov e r n o r s : t h e Aghlabids in T u n i s i a a n d t h e T a h i r i d s in K h u r a s a n (eastern I r a n ) , w h o c o n t i n u e d to c o n t r i b u t e to t h e c e n tral treasury. I n t h e era of S a m a r r a , however, genuinely i n d e p e n d e n t rulers, s u c h as t h e Saffarids of Sistan, ceased t o p a y , a n d m u c h confusion was caused b y t h e slave revolt of t h e Zanj in the m a r s h e s of s o u t h e r n Iraq for fifteen years until 883. R e m o v a l of A r a b s from t h e p a y registers of the a r m y (c. 833) equally alienated t h e tribes, a n d control over d i e A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a was increasingly lost, a p a r t from the H o l y Cities of M e c c a a n d M e d i n a .
T h e ' A b b a s i d s first settled n e a r K u f a h , b u t in 762 t h e sec o n d 'Abbasid caliph, a l - M a n s u r , f o u n d e d a n e w capital, B a g h d a d , only 30 Ion (19 m i . ) from t h e S a s a n i a n capital of C t e s i p h o n . T h e centralized administrative traditions of t h e late S a s a n i a n E m p i r e w e r e t a k e n as a m o d e l for an imperial state, a p h a s e w h i c h in its original f o r m lasted for half a c e n t u r y until t h e d e a t h of H a r u n al-Rashid in 809. [See S a s anians.] T h e s u b s e q u e n t civil w a r , including the siege of B a g h d a d in 8 1 1 - 8 1 3 , d e s t r o y e d m u c h of t h e state's infra s t r u c t u r e a n d led to t h e increasing r e c r u i t m e n t of p e o p l e s from t h e eastern frontier in t h e a r m y , notably C e n t r a l Asian Iranians a n d T u r k s . R e l i a n c e o n t h e T u r k s led to alienation of t h e state from t h e M u s l i m p o p u l a t i o n ; in p a r t i c u l a r dis t u r b a n c e s b e t w e e n t h e T u r k s a n d t h e B a g h d a d i s led to t h e f o u n d a t i o n of a n e w capital, S a m a r r a , b y a l - M u ' t a s i m in 836. In spite of t h e success of a l - M u ' t a s i m himself in r e f o r m i n g t h e state, the isolation of t h e caliphs with their a r m y in S a m a r r a e x p o s e d t h e ruler to control b y t h e soldiery, cul m i n a t i n g in a d e c a d e of troubles in t h e 860s, a n d gravely w e a k e n e d t h e prestige of t h e state. A l r e a d y existing t e n d e n cies w e r e given free rein: t h e increasingly successful at t e m p t s b y t h e p r o v i n c e s to gain i n d e p e n d e n c e , a s e p a r a t i o n of t h e religious institution of I s l a m f r o m t h e control of t h e caliph, a n d t h e evolution of a c o m m e r c i a l e c o n o m y t h a t w a s u n c o n t r o l l e d b y t h e state.
T h e e c o n o m i c basis of t h e ' A b b a s i d state was the l a n d tax o n agriculture, initially calculated in cash, a n d later as a p r o p o r t i o n of t h e c r o p . B y far t h e largest s u m s were contributed b y Iraq, b u t E g y p t a n d w e s t e r n I r a n were also significant. T h e i m p o r t a n c e of I r a q s t e m m e d from tire high degree of d e v e l o p m e n t of irrigation u n d e r t h e Sasanians, which has b e e n well illustrated b y t h e area surveys of R o b e r t M c C . A d a m s in t h e Diyala region ( A d a m s , 1965), a n d s o u t h c e n tral I r a q ( A d a m s , 1981). [See Diyala.] A l t h o u g h it is difficult to date tire c o n s t r u c t i o n of canals, t h e full elaboration of t h e system seems t o date t o t h e later Sasanian period in t h e sixth
1
'ABBASID CALIPHATE century, p r o b a b l y u n d e r t h e centralizing m o n a r c h K h u s r a u A n u s h i r v a n (531-578). Particularly t h e n o r t h e r n extension of t h e N a h r a w a n canal east of B a g h d a d (Ar., al-Qatul alKisrawi) with its offtakes from t h e T i g r i s River in t h e region of S a m a r r a i n c r e a s e d t h e availability of irrigation w a t e r c o n siderably. T h e early ' A b b a s i d s , al-Rashid a n d a l - M a ' m u n (813-833), took care t o a d d t o t h e system. H o w e v e r , this a c h i e v e m e n t carried within it t h e seeds of its o w n decay: a c c o r d i n g t o A d a m s , t h e s h a r p increase i n t h e availability of w a t e r leads t o r a p i d salinization a n d , after a certain l e n g t h of t i m e , decline i n land p r o d u c t i v i t y ( A d a m s , 1981, p . 20). E v e n if this were n o t so, t h e l o n g a n d massive Sasanian ir rigation canals of I r a q — t h e N a h r a w a n canal is 225 k m (139.5 - ) l ° g — r e q u i r e d a large i n v e s t m e n t to excavate, a n d a centralized a d m i n i s t r a t i o n to m a i n t a i n , a degree of organization t h a t d i d n o t exist before t h e sixth c e n t u r y or after t h e n i n t h century. I t w a s impossible, t h e n , later to r e place canals r u i n e d by w a r f a r e , s e d i m e n t a t i o n or, m o r e i m portantly, t h e regrettably f r e q u e n t t e n d e n c y of t h e T i g r i s a n d t h e E u p h r a t e s t o c h a n g e their c o u r s e s . A c c o r d i n g to b o t h archaeological surveys a n d historical sources, there w a s a severe r e t r e n c h m e n t in t h e cultivated area of I r a q from t h e m i d - t e n t h c e n t u r y o n w a r d . A l t h o u g h t h e decline of Iraq, o n e of the m o s t striking p h e n o m e n a of t h e e c o n o m i c history of Islam, r e m a i n s a p u z z l e , it m a y b e t h a t t h e explanation lies in this area. m i
n
T h e r e is n o d o u b t t h a t t h e f o r t u n e s of t h e ' A b b a s i d state paralleled t h e e c o n o m i c f o r t u n e s of Iraqi agriculture. I n its first c e n t u r y the ' A b b a s i d caliphate w a s a great world p o w e r . T h e system was established b y a l - M a n s u r (754-775), b a s e d u p o n t h e b u r e a u c r a c y i n h e r i t e d from t h e Sasanians a n d an aristocracy of t h e K h u r a s a n i A r a b s . M o n u m e n t a l architec t u r e played a significant role. T h e n e w capital of B a g h d a d ( f o u n d e d 762-766) w a s d o m i n a t e d b y t h e R o u n d City, t h e circular fortified p a l a c e a n d administrative quarter, w h i c h is t h e first fully developed e x a m p l e of a n Islamic royal city ( N o r t h e d g e , 1994). T h e ' A b b a s i d a r m y , t h e K h u r a s a n i y a h , w e r e settled in a c a n t o n m e n t i n a l - H a r b i y a h , a n d t h e c r o w n p r i n c e , a l - M a h d i , h a d h i s o w n establishment o n t h e east b a n k in Rusafa. T h e m a r k e t s w e r e c e n t e r e d a r o u n d a p r e Islamic s e t t l e m e n t at a l - K a r k h , A l t h o u g h w e h a v e n o ar chaeological t r a c e of early B a g h d a d , t h e p l a n w a s very influ ential, a n d t h e s a m e general p a t t e r n c a n b e seen r e p e a t e d over t h e following c e n t u r y . After t h e a b a n d o n e d c o n s t r u c tion of a n octagonal city o n t h e p a t t e r n of t h e R o u n d City at Qadisiyah in 796, H a r u n a l - R a s h i d (786-809) built a pal ace q u a r t e r at R a q q a in Syria, outside t h e walls of a h o r s e s h o e - p l a n city built b y a l - M a n s u r i n 772 apparently as a garrison center. [See R a q q a , ar-.] T h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of caliphal cities r e a c h e d its greatest ex t e n t a t S a m a r r a (836-892), w h e r e 57 sq k m (22 sq. m i . ) of c o n s t r u c t i o n in pise, m u d b r i c k a n d b a k e d brick in a s t e p p e z o n e o n t h e b a n k of t h e T i g r i s i n c l u d e d t w o caliphal e s t a b l i s h m e n t s , S u r r a M a n R a ' a a n d al-Mutawakkiliyah, six m a jor military c a n t o n m e n t s a n d a m o d e r a t e - s i z e d t o w n . T h e
3
two m a i n military c a n t o n m e n t s (Ar., qati'a), of t h e T u r k s at a l - K a r k h , a n d t h e C e n t r a l Asian Iranians at al-Matira, w e r e p l a c e d a p a r t from S u r r a M a n R a ' a , a t a distance of 2 farsakhs e a c h (c. 10 k m [6 m i . ] ) , a l t h o u g h Matira w a s later engulfed b y t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e city, a n d t h e r e w e r e further c a n t o n m e n t s in t h e city itself. T h e caliphal estab lishments a n d military c a n t o n m e n t s consisted of a m a i n pal ace, m i n o r palaces, a g r a n d a v e n u e , a n d a grid of streets with h o u s e s . Significant differences from R o m a n practices in military settlement lay in t h e f r e e d o m of ' A b b a s i d t r o o p s to m a r r y , p e r s o n a l allegiance to generals, a n d ethnic division of units. T h e imperial c h a r a c t e r of the city is e m p h a s i z e d by the lack of fortifications a n d t h e m o n u m e n t a l provision for s p o r t s — r a c e courses a n d p o l o g r o u n d s . A c c o r d i n g to t h e e x t r a v a g a n t textual d e s c r i p t i o n s , t h e t e n t h - c e n t u r y palace c o m p l e x in B a g h d a d (Dar al-Khilafah) w a s similar, b u t t h e e c o n o m i c collapse of the caliphate suggests a reality of m o r e limited d i m e n s i o n s . T h e p l a n n i n g of t h e palaces revolved a r o u n d t h e four iwan p l a n — a c c o r d i n g t o E . J. Keall (1974) t h e iwan is first f o u n d as a n o p e n - f r o n t e d vaulted hall i n P a r t h i a n M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e original p a t t e r n of four iwans facing o n t o a c o u r t y a r d gave w a y to a central d o m e c h a m b e r with four iwans o p e n i n g t o t h e exterior. S a m a r r a a n d R a q q a a r e t y p ically M e s o p o t a m i a n , vast c o m p l e x e s of r o o m s a n d court y a r d s , w i t h provision a t S a m a r r a for s u n k e n basins t o avoid t h e h e a t of s u m m e r . I n I r a q a n d I r a n t h e Sasanian tradition of c a r v e d stucco r e v e t m e n t s w a s further developed with n e w inspiration in t h e designs, suggested t o b e of Indian, Central Asian, a n d Byzantine origin—a sign of wider cultural hori zons. T h i s dynastic c o n c e n t r a t i o n o n t h e capital diverts o u r at tention from the g r o w i n g islamization of t h e provinces; a p a r t from Syria, m a n y of t h e congregational m o s q u e s in cities were first built in t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y , s u c h as at Isfahan. T h e p a t t e r n was established of a c o u r t y a r d m o s q u e with a h y postyle or basilical p r a y e r hall, a n d a m i n a r e t opposite t o t h e mihrab (the niche indicating t h e direction of M e c c a ) , a p l a n built differently a c c o r d i n g t o local architectural traditions. At Kairouan (Qayrawan) in Tunisia the mosque has a square brick minaret, h o r s e s h o e arches, a n d square external buttresses; at S a m a r r a t h e m i n a r e t is helicoidal, apparently after t h e p a t t e r n of Assyrian ziggurats, t h e buttresses semi circular, a n d t h e arches p o i n t e d . T h e defenses of t h e Byzantine frontier in southeastern Anatolia, stretching from T a r s u s t o Malatya, a n d E r z u r u m , were based o n series of fortified cities, in w h i c h t h e frontier ttoops w e r e settled. It w a s only at t h e e n d of t h e eighth cen tury a n d t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e n i n t h t h a t t h e R o m a n c o n c e p t of t h e frontier fort w a s i n t r o d u c e d in t h e ribats of t h e T u nisian coast a n d C e n t r a l Asia. W i t h t h e collapse of the sec ular authority of t h e ' A b b a s i d Caliphate, t h e ribats w e r e m a n n e d b y volunteers for religious r e a s o n s , a n d in the t e n t h c e n t u r y t h e y d e v e l o p e d into religious centers, or caravan serais, if located o n a m a i n r o u t e .
4
c
ABBASID CALIPHATE
D u r i n g the early part of the A b b a s i d period, especially in the reigns of a l - M a h d i a n d H a r u n al-Rashid, the transdesert pilgrim road from B a g h d a d a n d K u f a h to M e c c a w a s built u p in a m o n u m e n t a l form, k n o w n today as D a r b Z u b a y d a h [See D a r b Z u b a y d a h . ] T h e hajj w a s sometimes led by the caliph a n d nearly always by a leading m a n of state. L o n g stretches of the r o a d w e r e cleared of boulders, and in places the road was walled a n d drainage ditches were d u g . T h e road stations in I r a q a n d Saudi Arabia have b e e n surveyed, a n d the station at a r - R a b a d h a has b e e n excavated. T h e ar r a n g e m e n t s seem to have fallen into decay in the t e n t h c e n tury. A p a r t from state activity, a thriving commercial e c o n o m y begins to be visible in the archaeological evidence. In p a r t this was related to t h e g r o w t h of maritime trade with the F a r East. Although the Sasanians h a d taken care to control I n dian O c e a n t r a d e , a substantial increase in quantity o c c u r r e d a b o u t 800, based o n Basra a n d the Gulf. Excavations at Siraf on the Iranian coast r e c o r d e d the first a p p e a r a n c e of C h i nese stoneware a n d , later, porcelain, the first of a long line of Chinese ceramic i m p o r t s that c a m e to d o m i n a t e t h e M i d dle East. H o w e v e r , distribution patterns show t h a t in fact Chinese pottery did n o t p e n e t r a t e in quantity far from t h e p o r t s or river t r a n s p o r t to the capital cities of Iraq. C e r a m i c s are also only the m o s t visible element of trade in the ar chaeological record; spices and teakwood were also i m p o r tant. F r o m the t e n t h century o n w a r d , after the sack of Basra by the Qaramita, the t r a d e m o v e d elsewhere, notably the R e d Sea a n d Egypt. T h e c o n s e q u e n c e s of this trade w e r e fundamental. O n t h e simplest level, it is r e m a r k a b l e that t h e introduction of p o l y chrome-glaze pottery in Iraq, a n d t h u s in Islam, closely p o s t dates the first large-scale Chinese i m p o r t s . A l t h o u g h s o m e copying of C h i n e s e white stoneware a n d splash-lead glazes took place, original Islamic techniques played a m o r e i m p o r t a n t role—cobalt-blue painting, luster painting, a n d glazed-relief m o l d e d wares, T h e evidence a p p e a r s to s h o w t h a t the idea of p o l y c h r o m y spread immediately t o Syria, E g y p t , a n d Iran, a n d polychrome-glaze pottery quickly b e c a m e the staple of fine ceramics. T h e stimulation to t h e p o t tery industry was n o t limited to glazed wares: Brittle-Ware cooking pots from N o r t h Syria, a n d unglazed barbotine a n d m o l d e d vessels w e r e also t r a d e d widely. However, as d e m o n s t r a t e d for later periods b y K. N . C h a u d h u r i (1985), a l t h o u g h there was a risk of shipwreck, even a single successful eastern voyage could lead t o e n o r m o u s profits. T h e availability of large quantities of invest m e n t capital a m o n g Basran a n d other m e r c h a n t s is t h e b e s t explanation of p h e n o m e n a in the historical sources a n d t h e archaeological record. G a n g s of i m p o r t e d E a s t African slaves (Zanj) p u t to clearing saline land for agricultural e s tates a r o u n d Basra, revolted, b u t particularly there was e c o n o m i c d e v e l o p m e n t in the A r a b i a n Peninsula. Large-scale development of c o p p e r m i n i n g in O m a n during t h e n i n t h
century has b e e n d e m o n s t r a t e d , a n d t h e S a u d i A r a b i a n ar chaeological survey has f o u n d m i n i n g sites east of M e d i n a for gold a n d chlorite-schist for c o o k i n g p o t s , l a m p s , a n d in cense b u r n e r s . P r o d u c e d a r o u n d S a ' d a h in Y e m e n even t o day, chlorite-schist is f o u n d in m o s t archaeological deposits in the Fertile C r e s c e n t b e t w e e n t h e m i d - e i g h t h a n d n i n t h centuries, a n d t h e central A r a b i a n p r o d u c t i o n r e p r e s e n t s an expansion. I n v e s t m e n t in Arabia m a y h a v e b e e n s e n t i m e n tal, b u t peaceful conditions t h e r e o p e n e d u p possibilities t h a t did n o t exist later. A t any rate t h e political collapse of t h e ' A b b a s i d r e g i m e in the second q u a r t e r of the t e n t h c e n t u r y b r o u g h t an e n d t o p r o m i s i n g d e v e l o p m e n t s . Political a n d e c o n o m i c p o w e r (including also t h e centers of p r o d u c t i o n , m o s t visibly of ceramics) was s u b s e q u e n t l y in E g y p t (the F a t i m i d s from 969) a n d I r a n - C e n t r a l Asia (the B u y i d s , S a m a n i d s a n d Seljuks). T h e agriculture of these regions d e p e n d s on shortdistance, easily m a i n t a i n e d irrigation systems, w h i c h could survive i n d e p e n d e n t l y of the low level of organization of a medieval state. [See also A r a b i a n Peninsula, article on A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a in Islamic T i m e s ; B a g h d a d ; F a t i m i d D y n a s t y ; M e s o p o t a mia, article on M e s o p o t a m i a in t h e Islamic P e r i o d ; S a m a r r a , article on Islamic Period; and U m a y y a d Caliphate.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A d a m s , Robert M c C . Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains, Chicago, 1 9 6 5 . A d a m s , Robert M c C . Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. C h a u d h u r i , K. N . Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Eco nomic History from the Rise of Islam to 17s - C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 5 . Costa, Paolo M., a n d T , J. Wilkinson. " T h e Hinterland of S o h a r . " Journal of Oman Studies 9 ( 1 9 8 7 ) . Creswell, K, A. C. Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, Urnayyads, Early 'Abbasids, and Tulunids. Oxford, 1940. D e Jesus, P . S., et al. "Preliminary R e p o r t of t h e Ancient M i n i n g S u r vey, 1981 ( 1 4 0 1 ) . " Atlal6 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 6 3 - 9 6 . Keall, E. J. " S o m e T h o u g h t s on the Early E y v a r . " In Near Eastern Numismatics: Iconography, Epigraphy, and History, edited by D . K. Kouymjian, p p . 1 2 2 - 1 3 6 . Beirut, 1 9 7 4 . 0
K e n n e d y , H u g h . The Early 'Abbasid Caliphate: A Political History. L o n don, 1 9 8 1 . K e n n e d y , H u g h . The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century. L o n d o n , 1986. Kervran, Monik. " L e s niveaux islamiques du secteur oriental du tepe de l'Apadana." Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran 7 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 7 5 - 1 6 2 . Lassner, Jacob. " T h e Caliph's Personal D o m a i n : T h e City Plan of Baghdad R e e x a m i n e d . " In The Islamic City, edited by Albert H o u r ani and S. M . Stern, p p . 1 0 3 - 1 1 8 . Oxford, 1 9 7 0 . Lassner, Jacob. The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages: Text and Studies. Detroit, 1 9 7 0 . M o r o n y , Michael, " C o n t i n u i t y and C h a n g e in t h e Administrative G e ography of L a t e Sasanian a n d Early Islamic al-'Iraq." Iran 20 (1982) : 1-49. Popovic, Alexandre. La revoke des esclaves en Iraq au DlellXe siecle. Paris, 1 9 7 6 ,
ABLLA Rashid, Sa'ad al-. Darb Zubaydah:
The Pilgrim Road from Kufa to
Mak-
kah. Riyadh, 1980. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. Al-Rabadhah: A Portrait of Early Islamic Civilisation in Saudi Arabia. L o n d o n , 1986. Samarrai, H u s a m Q. Agriculture in Iraq during the Third Century A. H. Beirut, 1 9 7 2 . Sarre, Friedrich P. T . Ausgrabungen von Samarra, vol. 2, Die Keramik von Samarra. Berlin, 1 9 2 5 . Waines, David. " T h e T h i r d - C e n t u r y Internal Crisis of t h e 'Abbasids," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 282-306. W a t s o n , A n d r e w M . Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100. Cam bridge, 1983. W h i t e h o u s e , David. "Siraf: A Medieval P o r t on the Persian Gulf." World Archaeology 2 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 1 4 1 - 1 5 8 .
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Felix-Marie. Grammaire du Grec biblique suivie d'un choix de Papynts. Paris, 1927. Abel, Felix-Marie, Geographie de la Palestine. 2 vols. Paris, 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 8 . Abel, Felix-Marie. Les livres des Maccabees. Paris, 1949. Abel, Felix-Marie. Histoire de la Palestine depuis la conquete d'Alexandre jusqu'a I'invasion arabe. Paris, 1 9 5 2 . Vincent, L . - H . , and Felix-Marie Abel. Bethleem, tivite. Paris, 1 9 1 4 . Vincent, L . - H . , and Felix-Marie Abel. Hibron: sepulture des patriarches. Paris, 1 9 2 3 .
le sanctuaire de la naLe Haram
el-Khalil,
Vincent, L . - H . , and Felix-Marie Abel. Jerusalem: Recherches de topogra phic, d'archeologie et d'histoire, vol. 2, Jerusalem nouvelle. Paris, 1926. Vincent, L . - H . , and Felix-Marie Abel. Emmaiis, toire. Paris, 1 9 3 2 .
sa basilique et son his
ALASTAIR NORTHEDGE
JEROME MURPHY-O'CONNOR, O.P.
ABEL, F E L I X - M A R I E (i878-1953), professor of history a n d g e o g r a p h y at t h e Ecole Biblique et A r c h e o l o -
ABILA, city of the D e c a p o l i s , located a b o u t 151cm (9 mi.) n o r m - n o r t h e a s t of I r b i d i n n o r t h e r n J o r d a n . Abila has a n occupational history t h a t e x t e n d s from t h e fourth millen n i u m to 1500 GE. It is identified in n u m e r o u s ancient sources: Polybius ( s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE) m e n t i o n s t h a t A n t i o c h u s III (218 BCE) c o n q u e r e d Abila along with Pella a n d G a d a r a / U m m Qeis (Hisloriae 5.69-70). It is later c o n q u e r e d by A l e x a n d e r J a n n a e u s (first c e n t u r y BCE), as r e p o r t e d by G e o r gios Synkellos (Chronographia, 294 D - 2 9 5 A ) . A n inscrip tion (133/144 CE) at T a y i b e h , n o r t h e a s t of Palmyra, Syria, speaks of an agaihangelos Abilenos tes Dekapoleos ("good m e s s e n g e r , or well-heralded Abila of t h e D e c a p o l i s ; " CIG 4501 o r L e B a s - W a d d i n g t o n , Inscriptions III, 2, n o . 2631 = OGIS 631). I n the s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, Ptolemy {Geography 5.14) identifies this Abila separately from the Abila of L y s anias just n o r t h of D a m a s c u s , Syria. Hierokles (sixth cen tury CE) in Synekdemos ( p p . 720-721) lists this Abila as p a r t of the Provincia S e c u n d a , along with the n e a r b y sites of Scythopolis, Sella (Pella), G a d a r a , a n d Capitolias. J e r o m e iden tifies a n Abila 12 R o m a n miles from G a d a r a (Carl Ritter, Erdkunde, Berlin, 1832-1858, vol. 15, p . 1060), the same city (Abel) E u s e b i u s h a d earlier located 12 R o m a n miles east of G a d a r a (Onomasticon, 32.16; Spijkerman, 1978, p p . 48-49, n, 5; cf. J o h a n n L. B u r c k h a r d t , Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, rpt. N e w York, 1983, vol. 1, p . 537, n o t e to p . 425). I n 1888 Gottlieb S c h u m a c h e r (1889, p p . 18, 21) found that the nationals at this site still called t h e n o r t h tell T e l l Abil. T h e 1984 excavation on T e l l Abila p r o d u c e d an inscription in G r e e k with the n a m e c u t in the s e c o n d line; in the fourth line Bmrnaftha] ( H a m m a t h - G a d e r ) , a site 18 k m (11 mi.) w e s t of Abila (Michael A v i - Y o n a h , The Holy Land, G r a n d R a p i d s , M i c h . , 1977, p p . 166, 170) is m e n t i o n e d , further verifying t h a t this is Abila of the Decapolis. In the B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages the site's n a m e m a y h a v e carried t h e prefixed n o u n , 'abel ( H e b . , " m e a d o w " ; Ar., " g r e e n " ) . It is similar to the Semitic n o u n u s e d in several o t h e r sites in the J o r d a n River system: Abel B e t h - M a a c a h (2 Kgs. 15:29); Abel
gique F r a n c a i s e in J e r u s a l e m from 1905 to 1953. Abel w e n t t o J e r u s a l e m as a novice in t h e D o m i n i c i a n O r d e r in 1900. E v e n as a s t u d e n t he p a r t i c i p a t e d in t h e scientific activity of t h e Ecole Biblique, w h e r e h e w a s to s p e n d his entire career. F r o m his d e b u t in die p a g e s of the Revue Biblique in 1903, Abel systematically p u b l i s h e d d o z e n s of detailed studies of different areas in the r e g i o n s , from t h e O r o n t e s River to the Sinai D e s e r t a n d from C y p r u s to J o r d a n . H e eventually syn thesized in his t w o - v o l u m e Geographie de la Palestine (Paris, 1933-1938), w h i c h deals in e x e m p l a r y detail with physical, historical, a n d political g e o g r a p h y from earliest times t o the Byzantine period. T h e t e n m a p s h e p r e p a r e d h a v e served as t h e p r i m e , b u t often u n a c k n o w l e d g e d , s o u r c e of m u c h s u b s e q u e n t t o p o g r a p h i c a l identification. Abel's m a s t e r y of t h e w h o l e r a n g e of G r e e k sources is displayed in his Grammaire du Grec biblique suivie d'un choix de Papyrus (Paris, 1927), his major c o m m e n t a r y on 1 a n d 2 Maccabees (1949), a n d his t w o - v o l u m e Histoire de la Palestine depuis la conquete d'Alexandre jusqu 'a Vinvasion arabe (Paris, 1952). H e h a d a n u n c a n n y ability t o identify t h e key q u e s tions in texts, a n d t h e vast majority of his p r o p o s e d a n swers—for e x a m p l e , his location of Pilate's p r a e t o r i u m in H e r o d t h e G r e a t ' s p a l a c e , r a t h e r t h a n at the A n t o n i a for t r e s s — h a v e s t o o d t h e test of time. Inevitably L . - H . V i n c e n t , also of t h e Ecole Biblique, called o n h i m to contribute t h e d o c u m e n t a r y evidence to t h e m a g isterial studies of B e t h l e h e m , H e b r o n , Jerusalem, a n d E m m a u s o n w h i c h they collaborated (Paris, 1914, 1923, 1926, 1932, respectively). H i s e x t r a o r d i n a r y erudition facilitated t h e ease with w h i c h h e t r a c k e d d o w n t h e m o s t esoteric data, even for individual b u i l d i n g s . It is his insights rather t h a n V i n c e n t ' s conclusions t h a t give these v o l u m e s their p e r m a n e n t value. [See also E c o l e Biblique et A r c h e o l o g i q u e F r a n c a i s e ; and the biography of Vincent]
6
ABILA
M e h o l a h (Jgs. 7:22); Abel Shittim (Nm. 33:49); a n d Abel K e r a m i m (Jgs. 11:33). Matthew 4:25 a n d Mark 5:20 a n d 7:31 mention the Decapolis b u t w i t h o u t specifying Abila or a n y other individual city. I n die m o d e r n period, in 1806, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (Reisen durch Syrien, ed. Fr. K r u s e , Berlin, 1854-1859, vol. 1, p . 371, vol. 4, p p . 190-191) rediscovered Abila. H e was fol lowed by S c h u m a c h e r (see above) w h o described t h e ruins a n d drew a m a p of the site, today called Quailibah. I n 1978 W . Harold M a r e of C o v e n a n t Theological Seminary, St. L o u i s , revisited t h e site; h e b e g a n excavating there in 1980, with s u b s e q u e n t seasons in 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992,1994, a n d 1995. Abila of the Decapolis is a b o u t o n e mile n o r t h - s o u t h a n d a half-mile east-west in area. T h e site consists of Tell Abila to the n o r t h and Tell U m m e l - A m a d to t h e south. It is p r o tected by d e e p wadis o n the n o r t h , east, a n d s o u t h a n d b y a saddle depression b e t w e e n the two tells. T h e site is sur r o u n d e d by rich farmlands a n d has a generous water supply. A n c i e n t building r e m a i n s are visible over the entire site. Its occupational history begins in the Neolithic p e r i o d a n d goes t h r o u g h the Early B r o n z e , M i d d l e B r o n z e , L a t e B r o n z e , a n d Iron Ages a n d the Hellenistic period, c o n c e n t r a t e d partic ularly on the acropolis of Tell Abila. O c c u p a t i o n in the R o m a n , Byzantine, a n d Islamic periods (especially U m a y y a d a n d 'Abbasid, a bit of F a t i m i d , a n d some A y y u b i d / M a m l u k ) is evident t h r o u g h o u t the site. Occasional O t t o m a n sherds are also found, indicating m o r e recent T u r k i s h h e g e m o n y . c
ABILA.
F i g u r e 1. Restored
seventh-century
basilica.
Excavations (1982-1990) on t h e acropolis of Tell Abila u n c o v e r e d a large sixth-century triapsidal Christian basilica (19 X 34.5 m ) in area A . It shows evidence of two rows of twelve c o l u m n s dividing the n a v e from the side aisles. T h e nave is p a v e d w i t h an o p u s sectile floor a n d t h e a t t i u m in t h e west with mosaics. T h e c h u r c h w a s built o n t h e f o u n dations of an earlier possibly fourth-fifth-century Christian basilica or G r e c o - R o m a n t e m p l e . Just t o the n o r t h e a s t of the basilica, in deep t r e n c h e s (area A A ) , p o t t e r y a n d walls p o i n t t o R o m a n , Hellenistic, a n d I r o n a n d B r o n z e A g e o c c u p a tions. E B a n d M B p o t t e r y a p p e a r e d extensively in area A A . Excavation o n Tell U m m e l - A m a d revealed a s e v e n t h c e n t u r y triapsidal Christian basilica (20 X 41 m ) , with t w o rows of twelve c o l u m n s each. It, t o o , w a s p a v e d with an o p u s sectile floor a n d h a d mosaics in its auxiliary r o o m s , colon n a d e d p o r c h , a n d a t r i u m . T h e excavated r e m a i n s of this basilica w e r e r e s t o r e d in 1988 (see figure 1). In the terraced depression b e t w e e n the t w o tells a large civic center existed in t h e R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e periods. It included w h a t seems to have b e e n a t h e a t e r built into t h e n o r t h e a s t slope of U m m e l - ' A m a d . M o s t of t h e theater's r e m a i n s w e r e r e u s e d b o t h recently a n d in antiquity. S c h u m a c h e r (1889, p . 30) saw s o m e of the seats in 1888. In t h e U m a y y a d p e r i o d a large building (palace?) was c o n s t r u c t e d within the theater's cavea. P a r t of the cavea w a s u s e d in t h e 'Abbasid a n d A y y u b i d / M a m l u k p e r i o d s . A n e x t e n d e d B y z antine basalt street existed just in front ( n o r t h ) of the Islamic building. Its eastern s e g m e n t at least lay over a n earlier l i m e -
T h e basilica, partially r e s t o r e d in 1 9 8 8 , is l o
c a t e d o n U m m e l - ' A m a d , t h e s o u t h e r n tell at Abila. (Courtesy W . H. M a r e )
ABU HAMID, TELL stone street or plaza w i t h a n e n t r a n c e w a y . N o r t h of this plaza excavation w a s b e g u n in 1990 in w h a t seems to h a v e b e e n a b a t h / n y m p h a e u m c o m p l e x ; a c h a n n e l cut into a vault at t h e east end of the c o m p l e x indicates t h a t water was b r o u g h t t h e r e f r o m springs ( A i n Q u a i l i b a h at t h e s o u t h e r n foot of U m m e l - ' A m a d a n d K h u r a y b a h , farther south) t h r o u g h a n intricate s y s t e m of u n d e r g r o u n d a q u e d u c t s . T h e s e a q u e d u c t s , w h i c h h a v e b e e n excavated, studied, a n d m a p p e d , w e r e u s e d to b r i n g w a t e r t o t h e site to p r o v i d e for t h e n e e d s of i n d u s t r y , civic installations, a n d private citizens. I n t h e civic center farther t o t h e n o r t h e a s t , near t h e R o m a n b r i d g e , excavation was b e g u n in 1990, a n d h a s c o n t i n u e d , o n a n o t h e r large C h r i s t i a n basilica, cruciform in design (32 m X 29.25 m ) ; a t t h e extremities of t h e a r m s of the central apse, large basalt piers w i t h Ionic capitals w e r e f o u n d , as well as a n o t h e r n o r t h r o w a n d also a s o u t h r o w of basalt columns. c
Extensive burial sites w e r e c u t into t h e wadis. B e t w e e n 1982 a n d 1994, eighty-five b u r i a l sites (mostly t o m b s , b u t s o m e graves) w e r e excavated. T h e burials date mainly from t h e L a t e Hellenistic, R o m a n , a n d B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d s , b u t a few I r o n A g e a n d M B / L B p e r i o d t o m b s w e r e also excavated. T h e grave g o o d s , t h e e m b e l l i s h m e n t of t h e t o m b s a n d their architectural style, food offerings, a n d religious i c o n o g r a p h y indicate t h r e e levels of society: t h e wealthy, t h e m i d d l e class, and the poor. E x c a v a t i o n t h u s far of t h e I r o n a n d B r o n z e A g e levels h a s p r o d u c e d evidence of a fairly well-developed society, with a variety of pottery types a n d buildings with small r o o m s . E x cavation of t h e R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e levels points to a c o n siderably well-developed city of seven t h o u s a n d - e i g h t d i o u s a n d i n h a b i t a n t s , with a s t r o n g agricultural b a s e , thriving c o m m e r c i a l activity, a n d a s t r o n g e m p h a s i s o n cultural a n d religious activities. BIBLIOGRAPHY Corpus Inscriptionem Graecarum (CIG). 5 VOLS., 1 3 faces. Berlin, 1 8 2 8 1877, n o . 450. Dittenberger, W . Orientis Graecae Inscriptiones Seleclae (OGIS). Leip zig, 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 0 5 . L e Bas, Philippe, a n d William H e n r y W a d d i n g t o n . Inscriptionesgrecqucs et latines recueilles en Asie Mineure. Hildesheim and N e w York, 1 9 7 2 . Ill, 2, n o . 2 6 3 1 . M a r e , W . Harold, et al. Preliminary Reports. Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 17 (1980): 5 - 2 5 ; 21 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 5-68; 22 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 5 - 6 4 ; 24 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 7 - 1 0 8 ; 25 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 3 5 - 9 0 ; 26 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 5 - 7 0 ; 27 ( 1 9 8 S ) : 2 5 - 6 0 ; 28 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 3 5 - 7 6 ; 29 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 3 1 - 8 8 ; 30 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 7 - 1 0 6 ; 31 (1988): 1 9 - 6 6 ; 3 2 - 3 3 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 2 - 6 4 ; 34 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 2 - 4 1 ; 35 ( I 9 9 I ) : 2 - 4 1 M a r e , W . Harold, et al. " T h e Decapolis Survey Project: Abila 1 9 8 0 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 26 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 3 7 - 6 5 . M a r e , W . Harold, et al. " T h e 1982 Season at Abila of the Decapolis." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 28 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 3 9 - 5 4 . M a r e , W . H a r o l d , et al. " T h e 1 9 8 4 Season at Abila of the Decapolis." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 29 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 2 2 1 - 2 3 7 . M a r e , W . H a r o l d , "Quwailiba: Abila of t h e Decapolis." Archivfiir Orientforschung 33 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 206-209. M a r e , W . H a r o l d , et al. " T h e 1 9 8 6 Season at Abila of the Decapolis." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 31 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 0 5 - 2 1 9 .
7
M a r e , W . Harold, " Q u w e i l b e h (Abila)," In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denyse H o m e s - F r e d e r i c q and J. Basil H e n n e s s y , p p . 4 7 2 - 4 8 6 . L o u v a i n , 1989. M a r e , W . H a r o l d , " T h e 1988 Season of Excavation at Abila of the Decapolis." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 35 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 203-220. M a r e , W . Harold, "Abila." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 1 - 3 . Jerusalem and N e w York, 1993. S c h u m a c h e r , Gottlieb. Abila of the Decapolis. L o n d o n , 1889. Smith, R o b e r t H o u s t o n , a n d Leslie P . Day. Final Report on the College of Wooster Excavations in Area IX, the Civic Complex, 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 5 . Pella of the Decapolis, vol. 2. Wooster, Ohio, 1989. Spijkerman, Augusto. The Coins of the Decapolis and Provincia Arabia. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 8 . W . HAROLD MARE
A B U H A M I D , TELL, site located in the J o r d a n Valley, at 240 m below sea level, o n L i s a n m a r l deposits b e t w e e n two small wadis (32°i9' N , 35°33' E ) . It originally covered an area of 1,400 m e a s t - w e s t a n d 400 m n o r t h - s o u t h . Since 1975 a n d t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of m o d e r n agriculture, it has suf fered from intensive leveling, and m o s t of d i e site h a s dis appeared. T h e site w a s first s u r v e y e d in 1975 ( I b r a h i m , Sauer, a n d Yassine, 1975), a n d revisited in 1982 b y Z e i d a n Kafafi ( K a fafi, 1982). I n 1984 a n international research project was initiated b y t h e Institute of Archaeology and A n t h r o p o l o g y of Y a r m o u k University, J o r d a n ; t h e Institut F r a n c a i s d'Archeologie d u P r o c h e O r i e n t ( I F A P O , A m m a n ) ; a n d t h e C e n t r e N a t i o n a l d e la R e c h e r c h e Scientiflque, with t h e c o o p e r a t i o n of t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of J o r d a n . R e search was focused o n t h e J o r d a n Valley a n d the nortiiern J o r d a n i a n p l a t e a u in t h e seventh-fifth millennia BP. T h e first stage of t h e project w a s t h e excavation of A b u H a m i d . T h e five seasons carried o u t from 1986 to 1992 p r o v i d e d a firm stratigraphic a n d chronological s e q u e n c e : 350-2,000 sq m w e r e e x p o s e d , a n d l o n g n o r t h - s o u t h a n d e a s t - w e s t sections w e r e established. T h e stratigraphic s e q u e n c e a n d t h e c h r o n o l o g y of t h e o c c u p a t i o n of t h e site can n o w b e c o m b i n e d with t h e s e q u e n c e a t M u n h a t a (30 1cm, or 19 mi., to t h e n o r t h , o n t h e w e s t b a n k of t h e J o r d a n River) to p r o v i d e a clear picture of t h e h i s t o r y of t h e m i d d l e J o r d a n Valley r e gion. [See M u n h a t a ; J o r d a n Valley.] A t A b u H a m i d n o significant hiatus is p r e s e n t e d in t h e stratigraphic s e q u e n c e ; however, small gaps w e r e observed t h a t w e r e c a u s e d by occasional a b a n d o n m e n t o r by the u s e of t h e site b y seasonal g r o u p s (Dollfus a n d Kafafi, 1993). A t t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e o c c u p a t i o n , in t h e early seventh mil l e n n i u m BP, t h e g r o u p lived in circular or oval shelters p a r tially d u g into t h e soil ( u p to 1.50 m d e e p , 1.80-3 ' di a m e t e r ) ; s o m e are lined w i t h roughly m a d e bricks along t h e sides. T h e inhabitants u s e d various kinds of pits a n d g y p s u m basins t o store a n d p r o c e s s food. T h e i r h a n d m a d e pottery includes a small p e r c e n t a g e of p a i n t e d ware (bowls w i t h inm
n
8
ABU HAMID, TELL
terior and/or exterior decoration, such as chevrons or diag onal lines; jars with sun motifs a n d criss-crossed lines). In terms of subsistence, the inhabitants were b e y o n d merely exploiting natural resources; they employed strategies to ex ploit their livestock a n d grew w h e a t , barley, lentils, a n d p e a s . T h e s e levels are certainly postclassical Y a r m u k i a n , as d e fined at S h a ' a r h a - G o l a n by M o s h e Stekelis; at M u n h a t a 2b by Jean Perrot, Avi G o p h e r , a n d Yosef Garfinkel; at A b u T h a w w a b ; at ' A m R a h u b ; a n d at W a d i S h u ' e i b b y Kafafi ( 9 9 3 ) - [See S h a ' a r h a - G o l a n ; Shu'eib, Wadi.] I n s o m e strata ashy floors, pits, a n d hearths were observed, b u t n o dwelling remains. J
D u r i n g t h e next o c c u p a t i o n , which, according to the stra tigraphy a n d the associated cultural remains could b e d a t e d to the second p a r t of the seventh millennium BP, t h e h o u s e s were built with well-made plano-convex m u d bricks a n d m o s t are pluricellular. T h e i r r o o m s are rectangular a n d , in some instances, their interior walls were plastered with g y p sum. At least o n e s t r u c t u r e h a d a wall painting, of w h i c h some fragments were u n c o v e r e d , Its design is linear, b r o a d , straight lines in yellow a n d red, w i t h a series of n a r r o w e r vertical a n d curved lines in red. [See Wall Paintings.] T h e o c c u p a n t s either h e a t e d their houses or cooked inside (cf, some small oval pits with ashes), b u t m o s t d o m e s t i c activities took place outside, as suggested b y the m a n y g y p s u m plastered basins, oval fire pits, a n d hearths f o u n d in o n e of the dwelling complexes. In that same complex, t h e large rectangular living r o o m is clearly separated from a storage building comprised of two small rectangular r o o m s a n d a brick platform.
ABU HAMID, TELL. nium dwelling.
Rectangular
living room from a late
fifth-millen
(Courtesy Z. Kafafi)
T h e ceramic evidence shows n e w techniques, especially in decoration: incisions, impressions, d e e p p u n c t u r e s , c o m b i n g and such plastic decoration as incised or fingerimpressed b a n d s in relief; an applied snake decoration a p pears for the first time. P a i n t e d sherds as well as s o m e sherds of extremely finely m a d e dark- a n d red-faced b u r n i s h e d w a r e were found. S h a p e s t h a t played an i m p o r t a n t role in the following p e r i o d s , such as churns and pedestal vessels, m a k e their d e b u t here. F r o m a chronological p o i n t of view, these levels u n d o u b t e d l y pertain to the W a d i R a b a h c h r o n ological h o r i z o n (cf. W a d i R a b a h , M u n h a t a 2a, H a z o r e a ' ) , Differences d o exist, for at A b u H a m i d t h e r e is an a b s e n c e of carinated vessels a n d b o w rims.
lian/Beersheba culture, evident in aspects of its p o t t e r y a n d artifacts (large storage jars, flint p e r f o r a t e d disks, "pillar m o r t a r s " ) . A s t h e violin figurines a n d large z o o m o r p h o logical vessel (bull) recovered at T e l A b u H a m i d suggest, t h e g r o u p certainly h a d links with others living in t h e south ( N e g e v ) ; m o r e o v e r t h e r e also w e r e ties w i t h t h e i n h a b i t a n t s of t h e W a d i ' A r a b a h , indicated b y the c o p p e r u s e d in s o m e pins from W a d i F e i n a n c o p p e r ores.
In the early sixth millennium B P , the village c o m p o u n d was c o m p r i s e d of a series of houses. M o s t of t h e m w e r e originally unicellular, b u t d u r i n g their occupation partitions were m a d e in s o m e ; in others, small r o o m s were a d d e d . T h e houses differ in building t e c h n i q u e . S o m e are m a d e c o m pletely of m u d bricks, while others have walls with stone bases. As at t h e b e g i n n i n g of the occupation, the g r o u p raised animals: sheep, goats, pigs, a n d cattle. [See S h e e p a n d G o a t s ; Pigs; Cattle a n d Oxen.] Its material culture r e p r e sents a regional f a d e s — n o r t h e r n M i d d l e J o r d a n Valley, U p p e r J o r d a n Valley, D j a u l a n , Irbid plateau—of t h e G h a s s u -
Dollfus, Genevieve, a n d Z e i d a n A. Kafafi et al. "Preliminary Results of the First Season of the Joint J o r d a n o - F r e n c h Project at A b u H a m i d . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 30 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 353-380.
[See also Institut F r a n c a i s d'Archeologie d u P r o c h e O r i ent.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dollfus, Genevieve, a n d Zeidan A. Kafafi et al. " A b u H a m i d , an Early F o u r t h Millennium Site in t h e Jordan Valley: Preliminary Results." In The Prehistory of Jordan: The State of Research in 1086, edited by A. N . Garrard and H a n s G e o r g Gebel, p p . 5 6 7 - 6 0 1 . Oxford, 1988. Dollfus, Genevieve, a n d Zeidan A. Kafafi. " R e c e n t Research at A b u H a m i d . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 38 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 241-262. Dollfus, Genevieve, a n d Zeidan A. Kafafi. "Representatins h u m a i n e s et animales sur le site d'Abu H a m i d ( M I - 7 E - D ' e b u t 6 E Millenaire
ABU SALABIKH BP)." Studies in the History and Archaeology
of Jordan 5 ( 1 9 9 5 ) : 4 4 9 -
457Ibrahim, M o a w i y a h , James A . Sauer, and K h a i r Yassine. " T h e East Jordan Valley Survey, 1 9 7 5 . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 222 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 4 1 - 6 6 . Kafafi, Zeidan A . " T h e Neolithic of J o r d a n (East B a n k ) . " P h . D . diss., Freie Universitat Berlin, 1 9 8 2 . Kafafi, Z e i d a n A . " T h e Y a r m o u k i a n s in J o r d a n . " Paleorient 1 9 . 1 (1993): 1 0 1 - 1 1 5 . ZEIDAN A . KAFAFI a n d GENEVIEVE DOLLFUS
9
u p of the h a r b o r , or was destroyed in the Assyrian invasions in the e i g h t h c e n t u r y BCE. [See P h o e n i c i a n s ; Assyrians.] S t r a t u m I I A - B (fifth-fourth century) p r o d u c e d a Persianperiod settlement, with substantial fortifications a n d consid erable i m p o r t e d pottery. T e l l A b u H a w a m was subsequently largely a b a n d o n e d . M a n y of the t o m b s in the n e a r b y c e m etery on t h e n o r t h e r n slope of M t . C a r m e l belong to this Persian horizon. BIBLIOGRAPHY
A B U H A W A M , TELL, i o - a c r e m o u n d on t h e M e d iterranean coast n e a r w h e r e t h e K i s h o n River empties into t h e bay of Haifa ( m a p reference 151 X 144). It m a y b e i d e n tified with B r o n z e - I r o n A g e A c h s h a p h , or biblical S h i h o r L i b n a h (Jos. 19:26). W i t h i n t h e Haifa city limits, t h e site w a s t h e focus of several salvage excavations b y t h e British M a n datory D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities (1922-1933), a n d later b y t h e Israeli archaeologists E m a n u e l Anati, Y a a c o v O l a m i , a n d M o s h e P r a u s n i t z (1952, 1963). M o r e m o d e r n stratigraphic w o r k was carried o u t in 1984-1989 b y F r e n c h a n d Israeli archaeologists. T h e y also investigated the ancient h a r b o r area, w h i c h was responsible for T e l l A b u H a w a m ' s relative a b u n d a n c e of i m p o r t e d w a r e s a n d c o m m e r c i a l p r o m i n e n c e . T h e earlier stratigraphic s e q u e n c e , mostly derived by R. W . H a m i l t o n (1932, 1933), h a s b e e n m u c h d e b a t e d in t h e literature. Jacqueline Balensi (1980) h a s revised the strata a n d dates (1985, 1986) b a s e d o n t h e latest excavations. T h e t o w n was f o u n d e d at t h e e n d of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e ( s t r a t u m VI; sixteenth-fifteenth c e n t u r y BCE), t h e n for tified a n d e q u i p p e d with a citadel a n d sanctuary w h e n it b e c a m e a major e n t r e p o t d u r i n g the L a t e B r o n z e A g e (stra t u m V A - C ; mid-fifteenth-twelfth c e n t u r y ) . T h e material b e l o n g i n g t o the latter h o r i z o n is exceptionally fine a n d often i m p o r t e d ; t h e older view t h a t T e l l A b u H a w a m w a s an E g y p t i a n n i n e t e e n t h - d y n a s t y naval b a s e has n o w b e e n largely a b a n d o n e d (Weinstein, 1980). T h e destruction t h a t e n d e d s t r a t u m V C was p r o b a b l y c a u s e d b y invading " S e a P e o p l e s " in a b o u t 1200 BCE, as at other sites along t h e L e v antine coast. [See Philistines, article on Early Philistines.] A g a p p o s i t e d by H a m i l t o n at t h e e n d of s t r a t u m V seems n o t t o h a v e existed. S t r a t u m I V A - B ( e l e v e n t h - t e n t h c e n t u r y ) represents an I r o n I r e o c c u p a t i o n , c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y r e u s e of t e m p l e 30, three-room houses, and some Phoenician bichrome wares. T h i s s t r a t u m e n d e d in a g r e a t conflagration. S t r a t u m I I I A - B ( t e n t h - e i g h t h century) belongs to the I r o n II p e r i o d a n d s e e m s t o r e p r e s e n t a m i x e d IsraeliteP h o e n i c i a n culture, in w h i c h s o m e of t h e earlier cyclopean walls a n d other installations w e r e r e u s e d . T h e p o t t e r y in cluded late C y p r o - P h o e n i c i a n w a r e s ; s o m e " S a m a r i a " wares; C y p r i o t W h i t e - P a i n t e d III w a r e s , a n d G r e e k i m p o r t s . T h i s s t r a t u m either declined, p e r h a p s as a result of t h e silting
Balensi, Jacqueline. "Les fouilles d e R. W . Hamilton a Tell Abu H a w a m , Niveaux IV et V . " P h . D . diss., University of Strassburg, 1980. Balensi, Jacqueline, et al. " A b u H a w a m , T e l l . " In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 7 - 1 4 . Je rusalem and N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . Weinstein, James M . " W a s Tell Abu H a w a m a Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian Naval Base?" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 238 (1980): 4 3 - 4 6 . WILLIAM G . DEVER
A B U SALABIKH ( m o d e r n n a m e , Ar., Tell or Isan A b u es-Salablh ["father of clinker"]), city of t h e fourth a n d third millennia in s o u t h e r n Iraq, located at the center of the M e s o p o t a m i a n alluvial plain b e t w e e n the E u p h r a t e s a n d T i gris Rivers (32°i5' N , 4 5 V E ) . T h e site's m o d e r n n a m e c o m e s from t h e quantities of overtired c e r a m i c slag f o u n d o n its sLirface. S e t t l e m e n t distribution a n d g e o m o r p h o l o g y suggest t h a t in antiquity the site lay on a principal a r m of the E u p h r a t e s , flowing from K i s h t o w a r d N i p p u r , which lies only s o m e 16 k m ( a b o u t 10 mi.) to the southeast a n d c a n b e seen from A b u Salabikh o n a clear day. T h e site's ancient n a m e remains uncertain. K e s h (kes), w h i c h was initially p r o p o s e d , seems likelier to b e near A d a b , farther east ( p e r h a p s at T e l l al-Wilayah). A t present, E r e s h c o u n t s as t h e best c a n d i d a t e , which w o u l d b e significant in t h a t its p a t r o n deity was N i s a b a , g o d d e s s of reeds a n d h e n c e of scribal craft. T h e m o u n d s on the site are scattered over an area of a b o u t 2 X 1 Ion. N o n e rises m o r e t h a n 5 m a b o v e the s u r r o u n d i n g plain, b u t their lower p a r t s are s h r o u d e d by 2-3 m of silt that h a s a c c u m u l a t e d since the first settlement here. T h e earliest occupation is h i n t e d at by a few L a t e U b a i d p a i n t e d p o t s h e r d s from unstratified contexts, U r u k levels are r e p r e s e n t e d on the S o u t h w e s t ( " U r u k " ) , W e s t , a n d N o r t h w e s t M o u n d s b u t are n o t yet identified elsewhere. T h e N o r t h e a s t M o u n d a n d c o m p o u n d s laid o u t on t h e flattened surface of t h e W e s t M o u n d date f r o m t h e b e g i n n i n g of Early D y n a s t i c ( E D ) I (c. 2900 BC). T h e o c c u p a t i o n of the M a i n M o u n d m a y n o t p r e d a t e t h e later E D I, All t h a t is k n o w n of the S o u t h M o u n d is that its surface levels w e r e o c c u p i e d in E D III. T h e very low-lying area k n o w n as t h e East M o u n d s m a y b e U r III, o n the e v i d e n c e of an unstratified A m a r - S u e n brick. D a t e s of a b a n d o n m e n t are m o r e difficult to establish b e c a u s e of massive erosion. T h e r e is n o r e a s o n to think that
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ABU SIMBEL
the m a i n p a r t of the U r u k M o u n d was occupied after the U r u k period, or t h e W e s t M o u n d after E D I. T h e highest buildings surviving o n the M a i n M o u n d are E D III, b u t the evidence of p o t s h e r d s u s e d as packing a r o u n d drains, in pits a n d in tip lines outside the city wall proves Akkadian a n d probably U r III o c c u p a t i o n . T h e r e is no artifactual evidence for the second m i l l e n n i u m BC or later. Archaeological notice of the site was first published by Albrecht Goetze a n d V a u g h n E. Crawford, as p a r t of the Akkad survey carried o u t b y the A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research. C r a w f o r d initiated excavations in 1963-1965, assisted by D o n a l d P . H a n s e n . Several s o u n d ings were m a d e : of principal interest was the u n e x p e c t e d discovery of about five h u n d r e d pieces of P r e - S a r g o n i c c u neiform tablets scattered t h r o u g h t h e r o o m s of a building in area E on t h e M a i n M o u n d , p r o b a b l y part of a t e m p l e c o m plex. Published b y R o b e r t D . Biggs in 1974, they revolu tionized our view of early M e s o p o t a m i a n literature. Of p a r ticular interest are versions of the Instructions of S h u r u p p a k a n d the K e s h T e m p l e H y m n . Old Babylonian copies of these texts help us to u n d e r s t a n d them. In addition to lexical a n d geographical lists, s o m e n o w duplicated by texts f r o m Ebla in Syria, m e r e are literary a n d religious pieces a n d a few public administrative d o c u m e n t s . L a t e r work at the site yielded additional tablets, s o m e from other buildings on t h e M a i n M o u n d , including administrative tablets a n d an in cantation. A contour survey was carried o u t in 1973 a n d excavation was r e s u m e d in 1975 by t h e British School of Archaeology in Iraq, u n d e r the direction of J. N . Postgate. T h e work c o n t i n u e d with occasional fallow years until 1989 a n d will b e r e s u m e d if circumstances permit. T h e principal results in clude the recovery of m o r e than 4 ha (10 acres) of the city layout as a result of surface clearing: on the m a i n m o u n d this revealed the street a n d lane network, the line of the city wall, t h e p r o b a b l e location of gates, and m a n y individual buildings. O n the W e s t M o u n d it showed that the E D I settlement was laid out in c o m p o u n d s divided b y h e a v y walls. I n areas A a n d E of the M a i n M o u n d , buildings excavated b y the earlier excavators were further investigated. T h i s e n tailed excavating n u m e r o u s graves, furnished with consid erable a m o u n t s of pottery, jewelry, a n d other g o o d s , i n c l u d ing equids p r e s u m a b l y h a r n e s s e d to wheeled vehicles. S o m e of t h e graves were d e m o n s t r a b l y intramural having been d u g from within the houses. Against the southeastern side of t h e area E complex a massive refuse tip was identified t h a t was m o r e than 6 m d e e p . It contained m a n y d o o r sealings, fig urines, a n d other items suggestive of t e m p l e discard. T w o large E D III domestic buildings were excavated on t h e M a i n M o u n d , with particular attention, given to defining t h e u s e of space t h r o u g h quantitatively controlled recovery a n d m i cromorphological e x a m i n a t i o n of the stratification. S u s a n M . Pollock u n d e r t o o k excavation a n d other w o r k
on t h e U r u k M o u n d b e t w e e n 1985 a n d 1990. H e r w o r k c o n firmed an o c c u p a t i o n f r o m Early to L a t e U r u k , with a small E D o c c u p a t i o n o n t h e m o u n d ' s s o u t h e a s t e r n sector. A L a t e U r u k city wall 20 m thick was located. D e t a i l e d observation of its surface r e m a i n s h a s illuminated t h e distribution of a c tivities t h r o u g h o u t t h e settlement. [See also M e s o p o t a m i a , article on A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Biggs, Robert D . Inscriptions from Tell Abu Salabikh. University of C h i cago Oriental Institute Publications, no. 99. Chicago, 1 9 7 4 . Defini tive publication of the inscriptions from 1963 to 1 9 6 5 , with a r e p o r t on the excavations by D o n a l d P. H a n s e n . G r e e n , A. R., et al. Abu Salabikh Excavations, vol. 4, The 6G Ash-Tip and Its Contents. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 . See below for the first three volumes of this report; two additional volumes are in preparation. M a r t i n , Harriet P., J a n e M o o n , and J. N . Postgate. Abu Salabikh cavations, vol. 2, Graves 1 to 99. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 5 .
Ex
M o o n , Jane. Abu Salabikh Excavations, vol. 3 , Catalogue of Early Dy nastic Pottery. L o n d o n , 1987. Pollock, Susan. " A b u Salabikh, the U r u k M o u n d , 1 9 8 5 - 8 6 . " Iraq 49 (1987): 1 2 1 - 1 4 1 . Pollock, Susan. "Archaeological Investigations on the U r u k M o u n d , Abu Salabikh." Iraq 52 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 8 5 - 9 3 . Pollock, Susan, Caroline Steele, and M e l o d y P o p e . "Investigations on the U r u k M o u n d , Abu Salabikh, 1 9 9 0 . " Iraq 53 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 5 9 - 6 8 . Postgate, J. N . "Excavations at Abu Salabikh" ( 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 7 9 ) . Iraq 39.2 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 2 6 9 - 2 9 9 ; 40.2 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 7 7 - 8 7 ; 42,2 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 8 7 - 1 0 4 . Postgate, J. N . Abu Salabikh Excavations, vol. 1, The West Mound Sur face Clearance. L o n d o n , 1983. Postgate, J. N . "Excavations at Abu Salabikh, 1 9 8 8 - 8 9 . " Iraq 52 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 95-106. Postgate, J. N . j and Jane M o o n . "Excavations at Abu Salabikh, 1 9 8 1 . " Iraq 44.2 (1982): 1 0 3 - 1 3 6 . Postgate, J. N . , and P . R. S. M o o r e y . "Excavations at A b u Salabikh, 1 9 7 5 . " Iraq 38.2 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 1 3 3 - 1 6 9 . F o r other articles on the inscrip tions, animal and fish bones, fire installations, pottery, the flint in dustry, a n d geomorphology, see various authors in Iraq, vols. 4 0 - 5 2 . J. N . POSTGATE
A B U S I M B E L , colossal t e m p l e c o m p l e x located in the n o r t h e r n S u d a n a b o u t 200 k m (186 mi.) u p t h e Nile from A s w a n (22°21' N , 31°3 8' E ) . Built in N u b i a b y t h e E g y p t i a n p h a r a o h R a m e s e s II (1279-1213 BCE), t h e c o m p l e x consists of two rock-cut t e m p l e s , a large s t r u c t u r e for the p h a r a o h a n d a small one for h i m a n d his q u e e n , Nefertari. B e g u n after 1274, b o t h t e m p l e s w e r e officially o p e n e d for cult p u r poses in 1255; the officials responsible for t h e w o r k w e r e t w o successive viceroys of K u s h ( N u b i a ) , I u n y a n d H e k a n a k h t , a n d a royal c u p b e a r e r , A s h a h e b s e d . I n 1238 A b u Simbel e x p e r i e n c e d a severe e a r t h q u a k e . Viceroy P a s e r carried o u t extensive repairs, b u t the u p p e r p a r t of o n e of four great colossi of R a m e s e s II t h a t fronted t h e G r e a t T e m p l e h a d t o b e left w h e r e it h a d fallen. T h e colossi, a n d the G r e a t T e m ple itself, w e r e already partly b u r i e d u n d e r e n c r o a c h i n g s a n d in 593, w h e n G r e e k , C a r i a n , a n d P h o e n i c i a n m e r c e n a r i e s serving in a n i n v a d i n g a r m y of P s a m m e t i k II (595-589) left
ABYDOS graffiti relatively h i g h u p o n t h e legs of the colossi. E v e n tually b o t h t e m p l e s were largely b u r i e d u n d e r s a n d ; t h e G r e a t T e m p l e w a s r e d i s c o v e r e d b y t h e Swiss traveler J o h a n n B u r c k h a r d t in 1813 a n d first e n t e r e d by t h e early E g y p tologist G i o v a n n i Belzoni in 1817. T h e t w o t e m p l e s of A b u Simbel are t h e b e s t - p r e s e r v e d e x a m p l e s of the g r a n d i o s e a r t a n d architecture typical of t h e reign of R a m e s e s II. E a c h was c u t into separate, high s a n d stone bluffs. Nefertari's s t r u c t u r e lay n o r t h e a s t of the G r e a t T e m p l e . T h e G r e a t T e m p l e ' s facade is c u t directly into t h e cliff face (over 26 m [85 ft.] high a n d recalling a t e m p l e p y l o n in f o r m ) . F o u r colossal figures (over 19.8 m [65 ft.] high) of an e n t h r o n e d R a m e s e s s t a n d in front, a n d over t h e e n t r a n c e a statue of R e - H a r a k h t i , a solar g o d , set in a recess, receives offerings from figures of R a m e s e s cut in relief o n either side. A frieze of b a b o o n s along t h e t o p of t h e facade r e p r e s e n t s those creatures of t h e " e a s t e r n h o r i z o n " w h o a d o r e t h e rising s u n . T h e G r e a t T e m p l e ' s m a x i m u m d e p t h is 62.85 m (206.2 ft.); o n e a c h side, also rock cut, are l o n g c h a m b e r s , which h o u s e d t e m p l e utensils a n d furniture. W i t h i n is a large c o l u m n e d hall lined with eight colossal figures of R a m e s e s s t a n d i n g in b o t h royal regalia a n d Osiride p o s e . T h e reliefs covering t h e walls focus mostly on royal victories; in particular, t h e n o r t h wall is o c c u p i e d b y t h e b e s t - p r e s e r v e d d e p i c t i o n of t h e f a m o u s battle of R a m e s e s II against t h e Hittites at Q a d e s h (1274). M o r e conventional scenes involving Syrians, L i b y a n s , a n d N u b i a n s are f o u n d o n t h e s o u t h wall. B e y o n d , a smaller c o l u m n e d hall is e m bellished w i t h cult scenes, a n d further in (after a small ves tibule) is t h e sanctuary, w h i c h contains an altar or b a r q u e stand (at festival times, i m a g e s of g o d s w e r e carried outside t h e t e m p l e in a b o a t - s h a p e d p a l a n q u i n ) a n d , along the rear wall, four seated statues r e p r e s e n t i n g P t a h a n d A m u n o n the south side a n d t h e deified R a m e s e s a n d R e - H a r a k h t i o n the n o r t h side. I n tire N e w K i n g d o m (eighteenth t o t w e n t i e t h dynasties, 15 50-1069) a p h a r a o h c o u l d b e u n d e r s t o o d as b e ing b o t h a m o r t a l earthly ruler a n d simultaneously a divine b e i n g capable of receiving cult like a g o d . Nefertari's t e m p l e is m a r k e d l y smaller; its facade is only 12 m (39 ft.) h i g h , a n d its total d e p t h a b o u t 20 m (66 ft.). Six colossal s t a n d i n g figures (all 9.9 m [32.4 ft.] high) front t h e t e m p l e . O n each side, Nefertari is depicted as the g o d dess H a t h o r a n d is flanked b y figures of R a m e s e s . A col u m n e d hall with six H a t h o r i c c o l u m n s within is d e c o r a t e d mainly with cult scenes, a n d a small c h a m b e r before the s a n c t u a r y celebrates in its reliefs deities associated with f e m ininity a n d birth. H a t h o r in c o w f o r m e m e r g e s f r o m t h e m a r s h e s , a n d T a w e r e t , p r o t e c t o r of w o m e n in childbirth, a p p e a r s . I n the s a n c t u a r y is a statue of H a t h o r as a c o w p r o t e c t i n g the king. Implicitly h e is h e r m a t u r i n g s o n , al t h o u g h h e is s h o w n as a n adult. T h e t e m p l e s of A b u S i m b e l are of manifold significance; they are b e s t u n d e r s t o o d as a c o n c e p t u a l , as m u c h as an architectural, whole. O n o n e level, t h e t e m p l e s link R a m e s e s
11
w i t h the g o d s of N u b i a a n d E g y p t , specifically t h e N u b i a n g o d s H o r u s of M e h a n d H a t h o r of Ibshek, a n d t h e four E g y p t i a n deities P t a h , A m u n , R e - H a r a k h t i , a n d the deified R a m e s e s himself. T h e y also p r o v i d e t h e context for a cult of the divine R a m e s e s . H o w e v e r , t h e m y t h i c dimensions of kingship are also involved. T h e Nefertari t e m p l e is c o n c e p tually a secluded arena for c o n c e p t i o n , gestation, birth, a n d creation, a n d Nefertari a n d four individualized hypostases (essential natures) of R a m e s e s (the six colossi) literally stride o u t from it. T h e s e s a m e f o u r hypostases take their place as the four colossi of the G r e a t T e m p l e , w h i c h celebrates R a m eses as virtual e m b o d i m e n t of t h e s u n g o d on earth a n d ruler of E g y p t a n d the world. T h e Nefertari t e m p l e w a s aligned so t h a t its' m o s t direct solar illumination w o u l d occur at a b o u t t h e winter solstice. Sunlight p e n e t r a t e d tire G r e a t T e m p l e m o s t d e e p l y a b o u t a m o n t h a n d a half before or after t h e solstice. T h e s e schedules suggest that Nefertari's t e m p l e w a s ritually m o s t significant d u r i n g the p e r i o d of g r o w t h a n d e m e r g e n c e , a n d the G r e a t T e m p l e w a s m o s t p r o m i n e n t at the t i m e of increasing heat a n d at the i n u n dation. As a result of the flooding of N u b i a b y the L a k e N a s s e r reservoir, b o t h t e m p l e s w e r e cut into segments a n d rebuilt at a h i g h e r location b e t w e e n 1964 a n d 1968, a spectacularly successful example of salvage archaeology. [See also N u b i a . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Desroches-Noblecourt, Christiane, and Charles Kuentz. La petit temple d'Abou Simbel, 2 vols. C e n t r e de D o c u m e n t a t i o n et d ' E t u d e sur l'Ancienne Egypte, M e m o i r e s , vols. 1 - 2 . Cairo, 1968. Desroches-Noblecourt, Christiane, and G e o r g Gerster. The World Saves Abu Simbel. Vienna, 1 9 6 8 . Hery, Francois-Xavier, a n d T h i e r r y Enel. Abou Simbel & les temples de Nubie. Aix-en-Provence, 1994. Save-Soderbergh, T o r g n y , ed. Temples and Tombs of Ancient Nubia: Tlte International Rescue Campaign at Abou Simbel, Philae, and Other Sites. L o n d o n , 1987. DAVID O'CONNOR
A B Y D O S , o n e of a n c i e n t E g y p t ' s m o s t sacred sites, lo cated in the eighth U p p e r E g y p t i a n n o m e , or p r o v i n c e ( 2 6 ° n ' N , 3i°55' E ) . Archaeological survey indicates t h a t along with T h i s ( T h i n i s ) it was o n e of t w o p r o m i n e n t towns within this administrative district. Initially, K h e n t i a m e n t i u , a p r o t e c t o r of cemeteries, was the local g o d , b u t by t h e late Old K i n g d o m (c. 2350 BCE), h e h a d b e e n syncretized with Osiris, the powerful g o d of t h e u n d e r w o r l d . M o s t likely, Osi ris c a m e to b e associated w i t h A b y d o s b e c a u s e the ancient E g y p t i a n s believed t h e u n d e r w o r l d ' s e n t r a n c e was there. By t h e twelfth d y n a s t y (c. 1991-1783 BCE), a n n u a l rites i n c l u d e d a procession f r o m t h e t e m p l e at t h e e d g e of the flood plain t o Osiris's s u p p o s e d t o m b at U m m e l - Q a ' a b , the Early
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ABYDOS
Dynastic royal cemetery at the foot of the high desert e s carpment. In ancient E g y p t the n a m e Abydos applied only t o t h e town in which the Osiris t e m p l e was located. T o d a y die d e s ignation Abydos refers to the t o w n as well as a n u m b e r of settlements, cemeteries, and m o n u m e n t s located along a narrow 4 k m (2.5 mi.) stretch of low desert. Additionally, several other A b y d o s cemeteries, including U m m e l - Q a ' a b , are found b e y o n d this z o n e , into t h e low desert along a small wadi whose m o u t h w a s located b e h i n d the town of A b y d o s . T h e first p e r s o n t o excavate at A b y d o s was A u g u s t e M a r iette a r o u n d 1858-1859. H e focused on the necropoleis, la beling the largest ones the N o r t h , M i d d l e , and S o u t h C e m eteries. H e was principally interested in acquiring funerary stelae, ( c o m m e m o r a t i v e tablets), although h e u n d e r t o o k a substantial a m o u n t of excavation in the n o r t h w e s t corner of K o m es-Sultan (tile m o d e r n n a m e for the ancient t o w n site), searching for the " t o m b of Osiris." T h e ancient E g y p t i a n s believed that A b y d o s was the burial place of Osiris, h e n c e Mariette's search for that t o m b . Between 1895 a n d 1897, Emile Amelineau c o n d u c t e d t h e first excavations at U m m e l - Q a ' a b , uncovering t o m b s of early kings. A considerable b o d y of early archaeological w o r k was c o n d u c t e d u n d e r the auspices of the E g y p t E x ploration F u n d ( E E F ) of L o n d o n . William M a t t h e w Flin ders Petrie was responsible for the largest a n d m o s t system atic b o d y of early E E F excavations. Although A m e l i n e a u h a d already d u g at U m m e l - Q a ' a b , Petrie's m o r e detailed research on the t o m b s a n d Amelineau's d u m p s allowed h i m to outline the Early D y n a s t i c period. Also h e excavated t h e Osiris temple, some of the early t o w n , as well as the M i d d l e C e m e t e r y ; m u c h of this w o r k h a s yet t o b e i m p r o v e d u p o n . O t h e r archaeologists w o r k e d there as well: T . Eric Peet a n d H e n r i Frankfort ( M i d d l e C e m e t e r y ) ; E. R. A y r t o n a n d C . T . Currelly ( S o u t h A b y d o s ) ; a n d A r t h u r C. M a c e ( N o r t h C e m e t e r y ) . J o h n G a r s t a n g d u g in t h e N o r t h a n d M i d d l e Cemeteries as well b u t published little. Abydos continues t o b e a rich source of data. Since 1979, t h e Pennsylvania-Yale E x p e d i t i o n to A b y d o s has regularly a n d systematically explored the ancient t o w n a n d n e a r b y funerary remains, especially M i d d l e K i n g d o m c e n o t a p h s of private persons a n d the m u d - b r i c k funerary enclosures of the first a n d second dynasties. A t t h e latter, n u m e r o u s m u d brick structures h a v e b e e n discovered t h a t h o u s e w o o d e n boats. R e c e n t work a t C e m e t e r y U near U m m e l - Q a ' a b b y the G e r m a n Archaeological Institute in Cairo has u n c o v e r e d t o m b s belonging to high-ranking individuals, possibly kings, w h o s e remains date prior to N a r m e r of D y n a s t y 0 (c. 3150
t o p t a h built by Seti I] a n d u n d e r C e m e t e r y D ) h a v e b e e n assigned t o the s u b s e q u e n t late N a q a d a II a n d III periods. T h e stratigraphic r e m a i n s from K o m es-Sultan suggest t h a t t h e t o w n was o c c u p i e d by the e n d of t h e P r e d y n a s t i c period, b u t t h e earliest stratified levels in the Osiris t e m p l e c a n n o t b e d o c u m e n t e d p r i o r to t h e late O l d K i n g d o m . C a c h e s of objects a n d several burials within t h e t o w n site ( M series), generally agreed t o be principally of Early D y n a s t i c date, suggest, however, that t h e t e m p l e flourished earlier. T h e ten royal t o m b s at U m m e l - Q a ' a b a n d their funerary enclosures in the M i d d l e C e m e t e r y are t h e m o s t significant early dynastic r e m a i n s . T h e Old K i n g d o m is r e p r e s e n t e d by t o m b s (most in M a r i e t t e ' s N o r t h a n d M i d d l e c e m e t e r i e s ) , t e m p l e architecture, a n d a settlement ( b o t h in K o m es-Sul t a n ) . T h e increasing i m p o r t a n c e of A b y d o s to t h e M i d d l e K i n g d o m E g y p t i a n s can b e seen in the g r o w t h of the c e m etery zone. In addition t o traditional burials, c e n o t a p h s (or m o r e precisely, m e m o r i a l chapels) b e c a m e fashionable. T h e private cenotaphs are located in the e a s t e r n m o s t p o r t i o n of t h e N o r t h C e m e t e r y , b u t large royal c e n o t a p h - t e m p l e s , s u c h as those of S e n w o s r e t (Sesostris) III a n d A h m o s e , w e r e built farther s o u t h ( n o w k n o w n as S o u t h A b y d o s ) . Particularly well k n o w n are t h e n i n e t e e n t h - d y n a s t y s t r u c t u r e s , i n c l u d i n g o n e dedicated t o R a m e s e s I, the large, well-preserved ex a m p l e built by Seti I, a n d t h e small R a m e s e s II t e m p l e . T h e N o r t h a n d M i d d l e C e m e t e r i e s w e r e u s e d extensively from the N e w K i n g d o m t h r o u g h t h e R o m a n p e r i o d , a n d t h e south cemetery is certainly of a late date. A s of t h e P t o l e m a i c period, the w a d i b e d , previously taboo for burial p u r p o s e s , b e c a m e a heavily exploited c e m e t e r y z o n e . T h e cemeteries for a n i m a l s — p r e d o m i n a n t l y ibis, dog, a n d h a w k — d a t e t o t h e L a t e period a n d s u b s e q u e n t phases of E g y p t i a n history. T h e Osiris t e m p l e was e x p a n d e d in the M i d d l e K i n g d o m , a n d in the later N e w K i n g d o m , it was leveled a n d rebuilt. N u m e r o u s rulers of the N e w K i n g d o m ( e i g h t e e n t h - t w e n tieth dynasties) d e c o r a t e d a n d a d d e d o n t o t h e r e v a m p e d t e m p l e . Rameses I I built a n e w t e m p l e , t h e p o r t a l , t o t h e west. F i n d s of private a n d royal statuary, dating t h r o u g h t h e e n d of the twenty-sixth dynasty, testify t o t h e Osiris t e m p l e ' s c o n t i n u e d use. F r a g m e n t s b o r e a dedication to N e c t a n e b o , suggesting t h a t building c o n t i n u e d in t h e thirtieth D y n a s t y , a n d t h e s a m e s t r u c t u r e w a s p r o b a b l y u s e d in t h e P t o l e m a i c a n d R o m a n periods, [See also Egypt, article on Predynastic E g y p t ; E g y p t E x ploration Society; and the biographies of Frankfort, Garstang,
Mariette, and Petrie.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BCE).
T h e earliest predynastic remains date to the late N a q a d a I a n d early N a q a d a II periods (Cemeteries cb/C, E , U , a n d S/Salmani a n d a settlement east of t h e A h m o s e c e n o t a p h ) . N u m e r o u s cemeteries (%/B, E , U , a n d S/Salmani) a n d sev eral small settlements (west of t h e Osireion [elaborate c e n -
Dreyer, Gtinter. " R e c e n t Discoveries at Abydos C e m e t e r y U . " In The Nile Delta in Transition: 4th~3rd Millennium B.C., edited by E d w i n C. M . van den Brink, p p . 2 9 3 - 2 9 9 . T e l Aviv, 1 9 9 2 . Brief s u m m a r y of the newly discovered burials of the earliest rulers. Kees, H e r m a n n . Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography. T r a n s l a t e d by Ian F . D . M o r r o w . Edited by T . G. H . James. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 1 . C h a p -
ACHZIV ter 9 is devoted to a very readable discussion of t h e significance of Abydos in ancient Egyptian culture. K e m p , Barry J. " T h e Egyptian 1st D y n a s t y Royal Cemetery." Antiquity 41 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 2 2 - 3 2 . I m p o r t a n t discussion of the evidence that leads most scholars to accept the structures of U m m el-Qa'ab as the t o m b s of Egypt's first kings not c e n o t a p h s . K e m p , Barry J. " A b y d o s . " In Lexikon der Agyptologie, vol. 1, cols. 2 8 - 4 1 . Wiesbaden, 1 9 7 2 . Excellent s u m m a r y of the archaeological remains at Abydos. K e m p , Barry J. " A b y d o s . " In Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Explora tion Society, 1882-1082, edited by T . G. H . James, p p . 7 1 - 8 8 . L o n don, 1982. S u m m a r i z e s the archaeological excavations conducted at Abydos u n d e r the auspices of the E g y p t Exploration Society. O ' C o n n o r , David. " T h e ' C e n o t a p h s ' of the M i d d l e K i n g d o m at A b y d o s . " In Melanges Gamal Eddin Mokhtar, vol. 2, p p . 1 6 1 - 1 7 7 . Cairo, 1985. Clear, detailed discussion of the Pennsylvania-Yale Expedi tion's excavations of private cenotaphs of the M i d d l e K i n g d o m . O ' C o n n o r , David. " T h e Earliest P h a r a o h s and T h e University M u s e u m . " Expedition 29.1 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 7 - 3 9 . Excellent s u m m a r y of k n o w n Early Dynastic sites at A b y d o s , with information about the p e r s o n alities of the individuals responsible for some of the archaeological excavations there at the t u r n of the century. O ' C o n n o r , David. " B o a t Graves a n d P y r a m i d Origins: N e w Discov eries at Abydos, E g y p t . " Expedition 33.3 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 5 - 1 7 . O ' C o n n o r discusses his most recent find of boats in the vicinity of an Early Dynastic funerary enclosure. DIANA CRAIG PATCH
A C H A E M E N I D D Y N A S T Y . See Persians.
A C H Z I V (or A k h z i b ; Ar., E z - Z i b ; Assyr., A c c i p u ) , site located on t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast of Israel, 15 k m (9 mi.) n o r t h of A k k o a n d 25 Ion (15 mi.) s o u t h of T y r e (33°02'o8" N , 35°o6' E ) . T h e tell, a d o u b l e m o u n d , is located o n a kurkar (sandstone) ridge t h a t overlooks the M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea a n d is s o u t h of the e s t u a r y of t h e K e s i b River. T o t h e s o u t h a d e e p riverbed is u s a b l e as an a n c h o r a g e . B e y o n d t h e s o u t h e r n b a y , a well-protected a n d sizable h a r b o r ( M i n a t e z Z i b ) can a c c o m m o d a t e a considerable n u m b e r of boats. A n u n d e r w a t e r survey revealed r o c k installations u s e d in g r o w ing crops of the M u r e x snail t h a t p r o d u c e s the p u r p l e a n d blue dyes so valued in antiquity. Achziv is m e n t i o n e d in m e H e b r e w Bible as a t o w n on t h e n o r t h e r n coast of C a n a a n b o r d e r i n g t h e land of t h e S i d o n ians a n d allotted to the tribe of A s h e r (Jos. 19:29). G r e e k a n d R o m a n writers, a m o n g t h e m J o s e p h u s , k n e w E k d i p p a , a city o n t h e P h o e n i c i a n coast (War 1.257). T r a v e l e r s a n d historians in R o m a n , B y z a n t i n e , a n d A r a b times also m e n tion Achziv on t h e r o a d t o T y r e , 16 k m (9 mi.) from Akko, T h e C r u s a d e r s built a fortress, the Casal U m b e r t i , on the h i g h e r m o u n d of the tell. T h e native Arabic-speaking p o p ulation c o n t i n u e s t o call tire village Ekziv/ez-Zib. I n 1963-1964, excavations w e r e u n d e r t a k e n jointly by the Istituto d e Vicino Oriente of t h e University of R o m e a n d the Israel D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities, d i r e c t e d by M o s h e W . P r a u s n i t z . F o u r c o n t e m p o r a r y , or o v e r l a p p i n g , I r o n A g e
13
cemeteries were excavated: t h e central cemetery ( C C A ) at t h e foot of the defenses o n t h e eastern slope; t h e n o r t h e r n c e m e t e r y ( N C A ) on the n o r t h e r n b a n k of t h e K e s i b River; the s o u t h e r n cemetery ( S C A ) overlooking M i n a t ez-Zib; a n d t h e eastern c e m e t e r y ( E C A ) , d u g into a second kurkar ridge east of a n d parallel t o the coastal ridge. A c c o r d i n g t o Jewish tradition, this is t h e n o r t h w e s t b o r d e r of the ancient land of Israel. Achziv's strategic position o n t h e coastal m a i n artery, the Via M a r i s , from T y r e to Akko a n d on to Philistia, was cov eted by the Asherites a n d the T y r i a n s . In antiquity the h a r b o r was regularly visited b y L e v a n t i n e , as well as Cypriot, coastal vessels. T h e S i d o n i a n s focused all their resources on m a i n t a i n i n g control of the h a r b o r . T h e i r n o u r i s h i n g arts a n d crafts survived the aftermath of the collapse of eastern M e d iterranean t r a d e in the twelfth c e n t u r y BCE (see below). T h e site's earthworks—its r a m p a r t a n d glacis—and t o w ers were built in t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e IIA period. T h e p e n insula w a s t u r n e d into an island city b y cutting the fosse to join the creek with the m o u t h of the K e s i b River. A t t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e I, the site's defenses w e r e d e s t r o y e d a n d t h e n rebuilt, only t o b e destroyed again at the e n d of L B II. Inside tire city, t h e excavators discontinued a test t r e n c h w h e n it r e a c h e d the final L B destruction layers. A m o n g the few r e m a i n s belonging t o t h e transitional I r o n A g e IA, pits, fireplaces, a n d occasional walls were excavated. Inside the pits, wall brackets a n d Philistine-style pottery were discov ered. A c h z i v r e c o v e r e d in t h e eleventh century BCE (Iron I B ) . T h e t o w n p r o c e e d e d to develop rapidly, a n d d u r i n g t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE r e a c h e d its largest size, s o m e 20 acres. S e n n a c h e r i b of Assyria c o n q u e r e d a p r o s p e r o u s t o w n in 701 BCE. T h e excavations o n t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of the m o u n d u n c o v e r e d a n u m b e r of s t o r e r o o m s adjacent to the L a t e Iron A g e a n d P e r s i a n - p e r i o d fortifications. Inside the storerooms were jars given as tax p a y m e n t s " t o m y lord t h e k i n g , " in cised in A r a m a i c Adonimelech. T h e t o w n ' s prosperity c o n t i n u e d t h r o u g h o u t the Hellenistic a n d Early R o m a n p e r i o d s . T h e higher, small central m o u n d contained levels from the B y z a n t i n e to the A r a b a n d C r u s a d e r periods. F o u r p h a s e s of activity in the n o r t h e r n cemetery were dis cerned. S t r a t u m 4, the earliest, revealed p a r t of a floor of an o p e n area—a " h i g h p l a c e " — t h a t h a d a cultic use. It was f o u n d e d on s a n d a n d covered with thick layers of plaster, indicating frequent r e u s e d u r i n g the e i g h t h - s e v e n t h c e n t u ries BCE. A masseba, or stela (1.5 X 1 m ) , u s e d as an altar was f o u n d lying o n die floor. Subsequently, this " h i g h p l a c e " w a s enclosed b y a wall. T h e wall r e m a i n e d in use t h r o u g h o u t s t r a t u m 3. Jars with ashes a n d kraters containing cremation burials, juglets, a n d Achziv-ware vessels h a d b e e n placed a r o u n d the h i g h place a n d b e n e a t h its foundations. Graves first a p p e a r in s t r a t u m 3, with small baetyls (upright stones signifying H e b . , bet-el, " h o u s e of G o d " ) m a r k i n g each burial. Until recently, this type of baetyl was k n o w n
14
ACOR
only in P u n i c N o r t h Africa. A t o p h e t was discovered nearby—tire first instance of a t o p h e t related to a centtal high place discovered in t h e P h o e n i c i a n h o m e l a n d . T h e central cemetery contained cist graves dated to Early Iron IB. Single or pairs of skeletons were b u r i e d in a supine position. T h e y w e r e found with cylinder seals, a b r o n z e bowl, a small ivory bowl with a lion c o u c h a n t o n t h e rim, and n u m e r o u s locally m a d e b i c h r o m e pilgrim flasks—bur nished a n d d e c o r a t e d with vertical, concentric circles. A b r o n z e double axhead, a spear, and a fibula date t h e cists to the eleventh c e n t u r y BCE. [See Seals; T o m b s ; G r a v e Goods.] T h e eastern c e m e t e r y began to h e used at t h e e n d of Iron IB. M a n y r o c k - h e w n burial c h a m b e r s with shafts were found in a family vault that was in use for 250-300 years. T h e s e c h a m b e r t o m b s are identical with c o n t e m p o r a r y I s raelite burials. In t h e m , a sequence of p r o t o - B l a c k - o n - R e d a n d Black-on-Red I wares was found along w i t h r e d - b u r nished a n d red-polished jugs of typical Achziv ware. Only a few early b i c h r o m e vessels and pilgrim flasks were found. A different r a n g e of I r o n II pottery a p p e a r e d with m o s t of the burials in the southern cemetery. B i c h r o m e , blackon-red, a n d b l a c k - o n - p i n k pilgrim flasks r e p r e s e n t t h e over w h e l m i n g majority of pottery in this cemetery's early p h a s e , which was dated b y its ceramics, scarabs, a n d seals to t h e eleventh-tenth centuries BCE. A recently excavated built t o m b illustrates funerary architecture a n d this cemetery's three phases. A short d r o m o s led to t h e e n t r a n c e of a rec tangular c h a m b e r d u g into the earth a n d h e w n into t h e rock. Its roof, visible a b o v e g r o u n d , was covered with large stone slabs sealed b y a stepped, u p p e r structure of clay bricks, to f o r m a high place. T h e d r o m o s a n d the c h a m b e r w e r e ar ranged o n an e a s t - w e s t axis. T h i s was a family t o m b in which d i e bodies were placed o n their back facing t h e en trance in the s o u t h e r n corner of the east wall. T h e c e m e t e ry's middle p h a s e ( e n d of t h e t e n t h to e n d of t h e eighth century BCE) is m a r k e d b y t h e first a p p e a r a n c e of r e d - p o l ished Achziv jugs a n d bowls. T h e final p h a s e (seventh c e n tury BCE) is n o t e w o r t h y for the large i m p o r t e d storage jars used as receptacles for funerary gifts. D u r i n g all t h r e e phases, valuable metals (lead n e t weights, b r o n z e a r m r i n g s , a n d other o r n a m e n t s of gold), ivories, a m b e r b e a d s a n d seals, a n d votive figurines were buried with t h e deceased. T h e s e finds b e a r witness to t h e range of Sidonian t r a d e t h r o u g h o u t t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n basin a n d t h e rest of t h e N e a r East. BIBLIOGRAPHY Giveon, Raphael. Scarabs from Recent Excavations in Israel, Fribourg, 1988. See pages 2 2 - 3 9 (nos. 5 - 2 8 ) . Oren, Eliezer D . " T h e Pottery from the Achzib Defence System, Area D , 1963 and 1964 Seasons." Israel Exploration Journal 25 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 211-225. Prausnitz, M . W . " N o t e s and N e w s . " Israel Exploration Journal 9
( 1 9 5 9 ) : 2 7 1 ; 10 ( i 9 6 0 ) : 2 6 0 - 2 6 1 ; 13 ( 1 9 6 3 ) : 3 3 7 - 3 3 8 ; 15 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 2 5 6 258. Prausnitz, M . W . "Red-Polish and Black-on-Red W a r e s of Akhziv." In The First International Congress of Cypriot Studies, p p . 1 5 1 - 1 5 6 . Nicosia, 1969. Prausnitz, M . W . "Israelite and Sidonian Burial Rites at Akhziv." In Proceedings of the Fifth World Congress of Jewish Studies, vol. 1, p p . 8 5 - 8 9 . Jerusalem, 1 9 7 2 . Prausnitz, M . W . " T h e Planning of the M i d d l e Bronze Age T o w n of Achzib and Its D e f e n c e s . " Israel Exploration Journal 25 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 2 0 2 210. Prausnitz, M . W . "Die N e k r o p o l e n von Akhziv u n d die Entwicklung der Keramik v o m 10. bis z u m 7. J a h r h u n d e r t v. Chr. in Akhziv, Samaria u n d A s h d a d . " In Phbnizier im Westen, edited by H a n s G e o r g Niemeyer, p p . 3 1 - 4 4 . M a d r i d e r Beitrage, 8. M a i n z , 1982. Prausnitz, M . W . "Akhziv ( N o r t h ) . " Excavations and Surveys in Israel 4 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 2. Smith, Patricia M . , et al. " H u m a n R e m a i n s from t h e Iron Age C e m e teries at Akhziv." Revista di Studi Fenici 18.2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 1 3 7 - 1 5 0 . M . W . PRAUSNITZ
ACOR. See A m e r i c a n C e n t e r of Oriental R e s e a r c h .
A D A B ( m o d e r n B i s m [ a ] y a ) , m o u n d s located in a desert area of s o u t h e r n I r a q a b o u t 40 k m ( 2 5 mi.) d u e east of t h e m o d e r n town of D i w a n i y a a n d a b o u t 30 k m (19 mi.) s o u t h east of t h e ancient religious capital of N i p p u r (3i°54' N , 45°36' E ) T h e identification of the site w i t h ancient A d a b was m a d e b y E d g a r J a m e s B a n k s a t t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e twentieth c e n t u r y o n t h e basis of inscriptions from t h e m a i n t e m p l e , w h i c h n a m e d it as t h e E - S a r , k n o w n t o be t h e m a i n t e m p l e of A d a b . I n 1885 J. P . P e t e r s , t h e excavator of N i p p u r , visited t h e site a n d n o t e d its m a i n features. Banks car ried o u t the first full-scale excavations in 1903-1904, w h i c h h e described in his b o o k (1912). It r e m a i n s t h e major s o u r c e of information a b o u t t h e site. A d a b is r o u g h l y r e c t a n g u l a r in s h a p e a n d is a p p r o x i m a t e l y a mile long b y half a mile wide. It is s u r r o u n d e d by a d o u b l e wall that, at least in p a r t , is tliird-millennium in date a n d is bisected by t h e b e d of a d r i e d - o u t canal, a b r a n c h of t h e Shatt-an-Nil, w h i c h linked it to N i p p u r . I n s i d e t h e walls are a n u m b e r of m o u n d s , one of w h i c h Banks identified as a t e m e n o s with a ziggurat a n d t e m p l e ; others c o n t a i n e d a p a l ace a n d an area of d o m e s t i c dwelling. A d d i t i o n a l low m o u n d s lay outside t h e walls a n d m a y r e p r e s e n t t h e r e m a i n s of s u b u r b s a n d g a r d e n s . T h e t o w n w a s inhabited from at least t h e early t h i r d mil l e n n i u m a n d a p p e a r s in t h e S u m e r i a n K i n g L i s t w h e r e t h e dynasty of A d a b contains t h e n a m e of a single king, L u g a l a n n e - M u n d a , credited with a reign of n i n e t y years. H e is t h o u g h t to h a v e lived at t h e e n d of t h e E a r l y D y n a s t i c III period. T h e i m p o r t a n c e of t h e t o w n in t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m is confirmed b y tire archaeological finds, w h i c h i n c l u d e t h e statue of a n o t h e r ruler of similar d a t e , L u g a l D a - u d u , a n d
ADEN an area of well-preserved private h o u s e s w h i c h i n c l u d e d one fine c o u r t y a r d h o u s e with a b r i c k - p a v e d floor. B a n k s iden tified the h o u s e as t h e r e s i d e n c e of the local governor, on the basis of c u n e i f o r m tablets f o u n d in it. Bricks s t a m p e d with the n a m e s of Early D y n a s t i c a n d A g a d e (Akkadian) kings, including S a r g o n I a n d N a r a m - S i n , w e r e recovered from t h e t e m e n o s ; bricks s t a m p e d with the n a m e of Shulgi c a m e from the t o p levels of t h e ziggurat. H a m m u r a b i claims, in t h e p r o l o g u e to his law c o d e , t o h a v e (re)built the t e m p l e a n d t h e city. P a r t of a palace t h o u g h t to d a t e t o this period was f o u n d o n m o u n d i . O c c a s i o n a l bricks s t a m p e d with t h e n a m e of K u r i g a l z u indicate t h a t t h e city w a s still inhabited, a n d of s o m e i m p o r t a n c e , in t h e K a s s i t e period. Small finds include a collection of a b o u t t h r e e h u n d r e d cuneiform clay tablets from t h e so-called palace, a n d s o m e of a late t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m d a t e f r o m the private h o u s e s . A magnificent collection of i n s c r i b e d a n d d e c o r a t e d sherds from a wide variety of stone b o w l s was f o u n d in the t e m p l e d u m p . S o m e of the finest are of steatite, or chlorite, elabo rately d e c o r a t e d w i t h g e o m e t r i c a n d figurative designs. M a n y of t h e designs c a n be m a t c h e d on similar vessels from Iran a n d Arabia, as well as f r o m M e s o p o t a m i a n cities s u c h as N i p p u r , U r , a n d M a r i . It h a s b e e n suggested t h a t A d a b m a y have b e e n a distribution p o i n t for this t y p e of i m p o r t e d vessel. P r o v e n i e n c e analyses of t h e stone h a v e also indicated a n u m b e r of different sources for t h e m in southeast Iran a n d the A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a . A fine alabaster h e a d of a m a n , with a c l o s e - t r i m m e d b e a r d and inlaid eyes, only 10 c m high, is d a t e d to t h e A k k a d i a n p e r i o d on stylistic g r o u n d s a n d on t h e basis of its stratigraphic association w i t h a n inscription t h o u g h t to b e of t h a t date. It is t h e finest of a n u m b e r of h e a d s a n d other fragments of statuary. A d a b u n d o u b t e d l y is o n e of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m sites in s o u t h ern Iraq, still to be fully explored. [See also N i p p u r ; S u m e r i a n s ; and the biography of Peters.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Banks, Edgar James. Bismya, or, The Lost City of Adab. N e w York and London, 1912. U n g e r , Eckhard. " A d a b . " In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. I, p p . 2 1 - 2 2 . Berlin, 1932. HARRIET CRAWFORD
A D E N , since antiquity a m a j o r p o r t city (i2°46' N , 45°02' E ) o n the G u l f of A d e n , n o w i n Y e m e n . M o d e r n A d e n is associated with the n o r t h w e s t e r n p o r t o n B a n d a r T a w a h i , b u t the a n c i e n t a n d medieval p o r t a p p e a r s to have b e e n o n Sira Bay, on t h e eastern side of t h e irregular oval volcanic p r o m o n t o r y k n o w n as A d e n ( / A d a n ) . T h e ancient city w a s located at C r a t e r , t h e hollow of t h e volcano w a s h e d b y t h e waters of Sira Bay. I n antiquity, A d e n m a y h a v e b e e n a n island intermittently, especially at high tide. A n c i e n t l a n d
15
a n d sea c o m m u n i c a t i o n s r o u t e s m e t at A d e n , as k n o w n p r i marily from d e d u c t i o n s a n d later sources. T h e very few in scriptions f o u n d in A d e n m a y n o t c o m e from t h e r e origi nally, a n d S o u t h A r a b i a n texts n a m e m a n y cities called A d e n . It is n o t clear w h e n the p r e s e n t n a m e c a m e to be associated with this particular city. T h e principal pieces of direct evidence c o n c e r n i n g A d e n are the f a m o u s water tanks a n d the a n c i e n t text t h e Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. F r o m prehistoric until m o d e r n times, t h e city at t h e p r e s e n t location of A d e n has b e e n an e m p o r i u m , i m p o r t i n g a n d e x p o r t i n g , serving the m a s t e r s of the interior, rather t h a n b e c o m i n g a p o w e r in its o w n right. Historically the p o r t of A d e n served the frankincense t r a d e of the k i n g d o m of A w s a n in W a d i M a r k h a in t h e first half of tire first millen n i u m BCE a n d t h e n the k i n g d o m of Saba (Sheba) in t h e fol lowing centuries, before falling into the h a n d s of the king d o m of Q a t a b a n a n d later H i m y a r . I n f o r m e d speculation suggests t h a t t h e historic role m i r r o r e d a prehistoric p r e c e d e n t — t h e i m p o r t a t i o n of frankincense from D h u f a r a n d S o malia a n d t h e t r a n s s h i p m e n t b y tire overland t r a d e r o u t e heading north. D u r i n g the first centuries of Islam, a p a r t from continuing to serve as a n e m p o r i u m , A d e n m a y have b e c o m e a p r i m a r y s o u r c e of glass, which was e x p o r t e d t o the L e v a n t a n d the F a r East, again p e r h a p s in c o n t i n u a t i o n of an earlier tradi tion. D u r i n g t h e Rasulid p e r i o d (thirteenth c e n t u r y ) , A d e n i m p o r t e d C h i n e s e p r o d u c t s a n d e x p o r t e d horses. It w o u l d s e e m t h a t t h e t e m p o r a r y decline of ancient A d e n in the first centuries CE c a n b e associated w i t h the rise of the Himyarite p o r t M u z a (near m o d e r n M o c h a , o n the R e d Sea coast) a n d the H a d h r a m a u t p o r t Q a n a ' ( m o d e r n Bir 'Ali, 500 k m [310 mi.] farther east), which flourished from roughly the first century BCE until well after tire demise of the H a d h r a m a u t k i n g d o m . Historically, A d e n p r o b a b l y d o m i n a t e d the sea b o r n e i m p o r t - e x p o r t frankincense t r a d e d u r i n g the entire first m i l l e n n i u m BCE. T h e Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a s h i p p i n g guide dating to t h e first-third century, describes all of the ports in the region, defining the S o u t h A r a b i a n coast as " A u s a n i c " (thus associated with the k i n g d o m o f ' A w s a n ) a n d reports that the p o r t of A d e n ( E u d a i m o n Arabia or Arabia Felix) was sacked, possibly b y the R o m a n E m p e r o r Claudius (41-54 CE). It has b e e n equally plausibly argued, however, that the p l u n d e r i n g was the work of a H i m y a r i t e king. Because t h e date of t h e Periplus itself is n o t certain, the destruction m a y h a v e o c c u r r e d a n y w h e r e f r o m first t o t h e third centuries CE. Regardless of the date, the eclipse w a s only t e m p o r a r y ; a n d E u d a i m o n Arabia was flourishing again soon thereafter. T h e m o s t o v e r w h e l m i n g archaeological feature of A d e n consists of the f a m o u s T a w i l a t a n k s . C a r v e d into t h e rock of a n a r r o w cleft o n t h e s o u t h e r n edge of Crater, they h a v e a c o m b i n e d capacity of s o m e 136,500,000 1 (30 million i m perial gals.) of water. T h e y w e r e filled completely in 1993,
16
ADULIS
showing that the capacity c o r r e s p o n d e d to the extraordi narily irregular rainfall patterns of A d e n , w h e r e 70 m m (2.8 in.) annual rainfall was the m e a n in the 1980s, T h a t the tanks were r e m o d e l e d by Islamic a n d British rulers is clear, b u t the date of their conception is not. A p a r t from r a n d o m soundings and an a t t e m p t to reestab lish the ancient coastline, archaeological research in A d e n itself has never b e e n u n d e r t a k e n , and the objects supposedly coming from t h e city a n d neighboring regions c a n n o t be regarded as reliable sources. T h e c o l u m n capitals f o u n d 3 m (10 ft.) b e n e a t h t h e surface in the city are medieval a n d n o t ancient. D a t i n g to t h e third a n d early second millennia a n d r e vealing parallels to b o t h Africa and the rest of t h e peninsula, the pottery from t h e sites of S u b r a n d Bir N a s s e r , some 2 5 30 1cm (15.5-18.6 mi.) n o r t h , suggests, however, t h a t A d e n was indeed a t r a d i n g center in prehistoric times. Prehistoric i m p o r t pieces can have reached S u b r only after passing t h r o u g h A d e n , a n d the same route applies t o the G r e c o R o m a n finds from t h e district northwest of S u b r . T h e Q a t abanian material f r o m Bir F a d h l , o n e of t h e m a i n l a n d s u b urbs of the m o d e r n city, underlines t h e c o n t i n u o u s i m p o r t a n c e of t h e site. T h u s , despite the dearth of material, dispersed artifacts a n d written S o u t h Arabian and medieval sources indicate t h a t A d e n always served as a major p o r t despite occasional periods of decline, such as t h a t m e n t i o n e d
in the Periplus. [See also H a d h r a m a u t ; H i m y a r ; M o c h a ; Q a t a b a n ; and Y e men.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Casson, Lionel, ed. and trans. The "Periplus Maris Erythraei": Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton, 1989. D o e , Brian. Southern Arabia. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 , Guide to the most impor tant published sources relating to Aden. DAVID A . WARBURTON
A D U L I S , i m p o r t a n t ancient coastal t r a d i n g center in Ethiopia ( n o w in Eritrea; I 5 ° i 7 ' N , 39°4o' E ) . L o c a t e d on the d e e p G u l f of Z u l a (Annesley B a y ) , Adulis was t h e R e d Sea p o r t of a n c i e n t A x u m . T h i s was where R o m a n traders t r a n s s h i p p e d g o o d s to vessels h e a d e d , for s o u t h e r n India. F r o m Adulis, ivory collected in n o r t h e r n Ethiopia was s h i p p e d to the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . A l t h o u g h the site was occupied before t h e Aksumite period, the p e r i o d of its ac tivity as a trading center was from t h e first t h r o u g h the eighth c e n t u r y CE. T h e first extensive note a b o u t Adulis a n d t h e first m e n t i o n of A x u m appears in a Greek m e r c h a n t ' s h a n d b o o k , the Per iplus of the Erythraean [Red] Sea, datable to 40-70 CE. A c cording to this source, the journey from Adulis to K o l o e , an inland city a n d t h e first t r a d i n g p o s t for ivory, t o o k t h r e e days. F r o m t h e r e it was five days to tire metropolis called
Axomites. T h e ruler of these regions was Zoskales, w h o w a s well versed in r e a d i n g and writing Greek. M a j o r exports of Adulis were ivory, tortoise shell, a n d r h i n o c e r u s h o r n ; i m ports i n c l u d e d clothing from E g y p t , millefiori glass, brass, iron, wine, olive oil, I n d i a n iron, a n d steel (Periplus, 4-6). T h e land r o u t e w e n t u p the n o r t h e r n E t h i o p i a n e s c a r p m e n t to K o l o e of t h e Periplus ( p e r h a p s t h e site k n o w n cur rently as M a t a r a ) a n d t h e n west t o A x u m . F r a g m e n t s of M e d i t e r r a n e a n a m p h o r a e , glass, a n d iron in later c h r o n o logical levels at Adulis, A x u m , a n d M a t a r a d e m o n s t r a t e t h e continued i m p o r t a n c e of A x u m ' s i m p o r t t r a d e . T h e a u t h o r of the Christian Topography (recently identi fied as C o s t a n t i n e of Antioch) visited Adulis a b o u t 520 CE. T h e p o r t of t h e A x u m i t e s , h e w r o t e , was visited b y m e r chants of A l e x a n d r i a a n d Eilat [Aila]. A t Adulis h e c o p i e d t h e G r e e k inscription of a m a r b l e victory t h r o n e of an u n identified A x u m i t e ruler (xh&MonumentumAdulitanum) a n d t h e G r e e k inscription of a basalt stele of P t o l e m y III. T h e search for t h e Monumentum Adulitanum inspired n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y interest in the r u i n s of Adulis. R o b e r t o P a r i b e n i excavated at Adulis in 1906, followed b y Francis Anfray in 1961 a n d 1962. Like A x u m a n d M a t a r a , Adulis was unwalled. T h e m o n u m e n t a l architecture c o m plexes of the n o r t h e r n and n o r t h e a s t e r n p o r t i o n s of the site reveal characteristic traits of A x u m i t e a r c h i t e c t u r e — s t e p p e d podia platforms w i t h projecting a n d r e - e n t r a n t walls, a n d adjacent a n n e x constructions. Anfray's excavations revealed specific similarities b e t w e e n Adulis a n d M a t a r a . H e u n c o v ered a n area at t h e western p a r t of t h e site w i t h p o p u l a r t w o to t h r e e - r o o m dwellings t h a t a p p e a r to h a v e b e e n p a r t of a m u c h larger architectural c o m p l e x . Unlike the c h u r c h e s at inland A x u m i t e sites, those at A d ulis yielded fragments of prefabricated m a r b l e ecclesiastical furnishings from t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n (see figure 1). T h e s e are datable to the sixth century. F r a g m e n t s of similar or identical m a r b l e chancel panels a n d p o s t s are f o u n d at C o n s t a n t i n o p l e a n d R a v e n n a as well as at c h u r c h e s in Byz antine Palestine. T h e prefabricated m a r b l e s f o u n d at Adulis m u s t have b e e n carved at eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n quarries, sent overland t h r o u g h the N e g e v , a n d s h i p p e d f r o m a p o r t at the n o r t h e r n e n d of the R e d Sea, p r o b a b l y Aila. T h e s e m a r b l e fragments f o u n d at Adulis are associated with c h u r c h e s built in A x u m i t e style. T h e i r p l a n (like the c h u r c h in c o m p l e x F at M a t a r a ) is a basilica with an in scribed eastern apse. T h e latter feature is typical of sixthc e n t u r y c h u r c h e s in Byzantine Palestine. In t h e c o m p l e x t h a t includes t h e n o r t h e r n c h u r c h , P a r i b e n i f o u n d fragments of m a r b l e reliefs carved with a s i x - a r m e d star disk. T h i s design p r o m p t e d h i m to identify t h e architectural m a s s below t h e c h u r c h as a p a g a n ara del sole ("altar of t h e s u n " ) . H o w e v e r , t h e s i x - a r m e d star disk is typical of t h e repertoire of designs carved on prefabricated m a r b l e chancel a n d a m b o (pulpit) furnishings; these fragments s h o u l d also b e d a t e d t o t h e sixth century.
AEGEAN ISLANDS A s h layers a n d charcoal p r o v i d e a m p l e evidence of fire at Adulis, b u t t h e p o r t city w a s n o t d e s t r o y e d in the second quarter of t h e seventh c e n t u r y as s o m e h a v e a s s u m e d . I n ternational t r a d e r o u t e s w e r e deflected f r o m t h e R e d Sea from the late sixth c e n t u r y o n w a r d , a n d the i m p o r t a n c e of Adulis w a n e d . [See also A x u m ; Ethiopia; M a t a r a . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Anfray, Francis. " D e u x villes axoumites: Adoulis et M a t a r a . " In IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Ethiopia - Rome 1972, p p . 7 4 5 - 7 6 6 , pis. 1 - 6 . Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Q u a d e r n o n o . 1 9 1 . R o m e , 1974. Includes a discussion of the findings of t h e 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 2 mission of the Ethiophian Institute of Archaeology (led by Anfray). Casson, Lionel. The "Periplus Maris Erythraei": Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. P r i n c e t o n , 1989. Presents the m o s t recent discussion of the date of the Periplus. Heldrnan, Marilyn E. "Early Byzantine Sculptural F r a g m e n t s from A d ulis." In Etudes ethiopiennes, Actes de la Xe confirence internaitonale des etudes ethiopiennes - Paris 1988, edited by Claude L e p a g e , vol. 1, p p . 2 3 9 - 2 5 2 Paris, 1 9 9 4 . M u n r o - H a y , Stuart. " T h e British M u s e u m Excavations at Adulis, 1 8 6 8 . " Antiquaries Journal 69.1 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 4 3 - 5 2 pis. 3 - 6 W i t h an in clusive bibliography. MARILYN E . HELDMAN
A E G E A N I S L A N D S . T h e p u r p o s e of this essay is to situate the A e g e a n Islands in their o w n social, e c o n o m i c a n d cultural milieu as well as in a N e a r E a s t e r n context. L i n k s b e t w e e n the A e g e a n Islands a n d t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t w e r e influenced b y t h e e v e r - c h a n g i n g array of states a n d cultures t h a t d o m i n a t e d the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n — i n Syria-Pal
ADULIS. F i g u r e 1. Marble
chancel posts and panels.
m a r a . (Courtesy M . E. H e l d m a n )
17
estine, Anatolia, a n d E g y p t . T o discuss these island cultures a n d their relationship to N e a r E a s t e r n societies, it is i m p o r t a n t to m o v e b a c k a n d forth b e t w e e n b e t w e e n historical a n d archaeological r e c o r d s , always keeping e a c h distinct b u t placing o n e in c o u n t e r p o i n t t o t h e other wherever a p p r o priate. S u c h an a p p r o a c h will facilitate o u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the political ties, e c o n o m i c relationships, a n d cultural a s s o ciations b e t w e e n t h e major polities of t h e m a i n l a n d N e a r E a s t a n d the d o m i n a n t island cultures of the A e g e a n . By the b e g i n n i n g of the Early B r o n z e A g e , a b o u t 3000 BCE, m o s t of t h e A e g e a n Islands h a d b e e n settled for t h e better p a r t of a m i l l e n n i u m , b u t C r e t e h a d b e e n occupied for sev eral millennia. O u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of island d e v e l o p m e n t s d u r i n g the third m i l l e n n i u m is b a s e d exclttsively on a r c h a e ological evidence. D o c u m e n t a r y materials d o n o t c o m e into play before the M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e ( a b o u t 2000-1600). By t h e L a t e B r o n z e Age ( a b o u t 1600-1200/1100), t h e devel o p i n g international spirit in t h e A e g e a n a n d eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n led to m u c h closer connections within the M e d i t e r r a n e a n islands a n d b e t w e e n t h o s e islands a n d the ancient N e a r East. S u c h d e v e l o p m e n t s fostered a n e e d for m o r e d e tailed r e c o r d s of c o m m e r c i a l transactions or political alli ances a n d divisions. T h e absolute chronology of the A e g e a n Early B r o n z e A g e h a s i m p r o v e d markedly in r e c e n t years, a n d yet, b e c a u s e it is difficult to establish chronological connections a m o n g so m a n y islands, cultural s e q u e n c e s still r e m a i n v a g u e , a n d e c o n o m i c or social d e v e l o p m e n t s c a n only b e assessed in t h e b r o a d e s t of t e r m s . By t h e M i d d l e a n d L a t e B r o n z e Ages ( a b o u t 2000-1200), m o r e detailed cultural sequences help to characterize m a n y of t h e A e g e a n Islands. O n e result is
S i x t h c e n t u r y CE. A r c h a e o l o g i c a l M u s e u m , A s
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that the chronological framework a n d t h e relative c h r o n o logical s e q u e n c e s in t h e Aegean a n d eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n are well k n o w n . Absolute dating, however, a n d t h e r a d i o carbon dating m e t h o d are still m u c h debated. T h e t w o following reasons underlie t h e i m p r o v e d situa tion for dating: ( i ) T h e international contacts that devel o p e d on a n u n p r e c e d e n t e d scale b e t w e e n a b o u t 1800 a n d 1100 BCE b r o u g h t distinctive Aegean pottery or metal p r o d ucts into reasonably secure stratigraphic contexts in E g y p t or western Asia, w h e r e astronomically derived dates have e n h a n c e d possibilities for closer dating; (2) t h e spectacular Bronze Age e r u p t i o n o n the Cycladic island of T h e r a n o t only b u r i e d t h e site of Akrotiri b u t also preserved crucial evidence for r a d i o c a r b o n dating. Still t h e chronological d e b a t e continues. T h e best r a d i o carbon-based a p p r o x i m a t i o n for the cataclysmic event a s sociated with t h e T h e r a e r u p t i o n is 1728 BCE a date which may correlate w i t h other types of scientific evidence. Y e t there remain considerable p r o b l e m s associated with labo ratory error, interlaboratory c o m p a r i s o n s , a n d t h e statistical approximation of calibrated r a d i o c a r b o n - d a t e ranges. U n like m o s t archaeologists elsewhere, m a n y A e g e a n prehistorians do n o t a c c e p t r a d i o c a r b o n - d a t i n g evidence. O n e c o n s e q u e n c e is t h e notable disparity of u p to 150 years b e t w e e n their favored date for t h e e r u p t i o n of T h e r a ( a b o u t 1550) and the best estimate t h a t c u r r e n t scientific evidence c a n provide. D e s p i t e t h e wide range of scholarly expertise a n d high-tech e q u i p m e n t b r o u g h t to bear on the p r o b l e m , such discrepancies persist: they are typical of archaeology the world over. C y c l a d e s a n d C r e t e . A l t h o u g h limited in size, m o s t C y cladic islands were colonized b y the B r o n z e A g e , n o t least because water a n d arable land were available. T h e role of the Cyclades in B r o n z e Age regional t r a d e networks was perhaps even m o r e i m p o r t a n t in their p e r m a n e n t settlement. Early mariners u s e d islands as landmarks (or " s t e p p i n g stones") to avoid crossing o p e n stretches of sea. T h e loca tion of the Cyclades within t h e Aegean allowed t h e m t o serve as bridges linking m a i n l a n d G r e e c e , C r e t e a n d Anatolia. D u r i n g t h e Early Cycladic p e r i o d ( a b o u t 3000-1800 BCE), these islands w e r e at t h e forefront of cultural a n d artistic developments in t h e Aegean, only to give w a y in t h e s u b sequent M i d d l e a n d L a t e Cycladic periods to their increas ingly influential n e i g h b o r s , t h e M i n o a n s a n d t h e M y c e n a e ans. In c o m p a r i s o n with C r e t e , t h e Cyclades s h o w less archaeological evidence for contact with areas b e y o n d t h e Aegean. T h e final settlement at T h e r a in t h e late M i d d l e Bronze Age is an exception. L i n k s b e t w e e n M i n o a n C r e t e a n d C y p r u s , t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a n d t h e N e a r East (including E g y p t ) increased t h r o u g h time a n d r e a c h e d a peak during tire L a t e B r o n z e Age. W h e r e a s t h e likelihood of some N e a r E a s t e r n influence o n M i n o a n C r e t e is still d e bated, recent finds of Minoan-style frescoes (Egypt) a n d
painted-plaster floors (Israel) leave n o d o u b t t h a t A e g e a n influences traveled in t h e o p p o s i t e direction. A e g e a n prehistorians w o r k in a nearly " p r e h i s t o r i c " c o n text with a very limited r a n g e of d o c u m e n t a r y evidence (Linear A a n d L i n e a r B) at their disposal. T h i s factor c o m bined with tire i n h e r e n t chronological i m p r e c i s i o n for Bronze Age C r e t e a n d t h e C y c l a d e s (from 50 to 200 years) makes it difficult to p r o v i d e reliable narrative a c c o u n t s for m u c h of the B r o n z e A g e . G i v e n t h e n a t u r e of the evidence, t h e best that A e g e a n prehistorians c a n d o is to outline p a t terns of h u m a n activity, d e v e l o p m e n t , or c h a n g e . T o reflect this situation, t h e chronological t e r m s u s e d here are b a s e d o n t h e m o s t obvious material d e v e l o p m e n t in t h e A e g e a n world: t h e e m e r g e n c e , d e v e l o p m e n t , a n d decline of palatial civilization o n M i d d l e - L a t e B r o n z e C r e t e . T h e Pre-Palalial Period c o r r e s p o n d s to t h e Early B r o n z e A g e ( E B A ) a n d spans t h e p e r i o d from 3000 to a b o u t 2000/1950 BCE. T h e Old Palatial Period c o r r e s p o n d s to t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e ( M B A ) , covering t h e p e r i o d 1950-1700 BCE. T h e New Palatial Period m a r k s t h e transition from M i d d l e to L a t e B r o n z e , a b o u t 1700-1400 BCE. T h e Post-Palatial Period c o r r e s p o n d s t o t h e later p h a s e s of t h e L a t e B r o n z e Age ( L B A ) , e x t e n d i n g from 1400 to 1200 BCE. T h e final p e r i o d is t h e Sub-Minoan/Mycenaean, from 1200 to 1000 B C E . D u r i n g t h e third m i l l e n n i u m BCE, innovations in m a r i t i m e t r a n s p o r t a n d t h e earliest cultivation of olives a n d vines h a d a striking effect o n social a n d e c o n o m i c d e v e l o p m e n t s . Heretofore isolated from t h e b r o a d e r M e d i t e r r a n e a n world, A e g e a n islanders b e g a n to m a n u f a c t u r e distinctive artifacts, to participate in overseas t r a d e , a n d t o c o n s t t u c t t h e earliest t o w n s in the M e d i t e r r a n e a n . M o s t Cycladic sites (farming settlements) w e r e n o m o r e t h a n a n acre in size, b u t their s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t t h e islands is a n o t a b l e feature of t h e Early B r o n z e A g e archaeological r e c o r d . A t t h e s a m e time, the a d v e n t a n d s p r e a d of c o p p e r a n d silver metallurgy p e r m i t t e d some A e g e a n islanders to a c q u i r e wealth a n d p r e s tige, which p r o m o t e d social stratification. A m u l t i t u d e of h a r b o r s a n d t h e potential diversity of t r a d i n g r o u t e s further p r o m o t e d international contacts. T h e s e interrelated d e v e l o p m e n t s r e p r e s e n t a s h a r p b r e a k with earlier p a t t e r n s . O n C r e t e in t h e Early B r o n z e A g e , several n e w , widely dispersed settlements arose. Before larger sites s u c h as K n o s s o s , Mallia, or Phaistos—all situated in agriculturally favorable positions a n d all destined t o b e c o m e palace c e n t e r s — c o u l d b e c o n s t r u c t e d a n d m a i n t a i n e d (along with their d e p e n d e n t p e r s o n n e l ) , society h a d to b e reoriented, a n d a labor force mobilized. I t is still difficult t o r e c o n s t r u c t this social reorganization from t h e archaeologi cal record.
AEGEAN ISLANDS H o w did these d e v e l o p m e n t s p r o m o t e long-distance t r a d e , a n d h o w did t h a t t r a d e h e l p to stabilize the n e w p a latial regimes? T h e A e g e a n generally a n d C r e t e in particular w e r e obvious n o d e s for t r a d e a n d c o m m u n i c a t i o n s b e t w e e n t h e east a n d central M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a n d b e t w e e n E u r o p e a n d t h e N e a r East. A l t h o u g h Early B r o n z e A g e t r a d e in t h e A e g e a n w a s chiefly local or regional, it h a d a n international aspect c o n c e r n e d w i t h t h e acquisition of l u x u r y items or b a sic resources. S u c h "prestige g o o d s " singled o u t t h e social g r o u p s t h a t increasingly m a i n t a i n e d centralized control over C r e t e a n d d e v e l o p e d t h e A e g e a n palatial system. B e c a u s e the palaces n o t only m a i n t a i n e d p r o d u c t i o n for e x p o r t b u t at t h e s a m e time controlled i m p o r t s , they played a key role in overseas t r a d e . I n t h e r e t u r n t r a d e , C r e t e offered its N e a r E a s t e r n p a r t n e r s finished g o o d s — t e x t i l e s , metal, s e m i p r e cious stones, o r g a n i c g o o d s , a n d dyes. T h e material evidence of c o n t a c t with t h e ancient N e a r East, therefore, is clear, b u t t h e n a t u r e of this contact is a p r o b l e m a t i c issue t h a t t h e archaeological r e c o r d c a n n o t r e solve easily. H o w w e r e g o o d s e x c h a n g e d ? W h o actually c o n d u c t e d t r a d e ? S o m e scholars w h o s t u d y t h e later, M i n o a n L i n e a r B tablets m a i n t a i n t h a t t h e palaces could n o t h a v e controlled overseas t r a d e b e c a u s e it is n e v e r m e n t i o n e d as s u c h i n t h e tablets. G i v e n t h e evidence for c o n t a c t s b e t w e e n M i n o a n C r e t e a n d t h e L e v a n t d u r i n g t h e O l d Palatial p e r i o d , is it possible t h a t M i n o a n palatial civilization evolved as a result of inter action b e t w e e n t h e A e g e a n a n d t h e N e a r East? Because cer tain functional (drainage s y s t e m s ) , technical, a n d stylistic aspects (ashlar m a s o n r y , wall paintings) in t h e t w o areas a r e similar, s o m e archaeologists h a v e a r g u e d for a direct t e c h nological a n d artistic e x c h a n g e of ideas. Several n e w features a p p a r e n t in t h e M i n o a n palaces (pottery s h a p e s , m o n u m e n tality of t h e palaces, i c o n o g r a p h y , u s e of writing, a n d c o m plexity of M i n o a n p r o d u c t i o n a n d c o m m u n i c a t i o n systems) are n o t r a n d o m o c c u r r e n c e s . T h e y m a y reflect a close knowledge of N e a r E a s t e r n ideas of kingship. T h e c e r e m o n i a l a n d administrative a s p e c t s , however, a p p e a r as early on C r e t e as t h e y d o in t h e N e a r East, a n d there is little t h a t is specifically N e a r E a s t e r n a b o u t their a d o p t i o n in M i n o a n b u r e a u c r a c i e s . E a c h M i n o a n palace reveals u n i q u e ele m e n t s , a n d in overall design t h e y focus o n a central c o u r t i n a m a n n e r distinct from N e a r E a s t e r n palaces ( M a r i or A l alakh), or from E g y p t i a n u r b a n centers (Tell e l - A m a r n a ) . I n other w o r d s , t h e form of t h e M i n o a n palaces is clearly n o t derived from N e a r E a s t e r n p r o t o t y p e s . I n a n era of increasing internationalism, cultural i n t e r c o n nections b e t w e e n the N e a r E a s t a n d t h e A e g e a n a r e n o t especially r e m a r k a b l e . It is likely, therefore, t h a t the i n t e n sification of long-distance t r a d e d u r i n g t h e twentieth-sev e n t e e n t h centuries BCE (including gift exchanges b e t w e e n palace centers in b o t h regions) m a y h a v e led Crete's rulers to e m u l a t e w h a t t h e y learned a b o u t N e a r E a s t e r n royal i n
19
stitutions, particularly t h o s e aspects that m a y h a v e helped to consolidate their o w n rule. A c q u i r i n g "prestige g o o d s " from a b r o a d h e l p e d to confer h i g h e r status o n M i n o a n elites, w h i c h in t u r n led to further social inequalities. I n s u m , e x p o s u r e t o t h e ideas a n d institutions of the ancient N e a r E a s t did n o t lead directly to t h e rise of t h e M i n o a n palaces, a l t h o u g h it m a y h a v e initiated s o m e level of c o m p e t i t i o n a m o n g elites in n e i g h b o r i n g M i n o a n polities a n d thereby led to intensified p r o d u c t i o n , as well as social a n d organizational change. C r e t e ' s N e o - P a l a t i a l P e r i o d . A b o u t 1700 BCE, a n e a r t h q u a k e or series of quakes d e s t r o y e d C r e t e ' s first palaces. I n the elaborate reconstructions t h a t followed, t h e magnificent frescoes widely recognized as a n i m p o r t a n t hallmark of M i n o a n civilization w e r e a p p l i e d t o t h e n e w palace walls. U n p r e c e d e n t e d wealth is further indicated b y fine p a i n t e d p o t tery, jewelry, engraved g e m s , b r o n z e items, a n d ivory figurines. Self-supporting i n food a n d m o s t other basic r e sources except metals, t h e inhabitants of M i n o a n Crete i n tensified their agricultural a n d textile p r o d u c t i o n . C o m b i n e d with t h e extensive t r a d e c o n t a c t s t h a t t u n n e l e d luxury items a n d other goods into t h e e c o n o m y , these factors b r o u g h t C r e t e to t h e a p e x of p r o s p e r i t y b y a b o u t 1600. Even if land a n d agriculture-pastoralism formed the eco n o m i c basis of t h e palatial system, centralized control over foreign t r a d e p r o v i d e d m u c h of t h e extraordinary wealth a n d prestige items t h a t h e l p e d t o solidify political a n d e c o n o m i c p o w e r . M e r c h a n t s or m a r i n e r s , m o r e o v e r , w o u l d have i n dulged i n o t h e r forms of (private) trade a n d barter. T h r o u g h s u c h m e c h a n i s m s , M i n o a n g o o d s b e g a n to a p p e a r in in creasing n u m b e r s t h r o u g h o u t t h e A e g e a n a n d western A n atolia, a n d i n C y p r u s , tire L e v a n t , a n d E g y p t . D o c u m e n t a r y a n d pictorial evidence related to KeftiujKaptaru ( C r e t e , or the A e g e a n world generally) suggests t h a t this t r a d e w a s m u c h m o r e extensive t h a n t h e archaeological evidence alone w o u l d imply. T h e " c u l t u r a l i m p e r i a l i s m " suggested by t h e p r e s e n c e of M i n o a n g o o d s overseas, however, does n o t m e a n t h a t the M i n o a n s also exercised political or even e c o nomic dominion. T o w a r d t h e e n d of w h a t A e g e a n prehistorians t e r m t h e L a t e M i n o a n ( L M ) IB p e r i o d , w h e n " m a r i n e - s t y l e " pottery flourished o n C r e t e , t h e r e is evidence of d a m a g e , desertion, o r destruction at several M i n o a n sites with the possible ex ception of K n o s s o s . T h e i m m e d i a t e a n d extensive rebuild ing t h a t followed w a s a l m o s t as elaborate as that of the p a latial p e r i o d , b u t M i n o a n settlement overall contracted d u r i n g t h e L M II period. K n o s s o s , extensively r e m o d e l e d at the s a m e t i m e , r e m a i n e d t h e only functioning palatial center. M y c e n a e a n (i.e., G r e e k m a i n l a n d ) influence b e c a m e m o r e evident o n C r e t e at t h e s a m e time. S o m e t i m e within t h e post-palatial p e r i o d (the date is d i s p u t e d ) K n o s s o s ' s g r a n d palace w a s destroyed b y fire. Afterward, although M i n o a n culture flourished at sites s u c h as K h a n i a in t h e west a n d
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AEGEAN ISLANDS
K o m m o s on t h e s o u t h coast, palatial life on Crete along with M i n o a n p o w e r a n d influence in the A e g e a n ceased to exist. T h e political a n d e c o n o m i c collapse of M i n o a n C r e t e c a m e at a time w h e n M i n o a n power, in archaeological t e r m s , seemed t o be at its peak. Over recent decades t h e L M IB destructions a n d the M i n o a n collapse h a v e b e e n attributed exclusively to s u c h factors as the cataclysmic e r u p t i o n of a volcano o n T h e r a , earthquakes and fires, a M y c e n a e a n in vasion, or an internal revolution. Y e t we k n o w t h a t t h e col lapse of d o m i n a n t early states at t h e peak of their p o w e r is n o t u n c o m m o n — w i t n e s s M e s o p o t a m i a d u r i n g t h e Old Babylonian or N e o - A s s y r i a n periods or E g y p t d u r i n g its N e w K i n g d o m . It is m u c h m o r e likely t h a t Crete's political a n d e c o n o m i c p r e e m i n e n c e w a s disrupted by several inter related factors, a m o n g t h e m t h e T h e r a n eruption, t h e later L M IB earthquakes, a n d M y c e n a e a n incursions. External factors such as increased M y c e n a e a n p o w e r a n d Hittite ex p a n s i o n in Anatolia a n d n o r t h Syria m a y also h a v e u p s e t t h e balance of M i n o a n p o w e r , a n d d i s r u p t e d long-standing M i n o a n links with those areas. O n c e M i n o a n p o w e r was shat tered, an internal revolution m a y have temporarily c o n c e n trated p o w e r at K n o s s o s . Crete never regained its position of d o m i n a n c e , a n d like all other states in the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n , it suffered further e c o n o m i c stress at d i e e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e Age. T h e r a . N o w h e r e is t h e extent of M i n o a n cultural contacts overseas m o r e a p p a r e n t t h a n at t h e site of Akrotiri in T h e r a . Excavations at Akrotiri (a B r o n z e Age P o m p e i i in t h e A e gean) have u n c o v e r e d h u n d r e d s of examples of M i n o a n p o t tery, as well as " M i n o a n i z i n g " features a n d i c o n o g r a p h y in pottery, frescoes, spindle whorls, l a m p s , a n d other items. W h e n t h e M i n o a n s e m e r g e d as a major e c o n o m i c force in the A e g e a n d u r i n g t h e early s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, other islands like T h e r a m a y have a c c r u e d prestige or p o w e r sim ply by possessing M i n o a n p r o d u c t s . In the final two p h a s e s of its occupation, t h e inhabitants of Akrotiri h a d rebuilt their t o w n in a m a n n e r r e m i n i s c e n t of the d o m i n a n t M i n o a n centers o n Crete. T h r o u g h o u t the island there are signs of dispersed settlement—farmsteads, villages, p e r h a p s " c o u n t r y houses"—similar t o t h a t of con t e m p o r a r y M i n o a n C r e t e . Akrotiri's multistoried architec ture, however, is u n i q u e , and its pottery a n d other fine arts represent a high Cycladic standard. T h e site of Akrotiri w o u l d have b e e n an i m p o r t a n t b u reaucratic center with a m a r i t i m e location ideally situated for inter-Aegean c o m m u n i c a t i o n s . Sailing ships, w h i c h are depicted on T h e r a ' s " M i n i a t u r e F r e s c o , " would h a v e helped to regularize intra-Aegean t r a d e , a n d to facilitate a n in creased m o v e m e n t of local, surplus, a n d l u x u r y g o o d s . As in Crete, the incentive m a y have c o m e from t h e elite desire to acquire prestige goods (on T h e r a , often of M i n o a n origin or style) in o r d e r to concentrate a n d legitimize p o w e r a n d from t h e ability of t h a t elite to control a labor force that p r o d u c e d finished goods for t r a d e .
T h e cataclysmic destruction suffered b y t h e t o w n of Ak rotiri t o w a r d t h e e n d of L M I A b u r i e d it in m o r e t h a n 30 m (98 ft.) of volcanic ash a n d debris. T h e entire island of T h e r a w a s d e v a s t a t e d . T h r o u g h o u t t h e A e g e a n area, ash fallout, if n o t tidal w a v e s , w r e a k e d further h a v o c . S h i p p i n g a n d trading within t h e A e g e a n m u s t h a v e b e e n curtailed as a result, a n d s o m e scholars a r g u e t h a t this h y p o t h e t i c a l series of related events m u s t have b r o k e n M i n o a n control over A e g e a n seas. E v e n if e a r t h q u a k e s c o n n e c t e d with t h e e r u p tion caused localized destructions o n C r e t e , t h e series of ca tastrophes o n C r e t e , which served to u n d e r m i n e its p r e e m i n e n c e within t h e A e g e a n , o c c u r r e d d u r i n g t h e L M IB (not t h e L M IA) p o t t e r y p h a s e . In other w o r d s , h o w e v e r disruptive the T h e r a n e r u p t i o n m a y h a v e b e e n to A e g e a n society a n d c o m m e r c e , it did n o t c a u s e t h e d e m i s e of M i n o a n cultural a n d political d o m i n i o n . R h o d e s . T h r o u g h o u t the D o d e c a n e s e g r o u p of islands, which includes R h o d e s , archaeological evidence for t h e Early a n d M i d d l e B r o n z e Ages is still limited. T h e heaviest concentration of sites o n R h o d e s is f o u n d along t h e fertile n o r t h w e s t coastal plain, w h e r e two key L a t e B r o n z e A g e s i t e s — T r i a n d a a n d Ialysos—were situated. T h e earliest m i d d l e B r o n z e Age settlement at T r i a n d a reveals a local character p e p p e r e d with nortirwest A n a t o l i a n influence. A s u b s e q u e n t L a t e M i n o a n IA t o w n covered m o r e tiian 12 ha (29.6 acres) a n d revealed so m u c h e v i d e n c e of M i n o a n c o n tact tiiat L M I A T r i a n d a is widely r e g a r d e d as a M i n o a n colony. T h i s classification m a s k s t h e fact t h a t t h e inhabitants of T r i a n d a like uiose of c o n t e m p o r a r y Akrotiri a n d of m a n y M i n o a n settlements h a d greatly e x p a n d e d a n d elaborated their t o w n s d u r i n g t h e L M I A p e r i o d . After w h a t a p p e a r s t o b e e a r t h q u a k e d a m a g e , T r i a n d a u n d e r w e n t s o m e r e n o v a t i o n s , w h i c h w e r e d i s r u p t e d a n d left unfinished. P e r h a p s this w a s yet a n o t h e r o u t c o m e of t h e massive volcanic e r u p t i o n o n T h e r a ( t e p h r a from several places in n o r t h w e s t R h o d e s h a s b e e n analyzed as T h e r a n in origin). T r i a n d a was partially r e c o n s t r u c t e d in L M I B , b u t t h e n e w t o w n was r e d u c e d in size a n d m o r e limited in h a b itation. T h e L M IB a n d L a t e C y p r i o t I p o t t e r y f o u n d in tltis s t r a t u m indicates that overseas links r e m a i n e d o p e n , a n d d i e increasing o c c u r r e n c e of M y c e n a e a n p o t t e r y (Late Helladic II-IIIA2) in die u p p e r layers m a y indicate c h a n g i n g e c o n o m i c orientations. E v i d e n c e for L a t e B r o n z e A g e settlements o n R h o d e s ends with t h e a p p a r e n t a b a n d o n m e n t of the site of T r i a n d a d u r i n g t h e f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE.
T h e m o r t u a r y evidence for t h e following centuries is over whelmingly b a s e d o n t h e massive c e m e t e r y site at n e a r b y Ialysos. T h e p r e s e n c e in t h e Ialysos t o m b s of a variety of metal artifacts, a m b e r , glass o r n a m e n t s , b e a d s of s e m i p r e cious stones, a n d r o c k crystal, a n d even t h e o d d seal a n d E g y p t i a n s c a r a b , attests to far-flung e c o n o m i c relations. Like T r i a n d a before it, Ialysos w o u l d h a v e b e e n a n ideal p o i n t for t r a n s s h i p p i n g cargo from eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n
AEGEAN ISLANDS b o t t o m s o n t o local craft a n d m a y therefore h a v e controlled m u c h of the eastern t r a d e c o m i n g into t h e A e g e a n . T h e c u r r e n t archaeological r e c o r d of L a t e B r o n z e A g e R h o d e s s u g gests t h a t a g r o u p of M i n o a n or M y c e n a e a n m e r c h a n t s e n sconced at T r i a n d a or Ialysos m a y h a v e m a n a g e d t h e t r a n s s h i p m e n t of g o o d s t o a n d f r o m t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . I n this scenario, R h o d i a n elites w o u l d h a v e e m u l a t e d a n d s o u g h t t o acquire certain prestige g o o d s from t h e A e g e a n core area. The Aegean World a n d t h e Ancient Near East. Cu neiform, hieroglyphic, a n d hieratic d o c u m e n t s d a t e d p r i marily to t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE refer only sporadically to t h e A e g e a n Islands. E v e n t h e n , t h e g e o g r a p h i c identifi cations proposed—Alihijawa^Achaean; Keftiu/Kapht o r = C r e t e or t h e A e g e a n — a r e n o t universally a c c e p t e d . T h e s e texts a r e n o t only limited in n u m b e r , they are also u n e v e n i n n a t u r e a n d c o n c e r n e d with idiosyncratic m a t t e r s t h a t often h a v e little relevance for historical r e c o n s t r u c t i o n . M a n y have little b e a r i n g o n t h e archaeological r e c o r d of t h e B r o n z e A g e A e g e a n world. Cultural associations b e t w e e n t h e A e g e a n Islands a n d t h e ancient N e a r East a r e b e s t d e m o n s t r a t e d b y archaeologi cal materials, w h i c h s h o w particularly close contacts o n the p a r t of M i n o a n C r e t e d u r i n g t h e M i d d l e a n d L a t e B r o n z e Ages. T h e d o c u m e n t a r y evidence associated w i t h the t e r m s Ahhijawa, Keftiu, a n d Kaptaru provides insight into certain types of i s l a n d - m a i n l a n d c o n t a c t s , usually e c o n o m i c or geopolitical in n a t u r e . W h a t w e c a n learn from textual evidence a b o u t relations b e t w e e n Ahhijawa a n d H i t tite Anatolia, for e x a m p l e , is decidedly geopolitical or mili tary in outlook. Y e t w e also k n o w t h a t t h e p e o p l e of Ahhijawa w e r e able t o ply t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea t o their e c o n o m i c advantage. B y contrast, d o c u m e n t a r y m a terials t h a t refer t o K e f t i u / K a p t a r u are decidedly e c o n o m i c in n a t u r e . Y e t w e also learn t h a t Keftiu w a s r a n k e d politically with powerful states such as B a b y l o n , H a t t i , Assur, U g a r i t , and Cyprus. O u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of t h e relationships b e t w e e n tire B r o n z e A g e A e g e a n a n d E g y p t or t h e L e v a n t has b e e n col ored by n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y p r e c o n c e p t i o n s t h a t d i s c o u n t e d t h e notion of Semitic cultural i m p a c t u p o n t h e B r o n z e A g e p r e c u r s o r s of classical G r e e k civilization. T h e s e views h a v e n o w altered dramatically, n o t least b e c a u s e of M a r t i n B e r nal's controversial study Black Athena (1987). Bernal b e lieves t h a t E g y p t o - L e v a n t i n e cultural a n d linguistic influ ences o n t h e A e g e a n world b e g a n as early as 2000 BCE a n d played a central role in t h e f o r m a t i o n of G r e e k civilization. T h e p r e s e n t study h a s suggested, quite t o t h e contrary, t h a t s o m e rulers of M i n o a n C r e t e , as a n adjunct t o c o m m e r c i a l t r a d e , c a m e t o e m u l a t e various aspects of N e a r E a s t e r n i d e ology in o r d e r t o e n h a n c e their o w n political roles. T h e Keftiu evidence m a k e s it clear t h a t A e g e a n t r a d e r s visited E g y p t d u r i n g t h e m i d - s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m , while t h e evidence of t h e T e l l e d - D a b ' a frescos indicates t h a t contacts
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b e t w e e n E g y p t a n d t h e A e g e a n w e n t b e y o n d t h e purely commercial. T h e E g y p t i a n s chose t o describe their o w n r e lationship with t h e Keftiu as t r i b u t a r y — a n d thus politically motivated. A l t h o u g h a statue base of A m e n o p h i s III m a y well have r e c o r d e d a f o u r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y Egyptian a m b a s sadorial visit t o t h e A e g e a n , it c a n n o t b e interpreted (follow ing Bernal) as indicating E g y p t i a n suzerainty over t h e A e gean. I n s u m , w h e r e a s Bernal's challenge t o t h e o r t h o d o x y a b o u t t h e n a t u r e of s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m A e g e a n - N e a r East e r n relations m a y force scholars t o reevaluate earlier colonial a n d racist n o t i o n s , his c o n c e p t of E g y p t i a n or Levantine col onizations in t h e A e g e a n is ill f o u n d e d a n d confuses t h e n a t u r e of e c o n o m i c a n d ideological processes at w o r k in t h e B r o n z e A g e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . T h e K e f t i u / K a p t a r u d o c u m e n t s s h o w t h a t t h e Aegean world h a d a recognized political status a m o n g c o n t e m p o r a r y N e a r E a s t e r n states a n d enjoyed e c o n o m i c relations with E g y p t , M a r i , a n d Ugarit. C r e t e ' s active involvement in this trade enriched its o w n culture, vitalized t h e palatial e c o n o m y , a n d e x p a n d e d its h o r i z o n s far b e y o n d the Aegean area. If t h e Ahhijawa-Achaiwa e q u a t i o n is accepted, t h e g e o p o litical status of t h e A e g e a n w o r l d indicated by t h e Keftiu/ K a p t a r u r e c o r d s finds further substantiation. M y c e n a e a n t r a d i n g v e n t u r e s c o r r e s p o n d closely in time a n d space to t h e e c o n o m i c a n d political activities of t h e Ahhijawa. T h e Ahhijawa-Achaiwa c o r r e s p o n d e n c e seems eminently defen sible. It hints at A e g e a n military a n d political m a n e u v e r s in western Anatolia, reveals t h a t diplomatic relations existed b e t w e e n t h e t w o areas, a n d m a k e s it feasible t o reconsider t h e quasi-historical aspects of the T r o j a n war. T h e elaborate c o m m e r c i a l networks of t h e B r o n z e A g e M e d i t e r r a n e a n involved a m u l t i t u d e of ttade m e c h a n i s m s a n d a variety of t r a d i n g p a r t n e r s . T o g e t h e r they defined the n a t u r e a n d intensity of M e d i t e r r a n e a n contacts with the ancient N e a r East. A l t h o u g h s o m e h a v e argued for a state-controlled M i n o a n thalassocracy, t h e r e are good reasons t o t h i n k t h a t localized trade p r e d o m i n a t e d in t h e Cycladic a n d D o d e c a n e s e islands. I n either case, cen tralized control over s o m e aspects of t r a d e does n o t preclude private initiative in others. T h e ethnicity of t h e m e r c h a n t s a n d m a r i n e r s w h o c o n d u c t e d M e d i t e r r a n e a n trade has b e e n d e d u c e d from archaeological evidence or p r e s u m e d on t h e basis of personal n a m e s f o u n d in d o c u m e n t a r y records. T o gether t h e y indicate t h a t Semites, H u r r i a n s , Anatolians, Egyptians, Minoans, Cypriotes, and probably Mycenaean Greeks w e r e involved. Y e t t h e r e is n o final w a y t o determine w h o controlled or directed t r a d e . A C a n a a n i t e thalassocracy is n o m o r e plausible t h a n a M i n o a n o n e . T h e picture t h a t e m e r g e s from t h e foregoing suggests t h a t ruling elites, royal m e r c h a n t s , itinerant tinkers, a n d private individuals were all involved i n t h e l o n g - t e r m political a n d e c o n o m i c intercon nections b e t w e e n t h e A e g e a n Islands a n d t h e ancient N e a r East. [See also C r e t e ; M i n o a n s . ]
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AGRICULTURE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bietak, Manfred, et al. " N e u e Grabungsergebnisse aus Tell el D a b ' a u n d 'Ezbet Helmi im ostlichen Nildelta 1 9 8 9 - 1 9 9 1 . " Agypten und Levante 4 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 9 - 8 1 . Bietak, Manfred, et al. Pharaonen und Fremde: Dynasiien im Dunkel, Vienna, 1994. Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civili zation, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785—1985; vol. 2, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. N e w Brunswick, N.J., 1 9 8 7 - 1 9 9 1 . T h e first two of four projected volumes, detailing Bernal's ideas concerning Egypto-Levantine influence o n t h e Bronze Age Aegean. Cherry, John F . "Polities and Palaces: S o m e Problems in M i n o a n State Formation." In Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-Political Change, ed ited by Colin Renfrew and John F . Cherry, p p . 1 9 - 4 5 . C a m b r i d g e , 1986. Detailed theoretical study of the possible impact of N e a r East ern political a n d ideological factors o n the formation of the M i n o a n palaces. Dietz, Soren, and Ioannes Papachristodoulou, eds, Archaeology in the Dodecanese. C o p e n h a g e n , 1988. Provides up-to-date reports on sites and artifactual material from R h o d e s a n d other Dodecanese islands (prehistoric to Classical). D o u m a s , Christos. Santorini: A Guide to the Island and Its Archaeological Treasures. Athens, 1985. U p - t o - d a t e , general archaeological study and guide to t h e excavations on T h e r a . Forrer, E. 0 . "Vorhomerische Griechen in d e n Keilschrifttexten von Boghazkoi." Mitteihngen des deutschen Orient Gesellschaft 63 (1924): 1 - 2 2 . Forrer's original publication, equating Ahhiyawa a n d Achaiwa. See also S o m m e r and Huxley. G a l e , N . H . , ed. Bronze Age Trade in the Mediterranean. Studies in M e d iterranean Archaeology, vol. 90. [Goteborg], 1 9 9 1 . Publication of a 1988 conference held in Oxford, featuring several important papers dealing with various aspects of trade in the Bronze Age Aegean a n d adjacent areas. Gtiterbock, H a n s G . , Machteld J. Mellink, and Emily T o w n s e n d Vermeule. " T h e Hittites a n d t h e Aegean W o r l d . " American Journal of Archaeology 87 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 3 3 - 1 4 3 . Reasonably u p - t o - d a t e discussion of the Ahhiyawa-Aegean debate, by a Hittitologist, a n Anatolian ar chaeologist, a n d an Aegean archaeologist, respectively. H a r d y , D . A., et al., eds. Thera and the Aegean World, vol. 3.1, Archae ology. L o n d o n , 1990. Published proceedings of a 1989 conference, detailing t h e latest archaeological work on t h e island of T h e r a . I n dispensable for any extended study of Aegean prehistory. Hardy, D . A., and Colin Renfrew, eds. Thera and the Aegean World, vol, 3.3, Chronology. L o n d o n , 1990. Published proceedings of a 1989 conference, with several important chronological studies relating t o Thera. Indispensable for research o n Bronze Age Aegean chronol ogy. Huxley, George L . Achaeans and Hittites. Oxford, i 9 6 0 . T h e best E n glish-language discussion of the corpus of cuneiform Hittite texts o n the Ahhijawa. See also Gtiterbock et al. Manning, Start. " T h e Bronze Age Eruption of T h e r a : Absolute D a t ing, Aegean Chronology, a n d Mediterranean Cultural Interrela tions." Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 1.1 (1988): 1 7 - 8 2 . T h e most detailed discussion available of t h e archaeological, radiocarbon, and other scientific factors involved in the higher Aegean Bronze Age chronology. See also M a n n i n g (1992). Manning, Start. " T h e Emergence of Divergence: Bronze Age Crete and t h e Cyclades." I n Development and Decline in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, edited b y Clay Mathers and Simon Stoddart, p p . 2 2 1 - 2 7 0 . Sheffield, 1 9 9 4 . Comprehensive and u p - t o - d a t e discussion of a vast range of Aegean Bronze Age sites and materials within a sophisticated theoretical (social) framework. M a n n i n g , Sturt. The Absolute Chronology of the Aegean Early Bronze Age.
M o n o g r a p h s in M e d i t e r r a n e a n Archaeology, vol. 1. Sheffield, 1 9 9 5 . Comprehensive study, u p d a t e d just before publication, establishing an accurate chronological framework for t h e Aegean during the Early Bronze Age. Replaces W a r r e n a n d H a n k e y a n d contains an a p p e n d i x treating die higher Aegean chronology. M e e , Christopher. Rhodes in the Bronze Age. W a r m i n s t e r , 1982. Still the only book in English that deals with Bronze Age R h o d e s in detail, heavily weighted toward description a n d study of t h e M y c e n a e a n pottery from t h e t o m b s at Ialysos. Renfrew, Colin. The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Ae gean in the Third Millennium B.C. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 2 . Still the most c o m prehensive archaeological study of the Cycladic islands during t h e Bronze Age, a n d unlikely t o be superseded in the immediate future. Sherratt, A n d r e w G., a n d S u s a n Sherratt. F r o m Luxuries to C o m modities: T h e N a t u r e of M e d i t e r r a n e a n B r o n z e Age T r a d i n g Sys t e m s . " I n Bronze Age Trade in the Mediterranean, edited b y N . H . Gale, p p . 3 5 1 - 3 8 6 . Studies in M e d i t e r r a n e a n Archaeology, vol. 90. [Goteborg], 1 9 9 1 . T h e m o s t sophisticated theoretical article ever written o n the topic of Bronze Age trade in the M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a n d the standard-bearer for t h e Oxford conference where it was first p r e sented. S o m m e r , F e r d i n a n d . Die Ahhijawa-Urkunden. A b h a n d l u n g e n der Bayerische Akademie d e r Wissenschaften, Historische-Philosophische Abteilung 6. M u n i c h , 1 9 3 2 . S o m m e r ' s publication of t w e n t y - o d d Hittite cuneiform texts concerning the Ahhiyawa. See also Forrer and Huxley. Strange, John. CaphlorlKeftiu: A New Investigation. Acta Theologica Danica, vol. 1 4 . Leiden, 1980. Detailed philological stady of all tex tual evidence for KaphtorlKeftiu, flawed b y its identification of that place n a m e with C y p r u s . See also Vercoutter. Vercoutter, Jean. L'Egypte et le monde egeen prehellenique. Bibliotheque des E t u d e s , vol. 2 2 . Cairo, 1956. Still the m o s t comprehensive study of all Egyptian material, especially of Kaphtor/Keftiu, related t o t h e Bronze Age Aegean. W a c h s m a n n , Shelley. Aegeans in the Theban Tombs. Orientalia L o v a n iensia Analecta, vol. 20. L o u v a i n , 1 9 8 7 . C o m p r e h e n s i v e , u p - t o - d a t e , descriptive study of all T h e b a n t o m b paintings t h o u g h t to depict Bronze Age Aegean peoples, including a discussion of Keftiu-rs\&ttd issues. Warren, Peter M . , a n d V r o n w y Hankey. Aegean Bronze Age Chronology. Bristol, 1989. T h e most detailed recent publication of the traditional (lower) chronology in t h e Aegean, which rejects t h e u p d a t i n g n e cessitated by t h e radiocarbon dates from T h e r a . See M a n n i n g (1988). W a t r o u s , L . Vance. " T h e Role of t h e N e a r East in t h e Rise of t h e Cretan Palaces." I n The Function of the Minoan Palaces, edited b y Robin H a g g a n d N a n n o M a r i n a t o s , p p . 6 5 - 7 0 . . Skrifter Utgivna av Svenska Institutet i Athen, vol. 35. Stockholm, 1 9 8 7 . C o m p r e h e n sive, traditional archaeological discussion of possible N e a r Eastern influences on t h e art a n d architecture of the M i n o a n palaces. A . BERNARD KNAPP
A G R I C U L T U R E . T h e b r o a d a r r a y of activities a n d k n o w l e d g e w h e r e b y h u m a n c o m m u n i t i e s exploit p l a n t s t o p r o d u c e food a n d other c r o p s (fibers a n d oils), agriculture, literally m e a n s t h e cultivation of fields. I n t h e N e a r E a s t , agriculture-based subsistence nearly always i n c l u d e d a c o m p o n e n t of pastoralism. T h e n a t u r e of agricultural systems is d e t e r m i n e d b y t h e c o m p l e x interaction of e n v i r o n m e n t , p o p u l a t i o n , a n d t e c h n o l o g y . T e c h n o l o g y i n c l u d e s tools a n d t e c h n i q u e s as well as cultural t r a d i t i o n s — k n o w l e d g e a n d s o -
AGRICULTURE cial organization—for dealing w i t h t h e material a n d social e n v i r o n m e n t . P o p u l a t i o n size d e t e r m i n e s t h e n u m b e r of h a n d s available for agricultural tasks. T h e influence of p o p ulation o n t h e c o n d u c t of agriculture is also s h a p e d b y its distribution o n t h e l a n d s c a p e , b o t h in t e r m s of density a n d its location relative t o p a r t i c u l a r e n v i r o n m e n t a l conditions a n d lines of c o m m u n i c a t i o n . T h e e n v i r o n m e n t a l d e t e r m i n a n t itself e m b r a c e s b o t h t h e physical e n v i r o n m e n t — c l i m a t e , soil, vegetation, a n d t o p o g r a p h y — a n d t h e cultural/ historical e n v i r o n m e n t , i n c l u d i n g t h e configuration of inter regional political p o w e r . T h e interrelatedness of these t h r e e p a r a m e t e r s b e a r s e m p h a s i z i n g . T h e study of agriculture in t h e N e a r E a s t has periodically highlighted either t e c h n o l o g ical innovation, e n v i r o n m e n t a l c h a n g e , o r p o p u l a t i o n g r o w t h as t h e key t o explain t h e e b b a n d flow of farming. Y e t n o n e of these d e t e r m i n a n t s c a n b e isolated f r o m t h e others. E n v i r o n m e n t is n o static dictator, b u t r e s p o n d s t o technological t r e a t m e n t . T e c h n o l o g i e s generally d e p e n d u p o n e c o n o m i c feasibility, largely a m a t t e r of labor s u p p l y in t h e ancient world. P o p u l a t i o n is n o t a straightforward m e a s u r e of available labor b e c a u s e a constellation of cultural traditions a n d historical c i r c u m s t a n c e s affects t h e w e i g h t of p e r capita labor b u r d e n s . O r i g i n s o f A g r i c u l t u r e . Archaeological data relating t o t h e origins of agriculture h a v e m u s h r o o m e d since R o b e r t B r a i d w o o d ' s expedition t o J a r m o in I r a q b e g a n a systematic gathering of botanical e v i d e n c e for p l a n t domestication ( B r a i d w o o d , i960). [See J a r m o . ] T h e transition f r o m t h e foraging cultures of t h e late Epipaleolithic ( c . 11,000-9000 BCE) to t h e f a r m i n g cultures of t h e N e o l i t h i c (c. 9000-5000 BCE) is d o c u m e n t e d b y vegetal a n d animal r e m a i n s r e c o v ered in excavations, b y artifacts—prehistoric tools a n d fa cilities—and b y h u m a n skeletal r e m a i n s . Village life p r e c e d e d farming. A t sites s u c h as H a y o n i m , M u r e y b e t , a n d A b u H u r e y r a in t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t a n d Syria, villagers g a t h e r e d wild cereals a n d p u l s e s . [See H a y o n i m ; M u r e y b e t . ] Centuries of harvesting wild cereals altered their c h a r a c t e r istics, selecting for larger h e a d s t h a t d i d n o t b u r s t w h e n h a r vested. S o , t o o , g e n e r a t i o n s of y e a r - r o u n d c o m m u n a l life forged n e w forms of social organization. Early foragers p a v e d t h e w a y for t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of agriculture. C u r r e n t m o d e l s of t h e origins of agriculture diverge sig nificantly f r o m V . G o r d o n C h i l d e ' s m i d - c e n t u r y portrait of d o m e s t i c a t i o n driven b y t h e o p p o r t u n i t y a n d necessity o f a d v a n c i n g aridity ( C h i l d e , 1969). O n e k e y e l e m e n t of c u r r e n t theory is t h e recognition t h a t d e n s e stands of wild c e reals offered a n attractive s u b s i s t e n c e s o u r c e for early for agers o n a seasonal basis. E x p l a n a t i o n s of w h a t m o t i v a t e d t h e shift from g a t h e r i n g b o u n t i f u l wild harvests to c o n s c i o u s cultivation call u p o n climatic deterioration, m o r e p e r m a n e n t a n d p o p u l o u s settlements a n d t h e resulting p r e s s u r e o n local resources, as well as t h e e m e r g e n c e of n e w social f o r m s a n d cultural traditions. All e x p l a n a t i o n s still suffer from a n i n substantial d a t a b a s e . K n o w l e d g e of a n c i e n t e n v i r o n m e n t a l
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conditions a n d preagricultural subsistence patterns h a s n o t stretched t o t h e p o i n t of b e i n g able t o tie t h e emergence of village life or t h e a p p e a r a n c e of d o m e s t i c a t e d crops to local changes in environment a n d resource use. R e m a i n s of d o m e s t i c a t e d c r o p s first a p p e a r in t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t in a b o u t 9000 BCE. Usually preserved t h r o u g h carbonization b y fire, d o m e s t i c a t e d cereal seeds possess p l u m p e r kernels t h a n their wild c o u n t e r p a r t s a n d less brittle ears t h a t resist shattering w h e n ripe. S u c h morphological indicators of d o m e s t i c a t i o n d o n o t exist for lentils, peas, bit ter vetch, a n d chick-peas. Y e t , these pulses routinely join barley, e m m e r wheat, a n d einkorn w h e a t in t h e a r c h a e o b o tanical material from this p e r i o d of incipient farming villages ( P r e - P o t t e r y , or A c e r a m i c , Neolithic, c. 9000-6000 BCE). G r a i n s a n d l e g u m e s w e r e c o m p l e m e n t a r y crops at a n early stage of agricultural d e v e l o p m e n t . Botanical finds at Jericho Qordan Valley), A s w a d (near D a m a s c u s ) , A b u H u r e y r a (western Syria), Cayonii ( s o u t h e a s t e r n Anatolia), Yiftahel (Galilee), a n d ' A i n G h a z a l (near A m m a n ) represent t h e s p r e a d of agricultural life. [See Jericho; C y ° ; Yiftahel; Ain Ghazal.] T h o u g h h u n t i n g m a m m a l s such as gazelle a n d gathering wild fruits a n d seeds c o n t i n u e d alongside farming, settled life in these m u d - b r i c k villages w a s thoroughly c o m mitted t o crop cultivation. A n u m b e r of sites attain sizable p r o p o r t i o n s a n d show signs of social differentiation (e.g., A i n G h a z a l ) . T h e y witness technological d e v e l o p m e n t s as well, including t h e building of rectilinear h o u s e s , s o m e em ploying lime plaster a n d timber in their construction. Flax, h a r v e s t e d for its fiber (linen) as well as its oil, also shows u p in tire p l a n t medleys of P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic ( P P N ) vil lages. M a n y sites evidence h e r d i n g sheep a n d goats as well. B e c a u s e these animals w e r e d o m e s t i c a t e d in t h e region of t h e Z a g r o s M o u n t a i n s , their place in t h e subsistence systems of t h e L e v a n t manifests interregional exchange. Sheep a n d goats r e p r e s e n t t h e other side of t h e e x c h a n g e network t h a t sent d o m e s t i c a t e d cereals n o r t h w a r d from t h e L e v a n t . [See S h e e p a n d Goats.] a
n u
c
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By a b o u t 6000 BCE, t h e agricultural village was well estab lished in t h e N e a r East. F a r m i n g cereals a n d pulses a n d h e r d i n g s h e e p , goats, pigs (sporadically), a n d cattle formed its e c o n o m i c basis, initiating an e n d u r i n g p a t t e r n of m i x e d subsistence. [See Pigs; Cattle a n d Oxen.] Subsistence secu rity was e n h a n c e d by the proliferation of free-threshing w h e a t (where t h e kernel is freed from its hull d u r i n g t h r e s h ing, obviating p o u n d i n g before u s e ) a n d six-row barley. T h o u g h data from t h e P o t t e r y Neolithic ( P N ) p e r i o d r e m a i n s p a r s e , changes in t h e distribution of settlements r e flected t h e increasing reliability of subsistence systems. A particularly i m p o r t a n t e x p a n s i o n of t h e p o p u l a t i o n l a n d scape o c c u r r e d outside t h e rainfall agriculture z o n e in south e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . A t t h e eastern edge of t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n plain, C h o g a M a m i h a s p r o d u c e d traces of an irrigation ca nal as well as botanical i n d i c a t o r s — p l u m p flax seeds—of c r o p irrigation. Sketchy data awkwardly c r a m p knowledge
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AGRICULTURE
of this period s u b s e q u e n t to t h e origins of agriculture a n d p r i o r t o t h e third-millennium BCE e m e r g e n c e of irrigationbased M e s o p o t a m i a n civilization. [See Irrigation.] In the L e v a n t , t h e Chalcolithic period (5000-3500 BCE) a d d e d a crucial c o m p o n e n t to t h e subsistence repertoire: t h e cultivation of fruit trees. Fruit pips preserved outside t h e natural range of wild trees a n d vines offer t h e first signs of horticulture. T h e olive a n d t h e date palm a p p e a r e d earliest. [See Olives.] T h e domestication of the fig, also a native s p e cies, probably waited until t h e Early Bronze Age. T h e same holds for t h e i m p o r t e d p o m e g r a n a t e a n d g r a p e vine ( E u r asian natives). D o m e s t i c a t i o n of fruit trees r e q u i r e d s u b stituting vegetative for sexual p r o p a g a t i o n , a n d these five fruits—olive, date, fig, p o m e g r a n a t e , a n d g r a p e — s h a r e d t h e capacity to be multiplied by simple cuttings, roofings, or transplanting of offshoots. M o r e technically d e m a n d i n g grafting enabled t h e t a m i n g of apple, pear, and other ttees, b u t only m u c h later. T h e earliest examples of olives a n d dates materialized at t h e large fourth-millennium J o r d a n Valley site of Teleilat el-Ghassul. [See Teleilat el-Ghassul.] T h e s e same t w o fruits also showed u p i n t h e botanical r e mains excavated from t h e Cave of t h e T r e a s u r e ( N a h a l M i s h m a r ) in the J u d e a n Desert. [See J u d e a n D e s e r t Caves.] While it is possible t h a t t h e fruits were i m p o r t e d at b o t h sites from zones w h e r e they grew wild, Chalcolithic sites in t h e G o l a n have p r o d u c e d n u m e r o u s finds of olive w o o d , d e m onstrating t h e cultivation of t h e tree. [See Golan.] S p o u t e d craters at t h e sites m a k e sense as tentative separator vats for the p r o d u c t i o n of olive oil. Fruits have n o t a p p e a r e d a m o n g the Beersheba culture sites, w h e r e evidence points t o w a r d a greater c o m m i t m e n t t o pastoral pursuits. A n i m a l kill-off patterns, m u l t i t u d i n o u s ceramic c h u r n s , a n d artistic motifs together portray c o m m u n i t i e s devoted t o animals n o t only for their m e a t , b u t for their secondary p r o d u c t s as well. [See Beersheba.] A g r i c u l t u r e i n U r b a n i z e d M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e emer gence of the world's first u r b a n civilization in s o u t h e r n M e sopotamia's U r u k period is linked inextricably t o the b o u n t y of irrigated grain fields. Y e t scholars of early M e s o p o t a m i a have m o v e d away from t h e c o m m a n d i n g hypothesis of K a r l Wittfogelin Oriental Despotism (1957) that explained the rise of social complexity b y t h e n e e d t o create administrative structures to m a n a g e t h e irrigation works. B e c a u s e data place control of irrigation at t h e local rather t h a n regional level, t h e administration of large-scale irrigation projects was n o t t h e p r i m e agent in urbanization. T h e e m e r g e n c e of stratified society w a s nonetheless d e p e n d e n t u p o n t h e p o tential surplus in t h e reliable cereal harvests p r o d u c e d b y the irrigation of this otherwise uncultivable alluvial plain. T h e increased conflict i n h e r e n t in t h e landscape's b u r geoning p o p u l a t i o n density—clearly manifest in t h e settle m e n t patterns—set t h e scene for t h e birth of a n e w political order. F r o m multitiered settlement patterns t o systems of writing, m o n u m e n t a l a r t a n d architecture t o delicately
carved cylinder seals, a n u r b a n - b a s e d , rivertme civilization took shape. A " m a n a g e r i a l r e v o l u t i o n " did overtake agriculture in early M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e interrelated complexities of b r i n g ing water t o t h e fields, c a p t u r i n g it, d r a i n i n g away u n w a n t e d water, a n d p r o t e c t i n g arable plots from floods called for m a n a g e m e n t . T h e fact t h a t t h e flow of t h e T i g r i s a n d E u p h r a t e s Rivers is n o t s y n c h r o n i z e d with t h e n e e d s of f a r m i n g (the rivers are l o w at planting t i m e in t h e fall a n d r e a c h flood stage after crops are well grown) exposes t h e n e e d for care ful coordination. T e x t s m e n t i o n a local official, t h e gugallum, t h e " c a n a l i n s p e c t o r , " w h o m a y have served this function as well as seeing t o canal m a i n t e n a n c e . C o n s t r u c t i o n of irri gation facilities w o u l d also r e q u i r e p l a n n i n g a n d collabora tion a n d m i g h t entail the c o o p e r a t i o n of o n e or m o r e villages. R e c o r d s a n d inscriptions advertise royal a c c o m p l i s h m e n t s in sluice construction, canal digging, a n d even alterations in river courses. T h e advantages of scale in irrigation agricul ture—from planning to production—were apparently rec ognized early o n a n d resulted i n n u m e r o u s g r a n d i o s e state initiatives. T h e t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m m a n a g e r s of this agrarian society left records outlining t h e farming system. O n e U r III text, t h e so-called F a r m e r ' s I n s t r u c t i o n , a p p a r e n t l y i n t e n d e d t o disseminate practicable information. It detailed fieldwork f r o m initial p r e p a r a t i o n t h r o u g h harvest. Its outline of a g ricultural practice fits readily within t h e b o u n d a r i e s of e t h nographically d o c u m e n t e d traditional irrigated cereal p r o duction. F l o o d i n g t h e b o n e - d r y field from t h e adjacent irrigation ditch l a u n c h e d the agricultural year i n t h e fall. T h e p l o t was grazed over a n d h o e d t o loosen the g r o u n d . P l o w i n g followed. U s e of t h e p l o w in t h e N e a r E a s t dates t o the U r u k period, as plow m a r k s in t h e soil a n d r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of plows o n seals attest; t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m cultivators w e r e m e ticulous in its d e p l o y m e n t . T h e I n s t r u c t i o n s specifies furrow spacing, signaling close attention t o g r o w i n g conditions a n d their effect o n yield. O t h e r r e c o r d s c o n t a i n e d precise cal culations of seed rates. T h e seed was p l a n t e d , n o t s o w n , with t h e help of a seed drill attached t o t h e plow. A timetable e n u m e r a t e d t h e ideal delivery of irrigation w a t e r t o t h e field. Nearly o n e - t h i r d of t h e text's lines profile t h e harvest a n d crop-handling season. Flarvest r e p r e s e n t e d a c r u n c h p o i n t in t h e farming calendar a n d w a s a t i m e of e c o n o m i c reck oning. L a n d l o r d - t e n a n t farmer contracts a n d loan d o c u m e n t s took c r o p failure as well as p r e - a n d p o s t h a r v e s t price variation into a c c o u n t . [See U r . ] W h e a t a n d barley w e r e t h e key c r o p s , o c c u p i e d t h e lion's share of t h e irrigated arable land, a n d figure m o s t p r o m i nently in t h e d o c u m e n t s . [See Cereals.] C o n t r a c t s a n d a d ministrative r e c o r d s also m e n t i o n lentils, p e a a n d b e a n s p e cies, onions a n d garlic, flax, a n d s e s a m e . N o n - n a t i v e s e s a m e w a s likely i n t r o d u c e d from t h e I n d u s Valley d u r i n g t h e third millennium. G r o w n for its oil, sesame b e c a m e a n extremely i m p o r t a n t c o m m e r c i a l crop in this r e g i o n outside t h e r a n g e
AGRICULTURE of olive-oil p r o d u c t i o n . G a r d e n s offered c u c u m b e r s , s o m e root vegetables, a n d lettuce as well. O r c h a r d s b o a s t e d tall date p a l m s , p o m e g r a n a t e s , a p p l e s , figs, vines, a n d tamarisk trees cultivated for their t i m b e r . O f these, the date p a l m o c c u p i e d the position of greatest i m p o r t a n c e , parallel to t h e olive in M e d i t e r r a n e a n lands. T h e date p r o d u c e d a storable c r o p of great nutritional value as well as w o o d , fiber, a n d leaves u s e d in roofing. S h e e p a n d goats d o m i n a t e d t h e a n i m a l holdings detailed by t e m p l e offering lists a n d h o u s e h o l d p r o p e r t y inventories. C o n t r a c t s b e t w e e n h e r d o w n e r s a n d s h e p h e r d s specified flock c o m p o s i t i o n s , t e r m s of e m p l o y m e n t , a n d t h e expected productivity of the h e r d . [See A n i m a l H u s b a n d r y . ] T h e h u g e v o l u m e of texts continues t o p r o v i d e the p r i m a r y s o u r c e of information o n the animal a n d c r o p i n v e n t o r y of early M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e strictly archaeological c o n t r i b u t i o n of r e c o v ering botanical a n d zoological data r e m a i n s m i n i m a l in c o m parison. N e v e r t h e l e s s , p a l e o b o t a n i s t s h a v e identified a h o s t of agricultural plants from t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m contexts: of the grains einkorn, e m m e r , a n d n a k e d w h e a t a n d six- a n d t w o r o w barley; lentil, p e a , chick-pea, grass p e a , h o r s e b e a n , bit ter vetch, d a t e a n d grape; as well as t a m a r i s k a n d willow trees. M e d i t e r r a n e a n M i x e d E c o n o m y . Civilization s p r i n t e d a h e a d in M e s o p o t a m i a ( a n d E g y p t ) . By the Early B r o n z e Age (contemporaneous with the Mesopotamian Late U r u k t h r o u g h t h e T h i r d D y n a s t y at U r ) , Palestinian societies h a d decisively a s s e m b l e d all t h e e l e m e n t s of w h a t has c o m e t o b e k n o w n as t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n m i x e d e c o n o m y . T h e e m e r g e n c e of full-fledged M e d i t e r r a n e a n agriculture a n d p a s t o r alism coincided w i t h Palestine's first u r b a n period. T h e r e gion e x p e r i e n c e d f u n d a m e n t a l l y the s a m e d y n a m i c as i n M e s o p o t a m i a : u r b a n i z a t i o n , intensification of agricultural p r o d u c t i o n , a n d interregional t r a d e . T h e p o p u l a t i o n l a n d scape s h o w e d the first signs of this transformation. Palestine witnessed a d r a m a t i c g r o w t h in t h e n u m b e r s of settlements a n d a c o n s p i c u o u s shift t o w a r d less arid plains a n d valleys, e n c o m p a s s i n g the h i g h l a n d r e g i o n as well. M i n i m a l l y t w o tiered settlement p a t t e r n s constellated villages a r o u n d walled cities in the L e v a n t as they h a d previously in M e s o p o t a m i a . Botanical r e m a i n s from B a b e d h - D h r a ' a n d N u m e i r a o n the eastern shore of t h e D e a d Sea illustrate t h e c h a n g e d e c o n o m i c r e g i m e . [.Sije B a b e d h - D h r a ' . ] T h e m a j o r c r o p , barley, included the b o u n t e o u s six-row variety, w h i c h was better r e p r e s e n t e d t h a n t h e t w o - r o w . Figs a n d grapes joined the olive in the fruit assemblage. F l a x was g r o w n , a n d the large size of the p r e s e r v e d seeds suggests t h a t it was an irrigated crop. C o u p l e d with the large a m o u n t s of linen discovered in burials, t h e flax seeds suggest t h e a p p e a r a n c e of a local t e x tile industry. [See T e x t i l e s , article on Textiles of the Neolithic t h r o u g h I r o n Ages.] F a u n a l r e m a i n s e x t e n d e d b e y o n d t h e p r e d o m i n a t e sheep a n d goats t o include t h e donkey, a c r u cial p a c k animal. Increasingly p r o d u c t i v e grain fields, e x p a n d i n g invest
25
m e n t in horticulture, intensified p r o d u c t i o n of selected crops, local industry, a n d a d v a n c i n g t r a d e — i n s u m , inten sified agriculture yielding a greatly a u g m e n t e d total eco n o m i c p r o d u c t — a r e in e v i d e n c e t h r o u g h o u t the L e v a n t . T h e c e r a m i c repertoire i n c l u d e d t r a n s p o r t containers for li q u i d s — n o t a b l y A b y d o s w a r e a n d metallic c o m b ware. M e tallic c o m b w a r e has been associated with olive oil a n d w i n e p r o d u c t i o n . Its particular clay a n d high t e m p e r a t u r e firing served to seal otherwise p o r o u s walls. M o r e o v e r , storejars of metallic w a r e have been f o u n d in conjunction with an elab orate oil press at Early B r o n z e A g e Ugarit. [See Ugarit.] A b y dos jugs w e r e widely distributed, r a n g i n g from s o u t h e r n E g y p t to t h e n o r t h e r n coastland of Syria. [See Abydos.] T h e vessels likely carried Palestinian oils a n d o i n t m e n t s for elite c o n s u m p t i o n . T r a d e c o n n e c t i o n s were particularly strong b e t w e e n E g y p t a n d t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t . A n impressive ar ray of g o o d s was already flowing b y t h e initial phase of t h e Early B r o n z e period. T o t h e n o r t h , t h e g r o w t h and strength a n d the exceptional durability of L e v a n t i n e cities s u c h as Byblos already d e m o n s t r a t e in the Early B r o n z e A g e the central i m p o r t a n c e of seafaring a n d especially seaborne t r a d e for the s h a p e a n d c o n d u c t of agricultural subsistence. [See Byblos.] C y p r u s a n d t h e islands of the Aegean were already participating in a M e d i t e r r a n e a n m a r i t i m e e c o n o m i c system. C y p r i o t c o p p e r ores w e r e e x c h a n g e d with the N e a r E a s t a n d E g y p t , as were m a n u f a c t u r e d g o o d s a n d agricul tural p r o d u c t s from the C y c l a d e s and C r e t e . F a r m i n g set tlements s p r e a d widely o n t h e islands, forming t h e f o u n d a tions for the e m e r g e n c e of t h e palatial periods. [See C y p r u s ; A e g e a n Islands.]
AGRICULTURE.
Room
tesy A S O R Archives)
with sixteen grindstones
in situ. E b l a . ( C o u r
26
AGRICULTURE
T h e granary at B e t h - Y e r a h (near t h e Sea of Galilee), with its capacity of approximately one a n d one-half tons of grain, illustrates the e x p a n s i o n of grain p r o d u c t i o n . [See B e t h Yerah; Granaries a n d Silos.] A n i m a l b o n e remains p o i n t to a likely contributor to this a u g m e n t e d capacity; the increased incidence of ox b o n e s calls attention to the first w i d e s p r e a d a p p e a r a n c e of this draft animal in Palestine. T h e t h o u s a n d year old scratch plow (ard) m u s t have cut furrows b e h i n d this source of traction. A l t h o u g h textual sources d o n o t exist, t h e collection a n d distribution of such quantities of grain d e m a n d s n o less of a managerial revolution t h a n t r a n s p i r e d in M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e m e c h a n i s m s by which this grain was p r o d u c e d for storage m a y h a v e included elements of elite " s t i m u l a t i o n " of increased p r o d u c t i o n , s u c h as was argued years ago by Childe, t h e " u r b a n r e v o l u t i o n ' s " original t h e orist (see a b o v e ) . M o r e crucial were the growing abilities of an u r b a n - b a s e d elite to " e x t r a c t " or a p p r o p r i a t e the p r o d u c t of subsistence cultivators, including the " n o r m a l " surplus p r o d u c e d as a buffer by village agriculturalists. D u r i n g the Early B r o n z e A g e , interaction b e t w e e n u r b a n a n d rural spheres constituted the e m e r g e n t e c o n o m i c c o n t e x t in w h i c h subsistence strategies developed over t h o u s a n d s of years b e n t to n e w u r b a n - b a s e d d e m a n d s . Typically for the S y r o Palestinian region, this process took place in the c o n t e x t of increasing relations with m o r e highly organized a n d m o r e powerful n e i g h b o r s , in this case, a unified Egypt. T h e basic structure of the M e d i t e r r a n e a n m i x e d e c o n o m y rests on the region's sharp climatic biseasonality. T h e b e ginning of the agricultural year finds t h e fields h a r d b a k e d
AGRICULTURE. S.Jorgensen)
by five m o n t h s of rainless s u m m e r , d u r i n g w h i c h high in solation rates d r a i n the soil of all its m o i s t u r e . T h e winter rains m u s t fall to i n a u g u r a t e the p l o w i n g of the fields. T h r o u g h o u t m o s t of the region precipitation is a m p l e , a b o v e the 200 m m level necessary for dry farming. Y e t , s q u e e z e d into the short rainy season ( O c t o b e r - A p r i l , w i t h m o s t rain falling in t h r e e m o n t h s ) , rain falls intensely a n d m u c h p r e cious water is lost to agriculture t h r o u g h runoff. M o v e o v e r , t h e precipitation is highly erratic b o t h with r e s p e c t t o its a n n u a l a c c u m u l a t i o n a n d its p a t t e r n t h r o u g h o u t the season. Because crops d e p e n d entirely o n the rain t h a t falls d u r i n g their growth, t h e y are vulnerable b o t h to precipitation defi ciencies a n d to skewed p a t t e r n s t h a t m a y delay t h e o p e n i n g of t h e sowing season o r strand g e r m i n a t e d c r o p s b e n e a t h rainless skies. T h e strictly limited possibilities of a s s u r i n g w a t e r supplies t o cereal fields t h r o u g h irrigation offer n o r e lief from rainfall d e p e n d e n c y . T o c o p e with t h e frustrating rainfall r e g i m e , farmers stag g e r e d their field p r e p a r a t i o n a n d b r o a d c a s t s o w i n g so as n o t t o d e p e n d too heavily o n any particular p a t t e r n of rainfall. T h e plowing a n d sowing season stretched well into t h e w i n ter as the Iron A g e " G e z e r c a l e n d a r " indicates b y devoting four m o n t h s to t h e operation. [See G e z e r Calendar.] B e g i n n i n g in early s u m m e r , t h e cereal harvest e m b o d i e d t h e p e riod of greatest labor intensity, a p e a k in the c u r v e of a n n u a l l a b o r d e m a n d . A r d u o u s tasks a n d a h i g h degree of attention w e r e required t o b r i n g in the w h e a t a n d barley. H a r v e s t i n g p e r se w a s a c c o m p l i s h e d b y r e a p i n g w i t h a h a n d sickle or h a n d picking. T h e h a r v e s t e d stalks w e r e t h e n t r a n s p o r t e d to
Threshingfloorwith piles of grain. E a s t
D e l t a r e g i o n , E g y p t . ( P h o t o g r a p h courtesy J.
AGRICULTURE
AGRICULTURE. Agricultural
27
terraces. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
t h e t h r e s h i n g floor, dried, a n d t h r e s h e d t o disarticulate t h e spikelets a n d r e m o v e t h e hulls. W i n n o w i n g a n d sieving s e p arated t h e chaff from t h e grain, w h i c h w a s finally m e a s u r e d a n d stored. Cereals w e r e b y n o m e a n s t h e sole focus of agricultural energy. A variety of c r o p s diversified t h e p r o d u c t i v e b a s e , s p r e a d i n g risk a n d o p t i m i z i n g l a b o r r e s o u r c e s . Pulses (e.g., lentils a n d chick-peas) w e r e p l a n t e d p r e d o m i n a n t l y as field c r o p s , while o t h e r vegetables ( o n i o n s , m e l o n s , leeks) w e r e likely t e n d e d in g a r d e n plots n e a r residential z o n e s . V i n e a n d tree crops p r o v i d e d t h e m o s t significant s p r e a d i n g of risk w i t h o u t c o m p e t i n g for t h e l a b o r n e e d e d for field c r o p s . C u l tivators o p e n e d o r c h a r d s a n d v i n e y a r d s t o t h e rain b y h o e i n g a n d p l o w i n g d u r i n g breaks in t h e field sowing season. L i k e wise, p r u n i n g was a c c o m p l i s h e d at i n - b e t w e e n times. M o s t i m p o r t a n t l y , t h e h a r v e s t f r o m g r a p e vines, fig trees, a n d olive trees m e s h e d advantageously w i t h t h e cereal harvest. T h e fig r i p e n e d incrementally a t b o t h e n d s of s u m m e r . G r a p e h a r v e s t a n d p r o c e s s i n g w e r e intensive. G r a p e s were t r e a d or p r e s s e d in shallow, r o c k - c u t d e p r e s s i o n s a n d t h e juice d e c a n t e d t h r o u g h o n e or m o r e b a s i n s , t h e n Iadeled off into ceramic jugs. G r a p e s h a d t o b e p r o c e s s e d expeditiously, y e t wine p r o d u c t i o n o c c u p i e d vintners after w h e a t a n d barley h a d already b e e n p u t away. [See Viticulture.] Olive picking a n d oil m a n u f a c t u r e w e r e also c o n c e n t r a t e d a n d l a b o r i o u s . R i p e olives w e r e p i c k e d or b e a t e n from tree b r a n c h e s , p o u n d e d or c r u s h e d with s o m e t y p e of s t o n e , a n d pressed. T h e resultant oil was d e c a n t e d from t h e surface of t h e a g gregate extracts. T h o u g h d e m a n d i n g , olive oil m a n u f a c t u r e t r a n s p i r e d before t h e onset of t h e w i n t e r rains a n d t h e r e t u r n to grain field p r e p a r a t i o n .
All told, t h e a n n u a l agricultural calendar was a full o n e , as t h e G e z e r tablet outlines: line line line line line line line line
i: two m o n t h s of [olive] harvest; 1-2: two m o n t h s of sowing; 2: two m o n t h s of late sowing; 3: a m o n t h of h o e i n g w e e d s ; 4: a m o n t h of h a r v e s t i n g barley; 5: a m o n t h of h a r v e s t i n g a n d [measur]ing; 6: t w o m o n t h s of c u t t i n g [grapes]; 7: a m o n t h of [collecting] s u m m e r fruit.
T h e diversification of t h e agricultural b a s e a c c o m p l i s h e d especially by the cultivation of tree a n d vine crops served indispensably in a geographically fractured region with lim ited e x p a n s e s of level land. Plains a n d valley b o t t o m s — f r o m t h e M a d a b a Plains of central J o r d a n t o t h e basin of t h e O r o n t e s River in S y r i a — h a d long b e e n t h e focus of profuse agricultural efforts. [See J o r d a n Valley.] F a r m i n g m u s t often m a n a g e in t h e s o m e t i m e s m o u n t a i n o u s h i g h l a n d terrain. T h i s terrain was perfectly suited t o horticulture. Heavier rainfall a n d hilly terrain, h o w e v e r , d e m a n d e d a t t e m p t s t o p r e s e r v e t h e h i g h l a n d s ' n u t r i e n t - r i c h b u t easily e r o d e d terra rossa soils. T e r r a c e c o n s t r u c t i o n represents t h e chief strat egy t o stabilize hillside soils, a n d terraces offer t h e further a d v a n t a g e of controlling runoff a n d a u g m e n t i n g rainwater infiltration. Archaeological d o c u m e n t a t i o n of terrace c o n struction, t h o u g h still s p o r a d i c , stretches b a c k to the Early B r o n z e A g e . Yet, t h e w i d e s p r e a d a d o p t i o n of terraces was regularly limited b y t h e h i g h labor costs d e m a n d e d b y their c o n s t r u c t i o n a n d m a i n t e n a n c e . S h o r t - t e r m challenges alone p r e o c c u p i e d subsistence-oriented agriculturalists, leaving
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precious time left for investments in long-term stability. "Soil m i n i n g " often resulted: t h e terracing accomplished d u r i n g the m o s t intensive periods of agricultural d e v e l o p m e n t often faced the n e e d t o i m p o r t colluvial soil from valley floors to fill hillside terraces above. T e r r a c e d - b a s e d horticultural d e v e l o p m e n t held t h e key to any long-term highland agricultural tenancy. Like p a s t o r alism, it c o m p l e m e n t e d rain-fed grain cultivation. M a n y of its products were storable (wine a n d raisins, olive oil, a n d fig cakes) a n d m a d e essential dietary contributions (e.g., sugar and fat). Horticulture p r o v i d e d a resource subject to a s o m e w h a t different set of environmental hazards t h a n field crops, whose yields were n o t only erratic, b u t notably m e a ger. W i t h w h e a t a n d barley yields stagnant at t e n to fifteen fold, t h e olives, grapes, figs, a n d p o m e g r a n a t e s of t h e hill sides were indispensable. M o r e o v e r , the transportability of tree a n d vine p r o d u c t s facilitated t h e creation of regional economies a n d interregional exchange. S u b s i s t e n c e - P a t t e r n Oscillations. T h e building, dis mantling, a n d rebuilding of the M e d i t e r r a n e a n m i x e d e c o n o m y h a s s t a m p e d the e b b a n d flow of Syro-Palestinian civ ilization since it was achieved by t h e Early B r o n z e A g e . T h u s , after realizing a plateau of u r b a n life a n d sway over the hinterlands, the collapse of Early B r o n z e culture o p e n e d a p e r i o d of agricultural a b a t e m e n t . Over t h e course of sev eral centuries, the relative p r o p o r t i o n of agriculturalists d e creased, a n d n o m a d i c pastoralists multiplied o n the land scape. [See Pastoral N o m a d i s m . ] T h e M i d d l e B r o n z e reemergence of m o r e intensive subsistence patterns is well illustrated in t h e E g y p t i a n tale of Sinuhe (mid-twentieth century BCE), w h o testifies regarding his allotment of land s o m e w h e r e in n o r t h e r n Syria-Palestine: " I t was a g o o d land, n a m e d Yaa. Figs w e r e in it, a n d grapes. It h a d m o r e wine t h a n water. Plentiful was its h o n e y , a b u n d a n t its olives. Every kind of fruit w a s o n its trees. Barley w a s t h e r e , a n d e m m e r . T h e r e was n o limit to a n y [kind of] cattle" (ANET, p . 19,11. 81-84). S u c h subsistence-pattern oscillations r e p resent m o v e m e n t s along a n increasingly well u n d e r s t o o d and d o c u m e n t e d pastoral-agricultural c o n t i n u u m . A t o n e e n d of this s p e c t r u m , periods of high-intensity agriculture manifest relatively higher p o p u l a t i o n densities; settlement patterns with recognizable centtal places; specialization of production in agricultural, industrial, a n d pastoral p u r s u i t s , including the p r o d u c t i o n of market-oriented g o o d s ; integra tion into interregional a n d international trading n e t w o r k s ; a n d heightened investments in p e r m a n e n t p r o d u c t i o n facil ities, transportation, food storage, a n d water a n d soil m a n agement. [See F o o d Storage.] A t t h e s p e c t r u m ' s o t h e r e n d , periods of agricultural a b a t e m e n t p r o d u c e low-intensity constellations d o m i n a t e d b y subsistence-oriented n o m a d i c pastoralists. A relatively lower sedentary p o p u l a t i o n density clings to a decentralized l a n d s c a p e with fewer settled t o w n s a n d villages, while n o n s e d e n t a r y folk spread o u t in seasonal e n c a m p m e n t s . Regional isolation d a m p e n s trade, a n d p r o
duction for a u t o c o n s u m p t i o n p r o d u c e s few large-scale p e r m a n e n t facilities. T h e basic principle u n d e r l y i n g m o v e m e n t along this a g ricultural-pastoral c o n t i n u u m relates to contrast in t h e elas ticity of the t w o m o d e s of p r o d u c t i o n . Pastoral productivity a n d its d e m a n d s for land (pasturage) a n d labor fluctuate considerably: b o o m years see t r e m e n d o u s increases b u t are m a t c h e d by t h e precipitous declines of b u s t years. F a r m i n g , on t h e other h a n d , is m o r e inelastic: l a n d a n d labor n e e d s r e m a i n relatively c o n s t a n t a n d d o n o t rise a n d fall with t h e success of each c r o p . T h e s e contrary t e n d e n c i e s p r o v i d e i n centives for t h e security-conscious integration of pastoral a n d agricultural p u r s u i t s . T h e y also associate t h e florescence of agriculture with p e r i o d s of well-organized central a u t h o r ity, w h i c h provides t h e stability, institutions, a n d capital n e c essary for agricultural growth. T h e p r e d o m i n a n c e of p a s toralism is associated with weak rule a n d d i s o r d e r e d social conditions. U n d e r s u c h risky conditions, t h e selection of r e silient a n d mobile pastoralisrn offers an adaptive a d v a n t a g e . M a n y factors a r e associated with m o v e m e n t along this c o n t i n u u m . Agricultural intensification is p r o p e l l e d b y p o p ulation growth, centralization, e x p a n d i n g m a r k e t s a n d i n ternational t r a d e , b u r e a u c r a t i c direction, a n d innovation. A b a t e m e n t is c o n n e c t e d to e n v i r o n m e n t a l d e g r a d a t i o n , p o p ulation decline, loss of t r a d i n g o p p o r t u n i t i e s , political dis integration, a n d military defeat. E m p i r e a n d A g r i c u l t u r a l Intensification. T h e I r o n A g e in Palestine m a r k s a particularly s h a r p a n d w e l l - d o c u m e n t e d spike in t h e course of L e v a n t i n e a n d N e a r E a s t e r n agricultural history. Regional settlement p a t t e r n s signal a t h r o u g h g o i n g intensification of agricultural subsistence. T h e crucial context of this agricultural trajectory w a s t h e expansion of the Assyrian E m p i r e a n d t h e florescence of M e d i t e r r a n e a n ttade. Galvanized b y t h e m a r i t i m e expertise a n d u r b a n - o r i e n t e d m a n u f a c t u r i n g a d v a n t a g e of t h e P h o e nicians, t r a d e connections b e g a n to w e a v e a w e b of inter regional exchange a n d regional specialization across t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n world. By t h e first t w o centuries of t h e first millennium, T y r i a n a n d other P h o e n i c i a n t r a d e r s plied t h e m a i n artery of e a s t - w e s t ttade from C y p r u s along t h e s o u t h ern Anatolian coast to t h e A e g e a n , C r e t e , a n d t h e Cyclades, a n d as far west as Sardinia. T h e long-distance r o u t e s linked u p with existing regional e x c h a n g e n e t w o r k s , stimulating the g r o w t h of local centers. I n t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE, Assyrian expansion w e s t w a r d to t h e L e v a n t s o u g h t to establish a n d control t r a d e with t h e lands of t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n as well as with E g y p t a n d Arabia. Assyria also a i m e d t o e n r i c h itself by gathering spoil a n d extracting regular tribute. M o s t of the tributary g o o d s were n o t i n d i g e n o u s to subjugated regions: according t o Assyrian sources, t h e J u d e a n king H e zekiah's postrevolt tribute ( m e n t i o n e d i n 2 Kgs. 18:13-16) included gold, silver, g e m s , ivory-inlaid c o u c h e s , e l e p h a n t hides, African b l a c k w o o d , b o x w o o d , a n d h u m a n beings
(ANET, p. 288).
AGRICULTURE T h e luxury g o o d s d e m a n d e d as t r i b u t e p a y m e n t s held m o r e c o n s e q u e n c e s for agricultural e c o n o m i e s t h a n s h o r t t e r m i m p o v e r i s h m e n t ; they incited t h e search for high-value materials. T h e s e c o m m o d i t i e s (preciosities) h a d to b e p r o c u r e d o n t h e international t r a d e n e t w o r k . T o enter this n e t w o r k d e m a n d e d intensive i n v e s t m e n t s in exportable a g ricultural p r o d u c t s . T h u s , Assyrian p o w e r p u s h e d d e p e n d e n t polities t o p r o d u c e m o r e a n d pulled t h e m t o w a r d s p e cific p r o d u c t s . T h e s e influences w e r e joined b y increasing p o p u l a t i o n densities, u r b a n i z a t i o n , a n d political centraliza tion in s p u r r i n g agricultural industrialization a n d c o m m e r cialization. I n Israel a n d J u d a h , t h e intensification of olive oil a n d wine p r o d u c t i o n s t a n d s o u t . [See J u d a h . ] T e r r a c e technology a d v a n c e d , reclaiming d e n u d e d hillside slopes. T h e terraces w e r e a c c o m p a n i e d b y h u n d r e d s of r o c k - c u t presses t h r o u g h o u t h i g h l a n d r e g i o n s w h e r e wine p r o d u c t i o n p r o g r e s s e d at b o t h industrial sites ( G i b e o n n o r t h of Jerusa lem) a n d dispersed f a r m s t e a d s (e.g., K h i r b e t e r - R a s ) . [See Gibeon.] T h e addition of a b e a m a d v a n c e d existing p r e s s i n g technology, a d d i n g leverage t o e x t r a c t g r a p e juice a n d olive oil m o r e proficiently. I n J u d a h , signs of b u r e a u c r a t i c m a n a g e m e n t of w i n e p r o d u c t i o n a n d distribution took t h e form of royally s t a m p e d w i n e jar h a n d l e s . T h e e n o r m o u s c o n c e n tration of olive-oil p r o d u c t i o n facilities at s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE T e l M i q n e / E k r o n o n t h e s o u t h e r n Palestinian coast s u perbly manifested t h e e c o n o m i c benefits of p r o x i m i t y to t h e sea a n d t h e access it afforded i n t o M e d i t e r r a n e a n c o m m e r c e . M o r e t h a n 100 olive-oil p r o d u c t i o n u n i t s h a v e b e e n excavated or s u r v e y e d thus far, m a k i n g t h e site the largest s u c h constellation of industrial facilities in t h e a n c i e n t N e a r East (Heltzer a n d E i t a m , 1987). T h e overall agricultural i n tensification stretched as far as t h e arid lands of the N e g e v desert, w h e r e runoff f a r m i n g c r e a t e d costly w a d i terraces, c a t c h m e n t s , a n d even diversion systems to t r a p a m e a g e r rainfall. [See M i q n e , T e l ; N e g e v . ] W i t h its e m p h a s i s o n c o m m o d i t y p r o d u c t i o n , I r o n A g e agricultural intensification supplies a signal instance of u r b a n m a n i p u l a t i o n of the e c o n o m y c o u n t e r to the subsis tence-oriented objectives of villages. Villages c o p e with t h e two major constraints of erratic e n v i r o n m e n t (physical as well as political) a n d d e m o g r a p h i c fragility b y diversifying their p r o d u c t i v e regimes. F a r m e r s seek to s p r e a d t h e risk i n h e r e n t in settled agriculture b y p l a n t i n g a variety of crops in scattered locations a n d b y a scattered timetable. H e r d s are m a i n t a i n e d as p a r t of t h e village enterprise, a c o m p l e m e n t a r y p u r s u i t that a d d s greatly to h o u s e h o l d productivity as well as resilience. S u c h s u b s i s t e n c e - o r i e n t e d objectives are n o t sustainable w h e n u r b a n - b a s e d direction of t h e p r o ductive activities sets t h e agricultural a g e n d a for rural life. T h e g o v e r n o r s d e m a n d e d t h e m o s t readily exchangeable a n d e x p o r t a b l e c o m m o d i t i e s — w i n e a n d olive oil in t h e L e v a n t — a n d e n c o u r a g e d their p r o d u c t i o n through" polices of taxation a n d p r o c u r e m e n t , judicial regulation, a n d land d e v e l o p m e n t . T h e s e forces p u s h e d village agriculture t o w a r d
29
specialization. R u r a l life f o u n d itself m a l d n g investments in l o n g - t e r m i m p r o v e m e n t s (such as water reservoirs a n d ter racing), producing marketable goods, and depending u p o n regional networks of e x c h a n g e . T h u s , agricultural intensifi cation severed village life f r o m its traditional subsistence m o o r i n g s as u r b a n rule fashioned a " c o m m a n d " or " m o bilization" e c o n o m y . D e p e n d e n t u p o n maladroit a d m i n i s trative structures, t e n u o u s politically secured access to m a r itime t r a d e , a n d the erratic n a t u r e of the Palestinian natural e n v i r o n m e n t , s u c h a s t r u c t u r e d e c o n o m i c system was highly fragile. A g r i c u l t u r a l D a t a . C h a r t i n g tire d y n a m i c relationship b e t w e e n u r b a n a n d rural z o n e s is o n e area t h a t benefits from e m e r g e n t archaeological strategies p u r s u i n g quantitative r e c o n s t r u c t i o n s of ancient agricultural e c o n o m i e s . [SeePaleoe n v i r o n m e n t a l R e c o n s t r u c t i o n ; Paleobotany.] I n t h e a b sence of ancient agricultural r e c o r d s , researchers t u r n to data from preindustrial e c o n o m i e s t o posit levels of yields, p r o p o r t i o n s of various c r o p s (especially grains a n d fruits), a n d animals (sheep, goats, a n d cattle), as well as h u m a n dietary n e e d s . T h e s e data are collected in e t h n o a r c h a e o l o g ical fieldwork or are m i n e d from the census figures of t h e late p r e m o d e r n a n d even t h e earlier O t t o m a n periods. [See Ethnoarchaeology.] A d m i t t e d l y relative a n d a p p r o x i m a t e , s u c h data join with s i t e - c a t c h m e n t analysis a n d other r e gional studies to offer assessments of field a n d p a s t u r e p o tential (carrying capacity). P l a c e d n e x t to other archaeolog ical indicators (e.g., settlement p a t t e r n s , site areas, a n d p r o c e s s i n g installations), s u c h calculations fuel assessments of agricultural intensity a n d r e c o n s t r u c t i o n s of t h e relation ship b e t w e e n agricultural p r o d u c t i o n a n d its larger political a n d e c o n o m i c e n v i r o n m e n t . T h u s , for e x a m p l e , t h e olive presses at T e l M i q n e m i g h t h a v e p r o d u c e d 1,000 t o n s of oil e a c h season. B a s e d o n yields from olive groves planted a n d t e n d e d u n d e r preindustrial c o n d i t i o n s (kilograms p e r tree a n d trees p e r h e c t a r e ) , M i q n e ' s d e m a n d for raw olives w o u l d have r e q u i r e d o r c h a r d s r a n g i n g over 5,000 h a (12,350 acres), e n c o m p a s s i n g a r a d i u s of 10-20 k m (6-12 m i . ) sur r o u n d i n g t h e site. T h e control of s u c h a vast territory raises political questions a n d p o i n t s to t h e role of t h e Assyrian E m p i r e in creating conditions for o r s p o n s o r i n g the massive industrial center. Paleoosteological analysis of faunal r e m a i n s offers crucial assistance to r e c o n s t r u c t i o n s of ancient agricultural e c o n o m i e s . Analysis of stratified b o n e refuse p e r m i t s characteri zations of animal p r o d u c t i o n systems a n d their t e m p o r a l d e v e l o p m e n t . [See Paleozoology.] B e c a u s e of the inter d e p e n d e n c e b e t w e e n pastoralism a n d agriculture in t h e N e a r East, these data p e r m i t inferences a b o u t the n a t u r e of t h e agricultural systems. T h u s , a n increase in the relative frequencies of cattle a n d p i g b o n e s at t h e expense of sheep/ goat b o n e s m a y manifest t h e w a x i n g of agricultural intensity. L a n d d e v e l o p m e n t a r o u n d a site r e d u c e s t h e a m o u n t of small-animal p a s t u r a g e available, forcing s h e e p a n d g o a t
30
AHARONI, YOHANAN
pastoralism m o r e into the periphery. Cattle can b e kept m o r e easily in close p r o x i m i t y to agricultural o p e r a t i o n s , a n d their traction is crucial for field c r o p s . Pigs find their place as t o w n scavengers. A m o n g s h e e p a n d g o a t s , kill-off p a t terns p r o v i d e a c o m p l e m e n t a r y b a r o m e t e r of t h e d e r e a l i z a t i o n of p a s t o r a l p r o d u c t i o n : g r e a t e r d i s t a n c e s b e t w e e n t h e loci of c o n s u m p t i o n a n d h e r d i n g spell h i g h e r ages at d e a t h , as n o m a d i c pastoralists sell older a n i m a l s to t o w n dwellers. I n c r e a s i n g p r o p o r t i o n s of s h e e p / g o a t s a n d y o u n g e r ages a t d e a t h m a y signal a less intensive e c o n o m y with a less d i c h o t o m i z e d a g r i c u l t u r a l - p a s t o r a l c o n t i n u u m . T h u s , faunal r e m a i n s offer t h e possibility of c h a r t i n g t h e e b b a n d flow of agricultural life. [See also F a r m s t e a d s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Borawski, O d e d . Agriculture in Iron Age Israel Winona Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 7 . Catalog of the components of Israelite agriculture, with special e m phasis on their H e b r e w Bible terminology. Braidwood, Robert J„ a n d Bruce H o w e , eds. Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, vol. 3 1 . Chicago, i 9 6 0 . Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture. Vols. 1 - 7 . C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 9 3 . I n dispensable collections of articles by archaeologists, philologists, agronomists, a n d ethnographers. Individual volumes focus on cere als, field crops, fruits, irrigation, trees, a n d domestic animals. Childe, V. Gordon. New Light on the Most Ancient East ( 1 9 5 2 ) . 2 d ed. N e w York, 1969. D a l m a n , Gustaf. Arbeit und Situ in Paldstina. 7 vols, in 8. Giitersloh, 1 9 2 8 - 1 9 4 2 . Rich c o m p e n d i u m of Palestinian village life as D a l m a n observed it in the early twentieth century, Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, 1988. Presentation a n d analysis of the setdement pattern a n d m a t e rial culture of Early Iron Age Palestine, focusing on the central hill country and utilizing 1945 village statistics to portray the d e m o g r a phy a n d economy of p r e m o d e r n settlement. Halstead, Paul, and J o h n O'Shea, eds. Bad Year Economics: Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty. N e w York, 1989. Collection of essays on culturally a n d historically diverse contexts regarding h o w h u m a n communities secure their food supplies in the face of envi ronmental variability. Heltzer, Michael, a n d David Eitam, eds. Olive Oil in Antiquity: Israel and Neighboring Countries from Neolith [sic] to Early Arab Period. Haifa, 1987. Several articles on the olive-oil production facilities at T e l M i q n e highlight a wide-ranging collection on this m o s t i m p o r tant fruit of the Mediterranean basin. Hesse, Brian, and Paula W a p n i s h . Animal Bone Archaeology: From Ob jectives to Analysis. Washington, D . C . , 1985. Exacting, detailed, a n d superbly illustrated presentation of faunal analysis, covering speci m e n identification, t h e nature of bone preservation, sampling strat egies, a n d analysis. Hesse, Brian, "Animal U s e at T e l Miqne-Ekron in the Bronze Age a n d Iron Age." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 264 (1986): 1 7 - 2 7 . Animal bone statistics depict shifts in t h e animalhusbandry systems that s u p p o r t e d T e l Miqne/Ekron. Hopkins, David C. The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age. Sheffield, 1 9 8 5 . A systematic, anthropologically ori ented presentation of the nature of agriculture a n d its particular manifestations in Early Iron Age Palestine. LaBianca, Oystein S. Hesban, vol. 1, Sedentarization and Nomadization: Food System Cycles at Hesban and Vicinity in Transjordan. Berrien
Springs, Mich., 1990. Outlines the idea of a "food s y s t e m , " including relevant concepts of intensification a n d a b a t e m e n t a n d sedentariza tion a n d nomadization as integrating principles for archaeological investigation. Describes the successive food-system configurations for t h e Hesban (Heshbon) region of J o r d a n based on excavated a n imal-bone refuse a n d carbonized seeds a n d survey data. Miller, N a o m i F . " T h e N e a r E a s t . " In Progress in Old World Palaeoethnobotany, edited by Willem v a n Zeist et al,, p p . 1 3 3 - 1 6 0 . R o t t e r d a m , 1 9 9 1 . Up-to-date survey of t h e archaeobotanical record of the N e a r East. Nissen, H a n s J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. Translated b y Elizabeth Lutzeier a n d K e n n e t h J. N o r t h c o t t . Chicago, 1988. Readable survey that includes a discussion (based o n settlement patterns) of t h e beginnings of food p r o d u c t i o n , p e r m a n e n t settlement, a n d the emergence of high civilization t h r o u g h the third millennium. Relies t o o heavily on a n insecure reconstruc tion of climate change to explain developments. Postgate, J. N . Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. R e v . ed. L o n d o n , 1994. Artful integration of literary a n d archaeological data, creating a lively narrative of the social world of M e s o p o t a m i a , 3 0 0 0 - 1 5 0 0 BCE. Renfrew, Jane M . Palaeoethnobotany: The Prehistoric Food Plants of the Near East and Europe. N e w York, 1 9 7 3 . Classic text with illustrations of each of the major genera a n d species of domesticated a n d edible wild plants, their origins, identification, cultivation, a n d u s e . Sherratt, Susan, a n d A n d r e w G . Sherratt. " T h e G r o w t h of the M e d i terranean E c o n o m y in the Early First Millennium B C . " World Ar chaeology 24.3 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 3 6 1 - 3 7 8 . Outlines the development of I r o n Age trading systems in the Mediterranean against B r o n z e Age p a t terns from the perspective of world systems theory. M a p s the inter action of Assyrian, eastern, central, a n d western M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a n d E u r o p e a n economic arenas. Stager, L a w r e n c e E. " T h e First Fruits of Civilization." I n Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages: Papers in Honour of Olga Tufnell, edited b y Jonathan N . T u b b , p p . 1 7 2 - 1 8 7 . University of L o n d o n , Institute of Archaeology, Occasional Publication, n o . 1 1 . L o n d o n , 1 9 8 5 . L u c i d chronicle a n d explanation of E B domestication of t h e olive, grape, date, fig, a n d pomegranate. Zohary, Daniel, a n d M a r i a Hopf. The Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Eu rope, and the Nile Valley. 2 d ed. Oxford, 1 9 9 3 . Synthesis of c r o p plant evolution combining data from archaeology a n d t h e distribu tion of living plants. Covers cereals, pulses, oil a n d fiber crops, fruit trees and nuts, vegetables a n d tubers, condiments a n d dyes, as well as wild fruits. DAVID C. HOPKINS
AHARONI, YOHANAN
( 1 9 1 9 - 1 9 7 6 ) , Israeli biblical
a r c h a e o l o g i s t a n d historical g e o g r a p h e r . B o r n in G e r m a n y , A h a r o n i w e n t to P a l e s t i n e as a y o u n g m a n . H i s c h a r a c t e r a n d his desire to e x p l o r e Israel w e r e f o r m e d in t h e Z i o n i s t y o u t h m o v e m e n t a n d t h e k i b b u t z . H e e a r n e d his P h . D . in 1957 a t t h e H e b r e w U n i v e r s i t y of J e r u s a l e m , w h e r e h e s t u d ied u n d e r Benjamin M a z a r . Aharoni's doctoral dissertation, a l m o s t u n k n o w n o u t s i d e of Israel, o u t l i n e d a n i m p o r t a n t d i r e c t i o n for biblical a r c h a e o l o g y , w h i c h h a d b e e n f o r e s e e n b y t h e G e r m a n biblical s c h o l a r A l b r e c h t A l t in 1925: r e g i o n a l r e s e a r c h c o m b i n e d w i t h biblical-historical d a t a i n a critical synthesis. T h i s w a s t h e first a r c h a e o l o g i c a l c h a l l e n g e t o t h e "Albright-Glueck-Yadin
s c h o o l " of biblical
archaeology.
AHIRAM INSCRIPTION [See the biographies of Mazar; Albright, Alt, Glueck, and Yadin.] A h a r o n i ' s u n t i m e l y d e a t h left his regional research in t h e N e g e v desert unfinished. H i s e m p h a s i s o n a regional a p p r o a c h w a s d e v e l o p e d by his s t u d e n t s , h o w e v e r — m a i n l y b y M o s h e K o c h a v i a n d his s t u d e n t s in t u r n — i n projects in the Galilee, t h e G o l a n , M a n a s s e h , E p h r a i m , a n d J u d a h . T h e s e projects h a v e h a d a major i m p a c t o n biblical history and the archaeology of Israel. B e t t e r - k n o w n outside Israel are A h a r o n i ' s syntheses ( i 962-1964) of t h e historical g e o g r a p h y of the biblical p e r i o d . T h e s e works are still a m o n g the m a i n h a n d b o o k s for this field. T h e y c o m b i n e a wide r a n g e of archaeological a n d historical data for the ancient N e a r East, w i t h a semicritical u s e of biblical materials. A h a r o n i excavated at R a m a t R a h e l , L a c h i s h , A r a d , a n d T e l B e e r s h e b a . H e d e v e l o p e d an Israeli m e t h o d of excava tion t h a t e m p h a s i z e s the i m p o r t a n c e of digging large areas, in addition to r e c o r d i n g sections, for a better u n d e r s t a n d i n g of a site. T h i s strategy was a r e s p o n s e to t h e W h e e l e r - K e n y o n m e t h o d . [See the biographies of Kenyan and Wheeler.] A h a r o n i p u b l i s h e d t h e A r a d inscriptions, a n i m p o r t a n t c o n tribution to t h e history a n d p a l e o g r a p h y of late I r o n A g e J u d a h . N o t e w o r t h y also is his p a r t i c i p a t i o n in t h e exploration of t h e caves in the J u d e a n D e s e r t a n d of M a s a d a , his work at H a z o r , a n d his study of I r o n A g e M e g i d d o . I n 1968 A h a r o n i f o u n d e d t h e Institute of A r c h a e o l o g y at T e l Aviv University. H e g a t h e r e d scholars in archaeology, ancient N e a r E a s t studies, a n d related disciplines, e n s u r i n g progress t o w a r d c u r r e n t interdisciplinary research. A l o n g with Yigael Y a d i n , his everlasting adversary, A h a r o n i s h a p e d t h e character of Israeli biblical archaeology. [See also A r a d Inscriptions; B e e r s h e b a ; Biblical A r c h a e ology; Historical G e o g r a p h y ; J u d a h ; and R a m a t R a h e l ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in the Upper Galilee (in H e b r e w ) . Jerusalem, 1 9 5 7 . Aharoni's first regional r e search, based on his P h . D . dissertation. M o s t of his conclusions are no longer valid, but this study is a methodological t u r n i n g point in the archaeology of Israel and in biblical history. Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . Excavations at Ramat Rahel. 2 vols. R o m e , 1 9 6 2 1964. Covers the 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 0 a n d 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 2 excavation seasons. Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography ( 1 9 6 7 ) . 2 d ed. Philadelphia, 1 9 7 9 . Still the m o s t comprehensive description a n d primary h a n d b o o k for the historical geography of biblical Israel a n d Judah, M u c h of what was out of date was replaced in the post h u m o u s editions, edited by A n s o n F . Rainey. Aharoni, Y o h a n a n , ed. Beer-Sheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons. T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 3 . Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . Investigations at Lachish: The Sanctuary and the Res idency (Ijichish V). T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 5 . Aharoni, Y o h a n a n , with contributions by Joseph N a v e h . Arad Inscrip tions. T r a n s l a t e d by Judith B e n - O r . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . Aharoni, Y o h a n a n , and Michael Avi-Yonah. The Macmillan Bible Atlas. 3 d ed., completely revised by A n s o n F . Rainey a n d Zeey Safrai. N e w York, 1993. Detailed m a p s of t h e biblical and R o m a n - B y z a n t i n e p e riods. T h e material by Aharoni, u p to the Persian period, is a useful s u p p l e m e n t to his Historical Geography (see aboye).
31
Bachi, Gabriella, c o m p . "Bibliography of Y. A h a r o n i . " Tel Aviv 3 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 161—184. Kochavi, M o s h e . "Professor Y o h a n a n Aharoni, 1 9 1 9 - 1 9 7 6 : In M e m o r i a m . " Tel Aviv 3 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 2 - 4 . Avi OFER
AHIRAM INSCRIPTION.
T h e sarcophagus of
A h i r a m f o u n d in Byblos, in L e b a n o n , by F r e n c h archaeol ogists in 1923 is o n e of the m o s t i m p o r t a n t works of art from t h e L e v a n t . [See Byblos.] Its inscription can b e considered the oldest meaningful d o c u m e n t so far k n o w n in Phoenician. T h e text, in two lines of u n e q u a l length, is carved on the lid of the s a r c o p h a g u s . W o r d s a n d syntactic units are separated b y a small vertical stroke, b u t t h e technical execution of the writing leaves a bit to be desired, Analysis of t h e inscription shows that o r t h o g r a p h i c p r a c t i c e at the e n d of t h e second m i l l e n n i u m BCE did n o t i n c l u d e t h e u s e of m a t r e s lectionis. T h e script p r e s e n t s a n u m b e r of peculiar features: t h e aleph, t h e u p r i g h t stance of gimel, t h e horizontal crossbars of het, a n d the archaic ayin. T h e inscription is dated on paleographic g r o u n d s to a b o u t 1000 BCE. T h e text runs as follows: "Coffin w h i c h Itthobaal s o n of A h i r a m , king of Byblos, m a d e for A h i r a m , his father, w h e n h e placed h i m in eternity: if a king from a m o n g kings or a g o v e r n o r from a m o n g gov ernors or t h e c o m m a n d e r of an a r m y should c o m e u p against Byblos a n d u n c o v e r this coffin, m a y the scepter of his rule b e b r o k e n , m a y t h e t h r o n e of his kingship b e over t u r n e d , a n d m a y p e a c e flee Byblos, a n d (as for) h i m , m a y his inscription b e effaced (from) before B y b l o s . " T h e decoration on the lid p o r t r a y s t w o figures, a father a n d son. T h e d e a d father holds a d r o o p i n g flower in one h a n d a n d raises the other in a gesture of benediction. O n the main b o d y of t h e s a r c o p h a g u s , t h e father is e n t h r o n e d , a n d before h i m is a table l a d e n with food; o n the other side of t h e table a s t a n d i n g courtier is followed by two m e n with c u p s a n d four others with b o t h h a n d s raised. M o u r n i n g w o m e n , p e r s o n s carrying baskets on their h e a d s , a n d a single m a n leading an animal are carved o n the n a r r o w a n d long sides of t h e s a r c o p h a g u s . T h e strong E g y p t i a n influence in t h e i c o n o g r a p h y of these scenes reflects t h e connections this ancient city-state always h a d w i t h Egypt. T h e decoration allows for a date at the e n d of t h e eleventh century BCE, w h i c h accords well with t h e p a l e o g r a p h y of the inscription. T h e royal n a m e Ahiram, w h i c h m e a n s " M y b r o t h e r [god] is exalted," a p p e a r s very frequently in Phoenicia, b u t less so t h e n a m e Itthobaal, " B a a l is w i t h h i m . " BIBLIOGRAPHY D u s s a u d , Rene. "Les inscriptions pheniciennes du tombeau d'Ahiram, roi de Byblos." Syria 5 ( 1 9 2 4 ) : 1 3 5 - 1 5 9 . Contains the editioprinceps of the principal Ahiram inscription (pp. 1 3 5 - 1 4 2 ) . Gibson, J o h n C, L . Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, nician Inscriptions. Oxford, 1982. See pages 1 2 - 1 6 .
vol. 3, Phoe
P o r a d a , Edith. " N o t e s on the Sarcophagus of A h i r a m . " Journal
of the
32
AHMAR, TELL
Ancient
Near
Eastern
Society
of Columbia
University
5
(1973):
355-372. Teixidor, Javier. "L'inscription d'Ahiram a n o u v e a u . " Syria 64 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 137-140. JAVIER TEIXIDOR
AHMAR, TELL. See Til Barsip.
AI, biblical site located east of Bethel (Gn. 12:8, Jos. 7:2). T h r e e sites on t h e p e r i m e t e r of m o d e r n Deir D i b w a n , 3 k m (2 mi.) east of Beitin (Bethel) have b e e n suggested as the location of biblical Ai: K h i r b e t H a i y a n , to the south, K h i r b e t K h u d r i y a , to the east; a n d et-Tell, to t h e northwest. T h e first two have b e e n excavated a n d found to b e Byzantine settlements. Et-Tell ( m a p reference 71385 X 53365), a p o l y g o n - s h a p e d m o u n d of 27.5 acres, situated on t h e s o u t h side of t h e deep W a d i el-Jaya, w h i c h leads east t o w a r d Jericho, has b e e n extensively excavated. It yielded cultural material from as early as 3100 BCE, E t - T e l l is generally accepted as biblical Ai; b o t h t h e H e b r e w a n d Arabic n a m e s for the site m e a n " d i e ruin h e a p . " T h e first excavations at et-Tell were undertaken by J o h n Garstang for the D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of Palestine in 1928 b u t were brief a n d involved only eight t r e n c h e s . T h e work yielded a three-page s u m m a r y report a n d the sketch of a plan. Judith M a r q u e t - K r a u s e , with t h e s u p p o r t of B a r o n E d m o n d de Rothschild, directed the second excavation p r o ject in 1933-1935. H e r work focused on the highest p a r t of the m o u n d a n d the Early B r o n z e A g e necropolis east of it. T h e Rothschild expedition excavated several significant E B structures, including t h e temple-palace ( M a r q u e t - K r a u s e r ' s palais) a n d die sanctuary on the acropolis with its splendid alabaster a n d pottery cult objects; the nearby Iron A g e vil lage, where finds d e m o n s t r a t e d t h a t the village h a d b e e n built directly on top of the E B city; a n d the lower city, w h o s e fortifications included a p o s t e r n and towers. T h e third excavation project at et-Tell was a joint e x p e dition of several r e s e a r c h institutions t h a t was in the field for nine seasons (1964-1976) u n d e r the direction of Joseph A. Callaway. T h e joint expedition e x p a n d e d t h e M a r q u e t K r a u s e excavations to include the citadel fortifications; the e x p a n d e d Iron A g e village; the lower-city residential area; fortifications with gates; a n d a reservoir. In addition, it ex cavated three sites in the vicinity of et-Tell to address further the location of biblical Ai a n d t o secure comparative m a t e rials from the region for t h e study of et-Tell. In 1964 a n d 1969, K h i r b e t H a i y a n w a s excavated to b e d r o c k a n d w a s f o u n d to b e a Byzantine settlement, T o m b s a n d a Byzantine settlement were also excavated at K h i r b e t K h u d r i y a in 1966 a n d 1968. B o t h sites m a y represent t h e location of m o n a s teries. T h e third site in t h e regional study was K h i r b e t R a d d a n a h , at the n o r t h e r n perimeter of m o d e r n Ramallah. A n
unfortified village w i t h pillared h o u s e s was excavated t h a t is c o n t e m p o r a r y with t h e Iron Age village at et-Tell. T h e major evidence from et-Tell points to five settlement phases with a b u n d a n t cultural r e m a i n s . T h e original settle m e n t (EB IB, 3250-3100 BCE) is a n u n w a l l e d village 220 m long a n d located o n t h e u p p e r terraces of t h e site. T h e ar tifacts indicate a m i x t u r e of local a n d foreign elements. L o cal Chalcolithic traits of the indigenous p o p u l a t i o n include angular jar n e c k a n d rim f o r m s , as well as angular b o w l forms. " F o r e i g n " influence has b e e n seen in carinated plat ters, h o l e m o u t h jars with their r i m s rolled i n w a r d , a n d painted designs of g r o u p s of lines. Callaway (1964) t h o u g h t these n e w forms m i g h t have b e e n t h e result of m i g r a t i o n s of populations from Anatolia a n d Syria, b u t m o s t scholars dis sent from t h a t view. T h e d e a d w e r e b u r i e d in caves along the slopes of the hill, a n d t h e burial goods reflect t h e cultural varieties of t h e m i x e d settlement p o p u l a t i o n . T h e second settlement p h a s e ( E B I C , 3100-2950 BCE) w a s a well-planned, walled city enclosing 27.5 acres. M a s s i v e fortifications were c o n s t r u c t e d over the h o m e s in the u n walled village, following t h e site's n a t u r a l c o n t o u r s . F o u r city-gate complexes were discovered: t h r e e of t h e m were one m e t e r wide a n d w e n t straight t h r o u g h t h e wall; t h e fourth, w h i c h a p p e a r s to b e larger t h a n t h e others, was only partially excavated. All t h e gates w e r e fortified b y towers constructed o n the wall's exterior. T h e s e fortifications e n closed significant functional areas, including t h e impressive acropolis complex, t h e citadel a n d sanctuary, a n d a m a r k e t a n d residential area. A large building (25 m long) of u n c u t stones with structures attached m a y r e p r e s e n t t h e t e m p l e palace c o m p l e x of t h e acropolis a n d t h e center of u r b a n life. Callaway argued again t h a t the changes in material culture a n d settlement plans suggest t h a t t h e i n d i g e n o u s p o p u l a t i o n was a b s o r b e d by n e w c o m e r s , possibly f r o m Anatolia a n d Syria (Callaway, 1972). T h e s e n e w c o m e r s i m p o s e d n e w leadership forms a n d a c h a n g e d lifestyle f r o m village to u r b a n life, with creative city p l a n n i n g for t h e n e w settlement. In any case, tliis settlement e n d e d in d e s t r u c t i o n — a blanket of ashes b e i n g m u t e testimony to t h e violent event. T h e settlement w a s rebuilt in the third major p h a s e (EB II, 2950-2775 BCE) of its history. T h e i n h a b i t a n t s r e p a i r e d a n d modified buildings a n d w i d e n e d a n d s t r e n g t h e n e d t h e fortifications, all inferior to those of the original city. N e w pottery forms include a carinated bowl with a n o u t w a r d curving rim a n d a jug with a tall cylindrical n e c k a n d h i g h loop h a n d l e s . A massive d e s t r u c t i o n of this city m a y h a v e b e e n caused by an e a r t h q u a k e , as e v i d e n c e d by rifts in t h e b e d r o c k a n d associated walls, with stones tilting into the fis sures. T h e destruction was a c c o m p a n i e d b y an intense fire. Egyptian i n v o l v e m e n t in the rebuilding of t h e f o u r t h set t l e m e n t (EB III, 2775-2400 BCE) is evident in t h e t e m p l e palace a n d in the c o r n e r - g a t e area of t h e fortifications. C o l u m n bases in the t e m p l e - p a l a c e w e r e r e w o r k e d w i t h c o p p e r saws like those u s e d b y E g y p t i a n craftsmen. T h e walls w e r e
'AIN DARA'
33
built of h a m m e r - d r e s s e d stones laid like bricks. T h e interior of the walls was plastered, a n d the r o o m s c o n t a i n e d E g y p tian i m p o r t s of alabaster a n d s t o n e vessels. A t the southeast c o r n e r of t h e cities' fortifications, a k i d n e y - s h a p e d reservoir w a s c o n s t r u c t e d to c a p t u r e r a i n w a t e r from the u p p e r city. [See Reservoirs.] Estimates of its capacity r a n g e from 1,800 to 2,000 cu m . Major changes a p p e a r a b o u t m i d w a y in this fourth p e r i o d of settlement (c. 2550 BCE). Walls were rebuilt, the t e m p l e was r e d e s i g n e d as a royal r e s i d e n c e , a n d a s a n c t u a r y was c o n s t r u c t e d against t h e citadel. K h i r b e t K e r a k p o t t e r y a n d n e w objects seem t o i m p l y a n e w influence from the n o r t h of C a n a a n . T h i s p h a s e w a s e n d e d by a n o t h e r vi olent d e s t r u c t i o n (c. 2400 BCE), a n d t h e site was a b a n d o n e d a n d left in ruins for m o r e t h a n a m i l l e n n i u m .
c r o p planting. [See Cisterns; Agriculture.] T h e s e settlers w e r e farmers a n d s h e p h e r d s , as indicated b y t h e stone sad dles, q u e r n s , m o r t a r s , pestles, iron i m p l e m e n t s , a n d n u m e r ous b o n e s of goats a n d s h e e p . [See Sheep a n d Goats.] T w o p h a s e s of the Iron A g e village are seen in t h e rebuilt houses a n d die different p o t t e r y f o r m s . T h e original houses w e r e modified by relocating their d o o r s , repairing walls, a n d r e surfacing floors. T h e long collared-rim storejar distinguishes the first-phase pottery form from the low collared-rim jar of the s e c o n d p h a s e . Slingstones w e r e f o u n d o n the floors of the rebuilt h o u s e s , suggesting that the settlement m a y have b e e n a b a n d o n e d after a m i n o r battle. T h e excavator has s u g gested t h a t this Iron I settlement r e p r e s e n t e d the Early Is raelite villagers described in the Book of Judges.
T h e fifth a n d final s e t t l e m e n t p h a s e (Iron A g e I, 12001050 BCE) was established o n t h e terraces below t h e a c r o p olis b y n e w c o m e r s . T h e n e w villagers, p r o b a b l y " P r o t o - I s raelites," did n o t fortify their settlement, a n d their h o u s e s were characterized by pillars or piers t h a t s u p p o r t e d the roof a n d divided t h e space. Streets w e r e p a v e d with cobble stones, a n d the h o u s e s s h a r e d c o m m o n walls—suggesting t h a t t h e p o p u l a t i o n w a s m a d e u p of e x t e n d e d families. T w o n e w technologies were evident: cisterns w e r e d u g for a water supply (see figure 1) a n d t h e hillslopes w e r e t e r r a c e d for
[See also C e r a m i c s , article on Syro-Palestinian C e r a m i c s of the Neolithic, B r o n z e , a n d I r o n Ages; and the biographies
of Callaway, Garstang, and Marquet-Krause.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Callaway, Joseph A. Pottery from the Tombs at Ai (el-Tell). Colt Archae ological Institute, M o n o g r a p h Series, 2. L o n d o n , 1964. Callaway, Joseph A. " T h e 1964 'Ai (et-Tell) Excavations." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 1 7 8 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 1 3 - 4 0 . Callaway, Joseph A., and M . B. Nieol. " A S o u n d i n g at Khirbet Haiyan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 183 (1966): 1 2 - 1 9 . Callaway, Joseph A. " N e w Evidence on the C o n q u e s t o f ' A i . " Journal of Biblical Literature 87 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 3 1 2 - 3 2 0 . Callaway, Joseph A. " T h e 1966 'Ai (et-Tell) Excavations." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 196 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 2 - 1 6 . Callaway, Joseph A. " T h e 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 6 9 'Ai (et-Tell) Excavations." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 198 (1970): 7 3iCallaway, Joseph A. The Early Bronze Age Sanctuary at Ai (et-Tell). London, 1972. Callaway, Joseph A., and K e r m i t Schoonover, " T h e Early Bronze Age Citadel at Ai (et-Tell)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 207 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 4 1 - 5 3 Callaway, Joseph A. The Early Bronze Age Citadel and IJOWCV City alAi (et-Tell). C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1980. M a r q u e t - K r a u s e , Judith. Ijisfouilles de 'Ay (et-Tell), 1933-1935. 2 vols. Paris, 1949. ROBERT E . COOLEY
AIA.
C
See Archaeological Institute of America.
C
AIN DARA , site located in Syria's 'Afrin valley, u p
s t r e a m from the ' A m u q plain, a b o u t 67 k m (42 mi.) n o r t h w e s t of A l e p p o a n d 7 k m (4 mi.) s o u t h of t h e n e w city of Afrin (36°56' N , 36°55' E ) . It is n o t far from the a r c h a e o logical site of H a - z a - z a / A - z a - z a , m o d e r n F a z a z , a b o u t 25 k m (15.5 mi.) t o t h e n o r t h e a s t , a n d from Tell Rifa'at/Arpad, a AI. F i g u r e 1. Three cisterns in the courtyard of a house. (Erich Les- b o u t 30 k m (18 mi.) to the east. Ain D a r a is n a m e d after a spring a b o u t 700 m east of t h e m o u n d . T h e tell is enorsing/Art R e s o u r c e , N Y ) c
c
c
34
'AIN DARA'
m o u s . Its citadel rises a b o u t 30 m from t h e level of the plain; its lower city covers a n area of 24 h a (59 acres). 'Ain D a r a ' is not m e n t i o n e d often in the scholarly litera ture. S o m e researchers p a s s e d t h r o u g h t h e area while s t u d y ing t h e ancient city of K u n u l u a . It was generally ignored, however, until the c h a n c e discovery of a m o n u m e n t a l basalt lion in 1955. T h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of A l e p p o t h e n initiated a series of seasons of excavation o n t h e tell. Excavations at its s o u t h e r n corner a n d on the n o r t h w e s t ern edge of t h e s u m m i t were c o n d u c t e d in 1956,1962, a n d in 1964 u n d e r t h e direction of Feisal Seirafe, assisted b y the F r e n c h archaeologist M a u r i c e D u n a n d . [See the biography of Dunand.] In 1976 a n d again in 1978, a n expedition from t h e Syrian D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities a n d M u s e u m s , u n d e r t h e direction of Ali A b o u Assaf, excavated at t h e site. In seasons 6 - 1 1 (1980-1985) a t e m p l e was uncovered. I n 1983 a n d 1984, P a u l Z i m a n s k y a n d Elizabeth Stone m a d e s o u n d i n g s in t h e lower city near t h e western a n d n o r t h e r n corner. F r o m surface exploration a n d a sounding in t h e cit adel a n d the lower city it a p p e a r s t h a t t h e lower city was settled from the e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e Age (c. t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE) until t h e I r o n A g e II (c.740 BCE). E x c e p t for the R o m a n period, t h e citadel was settled from t h e C h a l colithic t h r o u g h the O t t o m a n periods. T h e following levels, d a t e d b y their artifacts, were distin guished in t h e area above a n d a r o u n d t h e temple, w h i c h belongs to level VII (three phases: 1300-1000BCE; 1000-900 BCE; a n d 900-740 BCE). Level I: Seljuk p e r i o d (1100-1400 CE) Level II: L a t e Byzantine period (650 CE)
'AIN DARA'.
Level III: U m a y y a d a n d ' A b b a s i d p e r i o d (650-900 CE) Level IV: Hellenistic p e r i o d (330-75 BCE) Level V: L a t e A r a m e a n a n d A c h a e m e n i d p e r i o d s (530330 BCE) Level VI: A r a m e a n a n d N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d s (740530 B C E ) . T h e t e m p l e , oriented to t h e southeast, consists of six a r chitectural c o m p o n e n t s . 1. Paved courtyard. A well a n d a basin for w a s h i n g h a n d s before entering t h e s a n c t u a r y for p r a y e r s w e r e f o u n d in t h e courtyard. 2. Entrance. T h r e e basalt steps d e c o r a t e d with a guilloche p a t t e r n led t o the e n t r a n c e , w h i c h was a portico with t w o c o l u m n s . T w o h u g e limestone threshold blocks w e r e situ ated in the successive d o o r w a y s ; there are i m p r e s s i o n s of two footprints o n t h e first, a n d t h e print of a left foot o n t h e s e c o n d (97 X 31 c m ) . T w o towers or r o o m s m a y h a v e flanked the e n t r a n c e . T h r o u g h a r o o m o n t h e right a stair case b e t w e e n the anticella a n d t h e corridor w a s r e a c h e d . T w o sphinxes a n d four colossal lions flank t h e e n t r a n c e , g u a r d i n g t h e portico. 3. Facade. Reliefs of lions a n d sphinxes a r r a n g e d in t w o levels d e c o r a t e d t h e facade. T h e u p p e r level was c o m p r i s e d of h u g e lions in p r o t o m e , a n d t h e lower of o p p o s i n g lions a n d sphinxes. 4. Anticella. T h e decoration of t h e o b l o n g anticella is very impressive. A b o v e t h e floor o n t h e lower p a r t of t h e wall is a series of orthostats d e c o r a t e d w i t h a pair of guilloches. L a r g e basalt slabs are d e c o r a t e d with figures of m o u n t a i n g o d s ; t h e o r n a m e n t a t i o n a b o v e t h e orthostats is g e o m e t r i c .
Basalt bas-relief on a socle, depicting a mountain god and two bulls with human heads and
arms. N a t i o n a l M u s e u m , A l e p p o , Syria. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N Y )
C
5. Stairway. T h r e e steps of a stairway join t h e anticella with t h e cella. T h e cella m u s t h a v e o n c e h a v e b e e n very impressive. O n l y a few orthostats d e c o r a t e d with guilloches remain. T h e p o d i u m o p p o s i t e t h e d o o r was badly destroyed. Its profile is only suggested b y t h e series of facing basalt orthostats, d e c o r a t e d w i t h figures of m o u n t a i n g o d s a n d g e niuses (see b e l o w ) . 6. Raised corridor. I n t h e latest p h a s e of t h e t e m p l e t h e builder s u r r o u n d e d it with a raised corridor. O r t h o s t a t s of o p p o s i n g lions a n d s p h i n x e s g r a c e its exterior, a n d lions flank its e n t r a n c e . O n b o t h sides of t h e corridor t h e builders originally erected thirty o p p o s i n g stelae w i t h different scenes (e.g., a t h r o n e d king, a p a l m tree, a s t a n d i n g g o d , offerings). T h e sculpture in d i e t e m p l e a t ' A i n D a r a ' is integrated into t h e building's design: lions line t h e p a s s a g e t h r o u g h the gates, lions a n d s p h i n x e s are c a r v e d i n p r o t o m e o n the slabs in t h e anticella a n d o n t h e socle in t h e n i c h e of the p o d i u m in t h e cella. T h e stelae o n b o t h sides of corridor exhibit t h e s a m e t e c h n i q u e : eighty-two reliefs f o r m a d a d o a r o u n d t h e sides of the t e m p l e terrace. T h e r e p e r t o i r e is v e r y limited— only lions a n d sphinxes. It is well k n o w n t h a t t h e lion is a n attribute of t h e g o d d e s s Ishtar, a n d it is k n o w n from P h o e nician works of art t h a t t h e s p h i n x is a n attribute of t h a t g o d d e s s . I s h t a r - S a w u s k a , t h e lover of t h e m o u n t a i n g o d , ruled t h e m o u n t a i n s i n n o r t h e r n Syria a n d s o u t h e r n A n a tolia. [See Phoenicians.] B e c a u s e d i e m o u n t a i n g o d is d i p icted o n t h e orthostats a n d socles i n t h e cella a n d anticella, it c a n b e a s s u m e d that t h e t e m p l e w a s d e d i c a t e d t o the g o d dess Ishtar. I n its p l a n t h e t e m p l e a t 'Ain D a r a ' repeats t h e m a i n features of temples at T e l l C h u e r a , M u n b a q a , E m a r , Ebla, H a z o r , a n d Tell T a ' y i n a t . [See C h u e r a , Tell; E m a r ; Ebla; H a z o r . ] A t 'Ain D a r a ' , h o w e v e r , t h e following p r i n cipal changes a p p e a r : t h e p l a t f o r m is higher, a corridor is situated o n t h r e e sides of t h e t e m p l e , t h e decorations include m o r e t h a n 168 reliefs a n d sculptures in p r o t o m e , a n d a d e e p well a n d a large chalkstone basin o p p o s i t e t h e east c o r n e r were f o u n d in t h e p a v e d c o u r t y a r d . T h e lions a n d sphinxes o n the m a i n facade a n d the facade of the cella r e s e m b l e those g u a r d i n g t h e gates at B o g a z k o y a n d Alaca H o y u k a n d m a y be said t o follow C a n a a n i t e a n d Hittite p r o t o t y p e s . [See B o gazkoy; Hittites.] [See also T e m p l e s , article on Syro-Palestinian T e m p l e s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abdul-Hals, Selim. " L e s musees syriens et l'education." Annates Archeoiogiques Arabes Syriermes 1 5 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 3 - 1 2 . Abou Assaf, AH. Der Tempel von 'Ain Dara. M a i n z a m Rhein, 1990. Annates Archiologiques Arabes Syriennes 1 0 ( i 9 6 0 ) : 8 7 - 1 0 3 . A L I ABOU ASSAF
'AIN E S - S A M I Y E H , a n exceptionally strong, p e r e n nial spring s o m e 19 k m (12 mi.) n o r t h - n o r t h e a s t of Jerusa lem, at t h e n o r t h e a s t e r n foot of B a a l H a z o r , o n e of t h e h i g h est peaks in the J u d e a n m o u n t a i n s (31°59' N , 35°2o' E ) . T h e c
AIN ES-SAMIYEH
35
s p r i n g arises in a d e e p ravine s u r r o u n d e d b y cliffs pock m a r k e d w i t h caves a n d grottoes. William Foxwell Albright, A m i h a i M a z a r , a n d others h a v e suggested plausibly t h a t this lush area was a sanctuary in antiquity. T h e spring irrigates a system of small valleys t h a t c o n v e r g e into t h e W a d i Auja, w h i c h cuts all the w a y d o w n f r o m t h e J u d e a n hills, a t 457 m (1,500 ft.), t o t h e J o r d a n Valley. T h e spring still provides copious water for t h e t o w n of R a m a l l a h , from t h e m o d e r n p u m p i n g station a t the site. It is n o t surprising t h a t t h e r e a r e a n u m b e r of archaeolog ical sites of m a n y periods i n t h e vicinity. (1) K h i r b e t S a m i y e h lies 275 m (900 ft.) t o t h e southeast, apparently a relatively late r u i n , mostly B y z a n t i n e a n d A r a b . (2) K h i r b e t el-Marjameh ( " R u i n of t h e H e a p s of S t o n e s " ) is a large, rocky ruin o n a p r o m o n t o r y just n o r t h e a s t of t h e spring, with sherds from t h e Early B r o n z e , M i d d l e B r o n z e , a n d L a t e B r o n z e A g e s , as well as major r u i n s from t h e Iron I—II p e riods. (3) T h e long, n a r r o w D h a h r M i r z b a n e h ridge, s o m e 730 m (2,400 ft.) n o r t h - n o r t h e a s t of t h e spring, has a few r e m a i n s from a n E B I V settlement a n d a c o m p l e x of m u c h r o b b e d cemeteries t h a t is k n o w n to h a v e m o r e t h a n o n e thousand tombs. T h e antiquities of 'Ain e s - S a m i y e h have long b e e n k n o w n to t o p o g r a p h e r s a n d archaeologists, b u t die area's settlement history w a s only elucidated recently. D a v i d G . L y o n a c q u i r e d Early B r o n z e I V p o t t e r y f r o m r o b b e d shaft t o m b s while director of the A m e r i c a n School of Oriental Research in 1906-1907, a n d similar material found its w a y into m a n y o t h e r collections from J e r u s a l e m a n d elsewhere. Albright s u r v e y e d K h i r b e t e l - M a r j a m e h in 1923, identifying it with biblical E p h r a i m (2 Sm. 13:23). P a u l W . L a p p excavated forty-five Early B r o n z e I V t o m b s o n t h e D h a h r M i r z b a n e h in 1963-1964, b u t h e failed t o locate any settlement. Bakizah S h a n t u r a n d Y u s u f L a b i d i d u g a n o t h e r forty-four Early B r o n z e I V t o m b s in 1970; a n d William G . D e v e r published still m o r e material from r o b b e d t o m b s in 1972. Z . Kallai surveyed K h i r b e t e l - M a r j a m e h i n 1968, o p p o s i n g Albright's identification a n d suggesting a n alternative identification with Baal Shalisha (1 Sm. 9:4; 2 Kgs. 4:42). M a z a r cleared p o r t i o n s of t h e I r o n A g e t o w n in 1975 a n d 1978. Finally, in 1987 Israel Finkelstein located m a n y m o r e Early B r o n z e IV t o m b s o n t h e D h a h r M i r z b a n e h , as well as a fairly extensive settlement from the same p e r i o d . T h e t w o b e s t - k n o w n p e r i o d s of o c c u p a t i o n in the vicinity of 'Ain es-Samiyeh are t h e Early B r o n z e I V a n d I r o n I—II. D u r i n g t h e Early B r o n z e I V (c. 2300-2000 BCE), t h e site attracted large n u m b e r s of m i g r a t o r y pastoralists, as well as transitory s e t d e m e n t s . T h e D h a h r M i r z b a n e h shaft-tomb cemetery, w i t h several differing g r o u p s of t o m b s , is t h e larg est s u c h c e m e t e r y k n o w n i n Palestine, w i t h eleven h u n d r e d t o m b s i n evidence a n d m a n y m o r e n o d o u b t y e t u n d i s c o v ered. T h e pottery belongs t o D e v e r ' s Central Hills t y p e b u t has clear links w i t h j e r i c h o , t h e J o r d a n Valley, a n d t h e s o u t h -
36
'AIN GHAZAL
ern H e b r o n hills. O n e t o m b p r o d u c e d a u n i q u e silver goblet of Syrian origin, with an e m b o s s e d scene in the U r III style. T h e settlement on t h e ridge at D h a h r M i r z b a n e h , partly en closed, covers some 4 acres a n d has remains of b o t h c r u d e dwellings and a possible cult area, possibly with two phases. T h e Iron A g e o c c u p a t i o n , c o n c e n t r a t e d at K h i r b e t elM a r j a m e h , m a y extend from the tenth to t h e late eighth c e n tury BCE. T h e earliest p h a s e of o c c u p a t i o n at the 10-acre site m a y have b e e n in the t e n t h century BCE, for there is material k n o w n from r o b b e d t o m b s of that period in the vicinity. S o m e w h a t later, in t h e n i n t h - e i g h t h centuries BCE, a t o w n grew u p , with well-laid-out lanes a n d densely built-up c o u r t yard houses of the "Israelite" t y p e , s u r r o u n d e d b y a stone wall 4 m wide with a massive tower, or citadel, at its n o r t h e r n end. T h e existence of a large fortified t o w n d u r i n g t h e M o n archy in such an isolated site m a y seem surprising, b u t it is explicable given t h e strategic i m p o r t a n c e of a n d attractive conditions for settlement at A i n es-Samiyeh. c
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William F. " T h e Ephraim of the Old and N e w T e s t a m e n t s . " Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 3 (1923): 36-40. Dever, William G. " M i d d l e Bronze Age I Cemeteries at M i r z b a n e h 2
and 'Ain-Samiya." Israel Exploration Journal 22.2-3 ( i 9 7 ) : 9 5 - 1 1 2 . Dever, William G. " M B IIA Cemeteries at 'Ain es-Samiyeh a n d Sinjil." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 1 7 ( F e b ruary 1975): 2 3 - 3 6 . Finkelstein, Israel. " T h e Central Hill C o u n t r y in the Intermediate Bronze Age." Israel Exploration Journal 4 1 . 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 9 - 4 5 . Kallai, Zecharia. "Baal-Shalisha and E p h r a i m . " In HaMikra' weToledol Yisra'el: Essays in Memory of Ron Yishai, edited by Benjamin Uffenheimer, p p . 6 0 - 7 1 . Tel Aviv, 1 9 7 2 . L a p p , Paul W . The Dhahr Mirzbaneh Tombs: Three Intermediate Bronze Age Cemeteries in Jordan. N e w Haven, 1966. Mazar, Amihai. " T h r e e Israelite Sites in the Hills of J u d a h and E p h r a i m . " Biblical Archaeologist 45.3 (1982); 1 6 7 - 1 7 8 . Shantur, Bakizah, and Yusuf Labadi. " T o m b 204 at 'Ain Samiya." Israel Exploration Journal
21.2-3 (1971): 73-77. WILLIAM G . DEVER
'AIN GHAZAL, site located in the W a d i Z e r q a , at t h e n o r t h e a s t edge of A m m a n , J o r d a n (3i°59' N , 35°58' E ) . H i g h w a y construction in 1974 b a r e d a continuous e x p o s u r e of archaeological settlement. Six seasons of excavations a n d site survey were c o n d u c t e d u n d e r the auspices of Y a r m o u k University, t h e University of K a n s a s , S a n D i e g o State U n i versity, the D e s e r t R e s e a r c h Institute of t h e University of N e v a d a , and the J o r d a n i a n D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities from 1982 to 1985 a n d in 1988-1989 (cf. Rollefson, S i m m o n s , a n d Kafafi, 1992), a n d a regional survey a r o u n d t h e settlement was u n d e r t a k e n in 1987 b y Alan H . S i m m o n s a n d Z e i d a n A. KafafI (1988). M o r e t h a n forty r a d i o c a r b o n dates from t h e site h a v e s h o w n that settlement was continuous for m o r e t h a n two t h o u s a n d years. C o u p l e d with major changes in architec
t u r e , ritual, e c o n o m i c b a s e , a n d c e r a m i c t e c h n o l o g y , four major stages of cultural d e v e l o p m e n t h a v e b e e n identified. M i d d l e P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic B ( M P P N B ) P e r i o d . I n the earliest p h a s e a t 'Ain G h a z a l (c. 7200-6500 B C E ) , cereals a n d pulses were f a r m e d a n d goat h u s b a n d r y developed. By the middle of the seventh m i l l e n n i u m , t h e settlement h a d g r o w n from a small h a m l e t of a b o u t 2 ha (5 acres) t o a village of nearly 5 h a (12 acres). H u n t i n g still p l a y e d a vital role in the diet, contributing half of t h e m e a t protein; d o m e s t i c a t e d goats p r o v i d e d t h e other half. Hotises w e r e large (up t o 40-50 sq m ) , with t h e n u m b e r of r o o m s increasing f r o m o n e at t h e beginning of the p e r i o d to t w o a n d t h r e e r o o m s b y the e n d of t h e p h a s e . Walls were of u n d r e s s e d fieldstone, coated with m u d m o r t a r a n d finished w i t h lime plaster. Floors were m a d e of a fine layer of lime plaster applied over a lime-and-gravel b a s e . R e d p i g m e n t w a s u s e d to decorate the floors a n d walls; a few fragments indicate specific d e signs: stylized birds a n d p e r h a p s other animals a m o n g d i e m . M P P N B ritual practices were particularly striking at ' A i n G h a z a l . Subfloor h o u s e burials of b o t h adults a n d children were t h e n o r m , a l t h o u g h c o u r t y a r d burials w e r e also c o m m o n . All burials w e r e individual ( e x c e p t for females w i t h n e w b o r n s or still b i r t h s ) . T h e c o m m o n regional M P P N B practice of decapitating t h e corpses of children a n d adults a n d interring their skulls elsewhere was followed (in s o m e cases t h e skulls w e r e t r e a t e d with special r e v e r e n c e , see b e low). A significant n u m b e r of " t r a s h b u r i a l s " of adults with skulls intact was also f o u n d , suggesting t h a t social divisions existed in t h e early seventh m i l l e n n i u m BCE. A l t h o u g h the a p p e a r a n c e of n u m b e r s of small b a k e d a n d u n b a k e d clay figurines of h u m a n s a n d animals is a c h a r a c teristic of t h e M P P N B , only a few s p e c i m e n s of t h e e c o nomically i m p o r t a n t goats were f o u n d at 'Ain G h a z a l . C a t tle, o n the other h a n d , d o m i n a t e d the identifiable animal figurines, including two e x a m p l e s of "ritually killed" cows b u r i e d b e n e a t h a h o u s e floor a n d several others w i t h twisted fiber imprints b e h i n d their h e a d t h a t suggest halters. T h e h u m a n figurines a r e headless or lack a b o d y , p e r h a p s reflect ing a close parallel to t h e p r e d o m i n a n t burial m o d e . Fertility figurines at 'Ain G h a z a l are very distinct: obviously p r e g n a n t females with d i s t e n d e d a b d o m e n s a n d enlarged breasts are also decorated with r o c k e r - s t a m p e d " t a t t o o i n g . " T h e m o s t impressive aspects of ritual activity at 'Ain G h a zal are plastered skulls a n d plaster h u m a n statuary. Six p l a s tered skulls a n d t w o caches of statues h a v e b e e n r e c o v e r e d . T h r e e plastered skulls h a v e b e e n d a t e d t o before 7100 BCE, a n d a c a c h e of twenty-five statues a n d b u s t s dates t o a b o u t 6750 BCE; a s e c o n d cache of statues m a y date to a b o u t 6,500 BCE, at t h e transition of t h e M P P N B a n d t h e L a t e P r e - P o t tery Neolithic B ( L P P N B ) . L a t e P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic B P e r i o d ( L P P N B ) . A t 'Ain G h a z a l t h e L a t e P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic B p e r i o d lasts from a b o u t 6500 t o a b o u t 6000 BCE. W i t h i n this p e r i o d t h e site m o r e t h a n d o u b l e d in size, r e a c h i n g 10 ha (25 acres) in extent. H o u s e design c h a n g e d radically, f r o m t h e spacious
'AIN GHAZAL
37
BCE) 'Ain G h a z a l grew to m o r e t h a n 12 ha (30 acres; a n d , possibly, to m o r e t h a n 14 ha or 34 acres). A l t h o u g h details of t h a t p e r i o d ' s agricultural p u r s u i t s are lacking, a farming base for the settlement is u n d e n i a b l e . H u n t i n g , on the other h a n d , was severely restricted t o s t e p p e a n d desert fauna, with d o m e s t i c a t e d goats, cattle, pigs, a n d s h e e p constituting the bulk (90 percent) of r e c o v e r e d animal b o n e s . B e y o n d differences in a n i m a l h u s b a n d r y , h u n t i n g , a n d implied e n v i r o n m e n t a l c h a n g e , t h e P P N C p e r i o d at 'Ain G h a z a l suggests in other critical ways t h a t a major cultural c h a n g e w a s u n d e r w a y . Architecturally, h o u s e s included semistibterranean structures f o u n d e d on M P P N B and/or L P P N B lime-plaster floors, as well as similar surface s t r u c tures t h a t differed dramatically from M P P N B a n d L P P N B times. Buildings were smaller ( a p p r o x i m a t e l y 3.5-4 m o n a side), with small r e c t a n g u l a r c h a m b e r s (approximately 3 times 1 m ) bisected b y a central corridor t h a t created cells too small for n o r m a l d o m e s t i c functions, s u c h as living or sleeping areas. Altogether, t h e P P N C structures suggest p e r m a n e n t storage features w i t h flimsy superstructures.
'AIN GHAZAL. Human
figurines.
( P h o t o g r a p h by Dorrell and Stuart
Laidlaw; courtesy G. Rollefson)
t w o - to t h r e e - r o o m M P P N B settings to multiple small cells ( a p p r o x i m a t e l y 2 x 2 m e a c h ) a r o u n d a central hall or c h a m b e r of u n k n o w n d i m e n s i o n s . L i m e - p l a s t e r floors d e c orated with r e d ocher c o n t i n u e d to characterize the build ings. T h e site's e c o n o m i c base r e m a i n e d agrictutural. D o m e s ticated dogs are evident early in t h e p h a s e , a n d at its close cattle a n d pigs w e r e p r o b a b l y d o m e s t i c a t e d . It is clear t h a t h u n t e d wild species b e g a n to decline dramatically after 6500 BCE, signaling a major e n v i r o n m e n t a l c h a n g e for the settle m e n t a n d its vicinity. T h e r e a p p e a r to b e n o major ritual changes in h u m a n burials f r o m t h o s e in t h e M P P N B ; the n u m b e r of h u m a n a n d animal figurines r e c o v e r e d from the restricted areas of excavation also w a s the s a m e , P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic C P e r i o d ( P N N C ) . T h e e n d of t h e seventh m i l l e n n i u m in a n c i e n t Palestine witnessed the demise of all k n o w n large agricultural settlements. H o w e v e r , d u r i n g t h e P r e - P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c C p e r i o d (6000-c. 5500
T h e ritual aspects of the first half of t h e sixth millennium contrast with the L P P N B as strongly as t h e architectural elements. P P N C burials o c c u r as subfloor a n d courtyard i n t e r m e n t s , but in every case t h e skull r e m a i n s intact with the skeleton. T h e consistent o c c u r r e n c e of pig remains with P P N C burials is also a major d e p a r t u r e from P P N B p r a c tices. T h e a p p e a r a n c e of p o t t e r y h a s l o n g b e e n taken to b e a w a t e r s h e d of cultural d e v e l o p m e n t in the L e v a n t , a n d in the south it h a s b e e n conventionally a s s u m e d t h a t this was a technological innovation i n t r o d u c e d b y p o p u l a t i o n s migrat ing from the n o r t h (Mellaart, 1975, p . 238). T h e evidence from 'Ain G h a z a l argues against this view however. Several examples of modifications of P P N C architecture are asso ciated with c r u d e fired p o t t e r y , followed soon thereafter by typical Y a r m u k i a n ceramics. T h i s d e v e l o p m e n t indicates t h a t the transition from t h e a c e r a m i c to t h e ceramic N e o lithic was a local p h e n o m e n o n (Rollefson, Kafafi, a n d S i m m o n s , 1993). Y a r m u k i a n P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c . T h e gradual changes from t h e P P N C to the Y a r m u k i a n P o t t e r y Neolithic are also expressed in other ways. H u n t i n g a n d h e r d i n g evidence from animal remains is similar for b o t h periods. T h e earliest Y a r m u k i a n inhabitants modified s t a n d i n g P P N C structures, b u t slightly later, Y a r m u k i a n s built p e r m a n e n t rectangular structures very different from P P N C n o r m s . T h e s e struc tures i n c l u d e d large o p e n spaces enclosed b y stone walls, with floors m a d e of p u d d l e d m u d or huwwar, a " p l a s t e r " c o m p o s e d of m u d and p o u n d e d chalk. T h e latest preserved Y a r m u k i a n architectural r e m a i n s are curvilinear stone ar r a n g e m e n t s a r o u n d the r e p e a t e d a p p e a r a n c e of p u d d l e d m u d floors. T h e indication is t h a t 'Ain G h a z a l had ceased to function as a p e r m a n e n t settlement, offering instead a seasonal c a m p for pastoral n o m a d i c g r o u p s , probably d u r ing t h e dry s u m m e r m o n t h s . T h e evidence from 'Ain Ghazal
38
'AJJUL, TELL EL-
(Kohler-Rollefson, 1988; Kohler-Rollefson a n d Rollefson, 1990), as well as from the eastern deserts of J o r d a n (e.g., Betts, 1986, p . 303) strongly suggests t h a t an increasing r e liance on pastoral n o m a d i s m b e g a n during the P P N C a n d that pastoral a n d agricultural e c o n o m i c systems w e r e c o m pletely segregated shordy after the beginning of t h e Y a r m u k i a n period. I n its ritual practices t h e Y a r m u k i a n p e r i o d differed vastiy from its aceramic forebears: n o t a single Y a r m u k i a n burial has b e e n identified at 'Ain G h a z a l a n d animal figurines are rare, although a bird (?) has b e e n found; h u m a n figurines are also few, b u t the h e a d of a typical "coffee-bean" fertility figurine (Rollefson, Kafafi, a n d S i m m o n s , 1993) was r e c o v ered (cf. Perrot, 1964, pi. X X H I ) . I n t e r p r e t a t i o n of t h e D a t a . T h e changes witnessed in t h e long, u n b r o k e n occupational sequence at 'Ain G h a z a l c a n b e u n d e r s t o o d in terms of responses to the d e m a n d s of increasing p o p u l a t i o n g r o w t h on w h a t was a lucrative b u t delicate habitat. T h e M P P N B strategy of a c o m b i n e d h u n t ing, goat herding, a n d agricultural subsistence base p e r m i t t e d an u n p r e c e d e n t e d p o p u l a t i o n growth. By the onset of the L P P N B , t h e effects of these increasing d e m a n d s is seen in the decrease of animal species variability. T h i s decrease culminated during the P P N C period, w h e n faunal diversity collapsed t o a handful of wild species. C o n t i n u e d e n v i r o n m e n t a l degradation d u r i n g t h e Y a r m u k i a n period finally led to the collapse of 'Ain G h a z a l as a p e r m a n e n t settlement (Kohler-Rollefson a n d Rollefson 1990). Climate change h a d little to do with the demise of ' A i n G h a z a l (and other settlements in the southern L e v a n t ) . T h e large d e m a n d s on tree stands for fuel to p r o d u c e M P P N B a n d L P P N B lime plaster deforested an area within a radius of several kilometers; exacerbated by the appetite of increas ingly large herds of goats, t h e landscape a r o u n d 'Ain G h a z a l was exposed to continual erosion by the winter rains a n d s u m m e r winds. L o g s a n d b r a n c h e s b e c a m e scarcer for c o n struction t h r o u g h time, a n d w o o d w a s increasingly difficult to collect for hearths. Agricultural fields within a reasonable distance from the spring at 'Ain G h a z a l b e c a m e so distant titat it was n o longer feasible to u s e t h e settlement as a h o m e base. By the P P N C period the cultural degradation of t h e e n v i r o n m e n t was p r o b a b l y already irreversible, a n d late P P N C and Y a r m u k i a n efforts to accom'modate t h o s e changes were too little a n d too late for the l o n g - t e r m stable continuation of a p e r m a n e n t c o m m u n i t y . [See also Cattle a n d O x e n ; Paleoenvironmental R e c o n struction; Pigs; and S h e e p a n d Goats.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Betts, Alison V. G. " T h e Prehistory of the Basalt Desert, T r a n s j o r d a n : An Analysis." Ph. D . diss., University of L o n d o n , 1986. Kohler-Rollefson, Use. " T h e Aftermath of the Levantine Neolithic Revolution in the Light of Ecological and Ethnographic E v i d e n c e . " Paleorient 14.1 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 8 7 - 9 3 . Kohler-Rollefson, Ilse, and G a r y O. Rollefson. " T h e I m p a c t of N e o lithic Subsistence Strategies on the Environment: T h e Case of 'Ain
Ghazal, J o r d a n . " In Man's Role in the Shaping of the Eastern Medi terranean landscape, edited by Sytze Bottema et al., p p . 3 - 1 4 . R o t terdam, 1990. Mellaart, James. The Neolithic of the Near East. N e w York, 1 9 7 5 . Perrot, Jean. " L e s d e u x premieres campagnes de fouilles a M u n h a t a , 1 9 6 2 - 1 9 6 3 : Premiers resultats." Syria 41 ( 1 9 6 4 ) : 3 2 3 - 3 4 5 . Rollefson, G a r y O., Z e i d a n A. Kafafi, and Alan H . S i m m o n s . " T h e Neolithic Village of 'Ain Ghazal, Jordan: Preliminary R e p o r t on the 1989 Season." In Preliminary Excavation Reports: Sardis, Paphos, Caesarea Maritima, Shiqmim, 'Ain Ghazal, edited by William G. Dever, p p . 1 0 7 - 1 2 6 . A n n u a l of the A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research, no. 5 1 . Baltimore, 1993. Rollefson, Gary O., Alan H. S i m m o n s , and Z e i d a n A. Kafafi. " N e o lithic Cultures at 'Ain Ghazal, J o r d a n . " Journal of Field Archaeology 19 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 4 4 3 - 4 7 ° S i m m o n s , Alan H., a n d Zeidan A. Kafafi. "Preliminary R e p o r t on the 'Ain Ghazal Archaeological Survey, 1 9 8 7 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 32 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 2 7 - 3 9 . GARY O . ROLLEFSON
C
AJJUL, TELL EL- (Ar., " t h e m o u n d of t h e c a l f " ) , site located on t h e n o r t h e r n b a n k of W a d i G a z a , 2 k m (1.2 mi.) from t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast a n d 6 k m (3.6 mi.) s o u t h w e s t of m o d e r n G a z a (3i°29' N , 34°28' E; m a p reference 0934 X 0976). T h e site is p o o r l y p r e s e r v e d as a result of e n croaching d u n e s a n d seasonal flooding; it is at least 8 h a (20 acres) in size a n d r e c t a n g u l a r in s h a p e . William M . Flinders Petrie excavated T e l l el-'Ajjul for t h e British School of A r c h a e o l o g y from 1930 to 1934. E r n e s t H . M a c k a y a n d M a r g a r e t A . M u r r a y briefly c o n t i n u e d t h e ex cavation in 1938. L e s s t h a n 5 p e r c e n t of t h e site has b e e n excavated. Petrie claimed that T e l l el-'Ajjul w a s ancient G a z a . However, A h a r o n K e m p i n s k i (1974) n o t e s t h a t a n cient G a z a was p r o b a b l y located within t h e confines of t h e m o d e r n city and correctly suggests t h a t T e l l el-'Ajjul is t h e city of S h a r u h e n , m e n t i o n e d in b o t h biblical a n d E g y p t i a n sources. T h e size of Tell el-'Ajjul, along with its great q u a n tity of Hyksos scarabs a n d die wealth of its gold h o a r d s , s u p p o r t s this identification. Petrie's excavation a n d p u b l i cation of t h e site are, t h u s , p r o b l e m a t i c , a n d basic aspects of stratigraphy a n d chronology r e m a i n confusing a n d c o n troversial. William Foxwell Albright (1938), J a m e s R. S t e w art (1974), K e m p i n s k i (1993), a n d William G . D e v e r (1992) h a v e all a t t e m p t e d to r e w o r k the dating of T e l l el-'Ajjul. [See
the biographies of Petrie and Albright.] E x c e p t for the site's Early B r o n z e I V t o m b s , t h e r e are scant traces of early settlement. T e l l el-'Ajjul r e a c h e d its ze nith during the M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . In t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , o c c u p a t i o n was limited, b u t n e w cemeteries a p p e a r e d . T h e r e are a few I r o n A g e II burials a n d a s m a t t e r i n g of material t h a t dates t o the Hellenistic, R o m a n , a n d L a t e A r a b periods. C e m e t e r i e s . C e m e t e r y 1500 (EB IV) is l o c a t e d w e s t of t h e tell a n d includes a p p r o x i m a t e l y forty-two single, artic ulated burials in r e c t a n g u l a r t o m b s with s q u a r e shafts. [See Burial Sites; T o m b s . ] G r a v e g o o d s w e r e often limited to a single b r o n z e dagger. [See G r a v e G o o d s . ] K a t h l e e n M . K e n -
'AJJUL, TELL ELyon (1956) suggests t h a t only t h e earliest t o m b s contained daggers. C e m e t e r y 100-200 ( E B IV) is located east of t h e tell a n d c o n t a i n e d a p p r o x i m a t e l y fifty burials. Its t o m b s shafts a n d c h a m b e r s t e n d to b e r o u n d e d . G r a v e g o o d s i n cluded ceramic bowls a n d d e e p c u p s b u t very few daggers. T h e earliest material from t h e tell itself c o m e s from t h e C o u r t y a r d C e m e t e r y . Its t o m b s w e r e c u t into t h e soft m a r l in the n o r t h e r n c o r n e r of t h e site. T h e r e is a total of t w e n t y five h u m a n burials a n d evidence of eighty animals. Burials w e r e usually of single individuals. Six p h a s e s of burial types h a v e b e e n identified d a t i n g to M B I I A . N o t e w o r t h y is the burial of a child w e a r i n g gold jewelry f o u n d b e n e a t h palace II. T h e C a n a a n i t e city ceased to function in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e a n d a series of t h r e e large cemeteries b e g a n to develop to t h e n o r t h a n d east of t h e tell. T h e lower c e m e t e r y t o the n o r t h of the site, t h e e i g h t e e n t h - d y n a s t y c e m e t e r y to t h e n o r t h e a s t , a n d t h e eastern c e m e t e r y t o the east c o n t a i n e d t h r e e h u n d r e d a n d five simple p i t burials a n d eight elaborate p i t burials. T h e p i t burials w e r e simple shallow rectangular or oval pits d u g into t h e g r o u n d . T h e practice of pit burials c o n t i n u e d f r o m t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e , b u t t h e M B burials w e r e i n t r a m u r a l , w h e r e a s t h e L B cemeteries w e r e not. H o w e v e r , t h e r e are a few L B i m r a m u r a l burials o n t h e tell. T h e p i t burials c o n t a i n a high p e r c e n t a g e of i m p o r t e d C y p r i o t p o t t e r y . O t h e r grave g o o d s include M y c e n a e a n ILIA p o t t e r y , g o l d a n d b r o n z e jewelry, metal objects (e.g., toggle p i n s , needles, d a g g e r s , a r r o w h e a d s , a blade, razor, adzer, a n d a x e ) , a n d E g y p t i a n objects, especially scarabs. T h e cemeteries decline in u s e in L B LIB. Eight elaborate pit t o m b s t h a t i n c l u d e a d r o m o s a n d a stone-lined cist are u n i q u e to T e l l el-'Ajjul a n d date t o L B II. T h i s evolution from simple p i t burials p r o b a b l y a c c o m m o d a t e d elite families. B o t h t h e s t r u c t u r e of t h e t o m b s a n d t h e grave g o o d s are m o r e elaborate. T h e grave goods i n cluded a great n u m b e r of w e a p o n s , E g y p t i a n objects (a gold ring, s c a r a b s ) , a n d E g y p t i a n - i n s p i r e d objects (lead fishingn e t weights, d u c k - s h a p e d b o w l ) . T h e " g o v e r n o r ' s t o m b " is particularly o u t s t a n d i n g a n d w a s r e u s e d several times throughout the Late Bronze Age. It has a stepped dromos, walls lined with s a n d s t o n e slabs, a n d a gabled roof. G r a v e g o o d s include a gold r i n g with t h e n a m e of T u t a n l d i a m u n , a scarab of R a m e s e s I I , thirty-five a r r o w h e a d s , a b r o n z e wine set, fishing weights, a n d a n d u c k - s h a p e d ivory b o w l . O t h e r L B burial types i n c l u d e cave burials a n d loculi b u r ials. Rivka G o n e n (1992) considers t h e limited u s e of these burial types to b e evidence of foreign p o p u l a t i o n s , with pit burials reserved for t h e i n d i g e n o u s p o p u l a t i o n . A g r o u p of loculi burials w a s f o u n d in t h e e a s t e r n cemetery. E a c h cave h a d a w i d e e n t r a n c e a n d tire loculi w e r e c a r v e d into the walls. T h e caves m e a s u r e d a t least 3.5 m in d i a m e t e r , with t h e largest m e a s u r i n g 3.5 X 6 m . T h e y m a y h a v e h a d vaulted ceilings. E a c h loculus h a d t h e r e m a i n s of at least t w o i n d i viduals a n d several c o n t a i n e d t h e d i s m e m b e r e d skeleton of an e q u i d ( t o m b 411 c o n t a i n e d t h e r e m a i n s of a n entire
39
h o r s e ) . A c a c h e of limbs from a variety of species including ass, gazelle, horse, a n d ox, as well as h u m a n b o n e s , was f o u n d near t h e e n t r a n c e to t h e s e loculi. G o n e n (1992; p . 131) c o m p a r e s t h e horse burials to o n e from M a r a t h o n in G r e e c e . A n o d d u s e of a burial cave is o n e c u t into t h e M B fosse: a shaft leads to a central c h a m b e r , off of which two burial niches c o n t a i n e d t h e r e m a i n s of four distinct burial g r o u p s . A total of fourteen p e o p l e w a s found. T h e r e is s o m e indication of Phoenician-style c r e m a t i o n burials in cemetery 1000. T h i r t e e n simple graves contained c r e m a t i o n u r n s along with m e t a l (bronze a n d iron) a n d E g y p t i a n objects (faience c u p , scarabs, a m u l e t s ) . C y p r o P h o e n i c i a n vessels, C y p r i o t vessels, a n d s o m e Philistine p o t tery w e r e also found. T h e c r e m a t i o n jar burials date t o t h e t e n t h - e i g h t h centuries BCE. F o r t i f i c a t i o n s . T h e site w a s p r o t e c t e d b y a fosse t h a t sur r o u n d e d t h e m o u n d o n three sides a n d was u p to 6 m d e e p . T h e fosse was created b y digging o u t t h e soft m a r l a n d sand stone, w h i c h in t u r n w a s u s e d t o b u i l d a steep r a m p a r t . T h e fosse a n d r a m p a r t date to late M B IIA. T h e r e is s o m e evi d e n c e for a m u d - b r i c k wall c r o w n i n g t h e r a m p a r t that would h a v e b e e n c o n t e m p o r a r y w i t h palace III. E n t r a n c e to t h e site was from t h e n o r t h e a s t , w h e r e a strip of m a r l w a s left intact, acting as a causeway across t h e fosse. A series of enigmatic shallow t u n n e l s e m e r g e d from t h e causeway a n d continued o u t t o t h e coastal plain. Olga T u f n e l l (1993) suggests that these tunnels m a y b e p a r t of a n irrigation system. [See Irri gation.] P a l a c e s . A p l a n n e d city w a s c o n s t r u c t e d inside t h e r a m p a r t s in t h e M B IIB. A ring r o a d encircles t h e inside of its fosse, a n d a major s o u t h e a s t - n o r t h w e s t r o a d runs t h r o u g h t h e center of t h e tell. Palace I (43 X 55 m ) is located in the n o r t h w e s t p a r t of the m o u n d . A rectangular structure, it consists of a large central c o u r t y a r d s u r r o u n d e d by r o o m s a n d is c o n s t r u c t e d of large blocks of s a n d s t o n e , p r o b a b l y cuttings from t h e fosse. P a l a c e I bears s o m e similarities in p l a n a n d c o n s t r u c t i o n to t h e M B palace at L a c h i s h , includ ing e m b e d d e d orthostats in t h e lower p a r t of plastered walls—a C a n a a n i t e architectural tradition. [See Lachish.] City III w a s partially destroyed in t h e early sixteenth century BCE.
City II w a s built along t h e s a m e general p l a n as City III a n d dates to M B I I C , T h e residential q u a r t e r , in the s o u t h east p a r t of t h e m o u n d , is divided b y long streets that create an o r t h o g o n a l p l a n similar to M B M e g i d d o . H o u s e s h a d sev eral r o o m s a n d often i n c l u d e d a small interior courtyard. Patrician h o u s e s r a n g e d in size from 190 t o 270 sq m a n d sometimes h a d s e c o n d stories; t h e h o u s e s belonging t o in dividuals of lower status w e r e o n e story a n d only 70-100 sq m in size, P a l a c e I I is built a b o v e palace I, b u t it is smaller a n d m a d e entirely of m u d brick, w i t h o u t orthostats. Several very significant gold h o a r d s w e r e f o u n d in c o n texts m o s t likely associated w i t h City II prior to its d e s t r u c tion. T h e s e h o a r d s suggest t h a t Tell el- Ajjul was a wealthy city. T h e s e particular h o a r d s m a y reflect t h e stress felt by. c
40
'AJJUL, TELL EL-
the inhabitants d u r i n g A h m o s e ' s c a m p a i g n in C a n a a n , w h e n the Egyptians besieged t h e city of S h a r u h e n for three years. T h e City II palace was t h u s p r o b a b l y desffoyed in a b o u t 1530 BCE. T h e city declined steadily in the L a t e B r o n z e A g e , w h e n a series of large cemeteries was in use. T h e palace, w h i c h was rebuilt several times t h r o u g h o u t the L a t e B r o n z e A g e , was converted into an Egyptian fortress t h a t controlled the coastal road to G a z a . Palace III dates to L B I B , Palace I V to L B IIA, a n d Palace V to L B IIB. T h e r e is s o m e evidence of an Iron A g e o c c u p a t i o n . Albright (1938) suggested that Palace V might date to the t e n t h century BCE. [See Palace.] M a t e r i a l C u l t u r e . T h e use of b i c h r o m e decoration, the a r r a n g e m e n t of motifs, and the vessel m o r p h o l o g y at T e l l el-'Ajjul all reflect C a n a a n i t e ceramic traditions. A b i c h r o m e ware sometimes referred to as 'Ajjul P a i n t e d W a r e is dis tinctive because r e d a n d black p a i n t were u s e d to depict b o t h geometric a n d a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c motifs. T h e decoration is frequently arranged in a frieze of m e t o p e s or triglyphs in w h i c h bulls, birds, a n d fish are depicted. T y p i c a l ceramic forms at the site include the krater, jug, a n d bowl. S o m e forms are m o r e typically Cypriot, however, as are the a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c motifs. B i c h r o m e W a r e begins in M B I I C a n d continues in u s e until L B IA. It has a wide distribution in the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n b u t is f o u n d primarily along t h e s o u t h e r n coast of Palestine, in the Shephelah, along the Syrian coast, on C y p r u s , in the Egyptian D e l t a , a n d in Cilicia. N e u t r o n acti vation analysis has d e m o n s t r a t e d that m o s t of the T e l l el'Ajjul B i c h r o m e W a r e was p r o d u c e d in eastern C y p r u s , which was a major p r o d u c t i o n center for this ceramic t y p e (Artzy et al., 1973). [See N e u t r o n Activation Analysis.] S o m e of the B i c h r o m e W a r e from Tell el-'Ajjul was also p r o d u c e d locally. O t h e r i m p o r t e d Cypriot pottery f o u n d at T e l l el-'Ajjul includes R e d - o n - B l a c k , Black-Slip II, M o n o c h r o m e , Black L u s t r o u s , Base-Ring I and II, White-Slip I a n d II, and W h i t e - P a i n t e d IV a n d V W a r e s . Tell el-'Ajjul is well k n o w n for gold jewelry found in sev eral hoards a n d in t o m b s . U n i q u e gold crescents, p e n d a n t s , earrings, toggle pins, a n d bracelets were m a d e in a variety of sophisticated techniques s u c h as granulation, cloisonne, a n d repousse. [See Jewelry.] Gold-foil p e n d a n t s with s c h e matic representations of a fertility goddess, similar to ex amples from Gezer, were also found. [See Gezer.] T h e gold itself was probably i m p o r t e d from N u b i a . [See N u b i a . ] T h e jewelry found is also m a d e of silver, electrum, a n d lead. T h e floruit of jewelry p r o d u c t i o n was in M B I I C . Tell el-'Ajjul has p r o d u c e d scores of fifteenth-dynasty, or Hyksos, scarabs a n d eighteenth-dynasty scarabs, [See H y k sos.] Egyptian royal seals from several kings were f o u n d , including A m e n e m h e t III, Neferhotep I, a n d M a - i b R e Sheshi. O t h e r E g y p t i a n artifacts include a jar w i t h car t o u c h e s of H a t s h e p s u t a n d T h u t m o s i s III, a gold signet ring with the n a m e of T u t a n k h a m u n , a n d scarabs of T h u t m o s i s
III. T h e last royal n a m e f o u n d is t h a t of R a m e s e s II, i n d i cating that the cemeteries were u s e d until 1200 BCE. [See also C e r a m i c s , article on Syro-Palestinian C e r a m i c s of t h e Neolithic, B r o n z e , a n d I r o n Ages; and Fortifications, article on Fortifications of t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Chronology of a S o u t h Palestinian City, Tell el-'Ajjul." American Journal of Semitic Languages and Lit erature 55.4 ( 1 9 3 8 ) : 3 3 7 - 3 5 9 . Artzy, Michal, et al. " T h e Origin of the 'Palestinian' B i c h r o m e W a r e . " Journal of the American Oriental Society 93.4 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 4 4 6 - 4 6 1 . Dever, William G. " T h e Chronology of Syria-Palestine in the S e c o n d Millennium B.C.E.: A Review of C u r r e n t Issues." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 288 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 - 2 5 . Epstein, Claire. Palestinian Bichrome Ware. L e i d e n , 1 9 6 6 . T h e most comprehensive analysis of b i c h r o m e pottery from a stylistic p e r spective. T h o u g h a bit dated and written prior to Artzy et al.'s im p o r t a n t work, this is still worthwhile. G o n e n , Rivka. Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Laic Bronze Age Canaan. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Se ries, 7. Winona Lake, Ind., 1 9 9 2 . See especially pages 7 0 - 8 2 , n 8 f f . Heurtley, W. A. "A Palestinian Vase-Painter of t h e Sixteenth C e n t u r y B . C . " Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 8 ( 1 9 3 8 ) : 2 1 - 3 7 , T h e first comprehensive look at bichrome pottery; remains valuable for its stylistic analysis. Kempinski, Aharon. " T e l l el-'Ajjul—Beth-Aglayim or S h a r u h e n ? " rael Exploration Journal 2 4 . 3 - 4 (!974)- 4 5 I 5 I
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Is
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Kempinski, Aharon. " T h e M i d d l e Bronze A g e . " In The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, edited by A m n o n B e n - T o r , p p . 1 5 9 - 2 1 0 . N e w H a v e n , 1992. Kempinski's overviews of Tell el-'Ajjul are invaluable for u n derstanding the importance of the site and the material's broad im plications (see esp. p p . i89ff, 203ff), Kempinski, Aharon. " T e l l el-'Ajjul." In The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 5 2 - 5 3 . Jerusalem and N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . K e n y o n , Kathleen M . " T o m b s of the Intermediate Early B r o n z e - M i d dle Bronze Age at Tell Ajjul." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 3 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 4 1 - 5 5 . M c G o v e r n , Patrick E. Late Bronze Age Palestinian Pendants: Innovation in a Cosmopolitan Age. Sheffield, 1985. Excellent detailed treatment of Canaanite pendants; Tell el-'Ajjul's m a n y such p e n d a n t s are prominent. Negbi, Ora. 77ze Hoards of Goldwork from Tell el-Ajjul. Studies in M e d iterranean Archaeology, vol. 2 5 . Goteborg, 1 9 7 0 . Valuable overview of the gold jewelry from the site, with i m p o r t a n t c o m m e n t a r y on its dating and stylistic influences. Peine, W. M . Flinders. Ancient Gaza. 4 vols. L o n d o n , 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 4 . Petrie, W . M . Flinders. City of Shepherd Kings and Ancient Gaza V. L o n d o n , 1 9 5 2 . Excavation reports by Petrie to b e read as catalogs. Stewart, James R. Tell el-'Ajjul: The Middle Bronze Age Remains. in Mediterranean Archaeology, 38. Goteborg, 1 9 7 4 . Tufnell, Olga. " T h e C o u r t y a r d Cemetery at Tell el-'Ajjul, Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology 3 ( 1 9 6 2 ) : 1 - 3 7 .
Studies
Palestine."
Tufnell, Olga. " A Review of the Contents of Cave 303 at Tell el-'Ajjul." 'Atiqot 14 (1980): 3 7 - 4 8 . T h i s and the article by Tufnell above r e p resent some of the best analyses of the Tell el-'Ajjul material by someone who was present at the excavations. Tufnell, Olga. "Tell el-'Ajjul." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeolog ical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 4 9 - 5 2 . Jerusalem and N e w York, 1993. J. P. DESSEL
AKKADE e
AJLUN, site located above W a d i Kafranja, o n e of t h r e e valleys b e t w e e n t h e t w o lakes w h i c h climb from t h e J o r d a n Valley u p t o t h e T r a n s Jordanian p l a t e a u (32°2o' N , 35°45' E ) . Ajlun h a s the best p r e s e r v e d A y y u b i d m o s q u e in J o r d a n . A n inscription of al-Malik a l - M u ' a z z a m (RCEA 3970) d e m onstrates t h a t it w a s f o u n d e d i n or before 1218-1227. T h e m i n a r e t was built u n d e r B a y b a r s I in 1264 (RCEA 4528), a n d the d o o r w a y was r e p a i r e d i n 1332 (RCEA 5618). 'Ajlun castie, called QaVat al-Rabad ("citadel of the s u b u r b " ) after t h e s u b u r b w h i c h g r e w u p a r o u n d it, occupies the last high p o i n t in t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e valley. I t was extensively restored b y t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of T r a n s j o r d a n in 1927-1929. T h e castle w a s f o u n d e d in 1184-1145 b y Izz a d - D i n U s a m a b y o r d e r of Salah a d - D i n (Saladin) t o c o u n t e r t h e t h r e a t p o s e d by the C r u s a d e r s ' Belvoir castle o n the o p p o s i t e side of t h e J o r d a n Valley. I t m a y also h a v e served t o check R e y n a l d d e C M t i l l o n , lord of K e r a k , a n d t o p r o t e c t t h e region's r i c h iron ore deposits. c
e
T h e nucleus of the castle w a s a f o u r - t o w e r e d keep o n t h e site's highest p o i n t , flanked by t w o baileys o n its eastern a n d s o u t h e r n sides. T h e m a i n e n t r a n c e lay b e n e a t h t h e southeast c o r n e r of t h e k e e p , p r o t e c t e d b y a m a c h i c o u l i s o n two cor bels (dismantled in 1927). T h e w h o l e c o m p l e x was sur r o u n d e d b y a d e e p r o c k - c u t ditch. T h e castle w a s extensively refortified in a b o u t 1214 b y Aybak b . A b d Allah, c h a m b e r l a i n (Ar., ustadh al-dar) t o alMalik a l - M u ' a z z a m Isa. H e built the south tower to p r o t e c t the reflex angle b e t w e e n t h e t w o baileys (RCEA 3746), a d d e d a w a r d t o its east, c o n s t r u c t e d two o u t e r gates ( o n e d e c o r a t e d with z o o m o r p h i c c a r v i n g s ) , a n d h e i g h t e n e d m u c h of the older structure. c
c
S o m e restoration to t h e east wall w a s carried o u t in a b o u t 1253-1260 (RCEA 4463), before t h e castle w a s s u r r e n d e r e d t o the M o n g o l s (in 1260), C r u d e repairs t o t h e keep a n d t h e s o u t h w e s t c o r n e r are p o s t m e d i e v a l . T h e castle was still i n habited w h e n J. L . B u r c k h a r d t visited it in 1812, a n d I b r a h i m P a s h a installed a small E g y p t i a n garrison t h e r e in 1831-1841. [See also C r u s a d e r P e r i o d ; K e r a k . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Johns, C . N . "Medieval 'Ajlun: T h e C a s t l e . " Quarterly of the Depart ment of Antiquities of Palestine 1 ( 1 9 3 2 ) : 2 1 - 3 3 . G o o d account of the castle's history a n d construction. Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie arabe ( R C E A ) . 18 vols, to date. E d ited b y Etienne C o m b e , Jean Sauvaget, and G a s t o n Wiet. Cairo, 1 9 3 1 - . Standard collection of Arabic epigraphy. JEREMY JOHNS
A K K A D E , capital city, location u n k n o w n , of the A k k a dian E m p i r e (c. 2290-2200 BCE), c r e a t e d a n d m a i n t a i n e d b y S a r g o n a n d his dynastic successors. T h e city of A k k a d e a n d the A k k a d i a n E m p i r e are at t h e n e x u s of several interrelated
41
p r o b l e m s : t h e location of t h e city; w h y a n d h o w southern M e s o p o t a m i a u n d e r w e n t a centralization of regional p o w e r , passing from a loose u r b a n confederation in the early third m i l l e n n i u m to tight politicoeconomic imperialization u n d e r o n e city in the late third m i l l e n n i u m ; w h e t h e r t h e third-mil l e n n i u m cities of southern M e s o p o t a m i a w e r e self-sustain ing or were d e p e n d e n t o n adjacent regions for essential r e sources; t h e r e a s o n for t h e regional extensions of southern M e s o p o t a m i a n political a n d e c o n o m i c p o w e r in t h e m i d third m i l l e n n i u m ; a n d h o w t h e e m p i r e functioned a n d t h e reasons for its collapse. T h e s e historical questions s u r r o u n d ing Akkade m a k e the city t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t ancient W e s t Asian site as yet to b e located a n d excavated. K n o w l e d g e of the city a n d t h e e m p i r e is mostly derived from settlements and material a n d epigraphic r e m a i n s from regions imperialized b y the A k k a d i a n s , a n d from Akkadianp e r i o d d o c u m e n t s copied by later scribes. H o w e v e r , the ear liest reference t o Akkade o c c u r s in a year date of E n s a k u s a n n a (second dynasty of U r u k ) , w h o p r o b a b l y ruled within t h e g e n e r a t i o n prior t o S a r g o n , f o u n d e r of t h e Akkadian dy nasty. [See U r u k - W a r k a . ] T h i s singular d a t u m indicates that Akkade w a s n o t f o u n d e d ab novo b y S a r g o n a n d suggests the limitations of data presently available for u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e early history of the city a n d its rise t o regional political power. C o n t e m p o r a r y A k k a d i a n - p e r i o d references, as well as later copies of historical inscriptions, describe Akkade as a bustling imperial capital with t e m p l e s a n d palaces, a b u s y h a r b o r , a large imperial b u r e a u c r a c y , m e r c h a n t s travel ing t o distant realms acquiring a n d dispatching exotic g o o d s , as well as a n a r m y c a p a b l e of m a r c h e s t o the M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea, to the sources o f t h e Tigris a n d the E u p h r a tes, a n d t h e c o n q u e s t of the u r b a n centers in its path. T h e m o s t famous of t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n "city l a m e n t s , " the C u r s e of A k k a d e , c o m p o s e d within a h u n d r e d years of the A k k a d i a n imperial collapse, describes the collapse a n d a b a n d o n m e n t of Akkade as symbolic of the collapse of the Ak kadian Empire. Historical references indicate, h o w e v e r , t h a t Akkade was o c c u p i e d for seventeen h u n d r e d years following the collapse of t h e e m p i r e . I n the U r III p e r i o d tire city w a s the seat of a provincial governor, while t h e p r o l o g u e t o t h e C o d e of H a m m u r a b i m e n t i o n s t h e still-functioning E u l m a s T e m p l e of Istar (Ishtar) within " b r o a d - m a r t e d " Aldsade. Parts of the ancient city w e r e still settled in t h e Kassite, Neo-Assyrian, a n d N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d s , d u r i n g which archaeological expeditions w e r e repeatedly u n d e r t a k e n in search of Akka d i a n - p e r i o d treasure. [See Kassites; Assyrians; Babylonians.] T h e m o s t f a m o u s of these excavations, a p r o g r a m t h a t lasted three years, was directed b y a scribe of K i n g N a b o n i d u s of B a b y l o n (r. 555-539) w h o t o o k a n impression of a c o m m e m o r a t i v e inscription e x c a v a t e d within a palace of Sarg o n ' s g r a n d s o n N a r a m - S i n ; t h e excavator labeled t h e i m pression with its p r o v e n i e n c e as well as his n a m e . T h e city
42
AKKADE
is last m e n t i o n e d in a d o c u m e n t dated t o year 29 of t h e reign of D arms. V. G o r d o n Childe's early characterization of the A k k a d i a n E m p i r e stressed its c a m p a i g n s of c o n q u e s t for t h e acquisi tion of resources unavailable in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , such as metals a n d t i m b e r . Childe's sketch, although still influential a m o n g archaeologists, could not consider t h e progression and t h e c o n t e x t of expansionary activities di rected from Akkade that are n o w d o c u m e n t e d in t h e ar chaeological a n d epigraphic r e c o r d s , n o r the still earlier se q u e n c e of repeated s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n e x p a n s i o n s d o c u m e n t e d in the L a t e U b a i d , L a t e U r u k , a n d L a t e Early D y n a s t i c il/early Early D y n a s t i c III periods (Childe, 1951). T h e detailed Akkadian data suggest t h a t S a r g o n ' s long distance military c a m p a i g n s were b u t o n e stage of t h e A k kadian expansionary process. T h e s e early military c a m paigns focused on c o n q u e s t of distant u r b a n centers a n d t h e retrieval of p l u n d e r . S u b s e q u e n t military c a m p a i g n s led b y Sargon's successors, particularly N a r a m - S i n , c o n q u e r e d a n d t h e n imperialized b o t h irrigation-agriculture s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a and dry-farming n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . I n this second stage of Akkadian expansion, t h e forces from Akkade first c o n q u e r e d local states a n d t h e n c o n s t r u c t e d fortresses and t e m p l e s for resident Akkadian administrators a n d functionaries. Acting in each imperialized province, these A k k a d i a n forces systematically i m p l e m e n t e d five imperial strategies o n behalf of t h e capital: 1. Reorganized t h e administrative structure of agricultural p r o d u c t i o n by establishing a streamlined administrative c o m m a n d responsible to authorities in Akkade; 2. Reorganized t h e spatial structure of regional agricultural p r o d u c t i o n b y vacating s e c o n d - a n d third-level p o p u l a tion centers; c o n c e n t r a t e d labor forces in u r b a n centers; a n d constructed city walls to enclose relocated p o p u l a tions; 3. Intensified a g r o - p r o d u c t i o n by creating imperial d o m a i n s in S u m e r a n d A k k a d for t h e exclusive p r o d u c t i o n of A k kade-directed taxes a n d b y e x t e n d e d , a n d p e r h a p s irri gated, cereal p r o d u c t i o n in die imperialized dry-farming regions; 4. I n t r o d u c e d and enforced imperial-standard units of m e a sure for ration-labor work gangs a n d for regional agri cultural p r o d u c t i o n ; 5. Extracted imperial taxes, as m u c h as 70 p e r c e n t of t h e intensified a g r o - p r o d u c t i o n , from each reorganized a d ministrative unit, a n d s h i p p e d these agricultural goods b y water transport to Akkade. T h i s flow of administrators, military forces, a n d i m p e r ialized agricultural p r o d u c e into a n d o u t of Akkade can b e m o d e l e d (see figure 1) to illustrate t h e imperial a c c u m u l a tion of agricultural wealth from b o t h S u m e r in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Subir, t h e dry-farming K h a b u r plains of
n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . [See S u m e r i a n s . ] Similar relation ships were s t r u c t u r e d at t h e five other h i g h - p r o d u c t i v i t y d r y farming regions (Susa, G a s u r / N u z i , Erbil, N i n e v e h , D i y a r bakir) s u r r o u n d i n g A k k a d e , w h e r e u r b a n i z e d polities w i t h nucleated labor forces already c o m p r i s e d a p r e a d a p t a t i o n for Akkadian agricultural imperialism. [See Susa; N u z i ; N i n eveh.] T h e w a t e r - b o r n c o u r s e of imperialized a n d convertible agricultural wealth into A k k a d e f r o m adjacent r e g i o n s u n derlies the ideal of regional unification u p h e l d b y t h e A k kadians and successor M e s o p o t a m i a n e m p i r e s . It also e m phasizes the still-problematic goals of t h e earlier s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n e x p a n s i o n s into these s a m e r e g i o n s , al t h o u g h the form a n d regional s t r u c t u r e of earlier e x p a n s i o n s differed considerably. T h e description of t h e fall of A k k a d e in t h e p o e t i c C u r s e of Akkade p o r t r a y s a city suffering from r e d u c e d E u p h r a t e s flow, desiccated irrigation fields, famine, a n d t h e i n c u r s i o n s of n e i g h b o r i n g " b a r b a r i a n s " into t h e A k k a d i a n h e a r d a n d . T h e s e descriptions h a v e b e e n u n d e r s t o o d as p o e t i c m e t a p h o r s b y m a n y Assyriologists, b u t a few h a v e v e n t u r e d t h a t t h e descriptions, while p o e t i c , are n o t necessarily m e t a p h o r i c . S o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n irrigation agriculture w a s d e p e n d e n t u p o n t h e frequently variable flow of t h e E u p h r a tes. T h e d o c u m e n t a r y evidence for L a t e A k k a d i a n - p e r i o d agricultural failure in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , a n d for ex t e n d e d d r o u g h t in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , c o n f o r m s to t h e i n d e p e n d e n t data for h e m i s p h e r i c aridification, p r o b a b l y a n a b r u p t climate c h a n g e , b e g i n n i n g in a b o u t 2200 BCE. T h e g r a d u a l aridification a n d decrease in E u p h r a t e s flow t h a t h a d b e g u n a b o u t seven h u n d r e d years earlier m a y explain in p a r t t h e stages of conflict, unification, a n d e x p a n s i o n t h a t cul m i n a t e d in A k k a d e ' s ascension to regional a n d t r a n s r e g i o n a l power. T h e publication in 1972 of two surface surveys of t h e r e gion of Akkad raised a n e w t h e l o n g s t a n d i n g q u e s t i o n of t h e location of A k k a d e . T h e associations of S a r g o n a n d A k k a d e with t h e city of K i s h m a d e these surface r e c o n n a i s s a n c e o b servations particularly i m p o r t a n t for locating t h e city. [See Kish.] T h e s e associations i n c l u d e t h e p a r a m o u n t c y of K i s h within s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a in t h e p r e - A k k a d i a n p e r i o d , S a r g o n ' s service as c u p b e a r e r to U r - z a b a b a , king of K i s h , a n d t h e historiographic traditions of S a r g o n ' s c o n s t r u c t i o n of a n e w city opposite Babylon, w h i c h is adjacent to K i s h . [See Babylon.] I s h a n M i z y a d , o n e site identified in t h e A k k a d surveys, is located b e t w e e n K i s h a n d B a b y l o n , b e s i d e t h e a n c i e n t course of t h e E u p h r a t e s River. It p r e s e n t s several locational, t o p o g r a p h i c , a n d settiement-history features t h a t c a n b e a s sociated with Akkade. R e c e n t Iraqi g o v e r n m e n t s o u n d i n g s at t h e site p r o d u c e d evidence for t h e U r I I I settlement t h e r e , a n d cuneiform texts m e n t i o n i n g B a b - E a , b u t d i d n o t e x t e n d to t h e site's Akkadian levels ( M a h d i , 1986). B a b - E a , a n o t h erwise u n k n o w n t o p o n y m , is a likely n a m e for a n u r b a n
AKKADE
43
winter rain
labor
DIYAR -BAKR local maintenance NINUA
SUBIR imperial taxes
ARBILU
water transport
army
A
K
K
water transport
A
D
imperial administration
GASUR
E
| army |
SUSA
imperial administtation
imperial taxes SUMER local maintenance
labor
AKKADE.
Euphrates irrigation
Figure I . Flow chart schematizing
Akkadian
z
q u a r t e r or " g a t e . " M o r e r e c e n t r e v i e w s of historical o c c u r r e n c e s of t h e city s t r o n g l y s u g g e s t a l o c a t i o n a b o u t 50 k m (31 m i . ) t o t h e n o r t h e a s t , a t o r n e a r d i e c o n f l u e n c e of t h e Tigris a n d t h e Diyala Rivers. T h e s e locational suggestions, if a c c u r a t e , m a y r e q u i r e a m a j o r r e c o n s i d e r a t i o n of d i e role of t h e T i g r i s R i v e r i n t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n history. [See also A g r i c u l t u r e ; A k k a d i a n s ; and M e s o p o t a m i a , article on A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a . ]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Attinger, Pascal. " R e m a r q u e s a p r o p o s d e la 'Malediction d ' A c c a d . ' " Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale 78 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 9 9 - 1 2 1 . Full translation of t h e Curse of Akkade, with a n illuminating discussion of its ambiguous or difficult-to-translate passages. Childe, V. G o r d o n . Man Makes Himself. N e w York, 1 9 5 1 . Influential sketch of N e a r Eastern prehistory a n d early historic developments, including t h e origins of M e s o p o t a m i a n cities a n d empires, Foster, Benjamin R . " M a n a g e m e n t a n d Administration in the Sargonic P e r i o d . " In Akkad, the First World Empire, edited by M a r i o Liverani,
agro-imperialism.
_
PP- 5 3 9 - P a d u a , 1 9 9 3 . S u m m a r y of the epigraphic data for Ak kadian imperial activity. G i b s o n , M c G u i r e . The City and Area of Kish. M i a m i , 1 9 7 2 . Archaeo logical surface reconnaissance, including a n appendix by Robert Ad ams presenting t h e settlement data from his earlier Akkade survey. Glassner, J.-J. " L a fin d'Akkade: A p p r o c h e chronologique." Nouvelles Assyriologiques Breves et Ulilitaires 1 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 8-9. Outline of the se quence, chronology, a n d actors within the Akkadian collapse events. M a h d i , A. M . " I s h a n Mizyad: I m p o r t a n t centre agadeene." Histoire et Archeologie 103 (1986): 6 5 - 6 7 . S u m m a r y description of brief Iraqi excavations at a site hypothesized t o b e Akkade. M c E w a n , G. J. P , "Agade after d i e Gutian Destruction: T h e Afterlife of a M e s o p o t a m i a n City." Archiv filr Orientforschung 29 (1982): 8 - 1 5 . Synthesis of cuneiform references to Akkade after the imperial collapse. W a l l - R o m a n a , Christophe. " A n Areal Location of A g a d e . " Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49.3 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 2 0 5 - 2 4 5 . Collection of epigraphic data for a Tigris-region location for Akkade. Weiss, Harvey. " K i s h , Akkad, a n d A g a d e . " Journal of the American Ori ental Society 95,3 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 4 3 4 - 4 5 3 . Analysis of Kish-area settlement data for t h e Akkadian period a n d comparison with epigraphic data for t h e location of Akkade. Weiss, Harvey, a n d M . - A . Courty. " T h e Genesis a n d Collapse of the
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Akkadian E m p i r e . " In Akkad, the First World Empire, edited by Mario Liverani, p p . 1 3 1 - 1 5 6 . Padua, 1993. A model for the devel opment, function, and collapse of the Akkadian E m p i r e , with an emphasis on late third-millennium abrupt climate change a n d thirdmillennium variability in Tigris-Euphrates flow. HARVEY WEISS
AKKADIAN. T h e language of t h e ancient Assyrians a n d Babylonians of M e s o p o t a m i a , Akkadian, s u b s u m e s b o t h A s syrian a n d Babylonian dialects within it. T h e earliest attested Semitic language, A k k a d i a n comprises the m o r e i m p o r t a n t m e m b e r of d i e eastern b r a n c h of d i e Semitic family ( t h e other m e m b e r being Eblaite). T h e name Akkadian (akkadii) derives from A k k a d ( e ) , t h e capital city built by king Sargon in a b o u t 2300 BCE. It is n o t k n o w n w h e n speakers of Akka dian o r its linguistic predecessor(s) first arrived in M e s o potamia, n o r is it k n o w n w h e n t h e last speakers of d i e lan guage died out; the first written attestations date to t h e 26th c e n t u r y BCE (in Semitic n a m e s ; connected texts s o m e w h a t later) and the latest t o the first century CE. Several h u n d r e d t h o u s a n d texts have been discovered in excavations, m a n y of which remain u n p u b l i s h e d . D i a l e c t s a n d G e n r e s , O l d Akkadian refers to texts from the earliest attestation of Akkadian d o w n t o a b o u t t h e b e ginning of t h e s e c o n d millennium, t h u s including d o c u m e n t s dating t o the reigns of Sargon and N a r a m - S i n of Ak kad a n d to t h e U r III period; although t h e t e r m is u s e d collectively for all s u c h texts, dialectal distinctions, b o t h g e o graphical and chronological, are evident within this c o r p u s . Old Akkadian is attested in letters, legal texts, e c o n o m i c dockets, royal inscriptions, a n d a few literary texts (such as a love incantation). T o d i e middle of die Old Akkadian p e riod as well date d i e t h o u s a n d s of texts f o u n d recentiy at Ebla, in Syria, s o m e of w h i c h are also partiy written in a Semitic language, referred t o as Eblaite o r E b l a i c . F o r m e r l y thought to be an early representative of W e s t Semitic, E b laite is n o w considered to b e a close linguistic relative of Akkadian (or even, t h o u g h tiiis is less likely, a dialect of Ak kadian). [See Ebla T e x t s . ] In t h e second a n d first millennia, t w o major geographical dialects are attested, Assyrian in northern M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Babylonian in t h e south. Linguistically these are distin guished by a n u m b e r of phonological differences, b y m i n o r morphological variations, a n d by certain lexical items. T h e Assyrian and Babylonian scripts also developed s o m e w h a t independently of o n e another. A s is t r u e in all languages, n u m e r o u s linguistic changes occurred over t h e m a n y c e n turies in which Assyrian a n d Babylonian were spoken, a n d these a p p e a r e d (eventually) in t h e texts. Altiiough these d e velopments arose continuously, so that tiiere are n o n e a t chronological divisions, scholars refer for t h e sake of c o n venience to t h e following s u b p h a s e s , which c o r r e s p o n d roughly with political periods:
O l d Assyrian M i d d l e Assyrian Neo-Assyrian
2000-1500 1500-1000 1000-600 600 B C E - I O O CE
Old Babylonian Middle Babylonian Neo-Babylonian Late Babylonian
Old Assyrian is k n o w n from a p p r o x i m a t e l y fifteen t h o u s a n d letters a n d legal a n d e c o n o m i c d o c u m e n t s d a t i n g from the m i d - t w e n t i e t h t o t h e m i d - e i g h t e e n t h centuries BCE, m o s t of w h i c h have b e e n f o u n d i n C a p p o d o c i a (eastern T u r k e y ) at t h e site of K a n e s ( m o d e r n K u l t e p e ) , a l t h o u g h otiier sites in Anatolia a n d Assyria h a v e also p r o d u c e d a few similar texts. T h e majority of these d o c u m e n t s c o n c e r n t h e business activities of Assyrian m e r c h a n t h o u s e s a n d their t r a d e with outposts in Anatolia. ( T h e majority of tiiese texts are u n published.) Also attested a r e a n u m b e r of royal inscriptions of rulers of t h e city of Assur, c o m m e m o r a t i v e a n d dedica tory in n a t u r e , a n d a few magical texts. [See K u l t e p e T e x t s . ] M i d d l e Assyrian is sparsely attested, a l t h o u g h it is k n o w n from a variety of g e n r e s , including letters, legal texts, e c o n o m i c texts, a n d inscriptions of t h e early kings of d i e nation a n d nascent e m p i r e of Assyria, a n d a set of h a r e m decrees. P e r h a p s m o s t f a m o u s , however, are the f o u r t e e n tablets c o n taining t h e M i d d l e Assyrian laws, discovered in t h e city of Assur. N e o - A s s y r i a n is t h e s p o k e n l a n g u a g e of t h e p e r i o d of t h e Assyrian E m p i r e i n t h e first m i l l e n n i u m until its d e m i s e late in t h e seventh c e n t u r y BCE. T h e r e are a great m a n y letters a n d administrative texts, of b o t h t h e c o u r t a n d private i n dividuals. M a n y royal inscriptions a n d scholarly writings are also attested; as in all p e r i o d s , literary texts exhibit consid erable linguistic influence of the m o r e prestigious B a b l y o n ian dialect. Old Babylonian is t h e language of several tens of t h o u s a n d s of texts, dating t o t h e first half of the s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m , from d i e first dynasty of B a b y l o n , from t h e Isin a n d L a r s a dynasties, a n d from other soutiiern M e s o p o t a m i a n sites, as well as from sites outside M e s o p o t a m i a , s u c h as M a r i a n d Susa. N o t surprisingly, texts from s u c h a r a n g e of sites exhibit n u m e r o u s m i n o r dialectal differences. T h e best-studied form of O l d B a b y l o n i a n is t h a t of d i e c o u r t of K i n g H a m m u r a b i of Babylon. A n extremely diverse variety of genres h a s b e e n preserved; in addition t o tiiousands of letters, contracts, e c o n o m i c texts, a n d royal inscriptions, these include the f a m o u s " c o d e " of laws of H a m m u r a b i ( t h e longest single O l d B a b y l o n i a n d o c u m e n t ) , a n d m a n y l a n d s of scholarly a n d school texts s u c h as m e d i c a l , m a t h e m a t i c a l , a n d grammatical texts, encyclopedic lists of w o r d s (lexical texts), a n d o m e n s . T h e r e a r e also h y m n s , p r a y e r s , a n d epic a n d mydiological works of literature, of w h i c h t h e b e s t k n o w n are G i l g a m e s h , Atrahasis (the flood story), a n d A n z u (the theft of the "tablets of d e s t i n y " ) ; these latter texts, as well as royal inscriptions, a r e often written in a h i g h literary language full of archaic forms a n d archaisms. I n later times, O l d B a b y l o n i a n w a s r e g a r d e d as t h e clas-
AKKADIAN sical p e r i o d of A k k a d i a n l a n g u a g e a n d literature, a n d scribes in b o t h Babylonia a n d Assyria a t t e m p t e d to duplicate it in a purely literary (i.e., u n s p o k e n ) l a n g u a g e called S t a n d a r d Babylonian ( t h o u g h usually with m i x e d results, as their o w n linguistic forms frequently i n t e r v e n e d ) . T h i s is t h e dialect in which s u c h i m p o r t a n t works as Enuma elish a n d t h e later version of G i l g a m e s h a r e w r i t t e n — i n d e e d , all of t h e literary texts of d i e first m i l l e n n i u m , as well as m a n y royal i n s c r i p tions.
45
AS
U
4,
M i d d l e Babylonian is t h e l a n g u a g e of texts from t h e K a s site p e r i o d . Like M i d d l e Assyrian, it is less well r e p r e s e n t e d t h a n t h e dialects t h a t p r e c e d e a n d follow it. It is k n o w n from letters, legal texts, e c o n o m i c texts, a few royal inscriptions, a n d inscribed b o u n d a r y stones (kudurrus). Already in t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e p e r i o d , b u t especially in t h e L a t e B r o n z e , A k k a d i a n , particularly B a b y l o n i a n , was u s e d as a n international lingua franca; A k k a d i a n texts h a v e b e e n f o u n d at a great m a n y sites o u t s i d e M e s o p o t a m i a , including Alalakh, E m a r , a n d U g a r i t in Syria, H a t t u s a in Anatolia ( m o d e r n B o g a z k o y , t h e capital of t h e Hittite l a n d ) , a n d elA m a r n a in E g y p t , to n a m e a few. T h e l a n g u a g e of these texts, w h i c h w a s written b y n o n - n a t i v e speakers, is usually t e r m e d Peripheral A k k a d i a n ; t h e texts vary considerably in their fidelity to n o r m a t i v e g r a m m a r a n d frequentiy betray the influence of die scribes' o w n languages. [See E m a r T e x t s ; Alalakh T e x t s ; U g a r i t I n s c r i p t i o n s ; A m a r n a Tablets.] N e o - B a b y l o n i a n refers t o t h e s p o k e n , nonliterary lan g u a g e of s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a until t h e e n d of d i e Assyr ian E m p i r e , after w h i c h t h e t e r m L a t e B a b y l o n i a n is u s e d for t h e final p e r i o d of texts w r i t t e n in Akkadian. T h e s e d i alects c o m p r i s e large n u m b e r s of letters a n d administrative d o c u m e n t s . F o r literary a n d m o n u m e n t a l texts, S t a n d a r d Babylonian (see above) was e m p l o y e d . W r i t i n g S y s t e m . A k k a d i a n w a s written in cuneiform, a system of w e d g e - s h a p e d c h a r a c t e r s usually pressed into moist clay tablets with a reed stylus. ( O t h e r m e d i a for i n scriptions w e r e w a x , metal, a n d , especially for m o n u m e n t a l texts, stone.) T h e system was b o r r o w e d from S u m e r i a n , t h e other l a n g u a g e of M e s o p o t a m i a a n d d i e language for w h i c h it w a s devised. T h e writing w a s at first p i c t o g r a p h i c , with fairly representational d r a w i n g s ; early o n , h o w e v e r , it b e c a m e m o r e a n d m o r e stylized until d i e p i c t o g r a p h s ulti mately b e c a m e u n r e c o g n i z a b l e . A s t h e O l d B a b y l o n i a n ( c o d e of H a m m u r a b i ) forms i n figure i s h o w , individual signs m a y consist of o n e w e d g e ( s u c h as A § a n d U ) , of a few w e d g e s ( s u c h as B A D a n d M A § ) , or of m a n y w e d g e s (such as I N a n d I G ) . A s already n o t e d above, forms of signs c o n t i n u e d to c h a n g e t h r o u g h o u t t h e history of A k k a d i a n , a n d Assyrian a n d Babylonian f o r m s differed f r o m o n e a n other: t h e histories of a r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s a m p l e of signs a p p e a r in figure 2. T h e r e are t h r e e t y p e s of signs: 1. Phonetic signs. Syllables o r p a r t s of syllables to b e p r o n o u n c e d a r e indicated b y p h o n e t i c signs t h a t m a y r e p r e s e n t a simple vowel (such as " a " ) , a c o n s o n a n t plus a vowel
AKKADIAN.
F i g u r e I.
Cuneiform writing (Old Babylonian Code of
Hammurabi). (Courtesy J. H u e h n e r g a r d )
( " b a " ) , a vowel plus a c o n s o n a n t ( " a b " ) , or a c o n s o n a n t v o w e l - c o n s o n a n t s e q u e n c e ( " b a d " ) . Individual c o n s o n a n t s c a n n o t b e written. 2. fjogograms. T h e s e m a y b e u s e d to r e p r e s e n t whole words. 3. Determinatives. A few signs t h a t serve as classifiers in dicating s e m a n t i c ranges a r e k n o w n as determinatives. O n e d e t e r m i n a t i v e , for e x a m p l e , m a y p r e c e d e w o r d s for items m a d e of w o o d , while a n o t h e r p r e c e d e s n a m e s of gods. T h e t h r e e types of signs are formally indistinguishable a n d , in fact, s o m e signs are u s e d in all three ways; an ex a m p l e is t h e sign K I , which, in a n y given context m a y , a m o n g other possibilities, r e p r e s e n t t h e (part-) syllable " k i , " d e n o t e t h e w o r d for " e a r t h , " or indicate t h a t the w o r d p r e c e d i n g it is a place n a m e . T o illusttate t h e writing system, t h e b e g i n n i n g of L a w 8 of H a m m u r a b i ' s c o d e is r e p r o d u c e d in figure 3 witii a s t a n d a r d Assyriological transliteration, in w h i c h p h o n e t i c values a p p e a r i n italics, l o g o g r a m s in r o m a n capital letters (with their S u m e r i a n p r o n u n c i a t i o n ) , a n d a determinative in superscript letters. A s t h e s a m p l e in figure 3 indicates, cuneiform is w r i t t e n from left t o right. T w o additional c o m p l i c a t i n g aspects of t h e writing system are h o m o p h o n y and p o l y p h o n y . H o m o p h o n y describes d i e fact tiiat several discrete signs m a y h a v e d i e same p h o n o logical value, s u c h as /sa/; tiiese a r e distinguished in t r a n s literation b y diacritical m a r k s as follows: t h e m o s t c o m m o n sign found for a particular value receives n o special mark, t h e s e c o n d a n acute accent over t h e vowel, a n d t h e third a grave accent, whereas t h e f o u r t h a n d following receive s u b -
46
AKKADIAN
Sign N a m e and Meaning
Pictogram
Old Bab./Assyr.
O l d Aid;:.
Middle Bab./Assyr.
Bab.
DINGER "star"
NeoBab./Assyr.
4
Assyr.
Bab.
KA ''mouth"
Assyr.
Bab.
LUGAL "king"
Assyr.
Bab.
GUD "ox"
Assyr.
AKKADIAN.
F i g u r e 2. Comparison of Old Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian Cuneiform Signs. (After
Labat, 1988)
script n u m b e r s ( t h u s , sa, sd, sd, sa etc.; called s a - o n e , sat w o , sa-three, sa-four, etc.). M a n y signs are p o l y p h o n o u s — that is, they m a y r e p r e s e n t m o r e than o n e p h o n e t i c value; for e x a m p l e , t h e sign u s e d to write the value ud m a y also b e u s e d to write t h e values tarn a n d pir. 4l
G r a m m a t i c a l S u m m a r y . T h e original n u m b e r of twenty-nine P r o t o - S e m i t i c c o n s o n a n t s w a s considerably r e d u c e d in Akkadian, p r o b a b l y t h r o u g h c o n s t a n t c o n t a c t with S u m e r i a n , to only twenty, as s h o w n in table 1. N a t u r a l l y d i e precise p r o n u n c i a t i o n of these p h o n e m e s is u n k n o w n ; m o d ern scholars b a s e their p r o n u n c i a t i o n o n parallels with living
Semitic languages. T h e p h o n e m e £ is p r o n o u n c e d as " s h " a n d h as " c h " in t h e G e r m a n ach o r Scottish loch; t h e s o called " e m p h a t i c " c o n s o n a n t s q, s, t w e r e either p h a r y n gealized (as in Arabic) or, m o r e likely, glottalized (as in A m haric a n d m o d e r n S o u t h A r a b i a n l a n g u a g e s ) . It is likely t h a t Old-Akkadian p r e s e r v e d m o r e of t h e original Semitic c o n s o n a n t s , especially t h e interdental *0 a n d s o m e of t h e socalled guttural p h o n e m e s , s u c h as h a n d ' ' ; d i e writing system was poorly e q u i p p e d t o expressed s u c h s o u n d s , h o w e v e r . Early Semitic h a d t h r e e short vowels, (a, i, u) a n d t h r e e c o r r e s p o n d i n g long vowels (a, F, it); m o s t dialects of A k k a -
Sum-ma a-wi-Ium
if m a n
lu G U D lu U D U
or ox or sheep
lu A N S E lu S A H i g
if
or donkey or pig
uluS MA
or else
iS-ri-ig
stole
w o o d
boat
"If a m a n stole an ox, a sheep, a donkey, a pig, or a boat,..." AKKADIAN.
Figure
3. Sample Akkadian text from Code of Hammurabi. (Courtesy
J. H u e h n e r g a r d )
AKKADIAN TABLE 1.
Akkadian
Stops Voiced Voiceless Emphatic
Consonants
Bilabial
Dental
b P
d t t
Fricatives Voiced Voiceless Emphatic Nasal
Palato-Alveolar
Glottal
8 k
2
s
S
h
s m
n r
Trill Approximant
Velar
w
l,y
dian preserve these a n d a d d a f o u r t h vowel quality, e a n d long e. M o s t Assyriologists distinguish t w o types of long vowels, m a r k i n g t h o s e inherited as long vowels w i t h a m a cron (a, e, F, it) a n d t h o s e t h a t result from t h e contraction of two adjacent vowels witii a circumflex ( 4 2, f, u). It h a s recentiy b e e n p r o p o s e d t h a t A k k a d i a n also h a d a fifth p h o n e m i c vowel quality, o ( W e s t e n h o l z , 1991). A k k a d i a n p h o n o l o g y is m a r k e d b y a n u m b e r of s o u n d changes vis-a-vis c o m m o n S e m i t i c , in addition t o t h e loss of c o n s o n a n t s a n d the addition of t h e vowel e already d e scribed. All dialects exhibit a p h e n o m e n o n called vowel syn c o p e , in w h i c h the s e c o n d of t w o s h o r t vowels in o p e n syl lables is deleted, as in damqum, " g o o d ( m a s c u l i n e ) , " from *da/mi/qum (cf. t h e feminine c o u n t e r p a r t , damiqtum) or in napsdtum, from *najpijsaltum, t h e plural of napistum, "life." Also c o m m o n to Akkadian is G e e r ' s law, a c c o r d i n g t o w h i c h two e m p h a t i c c o n s o n a n t s m a y n o t c o o c c u r in o n e w o r d : t h u s , for e x a m p l e , Semitic *qasarum b e c a m e A k k a d i a n kasarum, " t o b i n d " ; Semitic *sabatum b e c a m e Akkadian sabatum, " t o seize"; a n d Semitic *qatarum b e c a m e qatarum, " t o billow (of s m o k e ) . " In B a r t h ' s law, t h e initial m of n o u n prefixes b e c a m e n in w o r d s in w h i c h a labial c o n s o n a n t (b,
T A B L E 2.
m, p) followed: narkabtum, " c h a r i o t ; " naramum, " b e l o v e d " ; naspakum, " s t o r a g e a r e a . " B o t h Assyrian a n d Babylonian forms of A k k a d i a n also exhibit distinctive types of vowel h a r m o n y : in Assyrian, s h o r t a in an u n a c c e n t e d o p e n syllable is replaced by a short-vowel t h a t m i m i c s the vowel of t h e following syllable, as in isbat, " h e seized," b u t tasbiti (vs. Babylonian tasbati), " y o u (feminine) seized," and isbutii (vs. B a b y l o n i a n isbatu), " t h e y (masculine) seized"; in Babylo nian, the p r e s e n c e of an e vowel t e n d s t o cause an a vowel in t h e same w o r d to b e c o m e e, as in beletum, " l a d i e s " (from belatum; cf. iarratum, " q u e e n s " ) . T h e basic m o r p h o l o g i c a l categories of p r o n o u n s , n o u n s , a n d verbs generally exhibit t w o g e n d e r s (masculine a n d feminine) a n d three n u m b e r s (singular, dual, a n d plural), although d i e u s e of t h e d u a l is considerably circumscribed after the O l d Akkadian p e r i o d . As in otiier Semitic l a n g u a g e s , t h e r e is a set of i n d e p e n d e n t personal p r o n o u n s a n d t h e r e are also sets of p r o n o m inal suffixes t h a t indicate possession ( w h e n u s e d o n n o u n s a n d prepositions) or direct or indirect objects (on v e r b s ) ; t h e Old B a b y l o n i a n a n d O l d Assyrian forms are s h o w n in table 2. Indirect object f o r m s are also attested in Eblaite b u t are n o t f o u n d in other b r a n c h e s of Semitic; they p r o b a b l y r e p r e s e n t a n innovation within East Semitic (Akkadian a n d Eblaite). I n early dialects of A k k a d i a n ( O l d Akkadian, Old B a b y lonian, O l d Assyrian), as in other morphologically c o n s e r vative Semitic languages, n o u n s a n d adjectives exhibit three cases, m a r k e d with distinct vowels: n o m i n a t i v e , for the s u b ject of a clause ( m a r k e d w i t h w; in t h e dual with a); genitive, indicating possession a n d also u s e d after prepositions ( m a r k e d wiui z); a n d accusative, for t h e direct object a n d various adverbial uses ( m a r k e d w i t h a). In dual a n d plural forms t h e genitive a n d accusative m e r g e into a single form, t e r m e d t h e oblique ( m a r k e d w i t h i). I n addition to endings t h a t indicate t h e case, t h e regular, or free, forms of n o u n s also b e a r a final -m in t h e singular a n d t h e feminine plural ( b u t n o t in t h e m a s c u l i n e plural) a n d a final -n in t h e dual.
Old Babylonian (OB) and Old Assyrian (OA) Pronoun Forms ( 1 , 2, 3 = first, s e c o n d , t h i r d
p e r s o n ; m = m a s c u l i n e ; f = f e m i n i n e ; c = c o m m o n g e n d e r ; s = singular; p = p l u r a l ; d u a l f o r m s a r e omitted). Independent
Possessive
Direct Object
Indirect Object
OB
OA
OB/OA
OB
OA
OB
OA
lcs 2ms 2fs 3ms 3fs
andku
andku atta atti sit
-i,ya -ka -ki -su -sa
-ni -ka -ki -su -H
-ni,-i -ka -ki -hi -si
-nim -kum -kim -sum -sim
-nim -kum -kim -him -sim
lcp 2mp 2fp 3mp 3fp
nmu attunu attina sunu sina
nmu attunu attina sunu Una
-ni -kunu -kina -sunu -sina
-nidti -kuniiti -kinati -kuniiti -hnati
-nidti -kunu -kina -sunu -Una
-niaiim -kunusim -kindsim -suniisim -sindsim
-nidti -kuniiti -kinati -hmuti -sindti
atta
atti su si
Silt
47
48
AKKADIAN
F e m i n i n e n o u n s a n d feminine forms of adjectives are usually m a r k e d with either -t- or -at- after the base a n d before the case vowel: belum, " l o r d " ; beltum, " l a d y " ; sarrum, " k i n g " ; ilarratum, " q u e e n " ; tabum (masc.) a n d tdbtum (fem.), " p l e a s a n t " ; dannum (masc.) and dannatum (fern.), " s t r o n g . " Besides the regular, or free, form of t h e n o u n t h e r e is also tile b o u n d form (or c o n s t r u c t form), u s e d w h e n a n o u n syntactically g o v e r n s a n o t h e r n o u n or a p r o n o m i n a l suffix; t h e b o u n d form generally lacks b o t h t h e final -mj-n a n d t h e case vowel: sarratum, " q u e e n , " a n d matum, " l a n d " (both n o m i n a t i v e case); b u t sarrat mdtim, " q u e e n of t h e l a n d " (with " l a n d " appropriately in t h e genitive case), a n d sarratni, " o u r q u e e n . " Adjectives are for the m o s t p a r t d e clined like substantives, although they exhibit a distinctive e n d i n g in masculine-plural forms. T a b l e 3 shows t h e regular (free form) declensions of the substantives sarrum, " k i n g , " and sarratum, " q u e e n , " a n d t h e adjective tabum, " p l e a s a n t , " in Old Babylonian. Final -m/-n were lost in t h e late stages of b o t h Old Assyrian a n d Old Babylonian, so t h a t in later phases of Akkadian t h e singular sarrulsarri/sarra is found, for example. Still later in the history of Akkadian, t h e case system itself b e c a m e defunct as final vowels were lost. (In the literary dialect called S t a n d a r d Babylonian, t h e n o m i native a n d t h e accusative are b o t h usually written sarru; one form, t h e earlier oblique, is usually written for plurals r e gardless of case.) In addition to their free a n d b o u n d forms, substantives a n d adjectives also enter into a syntactic construction called the predicative form (also called the stative, with adjectives), in which the b a s e of a substantive or adjective is followed by a special set of p r o n o m i n a l suffixes; the two elements constitute a verbless clause, with t h e substantive or adjective as predicate a n d t h e p r o n o m i n a l suffix as subject: sarraku, " I (-aku) a m king ( f a n - ) " ; tabat, "it (feminine; -at) is pleas ant (tab-)"; rabianu, " w e (-ami) are great (rabi-)." T h a t this is an ancient c o n s t r u c t i o n is suggested b y t h e a p p e a r a n c e of a similar construction in Old Egyptian; in other Semitic lan guages, h o w e v e r , it fell o u t of use except in restricted cir cumstances. -
TABLE 3.
Old Babylonian Noun Declension "PLEASANT" "KING"
"QUEEN"
Masc.
Fern.
Singular Nominative Genitive Accusative
sarrum Sarrim sarram
sarratum sarratim sarratam
tabum tdbim tabam
tdbtum tabtim tabtam
Dual Nominative Oblique
sarran sarrfn
sarratan sarratm
Plural Nominative Oblique
Sarru iarri
sarratum sarratim
tabutum tabutim
tabatum tabatim
Akkadian verbal m o r p h o l o g y is c o m p l e x , as in o t h e r S e mitic languages. T h e verbal " r o o t " usually consists of t h r e e c o n s o n a n t s , as in r-k-b, " r i d e . " T h e r e are four m a i n finite forms (or tenses, or aspects): (1) an imperfective f o r m d e n o t i n g t h e p r e s e n t , t h e future, t h e h a b i t u a l or circumstantial past, a n d a variety of m o d a l functions, t h a t is c h a r a c t e r i z e d by doubling in t h e s e c o n d of t h e t h r e e r o o t c o n s o n a n t s , as in arakkab, " I r i d e / a m riding/will r i d e / u s e d to ride ( e t c . ) , " in w h i c h the prefix a- denotes " I " (cf. nirakkab, " w e r i d e , " with ni- for " w e " ) ; (2) a p u n c t i v e f o r m called t h e preterite, for the past, as in arkab, " I r o d e , d i d r i d e " ; (3) t h e perfect, a form i n w h i c h -t- is infixed after t h e first r o o t c o n s o n a n t , as in artakab, " I have r i d d e n " ; a n d (4) t h e i m p e r a t i v e rikab, "ride!". T h e imperfective f o r m arakkab a n d t h e preterite arkab were u n d o u b t e d l y inherited essentially u n c h a n g e d from c o m m o n Semitic. Akkadian shares t h e arakkab form with E t h i o p i a n a n d m o d e r n S o u t h A r a b i a n Semitic lan guages ( c o m p a r e classical E t h i o p i c 'arakkab, " I a t t a i n " ) , b u t t h e f o r m was lost in t h e C e n t r a l Semitic l a n g u a g e s ( s u c h as Arabic, H e b r e w , a n d A r a m a i c ) . T h e preterite f o r m arkab is f o u n d in m o s t other Semitic languages in restricted u s e s , b u t has b e e n r e p l a c e d as t h e m a i n p a s t - t e n s e f o r m b y a conju gation in w h i c h t h e subject p r o n o u n s are i n d i c a t e d b y suf fixes rather titan prefixes (derived ultimately f r o m t h e p r e d icative form of A k k a d i a n , discussed a b o v e ) , as in A r a b i c rakibtu or H e b r e w rokabti, " I r o d e . " T h e f o r m called t h e perfect is n o t f o u n d in other Semitic l a n g u a g e s a n d is g e n erally c o n s i d e r e d an Akkadian innovation. Finite verbs m a y b e m a r k e d w i t h a m o r p h e m e called t h e ventive, w h i c h in dicates m o t i o n or activity in t h e direction or p r o x i m i t y of t h e speaker: illik, " h e w e n t , " b u t illikam, " h e c a m e " ; tusi, " y o u w e n t f o r t h , " b u t tusiam, " y o u c a m e f o r t h . " T h e v e n tive is u n k n o w n in other Semitic languages a n d its p r e s e n c e in Akkadian m a y reflect t h e influence of S u m e r i a n . In addition to t h e finite f o r m s t h e r e is a verbal n o u n or infinitive, rakabum, " t o r i d e " ; an active participle rakibum, " r i d i n g , r i d e r " ; a n d a verbal adjective rakbum, " r i d d e n . " T h e s e forms h a v e analogues or parallels in t h e o t h e r Semitic languages. In c o m m o n with o t h e r Semitic t o n g u e s , A k k a d i a n exhibits t h e modification of verbal r o o t s , b y m e a n s of prefixes or other c h a n g e s , to p r o d u c e a series of a u g m e n t e d s t e m s with m e a n i n g s derived m o r e - o r - l e s s p r e d i c t a b l y f r o m t h a t of t h e basic stem; for e x a m p l e , from t h e basic f o r m parasum, " t o s e p a r a t e , " a r e derived a passive v e r b w i t h a prefixed n, naprusum, " t o b e s e p a r a t e d " ; a causative v e r b with a p r e fixed it, suprusum, " t o cause to s e p a r a t e " ; a n d a n iterative verb with a n infixed syllable, pitarrusum, "to separate re p e a t e d l y . " T h e last of these is an A k k a d i a n i n n o v a t i o n , u n k n o w n elsewhere in Semitic. In m a n y features of syntax A k k a d i a n r e s e m b l e s other S e mitic languages closely. F o r e x a m p l e , attributive adjectives follow their h e a d n o u n s a n d m u s t agree w i t h t h e m in g e n d e r , n u m b e r , a n d case; a n d verbs m u s t agree w i t h their subjects in gender a n d n u m b e r . A k k a d i a n m a k e s f r e q u e n t u s e of a
AKKADIANS genitive chain involving juxtaposition of two n o u n s to i n dicate g o v e r n a n c e of o n e b y d i e other, t h e lead or g o v e r n i n g n o u n a p p e a r i n g in t h e b o u n d ( c o n s t r u c t ) f o r m , as in sarrat matim, " q u e e n of t h e l a n d " (see a b o v e ) ; b u t a p r o n o m i n a l form, sa, also evolved for t h e e x p r e s s i o n of t h e s a m e rela tionship, as in larratum sa matim, " q u e e n of the l a n d " (a similar d e v e l o p m e n t o c c u r r e d in m a n y o t h e r Semitic lan guages). In other syntactic features A k k a d i a n deviates m a r k e d l y from its Semitic relatives. I n all p r o s e dialects a n d texts, t h e verb occupies t h e final p o s i t i o n in t h e sentence, a feature u n d o u b t e d l y b o r r o w e d from S u m e r i a n : sarrum ekallam ina Slim ibni, " k i n g - p a l a c e - i n - c i t y - b u i l t " (i.e., " t h e king built a palace in the c i t y " ) . Already n o t e d a b o v e was t h e u s e of t h e predicative c o n s t r u c t i o n in verbless sentences in w h i c h t h e predicate is a n adjective or a n o u n : Hammurapi rabi, " H a m m u r a b i is g r e a t " ; sarraku, " I a m k i n g . " T h e r e are t w o m a i n clause c o o r d i n a t o r s : u (Semitic wa-) c o n n e c t s n o u n s in phrases (sarrum u sarratum, " k i n g a n d q u e e n " ) a n d clauses that are n o t semantically c o n n e c t e d (abni u arkab, " I built a n d I [also] r o d e " ) , w h e r e a s t h e enclitic particle -ma c o n nects clauses in w h i c h t h e first is logically s u b o r d i n a t e to t h e second (allikam-ma abni, " I c a m e a n d t h e n b u i l t " or " h a v i n g c o m e , I b u i l t " ) . T h e use of -ma is so c o m m o n that the w i d e r a n g e of s u b o r d i n a t i n g c o n j u n c t i o n s is u s e d only infrequentiy ( s u b o r d i n a t e clauses, like otiier p a r t s of speech, u s u ally p r e c e d e t h e m a i n - c l a u s e v e r b ) . T h e syntax of t h e infin itive is c o m p l e x ; for e x a m p l e , t h e p h r a s e " o n reaching t h e t o w n " m a y a p p e a r in the following tiiree forms: ina kasad Slim (lit., " i n t h e r e a c h i n g of t h e t o w n " ) , ina Slim kasadim ("in t o w n - r e a c h i n g " ) , alam ina kasadim ("the t o w n in reaching"). T h e majority of t h e lexicon in all A k k a d i a n dialects is i n herited from c o m m o n Semitic. I n t h e earliest period, h o w ever, there are already m a n y l o a n w o r d s from S u m e r i a n , nearly all of w h i c h are n o u n s , covering a w i d e s e m a n t i c range. B e g i n n i n g in t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n a n d N e o - B a b y l o n i a n periods, m a n y A r a m a i c w o r d s b e g i n t o e n t e r the l a n g u a g e as well.
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Gelb, Ignace J., et al. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Chicago, 1 9 5 6 - . Encyclopedic reference work, devoting one volume to each "letter" of the Akkadian p h o nological system; sixteen of twenty-one volumes have appeared to date. Gelb, Ignace J. Old Akkadian Writing and Grammar. Materials for the Assyrian Dictionary, 2. 2 d ed. Chicago, 1 9 6 1 . Description of the earliest phase of Akkadian. Groneberg, Brigitte. Syntax, Morphologie und Stil derjungbabylonischen "hymnischen" Literatur. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1987. Up-to-date d e scription of the important literary dialect known in English as Stan dard Babylonian. Hecker, Karl. Grammalik der Kultepe-Texte. Analecta Orientalia, 44. R o m e , 1968. Comprehensive description of the Old Assyrian dialect. Labat, R e n e . Manuel d'ipigraphie akkadienne. 6th ed. by Florence M a l bran-Labat. Paris, 1988. O n e of two sign lists that give both p h o nological and logographic values and histories of individual signs (the other is Borger, 1988; see above). Mayer, Walter. Untersuchungen zur Grammatik des Mittelassyrischen. Kevelaer, 1 9 7 1 . T h e most thorough treatment of the Middle Assyr ian dialect. Reiner, Erica. A Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian. T h e H a g u e , 1966. T h e most competent linguistic presentation of Akkadian yet published. Reiner, Erica. "Akkadian." In Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 6, Lin guistics in South West Asia and North Africa, edited by T h o m a s A. Sebeok, p p . 2 7 4 - 3 0 3 . T h e H a g u e , 1970. History of Akkadian gram matical and lexical research, and a review of topics requiring new or additional research. Reiner, Erica. " D i e akkadische Literatur." In Altorientalische Lileraturen: Neues Handbuch der Litaraturaissenschaft, edited by Wolfgang Rollig, p p . 1 5 1 - 2 1 0 . W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 7 8 . Comprehensive review of the types of Akkadian literature. Rollig, Wolfgang. "Oberblick iiber die akkadische Literatur." In Real lexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasialischen Archaologie, vol. 7, p p . 48-66. Berlin, 1987. Survey of Akkadian literary works. Soden, Wolfram von. Akkadisches Handworterbuch. 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 8 1 . T h e only complete m o d e r n dictionary of Akkadian. Soden, Wolfram von. Grundriss der akkadischen Grammalik samt Erganzungsheft. R o m e , 1 9 6 9 . S t a n d a r d reference grammar of Akka dian. Soden, Wolfram von, and Wolfgang Rollig. Das akkadische Syllabar. 4th ed. R o m e , 1 9 9 1 . Authoritative reference for phonetic sign values in Akkadian. Westenholz, Aage. " T h e P h o n e m e /o/ in Akkadian." Zeitschrifl fiir As syriologie 81 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 0 - 1 9 . JOHN HUEHNERGARD
[See also Akkadians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aro, Jussi. Studien zur mittelbabylonischen Grammalik. Studia Orientalia, 20. Helsinki, 1 9 5 5 . T h e m o s t recent monograph-length treat m e n t of Middle Babylonian g r a m m a r . Borger, Rykle. Handbuch der Keilschriftliteratur. 3 vols. Berlin, 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 5 . Indispensable guide to the publication of Akkadian and Sumerian texts and all matters pertaining to the reading of cuneiform texts, u p d a t e d in the periodical Archiv fur Orientforschung. Borger, Rykle. Assyrisch-babylonische Zeichenliste. 4th ed. Kevelaer, 1988. O n e of two sign lists t h a t give both phonological and logographic values and histories of individual signs (the other is L a b a t , 1988; see below). Ebeling, Erich, et al., eds. Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen ArchUologie. Berlin, 1 9 3 2 - . Encyclopedic reference work of all things Assyriological.
AKKADIANS. A l t h o u g h t h e origin of the t e r m is u n k n o w n , Akkadians refers t o a Semitic-speaking people living in n o r t h e r n Babylonia in a b o u t 2400-2100 BCE. T h e t e r m m a y derive f r o m a city a n d its s u r r o u n d i n g territory, for w h i c h t h e earliest spellings are A g a d e o r Aggide, later A k k a d e or Akkad. By d i e e n d of t h e third millennium, t h e land of Akkad m e a n t n o r t h e r n Babylonia, from n o r t h of N i p p u r to Sippar. H o w e v e r , d u r i n g t h e early second millennium BCE, t h e n a m e Akkadians b r o a d e n e d t o m e a n t h e indigenous p o p u l a t i o n of all of Babylonia, as o p p o s e d t o Amorites. By d i e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, A k k a d h a d b e c o m e a literary syn o n y m for Babylonia. M o d e r n scholars call the language of d i e Akkadians Old A k k a d i a n , to distinguish it from *Akkadian, t h e ancient n a m e , u s e d from t h e early second millen-
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n i u m onward, for t h e Semitic language of Assyria a n d B a b ylonia and its n u m e r o u s dialects. T h e term Akkadian period usually refers to t h e 150 years (c. 2334-2193 BCE) defined by t h e reign of five kings of t h e Akkadian, or Sargonic, dy nasty (hence also called die Sargonic p e r i o d ) . S o m e scholars a d d another fifty years to this t o include later kings of t h e city A g a d e (Akkade), thus overlapping t h e L a t e Akkadian a n d Post-Akkadian, o r G u t i a n , periods. T h e b r o a d e r m e a n ings of Akkad a n d Akkadian were c o n s e q u e n c e s of political a n d military e x p a n s i o n of die Sargonic dynasty. Babylonian a n d Assyrian e x p a n d e d from local to regional t e r m s , w i t h their respective e m p i r e s , are later examples of t h e same p r o cess. Prior to the Sargonic dynasty, n o r t h e r n Babylonia was p a r t of a larger Semitic-speaking cultural h o r i z o n t h a t stretched west into n o r t h e r n Syria from its M e s o p o t a m i a n center at Kish, p e r h a p s as early as the Early D y n a s t i c I p e riod. T h e Akkadians m a y h a v e b e e n an eastern g r o u p of this population, p e r h a p s centered a r o u n d t h e confluence of t h e Diyala a n d the Tigris Rivers. T h i s is only a hypothesis, for, according to surface surveys, t h e Diyala region was only sparsely p o p u l a t e d in t h e Akkadian period. T h e relationship b e t w e e n t h e Akkadians a n d t h e earlier, m o r e widely distrib u t e d Semitic-speaking population of greater n o r t h e r n M e s opotamia remains o b s c u r e . In the absence of epigraphic data, Akkadian p e r i o d sites are often difficult to distinguish from tiiose of earlier or later periods; as a result, analysis of settlement patterns m a y b e based on sketchy evidence. Archaeological surveys suggest that during the A k k a d i a n p e r i o d t h e p o p u l a t i o n of n o r t h e r n Babylonian cities a n d t o w n s increased at t h e e x p e n s e of vil lages. T h e s e findings could imply centralization of g o v e r n m e n t a n d p r o d u c t i o n . In contrast, t h e central E u p h r a t e s floodplain witnessed a decline in the n u m b e r a n d size of large u r b a n centers b u t an increase in the n u m b e r a n d size of m e d i u m - s i z e d t o w n s a n d smaller villages ( R o b e r t M c C . A d a m s , Heartland of Cities, Chicago, 1981, p . 139). Al t h o u g h this can b e viewed as a l o n g - t e r m natural develop ment, a contributing factor could have b e e n aggression b y the Akkadian dynasty against the older city states in this region, with t h e creation of e x t r a u r b a n administrative cen ters. T h e resulting pattern—centralization of rural land scapes and decentralization of potentially competitive u r b a n landscapes—needs verification. T o p o g r a p h i c lists of n o r t h e r n Babylonian settlements per mit reconstruction of nine i m p o r t a n t waterways b r a n c h i n g southward f r o m t h e area of Sippar, b e t w e e n t h e m o d e r n courses of the E u p h r a t e s a n d Tigris Rivers, with a string of towns along each a n d a sparsely p o p u l a t e d hinterland b e tween (Douglas F r a y n e , The Early Dynastic List of Geograph ical Names, A m e r i c a n Oriental Series; vol. 74, N e w H a v e n , 1992). C o m m u n i c a t i o n n o r t h w e s t followed t h e E u p h r a t e s u p s t r e a m ; o n e r o u t e east led to the Iranian plateau tiirough the H a m r i n Valley, w h e r e extensive remains of t h e Akkadian period h a v e b e e n found.
N o r t h e r n Babylonia d e p e n d e d on a m i x e d e c o n o m y of agriculture a n d h u s b a n d r y . D u r i n g t h e A k k a d i a n p e r i o d there is substantial e p i g r a p h i c evidence for c o n t r o l of p r o duction t h r o u g h local centers of collection, p r e p a r a t i o n , a n d redistribution of food for workers; p r o d u c t i o n , storage, a n d distribution of i m p l e m e n t s ; a n d c o o r d i n a t i o n of agriculture. Fields w e r e allocated t o plowing t e a m s ; seed a n d feed u s e d for draft animals a n d t h e collection, distribution, a n d t r a n s p o r t of t h e harvest, locally a n d to t h e capital, w e r e r e c o r d e d ; a n d flocks a n d h e r d s w e r e m a i n t a i n e d (shearing, culling, counting, fattening). T h e history a n d culture of the A k k a d i a n s a r e m o s t l y a s sociated with t h e Sargonic E m p i r e , a military, political, a n d cultural unification of M e s o p o t a m i a a n d N o r t h Syria tiiat is often c o n s i d e r e d t h e first of t h e great e m p i r e s or territorial states in M e s o p o t a m i a n history. T h e f o u n d e r of t h e d y n a s t y was S a r g o n ( S h a r r a k i n ) of A k k a d (so called t o distinguish h i m from the t w o later Assyrian kings referred t o as S a r g o n I a n d I I ) . A c c o r d i n g t o one l e g e n d a r y a c c o u n t , h e w a s c u p bearer t o a k i n g of K i s h . T h w a r t i n g a m u r d e r p l o t b y his master, S a r g o n m a d e himself king, taldng t h e title " k i n g of K i s h , " w h i c h implied suzerainty over n o r t h e r n Babylonia a n d p e r h a p s b e y o n d . H e defeated t h e p r i n c i p a l ruler in S u m e r , Lugalzagesi king of U r u k , a n d t h e r e b y u n i t e d B a b y lonia u n d e r o n e rule. H e i n v a d e d s o u t h w e s t e r n I r a n in sev eral c a m p a i g n s a n d t u r n e d n o r t h a n d n o r t h w e s t t o Syria a n d Anatolia, stating in his inscriptions t h a t M a r i a n d E b l a b e c a m e s u b o r d i n a t e to h i m . H e is credited with b u i l d i n g u p a capital city, A k k a d e (often spelled A g a d e in m o d e r n b o o k s , to distinguish it from t h e region of A k k a d ) . T h e city's lo cation h a s n o t b e e n identified, b u t it m a y lie east of t h e c o n fluence of t h e T i g r i s a n d Diyala Rivers, altiiough a location n e a r K i s h h a s b e e n p r o p o s e d . I n a n inscription h e boasts t h a t h e m a d e Akkadians g o v e r n o r s t h r o u g h o u t his c o n q u e r e d lands. S a r g o n ' s life, reign, a n d exploits b e c a m e t h e subjects of a richly e m b r o i d e r e d literary tradition in later M e s o p o t a m i a , i n c l u d i n g epic p o e t r y a n d a tale t h a t h e was b o r n in secret t o a priestess a n d set adrift i n a basket. A stela, n o w in t h e L o u v r e , is t h e major surviving m o n u m e n t of his reign; his c o m m e m o r a t i v e inscriptions are b e s t k n o w n from copies p r e p a r e d b y B a b y l o n i a n scholars c e n t u r i e s after his death. S a r g o n w a s r e m e m b e r e d in later ages as tile a r c h t y p ical successful warrior-ldng; it is for h i m t h a t t h e d y n a s t y is n a m e d S a r g o n i c (to b e distinguished from S a r g o n i d , refer r i n g to S a r g o n II of Assyria a n d his s u c c e s s o r s ) . Sargon's s o n a n d successor, R i m u s h , d e v o t e d m u c h of his nine-year reign to s u p p r e s s i n g revolts in S u m e r i a n cities. His inscriptions claim t h e execution a n d e n s l a v e m e n t of tens of t h o u s a n d s of p e o p l e . F r a g m e n t a r y stelae s h o w i n g m a r c h i n g soldiers, p a r a d i n g a n d killing captives m a y d a t e t o this reign or later (e.g., t h e Victory Stela f r o m T e l l o h at t h e L o u v r e , a fragment at t h e B o s t o n M u s e u m of F i n e A r t s , a n d t h e Nasiriyyah stela, t h e last p e r h a p s c o m m e m o r a t i n g a n A n a tolian c a m p a i g n b y a later k i n g ) . R i m u s h w a s m u r d e r e d in
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a palace conspiracy a n d s u c c e e d e d by his b r o t h e r , M a n i s h tushu. M a n i s h t u s h u restored his father's control over s o u t h western Iran, w h e r e a n expansionist state, P a r a h s e ( M a r hasi), h a d established itself. H e also l a u n c h e d a naval c a m p a i g n in t h e Gulf, a m o n g d i e results of which was t h e importation of blocks of diorite. A g r o u p of statues from his reign carved in this h a r d m e d i u m marks t h e e m e r g e n c e of w h a t is called t h e Akkadian style in sculpture: life-sized or larger naturalistic, b u t idealized portraits of t h e ruler t h a t convey a sense of serene m u s c u l a r strength a n d u n c h a l l e n ged p o w e r . T h e style a n d m e d i u m w e r e imitated for c e n turies thereafter. A n o t h e r i m p o r t a n t m o n u m e n t of his reign, called the Obelisk of M a n i s h t u s h u , records the king's p u r chase of large tracts of land from families in w e s t e r n B a b ylonia, p r e s u m a b l y for redistribution to his officers a n d household in r e t u r n for their service. H e too w a s m u r d e r e d in a palace conspiracy after a reign of fifteen years, t o b e succeeded b y his son, N a r a m - S i n .
w e r e reorganized as p r o v i n c e s a n d N a r a m - S i n ' s p r o g e n y served as g o v e r n o r s a n d priestesses. H i s r e b u i l d i n g of t h e T e m p l e of Enlil at N i p p u r m a y h a v e i n s p i r e d a S u m e r i a n narrative p o e m called t h e C u r s e of A g a d e , w h i c h attributes t h e later fall of t h e e m p i r e to N a r a m - S i n ' s h u b r i s a n d falsely projects it to his reign. T h e art of this p e r i o d is exemplified b y a stela of N a r a m Sin, n o w also in t h e L o u v r e , t h a t s h o w s t h e deified king invading a m o u n t a i n o u s region. Its brilliant design a n d ex ecution m a k e it o n e of d i e m o s t significant w o r k s of a r t of its m i l l e n n i u m to h a v e survived. [See Stelae.] T h i s a n d var ious other r o c k reliefs projected t h e authority of t h e ruler a n d the d e a t h a n d e n s l a v e m e n t in store for his e n e m i e s . C y l inder seals u s e d by courtiers w e r e exquisitely e n g r a v e d with c o m b a t scenes a n d r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of wild b e a s t s in heraldic poses. A m u t i l a t e d n u d e m a l e figure, f o u n d at Bassetki, was
Like Sargon, N a r a m - S i n b e c a m e the subject of legendary a n d m o n i t o r y literature after his death, so t h a t t h e events of his thirty-seven(?)-year reign are difficult to interpret. H e was a successful warrior-king w h o s e conquests established his h e g e m o n y over t h e u p p e r Gulf, southwestern I r a n , A s syria, t h e U p p e r E u p h r a t e s a n d Tigris into Anatolia, a n d N o r t h Syria to t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast. I n his inscriptions h e claims to b e t h e first to destroy Ebla a n d A r m a r i u m , the latter a heavily fortified city in the same region, p e r h a p s m o d e r n A l e p p o . Major religious a n d administrative s t r u c tures of diis p e r i o d at Tell Brak in die K h a b u r region s h o w that his policy was o n e of direct rule in this area, p e r h a p s intending to develop its agricultural potential. M a s s p r o duction of s t a n d a r d i z e d p o t t e r y a t Tell Leilan, also in t h e K h a b u r , suggests t h e u s e of a rationed labor force or garri son there at a b o u t this time; changes in local settlement pat terns could b e t h e result of enforced centralization. [See Brak, Tell; Leilan, T e l l ] T h r o u g h o u t his reign, N a r a m - S i n faced i m p o r t a n t rebel lions a n d external attacks, s o m e o n a scale t h a t gained s u pernatural character in later literature. O n e was led by a S u m e r i a n city, t h e n a m e of which is u n c e r t a i n , a n d i n c l u d e d Amorite t r i b e s m e n a n d p e r h a p s the land of M a g a n ( O m a n a n d t h e Iranian coastline opposite); it t h u s s e e m e d a w o r l d wide event to M e s o p o t a m i a n c o n t e m p o r a r i e s . A n o t h e r r e bellion was centered o n a p r e t e n d e r at Kish, w i t h s u p p o r t at N i p p u r , U r u k , a n d elsewhere. I n n i n e battles, N a r a m - S i n defeated a coalition of foreign rulers a n d M e s o p o t a m i a n al lies. T h e s e d r a m a t i c events were retold as cautionary tales in later literature, while in his o w n lifetime they resulted in his deification as savior of his city, A g a d e . H e led a n e x p e dition to t h e sources of t h e Tigris a n d r e c o n q u e r e d Susiana, imposing a treaty o n the ruler there. H i s reign m a r k s t h e apogee of t h e Sargonic state. A standardized b u r e a u c r a c y spread t h r o u g h o u t M e s o p o t a m i a , w h e r e former city-states
•
AKKADIANS.
F i g u r e I.
Bronze head from Nineveh. I r a q M u s e u m ,
B a g h d a d . (Scala/Art Resource, N Y )
AKKADIANS cast in m o r e t h a n 160 kg of c o p p e r , p r o o f of t h e extraordi n a r y artistic a n d technical a c h i e v e m e n t s of t h e period, fur ther exemplified b y a b r o n z e h e a d of an A k k a d i a n ruler f o u n d at N i n e v e h (see figure i ) . A later poetic narrative speaks of t h e t r e a s u r e s a c c u m u l a t e d in t h e capital; t h e wealth a n d resources available to d i e royal e s t a b l i s h m e n t are r e flected in adminisU-ative d o c u m e n t s of d i e p e r i o d as well, s o m e of w h i c h list magnificent gifts to t h e royal family. N a r a m - S i n was s u c c e e d e d b y his son, Sharkalisharri, t h e events of w h o s e twenty-five-year reign are obscure. H e m a y h a v e faced a rebellion at his accession. A s c r o w n p r i n c e h e directed t h e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e T e m p l e of Enlil at N i p p u r , w h o s e w o r k h e m a y h a v e c o m p l e t e d as king. His t e r ritories shrank, a l t h o u g h h e c l a i m e d victory over t h e E l a m ites in t h e Diyala region. S a r g o n i c administrators m u s t h a v e left Susiana b y this time a n d t h e f o r m e r g o v e r n o r of t h e area, E p i r - m u p i , m a y h a v e set u p a n i n d e p e n d e n t k i n g d o m . S h a r kalisharri also f o u g h t t h e A m o r i t e s n e a r Jebel Bishri, as well as t h e G u t i a n s , a p e o p l e of u n c e r t a i n origin w h o m t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n s c o n s i d e r e d b a r b a r i a n s . T h e p i c t u r e is of an e m b a t t l e d state falling b a c k t o w a r d its capital. Its final col lapse m a y h a v e b e e n the result of internal weaknesses, r e bellion, a n d foreign attack, especially, a c c o r d i n g to S u m e rian tradition, b y the Gutians. Dessication and a b a n d o n m e n t of f o r m e r A k k a d i a n centers in die K h a b u r , s u c h as Tell Leilan, m a y also h a v e b e e n a significant factor ( H a r v e y Weiss et a l , " T h e G e n e s i s a n d Collapse of T h i r d M i l l e n n i u m N o r t h M e s o p o t a m i a n Civilization," Science 261 [1993]: 995-1004). T h e r e followed a short i n t e r r e g n u m : a letter, a p p a r e n t i y from a ruler of this p e r i o d , asserts " T h e r e is a king in A g a d e , " w h e r e a s d i e S u m e r i a n K i n g L i s t says " W h o w a s king, w h o was n o t k i n g ? " A local dynasty was established at A g a d e t h a t r u l e d for a b o u t forty years. O n e of its kings, D u d u , c a m p a i g n e d against U m m a a n d S u s a , b u t A g a d e w a s thereafter a n u n i m p o r t a n t place, a l t h o u g h attested into t h e A c h a e m e n i d period. O n e major legacy of t h e S a r g o n i c d y n a s t y to M e s o p o t a mia was t h e realization of t h e political a n d e c o n o m i c p o s sibilities of a territorial state, t r a n s c e n d i n g t h e city-state p a t tern typical of S u m e r previously. A l o n g with this c a m e political v o c a b u l a r y , military a n d m a n a g e m e n t strategies, a n d a grandiose ideology of t h e ruler t h a t w e r e to b e e m u lated, d e n o u n c e d , a n d a d m i r e d for fifteen h u n d r e d years. P r i o r to t h e S a r g o n i c dynasty, d i e A k k a d i a n s p r e s u m a b l y shared t h e religious convictions of t h e Semites of n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Syria, w h i c h often a c c o r d e d special v e n eration to t h e s u n ( S h a m a s h ) , t h e m o o n ( S i n ) , a n d d i e planet V e n u s (Ishtar), especially as " l a d y of c o m b a t " ( A n n u n i t u m ) . T h e inclusion of S u m e r in t h e Sargonic state b r o u g h t with it t h e S u m e r i a n city-states' p a n t h e o n , includ ing Enlil, chief g o d of S u m e r , thereafter u s e d as a t e r m for " s u p r e m e d e i t y . " S u m e r i a n I n a n n a , a g o d d e s s of r e p r o d u c tion a n d fertility, was fused w i t h Ishtar t o create a c o m p l e x ,
53
c o n t r a d i c t o r y p e r s o n a . S o m e deities i m p o r t a n t in N o r t h Syria, s u c h as A d a d (the t h u n d e r g o d ) a n d D a g a n ( p o p u l a r in t h e U p p e r E u p h r a t e s region) w e r e less i m p o r t a n t in n o r t h e r n Babylonia, suggesting greater S u m e r i a n t h a n Syr ian influence there. A deity referred to simply as G o d (II or H u m ) is sometimes c o m p a r e d to t h e western El or t h e later B a b y l o n i a n Hum, in t h e sense of " p e r s o n a l g o d . " L o c a l d e ities in n o r t h e r n Babylonia i n c l u d e d Z a b a b a (at K i s h ) ; Ilaba, a p a t r o n deity of t h e d y n a s t y ; a n d N e r g a l (at C u t h a ) . Save for N e r g a l , little or n o m y t h o l o g y is k n o w n of these figures. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t religious c o m p o s i t i o n s of t h e p e r i o d are a t t r i b u t e d to E n h e d u a n n a , d a u g h t e r of S a r g o n and high priestess of t h e m o o n g o d Sin at U r . T h e s e include a cycle of S u m e r i a n h y m n s in h o n o r of i m p o r t a n t S u m e r i a n s a n c tuaries, p e r h a p s with t h e i n t e n t of p r o m o t i n g S u m e r o - A k k a d i a n syncretism. A m o n g h e r other works is a narrative p o e m describing h e r p e r s o n a l humiliation at t h e h a n d s of a local p r e t e n d e r a n d h e r a p p e a l to Ishtar, w h o reinstates h e r a n d destroys h e r e n e m i e s . T h i s is b u t o n e e x a m p l e of m a n y w h e r e Ishtar is r e g a r d e d as h o l d i n g t h e royal family in special favor: b o t h S a r g o n a n d N a r a m - S i n are said to have b e e n loved b y Ishtar, a n d t h e S a r g o n i c dynasty is sometimes r e ferred to in later sources as I s h t a r ' s p e r i o d of ascendancy. M e s o p o t a m i a n religious architecture of this p e r i o d is poorly k n o w n , a n d , w h e r e identified, shows no significant changes in p l a n from p r e v i o u s phases of established t e m ples. A religious s t r u c t u r e at T e l l Brak contained a large c o u r t y a r d t h a t m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d for s o m e i m p o r t a n t p u b lic event. N a r a m - S i n i n t r o d u c e d religious veneration of t h e living ruler b y p r o c l a i m i n g himself g o d of his city, Agade. Secular architecture is also poorly k n o w n , for various buildings formerly c o n s i d e r e d Sargonic in date, such as d i e n o r t h e r n palace at Tell A s m a r , t h e palace at Tell al-Wilayah, a n d the Old Palace at Assur, are n o w generally dated to earlier or later p e r i o d s . A large building at Tell Brak, which i n c o r p o r a t e d s o m e bricks s t a m p e d with t h e n a m e of N a r a m Sin, r e m a i n s t h e m o s t securely d a t e d building of t h e Akka dian period. Tell T a y a is a t o w n - s i z e d settlement of this p e r i o d , allowing the r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of h o u s e a n d street plans a n d a g r o u p of administrative buildings. A k k a d i a n society m a y originally have b e e n articulated b y e x t e n d e d families r e c k o n i n g their descent from a c o m m o n male a n c e s t o r and h o l d i n g large areas of arable land in c o m m u n a l ownership, witii shares allotted to individuals a n d n u clear families. An i n n o v a t i o n of t h e S a r g o n i c dynasty was t h e creation of royal estates a n d their distribution to m e m b e r s of t h e royal family a n d ruling elite. T h e s e elites in turn leased a n d subleased parcels for r e n t a l p a y m e n t s in cash a n d kind, A k k a d i a n estates h a v e b e e n identified at G a s u r ( N u z i ) , in Akkad ( U m m el-Jir), in S u m e r ( M e s a g Estate, near U m m a ) , a n d Susa. A n A k k a d i a n stela f r o m G i r s u (Telloh) records distribution of an i m m e n s e area of land to Sargonic officials, including t o w n s a n d villages. R e c o r d s of internal c o m m e r c e s h o w t h e free circulation
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AKKO
of silver in private h a n d s a n d g o v e r n m e n t establishments a n d its use as a s t a n d a r d of valuation a n d m e d i u m of ex c h a n g e . C o m m o d i t i e s b o u g h t a n d sold included foodstuffs, slaves, real estate, aromatics, metals, a n d finished p r o d u c t s s u c h as wagons a n d b o a t s . T h e r e are hints of international v e n t u r e trade by c o m m e r c i a l families tihat took a d v a n t a g e of t h e Sargonic o c c u p a t i o n of such entrepots as Susa to p u r chase foreign c o m m o d i t i e s such as copper, tin, a n d semi precious stones. Sargonic weights and m e a s u r e s s p r e a d , with the e m p i r e , to Syria a n d Anatolia. F o r e i g n t r a d e is k n o w n to D i l m u n , M a g a n , a n d M e l u h h a . Extensive archival r e m a i n s from all p a r t s of M e s o p o t a m i a a n d from Susa illuminate m a n a g e m e n t a n d r e c o r d k e e p i n g techniques, using a distinctive calligraphy for official p u r poses. T h e s e archives shed light o n such subjects as labor, animal h u s b a n d r y , fishing, agriculture, and p r o d u c t i o n (sometimes o n a gigantic scale); on c o m m o d i t i e s s u c h as pottery; a n d o n comestibles such as b r e a d a n d beer. T h e s e archives mostly date to the reigns of N a r a m - S i n a n d S h a r kalisharri a n d i n c l u d e r e c o r d s of Akkadian estates, as well as u r b a n and regional administrative centers. F a m i l y a n d p r i vate archives include records of buying, selling, a n d leasing land; m a k i n g loans at interest; depositing valuables; m a n aging livestock; a n d contracting to carry o u t g o v e r n m e n t services. Sargonic letters m a k e requests a n d orders for g o o d s a n d services, b r i n g n e w s , a n d m a k e complaints a n d p e t i tions. T h e Akkadian rulers d r e w from their n o r t h e r n e n v i r o n m e n t traditions of statecraft dating t o t h e earliest kings of Kish. T h e s e they i n t r o d u c e d to S u m e r , along with Akkadian ideas of nobility, land t e n u r e , a n d military organization. O n t h e other h a n d , m u c h of Akkadian literate a n d scholastic tradition was d r a w n from S u m e r , either directiy t h r o u g h conquest, or indirectly t h r o u g h long-standing S u m e r i a n cul tural influence in t h e n o r t h . T h i s m e a n s tiiat a n o r t h - s o u t h influence w e n t in b o t h directions over m a n y centuries. T h e Akkadian a c h i e v e m e n t was to b e a n i m p o r t a n t i d e ological concern in later M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e rulers of t h e successor state of the third dynasty of U r distanced t h e m selves from it, a l t h o u g h they a d o p t e d its m a n a g e m e n t t e c h niques, whereas t h e dynasty of E s h n u n n a a d o p t e d Sargonic royal n a m e s . T o t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n s , t h e Sargonic, or Ak kadian, period w a s a t u r n i n g p o i n t in their history. [See also Akkade; Diyala; Ebla; Kish; M a r i ; M e s o p o t a m i a ; article on M e s o p o t a m i a ; N i p p u r ; T a y a , T e l l ; U r ; andUrvkWarka.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Amiet, Pierre. Van d'Agadi au Musee du Louvre. Paris, 1 9 7 6 . Detailed study of the large collection of Sargonic sculpture in the Louvre. Boehmer, Rainer Michael. Die Bntwicklung der Glyptic wahrend derAkkad-Zeit, Berlin, 1 9 6 5 . Major publication and study of cylinder seals of the Akkadian period. Cooper, Jerrold S. The Curse of Agade. Baltimore, 1983. Edition of a
Sumerian narrative p o e m about the destruction of t h e Sargonic e m pire, with a discussion of t h e historical background. Foster, Benjamin R. "Archives and E m p i r e in Sargonic M e s o p o t a m i a . " In Cuneiform Archives and Libraries, edited by Klaas R. Veenhof, p p . 4 6 - 5 2 . Leiden, 1986. Survey of historical uses of administrative d o c uments of the Akkadian period; with a bibliography. Foster, Benjamin R. "Select Bibliography of the Sargonic P e r i o d . " In Akkad, the First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions, edited by Mario Liverani, p p . 1 7 1 - 1 8 2 . P a d u a , 1 9 9 3 . Annotated bibliog raphy for archaeology, art, language, literature, and archival and inscriptional sources for the Akkadian period, as well as studies of the history and economy of t h e Sargonic E m p i r e . F r a y n e , Douglas. The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods, vol. 2, Sargonic and Gutian Periods, 2334-2113 BC. T o r o n t o , 1 9 9 3 . C o m m e m o r a t i v e inscriptions of the Akkadian period, with historical commentary. Glassner, J.-J. La chute d'Akkade: L'evenement et sa mimoire. Berliner Beitriige z u m Vorderen Orient, 5. Berlin, 1986. Historical survey of the period, with a bibliography. Flallor, William W . , and J. J. A. Van Dijk. The Exaltation oflnama. Yale N e a r Eastern Researchers, 3. N e w H a v e n , 1968. Edition a n d C o m mentary on a p o e m by E n h e d u a n n a , daughter of Sargon. Liverani, M a r i o , ed. Akkad, the First World Empire. P a d u a , 1 9 9 3 . Essays o n the history, archaeology, administration, and tradition of the Ak kadian Empire. Nissen, H a n s J. " ' S u m e r i a n ' vs. 'Akkadian' Art: Art and Politics in Babylonia of t h e M i d - T h i r d Millennium B . C . " In Insight through Images: Studies in Honor of Edith Porada, edited b y Marilyn KellyBuccellati, p p . 1 8 9 - 1 9 6 . Malibu, 1986. Porada, Edith. " T h e Period of Akkad." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vol. 1, edited by Robert W . Ehrich, p p . 1 1 3 - 1 1 6 . 3 d e d . Chicago, 1992. Archaeological evidence for Akkadian chronology. Westenholz, Aage. " T h e Sargonic P e r i o d . " In Circulation of Goods in Non-Palatial Context in the Ancient Near East, edited by Alfonso Archi, p p . 1 7 - 3 0 . Incunabula Graeca, 82. R o m e , 1984. Surveys records of commercial activity. BENJAMIN R . FOSTER
AKKO (Ar., T e l l e l - F u k h a r ) , a p r o m i n e n t 50-acre tell o n t h e n o r t h e r n b a n k of t h e N a ' a m a n R i v e r in Israel, n e a r its d e b o u c h m e n t into t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea at t h e m e d i e v a l m o d e r n p o r t of Akko ( m a p reference 1585 X 2585). It w a s excavated f r o m 1973 t o 1989 b y M o s h e D o t h a n o n behalf of Haifa University, w i t h t h e p a r t i c i p a t i o n of t h e University of M a r b u r g , G e r m a n y . O c c u p a t i o n levels f r o m t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e to t h e R o m a n era w e r e revealed. T e l Akko was evidently a major p o r t in t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e Age, heavily d e f e n d e d b y a massive terre pisie e m b a n k m e n t a n d glacis c o n n e c t e d w i t h a c y c l o p e a n wall 3.5 m wide witii towers. A large fortress with a n e a r b y elite t o m b is associated with t h o s e early defenses, all d a t e d b y t h e excavator t o t h e late M B I. T o this h o r i z o n apparently b e l o n g sherds of C y p riot W h i t e P a i n t e d I I I - I V pottery, a m o n g t h e earliest s u c h imports k n o w n in t h e L e v a n t . Early in M B II t h e e m b a n k m e n t a n d r a m p a r t s w e r e a u g m e n t e d , a n d a t h r e e - e n t r y w a y sea gate, w a s c o n s t r u c t e d d o w n along t h e n o r t h w e s t slopes. In M B III, Akko s e e m s to have declined, a n d s o m e of t h e defenses, i n c l u d i n g t h e gate, were a b a n d o n e d . H o w e v e r , a n u m b e r of t o m b s b e l o n g i n g
ALALAKH to this p e r i o d h a v e b e e n f o u n d , b o t h c o n s t r u c t e d a n d p i t burials, as well as a rare t y p e of s t o n e - v a u l t e d t o m b . T h e s e t o m b s p r o d u c e d c e r a m i c i m p o r t s ( s o m e from A n a t o l i a ) , w e a p o n s , scarabs, a n d jewelry. In t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e s o m e of t h e r a m p a r t s w e r e r e constructed. F r o m t h e first p h a s e , in t h e early fifteenth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e r e is a n elaborate t o m b of ashlar c o n s t r u c t i o n , with B i c h r o m e a n d C h o c o l a t e - o n - W h i t e pottery. T h e p h a s e seems to e n d in a d e s t r u c t i o n . L B II is witnessed b y large, well-planned buildings, as well as n u m e r o u s C y p r i o t a n d M y c e n a e a n i m p o r t s t h a t p o i n t t o p r o s p e r o u s t r a d e . T h e site r e m a i n e d largely unfortified, a l t h o u g h , a c c o r d i n g t o a relief at K a r n a k , R a m e s e s II d e s t r o y e d a gate at Akko. T h e final L B levels a r e characterized by burials f o u n d in t h e a b a n d o n e d fortress (building A ) , followed b y silos and industrial installations of several t y p e s . L a t e C y p r i o t a n d M y c e n a e a n IIIB p o t t e r y places this p h a s e in t h e late t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE.
T h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e I r o n A g e a p p e a r s to be m a r k e d b y n e w settlers, a l t h o u g h the r e m a i n s consist largely of pits a n d w o r k s h o p s , with flimsy dwellings. L a t e M y c e n a e a n I I I C : i b pottery, as well as a scarab of T a w o s e r t , q u e e n of E g y p t in a b o u t 1207-1200 BCE, places this o c c u p a t i o n mainly in t h e early twelfth c e n t u r y BCE. T h e excavator suggests t h a t t h e inhabitants w e r e t h e S h e r d e n , o n e g r o u p of t h e Sea P e o p l e s k n o w n from t h e o n o m a s t i c o n of A m e n e m o p e t (c. 1000 B C E ) , w h o are said to h a v e o c c u p i e d t h e coast n o r t h of t h e Ski. T h e eleventh a n d t e n t h centuries BCE a r e poorly attested. T h e r e are m o r e extensive r e m a i n s f r o m t h e I r o n II p e r i o d , including residences a n d several large p u b l i c buildings. T h e site was destroyed b y fire, p r o b a b l y b y t h e Assyrians in t h e late eighth c e n t u r y BCE. O n l y s c a n t r e m a i n s survive from t h e Babylonian p e r i o d , b u t in d i e P e r s i a n p e r i o d Akko r e c o v ered, p r o b a b l y as a p o r t again a n d an administrative center. Attic i m p o r t s a n d s o m e P h o e n i c i a n inscriptions b e l o n g to this era. T h e Hellenistic p e r i o d reveals a well-planned t o w n , preserving t h e P e r s i a n b u i l d i n g t e c h n i q u e of ashlar c o n struction i n t e r s p e r s e d w h h r u b b l e fill: R o m a n , B y z a n t i n e , a n d C r u s a d e r r e m a i n s h a v e either b e e n severely d i s t u r b e d or have largely d i s a p p e a r e d . BIBLIOGRAPHY D o t h a n , M o s h e , and D i e t h e l m C o n r a d . " A c c h o . " Israel Exploration JournaH^ ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 5 7 - 2 5 8 ; 24 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 2 7 6 - 2 7 9 ; 25 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 1 6 3 - 1 6 6 ; 26 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 2 0 7 - 2 0 8 ; 27 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 2 4 1 - 2 4 2 ; 28 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 2 6 4 - 2 6 6 ; 29 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 2 2 7 - 2 2 8 ; 31 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : n o - i i 2 ; 3 3 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : i i 3 - n 4 J 3 4 ( i 9 8 4 ) : 189-190. D o t h a n , M o s h e . " A Sign of T a n i t from Tel ' A k k o . " Israel
Exploration
Journal 2 4 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 4 4 - 4 9 . D o t h a n , M o s h e . ' " A k k o : Interim Excavation R e p o r t , First Season, 1
9 7 3 / 4 ' " Bulletin
of the American
Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 224
( 1 9 7 6 ) : 1-48. D o t h a n , M o s h e . " A n Attic R e d - F i g u r e d Bell-Krater from T e l ' A k k o . " Israel Exploration Journal 29 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 1 4 8 - 1 5 1 . D o t h a n , M o s h e . " A Phoenician Inscription from ' A k k o . " Israel Explo ration Journal 35 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 8 1 - 9 4 .
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D o t h a n , M o s h e . "Archaeological Evidence for M o v e m e n t s of the Early 'Sea Peoples' in C a n a a n . " In Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited by S e y m o u r Gitin and William G. Dever, p p . 5 9 - 7 0 . Annual of the American Schools of Oriental R e search, 49. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 9 . WILLIAM G. DEVER
A L A L A K H ( m o d e r n T e l l ' A t c h a n a ) , site located in t h e T u r k i s h p r o v i n c e of H a t a y , n e a r t h e m o u t h of the O r o n t e s River, in t h e A m u q plain (36°io,' N , 36°29' E ) . T h e site c o m m a n d e d the area's p r i n c i p a l t r a d e r o u t e s a n d was se lected b y C. L e o n a r d Woolley in 1936 as a link b e t w e e n die early cultures of t h e A e g e a n a n d the Asiatic m a i n l a n d . c
T h e m o u n d (750 X 300 m ) is an oval, its axis being r o u g h l y n o r t h w e s t b y southeast. T h e elevation slopes from a b o u t 9 m at t h e n o r t h w e s t e r n e n d to t h e level of t h e plain o n the soutiiwest. H o r i z o n t a l excavation w a s concentrated in t h e n o r t h and n o r d i w e s t e r n p a r t s of t h e m o u n d , with sev eral d e e p s o u n d i n g s p r o v i d i n g a c o n t i n u o u s s e q u e n c e of seventeen architectural levels r e a c h i n g b a c k t o t h e early sec o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. T h e succession of temples, palaces, a n d t o w n defenses confirmed t h e city's p r o m i n e n c e , partic ularly d u r i n g levels VII a n d IV. T h o s e p e r i o d s are n o t e d for their royal archives, w h i c h identify t h e ancient site as Alalakh, capital of t h e p r o v i n c e M u k i s h , vassal to t h e k i n g d o m s of Y a m h a d ( m o d e r n A l e p p o ) in d i e eighteenth-sixteenth centuries BCE and M i t a n n i in t h e fifteenth-fourteenth cen turies BCE. [See Alalakh T e x t s ; A l e p p o ; Mitanni.] P r o v i d i n g key s y n c h o n i s m s with t h e kings of Y a m h a d , M a r i , Babylon, H a t t i , M i t a n n i , a n d E g y p t , these archives are central to dis cussions of absolute c h r o n o l o g y for the second millennium BCE a n d have b e e n cited, in particular, in s u p p o r t of the " m i d d l e " chronology. [See M a r i ; Babylon.] T h e two ar chives also reveal c h a n g e s in social s t r u c t u r e a n d ethnic c o m p o s i t i o n that, c o m b i n e d witii t h e material r e m a i n s , bear, in particular, o n t h e p r o b l e m of H u r r i a n infiltration a n d cul t u r e . [See Hurrians.] S u b s e q u e n t spells u n d e r Hittite suzer ainty b e t w e e n levels III a n d I e n d e d in t h e city's final d e struction, tentatively correlated with d i e onslaught of t h e Sea P e o p l e s . [See Hittites.] L e v e l O r e p r e s e n t s a brief a t t e m p t at recolonization in the twelfth c e n t u r y BCE. H i s t o r y of E x c a v a t i o n . Woolley, o n behalf of the British M u s e u m in L o n d o n , c o n d u c t e d eight seasons of excavation b e t w e e n 1937 a n d 1939 a n d 1946 a n d 1949. His first ex p l o r a t o r y s o u n d i n g s , b e g u n as a n offshoot of t h e excavations at t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n p o r t of T e l l a l - M i n a , were followed in 1937 b y m o r e extensive investigations of t h e level I - I V r e s idential h o u s e s a n d associated citadel wall. T h e level I V p a l ace a n d archives, discovered at t h e e n d of this season, w e r e fully excavated in 1938, w h e n investigations along t h e n o r t h ern a n d n o r t h w e s t e r n ridge of d i e tell e x p o s e d older fortifi cations of V I a n d V as well as the city gate of VII. T h e fourth season (1939) was m a r k e d b y t h e discovery of tp'alace VII
56
ALALAKH
a n d its archives b e n e a t h the private houses of I V - V I . D i rectiy west of d i e palace. Woolley e n c o u n t e r e d t h e t e m p l e precinct, which b e c a m e t h e focus of die first p o s t w a r season in 1946. By d i e e n d of d i e fifth season, m o s t of levels I - V I I h a d b e e n u n c o v e r e d , a n d a s o u n d i n g below palace V I I ex p o s e d p r e c u r s o r s in levels VIII a n d I X . E x t e n d e d d o w n t o t h e water table in 1947, this d e e p s o u n d i n g p r o d u c e d seven further levels, X - X V I ; a second s o u n d i n g in t h e t e m p l e p r e cinct r e a c h e d virgin soil below level X V I I , u n d e r t h e p r e s e n t water table. T h e last t w o seasons were devoted to p r o b l e m s of stratigraphy in t h e t e m p l e s o u n d i n g a n d t h e fortifications of levels I - V I I . [See the biography of Woolley.]
a n d ceramic parallels b e t w e e n Alalakh V I I a n d E g y p t ' s twelfth dynasty. I n s t e a d , t h e y w o u l d correlate t h e m with M i d d l e B r o n z e I I B / C material in Palestine. T h e i n t r o d u c tion of B i c h r o m e w a r e , Base R i n g I, a n d C y p r i o t M o n o c h r o m e in V I B suggests a d e s t r u c t i o n date of a b o u t 1575 BCE or later for VII, w h i c h w o u l d tiius s p a n t h e late seven t e e n t h - e a r l y sixteenth centuries BCE. D e s p i t e reservations a b o u t t h e dating of B i c h r o m e W a r e b a s e d o n its p r e s e n c e in M e g i d d o s t r a t u m IX, w h i c h e n d e d in d e s t r u c t i o n s u p p o s edly at the h a n d s of T h u t m o s e III in 1468/67 BCE, r e c e n t evaluations of historical a n d archaeological d a t a s u p p o r t t h e "low" chronology.
T h e finds were divided mainly b e t w e e n the British M u s e u m in L o n d o n a n d t h e H a t a y M u s e u m in A n t a k y a , b u t some also w e n t t o the A s h m o l e a n M u s e u m at Oxford U n i versity a n d t o d i e Universities of Sydney a n d M e l b o u r n e , Australia. T h e field notes a n d negatives are s t o r e d at d i e Institute of Archaeology, L o n d o n . T h e results of t h e exca vations were p u b l i s h e d in preliminary reports b e t w e e n 1936 a n d 1950. Woolley's final publication in 1955 followed two volumes o n e p i g r a p h y b y Sidney S m i d i (1949) a n d D o n a l d J. W i s e m a n (1953). M u c h of t h e secondary literature is d e voted to p r o b l e m s of stratigraphy a n d chronology.
Woolley's p r o p o s e d hiatus b e t w e e n d i e d e s t r u c t i o n of level VII and t h e b e g i n n i n g of level VI is also q u e s t i o n e d . Levels V I a n d V were associated b y W o o l l e y w i t h t w o r e buildings of t h e fortress, each of w h i c h c o m p r i s e d t w o dis tinct phases: V I A a n d B , V A a n d B . T h e correlation of V I - V with the M B I I C a n d L a t e B r o n z e I p e r i o d (c. 1575-1460 BCE) is s u p p o r t e d b y c e r a m i c parallels f r o m r e c e n t excava tions at Tell Fladidi a n d M u m b a q a t . [See H a d i d i , T e l l ]
S t r a t i g r a p h y a n d C h r o n o l o g y . T h e absolute c h r o n o l ogy at Alalakh hinges o n the dating of t h e archives in levels V I I and IV. T h a t dating, in t u r n , d e p e n d s o n t h e r e c o n s t r u c tion of t h e local genealogy a n d o n s y n c h r o n i s m s with exter nal king lists as well as ceramic a n d glyptic assemblages. Level VII constitutes a n architectural p h a s e r e p r e s e n t e d b y a city gate, r a m p a r t s , a t e m p l e , a n d a palace. A r c h a e o logically, level V I I is considered coterminous with t h e pal ace, w h o s e archive of 175 tablets spans at least two rulers at Alalakh, coinciding with at least five rulers at Y a m h a d . B o t h t h e palace archive a n d architecture suggest a s h o r t o c c u pation of fifty to seventy-five years. Originally, S m i t h (1940), followed b y Woolley (1953, 1955), fixed t h e time span of VII at 1780-1750 BCE. I n his assessment, b a s e d o n ceramic a n d glyptic evidence as well as t h e V e n u s tablets of A m m i s a d u q a , S m i t h assumes a s y n c h r o n i s m b e t w e e n Y a r imlim of level VII, H a m m u r a b i of Babylon, a n d Zimrilim of Mari. Following the publication of the texts in 1953, it t r a n s p i r e d t h a t the c o n t e m p o r a r y of H a m m u r a b i a n d Zimrilim was Yarimlim of Y a m h a d , grandfather of Yarimlim of Alalakh to w h o m t h e oldest palace records pertain. T h e dates w e r e revised to about 1720-1650 BCE by advocates of t h e " m i d d l e " chronology (see a b o v e ) . Following B e n n o L a n d s b e r g e r ("Assyrische Konigsliste u n d 'dunkles Zeitalter,' " Journal of Cuneiform Studies 8 [1954], p . 8), Albrecht G o e t z e (1957, p . 23) linked t h e destruction of VII with Mursili I a n d t h e sack of Babylon d u r i n g t h e reign of S a m s u d i t a n a . H o w e v e r , texts found at Bogazkoy in 1957 reveal t h a t it was Hattusili I w h o destroyed Alalakh during his second Syrian c a m p a i g n . [See Bogazkoy.] P r o p o n e n t s of t h e " l o w " chronology q u e s tion the accuracy of t h e V e n u s tablets and dispute t h e glyptic
T h e b e g i n n i n g of level IV, a c c o r d i n g t o W o o l l e y , is m a r k e d b y t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e N i q m e p a p a l a c e , w h i c h was destroyed in t h e reign of N i q m e p a ' s s o n , Ilimilimma, before t h e e n d of level IV. B e c a u s e , c o n t r a r y to Woolley's a s s u m p t i o n , six of d i e three h u n d r e d tablets in t h e palace archive p e r t a i n to I d r i m i (once c o n s i d e r e d t o b e N i q m e p a ' s g r a n d s o n b u t n o w recognized as his father), it is u n c e r t a i n w h o built the palace. Idrimi's date derives f r o m his inscribed statue, a l t h o u g h t h e text, if c o m p o s e d p o s t i i u m o u s l y , has little historical value. Vassal to P a r r a t t a r n a , k i n g of t h e H u r rians, a n d indirectiy linked witii t h e Hittite king Z i d a n t a , Idrimi is n o w d a t e d to a b o u t 1470 BCE. I n r e c e n t studies (Gates, 1981, p p . 8-9; G a t e s , 1987, p . 76; H e i n z , 1992) h e is associated w i t h t h e s o u t h e a s t e r n w i n g ( C 1 - 9 ) of t h e palace a n d the triple serai ( T k . [orig., P e r s . ] , " p a l a c e " ) gate, b o t h assigned to level V B . Woolley's 1460/50 BCE d a t e for d i e start of level I V c o n f o r m s w i t h d i e relative d a t i n g of t h e M i t a n n i a n rulers a n d t h e dates of M e d i t e r r a n e a n i m p o r t s in IV. N i q m e p a is vassal to Saustatar, king of M i t a n n i , w h o s e seal occurs at N u z i , w h e r e it m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d as an heirloom. [See Seals; N u z i . ] T h e a b s e n c e of B i c h r o m e W a r e in Alalakh IV, c o m b i n e d with t h e p r e s e n c e of C y p r i o t B a s e - r i n g II W a r e s a n d a M y c e n a e a n ILIA sherd, places d i e d e s t r u c t i o n of palace IV after 1425 BCE. T h e e n d of level I V , a t t r i b u t e d to an invasion b y S u p p i l u l i u m a I, w a s o n c e d a t e d 1370 BCE b u t m i g h t b e as late as 1340 BCE, a c c o r d i n g to t h e " l o w " chronology. Level VII p r o v i d e s a n e n d d a t e for levels X V I I - V I I I en c o u n t e r e d in t w o d e e p s o u n d i n g s . W o o l l e y ' s correlation b e t w e e n these t w o s o u n d i n g s , h o w e v e r , w a s b a s e d o n t h e se q u e n c e of structures below V I I a n d is currentiy challenged b y a c o m p a r a t i v e s t u d y of t h e p o t t e r y ( H e i n z , 1992). I n b o t h s o u n d i n g s , levels IX-VLU r e p r e s e n t s u b p h a s e s of VII. W h e r e a s in t h e palace s o u n d i n g , levels X V I - X I V = X I I I , in t h e t e m p l e s o u n d i n g , levels X V I - X V = X I V a n d X I = X .
AJLALAKH Woolley's original f o u r t h - m i l l e n n i u m date for t h e b e g i n n i n g of die " A r c h a i c " levels w a s q u e s t i o n e d as l o n g ago as 1957 by M a c h t e l d J. Mellink (review of Woolley, Alalakh, in American Journal of Archaeology 61 [1957]: 395-400). H e r observation t h a t t h e u n i f o r m c e r a m i c assemblage of X V I I - V I I I m a t c h e s d i e early M B r e p e r t o i r e h a s since b e e n confirmed b y several studies d r a w i n g o n c o m p a r a t i v e evi d e n c e from recent excavations, in particular at T e l l e d D a b ' a in t h e E g y p t i a n D e l t a , a n d T e l l M a r d i k h / E b l a , T e l l H a b u b a K a b i r a , T e l l H a d i d i , a n d M u m b a q a t in Syria. [See D a b ' a , T e l l e d - ; Ebla; H a b u b a K a b i r a . ] T h e u p p e r m o s t levels, I I I - I , share c e r a m i c elements. T h e destruction following level I I , w h i c h c o n t a i n e d L a t e C y p r i o t IIB ware, signals t h e e n d of a p e r i o d of Hittite d o m i n a t i o n (c. 1350/40-1275 BCE). Level I is d a t e d b y t h e p r e s e n c e of L a t e M i n o a n IIIB p o t t e r y t o t h e late t h i r t e e n t h - e a r l y twelfth centuries BCE, p r e c e d i n g t h e arrival of t h e Sea Peoples. A r c h i t e c t u r e . A circuit wall, city gate, a n d fortress e n closed a palace, a t e m p l e , a n d residential h o u s e s . O f t h e s e , only t h e palace a n d t e m p l e w e r e t r a c e d d o w n t h r o u g h t h e Archaic levels. W h i l e t h e t e m p l e location r e m a i n e d m o r e or less fixed, t h e palace m o v e d f r o m t h e t e m p l e area t o t h e city gate in t h e m i d - s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. Middle Bronze IIA (levels XVII-X). T h e t e m p l e was traced b a c k t o level X I V , b u t b e s t k n o w n is t h e t e m p l e p l a n of X I I A - B . C o n s i d e r e d a p r e c u r s o r to t h e N e o - H i t t i t e bit hilani, this multistoried t e m p l e i n c l u d e d a cella a n d an a n t e r o o m fronted b y a c o u r t y a r d . I n d i e p a l a c e s o u n d i n g , level X I I also p r o d u c e d t h e earliest r e m a i n s of a m o n u m e n t a l building with a c o l o n n a d e , followed in levels X I - X b y a n i m p o s i n g s t r u c t u r e witii a stairway a n d c o u r t y a r d . Middle Bronze IIB (levels IX-VII). T h e sparse a r c h i tectural r e m a i n s of levels I X - V I I I are c o n s i d e r e d s u b p h a s e s of t h e t e m p l e a n d palace of level V I I , w h i c h also includes a r a m p a r t , gate, a n d " f o r t r e s s . " T h e so-called Y a r i m l i m p a l ace is built in three sections o n a t e r r a c e d terrain along t h e city wall. T h e official q u a r t e r ( r o o m s 1-13), embellished b y basalt orthostats, contains t h e m a i n e n t r a n c e , c o u r t y a r d , a u dience c h a m b e r , a n d archive r o o m . It rises t o t h e central block in w h i c h a stairway leads t o t h e living q u a r t e r s a b o v e . Botii t h e a u d i e n c e c h a m b e r a n d t h e u p p e r living r o o m w e r e divided b y w o o d e n c o l u m n s o n basalt bases b e t w e e n t w o projecting piers, a feature t h a t r e c u r s in levels I V - I . T h e walls w e r e d e c o r a t e d b y frescoes of architectural a n d n a t u ralistic designs of C r e t a n inspiration. Stairs lead d o w n t o a possible h y p o g e u m , w h i c h r e m a i n s a n e n i g m a . T h e s o u t h ern section p r o b a b l y served a d o m e s t i c function. T h e adjoining t e m p l e c o n t a i n e d related tablets. Its u n u s u ally thick walls suggest a n u p p e r story; its p l a n , w h i c h c o n sists of a shallow a n t e c h a m b e r a n d d e e p cella witii an altar aligned o n a central axis with t h e e n t r a n c e , is related t o t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m N o r t h Syrian p r o t o t y p e s . Also typical of Syria a n d Palestine in t h e M B II p e r i o d is the " t h r e e - e n t r a n c e " city gate f r a m e d b y lateral towers c r o w n i n g a n e a r t h e r n r a m p a r t o r glacis. T h e gate's associ
57
ation with level V I I is b a s e d o n its relative position below the fort/fortress of level I V .
Middle
Bronze
IIC-Late
Bronze
I (levels
VI-IV). A l
t h o u g h t h e remains of levels V I a n d V w e r e e n c o u n t e r e d in all areas of excavation, their s u b p h a s e s , A a n d B , were less a p p a r e n t outside t h e fortress. T h e first major construction is t h e n i n e - r o o m palace a n d triple (serai) gate of level V B , n o w associated with Idrirni, tiiat w e r e later incorporated as die s o u t h w i n g in N i q m e p a ' s level I V palace. T h e separation of the palace from the t e m p l e a n d its relocation n e a r t h e city gate indicate major social or political change. Its plan, c o m prising a central h e a r t h r o o m s u r r o u n d e d b y smaller utility a n d storage r o o m s , is i n t h e tradition of c o n t e m p o r a r y houses. Its m a i n distinguishing feature is its m o n u m e n t a l e n t r a n c e with stairs a n d a c o l u m n e d portico. Polished basalt orthostats line t h e walls of t h e e n t r a n c e a n d a n t e r o o m lead ing to stairs a n d a n u p p e r story. Like t e m p l e X I I , this a r r a n g e m e n t is seen as a p r e c u r s o r of the earlier bit hilani plan. C o l u m n e d porticoes also m a r k t w o ceremonial r o o m s of t h e later extension built by N i q m e p a ' s son, Ilimilimma, a n d r e cur in d i e fort. T h e level I V t e m p l e , s u p e r i m p o s e d o n t h e s u n k e n cella of t e m p l e V , resembles the axial plan of temple VII, w h i c h c o n f o r m e d to a local N o r t h Syrian tradition. T h e t o w n defenses, t r a c e d to levels V a n d VI, were only partially r e m o d e l e d in level I V . T h e e n t r a n c e leads t h r o u g h a n a r r o w passage with t w o right-angle t u r n s . It o p e n s into a courtyard b o r d e r e d o n t h e n o r t h w e s t b y t h e fortress, w h i c h is integrated with t h e gate buildings a n d contains formal rooms with columned porticoes. Late Bronze IIA-B (levels III-I). Following t h e d e s t r u c tion of level IV, d i e fort a n d t e m p l e w e r e rebuilt on a massive scale b y t h e Hittite c o n q u e r e r s . I t o c c u p i e d t h e entire n o r t h west q u a r t e r of d i e citadel, i n c l u d i n g d i e old palace area. Its d e s t r u c t i o n at the end of level II was s u c c e d e d by a rebuild ing o n a smaller scale. T e m p l e III c o m p r i s e d t w o d o u b l e - s t o r i e d shrines with o p posite orientations. In shrine A , the altar is located in t h e courtyard, with t h e cella, p r e s u m a b l y , upstairs. T e m p l e II m a r k s a reversion to d i e axial plan of levels I V a n d V I I . T e m p l e I is a one-story b u i l d i n g consisting of a large cella, a n t e c h a m b e r , a n d c o u r t y a r d . A p a r t from porticoed d o o r s , its distinguishing features i n c l u d e a triple-niched cella in p h a s e A a n d an a n n e x in p h a s e B . P o t t e r y . T h e ceramic e v i d e n c e c o m e s from all levels at Alalakh a n d s u p p l e m e n t s t h e tablets from levels V I I and I V as a chronological index. A t t e m p t s to subject this material to statistical analysis h a v e b e e n t h w a r t e d b y lack of infor m a t i o n in t h e final r e p o r t (McClellan, 1989), b u t c o m p a r ative studies of t h e p o t t e r y assemblage have led to adjust m e n t s in Woolley's correlation b e t w e e n levels at Alalakh a n d their association with d a t e d assemblages in M e s o p o t a m i a , Palestine, a n d t h e A e g e a n . Middle Bronze IIA (levels XVII-X). T h e type index of levels X V I I - X i s " A m u q - C i l i c i a n " ware, with its character istic trefoil-mouthed jugs, c a r i n a t e d bowls, a n d high-footed
58
ALALAKH
vessels decorated with a p a i n t e d triglyph-metope frieze c o n taining geometric, plant, a n d animal motifs. D a t e d parallels from n o r t h e r n Syria, Cilicia, a n d Anatolia range within t h e M B IIA period. F r o m level X I I c o m e s a solitary " r e d - c r o s s b o w l , " w h o s e far-flung analogs date to the E B III period. Level X saw t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of K h a b u r W a r e a n d gray b u r nished W a r e , b o t h characteristic of the M B LIB p e r i o d . Middle Bronze IIB (levels IX-VII). T h e b u r n i s h e d gray w a r e tiiat b e g a n in level X is characteristic of IX-VLII b u t also occurs in levels VLT-V. K h a b u r W a r e , t o o , continues t h r o u g h VIII. T h e c e r a m i c assemblage of VII is m a r k e d b y the absence of p a i n t e d pottery a n d b y bowls a n d handleless pots with carinations a n d flaring rims.
Middle Bronze IIC-Late
Bronze I (level VIA-B).
The
m a i n feature of VI is t h e a b r u p t influx of Syro-Palestinian wares (black lustrous juglets, painted craters, a n d footed goblets), w h i c h together with C y p r i o t i m p o r t s ( B i c h r o m e , Red-on-Black, a n d M o n o c h r o m e ware in VIA; W h i t e Slip I a n d Base R i n g I in VLB), provide a chronological indicator of the transition from t h e M i d d l e to t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e . Late Bronze IA-B (levels V-IV). Level V is m a r k e d b y i m p o r t e d W h i t e Slip I a n d II, Base R i n g I, late K h a b u r W a r e , a n d Black I m p r e s s e d W a r e . T h e d i s a p p e a r a n c e of B i c h r o m e W a r e a n d K h a b u r W a r e in level I V a n d t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of N u z i W a r e h a v e long overshadowed t h e transi tional character of tiiis level. In it, C y p r i o t i m p o r t s ( W h i t e Slip I a n d II, Base R i n g II) increased, while n e w types a p p e a r e d that b e c a m e m o r e c o m m o n in levels III—I. Late Bronze IIA-B (levels III-I). T h e w h i t e - p a i n t e d N u z i W a r e blends into " A t c h a n a W a r e , " a local variation w h o s e shapes a n d decoration show strong Aegean affinities. In level II, the fashion for Cypriot wares is s u p e r c e d e d b y M y c e n a e a n IILA a n d B i m p o r t s , t h e m a i n ceramic e l e m e n t of level I. G l y p t i c . T h e glyptic material from Alalakh comprises cylinder seals mainly b u t also scarabs. Actual cylinder seals span a b r o a d e r time range a n d s h o w greater variety. T h e y are, however, qualitatively inferior to the seal impressions, which occur mainly on envelopes in V I I a n d o n tablets a n d jars in IV. T h e s e include seal impressions of t h e rulers of Alalakh, Y a m h a d , a n d M i t a n n i . I n VLT, t h e s t a n d a r d c o m positional s c h e m e comprises a n inscription a n d t h r e e s t a n d ing figures: t h e king/seal owner, a deity, and-an interceding goddess. T h e style evolves from solid, delicately m o d e l e d figures (baroque) t o w a r d thinner, elongated figures e x e cuted in flat relief ( r o c o c o ) . A l t h o u g h locally p r o d u c e d , t h e designs show Egyptian, Babylonian, a n d C a p p a d o c i a n as well as Aegean a n d C y p r i o t inspiration. T h e seal i m p r e s sions from TV a r e i n contrast with c o n t e m p o r a r y seals. W h e r e a s t h e f o r m e r reveal a preference for r e c u t older or foreign p r o d u c t s with distinctive designs, t h e latter, m a d e of sintered quartz, a r e uniformly drill decorated, w h i c h c h a r acterizes t h e w i d e s p r e a d M i t a n n i a n C o m m o n Style. T h e r e are local variations, of w h i c h t h e Alalakh g r o u p a p p e a r s to be one.
T h e oldest cylinder seals b e l o n g to t h e late fourtii-early third millennia. O n c e cited as evidence for t h e early d a t i n g of t h e Archaic levels, t h e y are n o w r e c o g n i z e d as a n t i q u e s . T h e latest seals, s h o w i n g figures with raised a r m s s u p p o r t i n g the winged disk, a r e related to Hittite i c o n o g r a p h y , w h i c h , ultimately, however, derived from n o r t h e r n Syria. S m a l l F i n d s . A s a result of n u m e r o u s violent d e s t r u c t i o n s followed b y looting, few of the small finds w e r e f o u n d in situ a n d their dates a r e largely o p e n to d e b a t e . C o m p o s i t e statues were p o p u l a r d u r i n g V I I , to j u d g e b y t h e stone h e a d s a n d fragments from t h e floor of the t e m p l e . M o s t r e m a r k a b l e is t h e black diorite " h e a d of Y a r i m l i m , " a priestiy figure, w h o s e b e a r d a n d m o u s t a c h e m a y have b e e n highlighted b y p a i n t or incrustation. T w o c r u d e basalt figures f o u n d in t h e northeast gate t o w e r of level V b e l o n g t o a g r o w i n g n u m b e r of statuettes from Syria, n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , a n d t h e L e v a n t i n e coast. T h e y d a t e to t h e m i d d l e a n d late s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, a n d their contexts suggest a g u a r d i a n f u n c tion. T h e well-known seated statue of I d r i m i , identified b y its autobiographical inscription, w a s f o u n d b r o k e n a n d b u r ied in the t e m p l e I B a n n e x . T h o u g h t to h a v e survived several centuries as an object of veneration, it is u n c l e a r w h e t h e r t h e statue was ever m o u n t e d o n t h e basalt lion t h r o n e f o u n d nearby. M a d e of white stone, with eyes a n d eyebrows inlaid in black stone, t h e statue's striking frontality w a s o n c e c o n sidered characteristic of H u r r o - M i t a n n i a n art. H o w e v e r , its tall h a t a n d w r a p a r o u n d cloak with its thick rolled h e m place it firmly i n the O l d Syrian tradition. E g y p t i a n influence is seen in the s o m b e r facial expression a n d tire p o s i t i o n of t h e h a n d s . M o r e puzzling is t h e abstract s c u l p t u r e of a r a m ' s h e a d from palace I V , w h o s e only parallel c o m e s f r o m N u z i . Evidence of Hittite s u p r e m a c y d u r i n g level III is m a n i f e s t e d by d i e basalt slab of a Hittite royal relief s h o w i n g T u d h a l i y a a n d his wife, w h i c h w a s f o u n d i n v e r t e d as a p a v i n g slab in t e m p l e I. Also of this general p e r i o d , b u t c o n s i d e r e d typically N o r t h Syrian, a r e t w o c o r n e s t o n e lion s c u l p t u r e s w i t h t h e h e a d , chest, a n d forelegs carved in d i e r o u n d ; t h e b o d y is r e n d e r e d in relief. M o s t n o t e w o r t h y is a b r o n z e g o d seated o n a n eagle f r o m the level V I I gate a n d a b r o n z e g o d d e s s from t e m p l e V. A ritual spearhead w i t h m o l d e d lions g r i p p i n g d i e b l a d e is c o n sidered to b e of Hittite inspiration. T h i s a n d a c e r e m o n i a l s w o r d with an inlayed hilt a n d a l u n a t e h a n d l e w e r e f o u n d in level I a n d a r e difficult to date. Alalakh's location at d i e h e a r t of t h e ivory t r a d e n e t w o r k is evidenced b y t h e store of e l e p h a n t tusks f o u n d in p a l a c e VII. U s e d primarily for a p p l i q u e or inlay, d i e r a w material was w o r k e d by local craftsmen, a l t h o u g h E g y p t i a n a n d H i t tite inspiration is a p p a r e n t . T h e repertoire of l u x u r y p r o d ucts includes statuettes, toilet b o x e s , a n d bowls f r o m t h e t e m p l e , palace, a n d graves. T h e discovery of faience vessels a n d p o l y c h r o m e glass b e a d s in t h e level V I I t e m p l e a n d palace is c o n s i s t e n t with the M B glass a n d faience i n d u s t r y in Syria a n d Anatolia. [See Glass.] T h e s e p r e c e d e t h e earliest glass vessels a n d t h e
ALALAKH TEXTS first vessels of glazed t e r r a c o t t a f o u n d in level V I . T h e glaze is alkaline, n o t lead, as o n c e t h o u g h t . W o o l l e y ' s d i s c o v e r y of s h e r d s of p o l y c h r o m e , c o r e - f o r m e d glass vessels in level V I m u s t b e cited w i t h c a u t i o n : e x a m p l e s f o u n d o u t s i d e Alalakh d a t e t o d i e mid-fifth c e n t u r y BCE. O t h e r cast o r m o l d e d glass objects
reported
from
level V I ,
notably
a
nude-female
p l a q u e , are in k e e p i n g w i t h e x t e r n a l finds. BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Collon, D o m i n i q u e . The Seal Impressions from Tell Atchana/Alalakh. Al ter Orient u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , 2 7 . Kevelaer, 1975. Comprehensive publication of the seal impressions from Alalakh, with a critical ex amination of their chronological a n d sociological role, combined with an art historical study of style a n d iconography. Collon's dating of level VII is n o w obsolete. Collon, D o m i n i q u e . The Alalakh Cylinder Seals. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 1 3 2 . Oxford, 1982. Valuable cat alog with m u c h information on dating, iconography, a n d distribution included with t h e descriptions in the individual entries. Dietrich, Manfried, a n d Oswald L o r e t z . " D i e Inschrift d e r Statue des Konigs Idrimi von Alalah." Ugarit Forschungen 1 3 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 2 0 1 - 2 6 9 . Oiler, Gary H o w a r d . " T h e A u t o b i o g r a p h y of Idrimi: A N e w T e x t E d i tion with Philological a n d Historical C o m m e n t a r y . " P h . D . diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977. Reedition of the text with a useful s u m m a r y of existing theories o n the inscription a n d a critical eval uation of its historical significance. Smith, Sidney. The Statue of Idri-mi. Occasional Publications of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, n o . 1. L o n d o n , 1949. T h e original translation a n d evaluation of t h e Idrimi inscription, which has been a m e n d e d a n d a u g m e n t e d b y newer readings, notably Oiler ( 1 9 7 7 ) and Dietrich a n d Loretz ( 1 9 8 1 ) . W i s e m a n , D . J. The Alalakh Tablets. Occasional Publications of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, n o . 2. N e w York, 1 9 5 3 . Primary reference work for m o s t of t h e 460 tablets from Alalakh, with a useful introduction a n d synopsis of key developments in p o p ulation, social structure, religion, a n d literature. Additional tablets were published by W i s e m a n in " S u p p l e m e n t a r y Copies of Alalakh T a b l e t s , " Journal of Cuneiform Studies 8 ( 1 9 5 4 ) : 1 - 3 0 . Woolley, C. L e o n a r d . A Forgotten Kingdom. L o n d o n , 1953. P o p u l a r account of t h e excavations. Woolley, C . L e o n a r d . Alalakh: An Account of the Excavations at Tell Atchana in the Hatay, 1937-1949. Oxford, 1955. T h e final publica tion of Woolley's last excavation, an overview of the general results. O n the whole, the chronology is outdated and Woolley's interpre tation of t h e lower strata, in particular, is doubtful. Recent studies on t h e pottery, small finds, a n d glyptic have been frustrated by in adequacies a n d inaccuracies with r e g a r d t o information on findspots, types, a n d quantities. Best u s e d in conjunction with the field notes a n d actual objects. Secondary Sources
59
University of Gothenburg, 20-22 August laSj, edited by Paul Astrom, p p . 60-86. G o t h e n b u r g , 1987. U p d a t e d version of her 1981 work. G o t z e , Albrecht. "Alalah a n d Hittite C h r o n o l o g y . " Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 146 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 2 0 - 2 6 . Heinz, Marlies. Tell Atchana/Alalakh: Die Schichten VII-XVII. Alter Orient u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , 4 1 . Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1992. T h e most recent in-depth investigation of t h e early ceramic assemblage, with a view toward defining its date a n d context. D r a w i n g on comparative material from recent excavations, Heinz proposes adjustments t o Woolley's stratigraphic correlations a n d supports the M B horizon suggested by Mellink a n d others. McClellan, T h o m a s L . " T h e Chronology a n d C e r a m i c Assemblages of Alalakh." In Essays in Ancient Civilization Presented to Helene J. Kantor, edited by Albert L e o n a r d , Jr., a n d Bruce B . Williams, p p . 1 8 1 - 2 1 2 . Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 47. Chicago, 1989. L u c i d discussion of the central issues affecting the chronology of Alalakh, which the author attempts to solve by means of a statis tical analysis of pottery types in various levels. Relying heavily on Woolley's publication, McClellan's results are p e r h a p s less reliable t h a n those of Heinz ( 1 9 9 2 ) , w h i c h are based on her inspection of the actual sherds. See the c o m m e n t s on McClellan by Heinz in Akkadica 83 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 - 2 5 . Smith, Sidney. Alalakh and Chronology. L o n d o n , 1940. T h e basis for the middle chronology, which gained a wide following a n d is still prevalent in textbooks despite t h e faulty synchronisms between t h e kings of Alalakh a n d Babylon. DIANA L . STEIN
A L A L A K H T E X T S . British-led archaeological teams, d i r e c t e d b y C . L e o n a r d W o o l l e y from
1937 to 1939
and
a g a i n from 1946 t o 1949, e x c a v a t e d m o r e t h a n 515 texts a n d f r a g m e n t s a t T e l l ' A t c h a n a , in n o r t h w e s t e r n Syria, t h e site of t h e a n c i e n t city of Alalakh. O f d i e s e v e n t e e n levels of o c c u p a t i o n f o u n d , d a t e d f r o m a b o u t 2400 t o a b o u t 1195 BCE, t w o y i e l d e d nearly all t h e t e x t s : level VII ( m i d - e i g h t e e n t i i mid-seventeenth centuries) synchronized with the First D y n a s t y of B a b y l o n ; a n d level I V (fifteentii c e n t u r y ) s y n c h r o n i z e d w i t h t h e k i n g d o m of M i t a n n i . A l m o s t two h u n d r e d texts d a t e t o level V I I , a b o u t tiiree h u n d r e d t o level I V , a n d a b o u t t w e n t y t o d i e s u c c e e d i n g levels. All b u t a few of t h e t e x t s a r e w r i t t e n in A k k a d i a n c u n e i f o r m o n clay tablets. A letter a n d a l e n g t h y divination t e x t are in H i t t i t e , a n d an i n s c r i p t i o n of K i n g I d r i m i is written in A k k a d i a n o n a s t a t u e (see b e l o w ) . N e a r l y all t h e A k k a d i a n texts w e r e w r i t t e n locally i n a w e s t e r n f o r m of the l a n g u a g e t h a t b e t r a y s a H u r r i a n i n f l u e n c e a n d , to a lesser d e g r e e , of t h e local W e s t S e m i t i c l a n g u a g e s . A few of t h e A k k a d i a n t e x t s w e r e p u b l i s h e d preliminarily b y S i d n e y S m i t i i in 1939. T h e H i t t i t e letter was p u b l i s h e d
Albright, William Foxwell. "Stratigraphic Confirmation of t h e L o w M e s o p o t a m i a n C h r o n o l o g y . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, n o . 1 4 4 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 26--30. Pioneering study of the low chronology, which h a s recently gained favor.
b y H . E h e h o l f in d i e s a m e y e a r . T h e s t a t u e inscription of
Gates, Marie H . C . Alalakh Levels VI and V: A Chronological Reassess ment. S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n Studies, 4.2. M a l i b u , 1 9 8 1 . Novel a p p r o a c h t o t h e dating of Alalakh V I I a n d IV by m e a n s of the L B assemblages of t h e intervening levels VI a n d V , which s u p p o r t the low chronology.
M a r c u s , b y G a r y H . Oiler, a n d b y M a n f r i e d D i e t r i c h a n d
Gates, Marie H . C . "Alalakh a n d C h r o n o l o g y A g a i n . " I n High, Middle, or Low? International Colloquium on Absolute Chronology Held at the
I d r i m i was p u b l i s h e d in a s e p a r a t e v o l u m e b y S m i d i in 1949; it h a s b e e n reedited b y E d w a r d L . G r e e n s t e i n a n d D a v i d
O s w a l d L o r e t z . M o r e t h a n 460 texts w e r e cataloged
and
m o s t of t h e m p u b l i s h e d in a h a n d w r i t t e n c o p y a n d / o r t r a n s literation b y D o n a l d J. W i s e m a n i n a 1 9 5 3 v o l u m e , w h i c h i n c l u d e d Oliver R. G u r n e y ' s t r a n s l i t e r a t i o n of a l e n g t h y H i t tite d i v i n a t i o n r e p o r t , a n d i n a series of s u b s e q u e n t articles.
60
ALALAKH TEXTS
Forty-three additional, fragmentary d o c u m e n t s from level I V were published in transliteration b y Dietrich a n d L o r e t z in three articles a p p e a r i n g in 1969-1970. O n e text, a n a m e list, remains altogether u n p u b l i s h e d . T h e majority of the tablets are held by t h e Antakya M u s e u m in T u r k e y ; m o s t of t h e rest are held by the British M u s e u m . T h e level VII tablets, mainly from the reign of Y a r i m lim and his son A m m i t a q u m , were, for t h e m o s t p a r t , dis covered in tire palace archive a n d in the temple. M o s t of t h e level IV tablets w e r e found in t h e palace of N i q m e p a , b u t outside ± e archive, strewn a b o u t the floors as t h o u g h they w e r e being r e m o v e d to safety at the time the palace was burned. T h e majority of t h e texts are lists: censuses b y n a m e a n d in some cases also b y place a n d occupation; inventories; ra tion lists; landholdings; and others. T w o level I V texts list w o m e n . T h e r e are contracts of t o w n p u r c h a s e s , m a i n l y from level VII, a n d d e e d s of t h e exchange of villages, mainly from level IV. Several contracts, issuing loans or giving credit— m a n y by the king or his agent—take persons as surety, as at N u z i . T h e king serves as magistrate, b u t in level I V h e m u s t also appear as a litigant before t h e M i t a n n i overlord. T h e last king of level IV, Ilimilimma II, a d o p t s a m a n as his "fa t h e r , " providing h i m a son's service in life a n d death in re t u r n for a father's inheritance. A level IV m a r r i a g e contract permits a m a n to designate a son other t h a n the firstborn as principal heir, in a c c o r d a n c e with practices at N u z i a n d Ugarit. T h e p r e s e n c e of parts of t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n lexical series ~HAK-ra=hubullu attests to a Babylonian scribal tra dition. T h e texts furnish an excellent picture of level VII a n d IV societies with r e s p e c t to ethnicity, e c o n o m i c s t r u c t u r e , a n d size. A substantial H u r r i a n sector in level VII b e c o m e s the p r e d o m i n a n t p o p u l a t i o n g r o u p in level IV. T h e latter society is stratified into a small aristocracy, a middle class of "free(d) p e r s o n s , " a n d a heterogeneous lower class, includ ing peasants a n d rootless 'Apiru. I n t h e level VII texts w e find references to a certain A b b a n (or A b b a - ' I l ) , king of the north-central d o m a i n of Y a m h a d , w h o granted Alalakh to his son Yarimlim as p a r t of a division of power to decrease t h e chances of revolt. Y a r i m l i m ' s gifts t o the t e m p l e , apparently u p o n his accession, are also d o c u m e n t e d . T w o treaties governing t h e extradition of fugitives are present in t h e c o r p u s , o n e from level VII a n d a n o t h e r from level IV, In t h e latter treaty t h e H u r r i a n overlord, Barrattarna, oversees the a g r e e m e n t between two vassals, Pilliya, apparently of K i z z u w a t n a (Cilicia) a n d I d r i m i of Ala lakh. T h e p s e u d o a u t o b i o g r a p h y of K i n g Idrimi was inscribed in 104 lines across t h e front of a statue of t h e subject t h a t h a d stood, e n t h r o n e d , in the sanctuary, a n d w a s securely b u r i e d nearby, a p p a r e n t l y to p r o t e c t it from t h e c o m i n g d e struction t h a t took place in level I. T h e text, w h i c h w a s c o m p o s e d in t h e m i d - 1 5 t h century b y a well-known scribe in t h e
palace of Idrimi's son N i q m e p a , p r o v i d e s invaluable histor ical information within a u n i q u e s p e c i m e n of a n c i e n t Syrian narrative prose. Its closest parallels are t h e E g y p t i a n tale of S i n u h e a n d the biblical stories of J a c o b , J o s e p h , M o s e s , a n d D a v i d . It tells h o w I d r i m i , w h o e s c a p e d calamity in his native A l e p p o with his older b r o t h e r s , w e n t o n t o live a m o n g ' A p i r u in n o r t h e r n C a n a a n until he could r e t u r n to t h e l a n d of M u kish and, b y the assent of B a r r a t t a r n a , a s s u m e t h e kingship of Alalakh. T h i s a n d o t h e r level IV Alalakh texts are of particular value, for they illuminate w h a t w o u l d h a v e otherwise b e e n a continuation of the " d a r k a g e " created b y t h e lack of e p igraphic sources for t h e sixteenth c e n t u r y BCE. [See also Akkadian; Alalakh; H u r r i a n s ; and N u z i . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Hess (see below) provides a key to the various primary publications of texts, and these references are not repeated here: Dietrich, Manfried, and Oswald Loretz. " D i e Inschrift der Statue des Konigs Idrmi von Alalah." Ugarit-Forschugen 13 ( 1 9 8 1 , ) : 2 0 1 - 2 6 8 . T h o r o u g h re-edition of t h e inscription based on a new collation with some improvements in interpretation. Draffkorn, Ann. " H u r r i a n s and H u r r i a n at Alalah: A n Ethno-Linguistic Analysis." P h . D . diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1 9 5 9 . T h e most comprehensive investigation of Hurrian n a m e s a n d terminology in the Alalakh texts from levels VII and IV; it has a t e n d e n c y to maxi mize the Hurrian presence and influence where evidence is lacking or ambiguous. D r o w e r , Margaret S. "Syria c. 1 5 5 0 - 1 4 0 0 B . C . " In The Cambridge An cient History, vol. 2, pt. I, History of the Middle East and the Aegean Region c. 1800-1380 B.C., edited by I. E . S. E d w a r d s et al., p p . 4 1 7 - 5 2 5 . 3d ed. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 7 3 . S o u n d interpretation of the his torical context and significance of level IV at Alalakh. T h e reader m u s t follow the bibliographic references for documentation. Greenstein, Edward L., and David M a r c u s . " T h e Akkadian Inscription of Idrimi." Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University 8 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 5 9 - 9 6 . Detailed linguistic and philological c o m mentary, but a few of its suggestions are n o t sustained b y a collation of the text. Hess, Richard S. " A Preliminary List of the Published Alalakh T e x t s . " Ugarit-Forschungen 20 (1988): 6 9 - 8 7 . Catalog of all published texts and fragments, except the Idrimi inscription, with reference to places where h a n d copies, transliterations, and translations m a y be found. T h o r o u g h , but lacks some data. Hess, Richard S. "Observations on S o m e U n p u b l i s h e d Alalakh T e x t s , Probably from Level I V . " Ugarit-Forschungen 24 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 1 3 - 1 1 5 . N o t e 2 provides references to additional transliterations and trans lations of texts, courtesy of N a d a v N a ' a m a n . Klengel, Horst. Ceschichte Syriens im 2. Jahrtausend v.u.Z., vol. 1, Nordsyrien. Berlin, 1 9 6 5 . Comprehensive presentation a n d analysis of the pertinent historical sources, which benefits from c o m p a r i s o n with other, later discussions because of the often difficult n a t u r e of the material. K u p p e r , J.-R. " N o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a and Syria." In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 2, pt. 1, History of the Middle East and the Aegean Region c. 1800-1380 B.C., edited by I. E. S, E d w a r d s , p p . 1 - 4 1 . 3d ed. Cambridge, 1 9 7 3 . S o u n d interpretation of the historical context and significance of the level VII Alalakh texts. T h e reader m u s t fol low the bibliographic references for documentation. Oiler, Gary H. " T h e Autobiography of I d r i m i . " P h . D . diss,, University of Pennsylvania, 1 9 7 7 . Transcription, translation, and interpretation
ALBRIGHT, WILLIAM FOXWELL based on a new collation, with g o o d discussion of historical and lit erary matters. Smith, Sidney. " A Preliminary A c c o u n t of the T a b l e t s from A t c h a n a . " Antiquaries Journal 1 9 . 1 ( 1 9 3 9 ) : 3 8 - 4 8 . Initial sampling of diverse texts, superseded for the m o s t p a r t by later publications. Smith, Sidney. The Statue of Idri-mi. Occasional Publications of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, n o . 1. L o n d o n , 1 9 4 9 . Initial publication of Alalakh's m o s t remarkable text. Still valuable for h a n d copies and p h o t o g r a p h s , b u t m a n y of Smith's readings a n d interpretations have been superseded. W i s e m a n , D o n a l d J., and Richard S. Hess. "Alalakh T e x t 4 5 7 . " UgaritForschungen 26 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 5 0 1 - 5 0 8 . Publication and discussion of this list of personal n a m e s and their geographic locations. Woolley, L e o n a r d . A Forgotten Kingdom. L o n d o n , 1 9 5 3 . Popular, a u thoritative account of Tell ' A t c h a n a and neighboring excavations, providing historical b a c k g r o u n d a n d interpretation. T h e history of level IV Alalakh is distorted b y t h e author's acceptance of Sidney Smith's dating of Idrimi to the end, rather t h a n the beginning, of t h e dynasty. Woolley, L e o n a r d . Alalakh: An Account of the Excavations at Tell At chana in the Hatay, 1937-1949, Oxford, 1 9 5 5 . F u n d a m e n t a l , c o m prehensive excavation report; tire conclusions (especially concerning chronology) m u s t be balanced by later, critical discussions. EDWARD L . GREENSTEIN
ALBRIGHT,
WILLIAM
FOXWELL
(1891-
1971), t h e a c k n o w l e d g e d " d e a n of biblical a r c h a e o l o g y . " B o r n to self-supporting m i s s i o n a r y p a r e n t s in Chile, Al bright g r e w u p in a strict, frugal M e t h o d i s t family as t h e oldest of four boys a n d t w o girls. A t t h e age of five, o n fur lough with his p a r e n t s at his g r a n d m o t h e r ' s Iowa farm, t h e nearsighted William c a u g h t h o l d of a m a c h i n e r o p e t h a t d r e w his left h a n d u p into a pulley, injuring it severely. T h u s h a n d i c a p p e d , the b o y , o n r e t u r n i n g to Chile, a n d u n a b l e t o engage in sports, d e v o u r e d his father's history a n d theology b o o k s . By age eleven he w a n t e d to b e c o m e an archaeologist b u t feared t h a t b y t h e time h e was old e n o u g h everything w o u l d h a v e b e e n discovered. T h e family r e t u r n e d to I o w a in 1903, a n d William at t e n d e d a regular school instead of being t u t o r e d at h o m e . I n 1912 h e was g r a d u a t e d f r o m U p p e r I o w a University a n d spent t h e n e x t year as a t e a c h e r in a n d principal of a h i g h school in M e n n o , S o u t h D a k o t a , a V o l g a - G e r m a n farming c o m m u n i t y . Realizing t h a t h e h a d n o gift for teaching y o u n g pupils, he sent an application t o P a u l H a u p t at J o h n s H o p kins University in B a l t i m o r e , M a r y l a n d . H e enclosed proofs of an article of his u i a t h a d b e e n a c c e p t e d b y a G e r m a n scholarly journal. T h e article dealt with an A k k a d i a n w o r d — h e h a d in college t a u g h t himself A k k a d i a n as well as H e b r e w , a n d k n e w S p a n i s h , F r e n c h , G e r m a n , Latin, a n d Greek. H a u p t g r a n t e d h i m a m o d e s t scholarship t h a t e n abled h i m to begin four years of study in Baltimore t h a t h e was t o pass with brilliance. Albright w o n t h e T h a y e r Fellowship for study in J e r u s a lem b u t w a s u n a b l e to u s e it until t h e e n d of W o r l d W a r I. In 1916, after e a r n i n g his P h . D . , h e received research grants
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a n d t a u g h t in H a u p t ' s Oriental S e m i n a r y at J o h n s H o p k i n s . L a t e in 1918, he e n d u r e d six painful m o n t h s as a clerk in t h e army. R e t u r n e d at last to his beloved books a n d teaching, h e m e t his future wife, R u t h N o r t o n , w h o subsequently e a r n e d h e r P h . D . in Sanskrit literature in t h e Classical S e m inary at H o p k i n s . Albright arrived in J e r u s a l e m at t h e b e g i n n i n g of 1920 for a d e c a d e of fruitful study, teaching, exploration, a n d exca vation. Fie m a d e his h o m e at the A m e r i c a n School of O r i ental R e s e a r c h , n o w t h e W i l l i a m F . Albright Institute of A r chaeological R e s e a r c h , w h e r e h e a n d R u t h N o r t o n w e r e m a r r i e d in 1921. His tiiree b o y h o o d years s p e n t living in t h e A t a c a m a D e s e r t of n o r t h e r n Chile were excellent p r e p a r a tion for life in t h e N e a r East, the place t h a t h a d so early b e c o m e the focus of his interest, study, a n d lifework. U n d e r P a u l H a u p t , Albright h a d b e e n trained in higher criticism a n d a mythological a p p r o a c h to biblical subjects. T h e i m p a c t of being in t h e land of d i e Bible, as h e led his s t u d e n t s o n walking a n d h o r s e b a c k t o u r s , convinced h i m of d i e Bible's basic historicity, c h a n g i n g his focus a n d his writ ing. T h e Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR) was b e g u n t h e s a m e m o n t h h e arrived, a n d for years its m a i n c o n t e n t w a s his r e p o r t s of his explorations a n d excavations, written in a p o p u l a r style to generate in terest a n d s u p p o r t . H e w a s its editor from 1930 t o 1968. Albright first excavated at Tell el-Ful, t h e palace of K i n g Saul at G i b e a h . H e also excavated at T e l l Beit M i r s i m for four seasons (1926-1932), w h i c h h e believed to b e biblical D e b i r (Israeli a n d other scholars prefer n e a r b y K h i r b e t R a b u d ) . T e l l Beit M i r s i m p r o v e d ideal for ascertaining a p o t tery c h r o n o l o g y for w e s t e r n Palestine, as its layers of o c c u p a t i o n w e r e clearly s e p a r a t e d b y destruction levels. Albright's chronology is still s t a n d a r d . F r o m 1929 to 1935, h e also c o n d u c t e d " s h o e s t r i n g " excavations at Bethel a n d Betli-Zur—while c o m m u t i n g half-yearly b e t w e e n Baltimore a n d J e r u s a l e m — a n d later excavated in Soutii Arabia. H e was c h a i r m a n of the O r i e n t a l S e m i n a r y at H o p k i n s from 1929 until his r e t i r e m e n t in 1958. A t H o p l d n s he p r o d u c e d a cadre of scholars w h o b e c a m e specialists in die n u m e r o u s fields in w h i c h this giant h a d p i o n e e r e d a n d m a d e himself expert. Albright published prolifically—his lifetime bibliographic total is m o r e t h a n eleven h u n d r e d books a n d articles. H e received m e d a l s a n d other a w a r d s , a n d a b o u t thirty h o n o r ary doctorates in t h e U n i t e d States a n d in m a n y E u r o p e a n countries. I n 1969, on his last visit, he was given t h e h o n orary title of " W o r t h y [One] of J e r u s a l e m , " w h i c h h a d never before b e e n given to a n o n - J e w . H e h a d played a p a r t in s u c h " r e v o l u t i o n a r y " (his w o r d ) discoveries as t h e Ugaritic tablets (1929) a n d t h e D e a d Sea Scrolls (beginning in 1947) a n d w a s f o u n d i n g coeditor, with D a v i d N o e l F r e e d m a n , of t h e A n c h o r Bible project. Albright died from multiple strokes just a few m o n t h s after celebrating his eightieth b i r t h d a y a n d receiving his final Fest-
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ALBRIGHT INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH
schrift. H e h a d b e e n a legend in his own time, a pioneer archaeologist, a n d a historian of ideas, especially of religion, in t h e ancient N e a r East, a n d truly a genius. [See also A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research; Beit M i r s i m , T e l l ; B e t h - Z u r ; D e a d Sea Scrolls; Historical G e ography; R a b u d , K h i r b e t ; and U g a r i t Inscriptions.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible ( 1 9 3 2 ) , C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1 9 7 4 . Albright, William Foxwell. From the Stone Age to Christianity: Mono theism and the Historical Process, Baltimore, 1940. Albright, William Foxwell. Archaeology and the Religion of Israel. Balti more, 1942. Albright, William Foxwell. History, Archaeology, and Christian Human ism. N e w York, 1 9 6 4 . Albright, William Foxwell. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths. G a r d e n City, N . Y . , 1968. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 122 (April 1 9 5 1 ) : In H o n o r of William Foxwell Albright on His Sixtieth Birth day, M a y 2 4 , 1 9 5 1 (guest editor: E p h r a i m Avigdor Speiser). F r e e d m a n , David N o e l , ed. The Published Works of William Foxwell Albright: A Comprehensive Bibliography. C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1 9 7 5 . Goedicke, H a n s , ed. Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright. Baltimore, 1 9 7 1 . Malamat, A b r a h a m , ed. W. F. Albright Volume. Eretz-Israel, vol. 9. Je rusalem, 1969. R u n n i n g , L e o n a Glidden, and David Noel Freedman. William Foxwell Albright: A Twentieth-Century Genius. N e w York, 1 9 7 5 ; centennial ed., Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 9 1 . Van Beek, G u s W . The Scholarship of William Foxwell Albright: An Ap praisal. Atlanta, 1989. Wright, G. Ernest, ed. The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright. G a r d e n City, N . Y . , 1 9 6 1 . LEONA GLIDDEN RUNNING a n d DAVID NOEL FREEDMAN
ALBRIGHT INSTITUTE OF A R C H A E O LOGICAL R E S E A R C H . T h e W. F . Albright Insti t u t e of Archaeological R e s e a r c h (ALAR) in Jerusalem is t h e oldest A m e r i c a n research center for ancient N e a r E a s t e r n studies in t h e M i d d l e East. F o u n d e d in 1900 as d i e A m e r i c a n School of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A S O R ) by its p a r e n t organi zations—die A m e r i c a n Oriental Society, t h e Society for B i b lical Literature, a n d t h e Archaeological Institute of A m e r i ca—its p u r p o s e was t o create an institutional base in Palestine in which scholars could p u r s u e m o r e efficiently a n d productively their research o n issues relating t o t h e L e vant. I n 1970, u n d e r t h e leadership of t h e n A S O R p r e s i d e n t G . E r n e s t W r i g h t , the school was separately i n c o r p o r a t e d a n d r e n a m e d after its m o s t distinguished director, William Foxwell Albright. T o d a y , ALAR is one of three institutes affiliated with A S O R , t h e others being in A m m a n a n d N i c osia. S u p p o r t for ALAR is provided by its trustees, alumni, a n d a large constituency within t h e A S O R c o n s o r t i u m of 150 institutions. T h e p r e s e n t A I A R facility, constructed in 1925 for
A S O R , is located 500 m e t e r s n o r t h of t h e old walled city of Jerusalem. It is within walking distance of t h e E c o l e Biblique et Archeologique F r a n c a i s e ; t h e British, G e r m a n , a n d S p a n ish Schools of A r c h a e o l o g y ; t h e Institute of Islamic A r c h a e ology; the N e l s o n G l u e c k School of Biblical A r c h a e o l o g y of t h e H e b r e w U n i o n College-Jewish Institute of Religion; t h e H e b r e w University's Institute of A r c h a e o l o g y ; t h e R o c k e feller M u s e u m ; a n d t h e Israel Antiquities A u t h o r i t y . T h i s g r o u p i n g of scholarly resources is an u n p a r a l l e l e d c o n c e n tration of h u m a n , bibliographic, a n d artifactual r e s o u r c e s in N e a r E a s t e r n studies. T h e m a i n objectives of the institute, w i t h its l o n g - s t a n d i n g tradition of a c a d e m i c f r e e d o m a n d excellence in s c h o l a r s h i p , are to provide a c o m p r e h e n s i v e scholarly e n v i r o n m e n t for qualified students a n d scholars in a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t e r n s t u d ies; t o advance t h e study of t h e literature, history, a n d cul t u r e of the ancient N e a r East, w i t h an e m p h a s i s o n t h e dis ciplines of the archaeology of Palestine a n d biblical studies; a n d t o help e d u c a t e d i e n e x t g e n e r a t i o n of A m e r i c a n scholars in ancient N e a r E a s t e r n studies, w i t h an e m p h a s i s o n t h e training of archaeologists. T h e i m p o r t a n c e of A I A R is m e a s u r e d b y its critical c o n tributions t o the d e v e l o p m e n t of d i e discipline of S y r o - P a l estinian archaeology, in particular t h e archaeology of a n cient Israel. T h e s e include a d v a n c e m e n t s in excavation m e t h o d o l o g y , archaeological p e r i o d i z a t i o n , a n d strati g r a p h i c a n d material culture analyses. T h e y also i n c l u d e t h e results of t h e institute's major excavations a n d surveys, its pivotal role in t h e study of t h e D e a d Sea Scrolls, a n d d i e i m p a c t of its distinguished a l u m n i o n t h e fields of a n c i e n t N e a r Eastern, biblical, a n d J u d a i c studies. T h e institute's m o s t p r o d u c t i v e p e r i o d s h a v e b e e n u n d e r its five l o n g - t e r m directors. William Foxwell Albright (1920-1926,1927-1929,1933-1936) is c o n s i d e r e d t h e father of t h e discipline of Palestinian, or biblical, archaeology. Al bright's T e l l Beit M i r s i m excavation r e p o r t s (1932-1943) p r o d u c e d a p o t t e r y dating s e q u e n c e tiiat gave t h e e m e r g i n g field of Palestinian archaeology a chronological f o u n d a t i o n t h a t is still used. T h e framework for tiiis n e w discipline a n d t h e stimulus for its g r o w t h were p r o v i d e d b y Albright's syn thetic volumes o n t h e archaeology of Palestine a n d religion of Israel (1942; 1949), a n d b y his seminal articles o n H e b r e w a n d P h o e n i c i a n epigraphy. N e l s o n G l u e c k (1932-1933,1936-1940,1942-1947) i d e n tified m o r e tiian 1,000 sites in his survey of T r a n s j o r d a n a n d p r o d u c e d t h e first scientific d e m o g r a p h i c syntiiesis of M o a b , A m m o n , a n d E d o m , p u b l i s h e d in four v o l u m e s ( 1 9 3 4 1951). T h i s is still a p r i m a r y textbook of t h e a r c h a e o l o g y of J o r d a n , as is his v o l u m e o n t h e N a b a t e a n s (1966), b a s e d o n his excavation of K h i r b e t e t - T a n n u r . P a u l L a p p (1961-1965) m a d e a major c o n t r i b u t i o n to t h e s t u d y of Palestinian p o t t e r y in his p i o n e e r i n g v o l u m e o n t h e L a t e Hellenistic a n d Early R o m a n p e r i o d s (1961). Also, his excavations at ' I r a q el-Amir, T e l l e r - R u m e i t h , W a d i e d - D a -
ALEPPO c
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liyeh, D h a h r M i r z b a n e h , T e l l el-Ful, a n d T e l l T a a n a c h p r o d u c e d significant results for t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages a n d t h e Hellenistic a n d Early R o m a n p e r i o d s .
front of archaeological a n d historical scholarship in t h e M i d dle East. It is this tradition t h a t h a s m a d e t h e Albright I n stitute a r e n o w n e d international research center.
William G . D e v e r ( i 971-1975) is best k n o w n for his w o r k at T e l l G e z e r a n d o n t h r e e of t h e G e z e r r e p o r t v o l u m e s (1970-1986). H i s l o n g - t e r m r e s e a r c h projects a n d publica tions o n d i e material culture of t h e Early B r o n z e IV ( M i d d l e B r o n z e I) p e r i o d , die c h r o n o l o g y of M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e II, d i e L a t e B r o n z e II/Iron I transition, a n d his integrative stud ies e m p h a s i z i n g n e w directions in archaeology h a v e b e c o m e a major focus of s t u d y in t h e a r c h a e o l o g y of ancient Israel. C o n t i n u i n g o n e of Albright's legacies, D e v e r has t r a i n e d m a n y of t h e n e w g e n e r a t i o n of A m e r i c a n archaeologists presently w o r k i n g in t h e M i d d l e East.
[See also A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research; Biblical A r c h a e o l o g y ; and the biographies of Albright, Glueck, and Lapp. In addition, all sites mentioned are the subject of inde pendent entries.]
T h e A I A R ' s c u r r e n t director, S e y m o u r Gitin, a p p o i n t e d in 1980, was a s t u d e n t of b o t h G l u e c k ' s a n d D e v e r ' s a n d is k n o w n for his publications o n t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE at Tell G e z e r (1990) a n d o n t h e I r o n II p e r i o d at T e l M i q n e / E k r o n (1981-1995). B a s e d o n t h e w o r k of his p r e d e c e s s o r s , he h a s built a n extensive p r o g r a m t h a t offers p r e - a n d p o s t doctoral researchers multicultural experiences s p a n n i n g t h e b r o a d s p e c t r u m of N e a r E a s t e r n studies. T h e p r o g r a m p r o vides a u n i q u e o p p o r t u n i t y for t h e e x c h a n g e of ideas b e tween t h e forty a n n u a l A I A R a p p o i n t e e s , primarily from N o r t h A m e r i c a a n d E u r o p e , a n d h u n d r e d s of researchers living a n d working in Israel a n d in o t h e r countries in d i e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n basin. F o r m a n y , i n c l u d i n g Palestin ian a n d foreign scholars w o r k i n g in A r a b countries, t h e i n stitute is their p r i m a r y c o n t a c t w i t h colleagues in Israel. T h e p r o g r a m , w h i c h annually involves m o r e t h a n three t h o u s a n d s p a r t i c i p a n t s , includes a series of eighty lectures, r e p o r t s , s e m i n a r s , w o r k s h o p s , field trips (local a n d a b r o a d ) a n d social events, a n d s u p p o r t for t w e n t y - o n e ASOR-affiliated excavation a n d p u b l i c a t i o n projects, a m o n g w h i c h are the l o n g - t e r m projects at A s h k e l o n , C a e s a r e a , L a h a v , S e p phoris, a n d t h e institute's excavation at T e l M i q n e / E k r o n , jointly s p o n s o r e d w i t h t h e I n s t i t u t e of A r c h a e o l o g y of t h e H e b r e w University of Jerusalem. T h e A I A R also has a p u b lications p r o g r a m , a n extensive r e s e a r c h library, l a b o r a t o ries, a n d living a c c o m m o d a t i o n s for thirty-four p e o p l e . T o further e x p a n d the s c o p e of interregional scholarly collaboration, A I A R recentiy initiated a n international r e search project, " T h e N e o - A s s y r i a n E m p i r e in d i e S e v e n t h C e n t u r y BC: A S t u d y of t h e I n t e r a c t i o n s b e t w e e n C e n t e r a n d P e r i p h e r y . " D e s i g n e d t o investigate t h e g r o w t h a n d devel o p m e n t of d i e Assyrian E m p i r e , its p a r t i c i p a n t s include r e searchers w h o have w o r k e d o n C y p r u s a n d in E g y p t , G r e e c e , Iran, Iraq, Israel, J o r d a n , S p a i n , Syria, a n d T u r k e y . T h e institute h a s also created a l o n g - t e r m joint research, lecture, field t r i p , a n d fellowship p r o g r a m w i t h t h e A m e r i c a n School of Classical Studies a t A t i i e n s , a p r o g r a m it p l a n s to e x t e n d to o t h e r A m e r i c a n r e s e a r c h centers in t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n basin. F o r almost o n e h u n d r e d years, A I A R h a s b e e n at d i e fore
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell, ed. The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim. 4 vols. A n n u a l of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 2 , 1 3 , 17, 21/22. N e w Haven, 1932-1943. Albright, William Foxwell. Archaeology and the Religion of Israel. Balti more, 1942. Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine. H a r m o n d s worth, 1 9 4 9 . D e v e r , William G . , et al. Gezer I: Preliminary Report of the 1964-66 Seasons. Jerusalem, 1970. D e v e r , William G . , et al. Gezer II: Preliminary Report of the 1967-70 Seasons in Field I and II. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 4 . Dever, William G . , et al. Gezer IV: The 1969-71 Seasons in Field VI, the "Acropolis. " J e r u s a l e m , 1986. Gitin, Seymour. " T e l M i q n e - E k r o n : A T y p e - S i t e for the Inner Coastal Plain in the Iron Age II P e r i o d . " In Recent Excavations in Israel: Stud ies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited by Seymour Gitin and William G . Dever. A n n u a l of the American Schools of Oriental Research 49 (1989), pp. 23-58. Gitin, Seymour. Gezer III: A Ceramic Typology of the Late Iron II, Per sian, and Hellenistic Periods at Tell Gezer. Jerusalem, 1990. Gitin, Seymour, ed. Tel Miqne (Ekron) Excavation Project. 6 vols. Jeru salem, 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 9 5 . Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. 4 vols. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 4 , 1 5 , 18/19, 25/28. N e w Haven, 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 5 1 . Glueck, Nelson. Deities and Dolphins: The Stoiy of the Nabataens. L o n d o n , 1966. K i n g , Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. L a p p , Paul W . Palestinian Ceramic Chronology, 200 B.C.-A.D. 70. N e w Haven, 1961. SEYMOUR GITIN
A L E P P O (Ar., H a l a b ) , t h e s e c o n d largest city in Syria, located in d i e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e c o u n t r y (40°i2' N , 38°68' 5" E ) . It has b e e n o c c u p i e d since r e m o t e antiquity a n d p l a y e d a very i m p o r t a n t role in N e a r E a s t e r n history d u r i n g t h e second millennium BCE. It is likely t h a t A l e p p o has existed since at least d i e Early B r o n z e A g e , a l t h o u g h t h e e v i d e n c e is indirect and uncertain. E x c a v a t i o n s of a small site in t h e soudiwest p a r t of m o d e r n A l e p p o (al-Ansari) e x p o s e d Early B r o n z e IV levels a n d s h o w at least t h a t t h e outskirts of d i e area w e r e occupied in d i e latter p a r t of t h e m i l l e n n i u m (see A n t o i n e Suleiman, " E x c a v a t i o n s at A n s a r i - A l e p p o for t h e Seasons 1973-1980: Early a n d M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e s , " Akkadica 40 [1984]: 1-16; a n d idem., "Fouilles d'Alep ( A l - A n s a r i ) , " Syria 62 [1985]: 135). A l e p p o m a y b e m e n t i o n e d u n d e r t h e n a m e H a l a m in tablets from Ebla a n d Early D y n a s t i c M a r i (see W . G . L a m -
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ALEPPO
bert, " H a l a m , Il-Halam a n d A l e p p o , " Mart: Annates de Recherches Interdisciplinaires 6 [1990]: 641-643.). D u r i n g the first half of t h e second millennium, A l e p p o was t h e capital of d i e i m p o r t a n t state of Y a m h a d , w h i c h played a leading role in the political d e v e l o p m e n t of n o r t h ern Syria and U p p e r M e s o p o t a m i a . D u r i n g t h e eighteenth century BCE, Y a m h a d was t h e m o s t powerful state in Syria and could resist die expansionist attempts of S h a m s h i - A d a d I of Assyria. T h e Hittites, w h o rose to p o w e r in Anatolia d u r i n g t h e seventeenth c e n t u r y BCE, referred to Y a m h a d as having a " g r e a t k i n g s h i p . " A l e p p o p r o s p e r e d until t h e o p e n ing years of die sixteenth c e n t u r y BCE, w h e n Mursili I of Hatti attacked a n d d e s t t o y e d d i e city. D u r i n g die L a t e B r o n z e Age, A l e p p o no longer held its previous, d o m i n a n t position; instead, it b e c a m e a strategic p a w n in the imperial conflicts b e t w e e n H a t t i a n d M i t a n n i over t h e control of n o r t h e r n Syria, eventually c o m i n g firmly u n d e r Hittite rule. D u r i n g t h e first millennium BCE, A l e p p o a p p e a r s to have b e e n r e d u c e d to political insignificance, b u t it retained its ancient religious status as a major center of t h e worship of H a d a d , t h e s t o r m god. I n the early third c e n t u r y BCE, Seleucus I N i c a t o r settled a colony of M a c e d o n i a n s at A l e p p o , r e n a m e d it Beroea, a n d rebuilt d i e t o w n as a Hellenistic city, probably with a s q u a r ish city wall a n d rectilinear streets, some of which can still be discerned in die c u r r e n t layout of d i e " O l d C i t y . " Evi d e n c e for the R o m a n period is extremely slim, b u t t h e city is likely to have p r o s p e r e d , as did m o s t of n o r t h e r n Syria, a k h o u g h n o t as a major city. A l e p p o r e m a i n e d a s e c o n d a r y city u n d e r the s h a d o w of Antioch until t h e latter was d e
ALEPPO.
Figure
stroyed in 539/40 CE. It is likely t h a t A l e p p o b e g a n to develop into a major trade center at this point. I n 636 CE, A l e p p o c a m e u n d e r M u s l i m control, a n d in t h e early eighth c e n t u y CE, a major m o s q u e w a s built b y either al-Walid I (r. 705-715) or his successor, S u l a y m a n (r. 7 1 5 - 7 1 7 ) . Unfortunately, n o n e of this m o s q u e h a s sur vived t h e several d e s t r u c t i o n s a n d disasttous fires t h a t befell it. Following t h e d e m i s e of t h e U m a y y a d d y n a s t y in t h e m i d eighth century, A l e p p o , like m o s t of Syria, slipped into a d e e p decline, from w h i c h it did n o t r e c o v e r until t h e twelfth century. B e c a u s e t h e city has b e e n continuously o c c u p i e d for m i l lennia, little archaeological work h a s b e e n d o n e in A l e p p o . It is n o t yet certain w h e r e t h e earliest o c c u p a t i o n of t h e t o w n actually occurred, a l t h o u g h m o s t scholars believe t h a t a tell in t h e western p a r t of the c u r r e n t O l d City, called e l - ' A q a b e , represents t h e original settlement. It is a s s u m e d t h a t t h e site e x p a n d e d eventually to include t h e h i g h hill n o w o c c u p i e d by t h e great medieval citadel (see figure 1 ) . L i m i t e d exca vations early in this c e n t u r y b y G . Ploix de R o t r o u o n t h e citadel showed t h a t this h i g h hill was o c c u p i e d at least b y the first m i l l e n n i u m BCE. T h e excavators f o u n d t h e wall of a major public building, along with o r n a m e n t e d o r t h o s t a t s , t w o basalt lions, a n d a relief sculpture d a t i n g to t h e nintii/ eighth centuries BCE. R e m a i n s of the Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s are few. As m e n t i o n e d above, d i e area east a n d s o u t h of t h e tell, el' A q a b e , preserves d i e lines of t h e rectilineal streets of t h e Hellenistic city. T h e streets divided t h e area into r e c t a n g u l a r blocks roughly 48 m n o r t h - s o u t h a n d 124 m e a s t - w e s t , t h e
1. Medieval citadel. (Courtesy W . T . Pitard)
ALEXANDRIA typical a r r a n g e m e n t in cities f o u n d e d d u r i n g t h e Seleucid period. N o t h i n g of t h e original city wall h a s b e e n f o u n d , b u t scholars have generally t h o u g h t t h a t t h e p r e s e r v e d medieval wall r u n s along t h e ancient line. N o building r e m a i n s of t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s h a v e b e e n r e c o v e r e d o n t h e citadel hill, a l t h o u g h n u m e r o u s small finds indicate a s u b stantial o c c u p a t i o n t h e r e d u r i n g this t i m e . D u r i n g t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d t h e city e x p a n d e d outside t h e old walls, a n d r e c o r d s m e n t i o n t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of sev eral c h u r c h e s . H o w e v e r , r e m a i n s of only o n e c h u r c h survive, the city's s u m p t u o u s a n d beautiful cathedral, located jtist s o u t h of w h e r e t h e great m o s q u e w a s eventually built a n d the madrasah Halawiyeh, a n Islamic school, n o w stands. A few vestiges of t h e G r e a t S y n a g o g u e built d u r i n g this p e r i o d b y A l e p p o ' s t h e n large a n d p r o s p e r o u s Jewish c o m m u n i t y h a v e also survived. N o o v e r w h e l m i n g changes t o o k place in t h e city d u r i n g t h e U m a y y a d period. Its m o s t significant building w a s , of course, t h e G r e a t M o s q u e , w h o s e c o n s t r u c t i o n b e g a n in a b o u t 7 1 5 . It is n o t certain w h e t h e r Caliph al-Walid or his successor S u l a y m a n actually i n a u g u r a t e d t h e project. Al t h o u g h n o n e of the original exists, r e c o r d s s h o w m a t it was built o n t h e s a m e general p l a n as t h e G r e a t M o s q u e of D a m a s c u s , b u t o n a m o r e m o d e s t scale. F r o m t h e m i d - e i g h t h until t h e mid-twelfth c e n t u r y , A l e p p o suffered a significant decline. R e p a i r s were m a d e to t h e major structures of earlier p e r i o d s , b u t little n e w devel o p m e n t took place i n t h e city. BIBLIOGRAPHY G a u b e , H e i n z , a n d E u g e n Wirth. Aleppo: Historische und geographische Beitrage zur baulichen Gestaltung, zur sozialen Organisation und zur wirtschaftlichen Dynamik einer vorderasiatischen Femhandelsmelropole. Beihefte z u m T u b i n g e r Atlas des V o r d e r e n Orients, 58. W i e s b a d e n , 1984. Excellent study of the city; a very different interpretation of its growth from the Hellenistic t h r o u g h Byzantine periods from that of Sauvaget (see below). Klengel, Horst. Geschichte Syriens im 2. jfahrtausendv.u.Z. Teili-Nordsyrien. Berlin, 1 9 6 5 . By far the best (though n o w somewhat dated) study of the city during its early p e r i o d of greatness. Chapters 7 - 1 0 deal with Aleppo during the s e c o n d millennium BCE. Klengel, Horst. Syria: 3000 to 300 B.C. A Handbook of Political History. Berlin, 1 9 9 2 . A less detailed, b u t m o r e current study. See especially chapter 2. Sauvaget, Jean. Alep: Essai sur le diveloppemenl d'une grande ville syrienne, des origines an milieu de XIXe si'ecle. Paris, 1 9 4 1 . Classic study of the city, which should now b e read in conjunction with t h e volume by G a u b e a n d Wirth. Because of t h e meager evidence for the early periods, Sauvaget d e p e n d s heavily o n parallels from other Syrian cities. W A Y N E T . PITARD
A L E X A N D R I A , city i n E g y p t , t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t of m a n y b y t h a t n a m e f o u n d e d b y A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t (d. 3 2 3 BCE) . Alexandria ( G k . , Alexandreia) w a s built o n a ridge of land b e t w e e n the M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea a n d L a k e M a r e o t i s at
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t h e western e n d of t h e N i l e D e l t a ( 3 i ° i 2 ' N , 29°53' E ) , w h e r e there was already a native E g y p t i a n village, Rhakotis. Rhakotis was t h e n a m e given to t h e q u a r t e r of die city o c c u p i e d chiefly b y native E g y p t i a n s a n d w a s later retained as a designation for t h e city as a w h o l e in C o p t i c sources (Rakote, R a k o t i ) . Its m o d e r n A r a b i c n a m e is el-Iskandariya. H i s t o r y . Alexandria w a s f o u n d e d in t h e spring of 331 BCE. Its first architect was D e i n o k r a t e s of R h o d e s ; K l e o m e n e s of N a u k r a t i s w a s its first g o v e r n o r . I n 323 E g y p t c a m e u n d e r t h e rule of t h e M a c e d o n i a n P t o l e m y I Soter, w h o h a d b e e n a general a n d c o m p a n i o n of Alexander. T h e city b e c a m e t h e capital of P t o l e m a i c E g y p t a n d quicldy p r o s p e r e d , even tually b e c o m i n g the cultural a n d educational center of t h e Hellenistic world. A m u l t i e t h n i c city, Alexandria b e c a m e t h e h o m e of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t Jewish c o m m u n i t y of t h e D i aspora (Jews living outside of Palestine). L a t e r , from t h e third t o d i e fifth centuries CE, the Alexandrian c h u r c h was t h e leading intellectual a n d theological center of C h r i s t e n dom. Alexandria c a m e u n d e r R o m a n rule in 30 BCE. After a series of disasters—riots a n d p o g r o m s against t h e Jews in 38 a n d 66 CE; d i e Jewish revolt of 1 1 5 - 1 1 7 ; a n d attacks o n t h e city b y Caracalla in 215, A u r e l i a n in 273, a n d Diocletian in 295—the city declined in p o p u l a t i o n a n d in area. F u r t h e r devastation w a s visited o n t h e city b y d i e Persians in 617 a n d b y t h e A r a b s in 641, after w h i c h E g y p t as a whole c a m e u n d e r M u s l i m A r a b rule. Alexandria was t h e n eclipsed b y t h e n e w A r a b capital at F u s t a t (Old Cairo) a n d by t h e m a r itime city of R a s h i d (Rosetta) o n d i e m o u t h of t h e western b a n k of t h e Nile. I n 1798 N a p o l e o n a n d his forces e n c o u n tered Alexandria as a small village of a few tiiousand i n h a b itants. T h e city's m o d e r n d e v e l o p m e n t b e g a n u n d e r M u h a m m a d 'Ali (1805-1848), a n d it is n o w a major city with a p o p u l a t i o n estimated as h i g h as four million. T o p o g r a p h y . T h e d o m i n a n t geographical feature of Al e x a n d r i a was die bay f o r m e d b y a p r o m o n t o r y called L o chias ( m o d e r n Silsila), p r o t e c t e d b y t h e island of P h a r o s off shore. A dike joining t h e island to d i e m a i n l a n d , t h e H e p t a s t a d i o n (Gk., " s e v e n s t a d e s " l o n g ) , built soon after d i e city's f o u n d i n g , divided t h e bay into t w o m a i n h a r b o r s . T h i s su-ucture has silted u p over t h e centuries; b y N a p o leon's time t h e city's p o p u l a t i o n was c o n c e n t r a t e d o n t h e resulting l a n d area. T h e b e s t a n d m o s t extensive description of Alexandria at d i e e n d of d i e P t o l e m a i c p e r i o d is that of Strabo in b o o k 17 of his Geography, w h i c h w a s b a s e d o n p e r s o n a l observations m a d e d u r i n g a residence a b o u t 24-20 BCE. Strabo begins his description b y giving t h e d i m e n s i o n s of t h e city. 30 stades (5.5 k m or 3.5 mi.) in length (east-west) a n d approximately 8 stades (1.5 k m or 1 mi.) in w i d t h ( n o r t h - s o u t h ) . Of t h e wide streets intersecting t h e city, t h e two b r o a d e s t cut o n e a n o t h e r at right angles ( 1 7 . 1 . 8 ) . T h e long o n e , Via C a n o p i c a ( c o r r e s p o n d i n g roughly to t h e m o d e r n Sharia el-PIorreya) r a n from d i e necropolis (cemetery) in t h e west to t h e C a -
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n o p i c G a t e in the east. Strabo reports that u p to a third of t h e city consisted of an area called t h e Palaces, r e s p l e n d e n t with beautiful buildings, t h e m o s t p r o m i n e n t of which w e r e t h e M o u s e i o n ( p r e s u m a b l y including the famous L i b r a r y ) a n d d i e S e m a (die t o m b of Alexander and s o m e of his s u c cessors). C o n c e n t r a t e d o n a n d n e a r C a p e Lochias was a smaller p a r t of the Palaces n e i g h b o r h o o d called t h e inner palaces (17.1.9). Strabo t h e n describes t h e city as one w o u l d e n c o u n t e r it sailing into t h e " g r e a t " (eastern) harbor. T o t h e right lay P h a r o s with its f a m o u s lightiiouse (one of the seven w o n d e r s of t h e ancient w o r l d ) . T o the left w e r e the reefs a n d p r o m ontory of Lochias with its royal palace a n d private royal h a r bor. O p p o s i t e that h a r b o r was A n t i r r h o d o s , a n island with a palace a n d a n o t h e r small harbor. T h e T h e a t e r o c c u p i e d a p r o m i n e n t place o n t h e m a i n l a n d above. A n elbow of land e x t e n d e d from t h e s h o r e o n which was a t e m p l e of P o s e i d o n . F r o m there M a r k A n t o n y h a d e x t e n d e d a m o l e or break water o u t into t h e h a r b o r , w h e r e o n an artificial island h e built a palace, the T i m o n i u m ( 1 7 . 1 . 9 ) . Structures furtiier west included the C a e s a r i u m , w h i c h w a s a temple b e g u n b y Cleopatra VII for Julius Caesar a n d completed as a t e m p l e dedicated to A u g u s t u s . N e a r b y w e r e the E m p o r i u m (market) with its warehouses a n d ship build ings extending as far as t h e H e p t a s t a d i o n . B e y o n d lay t h e western harbor, t h e E u n o s t o s (now t h e m a i n h a r b o r of Al exandria) within which was a smaller harbor, t h e K i b o t o s , u s e d for Nile traffic a n d c o n n e c t e d to a canal leading t o L a k e M a r e o t i s . A necropolis lay outside die city to t h e west. W i t h i n the city east of the canal w e r e the S e r a p e u m ( t e m p l e of t h e god Serapis) a n d other sanctuaries. In the central p a r t of t h e city were t h e G y m n a s i u m , a center for athletic training a n d education, which was situ ated o n Via C a n o p i c a , a n d t h e P a n e i o n (a sanctuary of t h e god P a n ) o n a hill nearby. Outside of the C a n o p i c G a t e t o the east lay the H i p p o d r o m e (racetrack) a n d b e y o n d that, 5.5 k m (3.5 mi.) from Alexandria, the s u b u r b Nikopolis founded b y A u g u s t u s in c o m m e m o r a t i o n of his victory over M a r k A n t o n y and C l e o p a t r a (17.1.10). A b s e n t from S t t a b o ' s a c c o u n t is any m e n t i o n of t h e city's walls, t h e older eastern necropoleis, the fortified acropolis, t h e city's agora, assorted other p u b l i c buildings a n d t e m p l e s , a n d its division into five quarters n a m e d for the first five letters of the G r e e k alphabet, details k n o w n from o t h e r a n cient sources. Philo reports that two of t h e " l e t t e r s " were p r e d o m i n a n t i y Jewish (Flaccus, 55). A r c h a e o l o g i c a l H i s t o r y . Alexandria presents d a u n t i n g p r o b l e m s for t h e archaeologist, b e c a u s e of geological factors a n d t h e results of u r b a n d e v e l o p m e n t since t h e n i n e t e e n t h century. Because t h e coastal area of t h e city has subsided s o m e 4 m (15.7 ft.) over t h e centuries, t h e ancient structures along die coast h a v e b e e n swallowed u p b y t h e sea, leaving only foundations s o m e t i m e s visible b e n e a t h t h e surface. T h i s subsidence plus intensive building activity, with m u c h
cutting a n d filling, h a s resulted in d i e virtual obliteration of t h e c o n t o u r s of t h e ancient city. N u m e r o u s a n c i e n t s t r u c tures were d e m o l i s h e d at t h e t i m e of the c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e corniche ( c o m p l e t e d in 1906), a n d t h e p r e s e n t coastiine fac ing die h a r b o r s is c o m p l e t e l y artificial. T h e first m o d e r n archaeological excavation of any c o n s e q u e n c e was carried o u t b y M a h m u d Bey " e l - F a l a k i , " c o u r t a s t t o n o m e r of K h e d i v e Ismail, w h o s e goal w a s to p r e p a r e a m a p of t h e a n c i e n t city. O n t h e basis of m a n y s o u n d ings M a h m u d Bey p r e p a r e d a p l a n of t h e a n c i e n t streets a n d walls, published in 1872, w h i c h is still in u s e t o d a y . U n f o r tunately, he h a d n o qualifications as a n archaeologist, a n d t h e accuracy of his w o r k h a s often b e e n q u e s t i o n e d . W h e r e m o d e r n excavations h a v e confirmed t h e existence of s o m e of his streets, for e x a m p l e , at K o m el-Dik, these t u r n o u t to belong to d i e late R o m a n period. T h e i r orientation differs in t h e m a i n from t h e streets of t h e P t o l e m a i c era. Scientific excavations b e g a n with t h e a p p o i n t m e n t of G i u s e p p e Botti in 1891 to t h e directorship of t h e newly f o r m e d G r e c o - R o m a n M u s e u m . H i s work in d i e city a n d in t h e a n cient necropoleis w a s p u b l i s h e d in n u m e r o u s m o n o g r a p h s a n d in several v o l u m e s of the Bulletin de la Societe (royaie) archeologique d'Alexandrie. U l e
I n 1895, E g y p t E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d of L o n d o n sent D . G . H o g a r t h , E. F . B e n s o n , a n d E . R. B e v a n to A l e x a n d r i a to carry o u t s o m e excavations in t h e city a n d in d i e eastern cemeteries. H o g a r t h ' s r e p o r t was very pessimistic, c o n c l u d ing tiiat t h e city's greatest m o n u m e n t s s t o o d w i t h i n d i e area covered by the o c c u p i e d q u a r t e r s of Alexandria (then r e centiy built) or b y t h e e n c r o a c h i n g sea, e x c e p t for t h e Ser a p e u m then u n d e r excavation b y Botti. H e expressed d o u b t s as to t h e possibility of r e a c h i n g P t o l e m a i c levels o w i n g to t h e rise of t h e w a t e r table resulting f r o m d i e city's subsi d e n c e . H o g a r d i advised against any furtiier work b y foreign societies in Alexandria, advice fortunately n o t h e e d e d . A G e r m a n expedition s p o n s o r e d b y E r n s t v o n Sieglin w o r k e d in Alexandria from 1898 t o 1902. Botti was s u c c e e d e d b y Evaristo Breccia ( c u r a t o r of d i e m u s e u m , 1904-1933), w h o e x p a n d e d u p o n Botti's efforts. Achille Adriani followed Breccia i n 1932 (curator, 1933-1939; 1947-1953). Adriani's directorship of t h e m u s e u m was i n t e r r u p t e d d u r i n g d i e war years, w h e n Alan R o w e served as c u r a t o r (1941-1947) a n d w o r k e d d u r i n g t h a t time o n the S e r a p e u m hill a n d at t h e K o m el-Shogafa n e cropolis nearby. A p a r t from d i e excavation of d i e S e r a p e u m a n d d i e n e cropoleis of Alexandria, m u c h of t h e archaeological w o r k in t h e city until i960 consisted of narrowly confined s o u n d i n g s or salvage w o r k c o n n e c t e d with i n n u m e r a b l e b u i l d i n g p r o j ects. T h e m a n y artifacts t h a t h a v e t u r n e d u p are h o u s e d mainly in t h e G r e c o - R o m a n M u s e u m . U n f o r t u n a t e l y m u c h has also b e e n destroyed. T h e m o s t extensive archaeological p r o j e c t ever m o u n t e d in Alexandria is t h a t of d i e Polish C e n t e r of M e d i t e r r a n e a n
ALEXANDRIA Archaeology in t h e K o m el-Dik n e i g h b o r h o o d , virtually in t h e center of t h e city. T h e e x c a v a t i o n s b e g a n u n d e r K a z i m ierz M i c h a l o w s k i in i960 a n d a r e o n g o i n g . A late R o m a n theater discovered in 1964 h a s b e e n r e s t o r e d a n d n o w serves as t h e centerpiece of a n archaeological p a r k (see figure 1 ) . O t h e r finds at K o m el-Dik i n c l u d e a large b a t h c o m p l e x ( s e c o n d - s i x t h c e n t u r y C E ) , a g r o u p of early R o m a n h o u s e s , a s e c o n d - c e n t u r y school b u i l d i n g , a n d a p a r t of a P t o l e m a i c pavement. It h a s n o t b e e n possible t o o b t a i n a c o m p l e t e stratigraphic r e c o r d of t h e city's archaeological history a p a r t from the p a r tial results o b t a i n e d at isolated locations. C o n t r a r y to H o garth's e x p e c t a t i o n s , h o w e v e r , P t o l e m a i c levels h a v e b e e n identified, principally at four areas. I n a d d i t i o n t o d i e finds at K o m el-Dik, t h r e e areas associated w i t h t h e ancient royal q u a r t e r h a v e b e e n e x c a v a t e d : (1) several sites in d i e area a r o u n d t h e g o v e r n m e n t h o s p i t a l , (2) n e a r d i e M e d i c a l F a c ulty of t h e University of A l e x a n d r i a , a n d , m o s t recentiy, (3) at t h e site of d i e n e w Alexandria L i b r a r y , opposite Silsila. I n addition, P t o l e m a i c f o u n d a t i o n s h a v e b e e n f o u n d just s o u t h of H o r r e y a Street, n e a r K o m el-Dik. F a r t h e r west along d i e s a m e street f o u n d a t i o n s of a t e m p l e of Sarapis a n d Isis (identified as s u c h b y a n inscription of P t o l e m y I V a n d Q u e e n A r s i n o e III) w e r e f o u n d already i n 1895, b u t tiiis find was n o t associated with a scientific archaeological excava tion. T h e only s t r u c t u r e m e n t i o n e d b y S t r a b o t h a t h a s so far b e e n confirmed archaeologically is t h e S e r a p e u m ( G k . , S e r a p e i o n ) . L o c a t e d i n d i e R h a k o t i s district ( m o d e r n K h a r m u z ) , it is a t e m p l e t h a t also served as a d a u g h t e r library t o
67
t h e M o u s e i o n . I t is n o w covered over b y a hillock d o m i n a t e d b y a c o l u m n 26.85 m (88 ft.) high referred t o erroneously as " P o m p e y ' s Pillar"—it w a s actually dedicated t o E m p e r o r Diocletian (see figure 2). T h e S e r a p e u m was excavated first b y G i u s e p p i Botti (1894-1896) a n d t h e n b y Alan R o w e (1943-1945,1956). E x c a v a t i o n s revealed evidence of a m a jor P t o l e m a i c t e m p l e built b y P t o l e m y III, a n d possibly a n earlier o n e built b y P t o l e m y I. T h e s e structures were e n closed within a m u c h larger s a n c t u a r y built in t h e early R o m a n p e r i o d . T h e sack of t h e S e r a p e u m b y Christians in 391 a p p a r e n t l y did n o t result in d i e t e m p l e ' s c o m p l e t e d e s t r u c tion at t h a t time, c o n t r a r y t o a n often-repeated claim. T h e P h a r o s t o w e r a n d lighthouse, w h i c h w a s built early in t h e third century BCE, w a s severly d a m a g e d b y a n e a r t h q u a k e in 956 CE a n d i n c u r r e d further d a m a g e by s u b s e q u e n t earthquakes. By d i e fourteentii c e n t u r y it w a s in ruins. I n 1480 Sultan Ashraf Qait B e y built a fortress u p o n its f o u n dations. T r a c e s of t h e t e m p l e of Isis P h a r i a ( n o t m e n t i o n e d b y Strabo) a n d a colossal statue of Isis h a v e b e e n found b y divers off t h e n o r t h coast of P h a r o s n e a r t h e Qait Bey fort. S t r u c t u r e s associated with A n t i r r h o d o s a n d M a r k A n t o n y ' s T i m o n i u m h a v e b e e n s p o t t e d b y divers in t h e eastern H a r b o r , b u t n o u n d e r w a t e r excavations have b e e n carried o u t t h e r e as yet. N o r e m a i n s of t h e H e p t a s t a d i o n have b e e n identified, n o r is its exact location k n o w n . A s for t h e famous M o u s e i o n a n d S e m a , n o trace of these m o n u m e n t s h a s b e e n f o u n d . T h e r e is a long-standing b u t u n c o n f i r m e d r u m o r t o t h e effect t h a t Alexander's t o m b is located u n d e r t h e m o s q u e of N e b i D a n i e l , n e a r K o m el-Dik. O n t h e other h a n d , s o m e h a v e argued unconvincingly d i a t
ALEXANDRIA. F i g u r e 1. Late Roman theater. F o u r t h - s i x t h c e n t u r y CE. (Courtesy B . A. Pearson)
68
ALEXANDRIA
t h e "Alabaster T o m b " f o u n d in the Latin C e m e t e r y is a c tually Alexander's t o m b . It is a M a c e d o n i a n - s t y l e t o m b , originally covered by a t u m u l u s , of the P t o l e m a i c period, b u t its original o w n e r r e m a i n s u n k n o w n .
b e e n identified within t h e city, t h o u g h an isolated dedicatory inscription of 37 BCE was f o u n d in G a b b a r i ( p a r t of t h e west ern necropolis a r e a ) , a n d a n o t h e r of t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE in H a d r a (part of t h e eastern necropolis area).
T h e T h e a t e r described b y Strabo was p r o b a b l y located n e a r t h e m o d e r n g o v e r n m e n t hospital, b u t t h e excavations in that vicinity h a v e t u r n e d u p n o convincing traces. R e m a i n s of other P t o l e m a i c buildings have b e e n found there. T h e r e is n o archaeological evidence of the G y m n a s i u m or the Paneion. T h e a p p r o x i m a t e location of the C a e s a r i u m is well k n o w n b e c a u s e t h e obelisks associated with it r e m a i n e d , one standing and o n e fallen, until t h e 1870s. ( T h e s e obelisks are n o w located respectively in C e n t r a l P a r k in N e w Y o r k City a n d o n the T h a m e s E m b a n k m e n t in L o n d o n . ) T h e lavish description of t h e t e m p l e and its precincts p r o v i d e d b y Philo (Embassy to Gains 151) has n o t b e e n confirmed b y archaeology, t h o u g h it is n o t inconceivable t h a t excavations b e g u n in 1992 at the site of t h e old Majestic T h e a t e r m a y t u r n u p s o m e trace of it. T h e C a e s a r i u m was rebuilt as a c h u r c h in t h e fourth c e n t u r y a n d was finally destroyed in
E p i p h a n i u s of Salamis lists t h e c h u r c h e s in Alexandria k n o w n to h i m (Panarion 69.2), all of t h e m datable to t h e fourth century e x c e p t t h a t of T h e o n a s ( b i s h o p , 282-300). T h i s , the earliest attested c h u r c h in A l e x a n d r i a , is said to have b e c o m e p a r t of t h e M o s q u e of a T h o u s a n d Pillars, d a m a g e d b y t h e F r e n c h i n 1798 a n d d e s t r o y e d in 1829. A n other c h u r c h - b e c o m e - m o s q u e is t h a t built b y St. A t h a n a s i u s n e a r a t e m p l e called B e n d i d i o n (or M e n d i d i o n ) , w h i c h w a s rebuilt as t h e M o s q u e of the S o u q al-Attarin ( d e s t r o y e d in 1830). H u n d r e d s of stone fragments from c h u r c h e s datable to t h e f o u r t h - s e v e n t h centuries h a v e b e e n f o u n d — b e l o n g i n g to architectural features s u c h as capitals, c o l u m n b a s e s , a n d decorative e l e m e n t s — b u t unfortunately n o n e of these o b jects was f o u n d in situ. T h u s , a l t h o u g h locations of s o m e ancient c h u r c h e s are well established, n o t o n e h a s ever b e e n identified b y excavation.
912.
T h e best p r e s e r v e d evidence of P t o l e m a i c a n d R o m a n art a n d architecture is t h a t associated w i t h t h e necropoleis of Alexandria. T h e oldest of these cemeteries w e r e located east of t h e early P t o l e m a i c city a n d w e r e left u n m e n t i o n e d b y S t r a b o , p r e s u m a b l y b e c a u s e t h e y were n o longer in use. T h e city h a d e x t e n d e d e a s t w a r d by his time. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t necropoleis are i n the S h a t b y district ( f o u r t h - t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE), excavated b y Breccia; several areas of H a d r a (mainly t h i r d - s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE, some later); I b r a h i m i y a ; a n d , far ther east, M u s t a f a Pasha. A small, late P t o l e m a i c h y p o g e u m
M e n t i o n should b e m a d e of the synagogues a n d c h u r c h e s k n o w n from literary sources. Philo cites n u m e r o u s syna gogues (proseuchat) existing in Alexandria (Embassy to Gains, 132), including o n e n e a r t h e G y m n a s i u m uhat he calls " t h e largest a n d m o s t n o t a b l e " (134-135), p r e s u m a b l y to b e identified with t h e d o u b l e - c o l o n n a d e d basilica described in rabbinic sources (Tosefta Suk. 4.6; J . T . Suk 5.1; B . T . Suk 51b) tiiat also r e p o r t its destruction u n d e r T r a j a n d u r i n g t h e revolt of 1 1 5 - 1 1 7 . N o traces of this or other synagogues have
ALEXANDRIA.
Figure
2. Pompey's pillar. (Courtesy B. A. Pearson)
ALEXANDRIA ( s u b t e r r a n e a n b u r i a l c h a m b e r ) w a s also f o u n d i n tire A n t o n i a d i s G a r d e n . O f t h e s e only t h e S h a t b y n e c r o p o l i s c a n b e visited. T h e i s l a n d of P h a r o s h a d a s u b s t a n t i a l n a t i v e p o p u l a t i o n in t h e P t o l e m a i c a n d early R o m a n p e r i o d s , a n d several late Ptolemaic-early R o m a n hypogaea have been found there, t h a t is, t h o s e of R a s e l - T i n a n d A n f o u c h i . T h e latter is a c cessible. P r o b a b l y t h e m o s t r e m a r k a b l e of A l e x a n d r i a ' s n e cropoleis is t h e m a g n i f i c e n t t h r e e - l e v e l h y p o g e u m c o m p l e x at K o m e l - S h o g a f a ( m a i n l y s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE) n e a r t h e S e r a p e u m . A p o p u l a r t o u r i s t a t t r a c t i o n , it h a s c a r v e d
tomb
c h a m b e r s f e a t u r i n g bas-relief d e c o r a t i o n s of m i x e d E g y p t i a n and Greek inspiration. T h e western necropolis m e n t i o n e d by Strabo corresponds t o finds m a d e in t h e m o d e r n i n d u s t r i a l a r e a s of M a f r u s a , Gabbari, a n d W a r d i a n — h y p o g a e a a n d other tombs datable t o t h e late P t o l e m a i c a n d early R o m a n p e r i o d s . M o s t of these burials have b e e n destroyed, although s o m e discov eries h a v e b e e n m a d e b y t h e E g y p t i a n A n t i q u i t i e s O r g a n i z a t i o n at W a r d i a n , i n c l u d i n g a s e c o n d - c e n t u r y BCE h y p o g e u m w i t h w e l l - p r e s e r v e d wall p a i n t i n g s . T h u s , a h u n d r e d y e a r s of a r c h a e o l o g i c a l w o r k in A l e x andria has p r o d u c e d mixed results. P e r h a p s the richest p o s sibilities for f u t u r e w o r k a r e u n d e r w a t e r , p r i n c i p a l l y in t h e e a s t e r n h a r b o r a n d off S h a t b y b e a c h e a s t of Silsila. T h e latter area c o r r e s p o n d s t o A l e x a n d r i a ' s m a i n J e w i s h q u a r t e r in a n t i q u i t y , as a t t e s t e d b y J o s e p h u s (Against
Apion
2.33-36).
BIBLIOGRAPHY Adriani, Achille. "Saggio di u n a pianta archeologica di Alessandria." Annuario del Museo Greco-Romano I ( 1 9 3 4 ) : 5 5 - 9 6 , m a p . G u i d e to archaeological discoveries m a d e i n Alexandria to 1 9 3 1 . Adriani, Achille. Reperlorio d'arte dell'Egitto greco-romano. Series C . 2 vols. Palermo, 1 9 6 6 . Essential work on t h e topography of ancient Alexandria a n d reports on excavations in t h e city a n d its necropoleis, with bibliographies. Bonacasa, Nicola, a n d A n t o n i n o D i Vita, eds. Alessandria e il mondo ellenistico-romano: Stndi in onore di Achille Adriani. 3 vols. R o m e , 1983. Contains essays by leading scholars o n the history, t o p o g r a p h y , art, a n d architecture of ancient Alexandria, Botti, Giuseppe. Plan de la ville d'Alexandrie d I'epoque ptolema'ique. A l exandria, 1898. Discussion of the ancient testimonies of Alexandria's t o p o g r a p h y a n d m o n u m e n t s in t h e Ptolemaic period in light of ar chaeological discoveries. Breccia, Evaristo. Alexandria and Aegyptum: A Guide to an Ancient and Modern Town, and to Its Graeco-Roman Museum. Bergamo, 1 9 2 2 . E x p a n d e d English edition of t h e historical a n d topographical a c count of ancient Alexandria, with a guide t o t h e G r a e c o - R o m a n M u seum. Originally published in F r e n c h ( 1 9 1 4 ) , a n d still very useful. Breccia, Evaristo, ed. Inscriptiones Graecae Aegypti, vol, 2 , Inscriptiones nunc Alexandriae in Museo ( 1 9 1 1 ) . Chicago, 1 9 7 8 . Useful b u t dated collection of the Greek inscriptions found in Alexandria, with c o m mentary. Butler, Alfred J. The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Domain. Edited by P . M . Fraser. 2 d ed, Oxford, 1 9 7 8 . See t h e valuable chapter, "Alexandria at the C o n q u e s t " ( p p . 368-400). Description
de I'Egypte. 21 vols. Paris, 1 8 0 9 - 1 8 2 8 . Rare multi-volume
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report of the studies of E g y p t carried o u t by the scientific staff of N a p o l e o n ' s expedition. Contains descriptions of the antiquities of Alexandria by B . Saint-Genis (in vol. 2 of Antiquites: Descriptions) and of the " m o d e r n state" by G. L e Pere (in vol. 2 of Etat modeme: Texte). T h e five volumes of Antiquites: Planches have been r e p r o d u c e d in Monuments of Egypt: The Napoleonic Edition, 2 vols., edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie and Michel D e w a c h t e r (Princeton, 1 9 8 7 ) . F o r Alexandrian m o n u m e n t s see volume 1, plates ( = Planches, vol. 5, pis. 3 2 , 3 4 - 3 9 , 4 1 - 4 2 ) , a n d volume 2, double plates (= Planches, vol. 5, pis. 3 1 , 3 3 , 40). Fraser, P . M . Ptolemaic Alexandria. 3 vols. Oxford, 1 9 7 2 . Absolutely indispensable study of Alexandria in t h e Ptolemaic period, with ex tensive accounts of topography a n d archaeology (see vol. 1, p p . 3 - 3 7 ; vol. 2 , p p . I - I I I ) . H o g a r t h , D . G . , a n d E . F . Benson. " R e p o r t on Prospects of Research in Alexandria." In Egypt Exploration Fund: Archaeological Report, 1894-1855, p p . 1 - 3 3 . L o n d o n , 1895, Contains a report of work in Alexandria and t h e eastern cemeteries. H o r b u r y , W . , a n d D . N o y , e d s . Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt. C a m b r i d g e , 1992. Contains all of t h e Jewish inscriptions of the G r a e c o - R o m a n period found in Egypt. N o s . 1 - 2 1 ( p p , 1-24) are the Alexandrian ones. N o s . 1 2 5 - 1 3 4 , of uncertain origin ( p p . 2 1 2 - 2 2 6 ) , m a y include inscriptions of Alexandrian origin, Jondet, M . Gaston. Atlas historique de la ville el des ports d'Alexandrie. Cairo, 1 9 2 1 . Contains r e p r o d u c t i o n s of m a p s of Alexandria from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, invaluable for topographical re search. M a h m o u d - B e y , Al-Falaki. Memoire sur Vantique Alexandrie, sesfauborgs et environs. C o p e n h a g e n , 1 8 7 2 . Contains the famous m a p of ancient Alexandria and its streets. Pagenstecher, Rudolf. Nekropolis: Untersuchungen iiber Gestall und EntwicklungderAlexandrinischen GrabanlagenundihrerMalereien.L&ipzig, 1 9 1 9 . Valuable discussion of Alexandrian art and architecture as revealed in the city's cemeteries, comprising p a r t of a report of the Sieglin expedition. Pearson, Birger A. " T h e N e w Alexandria Library: A n U p d a t e . " Biblical Archaeologist 56 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 2 2 1 . Brief account of the excavations begun in M a y 1993 at the site of t h e n e w Alexandria Library, part of the " P a l a c e s " area of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Rodziewicz, Mieczyslaw. Les habitations romaines tardives d'Alexandrie: A la lumiere des fouilles polonaises a Kom el Dikka. Alexandrie, 3. W a r s a w , 1984. Valuable study of t h e results of excavations at K o m el-Dik by t h e project's former director, concentrating chiefly on t h e R o m a n houses, with n u m e r o u s p h o t o g r a p h s , plans, a n d drawings. Sieglin, E r n s t von. Die Nekropole von Kom-esch-Schukafa. 2 vols. L e i p zig, 1908. Complete a c c o u n t of the most impressive of Alexandria's t o m b complexes, comprising p a r t of a report of the Sieglin expedi tion. Swelim, Nabil, ed. Alexandrian Studies in Memoriam Daoud Abdu Daoud. Alexandria, 1 9 9 3 . Collection of essays on the history, t o p o g raphy, archaeology, a n d art of ancient Alexandria. T k a c z o w , Barbara. "Archaeological Sources for t h e Earliest Churches in Alexandria." In Coptic Studies: Acts of the Third International Con gress of Coptic Studies, Warsaw, 20-25 August 1984, edited by W l o d zimierz Godlewski, p p . 4 3 1 - 4 3 5 . Warsaw, 1 9 9 0 . Contains a discus sion of Alexandria's churches of the fourth-seventh centuries, a n d architectural fragments associated with t h e m . T h e ancient literary a n d d o c u m e n t a r y references to Alexandria, its topographical features, a n d its m o n u m e n t s are far too numerous to list here, b u t are conveniently collected in Aristide Calderini's invaluable work, Dizionario dei nomi geografici e topografici dell'Egitto greco-romano, vol. 1 . 1 , Alexandria, p p . 5 5 - 2 0 6 (Milan, 1 9 3 5 ) . See also Supplemento, vol. 1, 1 9 3 5 - 1 9 8 6 , edited b y Sergio Daris, p p . 1 8 - 2 2 (Milan, 1988). BIRGER A . PEARSON
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A L E X A N D R I A N E M P I R E . U n d e r d i e h e g e m o n y of K i n g Philip II of M a c e d o n i a a n d , later, his s o n A l e x a n d e r III (the G r e a t ) , d i e Greek city-states b o u n d themselves t o a military alliance (the L e a g u e of C o r i n t h ) for t h e p u r p o s e of invading d i e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e . T h i s P a n - H e l l e n i c cru sade was m e a n t t o rescue t h e A e g e a n w o r l d from a long history of Persian influence a n d t o avenge t h e fifth-century BCE invasion by X e r x e s , which h a d destroyed m u c h of A t h ens. In 336, Philip II w a s assassinated o n t h e eve of t h e G r e e k advance, b u t his y o u n g s o n Alexander (356-323) took u p t h e cause after securing his position o n t h e M a c e donian throne. In 334 BCE t h e n e w M a c e d o n i a n king led nearly 40,000 troops across t h e Hellespont into A c h a e m e n i d Anatolia. H e quickly defeated a satrapal (Persian provincial) a r m y at t h e battle of t h e G r a n i c u s River a n d t h e n systematically c a p t u r e d d i e coastal strongholds of t h e Persian fleet from t h e Hellespont t o Cilicia. T h e A c h a e m e n i d king, D a r i u s III (r. 336-330), personally c o m m a n d e d his t r o o p s in a m o v e to halt t h e G r e e k a d v a n c e into Syria. A t die battle of Issus (late 333)5 Alexander defeated, b u t d i d n o t capture, t h e king of Persia. While D a r i u s r e g r o u p e d in M e s o p o t a m i a , A l e x a n d e r c o n t i n u e d his coastal c a m p a i g n d o w n t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . T h e offshore fortress of T y r e resisted for seven m o n t h s b u t fell in a b r u t a l assault w h e n A l e x a n d e r ' s forces c o m p l e t e d a i,6oo-meter siege m o l e o u t t o t h e island. After besieging t h e city of G a z a in late 332, t h e Greeks m a r c h e d u n o p p o s e d into E g y p t . Alexander w a s seen b y t h e Egyptians as a liberator w h o respected their ancestral c u s t o m s a n d religion. H e u n d e r took a n a r d u o u s journey t o consult d i e oracle of Z e u s - A m m o n at Siwah in t h e L i b y a n D e s e r t , w h e r e h e w a s s u p p o s edly assured of w o r l d conquest. Alexander's m o s t e n d u r i n g a c h i e v e m e n t in E g y p t was t h e construction of a city, bearing his n a m e (Alexandria) a n d destined t o b e c o m e a n unrivaled intellectual a n d c o m m e r c i a l success u n d e r t h e p a t r o n a g e of his successors. In early s u m m e r 331, Alexander's forces m a r c h e d b a c k to Phoenicia a n d t h e n east t o w a r d M e s o p o t a m i a for a s h o w d o w n with D a r i u s . T h e Persian king h a d n o t b e e n idle. H i s forces n u m b e r e d over 100,000, a n d h e h a d carefully p r e p a r e d a battlefield near Arbela. O n 1 O c t o b e r 331 Alexan der's army r o u t e d t h e Persians at t h e b a t d e o f G a u g a m e l a . Again D a r i u s e s c a p e d eastward, h o p i n g t o rally a defense of Bactria (Afghanistan), b u t h e h a d lost t h e h e a r t of his e m pire. T h e major cities of M e s o p o t a m i a lay o p e n t o Alex ander, who m a r c h e d t r i u m p h a n d y into Babylon, Susa, a n d finally Persepolis in J a n u a r y 330. T h e vast A c h a e m e n i d treasures w e r e seized a n d t h e palace destroyed. T h e G r e e k s were avenged for t h e sack of A t h e n s a c e n t u r y a n d a half before. [See Persians; Babylon; Susa; Persepolis.] Alexander soon r e s u m e d his p u r s u i t of D a r i u s . N e a r H e catompylos ( m o d e r n S h a h r - i Q u m i s ) , however, a d e s p e r a t e g r o u p of Iranian nobles led b y Bessus, satrap of Bactria,
assassinated D a r i u s . A s successor t o t h e A c h a e m e n i d t h r o n e , A l e x a n d e r gave D a r i u s a royal burial, b u t B e s s u s tried to u n d e r m i n e A l e x a n d e r ' s legitimacy b y declaring h i m self t h e rightful P e r s i a n king. T h u s , A l e x a n d e r w a s c o m pelled to c o n t i n u e his a d v a n c e e a s t w a r d against this n e w adversary. T h e s e n e x t c a m p a i g n s carried A l e x a n d e r ' s a r m y b e y o n d t h e N e a r East into C e n t r a l Asia (329-327) a n d t h e I n d u s Valley (326-325). O n their r e t u r n , a fleet c o m m a n d e d b y N e a r c h u s e x p l o r e d t h e coastline f r o m Pattala t o t h e P e r sian Gulf while A l e x a n d e r led t h e land forces o n a disastrous desert m a r c h t h r o u g h G e d r o s i a b a c k t o B a b y l o n . A l e x a n d e r e n c o u n t e r e d m a n y military h a r d s h i p s d u r i n g these years in t h e distant east, a n d h e faced a g r o w i n g tide of related p r o b l e m s : opposition of his h i g h c o m m a n d t o acts of reconciliation with t h e defeated I r a n i a n nobility, sagging m o r a l e of his t r o o p s b e c a u s e of physical a n d emotional strain, limited r e s o u r c e s t o o c c u p y a n d a d m i n i s t e r t h e east e r n e m p i r e , a n d m i s c o n d u c t a m o n g d i e senior officials in c h a r g e of t h e N e a r E a s t e r n satrapies d u r i n g A l e x a n d e r ' s a b sence in India. W h e n A l e x a n d e r r e t u r n e d t o M e s o p o t a m i a i n 324, h e b e g a n t o address t h e e m e r g i n g crisis in h i s newly w o n e m p i r e . H e p u n i s h e d s o m e officials a n d p a r d o n e d o t h e r s , p a i d his a r m y h a n d s o m e l y from t h e r e v e n u e s earlier stockpiled after t h e p l u n d e r of S u s a a n d Persepolis. H e a r r a n g e d a massive w e d d i n g c e r e m o n y at S u s a in w h i c h senior officers took n o ble P e r s i a n b r i d e s , a n d 10,000 M a c e d o n i a n soldiers f o r m a l ized their liaisons with native w o m e n . W h e n A l e x a n d e r t h e n organized a force of i n d i g e n o u s soldiers t o h e l p m e e t his military n e e d s , h e h a d t o face d o w n at O p i s in 324 t h e m u t i n o u s i n s u b o r d i n a t i o n of his M a c e d o n i a n veterans w h o o p p o s e d an ethnically m i x e d military system. I n t h e m i d s t of plans for future c o n q u e s t s , i n c l u d i n g a n expedition to Arabia, A l e x a n d e r fell ill a n d died at B a b y l o n in early J u n e 323. T h e a r m y a n d its officers s o o n quarreled over the issue of succession. A c o m p r o m i s e p r o v i d e d for a d u a l m o n a r c h y s h a r e d b y two nonentities: Philip III A r r h i d a e u s , A l e x a n d e r ' s infirm half b r o t h e r , a n d A l e x a n d e r I V , A l e x a n d e r ' s p o s t h u m o u s son, I n t r u t h , d i e e m p i r e w a s g o v e r n e d b y a m b i t i o u s generals d o w n t o 306/05. First, P e r d i c c a s asserted autiiority as r e g e n t for t h e kings b u t w a s assassi n a t e d in 320. I n M a c e d o n i a , t h e aging general A n t i p a t e r served as t h e n e x t r e g e n t until his d e a t h a year later. T h e fragile u n i t y of t h e e m p i r e e n d u r e d as d i e diadochoi ('successors') c o m p e t e d for t h e regency, often in shifting coalitions sealed b y m a r r i a g e alliances a n d satrapal a p p o i n t m e n t s . U n t i l his defeat a t t h e battle of I p s u s in 301, t h e lead in this struggle w a s t a k e n b y A n t i g o n u s t h e O n e - E y e d , along with his s o n D e m e t r i u s t h e City-Sacker. T h o s e n o t a i m i n g for s u p r e m e p o w e r staked o u t smaller d o m a i n s for t h a t d a y w h e n t h e e m p i r e w o u l d splinter b e y o n d a single m a n ' s g r a s p . A s e x p e c t e d , t h e assassination of t h e t w o kings, Philip III (317/16) a n d A l e x a n d e r I V (311/10), e x h a u s t e d t h e bloodline of A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t a n d o p e n e d t h e w a y for
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the formation of n e w royal dynasties in the N e a r East h e a d e d by P t o l e m y ( E g y p t ) , a n d Seleucus (Syria). T h e political unity of die Alexandrian E m p i r e h a d n o t long survived the fall of t h e A c h a e m e n i d s , as t h e c o m p e t i tion for greatness inspired b y Alexander led to a n u n p r e c e d e n t e d period of k i n g m a k i n g a m o n g die M a c e d o n i a n s a n d , ' later, the local nobility of t h e N e a r East as well. Generally k n o w n as t h e Hellenistic A g e , the tiiree centuries following Alexander's death ( 3 2 3 - 3 0 ) witnessed the reigns of fourteen Ptolemies in E g y p t , c a p p e d by d i e remarkable career of Q u e e n Cleopatra VII (r. 51-30). In addition to t h e Nile Val ley, the Ptolemies controlled a few Aegean p o r t s , C y p r u s , a n d Cyrene; diey fought five major Syrian wars against d i e Seleucids for d o m i n i o n over Coele-Syria (Palestine) d o w n to 200. [See Ptolemies; C y r e n e ; Coele-Syria.] T h e Seleucid dynasty p r o d u c e d over t w o d o z e n ldngs a n d n u m e r o u s u s u r p e r s . In addition, the slow dissolution of this vast state, which u n d e r Seleucus I (312-281) h a d stretched from Anatolia to Afghanistan, allowed the rise of m a n y local dynasties in areas such as Bactria, Parthia, C o m m a g e n e , P e r g a m o n , J u d e a , Iturea, N a b a t e a , and C h a r a c e n e ; smaller principalities and n u m e r o u s cities also gained their i n d e p e n dence, m o s t notably in Phoenicia. By t h e time t h a t R o m e a n n e x e d the r e m a i n s of t h e Seleucid E m p i r e in 63, only t h e region a r o u n d A n t i o c h w a s left in M a c e d o n i a n h a n d s . [See Seleucids; P e r g a m o n ; Antioch.] T h i s N e a r Eastern world gradually a b s o r b e d into d i e R o m a n E m p i r e was very different from t h e A c h a e m e n i d w o r l d rapidly absorbed into t h e Alexandrian E m p i r e s o m e t h r e e centuries earlier. T h e s e differences give m e a s u r e to t h e i m pact of Alexander t h e G r e a t u p o n tiiis region. W e m a y here s u m m a r i z e t h a t legacy in its archaeological context. First, the rise of an Alexandrian E m p i r e i n t r o d u c e d a strong a n d lasting Hellenic influence into t h e rich cultural milieu of the N e a r East. T h i s is n o t to say tiiat G r e e k culture wholly d o m i n a t e d d i e area d u r i n g the Hellenistic A g e n o r tiiat some G r e e k influence h a d n o t already been felt in t h e N e a r East long before Alexander's invasion. G r e e k m e r c e naries h a d b e e n recruited earlier into the armies of t h e A c h a e m e n i d kings, and G r e e k m e r c h a n t s h a d long plied their trade in the ports of the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . A G r e e k trading colony h a d existed at Naukratis (Egypt) since the seventh century. [See Naukratis.] T h e degree of Hellenic influence clearly intensified, however, n o longer i n c r e m e n tally, b u t exponentially, in t h e wake of Alexander's wars. R a t h e r than a few t h o u s a n d G r e e k mercenaries, the N e a r East witnessed a w a v e of G r e e k military colonists (kleroukoi) t h a t crested in t h e h u n d r e d s of t h o u s a n d s . W h e r e v e r t h e r e were p e r m a n e n t c a m p s of G r e e k soldier-settlers, t h e r e w e r e n o w islands of Hellenism in the Semitic N e a r East. Of course, n o n Greeks inhabited tiiese " i s l a n d s " as well, s o m e as soldiers or s u p p o r t personnel, others as wives or workers. R e c e n t excavations on Ikaros ( m o d e r n Failaka) reveal a S e leucid military settlement w h e r e traditional M e s o p o t a m i a n
artifacts a n d n o n G r e e k graffiti exist side b y side with d e d ications to G r e e k gods m a d e b y d i e garrison c o m m a n d e r a n d his t r o o p s . [See Failaka.] F r o m Anatolia as far east as Ai K h a n u m (Afghanistan), evidence of this t y p e d e m o n strates h o w i m m i g r a n t G r e e k soldiers i n t r o d u c e d a n e w b u t n o t o v e r w h e l m i n g cultural element in t e r m s of their lan g u a g e , religion, art, a n d architecture. I n E g y p t , w h e r e p a pyrus d o c u m e n t s tell t h e story m o r e fully, w e c a n follow t h e family histories of s o m e of these settlers. I n s o m e cases, t h e colonists held doggedly to their Hellenic b a c k g r o u n d a n d insulated themselves as far as possible from native influ ences; odiers m a r r i e d E g y p t i a n wives, w o r s h i p e d local d e i ties, a n d raised bilingual children. W h a t e v e r t h e degree of cultural " f u s i o n " in a given klerouchia, t h e r a t h e r s u d d e n a n d sustained p r e s e n c e of G r e e k soldiers o c c u p y i n g t h e N e a r East c o n t r i b u t e d greatiy t o t h e changes w r o u g h t by A l e x a n d e r the G r e a t . S e c o n d , the n u m b e r of Hellenistic u r b a n centers grew. T h e one G r e e k e n t r e p o t at N a u k r a t i s w a s quickly s u p p l a n t e d by d o z e n s of full-fledged cities f o u n d e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e N e a r East b y A l e x a n d e r a n d his successors. Alexandria in E g y p t b l o s s o m e d u n d e r t h e P t o l e m i e s into a major M e d iterranean city t h a t attracted G r e e k artists, intellectuals, a d ministrators, m e r c h a n t s , a n d m a n y others into its p o p u l a tion. A l t h o u g h n o n - G r e e k s certainly p l a y e d a vital role in t h e city's history, t h e Hellenic element u n d e r P t o l e m a i c p a t r o n a g e enjoyed a privileged position b o t h politically a n d culturally. [See Alexandria.] T h e s a m e o c c u r r e d at A n t i o c h , one of the capitals of t h e Seleucid E m p i r e , a n d m a n y o t h e r places. T h e administration of t h e s e Hellenistic cities w a s generally Greek, t h o u g h w e c a n trace in t h e d o c u m e n t a r y sources d i e a p p o i n t m e n t of s o m e officials b e a r i n g n o n G r e e k n a m e s a n d tides; s o m e city business w a s c o n d u c t e d in native languages a n d a c c o r d i n g to local c u s t o m s . B a b y l o n provides a well-known e x a m p l e of h o w traditional M e s o p o t a m i a n t e m p l e a n d civic practices survived t h e intrusion of the Greeks. I n t h e m a i n , h o w e v e r , t h e G r e e k language a n d Hellenic political institutions t o o k r o o t in tiiese n e w f o u n d a t i o n s . C a r e was often taken b y t h e M a c e d o n i a n dy nasts to give t h e s e cities a G r e e k a p p e a r a n c e t o go along with their G r e e k n a m e s (usually dynastic, b u t occasionally t r a n s p l a n t e d p l a c e - n a m e s from G r e e c e ) a n d institutions (e.g., boule [council] a n d agora [assembly]). T h o u g h often a d a p t e d to local building m e t h o d s a n d materials (e.g., m u d brick), Hellenic s t r u c t u r e s s u c h as g y m n a s i a a n d theaters rose o n N e a r E a s t e r n soil. G r e e k terra cottas, c o l u m n d r u m s a n d capitals, propylaea [entrance s t r u c t u r e s ] , a n d M a c e d o n i a n palaces c o u l d b e seen in m a n y of these cities, along with G r e e k p o t t e r y a n d other G r e e k d o m e s t i c items in p r i vate h o u s e s built of G r e e k design. E v e n burial practices a n d t o m b construction were influenced b y Hellenic m o d e l s , as at Jerusalem, M a r i s a ( M a r e s h a h ) , D e i r e d - D e r b in S a m a r i a , Suweida in Syria, H e r m e l and K a l a t F a k r a in L e b a n o n , a n d of course P e t r a in t h e N e g e v . Clearly, places s u c h as B a b -
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ylon a n d J e r u s a l e m did n o t b e c o m e t h o r o u g h l y hellenized, b u t a substantial G r e e k p r e s e n c e could easily b e seen d i e r e by a n y visitor, a n d s o m e cultural interaction a n d b l e n d i n g was inevitable over t h e c o u r s e of t h r e e centuries. [See J e r u salem; M a r e s h a h ; S u w e i d a ; Petra.] T h r o u g h military o c c u p a t i o n a n d city founding, t h e n , G r e e k culture m a d e a lasting i m p a c t u p o n t h e N e a r East. T h e G r e e k l a n g u a g e , in t h e K o i n e ( c o m m o n G r e e k ) dialect of t h e Hellenistic world, b e c a m e t h e lingua franca of t h e N e a r East, a role previously p l a y e d b y A r a m a i c u n d e r t h e A c h a e m e n i d s . Y e t , w h e n t h e R o m a n s arrived on t h e scene in the first c e n t u r y BCE, tiiey c o u l d still h e a r s p o k e n a variety of Semitic l a n g u a g e s a n d local dialects. T h e y could see i n t h e Seleucid archives r e c e n t c u n e i f o r m texts, or in E g y p t t h e o n g o i n g u s e of hieroglyphs a n d d e m o t i c script o n m o n u m e n t s a n d inscriptions s u c h as t h e f a m o u s Rosetta S t o n e from d i e reign of P t o l e m y V (205-180). B u t t h e language of t h e Hellenistic rulers was G r e e k (only t h e last of t h e P t o l e mies, C l e o p a t r a V I I (51-30), learned t h e E g y p t i a n l a n g u a g e ) , a n d c o u r t life r e q u i r e d K o i n e for business a n d plea sure. T h e e d u c a t e d elite s e l d o m strayed into t h e l a n g u a g e s or literatures of t h e N e a r E a s t e r n p e o p l e s . N a t i v e works of n o t e h a d t o b e translated into G r e e k for further s t u d y , as in d i e case of d i e S e p t u a g i n t , t h e E g y p t i a n history preserved b y M a n e t h o , or t h e B a b y l o n i a n lore translated b y Berossos. W h e n A l e x a n d e r i n v a d e d t h e N e a r E a s t , interpreters w e r e r e q u i r e d t o m a k e it possible for G r e e k s a n d n o n - G r e e k s t o c o m m u n i c a t e . W h e n t h e R o m a n s arrived, G r e e k was a s e c o n d l a n g u a g e t h r o u g h o u t t h e region, a t least a m o n g d i e priv ileged classes. T h a t did n o t c h a n g e , e v e n t h r o u g h centuries of R o m a n rule. T h e N e w T e s t a m e n t took f o r m in K o i n e , R o m a n coinage i n t h e N e a r E a s t e m p l o y e d G r e e k i n s c r i p tions, a n d B y z a n t i u m i n h e r i t e d from t h e Alexandrian E m pire a n administrative s y s t e m b a s e d o n G r e e k r a t h e r t h a n L a t i n . [See Greek.] Third, t h e Alexandrian E m p i r e increased the production of coins, w h i c h m a d e t r a d e easier. G r e e k s , especially m e r chants a n d m e r c e n a r i e s , w e r e long a c c u s t o m e d t o t h e c o n venience of coinage. T h e A c h a e m e n i d s h a d established m i n t s , therefore, in those r e g i o n s w h e r e Greeks w e r e n o r mally recruited a n d stationed, b u t h a d n o t p r e s s e d t o h a v e a m o n e t i z e d e c o n o m y replace traditional barter i n other ar eas of their e m p i r e . T r a d i n g c e n t e r s , s u c h as Phoenicia a n d E g y p t , h a d b e e n c o m p e l l e d t o i m p o r t G r e e k coinage o r t o m i n t locally. A l e x a n d e r a n d h i s successors c h a n g e d this sit u a t i o n very rapidly, n o t so m u c h as p a r t of a g r a n d e c o n o m i c s c h e m e t o stimulate t h e " s t a g n a n t " N e a r E a s t ( a n old view t h a t still holds t o o m u c h influence), b u t ratiier t o m e e t t h e i m m e d i a t e n e e d s of a m a s s i v e invasion a n d o c c u p a t i o n . T o p a y his t r o o p s , A l e x a n d e r o p e r a t e d nearly t w o d o z e n royal m i n t s i n Anatolia, C y p r u s , Syria, P h o e n i c i a , E g y p t , a n d Mesopotamia, These mints produced a homogeneous, "im p e r i a l " coinage o n t h e Attic G r e e k s t a n d a r d (see figure 1). M a s s i v e supplies of bullion c a m e to h a n d w h e n A l e x a n d e r
ALEXANDRIAN EMPIRE.
F i g u r e I . Macedonian tetradrachm. Figaie
of A l e x a n d e r III is s e a t e d o n right. D a t e d t o 320 BCE, (Courtesy American N u m i s m a t i c Society)
c a p t u r e d t h e treasuries of t h e A c h a e m e n i d palaces; P e r s e p olis alone yielded s o m e 120,000 talents' w o r t h ( m o r e t h a n 3 million k g or 6.8 million lbs.) of silver. M o s t , b u t n o t all, of this p l u n d e r w a s c o n v e r t e d into coins t o m e e t t h e military e x p e n s e s of A l e x a n d e r a n d t h e diadochoi. O v e r time, a m o n etary e c o n o m y replaced b a r t e r in m o s t parts of t h e N e a r East, particularly t h e u r b a n i z e d areas. T h i s is especially ev ident in t h e increased p r o d u c t i o n of b r o n z e fiduciary cur rencies, a n d t h e striking of Greek-style coinage in areas b e y o n d the control of d i e P t o l e m i e s a n d Seleucids. All of t h e native dynasties that b r o k e free of t h e Seleucids m i n t e d H e l lenistic coinage. W i d e s p r e a d m o n e t a r y p r o d u c t i o n facili t a t e d t r a d e . Archaeology confirms this d e v e l o p m e n t t h r o u g h coin finds, t h e diffusion of M e d i t e r r a n e a n a m p h o r a e , a n d t h e luxury goods that flowed i n a n d o u t of t h e N e a r East. F r o m the deatii of A l e x a n d e r d o w n t o 167 BCE, w h e n p u n ished b y R o m e with crippling e c o n o m i c sanctions, R h o d e s served as d i e wealthy center of East M e d i t e r r a n e a n m a r i t i m e t r a d e ; its a m p h o r a e h a v e b e e n f o u n d f r o m t h e British Isles to I n d i a . [See Coins.] I n spite of e c o n o m i c growtii in t h e Hellenistic Age, w a r still p r o v i d e d d i e usual m e a n s of e x p a n d i n g royal wealth. T a x e s , tolls, a n d t r i b u t e s e l d o m m e t t h e exorbitant needs of t h e kings, for w h o m c o n s p i c u o u s c o n s u m p t i o n o n a g r a n d scale w a s a hallmark of Hellenistic m o n a r c h y . If n o t b y t r a d e , t h e n b y c o n q u e s t , these kings sought l u x u r y goods t o p u t o n p a r a d e . O n o n e f a m o u s occasion, P t o l e m y II (285/82-246) m a r c h e d t h r o u g h Alexandria an a s t o u n d i n g display of p r e s tige i t e m s , i n c l u d i n g exotic animals from India, Ethiopia, a n d Arabia. T h e r e w a s also competition a m o n g t h e kings either t o develop t h e largest w a r s h i p s o r t o field t h e largest e l e p h a n t c o r p s . E v e r y w h e r e in t h e N e a r East, t h e M a c e d o nian military system t o o k hold. B e g i n n i n g with A l e x a n d e r , levies of local t r o o p s w e r e a r m e d a n d trained i n t h e M a c e donian m a n n e r , a practice e x p a n d e d b y t h e successors from d i e late third c e n t u r y BCE o n w a r d . A d v a n c e d siege engines a n d artillery, n o t to m e n t i o n d i e counterforce of intensive fortification, b e c a m e s t a n d a r d features of N e a r E a s t e r n w a r fare. Hellenistic armies w e r e naturally t h e heirs of t h e Al-
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exandrian E m p i r e ratiier t h a n of d i e A c h a e m e n i d . In fact, all processes of hellenization were essentially military in or igin, from colonization to monetization. T h e legacy of t h e Alexandrian E m p i r e r e m a i n e d imperialist and colonial in nature. W h e n looking so deliberately for Alexander's i m p a c t o n the N e a r East, w e m u s t n o t leave the false impression t h a t earlier p a t t e r n s of social, cultural, political, religious, military, a n d e c o n o m i c life were totally swept away. In m a n y ways, the Hellenic c u s t o m s of t h e c o n q u e r o r s were held at b a y b y t h e resilient a n d often better-suited tra ditions of t h e i n d i g e n o u s peoples. Recall that local lan guages were n o t effaced b y Greek a n d t h a t m a n y Greeks a d o p t e d N e a r Eastern religious practices or, at t h e very least, a d a p t e d t h e m to their o w n use t h r o u g h syncretism. E v e n in warfare, t h e Greeks grew fond of t h e elephants a n d scythed chariots e m p l o y e d b y t h e A c h a e m e n i d s . I n fact, Seleucus I t r a d e d India to C h a n d r a g u p t a M a u r y a for five h u n d r e d el e p h a n t s , which p r o v e d a good i n v e s t m e n t at d i e battle of I p s u s in 301. N o reign or region of t h e Hellenistic N e a r E a s t was t h o r oughly Greek. T h e i m p o r t a n t political institutions of d i e G r e e k s , m o s t notably those of t h e polis (city), functioned within an administrative system that was largely A c h a e m e n i d . Alexander h a d retained d i e successful b u r e a u c r a t i c structure of the N e a r East, with its diverse collection of " t e m p l e - s t a t e s " , s e m i - i n d e p e n d e n t cities a n d tribes, t r i b u tary ldngs, a n d satraps. Before b e c o m i n g lungs, all of d i e eastern diadochoi h a d first b e e n satraps. W h e n , for e x a m p l e , t h e Seleucids later established their royal dynasty, they a p p o i n t e d satraps of their own, some of w h o m in t u r n b e c a m e i n d e p e n d e n t kings w h o straightaway divided their former satrapies into smaller satrapies. Clearly, d i e Greeks could find nothing better t h a n t h e old A c h a e m e n i d s t r u c t u r e within which to build their new Hellenistic states. T h e hellenization of t h e Semitic East was, therefore, a long, complex process t h a t did n o t t o u c h all areas n o r all classes with the s a m e effect. T h e aggressive m e a s u r e s to c o m p e l cultural c h a n g e in J u d e a u n d e r A n t i o c h u s I V (175-164), for e x a m p l e , sparked intensive resistance that, itself, divided m a n y n o n - G r e e k s over t h e issue of helleni zation. Everywhere in t h e N e a r East, Alexander's legacy was a patchwork of languages a n d cultures t h a t i n c l u d e d for t h e first time a substantial G r e e k element tiiat clearly inspired s o m e and incensed others. BIBLIOGRAPHY Austin, M . M . , ed. Tfie Hellenistic World from Alexander to the Roman Conquest: A Selection of Ancient Sources in Translation. Cambridge, 1981. Convenient collection of 2 7 9 items, including literary sources as well as documentary evidence. Bosworth, A. B . Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great. Cambridge, 1988. T h e best recent biography, meticulously r e searched with excellent chapters on administration a n d the army. Burstein, Stanley B., ed. a n d trans. The Hellenistic Age from the Battle
of Jpsos to the Death of Kleopalra VII. T r a n s l a t e d D o c u m e n t s of Greece and R o m e , vol. 3. Cambridge, 1 9 8 5 . Well-chosen selection of 1 1 2 d o c u m e n t s , with first-rate c o m m e n t a r y and bibliographical references. Downey, Susan B . Mesopotamian Religious Architecture: Alexander through the Parthians. Princeton, 1988. Close scholarly examination of how N e a r Eastern traditions e n d u r e d u n d e r foreign occupation. Eddy, Samuel K. The King Is Dead: Studies in Near-East Resistance to Hellenism, 334-31 B.C. Lincoln, N e b . , 1 9 6 1 . Classic attempt to see the N e a r Eastern side of t h e Hellenistic world. Fedak, Janos. Monumental Tombs of the Hellenistic Age: A Study of Se lected Tombs from the Pre-Classical to the Early Imperial Era. T o r o n t o , 1990. T h e best work of its kind, covering t o m b architecture from pre-Classical to R o m a n periods. Grainger, John D . The Cities of Seleukid Syria. Oxford, 1990. Useful case study of Hellenistic city-founding in the heart of the Seleucid Empire, with summaries of excavations and surveys. G r e e n , Peter. Alexander to Actium: Tlie Historical Evolution of the Hel lenistic Age. Berkeley, 1990. Opinionated b u t expert essay of nearly a thousand pages that minimizes the geniune interaction of Greek and non-Greek cultures. G r e e n , Peter, ed. Hellenistic History and Culture. Berkeley, 1 9 9 3 , Eight articles on important aspects of Hellenistic studies, with an excellent balance of critical responses and discussion. Hengel, Martin. Jews, Greeks, and Barbarians: Aspects of the Helleniza tion of Judaism in the Pre-Christian Period. L o n d o n , 1980. K u h r t , Amelie, a n d Susan Sherwin-White, eds. Hellenism in the East: The Interaction of Greek and Non-Greek Civilisations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander. Berkeley, 1987. Six studies giving m u c h needed attention t o the n o n - G r e e k side of Hellenistic history and making effective use of n e w archaeological evidence. Lewis, Naphtali. Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt: Case Studies in the Social History of the Hellenistic World. Oxford, 1986. Uses papyrological evidence to explore cultural interaction on the personal level. Mornigliano, Arnaldo. Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization. Cam bridge, 1 9 7 5 . Based on a series of lectures at C a m b r i d g e , this work examines the intellectual meeting g r o u n d of Greeks, R o m a n s , Per sians, Jews, and Celtic tribes. Rostovtzeff, Michael. 77K Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World. 3 vols. 2d ed. Oxford, 1 9 5 3 . Venerable a n d still valuable treat ment of the scattered evidence; nothing is likely to replace its scope. Samuel, Alan E. Prom Athens to Alexandria: Hellenism and Social Goals in Ptolemaic Egypt. Series Sludia Hellenistica, vol. 26. Louvain, 1983. Careful analysis of all phases of contact a n d conflict between Greek and Egyptian cultures in t h e Hellenistic Age. Samuel, Alan E. The Shifting Sands of History: Interpretations of Ptole maic Egypt. Publications of the Association of Ancient Historians, vol. 2. L a n h a m , M d . , 1989. Rich historiographical survey for the educated nonspecialist. Sherwin-White, Susan, and Amelie K u h r t . From Samarkhandto Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire. Berkeley, 1 9 9 3 . T h e best single volume n o w available on the Seleucids, with detailed regional surveys a n d up-to-date archaeological evidence. T h o m p s o n , Dorothy, Memphis under the Ptolemies. Princeton, 1988. Very detailed but readable account of a key Egyptian city, fully d o c umented and illustrated. Walbank, F. W., a n d A. E. Astin, et al. The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 7 . 1 , The Hellenistic World. 2 d ed. C a m b r i d g e , 1984. T h e best starting point for all aspects of Hellenistic history. N o t e also die ar ticle on later Seleucid history by Christian Habicht, " T h e Seleucids and T h e i r Rivals," in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol, 8, Rome and the Mediterranean to 133 B.C., edited b y A. E. Astin et al., p p . 324-387 (Cambridge, 1989). FRANK L . HOLT
ALPHABET ALI K O S H , a small p r e h i s t o r i c site located o n t h e D e h L u r a n plain in s o u t h w e s t e r n I r a n a t a n elevation of a b o u t 170 m (32°3o' N , 47°2o' E ) . T h e plain, covering a p p r o x i mately 169 s q k m (100 sq. m i . ) is enclosed b y t h e Z a g r o s M o u n t a i n s o n t h e n o r t h , a low line of hills a n d t h e vast M e s o p o t a m i a n plain o n t h e s o u t h , a n d b y t w o small streams o n t h e east a n d west. I n 1903 t h e F r e n c h archaeologists, J o s e p h E . G a u t i e r a n d Georges L a m p r e , representing the Mission Archeologique de P e r s e , e x c a v a t e d a small t r e n c h a t t h e site t h a t they called T e p e M o h a m m e d Jaffar ( t h e n a m e of a local tribal l e a d e r ) . W h e n they f o u n d only r e m a i n s of " r e e d a n d b r a n c h h u t s , " along with s o m e flints a n d c r u d e c e r a m i c s , t h e y a b a n d o n e d work. N e a r l y sixty years later, R o b e r t B r a i d w o o d a n d R i c h ard W a t s o n of t h e Oriental I n s t i t u t e Prehistoric Project col lected s o m e flints t h e r e a n d , o n their advice, in 1961 F r a n k H o l e a n d K e n t F l a n n e r y (Rice U n i v e r s i t y - O r i e n t a l I n s t i tute) u n d e r t o o k a 3 - b y - 5 - m e t e r excavation. T h e u p p e r lay ers of t h e site w e r e f o u n d t o c o n t a i n Early Neolithic pottery, b u t t h e lower layers were a c e r a m i c . A c c o r d i n g t o local vil lagers, d i e site h a d t w o n a m e s , B u s M o r d e h (Pers., " d e a d g o a t " ) a n d Ali K o s h (Pers., " t h e p l a c e w h e r e Ali w a s killed"). U n a w a r e a t t h e time tiiat t h e F r e n c h h a d n a m e d t h e site M o h a m m e d Jaffar, t h e excavators called it Ali K o s h . O n t h e basis of t h e initial results, a n d especially o n finding c h a r r e d seeds in ashy material collected for r a d i o c a r b o n d a t ing, H o l e a n d F l a n n e r y r e t u r n e d to t h e site in 1963 for m o r e extensive excavations. G u i d e d b y B r a i d w o o d ' s previous r e search into t h e origins of d o m e s t i c a t i o n , t h e r e n e w e d e x c a vation w a s f o c u s e d o n r e c o v e r i n g p l a n t r e m a i n s a n d a n i m a l b o n e s . Plans Helbaek, a D a n i s h paleobotanist w h o h a d w o r k e d with B r a i d w o o d , a n autiiority o n a n c i e n t p l a n t r e m a i n s , joined t h e t e a m in t h e field to s t u d y t h e samples as they were excavated. T o e x t r a c t seeds from t h e soil, t h e e x cavators u s e d flotation (the first t i m e t h e t e c h n i q u e w a s e m ployed in S o u t h w e s t A s i a ) . T h e t e c h n i q u e separates c h a r r e d organic remains f r o m soil b y i m m e r s i n g t h e m in w a t e r w i t h t h e aid of m a c h i n e s . A t Ali K o s h , a t e d i o u s h a n d m e t h o d w a s u s e d , witii w a t e r t r u c k e d t o t h e site. T h e r e a r e t h r e e archaeological p h a s e s at Ali K o s h , e a c h given local site n a m e s : B u s M o r d e h for t h e oldest, Ali K o s h for t h e s e c o n d aceramic p h a s e , a n d M o h a m m e d Jaffar for t h e ceramic Neolithic. Fifteen r a d i o c a r b o n dates were orig inally obtained for t h e site, b u t they gave highly variable a n d a m b i g u o u s results. O n t h e basis of dates from other sites, as well as additional accelerator m a s s s p e c t r o s c o p y A M S dates o n c h a r r e d b o n e f r o m d i e B u s M o r d e h a n d Ali K o s h p h a s e s , it is n o w estimated t h a t t h e site w a s f o u n d e d in a b o u t 7000 BCE.
T h e first settlers a t Ali K o s h lived n e a r a p e r m a n e n t m a r s h from w h i c h they h a r v e s t e d fish, turtles, clams, a n d w a t e r fowl. H u n t e r s stalked wild gazelle, onager, cattle, a n d pigs t h a t grazed t h e s u r r o u n d i n g plain, a n d h e r d e r s kept small flocks of d o m e s t i c goats. [See Cattle a n d O x e n ; Pigs; S h e e p
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a n d Goats.] T h e y s u p p l e m e n t e d these foods b y harvesting seasonally a b u n d a n t wild p l a n t foods a n d cultivating w h e a t a n d barley. [See Cereals.] T h e successive layers a t Ali K o s h d o c u m e n t the increasing d e p e n d e n c e o n d o m e s t i c a t e d h e r d s a n d agriculture until 6000 BCE, w h e n t h e m a r s h dried a n d t h e villagers m o v e d t o o n e of d i e other sites o n t h e plain, s u c h as C h o g h a Sefid. [See also Persia, article on Prehistoric Persia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Gautier, Joseph, a n d Georges L a m p r e . "Fouilles d e M o u s s i a n . " Mimoires de la Delegation en Perse 8 ( 1 9 0 5 ) : 5 9 - 1 4 9 . T h e first mention of Ali K o s h , here called T e p e M o h a m m a d - D j a f f a r (see p p . 8 1 - 8 3 ) . Hole, Frank, et al„ eds. Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran. University of Michigan, M e m o i r s of the M u s e u m of Anthropology, n o . 1. A n n Arbor, 1 9 6 9 , Final report of t h e excavations, with specialist studies of botanical and faunal remains. Hole, Frank, ed. The Archaeology of Western Iran. Washington, D . C . , 1987. See chapters 2 a n d 3 for.discussions of Ali K o s h a n d otlier c o n t e m p o r a r y sites. FRANK HOLE
A L P H A B E T . [This entry treats the origins and develop ment of what is traditionally termed the "alphabet," that is, the stages termed "abjad" and "alphabet." For definitions and fur ther discussion, see W r i t i n g a n d W r i t i n g Systems.] T h e a l p h a b e t b e g a n as a system of symbols, each of w h i c h r e p r e s e n t e d a c o n s o n a n t a l p h o n e m e . B e c a u s e in t h e earliest attested stages t h e signs are q u a s i - p i c t o g r a p h i c a n d the form of t h e sign c o r r e s p o n d s i n several cases t o t h e n a m e of t h e letter k n o w n f r o m later p e r i o d s , it is plausible t h a t each of t h e earliest sign forms b o r e a n a m e b e g i n n i n g with d i e p h o n e m e r e p r e s e n t e d b y t h e sign. F o r e x a m p l e , the n a m e of the {b}-sign w o u l d h a v e b e e n baytu, t h e Semitic word for " h o u s e , " a n d it w o u l d h a v e r e p r e s e n t e d d i e c o n s o n a n t a l p h o n e m e /b/. T h i s is t h e so-called a c r o p h o n i c principle. M o r e titan a m i l l e n n i u m after writing h a d c o m e into u s e in M e s o p o t a m i a a n d i n E g y p t , t h e alphabetic principle was devised s o m e w h e r e in t h e L e v a n t b e t w e e n these t w o early centers of civilization. B e c a u s e of d i e representational c h a r acter of t h e earliest signs, t h e invention p r o b a b l y took place u n d e r E g y p t i a n radier t h a n u n d e r M e s o p o t a m i a n influence, for hieroglyphs m a i n t a i n e d p i c t o g r a p h i c forms for millen nia, even while cursive scripts developed. [See E g y p t i a n ; H i eroglyphs.] O n t h e other h a n d , a l t h o u g h a system of quasialphabetic signs was d e v e l o p e d i n E g y p t i a n , u s e d principally to r e p r e s e n t foreign n a m e s , e a c h E g y p t i a n sign c o n t i n u e d t o note o n e , t w o , o r three c o n s o n a n t s until t h e G r e e k a l p h a b e t was a d o p t e d for C o p t i c . [See H i e r o g l y p h s ; Greek; C o p t i c ] T h e earliest alphabet clearly did n o t originate in a simple b o r r o w i n g of t h e E g y p t i a n quasi-alphabetic signs, for n o sin gle c o r r e s p o n d e n c e b e t w e e n t h e t w o systems h a s b e e n p r o v e n . R a t h e r , even t h o u g h t h e idea m a y well h a v e b e e n
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b o r n u n d e r the influence of the Egyptian u s a g e (Sznycer, 1974; Sass, 1991), t h e t r u e invention is t h e idea of n o t i n g die consonantal s e g m e n t only, for t h a t resulted in t h e radical reduction of the n u m b e r of signs: from die large n u m b e r required for a syllabic system to a m u c h small n u m b e r r e quired for an alphabetic system. It is estimated t h a t a w o r k ing M e s o p o t a m i a n scribe n e e d e d an active k n o w l e d g e of a p proximately two h u n d r e d signs, b u t the earliest alphabets probably d i d n o t h a v e m o r e titan twenty-nine signs at t h e m o s t . T h e imitation of the Egyptian iconic principle of writ ing also resulted in a set of relatively simple symbols; t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n cuneiform system, b y contrast, included m a n y signs t h a t consisted of a large n u m b e r of w e d g e s (ten or m o r e in the archaic p e r i o d ) a n d that required m u c h p r a c tice to p r o d u c e a n d to recognize. [See Cuneiform.] It can b e debated whether t h e c o n s o n a n t a l writing system merits t h e n a m e alphabet, b u t the simplification of t h e writing process it represented m a k e s it t h e decisive step t o w a r d t h e full al p h a b e t as devised b y tire Greeks. [See W r i t i n g a n d W r i t i n g Systems.] Because of the small n u m b e r of extant early alphabetic inscriptions a n d t h e difficulties in dating t h e m , it is u n c e r t a i n just where the alphabet was invented. B e c a u s e t h e earliest k n o w n examples a r e arguably the Proto-Sinaitic texts, it is t e m p t i n g to see in t h e m the texts for the writing of w h i c h the alphabet was invented. T h a t t e m p t a t i o n m u s t b e r e sisted, however, for it is presentiy impossible to d e t e r m i n e w h e t h e r the social conditions requisite for t h e invention of a writing system existed in the Sinai t h e n — t h a t is, t h e p r e s e n c e of a scribe of t h e language for which t h e alphabet w a s invented w h o was also well acquainted with Egyptian. It is in any case likely t h a t t h e invention was only a c c o m p l i s h e d o n c e and spread t h r o u g h o u t t h e L e v a n t . In theory, it could h a v e o c c u r r e d a n y w h e r e there was an Egyptian influence in t h e late M i d d l e K i n g d o m — f r o m E g y p t itself t h r o u g h C a n a a n into Syria. T h e concentration of early texts in Sinai a n d die various inscriptions from sites in s o u t h e r n C a n a a n , however, m a k e t h e m o s t plausible hypothesis tiiat of a s o u t h ern origin. If the hypothesis b e a c c e p t e d t h a t t h e above Proto-Sinaitic a n d P r o t o - C a n a a n i t e inscriptions r e p r e s e n t the earliest al phabetic writings, a necessary corollary is that t h e a l p h a b e t was invented to write a W e s t Semitic language. [See P r o t o Sinaitic; P r o t o - C a n a a n i t e . ] Unfortunately, p r o b l e m s of overall d e c i p h e r m e n t a n d of the identification of individual signs a n d their variants m a k e it impossible at p r e s e n t to d e termine t h e precise characteristics of the language(s) r e p resented by d i e earliest inscriptions. T h e data available in dicate an early dialect of Canaanite. U g a r i t i c A l p h a b e t . T h e earliest W e s t Semitic l a n g u a g e represented in an alphabetic script a n d with an i m p o r t a n t b o d y of decipherable inscriptions is Ugaritic. [See Ugarit; Ugaritic; Ugarit Inscriptions.] T h e s e texts date to t h e four
t e e n t h - t h i r t e e n t h centuries BCE, a l t h o u g h t h e greatest n u m b e r are p r o b a b l y from the last few d e c a d e s before t h e destruction of t h e site in t h e early twelfth c e n t u r y BCE. Ugaritic m a d e t w o major c o n t r i b u t i o n s to d i e early history of t h e alphabet: it is t h e only W e s t Semitic alphabetic writing system t h a t is c u n e i f o r m a n d a significant n u m b e r of a b e cedaries exist (an abecedary is t h e c o n v e n t i o n a l n a m e for t h e writing o u t of a n a l p h a b e t a c c o r d i n g t o an established or der). F o r reasons presently u n k n o w n (the prestige of M e s o p o t a m i a n c u n e i f o r m , a t e m p o r a r y shortage of p a p y r u s ? ) , t h e W e s t Semitic a l p h a b e t w a s r e d u c e d t o w e d g e forms a n d written on clay at Ugarit. [See P a p y r u s ; W r i t i n g Materials.] Various considerations—chronological, formal, a n d s t r u c t u r a l — m a k e it highly unlikely t h a t t h e Ugaritic writing sys t e m represents a local invention of d i e alphabet: it a p p e a r e d too late (fourteenth c e n t u r y BCE), there are several plausible c o r r e s p o n d e n c e s of sign forms b e t w e e n it a n d t h e k n o w n linear writing systems, a n d it does n o t c o r r e s p o n d perfectiy to the Ugaritic p h o n o l o g i c a l system. T h e Ugaritic abecedaries h a v e established several valu able reference p o i n t s in t h e history of t h e alphabet. • T h e y p r o v e tiiat the o r d e r of t h e letters later k n o w n as t h e s t a n d a r d N o r t h w e s t Semitic o r d e r ( H e b r e w , P h o e n i c i a n P u n i c , A r a m a i c ) was in use in t h e f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE in Syria. [See H e b r e w L a n g u a g e a n d L i t e r a t u r e ; P h o e n i cian-Punic; A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d Literature.] A b e c e daries are attested in Palestine a n d in P h o e n i c i a b y t h e late thirteenth c e n t u r y BCE a n d o n i n t o t h e first millen n i u m BCE ( C r o s s , 1980, p p . 8-15; L e m a i r e , 1978). T h e early date of t h e Ugaritic e x a m p l e s a n d d i e w i d e s p r e a d of t h e later languages attesting this o r d e r m a k e it plausible t h a t the i n v e n t o r of t h e alphabet h a d conventionally u s e d this order for p e d a g o g i c p u r p o s e s . • C o m p a r i s o n b e t w e e n t h e Ugaritic abecedaries a n d t h e or der of letters in t h e later N o r t h w e s t Semitic languages shows t h a t a " l o n g " a l p h a b e t w a s in u s e in t h e f o u r t e e n t h century BCE. T h e basic c o n s o n a n t a l i n v e n t o r y of Ugaritic was represented b y t w e n t y - s e v e n signs, w h e r e a s t h e basic s o u t h e r n C a n a a n i t e a l p h a b e t consisted of t w e n t y - t w o signs. T h e five extra Ugaritic signs are i n t e r s p e r s e d a m o n g t h e signs k n o w n from t h e soutiiern C a n a a n i t e al p h a b e t as follows: Canaanite
'
b
g
Ugaritic
a
b
g
Canaanite
I m
Ugaritic
I m
d
d h
d
h
h
w
w
z z
h h
n
s ' p
s q r s
n z
s ' p
$ q
r t
t t
y y
k k
s
t g
t
(i u s)
• If t h e inventor of t h e Ugaritic c u n e i f o r m s y s t e m h a d b e e n imitating a " s h o r t " alphabet, h e w o u l d in all likelihood
ALPHABET have t a c k e d t h e extra signs h e n e e d e d o n t h e e n d of t h e alphabet, as h e d i d with t h e t h r e e extra signs t h a t h e d i d devise ({i, u , s } ) — a n d as t h e G r e e k s did w h e n t h e y b o r r o w e d a n d a d a p t e d t h e W e s t Semitic alphabet; or h e w o u l d h a v e a d a p t e d existing signs in g r o u p s , as t h e A r a b s did w h e n they revised t h e N o r t h w e s t Semitic a l p h a b e t . R a t h e r , h e seems to h a v e b e e n following an established o r d e r in w h i c h {h} followed {g}, {§} followed {k}, et cet era. B e c a u s e t h e Ugaritic p h o n o l o g i c a l system does n o t perfectly m a t c h t h e writing s y s t e m (e.g., is u s e d i n c o n s i s tently), it is likely t h a t t h e a l p h a b e t w a s originally b o r r o w e d from a W e s t Semitic l a n g u a g e with a slightly dif ferent c o n s o n a n t a l i n v e n t o r y a n d / o r t h a t t h e u s e of t h e long linear a l p h a b e t already h a d a history at Ugarit. • T h e order of t h e long a l p h a b e t , as illustrated by t h e U g a ritic abecedaries, m a k e s t h e h y p o t h e s i s plausible t h a t t h e short a l p h a b e t is a simplification of t h e longer one: t h a t is, certain sign f o r m s w e r e d r o p p e d f r o m u s a g e w h e n n o t n e e d e d ( p r o b a b l y in t h e p r o c e s s of a d o p t i o n from o n e l a n g u a g e to a n o t h e r , r a t h e r t h a n b y a l p h a b e t reform in a given c o m m u n i t y ) , for a l p h a b e t u s a g e t e n d s to b e c o n servative. • T h e r e c e n t discovery at U g a r i t of a n a b e c e d a r y in t h e S o u t h Semitic o r d e r a n d with variant sign forms ( G a q u o t , forthcoming; Bordreuil and Pardee, forthcoming), a n d t h e earlier d e c i p h e r m e n t of a c u n e i f o r m tablet from B e t h S h e m e s h as an a b e c e d a r y in t h e S o u t h Semitic o r d e r ( L o u n d i n , 1987; further b i b l i o g r a p h y in Bordreuil a n d P a r d e e , f o r t h c o m i n g ) , p r o v e t h e w i d e s p r e a d u s e of a dif ferent alphabetic o r d e r c o u p l e d with variant sign f o r m s . [See B e t h - S h e m e s h . ] T h e s e a b e c e d a r i e s m u s t reflect t h e u s e of a l a n g u a g e of t h e S o u t h Semitic t y p e in C a n a a n , a l t h o u g h t h e y a n d a few signs o n sherds f r o m K a m i d elL02 (Rollig a n d M a n s f e l d , 1969-1970) are t h e only p r e s ent evidence for t h a t u s a g e . [See K a m i d el-Loz.] S p r e a d o f t h e S e m i t i c A l p h a b e t . T h e d a t e of t h e earliest P h o e n i c i a n inscriptions h a s b e e n m u c h d e b a t e d . T h e A h i r a m inscription is t h e earliest c o n t i n u o u s t e x t in a P h o e nician dialect, b u t a r r o w h e a d inscriptions from a b o u t 1 1 0 0 900 BCE a n d a few very brief inscriptions from Byblos a n d other sites illustrate t h e u s e of t h e a l p h a b e t in t h e Early I r o n period. [See A h i r a m I n s c r i p t i o n ; Byblos.] It is also clear t h a t t h e Ugaritic c u n e i f o r m s y s t e m w a s occasionally u s e d t o write C a n a a n i t e at t h e very e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e (the l a n g u a g e of a late m i r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE inscription f r o m Sarepta in Ugaritic script h a s b e e n classified as P h o e n i c i a n : see G r e e n s t e i n , 1976, a n d B o r d r e u i l , 1979). [See Sarepta.] By t h e late t e n t h - e a r l y n i n t h centuries BCE, inscriptions i n A r a m a i c a n d H e b r e w illustrate t h e s p r e a d of t h e P h o e n i c i a n a l p h a b e t inland. It is clear t h a t t h e A r a m a e a n s b o r r o w e d t h e a l p h a b e t f r o m t h e P h o e n i c i a n s b e c a u s e t h e sign forms in t h e earliest inscriptions are P h o e n i c i a n a n d b e c a u s e t h e r e w e r e
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major phonological differences b e t w e e n t h e two languages t h a t affected t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of A r a m a i c o r t h o g r a p h y . [See A r a m e a n s ; Phoenicians.] F o r e x a m p l e , /d/ a n d /s/ h a d coa lesced in P r o t o - P h o e n i c i a n a n d only o n e sign r e m a i n e d ; A r a m a i c , on t h e o t h e r h a n d , h a d a p h o n e m e , /d/, t h e scribes r e p r e s e n t e d b y m e a n s of {q}; at a later p o i n t , t h e p r o n u n ciation of /d/ shifted a n d t h e scribes b e g a n r e p r e s e n t i n g it b y {'}: for e x a m p l e , " e a r t h " {'rs} in P h o e n i c i a n is written f r q } in Old A r a m a i c , {Y} in the Persian period. B e c a u s e /s/ survived as a p h o n e m e in H e b r e w b u t w i t h o u t a c o r r e s p o n d i n g sign in t h e H e b r e w alphabet, it is clear t h a t t h e H e b r e w s b o r r o w e d t h e s t a n d a r d s h o r t a l p h a b e t from t h e P h o e n i c i a n s or from speakers of a n o t h e r N o r t h w e s t Semitic l a n g u a g e w h o u s e d t h e s a m e alphabet. (For the possibility t h a t oilier c o n s o n a n t a l p h o n e m e s h a d survived in t h e H e b r e w of t h e biblical p e r i o d t h a t w e r e n o t n o t e d in t h e writing system, see K u t s c h e r , 1982, p p . 17-18.) All that can b e said for t h e p r e s e n t is that t h e H e b r e w a l p h a b e t does n o t r e p r e sent a n i n d e p e n d e n t a d a p t a t i o n of t h e s h o r t alphabet to t h e peculiarities of t h e H e b r e w language (cf. Cross, 1980, p p . 13-15). W i t h i n t h e L e v a n t t h e various linguistic/political/geo graphic entities a d o p t e d t h e alphabet, a n d t h e sign forms u n d e r w e n t local evolutions ( N a v e h , 1982/1987; C r o s s , 1980). T h e alphabet s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t t h e Semitic world a n d t o its colonies ( P h o e n i c i a n s in t h e W e s t ) . After A r a m a i c w a s a d o p t e d as a lingua franca b y t h e A c h a e m e n i d s , its u s age s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t t h e N e a r E a s t a n d b e y o n d ; A r a m a i c even seems to have b e e n u s e d logographically in areas cor r e s p o n d i n g to m o d e r n T u r k m e n i s t a n a n d Georgia ( N a v e h , 1982/1987, p p . 127-130). T h e s h o r t a l p h a b e t was eventually b o r r o w e d b y A r a b i c speakers a n d a d a p t e d in a different or d e r t o express t h e fuller c o n s o n a n t a l inventory of A r a b i c — twenty-eight p h o n e m e s ( N a v e h , 1982/1987, p p . 153-162). [See A r a b i c ] C o n t r i b u t i o n o f G r e e k . T h e r e has b e e n a l o n g c o n t r o versy a b o u t t h e date at w h i c h t h e Greeks b o r r o w e d t h e W e s t Semitic c o n s o n a n t a l a l p h a b e t , with proposals ranging over several centuries—from t h e m i d d l e of t h e second millen n i u m BCE to the early eighth c e n t u r y BCE. P h o e n i c i a n and A r a m a i c inscriptions f r o m as early as a b o u t 900 BCE (Bisi, 1991) are rare in t h e W e s t , a n d the earliest G r e e k inscrip tions d a t e t o t h e early eighth c e n t u r y BCE; t h u s , a h y p o t h e t ical earlier b o r r o w i n g of t h e alphabet m u s t b e b a s e d on t h e typology of letter forms: t h e earliest G r e e k letters m o s t clearly resemble W e s t Semitic signs from w h a t period? Viewed abstractly, d e n y i n g a date significantly earlier t h a n t h e first inscriptions is essentially an a r g u m e n t from silence: b e c a u s e n o e x a m p l e s exist of G r e e k writing earlier t h a n t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e writing system was a d o p t e d relatively shortly before t h a t date. Following R h y s C a r p e n t e r ' s 1933 article of f u n d a m e n t a l i m p o r t a n c e , P . Kyle M c C a r t e r (1975) a n d M a r i a Giulia A m a d a s i G u z z o (1991) h a v e m a d e
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very strong a r g u m e n t s from sign typology that essentially back u p the a r g u m e n t from silence, to the effect t h a t archaic G r e e k letters look like W e s t Semitic forms from the late ninth/early eighth centuries BCE. A less heated d e b a t e h a s b e e n carried o n with regard to t h e place w h e r e d i e alphabet was b o r r o w e d , with proposals t e n d i n g to fit the date b e i n g argued. Because of t h e varieties of letter forms a n d alphabetic configurations attested a m o n g d i e Greeks, there are even those w h o favor multiple b o r r o w ings: while refusing to choose a particular place of b o r r o w ing, A m a d a s i G u z z o (1991, p . 309) makes an essential m e t h odological point: t h e sophistication s h o w n in recognizing p h o n e t i c equivalences b e t w e e n t h e G r e e k b o r r o w e r ' s lan guage, t h e P h o e n i c i a n system being b o r r o w e d , a n d t h e ad aptations to G r e e k n e e d s requires t h a t t h e place of b o r r o w ing b e a metropolitan center with significant g r o u p s of b o t h Greeks and P h o e n i c i a n s , including well-trained scribes. [See Scribes and Scribal T e c h n i q u e s . ] T h e alphabet b o r r o w e d by t h e Greeks was of t h e P h o e nician type, consisting of twenty-two c o n s o n a n t a l signs. T h i s is clear b o t h from early Greek abecedaries a n d from t h e numerical value of t h e Greek letters (Pierart, 1991, p p . 571-573, figs. 1, 2). M o s t scholars a s s u m e that t h e P h o e nicians themselves were t h e transmitters—in no small p a r t b e c a u s e of t h e m a n y contacts b e t w e e n Greeks a n d P h o e nicians on their c o m m o n M e d i t e r r a n e a n waters. It c a n n o t b e ruled o u t that t h e A r a m e a n s w e r e involved, b u t b e c a u s e t h e A r a m e a n s w e r e n o t k n o w n as seafarers, this t h e o r y u s u ally involves overland transmission across Asia M i n o r (Amadasi G u z z o , 1991). T h e strongest basis for this t h e o r y remains the Greeks n a m e s of t h e letters, s u c h as alpha a n d delta, for they s e e m to reflect A r a m a i c p r o n u n c i a t i o n , n o t Phoenician (which w o u l d be 'alp a n d dali). It has b e e n c o u n t e r a r g u e d t h a t f o r m s like alpha only r e p r e s e n t t h e G r e e k p r o nunciation of c o n s o n a n t a l clusters such as /-lp/ at t h e e n d of die word, whereas s o m e letter n a m e s , such as iota, p r e s u p p o s e a n o n - A r a m a i c origin ( N a v e h , 1982/1987, p . 183). By inventing t h e notation of vowels, t h e G r e e k s m a d e their o w n contribution to die history of t h e alphabet. O n t h e Semitic side, a start in this direction h a d b e e n m a d e that h a s b e c o m e systematized in H e b r e w a n d in Arabic: d i e u s e of m a t t e s lectionis. T h e c o n s o n a n t s 'aleph, he, wazv, a n d yod were first used by A r a m e a n s a n d H e b r e w s to indicate a long vowel. T h e usage m a y h a v e arisen b y analogy from historical writings (e.g., if/bayt/becomes/bet/, the t e n d e n c y is to c o n tinue writing the w o r d with {y}, even t h o u g h t h e c o n s o n a n t is n o longer p r o n o u n c e d ) . It never b e c a m e a rigid system in any of t h e H e b r e w or A r a m a i c dialects of t h e p r e - C h r i s t i a n era, b u t in time m o r e a n d m o r e matres lectionis are f o u n d in the texts. T h e y are u s e d , for example, m o r e frequentiy in the so-called sectarian d o c u m e n t s from Q u m r a n t h a n in t h e received text of die P e n t a t e u c h , w h i c h represents a stage of t h e text dating a few centuries earlier t h a n the D e a d Sea Scrolls. [See Q u m r a n ; D e a d Sea Scrolls.]
It is for t h e p r e s e n t a m o o t p o i n t w h e t h e r t h e G r e e k s k n e w a b o u t s u c h u s a g e s — t h e y certainly did n o t if t h e a l p h a b e t was b o r r o w e d f r o m t h e P h o e n i c i a n s , for m a t r e s lectionis w e r e n o t a p a r t of n o r m a t i v e P h o e n i c i a n o r t h o g r a p h y in t h e eighth century BCE. W h a t t h e G r e e k s did, in a n y case, w a s t o give vocalic values to certain P h o e n i c i a n c o n s o n a n t s t h a t did n o t c o r r e s p o n d to c o n s o n a n t a l p h o n e m e s in t h e G r e e k language, b e g i n n i n g witii the first letter of t h e alphabet: t h e sign for t h e W e s t Semitic c o n s o n a n t /'/ w a s u s e d t o r e p r e s e n t t h e vowel /a/ b y t h e G r e e k s . T h e signs for all t h e Semitic gutturals (/', h, h , 7) w e r e so a d a p t e d , as w e r e t h o s e for t h e t w o c o n t i n u a n t s /w/ a n d /y/. T h e addition of vowel signs m a d e t h e a l p h a b e t m o r e e x plicitly expressive, for it p r o v i d e d a m o r e c o m p l e t e p r o n u n ciation of a w o r d t h a n did t h e n o t a t i o n of c o n s o n a n t s only. T h e notation of vowels m a d e t h e G r e e k a l p h a b e t a stronger p e d a g o g i c tool, allowing for a decrease in t h e i m p o r t a n c e of oral tradition in t e a c h i n g . T h i s i n c r e a s e d expressivity n o t only gave a m o r e c o m p l e t e rendition of w o r d s in a given language, b u t also facilitated r e a d i n g a n d u n d e r s t a n d i n g a foreign language. G r e e k also h a d a series of c o n s o n a n t a l p h o n e m e s that d i d n o t h a v e c o r r e s p o n d e n c e s in P h o e n i c i a n . N e w signs were i n v e n t e d or existing ones w e r e t r a n s m u t e d for those s o u n d s a n d t h e y w e r e a d d e d to t h e e n d of t h e a l p h a b e t — w h e n c e c o m e several of t h e letters t h a t o c c u r in t h e English a l p h a b e t after {t}, t h e last sign of t h e W e s t S e mitic alphabet. T h e transmission of t h e a l p h a b e t to t h e G r e e k s p e r m i t t e d t h e writing d o w n of G r e e k traditions t h a t h a v e by this m e a n s b e c o m e p a r t of m o d e r n culture. F o r e x a m p l e , t h e H o m e r i c traditions plausibly b e g a n b e i n g c o m m i t t e d to writing in t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE, shortiy after d i e full alphabet was devised ( A m a d a s i G u z z o , 1991, p p . 307308; Powell, 1991). T h e invention of the c o n s o n a n t a l a l p h a b e t b y t h e Semites a n d its t r a n s f o r m a t i o n b y the G r e e k s for t h e n o t a t i o n of vowels are often cited as i m p o r t a n t factors in d i e d e m o c ratization of writing. A l t h o u g h w i d e s p r e a d literacy d i d n o t follow immediately u p o n d i e i n v e n t i o n of t h e alphabet, a m o r e rapid s p r e a d of literacy c a n b e seen after t h e invention of t h e vowels. [See Literacy.] T h e r e is certainly a g o o d deal of t r u t h in linking d e m o c r a t i z a t i o n a n d t h e alphabet: to t h e e x t e n t tiiat t h e g r o w t h of d e m o c r a c y r e q u i r e d a n e d u c a t e d m i d d l e class to deal with t h e complexities of g r o w i n g soci eties, t h e ease of u s e of t h e a l p h a b e t m a y b e t h o u g h t to h a v e facilitated, b y d i e principle of efficient u s e of r e s o u r c e s , this process. O w i n g to the s p r e a d of alphabetic u s a g e t h r o u g h o u t t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n w o r l d a n d eastward d u r i n g the last centuries of the p r e - C h r i s t i a n era, t h e major writings of t h e t h r e e great W e s t e r n religions h a v e , w i t h relatively few exceptions (e.g., E t h i o p i c ) , b e e n t r a n s m i t t e d in a l p h a b e t i c scripts (e.g., H e b r e w , Greek, L a t i n , Syriac, C o p t i c , A r a b i c , A r m e n i a n ) . [See Ethiopic; Latin; Syriac; C o p t i c ; A r m e n i a n . ]
ALT, ALBRECHT BIBLIOGRAPHY Amadasi G u z z o , M a r i a Giulia. " ' T h e S h a d o w Line*: Reflexions s u r l'introduction de l'alphabet e n G r e c e . " In Phainikeia Grammata, lire et ecrire en Meditermnee: Actes du colloque de Liege, 15-18 navembre 1989, edited by C l a u d e Baurain et al., p p . 2 9 3 - 3 1 1 . N a m u r , 1 9 9 1 . Excellent, brief overview of t h e origin of t h e alphabet a n d its t r a n s mission to t h e Greeks, with a g o o d presentation of methodological factors. T h e essential bibliography is provided in footnotes. Bisi, A n n a M . " L e s plus anciens objets inscrits en phenicien et en arameen retrouves en Grece: L e u r typologie et leur rflle." I n Phainikeia Grammata, lire et ecrire en Meditermnee: Actes du colloque de Liege, 1518 novembre 1989, edited by C l a u d e Baurain et al., p p . 2 7 7 - 2 8 2 . N a m u r , 1 9 9 1 . Discusses t h e implications of t h e presence of P h o e nician- a n d Aramaic-transcribed objects in t h e West. Bordreuil, Pierre. "L'inscription p h e n i c i e n n e d e Sarafand en cuneiformes alphabetiques." Ugarit Porschungen 11 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 6 3 - 6 8 . I m p r o v e d reading of the Sarepta inscription in Ugaritic script. Bordreuil, Pierre, a n d D e n n i s P a r d e e . " L e s textes ougaritiques." F o r t h coming in t h e edition of texts discovered at R a s Shamra from 1986 to 1992. Includes t h e editio princeps of the abecedary in South Semitic order. C a q u o t , A n d r e . " U n abecedaire d u type sud-semitique decouvert e n 1992 dans les fouilles archeologiques francaises d e Ras S h a m r a - O u g arlt." Comptes Rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions el des Belles Lettres. F o r t h c o m i n g . First a n n o u n c e m e n t of t h e discovery of an a b e cedary of South Semitic type at R a s S h a m r a . Carpenter, Rhys. " T h e Antiquity of t h e Greek A l p h a b e t . " American Journal of Archaeology 37 ( 1 9 3 3 ) : 8-29. F u n d a m e n t a l article o n the methodology of dating the b o r r o w i n g of the alphabet by t h e Greeks. M o r e recent discoveries have m o v e d t h e date a bit earlier, b u t t h e basic arguments still stand. Cross, F r a n k M o o r e . " N e w l y F o u n d Inscriptions in O l d Canaanite a n d Early Phoenician Scripts." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 238 (1980): 1 - 2 0 . Reappraisal of alphabetic origins a n d developments which accepts an early borrowing of die alphabet by the Greeks (eleventh century). Greenstein, E d w a r d L . " A Phoenician Inscription in Ugaritic S c r i p t ? " Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University 8 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 4 9 - 5 7 . Identifies t h e l a n g u a g e of the Sarepta inscription in Ugaritic script as Phoenician. Kutscher, E d u a r d Y. A History of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem, 1 9 8 2 . Includes a discussion of the relationship of graphemes t o p h o n e m e s in Biblical H e b r e w . L e m a i r e , A n d r e . " F r a g m e n t d ' u n alphabet ouest-s6mitique d u VHIe siecle av. J . - C . " Semitica 28 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 7 - 1 0 . Edition of a partial a b e cedary p u r c h a s e d o n t h e antiquities market. L u n d e n [Loundine], A, G. " L ' a b e c e d a i r e de Beth S h e m e s h . " Le Museon 100 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 4 3 - 2 5 0 . M c C a r t e r , P . Kyle, Jr. The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet and the Early Phoenician Scripts. H a r v a r d Semitic M o n o g r a p h s , 9. Missoula, 1 9 7 5 . T h e basic work accepting a late borrowing of the alphabet by t h e Greeks (though it leaves o p e n t h e possibility of earlier experiments). C o m p e t e n t treatment of both t h e Semitic a n d the Greek sides of the question. N a v e h , Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography. 2 d ed. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 7 . G o o d overview of alphabetic origins a n d developments, t h o u g h o n e m a y query t h e late dating of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (fifteenth cen tury) a n d the early borrowing of t h e alphabet by the Greeks (eleventh century). Generally m o r e t h o r o u g h on graphic evolutions t h a n on correlations between graphemes a n d p h o n e m e s . Pierart, Marcel. "Ecriture et identite culturelle: L e s cites d u P61oponnese nord-oriental." In Phoinikeia Grammata, lire et ecrire en Mediterranee: Actes du colloque de Liige, 15-18 novembre 1989, edited by
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C l a u d e Baurain et al., p p . 5 6 5 - 5 7 6 . N a m u r , 1 9 9 1 . Discussion of the contribution of Greek abecedaries to the early history of the alphabet a m o n g the Greeks. Powell, B . P . " T h e Origins of Alphabetic Literacy among t h e Greeks." In Phoinikeia Grammata, lire et ecrire en Meditenanee: Actes du colloque de Liege, 15-19 novembre 1989, edited by Claude Baurain et al., p p . 3 5 7 - 3 7 0 - N a m u r , 1 9 9 1 . Sees t h e origin of vowel notation by the Greeks in the requirements of representing t h e hexameter in writing. Rollig, Wolfgang, a n d G. Mansfeld. " Z w e i Ostraka v o m Tell K a m i d el-Loz u n d ein neuer Aspekt fur die E n t s t e h u n g des kanaanaischen A l p h a b e t s . " Die Well des Orients 5 ( 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 7 0 ) : 2 6 5 - 2 7 0 . Sass, Benjamin. Studia Alphabetica: On the Origin and Early History of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic, and Greek Alphabets. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 102. Freiburg, 1 9 9 1 . Overview of various crucial points in the origin a n d transmission of the alphabet. Sznycer, Maurice. " Q u e l q u e s r e m a r q u e s a p r o p o s d e la formation de l'alphabet ph6nicien." Semitica 24 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 5 - 1 2 . Brief b u t systematic t r e a t m e n t of alphabetic origins. DENNIS PARDEE
ALT,
ALBRECHT
(1883-1956),
Hebrew
Bible
s c h o l a r a n d f o u n d e r of t h e discipline of historical g e o g r a p h y . Alt w a s b o r n in S t u b a c h , n e a r N e u s t a d t / A i s c h , i n Bavaria. After finishing t h e g y m n a s i u m in A n s b a c h , h e s t u d i e d d i e ology in E r l a n g e n a n d i n L e i p z i g . I n 1909 h e received a d o c t o r a t e of t h e o l o g y for his thesis " I s r a e l u n d A g y p t e n . " I n t h a t s a m e y e a r , h e r e c e i v e d a p r o m o t i o n t o lecturer a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y of G r e i f s w a l d , w h e r e h e served as associate p r o fessor of O l d T e s t a m e n t s t u d i e s . H e b e c a m e a full p r o f e s s o r a t Basel i n 1914 a n d at H a l l e in 1921. H e h e l d t h e O l d T e s t a m e n t chair at L e i p z i g f r o m 1923 u n t i l shortiy before his d e a t h . Alt w a s a very gifted t e a c h e r , a n d m a n y of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t scholars in t h e field of O l d T e s t a m e n t
studies
w e r e his p u p i l s : M a r t i n N o t h , G e r h a r d v o n R a d , H e r b e r t D o n n e r , a n d Siegfried H e r r m a n n . H e w a s also closely affil i a t e d w i t h t h e E v a n g e l i s c h e s I n s t i t u t fur die A l t e r t u m s w i s s e n s c h a f t des H e i l i g e n L a n d e s . H e m a d e t w o l o n g visits to P a l e s t i n e in 1908 a n d 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 1 3 a n d d i r e c t e d t h e institute's scientific r e s e a r c h a n d field t r i p s t h e r e from 1924 u n t i l 1931. I n 1925 h e b e c a m e p r e s i d e n t of t h e D e u t s c h e r V e r e i n z u r E r f o r s c h u n g P a l a s t i n a s a n d in 1927 e d i t o r of t h e
Palastina
Jahrbuch. Alt h a d a p r o f o u n d k n o w l e d g e of t h e texts d e a l i n g w i t h d i e h i s t o r y of P a l e s t i n e in all p e r i o d s , as well as an i n t i m a t e k n o w l e d g e of t h e c o u n t r y itself. H e d e v e l o p e d d i e history of its territories in t h e biblical p e r i o d (Temtarialgeschichte)
as a
special subject area i n t h e discipline of t h e historical g e o g r a p h y of t h e H o l y L a n d , w i t h f a r - r e a c h i n g results. A l d i o u g h h e n e v e r p u b l i s h e d a b o o k s u m m a r i z i n g his w o r k , m a n y of his p a p e r s b e c a m e t h e f o c u s of furtiier r e s e a r c h a n d a d v a n c e d d i e o r i e s . H i s critical s t u d i e s of t h e lists of t h e cities in t h e H e b r e w Bible w e r e u s e d as p r i m a r y s o u r c e s for t h e m a n y different p e r i o d s o f Israel's h i s t o r y . D e v e l o p i n g t h e critical v i e w of G e r m a n s c h o l a r s h i p t o w a r d t h e historicity of t h e Book of Joshua,
A l t a r t i c u l a t e d a n e w t h e o r y of t h e c o n
q u e s t of d i e l a n d b y t h e t r i b e s of Israel: t h e i m m i g r a t i o n , or
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infiltration, theory. E v e n t h o u g h some of his ideas are n o longer accepted, m a n y others r e m a i n of f u n d a m e n t a l i m p o r t a n c e to the fields of archaeology a n d biblical studies, especially in t h e areas of biblical law and social d e v e l o p m e n t . H e influenced n o t only his o w n pupils, b u t scholars all over t h e world. His collected p a p e r s a p p e a r e d in 1953 a n d 1959 in three volumes, t h e last one edited by N o t h . A selection of his work in English translation a p p e a r e d in 1966 u n d e r t h e tide Essays on Old Testament. History and Religion. Alt has b e e n praised b y those w h o studied w i t h h i m as a stimulating teacher w h o e n c o u r a g e d his pupils t o d o original work. His k n o w l e d g e of topographical a n d historical details exceeded t h a t of all his colleagues a n d enabled h i m to d e velop n e w views for certain regions a n d whole e p o c h s . Al t h o u g h he never participated in an excavation, Alt closely followed t h e progress of archaeological fieldwork. I n his o w n work, he u s e d p o t t e r y as a key indicator for chronology, c o m b i n i n g surface exploration with text interpretation in a u n i q u e way. T h i s n e w a p p r o a c h to the material a d v a n c e d specialized research into tire territories a n d regions of an cient Palestine. [See also Historical G e o g r a p h y ; and the biography of Noth.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bardtke, H a n s . "Albrecht Alt: L e b e n u n d W e r k . " Theologische Literaturzeitung 81 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 5 1 3 - 5 2 2 . N o t h , Martin. "Albrecht Alt z u m Gedachtnis." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins
7 2 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 1-8. VOLKMAR FRITZ
A L T A R S . In the ancient N e a r East, altars are typically classified o n the basis of their material a n d style of c o n s t r u c tion. H o w e v e r , t h e flexibility a n d c o m p r e h e n s i v e n e s s of a typology based o n function a n d location allows altars to be described within a n archaeological context useful in analys ing written sources s u c h as t h e H e b r e w Bible. T h e t e r m altar refers to any surface o n which a n offering t o a deity is placed. T h e use of altars is widespread geographically a n d chronologically t h r o u g h o u t t h e N e a r East, with types r a n g ing from plain r o c k surfaces to elaborate installations within t e m p l e complexes. A l t h o u g h altars were associated witii the p r e s e n c e of a deity, their location was n o t limited t o t h e area of temples. Altars were often located o n hilltops, raised plat forms, a n d rooftops, as well as in a r a n g e of settings n o t characterized b y height. T h e t e r m altar should n o t b e a p plied to the interior raised platform, or " d a i s , " f o u n d o p posite the entry to m a n y temples, o n which t h e i m a g e of t h e deity was displayed. A distinction is m a d e archaeologically b e t w e e n altars found outside structures (type I) a n d t h o s e f o u n d within structures (type I I ) , b o t h having a n u m b e r of s u b t y p e s . 1. Rock altars: type la. A n example of a rock altar is t h e s t e p p e d stone block w i t h channels a n d c u p m a r k s f o u n d at
T e l Sera', west of Jerusalem. T h i s installation h a s b e e n a s sociated with t h e a c c o u n t of t h e sacrifice of M a n o a h in Judges 13. It is often impossible to verify t h e d a t e or religious function of this t y p e of altar b e c a u s e of t h e lack of associated artifacts. It should also b e n o t e d t h a t seemingly " s e c u l a r " installations, s u c h as t h r e s h i n g floors, m a y h a v e h a d religious/cultic c o n n e c t i o n s in ancient times. [See Sera', Tel.] 2. Open altars: type lb. Installations k n o w n as o p e n altars h a d clear cultic functions b u t w e r e n o t located witiiin t e m p l e complexes. A n e x a m p l e is t h e Early B r o n z e A g e s t r u c t u r e (4017) at M e g i d d o , in a n c i e n t Palestine, a large altar (8 m diameter) m o u n t e d via steps. [See M e g i d d o . ] I n later p e r i o d s this type of installation is f o u n d s u r r o u n d e d b y a n u m b e r of temples (although it does n o t afford direct access to t h e m ) . O t h e r buildings s o m e t i m e s f o u n d n e a r o p e n altars m a y h a v e h a d a function witiiin t h e cult, b u t t h e y are n o t c o n s i d e r e d t e m p l e s . T h r o u g h o u t d i e N e a r E a s t e v i d e n c e of o p e n altars c o m e s primarily from t h e B r o n z e A g e . 3. Enclosed altars: type Ic. F o u n d c o m m o n l y t h r o u g h o u t t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s , enclosed altars w e r e located witiiin t h e forecourt of t e m p l e c o m p l e x e s . E x a m p l e s of this type m a y be seen in t h e t e m p l e areas at K i t i o n o n C y p r u s . [See Kition.] A n o t h e r p r o m i n e n t e x a m p l e is t h e stone a n d e a r t h altar of t h e J u d a h i t e t e m p l e at A r a d . [See Arad.] B i b lical evidence (1 Kgs, 9:25, for e x a m p l e ) indicates a similarly located altar in t h e c o u r t y a r d of t h e S o l o m o n i c T e m p l e in Jerusalem, b u t this has n o t b e e n verified archaeologically. B o d i die archaeological a n d written e v i d e n c e identify o p e n a n d enclosed altars ( H e b . , mizbeah), often witii " h o r n s , " as t h e site of b u r n t offerings. T h e written e v i d e n c e suggests t h a t the materials u s e d in t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of tiiese altars included earth, stone, a n d metal, a l t h o u g h t h e r e are n o k n o w n excavated e x a m p l e s of metal. 4. Incense altars: type Ha. It is unlikely tiiat altars f o u n d witiiin buildings were u s e d for t h e b u r n i n g of a n i m a l sacri fices. It was t h e p r a c t i c e within t e m p l e s , h o w e v e r , t o b u r n several types of incense. A variety of stone a n d c e r a m i c s t a n d s h a v e b e e n identified as incense altars, a n d a n u m b e r of d i e former, w h i c h m a y have h a d a religious function, h a v e also been identified in " s e c u l a r " contexts. I n c e n s e altars b e c a m e u b i q u i t o u s in t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t d u r i n g the P e r s i a n period. 5. Presentation altars: type lib. T h e " p r e s e n t a t i o n " altar is f o u n d within t e m p l e s a n d related buildings b u t is n o t a s s o ciated with b u r n i n g . It is a surface u p o n w h i c h offerings t o t h e deity, such as grain, could b e placed. A t times, p r e s e n tation altars took t h e f o r m of b e n c h e s (often plastered m u d brick); stone " t a b l e s " o r ceramic s t a n d s also served this function. 6. Libation altars: type lie. Offerings t o deities also in c l u d e d liquids, s u c h as water, wine, a n d oil. Installations with depressions—plastered m u d brick o r large stone basins (e.g., the G e z e r stelae field), d e t a c h e d stone tables with carved depressions (e.g., H a z o r , area H ) , or bowls p l a c e d
AMARNA, TELL ELo n ceramic s t a n d s — h e l d s u c h offerings. T h i s t y p e of altar is often f o u n d within t h e t e m p l e itself (cf. L a c h i s h P a l a c e T e m p l e ) or in its c o u r t y a r d (e.g. E i n - G e d i ) . [See G e z e r ; Hazor; Lachish; 'Ein-Gedi.] c
Altars w e r e the focal p o i n t of c o m m u n i c a t i o n b e t w e e n t h e h u m a n a n d divine realms a n d a r e u b i q u i t o u s in t h o s e areas of t h e N e a r E a s t w h e r e religious practice included t h e t r a n s mission of foodstuffs to t h e g o d s .
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Archaeology Today, 1000; Proceedings of the Second International Con gress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem June-July J 9 9 0 , edited by Avraham Biran and Joseph Aviram, p p . 1 8 8 - 1 9 5 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 3 . Meyers, Carol L. "Altar." In Harper's Bible Dictionary, p p . 2 2 - 2 4 . San Francisco, 1 9 8 5 . Overview of the types and functions of altars m e n tioned in the H e b r e w Bible. Stendebach, Franz Josef. "Altarformen im kanaanaisch-israelitischen R a u m . " Biblische Zeitschrift 2 0 { 1 9 7 6 ) : 1 8 0 - 1 9 6 . Werner, H a r o l d M . The Altars of the Old Testament, Leipzig, 1 9 2 7 . ROBERT D. HAAK
[See also Cult; I n c e n s e ; and T e m p l e s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Barrick, W . Boyd. " H i g h Place." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3 , p p . 1 9 6 - 2 0 0 . N e w York, 1 9 9 2 . S u m m a r y of an important study that distinguishes altars from cultic areas known as high places. Bergquist, Birgitta. "Bronze A g e Sacrificial Koine in the Eastern M e d iterranean? A Study of Animal Sacrifice in t h e Ancient N e a r East." In Ritual and Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East, edited b y J. Q u a e gebeur, p p . 1 1 - 4 3 . Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 5 5 . L e u v e n , 1993.
DeVries, L a m o i n e R, " C u l t Stands: A Bewildering Variety of Shapes and Sizes." Biblical Archaeology Review 1 3 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 6 - 3 7 . P o p u l a r presentation of information about ceramic stands, especially in cultic contexts. Galling, K u r t . Der Altar in den Kulturen des alten Orients cine archdologische Studie. Berlin, 1 9 2 5 . Classic study of the p h e n o m e n o n of altars in the ancient N e a r East. Gitin, Seymour. "Incense Altars from Ekron, Israel, and Judah: C o n text and T y p o l o g y . " Eretz-Israel 2 0 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 5 2 * - 6 7 * . Authoritative study of four-horned incense altars in the Iron Age. Haak, Robert D . "Altar." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1, p p . 1 6 2 - 1 6 7 . N e w York, 1 9 9 2 . Convenient s u m m a r y of information concerning altars in the written a n d archaeological record. Hagg, Robin. " O p e n Cult Places in the Bronze Age Aegean." In Biblical
ALTARS.
A M A R N A , TELL EL-, site of t h e capital of t h e heretic E g y p t i a n king A k h e n a t e n , built t o h o n o r his sole g o d , Aten, located in M i d d l e E g y p t (27°38' N , 30°53' E ) . T h e large m u d - b r i c k a n d stone e x p a n s e of t h e city, as well as t h e cu neiform clay tablets f o u n d there within a state archival of fice, have m a d e T e l l e l - A m a r n a i m p o r t a n t to archaeologists a n d essential to historians of t h e N e a r East in t h e L a t e Bronze Age. I d e n t i f i c a t i o n . T h e r e m a i n s of T e l l e l - A m a r n a t o d a y stretch s o m e 10 k m (10 m i . ) n o r t h to s o u t h on t h e east side of t h e Nile River. T h e a n c i e n t city a n d environs o c c u p i e d nearly twice that distance o n b o t h sides of t h e river a n d were t o g e t h e r called Akhetaten, " t h e H o r i z o n of the Aten (sun d i s k ) . " T h e n a m e was given b y t h e city's founder, A k h e n a t e n , o n a series of stelae p l a c e d to delimit Tell el-Amarna. T h e city within A k h e t a t e n m a y h a v e h a d a separate desig nation or m o r e t h a n o n e , a n d t h e m o n u m e n t a l buildings t h a t A k h e n a t e n p l a c e d witliin t h e city likewise h a d discreet a p pellations (for s o m e of t h e s e see b e l o w ) .
Limestone incense altars, T e l M i q n e , I r o n II p e r i o d . (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
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AMARNA, TELL ELof the site were o c c u p i e d , h o w e v e r , d u r i n g o t h e r ancient eras. Earliest r e m a i n s are k n o w n f r o m several Paleolithic sites with flint c o n c e n t r a t i o n s , a n d a few N e o l i t h i c ( p r e d y nastic) artifacts suggest p r e - t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m o c c u p a t i o n in t h e region. A k h e n a t e n ' s city within Akhetaten w a s largely a b a n d o n e d within a d o z e n years of his d e a t h . T h e ruler w h o s u c c e e d e d A k h e n a t e n for a year o r t w o , S m e n k h k a r e , a p p e a r s to h a v e resided in e l - A m a r n a , a n d T u t a n k h a t e n , w h o s o o n c h a n g e d his n a m e to t h e m o r e familiar T u t a n k h a m u n , is well attested at t h e site for at least a n o t h e r t w o years. Building activity is d o c u m e n t e d also in a worker's village in t h e p e r i o d following T u t a n k h a m u n ' s a b a n d o n m e n t of M i d d l e E g y p t a n d r e t u r n to t h e region of T h e b e s . T h e full s e v e n t e e n years of A k h e n a t e n ' s reign, t o g e t h e r w i t h t h e d o z e n or so years c o m p r i s i n g S m e n k h k a r e ' s , T u t a n k h a m u n ' s , a n d A y ' s rules, are often r e ferred to as the " A m a r n a P e r i o d , " a l t h o u g h e l - A m a r n a w a s n o t inhabited d u r i n g all of it.
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V AMARNA, TELL E L - .
F i g u r e I.
Limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti.
N e w K i n g d o m , e i g h t e e n t h dynasty, A m a r n a p e r i o d , c. 1340 BCE. H e i g h t , 50 c m . E g y p t i a n M u s e u m , Berlin. (Erich Lessing/Art R e source, N Y )
T h e n a m e Tell el-Amama is a m i s n o m e r , for t h e site h a s n o visible m o u n d that characterize tells in t h e N e a r East generally. M o d e r n n a m e s a n d spellings h a v e shifted since W e s t e r n expeditions arrived there in the late eighteenth cen tury. First designated with t h e n a m e of t h e village of El-Tell by the N a p o l e o n i c expedition of 1798, the site was called b y several n a m e s , for e x a m p l e , Till Bene A m r a n , u s e d b y R o b ert H a y in 1829. E u r o p e a n travelers conflated t h e villages of et-Tell (or Till) a n d el-Amariya with a tribe settled in the region called B e n A m r a n . T h e n a m e Telfl) el-Amama first a p p e a r e d o n a publication b y Sir J o h n G a r d n e r Wilkinson, w h o m a p p e d the site a n d published his m a p in 1830. O c c u p a t i o n a l H i s t o r y . T e l l el-Amarna, or e l - A m a r n a as it is n o w m o r e c o m m o n l y t e r m e d , consists principally of the capital built for K i n g A k h e n a t e n , a b o u t 1350 BCE, o n land tiiat he believed to b e previously unsettled. ( S o n of A m e n h o t e p III, A k h e n a t e n h a d ascended t h e t h r o n e as A m e n h o tep I V , b u t c h a n g e d his n a m e a few years later.) A few areas
I n o n e region of s o u t h e r n e l - A m a r n a , n e a r d i e river, are t h e r e m a i n s of a t o w n t h a t survived t h e a b a n d o n m e n t of d i e m a i n city. F r a g m e n t a r y architecture of late N e w K i n g d o m date or later a r e m i x e d t h e r e w i t h s h e r d s of t h e A m a r n a period. Altiiough originally identified as t h e "river t e m p l e , " t h e bits of structures h a v e recently b e e n relabeled as h o u s e r e m a i n s . A few burials of t h e t w e n t y - s e c o n d - t w e n t y - t h i r d dynasties were f o u n d i n t h e early 1920s n e a r d i e w o r k e r ' s village, a n d in 1984 a burial of t h e t w e n t i e t h - t w e n t y - f i r s t dynasties was e x c a v a t e d in t h e s a m e area. S h e r d s of t h e L a t e Period ( e n d of eighth c e n t u r y - 3 3 2 BCE) w e r e f o u n d n e a r the s o u t h e r n t o m b s of A k h e n a t e n ' s nobles. T h e s e m a y h a v e b e longed to burials of a p o p u l a t i o n living in d i e general vicinity (possibly the river t o w n ) or m a y indicate t r a n s i e n t activity t h r o u g h t h e area for various p u r p o s e s , possibly even illicit o n e s , that is, t o m b r o b b e r y . I n t h e R o m a n p e r i o d several settlements existed at t h e site of e l - A m a r n a , a n d C o p t i c Christians later c o n v e r t e d t o m b s t h e r e for h o u s i n g a n d w o r ship. R e s e a r c h a n d E x c a v a t i o n . T h e largest of t h e few p r e served E g y p t i a n cities, e l - A m a r n a h a s b e e n frequently ex p l o r e d a n d studied. R e c e n t surveys a n d c o m p a r i s o n s with t h e earliest m a p s of t h e region indicate t h a t e l - A m a r n a h a s always b e e n visible t o interested visitors. A r e a s d e s t r o y e d b y illicit digging a p p e a r to h a v e b e e n only slightly less disturbed 150 ago t h a n t o d a y . As early as 1 7 1 4 F a t h e r C l a u d e Sicard, a F r e n c h Jesuit missionary, p u b l i s h e d a d r a w i n g of A m a r n a B o u n d a r y Stela A at T u n a el-Gebel. T h e N a p o l e o n i c scientific e x p e d i t i o n visited t h e region in 1799, a n d E d m e J o m a r d p r o d u c e d a p l a n of El T e l l in t h e p i o n e e r i n g study Description de I'Egypte, p u b l i s h e d in 1817. Sir J o h n G a r d n e r W i l k i n s o n vis ited el-Amarna in 1824 a n d 1826 to d r a w , p l a n , a n d c o p y t h e buildings a n d t o m b s a n d h e p r o d u c e d p l a n s of t h e entire city. O t h e r travelers in t h e 1820s a n d 1830s, s u c h as R o b e r t H a y , James B u r t o n , a n d N e s t o r L ' H o t e , m a d e copies of d i e
AMARNA, TELL ELt o m b s of A k h e n a t e n ' s nobles. T h e royal P r u s s i a n e x p e d i t i o n led b y R i c h a r d L e p s i u s d r e w p l a n s of t h e city of e l - A m a r n a b e t w e e n 1843 a n d 1845. T h e first m o d e r n archaeological w o r k a t e l - A m a r n a t o o k place in 1891-1892 w h e n Sir William M a t t h e w Flinders P e trie o p e n e d excavations in a variety of locations at t h e site. Several expeditions followed i n r a p i d succession, c u l m i n a t ing in t h e m e t h o d i c a l survey a n d excavations of L u d w i g B o r c h a r d t (1907, 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 1 4 ) , carried o u t for t h e D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesellschaft. S o m e of d i e b e s t - k n o w n works of A m a r n a art were u n c o v e r e d d u r i n g this p e r i o d , i n c l u d i n g t h e f a m o u s b u s t of Nefertiti (see figure 1), w h i c h is n o w in t h e E g y p t i a n M u s e u m in Berlin ( C h a r l o t t e n b u r g ) , a n d n u m e r o u s otiier statues f o u n d in t h e h o u s e a n d w o r k s h o p of t h e sculptor T h u t m o s e in t h e m a i n city/south s u b u r b . T h e E g y p t E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d ( n o w Society) of L o n d o n c o p i e d a n d p u b l i s h e d t h e private t o m b s a n d b o u n d a r y stelae b e t w e e n 1901 a n d 1907. T h e y r e s u m e d w o r k a t the site in 1921 u n d e r a succession of well-known directors, i n c l u d i n g T h o m a s E r i c P e e t , H e n r i F r a n k f o r t , F r a n c i s Llewellyn Grif fith, a n d J o h n D . S. P e n d l e b u r y . T h e E E F e x p l o r e d nearly all areas of t h e site, m o v i n g f r o m p e r i p h e r a l regions s u c h as t h e w o r k e r ' s village, t h e "river t e m p l e , " a n d t h e n o r t h e r n palace to later extensive excavations in t h e central city last ing until 1936. I n t h e early 1970s Geoffrey T . M a r t i n reinvestigated t h e royal t o m b at e l - A m a r n a a n d p u b l i s h e d in addition t h e n u m e r o u s b u t f r a g m e n t a r y objects f r o m t h e t o m b associated with A k h e n a t e n a n d Nefertiti. I n 1977 t h e E g y p t E x p l o r a t i o n Society r e s u m e d w o r k u n d e r d i e direction of Barry J. K e m p a n d has w o r k e d a t the site since. K e m p c o m m e n c e d exca vation at t h e w o r k e r ' s village t h a t o n c e h o u s e d artisans e m ployed in t h e royal t o m b . H i s t e a m f o u n d t h a t the village m a y h a v e b e e n a b a n d o n e d a n d dien reinhabited in t h e t i m e of T u t a n k h a m u n b y g u a r d i a n s of t h e royal a n d private n e cropoleis. R e s e a r c h has f o c u s e d o n identifying p a t t e r n s of activity sited within t h e village, as well as the i n t e r d e p e n d e n c e b e t w e e n t h e village a n d t h e central city. K e m p has m o v e d his investigations into t h e m a i n city area since 1987 b u t c o n t i n u e s to b e interested in d i e interrelationships b e tween p u b l i c a n d private buildings a n d their p e r i p h e r a l e c o nomic dependencies. R e m a i n s . T h e fifteen b o u n d a r y stelae of A k h e n a t e n d e limiting t h e territory of e l - A m a r n a , like t h e r e m a i n s of t h e city t h e y describe, are i m p o r t a n t m o n u m e n t s . S o m e of t h e s e b o u n d a r y m a r k e r s consist only of a stela a n d others of a n actual r o c k shrine c o n t a i n i n g statuary. T h e y p r o v i d e further i n f o r m a t i o n vis-a-vis t h e site, h o w e v e r , for t h r e e of t h e m p r e s e r v e t h e t e x t of a p r o c l a m a t i o n m a d e b y A k h e n a t e n in t h e first m o n t h s of his fifth regnal year, in w h i c h h e describes a n d n a m e s n u m e r o u s b u i l d i n g s a n d c o m p l e x e s to b e c o n structed a t A k h e t a t e n . S o m e of t h e s e (e.g.,'the great A t e n t e m p l e , t h e " m a n s i o n o f t h e A t e n , " t h e royal t o m b ) c a n b e identified with e x c a v a t e d s t r u c t u r e s ; s o m e c a n n o t with cer
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tainty (e.g., die " h o u s e of rejoicing a n d s u n s h a d e of the great q u e e n " ) , and s o m e o t h e r s a p p e a r n e v e r to have b e e n c o m pleted (e.g., the t o m b of t h e M n e v i s bull of Heliopolis). T h e identifiable buildings c o r r e s p o n d to complexes a n d t o m b s built t h r o u g h o u t m u c h of t h e 10-kilometer n o r t h - s o u t h stretch of e l - A m a r n a , a fact t h a t confirms d i e original design of t h e city as a long n a r r o w t o w n a c c o m m o d a t e d t o t h e Nile a n d d i e eastern bay of l i m e s t o n e cliffs b y a royal road. T h i s r o a d was later redirected in p a r t b u t r e m a i n e d t h e p r i m a r y r o u t e Uniting n o r t h areas to t h e centtal city. A t its n o r t h e r n e n d , e l - A m a r n a h a d a m u d - b r i c k n o r t h e r n river p a l a c e oriented o n its w e s t side to t h e royal r o a d t h a t travels s o u t h w a r d for 6 k m (3.7 m i ) . T h i s palace m a y have b e e n t h e principal r e s i d e n c e of d i e king. A g r o u p of a d m i n istrative buildings lies just soutii of it along with a residential q u a r t e r likewise oriented to d i e r o a d . F a r t h e r south is the n o r t h e r n palace, also built t o face t h e royal r o a d a n d a tourist attraction t o d a y . H e r e , a r o u n d courts with pools a n d s h a d e d g a r d e n p o r t i c o e s , lived a t least t w o q u e e n s , including M e retaten, A k h e n a t e n ' s d a u g h t e r , w h o resided there after a predecessor, p e r h a p s Nefertiti or Kiya. T h e n o r t h e r n s u b u r b is located t o t h e east of die royal r o a d orientation, a n d t h e p a r t s excavated (those fartiiest n o r t h from die central city) a p p e a r to h a v e been a late ad dition. A r e a s of r e s i d e n c e b e t w e e n t h e n o r t h e r n s u b u r b a n d d i e central city have n o t b e e n excavated b u t could reveal in time w h e t h e r this is a n a t u r a l n o r t h e r n extension from t h e central city or grew u p later in a separate b u t parallel fashion. T h e central city contains m o s t of t h e buildings w h o s e m a terial r e m a i n s , a r c h i t e c t u r e , a n d p r e s e r v e d decoration m a y suggest a center p l a n n e d for state administration a n d w o r ship. Oriented to t h e royal r o a d , it contained from n o r t h to south, t h e e n o r m o u s p r e c i n c t of t h e great A t e n t e m p l e ( " h o u s e " or "estate of t h e A t e n " ) ; t h e king's h o u s e , c o n n e c t e d b y a b r i d g e to t h e great palace; t h e smaller A t e n t e m ple (the " M a n s i o n of t h e A t e n " ) ; a n d t h e S m e n k h k a r e hall. O n t h e east side of t h e r o a d , die king's h o u s e a n d smaller Aten temple w e r e t h e w e s t e r n m o s t of a c o m p l e x of buildings that w e r e crucial t o state functions. K e m p considers the K i n g ' s h o u s e t o b e d i e m o s t likely siting for d i e " w i n d o w of a p p e a r a n c e " p i c t u r e d in n u m e r o u s private t o m b s of A k h e n a t e n ' s officials ( K e m p a n d Garfi, 1993, p . 59). A series of scribal offices lay east of d i e king's h o u s e , including one identified by s t a m p e d bricks as t h e " p l a c e of t h e p h a r a o h ' s c o r r e s p o n d e n c e . " In this archival office w e r e found the m a jority of t h e A m a r n a L e t t e r s , f a m o u s as t h e c o r r e s p o n d e n c e b e t w e e n t h e E g y p t i a n rulers A m e n h o t e p III, A k h e n a t e n , and T u t a n k h a m u n with kings a n d city-state rulers from M e s o p o t a m i a a n d t h e L e v a n t . T o t h e east of t h e offices lies a garrison block w i t h a n i m a l stalls a n d barracks, as well as separate storage areas for rations. T h i s security c o m p l e x is n o t oriented t o w a r d t h e royal road. Being on d i e eastern e d g e of d i e city, it m a y h a v e h a d m o r e association with t h e desert a n d t h e w a d i d u e east leading t o t h e royal t o m b .
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T h e b e s t - k n o w n c o m p o u n d in the central city, t h e great Aten t e m p l e , likewise c o m p r i s e d several structures. T h e G e m p a a t e n ( " t h e A t e n is f o u n d " ) was a m u l t i c o u r t e d stone building near the western e n d of t h e t e m p l e precinct. It was entered from a western gateway t h r o u g h high pylons giving o n to stone colonnades that themselves led to a series of u n r o o f e d c o u r t y a r d s . W i t h i n a n d beside these courts w e r e arranged bread-offering altars, m a d e of stone (within t h e courts) or brick ( s o u d i of the c o u r t s ) . M o r e t h a n 750 altars were placed within t h e G e m p a a t e n , a n d some 920 brick t a bles lay to the south of d i e building. A n o t h e r 920 m a y o n c e have existed o n t h e n o r t h e r n side. T h e formal c o l o n n a d e d setting a p p e a r s to have b e e n the p r i m a r y offering area for A t e n state worship b u t n o t t h e actual sanctuary of t h e t e m ple. Between G e m p a a t e n a n d a second stone s t r u c t u r e to t h e east, t h e sanctuary, was a " b u t c h e r ' s y a r d " with t e t h e r ing stones a n d a n e n o r m o u s o p e n area. A separate n o r t h e r n entrance to t h e o p e n area before the sanctuary was elabo rated as a gateway pavilion. A stela of quartizite, p e r h a p s evoking t h e Heliopolitan benben stone, was set u p o n a line with this e n t r a n c e . T h e sanctuary building was flanked to t h e n o r t h b y m o r e bread-offering altars, b u t excavations to t h e south of the building a n d just outside t h e enclosure wall have revealed indications of different ritual activities as well. I n a d u m p Petrie a n d P e n d l e b u r y found plain everted r i m bowls with b u r n t r e s i n s inside. I n 1986 K e m p confirmed t h a t d i e bowls with b u r n e d " i n c e n s e " were c o m m o n in t h e d u m p area along with " b e e r - j a r " s h a p e s a n d other offering vessel types ( K e m p , 1989, vol. 4, p p . 1 1 6 - 1 2 1 ) . H e f o u n d frag m e n t s of storage jars, a n d P e n d l e b u r y h a d f o u n d seals a n d labels in t h e area. K e m p has identified this d u m p as a sig nificant locale for the sanctuary's refuse. It provides evi
d e n c e for the libations a n d offerings of i n c e n s e m a d e within t h e n e i g h b o r i n g building. K e m p has n o t e d d i e p l a c e m e n t of large bakeries o n t h e s o u t h side of t h e enclosure wall o p posite t h e G e m p a a t e n . T h e h u n d r e d s of altars t h e r e w o u l d h a v e held loaves from those bakeries; K e m p believes t h a t a s e g m e n t of t h e city's p o p u l a c e offered to t h e A t e n o n t h e brick tables to t h e south of t h e G e m p a a t e n while t h e king a n d family officiated inside d i e t e m p l e p r o p e r ( K e m p a n d Garfi, 1993, p . 55). D e s p i t e K e m p ' s c o n t r i b u t i o n s , t h e ritual connection b e t w e e n t h e s a n c t u a r y a n d d i e G e m p a a t e n , as well as t h e u s e p a t t e r n s for t h e c o m p l e x generally, r e m a i n uncertain. In die m a i n city or soutii s u b u r b are residential a n d a d ministrative q u a r t e r s . L a r g e - s c a l e u n e x c a v a t e d c o m p l e x e s of u n d o u b t e d administrative n a t u r e lie in this sector, largely to t h e west of m o r e d o m e s t i c structures. T h e state a n d t e m ple institutions o p e r a t e d tiieir o w n e c o n o m i e s a n d n e c e s s a r ily h o u s e d the r e s o u r c e s , b o t h perishable a n d n o n p e r i s h a b l e . K e m p believes t h a t g o v e r n m e n t w o r k s h o p s m a y h a v e b e e n situated in these large centers, b u t h e also n o t e s t h a t large institutions a p p e a r to h a v e b e e n m a d e u p of a n u m b e r of c o m p l e x e s , often n o t located t o g e t h e r . T h e designation of industrial centers w i t h o u t inscription as " r o y a l , " " t e m p l e , " or " p r i v a t e " t h u s b e c o m e s p r o b l e m a t i c ( K e m p a n d Garfi, 1993, p p . 67-69; K e m p , 1989, vol. 5, p p . 56-63). T h e h o u s e a n d w o r k s h o p of t h e s c u l p t o r T h u t m o s e , fa m o u s for t h e m a n y statues a n d plaster m a s k s of royal family, are located in t h e s o u t h s u b u r b n e a r o t h e r s c u l p t o r s ' s h o p s (see figure 2). T h u t m o s e ' s precise e c o n o m i c a n d a d m i n i s trative association with his p a t r o n s is difficult t o ascertain. W h e t h e r individual artisans w e r e c o n t r a c t e d directiy b y t h e c o u r t , t h r o u g h c o u r t - s a n c t i o n e d p a t r o n s , or botii is u n -
Head of Nefertiti found here AMARNA, TELL E L - .
F i g u r e 2. Floor plan of the house of the sculptor Thutmose. (After K e m p , 1989)
AMARNA, TELL ELk n o w n . F o r e x a m p l e , s o m e obviously n o n r o y a l estates a p p e a r to h a v e h o u s e d royal w o r k s h o p s , p e r h a p s as a s u b c o n tract from t h e c r o w n . A r c h i t e c t u r e is n o t always a clear indicator of function. Archaeological r e s e a r c h h a s d e m o n s t r a t e d t h e often diverse p a t t e r n s of u s e for b o t h r e s i d e n c e s a n d specialized buildings, s u c h as " m a g a z i n e s , " w h i c h , as K e m p h a s f o u n d , were u s e d b o t h for p r o d u c t i o n a n d for storage ( K e m p a n d Garfi, 1993, p p . 67-69). N e a r l y all areas of e l - A m a r n a held residences (royal, t e m p l e , p r i v a t e ) , a n d t h o s e residences nearly always c o n t a i n e d s e p a r a t e storage facilities, wells, often industrial centers. T h e degree to w h i c h t h e s e s e p a r a t e facilities i n d i cate i n d e p e n d e n t e c o n o m i c b e h a v i o r is u n k n o w n . T o t h e s o u t h of t h e m a i n city/south s u b u r b is K o m elN a n a , oriented t o t h e original royal r o a d as it was laid o u t before t h e g r o w t h of the m a i n city. K o m e l - N a n a is a t e m p l e c o m p l e x w i t h s u p p o r t i n g b u i l d i n g s for food p r o d u c t i o n a n d storage. K e m p believes t h a t this is t h e t h i r d of three major institutions described in t h e early p r o c l a m a t i o n , t h e " s u n s h a d e of t h e great q u e e n " ( K e m p a n d Garfi, 1993, p . 79). E v e n farther s o u t h a n d entirely isolated is t h e M a r u a t e n , a site tiiat h o u s e s enclosures w i t h altars a n d shrines along w i t h pools a n d s u r r o u n d i n g g a r d e n s . It is clearly linked with queens, including Akhenaten's daughter Meretaten. Otiier areas of s o u t h e r n e l - A m a r n a include t h e a b o v e m e n t i o n e d river settlement, w h i c h is a residential area a n d e l - H a w a t a in t h e far s o u t h also n e a r t h e Nile. Little r e m a i n s in this sector. O n t h e o p p o s i t e e n d of t h e site are a n u m b e r of architectural r e m a i n s n o t p a r t of t h e city p r o p e r . T h r e e large desert altars in t h e n o r t h e a s t e r n desert, nearly o p p o s i t e t h e n o r t h palace, are o r i e n t e d t o w a r d t h e royal r o a d . T h e s e m u d - b r i c k structures w i t h r a m p s o n c e held pavilions, p e r h a p s for large-scale royal r e c e p t i o n s of dignitaries, s u c h as are p i c t u r e d in t w o private t o m b s . A b o v e these altars are t h e n o r t h e r n t o m b s of private residents of e l - A m a r n a . A s e c o n d set of s u c h t o m b s exists in t h e s o u t h e r n cliffs. A total of forty-three t o m b s was e x c a v a t e d in w h o l e or p a r t . T h e m o s t elaborate h a d c o l o n n a d e d i n n e r halls, a n d in t h o s e t h a t w e r e d e c o r a t e d ( m a n y were left i n c o m p l e t e ) d i e royal family a n d t h e architecture of A k h e t a t e n figured p r o m i n e n t l y in p a i n t e d relief s c u l p t u r e . T h e royal t o m b a n d a few u n i n s c r i b e d smaller t o m b s w e r e located in a w a d i r e a c h e d t h r o u g h a larger w a d i r u n n i n g eastward o p p o s i t e d i e c e n t r a l city. U n u s u a l relief scenes of m o u r n i n g over corpses o n b e d s a p p e a r o n t h e walls of t h e royal burial c h a m b e r a n d o n a side c h a m b e r u s e d for t h e burial of A k h e n a t e n ' s d a u g h t e r M e k e t a t e n , w h o m a y h a v e died in childbirth. T h e royal funerary g o o d s left at t h e site w e r e s m a s h e d i n t o pieces, b u t r e m a i n s of t h e royal s a r c o p h agus a n d c a n o p i c b o x h a v e b e e n studied ( M a r t i n , 1974). A t t h e m o u t h of eastern w a d i w a s t h e w o r k e r ' s village, w h i c h was a p p a r e n t l y u s e d for t h e b u i l d i n g of t h e royal t o m b a n d later, d u r i n g t h e reign of T u t a n k h a m u n , for g u a r d i n g t h e s a m e area. R e s i d e n t s a t this village in t h e time of T u t a n
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k h a m u n h a d n o t only self-sufficient residences b u t also shrines w h e r e families g a t h e r e d to eat a n d c o m m u n e with recently deceased relatives. T h e s e shrines would also have b e e n m e m o r i a l chapels for a h o u s e h o l d or several related h o u s e h o l d s . T h e s e c o n d p h a s e in t h e w o r k e r ' s village is o n e of d i e latest excavated, r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e later reign of A k h e n a t e n t h r o u g h t h e reign of T u t a n k h a m u n , including t h e time after t h e court's d e p a r t u r e from e l - A m a r n a . T h e activity of t h e g u a r d s living in t h e village in t h e last p h a s e therefore reflects a m i x t u r e of religious beliefs with various traditional gods r e a p p e a r i n g in s h r i n e i m a g e s . Following the a b a n d o n m e n t of d i e w o r k e r ' s village, t h e city of A m a r n a was b o t h u s e d as a quarry, especially for the R a m e s s i d e t e m p l e at H e r m o p o l i s , a n d deliberately mutilated. Statuary w a s d e stroyed in situ or d r a g g e d away a n d d u m p e d . A similar p a t t e r n of reuse a n d d e s t r u c t i o n can b e seen in the earlier c o m plex a t E a s t K a r n a k , w h i c h A k h e n a t e n built b o t h before a n d after his c h a n g e of n a m e from A m e n h o t e p . BIBLIOGRAPHY Aldred, Cyril. Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt: A New Study. L o n d o n , 1968. Pioneering historical and art historical study of the ruler, p r e senting Aldred's arguments for a prolonged co-regency between Akhenaten a n d his father A m e n h o t e p III. Revised and reissued in 1988. B o m a n n , Ann H . The Private Chapel in Ancient Egypt: A Study of the Chapels in the Workmen's Village at El Amarna with Special Reference to Deir el Medina and Other Sites. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 1 . Identifies the close relationship between el-Amarna chapels and D e i r el-Medineh pri vate chapels used for personal cult worship, differentiating tiiese from chapels strictly attached to t o m b s , which the author considers to b e for the K a of the deceased. K e m p , Barry J. Amarna Reports. 5 vols. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 8 9 . Annual reports of work by t h e E g y p t Exploration Society u n d e r K e m p ' s direction. Each volume includes contributions by expedition m e m bers o n topics such as pottery analysis, ancient wells, survey work, ancient ovens, faunal a n d botanical remains, etc. K e m p ' s offerings are always written with the reader in mind, but some authors allow the technical side to dominate. K e m p , Barry J. "Tell el-Amarna." In Lexikon dor Agyptologie, vol. 6, cols. 3 0 9 - 3 1 9 . Wiesbaden, 1 9 8 5 . Encyclopedia article encapsulating work at the site, with references to 1985. K e m p , Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. L o n d o n , 1989. General work on the cultural life of ancient Egypt, with a lengthy chapter using el-Amarna as " E g y p t in microcosm." Contains anal ysis of work u p to 1988. K e m p , Barry J., a n d Salvatore Garfi. A Survey of the Ancient City of El'Amarna. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 . Survey sheets of the site with accompanying text. K e m p offers a n u m b e r of recent thoughts, particularly on p r o visioning within el-Amarna, and provides summaries of earlier anal yses witiiin the technical descriptions of the sheets. Martin, Geoffrey T . The Royal Tomb at el-Amama I. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 4 . T h e t o m b objects from m u s e u m s all over the world gathered t o gether for study. Martin, Geoffrey T . A Bibliography of the Amarna Period and Its After math. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 1 . M o r a n , William L . The Amarna Letters. Baltimore, 1992. Retranslation and annotation of the famous correspondence between the rulers of el-Amarna, M e s o p o t a m i a , and the Levant. Eminently readable. M u r n a n e , William J., and Charles C. Van Siclen III. The
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Stelae of Akhenaten. L o n d o n , 1993. Publication of the refound, recollated, and researched boundary stelae, forming an important ref erence work for historians and philologists of el-Amarna. Redford, Donald B. Akhenaten the Heretic King. Princeton, 1984. Chapter 7 contains Redford's summation of the city. Archaeologically m u c h has been revised since that time, b u t Redford has a spir ited style and links the site with East Karnak, where he excavated Akhenaten's early temples. Van de Walle, Baudouin. " L a decouverte d'Amarna et d ' A k h e n a t o n . " Revue d'Egyptologie 28 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 7 - 2 4 . History of the early researches at el-Amarna. BETSY M . BRYAN
A M A R N A T A B L E T S . Tell e l - A m a r n a (ancient A k h etaten) in m i d d l e E g y p t w a s , in die fourteenth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e capital city of A k h e n a t e n , or A m e n o p h i s IV. In 1887 local inhabitants discovered cuneiform tablets t h e r e while digging in t h e m o u n d s . T h e tablets eventually f o u n d their w a y to a n t i q u e dealers and m u s e u m s . Subsequently, m o r e tablets were u n e a r t h e d in organized excavations. T h e exist i n g corpus consists of 380 tablets n o w primarily in the Brit ish M u s e u m in L o n d o n , t h e Vorderasiatisches M u s e u m in Berlin, and the E g y p t i a n M u s e u m in Cairo, T h e corpus of the A m a r n a tablets mainly includes letters sent to die courts of t h e Egyptian p h a r a o h s A m e n o p h i s III a n d his son A k h e n a t e n , T h e senders were o t h e r kings— n a m e l y of Babylonia, Assyria, Haiti, M i t a n n i , a n d Alashiya—and some m i n o r princes a n d rulers in the N e a r East. T h e majority of t h e extant letters are from vassals of t h e Egyptian E m p i r e in t h e L e v a n t . S o m e copies or drafts of letters from the p h a r a o h s are also preserved. A n o t h e r p a r t of the corpus consists of scholarly tablets (e.g., literary texts, vocabularies, and scribal exercises). M o s t of t h e A m a r n a texts were written in Akkadian, die diplomatic l a n g u a g e of t h e ancient N e a r East in the second millennium BCE (two of the letters were written in Hittite a n d o n e in H u r r i a n ) . T h e letters from C a n a a n reflect a language t h a t is a m i x t u r e of t h e Akkadian lingua franca a n d die local C a n a a n i t e , t h e m o t h e r t o n g u e of their scribes. T h e A m a r n a letters from C a n a a n are tiius a u n i q u e , and invaluable source for u n d e r standing t h e C a n a a n i t e dialects of t h e second millenium BCE. T h e international c o r r e s p o n d e n c e is usually c o n c e r n e d with exchanges of gifts; s o m e letters deal with diplomatic marriages a n d thus give t h e impression of a time of peaceful relationships a m o n g the great political powers o f t h a t p e r i o d . H o w e v e r , the rising p o w e r of d i e Hittites was already threat ening die n o r t h e r n b o r d e r of die E g y p t i a n E m p i r e , which is clearly reflected in t h e letters from E g y p t ' s vassals in t h e nortiiern L e v a n t . A considerable n u m b e r of letters from Byblos (in L e b a n o n ) tell of t h e pressure p u t on d i e coastal plain by Adbi-Asirta a n d his sons after h i m . T h e s e letters, along with others from d i e n o r t h e r n L e v a n t , a n d letters from t h e A m u r r i t e kings themselves, tell t h e story of t h e rise of t h e state of A m u r r u , a n d the shift of allegiance of Aziru, t h e
A m u r r i t e king a n d son of Abdi-Assirta, from E g y p t to t h e Hittites. L e t t e r s from local kings in m o s t areas of Syria a n d Palestine reflect a n almost c o n s t a n t state of conflict a n d r e quests to the p h a r a o h to intervene. I n n e r - c i t y rebels a n d pressure from t h e 'apiru, a class of outsiders, a r e also c o m m o n l y m e n t i o n e d . F o r e x a m p l e , i R - h e b a , king of J e r u s a l e m , complains a b o u t a coalition of o t h e r s o u t h e r n C a n a a n i t e kings against h i m led b y Milkilu, king of G e z e r . L a t e r , in G e z e r , Y a p a ' u , a successor of Milkilu, c o m p l a i n s t h a t his b r o t h e r rebelled against h i m a n d joined t h e 'apiru. Similar descriptions of u n s t e a d y situations c o m e from all over t h e area d o m i n a t e d b y E g y p t . T h r o u g h t h e A m a r n a letters w e learn a b o u t d i e relation ship b o t h b e t w e e n t h e empires a n d a m o n g t h e local C a naanite rulers; a b o u t t h e ways t h e E g y p t i a n E m p i r e d o m i n a t e d its territories in t h e L e v a n t ; a b o u t d i e social diversity in Syria-Palestine; a n d a b o u t t h e political s t r u c t u r e a n d struggles b e t w e e n t h e Hittite a n d t h e E g y p t i a n e m p i r e s at their b o r d e r s in t h e n o r t h e r n L e v a n t . T h e A m a r n a letters constitute a u n i q u e c o r p u s for s t u d y i n g t h e social a n d polit ical s t r u c t u r e of Syria-Palestine in t h e s e c o n d half of t h e fourteenth c e n t u r y BCE, a time t h a t h a s accordingly b e e n t e r m e d , t h e A m a r n a age. Shortiy after their discovery, all of t h e A m a r n a texts w e r e published in c u n e i f o r m copies, in transliteration, a n d in translation. Jorgen A. K n u d t z o n (1915) c o m p i l e d a full e d i tion of d i e texts t h a t is still authoritative with r e g a r d t o their Akkadian texts. T h e s e c o n d v o l u m e of tiiis edition includes a historical c o m m e n t a r y b y O t t o W e b e r a n d a n analytic v o cabulary b y E r i c h Ebeling. T h e texts discovered later w e r e published b y A n s o n F . R a i n e y in 1970 (revised edition, 1978). T h e language of t h e C a n a a n i t e A m a r n a letters p o s ited m a n y difficulties, b u t William L . M o r a n achieved a breaktiirough in 1950 in u n d e r s t a n d i n g it as a m i x e d lan guage. This breakthrough and subsequent research by M o r a n , R a i n e y , a n d others h a v e established t h e study of t h e A m a r n a letters o n solid philological g r o u n d s . A n e w , a u dioritative translation of t h e A m a r n a letters b y M o r a n a p p e a r e d in F r e n c h in 1987 (English edition, 1992). Historical research has c o n c e n t r a t e d mainly o n d i e relationships b e tween the great p o w e r s a n d m u c h less o n t h e internal affairs of Syria-Palestine. T h e first major a t t e m p t to tackle t h e c o m plicated chronological disposition of t h e letters w a s m a d e b y E d w a r d F . C a m p b e l l (1964). T h i s p a v e d d i e w a y for N a d a v N a ' a m a n ' s p i o n e e r i n g history of Palestine in t h e A m a r n a p e r i o d (1975). H o r s t Klengel (1965-1970) w a s t h e first to h a n d l e comprehensively internal affairs in Syria. [See also Akkadian; and A m a r n a , T e l l el-.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Campbell, E d w a r d F . The Chronology of the Amarna Letters: With Spe cial Reference to the Hypothetical Coregency ofAmenophis III and Akhe naten. Baltimore, 1964. Kitchen, K. A. Suppiluliuma
and the Amarna Pharaos: A Study in Rel-
AMATHUS ative Chronology. Liverpool M o n o g r a p h s in Archaeology and Ori ental Studies, n o . 5. Liverpool, 1 9 6 2 . Klengel, Horst. Geschichte Syriens im 2,Jahrtausendv.u.Z, 3 vols. Berlin, 1965-1970. K n u d t z o n , J0rgen A. Die el-Amarna-Tafeln ( 1 9 1 5 ) . Vorderasiatische Bibliothek, 2. Leipzig, 1964. K u h n e , C o r d . Die Chronologie der intemationalen Korrespondene von ElAmarna. Alter Orient u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , vol. 1 7 . Kevelaer, 1 9 7 3 . M o r a n , William L. " A Syntactical S t u d y of t h e Dialect of Byblos as Reflected in the A m a r n a T a b l e t s . " P h . D . diss., Johns H o p k i n s U n i versity, 1 9 5 0 . T h e first b r e a k t h r o u g h for the u n d e r s t a n d i n g of t h e language of the Canaanite A m a r n a letters. Available from University Microfilms International, A n n A r b o r . M o r a n , William L . The Amarna Letters. Baltimore, 1 9 9 2 . N a ' a m a n , N a d a v . " T h e Historical Disposition and Historical D e v e l o p m e n t of Eretz-Israel a c c o r d i n g to the A m a r n a L e t t e r s . " P h . D . diss., Tel Aviv University, 1 9 7 5 . In H e b r e w with English s u m m a r y . Rainey, A n s o n F . Tell el-Amarna Tablets, 359-379, 2 d ed., rev. Alter Orient u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , vol. 8. Kevelaer, 1 9 7 8 . SHLOMO IZRE'EL
A M A T H U S , city o n t h e s o u t h coast of C y p r u s , a p p r o x imately 10 k m (6.2 mi.) east of m o d e r n Limassol, capital of o n e of t h e small k i n g d o m s of t h e island until the e n d of d i e f o u r t h c e n t u r y BCE (34°4i'25" N , 33°i2'5" E ) . T h e principal p a r t of t h e site o c c u p i e s a small hill 88 m (289 ft.) high; t o w a r d d i e south d i e hill d e s c e n d s in a gentle slope t o t h e sea, b u t o n t h e o t h e r t h r e e sides t h e site is p r o t e c t e d b y a n a t u r a l cliff. T o t h e s o u t h e a s t of t h e acropolis t h e r e is t h e lower city o c c u p i e d principally d u r i n g d i e R o m a n p e r i o d , a n d t h e p o r t built at t h e e n d of t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y . T h e necropoleis e x t e n d all a r o u n d d i e s e p o p u l a t e d areas, b u t t h e u n e x c a v a t e d s u m m i t of t h e hill, called Viklaes, to t h e east of t h e acropolis, seems to h a v e b e e n o c c u p i e d b y a P h o e n i c i a n sanctuary. T h e G r e e k a n d L a t i n literary texts c o n c e r n i n g a n c i e n t A m a t h u s are n o t n u m e r o u s . A c c o r d i n g t o t h e historian T h e o p o m p o s (fourth c e n t u r y B C E ) , t h e city w a s h o m e to t h e d e s c e n d a n t s of t h e " c o m p a n i o n s of K i n y r a s w h o h a d b e e n p u t t o flight b y t h e G r e e k s w h o a c c o m p a n i e d A g a m e m n o n . " P s e u d o - S k y l a x o n t h e o t h e r h a n d describes t h e A m a t h u s i a n s as " a u t o c h t h o n o u s . " T h e inscriptions discovered at t h e site confirm tiiat until d i e b e g i n n i n g of t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d t h e A m a t h u s i a n s w r o t e a n d v e r y p r o b a b l y spoke a l a n g u a g e t h a t w a s neither I n d o - E u r o p e a n n o r Semitic, b u t one tiiat is c o n ventionally called " e t e o c y p r i a n . " H o w e v e r , t h e d e a r t h of available inscriptions m a k e s translation impossible. U n t i l 1975 t h e archaeological e x p l o r a t i o n of A m a t h u s involved only t h e necropoleis: in 1874-1875 t h e A m e r i c a n c o n s u l L u i g i P a l m a di C e s n o l a h a d discovered a few spectacular pieces, s u c h as a g r a n d l i m e s t o n e s a r c o p h a g u s at d i e N e w Y o r k M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m or a silver c u p at t h e British M u s e u m . T h e first scientific excavations were carried o u t in 1893-1894 b y a British e x p e d i t i o n , followed in 1930 b y those of a S w e d i s h expedition d i r e c t e d b y E i n a r Gjerstad. Since 1975, an e x p e d i t i o n from t h e F r e n c h S c h o o l of Archaeology
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in A t h e n s has o p e n e d m a n y sites o n the acropolis, in the p o r t , a n d in m a n y places o n the r a m p a r t s of the city; these excavations have b e e n c o n c l u d e d b y a survey of t h e territory of this small realm. F o r its p a r t , t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiq uities of C y p r u s has t a k e n c h a r g e of t h e excavation of the lower city a n d associated t o m b s , especially in t h o s e areas, w h e r e sites are t h r e a t e n e d b y constructions p r o m p t e d b y t o u r i s m . [See the biographies of di Cesnola and Gjerstad.] M a n y sites located close to d i e city testify to an o c c u p a t i o n of t h e region since t h e P r e - P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c b u t , curiously, n o i m p o r t a n t settlement h a s yet b e e n attested in t h e L a t e B r o n z e P e r i o d , w h e n d i e s o u t h coast of C y p r u s k n e w its m o s t i m p o r t a n t d e v e l o p m e n t (despite C e s n o l a ' s claims to h a v e discovered oriental cylinder seals a n d M y c e n a e a n p o t tery at A m a t h u s ) . T h e earliest evidence of o c c u p a t i o n of t h e site dates t o t h e eleventh c e n t u r y , b u t this consists of n o m o r e titan a small deposit of pottery f o u n d o n t h e slope of t h e acropolis a n d , p e r h a p s , of the t o m b situated at the very t o p of t h e hill, in the f u t u r e sanctuary of A p h r o d i t e . T h e other oldest t o m b s currentiy k n o w n date n o further b a c k t h a n t h e late C y p r o - G e o m e t r i c I (i.e., t h e beginning of tile t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE), a n d a m o r e d e n s e o c c u p a t i o n of t h e site, characterized by t h e e x c h a n g e s with Phoenicia a n d the A e g e a n w o r l d , is attested only in C y p r o - G e o m e t r i c II a n d III ( e n d of t h e t e n t h - e i g h t h c e n t u r y ) . O n t h e acropolis, d i e first p h a s e s of t h e sanctuary of A p h r o d i t e a n d the palace do n o t d a t e b a c k further t h a n t h e eighth century. R e g a r d i n g t h e o c c u p a t i o n of A m a t h u s in d i e C y p r o - G e o m e t r i c II—III a n d at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e C y p r o - A r c h a i c , it is necessary to consider t h e p r o b l e m of d i e identification of t h e k i n g d o m of Q a r t i h a d a s h t , t h e C a r t h a g e of C y p r u s , m e n t i o n e d b o t h in t h e d e d i c a t i o n of a b r o n z e bowl discovered in t h e last c e n t u r y in t h e area of A m a t h u s / L i m a s s o l (object offered t o Baal of L e b a n o n b y a " g o v e r n o r of Cartilage, servant of H i r a m , king of t h e S i d o n i a n s , " eightii c e n t u r y ) , a n d in t h e list of die C y p r i o t kings subject to Esarhadclon a n d A s h u r b a n i p a l (seventh c e n t u r y ) . G i v e n t h e i m p o r t a n c e of t h e P h o e n i c i a n influence on die material culture a n d r e ligion of A m a t h u s , it is altogether possible that this " C a r thage of C y p r u s " referred to A m a t h u s , even if t h e P h o e n i cians exerted only a t e n u o u s p o w e r t h e r e a n d t h e majority of t h e p o p u l a t i o n was m a d e u p of " E t e o c y p r i o t s . " T o t h e a r g u m e n t s that result from t h e studies already p u b l i s h e d o n e m u s t a d d t h e discovery in 1992, in t h e west p a r t of t h e n e cropolis b y die edge of t h e sea, of a great mass of burials in vases p l a c e d o n d i e b a r e eartii. T h e s e h u n d r e d s of vases, w h i c h contain t h e r e m a i n s of children or adults, s e e m to date b e t w e e n the e n d of C y p r o - G e o m e t r i c a n d the C y p r o - A r chaic. T h i s was very p r o b a b l y d i e P h o e n i c i a n necropolis of A m a t h u s . In t h e fifth a n d f o u r t h centuries, w h e n C y p r u s was a p a r t of t h e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e , t h e Phoenician p r e s ence at A m a t h u s was visibly limited: all t h e kings h a d G r e e k n a m e s . In d i e a b s e n c e of inscriptions, only isolated m o n u m e n t s s u c h as a n t h r o p o i d s a r c o p h a g i , b r o u g h t t o light in t h e
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necropolis, a n d fragments of t h e " t h r o n e of A s t a r t e " dis covered on t h e hill of Viklaes, t o t h e east of t h e acropolis, still testify t o t h e role played in t h e city b y t h e P h o e n i c i a n s . O n t h e acropolis, t w o sites o p e n e d by t h e F r e n c h e x p e dition have revealed i m p o r t a n t information on t h e history a n d civilization of A m a t h u s . T h e first, situated half-way u p t h e hill, explored a large building of w h i c h t h e first two levels date to t h e end of the C y p r o - G e o m e t t i c a n d t h e C y p r o Archaic; these levels are followed b y a r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e whole at t h e e n d of the sixth century or the beginning of t h e fifth a n d t h e n a destruction a r o u n d 300. A t t h e m o m e n t only t h e area of the w a r e h o u s e s has b e e n excavated, b u t t h e r e a r e n u m e r o u s similarities with t h e palace of V o u n i , o n t h e n o r t h coast of C y p r u s , excavated b y t h e Swedish expedition of Gjerstad, a n d consequentiy there is a g o o d c h a n c e that this building o n t h e acropolis is t h e palace of t h e kings of A m a t h u s , destroyed n o later t h a n t h e war b e t w e e n P t o l e m y I a n d D e m e t r i o s Poliorcete. [See Vouni.] T h e pottery i m p o r t e d from A t h e n s a n d t h e quality of t h e limestone sculpture ( a m o n g which it is necessary to m e n t i o n t h e H a t h o r i c col u m n capital dated a r o u n d 480, t h e loveliest e x a m p l e of this type discovered at C y p r u s ) testify to d i e wealth of t h e local princes in t h e fifth c e n t u r y after t h e victory of their allies, the Persians, over t h e Cypriots w h o joined t h e revolution o n t h e side of t h e Ionians (499-497). Currently t h e b e s t - k n o w n site at A m a t h u s is t h e sanctuary of A p h r o d i t e , situated at t h e s u m m i t of the acropolis. C i t e d b y t h e R o m a n historian T a c i t u s (Annals 3.62) as o n e of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t o n C y p r u s , it w a s definitely identified in 1979 owing t o d i e discovery of t w o dedications m a d e b y king Androkles, a c o n t e m p o r a r y of Alexander t h e G r e a t . T h e s e dedications were a d d r e s s e d to " t h e C y p r i o t " (Kypria) a n d to " t h e C y p r i o t A p h r o d i t e " (Aphrodite K y p r i a ) . T h e s a n c tuary developed b e g i n n i n g in t h e eighth century, n o d o u b t on t h e site of an older t o m b , p e r h a p s t h a t of A r i a n a - A p h rodite m e n t i o n e d b y P l u t a r c h (Life of Theseus 20.30-34, cit ing t h e A m a t h u s i a n historian P a i o n ) . A l t h o u g h t h e ancient cities were devastated in t h e R o m a n period a n d , above all, in t h e early years of Christianity, s o m e characteristics of t h e primitive sanctuary can b e discerned. T h e r e w a s a large court open t o d i e sky, into which a small natural cave o p e n e d . T h i s area w a s dedicated to t h e cult d o w n t o t h e fifth century. T w o large monolithic vases m a d e of local limestone w e r e also found h e r e , o n e of which was taken t o t h e L o u v r e in Paris in 1865; weighing approximately 13,000 kg (14 t o n s ) , it has four h a n d l e s , o n e of w h i c h bears a n E t e o c y p r i o t inscription. B e n e a t h these handles t h e vase is decorated w i t h bulls. T h e water t h a t these vases contained w a s p e r h a p s u s e d in ablutions of d i e faithful d u r i n g rituals practiced i n tire sanctuary. I n t h e sixth t o fifth century a fair n u m b e r of figurines of t h e G r e e k K o r e or of the breast-holding P h o e nician " A s t a r t e " t y p e w e r e offered. F u r t h e r m o r e , a H a t h o r i c c o l u m n capital m a d e of limestone, which w a s f o u n d in a
Christian wall n e a r t h e vases, shows t h a t t h e local g o d d e s s was equivalent t o t h e E g y p t i a n c o w - h e a d e d H a t h o r , w h o w a s also a g o d d e s s of love a n d fertility. I n t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d , a n inscription suggests t h a t t h e cult of Isis a n d S e rapis was associated with t h a t of A p h r o d i t e . T h i s association was illustrated b y t h e discovery just u n d e r t h e palace of m a n y terra-cotta figurines, from t h e e n d of t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d , r e p r e s e n t i n g A p h r o d i t e a n d Isis. I n t h e last q u a r t e r of t h e first c e n t u r y CE a m o n u m e n t a l G r e e k t e m p l e w a s c o n structed, b u t w i t h " N a b a t e a n " c o l u m n capitals of great quality. A t the b e g i n n i n g of t h e seventh c e n t u r y CE t h e s u r viving p a g a n buildings were d e s t r o y e d for t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of a c h u r c h a n d other C h r i s t i a n buildings. T h e site w a s a b a n d o n e d at t h e e n d of t h e seventh c e n t u r y , w h e n L i m a s s o l b e c a m e t h e principal u r b a n center of t h e region. BIBLIOGRAPHY Each year a report on the work of t h e F r e n c h expedition a n d t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities is published in the Bulletin de Conespondance Hellenique. F o r m o n o g r a p h s o n the results of t h e F r e n c h expedition, see Pierre Aupert et al., Amathonte I. Testimonia i:Auteurs anciens, monnayage, voyageurs, fouilles, origines, geographic (Paris, 1 9 8 4 ) , which c o n tains all the literary sources concerning A m a t h u s ; A n t o i n e H e r m a r y , with Veronica T a t t o n - B r o w n , Amathonte II. Testamonia 2: Les sculptures decouvenes avant 1975 (Paris, 1 9 8 1 ) ; R o b e r t Laffineur et al., Amathonte III. Testimonia 3: L'orfevrerie (Paris, 1 9 8 6 ) ; a n d A n n e Queyel, Ama thonte IV: Les figurines hellenisliques de terre cuite (Paris, 1988). A n t o i n e H e r m a r y provides a synthesis in F r e n c h and English, with a detailed bibliography, in " L e s fouilles francaises d ' A m a t h o n t e / T h e F r e n c h E x cavations at A m a t h u s , " in Kinyras: L'arMologiefrangaise a Chypre, p p . 1 6 7 - 1 9 3 (Lyon, 1 9 9 3 ) . T h e excavations of t h e D e p a r t m e n t of A n t i q uities are covered in Vassos Karageorghis et al., eds., La necropole d'Amathonte: Tombes 110-383, 6 vols. (Nicosia, 1 9 8 7 - 1 9 9 2 ) . F o r t h e early periods and relations with the East, t h e reader should consult Antoine H e r m a r y , " A m a t h o n t e de C h y p r e et les P h e n i c i e n s , " in Phoe nicia and the East Mediterranean in the First Millennium B.C., edited by E d u a r d Lipinski, p p . 3 7 5 - 3 8 8 (Louvain, 1 9 8 7 ) ; a n d Vassos K a r a georghis and M . Iacovou, " A m a t h u s T o m b 5 2 1 : A C y p r o - G e o m e t r i c I G r o u p , " Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cypms ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 7 5 100, pis. 4 - 1 1 . A guide of the site, edited by Pierre A u p e r t , is in press. ANTOINE HERMARY Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
AMERICAN CENTER OF ORIENTAL R E SEARCH. Located in A m m a n , Jordan, the American C e n t e r of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A C O R ) w a s established in 1968, b u t its origins b e l o n g t o t h e t u r n of t h e c e n t u r y . I n 1900 t h e A m e r i c a n S c h o o l of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A S O R ) w a s established i n J e r u s a l e m as a p e r m a n e n t r e s e a r c h center tiiat w o u l d facilitate regional biblical, historical, linguistic, a n d archaeological studies. After 1967 t h e s c h o o l b e c a m e k n o w n as t h e Albright Institute of Archaeological R e s e a r c h . In t h e aftermath of t h e 1967 W a r , b e c a u s e it is situated in E a s t Jerusalem, it b e c a m e logistically i m p o s s i b l e t o c o n t i n u e u s i n g t h e institute as a b a s e of o p e r a t i o n s for archaeological
AMERICAN CENTER OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH field projects in J o r d a n a n d n e i g h b o r i n g A r a b countries. D r . G. E r n e s t W r i g h t , t h e n p r e s i d e n t of A S O R , called for t h e establishment of a n e w r e s e a r c h institute in A m m a n , a n d in 1968 an a p a r t m e n t w a s r e n t e d n e a r t h e first traffic circle o n Jebel A m m a n . Like its p r e d e c e s s o r in J e r u s a l e m , t h e future of t h e A m m a n institute w a s very u n c e r t a i n at its genesis. F u n d i n g w a s m i n i m a l a n d t h e n e w center h a d neither a li brary n o r o t h e r assets. I n 1971 A C O R w a s legally i n c o r p o r a t e d a n d registered in b o t h t h e U n i t e d States a n d J o r d a n as a n o n p r o f i t educational a n d cultural organization. It is g o v e r n e d b y a b o a r d of t r u s t ees in a c c o r d a n c e with its c h a r t e r a n d bylaws. A l t h o u g h A C O R is technically an i n d e p e n d e n t organization, it has al ways m a i n t a i n e d a close w o r k i n g relationship with its p a r e n t organization, A S O R . F o r t h e first seven years of its existence, A C O R o p e r a t e d with a m o d e s t a n n u a l b u d g e t of less t h a n $25,000 p r o v i d e d b y grants from t h e U . S . I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y ( U S I A ) , A S O R , a n d private c o n t r i b u t i o n s . Its directorship w a s a one-year a p p o i n t m e n t t h a t also carried with it t h e title " a n nual p r o f e s s o r . " I n addition to facilitating t h e research p r o j ects of U . S . a n d C a n a d i a n scholars, the directors also t a u g h t courses at t h e University of J o r d a n a n d w e r e i n s t r u m e n t a l in setting u p t h e m a s t e r ' s p r o g r a m in archaeology t h e r e . T h e A C O R directors in o r d e r of their t e r m s of service b e t w e e n 1968 a n d 1975 w e r e R u d o l p h D o r n e m a n n , M u r r a y N i c h o l , Bastiaan v a n E l d e r e n , Siegfried H o r n , H e n r y T h o m p s o n , a n d G e o r g e M e n d e n h a l l . D u r i n g t h o s e early years a c o o k w a s t h e only full-time e m p l o y e e . I n 1971, t h e c e n t e r m o v e d t o s o m e w h a t larger q u a r t e r s near t h e t h i r d circle o n Jebel A m m a n a n d a small library collection w a s established. T h e a p p o i n t m e n t of J a m e s S a u e r as director in 1975 m a r k e d a n i m p o r t a n t t u r n i n g p o i n t for A C O R . S a u e r was the first l o n g - t e r m a p p o i n t m e n t , serving from 1975 t o 1981. D u r i n g his t e n u r e , a hostel w a s e s t a b lished to p r o v i d e a c c o m m o d a t i o n s for visiting scholars, a n d t h e n u m b e r of r e s e a r c h projects w o r k i n g t h r o u g h t h e c e n t e r m o r e t h a n d o u b l e d . T h e o p e r a t i n g b u d g e t tripled a n d i n c o m e g e n e r a t e d f r o m t h e hostel a n d e q u i p m e n t rental m a d e t h e institute less d e p e n d e n t o n external funding sources. B y 1977 A C O R h a d o u t g r o w n t h e third-circle facility a n d a newly c o n s t r u c t e d t w o - s t o r y h o u s e w a s r e n t e d n e a r t h e sixth circle o n Jebel A m m a n . I n 1980 n e w fellowships w e r e e s t a b lished with f u n d i n g from t h e N a t i o n a l E n d o w m e n t for t h e Humanities. T h e r a p i d g r o w t h of A C O R ' s projects a n d p r o g r a m , along with rising rental costs in A m m a n , s p a w n e d a d i s c u s sion in t h e late 1970s a b o u t t h e advisability of c o n s t r u c t i n g a p e r m a n e n t facility for A C O R . C r o w n P r i n c e H a s a n i b n T a l a l e n c o u r a g e d this c o u r s e of action, pledging his g o v e r n m e n t ' s s u p p o r t in securing l a n d . T h e task of overseeing t h e fund-raising a n d c o n s t r u c t i o n projects w a s u n d e r t a k e n b y D a v i d M c C r e e r y , w h o served
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as director from 1981 t o 1988. T h r o u g h o u t t h e 1980s, the n u m b e r of field projects w o r k i n g t h r o u g h A C O R , of longt e r m appointees, of library v o l u m e s , a n d of resident scholars c o n t i n u e d t o increase. T h e p u b l i c lecture series a n d field trips to archaeological sites initiated b y S a u e r grew in p o p ularity. In J u n e 1986 t h e n e w A C O R facility, located at t h e west ern edge of A m m a n , n e a r t h e university a n d the British a n d G e r m a n archaeological Institutes, o p e n e d its d o o r s . T h e 25,000-square-foot facility comfortably a c c o m m o d a t e s thirty p e o p l e , a library, private study carrels, a conservation lab, w o r k r o o m s , storage r o o m s , a n d a lecture r o o m . B e t w e e n 1988 and 1994, A C O R w a s directed b y Bert de Vries (1988-1991) a n d Pierre Bikai (since 1991). U n d e r tiiese m o s t recent directors a Cultural R e s o u r c e M a n a g e m e n t p r o g r a m w a s established in cooperation with t h e J o r d a n i a n D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities to p r o t e c t a n d conserve e n d a n g e r e d sites. A C O R works closely witii J o r d a n i a n a n d U . S . g o v e r n m e n t a l agencies to c o o r d i n a t e t h e interests of t h e international scholarly c o m m u n i t y a n d g o v e r n m e n t a l agencies interested in d e v e l o p i n g archaeological sites for their touristic a n d e c o n o m i c value to t h e country. T h e A C O R library holds m o r e t h a n twenty t h o u s a n d v o l u m e s , m a k i n g it o n e of the b e s t in t h e region. I n 1994, a newly e q u i p p e d conservation lab w a s i n a u g u r a t e d a n d i m m e d i ately p u t to use b y a U . S . / F i n n i s h J o r d a n i a n t e a m working o n t h e fifth-sixtii-century P e t r a p a p y r i . [See Petra, article on R e c e n t Finds.] A p p r o x i m a t e l y forty archaeological field projects are c u r rently associated with A C O R . A C O R is t o d a y actively p r o m o t i n g d i e investigation of J o r d a n ' s prehistoric a n d p o s t classical (Islamic) p e r i o d s . A l t h o u g h archaeological research has always b e e n the focal p o i n t of t h e institute, t h r o u g h o u t t h e early 1990s t h e s c o p e of A C O R - s p o n s o r e d research was b r o a d e n e d dramatically. T h e institute n o w offers fellow ships in a variety of disciplines u n d e r t h e overall rubric of N e a r E a s t e r n Studies. T h e institute h o u s e s u p to thirty scholars a n d students o n a regular basis a n d has an overflow capacity of u p to seventy d u r i n g d i e p e a k excavation season. A C O R has b e c o m e a truly international institute. I n 1992 A C O R initiated a n e w p r o g r a m with the goal of p r o d u c i n g high-quality archaeological publications in Jor d a n . W i t h f u n d i n g from t h e U . S . A g e n c y for International D e v e l o p m e n t , t h e first m a j o r A C O R publication—The Mo saics of Jordan—appeared in 1993, followed b y volumes o n t h e architecture of t h e G r e a t T e m p l e of A m m a n a n d t h e J o r d a n Antiquities D a t a b a s e a n d Information System. A publications e n d o w m e n t h a s b e e n established to ensure t h e longevity of A C O R ' s p u b l i c a t i o n p r o g r a m . I n its brief twenty-five-year history, A C O R has u n d e r g o n e several t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s , to take its place, despite political a n d fi nancial obstacles, as a d y n a m i c research institute in t h e N e a r East.
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AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR MAGHREB STUDIES
[See also Albright Institute of Archaeological R e s e a r c h ; A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research; and the biography of Wright.]
[See also C o u n c i l of A m e r i c a n Overseas R e s e a r c h C e n ters; Libya; M i d d l e East Studies Association; and N o r t h Af rica.] JOSEPH A . GREENE
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bikai, Pierre, ed. ACOR, the First Twenty-Five Years: The American Center of Oriental Research, 1968-1993. A m m a n , 1993. Kanellopoulos, Chrysanthos. The Great Temple of Amman: The Archi tecture. A m m a n , 1 9 9 4 . King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Palumbo, Gaetano, ed. JADIS, the Jordan Antiquities Database and In formation System: A Summary of the Data. A m m a n , 1994. Piccirillo, Michele. The Mosaics of Jordan. A m m a n , 1993. DAVID W . MCCREERY
AMERICAN INSTITUTE F O R M A G H R E B STUDIES. F o u n d e d in 1984 as a private, nonprofit a s sociation to foster r e s e a r c h a n d p r o m o t e scholarly c o o p e r ation between t h e U n i t e d States a n d countries in N o r t h Af rica k n o w n collectively as t h e M a g h r e b (Algeria, L i b y a , Mauritania, M o r o c c o , a n d T u n i s i a ) , t h e A m e r i c a n Institute for M a g h r e b Studies ( A I M S ) is s u p p o r t e d financially b y i n dividual a n d institutional m e m b e r s h i p s , as well as b y p u b l i c a n d private grants. A I M S meets annually in conjunction with t h e M i d d l e E a s t Studies Association. A I M S operates a n overseas center, t h e C e n t e r for M a g h rebi Studies in T u n i s ( C e n t r e d ' E t u d e s M a g h r e b i n e s a T u nis, or C E M A T ) . C E M A T w a s established in 1985 u n d e r an a g r e e m e n t b e t w e e n A I M S a n d t h e T u n i s i a n M i n i s t r y of Higher E d u c a t i o n a n d Scientific Research. T h e ministry provides C E M A T ' s premises a n d administrative s u p p o r t , while A I M S contributes a n A m e r i c a n resident director. C E M A T assists visiting researchers in m a k i n g contact with l o cal scholars, gaining access t o research resources, a n d se curing permissions for fieldwork. It also sponsors lectures a n d seminars by local a n d foreign scholars a n d m u s e u m a n d archaeological site tours. C E M A T maintains a reference li brary of works in English on t h e M a g h r e b , especially A m e r ican a n d British dissertations n o t otherwise readily available in t h e region. It also possesses a large collection of W o r l d W a r II-vintage t o p o g r a p h i c m a p s of t h e M a g h r e b . A I M S sponsors a n a n n u a l regional conference o n a s p e cific topic held on a rotating basis in o n e of t h e M a g h r e b countries. I n developing its p r o g r a m s a n d p l a n n i n g its a n nual conference, A I M S a n d C E M A T w o r k closely with a n advisory c o m m i s s i o n c o m p o s e d of T u n i s i a n , M o r o c c a n , Al gerian, and A m e r i c a n m e m b e r s . A I M S offers grants for travel a n d research in t h e M a g h r e b , mainly for topics in t h e humanities a n d social sciences. A I M S also publishes p r o ceedings of its a n n u a l conferences a n d occasional p a p e r s . A I M S is a m e m b e r of d i e Council of A m e r i c a n Overseas Research C e n t e r s ( C A O R C ) a n d is associated with t h e T a n g i e r A m e r i c a n L e g a t i o n M u s e u m in M o r o c c o .
AMERICAN INSTITUTE F O R YEMENI S T U D I E S . U n t i l t h e early 1970s, Y e m e n , l a n d of t h e fa bled Q u e e n of S h e b a a n d a rich s o u r c e for classical a n d Islamic N e a r E a s t e r n history, w a s effectively closed to for eigners. I n 1970, a l t h o u g h a n e w m o d e r n i z i n g g o v e r n m e n t there c h a n g e d this policy, W e s t e r n scholars f o u n d t h a t fieldw o r k w a s being severely h a m p e r e d b y t h e lack of research facilities a n d materials. I n 1978 t h e A m e r i c a n Institute for Y e m e n i Studies (AIYS) w a s f o u n d e d i n T o r o n t o t o p r o v i d e such field s u p p o r t for international scholars in all disciplines a n d t o act a s an international clearinghouse for r e s e a r c h r e lated to Y e m e n . B y t h e 1990s o t h e r n a t i o n a l r e s e a r c h insti tutes h a d b e e n established in Y e m e n , n o t a b l y b y t h e Italian, F r e n c h , a n d G e r m a n g o v e r n m e n t s . A I Y S differs from t h e m in its b r o a d s c o p e of disciplinary interest a n d deliberately international scholarly s u p p o r t . A I Y S is h o u s e d at t h e University of C h i c a g o ' s Oriental Institute. Its individual m e m b e r s h i p as of 1995 w a s 190, d r a w i n g from scholars from a r o u n d t h e w o r l d ; t h e r e a r e thirty-six university a n d m u s e u m institutional m e m b e r s . Archaeology h a s b e e n a p r i m a r y beneficiary of t h e insti tute. Its lead f o u n d i n g m e m b e r a n d first a n d c u r r e n t presi d e n t is M c G u i r e G i b s o n , a N e a r E a s t e r n archaeologist. T h e institute h a s u n d e r t a k e n archaeological projects o n its o w n : in 1993 it carried o u t a n archaeological survey of t h e p r o p o s e d highway r o u t e b e t w e e n M a r i b a n d S h a b w a a n d c o n t i n u e d a s e c o n d season of excavation in t h e vicinity of S h a b w a . Its key role, h o w e v e r , is in p r o v i d i n g logistic a n d liaison s u p p o r t for t h e n u m e r o u s m e m b e r t e a m s w o r k i n g i n t h e c o u n t r y . Several of these g r o u p s already figure p r o m i nently in t h e history of archaeology in Y e m e n . B e t w e e n 1981 a n d 1986 t h e A m e r i c a n F o u n d a t i o n for t h e S t u d y of M a n ( A F S M ) , u n d e r Chief Archaeologist J a m e s S a u e r , carried o u t t h e first m o d e r n excavation in n o r t h e r n Y e m e n (at W a d i el-Jubah) since t h e brief 1951 e x p e d i t i o n of W e n d e l l Phillips, d i e f o u n d e r of A F S M . U n d e r t h e direction of E d w a r d Keall, in 1982 T o r o n t o ' s Royal O n t a r i o M u s e u m b e g a n t h e b r o a d est multiseason archaeological survey t o date in Y e m e n , t h a t of t h e coastal city of Z a b i d ; excavation c o n t i n u e d t h e r e in
1993. A I Y S also plays a major s u p p o r t role in U N E S C O ' s ef forts t o conserve t h e O l d City district of Y e m e n ' s capital, S a n ' a . A I Y S publishes b o t h a T r a n s l a t i o n s a n d a D e v e l o p m e n t m o n o g r a p h series. Its s e m i a n n u a l bulletin, Yemen Up date ( C h i c a g o , 1979-) r e p o r t s o n all o n - g o i n g archaeological research i n a n d c o n c e r n i n g Y e m e n . [See also J u b a h , W a d i el-; M a r i b ; S a n ' a ; S h a b w a ; Y e m e n ; and Zabid.]
AMERICAN RESEARCH CENTER IN EGYPT BIBLIOGRAPHY Buringa. Joke. Bibliography on Women in Yemen. Edited by M a r t a Coilwin. A I Y S , Y e m e n D e v e l o p m e n t Series, no. 2. P o r d a n d , O r e . , 1 9 9 2 . Croken, Barbara, et al. Libraries and Scholarly Arab
Republic.
Resources in the
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A I Y S , Y e m e n G u i d e Series, n o . 2. D e K a l b , 111.,
c.1985. Tutwiler, Richard, a n d Sheila C a s a p i c o . Yemeni nomic Change. A I Y S , Y e m e n D e v e l o p m e n t r9«i. W e n n e r , M a n f r e d W . , a n d Leila N . Swanson. An for Researchers and Scholars. A I Y S , Y e m e n D e K a l b , 111., c. 1984.
Agriculture and Eco Series, no. 1. S a n ' a , Introduction to Yemen G u i d e Series, n o . 1. JON MANDAVILLE
AMERICAN INSTITUTE S T U D I E S . Established in 1967
OF
IRANIAN
as a n o n p r o f i t e d u c a tional organization t o e n c o u r a g e a n d facilitate I r a n i a n s t u d ies, t h e A m e r i c a n Institute of I r a n i a n S t u d i e s was f o u n d e d b y a c o m m i t t e e c o m p o s e d of R o b e r t H . D y s o n , Jr., R i c h a r d N . F r y e , a n d J a c o b C . H u r e w i t z . T h e institute w a s s u p p o r t e d by s o m e t w e n t y universities a n d m u s e u m s , e a c h of which n o m i n a t e d a trustee t o t h e g o v e r n i n g b o a r d , w h i c h elected officers to a d m i n i s t e r t h e institute. F r o m 1969 until 1979 t h e institute o p e r a t e d a c e n t e r i n T e h r a n , w h i c h served as a liaison b e t w e e n N o r t h A m e r i c a n scholars a n d t h e I r a n i a n g o v e r n m e n t . T h e T e h r a n c e n t e r also m a i n t a i n e d a small library, issued a quarterly newsletter, h o s t e d informal s e m i n a r s o n c u r r e n t r e s e a r c h , a n d m a i n t a i n e d a hostel to p r o v i d e t e m p o r a r y h o u s i n g for scholars. D u r i n g t h e years t h e T e h r a n c e n t e r w a s o p e n t h e r e w a s a virtual explosion of r e s e a r c h in I r a n . N u m e r o u s a r c h a e o l o g ical excavations a n d regional surveys w e r e c o n d u c t e d , a n d g r a d u a t e s t u d e n t s a n d established scholars in almost all h u m a n i s t i c a n d social science disciplines w e r e well r e p r e s e n t e d in t h e c o u n t r y . T h e c e n t e r w a s a focal p o i n t for interdisci plinary discourse t h a t created a r e m a r k a b l e sense of c a m a raderie. Since 1979 t h e institute h a s c o n t i n u e d t o foster r e s e a r c h o n I r a n i a n topics b y offering dissertation grants, essay a n d translation prizes, a n d p u b l i c a t i o n s u b v e n t i o n . It h a s s u p p o r t e d a bibliographic i n v e n t o r y of r e s o u r c e s for I r a n i a n studies in N o r t h A m e r i c a n libraries a n d c o m m i s s i o n e d a survey of t h e state of I r a n i a n studies i n N o r t h A m e r i c a n universities. I n J a n u a r y 1989, t h e institute c o n v e n e d a c o n ference o n I r a n i a n studies a t t h e A r t h u r M . Sackler Gallery at t h e S m i t h s o n i a n Institution in W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . P a p e r s w e r e delivered o n t h e state of studies i n d i e following dis ciplines: literature, history, linguistics, e c o n o m i c s , sociology, political science, g e o g r a p h y , a n t h r o p o l o g y , archaeology, a n d art history. T h e p r o c e e d i n g s of t h e conference will b e p u b l i s h e d i n a special issue of t h e journal Iranian Studies. T h e archives of t h e institute a r e h e l d i n d i e University M u s e u m Archives at t h e U n i v e r s i t y M u s e u m , University of Pennsylvania. WILLIAM M . SUMNER
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AMERICAN PALESTINE EXPLORATION SOCIETY. A privately f u n d e d society for t h e g e o g r a p h ical a n d archaeological e x p l o r a t i o n of t h e Holy L a n d , t h e A m e r i c a n Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n Society ( A P E S ) w a s f o u n d e d in N e w Y o r k city i n 1870. T h e society's leaders, including Roswell H i t c h c o c k of U n i o n T h e o l o g i c a l S e m i n a r y a n d J. H e n r y T h a y e r of H a r v a r d University, h i g h lighted t h e conservative theological orientation of t h e A P E S in their h o p e t h a t archaeology w o u l d help verify t h e histor ical authenticity of t h e Bible, W i t h that goal in m i n d , funds were solicited from A m e r i c a n universities a n d c h u r c h g r o u p s a n d a n expedition w a s recruited t o u n d e r t a k e a sur vey of T r a n s j o r d a n . T h e w o r k w a s c o o r d i n a t e d with t h e sur vey work of t h e B r i t i s h - s p o n s o r e d Palestine Exploration F u n d in western Palestine. F r o m t h e start, t h e A m e r i c a n expedition w a s p l a g u e d b y a lack of funds a n d p o o r c o m m u n i c a t i o n with society h e a d q u a r t e r s i n N e w York. L e d b y U . S . Cavalry L i e u t e n a n t E d gar Z . Steever a n d naturalist J o h n A . P a i n e of N e w York, d i e A m e r i c a n t e a m p r o c e e d e d t o M o a b from Beirut in s p r i n g 1873. T h e result w a s a preliminary ( a n d only roughly triangulated) field m a p of a p p r o x i m a t e l y 500 s q u a r e miles e x t e n d i n g soutirward from H e s b a n ( H e s h b o n ) . Following Steever's resignation in 1874, t h e A P E S a i m e d t o James C . L a n e , a f o r m e r railroad p l a n n e r a n d Civil W a r h e r o , to c o m m a n d its s u b s e q u e n t e x p l o r a t i o n parties. Also a p p o i n t e d at this time w a s t h e R e v e r e n d Selah Merrill of A n d o v e r , M a s sachusetts as expedition archaeologist. T h e s e c o n d A P E S e x p e d i t i o n d e p a r t e d from B e i r u t i n S e p t e m b e r 1875 a n d w a s considerably m o r e successful t h a n t h e first. T h e goal of detailed m a p p i n g w a s a b a n d o n e d ; instead, t h e t e a m t o o k h u n d r e d s of p h o t o g r a p h s a n d collected t h o u s a n d s of artifacts a n d n a t u r a l specimens. After L a n e ' s resignation in a d i s a g r e e m e n t over funding, Merrill w a s placed in charge of A P E S explorations a n d led t h r e e m o r e expeditions. T h e s e w e r e t h e A P E S ' s final expeditions; t h e organization w a s n e v e r able t o m u s t e r t h e resources o r t r a i n e d p e r s o n n e l of its British c o u n t e r p a r t . T h e A m e r i c a n Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n Society p u b l i s h e d its last Statement in 1877. [See also the biographies of Merrill and
Thayer,]
BIBLIOGRAPHY King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. M o u l t o n , W a r r e n J. " T h e American Palestine Exploration Society." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 8 (1928): 5 5 - 6 9 . Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Ar chaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917. New York, 1 9 8 2 . N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN
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E G Y P T . F o u n d e d i n 1948, t h e A m e r i c a n R e s e a r c h C e n ter in E g y p t ( A R C E ) is a n organization t h a t assists A m e r i -
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can institutions c o n d u c t i n g archaeological projects in Egypt. Since 1951, an office has b e e n m a i n t a i n e d in G a r d e n City, C a i r o , where the staff assists resident scholars a n d fellows a n d manages A R C E ' s p r o g r a m s in Egypt. Over t h e years, m a n y A m e r i c a n archaeological projects, s u c h as t h e E p i graphic Survey of t h e Oriental Institute of t h e University of Chicago and t h e T h e b a n M a p p i n g Project, have w o r k e d in E g y p t u n d e r A R C E ' s aegis. A l t h o u g h A R C E ' s attention first focused o n ancient E g y p t , its b o a r d s o o n recognized that E g y p t h a d a n i m p o r t a n t role in t h e m o d e r n M i d d l e East. T h i s realization led t o a b r o a d e n i n g of A R C E ' s agenda to e m b r a c e scholars inter ested in all aspects of medieval and m o d e r n Egypt, resulting, for example, in s u p p o r t for t h e A m e r i c a n University in C a i ro's excavations in F u s t a t , an early Islamic settlement. [See Fustat.] A R C E thus aims to provide its m e m b e r s with a b e t ter u n d e r s t a n d i n g of E g y p t , b o t h ancient a n d m o d e r n . I n the past three decades, A R C E has p u r s u e d several m a jor initiatives: a d v a n c i n g A m e r i c a n a n d E g y p t i a n collabo ration, encouraging research, a n d assisting scholarly p u b l i cation. T h e i m p o r t a n c e of A m e r i c a n a n d E g y p t i a n cooperation is a high priority. A n early and i m p o r t a n t e x a m p l e of s u c h t e a m w o r k was A R C E ' s involvement in t h e N u b i a n salvage operation, a n d since t h e n restoration of t h e S p h i n x has b e e n t h e subject of collaboration. T h e s e c o n d goal is successfully a d d r e s s e d t h r o u g h t h e fellowship p r o g r a m , bringing b o t h n e w a n d established scholars t o E g y p t u n d e r A R C E ' s s p o n s o r s h i p . Recently, A R C E has b e g u n t h e reverse process, s e n d i n g E g y p t i a n researchers to t h e U n i t e d States. T h e initial step t o w a r d a p r o g r a m of scholarly publication was taken in 1951 w h e n t h e first issue of t h e Newsletter a p p e a r e d . It c o m m u n i c a t e d t o A R C E ' s m e m b e r s information a b o u t the recent responsibilities a n d travels of its directors a n d officers. N o w A R C E fellows p r e s e n t t h e preliminary reports of their projects in this format. T h e initial v o l u m e of t h e annual Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, a periodical presenting scholarly research on all E g y p t ' s h i s tory a n d culture, was p u b l i s h e d in 1962. Since t h e n A R C E has e x p a n d e d its publication p r o g r a m to include m o n o g r a p h s a n d catalogs. A R C E ' s h e a d q u a r t e r s is located in N e w Y o r k City. M e m bers of die b o a r d of governors include representatives from r e s e a r c h - s u p p o r t i n g institutions a n d scholars a n d n o n - a c a demics, w h o are all elected from a m e m b e r s h i p t h a t in t h e early 1990s stood at twelve h u n d r e d . I n 1985, t h e first of five regional chapters w a s formed. T h e s e chapters have c o n t r i b u t e d to a growing m e m b e r s h i p a n d e x p a n d e d A R C E ' s p u b lic p r o g r a m m i n g in t h e U n i t e d States. BIBLIOGRAPHY American Research Center in Egypt. Forty Years of Bridging Time and Culture. N e w York, 1 9 8 7 . Interesting summary of the organization's goals and accomplishments.
American Research C e n t e r in Egypt. Informational p a m p h l e t . N e w York, 1992. Basic information about the C e n t e r ' s c u r r e n t direction. DIANA CRAIG PATCH
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T U R K E Y . A m e r i c a n s h a v e p a r t i c i p a t e d in t h e a r c h a e o logical exploration of T u r k e y since t h e 1881-83 excavations at Assos in t h e T r o a d , s p o n s o r e d b y d i e Archaeological I n stitute of A m e r i c a just t w o years after its f o u n d a t i o n . F o l lowing t h e establishment of d i e R e p u b l i c of T u r k e y in 1923, archaeologists w e r e joined b y scholars in m a n y o t h e r disci plines, including historians of all p e r i o d s , political a n d social scientists, philologists, anthropologists, a n d T u r c o l o g i s t s . B y t h e early 1960s, it w a s clear t h a t a n organization w a s n e e d e d to assist scholars c o n d u c t i n g r e s e a r c h in t h e c o u n t r y . T h e A m e r i c a n R e s e a r c h Institute in T u r k e y ( A R I T ) w a s f o u n d e d in 1964 " t o p r o m o t e research o n T u r k e y in ancient, medieval, a n d m o d e r n times in all fields of t h e social sciences a n d t h e h u m a n i t i e s . " A R I T , t h e p r i m a r y representative of A m e r i c a n higher e d u c a t i o n within T u r k e y , is s u p p o r t e d a n d g o v e r n e d b y a c o n s o r t i u m of thirty-five universities, m u s e u m s , a n d research institutions in t h e U n i t e d States a n d C a n ada. A R I T ' s b r a n c h e s in I s t a n b u l a n d i n A n k a r a , each w i t h a resident director, specialized library, a n d hostel, p r o v i d e a wide range of scholarly s u p p o r t services. F r o m its inception, A R I T has c o n c e n t r a t e d its resources o n a fellowship p r o g r a m t h a t has e n a b l e d m o r e tiian o n e t h o u s a n d p r e - a n d p o s t d o c t o r a l researchers to w o r k in T u r key. T h i s includes fellowships to T u r k i s h scholars, a w a r d e d through ARIT's in-country counterpart, the Tiirk-Amerikan Ilmi Arastirmalar Demegi ( T u r k i s h - A m e r i c a n A c a d e m i c R e search Association). A R I T also a d m i n i s t e r s an intensive s u m m e r p r o g r a m of a d v a n c e d T u r k i s h - l a n g u a g e instruction at B o s p h o r u s University. T h r o u g h o u t its existence, A R I T has strongly s u p p o r t e d archaeological research in T u r k e y , a n d four of its six p r e s idents have been p r o m i n e n t in this field: H a n s G . Gtiter bock, w h o guided t h e institute t h r o u g h m u c h of its formative d e c a d e ; Cecil L . Striker; M a c h t e l d J. Mellink; a n d G. K e n n e t h S a m s . In 1993, at t h e r e q u e s t of t h e T u r k i s h M i n i s t r y of C u l t u r e , A R I T a s s u m e d responsibility for c o n d u c t i n g an a n n u a l p r i m a r y review of all applications from d i e U n i t e d States for archaeological excavations a n d surveys within Turkey. T O N I M . CROSS
AMERICAN SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL RE S E A R C H IN B A G H D A D . T h e idea of a n A m e r i c a n school of M e s o p o t a m i a n archaeology in B a g h d a d was p r o p o s e d in 1913 b y G e o r g e A a r o n B a r t o n t o t h e A r c h a e o l o g ical Institute of A m e r i c a ( A I A ) . T h e ALA a p p o i n t e d a c o m mittee with B a r t o n as chair to study t h e m a t t e r a n d , if
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feasible, organize t h e school. I n 1919-1920, Albert T . Clay, a n n u a l professor at t h e A m e r i c a n S c h o o l for Oriental R e search ( A S O R ) in J e r u s a l e m , w a s sent t o B a g h d a d joindy b y t h e ALA c o m m i t t e e a n d t h e A S O R executive c o m m i t t e e to p r e p a r e t h e way for t h e n e w school; h e a r r a n g e d for it initially t o b e sheltered by t h e A m e r i c a n consulate. In 1921, t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n c o m m i t t e e of t h e ALA a n d t h e executive c o m m i t t e e of A S O R in J e r u s a l e m jointly i n c o r p o r a t e d as t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of O r i e n t a l R e s e a r c h , the plural " s c h o o l s " b e i n g an intentional recognition of t h e p l a n n e d B a g h d a d enterprise a n d other possible u n d e r t a k i n g s else w h e r e in t h e N e a r East. In t h a t s a m e year, M e s o p o t a m i a n c o m m i t t e e m e m b e r M o r r i s J a s t r o w , Jr., died, a n d his w i d o w p r e s e n t e d t h e Assyriological p o r t i o n of his library to t h e p l a n n e d school; it r e a c h e d B a g h d a d in 1924, w h e r e it f o r m e d t h e core of t h e n e w school's library. A n earlier b e q u e s t of books from p i o n e e r Orientalist William W a r d for an antic ipated A m e r i c a n school in B a g h d a d s e e m s n e v e r t o have gotten b e y o n d Philadelphia.
m a i n source of i n c o m e was a n e n d o w m e n t f u n d b e q u e a t h e d by James B. Nies. T h e school w a s conceived as a n e n g i n e for A m e r i c a n ar chaeological activity in M e s o p o t a m i a . I t played t h a t role b o t h b y enabling its directors, a n n u a l professors, a n d fellows to b e in I r a q participating in various digs a n d projects and b y directly s p o n s o r i n g excavations, preferably with other in stitutions. Between t h e w a r s , t h e B a g h d a d school jointly s u p p o r t e d w o r k a t N u z i with t h e I r a q M u s e u m a n d H a r v a r d University; a t T e p e G a w r a w i t h t h e University M u s e u m of t h e University of Pennsylvania a n d D r o p s i e College; at T e l l Billa and Khafajeh with t h e University M u s e u m ; a n d at T e l l U m a r witii t h e University of M i c h i g a n . After W o r l d W a r II, die school s p o n s o r e d , with t h e Oriental Institute of t h e U n i versity of C h i c a g o , several c a m p a i g n s at N i p p u r a n d the I r a q Prehistoric Project (together witii related projects in I r a n a n d T u r k e y ) a n d t h e I r a q Surface Survey, as well as excavations at al-Hiba with N e w Y o r k University a n d t h e M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m of A r t ( N e w Y o r k C i t y ) .
O n 2 N o v e m b e r 1923, A l b e r t T . Clay i n a u g u r a t e d t h e A m e r i c a n S c h o o l of Oriental R e s e a r c h i n B a g h d a d in d i e p r e s e n c e of t h e A m e r i c a n c o n s u l a n d officials of t h e Iraqi a n d British g o v e r n m e n t s . T h e school's first-year's p r o g r a m i n c l u d e d p u b l i c lectures o n B a b y l o n i a n history, o u t r e a c h sessions w i t h Iraqi s c h o o l m a s t e r s , a n d archaeological survey work.
Publications s p o n s o r e d o r c o s p o n s o r e d b y t h e school in clude n u m e r o u s v o l u m e s of N u z i tablets; t h e excavations of N u z i a n d G a w r a ; N e u g e b a u e r a n d Sachs (1945); and d i e following A A S O R v o l u m e s : Speiser (1941); K r a m e r (1944); P o r a d a (1947); a n d G o e t z e (1956). I n 1947, A S O R , at the u r g i n g of t h e B a g h d a d school c o m m i t t e e , b e g a n publishing t h e Journal of Cuneiform Studies;, w h i c h immediately estab lished itself as a leading Assyriological journal. It was f o u n d e d b y G o e t z e a n d e d i t e d b y h i m until his death in 1971; from 1972 to 1990 it w a s edited b y Erie Leichty. Since 1990 the editor has b e e n Piotr M i c h a l o w s k i of die University of M i c h i g a n .
T h e B a g h d a d school was always m o r e a research c o n c e p t t h a n a place. I n 1926, G e r t r u d e Bell, h o n o r a r y director of antiquities for Iraq, offered t h e school a r o o m for its library in t h e n e w I r a q M u s e u m ; it r e m a i n s in t h a t m u s e u m , still serving, as A S O R i n t e n d e d in 1926, as " t h e first nucleus of an archaeological library in t h a t p a r t of t h e w o r l d " ( D o u g h erty, 1926). D e s p i t e s p o r a d i c p l a n s a n d h o p e s , t h e school w o u l d have n o building of its o w n in B a g h d a d ; yet, it m a n aged, over a fifty-year p e r i o d , t o a s s e m b l e an impressive r e c ord of scholarly a c h i e v e m e n t . T h e school w a s led b y a l o n g - t e r m director a n d staffed b y a variety of a n n u a l a p p o i n t e e s , t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t being t h e a n n u a l professor a n d t h e ( m o r e junior) fellow. B a r t o n , t h e first director, (1922-1934), w a s r e s i d e n t in the U n i t e d States; s u b s e q u e n t directors s p e n t varying lengths of time in B a g h d a d w h e n conditions p e r m i t t e d : E p h r a i m A. Speiser (1934-1947), A l b r e c h t G o e t z e (1947-1956), V a u g h n C r a w ford (1956-1968), a n d R o b e r t M c C . A d a m s (1968-1970). A n n u a l professors a n d fellows i n c l u d e d , a m o n g others, A d a m s , R o b e r t Biggs, J. A. B r i n k m a n , G i o r g i o Buccellatti, Briggs B u c h a n a n , G e o r g e C a m e r o n , E d w a r d C h i e r a , A. T . Clay, C r a w f o r d , G e o r g e D a l e s , R a y m o n d D o u g h e r t y , R i c h a r d Ellis, M c G u i r e G i b s o n , G o e t z e , C y r u s G o r d o n , D o n a l d Hansen, Alexander Heidel, Bruce H o w e , Thorkild Jacobsen, S a m u e l N . K r a m e r , T h e o p h i l e M e e k , A l b e r t T . O l m stead, E d i t h P o r a d a , Speiser, a n d L e r o y W a t e r m a n . Begin n i n g in a b o u t 1931, t h e s c h o o l w a s overseen b y a s t a n d i n g c o m m i t t e e of t h e A S O R b o a r d of trustees. T h e school's
c
After 1970, as access to I r a q b e c a m e m o r e restricted a n d t h e n o t i o n of an A S O R school (or center, as it h a d c o m e to b e called) a n d professor in B a g h d a d less tenable, t h e B a g h d a d school c o m m i t t e e b e c a m e t h e c o m m i t t e e on M e s o p o t a m i a n civilization, or, as it is m o r e c o m m o n l y k n o w n , t h e B a g h d a d c o m m i t t e e . It a w a r d s an a n n u a l M e s o p o t a m i a n fellowship t o p r e - a n d p o s t d o c t o r a l scholars for research o n ancient M e s o p o t a m i a n civilization, preferably involving s o m e residence in t h e N e a r East. It continues to oversee die publication of t h e Journal of Cuneiform Studies and publishes a newsletter, Mar Sipri. F o r several years before t h e Gulf w a r , the C o m m i t t e e ' s McAllister F u n d s u p p o r t e d excava tions at M a s h k a n - s h a p i r , A b u SalabOdi, Tell H a m i d a , a n d Deylam. [See also A b u Salabikh; A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e search; Khafajeh; M a s h k a n - s h a p i r ; N i p p u r ; N u z i ; T e p e G a w r a ; and the biography of Speiser.] BIBLIOGRAPHY D o u g h e r t y , R a y m o n d . " R e p o r t s . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 22 ( 1 9 2 6 ) : 1. Goetze, Albrecht. The Laws of Eshnunna. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 3 1 . N e w H a v e n , 1 9 S 6 .
94
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K i n g , Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. K r a m e r , Samuel N o a h . Sumerian Literary Texts. Annual of the A m e r ican Schools of Oriental Research, 23. N e w Haven, 1944. Neugebauer, Otto, and A b r a h a m Sachs. Mathematical Cuneiform Texts. American Oriental Series, 29. N e w Haven, 1945. Porada, Edith. Seal Impressions from Nuzi. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 24. N e w Haven, 1 9 4 7 . Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. Introduction to Human. Annual of the A m e r ican Schools of Oriental Research, 20. N e w Haven, 1 9 4 1 . JERROLD S. COOPER
AMERICAN S C H O O L S OF ORIENTAL R E S E A R C H . T h e history a n d tradition of the A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A S O R ) are linked t o t h e p a r ent societies that called for its f o u n d i n g m o r e t h a n a c e n t u r y ago. T h e first a c a d e m i c organization t o press for t h e e s t a b lishment of a n e w society with an archaeological focus was t h e Society of Biblical L i t e r a t u r e ( S B L ) , originally f o u n d e d as the Society for Biblical Literature a n d Exegesis in 1880. O n 13 J u n e 1895, its president, J. H e n r y T h a y e r , a specialist in t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t at H a r v a r d University, u r g e d t h e s o ciety to establish a school in Palestine t h a t would b e able to p r o m o t e t h e study of scripture in t h e very land in w h i c h it h a d taken shape. It was to be called an A m e r i c a n School for Oriental S t u d y a n d Research. O t h e r s , notably H e n r y W . H u l b e r t , w a n t e d such a school to b e located in Beirut a n d h a d referred to it as a school of biblical archaeology a n d philology in the East. [See the biography of Thayer.] T h a y e r ' s suggestion t o establish a school in Palestine w a s referred to c o m m i t t e e , w h i c h consequently p u b l i s h e d a cir cular to win t h e s u p p o r t a n d confidence of b o u t theological schools and universities. In t h a t d o c u m e n t T h a y e r ' s col leagues expressed t h e rationale for establishing an overseas center in this way: " T h e object of t h e school w o u l d b e to afford graduates of A m e r i c a n theological seminaries, a n d other similarly qualified p e r s o n s , o p p o r t u n i t y to p r o s e c u t e biblical and linguistic investigations u n d e r m o r e favorable conditions that can b e secured at a distance from t h e H o l y L a n d ; . . . to gather material for t h e illustration of t h e biblical narratives; t o settle doubtful points in biblical t o p o g r a p h y ; to identify historic localities; t o explore a n d , if possible, e x cavate sacred sites" (King, 1983, p . 26). T h e t o n e a n d direction of S B L ' s 1895 circular clearly e x press the overriding interest of the f o u n d i n g fathers, w h i c h remains to this d a y , although A S O R ' s p u r p o s e was soon b r o a d e n e d t o include nonbiblical aspects of N e a r E a s t e r n studies. T h e circular also illustrates die W e s t e r n bias of " O r i e n t a l i s m , " a certain disregard of indigenous culture b y those who s t u d y a region only in t e r m s of W e s t e r n a n d c o lonial values. A t a n y r a t e , b y 1890 eleven institutions h a d pledged one h u n d r e d dollars each annually, for a p e r i o d of five years, until a p l a n for a new school could b e i m p l e mented.
A n o t h e r s t r o n g s u p p o r t e r of t h e idea of establishing an overseas r e s e a r c h center in d i e N e a r E a s t w a s t h e A m e r i c a n Oriental Society, w h i c h formally e n d o r s e d t h e i d e a in 1896. I n 1898 d i e Archaeological Institute of A m e r i c a (AIA) n o t only e n d o r s e d t h e p r o p o s a l , b u t also p l e d g e d a n a n n u a l s u b sidy. T h e AIA h a d established its o w n A m e r i c a n School of Classical Studies at A t h e n s in 1882 a n d a c o m p a r a b l e school in R o m e in 1895, which in 1913 was c o n s o l i d a t e d with t h e A m e r i c a n A c a d e m y in R o m e , formerly a fine arts school a n d enterprise devoted to h u m a n i s t i c research. T h e p r e s i d e n t of t h e A I A in 1899 w a s Charles Eliot N o r t o n , professor of F i n e Arts at H a r v a r d ; h e p l e d g e d his c o m p l e t e s u p p o r t to a school of biblical studies t h a t w o u l d s o o n be established in J e r u s a l e m o n t h e m o d e l of d i e A m e r i c a n institutes in A t h e n s a n d Rome. By 1900 t w e n t y - o n e institutions of h i g h e r l e a r n i n g — c o l leges, seminaries, a n d universities—had b e e n o r g a n i z e d into A S O R ' s first a c a d e m i c c o n s o r t i u m . A M i o u g h m o s t of tiiose institutions were secular universities, theological interest a n d s u p p o r t w e r e key from t h e outset. T h e o r g a n i z i n g c o m m i t tee's r e s t a t e m e n t of goals a n d objectives, w h i c h b e c a m e t h e basis of A S O R ' s future bylaws, reflected a b r o a d e n e d intel lectual horizon t h a t w o u l d enable A S O R to e x t e n d its p u r view b e y o n d t h e L e v a n t into t h e greater N e a r E a s t a n d t o e x t e n d its historical r e a c h a n d interest b e y o n d t h e m e r e "biblical." Its c h a r t e r also c o n t a i n e d a n inclusive s t a t e m e n t t h a t resonates w i t h a n entirely m o d e r n spirit: " T h e S c h o o l shall b e o p e n to duly qualified applicants of all races a n d b o t h sexes, a n d shall be k e p t wholly free from obligations or preferences as respects a n y religious d e n o m i n a t i o n or liter ary institution." A S O R ' s ties w i t h t h e A I A a n d S B L w e r e so s t r o n g that in t h e early years all r e s e a r c h studies c o n d u c t e d u n d e r A S O R auspices w e r e to b e p u b l i s h e d in d i e journal of either affiliated society—the f o r m e r p u b l i s h i n g a r c h a e o logical a n d nonbiblical material, t h e latter t h e biblical. J e r u s a l e m . A S O R ' s first overseas institute w a s o p e n e d in 1900 in Jerusalem, with Charles C. T o r r e y , a n O l d T e s t a m e n t scholar at Yale University, serving as its first director for t h a t year. T o r r e y , s u p p o r t e d b y t h e U . S . c o n s u l in J e rusalem, Selah Merrill, himself a distinguished Orientalist, established A S O R ' s first h e a d q u a r t e r s i n a large r o o m in a hotel in t h e Jaffa G a t e area, l a u n c h e d a lecture p r o g r a m , a n d b e g a n his o w n series of field explorations. T h e s e activities b e c a m e hallmarks of A S O R institutes' future p r o g r a m s . W i t h o u t a p e r m a n e n t A S O R facility, A m e r i c a n scholars i n Jerusalem a t the t i m e w e r e d e p e n d e n t o n otiier institutes for library resources. [See the biography of Merrill] Palestine's u n s t a b l e political situation at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e twentieth c e n t u r y , w i t h t h e e m e r g e n c e of A r a b n a t i o n alism clashing w i t h Z i o n i s m a n d signaling t h e collapse of t h e O t t o m a n E m p i r e , m a d e significant p r o g r e s s for t h e J e r u s a l e m school difficult. T h e political instability, lack of a p e r m a n e n t facility, a n d a n n u a l rotation of directors m e a n t t h a t a p r o g r a m of activities along d i e lines established b y T o r r e y
AMERICAN SCHOOLS OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH a n d his successors w a s d i e c o r r e c t a n d m o s t stable c o u r s e for t h e school. T h e c h a r a c t e r of t h e p r o g r a m , e x c e p t for excavation, r e m a i n e d intact until 1920, w h e n William F o x well Albright b e c a m e t h e school's first l o n g - t e r m director, serving until 1929, a n d t h e n again from 1933 to 1936. A S O R ' s first major field p r o j e c t in t h e years prior to Albright w a s t h e e x p e d i t i o n to S a m a r i a (1908-1910) led b y G e o r g e A . Reisner, C l a r e n c e S. Fisher, a n d D a v i d G . L y o n , a n d in 1908 b y Gottlieb S c h u m a c h e r . T h e r e p o r t of this project, delayed b y W o r l d W a r I, a p p e a r e d in 1924. [See S a m a r i a ; and the biographies of Albright, Reisner, Fisher, and Schu macher.} D u r i n g t h o s e years, t h e J e r u s a l e m school was m a n a g e d in t h e U n i t e d States by c o m m i t t e e . R e p o r t s o n d i e school's activities a n d research were given at special m e e t i n g s or at A S O R m e e t i n g s held in c o n j u n c t i o n widi d i e a n n u a l m e e t ing of d i e S B L or A I A . T o all i n t e n t s a n d p u r p o s e s , A S O R a n d d i e J e r u s a l e m school w e r e o n e a n d t h e s a m e . I n 1907 d i e O t t o m a n g o v e r n m e n t r e c o g n i z e d t h e school in J e r u s a l e m as t h e " A m e r i c a n School of A r c h a e o l o g y at J e r u s a l e m . " I n 1910 d i e m a n a g i n g c o m m i t t e e c h a n g e d its official n a m e to T h e A m e r i c a n School of Oriental R e s e a r c h in Jerusalem. In 1917 T o r r e y a n n o u n c e d t h e p r o m i s e of a gift of $50,000 b y J a n e O r r N i e s t o erect a p e r m a n e n t facility in Jerusalem o n land t h a t h a d b e e n p u r c h a s e d in 1909. J a m e s A, M o n t g o m ery of t h e University of P e n n s y l v a n i a a n d t h e P r o t e s t a n t E p i s c o p a l Divinity School, d i e J e r u s a l e m school's a n n u a l di r e c t o r in 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 5 , b e c a m e t h e c h a i r m a n of A S O R ' s m a n aging c o m m i t t e e in 1918. A t its a n n u a l m e e t i n g t h e c o m m i t t e e v o t e d to r e o p e n t h e J e r u s a l e m school t h e following year (it h a d b e e n t e m p o r a r i l y closed d u r i n g t h e w a r from (1916 to 1918). At t h a t 1918 m e e t i n g , A l b r i g h t was elected T h a y e r Fellow for 1919. T h e school r e o p e n e d in O c t o b e r 1919, with William H . W o r r e l l as director. T h e first issue of t h e Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR), t h e journal t h a t w a s t o b e c o m e t h e central o r g a n of scholarly c o m m u n i c a t i o n for A S O R , also a p p e a r e d in tiiat year. T h e first issue of A S O R ' s Annual a p p e a r e d in 1920, edited b y four f o r m e r directors of t h e J e r u s a l e m school. T h e legal i n c o r p o r a t i o n of A S O R in d i e District of C o l u m b i a in 1921 reiterated t h e plural " S c h o o l s " in d i e tide, correctly anticipating t h e f u t u r e of other institutes in t h e N e a r East, b u t specifically t h e i m m i n e n t start of t h e school in B a g h d a d . I n 1923 t h e E g y p t i a n a n k h , t h e s y m b o l of life, inside of w h i c h w a s t h e e i g h t - p o i n t e d B a b y l o n i a n star, t h e sign of deity, b e c a m e t h e l o g o of A S O R . A S O R P r e s i d e n t s . A S O R ' s p r e s i d e n t s f o r m an illustri o u s g r o u p . T h e w o r k of t h e s e individuals r e p r e s e n t s t h e h e i g h t of scholarship in their respective fields.
1955-1965
95
A. Flenry Detweiler, Cornell University
1966-1974
G . E r n e s t W r i g h t , H a r v a r d University
1
F r a n k M o o r e C r o s s , H a r v a r d University
975-1976
1976-1982
Philip J. K i n g , B o s t o n College
1982-1988
J a m e s A. S a u e r , University of Pennsylvania
1988-1989
P . K y l e M c C a r t e r , J o h n s H o p k i n s University
1990-1996
Eric M . M e y e r s , D u k e University
1996-
Joe D . Seger, Mississippi State University
[See the biographies of Montgomery,
Burrows,
Kraeling,
and
Wright] B a g h d a d . W i t h t h e l o n g - t e r m a p p o i n t m e n t of Albright as director in J e r u s a l e m in 1920, archaeological activities t h e r e e x p a n d e d a n d t h e school's future was s e c u r e d in a way t h a t h a d n o t b e e n possible before. S u c h stability also allowed A S O R to enlarge its h o r i z o n s to M e s o p o t a m i a , w h e r e d i e B a g h d a d school, originally called t h e A m e r i c a n School of M e s o p o t a m i a n Archaeology, o p e n e d officially in 1923. T h a t school was t h e first A m e r i c a n a c a d e m i c institution in B a g h d a d ; it was h o u s e d in a s p a c e p r o v i d e d b y t h e A m e r i c a n consulate. T h e B a g h d a d school, a l t h o u g h n o t a full-fledged institute, h a d an o u t s t a n d i n g library, a n d from its inception p r o v i d e d a n i m p o r t a n t b a s e from w h i c h researchers c o n d u c t e d field surveys a n d on-site e x a m i n a t i o n of t h e m o s t -
i m p o r t a n t sites in M e s o p o t a m i a . A m o n g t h e b e s t - k n o w n e x cavations c o n d u c t e d from t h e school w e r e d i e A S O R - H a r v a r d excavations a t N u z i , particularly f r o m 1925 t o 1931. [See N u z i . ] O u t e r n o t e w o r t h y excavations i n c l u d e Tell Billa, T e p e G a w r a , T a r k h a l a n , a n d T e l l O m a n . [See T e p e G a w ra.] B a g h d a d ' s first publication, E d w a r d C h i e r a ' s The Joint Expedition
with the Iraq Museum
at Nuzi,
a p p e a r e d in 1927.
It soon b e c a m e clear t h a t t h e r e w e r e n o t sufficient finan cial resources to s u p p o r t a p e r m a n e n t facility in Jerusalem a n d a n e w o n e in B a g h d a d . H e n c e , A S O R ' s a c a d e m i c m a n aging c o m m i t t e e w a s r e o r g a n i z e d in 1929 t o include n o n a c a d e m i c , lay m e m b e r s o n a b o a r d of trustees to b r o a d e n its financial base. T h e B a g h d a d school a t t r a c t e d a series of distinguished scholars as a n n u a l professors until 1970. T h e n , for political reasons, it was n o longer possible for A m e r i c a n s to b e in residence tiiere. A m o n g d i o s e w h o w o r k e d o u t of B a g h d a d w e r e E p h r a i m Speiser (1926-1927, 1931-1932), N e l s o n G l u e c k (1933-1934, 1942-1946), S a m u e l N o a h K r a m e r (1946-1947)3 T h o r k i l d J a c o b s e n (1953-1954, 1968-1969), R o b e r t M c C . A d a m s (1968-1969), A l b r e c h t G o e t z e (19551956), a n d M c G u i r e G i b s o n (1969-1970). [See the biogra phies of Speiser, Glueck, and Jacobsen.]
F r o m 1947 to 1956
G o e t z e served as director of t h e school; a m o n g his m o s t 1921-1933 1934-1948 1949-1954
J a m e s A. M o n t g o m e r y , University of P e n n sylvania Millar B u r r o w s , Yale University C a r l PI. K r a e l i n g , University of C h i c a g o
notable achievements w a s d i e f o u n d i n g of t h e Journal
of'Cu
neiform Studies in 1947. T h e 1967 Arab-Israeli W a r m a d e any future significant A S O R p r e s e n c e in Iraq doubtful. A S O R ' s last field project prior to t h e w a r h a d b e e n in 1963,
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b u t it r e n e w e d its fieldwork there in t h e 1980s. T h e 1991 Gulf W a r e n d e d t h a t activity as well. T h e annual professorship in B a g h d a d was converted to a M e s o p o t a m i a fellowship following t h e t e r m i n a t i o n of a physical presence at t h e school in B a g h d a d . T o d a y , a c o m mittee supervises A S O R ' s interests in the region a n d over sees publication of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
H o w e v e r , following t h e 1967 war a n d t h e reunification of Jerusalem, there w e r e two schools in t h e city d e v o t e d to ar chaeological work, A S O R ' s J e r u s a l e m school a n d H U C , later to b e r e n a m e d tire N e l s o n G l u e c k S c h o o l of Biblical Archaeology. [See N e l s o n G l u e c k S c h o o l of Biblical A r chaeology.] T h e 1967 war, h o w e v e r , h a d even far greater implications for A S O R .
I n t e r w a r P e r i o d (1919-1945). A r e m a r k m a d e b y Millar B u r r o w s w h e n h e served as director of the Jerusalem school (1931-1932) provides insight into t h e p e r i o d b e t w e e n t h e world wars a n d is remarkably relevant. N o t i n g t h e dearth of A m e r i c a n archaeologists a n d t h e plethora of archaeological activities in Palestine, h e observed t h a t m o s t of the funding was A m e r i c a n , that m o s t of t h e leadership of excavations was n o n - A m e r i c a n , a n d t h a t chief a m o n g A S O R ' s goals was to raise a cadre of " y o u n g A m e r i c a n s w h o w o u l d like to take u p the fascinating w o r k , " T h e interwar years p r o d u c e d a new generation of leaders in t h e field in the N e a r East, yet there was a genuine shortage of qualified Americans t o carry forward t h e aims of A S O R ' s founders, as well as a shortage of funds to carry t h e m out. D e s p i t e t h e considerable achievements of the Jerusalem a n d B a g h d a d schools, politics soon again interfered in t h e progress of the first half of t h e twentieth century.
A S O R a n d I t s O v e r s e a s C e n t e r s : 1967-1978. O n e of t h e major results of t h e 1967 w a r w a s t h e A r a b b o y c o t t of all scholars working in Israeli territory, f o r m e r territory or newly held, w h i c h effectively m e a n t t h a t archaeologists a n d N e a r Eastern specialists in o t h e r disciplines h a d to decide w h e t h e r to c o n t i n u e to w o r k in Israel. If t h e y h a d w o r k e d in Israel they could c h o o s e to w o r k in A r a b l a n d s , especially in t h e H a s h e m i t e K i n g d o m of J o r d a n or in Syria, b u t could n o t t h e n continue to w o r k in Israel as well. B e c a u s e t h e B a g h d a d school was defunct, t o all intents a n d p u r p o s e s , t h e A S O R b o a r d of trustees, h e a d e d b y G. E r n e s t W r i g h t of H a r v a r d University, p r e s i d e n t at t h e t i m e , decided t h a t t h e only w a y for A S O R scholars t o c o n t i n u e working o n b o t h sides of t h e J o r d a n River w a s t o create separate institutes: a separately i n c o r p o r a t e d A m m a n center in J o r d a n a d m i n i s t e r e d b y its o w n b o a r d of trustees, so t h a t A S O R ' s historic aims a n d goals could c o n t i n u e to b e p u r s u e d u n i m p e d e d , a n d t h e J e r u s a l e m school to b e reorganized along t h e s e s a m e lines. T h e A S O R trustees a p p r o v e d the m o v e in D e c e m b e r 1969. T h e Jerusalem school was r e n a m e d t h e W . F . Albright I n stitute of Archaeological R e s e a r c h ( A I A R ) ; it still o c c u p i e s t h e building w h o s e c o n s t r u c t i o n was b e g u n in 1924, c o m pleted in 1931, a n d d e s i g n a t e d a historical l a n d m a r k b y t h e State of Israel. T h e A m m a n center w a s n a m e d t h e A m e r i c a n C e n t e r of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A C O R ) ; it m o v e d into a s p a cious, state-of-the-art facility in 1986.
A major figure to e m e r g e d u r i n g this period was N e l s o n Glueck, explorer p a r excellence. T r a i n e d in biblical studies at J e n a in G e r m a n y , G l u e c k c a m e u n d e r t h e influence of Albright in the late 1920s while digging at Tell Beit Mirsirn. T h e r e he learned t h e essentials of stratigraphic archaeology a n d t h e basis of ceramic typology. G l u e c k s u c c e e d e d Al bright as director of t h e school i n Jerusalem in 1936, a p o sition h e held three times, first in 1932-1933, again from 1936 to 1940, a n d finally from 1942 t o 1947. Glueck's major contribution to work in the region was his extensive explorations in T r a n s j o r d a n a n d t h e N e g e v desert. As a result of this enterprise he b e c a m e fascinated with t h e history a n d material culture of the N a b a t e a n s . Glueck c o n d u c t e d his surveys while serving as director of the Jerusalem school. Fie developed his expertise in N a b a t e a n studies from 1952 to 1964, while b a s e d at H e b r e w U n i o n College ( H U C ) in Cincinnati, O h i o ; h e h a d b e e n a faculty m e m b e r there since 1928 and b e c a m e p r e s i d e n t in 1948. O n e of his major accomplishments as a n administrator w a s the building of the H U C c a m p u s in Jerusalem, which o p e n e d in 1963 with an archaeological c o m p o n e n t h e envisioned as the successor t o A S O R ' s Jerusalem school, w h i c h h a d been cut off from I s rael as a result of t h e 1948 W a r of I n d e p e n d e n c e . T h e irony of the situation c a n n o t b e overstated. Glueck, p r e s i d e n t of a theological school for training A m e r i c a n R e form rabbis, h a d explored t h e territories that largely b e c a m e p a r t of the K i n g d o m of J o r d a n . H e f o u n d e d a n archaeolog ical school in Israeli Jerusalem largely b e c a u s e A r a b lands h a d b e e n cut off from Jewish archaeologists after 1948.
B o t h institutes, newly constituted with their o w n b o a r d s of trustees, b e g a n their operations in s p r i n g 1970. T h e A S O R b o a r d c o n t i n u e d to subsidize in p a r t t h e activities at b o t h schools, b u t increasingly t u r n e d its attention to g e n erating funds for n e w overseas field projects, publications, a n d o t h e r p r o g r a m m a t i c activities relating to its a n n u a l c o n vention held in conjunction with t h e S B L a n d t h e A m e r i c a n A c a d e m y of Religion ( A A R ) . In creating a decentralized A S O R , W r i g h t a n d t h e trustees h a d averted t h e political r e p e r c u s s i o n s of t h e Arab-Israeli conflict. T h e p a r e n t organization w a s , h o w e v e r , still e x p e c t e d t o seek and secure funds as before for b o t h centers a n d t o fund field projects o n b o t h sides of t h e J o r d a n River. A S O R subsidies to t h e centers c o n t i n u e d t h r o u g h t h e 1980s, b u t responsibility for raising funds for t h e overseas centers, their p r o g r a m s , a n d their buildings b e g a n t o shift t o their own boards. D u r i n g t h e t u m u l t u o u s p e r i o d in t h e region b e t w e e n t h e 1967 a n d 1973 wars, A S O R entertained t h e idea of e s t a b lishing a center in B e i r u t t h a t w o u l d focus scholarly attention
AMERICAN SCHOOLS OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH o n L e b a n o n ' s special h e r i t a g e of P h o e n i c i a n culture, in ad dition to o t h e r aspects of its rich material r e m a i n s . Altiiough t h e Civil W a r in L e b a n o n a n d A S O R ' s increased financial responsibilities ultimately p r e c l u d e d u n d e r t a k i n g t h e p r o ject, interest in P h o e n i c i a led A S O R scholars to look to two of P h o e n i c i a ' s principal colonies, C y p r u s a n d Cartilage, for t h e recovery of n e w data t h r o u g h archaeological excavation. [See C y p r u s ; Carthage.] A t C a r t h a g e , A S O R fulfilled its field objectives from 1975 to 1979 b y s p o n s o r i n g a series of excavations, financed with U . S . federal f u n d s , at P u n i c a n d R o m a n C a r t h a g e . D u r i n g this limited p e r i o d A S O R s u p p o r t e d a n e w center n e a r b y , t h e C a r t h a g e R e s e a r c h I n s t i t u t e , w h i c h served as a b a s e for t h e excavation a n d survey w o r k at d i e site. T h e w e s t e r n M e d i t e r r a n e a n region c o u l d n o t m a i n t a i n its h o l d o n A S O R ' s historic c o n s t i t u e n c y , h o w e v e r , w h i c h w a s far m o r e oriented to t h e east, a n d t h e institute closed u p o n d i e c o m pletion of fieldwork. C y p r u s , t h e o t h e r i m p o r t a n t P h o e n i c i a n colony, attracted A S O R ' s attention in t h e early 1970s. E n c o u r a g e d b y W r i g h t t o engage in fieldwork t h a t w o u l d s h e d further light o n P h o e nician culture a n d also establish a definitive typology of C y p r i o t c e r a m i c s , A S O R scholars b e g a n excavations at t h e C y p r i o t site of Idalion in 1 9 7 1 . P r e l i m i n a r y w o r k at Idalion h a d involved W r i g h t a n d t h r e e of his f o r m e r s t u d e n t s : P a u l L a p p , until his u n t i m e l y d e a t h in 1970; L a w r e n c e Stager; a n d Anita Walker. W r i g h t ' s interest in establishing a p e r m a n e n t A S O R facility a w a y f r o m t h e center of t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t e r n m a i n l a n d w a s further stimulated b y his o w n w o r k at Idalion. W r i g h t died in 1974, four years before d i e f o u n d i n g of the m o s t r e c e n t of A S O R ' s overseas c e n t e r s , d i e C y p r u s A m e r i c a n Archaeological R e s e a r c h Institute ( C A A R I ) , in Nicosia. [See Idalion; and the biography of Lapp.] Establishing a research c e n t e r o n t h e island of C y p r u s e n abled A S O R at long last t o e n t e r institutionally into t h e w o r l d of classical archaeology a n d t o p r o v i d e a b r i d g e b e t w e e n it a n d N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology. In fact, N e a r E a s t e r n sites are replete witii r e m a i n s f r o m t h e classical p e r i o d , a n d A S O R field projects h a d long dealt with material orig inating in or influenced b y A e g e a n cultures. T h e n e w insti t u t e in Nicosia b r o u g h t f o r m a l recognition to A S O R ' s b r o a d e r interest in t h e classical a n d pre-classical A e g e a n w o r l d s , for C y p r u s in nearly all its p e r i o d s of h u m a n o c c u p a t i o n exhibits a m e e t i n g or synthesis b e t w e e n N e a r E a s t e r n a n d A e g e a n cultures. B e c a u s e t h e r e w a s n o university o n C y p r u s until 1993, C A A R I h a d a n d c o n t i n u e s to h a v e a s p e cial role in d i e intellectual life of t h e c o u n t r y . Like A S O R ' s o d i e r institutes, C A A R I c o o p e r a t e s closely with t h e local d e p a r t m e n t of antiquities a n d invites scholars of all countries t o u s e its library a n d facilities. A l t h o u g h A S O R - s p o n s o r e d excavations o n C y p r u s h a v e t h u s far b e e n few, C A A R I ' s p r e s e n c e h a s nonetheless b e e n influential. T h e institute's fa
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cility is a m e e t i n g g r o u n d for scholars from all over t h e world. C A A R I m o v e d into elegant r e n o v a t e d quarters in 1991 a n d , like A I A R a n d A C O R , is m a n a g e d b y an i n d e p e n d e n t b o a r d of trustees a n d received subsidies from A S O R until 1990. T h e establishment of A C O R in 1970, initially a way of c o n t i n u i n g traditional p a t t e r n s of N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology with a s t r o n g biblical focus, also led to a significant w i d e n i n g of A S O R ' s perspective o n archaeology in general a n d o n several subfields in particular. F a r m o r e digs were carried o u t in J o r d a n at prehistoric sites b y A m e r i c a n s t h a n in Israel (where t h e biblical focus r e m a i n e d a constraint), a reality paralleled also o n C y p r u s . Archaeology in J o r d a n b e g a n to p r o s p e r in n e w a n d u n a n t i c i p a t e d w a y s . T h e L a t e A n t i q u e floruit of T r a n s j o r d a n i a n Christianity, for e x a m p l e , w h i c h e x t e n d e d well into t h e Early Islamic p e r i o d , has b e c o m e a special field along with Islamic archaeology, w h i c h is also flourishing. W i t h its a b u n d a n c e of U . S . federal funding, A C O R has also e n a b l e d cultural r e s o u r c e m a n a g e m e n t — t h e excavation a n d restoration of antiquities sites for national a n d touristic p u r p o s e s — t o set d i e s t a n d a r d for the entire region. [See R e s t o r a t i o n a n d C o n s e r v a t i o n ; C o n s e r v a t i o n Archaeology.] N e w D i r e c t i o n s : 1978-1995. W i t h t h e decentralization of A S O R a n d with t h e o p e r a t i o n s a n d p r o g r a m s of the overseas centers r u n entirely b y separate b o a r d s , A S O R ' s historic role in fostering excavations a n d scholarship has c h a n g e d . A S O R ' s h o m e office c o n t i n u e s to assist t h e overseas centers in building their libraries t h r o u g h b o o k a n d journal ex c h a n g e s , in c o m m u n i c a t i n g w i t h U . S . trustees a n d scholars, in s o m e b a n k i n g activities, in p r e p a r i n g a n d auditing federal grants, a n d in s o m e f u n d raising. T h e a p p r o x i m a t e l y 150 colleges, universities, seminaries, a n d m u s e u m s t h a t consti tute d i e A S O R c o n s o r t i u m of c o r p o r a t e m e m b e r s are b y a n d large t h e s a m e institutions t h a t send volunteers a n d students to digs and tiiat s u p p o r t scholars in their a c a d e m i c pursuits at each of d i e centers. A S O R ' s a n n u a l c o n v e n t i o n a n d its publications are t h e two major vehicles for facilitating interaction a m o n g schol ars in t h e field of a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t e r n archaeological stud ies. A S O R r e m a i n s t h e p r e m i e r international scholarly or ganization dedicated to fostering research in t h e m o d e r n N e a r East. Its r e c o r d of sustaining its projects t h r o u g h p e riods of w a r a n d political tension h a s w o n it valued a d m i ration in the region. T h e realization of p e a c e treaties b e t w e e n Israel a n d its n e i g h b o r s m a k e s the future seem b r i g h t e r t h a n ever before a n d should result in n e w projects in N e a r E a s t e r n research. C u r r e n t d e v e l o p m e n t s within A S O R a n d its overseas centers can b e followed in its q u a r terly Newsletter, or m o r e generally in its quarterly journal, The Biblical Archaeologist. A S O R ' s h o m e office was located o n t h e J o h n s H o p k i n s University c a m p u s in Baltimore, M a r y l a n d ; as of July 1996 die office, together with those of
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the three overseas centers, was relocated to t h e c a m p u s of B o s t o n University, adjacent to the h e a d q u a r t e r s of t h e A r chaeological Institute of America. [See also Albright Institute of Archaeological R e s e a r c h ; A m e r i c a n C e n t e r for Oriental Research; A m e r i c a n School of Oriental Research in B a g h d a d ; Archaeological Institute of America; C y p r u s A m e r i c a n Archaeological R e s e a r c h I n stitute; Periodical L i t e r a t u r e ; and Society of Biblical Liter ature.] BIBLIOGRAPHY King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. T h e defin itive work on A S O R ' s history, prepared by a past president and c o m missioned by the A S O R trustees. ERIC M . MEYERS
A M M A N , capital city of the H a s h e m i t e K i n g d o m of Jor d a n , located a b o u t 88 k m (55 mi.) east of Jerusalem, 206 k m (128 mi.) south of D a m a s c u s , a n d 335 k m (208 mi.) n o r t h o f ' A q a b a (3i°57' N , 35°S6' E; m a p reference 238 X 152). In the earliest references, it is designated as ' A m m a n of t h e B e n e ' A m m o n or as R a b b a t Bene ' A m m o n a n d is referred
AMMAN.
to as Bit A m m a n u in Assyrian texts. It w a s r e n a m e d Phila delphia at t h e time of P t o l e m y II P h i l a d e l p h u s (283-246 BCE); its earliest n a m e was revived as ' A m m a n in t h e Islamic period. T h e A m m a n district is a fertile area t h a t d r o p s d o w n t h r o u g h r o u g h terrain a n d occasionally forested hillsides to the J o r d a n Valley t o t h e w e s t a n d m e r g e s gradually into t h e steppelike desert t o t h e east. [See J o r d a n Valley.] T h e city h a s a l o n g history d a t i n g b a c k to t h e sixth m i l l e n n i u m ; remains f o u n d in its vicinity d a t e b a c k even earlier, to t h e Paleolithic p e r i o d . Jebel Q a l ' a , A m m a n ' s citadel, w a s the focus of settlement for t h o u s a n d s of years (see figure 1 ) ; n u m e r o u s sites o c c u p i e d in m a n y different p e r i o d s are scat tered a r o u n d the city. S o m e — S a h a b , T e l l e l - ' U m e i r i , 'Ain G h a z a l , a n d Safut—were significant settlements in size, stra tegic location, a n d p r e s e r v e d artifacts. A m m a n was still flourishing in the t e n t h c e n t u r y CE a c c o r d i n g to t h e A r a b historian a l - M u q a d d a s i , b u t b y d i e fifteenth c e n t u r y it w a s described as a field of ruins. A m m a n was a spectacular R o m a n , B y z a n t i n e , a n d U m a y y a d r u i n for m a n y centuries until late in t h e O t t o m a n period, with impressive stretches of fortification walls, col o n n a d e d streets, a n d m a n y substantially p r e s e r v e d b u i l d ings. A l t h o u g h a d v e n t u r e r s m a d e t h e trip to a n c i e n t r u i n s
F i g u r e 1. Plan of the citadel, Jebel el-Qafa. (Courtesy R. D o r n e m a n n )
AMMAN east of t h e J o r d a n River late in t h a t p e r i o d , serious surveys of sites s u c h as A m m a n w e r e n o t initiated until t h e n i n e t e e n t h century. C l a u d e R. C o n d e r visited A m m a n in 1880 a n d H o w a r d C r o s b y B u d e r p u b l i s h e d t h e results of t h e P r i n c e t o n Archaeological S u r v e y t h e r e in 1921. T h e survey i n c l u d e d t h e careful m a p p i n g a n d e x a m i n a t i o n of ruins in A m m a n a n d elsewhere in T r a n s j o r d a n . T h e gradual resetd e m e n t of A m m a n b e g a n in 1878, as a small village a m o n g t h e r u i n s , with a g r o u p of Circassians relocated b y O t t o m a n T u r k i s h authorities. T h e village e x p a n d e d after P r i n c e A b d ullah c h o s e A m m a n as t h e seat of g o v e r n m e n t in 1921 a n d t h e H a s h e m i t e K i n g d o m of J o r d a n w a s established in 1946. A n o t h e r e x p a n s i o n of d i e city t o o k p l a c e in t h e 1970s a n d 1980s. It n o w covers m o r e t h a n 9 0 0 sq k m (558 sq. m i . ) , with a p o p u l a t i o n a p p r o a c h i n g t w o million. T h r o u g h o u t history, t h e c o m m u n i c a t i o n essential to d i e p r o s p e r i t y of A m m a n a n d t h e s u r r o u n d i n g area ttaversed t h e desert h i g h w a y a n d t h e K i n g s H i g h w a y . N e l s o n G l u e c k ' s extensive T r a n s Jordanian survey (1932-1949) h a s recentiy b e e n a u g m e n t e d b y surveys c o n n e c t e d with t h e Cultural R e s o u r c e M a n a g e m e n t p r o g r a m in J o r d a n a n d b y t h e M a d a b a Plains Project. T h i s h a s led to a better u n d e r s t a n d i n g of l a n d - u s e p a t t e r n s a n d t h e interrelationships b e t w e e n r e m a i n s in t h e c o u n t r y s i d e (farmsteads, storage t o w ers, a n d forts) a n d o c c u p a t i o n o n t h e region's tells. E a r l i e s t R e m a i n s . T h e earliest major settlement a r o u n d A m m a n is t h e N e o l i t h i c village of ' A i n G h a z a l . [See 'Ain G h a z a l ] Its o c c u p a t i o n e x t e n d e d from t h e N a t u f i a n a n d P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic ( P P N ) p e r i o d s t h r o u g h an early p o t tery p h a s e of d i e Y a r m u k i a n culture. T h e site's m o s t r e m a r k a b l e r e m a i n s are rectilinear s t r u c t u r e s with plastered walls from t h e P P N B t h a t are associated witii burials of p l a s t e r e d skulls a n d caches of t h e earliest k n o w n r e e d - a n d - p l a s ter h u m a n statuary. O c c u p a t i o n o n t h e citadel, Jebel Q a l ' a , c a n b e t r a c e d to t h e Neolithic as well, b u t , e x c e p t for Chalcolithic p o t t e r y f o u n d in a cave o n its s e c o n d p l a t e a u , r e m a i n s are extremely scanty for any p e r i o d before t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . Early B r o n z e A g e t o m b s h a v e b e e n f o u n d o n Jebel Q a l ' a , Jebel e t - T a j , Jebel Abdali, a n d o t h e r n e a r b y sites like U m m elBighal. T h e traditions r e c o r d e d in t h e biblical a c c o u n t s of L o t a n d A b r a h a m indicate a n early political A m m o n i t e e n tity (Gn. 19:28). Walls of substantial M B b u i l d i n g s a n d stretches of t h e fortifications h a v e b e e n e x c a v a t e d o n t h e citadel, b u t t h e r e m a i n s are scattered a n d d o n o t p r o v i d e i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t h o w t h e site was o r g a n i z e d t h e n . T h e i m p o r t a n c e of t h e M B settlement is d e m o n s t r a t e d b y t h e m a n y rich t o m b g r o u p s excavated o n Jebel Q a l ' a a n d in t h e n e a r b y hills, T h e a s s e m blage includes distinctive, w e l l - m a d e vessels; scarabs; cyl i n d e r seals; metal pins a n d i m p l e m e n t s ; ivory inlays; b e a d s ; a n d alabaster jars. T h e c h o c o l a t e - o n - w h i t e wares a n d t h e white b u r n i s h e d w a r e s f r o m t h e e n d of t h e p e r i o d a n d t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e a r e exceptionally finely
99
m a d e . B r o n z e A g e r e m a i n s have b e e n f o u n d o n t h e highest a n d s e c o n d plateau of Jebel Q a l ' a , indicating t h a t t h e city (at least 20 h a [49 acres] in extent) was p r o b a b l y as large a n d i m p o r t a n t as the I r o n A g e city (see b e l o w ) . Little is k n o w n a b o u t t h e p e r i o d s of o c c u p a t i o n o n t h e lowest, or third, pla teau in a n y p e r i o d b e c a u s e it is covered with m o d e r n h o u s e s . T h e richest r e m a i n s f r o m L a t e B r o n z e A g e in t h e A m m a n district c o m e at p r e s e n t f r o m t h e t e m p l e at t h e old airport, n o r t h e a s t of the city. [See A m m a n A i r p o r t T e m p l e . ] E x c a vation of this substantial, isolated building yielded signifi cant quantities of foreign, C y p r i o t a n d M y c e n a e a n a n d l u x u r y w a r e s , and i m p o r t a n t small finds s u c h as cylinder seals, jewelry, E g y p t i a n s c a r a b s , amulets, a n d alabaster vessels. Similar artifacts h a v e b e e n f o u n d in lesser quantities in A m m a n - a r e a t o m b s . A n architecturally similar structure was discovered n e a r b y at e l - M a b r a k (Yassine, 1988, p p . 61-64). I r o n A g e . R e m a i n s of t h e I r o n A g e o c c u p a t i o n on Jebel Qal'a h a v e b e e n excavated in m o r e areas and in larger e x p o s u r e s t h a n for earlier p e r i o d s , b u t still n o t e n o u g h to reveal a c o h e r e n t plan. Several centuries of I r o n II o c c u p a t i o n are r e p r e s e n t e d , b u t t h e y only give limited insight into t h e n a t u r e of t h e settlement. P o r t i o n s of fortification walls a n d a possible gateway were e x c a v a t e d f r o m t h e t e n t h a n d n i n t h centuries BCE ( D o r n e m a n n , 1983, p p . 90-92) a n d sections of defense walls h a v e b e e n f o u n d in several other areas ( H u m b e r t a n d Z a y a d i n e , 1992). A large building of late I r o n II d a t e h a s b e e n e x c a v a t e d o n t h e s e c o n d plateau ( H u m b e r t a n d Z a y a d i n e , 1992). T h e first excavators, an Italian e x p e dition in 1934 (Bartoccini, 1933-1934), suggested t h a t t e m ple r e m a i n s existed in w h a t was later t h e p r e c i n c t of t h e R o m a n T e m p l e of H e r c u l e s . H o w e v e r , t h e " t e m p l e " was badly destroyed b y t h e R o m a n c o n s t r u c t i o n , m a k i n g t h e designation questionable. A large n u m b e r of rich I r o n A g e t o m b s h a v e b e e n excavated in A m m a n a n d its vicinity. A t o m b n e a r t h e royal p a l a c e p r o v i d e d evidence t h a t s p a n n e d t h e e n d of the B r o n z e A g e a n d I r o n I a n d II. T h i s s u p p l e m e n t s t h e m e a g e r e v i d e n c e from Jebel Qal'a for t h e b e g i n ning of t h e I r o n Age. T h e early pottery traditions of t h e I r o n Age s h o w limited e x a m p l e s of t h e d e c o r a t e d pottery witii a n Aegean influence t h a t is so characteristic in coastal a s s e m blages from t h e period. A l t h o u g h a variety of painted pottery is p r e s e n t , the assemblage is d o m i n a t e d b y plain wares tiiat show a transition in f o r m a n d t e c h n i q u e from t h e B r o n z e A g e to I r o n II materials. A long list of n e i g h b o r i n g sites has n o w b e e n investigated t o h e l p develop a picture of the area's material culture in d i e I r o n A g e . Excavation has n o w b e e n carried o u t or t o m b s e x c a v a t e d at T e l l el-'Umeiri, Tell Jawa, Tell Safut, T e l l Siran, K h i l d a , K h i r b e t el-Hajjar, M e q a b e lein, R u j m el-Malfuf, a n d T e l l S a h a b . [See 'Umeiri, T e l l el-; Safut, T e l l ; and Sahab.] M a n y of the e x c a v a t e d t o m b g r o u p s a n d m u c h of t h e p o t tery e n c o u n t e r e d o n t h e site date to t h e seventh a n d sixth centuries BCE. T h e p o t t e r y tradition is impressive for its s o phistication. R e d - b u r n i s h e d w a r e is t h e m o s t distinctive I r o n
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II feature, with s o m e very sophisticated, finely m a d e ex amples of bowls and jars. T h e s e traditions can be established in a b r o a d e r regional context with examples that rival t h e best p r o d u c t i o n in n e i g h b o r i n g lands, particularly t h e P h o e nician coast, if they are n o t examples of imports. A char acteristic corpus of simple p a i n t e d pottery also exists. T h e t o m b s d e m o n s t r a t e a burial tradition t h a t includes a n t h r o p o i d coffins. O n e of t h e A m m o n i t e kings, ' A m m i - N a d a b , is m e n t i o n e d o n t h e seal of o n e of his officers that was f o u n d in one of these t o m b s , in a rich assemblage that also c o n tained gold a n d silver jewelry a n d decorated seals. H a n d m a d e a n d m o l d - m a d e figurines illustrate the period's artistic conventions, with h o r s e a n d rider figurines p r e d o m i n a t i n g that apparently enjoyed special significance locally, a t least in t h e A m m a n District. R a b b a t A m m o n w a s t h e capital of an I r o n A g e state t h a t at times stretched from t h e m o d e r n W a d i Mujib (biblical A r n o n River) to t h e W a d i Z e r q a (biblical J a b b o k R i v e r ) , from the J o r d a n River to t h e desert, a n d at times b e y o n d . Its relationships with t h e n e i g h b o r i n g states of M o a b a n d Israel, as well as t h e m i g h t y Assyrian, N e o - B a b y l o n i a n , a n d Persian empires shifted constantly a n d dramatically from peaceful a n d cooperative to hostile. A m m a n is first m e n tioned as a state in t h e J e p h t h a h stories in Judges 3 a n d 11 a n d played an i m p o r t a n t role in t h e t i m e of D a v i d a n d Sol o m o n . It fought as a m e m b e r of a coalition of Syrian a n d neighboring states against Assyrian advances in t h e n i n t h century BCE b u t eventually was i n c o r p o r a t e d into t h e Assyr ian provincial administration u n d e r Tiglath-Pileser III. T w o A m m o n i t e rulers of the seventh century BCE are m e n t i o n e d in an inscription o n a B r o n z e bottle from T e l l Siran, a d d i n g to t h e still i n c o m p l e t e series of royal names that extends from the late eleventh t h r o u g h t h e sixth centuries BCE. A m m a n c a m e successively u n d e r N e o - B a b y l o n i a n a n d t h e n Persian rule ( u n d e r t h e P e r s i a n governorship of Arabia). T h e T o b i a d family, powerful Jewish landowners in t h e A m monite area c o n n e c t e d with the Jerusalemite p r i e s t h o o d , was influential in A m m a n in t h e Persian a n d Hellenistic periods. A small corpus of A m m o n i t e inscriptions a n d an extensive collection of inscribed seals exist. T h e A m m a n citadel i n scription and t h e inscribed bottle from Tell Siran are t h e longest texts. T h e y illustrate an A m m o n i t e language, b u t it is difficult to translate b e c a u s e t h e corpus is so limited. A m m o n i t e script is related to H e b r e w , Phoenician, A r a m a i c , a n d M o a b i t e . [See A m m o n i t e Inscriptions.] A rich collection of sculpture and other small finds indi cates m a n y elements i n c o r p o r a t e d from a variety of sources, particularly E g y p t i a n , P h o e n i c i a n , Syrian, Assyrian, a n d Cypriot. T h e corpus of A m m o n i t e limestone a n d basalt sculpture continues t o grow a n d is quite distinctive: small freestanding sculptures in the r o u n d with u n u s u a l a n d u n realistic p r o p o r t i o n s , frequently with oversized h e a d s , feet, and other b o d y parts. S o m e pieces are very polished i n their r e n d e r i n g and others heavily stylized (see figure 2).
AMMAN.
F i g u r e 2. Double-faced stone female head. I r o n
Age.
(Courtesy R. D o r n e m a n n )
Hellenistic, R o m a n , a n d E a r l y I s l a m i c P e r i o d s . Fol lowing t h e c o n q u e s t s of A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t , A m m a n w a s included in t h e s p h e r e of control of t h e P t o l e m i e s . P t o l e m y II P h i l a d e l p h u s (285-247 BCE) rebuilt t h e city a n d r e n a m e d it Philadelphia. A m m a n later c a m e u n d e r t h e c o n t r o l of t h e Seleucid dynasty of Syria. Only scattered b u i l d i n g r e m a i n s of this p e r i o d have b e e n e n c o u n t e r e d so far o n t h e t w o u p p e r plateaus of t h e citadel, b u t t h e ceramic r e m a i n s , coins, a n d other small finds again indicate a rich a n d p r o s p e r o u s city. A m m a n b e c a m e p a r t of the R o m a n E m p i r e in t h e first century BCE, a result of P o m p e y ' s victories. M a r c u s A n t o nius took t h e A m m o n i t e area from N a b a t e a n control a n d gave it to Egypt. W i t h his defeat at A c t i u m (31 B C E ) , t h e city regained its i n d e p e n d e n c e in t h e R o m a n world. A n e w height in t h e city's p r o s p e r i t y w a s r e a c h e d in t h e s e c o n d century BCE, w h e n T r a j a n ' s a n n e x a t i o n of t h e N a b a t e a n k i n g d o m r e d u c e d c o m p e t i t i o n for t r a d e . A m m a n was asso ciated with t h e D e c a p o l i s league of cities a n d w a s an i m p o r t a n t stop o n a newly established r o a d system, the Via N o v a T r a j a n a . [See Decapolis.] A m m a n ' s e x p a n s i o n a n d prosperity in t h e R o m a n p e r i o d (second century CE) entitled it to all of t h e t r a p p i n g s of a major city in the e m p i r e : t e m p l e s a d o r n e d its acropolis a n d a t h e a t e r / o d e u m c o m p l e x a n d o t h e r impressive structures,
AMMAN
s u c h as t h e n y m p h a e u m o n t h e b a n k s of t h e stream, t h e Seil A m m o n , a d o r n e d t h e d o w n t o w n area (see figure 3). A system of c o l o n n a d e d streets organized t h e city's areas: its cardo r a n d o w n the m a i n w a d i along t h e Seil A m m o n , w h i c h was vaulted, its decumanus intersected the cardo n e a r t h e p r e s e n t - d a y H u s s e n i m o s q u e in d i e d o w n t o w n area; a n d a n o t h e r street e x t e n d e d u p t h e slopes of t h e citadel t h r o u g h a m o n u m e n t a l gateway. T h e p a r t i y r e s t o r e d t e m p l e o n t h e citadel is n o w securely a t t r i b u t e d to H e r c u l e s b y two frag m e n t s of a n inscription o n t h e architrave of t h e portico t h a t dedicates t h e building to t h e e m p e r o r s M a r c u s Aurelius A n t o n i u s a n d L u c i u s A u r e l i u s V e r u s (161-169 CE), d u r ing t h e g o v e r n o r s h i p of P . Julius G e m i n i u s M e r c i a n u s (see figure 4). Philadelphia w a s t h e seat of a b i s h o p r i c in the B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d . R e m a i n s of several c h u r c h e s w e r e r e c o r d e d o n early t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y m a p s of t h e d o w n t o w n ' area a n d a c h u r c h
101
d e d i c a t e d to St. Elianos (a tiiird-century Christian m a r t y r from A m m a n ) stands e x c a v a t e d o n d i e citadel. T h e tradi tional location of the C a v e of tire Seven Sleepers, o n the outskirts of A m m a n , at Rajib, n e a r S a h a b , still venerated, traces its origins to B y z a n t i n e legends. T h e R o m a n city was rebuilt in b o t h t h e B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic periods. T h e ancient n a m e Amman w a s again given to a b u r g e o n i n g city substantially r e n e w e d b y walls, streets, a n d an i m pressive palace c o m p l e x o n d i e citadel in t h e Islamic period. A m m a n p r o s p e r e d u n d e r t h e U m a y y a d dynasty a n d was d i e g r a n a r y of t h e ' A b b a s i d p r o v i n c e . Following the Islamic p e riod, t h e city w a n e d in i m p o r t a n c e , its decline h a s t e n e d b y t h e shift of major administrative functions t o other cities— to K e r a k , H e s b a n , a n d Salt, in t u r n . By the fourteenth c e n t u r y , A b u l F i d a , a n A r a b writer, described t h e city as a ruin. [See also A m m a n A i r p o r t T e m p l e . ]
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AMMAN AIRPORT TEMPLE American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 8 / 1 9 . N e w H a v e n , 1 9 3 9 . O n e of four volumes in a landmark survey covering all of the T r a n s jordan, including materials from the A m m a n area. Harding, G. Lankester. The Antiquities of Jordan. L o n d o n , 1 9 5 9 . E x cellent overview of the cultural remains of Jordan. H o m e s - F r e d e r i c q , Denyse, and J. Basil Hennessy, eds. Archaeology of Jordan, vol. I, Bibliography and Gazetteer of Surveys and Sites. L o u vain, 1986. Very useful s u m m a r y of sites and excavations in Jordan. H u m b e r t , Jean-Baptiste, and Fawzi Zayadine. " T r o i s c a m p a g n e s de fouilles a A m m a n ( 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 9 1 ) . T r o s i e m e T e r r a s s e de la citadelle (Mission Franco-Jordanienne)." Revue Biblique 99 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 2 1 4 - 2 6 0 . LaBianca, Oystein S. Hesban, vol. 1, Sedentarization andNomadization: Food System Cycles at Hesban and Vicinity in Transjordan. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1990. Innovative work interpreting tire remains en countered in surveys of the H e s b a n a n d A m m a n areas. L a n d e s , George M . " T h e Material Civilization of the A m m o n i t e s . " Biblical Archaeologist 24 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 6 5 - 8 6 . I m p o r t a n t synthesis of A m monite culture and history, N o r t h e d g e , Alastair. Studies on Roman and Islamic Amman: The Exca vations of Mrs. C.-M. Bennett, and Other Investigations. Oxford, 1 9 9 2 . Major study of the architecture and other remains of t h e R o m a n a n d Islamic periods in A m m a n . Yassine, Khair. Archaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports. A m m a n , 1988. RUDOLPH H . DORNEMANN
A M M A N A I R P O R T T E M P L E , located at t h e for
AMMAN.
F i g u r e 4.
Temple
of Hercules.
(Photograph by
Gaetano
Palumbo, courtesy A C O R )
BIBLIOGRAPHY Almagro, Gorbea Antonio. " T h e Photogrammetric Survey of the Cit adel of A m m a n and Other Archaeological Sites in J o r d a n . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 24 (1980); 1 1 1 - 1 1 9 . Bartoccini, Renato. "Scavi a d A m m a n della missione archeologica italiana." Bolleltino dell' Associazione interna degli studi mediterranei 4 ( 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 4 ) : fasc. 4 - 5 , PP. 1 0 - 1 5 . Butler, Howard Crosby. Ancient Architecture in Syria. Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, 1904-1905 and 1909, Division 2, Section A. Leiden, 1907. Includes a survey of A m m a n w h e n major ruins were still visible (see p p . 34-62)D o r n e m a n n , Rudolph H. The Archaeology of the Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Milwaukee, 1983. Major synthesis of archae ological remains in the Transjordan concentrating on remains from Amman. Geraty, Lawrence T . , et al. " M a d e b a Plains Project: A Preliminary Report of the 1987 Season at Tell 'Umeiri and Vicinity." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 26 (1990): 5 9 - 8 8 . R e port of an ongoing project fliat is doing major work in the area and integrating remains from stratigraphic excavation with systematic survey of the surroundings. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 3. Annual of the
m e r A m m a n Civil A i r p o r t in M a r k e h , J o r d a n , a n o r t h e r n s u b u r b of A m m a n . T h e site lies i m m e d i a t e l y east of d i e a p r o n r u n w a y , w h e r e it joins t h e first of d i e m a i n r u n w a y s , a n d a b o u t 300 m s o u t h of the terminal. T h i s single-period site was discovered in 1955 while bulldozers w e r e e x p a n d i n g t h e r u n w a y area. A salvage excavation b y M . Salih cleared a s q u a r e s t r u c t u r e to its s t o n e - p a v e d floor; G . L a n k e s t e r H a r d i n g r e p o r t e d o n it in 1956 (Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 3:80). L a t e r , H a r d i n g identified t h e structure as an isolated L a t e B r o n z e A g e t e m p l e (Palestine Exploration Quarterly 90 [1958]: 1 0 - 1 2 ) . J. Basil H e n n e s s y (1966) subsequently excavated b e n e a t h t h e floor a n d in p r o b e s outside t h e structure. H e i n t e r p r e t e d t h e site as a t e m p l e w h e r e h u m a n sacrifice h a d t a k e n place a n d c o n firmed t h e s t r u c t u r e ' s isolation ( H e n n e s s y , 1985). I n 1976, w h e n t h e site was again t h r e a t e n e d by e x p a n s i o n , L a r r y G . H e r r e x p a n d e d H e n n e s s y ' s p r o b e s in t h e n o r t h . H e r r u n covered a square stone s t r u c t u r e h e i n t e r p r e t e d as a platform for cremation, u s e d with t h e m a i n building, w h i c h h e s u g gested h a d functioned as a m o r t u a r y t e m p l e ( " T h e A m m a n A i r p o r t Structure a n d t h e Geopolitics of A n c i e n t T r a n s j o r d a n , " Biblical Archaeologist 46 [1983]: 223-229). T h e p l a n of t h e building was virtually a perfect s q u a r e , approximately 15 m o n a side (see figure 1). A n a r r o w d o o r led t h r o u g h the t w o - m e t e r - t h i c k n o r t h wall to a series of six i n t e r c o n n e c t e d , r e c t a n g u l a r r o o m s , of r o u g h l y t h e s a m e size, s u r r o u n d i n g a central s q u a r e r o o m . I n t h e m i d d l e of t h e central r o o m was a circular pillar base o r platform/incense altar. All t h e r o o m s w e r e p a v e d w i t h flat stones. A shallow earth surface e x t e n d e d a b o u t 2 m n o r t h of t h e structures
AMMON
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m o r t u a r y activities, w h i c h w o u l d have included, a m o n g other possible activities, c r e m a t i o n a n d t h e storage of t o m b offerings. A l t h o u g h Semites d i d n o t generally practice c r e m a t i o n , Hittites a p p a r e n t i y did, w h i c h suggests their p r e s e n c e in t h e region at t h e t i m e . BIBLIOGRAPHY Hankey, Vronwy. " A Late Bronze Age T e m p l e at A m m a n : I. T h e Ae gean Pottery." Levant 6 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 1 3 1 - 1 5 9 . Technical publication of fifty to sixty imported M y c e n a e a n pots from the 1955 and 1966 ex cavations studied in the context of other M y c e n a e a n finds from an cient Palestine.
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Hankey, Vronwy. " A Late Bronze Age T e m p l e at A m m a n : II. Vases and Objects M a d e of S t o n e . " Levant 6 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 1 6 0 - 1 7 8 . D o e s for the stone vessels what she does for the Mycenaean pottery (see above). Hennessy, J. Basil. "Excavation of a Late Bronze Age T e m p l e at A m m a n . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 98 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : 1 5 5 - 1 6 2 . In the ab sence of a final report, the best publication on the 1966 excavations, although it appeared almost immediately after die excavations were completed, leaving m a n y finds unstudied. Hennessy, J. Basil. " T h i r t e e n t h Century B . C . T e m p l e of H u m a n Sac rifice at A m m a n . " Studia Phoenicia 3 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 8 5 - 1 0 4 . H e r r , Larry G . , ed. The Amman Airport Excavations, 1976. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 48. "Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Final publication of the small 1976 excavations, the most com plete synthesis t o date. LARRY G . HERR
F i g u r e i . Plan of the Amman airport temple, based on 1 9 6 6 excavation plans. A t t h e n o r t h e a s t is a very
AMMAN AIRPORT TEMPLE.
small e n t r a n c e . In t h e c e n t e r r o o m is t h e circular " i n c e n s e a l t a r " or " c o l u m n b a s e . " (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
d o o r w a y , b u t n o other e x t e r n a l surface could be distin guished. Six m e t e r s to t h e n o r t h w a s a s q u a r e stone s t r u c t u r e m e a s u r i n g a b o u t 4 m p e r side. T h e finds from inside a n d outside d i e structure c o m p r i s e d an extremely large p r o p o r t i o n of i m p o r t e d finds, including M y c e n a e a n pottery, E g y p t i a n s t o n e vessels a n d scarabs, a n d C y p r i o t pottery. O t h e r objects i n c l u d e d h u n d r e d s of b e a d s m a d e of semiprecious s t o n e s , small strips of gold, b r o n z e a n d silver jewelry, a n d b r o n z e w e a p o n s . S u c h items are n o r mally r a r e at c o n t e m p o r a r y sites in J o r d a n . M o r e o v e r , in 1976 H e r r (1983) collected a total of 1,127 b u r n e d adult h u m a n b o n e fragments. H e n n e s s y (1966) h a d also collected b u r n e d h u m a n b o n e s in f o u n d a t i o n deposits beneatii t h e floors of t h e s t r u c t u r e . T h e i m p o r t e d r e m a i n s s p a n t h e late M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e t h r o u g h t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e ( c 1700-1200 BCE). M a n y of t h e m m u s t have b e e n c u r a t e d in antiquity a n d p r e s e r v e d titrough g e n e r a t i o n s as special objects b e c a u s e t h e local p o t tery seems t o d a t e exclusively to t h e 13th c e n t u r y BCE, t h e e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e . B e c a u s e d i e b u r n e d b o n e s w e r e f r o m adults, t h e p r a c t i c e of c r e m a t i o n has b e e n s u g g e s t e d , n o t h u m a n sacrifice b e cause t h a t usually involved children. F u r t h e r m o r e , t h e c u r ated i m p o r t e d objects a r e typical of L a t e B r o n z e t o m b d e posits, suggesting t h a t t h e w h o l e site- w a s d e d i c a t e d to
AMMON.
A m m o n a n d d i e A m m o n i t e s m a k e u p o n e of t h e national g r o u p s east of t h e J o r d a n River m e n t i o n e d b y t h e Bible as enemies or subjects of Israel d u r i n g the time of the Israelite m o n a r c h y , t h e I r o n II period. T h e y are best k n o w n from t h e seventh a n d sixth centuries BCE, w h e n a large p o r t i o n of t h e biblical a n d Assyrian sources t h a t m e n tion t h e m were written a n d w h e n their material culture flourished in d i e archaeological record. H i s t o r y . A c c o r d i n g t o t h e Bible (Gn. 19:38), die e p o n y m o u s ancestor of die A m m o n i t e s was the son of A b r a h a m ' s n e p h e w L o t , w h o h a d an i n c e s t u o u s relationship with his d a u g h t e r while fleeing f r o m t h e destruction of S o d o m a n d G o m o r r a h . T h e y p r o b a b l y first a p p e a r e d t o w a r d d i e e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e or in t h e Early I r o n I period (c. 1300 BCE), h o w e v e r , w h e n a cluster of sites in t h e A m m a n region b e g a n to b e settled b y d i e m or b y others p e r h a p s related to t h e m ( A m m a n , B a q ' a h Valley, ' U m e i r i , Jawa, H e s b a n , Jalul, M a d a b a ) . [See A m m a n ; B a q ' a h Valley; U m e i r i , Tell el-; Jawa; H e s b a n ; M a d a b a . ] M o r e such sites will p r o b a b l y b e f o u n d in d i e future. T h e s e a n d s u b s e q u e n t settlements dis play a continuity of m a t e r i a l culture tiiroughout Iron I, I r o n II, a n d t h e Persian p e r i o d t h a t indicates an ethnic a n d n a tional c o n t i n u u m ( H e r r , 1992). N a t i o n a l awareness r e a c h e d its h e i g h t in the seventh c e n t u r y BCE, w h e n d i e P a x Assyriaca allowed d i e greatest intensification of settlement before R o m a n times a n d t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of a distinctive material cul t u r e t h a t can b e called A m m o n i t e . c
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Several A m m o n i t e kings (or chiefs) are k n o w n from a va riety of literary evidence. T h e Israelite chief Saul f o u g h t with a c o r r e s p o n d i n g leader in A m m o n w h o m t h e Bible calls N a h a s h ( " s n a k e " ) , p e r h a p s in the late eleventh c e n t u r y (i Sm. 1 1 : 1 - 1 2 ) ; a n d K i n g D a v i d dealt with an insult f r o m H a n u n t h e son of N a h a s h (2 Sm. 10:1-4). Tiglath-Pileser III m e n tions a Shanib as king in a text dated to a b o u t 733 BCE (ANET 282), a n d two statues from A m m a n d a t e d to t h e e i g h t h - s e v e n t h centuries BCE, n o w in the A m m a n M u s e u m , m a y represent ldngs: t h e y claim to b e of Z a k u r t h e son of Shanib and Yarih-Ezer. T h e Assyrian kings S e n n a c h e r i b a n d E s a r h a d d o n (early seventh century BCE) m e n t i o n B u du'il (Assyr., P u d u - I l u ; Riekele Borger, Die Inschriften AsarhaddonsKbnigs von Assyrien, G r a z , 1956); a n d A s h u r b a n i p a l lists ' A m m i - N a d a b in a b o u t 667 BCE (ANET 294). A small b r o n z e bottie from T e l l Siran n e a r A m m a n lists several kings, including ' A m m i - N a d a b I, his son Hissal'il, and ' A m m i - N a d a b II, t h e s o n of Hissal'il. Finally, a seal i m pression from Tell el-'Umeiri was m a d e from a seal b e l o n g ing to a royal official w h o served a king n a m e d Ba'alyasha', u n d o u b t e d l y t h e Ba'alis of Jeremiah 40:14, w h o a p p e a r s in a story dated to a b o u t 582 BCE (Herr, 1985). Probably as a result of A m m o n i t e complicity in t h e m u r d e r of Gedeliah, t h e B a b y l o n i a n - a p p o i n t e d g o v e r n o r of J u d a h , the Babylonians c o n q u e r e d A m m o n a n d m a d e it a p a r t of their e m p i r e , b u t retained the A m m o n i t e king (Josephus, Antiq. 10.9:7). T h e m o n a r c h y seems to have lasted t h r o u g h t h e Babylonian p e r i o d b u t was replaced by a P e r s i a n p r o vincial system similar to t h e o n e in J u d a h (Herr, 1993). T h e biblical reference to T o b i a h (e.g., Neh. 2:10) as a Persian official in A m m o n has created t h e mistaken a s s u m p t i o n b y s o m e t h a t h e w a s a n A m m o n i t e ruler of t h e Persian g o v e r n m e n t — h o w e v e r , n o A m m o n i t e would give his child a Y a h wistic (Hebrew) n a m e . B a s e d o n t h e occurrence of t h e n a m e in two A r a m a i c t o m b inscriptions at I r a q el-Amir, t h e p r e s e n c e of a dynasty of T o b i a d s in t h e well-watered W a d i esSir west of A m m a n m u s t be accepted. [See ' I r a q el-Amir.] T h e y m a y h a v e b e e n d e s c e n d e n t s of N e h e m i a h ' s T o b i a h . It is possible that this family d e s c e n d e d from t h e r e n e g a d e p r i n c e of J u d a h , Ishmael, w h o escaped t h e Babylonian d e sttuction of J u d a h b y fleeing to A m m o n a n d soon thereafter m u r d e r e d G e d e l i a h (Jer. 40). T h e A m m o n i t e p r e s e n c e a p parently c o n t i n u e d b e h i n d the scenes d u r i n g t h e classical a n d Islamic periods, r e m e m b e r e d in t h e n a m e of m o d e r n J o r d a n ' s capital city, A m m a n . G e o g r a p h i c a l B o r d e r s . T h e territory of A m m o n cen t e r e d a r o u n d its central city, called R a b b a t A m m o n in t h e Bible. T h e ancient city is still preserved in d o w n t o w n A m m a n , J o r d a n , on t h e hill called el-Qal'a ("the C i t a d e l " ) . Al t h o u g h t h e I r o n Age I a n d Early I r o n II territory of A m m o n m a y have h a d sUghtly different b o r d e r s , a c o m m o n material culture—including pottery, script, a n d l a n g u a g e — h a s b e e n found at sites from W a d i Z e r q a in the n o r t h to t h e s o u t h e r n e d g e of t h e hilly region n o r t h of M a d a b a a n d from t h e east
e r n desert to t h e J o r d a n Valley (late s e v e n t h a n d sixth c e n turies BCE), u n d o u b t e d l y r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e A m m o n i t e c u l t u r e at its greatest e x t e n t ( H e r r , 1992). Biblical e v i d e n c e suggests t h a t M o a b m a y h a v e conttolled t h e s o u t h e r n e d g e of this territory for a time (Hiibner, 1992, p p . 1 3 1 - 1 5 7 ) . A m m o n i t e holdings in the J o r d a n Valley m a y h a v e o c c u r r e d only d u r i n g t h e seventh a n d early sixth centuries BCE as well. S e t t l e m e n t P a t t e r n . F o r m o s t of its history, A m m o n w a s p r o b a b l y little m o r e t h a n a city-state—that is, t h e capital city ruled a small territory o n t h e central T r a n s j o r d a n p l a t e a u w i t h satellite t o w n s a n d villages in a relatively small h i n t e r land. T h e finds f r o m small excavations o n t h e citadel of A m m a n reflect a major u r b a n center ( G e r a t y a n d Willis, 1986, p p . 11—17). S t o n e statues of kings or divinities, royal i n s c r i p tions s u c h as t h e A m m a n Citadel I n s c r i p t i o n ( H o r n , 1969), m a n y small finds of superior quality, a n d t h e large size of t h e site all p o i n t to its central i m p o r t a n c e . Smaller t o w n s in t h e s u r r o u n d i n g h i n t e r l a n d fed t h e capital with agricultural p r o d u c e g a t h e r e d from their o w n territories. Several h a v e b e e n excavated: T e l l Safut, U m m a d - D a n a n i r , S a h a b , Jawa, T e l l el-'Umeiri, a n d H e s b a n . [See Safut, T e l l ; Sahab.] T h r o u g h o u t the region are m a n y small, isolated structures often built of megalithic stones. Early explorers i n t e r p r e t e d t h e m as towers for t h e defense of t h e capital, b u t d i e location of m o s t of t h e m ( o n s p u r s of hills with p o o r visibility a b o v e agricultural fields) suggests t h e y w e r e f a r m s t e a d s . [See F a r m s t e a d s . ] T h e few larger ones o n hilltops m a y h a v e served as military w a t c h t o w e r s . T h e scores of farmsteads in t h e A m m o n i t e region s e e m t o have p r o d u c e d grain in t h e valley b o t t o m s a n d fruit o n t h e slopes. S t r o n g evidence for w i n e p r o d u c t i o n was f o u n d at several farmsteads in t h e ' U m e i r i region. [See Viticulture.] T o g e t h e r with a n administrative center dating to t h e sev enth-fifth centuries BCE at Tell e l - ' U m e i r i , t h e A m m o n i t e m o n a r c h y seems to h a v e h e l p e d farmers c o n s t r u c t these farmsteads to p r o d u c e wine for t r i b u t e to B a b y l o n . T h e farmsteads c o n t i n u e d into t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d . A l o n g with agriculture, m o s t families k e p t m i x e d flocks of s h e e p a n d goats, s o m e cattle a n d a few donkeys a n d h o r s e s . S o c i a l a n d P o l i t i c a l O r g a n i z a t i o n . As w a s t r u e of m o s t of t h e tribal g r o u p s in t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t d u r i n g t h e early stages of t h e I r o n Age, w h e n t h e y originated, individual loy alties were stronger to family a n d clan t h a n tiiey w e r e to a cohesive " n a t i o n a l " entity. T h e n a m e bene 'ammon, " s o n s of A m m o n " (e.g., Gn. 19:38), seems t o suggest a n allied g r o u p of tribes or clans that, b y I r o n II, w h e n the biblical n a m e w a s u s e d , h a d coalesced into a c o h e r e n t a n d p e r m a n e n t tribal confederation with a chief or " k i n g " as h e a d ( L a B i a n c a and Y o u n k e r , 1994). B y t h a t t i m e national a w a r e ness was developing rapidly, facilitated b y a n a t i o n a l deity, M i l k o m , a n d t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of an A m m o n i t e script o u t of A r a m a i c a n d a dialect (or l a n g u a g e ) related to o t h e r N o r t h w e s t Semitic l a n g u a g e g r o u p s ( P h o e n i c i a n , A r a m a i c , H e b r e w , M o a b i t e , a n d E d o m i t e ) . A m m o n a p p e a r s as t h e
AMMONITE INSCRIPTIONS n a m e of a P e r s i a n p r o v i n c e o n t h r e e seals f o u n d at Tell el' U m e i r i ( L a r r y G . H e r r , " T w o S t a m p e d Jar I m p r e s s i o n s of t h e Persian P r o v i n c e of A m m o n from T e l l e l - U m e i r i , " An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 36 [1992]: 1 6 3 -
105
[See also E d o m ; M o a b ; and T r a n s j o r d a n , article on T r a n s j o r d a n in t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages.]
c
166). E t h n i c i t y a n d M a t e r i a l C u l t u r e . E x c a v a t i o n s have u n covered a strong similarity in t h e material culture within t h e b o u n d a r i e s m e n t i o n e d a b o v e d u r i n g t h e L a t e I r o n II a n d P e r s i a n p e r i o d s . P o t t e r y f o r m s frequentiy f o u n d in t h e A m m o n i t e region are rare or u n k n o w n elsewhere ( L u g e n b e a l a n d Sauer, 1972). F i g u r i n e s , a l t h o u g h similar to those f o u n d all over t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t , h a v e u n i q u e features t h a t allow researchers to p i n p o i n t t h e m t o t h e A m m o n i t e region. I n scriptions are written in a n a l p h a b e t i c script similar to t h a t of other N o r t h w e s t Semitic p e o p l e s b u t with easily definable characteristics t h a t can b e isolated to A m m o n (Herr, 1978, Aufrecht, 1989). P e r s o n a l n a m e s from inscriptions f o u n d in A m m o n also reflect typical p a t t e r n s . U s e of t h e t h e o p h o r i c e l e m e n t '77 (or 'El) is almost universal, in spite of t h e practice elsewhere of u s i n g national deities m o s t of t h e time. C e r t a i n p e r s o n a l n a m e s a r e f o u n d m o r e frequentiy in the A m m o n i t e region t h a n elsewhere, s u c h as T a m a k ' i l or 'Ilnadab ( A u frecht, 1989, p p . 356-376.; H i i b n e r , 1992, p p . 125-129). M a n y s h o r t inscriptions allow a basic description of t h e A m m o n i t e dialect J a c k s o n , 1983; Aufrecht, 1987). All of t h e s e cultural features indicate tiiat, b y t h e eighth a n d seventii centuries BCE, A m m o n i t e s saw themselves as a distinctive e t h n o s even t h o u g h A m m o n i t e p o t t e r y m a y b e related m o r e to regional technologies t h a n t o ethnic practices. R e l i g i o n . A m m o n i t e religion can b e characterized as a limited p o l y t h e i s m or h e t e r o t h e i s m c e n t e r e d 011 die deity M i l k o m , w h o seems to h a v e b e e n a n 'II (or 'El) divinity b a s e d o n t h e bull i m a g e r y in A m m o n i t e i c o n o g r a p h y (es pecially t h e seals) a n d t h e u s e of 'II in t h e A m m o n i t e o n o m a s t i c o n (Aufrecht, 1989). T h e few A m m o n i t e n a m e s with t h e d i e o p h o r i c title bdal ( " l o r d " ) p r o b a b l y refer t o M i l k o m . T h e A m m o n i t e deity should n o t b e e q u a t e d with M o l e k , as 1 K i n g s 11:7 s e e m s to do (mlk is d i e result of a scribal e r r o r for mlkm); therefore, M i l k o m s h o u l d n o t b e c o n n e c t e d with rites of child sacrifice, as t h e m i s t a k e n c o n n e c t i o n of M o l e k with M i l k o m has suggested to s o m e . T h e A m m o n i t e s w e r e o n e of t h e few p e o p l e s of t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t to d e p i c t deities in statues. Several stone b u s t s w e a r i n g c r o w n s f o r m e d of t h e E g y p t i a n atef symbol m a y d e p i c t M i l k o m (Piotr Bienkowski, The Art of Jordan, L i v e r p o o l , 1991, p . 41). T h e large R o m a n T e m p l e of H e r c u l e s o n t h e A m m o n i t e citadel h a s led s o m e researchers to suggest an identification with t h a t G r e e k deity (Hiibner, 1992, p . 259). T h e p r i m a r y g o d d e s s w a s Astarte, p r o b ably seen as d i e c o n s o r t of M i l k o m . O n e seal in typical A m m o n i t e script even m e n t i o n s a pious w o r s h i p e r of t h e g o d d e s s at S i d o n (Aufrecht, 1989, p p . 145-148). Scores of figurines of n u d e fertility g o d d e s s e s p r o b a b l y are m e a n t t o d e p i c t her.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aufrecht, Walter E . " T h e A m m o n i t e L a n g u a g e of the Iron A g e . " Bul letin of the American
Schools of Oriental Research, no. 266 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 8 5 -
95Aufrecht, Walter E . A Corpus of Ammonite
Inscriptions.
Lewiston, N . Y.,
1989. Geraty, Lawrence T „ and L l o y d A. Willis. "Archaeological Research in T r a n s j o r d a n . " In The Archaeology
of Jordan and Other Studies
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sented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by L a w r e n c e T . Geraty and L a r r y G. H e r r , p p . 3 - 7 2 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. H e r r , L a r r y G. The Scripts of Ancient
Northwest
Semitic Seals. H a r v a r d
Semitic M o n o g r a p h s , 1 8 . Missoula, 1 9 7 8 . H e r r , L a r r y G., ed. The Amman
Airport Excavations,
1976. Annual of
the American Schools of Oriental Research, 48. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1983. H e r r , Larry G. " T h e Servant of Baalis." Biblical
Archaeologist
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(1985): 1 6 9 - 1 7 2 . H e r r , L a r r y G. "Shifts in Settlement Patterns of Late Bronze and Iron Age A m m o n . " In Studies
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vol. 4 , edited by Ghazi Bisheh, p p . 1 7 5 - 1 7 8 . A m m a n , 1 9 9 2 . H e r r , L a r r y G. " W h a t Ever H a p p e n e d to the A m m o n i t e s ? " Archaeology
Biblical
Review 19.6 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 2 6 - 3 5 .
H o r n , S. H . " T h e A m m a n Citadel Inscription." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 193 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 2 - 1 3 . Hiibner, Ulrich. Die Ammonitcr,
A b h a n d l u n g e n des D e u t s c h e n Palas-
tinavereins, 1 6 . W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 9 2 . Jackson, K e n t P . The Ammonite
Language
of the Iron Age. Harvard Se
mitic M o n o g r a p h s , 27. C h i c o , Calif., 1983. LaBianca, Oystein S., and R a n d y W . Younker. " T h e K i n g d o m s of A m m o n , M o a b , and E d o m : T h e Archaeology of Society in L a t e Bronze/Iron Age T r a n s j o r d a n , ca. 1400-500 BCE." In The
Archaeology
of Society in the Holy Land, edited by T h o m a s E. Levy, p p . 3 9 9 - 4 1 5 . L o n d o n , 1994. Lugenbeal, E d w a r d N . , a n d J a m e s A. Sauer. "Seventh-Sixth C e n t u r y B.C. Pottery from Area B at Heshbon." Studies
Andrews
University
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10 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 2 1 - 6 9 .
M c G o v c r n , Patrick E. The Late Bronze Transjordan:
The Baa'ah
and Early Iron Ages of Central
Valley Project, 1977-1981.
University M u
seum, M o n o g r a p h 65. Philadelphia, 1986. LARRY G . HERR
AMMONITE INSCRIPTIONS.
A m m o n i t e texts are inscribed o n various materials: stone (e.g., from the A m m a n Citadel), metal (e.g., o n a bottle from Tell Siran), p o t tery (engraved, e.g., from S a h a b ; or witii ink o n ostraca, e.g., from T e l l H e s b a n ) , s e m i p r e c i o u s stones (seals), a n d clay (seal impressions, k n o w n as bullae). [See A m m a n ; S a h a b ; Ostraca; H e s b a n ; Seals.] A n inscription m a y b e defined as A m m o n i t e a c c o r d i n g to several categories of criteria: g e o g r a p h i c (i.e., t h e text was f o u n d in territory ascribed to t h e A m m o n i t e s ) , cultural (e.g., i c o n o g r a p h i c , religious), tech nical (e.g., p a l e o g r a p h i c ) , a n d linguistic (i.e., g r a m m a t i c a l a n d lexical). U n f o r t u n a t e l y , so few inscriptions of significant length are attested, t h e p r e s e n d y k n o w n linguistic features
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AMMONITE INSCRIPTIONS
differentiating t h e A m m o n i t e language from M o a b i t e a n d E d o m i t e are rather few in n u m b e r . T h u s , other criteria h a v e b e e n u s e d m o r e extensively in defining the A m m o n i t e cor p u s , for e x a m p l e , i c o n o g r a p h y a n d onomastics (Israel, 1979; N a v e h , 1982/1987, p p . 1 0 5 - 1 1 1 ; Jackson, 1983; Aufrecht, 1987). S e a l s . T h e largest n u m b e r of extant A m m o n i t e i n s c r i p tions are o n seals (Hiibner, 1993; p p . 154-155) a n d date to t h e eighth-sixth centuries BCE. T h e earlier ones are classified as A m m o n i t e primarily o n t h e basis of t h e script a n d t h e discovery site; the later ones are classified o n t h e basis of language, onomastics, or i c o n o g r a p h y b u t n o t o n t h e script, which is A r a m a i c . [See A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d Literature.] Only a small n u m b e r h a v e b e e n found in systematic e x c a vations, and it is difficult without scientific analysis to estab lish which of the objects obtained o n the antiquities m a r k e t are authentic ( H i i b n e r , 1993, p p . 132-133; Bordreuil, 1992, PP- 13—38). T h e history of research a n d the criteria t h a t di rected the formation of t h e extant c o r p u s of A m m o n i t e seals are listed by Felice Israel (1991, p p . 227-231, a n d Pierre Bordreuil (1992, p p . 1 5 7 - 1 5 9 ) . M o n u m e n t a l Inscriptions. T h e circumstances of dis covery of t h e A m m a n Citadel inscription ( C M / 5 9 ) r e m a i n unclear. T h e beginnings and endings of all of its lines h a v e disappeared b u t p a l e o g r a p h i c analysis indicates a date for it at t h e beginning of t h e eighth century BCE. Several t e m p t i n g hypotheses regarding its p u r p o s e (bibliography in CAI) have been rejected b e c a u s e they a r e based o n incorrect r e a d ings. M o s t p r o b a b l y t h e inscription refers to an order from t h e A m m o n i t e national g o d , M i l k o m , to build s o m e mb't, " e n t r a n c e s . " A salvation oracle appears at the e n d of t h e inscription. Because it was r e u s e d in A m m a n ' s R o m a n t h e a t e r a n d probably conceived b y its author as a building inscription, CAI 58 is k n o w n as t h e A m m a n T h e a t e r inscription. U n fortunately, the d i s a p p e a r a n c e of t h e beginning a n d endings of its lines i m p e d e s u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e text, which is dated only paleographically to t h e sixth century BCE. A now d a m a g e d inscription of t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE (CM/43) is engraved o n t h e b a s e of t h e statue of Yrlfzr, t h e g r a n d s o n of the A m m o n i t e king Shanibu, T h e u s e of br for " s o n " indicates t h a t tire language of the inscription is A r a maic. P r o d u c e d as a p a r t of m o n u m e n t a l artworks, b u t n o n m o n u m e n t a l in character, are letters a n d religious symbols engraved o n the reverse of eyes fixed in t h e h e a d s of female statues found o n t h e A m m a n Acropolis (CAI73). T h e p u r p o s e of these brief inscriptions w a s to indicate their correct p l a c e m e n t to t h e builders or craftsmen. T h e y h a v e b e e n dated to t h e seventh c e n t u r y BCE, b u t on archaeological ev idence rather t h a n b y paleographic c o m p a r i s o n s . Inscriptions o n M e t a l . A n A m m o n i t e inscription, p r o b ably royal, from T e l l Siran near A m m a n (CAI 78), is en graved o n a metal bottle (Hiibner, 1992, p . 29). T h e text
contains stylistic literary features k n o w n from o t h e r N o r t h west Semitic literature. A c u p f o u n d in an I r o n II t o m b at K h i r b e t U d e i n a h , also n e a r A m m a n ( H i i b n e r , 1992, p p . 3031), is engraved w i t h t h e n a m e of its o w n e r . T h e inscription is dated to the sixth c e n t u r y BCE o n archaeological a n d p a leographic g r o u n d s . T w o inscribed weights are k n o w n w h o s e A m m o n i t e identification r e m a i n s in d o u b t ( H i i b n e r , 1992, p p . 31-32). Inscriptions o n C l a y . A m m o n i t e ostraca h a v e b e e n f o u n d at T e l l H e s b a n (CAI 65, 80, 94, 137), T e l l e l - M a z a r (CAI 144-147), a n d T e l l e l - ' U m e i r i ( H e r r , 1992). [SeeMazar, Tell el-; ' U m e i r i , T e l l el-.] U l r i c h H i i b n e r (1992, p . 136) disputes t h e classification of t h e T e l l H e s b a n ostraca as A m m o n i t e for t o p o g r a p h i c r e a s o n s . T h e validity of t h e g e o g r a p h i c a r g u m e n t is doubtful, h o w e v e r , for t h e oracle of Jer emiah 49:1-3 shows t h a t d u r i n g tire sixth c e n t u r y B C E H e s h b o n / H e s b a n was u n d e r A m m o n i t e control ( L e m a i r e , 1992). In any case, t h e l a n g u a g e a n d script of t h e s e texts is not Moabite. T h e y have been dated on paleographic g r o u n d s t o t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE b y F r a n k M . C r o s s (1986, p p . 480-484). T h e H e s b a n I V o s t r a c o n (CAI 80) is n o t e w o r t h y for its g r a m m a t i c a l features, w h i c h are characteristic of t h e A m m o n i t e l a n g u a g e . Also of n o t e are T e l l M a z a r o s traca n o . 3 (CAI 144), a letter from t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE t h a t contains a typical epistolary formula, a n d n o . 7 (CAI 147), a list of p e r s o n a l n a m e s dating to t h e fifth c e n t u r y BCE t h a t d e m o n s t r a t e s t h e continuity of t h e traditional A m m o n ite o n o m a s t i c o n (Heltzer, 1989). O t h e r d o c u m e n t s from t h e site refer to agricultural life a n d are t o b e ascribed t o t h e Hellenistic period. T h e ostraca f r o m T e l l el-'Umeiri r e m a i n u n d e c i p h e r e d for t h e m o s t p a r t b e c a u s e of their p o o r state of p r e s e r v a t i o n . O n e fragmentary inscription from t h a t site m a y b e classified as sacred (Herr, 1992, p p . 195-196). T h e ostraca from D e i r 'Alia are still u n p u b l i s h e d (see t h e list in F r a n k e n a n d I b r a h i m , 1977-1978, p . 79). [See D e i r 'Alia Inscriptions.] T h e scholarly c o n s e n s u s t h a t o s t r a c o n n o . 6231 from N i m r u d ( G W 4 7 ) is a list of typical A m m o n i t e p e r s o n a l n a m e s w a s recently rejected b y B o b Becldng (1988) a n d H t i b n e r (1992, PP- 35-37)' [See N i m r u d . ] H o w e v e r , t h e p r e s e n c e of A m m o n i t e s a t N i m r u d has b e e n p r o v e d b y the discovery of A m m o n i t e p o t t e r y o n t h e site (Israel, 1990, p . 234). T h e possibility of ascribing the d o c u m e n t to t h e A m m o n i t e w o r l d therefore r e m a i n s o p e n . E x c a v a t i o n s at A m m a n (CAI 77), H e s b a n (CAI 81), S a h a b ( H i i b n e r , 1992, p . 39, n o . 4), a n d K h i r b e t U m m a d - D a n a n i r ( H t i b n e r 1992, p . 39, n o . 5) h a v e p r o d u c e d pottery e n g r a v e d with p e r s o n a l n a m e s t h a t are m o r e or less fragmentary. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aufrecht, Walter E . " T h e A m m o n i t e L a n g u a g e of the I r o n A g e . " Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 266 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 8 5 95. Review of Jackson ( 1 9 8 3 ) .
AMORITES Aufrecht, Walter E. A Corpus of Ammonite Inscriptions (CAI). Lewiston, N . Y . , 1989. Includes extensive bibliography and photographs. Becking, Bob. " K a n n das Ostrakon N D 6231 von Nimrild fiir a m m o n itisch gehalten w e r d e n ? " Zeitschrift. des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 104 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 5 9 - 6 7 . Rejects t h e N i m r u d ostracon as A m m o n i t e . Bordreuil, Pierre. " S c e a u x inscrits des pays d u L e v a n t . " In Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 1 2 , cols. 8 6 - 2 1 2 . Paris, 1 9 9 2 . Detailed overview of inscribed seals from the Levantine area. Cross, F r a n k M o o r e . " A n U n p u b l i s h e d A m m o n i t e Ostracon from H e s b a n . " In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by L a w r e n c e T . Geraty and Larry G. H e r r , p p . 4 7 5 - 4 8 9 . Berrien Springs, M i c h . , 1986. F r a n k e n , H . J., and M o ' a w i y a h Ibrahim. " T w o Seasons of Excavations at Deir 'Alia, 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 7 8 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 22 ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 7 8 ) : 5 7 - 7 9 . Heltzer, Michael. " T h e Tell e l - M a z a r Inscription n° 7 and S o m e H i s torical and Literary P r o b l e m s of the V S a t r a p y . " Transeuphratene 1 (1989): 1 1 1 - 1 1 8 . t h
H e r r , L a r r y G. "Epigraphic F i n d s from Tell el-'Umeiri during the 1989 S e a s o n . " Andrews University Seminary Studies 30 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 8 7 - 2 0 0 . Flubner, Ulrich. Die Ammoniter: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte, Kultur und Religion eines transjordanischen Volkes irn 1 . Jahrtausend. v. Chr. A b h a n d l u n g e n des D e u t s c h e n Palastinavereins, 16. W i e s b a d e n , 1992. Extensive bibliography, with particular attention to A m m o n i t e culture. Flubner, Ulrich. " D a s ikonographische Repertoire der ammonitischen Siegel u n d seine E n t w i c k l u n g . " In Studies in the Iconography of North west Semitic Inscribed Seals: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Fribourg on April 17-20, 1991, edited by Benjamin Sass and Christoph Uehlinger, p p . 1 3 0 - 1 6 0 . Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 1 2 5 . Freiburg, 1993. Overview of A m m o n i t e seals, particularly from the iconographic perspective. Israel, Felice. " T h e L a n g u a g e of the A m m o n i t e s . " Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 10 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 1 4 3 - 1 5 9 . Brief overview of the A m m o n i t e language problem, with extensive bibliography. Israel, Felice. " N o t e A m m o n i t e II: L a religione degli Ammoniti attraverso le fonti epigrafiche." Studi e Materiali Storico-Religiosi 56 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 3 0 7 - 3 3 7 . A m m o n i t e religion as revealed by A m m o n i t e inscriptions. Israel, Felice. " N o t e A m m o n i t e III: Problemi di epigrafia sigillare a m m o n i t a . " In Phoinikeia Grammata, lire etecrire en Meditenanee: Actes du colloque de Liege, 1 5 - / 8 novembre 1989, edited by Claude Baurain et al., p p . 2 1 5 - 2 4 1 . N a m u r , 1 9 9 1 . Overview of A m m o n i t e seals. Israel, Felice. " N o t e di onomastica semitica 7/2. Rassegna critico-bibliografica ed epigrafica su alcune o n o m a s t i c h e palestinesi: L a T r a n s giordania." Studi Epigrajici e Linguistici 9 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 9 5 - 1 1 4 . T r a n s j o r danian onomastics, including A m m o n i t e . Jackson, K e n t P . The Ammonite Language of the Iron Age. H a r v a r d S e mitic M o n o g r a p h s , 2 7 . Chico, Calif., 1983. A t t e m p t to gather all the data for defining the A m m o n i t e language (see Aufrecht 1 9 8 7 ) . Lemaire, Andre. "Pleshbon = H i s b a n ? " Eretz-Israel23 (1992): 64-70. N a v e h , Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography. 2 d ed. Jerusalem, 1987. D i s c u s sion of the A m m o n i t e script. FELICE ISRAEL
A M O R I T E S . T h e t e r m Amorite is t h e English r e n d e r i n g of t h e H e b r e w w o r d 'emort, w h i c h is derived in t u r n f r o m t h e A k k a d i a n Amurrum o r Amurr-T-itm, T h i s gentilic is d e rived from t h e t e r m Amurrum, w h i c h c o r r e s p o n d s to mardu in S u m e r i a n (written M A R . T U ) , of u n k n o w n origin. T h e H e b r e w f o r m is a gentilic f r o m a n a m e s u c h as *'emdr,
107
w h i c h is otherwise u n a t t e s t e d in H e b r e w . T h e English t e r m Amurrite, derived directly from the A k k a d i a n version of the w o r d , is preferred by s o m e scholars. N o distinctive archaeological evidence can b e c o n v i n c ingly associated with t h e A m o r i t e s . T h e material culture f o u n d in the u r b a n centers w h e r e they w e r e active does n o t exhibit stylistic traits t h a t could positively be identified with t h e m ; this holds t r u e e v e n for smaller provincial cities closer t o their h o m e g r o u n d , s u c h as T e r q a . [See T e r q a . ] N o r has any site b e e n identified in t h e s t e p p e t h a t could even b e dated to t h e p e r i o d in q u e s t i o n . W h a t is left are only t a n t a lizing textual clues t h a t speak of w e a p o n s a n d g a r m e n t s fashioned in t h e A m o r i t e style and t h a t indicate t h a t t h e y w e r e t h e suppliers of p r o d u c t s associated with h e r d i n g a n d w i t h the steppe (salt a n d a special kind of truffle, b o t h re sources still b e i n g exploited). T h e p e r t i n e n t textual d o c u m e n t a t i o n falls into t h r e e major periods: 1. Second half of the third millennium (2500-2000 BCE): T h e relatively few explicit references to Amorites are p r i marily from s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Ebla. [See Ebla.] T h e few individuals so identified are generally labeled in the texts by t h e S u m e r i a n appellative M A R . T U . 2. Old Babylonian period (c. 1900-1600). L a r g e n u m b e r s of individuals are m e n t i o n e d in cuneiform texts of the Old B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d ( w h i c h c o r r e s p o n d s in p a r t to the M i d d l e B r o n z e Age) w h o b e a r n a m e s identifiable linguistically as A m o r i t e ; t h e y are not, h o w e v e r , explicitly labeled MAR.TU". Besides p e r s o n a l n a m e s t h e r e are also n a m e s for larger social g r o u p s a n d a few w o r d s referring to t h e l a n d s c a p e a n d the material culture. T h e majority of die texts were f o u n d at M a r i . [See M a r i ; M a r i T e x t s . ] 3. Late Bronze Age. N o t r a c e is left of t h e Amorites in L B M e s o p o t a m i a , e x c e p t t h a t t h e t e r m Amurrum is still in u s e t o d e n o t e the west. I n Syria tiiere is an i m p o r t a n t k i n g d o m t h a t bears t h e n a m e Amurrum (written as either M A R . T U or A-mur-ri in Akkadian texts f r o m e l - A m a r n a , Ugarit, a n d B o gazkoy a n d as W r i n U g a r i t i c texts). [.See A m a r n a T a b l e t s ; Bogazkoy; Ugaritic Inscriptions.] O r i g i n a n d E t h n o l i n g u i s t i c Identification. T h e wide s p r e a d opinion a m o n g scholars is t h a t t h e Amorites spoke a W e s t Semitic language a n d w e r e essentially a n o m a d i c p o p ulation interacting w i t h t h e u r b a n centers of S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e n a t u r e of this interaction has b e e n variously defined as r e p r e s e n t i n g a g r a d u a l infiltration ( K u p p e r , 1957; A n b a r , 1991) or a symbiosis b a s e d especially on e c o n o m i c factors ( R o w t o n , 1987). T h e i r origin w o u l d be in the Syrian s t e p p e , a n d this w o u l d h a v e s h a p e d their etiinic identity as essentially n o m a d i c , w h a t e v e r n u a n c e is placed on this def inition. A n alternative i n t e r p r e t a t i o n views t h e Amorites as p e a s ants originally at h o m e in t h e n a r r o w valley of t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s River (Buccellati, 1992; a preliminary suggestion in this sense w a s a d v a n c e d by G e o r g e M e n d e n h a l l a n d by
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his student, J o h n T . L u k e [Luke, 1965]). F r o m tiieir r e stricted h o m e b a s e , they would have m o v e d t o w a r d d i e s t e p p e in a successful effort to gain control of the vast s t e p p e rangeland for their flocks. In die process, diey w o u l d h a v e acquired n o m a d i c traits a n d developed considerable social a n d political a u t o n o m y . In this perspective, their l a n g u a g e represents d i e rural Semitic c o u n t e r p a r t of u r b a n Semitic (Akkadian/Eblaite), vis-a-vis which it retained m o r e archaic traits. T h e A m o r i t e l a n g u a g e is k n o w n almost exclusively from personal n a m e s ( m o r e t h a n four t h o u s a n d text o c c u r r e n c e s ; Gelb, 1980). Like all Semitic n a m e s , they consist of r e c o g nizable sentences a n d n o u n p h r a s e s , so t h a t m u c h can b e said a b o u t p h o n e m i c s a n d m o r p h o l o g y . S o m e traits are m o s t distinctive, in c o m p a r i s o n to Akkadian, the other S e mitic language with which it is c o n t e m p o r a r y in (Buccellati, 1966; Huffmon, 1965). 1. T h e p h o n e m i c inventory includes m o r e c o n s o n a n t s d i a n Akkadian, w h i c h is m o s t likely t h e result of t h e r e t e n tion of archaic traits (rather t h a n an i n n o v a t i o n ) ; see, for example, t h e retention of 'ayn, as in 'ammu-rapi, " t h e p a ternal uncle has h e a l e d . " 2. Several m o r p h o p h o n e m i c alternations are also indic ative of archaism: t h e retention of the m i d d l e vowel in salamatum ( c o m p a r e Akk. salimtum), "well-being." 3. T h e third p e r s o n of t h e verb retains the original vowel in first position: Yasma-Dagan, "Dagan hears" (compare Akk. Isme-Dagan). 4. A possible innovation in t h e verbal system is t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of a perfect with suffixed p r o n o m i n a l elements: Mutu-malaka, " t h e m a n has r u l e d . " 5. T h e w o r d o r d e r retains for the m o s t p a r t t h e s e q u e n c e verb-subject, as in Yantin-Erah, " t h e m o o n g o d gives" ( c o m p a r e the semantically equivalent Akkadian n a m e Siniddinam w h e r e t h e w o r d order is inverted). T h e few A m o r i t e w o r d s t h a t have survived outside o n o mastics include s o m e t o p o n y m s t h a t refer to t h e local land scape. T h u s , nawii c o n n o t e s the specific p e r c e p t i o n of t h e Syrian steppe, d o t t e d with wells a n d h e r d i n g c a m p s . As such, it m a y b e a n Amorite w o r d ( b o r r o w e d in A k k a d i a n ) , while serum is t h e p r o p e r Akkadian t e r m for t h e s o u t h e r n steppe, m o r e sharply differentiated from t h e irrigated agri cultural areas. Similarly, t h e A m o r i t e t e r m yamina refers to t h e "right (bank of t h e r i v e r ) , " looking at t h e E u p h r a t e s flowing d o w n s t r e a m (only secondarily did it acquire the m e a n i n g " s o u t h " ) . Also A m o r i t e are the t e r m s 'aharatum/ 'aqdamatum, w h i c h refer, respectively, to " t h e region b e h i n d " or "in front," b o l t i n g at t h e river from t h e w e s t e r n side, w h e r e the major cities were located. G e o g r a p h i c B a c k g r o u n d . T h e Amorites r e p r e s e n t o n e of the b e t t e r - k n o w n n o n u r b a n societies of die ancient N e a r East. T h e question a b o u t their origin has a b e a r i n g o n a p r o p e r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of their socioeconomic institutions. If d i e y were n o m a d s , or s e m i n o m a d s , on their way to s e d e n -
tarization, a well-established social organization w o u l d h a v e to b e a s s u m e d t h a t h a d d e v e l o p e d a p a r t from u r b a n civili zation a n d c a m e t o face it full b l o w n from a p o s i t i o n of o u t right distinctiveness—and from a distant location t h a t d i d n o t allow contact. As indicated a b o v e , s o m e scholars prefer to see t h e m instead as p e a s a n t s in an incipient stage of n o m a d i z a t i o n , with a persistent g e o g r a p h i c a n d institutional link to the u r b a n setting from w h i c h t h e y originated. L i k e d i e other rural classes m o r e directiy u n d e r t h e sway of city influence, they w e r e essentially " p a r a u r b a n " at t h e s a m e t i m e that they w e r e developing a n t i u r b a n t e n d e n c i e s . It is this perspective t h a t is followed h e r e . T h e area of d i e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s is well within t h e arid z o n e (below t h e 200-millimeter rainfall line), so tiiat agri culture is impossible w i t h o u t irrigation. [See Irrigation.] H o w e v e r , t h e b e d of t h e river h a s cut a d e e p t r o u g h in d i e s t e p p e , a n d the irrigable area is limited t o a n a r r o w strip t h a t is for die m o s t p a r t n o m o r e t h a n 10 k m (6 m i . ) wide; it is called zbr in A r a b i c , a n d in Akkadian ah Purattim. T h e u r b a n density in t h e area of t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s is c o r r e s p o n d i n g l y m u c h lower t h a n either in t h e irrigable alluvium t o t h e s o u t h or t h e rain-fed plains to t h e n o r t h a n d t h e west. A s a result, a single political center ( M a r i , for m o s t of d i e A m o r i t e period) controlled a m u c h vaster territory ( c o m prising valley floor a n d steppe) titan any o t h e r S y r o - M e s o potamian kingdom. T h e exploitation of t h e s t e p p e as a r a n g e l a n d for h e r d i n g t u r n e d o u t to be of major e c o n o m i c benefit: this was possible t h r o u g h t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of a n e t w o r k of wells tiiat p r o v i d e d w a t e r for animals (not for cultivation, m u c h less for h u m a n s , b e c a u s e it was t o o brackish). T h e p e a s a n t s of t h e valley floor seized o n this o p p o r t u n i t y a n d e x p a n d e d i m m e a s u r a b l y t h e territorial b o u n d a r i e s a n d t h e e c o n o m i c base of t h e k i n g d o m t o which they b e l o n g e d . E v e n t h o u g h it r e m a i n e d w i t h o u t u r b a n settlements until t h e latter p a r t of t h e s e c o n d millen n i u m BCE, the entire s t e p p e w a s d i e d o m a i n of t h e M a r i h e r d e r s , w h o w e r e in direct c o n t a c t w i t h t h e cities from t h e O r o n t e s valley t o t h e K h a b u r plains. Social a n d E c o n o m i c Institutions. T h e peasant-herd ers acquired a h i g h degree of a u t o n o m y , simply b e c a u s e t h e s t e p p e , h o w e v e r t e m p o r a r y a r e s i d e n c e it m i g h t h a v e r e m a i n e d for t h e m , p r o v i d e d a safe distance f r o m t h e forces of t h e central g o v e r n m e n t , w h i c h was a i m i n g t o enforce r e g ulations p e r t a i n i n g especially t o military c o n s c r i p t i o n a n d taxation. Certainly t h e g o v e r n m e n t n e v e r u n d e r t o o k t h e task of i m p o s i n g direct central controls in t h e s t e p p e : it is signif i c a n t t h a t of t h e several military confrontations b e t w e e n t h e u r b a n g o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e various A m o r i t e g r o u p s , only t h o s e initiated b y t h e kings of t h e O l d A k k a d i a n d y n a s t y speak of battles in t h e s t e p p e ; tiiose involving t h e kings of M a r i take place at or n e a r t h e cities b y t h e riverbanks. F r o m this p e r s p e c t i v e it m a y b e said t h a t t h e A m o r i t e s e x t e n d e d b e y o n d t h e limits of territorial contiguity t h e ties that, in t h e u r b a n a n d rural settlements, h a d g r o w n t o b e
AMORITES
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intimately d e p e n d e n t o n just s u c h contiguity. T h e 'ibrum is t h e smallest unit t o t r a n s c e n d t h e village a n d function as a n e x t e n d e d nonterritorial n e i g h b o r h o o d , a " c l a n . " ( T h e t e r m 'dbirum, c o u l d m e n b e u n d e r s t o o d as " t h e o n e w h o joins t h e 'ibrum" referring to a n individual e s c a p i n g from a city t o a clan a n d in this r e s p e c t it w o u l d b e semanticaHy, t h o u g h n o t morphologically, equivalent to t h e H e b r e w gentilic f o r m 'ibr-t), T h e clustering of clans into h i g h e r units w o u l d result in a tribe, to w h i c h t h e A m o r i t e t e r m gayum seems to a p p l y .
A clear indication of t h e d e g r e e of political a u t o n o m y achieved c o m e s from t h e titulary of t h e leaders. T h e office of village h e a d m a n (sugagum) w a s e x t e n d e d to p r o v i d e lead e r s h i p , b e y o n d t h e village, to t h e clan. T h e title king ( L U G A L or sarrum) was u s e d for t h e leader of t h e tribe (gayum). It is i m p o r t a n t to n o t e that only t h e n a m e of a n individual tribe, a n d n e v e r t h e n a m e of a major tribal family, a p p e a r s in t h e royal titulary of these tribal " k i n g s , " with t h e following q u a l ifications.
T h e larger tribal families w e r e defined b y p r o p e r n a m e s : A m o r i t e s in the earlier p e r i o d s a n d t h e n , as a result of d e m o g r a p h i c increases, a variety of o t h e r n a m e s , including e s pecially t h e H a n e a n s a n d t h e S u t e a n s . ( M e n t i o n is f o u n d of t h e " d y n a s t y of A m u r r u m , " referring to t h e H a m m u r a b i line in Babylon.) T h e t e r m maru yamina, o n t h e other h a n d , w h i c h is generally i n t e r p r e t e d as t h e n a m e of a n an alog o u s tribal family, can b e s t b e i n t e r p r e t e d as t h e generic, a n d p o tentially d e r o g a t o r y , t e r m for tribal people—literally, " s o n s of (the s t e p p e on) t h e right ( b a n k ) " — m u c h as maruugarim a n d maru dlim—literally, " s o n s of t h e irrigation district" a n d " o f t h e c i t y " — m e a n , respectively, " p e a s a n t s " a n d " u r b a n d w e l l e r s . " O n l y clans a n d t r i b e s w e r e associated with s p e cific g e o g r a p h i c areas, b u t n o t t h e larger tribal families.
1. T h e plural "kings of H a n a " a n d "kings of t h e sons of yamina" (alternating w i t h "fathers of . . .") is n o t p r o p e r l y a royal title, b u t r a t h e r a descriptive designation for t h e lead ers of individual H a n e a n or n o m a d i c n i b e s .
P o l i t i c a l C o n s o l i d a t i o n . T h e d e v e l o p m e n t of a tribal s t r u c t u r e h a d significant political ramifications. I n t h e first place, t h e tribe b e c a m e t h e m a j o r alternative to t h e territorial state as a factor in p r o v i d i n g political cohesion. I n o t h e r w o r d s , while t h e city h a d b e e n t h e first major state o r g a n i zation, w h i c h built o n t h e solidarity deriving from territorial contiguity, t h e tribe achieved similar goals w i t h o u t p r e s u p p o s i n g s u c h contiguity. W h a t little is k n o w n a b o u t A m o r i t e tribal history is, therefore, of g r e a t c o n s e q u e n c e in t y p o l o g ical t e r m s . T h e d e v e l o p m e n t of p u t a t i v e kinship ties (as ev i d e n c e d , a m o n g o t h e r t h i n g s , b y t h e p r o m i n e n t role p l a y e d in t h e o n o m a s t i c s b y kinship t e r m s s u c h as 'ammu, " p a t e r n a l u n c l e " ) b e a r s evidence to this. M o r e i m p o r t a n t , h o w e v e r , is t h e ability to retain the c o h e s i o n of a large h u m a n g r o u p over t h e vasteness of t h e s t e p p e , w h i c h w a s the last r e g i o n of t h e N e a r E a s t t o b e c o m e u r b a n i z e d . T h e t e r m chiefdom m i g h t b e u s e d , b u t such political units h a d very special d i m e n s i o n s . It is o u t of this e x p e r i m e n t with tribal institutions, w h i c h t h e A m o r i t e s w e r e t h e first to u n d e r t a k e , t h a t t h e p o litical configuration of a n a t i o n a l state eventually arose (as distinct f r o m city-states a n d e x p a n d e d territorial states).
TABLE
2. T h e title " k i n g of H a n a " ( a s s u m e d b y t h e rulers of M a r i a n d possibly T e r q a , b u t never u s e d b y individual tribal leaders) m a y b e u n d e r s t o o d as p r o g r a m m a t i c in t h a t it p r o claimed t h e b r o a d authority of t h e king of t h e city-state over t h e entire tribal family, r a t h e r t h a n over any single tribe. 3. T h e Old B a b y l o n i a n title wakil Amurrim, " l e a d e r of A m u r r u m " (translated as " g e n e r a l " ) , m a y b e a carry-over into t h e u r b a n s p h e r e of t h e p o s i t i o n of t h e m i n o r tribal kings after their political a n d military integration h a d taken place: a " k i n g of A m n a n u m , " for i n s t a n c e , w o u l d be called leader of A m u r r u m after he was a b s o r b e d within t h e military c a d r e of Babylon. F r o m t h e r e t h e title w o u l d have a s s u m e d t h e generic c o n n o t a t i o n of "military leader, g e n e r a l . " 4. T h e title " k i n g of A m u r r u m , " as f o u n d at a later d a t e in Syria, w o u l d r e p r e s e n t a parallel d e v e l o p m e n t , with t h e a d d e d d i m e n s i o n of political i n d e p e n d e n c e . T h e situation m a y b e s u m m a r i z e d as s h o w n in table 1. E x p a n s i o n a n d A s s i m i l a t i o n . T h e tribal entities u n d e r t h e rule of these kings a c q u i r e d sufficient military strength to p o s e a t h r e a t to t h e established territorial states. E v e n t u ally, in fact, m o s t of these k i n g d o m s of ancient S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a were o v e r r u n b y A m o r i t e s . T h e full d i m e n s i o n of this d a n g e r b e c a m e a p p a r e n t b y t h e e n d of tire third millen n i u m , w h e n Shulgi a n d S h u - S i n of t h e third dynasty of U r built a defensive system c a l l e d — p r e s u m a b l y in a m i x t u r e of S u m e r i a n a n d A k k a d i a n — B k D - m u r i q - T i d n i m , " t h e wall (or fortress) that repels T i d n u m " (another general n a m e for t h e A m o r i t e s ) . T h i s m a y h a v e b e e n a line of w a t c h t o w e r s stretching "like a n e t " into t h e s t e p p e o n either side of t h e E u p h r a t e s and T i g r i s R i v e r s , for a lengtii of s o m e 280 k m , or 174 m i . (cf. Wi l ck e, 1969, p . 9). B y t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y
1. Socio-political Categories Generic
Group
Amurrum, maru yamina
Tribal Family
Hana, Sutu
Tribe
Clan
gaytt
hibnim
sarrum
sugagum
Leadership Tribal Urban
sar Hana
wakil Amurrim
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of the following millennium, m o s t of t h e royal dynasties of S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n city-states were A m o r i t e , least in t e r m s of the linguistic affiliation of t h e n a m e s of their kings. B e cause it is unlikely t h a t this was purely o n a c c o u n t of stylistic preferences, it can b e a s s u m e d t h a t the n a m e bearers were A m o r i t e n o t just onomastically, b u t ethnically. T h e c o u n t e r p a r t of the political takeover was a t h o r o u g h " u r b a n i z a t i o n " of d i e A m o r i t e s — a complete assimilation into the culture of t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n cities. It m a y n o t b e necessary to speak of t h e Amorites b e c o m i n g M e s o p o t a m i a n s if it is a c c e p t e d that, as a local rural class, t h e y h a d in fact b e e n M e s o p o t a m i a n all along. T h u s , it m a y b e as s u m e d t h a t t h o s e A m o r i t e elements w h o established t h e m selves as die n e w ruling dynasties simply b e c a m e fully u r b a n , from t h e p a r a u r b a n t h a t they w e r e , while other segments of t h e s a m e p o p u l a t i o n r e m a i n e d just as rural a n d p a r a u r b a n as t h e y h a d b e e n . T h i s is t h e picture t h a t t h e M a r i texts, in particular, paint. In the area of t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s , t h e s t e p p e r e m a i n e d the exclusive d o m a i n of d i e p e a s a n t p o p u l a t i o n , w i t h o u t t h e u r b a n leadership ever trying to intervene there directiy. Af ter t h e fall of M a r i a n d t h e n of T e r q a as t h e capital of t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s (by t h e m i d d l e of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE), t h e entire region u n d e r w e n t a devolution process of deurbanization. T h e tribes m o v e d their g e o g r a p h i c focus to the west, w h e r e t h e y eventually established (by a b o u t 1300 BCE) the first t r u e s t e p p e - b a s e d state, t h e k i n g d o m of A m u r r u m . Because of its u n i q u e typological traits, this final efflo rescence of d i e Amorites m a y b e r e g a r d e d as their first t r u e state formation; the odier k i n g d o m s called A m o r i t e are so only in t e r m s of the origin of their dynasties a n d p a r t of t h e population, b u t n o t institutionally. I d e o l o g y a n d I n t e l l e c t u a l H i s t o r y . I n d i e early stages of t h e confrontation b e t w e e n die Amorites a n d d i e s o u t h e r n city-states, S u m e r i a n characterizations are f o u n d of t h e A m orites as n o m a d i c : t h e y " d o n o t b e n d their k n e e " (no or ganized t e m p l e cult), they " d o n o t b u r y their d e a d " (no p e r m a n e n t cemeteries), they " d o n o t grow g r a i n " (no ag riculture—at least at t h e p o i n t of contact in s o u t h e r n M e s opotamia) . H o w e v e r , n o convincing, i n d e p e n d e n t trace of their culture, a n d in particular their ideology, w a s t r a n s ferred to the u r b a n culture into which t h e y b e c a m e assimi lated. It is only in t h e west tiiat s u c h traces m a y b e f o u n d , p o s sibly ttansmitted over t h e intermediary of t h e k i n g d o m of A m u r r u . It h a s long since b e e n a r g u e d t h a t t h e patriarchal tradition of t h e Bible c a n be u n d e r s t o o d against t h e setting of A m o r i t e e x p a n s i o n . Because several scholars t e n d to ac cept a m u c h later date for d i e patriarchal tradition, this in terpretation is n o w generally downplayed. T h e r e are still, nevertheless, g o o d reasons in its favor, such as t h e close p a r allels in onomastics (e.g., A m o r i t e Ya'qubum a n d H e b r e w Ya'qob) a n d institutions (e.g., the agropastoralist e c o n o m i c
b a s e , t h e rejection of d i e u r b a n milieu, t h e significance of wells). T h e r e is also, h o w e v e r , a m o r e generic a r g u m e n t t h a t bears m e n t i o n i n g . T h e figures of t h e p a t r i a r c h s are relatively m o d e s t from t h e p o i n t of view of t h e c o u r t a n d t e m p l e t h a t sanctioned tiieir i n t r o d u c t i o n in t h e c a n o n . A later p r o c e s s of literary invention w o u l d h a v e b e e n likely to p r e s e n t g r a n d e r figures a n d m o r e heroic events. If t h a t is n o t so, it is very likely b e c a u s e t h e A m o r i t e c o n q u e s t of t h e s t e p p e was indeed p e r c e i v e d as epic in its p r o p o r t i o n s b y t h o s e w h o h a d carried it o u t in d i e first place. Similar echoes are f o u n d in M e s o p o t a m i a — i n , for e x a m p l e , t h e Assyrian king list, which gives t h e n a m e s of earlier kings " w h o dwelt in t e n t s " a n d in t h e r e t e n t i o n of A m o r i t e p e r s o n a l n a m e s for rulers w h o h a d long since lost their n o m a d i c identity. T h e s e are, h o w e v e r , n o m o r e t h a n e c h o e s ; t h e interaction of t h e p a s toralists with u r b a n culture w a s t o o close, a n d t h e cultural weight of u r b a n tradition t o o m a s s i v e , to allow for t h e crys tallization of any t r u e internal A m o r i t e ideology. T h e dis t a n c e (in time a n d space) resulting from t h e relocation in t h e west, a n d t h e eventual e s t a b l i s h m e n t of a culturally a u t o n o m o u s s t e p p e k i n g d o m , t h a t of A m u r r u , w e r e possibly t h e catalysts for s u c h crystallization. If so, t h e " A m o r i t e " s t e p p e , h a v i n g r e m a i n e d t h e last e m p t y , n o n u r b a n s p a c e of t h e Fertile C r e s c e n t , was to p r o v e , b y virtue of its very b a r r e n n e s s , o n e of t h e m o s t fruitful b r i d g e s across s p a c e a n d time in a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t e r n history. [See also A k k a d i a n ; H e b r e w L a n g u a g e a n d L i t e r a t u r e ; M e s o p o t a m i a , article on A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a ; and Syria, article on Syria in t h e B r o n z e Age.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Anbar, M o s h e . Les tribus arnurrites de Mari, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 108. Fribourg, 1 9 9 1 . Methodologically in line with K u p p e r ' s work; presents an u p - t o - d a t e , reliable review of the philological evidence. Archi, Alfonso, et al. / nomi di luogo dei testi di Ebla (ARETI-IV, VIIX e altri documenti editi e inediti). R o m e , 1 9 9 3 . Complete list, with a discussion, of all the references from the texts of Ebla to MAR.TU(M). Buccellati, Giorgio. The Amorites of the Ur III Period, Pubblicazioni del Seminario di Semitistica, Richerche 1. N a p l e s , 1 9 6 6 . Historical and linguistic analysis of t h e earliest phase of Amorite. Buccellati, Giorgio. ' " R i v e r Bank,' 'High C o u n t r y , ' a n d 'Pasture L a n d ' : T h e G r o w t h of N o m a d i s m on the M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s a n d t h e K h a b u r . " In Tall al-IIamidvya 2, b y Seyarre Eichler et al., p p . 8 7 - 1 1 7 . Gottingen, 1 9 9 0 . Presents the evidence from " p e r c e p t u a l " geogra phy as gleaned from the ancient texts a n d the contemporary land scape. Buccellati, Giorgio. "Ebla and the A m o r i t e s . " In Eblaitica, vol. 3, edited by Cyrus H . G o r d o n et al., p p . 8 5 - 1 0 6 . W i n o n a L a k e , Ind., 1 9 9 2 . T h e last in a series of articles dealing with the hypothesis that the Amorites were originally peasants in t h e process of nomadization. Gelb, Ignace J. Computer-Aided Analysis of Amorite. Chicago, 1980. T h e most comprehensive a n d authoritative collection of personal n a m e s , each one p a r s e d grammatically, and a variety of alternative listings according t o different grammatical categories. Huffmon, H. B . Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts: A Structural
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and Lexical Study. Baltimore, 1965, Still t h e most detailed and bal anced reconstruction of the A m o r i t e language. Izre'el, S h l o m o . Amurru Akkadian: A Linguistic Study. 2 vols. H a r v a r d Semitic Studies, 4 0 - 4 1 . A d a n t a , 1991. T h o r o u g h investigation of the second millennium BCE k i n g d o m of A m u r r u , including an appendix of the history of A m u r r u by I t a m a r Singer. K u p p e r , J.-R. Les nomades en Mesopotamie au temps des wis de Mari. Paris, 1957. M o d e r n classic o n the subject. K u p p e r , J.-R. L'iconographie du dieu Amurru dans la glyptique de la Ire dynastic babylonienne. Brussels, 1961. Argues for a M e s o p o t a m i a n origin of the e p o n y m divinity of t h e Amorites. L u k e , John T r a c y . "Pastoralism and Politics in the M a r i Period." P h . D . diss., University of M i c h i g a n , 1965. Influential dissertation based on G e o r g e M e n d e n h a l l ' s theory. M a t t h e w s , Victor H. Pastoral Nomadism in the MariKingdom, ca. 18301760 B.C. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation S e ries, 3. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1978. P o d a n y , A. H . " A M i d d l e Babylonian D a t e for the H a n a K i n g d o m . " Journal of Cuneiform Studies 4 3 - 4 5 (1991-1993): 53-62. Argues that die cities of H a n a were located on the K a b u r , not the Euphrates. R o w t o n , M . B . " T h e Role of E t h n i c Invasion and die Chiefdom R e gime in D i m o r p h i c Interaction: T h e Post Kassite Period." In Lan guage, Literature, and History: Philological and Historical Studies Pre sented to Erica Reiner, edited by Francesca Rochberg-Halton, p p . 367-378. N e w H a v e n , 1987. T h e last in a series of influential articles on the question of n o m a d i s m in southwestern Asia at the time of the Amorites. Wilcke, Claus. " Z u r Geschichte der A m u r r i t e r in der Ur-III-Zeit." Die Welt des Orients 5 (1969): 1-31. T h e historical evidence for the A m orite invasions in the south at the end of t h e third millennium. GIORGIO BUCCELLATI
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A M R I T ( a n c i e n t M a r a t h u s ) , site l o c a t e d 7 k m (4 mi.) s o u t h of T a r t u s , Syria, a n d 700 m inland f r o m t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea, b e h i n d tall s a n d d u n e s , w h e r e r e c e n t discoveries from the Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s w e r e m a d e . E a s t of d i e d u n e s t h e plain is d o m i n a t e d b y a r o c k y plateau. T h e d i m e n s i o n s of die ancient t o w n w e r e 3 X 2 k m ( 2 X 1 m i . ) . T w o springs, 1,300 m a p a r t , a b o u t 1.5 Ion from t h e sea, feed t h e N a h r 'Ami-it t o t h e n o r t h a n d N a h r a l - Q u b l e h t o d i e s o u t h . B o t h flow t o w a r d t h e sea, t h e first o n e directly; d i e s e c o n d o n e , w h i c h forms a n angle to d i e n o r t h , r u n s along t h e coast before it joins N a h r ' A m r i t close to its estuary. ' A m r i t served as the c o n t i n e n t a l p o r t for t h e island of A r a d u s / P h o e n i c i a n R u a d ( A r w a d ) . R e c e n t excavations r e c o v ered a simple h a r b o r t h a t h a d sheltered ships. T h e rocky a n d arid island of A r a d u s faces the c o n t i n e n t 2.5 k m (1.5 mi.) away; it has t w o large, w e l l - p r o t e c t e d d e e p - w a t e r b a y s tiiat f o r m a n a t u r a l h a r b o r . W h e n U g a r i t declined, A r a d u s b e c a m e t h e principal c o m m e r c i a l a n d n a v a l p o w e r o n t h e Syrian coast, as i m p o r t a n t as P h o e n i c i a n S i d o n to the s o u t h . U n t i l R o m a n times, the entire region d e p e n d e d o n t h e h a r b o r s of A r a d u s a n d ' A m r i t . A n c i e n t historians r e c o u n t tiiat A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t s p e n t four days at M a r a t h u s while his a r m y c o n q u e r e d D a m a s c u s . [See Arwad.] Prior to excavation, t h e only visible m o n u m e n t s w e r e from the Persian period: f u n e r a r y t o w e r s , t w o of t h e m called
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the spindles by t h e local p o p u l a t i o n a n d a third that is c u b e s h a p e d (see b e l o w ) . I n a d d i t i o n , two temples were built a r o u n d a spring: t h e M a ' a b e d a n d a t e m p l e at the " s p r i n g of the s e r p e n t s . " T h e latter, a l t h o u g h visible long ago, has d i s a p p e a r e d entirely: early visitors to the site, M . M a u n d r e l l (1697), R i c h a r d P o c o c k e (1743), a n d E r n e s t R e n a n (i860), d e s c r i b e d two sanctuaries there. A small archaeological in vestigation was u n d e r t a k e n b y M a u r i c e D u n a n d in 1926 at die M a ' a b e d , b u t it is only since 1954 t h major explora tions of the tell a n d s t a d i u m h a v e taken place. T h e M a ' a b e d w a s partly excavated in 1957 a n d a h y p o g e u m in 1976. [See the biographies of Renan and Dunand.] a t
L e d b y D u n a n d , excavations were b e g u n at t h e tell east of die M a ' a b e d a n d s o u t h of N a h r ' A m r i t . T h e tell is r e c tangular, m e a s u r i n g n o m at its n o r ± - s o u t h axis a n d 140 m at t h e e a s t - w e s t axis. T h e s u m m i t platform is 16.25 m above sea level a n d t h e b e d r o c k a b o u t 10-11 m . T h e ar chaeological occupational layer is a b o u t 7-8 m thick. At the n o r t h e r n side of the tell, a m a i n building c a m e to light t h a t is p r e s e r v e d on 24.2 m e a s t - w e s t a n d to a w i d t h of 21.8 m; only the s o u t h e r n wall is p r e s e r v e d in its entire length. T h e m o s t significant objects f r o m t h e building date to the e n d of the Persian p e r i o d ( e n d of t h e fifth a n d t h e first half of the fourth centuries BCE). D u r i n g t h e excavations on die tell, a d e e p test t r e n c h indicated d i e earliest levels (dated by the ceramics) t o b e from t h e e n d of the third millennium: jugs w i t h small h a n d l e s a n d s h o r t n e c k s t h a t are decorated with clear, closely spaced h o r i z o n t a l lines. I n the excavated area, eight corbeled t o m b s were discov ered. Small stones f o r m e d a circular d o m e that closed a pit 2.5-3.5 d e e p . T h e skeletons found in the better-preserved t o m b s w e r e folded over o n themselves b e c a u s e the t o m b ' s d i a m e t e r was n o t large e n o u g h to a c c o m m o d a t e an e x t e n d e d b o d y . A m o n g t h e grave g o o d s w e r e a b r o n z e p i n , a fenes trated ax, a semicircular ax, a dagger blade, a terra-cotta c u p , a spearpoint, a jug, c r e a m - c o l o r e d goblets with incised lines, a n d decorated jars. [See Burial T e c h n i q u e s ; G r a v e Goods.] T h e s e silo t o m b s c a n n o w b e a d d e d to the k n o w n forms of burial in P h o e n i c i a n Syria: their dates vary b e t w e e n the M i d d l e B r o n z e III a n d L a t e B r o n z e I or II. [See T o m b s . ] T h e s e dates are interesting for their potential c o n n e c t i o n w i t h the Amorite invasion of Phoenicia. ' A m r i t lies at the m a r i t i m e outiet of t h e E l e u t h e r u s valley, w h i c h served as one of the m a i n routes of t h e A m o r i t e invasion. T h e site's p o r t i c o e d t e m p l e is k n o w n to the local p o p u lation b y t h e n a m e Ma'abed. Excavations were u n d e r t a k e n in 1955 to clarify a few p r o b l e m s resulting from R e n a n ' s Mission de Phenicie (1864). T h e M a ' a b e d was excavated from t h e rocky slope of gravel n e a r N a h r M a r a t h u s . T h e t e m p l e site was completely covered with rubble; only t h e T s h a p e d c o r n e r pillars a n d t h e sanctuary at t h e center of the b u i l d i n g w e r e visible. T h e 1957 excavation r e a c h e d the b o t m
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torn of t h e basin a t a d e p t h of 3 m below t h e floor level of d i e portico. T h e temple's m a x i m u m dimensions w e r e 56.23 m in length a n d 49.5 m in width; t h e basin was 46.7 X 38.5 m ; t h e total height is 7.7-8 m at t h e northwestern corner. A channel r u n n i n g n o r t h w e s t carried t h e water o u t of tire b a sin. T h e excavation r e m o v e d massive architectural fragments t h a t h a d rolled into t h e basin: all were portico e l e m e n t s — pillars, architraves, friezes, a n d leonine gargoyles—in t h e A c h a e m e n i d P e r s i a n style. A m o n g t h e recovered p o t t e r y were fragments of a m p h o r a e from R h o d e s , s t a m p e d h a n dles, a n d large M e g a r i a n bowls as well as incised P e r g a m o n pottery; in t h e n o r t h e r n section were f o u n d n u m e r o u s frag m e n t s of globe-shaped flat-bottom jugs with a small p o u r i n g lip on die shoulder a n d a short n e c k e n d i n g in a strainer, usually with two-five holes, sometimes seven. T h e s e jugs m a y have been receptacles for holy water from t h e t e m p l e . T h e pillars recovered are 3 m tall, 1 m X 55-60 c m i n section. I n addition, blocks of architrave a n d blind m e r l o n s from t h e crowning, as well as bossage from t h e covering,
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w e r e recovered. T h e s e fragments p e r m i t t e d a r e c o n s t r u c tion of t h e naos in t h e center of t h e basin, w h e r e it w o u l d h a v e served as a shelter for t h e idol (see figure 1 ) . T h i s t e m ple, witii its wide e n t r a n c e , flanked b y t w o s q u a r e towers o n t h e n o r t h , a n d a n altar in its m i d d l e , is u n i q u e . I t dates t o t h e time of t h e A c h a e m e n i d e x p a n s i o n into Syria after C y r u s t h e G r e a t c o n q u e r e d B a b y l o n (539 BCE). I t w a s d e d i c a ted t o t h e savior gods M e l q a r t a n d E s h m u n . T h e remains from t h e favissa D u n a n d discovered i n 1926 also date to t h e t w o centuries of P e r s i a n rule. T h e favissa is situated 100 m w e s t of t h e M a ' a b e d , w h e r e it f o r m s a n e m b a n k m e n t (70 m X 60 m ) . U n t i l very recently, t h e local p o p u l a t i o n exploited t h e favissa for b u i l d i n g materials. D u n a n d f o u n d several limestone statues, s o m e of t h e m d r e s s e d in t h e style of t h e time of R a m e s e s II; others r e p r e s e n t H e r acles a n d are similar to t h e statues at t h e stairs at Persepolis ( D u n a n d , 1944-1945; 1946-1948). T h e 1957 excavation a d d e d a n u m b e r of fragments t h a t c o u l d b e joined t o t h e statuary f o u n d i n 1926. T h e statues d a t e t o t h e s i x t h - f o u r t h centuries BCE. [See Persepolis.]
The sanctuary after restoration. (Courtesy N . Saliby)
AMULETS T h e s t a d i u m at ' A m r i t h a s b e e n k n o w n since R e n a n ' s e x cavations (see a b o v e ) . It s t a n d s a t t h e n o r t h e r n b e n d of t h e N a h r a n d is 230 m long a n d 30 m w i d e . T h e r e are seven tiers of seats (each 55 c m d e e p ) o n b o t h sides tiiat e n d in a semicircle with t w o corridors for p a s s a g e . O n t h e s o u t h e r n side were f o u n d a t i o n s for small h o u s e s . S t a m p e d handles f r o m R h o d i a n a m p h o r a e w e r e f o u n d i n test t r e n c h e s . R o m a n t o m b s were h o l l o w e d o u t of d i e rock. T h e s t a d i u m dates t o t h e fourth c e n t u r y BCE, w i t h c o n t i n u e d u s e t h r o u g h t h e third c e n t u r y BCE. T h e spindles a r e h y p o g e a t o p p e d b y funerary m o n u m e n t s . T h e p y r a m i d a l h y p o g e u m consists of a cubic b a s e o n which stands a cylinder t o p p e d b y an eight-sided p y r a m i d . T w o irregular steps d e s c e n d into it, followed b y t h r e e m o r e leading to t h e b o t t o m . T h e interior consists of t w o c h a m b e r s , d i e first with loculi a n d t h e s e c o n d m e a n t to h o l d t h e f o u n d e r of t h e h y p o g e u m . T h e p y r a m i d a l h y p o g e u m is c o n t e m p o r a r y w h h d i e ' A m r i t t e m p l e , b u t t h e objects f o u n d in it date to t h e p e r i o d b e t w e e n t h e f o u r d i a n d first centuries BCE, indicating t h a t d i e h y p o g e u m was in u s e for a long p e riod of t i m e . T h e d o m e h y p o g e u m is a 5.5-meter-high cylinder flanked b y four lions a n d t o p p e d b y a d o m e . T h e u p p e r p a r t h a s decorative friezes similar t o t h o s e from t h e t e m p l e . It is 9.5 m high, plus t h e b a s e . T h e interior is r e a c h e d via a slope e n d i n g in tiiree steps before t h e e n t r a n c e . T h e internal or ganization is similar to t h a t of t h e p y r a m i d a l h y p o g e u m . A p l a n a n d a section e x e c u t e d d u r i n g t h e 1976 restoration r e c tified t h e results previously p u b l i s h e d b y R e n a n (1864). A c r o s s t h e centuries t h e b u i l d e r s of t h e t o w n of ' A m r i t f o u n d their stone at a q u a r r y w h o s e material is golden in color. T h e ruins of t h e t o w n later served as a q u a r r y for c o n s t r u c t i o n at R u a d a n d T a r t u s . ' A m r i t w a s destroyed in t h e first c e n t u r y BCE. W h a t r e m a i n s constitutes a u n i q u e P h o e n i c i a n site, w h i c h clearly s h o w s d i e assimilation of O r i e n t a n d O c c i d e n t i n its a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d ceramic artifacts. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bordreuil, Pierre, " L e dieu E c h m o u n dans la region d ' A m r i t h . " In Sta dia Phoenicia, vol. 3, edited by Eric G u b e l and E d u a r d Lipihski, p p . 2 2 1 - 2 3 0 . Louvain, 1985. D u n a n d , Maurice. " L e s sculptures de la favissa du temple d ' A m r i t . " Bulletin duMusiede Beyrouth 7 ( 1 9 4 4 - 1 9 4 5 ) : 9 9 - 1 0 7 5 8 ( 1 9 4 6 - 1 9 4 8 ) : 81-107. D u n a n d , Maurice. " R e c h e r c h e s archeologiques dans la region de M a r athus: N o t e preliminaire." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 3 (1953): 165-170. D u n a n d , M a u r i c e , et al. "Les fouilles d'Amrith en 1 9 5 4 : R a p p o r t p r e liminaire." Annates ArchMogiques Arabes Syriennes 4.-5 ( 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 5 ) : 189-204. D u n a n d , Maurice, a n d Nassib Saliby. " R a p p o r t preliminaire sur les fouilles d'Amrith e n 1 9 5 5 . " Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 6 (1956): 3-ioD u n a n d , M a u r i c e , a n d Nassib Saliby. " L e sanctuaire d'Amrit: R a p p o r t preliminaire." Annates ArchMogiques Arabes Syriennes 1 1 - 1 2 ( 1 9 6 1 1962): 3 - 1 2 . D u n a n d , M a u r i c e , a n d R a y m o n d D u r u . Oumni el-'Amed. Paris, 1 9 6 2 .
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D u n a n d , Maurice. "Phenicie." In Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement, vol. 7, cols. 1 1 4 1 - 1 2 0 4 . Paris, 1966. D u n a n d , M a u r i c e , and Nassib Saliby. Le temple d'Amrith dans la Peree d'Aradus. Bibliothique Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 2 1 . Paris, 1985. D u s s a u d , Rene. Topographie historique de la Syrie antique et medievale. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol, 4. Paris, 1927. Gawlikowski, Michal. Monuments funeraires de Palmyre. Warsaw, 1 9 7 0 . M a u n d r e l l , H e n r y . Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter, A.D. 1697. L o n d o n , 1 8 1 0 . R e n a n , Ernest. Mission de Phenicie, Paris, 1864. Rey-Coquais, Jean-Paul. Arados et sa Peree aux epoques grecque, romaine et byzantine, Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 97. Paris, 1974Saliby, Nassib. "Essai de restitution du temple d ' A m r i t . " Annates cheologiques Arabes Syriennes 21 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 283-288.
Ar
Saliby, N a s s i b . Article in Congres international du verre provenant de la cote phenicienne, p p . 1 3 3 - 1 4 3 . L o n d o n , 1 9 7 9 . Saliby, Nassib. Archcologie et histoire de la Syrie. Vol. 2. Liege, 1989. Seyrig, H e n r i . " A r a d u s et sa Peree sous les rois Seleucides." Syria 28 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 206-220. NASSIB SALIBY Translated from French by Ulla Kasten
AMULETS.
T h e L a t i n t e r m amuletum ("an object u s e d as a c h a r m t o avert evil") was possibly derived from d i e Arabic w o r d hamilet (sometiiing "carried, w o r n " ) b y d i e first c e n t u r y CE b e c a u s e t h e t e r m first a p p e a r s in the w o r k of Pliny d i e Elder (Nat. Hist. 29.66,83; 37.50,118). A m u l e t s are objects m a d e of v a r i o u s types of material, either u n i n scribed o r inscribed, a n d s u p p o s e d l y c h a r g e d with s u p e r n a t u r a l p o w e r . T h e magical properties believed to be inher ent in particular p l a n t s , animals, stones, a n d metals often d e t e r m i n e d the selection of a certain material for an amulet. A m u l e t s function like p r a y e r s ; diey are i n t e n d e d to offer p r o t e c t i o n from disease, m i s f o r t u n e , or attacks from super n a t u r a l beings or t o g u a r a n t e e wealth, success, a n d victory. I n t h e a n c i e n t N e a r East, t h e y w e r e usually w o r n o n die n e c k o n a c o r d or chain, b u t s o m e types of amulets were affixed to h o u s e s a n d places of business. Lamellae, a special t y p e of amulet, are thin pieces of inscribed tin, lead, b r o n z e , silver, or gold t h a t w e r e rolled u p , p l a c e d in small t u b e s , and t h e n w o r n o n a c o r d a r o u n d t h e neck. F r e q u e n t i y magical letters, w o r d s , symbols, or p i c t u r e s w e r e engraved on semiprecious stones (e.g., h e m a t i t e , c h a l c e d o n y , q u a r t z ) , which are g e n erally called " m a g i c a l g e m s . " A m u l e t s were also m a d e of perishable animal a n d vegetable material, such as leather, b o n e , w a x , w o o d , h e r b s , r o o t s , linen, a n d p a p y r u s , a n d m a n y of these h a v e also survived b e c a u s e of t h e very dry climate. A m u l e t s of various types were widely u s e d t h r o u g h o u t die ancient N e a r East, a l t h o u g h it is frequentiy difficult to d e t e r m i n e w h e t h e r s m a l l u n i n s c r i b e d objects and statuettes a c tually functioned as a m u l e t s . F u r t h e r m o r e , s o m e items m a y h a v e h a d dual functions, serving as amulets in addition to tiieir original function. F o r e x a m p l e , cylinder seals (en-
114
AMULETS
graved with designs, inscriptions, or b o t h ) , sometimes w o r n s u s p e n d e d o n a c o r d a r o u n d the o w n e r ' s neck occasionally functioned as amulets. M i t a n n i a n faience seals from t h e last half of second m i l l e n n i u m BCE probably functioned as b o t h jewelry a n d amulets. O n the other h a n d , t h e function of two small seventh-century BCE rectangular limestone plaques with A r a m a i c inscriptions from Arslan T a s h (between C a r chemish and H a r r a n in Syria) is clear. O n e depicts a winged s p h i n x and a c r o u c h i n g lioness with a serpent's tale swallow ing a m a n a n d is inscribed with a n incantation t o p r o t e c t the house of the strangling n o c t u r n a l d e m o n s , while t h e other depicts a p e r s o n with big eyes a n d scorpion feet a n d has two inscriptions, one for protection against t h e evil eye, a n d the other to obtain rain, (translations in Beyerlin, 1978, p p . 247250; pictured in P r i t c h a r d , 1969, p . 216, n o . 662). D u r i n g t h e Persian period (539-330 BCE), m a n y glass amulets in the shape of h u m a n h e a d s (both bearded male a n d female), h a v e b e e n f o u n d i n t o m b s in C y p r u s , Egypt, a n d t h e S y r o Palestinian coast (as well as Spain, C a r t h a g e , a n d Sardinia). T h i s distribution suggests that they were p r o d u c e d a n d dis tributed by Phoenicians.
magicae, t h a t is, " m a g i c a l w o r d s " m a d e u p of m e a n i n g l e s s , t h o u g h traditional, strings of vowels a n d c o n s o n a n t s t h a t m a k e n o sense in G r e e k (e.g., " a b l a t h a n a l b a " ) . T h e s e g e m s t o n e amulets w e r e w o r n in rings, bracelets, o r as p a r t s of necklaces ( B o n n e r , 1950; D e l a t t e a n d D e r c h a i n , 1964). S o m e of these amulets consist of an incised i m a g e o n t h e obverse a n d a magical inscription o n t h e reverse, a n d others h a v e only a magical inscription. T h e s t r o n g influence of E g y p t i a n religion o n G r e c o - R o m a n magical practices m e a n t t h a t gods like Osiris, Sarapis, Isis, A n u b i s , a n d H o r u s o c c u r frequently on a m u l e t s . F a v o r e d b y m a g i c a l practitioners w e r e the r o o s t e r - h e a d e d , snake-footed god a n d a headless figure variously identified as Iao (a divine n a m e derived f r o m J u d a i s m ) , S e t h , A t u m , or Osiris (the last t h r e e of E g y p tian origin). T h i s i c o n o g r a p h y is n o t k n o w n from ancient cults. T h e strong influence of J u d a i s m o n a n c i e n t m a g i c h a d a p r o f o u n d effect o n t h e divine n a m e s inscribed o n a m u l e t s , including Iao, A d o n a i , S a b a o t h , a n d E l o h i m . T h e G r e e k magical p a p y r i contains m a n y spells in w h i c h careful i n structions are given r e g a r d i n g h o w to p r e p a r e amulets p r o p erly a n d w h a t s h o u l d b e inscribed o n t h e m .
E g y p t i a n A m u l e t s . M o r e amulets are p r e s e r v e d from ancient E g y p t t h a n from a n y w h e r e else in die a n c i e n t N e a r East. T h r e e Egyptian t e r m s for amulet are sa ( " p r o t e c t i o n " ) , meket ( " p r o t e c t o r " ) a n d uedjau ("healtii-maintaining object"). A m u l e t s for t h e d e a d were essential features of Egyptian funerary practice. T h e Book of the Dead contains incantations that, w h e n recited, were t h o u g h t t o e n d o w t h e amulets with magical p o w e r s . S o m e t i m e s larger t h a n a m u lets w o r n b y t h e living, funerary amulets were f o u n d o n dif ferent parts of t h e b o d y , n o t just a r o u n d t h e neck. M a n y amulets were w r a p p e d u n d e r t h e b a n d a g e s . T h e r e w a s an a p p r o p r i a t e a m u l e t for each limb of the deceased. T h e r e were at least 275 types (Petrie, 1914).
J e w i s h A m u l e t s . T h e p r i m a r y H e b r e w t e r m for a m u l e t , qm comes f r o m a r o o t m e a n i n g " t o b i n d " , " t o t i e . " T h e H e b r e w Bible h a s surprisingly few real or i m a g i n e d refer ences to amulets (Gn. 35:4; Ex. 32:3; Jgs. 8:21, 26; Is. 3:1820; Zech. 14:20); only in t h e f o u r t h reference a r e they viewed pejoratively, b u t n o w h e r e are t h e y f o r b i d d e n . A l t h o u g h m o s t surviving Jewish amulets are from t h e R o m a n p e r i o d , t w o silver amulets d a t i n g from t h e late s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE w e r e f o u n d at K e t e f H i n n o m in the vicinity of J e r u s a l e m ( D a v i e s , 1991, p . 72, 4.301, 302). [See K e t e f H i n n o m . ] O n e contains t h e entire priestly blessing in Numbers 6:24-26, a n d t h e other has an abbreviated form of t h e s a m e text, w h i c h contains t h e divine n a m e Y H W H t h r e e times, a text often u s e d or alluded t o o n later Jewish amulets (Schrire, 1966, p p . 82, 97).
Ushebtis were small funerary statuettes inscribed with t h e n a m e of t h e deceased a n d a magical spell from t h e Book of the Dead. T h e s e statuettes were i n t e n d e d to take t h e place of the deceased w h e n t h e gods desired work in their fields to be performed. Scarabs, representing a type of beetle, m a d e from m a n y materials b u t typically stone or faience (glazed blue, green, or t u r q u o i s e ) , were symbols of t h e g o d K h e p r i (the rising s u n ) , p r o m i s i n g d i e renewal of life in t h e n e x t world. O t h e r E g y p t i a n amulets r e p r e s e n t e d various parts of t h e h u m a n b o d y a n d were i n t e n d e d to p r o t e c t t h o s e parts from misfortune or disease. G r e c o - R o m a n A m u l e t s . T h e three general G r e e k t e r m s for amulets are phylakterion ("safeguard," " p r e s e r v a t i v e " periapton, a n d periamma (both m e a n i n g " a t t a c h e d , " "tied o n " ) . T h o u s a n d s of G r e c o - R o m a n amulets f r o m t h e first few centuries CE h a v e survived, primarily inscribed o n g e m stones. T h e s e g e m s t o n e amulets have b e e n frequently, t h o u g h mistakenly, called " G n o s t i c " amulets in t h e p a s t b e cause of t h e use of bizarre images (such as a c o m m o n l y occurring r o o s t e r - h e a d e d , snake-footed figure) a n d of voces
A c c o r d i n g to 2 Maccabees 12:40, w h e n J u d a s e x a m i n e d t h e bodies of Jews w h o h a d fallen in battle, h e discovered t h a t " a l l " of t h e m w e r e w e a r i n g hieromata, " s a c r e d o b j e c t s " or " a m u l e t s " c o n s e c r a t e d to t h e idols of J a m n i a . Phylacteries (from t h e G r e e k w o r d phylakterion, " m e a n s of p r o t e c t i o n " ) or tefillin, from tefilla, " p r a y e r " (Ex. 13:9,16; Dt. 6:8; cf. Mt. 23:5) are containers holding four Biblical passages: Ex. 1 3 : 1 1 0 , 1 1 - 1 6 ; Dt. 6:4-9,11:13-20. T h e p h y l a c t e r y t h a t i s p l a c e d on t h e u p p e r p a r t of t h e left a r m contains just one roll of p a r c h m e n t o n w h i c h all four passages are written, a n d t h a t p u t o n t h e u p p e r forehead contains four separate rolls of p a r c h m e n t . T h e y are traditionally w o r n b y Jewish males d u r i n g prayer, e x c e p t o n S a b b a t h s a n d holy days.. A l t h o u g h tefillin a r e distinguished from amulets in t h e M i s h n a h (Shab. 6.2; 8,3; Sheq. 3.2)3 t h e y are called phylacteries, a n d t h e y w e r e a s s u m e d to exert protective p o w e r s o n t h e w e a r e r s . T h e mesuzdt, w h i c h still function as a p o t r o p a i c a m u l e t s , are small containers fixed o n d o o r p o s t s (Dt. 6:9). T h e y c o n t a i n
'AMUQ a
n
u
t h e Biblical texts Deuteronomy 6:4-9 11:13-20, w h i c h m e n t i o n t h e n a m e of G o d t e n t i m e s , i n c l u d i n g t h e t e t r a g r a m m a t o n (the four c o n s o n a n t s of t h e H e b r e w n a m e for G o d — Y H W H ) seven t i m e s . T w o Jewish magical h a n d b o o k s , the first from t h e T a l m u d i c era a n d the s e c o n d n o t later t h a n the eleventh c e n t u r y , are t h e Sefer ha-Razim ( " B o o k of M y s t e r i e s " ) , a n d t h e Harba de Mosheh ( " S w o r d of M o s e s " ) c o n t a i n i n g i n s t r u c t i o n s for t h e p r e p a r a t i o n of amulets. BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrews, Carol. Amulets ofAncient Egypt. Austin, 1994. Barkay, Gabriel. " T h e Divine N a m e F o u n d in Jerusalem." Biblical Ar chaeology Review 9.2 (1983): 14-19. Popular, illustrated discussion of the two silver amulets covered in m o r e detail in Yardeni (below). Benoit, Pierre, et al. Les grottes de Murabba'at. Discoveries in the J u daean D e s e r t , vol. 2 Oxford, 1961. See pages 80-86 for phylactery a n d mezuza from W a d i M u r a b b a ' a t , with references to earlier p u b lications of phylacteries a m o n g t h e D e a d Sea Scrolls. Beyerlin, Walter, ed. Near Eastern Religious Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Philadelphia, 1978. B o n n e r , Campbell. Studies in Magical Amulets, Chiefly Graeco-Egyptian. Ann Arbor, M i c h . , 1950. I m p o r t a n t discussion of G r e c o - R o m a n a m ulets and magical g e m s dating primarily from ca. 100-500 CE. B o n n e r , Campbell. " A m u l e t s Chiefly in the British M u s e u m : A S u p plementary Article," Hesperia 20 (1951): 301-345. Budge, E. A. Wallis. Amulets and Superstitions. L o n d o n , 1930. D a u p h i n , Claudine. " A G r a e c o - E g y p t i a n Magical Amulet from M a z z u v a h , " 'Atiqot 22 (1993): 145-147. Davies, G r a h a m I. Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance. Cambridge, 1991. Delatte, A r m a n d , and Phillippe D e r c h a i n . Les intailles magiques gricoegyptiennes. Paris, 1964. I m p o r t a n t study of G r e c o - R o m a n magical gems. G a g e r , J o h n G „ ed. Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from Antiquity and the Ancient World. N e w York, 1992. Lise, Giorgio. Amuleti EgizilEgyptian Amulets. Milan, 1988. M o n t g o m e r y , James A. " S o m e Early Amulets from Palestine." Journal of the American Oriental Society 31 (1911): 272-281. Miiller-Winkler, Claudia. Die dgyptischen Objeht-Amulette. Freiburg, 1987N a v e h , Joseph, and Shaul Shaked. Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of iMe Antiquity. Jerusalem and L e i d e n , 1985. Collection of and c o m m e n t a r y on all H e b r e w a n d Aramaic amulets from the first to the fourth centuries CE from Syria-Palestine, except those published in M o n t g o m e r y (above). Petrie, W . M . Flinders, Amulets: Illustrated by the Egyptian Collection in University College, London. L o n d o n , 1914. I m p o r t a n t study of E g y p tian amulets, lavishly illustrated. Pritchard, James B. The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament. 2 d ed. Princeton, 1969. Reiner, Erica. " P l a g u e Amulets a n d H o u s e Blessings." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 19 (i960): 148-155. Schrire, T h e o d o r e . Hebrew Amulets: Their Decipherment and Interpre tation. L o n d o n , 1966. T r a c h t e n b e r g , Joshua. Jewish Magic and Superstition. N e w York, 1939. Contains a chapter devoted to late T a l m u d i c a n d medieval Jewish amulets ( p p . 132-152). W a e g e m a n , Maryse. Amulet and Alphabet: Magical Amulets in the First Booh of Cyranides. A m s t e r d a m , 1987. T h e Cyranides is an ancient encyclopedia of magical lore c o m p o s e d in t h e first or second century CE.
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Yardeni, Ada. " R e m a r k s on the Priestly Blessing on T w o Ancient A m ulets from Jerusalem." Vetus Testamentum 41 (1991): 176-185. Zwierlein-Diehl, Erika, ed. Magische Amulette. Opladen, 1992. DAVID E. AUNE
' A M U Q , a well-watered a n d extremely fertile plain m o r e t h a n 1,400 s q k m (868 sq. mi.) in area, b o u n d e d on the n o r t h by the T a u r u s M o u n t a i n s a n d on the west by the Kizildag extension of the A m a n u s M o u n t a i n s . T o t h e northeast the K u r t D a g i rises to the A n a t o l i a n plateau; on the east a n d s o u t h t h e hills of Jebel S i m a ' a n a n d Jebel 'Ala rise to the A l e p p o plateau; a n d o n t h e southwest, b e h i n d the ruins of A n t i o c h o n O r o n t e s , rises Jebel Akra. T h e 'Afrin a n d K a r a S u Rivers flow into the ' A m u q from the east, w h e r e t h e y r e a c h a m a r s h y area a r o u n d t h e L a k e of Antioch. T h a t p o i n t is n o r t h of a major b e n d in t h e O r o n t e s River that flows for m o r e t h a n 644 k m (400 mi.) from t h e s o u t h a n d makes a s h a r p b e n d t h e r e to t h e sea. M a j o r c o n n e c t i n g roads traverse t h e area a n d are well d o c u m e n t e d t h r o u g h o u t history—from the A l e p p o area a n d p o i n t s s o u t h a n d east, to the coast along t h e course of t h e O r o n t e s River. C o n n e c t i o n s t o the Anatolian plateau a n d Cilicia are m a d e possible t h r o u g h the Bailan P a s s t h r o u g h the A m a n u s M o u n t a i n s . T h e ' A m u q plain is d o t t e d w i t h n u m e r o u s tells, a strategic selection of w h i c h h a v e b e e n investigated. Archaeological r e m a i n s before the N e o l i t h i c p e r i o d are n o t well d o c u m e n t e d at p r e s e n t , b u t a series of rich cultural sequences c o n t i n u e s from t h a t p e r i o d t o t h e present. T h e archaeolog ical s e q u e n c e has b e e n b l o c k e d o u t in phases by the exca vations of the Oriental Institute of t h e University of Chicago carried o u t b e t w e e n 1933 a n d 1937 at the i m p o r t a n t sites of T e l l T a ' y i n a t (36°i5' N , 36°22'3o" E ) on t h e O r o n t e s 2 Ion (1 mi.) n o r t h w e s t of T e l l ' A t c h a n a a n d 20 k m (12 mi.) east- n o r t h e a s t of A n t i o c h (36°i7' N , 3 6 ° 2 2 ' n " E ) ; Tell el-Judeideh; Catal Hoytik, T e l l D h a h a b , a n d T e l l K u r d u . T h e excavators designated p h a s e s A - Q from the Neolithic t h r o u g h t h e Hellenistic periods. T h e ancient capital of Al alakh w a s excavated b y a British expedition in 1937-1939 a n d 1946-1949 t h a t highlighted the o c c u p a t i o n of the M i d dle a n d L a t e B r o n z e Ages (within phases K - L of the O r i ental Institute excavation s e q u e n c e ) . [See Alalakh.] T h e British expedition also e x c a v a t e d at T a b a r a el-Akrad, T e l l esh-Sheikh, a n d a l - M i n a o n the M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast. T h e classical periods w e r e d o c u m e n t e d primarily t h r o u g h the ef forts of t h e P r i n c e t o n University excavations at Antioch. [See A n t i o c h on Orontes.] Excavations farther south along the O r o n t e s at Q a r q u r a n d at 'Ain D a r a ' to the east on the Afrin h a v e yielded b y assemblages very closely related cul turally to the ' A m u q in t h e specific periods t h a t have so far b e e n investigated there. [See Q a r q u r , Tell; 'Ain D a r a ' . ] T h e Neolithic s e q u e n c e in the ' A m u q begins with the P o t tery Neolithic. T h e flint inventory a n d s u c h pottery,, as
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coarse simple wares; dark-faced b u r n i s h e d wares with in cised, impressed, a n d w a s h e d variants; a n d brittle a n d o t h e r painted wares characterize t h e assemblage. It is further ar ticulated b y period-typical p e n d a n t s a n d s t a m p seals, stone tools, and w o r k e d b o n e . T h e sequence c o n t i n u e s t h r o u g h t h e Halaf a n d U b a i d p e riods, again well d o c u m e n t e d b y rich ceramic traditions. A t r e m e n d o u s variety of m o n o c h r o m e a n d b i c h r o m e p a i n t e d wares, characteristic of these p h a s e s , represents strong local traditions as well as typical Halaf a n d U b a i d p a i n t e d traditions. T h e latter h a v e wide-ranging connections to welld o c u m e n t e d cultures across n o r t h e r n Syria, into t h e A s s y r ian heartland, a n d reaching s o u t h into s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a mia. T h e long tradition of dark-faced b u r n i s h e d ware e n d e d in phase E , at t h e e n d of the U b a i d period. Small finds in clude b o t h c h i p p e d a n d g r o u n d - s t o n e tools, in a d e c r e a s e d quantity from before, a n d includes a significant q u a n t i t y of well-made stone b o w l s , as well as s t a m p seals, b e a d s , a n d pendants. N e w ceramic a n d stone-tool traditions are p r e s e n t in ' A m u q p h a s e F , a n d metal objects are p r e s e n t for d i e first time a n d in significant quantities. Flint tools characteristic of die C a n a a n e a n industry occur from p h a s e F t h r o u g h p h a s e H . Characteristic ceramic indicators of foreign c o n nections are included a m o n g t h e rich local assemblage of t h e fourth millennium. T h e beveled-rim bowls, triangularlug handles, b e n t s p o u t s , a n d other distinctive features of t h e Late U r u k - J e m d e t N a s r p e r i o d in M e s o p o t a m i a are clearly r e p r e s e n t e d in ' A m u q p h a s e F a n d c o n t i n u e t o be p r e s e n t at t h e b e g i n n i n g of p h a s e G . In p h a s e G t h e variety of pottery increases, as cultural connections b e c o m e b r o a d e r . I n addition to t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n ceramic influ ences already m e n t i o n e d , there are cylinder seals a n d r e served-slip wares. In addition to the local stamp seals, locally p r o d u c e d cylinder seats also show M e s o p o t a m i a n influence. Similar definitive features are f o u n d in a G e r z e a n c o n t e x t in E g y p t , including multiple-brush p a i n t e d pottery, incised a n d impressed wares, a n d 'Syrian bottles.' Palestinian c o n nections are d e m o n s t r a t e d with platter forms, r e d - s u r f a c e d wares with simple a n d p a t t e r n e d b u r n i s h e d decorations, a n d c o m b - i m p r e s s e d surface t r e a t m e n t o n h a r d , high-fired wares. T h e tiiird-millennium s e q u e n c e is r e p r e s e n t e d in e x c e p tional detail. T h e plain simple wares of p h a s e s G - J , i n c l u d ing a variety of c u p or goblet forms, are established with basic similarities b u t s o m e geographic variation over a b r o a d area of n o r t h e r n Syria. R e d - b l a c k b u r n i s h e d ware with c o n nections to s o u t h e a s t e r n T u r k e y , also k n o w n as K h i r b e t K e r a k w a r e , is well r e p r e s e n t e d in phases G - I . I n p h a s e I, a n d particularly in p h a s e J, a n e w , sophisticated p a i n t e d tra dition, characteristic of die e n d of d i e Early B r o n z e A g e , is well represented. A g o o d sampling of small finds was also excavated in these p h a s e s , r a n g i n g from b e a d s , a variety of stone tools, metal i m p l e m e n t s , a n d terra-cotta figurines to
surprisingly sophisticated h u m a n figurines f r o m p h a s e G t h a t were cast in c o p p e r by a lost-wax p r o c e s s . A drastic c h a n g e o c c u r r e d in t h e ' A m u q at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE with radical political a n d cul tural shifts. T h e flourishing E B cultural tradition, well r e p resented a t T e l l T a ' y i n a t , e n d e d , a n d t h e n e a r b y site of T e l l ' A t c h a n a rose t o p r o m i n e n c e . T h e c e r a m i c traditions c h a n g e d significantly at t h a t time. C o m b - i n c i s e d d e c o r a t i o n b e c a m e t h e m o s t c o m m o n l y u s e d , t h o u g h beautiful pieces of p a i n t e d "Cilician w a r e " jars, jugs, a n d b o w l s are p r e s e n t in limited quantity. S p e c t a c u l a r r e m a i n s from t h e m i d d l e of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE w e r e p r e s e r v e d at T e l l ' A t c h a n a , t h e site of a n c i e n t Alalakh, capital of a r e g i o n within t h e k i n g d o m of Y a m h a d tiiat h a d its capital at A l e p p o . [See Aleppo.] Palace c o m p l e x e s w e r e e x c a v a t e d in levels V I I a n d IV. T h e level V I I palace dates to t h e e n d of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e , primarily to t h e eighteenth c e n t u r y BCE a n d is at tributed to Y a r i m l i m b y C. L e o n a r d W o o l l e y ( 1 9 5 5 ) , t h e site's excavator. T h e level I V palace dates t o early in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , primarily in t h e late fifteenth a n d early f o u r t e e n t h centuries BCE, a n d was labeled t h e palace of N i q m e p a by Woolley, ( 1 9 5 5 ) . R i c h artistic r e m a i n s w e r e p r e s e r v e d in t h e palaces a n d associated t e m p l e s , as well as significant archives of c u n e i f o r m tablets a n d t h e inscribed statue of t h e seated king Idrimi. T h i s w r i t t e n d o c u m e n t a t i o n gives an insight into t h e history, d i p l o m a c y , t r a d e , a d m i n istrative s t r u c t u r e s , a n d m a n y other details of d i e culture of t h e period. [See Alalakh T e x t s . ] T h e long, c o n t i n u o u s s e q u e n c e of t e m p l e s was located adjacent t o t h e palaces a n d n o t far f r o m a major city gate t h a t is best p r e s e r v e d in level V I I a n d c o v e r e d b y a fortress in levels III—H. Interestingly, t h e architectural traditions r e p resented in the t e m p l e plans c h a n g e d radically in its rebuildings. T y p i c a l Syrian direct-access t e m p l e s o c c u r b u t others, including s o m e t h a t s e e m to h a v e A n a t o l i a n inspiration, are also present. International c o n n e c t i o n s are also d e m o n s t r a t e d in t h e d e c o r a t e d N u z i a n d ' " A t c h a n a " p o t t e r y f o u n d in levels I V - I I a n d in t h e i m p o r t e d M y c e n a e a n a n d C y p r i o t w a r e s in t h e same time r a n g e a n d later. Also, i m p o r t e d E g y p t i a n , C r e t a n , a n d Anatolian objects w e r e f o u n d in these contexts. T h e well-built palaces o n c e s t o o d several stories h i g h a n d w e r e d e c o r a t e d with frescoes. Basalt o r l i m e s t o n e orthostats faced t h e walls of major r o o m s a n d c o u r t y a r d s , a n d w o o d was heavily u s e d in t h e construction. T h e half-timber c o n struction in t h e level I V palace is particularly well d o c u mented. W h e n Alalakh was destroyed at t h e e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , political p o w e r in t h e region shifted a n d again b e c a m e established at n e a r b y T a ' y i n a t , as it h a d a p p a r e n t l y shifted from T a ' y i n a t t o Alalakh earlier. T h e transition p e r i o d in t h e twelfth-eleventh centuries BCE is n o t well r e p r e s e n t e d at either site b u t is well d o c u m e n t e d at T e l l el-Judeideh a n d Catal Hoyiik. A e g e a n influence is very clear i n t h e p a i n t e d
ANAFA, TEL pottery of p h a s e N , particularly in its very distinctive shapes a n d p a i n t e d designs. T h e r e is s o m e d e v e l o p m e n t within this pottery tradition d o w n to t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE, b u t a n o t h e r tradition, characterized b y r e d - w a s h e d a n d b u r n i s h e d pottery, b e c a m e d o m i n a n t in a b o u t 1000 BCE. T h a t n e w t r a dition is also well d o c u m e n t e d to the s o u t h at T e l l Q a r q u r a n d to d i e w e s t at ' A i n D a r a ' . A t T a ' y i n a t it o c c u r s t h r o u g h several p h a s e s of a citadel c o m p l e x characterized b y a series of typically Syrian hilani b u i l d i n g s a n d a small t e m p l e of direct-axis t y p e b u t p r o p o r t i o n e d longer t h a n wide. L u w i a n hieroglyphic and o t h e r inscriptions date t h e c o m p l e x t o t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n p e r i o d , c o n t i n u i n g well b e y o n d t h e reign of Tiglath-Pileser III. Eight- a n d s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE E g y p tian, G r e e k , a n d C y p r i o t p o t t e r y are better d o c u m e n t e d in t h e latest layers of this c o m p l e x t h a n earlier. I n a n o t h e r area of t h e site a palatial Assyrian b u i l d i n g of t h e seventh a n d sixth centuries BCE was e x c a v a t e d by t h e Oriental Institute expedition ( H a i n e s , 1971, p p . 61-63, pis. 84, 85, a n d 109) a n d "Assyrian palace w a r e " w a s a m o n g the ceramic m a t e rials f o u n d in its r e m a i n s . T h e British expedition t o Alalakh also excavated a site o n die coast t h a t w a s c o n s i d e r e d to b e the outlet to t h e sea for t h e ' A m u q area in the I r o n A g e . T h i s site, a l - M i n a , w a s o c c u p i e d primarily from t h e m i d - e i g h t h c e n t u r y BCE until t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e Hellenistic period, b u t also s u b s e q u e n t l y in t h e Byzantine a n d later p e r i o d s . I r o n A g e s t o r e r o o m s at a l - M i n a c o n t a i n e d quantities of i m p o r t e d A e g e a n a n d C y p r i o t wares t h a t are also r e p r e s e n t e d in t h e ' A m u q , b u t n o t in t h e s a m e quantities. As in t h e ' A m u q , the se q u e n c e c o n t i n u e s u n b r o k e n into t h e Hellenistic period. T h e f o u n d i n g of the city of A n t i o c h b y Seleucus I in 300 BCE c a u s e d a major political shift in the area. As t h e city grew to b e c o m e o n e of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t in the ancient w o r l d , the ' A m u q plain clearly shifted t o a s u p p o r t i n g b u t integral role in its success. T h e ' A m u q plain w a s n o w k n o w n b y a n e w designation, t h e plain of A n t i o c h . T h e rich culture of t h e area relied on die newly c o n s t r u c t e d ports of Seleucia a n d L a o d o c i a . A n t i o c h w a s r e n o w n e d for its b e a u t y in a n tiquity, t h o u g h its physical a p p e a r a n c e w a s altered several times by major e a r t h q u a k e s . T h e P r i n c e t o n E x p e d i t i o n to A n t i o c h h a s p r o v i d e d a h i n t of die greatness of this c e n t e r in t h e rich architectural a n d artistic r e m a i n s t h a t are p a r t of the cultural materials tiiat w e r e u n c o v e r e d ( D o w n e y , 1961). A n t i o c h c o n t i n u e d b e y o n d t h e classical p e r i o d as an i m p o r t a n t B y z a n t i n e a n d t h e n C r u s a d e r city. Its fortunes only d e clined drastically after t h e d e s t r u c t i o n s suffered at the h a n d s of M u s l i m a n d M o n g o l forces in the t h i r t e e n t h century. BIBLIOGRAPHY Braidwood, R o b e r t J., a n d L i n d a S. Braidwood. Excavations in thePlain of Antioch, vol. i , The Earlier Assemblages, Phases A-J. Oriental I n stitute Publications, 6 1 . Chicago, i 9 6 0 . Major resource detailing die archaeological assemblages of the ' A m u q from the Neolithic t h r o u g h the Early Bronze Age,
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D o w n e y , Glanville. A History of Antioch in Syria: From Seleucus to the Arab Conquest. Princeton, 1 9 6 1 . Excellent s u m m a r y of the history of Antioch, reviewing the finds of the Princeton Archaeological E x p e dition in their historical context. Haines, Richard C. Excavations in the Plain of Antioch, vol. 2, The Struc tural Remains of the Later Phases. Oriental Institute Publications, 95. Chicago, 1 9 7 1 . Final architectural study of t h e later phases excavated by the Oriental Institute. Smiuh, Sidney. Alalakh and Chronology. L o n d o n , 1940. Basic publica tion a n d commentary on the cuneiform texts found at Alalakh. Woolley, C . Leonard. A Forgotten Kingdom. L o n d o n , 1953. Interesting discussion of the excavations at Tell 'Atchana, for a general audi ence. M u s t be used with caution because t h e chronological discus sion for the period prior to 2000 BCE has been completely revised. Woolley, C . L e o n a r d . Alalakh: An Account of the Excavations at Tell Atchana in the Hatay, 1937-1949. Oxford, 1 9 5 5 . Major d o c u m e n tation of the archaeological materials and architecture excavated at Tell 'Atchana, but also m u s t be used with caution for the discussion of materials dated before 2000 BCE because the chronology has been completely revised. RUDOLPH H . DORNEMANN
A N A F A , T E L , small site in the n o r t h e a s t e r n c o r n e r of m o d e r n Israel ( m a p reference 2105 X 2869). T h e site was first excavated b e t w e e n 1968 a n d 1973 b y the M u s e u m of A r t a n d Archaeology of t h e University of Missouri, u n d e r tile directorship of Saul W e i n b e r g . T h e s e excavations r e vealed evidence for o c c u p a t i o n from t h e Early B r o n z e II p e r i o d t h r o u g h the first c e n t u r y BCE. T h e remains of t h e L a t e Hellenistic era were t h e best p r e s e r v e d a n d were strik ing for d i e n u m b e r s of i m p o r t e d luxury p r o d u c t s — f r a g m e n t s of t h o u s a n d s of cast-glass bowls a n d the red-gloss pottery k n o w n as E a s t e r n Sigillata A, as well as h u n d r e d s of m o l d - m a d e l a m p s and coins of T y r e a n d Sidon. T h e p r i n cipal b u i l d i n g u n c o v e r e d w a s lavishly d e c o r a t e d with gilded a n d p a i n t e d stucco in the m a n n e r of die Hellenistic buildings o n D e l o s . I n d e e d , the variety of finds led W e i n b e r g to s p e c ulate t h a t the L a t e Hellenistic settlement might have b e e n a t r a d e e m p o r i u m p r o v i d i n g amenities for those plying the caravan r o u t e from D a m a s c u s to T y r e a n d t h a t w a s a b a n d o n e d , never to b e r e o c c u p i e d , w h e n the c a m p a i g n s of Alex a n d e r J a n n a e u s m a d e the area too d a n g e r o u s for trade. S t u d y seasons b e t w e e n 1974 a n d 1977 cast s o m e d o u b t s on these h y p o t h e s e s a n d led to the r e o p e n i n g of the site for a s e c o n d series of excavations b e t w e e n 1978 a n d 1986. T h i s series was jointly s p o n s o r e d by the M i s s o u r i M u s e u m a n d the Kelsey M u s e u m of t h e University of M i c h i g a n with S h a r o n H e r b e r t a n d W e i n b e r g serving as co-directors. T h e excavations were f u n d e d b y the s p o n s o r i n g universities, the S m i t h s o n i a n Institution, t h e N a t i o n a l E n d o w m e n t for t h e 1
H u m a n i t i e s , a n d private d o n o r s . T h e first of three projected v o l u m e s of final r e p o r t s o n the site a p p e a r e d in 1994 ( H e r b e r t et. al., 1994). T h e r e is still n o evidence for the ancient n a m e of the settlement. G . F u k s (Scripta Classica Israelica, 1979-1980, p p . 178-184) h a s a r g u e d it to b e Arsinoe of
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C o d e - S y r i a . A r g u m e n t s against this identification a p p e a r in TelAnafa (vol. i.i, p . 10, note 25). T h e second series of excavations at T e l Anafa focused on two issues: the form a n d function of the L a t e Hellenistic stuccoed building, only a corner of w h i c h h a d b e e n e x p o s e d in the first series; and the date of the final p h a s e of o c c u p a t i o n in antiquity. S t u d y h a d s h o w n substantial n u m b e r s of early R o m a n artifacts at the site b u t no clearly R o m a n buildings. W i t h t h e e x p o s u r e of m o r e t h a n 50 p e r c e n t of the stuccoed building by 1986, it was established that this s t r u c t u r e was m o d e l e d after Greek peristyle private h o u s e s . Sig nificant variations from the p r o t o t y p e include P h o e n i c a n m a s o n r y t e c h n i q u e s , an elaborate bath c o m p l e x , a n d its large size. All these variations m i g h t be attributed to linger ing Phoenician c u s t o m s of the residents of n e a r b y T y r e into w h o s e territory t h e L a t e Hellenistic site c a n b e a r g u e d to fall. T y r i a n s are, in fact, the m o s t likely candidates to h a v e built a n d lived in t h e structure n o w t h o u g h t to b e a private country villa rather t h a n a t r a d e center. T h e R o m a n o c c u p a t i o n was also clarified with t h e e x p o s u r e of eleven small dwellings datable to the first century CE. Unlike t h e Helle nistic remains, t h e R o m a n levels showed little evidence of contact with T y r e b u t w e r e m u c h m o r e closely c o n n e c t e d with the e c o n o m y of the Galilee a n d H e r o d Philip's n e a r b y capital of C a e s a r e a Philippi. In s u m m a r y , t h e richness of the site a n d controlled stratigraphic contexts of the finds allow T e l Anafa to serve as a Hellenistic type-site for t h e L e v a n t , presenting a b r o a d e r a n d m o r e closely d a t e d r a n g e of H e l lenistic artifacts t h a n ever before possible. Its location in t h e b o r d e r area b e t w e e n Phoenicia, t h e Galilee, a n d t h e G o l a n also makes it an i m p o r t a n t site for studying changing inter actions b e t w e e n G r e e k s , Phoenicians, Ituraeans, a n d Jews in the Hellenistic a n d R o m a n eras. [See also Galilee, article on Galilee in the Hellenistic t h r o u g h Byzantine Periods; Golan; Phoenicians; and Tyre.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Fuks, Gideon. " T e l Anafa: A Proposed Identification." Scripta Classica Israelicas ( 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 0 ) : 1 7 8 - 1 8 4 . Herbert, Sharon C. " T h e Greco-Phoenician Settlement at Tel Anafa: A Case Study in the Limits of Hellenization." In Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Bib lical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by A v r a h a m Biran and Joseph Aviram. Jerusalem, 1 9 9 3 . Herbert, Sharon C , et al. Tel Anafa I: Final Report on Ten Years of Excavation at a Hellenistic and Roman Settlement in Northern Israel. 2 vols. Journal of R o m a n Archaeology, Supplementary Series, 1 0 . 1 . A n n Arbor, Mich., 1994. Includes an introduction and chapters on occupational history a n d stratigraphy, stamped a m p h o r a handles, coins, a Tyrian sealing, the geological setting, and vertebrate fauna. Naveh,Joseph. " U n p u b l i s h e d Phoenician Inscriptions from Palestine." Israel Exploration Journal 37 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 5 - 3 0 . Weinberg, Saul S. " T e l Anafa: T h e Hellenistic T o w n . " Brochure for an excavation exhibit, Rockefeller M u s e u m . Jerusalem, 1 9 7 0 . Weinberg, Saul S. " T e l Anafa: T h e Hellenistic T o w n . " Israel Explo ration Journal 21 ( r 9 7 i ) : 8 6 - 1 0 9 . SHARON C . HERBERT
A N A L Y T I C A L T E C H N I Q U E S . T h e traditional ar chaeological m e t h o d s of classification a n d seriation w e r e d e veloped on the basis of the physical a p p e a r a n c e of a r c h a e ological artifacts, b u t it is increasingly a c k n o w l e d g e d t h a t the material of the artifact also carries information. T h e r e is usually n o difficulty, for e x a m p l e , describing p o t t e r y b y its color a n d texture; it is, however, m o r e difficult to describe artifacts m a d e of rock or metal in this w a y w i t h o u t b e i n g inaccurate (e.g., " g r e e n s t o n e " ) or even w r o n g . T h e possi bility of identifying the n a t u r e of certain materials only by scientific analysis inevitably arises. T o extract t h e m a x i m u m information locked in t h e material of archaeological r e m a i n s it is often necessary to p r o c e e d one step farther to e m p l o y a variety of scientific t e c h n i q u e s to establish, for e x a m p l e , the identity a n d geographic sources of t h e r a w materials u s e d or t h e t e c h n i q u e s of m a n u f a c t u r e . T h u s , applying sci entific m e t h o d s to archaeological objects can simply b e r e garded as an extension to the sort of visual e x a m i n a t i o n the magnifying lens or binocular m i c r o s c o p e d o . D e t e r m i n i n g chemical c o m p o n e n t s (or elemental analy sis) is n o w a d a y s rarely a c c o m p l i s h e d by t h e classical w e t chemical m e t h o d s (i.e., gravimetric or v o l u m e t r i c quantifi cation b y chemical reactions in a q u e o u s solution); it is car ried out rather b y applying physical t e c h n i q u e s b a s e d on the properties of molecules, a t o m s , a n d a t o m i c nuclei. T h e c o m m o n principle of these analytical t e c h n i q u e s is t h e ex p o s u r e of the s a m p l e to s o m e f o r m of energy i n p u t ( t h e r m a l or b y irradiation with p h o t o n s or particles). E x p o s u r e results in the excitation of molecules a n d a t o m s t h a t either emit, scatter, a b s o r b , or r e e m i t various forms of radiation analyzable with spectroscopic m e t h o d s . T h e choice of any m e t h o d usually d e p e n d s on a variety of factors such as sensitivity, selectivity, precision, accuracy, speed, availability, or cost of analysis. T h e i r applicability m a y d e p e n d o n the sample matrix, s a m p l e size, or o n a n other specific c o m p o n e n t b e i n g absent. E v e n m o r e i m p o r t a n t is t h e sampling step. It h a s to b e ascertained tiiat t h e sample is truly representative of the w h o l e t h a t it r e p r e s e n t s . W i t h archaeological objects it is often n o t possible to r e m o v e a s a m p l e , so t h a t the application of n o n d e s t r u c t i v e t e c h niques b e c o m e s necessary. S o m e t i m e s it m a y n o t b e p o s s i ble t o obtain a p u r e sample from a h e t e r o g e n e o u s object. I n this case, it is b e t t e r to apply a microanalytical m e t h o d witii high lateral resolution. O n t h e other h a n d , if k n o w i n g the average c o m p o s i t i o n of a h e t e r o g e n e o u s s a m p l e will suffice, the bulk analysis of a relatively large s a m p l e m a y p r o v i d e m o r e reliable results t h a n any microanalytical m e t h o d . O p t i c a l M e t h o d s . T h e r a n g e of colors to w h i c h the h u m a n eye is sensitive is only a very n a r r o w r a n g e of t h e elec t r o m a g n e t i c s p e c t r u m of radiation. O f progressively d e creasing wavelength a n d , h e n c e , increasing e n e r g y are t h e ultraviolet, X - r a y , a n d 7-ray regions of t h e s p e c t r u m , while t h e infrared a n d m i c r o w a v e regions h a v e longer wavelengths
ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES t h a n visible light. All tiiese r e g i o n s are u s e d in chemical anal ysis. U V - V I S s p e c t r o s c o p y (also called colorimetry) involves m e a s u r i n g d i e intensity of a b s o r p t i o n of visible light. It is dierefore restricted to colored s u b s t a n c e s , usually in solu tion. Often, n o t d i e s u b s t a n c e itself b u t a colored derivative is m e a s u r e d b y c o m p a r i s o n w i t h s t a n d a r d solutions. C o n centrations of elements c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d in t h e p a r t s p e r million r a n g e in solutions ( i p p m = i ing/g = 0.0001%) as well as their valency states a n d c o m p l e x species (speciation). T h i s m e t h o d is regaining i m p o r t a n c e b e c a u s e it is r a t h e r inexpensive a n d c a n be a p p l i e d in t h e field (e.g., for envi r o n m e n t a l m o n i t o r i n g a n d p h o s p h a t e analysis). I n optical emission s p e c t r o m e t r y ( O E S ) t h e s a m p l e t o b e analyzed is v a p o r i z e d at h i g h t e m p e r a t u r e s b y m e a n s of c o m b u s t i o n flames, an electric discharge b e t w e e n elec t r o d e s , a laser b e a m , or a p l a s m a t o r c h . S u c h a t r e a t m e n t breaks m o s t chemical b o n d s a n d excites t h e outer electrons of s o m e a t o m s to higher e n e r g y levels t h a t e m i t light in t h e visible a n d n e a r ultraviolet r e g i o n o n their r e t u r n to t h e g r o u n d state. T h i s light consists of a n u m b e r of sharply d e fined wavelengths o r spectral lines t h a t are characteristic of t h e p a r t i c u l a r e l e m e n t excited. C o n s e q u e n d y , t h e d e t e r m i n a t i o n of t h e c o n s t i t u e n t w a v e l e n g t h s in t h e light e m i t t e d b y t h e s a m p l e p r o v i d e s t h e basis for identifying the elements p r e s e n t in t h e s a m p l e while t h e intensity of the light, at a particular wavelength, p r o v i d e s an estimate of t h e c o n c e n tration of t h e associated e l e m e n t . By c o m p a r i s o n with s t a n d a r d s of k n o w n c o m p o s i t i o n it allows, in principle, t h e si m u l t a n e o u s d e t e r m i n a t i o n of u p t o seventy elements in t h e r a n g e of b e t w e e n 1 p p m a n d 10 p e r c e n t w i t h detection limits varying b e t w e e n 1 a n d 100 p p m in t h e solid s a m p l e . A l t h o u g h s o m e materials, like m e t a l s , c a n b e u s e d directly as electrodes, the m e t h o d c a n n o t b e r e g a r d e d as n o n d e s t r u c tive. F o r analysis, a small s a m p l e , typically 10 m g , has to b e r e m o v e d from t h e object. T h e s a m p l e is either dissolved or m i x e d directly with p u r e g r a p h i t e p o w d e r a n d p l a c e d in a graphite c u p , w h i c h forms t h e lower electrode. A n electric arc or a spark discharge is struck b e t w e e n this a n d an u p p e r g r a p h i t e electrode, thus c o m p l e t e l y volatilizing t h e s a m p l e a n d exciting its c o n s t i t u e n t a t o m s . A m o r e elegant m e t h o d of direct analysis is t h e excitation with a n intense laser b e a m of a b o u t 100 |j,m in d i a m e t e r . A brief b u r s t of intense light is sufficient to vaporize a few m i c r o g r a m s of material a n d leaves b e h i n d only a very small a n d h a r d l y visible crater o n t h e surface of t h e object. T h e small c l o u d of s a m p l e v a p o r n e e d s an auxiliary spark d i s c h a r g e t o excite t h e emission s p e c t r u m u s e d for analysis. A l t h o u g h this l a s e r - i n d u c e d O E S may appear to be a m u c h better technique than the first o n e , it h a s t h e decisive d i s a d v a n t a g e t h a t its r e p r o d u c ibility is m u c h lower a n d t h a t it c a n only b e u s e d for quali tative or semiquantitative analyses. F u r t h e r i m p r o v e m e n t of t h e t e c h n i q u e has b e e n m a d e b y t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of a p l a s m a t o r c h for die vaporization a n d
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excitation of the s a m p l e instead of t h e electric discharge. It has only relatively recently b e e n possible to obtain a stable p l a s m a (a completely ionized gas) u n d e r laboratory c o n d i tions. T h e m o s t widely e m p l o y e d p l a s m a for analytical p u r p o s e s consists of a r g o n flowing t h r o u g h a q u a r t z t u b e placed with its u p p e r e n d into a h i g h - f r e q u e n c y ( a b o u t 30 M H z ) m a g n e t i c field. O n c e ignited t o p l a n t a " s e e d " of electrons in t h e gas, t h e electron are accelerated by t h e oscillating field a n d obtain e n o u g h e n e r g y t o ionize all o t h e r a r g o n a t o m s within a very s h o r t time. T h e result is a very h i g h - t e m p e r a t u r e flame ( u p to io,ooo°C) t h r o u g h w h i c h t h e solution of t h e dissolved s a m p l e is t r a n s p o r t e d as an aerosol. T h i s t e c h n i q u e is called inductively c o u p l e d p l a s m a - O E S ( I C P - O E S ) a n d is a highly reliable m e t h o d for t h e analysis of m a n y el e m e n t s in die parts p e r billion ( p p b ) r a n g e in solutions (1 p p b = i n g / g = o . o o o o o o i % ) . B e c a u s e solids have to b e dis solved for analysis, elemental concentrations in t h e p p m r a n g e c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d in the solid sample. A disadvantage is t h a t t h e dissolution step is very critical for t h e accuracy of t h e m e t i i o d and t h e s a m p l e is lost o n analysis. I n a t o m i c a b s o r p t i o n s p e c t r o m e t r y (AAS) the sample, usually in the form of a solution, is also volatilized a n d at o m i z e d w i t h c o m b u s t i o n flames or b y electrothermal heating in a small graphite t u b e . T h i s m e t h o d utilizes the fact that free a t o m s c a n absorb r a d i a t i o n at t h e s a m e wavelength t h a t t h e y w o u l d emit o n excitation. If c o p p e r is being deter m i n e d , a c o p p e r - c o n t a i n i n g light source is u s e d t o p a s s a b e a m t h r o u g h t h e a t o m i z e d s a m p l e . T h e a m o u n t of light a b s o r b e d can b e detected electronically a n d is directly p r o portional to the n u m b e r of a t o m s present. C o m p a r i s o n with s t a n d a r d solutions yields elemental concentrations. T h e in s t r u m e n t a t i o n of A A S is c h e a p e r t h a n t h a t of O E S and d i e m e t h o d is less sensitive t o interelement interferences. D e tection limits are r o u g h l y c o m p a r a b l e . H o w e v e r , only o n e e l e m e n t c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d with o n e m e a s u r e m e n t , whereas with O E S all detectable elements are m e a s u r e d simulta neously. Only elemental c o n c e n t r a t i o n s c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d with b o t h m e t h o d s . T h e m e t h o d s discussed so far are b a s e d on the fact t h a t electrons of t h e outer shells of atoms can b e excited, w h i c h results in absorption a n d emission of light in the visible a n d U V r a n g e of t h e electromagnetic s p e c t r u m . T h e energy of infrared radiation is t o o low for such processes, b u t it can excite oscillations a n d vibrations in molecules. Certain s p e cific wavelengths t h a t d e p e n d o n t h e s t r u c t u r e of the c o m p o u n d being tested are a b s o r b e d w h e n a b e a m of infrared radiation is p a s s e d t h r o u g h a suitably p r e p a r e d s p e c i m e n of almost any inorganic or o r g a n i c c o m p o u n d . T h e greatest u s e of this t e c h n i q u e ( I R S ) is in d i e qualitative identification of organic c o m p o u n d s . S t r u c t u r a l information o n t h e p r e s e n c e or a b s e n c e of certain functional g r o u p s is obtained. It is t h u s a typical m e t h o d for species analysis. M a n y c o m p o u n d s exhibit typical infrared spectra t h a t can be u s e d as a "fingerprint." R e s o n a n c e r a m a n spectroscopy ( R R S ) is a
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c o m p l e m e n t a r y t e c h n i q u e t o I R S in that the radiation scat t e r e d and partly r e e m i t t e d in a direction p e r p e n d i c u l a r to t h a t of the incident b e a m is m e a s u r e d . X - R a y M e t h o d s . W h e n an element is irradiated with X rays of a p p r o p r i a t e wavelengtii, X-rays of different b u t smaller wavelength, characteristic of the element, are emit ted. T h e underlying p r o c e s s is t h e d i s p l a c e m e n t of an elec t r o n of one of the inner shells of the a t o m followed by filling of the vacancy by o n e of d i e outer electrons c o m b i n e d with simultaneous emission of a p h o t o n . C o m p l e x m i x t u r e s can usually b e analyzed w i t h o u t prior separation of t h e c o m p o n e n t s by the s p e c t r o s c o p y of t h e secondary radiation with diffracting crystals or s e m i c o n d u c t o r detectors a n d — m o s t i m p o r t a n t — t h e m e t h o d is virtually n o n d e s t r u c t i v e (only some glasses a n d g e m s t o n e s m a y c h a n g e color o n irradiation with X-rays, b u t this c a n b e reverted b y gentie h e a t i n g ) . However, t h e d e p t h of analysis is only in the r a n g e of o.i m m in silicates a n d even less in metals, so that t h e surface of an object has to be representative of t h e bulk composition, which is n o t always t h e case. T h e r e f o r e , it m a y often b e better to take a representative sample a n d perform t h e anal ysis on that. T h e sensitivity of t h e m e t h o d d e p e n d s o n t h e matrix a n d t h e element to b e analyzed, b u t typical detection limits are a r o u n d 10-100 p p m . X R F is t h e s t a n d a r d m e t h o d for rock analysis in geology, a n d it is also widely e m p l o y e d for ana lyzing metals a n d alloys. T h e analyzed area is usually a b o u t 1 c m in diameter b u t can be r e d u c e d with a p p r o p r i a t e slits; however, these also r e d u c e die intensity of t h e p r i m a r y b e a m a n d accordingly e x t e n d t h e necessary m e a s u r e m e n t t i m e . X-rays can also b e excited by energetic electrons t h a t can b e focused with m a g n e t i c lenses. I n the electron p r o b e m i croanalyzer, a fine electron b e a m is focused on t h e surface of the sample (approximately 1 u.m in d i a m e t e r ) ; t h e posi tion of the b e a m c a n be c h a n g e d systematically. T h u s , it is possible to obtain information o n the c o n c e n t r a t i o n s a n d distribution of t h e elements within a small area of d i e s a m ple. F o r quantitative analysis t h e sample is m o u n t e d in a resin a n d t h e surface polished. Accordingly, strictly n o n destructive analysis is n o t possible, b u t small objects like coins can b e investigated with little d a m a g e . Electrons in d u c e m o r e b a c k g r o u n d radiation in t h e s a m p l e . T h e r e f o r e , detection limits a r e s o m e w h a t higher ( > i o o p p m ) t h a n w i t i i XRF. P r o t o n s p r o d u c e m u c h less b a c k g r o u n d a n d can also be focused so t h a t p r o t o n - i n d u c e d X-ray analysis ( P I X E ) c o m bines lower detection levels a n d high lateral resolution. However, t h e i n s t r u m e n t a l effort to p r o d u c e a p r o t o n b e a m is m u c h larger t h a n for electrons. Accordingly, this m e t h o d is rarely available a n d comparatively expensive. W i t h X - r a y diffraction analysis ( X R D ) , crystal structures ( a n d thus mineral c o m p o u n d s ) c a n b e identified. T h i s m e d i o d is very useful t o c o m p l e m e n t chemical analysis
w h e n different materials have similar chemical c o m p o s i tion. N u c l e a r M e t h o d s . While the preceding methods make u s e of physical processes taldng place in t h e molecules or in t h e electron shells of a t o m s , nuclear m e t i i o d s are b a s e d o n reactions t h a t o c c u r b e t w e e n nuclei a n d n e u t r o n s or c h a r g e d particles. S u c h reactions are usually a c c o m p a n i e d or fol l o w e d by the emission of radiation t h a t is p h e n o m e n o l o g i cally largely identical w i t h the radiation e m i t t e d b y t h e elec t r o n shells—with the difference t h a t it originates from t h e n u c l e u s . T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t of these t e c h n i q u e s is n e u t r o n activation analysis ( N A A ) , in w h i c h a s a m p l e is irradiated w i t h t h e r m a l n e u t r o n s t o interact w i t h t h e a t o m i c nuclei of t h e constituent elements, teansforming t h e m into u n s t a b l e radioactive isotopes. T h e decay of t h e s e isotopes is often a c c o m p a n i e d b y t h e emission of 7-rays, w h i c h can b e u s e d for identifying a n d quantifying t h e e l e m e n t s i n question. T h e spectroscopic t e c h n i q u e s for 7-rays are similar to t h e ones u s e d for X - r a y s . B e c a u s e radioactivity c a n b e m e a s u r e d very sensitively, this m e t h o d offers a n unparalleled c o m b i n a t i o n of selectivity a n d sensitivity for simultaneously d e t e r m i n i n g m a n y elements. Typically, a b o u t 40 elements c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d i n rock samples from major c o m p o n e n t s to t h e p p b range. F o r several elements this is t h e m o s t sensitive m e t h o d of analysis altogether. D e p e n d i n g o n their major c o m p o s i t i o n s , small objects c a n b e a n a l y z e d n o n d e s t r u c tively, if n o long-lived isotopes are p r o d u c e d . I n any case, t h e s a m p l e is p r e s e r v e d a n d can b e u s e d for o t h e r investi gations after t h e decay of the radioactivity. T h e major dis a d v a n t a g e of this m e t h o d is t h e low a n d diminishing avail ability of strong n e u t r o n s o u r c e s — t h a t is, n u c l e a r r e s e a r c h reactors. A n a l o g o u s t o A A S , M o s s b a u e r effect s p e c t r o s c o p y ( M E S ) involves t h e a b s o r p t i o n of 7-rays of characteristic energies within a very n a r r o w e n e r g y r a n g e b y specific nuclei in t h e sample. T h i s m e t h o d is mainly u s e d for d i e speciation of iron in various matrices or, m o r e generally, p r o v i d e s in formation o n t h e i m m e d i a t e crystallographic e n v i r o n m e n t of t h e isotope u n d e r investigation. Typically, it is t h e ratio of F e / F e in minerals that is of interest b e c a u s e it bears o n t h e a m b i e n t c o n d i t i o n s d u r i n g t h e f o r m a t i o n of i r o n - c o n taining minerals. 2 +
3 +
A mass s p e c t r o m e t e r is an i n s t r u m e n t t h a t will sort o u t c h a r g e d gas molecules (ions) a c c o r d i n g to their masses by accelerating t h e m electrically t o f o r m a b e a m t h a t is d e flected magnetically i n t o separate b e a m s a c c o r d i n g to t h e m a s s - t o - c h a r g e ratio of t h e ions involved. T h e s e b e a m s c a n b e m a d e to pass t h r o u g h a series of slits to r e a c h separate detectors w h e r e t h e y a r e individually c o u n t e d . I n t h e r m a l ionization mass s p e c t r o m e t r y ( T I M S ) t h e e l e m e n t s o u g h t h a s to be s e p a r a t e d from t h e s a m p l e a n d is t h e n e v a p o r a t e d a n d ionized f r o m an array of h o t filaments. Quantification is achieved b y a d d i n g k n o w n a m o u n t s of different isotopes
ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES of t h e s a m e e l e m e n t (isotope dilution). F o r m a n y elements this is t h e m o s t sensitive t e c h n i q u e available, b u t it is r a t h e r t i m e c o n s u m i n g a n d usually only one e l e m e n t can be m e a s u r e d at a t i m e . T h e major a d v a n t a g e is t h a t n o t only t h e c o n c e n t r a t i o n of a n e l e m e n t c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d , b u t also its isotopic c o m p o s i t i o n — w h i c h is especially i m p o r t a n t for el e m e n t s with v a r y i n g a b u n d a n c e s of their c o n s t i t u e n t stable isotopes. M o s t elements o n E a r t h h a v e a u n i f o r m isotopic c o m p o s i t i o n regardless of their location or chemical f o r m . Variations can b e i n d u c e d in light elements (from h y d r o g e n t o sulfur) b y physical p r o c e s s e s s u c h as diffusion that are sensitive to isotopic differences (e.g., " h e a v y " water, D 0 can b e e n r i c h e d b y r e p e a t e d e v a p o r a t i o n of o r d i n a r y water) or b y t h e decay of radioactive e l e m e n t s o c c u r r i n g in n a t u r e . A typical e x a m p l e is t h e d e c a y of u r a n i u m a n d t h o r i u m t o lead, so t h a t t h e isotopic c o m p o s i t i o n of lead varies a c c o r d ing to w h i c h geochemical e n v i r o n m e n t it derives. 2
T h e r e are also alternative w a y s to p r o d u c e ions from t h e sample: O n e is the direct a t o m i z a t i o n a n d ionization b y a n electric spark similar to O E S ( s p a r k - s o u r c e m a s s s p e c t r o m e u y , or S S M S ) or t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of a s a m p l e solution into a p l a s m a t o r c h ( I C P - M S ) . B o t h c o m b i n e t h e high sensitivity of M S with m u l t i e l e m e n t detection. H o w e v e r , especially S S M S c a n only b e r e g a r d e d as a semiquantitative m e t h o d unless a t e d i o u s m u l t i e l e m e n t i s o t o p e dilution t e c h n i q u e is applied. If a s a m p l e is directly e v a p o r a t e d b y a n a r r o w laser b e a m and t h e n i n t r o d u c e d into a n I C P - M S , h i g h lateral r e s olution is also possible. E v e n b e t t e r resolution is achieved b y ionization with a p r i m a r y b e a m of i o n s ( s e c o n d a r y - i o n m a s s s p e c t r o m e t r y , or S I M S ) , so t h a t t h e features of t h e E M P A are c o m b i n e d with h i g h sensitivity a n d isotopic anal ysis. U n f o r t u n a t e l y , precision a n d a c c u r a c y of all these m e t h o d s is n o t yet c o m p e t i t i v e with conventional instru m e n t a l m e t h o d s (e.g., X R F or N A A ) b e c a u s e of interelem e n t effects t h a t a r e as yet difficult t o correct. H o w e v e r , with their increased u s e , t h e s e n e w t e c h n i q u e s will certainly b e c o m e powerful a n d reliable analytical tools. T h e m a i n field of application of M S in analytical c h e m istry is actually the analysis of c o m p l e x organic molecules. T o increase its selectivity, it is n o w c o m m o n practice to s e p arate t h e individual c o m p o n e n t s first in a gas c h r o m a t o g r a p h ( G C ) b y differential a d s o r p t i o n o n a solid stationary p h a s e ( G C - M S ) . B e c a u s e of t h e s e differences, each c o m p o n e n t diffuses at a different s p e e d t h r o u g h a n a r r o w col u m n p a c k e d with, for e x a m p l e , silica gel, so t h a t a t t h e e n d of t h e c o l u m n tire c o m p o n e n t s a r e completely separated a n d i n t r o d u c e d into a M S o n e after t h e other. S e l e c t e d A r c h a e o l o g i c a l A p p l i c a t i o n s . O E S was the first widely e m p l o y e d physical m e t h o d of chemical analysis; t h u s , m o s t of t h e analytical d a t a p u b l i s h e d since 1930 w a s , until recently, derived from this t e c h n i q u e . M o s t n o t e w o r t h y are t h e m a n y t h o u s a n d s of analyses of prehistoric m e t a l o b jects from E u r o p e , t h e e a s t e r n M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a n d t h e N e a r
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E a s t carried out a t the W u r t t e m b e r g i s c h e s L a n d e s m u s e u m in Stuttgart, G e r m a n y . T h e s e data are still t h e p r i m a r y source for studying t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of alloying techniques in various regions a n d h a v e frequently b e e n discussed in t e r m s of t h e p r o v e n a n c e of r a w materials. T h e m e t h o d is still in u s e b u t X R F , A A S , N A A , a n d I C P - O E S are replac ing it increasingly in d e t e r m i n i n g major a n d trace elements. A significant m e t h o d i c a l e x t e n s i o n h a s b e e n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of T I M S for d e t e r m i n i n g lead isotope ratios n o t affected b y p r o d u c t i o n processes. Obsidian, a naturally o c c u r r i n g volcanic glass that h a s b e e n u s e d widely for b l a d e s f r o m Paleolithic periods t h r o u g h t h e B r o n z e A g e , is a m u c h better material for p r o v e n a n c e studies b e c a u s e t h e p r o d u c t i o n of artifacts does n o t alter its chemical c o m p o s i t i o n in any w a y a n d it is also very resistant to chemical w e a t h e r i n g . O E S h a s b e e n u s e d to characterize m a n y obsidian sources in t h e A e g e a n , in central a n d eastern Anatolia, in A r m e n i a , a n d in E t h i o p i a , as well as obsidian artifacts from N e a r E a s t e r n sites. It a p p e a r s that t h e L e v a n t was mainly supplied f r o m C a p p a d o c i a n sources, whereas obsidian from eastern Anatolia was d o m i n a n t along t h e Z a g ros flanks. T o d a y , t h e m o s t widely applied analytical m e t h ods for this p u r p o s e are N A A a n d R F A , although the latter is n o t applicable for very small samples. So far, T I M S has offered little advantage over t h e s e m e t h o d s . I n a similar a p p r o a c h , O E S has also b e e n u s e d for t h e chemical analysis of p o t t e r y ; h o w e v e r , characterizing clay sources presents m o r e difficulties t h a n obsidian. T h e r e is a very large n u m b e r of p o t e n t i a l clay sources, a n d the varia tion within a source is likely to b e larger t h a n with obsidian. O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , for mineralogical reasons, t h e variation b e t w e e n sources is rather small; as a result, they can hardly b e distinguished with t h e relatively low precision of O E S . P r o g r e s s , t h u s , c a m e only after t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of N A A , w h i c h is n o w t h e s t a n d a r d m e t h o d for p o t t e r y analysis. S t o n e artifacts h a v e also b e e n studied extensively, p a r t i c ularly m a r b l e , starting with isotope analysis of c a r b o n a n d oxygen. As with all studies w h e r e m a n y sources have to be considered, various o v e r l a p p i n g p a r a m e t e r s p r e v e n t t h e u n i q u e a s s i g n m e n t of an artifact to any source. Better r e s olution b e t w e e n sources c a n only b e achieved by increasing t h e n u m b e r of g e o c h e m i c a l p a r a m e t e r s . H e n c e , isotope analysis is n o w routinely c o m p l e m e n t e d b y trace element a n d p e t r o g r a p h i c analysis. O f organic materials, a m b e r h a s b e e n t h e m o s t extensively studied, especially by I R S , with t h e a i m of localizing r a w material sources a n d establishing t r a d e routes in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e . A p r o m i s i n g field seems to b e the analysis of food residues b y G C - M S . [See also D a t i n g T e c h n i q u e s ; M i c r o s c o p y ; N e u t r o n A c tivation Analysis; S p e c t r o s c o p y ; and X - R a y Diffraction Analysis.]
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ANATOLIA: Prehistoric Anatolia BIBLIOGRAPHY
Prehistoric Anatolia
Beck, Curt W., Constance A. Fellows, and Edith M a c K e n n a n . " N u clear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometry in Archaeology." In Ar chaeological Chemistry: A Symposium Sponsored by the Division of the History of Chemistry at the 165th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Dallas, Texas, April 9-10,1973, edited by C u r t W . Beck, p p . 2 2 6 - 2 3 5 . American Chemical Society, Advances in Chemistry Se ries, no. 138. Washington, D . C . , 1 9 7 4 . G o o d introduction to an im portant technique (not covered in this article) for analyzing organic materials in archaeology.
V . G o r d o n C h i l d e places the origins of his N e o l i t h i c R e v olution in hypothesized " n u c l e a r z o n e s " w h e r e climate, e n v i r o n m e n t , a n d h u m a n e x p e r i e n c e c a m e t o g e t h e r to catalyze t h e transition of h u m a n society from a f o o d - g a t h e r i n g or g a n i s m to a f o o d - p r o d u c i n g o n e ( C h i l d e , 1952, p . 23). T h e s e nuclear z o n e s w e r e limited to a n a r c of land from E g y p t to M e s o p o t a m i a , the so-called Fertile C r e s c e n t . Al t h o u g h later scholarship considered A n a t o l i a n sites s u c h as C a t a l Hoytik a n d C a y o n i i to b e p e r i p h e r a l d e v e l o p m e n t s of t h e L e v a n t i n e N e o l i t h i c tradition, t h e g r o w i n g evidence f r o m sites such as Asikli Hoytik p o i n t s to an a u t o c h t h o n o u s d e v e l o p m e n t within Anatolia. [See C a t a l Hoytik; Cayonii.] As a result, Anatolia h a s b e g u n to take its p l a c e as o n e of t h e p r i m a r y areas of prehistoric investigation in the N e a r East. It was in t h e Neolithic a n d Chalcolitiiic periods t h a t h u m a n s a c q u i r e d the capacity to m a n i p u l a t e their s u r r o u n d ings in ways still observable in t h e archaeological r e c o r d .
B o u m a n s , Paul W. J. M . , ed. Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spec troscopy, N e w York, 1987. Comprehensive overview of this relatively new analytical technique. E h m a n n , William D . , and Diane E. Vance, eds. Radiochemislry and Nuclear Methods in Analysis. N e w York, 1 9 9 1 . T h e m o s t readable m o d e r n treatment of analytical radiochemistry. Harbottle, G a r m a n . " C h e m i c a l Characterization in Archaeology." In Contexts for Prehistoric Exchange: Studies in Archaeology, edited by Jonathan E. Ericson and T i m o t h y K. Earle, p p . 1 3 - 5 1 . N e w York, 1982. Useful review of the application of chemical analyses in ar chaeology. Kolthoff, I. M . , and Philip J. Elving, eds. Treatise on Analytical Chem istry. 2d ed. N e w York, 1 9 7 8 - . Authoritative series on analytical chemistry that treats the field comprehensively. Pollard, A. M . , ed. New Developments in Archaeological Science: A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society and the British Academy, February 1991. Proceedings of the British Academy, 7 7 . Oxford, 1992. T h e most recent collection of specific applications of scientific m e t h o d s to archaeological problems. P o t t s , P . J . / 4 Handbook of Silicate Rock Analysis. Glasgow, 1987. S u m marizes the principles and experimental techniques of all analytical methods discussed in this text with the exception of I R S , R R S , and GC-MS. Tite, Michael S. Methods of Physical Examination in Archaeology. L o n don and N e w York, 1 9 7 2 . Concise overview of physical m e t h o d s applied for the location, dating, and compositional analysis of ar chaeological artifacts. Wagner, U., F. E. Wagner, and J. Riederer. " T h e Use of M o s s b a u e r Spectroscopy in Archaeometric Studies." In Proceedings of the 24th International Archaeometry Symposium, edited by Jacqueline S. Olin and M . J. Blackman, p p . 1 2 9 - 1 4 2 . Washington, D . C . , 1986. Useful introduction to the principles of the method, with an archaeological application. Zussman, J., ed. Physical Methods in Determinative Mineralogy. 2 d ed. N e w York and L o n d o n , 1 9 7 7 . Somewhat dated but detailed and authoritative review of O E S , X R F , X R D , A A S , IRS, a n d S S M S . ERNST PERNICKA
A N A T O L I A . [This entry provides a broad survey of the history of Anatolia as known primarily from archaeological dis coveries. It is chronologically divided into four articles: Prehistoric Anatolia Ancient Anatolia Anatolia from Alexander to die Rise of Islam Anatolia in the Islamic P e r i o d In addition to the related articles on specific subregions and sites referred to in this entry, see also History of the Field, article on Archaeology in t h e Anatolian Plateau.]
C l i m a t e , E n v i r o n m e n t , and D o m e s t i c a t i o n . M u c h of Anatolia is situated along a b r o a d plateau t h a t stretches from t h e A e g e a n Sea t o Iran. W h i l e this plateau m a y seem, at first glance, to be little m o r e t h a n m o n o t o n o u s h i g h l a n d s , careful inspection reveals a c o m p l e x l a n d s c a p e c o m p o s e d of n u m e r o u s m i c r o e n v i r o n m e n t s , e a c h w i t h its o w n peculiar set of ecological features (Yakar, 1991). W i t h i n t h e c o n t e x t of this ecological framework, the basic e l e m e n t s of soil, t e m p e r a t u r e , a n d precipitation h a d m u c h t o do w i t h t h e success o r failure of h u m a n habitation 011 t h e p l a t e a u (cf. G o r n y , 1995b). E n v i r o n m e n t a l studies indicate t h a t t h e climate of Anatolia in t h e era p r e c e d i n g t h e Neolithic m a y h a v e dif fered significantly from w h a t it is t o d a y , witii large areas inhospitable to h u m a n h a b i t a t i o n (Butzer, 1970, 1982; C o h e n , 1971), Climatic conditions seem t o h a v e ameliorated in Anatolia d u r i n g t h e eighth m i l l e n n i u m , m a k i n g it c o n d u c i v e t o settlement at sites s u c h as Hacilar a n d C a t a l Hoytik. [See Hacilar.] W h e t h e r this climatic c h a n g e was t h e p r i m e cata lyst b e h i n d the innovations of t h e N e o l i t h i c p e r i o d is still u n c e r t a i n , b u t w h a t stands o u t is die dramatically different direction h u m a n culture took from t h a t p o i n t o n w a r d . A l t h o u g h h u m a n s h a d already b e g u n to observe a n d e x p e r i m e n t with t h e plants (and animals) in their e n v i r o n m e n t , it w a s n o t until this m o d e r a t i n g c h a n g e in climate o c c u r r e d t h a t the " i n c i p i e n t a g r i c u l t u r e " of the Epipaleolithic p e r i o d finally gave w a y t o a m o r e formalized system of settlement a n d cultivation. [See Agriculture.] T h e system was c h a r a c terized b y dry-farming c o m m u n i t i e s in w h i c h t h e i n h a b i t a n t s practiced cereal cultivation a n d a n i m a l h u s b a n d r y . [See Cereals.] W h i l e village c o m m u n i t i e s a p p a r e n t l y s p r a n g u p before t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of p l a n t d o m e s t i c a t i o n , t h e r e are indications t h a t , in at least s o m e cases (see b e l o w ) , animal domestication also p r e c e d e d t h a t of p l a n t s , especially i n c e n tral Anatolia (cf. Yakar, 1991; M . O z d o g a n , 1995). [See Vil-
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lages.] O t h e r d e v e l o p m e n t s i n social organization, ideology, architecture, a n d c r a f t m a n s h i p followed o n d i e heels of t h e f o o d - p r o d u c i n g revolution; e x c h a n g e is also evident, even from earliest times. T h e s e cultural d e v e l o p m e n t s , h o w e v e r , r e p r e s e n t only a small s e g m e n t o n a l o n g a n d n o t necessarily straight c o n t i n u u m .
f o u n d i n s u b p h a s e III r e p r e s e n t s a n o t h e r innovation of t h e C a y o n i i inhabitants, a n d t h e "cell b u i l d i n g " is t h e featured architectural type. T h e a d v a n c e d style a n d a r r a n g e m e n t of these architectural types m a y eventually p r o v i d e s o m e of the first real evidence of stratification a n d specialization (their architectural a n t e c e d e n t s a r e still t o b e d i s c o v e r e d ) .
N e o l i t h i c P e r i o d ( c . 11000-5500 BCE). T h e earliest evi d e n c e of settled life i n Anatolia dates to t h e Neolithic p e r i o d (Singh, 1974; Mellaart, 1975; T o d d , 1980; Yakar, 1991; J o u kowsky, f o r t h c o m i n g ) , w i t h s e t t l e m e n t divided into t w o p h a s e s b a s e d o n t h e a b s e n c e o r p r e s e n c e of pottery t e c h nology. P r e p o t t e r y o r a c e r a m i c settlements h a v e b e e n i d e n tified a t C a y o n i i , Hallan C e m i , N e v a h Cori, Gritille, Asikh Hoyiik, a n d S u b e r d e , with additional e v i d e n c e c o m i n g from surveys (cf. Voigt, 1985; T o d d , 1980; M e r i c , 1993; Algaze, 1994; M . O z d o g a n 1995). [See Nevali Cori.] T o g e t h e r t h e y p r o v i d e a b r o a d e n i n g vista of Neolitiiic settlement in A n a tolia.
P h a s e s I a n d II a t C a y o n i i yielded wild cereals, vetch, a n d n u t s , s u p p l e m e n t e d b y wild pig, goat, s h e e p , a n d deer. [See S h e e p a n d Goats.] E v i d e n c e o f d o m e s t i c a t i o n begins to a p p e a r b y p h a s e s I I I - I V , w i t h plants s u c h as p e a s , lentils, a n d e m m e r joined b y d o m e s t i c a t e d animals s u c h as s h e e p , goat, a n d p i g . T h e e c o n o m y o f C a y o n i i m a y have b e e n a u g m e n t e d b y c o p p e r p r o d u c t i o n from a n e a r b y m i n e . T h e site's p i n s , awls, a n d fishhooks r e p r e s e n t d i e first k n o w n u s e of c o p p e r for fashioning tools; w h e t h e r this c o p p e r was u s e d in t r a d e is unclear, b u t t h e increased u s e of obsidian f r o m t h e N e m r u d D a g i region in p h a s e I V d o e s suggest t h a t it could h a v e b e e n i m p o r t e d i n t h e e x c h a n g e .
R a d i o c a r b o n dating of the e v i d e n c e o f t h e Neolithic a t Hallan C e m i places it in t h e n i n t h m i l l e n n i u m , malting it t h e oldest k n o w n p e r m a n e n t s e t t l e m e n t in Anatolia ( R o s e n b e r g , 1994). C i r c u l a r h o u s e s a p p e a r e d i n e a c h of t h e t w o levels o f o c c u p a t i o n , w h o s e e c o n o m y w a s typical of a food-collecting site. N e a r l y all t h e faunal a n d b o t a n i c a l r e m a i n s a p p e a r t o h a v e c o m e from wild s p e c i e s — t h e e x c e p t i o n b e i n g t h e p i g , w h i c h m a y h a v e b e e n d o m e s t i c a t e d . [See Pigs.] T h i s s u g gests that, contrary t o earlier o p i n i o n s , a n i m a l d o m e s t i c a t i o n p r o b a b l y o c c u r r e d here (in t h e f o r m of pig d o m e s t i c a t i o n ) prior t o t h e d o m e s t i c a t i o n o f plants. Q u e r n s , g r i n d i n g stones, a n d pesties, m a n y of w h i c h w e r e festooned with z o o m o r p h i c d e c o r a t i o n s , d e m o n s t r a t e t h a t wild grains w e r e p r o c e s s e d . O t h e r evidence p o i n t s t o fishing a n d n u t a n d leg u m e g a t h e r i n g s u p p l e m e n t i n g t h e diet. [See Fishing.] W h i l e m o s t of t h e c h i p p e d - s t o n e i n d u s t r y is t o b e a t t r i b u t e d t o obsidian derived from t h e V a n region, t h e microlithic r e p ertoire h a s little i n c o m m o n w i t h c o n t e m p o r a r y c u l t u r e s — w h i c h m a y p o i n t t o outside influences. O b s i d i a n , c o p p e r (or p e r h a p s just c o p p e r o r e ) , a n d M e d i t e r r a n e a n shells suggest t h a t e x c h a n g e also f o r m e d p a r t of t h e H a l l a n C e m i e c o n omy.
E v i d e n c e r e g a r d i n g m o r t a l i t y for t h e site's i n h a b i t a n t s c o m e s f r o m the r e m a i n s of m o r e t h a n five h u n d r e d individ uals f o u n d at Cayonii. O f interest are t h e skeletal r e m a i n s f o u n d associated with t h e so-called skull h o u s e , w h e r e t h e discovery of n u m e r o u s skulls suggests a cult in w h i c h t h e skull p l a y e d a n i m p o r t a n t role. [See Cult.] Additional evi d e n c e revealing t h e religious a n d artistic sensibilities of t h e inhabitants is d e m o n s t r a t e d b y clay figurines f o u n d at t h e site, especially tiiose tiiat a r e early manifestations of t h e m o t h e r - g o d d e s s m o t i f so p r o m i n e n t in later cultures. Al t h o u g h t r u e p o t t e r y w a s a b s e n t , white plaster vessels o c c u r r e d in d i e u p p e r levels.
T h e w e l l - d o c u m e n t e d s e t t l e m e n t at C a y o n i i (c. 8000 BCE) p r o v i d e s revealing data r e g a r d i n g t h e shift from a h u n t e r g a t h e r e r society t o a village-farming e c o n o m y (cf. B r a i d w o o d a n d B r a i d w o o d , 1982; A . O z d o g a n , 1995). F o u r p h a s e s o f settlement cover s o m e five h u n d r e d years a n d dis play u n u s u a l s t a n d a r d i z a t i o n i n their p l a n s . T h e p h a s e I p r e historic settlement covered a p p r o x i m a t e l y 30,000 sq m a t its p e a k a n d was o c c u p i e d b y several u i o u s a n d i n h a b i t a n t s . T h e earliest structures i n s u b p h a s e I w e r e primarily oval a n d set o n virgin soil. S u b p h a s e I I s h o w e d e v i d e n c e of t o w n p l a n n i n g , with a central s q u a r e a n d buildings o n a s o u t h - s o u t h easterly axis. T h e d o m i n a n t b u i l d i n g style is t h e so-called grill building, w h i c h e n c o u r a g e s ventilation. A terrazzo floor
N e v a h Cori is t h e site of a n a c e r a m i c village w h o s e e x cavation was occasioned b y , t h e Atatiirk d a m project o n t h e E u p h r a t e s River ( H a u p t m a n n , 1993). [See Euphrates.] F o u r levels of a c e r a m i c r e m a i n s w e r e recovered. M a n y of t h e twenty-seven tripartite structures excavated are of interest, b u t several are of p a r t i c u l a r n o t e . H o u s e 13 yielded a ter razzo floor with several limestone stelae, o n e of w h i c h is 2.50 m h i g h a n d portrays a h u m a n figure. T h e p r e c e d i n g level of t h e h o u s e p r o d u c e d several m o r e carved stelae. T h e m o n u m e n t a l sculptures a r e said t o indicate t h e p r e s e n c e of a s a n c t u a r y . Several otiier buildings w e r e c o n s t r u c t e d with cross channels r u n n i n g u n d e r t h e walls. Cattle was d o m e s ticated a n d cereals cultivated. [See Cattle a n d Oxen.] Flint w a s t h e stone of choice, b u t n o obsidian h a s b e e n discov ered. Artistic motifs o n several s t o n e vessels m a y link t h e site w i t h P r e - P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c B sites o n t h e L e v a n t i n e coast. F a r d i e r to t h e west, i n t h e h e a r t of t h e plateau, is Asikh Hoyttk, o n e of Anatolia's m o s t i m p o r t a n t Neolithic sites (Esin, 1991,1995). T h e s e t t l e m e n t displays thickly clustered h o u s e s a n d a d o u b l e wall, o n e of s t o n e a n d o n e of m u d brick. F a u n a l r e m a i n s indicate t h a t wild s h e e p a n d goat were c o n s u m e d , b u t t h e r e is n o e v i d e n c e of agriculture in t h e 1 5 -
124
ANATOLIA: Prehistoric Anatolia
m e t e r - d e e p deposit. C e r a m i c s were i n t r o d u c e d in its later levels. T h e sophistication of t h e Asikli assemblage is evi d e n c e that Neolithic settiement in Anatolia was m o r e t h a n just an afterthought of L e v a n t i n e developments. T h e a p p e a r a n c e of p o t t e r y at Neolithic sites in Anatolia is dated to a b o u t 6500 BCE. Catal Hoyiik (East), p e r h a p s t h e best-known site of the C e r a m i c Neolithic (Mellaart, 1967), was c o m p o s e d of buildings with contiguous walls a n d e n tryways t h r o u g h t h e roof. T h e solid exterior face of t h e vil lage probably served as a simple defensive device. Utilitarian pottery is found in all thirteen of its excavated levels. A c eramic levels were n o t found b u t are t h o u g h t t o lie b e n e a t h the ceramic levels. T h e c h i p p e d - s t o n e assemblage from C a tal Hoyiik is notable b e c a u s e the inhabitants m a d e exclusive use of obsidian from local sources. T h e i m p o r t a n c e of this obsidian resource c a n n o t b e overemphasized, as discoveries of central Anatolian obsidian in places s u c h as Jericho i n Syria-Palestine are indicative of Early Neolithic exchange. [See Jericho.] M e d i t e r r a n e a n shells, metal ores, a n d pig m e n t s n o t found locally provide additional evidence of a n exchange network. A n i m a l h u s b a n d r y appears to have b e e n i m p o r t a n t to t h e t o w n ' s overall e c o n o m y , witii m o s t of its m e a t coming from cattle. H u n t i n g w a s still a n i m p o r t a n t factor, however, as indicated by t h e b o n e s of wild animals a n d h u n t scenes depicted o n d i e walls of buildings. [See H u n t i n g ; Wall Paintings.] C u l t figurines, shrines with b u c rania, plaster reliefs, a n d wall paintings reflect t h e t o w n ' s religious disposition. T h e site comes t o a n e n d in a b o u t 5400 BCE b u t is s u c c e e d e d b y a settlement in t h e Early C h a l c o lithic period. Hacilar (Mellaart, 1970) illustrates a L a t e Neolithic t r a dition s o m e w h a t farther west of Catal Ployvik a n d provides a key link with other L a t e Neolithic ttaditions. T h e Early A c e r a m i c period (of which there were seven sublevels t h a t e n d e d in a b o u t 6700 BCE) e n d e d with an a b a n d o n m e n t of approximately one t h o u s a n d years. T h e succeeding six lev els ( I X - V I ) , which span a period from a b o u t 5700 t o 5600 BCE) represent typical Neolithic agricultural settlements t h a t cultivated w h e a t a n d barley along with lentils. Only t h e d o g was domesticated, a n d h u n t i n g still provided a s u p p l e m e n t to the local diet. P o t t e r y a p p e a r s for t h e first time in level I X , and exquisite clay figurines, p r o b a b l e d o m e s t i c cult stat ues, appear i n Neolithic levels I X - V I . In Cilicia t h e sites of M e r s i n a n d T a r s u s m a i n t a i n e d their close links with t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n plain. [See Cilicia.] Central Anatolian obsidian found at M e r s i n illustrates t h e contact between Cilicia a n d t h e plateau. K o s k H o y u k , l o cated near N i g d e , is again close t o t h e obsidian sources (Silistreli, 1989). N o t surprisingly, 90 percent of its c h i p p e d stone assemblage is c o m p o s e d of obsidian. Its strategic situation leading t o t h e Cilician gates, along with t h e obsid ian a n d crafted pottery a n d figurines that parallel t h e Catal Hoyiik assemblage, suggests a n exchange of materials a n d ideas a m o n g Cilicia, t h e ' A m u q , a n d t h e L e v a n t . [See
' A m u q ; Levant.] Hoyticek, n e a r L a k e B u r d u r , is i m p o r t a n t as a site t h a t was a p r e d e c e s s o r t o d i e L a t e Neolithic (levels , I X - V I ) at Hacilar ( D u r u 1993). I n the n o r t h w e s t , t h e earliest levels at H o c a C e s m e H o y u k in T h r a c e also s h o w c o n n e c tions witii Hacilar levels I X - V I a n d p r o v i d e clues a b o u t t h e w i d e s p r e a d character of t h e Anatolian L a t e Neolithic ( O z d o g a n , 1993). Neolithic innovations o c c u r r e d in Anatolia over a n e x t e n d e d period a n d i n widely differing regions—establishing a tradition that w a s b o t h rich a n d c o m p l e x . Early on, settle m e n t s practiced a m i x e d e c o n o m y c o m p o s e d of food g a t h ering, food p r o d u c t i o n , a n d e x c h a n g e , with surplus g o o d s leading to social complexity at places like C a y o n i i a n d Catal Hoytik. Pyrotechnological industries w e r e i n their initial stage of d e v e l o p m e n t , as evidenced b y metals a n d p o t t e r y (Esin, 1995; S c h m a n d t - B e s s e r a t , 1977). Artistic r e p r e s e n tations at Catal H o y i i k a n d N e v a h Cori p r o v i d e e v i d e n c e of religious sensibilities a n d t h e ability t o t h i n k in t h e abstract. Evidence of e x c h a n g e provides a w i n d o w t o a c o m p l e x e x traregional perspective tiiat m u s t already h a v e b e e n taking s h a p e at this early date (Yakar, 1991). C h a l c o l i t h i c P e r i o d . T h e innovations a n d technologies t h a t originated i n t h e Neolithic p e r i o d w e r e e x p a n d e d i n t h e Chalcolithic period. Excavations a n d surveys b e a r witness to a w i d e n i n g n e t w o r k of settlements across a b r o a d r a n g e of environmental settings (cf. Yakar, 1985; S u m m e r s , 1993; Efe, 1993; Parzinger, 1993; Algaze, 1994; G o r n y et al„ 1995c). T h e Chalcolithic is generally delineated into t h r e e chronological p h a s e s : Early (5500-5000 B C E ) , M i d d l e (5000-4500 BCE), a n d L a t e (4500-3000 BCE). T h e e m e r g e n c e of t h e Anatolian plateau as an i m p o r t a n t center of settlement i n t h e prehistoric p e r i o d m e a n s t h a t discussions regarding t h e Anatolian Chalcolithic m u s t take into a c c o u n t n o t only chronological factors, b u t a n e x p a n d e d g e o g r a p h i c r a n g e i n w h i c h c o n t e m p o r a r y d e v e l o p m e n t s o c c u r alongside e a c h other o n b o t h t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n plain a n d in d i e E u r o - A n a t o l i a n regions.
Anatolia
and the Syro-Mesopotamian
plain.
The
t h r e e phases of t h e Chalcolithic p e r i o d i n d i e Syro-Anatolian region developed gradually from t h e N e o l i t h i c p e r i o d o n w a r d , witii n o indication of cultural u p h e a v a l . Hacilar I - V (Mellaart, 1970) r e m a i n s t h e principle site for t h e Anatolian Early Chalcolithic. A n i m a l h u s b a n d r y p r o b a b l y existed at Hacilar just as it d i d at C a n H a s a n , w h e r e s h e e p , goats, cat tle, a n d p e r h a p s pigs w e r e kept ( F r e n c h , 1972). T h e d o g is t h e only animal for w h i c h t h e r e is e v i d e n c e of d o m e s t i c a t i o n . Paleobotanical research discovered e m m e r a n d e i n k o r n w h e a t , along with barley, lentils, p e a , bitter vetch, pistachio, a n d a l m o n d . W h a t set Chalcolithic Hacilar a p a r t from o t h e r Anatolian settlements, however, w a s t h e r e d - o n - c r e a m p o t tery of levels I I - V ; its quality is u n p a r a l l e d t h r o u g h o u t b o t h Anatolia a n d t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t until m u c h later times. In addition t o t h e ceramics, a later p h a s e of figurines w a s u n c o v e r e d at Chalcolithic Flacilar. T h e y lack t h e creativity
ANATOLIA: Prehistoric Anatolia a n d zest f o u n d in t h e earlier N e o l i t h i c e x a m p l e s a n d e v e n tually d e g e n e r a t e d into s c h e m a t i z e d violin-shaped e x a m p l e s in level I. T h e early levels r e m a i n e d u n p r o t e c t e d , b u t a d e fensive p e r i m e t e r w a s f o r m e d i n level II b y t h e construction of a fortification wall 1.5-3 m thick. T h e village s h o w e d ev i d e n c e of specialization, w i t h various industries located i n their o w n sectors. Shrines i n t h e site's n o r t h e a s t corner, along with t h e p r e s e n c e of m o t h e r - g o d d e s s figurines, i n d i cate c o n t i n u i n g religious sensibilities. T h e settlement w a s d e s t r o y e d a n d t h e n resettled. I t s n e w inhabitants built a n even stronger fortification wall. Hacilar I c a m e t o a violent e n d in a b o u t 4800 BCE a n d a p p e a r s t o h a v e left n o heirs t o its rich traditions. T h e Cilician t o w n s of M e r s i n a n d T a r s u s again r e p r e s e n t t h e n o r t h e r n m o s t extension of t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n cul t u r a l z o n e a n d p r o v i d e a p o t e n t i a l interface for c o n n e c t i n g t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n a n d E u r o - A n a t o l i a n worlds. Early Chalcolithic M e r s i n (levels X X I I I - X X ) shows Halaf inspi ration in its c e r a m i c s e q u e n c e , b u t t h e M i d d l e Chalcolithic is p o o r l y r e p r e s e n t e d . T h e c e r a m i c r e p e r t o i r e begins t o s h o w U b a i d influences in t h e L a t e Chalcolithic (level X V I ) , w h e n t h e t o w n was d e f e n d e d b y a wall, a fortified gate, a n d a glaci ( G a r s t a n g , 1953). A large r e s i d e n c e a n d outbuildings give t h e settlement t h e a p p e a r a n c e of a military q u a r t e r s . T h e t o w n w a s leveled b y a t t a c k in a b o u t 4300 BCE. T h e M i d d l e Chalcolithic, is b e s t r e p r e s e n t e d b y a string of settlements stretching a l o n g t h e E u p h r a t e s River f r o m Lower Mesopotamia to the Middle Euphrates. Late Ubaid evidence f o u n d at sites along this r o u t e , s u c h as a t D e g i r m e n t e p e , suggests t h a t M e s o p o t a m i a n s e x p a n d e d into t h e area i n o r d e r t o exploit t h e r e s o u r c e s of t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a tes (Esin, 1989; H e n d r i c k s o n a n d T h u e s e n , 1989). W h i l e t h e T a u r u s M o u n t a i n s are generally c o n s i d e r e d t o h a v e b e e n a barrier t o i n t e r c o u r s e b e t w e e n t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n a n d E u r o - A n a t o l i a n cultural z o n e s , t h e p r e s e n c e of U b a i d p o t tery a t Fraktin suggests t h a t M e s o p o t a m i a n influences c o u l d h a v e p e n e t r a t e d into central Anatolia a t this very early date. [See T a u r u s M o u n t a i n s , ] I n n o r t h e a s t e r n Anatolia t h e r e is increasing evidence o f T r a n s - C a u c a s i a n culture b y t h e e n d of t h e L a t e Chalcolithic ( S a g o n a , 1984). T h e g r o u p ' s u n i q u e red-black polished p o t tery p r o v i d e s a reliable m e a n s of t r a c i n g this culture from t h e C a u c a s u s into Anatolia; h o w e v e r , t h e sparcity of s e c u r e data m a k e s it difficult t o p r o v i d e assess t h e g r o u p ' s i m p a c t o n Anatolia's cultural d e v e l o p m e n t . T h e L a t e Chalcolithic p e r i o d is b e s t d o c u m e n t e d b y a n o t h e r M e s o p o t a m i a n i n t r u sion. Following t h e lead of their U b a i d p r e d e c e s s o r s , U r u k elements settled i n Anatolia as far n o r t h as t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s , a t n u m e r o u s sites a l o n g t h e river: a t H a b u b a K a bira, C a r c h e m i s h , K u r b a n H o y i i k , S a m s a t H o y u k , H a c i n e b i T e p e , N o r s u n t e p e , a n d m o s t notably at Arslantepe (Frang i p a n e , 1988-1989). [See F l a b u b a K a b i r a ; C a r c h e m i s h ; A r slantepe.] T h e w i d e s p r e a d U r u k system collapsed s u d d e n l y in a b o u t 3000 BCE (Algaze, 1993; cf. Stein, f o r t h c o m i n g ) .
12 5
Euro-Anatolian zone. S o m e studies postulate that at roughly t h e s a m e t i m e in w h i c h i m p o r t a n t d e v e l o p m e n t s were s h a p i n g Neolithic a n d Chalcolithic traditions o n t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n plain, intensive interaction b e t w e e n E u r o p e a n d Anatolia w a s establishing i n d e p e n d e n t links b e t w e e n the t w o regions. Prehistoric c o n n e c t i o n s b e t w e e n A n atolia a n d t h e Balkans a s s u m e internal d e v e l o p m e n t rather t h a n external influence, w i t h a g e o g r a p h i c range e x t e n d i n g from t h e H u n g a r i a n plain t o t h e s o u t h e a s t e r n stretches o f Anatolia, w h e r e it is effectively c u t off from contact with M e s o p o t a m i a b y t h e T a u r u s M o u n t a i n s ( O z d o g a n , 1993). E v i d e n c e suggests t w o p h a s e s of contact: t h e first, begin n i n g in a b o u t 5500 BCE ( T h i s s e n , 1993; T o d o r o v a , 1993)— or r o u g h l y c o n t e m p o r a r y w i t h t h e Early Chalcolithic of t h e S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n r e g i o n — a n d c o n t i n u i n g until t h e b e ginning of t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m , w h e n several elements m a y h a v e b e e n responsible for a cultural break. A m o n g these elements w e r e tectonic activity, h i g h e r t e m p e r a t u r e s resulting from climatic c h a n g e , long periods of d r o u g h t , e r o sion, c h a n g i n g sea levels, a n d / o r n o m a d i c invasions ( T o dorova, 1993; L i c h a r d u s - I t t e n , 1993). T h e resulting b r e a k d o w n of existing social structures lasted approximately eight h u n d r e d years, d u r i n g w h i c h t i m e t h e affected areas wit nessed mostly local d e v e l o p m e n t (Makkey, 1993; T o d o r o v a , 1993)- T h e s e c o n d p h a s e , b e g i n n i n g at t h e e n d of the fourth m i l l e n n i u m , saw a stabilization of e n v i r o n m e n t a l conditions, w h i c h l e d t o tire r e n e w a l of cultural interaction b e t w e e n southeast E u r o p e a n d Anatolia ( T o d o r o v a , 1993). E v i d e n c e for t h e s p r e a d of E u r o - A n a t o l i a n culture into central Anatolia c o m e s first from sites in t h e northwest, s u c h as Y a n m b u r g a z ( O z d o g a n , 1991) a n d l l i p i n a r ( R o o d e n b e r g , 1993). I t is also a p p a r e n t a t central Anatolian sites such as Ali§ar I-Ioyiik a n d Gelveri, w h e r e curvilinear-decorated p o t tery of t h e so-called fruchenstich t e c h n i q u e is dated t o b e t w e e n 4000 a n d 3500 BCE (Esin, 1993; T h i s s e n , 1993; G o r n y , i995a). G r a p h i t e - s l i p p e d pottery f o u n d a t C a d i r Ployuk a n d Alisar is linked with t h e K a r a n o v a V I V i n c a D culture a n d provides a date b e t w e e n 3000 a n d 3500 BCE for settlement at b o t h Alisar a n d C a d i r ( T h i s s e n , 1993; G o r n y , 1995a). F u r t h e r evidence for t h e b r e a d t h of L a t e Chalcolithic culture comes from s o u t h w e s t e r n sites s u c h as E l m a h (Eslick, 1992), Beycesultan (Mellaart, 1962), a n d Aphrodisias (Jorikowsky, 1986), w h e r e cultural d e v e l o p m e n t m a y h a v e some c o n n e c tion with earlier influences from Hacilar. [See Aphrodisias.] T h e Chalcolithic p e r i o d witnessed t h e dramatic devel o p m e n t o f earlier Neolithic t h e m e s . F o o d p r o d u c t i o n b e g a n t o take o n a s t a n d a r d a p p e a r a n c e across t h e plateau, with m o s t of t h e major categories of plants a n d animals d o m e s ticated. H o r t i c u l t u r e , h o w e v e r , does n o t seem t o have m a d e its a p p e a r a n c e until t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m ( G o r n y , 1995a). T h e h u n t i n g a n d g a t h e r i n g of foodstuffs still a u g m e n t e d t h e Anatolian diet, b u t t h e y w e r e declining. Artistic expression r e a c h e d a height in t h e p o t t e r y of Hacilar, a n d cosmological t h e m e s a r e recognizable i n s u c h religious motifs as m o t h e r -
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g o d d e s s figurines. Increasing social complexity s e e m s t o have fueled the c o m p e t i t i o n for limited r e s o u r c e s , w h i c h m a y a c c o u n t for the evidence of fortifications a n d major defensive systems at M e r s i n a n d H a c i l a r — e v i d e n c e t h a t b e trays an ability to c o o r d i n a t e massive a m o u n t s of labor and capital. By the b e g i n n i n g of t h e third millennium (Early B r o n z e Age I) t h e r e w e r e increasing p o i n t s of c o n t a c t along t h e E u r o - A n a t o l i a n a n d S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n interface. T h a t barrier gradually b r o k e d o w n , h o w e v e r , a n d a n increasing orientalization of t h e Anatolian plateau took p l a c e t h a t greatiy influenced interaction b e t w e e n Anatolia, Syria, a n d M e s o p o t a m i a in the historical periods. BIBLIOGRAPHY Algaze, Guillermo. The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Early Me sopotamian Civilization. Chicago, 1 9 9 3 . Algaze, Guillermo, et al. " T h e Tigris-Euphrates Archaeological R e connaissance Project: Final Report of the Birecik and Carchemish D a m Survey A r e a s . " Anatolica 20 (1994): 1 - 1 4 4 . Bordaz, J. " C u r r e n t Research in the Neolithic of South Central T u r k e y : Suberde, Erbaba, a n d T h e i r Chronological Implications." American Journal of Archaeology 7 7 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 282-288. Bordaz, J". "Erbaba: T h e 1 9 7 7 a n d 1978 Excavations in Perspective." Turk Arkeolofi Dergesi 26 (1982): 8 5 - 9 3 . Braidwood, Linda S„ and R o b e r t J. Braidwood, eds. Prehistoric Village Archaeology in South-Eastern Turkey. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 1 3 8 . Oxford, 1982. Butzer, Karl W . "Physical Conditions in Eastern E u r o p e , Western Asia, and Egypt before the Period of Agricultural a n d U r b a n Settlement." In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1 . 1 , edited by I. E. S. Edwards et al., p p . 3 5 - 6 9 . C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 7 0 . Butzer, Karl W . Archaeology as Human Ecology: Method and Theory for a Contextual Approach. C a m b r i d g e , 1982. Childe, V. G o r d o n . New Light on the Most Ancient East. 4th ed. N e w York, t 9 5 2 . Cohen, H. " T h e Paleoecology of South Central Anatolia at the E n d of the Pleistocene and the Beginning of tire H o l o c e n e . " Anatolian Stud ies 20 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 1 9 - 1 3 7 . D u r u , Refik. "Hoyiicek Kazilan." Kazi Sonuclan Toplantisi 1 4 . 1 (1993): 1 4 7 - 1 5 3 . Efe, T u r h a n . "Chalcolithic Pottery from the M o u n d s of Aslanapa a n d Kinik." Anatolica 19 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 9 - 3 1 . Esin, Ufuk, "An Early T r a d i n g Center in Eastern Anatolia." In Anatolia and the Ancient Near East: Studies in Honor of Tahsin Ozgiic, edited by Kutlu E m r e et al., p p . 1 3 5 - 1 4 1 . Ankara, 1989. Esin, Ufuk. "Salvage Excavations at the Pre-Pottery Site of Asikli H b yiik in Central Anatolia." Anatolica 17 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 2 4 - 1 7 4 . Esin, Ufuk. "Gelveri: Ein Beispiel fur die kulturellen Bezeihungen zwischen Zentralanatolien und Siidosteuropa w a h r e n d des Chalko\ithikums." Anatolica 19 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 4 7 - 5 6 . Esin, Ufuk. "Metallurgy at the Prehistoric Site of Asikh." In Prehistorya Yazilan: Readings in Prehistory, p p . 6 1 - 7 8 . Istanbul, 1 9 9 5 . Eslick, Christine M . Elmah-KarataS I, the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Pe riods: Bagbasi and Other Sites. Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1992. Frangipane, Marcella. "Aspects of Centralization in the L a t e U r u k P e riod in the M e s o p o t a m i a n Periphery." Origini 1 4 ( 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 9 ) : 5 3 5 560. French, David H . "Excavations at C a n Hasan II, 1 9 6 9 - 7 0 . " In Papers
in Economic Prehistory, edited by David H . F r e n c h et al., p p . 18c— 190. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 7 2 . Garstang, John. Prehistoric Mersin: Yiimiik Tepe in Southern Turkey. Oxford, 1 9 5 3 . G o l d m a n , Hetty, ed. Excavations
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1956. Gorny, Ronald L . Review essay on Anatolica 19 (special issue on " A n atolia a n d the B a l k a n s " ) . Biblical Archaeologist 58 ( 1 9 9 5 a ) : 1 1 9 - 1 2 2 . Gorny, Ronald L . "Viticulture and Ancient Anatolia." In The Ancient Origins of Wine, edited by Patrick E. M c G o v e r n , p p . 1 3 3 - 1 7 4 . N e w ark, 1995b. Gorny, Ronald L . , et al. " T h e Alisar Regional Project, 1994 S e a s o n . " Anatolica 21 ( 1 9 9 5 c ) : 6 8 - 1 0 0 . H a u p t m a n n , Harald. "Ein K u l t g e b a u d e in Nevali C o r i . " In Between the Rivers and over the Mountains: Archaeologica Anatolica et Mesopota mia, Alba Palmieri Dedicata, edited by Marcella F r a n g i p a n e et al., pp. 37-69. Rome, 1993. Henrickson, Elizabeth F . , a n d Ingolf T h u e s e n , eds. Upon This Foun dation: The' Ubaid Reconsidered. Carsten N i e b u h r Institute of Ancient N e a r East Studies, 10. C o p e n h a g e n , 1 9 8 9 . See die introduction by Henrickson a n d T h u e s e n . Joukowsky, M a r t h a Sharpe. Prehistoric Aphrodisias: An Account of the Excavations and Artifact Studies. 2 vols. Archaeologia T r a n s a t l a n t i c , 3,39. Providence, R.I., 1 9 8 6 . Joukowsky, M a r t h a S h a r p e . Early Turkey: An Introduction to the Ar chaeology of Anatolia from Prehistory through the Lydian Period. F o r t h coming, Lichardus-Itten, M a r i o n . " Z u m Beginn des Neolithikums im T a l der S t r u m a . " Anatolica 1 9 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 9 9 - 1 1 6 . Makkay, Janos. " P o t t e r y Links between L a t e Neolithic Cultures of the N W Pontic a n d Anatolia and the Origins of the Hittites." Anatolica 19 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 1 7 - 1 2 8 . Mellaart, James, Beycesultan I: The Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Levels. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 2 . Mellaart, James. Catal Hoyiik: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. L o n d o n , 1967. Mellaart, James. Excavations at Hacilar. 2 vols. E d i n b u r g h , 1 9 7 0 . Mellaart, James. The Neolithic of the Near East. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 5 . M e r i c , R. " P r e - B r o n z e Age Settlements of W e s t - C e n t r a l Anatolia," Anatolica 19 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 4 3 - 1 4 7 . Osten, H a n s H e n n i n g . The Alisar Hoyiik: Seasons of 1930-32. Oriental Institute Publications, 2 8 . 1 . Chicago, 1 9 3 7 . 6 z d o g a n , Ash. "Life at Cayonii d u r i n g the Pre-Pottery Neolithic P e riod." In Prehistorya Yazilan: Readings in Prehistory, p p . 7 9 - 1 0 0 . Is tanbul, 1 9 9 5 . O z d o g a n , M e h m e t . " A n Interim R e p o r t on the Excavations at Y a n m b u r g a z a n d T o p t e p e in Eastern T h r a c e . " Anatolica 17 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 59-120. Ozdogan, M e h m e t . "Vinca a n d Anatolia: A N e w L o o k at a Very O l d P r o b l e m . " A n a t o l i c a 19 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 7 3 - 1 9 3 . Ozdogan, M e h m e t . "Neolithic Anatolia: T h e State of C u r r e n t R e search." In Prehistorya Yazilan: Readings in Prehistory, p p . 4 1 - 6 0 . Istanbul, 1 9 9 5 . O z d o g a n , M e h m e t . " P r e - B r o n z e Age S e q u e n c e of Central Anatolia: An Alternative A p p r o a c h . " In Beran Festschrift. F o r t h c o m i n g . Parzinger, H , " Z u r Zeitstellung der Biiyiikkaya-ware: Bemerkungen zur vorbronzezeitlichen Kulturfolge Zentralanatoliens." Anatolica 1 9 (1993): 2 1 1 - 2 2 9 , R o o d e n b e r g , J. "Ilipinar X to VI: Links and C h r o n o l o g y . " Anatolica 1 9 (1993): 2 5 1 - 2 6 7 . Rosenberg, M . "Hallan Cemi Tepisi, A n Early Aceramic Neolithic Site in Eastern Anatolia: S o m e Preliminary Observations C o n c e r n i n g Material C u l t u r e . " Anatolica 20 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 - 1 8 .
ANATOLIA: Ancient Anatolia Sagona, A. G. The Caucasian Region in the Early Bronze Age. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 214. Oxford, 1984. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. " T h e Beginnings of the U s e of Clay in T u r k e y . " Anatolian Studies 27 (1977): 133-150. Silistreli, U g u r . " L e s fouilles d e K5sk H o y i i k . " In Anatolia and the An cient Near East: Studies in Honor of Tahsin Ozguc, edited b y Kutlu E m r e et al., p p . 461-463. Ankara, 1989. Singh, P u r u s h o t t a m . The Neolithic
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1974Stein, G. " U r u k Colonial E x p a n s i o n a n d Anatolian C o m m u n i t i e s : A n Interim R e p o r t on t h e 1992-3 Excavations at Hacirebi, T u r k e y , " American Journal of Archaeology. F o r t h c o m i n g . S u m m e r s , G. D . " T h e Chalcolithic Period in Central Anatolia." In The Fourth Millennium B. C.: Proceedings of the International Symposium, Nessebur, 28-30 August 1992, edited b y Petya Georgieva, p p . 29-48. Sofia, 1993. T h i s s e n , L . " N e w Insights in Balkan-Anatolian Connections in the L a t e Chalcolithic: Old Evidence from t h e T u r k i s h Black Sea Littoral." Anatolian Studies 43 (1993): 207-237. T o d d , Ian A. The Prehistory of Central Anatolia, vol. I, The Neolithic Period. Studies in M e d i t e r r a n e a n Archaeology, vol. 60. G o t e b o r g , 1980. T o d o r o v a , Flenrietta. " D i e Protobronzezeit auf d e r Balkanhalpinsel." Anatolica 19 (1993): 307-318. Voigt, M a r y M . "Village on t h e E u p h r a t e s : Excavations at Neolithic Gritille in T u r k e y . " Expedition 27 (1985): 10-24. Yakar, Jak. The Later Prehistory of Anatolia: The Late Chalcolithic and the Early Bronze Age. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 268. Oxford, 1985. Yakar, Jak. Prehistoric Anatolia: The Neolithic Transformation and the Early Chalcolithic Period. T e l Aviv, 1991. RONALD L . GORNY
Ancient Anatolia Archaeological discoveries i n t h e m o d e r n era have b r o u g h t t o light a r e m a r k a b l e series of i n d i g e n o u s civilizations t h a t arose in Anatolia d u r i n g t h e B r o n z e A g e (c. 3000-1200 BCE) a n d in s u b s e q u e n t centuries before t h e c o n q u e s t s of Alex a n d e r t h e G r e a t in t h e 330s BCE. N o u r i s h e d b y t h e r e g i o n ' s rich subsistence b a s e a n d c o v e t e d m e t a l r e s o u r c e s , tiiese civ ilizations d e v e l o p e d distinctive f o r m s of material culture, r e ligion, a n d writing. A t t h e s a m e time, t h e y w e r e influenced a n d e n r i c h e d b y o n g o i n g c o n t a c t s witii their neighbors. A s with o t h e r areas o f t h e N e a r E a s t a n d A e g e a n , t h e initial i m p e t u s for exploring Anatolia's p r e - R o m a n p a s t c a m e from E u r o p e a n a n d A m e r i c a n interest in t r a c i n g civilizations k n o w n from t h e Bible or f r o m G r e e k epic a n d historical t r a dition. O r g a n i z e d archaeological investigations thus b e g a n in t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y with searches for H o m e r ' s T r o y , t h e G r e e k cities a n d A n a t o l i a n k i n g d o m s of H e r o d o t u s ' s a c c o u n t s , a n d t h e biblical Hittites. T h e rediscovery a n d d o c u m e n t a t i o n of other native a n d of prehistoric cultures fol l o w e d d u r i n g t h e twentieth c e n t u r y , t o g e t h e r with efforts t o explore areas o n c e c o n s i d e r e d p e r i p h e r a l or provincial. W r i t i n g , a n d h e n c e t h e earliest e v i d e n c e for linguistic, e t h nic, a n d historical labels, is first attested in Anatolia shortly after 2000 BCE. [See W r i t i n g a n d W r i t i n g Systems.] T h e s e
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r e c o r d s , t h e archives of A s s y r i a n m e r c h a n t s from n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , d o c u m e n t several ethnic a n d linguistic g r o u p s residing in central Anatolia, a n d t h e y also tie t h e a r chaeological s e q u e n c e s of t h e region to M e s o p o t a m i a n a b solute chronologies. F o r t h e Early B r o n z e A g e (c. 3000-2000 BCE), dates in years are o b t a i n e d b y r a d i o c a r b o n dating a n d b y cross-dating sites u s i n g isolated artifacts that supply syn c h r o n i s m s with t h e absolute chronologies of M e s o p o t a m i a , Syria, a n d Egypt. T h r o u g h o u t the period, archaeological se quences recovered from stratified sites furnish relative c h r o nologies . B r o n z e A g e m e t a l technologies h a d a p r o f o u n d i m p a c t o n t h e location a n d organization of settlements, material cul t u r e , a n d c o m m e r c i a l n e t w o r k s in Anatolia. [See M e t a l s , ar ticle on Artifacts of t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages.] B r o n z e , sil ver, a n d gold were highly p r i z e d for w e a p o n s , tools, a n d p e r s o n a l o r n a m e n t s , a n d t h e influence of these prestige m a terials c a n b e seen i n t h e metallic s h a p e s , colors, a n d highly b u r n i s h e d surfaces of c o n t e m p o r a r y c e r a m i c vessels. S t i m u l a t e d b y t h e d e m a n d for m e t a l s , t r a d e in b o t h r a w materials a n d finished g o o d s s u p p l e m e n t e d t h e settled subsistence e c o n o m y b a s e d o n d r y f a r m i n g a n d animal h u s b a n d r y al r e a d y established in N e o l i t h i c times. Sites of this p e r i o d display distinctive regional styles in architecture, ceramics, m e t a l w o r k , a n d burial c u s t o m s , p e r h a p s reflecting different e t h n i c g r o u p s organized in small states. T h e site of Hisarlik, near Canakkale, illustrates t h e material culture of n o r t h w e s t e r n Anatolia in this period. L o n g identified as t h e T r o y of H o m e r ' s Iliad, t h e site is l o cated in r i c h f a r m l a n d , w i t h access to t h e sea; its fortified citadel enclosed several buildings of a particular p l a n k n o w n as a m e g a r o n . [See the biography of Schliemann.] Quantities of gold a n d silver vessels a n d jewelry preserved in a n u m b e r of " t r e a s u r e s " testify t o a highly developed m e t alworking industry a n d a wealthy elite. [See Jewelry.] M a n y of T r o y ' s i m p o r t a n t c o m m e r c i a l a n d cultural contacts w e r e clearly b y sea, for similar forms of architecture, ceramics, a n d m e t a l w o r k a r e f o u n d a t sites along t h e western coast a n d o n offshore islands. O n t h e s o u t h e r n coast, a t t h e site of K a r a t a s - S e m a y u k n e a r Elmali, west of Antalya, a fortified citadel enclosed structures of m e g a r o n plan. I n contrast to T r o y , w h e r e n o t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m burials have y e t b e e n f o u n d , K a r a t a s yielded a n extensive c e m e t e r y of i n h u m a tions p l a c e d in large c e r a m i c storage jars, or pithoi. T h i s f o r m of burial w a s also c u s t o m a r y in west-central Anatolia, w h e r e it c o n t i n u e d into d i e early s e c o n d millennium BCE. [See Jar Burials.] Still farther east, at t h e coastal site of T a r s u s (Gozlii K u l e ) , n e a r A d a n a , architecture, ceramics, a n d m e t alwork similar to styles attested at T r o y a n d K a r a t a s d e m onstrate t h e r a n g e a n d i m p o r t a n c e of seagoing contacts in this period. [See Seafaring.] I n n o r t h - c e n t r a l Anatolia, a t t h e site of Alaca Hoytik, stone-lined cist burials richly e q u i p p e d with metal vessels, jewelry, a n d w e a p o n s p r o b a b l y b e l o n g e d
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to t h e ruling elite. Elsewhere in central Anatolia, as at Alisar Hoyiik a n d K u l t e p e , fortification walls enclosed settlements with m o d e s t architecture a n d simple i n h u m a t i o n burials; large-scale buildings served as residences a n d administrative centers for the rulers or c o m m u n a l functions, such as t e m ples. In eastern Anatolia, little-known archaeologically in this period, ceramics a n d metalwork reveal links with n o r t h ern Mesopotamia and the Caucasus Mountains. N o written r e c o r d s explain t h e religious beliefs or p r a c tices of E B A n a t o l i a n cultures. C e r a m i c or metal sculptures of bulls, stags, a n d felines, a m o n g other animals, are often interpreted as representations of deities or of animals a s s o ciated with particular deities. Illustrations of deities a n d their animals, or textual descriptions of s u c h images, a r e f o u n d in central Anatolia i n t h e second millennium BCE. S o m e of t h e s a m e animals a p p e a r to h a v e b e e n w o r s h i p p e d in central Anatolia in Neolithic a n d Chalcolithic times, indicating a remarkable continuity in cultic expression over a p e r i o d of several millennia. A series of destruction levels at sites in western Anatolia from t h e m i d - a n d late third millennium h a s b e e n t h o u g h t b y some scholars t o indicate t h e arrival of peoples spealdng I n d o - E u r o p e a n languages, w h o s e p r e s e n c e in central A n a tolia is first d o c u m e n t e d b y personal n a m e s m e n t i o n e d in t h e Assyrian m e r c h a n t s ' archives. [See I n d o - E u r o p e a n L a n guages.] H o w e v e r , w h e r e the h o m e l a n d of t h e I n d o - E u r o p e a n speakers w a s located, a n d h e n c e the r o u t e or routes b y w h i c h they entered Anatolia, a n d w h e n , are issues currentiy u n d e r debate. Beginning in the M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e (2000-1600 BCE), a n d continuing into t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e (1600-1200 BCE), written records s u p p l e m e n t archaeology in d o c u m e n t i n g political and e c o n o m i c organization, as well as ethnic a n d linguistic m a k e u p . T h e earliest written records f o u n d in A n atolia are t h e c o m m e r c i a l archives of m e r c h a n t s from n o r t h ern M e s o p o t a m i a . W r i t t e n in the Old Assyrian dialect of Akkadian, o n e of d i e Semitic languages of M e s o p o t a m i a , in cuneiform script, the r e c o r d s consist of small clay tablets a n d the clay envelopes in which they were originally e n closed. [See Cuneiform.] By far t h e largest m e r c h a n t ar chives have b e e n excavated at K u l t e p e , ancient K a n e s , near Kayseri in central Anatolia, furnishing evidence for t h e or ganization of the t r a d e . [See K u l t e p e T e x t s ; Kanes.] Private, family-based firms established in Assur, t h e capital of t h e Assyrian state of n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , a r r a n g e d for t h e e x p o r t via donkey caravan of textiles a n d g a r m e n t s a n d a metal, probably tin, i n exchange for silver a n d gold. [See Assur; Textiles; T r a n s p o r t a t i o n . ] T h i s t r a d e w a s c o n d u c t e d b y Assyrian commercial representatives, w h o established p e r m a n e n t residence at s o m e twenty centers in central a n d southeastern Anatolia a n d n o r t h e r n Syria; t h e t r a d e contin u e d for at least three generations. [See Assyrians,] T h e texts also provide a glimpse of the local c o m m u n i t i e s with w h o m t h e foreign m e r c h a n t s d i d business a n d occasionally inter
m a r r i e d . References to local Anatolian rulers suggest a p o litical framework of small, i n d e p e n d e n t states, occasionally u n i t e d in t e m p o r a r y alliances t h r o u g h t h e efforts of a p o w erful individual. T h e m e r c h a n t s a n d their families lived in h o u s e s a n d used furnishings a n d utensils indistinguishable from those of the local residents. I m p o r t e d from M e s o p o t a m i a , t h e A k k a d i a n l a n g u a g e a n d cuneiform script s e e m n o t to h a v e b e e n a d o p t e d for u s e b y native Anatolians. M a n y d o c u m e n t s are sealed w i t h cylinder seals, however, a M e s o p o t a m i a n i n v e n t i o n t h a t s p a w n e d a native Anatolian style depicting local deities a n d scenes of w o r s h i p . [See Seals.] I m p r e s s i o n s of these seals a r e f o u n d o n clay envelopes alongside t h o s e of M e s o p o t a m i a n a n d N o r t h Syrian glyptic styles. T h e indigenous f o r m of seal w a s t h e s t a m p , w h i c h w a s u s e d along witii t h e cylinder, a n d c o n t i n u e d after t r a d e w i t h Assyria e n d e d . I n a b o u t 1750 BCE, t h e m e r c h a n t settlements a n d local c o m m u n i t i e s w e r e destroyed a n d a b a n d o n e d . P e r h a p s a c e n t u r y later, a p e o p l e k n o w n as t h e Hittites established a n e w political o r d e r from their capital city, H a t t u s a , t o d a y called Bogazkoy. [See Hittites; Bogazkoy.] Earlier t h e site of an Assyrian m e r c h a n t colony a n d local settlement, H a t t u s a served as t h e capital of t h e Hittite O l d K i n g d o m (1650-1400 BCE) a n d E m p i r e (1400-1200 BCE) a l m o s t c o n t i n u o u s l y for m o r e t h a n four h u n d r e d years. F r o m this regional b a s e , t h e Hittite kings gradually e x p a n d e d their d o m a i n b y f r e q u e n t military c a m p a i g n s a n d c a m e t o rule over m o s t of central a n d southeastern Anatolia. T h e language of t h e Hittites h a s b e e n p r e s e r v e d in e x t e n sive cuneiform r e c o r d s o n clay tablets r e c o v e r e d f r o m H a t t u s a . K n o w n i n t h e texts as N e s h i t e , it b e l o n g s to t h e I n d o - E u r o p e a n family of languages. T w o o t h e r languages preserved i n t h e archives, L u w i a n a n d Palaic, a r e closely related to Hittite. [See Luwians.] T h e archives also i n c l u d e texts written in A k k a d i a n , t h e Semitic l a n g u a g e of M e s o potamia; Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language spoken b y t h e Hittites' n e i g h b o r s to t h e southeast; a n d H a t t i a n , a n other n o n - I n d o - E u r o p e a n l a n g u a g e a p p a r e n t l y s p o k e n b y t h e pre-Hittite i n h a b i t a n t s of central Anatolia. [See A k k a dian; H u r r i a n . ] A m o n g t h e contents of t h e archives are royal laws, decrees, edicts, treaties, a n d letters; annals; literary works, epics, a n d m y t h s ; a n d a vast n u m b e r of religious texts relating to festivals, rituals, a n d i n c a n t a t i o n s . T h e c u n e i f o r m script continued as t h e principal writing s y s t e m until t h e e n d of t h e empire. I n addition to c u n e i f o r m , t h e Hittites also e m p l o y e d a hieroglyphic writing consisting of p i c t o g r a p h i c signs. A writing system of Anatolian i n v e n t i o n , t h e h i e r o glyphic script w a s u s e d o n personal seals a n d o n stone m o n u m e n t s carved w i t h figured scenes. T h e l a n g u a g e of t h e h i eroglyphic script w a s n o t Hittite b u t L u w i a n , its close ldn also written in c u n e i f o r m script o n texts f o u n d a t H a t t u s a . F r o m their political h e a r t l a n d i n n o r t h - c e n t r a l Anatolia, t h e Hittite kings ruled over a n ethnically a n d linguistically diverse e m p i r e . A t its m a x i m u m extent, in t h e t h i r t e e n t h
ANATOLIA: Ancient Anatolia c e n t u r y BCE, Hittite influence—if n o t o u t r i g h t political c o n t r o l — r e a c h e d far into w e s t - c e n t r a l Anatolia. In this region, t h e Hittites c a m e into conflict with a p o w e r called t h e king d o m of A r z a w a , w h i c h s e e m s t o h a v e o c c u p i e d t h e coastal regions of w e s t e r n a n d s o u t h e r n Anatolia, a n d w h o s e lan g u a g e was L u w i a n . A r z a w a w a s d e s t r o y e d b y t h e Hittites in a b o u t 1350 BCE. F a r t h e r w e s t lay t h e state k n o w n in Hittite texts as A h h i y a w a , w h i c h h a s l o n g b e e n identified b y s o m e w i t h t h e M y c e n a e a n ( A c h a e a n ) G r e e k s . T h e Hittite kings m a i n t a i n e d active d i p l o m a t i c e x c h a n g e s with t h e great e m pires to t h e south a n d east: t h e M i t a n n i , centered in n o r t h e r n Syria a n d M e s o p o t a m i a ; E g y p t ; Babylonia; a n d Assyria. E g y p t i a n d o c t o r s a n d B a b y l o n i a n sculptors were invited to t h e Hittite court b y t h e king himself, a n d diplomatic m a r riages w e r e a r r a n g e d a m o n g t h e i m m e d i a t e m e m b e r s of these e m p i r e s ' ruling families. T h e close relationships the kings enjoyed w i t h their c o u n t e r p a r t s in n e i g h b o r i n g e m pires are richly illustrated b y t h e A m a r n a letters, royal cor r e s p o n d e n c e written in A k k a d i a n a n d f o u n d at t h e site of A m a r n a in E g y p t , dating principally f r o m t h e reigns of p h a r aohs A m e n h o t e p III a n d A k h e n a t e n (c. 1360-1330 BCE). [See A m a r n a Tablets.] Yet, a t t h e s a m e t i m e , t h e Hittites f o u g h t w i t h E g y p t over control of Syria's rich f a r m l a n d s a n d thriv ing coastal p o r t s . F i n d s of r a w materials, s u c h as ingots, t o g e t h e r w i t h l u x u r y finished g o o d s , d e m o n s t r a t e t h a t e x t e n sive t r a d e a n d p e r h a p s also d i p l o m a t i c contacts flourished in t h e A e g e a n region. T h e Hittite E m p i r e , t h r o u g h its i m p o r t a n t p o r t at U g a r i t , w a s a n active participant. [See U g a rit.] H a t t u s a h o u s e d i m p r e s s i v e buildings of administrative a n d religious function, s u r r o u n d e d b y m o n u m e n t a l fortifi cation walls pierced b y a few elaborate gates with carved sculptural decoration. M a s s i v e stone f o u n d a t i o n s , h e w n with h a r d e r stones or iron tools, also s e c u r e d m u d - b r i c k walls with t i m b e r f r a m e w o r k for p a l a c e structures, in w h i c h t h e extensive archives m e n t i o n e d previously w e r e f o u n d . O n higher g r o u n d , a b o v e t h e palace-citadel, a religious p r e c i n c t h o u s e d s o m e thirty t e m p l e s a l m o s t identical in plan, p r o b ably built in o n e massive p h a s e of c o n s t r u c t i o n d u r i n g t h e t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. B e l o w t h e palace-citadel a m o n u m e n t a l t e m p l e adjoined b y extensive storage facilities w a s a p p a r e n t l y d e d i c a t e d to t h e H i t t i t e s ' chief deities, t h e s t o r m g o d , T e s u b , a n d s u n g o d d e s s , H e p a t (see below). O u t s i d e t h e capital few sites h a v e b e e n intensively excavated, b u t at least several smaller cities b o a s t e d architecture a n d s c u l p t u r e e m u l a t i n g imperial fashions: m o d e s t palaces, city walls d e c o r a t e d w i t h figural relief s c u l p t u r e s , a n d g u a r d i a n gate fig u r e s . C e r a m i c styles t h r o u g h o u t t h e e m p i r e are virtually identical t o t h o s e f o u n d at H a t t u s a , p e r h a p s suggesting a centrally a d m i n i s t e r e d i n d u s t r y . T e x t s f o u n d i n t h e H a t t u s a archives, t o g e t h e r w i t h r e m a i n s of t e m p l e s a n d o t h e r cult sites, furnish i n f o r m a t i o n o n t h e religion of t h e Hittites. T h e i r p a n t h e o n consisted of m a l e a n d female deities personifying forces of n a t u r e , b u t it
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also i n c l u d e d deities of t h e Syrian a n d M e s o p o t a m i a n relig ions. T h e i c o n o g r a p h y of t h e p a n t h e o n is k n o w n from relief preserved at cult sites, especially t h e rock sanctuary of Yazihkaya, near H a t t u s a . T h e deities w e r e often associated with a particular animal, w h o s e i m a g e could b e w o r s h i p p e d as a representative of t h e deity. Iconographically, s o m e are closely related to deities d e p i c t e d in the native Anatolian seals of t h e Assyrian m e r c h a n t colonies (see a b o v e ) . Cult sites, usually consisting of a stone m o n u m e n t or rock face carved with a scene of w o r s h i p , h a v e b e e n found over a wide area of Anatolia, s u p p l e m e n t i n g textual d o c u m e n t a t i o n for an extraordinarily active calendar of religious festivals cele b r a t e d b y t h e Hittite ldng a n d q u e e n t h r o u g h o u t t h e e m p i r e . In a b o u t 1200 BCE, H a t t u s a was destroyed. T h e reasons for t h e destruction of this a n d other Hittite cities, a n d t h e s u b s e q u e n t collapse of t h e e m p i r e , are n o t well u n d e r s t o o d . P r e s u m a b l y , there w e r e significant m o v e m e n t s of peoples t h r o u g h o u t Anatolia t h a t s u c c e e d e d in disrupting t h e e m pire's established political a n d military authority. W h a t e v e r t h e c a u s e , t h e site of H a t t u s a was virtually a b a n d o n e d for s o m e t i m e a n d never again s u p p o r t e d a major city. F o r t h e p e r i o d b e g i n n i n g in a b o u t 1200 BCE, k n o w n in archaeological t e r m s as t h e I r o n Age, almost everywhere in Anatolia a " d a r k a g e " followed the end of t h e Hittite E m pire. Yet, m a n y imperial traditions lived o n in southeastern Anatolia a n d n o r t h e r n Syria, formerly b o r d e r provinces. T h e r e , small k i n g d o m s w e r e established, probably b y 1000 BCE, w h e n hieroglyphic inscriptions in t h e L u w i a n language again a p p e a r e d o n s t o n e m o n u m e n t s . As w i t h t h e hiero glyphic script of Hittite imperial times, these texts were mostly official a n d highly restricted in content, consisting primarily of c o m m e m o r a t i v e a n d dedicatory inscriptions, b o u n d a r y m a r k e r s , a n d l a n d grants. T h e N e o - H i t t i t e states also c o n t i n u e d imperial traditions of m o n u m e n t a l stone ar chitecture a n d reliefs d e c o r a t i n g city walls a n d gates. Also b e g i n n i n g in a b o u t 1000 BCE, t h e A r a m e a n s , a Semiticspeaking p e o p l e , m o v e d into n o r t h w e s t Syria a n d estab lished neighboring, a n d s o m e t i m e s rival, states. [See A r a m e a n s . ] T h e A r a m e a n s w r o t e their language u s i n g t h e P h o e n i c i a n alphabetic script, b u t d r e w o n Hittite traditions for m o n u m e n t a l stone architecture a n d sculpture. [See P h o e n i c i a n - P u n i c ] L o c a t e d o n or n e a r t h e E u p h r a t e s River a n d in control of t h e lucrative t r a d e r o u t e s b e t w e e n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d t h e Syrian coast, t h e N e o - H i t t i t e a n d A r a m e a n states w e r e well suited to p r o s p e r . Beginning in t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE, t h e y c a m e u n d e r t h e influence a n d t h e n t h e political c o n t t o l of t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n E m p i r e centered in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . B y t h e e n d of t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e states were forced to p a y t r i b u t e to t h e Assyrians. In eastern Anatolia, t h e B r o n z e A g e traditions of c u n e i f o r m script a n d interaction with M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Syria c o n t i n u e d in t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE in t h e k i n g d o m of U r artu. [See Urartu.] C e n t e r e d a r o u n d L a k e V a n , this k i n g d o m c a m e t o p o w e r in t h e early first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, a rival state
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o n t h e n o r t h e r n frontier of t h e Neo-Assyrian E m p i r e . Its n o n - I n d o - E u r o p e a n language, apparentiy related to H u r rian, was written in cuneiform a n d has survived in m a n y official a n d c o m m e m o r a t i v e inscriptions. A t its greatest e x tent, in t h e ninth c e n t u r y BCE, U r a r t u extended well into t h e regions occupied n o w by t h e Republic of A r m e n i a a n d Ira n i a n Azerbaijan. Like d i e N e o - H i t t i t e states, U r a r t u w a s c o n q u e r e d a n d destroyed as a political entity b y Assyrian armies in t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE. U r a r t u also e n g a g e d in diplomatic a n d c o m m e r c i a l exchanges with Phrygia, a n d p e r h a p s also with N o r t h Syria. By contrast, in t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, t h e k i n g d o m s of central a n d western Anatolia b o r r o w e d alphabetic scripts to write their Anatolian languages. Inscriptions in P h r y g i a n , L y d i a n , Lycian, a n d C a r i a n are mostly dedicatory or c o m m e m o r a t i v e , a n d for narrative accounts scholars d e p e n d o n die writings of Plerodotus (fifth c e n t u r y BCE), a native of t h e G r e e k town of Halikarnassos o n t h e southwest coast of A n atolia. [See Lycia.] D u r i n g t h e early first millennium BCE, settlers from m a i n l a n d G r e e c e established colonies o n t h e western and soutitern coasts of Anatolia, a n d later along t h e Black Sea coast. W h i l e closely tied to their m o t h e r cities, these colonies p r o s p e r e d t h r o u g h their e c o n o m i c interaction with Anatolian states, with w h o m they w e r e also linked cul turally. West-central Anatolia c a m e u n d e r t h e control of d i e Phrygians, a n I n d o - E u r o p e a n - s p e a k i n g g r o u p t h a t seems t o have migrated there from t h e far northwest, p r o b a b l y orig inally from T h r a c e , reaching central Anatolia p e r h a p s in a b o u t i i o o BCE. P h r y g i a n inscriptions, mostly votive, a r e f o u n d on rock facades, altars, a n d small objects. Excavations at t h e Phrygian capital of G o r d i o n , west of A n k a r a , h a v e u n c o v e r e d remains of fortifications, m o n u m e n t a l buildings, a n d impressive m m u l u s burials w h o s e rich contents suggest t h a t their o c c u p a n t s were m e m b e r s of the ruling family. [See G o r d i o n ; T u m u l u s . ] C r e m a t i o n seems to h a v e b e e n t h e m o r e typical burial form. H e r o d o t u s a n d later G r e e k tradi tion are the principal written sources on t h e P h r y g i a n s a n d their kings, especially M i d a s , w h o m a y also b e t h e ruler, M i t a , m e n t i o n e d in N e o - A s s y r i a n records. I n o u t d o o r cult places a n d in city temples, t h e Phrygians w o r s h i p p e d a b o v e all Cybele, a n earth goddess of longstanding Anatolian tra dition. G o r d i o n was destroyed i n a b o u t 700 BCE, a p p a r e n t i y by invading C i m m e r i a n s from t h e north, whose attacks o n Anatolia were r e c o r d e d i n b o t h G r e e k a n d N e o - A s s y r i a n sources. T h e downfall of t h e Phrygians enabled a n o t h e r Anatolian k i n g d o m to extend its d o m i n a t i o n toward t h e plateau. U n t i l its c o n q u e s t by t h e A c h a e m e n i d Persians in t h e 540s BCE, t h e L y d i a n k i n g d o m of western Anatolia was ruled from its capital at Sardis, east of Izmir. [See Sardis.] D u r i n g t h e sev e n t h century a n d into t h e first half of die sixth c e n t u r y BCE, the kings of L y d i a , especially C r o e s u s , acquired wealth a n d status that b e c a m e legendary i n later G r e e k tradition. T h e
history of L y d i a a n d its links w i t h t h e coastal G r e e k cities u n d e r its control a r e k n o w n principally t h r o u g h H e r o d o t u s ' s a c c o u n t s ; inscriptions in t h e native l a n g u a g e a r e few a n d mostly votive in content. L y d i a also e x c h a n g e d d i p l o m a t i c envoys with t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n c o u r t . After C r o e s u s ' s defeat b y C y r u s , king of Persia, t h e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e a c q u i r e d t h e vast a n d rich region of Anatolia. T h e A c h a e m e n i d d o m i n a t i o n of Anatolia i n t r o d u c e d n e w cultural elements, i n c l u d i n g l a n g u a g e s a n d scripts, religion, a n d artistic traditions. A r a m a i c , t h e b u reaucratic language of t h e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e , h a s b e e n preserved in t h e f o r m of inscriptions c a r v e d o n grave stelai or o n small objects s u c h as cylinder seals. [See A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d Literature.] Inscriptions n a m i n g I r a n i a n deities or their a m a l g a m a t i o n s with A n a t o l i a n o r G r e e k c o u n t e r parts d e m o n s t r a t e that Iranian religious beliefs w e r e also i n t r o d u c e d into t h e region. U n d e r D a r i u s (r. 520-486 BCE), t h e e m p i r e was organized into p r o v i n c e s called satrapies, ruled by a g o v e r n o r , or s a t r a p , usually a m e m b e r of t h e royal family. I n w e s t e r n Anatolia, t h e satrapies c e n t e r e d at Sardis a n d Daskyleion a r e k n o w n in p a r t t h r o u g h G r e e k a c c o u n t s describing t h e conflict b e t w e e n t h e G r e e k s a n d P e r s i a n s . A r chaeology h a s c o n t r i b u t e d additional i n f o r m a t i o n , showing t h a t t h e satrapal capitals fostered a rich a n d varied artistic m i x c o m b i n i n g G r e e k , native, a n d I r a n i a n traditions. F a r ther south, in L y c i a , inscriptions i n L y c i a n , G r e e k , a n d A r amaic, together w i t h extensive archaeological r e m a i n s , d o c u m e n t a similar cultural flowering u n d e r local d y n a s t s w h o ruled for t h e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e . T h e invasion of M a c e d o n i a n armies l e d b y A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t , w h i c h b e g a n with t h e e m p i r e ' s w e s t e r n m o s t p o s s e s sions in Anatolia i n t h e 330s BCE, b r o u g h t t h e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e t o a n e n d . In his sweep t h r o u g h w e s t e r n Asia, A l e x a n d e r attacked a n d b u r n e d m a n y of Anatolia's great cities. I n 333 BCE h e defeated t h e last A c h a e m e n i d ruler, D a r i u s III, at t h e battle of Issus, n e a r m o d e r n I s k a n d e r u n . [See also Alexandrian E m p i r e ; and Persia, article on A n cient Persia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Akurgal, Ekrem. Die Kunst Anatoliens von Homer bis Alexander. Berlin, 1 9 6 1 . Well-illustrated survey of the native arts of Anatolia in t h e first millennium BCE, with special reference to central a n d western A n a tolia. American Journal of Archaeology. Includes a yearly illustrated newsletter reporting o n excavation a n d survey results in T u r k e y , covering t h e Palaeolithic t h r o u g h Byzantine periods. Initiated by M a c h t e l d J. M e l link, "Archaeology in Asia Minor/Anatolia" ( 1 9 5 5 - 1 9 9 3 ) , the n e w s letter is n o w written by Marie-Henriette C . Gates, "Archaeology in Turkey" (1994-). Bittel, Kurt. Die Hethiter: Die Kunst Anatoliens vom Ende des 3. bis zum Anfang des 1 . Jahrtausends vor Christus. M u n i c h , 1 9 7 6 . Richly illus trated survey focusing on art and architecture, beginning with cul tural developments of the Early Bronze A g e . The Cambridge Ancient History. Vols. 1 - 3 . 2 , 4 . C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 8 8 . Contains authoritative chapters on t h e archaeology a n d history of
ANATOLIA: Anatolia From Alexander to the Rise of Islam Anatolia from the Early Bronze Age through the Achaemenid period. See essays by James Mellaart, Hildegard L e w y , R. A. Crossland, Albrecht Gotze, R. D . Barnett, Carl W . Blegen, M a c h t e l d J . Mellink, J. D . Hawkins,J. M . Cook, and O l i v i e r M a s s o n . Contributions treat ing the Bronze Age, especially archaeological topics, are out of date and need to be s u p p l e m e n t e d b y preliminary or final publications mentioned in the yearly newsletter of the American Journal of Ar chaeology (see above). G u r n e y , O . R. The Hittites. Rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1990. Highly readable and useful introduction to the history, languages, and archaeological remains. H a a s , Volkert. Geschichte der hethitischen tailed scholarly synthesis.
Religion.
Leiden, 1994. D e
Sasson, Jack M . , et al., eds. Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. N e w York, 1 9 9 5 . Articles on Anatolian history, art, and archaeology, writ ten by specialists for a general readership; illustrated, with annotated bibliographies. van L o o n , Maurits N . Anatolia 1985.
in the Second Millennium
B.C.
Leiden,
van L o o n , Maurits N . Anatolia in the Earlier First Millennium B. C. Lei den, 1 9 9 1 . T h i s a n d van L o o n ' s volume above examine the rich repertoire of religious iconography in the light of archaeological and textual sources; abundantly illustrated and full of insights. ANN C.
GUNTER
Anatolia From Alexander to the Rise of Islam T h e Hellenistic age in Anatolia o p e n s with t h e arrival of A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t , Icing of M a c e d o n , at T r o y in 334 BCE, from w h e n c e he l a u n c h e d his c o n q u e s t of t h e Persians a n d u n i t e d t h e G r e e k s , or H e l l e n e s , o n b o t h sides of t h e A e g e a n Sea. F i n a l victory against D a r i u s III w a s achieved at d i e b a t tie of I s s u s , near Syrian A n t i o c h , in 333 BCE. [See Antioch.] H e n c e f o r t h , G r e e k c u l t u r e a n d institutions, already e s t a b lished t o s o m e extent in t h e w e s t e r n cities, p r e d o m i n a t e d in Anatolia. A u n i f o r m c u l t u r e a n d t h e G r e e k language s u p p l a n t e d local styles a n d dialects. P r e d o m i n a n t was the f o u n d a t i o n of cities g o v e r n e d b y G r e e k political institutions, a council, p o p u l a r assembly, a n d college of magistrates. T h e gymnasion was t h e key cultural a n d e d u c a t i o n a l institution. T h e P e r s i a n oligarchy w a s s u p p l a n t e d b y principles t h a t w e r e d e m o c r a t i c b y t h e s t a n d a r d s of t h e day. A l e x a n d e r died in 323 BCE. W i t h i n t w e n t y years his e m p i r e was divided into four k i n g d o m s ruled b y his successors (diadochoi) a n d Hellenistic m o n a r c h y e m e r g e d . T h e attributes of kingship a p p e a r o n coins a n d s c u l p t u r e . [See Coins.] A n atolia n o r t h of t h e T a u r u s M o u n t a i n s was ruled b y t h e S e leucids, d e s c e n d a n t s of S e l e u c u s , o n e of A l e x a n d e r ' s g e n erals. [See Seleucids.] T h e ruler of T h r a c e , L y s i m a c h o s , rivaled Seleucid control in Anatolia until h e was defeated b y Seleucus I at t h e battle of K o r u p e d i o n in 281 BCE. S o u t h of d i e T a u r u s , L y c i a a n d P a m p h y l i a b e l o n g e d to t h e P t o l e m i e s , w h o r u l e d E g y p t . [See L y c i a ; Ptolemies.] T h e cities o n t h e A e g e a n coast, d e s c e n d e n t s of t h e G r e e k colonies, r e m a i n e d nominally free. C a p p a d o c i a , P o n t u s , a n d Bithynia r e m a i n e d i n d e p e n d e n t k i n g d o m s . [See C a p p a d o c i a . ] In t h e early t h i r d c e n t u r y (c. 280 B C E ) , a s e m i - i n d e p e n d e n t k i n g d o m arose in
131
t h e west, ruled by t h e local Attalid dynasty established at P e r g a m o n . [See P e r g a m o n . ] T h e s e changes h a d p r o f o u n d cultural effects strongly elu cidated b y the archaeological record. Inscriptions, m a n y col lected before the era of controlled excavation a n d published in a systematic c o r p u s , Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antigua, are as i m p o r t a n t as historical texts in revealing die major players, social a n d political organization, a n d c h a n g e s in r e ligion a n d o c c u r r e n c e of festivals. T h e n e t w o r k of r o a d s the P e r s i a n s established w a s e x p a n d e d b o t h for the m o v e m e n t of t r o o p s and for travel a n d t r a d e . [See R o a d s ; T r a n s p o r tation.] Coins were m i n t e d b y kings a n d b y cities. A single s t a n d a r d for silver a n d gold prevailed over m u c h of t h e H e l lenistic world, a n d t h e i s s u a n c e of b r o n z e coins in small d e n o m i n a t i o n s led to a m o n e t a r y e c o n o m y . C o i n s were also u s e d as p r o p a g a n d a : for e x a m p l e , coins show A l e x a n d e r with t h e p o w e r a n d attributes of Z e u s . P a t t e r n s of overseas t r a d e h a v e b e e n established t h r o u g h analysis of ceramics, their s t a m p s , a n d graffiti. A Celtic tribe from E u r o p e , the G a u l s , or Galatians, in v a d e d Anatolia in 278 BCE. W i t h i n t e n years t h e Galatians h a d a c q u i r e d extensive territories a n d wealth t h r o u g h p l u n der a n d extracting p r o t e c t i o n m o n e y from cities. In t h e m i d t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE, t h e Galatians a n d their allies in Bythinia were defeated in a decisive battle by t h e king of P e r g a m o n , Attalus I. In celebration of this victory, a great altar d e c o rated w i t h reliefs a n d t w o s c u l p t u r e s — a dying G a u l by E p i g o n u s a n d a warrior a n d his wife c o m m i t t i n g suicide—were set u p in t h e p r e c i n c t of t h e T e m p l e of A t h e n a at P e r g a m o n , establishing it as a n artistic center t h a t rivaled A t h e n s a n d e x t e n d e d far-reaching influence into t h e R o m a n imperial period. T h e majority of t h e G a u l s m o v e d into Phrygia, which was r e n a m e d Galatia. A l t h o u g h partially hellenized, they r e tained their o w n material culture, a distinctive political a n d social organization, a n d their o w n language, still spoken in L a t e Antiquity, T h e i r c u s t o m s i n c l u d e d h u m a n a n d animal sacrifice, which has b e e n graphically confirmed by skeletal finds a t G o r d i o n . [See G o r d i o n . ] H e l l e n i s t i c C i t i e s . I n t h e T r o a d , Alexander instructed that I l y u m b e rebuilt. It w a s later o v e r s h a d o w e d b y Alex a n d e r T r o a s a n d joined in t h e Ilian foundation witii Assos, Parium, and Lampsacus. Cyme, Myrina, Gryneum, and Elea (the p o r t of P e r g a m o n ) w e r e established. T h e Ionian cities of E p h e s u s , S m y r n a , P r i e n e , a n d C o l o p h o n were m o v e d , largely b e c a u s e silt h a d filled in t h e harbors a n d cre ated u n h e a l t h y m a r s h e s . [See Assos; E p h e s u s ; Priene.] T h e n e w cities s h o w t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of p l a n n e d c o m p l e x e s in w h i c h individual buildings were designed to fit a visually unified whole a n d t h e streets followed t h e rectilinear grid p l a n n a m e d for H i p p o d a m u s of M i l e t u s . O p e n spaces were p r o v i d e d by sanctuaries, t h e palaestras of d i e gymnasia, and rectilinear agoras with stoas, often two-storied, o n all four sides, except w h e r e t h e y w e r e built into t h e hillside, as at
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ANATOLIA: Anatolia From Alexander to the Rise of Islam
Assos and P e r g a m o n . In s o m e cases shops w e r e built b e h i n d
E a c h city controlled t h e s u r r o u n d i n g territory with f a r m s ,
t h e colonnade; t h e east stoa of t h e S o u t h Agora at M i l e t u s
t o w n s , sanctuaries, a n d l a n d e d estates. O n t h e c o a s t a n d
has back-to-back s h o p s a n d at Alinda a n d Aigai s h o p s a n d
along the e a s t - w e s t river valleys t h e s e territories w e r e c o n
s t o r e r o o m s w e r e built below t h e c o l o n n a d e o n t h e downhill
tiguous,
side of t h e agora. [See Miletus.]
A l t h o u g h m a n y surveys h a v e b e e n carried out, analysis of
T h e classical o r d e r s w e r e u s e d freely for n o n s t r u c t u r a l decoration. [See Architectural Orders.] T h e T e m p l e of Z e u s
b u t the density of u r b a n i z a t i o n d i m i n i s h e d inland.
c o u n t r y life is t h e area least elucidated b y archaeology. Hellenistic T e m p l e s a n d Religion. Temples and
tiieir
at Olba in Cilicia, b e g u n in a b o u t 170 BCE by A n t i o c h u s IV,
estates w e r e central to t h e religious a n d e c o n o m i c life of
ranks with the O l y m p e i o n in A t h e n s as t h e earliest C o r i n
Anatolia; t e m p l e states, r u l e d b y priests, b e c a m e s t r o n g c e n
t h i a n temples. T h e C o u n c i l H o u s e at Miletus exemplifies
ters of settlement in t h e interior a n d in t h e s o u t h , w h e r e cities
the n e w secular architecture a n d d i e use of c o m p o s i t e or
w e r e slow to develop. T e m p l e estates w e r e n o t secularized
ders. All cities h a d a t h e a t e r with stage buildings a n d a sta
until the R o m a n p e r i o d , b u t u n d e r Seleucid r u l e land w a s
d i u m with seating s u p p o r t e d b y stone vaulting. [See T h e a
often taken from t h e m to f o u n d cities. T h e a n c i e n t fertility
ters; S t a d i u m s ; Building Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s , article
g o d s w o r s h i p e d at t h e s e cult centers gradually a c q u i r e d
on Materials and T e c h n i q u e s of the Persian t h r o u g h R o m a n
G r e e k n a m e s a n d associations: for e x a m p l e , Attis at P e s s i -
Periods.] Portrait statues s t o o d in t h e theater, in t h e agoras,
n u s , Z e u s of O l b a , a n d t h e m a n y shrines to A r t e m i s . [See
a n d along the streets, a reversal of earlier c u s t o m , w h i c h
Cult.]
prohibited the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of a n individual before death.
I n t h e west, cult centers flourished, s o m e traditionally at
[See Architectural D e c o r a t i o n , ] A l t h o u g h few statues have
t a c h e d to t h e cities. O n e of t h e largest b u i l d i n g projects w a s
survived, m a n y bases a n d dedicatory inscriptions r e m a i n t o
t h e T e m p l e of A p o l l o , p a t r o n deity of t h e Seleucid kings, at
tell of t h e benefactions of individual citizens. [See I n s c r i p
D i d y m a (see a b o v e ) . T h e rebuilding of t h e h u g e T e m p l e of
tions, article on Inscriptions of t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n
A r t e m i s at E p h e s u s was t o m a k e it o n e of t h e S e v e n W o n
Periods.]
ders of the W o r l d .
As a wealthy class of m e r c h a n t s a n d officials arose, g r a n d
R o m a n R u l e . T h e p r e s s u r e of t h e e x p a n d i n g p o w e r of
residences were built, typically focused o n a n i n n e r c o u r t
R o m e was felt as early as 200 BCE, a n d b y t h e first c e n t u r y
a n d decorated with m o s a i c p a v e m e n t s , p a i n t e d walls, a n d
BCE, after t h e c o n q u e s t of P o m p e y , t h e r e m a i n i n g Hellenistic
marble statues a n d furnishings. [See M o s a i c s ; Wall P a i n t
k i n g d o m s w e r e vassal states. A u g u s t u s a n n e x e d m o s t of A n
ings.] T h e s e are k n o w n b e s t
the well-preserved
atolia to R o m e , a n d u n d e r his reign t h e growtii of u r b a n
houses excavated a t P r i e n e . Furnishings w e r e lavish, with
institutions, a p e r m a n e n t military p r e s e n c e , a n d radical
tiirough
marble stands a n d tables, ivory inlay, a n d b r o n z e a n d silver
changes in the p a t t e r n of l a n d o w n e r s h i p w e r e witnessed.
embellishment. T e r r a - c o t t a figurines w e r e m u c h favored as
T h e institutions a n d ideals of t h e Hellenistic m o n a r c h s w e r e
o r n a m e n t s a n d as d e d i c a t i o n s , a n d they reveal a great deal
c o n t i n u e d a n d evolved as Anatolia w a s i n t e g r a t e d into t h e
a b o u t styles of dress a n d daily activities ( M y r i n a ) .
social and e c o n o m i c organization of t h e R o m a n e m p i r e . A l
Post-and-lintel c o n s t r u c t i o n r e m a i n e d basic, b u t the a r c h
t h o u g h L a t i n w a s t h e l a n g u a g e of e m p i r e , t h e l a n g u a g e of
a n d vault were i n t r o d u c e d . [See Arches.] Sloping vaults c o v
d i e e d u c a t e d classes in w h i c h official notices a n d d e d i c a t i o n s
ered t h e interior passages in the T e m p l e of Apollo at D i -
w e r e inscribed r e m a i n e d Greek. [See L a t i n ; Greek.]
d y m a . [See D i d y m a . ] T h e tradition of fitted stone m a s o n r y w i t h o u t the use of m o r t a r persisted.
F r o m 25 BCE t o 235 CE, Anatolia w a s o r g a n i z e d into five m a j o r p r o v i n c e s — A s i a , Bithynia a n d P o n t u s , Galatia, a n d
A new style of city p l a n n i n g developed that was r o o t e d in
C a p p a d o c i a , f r o m w h i c h T r e s E p a r c h i a e was split in 140
the ancient Anatolian acropolis palace. [See Palace.] I t fea
C E — w i t h t h e E u p h r a t e s River f o r m i n g t h e e a s t e r n frontier.
t u r e d vertical p l a n n i n g a n d conformity r a t h e r t h a n resist
[See E u p h r a t e s . ] T h e b o u n d a r i e s of t h e p r o v i n c e of Asia
ance to die t o p o g r a p h y . P e r g a m o n d e m o n s t r a t e s t h e m o s t
r e m a i n e d firm, b u t t h e others, especially G a l a t i a ' s , fluctu
a d v e n a t r o u s and d r a m a t i c d e v e l o p m e n t of this n e w c o n c e p t
ated. A d m i n i s t r a t i o n d e p e n d e d o n a n e t w o r k of cities a n d
of exploiting die terrain b u t regularizing it with terraces s u p
their d e p e n d e n t territories. T a x collection, p r o v i s i o n of s u p
p o r t e d by retaining walls of large ashlars—once believed to
plies, a n d t r a n s p o r t for t h e armies a n d officials w e r e all o r
b e a Hellenistic i n n o v a t i o n b u t n o w k n o w n to h a v e o c c u r r e d
ganized t h r o u g h t h e a d m i n i s t r a t i o n of t h e cities. U r b a n i z a
m u c h earlier, at Sardis. [See Sardis.]
tion s p r e a d t h r o u g h t h e i m p e r i a l f o u n d a t i o n of cities a n d t h e
T h e deification of kings a n d the Itemization of nobles a n d
consolidation of their territories. By t h e e n d of the Julio-
local potentates gave rise to t h e building of g r a n d t o m b s .
C l a u d i a n p e r i o d (68 CE), a n e t w o r k of cities w a s established
[See T o m b s . ] T h e m o s t splendid is t h e t o m b at Belevi, n e a r
in central Anatolia for t h e first time. F o r t w o centuries t h e r e
E p h e s u s , b e g u n after 300 BCE, possibly for L y s i m a c h o s . T h e
after, the A n a t o l i a n cities grew in size a n d i m p o r t a n c e a n d
t o m b was r e u s e d b y A n t i o c h u s II. I n Lycia, r o c k - c u t t o m b
b e c a m e t h e wealthiest in t h e e m p i r e .
c h a m b e r s are faced with G r e e k facades, s o m e s h o w i n g P e r
T h e wealth of t h e A n a t o l i a n cities w a s , h o w e v e r , always
sian burial c u s t o m s c o m b i n e d with G r e e k figural styles. [See
derived f r o m t h e l a n d a n d t h e e x p a n s i o n of agriculture a n d
Burial T e c h n i q u e s . ]
stock raising. [See Agriculture.] T i m b e r w a s b r o u g h t d o w n
ANATOLIA: Anatolia From Alexander to the Rise of Islam from t h e m o u n t a i n s a n d m a r b l e was o n e of t h e principle e x p o r t s t h r o u g h o u t t h e e m p i r e . B o t h t h e sculptors a n d s c u l p t u r e from t h e w o r k s h o p s at A p h r o d i s i a s w e r e f o u n d at R o m e a n d o t h e r centers. [See Aphrodisias.] Salted fish ( t u n n y ) , olives, g r a p e s , a n d w i n e ( C a p p a d o c i a n w i n e rivaled t h a t from G r e e c e ) , grain, w o o l a n d skins from stock raising, a n d flax a n d linen w o v e n in Cilicia w e r e all widely e x p o r t e d . [See Olives; Viticulture; Cilicia.] A d d i t i o n a l wealth was d e rived f r o m silver a n d i r o n d e p o s i t s , semiprecious stones, m i c a , a n d other m i n e r a l r e s o u r c e s . [See M e t a l s , article on Artifacts of the P e r s i a n t h r o u g h R o m a n Periods.] T h e h u g e h a r b o r buildings at A e g e a n a n d M e d i t e r r a n e a n p o r t s b e a r witness to t h e e x t e n t of m a r i t i m e t r a d e . U n d e r w a t e r a r c h a e ology h a s just b e g u n to reveal rich information from s h i p wrecks a n d s u b m e r g e d h a r b o r s . [See Seafaring.] I n t h e T a u r u s / P i s i d i a , t h e J u l i o - C l a u d i a n e m p e r o r s built r o a d s t o link the h i g h l a n d cities with t h e coast. By t h e e n d of tire first c e n t u r y CE, a n e t w o r k of p a v e d r o a d s t h a t w a s m a i n t a i n e d until t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y crisscrossed t h e p e n i n sula. T h e roads w e r e built primarily b y Vespasian for t h e military, b u t t h e y facilitated travel a n d trade. I n the second a n d t h i r d centuries, a s y s t e m of rest h o u s e s a n d p o s t stations d e v e l o p e d . V e s p a s i a n established t h e limes o n t h e frontier— forts linked by p a v e d h i g h w a y s a n d auxiliary forts b e t w e e n t h e m — a n d established g a r r i s o n s , t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t at A n cyra. Roman cities. T h e r e w a s absolute continuity of t h e H e l lenistic tradition in a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d city p l a n n i n g u n d e r R o m a n rule, b u t t h e e m p h a s i s w a s m o r e o n secular t h a n reli gious building. [See Cities, article on Cities of t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n Periods.] C h a n g e s in c o n s t r u c t i o n materials e s pecially t h e u s e of vaulting a n d c o n c r e t e , were n o t as d r a m a t i c as in t h e W e s t . T h e n o t a b l e c o n t r i b u t i o n of R o m a n p l a n n e r s w a s to c o n n e c t u r b a n spaces with c o l o n n a d e d t h o r oughfares t h a t t r a n s e c t e d t h e city b e t w e e n well-defined g a t e ways. Sagalassos exemplifies t h e R o m a n e m b e l l i s h m e n t of t h e city w i t h m o n u m e n t a l e n t r a n c e s a d d e d to b o t h agoras u n d e r T i b e r i u s a n d C l a u d i u s , t h e b u i l d i n g of a s a n c t u a r y of Apollo Clarius, p r o b a b l y u n d e r A u g u s t u s , a n d the b u i l d i n g of t r i u m p h a l a r c h e s , s y m b o l i c of R o m a n rule. In 17 CE, an e a r t h q u a k e leveled twelve of t h e great cities in t h e west; h a r d e s t hit w a s Sardis. R e b u i l d i n g w a s o n a strictly R o m a n p l a n u n d e r i m p e r i a l direction. As t h e cities grew, n e w buildings a n d n e i g h b o r h o o d s w e r e c o n n e c t e d b y major streets h a v i n g c o l o n n a d e d sidewalks with s h o p s b e h i n d tltem. T h e streets o p e n e d into c o l o n n a d e d plazas t h a t served as the c o m m e r c i a l agoras a n d as g a t h e r i n g places. Statuary in every conceivable c o n t e x t — a l o n g t h e r o a d w a y s , o n facades a n d m o n u m e n t s , a n d o n t o m b s a n d s a r c o p h a g i — celebrated t h e p o w e r of t h e e m p e r o r a n d t h e prestige of rich citizens. [See S a r c o p h a g u s . ] P o r t r a i t s c u l p t u r e b e c a m e a m a jor i n d u s t r y (e.g., at A p h r o d i s i a s ) . R e c e n t evidence suggests Sagalassos was a n equally i m p o r t a n t center for s c u l p t u r e . S t o n e c u t t e r s of all types w e r e r e q u i r e d to chisel inscriptions a n d elaborate architectural o r n a m e n t a n d to cut m a r b l e a n d
133
other colored stones to b e set in p a t t e r n s o n walls a n d floors. Schools of painters a n d mosaicists a p p e a r to have m o v e d from city t o city. By t h e e n d of t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y every t h r o u g h w a y h a d a fountain, s o m e set in e x e d r a s (as at t h e great nymphaion at M i l e t u s ) , s o m e with elaborate aedicular buildings (e.g., a t Hierapolis, S i d e ) . T h e b a t h - g y m n a s i u m b e c a m e t h e archi tectural s y m b o l of i m p e r i a l culture. [See Baths.] Baths a n d fountains r e q u i r e d vast a m o u n t s of w a t e r , w h i c h were p r o vided b y a q u e d u c t s . [See A q u e d u c t s . ] Placing the water s u p ply o u t s i d e t h e fortification walls was only m a d e possible b y t h e pax romana. A d e q u a t e d r a i n a g e a n d waste disposal w e r e t h e responsibility of t h e civic administration. E n t e r t a i n m e n t was taken for g r a n t e d b y t h e p o p u l a c e . T h e a t e r s w e r e modified t o a c c o m m o d a t e animal contests a n d m a n y cities h a d an a m p h i t h e a t e r . T h e b e s t - p r e s e r v e d theater, at A s p e n d o s , h a s a seating capacity for seventy-five h u n d r e d spectators. H o u s i n g , n e e d e d for a vastly increased p o p u l a t i o n , is best studied at E p h e s u s , w h e r e t e r r a c e d h o u s e s r e a c h e d five s t o ries a n d were a r r a n g e d in blocks, or insulae. T h e y w e r e richly furnished a n d d e c o r a t e d with m o s a i c s , paintings, a n d c u t - m a r b l e inlay. Inscriptions d o c u m e n t s o m e key aspects of city life. P a triotism is revealed b y dedications t o the patris. F a m i l y m e m b e r s were celebrated t h r o u g h t h e n a m i n g of privately d o n a t e d buildings, as t h e libraries at Sagalassos a n d E p h e s u s d e m o n s t r a t e . [See L i b r a r i e s a n d Archives.] P r e - R o m a n cul tural heritage was often celebrated: T a r s u s a n d Aigai in C i licia claimed P e r s e u s as their f o u n d e r , N i c a e a was f o u n d e d b y Flerakles, o t h e r cities claimed relationships with A r g o s , Atliens, a n d S p a r t a . U n d e r the Severan e m p e r o r s building r e a c h e d a zenith, a n d t h e n e t w o r k of cities attained its m a x i m u m g e o g r a p h i c extent. Imperial cult. T h e imperial cult played an i m p o r t a n t role in the d e v e l o p m e n t of u r b a n i s m . I n newly a n n e x e d areas t h e cult p r o v i d e d traditions t h a t unified t h e p o p u l o u s : public sacrifices, festivals, g a m e s , wild-animal fights (venaliones), a n d gladiatorial shows at w h i c h feasts w e r e enjoyed a n d corn a n d oil distributed. Before taking t h e n a m e of A u g u s t u s in 27 BCE, Octavian a u t h o r i z e d dedications to R o m e a n d t h e deified Julius Caesar at E p h e s u s a n d N i c a e a a n d t o himself at P e r g a m o n a n d N i c o m e d i a . A t Aphrodisias the Sebasteion, t h e m o s t elaborate t e m p l e c o m p l e x to t h e imperial cult presently k n o w n , w a s established d u r i n g the reign of C l a u dius (41-54 CE) t h r o u g h a private d o n a t i o n . T h e t e m p l e it self a n d t h e p u b l i c buildings c o n n e c t e d to it w e r e often t h e first G r e c o - R o m a n buildings in t h e n e w cities of t h e interior. L a t e r E m p i r e . In t h e m i d - t h i r d century, incursions b y t h e G o t h s from t h e n o r t h a n d t h e Sasanian Persians a n d b r e a k a w a y dynasts of P a l m y r a from t h e east a n d south c a u s e d t h e collapse of t h e e m p i r e ' s frontiers. [See Sasanians; P e r s i a n s ; Palmyra.] T h r o u g h o u t t h e peninsula hasty forti fications were built a r o u n d t h e cities, often with material taken from p u b l i c buildings. W i d e s p r e a d plague also c o n -
134
ANATOLIA: Anatolia From Alexander to the Rise of Islam
tributed to an e c o n o m i c crisis. In r e s p o n s e , Diocletian, w h o ruled from N i c o m e d i a (284-305, instituted radical a d m i n istrative changes: he created smaller provinces c o m p o s e d of t h e contiguous territories of the cities. Frontiers w e r e strengthened a n d t r o o p s , w h o were paid in kind as well as in coin, were stationed in a n d near t h e cities. T h e authority of t h e city councilors gradually diminished u n d e r t h e strain of increased taxation, and t h e ancient a u t o n o m y of t h e cities was gradually lost. T h e transfer of lands to t h e c h u r c h a n d c o n s e q u e n t loss of taxes also c o n t r i b u t e d to u r b a n decline. T h e countryside, with its villages and l a n d e d estates, b e c a m e the key factor in e c o n o m i c recovery in d i e fourth c e n tury. [See Villages.] W h e n grain supplies from E g y p t w e r e i n a d e q u a t e , the capital was supplied from Anatolia, e s p e cially from Bithynia a n d Phrygia. Stock raising c o n t i n u e d to be t h e p r e d o m i n a n t u s e of land on t h e central plateau. N e i ther erosion n o r deforestation from the overexploitation of t h e land appears to h a v e altered settlement p a t t e r n s — t h e only geomorphological c h a n g e to h a v e d o n e so was d i e silt ing u p of the great h a r b o r s . Scholarship has relinquished t h e old c o n c e p t of "decline a n d fall," largely as a result of the archaeological evidence, w h i c h shows c o n t i n u e d u r b a n life a n d even growth d u r i n g t h e fourth a n d fifth centuries. T h e survival of classical cul t u r e is seen in writing a n d in t h e arts, especially s c u l p t u r e (e.g., at N i c o m e d i a , N i c a e a , E p h e s u s , a n d Sardis). In t h e sixth century, the picture changed. Plague struck again a n d pressure from the Persians intensified. Treaties w i t h t h e m were m a d e at a n e n o r m o u s price in gold. Justinian's building p r o g r a m s caused a further strain o n local economies a n d m a n p o w e r , while earthquakes disrupted t h e water s u p p l y a n d t h e a q u e d u c t s fell into disrepair. I n general, t h e s u b d i vision of and e n c r o a c h m e n t o n m o n u m e n t a l buildings a n d thoroughfares was w i d e s p r e a d (e.g., at Sagalassos, Sardis, A n c y r a ) . H o w e v e r , streets were repaired late into t h e c e n tury a n d a lively local c o m m e r c e a n d small industry c o n t i n u e d with the m a n u f a c t u r e of pottery, glass, gilded jewelry, a n d utilitarian metal items—albeit often from recycled m a terials (e.g., at Sardis, Sagalassos). [See Glass, Jewelry.] O f c o n t i n u e d scholarly d e b a t e is w h e t h e r d i e evidence d e m onstrates an actual decline in society or a n e w p a t t e r n of settlement t h a t was c o n c e n t r a t e d less in t h e city, foreshad owing t h e medieval society t h a t e m e r g e d after the dark age t h a t followed the Persian invasions in the seventh c e n t u r y (see below). Judaism and Christianity. T h e single m o s t provocative d e v e l o p m e n t in L a t e Antiquity was t h e rise of Christianity, w h i c h was i n t r o d u c e d into Anatolia b y St. P a u l in t h e first c e n t u r y CE. After t h e Christian c h u r c h was legalized in t h e early fourth century, c h u r c h e s a n d other ecclesiastical build ings w e r e built rapidly, sometimes p r e e m p t i n g civic space such as the agora (e.g., at Sagalassos). [See C h u r c h e s . ] P a gan temples slowly w e n t o u t of u s e or w e r e c o n v e r t e d t o churches (e.g., at A p h r o d i s i a s ) . Burials w e r e m a d e in a n d a r o u n d the c h u r c h e s , a c h a n g e from t h e R o m a n prohibition
of burial witiiin t h e city. [See Burial Sites.] Political p o w e r transferred from t h e civic centers to the ecclesiastical realm. Excavation has e n h a n c e d the p i c t u r e of p e r s o n a l piety t h r o u g h rich finds of seals a n d a m u l e t s , small flasks from pilgrimage sites, a n d Christian symbols o n d o m e s t i c pottery, glass, metal, gravestones, a n d s a r c o p h a g i . T h e material cul t u r e also d e m o n s t r a t e s the persistence of p a g a n cult a n d s u perstition, especially t h e practice of m a g i c . T h e conditions u n d e r w h i c h Christianity s p r e a d so r a p idly in Anatolia a r e c o m p l e x . Archaeological e v i d e n c e h a s illuminated t h e size a n d civil status of Jewish c o m m u n i t i e s (e.g., t h e great s y n a g o g u e at Sardis, a n inscription a t A p h r o d i s i a s , coins from A p a m e a in P h r y g i a s h o w i n g N o a h ' s ark). Jews h a d b e e n resettled in L y d i a a n d P h r y g i a b y A n tiochus III at the e n d of d i e third c e n t u r y BCE, a n d imperial directives h a d p r o t e c t e d Jewish law a n d c u s t o m s since t h e reign of Caesar. A s is clear from t h e story of P a u l ' s visits t o Galatia, related in Acts, t h e status of t h e Jewish c o m m u n i t i e s was u n d o u b t e d l y basic to t h e s p r e a d of t h e Christian m e s sage. C o n c u r r e n t l y , a s t r o n g t e n d e n c y t o m o n o t h e i s m h a d developed in p a g a n i s m with t h e rise of a " s u p e r g o d " (Theos Hipsistos, a t e r m u s e d also b y t h e Jews to describe their G o d ) . T h u s , t h e w o r s h i p of a n a b s t r a c t g o d w h o dwelt above or replaced t h e a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c p a n t h e o n w a s fertile g r o u n d for t h e s p r e a d of Christianity e v e n before C o n s t a n tine, w h e n it was a c c e p t e d as t h e official religion, s u p p l a n t ing t h e imperial cult. E n d of A n t i q u i t y . T h e Sasanian P e r s i a n s , u n d e r C h o s roes II, took A n t i o c h a n d J e r u s a l e m in 614 CE, Alexandria in 617, a n d t h e n t u r n e d o n Anatolia. [See J e r u s a l e m , A l e x a n dria.] C o i n finds at several Anatolian cities stop witii t h e issues of 616/17, a n d t h e r e is evidence of d e s t r u c t i o n , b u r n ing, a n d p o p u l a t i o n dispersal. H e r a c l i u s c o u n t e r a t t a c k e d a n d reestablished t h e eastern frontier, b u t t h e cities of A n atolia h a d suffered t o s u c h an e x t e n t t h e y n e v e r r e c o v e r e d . T h e history of central Anatolia d u r i n g t h e seventh a n d eighth centuries is little k n o w n , excavation shows t h a t c h u r c h e s were r e p a i r e d a n d enlarged (e.g., at A m o r i u m , Sardis, A p h r o d i s i a s ) , b u t little is k n o w n a b o u t t h e life of t h e inhabitants. A g e n u i n e dark age a p p a r e n t l y e n s u e d until t h e n i n t h century, for w h i c h s o m e evidence is available. W h e n recovery did occur, t h e cities t h a t survived h a d r e t r a c t e d to walled acropoleis. T h e vast u r b a n culture established u n d e r G r e c o - R o m a n d o m i n a t i o n was to s o m e e x t e n t a t h i n veneer t h a t d i s a p p e a r e d after imperial rule was w e a k e n e d a n d A n atolia b e c a m e o n c e again a land of villages a n d c o u n t r y e s tates. [See also A l e x a n d r i a n E m p i r e , and R o m a n E m p i r e . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity. N e w York, 1 9 7 1 . Social history, especially t h e deep effects of religious change r o o t e d in A n atolia. The Cambridge Ancient History. Vols. 7 . 1 , 8, and 9. 2 d ed. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 9 4 . T h e best historical overview of the Hellenistic and early
ANATOLIA: Anatolia in the Islamic Period R o m a n period; the tents. T h e separate tions o n sites and planned. Extensive
relevant sections are clear from the outline/con plates to v o l u m e 7.1 provide notes a n d illustra finds. Additional volumes of this edition are bibliography.
C a m e r o n , Averil. 77M Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 5 9 5 - 6 0 0 . L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 . Provides extensive critical bibliography and analysis of the state of scholarship, situating Anatolia in a broader context. Foss, Clive. History and Archaeology ojByzantine Asia Minor. Aldershot, 1990. T h e articles reprinted here f o r m the seminal study of the " d i s a p p e a r a n c e " of the great G r e c o - R o m a n cities and the importance of archaeological evidence to historical reconstruction. Gates, Marie-FIenriette. "Archaeology in T u r k e y . " American Journal of Archaeology 99 ( 1 9 9 5 ) : 2 0 7 - 2 5 5 . T h e most recent s u m m a r y of c u r rent fieldwork and new bibliography for sites in Anatolia, published annually (previously "Archaeology in Asia M i n o r " by M a c h t e l d Mellink). H a n f m a n n , George M . A. From Croesus to Constantine: The Cities of Western Asia Minor and Their Arts in Creek and Roman Times. A n n Arbor, 1 9 7 5 . Still a stimulating t r e a t m e n t of the creative syndiesis of Greek and Anatolian contributions to the plastic arts and city plan ning. Lloyd, Seton. Ancient Turkey: A Traveller's History of Anatolia. L o n d o n , 1989. Extraordinarily clear narrative history i m b u e d with the a u tiior's close experience of die ancient sites, routes, and countryside. See especially chapters 1 2 - 2 0 . M a c D o n a l d , William L . The Architecture of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, An Urban Appraisal. N e w H a v e n , 1986. T h e reciprocal relationship of R o m e and its provinces in the development of urbanism and t h e imagery of empire. Limited in its point of view; see the review by Frank B. Sear, Journal of Roman Archaeology I (1988): 1 6 0 - 1 6 5 . M a g i e , David. Roman Rule in Asia Minor to the End of the Third Century after Christ. 2 vols. Princeton, 1 9 5 0 . F u n d a m e n t a l to the study of the R o m a n period. Mitchell, Stephen. Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. 1, The Celts and the Impact of Roman Rule; vol. 2, The Rise of the Church. N e w York, 1993. Definitive treatment of the period from the conquest of Alexander t h r o u g h the fourth century CE. T h o r o u g h synthesis of textual and archaeological evidence, concentrating o n central Anatolia, Extensive bibliography. Price, S, R. F . Rituals of Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. C a m b r i d g e , 1984. R e m a i n s t h e basic work. R a m a g e , N . H . , and A n d r e w R a m a g e . Roman Art: Romulus to Con stantine. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1 9 9 1 . L u c i d and well-illustrated a c count. T h e authors' long experience working in T u r k e y results in m o r e t h a n usual emphasis o n the artistic centers in Anatolia. A new edition is in press. Syme, Ronald. Anatolica: Studies in Strabo. Edited and completed post h u m o u s l y by A n d i o n y R. Birley. Oxford, 1 9 9 5 . Studies in die his torical geography of Anatolia and adjacent regions, with reference to the Geography of Strabo. JANE AYER SCOTT
Anatolia in the Islamic Period T h r e e p h a s e s m a r k d i e history of m e d i e v a l Anatolia. F r o m t h e sevendi to t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y CE u r b a n life a n d e c o n o m i c e x c h a n g e shrank drastically; f r o m t h e t e n t h until t h e twelfth c e n t u r y recovery o c c u r r e d in t o w n s , cities, a n d t h e c o u n t r y side until t h e disruptions of T u r k i s h i m m i g r a t i o n ; a n d from t h e twelfth c e n t u r y o n w a r d an influx of pastoral n o m a d s , a g r o w t h of regional t r a d e , a n d t h e processes of conversion to I s l a m a c c o m p a n i e d t h e splintering of political authority a n d d i e e n d of B y z a n t i n e p o w e r in t h e p e n i n s u l a . D u r i n g t h e
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first era, B y z a n t i u m r u l e d t h e peninsula s u p r e m e ; in t h e sec o n d , central Anatolia b e c a m e t h e h o m e of the Seljuks of R u m ; a n d in the third, B y z a n t i u m lost control over t h e coastal lands a n d t h e Seljuks ultimately d i s a p p e a r e d before t h e M o n g o l s a n d t h e T u r k i s h beyliks (area ruled b y a bey). D e s p i t e the utility of s u c h p u b l i c works as the great b r i d g e over t h e S a n g a r i u s ( c o m p l e t e d in 560) and the c h u r c h of St. J o h n at E p h e s u s of the e m p e r o r Justinian (527-565), t h e cost of his c a m p a i g n s , as well as outbreaks of plague (beginning in 542), b u r d e n e d his subjects a n d led to a p a u s e in t h e p r o s p e r i t y of t o w n s a n d cities. T h i s p r o s p e r i t y c a m e to an e n d following t h e destructive invasions of t h e Persians ( 6 1 3 626), w h o practically e n d e d classical u r b a n life in this c o r n e r of die M e d i t e r r a n e a n . O n c e p r o s p e r o u s cities (Sardis [c. 616] E p h e s u s [c. 614], A n k a r a [622], P e r g a m o n , for e x a m ple) s h r a n k t o fortifications a n d villages, occasionally o n n e a r b y hills. C o i n finds a n d t h e evidence from s u c h sites as h a v e b e e n excavated or s u r v e y e d p o i n t to a substantial d e cline in e c o n o m i c life a n d t h e e n d of public works a n d social services. A full recovery from d i e Persian devastation r e m a i n e d i m possible for two full centuries b e c a u s e of M u s l i m raids t h a t b e g a n in 641. A n k a r a in t h e center a n d A m o r i o n in t h e s o u t h w e s t b e c a m e centers of Byzantine defense, a n d m a n y cities b e c a m e walled or h a d their existing walls strengthened. T h e raids were disruptive b u t did n o t result in M u s l i m o c c u p a t i o n of lands n o r t h a n d west of t h e T a u r u s range, a n d in areas u n t o u c h e d b y M u s l i m raids tiiere w a s a relative c o n tinuity, as in t h e m o n a s t i c c o m m u n i t i e s in Bithynia. N o n e theless, d i e r e is little B y z a n t i n e c o n s t r u c t i o n on t h e plateau b e y o n d repairs tiiat m a y b e securely dated to t h e p e r i o d from t h e P e r s i a n invasions t o d i e M a c e d o n i a n dynasty, a n d t h u s the era is justly t e r m e d a " d a r k a g e . " Cities b e c a m e fortified, h o u s i n g s h r a n k in size a n d quality, a n d m a n y setd e m e n t s r e m o v e d to b e t t e r defensible hills: external threat a n d internal defense b e c a m e key c o n c e p t s . B e g i n n i n g in t h e m i d - n i n t h century, d i e e m p e r o r s of t h e M a c e d o n i a n dynasty m a n a g e d to stop t h e raids (after S63 diey w e n t o n t h e offensive) a n d t o restore p e a c e a n d p r e dictability t o life o n t h e plateau. C o n s e q u e n t l y , there is ev idence of e c o n o m i c e x p a n s i o n a n d u r b a n revival. A b r o a d recovery m a y b e posited from t h e restoration of t h e c h u r c h of t h e D o r m i t i o n at N i c a e a (after 843), t h e c h u r c h of St. N i c h o l a s a t M y r a , t h e building, p e r h a p s in d i e late n i n d i century, of the (pilgrimage?) c h u r c h at D e r e a g z i (Lycia), a very large b u i l d i n g for a r e m o t e hill c o u n t r y , a n d t h e t e n t h or eleventh-century c h u r c h of Ucayak. I n t h e nintii c e n t u r y tiiere also b e g a n an era of c o n s t r u c t i o n a n d elaboration of d i e r o c k - c u t c h u r c h e s a n d m o n a s t e r i e s of C a p p a d o c i a , in d i e P e r i s t r e m a valley n e a r Aksaray a n d t h e area centered o n G o r e m e , w h e r e n e w b u i l d i n g flourished from a r o u n d 900 to a b o u t 1060. T u r k i s h migration into Anatolia b e g a n in t h e mid-eleve n d i c e n t u r y , a n d after t h e Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan (10631073) defeated t h e B y z a n t i n e s at M a n z i k e r t (1071) no line
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of defense p r e v e n t e d the T u r k s from raiding t h e plateau a n d even establishing a short-lived emirate at Nicaea. D u r i n g t h e First C r u s a d e , Alexios K o m n e n o s (1081-1118) m a n a g e d to r e c o n q u e r Nicaea a n d to retrieve t h e coastal plains a n d t h e hill country of western Anatolia for Byzantium. D u r i n g d i e twelfth century Seljuk a n d D a n i s h m e n d leaders w a r r e d over t h e possession of central Anatolia, a n d only after t h e defeat of the D a n i s h m e n d i d s (1178) a n d the crushing of a B y z antine army at M y r i o c e p h a l o n (1176) were t h e Seljuks, n o w established at I c o n i u m / K o n y a u n d e r t h e leadership of Kihj Arslan II ( 1 1 5 5 - 1 1 9 2 ) , able to devote themselves fully to t h e elaboration of Perso-Islamic civilization in t h e peninsula, in 1156 the construction of t h e 'Ala e d - D i n m o s q u e at K o n y a b e g a n , b u t n o great resources were available for m o n u m e n tal building. T h e Seljuks b e g a n to strike silver dirhams in t h e 1180s, a n d their silver coinage, of a fineness superior t o o t h e r M u s l i m coinages in t h e L e v a n t , c o n t i n u e d to e x p a n d until t h e e n d of t h e thirteenth century. T o their west, d u r i n g t h e early a n d middle years of the twelfth c e n t u r y the K o m n e n i built a n u m b e r of fortifications a n d walled m a n y of their Anatolian towns (e.g., A c h y r a o u s 1139, D o r y l a i o n 1 1 7 5 , Laodikeia [Laodicea] c. 1 1 1 9 , L o p a d i o n 1130), a n d as d i e frontier stabilized o n the western confines of the plateau af ter d i e F o u r t h C r u s a d e , there was further e c o n o m i c devel o p m e n t , including the growth of long-distance t r a d e t h r o u g h o u t the peninsula a n d across t h e political frontiers. E v e n during t h e period of Byzantine exile in Anatolia, from 1204 to 1261, there is evidence of an increase in wealth b o t h in die " e m p i r e s " of N i c a e a a n d T r e b i z o n d : building of c h u r c h e s (e.g., Nicaea) a n d fortifications (such as N y m p h a i o n , Pegai) r e s u m e d o n a m o d e s t scale. T h e r e w a s , h o w ever, m u c h m o r e T u r k i s h t h a n Byzantine construction in Anatolia. T h e fullest flowering of Seljuk civilization in Anatolia o c c u r r e d in t h e generation before t h e M o n g o l defeat of t h e Seljuk armies at K o s e D a g i (1243). T h e m o n u m e n t a l c o n structions of the Seljuks, superior in n u m b e r , quality, a n d size to Byzantine Anatolian architecture, reflect t h e wealth of their society, i n d e e d , n o fewer t h a n t e n Anatolian silver m i n e s were in operation ( a n d w e r e Seljuk m i n t sites) d u r i n g t h e century. T h e Seljuks c o n q u e r e d i m p o r t a n t p o r t s ( A n talya in 1207, Sinope in 1214) t h a t allowed t h e m t o establish a n d reinforce commercial routes. T h e extent of t r a d e , a n d its extension across t h e peninsula from C o n s t a n t i n o p l e t o K o n y a a n d from K o n y a to t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n or t o Sivas a n d the east is b e s t m e a s u r e d b y t h e forty or m o r e c a r a v a n serais built d u r i n g this era (no Byzantine caravanserai is k n o w n ) . T h e r e was a great deal of m o s q u e a n d t o m b c o n struction, a n d excavation of t h e c o u n t r y palaces of t h e Sel juks at K u b a d i y a a n d K u b a d a b a d has b e g u n ( M . Zeki-Oral, 1949-1951, K a t h a r i n a O t t o - D o m a n d M e h m e t O n d e r , 1965-1966). T h e R u m Seljuk constructions of this era are k n o w n for their extensive use of calligraphic o r n a m e n t a t i o n a n d "stalactites" (muqarnas). D u r i n g t h e entire c e n t u r y
m u c h of t h e m o n u m e n t a l architecture w a s o r d e r e d b y h i g h officials of t h e g o v e r n m e n t , a n d there w a s a g o o d deal of building (besides at K o n y a ) in Sivas, T o k a t , A m a s y a , a n d E r z u r u m . T h e p a t r o n a g e of t h e sultans was either military or devoted to c o m m e r c i a l use; a n d tiiere w a s s o m e p a t r o n age from t h e w o m e n of t h e royal family. T h e M o n g o l s ex t r a c t e d an e n o r m o u s tribute from t h e Seljuks, a n d after 1277 administered eastern Anatolia as a p r o v i n c e of t h e Ilkhanate, b u t t h e e c o n o m i c e x p a n s i o n of t h e p e n i n s u l a d i d n o t suffer greatly; in 1299 t h e r e w e r e well over thirty m i n t s striking silver dirhams, a figure n o t attained before or since. After 1243, however, tiiere is little architectural p a t r o n a g e from t h e sultans, a n d m o s t c o m e s from t h e officials of state; tiiere w a s , t h e n , n o letting u p in construction. T h e M o n g o l s w e r e able to control eastern Anatolia into t h e f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y , b u t t h e collapse of B y z a n t i n e defenses at t h e e d g e of t h e plateau after t h e recovery of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e in 1261 led to t h e T u r k i s h infiltration of t h e entire coastal areas, e x c e p t for T r e b i z o n d a n d t h e eastern shores of t h e M a r m a r a , b y 1300, a n d t h e division of Anatolia into a n u m b e r of beyliks, usually f o u n d e d b y i n d e p e n d e n t chiefs, w h i c h lasted until t h e later O t t o m a n c o n q u e s t s . T h e m o s q u e s a n d other s t r u c t u r e s of t h e early beylik era are small, a n d a m o n g early O t t o m a n m o n u m e n t s they display Byzantine influence in building style ( " B y z l a m i c , " in t h e t e r m i n o l o g y of Clive F o s s ) . D e s p i t e t h e political, cultural, a n d religious c h a n g e s d u r ing this era, there w e r e s o m e c o n s t a n t s . T h e i n c u r s i o n s of t h e T u r k s before a n d w i t h t h e M o n g o l s s t r e n g t h e n e d t h e pastoral s e g m e n t of Anatolian agriculture, b u t it h a d long b e e n polycultural. Agricultural t e c h n o l o g y r e m a i n e d b a s e d u p o n earlier practices. B y 1300, t h e c o n v e r s i o n of G r e e k Christians to Islam was well u n d e r w a y b u t b y n o m e a n s complete, a n d t h e r e w e r e inheritances f r o m Christianity in t h e form of Islam p r a c t i c e d in t h e c o u n t r y s i d e . [See also B y z a n t i n e E m p i r e . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY C a h e n , Claude. La Turquie pre-Ottomane. Paris and Istanbul, 1988. Standard survey of the Seljuks of R u m ; the English version ( N e w York, 1968) has fuller coverage but lacks d o c u m e n t a t i o n . C r a n e , Howard. " N o t e s on Saldjuq Architectural Patronage in T h i r teenth-Century Anatolia." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 - 5 7 . Contains a full list of p a t r o n s a n d buildings, with helpful c o m m e n t a r y . Foss, Clive. "Archaeology and the ' T w e n t y Cities' of Byzantine Asia." American Journal of Archaeology 81 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 4 6 9 - 4 8 6 . Convenient s u m m a r y of i m p o r t a n t work published in detail in later articles a n d monographs. Foss, Clive, and D a v i d Winfield. Byzantine Fortifications: An Introduc tion. Pretoria, 1986. I m p o r t a n t study of m e t h o d . H e n d y , Michael. Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c. 3001450. Cambridge, 1 9 8 5 . L a n d m a r k study (to be u s e d with caution) of the interaction of Byzantine economic, social, and m o n e t a r y his tory. M a n g o , Cyril, Byzantine Architecture. N e w York, 1 9 7 6 . Authoritative, well-illustrated survey.
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Meinecke, Michael. " K u b a d a b a d . " In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 5, p p . 285-286. Leiden, 1986. . The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. 3 vols. Oxford, 1 9 9 1 . T h e best digest of information on individual sites. T h e Encyclopaedia of Islam is uneven, as is its T u r k i s h version, the Islam Ansiklopedisi, which is fuller on Anatolian cities. Rodley, L y n . Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia. Cambridge, 1985. Emphasizes architecture rather than decoration. Tabula imperii byzantini. Vienna, 1 9 7 6 - . T h e best site surveys and dis cussions of sources bearing u p o n particular locales; profusely illus trated with excellent maps. RUDI PAUL LINDNER
ANCHORS. Figure 1. Depiction of a figure on a ship handling a stone anchor. P a i n t i n g f r o m a s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE C y p r i o t jug.
(After
ANCHORS.
Karageorghis and des Gagniers, 1 9 7 4 , p . 1 2 3 , n o . 1 1 . 2 )
As t h e last h o p e for a s t o r m - t o s s e d s h i p , a n c h o r s also t o o k o n a religious significance—and m a n y h a v e b e e n f o u n d in t e m p l e s a n d other cultic locations. B e c a u s e a n c h o r s f o u n d o n t h e seabed are unlikely t o h a v e a stratigraphic c o n t e x t , their d a t i n g d e p e n d s largely o n a n c h o r s f o u n d at a r c h a e o logically excavated l a n d sites.
view of a similar operation. Alternately, cargo derricks m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d for m a n e u v e r i n g a n c h o r s . A n c i e n t ships e m p l o y e d a c o m p l e m e n t of a n c h o r s . T h e U l u b u r u n shipwreck off t h e coast of T u r k e y carried twentyfour weight a n c h o r s , totaling m o r e t h a n 4 t o n s . T w o - t h i r d s of t h e s h i p ' s a n c h o r s w e r e stationed at t h e b o w , while the r e m a i n d e r h a d b e e n s t o w e d a m i d s h i p s . [See U l u b u r u n . ] A g r o u p of fifteen Byblian a n c h o r s , u n d o u b t e d l y from a single ship, w e r e f o u n d in Israel at N e v e h Y a m . Curiously, only o n e a n c h o r has b e e n f o u n d o n t h e C a p e Gelidonya ship w r e c k off T u r k e y , p e r h a p s indicating that n o t all of the ship h a s b e e n located. [See C a p e Gelidonya.]
I n antiquity, those w h o sailed utilized stones as t h e earliest a n c h o r i n g devices. As a n c h o r s f o u n d o n d i e seabed a s s u m e t h e p a s s i n g of a ship, these stones p r o v i d e valuable clues a b o u t a n c i e n t r o u t e s a n d seafaring practices: Defining t h e nationalities of stone a n c h o r t y p e s c a n t h u s lead researchers t o d e t e r m i n i n g t h e r a n g e a n d d i rections of a n c i e n t seafarers. A ship's h o m e p o r t also m a y b e identifiable from t h e a n c h o r s it carried.
S t o n e A n c h o r s . A l o n g t h e shores of d i e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n d u r i n g t h e B r o n z e a n d t h e I r o n Ages, a n c h o r stones were p i e r c e d to s e c u r e t h e h a w s e r s ( r o p e s ) . T y p o logically, p i e r c e d - s t o n e a n c h o r s fall into t h r e e categories: weight a n c h o r s , in w h i c h t h e s t o n e ' s w e i g h t acts as t h e a n c h o r i n g device; s a n d a n c h o r s , w h i c h are relatively light weight a n d c o n t a i n one or m o r e additional piercings t o se c u r e w o o d e n slats t h a t g r a s p t h e seabed; a n d c o m p o s i t e a n c h o r s , w h i c h h o l d t h e s e a b e d b o t h b y m e a n s of their weight a n d b y w o o d e n " a r m s " inserted t h r o u g h additional piercings. S t o n e a n c h o r s a r e often a s y m m e t r i c a l . E r e c t a n c h o r s p o sitioned at t h e b o w are s o m e t i m e s d e p i c t e d in illustrations of seagoing ships in Old K i n g d o m E g y p t . T h i s design m a y h a v e p e r m i t t e d the a n c h o r s t o s t a n d u p r i g h t o n a tilting deck. If so, b a r s m u s t h a v e b e e n u s e d to lock d i e m in place against t h e b u l w a r k s to p r e v e n t their shifting in heavy seas. A l t h o u g h t h e heaviest r e c o r d e d B r o n z e A g e stone a n c h o r , f r o m K i t i o n , weighs 1,350 kg, it is unlikely to h a v e b e e n u s e d at sea. [See Kition.] H a l f - t o n s t o n e a n c h o r s f o u n d o n d i e M e d i t e r r a n e a n sea floor p r o b a b l y indicate t h e u p p e r limits of functional weight. H o w s u c h h e a v y a n c h o r s w e r e raised w i t h o u t a c a p s t a n is unclear. T w o s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE C y p riot jugs d e p i c t t h e h a n d l i n g of s t o n e a n c h o r s (figure 1 ) . O n e scene shows t h e a n c h o r ' s h a w s e r going t h r o u g h a sheave a t t h e t o p of t h e m a s t , while t h e o t h e r seems to b e an e x p l o d e d
Studies in t h e typologies of B r o n z e A g e stone anchors h a v e p e r m i t t e d t h e differentiation of several regional types. E g y p t i a n anchors often h a v e a s e c o n d , L - s h a p e d piercing n e a r t h e a n c h o r ' s b a s e , p e r h a p s for t h e a t t a c h m e n t of a line with a float to indicate t h e a n c h o r ' s location on d i e sea b e d (see b e l o w ) . E x a m p l e s h a v e b e e n f o u n d at Mirgissa on t h e U p p e r Nile River, at W a d i G a w a s i s o n E g y p t ' s R e d Sea coast, a n d as far afield as Byblos in L e b a n o n a n d U g a r i t in Syria. S t o n e a n c h o r s a b o u n d u n d e r w a t e r along Israel's M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast. Several a n c h o r s from t h e C a r m e l coast bear m a r k i n g s , s o m e in relief. T h e earliest datable stone, a n chorlike objects in t h e N e a r E a s t are shfifonim ( H e b . , " v i p e r s " ) , f o u n d in the region immediately s o u t h of t h e Sea of Galilee. [See Shfifonim.] N u m e r o u s stone anchors have also b e e n f o u n d at Byblos a n d Ugarit. A m o n g those f o u n d at Byblos w e r e several t h a t h a v e a distinctly triangular shape. A l t h o u g h a n c h o r s w i t h this s h a p e are c o m m o n l y t e r m e d B y blian, t h e majority h a v e b e e n f o u n d in Israeli waters (figure
2). C y p r u s is rich in stone a n c h o r s — 1 4 7 w e r e found at Kition alone. F e w stone a n c h o r s h a v e b e e n r e c o v e r e d from T u r k i s h waters, h o w e v e r , a n d t h e y are so rare in t h e A e g e a n Sea t h a t a different form of a n c h o r i n g device m a y h a v e b e e n in use there. A e g e a n B r o n z e A g e cultures m a y have e m p l o y e d killiks—devices that u s e u n d r e s s e d stones as weights for
138
ANCHORS nological d e v e l o p m e n t s . S t o n e stocks often b r o k e o n rocky sea b o t t o m s . L e a d - c o r e d w o o d e n stocks w e r e n o t as fragile, b u t their n u m b e r was directly linked t o t h e s u p p l y of lead. L e a d was in s h o r t s u p p l y until t h e late t h i r d - c e n t u r y BCE, w h e n the R o m a n s gained control of rich S p a n i s h silver m i n e s a n d p r o d u c e d silver, a n d its b y - p r o d u c t , lead, o n a g r a n d scale. W h e n t h e p r i c e of lead fell, t y p e - I l l solid-lead stocks a p p e a r e d a l m o s t simultaneously. T y p e - I V r e m o v a b l e stocks are frequentiy f o u n d in t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . T h e s e collapsible a n c h o r s were d e s i g n e d for an e c o n o m y of space a n d suggest t h e u s e of smaller ships. T h e versatile removable-stock w o o d e n a n c h o r s h e r a l d e d increasing u s e of removable-stock iron a n c h o r s .
ANCHORS. F i g u r e 2 .
0
10
Stone
anchor.
20
30 cm
Byblian a n c h o r f o u n d in tire
a n c i e n t h a r b o r of D o r , in T a n t u r a L a g o o n , Israel. (Courtesy S. Wachsmann)
w o o d e n anchoring devices. O n c e t h e w o o d disintegrated, the a n c h o r - s t o n e w o u l d b e indistinguishable f r o m other stones (see below). O n C r e t e , some stone a n c h o r s have b e e n found at Mallia a n d K o m m o s . A n a n c h o r - s h a p e d p o r p h y r y stone from K n o s s o s , with a relief carving of an o c t o p u s , m a y have b e e n a weight, or a cultic object. It is unlikely to have ever been e m p l o y e d at sea. Small stone a n c h o r s have continued in u s e into m o d e r n times. L a r g e stone a n c h o r s — t h o s e that required m o r e t h a n one person t o h a n d l e t h e m — a p p a r e n t i y w e n t o u t of u s e as n e w types of a n c h o r s w e r e i n t r o d u c e d , t o w a r d t h e e n d of the I r o n Age. W o o d e n A n c h o r s . D r a m a t i c changes in a n c h o r shape probably o c c u r r e d t o w a r d the e n d of t h e seventh century BCE w h e n t h e w o r d ankura ( " b e n t " ) first appears in G r e e k texts (Kapitan, 1984; p p . 33-36). F o u r types of w o o d e n a n chor stocks were u s e d in the G r e c o - R o m a n , p e r i o d (figure 3): stone (type I ) ; w o o d witii lead cores (II); lead (III), o c casionally with w o o d e n cores ( C ) , a n d r e m o v a b l e lead stocks (IV). L e a d stocks c o n t i n u e d to b e k n o w n as stones long after their typological forebears fell into disuse ( D u r r b a c h and Roussel, 1926-1935, vol. 1, 443.92, vol. 3;i4X7, p p . 163-65). In general, Greeks u s e d stone-stocked anchors (type I ) , whereas R o m a n s u s e d solid lead (type III) stocks. T y p e II represents a transition from stone to lead stocks, a n d t y p e IV a m o r e drastic c h a n g e from w o o d e n anchors to iron a n chors. B o t h transitions w e r e p r o d u c t s of historical a n d t e c h
Greeks called a n c h o r s h a n g i n g gear ( p r o b a b l y b e c a u s e they h u n g from b o w s a n d sterns [Casson, 1971, p . 265]), stays ( A t h a n a e u s , Diepnosophists 3.99D), or e v e n h o l d e r s ( L u c i a n , Lex. 15). T h e largest a n c h o r w a s t h e " s a c r e d a n c h o r " which was t h r o w n in times of d e s p e r a t i o n ( L u c i a n , Jup. Trag. 51). R o m a n a u t h o r s m a d e m o r e specific refer ences to a n c h o r p a r t s . A r m s (figure 3.3) or even entire a n chors were k n o w n as h o o k s (Virgil, Aeneid 1.169.3). T h e conical iron or b r o n z e c a p s t h a t reinforced a r m e n d s (figure 3.2) were called teeth (Livy 37.30.9-10), b e c a u s e of their toothlike s h a p e , o r claws (Plutarch, de mul. 8.247E). Pliny credited i n v e n t i o n of t h e o n e - a r m e d a n c h o r to E u p a l a m u s a n d of t h e t w o - a r m e d a n c h o r to A n a c h a r s i s (Nat. Hist. 7.56.209). References like Pliny's w e r e t h o u g h t a p o c ryphal until a r e i n f o r c e m e n t collar (figure 3.4) for a o n e a r m e d a n c h o r w a s f o u n d n e a r Brindisi, Italy ( K a p i t a n , 1984; Rosloff, 1991). O n e - a r m e d iron a n c h o r s also existed (P. Lond. n 6 4 h 1 1 . 7 - 1 1 ) . Scholars learned m o r e a b o u t a n c h o r a r m c o n s t r u c t i o n with t h e discovery of a f r a g m e n t a r y a n c h o r o n the C h r e t i e n n e " C " wreck (Joncheray, 1975). A r m s w e r e b o u n d fas t e n e d to a n c h o r shanks with Z - s h a p e d h o o k joints t h a t w e r e , in t u r n , secured b y m o r t i s e - a n d - t e n o n joints (figure 3.5). Pegs placed p e r p e n d i c u l a r l y t h r o u g h t e n o n s in a n c h o r a r m s locked t h e m in position. W h e n a r m / s h a n k joints l o o s e n e d with wear, r e i n f o r c e m e n t collars (figure 3.4) p o u r e d o n t o a n c h o r s held t h e a n c h o r a r m s in position ( H a l d a n e , 1986). Pliny records cork floats o n lines u s e d t o m a r k a n a n c h o r ' s location o n t h e sea b o t t o m (Nat. Hist. 16.13.34). T h e s e lines, tied t o w o o d e n - a n c h o r c r o w n n o t c h e s (figure 3.6) or iron a n c h o r c r o w n rings, also freed a n c h o r s stuck in t h e sea bed. I r o n A n c h o r s . H e r o d o t u s (9.74) m a k e s t h e first r e c o r d e d reference t o iron a n c h o r s in t h e early fifth c e n t u r y BCE. I r o n was scarce, h o w e v e r , a n d iron a n c h o r s d o n o t c o m m o n l y a p p e a r o n shipwrecks until t h e first c e n t u r y CE. A S i r o n working t e c h n o l o g y d e v e l o p e d in t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n , t h e u s e of w o o d e n a n c h o r s diminished. T h e first conclusive evidence of a n c h o r m a n u f a c t u r e to p r e d e t e r m i n e d specifications c a n b e s e e n in i r o n a n c h o r s . T h e first-century CE iron a n c h o r f o u n d at L a k e N e m i , Italy,
ANCHORS
ANCHORS.
F i g u r e 3.
Wooden
anchors.
139
S t o c k t y p e s for w o o d e n a n c h o r s . T y p e I is a s t o n e stock;
T y p e II is a w o o d s t o c k w i t h a lead c o r e ; T y p e III stocks are lead; T y p e I V stocks h a v e r e m o v a b l e lead c o r e s . T h e pieces of t h e T y p e III a n c h o r are n u m b e r e d : ( 1 ) s h a n k ; (2) t e e t h ; ( 3 ) a r m ; (4) r e i n f o r c e m e n t collar; ( 5 ) m o r t i s e a n d t e n o n joints; ( 6 ) c r o w n . (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
h a s its w e i g h t inscribed in R o m a n p o u n d s o n its shank ( S p e ziale, 1931). T h e a n c h o r c o m p l e m e n t of t h e s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y CE Yassiada B y z a n t i n e s h i p w r e c k f o u n d off t h e coast of T u r k e y m a y have r a n g e d f r o m smallest to largest in i n c r e m e n t s of 5 0 R o m a n p o u n d s (Bass a n d v a n D o o r n i n c k , 1982, p . 134). [See Yassiada W r e c k s , ] A n c h o r a r m configurations also s h o w a progressive e v o lution. I r o n a n c h o r a r m s first i m i t a t e d t h e s h a r p V p a t t e r n of w o o d e n a n c h o r s b u t gradually relaxed to t h e lunate s h a p e of t h e N e m i iron a n c h o r ( B ) ; t h e y c o n t i n u e to o p e n f r o m t h e first to t h e fourth c e n t u r i e s CE in t h e D r a m o n t D a n d F a n c h o r s . T h e c r u c i f o r m s h a p e of t h e s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y Yassiada a n c h o r s reflects t h e christianization of t h e R o m a n E m p i r e . A n c h o r a r m angles relative t o s h a n k s increased until they r e a c h e d the Y s h a p e of t h e e l e v e n t h - c e n t u r y Serce L i m a m a n c h o r s . [See Serce L i m a m . ] Increasingly u n s t a b l e e c o n o m i c a n d political conditions in t h e m e d i e v a l M e d i t e r r a n e a n dictated die u s e of smaller, faster ships. D e c k space w a s at a p r e m i u m , and d i e u s e of d u r a b l e , r e m o v a b l e - s t o c k i r o n a n c h o r s a b o a r d ships b e c a m e t h e rule. [See also Ships a n d Boats.]
Recording of Pierced Stones from the M e d i t e r r a n e a n . " In Marine Archaeology: Proceedings of the XXIII Symposium of the Colston Re search Society Held in the University of Bristol, April 4th to 8th, 1971, edited b y D . J. Blackman, p p . 3 9 7 - 4 0 6 . Colston Papers, no. 32, L o n don, 1 9 7 3 . Frost, H o n o r . " E g y p t and S t o n e Anchors: S o m e Recent Discoveries." Mariner's Minor 65 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 1 3 7 - 1 6 1 . Frost, H o n o r . " A p p e n d i x I: T h e Kition A n c h o r s , " In Excavations at Kilion 5, vol. 1, The Pre-Phoenician Levels, Areas I and II, edited by Vassos Karageorghis a n d M a r t h a D e m a s , p p . 2 8 1 - 3 2 1 , pis. A - N . Nicosia, 1986. Frost, H o n o r . " A n c h o r s Sacred a n d Profane: Ugarit-Ras S h a m r a , 1986, the Stone Anchors Revised a n d C o m p a r e d . " In Arts et indus tries de la pierre, edited b y Marguerite Y o n , p p . 3 5 5 - 4 1 0 . Ras S h a m r a - O u g a r i t , 6. Paris, 1 9 9 1 . Galili, E h u d . " A G r o u p of Stone Anchors from N e w e - Y a m . " Inter national Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 14 (1985): 143-153. Galili, E h u d , and K u r t Raveh. " S t o n e Anchors with Carvings from the Sea off M e g a d i m . " Sefunim 7 (1988): 4 1 - 4 7 , pi. 5. Karageorghis, Vassos, and Jean des Gagniers. IM ceramique chypriote de style figure, Age du fer (1050-500 Av. J.-C). Rome, 1974. Sayed, A. M . A. H . "Discovery of the Site of the Twelfth-Dynasty Port at W a d i Gawasis on the R e d Sea S h o r e . " Revue d'Egyplologie 29 (1977): 138-178. W a c h s m a n n , Shelley, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant. College Station, T e x a s , in press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stone Anchors Frost, H o n o r . " T h e Stone A n c h o r s of U g a r i t . " Ugaritica 6 ( 1 9 6 9 a ) : 235-245. Frost, H o n o r . " T h e S t o n e A n c h o r s of Byblos." Melanges de I'Universite Saint-Joseph 45 ( : 9 6 9 b ) : 4 2 5 - 4 4 2 . Frost, H o n o r . " A n c h o r s , the P o t s h e r d s of M a r i n e Archaeology: O n the
Wood and Iron Anchors Babbitt, F r a n k C , trans. Plutarch's Moralia. Vol. 3: 1723-2630. L o e b Classical Library. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 9 6 1 . Bass, G e o r g e F . , a n d Frederick H . van Doorninck, Jr. YassiAda, vol. 1, A Seventh-Century Byzantine Shipwreck. College Station, T e x a s ,
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ANDRAE, WALTER
Casson, Lionel. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. Princeton, 1 9 7 1 . Definitive work on ancient ships and seafaring. D u r r b a c h , Felix, and Pierre Roussel. Inscriptions de Debs. Vols. 1 and 3. Paris, 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 3 5 . Godley, Alfred D . , trans. Herodotus. Vol. 4, Books 8-9. L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1924. Gulick, C. B., trans. Alhanaeus: The Deipnosophists. Vol. 1, Books 1 - 3 . L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1927. Haldane, Douglas. " W o o d e n Anchor A r m Construction." International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 15 (1986): 1 6 3 - 1 6 6 . H a r m o n , A u s d n M . , trans. Lucian. Vol. 5, L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1936. H a r m o n , Austin M . , trans. Lucian. Vol. 2. L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., i960. Joncheray, J.-P. " L ' e p a v e ' C ' de la chretienne." Cahiers
d'Archeologie
Subaquatique, supp. 1 ( 1 9 7 5 ) . K a p i t a n , Gerhard, "Ancient Anchors: Technology and Classification." International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Explo ration 13 (1984): 3 3 - 4 4 . K e n y o n , Frederic, a n d H. Idris Bell. Greek Papyri in the British Museum. Vol. 3. L o n d o n , 1907. Rackham, Harris, trans. Pliny: Natural History. Vol. 2, Books 3 - 7 . L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1942. Rackham, Harris, trans. Pliny: Natural History. Vol. 4, Books 1 2 - 1 6 . L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 4 5 . Rosloff, Jay. " A O n e - A r m e d Anchor of c. 400 B.C.E. from M a ' a g a n Michael Vessel, Israel: A Preliminary R e p o r t . " International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 20.3 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 223-226. Sage, E. T „ trans, Livy: From the Founding of the City. Vol. 10, Books 3 5 - 3 7 . L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1935. Speziale, G. C . " T h e R o m a n Anchors F o u n d a t N e m i . " Manner's Mir ror 17 ( 1 9 3 1 ) : 300-320. SHELLEY WACHSMANN a n d DOUGLAS HALDANE
ANDRAE, WALTER (1875-1956), archaeologist, scholar, a n d museologist. A n d r a e was b o r n in A n g e r , n e a r Leipzig, G e r m a n y . After finishing school at G i m m a (the school of t h e princes of S a x o n y ) , h e studied architecture for four years at the T e c h n i c a l University in D r e s d e n . A n d r a e was only t w e n t y - t h r e e w h e n , in 1898, h e set off for the N e a r East with the D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesellschaft's B a b y l o n E x pedition. In Babylon A n d r a e learned excavation techniques from the expedition's leader, R o b e r t Koldewey, the m o s t p r o m i n e n t excavator of t h a t time. I n 1903, A n d r a e u n d e r took the first excavation of his o w n , at Assur, the capital of Assyria. H e worked there until 1914. A n d r a e also w o r k e d at Shuruppak (modern Fara) and Kisurra (Abu Hatab), both s o u t h of Babylon, a n d at H a t r a , the P a r t h i a n city of the sun g o d northwest of Assur. D u r i n g W o r l d W a r I, A n d r a e served as a G e r m a n a r m y officer in the N e a r East. After the war he was e m p l o y e d by t h e Berlin M u s e u m , w h e r e h e succeeded K o l d e w e y as c u rator of the N e a r East collection. I n 1928 he b e c a m e director of t h e N e a r East d e p a r t m e n t of t h e State M u s e u m of Berlin, a position h e held until die 1950s. After W o r l d W a r II, A n drae b e c a m e a professor of the history of architecture at the
T e c h n i c a l University in Berlin. T o w a r d the e n d of his life, a n accident c a u s e d his almost c o m p l e t e b l i n d n e s s . A t Assur, A n d r a e first i n t r o d u c e d t h e system of e x a m i n i n g levels: in the area of the T e m p l e of Ishtar, the oldest b u i l d i n g at Assur, he n a m e d b u i l d i n g levels b y letter, designating A for the u p p e r m o s t a n d H for t h e lowest level. H e also d e veloped K o l d e w e y ' s m e t h o d s of archaeological w o r k for d i e c o m i n g generations. A t t h e Berlin M u s e u m , A n d r a e was r e sponsible for d i e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n w o r k on t h e P r o c e s s i o n Street, t h e Ishtar G a t e , a n d other m o n u m e n t s from A s s u r and Uruk. [See also Assur; D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesellschaft; and the bi ography of Koldewey.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A n d r a e , Ernst Walter, and Rainer Michael B o e h m e r . Sketches by an Excavator: Walter Andrae im Orient, 1898-1919. Berlin, 1989. A n d r a e , Walter. Ijibenserinnerungen eines Ausgrdbers. Berlin, 1 9 6 1 . A n d r a e , Walter. Das wiedererstandene Assur. 2 d ed. M u n i c h , , 1 9 7 7 . BARTI-IEL HROUDA
A N I M A L H U S B A N D R Y . T h e d o m e s t i c a t i o n of a n imals is a c o m p o n e n t of the " N e o l i t h i c R e v o l u t i o n " a n d a process t h a t h a d an i m p a c t b o t h o n the biology of t h e t a m e d a n d tire culture of the t a m e r s . O n e of t h e m a i n centers for t h e evolution of h u s b a n d r y was the ancient N e a r East, w h e r e its beginnings, i n the early H o l o c e n e c. 9000 BCE, c a n b e f o u n d in Iran, I r a q , Anatolia, Syria, a n d the L e v a n t , within t h e hilly zones adjacent to t h e Fertile C r e s c e n t . T h e r e , within a relatively short p e r i o d of time—a few t h o u s a n d years at m o s t — m o b i l e h u n t i n g a n d gathering, a strategy t h a t h a d been successful for millennia, was r e p l a c e d b y sedentary farming a n d animal h u s b a n d r y as the p r i m a r y m o d e of s u b sistence for m o s t c o m m u n i t i e s . T h e s e t h r e e aspects of t h e Neolithic R e v o l u t i o n — s e d e n t i s m , h u s b a n d r y , a n d agricul t u r e — a r e interwoven b u t i n d e p e n d e n t c o m p o n e n t s of t h e process; t h u s , evidence for the p r e s e n c e of o n e is n o t certain p r o o f for the existence of the others. F o r this r e a s o n , t h e p r i m a r y evidence for animal h u s b a n d r y is to b e s o u g h t in d i e b o n e s of animals recovered at archaeological sites. Bones reflect d o m e s t i c a t i o n in two ways. O n e is t h e i m p a c t the p r o c e s s h a d on the wild species t h a t c a m e u n d e r h u m a n control; t h e other is its i m p a c t o n h u m a n values a n d social organizations. Shifts in t h e selective forces affecting t h e small p o p u l a t i o n s of animals initially t a m e d gradually c h a n g e d die a p p e a r a n c e of their d e s c e n d a n t s : m o s t b e c a m e smaller, n e o t e n o u s features w e r e retained,, a n d coat color a n d t e x t u r e as well as o t h e r m o r p h o l o g i c a l features b e c a m e m o r e variable. T h e s e changes w e r e likely n o t intentional goals of t h e first h e r d e r s b u t e m e r g e d from t h e p r o c e s s of selecting animals w h o w e r e easiest to m a n a g e a n d m a i n t a i n . S o m e novel m o r p h o l o g i c a l a n d behavioral features did c o m e t o h a v e e c o n o m i c significance: t h e wooly coat of s h e e p or a
ANIMAL HUSBANDRY m o r e docile personality in cattle; outers, s u c h as t h e cork screw h o r n s of goats o r t h e s h o r t e n e d faces of pigs, a l t h o u g h p e r h a p s culturally salient, d i d n o t c o n t r i b u t e obvious m a terial benefits t o t h e h u s b a n d e r s ' n e w a d a p t a t i o n t o t h e e n vironment. M o r p h o l o g i c a l features p r o d u c e d t h r o u g h u n c o n s c i o u s h u m a n i n t e r v e n t i o n are visible in skeletons a n d can b e u s e d t o d e m o n s t r a t e t h e p r e s e n c e o f d o m e s t i c stock at a n a r c h a e ological site. A t Ali K o s h , in s o u t h w e s t e r n I r a n , t h e p r e s e n c e of d o m e s t i c sheep c. 7500-7000 BCE is e v i d e n c e d b y t h e skull of a hornless ewe; d o m e s t i c goats a r e d e d u c e d from h o r n core m o r p h o l o g y ( t h e h o r n s o f b o v i d s , w h i c h a r e n o t s h e d like antlers, a r e keratinous s h e a t h s covering b o n e spikes t h a t project from t h e frontal b o n e of t h e skull). A t Hallan C e m i , in eastern Anatolia, d o m e s t i c pigs c a n b e d e m o n s t r a t e d in a b o u t 8000 BCE o n t h e basis of t h e discovery of teeth smaller t h a n their wild a n c e s t o r s ' . T h e existence of d o m e s t i c cattle in central Anatolia in t h e late sixth m i l l e n n i u m h a s b e e n a r g u e d o n t h e basis of t h e small overall size of t h e animals. M o r p h o l o g i c a l evidence a l o n e , h o w e v e r , is insufficient t o t r a c e t h e process of d o m e s t i c a t i o n . T h e earliest stages of h u s b a n d r y — t h o s e t h a t o c c u r r e d before m o r p h o l o g i c a l changes appeared—will b e missed. Moreover, the remains of d o m e s t i c stock a t a site is n o t certain p r o o f that t h e p e o p l e w h o slaughtered a n d c o n s u m e d t h e animals also raised t h e m . T h u s , t h e s e c o n d w a y in w h i c h b o n e s reflect d o m e s tication is crucial. D o m e s t i c a t i o n is t h e i n c o r p o r a t i o n of living animals into h u m a n society. D o m e s t i c a t i o n n o t only p r o d u c e s d o m e s t i c animals, it e n c o u r a g e s d i e a d o p t i o n of different values a n d social organizations b y t h e societies t h a t e m p l o y it. A major a d j u s t m e n t is required: a n i n c r e a s e d sense of p r o p e r t y b e c o m e s a m e a s u r e o f social status. T h e t e r m husbandry m e a n s to conserve, k e e p , a n d alienate r e s o u r c e s . T h e r o u t e t o s u c cess is t h r o u g h resisting t h e i m p u l s e t o slaughter stock so t h a t h e r d g r o w t h c a n b e e n c o u r a g e d . T h i s w a y of thinking is a n a t h e m a to m a n y foraging societies in w h i c h t h e r e is s t r o n g p r e s s u r e t o share t h e g a m e from a successful h u n t across t h e whole c o m m u n i t y . T h e d e m o g r a p h i c s of pastoral societies a r e s h a p e d b y t h e ratio b e t w e e n t h e n u m b e r of h e r d e r s a n d t h e size of t h e flock, a relatively rigid relation ship tiiat fosters s e g m e n t a t i o n within c o m m u n i t i e s o n h o u s e h o l d lines a n d d i s c o u r a g e s t h e free flow of p e r s o n n e l b e t w e e n c a m p s o r settlements t h a t is characteristic of h u n t ers. T h e events of t h e early H o l o c e n e i n t h e N e a r E a s t t h e r e fore p r o d u c e d significant c h a n g e s in t h e values a n d social organization of t h e e m e r g e n t c o m m u n i t i e s . T h e n e w atti t u d e s c a n only b e inferred indirectly. A k e y c o m p o n e n t of h u s b a n d r y is t h e decision t o cull. T h e p r o p o r t i o n s of t h e different ages a n d sexes in t h e animals t h a t h e r d e r s c h o o s e t o slaughter t o feed their families are distinct from those seen in t h e animals h u n t e r s a r e likely t o kill. T h u s , evaluation of t h e mortality of potentially d o m e s t i c a b l e animals at a site is a key t e c h n i q u e i n d e t e r m i n i n g w h e t h e r t h e h u m a n b e h a v
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iors associated with p a s t o r a l i s m a r e p r e s e n t . T h o u g h other i n f o r m a t i o n is s u p p o r t i v e , d e m o g r a p h i c information is c e n tral to t h e conclusions t h a t s h e e p were d o m e s t i c b y a b o u t 8500 BCE at Zawi C h e m i a n d S h a n i d a r cave in n o r t h e r n Iraq a n d goats h u s b a n d e d a t T e p e Ganj D a r e h in w e s t e r n Iran b y 7000 BCE. W h a t m o t i v a t e d t h e i n c o r p o r a t i o n of animals into h u m a n society? M o s t theories h a v e a r g u e d t h a t t h e reliable p r o d u c tion of m e a t w a s t h e incentive. It is widely agreed t h a t h u m a n p o p u l a t i o n was increasing in t h e Early H o l o c e n e , forc ing marginal habitats (from a h u n t e r - f o r a g e r perspective) to b e o c c u p i e d — l a n d s with less g a m e , w h e r e those c o m m u nities w i t h domestic h e r d s w o u l d m o r e easily survive. B e cause s o m e of these m a r g i n a l habitats a r e outside t h e r a n g e of the wild ancestors of s h e e p , t h e discovery of their r e m a i n s a t s u c h P r e - P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c sites as Jericho in t h e J o r d a n Valley, B e i d h a in J o r d a n , a n d A b u H u r e y r a o n t h e E u p h r a t e s River i n Syria h a s b e e n taken as direct evidence of d o m e s tication. F o r w h a t , t h e n , w e r e t h e y b e i n g raised? A t t h e same time m a r g i n a l habitats w e r e b e i n g i n v a d e d , t h e e n v i r o n m e n t of t h e Early H o l o c e n e w a s b o t h spatially variable a n d t e m porally erratic—conditions ethnology tells u s p r o m o t e stor age as a buffering m e c h a n i s m , a n d h u s b a n d r y is a f o r m of storage o n t h e hoof. T h e difficulty with these m o d e l s h a s b e e n d i e lack of a n e x p l a n a t i o n for h o w h u n t e r s c a n avoid killing t h e animals t h e y e n c o u n t e r a n d instead treat t h e m m o r e like gathered r e s o u r c e s — w h i c h , again ethnology r e p o r t s , a r e s h a r e d within t h e h o u s e h o l d , n o t the c o m m u n i t y at large. O n e controversial explanation for t h e motivation is t h e milk even wild caprines yield. Small n u m b e r s of t a m e stock m a i n t a i n e d b y h o u s e h o l d s for dairy p r o d u c t s could h a v e served as t h e basis for t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of larger h e r d s capable of p r o d u c i n g m e a t . A s e c o n d factor is t h e behavior of t w o of t h e wild species first d o m e s t i c a t e d — s h e e p a n d goats. B o t h of these animals are "vertical m i g r a t o r s , " a d a p t ing to t h e c h a n g e of t h e season b y m o v i n g u p a n d d o w n p r e c i p i t o u s terrain. T h e y c o n t r a s t with "horizontal m i g r a t o r s , " s u c h as gazelles a n d e q u i d s , w h i c h deal with variable climate b y traversing great distances. S h e e p a n d goats also h a v e a considerable a t t a c h m e n t t o their h o m e ranges. E x ploiting t h e m , r a t h e r t h a n t h e horizontal m i g r a t o r s , w o u l d h a v e given a n e w definition t o t h e c o n c e p t of h u n t i n g ter ritory b e c a u s e sheep a n d goat habitat is p r o d u c t i v e yearr o u n d rather t h a n just seasonally. I t is m o r e w o r t h defend ing. G a m e - m a n a g e m e n t t e c h n i q u e s , which m i m i c s o m e h e r d i n g strategies a n d so are h a r d to distinguish in t h e a r chaeological r e c o r d , w o u l d h a v e h a d value a n d offered a n other potential p a t h w a y t o m o r e intensive h u s b a n d r y . A l t h o u g h h u s b a n d r y w a s u n d e r w a y b y a b o u t 9000 BCE, it took nearly eight t h o u s a n d s years for t h e list of N e a r Eastern domesticates t o b e c o m p l e t e . S h e e p , goats, a n d p r o b a b l y pigs w e r e first, d o m e s t i c a t e d across southwest Asia b y 7000 BCE. B y 6000 BCE, t h e first sites with multiple species of d o mestic livestock a r e r e c o r d e d (e.g., E r b a b a i n Anatolia a n d
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J a r m o in Iraq, a m o n g m a n y o t h e r s ) . A t a b o u t t h e s a m e t i m e or a little earlier, a figurine found at t h e western Iranian site of Sarab indicates that woolly sheep were k n o w n . H u n t i n g h a d not died o u t as a n i m p o r t a n t subsistence p u r s u i t — t h o u g h a t sites w h e r e t h e i m p o r t a n t domesticates b e longed to tire s a m e species as the wild animals h u n t i n g m i g h t also have been p u r s u e d — b u t there is presently n o w a y to estimate its contribution accurately. However, a t t h e site of U m m D a b a g h i y e h , a sixth-millennium settlement in Iraq, onagers (a wild relative of t h e horse) were h u n t e d i n t e n sively. A scattering of d o m e s t i c donkeys is found i n various p a r t s of t h e N e a r East in a b o u t 3000 BCE, in M e s o p o t a m i a often in ritual contexts. Shortly thereafter, t h e animal b e c a m e a mainstay as a beast of b u r d e n . T h e h o r s e was d o mesticated in central Asia b y t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m a n d seems to have a p p e a r e d in t h e N e a r East b y t h e third mil l e n n i u m , although a Chalcolithic horse b o n e has b e e n f o u n d in Israel's N e g e v desert. Cattle entered t h e b a r n y a r d at t h e e n d of the sixth m i l l e n n i u m a n d w e r e used for motive p o w e r a n d milk b y t h e fourth, T h e centuries just before 3000 BCE have b e e n referred to as t h e p e r i o d of t h e S e c o n d a r y P r o d u c t s R e v o l u t i o n — a t i m e w h e n donkeys n o t only entered t h e work force, b u t sheep, goats, a n d cattle b e g a n t o b e m a n a g e d for their fiber a n d dairy p r o d u c t s . I n fact, t h e m a n a g e m e n t for s e c o n d a r y p r o d u c t s p r o b a b l y b e g a n m u c h earlier; it is m o r e correct to say that the effort invested in these forms of h u s b a n d r y i n creased with the a d v e n t of complex society. T h e complex political organization associated with t h e rise of the state r e s h a p ed animal h u s b a n d r y in the N e a r East, O n e d e v e l o p m e n t was specialized n o m a d i c pastoralism, a n adaptation d e p e n d e n t o n t h e e c o n o m i c infrastructure t h e state provides. It is n o t , as s o m e would have it, a simpler subsistence m o d e into w h i c h p e o p l e slip d u r i n g t h e inter m i t t e n t periods of social disintegration b r o u g h t o n b y t h e collapse of states a n d empires. N o m a d i c pastoralism has t h e capacity to generate considerable political p o w e r . T h o u g h it is counterintuitive, the successes a n d failures of individual pastoralists d o n o t even o u t over time. Instead, s o m e s u c ceed enormously a n d are able to employ or otherwise attach their luckless fellows t o m a n a g e their ever-increasing h e r d s . T h e s e a r r a n g e m e n t s are capable of multiplying t o p r o d u c e n o m a d i c " k i n g d o m s " of considerable p o w e r . U n d e r t h e state, animal p r o d u c t i o n w a s m a n a g e d either t h r o u g h b u reaucrats o r t h e action of markets. I n either case, h u s b a n d e r s were e n c o u r a g e d b y t h e d e m a n d s m a d e o r t h e opportunities p r o v i d e d b y these institutions to redirect their efforts away from h o u s e h o l d p r o d u c t i o n a n d t o w a r d t h e creation of a n imal p r o d u c t s for exchange. F o r example, in t h e L e v a n t , at T e l Halif, donkeys w e r e p r o d u c e d o n a large scale, p r e s u m ably to serve a regional n e e d for t r a n s p o r t animals. T h i s principle also is visible in the transformation of culling strat egies for sheep a n d goats. Effective m u l t i p u r p o s e m a n a g e m e n t of these animals for h o u s e h o l d c o n s u m p t i o n focuses
o n dairy p r o d u c t i o n as t h e m o s t efficient m e t h o d of p r o d u c i n g calories. E v i d e n c e for h e r d i n g t e c h n i q u e s a i m e d at t h e p r o d u c t i o n of m e a t o r wool implies that t h e e x c h a n g e value associated with these p r o d u c t s w a s sufficient t o o u t weigh t h e overall decrease in total p r o d u c t i o n . T h e s e a r e r e c o r d e d in all p a r t s of t h e N e a r East. I n M e s o p o t a m i a , c u neiform d o c u m e n t s indicate t h a t b y t h e e n d of t h e third m i l l e n n i u m extensive centralized s h e e p h e r d i n g w a s u n d e r w a y . Unfortunately, t h e d o c u m e n t a r y r e c o r d refers almost exclu sively to state-directed activities a n d p r o v i d e s n o p i c t u r e of t h e rural d o m e s t i c p r o d u c t i o n of a n i m a l p r o d u c t s , w h i c h m u s t h a v e been e n o r m o u s . T h e textual r e c o r d also indicates t h a t local " b r e e d s " h a d developed. It is a mistake to view these as distinctive m o r phologies p r o d u c e d b y deliberate isolation a n d selection, as is practiced in m o d e r n h u s b a n d r y . I n s t e a d , subregional e c o n o m i c , political, a n d physical b o u n d a r i e s p r o d u c e d isolated p o p u l a t i o n s of d o m e s t i c stock that, either t h r o u g h a d a p t a tion t o local conditions o r t h e effects of genetic drift, attained distinctive a n d recognizable qualities. I n t h e s e c i r c u m stances, local h e r d s , even t h o u g h n a m e d , actually c o n t a i n a wide r a n g e of m o r p h o l o g i e s . Genesis 31 p r o v i d e s a clear e x a m p l e of t h e principle. W h i l e J a c o b believes t h a t t h e c h a r acteristics of t h e m a l e goats in his flock will t u r n u p in t h e n e x t generation of kids, t h e flock itself is very diverse in a p p e a r a n c e , hardly t h e m o d e r n idea of a b r e e d . I n Egypt, d o m e s t i c s h e e p a n d goats s e e m t o h a v e b e e n i m p o r t s from s o u t h w e s t Asia. I n t h e case of cattle, t h e case is n o t settled. A center of domestication, i n d e p e n d e n t of t h e o n e in Anatolia a n d southeast E u r o p e , m a y h a v e existed in n o r t h e a s t Africa. Certainly in t h e p h a r a o n i c e r a , extensive e x p e r i m e n t a t i o n with a w i d e r a n g e of animals w a s practiced. While most ventures never went beyond taming, some birds, notably geese, b e c a m e significant d o m e s t i c a t e s , as they d i d in M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e date t h e c a m e l e n t e r e d t h e register of d o m e s t i c stock is u n k n o w n . T h o u g h m o s t authorities w o u l d place t h e event in Arabia a n d eastern I r a n s o m e t i m e in t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m or a little earlier, t h e evidence is extremely thin a n d subject t o alternative explanations. A s i m p o r t a n t c o n t r i b u t o r s t o t h e e c o n o m y , h o w e v e r , t h e evidence for camels p o i n t s certainly t o t h e early first a n d p e r h a p s t o t h e m i d d l e of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. O t h e r animals deserve s o m e m e n t i o n . T h e h u m p e d Z e b u cattle, especially well a d a p t e d t o arid c o n d i t i o n s , is p r e s e n t in J o r d a n b y t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , a l t h o u g h t h e difficulty associated with identifying its r e m a i n s m e a n s t h a t it m a y b e p r e s e n t elsewhere earlier, b u t u n r e c o g n i z e d a m o n g t h e b o n e s of t h e m o r e c o m m o n t a u r i n e cattle. T h e s a m e p r o b l e m faces t h e identification of t h e c o n t r i b u t i o n of t h e w a t e r buffalo, p r e s u m a b l y wild examples of w h i c h h a v e b e e n f o u n d in Halafian deposits, F a u n a l evidence s h o w s t h a t t h e animal w a s d o m e s t i c a t e d in t h e I n d u s Valley b y t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , a n d a seal i m p r e s s i o n places t h e a n i m a l i n M e s -
'ANJAR o p o t a m i a at a b o u t the s a m e t i m e . Little m o r e is k n o w n . T h e i n d i g e n o u s hare of the N e a r E a s t w a s n o t d o m e s t i c a t e d , a n d rabbits w e r e n o t i n t r o d u c e d until R o m a n times. F i s h w e r e raised in p o n d s in M e s o p o t a m i a b u t do n o t s e e m t o h a v e b e e n t r u e domesticates. Bees w e r e kept in E g y p t b e g i n n i n g in t h e O l d K i n g d o m (third m i l l e n n i u m ) , b u t the technology does n o t s e e m to h a v e s p r e a d to Asia. T h e e l e p h a n t p r e s e n t s an especially c o m p l e x p r o b l e m . T h e discovery of ivory at s u c h w o r k s h o p s as Bir es-Safadi in the n o r t h e r n N e g e v indicates the p r e s e n c e of t h e a n i m a l in t h e Chalcolithic period. S c a t t e r e d b o n e a n d tusk finds t o g e t h e r witii textual r e c o r d s of imperial h u n t i n g suggest t h a t a relict p o p u l a t i o n of an as yet u n d e t e r m i n e d species of e l e p h a n t w a s p r e s e n t in Syria as late as t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE. H o w e v e r , at least o n e authority h a s a r g u e d tiiat these animals w e r e actually t r a n s p o r t e d from India for royal s p o r t a n d so technically w o u l d b e d o m e s t i cates. Finally, t h e chicken has b e e n r e p o r t e d from occasional finds as early as d i e Early B r o n z e Age. T h e scarcity of these r e p o r t s a n d t h e possibility of c o n t a m i n a t i o n associated with m o s t of t h e m contrasts with t h e explosion of chicken h u s b a n d r y t h a t begins in t h e P e r s i a n a n d particularly the H e l lenistic period. T h e evidence n o w p o i n t s to a n original d o mestication of die chicken in C h i n a d u r i n g the Neolithic, followed b y a n extremely slow diffusion west. [See also C a m e l s ; Cattle a n d O x e n ; E q u i d s ; Paleozoology; Pigs; and S h e e p a n d Goats.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Boessneck, Joachim. Die Tierwelt des Alten Agypten: Untersucht anhand Kulturgeschichtlicher und Zoologischer. M u n i c h , 1988. Encyclopedic survey of animal domestication in Egypt. Clutton-Brock, Juliet, ed. The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism, andPredation, L o n d o n , 1989. Presents important studies by Pierre D u c o s and S a n d o r Bokonyi from a social and instrumental perspective, as well as a survey by Richard H . M e a d o w of the m e t h ods of determining animal domestication in the N e a r East. C r a b t r e e , P a m J. "Early Animal D o m e s t i c a t i o n in the Middle East a n d E u r o p e . " In Archaeological Method and Theory, edited by Michael B. Schiffer, p p . 2 0 1 - 2 4 5 . T u c s o n , 1 9 9 3 . Clearly written s u m m a r y of the evidence for animal domestication, although it does not e m p h a size social process. Gautier, Achilles. La domestication: Et I'homme crea ses animaux. Paris, 1990. I m p o r t a n t E u r o p e a n perspective on the process of animal d o mestication. Grigson, Caroline. " P l o u g h a n d P a s t u r e in t h e Early E c o n o m y of tire S o u t h e r n L e v a n t . " In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, edited by T h o m a s E. Levy, p p . 2 4 5 - 2 6 8 . N e w York, 1 9 9 5 . R e c e n t review of the process of domestication in the western N e a r East. Emphasizes a critical review of t h e evidence within an ecological model. R e d d i n g , R. W . " A General E x p l a n a t i o n of Subsistence C h a n g e : F r o m H u n t i n g a n d Gathering to F o o d P r o d u c t i o n . " Journal of Anthropo logical Archaeology 7 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 5 6 - 9 7 . Utilizes a systems a p p r o a c h to explain t h e advent of domestication. Russell, Kenneoh. After Eden. British Archaeological Reports, I n t e r n a tional Series, n o . 3 9 1 . O x f o r d , 1 9 8 8 . I m p o r t a n t statement from t h e
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perspective of optimization theory on the process of domestication, providing the a r g u m e n t for the early exploitation of dairy p r o d u c t s . T c h e r n o v , Eitan, a n d Liora K. Horwitz. " B o d y Size Diminution u n d e r Domestication: Unconscious Selection in Primeval Domesticates." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 10 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 5 4 - 7 5 . Sophisti cated analysis of the coevolution of domesticators and domesticated. Zeder, Melinda A. Feeding Cities: Specialized Animal Economy in the Ancient Near East. W a s h i n g t o n , D . C , 1 9 9 1 . Based on a study of T a l - e M a l y a n in Iran, providing a systems view of t h e impact of c o m p l e x society on animal production systems in southwest Asia. BRIAN HESSE
' A N J A R ('Andjar, ' A i n al-Jarr), site located in L e b a n o n , in the eastern foothills of the B i q a ' (Bekaa) Valley, south of Baalbek, halfway b e t w e e n Beirut a n d D a m a s c u s (35°56' N , 33°44' E ) . S o m e ruins in the area of 'Anjar, in particular a q u a d r a n g u l a r fortification wall, were described b y n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y travelers a n d biblical scholars, s u c h as J o h a n n L . B u r c k h a r d t a n d E d w a r d R o b i n s o n . T h e first e x p l o ration of the site, carried o u t by t h e G e r m a n Archaeological E x p e d i t i o n excavating at Baalbek, w a s p u b l i s h e d in 1938 by D a n i e l M . K r e n c k e r a n d Willy Z s c h i e t z s c h m a n n . I n 1939, J e a n S a u v a g e t identified t h e ruins as U m a y y a d 'Ain al-Jarr. I n 9535 M a u r i c e C h e h a b b e g a n to excavate 'Anjar, p u b lishing preliminary r e p o r t s in 1957 a n d 1963. I n 1967, S o lange O r y p u b l i s h e d die site's Arabic inscriptions and graf fiti, a n d J e a n - P a u l R e y - C o q u a i s published the few G r e e k inscriptions excavated. I n 1969, K. A . C . Creswell included 'Anjar i n his second edition of Early Muslim Architecture (1969). In 1993, Hafez K . C h e h a b c o m m e n t e d on G r e e k a n d Syriac texts t h a t attribute t h e construction o f ' A n j a r r e spectively to al-Walid I (r. 705-715 C E ) , a n d his son a l - ' A b b a s (in 709 CE); C h e h a b also discussed 'Anjar's identification w i t h Chalcis a d L i b a n u m , its pre-Islamic origin, a n d die p r o b l e m s created b e c a u s e t h e material culture excavated at 'Anjar has n o t b e e n studied. It is still u n c l e a r w h e t h e r the site is an Islamic f o u n d a t i o n reusing architectural structures from n e a r b y R o m a n a n d Byzantine sites, or the Islamic r e consu-uction of a previous settlement. It is even less certain t h a t the I t u r e a n a n d H e r o d i a n Chalcis was at 'Anjar. T h e excavations at 'Anjar carried o u t by M a u r i c e C h e h a b cleared a q u a d r a n g u l a r defense wall (310 X 370 m ) t h a t was b u t t r e s s e d with semicircular towers a n d h a d a m o n u m e n t a l gate in die middle of e a c h side. T w o c o l o n n a d e d avenues link the gates a n d intersect at right angles u n d e r a m o n u m e n t a l t e t r a p y l u m . T w o palaces, a m o s q u e (with a mihrab a d d e d later), a n d t w o b a t h s (the larger with mosaic a n d m a r ble floors) were cleared a n d partially rebuilt. T h e f o u n d a tions of t h r e e other palaces w i t h i n n e r courts were f o u n d along t h e east-west c o l o n n a d e d avenue. T h e overall p l a n of this walled town, w h i c h recalls plans of R o m a n and B y z antine castra, a p p e a r s t o h a v e b e e n laid o u t all at once: t h e f o u n d a t i o n m a s o n r y , u s i n g a h a r d m o r t a r , is of t h e s a m e t y p e for all the large structures. T h e s o u t h w e s t q u a d r a n t is :
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ANTIOCH ON ORONTES
covered with smaller dwellings. D r a i n a g e channels w e r e found all over the site, converging t o w a r d sewers built u n d e r die c o l o n n a d e d avenues. R e u s e d architectural structures, in particular capitals of R o m a n a n d Byzantine types, were found in the larger palace a n d along the porticoes. A c o l u m n with a G r e e k Christian inscription t h a t b e l o n g e d to a c h u r c h dedicated to " O u r L a d y M o t h e r of G o d " can b e seen in the court of t h e larger palace. M a n y stone elements of archivolts a n d friezes (with vegetal, floral, a n d geometric motifs) a n d pillar and pilaster capitals ( s o m e with figures) w e r e u n c o v ered in t h e palaces. It remains t o b e seen w h e t h e r this p a r t of t h e architectural decoration is Islamic or pre-Islamic. It is certain, however, that 'Anjar, called 'Ain al-Jarr in Islamic sources, was inhabited from at least 741 CE until its d e s t r u c tion, r e p o r t e d b y the M u s l i m g e o g r a p h e r A b u al-Fida', in 1321. BIBLIOGRAPHY Burckhardt, Johann L. Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.
London,
1822. See pages 8-9. C h e h a b , Hafez. " O n the Identification of 'Anjar ('Ayn al-Jarr) as an U m a y y a d F o u n d a t i o n . " Muqamas 10 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 4 2 - 4 8 . C h e h a b , Maurice. " T h e U m a y y a d Palace at 'Anjar." Ars Orientalis 5 (1963): 1 7 - 2 5 . Creswell, K. A. C . Early Muslim Architecture,
vol. 1, Umayyads A.
622-7$o. 2d ed. Oxford, 1969, See pages 4 7 8 - 4 8 1 . Krencker, Daniel M . , and Willy Zschietzschmann. Romische
D.
Tempelin
Syrien. Vol. 1. Berlin, 1 9 3 8 . See pages 1 9 2 - 1 9 4 . Ory, Solange. " L e s graffiti Umayyades de 'Ayn a l - G a r r . " Bulletin
du
Musee Beyrouth 20 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 9 7 - 1 4 8 . Rey-Coquais, Jean-Paul. Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, vol. 6, Baalbek
el Beqa. Institute Francais d'Archeologie de Beyrouth,
Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, 78. Paris, 1 9 6 7 . S e e p a g e s 229-232. Robinson, Edward, et al. Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions: A Journal of Travels in the Years 1838 and 1852, vol. 3, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine. 2d ed. L o n d o n , 1 8 5 6 . See pages 495-500. Sauvaget, Jean. "Les m i n e s omeyyades de 'Andjar." Bulletin de Beyrouth 3 ( 1 9 3 9 ) : 5 - 1 1 .
du
Musee
HAFEZ CHEHAB
A N T I O C H O N O R O N T E S , site identified with A n takya, m o d e r n H a t a y , f o u n d e d on t h e course of the O r o n t e s River (36°i2' N , 36°io' E ) . O n e of the greatest cities in the ancient world, A n t i o c h is n o w a t o w n of m o d e r a t e i m p o r tance, i n c o r p o r a t e d into T u r k e y in 1938. A n t i o c h was orig inally f o u n d e d in 330 BCE by Seleucus I. H e n r i Seyrig has d e m o n s t r a t e d t h a t t h e cities t h a t p r e c e d e d it on t h e plain of Antioch, Alalakh, a n d later Antigonia, the short-lived city f o u n d e d b y A n t i g o n u s I (the O n e - E y e d ) , w e r e situated within the plain a n d d r e w the bulk of their resources from t h e fertility of t h e ' A m u q a n d t h e proximity of inland Syria. I n contrast, A n t i o c h is o n t h e O r o n t e s River, w h e r e its c h a n nels r u n into t h e sea. It was located directly o n the great
t r a d e r o u t e t h a t r u n s from the P e r s i a n Gulf to the M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea by w a y of d i e E u p h r a t e s River valley. It is n o table t h a t a m o n g the t h r e e cities f o u n d e d in t h e s a m e p e r i o d by Seleucus, t w o — S e l e u c i a of Pieria a n d L a o d i c e a — w e r e sited on the sea a n d served as t r a d i n g outlets. It m a y s e e m t h a t die t r u e capital of the Seleucid E m p i r e w a s Seleucia of Pieria rather t h a n Antioch. Seleucia, h o w e v e r , was e x p o s e d a n d occasionally s u c c u m b e d to external t h r e a t s w h i c h gave the advantage t o A n t i o c h . Of ancient A n t i o c h , n o t h i n g r e m a i n s o n t h e surface ex cept for a few traces of walls. T h e city suffered n u m e r o u s earthquakes a n d was r e c o n s t r u c t e d e a c h time u p o n t h e ruins of the p r e c e d i n g e p o c h . T h a n k s to a n c i e n t autiiors, p r i n c i pally Libanios a n d Julian in t h e fourth c e n t u r y a n d Malalas in t h e sixth, its t o p o g r a p h y is k n o w n w i t h s u c h precision t h a t the G e r m a n philologist Carl Otfried M u l l e r gave a fairly p r e cise view of t h e city in his Antiquitat.es Antiochenae p u b l i s h e d in 1839. T h e excavations carried o u t b e t w e e n 1932 a n d 1939 by P r i n c e t o n University u p d a t e d a n d refined w h a t was k n o w n of the city. T h e earliest levels o c c u r at a d e p t h of 11 m ; the city of Justinian (sixth c e n t u r y CE) w a s f o u n d at 6 m . Because of the c o n t i n u o u s o c c u p a t i o n of the city, it w a s n o t possible to p r o c e e d with extensive excavations. I n addition, the rise in the level of t h e O r o n t e s a n d t h e s u r r o u n d i n g w a t e r table as a result of alluviation h a s resulted in t h e s u b m e r s i o n of the earliest Hellenistic levels. T h e great n o r t h - s o u t h r o a d t h a t traversed t h e city could b e t h o r o u g h l y excavated, h o w ever. Because all the city streets c o n n e c t e d t o t h e m a i n r o a d , the excavators w e r e able to a d v a n c e o u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the city's general organization a n d evolution. O u r k n o w l e d g e of d i e city f o u n d e d b y Seleucus is r e stricted t o a r e c o r d of its m o d e s t size. S i t u a t e d entirely o n the left b a n k of d i e O r o n t e s , it was s u r r o u n d e d by a wall t h a t e x t e n d e d to t h e east along a cart track o n w h i c h a great c o l o n n a d e d r o a d was later installed. A c c o r d i n g to d i e texts, it i n c l u d e d a G r e c o - M a c e d o n i a n a n d an A r a m e a n quarter. As die capital of the Seleucid k i n g d o m , w h i c h , at the e n d of the third century, e x t e n d e d as far as I n d i a a n d i n c l u d e d Asia M i n o r , A n t i o c h e x p e r i e n c e d r a p i d g r o w t h . Its area m o r e t h a n doubled u n d e r A n t i o c h u s IV, w i t h t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of the E p i p h a n i a q u a r t e r t o the east. T h e city d i d n o t yet h a v e the wealth it later acquired. T h e ancient r o a d t h a t r a n along the wall of Seleucus certainly existed in t h e center of the city, b u t it was u n p a v e d a n d r e m a i n e d so a n d w i t h o u t a gate until the b e g i n n i n g of t h e first c e n t u r y . Antioch participated in the u r b a n e x p a n s i o n t h a t resulted from t h e R o m a n a n n e x a t i o n of Syria. U n d e r A u g u s t u s , thanks t o the intervention a n d financing of A g r i p p a a n d H e r o d , t h e city's great r o a d w a s flanked b y b r o a d walkways. T i b e r i u s installed the c o l o n n a d e . T h e r o a d w a s t r a n s e c t e d b y alleys a n d lined w i t h s h o p s , at least o n its east side. T h e city was destroyed b y t h e terrible e a r t h q u a k e of 115 CE. T r a jan, w h o was p r e s e n t i n the city, e s c a p e d b y taking refuge
APAMEA in t h e H i p p o d r o m e . R e c o n s t r u c t i o n w a s p l a n n e d on a g r a n d scale a n d c o m p l e t e d in d i e time of A n t o n i n u s . L a n d w a s e x p r o p r i a t e d on b o t h sides of t h e r o a d w a y , a n d a n e w , wider (33 m ) r o a d was c o n s t r u c t e d t h a t w a s m o r e m o n u m e n t a l t h a n the p r e c e d i n g o n e . T h e r o a d w a y w a s 9 m w i d e , e a c h lateral gate w a s 9 w i d e , a n d t h e s h o p s w e r e 6 m d e e p . It w a s t h e m o s t impressive r o a d in all the Syrian cities, except for t h e o n e at A p a m e a . N o major modification of t h e city p l a n w a s u n d e r t a k e n until the sixth century. L i b a n i o s a n d M a l a l a s a n d a m o s a i c e x e c u t e d in a b o u t 460 at Y a k t o i n f o r m u s t h a t t h e city e n joyed a c o n t i n u o u s increase i n its p o p u l a t i o n a n d m o n u m e n t a l o r n a m e n t a t i o n . F o r several d e c a d e s , die city's growtii w a s i n t e r r u p t e d only b y its c a p t u r e b y the Persians (in 256 a n d 260) a n d die d e p o r t a t i o n in e a c h case of a p o r tion of t h e p o p u l a t i o n . A t t h e e n d of t h e fourth c e n t u r y , s u b u r b s w e r e built outside t h e city walls. After t h e E d i c t of M i l a n , several c h u r c h e s w e r e c o n s t r u c t e d , including an o c t a g o n a l b u i l d i n g n o t a b l e for its scale a n d gilded w o o d c u pola. It w a s attributed to C o n s t a n t i n e a n d called the domus aurea, t h e " h o u s e of g o l d . " T h e city w a s lighted t h r o u g h d i e night. E v e n t h o u g h the p o p u l a t i o n w a s k n o w n as b o i s t e r o u s , pleasure loving, a n d a r g u m e n t a t i v e , Julian the A p o s t a t e dis pleased t h e p e o p l e with his p a g a n i s m a n d his lack of interest in g a m e s . T h e wealthy i n h a b i t a n t s of A n t i o c h h a d c o u n t r y h o u s e s in t h e vicinity of D a p h n e . I n t h e third c e n t u r y , this little t o w n , celebrated for the a b u n d a n c e of its waters, a c q u i r e d a n u r b a n organization: n a r r o w lanes a p p e a r to have sepa r a t e d t h e m o d e s t p r o p e r t i e s , a n d s u b t e r r a n e a n channels s u p plied t h e m with water. A n u m b e r of p a g a n sanctuaries w e r e installed at D a p h n e , i n c l u d i n g o n e d e d i c a t e d to oracular Apollo. T h e Christians s u c c e e d e d in dislodging t h e m . In the fifth a n d sixth c e n t u r i e s , t h e life of t h e city w a s m a r k e d b y the contests t h a t o p p o s e d the factions of t h e Blues a n d t h e G r e e n s in t h e H i p p o d r o m e , b u t especially by t h e confrontation of the C h a l c e d o n i a n s a n d die M o n o p h y sites. T h e sixth c e n t u r y w a s m a r k e d by great disasters. E a r t h q u a k e s struck A n t i o c h i n 526 a n d 528 tiiat killed b e t w e e n 250,000 a n d 300,000 victims, a n o d i e r e a r t h q u a k e struck in 551 a n d at D a p h n e i n 577. I n 528, e l - M u n d h i r t h e L a k l i m i d i a n , a P e r s i a n ally, c a p t u r e d a n d sacked t h e city a n d d e p o r t e d a significant p o r t i o n of t h e p o p u l a t i o n . Antioch suffered a similar attack b y t h e Persians in 540. E p i d e m i c s of p l a g u e struck f r o m 542 to 573. After t h e destructions of 526 a n d 528, well d o c u m e n t e d b y excavation, Justin a n d t h e n Justinian r e c o n s e c r a t e d t h e city as T h e o p o l i s a n d d e d icated considerable resources t o its r e c o n s t r u c t i o n . I n spite of w h a t P r o c o p i u s says, t h e d e s t r u c t i o n debris could n o t b e completely cleared away. I n t h e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of the n e w city, m o s t of the r u b b l e w a s r e u s e d . T h e great r o a d w a s r e c o n s t r u c t e d o n e m e t e r h i g h e r , witii basalt paving. S o m e m o n u m e n t s w e r e r e s t o r e d a n d others w e r e newly c o n
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structed. T h e city wall, w h i c h h a d b e e n destroyed several times, was rebuilt b u t with a shorter perimeter. In s u m , the city was restored—if n o t t o its a n c i e n t splendor, at least a p p r o a c h i n g it. D i s a s t e r s were r e n e w e d in the seventh century. A n t i o c h w a s c a p t u r e d by t h e Persians in 606, 607, a n d again in 611 a n d r e m a i n e d o c c u p i e d until 622. E a r t h q u a k e s followed the pillage. W h e n t h e A r a b s arrived in 636, the city was in a pitiful state a n d was taken w i t h o u t resistance. T h e city never r e c o v e r e d her f o r m e r m e t r o p o l i t a n role. A n t i o c h reverted again to Byzantine control in t h e second half of the t e n t h century. It fell t o Philarete, t h e A r m e n i a n a d v e n t u r e r , in the last third of t h e eleventh c e n t u r y , a n d t h e n to the F r a n k s , at t h e very e n d of the s a m e century. T a k e n by t h e C r u s a d e r s in 1098, A n t i o c h ceased to be the capital of Syria b e c a u s e of t h e decline in the n u m b e r a n d activity of its inhabitants a n d its status. I n the twelfth a n d thirteenth centuries, it again b e c a m e a capital, b u t of a state m u c h r e d u c e d in size, the principality of A n t i o c h . BIBLIOGRAPHY D o w n e y , Glanville. A History of Antioch in Syria. Princeton, 1 9 6 1 . K e n n e d y , H u g h . " T h e L a s t C e n t u r y of Byzantine Syria." Byzanlinische Forschungen 10, p p . 1 4 1 - 1 8 3 . Lassus, Jean. Lesportiqucs d'Antiochs. Princeton, 1 9 7 7 . Levi, D o r o . Antioch Mosaic Pavements. 2 vols. Princeton, 1947. Liebeschuetz, J. H . W. G. Antioch, City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire. Oxford, 1 9 7 2 . Stillwell, Richard. Antioche-on-the-Orontes: The Excavations, 19331936. Princeton, Stillwell, Richard. 1938. Princeton, T a t e , Georges. Les
1938. Antioche-on-the-Orontes: The Excavations, 1941. campagnes de la Syrie du Nord du He au Vile
1937siecle.
Vol. 1. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 3 3 . Paris, 1992. T c h a l e n k o , Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: Le massif du Belus a I'epoque romaine. 3 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et H i s torique, vol. 50. Paris, 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 5 8 . GEORGES TATE Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
A P A M E A (Gk., A p a m e i a , L a t . , A p a m e a , Ar., Afamiya, F a m i y a ; O l d F r . , F e m i e ) , Hellenistic, R o m a n , Byzantine, a n d Early Islamic city in t h e M i d d l e Orontes valley, o n e of die four m a i n cities of t h e N o r t h Syrian tetrapolis (Strabo 16.2.10). O n c e t h o u g h t t o b e a t H a m a (Epiphaneia) b e c a u s e of an e r r o n e o u s identification witii t h e Syriac E u p h e m i a , 'wpymy' (P. della Valle, 1614), it has b e e n located at Q a f a t e l - M u d i q in t h e p r o v i n c e of H a m a , Syria (35°25' N , 36 24' E) at least since C a r s t e n N i e b u h r ' s visit in 1766, C . - F . Volney's from 1783 to 1785, a n d J o h a n n L . B u r c k h a r d t ' s i n 1812. [See H a m a . ] T h e city w a s f o u n d e d in 300/299 BCE b y Seleucus I N i c a t o r w i t h t h e dynastic n a m e Apamea, related to that of the sovereign's wife, A p a m a . It was d i e h e a d c
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quarters of t h e Seleucid army, with five h u n d r e d w a r ele p h a n t s , a p a y corps checking office, a n d a stud farm t h a t comprised no fewer tiian thirty t h o u s a n d m a r e s a n d t h r e e h u n d r e d stallions. " R i d i n g masters, m a s t e r s - a t - a r m s a n d a n y o n e w h o w a s paid t o teach d i e art of warfare were also stationed t h e r e " ( S t r a b o 16.2.10). T h e town, like A n t i o c h , w h i c h also lies in a seismic region, suffered m a n y e a r t h quakes in its history, a m o n g w h i c h those of 1 1 5 , 526, 528, 1157, and 1170 CE were t h e m o s t disastrous. Definitively a b a n d o n e d after these last t w o , t h e t o w n was s u p e r s e d e d b y t h e citadel on t h e tell, w a s reconstructed b y N u r a d - D i n , a n d encloses t h e m o d e r n village. Foreign travelers to t h e site n o t e d s o m e scattered G r e e k a n d Latin inscriptions, t h e r e m a i n s of a magnificent colon n a d e d street that o n c e crossed t h e site, a n d an agora, a ca thedral, a n d a theater. C u m o n t , w h o visited t h e r u i n s o n his w a y t o D u r a - E u r o p o s (1922), r e c o m m e n d e d t h e site t o t h e Belgian F o n d s N a t i o n a l d e la R e c h e r c h e Scientifique for ex cavation. After a survey i n 1928, F . M a y e n c e led seven c a m paigns there (1930-1938), with t h e help of the architect H . Lacoste. T h e work w a s i n t e r r u p t e d b y W o r l d W a r II, r e s u m e d for t w o years (1947, 1953), a n d t h e n r e s u m e d every year from 1965 o n w a r d , with a n e w staff, in c o o p e r a t i o n with t h e Syrian D i r e c t o r a t e General of Antiquities a n d M u s e u m s , which is responsible for restoration. A l t h o u g h especially interested in t h e city's wide s p e c t r u m of historical p e r i o d s , t h e Belgian expedition h a s also s u r veyed M i d d l e Paleolithic e n c a m p m e n t s a n d w o r k s h o p s w h e r e flints were k n a p p e d , collected Neolithic material t h a t fell from t h e t o p of t h e tell, a n d excavated rich B r o n z e A g e t o m b s . It has systematically u n c o v e r e d a n d studied various m o n u m e n t s belonging t o t h e later periods of o c c u p a t i o n . Soundings m a d e o n t h e s o u t h e r n slope of t h e tell in 1970 revealed L a t e U b e i d s h e r d s (square A 1) a n d s o m e thirty successive strata of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e a n d t h e transi tional p h a s e to t h e L a t e Bronze (square B 1). Inaccessible until n o w on t h e slopes of t h e medieval citadel, t h e s e c o n d millennium BCE a n d t h e first half of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE remain mostly u n k n o w n . H o w e v e r , the discovery of a N e o Hittite stela of K i n g Urhilina of I i a m a (c. 850-840 BCE) in the foundation of a Christian c h u r c h on t h e plateau attests to the city's i m p o r t a n c e at that time. By c o m p a r i n g A p a m e a t o t h e other Seleucid t o w n s of t h e tetrapolis a n d m a k i n g soundings o n t h e m a i n street a n d a t t h e foot of the city wall, d i e Hellenistic t o w n p l a n n i n g is n o w better u n d e r s t o o d . U n e a r t h i n g t h e r a m p a r t o n its n o r t h e r n , eastern, a n d s o u t h e r n sides (1984-1986) confirmed t h a t t h e city wall, p e r h a p s n o t earlier t h a n t h e e n d of t h e third c e n tury BCE, enclosed a city of a b o u t 230 h a (568 acres). T h e town developed within this framework, divided into quarters of varying i m p o r t a n c e a n d character, in a cross-of-Lorraine pattern, of its m a i n plateiai. T h e insulae s e e m t o h a v e m e a sured approximately 55 X 110 m , just as at A n t i o c h a n d Laodicea, its sister cities. [See Antioch o n Orontes.] R e c e n t
discoveries at t h e n o r t h e r n gate have s h o w n t h a t in t h e H e l lenistic p e r i o d a c o l o n n a d e d a v e n u e , in a " D o r i c o - T o s c a n " c o m p o s i t e style, p r e c e d e d t h e C o r i n t h i a n p o r t i c o e s built af ter t h e e a r t h q u a k e of 115 CE ( s o m e of these capitals w e r e f o u n d r e u s e d i n private h o u s e s ) . I n t h e c e n t e r of t h e city, west of t h e m a i n axis a n d b e t w e e n t h e t w o p r i n c i p a l e a s t west arteries, w a s t h e h u g e peribolos of a t e m p l e d e d i c a t e d to Z e u s Belos, t h e oracular g o d of A p a m e a . T h e m o n u m e n t stands o n a h i g h p o d i u m t h a t o c c u p i e d t h e highest p o i n t o n t h e u r b a n l a n d s c a p e , i n front of t h e citadel, exactly w h e r e t h e t e m p l e of d i e poliad g o d d e s s A r t e m i s d o m i n a t e s t h e city of Gerasa/Jerash. [See Jerash.] It is n o t possible to r e c o v e r anything of t h e Hellenistic buildings b e c a u s e t h e y w e r e e x tensively rebuilt in t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE. T h e Corinthian colonnaded avenue (north-south), where s m o o t h c o l u m n s alternate with c o l u m n s w i t h vertical a n d sometimes rare spiral fluting, attests t o t h e g r a n d e u r of t h e restored city (3,750 m wide a n d a b o u t 1,850 m f r o m its n o r t h e r n to its s o u t h e r n gate). H u n d r e d s of s h o p s a n d w o r k shops, m o n u m e n t a l b a t h s (e.g., t h e N o r t h B a t h s , d e d i c a t e d b y L . Julius A g r i p p a , 116/17 C E ) , a large p u b l i c latrine, a t w o story n y m p h a e u m d e c o r a t e d w i t h statues of g o d s a n d h e r o e s (?), t h e c o u r t y a r d s of s o m e t e m p l e s a n d a s y n a g o g u e , a n d , later, t h e entrances to m a n y c h u r c h e s ( N o r t h w e s t Basilica, Atrium Church, and Rotunda) opened onto t h e avenue. Pri vate h o u s e s (excavated since 1973) a r e n u m e r o u s o n d i e other streets. O f special interest, b e c a u s e of their spectacular p r o p o r t i o n s (from 1,500 sq m s o m e t i m e s t o 4,500 s q m ) , t h e h o u s e s , with tiieir peristyles with w i d e o p e n i n g s a n d tiieir beautifully o r n a m e n t e d r e c e p t i o n halls ( p a v e d with mosaics or o p u s sectile), confirm t h a t a n aristocracy of rich l a n d owners lived in t h e city. A p a m e a h a d b e e n , since N u m e n i u s setded his school t h e r e i n t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, t h e seat of various philosophic s c h o o l s — E p i c u r e a n s a n d especially N e o - P l a t o n i s t s — w h o s e i m p o r t a n c e ceased only as a c o n s e q u e n c e of t h e T h e o d o s i a n edicts, w h e n d i e Belos T e m p l e , t h e oracle H a d r i a n , S e p t i m i u s S e v e r u s , a n d M a c r i n u s h a d earlier consulted, w a s destroyed b y B i s h o p M a r c h e l l u s (c. 376 CE). A m a r v e l o u s series of m o s a i c s , f o u n d u n d e r t h e p a v e m e n t of t h e cathedral t h a t w a s t o seal t h e N e o - P l a t o n i c school ( n o w i n t h e M u s e e s R o y a u x d ' A r t e t d ' H i s t o i r e in Brussels a n d in t h e local m u s e u m at A p a m e a ) reveals m u c h of t h e temples i c o n o g r a p h i c p r o g r a m : Socrates as o n e of t h e Seven W i s e M e n of G r e e c e , t h e r e t u r n of Ulysses t o Ithaca as a symbol of t h e soul recovering P h i l o s o p h y a t t h e e n d of its life, t h e c r o w n i n g of Cassiopeia as B e a u t y itself i n t h e competition with t h e N e r e i d s . T h e m o s a i c s m a y h a v e b e e n c o m m i s s i o n e d i n t h e time of E m p e r o r Julian b y S o p a t r o s II, in t h e very last years of t h e school's life. [See Mosaics,] Apamea's proximity to Antioch, where R o m a n emperors so often p r e p a r e d their eastern c a m p a i g n s against t h e P a r thians a n d later t h e Sasanians, led t o its b e i n g t h e w i n t e r quarters of t h e L e g i o I I P a r t h i c a i n t h e third c e n t u r y CE. T h i s special elite c o r p s a c c o m p a n i e d Caracalla, Severus A l e x -
APHEK a n d e r , a n d G o r d i a n III t o t h e E a s t a n d w a s stationed n e a r t h e city for a few years e a c h t i m e . N u m e r o u s gravestones of its soldiers, r e u s e d in o n e of t h e towers of t h e city wall, are i n c o m p a r a b l e d o c u m e n t a t i o n of these events a n d their p a r ticipants, as are t h e stelae of riders of t w o cavalry alae (Ulpia C o n t a r i o r u m a n d Flavia Britannica) d i s p a t c h e d t h e r e from t h e Balkans in 252 CE t o stop tire first Sasanian raid into t h e e m p i r e ' s territory. C h u r c h e s w e r e built t h r o u g h o u t t h e city, as elsewhere in t h e p r o v i n c e (Tell A r r , 374 CE; H a s s , 388 CE; K h i r b e t M u q a , 394/95 CE). Bishops w e r e k n o w n t h e r e as early as 325 CE ( C o u n c i l of N i c a e a ) . T h e m o n u m e n t s date mainly from t h e fifth a n d especially t h e sixth c e n t u r i e s , from t h e Justinianic rebuilding of the t o w n after t h e e a r t h q u a k e s of 526 a n d 528 CE. T h i s is t r u e for t h e A t r i u m C h u r c h , w h e r e d i e cult of t h e m a r t y r s d e v e l o p e d a r o u n d reliquaries of Sts. C o s m a s a n d D a m i a n a n d of St. T h e o d o r e ; for d i e R o t u n d a ; for t h e C a thedral (for w h o s e d e c o r a t i o n A r c h b i s h o p P a u l is r e s p o n sible); a n d for a pillared basilica recently excavated at t h e n o r d i e r n gate. Apamea was n o t destroyed when Chosroes I invaded Syria in 540 CE, a n d it w a s t a k e n b u t also n o t d e s t r o y e d in 613 CE b y C h o s r o e s II. T h e t o w n suffered d u r i n g t h e raid of A d a a r m a n e s in 573 CE, w h o sent s o m e 292,000 captives into exile i n Persia. T h e city o p e n e d its doors t o t h e c o n q u e r i n g A r a b s in 638 b e c a u s e of t h e M o n o p h y s i t e inclina tion of a great p a r t of t h e p o p u l a t i o n against B y z a n t i n e fiscal o p p r e s s i o n . T h e city did n o t suffer a n y d a m a g e , b u t s o m e of its richest i n h a b i t a n t s a p p e a r t o h a v e a b a n d o n e d their h o u s e s . T h e i r flight w a s n o t t e m p o r a r y , as t h e y m a y h a v e believed it w o u l d b e , a n d t h e servants tiiey left t o p r o t e c t tiieir p r o p e r t y retained it. A s a result, d e e p social changes e n s u e d . C e r a m i c s a n d coins d a t e tiiis last p h a s e in t h e city's history t o t h e s e v e n t h - t e n t h c e n t u r i e s . A p a m e a was retaken a n d r e o c c u p i e d b y t h e Byzantines in 975; it fell t o t h e F a t i m i d s in AH 388/998 CE a n d t h e n t o t h e C r u s a d e r s , w h o h e l d t h e citadel b e t w e e n 1106 a n d 1149. A t t h a t time, t h e plateau w a s already mostly a b a n d o n e d as a result of t h e p e r i o d ' s i n c r e a s i n g political instability. T h e s e vere e a r t h q u a k e of 1157 s t r u c k A p a m e a off t h e m a p . I t is m e n t i o n e d in A r a b i c sources i n t h e list of t h e cities destroyed t h e n b u t does n o t a p p e a r as o n e of t h e cities d e s t r o y e d in
1170. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baity, Janine, et al., eds. Apamee de Syrie: Bilan des recherches archeologiques, 1065-1068. Brussels, 1 9 6 9 . T h e results of the first four c a m paigns, as well as a discussion with colleagues excavating other sites in Syria. Baity, Janine, a n d Jean C h . Baity, e d s . Apamee de Syrie: Bilan des re cherches archeologiques, 1969-1071. Brussels, 1 9 7 2 . T h e results of the 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 7 1 campaigns. Baity, Janine, a n d Jean C h . Baity. "Julien et Apamee: Aspects d e la restauration de 1'hellenisme et d e la politique antichretienne de l ' e m p e r e u r . " Dialogues d'Histoire Ancienne 1 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 2 6 7 - 3 0 4 . T h e
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links between A p a m e a a n d E m p e r o r Julian through an analysis of the mosaics of the Neo-Platonic school discovered under the cathe dral. Baity, Janine, a n d Jean C h . Baity. " A p a m e e de Syrie, archeologie et histoire. I. D e s origines a la T e t r a r c h i e . " I n Aufslieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt, vol. II.8, edited by Hildegard T e m p o r i n i , p p . 1 0 3 - 1 3 4 . Berlin, 1 9 7 7 . Ancient sources a n d archaeological m o n u ments combined to present a history of A p a m e a . Baity, Janine, ed. Apamee de Syrie: Bilan des recherches archeologiques, 973~ 979Brussels, 1984. Focuses o n domestic architecture, p r e senting the results of t h e 1 9 7 3 - 1 9 7 9 campaigns in five different houses within the context of extensive comparative material from other sites in Syria a n d the N e a r East. Baity, Janine, a n d Jean C h . Baity. " U n p r o g r a m m e philosophique sous la cathedrale d ' A p a m e e : L ' e n s e m b l c neo-platonicien de l ' E m p e r e u r Julien." I n Texte et image: Actes du colloque international de Chantilly, 13 au 15 octobre 1982, p p . 1 6 7 - 1 7 6 . Paris, 1984. Attempts a global analysis of the mosaics of the Neo-Platonic school. I
I
Baity, Jean Ch., a n d Jacqueline Napoleone-Lemaire. L'eglise a atrium de la Grande Colonnade. Brussels, 1969. T h e church through its s u c cessive architectural phases. Baity, Jean C h . " L ' e v e q u e Paul et le p r o g r a m m e architectural et d e coratif d e la cathedrale d ' A p a m e e . " In Melanges d'histoire ancienne et d'archeologie offerts d Paul Collart, edited by Pierre Ducrey et al„ p p . 3 1 - 4 6 . Cahier's d'Archeologie R o m a n d e d e la Bibliotheque Historique Vaudoise, vol. 5. L a u s a n n e , 1 9 7 6 . Interprets the program of the cathedral's mosaics as influenced by the patronage of Bishop Paul in the 630s. Baity, Jean C h . " L e s grandes Stapes de l'urbanisme d'Apam6c-sur1'Oronte." Ktema 2 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 3 - 1 6 . Sketches the evolution of town planning through its four major phases (Hellenistic, R o m a n , Byz antine, and Early Islamic). Baity, Jean C h . Guide d'Apamee. Brussels, 1 9 8 1 . Intended primarily as a guide t o t h e m o n u m e n t s at A p a m e a , this book also provides an extensive bibliography a n d n u m e r o u s illustrations; t h e best intro duction to the city. JEAN C H . BALTY
APHEK
(Gk., Antipatris; Ar., Tell R a s el-'Ain), site l o cated i n Israel at t h e h e a d w a t e r s of t h e Y a r k o n River o n t h e S h a r o n plain (32°o6' N , 34°56' E; m a p reference 143 X 168). T e l A p h e k , o n e of five different places b y the n a m e of Aphek ( H e b . , 'aphik, " r i v e r b e d " ) m e n t i o n e d in t h e H e b r e w Bible, is situated o n o n e of t h e c o u n t r y ' s m o s t i m p o r t a n t ancient crossroads. It is a b o u t 30 acres in size a n d w a s c o n tinuously inhabited from t h e Chalcolithic to t h e O t t o m a n period. A p h e k is first m e n t i o n e d in t h e Egyptian Execration texts of t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE as ' A P Q M . I n the t o p o g r a p h ical lists of T h u t m o s e III it is m e n t i o n e d as n u m b e r 66, o n the Via Maris, between O n o to the south and Socoh to the n o r t h . T h e location w a s i n s t r u m e n t a l in establishing its i d e n tification, first p r o p o s e d b y A l b r e c h t Alt a n d William F o x well Albright in 1923. A p h e k is also m e n t i o n e d in t h e annals of A m e n h o t e p II as a city t h a t s u r r e n d e r e d t o h i m o n his m a r c h to t h e n o r t h e r n S h a r o n . I n t h e S e p t u a g i n t it is called A p h e k of t h e S h a r o n in t h e list of c o n q u e r e d C a n a a n i t e cities in Joshua 12. I t served twice as a b a s e for the Philistines in their w a r against Israel ( r Sm. 4:21, 29:1). D a v i d covered
APHEK.
General plan of the site. (Courtesy M . Kochavi)
APHEK t h e distance b e t w e e n A p h e k a n d Ziklag in d i r e e days, a r e a sonable walking t i m e b e t w e e n A p h e k a n d s o u d i e r n Philistia (i Sm. 30:1). Aphek/Antipatris marked the border between the coun try's n o r d i e r n a n d t h e s o u t h e r n regions. It is m e n t i o n e d in tiiis c o n t e x t in E s a r h a d d o n ' s c a m p a i g n to E g y p t ; in a n A r a m a i c letter from E g y p t w a r n i n g against Babylonian t r o o p s a p p e a r i n g as far as A p h e k ; a n d in several Jewish laws a n d legends in which Antipatris is t h e n o r t h e r n m o s t t o w n of J u d a h . [See J u d a h . ] T h e b u i l d i n g of Antipatris b y H e r o d t h e G r e a t in 9 BCE, in m e m o r y of his father, A n t i p a t e r , is r e p o r t e d b y J o s e p h u s (War 1.21.9), as is its destruction d u r i n g t h e First Jewish Revolt (War 2.29.1). [See First Jewish R e volt.] L a t e R o m a n A n t i p a t r i s w a s o n e of the t o w n s c o m pletely r u i n e d in t h e 363 e a r t h q u a k e . A n e i g h t h - c e n t u r y U m a y y a d fort a n d a n O t t o m a n fortress b y t h e n a m e of Binar Bashi, built in 1572, m a r k t h e only major later o c c u p a t i o n of t h e site. T w o r e s c u e excavations a n d a p l a n n e d excavation project h a v e b e e n carried o u t at A p h e k . T h e first r e s c u e o p e r a t i o n w a s c o n d u c t e d in 1934-1936 b y J a c o b O r y o n behalf of t h e Palestine D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities. T h e s e c o n d o n e t o o k place in 1961, u n d e r t h e direction of A v r a h a m Eitan o n b e half of t h e Israel D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities. T h e A p h e k Antipatris E x p e d i t i o n , d i r e c t e d b y Pirhiya Beck a n d M o s h e K o c h a v i of T e l Aviv U n i v e r s i t y , was carried o u t in thirteen seasons of excavation, from 1972 to 1985. T h e archaeology a n d history of t h e site a r e r e c o u n t e d h e r e in chronological order, utilizing t h e results of all t h r e e expeditions. Chalcolithic a n d E a r l y B r o n z e A g e s . A n o d u l e of g r a y ish soil c o n t a i n i n g Chalcolithic s h e r d s w a s f o u n d in a section c u t at d i e s o u t h e a s t e r n slope of the tell. I t r e p r e s e n t s t h e earliest settlement at t h e site, n e a r a large b o d y of water f o r m e d b y die Y a r k o n s p r i n g s , o n e of several Chalcolithic settlements k n o w n in t h e vicinity. R e m a i n s from the Early B r o n z e A g e w e r e u n c o v e r e d in all t h e excavated areas. E B I B private buildings w e r e u n c o v e r e d n e a r d i e n o r t h e r n city wall. T h e wall (2.5 m w i d e ) , w h i c h also forms t h e n o r t h eastern c o r n e r of t h e tell in O r y ' s excavation, was laid in t h r e e even courses of fieldstones followed b y layers of c r u s h e d - t e r ^ a r s u n - d r i e d m u d bricks. A substantial build ing with r o u n d e d c o r n e r s w a s u n c o v e r e d at t h e s o u t h e a s t e r n e d g e of t h e site. A t this early d a t e t h e settled area already c o m p r i s e d all of t h e tell. A section of t h e E B II t o w n at t h e n o r t h e a s t edge of t h e site c o n t a i n e d several b r o a d h o u s e s a r r a n g e d o n botii sides of t w o streets. V e r y few E B III p o t tery sherds w e r e detected, suggesting a decrease in t h e town's importance then. I n the E B I V (Intermediate Bronze p e r i o d ) , t h e site w a s totally deserted. M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . A p h e k was rebuilt at t h e very b e g i n n i n g of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . A s in t h e earlier u r b a n p e r i o d , its r e m a i n s were f o u n d in all areas of excavation, b u t far m o r e of t h e m w e r e e x p o s e d , t h u s enabling tiieir p h a s i n g into six stages of o c c u p a t i o n .
149
Stage 1. Private buildings, t o m b s , a n d pottery were f o u n d in t h e acropolis fill. T h e pottery i n c l u d e d simple bowls a n d w h i t e w a s h e d storage jars d e c o r a t e d with b i c h r o m e p a i n t i n g , incised decoration, or applied relief. Stage 2. T h e first p a l a c e (palace I) w a s c o n s t r u c t e d o n t h e acropolis fill. E x p o s u r e of its n o r t h w i n g revealed a large hall c o n t a i n i n g storejars a n d a n adjacent c o u r t y a r d witii t w o cooking ovens. I n t r a m u r a l burials, typical of all t h e M B p h a s e s , were f o u n d b e n e a t h t h e c o u r t y a r d floor. ( T h e p o t tery resembles that f o u n d in t h e cist graves O r y excavated.) T h e s e burials m a y b e l o n g t o A p h e k ' s royal cemetery. T h e n e w M B city wall (3.5 m wide) was erected several m e t e r s uphill from t h e E B city wall. Stage 3. Palace II, w i t h its t h r e e large courtyards with p l a s ter floors, was built o n d i e western slope of t h e tell, n o t o n t h e acropolis. A major restoration of t h e city wall took place d u r i n g this p h a s e . T h e p o t t e r y ' s elegant shapes a n d lustrous r e d slip (palace w a r e ) — c a r i n a t e d bowls a n d jugs with p e r fect finish—represent a zenith in t e r m s of style a n d crafts manship. Stage 4. Palace II w a s a b a n d o n e d a n d a residential q u a r t e r with m a n y infant burials in jars took its place. T h e pottery has M B I I affinities. Stage 5. Palace III, t h e largest of A p h e k ' s palaces was built o n t h e acropolis. Its 2-meter-wide walls, with f o u n d a t i o n s 2 m d e e p , enclosed a n area of a b o u t 4,000 s q m . Its " r e c e p t i o n hall" was 150 s q m in size; t w o o n e - m e t e r - w i d e c o l u m n s s u p p o r t e d die ceiling. Stage 6. M a n y modifications o c c u r r e d in t h e palace III plan. T h e hall was divided into small r o o m s , o n e of w h i c h was a cultic area c o m p r i s i n g a monolithic r o u n d altar a n d a cistern. T h e palace was d e s t r o y e d in a h u g e conflagration at t h e e n d of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . Besides the acropolis a n d its vicinity, only t h e far s o u t h eastern p a r t of t h e tell w a s excavated at M B levels. T h i s area was first u s e d to fire p o t t e r y in p o t t e r y kilns; three m o r e or less c o m p l e t e kilns w e r e excavated. T h e area was s u b s e quently t u r n e d into a burial g r o u n d . D u r i n g m o s t of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e , A p h e k w a s t h e central city in t h e s o u t h ern S h a r o n . L a t e B r o n z e A g e . D u r i n g t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , diree m o r e palaces w e r e built o n A p h e k ' s acropolis. Palace I V (fif t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE) w a s built o n t h e r e m a i n s of palace III, r e u s i n g its cultic installation. Palace V (fourteenth c e n t u r y BCE) was built o n a n e w orientation, with large p a v e d c o u r t yards. A stone-lined family grave a n d t w o large plastered wine presses belong t o t h e t h i r t e e n t h century BCE. Palace V I , t h e last of A p h e k ' s palaces was a n E g y p t i a n fortified resi dency, built o n t h e s o u t h w e s t e r n wing of the previous p a l ace, I t h a d solid stone walls (1.4 m w i d e , 2 m high) a n d was 400 s q m in area, Its g r o u n d floor consisted of t w o small r o o m s , two storage halls, a corridor, a n d a stone a n d brick staircase leading to a n u p p e r floor. A monolithic t r o u g h was located at the m a i n e n t r a n c e . T h e residency was destroyed
150
APHEK
APHEK.
Palace
VI, the Egyptian
governor's
residence.
(Courtesy M . Kochavi)
b y a fire m a t c o n s u m e d its u p p e r floor a n d sealed t h e g r o u n d floor with its debris. Several inscribed items were f o u n d u n d e r d i e debris: T w o u n i q u e cuneiform lexical tablets, one of w h i c h m e n tions kinds of liquids in S u m e r i a n , Akkadian, a n d C a naanite; the s e c o n d is bilingual, in S u m e r i a n a n d Ak kadian or C a n a a n i t e [See Sumerian; Akkadian; Proto-Canaanite.] A fragmentary business letter, in cuneiform A k k a d i a n [See Cuneiform.] A Hittite seal i m p r e s s i o n with t h e n a m e of a royal p r i n c e or princess [See Hittites; Seals.] T h r e e administrative fragments written in Akkadian A n Egyptian faience ring inscribed with a blessing to A m u n - R e a n d an E g y p t i a n faience f o u n d a t i o n deposit plaque dedicated b y R a m e s e s II to t h e g o d d e s s Isis A complete cuneiform clay tablet containing a letter from T a k u h l i n u , t h e prefect of Ugarit, to H a y a , t h e E g y p t i a n high c o m m i s s i o n e r of C a n a a n . [See Ugarit.] T h e syn c h r o n i s m b e t w e e n the careers of tiiese personalities fixes the date of the destruction of L B A p h e k to 1240/
30
BCE.
Iron A g e . After a g a p in o c c u p a t i o n , t h e acropolis of A p h e k was resettled in t h e twelfth century BCE. T w o resi dential quarters with different characters were u n c o v e r e d : fine square buildings with p a v e d c o u r t y a r d s — t h e elite sec t i o n — a n d h a p h a z a r d l y built dwellings—the p o o r e r quarter. Fishhooks, lead n e t weights, and turtie shells were f o u n d in
Tablets APHEK.
Plan of Palace
VI, the Egyptian
governor's
ing by Judith Dekel; courtesy M . Kochavi)
residence.
(Draw
APHRODISIAS the poorer houses, indicating that their inhabitants were fish ermen. [See Fishing.] Philistine pottery, several figurine heads of the Philistine goddess Ashdoda and a clay tablet inscribed in an as yet undeciphered script indicate a Philis tine presence at Aphek in the eleventh century BCE. [See Phil istines, article on Early Philistines.] Stone-lined silos typical at Israelite sites were dug into the debris of the first Iron A g e strata which may indicate the arrival of the Israelites at Aphek. Several four-room houses from the tenth century BCE were also excavated. [See Four-room House.] Most of the later strata on the acropolis were wiped out during lev eling operations to construct a fort in die Ottoman period. Hellenistic a n d R o m a n P e r i o d s . Excavation south of the acropolis penetrated only to the Hellenistic level. Private buildings, arranged on both sides of a road, were excavated. T h e western part of a Hellenistic fort, erected on the acrop olis, was saved from the Ottoman leveling operations. T h e s e remains suggest locating the Hellenistic town of Pegae at Aphek, rather than at the ruins of Fejja, its namesake, 2 km to the southwest. Herodian Antipatris was built on the same plan as the Hellenistic town. A section of its marketplace, with shops arranged on both sides of a Q-meter-wide paved cardo, was excavated. T h e town's destruction by Vespasian in 68 is well attested. T h e shops and their merchandise were burned and hoards of coins and unused oil lamps were found on the floors. T h e restoration of Antipatris during the second-third centuries nearly doubled the limits of the city toward the south. Several mansions, some with elaborately decorated mosaic floors, were built then; public buildings were added around the forum; and an odeum was constructed near die town's southern gate. [See Mosaics; Odeum.] This prosper ous town was completely destroyed, probably in the earth quake of 363. Only fragmentary remains from the Byzantine period were found, and no town has been built on the tell since. T h e fort that crowns the tell today was built in the sixteenth century by die Ottoman Turks as a cavalry base, guarding tiiat segment of the Via Maris between Gaza and the Megiddo pass. Its gate, mosque, and barracks have been excavated. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Site of A p h e k in the S h a r o n . " Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 3 ( 1 9 2 3 ) : 5 0 - 5 3 . Beck, Pirhiya. " A n Early Bronze Age 'Family' of Bowls from T e l A p h e k . " Tel Aviv 1 2 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 7 - 2 8 . Analyzes a class of pottery found at Aphek a n d suggests A p h e k as its p r o d u c t i o n center. Beck, Pirhiya. " T h e M i d d l e Bronze A g e IIA Pottery from Aphek, 1 9 7 2 1984: First S u m m a r y . " Tel Aviv 1 2 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 8 1 - 2 0 3 . Definitive work on the chronology of M B I I A pottery b a s e d on the Aphek stratig raphy. Eitan, Avraham. "Excavations at t h e F o o t of T e l Rosh H a 'Ayin" (in H e b r e w ) . 'Atiqot 5 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 4 9 - 6 8 . R e p o r t on the 1 9 6 1 excavations. Hellwing, Salo [Shlomo], a n d R a m G o p h n a . " T h e Animal Remains
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from the Early a n d M i d d l e Bronze Ages at Tel Aphek a n d Tel Dalit: A Comparative S t u d y . " Tel Aviv 1 1 (1984): 4 8 - 5 9 . Iliffe, J. H . "Pottery from Ras el-'Ain." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 5 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 1 3 - 1 2 6 . I m p o r t a n t for the pottery from the M B IIA cist graves. Kindler, Arie. " T h e Coins of Antipatris" (in H e b r e w ) . Eretz-Isracl 19 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 2 5 - 1 3 1 . Catalog of the coins minted in Antipatris. Kochavi, M o s h e , a n d Pirhiya Beck. Aphek-Ant.ipalris, 1972-1073: Pre liminary Report, T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 6 , T h e first two seasons of excavation and an analysis of the chronology a n d typology of the Aphek M B IIA pottery. Kochavi, M o s h e , et al. Aphek-Antipatris, 1974-1977: The Inscriptions. T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 8 . Prima lectiones of the Aphek inscriptions. Kochavi, M o s h e , et al. "Aphek-Antipatris, T e l Poleg, T e l Zeror, and T e l Burga: F o u r Fortified Sites of the M i d d l e Bronze IIA in the Sharon Plain." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 95 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 1 2 1 - 1 6 5 . Establishes the existence of fortified cities in this period on the basis of M B IIA A p h e k a n d other sites (see Yadin below). Kochavi, M o s h e . " T h e History and Archaeology of Aphek-Antipatris, a Biblical City in the Sharon Plain." Biblical Archaeologist 4 4 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 7 5 - 8 6 . Concise review based on information available by 1980. Kochavi, M o s h e . Aphek-Antipatris: Five Thousand Years of History (in H e b r e w ) . T e l Aviv, 1989. T h e most complete synthesis on the sub ject, with a comprehensive bibliography. Kochavi, M o s h e . Aphek in Canaan: The Egyptian Governor's Residence and Its Finds. Israel M u s e u m Catalogue, no. 3 1 2 . Jerusalem, 1990. H e b r e w and English text with n u m e r o u s illustrations. Ncidinger, William. " A T y p o l o g y of Oil L a m p s from die Mercantile Q u a r t e r of Antipatris." Tel Aviv 9 (1982): 1 5 7 - 1 6 9 . Report on the Hellenistic and R o m a n periods. Ory, J. "Excavations at Ras el-'Ain." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 5 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 ; 6 ( 1 9 3 7 ) : 9 9 - 1 2 0 . R e p o r t o n the first rescue excavation at the site. O w e n , D a v i d I„ et al. Aphek-Antipatris, 1978-198$: The iMterfrom Uga rit—Philological, Historical, and Archaeological Considerations. Tel Aviv, 1 9 8 7 . Establishes the date of the end of L B Aphek. Yadin, Yigael. " T h e N a t u r e of Settlement in the Middle Bronze IIA Period in Israel and the P r o b l e m of the A p h e k Fortifications." Zeit schrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 94 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 - 2 3 . Argues against the dating of die A p h e k city wall to M B IIA. MOSHE KOCHAVI
APHRODISIAS,
site located in a fertile u p l a n d plain s o u t h of t h e M a e a n d e r River valley, a b o u t 200 k m (124 mi) southeast of Izmir, in m o d e r n T u r k e y (37°43' N , 28°44' E ) . T h e city was p a r t of ancient Caria a n d was best k n o w n for its cult of A p h r o d i t e a n d t h e high-quality work of its sculp tors in marble. T h e site was visited in t h e eighteenth a n d n i n e t e e n t h centuries b y s u c h learned travelers as William S h e r a r d , die Dilettante, a n d Charles T e x i e r ) . Excavations w e r e first c o n d u c t e d in 1914 by P a u l G a u d i n a n d in 1937 b y Giulio Jacopi. Systematic investigation has b e e n carried o u t since 1961 b y N e w Y o r k University, led, until his d e a t h in 1990, b y K e n a n T . E r i m . T h e site's buildings a n d m o n u m e n t s , p r e d o m i n a n t i y of t h e R o m a n period, are exceptionally well preserved a n d u n usually well d o c u m e n t e d b y inscriptions. T h i s material gives a detailed picture of t h e city a n d its people from t h e first to t h e sixth century.
152
APLIKI
Aphrodisias was f o u n d e d , a c c o r d i n g to a legend r e c o r d e d by S t e p h a n u s of B y z a n t i u m , by the Babylonian king N i n o s , h u s b a n d of Semiramis. T h e r e are considerable prehistoric a n d Bronze Age r e m a i n s , b u t fewer for the archaic a n d clas sical periods. T h e t o w n grew u p a r o u n d its s a n c t u a r y of Aphrodite in the second century BCE and b e g a n r a p i d u r banization in the mid-first century BCE. Sulla a n d C a e s a r patronized the sanctuary, a n d in 39 BCE the city gained last ing favor a n d privileges t h r o u g h Octavian. Loyalty to R o m e in the W a r of L a b i e n u s (41/40 BCE) was r e w a r d e d by t h e granting of a u t o n o m y , tax-free status, a n d n e w asylum rights for the T e m p l e of A p h r o d i t e . T h e n e a r b y m a r b l e quarries were o p e n e d a n d , d u r i n g the first a n d s e c o n d c e n turies, the city saw c o n t i n u o u s building. Aphrodisias retained its u r b a n vitality far into late antiq uity, w h e n it was t h e seat of the R o m a n governor of t h e n e w (Diocletianic) p r o v i n c e of Caria. F o r a long p e r i o d . A p h rodite and tire old religion r e m a i n e d strong alongside rising Christianity. T h e city h a d a Christian bishop in t h e fourth century, and in the fifth century it was still h o m e to a leading school of p a g a n N e o p l a t o n i c philosophy. T h e N o r t h A g o r a a n d Portico of T i b e r i u s were two great colonnaded piazzas that together defined the o r t h o g o n a l center of the city's u r b a n p l a n , laid o u t p r o b a b l y in the late first century BCE a n d u n d e r construction t h r o u g h o u t t h e first century CE. T h e C o u n c i l H o u s e ( O d e i o n , first-second c e n tury CE) formed, with t h e N o r t h Agora, an a g o r a - b o u l e u terion complex typical of civic planning of d i e early imperial p e r i o d in Asia M i n o r . It was decorated with a scaenae frons a n d a rich display of m a r b l e statuary. T h e T e m p l e of A p h r o d i t e , rebuilt in the 30s BCE as a p r o style temple, was s u r r o u n d e d d u r i n g the first century CE w i t h a great Ionic peripteral c o l o n n a d e (8 X 13 m ) . It was later t u r n e d into a Christian basilica, witii considerable care a n d e c o n o m y , a n d is o n e of the best examples of such a t e m p l e c h u r c h conversion. A m o n u m e n t a l c o l u m n a r T e t r a p y l o n (mid-second century CE), in the style of the A n t o n i n e b a r o q u e , formed the e n t r a n c e gate t o the sanctuary area. Its full restoration, u s i n g 85% of its original blocks, was c o m pleted in 1991. T h e Sebasteion, built in the mid-first century CE, w a s a remarkable t e m p l e c o m p l e x dedicated to A p h r o d i t e a n d d i e Julio-Claudian e m p e r o r s . It was excavated b e t w e e n 1979 and 1982. T h e c o m p l e x consisted of a raised prostyle C o rinthian temple a p p r o a c h e d by a n a r r o w processional w a y flanked by two porticos 90 m long, each three-storied a n d decorated with a series of figural m a r b l e reliefs. T h e m o r e t h a n eighty surviving reliefs represent scenes b o t h from G r e e k mythology a n d of R o m a n imperial subjects. T h e Hadrianic B a t h s , built across t h e e n d of t h e P o r t i c o of Tiberius, were a massive construction a n d h a v e b e e n s t a n d i n g since antiquity. T h e y are c o m p o s e d of five great barrel-vaulted parallel c h a m b e r s , with an i m p o s i n g colon n a d e d court in front. A stadium, built in t h e first-second
centuries CE, was e n c o m p a s s e d b y t h e later city wall ( m i d fourth c e n t u r y ) , a n d is virtually intact. I t is 262 m long with thirty tiers of seats a n d could h o l d u p t o thirty t h o u s a n d people. T h e theater, built into t h e site's m a i n prehistoric hoyuk in d i e later Hellenistic p e r i o d , was e q u i p p e d in the 30s BCE with an elaborate c o l u m n a r stage facade d o n a t e d by a powerful local benefactor, o n e C . Julius Zoilos, a n ex-slave a n d a g e n t of the e m p e r o r A u g u s t u s , as r e c o r d e d i n t h e inscribed d e d ication of t h e building. M a r b l e seating a n d o t h e r m o n u m e n tal w o r k w e r e a d d e d in the first c e n t u r y CE. T h e building r e m a i n e d in use until the s e v e n t h c e n t u r y , w h e n t h e t h e a t e r hill was converted into a fort. A p h r o d i s i a n sculptors w e r e well k n o w n a b r o a d — t h e y p r o v i d e d sculpture for H a d r i a n ' s villa at Tivoli, for e x a m p l e — a n d held in high r e p u t e at h o m e . A large sculptor's w o r k s h o p has b e e n excavated in the h e a r t of t h e city ( b e t w e e n the C o u n c i l H o u s e a n d the T e m p l e ) , a n d the r a n g e of fine statuary r e c o v e r e d from o t h e r buildings gives a c o m plete cross section of t h e sculpture p r o d u c t i o n of a G r e e k city in the R o m a n period. T h e sculptures r a n g e from sec o n d - c e n t u r y BCE grave reliefs to fifth-century CE statues of L a t e R o m a n governors. BIBLIOGRAPHY Erim, Kenan T . Aphrodisias: City of Venus Aphrodite. L o n d o n and N e w York, 1986. A well-illustrated introduction t o the history and m o n u m e n t s of the site, with full bibliography of earlier work. Joukowsky, M a r t h a S. Prehistoric Aphrodisias, 2 vols. R h o d e Island and Louvain, 1986. Detailed publication of all aspects of t h e site in the Bronze Age and earlier. Reynolds, J. M . Aphrodisias and Rome. L o n d o n , 1983. Publication of an important series of inscriptions, including several imperial letters, detailing the city's special relationship with R o m e . R o u e c h e , Charlotte. Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity. L o n d o n , 1989. P u b lication of the L a t e Antique inscriptions (after 250 CE), with full his torical c o m m e n t a r y on the city in this period. R o u e c h e , Charlotte. Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias. London, 1993. A publication of inscriptions and graffiti relating to the athletic festivals a n d games held in the city. Rouech6, Charlotte, and K e n a n T . E r i m , eds. Aphrodisias Papers 1 . Journal of R o m a n Archaeology S u p p l e m e n t a r y Series, n o . 1. A n n Arbor, 1990. Studies on tire temple of A p h r o d i t e and various g r o u p s of sculpture. Smith, R. R. R. Aphrodisias I. The Monument of C. Julius Zoilos. M a i n z , 1993, A detailed publication of the allegorical frieze from the t o m b of Zoilos, the freedman and agent of Octavian in the city in the 30s BCE. T h e first in a new series publishing t h e major m o n u m e n t s of the site. Smith, R. R. R., and K e n a n T . Erim, eds, Aphrodisias Papers 2. Journal of R o m a n Archaeology Supplementary Series, n o . 2. A n n Arbor, 1 9 9 1 . Studies on t h e theater, coins, a n d further g r o u p s of sculpture. R . R . R. SMITH
A P L I K I , i m p o r t a n t c o p p e r - m i n i n g a n d smelting site o n C y p r u s . L o c a t e d a p p r o x i m a t e l y 6.5 k m (4 mi.) s o u t h of t h e m o d e r n village of Lefka o n the east b a n k of t h e M a r a t h a s a River in t h e foothills of t h e T r o o d o s M o u n t a i n s (35°04'39"
'AQABA N , 32°50'34" E ) , Ap]M-Karamallos was a Late Bronze Age m i n e r s ' village in t h e c o p p e r - m i n i n g region of n o r t h w e s t C y p r u s . T h e discovery of L a t e B r o n z e A g e ceramics by t h e C y p r u s M i n e s C o r p o r a t i o n led to limited excavations in 1938 a n d 1939 u n d e r direction of J o a n d u P l a t T a y l o r o n behalf of t h e C y p r u s D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities. T h e site occupies a n area of p e r h a p s t w o h a (5 acres) o n a h i g h plateau. Several t r e n c h e s were o p e n e d , designated areas A - H . Architectural r e m a i n s w e r e u n c o v e r e d in areas A (roughly 270 sq m or 2,905 sq. ft.) a n d B (125 sq m or 1,345 1 . ft.); other t r e n c h e s w e r e smaller a n d revealed frag m e n t a r y walls or pits a n d L a t e B r o n z e A g e sherd material. T h e r e m a i n s in area A c o m p r i s e a well-built stone a n d m u d brick L - s h a p e d s t r u c t u r e of at least eight r o o m s o p e n i n g o n t o a c o u r t y a r d , s o m e p r o v i d e d with b e n c h e s a n d h e a r t h s . T a y l o r identified t w o p e r i o d s of o c c u p a t i o n , distinguished by two floor levels a n d architectural r e a r r a n g e m e n t s . T h i s c o m p l e x was d e s t r o y e d b y fire. Area B revealed r e m a i n s of at least five h o u s e s with o n e p e r i o d of o c c u p a t i o n , w h i c h w e r e a b a n d o n e d b u t n o t b u r n t . Principal p o t t e r y types from diese buildings include W h i t e Slip II, Base R i n g II, Plain White Wheelmade, imported Mycenaean, White-Painted W h e e l m a d e III, C o a r s e M o n o c h r o m e (Apliki) wares a n d large storage jars (pithoi). T h i s c e r a m i c evidence suggests t h a t the site w a s c o n s t r u c t e d d u r i n g L a t e C y p r i o t I I C (thir t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE) a n d d e s t r o y e d a n d a b a n d o n e d early in L a t e C y p r i o t IIIA (early twelfth c e n t u r y BCE) . s
T h e site is of greatest interest for its evidence for m e t a l lurgical activity. Quantities of b l a c k slag, with r o p y surface, a type formerly t h o u g h t to b e l o n g t o the R o m a n period, w e r e f o u n d in areas A a n d B , along w i t h crucible fragments a n d tuyeres (pipes for c h a n n e l i n g air into a f u r n a c e ) , i n c l u d i n g D - s h a p e d a n d elbow types, in stratified L a t e B r o n z e A g e contexts within t h e h o u s e s . T h e location of t h e site a n d t h e massive size of the slag (blocks w e i g h i n g u p to 14 k g or 30.8 lbs.) a n d tuyeres suggest t h a t it was a major c o p p e r - m i n i n g a n d smelting center. M i n e shafts a n d galleries n o t e d in t h e n e a r b y c o p p e r - r i c h hills m a y h a v e b e e n associated with this settlement, a l t h o u g h i n d e p e n d e n t archaeological dating ev i d e n c e for d i e m is lacking. O t h e r objects from the r o o m s include l o o m weights, s p i n dle whorls, a n d wall b r a c k e t s for h a n g i n g l a m p s ; s t o n e q u e r n s , pestles, a n d bowls; b r o n z e chisels, drills, a n d knives; terra-cotta bull a n d female figurines; u n e n g r a v e d cylinders of ivory a n d steatite; f r a g m e n t s of a w o o d e n c o m b ; a gold l u n a t e earring; a n d a large s e r p e n t i n e s t a m p seal carved with a bull's h e a d a n d C y p r o - M i n o a n sign. B u r n t vegetable r e m a i n s from area A i n c l u d e b a r l e y , w h e a t , h o r s e b e a n , lentil, a l m o n d , g r a p e , olive, a n d c o r i a n d e r . T h e y w e r e p r o b a b l y n o t cultivated at d i e site, w h i c h is badly suited for farming, b u t m a y h a v e b e e n e x c h a n g e d for t h e c o p p e r p r o d u c e d there. A large slag h e a p a n d L a t e R o m a n - B y z a n t i n e r e m a i n s h a v e b e e n f o u n d at the foot of t h e hill. [See also M i n e s a n d M i n i n g . ]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Helbaek, H a n s . " L a t e Cypriote Vegetable Diet at Apliki." Opusaila Atheniensia 4 ( 1 9 6 2 ) : 1 7 1 - 1 8 6 . Detailed discussion of the plant re mains, tiieir place in N e a r Eastern agriculture, and possible trade in agricultural products. Kling, Barbara. Mycenaean IIIC:ib and Related Potteiy in Cyprus. Stud ies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 87. G o t e b o r g , 1989. Reas sessment of the site's chronology in die light of recent discussions of the ceramics of the L C IIC and L C IIIA periods (see p p . 8 5 - 8 6 ) ; accepts T a y l o r ' s original dating. M u h l y , James D . " T h e Organisation of the C o p p e r Industry in L a t e Bronze Age C y p r u s . " In Early Society in Cyprus, edited by Edgar Peltenburg, p p . 2 9 8 - 3 1 4 . E d i n b u r g h , 1989. Discussion of metallur gical remains based on recent reexamination of the material, and consideration of the place of Apliki within the larger context of the Late Cypriot c o p p e r industry. Taylor, J o a n duPlat. " A L a t e Bronze Age Settlement at Apliki, Cy p r u s . " Antiquaries Journal 32 ( 1 9 5 2 ) : 1 3 3 - 1 6 7 . Original excavation report containing good descriptions of the architecture, pottery, and small finds. BARBARA KLING
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A Q A B A , p o r t in m o d e r n J o r d a n overlying the ancient cities of R o m a n Aila a n d early Islamic Ayla (29°3i' N , 3 5 V E ) . T h e biblical sites of Eilat a n d E z i o n - G e b e r were p r e s u m a b l y also located s o m e w h e r e in t h e vicinity. Situated at the n o r t h end of the G u l f of ' A q a b a , on an a r m of the R e d Sea, A q a b a lies at the n e x u s of i m p o r t a n t t r a d e routes. T h e p o r t serviced sea traffic w i t h E g y p t , S o u t h Arabia, Africa, a n d India. Several l a n d r o u t e s intersected at ' A q a b a , includ ing r o a d s n o r t h e a s t d i r o u g h T r a n s j o r d a n t o Syria, n o r t h via W a d i ' A r a b a h to die D e a d Sea a n d J o r d a n Valley, n o r t h w e s t via the N e g e v to G a z a o n t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n , west across Sinai to E g y p t , a n d s o u t h e a s t into tire A r a b i a n Peninsula. C o p p e r from i m p o r t a n t m i n e s at F e i n a n a n d T i m n a ' , just to t h e n o r t h in W a d i ' A r a b a h , was t r a n s s h i p p e d via this port. Several Chalcolithic sites are attested in the region. O n e , die small m o u n d of T e l l M a q u s s n e a r die m o d e r n ' A q a b a air p o r t , was excavated b y Lufti Khalil in 1985 and yielded ev idence of c o p p e r p r o c e s s i n g from die mid-fourtii millen n i u m (Khalil, 1987, 1992). c
T h e biblical tradition asserts t h a t Eilat was t h e p o r t of d e p a r t u r e for S o l o m o n ' s m e r c h a n t fleet to O p h i r (r Kgs. 9:26-28; 2 Chr. 8:17-18). A later ldng of J u d a h , J e h o s h a p h a t , also p l a n n e d t o s e n d a fleet to O p h i r , b u t it was wrecked at E z i o n - G e b e r (1 Kgs. 22:48; 2 Chr. 20:36-37). Eilat was later c e d e d by J u d a h to the E d o m i t e s in the late eighth century BCE (2 Kgs. 16:2). [See J u d a h . ] Inspired by t h e biblical traditions, N e l s o n G l u e c k excavated T e l l el-Kheleifeh (1938-1940), a low m o u n d j u s t n o i t h w e s t of m o d e r n ' A q a ba. [See Kheleifeh, T e l l el-,] G l u e c k (1965) claimed to h a v e f o u n d E i l a t / E z i o n - G e b e r , b u t his results were never a d e quately published. A r e e x a m i n a t i o n by G a r y Pratico (1993) of G l u e c k ' s evidence suggests, ratiier, an E d o m i t e settle m e n t o c c u p i e d from t h e late eighth t h r o u g h the fourth c e n turies BCE. T h e walled site, a p p a r e n t i y a caravanserai,
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AQABA
yielded evidence of grain storage, c o p p e r smelting, a n d trade with s o u t h e r n Arabia. [See the biography of Glueck] T h e next major ancient settlement was Aila, a city at t h e h e a d of the gulf attested in various literary sources d u r i n g t h e R o m a n a n d Byzantine periods. Its origin is unclear, b u t presumably Aila b e g a n as a N a b a t e a n settlement in t h e first c e n t u r y BCE. [See N a b a t e a n s . ] S t r a b o (Geog. 16.2.30), writ ing in the early first c e n t u r y CE, already refers to Aila as a city (polis). M e r c h a n t s from Aila traveled to S o u t h Arabia to obtain frankincense a n d m y r r h (Geog. 16.4.4). T h e city passed u n d e r direct R o m a n rule with the annexation of N a batea as the R o m a n p r o v i n c e of Arabia in 106 CE. Aila t h e n b e c a m e tire s o u t h e r n t e r m i n u s of t h e Via N o v a T r a j a n a , a major t r u n k road b e t w e e n soutiiern Syria a n d t h e R e d Sea c o m p l e t e d in 1 1 1 - 1 1 4 CE. T h e strategic i m p o r t a n c e of t h e city is suggested b y t h e transfer of the L e g i o X Fretensis from Jerusalem t o Aila in a b o u t 300 CE (Eusebius, Onomasticon 6.17). A fragmentary m o n u m e n t a l L a t i n building in scription of t h e early f o u r t h century m a y relate to this legion, which r e m a i n e d g a r r i s o n e d until at least t h e t u r n of t h e fifth century (Notitia Dignitatum Oriens 34.30). Christian bishops from Aila are attested beginning in 325. Various sources suggest t h a t significant seaborne t r a d e c o n t i n u e d b e t w e e n Aila and t h e I n d i a n O c e a n littoral t h r o u g h t h e B y z a n t i n e period. T h e city m a d e a treaty with t h e p r o p h e t M u h a m m a d himself in 630 t h a t guaranteed protection of its c o m m e r c e at the beginning of t h e M u s l i m conquest. R i c h a r d B u r t o n identified t h e remains of N a b a t e a n a n d R o m a n Aila in 1878. T h e classical site, n o w within t h e m o d ern city of ' A q a b a , was rediscovered b y J o h n L . M e l o y in 1989. A n excavation l a u n c h e d b y S. T h o m a s P a r k e r of N o r t h Carolina State University in 1994 u n c o v e r e d signifi cant portions of Aila. T h e earliest excavated evidence dates to the first centuries BCE/CE, including a m p h o r a e from t h e western M e d i t e r r a n e a n , terra sigillata, a n d p a i n t e d N a b a t e a n fine ware. T h i s Early R o m a n pottery w a s associated with m u d - b r i c k d o m e s t i c structures. F a r t h e r south, t h e city wall was erected i n stone in the late fourth century. T h e excavated s e g m e n t is a b o u t 30 m long, survives to nearly 2 m in height, a n d was defended b y a projecting rectangular tower. T h e wall w a s built over an earlier massive m u d - b r i c k structure, apparentiy o n c e vaulted. Just n o r t h of t h e city wall was a m u d - b r i c k domestic complex consisting of r o o m s built a r o u n d a p a v e d courtyard. T h e complex w a s a p p a r ently occupied from t h e sixth/seventh to t h e eighth c e n t u ries. N o r t h of t h e d o m e s t i c complex was a cemetery of m u d brick t o m b s . [See T o m b s . ] T h r e e excavated t o m b s each contained a single articulated skeleton a n d date to t h e fourth century. C o n t i n u e d international t r a d e d u r i n g t h e B y z a n t i n e period is evidenced b y fine glossy r e d pottery i m p o r t e d from N o r t h Africa, t h e A e g e a n , C y p r u s , a n d Egypt. S o u t h of t h e Byzantine city wall (i.e., within t h e city walls), two other areas yielded substantial evidence of Early Islamic o c c u p a tion. T h i s suggests t h a t t h e Byzantine city survived for a
t i m e alongside t h e n e w Early Islamic city f o u n d e d just to t h e southeast. Archaeological investigation of the early Islamic city at ' A q a b a b e g a n in 1986 a n d c o n t i n u e d t h r o u g h 1993 u n d e r D o n a l d W h i t c o m b . T . E . L a w r e n c e ( L a w r e n c e of A r a b i a ) p r o v i d e d t h e earliest description of t h e site in 1914 as a " s e t t l e m e n t of some luxury in the early M i d d l e A g e s " (Woolley a n d L a w r e n c e , 1936). T h e Early Islamic city w a s p r o b a b l y f o u n d e d u n d e r ' U t h m a n ibn 'Affan (c. 650). B e n e a t h t h e slightly m o u n d e d surface is a b o u t 4.5 m of o c c u p a t i o n f r o m t h e m i d - s e v e n t h c e n t u r y until t h e arrival of t h e C r u s a d e r s in 1 1 1 6 . T h e city wall is d e f e n d e d b y U - s h a p e d towers a n d was entered via four gates, n o w n a m e d t h e E g y p t i a n , Syrian, I-Iijazi, a n d Sea G a t e s . T h e p l a n of d i e city (165 X 140 m ) is m a r k e d b y axial streets dividing t h e t o w n into four q u a d r a n t s . T h e central crossing h a d a tetrapylon, like tire early Islamic city of 'Anjar in s o u t h e r n L e b a n o n . T h e p l a n m a y h a v e b e e n m o d e l e d o n t h a t of t h e fortress of t h e L e g i o X Fretensis, p r e s u m a b l y located n e a r b y . In a d d i t i o n to t h e streets a n d residences of t h e later p e r i o d s (see b e l o w ) , sev eral functional institutions h a v e b e e n d i s c o v e r e d . T h e c e n tral pavilion b e c a m e a wealthy m e r c h a n t ' s r e s i d e n c e , w h i c h m i g h t be associated with t h e g o v e r n o r ' s palace. T h e c h a n g e s associated with t h e ' A b b a s i d reorganization of t h e city after 750 included t h e u s e of t h e sea wall as t h e b a c k d r o p of an extensive suq, o r " m a r k e t , " w i t h n u m e r o u s small s h o p s ( s o m e c o m p o s e d of c o n v e r t e d towers) lined u p along t h e b e a c h . D u r i n g t h e 1993 season, t h e city's congregational m o s q u e was discovered, a hypostyle hall in t h e Syrian style a n d a n i m p o r t a n t addition to e x c a v a t e d m o s q u e s of t h e early Islamic period. [See M o s q u e . ] T h i s m o s q u e is oriented southwest, possibly a m i s c o n c e p t i o n of t h e direction of M e c c a (Ar., qiblah). T h e stratigraphic evidence gives a n artifactual s e q u e n c e t h a t amplifies t h e m e a g e r historical i n f o r m a t i o n o n Aila. T h e m o s t recent levels ( p h a s e E , 1050-1100 CE) b e l o n g t o t h e L a t e 'Abbasid o r F a t i m i d p e r i o d a n d a r e m a r k e d b y t h e af t e r m a t h of the 1068 e a r t h q u a k e . T h e limited r e c o n s t r u c t i o n a m i d t h e r u b b l e e n d e d w i t h t h e arrival of a b a n d of C r u s a d ers; the people of Aila fled in tiieir b o a t s , r e t u r n i n g m u c h later to resettle a r o u n d t h e ' A q a b a castle, o n e kilometer to t h e south. T h e c e n t u r y before this ( p h a s e D , 950-1050) was n o t m u c h better. T h e F a t i m i d s of E g y p t established s o m e control, b u t increasingly s o u t h e r n Palestine w a s a w a r z o n e w h e r e t h e F a t i m i d s e x c h a n g e d lands w i t h B y z a n t i n e s , Sel juks, a n d a local b e d o u i n confederation. I n 1024 t h e t o w n w a s sacked b y t h e B a n u Jarrah, a c a t a s t r o p h e in w h i c h a h o a r d of gold w a s a b a n d o n e d . T h e h o a r d , of thirty-two di n a r s , was c o m p o s e d m a i n l y of issues from Sijilmasa in M o r o c c o , suggesting a m e r c h a n t ' s or a pilgrim's loss. T h e p o t t e r y m a y p o i n t to this social instability: fine luster, d e c o r a t e d , a n d otiier glazed wares o c c u r w i t h a c r u d e , h a n d m a d e pottery. T h e p r e c e d i n g p h a s e C (850-950) is a m y s t e r y c e n t u r y at ' A q a b a , w h e n a p p a r e n t i y n o t h i n g d r a -
' AQABA
m a t i c h a p p e n e d — n e i t h e r political n o r n a t u r a l events m a r r e d its tranquility. T h e ' A b b a s i d p e r i o d ( p h a s e B , 750-850) b e g a n w i t h a c a t a s t r o p h e , t h e e a r t h q u a k e of 748; a n energetic r e c o n s t r u c tion a n d reorganization r e s u l t e d in a n e w , m o r e p r o s p e r o u s t o w n t h a t b e c a m e a n i m p o r t a n t center for t h e study of r e ligious law. T h e p o t t e r y again reflects t h e s e changes: t h e transition i n t r o d u c e d an u n g l a z e d c r e a m w a r e ( M a h e s h w a r e ) , a b a n d o n i n g d i e earlier B y z a n t i n e / U m a y y a d tradition a n d revealing stylistic attributes typical of ' A b b a s i d Iraq. O t h e r artifacts reveal t h e cultural leadership of t h e Hijaz d u r i n g this p e r i o d , w h e n Aila p a r t i c i p a t e d in t h e active c o m mercial w o r l d of t h e I n d i a n O c e a n via S o u t h A r a b i a a n d Ethiopia. T h e s e p a t t e r n s b e g a n in tire initial p h a s e A (650750) a n d e n d u r e d even t h o u g h t h e m o s t p r o m i n e n t cultural influence of t h a t p e r i o d w a s f r o m Early Islamic E g y p t . T h e earliest glazed ceramics at ' A q a b a ( C o p t i c glazed ware) w e r e p r o d u c e d in E g y p t ( p r o b a b l y at Alexandria) in the early eighth c e n t u r y ; t h e finds a t ' A q a b a h a v e confirmed t h e i d e n tification of this c e r a m i c t r a d i t i o n . T h e city p l a n a n d artifacts
155
of this p h a s e testify to t h e t r a n s f o r m a t i o n from L a t e B y z antine to Early Islamic styles, paralleling t h e e m e r g e n c e of Islamic political a n d cultural identity in t h e time of t h e first caliphs a n d t h e U m a y y a d dynasty. BIBLIOGRAPHY Burton, Richard F . The Land of Midian (Revisited). Vol. 2. L o n d o n , 1879. See pages 2 4 0 - 2 4 1 . Glueck, Nelson. " E z i o n - G e b e r . " Biblical Archaeologist 28 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 7 0 87. Glueck's final interpretation of Tell el-Kheleifeh, revising some of his earlier views. Khalil, Lufti. "Preliminary R e p o r t on the 1985 Season of Excavation at el-Maqass—'Aqaba." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 31 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 4 8 1 - 4 8 3 . Khalil, Lufti. " S o m e Technological Features from a Chalcolithic Site at M a g a s s — ' A q a b a . " In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jor dan IV, p p . 1 4 3 - 1 4 8 . A m m a n , 1 9 9 2 . M a c A d a m , H e n r y I, " F r a g m e n t s of a Latin Building Inscription from 'Aqaba, J o r d a n . " Zeitschriftfilr Papyrologie undEpigraphikTj (1989): 163-172. Meloy, J o h n L , "Results of an Archaeological Reconnaissance in W e s t 'Aqaba: Evidence of the Pre-Islamic Settlement." Annual of the De partment of Antiquities of Jordan 35 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3 9 7 - 4 1 4 .
156
C
AQAR QUF
Parker, S. T h o m a s . " T h e R o m a n 'Aqaba Project: Aila Rediscovered." Biblical Archaeologist 57 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 7 2 . Short summary of results from the first field season. Parker, S. T h o m a s . "Preliminary R e p o r t on the 1994 Season of die R o m a n 'Aqaba Project." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Forthcoming. Pratico, Gary D . Nelson Glueck's 1038-1940 Excavations at Tellel-Kheleifeh: A Reappraisal. American Schools of Oriental Research Ar chaeological Reports, 3. Adanta, 1 9 9 3 . This study, based on a re examination of Glueck's artifacts and field records, casts d o u b t o n Glueck's claim t h a t the site was Solomon's Ezion-Geber. W h i t c o m b , D o n a l d S. "Excavations in 'Aqaba: First Preliminary R e port." Annual of the Department, of Antiquities of Jordan 31 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 247-266. W h i t c o m b , D o n a l d S. 'Aqaba: Port of Palestine on the China Sea. A m man, 1988. Excellent introductory guide to die site, although now somewhat dated. Whitcomb, D o n a l d S. " C o p t i c Glazed Ceramics from the Excavations at 'Aqaba, J o r d a n . " Journal
of the American Research Center in Egypt
26 (1989): 1 6 7 - 1 8 2 . Whitcomb, Donald S. "Evidence of t h e Umayyad Period from the 'Aqaba Excavations." I n The History of Bilad al-Sham during the Umayyad Period: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference, vol. 2, edited by M u h a m m a d A d n a n al-Bakhit and R o b e r t Schick, pp. 1 6 4 - 1 8 4 . A m m a n , 1989. Whitcomb, Donald S. "Diocletian's Misr at 'Aqaba." Zeitschrift
des
Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 106 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 1 5 6 - 1 6 1 . D e b u n k s the view that the Early Islamic fortified town was actually a rebuilt version of an earlier R o m a n legionary fortress. Whitcomb, D o n a l d S. " T h e Fourth Gate at Ayla: A Report on the 1992 Excavations at ' A q a b a . " Annual
of the Department
of Antiquities
of
Jordan 37 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 533-543Whitcomb, Donald S. Ayla: Art and Industry in the Islamic Port of 'Aqaba. Chicago, 1994. Whitcomb, Donald S. " T h e Misr of Ayla: Settlement at al-'Aqaba in the Early Islamic Period." In The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, vol. 2 , Land Use and Settlement Patterns, edited by G. R. D . King and Averil C a m e r o n , p p . 1 5 5 - 1 7 0 . Princeton, 1994. Woolley, C. L e o n a r d , and T , E. Lawrence. The Wilderness ofZin.
New
York, 1936. See pages 1 4 1 - 1 4 5 . S. THOMAS PARKER a n d DONALD S. WHITCOMB
'AQAR QUF
( D u r K u r i g a l z u ) , site located a b o u t 30 k m
(19 mi.) west of B a g h d a d , I r a q (33°2i' N , 44°2i' E ) , a n d situated o n an o u t c r o p of die limestone terrace of t h e E u phrates River adjoining t h e Patti-Enlil canal in t h e east, c o n necting it with d i e Babylonian city of Sippar. It was identi fied b y H e n r y Creswicke Rawlinson o n t h e basis of bricks inscribed with t h e n a m e of the Kassite residence/capital D u r Kurigalzu (H. G. Rawlinson, A Selection from the Inscriptions
of Chaldaea,
Assyria,
and Babylonia,
Historical The Cu
neiform Inscriptions of W e s t e r n Asia, 1, L o n d o n , 1861, pi. 4.14). T h e t o w n was f o u n d e d b y t h e Kassite king Kurigalzu I a t the e n d of t h e fifteenth or t h e beginning of t h e f o u r t e e n t h century BCE, T h e r e are traces of an older settlement f r o m t h e fifteenth century. Following the fall of t h e Kassite dy nasty d u r i n g t h e twelfth century BCE, t h e site was a b a n d o n e d
a n d never r e o c c u p i e d . It w a s , h o w e v e r , occasionally u s e d for burials. T h e overall o c c u p a t i o n area seems t o h a v e b e e n a b o u t 225 ha (556 acres) with an e n c l o s u r e wall, p a r t s of w h i c h could b e distinguished t o p o g r a p h i c a l l y in t h e east. W i t h i n this area several hills diversify t h e otherwise flat g r o u n d ; t h e highest of t h o s e hills is A q a r Quf. A n o t h e r hill, 1 k m to the west, is T e l l al-Abyad; a third m o u n d , A, lies b e t w e e n t h e m , b u t only 100 m t o t h e w e s t of t h e ziggurat at ' A q a r Quf. E x c a v a t i o n results p o i n t t o a clear functional s e p aration of the t w o m a i n a r e a s — A q a r Q u f b e i n g t h e religious district a n d T e l l a l - A b y a d t h e palace a n d administrative c e n ter. B o t h were e x c a v a t e d b y a joint Iraqi-British mission di rected b y S e t o n L l o y d a n d T a h a Baqir u n d e r t h e auspices of t h e British S c h o o l of A r c h a e o l o g y in I r a q a n d t h e Iraqi D i r e c t o r a t e - G e n e r a l of Antiquities b e t w e e n 1942 a n d 1945. [See the biography of Lloyd.] c
c
T h e ziggurat, E - G I - K I L , is p a r t of t h e t e m p l e q u a r t e r , which is d e v o t e d to t h e god Enlil, t h e m a i n g o d in t h e B a b ylonian p a n t h e o n . Its g r o u n d p l a n is a l m o s t s q u a r e , covering an area of 69 X 67.6 m . T h r e e m a i n staircases led u p t o t h e first terrace, w h i c h m u s t h a v e b e e n a b o u t 33 m high. T h e two lateral staircases s p r e a d a r o u n d t h e c o r n e r s to m e e t d i e m a i n central staircase. O n l y a small p a r t of t h e t e m p l e c o m plex was excavated. It consisted originally of t h r e e almost square c o u r t y a r d s , e a c h of w h i c h w a s enclosed b y a single r o w of r o o m s . T h e m a i n t e m p l e is n o t p r e s e r v e d b u t m u s t have b e e n situated b e t w e e n t h e central c o u r t y a r d a n d t h e m a i n staircase of t h e ziggurat. A c c o r d i n g t o inscriptions f o u n d in each unit, t h e central o n e w a s d e v o t e d to t h e g o d Enlil; t h e one o n t h e n o r t h e a s t to his wife, t h e g o d d e s s Ninlil; a n d die one o n t h e s o u t h w e s t to t h e w a r g o d N i n u r t a . O n m o u n d A a n o t h e r t e m p l e , possibly also d e d i c a t e d t o Ninlil, was discovered. T h e palace consisted of several u n i t s , n o t all c o n t e m p o rary. In t h e m a i n u n i t , A, four stages w e r e distinguished. U n i t H , with wall paintings in situ, w a s t h e latest addition, [See Wall Paintings.] T h e palace w a s in u s e until t h e e n d of t h e Kassite d y n a s t y (mid-twelfth c e n t u r y BCE). U n i t A c o n sisted of three mittelsaalhauser (a b u i l d i n g with a large c e n tral hall flanked o n e a c h long side b y a r o w of smaller r o o m s c o n n e c t e d with it) adjoining a square c o u r t y a r d . T h e g r o u n d plans of all b u t t h e o n e on t h e n o r t h e a s t are very similar; it seems t o have b e e n t h e t h r o n e r o o m u s e d in c o n n e c t i o n with a ceremonial r o o m . O t h e r r e m a r k a b l e features of the palace are a treasury o n t h e east, w h i c h consisted of small vaulted r o o m s along a corridor. [See Palace.] M a n y of t h e k n o w n major works of art of t h e Kassite p e riod were f o u n d in t h e palace at D u r K u r i g a l z u . A s c u l p t u r e d terra-cotta h e a d of a b e a r d e d m a n , a n a l m o s t c o m pletely p r e s e r v e d s c u l p t u r e of a h y e n a , a relief m a c e h e a d of limestone, s o m e glass inlays, gold jewelry, a n d gold o r n a m e n t s a n d overlays are a m o n g t h e small finds. O n l y i n t e r i m reports o n t h e excavations at ' A q a r Q u f h a v e b e e n p u b l i s h e d
AQUEDUCTS (Baqir, 1944-1946). M u c h of t h e u n p u b l i s h e d material is in the Baghdad M u s e u m . [See also Kassites; M e s o p o t a m i a , article on A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a ; Sippar; T e m p l e s , article on M e s o p o t a m i a n T e m ples; Ziggurat; and the biography of Rawlinson.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Balkan, K e m a l . "Kassitenstudien I. D i e S p r a c h e d e r Kassiten." Amer ican Oriental Series 37 ( 1 9 5 4 ) : 9 3 . Baqir, T a h a . Iraq Government Excavations at 'Aqar Quf, 1942-1943. Iraq S u p p l e m e n t . L o n d o n , 1944. Baqir, T a h a . Iraq Government Excavations al 'Aqar Quf. Second Interim Report, 1943-1944. Iraq S u p p l e m e n t . L o n d o n , 1 9 4 5 . Baqir, T a h a . " I r a q G o v e r n m e n t Excavations at ' A q a r Quf: T h i r d I n terim R e p o r t , 1 9 4 4 - 1 9 4 5 . " Iraq 8 ( 1 9 4 6 ) : 7 3 - 9 3 . Heinrich, Ernst. Die Tempel und Heiligtiimer im alten Mesopotamien. D e n k m a l e r Antiker Architektur, 1 4 . Berlin, 1982. See pages 2 2 3 - 2 2 5 . Heinrich, Ernst. Die Palaste im alten Mesopotamien. D e n k m a l e r Antiker Architektur, 1 5 . Berlin, 1984. See pages 8 9 - 9 1 . Nashef, Khaled. Die Orts- und Gezudssemamen der mittelbabylonischen und mittelassyrischen Zeit. Repertoire G e o g r a p h i q u e des T e x t e s C u neiformes, 5. W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 8 2 . S e e " D u r - K u r i g a l z u . " T o m a b e c h i , Yoko. "Wall Paintings from D u r Kurigalzu." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 42 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 2 3 - 1 3 1 . HARTMUT KUHNE
AQUEDUCTS.
I n antiquity, aqueducts transported spring w a t e r o r r u n n i n g w a t e r t o c o m m u n i t i e s , principally to cities, b u t also t o palaces, fortresses, m o n a s t e r i e s , a n d farms. T h e s e water systems s u p p l i e d fresh w a t e r for i n d i vidual everyday u s e , for pools i n private residences, a n d for p u b l i c u s e in b a t h h o u s e s , f o u n t a i n s , a n d reservoirs. T h e y t r a n s p o r t e d water f r o m a h i g h p l a c e to a low place a c c o r d i n g t o t h e law of gravity. A q u e d u c t s b e g i n a t springs, a few of w h i c h w e r e e n h a n c e d b y built s t t u c t u r e s : at J e r u s a l e m , C a e sarea, E m m a u s , Sebaste, B e t h - G u v r i n , a n d ' E i n - B o q e q in Palestine. A t first, c h a n n e l s for t h e m o v i n g water w e r e d u g into t h e g r o u n d , b u t eventually t h e y w e r e h e w n o r built of field stone, sealed w i t h w a t e r p r o o f plaster, a n d covered with flat stone slabs t h a t p r e v e n t e d t h e w a t e r from b e c o m i n g p o l luted. I n a n u m b e r of places, pits w e r e d u g , into w h i c h r e s i d u e from t h e s e d i m e n t s i n t h e w a t e r c o u l d settle. T h e c h a n nels in w h i c h t h e water flowed w e r e generally c u t in a r e c t a n g u l a r shape; s o m e n a r r o w e d at t h e b o t t o m , t o b e c o m e trapezoidal. T h e d i m e n s i o n s of t h e c h a n n e l s w e r e d e t e r m i n e d b y t h e a m o u n t of w a t e r t h e y w e r e d e s i g n e d t o carry: from 1.4 X 1.8 m long (the lower a q u e d u c t a t C a e s a r e a ) to 0.1 X 0.14 m l o n g (the l o w e r a q u e d u c t at E m m a u s ) a n d generally a b o u t 0.3-0.5 m w i d e a n d 0.5-0.8 m d e e p . T h e a q u e d u c t s themselves w e r e usually built from small stones t h a t d i d n o t exceed 0,2 m in length; t h e stones w e r e held t o g e t h e r w i t h m o r t a r . I n o r d e r t o cross valleys a n d m o u n t a i n chains, a r c h e d b r i d g e s w e r e built a n d t u n n e l s w e r e d u g . T u n n e l s first a p p e a r e d in t h e I r o n A g e i n J e r u s a l e m in P a l
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estine a n d a t Erbil in Syria. M a n y were d u g in t h e Hellenis tic, R o m a n , a n d B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d s , several of which h a d shafts 33-56 m apart. S u c h a s y s t e m allowed t h e digging t o b e carried o u t simultaneously in all t h e shafts, so t h a t work o n t h e t u n n e l could p r o c e e d m o r e quickly. T u n n e l s c o n structed in this m a n n e r w e r e u s e d at A k k o , B e t h - h a - ' E m e k , G a a t o n , Jerusalem, C a e s a r e a , a n d S e p p h o r i s . Shorter t u n nels w i t h o u t shafts w e r e f o u n d a t Susita, Sebaste, Jerusalem, Jericho, Q u m r a n , a n d H y r k a n i a . F r o m t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d o n w a r d , it was c u s t o m a r y in d e e p valleys t o u s e a n i n v e r t e d s i p h o n t o m o v e water. T h i s consisted of a lead or clay p i p e t h a t could b e closed off. T h i s i m p o r t a n t invention c o n v e y e d w a t e r t o cities o n high hills (at P e r g a m o n the ridge w a s a b o u t 200 m h i g h ) . T o regulate t h e flow of water, pools a n d reservoirs w e r e built along t h e p a t h of t h e a q u e d u c t s . N e a r t h e city o r inside it, t h e water e n t e r e d a large reservoir ( S e p p h o r i s , Susita) or a n enclosed p o o l ( S e p p h o r i s , T i b e r i a s , Jericho, Petra, H u m e i m a ) or e n t e r e d into large w a t e r pits ( M a s a d a , C y p r o s , Sartaba, H y r kania) . In t h e R o m a n p e r i o d , a n inverted siphon built of stone links w a s in u s e a t J e r u s a l e m , Susita, a n d B e t h - Y e r a h . L i n k e d stones were u s e d in building t h e arched bridges t h a t a p p e a r for t h e first t i m e i n t h e first c e n t u r y BCE. T h e s e b r i d g e s a r e considered t h e m o s t impressive structures a s sociated with t h e a q u e d u c t s ; t o g e t h e r w i t h t h e inverted si p h o n (sometimes also in c o m b i n a t i o n , as at A s p e n d o s in Anatolia) a n d t h e t u n n e l s , they m a r k t h e h i g h p o i n t in t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of a q u e d u c t s . T h e earliest a q u e d u c t is M e n u a ' s canal d u g a t U r a r t u in T u r k e y , at t h e b e g i n n i n g of the eighth century BCE. It c o n veyed spring w a t e r for a distance of a b o u t 56 k m ( a b o u t 35 mi) t o t h e foot of t h e settlement at t h e citadel of U r a r t u . K n o w l e d g e of this t e c h n o l o g y traveled from U r a r t u to A s syria, w h e r e , a t t h e e n d of t h e eighth century BCE, S e n n a c h erib built two a q u e d u c t s for t h e cities o f N i n e v e h a n d Erbil. T h e a q u e d u c t a t N i n e v e h w a s a b o u t 55 k m long a n d i n c l u d e d a n u m b e r of t u n n e l s a n d bridges. Inscriptions glori fying S e n n a c h e r i b h a v e b e e n discovered o n t h e largest of t h e bridges ( a p p r o x i m a t e l y 300 m l o n g a n d a b o u t 12 m w i d e ) . A shaft t u n n e l w a s d u g for t h e a q u e d u c t a t Erbil. H e z e k i a h ' s T u n n e l (533 m long) was built i n Jerusalem in t h e s a m e period. It p a s s e d u n d e r t h e city, t o t h e other side of t h e ridge, going east t o southwest, i n o r d e r to b r i n g water into t h e city. T h e t e c h n i q u e of conveying water b y m e a n s of a q u e d u c t s also r e a c h e d classical G r e e c e , w h e r e , in t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE, E u p a l i n o s c o n s t r u c t e d a t u n n e l 1,040 m long t o b r i n g w a t e r t o t h e city of S a m o s . H e z e k i a h ' s T u n n e l a n d t h e t u n n e l of E u p a l i n o s , b o t h of w h i c h were built w i t h o u t t r e n c h e s , are c o n s i d e r e d t h e greatest works of watere n g i n e e r i n g technology in t h e preclassical period. T h e tech n i q u e s d e v e l o p e d b y t h e G r e e k s for building a q u e d u c t s arose f r o m t h e n e e d t o h i d e their water systems from their
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enemies. As a result, they constructed u n d e r g r o u n d t u n n e l s . Just s u c h a water system in Palestine b r o u g h t water from a distance of a b o u t 14 k m (8.75 mi.) to die city of Ptolemais/ Akko, at the beginning of the third century BCE, it is t h e first a q u e d u c t to bring water from such a distance. I n die second century BCE, in the desert of Palestine, aq u e d u c t s gathered floodwaters into gigantic water pits located in palaces a n d fortresses. T h e s e a q u e d u c t s are distinguished by a deeply cut channel. A t Sartaba and Hyrkania, an in verted siphon was built t h a t allowed water to b e conveyed to the pits situated along t h e slope of t h e fortress, a c c o r d i n g to the principle t h a t water in a pipe will always rise to its original height. A n a q u e d u c t was built from the springs at W a d i Qelt to the palaces of the H a s m o n e a n s in Jericho; in it a clay pipe was installed t h a t was u s e d as a n inverted si p h o n to raise water to the fortress. T h e lower a q u e d u c t to Jerusalem is dated t o this s a m e period. I n the R o m a n period, a q u e d u c t s were built in m o s t of the cities of the ancient N e a r East. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t ones w e r e in Palestine, at C a e s a r e a a n d in Jerusalem. T h e u p p e r a q u e d u c t at Caesarea, first built either by H e r o d the G r e a t or by his followers, rests o n impressive arches to keep w a t e r at the desirable height. T h u s , the water could reach every p a r t of the city by force of gravitation. At t h e time of t h e e m p e r o r H a d r i a n , a second a q u e d u c t was affixed to it t h a t bears n o fewer t h a n nine imperial inscriptions glorifying the e m p e r o r for building the structure. Jerusalem's a q u e d u c t in this p e r i o d is an a r r a n g e m e n t of four a q u e d u c t s w h o s e total length is about 80 k m ( a b o u t 50 m i . ) . Additional a q u e d u c t s w e r e built at Antioch, T y r e , T a d m o r / P a l m y r a , Banias, S u sita (three a q u e d u c t s ) , G a d a r a / U m m Qeis, T i b e r i a s ( t w o ) , Sepphoris (two), B e t h - S h e a n (three), Abila (three), D o r (two), Legio, S h a ' a r h a - ' A m a q i m ( t w o ) , Sebaste/Samaria (two), S h e c h e m , E m m a u s (two), B e t h - G u v r i n ( t w o ) , H u m e i m a , a n d Petra ( t w o ) , a m o n g others. A n inverted si p h o n built of stone links is f o u n d on the ridge ( a b o u t 45 m deep) at Susita and in the valley of Bethlehem, on t h e high ( a b o u t 40 m deep) a q u e d u c t to Jerusalem. T h e a q u e d u c t at Tiberias has a s e c o n d a r y water line ( a b o u t 20 m d e e p ) t h a t leads to the b a t h h o u s e at B e t h - Y e r a h . Stone inverted si p h o n s such as these are w i d e s p r e a d in m a n y R o m a n cities in western Anatolia. Bridges support a q u e d u c t s in only a few places: at C y p r e s a n d Hyrkania a n d in W a d i Qelt, Samaria, T i b e r i a s , Jerusa lem, a n d N a a r a n , n e a r Jericho. T h e r e p r o b a b l y was a b r i d g e at Sepphoris, b u t it h a s b e e n completely destroyed. I n other places, high s u p p o r t walls were built to guard the a q u e d u c t as it passed t h r o u g h low-lying regions: at C y p r o s , H y r k a n i a , a n d Sepphoris. A q u e d u c t s were u s e d late into t h e Byzantine period. In the Early A r a b period, an a q u e d u c t was built at R a m l a , t h e n the capital of Palestine. c
Jerusalem's a q u e d u c t s c o n t i n u e d to operate in t h e M a m luk a n d O t t o m a n periods. I n t h e O t t o m a n period, t w o a q u e d u c t s were built at Akko; the later one dates to t h e reign
of t h e Pasha S u l e y m a n a n d o p e r a t e d from 1814 to 1948. T h e Biar a q u e d u c t , one of t h e four a q u e d u c t s t o J e r u s a l e m , w a s repaired by the British a n d still operates, as do t h e ones in W a d i Qelt a n d W a d i Auja, w h i c h w e r e built in t h e t w e n t i e t h century on t h e f o u n d a t i o n s of a q u e d u c t s f r o m t h e H a s m o n e a n period. [See also Baths; C i s t e r n s ; D a m s ; H y d r o l o g y ; P o o l s ; R e s ervoirs; Sewers; and W a t e r T u n n e l s . In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries^ BIBLIOGRAPHY 'Amit, David, Yizhar Hirschfeld, and Joseph Patrich, eds. The Aque ducts of Ancient Palestine (in H e b r e w ) . Jerusalem, 1989. Olami, Yaacov, and Y e h u d a h Peleg. " T h e W a t e r Supply System of Caesarea M a r i t i m a . " Israel Exploration Journal 27.2-3 (1977): 1 2 7 - 1 3 7 , pis. 1 6 - 1 7 . Stenton, E. C , and J. J. Coulton. " O i n o a n d a : T h e W a t e r Supply and A q u e d u c t . " Anatolian Studies 36 (1986): 1 5 - 5 9 . T s u k , Tsvika. " T h e A q u e d u c t s to S e p p h o r i s . " M . A . thesis, T e l Aviv University, 1985. In H e b r e w , with English s u m m a r y . T s u k , Tsvika. " T h e A q u e d u c t to Legio and the Location of the C a m p of the Vlth R o m a n L e g i o n . " Tel Aviv 1 5 - 1 6 ( 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 8 9 ) : 9 2 - 9 7 , pis. 1 3 - 1 4 Vitruvius, Pollio. De Architectura. Book 8. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 3 4 . TSVIKA TSUK Translated from Hebrew by Eric S. Cohen
A R A B I A N P E N I N S U L A . [ This entry provides a broad survey of the history of the Arabian Peninsula as known pri marily from archaeological discoveries. It is chronologically di vided into three articles: T h e A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a in Prehistoric T i m e s T h e A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a before t h e T i m e of Islam T h e A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a i n Islamic T i m e s In addition to the related articles on specific countries, subregions, and sites referred to in this entry, see H i s t o r y of t h e Field, article on Archaeology in t h e A r a b i a n Peninsula.]
The Arabian Peninsula in Prehistoric Times T h e earliest h o m i n o i d finds from t h e A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a are fossil r e m a i n s of d r y o p i t h e c i n e t y p e r e c o v e r e d in n o r t h e a s t ern Saudi Arabia a n d d a t e d to the L o w e r M i o c e n e (c. seve n t e e n - f o u r t e e n million years B C E ) . E a s t e r n A r a b i a m u s t h a v e b e e n a relatively lush e n v i r o n m e n t t h e n , for t h e fossil r e c o r d contains evidence for the p r e s e n c e of various m e m bers of the giraffe, b o v i n e , pig, crocodile, a n d r h i n o c e r o s families. A great q u a n t i t y of i m p o r t a n t fossil r e m a i n s h a s also recently b e e n discovered in w e s t e r n A b u D h a b i , b u t thus far n o r e m a i n s of h o m i n o i d s . T h e earliest traces of artifactual remains, possibly of h o m i n i d origin, c o m e f r o m a site n o r t h of Hail in S a u d i Arabia, w h e r e a p r e - A c h e u l e a n industry, t h o u g h t t o b e related to O l d o w a n B in E a s t Africa, has b e e n identified. M u c h of n o r t h e r n , w e s t e r n , a n d s o u t h western Arabia, in w h a t is geologically p a r t of t h e A r a b i a n
ARABIAN PENINSULA: The Arabian Peninsula in Prehistoric Times shield formation, h a s yielded r e m a i n s of L o w e r Pleistocene d a t e (c. 1.2 milIion—100,000 B P ) , w h e r e a p o p u l a t i o n u s i n g a variety of L o w e r , M i d d l e , a n d U p p e r A c h e u l e a n industries lived. T y p i c a l A c h e u l e a n h a n d a x e s , bifaces, c h o p p i n g tools, a n d flakes h a v e b e e n f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t this region. T h e M i d d l e Pleistocene is equally, if n o t b e t t e r r e p r e s e n t e d b y sites w i t h M i d d l e Paleolithic tools of M o u s t e r i a n o r M o u s terian of A c h e u l e a n tradition, d a t i n g t o a b o u t 75,000-30,000 BP. Sites in t h e R u b al-Khali w e r e recently studied that c o n tain a n i n d u s t r y typologically related t o t h e Aterian of N o r t h Africa, a n d tiiat p r o b a b l y date t o a b o u t 35,000-20,000 BP. T h e existence of h u m a n o c c u p a t i o n in presently desertic areas s u c h as this w a s m a d e possible b y considerably moister conditions d u r i n g t h e L a t e P l e i s t o c e n e , p r o b a b l y as a result of a n o r t h w a r d d i s p l a c e m e n t of t h e m o n s o o n at t h a t time. T h e R u b al-Khali w a s a n area of savannahlike grassland then, It is n o t e w o r t h y , h o w e v e r , t h a t U p p e r Paleolithic r e m a i n s of L a t e Pleistocene date a r e r a r e in n o r t h e r n Arabia. N o e v i d e n c e of L o w e r , M i d d l e , or U p p e r Paleolithic industries h a s yet b e e n r e c o v e r e d a n y w h e r e o n t h e A r a b i a n shelf—that is, in eastern Arabia ( O m a n i n c l u d e d ) , w h e r e t h e earliest industries f o u n d d a t e t o a b o u t 5000 BCE. Sites dating t o this p e r i o d w e r e first identified in Q a t a r , w h e r e tiiey w e r e a s signed t o d i e so-called Q a t a r B g r o u p . M o r e recently, c o n t e m p o r a r y a n d , t o a limited e x t e n t , typologically related sites b e l o n g i n g t o t h e W a d i W u t a y y a facies h a v e b e e n found o n t h e coast of O m a n . T h e b l a d e a r r o w h e a d s t h a t characterize t h e Q a t a r sites s h o w a clear affinity t o L e v a n t i n e t y p e s . T h i s suggests t h a t d i e s o u t h w a r d s p r e a d of pastoral g r o u p s from t h e L e v a n t , via n o r t h e r n A r a b i a , m a y h a v e o c c u r r e d t h e n , p e r h a p s coinciding with w h a t h a s b e e n described as a n early/ m i d - H o l o c e n e "climatic o p t i m u m " in t h e region. M o i s t e r c o n d i t i o n s t h r o u g h o u t e a s t e r n Arabia p r o b a b l y prevailed t h r o u g h t h e fifth m i l l e n n i u m , w h e n a veritable explosion in t h e n u m b e r of late prehistoric sites b e l o n g i n g t o t h e " A r a b i a n bifacial t r a d i t i o n " (i.e., c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y stone tools flaked witii fine r e t o u c h o n t w o sides) o c c u r r e d . F i n e p r e s s u r e flaking, a n d t h e u s e of t a n g e d a n d / o r b a r b e d a r r o w h e a d s in n o r t h e a s t e r n Arabia, Q a t a r , d i e R u b al-Khali, Y e m e n , a n d t h e coast of t h e U n i t e d A r a b E m i r a t e s ( U A E ) , a r e c o m m o n features, w h e r e a s a r r o w h e a d s are a b s e n t o n t h e coast of O m a n p r o p e r in t h e so-called S a r u q facies. I n spite of t h e fact t h a t t h e p r o m i n e n c e of t h e a r r o w h e a d in their tool kit m i g h t a r g u e otherwise, t h e bearers of this culture w e r e n o t exclusively o r even primarily h u n t e r s . Sites in eastern Arabia of this p e r i o d routinely contain r e m a i n s of d o m e s t i c a t e d s h e e p a n d goat, n e i t h e r of w h i c h w a s , in its wild state, native t o t h e r e g i o n . ( T h e y m a y h a v e b e e n i n t r o d u c e d b y those L e v a n t i n e / N o r t h A r a b i a n i m m i g r a n t s w h o b r o u g h t with t h e m t h e b l a d e - a r r o w h e a d t e c h n o l o g y of t h e Q a t a r B sites.) M o r e o v e r , t h e coastal sites always s h o w ev i d e n c e for extensive shellfish gatiiering as well as fishing, routinely yielding ovoid a n d s u b r e c t a n g u l a r stone c r u s h i n g
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platforms, often deeply p i t t e d in t h e center, t h a t w e r e p r o b ably u s e d , together witii a particular kind of stone chisel, to o p e n shellfish. Various f o r m s of n e t sinkers are also c o m m o n o n these sites. T h u s , sites of t h e A r a b i a n bifacial tradition p r o b a b l y r e p r e s e n t the r e m a i n s of pastoralists w h o m o v e d seasonally b e t w e e n t h e coast, w h e r e they did s o m e shellfish g a t h e r i n g a n d fishing, a n d t h e interior, w h e r e t h e y could graze their h e r d s d u r i n g t h e winter. H u n t i n g was a n option a n d helped t o conserve their h e r d s ( p e r h a p s u s e d principally for milk p r o d u c t s , hair, a n d fleece) b y p r o v i d i n g a n o t h e r source of p r o t e i n . [See P a s t o r a l N o m a d i s m ; S h e e p a n d Goats; Fishing; Hunting.] S o m e of d i e coastal A r a b i a n bifacial sites in Saudi Arabia, Q a t a r ( Q a t a r g r o u p s A , C , D ) , B a h r a i n , a n d t h e U A E have also yielded small a m o u n t s o f i m p o r t e d M e s o p o t a m i a n p o t tery of U b a i d 3-4 type. T h o s e sherds t h a t have b e e n a n a lyzed c o m e almost certainly f r o m U r a n d a l - ' U b a i d in s o u t h ern Iraq, p r e s u m a b l y from vessels t r a d e d to t h e local inhabitants b y M e s o p o t a m i a n s in r e t u r n for local p r o d u c t s , p e r h a p s pearls, dried fish, a n d c o p p e r . I t a p p e a r s , however, tiiat this c o n t a c t d i d n o t lead t o t h e birth of an indigenous c e r a m i c tradition in eastern Arabia. S o m e sites in eastern S a u d i Arabia o n w h i c h p a i n t e d U b a i d sherds have b e e n f o u n d also c o n t a i n e d e x a m p l e s o f a coarse, r e d , chaff-tem p e r e d pottery; h o w e v e r , as this tends n o t t o o c c u r o n sites w i t h o u t t h e i m p o r t e d w a r e , it w o u l d n o t seem t o b e an in d i g e n o u s p r o d u c t . Certainly t h e r e is n o indication of a n e v o lution of local ceramic t e c h n o l o g y p o s t d a t i n g t h e period of U b a i d c o n t a c t with t h e area. [See U r ; U b a i d . ] T h e archaeological r e c o r d of O m a n , n o r t h e a s t e r n Arabia, a n d Y e m e n shows conclusively tiiat sites of the Arabian b i facial tradition c o n t i n u e d t o exist right d o w n to t h e third m i l l e n n i u m . T h e latest sites of this type o n d i e coast of O m a n ( B a n d a r Jissa facies), aldiough aceramic, d o contain small a m o u n t s of c o p p e r o r b r o n z e b u t w o u l d never b e clas sified as B r o n z e A g e sites. T h u s , t h e users of t h e A r a b i a n bifacial tradition p r e s u m a b l y r e p r e s e n t a s e g m e n t of t h e l o cal p o p u l a t i o n that coexisted with those other, sedentary g r o u p s , y e t d i d n o t m o v e d o w n a social evolutionary p a d i leading ultimately t o w a r d a c o m p l e x , " B r o n z e A g e " way of life. T o w h a t extent t h e A r a b i a n bifacial g r o u p s were p a r t time agriculturalists is a n o p e n question. S o m e sites in t h e desertic regions of eastern S a u d i Arabia h a v e yielded g r i n d ing stones, t h o u g h these n e e d n o t have b e e n u s e d t o grind d o m e s t i c a t e d cereals. T h e site of R a s a l - H a m r a 5, o n t h e coast of O m a n near M u s c a t , m a y h a v e t h e earliest evidence of d o m e s t i c a t e d s o r g h u m — d u r i n g t h e fourtii m i l l e n n i u m — b u t this was recently d i s p u t e d . A t Hili 8, in t h e interior of A b u D h a b i , d o m e s t i c a t e d cereals a n d dates are p r e s e n t b y a b o u t 3 t o o BCE, along with d o m e s t i c a t e d s h e e p , goats, a n d cattle; h o w e v e r , t h e origins of t h e cereals ( t h e date [i.e., datepalm] was i n d i g e n o u s ) is u n k n o w n . [See also Agriculture; Cereals; K u w a i t ; O m a n ; Qatar; U n i t e d A r a b E m i r a t e s ; and Y e m e n . ]
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ARABIAN PENINSULA: The Arabian Peninsula before the Time of Islam BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amirkhanov, Khizri A. Pakolit Iuga Aravii ( T h e Paleolithic in South Arabia). Moscow, 1 9 9 1 . T h e most extensive account of the subject ever written, with an English summary. Andrews, Peter, et al. "Dryopithecines from the Miocene of Saudi Ara bia." Nature 274 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 2 4 9 - 2 5 1 . Di Mario, Francesco. " A N e w Lithic Inventory from Arabian Penin sula: T h e N o r t h Yemen Industry in Bronze Age." Oriens Antiquus 26 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 8 9 - 1 0 7 . T o be read in conjunction with the article by U e r p m a n n (below) for lithic facies of the Bronze Age. Di M a r i o , Francesco. " T h e Western a r - R u b ' al-Khali 'Neolithic': N e w D a t a from the Ramlat Sab'atayn (Yemen Arab Republic)." Annali dell'ktituto Orientate diNapoli 49 (1989): 1 0 9 - 1 4 8 . T h e most recent statement on the western R u b al-Khali Neolithic. Edens, Christopher. " T h e R u b al-Khali 'Neolithic' Revisited: T h e View from N a d q a n . " In Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archae ology, edited by Daniel T . Potts, p p . 1 5 - 4 3 . Carsten N i e b u h r Insti tute Publication, 7. Copenhagen, 1988. Comprehensive study of the Late Prehistoric stone-tool assemblages from the R u b al-Khali; an excellent bibliography refers to earlier works on the subject. Inizan, Marie-Louise. Prehistoire a Qatar. Mission Archeologique F r a n chise a Qatar, vol. 2. Paris, 1980. Final publication of the work of the F r e n c h mission u n d e r Jacques Tixier on die Qatar peninsula. Su persedes all earlier publications on the prehistory of Qatar by the Danish, British, and F r e n c h missions. Inizan, Marie-Louise, and L u c Ordieb. "Prehistoire dans la region de Shabwa au Yemen du sud ( R . D . P . Y e m e n ) . " Paleoricnt 1 3 . 1 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 5-22. M c C I u r e , Harold A. " L a t e Quaternary Palaeogeography and L a n d scape Evolution of the R u b ' al-Khali." In Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archaeology, edited by Daniel T . Potts, p p . 9 - 1 3 . Carsten N i e b u h r Institute Publication, 7. Copenhagen, 1988. Brief survey of the environmental history of the R u b al-Khali in the period 35,00020,000 BCE. Potts, Daniel T . The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. Vol. I. Oxford, 1990. T h e entire prehistoric record of eastern Arabia, from the earliest hominoid finds through die late prehistoric period. Tosi, Maurizio. " T h e Emerging Picture of Prehistoric Arabia." Annual Review of Anthropology 1 5 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 4 6 1 - 4 9 0 . Synthetic look at the peninsula in prehistory, emphasizing processes of cultural evolution. U e r p m a n n , Margarethe. "Structuring the Late Stone Age of South eastern Arabia." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 3 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 6 5 109. T h e first comprehensive presentation of the late prehistoric stone-tool assemblages on the O m a n peninsula. DANIEL T . POTTS
The Arabian Peninsula before the Time of Islam A l t h o u g h a n u m b e r of early E u r o p e a n visitors wrote valu able descriptions of d i e visible ancient m o n u m e n t s o n t h e A r a b i a n Peninsula, it is only d u r i n g t h e last generation that systematic archaeological research has b e e n carried o u t there, a n d t h e n only i n limited areas. C o m p a r e d w i t h other parts of S o u t h w e s t Asia, therefore, current knowledge of Arabia is m e a g e r a n d u n e v e n ; m u c h of t h e archaeological m a p remains blank, a n d p r o b l e m s of chronology a n d inter pretation a b o u n d . M a n y of t h e blanks are doubtless a t r u e reflection of the absence of p e r m a n e n t settlement, b o t h a n cient a n d m o d e r n , in t h o s e vast b a r r e n areas of desert w h i c h o c c u p y m u c h of the central a n d eastern p a r t s of Arabia.
E v e n those areas, h o w e v e r , usually have sufficient vegeta tion t o s u p p o r t n o m a d s a n d their flocks ( w h o leave little sign of their p r e s e n c e in t h e archaeological r e c o r d ) . T h e desert is, after all, scattered with oases w h i c h f o r m staging posts on t h e cross-peninsular r o u t e s . O t h e r p a r t s of A r a b i a are m o r e fertile a n d attractive to h u m a n settlement, a n d it is in t h e m t h a t the major d e v e l o p m e n t s in p r e - I s l a m i c A r a b i a n civilization took place: the m o u n t a i n s a n d valleys of Asir, Y e m e n , a n d H a d h r a m a u t in t h e s o u t h w e s t (the A r a b i a Felix of t h e classical a u t h o r s ) ; D h o f a r in t h e s o u t h a n d O m a n in t h e southeast; a n d t h e lagoons a n d islands along d i e coast of t h e Arabian (Persian) G u l f in t h e east. [See Y e m e n ; H a d h r a m a u t ; O m a n . ] S o m e of these s a m e regions are also rich in natural resources: c o p p e r in O m a n , a r o m a t i c g u m s (frankincense a n d m y r r h ) in Y e m e n a n d D h o f a r ; a n d fish a n d pearls from t h e Gulf. P r o b a b l y t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t fac tor in t h e historical d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e A r a b i a n P e n i n s u l a has b e e n t h e exploitation of t h e s e n a t u r a l r e s o u r c e s b y m o r e powerful neighbors—first M e s o p o t a m i a a n d E g y p t a n d t h e n G r e e c e , R o m e , a n d Persia—from w h o m t h e A r a b i a n p e o ples received cultural stimuli, b o t h material a n d spiritual. T h e y assimilated a n d refashioned t h o s e influences t o suit their o w n n e e d s a n d tastes. S p o r a d i c contact b e t w e e n t h e i n h a b i t a n t s of eastern A r a bia a n d s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a b e g a n at least as early as t h e fifth millennium. It is d e m o n s t r a t e d b y t h e p r e s e n c e at a n u m b e r of small A r a b i a n coastal sites of t h e distinctive p a i n t e d U b a i d p o t t e r y t h a t w a s m a n u f a c t u r e d in M e s o p o tamia a n d b r o u g h t t o A r a b i a by seasonal f i s h e r m e n . A r chaeological evidence for this c o n t a c t ceases for t h e early p a r t of t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m b u t occurs again after a b o u t 3000 BCE, in t h e f o r m of a n o t h e r t y p e of M e s o p o t a m i a n p o t tery, t h e J e m d e t N a s r style, f o u n d at certain sites in inland O m a n , such as Plafit. T h i s distribution m a y indicate tiiat t h e O m a n i c o p p e r deposits w e r e already b e i n g exploited. By this t i m e d i e a d v a n c e d , literate S u m e r i a n civilization h a d b e e n established in M e s o p o t a m i a . [See S u m e r i a n s . ] It w a s greatiy d e p e n d e n t for its wealth a n d p o w e r u p o n foreign t r a d e , b o t h for t h e supply of t h o s e r a w m a t e r i a l s — m e t a l s , s e m i p r e c i o u s stones, g o o d building stone, a n d timber—Mesopotamia it self lacked a n d for t h e profits to b e m a d e from t h e e x p o r t of t h e foodstuffs, textiles, a n d m a n u f a c t u r e d items it p r o d u c e d in a b u n d a n c e . T h e S u m e r i a n s w e r e t h u s a t r a d i n g p e o p l e , a n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e third m i l l e n n i u m t h e gulf a n d t h e seas b e y o n d , t o w a r d I n d i a , w e r e t h e scene of intense c o m m e r c i a l activity. A s a result, eastern A r a b i a , t h e s o u r c e of s o m e of t h e raw materials in d e m a n d a n d well p r o v i d e d with h a r b o r s a n d fresh water, p r o s p e r e d . T h i s is d o c u m e n t e d i n the M e s o p o t a m i a n t e x t u a l s o u r c e s , w h e r e t w o places in particular a r e m e n t i o n e d in c o n n e c t i o n w i t h this activity: D i l m u n a n d M a g a n (or M a k k a n ) . [See D i l m u n . ] T h e f o r m e r c a n confidentiy b e identified w i t h t h e island of B a h r a i n a n d n e i g h b o r i n g p a r t s of t h e n o r t h e r n gulf, while M a g a n is almost certainly O m a n . [See Bahrain.] It w a s t h e r e
ARABIAN PENINSULA: The Arabian Peninsula before the Time of Islam t h a t , in t h e third a n d early s e c o n d millennia BCE, w h a t c a n b e t e r m e d t r u e civilization first d e v e l o p e d o n t h e p e n i n s u l a . T w o distinct b u t closely related A r a b i a n cultures e m e r g e d in this p e r i o d . O n e , t h e U m m e n - N a r culture, n a m e d for t h e island off t h e coast of A b u D h a b i , w h e r e it w a s first discovered, is s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t O m a n a n d is clearly to b e e q u a t e d w i t h M a g a n . A l t h o u g h m a n y small settlements a r e k n o w n , m o s t of d i e archaeological material c o m e s from t h e distinctive U m m e n - N a r t o m b s . T h e t o m b s a r e circular s t o n e structures, often with excellent m a s o n r y , designed for multiple successive burials. [See T o m b s . ] It s e e m s t h a t O m a n w a s t h e n i n h a b i t e d b y a tall p e o p l e w h o cultivated w h e a t , barley, d a t e s , a n d s o r g h u m ( s o m e form of s i m p l e run-off irrigation m a y h a v e b e e n p r a c t i c e d ) . [See Agricul t u r e ; Cereals; Irrigation.] T h e y raised s h e e p , goat, a n d cat tle, a n d t h e d o m e s t i c a t e d d o n k e y a n d c a m e l w e r e p r o b a b l y also k n o w n . [See S h e e p a n d G o a t s ; Cattle a n d O x e n ; C a m els.] H u n t i n g gazelle, oryx, a n d various birds w a s also i m p o r t a n t , while at coastal s e t t l e m e n t s fishing a n d d i e c a p t u r e of large sea m a m m a l s s u c h as t h e turtle a n d d u g o n g w e r e c u s t o m a r y . [See Fishing.] T h e m i n i n g a n d smelting of t h e local c o p p e r ore a p p e a r s t o h a v e b e e n well established, a n d s o m e sites (e.g., M a y s a r ) h a v e b e e n i n t e r p r e t e d as special ized industrial centers. A r s e n i c a n d tin f o u n d in s o m e of t h e b r o n z e objects w e r e p r o b a b l y b r o u g h t f r o m Afghanistan or Iran. S u c h m e r c a n t i l e c o n t a c t s w i t h t h e E a s t a r e confirmed b y s o m e of d i e p o t t e r y , w h i c h is influenced b y t h e ceramic tra dition of those countries a n d even, occasionally, b y t h a t of t h e I n d u s River Valley civilization. C o m m e r c i a l contacts w e r e p r o b a b l y strongest w i t h S u m e r , h o w e v e r , either d i rectiy or, m o r e likely, indirectiy, via D i l m u n , S o m e p o t t e r y of t h e U m m e n - N a r t y p e h a s b e e n f o u n d at t h e nortiiern e n d of t h e gulf. T h e c o r r e s p o n d i n g culture is t h a t of D i l m u n , p r o b a b l y originating in a b o u t 3000 BCE o n the m a i n l a n d of Arabia, b u t best k n o w n d u r i n g t h e late third a n d t h e early s e c o n d millennia BCE f r o m excavations o n t h e islands of B a h r a i n a n d Failaka ( K u w a i t ) . [See Failaka; K u w a i t . ] A t Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain a s e q u e n c e of five " c i t i e s " h a s b e e n u n c o v e r e d b e t w e e n 1953 a n d 1969 b y a t e a m of D a n i s h ar chaeologists, directed b y Geoffrey Bibby, of w h i c h cities I (c. 2400-2000 BCE) a n d II ( c . 2000-1600 BCE) a r e relevant h e r e ; t h e excavations p r o d u c e d a wealth of material, p a r t i c ularly distinct types of p o t t e r y a n d s t a m p seals (Bibby, 1969; H o j l u n d a n d A n d e r s e n , 1994). [See Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain; Seals,] T h e finds have e n a b l e d archaeologists t o establish cultural a n d chronological links t h r o u g h o u t t h e r e g i o n — f r o m s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d t h e G u l f of Iran, B a l u c h i stan, a n d t h e I n d u s V a l l e y — t h u s confirming t h e p i c t u r e of w i d e s p r e a d t r a d e activity p r o v i d e d b y c o n t e m p o r a r y M e s o p o t a m i a n texts. Little a r c h i t e c t u r e of this p e r i o d survived a t Q a f a t al-Bahrain, a l t h o u g h city II w a s p r o v i d e d w i t h a substantial t o w n wall. F o r this a s p e c t of D i l m u n civilization, t h e sites of B a r b a r , D i r a z , a n d Sar, all o n B a h r a i n , are m o r e
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informative. A t S a r , r e c e n t excavations (Crawford, 1993) revealed a regular p l a n of s t a n d a r d h o u s e s lining a street. T h e i r o c c u p a n t s (judging from t h e n u m b e r of seals, seal i m p r e s s i o n s , a n d i m p o r t e d materials a n d objects) were e n gaged in c o m m e r c i a l activities. H o w e v e r , t h e e c o n o m y of die settlement s e e m s , f r o m a s t u d y of t h e excavated b o n e s a n d p l a n t r e m a i n s , t o h a v e b e e n m a i n l y b a s e d o n agriculture a n d fishing. A small t e m p l e w a s also excavated there a n d a t D i r a z . T h e major D i l m u n s a c r e d building k n o w n is a t B a r b a r , t h o u g h . It is a finely c o n s t r u c t e d of stone a n d incor p o r a t e s a sacred well; it is itself enclosed b y an oval p e r i m e t e r wall recalling t h e t e m p l e ovals a t Khafajeh a n d U b a i d in M e s o p o t a m i a . I t has b e e n suggested t h a t d i e B a r b a r t e m p l e m a y h a v e b e e n dedicated t o t h e S u m e r i a n god Enid, w h o s e special e l e m e n t was water. N o d i i n g is k n o w n o f the rituals c o n d u c t e d in these t e m p l e s , o r of t h e organization of reli gious life in D i l m u n ; h o w e v e r , t h e h u n d r e d s of burial m o u n d s of this p e r i o d w i t h w h i c h B a h r a i n is covered, a n d w h i c h h a v e p r o d u c e d large quantities of rich grave g o o d s , testify t o d i e a m o u n t of r e s o u r c e s invested in provising t h e afterlife. [See G r a v e G o o d s . ] T h e p r e c o c i o u s U m m e n - N a r a n d D i l m u n cultures, d e p e n d e n t as they were u p o n a thriving m a r i t i m e trade, s e e m n o t t o h a v e spread very far inland from t h e gulf a n d t h e O m a n peninsula. N o r d i d these regions c o n t i n u e to flourish to t h e s a m e e x t e n t after a b o u t t h e m i d d l e of t h e second mil l e n n i u m BCE. A l t h o u g h t h e g a p o n c e t h o u g h t t o exist in t h e archaeological r e c o r d t h e r e d u r i n g t h e second half of t h a t m i l l e n n i u m a n d t h e first half of t h e n e x t is gradually b e i n g filled, it is clear t h a t gulf t r a d e was in decline. M e s o p o t a m i a n m e r c h a n t s increasingly favored t h e nortiiern routes along d i e T i g r i s and E u p h r a t e s Rivers t o w a r d Anatolia, Syria, a n d t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n ( w h e r e , e.g., C y p r u s was t h e n t h e m a i n source of c o p p e r ) . D i l m u n c o n t i n u e d t o be m e n t i o n e d in t h e literary sources a n d w a s p r o b a b l y i n c o r p o r a t e d into t h e Kassite a n d , later, N e o - A s s y r i a n E m p i r e s ; Qal'at al-Bahrain itself m a i n t a i n e d its u r b a n c h a r a c t e r (cities III, I V ) . Else w h e r e , however, cultural s t a n d a r d s s e e m to h a v e declined, p e r h a p s also partly b e c a u s e of a slight deterioration i n t h e climate. F o r whatever r e a s o n , o n p r e s e n t evidence it seems t h a t it w a s n o t until t h e e n d of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE t h a t a real cultural revival t o o k place in eastern Arabia. U n t i l receirdy very little was k n o w n of conditions o n d i e rest of d i e peninsula i n t h e third a n d s e c o n d millennium BCE. It was generally a s s u m e d t h a t t h e area was m o s d y u n i n h a b ited except, p e r h a p s , b y a few survivors of t h e S t o n e A g e h u n t e r s w h o h a d o n c e lived t h e r e in climatically m o r e fa vorable times. T h i s p i c t u r e h a s n o w b e g u n t o change. R e cent surveys, particularly in Saudi Arabia (for preliminary r e p o r t s , see t h e journal Atlal 1 [1977] a n d following years), h a v e located t h e r e m a i n s of m a n y h u n d r e d s of small settle m e n t s a n d burial g r o u n d s . A l t h o u g h it is currently i m p o s sible t o date m o s t of d i e s e , archaeological research in Y e m e n indicates, o n t h e basis of r a d i o c a r b o n dating, t h a t similar
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sites there were o c c u p i e d as early as die second or even the third millennium BCE. Little can be said as yet a b o u t t h e life styles of die inhabitants, although agriculture a n d stock rear ing were practiced a n d simple c o p p e r metallurgy k n o w n . It is claimed (Maigret, 1990) t h a t s o m e of the pottery in u s e has similarities witii t h a t of c o n t e m p o r a r y Palestine. If this is so, it m a y p o i n t to the direction from which cultural in fluences, a n d p e r h a p s elements of the p o p u l a t i o n itself, r e a c h e d southwestern Arabia. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t aspect of recent w o r k in Y e m e n is tiiat it has at last p r o v i d e d an acceptable b a c k g r o u n d against w h i c h t h e spectacular cultural d e v e l o p m e n t tiiere in t h e first millennium BCE m a y b e set. T h e substantial architectural m o n u m e n t s of ancient southwestern Arabia—walled t o w n s , temples, d a m s — h a v e l o n g b e e n k n o w n . In addition, the m a n y inscriptions associated with t h e m or carved o n natural rock faces indicate that this was an a d v a n c e d , literate civi lization. T h e inscriptions have enabled scholars t o r e c o n struct, in outline, t h e c o m p l e x political history of t h e region. It reflects t h e rivalries of t h e various tribal federations (each of which spoke a n d w r o t e a distinct b r a n c h of a Semitic language k n o w n as Old S o u t h Arabian) as they struggled for control of t h e t r a d e routes. It was t h e e x p o r t of frankincense a n d m y r r h (which grew only there and in n e i g h b o r i n g East Africa) which p r o v i d e d t h e chief source of wealth for t h e S o u t h A r a b i a n states. T h e r e w e r e four of these states, each centered on a city on t h e inland slopes of t h e high coastal m o u n t a i n s . T h e s e states were p r o t e c t e d from the destructive s u m m e r m o n s o o n a n d w e r e close to t h e edge of t h e desert, w h e r e caravan travel was comparatively easy a n d t h e runoff could be utilized for agriculture. T h e date of t h e e m e r g e n c e of these states is t h e subject of intense d e b a t e (see K. A. K i t c h e n , Documentation for Ancient Arabia, Parti, Liverpool, 1994, chaps. 1-4). T h e earliest was certainly S a b a ' ( S h e b a ) , with its capital at M a r i b . [See Sheba; Marib.] T h e first ref erence to a king of S h e b a , YitiV'amara, occurs in a n inscrip tion of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (r. c. 745-727 BCE) . It was once generally agreed that this m a r k e d the a p p r o x i m a t e date of t h e beginning of a developed culture in the region. H o w e v e r , s o m e scholars have accepted t h e a c c o u n t in the H e b r e w Bible of t h e visit of S h e b a ' s q u e e n t o K i n g Solomon in t h e t e n t h century BCE as a reliable indi cation of its i m p o r t a n c e this early. R e c e n t geoarchaeological work o n the M a r i b d a m a n d associated field systems has led scientists to c o n c l u d e t h a t major hydraulic engineering works were b e i n g built there at the beginning of t h e first millennium BCE, a n d t h a t s o m e form of irrigation h a d b e e n in u s e a t h o u s a n d or m o r e years earlier (furgen S c h m i d t in D a u m , 1988, p p . 55-62). A date n o later t h a n t h e e n d of t h e second millennium BCE for the a p p e a r a n c e of an a d v a n c e d civilization in S o u t h Arabia is n o w also s u p p o r t e d b y m o s t epigraphists, on t h e g r o u n d s t h a t the script in w h i c h t h e inscriptions are written could only h a v e b e e n derived f r o m t h e C a n a a n i t e linear alphabet of t h e twelfth-eleventh c e n
turies B C E — a n d n o t from later P h o e n i c i a n or A r a m e a n ver sions. Suggestions t h a t it was inspired b y t h e G r e e k script of d i e sixth-fiftli centuries BCE have b e e n completely dis c o u n t e d (see t h e discussion in M a i g r e t a n d R o b i n , 1989). So powerful a n d rich w a s S a b a ' t h a t its n a m e b e c a m e s y n o n y m o u s in G r e c o - R o m a n times with all of s o u t h w e s t A r a bia. Well before t h a t , t h e k i n g d o m h a d yielded p r i d e of place t o states w h i c h h a d o n c e b e e n its vassals: M a ' i n , c e n t e r e d at Q a r n a w in t h e n o r t h (fl. fifth-fourth centuries B C E ) ; H a d h r a m a u t in t h e east, w h e r e it controlled t h e m a i n frank i n c e n s e - p r o d u c i n g region of D h o f a r ( f o u r t h - s e c o n d c e n turies BCE) ; and Q a t a b a n in t h e s o u t h e a s t ( t h i r d - s e c o n d c e n turies B C E ) . I n t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y B C E , h o w e v e r , an i m p o r t a n t shift of p o w e r took place, a w a y from t h e i n l a n d valleys a n d oases b o r d e r i n g t h e desert a n d t o w a r d t h e coast, closer to t h e sea lanes. After t h e discovery b y w e s t e r n sailors of t h e value of s h i p p i n g in the I n d i a n O c e a n d u r i n g d i e m o n s o o n w i n d s , the sea lanes b e g a n to play a greater p a r t in t h e t r a n s p o r t of b o t h t h e locally p r o d u c e d a r o m a t i c s a n d of t h e spices a n d other p r e c i o u s c o m m o d i t i e s from India a n d S o u t h e a s t Asia. T h i s t r a d e is vividly d e s c r i b e d in t h e sailors' h a n d b o o k k n o w n as t h e Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (see t h e edition by L i o n e l C a s s o n , P r i n c e t o n , 1989) written in t h e m i d d l e of t h e first c e n t u r y CE. T h e beneficiary of this shift of p o w e r w a s t h e k i n g d o m of H i m y a r , w h o s e capital, Zafar, is situated o n t h e crest of t h e m o u n t a i n s at t h e h e a d of routes r u n n i n g d o w n t o the coastal plain. [See H i m y a r ; Zafar.] It was u n d e r d i e H i m y a r i t e kings in t h e fourth a n d fifth centuries CE t h a t b o t h J u d a i s m a n d Christianity w e r e established in Y e m e n , leading t o internal religious strife as well as to conflict with t h e Christian state of Abyssinia across t h e R e d Sea. It was for help against Abyssinia t h a t t h e Himyarites a p p e a l e d successfully t o t h e S a s a n i a n P e r s i a n s , w h o were in effective control of S o u t h A r a b i a at t h e time of its conversion to Islam in t h e m i d - s e v e n t h c e n t u r y . [See S a s anians.] A l t h o u g h t o m b r o b b i n g a n d illicit excavations h a v e filled t h e m u s e u m s a n d private collections of t h e w o r l d with S o u t h A r a b i a n antiquities (especially d i e small alabaster statues, votive plaques, a n d vessels in w h i c h t h e region s e e m s t o h a v e specialized), very little scientific archaeology h a d b e e n u n dertaken. A p a r t f r o m t h e t h r e e capital cities of T i m n a ' ( Q a t a b a n ) , M a r i b ( S a b a ' ) , a n d S h a b w a ( H a d h r a m a u t ) n o n e of d i e major sites h a s b e e n excavated, a n d very few h a v e b e e n even p r o p e r l y surveyed a n d r e c o r d e d . [See T i m n a ' ( A r a b i a ) ; Q a t a b a n ; Shabwa.] T h a t they w e r e n o r m a l l y p r o v i d e d w i t h massive stone fortifications is obvious o n t h e g r o u n d , b u t n o n e have b e e n studied. D a m s , b o t h of s t o n e a n d of earth, a n d associated irrigation works a r e also c o m m o n , a l t h o u g h only those at M a r i b h a v e received attention. D o m e s t i c a n d m i n o r public buildings s e e m m o s t i y to h a v e b e e n of u n b a k e d m u d brick; one e x c a v a t e d h o u s e at S h a b w a is of reinforced timber a n d several stories high, f o r e s h a d o w i n g t h e typical tall houses of m e d i e v a l a n d m o d e r n Y e m e n .
ARABIAN PENINSULA: The Arabian Peninsula before the Time of Islam T h e m o s t m o n u m e n t a l a n d b e s t - k n o w n buildings are t h e t e m p l e s , w h i c h , in an essentially t h e o c r a t i c society, were n o t only t h e h o m e s of t h e g o d s a n d places for cultic ritual, b u t also played an i m p o r t a n t secular role in a d m i n i s t r a t i o n , tax collection, a n d judicial activities. I n their surviving f o r m s , t h e t e m p l e s are t h e result of l o n g p e r i o d s of r e n o v a t i o n a n d elaboration. It is likely tiiat t h e earliest cult place was little m o r e t h a n an o p e n - a i r e n c l o s u r e with a s t a n d i n g stone r e p resenting t h e deity, p e r h a p s u n d e r a simple c a n o p y . T h e m o s t c o m m o n basic p l a n of t h e later t e m p l e s , particularly in t h e S a b a e a n region, r e m a i n e d t h a t of a n enclosed r e c t a n gular c o u r t y a r d with a m o r e elaborate c h a m b e r at o n e e n d , a l t h o u g h regional variations a r e f o u n d . Particularly striking in these t e m p l e s is t h e a b u n d a n t u s e of s q u a r e m o n o l i t h i c c o l u m n s in the c o u r t y a r d , either as a n interior peristyle or completely filling t h e o p e n area. M o n u m e n t a l e n t t a n c e buildings (or gateways, r e m i n i s c e n t of t h e G r e e k / R o m a n p r o p y l a e u m , a n d leading to a sacred enclosure, as at M a r i b ) with similar m a s s i v e c o l u m n s a r e also f o u n d . O r n a m e n t a tion is typically ascetic a n d abstract. B u l l - h e a d e d gargoyles a n d friezes of i b e x h e a d s d o a p p e a r , b u t always e x p r e s s e d in a rigid g e o m e t r i c style. T h e only concessions to n a t u r a l ism are d i e simple vine scrolls a n d p a l m e t t e s f o u n d o n ar chitraves a n d wall p a n e l s . S t a n d a r d s of craftsmanship are o n t h e w h o l e excellent, h o w e v e r , with t h e ashlar l i m e s t o n e m a s o n r y particularly n o t e w o r t h y . T h e origins of this a d v a n c e d civilization r e m a i n u n c e r t a i n , as do t h e dates of t h e a p p e a r a n c e of its various c o m p o n e n t s . M a s o n r y styles h a v e b e e n c o m p a r e d w i t h t h o s e of P h o e n i c i a a n d Israel in t h e late s e c o n d - e a r l y first millennia B C E , t h e r e b y reinforcing t h e links suggested b y tire script a n d b y d i e story of t h e Q u e e n of S h e b a . S u c h styles h a d a long history in Assyria a n d Persia as well, h o w e v e r . T h e influence of A c h a e m e n i d Persia ( s i x t h - f o u r t h centuries BCE) h a s b e e n seen in t h e prolific u s e of massive c o l u m n s , especially in hypostyle halls, b u t this w a s also always a feature of E g y p tian religious architecture. T h e a u s t e r e , massive n a t u r e of t h e architecture a n d its d e c o r a t i o n is also suggestive of E g y p t , a l t h o u g h n o typically E g y p t i a n motifs occur. T h e vine scrolls are u n d o u b t e d l y of M e d i t e r r a n e a n inspiration b u t could equally well h a v e c o m e b y w a y of Hellenistic E g y p t , t h e L e v a n t , M e s o p o t a m i a , or Persia. S o u t h A r a b i a w a s inevitably b r o u g h t into c o n t a c t w i t h all of these regions t h r o u g h t h e a r o m a t i c a n d spice t r a d e . It w o u l d b e n a t u r a l for its material culture to reflect t h o s e contacts. N e v e r t h e less, S o u t h A r a b i a n civilization w a s n o t c o s m o p o l i t a n — i n t h e sense tiiat it was a n u n d i g e s t e d m i x t u r e of foreign ele m e n t s . R a t h e r , it was a distinctive b l e n d of A r a b i a n a n d n o n A r a b i a n t h e m e s , selected a n d assimilated b y w h a t was clearly a highly creative p e o p l e , a n d fully w o r t h y of t h e fame it achieved in b o t h t h e a n c i e n t a n d m o d e r n w o r l d s . W i t h t h e notable e x c e p t i o n of Abyssinia, w h e r e c o n t e m p o r a r y d e v e l o p m e n t s in institutions, religion, a n d material culture largely paralleled t h o s e in S o u t h Arabia, this flour
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ishing civilization s e e m s to h a v e h a d little direct influence o n t h e r e s t of the peninsula. O t h e r p a r t s of Arabia were cer tainly affected b y t h e i n c e n s e t r a d e , however. As early as t h e t h i r t e e n t h - e l e v e n t h centuries BCE, nortiiwest A r a b i a — t h e H i j a z — h a d seen t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of u r b a n settlements at oases s u c h as Q u r a y y a h a n d T a y m a ' . [See Q u r a y y a h ; T a y m a ' . ] It is possible t h a t t h e s e sites w e r e already involved in t h e t r a d e , p e r h a p s u n d e r E g y p t i a n ( M i d i a n ) initiative. [See M i d i a n . ] If so, they m u s t h a v e b e e n in contact with t h e p r o d u c i n g regions of t h e s o u t h a n d p l a y e d a role in t r a n s mitting t h o s e Syro-Palestinian elements (script a n d m a s o n r y a n d p o t t e r y styles) discernible in S o u t h A r a b i a n civilization. A l t h o u g h this r e m a i n s controversial, it is certain from t h e Assyrian a n d B a b y l o n i a n texts that, b y the mid-first millen n i u m BCE, the inhabitants of n o r t h e r n Arabia were profiting from the a r o m a t i c t r a d e a n d t h a t T a y m a ' a n d a l - ' U l a / D e d a n h a d b e c o m e t h e centers of small k i n g d o m s . [See D e d a n . ] A t D e d a n , M i n a e a n inscriptions a n d sculptural fragments sur vive f r o m a small colony f o u n d e d t h e r e b y m e r c h a n t s from S o u t h Arabia in the f o u r t h c e n t u r y BCE. Of these N o r t h A r a b i a n k i n g d o m s t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t was that of the N a b a t e a n s , established at P e t r a , in m o d e r n J o r d a n , p r o b a b l y in t h e t h i r d century, a n d with a strongly hellenized material culture. [See N a b a t e a n s ; Petra.] N a b a t e a n pottery has b e e n f o u n d in Y e m e n , a n d it m a y well have b e e n t h r o u g h t h e s o u t h e r n N a b a t e a n c e n t e r of M e d a ' i n Saleh t h a t s o m e of t h e G r e c o - R o m a n features of t h e later p h a s e s of S o u t h Arabian civilization arrived. [See M e d a ' i n Saleh.] T h e e a s t - w e s t r o u t e s across d i e peninsula w e r e also as s u m i n g i m p o r t a n c e a t this time. A few N a b a t e a n sherds have been found at Thaj, probably the important emporium of G e r r h a m e n t i o n e d b y classical a u t h o r s , a b o u t 100 k m (62 mi.) i n l a n d from t h e gulf coast b e t w e e n K u w a i t a n d B a h rain. [See Thaj.] After w h a t a p p e a r s t o have b e e n a cultural decline t h r o u g h o u t m u c h of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, eastern Arabia a n d the Gulf e x p e r i e n c e d an e c o n o m i c revival. It was b r o u g h t a b o u t largely b y t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of a wealthy H e l lenistic (Seleucid) state in M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Persia follow ing t h e d e a t h of A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t in 323 BCE. [See Seleu cids.] T h e culture of t h e entire region b e c a m e rapidly infused with W e s t e r n e l e m e n t s , as s h o w n b y the discovery of a G r e e k t e m p l e at Failaka/Kuwait a n d G r e e k inscriptions, pottery, and jewelry t h e r e a n d at Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain, T h a j , a n d m a n y smaller sites. Little is k n o w n of t h e effects of t h e substitution of P a r tiiian for Seleucid p o w e r in t h e r e g i o n in t h e m i d - t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE. It is n o t until t h e Sasanian period (224-642 CE) t h a t t h e picture b e c o m e s clearer—although even t h e n only in t h e s o u t h e r n gulf. T h e Sasanians created a m a r i t i m e e m pire e n c o m p a s s i n g virtually all t h e I n d i a n O c e a n . While it w a s naturally t h e eastern (Persian) side of t h e gulf which benefited mostly from tiiis, O m a n a n d its chief p o r t , M a z u m ( m o d e r n S o h a r ) , p l a y e d a crucial strategic role also. [See Sohar.] N o r w a s S a s a n i a n i n v o l v e m e n t restricted to d i e
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coast; t h e interior of t h e O m a n p e n i n s u l a w a s c o l o n i z e d b y t h e P e r s i a n s , w h o , a m o n g o t h e r e n t e r p r i s e s , b e g a n fully t o exploit its c o p p e r d e p o s i t s again a n d p r o b a b l y i n t r o d u c e d n e w irrigation t e c h n o l o g y . T h e i r political a m b i t i o n s
led
t h e m even farther w e s t : Y a t h r i b ( m o d e r n M e d i n a ) w a s d e v a s t a t e d b y t h e S a s a n i a n a r m y in t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y CE a n d they were in effective c o n t t o l of s o u t h w e s t A r a b i a in t h e sixtii (see a b o v e ) [See M e d i n a . ] M o s t of t h e e v i d e n c e for this c o m e s at p r e s e n t f r o m literary r a t h e r t h a n archaeological s o u r c e s . H o w e v e r , sites of t h e p e r i o d are b e g i n n i n g t o b e investigated, especially in O m a n a n d t h e A r a b E m i r a t e s , N e v e r t h e l e s s , it is clear t h a t Persia h a d a p r o f o u n d effect o n t h e c u l t u r e of e a s t e r n a n d s o u t h e r n A r a b i a , t h e legacy of w h i c h was t o b e a n i m p o r t a n t factor in t h e h i s t o r y of t h e p e n i n s u l a in t h e m e d i e v a l p e r i o d . [See also M e s o p o t a m i a ; articles on A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a and M e s o p o t a m i a from A l e x a n d e r t o t h e R i s e of I s l a m ; and P e r s i a , articles on A n c i e n t P e r s i a and Persia from A l e x a n d e r t o t h e Rise of Islam.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bibby, Geoffrey. Looking for Dilmun. N e w York, 1969. Immensely read able a n d evocative account b y t h e m a n chiefly responsible for t h e Danish excavations which marked the real beginning of scientific archaeology in the Gulf a n d East Arabia in the 1950s a n d 1960s. A classic of archaeological literature. Bowen, Richard L e Baron, a n d Frank P . Albright, eds. Archaeological Discoveries in South Arabia. Baltimore, 1958. T h e first volume of the report on the pioneering work at M a r i b in the 1950s. Crawford, Harriet. " L o n d o n - B a h r a i n Archaeological Expedition: E x cavations at Saar, 1 9 9 1 . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 4 (1993): 1 - 1 9 . D a u m , Werner, ed. Yemen: Three Thousand Years of Art and Civilization in Arabia Felix. Innsbruck, 1988. Originally an exhibition catalog, this is now the best concise survey of South Arabian history a n d culture; authoritative contributions b y most of the leading workers in the field a n d excellent illustrations. D o e , Brian, Southern Arabia. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 . Informative though raflier poorly organized account of the archaeology of the region, c o n c e n trating on sites in the former British colony and protectorate of A d e n , where the author was director of antiquities. D o e , Brian. Monuments of South Arabia. N e w York, 1983. Similar t o D o e ( 1 9 7 1 ) b u t with a more extensive geographic coverage, includ ing the southern Gulf a n d O m a n . G r o o m , Nigel. Frankincense andMyrrh. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 1 . Excellent treat m e n t , although the argument (p. 37) that the incense trade was of little importance in South Arabia before the middle of the first mil lennium BCE has lost m u c h of its force. H0jlund, Flemming, a n d H . Hellmuth Andersen. Qala'at al-Bahrain, vol. 1, The Northern City Wall and the Islamic Fortress. M o e s g a a r d , 1994. T h e first detailed publication of some aspects of the important Danish excavations. Khalifa, Shaikha Haya A . al-, a n d Michael Rice, eds. Bahrain through the Ages: The Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1986. Collection of conference papers, varying in quality b u t mostly of importance, particularly those summarizing recent fieldwork. Larsen, Curtis E . Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society. Chicago, 1983. Somewhat outdated archaeological evidence b u t a n excellent and stimulating review of
the environmental factors affecting the prehistory a n d history of Bahrain, based largely on t h e author's original research. Maigret, Alessandro d e , a n d C . Robin. " L e s Fouilles Italiennes de Yala: Nouvelles donnees sur le chronologie de l'Arabie d u S u d Preislam i q u e . " Contes Rendus de I'Academic des Inscriptions et Belles Lellres (April-June 1989). Maigret, Alessandro d e , ed. The Bronze Age Culture ofHawlan at-Tiyal and al-Hada. Instituto Italiano p e r il M e d i o ed E s t r e m o Oriente, C e n t r o Studi e Scavi Archeologici, Reports a n d M e m o i r s , vol. 24. R o m e , 1990. Detailed a c c o u n t of t h e evidence from recent Italian excavations of third- and second-millennium BCE occupations in South Arabia. N a y e e m , M u h a m m a d Abdul. Prehistory and Protohistory of the Arabian Peninsula, vol. 1, Saudi Arabia. H y d e r a b a d , 1990. T h e only survey of its kind for Saudi Arabia; contains many facts b u t is somewhat uncritical. Potts, Daniel T . The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols, Oxford, 1990. T h e most comprehensive survey of the subject in English, from p r e historic times to tire coming of Islam, by a leading expert. I n c o r p o rates t h e evidence from recent fieldwork (otherwise only available in specialist journals). Full bibliography. Rice, Michael. Search for the Paradise Land. N e w York, 1 9 8 5 . P o p u l a r a n d generally reliable introduction t o t h e archaeology of the Gulf a n d Bahrain, from t h e earliest times to die death of Alexander. Well illustrated with a g o o d bibliography. Van Beek, G u s W . Hajar Bin Humeid: Investigations at a Pre-Islamic Site in South Arabia. Publications of the A m e r i c a n F o u n d a t i o n for the Study of M a n , vol. 5. Baltimore, 1 9 6 9 . R e p o r t of t h e first exca vation of a deeply stratified u r b a n site in the Y e m e n which provided reliable archaeological evidence for the chronology of S o u t h Arabian civilization. Vine, Peter, ed. Bahrain National Museum. L o n d o n a n d Bahrain, 1 9 9 3 . Well-illustrated guide to d i e m u s e u m , with a brief b u t reliable text. PETER J. PARR
The Arabian Peninsula in Islamic Times c
T h e m i s s i o n of t h e p r o p h e t M u h a m m a d i b n A b d A l l a h of Q u r a y s h w a s to u n i t e a d i v i d e d p e o p l e t h r o u g h t h e force of a n e w m o n o t h e i s t i c religion. H e r e c e i v e d d i v i n e r e v e l a t i o n s after 610 a n d a s s u m e d p r o p h e t h o o d . H i s t e a c h i n g s a r o u s e d opposition by the conservative M e c c a n s ( M a k k a n s ) , which led t o t h e e m i g r a t i o n of M u s l i m s first t o A b y s s i n i a in 614 a n d t h e n , i n 622 ( t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e I s l a m i c e r a ) , t o Y a t h r i b , r e n a m e d M e d i n a ( M a d i n a a l - M u n a w w a r a ) , capital of t h e first Islamic s t a t e . T h e state w a s a political c o m m u n i t y of p e o p l e (ummah)
b o n d e d b y t h e C o n s t i t u t i o n of M e d i n a
t h a t h a d b e e n laid d o w n b y t h e P r o p h e t a n d h e l d t o g e t h e r b y d i e religion of I s l a m u n d e r t h e P r o p h e t ' s l e a d e r s h i p . G r a d u a l l y , t h e P r o p h e t a t t e m p t e d to b u i l d a political a n d socioeconomic system a m o n g M u s l i m s b a s e d o n the divine revelations. T h e n e w I s l a m i c o r d e r , or p o l i t y , f o r g e d u n d e r t h e p r i n c i p l e s of e q u a l i t y a m o n g all, t h e r i g h t t o a n a d e q u a t e livelihood, c o u r t e o u s t r e a t m e n t , t h e s e c u r i t y of life
and
p r o p e r t y , a n d c o m m u n i t y stability, a t t r a c t e d g r o u p s of n o mads. They Prophet.
a c c e p t e d I s l a m a n d g a v e allegiance t o
Thus,
Islam
spread
gradually
and
the
peacefully
t h r o u g h far-flung A r a b i a , u n i f y i n g t h e A r a b s a n d e s t a b l i s h i n g Islamic i n s t i t u t i o n s . M e c c a ( M a k k a h ) for i n s t a n c e , w a s
ARABIAN PENINSULA: The Arabian Peninsula in Islamic Times c o n q u e r e d w i t h o u t a struggle b e c a u s e I s l a m p r o p a g a t e s p e a c e , all-embracing tolerance, a n d social equality. T h e i n stitutions of Islam, derived f r o m t h e Q u r ' a n a n d t h e P r o p h e t ' s traditions, altered b o t h t h e religious a n d d o m e s t i c life of its believers. S o m e of its features are p r a y e r five times a day, fasting, t h e pilgrimage to M e c c a , circumcision, a n d almsgiving. Islamic law (short ah) abolished slavery, limits a M u s l i m m a n to four wives at a time, a n d prohibits u s u r y , intoxicating b e v e r a g e s , certain t y p e s of food, a n d r e p r e s e n tational art. Islam h a s a p a r t i c u l a r s y s t e m of taxation, c o n tractual law, a n d i n h e r i t a n c e rules, a n d its o w n calendar a n d rules of m a n n e r s a n d m o r a l c o n d u c t . I n places w h e r e I s l a m w a s e m b r a c e d , t h e P r o p h e t allowed t h e existing official/gov e r n o r to c o n t i n u e t o rule. T h u s , w h e n Y e m e n a c c e p t e d I s l a m in 6283 t h e P r o p h e t allowed B u d h a n , t h e fifth P e r s i a n g o v e r n o r , w h o s e capital w a s S a n ' a , to c o n t i n u e in this c a pacity. [See San'a.] T h e F o u r C a l i p h s (632-661). T h e P r o p h e t died in 632, w i t h o u t m a k i n g provisions for a successor. A b u Bala:, o n e of his c o m p a n i o n s , w h o h a d r e p r e s e n t e d t h e P r o p h e t d u r i n g his illness, was c h o o s e n as successor. T h e institution of t h e caliphate, w h i c h lasted for c e n t u r i e s , t h u s e m e r g e d . D u r i n g A b u B a l a ' s caliphate, s o m e tribal revolts, or apostasy (ridda), arose a n d w e r e s u p p r e s s e d . Before his d e a t h in 634, A b u Bakr u r g e d his c o m p a n i o n s t o elect ' U m a r i b n a l - K h a t t a b as his successor, w h i c h t h e y readily did. T o t h e title caliph was a d d e d t h a t of amir al-mu'minin ( " c o m m a n d e r of t h e faithful"). I n addition to t h e c o n q u e s t a n d e x p a n s i o n of Islam outside Arabia, ' U m a r ' s greatest c o n t r i b u t i o n d u r i n g his t e n - y e a r t e n u r e w a s t o organize a f o r m of g o v e r n m e n t t h a t was fol l o w e d for centuries. Before his d e a t h U m a r a p p o i n t e d a n elective c o m m i t t e e (shura) of six from Q u r a y s h for selecting t h e caliph. T h e y elected ' U t h m a n . After ' U t h m a n ' s twelveyear rule, Ali i b n A b i T a l i b s u c c e e d e d h i m as caliph in 656. A struggle for t h e caliphate s o o n e n s u e d that 'Ali s u p pressed. c
c
Islam's e x p a n s i o n outside A r a b i a m a d e control difficult from a l - M e d i n a . T h u s , t o a d m i n i s t e r t h e c o n q u e r e d lands p r o p e r l y a n d m e e t t h e challenge of his adversary M u ' a w i y a h i b n A b i Sufyan, t h e g o v e r n o r of Syria, 'Ali, in 657, shifted t h e capital from M e d i n a to al-Kufah. F a c t i o n s f o r m e d a m o n g t h e M u s l i m s : o n e rebellious g r o u p from t h e Kharijis ( " o u t g o e r s " ) assassinated ' A h at a l - K u f a h in AH 40/661 CE. 'Ali's s o n a l - H a s a n was i m m e d i a t e l y p r o c l a i m e d caliph, b u t for r e a s o n s of political e x p e d i e n c y r e n o u n c e d his claim in favor of M u ' a w i y a h . U m a y y a d s (692-750) a n d ' A b b a s i d s (750-1171). U n d e r t h e U m a y y a d s , D a m a s c u s b e c a m e t h e capital of Islam, g o v ernors w e r e a p p o i n t e d at M e c c a a n d a l - M e d i n a , a n d n o m inal rule^was e x t e n d e d to o t h e r p a r t s of Arabia. [See D a mascus.] T h e ~ H i j a z - b e c a m e a separate p r o v i n c e ; N a j d , a l - Y a m a m a h , al-Bahrain, a n d O m a n b e c a m e p a r t s of t h e eastern p r o v i n c e ; a n d Y e m e n a n d S o u t h Arabia f o r m e d a n
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other p r o v i n c e . S u b s e q u e n t l y , for p u r p o s e s of p r o p e r a d ministration, the Hijaz, Y e m e n , a n d central Arabia w e r e c o m b i n e d into a single p r o v i n c e a n d w e r e ruled b y a viceroy of t h e caliph. M u ' a w i y a h , in o r d e r to m a i n t a i n tribal s u p p o r t in t h e p r o v i n c e s , gave t h e m a certain d e g r e e of a u t o n o m y . T h e factional rivalry b e t w e e n t h e 'Alids ( d e s c e n d e n t s of Ali and Fatimah, the Prophet's daughter) and Umayyads con tinued for decades. T h e caliphate u n d e r w e n t a c h a n g e from t h e p r o p h e t i c to s o m e t h i n g like sovereignty. T h e h e r e d i t a r y principle of succession t o t h e caliphate was i n t r o d u c e d in 679, w h e n M u ' a w i y a h n o m i n a t e d his s o n as his successor. S u b s e q u e n t l y , this U m a y y a d practice w a s followed b y the ' A b b a s i d s a n d other M u s l i m dynasties. c
Islamic coins (gold dinars a n d silver dirhams) w e r e m i n t e d for t h e first t i m e b y C a l i p h ' A b d al-Malik in 695. Politically, life at M e c c a a n d a l - M e d i n a t h e n was tranquil; intellectuals gathered t h e r e t o study a n d p r o p a g a t e the traditions of t h e P r o p h e t . T h e e x p a n s i o n of Islam a n d tire m a n y pilgrims visiting a l - M e d i n a a n d M e c c a b r o u g h t great wealth f r o m all parts of A r a b i a a n d n e i g h b o r i n g M u s l i m countries. T h e ' A b b a s i d s ruled over Arabia from B a g h d a d for nearly five centuries, in t w o s e p a r a t e p e r i o d s , b e g i n n i n g with C a liph A b u a l - ' A b b a s in 750. [See B a g h d a d . ] D u r i n g t h e first c e n t u r y of their rule, a n era of great prosperity, they m a i n tained authority in A r a b i a b y a p p o i n t i n g governors at M e c c a , a l - M e d i n a , Y e m e n , a n d t h e central a n d eastern regions. H o w e v e r , the s e c o n d p e r i o d , w h i c h b e g a n with M u tawakkil (847), w a s o n e of r a p i d decline. T h e reign of H a r u n al-Rashid (786-809) is r e c k o n e d as t h e golden a g e of t h e caliphate. T h e archaeological r e m a i n s a n d finds along t h e pilgrim r o a d ( D a r b Z u b a y d a h ) , from al-Kufah to M e c c a , established d u r i n g his p e r i o d , testify to t h e favorable socio e c o n o m i c conditions of t h e p e o p l e in Arabia in general a n d M e c c a a n d a l - M e d i n a in particular. [See D a r b Z u b a y d a h . ] Saudi Arabia is replete w i t h Early Islamic m o n u m e n t s a n d sites, especially at M e c c a a n d a l - M e d i n a a n d the pilgrim attractions in their vicinity. W h i l e t h e m a i n m o s q u e is at M e c c a (Masjid a l - H a r a m ) , m o s q u e s are n a m e d after t h e c o m p a n i o n s of the P r o p h e t : Bilal bi R a b a h , A b u Bakr a s Siddiq, H a m z a i b n a l - M u t t a l i b , ar-Raiya, al-Jin, a n d alIjaba. A t a l - M e d i n a , t h e r e is t h e M o s q u e of t h e P r o p h e t , M a s j i d Q u b a (the first m o s q u e built after t h e P r o p h e t m o v e d t o a l - M e d i n a ) , M a s j i d al-Juma, Masjid at Qiblatain, a n d M a s j i d ' U m a r i b n a l - K h a t t a b , a m o n g others. T h e m o u n t a i n s associated with t h e p r o p h e t i c revelations are Jebel T h o r a n d Jebel H a r a ' , or N o o r , at M e c c a . [See Mosque.] Archaeological excavations in Arabia have b r o u g h t t o light Early Islamic settled sites with characteristic features. T r a c e s of a F r i d a y m o s q u e h a v e b e e n f o u n d at Jawatha, n e a r Hafuf, a n d d a t e d to t h e first c e n t u r y of t h e Islamic era. Early a n d M i d d l e Islamic sites a r e characterized b y m u d - b r i c k ar chitecture. Early Islamic sites are characterized b y g r e e n -
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glazed and incised wares. Slighdy later sites display ' A b b a s i d glazed, painted, a n d luster wares. Impressive Islamic archi tectural r e m a i n s — p o t t e r y , soft-stone and glass vessels, bracelets, c o p p e r , a n d slag—have b e e n recovered from sev eral sites in central Arabia. I n the T a ' i f area of the Hijaz, d a m s were built d u r i n g M u ' a w i y a h ' s reign (AH 58/677-78 CE), as attested b y Kufic inscriptions. D a m s (at S a d d a l - Q u s a y b a h , S a d d al-Hasid, a n d Sadd az-Zaydia) d a t e d to t h e Early Islamic p e r i o d are also found in die K h a y b a r area in n o r t h w e s t Arabia. Besides d a m s , several reservoirs from t h e 'Abbasid period, especially along the pilgrim r o a d s , h a v e survived. Caliph ' U m a r ' s m o s q u e at D o m a t al-Jendal is one of t h e earliest stone-built m o s q u e s with a towerlike minaret. It is dated to 634-644. 'Abbasid-period t o w n s ( K h a y b a r a l - Q a d i m , R a f h e - L i n a h ) a n d forts (Qal'at a l - M u a z z a m ) are found in n o r t h w e s t A r a bia. In the vicinity of R i y a d h , near A m m a r i y a h , w e l l - p l a n n e d buildings with courtyards date to t h e 'Abbasid period. T h e y are dated by their characteristic glazed ceramics a n d steatite a n d glass objects. T r a c e s of settlements—including h o u s e s a n d m o s q u e s — h a v e also b e e n found in other parts of t h e peninsula—at B a h r a i n , O m a n , a n d Y e m e n a n d in d i e U n i t e d A r a b Emirates. In Bahrain, at Rasal-Qal'at, r e m a i n s of an Early Islamic city have been excavated t h a t were built over cities of earlier periods. T h e r e , d u r i n g t h e s e c o n d - f o u r t h centuries AH, a fort (qafat) was built w h o s e remains are preserved. It is o n e of the oldest e x a m p l e s of Early Islamic architecture. Its square plan (each side m e a s u r e s 52.50 m ) resembles t h e U m a y y a d residences in Syria a n d Palestine a n d t h e Q a s r alK h a r a n a h in J o r d a n . Its features suggest drat t h e building's function was military. Built of limestone, it has c o r n e r t o w ers. F o r t h e two decades following AH 317/930 CE, Bahrain h a d t h e privilege of h o u s i n g t h e Black S t o n e of t h e K a ' b a h , after it w a s r e m o v e d from M e c c a b y t h e Q a r m a t i a n s . T r a d i t i o n dates the building of t h e Masjid al-Khamis in B a h r a i n to 992, the time of U m a y y a d caliph ' U m a r ibn A b d u l Aziz. H o w e v e r , an inscription f o u n d in t h e m o s q u e dates it to t h e s e c o n d half of the eleventii century and attributes it to A b u S i n a n M u h a m m a d al-Fadl Abdullah, t h e third ruler in t h e al-'Auni family t h a t ruled Bahrain then. T h e earliest Islamic m o n u m e n t in Y e m e n is t h e al-Jami' al-Kabir (the G r e a t M o s q u e ) at S a n ' a , which was built o n t h e orders of the P r o p h e t d u r i n g his lifetime. It w a s e x p a n d e d by A y y u b ibn Y a h y a a t h - T h a q a f i , the U m a y y a d governor of S a n ' a , o n t h e orders of Caliph al-Walid M a r w a n . H o w e v e r , it was t h e 'Abbasid governor ' U m a r i b n ' A b d al-Majid al-'Adwi w h o p r o v i d e d doors for t h e m o s q u e for first time in t h e m i d - e i g h t h century. It has u n d e r g o n e several phases of renovation a n d rebuilding. I n t h e U A E , remains of m a n y Islamic buildings survive in
t h e al-'Ain area (Hili, Q a t t a r a , M a ' s u d i ) . I n t h e e m i r a t e of Sharjah Islamic-period settlements are also f o u n d at M u waylih, b e t w e e n t h e village of F a l a h a n d t h e eastern limits of the t o w n of Sharjah. [See also ' A b b a s i d Caliphate; B a h r a i n ; K u w a i t ; M e c c a ; M e d i n a ; O m a n ; U m a y y a d Caliphate; and Y e m e n . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Allah The Journal of Saudi Arabian Archaeology 1 - 1 3 ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 9 0 ) . Baladhuri, A h m a d ibn Yahya al-. Kitab futiih al-buldan. Cairo, 1 9 0 1 . Ibn al-KalbT. Kitab al-asnam, Cairo, 1 9 1 4 . Ibn Hisham, ' A b d al-Malik. Al-sira al-nabaweya. Cairo, 1 9 1 4 . Ibn Ishaq, M u h a m m a d . Sirat Rasiil Allah. L a h o r e , 1 9 6 7 . I b n Sa'd, M u h a m m a d . Al-tabaqat al-kubra. 10 vols. Beirut, 1 9 5 7 - 1 9 6 8 . Rashid, Sa'ad al-. Al-Rabadhah: A Portrait of Early Islamic Civilisation in Saudi Arabia. L o n d o n , 1986. Rentz, George. ' " A r a b , DjazTrat al-." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 1, p p . 5 3 3 - 5 5 6 . Leiden, i 9 6 0 - . Shibli N u m a n i , M u h a m m a d . Sirat al-Nabi. 2 vols. T r a n s l a t e d by Fazlur R a h m a n . Karachi, 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 1 . Von G r u n e b a u m , G. E. Classical Islam: A History, 600-1258. L o n d o n , 1970. Watt, W . M o n t g o m e r y . Muhammad at Medina. Oxford, 1 9 5 6 . W a t t , W . M o n t g o m e r y . The Majesty That Was Islam: The Islamic World, 661-1100. London, 1974. ABDUL RAHMAN T . AL-ANSARY
ARABIC.
T h e m o s t widely s p o k e n l a n g u a g e in tire M i d dle E a s t a n d N o r t h Africa t o d a y , s p o k e n b y m o r e t h a n 160 million p e o p l e , A r a b i c is t h e l a n g u a g e of d i e Q u r ' a n a n d is therefore u s e d in t h e p r a y e r s of 800 million M u s l i m s d i e world over. Arabic belongs to t h e Semitic family of l a n g u a g e s ; its closest relatives are S o u t h A r a b i a n a n d E t h i o p i a T w o varieties of Arabic are in u s e today—literary A r a b i c a n d colloquial Arabic. Literary is u s e d for all f o r m s of writ ing, such as fiction, n o n a c t i o n , a n d a d v e r t i s e m e n t s . T h i s Arabic is r e m a r k a b l y u n i f o r m t h r o u g h o u t t h e A r a b world. T h e language u s e d in a n e w s p a p e r f r o m M o r o c c o is t h e s a m e as tiiat u s e d in a n e w s p a p e r from I r a q . L i t e r a r y Arabic is also u s e d for formal s p e e c h , s u c h as n e w s b r o a d c a s t s , lec t u r e s , interviews, a c a d e m i c instruction, a n d s e r m o n s . T h e Arabic u s e d in everyday c o m m u n i c a t i o n is colloquial Arabic a n d consists of h u n d r e d s of dialects. T h e closer t w o c o m m u n i t i e s are geographically, t h e closer their A r a b i c ; d i e farther apart, the m o r e divergent their A r a b i c . T h u s a P a l estinian and a J o r d a n i a n c a n u n d e r s t a n d each o t h e r readily, b u t an Iraqi a n d a L i b y a n will e n c o u n t e r p r o b l e m s . W h e n e d u c a t e d Arabs w h o speak fairly different varieties of col loquial Arabic get together, they shift their A r a b i c t o w a r d t h e literary m o d e . T h e differences b e t w e e n literary A r a b i c a n d colloquial Arabic r a n g e from m i n i m a l to striking. T h e m o s t visible dif ference is t h a t literary A r a b i c utilizes a series of case m a r k e r s
ARABIC o n n o u n s a n d m o o d m a r k e r s o n verbs t h a t h a v e d i s a p p e a r e d in colloquial A r a b i c . S u c h a situation, in w h i c h t w o divergent forms of a l a n g u a g e exist, each w i t h its o w n social function, is k n o w n as diglossia. T h u s , literary A r a b i c h a s its role—writing a n d for m a l s p e e c h — a n d colloquial A r a b i c h a s its role—everyday conversation. T h e t w o roles are n o t m i x e d . U s i n g t h e literary l a n g u a g e in a t a x i c a b w o u l d p r o v o k e a m u s e m e n t , a n d deliv ering a n e w s b r o a d c a s t in t h e colloquial f o r m w o u l d get t h e a n n o u n c e r fired. T h e t w o f o r m s of t h e l a n g u a g e are also learned differently. Colloquial A r a b i c is a native, first l a n g u a g e , l e a r n e d b y children f r o m p a r e n t s a n d friends. It is never studied at school. L i t e r a r y A r a b i c is learned at school, t h e r e are n o native speakers of this form. A l t h o u g h literary A r a b i c a n d colloquial A r a b i c are freq u e n t i y said to b e p o l a r o p p o s i t e s , t h e situation is actually m o r e c o m p l e x . V a r i o u s f o r m s of i n - b e t w e e n Arabic exist. T h e literary a n d colloquial l a n g u a g e s form t w o e n d p o i n t s of a c o n t i n u u m ; for this r e a s o n , t h e t e r m multiglossia is s o m e t i m e s used. A radio b r o a d c a s t , for e x a m p l e , m a y in c l u d e every case a n d m o o d vowel, w h e r e a s a lecture m a y b e basically in t h e literary f o r m b u t w i t h o u t m o s t case vowels, t h u s verging t o w a r d t h e colloquial variety. T h e t e r m "classical A r a b i c " is h e r e u s e d for t h e A r a b i c written prior to N a p o l e o n ' s invasion of E g y p t (1798); t h e t e r m " l i t e r a r y " A r a b i c is u s e d for later written A r a b i c , a n d particularly for t h e m o d e r n p e r i o d . M a n y scholars u s e " c l a s sical" to i n c l u d e w h a t is h e r e called literary. T h e use of d i e o n e t e r m ("classical") stresses t h e continuity of t h e lan g u a g e , e m p h a s i z i n g t h a t t h e g r a m m a r of t h e Q u r ' a n is e s sentially t h e same as tiiat of a m o d e r n n e w s p a p e r . H o w e v e r , neither t h e stylistic differences over t h i r t e e n centuries n o r t h e c h a n g e s of v o c a b u l a r y (including m u c h b o r r o w i n g from W e s t e r n languages) can b e d e n i e d . T h e u s e of only o n e t e r m glosses over tiiese differences.
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s p o k e n t h r o u g h o u t t h e entire A r a b i a n Peninsula, b u t its ex act geographical distribution is u n c e r t a i n . A t t h e time of M u h a m m a d ' s b i r t h (570 CE), there w a s n o unifying political s t r u c t u r e in t h e A r a b i a n Peninsula; rather, h u n d r e d s of tribes, varying greatiy in size, lived t h r o u g h o u t t h e area. S o m e tribes s p o k e f o r m s of Preclassical N o r t h e r n A r a b i c , b u t m o s t tribes spoke o t h e r varieties of Arabic. S o m e of the linguistic features of these latter tribes are k n o w n because they h a v e b e e n r e c o r d e d b y medieval A r a b a n d Persian grammarians. Alongside these s p o k e n varieties of A r a b i c , t h e r e existed a literary variety, t h e poetic koine. T h i s w a s a supradialectal variety, w h i c h d r e w features (especially vocabulary) from all t h e various s p o k e n dialects. It was u s e d primarily for p o etry, n o t for everyday speech. T h e origins of this koine are u n k n o w n , b u t it p r e s u m a b l y originated with one of t h e s p o k e n dialects, p e r h a p s b a s e d o n t h e dialect of a c o m m e r c i a l or cultic center. T h i s interpretation m e a n s t h a t at t h e t i m e of M u h a m m a d ' s birth, a t y p e of diglossia already existed in die p e n insula. H o w e v e r , it is very difficult to d e t e r m i n e h o w the dialects of t h e t i m e differed from t h e poetic koine. T h e basic q u e s t i o n is: w h a t was t h e status of the case endings at t h e t i m e of, say, t h e b i r t h of M u h a m m a d ? O n e view is that t h e case endings w e r e still in u s e in b o t h t h e poetic koine a n d t h e c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s dialects b u t only disappeared later from t h e dialects t h r o u g h c o n t a c t w i t h languages lacking these g r a m m a t i c a l distinctions (such as P e r s i a n ) . T h e o p p o s i n g view h o l d s t h a t t h e case vowels h a d already disap p e a r e d from d i e spoken dialects and t h a t they m a y i n d e e d h a v e d i s a p p e a r e d centuries before t h e b i r t h of M u h a m m a d . T h e y w e r e , h o w e v e r , p r e s e r v e d in d i e literary language, p r i marily b e c a u s e of metrical considerations.
H i s t o r y . A r a b i c is first attested in t h e form of p r o p e r n a m e s . A t t h e battle of Q a r q a r ( C a r c h e m i s h ) in 853 BCE, a few A r a b chieftains allied t h e m s e l v e s w i t h s o m e Syrian a n d Palestinian k i n g d o m s ( i n c l u d i n g Aliab of Israel) against t h e Assyrians, w h o w e r e e x p a n d i n g s o u t h . T h e n a m e s of tiiese chieftains, p r e s e r v e d in c u n e i f o r m script, are recognizably A r a b i c , for e x a m p l e , G i n d i b u . A n u m b e r of such n a m e s o c c u r in N e o - A s s y r i a n a n d later annals.
N o literature from t h e pre-Islamic p e r i o d is directiy p r e served. Society in t h e p e n i n s u l a was largely n o m a d i c . I n s u c h an e n v i r o n m e n t , oral p o e t r y developed as t h e art form p a r excellence. T h e c u s t o m of m e m o r i z a t i o n played a key role in p r e s e r v i n g this p o e t r y . C o m p o s e d in the two or m o r e centuries p r e c e d i n g t h e b i r t h of M u h a m m a d , it was written d o w n o n a systematic basis in t h e middle of t h e eighth cen tury; a vast array has b e e n p r e s e r v e d . Because t h e p o e t i c koine was t h e language regularly u s e d for literary expression, t h e Q u r ' a n w a s delivered in this language.
T h e first written A r a b i c consists of t h o u s a n d s of graffiti written in a form of A r a b i c called Preclassical N o r t h e r n A r abic, w h i c h is first attested in t h e s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. T h e last inscriptions d a t e to p e r h a p s 500 CE or even later. T h e n u m b e r of s u c h inscriptions, in w h a t m u s t h a v e b e e n a largely illiterate society, is surprising. T h e y consist m a i n l y of p e r s o n a l a n d place n a m e s , b u t also i n c l u d e curses, r e m iniscences of t h e past, a n d m e m o r i a l s of t h e dead. P r e - c l a s sical N o r t h e r n A r a b i c is n o t o n e l a n g u a g e b u t c o m p r i s e s four or five closely related l a n g u a g e s or dialects. It w a s n o t
T h e p o e t i c koine a n d t h e related c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s s p o k e n dialects are categorized as N o r t h e r n Arabic. T h e relation ship of N o r t h e r n Arabic to Preclassical N o r t h e r n Arabic is u n c e r t a i n . B o t h coexisted as spoken languages for s o m e time, b u t their geographical distribution is n o t k n o w n . M o s t likely, b o t h N o r t h e r n A r a b i c a n d Preclassical N o r t h e r n A r abic go b a c k to a c o m m o n ancestor. Curiously, t h e medieval g r a m m a r i a n s do n o t m e n t i o n Preclassical N o r t h e r n Arabic forms, a n d it a p p e a r s to h a v e died o u t soon after t h e A r a b conquests.
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T h e first text in N o r t h e r n Arabic is a funeral inscription from N e m a r a in Syria d a t i n g to 328 CE. O n l y a handful of inscriptions in N o r t h e r n Arabic from before 600 CE are p r e served. Although written in p r o s e , n o t poetry, drey are in t h e same poetic k o i n e u s e d for pre-Islamic poetry a n d the Q u r ' a n or in s o m e spoken dialect close to it. Nortiiern Arabic h a d b e e n largely restricted to the p e n insula a n d the regions b o r d e r i n g u p o n Syria. T h e A r a b c o n quests, however, carried Arabic t h r o u g h o u t all of N o r t h Af rica a n d m o s t of t h e M i d d l e East. T h e m o s t widely spoken language in t h e M i d d l e East (outside the peninsula) o n the eve of t h e A r a b c o n q u e s t s was A r a m a i c , which t o d a y is s p o ken in only a few places. Similarly, in E g y p t C o p t i c b e c a m e displaced as a spoken language. In s o m e areas, s u c h as Iran, t h e Arabic language did n o t take root, b u t t h e Arabic script (the script u s e d for t h e Q u r ' a n ) did. T h u s , Persian is t o d a y written in Arabic script. Several other n o n - S e m i t i c lan guages have b e e n written in A r a b i c script, such as O t t o m a n Turkish. After the A r a b c o n q u e s t s , t h e medieval A r a b a n d Persian g r a m m a r i a n s studied the language of the Q u r ' a n and t h e language of pre-Islamic poetry. U s i n g primarily these two sources, t h e g r a m m a r i a n s defined t h e grammatical rules of Arabic. Classical A r a b i c is t h e language as specified b y these g r a m m a r i a n s . B e c a u s e of the sanctity a c c o r d e d d i e language of t h e Q u r ' a n , tire g r a m m a t i c a l structure of classical A r a b i c b e c a m e relatively fixed. T h e Q u r ' a n was t h e first large-scale p r o s e c o m p o s i t i o n in Arabic. T h e e x p a n s i o n of Islam b r o u g h t the A r a b s into c o n tact with other cultures, a n d the resultant cross-fertilization of ideas along with die a d o p t i o n b y n o n - A r a b M u s l i m s of Arabic as a written language led to an explosion in schol arship a n d literary activity. T h e r e is a vast b o d y of literature written in classical A r a b i c d u r i n g t h e medieval a n d p r e m o d ern periods. M u c h of this has n o t b e e n edited or published. Every major M i d d l e E a s t e r n city has large collections of m a n u s c r i p t s , often only incompletely cataloged. A system atic b u t b y n o m e a n s complete catalog of p u b l i s h e d a n d m a n u s c r i p t works for t h e early medieval period ( u p t o a b o u t 1050 CE) by F u a t Sezgin includes separate v o l u m e s for t h e following genres: (1) Q u r ' a n , religious sciences, history; (2) poetry; (3) m e d i c i n e , p h a r m a c o l o g y , zoology, veterinary science; (4) alchemy, chemistry, botany, agriculture; (5) m a t h e m a t i c s ; (6) a s t r o n o m y ; (7) astrology, meteorology; (8) lexicography; a n d (9) g r a m m a r . E a c h v o l u m e comprises thousands of entries. C o n t a c t with t h e W e s t d u r i n g t h e early m o d e r n p e r i o d led t o t h e i m p o r t i n g of n e w literary genres, including t h e short story, novel, and d r a m a . All three are actively practiced t o day. In 1988 t h e E g y p t i a n novelist a n d short-story writer N a g u i b M a h f o u z w o n t h e N o b e l Prize in literature. A small a m o u n t of fiction is n o w written in colloquial A r a b i c , p a r ticularly in E g y p t .
O r i g i n o f C o l l o q u i a l A r a b i c . Since classical A r a b i c w a s purely a literary l a n g u a g e (even if r o o t e d in a s p o k e n dia lect), the m o d e r n dialects c a n n o t b e r e g a r d e d as its lineal d e s c e n d a n t s . R a t h e r , t h e y are d e s c e n d a n t s of t h e N o r t h e r n A r a b i c dialects s p o k e n in the p e n i n s u l a at t h e time of t h e c o n q u e s t s . Exactly h o w t h e y c a m e into existence is still u n resolved. A p r o c e s s of leveling of dialects p r o b a b l y t o o k place after the c o n q u e s t s as A r a b soldiers f r o m different tribes c a m e t o g e t h e r in t h e A r a b military c a m p s . T h e r e w a s also w i d e s p r e a d c o n t a c t with n o n - S e m i t i c l a n g u a g e s . Because colloquial A r a b i c was n o t r e g a r d e d w i t h t h e s a m e sanctity as the classical form, it was n e v e r subject t o d i e n o r m a t i v e forces of t h e g r a m m a r i a n s a n d c o n s e q u e n t l y h a s c o n t i n u e d to evolve. T h e colloquial l a n g u a g e of t o d a y is very different from t h a t of a t h o u s a n d years ago. S c r i p t . T h e script u s e d to write A r a b i c derives from tiiat of t h e N a b a t e a n s , an A r a b i c - s p e a k i n g p e o p l e c e n t e r e d a r o u n d Petra. A l t h o u g h ethnic A r a b s , t h e N a b a t e a n s w r o t e in A r a m a i c b e c a u s e this was t h e prestige l a n g u a g e of t h e time. T h e i r form of t h e A r a m a i c script w a s a d o p t e d b y t h e A r a b s . T h e previously m e n t i o n e d inscription f r o m N e m a r a is Arabic in g r a m m a r b u t t h e script still looks N a b a t e a n . A s time passed, t h e external f o r m of t h e script c h a n g e d rapidly. Since Arabic h a d m o r e p h o n e m e s t h a n N a b a t e a n , a n d since several letters h a d b e g u n to fall t o g e t h e r in s h a p e , t h e A r a b s h a d to develop n e w symbols. T h i s w a s d o n e b y m a r k i n g s o m e letters witii dots. [See N a b a t e a n s ; A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d Literature.] Classical A r a b i c uses a series of s u p e r - a n d sublinear m a r k s to indicate vowels; these strokes are n o t p a r t of t h e c o n s o n a n t a l text. T h e y w e r e d e v e l o p e d to p r e s e r v e t h e cor rect a n d full p r o n u n c i a t i o n of t h e Q u r ' a n . T h e y are n o t in everyday u s e b u t a p p e a r only in t h e Q u r ' a n a n d occasionally in religious literature or poetry. Since t h e dots distinguishing certain c o n s o n a n t s c a n easily b e m i s p l a c e d or left out, a n d since the vowel m a r k s are u s u ally omitted, the A r a b i c script contains a certain m e a s u r e of i n h e r e n t ambiguity. A r a b scholars h a v e occasionally s u g gested modifications to t h e script, i n c l u d i n g t h e possibility of replacing it b y t h e L a t i n script. G i v e n t h e sanctity of t h e writing system, h o w e v e r , it is h a r d to i m a g i n e this h a p p e n ing. T h e script u s e d t o write Preclassical N o r t i i e r n A r a b i c is quite different f r o m tiiat u s e d for t h e classical f o r m ; it m a y h a v e b r a n c h e d off from t h e p a l e o a l p h a b e t b y d i e t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. T h e s a m e script w a s also e m p l o y e d for E p i graphic South Arabic a n d Ethiopia F u t u r e of A r a b i c . W i t h its long a n d c o m p l e x history, A r a b i c offers several interesting future scenarios. M a n y A r abs believe t h a t with t h e s p r e a d of e d u c a t i o n , t h e literary f o r m will take o v e r t h e functions of t h e colloquial, w h i c h will t h u s disappear. M o s t W e s t e r n linguists d o u b t this devel o p m e n t will occur. T h e y d o believe, o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , t h a t
ARAD: Bronze Age Period m a n y of the village-level dialects will d i s a p p e a r a n d t h a t di alects b a s e d o n t h e capital cities will spread. T h u s t h e col loquial dialect of C a i r o will displace o t h e r E g y p t i a n varieties. T h e state of diglossia, h o w e v e r , w i t h all its a t t e n d a n t p r o b l e m s , m a y persist for a very l o n g time. [See also Semitic L a n g u a g e s ; S o u t h Arabian.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
A b b o u d , Peter, et al. Elementary Modern Standard Arabic. 2 vols. 2 d ed. C a m b r i d g e , 1983. T h e most widely used teaching g r a m m a r of A r abic. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 3 - . T h e most recent large-scale treatment of Arabic literature; t h e quality of individual contributions varies. F o u r volumes have appeared t o date: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, edited by A. F . L . Beeston et al. ( 1 9 8 3 ) ; Abbasid Belles-Lettres, edited by Julia Ashtiany ( 1 9 9 0 ) ; Religion, Learning, and Science in the Abbasid Period, edited by M . J. L . Y o u n g et al. ( 1 9 9 0 ) ; a n d Modem Arabic Literature, edited b y M u h a m m a d Mustafa Badawi ( 1 9 9 2 ) . F e r g u s o n , Charles A. "Diglossia." Word 1 5 ( 1 9 5 9 ) : 3 2 5 - 3 4 0 . T h e first work t o systematically define a n d characterize diglossia in Arabic a n d other languages. Fischer, Wolfdietrich, a n d O t t o Jastrow. Handbuch der arabischen Dialekle. Porta L i n g u a r u m Orientalium, n.s. 1 6 . Wiesbaden, 1980. S u r vey of Arabic dialectology, with texts transcribed from several dif ferent dialects. Fischer, Wolfdietrich. Grundriss der arabischen Philologie, vol. i,Sprachwissenschaft. W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 8 2 . Studies of t h e different varieties of Arabic in tiieir Semitic context. H o p k i n s , Simon. Studies in the Grammar of Early Arabic Based upon Papyri Datable to before AM. 300IA.D. 012. L o n d o n Oriental Series, 37. Oxford, 1984. Detailed analysis of the earliest dated texts; for specialists. K a y e , Alan S. " A r a b i c . " In The World's Major Languages, edited by Bernard C o m r i e , p p . 6 6 4 - 6 8 5 . Oxford, 1 9 8 7 . Short description of tile major linguistic characteristics of Arabic, with a bibliography in cluding g r a m m a r s o n d i e major dialects. N e g e v , A v r a h a m . " O b o d a s t h e G o d . " Israel Exploration Journal 36 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 5 6 - 6 0 . Publication of a N a b a t e a n inscription which a p p a r ently contains two lines in N o r t h e r n Arabic, dating t o before 1 5 0 CE, thus predating the N e m a r a inscription by centuries. Sezgin, Fuat. Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. 9 vols. L e i d e n , 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 8 4 . Catalogue of published a n d u n p u b l i s h e d texts of m a n y different genres. Stetkevych, Jaroslav. The Modem Arabic Literary Language: Lexical and Stylistic Developments. Chicago, 1 9 7 0 . Discusses t h e changes taking place in Literary Arabic. Versteegh, Kees. Pidginizalion and Creolization: The Case of Arabic. A m s t e r d a m , 1984. Argues that d i e m o d e r n dialects result from a pidginization process, as t h e inhabitants of lands conquered by t h e Arabs attempted to learn Arabic. W a n s b r o u g h , John. Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. L o n d o n Oriental Series, 3 1 . Oxford, 1 9 7 7 . C o n t r o versial view of the development of Classical Arabic a n d of the text of t h e Q u r ' a n , which considers b o t h to have crystallized only some two centuries after the birth of M u h a m m a d . Zwettier, Michael. The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications. C o l u m b u s , Ohio, 1 9 7 8 . Studies d i e oral nature of Classical poetry, a n d t h e characteristics it shares with other such poetries of t h e world. P r o m p t e d m u c h heated discussion. JOHN L . HAYES
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A R A D . [This entry comprises two articles treating the re mains of the Bronze Age and Iron Age, respectively.] Bronze Age Period T e l A r a d lies 576 m a b o v e sea level, in Israel's n o r t h e a s t e r n N e g e v desert ( m a p reference 162 X 075). T h e 10-ha (25 acre) tell is b o w l s h a p e d , facilitating t h e drainage of runoff into its center, w h e r e a reservoir w a s located in t h e Early B r o n z e A g e II. A t p r e s e n t , a n n u a l rainfall averages 170 m m at T e l A r a d , classifying t h e climate as semiarid. H o w e v e r , t h e r e is m u c h evidence t o suggest a m o r e h u m i d climate for the Chalcolithic a n d Early B r o n z e A g e s , u p t o t h e m i d - t h i r d millennium. T h e city was f o u n d to h a v e five principal strata, witii vary ing local sequences a n d sublevels. Because t h e m a i n objec tive of t h e excavations a t A r a d was t o o b t a i n a c o m p r e h e n sive p i c t u r e of t h e site in its u p p e r m o s t u r b a n p h a s e (stratum I I ) , t h e p i c t u r e gained of t h e earlier strata (V-III) is m o r e fragmentary. S t r a t u m V. T h e s t r a t u m V settlement (c. 4000-3400 BCE) r e s e m b l e d c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s o n e s in t h e Beersheba valley: n o n - n u c l e a t e d r e m a i n s d i s p e r s e d over d i e tell a n d its neigh b o r i n g hills. T h o u g h assigned t o t h e Beersheba culture, n o cavelike, s u b t e r r a n e a n o c c u p a t i o n w a s found—only p i t dwellings—possibly b e c a u s e t h e loess layer at A r a d is very shallow. T h e pits m a y b e t h e lower sections of structures w h o s e u p p e r walls were m a d e of perishable materials. S t r a t u m V p r o d u c e d evidence of t w o p h a s e s . It n o w seems clear t h a t a g a p in o c c u p a t i o n o c c u r e d b e t w e e n strata V a n d I V b e c a u s e t h e material f o u n d in s t r a t u m I V belongs t o E B I B , a n d E B I A finds are absent. S t r a t u m I V . A n unfortified "village," w h o s e remains w e r e f o u n d w h e r e v e r s t r a t u m III r e m a i n s were r e m o v e d , r e p r e s e n t s s t r a t u m I V (3200-3000 BCE). Its full extent is u n k n o w n . F i n d s u n d e r t h e s u b s e q u e n t s t r a t u m III city-wall f o u n d a t i o n s w e r e of particular significance for chronological a n d u r b a n d e v e l o p m e n t . D a t e d t o E B I B , t h e settlement's traces w e r e f o u n d b o t h i n rock caves a n d in building r e m a i n s . N o remains of larger, p u b l i c buildings were dis c e r n e d . T h i s small c o m m u n i t y was o n e of several similar ones t h a t coexisted in the A r a d basin in E B I B . It is n o t clear w h e t h e r A r a d already served as a central place a t this time. T h e E g y p t i a n p o t t e r y from s t r a t u m I V indicates that t r a d e b e t w e e n E g y p t a n d C a n a a n , well-known from t h e southern coastal plain, also involved A r a d . T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t find of this k i n d was a n E g y p t i a n jar fragment bearing t h e serekh (die p h a r a o h ' s n a m e in a r e c t a n g u l a r frame) of N a r m e r , t h e last ldng of dynasty 0 , at t h e e n d of t h e Egyptian predynastic p e r i o d ( A m i r a n , 1974, 1976). T h i s inscription provided a s y n c h r o n i s m of C a n a a n i t e a n d E g y p t i a n chronologies: d i e E B I, coeval o n t h e w h o l e with t h e N a q a d a II and III p e r i o d s ,
170
ARAD: Bronze Age Period
included die reigns of die last p h a r a o h s of d y n a s t y 0 ( N a r m e r and H o r - A h a ) . E B II b e g a n in t h e reign of P h a r a o h D j e r of die first dynasty. T r a d e with E g y p t c o n t i n u e d t h r o u g h o u t the city's history (see below). T h e only burial cave found at A r a d so far belongs t o stra t u m IV. L o c a t e d n o r t h w e s t of (i.e., outside) the later s t r a t u m III city wall, die cave contained sixteen skeletons of m e n , w o m e n , and children; pottery, stone, a n d c o p p e r vessels; a n d beads of various materials. [See Burial Sites; G r a v e Goods.] O n e skull w a s t r e p h i n a t e d (a small section of t h e skull was r e m o v e d while the p e r s o n was alive)—one of the earliest of such surgeries k n o w n (Smith, 1990). S t r a t u m I I I . T h e r e a p p e a r s to b e n o hiatus b e t w e e n strata IV and III. T h e city wall, sacred precinct, palace, a n d other structures t h r o u g h o u t the tell were erected in s t r a t u m III, t h e earliest " u r b a n " s t r a t u m at T e l A r a d . T h e reservoir was also installed, s u r r o u n d e d by a c o m p l e x of p u b l i c build ings. T h i c k conflagration layers f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t the site, a n d the b r e a c h i n g a n d s u b s e q u e n t reconstruction of t h e city wall, attest to s t r a t u m B T s destruction by e n e m y attack in a b o u t 2800 BCE.
S t r a t u m I I . T h e destruction of s t r a t u m III w a s p r o b a b l y followed immediately by t h e s t r a t u m II settlement. Its ar chitectural style, b u i l d i n g t e c h n i q u e s , material culture, a n d social structure all s h o w continuity. Below is a m o r e detailed description of the finds from strata II a n d III. Fortifications. T h e city wall, 1,176 m long, c o n t a i n e d gates, p o s t e r n s , a n d t o w e r s . It r a n along t h e w a t e r s h e d a n d was f o u n d e d partiy on b e d r o c k a n d partly on s t o n e b e d d i n g . T h e wall was 2-2.5 thick, c o n s t r u c t e d of twin stone courses filled with r u b b l e , a n d estimated to h a v e b e e n 4-5 m high. T h e original s t r a t u m III towers w e r e semicircular. T w o of these w e r e r e p l a c e d in s t r a t u m II with r e c t a n g u l a r o n e s . T h e i r total n u m b e r has b e e n e s t i m a t e d at b e t w e e n tiiirty-five a n d forty, b u t t h e distances b e t w e e n t h e m are n o t u n i f o r m . T h e two gates discovered w e r e s o m e w h a t dissim ilar, the western o n e h a v i n g a wider o p e n i n g a n d a n adjoin ing semicircular t o w e r o n its n o r t h side, while t h e s o u t h w e s t e r n gate h a d a s q u a r e t o w e r flanking it. P o s t e r n s ( n a r r o w openings in d i e city wall) w e r e also u n c o v e r e d ; t h e y s e e m t o h a v e b e e n additional openings t h a t c o u l d b e easily p l u g g e d w h e n necessary. m
ARAD: Bronze Age Period Domestic architecture. N o w t e r m e d t h e A r a d H o u s e in t h e archaeological literature, t h e typical b u i l d i n g at A r a d , for b o t h p u b l i c a n d private p u r p o s e s , w a s a b r o a d r o o m — a r e c t a n g u l a r s t r u c t u r e w i t h an e n t r a n c e in t h e long wall. Its fea t u r e s r e c u r w i t h great regularity: b e n c h e s along t h e walls, a s t o n e pillar base in t h e c e n t e r t o s u p p o r t t h e roof, o n e to d i r e e steps d o w n f r o m t h e street outside, a n d a stone d o o r p o s t socket to the left of t h e e n t r a n c e t o t h e h o u s e . T h e location of t h e pillar bases, t o g e t h e r with a pottery m o d e l of a n A r a d H o u s e discovered in excavation, indicate a flat roof. T h i s basic s t r u c t u r e was usually o n e p a r t of a walled c o m p o u n d t h a t typically i n c l u d e d a c o u r t y a r d a n d a smaller s u b sidiary r o o m or t w o tiiat m a y h a v e served as storage facili ties. T h e c o u r t y a r d s c o n t a i n e d s q u a r e or r o u n d platforms u s e d as silo bases o r w o r k surfaces. Residential c o m p o u n d s usually c o n t a i n e d great quantities of restorable p o t t e r y v e s sels; i m p l e m e n t s of flint, b o n e , c o p p e r , a n d stone; a n d c h a r r e d grain, flax a n d l e g u m e seeds, olive pits, a n d a n i m a l b o n e s , all of w h i c h allowed for a detailed r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of daily life. C l e a r residential q u a r t e r s w e r e identified in areas T-east, T-north, H , and K. Public and elite areas. T h e t r a c t b e t w e e n t h e w e s t e r n gate a n d t h e reservoir w a s designated for p u b l i c a n d elite activities. F o u r distinct z o n e s w e r e discerned: the " m a r k e t " area, the palace, t h e sacred p r e c i n c t , a n d d i e reservoir d i s trict. T h i s discussion p r o c e e d s f r o m t h e w e s t e r n gate t o t h e reservoir o n t h e east.
ARAD:
Bronze Age.
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Market area. L o c a t e d just inside the w e s t e r n gate, t h e m a r ket area w a s a large o p e n s p a c e w i t h t w o large, atypical buildings with flimsy walls. F r a g m e n t s of mostly large pithoi (storage vessels) w e r e r e c o v e r e d f r o m t h e t w o buildings. Palace. A large enclosed c o m p l e x of interconnected r o o m s , courts, a n d p a s s a g e s , t h e p a l a c e h a d a large e n t r a n c e o n the n o r t h t h a t p r o v i d e d access from t h e m a i n street. Smaller entrances existed t o t h e south a n d east. A large r o o m a p p e n d e d by an a n t e c h a m b e r a n d t w o c o u r t y a r d s f o r m e d d i e core of the palace. N u m e r o u s other r o o m s , cells, a n d c o u r t s c o n t a i n e d considerable evidence for the storage, p r e p a r a t i o n , and cooking of food in large quantities. O t h e r u n u s u a l features i n c l u d e d large stone b a s i n s , monolithic " t a b l e s , " a n d a cultic stela (see b e l o w ) . T h e s e elements a n d the location of t h e c o m p l e x b e t w e e n t h e w e s t e r n gate a n d the reservoir, n e x t t o the s a c r e d precinct, gave rise t o the c o n jecture that this was t h e t o w n ' s administrative center. [See Palace.] Sacred precinct. Just b e l o w a n d across d i e street from the palace a n d s e p a r a t e d from t h e reservoir c o m p l e x by an o p e n square was another self-contained c o m p l e x . T h r e e of its c o m p o n e n t s were d i s c e r n e d in s t r a t u m II: a large twin t e m ple, a small twin t e m p l e , a n d a n o t h e r large, single-roomed cultic s t r u c t u r e . Several buildings a n d c o u r t y a r d s were only partially e x c a v a t e d n o r t h of the sacred precinct; their c o n n e c t i o n t o the p r e c i n c t r e m a i n s unclear. T h e large twin t e m ples each o p e n e d onto c o u r t y a r d s t h a t themselves o p e n e d
Reconstruction of the early Canaanite city. (Drawing by L. Ritmeyer; courtesy O. Han)
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o n t o a type of piazza. O n e of t h e courtyards c o n t a i n e d a large altar with a n adjacent basin. T h e southern c h a m b e r contained a stone masseba, or stela. L a r g e quantities of p o t tery a n d carbonized seeds w e r e recovered there. T h e smaller twin temples were m u c h like d i e large ones in plan. T h e courtyard of t h e n o r t h e r n hall contained another stone altar a n d a group of c o m p l e t e vessels, a n d c h u n k s of b i t u m e n f o u n d b e n e a t h t h e floor of the southern hall m a y h a v e b e e n a ritual offering. T h e s e twin t e m p l e units have m u c h i n c o m m o n with t h e E B I twin temples at M e g i d d o , while t h e b r o a d r o o m type itself is f o u n d at t h e Chalcolithic t e m p l e at ' E i n - G e d i a n d t h e E B acropolis T e m p l e at Ai. [See M e giddo; ' E i n - G e d i ; Ai.] Reservoir quarter. L o c a t e d in a depression in t h e t o w n ' s center, t h e reservoir quarter w a s c o m p r i s e d of a r i n g of structures s u r r o u n d i n g t h e reservoir on three sides. T h e r e s ervoir was a n o p e n p o o l of approximately 1,000 s q m , into w h i c h runoff drained from all p a r t s of t h e t o w n b y w a y of its radial streets. A d a m m u s t have existed o n t h e east side, w h e r e n o architectural r e m a i n s were preserved. T h e s u r r o u n d i n g buildings differ from those in t h e residential q u a r ters; they c a n b e divided into five blocks w h o s e s e q u e n c e of construction can b e traced. W o r t h y of n o t e are t h e W a t e r Citadel, with its massive walls a n d u n i q u e p l a n of five p a r allel c h a m b e r s , a n d t h e W a t e r C o m m i s s i o n e r ' s H o u s e ,
w h i c h includes t h e only t r u e stone p a v i n g at E B A r a d . [See Reservoirs.] Religious beliefs. T h e r e are s o m e clues t o t h e religious beliefs held b y t h e d e n i z e n s of A r a d , b u t t h e y r e m a i n s o m e w h a t of a mystery. T h e stela in d i e m a i n r o o m of t h e palace w a s inscribed w i t h t w o a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c figures w i t h g r a i n like h e a d s , o n e in a p r o n e a n d t h e other in a n u p r i g h t p o s i tion. T h e i c o n o g r a p h y is t h o u g h t t o r e p r e s e n t t h e cyclical n a t u r e of t h e agricultural seasons a n d of life a n d deatii (cf. t h e D u m u z i / I n a n n a tales of S u m e r i a n literature). [See A g riculture; Sumerians.] Cultic practice m a y also b e i n h e r e n t in t h e n u m e r o u s s t o n e a n d clay animal figurines f o u n d i n various r o o m s . I n general, it a p p e a r s t h a t t h e forces of n a t u r e w e r e a d o m i n a n t m o t i f i n t h e cult of A r a d . [See Cult.] Economy and urbanism. C o n s i d e r i n g its arid location, t h e e c o n o m y of E B A r a d was highly diversified. Sickle blades a n d a p l e t h o r a of carbonized grain (barley a n d w h e a t ) , p e a s , lentils, chickpeas, flax s e e d s , a n d olive pits from all parts of t h e settlement testify t o a thriving agricul tural base. S h e e p a n d goat b o n e s were u b i q u i t o u s a n d r e p resent t h e p r o d u c t i o n of dairy p r o d u c t s , m e a t , skins, a n d wool. Cattle b o n e s indicate t h e u s e of t h e p l o w , a n d ass b o n e s are indicative of t h e major f o r m of t r a n s p o r t a t i o n . [See Cereals; Olives; S h e e p a n d G o a t s ; Cattle a n d O x e n ; T r a n s portation.]
ARAD: Bronze Age Period F o o d p r o c e s s i n g s e e m s to h a v e b e e n t h e m o s t c o m m o n p u r s u i t : g r i n d i n g stones a n d m o r t a r s w e r e f o u n d in almost every h o u s e . E v i d e n c e of o t h e r d o m e s t i c activities exists as well: spindle w h o r l s , shuttles, a n d needles for s p i n n i n g , w e a v i n g , a n d sewing. Flint tools—sickle blades, tabular s c r a p e r s , drills, a n d a w l s — w e r e still widely u s e d in this p e riod. Special flint objects, s u c h as t a b u l a r scrapers a n d C a n a a n e a n blades, w e r e i m p o r t e d t o A r a d as finished p r o d u c t s , p r o b a b l y from t h e central N e g e v . Jewelry m a n u f a c t u r e is indicated b y b e a d s a n d shells i n various stages of modifi cation, f o u n d with c o p p e r a n d flint awls a n d drills. T h e shells w e r e from b o t h t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d t h e R e d Seas. T w o jewelry h o a r d s w e r e d i s c o v e r e d — i n a jug a n d jar, r e spectively—in a q u a r t e r t h a t p r o d u c e d e v i d e n c e for t h e e x istence of specialized artisans. [See Jewelry.] A n u m b e r of cylinder a n d s t a m p seals w e r e u n c o v e r e d , all m a d e of local chalk. T h e i r style a n d t e c h n i q u e a r e r e m i n i s c e n t of e x a m p l e s f r o m N o r t h Syria a n d M e s o p o t a m i a . L o n g - d i s t a n c e e x c h a n g e relations w e r e m a i n t a i n e d w i t h Sinai, E g y p t , a n d t h e n o r t h e r n C a n a a n i t e heartland. T h e s t u d y of p o t t e r y fabrics ( p e t r o g r a p h y ) h a s revealed p o t t e r y e x c h a n g e s b e t w e e n A r a d a n d C a n a a n i t e centers to t h e n o r t h . P e t r o g r a p h y h a s also d o c u m e n t e d ties with s o u t h e r n Sinai b y disclosing t h a t m a n y of t h e cooking pots at A r a d w e r e m a d e w i t h m i n e r a l s f o u n d exclusively in t h e f o r m e r region. T h e material culture of c o n t e m p o r a r y sites in Sinai is also r e m a r k a b l y similar t o t h a t of A r a d . T h e Sinai c o p p e r deposits s e e m t o h a v e b e e n t h e u n d e r p i n n i n g for this inter c o n n e c t i o n a n d it is suggested t h a t desert p e o p l e s u s e d A r a d as a t r a d e e m p o r i u m (Ilan a n d S e b b a n e , 1989; Finkelstein, 1990), b r i n g i n g c o p p e r t o e x c h a n g e for n o r t h e r n p r o d u c t s s u c h as olive oil a n d grain. A r a d s e e m s to h a v e b e e n t h e m a i n supplier of c o p p e r t o t h e n o r t h t h r o u g h o u t E B I a n d EBII. S o m e l a n d of c o n n e c t i o n w i t h E g y p t is also attested t o b y t h e E g y p t i a n p o t t e r y f o u n d at A r a d . It is n o t k n o w n w h a t E g y p t i a n p r o d u c e w a s s e n t t o A r a d in t h e s e vessels, b u t t h e E g y p t i a n s m a y well h a v e i m p o r t e d c o p p e r , salt, a n d b i t u m e n (the latter t w o from t h e n e a r b y D e a d Sea) from A r a d . ( I n general, t h e E g y p t i a n s w o u l d h a v e b e e n primarily interested in olive oil a n d w i n e from C a n a a n . ) Archaeological survey h a s revealed t h a t A r a d was e n c o m p a s s e d b y small r u r a l settlements it is a s s u m e d w e r e e c o nomically a n d politically associated, a n d p e r h a p s d o m i n a t e d , b y t h e t o w n ( A m i r a n et al., 1980). A r a d was, in fact, t h e only u r b a n entity in t h e N e g e v d u r i n g E B II a n d p r o b ably functioned as t h e focal p o i n t for m u c h of t h e region's c o m m e r c i a l a n d political activity. T h e d e s t r u c t i o n of t h e s t r a t u m II city m a y b e attributable t o any c o m b i n a t i o n of causes: a g r a d u a l decline in a n n u a l p r e c i p i t a t i o n t o w a r d t h e m i d d l e of t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , E g y p t i a n e n c r o a c h m e n t i n s o u t h e r n Sinai in t h e early years of t h e t h i r d d y n a s t y ( u n d e r m i n i n g A r a d ' s p r i m a c y as a m a jor t r a d i n g c e n t e r ) , or a v e r s i o n of t h e general political u n r e s t
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a n d collapse s u c h as afflicted t h e r e s t of C a n a a n s o m e w h a t later. S t r a t u m I . T h e s t r a t u m I settlement w a s m u c h smaller a n d m o r e s p a r s e t h a n t h e earlier o n e s , m a d e u p , p e r h a p s , of s q u a t t e r s w h o o c c u p i e d t h e r u i n e d city after its destruction. Following its a b a n d o n m e n t in a b o u t 2650 BCE, A r a d r e m a i n e d u n i n h a b i t e d until t h e I r o n A g e . E v e n t h e n , m o s t of t h e lower t o w n r e m a i n e d unsettled a n d relatively u n d i s t u r b e d . T h i s resulted in well-preserved r e m a i n s near t h e sur face, w h i c h h a v e allowed for a w i d e e x p o s u r e a n d a detailed r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e a n c i e n t t o w n ' s e c o n o m y a n d social life. T h e excavations at A r a d are of p a r a m o u n t i m p o r t a n c e for u n d e r s t a n d i n g processes of u r b a n i z a t i o n , t h e n a t u r e of t h e relationship b e t w e e n t h e d e s e r t a n d t h e s o w n , p a t t e r n s of e x c h a n g e , a n d t h e n u a n c e s of everyday life in t h e Early Bronze Age. [See also Building M a t e r i a l s a n d T e c h n i q u e s , article on B u i l d i n g Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s of t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s , Cities, article on Cities of t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages; and T e m p l e s , article on Syro-Palestinian T e m p l e s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Amiran, R u t h . "An Egyptian Jar F r a g m e n t with the N a m e of N a r m e r from A r a d . " Israel Exploration Journal 24 (1974): 4-12. Explains the nature of t h e synchronism between Egyptian and Canaanite chro nologies. Amiran, R u t h . " T h e N a r m e r Jar F r a g m e n t from Arad: An A d d e n d u m . " Israel Exploration Journal 26 (1976): 45-46. Important s u p plemental information to the previous paper. Amiran, R u t h , et al. Early Arad I: The Chalcolithic Settlement and Early Bronze Age City, First-Fifth Seasons of Excavations, 1962-1966. Je rusalem, 1978. T h e first final scholarly report. Several conclusions have been modified in the subsequent final reports (see below). Amiran, R u t h , et al. " T h e Arad Countryside." Levant 12 (1980): 2 2 29. Amiran, R u t h , and O m i t Ilan. Arad: Eine 5000 Jahre alte Sladt in der Wuste Negev, Israel. N e u m u n s t e r , 1992. T h e only comprehensive popular account of the finds from ancient Arad, includings m a n y photographs in color. Amiran, R u t h , and Ornit Ilan. Early Arad II: The Chalcolithic and Early Bronze IB Settlements and the Early Bronze II City—Architecture and Town Planning, Sixth to Eighteenth Seasons of Excavations, 1971-1978, 1980-1984. Jerusalem, 1996. T h e second detailed scholarly account of the Arad excavations, focusing on building techniques, with plans, reconstructions, and analysis. Amiran, R u t h , Ornit Ilan, a n d Michael Sebbane. Early Arad III: Finds of the Sixth-Eighteenth Seasons, 1971-1978, 1980-1984. Jerusalem, forthcoming. T h e third a n d final scholarly account, covering the small finds (pottery, crafts, agricultural implements, trade tech niques), their uses, and their social implications. Finkelstein, Israel. "Arad: U r b a n i s m of the N o m a d s . " Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina Vereins 106 (1990): 34-50. Interesting interpre tation of EB Arad as the n o r t h e r n m o s t manifestation of desert peo ples, rather t h a n as the s o u t h e r n m o s t outpost of the northern C a naanite culture. Ilan, Ornit, a n d Michael Sebbane. "Metallurgy, T r a d e , and the U r banization of Southern C a n a a n in the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze A g e . " In L'urbanisation de la Palestine d I'dge du Bronze ancient Bilan et perspectives des recherches aetuelles; Actes du Colhqtted'Emmaus, 2024 octobre 1986, vol. 1, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, p p . 139-162. British Archaeological R e p o r t s , International Series, n o . 527. O x -
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ford, 1989. Data-based inquiry into t h e crucial role of c o p p e r mining and trade between Arad and die Arava valley and Sinai. Includes a broad citation of relevant literature. Smith, Patricia M . " T h e T r e p h i n e d Skull from t h e Early Bronze Age Period at A r a d . " Emtz-hrad 21 (1990): 8 9 - 9 3 . ORNIT ILAN a n d RUTH AMIRAN
Iron Age Period T h e I r o n A g e settiement at A r a d w a s erected o n d i e n o r t h eastern hill of t h e Early B r o n z e A g e II city, following a g a p of o n e a n d a half millennia. T h e excavation of t h e site's fortress a n d tell w a s c o n d u c t e d d u r i n g five seasons (19621965, 1967) u n d e r t h e directorship of Y o h a n a n Aliaroni (in 1962, with R u t h A m i r a n ) . After 1977, limited excavations were carried o u t u n d e r t h e supervision of Z e ' e v H e r z o g , i n conjunction with the N a t i o n a l Parks A u t h o r i t y , w h i c h is c o n d u c t i n g restoration w o r k at t h e site. S o m e of this s u m m a r y includes reassessments of t h e work at I r o n A g e A r a d — stratigraphic a n d chronological conclusions tiiat differ from earlier views. T h e fortress a n d tell at A r a d p r o v i d e a u n i q u e archaeological s e q u e n c e for t h e period of t h e J u d e a n m o n archy. T h e discoveries of t h e J u d e a n t e m p l e a n d n u m e r o u s H e b r e w ostraca also contribute t o t h e site's i m p o r t a n c e . T h e site's Arabic n a m e (Tell Arad) affirms its identifi cation. It is also located at t h e distance from H e b r o n a n d Moleatha cited b y E u s e b i u s (Onomasticon 14. 1-3). Finally, the n a m e Arad is inscribed four times (in m i r r o r image) o n a pottery sherd found at t h e site. Arad is m e n t i o n e d in t h e Bible: t h e C a n a a n i t e king of Arad foils t h e Israelite a t t e m p t t o enter t h e c o u n t r y from t h e south (Nm. 2 1 : 1 , 33:40), it is o n t h e list of c o n q u e r e d C a naanite cities (Jos. 12:14); t h e Kenites settled in t h e wilder ness of J u d a h at " N e g e v A r a d " (Jgs. 1:16); it is listed ( m i s spelled as E d e r ) a m o n g d i e cities of J u d a h (Jos. 15:21); a n d t h e n a m e Arad is m e n t i o n e d twice on Shishak's ( S h e s h o n q ) list of 925 BCE ( n o s . 1 0 7 - 1 1 2 ) : Hgrm "Arad rbt 'Arad n-bt Yrhrn. T h e prevailing interpretation of t h e text is " t h e cit adels of greater A r a d a n d A r a d of t h e h o u s e of Y e r u h a m " (Aliaroni, 1993). A n o t h e r view recognizes t h r e e n a m e s in this text: Hagraim, Greater Arad, a n d Arad (of t h e family) nbt ( N a ' a m a n , 1985). " G r e a t e r A r a d " is u n a n i m o u s l y i d e n tified by scholars as T e l A r a d . I r o n A g e I V i l l a g e : S t r a t u m X I I . T h e first settlement (stratum XII) w a s built over t h e deserted ruins of t h e E B II city. I n fact, the n e w o c c u p a n t s r e u s e d s o m e of d i e old houses. M o s t of t h e s t r a t u m X I I remains were u n c o v e r e d to t h e west of t h e citadel, b u r i e d u n d e r a later glacis. Pillared walls a n d storage bins w e r e attached t o t w o of t h e E B II b r o a d r o o m s . A fence b o r d e r e d t h e h o u s e s o n t h e west, w h e r e a steep rock cliff is exposed. T h e p r e s e r v e d section, as well as sporadic finds u n c o v e r e d u n d e r t h e later r e m a i n s , allow t h e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of the small village in t h e f o r m of an enclosed settlement. I n s o m e spots, several s t t a t u m X I I living surfaces were n o t e d . T h e objects recovered d a t e to t h e eleventh century BCE. T h e r e was n o sign of a violent
destruction, a n d t h e s a m e c o m m u n i t y m a y h a v e erected t h e fortress of t h e s u c c e e d i n g o c c u p a t i o n a l stage, in t h e t e n t h century BCE. T h e initial p u b l i c a t i o n s of t h e finds from s t r a t u m X I I p r e sented a r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of a cultic t e m e n o s in t h e center of t h e site, with a n altar a n d a r o u n d h i g h place ( H e r z o g et al., 1984; A h a r o n i , 1993). T h e s e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s followed t h e view, first suggested b y Benjamin M a z a r , t h a t t h e religious tradition at t h e site s t e m m e d from t h e s e t t l e m e n t of t h e K e n ites, w h o h a d family ties ( H o b a b t h e K e n i t e ) with M o s e s as m e n t i o n e d in Judges 1:16 ( M a z a r , 1965). A m o r e critical opinion suggests t h a t these elements w e r e o r d i n a r y d o m e s t i c installations: a wall a n d a circular silo ( H e r z o g , 1994). [See G r a n a r i e s a n d Silos.] F i r s t F o r t r e s s : S t r a t u m X I . T h e fortress (55 X 50 m ) was carefully p l a n n e d : it was s u r r o u n d e d b y a c a s e m a t e wall a n d reinforced b y projecting t o w e r s . T h e r e m a i n s of four towers were d e t e c t e d o n t h e w e s t e r n side. E x c e p t o n t h e east, the c a s e m a t e wall w a s rebuilt i n t h e s u c c e e d i n g stage as a solid wall. T h e only e x p o s e d c a s e m a t e r o o m w a s at t h e n o r t h w e s t c o m e r . T h e outer wall is 1.60 m w i d e a n d d i e inner wall 1.40 m wide. O n d i e east, t h e c a s e m a t e r o o m s w e r e significantly wider, p e r h a p s serving as b a r r a c k s for t h e fort's g u a r d s . T h e citadels' gate w a s a t t h e n o r t h e r n e n d of t h e eastern side (blocked b y a later solid wall). T h e a p p r o a c h into t h e gate c h a m b e r w a s p r o t e c t e d b y t w o towers. T h e a s s u m e d p r e s e n c e of a t e m p l e in s t r a t u m X I w a s n o t validated b y t h e evidence. A p r o b e u n d e r t h e sacrificial altar disproved d i e a s s u m p t i o n t h a t t h e step at its s o u t h e r n side b e l o n g e d t o an older altar. R e m a i n s of a substantial s t r u c t u r e w e r e observed i n t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e fortress, b u t t h e y do n o t indicate a cultic u s e . It seems safer t o attribute t h e construction of t h e t e m p l e only t o s t r a t u m X . Several d o m e s t i c structures w e r e u n c o v e r e d o n t h e s o u t h ern side of t h e fortress. S o m e stone-lined granaries f o u n d t o t h e west of t h e fort indicate t h a t t h e glacis h a d b e e n laid in s t r a t u m X , w h o s e structures w e r e d e s t r o y e d i n a conflagra tion. N u m e r o u s p o t t e r y vessels f o u n d in t h e d e s t r u c t i o n layer clearly d a t e to t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, affirming t h e identification of t h e fortress w i t h t h e o n e o n Shishak's list (cf. Z i m h o n i , 1985). Solid-Wall F o r t r e s s : S t r a t a X - V I . T h e fortress rebuilt in s t r a t u m X w a s p r o t e c t e d b y a solid wall w i t h only t w o gate towers. T h e builders filled i n the s p a c e i n t h e casemates o n three sides, b u t o n t h e east t h e n e w wall w a s c o n s t r u c t e d over t h e inner c a s e m a t e wall. T h e wall w a s staggered at small angles in a s a w t o o t h p a t t e r n . T h e fort w a s t h e n s q u a r e , with an area of 52 m (or 100 cubits). A n e w gate with t w o long halls inside t h e wall a n d two projecting t o w e r s w a s built in t h e center of t h e eastern wing. T h e fortifications w e r e reinforced b y a w i d e glacis laid a r o u n d t h e fortress a n d r e t a i n e d b y a low wall at its base. A n additional defensive feature w a s t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of a w a t e r system. I t consisted of u n d e r g r o u n d cisterns h e w n d e e p into t h e b e d r o c k a n d plastered. [See Cisterns.] W a t e r
ARAD: Iron Age Period w a s directed into the system t h r o u g h a c h a n n e l cut into d i e rock o n the w e s t e r n side of t h e hill. T h e c h a n n e l w a s covered with stones a n d concealed by t h e glacis. T h e cisterns w e r e i n t e n d e d for u s e d u r i n g a siege, w h e n water could n o t b e d r a w n from t h e well outside the fortress in t h e lower city a n d carried b y jars or waterskins t o the c h a n n e l opening. A p a s s a g e in d i e solid wall, a b o v e d i e cover stones, m a y have served as a secret p o s t e r n . T h e c a s e m a t e fortifications first a t t r i b u t e d to this h o r i z o n w e r e c o n s t r u c t e d of ashlars w o r k e d with a t o o t h e d chisel. T h e i r attribution to strata V I I or V I was strongly criticized b y various scholars ( N y l a n d e r , 1967; Y a d i n , 1965). A r e e x a m i n a t i o n of t h e stratigraphic d a t a leads to t h e conclusion t h a t t h e c a s e m a t e s w e r e , rather, p a r t of a Hellenistic fortress t h a t w a s never c o m p l e t e d . T h e solid wall was t h u s utilized t h r o u g h o u t t h e I r o n A g e II, in strata X - V I . E a c h s t r a t u m is r e p r e s e n t e d b y definite architectural alterations, such as the raising of floor levels, a n d b y a large collection of p o t t e r y vessels f o u n d in d e s t r u c t i o n layers. T h e t i m e s p a n of these strata is b e t w e e n the n i n t h a n d early sixth centuries BCE. Temple. T h e erection of t h e t e m p l e in s t r a t u m X in t h e n o r t h w e s t q u a d r a n t of the fortress w a s t h e only major m o d ification m a d e in t h e interior. T h e t e m p l e itself consisted of a m a i n b r o a d r o o m hall with p l a s t e r e d b e n c h e s along its walls a n d a small c o m p a r t m e n t a t t a c h e d t o t h e center of t h e west e r n l o n g wall. T h e c o m p a r t m e n t served as the n a o s , iden tified w i t h t h e debir of t h e T e m p l e in Jerusalem. A stela m a d e f r o m an o b l o n g s t o n e with r o u n d e d edges a n d showing traces of r e d p a i n t w a s f o u n d lying n e x t t o a low stone p o d i u m . F o u r shallow steps led into t h e n a o s ; flanking t h e m w e r e t w o limestone incense altars. T h e s e objects date to t h e latest u s e of the t e m p l e (in s t r a t u m I X ) , b u t tiieir first u s e p h a s e m a y b e l o n g to t h e early shrine. I n front of t h e s a n c t u a r y w a s a r e c t a n g u l a r c o u r t y a r d (12.00 X 7.50 m ) w i t h a s t o n e p a v e m e n t . R o o m s flanked t h e c o u r t y a r d o n its other t h r e e sides, a n d a large sacrificial altar w a s f o u n d on t h e east. T h e altar (2.40 X 2.20 m ) w a s raised a p p r o x i m a t e l y 1.50 m a b o v e t h e floor of s t r a t u m X, It w a s built f r o m u n h e w n fieldstones laid in m u d m o r t a r . A stone s t e p , or b e n c h , h a d b e e n p l a c e d at t h e foot of its s o u t h e r n side. A large flint flagstone, girdled b y plastered c h a n nels, covered t h e t o p of the altar, a n d a small c o m p a r t m e n t w a s f o u n d adjacent t o t h e altar o n t h e west. A r e d - s l i p p e d clay incense b u r n e r , c o m p r i s e d of t w o p a r t s , w a s f o u n d in side t h e r o o m , attesting to t h e r o o m ' s u s e as a storage area for c e r e m o n i a l articles. I n s t r a t u m I X , t h e floor of t h e t e m p l e ' s c o u r t y a r d w a s elevated b y a b o u t 1.20 m , so t h a t t h e sacrificial alter p r o jected only 0.40 m . A n o t h e r i n n o v a t i o n related to t h e area's c e r e m o n i a l role was t h e addition of a stone-built basin in t h e c o u r t y a r d , 2 m s o u t h of the altar. Unlike t h e other b u i l d i n g s , n o indication of violent d e struction is observable in t h e t e m p l e area. T h e vertical dis p o s i t i o n of t h e altars a n d d i e stela a n d t h e s u p e r b preser v a t i o n of t h e limestone i n c e n s e altars a n d t h e t o p of the
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sacrificial altar indicate t h a t the t e m p l e w a s intentionally dis m a n t l e d . T h e u p p e r p a r t s of t h e walls w e r e t o r n d o w n a n d the whole area was b u r i e d u n d e r a thick layer of soil. T h e abolition of t h e temple is attributed t o the cultic reform car ried o u t by K i n g Hezeldah in 715 BCE (2 Kgs. 18:22). Dwellings, storerooms, and workshops. T h e remain ing area inside t h e fortress w a s allocated t o residential dwell ings in the southern wing, storage units in the n o r t h e r n q u a d r a n t , a n d the w o r k s h o p s of craftsmen o n t h e southwest. T h e h o u s e of Eliashib, t h e c o m m a n d e r of t h e A r a d fortress, w a s u n c o v e r e d at the eastern e n d of t h e s o u t h e r n wing. H i s letters a n d p e r s o n a l seals w e r e f o u n d in t w o successive lay ers. Crafts are evident from a h o a r d of u n w o r k e d silver a n d b r o k e n jewelry t h a t surely b e l o n g e d to a local silversmith; t h e dozens of juglets recovered suggest the p r o d u c t i o n of perfume. Inscriptions. M o r e t h a n o n e h u n d r e d H e b r e w inscrip tions w e r e u n c o v e r e d at A r a d . T h e y c o m p r i s e o n e of the largest epigraphic collections dating to the Iron A g e II ( A h a r o n i , 1981). M o s t of t h e inscriptions are on sherds (os t r a c a ) ; a few are inscribed o n whole pottery vessels. [See A r a d Inscriptions; O s t r a c o n . ] T h e ostraca are administrative in character. M a n y are letters c o n c e r n e d w i t h the delivery of t h e food s u p p l y (flour or b r e a d , wine, oil) t o military units or t o Mum, apparently P h o e n i c i a n m e r c h a n t s (originating f r o m K i t i o n o n C y p r u s ) in the service of t h e k i n g d o m . O t h ers r e c o r d taxes in kind sent from villages in s o u t h e r n J u d a h . S o m e historical information is h i n t e d at the letters: the in a u g u r a t i o n of a n e w king ( n o . 88), a n d tiireat of an E d o m i t e attack on R a m o t N e g e v ( n o . 25). N i n e t e e n inscriptions were f o u n d in o n e r o o m , in t h e h o u s e of Elyashib, the c o m m a n d e r of A r a d in s t r a t u m VI (see a b o v e ) . T h r e e of his personal seals w e r e u n c o v e r e d in s t r a t u m VII, indicating a short time s p a n b e t w e e n the e n d of b o t h strata. P o s t - I r o n A g e P h a s e s : S t r a t a V - I . N u m e r o u s pits, in w h i c h eighty-five A r a m a i c ostraca w e r e f o u n d , characterize the Persian period ( s t r a t u m V ) . A c a s e m a t e fortress was ini tiated later, in the Hellenistic period, b u t was never c o m pleted (see a b o v e ) . Instead, a small fort w a s erected within a fenced-in c a m p ( s t r a t u m I V ) . A n e w fort was erected in the R o m a n period ( s t r a t u m I I I ) , in t h e first century BCE, a n d existed for a b o u t t w o h u n d r e d years. Following a long p e riod of a b a n d o n m e n t , t h e r e m a i n s of t h e fort w e r e partially r e u s e d a n d i n c o r p o r a t e d into a way station in t h e Early A r a b period, in t h e seventh a n d eighth centuries CE (stratum I I ) . A b e d o u i n cemetery ( s t r a t u m I) of t h e t h i r t e e n t h - n i n e t e e n t h centuries concludes t h e stratigraphic s e q u e n c e . [See also Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages; and T e m p l e s , article on Syro-Palestinian T e m p l e s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, M i r i a m . " T h e Israelite Citadels." In The Nezo Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. i , p p . 82-87. Jeru salem and N e w York, 1 9 9 3 .
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ARAD INSCRIPTIONS
Aharoni, Yohanan, in collaboration with Joseph N a v e h . Arad Inscrip tions. Translated by Judith Ben-Or. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . Aharoni, Yohanan. "Arad: Identification and History." In The New En cyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p . 7 5 . Jerusalem and N e w York, 1993. Herzog, Ze'ev, et al. " T h e Israelite Fortress at A r a d . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 2 5 4 (1984): 1-34. Herzog, Ze'ev. " T h e Bcer-Sheba Valley: F r o m N o m a d i s m to M o n archy." In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel, edited by Israel Finkelstein and N a d a v N a ' a m a n , p p . 1 2 2 - 1 4 9 . Jerusalem a n d Washington, D . C . , 1994. Mazar, Benjamin. " T h e Sanctuary of Arad and the Family of H o b a b the Kenite." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 2 9 7 - 3 0 3 . N a ' a m a n , Nadav. " A r a d in the Topographical List of Shishak." Tel Aviv 1 2 (198s): 9 1 - 9 2 . Nylander, Carl. " A N o t e on the Stonecutting and M a s o n r y of T e l Arad." Israel Exploration Journal 17 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 5 6 - 5 9 . Yadin, Yigael. " A N o t e on the Stratigraphy of A r a d . " Israel Exploration Joumalis ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 180. Zimhoni, Orna. " T h e Iron Age Pottery of Tell 'Eton and Its Relation to the Lachish, Tell Beit Mirsim, and Arad Assemblages." Tel Aviv 12 (1985): 63-90.
J a n u a r y 597 BCE, w h e n N e b u c h a d r e z z a r w a s either o n his w a y to attack Jerusalem o r was already besieging it. T h e m o n t h was p r o b a b l y t h e last in t h e fortress's existence.
ZE'EV HERZOG
3. Name lists. M a n y ostraca from v a r i o u s strata are lists of n a m e s (nos. 22, 23, 27, 30?, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41?, 42?, 49, 58, 59, 64?, 67, 69?, 72, 74, 76?, 80, 110), w i t h or w i t h o u t symbols (of capacity?) a n d ciphers. It is very difficult t o d e t e r m i n e t h e precise p u r p o s e of tiiese lists, a l t h o u g h s o m e m a y have b e e n c o n n e c t e d witii t h e distribution of rations (cf. htm, " w h e a t , " in n o . 31). I n t h e latest ostraca, m o s t of t h e n a m e s are Yahwistic, witii t h e t h e o p h o r i c e l e m e n t yhw.
ARAD INSCRIPTIONS.
T h e excavation of t h e cit adel of Arad in d i e J u d e a n N e g e v (about 32 k m [20 mi.] south of H e b r o n ) , carried o u t b e t w e e n 1962 a n d 1967 b y Y o h a n a n A h a r o n i , w a s m a d e famous b y t h e discovery t h e r e of n u m e r o u s inscriptions, m o s t of t h e m written o n sherds in carbon black ink. T h e i r preservation was m a d e possible b y t h e N e g e v ' s dry climate a n d t h e care with w h i c h t h e y w e r e excavated. T h i s small site ( a b o u t 50 sq m ) p r o d u c e d 131 H e b r e w , 85 A r a m a i c , 2 Greek, a n d 5 Arabic inscriptions. H e b r e w I n s c r i p t i o n s . All of t h e H e b r e w inscriptions are from the I r o n A g e II a n d are written in P a l e o - H e b r e w . T h o s e f o u n d in stratified contexts are said to c o m e from strata V I - X I (c. 600 B C E - t e n t h century BCE). Inscriptions from earlier strata ( X I - X ) are rare a n d almost illegible; in addition, t h e stratigraphy of Iron Age II A r a d is d i s p u t e d . T h e final publication has n o t yet a p p e a r e d , a n d d i e p r o p o s e d dating, particularly for t h e earlier inscriptions, should b e considered tentative. I n any case, various g r o u p s of in scriptions can be discerned b a s e d o n their date a n d content: 1. Elyashib archives. Ostraca 1-18 are short messages sent to t h e c o m m a n d e r of t h e fortress, Elyashib son of E s h i y a h u (cf. item 10, below, o n seals), or to his lieutenant, N a h u m (no. 17 in t h e c o r p u s ) . Several are complete a n d m o s t are orders to give f o o d (flour/bread, oil, a n d wine) to p e o p l e designated as K i t t i m (ktyrn)—probably C y p r i o t or G r e e k mercenaries in t h e J u d e a n army. A c c o r d i n g to t h e quantity of food, there w e r e p r o b a b l y a b o u t twenty-five K i t t i m w h o generally received their food every four or six days. T h e s e inscriptions offer clues a b o u t t h e bookkeeping d o n e for t h e s t o r e r o o m in t h e fortress. A p p a r e n t l y , these ostraca w e r e k e p t for one m o n t h a n d , at t h e beginning of t h e n e x t m o n t h , w e r e registered o n a p a p y r u s scroll. T h e Elyashib ostraca seem to date to t h e t e n t h m o n t h — T e b e t — s t a r t i n g o n 16
2. Two probable royal ostraca. O s t r a c a 24 a n d 88 m a y b e from t h e royal c o u r t in J e r u s a l e m . B o t h are b r o k e n , b u t n u m b e r 24, with a t least n i n e c o m p l e t e lines, is e v i d e n c e of t h e E d o m i t e t h r e a t against R a m a t N e g e v , t h e capital of t h e Judean Negev (probably Khirbet Ghara/Tel 'Ira). This os t r a c o n contains a n order t o send soldiers from t h e small for tresses of A r a d a n d Q i n a h ( p r o b a b l y K h i r b e t G h a z z a / H o r v a t U z a ) to t h e t h r e a t e n e d t o w n . O s t r a c o n 88 is a royal declaration, p r o b a b l y of a n e w ldng of J u d a h ("I h a v e c o m e to reign/'ny mlkty") m e n t i o n i n g also t h e " k i n g of Egypt/w?& msrym." If it is n o t a schoolboy's exercise, it m a y b e attrib u t a b l e to t h e n e w king J e h o a h a z son of Josiah (2 Kgs. 23:31-32) or, m o r e likely, to Jehoiachin son of Jehoiakim (2 Kgs. 24:8) a n d b e dated t o D e c e m b e r 598 or J a n u a r y 597 BCE. I n t h a t case, b o t h ostraca m a y also date f r o m t h e last m o n t h ( s ) of t h e J u d e a n fortress. c
4. Military reports with a formulaic greeting. A few ostraca contain s o m e k i n d of a formulaic greeting: " Y o u r s o n ( s ) " or " y o u r b r o t h e r " N . . . a n d " I bless y o u b y YHWHIbrktk lyhwh" (nos. 21, 40; cf. n o s . 16 a n d 1 1 1 ? ) . 5. Single personal names. E i g h t ostraca ( n o s . 50-57) a r e small sherds with a single p e r s o n a l n a m e (occasionally in cluding t h e p a t r o n y m ) . T h e s e ostraca m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d as lots cast for priestly duties in t h e A r a d s a n c t u a r y . 6. Hieratic symbols. A few ostraca are a c c o u n t notes w i t h (hieratic?) symbols t h a t are difficult t o i n t e r p r e t (nos. 34, 112). T h e ostraca m a y b e c o n n e c t e d w i t h t h e collection of grain (cf. htm i n n o . 33) from various t o w n s (cf. n o . 25: 'Anim and Ma'on). 7. Inscriptions on whole jars. T h r e e inscriptions o n w h o l e jars m e n t i o n a d a t e , a p e r s o n a l n a m e , a n d a p l a c e n a m e ( n o s .
19, 20, 32?). 8. Incised inscriptions. O t h e r inscriptions, o n w h o l e vessels usually, indicate t h e n a m e of t h e o w n e r (nos. 89,91-98,100, 101?). T w o incised inscriptions o n small plates ( n o s . 102-103, p r o b a b l y to b e r e a d qf) a n d o n e p r e s e r v e d o n a b o d y sherd ( n o , 104, qds, " h o l y " ) a p p a r e n t l y c o n n e c t t h e s e vessels with a sanctuary. 9. Writing exercises. T w o inscriptions m a y h a v e b e e n a writing exercise: a plate incised several times w i t h t h e n a m e A r a d (no. 99) a n d a small f r a g m e n t of a n incised a b e c e d a r y (no. 90). 10. Seals. T h e r e are five H e b r e w seals ( n o s . 105-109), a m o n g t h e m t h r e e (nos. 105-107) with t h e n a m e of t h e c o m -
'ARA'IR m a n d e r of d i e fortress, E l y a s h i b son of Eshiyahu/7ys& bn 'syhw, a n d o n e (no. 108) w i t h t h r e e lines ( n a m e + p a t r o n y m + n a m e of t h e g r a n d f a t h e r ) . T h e y are all aniconic, c o n f o r m ing t h e r e b y t o the general p a t t e r n of seals in J u d a h in a b o u t 600 BCE. 11. Royal seals. N i n e royal seal i m p r e s s i o n s ilmlk hbrn; Imlk swkh) from d i e e n d of the eighth c e n t u r y BCE w e r e dis covered, all on b r o k e n jar h a n d l e s . 12. Inscribed weights. T h i r t e e n inscribed weights from t h e seventh c e n t u r y BCE were r e c o v e r e d : t w o pym weights, a one-shekel weight, t h r e e t w o - s h e k e l weights, a n d four eightshekel weights. All of t h e H e b r e w inscriptions shed vivid light o n t h e or ganization a n d life of a small J u d e a n fortress in t h e late sev e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. T h e y are e v i d e n c e t h a t writing w a s in c o m m o n u s e in a small fortress of t h e N e g e v before t h e first Nebudchadrezzar campaign. A r a m a i c I n s c r i p t i o n s . Eighty-five A r a m a i c ostraca w e r e f o u n d at T e l A r a d . M o s t are v e r y p o o r l y p r e s e r v e d a n d half are practically illegible. E x c e p t for n u m b e r s 38?, 44, a n d 45, t h e y are p r o b a b l y t o b e d a t e d paleographically to t h e fourth c e n t u r y BCE a n d m a y b e witnesses to d i e Persian political reorganization of t h e N e g e v at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h a t c e n t u r y (cf. A n d r e L e m a i r e , " P o p u l a t i o n s et territoires de la P a l e s tine a l ' e p o q u e p e r s e , " Transeuphratene 3 (1990): 3 1 - 7 4 , esp. 5 1 - 5 3 ; a n d L e m a i r e , in La Palestine a l'epoque perse, edited b y E . M . L a p e r r o o s a z a n d A . L e m a i r e , Paris, 1992, p p . 29-30). T h e ostraca frequently m e n t i o n h o r s e s (swsh) or donkeys (hmr), barley, m e a s u r e s (in a n abbreviated f o r m ) , p e r s o n a l n a m e s , a n d s o m e t i m e s a d a t e (b + n u m b e r ) . O s t r a c o n 12 specifies t h a t " d o n k e y d r i v e r s ? " c a m e " f r o m the p r o v i n c e of . . . (mdni)" a n d " b e l o n g t o t h e r e g i m e n t of A b d n a n a y (Idgl 'bdnny)." It is t h u s clear t h a t s o m e of these inscriptions at least are c o n n e c t e d w i t h military organization; j u d g i n g f r o m t h e n u m e r o u s o c c u r r e n c e s of t h e n a m e on other o s t r a c a , the local c o m m a n d e r m a y h a v e b e e n Y a d d u a (ydw ). I n addition to t h e s e ostraca t h e r e is an inscription o n a b o n e (no. 33) a n d a n o t h e r on a jar (no. 43). T h e o n o m a s t i c e v i d e n c e f r o m t h e s e inscriptions gives s o m e h i n t of t h e e t h n i c c o m p o s i t i o n of the s e t t l e m e n t at A r a d in the fourth c e n t u r y BCE: H e b r e w n a m e s are i n t h e majority, b u t t h e r e are also several E d o m i t e ( w h h t h e t h e o p h o r i c e l e m e n t qws) a n d A r a b i c (with the e n d i n g -w) n a m e s , as well as a B a b y l o n i a n name. c
G r e e k a n d A r a b i c I n s c r i p t i o n s . F r o m later p e r i o d s , t h e r e are inscriptions in G r e e k a n d Arabic. T w o f r a g m e n tary G r e e k ostraca w e r e d i s c o v e r e d t h a t are difficult t o r e a d a n d interpret. T h e y are p r o b a b l y from t h e R o m a n p e r i o d . F o u r of t h e fragmentary A r a b i c ostraca are p r o b a b l y to b e d a t e d to t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y CE. A fifth s h e r d is incised twice w i t h t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e formula: " I n t h e n a m e of Al lah. . . . " [See also A r a d ; O s t r a c o n ; Seals.]
177
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n , in collaboration with Joseph N a v e h . Arad Inscrip tions. T r a n s l a t e d by Judith B e n - O r . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . Editio princeps of all the inscriptions discussed here. Ahituv, Shmuel. Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions (in H e b r e w ) . Biblical Encyclopedia L i b r a r y , 7. Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . See pages 5 4 - 9 6 . Illustrated. Davies, G r a h a m I. Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 9 1 . See pages 1 1 - 3 8 . D i o n , P. E. " L e s K T Y M de T e l Arad: Grecs ou Pheniciens?" Revue Biblique 99 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 7 0 - 9 7 . L e m a i r e , Andre. Inscriptions hebraiques, vol. 1, Les ostraca. Litteratures Anciennes du Proche-Orient, 9. Paris, 1 9 7 7 . See pages 1 4 5 - 2 3 5 . M i t t m a n n , Siegfried. " 'Gib den Kittiiern 3 b(at) Weill.' M e n g e n u n d Gtiter in den Arad-Briefen." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 109 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 3 9 - 4 8 . N a v e h , Joseph. " T h e N u m b e r s of Bat in the A r a d Ostraca." Israel Ex ploration Journal 42 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 5 2 - 5 4 . Pardee, D e n n i s , et al. Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Letters. Society of Biblical Literature, Sources for Biblical Study, vol. 15. C h i c o , Calif., 1982. See pages 2 8 - 6 7 . ANDRE LEMAIRE
' A R A ' I R (Khirbet, ' A r a ' i r ) , biblical A r o e r ( n o t t o b e c o n fused w i t h A r o e r in J u d e a ) , site situated t o the east of D i b o n ( D h i b a n ) , 4 k m (2.5 mi.) from the M a d a b a - K e r a k r o a d , fol lowing d i e p a t h t h a t b o r d e r s t h e n o r t h e r n slope of W a d i elM u j i b (the biblical A r n o n River), Its p r e s e n t location coin cides w i t h the references in t h e H e b r e w Bible (Dt. 2:36,3:12, 4:48; Jos. 12:2; 2 Kgs. 10:33; Jer. 48:19) a n d in the M e s h a inscription (1. 26). [See M o a b i t e Stone.] F r o m the site's rel atively small size (50 X 50 m ) a n d the durability of its s t r u c tural r e m a i n s , it a p p e a r s t h a t Aroer was built as a solid for tress to control the K i n g ' s H i g h w a y crossing die A r n o n . A c c o r d i n g to 1 Chronicles 5:8, it w a s assigned to the tribe of R e u b e n after t h e Israelite c o n q u e s t , r e m a i n i n g in possession of the Israelites until the reign of S o l o m o n (Jgs. 11:26). K i n g M e s h a c o n q u e r e d a n d rebuilt it in a b o u t 850 BCE, a n n e x i n g it to the k i n g d o m of M o a b ( M e s h a inscription, 1.26). Shortly thereafter, A r o e r passes on t o t h e kings of D a m a s c u s (2 Kgs. 10:33), until t h e c o n q u e s t of Tiglath-Pileser III (732 BCE). J o s e p h u s (Antiq. 10.181) attributes its definitive destruction t o the armies of the ldng of B a b y l o n , N e b u c h a d r e z z a r (c. 582 BCE). Afterward, ' A r a ' i r is inhabited only occasionally, d u r i n g die Hellenistic a n d N a b a t e a n periods. Excavation at 'Ara'ir w e r e u n d e r t a k e n b y Emilio Olavarri for t h e C a s a Santiago of J e r u s a l e m from 1964 to 1966. Six archaeological levels w e r e u n c o v e r e d , c o r r e s p o n d i n g to as m a n y periods of o c c u p a t i o n . L e v e l V I , t h e earliest, has two p h a s e s : VLB ( I n t e r m e d i a t e B r o n z e A g e I, c. 2250-2050 BCE), w i t h r e m a i n s of s e m i n o m a d i c o c c u p a t i o n in w h i c h agricul t u r e is practiced; a n d V I A (Intermediate B r o n z e Age II, c. 2050-1900 BCE), widi very r u d i m e n t a r y stone houses. After a long p e r i o d of a b a n d o n m e n t , c o r r e s p o n d i n g to t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e (c. 1900-1250 BCE), 'Ara'ir was again o c c u p i e d at the e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e a n d the b e g i n -
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ARAMAIC L A N G U A G E A N D L I T E R A T U R E
rung of the Iron Age I (level V, c. 1250 BCE), as a well-built fortress belonging to t h e Israelite settlement. K i n g M e s h a of M o a b (c. 850 BCE) rebuilt the by t h e n ancient structure as a solid n e w fortress, using m o n u m e n t a l stones for the outers walls. T h e square building (50 X 50 m ) was p r o t e c t e d by three parallel walls: a n interior wall t h a t served as a buttress for the fortress's central area, an exterior wall 2 m w i d e , a n d an intermediate wall 1.5 m wide. T h e inner corridors r u n ning between each of these three walls were filled with t h e debris of earlier buildings. O n the n o r t h w e s t side, w h i c h faces the s u r r o u n d i n g plain a n d is therefore m o r e v u l n e r a ble, was a double defensive wall a n d in front of it a reservoir to collect a n d store water from rainfall. Following a n o t h e r p e r i o d of a b a n d o n m e n t , 'Ara'ir was reoccupied, in t h e s e c o n d and third centuries BCE (level III). A few h o u s e s w e r e built inside the ancient fortress; they do n o t a p p e a r t o h a v e b e e n constructed for p e r m a n e n c e , suggesting t h a t their in habitants w e r e s e m i n o m a d i c . T h e N a b a t e a n o c c u p a t i o n (level II) in the first c e n t u r y BCE and first c e n t u r y CE has little m o r e consistency. T o this period b e l o n g four h o u s e s exca vated witiiin d i e ancient fortress a n d several pits in the sur r o u n d i n g plain, some of t h e m still in use. By this t i m e , 'Ara'ir h a d already lost its strategic a n d military character. After t h e R o m a n c o n q u e s t of the N a b a t e a n k i n g d o m by C o r n e l i u s P a l m a (106 CE), several m o r e h o u s e s were built (level I ) , in t h e second a n d third centuries CE. T h e y w e r e scattered over t h e site a n d also do n o t a p p e a r to have b e e n built for p e r manence. [See also D i b o n ; M o a b . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Olavarri, Emilio. " S o n d a g e s a ' A R O ' E R sur l'Arnon." Revue Biblique 72 ( 1 9 6 5 ) 1 7 7 - 9 4 , pis. 1-4. Olavarri, Emilio. "Fouilles a ' A R O ' E R sur l'Arnon: Les N i v e a u x d u Bronze Intermediaire." Revue Biblique 76 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 2 3 0 - 2 5 9 , pis. 1 - 4 . EMILIO OLAVARRI
ARAMAIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. O n e of the two b r a n c h e s of the later N o r t h w e s t g r o u p of Semitic languages, the other being Canaanite (Phoenician a n d H e b r e w ) , " A r a m a i c " actually e n c o m p a s s e s a n u m b e r of closely related dialects. T h e y p r o b a b l y e m e r g e d in Syria at t h e end of the L a t e B r o n z e A g e ; the first written traces date from the tenth century BCE. T h e A r a m a i c dialects h a v e b e e n in continual u s e since t h a t time in s o m e f o r m . T h e i m p o r t a n c e of A r a m a i c lies in its long history a n d t h e g e o graphic extent of its influence. M a n y of the cultures of t h e region employed A r a m a i c for civil, literary, or religious u s e even w h e n the vernacular w a s another language. T h e for mative periods of Christianity a n d J u d a i s m o c c u r r e d w h e n A r a m a i c was in w i d e u s e , a n d it has left its m a r k on m u c h of their literature. T h e r e is n o consensus o n the periodization of A r a m a i c , b u t the categories developed by J o s e p h A.
F i t z m y e r (1979) are widely used: O l d A r a m a i c , t h e dialects of t h e Iron A g e inscriptions from Syria, Palestine, a n d M e s o p o t a m i a ( t e n t h - s e v e n t h centuries BCE), I m p e r i a l A r a m a i c (sixth-third centuries BCE), M i d d l e A r a m a i c ( s e c o n d c e n tury B C E - s e c o n d c e n t u r y C E ) , L a t e A r a m a i c ( t h i r d - e i g h t h centuries CE), a n d M o d e r n A r a m a i c ( p r e s e n t d a y ) . G r a m m a r . A r a m a i c g r a m m a r , t h e description of its p h o nology (meaningful s o u n d s ) , m o r p h o l o g y (formation a n d inflection of w o r d s ) , a n d syntax (meaningful a r r a n g e m e n t of w o r d s in clauses a n d s e n t e n c e s ) , shares m a n y features with t h e other Semitic languages. Alphabet. T h e A r a m e a n s b o r r o w e d t h e twenty-two-letter P h o e n i c i a n a l p h a b e t s o m e t i m e in the eleventh or t e n t h c e n tury BCE. T h e letter forms of the earliest inscriptions are t h e s a m e as c o n t e m p o r a r y P h o e n i c i a n ones. A r a m a i c forms of t h e letters b e g a n t o develop in the eighth c e n t u r y BCE. T h e intensive u s e of A r a m a i c in the P e r s i a n E m p i r e (539-332 BCE) resulted in a widely u s e d A r a m i a c cursive. T h e g e o graphic extent of A r a m a i c writing t r i g g e r e d — b y b o r r o w i n g or imitation—the d e v e l o p m e n t of alphabetic writing in n o n A r a m a i c languages s u c h as B r a h m i (in n o r t h w e s t e r n I n d i a ) , Armenian, and Georgian. L o c a l varieties of the script e m e r g e d i n t h e Hellenistic p e riod for writing t h e i n d i g e n o u s dialects, s u c h as Palestinian, N a b a t e a n , a n d P a l m y r e n e . Jewish scribes modified each let ter to fit within a n imaginary s q u a r e frame; this " s q u a r e script" was eventually u s e d for H e b r e w as well as A r a m a i c , a n d m u c h later w a s a d a p t e d for Y i d d i s h . T h e N a b a t e a n script eventually evolved into the Arabic cursive. Orthography. W h e n the Arameans adopted the alpha bet, t h e y h a d t w e n t y - s e v e n p h o n e m e s t o fit t o t h e t w e n t y t w o P h o e n i c i a n letters. Several of t h e letters h a d to r e p r e s e n t t w o p h o n e m e s (see table 1 ) . T h i s b r e a c h of t h e one-letter/ o n e - p h o n e m e principle m a y h a v e e x p e d i t e d a n i m p o r t a n t A r a m a i c innovation: u s i n g the letters /'/, /h/, /w/, a n d /y/ to r e p r e s e n t t h e long vowels /a/, /e/, /u/, a n d /T/, respectively. A t first u s e d mostly for final vowels, these m a t r e s lectionis ( " m o t h e r s of r e a d i n g " ) could also be u s e d within a w o r d , a n d conceivably for short as well as long vowels. S o m e later dialects fully exploit these possibilities; for e x a m p l e , M a n daic indicates every vowel by a mater. [See M a n d a i c ] H o w ever, the ambiguity i n h e r e n t in a primarily c o n s o n a n t a l sys t e m was n o t resolved until Syriac g r a m m a r i a n s in the fourth c e n t u r y CE i n v e n t e d symbols written a b o v e a n d b e l o w t h e c o n s o n a n t s to express t h e vowels. [See S y r i a c ] Jewish scribes a d o p t e d t h e principle (and s o m e of t h e diacritics) for t h e various vocalization systems developed for t h e s q u a r e script. T h e T i b e r i a n M a s o r e t i c system is still in u s e . Phonology. T h e c o n s o n a n t s a n d vowels of A r a m a i c h a v e u n d e r g o n e a n u m b e r of i m p o r t a n t c h a n g e s t h r o u g h o u t h i s tory. Consonants, T h e oldest A r a m a i c texts h a v e a c o n s o n a n t a l inventory little c h a n g e d f r o m P r o t o - S e m i t i c . O n e peculiarity is the indication of etymological d b y /q/; for e x a m p l e s , t h e
ARAMAIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE T A B L E 1.
Aramaic Phonemes.
T h e Aramaic p h o n e m e s are given,
b y p o i n t of articulation, in s t a n d a r d t r a n s c r i p t i o n . T h e
TABLE 2a.
Inflection of Nouns
squareMasculine
Feminine
Singular N o u n s Absolute Construct Emphatic
— — -a
-a
Plural N o u n s Absolute Construct Emphatic
-in -? -ayycf
-ait -at -ata
s c r i p t e q u i v a l e n t is also given, as well as t h e p h o n e m i c c h a n g e s t h a t b e c o m e s t a n d a r d in later dialects. Old Aramaic Laryngeals Glottal stop Voiceless s p i r a n t
', w r i t t e n s h, w r i t t e n n
Pharyngeals Voiceless s p i r a n t Voiced spirant
h, w r i t t e n n ', w r i t t e n s
Later Dialects
2
Postvelars Voiceless s p i r a n t Voiced spirant
179
-at -ta 1
3
'Old Aramaic also -dt. Syriac -ay. Syriac, JBA, Mandaic -e. h, w r i t t e n n g, w r i t t e n i>
Palatovelars Emphatic stop Voiced stop Voiceless s t o p
q, w r i t t e n p g, w r i t t e n 1 k, w r i t t e n 3
Prepalatals Voiceless sibilant L a t e r a l ( ? ) sibilant
s, w r i t t e n to i w r i t t e n to
Alveolars E m p h a t i c sibilant V o i c e d sibilant Voiceless sibilant
s, w r i t t e n a z, w r i t t e n l s, w r i t t e n o
Interdentals E m p h a t i c spirant Voiced spirant Voiceless s p i r a n t Voiced emphatic stop
f, d, t, d
Dentals E m p h a t i c stop Voiced stop Voiceless s t o p
t, w r i t t e n D d, w r i t t e n i t, w r i t t e n n
Bilabials Voiced stop Voiceless s t o p
b, w r i t t e n 3 p, w r i t t e n Q
Sonorants Lateral Flap(?) D e n t a l nasal Bilabial nasal
I, written"? r, w r i t t e n ~t M, w r i t t e n 3 m, w r i t t e n D
s
written o written i w r i t t e n o/to (?), written p
h(n)
8(0)
1(D) d(t) t(n)
'(»)
original *'ard, " e a r t l i , " is spelled /'rq/ (later dialects V ) . T h e articulation is n o t k n o w n , b u t in later p e r i o d s t h e c o n s o n a n t is written with ayin (/'/). I n I m p e r i a l A r a m a i c , t h e original interdentals (d, |, t) b e c o m e t h e c o r r e s p o n d i n g dentals (d, t„ t). All later dialects reflect this c h a n g e . T h e m e r g e r of h w i t h t a n d of i with j o c c u r r e d in t h e M i d d l e A r a m a i c period. (See table I . ) Vowels. By t h e time Old A r a m a i c e m e r g e d , all final s h o r t vowels h a d d i s a p p e a r e d . T h e o t h e r vowels, only partially indicated orthographically, s h o w s o m e d e v e l o p m e n t a w a y f r o m the P r o t o - S e m i t i c system of six vowels (long a n d s h o r t i a «); for e x a m p l e , u n s t r e s s e d final i b e c o m e s e (written
/h/). T h e position of w o r d stress affected the vowels: D u r i n g t h e M i d d l e A r a m a i c p e r i o d a n d after, short vowels in u n stressed o p e n syllables w e r e eliminated or r e d u c e d to the semivowel shewa (a). In s o m e late dialects, unstressed final long vowels were d r o p p e d . Morphology. M o r p h o l o g y is the analysis of w o r d s t r u c t u r e . A r a m a i c w o r d s can b e analyzed according to their for m a t i o n (the p r o d u c t i o n of lexical items) or their inflection (elements a d d e d to w o r d s t o indicate various nonlexical r e lations, s u c h as n u m b e r , g e n d e r , p e r s o n , a n d so o n ) . Nouns: Inflection and formation. N o u n s are inflected for three " s t a t e s " : absolute, c o n s t r u c t , a n d e m p h a t i c (or deter m i n e d ) . T h e absolute state is the u n m a r k e d state, while the e m p h a t i c state (indicated by final -a) signifies definiteness, similar to a definite article. ( T h e Old A r a m a i c inscriptions from Zincirli, T u r k e y , a n d t h e D e i r 'Alia plaster text do n o t u s e the e m p h a t i c state; it m a y h a v e b e e n a later innovation t h a t s p r e a d t o all the dialects.) [See D e i r 'Alia Inscriptions.] In Syriac a n d L a t e E a s t e r n A r a m a i c , the e m p h a t i c state is the n o r m a l state, while t h e absolute is u s e d only in certain contexts. (See table 2a-b.) N o u n s i n the c o n s t r u c t state are t h e h e a d words of genitive c o n s t r u c t i o n s (see b e l o w ) . I n addition to the states, m o s t n o u n s are m a r k e d for n u m b e r (singular, plural, a n d s o m e times dual) a n d g e n d e r ( m a s c u l i n e , feminine). M o s t n o u n s are f o r m e d by c o m b i n i n g a triconsonantal r o o t a n d a vocalic or vocalic-consonantal p a t t e r n , as in other Semitic lan guages. S o m e of t h e n o m i n a l p a t t e r n s h a v e a regular f u n c -
TABLE 2 b .
Example Showing Inflection of tab, "good" Masculine
Feminine
Singular Absolute Construct Emphatic
tab tab taba
taba tabat tdb'ta
Plural Absolute Construct Emphatic
tabin tabe tdbayyd
t&b&n tabat labdta
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ARAMAIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
TABLE 3.
The Aramaic Verb.
A g o o d i m p r e s s i o n of t h e similarities a n d differences b e t w e e n t h e dialects c a n b e g a i n e d f r o m a s y n o p t i c
table of v e r b conjugations. T h i s table p r e s e n t s t h e c o n j u g a t i o n of t h e r o o t ktb, " t o w r i t e , " in t h e G - s t e m (basic s t e m ) , p e r f e c t a n d i m p e r f e c t tenses. T h e s a m p l e dialects are those for w h i c h d e p e n d a b l e traditions of vocalization exist. " P r o t o - A r a m a i c , " t h e p u t a t i v e a n c e s t o r l a n g u a g e , is purely h y p o t h e t i c a l . S u p e r s c r i p t letters r e p r e s e n t c o n s o n a n t s w r i t t e n b u t n o t p r o n o u n c e d . ProtoAramaic
Targum Onkelos
JPA
Samaritan
Syriac
Mandaic
kataba katabat katabtd katabti katabt(u)
katab katabat katabta katabt katabit
katab katabat katabt katabt katabet
katab katabat katabt katabt katbat
ktav katvat ktavt ktav? kitvet
ktab kitbat ktabt ktabt kitbit
katabu katabd katabtuma katabtina katabna
katabti kataba katabton katablen katabna
katabu katben katabton katabten katabnan
kdtdbu katabi kdtabton kdtabfn kdtabnan
ktav™ ktav', ktaven ktavtun ktavten ktavn
ktab, ktabyun ktab, ktabyan ktabtun ktabtin ktabnin
yaktubu taklubu taktubu taktubina 'aktubu
yiktob tiktob tiktob tiktabin 'ektob
yektob tektob tektob tektabin 'ektob, nektob
yiktab tiktab tiktab tiktdbi iktab
nektuv tektuv tektuv tektvin ektuv
niktub tiktub tiktub tiktub iktub
yaktubuna yaktubna laktubuna taktubnd naktubu
yiktabun yiktaban tiktabun tiktaban niktob
yektabun yektaban tektabun tektaban nektob
yiktdbon yiktdban tihtdbon tiktaban niktab
nekwun nektvan tektvun tektvdn nektuv
nikitbun nikitban tikitbun tikitbun niktub
katab kattdb; haktdb?
miktab kattabd 'aktabd
mektob makattaba maktaba
maktab amkattaba miktaba
mektav mkattavu maktavu
miktab katobi aktobi
Perfect, Singular
3d masc. 3d fern. 2d masc. 2d fern. 1st (com.) Perfect, P l u r a l
3 d masc. 3d fem. 2d masc. 2d fem. 1st (com.) I m p e r f e c t (indicative), Singular
3d masc. 3d fem. 2d masc. 2d fem. 1st (com.) I m p e r f e c t (indicative), Plural
3d masc. 3d fem. 2d m a s c . 2d fem. 1st (com.) Infinitives
G-stem D-stem C-stem
tion, such as the adjectival p a t t e r n kattib (e.g., qaddis, " h o l y , " from qds"; rassf, " w i c k e d , " from rf), or t h e kdtob agentive (z.g.,pardq, " s a v i o r , " from prq), b u t m a n y p a t t e r n s have no systematic function. C o m p o u n d w o r d s are very rare. Verbs: Inflection and formation. V e r b s h a v e two conjuga tions, one with suffixes (the "perfect") a n d o n e with prefixes a n d sometimes suffixes (the " i m p e r f e c t " ) . ' T h e conjugational affixes indicate p e r s o n , n u m b e r , a n d gender. I n O l d a n d Imperial A r a m a i c , the imperfect distinguished b e t w e e n the indicative a n d jussive m o o d s , b u t the later dialects m a d e their paradigms uniform, leveling t h r o u g h the indicative type (Western A r a m a i c ) or t h e jussive type (Syriac, E a s t ern). Infinitives a n d active/passive participles c o m p l e t e t h e system. (See table 3.) Like n o u n s , r o o t / p a t t e r n combinations form verbal " s t e m s . " Unlike n o u n s , the stems form a limited b u t p r o ductive system a n d differentiate certain kinds of action. T h e three principal stems are t h e simple, or G stem for simple
or u n m a r k e d action; t h e D - s t e m (with a d o u b l e d m i d d l e r o o t letter) for repetitive, factitive, or pluritive action; a n d t h e C stem for causative action. E a c h stem h a s a c o r r e s p o n d i n g s t e m with prefixed 'it- ( G t , D t , C t ) , usually indicating d i e passive voice. Early A r a m a i c u s e d a n internal causative p a s sive instead of t h e C t - s t e m ; it also h a d a n internal G - s t e m passive. T h e verb stems in die perfect conjugation with t h e r o o t ktb are as follows (using Biblical A r a m a i c ) : G-stem
katab
Gt-stem
'itkstib
D-stem
katteb
Dt-stem
Htkattab
C-stem
hakteb
C-passive
huktab
I n later dialects, t h e C-passive huktab w a s r e p l a c e d b y 'ittaktab. Syntax.
S y n t a x examines t h e c o m b i n a t i o n of w o r d s into
p h r a s e s , clauses, a n d sentences. Only a few i m p o r t a n t syn tactic features are discussed here. Genitive phrase. T h e oldest t y p e is t h e c o n s t r u c t chain, in
ARAMAIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE w h i c h a n o u n in the c o n s t r u c t state is prosodically b o u n d t o a following n o u n t o p r o d u c e a genitive construction: bayt, " h o u s e " + malka, " t h e l u n g " > bet malka, " t h e h o u s e of the k i n g . " In O l d A r a m a i c t h e c o n s t r u c t p h r a s e begins t o b e r e p l a c e d , u n d e r A k k a d i a n influence, by n o u n s joined b y t h e particle di (later d-): bUa di malka ( s a m e m e a n i n g ) . S u c h c o n s t t u c t i o n s b e c o m e the rule i n t h e later dialects. A c o m m o n s u b t y p e has a suffix o n t h e h e a d - w o r d : beteh di malka, " h i s h o u s e of the k i n g , " or " t h e king's h o u s e . " Verbal function. T h e perfect conjugation is c o m m o n l y u s e d for t h e historical p a s t or t h e perfect. T h e imperfect h a s a m o r e c o m p l i c a t e d d e v e l o p m e n t . In t h e older texts, it h a s an iterative, durative, future, o r precative reference. W h e n u s e d as a p r e c a t i v e , s o m e dialects u s e d a preformative linstead of t h e u s u a l y-. In E a s t e r n A r a m a i c a n d Syriac, t h e precative c a m e to replace die indicative (with die prefor mative I- b e c o m i n g n- in Syriac a n d M a n d a i c ) . A t the s a m e time, the active participle c a m e t o b e u s e d as a p r e s e n t t e n s e a n d , with t h e r o o t hwy, " t o b e , " to d e n o t e p a s t or future c o n t i n u o u s action. I n Syriac a n d L a t e E a s t e r n A r a m a i c , t h e participle often d e n o t e s futurity, a n d t h e imperfect, m o d a l ity, while in the W e s t a t h r e e - t e n s e system formed: p a s t ( p e r fect), p r e s e n t (participle), a n d future (imperfect). Word order. T h e oldest w o r d o r d e r in t h e verbal clause is verb-subject-object ( V S O ) , w i t h a subject-verb-object ( S V O ) as a c o m m o n variant; b o t h o r d e r s are c o m m o n in t h e later dialects. S o m e I m p e r i a l A r a m a i c texts, as well as Biblical A r a m a i c , also use a n S O V o r d e r , a p p a r e n t l y u n d e r A k k a d i a n or Persian influence. Vocabulary. D e s p i t e significant dialect differences, a pervasive u n i t y is seen in c o m m o n A r a m a i c vocabulary. T h e m o s t frequentiy u s e d verbal r o o t s are s h a r e d b y all dialects: slg, " t o go u p " ; nht, " t o go d o w n " ; '11, " t o e n t e r " ; npq, " t o exit"; bd, " t o d o , m a k e " ; mil; " t o s p e a k " ; 'zl, " t o g o " ; yhb, " t o give"; ntl, " t o lift u p " ; a n d so on. T h e s a m e is t r u e of n o u n s , n u m e r a l s , a n d adjectives—for e x a m p l e , had, " o n e " ; rab, " g r e a t " ; 'orah, " w a y " ; 'atar, " p l a c e " ; saggi, " m a n y . " S u c h unity m u s t derive f r o m a c o m m o n divergence from a single ancestor dialect, or f r o m a c o n v e r g e n c e of dialects fostered by c o n s t a n t contact. P r o b a b l y b o t h elements c o n tributed to A r a m a i c uniformity. Contact with other languages. A r a m a i c was u s e d alongside o t h e r languages t h r o u g h o u t its history, a n d it b o t h a b s o r b e d features from t h e m a n d influenced t h e m . A k k a dian h a d great influence, particularly o n t h e shape of I m perial a n d E a s t e r n A r a m a i c (see a b o v e ) , a n d it b o r r o w e d freely from A r a m a i c as well. P e r s i a n also c o n t r i b u t e d m a n y lexemes a n d s o m e g r a m m a t i c a l features. G r e e k l o a n w o r d s a n d constructions b e c a m e increasingly c o m m o n in the B y z antine p e r i o d , especially in Syriac. [See Greek.] I n Jewish circles, A r a m a i c greatly altered H e b r e w ; postbiblical H e b r e w owes m a n y of its characteristic features t o A r a m a i c , a n d A r a m a i c in t u r n b o r r o w e d various religious w o r d s f r o m H e b r e w . Finally, A r a b i c owes its a l p h a b e t a n d a significant c
181
n u m b e r of l o a n w o r d s to A r a m a i c . [See H e b r e w L a n g u a g e and Literature; Arabic] Aramaic dialects. N o texts in t h e hypothetical ancestor language of the A r a m a i c dialects ( " P r o t o - A r a m a i c " ) have survived. F r o m its earliest written a p p e a r a n c e s , A r a m a i c is characterized by dialect divisions. Old Aramaic. T h e earliest O l d A r a m a i c text is a one-line inscription on a n altar f o u n d at Tell Halaf on t h e u p p e r K h a b u r River (KAI 231), possibly f r o m t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. [See Halaf, T e l l ] F r o m a n e a r b y site a n d from a slightly later time is the T e l l F a k h a r i y a h bilingual, a statue bearing inscriptions in Akkadian a n d Old A r a m a i c . [See F a k h a r i y a h A r a m a i c Inscription.] T h e oldest text from Syria is the M e l q a r t stela (KAI 201), a votive inscription to M e l q a r t from " B a r - H a d a d , king of A r a m , " probably from t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE. A l t h o u g h f o u n d n o r t h of A l e p p o , it p r o b a b l y originated in die k i n g d o m of D a m a s c u s . T h e longest texts, t h e Sefire treaty inscriptions (KAI222-224), a p p e a r on three stelae discovered at Sefire, s o u t h of A l e p p o . T h e y contain d i e t e x t of a treaty m a d e b e t w e e n M a t i " e l of A r p a d a n d a certain B a r - G a y a h of K T K (the Assyrian Shamshi-Ilu, a c c o r d i n g to A n d r e L e m a i r e a n d J . - M . D u r a n d , Les inscrip tions arameennes de Sfire et I'Assyrie de Shamshi-ilu, Geneva, Paris, 1984). T h e texts date from the m i d - e i g h t h century BCE. [See Sefire A r a m a i c Inscriptions.] c
T w o eighth-century BCE inscriptions, the H a d a d a n d P a n a m m u inscriptions (KAI 214,215) w e r e discovered at Z i n cirli (ancient S a m ' a l ) . T h e first is on a statue of H a d a d d e d icated by P a n a m m u I of S a m ' a l ; the s e c o n d is on a broken statue, dedicated to P a n a m m u II by his son B a r - R a k k a b (c. 730 BCE). T h e inscriptions are t h e only evidence for die S a m ' a l i a n dialect of A r a m a i c , w h i c h evinces a n u m b e r of archaisms a n d u n u s u a l features, leading s o m e to d o u b t its classification as A r a m a i c . B a r - R a k k a b also left six other texts, n o t written in S a m ' alian, of w h i c h t h e so-called Bauinschrift (KAI 216), detailing his building activities, is the long est a n d best preserved. F r o m t h e ancient k i n g d o m of H a m a t i i c o m e s t h e Z a k k u r stela (KAI 202), a fragmentary inscription from Afis south of A l e p p o . [See Z a k k u r Inscription.] It narrates the rise to kingship of Z a k k u r , " a h u m b l e m a n " (I.2), a n d h o w , having fought off a coalition of foreign kings, h e e m b a r k e d on build ing projects to the glory of his god Iluwer. It probably dates from die early eighth c e n t u r y BCE. T W O funerary inscriptions from N e r a b p r o b a b l y date from t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e seventh c e n t u r y BCE: the Sin-zer-ibni inscription (KAI 225) a n d die S i - g a b b a r inscription (KAI 226), c o m m e m o r a t i n g two priests of t h e g o d Sahr. [See N e r a b Inscriptions.] M o d e r n J o r d a n a n d Israel are t h e sites of two i m p o r t a n t r e c e n t discoveries. T h e m o s t interesting ( a n d perplexing) is t h e D e i r 'Alia plaster text, an inscription in ink p a i n t e d on plaster discovered in 1967 a t T e l l D e i r Alla in J o r d a n . Only fragments are p r e s e r v e d , a n d the r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of the text as a w h o l e is provisional. It is certain, however, t h a t it tells c
182
ARAMAIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
of a vision seen by B a l a a m son of Beor, k n o w n from Num bers 22-24. T h e connections with the biblical text are in triguing. Equally as controversial is the classification of t h e language: despite s o m e features t h a t link it to t h e local C a naanite languages ( H e b r e w or M o a b i t e ) , d i e language of t h e text should b e considered A r a m a i c . T h e newest A r a m a i c discovery is d i e T e l D a n stela, a stone fragment containing 13 incomplete lines discovered in n o r t h e r n Israel in 1993. T h e fragments tell of t h e victory of an A r a m e a n king, p r o b ably Hazael (eighth c e n t u r y BCE), over d i e "king of Israel" a n d t h e "king of t h e h o u s e of D a v i d " — t h a t is, J u d a h — i n w h a t , a p p a r e n d y , is d i e first reference to D a v i d outside t h e H e b r e w Bible. Additional fragments were discovered in I994-
Impend Aramaic. Assyria d o m i n a t e d t h e N e a r E a s t in t h e 8th a n d 7th centuries BCE, a n d t h e texts from this p e r i o d reflect a growing standardization of A r a m a i c — t h e b e g i n n i n g of "Imperial A r a m a i c , " an A r a m a i c koine t h a t left its m a r k on all s u b s e q u e n t dialects. T h e w i d e s p r e a d u s e a n d influence of A r a m a i c dates to the period of Assyrian h e g e m o n y . A narrative from d i e H e b r e w Bible depicts t h e knowl edge of A r a m a i c at this t i m e as a possession of t h e Israelite scribes b u t n o t of t h e c o m m o n people. T h e emissary of S e n nacherib of Assyria c a m e t o Jerusalem in 710 BCE t o d e m a n d surrender. D u r i n g t h e parley, t h e J u d e a n s said, " P l e a s e speak to y o u r servants in A r a m a i c , for we u n d e r s t a n d it. B u t d o n o t speak with us in J u d e a n in t h e hearing of t h e p e o p l e " (2 Kgs. 18:26). W r i t t e n a n d pictorial remains testify to t h e p r e s e n c e of A r a m e a n s a n d A r a m a i c scribes in official ca pacities t h r o u g h o u t t h e region. T h e extant A r a m a i c texts from t h e Assyrian period, h o w ever, are brief. T h e y include 14 inscribed weights from N i n eveh (CIS 1-14), dockets, labels, a n d brief records written or scratched into clay tablets from Assur, N i m r u d , T e l l Halaf, a n d elsewhere. T h e Assur ostracon (KAI 233) is a fragmentary letter s e n t from Babylonia and dated to a b o u t 650 BCE. [See N i n e v e h ; Assur; N i m r u d . ] Aramaic texts from t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d (612-539 BCE) are also few a n d brief, c o m p r i s i n g a few dockets, a n d one fragmentary p a p y r u s , t h e 6th-century A d o n letter (KAI 266), from t h e ruler of E k r o n ( T e l M i q n e ) in Palestine to the P h a r a o h . [See M i q n e , Tel.] T h e original of t h e U r u k incantation m a y date to t h e same period. Its magical text contains an archaic form of E a s t e r n A r a m a i c written in syl labic cuneiform o n a tablet dating to d i e third century BCE. T h e high p o i n t of Imperial A r a m a i c is in the P e r s i a n p e riod (539-332 BCE). T h e A c h a e m e n i d dynasty c o n t i n u e d t h e practice of u s i n g A r a m a i c as a lingua franca, a n d textual r e m a i n s from every p o i n t of t h e far-flung Persian E m p i r e attest to its u s e in law, administration, a n d literature. T h e largest a n d m o s t significant remains have c o m e from E g y p t , w h e r e t h e climate is ideal for preserving writings o n leather a n d p a p y r u s . O n e of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t m a n u s c r i p t finds of t h e century was t h e discovery in 1906 of t h e archives of
t h e Jewish colony at E l e p h a n t i n e , c o m p r i s i n g m o r e t h a n o n e h u n d r e d relatively intact p a p y r i . D a t i n g from t h e fifth c e n tury BCE, t h e y i n c l u d e t e n official letters t o a n d f r o m t h e h e a d of the c o m m u n i t y , several family archives, a n d n u m e r o u s administrative, legal, epistolary, a n d literary d o c u m e n t s . [See P a p y r u s ; Elephantine.] T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t literary t e x t is a c o p y of t h e W o r d s of Ahiqar, later versions of w h i c h are k n o w n f r o m other l a n guages. It is the story of h o w t h e sage A h i q a r , advisor to Assyrian royalty, w a s b e t r a y e d b y his n e p h e w N a d a n a n d later restored to favor. T h e " p r o v e r b s " of A h i q a r c o n t a i n e d in t h e d o c u m e n t are a significant e x a m p l e of N e a r E a s t e r n w i s d o m literature. Also f o u n d at E l e p h a n t i n e w a s an ancient translation of t h e Bisitun inscription of D a r i u s . [See Bisitun.] O t h e r significant d o c u m e n t s from E g y p t are t h e c o r r e s p o n d e n c e of A r s h a m , t h e P e r s i a n satrap of E g y p t ; t h e H e r m o polis letters, private letters written in a n o n s t a n d a r d dialect; p a p y r i a n d inscriptions from M e m p h i s S a q q a r a , A b y d o s , Giza, L u x o r , E d f u , a n d elsewhere. [See M e m p h i s ; S a q q a r a ; A b y d o s ; Giza.] O n e of t h e m o s t r e m a r k a b l e d o c u m e n t s is t h e A m h e r s t d e m o t i c p a p y r u s , a long, f r a g m e n t a r y scroll of religious a n d narrative texts in A r a m a i c written in E g y p t i a n d e m o t i c script. Still only partially p u b l i s h e d , t h e often id iosyncratic use of d e m o t i c characters m a k e s t h e p a p y r u s dif ficult to u n d e r s t a n d . O t h e r Imperial A r a m a i c d o c u m e n t s from Syria-Palestine, M e s o p o t a m i a , Asia M i n o r , I r a n (es pecially P e r s e p o l i s ) , Afghanistan, a n d Arabia ( T a y m a ' ) , s h o w its w i d e s p r e a d use. [See Persepolis; T a y m a ' . ] T h e A r amaic sections of t h e Book of Ezra in t h e H e b r e w Bible, putatively dating f r o m t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d , are written in I m perial Aramaic. Middle Aramaic. W h e n t h e G r e e k s c a m e to p o w e r in t h e N e a r East in the f o u r t h c e n t u r y BCE, A r a m a i c lost its official status. H o w e v e r , its long career as a lingua franca left its m a r k on every dialect, a n d t h e local v e r n a c u l a r s c o n t i n u e d to play major roles. T h e " p o s t - I m p e r i a l " p e r i o d , d u r i n g which t h e local dialects d e v e l o p e d as literary s t a n d a r d s in their o w n right, is called M i d d l e A r a m a i c . N a b a t e a n was u s e d in N o r t h Arabia, Sinai, a n d P e t r a in J o r d a n . Archaeologists h a v e f o u n d t h o u s a n d s of N a b a t e a n graffiti a n d burial inscriptions d a t i n g f r o m t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE t o t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y CE. Several N a b a t e a n legal texts have b e e n discovered in caves in t h e J u d e a n wilderness. I n general. N a b a t e a n is conservative, b e i n g m u c h influenced b y Imperial A r a m a i c . It contains a n u m b e r of loans from Arabic, t h e region's principal vernacular. T h e N a b a t e a n s developed a highly individual cursive script t h a t was t h e di rect ancestor of t h e A r a b i c script. [See N a b a t e a n I n s c r i p tions; Sinai; Petra.] T o t h e west, Jewish Palestinian A r a m a i c is attested f r o m t h e finds from t h e D e a d Sea wilderness, principally W a d i Q u m r a n . [See Q u m r a n . ] A b o u t 25 p e r c e n t of t h e D e a d Sea Scrolls w e r e written in A r a m a i c , i n c l u d i n g t h e o l d e s t t a r g u m (Aramaic Bible t r a n s l a t i o n ) , t h e T a r g u m of J o b . O t h e r i m -
ARAMAIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE p o r t a n t texts i n c l u d e t h e Genesis Apocryphon (a retelling of d i e patriarchal narratives), t h e Book of Tobit, t h e Book of Enoch, a n d t h e Testament of Levi. O t h e r texts, i n c l u d i n g apocalypses, stories, a n d legal texts, h a v e recently b e e n p u b lished, a n d testify t o a rich A r a m a i c literary culture in t h e centuries f r o m a b o u t 200 BCE t o t h e mid-first c e n t u r y CE. T h e A r a m a i c sections of t h e Book of Daniel p r o b a b l y b e l o n g to this p e r i o d , a l t h o u g h in s o m e respects its l a n g u a g e is m o r e archaic t h a n t h a t in t h e Q u m r a n d o c u m e n t s . Inscriptional material is sparse, b u t t h e r e a r e s o m e burial texts a n d graffiti o n ossuaries. L e t t e r s a n d legal d o c u m e n t s from t h e S e c o n d Jewish Revolt against R o m e (132-35 CE) f o u n d in other cave sites n e a r t h e D e a d Sea i n c l u d e letters ( s o m e in A r a m a i c ) written b y t h e revolt's leader, S h i m ' o n b a r K o s e b a / B a r K o k h b a . [See J u d e a n D e s e r t C a v e s ; D e a d Sea Scrolls; B a r K o k h b a Revolt.] T h e Q u m r a n dialect itself is conservative, b u t less so t h a n N a b a t e a n . B y t h e time of t h e S e c o n d Revolt, t h e v e r n a c u l a r was b e g i n n i n g t o shake off t h e influence of t h e old I m p e r i a l dialect, particularly in t h e B a r K o k h b a let ters. T h e legal texts often p r e s e r v e t h e formularies of earlier centuries. F r o m the same period, the Greek N e w T e s t a m e n t pre serves a few w o r d s a n d brief s e n t e n c e s in A r a m a i c ; this, c o m b i n e d w i t h o t h e r e v i d e n c e , h a s given A r a m a i c a r e p u tation as t h e " l a n g u a g e of J e s u s . " A l t h o u g h A r a m a i c w a s c o m m o n l y u s e d , it is n o t certain t h a t Jesus a n d t h e early Palestinian c h u r c h u s e d it exclusively b e c a u s e H e b r e w a n d G r e e k w e r e also widely s p o k e n at t h e time. T h e oasis of P a l m y r a ( T a d m o r ) in t h e Syrian desert yielded t h o u s a n d s of inscriptions in its n a t i o n a l script dating f r o m 44 BCE to 272 CE, i n c l u d i n g t h e longest A r a m a i c i n scription k n o w n , t h e Tariff Bilingual in G r e e k a n d P a l m y r e n e (137 CE). [See P a l m y r e n e Inscriptions.] P a l m y r e n e is a transitional dialect sharing b o t h W e s t e r n a n d E a s t e r n fea t u r e s . F a r t h e r n o r t h , a b o u t seventy votive a n d funerary i n scriptions in E d e s s e n e ( O l d Syriac) survive from the first a n d s e c o n d centuries CE. A s its n a m e indicates, this literary dialect originated i n E d e s s a ( m o d e r n U r f a ) . T h e oldest i n scription is d a t e d to 6 CE. Finally, t h e A r a m a i c of t h e P a r t h i a n E m p i r e is f o u n d o n h u n d r e d s of votive inscriptions from H a t r a , a n oasis o n t h e u p p e r T i g r i s River, from A s s u r a n d a few o t h e r sites. T h e y date from t h e first-third c e n t u r i e s CE. T h e m o r p h o l o g y of H a t r a n already displays t h e traits of t h e later E a s t e r n dia lects. [See H a t r a Inscriptions.] • Late Aramaic. T h e late dialects ( 2 0 0 CE-700 CE) are g e n erally associated w i t h t h e n a t i o n a l or religious g r o u p s t h a t u s e d t h e m . T h e y a r e typically divided geographically into E a s t e r n ( M e s o p o t a m i a n ) a n d W e s t e r n (Palestinian) dia lects. T h i s division is simplistic a n d s h o u l d b e revised t o i n c l u d e C e n t r a l A r a m a i c (see b e l o w ) , w h i c h is c o m p r i s e d of classical Syriac a n d other dialects n o t clearly falling into t h e E a s t - W e s t categories. W e s t e r n A r a m a i c includes t h e dialects-used b y t h e t h r e e
183
principal religious g r o u p s of Palestine in the Byzantine p e riod: Jewish Palestinian A r a m a i c , Christian Palestinian A r a m a i c , a n d S a m a r i t a n A r a m a i c . Jewish Palestinian A r a m a i c (JPA) is u s e d in t h e Palestinian t a r g u m , a translation of t h e P e n t a t e u c h p r e s e r v e d in v a r i o u s r e c e n s i o n s , including texts from t h e C a i r o geniza, liturgical selections k n o w n as t h e F r a g m e n t - T a r g u m , a n d t h e virtually c o m p l e t e T a r g u m Neoffti. A s o m e w h a t different (later?) dialect is u s e d in t h e Palestinian T a l m u d a n d d i e Palestinian rabbinic c o m m e n taries ( m i d r a s h i m ) . A l t h o u g h J P A developed from dialects s p o k e n in an earlier p e r i o d , occasional efforts to study it simply as t h e first-century CE vernacular ( a n d therefore t h e l a n g u a g e of Jesus) h a v e n o t b e e n successful. Christian P a l estinian A r a m a i c ( C P A ) is preserved in inscriptions a n d m a n u s c r i p t s of t h e Melkite Christians, primarily from t h e t l i i r d - n i n t h centuries CE. A l m o s t all of t h e literature is t r a n s lated from G r e e k a n d includes biblical texts, liturgies, ser m o n s , a n d biographies. C P A is written in a form of t h e Syr iac script, a n d i n d e e d Syriac was an i m p o r t a n t influence o n it. S a m a r i t a n A r a m a i c w a s u s e d by t h e S a m a r i t a n sect of J u d a i s m . T h e S a m a r i t a n s h a d their o w n t a r g u m (in two r e censions) a n d religious literature, including chronicles, ser m o n s , a n d liturgical p o e t r y . [See Samaritans.] E a s t e r n A r a m a i c is c o m p r i s e d of Jewish Babylonian A r a m a i c (JBA) a n d M a n d a i c . JBA was t h e language of t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n Jewish c o m m u n i t y . T h e A r a m a i c p o r t i o n s of t h e B a b y l o n i a n T a l m u d are t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t witness to this dialect. H u n d r e d s of bowls b e a r i n g magical incantations in JBA f r o m excavations at N i p p u r a n d other sites in L o w e r M e s o p o t a m i a constitute crucial nonliterary evidence for JBA. M a n d a i c was u s e d b y t h e M a n d a e a n s , a G n o s t i c sect living in p a r t s of I r a n a n d I r a q since L a t e Antiquity. M a n daic, u s e d in their v o l u m i n o u s religious literature (also in cluding incantation bowls a n d other magical texts), is very close to JBA in its g r a m m a r a n d v o c a b u l a r y b u t has its o w n distinctive script and o r t h o g r a p h y . C e n t r a l A r a m a i c is virtually equivalent to Syriac, t h e writ t e n variety of t h e s t a n d a r d A r a m a i c of S y r i a - U p p e r M e s o p o t a m i a d u r i n g t h e B y z a n t i n e period. T h e r e is m o r e surviv ing literature in Syriac t h a n in a n y other A r a m a i c dialect b e c a u s e it was u s e d b y a v a s t p o r t i o n of E a s t e r n Christianity for liturgy, translations of secular works, a n d religious lit e r a t u r e , i n c l u d i n g o n e of t h e oldest Bible translations, t h e Peshitta. Syriac Christianity, divided b y doctrinal controversies, split into t w o g r o u p s d u r i n g t h e fifth a n d sixth centuries CE. T h e W e s t e r n (Jacobite) b r a n c h , centered on Edessa in the B y z a n t i n e E m p i r e , a n d t h e E a s t e r n (Nestorian) b r a n c h , centered at Nisibis in t h e P e r s i a n s p h e r e , evolved their o w n scripts, p r o n u n c i a t i o n , a n d literary traditions. I n b o t h f o r m s , Syriac c o n t i n u e d t o b e a creative m e d i u m of literature until a r o u n d d i e f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y CE. It still survives in its clas sical f o r m as a liturgical a n d scholarly language. T h e lan g u a g e of T a r g u m O n k e l o s a n d T a r g u m J o n a t h a n , t h e m o s t
184
ARAMEANS
widely u s e d t a r g u m s in J u d a i s m , h a s p r o v e d difficult t o clas sify. A l t h o u g h m a n y c o n s i d e r it t o b e l o n g t o M i d d l e P a l e s tinian
A r a m a i c , it m a y b e a Jewish variety of early C e n t r a l
Aramaic. Late literary
dialects.
A r a m a i c declined as a s p o k e n l a n
g u a g e after t h e rise of A r a b p o w e r a n d prestige u n d e r I s l a m , b u t t h e literary dialects c o n t i n u e d in u s e . Syriac, as n o t e d , e n d u r e d as a literary m e d i u m to m o d e r n times. A n u m b e r of Jewish Bible translations w e r e written in late J e w i s h L i t e r a r y A r a m a i c , a dialect c o m b i n i n g E a s t e r n , W e s t e r n , a n d Syriac features. C P A ' s s e c o n d p r i n c i p a l literary p e r i o d o c c u r r e d d u r i n g t h e e l e v e n t h - t h i r t e e n t h centuries CE. Modern
Aramaic.
S o m e f o r m s of A r a m a i c are still s p o k e n
in various e t h n i c enclaves of t h e N e a r E a s t . W e s t e r n A r a m a i c is r e p r e s e n t e d b y t h e l a n g u a g e of t h e S y r i a n t o w n of M a ' l u l a a n d o t h e r n e a r b y villages a n d E a s t e r n A r a m a i c b y a n u m b e r of dialects s p o k e n i n p a r t s of T u r k e y , I r a q , a n d I r a n . T h e p h o n o l o g y a n d v o c a b u l a r y of t h e m o d e r n dialects are heavily i n f l u e n c e d b y A r a b i c , T u r k i s h , a n d P e r s i a n . [See also A r a m e a n s ; I m p erial A r a m a i c ; and P a l e s t i n i a n A r amaic] BIBLIOGRAPHY Beyer, Klaus. Die aramaischen Texts vom Toten Meer. Gottingen, 1 9 8 4 . Collection of D e a d Sea documents as well as other texts from t h e period, along with a general description and history of Aramaic, an outline grammar, a n d lexicon. A n ambitious b u t idiosyncratic study. A n Ergdnzungsband a p p e a r e d in 1994. Brockelmann, Carl. lexicon Syriacum, zd ed. Halle, 1928. D e g e n , Rainer. Altaramaische Grammatik der Inschriften des 10.-18. Jh. v. Chr. Wiesbaden, 1 9 6 9 . Complete text a n d grammatical descrip tion of Old Aramaic texts known to 1969. D o n n e r , Herbert, and Wolfgang Rollig. Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften (KAI). 3 vols. 2d ed. Wiesbaden, 1969. Useful collection of most of the major Aramaic inscriptions, including bibliography, commentary, and glossary.
sive s u m m a r y of research a n d suggests directions for inquiry into t h e earlier dialects. M a c u c h , Rudolf. Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandate. Berlin, 1965. M a c u c h , Rudolf. Grammatik des samaritanischen Aram&isch. Berlin, 1982. Mtiller-Kessler, Christa. Grammatik des Chrisllich-Palastinisch-Aramdischen, vol. 1, Schriftlehre, Lautlehre, Formenlehre. Hildesheim, 1 9 9 1 . Comprehensive g r a m m a r based on a reexamination of t h e manuscripts a n d inscriptions. M u r a o k a , T a k a m i t s u , ed. Studies in Qumran Aramaic. A b r - N a h r a i n , S u p p l e m e n t Series, vol. 3. L e i d e n , 1 9 9 2 . Essays o n general a n d p a r ticular linguistic issues raised by the Aramaic dialect of the D e a d Sea Scrolls. Noldeke, T h e o d o r . Compendious Syriac Grammar. T r a n s l a t e d by James A. Crichton. Rev. e d . L o n d o n , 1904. T h i s research g r a m m a r has n o t been equaled for its grasp of detail, especially in syntax. Porten, Bezalel, a n d A d a Yardeni. Textbook of Ancient Aramaic Docu ments from Ancient Egypt, vol. 1, Letters; vol. 2 , Contracts; vol. 3 , Lit erature, Accounts, Lists. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 6 - 1 9 9 2 . N e w edition of all t h e Elephantine papyri a n d other important Imperial A r a m a i c texts, i n cluding excellent facsimiles b y Yardeni. Rosenthal, Franz. Die aramaistische Forschung seit Th. Noldekes Veroffentlichungen. Leiden, 1 9 3 9 . Classic study of early linguistic research on Aramaic. Rosenthal, Franz. A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic. Porta L i n g u a r u m Orientalium, n.s. 5. Wiesbaden, 1 9 7 4 . Segert, Stanislav. Altaramaische Grammatik mil Bibliographic, Chrestomathie und Glossar. Leipzig, 1 9 7 5 . Detailed structural study of Old, Imperial, a n d Biblical Aramaic. Sokoloff, Michael. A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byz antine Period. R a m a t G a n , 1990. T h e first lexicon devoted solely t o J P A , compiled on the basis of die best m a n u s c r i p t evidence. Vogue, Melchior de. Corpus inscriptionum semilicamm, p a r t 2, Inscriptiones aramaicae. Paris, 1889. M o n u m e n t a l collection of m o r e than four thousand texts, sketchy for Old a n d Imperial Aramaic (both then little known) b u t admirably comprehensive for N a b a t e a n a n d Palmyrene inscriptions. EDWARD M . C O O K
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. " T h e Phases of the Aramaic L a n g u a g e . " In Fitzmyer's A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays, p p . 5 7 - 8 4 . Missoula, 1 9 7 9 . Description and defense of Fitzmyer's periodization of Aramaic.
ARAMEANS
Fitzmyer, Joseph A., a n d Stephen A. Kaufman. An Aramaic Bibliogra phy, part 1, Old, Official, and Biblical Aramaic. Baltimore a n d L o n don, 1992. Indispensable tool for studying the early dialects of A r amaic.
N e a r E a s t , p a r t i c u l a r l y Syria a n d M e s o p o t a m i a , in t h e first
Garr, W . Randall. Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E. Philadelphia, 1985. Methodologically significant study of di alect relationships, including Old Aramaic.
d e s i g n a t e s a n u m b e r of linguistically r e
lated e t h n i c g r o u p s w h o s p o k e t h e W e s t S e m i t i c l a n g u a g e called A r a m a i c a n d w h o i n h a b i t e d a c o n s i d e r a b l e p a r t of t h e
m i l l e n n i u m BCE. A n u m b e r of A r a m e a n n a t i o n - s t a t e s d e v e l o p e d i n Syria in t h e late e l e v e n t h a n d t h e t e n t h c e n t u r i e s BCE t h a t b e c a m e influential i n t h e political a n d c u l t u r a l d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e L e v a n t . A r a m e a n tribes also b e c a m e a m a j o r p o p u l a t i o n e l e m e n t in b o t h Assyria a n d B a b y l o n i a i n t h e first
Hoftijzer, Jacob, a n d Karel Jongeling. Dictionary of the North-West Se mitic Inscriptions. Leiden, 1995. An able and comprehensive t w o volume lexicon incorporating all the Old a n d Imperial Aramaic in scriptions (as well as Palmyrene, Hatran, and N a b a t e a n ) . Includes R. C. Steiner and A. M . Mashawi, " A Selective Glossary of N o r t h west Semitic T e x t s in Egyptian Script."
half of d i e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, SO t h a t e v e n t u a l l y A r a m a i c
K a u f m a n , Stephen A. The Akkadian Influences on Aramaic. Chicago, 1974. O n e of the few works to provide extensive treatment of t h e major linguistic influences on Aramaic.
t h e i r first certain a p p e a r a n c e in historical t e x t s only in t h e
Kutscher, E d u a r d Y. " A r a m a i c . " In Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 6, Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa, edited by T h o m a s A. Sebeok, p p . 3 4 7 - 4 1 2 . T h e Hague, 1 9 7 0 . Presents a c o m p r e h e n
b e c a m e t h e p r i m a r y s p o k e n l a n g u a g e of t h e F e r t i l e C r e s c e n t , largely r e p l a c i n g A k k a d i a n i n t h e e a s t a n d t h e local W e s t S e m i t i c dialects, s u c h as H e b r e w , in t h e w e s t . T h e origins o f t h e A r a m e a n s a r e o b s c u r e . T h e y
make
early e l e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. S o m e s c h o l a r s believe t h a t t h e y w e r e pastoralist t r i b e s living o n t h e b o r d e r s of t h e S y r i a n d e s e r t w h o s w e p t n o r t h w a r d i n t o n o r t h e r n Syria a n d U p p e r M e s o p o t a m i a d u r i n g t h e last y e a r s of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n -
ARAMEANS
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ARAMEAN CITY STATES
n i u m . After establishing t h e m s e l v e s t h e r e , t h e tribes m i g r a t e d b o t h t o w a r d t h e s o u t h w e s t , into central a n d s o u t h e r n Syria, a n d s o u t h e a s t w a r d , into central a n d s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . T h o s e scholars w h o disagree w i t h this m o d e l s u g gest t h a t t h e A r a m e a n s w e r e simply t h e d e s c e n d a n t s of t h e W e s t Semitic p o p u l a t i o n of Syria, k n o w n from earlier sec o n d - m i l l e n n i u m s o u r c e s as A m o r i t e s a n d A h l a m u . A l t h o u g h political p o w e r in n o r t h e r n Syria h a d b e e n h e l d b y the H u r rians in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , t h e I r o n A g e saw a r e s u r g e n c e of Semitic aristocracies (i.e., A r a m e a n s ) in c o n t r o l of m a n y areas. T h e A r a m e a n s n e v e r d e v e l o p e d a unified culture or p o
litical entity. N u m e r o u s small states developed t h r o u g h o u t Syria a n d flourished b e t w e e n the eleventh a n d t h e late eighth centuries BCE, alongside o t h e r states w h o s e aristocracies b e l o n g e d t o L u w i a n - s p e a k i n g g r o u p s t h a t h a d m i g r a t e d into n o r t h e r n Syria after t h e collapse of t h e Hittite E m p i r e . T h e A r a m e a n states w e r e eventually demolished, b o t h e c o n o m ically a n d ethnically, b y t h e Assyrians, t h r o u g h brutal mili tary s u p p r e s s i o n a n d m a s s d e p o r t a t i o n of p o p u l a t i o n s . A l t h o u g h d o z e n s of A r a m e a n tribes a n d states existed t h r o u g h o u t Syria, only a few of t h e m b e c a m e politically sig nificant a n d played major roles in t h a t region's political h i s tory.
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1. Bit-Zamani, Bit-Bahiani, Bit-Halupe, and Laqu. F o u r A r a m e a n states developed quite early along t h e western b o r der with Assyria, b u t they c a m e u n d e r Assyrian d o m i n a t i o n by t h e ninth c e n t u r y BCE. T h e i m p o r t a n t city of G u z a n a (Tell Halaf) was t h e capital of one of these states, BitBahiani. T h e excavations there p r o v i d e d significant evi d e n c e of early A r a m e a n public art a n d architecture.
offer little or n o insight into t h e internal s t r u c t u r e of t h e A r a m e a n k i n g d o m s . I n addition, r e m a r k a b l y little a r c h a e o logical work has b e e n d o n e o n t h e i m p o r t a n t sites, a n d m o s t of t h e large-scale excavations t h a t h a v e t a k e n p l a c e , s u c h as at Arslan T a s h , T e l l A h m a r , T e l l Halaf, a n d Zincirli, w e r e in t h e late n i n e t e e n t h or early t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r i e s , before reliable field a n d r e c o r d i n g t e c h n i q u e s w e r e d e v e l o p e d .
2 . Bit-Adini. L o c a t e d in the great b e n d of t h e E u p h r a t e s River, Bit-Adini was a formidable o p p o n e n t to Assyrian ex p a n s i o n d u r i n g t h e early ninth century BCE. E x c a v a t i o n s have taken place at two i m p o r t a n t cities of Bit-Adini—Til Barsip (Tell A h m a r ) , w h i c h m a y n o t actually have c o m e u n d e r A r a m e a n control until the reign of A h u n i , t h e last king of Bit-Adini, a n d H a d a t u (Arslan T a s h ) , which b e c a m e an i m p o r t a n t Assyrian o u t p o s t in the region after Bit-Adini was annexed.
N o t m u c h can b e said a b o u t A r a m e a n culture b e c a u s e so little archaeological a n d literary d a t a has b e e n r e c o v e r e d so far. T h e A r a m e a n s d o n o t a p p e a r t o h a v e m a d e major c o n tributions either to political or social practices in t h e L e v a n t ; a n d their styles of art a n d architecture a r e largely b a s e d o n those of others. I n n o r t h e r n Syria, t h e artistic a n d architec tural traditions of t h e A r a m e a n s w e r e heavily influenced first b y t h e N e o - H i t t i t e states, which p r e s e r v e d m a n y cultural elements of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e Hittite civilization, a n d later b y the Assyrians. T h e few artistic pieces from s o u t h e r n Syria show a strong cultural influence f r o m Phoenicia. T h e A r a m e a n s in Babylonia a p p e a r to h a v e a d a p t e d t o B a b y l o n i a n styles.
3. Bit-Agusi. In t h e region s u r r o u n d i n g A l e p p o , t h e state of Bit-Agusi was called Y a h a n early in the n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE, a n d , sometimes, A r p a d , after its capital city, in t h e eighth century. T h i s state, u n d e r vigorous kings, b e c a m e a p r i m a r y p o w e r in n o r t h e r n Syria in t h e ninth a n d eighth centuries BCE a n d was n o t fully s u b d u e d b y t h e Assyrians until 743 BCE, during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III. L i m i t e d exca vations have b e e n u n d e r t a k e n at A r p a d (Tell Rifa'af), a n d an i m p o r t a n t A r a m a i c treaty b e t w e e n king M a t f ' e l of BitAgusi a n d o n e B a r - G a ' y a of t h e land of ktk, inscribed o n stone stelae, was f o u n d at t h e site of Sefire, in the s o u t h e r n p a r t of the k i n g d o m . 4. Aram Damascus. I n s o u t h e r n Syria, A r a m D a m a s c u s played a major role in the L e v a n t in the ninth a n d eight centuries BCE, with t h e p e a k of its p o w e r occurring in t h e m i d a n d late n i n t h century, u n d e r its kings H a d a d - i d r i a n d Hazael. N o excavations h a v e r e a c h e d I r o n A g e levels at D a mascus. 5. Sam'al (Zincirli). M e n t i o n should also b e m a d e of t h e small city-state of S a m ' a l (Zincirli). Excavations at this site p r o d u c e d considerable sculpture, architecture, a n d i n s c r i p tions that are an i m p o r t a n t source of study for n o r t h A r a m e a n culture. 6. Other states in Syria. T h e r e were certainly large p o p ulations of A r a m e a n s in other states in Syria, although t h e y were often ruled by m e m b e r s of t h e N e o - H i t t i t e aristocracy. S o m e states h a d b o t h a L u w i a n a n d an Aramaic n a m e , s u c h as P a m n a / U n q i . T h e i m p o r t a n t k i n g d o m of H a m a t h w a s ruled in t h e t e n t h a n d n i n t h centuries BCE b y dynasts with N e o - H i t t i t e n a m e s , b u t b y kings with A r a m a i c n a m e s in t h e eighth century BCE. Literary r e m a i n s of the I r o n A g e A r a m e a n states are very limited. A few A r a m a i c inscriptions o n stone are k n o w n , b u t m o s t of the historical information available a b o u t these king d o m s c o m e s from Assyrian texts a n d t h e H e b r e w Bible. T h e s e two sources, while helpful, are of limited value, h o w ever, because they deal almost exclusively with t h e conflicts b e t w e e n their own nations a n d t h e A r a m e a n states. T h e y
A r a m a i c inscriptions indicate t h a t A r a m e a n religion d e s c e n d e d from the W e s t Semitic religion of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m . T h e weatlier/fertility god, H a d a d , a p p e a r s to h a v e b e e n t h e h e a d of t h e p a n t h e o n i n several of t h e A r a m e a n states, while the m o o n g o d Sin/Shahar, El, Rakib-el, S h a m a s h , a n d R e s h e p h seem t o h a v e played significant roles. T h e major legacy of t h e A r a m e a n s was their l a n g u a g e a n d script. B e c a u s e t h e y w e r e p r o b a b l y t h e largest p o p u l a t i o n g r o u p in Syria, their l a n g u a g e c a m e to d o m i n a t e t h a t area early in the first m i l l e n n i u m BCE. T h e m a s s d e p o r t a t i o n s of A r a m e a n s into Assyria in t h e n i n t h a n d eighth centuries r e sulted in t h e s p r e a d of t h e language into n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a ; b y the late eighth c e n t u r y it w a s b e i n g u s e d as a diplomatic l a n g u a g e b y t h e Assyrians t h e m s e l v e s . I n t h e Neo-Babylonian period, Aramaic became the most com m o n language in Babylonia as well. T h e P e r s i a n g o v e r n m e n t a d o p t e d A r a m a i c as its international l a n g u a g e , so t h a t it c a m e t o be u s e d c o m m o n l y across s o u t h w e s t Asia. T h u s , archives of A r a m a i c p a p y r i from E g y p t i n t h e P e r s i a n p e riod, A r a m a i c d o c u m e n t s from Palestine in t h e fourth c e n tury BCE, a n d inscriptions from T u r k e y , I r a n , a n d even Af ghanistan h a v e b e e n f o u n d . Eventually, Palestine's local W e s t Semitic dialects, including Flebrew, died a w a y a n d were replaced with A r a m a i c . By t h e last t w o centuries BCE, A r a m a i c h a d b e c o m e an i m p o r t a n t l a n g u a g e for Jewish lit e r a t u r e , a n d Syriac, an A r a m a i c dialect, p l a y e d a n i m p o r t a n t role in t h e E a s t e r n c h u r c h in t h e R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e p e riods. T h e A r a m e a n s b o r r o w e d their script f r o m t h e P h o e n i cians, p r o b a b l y in t h e late eleventh or early t e n t h c e n t u r y . H o w e v e r , t h e y m a d e a significant a d a p t a t i o n t o P h o e n i c i a n writing customs: t h e y w e r e the first to u s e s o m e of t h e al p h a b e t i c letters to indicate vowel s o u n d s (the so-called ma tres lectionis). T h i s i m p o r t a n t c o n t r i b u t i o n to o r t h o g r a p h y
ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA was slowly a d o p t e d b y other c u l t u r e s , including Israel. E v e n tually, t h e A r a m a i c script itself c a m e t o replace t h e o t h e r national scripts of Syria-Palestine, i n c l u d i n g t h a t of H e b r e w . T h e s q u a r e script c o m m o n l y u s e d in J u d e a (Judah) b y t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, w h i c h is t h e a n c e s t o r of t h e H e b r e w b o o k script u s e d today, is actually a d e s c e n d a n t of A r a m a i c script. [See also A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d L i t e r a t u r e , D a m a s c u s ; Halaf, Tell; and Syria, article on Syria in t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brinkman, J o h n A. A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia, 1158-722 B.C. R o m e , 1968. See this and the following for infor mation about the A r a m e a n tribes in Babylonia. Brinkman, John A. Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747-626 B.C. Philadelphia, 1 9 8 4 . Fitzmyer, Joseph A., a n d S t e p h e n A. K a u f m a n . An Aramaic Bibliogra phy, p a r t 1, Old, Official, and Biblical Aramaic. Baltimore and L o n d o n , 1992. M o n u m e n t a l , comprehensive bibliography of all p u b lished Aramaic inscriptions a n d papyri. G i b s o n , John C . L . Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 2, Ara maic Inscriptions. Oxford, 1 9 7 5 . C o n v e n i e n t English translation of t h e major Aramaic inscriptions. Greenfield, Jonas C. "Aspects of A r a m e a n Religion." In Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, edited by Patrick D , Miller, Jr., et al., p p . 6 7 - 7 8 . Philadelphia, 1 9 8 7 . Brief, helpful dis cussion of a topic that has barely b e e n examined in print. Hawkins, J. D . " T h e Neo-Hittite States in Syria a n d Anatolia." In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 3 . 1 , edited b y J o h n B o a r d m a n et al., p p . 3 7 2 - 4 4 1 . C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 2 . T h o r o u g h , rather technical survey of t h e history a n d culture of I r o n Age Syrian states. L a y t o n , Scott C . " O l d Aramaic Inscriptions." Biblical Archaeologist s i (1988,): 1 7 2 - 1 8 9 . F i n e , recent survey of the earliest k n o w n Aramaic inscriptions. Pitard, W a y n e T . Ancient Damascus: A Historical Study of the Syrian City-State from Earliest Times until Its Fall to the Assyrians in 732 B.C.E. W i n o n a L a k e , I n d „ 1 9 8 7 . Detailed a c c o u n t of this important southern Syrian state. Pitard, W a y n e T . " T h e A r a m a e a n s . " I n Peoples of the Old Testament World, edited by Alfred J. H o e r t h , Gerald L . Mattingly a n d E d w i n Y a m a u c h i , p p . 2 0 7 - 2 3 0 . G r a n d R a p i d s , M i c h . , 1994. General intro duction to A r a m e a n history a n d culture. Sader, Helene. Les etats aramiens de Syrie depuis leur fondation jusqu'd leur transformation en provinces assyriennes. Beirut, 1987. Deals in d e tail with Bit-Bahiani, Bit-Adini, Bit-Agusi, Sam'al, H a m a t h , a n d Aram-Damascus. W A Y N E T . PITARD
A R A R A T . See U r a r t u .
A R C E . .See A m e r i c a n R e s e a r c h C e n t e r in E g y p t .
ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF A M E R I C A . F o u n d e d in 1879 b y C h a r l e s Eliot N o r t o n , t h e Archaeological Institute of A m e r i c a (ALA) is a not-forprofit, scientific a n d e d u c a t i o n a l organization c h a r t e r e d
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t h r o u g h t h e S m i t h s o n i a n Institution b y t h e U . S . C o n g r e s s . T h e following act of i n c o r p o r a t i o n was a p p r o v e d b y P r e s i d e n t T h e o d o r e Roosevelt for t h e Archaelogical Institute of A m e r i c a o n 26 M a y 1906: " [ T h e Institute] shall have p e r petual succession for t h e p u r p o s e of p r o m o t i n g archaeolog ical studies b y investigation a n d research in the U n i t e d States a n d foreign countries . . . b y aiding t h e efforts of t h e i n d e p e n d e n t explorers, b y publication of archaeological p a p e r s , a n d reports of t h e results of t h e e x p e d i t i o n s . . . . " T h e institute is t h e oldest archaeological institution in N o r t h A m e r i c a , w h o s e g o v e r n i n g b o a r d was elected in 1929 to safeguard its e n d o w m e n t . T h e A I A administrative offices are located at B o s t o n University. T h e central mission of t h e A I A is t o e n c o u r a g e a n d p r o m o t e archaeological research a n d to increase public k n o w l e d g e a n d awareness t h r o u g h tire conservation, preservation, a n d publication of t h e w o r l d ' s p a t r i m o n y for t h e benefit of all. T h e institute r e m a i n s a p a r a d i g m for c o m b i n i n g b o t h a professional a n d p u b l i c focus o n archaeology. Its p r o g r a m s a n d activities are designed t o m e e t t h e n e e d s a n d interests of its m e m b e r s a n d t h e p u b l i c . T h e institute has initiated educational outreach in archaeology for schoolchildren t h r o u g h its Y o u t h E d u c a t i o n P r o g r a m , w h i c h has success fully i m p l e m e n t e d p r o g r a m s in St. L o u i s , M i n n e a p o l i s , L o s Angeles, a n d C h i c a g o . Since 1967, e x p e r t archaeologists h a v e g u i d e d travelers a r o u n d t h e world with the institutes p o n s o r e d tours. T h e institute i n a u g u r a t e d its scholarly journal, t h e Amer ican Journal of Archaeology (AJA), in 1882. D u r i n g W o r l d W a r II, t h e AJA p u b l i s h e d articles b y E u r o p e a n scholars, a n d t h e institute assisted in p r e p a r i n g m a p s of m o n u m e n t s it h o p e d w o u l d b e s p a r e d from b o m b i n g raids. P u b l i s h e d quarterly a n d with a circulation of four t h o u s a n d , it is d e v o t e d to t h e archaeology a n d art of ancient E u r o p e a n d the M e d i t e r r a n e a n world, i n c l u d i n g t h e N e a r East a n d E g y p t , from prehistory to late antiquity. T h e institute actively p r o m o t e s research a n d fieldwork a n d annually publishes t h e Fieldwork Opportunities Bulletin for s t u d e n t s and a m a t e u r s ; t h e publication lists o p p o r t u n i ties a n d p r o g r a m s s u p p l i e d b y excavation directors a n d in stitutions. T h e institute's other publications include a b stracts from its a n n u a l m e e t i n g (held, for ninety-three years, in conjunction with t h e A m e r i c a n Philological Association) a n d its Newsletter, f o u n d e d in 1989. Its a n n u a l report, t h e Bulletin, h a s b e e n p u b l i s h e d since 1910. B e t w e e n 1948 a n d 1973, t h e institute p u b l i s h e d m i r t e e n m o n o g r a p h s in the A I A M o n o g r a p h Series; since 1944 it has s u p p o r t e d t h e publication of t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l C o m m i t t e e o n t h e Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. T h e institute r e s p o n d e d t o t h e interests of nonspecialists b y publishing Archaeology m a g a z i n e (originally Art and Ar chaeology), b e g i n n i n g in 1914. Revitalized in 1948 (after t h e D e p r e s s i o n in t h e 1930s), it has followed a steady rate of g r o w t h to a p r e s e n t - d a y circulation of 150,000. Archaeology
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continues to inform the public a b o u t the latest discoveries in archaeology worldwide, with richly illustrated articles written by professionals. I n 1884, the institute established local societies in B o s t o n , N e w York, Baltimore, a n d Philadelphia; by 1890 t h e y were joined by societies in C h i c a g o , Detroit, M a d i s o n , a n d M i n neapolis. T o d a y , witii 11,400 m e m b e r s in 87 societies, the institute is o n e of the largest in the world. M e m b e r s of t h e AIA w h o belong to a local society enjoy lectures, field trips, tours, a n d m u s e u m visits, as well as serve on local c o m m i t tees.
distinction are n o m i n a t e d as F o r e i g n H o n o r a r y M e m b e r s to the governing b o a r d a n d council. T h e AIA is at t h e forefront in s h a p i n g s u c h national p u b l i c policy issues as artifact o w n e r s h i p , ethics, t h e e n v i r o n m e n t , a n d the future of archaeology. I n a p e r i o d of u n p r e c e d e n t e d looting of archaelogical sites a n d dealing in stolen a n t i q u i ties, the Professional Responsibilities C o m m i t t e e acts as t h e steward of t h e institute's mission. I n 1990, t h e institute a d o p t e d a Code of Ethics n o w followed b y m a n y o t h e r or ganizations.
T h e institute f o u n d e d the A m e r i c a n School of Classical Studies in A t h e n s in 1882. I n 1895 it founded w h a t b e c a m e the A m e r i c a n A c a d e m y in R o m e a n d in 1899-1900 was in strumental in establishing t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research. I n 1907 the institute established t h e School of A m e r i c a n Archaeology in Santa F e , N e w M e x i c o , for the study of the N a t i v e A m e r i c a n past, a n d in 1921 joined with the American Anthropological Association to create t h e A m e r i c a n School of Prehistoric Research, devoted to Stone A g e studies.
MARTHA SHARP JOUKOWSKY
In 1951 the institute f o u n d e d the A m e r i c a n R e s e a r c h C e n t e r in E g y p t a n d i n the mid-1960s s u p p o r t e d the f o u n d ing of the A m e r i c a n R e s e a r c h Institute in T u r k e y a n d d i e A m e r i c a n Institute of Iranian Studies. In 1974, it s u p p o r t e d the creation of the A m e r i c a n Institute of Nautical A r c h a e ology. A n annual Charles Eliot N o r t o n M e m o r i a l L e c t u r e s h i p was f o u n d e d in 1895 for presentations by a distinguished scholar. T h r e e additional lectureships were established in 1986: the A n n a M a r g u e r i t e M c C a n n a n d R o b e r t D . T a g g a r t Lectureship in U n d e r w a t e r Archaeology, the H o m e r A . a n d D o r o t h y B. T h o m p s o n L e c t u r e s h i p , and the G e o r g e M . A. H a n f m a n n L e c t u r e s h i p . I n 1990 the President's L e c t u r e s h i p was inaugurated. T h e s e special lectures are s u p p l e m e n t e d by p r o m i n e n t scholars w h o share their research results with the public by delivering a total of 250 lectures annually t h r o u g h o u t N o r t h America. T h e institute offers a p l a c e m e n t service for archaeologists a n d scholars in related fields as well as direct s u p p o r t for research and travel to five students per year; t h e p r o m o t i o n a n d s u p p o r t of g r a d u a t e fellowships b e g a n in 1961 with the Olivia James T r a v e l Fellowship, followed b y t h e H a r r i e t P o m e r a n c e Fellowship in 1971 a n d the A n n a C. a n d Oliver C. C o l b u r n Fellowship in 1990. I n addition, t h e institute also awards the Helen M . W o o d r u f f Fellowship a n d the K e n a n T . E r i m Aphrodisias Fellowship. T h e institute is c o m m i t t e d to recognizing distinguished scholars a n d archaeologists whose research has m a d e an outstanding contribution to t h e field. T o this e n d , t h e insti tute established the J a m e s R. W i s e m a n Book A w a r d , t h e G o l d M e d a l A w a r d for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement, a n d t h e P o m e r a n c e A w a r d for Scientific C o n tributions to Archaeology. I n addition, foreign scholars of
[See also A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research.]
ARCHES.
T h e a r c h is one of four b a s i c structural d e vices for bridging architectural spaces. T h e o t h e r t h r e e are the corbel, p o s t a n d lintel, a n d truss. B o t h corbeling a n d p o s t a n d lintel rely exlusively o n the vertical stacking of architec tural m e m b e r s . T r u s s i n g a n d arching o v e r c a m e this limita tion. T r u s s i n g uses t h e principle of triangular distribution of vertical force in a h o r i z o n t a l direction, to e n a b l e t h e b r i d g i n g of larger spans. T h o u g h this p r o v i d e d a solution for o p e n i n g spaces in p e d i m e n t e d G r e e k t e m p l e s a n d C h r i s t i a n a n d J e w ish basilicas, the c o m p l e x m a t h e m a t i c s involved in truss d e sign were n o t well u n d e r s t o o d until recently, a n d its u s e in antiquity r e m a i n e d tentative. [See Basilicas.] T h a t leaves t h e arch, which uses t h e principle of the w e d g e t o t r a n s p o s e vertical forces to h o r i z o n t a l planes. A r c h c o n s t r u c t i o n is m o r e c u m b e r s o m e t h a n p o s t a n d lintel b e c a u s e it requires centering—erecting supportive filler o n w h i c h to set the voussoirs until the keystone locks t h e m in place. N e v e r t h e less, it p r o v e d to b e the m o s t successful device of classical, L a t e A n t i q u e , a n d medieval architecture. T h e basic arch is a semicircle of m a s o n r y w i t h its center at t h e m i d p o i n t of d i e base line (see figure 1 ) . Its c o m p o n e n t blocks are voussoirs, each of w h i c h is c u t in a w e d g e s h a p e , so t h a t its joining side is aligned with t h e r a d i u s of t h e s e m i circle. T h e inner e d g e of a voussoir is usually d r e s s e d as a n arc of t h e interior circle of t h e a r c h (the i n t r a d o s or soffit). T h e u p p e r edge, t h e e x t r a d o s , m a y also receive circular dressing b u t m a y b e left r o u g h if d i e m a s o n r y a b o v e it is n o t smoothly dressed. T h e base stones of a n a r c h are called springers a n d are s o m e t i m e s set directiy into a wall or o n t o a projecting pier. H o w e v e r , the transition from vertical to circular is often defined b y placing the s p r i n g e r o n an i m post, a wall stone o r pier c a p with a m o l d i n g defining t h e setting of the arch. T h e keystone is set at t h e t o p , or c r o w n , of d i e arch a n d serves as t h e w e d g e t h a t holds all t h e o t h e r voussoirs in position. T o h a v e t h e c o m p o n e n t s of t h e a r c h stably locked in place, it n e e d s to b e l o a d e d , w h i c h m e a n s t h a t t h e w e i g h t of the wall above firmly w e d g e s t h e voussoirs into t h e arc of the circle. T h e t h r u s t created by this w e i g h t o n t o t h e c r o w n is deflected sideways t h r o u g h the lower c o m p o n e n t s of t h e
ARCHES
ARCHES.
Figure
I.
Arch for ceiling support in great room of house 35 at Umm el-Jimal.
189
( a ) load; (b)
k e y s t o n e ; (c) i n t r a d o s or soffit; (d) e x t r a d o s ; (e) h a u n c h ; (f) s p r i n g e r ; (g) i m p o s t ; ( h ) v o u s s o i r . (Drawing by T a n i a H o b b s ; courtesy B. de Vries)
arch. A t t h e h a u n c h , t h e area m i d w a y b e t w e e n tire k e y s t o n e a n d t h e springer, t h a t t h r u s t is d i r e c t e d a b o u t 45° d o w n w a r d a n d o u t w a r d — n a m e l y , o n t o d i e vertical wall or pier a n d into t h e adjacent m a s o n r y . T h i s is w h y an a r c h n e e d s n o t only a s t r o n g vertical b a s e , b u t also b u t t r e s s i n g . S u c h b u t t r e s s i n g m a y b e achieved variously b y t h i c k e n i n g t h e wall into w h i c h it is built, h a v i n g a b a l a n c i n g a r c h s p r i n g o u t of t h e o p p o s i t e wall face (as in an adjacent r o o m , or i n the rows of arches in R o m a n raised a q u e d u c t s a n d t h e side aisle partitions of basilical c h u r c h e s a n d s y n a g o g u e s ) , or h a v i n g a b u t t r e s s b r a c e t h e exterior wall face. I n R o m a n c o m m e m o r a t i v e arches (like tiiat of H a d r i a n at J e r a s h in J o r d a n ) d i e smaller flanking arches serve as b u t t r e s s e s for t h e h u g e central o n e . [See A q u e d u c t s . ] W h e n p r o p e r l y l o a d e d , an a r c h is s t r o n g e r t h a n a wall. H o w e v e r , w h e n it h a s lost its load, it b e c o m e s u n s t a b l e , a n d t h e voussoirs at t h e h a u n c h , w h e r e t h e t h r u s t is t h e greatest, h a v e a t e n d e n c y to p o p u p a n d
solid very side out.
T h e c r o w n t h e n flattens a n d b e c o m e s lower, t h e keystone looses its grip, a n d t h e a r c h collapses. T h e voussoirs of fallen arches are usually readily r e c o g nizable in collapse debris. T h e y will a p p e a r in a regular or der t h a t differs from an o r d i n a r y wall b e c a u s e t h e y form a single r o w of equal w i d t h " h e a d e r s " t h a t are n o t as neatiy aligned as in situ m a s o n r y . Individual pieces are readily identified b e c a u s e of tiieir w e d g e s h a p e a n d circularity on t h e n a r r o w side. T h i s is t r u e especially of R o m a n arches, w h i c h t e n d e d to b e of very high quality. In later c o n s t r u c tion, t h a t of the C r u s a d e r s , for e x a m p l e , s o m e arches were c o n s t r u c t e d of a c o m b i n a t i o n of u n d r e s s e d fieldstones, chink s t o n e s , a n d m o r t a r . If an arched partition was b o n d e d into t h e wall from w h i c h it w a s s p r u n g , collapse of t h e arch w o u l d result in a vertical d a m a g e line in t h a t wall. E v i d e n c e of its use c a n also b e s u r m i s e d f r o m t h e surviving piers from w h i c h a n arch w a s s p r u n g . T h e arch's b r i d g i n g function w a s u s e d in various ways.
190
ARCHITECTURAL
DECORATION
M o s t simply it created openings like doorways a n d w i n d o w s . T h e s t e p p e d arch, a series of arches with r e d u c e d heights (as in the vomitoria of the S o u t h T h e a t e r at Jerash) can b e a graceful transition from one type of space to a n other. Rows of arches could be u s e d t o s u p p o r t s u p e r s t r u c ture w h e n solid partitions were undesirable (curtain walls of R o m a n theaters, O t t o m a n railroad bridges). [See T h e a t e r s . ] T r a n s v e r s e arches set in a parallel r o w were u s e d to s u p p o r t t h e flat roofs over large auditoria (like t h e " h a l l " c h u r c h e s in L e v a n t i n e villages) or over u n d e r g r o u n d cisterns ( H u m e i m a , U m m el-Jimal, d i e N e g e v ) . [See Cisterns.] C o n tinuous arches in a linear direction form vaults, and t h o s e in a circular direction, d o m e s . Relieving arches w e r e c o m monly u s e d over lintels (the gate at Q a s r Bshir) to discharge their t h r u s t or in solid walls to bridge weak areas in t h e f o u n dation bedrock (north wall of t h e H e s b a n acropolis c h u r c h ) . A l t h o u g h the circular a r c h was k n o w n b u t u s e d only slightly in ancient E g y p t , M e s o p o t a m i a , and G r e e c e , it w a s basic to E t r u s c a n design a n d b e c a m e t h e basic structural c o m p o n e n t (alongside t h e Hellenistic post a n d lintel) of R o m a n architecture. It r e m a i n e d a c o m m o n feature of d o m e s tic h o u s e design from t h e B y z a n t i n e - U m a y y a d to t h e A y y u b i d - M a m l u k a n d L a t e O t t o m a n periods in the L e v a n t . Islamic architects p i o n e e r e d major innovations in various arch shapes, a m o n g t h e m variations o n the circular a r c h , b u t especially diverse forms of t h e p o i n t e d arch. T h o u g h t h e p o i n t e d arch m a y p r e d a t e Islam, it b e c a m e a regular feature of m o n u m e n t a l architecture s p o n s o r e d by U m a y y a d caliphs (like the D o m e of t h e R o c k in Jerusalem, w h e r e it occurs tentatively alongside t h e circular arch) and was tire t r a d e m a r k of classical M u s l i m design. T h u s , it m a y be c o n s i d e r e d a major technological b r e a k t h r o u g h of the L a t e A n t i q u e a n d Early Islamic cultural eras, contributing greatly to ease of construction, structural simplification, and elaboration of design aesthetics. [Many of the sites mentioned entries.]
are the subject of
independent
BIBLIOGRAPHY A d a m , Jean-Pierre. Roman Building: Materials and Techniques. Bloomington, Ind., 1994. Chapter 6, "Arches and Vaults," gives an ex cellent illustrated history. Fletcher, Banister, and John Musgrove, eds. History ofArchitecture. 19th ed. London and Boston; 1987. In a history such as this the historical uses of arches can easily be traced from die index. BEET DE VRIES
ARCHITECTURAL DECORATION.
In most regions of the N e a r E a s t t h e local limestone is of g o o d q u a l ity, especially o n Syria's limestone massif a n d in Baalbek, P a l m y r a , Palestine, a n d E g y p t , which allowed artisans t o w o r k in deep relief a n d witii "light a n d s h a d o w . " [See Baal bek; Palmyra.] In t h e case of h a r d stone, s u c h as basalt in t h e G o l a n a n d s o u t h e r n Syria a n d p o r p h y r y in t h e Sinai
desert, decorative motifs w e r e executed in bas-relief. [See G o l a n ; Sinai.] It was n o t until t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE t h a t t h e massive q u a r r y i n g , working, a n d t r a d i n g of m a r b l e a n d architectural elements in m a r b l e b e g a n . T h i s b e c a m e an i m p o r t a n t m e a n s for t h e distribution of a m o r e or less u n i f o r m imperial art a n d architecture. T h r o u g h o u t t h e R o m a n a n d the Byzantine p e r i o d s m a r b l e w a s i m p o r t e d into t h e N e a r East, mainly f r o m Aphrodisias in Caria a n d P r o c o n n e s u s in the Sea of M a r m a r a . [See Aphrodisias.] M a r b l e r e p l a c e d t h e local limestone, enabling m o r e impressive a n d finer achievements in architectural m o l d i n g a n d s c u l p t u r e . E v e n before the c o n q u e s t of A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t in 333331 BCE decorations in a G r e e k style a p p e a r e d in a funerary context on t h e P h o e n i c i a n coast (the s a r c o p h a g i of t h e m o u r n i n g w o m e n , of t h e satraps, of A l e x a n d e r , a n d related finds in t h e necropolis at S i d o n ) . [See P h o e n i c i a ; S a r c o p h agus; N e c r o p o l i s ; Sidon.] W i t h t h e a d v e n t of t h e Hellenistic age, however, w h e n a G r e e k regime was established in d i e N e a r E a s t u n d e r t h e Ptolemies, tiiese territories w e r e o p e n to t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n a n d s p r e a d of G r e e k styles in architec t u r e o n a large scale. [See Ptolemies.] T h e styles, all of t h e m trabeated, can b e differentiated a c c o r d i n g to t h e s h a p e of t h e base, c o l u m n , capital, a n d entablature. E a c h c o m p o n e n t h a d a systematic set of m o l d i n g s , a n d t h e r e w a s a c o r r e s p o n d e n c e b e t w e e n each m o l d i n g a n d t h e m o t i f carved o n it in relief. T h r e e w e r e t h e s e styles, w h i c h go b a c k to t h e Archaic a n d Classical G r e e k world: D o r i c , Ionic, a n d C o rinthian. T h e last o n e , recognized m a i n l y in t h e C o r i n t h i a n capital a n d cornice a n d b y t h e Attic base, b e c a m e i n c r e a s ingly p o p u l a r in t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s . A n o t h e r c o m m o n process in t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d was a b l e n d of orders: a D o r i c frieze a b o v e an I o n i c or C o r i n t h i a n capital was n o t u n u s u a l . In the Hellenistic a n d Early R o m a n p e r i o d s , d e c o r a t e d edifices were m a i n l y t e m p l e s , t o m b s , palaces, a n d t h e m a n sions of the wealthy: t h e r o c k - c a r v e d facades in P e t r a a n d Jerusalem, t h e p a i n t e d t o m b s of Alexandria a n d M a r i s a / M a reshah, t h e palaces of t h e H a s m o n e a n s a n d H e r o d . [See T o m b s ; Palace; P e t r a ; Jerusalem; M a r e s h a h ; H a s m o n e a n s . ] L o c a l traditions a n d Oriental influences—Egyptian, S y r o Palestinian, M e s o p o t a m i a n , a n d I r a n i a n — w e r e always at work, forming u n d e r c u r r e n t s tiiat e m e r g e d periodically in o n e region or another. T h e y m o r e a n d m o r e t o o k t h e lead in t h e Byzantine p e r i o d , establishing t h e C o p t i c style in E g y p t a n d t h e G r e c o - S y r i a n style. T h e religio-nationalistic r e s p o n s e of t h e Jews a n d t h e N a b a t e a n s to foreign influences a n d their rejection of figurative art resulted in t h e e m e r g e n c e of t w o indigenous decorative a p p r o a c h e s ( A v i - Y o n a h , 1961; Hachlili, 1988; Patrich, 1990). [See N a b a t e a n s . ] E v e r y w h e r e in the region the city was m o r e hellenized a n d r o m a n i z e d t h a n t h e countryside. D u r i n g the A n t o n i n e a n d S e v e r a n p e r i o d s ( s e c o n d a n d t h i r d centuries), w i t h t h e large-scale s p r e a d of R o m a n u r -
ARCHITECTURAL DECORATION b a n i z a t i o n in t h e N e a r East, s t o n e - m o l d e d architectural d e c orations in d i e G r e c o - R o m a n spirit w e r e f o u n d in all t h e cities. T h e m a i n t h o r o u g h f a r e s in a typical R o m a n city w e r e c o l o n n a d e d streets (cf. G e r a s a j e r a s h , Scythopolis/BethS h e a n , A p a m e a , P a l m y r a ) . [See Jerash; B e t h - S h e a n ; A p a mea.] F o r a a n d o t h e r public piazzas at t h e intersections of streets were s u r r o u n d e d b y c o l o n n a d e s a n d a d o r n e d with tetrapyla ( G e r a s a , B o s r a ) , tetrakionia (four c o l u m n s o n a c o m m o n pedestal; G e r a s a , P a l m y r a , A n t i n o e ) , " t r i u m p h a l " arches with single or triple o p e n i n g s ( P a l m y r a , Scythopolis, Jerusalem, P e t r a ) , m e m o r i a l c o l u m n s (Jerusalem), or p e d estals with statues. E v e n city gates, i n c o r p o r a t e d in sober wall lines, w e r e m a d e to r e s e m b l e t r i u m p h a l arches. T h e steady visual rhytiim of t h e street c o l u m n s w a s b r o k e n b y facades of a larger o r d e r of m a g n i t u d e : t h e h u g e p r o p y l a e a of t e m p l e s , t h e r m a e , basilicae, a n d o t h e r p u b l i c buildings. [See Basilicas.] T h e e m p h a s i s w a s o n t h e exterior, o n t h e facades. T h e scenafrons, a n i n n e r wall in t h e R o m a n theater, inspired t h e d e c o r a t i o n s of t h e p u b l i c n y m p h e a : a decorative wall of t w o or t h r e e stories, a d o r n e d w i t h niches h o l d i n g statues a n d with a n a p s e ( P h i l a d e l p h i a / A m m a n , G e r a s a , B o s r a , Scythopolis, P e t r a ) . [See T h e a t e r s ; A m m a n ; Bosra.] T h i s b a r o q u e system of niches a r r a n g e d in several stories, inspired b y Hellenistic A l e x a n d r i a (see b e l o w ) , w a s carried e v e n to t h e interior a n d exterior of t e m p l e s (cf. t h e T e m p l e of B a c c h u s in Baalbek, t h e T e m p l e of Z e u s i n G e r a s a ) . T h e i n n e r courts of t e m p l e s a n d t h e palaestra of t h e r m a e , g y m nasia, a n d stadia w e r e s u r r o u n d e d b y a stoa witii o n e or t w o r o w s of c o l u m n s a n d b y e x e d r a e . T h e first m a r b l e capitals a p p e a r e d in t h e N e a r E a s t in t h e late first or early s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE. L a t e r , d u r i n g t h e s e c o n d a n d early third centuries, C o r i n t h i a n m a r b l e capitals of tire " n o r m a l " type became widespread throughout the M e d i t e r r a n e a n , f o r m i n g an i m p o r t a n t c o m m o n feature of i m p e rial art a n d reflecting a r e n a i s s a n c e of t h e G r e e k art. A b o v e t h e two regular r o w s of a c a n t h u s leaves o n the " n o r m a l " C o r i n t h i a n capital are c o r n e r volutes a n d inner helices springing f r o m a n a c a n t h u s calyx, set o n t o p of a fluted s h e a t h k n o w n as a caulicole. T h e a b a c u s is d e c o r a t e d with a central n e u r o n . C o r i n t h i a n " n o r m a l " capitals (either in m a r b l e or in local stone) h a v e b e e n f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e N e a r East: at G e r a s a , B o s r a , P a l m y r a , C a e s a r e a , B e t h S h e a n , a n d in E g y p t (Fischer, 1990; K a u t z s c h , 1936; P e n s a b e n e , 1993). [See Caesarea.] S u b t y p e s of m a r b l e capitals are defined b a s e d o n t h e e x t e n t to w h i c h t h e leaves of t h e lower r o w r e m a i n i n d e p e n d e n t , a p p r o a c h , or t o u c h e a c h o t h e r in a g e o m e t r i c p a t t e r n of r h o m b o i d s a n d o b l o n g s — c o n t r i b u t i n g to t h e l i g h t - a n d - s h a d o w effect. W i t h t h e i n creased t o u c h i n g z o n e b e t w e e n d i e leaves of t h e lower r o w , t h e calathus b e c a m e covered, m o r e a n d m o r e , b y a n e t of g e o m e t r i c p a t t e r n s , causing t h e capital to lose its plasticity; t h e w a y was t h u s p r e p a r e d t o t h e schematically d e c o r a t e d B y z a n t i n e capital (see b e l o w ) . I m p o r t a n t p r o d u c t i o n c e n t e r s for m a r b l e w e r e the w o r k
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s h o p s at E p h e s u s , P e r g a m o n (active since Hellenistic times), a n d A p h r o d i s i a s ; the latter was a n e w , a n d t h e m o s t active, center in the R o m a n e m p i r e . [See E p h e s u s ; P e r g a m o n . ] T h e i r p r o d u c t s were e x p o r t e d a n d served as m o d e l s for local w o r k s h o p s in tire N e a r E a s t e r n p r o v i n c e s , where t h e details w e r e t h e n w o r k e d o u t o n blocks of i m p o r t e d m a r b l e or i m itated in local limestones. T h e crisis of t h e third century b r o u g h t a b o u t a decline in m a r b l e architecture everywhere a n d a revival of local traditions expressed in local stone. In t h e cities of the B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d , architectural m e m bers were c o m m o n l y t a k e n from R o m a n structures a n d r e u s e d . C h u r c h e s were d i e p r i m a r y n e w addition to the u r b a n l a n d s c a p e . As assembly halls, t h e r e is a clear t e n d e n c y in their architecture to a d o r n t h e interior at d i e expense of t h e exterior. [See C h u r c h e s . ] I n s t e a d of decorated, stonem o l d e d facades, t h e e m p h a s i s w a s placed o n floor a n d wall m o s a i c s , capitals in t h e c o l o n n a d e s or arcades of the basili cae, d i e t r i u m p h a l a r c h , a n d t h e string course. [SeeMosaics.] T h e liturgical furniture (e.g., t h e altar a n d its c y b o r i u m , t h e a m b o , a n d t h e chancel screen) also received attention from artists a n d sculptors. M a r b l e w a s t h e preferred material for t h e s e furnishings as well as for t h e plates u s e d for wall r e v e t m e n t a n d paving. Yet, o n Syria's limestone massif archi tectural stone m o l d i n g c o n t i n u e d , r e a c h i n g a floruit in m o n u m e n t s s u c h as Q a l ' a t S i m ' a n a n d t h e c h u r c h at Qalb L o u z e h ( S t r u b e , 1977; 1993). [See Q a l ' a t Sim'an.] T h e n o tion of a n architectural o r d e r in its G r e c o - R o m a n sense w a s lost, h o w e v e r , a n d d e c o r a t i o n w a s a d a p t e d to n e w architec tural forms. O n d i e exterior t h e e m p h a s i s was o n the frames of doors a n d w i n d o w s , r a t h e r t h a n o n t h e lintel alone. C o r nices r e a p p e a r e d u n d e r roofs, a n d m o l d i n g s u n d e r l i n e d d i e stories o n t h e facade a n d s u r r o u n d e d buildings. External apses w e r e d e c o r a t e d o n tiieir exterior b y attached c o l u m n s , as at Q a l ' a t S i m ' a n a n d associated c h u r c h e s , s u c h as at T u rin a n d F a s u q o n Jebel W a s t a n i (Biscop a n d Sodini, 1984). A G r e c o - S y r i a n style d e v e l o p e d a n d b e c a m e established in w h i c h h u m a n a n d animal figures are almost entirely a b s e n t a n d w h o s e vegetal motifs a r e n e v e r naturalistic. T h e a c a n t h u s in particular b e c a m e just a decorative motif. In the N e a r East in t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d , the C o r i n t h i a n capital a p p e a r e d in a rich variety of types a n d subtypes ( K a u t z s c h , i 9 3 6 ; P e n s a b e n e , 1993, p p . 1 5 7 - 1 7 7 ) . T h e c o m p o n e n t s of d i e u p p e r z o n e (six helices a n d volutes) are r e d u c e d in size or d i s a p p e a r , at t h e e x p e n s e of the a c a n t h u s leaves. T h e leaves are variegated in t r e a t m e n t a n d shape. T h e fine dressing, d o n e w i t h a drill, of t h e so-called T h e o dosian capital is especially delicate. Tilted, or " w i n d b l o w n " leaves, first seen in t h e S e v e r a n p e r i o d , r e a p p e a r e d . T h e biz o n e capital h a d variants, i n c l u d i n g wild beasts in t h e u p p e r z o n e a n d a tendril or a b a s k e t in t h e lower zone. T h e Ionic capital w i t h a springstone (an i m p o s t block) attached at t h e t o p b e c a m e o n e u n i t — d i e Ionic i m p o s t capital. Its lower, Ionic m e m b e r w a s greatly simplified a n d gradually r e d u c e d i n size until it d i s a p p e a r e d entirely. T h e i m p o s t b e c a m e a
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capital on its o w n , in either a trapezoidal or folded form, whose surface was covered with rich foliage, finely c u t with a drill, or with ribbons a r r a n g e d in a zigzag pattern. E g y p t . Alexandria a n d a few other u r b a n centers were m o r e receptive to G r e e k culture t h a n t h e vast rural z o n e along t h e Nile River a n d in t h e Delta, where t h e p h a r a o n i c tradition h a d b e e n p r e s e r v e d for centuries. [See Alexandria; Delta.] A final blending of traditions is reflected in t h e C o p tic art a n d architecture of t h e Christian Byzantine period. Ptolemaic Alexandria b e c a m e a leading Hellenistic center of architectural decoration a n d painting. [See Wall P a i n t ings.] Although t h e r e m a i n s a r e very fragmentary a n d scat tered, their features have b e e n defined as b a r o q u e : they broke away from a post-and-lintel system, d e m o n s t r a t i n g a n o n t e c t o n i c use of structural m e m b e r s (Adriani, 1966; B r e c cia, 1926; M c K e n z i e , 1990; P e n s a b e n e , 1993). Alexandria's Hellenistic architectural finds are mainly from its various necropoleis (Shatby, M u s t a f a Pasha, t h e Alabaster T o m b , Sidi G a b e r , M i n e t el-Bassal, M a f r o u s a , G a b b a r i , A n f o u s h y , Ras e l - T i n e , A n t o n i d e s G a r d e n , S u q el-Wardian, K o m elShoqafa, H a d r a ) a n d from T u n a el-Gebel (the necropolis of H e r m o p o l i s M a g n a ) , a n d from t e m p l e remains (mainly the Serapea at Alexandria a n d C a n o p u s , t h e Ptolemaic-cult sanctuary of H e r m o p o l i s M a g n a , a n d t h e SerapeumJ?] there). [See Cult.] M a n y architectural fragments are p r e served in t h e G r e c o - R o m a n M u s e u m in Alexandria. T w o other i m p o r t a n t sources of data are Kallixeinos's description of t h e pavilion of P t o l e m y I I , raised in Alexandria b e t w e e n 274 a n d 270 BCE to h o u s e a s y m p o s i u m held in c o n n e c t i o n with a great religious p r o c e s s i o n in h o n o r of D i o n y s u s ( A t h enaeus 5.196-197), a n d A t h e n a e u s ' s description of t h e p a latial Nile barge (Gk., thalamegos) of P t o l e m y I V (Athenaeus 5.203-206). All diree G r e e k orders w e r e r e p r e s e n t e d in Hellenistic E g y p t (Pensabene, 1993). T h e I o n i c - C o r i n t h i a n cornice, with modillions u n d e r t h e c o r o n a , a p p e a r e d with b o t h D o r i c a n d Ionic trabeation. T h e Alexandrian examples of a " f r e e " (heterodox) C o r i n t h i a n capital differed from t h e " H e l l e n i s tic" type found in Asia M i n o r (inspired b y t h e capital of t h e tholos at E p i d a u r o s ) a n d t h e " n o r m a l " type found in Italy. T h e last type did n o t a p p e a r i n Alexandria until t h e s e c o n d century CE. M o s t capitals were h e t e r o d o x ; " n o r m a l " capitals were very rare; a n d a m i x e d G r e c o - E g y p t i a n g r o u p i n t r o d u c e d lotus flowers, p a l m e t t e s , a n d p a p y r u s b u d s over t h e calathos. Sometimes t h e leaves were left plain, en basse. G r e e k a n d Asiatic type m a r b l e capitals were i m p o r t e d only during t h e R o m a n period. T h e style of m o s t bases was sim ple Attic. Bases on a s q u a r e or a n octagonal pedestal a p p e a r e d only in t h e R o m a n period. T h e structural features of b a r o q u e architecture r e c o g nized in Alexandria, all a p p e a r i n g before 100 BCE, i n c l u d e segmented, hollow, a n d b r o k e n p e d i m e n t s ; t h e so-called Syrian p e d i m e n t ; entablatures b r o k e n forward, a r c h e d o r curved vertically, or horizontal a n d curved inward; p r o jected pedestals; e n g a g e d c o l u m n s , pilasters, a n d q u a r t e r
c o l u m n s ; coupled q u a r t e r c o l u m n s ; tholoi; a n d apsidal niches decorated with shells o r coffering ( M c K e n z i e , 1990). S c u l p t e d c o n c h s w e r e p o p u l a r in E g y p t d o w n t o t h e B y z antine period (Kitzinger, 1937; T o r o k , 1990). T h e r e were Hellenistic decorative elements o t h e r t h a n t h e C o r i n t h i a n capital: architraves of t w o fasciae a n d of even o n e fascia (unlike t h e three fasciae of later R o m a n architec t u r e ) ; n e w types of cornices w i t h dentils o r with flat m o d i l lions (without t h e consoles of R o m a n a r c h i t e c t u r e ) ; a c a n thus c o l u m n bases ( a n e x a m p l e from t h e R o m a n p e r i o d is p r e s e r v e d in t h e t e t r a p y l o n of A l e x a n d e r Severus at A n tinoe); floral o r animal acroteria t h a t slope t o t h e side, unlike t h e vertically positioned G r e e k a n d R o m a n acroteria. M o s t of t h e P t o l e m a i c features a n d elements m e n t i o n e d above were carried into t h e first, s e c o n d , a n d early third centuries, u n d e r t h e R o m a n s , even b e y o n d E g y p t . T h e y s h a p e d R o m a n b a r o q u e architecture, like t h a t seen at Baal b e k (Lyttelton, 1974). Besides canonical e n t a b l a t u r e — c o m p o s e d of architrave, frieze, a n d cornice variants existed w i t h o u t a n architrave or w i t h o u t a frieze especially i n t h e R o m a n b a r o q u e . Hellenistic p a i n t i n g w a s influenced b y t h e Alex a n d r i a n style ( B r o w n , 1957). S o m e surviving Hellenistic a n d R o m a n t e m p l e s i n U p p e r E g y p t were c o n s t r u c t e d a c c o r d i n g t o a n c i e n t p h a r a o n i c tra dition (e.g., D e n d e r a , Edfu, K o m O m b o , P h i l a e ) , e v i d e n d y a living practice. T h e influence of this i n d i g e n o u s architec t u r e is also expressed i n s o m e types of b e l l - s h a p e d capitals d e c o r a t e d with lotus flowers or p a p y r u s b u d s , p a p y r u s bases, a n d in t h e so-called E g y p t i a n c o r n i c e (a cavetto cor nice a b o v e a t o r u s ) , p r e v a l e n t also in t h e " O r i e n t a l " facade types at Petra, in s o m e of t h e m o n u m e n t a l t o m b s in J e r u salem ( T o m b of Z e c h a r i a h , A b s a l o m ' s T o m b ) , a n d i n s o m e L a t e P e r s i a n a n d Early Hellenistic s t r u c t u r e s in P h o e n i c i a . T h e p y r a m i d , f o u n d in s o m e m o n u m e n t a l t o m b s i n J e r u salem a n d in ' A m r i t ( P h o e n i c i a ) , is a n o t h e r m o t i f derived from ancient E g y p t i a n architecture. [See 'Amrit.] I s r a e l a n d J o r d a n . T h e p a l a c e k n o w n as Q a s r e l - ' A b d at ' I r a q el-Amir d e m o n s t r a t e s a b l e n d of G r e e k elements t h a t are decisively A l e x a n d r i a n i n origin a n d Oriental e l e m e n t s of M e s o p o t a m i a n o r I r a n i a n origin: a G r e e k i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of a m o n u m e n t in t h e Oriental tradition. A l t h o u g h unfin ished, it is a well-preserved e x a m p l e of Hellenistic a r c h i t e c t u r e i n t h e Syro-Palestinian regime in t h e early s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE ( D e n t z e r - F e y d y , 1991). M o r e t h a n t e n archi tectural orders have b e e n c o u n t e d , of different t y p e s a n d sizes, s u p e r i m p o s e d o r set o n e n e x t t o d i e other. Y e t , t h e decoration exhibits a h o m o g e n o u s character. T h e o r d e r s a r e c o m p o s e d of freestanding c o l u m n s as well as q u a r t e r , half, a n d t h r e e - q u a r t e r e n g a g e d c o l u m n s a n d e n g a g e d pilasters. T h e half c o l u m n s m a y b e e n g a g e d t o a p o r t a l f r a m e , w i n d o w j a m b , o r wall face. T h e r e is a single m o d e l , i n several vari ations, of t h e C o r i n t h i a n capital a n d a single m o d e l of t h e I o n i a n capital. T h e C o r i n t h i a n capitals a r e " f r e e " ( h e t e r o d o x ) , related t o t h e A l e x a n d r i a n C o r i n t h i a n capital. Pilasters h a d capitals of their o w n , w i t h Attic bases; t h e col-
ARCHITECTURAL DECORATION u m n s of t h e u p p e r loggia h a d a n a c a n t h u s b a s e . T h e r e is a single m o d e l of D o r i c e n t a b l e m e n t a n d one of Ionic e n t a b l e m e n t . T h e Ionic o n e a p p e a r s , as is n o r m a l , o n t o p of a C o r i n t h i a n c o l u m n , while t h e D o r i c e x a m p l e exhibits a b l e n d of o r d e r s c o m m o n t o t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d a n d is p l a c e d o n t o p of C o r i n t h i a n as well as Ionic capitals. T h e i n n e r walls h a d c r o w n m o l d i n g s . Figural motifs—of p a n t h e r s , lions, a n d eagles—are s u p e r i m p o s e d o n t h e a r c h i t e c t u r a l o r d e r s , as decorative a c c e n t s , at the corners of t h e b u i l d i n g a n d its fountains. F r a g m e n t s of s t u c c o work w e r e f o u n d in t h e building as well. T h e influence of A l e x a n d r i a n architecture on t h e layout a n d d e c o r a t i o n s of t h e principal m o n u m e n t s a t P e t r a , in Jor d a n , can b e seen in t h e t e m p l e s — t h e Q a s r Bint F a r a u n a n d t h e T e m p l e of t h e W i n g e d L i o n s ( M c K e n z i e , 1990) a n d in t h e m o r e recently e x c a v a t e d S o u t h e r n T e m p l e . S o m e of P e t r a ' s m o n u m e n t a l t o m b facades reflect a decisive G r e c o - R o m a n architectural influence. H o w e v e r , m o s t of t h e m are Oriental in style, c r o w n e d b y o n e or t w o r o w s of crenellations (crowsteps) o r b y t w o sets of five c o r n e r steps t h a t face e a c h other. T h e crenellations, o r m e r l o n s , a r e an Oriental m o t i f of Assyrian origin, p o p u l a r in P h o e n i c i a in t h e L a t e P e r s i a n a n d Early Hellenistic p e r i o d s , t h a t survived in i n t e rior Syria u p t o t h e R o m a n p e r i o d (cf. t h e square altars o n M t . L e b a n o n , t h e T e m p l e of Bel in P a l m y r a ; t h e peribolos of t h e great t e m p l e in D a m a s c u s ; a n d t h e t e m p l e a t D m e i r , in s o u t h e r n Syria). [See Assyrians; Altars; D a m a s c u s . ] T h e N a b a t e a n plain-faced, b l o c k e d - o u t capital is derived f r o m t h e N a b a t e a n C o r i n t h i a n capital—a h e t e r o d o x floral capital (Patrich, 1984). S t u c c o w o r k a n d frescoes of the First a n d S e c o n d P o m p e i i a n styles d e c o r a t e d P e t r a ' s t e m p l e s a n d h o u s e s ( K o h l , 1910; Z a y a d i n e , 1987). T h e art of decorative s t u c c o w o r k is of I r a n i a n - C e n t r a l A s i a n origin; it s p r e a d to t h e w e s t a n d b e c a m e p o p u l a r t h e r e in t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d . T h e s t u c c o w o r k o n a m a n s i o n a t T e l Anafa in Israel d e m o n s t r a t e s t h e L a t e Hellenistic a c h i e v e m e n t s in this d o m a i n in Syria-Palestine u n d e r t h e Seleucids ( G o r d o n , 1977). S t u c c o f r a g m e n t s of a large, e n g a g e d C o r i n t h i a n o r d e r a n d of a n attic z o n e have b e e n r e trieved. T h e m a i n o r d e r includes pieces of white fluted shafts, s m o o t h r e d shafts, b a s e s , capitals, a n d fragments of s u c h e n t a b l a t u r e m e m b e r s as dentils, cornice, a n d c y m a . T h e c o m p o n e n t s of t h e attic z o n e i n c l u d e fragments of p i lasters, c o l o n n e t t e s , small capitals, a n d a lozenge p a t t e r n . A l i m e s t o n e capital w a s f o u n d as well. F o u r variants of t h e C o r i n t h i a n capital are of S y r i a n r a t h e r t h a n A l e x a n d r i a n Hellenistic stock, while t h e lozenges reflect a n E g y p t i a n i n fluence. T h e Hellenistic m a s o n r y style of t h e stucco w o r k reflected in t h e T e l Anafa finds survived o n M a s a d a in a b e t t e r state of preservation (Foerster, 1995). [See Anafa, T e l ; Masada.] T h e m a s o n r y style ( s o m e t i m e s referred to as incrustation, or structural style) is c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y its u s e of stucco as a m e d i u m for stimulating ashlars a n d o t h e r architectural ele m e n t s b y m o l d i n g t h e m i n relief. A wall w a s divided into
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five horizontal zones: p l i n t h ( a b o u t 20—30 c m h i g h ) ; drafted orthostats ( a b o u t 1 m h i g h ) ; frieze (string c o u r s e ) ; isodomic courses of drafted r e c t a n g u l a r blocks—the largest p o r t i o n of t h e wall; a n d a t o p z o n e , or wall c r o w n . Generally, this stucco w o r k was s u b s e q u e n t l y c o v e r e d w i t h p o l y c h r o m e p a i n t , b u t at M a s a d a , H e r o d i u m , a n d in a large m a n s i o n e x c a v a t e d in the Jewish Q u a r t e r in J e r u s a l e m (decorated in t h e First P o m p e i i a n style, closely related t o , although dif ferent from, the m a s o n r y style), t h e wall, including t h e or thostats, w a s p a i n t e d white. [See H e r o d u i m . ] P a i n t e d s u r faces, or frescoes, o n flat, n o n s t u c c o e d walls have also b e e n f o u n d o n M a s a d a , h o w e v e r , as well as in other Flerodian palaces ( H e r o d i u m , J e r i c h o ) , s o m e t i m e s in conjunction with e n g a g e d c o l u m n s , or pilasters, a n d at T e l Anafa. [See Jeri cho.] Actually, t h e N o r t h e r n Palace o n M a s a d a is consid ered to b e an e x a m p l e of built architecture t h a t inspired t h e S e c o n d P o m p e i i a n style in p a i n t i n g . Its relationship to Al e x a n d r i a n palace a r c h i t e c t u r e , o n t h e o n e h a n d , a n d to A u g u s t a n architecture in R o m e , o n t h e other, h a s b e e n n o t e d (Foerster, 1995). It m a y h a v e b e e n i n t r o d u c e d into J u d e a (Judah) u n d e r t h e influence (if n o t b y t h e very h a n d s ) of an A u g u s t a n R o m a n imperial w o r k s h o p (Foerster, 1995). In addition t o these survivals of t h e Hellenistic m a s o n r y style, t h e S e c o n d P o m p e i i a n style in wall p a i n t i n g (fresco) is r e p r e s e n t e d a t t h e a b o v e - m e n t i o n e d J u d e a n sites as well, w h e r e fragments of ceiling s t u c c o h a v e b e e n recovered. T h e M a s a d a c o l u m n s a r e built of separate d r u m s , covered b y a thick layer of stucco in a fluted p a t t e r n . C o l u m n s in other Flerodian palaces w e r e c o n s t r u c t e d similarly. It has also b e e n suggested t h a t t h e entablature w a s partially m a d e of w o o d a n d t h e n s t u c c o e d . T h e floors w e r e of plaster, m o saic, or o p u s sectile (colored stone tiles). O p u s sectile floors h a v e also b e e n f o u n d at J e r i c h o , C y p r o s , H e r o d i u m , a n d in t h e H e r o d i a n q u a r t e r in Jerusalem. T h e orchestra floor of t h e H e r o d i a n theater at C a e s a r e a was of p a i n t e d plaster, d e picting various g e o m e t r i c p a t t e r n s . T h e H e r o d i a n T e m p l e M o u n t in J e r u s a l e m is the m o s t prestigious H e r o d i a n project of m o n u m e n t a l architecture. T h e reliefs o n the shallow d o m e s of t h e H u l d a G a t e s , d e picting a n e t w o r k of g e o m e t r i c a n d vegetal p a t t e r n s , are ex ceptionally elegant. T h e " n o r m a l " types of C o r i n t h i a n capital, i n t r o d u c e d b y H e r o d u n d e r R o m a n influence, replaced the h e t e r o d o x c a p itals t h a t p r e d o m i n a t e d in t h e Hellenistic period. T h e H e r o d i a n C o r i n t h i a n capital is built of t w o blocks, like the A u g u s t a n one seen in R o m e (Fischer, 1990, p p . 12-20). T h e c o n t e m p o r a r y N a b a t e a n floral capital is similarly built of two blocks, b u t it shows affinities derived from Alexandria (Patrich, 1984). A t times, Hellenistic a n d Early R o m a n C o rinthian capitals were plastered with a thin layer of stucco a n d t h e n p a i n t e d (e.g., at T e l Anafa, M a s a d a , C y p r o s , Alexandria, E d f u ) . A t M a s a d a t h e colors u s e d were white a n d p u r p l e , in addition t o gilding. A peculiar feature of the H e r o d i u m capitals is a central leaf below t h e calyx t h a t is w o r k e d as a detail en bosse. " N o r m a l " C o r i n t h i a n capitals,
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with plain, en bosse leaves, were c o m m o n in Jerusalem in tire first century CE (e.g., on the M o u n t T e m p l e , in the Jewish Q u a r t e r , in the T o m b s of t h e K i n g s ) . T h e b l o c k e d - o u t C o rinthian capitals f o u n d on M a s a d a are derived from the H e r odian Corinthian capital, w h i c h was a " n o r m a l " type. Plainfaced or blocked-out capitals have also b e e n f o u n d on C y p r u s a n d in Egypt.
use in the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n basin: a fondness for g e o m e t r i c a n d vegetal surfaces or b a n d covering, filled with fig u r e s , fruits, a n d flowers a n d a r r a n g e d in endless p a t t e r n i n g . I n addition to t h e three classical o r d e r s , a T u s c a n order, with a particular capital t y p e , was recognized. T h i s form of capital often has a s h a r p - p o i n t e d leaf b e n e a t h e a c h angle of the abacus a n d the astragal at the n e c k is often omitted.
Jewish art in the post-70 CE period is expressed mainly in funerary architecture (e.g., in the necropolis at B e t h She'arim) a n d in synagogues. [See Beth-She'arim; S y n a gogues.] It was influenced to a large extent by t h a t of n o n Jewish society: in the p a g a n L a t e R o m a n p e r i o d it is extroverted a n d stone carved (Foerster, 1987); in the C h r i s tian Byzantine period it is introverted, a p p e a r i n g as floor a n d wall mosaics a n d wall paintings (Tsafrir, 1987). C o m p o nents that were d e c o r a t e d w e r e facades, portals, a n d w i n dows; capitals a n d entablature; the T o r a h ark; floors ( m o saics); a n d walls (frescoes). T h r e e types of ornate portals, or entrance frames (Ionic, with moldings parallel to the o p e n i n g frame a n d with two consols flanking the lintel; Attic, with lintel moldings wider titan t h e opening; a n d a lintel s u p p o r t e d by pilasters), a n d nine types of o r n a m e n t a l lintels have b e e n d o c u m e n t e d (Hachlili, 1988). T h e C o r i n t h i a n capital, of local m a n u f a c t u r e , was t h e m o s t prevalent type. Jewish motifs—mainly the m e n o r a h a n d other liturgical o b jects—may a d o r n o n e of its faces. H e a r t - s h a p e d c o l u m n s were crowned by h e a r t - s h a p e d capitals. T h e b e s t - k n o w n synagogue paintings are t h e t h i r d - c e n t u r y frescoes at D u r a E u r o p o s in Syria. [See D u r a - E u r o p o s . ] F r a g m e n t a r y fres coes a n d drawings of lesser quality h a v e also b e e n f o u n d in s o m e Galilean synagogues (e.g., at R e h o v , Husifah, M a ' o z H a y y i m , H a m m a t h T i b e r i a s , Beth A l p h a ) . [See H a m m a t h Tiberias; Beth Alpha.]
Hellenistic period. R e m a i n s from the Hellenistic p e r i o d in Syria are p r e s e r v e d mainly in t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n z o n e — at D u r a - E u r o p o s (lintels, m o l d i n g s ; S h o e , 1948) a n d Seleu cia o n t h e T i g r i s — a n d in t h e P h o e n i c i a n z o n e . I n Seleucia, w h e r e g o o d b u i l d i n g stone is rare, Seleucid decorative ar chitecture in terra cotta ( c o m m o n in the G r e e k world since Archaic times), w a s r e p l a c e d u n d e r the P a r t h i a n s b y m o l d e d stucco, w h i c h was p o p u l a r in C e n t r a l Asia. T h e r e c o g n i z e d motifs are western (e.g., p a l m e t t e s , a c a n t h u s leaves), eastern (geometric surfaces), a n d h y b r i d ( h e t e r o d o x capitals w i t h h u m a n h e a d s and b u s t s ) .
S y r i a . In geographic a n d cultural t e r m s , Syria e n c o m passes three different regions: the Phoenician coast; t h e i n terior, or central, region, including the Biqa'; and the M e sopotamian region, a transition z o n e b e t w e e n the western regions and Iran and C e n t r a l Asia. Excellent surveys h a v e b e e n m a d e of decorative art t h r o u g h o u t Syria in t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n periods ( D e n t z e r - F e y d y , 1989) a n d for the Byzantine period ( N a c cache a n d Sodini, 1989). W h a t is k n o w n a b o u t the Seleucid period and the art of A n t i o c h a n d of Seleucia on the Tigris is m e a g e r because their Hellenistic infrastructure has en tirely d i s a p p e a r e d — p e r h a p s having b e e n replaced by R o m a n imperial structures (as in D a m a s c u s a n d A p a m e a ) . [See Seleucids; Antioch o n Orontes; Seleucia on the Tigris; D a mascus.] T h e process by which Syrian decorative art d e veloped can b e traced for the periods following P o m p e y ' s establishment of the R o m a n p r o v i n c e of Syria. H o w e v e r , it is only from the Flavian p e r i o d o n w a r d that it shows signs of homogeneity a n d a c o h e r e n t evolution, b o t h chronolog ical a n d regional. Architectural decoration at Baalbek a n d Palmyra is provincial; it d e m o n s t r a t e s a virtuous a n d profuse combination of the G r e c o - R o m a n decorative g r a m m a r in
Hellenistic r e m a i n s in Phoenicia are few a n d diverse, r e flecting a c o m p o s i t e character of foreign origins. T h e u s e of crenellations, or s t e p c r o w , t o c r o w n the M a ' a b e d at ' A m r i t , the square altars o n M t . L e b a n o n , the T e m p l e of Bel at Palmyra, a n d the T e m p l e of D m e i r in s o u t h e r n Syria is M e s o p o t a m i a n in origin a n d survived into t h e R o m a n period. A n Egyptian influence on t h e M a ' a b e d c a n b e seen in its cornice, while its dentils reflect a G r e e k influence. O n e of the aedicules at 'Ain al-Hayat has a u r a e u s frieze. A n " E g y p tian c o r n i c e " is f o u n d in t h e tliird-century BCE s a n c t u a r y at U m m e l - ' A m a d , along w i t h hellenized e l e m e n t s — D o r i c capitals, m e m b e r s of an Ionic order (including capitals with a collar decorated w i t h palmettes t h a t s e e m to b e inspired by t h e ones o n the n o r t h e r n portico of t h e E r e c h t h e i o n in A t h e n s ) , a n d an I o n i c cornice r e s e m b l i n g o n e at ' I r a q elAmir. Roman period (first-third centuries). A r c h a i c d e c o rated blocks f o u n d at P a l m y r a b e l o n g to t h e frames of niches in t h e T e m p l e s of Bel a n d of Ba'al S h a m i n . T h e blocks are covered with vegetal decorations a r r a n g e d in b a n d s of e n d less, repetitive p a t t e r n s , a style derived f r o m I r a n a n d C e n tral Asia (Seyrig, 1934; 1940). M o s t p o p u l a r is a sinusoidal vine tendril with individual leaves, tiny vine b u n c h e s , a n d various interlacings a n d b u n d l e s of leaves; t h e u p p e r b a n d s contain figural reliefs. Hellenized motifs w e r e a p p a r e n t i y less p o p u l a r — t h e y are distorted a n d set o n i m p r o p e r m o l d ings. T h e C o r i n d i i a n h e t e r o d o x capitals at P a l m y r a , w h i c h lack helices also b e l o n g t o this A r c h a i c P a l m y r e n e style (Schlumberger, 1933). T h e basalt h e t e r o d o x capitals of t h e H a u r a n (e.g., at Si, Q a n a w a t , a n d Suweida) h a v e busts above t h e a c a n t h u s leaves, a n d t h e s t r u c t u r e a n d motifs of the d o o r frames recall t h e A r c h a i c P a l m y r e n e style ( D e n t z e r - F e y d y , 1985; 1990; 1992). T h e c o l u m n bases in the Ba'al S h a m i n t e m p l e at Si h a v e a c o r o n a of a c a n t h u s leaves. T h e architectural decorations in t h e T e m p l e of Bel at P a l m y r a (erected u n d e r T i b e r i u s b e t w e e n 19 a n d 32 CE) w e r e
ARCHITECTURAL DECORATION cut in the local limestone. T h e t e m p l e is considered to reflect t h e magnificence of Seleucid a r c h i t e c t u r e at A n t i o c h (Will, 9 7 S ) - T h e h o m o g e n e o u s a n d c o h e r e n t P a l m y r e n e style is distinguished in t h e T e m p l e of Bel by a variety a n d a b u n d a n c e of decoration. Its motifs b e l o n g to d i e central Syrian tradition revealed in A r c h a i c P a l m y r e n e sculpture: rich g e o m e t r i c , vegetal, a n d figurative d e c o r a t i o n s , a r r a n g e d in b a n d s or as surface c o v e r — a s in the ceiling coffers of t h e peristyle, displaying an " e n d l e s s p a t t e r n . " T h e s e local m o tifs are a b l e n d of e l e m e n t s a n d motifs from t h e classical repertoire. T h e decorative e l e m e n t s include C o r i n t h i a n a n d I o n i c capitals a n d fluted shafts; walls with an Attic b a s e ; t h r e e plain fasciae o n the architrave, w h o s e frieze is d e c o r a t e d with garlands held b y p u t t i ; a n d a C o r i n t h i a n cornice. T h e motifs include egg a n d t o n g u e , L e s b i a n c y m a t i o n , i n terlaces, b e a d a n d reel, dentils, modillions, rosettes, p a l m e t t e s , laurel b u n c h e s , s t e m s w i t h leaves, b a n d s of dressed leaves, a n d of floral scrolls (mainly a c a n t h u s , b u t vine a n d ivy as well). T h e r e are also indications of paintings a n d of m e t a l decoration, i n c l u d i n g b r o n z e capitals. I
Baalbek/Heliopolis b e c a m e a R o m a n colony in a b o u t 15 BCE u n d e r A u g u s t u s , t h u s o p e n i n g it to direct influences from R o m e . T h e t e m p l e s of Baalbek r e p r e s e n t the g r a n d e u r of R o m a n architecture in Syria. T h e C o r i n t h i a n c o l u m n s of t h e great T e m p l e of Jupiter (first c e n t u r y CE) are m o n o l i t h i c a n d its C o r i n t h i a n entablature is densely covered with u n i f o r m vegetal decoration: b e a d s a n d reels o n the architrave, p a l m e t t e s o n its c r o w n i n g cavetto, a frieze with consoles a n d animal p r o t o m e s , a n d a c o r n i c e extravagantly covered w i t h o r n a m e n t a t i o n . A close look at its capitals, niches, a n d other decorative elements ( W e i g a n d , 1914, 1924; S c h l u m b e r g e r , 1933; Lyttelton, 1974) reveals a coexistence of western a n d eastern Syrian t y p e s : only s o m e of its " n o r m a l " C o r i n t h i a n capitals are derived from R o m e ; the others display affinities typical of t h e Oriental p r o d u c t i o n seen at o t h e r sites in Syria a n d Asia M i n o r d u r i n g t h e empire—affinities t h a t seem, r a t h e r , to b e derived f r o m L a t e Hellenistic examples. S i m i larly, in the T e m p l e of B a c c h u s at Baalbek ( s e c o n d c e n t u r y ) , several m o d e l s of capital c a n b e recognized: a R o m a n , p r e Flavian m o d e l , s o m e of t h e E p h e s o - P e r g a m e n e school, a n d others in t h e P a l m y r e n e style. A motif derived directly from R o m e is t h e shell or c o n c h s h a p e t h a t a d o r n s d i e t e m p l e ' s semicircular niches. In t h e f o r e c o u r t t h e shell is p l a c e d w i t h its b a s e u p w a r d (in die R o m a n style), while at other Syrian sites it is generally f o u n d w i t h t h e base at t h e b o t t o m . E x a m p l e s of R o m a n types at B a a l b e k w e r e isolated a n d do n o t a p p e a r to constitute a factor dictating t h e Syrian decorative style u n d e r the e m p i r e ( D e n t z e r - F e y d y , 1989). T h e coex istence of t h r e e decorative styles can also b e seen in t h e ceil i n g coffers of the g r e a t altar at Baalbek (Collart a n d C o u p e l , i95i). T h e Baalbek style is reflected at t e m p l e s in t h e Biqa', o n M t . L e b a n o n , in t h e A n t i - L e b a n o n r a n g e ( N i h a , H o s n N i h a , H o s n S o l e i m a n ) , a n d in s o u t h e r n Syria.(Sleim). Ionic c a p itals, " p e o p l e d " o r v a c a n t a c a n t h u s scrolls, a n d o t h e r stan
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d a r d motifs of imperial decorative art in Syria (including the " S y r i a n g a b l e " ) , also d e m o n s t r a t e similarities with motifs a n d types from Asia M i n o r r a t h e r t h a n with t h o s e from R o m e ( D e n t z e r - F e y d y , 1989, p p . 467-470; Lyttelton, 1974)T h e traits of t h e A n t o n i n e a n d Severan periods t h a t are peculiar to Syria include t h e m e a n d e r m o t i f placed in u n u s u a l locations, s u c h as o n the fasciae of t h e architraves; t h e vine motif that, in the s e c o n d c e n t u r y , c o n t i n u e d to cover— as a single or double t e n d r i l — p o r t a l frames, friezes, a n d p i lasters; the excessive density of s c u l p t u r e d decorations f r a m ing the niches a n d portals of cult edifices; figural reliefs on t h e soffits or on die vertical surface of lintels; a n d ceiling coffers d e c o r a t e d with b u s t s set in an intricate geometric p a t t e r n . T h i s c o m m o n cultural stock of interior Syria was already e n c o u n t e r e d at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e imperial p e r i o d b u t m a y have m u c h older origins. I n s o u t h e r n Syria, s e c o n d - c e n t u r y p o r t a l lintels retained their figural d e c o r a t i o n , w h i c h in the n o r t h h a d m o v e d t o t h e soffits, in order n o t to distort t h e G r e c o - R o m a n archi tectural order. T h e third c e n t u r y is r e p r e s e n t e d mainly by the imperial building activity at Shahba-Philippopolis a n d adjacent sites. T h e simplification of decorative forms a n d a d e p a r t u r e from the imperial m o d e l s t h a t were used in the other regions are evident. I o n i c capitals witii local traits b e c a m e m o r e p o p u l a r , a n d t h e r e was a r e s u r g e n c e of local art in a d o m e s t i c context. Byzantine period. T h e cross, in a rich variety of forms, b e c a m e a d o m i n a n t m o t i f in t h e Byzantine period. O t h e r wise, t h e decorative g r a m m a r a n d s c h e m e w e r e derived from t h e classical r e p e r t o i r e of t h e R o m a n period, c o m b i n e d w i t h i n d i g e n o u s originality. I n the basaltic region, sculpture u n d e r w e n t a process of s c h e m a t i z a t i o n a n d simplification, while t h e local Syrian, Oriental decorative art in limestone flourished. Ecclesiastical decorative art affected domestic e m b e l l i s h m e n t (doors, w i n d o w s , porticoes), resulting in r e gional architectural h o m o g e n e i t y for the limestone massif, in w h i c h two local schools are recognized: the A n t i o c h e n e in the n o r t h a n d the A p a m e n e in t h e south. In porticoes, for e x a m p l e , a s q u a r e m o n o l i t h i c p i e r was c o m m o n l y u s e d in t h e n o r t h , w h e r e a c o l u m n w o u l d be e m p l o y e d in the south. T w o architects—Julianus a n d M a r k i a n o s Kyris—were a c tive in a b o u t 390 in B r a d a n d at Jebel S i m ' a n a n d Jebel B a risha. T h e y influenced t h e Syrian decorative art of later g e n erations, creating n e w t y p e s of capitals decorated with r i b b o n s or divided into t w o zones. M a r k i a n o s Kyris built four c h u r c h e s in a b o u t thirty years (c. 390-420) a n d i n t r o d u c e d n e w plans a n d d e c o r a t i o n . H e revived the P a l m y r e n e Archaic architectural d e c o r a t i o n after 450 years. T h e imperial architectural project of Qal'at S i m ' a n was also very influential in t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of Syrian decorative art in t h e sixth century. It is rich with moldings a n d motifs, including n e w forms of t h e a c a n t h u s leaf a n d a w i n d b l o w n C o r i n t h i a n capital, w h i c h r e a p p e a r e d two h u n d r e d years af ter it first e m e r g e d in Severan art. A m o n g its m o s t distin-
196
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g u i s h e d r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s are t h e basilica at Q a l b L o u z e h , a n d t h e capitals at Q a s r I b n W a r d a n ( S t r u b e , 1983). A l t o g e t h e r , t h e r e is a large variety of C o r i n t h i a n a n d S y r ian B y z a n t i n e capitals. T h e B y z a n t i n e C o r i n t h i a n capital is bell s h a p e d , b u t s h o r t e r t h a n t h e " n o r m a l " t y p e . A t t h e volutes are o m i t t e d ; i n o t h e r s , d e e p l y c a r v e d ,
times flowing
leaves are twisted into a w h o r l . T h e m o s t u s u a l f o r m is t h e u n c u t C o r i n t h i a n , in w h i c h t h e leaves are only b l o c k e d o u t . T h i s f o r m c o n t i n u e d t o b e u s e d in s i x t h - c e n t u r y c h u r c h e s a n d w a s the m o s t c o m m o n f o r m f o u n d in small c h u r c h e s of late d a t e in the r e g i o n . T h e m o s t p o p u l a r f o r m of m o l d i n g w a s d i e c y m a r e c t a , w i t h a fillet above a n d b e l o w . It w a s u s e d for d i e c o r n i c e s of all kinds of buildings t h r o u g h o u t t h e p e r i o d . T h e c y m a r e v ersa is rarely f o u n d in Syria a n d t h e n only in t h e early d a t e s . T h e m o l d i n g s of d o o r w a y s h a v e a classic profile c o n s i s t i n g of t w o or t h r e e n a r r o w fasciae, a n o v o l o , a c y m a r e c t a , a n d a flat b a n d ; t h e p o s i t i o n of t h e ovolo a n d t h e c y m a is fre q u e n t l y reversed. T h e a r c h i t r a v e s w e r e often perfectiy p l a i n a n d c o m p o s e d of t w o or t h r e e fasciae. B r o a d m o l d i n g s c a r ried vegetal b a n d s a n d disks a n d n a r r o w m o l d i n g s w e r e also often carved in p a t t e r n s . P u l v i n a t e d friezes w e r e usually o r n a m e n t e d with elaborate r i n c e a u x of highly c o n v e n t i o n a l a n d g e o m e t r i c a c a n t h u s leaves, i n t e r s p e r s e d w i t h s y m b o l i c disks. T h e d a t e d m o n u m e n t s of t h e fifth c e n t u r y n e a r l y all h a v e t h e s a m e profile in t h e i r m a i n c o r n i c e s : a c y m a r e c t a with a beveled fillet a t t h e t o p ; d a t e d b u i l d i n g s of d i e sixth c e n t u r y h a v e a m o r e S - s h a p e d profile in the c y m a t i u m . B e low this t h e r e are o n e , t w o , or e v e n t h r e e n a r r o w b a n d s , a f o r m also u s e d in t h e s t r i n g c o u r s e s . After r e a c h i n g a n a p ogee in d e c o r a t i o n u n d e r J u s t i n i a n , further g e o m e t r i z a t i o n a n d a lessening u s e of m o l d i n g s a n d m o t i v e s are seen. I n m a n y cases w h e r e a n o p e n i n g was r e c t a n g u l a r , t h e m o l d i n g s d e s c r i b e a semicircle o n t h e lintel a b o v e it, giving t h e effect of a r o u n d - h e a d e d w i n d o w . I n A n t i o c h e n e t h e w i n d o w m o l d i n g s w e r e c u r v e d u p w a r d a n d carried o v e r t h e n e x t o p e n i n g , p r e s e n t i n g a w a v y succession of c u r v e s , i n s t e a d of b e i n g r e t u r n e d at a r i g h t angle o n t h e s t r i n g c o u r s e
Breccia, Evaristo. Monuments de I'Egypte greco-romaine, vol. 1, Le rovine e i monumenti di Canopo. B e r g a m o , 1 9 2 6 . Brown, Blanche R. Ptolemaic Paintings and Mosaics and the Alexandrian Style. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 9 5 7 . C r e m a , Luigi. " L a formazione del ' F r o n t o n e siriaco.' " In Scritti di storia dell'arte in onore di Mario Salmi, vol. 1, edited by Valentino Martinelli, p p . 1 - 1 3 . R o m e , 1 9 6 1 . D u t h u i t , Georges. La sculpture Copte. Paris, 1 9 3 1 . Effenberger, A r n e . Koptische Kunst. Vienna, 1 9 7 5 . Fakharani, Fawzi el-. " S e m i - D o m e Decoration in G r e c o - R o m a n E g y p t . " American Journal ofArchaeology 69 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 5 7 - 6 2 . G r i m m , G u n t e r , et al. Das romisch-byzantinische Agypten. Aegyptiaca Treverensia, 2 . M a i n z , 1983. Hesberg, H e n n e r von. " Z u r Entwicklung d e r griechischen Architektur im ptolemaischen R e i c h . " In Das ptolemaische Agypten: Akten des intemalionalen Symposions, 2 7 . - 2 9 . Sept. 1076 in Berlin, edited by H e r wig Maehler a n d Volker M . Strocka, p p . 1 3 7 - 1 4 5 . M a i n z a m Rhein, 1978. Kautzsch, Rudolf. Kapitellstudien: Beitrage zu einer Geschichte des spatanliken kapitells im Osten vom 4. bis ins 7. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1 9 3 6 . Kitzinger, Ernst. " N o t e s on Early Coptic S c u l p t u r e . " Archaeologia 87 (1937): 181-215. Lyttelton, Margaret. Baroque Architecture in Classical Antiquity. L o n don, 1974. Makowiecka, Elzbieta. "Acanthus-Base: Alexandrian F o r m of Archi tectural Decoration at Ptolemaic a n d R o m a n P e r i o d . " titudes et Travauxs ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 1 1 5 - 1 3 1 . Michalowski, Kazmierz. The An of Ancient Egypt. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 9 . N o s h y , Ibrahim. The Arts in Ptolemaic Egypt. L o n d o n , 1 9 3 7 . P e n s a b e n e , Patrizio. Elementi architettonici di Alessandria e di altri siti egisiani. Repertorio d'Arte dell'Egitto G r e c o - R o m a n o , ser. C , vol. 3. Rome, 1993. Ronczewski, Konstantin. " L e s chapiteaux corinthiens et varies d u M u see G r e c o - R o m a i n d'Alexandrie." Acta Universitatis Latviensis 16 ( 1 9 2 7 ) : 3-32. Schmidt-Colinet, A n d r e a s . " D e r Ptolemaische Eckgiebel: U r s p r u n g u n d Wirkung eines ArchitekturmotWs." InArabiaAnliqua: Hellenistic Centers around Arabia, edited by Antonio Invernizzi a n d J e a n - F r a n cois Salles, p p . 1 - 1 4 . R o m e , 1 9 9 3 . TSrrik, Laszlo. " N o t e s o n t h e Chronology of L a t e A n t i q u e Stone Sculpture in E g y p t . " In Coptic Studies: Acts of the Third International Congress of Coptic Studies, Warsaw, 20-25 August 1984, edited by Wlodzimierz Godlewski, p p . 4 3 7 - 4 8 4 . W a r s a w , 1 9 9 0 . W a c e , A. J. B., et al. Hermopolis Magna, Ashmunein: The Ptolemaic Sanc tuary and the Basilica. Alexandria, 1 9 5 9 . Israel a n d Jordan
at t h e sill level. T h e s e c u r v e d m o l d i n g s w e r e often t e r m i n a t e d o n either side of a w i n d o w or at t h e e n d of a r o w of windows by two volutes. [See also A r c h e s ; A r c h i t e c t u r a l D r a f t i n g a n d D r a w i n g ; A r chitectural
Orders; Building Materials
and
Techniques;
P u b l i c Buildings; and T e m p l e s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Egypt Adriani, Achille. Repertorio d'arte dell'Egiito greco-romano. Series C , vols. 1 - 2 . Palermo, 1966. Badawy, Alexander. Coptic Art and Archaeology: The Art of the
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Avigad, N a h m a n . " T h e R o c k - C a r v e d Facades of the Jerusalem N e cropolis," Israel Exploration Journal 1 ( 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 1 ) : 9 6 - 1 0 6 . Avigad, N a h m a n . Discovering Jerusalem. Nashville, 1980. Avi-Yonah, Michael. Oriental Art in Roman Palestine. R o m e , 1 9 6 1 . Avi-Yonah, Michael. Art in Ancient Palestine: Selected Studies. Jerusa lem, 1 9 8 1 . Crowfoot, J. W . Early Churches in Palestine. L o n d o n , 1 9 4 1 . See pages 146-156. Dentzer-Feydy, Jacqueline. " L e s linteaux a figures divines e n Syrie meridionale." Revue Archeologique 1 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 6 5 - 1 0 2 . Fischer, M o s h e L . Das korinthische Kapitell im Alten Israel in der hellenistischen und romischen Periode. M a i n z a m Rhein, 1990. Fischer, M o s h e L . "Figural Capitals in R o m a n Palestine, M a r b l e I m ports a n d Local Stones: S o m e Aspects o f ' I m p e r i a l ' a n d 'Provincial' A r t . " Archaologischer Anzeiger ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 1 9 - 1 4 4 . Foerster, Gideon. "Architectural F r a g m e n t s from Jason's T o m b R e considered." Israel Exploration Journal 28 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 5 2 - 1 5 6 . Foerster, G i d e o n . " T h e A r t a n d Architecture of t h e Synagogue in Its
ARCHITECTURAL DRAFTING AND DRAWING L a t e R o m a n Setting." In The Synagogue in Late Antiquity, edited by L e e I. Levine, p p . 1 3 9 - 1 4 6 . Philadelphia, 1 9 8 7 . Foerster, G i d e o n . Masada V: The Yigael Yadin Excavations, 1963-196$, Final Reports: Art and Architecture. Jerusalem, 1 9 9 5 . G o r d o n , R o b e r t L . " L a t e Hellenistic Wall Decoration of T e l Anafa." P h . D . diss., C o l u m b i a University, 1 9 7 7 . Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. Ismail, Z. " L e s chapiteaux de P e t r a . " Le Monde de la Bible 1 4 (1980): 27-29. K o h l , Heinrich. Kasr Firaun in Petra. Leipzig, 1 9 1 0 . M a ' o z , Zvi. " T h e Art a n d Architecture of the Synagogues of the G o l a n . " In Ancient Synagogues Revealed, edited by L e e I. Levine, p p . 9 8 - 1 1 5 . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . M c K e n z i e , Judith. The Architecture of Petra. British A c a d e m y M o n o graphs in Archaeology, 1. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 0 . N e g e v , A v r a h a m . " N a b a t e a n Capitals in the T o w n s of the N e g e v . " Israel Exploration Journal 24 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 153—159. Ovadiah, Asher, and Yehudit T u r n h e i m . "Peopled" Scrolls in Roman Architectural Decoration in Israel. Rivista di Archeologia, Supplementi 12. Rome, 1994. Patrich, Joseph. " T h e D e v e l o p m e n t of the N a b a t e a n Capital" (in H e b r e w ) . Eretz-Israel 17 (1984): 2 9 1 - 3 0 4 . Patrich, Joseph. The Formation of Nabatean Art. L e i d e n , 1 9 9 0 . Peters, J o h n P . , a n d H e r m a n n T h i e r s c h . Painted Tombs in the Necropolis of Marissa. L o n d o n , 1 9 0 5 . Ronczewski, Konstantin. "Kapitelle des El H a z n e in P e t r a . " Archaologischer Anzeiger ( 1 9 3 2 ) : 3 7 - 9 0 . Schmidt-Colinet, A n d r e a s . " D o r i s i e r e n d e nabataische Kapitelle." Damaszener Mitteilungen 1 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 3 0 7 - 3 1 2 . Tsafrir, Y o r a m . " T h e Byzantine Setting a n d Its Influence o n Ancient Synagogues." In The Synagogue in Late Antiquity, edited by L e e I. Levine, p p . 1 4 7 - 1 5 7 . Philadelphia, 1 9 8 7 . T u r n h e i m , Yehudit. "Architectural D e c o r a t i o n in N o r t h e r n Eretz-Is rael in the R o m a n a n d Byzantine P e r i o d s " (in H e b r e w ) . P h . D . diss., T e l Aviv University, 1987. T u r n h e i m , Yehudit. " T h e Corinthian Cornice in N o r t h e r n Eretz-Israel in die R o m a n and Byzantine P e r i o d s . " In Plomenaje a Josi Maria Bldzquez, edited by Julio M a n g a s a n d Jamie Alvar. M a d r i d , 1 9 9 3 Watzinger, Carl. Denkmdler Palastinas. Vol. 2. Leipzig, 1 9 3 5 . W e i g a n d , E d m u n d . " D a s Theodosiuskloster: Z u r kunstgeschichtlichen Stellung Palastinas v o m 4 . - 7 . J a h r h u n d e r t . " Byzantinische Zeilschrift 23 ( 1 9 1 4 ) : 1 6 7 - 2 1 6 . Zayadine, Fawzi. "Decorative S t u c c o at Petra a n d O t h e r Hellenistic Sites." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by A d n a n H a d i d i , p p . 1 3 1 - 1 4 2 . A m m a n , 1 9 8 7 .
Syria Biscop, J e a n - L u c , and Jean-Pierre Sodini. " Q a l ' a t S e m ' a n e t l e s chevets a colonnes de Syrie d u N o r d . " Syria 61 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 2 6 7 - 3 3 0 . Butler, H o w a r d Crosby. Architecture and Other Arts. Publications of an A m e r i c a n Archaeological Expedition to Syria in 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 0 0 , P a r t 2. N e w York, 1903. Collart, Paul, et al. Sanctuaire de Baalshamin d. Palmyre. 6 vols. N e u chatel, 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 7 5 . Collart, Paul, a n d Pierre C o u p e l . L'autel monumental de Baalbek. Paris, 1951. Debevoise, Neilson C . " T h e Origin of Decorative S t u c c o . " American Journal of Archaeology 45 ( 1 9 4 1 ) : 4 5 - 6 1 . D e n t z e r - F e y d y , Jacqueline. " D e c o r architectural et developpement d u H a u r a n d u I e r siecle a v a n t J . - C . au V i l e siecle apres J . - C . " I n H a u r a n I, edited by Jean-Marie D e n t z e r , p p . 2 6 1 - 3 1 0 . Paris, 1 9 8 5 . D e n t z e r - F e y d y , Jacqueline. " L e decor architectural en Syrie aux epoques hellenistique et r o m a i n e . " I n Archiologie et histoire de la
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Syrie, vol. 2, La Syrie de I'&poque achemenide a Tavmement de Tlslam, edited by Jean-Marie D e n t z e r a n d Wmfried O r t h m a n n , p p . 4 5 7 - 4 7 6 . Saarbriicken, 1989. Dentzer-Feydy, Jacqueline. " L e s chapiteaux corinthiens n o r m a u x de Syrie meridionale." Syria 67 ( 1 9 9 0 a ) : 6 3 3 - 6 6 3 . Dentzer-Feydy, Jacqueline. " L e s chapiteaux ioniques de Syrie meri dionale." Syria 67 ( 1 9 9 0 b ) : 1 4 3 - 1 8 1 . D e n t z e r - F e y d y , Jacqueline. " L e decor architectural." In Iraq alAmir, le chateau du Tobiade Hyrcan, by Ernest Will et al., p p . 1 4 1 - 2 0 8 . Paris, 1 9 9 1 . Filarska, Barbara. " R e m a r q u e s sur le decor architectural de la voie p r e torienne au c a m p de Diocl6tien a Palmyre, et N o u v e a u x chapiteaux de P a l m y r e . " Etudes et Travaux 3 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : io8ff., i24ff. Gawlikowski, Michal, a n d Michal Pietrzykowski. " L e s sculptures d u temple de Baalshamin a P a l m y r e . " Syria 57 (1980): 4 2 1 - 4 5 2 . N a c c a c h e , Alice, a n d Jean-Pierre Sodini. " L e decor architectural en Syrie b y z a n t i n e . " In Archeologie et histoire de la Syrie, vol. 2, La Syrie de l'epoque achimenide a I'avlnement de Tlslam, edited by Jean-Marie D e n t z e r a n d Winfried O r t h m a n n , p p . 4 7 7 - 4 9 0 . Saarbriicken, 1989. Rostovtzeff, Michael. Dura-Europos and Its Art. Oxford, 1938. Schlumberger, Daniel. " L e s formes anciennes du chapiteaux corinthien en Syrie, en Palestine et en A r a b i c " Syria 1 4 ( 1 9 3 3 ) : 2 8 3 - 3 1 7 . Schlumberger, Daniel. " N o t e sur le decor architectural des colonnades des m e s et d u c a m p de Diocletien." Berytus 2 ( 1 9 3 5 ) : 1 6 3 - 1 6 7 . Schlumberger, Daniel. " D e s c e n d a n t s non-mediterraneens de l'art grec." Syria 37 ( i 9 6 0 ) : 2 5 3 - 3 1 8 . Seyrig, Henri. "Bas relief m o n u m e n t a u x d u temple d u Bel a Palmyre." Syria 15 ( 1 9 3 4 ) : I55~l86. Seyrig, H e n r i . " O r n a m e n t a p a l m y r e n a antiquiora." Syria 21 ( 1 9 4 0 ) : 277-328. Shoe, L u c y T . "Architectural M o u l d i n g s of D u r a - E u r o p o s . " Berytus 9 (1948): I - 4 C Strube, Christine. " D i e F o r m g e b u n g der Apsisdekoration in Qalbloze u n d Qalat S i m a n . " Jahrbuch fiir Antike und Christenlum 20 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 181-191. Strube, Christine. " D i e Kapitelle von Qasr Ibn W a r d a n . " Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum 26 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 5 9 - 1 0 6 . Strube, Christine. Baudekoration im Nordsyrischen Kalksteinmassiv, vol. 1, Kapitell-, Tiir- und Gesimsformen der Kirchen des 4. und 5. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. M a i n z am Rhein, 1 9 9 3 . T a n a b e , K a t s u m i , ed. Sculptures of Palmyra. T o k y o , 1 9 8 6 - . Weigand, E d m u n d . "Baalbek u n d R o m : Die rbmische Reichskunst in ihrer Entwickelung u n d Differenzierung." Jahrbuch des Deutschcn Archaologischen Instituts 29 ( 1 9 1 4 ) : 3 7 - 9 1 . Weigand, E d m u n d . "Baalbek: D a t i e r u n g u n d kunstgeschichtliche Stel lung seiner B a u t e n . " Jahrbuch fit Kunstwissenschaft ( 1 9 2 4 ) : 7 7 - 9 9 Will, Ernest. " I X congres international d'archeologie classique, D a m a s 1 9 6 9 . " Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 2 1 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 2 6 1 - 2 6 8 . Will, Ernest. " L e m o n u m e n t : S o n histoire, ses caracteres, son architecte." I n Le temple de Bel a Palmyre, vol. 2, by Henri Seyrig et al„ p p . 1 4 7 - 2 2 3 . Paris, 1 9 7 5 . JOSEPH PATRICH
ARCHITECTURAL DRAFTING AND DRAWING. By p r o v i d i n g scientifically m e a s u r e d g r a p h i c description a n d analysis to c o m p l e m e n t verbal a n d n u m e r i c r e c o r d i n g , architectural drafting a n d drawing play a n i m p o r t a n t role in t h e visual depiction of t h e h u m a n e n v i r o n m e n t . T h e archaeologist's n o t e b o o k usually includes lined a n d g r a p h p a p e r interleaved, a n d every field archae ologist m u s t b e skilled in b o t h verbal a n d graphic recording.
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In addition, well-staffed field projects include a t e a m of s p e cialists a d e p t a t using surveying i n s t r u m e n t s a n d trained in architecture and architectural drawing. Although p h o t o g r a p h y , like architectural drawing, p r o vides a three-dimensional visualization of a site or building, the roles are quite different, b u t c o m p l e m e n t a r y . P h o t o g r a p h y presents structures from a perspective; architectural drawing presents t h e m , n o t as seen, b u t as m e a s u r e d in h o r izontal (plan) a n d vertical (section, elevation) c o m p o n e n t s . As a result, these c o m p o n e n t s of three-dimensional s h a p e can b e r e p r o d u c e d accurately to a consistent scale o n t h e fiat plane of the d r a w i n g surface. A p h o t o g r a p h e r is forced to r e c o r d all the details within the image framed b y t h e lens; the architect selects only t h o s e features salient to u n d e r standing t h e shape b e i n g represented. F o r e x a m p l e , a ruin whose m a s o n r y is o v e r g r o w n with b r a m b l e s m a y show u p only as a wild thicket in a p h o t o g r a p h . In a drawing, h o w ever, t h e brambles can b e i g n o r e d and only t h e in situ m a sonry selected from a m o n g t h e r u b b l e , so that a viable build ing appears on p a p e r . H e n c e , the best visual depiction of an object or structure is achieved by publishing b o t h p h o t o g r a p h s a n d drawings: one gives a close a p p r o x i m a t i o n of w h a t is to b e seen, t h e other of what t h e original s h a p e was or was i n t e n d e d to b e . Artistic renderings a n d sketches, so p o p u l a r before p h o t o g r a p h y was c o m m o n l y u s e d , a r e , in a way, a middle g r o u n d , allowing the perspective of t h e c a m e r a a n d t h e selectivity of the drawing i n s t r u m e n t . G o o d artistic renderings can a d d valuable insights that m a y be missed b y the camera or ar chitectural drawing. [See P h o t o g r a p h y , article on P h o t o g r a p h y of Fieldwork a n d Artifacts.] Architectural d r a w i n g relies o n precise m e a s u r e m e n t a n d scale r e p r o d u c t i o n of t h e features a n d objects on a site. A p r i m a r y goal is to p r o v i d e a three-dimensional framework in w h i c h everything excavated can b e located, including b o t h t h e site's stratigraphic features a n d t h e artifacts f o u n d within its strata. I n this sense, architectural drawing is akin to m a p p i n g , and the various drawings are integral c o m p o nents of a master site m a p . Vertically, all features and objects are locatable o n sitewide sections related to their distance above sea level (a.s.L). S u c h a three-dimensional framework gives accurate locations for everything o n t h e site in question and makes it possible to d e t e r m i n e their comparative di mensional relationship t o features at other sites. In a b r o a d sense architecture suggests t h e adaptation of space for h u m a n habitation. A n entire site is therefore like a structure in which n a t u r a l a n d h a n d - w o r k e d elements function to form a cohesive settlement. C o n s i d e r e d in this way, t h e preparation of sitewide m a p s is an aspect of archi tectural drawing. In a n a r r o w sense architecture is t h e art of building, t h e creation of enclosed spaces in w h i c h h u m a n s live a n d function (barns, h o u s e s , t e m p l e s , palaces, forts). I n this sense architectural d r a w i n g b e c o m e s t h e c o m p r e h e n s i v e assembly o n p a p e r of fragmentary building r e m a i n s in order
to u n d e r s t a n d their s t r u c t u r e and function. T h i s requires careful m e a s u r e m e n t s a n d a k n o w l e d g e of a n c i e n t b u i l d i n g design a n d c o n s t r u c t i o n m e t h o d s . A s with p o t t e r y t y p o l o gies, building typologies m a k e it possible t o identify styles, d e t e r m i n e dates, a n d r e c o n s t r u c t t h e w h o l e f r o m f r a g m e n t s . As such, architectural d r a w i n g joins with o t h e r a r c h a e o l o g ical specializations t o c o n t r i b u t e to t h e overall interpretive process a n d to conservation. T a k i n g M e a s u r e m e n t s . Measuring techniques used on archaeological projects are identical to t h o s e u s e d b y sur veyors for m o d e r n platting of a subdivision. T h e y c a n b e learned from a s t a n d a r d textbook o n surveying o r from chapters o n surveying i n c l u d e d in archaeological field m a n uals. [See Site Survey.] T h e distance b e t w e e n two points is usually d e t e r m i n e d b y t a p i n g , for which 20-50-meter steel or vinyl tapes are u s e d for large areas a n d 3 - 5 - m e t e r steel t a p e s for small o n e s . All m e a s u r e m e n t s m u s t b e taken in horizontal a n d vertical c o m p o n e n t s in o r d e r to b e able t o r e c o r d t h e m to scale o n t h e drawing board. For horizontal measurements the tape m u s t b e held level a n d a p l u m b b o b u s e d at t h e lower p o i n t . F o r distances longer than 30-50 m (the limit of t h e t a p e l e n g t h ) , it is necessary t o establish a " c h a i n " of i n t e r m e d i a t e p o i n t s . S u c h chaining requires t h e u s e of a transit or theodolite to align t h e survey pins set o n t h e series of i n t e r m e d i a t e p o i n t s . A faster, b u t less a c c u r a t e , alternative to t a p i n g is to u s e t h e 1:100 ratio b e t w e e n t h e transit's stadia hair r e a d i n g s o n t h e leveling r o d a n d t h e distance along t h e line of sight. O n adequately funded projects b o t h t h e s e m e t h o d s h a v e b e e n obviated b y d i e electronic distance m e t e r ( E D M ) , a device that gauges distance b y m e a s u r i n g t h e time it takes to b o u n c e a laser b e a m shot f r o m p o i n t a off of a crystal target set at p o i n t b. R e a d i n g s are correct to a fraction of a milli m e t e r over distances of h u n d r e d s of m e t e r s . Vertical m e a s u r e m e n t , or leveling, is b e s t d o n e b y u s i n g a d u m p y level, transit, or theodolite with t h e telescope set level a n d a lev eling r o d (a 4-m pole with c e n t i m e t e r calibrations) held ver tically o n t h e points b e t w e e n w h i c h t h e difference in h e i g h t is desired. T h e final key e l e m e n t in m e a s u r e m e n t is triangulation, w h i c h allows t h e a c c u r a t e position of three or m o r e p o i n t s to be d e t e r m i n e d in relation to each other. T h i s process c o m b i n e s assessing linear distance (see above) with t h e m e a s u r e m e n t of angles b e t w e e n sets of p o i n t s . F o r e x a m p l e , once t h e distance b e t w e e n p o i n t s a a n d b a n d angles abc a n d bac is k n o w n , distances ac a n d be a n d angle acb c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d by g e o m e t r i c plotting or t r i g o n o m e t r i c solution. F o r long-distance m e a s u r e m e n t , h o r i z o n t a l angles are b e s t read with a transit or theodolite. H o w e v e r , for small spaces, astute u s e of a m e a s u r i n g t a p e will suffice. F o r e x a m p l e , to d e t e r m i n e t h e exact relationships a m o n g t h e four c o r n e r s of a r o o m , m e a s u r i n g t h e four sides a n d t h e t w o diagonal dis tances enables very precise plotting o n p a p e r . F o r survey w o r k i n a n excavation area, t a p i n g a n d trian-
ARCHITECTURAL DRAFTING AND DRAWING gulation can b e c o m b i n e d b y u s i n g a p l a n e table, a device t h a t enables t h e plotting of b o t h distances a n d angles directly o n t o a d r a w i n g as m e a s u r e m e n t s are b e i n g taken. T h i s t r a ditional e q u i p m e n t h a s b e e n r e p l a c e d , for t h o s e w h o can afford it, b y a c o m b i n a t i o n of t h e o d o l i t e , E D M , a n d d a t a r e c o r d e r , w h i c h allows t h e direct transfer of d a t a to a c o m p u t e r with c o m p u t e r - a i d e d d e s i g n ( C A D ) software. [See Computer Mapping.] A c t i v i t i e s i n t h e F i e l d . T h e architect's responsibilities d u r i n g fieldwork c a n b e d i v i d e d into sitewide a n d excava tion-related activities. Sitewide activities i n c l u d e p r o d u c i n g a c o n t o u r m a p with n a t u r a l features a n d m a p s with artificial features, i n c l u d i n g a n c i e n t s t r u c t u r e s visible a b o v e g r o u n d as well as m o d e r n b u i l d i n g s . I n m a n y cases, m u c h of this w o r k has already b e e n d o n e , a n d t h e i n f o r m a t i o n is available o n regional m a p s a n d aerial p h o t o g r a p h s f r o m national l a n d survey d e p a r t m e n t s or g e o g r a p h i c societies, m u n i c i p a l d e v e l o p m e n t m a p s from local m u n i c i p a l offices t h a t will s h o w existing h o u s e s a n d street s y s t e m s o n o r n e a r t h e site, m a p s d o n e b y earlier archaeological p r o j e c t s , a n d satellite p h o t o s from F r e n c h ( S p o t i m a g e ) a n d A m e r i c a n ( L a n d s a t ) sources. T h e g r o u n d survey c a n also b e greatly e n h a n c e d by l o w altitude aerial balloon p h o t o s , s u c h as t h o s e t a k e n b y W i l s o n M y e r s a n d Ellie M y e r s o v e r G r e e c e , C r e t e , J o r d a n , a n d Israel. E x c a v a t i o n - r e l a t e d activities b e g i n w i t h t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of a p r e d e t e r m i n e d excavation grid a n d t h e layout of t h e u n i t s (squares) to b e excavated. I n c o n j u n c t i o n with t h e site c o n t o u r survey, b e n c h m a r k s w i t h k n o w n a.s.l. elevations, from w h i c h t h e excavators take their levels, are established in or n e a r excavation u n i t s . W i t h t h e grid a n d b e n c h m a r k s in place, it is possible to m a i n t a i n a t h r e e - d i m e n s i o n a l c o n trol for r e c o r d i n g all finds. T o e n s u r e o n g o i n g accuracy, this s y s t e m n e e d s regular m a i n t e n a n c e (strings a n d b e n c h m a r k s often get m o v e d or d i s a p p e a r ) , a n d excavators n e e d t o b e advised o n a n d c h e c k e d o n t h e c o r r e c t u s e of t h e survey information. As an excavation p r o c e e d s , t h e architect serves as a c o n sultant t o i n t e r p r e t b u i l d i n g features as t h e y surface, to p r e dict w h e r e still-unexcavated p o r t i o n s of a s t r u c t u r e m a y b e , a n d to develop excavation strategy accordingly. After suf ficient m a s o n r y a p p e a r s , detailed (stone-for-stone) field d r a w i n g s are p r o d u c e d in p l a n a n d elevations. As t h e c o m p o n e n t s of a b u i l d i n g e x t e n d i n g over several excavation u n i t s c o m e t o g e t h e r in a single d r a w i n g , t h e integral n a t u r e of t h e s t r u c t u r e will usually e m e r g e . It is t h e n possible for t h e architect to advise t h e e x c a v a t o r o n w h e r e other c o m p o n e n t s of t h e s t r u c t u r e m a y b e located. Field d r a w i n g r e quires a p o r t a b l e d r a w i n g b o a r d a n d theodolite, or a p l a n e table, a n d is m o s t efficiently p e r f o r m e d w i t h a t e a m of t h r e e p e o p l e , with o n e d r a w i n g a n d t w o involved in t a p i n g a n d sighting. [See E x c a v a t i o n Strategy.] G i v e n t h e complexity of this set of field a s s i g n m e n t s , it is essential t o h a v e in place a well-organized a n d archivable
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r e c o r d i n g a n d filing system t o be a d a p t e d a n d followed for t h e d u r a t i o n of t h e field project. If a project goes o n for a n u m b e r of seasons, with possible c h a n g e s in t h e staff of ar chitects, these records are especially essential in reestablish ing t h e grid a n d t h e b e n c h m a r k s at t h e inception of each n e w season. Also, over m u l t i p l e seasons t h e array of d r a w ings will b e c o m e c u m b e r s o m e a n d confusing unless t h e d r a w i n g s are carefully n u m b e r e d a n d cataloged. It is even i m p o r t a n t to a d o p t a s t a n d a r d p a p e r size for ease of t r a n s p o r t a t i o n , storage, a n d future access. All t h e data p r o d u c e d in t h e field—survey n o t e s , layouts of excavation units, b e n c h m a r k s , calculations of levels preliminary sketches, ar chitectural d r a w i n g s — w i n d b l o w n and soiled t h o u g h t h e y m a y b e , are c o n s i d e r e d p r i m a r y information and should b e cataloged a n d s t o r e d for s u b s e q u e n t interpretive work. I n t e r p r e t a t i n g D a t a . T o enable t h e p r e p a r a t i o n of p u b lication d r a w i n g s , the goal is to c o m e o u t of the field with a set of sufficiently c o m p l e t e d a t a a n d drawings. T h i s is a job t h a t often c o n t i n u e s b e y o n d the field season, possibly an ocean's distance from a site, so t h a t it is impossible to retake a missing m e a s u r e m e n t . T o avoid s u c h frustration it is r e c o m m e n d e d t h a t at least t h e p u b l i c a t i o n drawings to b e u s e d in preliminary r e p o r t s b e c o m p l e t e d at t h e excavation c a m p d u r i n g t h e field season. T h i s a d d s a quality-control factor to t h e fieldwork b e c a u s e t h e p r o c e s s of tracing a n d assembling p o r t i o n s of different field d r a w i n g s will lead readily to t h e discovery of missing d a t a — w h i c h can t h e n b e easily s u p plied, especially if t h e c a m p is at t h e excavation site. T h i s also p u t s t h e final p r o d u c t i n t o t h e h a n d s of t h e a u t h o r of t h e p r e l i m i n a r y r e p o r t i m m e d i a t e l y . D o i n g t h e s a m e work after t h e r e t u r n h o m e c a n stretch over m o n t h s . It is therefore necessary to h a v e an a d e q u a t e , dust-free w o r k s p a c e e q u i p p e d w i t h tables a n d tools with which h i g h quality i n k d r a w i n g s a n d illustrations can be p r o d u c e d . W i t h C A D a n d G I S ( G e o g r a p h i c I n f o r m a t i o n Systems) software, t h e c o m p u t e r drafting of m a p s a n d buildings can also be d o n e o n location. T h e u s e of C A D enables t h e instant p r o d u c t i o n of publication-quality d r a w i n g s a n d t h e r e c o n s t r u c tion a n d m a n i p u l a t i o n of field drawings to create simula tions, from a n y selected p o i n t of view, of buildings a n d sites as they m a y h a v e looked in antiquity. G I S allows the u s e of a base m a p to store various layers (categories) of data that c a n b e retrieved b y u s i n g a m o u s e to "click o n " a p o i n t of t h e m a p w i t h w h i c h t h e d a t a are associated. [See C o m p u t e r R e c o r d i n g , Analysis, a n d Interpretation.] T h e a f t e r m a t h of t h e field season involves an array of fol l o w - u p research before t h e final publication of drawings a n d analyses of material culture: from analyzing construction t e c h n i q u e s , finding parallels for t h e site's building designs a n d settlement p l a n s , a n d d e t e r m i n i n g t h e u s e and function of t h e buildings to p r e p a r i n g plans for site restoration. D r a w i n g s for final p u b l i c a t i o n will i n c l u d e , a m o n g others, t h o s e of t h e actual r e m a i n s (already c o m p l e t e d d u r i n g t h e field s e a s o n ) , r e c o n s t r u c t i o n s s h o w i n g t h e c o m p l e t e s t r u c -
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ture as it was in t h e various phases of its u s e , artistic r e n derings, a n d studies of construction m e t h o d s , design t e c h niques, and architectural details. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Kathleen M . S., S. W . Green, and E. B. W . Z u b r o w , eds. Inter preting Space: GIS and Archaeology. N e w York, 1990. Detweiler, A. Henry. Manual of Archaeological Surveying. N e w H a v e n , 1948. This A S O R manual applies the regular principles of surveying to archaeology, and is still a good beginning point, especially for those working with a manual theodolite or transit. F o r greater detail and use of electronic and computerized equipment, up to date m a n uals on standard a n d electronic surveying, available in libraries of universities with engineering departments, should be consulted. Dillon, Brain, ed. The Student's Guide to Archaeological Illustrating. Vol. 1, Archaeological Research Tools. 2d rev. ed. Los Angeles, 1985. A useful introduction that includes chapters on m a p s , plans, sections and reconstruction drawings. Harris, Edward C. Principles of archaeological stratigraphy. 2d ed. L o n don and N e w York, 1989. Chapter 9, "Archaeological P l a n s , " gives a good theoretical discussion of the role of precise excavation plans and their difference from sections. H o b b s , A. H. A. Surveying for Archaeologists and Other Pieldworkers. N e w York, 1980. Includes an excellent section on m a p p i n g from oblique aerial photographs. BEET DE VRIES
ARCHITECTURAL ORDERS.
T h e two types of G r e e k t r a b e a t i o n — D o r i c a n d Ionic—apparently w e r e t h e m selves created as adaptations of N e a r E a s t e r n architectural o r n a m e n t s in a b o u t 600 a n d 560 BCE, respectively ( D o r i c as an adaptive imitation of t h e so-called P r o t o - D o r i c c o l u m n s of type at D e i r el-Bahari, Ionic as assemblage of M e s o p o tamian and L e v a n t i n e motifs). A l t h o u g h they d o exercise s o m e influence o n N e a r Eastern architecture after t h e sixth century BCE (especially A c h a e m e n i d a n d C y p r i o t ) , o n t h e whole they do n o t a p p e a r in d i e N e a r East before t h e c o n quests of Alexander. T h e Greek colonies (e.g., N a u k r a t i s ) a n d the Anatolian coastlands, which r e m a i n p a r t of t h e G r e e k h o m e l a n d s p r o p e r t h r o u g h o u t the Hellenistic period, are the exceptions. [See Naukratis.] T h e principal conservative tradition of m o n u m e n t a l ar chitecture in the Anatolian c o a s d a n d s is t h e Ionic tradition of temple design codified by P y t h e o s ( T e m p l e of A t h e n a at Priene, c. 340 BCE) a n d later by H e r m o g e n e s ( T e m p l e of Artemis L e u k o p h r y n e at M a g n e s i a ad M a e a n d r u m , c. 220/ 200 BCE). T h i s consisted of a refined system of p r o p o r t i o n s (Vitravius 3.3.1-13) based on a regular spacing of c o l u m n s o n a grid often d e t e r m i n e d b y t h e plinth m o d u l e . T h e p r i n cipal m o n u m e n t s of this tradition are a n u m b e r of peripteral a n d pseudodipteral temples (at M a g n e s i a , C h r y s e , T e o s , Ala b a n d a , and L a g i n a , t h i r d - s e c o n d centuries BCE). T h e other major m o n u m e n t s are d i e " I o n i a n " agoras and t e m p l e t e m e n e s u r r o u n d e d o n all four sides b y regularly s p a c e d col o n n a d e s , usually o n e story with D o r i c o n t h e exterior a n d Ionic o n the interior a n d with the passage t h r o u g h t h e agora
placed along o n e side ratiier t h a n axially ( M i l e t u s , M a g n e sia, a n d P r i e n e ) . [See M i l e t u s ; Priene.] T h e other tradition in Anatolia centers a r o u n d P e r g a m o n in t h e second c e n t u r y BCE a n d involves t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of earlier innovations in t h e syntax of t h e o r d e r s , w i t h t h e u s e of e n g a g e d pier c o l u m n s for corners of c o l o n n a d e s a n d u p p e r stories ( P e r g a m e n e stoas at A t h e n s a n d Aigai). T h e r e is also some use of screens of e n g a g e d o r d e r s as articulation for wall surfaces (tire bouleuteria at M i l e t u s a n d T e r m e s s o s ) a n d t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of buildings with real (the M a u s s o l e i o n [ M a u s o l e u m ] at Halikarnassos a n d Belevi) or e n g a g e d (the L i o n M o n u m e n t at K n i d o s ) o r d e r s o n a p o d i u m in t h e G r e e k a n d n o n - G r e e k lands of t h e s o u t h w e s t A n a t o l i a n coast. T h e earliest u s e of the e n g a g e d c o l u m n o n a project ing pedestal seems to b e t h e G y m n a s i u m at Stratonikeia ( m i d - s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE). [See P e r g a m o n ; Halikarnassos.] T h e extent to w h i c h Hellenic types of c o l u m n s s u p p l a n t e d native architectural forms in t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d in t h e N e a r East, a n d t h e n a t u r e of their d e v e l o p m e n t , is very u n certain. T h e r e a r e a l m o s t n o p r e s e r v e d interpretable a r c h i tectural remains until t h e early imperial p e r i o d , even in t h e principal centers, s u c h as A n t i o c h . [See A n t i o c h o n O r o n tes.] It has b e e n s p e c u l a t e d that t h e a r c h i t e c t u r e of t h e Syr ian coastlands was d o m i n a t e d b y t h e E a s t G r e e k (Anatolian) Ionic tradition b e c a u s e in the R o m a n p e r i o d d i e I o n i c r a t h e r t h a n t h e C o r i n t h i a n o r d e r p r e d o m i n a t e s . It is clear t h a t D o r i c a n d Ionic buildings were built b y G r e e k colonists as far east as Ai K h a n u m . H o w e v e r , r e c e n t scholarship has largely settled t h e p o i n t tiiat Hellenistic Alexandria was t h e major creative center in t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of so-called b a r o q u e aedicular screen ar chitecture a n d t h a t this is t h e a r c h i t e c t u r e d e p i c t e d i n S e c o n d Style P o m p e i i a n wall p a i n t i n g ( M c K e n z i e , 1 9 9 0 ) . T h i s architecture m u s t therefore h a v e d e v e l o p e d in A l e x a n d r i a n palace architecture in t h e third a n d s e c o n d centuries BCE. Individual features are noticeable in f r a g m e n t s in t o m b s in Alexandria a n d a t d i e Alexandria M u s e u m : p i e r c o l u m n s (from Shatby, M u s t a f a P a s h a , t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE) ; segmental p e d i m e n t s (from A n f o u s h y , H y p o g e u m 2, t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE); modillion cornices a n d coffered c o n c h e s (Alexandria M u s e u m ) . T o s o m e extent, t h e creativity of this architecture was clearly a p r o d u c t of t h e m i x i n g of Hellenic a n d native forms (e.g., segmental p e d i m e n t s a n d foliate b a s e s , t h e latter attestable for t h e E g y p t i a n s e v e n t e e n t h d y n a s t y ) . [See A l exandria.] T h i s architecture begins to a p p e a r in t h e evidence of p r e served buildings at t h e e n d of t h e first c e n t u r y BCE a n d s p r e a d s rapidly across t h e entire M e d i t e r r a n e a n in t h e c o u r s e of t h e first c e n t u r y CE. T h e earliest p r e s e r v e d b u i l d ings with a c o m p l e t e repertoire of b a r o q u e aedicular screen facades (broken a n d hollow p e d i m e n t s , c o l u m n s o n p e d e s tals, foliate bases, b r o k e n forward a n d c u r v e d e n t a b l a t u r e s , framed tholoi, coffered c o n c h niches) a r e t h e t e m p l e t o m b s at Petra (e.g., t h e K h a s n e , n o w d a t e d t o late first c e n t u r y
ARCHITECTURAL ORDERS BCE) a n d t h e P a l a z z o delle C o l o n n e in P t o l e m a i s , C y r e n a i c a (first c e n t u r y BCE or first c e n t u r y CE). By t h e s e c o n d half of t h e first c e n t u r y a n d t h e early s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE in Anatolia, this is established as t h e basic formal v o c a b u l a r y of t h e a t e r s c e n e buildings (e.g., t h e D o m i t i a n i c s c e n e at E p h e s u s ) ; of screen walls in t h e imperial c u l t c h a m b e r s of g y m n a s i a (at E p h e s u s , Sardis, a n d M i l e t u s ) ; of n y m p h a e a (the T r a j a n i c n y m p h a e u m at M i l e t u s ) ; a n d of o t h e r p u b l i c buildings (the Celsus library at E p h e s u s , c. 1 1 7 CE). T h e conservative t r a dition of t e m p l e design d e r i v e d f r o m H e r m o g e n e s does p e r sist in Asia M i n o r into t h e early s e c o n d c e n t u r y (at Aizanoi) b u t seems to e n d b y t h e t i m e of t h e peripteral c o l o n n a d e at Sardis (in A n t o n i n e b a r o q u e ) . [See P e t r a ; P t o l e m a i s ; E p h e sus; Sardis.]
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T h e c o l o n n a d e d street seems to originate in t h e Syrian coastlands in A u g u s t a n t i m e s (first attested in H e r o d ' s p r o ject at A n t i o c h ) , as does t h e a r c u a t e d or " S y r i a n " p e d i m e n t b e t w e e n twin t o w e r s (the A u g u s t a n T e m p l e of D u s h a r a at Si). A r c a d e s (archivolts o n c o l u m n s ) m a y exist in t h e Al e x a n d r i a n - i n s p i r e d r e p e r t o i r e before tire imperial era. Relatively little further c h a n g e occurs in t h e u s e of t h e orders i n Anatolia a n d t h e N e a r E a s t in t h e s e c o n d a n d third centuries CE. I n the s e c o n d century, t h e so-called m a r b l e style d o m i n a t e s t h e p r o d u c t i o n of o r n a m e n t in Anatolia, Syria, a n d N o r t h Africa, b a s e d o n p r o d u c t i o n from t h e P r o c o n n e s u s quarries. By S e v e r a n times, t h e p r o d u c t i o n of or n a m e n t is d o m i n a t e d b y a t y p e of brittle carving with simple faceted surfaces t h a t create a b r u p t contrasts of light a n d
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s h a d e ; this aesthetic forms t h e basis of L a t e A n t i q u e a n d Byzantine o r n a m e n t . T h e h y b r i d u s e of Hellenic types of c o l u m n s a n d N e a r E a s t e r n elements c o n t i n u e s t h r o u g h o u t t h e R o m a n p e r i o d . T h e T r a j a n i c kiosk at Philae is in a fully traditional E g y p t i a n form, w h e r e a s t h e t e m p l e t o m b s at P e t r a a n d t h e T e m p l e of Bel at P a l m y r a c o m b i n e canonical o r d e r s w i t h " A s s y r i a n " crowstep m e r l o n s a n d E g y p t i a n cavetto c o r n i c e s . A t a n u m ber of centers, buildings with partially or fully native p l a n s a d a p t t h e a r c h i t e c t u r e of t h e edicular s c r e e n or a r c a d e as e n g a g e d or low-relief surface p a t t e r n i n g , b u t w i t h o u t t h e fixed relative p r o p o r t i o n s or syntactical rules of Hellenic types (e.g., t h e T e m p l e of G a r e u s at U r u k ; t h e " p e r i p t e r o s " and t h e " F r e i t r e p p e n b a u " at A s s u r ) . [See also Architectural D e c o r a t i o n . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Boethius, Axel, and J. B . Ward-Perkins. Etruscan and Roman Architec ture. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1 9 7 0 . T h e section by W a r d - P e r k i n s (re printed as Roman Imperial Architecture [ 1 9 S 1 ] ) is still the s t a n d a r d survey of all imperial age R o m a n architecture. Browning, Iain. Petra. 2d ed. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 3 . 3 d ed. L o n d o n , 1989. G e n eral survey of Petra, Dentzer-Feydy, Jacqueline. " D e c o r architectural et d e v e l o p p e m e n t d u H a u r a n d u Ier siecle avant J . - C . au V i l e siecle apres J . - C . " In Hauran I, edited b y Jean-Marie D e n t z e r , vol. 1, p p . 2 6 1 - 3 1 0 . Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 2 4 . Paris, 1 9 8 5 . Survey for the specialist.
Shaft
Column
D o w n e y , Susan. Mesopotamian Religious Architecture: Alexander through the Parthians. Princeton, 1988. Focuses on the continuation of M e sopotamian tradition b u t with some consideration a n d illustration of Hellenic hybrid elements, particularly at D u r a a n d Assur. Lauter, H a n s . Die Architektur des Hellenismus. D a r m s t a d t , 1986. T h e only recent attempt at a general history of Hellenistic architecture, limited largely to Greek cultural areas but with some consideration of the N e a r East. Well illustrated in a c o m p a c t format. Lyttelton, Margaret. Baroque Architecture in Classical Antiquity. L o n don, 1 9 7 4 . Well-illustrated, c o m p e n d i o u s a t t e m p t t o chronicle t h e development of b a r o q u e aedicular screen architecture. M c K e n z i e , Juditii. The Architecture of Petra. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 0 . Well-illus trated study of one site, which establishes that so-called b a r o q u e ae dicular architecture developed in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE a n d is essentially that which is represented in P o m peiian second style painting. THOMAS NOBLE HOWE
ARCHIVES. ARMENIA. Base : Plinth ARCHITECTURAL ORDERS.
Diagram of various architectural features
of public buildings, (Courtesy T . N . Howe)
See Libraries a n d Archives.
A n y s t u d y of A r m e n i a n a r c h a e o l o g y is h a m p e r e d from die start b y f u n d a m e n t a l h a n d i c a p s : t h e c h r o nology r e m a i n s insufficiently precise a n d n o t yet universally a c c e p t e d , so t h a t terminologies u s e d b y local a n d foreign scholars vary. D e s p i t e t h e extensive w o r k d o n e in eastern Anatolia a n d n o r t h w e s t e r n I r a n , t h e majority of t h e e v i d e n c e c o m e s f r o m t h e p r e s e n t R e p u b l i c of A r m e n i a , c o m p r i s i n g , at best, one-fifth of historic A r m e n i a , w h i c h c o v e r e d all of
ARMENIA t h e A r m e n i a n plateau. C o n s e q u e n t l y , serious g e o g r a p h i c a n d chronological l a c u n a e r e m a i n , distorting o u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the existing m a t e r i a l . T h i s is especially so b e c a u s e t h e A r m e n i a n p l a t e a u at times entered into larger cul tural units. M o s t c o n c l u s i o n s are therefore r e n d e r e d tentative a n d possibly i n a c c u r a t e . Archaeological evidence o n t h e A r m e n i a n plateau begins w i t h t h e Early Paleolithic p e r i o d . T h e earliest finds in A r m e n i a , a n d i n d e e d in all of t h e f o r m e r U S S R to date, w e r e m a d e in 1946-1948 b y S. A . S a r d a r y a n a n d M . Z . P a n ichkina ( M o n g a i t , i 9 6 i , p p . 56-57; P a n i c h k i n a , 1950) a t S a t a n i d a r o n t h e s o u t h w e s t e r n slopes of M t . A r a g a c , n e a r t h e A r m e n o - T u r k i s h b o r d e r . T h e s e consisted of typical C h e l lean a n d Early A c h u l e a n artifacts, m a d e of obsidian, w h i c h is plentiful in this volcanic region. S o m e w h a t later, m o r e developed M i d d l e a n d L a t e Paleolithic sites also o c c u r in t h e g o r g e of t h e H r a z d a n River, just n o r t h of t h e p r e s e n t A r m e n i a n capita] of E r e v a n o n t h e M i d d l e A r a x e s River. A n u m b e r of p e t r o g l y p h s r e p r e s e n t i n g l o n g - h o r n e d animals a n d h u n t i n g scenes, f o u n d o n M t . A r a g a c a n d elsewhere in A r m e n i a a n d n e i g h b o r i n g Azerbaijan, m a y also go b a c k to t h e Paleolithic p e r i o d , a l t h o u g h their c h r o n o l o g y r e m a i n s uncertain. T h e stratigraphy of m o r e p e r m a n e n t s e t t l e m e n t s — r a t h e r than mere encampments—found on the southwestern slopes of M t . A r a g a c d e m o n s t r a t e s a direct succession from food-gathering t o f o o d - p r o d u c i n g levels n o t yet attested elsewhere in T r a n s c a u c a s i a . A local evolution derived f r o m t h e n e i g h b o r i n g hills ( a n d leading t o Neolithic settlements in t h e plain of E r e v a n as early as 6000 BCE) has c o n s e q u e n t l y
b e e n p o s t u l a t e d ( B u r n e y a n d L a n g , 1971, p . 34). T h e ag ricultural basis of t h e e c o n o m y in t h e earliest level of these n e w settlements is clearly attested b y t h e p r e s e n c e of q u e r n s , m o r t a r s , obsidian sickle b l a d e s , a n d storage jars; stock rais ing is reflected in rock reliefs of d o m e s t i c a t e d animals. V a r ious f o r m s of r o u n d - b o t t o m e d vessels a n d c u p s m a d e of sand a n d s t r a w - t e m p e r e d clay, occasionally decorated with an incised motif, m a r k t h e a p p e a r a n c e of pottery. T h e s e early settlements a p p a r e n t l y shared a c o m m o n tradition with t h o s e of m i d - s i x m - f i f t h - m i l l e n n i u m Georgia: a small, cir cular h o u s e plan occurs b o t h t h e r e a n d at T e l u t , west of Erevan. T h e transition from stone to metal late in t h e fourth mil l e n n i u m is still o b s c u r e , b u t t h e p e r i o d from a b o u t 3250 to a b o u t 1750 BCE is of particular n o t e in A r m e n i a . Called K u r o - A r a x e s b y local scholars, b u t also k n o w n u n d e r a va riety of other n a m e s (e.g.. Early T r a n s c a u c a s i a n ) , it s p a n n e d b o t h tire Chalcolithic (Soviet Eneolithic) and Early B r o n z e Ages. Geographically, its culture r e a c h e d from t h e C a u c a s u s to eastern Anatolia, n o r t h w e s t e r n Iran, a n d b e y o n d t o SyriaPalestine. Its r e m a r k a b l e stability a n d uniformity, despite a g r a d u a l evolution a n d t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of local particular ism in its last p h a s e , led Charles B u r n e y to c o n c l u d e t h a t " N e v e r again w a s t h e r e a culture in t h e highland z o n e b o t h so far-flung a n d so long-lived" ( B u r n e y and L a n g , 1971, p. 85). T h e h a l l m a r k u s e d t o identify t h e K u r o - A r a x e s culture is a distinctive, high-quality, d a r k - m o n o c h r o m e (usually black or red) b u r n i s h e d p o t t e r y in various shapes that is decorated with g r o o v e d , or occasionally raised, h a t c h e d triangles, sin-
ARMENIA. F i g u r e ! . Round house at Sengawit' displaying the base of a central post. T h i r d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. (Courtesy N . G. Garsoi'an)
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gle o r double spirals, zigzags, or incipient floral o r bird m o tifs. T h e superior technical level a n d sophistication r e a c h e d b y this style in the Araxes valley d u r i n g d i e third m i l l e n n i u m has lent credence to the hypotiiesis t h a t this m a y well h a v e b e e n its center. Variations of t h e type can b e t r a c e d t h r o u g h out t h e cultural area—particularly in t h e slightly later K h i r bet K e r a k ware of Syro-Palestine, w h o s e style seemingly originated in T r a n s c a u c a s i a . With some t e n d e n c y t o w a r d m o r e elongated forms, t h e K u r o - A r a x e s tradition lasted t h r o u g h t h e Early B r o n z e A g e a n d even b e y o n d t h e m i d second millennium BCE in some areas. Sengawit', a s o u t h e r n s u b u r b of E r e v a n o n t h e high left b a n k of t h e H r a z d a n , h a s often b e e n selected, a m o n g m a n y others, as a typical K u r o - A r a x e s site, although it was p r o b ably f o u n d e d even earlier. It was a p e r m a n e n t settlement, s u r r o u n d e d b y a protective wall of large, u n d r e s s e d stones, with an u n d e r g r o u n d p a s s a g e t o t h e river. Witiiin it w e r e g r o u p e d n u m e r o u s , usually single-room, r o u n d h o u s e s s o m e 7-8 m in diameter. T h e y are similar t o ones f o u n d i n Georgia, in K a r a b a g h , a n d n e a r N a x c a w a n o n t h e lower A r axes. C o m p o s e d of several stone courses s u r m o u n t e d b y thin wattle a n d clay walls, their inward curvature suggests a beehive shape. A c c o r d i n g to Afak'elyan (1976, p . 14), t h e interiors w e r e usually p a i n t e d blue. Rectangular annexes of t e n flanked t h e central r o o m , a n d t h e larger h o u s e s h a d a central w o o d e n p o s t (see figure 1). All examples i n c l u d e d a storage b i n for grain a n d a n elaborate a n d highly o r n a m e n t e d clay h e a r t h ( s o m e r a m shaped or with r a m h e a d s a n d movable parts) that m a y have served religious as well as practical p u r p o s e s . T h e growing i m p o r t a n c e of animal h u s b a n d r y is reflected b y petroglyphs and multiple figurines or amulets of tiny bulls, probably also with a religious sig nificance. Burials from tiiis p e r i o d are rare, b u t Sengawit' h a d a largely i n t r a m u r a l cemetery, with early c o m m u n a l burials in rectangular graves containing u p t o t e n bodies. G r a v e goods included stone a n d c o p p e r w e a p o n s , a m u l e t s , personal o r n a m e n t s , b o n e i m p l e m e n t s , a n d fragments of textiles. [See Burial Sites; G r a v e G o o d s ; W e a p o n s ; andTzxtiles, article on Textiles of t h e Neolithic t h r o u g h I r o n Ages.] Certain regions display signs of stagnation in t h e last, E B p h a s e of this culture, b e g i n n i n g in a b o u t 2300 BCE. H o w e v e r , t h e activity i n n o r t h e r n a n d central A r m e n i a did n o t abate. M a n y n e w settlements developed i n the hill c o u n t r y ( G a r n i , Elar, a n d L c a s e n in t h e north, Hafic i n t h e west) as t h e p r e d o m i n a n c e of animal h u s b a n d r y a n d p o p u l a t i o n p r e s s u r e b e g a n to require additional space. O f particular i m p o r t a n c e is t h e a p p e a r a n c e of a major metallurgical center a t M e c a m o r , west of E r e v a n . E v e n t h o u g h t h e t e c h n i q u e u s e d h a d p r o b a b l y b e e n b r o u g h t from M e s o p o t a m i a , a n d M e c a m o r did n o t reach its a p o g e e before t h e second half of t h e s e c o n d millennium BCE, it m a y b e t h e earliest such center in T r a n s caucasia. B r o n z e slag, together witii casserite ore a n d ani m a l - m a t t e r briquettes containing t h e p h o s p h o r u s r e q u i r e d t o extract tin from this ore, were found in M e c a m o r ' s earliest p h a s e , together with K u r o - A r a x e s pottery.
Considerable continuity from this c u l t u r e c a n b e t r a c e d in t h e s u b s e q u e n t M i d d l e B r o n z e ( t w e n t i e t h - f o u r t e e n t h centuries BCE) a n d L a t e B r o n z e ( t h i r t e e n t h - t e n t h centuries BCE) p e r i o d s , t h o u g h s o m e sites w e r e t e m p o r a r i l y a b a n d o n e d . E v e n so, A r m e n i a in the s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE p r e sents a c o m p l e x p i c t u r e , continually s u p p l e m e n t e d b y o n going excavations a n d t h e identification of n e w w e s t e r n sites t h r o u g h r e c e n t air surveys a n d t h e w o r k b y Philip K o h l a n d H e r m a n n G a s c h e u n d e r t h e auspices of t h e Institutes of A r chaeology of t h e A c a d e m i e s of Sciences of t h e A r m e n i a n a n d G e o r g i a n R e p u b l i c s . M o s t of t h e material for this p e r i o d derives from burials a n d shows a fairly unified culture, i n cluding b o t h T r a n s c a u c a s i a a n d n o r t h w e s t e r n I r a n b y t h e e n d of the f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. N u m e r o u s b a r r o w s of t h e n o r t h e r n s t e p p e t y p e , similar t o t h o s e f r o m Trialeti in s o u t h ern Georgia, h a v e c o m e t o light in t h e A r m e n i a n R e p u b l i c : at Kirovakan (c. 1500 BCE) a n d T a z e k e n d in t h e n o r t h , as well as at K a r a b a g h i n Azerbaijan, I n 1950, at L c a s e n , t h e lowering of the w a t e r level of L a k e S e v a n revealed a m a j o r cemetery i n u s e f r o m t h e third m i l l e n n i u m to a b o u t 1200 BCE. Its richest t o m b s , h o w e v e r , a p p r o a c h e d b y d r o m i a n d lined as well as r o o f e d w i t h massive s t o n e slabs, h a v e b e e n attributed t o t h e t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. [See T o m b s . ] N e a r Artik, on t h e w e s t e r n slopes of M t . A r a g a c , a vast c o m p l e x of s o m e 640 c a t a c o m b t o m b s with vertical shafts a n d oval burial c h a m b e r s filled with stones a n d e a r t h w a s u n c o v e r e d b e g i n n i n g i n 1959 b y T . S. X a c a t r y a n ( K h a c h a t r i a n , 1963). These have been dated to between die fourteenth and the t e n t h centuries BCE, witii t h e majority of burials b e l o n g i n g to t h e middle p h a s e (twelfth-eleventh c e n t u r i e s ) . I n b o t h types of cemeteries, single burials (the c o n t r a c t e d b o d y lies o n its side with n o particular orientation) are t h e n o r m , al t h o u g h twin a n d even s o m e c o m m u n a l burials occasionally a p p e a r in t h e last p h a s e . T h e great d e v e l o p m e n t of metallurgy, e v i d e n c e d b y t h e p r e s e n c e of s o m e twenty-four smelting furnaces at M e c a m o r dating to before 1000 BCE, is also reflected i n t h e diver sity a n d wealth of t h e grave furnishings. T h e richest a n d b e s t k n o w n are those from K i r o v a k a n : a g o l d b o w l d e c o r a t e d with pairs of r e p o u s s e lions, silver c u p s similar t o t h o s e f o u n d in t h e Trialeti b a r r o w s , a w o o d e n c o u c h witii silverp l a t e d e n d s , b r o n z e bowls a n d w e a p o n s , a n d a gold a n d carnelian necklace a d o r n i n g t h e c o r p s e . Similar b r o n z e tools, weapons, a n d ornaments—daggers with openwork p o m mels, s p e a r h e a d s , axes, swords w i t h d e c o r a t e d b l a d e s ( s o m e w i t h a c o p p e r - s n a k e inlay), b r o n z e a n d obsidian a r r o w h e a d s , h o r s e bits a n d w h e e l e d cheek pieces, d e c o r a t e d belts, bracelets w i t h spirals a n d granulation, earrings, hairpins with decorated h e a d s , a n d p e n d a n t s w i t h o p e n w o r k bells a n d birds w e r e f o u n d with b r o n z e , glass p a s t e , a n d carnelian b e a d s at Artik, L c a s e n a n d elsewhere. All testify t o t h e m a s tery of A r m e n i a n m e t a l w o r k i n this p e r i o d . [See M e t a l s , ar ticle on Artifacts of t h e Neolithic, B r o n z e , a n d I r o n Ages; Jewelry.] F o r e i g n influences o n A r m e n i a h a v e b e e n a r g u e d for t h e
ARMENIA late secoiid m i l l e n n i u m BCE. Parallels are manifest in t h e n o r t h e r n b a r r o w - t y p e burials, in t h e c e r a m i c s with c o r d e d d e c o r a t i o n (similar to t h o s e of t h e later s t e p p e k u r g a n s f o u n d in t h e earlier M B burials at L c a s e n ) , a n d p e r h a p s in t h e r e m a r k a b l e g r o u p of o p e n a n d c o v e r e d w o o d e n vehicles w i t h disk a n d s p o k e d wheels also r e c o v e r e d from L c a s e n . T h e s e c o r r e s p o n d t o e x a m p l e s in Trialeti, t h o u g h M i t a n n i a n influence from t h e s o u t h h a s also b e e n p o s t u l a t e d . [See M i t a n n i . ] T h e profusion of p o l y c h r o m e ceramics o c c u r r i n g at n u m e r o u s s i t e s — T a z e k e n d (with w h i c h a r e d - o n - b l a c k t y p e has b e e n identified), G a r n i , M e c a m o r , a n d L c a s e n , a m o n g o t h e r s — p o i n t s s o u t h w a r d , to n o r t h w e s t e r n I r a n . T h e s a m e holds for t h e M i t a n n i - t y p e cylinder seals discov ered in t h e earlier Artik t o m b s . E v e n s o , m o s t artifacts are of local origin, as is t h e gold. T h e earlier L c a s e n t o m b s a r e characterized b y tiieir o w n m o n o c h r o m e p o t t e r y with a p u n c t u a t e d d e c o r a t i o n . Similarly, all levels at Artik c o n t a i n only b l a c k - d e c o r a t e d c e r a m i c s , at times c r u d e , at times b u r n i s h e d to a nearly mirrorlike luster. T h e b u l k of t h e M B a n d L B e v i d e n c e is, t h e n , derived from cemeteries. H o w e v e r , c y c l o p e a n fortresses, k n o w n as herdsen, d a t i n g to t h e m i l l e n n i u m p r e c e d i n g t h e e i g h t h - c e n t u r y BCE a p p e a r a n c e of d i e U r a r t i a n s in t h e region, h a v e increasingly been d e t e c t e d t h r o u g h o u t d i e A r m e n i a n R e p u b l i c a n d in n e i g h b o r i n g K a r a b a g h (four in t h e i m m e d i a t e vicinity of G a r n i ) . [See U r a r t u . ] L a r g e g r o u p s of L B m e g a lithic m o n u m e n t s h a v e also b e e n r e c o r d e d near Sisian, in t h e eastern region of Z a n g e z u r . O f special interest are t h o s e k n o w n as visaps, " m o n s t e r s , o r d r a g o n s . " U p to 2-3 m long, w i t h large fish m o u t h s a n d eyes, as well as c r u d e indications of scales a n d gills, a n d e r e c t e d u p r i g h t in t h e m o u n t a i n s at t h e h e a d of springs, visaps m a y well indicate w i d e s p r e a d w a ter w o r s h i p , just as t h e p r e s e n c e of small amulets p o i n t to t h e probability of fertility cults. [See Cult.] Shrines with c u rious clay altars w i t h h e a r t h s a n d multiple c u p s , p r e s u m a b l y for libations a n d sacrifices, f o u n d n e a r t h e metalworks of late s e c o n d - m i l l e n n i u m BCE M e c a m o r , m u s t h a v e s o m e religious significance. A n artificial o p e n - a i r p l a t f o r m at M e c a m o r is m a r k e d w i t h hieroglyphic signs, for w h i c h an astral signifi c a n c e h a s b e e n suggested. W i t h t h e o p e n i n g of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, iron objects begin to a p p e a r in graves. T h e n e w t e c h n o l o g y m a y h a v e c a u s e d d i e g r a d u a l decline of M e c a m o r , even t h o u g h evi d e n c e d e m o n s t r a t e s d i e survival of s e c o n d - m i l l e n n i u m BCE T r a n s c a u c a s i a n culture t o t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE at least. E l e g a n t b r o n z e belts with r u n n i n g spiral b o r d e r s framing lively a n i m a l figures, chariots, a n d h u n t i n g scenes h a v e b e e n at t r i b u t e d to t h e i m m e d i a t e l y p r e - U r a r t i a n p e r i o d (c. 1 1 0 0 900 BCE) . H e n c e , for millennia, a n d d o w n to d i e U r a r t i a n c o n q u e s t in t h e early eighth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e A r a x e s valley a n d m u c h of n o r t h - c e n t r a l A r m e n i a h a d already e x p e r i e n c e d a c o n t i n u o u s , a n d at times brilliant, evolution—of w h i c h it m a y even h a v e b e e n t h e center d u r i n g t h e l o n g K u r o - A r a x e s period. I n s h a r p c o n t r a s t to t h e g r o w i n g wealth of evidence from
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earlier p e r i o d s , m a t e r i a l securely datable t o the m i l l e n n i u m from t h e sixtii c e n t u r y BCE to t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y CE is p u z zlingly meager. Its scarcity p r e s e n t s o n e of the major u n solved p r o b l e m s in A r m e n i a n archaeology. S o m e U r a r t i a n survivals occur at Armawir/Argistihinili a n d at E r e b u n i , witiiin t h e limits of m o d e r n E r e v a n ; e x c e p t for a few silver rhyta, a hypostyle hall a n d a fire altar at E r e b u n i , a n d t h e unfinished inscription of K i n g X e r x e s at V a n , h o w e v e r , t h e p e r i o d of A c h a e m e n i d d o m i n a t i o n of A r m e n i a ( s i x t h - f o u r t h centuries BCE) m u s t still b e r e c o n s t r u c t e d from literary sources, primarily X e n o p h o n . A l e x a n d e r tire G r e a t himself never visited A r m e n i a , a n d t h e Seleucid h o l d o n t h e plateau ruled b y a native d y n a s t y w a s precarious. [See Seleucids.] By t h e late t h i r d - e a r l y s e c o n d centuries BCE, e p o n y m o u s cities a p p e a r e d , p r e s u m a b l y m o d e l e d o n t h e u b i q u i t o u s Alexandrias: Artaxata/Artasat, t h e n o r t h e r n capital o n t h e m i d d l e A r a x e s f o u n d e d b y A r taxias/Artases; Zarisat; Z a r e h a w a n ; a n d A r s a m o s a t a in s o u t h w e s t e r n S o p h e n e ; eventually the n e w capital of T i granakert. O n l y A r t a s a t a n d A r m a w i r h a v e b e e n excavated t o d a t e , a n d even t h e site of T i g r a n a k e r t remains d i s p u t e d . N e v e r t h e l e s s , p r e l i m i n a r y w o r k shows generally Hellenistic u r b a n plans with an acropolis, a t e m p l e at A r m a w i r , h y p o caust b a t h s , s h o p s , a n d dwellings. [See Baths.] G r e e k in scriptions, or r a t h e r graffiti, from A r m a w i r s h o w a familiar ity with G r e e k classical literature. [See Greek.] A small statuette of die Praxitelean A p h r o d i t e t y p e was f o u n d in the excavations at A r t a s a t (Afakelyan, 1976, pi. xxii-xxiii), b u t t h e dating of t h e material from this city destroyed b y t h e R o m a n s in 59 CE a n d r e c o n s t r u c t e d w i t h the permission of t h e e m p e r o r N e r o (whose n a m e it briefly took after 66) is n o t clear. T h e a p o g e e of G r e e k influence c a m e d u r i n g the reign of T i g r a n II (95-55 BCE). Literary sources describe t h e Helle nistic character of his capital, T i g r a n a k e r t , and of his court. H a n d s o m e silver t e t r a d r a c h m s celebrating his taking of A n tioch o n the O r o n t e s R i v e r in 84 BCE follow t h e Hellenistic m o d e l : t h e y r e p r e s e n t t h e profile of t h e king o n the coin's obverse a n d d i e city's T y c h e as a c r o w n e d w o m a n en t h r o n e d above d i e O r o n t e s River o n its reverse, a n d they display G r e e k legends. [See A n t i o c h o n Orontes.] Similar coins of lesser quality c o n t i n u e d this t y p e in S o p h e n e until t h e first years of t h e C h r i s t i a n period. U n d e r t h e R o m a n s , a few inscriptions of T r a j a n a n d particularly from t h e reign of M a r c u s Aurelius at V a l a r s a p a t / K a i n e Polis ( " n e w city") west of E r e v a n , attest t h e p r e s e n c e of R o m a n t r o o p s . T h e major classical m o n u m e n t in A r m e n i a is t h e c o m p l e x at G a r n i . Its fortress w a s b e g u n in t h e t h i r d / s e c o n d century BCE. I t w a s rebuilt in t h e eleventit year of K i n g T r d a t (c. 77), a c c o r d i n g to a G r e e k inscription discovered there in 1945. W i t h i n it t h e ruins of a palace a n d of a small Ionic peripteros o n a h i g h p o d i u m w e r e f o u n d . T h e y are n o w r e c o n s t r u c t e d as a t e m p l e , t h o u g h this identification has b e e n challenged. D e s p i t e s o m e attributions to t h e t h i r d century, derived from later literature, this s t r u c t u r e is usually d a t e d to d i e first c e n -
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t u r y o n t h e basis of its style a n d u s e of a d r y - m a s o n r y tech nique with swallowtail c l a m p s , rather t h a n t h e later m o r t a r binder. A h y p o c a u s t b a t h n e a r b y p r o d u c e d a floor m o s a i c of classical sea gods a n d creatures in a s o m e w h a t c r u d e o p u s v e r m i c u l a t u m a n d sectile (Afak'elyan, 1976, pi. xxiii-xxvii). [See Mosaics.] Iranian aspects c o n t i n u e d to manifest themselves b e y o n d the fourth c e n t u r y BCE in clay plaques r e p r e s e n t i n g a M i t h raic heroic rider found at Artasat a n d in t h e pearl d i a d e m w o r n b y T i g r a n II o n his coinage. T h e m i x e d G r e c o - I r a n i a n type of this coinage similarly characterizes t h e classical b r o n z e h e a d of t h e Iranian goddess Anahita n o w in t h e Brit ish M u s e u m a n d in small statuettes of birds a n d stags o n a s t e p p e d pedestal discovered at Sisian. M o s t interesting of all are b o u n d a r y stones of Artases I (189-c. 160 BCE), w h o s e A r a m a i c inscriptions confirm the continuation of t h e local Orontid dynasty in this period, and the h u n t i n g scenes that decorate the h y p o g e u m of the Christian Arsacid kings at Alck', n o r t h w e s t of E r e v a n . [See Aramaic L a n g u a g e a n d L i t -
erature; H u n t i n g . ] T h e p r e s e n c e of Iranian fire altars u n d e r t h e m a i n altar of t h e patriarchal cathedral of E j m i a c i n a n d at K a s a x , farther n o r t h , m a r k t h e S a s a n i a n o c c u p a t i o n of A r m e n i a in t h e late fourth century. [See Sasanians,] T h e long hiatus of t h e A r m e n i a n archaeological d a r k ages c a m e t o a close with the a p p e a r a n c e of C h r i s t i a n m o n u m e n t s , p r o b a b l y in t h e fifth c e n t u r y . N u m e r o u s single- a n d three-aisled basilicas, seemingly related t o Syrian or A n a tolian types, w e r e built t h r o u g h o u t A r m e n i a a n d in G e o r g i a . [See Basilicas.] S o m e of these were m o n u m e n t a l a n d of r e m a r k a b l e quality, s u c h as t h e o n e at E r e r u k , o n t h e w e s t e r n b o r d e r of t h e A r m e n i a n R e p u b l i c , w h i c h h a s b e e n c o m p a r e d to the o n e at Q a l b L o u z e h in n o r t h e r n Syria. By t h e early seventh century, a m u l t i t u d e of d o m e d basilicas, a n d e s p e cially cruciform c h u r c h e s with a central d o m e o n s q u i n c h e s , a p p e a r e d in b o t h A r m e n i a a n d G e o r g i a , t o g e t h e r with a few circular a n d p o l y g o n a l t y p e s , of w h i c h t h e b e s t k n o w n is t h e o n e at Z u a r t n o c ' , n e a r Ejmiacin. [See C h u r c h e s . ] H i s t o riated stelae, often depicting figures in P a r t h i a n dress, w e r e erected—alone or within d o u b l e - a r c h e d m o n u m e n t s , s u c h as d i e o n e at O j u n , in t h e n o r t h , a n d possibly at Aludi in t h e east (see figure 2). [See Parthians.] S o m e of t h e c h u r c h e s (e.g., at Ptini, M r e n , O j u n , a n d At'eni in G e o r g i a ) h a v e fig u r e d relief d e c o r a t i o n s , b u t m o s t rely on t h e h a r m o n y of their p r o p o r t i o n s a n d t h e perfection of their d r e s s e d - s t o n e surfaces enclosing a m o r t a r i n n e r core a n d m i n i m a l a r c h i tectural d e c o r a t i o n a r o u n d w i n d o w s a n d cornices for their effect. T h e y r a n g e in size from t h e m i n u t e princely chapels at Astarak, T alin, a n d B j n i (belonging to t h e parafeudal ar istocracy of t h e p e r i o d ) to t h e vast d o m e d basilicas of St. G a y a n e at Ejmiacin, A r u c , T a l i n , a n d O j u n to t h e m o n u m e n t a l cruciform c h u r c h e s of Gafnahovit, St. Hfip'sime, a n d Sisian. T h e endless variety a n d sophistication of their types a n d p r o p o r t i o n s , as well as t h e subtlety of their d e c oration, testify t o the m a s t e r y of t h e artists a n d t h e wealth of their p a t r o n s , t h e ruins of w h o s e palaces are still visible in the countryside. T h e earlier cities, u n s u i t e d to c o n t e m p o r a r y military a n d aristocratic society, did n o t revive, ex c e p t for t h e administrative center of D u i n n e a r Artasat. R e cent excavations tiiere h a v e u n c o v e r e d a patriarchal residence a n d cathedral from t h e seventh c e n t u r y built over earlier structures. S t e a d y architectural activity c o n t i n u e d t h r o u g h m o s t of t h e seventh c e n t u r y , despite t h e A r a b c o n q u e s t of t h e A r m e n i a n plateau. It w a s h a l t e d for nearly t w o h u n d r e d years, h o w e v e r , along with m o s t cultural activity, w h e n t h e o c c u p a t i o n b e c a m e m o r e o p p r e s s i v e later in t h e eighth century. [See also A r m e n i a n . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Figure
2. Kars stele showing a male figure in Parthian
dress. (Courtesy N . G. Garsoi'an)
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A l t h o u g h s h a r i n g m a n y of t h e linguistic features a n d characteristics of t h e c o n t i g u o u s I n d o - E u r o p e a n dialects t h a t o n c e s p r e a d b e t w e e n G r e e k in t h e s o u t h a n d Balto-Slavic in t h e n o r t h , t h e p o s i t i o n of A r m e n i a n a m o n g t h e I n d o - E u r o p e a n l a n g u a g e s a p p e a r s to b e highly archaic, j u d g i n g from t h e p h o n e t i c system of stops. T h e p r e history of A r m e n i a n is invariably c o n n e c t e d with t h e spatial linguistic interrelationships of t h e a n c i e n t I n d o - E u r o p e a n dialects a n d t h e g e o g r a p h i c a l origin of t h e A r m e n i a n s a n d their m i g r a t i o n . H o w e v e r , t h e r e is n o scholarly c o n s e n s u s o n this subject. S o m e favor t h e traditional view t h a t A r m e n i a n s r e a c h e d Asia M i n o r from E u r o p e , a view b a s e d o n t h e testimonies of t h e classical G r e e k historians a n d t h e linguis tic affinities with t h e P o n t i c b r a n c h of I n d o - E u r o p e a n , t h a t is, G r e e k a n d t h e P a l e o - B a l k a n g r o u p ( T h r a c o - P h r y g i a n in
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p a r t i c u l a r ) . Otiiers hold t h a t t h e very cradle of P r o t o - I n d o E u r o p e a n is to b e f o u n d in e a s t e r n Anatolia a n d t h e s o u t h e r n C a u c a s u s in or n e a r A r m e n i a . W h e t h e r or n o t P r o t o - A r m e n i a n originated in t h e area w h e r e w e find it later, t h e lan g u a g e retains s o m e one t h o u s a n d w o r d s of I n d o - E u r o p e a n origin, m a k i n g it a n i m p o r t a n t s o u r c e for t h e s t u d y of I n d o E u r o p e a n roots. T h e early d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e l a n g u a g e s e e m s to have in c l u d e d considerable b o r r o w i n g s from n e i g h b o r i n g lan guages: f r o m H i t t o - L u w i a n a n d H u r r o - U r a r t i a n p r o p e r n a m e s ( t h e o n y m s , a n t h r o p o n y m s , a n d t o p o n y m s ) to I n d o I r a n i a n w o r d s of everyday life. T h e a r c h a i c contacts a m o n g t h e various p e o p l e s of t h e A r m e n i a n highlands a c c o u n t for a rich stock of c o m m o n t e r m s , a n d this d e v e l o p m e n t h a s given rise to passionate d e b a t e s over etymologies a n d loan w o r d s f r o m o n e or a n o t h e r of t h e languages of t h e r e g i o n — from t h e K a r t v e l i a n family a n d o t h e r C a u c a s i a n languages farther n o r t h to t h e various I r a n i a n languages. T h e r e is also s o m e lexical evidence s u g g e s t i n g possible early contacts with Semitic languages. T h e c o m p l e x i t y of t h e question of influ ences a n d counterinfluences n o t w i t h s t a n d i n g , t h e early i m p a c t of A r m e n i a n o n n e i g h b o r i n g l a n d s , s u c h as Georgia a n d Albania, h a s long b e e n r e c o g n i z e d . M a n y Iranian l o a n w o r d s also m a d e their w a y into t h e s e regions t h r o u g h A r m e n i a n , Y e t A r m e n i a n possesses w i t h Kartvelian a n d Albanian c o m p o n e n t s s u c h as c o n s o n a n t shifts that go b a c k to o n e or a n o t h e r of t h e ancient dialects f o u n d in t h e Balkan languages as substrata. T h e s u b s e q u e n t history of t h e language can b e divided into four major p e r i o d s : (1) preliterate, t h a t is, prior to t h e formulation of t h e A r m e n i a n a l p h a b e t early in t h e fifth c e n tury; (2) O l d A r m e n i a n , w h i c h is k n o w n t h r o u g h t h e clas sical sources of early A r m e n i a n literature in the fifth-tenth centuries; (3) M i d d l e A r m e n i a n , as developed primarily in t h e Cilician k i n g d o m in t h e eleventh-fifteenth centuries, a p e r i o d to w h i c h m o s t of d i e c u r r e n t dialectal p h o n e t i c splits c a n b e traced; a n d (4) M o d e r n A r m e n i a n , w h i c h is divided into E a s t e r n a n d W e s t e r n A r m e n i a n following t w o major dialectal g r o u p i n g s . O n e has flourished in a n d a r o u n d Ar m e n i a a n d I r a n with substantial literary d e v e l o p m e n t in T b i lisi since t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e n i n e t e e n t h century a n d in E r evan since t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e t w e n t i e t h century. T h e other has flourished simultaneously a m o n g A r m e n i a n c o m m u n i ties in Anatolia, t h e rest of t h e M i d d l e East, a n d d i e W e s t e r n w o r l d w i t h its literary capital at I s t a n b u l in t h e last c e n t u r y a n d Beirut in t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y . T h e E a s t e r n dialect r e tains t h e p r o n u n c i a t i o n of O l d A r m e n i a n , a n d the W e s t e r n dialect its o r t h o g r a p h y . T h e g r a m m a r s differ t h r o u g h o u t . Before t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of t h e A r m e n i a n script b y b r o a d modifications of t h e G r e e k a l p h a b e t a n d t o a lesser e x t e n t of t h e Syriac a l p h a b e t , A r m e n i a n s u s e d G r e e k and A r a m a i c for coinage a n d inscriptions. T h e coins of t h e i n d e p e n d e n t A r m e n i a n k i n g d o m of S o p h e n e , f o u n d e d b y A r s a m (26 c— 228), a n d those of t h e A r t a x i a d s , w i d e s p r e a d after t h e c o n -
208
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quests of T i g r a n II ( 9 5 - 5 5 ) , h a v e G r e e k legends. H o w e v e r , the l a n d m a r k inscriptions from the reign of Artases I ( 1 9 0 1 5 9 ) , t h e f o u n d e r of t h e Artaxiad dynasty, are in a n u n u s u a l form of A r a m a i c script. A royal dedicatory inscription at G a r n i , from t h e eleventh year of T r d a t I ( 6 6 B C E - C . 1 0 0 C E ) , the founder of t h e Arsacid dynasty in A r m e n i a , is in Greek. T h e r e are few L a t i n inscriptions from t h e R o m a n o c c u p a tion of the s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE. T h e earliest C h r i s t i a n texts u s e d in A r m e n i a were in Syriac, a n d t h e ecclesiastical cor r e s p o n d e n c e in t h e early decades of t h e A r m e n i a n C h u r c h was primarily in G r e e k . Very little of this c o r r e s p o n d e n c e survives in later translation. Unfortunately, in their zeal for Christianity a n d as t h e native historians of t h e fifth c e n t u r y attest, A r m e n i a n s m a d e a conscious effort to eradicate every relic of their p a g a n past. T h i s was a c c o m p l i s h e d u n d e r t h e leadership of G r i g o r t h e Illuminator, t h e saint largely r e sponsible for t h e conversion of t h e n a t i o n to Christianity in 3 1 4 . U n d e r his d e s c e n d a n t s t h e n a s c e n t c h u r c h took a n i n creasingly p r o - B y z a n t i n e stance a n d did away with m u c h of the early Syriac elements in A r m e n i a n Christianity. M o r e over, natural conditions a n d c o n s t a n t ravages b y hostile i n vaders also h a d a devastating effect. C o n s e q u e n t l y , t h e r e are n o d o c u m e n t a r y r e m a i n s from this period; a few lines of epic songs survived orally a n d were c o m m i t t e d t o writing b y later generations, t h e last b e i n g in t h e eleventh century. F r o m t h e first four centuries of scribal activity e m p l o y i n g t h e A r m e n i a n script t h e r e are only fragments t h a t are p r e served for the m o s t p a r t as e n d gatherings u s e d t o reinforce t h e b i n d i n g of later codices. T h e oldest surviving A r m e n i a n
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are M i d d l e A r m e n i a n a d d i t i o n s . T h e vowel w / m is t r a n s l i t e r a t e d u . T h e t r a n s l i t e r a t i o n follows t h e s t a n d a r d i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r a c t i c e , t h a t of H i i b s c h m a n n - M e i l l e t - B e n v e n i s t e ,
m a n u s c r i p t is a set o f t h e G o s p e l s from t h e year 8 8 7 , n o w in E r e v a n ( M a t e n a d a r a n L i b r a r y , n o . 6 2 0 0 ) . A s for t h e e p igraphic evidence, few A r m e n i a n inscriptions survive from these early centuries. T h e oldest is t h e late fifth-century in scription of t h e T e k o r basilica. T h e best e x a m p l e s of sixthc e n t u r y script a n d i c o n o g r a p h y c o m e f r o m m o s a i c floors f o u n d in a n d a r o u n d J e r u s a l e m . N u m e r o u s fine inscriptions from c h u r c h e s a n d m o n u m e n t s built in A r m e n i a i n s u b s e q u e n t centuries a n d o t h e r texts in t h e f o r m of graffiti, are f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e land. Graffiti are f o u n d also in distant places like t h e Sinai, left b y pilgrims e n r o u t e t o t h e m o n astery of St. C a t h e r i n e . N u m e r o u s graffiti w e r e left in Cilicia a n d Palestine d u r i n g t h e C r u s a d e s . Before t h e eleventh c e n tury, writing w a s only in uncials. T h e r e a f t e r , a significant paleographical d e v e l o p m e n t o c c u r r e d with t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of m i n u s c u l e s . T h e earliest inscriptions of this p e r i o d h a v e a m i x e d script, partly uncial a n d partly m i n u s c u l e , b u t u n cials c o n t i n u e t o b e t h e c o m m o n script for inscriptions. P r i o r to the u s e of m i n u s c u l e s A r m e n i a n p a l e o g r a p h y m a y b e d e scribed as s o m e w h a t u n i f o r m ; its study, h o w e v e r , is n o t firmly established. T h e invention of t h e native script in 4 0 5 CE is c r e d i t e d t o M a s t o c ' (d. 4 3 9 ) , a l e a r n e d cleric w h o w a s d e t e r m i n e d t o h a v e t h e Bible translated into A r m e n i a n . M a s t o c ' experi m e n t e d briefly with a script t h a t h a d b e e n d e v e l o p e d b y a Syrian b i s h o p n a m e d D a n i e l , b u t rejected it for its insuffi ciency a n d also e x c l u d e d t h e u s e of a p r e d o m i n a n t l y Semitic alphabet. O t h e r existing alphabets m u s t h a v e b e e n i n a d e quate for transcribing certain A r m e n i a n c o n s o n a n t s b y a sin gle sign; h e n c e , there is n o evidence for writing A r m e n i a n in either G r e e k , Syriac, or L a t i n script p r i o r t o M a s t o c ' . H i s a l p h a b e t of thirty-six c h a r a c t e r s , w h i c h was refined b y a calligrapher n a m e d Rufinus at S a m o s a t a p e r m i t t e d a p h o n e t i cally perfect t r a n s c r i p t i o n of t h e l a n g u a g e (see figure 1 ) . P u pils w e r e sent t o E d e s s a a n d C o n s t a n t i n o p l e t o s t u d y Syriac a n d Greek, t o acquire choice m a n u s c r i p t s , a n d t o translate. L a t e r o n , i n k e e p i n g with his m i s s i o n a r y e n d e a v o r s , M a § t o c ' devised alphabets for t h e G e o r g i a n s a n d t h e C a u casian A l b a n i a n s . K o r i w n , a p u p i l of M a s t o c ' , details t h e efforts of his tireless teacher in The Life of Mastoc, t h e first w o r k c o m p o s e d in A r m e n i a n (c. 4 4 3 ) . T h e w o r k c o n f o r m s t o t h e r e q u i r e m e n t s for e n c o m i u m in t h e classical tradition (a later, shorter ver sion omits t h e essential p r o e m ) . A n o t h e r p u p i l , E z n i k of K o l b , later b i s h o p of B a g r e w a n d , w r o t e Refutation of the Sects. T h i s f o u r - p a r t p o l e m i c , e m p l o y i n g traditional a r g u m e n t s o n D i v i n e P r o v i d e n c e vis-a-vis evil a n d free will, w a s directed against w h a t t h e a u t h o r c o n s i d e r e d t o b e false r e ligious m o v e m e n t s b e c a u s e of their rivalry witii C h r i s t i a n i t y — p a g a n i s m in general, Z o r o a s t r i a n i s m , G r e e k p h i l o s o p h y , a n d M a r c i o n i s m . A collection o f t w e n t y - t h r e e homilies a n d a few h y m n s h a v e b e e n traditionally a t t r i b u t e d t o M a s t o c ' himself. Likewise, a n o t h e r collection of liturgical c o m p o s i t i o n s , especially for t h e H o l y W e e k , t o g e t h e r w i t h a
ARMENIAN six-part Constitution g o v e r n i n g t h e h i e r a r c h y of t h e c h u r c h , h a s b e e n ascribed t o t h e p a t r i a r c h S a h a k , w h o held t h e h e reditary leadership of t h e A r m e n i a n C h u r c h for a b o u t fifty years (386-428, 435-438), t h e last of t h e lineage of G r i g o r t h e Illuminator t o h o l d t h a t office. A c c o r d i n g to K o r i w n , S a h a k w a s t h e f o r e m o s t p a t r o n of t h e activities p u r s u e d b y M a s t o c ' a n d his p u p i l s a n d w a s t h e translator of n u m e r o u s patristic works. H e w a s also r e s p o n s i b l e for t h e revision of t h e first translation of t h e Bible. T h e Old T e s t a m e n t was translated from Greek, a n d the N e w T e s t a m e n t w a s translated a p p a r e n t l y from t h e O l d Syriac version first a n d t h e n revised b y t h e s a m e translators, following a C a e s a r e a n - t y p e G r e e k text (traces of a later r e vision prior t o t h e eighth c e n t u r y a r e also discernible). T h e A r m e n i a n version, h o w e v e r , offers m o r e t h a n t h e u s u a l c o n t r i b u t i o n to t h e u n d e r s t a n d i n g of t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e textual tradition of t h e Bible. N u m e r o u s A r m e n i a n m a n u scripts containing t h e O l d T e s t a m e n t p r e s e r v e m a n y of O r igen's H e x a p l a r i c signs (asterisks, obeli, a n d m e t o b e l i ) , w h i c h are i m p o r t a n t e l e m e n t s for S e p t u a g i n t a l studies. N e w T e s t a m e n t m a n u s c r i p t s yield t r a c e s of t h e mostly lost O l d Syriac version, attested also in certain patristic q u o t a t i o n s . As for t h e textual t r a d i t i o n of t h e O l d T e s t a m e n t P s e u d e p i g r a p h a ( n o n c a n o n i c a l w o r k s ) , t h e A r m e n i a n often p r e serves readings s u p e r i o r t o t h o s e e x t a n t i n G r e e k , as i n t h e case of t h e Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. C e r t a i n of t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t a p o c r y p h a l w o r k s h a v e peculiar ver sions in A r m e n i a n , s u c h as t h e amplified Gospel of the In fancy. W i t h t h e e x c e p t i o n of t h e L a t i n V u l g a t e , t h e r e are m o r e A r m e n i a n biblical m a n u s c r i p t s t h a n of a n y other early ver sion. S u c h m a n u s c r i p t s , w h e t h e r whole or partial Bibles, constitute nearly a t e n t h of all m e d i e v a l A r m e n i a n m a n u scripts. T h e r e is b u t o n e A r m e n i a n - G r e e k bilingual text, c o n t a i n i n g Acts, t h e P a u l i n e c o r p u s , a n d t h e Catholic epistles (Paris, Bibliotheque N a t i o n a l e , A r m . 9, c. eleventh-twelfth c e n t u r y ) . Altogether t h e r e a r e m o r e t h a n thirty t h o u s a n d a n cient A r m e n i a n m a n u s c r i p t s , t w o - t h i r d s of w h i c h a r e a t t h e M a t e n a d a r a n L i b r a r y in E r e v a n . O t h e r major collections a r e at t h e St. J a m e s M o n a s t e r y in J e r u s a l e m a n d t h e M e k h i t a r i s t m o n a s t e r i e s in V e n i c e a n d V i e n n a . L e s s e r collections a r e f o u n d in several national a n d university libraries i n E u r o p e , t h e M i d d l e East, a n d t h e U n i t e d States. Scores of biblical c o m m e n t a r i e s also exist, c o v e r i n g a l m o s t every b o o k of t h e Bible. T h e m o s t p o p u l a r p r i m a r y s o u r c e o n t h e conversion of A r m e n i a from Z o r o a s t r i a n i s m t o Christianity very early i n t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y is t h e History of the Armenians b y A g a tliangelos. T h e i m p o r t a n c e of this w o r k is attested b y early translations into several l a n g u a g e s — G r e e k , G e o r g i a n , A r a b i c , L a t i n , a n d E t h i o p i a n , w i t h t w o distinct versions in e a c h of t h e first t h r e e l a n g u a g e s . T h e fifth-century A r m e n i a n a u t h o r p u r p o r t s t o b e a R o m a n scribe a n d a n eyewitness of t h e conversion of K i n g T r d a t I I I (298-c. 330), at w h o s e c o m
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m a n d h e w r o t e t h e History. N o t w i t h s t a n d i n g his u s e a n d a d a p t a t i o n of earlier s o u r c e s , t h e p s e u d o n y m o u s a u t h o r seems t o h a v e t r a n s m i t t e d s o m e reliable i n f o r m a t i o n r e g a r d ing t h e events s u r r o u n d i n g t h e conversion of t h e K i n g a n d t h e life a n d teachings of G r i g o r , t h e Illuminator of A r m e n i a . A m o n g t h e earlier sources u s e d b y h i m a r e K o r i w n ' s Life of Mastoc a n d t h e a n o n y m o u s collection of oral histories of G r e a t e r A r m e n i a d u r i n g t h e fourth c e n t u r y , compiled in t h e year 470 a n d t r a n s m i t t e d u n d e r t h e title Epic Histories (Buzandaran Patmut'iwnk'). I t contains earlier a n d conceivably m o r e trustwortliy t r a d i t i o n s . A clear evidence for t h e latter is t h e observation t h a t G r i g o r is called n e i t h e r " s a i n t " n o r " i l l u m i n a t o r " in t h e Buzandaran, t h u s reflecting a very early p e r i o d of t h e t r a d i t i o n — w h e n s u c h titles were n o t yet in v o g u e . T h e Buzandaran in its o w n way chronicles t h e his tory of A r m e n i a d u r i n g t h e l o n g reign of S h a p u r II of Persia (309-379) a n d c o n c l u d e s w i t h t h e official partition of t h e l a n d u n d e r his successor, S h a p u r III, in 387. T h e compila tion a t t e m p t s t o fill t h e historical g a p b e t w e e n the conversion of A r m e n i a at t h e h a n d of G r i g o r a n d t h e formulation of the alphabet b y Mastoc'. T h e a u t h o r makes a m p l e use of t h e A r m e n i a n Bible with w h i c h h e w a s t h o r o u g h l y familiar. T h e next century, from 387 t o 485, is covered by L a z a r P a r p e c ' i a n d Elise V a r d a p e t . I n a letter t o a noble friend, a n d overseer for t h e S a s a n i a n overlords, t h e marzpan V a h a n M a m i k o n e a n (485-505), L a z a r defends himself against rival clergy b e c a u s e of w h o m h e h a d s o u g h t exile in A m i d ( m o d e r n D i y a r b a k i r ) . T h e r e u p o n , h e was called b y V a h a n t o h e a d t h e m o n a s t e r y at V a t a r s a p a t a n d w a s c o m m i s s i o n e d b y h i m t o write t h e History. I n it h e acknowledges t h e works of t h e s h a d o w y Agathangelos a n d t h e Buzandaran a n d considers his o w n c o n t r i b u t i o n as t h e third historical writing ( K o r i w n ' s e n c o m i u m is d e e m e d s a c r e d b i o g r a p h y ) . L a z a r is t h e first A r m e n i a n historian of t h e fifth c e n t u r y whose identity is k n o w n . T h e central p a r t of his History focuses o n t h e revolt of 451 a n d t h e e n s u i n g battle against t h e Sasanian king Y a z d g i r d II (438-457) for p r e s s i n g t h e A r m e n i a n s to r e t u r n t o Z o r o a s t r i a n i s m . L a z a r gives n o details of t h e battle led b y V a r d a n M a m i k o n e a n , t h e h e r o of t h e p a t r o n ' s clan, a n d is often less elaborate t h a n Elise, t h e other e x p o n e n t of t h e event. T h e History of Vardan and the Armenian Warhy Elise amplifies that event, especially t h e battle. T h e r e a r e n u m e r ous o t h e r differences b e t w e e n t h e t w o a c c o u n t s , however, b e g i n n i n g with t h e c i r c u m s t a n c e s leading to t h e conflict t h a t led t o t h e revolt a n d t o w a r . T h e s e differences n o t w i t h s t a n d ing, Elise's m o r e p a s s i o n a t e retelling h a s e n d e a r e d his ver sion to t h e p o i n t of allowing little h e a r i n g for t h e other a c c o u n t o n which h e d e p e n d s . H e w r o t e at t h e request of t h e priest D a w i t ' M a m i k o n e a n likewise t o glorify t h e h e r o of t h e p a t r o n ' s clan, T h e r e is s o m e d o u b t a b o u t Elise's claim t o h a v e b e e n a n eyewitness t o t h e events r e c o r d e d b y him. H e e m p l o y s well-established martyrological elements, especially w h e n r e c o u n t i n g t h e s p e e c h e s h e attributes t o V a r d a n a n d t h e p r i e s t L e w o n d just before t h e fateful battle.
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T h e m o s t n o t e d historian, however, is t h e enigmatic Movses Xorenac'i, w h o s e History of the Armenians is d e e m e d extremely valuable especially for providing a c o h e r e n t a n d systematic view of t h e nation's history from mythical times t o the Persian p e r i o d (Book i ) a n d an apologetic i n t e r p r e tation of t h e A r m e n i a n dynastic history from t h e t i m e of Alexander the G r e a t to the early fifth century in favor of the patronizing Bagratids (Books 2-3). B o o k 1 includes s o m e rare examples of p r e - C h r i s t i a n oral poetry. In it the a u t h o r reflects keen awareness of t h e Hellenistic historiographical emphasis o n antiquity as f o u n d in the national histories of Eastern historians writing in Greek: Berossus, M a n e t h o , J o sephus, a n d Philo of Byblos (these h e e n c o u n t e r e d in t h e works of Eusebius of C a e s a r e a — h i s major s o u r c e — a n d fol lowed their apologetic c o m m o n p l a c e s ) . I n Books 2 a n d 3 h e relies on various other literary a n d historical sources, i n cluding t h e earlier histories of L a z a r a n d t h e Buzandaran collection, which h e modifies as necessary for his t r a n s p a r ent intentions. Following the religious awakening b r o u g h t a b o u t b y t h e early translations a n d the literary-historical d e v e l o p m e n t started b y K o r i w n , t h e r e c a m e yet another period of enlight e n m e n t , generated b y t h e translation of philosophical w o r k s from the classical p e r i o d a n d late antiquity. T h i s was achieved b y t h e "Hellenophile S c h o o l " of the sixth-eighth centuries n o t e d for its retention of G r e e k syntax. Collec tively, these translations are an o u t g r o w t h of t h e classical curriculum consisting of the seven liberal arts tiiat fell into two g r o u p s : the Trivium, consisting of g r a m m a r , rhetoric, a n d dialectic; a n d t h e Quadrivium, consisting of m u s i c , arithmetic, geometry, a n d a s t r o n o m y . T h e first c o m p r i s e d t h e elements of general liberal education, t h e best r e p r e s e n tative of which in t h e A r m e n i a n literary tradition is t h e late sixth-cenmry N e o p l a t o n i s t philosopher Dawit', s u r n a m e d "Invincible." Because of his c o n t e m p o r a n i e t y w i t h t h e early activities of the school, h e m a y have been i n s t r u m e n t a l i n its founding. F o u r of his works were translated from G r e e k into A r m e n i a n , possibly d u r i n g his lifetime (Definitions of Phi losophy, Commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge, Interpretation of Aristotle's Analytics, a n d Interpretation of Aristotle's Catego ries). Indicative of these grammatical, rhetorical, a n d philo sophical/theological interests are t h e n u m e r o u s elaborations on t h e Ars grammatica of Dionysius T h r a x a n d t h e m o r e t h a n three h u n d r e d Aristotelian a n d almost o n e h u n d r e d Philonic m a n u s c r i p t s (thanks to these translations, several philosophical a n d theological works n o w survive only in A r m e n i a n , including a fifth of t h e works of Philo of A l e x a n dria). T h e second curricular division consisted of t h e t e c h nical disciplines or tire sciences, t h e b e s t representative of which is A n a n i a Sirakac'i, a prolific a u t h o r of t h e seventh century. H e wrote s o m e twenty treatises, covering every a s p e c t of the sciences k n o w n i n t h e early M i d d l e Ages. History, however, c o n t i n u e d to d o m i n a t e the literary out p u t for t h e rest of t h e millennium. T h e rise of Islam a n d the extent to w h i c h A r a b rule affected A r m e n i a is t h e subject of
several historical works, t h e foremost of w h i c h is ascribed to a certain Sebeos. I n his History of Herakleios t h e s e v e n t h century a u t h o r a c c o u n t s for t h e B y z a n t i n e - P e r s i a n wars from t h e reign of M a u r i c e (582-602) to t h e accession of M u ' a w i y a h as caliph (661-680). L e w o n d (c. 730-790), a n apologist for t h e princely Bagratids ( s o o n to b e c o m e a royal dynasty, 885-1045), covers t h e years 632-788. T b v m a s A r cruni (c. 840-906), a n apologist for t h e princely A r c r u n i s , describes life u n d e r t h e caliphate in t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y . T h r o u g h o u t , h o w e v e r , h e shows d e p e n d e n c e o n all earlier A r m e n i a n historians. H i s y o u n g e r c o n t e m p o r a r y , t h e patri arch Y o v h a n n e s V D r a s x a n a k e r t c i (897-925), follows Xorenac'i r a t h e r closely b o t h i n his apologia for t h e Bagratids a n d in his b e g i n n i n g from mythical t i m e s . T h e ethos of t h e time, however, is d e p i c t e d b e s t in t h e national epic Sasunci Dawit'. L a t e r historians limit themselves t o chronicles of c u r r e n t events, s u c h as Aristakes Lastiverc'i (c. 1000-1073), w h o tells of t h e fall of the Bagratid capital, A n i , a n d M a t feos Ufhayec'i (i.e., E d e s s e n e , c. 1070-1140), w h o details d i e c o m i n g of t h e T u r k s a n d of d i e C r u s a d e r s . T h e r e a r e also poetic laments over t h e fall of Edessa t o N u r a d - D i n i n 1146 (by the p a t r i a r c h N e r s e s I V Snorhali, 1 1 6 6 - 1 1 7 3 ) , Jerusalem to Salah a d - D i n in 1187 (by t h e p a t r i a r c h G r i g o r I V P a h lawuni, 1 1 7 3 - 1 1 9 3 ) , a n d C o n s t a n t i n o p l e to M e h m e d II in 1453 (by Afakel Balisec'i, c. 1390-1454). I n spite of t h e d o m i n a n c e of t h e historical g e n r e in liter ature, tire Bible c o n t i n u e d as t h e p r i m a r y s o u r c e of inspi ration, as evidenced b y t h e mystical soliloquies of G r i g o r Narekac'i (c. 945-1003) a n d t h e first literary e p i c , a r e c o u n t ing of the Bible in verse b y G r i g o r M a g i s t r o s (c. 990-1059), a w o r k t h a t i n s p i r e d t h e m o r e elaborate Jesus the Son b y t h e patriarch N e r s e s I V Snorhali a c e n t u r y later. N e r s e s w a s t h e m o s t p r o m i n a n t figure of a n e w era of literary e n l i g h t e n m e n t that characterized d i e A r m e n i a n k i n g d o m of Cilicia i n t h e eleventh-fifteenth centuries. T h o u s a n d s of illuminated m a n u s c r i p t s , m o s t l y Bibles, a n d scores of c o m m e n t a r i e s o n various books of the Bible survive from tiiis p e r i o d . M o s t of these biblical c o m m e n t a r i e s w e r e i n s p i r e d b y t h e earlier translations of s u c h w o r k s from Syriac a n d G r e e k . S o m e of these early c o m m e n t a r i e s n o w survive only i n A r m e n i a n : E p h r e m t h e Syrian's Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles a n d his Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul, J o h n C h r y s o s t o m ' s Commentary on Isaiah, a n d Flesychius of J e r u s a l e m ' s Commentary on Job. L e x i c o g r a p h y likewise thrived with increasingly e x p a n d e d compilations w h e n M i d d l e A r m e n i a n w a s t h e c u r r e n t stage of t h e language. B y far t h e m o s t exhaustive of t h e A r m e n i a n lexica is t h e s o m e w h a t later Nor Bargirk' Haykazean Lezui ( N e w D i c t i o n a r y of t h e A r m e n i a n L a n g u a g e ) , p u b l i s h e d in t w o volumes b y t h e V e n e t i a n Mekhitarists (1836-1837). T h e w o r k e n c o m p a s s e s all w o r d s f o u n d i n m e d i e v a l A r m e n i a n literature, from t h e fifth to t h e fifteenth century. A l t h o u g h t h e coverage of t h e earlier literature is t h o r o u g h , t h e coverage of works written after t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y is r a t h e r sketchy, p e r h a p s intentionally, to avoid w h a t w a s p e r c e i v e d
'ARO'ER to b e Cilician c o r r u p t i o n s . N o l e x i c o n of M i d d l e o r Cilician A r m e n i a n exists. S u c h a w o r k s h o u l d n e c e s s a r i l y i n c l u d e w o r d s f o u n d o u t s i d e p u b l i s h e d religious texts a n d s h o u l d a c c o u n t for u n p u b l i s h e d m a n u s c r i p t s w i t h secular c o n t e n t s . [See also A r m e n i a . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abelyan, M a n u k . Hayoc' hin grakanut'yan patmut'yun (History of A n cient A r m e n i a n Literature). 2 vols. Erevan, 1 9 4 4 - 1 9 4 6 . Authoritative survey of ancient A r m e n i a n literature, organized b y genre. A b r a h a m y a n , A . G . Hay gri ev grS'ut'yan patmut'yun (History of t h e A r m e n i a n Script a n d Writing). E r e v a n , 1 9 5 9 . T h e best treatment of the subject, in the absence of a definitive work that would include recent discoveries in the Sinai a n d Jerusalem. Acaryan, H r a c e a y . Classification des dialects armeniens. Paris, 1 9 0 9 . H a n d y guide t o the A r m e n i a n regional dialects, unsurpassed by r e cent works. Acaryan, H r a c e a y . Hayeren armatakan bararan (Etymological Dictio nary of A r m e n i a n ) . 7 vols. E r e v a n , 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 3 5 . S t a n d a r d reference. Afiafyan, H r a c e a y . Hayoc' lezvi patmut'yun (History of d i e A r m e n i a n L a n g u a g e ) . 2 vols. Erevan, 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 3 5 . Classic source, in spite of m o r e recent works. Amah/an, H . M . Mijnadaryan Hayastani bafaranagrakan huSarjannere ( T h e Lexicographical Masterpieces of Medieval A r m e n i a ) . 2 vols. Erevan, 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 7 1 . Provides t h o r o u g h , topical coverage of A r m e nian lexicography t h r o u g h t h e middle ages. Benveniste, Emile. Origines de la formation des noms en indo-europien, Paris, 1 9 3 5 . Establishes t h e Classical A r m e n i a n voiced stops to b e t h e u n c h a n g e d I n d o - E u r o p e a n voiced (aspirated) stops. Etmekjian, James. History of Armenian Literature: Fifth to Thirteenth Centuries. N e w York, 1985. T h e b e s t English-language survey avail able, although uncritical a n d m a r r e d b y noticeable omissions. G o d e l , Robert. An Introduction to the Study of Classical Armenian. W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 7 5 . G o o d primer for d i e beginner. H u b s c h m a n n , I-Ieinrich. Kleine Schriften sum Armenischen. Edited b y Rudiger Schmidt. Hildesheim a n d N e w York, 1 9 7 6 . Pioneering s t u d ies, establishing d i e archaic place of A r m e n i a n a m o n g t h e I n d o - E u ropean languages, i n d e p e n d e n t f r o m Iranian. T h i s view, however, originated witii Johan Joachim S c h r o d e r in 1 7 1 1 . Jensen, H a n s . Aitarmenische Grammatik. Heidelberg, 1 9 5 9 . O n e of t h e best A r m e n i a n g r a m m a r s in t h e W e s t . Karst, Josef. Historische Grammatik des Kilikisch-Armenischen. Strassburg, 1 9 0 1 . T h e only work o n M i d d l e A r m e n i a n g r a m m a r . M a n n , S m a r t E . An Armenian Historical Grammar in Latin Characters (Morphology, Etymology, Old Texts). L o n d o n , 1 9 6 8 . Fine interpreta tion of the grammatical facts of t h e language. Markey, T . L . , and J o h n A. C . G r e p p i n , eds. When Worlds Collide: The Indo-Europeans and the Pre-Indo-Europeans. Linguistica Extranea, Studia 1 9 . A n n A r b o r , M i c h . , 1 9 9 0 . Collection of interdisciplinary p a p e r s from a 1 9 8 8 conference held in Bellagio, dealing witii t h e roots of I n d o - E u r o p e a n culture(s) a n d the Indo-Europeanization of large parts of Eurasia. Substantial attention is given to A r m e n i a n a n d the question of the original h o m e l a n d of t h e P r o t o - I n d o - E u r o p e a n s . Meillet, Antoine. Esquisse d'une grammaire comparee de Varmenien classique. 2 d ed. Vienna, 1936. S t a n d a r d work in a E u r o p e a n language. Pedersen, Holger. Kleine Schriften zum Armenischen. Edited by Rudiger Schmidt. Hildesheim a n d N e w York, 1982. Significant studies, e s pecially o n t h e Classical A r m e n i a n voiced stops, establishing t h e m to b e t h e u n c h a n g e d I n d o - E u r o p e a n voiced (aspirated) stops—as independently demonstrated by Benveniste, Stone, Michael E . The Armenian Inscriptions from the Sinai with Appen dixes on the Georgian and Latin Inscriptions by Michel van Esbroeck and W. Adder. H a r v a r d A r m e n i a n T e x t s a n d Studies, n o , 6, C a m bridge, M a s s . , 1982. M i d d l e A r m e n i a n rock inscriptions a n d graffiti;
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constitutes a major contribution to A r m e n i a n epigraphy a n d pale ography. T e r i a n , A b r a h a m . " T h e Hellenizing School: Its T i m e , Place, a n d Scope of Activities Reconsidered." I n East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, edited by N i n a G . Garso'ian et al., p p . 1 7 5 186. W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , 1982. Surveys t h e mostly philosophical translations of the Hellenophile School of t h e sixth to eighth centu ries and its formation. T h o m s o n , Robert W . " T h e F o r m a t i o n of the A r m e n i a n Literary T r a dition." In East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, edited by N i n a G . Garso'ian et al., p p . 1 3 5 - 1 5 0 . Washington, D . C . , 1982. Treats the development of A r m e n i a n historical p r o d u c tions a n d other literary works from t h e formative period t o the ninth century. T h o m s o n , Robert W . An Introduction to Classical Armenian. 2 d cd. D e l mar, N . Y . , 1989. G o o d textbook for t h e English reader. ABRAHAM TERIAN
'AROTER
(Ar., A r ' a r a h ) , site l o c a t e d o n a low ridge o v e r
l o o k i n g a b r o a d w a d i i n Israel's N e g e v d e s e r t , s o m e 22 k m (13 m i . ) s o u t h e a s t of B e e r s h e b a ( m a p reference 1479 X 0623). I n 1 Samuel
30:28, D a v i d s e n d s t h e spoils of w a r t o
' A r o ' e r ' s elders. It a p p e a r s also i n Joshua b o r d e r s of J u d a h . It is w r i t t e n Adada
15:22, defining t h e
in t h e M a s o r e t i c text.
G u i d e d b y t h e A r a b i c p r o n u n c i a t i o n , t h e site w a s first i d e n tified as ' A r o ' e r b y E d w a r d R o b i n s o n in 1838. E x c a v a t i o n s w e r e c a r r i e d o u t b e t w e e n 1975 a n d 1982 b y A v r a h a m B i r a n of d i e N e l s o n G l u e c k S c h o o l of Biblical A r c h a e o l o g y of t h e H e b r e w U n i o n College i n J e r u s a l e m a n d R u d o l p h C o h e n of t h e Israel A n t i q u i t i e s A u t i i o r i t y . Six a r e a s w e r e o p e n e d : a r e a s A , B , D , a n d Y o n t h e m o u n d ' s s u m m i t ; area C a t t h e b a s e of its s o u t h e a s t e r n slope; a n d area F o n a t e r r a c e in d i e N a h a l ' A r o ' e r d r a i n a g e a t d i e s o u t h w e s t foot of t h e tell. T h e tell, or a c r o p o l i s , o c c u p i e d a n area of a p p r o x i m a t e l y 1 h a (2.5 a c r e s ) , b u t i n t h e I r o n A g e t h e s e t t l e m e n t also o c c u p i e d a n o t h e r h e c t a r e o r so o u t s i d e t h e early acropolis wall ( s t r a t u m I V ) . F o u r m a i n strata w e r e identified: S t r a t u m I:
H e r o d i a n (50 B C E - 1 3 5 CE)
S t r a t u m II:
I r o n III (late s e v e n t h - e a r l y sixth c e n t u r i e s BCE)
S t r a t u m I I I : I r o n III ( m i d - t o late s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE) S t r a t u m I V : I r o n II—III (late e i g h t h o r early s e v e n t h - m i d s e v e n t h c e n t u r i e s BCE) T h e f o u n d i n g layer, s t r a t u m I V , f e a t u r e d a solid offseti n s e t wall as t h e d o m i n a n t f e a t u r e . I t s surfaces w e r e p l a s t e r e d , a n d a n e a r t h e n , s t o n e - l i n e d glacis w a s b u i l t a g a i n s t it from t h e outside. S o m e indications point t o a gateway on the southwest.
S t r u c t u r e s w e r e e r e c t e d against this wall
a l o n g its i n n e r face a n d t o w a r d t h e interior of t h e s e t t l e m e n t . T h e a r e a o u t s i d e t h e walls w a s also o c c u p i e d b y a r c h i t e c t u r a l r e m a i n s d a t i n g to this p h a s e o v e r a n a r e a of a p p r o x i m a t e l y o n e hectare. T h i s stratum h a s been attributed by the exca v a t o r s t o a fortification p r o j e c t ostensibly carried o u t b y M a n a s s e h , k i n g of J u d a h , w h i c h i n c l u d e d a n u m b e r of sites.
212
ARSLANTEPE
However, the pottery a n d certain other artifacts—three lamekkh seals in particular—suggest a possible earlier d a t e , p e r h a p s d u r i n g t h e reign of Hezekiah. In s t r a t u m III t h e acropolis wall a n d gateway w e n t o u t of use; structures were built over it a n d the u p p e r m o u n d ' s area was e x p a n d e d b y terracing. T h e lower slopes w e r e also built u p intensely d u r i n g this period, a n d m a n y r o u n d , s t o n e lined silos were constructed. In s t r a t u m II, die last I r o n A g e stratum, a small fort w a s built over the remains of t h e stra t u m I V gateway o n t h e acropolis. T h e settlement was r e o c cupied a r o u n d this fort, m u c h as before, often u s i n g existing walls.
3. T h e s t r a t u m I artifactual a s s e m b l a g e is a classic o n e of m u c h utility for c o m p a r a t i v e p u r p o s e s . T h e final p h a s e , closely dated t o a b o u t 70-135 CE, is also significant for p i n n i n g d o w n t h e d a t i n g a n d historical c o n t e x t of c o n t e m p o r a r y settlements at o t h e r sites. BIBLIOGRAPHY Biran, Avraham. " 'And D a v i d Sent Spoils . . . to the Elders in Aroer' (I Sam. 30:26-28): Excavators Bring Life to Ancient N e g e v Fortress but Find N o R e m a i n s of D a v i d ' s T i m e . " Biblical Archaeology Review 9 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 2 8 - 3 7 . P o p u l a r account of t h e excavations—including good color photos—with a m o r e detailed discussion of t h e biblical associations.
T h e c o s m o p o l i t a n n a t u r e of strata III a n d II is a c c e n t e d by E d o m i t e epigraphic material a n d pottery, as well as b y pottery, glass, a n d a commercial weight in t h e Assyrian style—all of w h i c h coexisted with t h e d o m i n a n t J u d a h i t e m a terial: pottery, pillar figurines, a shekel weight, a n d t h r e e lamelekh impressions. L o c a t e d o n a p r o m i n e n t transversal route between t h e K i n g ' s H i g h w a y on the T r a n s j o r d a n p l a teau a n d t h e coast, ' A r o ' e r was p r o b a b l y a major t r a d e center and provisioning station. F o r m o s t of its history it seems to have b e e n controlled b y J u d a h ( u n d e r t h e larger Assyrian umbrella), t h o u g h at a later stage t h e area m a y h a v e c o m e u n d e r E d o m i t e d o m i n i o n . [See E d o m . ]
Biran, Avraham, and R u d o l p h C o h e n . " A r o e r in the N e g e v . " EretzIsrael 1 5 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 2 5 0 - 2 7 3 . T h e m o s t complete publication to date, including detailed plans, sections, and stratigraphically organized material culture plates (though stratum IV is not represented in the latter). See p a g e 84* for an English s u m m a r y .
S t r a t u m I was c o m p r i s e d of two phases: t h e earlier d a t e d t o t h e late S e c o n d T e m p l e p e r i o d (first century BCE-first century CE) a n d the last to d i e period between d i e d e s t r u c tion of the T e m p l e a n d t h e B a r K o k h b a rebellion (c. 70-135 CE). T h e settlement w a s confined to d i e acropolis a n d fea tured a small square, two-story fortress to w h i c h a large square courtyard was a p p e n d e d (in area D ) a n d d o m e s t i c structures with b r e a d ovens in areas H a n d B . T h e finds include a well-preserved a n d diagnostic pottery assemblage; N a b a t e a n wares; a m o r a t a r i u m with t h e p o t t e r ' s n a m e s t a m p e d o n its r i m ; an A r a m a i c inscription listing w o r k e r s ' salaries; chalkstone vessels; glass vessels, including an in scribed Sidonian c u p ; a n d a b r o n z e umbo, or "shield b o s s . " T h i s small s e t d e m e n t m a y h a v e b e e n established u n d e r H e r o d the Great, or, m o r e likely, in light of the n u m i s m a t i c evidence, A g r i p p a (38-44 CE). T h e excavations at ' A r o ' e r resulted in three significant contributions to the field.
DAVID ILAN
1. T h e three I r o n A g e strata (II-IV) r e p r e s e n t discrete, well-defined material-culture assemblages t h a t show t y p o logical d e v e l o p m e n t a n d changing cultural affinities over a relatively short time ( a b o u t 100-150 years). T h e ceramic repertoires of these strata can b e u s e d as points of reference a n d c o m p a r i s o n for m o r e poorly defined assemblages in southern J u d a h , E d o m , a n d M o a b . [See M o a b . ] Relative chronologies can t h u s b e fine t u n e d to within approximately fifty years. 2. T h e c o m b i n a t i o n of Judahite, E d o m i t e , a n d Assyrian attributes in t h e material culture allows scholars to m a k e in ferences a b o u t e c o n o m i c ties, cultural affiliations, a n d p o litical control in t h e N e g e v in the I r o n Age.
Biran, Avraham. " A r o e r (in J u d e a ) . " In The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 8 9 - 9 2 . Jerusalem and N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . T h e most comprehensive English publication to date. Hershkovitz, Malka. "Aroer at the E n d of t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e P e r i o d . " Eretz-Israel 23 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 3 0 9 - 3 1 9 . G o o d s u m m a r y of d i e finds from a closely dated context, maldng it one of d i e type-sites for the period. Illustrations are useful for comparative p u r p o s e s . See page 1 5 6 * for an English s u m m a r y .
ARSLANTEPE,
tell (hoytik) located in eastern T u r k e y , 6 k m (4 mi.) n o r t h e a s t of t h e t o w n of M a l a t y a a n d 4 k m (2.5 mi.) s o u t h of t h e t o w n of Eski M a l a t y a ( O l d M a l a t y a ) , d i e ancient R o m a n settlement, in t h e m o d e r n village of O r d u z u , 15 k m (9 mi.) from t h e right b a n k of t h e E u p h r a t e s River. T h e site, w h i c h is a b o u t 30 m high, d o m i n a t e d t h e M a l a t y a plain from d i e fifth m i l l e n n i u m to t h e N e o - H i t t i t e age (1200-700 BCE), evident from t h e i n t e r r u p t e d succession of m a n y s e t d e m e n t levels, s o m e with m o n u m e n t a l a r c h i t e c t u r e . After t h e c o n q u e s t of t h e Assyrian king S a r g o n II in 712 BCE, t h e site declined for d i e first time in millennia. H o w ever, it seems t o have b e e n o c c u p i e d as a simple rural village in R o m a n times, b e t w e e n t h e fourth a n d sixth centuries CE, even o n c e the m a i n center h a d m o v e d to Eski M a l a t y a , t h e ancient t o w n of M e l i t e n e . T h e earliest historical reference to t h e t o w n , k n o w n as Mal(i)dija, was in t h e final p h a s e of t h e M i d d l e Hittite K i n g d o m in a b o u t 1400 BCE, w h e n it s u b m i t t e d to a Hittite long. W h e n it a p p e a r s in later Assyrian, N e o - A s s y r i a n , a n d B a b ylonian sources, t h e n a m e MilMelidia, MilMelidn, or Mil Melid is u s e d (see H a w k i n s , 1993, p p . 35-36) for o n e of d i e flourishing N e o - H i t t i t e centers t h a t s p r a n g u p i n t h e e a s t e r n regions following t h e b r e a k u p of t h e Hittite E m p i r e . [See Hittites.] It is t h e N e o - H i t t i t e p e r i o d stone reliefs, identified o n t h e m o u n d b y late n i n e t e e n t h - a n d early t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y trav elers, that led t h e F r e n c h scholar L o u i s D e l a p o r t e t o c o n d u c t
ARSLANTEPE
ARSLANTEPE.
213
Plan of the site. (Courtesy M . Frangipane)
t h e first archaeological w o r k t h e r e (1932-1939). D e l a p o r t e ' s excavations u n e a r t h e d a t e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE palace with a n e n t r y gate flanked b y two s c u l p t e d lions (the L i o n G a t e ) a n d a p a v e d c o u r t y a r d , b o t h w i t h l i m e s t o n e bas-reliefs d e c o r a t ing their walls. T o g e d i e r w i t h d i e large statue of a ruler erected after t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n o f t h e gate, this is o n e of t h e most important Neo-Hittite art complexes. C l a u d e F . - A . Schaeffer carried o u t s o m e d e e p s o u n d i n g s at d i e site in t h e early 1950s. A n Italian archaeological m i s sion has b e e n systematically excavating tiiere since 1961. B e g u n b y Piero M e r i g g i , from Pavia University, t h e excavation w a s directed initially b y Salvatore Puglisi a n d t h e n b y Alba Palmieri, b o t h from R o m e University. [See the biography of Schaeffer.] T h e Italian mission b e g a n excavating o n t h e n o r t h e a s t p a r t of t h e m o u n d , w h e r e t h e s t r u c t u r e s D e l a p o r t e b r o u g h t t o light lay. I n addition t o identifying o t h e r N e o - H i t t i t e a n d imperial Flittite buildings, a s e q u e n c e of walls a n d t o w n gates b e l o n g i n g t o t h e v a r i o u s p h a s e s of Hittite influence from b e t w e e n 1500 a n d 900 BCE w e r e identified, s u p e r i m p o s e d o n t h e o u t e r m o s t p a r t s of t h e L a t e Chalcolithic a n d
Early B r o n z e A g e settlements. I n d i e early 1970s, t h e m i s sion b e g a n w o r k in t h e s o u t h w e s t z o n e , w h e r e t h e m a i n n u clei of t h e t h i r d - a n d f o u r t h - m i l l e n n i u m settlements s e e m e d t o be. Extensive excavations i n this zone, a n d m o r e recently o n t h e western p a r t of t h e m o u n d , have revealed wide areas of m a n y s u p e r i m p o s e d settlements, A s a result, it is n o w possible t o r e c o n s t r u c t t h o r o u g h l y die history of t h e site a n d d i e region from t h e late fiftii t o t h e early second m i l l e n n i u m BCE.
T h e earliest level r e a c h e d so far, w h i c h is c a r b o n - 1 4 d a t e d t o t h e e n d of t h e fifth m i l l e n n i u m (4300--4000 BCE; period V I I I i n t h e site's internal s e q u e n c i n g ) , refers t o a little-known cultural a s p e c t of t h e region from t h e e n d of t h e U b a i d p e riod. (Schaeffer seems t o h a v e r e a c h e d a typical U b a i d h o rizon w i t h p a i n t e d p o t t e r y i n a d e e p sounding.) W h i l e this a s p e c t w a s r e p r e s e n t e d b y d o m e s t i c structures, a t least in t h e small area excavated, it was in t h e later p e r i o d (VII), in t h e first half of t h e f o u r t h m i l l e n n i u m , t h a t m o n u m e n t a l structures w e r e built. T h e settlement, w h i c h covered d i e whole area presentiy o c c u p i e d b y t h e tell, h a d functionally different sectors: t h e n o r t h e a s t z o n e was covered b y dwell-
214
ARSLANTEPE eardied there w h o s e function w a s religious, i n addition t o being u s e d for centralized e c o n o m i c a n d administrative a c tivities. T h e oldest of t h e s e (building I V ) w a s also t h e m o s t c o m p l e x a n d m o s t m o n u m e n t a l : it c o m p r i s e d a large b i p a r tite t e m p l e ( t e m p l e B ) s u r r o u n d e d b y wide c o r r i d o r s a n d b o r d e r e d on t h e south b y a r o w of adjacent s t o r e r o o m s . E n trance w a s t h r o u g h a m o n u m e n t a l r e c t a n g u l a r gate. T h e walls a r o u n d t h e o p e n i n g s a n d in t h e m o s t interior p a r t of t h e m a i n corridor leading t o t h e t e m p l e w e r e d e c o r a t e d with r e d and black wall paintings. Particularly n o t e w o r t h y are t h e paintings, covering two of t h e walls in t h e central r o o m lead ing to t h e s t o r e r o o m s , w h e r e a stylized h u m a n figure w i t h raised a r m s s t a n d i n g before a table o r a n altar u n d e r a k i n d of c a n o p y is r e p e a t e d l y depicted. T h e c o r r i d o r a n d t h e r o o m s s u r r o u n d i n g t h e cella of t h e t e m p l e w e r e d e c o r a t e d witii plastic c o n c e n t r i c lozenges applied with a s t a m p , very similar t o a related d e c o r a t i o n in o n e of t h e U r u k - W a r k a level III t e m p l e s . [See Wall Paintings.]
ARSLANTEPE. Excavated
site, (Courtesy M . Frangipane)
ings with varying floor plans, a n d domestic structures such as ovens, basins, a n d burials u n d e r t h e floor; t h e w e s t e r n z o n e contained large, i m p o s i n g buildings, with thick m u d brick walls coated in white plaster a n d distinctive floor plans a n d decorative features, built a t a m u c h higher level, o n w h a t m u s t have been t h e t o p of t h e ancient m o u n d . A building with several adjacent r o o m s h a d s o m e of the walls painted r e d a n d black, w i t h w h a t were probably geometric designs, a n d m u d - p l a s t e r e d m u d - b r i c k c o l u m n s arranged along t h e walls. W h a t e v e r activities were p e r f o r m e d there, t h e build ing m u s t have b e e n i m p o r t a n t a n d u s e d b y t h e e m e r g i n g elites. T h i s c o m m u n i t y ' s handicrafts s h o w an increasingly c o m plex organization of labor, judging from t h e a b u n d a n t m a s s p r o d u c e d pottery, t h e w i d e s p r e a d u s e of t h e wheel a n d p o t ters' m a r k s , a n d t h e m a n y m e t a l slag a n d c o p p e r ore fragments a n d finished c o p p e r objects (pins, awls, chisels) found on t h e site. T h i s L a t e Chalcolithic aspect belongs to a b r o a d e r cultural h o r i z o n that, with significant local differ ences, covers all d i e U p p e r E u p h r a t e s valley a n d t h e ' A m u q plain (Antiochia), w h e r e it is r e p r e s e n t e d b y p h a s e F . [See 'Amuq.] A central p o w e r b e c a m e fully established in d i e n e x t p e riod (VIA), b e t w e e n 3300 a n d 3000 BCE, w h e n t h e L a t e U r u k M e s o p o t a m i a n culture e x p a n d e d n o r t h w a r d , a n d Arslant e p e entered a n e x t e n d e d exchange network. I n this p e r i o d , a n e w large building was erected o n t h e ruins of t h e L a t e Chalcolithic building in t h e western area of t h e m o u n d , i n a topographically p r e e m i n e n t position; at t h e s a m e t i m e , a large public area w i t h m o n u m e n t a l buildings w a s c o n structed o n t h e s o u t h w e s t slope. T h r e e buildings w e r e u n -
A p a r t from t h e ideological-religious s p h e r e , t h e central in stitutions, w h i c h w e r e certainly very powerful b y this time, probably controlled m o s t e c o n o m i c activities t h r o u g h a s o phisticated administrative system. T h i s is e v i d e n c e d from t h e t h o u s a n d s of clay sealings f o u n d b o t h i n situ in o n e of t h e s t o r e r o o m s in building I V a n d piled in a s e t o r d e r in a kind of d u m p i n g place i n o n e of the walls in t h e large cor ridor, w h e r e t h e y h a d b e e n d i s c a r d e d , p r o b a b l y after b e i n g checked a n d r e c o r d e d . [See Seals.] T h e s y s t e m m u s t h a v e b e e n quite c o m p l e x , w h i c h t h e great m a n y officials inferred from t h e r e p e a t e d impressions of m o r e t h a n 150 different seals suggest. T h e s e consist m a i n l y of s t a m p seals with rich figurative motifs depicted in different styles, evidence of flourishing local glyptics. A few cylinder seals, s o m e t i m e s b e a r i n g motifs of M e s o p o t a m i a n style, a r e also p r e s e n t . M e t a l l u r g y was considerably d e v e l o p e d at this t i m e , as well. T w e n t y - o n e w e a p o n s of arsenical c o p p e r , s w o r d s a n d s p e a r h e a d s , plus a q u a d r u p l e spiral p l a q u e in a n o t h e r cult building (building III) t o t h e west of b u i l d i n g I V , o n a h i g h e r terrace, w e r e discovered. A n o t h e r t e m p l e ( t e m p l e A ) w a s built later t o w a r d t h e western e d g e of t h e m o u n d . I t also w a s bipartite a n d fol l o w e d almost t h e s a m e floorplan as t e m p l e B , s h o w i n g t h a t t h e r e existed a typical A r s l a n t e p e t e m p l e design at d i e e n d of t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m . T h e walls in o n e of r o o m s adjacent t o t h e cella also w e r e d e c o r a t e d with plastic g e o m e t r i c m o tifs, in this case c o n c e n t r i c ovals. Again, a large n u m b e r of d i s c a r d e d clay sealings w e r e f o u n d , e v e n t h o u g h activity w a s evidently o n a m u c h smaller scale. T h e decreasing d i m e n sions of t h e p u b l i c buildings a n d t h e declining scale of a c tivities p e r f o r m e d are p e r h a p s indications of t h e crisis t h a t was t o strike. T h e p u b l i c area w a s a b a n d o n e d a n d this early state system, w h i c h h a d b e e n strongly influenced b y t h e L a t e U r u k culture, while r e m a i n i n g m a r k e d l y original, collapsed. Following t h e destruction of t e m p l e A , at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e third m i l l e n n i u m (period V I B i ) , t h e site w a s i n h a b i t e d
ARTIFACT CONSERVATION by g r o u p s of a n E a s t e r n A n a t o l i a n / T r a n s c a u c a s i a n c u l t u r e u s i n g a typical h a n d m a d e r e d - b l a c k w a r e ; t h e y built a village of h u t s o n t h e r u i n s of t h e late fourth m i l l e n n i u m m o n u m e n t a l buildings. T h e close links with t h e s o u t h w e r e sev ered, e x c e p t for a s h o r t p e r i o d of c o n t a c t with t h e n o r t h e r n S y r o - M e s o p o t a m i a n area i m m e d i a t e l y afterward ( V I B 2 ) . T h e e v i d e n c e at A r s l a n t e p e is of a village of m u d - b r i c k h o u s e s , with plain, w h e e l m a d e p o t t e r y i n t h e L a t e U r u k t r a dition. T h e n e w links w i t h n o r t h e a s t e r n A n a t o l i a u n d e r l a y t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of a n e w local c u l t u r e t h r o u g h o u t t h e w h o l e of the t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , b e g i n n i n g in 2700 BCE (Early B r o n z e II a n d III p e r i o d , p h a s e s V I C a n d V T D ) , w h i c h w a s r e stricted t o t h e regions of M a l a t y a a n d Elazig, with c h a r a c teristic h a n d m a d e p a i n t e d p o t t e r y in a d d i t i o n t o a m o r e a b u n d a n t r e d - b l a c k w a r e . D u r i n g t h e s e c o n d p a r t of this p e r i o d , a n e w u r b a n s t r u c t u r e of A n a t o l i a n tradition w a s established at A r s l a n t e p e . A walled t o w n with a w e l l - p l a n n e d u r b a n layout w a s c o n s t r u c t e d , exploiting t h e s h a r p slope of the tell w i t h impressive t e r r a c i n g w o r k s . T h i s local cultural c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n r e m a i n e d a l m o s t u n changed even during the M i d d l e Bronze Age (phase V A , 2000-1700 BCE). N e w links in p o t t e r y p r o d u c t i o n with t h e areas s o u t h of the T a u r u s M o u n t a i n s a n d , t o a lesser d e g r e e , central Anatolia, a r e e v i d e n c e , h o w e v e r , of t h e n e w i n t e r n a t i o n a l relations t h e n b e i n g established b e t w e e n t h e e m e r g ing political entities o n t h e A n a t o l i a n h i g h l a n d s a n d t h e states of U p p e r M e s o p o t a m i a . S o o n , t h o u g h , t h e e a s t w a r d e x p a n s i o n of t h e Hittite k i n g d o m b r o u g h t t h e r e g i o n of M a latya into t h e s p h e r e of influence of central Anatolia. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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F r a n g i p a n e , Marcella. " M e l i d (Malatya, A r s l a n - T e p e ) . Archaologisch." I n Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 8 . 1 - 2 , p p . 4 2 - 5 2 . Berlin, 1993. General synthesis of the site's cultural sequence, taking into account t h e results obtained u p to the 1989 campaign. In English. F r a n g i p a n e , Marcella. " T h e R e c o r d F u n c t i o n of Clay Sealings in Early Administrative Systems as S e e n from Arslantepe-Malatya." In Ar chives before Writing, edited by Piera Ferioli et al., p p . 1 2 5 - 1 4 7 . T u rin, 1994Hawkins, J. D . " M e l i d (Malatya, A r s l a n - T e p e ) . Historisch." In Real lexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archdologie, vol. 8 . 1 - 2 , PP- 3 5 - 4 I . Berlin, 1 9 9 3 . General presentation of data o n t h e n a m e , historical sources, a n d inscriptions concerning t h e site. In English. Palmieri, Alba. "Scavi nell'area sud-occidentale di Arslantepe: Ritrov a m e n t o di u n a struttura t e m p l a r e dell'Antica E t a del B r o n z o . " Or igini 7 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 5 5 - 1 8 2 . Exhaustive report on the E B levels u p to 1973. Palmieri, Alba. "Excavations at Arslantepe (Malatya)," Anatolian Stud ies 31 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 0 1 - 1 1 9 . First presentation of the public buildings from t h e e n d of the fourth millennium (phase VIA) with metal weap ons and clay sealings, including a discussion of their significance and a short analysis of the successive developments in E B I B . Palmieri, Alba. "Storage and Distribution at Arslantepe-Malatya in t h e Late U r u k P e r i o d , " In Anatolia and the Ancient Near East: Studies in Honor of Tahsin Ozguc, edited b y K u t l u E m r e et al., p p . 4 1 9 - 4 3 0 . Ankara, 1989. Analysis of t h e functional organization of centralized storerooms in period VIA building IV and a preliminary presentation of wall paintings in the e n t r a n c e r o o m . Pecorella, Paolo E. Malatya III: II livello eteo imperiale e quelli ncoetei. Orientis Antiqui Collectio, 1 2 . R o m e , 1 9 7 5 . General report on the archaeological remains of t h e Hittite period excavated by t h e original Italian expedition. Puglisi, Salvatore M . , a n d Piero Meriggi. Malatya I: Rapporto preliminare delle campagne 1961 e 1962. Orientis Antiqui Collectio, 3. R o m e , 1964. Preliminary report on t h e first two campaigns carried o u t at the site by t h e Italian g r o u p . Schneider Equini, Eugenia. Malatya II: II livello romano bizantino e le testimonianze islamiche. Orientis Antiqui Collectio, 10. R o m e , 1 9 7 0 . R e p o r t o n t h e R o m a n - B y z a n t i n e remains found at the site. MARCELLA FRANGIPANE
Delaporte, L o u i s . Malatya, Arslantepe. Paris, 1 9 4 0 . Final report on t h e Neo-Hittite palace a n d reliefs excavated by t h e F r e n c h expedition in the 1930s. F r a n g i p a n e , Marcella, and Alba Palmieri, e d s . "Perspectives on P r o tourbanization in Eastern Anatolia: Arslantepe (Malatya), an Interim R e p o r t on t h e 1975—1983 C a m p a i g n s . " Origini 12.2 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 2 8 7 - 6 6 8 . T h e most complete report o n t h e archaeology, geomorphology, archaeozoology, paleobotany, dating, a n d archaeometallurgy of the E B IA a n d B levels (phases V I A a n d V I B ) . F r a n g i p a n e , Marcella, and Alba Palmieri. " U r b a n i z a t i o n in P e r i m e s o p o t a m i a n Areas: T h e Case of Eastern Anatolia." In Studies in the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions, edited by Linda Manzanilla, p p . 9 5 - 3 i 8 . British Archaeological R e p o r t s , International Series, n o . 349. Oxford, 1987. R e m a r k s on t h e cultural relations shown by t h e site with s o m h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a and other Mesopotamian-related n o r t h e r n sites in t h e Late U r u k period. S o m e suggestions are given on the role of external relations in early u r b a n developments at A r slantepe. 2
F r a n g i p a n e , Marcella. "Dipinti murali in u n edificio 'palaziale' di A r slantepe-Malatya: Aspetti ideologici nelle p r i m e forme di centralizzarione e c o n o m i c a . " Studi Miceni ed Egeo-Anatolici 30 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 4 3 1 5 4 . Preliminary publication of t h e wall paintings at the site. F r a n g i p a n e , Marcella. " A r s l a n t e p e - M e l i d - M a l a t y a . " In Scavi archeologici italiani in Turchia, p p . 3 1 - 1 0 3 . Venice, 1993. U p - t o - d a t e g e n eral presentation of t h e archaeology of t h e site, with color plates.
ARTIFACT CONSERVATION.
Archaeological artifacts p r o v i d e a u n i q u e r e c o r d of h u m a n behavior. A s t h e tangible r e m a i n s of p a s t societies, reflecting their ideas, b e liefs, a n d activities, artifacts c a n b e r e g a r d e d as p r i m a r y d o c u m e n t s of h u m a n b e h a v i o r . A t all t i m e s , their integrity a n d research potential m u s t b e k e p t i n m i n d . Preservation, o r stabilization, r a t h e r t h a n restoration, s h o u l d b e t h e p r i m a r y and ethical aim of archaeological conservation. W h e n e v e r possible, noninvasive p r o c e d u r e s s h o u l d b e selected a n d i n t e r v e n t i o n k e p t t o a m i n i m u m b e c a u s e intervention c a n lessen t h e r e s e a r c h p o t e n t i a l of artifacts. E a c h s u b s e q u e n t t r e a t m e n t m o v e s t h e artifact farther f r o m its original state. T r e a t i n g a n artifact is n o t necessarily restricted to p r e serving its a p p e a r a n c e o r its essential material(s). T h e t e c h nological i n f o r m a t i o n a n artifact e m b o d i e s s u c h as repairs or modifications m a d e i n antiquity, m u s t also b e preserved. C o n s e r v a t i o n consists of two m a i n functions: preservation a n d restoration. T h e goal of p r e s e r v a t i o n is to stabilize, or arrest, d a m a g e t o a n d t h e d e t e r i o r a t i o n of artifacts. It usually
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involves controlling an artifact's i m m e d i a t e e n v i r o n m e n t a n d the conditions of its u s e , b u t c a n also involve t r e a t m e n t w h e n d o n e to stabilize a n object. T h e p u r p o s e of restoration, a t e r m frequently b u t erroneously used interchangeably with conservation, is to r e t u r n an artifact to its original or a p r e vious a p p e a r a n c e . Restoration involves carefully consider ing t h e modification of an object's material a n d structure. While generally d o n e for exhibition or educational p u r p o s e s to aid in t h e process of interpretation, restoration can also b e used to stabilize an artifact. T h e underlying p r e c e p t guiding all conservation w o r k is respect for an artifact's aesthetic, historical, a n d physical in tegrity. F o r m o s t archaeological materials, historical a n d physical integrity m a y be of greater c o n c e r n t h a n t h e aes thetic. A n artifact's history should b e preserved a n d n o t sac rificed in r e t u r n i n g it to its original condition or in restoring it for solely aesthetic reasons. F o r e x a m p l e , if a vessel was repaired with rivets in antiquity, those modifications should n o t b e r e m o v e d t o d a y , n o m a t t e r h o w unsightly. R e s p e c t for a n object's integrity also involves n o t i m p o s i n g o n it t h e c o n servator's o w n cultural values a n d a s s u m p t i o n s a b o u t h o w it should look. Conservation t r e a t m e n t includes examination, analysis of t h e materials u s e d to create artifacts, active t r e a t m e n t in volving stabilization a n d restoration, passive t r e a t m e n t in volving e n v i r o n m e n t a l controls, a n d d o c u m e n t a t i o n . C o n servators strive to u s e only reversible materials w h e n they actively treat artifacts. Reversibility m e a n s t h a t any treat m e n t applied m u s t b e capable of being reversed or r e m o v e d at a later date, w i t h o u t d a m a g i n g or changing t h e object. T h e idea of reversibility recognizes t h a t conservation k n o w l edge is constantly developing. F u t u r e analytical m e t h o d s will surpass c u r r e n t t e c h n i q u e s , p e r h a p s enabling t h e e x traction of n e w information from u n c o m p r o m i s e d artifacts. S o m e t r e a t m e n t s b y their very n a t u r e are n o t reversible. F o r example, if an object has lost so m u c h of its cohesiveness t h a t it cannot b e lifted o u t of t h e g r o u n d safely, it m a y be necessary t o strengthen it b y a d d i n g a consolidant, even t h o u g h this process is n o t fully reversible. T h u s , t h e c o n c e p t of reversibility is of particular significance to on-site c o n s e r vation, where often p r o c e d u r e s m u s t be carried o u t u n d e r less t h a n ideal conditions. W h a t is d o n e in t h e field m o r e often t h a n n o t has to b e r e d o n e in t h e laboratory. Striving for reversibility ensures that conservators u s e only quality materials t h a t will e n d u r e . P u r e materials are u s e d rather than their p r o p r i e t a r y equivalents, w h i c h c o n tain, potentially harmful additives t h a t e x t e n d their shelf life or modify their p r o p e r t i e s . M i n i m a l intervention has b e c o m e a realistic t e n e t in c o n servation work: t r e a t m e n t should n o t be m o r e extensive t h a n absolutely necessary, a n d it should leave an artifact as close to its original condition as possible. If an artifact a p p e a r s to b e s o u n d a n d has a g o o d chance of survival w i t h o u t treat m e n t , t h e n n o t h i n g should b e d o n e . W h e n t r e a t m e n t is n e c essary, the conservation materials applied should be u s e d
minimally. M i n i m a l intervention is particularly i m p o r t a n t w h e n t r e a t m e n t m a y alter or destroy technological infor mation. D o c u m e n t a t i o n is a vital p a r t of a n y c o n s e r v a t i o n treat m e n t . W r i t t e n a n d p h o t o g r a p h i c r e c o r d s m a i n t a i n all t h e technological d a t a gleaned a b o u t an artifact d u r i n g treat m e n t , fully describing t h e materials a n d m e t h o d s involved for future researchers a n d c o n s e r v a t o r s . M i n i m a l intervention a n d full d o c u m e n t a t i o n take o n p a r ticular i m p o r t a n c e w h e n treating artifacts t o b e analyzed. A n y n-eatment a n artifact receives, i n c l u d i n g m e r e cleaning, c a n c o n t a m i n a t e it a n d invalidate s u b s e q u e n t analysis, w h e t h e r for dating, elemental analysis, or identifying u s e r e s idues. W h i l e m o s t of t h e a d d e d tteatment m a t e r i a l can b e r e m o v e d to t h e e x t e n t t h a t it m a y n o l o n g e r b e visible, traces will always r e m a i n to c o m p r o m i s e it. T h u s , artifacts to b e analyzed are often best left u n t r e a t e d . A t t h e very least, p a r t of t h e artifact s h o u l d b e left u n t r e a t e d o r s a m p l e s taken b e fore t r e a t m e n t . T h e r e are o t h e r ways in w h i c h c o n s e r v a t i o n t r e a t m e n t c a n invalidate r e s e a r c h potential. F r e q u e n t l y , valuable i n f o r m a tion is e m b o d i e d in t h e dirt or e n c r u s t a t i o n s o n t h e surface of an artifact, a n d , r e m o v i n g t h e m c a n b e just as d a m a g i n g as a d d i n g foreign materials. E v e n h a n d l i n g c a n c o m p r o m i s e future analytical work, as is t h e case w i t h s a m p l e s t a k e n for c a r b o n - 1 4 dating. T h e c o n s e r v a t o r m u s t w o r k closely with t h e archaeologist to e n s u r e t h a t r e s e a r c h potential is n o t compromised. C o n s e r v a t i o n efforts h a v e shifted i n favor of passive, or preventive, t e c h n i q u e s . T h e c o n c e p t u n d e r l y i n g this a p p r o a c h is that deterioration can b e r e d u c e d b y controlling its causes. T h e p r o p e r h a n d l i n g , storing, a n d exhibiting of artifacts can p r e v e n t deterioration a n d t h u s r e d u c e s t h e n e e d for active, or r e m e d i a l , t r e a t m e n t . While m o s t active t r e a t m e n t in archaeological c o n s e r v a tion should b e d o n e b y a trained c o n s e r v a t o r , preventive conservation t e c h n i q u e s can be p e r f o r m e d effectively b y t h e archaeologist, particularly o n site. P r o p e r h a n d l i n g p r o c e d u r e s , for e x a m p l e , p r e v e n t b r e a k a g e a n d d a m a g e . T h e n a t ural deterioration processes of materials can b e forestalled or r e d u c e d by e n s u r i n g t h a t artifacts are p r o p e r l y p a c k e d with suitable materials. T h e e x a m i n a t i o n of objects is a n i m p o r t a n t a s p e c t of ar chaeological conservation. Its goal is t o extract as m u c h i n formation as possible to elucidate o n g o i n g r e s e a r c h a b o u t technology, p r o v e n a n c e , a n d authenticity. A b a c k g r o u n d in materials science, along with extensive experience w i t h a w i d e variety of materials a n d artifacts, invests c o n s e r v a t o r s with t h e k n o w l e d g e a n d skills t h e y n e e d to r e c o g n i z e m a t e rials a n d d e t e r m i n e an artifact's c o m p o n e n t s . W h i l e t h e y d o n o t themselves u n d e r t a k e sophisticated analytical tests, t h e y are familiar with t h e capabilities of different analytical t e c h n i q u e s a n d can act as liaisons b e t w e e n archaeologists a n d other scientists. M o s t archaeological
conservators
understand
ancient
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technological p r o c e d u r e s a n d c a n t h u s p r o v i d e information a b o u t objects t h a t m i g h t o t h e r w i s e b e missed. F o r e x a m p l e , evidence of o r g a n i c materials is frequentiy preserved b y o r in corrosion p r o d u c t s o n m e t a l artifacts. I n cleaning t h e s e artifacts, an e x p e r i e n c e d c o n s e r v a t o r c a n recognize, d o c u m e n t , a n d preserve s u c h e v i d e n c e , w h e r e chemical cleaning b y a n o n c o n s e r v a t o r m i g h t inadvertentiy destroy it.
Seeley, N . J. "Archaeological Conservation: T h e Development of a Discipline." Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology, University ofIj>ndon 24 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 6 1 - 1 7 5 . Interesting outline of the history of archae ological conservation in Britain, including a good discussion of all basic aspects of archaeological conservation.
R e s t o r a t i o n is generally n o t a n i m p o r t a n t a s p e c t of ar chaeological conservation, b u t at times it is a p p r o p r i a t e . F o r e x a m p l e , restoring t h e m i s s i n g p a r t s of a n artifact c a n i n crease its e d u c a t i o n a l value or facilitate its interpretation. R e s t o r a t i o n should b e d o n e as obviously a n d honestly as possible, m a l d n g a clear d e m a r c a t i o n b e t w e e n w h a t is orig inal a n d w h a t has b e e n a d d e d . R e p a i r s or restoration s h o u l d b e visible a n d n o t m a k e t h e artifact a p p e a r to b e in b e t t e r c o n d i t i o n t h a n it actually is.
ARTIFACT DRAFTING AND DRAWING. Field archaeology is a destructive e n d e a v o r in t h e sense t h a t t h e r e m o v a l of o c c u p a t i o n a l debris a n d material culture d e stroys certain of a site's physical features a n d r e m a i n s . A n essential c o m p o n e n t of m o d e r n excavation m e t h o d o l o g y is careful r e c o r d i n g , so t h a t w h a t has b e e n r e m o v e d c a n b e r e c o n s t r u c t e d a n d studied w i t h a view to historical a n d cul tural interpretation.
I n restoring artifacts, c o n s e r v a t o r s m u s t b e careful n o t t o i m p o s e their o w n aesthetic or cultural values. M i s s i n g ele m e n t s , s u c h as h a n d l e s , s h o u l d n o t b e a d d e d unless t h e r e is unassailable e v i d e n c e for their s h a p e a n d position. N e i t h e r s h o u l d tlie extent of d e c o r a t i o n o n a n object b e left to g u e s s w o r k . If, for e x a m p l e , t h e d e c o r a t i o n o n a n object is r e p e t itive a n d s y m m e t t i c a l , t h e c o n s e r v a t o r m u s t h a v e clear evi d e n c e t h a t t h e design c o n t i n u e s in t h e s a m e w a y before restoring large sections of it. Similarly, if a n object's d e c o rative elements a p p e a r r a n d o m l y or a r e asymmetrical, only its basic s h a p e c a n tiien b e r e s t o r e d . E v e n w h e n a n artifact is p a r t of a g r o u p , it c a n n o t b e a s s u m e d t h a t it is just like t h e others. F o r all of these r e a s o n s , restoration is a c o n s e r vation p r o c e d u r e t h a t r e q u i r e s t h e collaboration of conser v a t o r a n d archaeologist to m a i n t a i n t h e ethics of restoration a n d t h e information t h e artifacts contain. [See also C o n s e r v a t i o n A r c h a e o l o g y ; Field C o n s e r v a t i o n ; and M u s e u m s a n d M u s e o l o g y . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY C r o n y n , J. M . The Elements of Archaeological Conservation. L o n d o n , 1990. T h e only text on this topic, a good overview b u t should b e u s e d with caution as n o t all t h e p r o c e d u r e s described are to be r e c ommended. Foley, K. " T h e Role of the Objects C o n s e r v a t o r in Field Archaeology." I n Conservation on Archaeological Excavations, edited by N . P. Stanley Price, p p . 1 1 - 2 0 . R o m e , 1 9 8 4 . G o o d discussion of the difference between conservation and restoration and of the function of an ar chaeological conservator. Plenderleith, H a r o l d J., a n d A. E . A. W e r n e r . The Conservation of An tiquities and Works of Art. 2 d ed. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 . S t a n d a r d text, n o w out of date, which m u s t be u s e d with caution. P y e , E „ a n d J. M . C r o n y n . " T h e Archaeological Conservator R e e x amined: A Personal View." I n Recent Advances in the Conservation and Analysis of Artifacts, edited b y James Black, p p . 3 5 5 - 3 5 7 . L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 . British perspective o n archaeological conservation a n d t h e role of t h e conservator, including a discussion of ethical consid erations governing conservation work. Sease, Catherine. A Conservation Manual for the Field Archaeologist. 2 d ed. L o s Angeles, 1 9 9 2 . U p - t o - d a t e information o n die handling a n d t r e a t m e n t of artifacts o n site, including methodology, bibliography, a n d lists of materials a n d suppliers.
CATHERINE SEASE
I n t h a t context, o n e of t h e i m p o r t a n t tasks of architectural drafting a n d d r a w i n g is t o create, a n d t h e r e b y preserve, a visual r e c o r d of t h e archaeological features or structures t h a t h a v e b e e n partially or completely r e m o v e d . T h e t e r m s fea ture a n d structure h a v e specific c o n n o t a t i o n s in archaeology. A feature is a major c o h e r e n t e l e m e n t o n a site, s u c h as a r o o m , c o u r t y a r d , or a n industrial installation. A structure is a g r o u p of features t h a t , t a k e n together, constitute a major architectural u n i t in o n e of its phases (such as a city gate, h o u s e , or water system). T h e c o m p o n e n t element(s) that define a physical feature or s t r u c t u r e are called loci (sg., locus). M o s t loci are real structural or architectural features. O n a daily basis, archaeologists are o c c u p i e d with creating this visual r e c o r d tiirough drafting n u m e r o u s plans ( t o p plans a n d p h a s e plans) a n d sections t h a t r e c o r d all layers a n d loci in horizontal a n d vertical relationship with o n e a n other. A t o p p l a n d o c u m e n t s t h e excavation's progress, a n d e a c h o n e is a r e c o r d of t h e excavated area at a p o i n t in m o d e r n time d u r i n g t h e excavation. A p h a s e p l a n d o c u m e n t s t h e loci a n d features of a given occupational level, t h e r e b y cre ating a r e c o r d of t h e e x c a v a t e d area at s o m e p o i n t in its history. A section d r a w i n g d o c u m e n t s vertical relationships a n d r e p r e s e n t s a scale d r a w i n g of o n e of t h e sides or balks of a n excavated area. T h i s three-dimensional a n d d e s c r i p tive r e c o r d i n g is t h e basis of m o d e r n recording m e t h o d o l ogy. I n tiieory, if plans a n d sections accurately reflect a n excavation, it should b e possible to reconstruct, witii a h i g h d e g r e e of precision, w h a t h a s b e e n r e m o v e d . Architectural drafting also plays a crucial role in t h e final p h a s e of a project b e c a u s e p l a n s , sections, a n d drawings of archaeological features a n d structures are published in p r e liminary a n d final r e p o r t s . T h e architectural drafting m a y take o n e or m o r e of t h r e e basic forms: fiat line drawing, pictorial drawing, or o r t h o g r a p h i c projection. Plans a n d sec tions usually a p p e a r as flat line drawings. F e a t u r e s a n d structures a r e usually p r e s e n t e d in this format b u t m a y b e r e p r e s e n t e d three-dimensionally in a pictorial drawing. T h e r e are t h r e e types of pictorial drawing: a x o n o m e t r i c (in cluding isometric projections), oblique, a n d perspective
218
ART SITES
projections. O r t h o g r a p h i c projections are n o t often u s e d in field recording a n d publication. [See also Architectural D r a w i n g ; Artifact C o n s e r v a t i o n ; and P h o t o g r a p h y ; article on P h o t o g r a p h y of Field W o r k a n d Artifacts.] GARY D . PRATICO
ART SITES.
Isolated m o n u m e n t s , m o s t frequently paintings a n d relief sculpture, for which there is n o k n o w n context are designated art sites. T h e best k n o w n are found in Iran and date from t h e Elamite period (c. 1925-1120 BCE) t h r o u g h t h e third c e n t u r y CE. F o u r groups of Elamite reliefs are carved into t h e rocky ravines at Izeh (formerly M a l a m i r ) , east of Susiana. T h e K u l - i F a r a h ravine has six reliefs, t h e principle o n e r e p r e s e n t i n g K i n g H a n n i a n d his minister, S h u t r u r u , a t t e n d i n g a sacrifice in t h e p r e s e n c e of musicians. A twenty-four-line inscription r u n s along t h e w i d t h of t h e relief. T h e Shakaf-i-Salman ravine has four reliefs, t w o of which represent K i n g H a n n i a n d his spouse. A similar relief w a s carved into t h e rocky face of t h e m o u n t a i n at N a q s h - i R u s t a m , four miles n o r t h of Persepolis, d u r i n g t h e N e o Elamite period. N a q s h - i R u s t a m , which b e c a m e t h e royal necropolis of t h e A c h a e m e n i d s in the time of D a r i u s I (522-486 BCE), has four t o m b s cut into the vertical rock that are a d o r n e d with reliefs. I n t h e third century CE, t h e Sasanian king S h a p u r I (241-272 CE) h a d a victory relief carved in t h e rock below the A c h a e m e n i d t o m b , w h e r e other reliefs also celebrate Sasanian victories. [See Izeh; N a q s h - i R u s t a m ; Elamites; Sasanians.] Less sophisticated in style a n d conception are t h e t h o u s a n d s of rock drawings a n d rock inscriptions in t h e s o u t h e r n Sinai D e s e r t . T h e rock drawings, which are i m possible to date, w e r e p r o b a b l y engraved b y desert p e o p l e a n d pilgrims. T h e i r subjects are p r e d o m i n a n t l y local ani m a l s , mostly camels a n d ibex, b u t occasionally m o r e exotic o n e s , such as oryxes a n d ostriches. A few h u n t i n g scenes are k n o w n . T h e m o s t extensive of t h e rock paintings is one found in J o r d a n , east of A m m a n , t h a t depicts a n antelope h u n t inside an enclosure, or desert " k i t e . " A rock drawing r e p r e s e n t i n g a m a n with his arms raised over his h e a d , p e r h a p s a cultic gesture, has b e e n f o u n d at T i m n a in the N e gev. [ S e e T i m n a (Negev).] c
c
BIBLIOGRAPHY Berghe, Louis Vanden. " L e s reliefs elamites de MalarnTr." IranicaAntiqua 3 ( 1 9 6 3 ) : 2 2 - 3 9 . Berghe, Louis Vanden. Reliefs rupestres de I'Iran ancien, Brussels, 1983. M o s t recent and authoritative work o n the Iranian reliefs. T h e r e are no English-language works devoted exclusively to the Iranian reliefs. Meshel, Zeev. " N e w D a t a about die 'Desert Kites.' " TelAviv 1 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 129-143. Meshel, Zeev, and Israel Finkelstein, eds. Sinai in Antiquity: Researcltes in the History and Archaeology of the Peninsula (in H e b r e w ) . Tel Aviv, 1980. LUCILLE A. ROUSSIN
ARWAD,
a small island located 2.5 k m (16 mi.) from Syria's M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast, facing t h e city of T o r t o s e a n cient A n t a r a d o s . T h e city of A r w a d w a s built o n t h e largest island of a chain of very small islands e x t e n d i n g s o u t h to T r i p o l i . Oval in s h a p e , it m e a s u r e s 800 X 500 m . As n o t e d b y S t r a b o (16.2.13), its surface area was so limited t h a t h o u s e s h a d to b e built several stories high. T h e site's n a m e in P h o e n i c i a n , 'nod, m e a n s " r e f u g e . " T h e n a m e also a p p e a r s in Eblaitic as A-ra-wa-ad in t h e E b l a archives of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE; in A k k a d i a n as Ar-wa-da, A-ru-da, A-ru-ad-da in t h e Alalakh a n d A m a r n a tablets; as Arados in G r e e k a n d L a t i n ; a n d as Arwad in A r a b i c . T h e island h a s p r o b a b l y b e e n i n h a b i t e d since t h e N e o lithic p e r i o d ( o c c u p a t i o n a l r e m a i n s of this p e r i o d h a v e b e e n found on the mainland), b u t continuous h u m a n occupation at t h e site has erased all remains e x c e p t for t h o s e belonging t o t h e R o m a n p e r i o d . I n t h e fifteenth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e p e o p l e of A r w a d r e a c h e d U g a r i t a n d other Palestinian a n d P h o e nician cities (Astour, 1959, 70-76). A c c o r d i n g t o t h e A m a r n a letters (fourteenth c e n t u r y B C E ) , t h e sailors of A r w a d frequentiy traveled to E g y p t a n d t h e eastern M e d i t e r a n n e a n . A t t h e e n d of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, w i t h t h e invasion of t h e Sea P e o p l e s , t h e c o n c e p t of unity a m o n g P h o e n i c i a n cities developed. M u t u a l interest led to their o c casional alliance u n d e r t h e authority of one o r t h e o t h e r of t h e m for a limited p e r i o d in o r d e r avoid t h e rivalry of t h e g r e a t p o w e r s . T h e s e cities, h o w e v e r , r e m a i n e d basically in d e p e n d e n t city-states. [See Phoenicia; Phoenicians.] T h e c u n e i f o r m sources related t o t h e c a m p a i g n s of T i g lath-Pileser ( 1 1 1 5 - 1 0 7 7 BCE) m e n t i o n t h e continental area of A r w a d , w h i c h p r o b a b l y p r o v i d e d food for t h e island a n d also served as its cemetery. T h i s idea is s t r e n g t h e n e d b y t h e r e c e n t discovery of a necropolis of royal c h a r a c t e r s o u t h e a s t of T o r t o s e dating to t h e fifth c e n t u r y BCE. ( T h e c e m e t e r y is n o t yet p u b l i s h e d , b u t t h e s a r c o p h a g i a r e in t h e T o r t o s e M u s e u m . ) T o w a r d t h e m i d - n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE, A r w a d w a s only a small city-state, c o m p a r e d with t h e large n e i g h b o r i n g king d o m s of S i y a n n u a n d Irqata (Tell ' A r q a ) . A r w a d a n d U s h a t u sent t w o h u n d r e d soldiers e a c h to Q a r q a r against S h a l m a n e s e r III in 853 BCE, while S i y a n n u a n d I r q a t a each c o n t r i b u t e d t e n t h o u s a n d . (Pritchard, ANET, p . 279). It is also at a b o u t this t i m e t h a t the G r e e k s established their set tlements s o u t h of A r w a d (Riis, 1970, p . 1 6 1 ) . A t t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE, A r w a d flourished as a result of its shipbuilding t r a d e . T h e skill of its builders h e l p e d e x p a n d the k i n g d o m o n t o t h e m a i n l a n d ; t h e A r a m e a n p r e s e n c e m a r k e d A r w a d ' s inland b o u n d a r i e s . [See A r a m e a n s . ] A r w a d s o o n lost its c o n t i n e n t a l provinces t o S u m u r , h o w e v e r , w h i c h b e c a m e t h e capital of A m u r r u . I n 701 BCE, AbdiPti, king of A r w a d , paid t r i b u t e t o S e n n a c h e r i b . His successor, M a t a n b a ' a l , is m e n t i o n e d a m o n g t h e twelve kings of t h e seacoast w h o w e r e o r d e r e d b y E s a r h a d d o n (680-669 BCE) t o t r a n s p o r t " b u i l d i n g m a t e r i a l " to N i n e v e h (Pritchard, ANET, n o . 297). I n administrative
ASHDOD d o c u m e n t s f o u n d in B a b y l o n , t h e king of A r w a d is m e n tioned a m o n g others w h o b e l o n g e d t o t h e c o u r t of N e b u c h a d r e z z a r II (605-562 B C E ) , w h e r e c a r p e n t e r s from A r w a d w e r e e m p l o y e d . T h e s h i p b u i l d i n g craft c o n t i n u e s o n A r w a d t o t h e p r e s e n t d a y . [See S h i p s a n d Boats.] D u r i n g t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d , t h e P e r s i a n king o w n e d a s u m p t u o u s palace o n d i e island, a n d t h e A r a d i a n navy, l e d b y M e r b a l s o n of A g b a l , j o i n e d X e r x e s ' s expedition against t h e G r e e k s . W i t h A l e x a n d e r d i e G r e a t ' s c o n q u e s t of Syria, G e r a s t r a t o s , ldng of A r w a d , s u r r e n d e r e d his k i n g d o m t o t h e c o n q u e r o r . L a t e r , h o w e v e r , t h e Seleucids offered t h e A r a d i a n confederation a u t o n o m y . D o c u m e n t a t i o n related t o A r w a d in t h e R o m a n p e r i o d is scarce. Silver coins d i s a p p e a r in 46/45 BCE, a n d gradually A r a d o s ceases to b e m e n t i o n e d . T h e few r e m a i n i n g m o n u m e n t s o n t h e island i n c l u d e a h u g e r a m p a r t built to p r o t e c t it b o t h f r o m its e n e m i e s a n d f r o m s t o r m y winter seas. T h i s wall dates t o t h e Hellenistic or R o m a n period. [See also the biography of Seyrig.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aatour, Michael. " L e s etrangers a Ougarit et le statut juridique des H a b i m . " Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale 59 ( 1 9 5 9 ) : 7 0 76. Pritchard, James B . Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Tes tament (ANET). Princeton, 1 9 6 9 . R e y - C o q u a i s , Jean-Paul. Arados et sa peree aux epoques grecque, romaine et byzantine. Paris, 1 9 7 4 . Riis, Paul J. Sukas I. The North-East Sanctuary and the First Settling of the Greeks in Syria and Palestine. C o p e n h a g e n , 1 9 7 0 . Seyrig, H e n r i . " A r a d u s et sa p e r e e sous les rois Seleucides." Syria 28 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 206-220. LEILA BADRE
ASHDOD,
large m o u n d of s o m e 70 acres, located o n t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast n o r t h of A s h k e l o n , t h a t w a s a major s e a p o r t in t h e L a t e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages ( m a p reference 118 X 129). T h e site w a s e x c a v a t e d f r o m 1962 t o 1972 for t h e Israel D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities, u n d e r t h e direction of M o s h e D o t h a n , T w e n t y - t h r e e strata w e r e discerned, f r o m d i e late M i d d l e B r o n z e t o t h e B y z a n t i n e period. T h e first fortified city b e g a n in M B I I I ( s t r a t u m X X I I I ) , w i t h defenses t h a t i n c l u d e d city walls, a n e a r t h e n glacis, a n d a r a r e t w o - e n t r y w a y gate ( r a t h e r t h a n t h e u s u a l t h r e e - e n t r y w a y t y p e ) . T h e r e follow five e p h e m e r a l L B p h a s e s (strata XVIII-XXII). T h e m a i n L B p h a s e ( L B I I A - B ) is r e p r e s e n t e d b y strata X T V - X V I I , all s h o w i n g s t r o n g continuity. Its substantial m u d - b r i c k buildings m a y e v e n b e fortified. O n e large, m u l t i r o o m e d c o u r t y a r d s t r u c t u r e m a y b e a n e x a m p l e of t h e Egyptian-style " r e s i d e n c e s " k n o w n a t o t h e r A m a r n a A g e sites in C a n a a n . A f r a g m e n t a r y d o o r p o s t t h a t m a y h a v e orig i n a t e d in this b u i l d i n g is i n s c r i b e d w i t h a n a m e t h a t m a y b e t h a t of a n E g y p t i a n g o v e r n o r . T h e r e a r e also i m p o r t s f r o m
219
C y p r u s a n d d i e M y c e n a e a n world. T h e city of s t r a t u m X I V w a s violentiy d e s t r o y e d b y fire t o w a r d t h e e n d of t h e thir t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE a n d c o v e r e d b y a thick a s h layer, a p p a r entiy b y t h e " S e a P e o p l e s . " S t r a t u m X I I I A - B m a r k s a major c h a n g e at A s h d o d . S t r a t u m X I I I B is transitional, witii n e w c o n s t r u c t i o n s , s o m e p a r tially built over t h e earlier fortifications. Characteristic i m p o r t e d M y c e n a e a n I I I C n s h e r d s date this brief o c c u p a t i o n to a b o u t 1225-1175 BCE. S t r a t u m XLIIA represents t h e first substantial Philistine settlement, w h i c h t h e n c o n t i n u e s t h r o u g h t o its m a i n p h a s e i n strata X I I - X I . A s h d o d was o n e of t h e five cities of t h e Philistine Pentapolis k n o w n from t h e Bible ( t h e others b e i n g G a z a , A s h k e l o n , E k r o n / T e l M i q n e a n d G a t h / T e l E r a n i ) . [See Ashkelon; M i q n e , T e l ; ' E r a n i , Tel.] A large fortress c o n s t r u c t e d in s t r a t u m X I i n area A , m a r k e d b y Philistine B i c h r o m e ware, c o n t i n u e d in u s e into t h e early t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. I n area G , s t r a t u m X I I was r e p resented by heavy structures, some forming a "casemate" line of defense. Several of t h e r o o m s were u s e d as w o r k s h o p s . I n one of t h e m , stacks of p a i n t e d bowls of M y c e n a e a n I I I C t y p e w e r e f o u n d , s o m e possibly i m p o r t e d , d i e f o r e r u n n e r s of t h e full-blown Philistine B i c h r o m e ware. In area H a distinctive apsidal s t r u c t u r e b e l o n g i n g t o s t t a t u m X I I m a y h a v e h a d a cultic function, t o judge from a terra cotta r e p r e s e n t i n g a female g o d d e s s seated on a c o u c h , similar to t h e well k n o w n M y c e n a e a n " m o u r n e r " figurines. T h e r e were also t w o seals, o n e w i t h signs similar t o t h e C y p r o - M i n o a n script u s e d o n C y p r u s a n d i n t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n in t h e thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE, t h e other w i t h signs a n d a pictorial r e p r e s e n t a t i o n in t h e A e g e a n style. [See Seals; M i noans.] T h e s e are so far t h e only examples of a possible Philistine script. I n area M , t h e r e w a s evidence of t h e e x p a n s i o n of Philistine o c c u p a t i o n b e y o n d t h e acropolis t o t h e lower city in t h e m i d - e l e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE ( s t r a t u m X B ) . A t w o - c h a m b e r e d m u d - b r i c k city gate attached to a section of city wall is attributed b y t h e excavator t o s t r a t u m X A ; it is t h o u g h t to h a v e b e e n d e s t r o y e d in t h e early t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, in t h e c a m p a i g n s of K i n g D a v i d . c
T h e I r o n II p e r i o d is r e p r e s e n t e d b y strata I X - V I , mostly in t h e lower city. N e a r t h e area M gate a n e w city gate w a s built, of t h e f o u r - e n t r y w a y t y p e familiar at Israelite sites of t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE (e.g., at H a z o r , M e g i d d o , G e z e r ) c o n n e c t e d t o a solid r a t h e r t h a n a c a s e m a t e wall. [See H a z o r ; M e g i d d o ; Gezer.] A v a r i a n t of d i e typical Israelite r e d - b u r n i s h e d pottery n o w b e g i n s t o a p p e a r at A s h d o d — r e d b u r n i s h e d b u t with b a n d s of black; Philistine B i c h r o m e ware is n o w extinct. A fortress w a s built in s t r a t u m I X t h a t is c o n n e c t e d w i t h this p o t t e r y . I n s t r a t u m VIII a small t e m p l e with several r o o m s w a s f o u n d with a considerable n u m b e r of a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c a n d z o o m o r p h i c figurines, m a n y of t h e m from K e r n o i . T h e scattered skeletal remains of s o m e three t h o u s a n d h u m a n s w e r e also f o u n d , s o m e w i t h funerary offerings, m o s t in s e c o n d a r y burials. T h e excavators suggest t h a t t h e s e r e m a i n s testify t o t h e destruction b y S a r g o n I I i n
220
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711 BCE, k n o w n from b o t h Assyrian a n d biblical texts. T w o fragments of a basalt relief of S a r g o n were recovered, similar to victory stelae f o u n d at K h o r s a b a d . [SeeKhorsabad.] S t r a t u m VII belongs t o the early seventh century BCE. A s h d o d is probably best u n d e r s t o o d t h e n n o t as a J u d e a n site, b u t as p a r t of the " N e o - P h i l i s t i n e " culture tiiat still flourished along the southern coast—as L a t e Iron Age Ashkelon, M i qne/Ekron, a n d several other sites also seem to be. Yet, s o m e H e b r e w ostraca, inscribed weights, a n d a few royal s t a m p e d jar handles attest to t r a d e with J u d a h . S t r a t u m VI lasts until t h e end of the seventh c e n t u r y BCE and the rise of Babylon. S t r a t u m V has r e m a i n s of a large public building of the Persian period, s o m e fine jewelry, a n d an A r a m a i c ostracon reading " w i n e delivered in the n a m e of Z e b a d i a h . " Helle nistic remains (stratum IV) reveal a well-planned t o w n . Strata I I I - I r e p r e s e n t the R o m a n , Byzantine, and Early A r a b periods at A s h d o d . Following the First Jewish Revolt against R o m e a n d the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, A s h d o d was of little i m p o r t a n c e , however. BIBLIOGRAPHY D o t h a n , M o s h e , and David Noel F r e e d m a n . Ashdod I: The First Season of Excavations, 1962. 'Atiqot, 7. Jerusalem, 1967. D o t h a n , M o s h e . Ashdod tt-IH: The Second and Third Seasons of Exca vations, 1963, 19&S- 'Atiqot, 9 - 1 0 . Jerusalem, 1 9 7 1 . Dotiian, M o s h e , and Yosef Porath. Ashdod IV: Excavation of Area M. 'Atiqot, 15. Jerusalem, 1982, D o t h a n , M o s h e , and Yosef Porath. Ashdod V: Excavation of Area G, the Fourth-Sixth Seasons of Excavations, 1968-1970. 'Atiqot, 23. Jerusa lem, 1993. D o t h a n , T r u d e , and M o s h e D o t h a n . People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines. N e w York, 1992. WILLIAM G . DEVEK
A S H K E L O N , site located on Israel's M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast, some 63 Ion (39 mi.) south of T e l Aviv a n d 16 k m (10 mi.) n o r t h to G a z a (3i°4o' N , 34°33' E; m a p reference 107 X 119). T h e ruins of tine ancient city, n o w a national park, form a 150-acre semicircle t h a t faces the sea. A r c h a e ological excavations h a v e revealed evidence of o c c u p a t i o n beginning as early as the Neolithic p e r i o d a n d e n d i n g w i t h the final a b a n d o n m e n t of tire site in C r u s a d e r times. T h e aquifer r u n n i n g u n d e r t h e site m a d e it a favored s p o t for settlement, a n d it b e c a m e an i m p o r t a n t seaport at an early date. T h e n a m e Ashkelon itself is attested in historical r e c ords (the Egyptian E x e c r a t i o n texts) as early as t h e n i n e t e e n t h century BCE. It p r o b a b l y reflects the Semitic r o o t *tql, " t o w e i g h , " a n d so is related to t h e H e b r e w w o r d shekel. Ashkelon flourished as a center of t r a d e u n d e r this n a m e — t r a n s m u t e d to Ascalon d u r i n g the Hellenistic p e r i o d — f r o m a b o u t 2000 BCE (if n o t earlier) until its demise in 1270 CE. D u r i n g the L a t e B r o n z e A g e , Ashkelon was p a r t of t h e Egyptian E m p i r e in C a n a a n . Several letters from its ruler to t h e p h a r a o h were f o u n d in t h e el-Amarna archive. T o w a r d
t h e e n d of die L a t e B r o n z e A g e (c. 1200 BCE), P h a r a o h M e r n e p t a h c o m m e m o r a t e d his s u p p r e s s i o n of a revolt by A s h kelon a n d other g r o u p s in C a n a a n . Ashkelon did n o t r e m a i n in E g y p t i a n h a n d s m u c h longer, h o w e v e r ; it fell to the Sea Peoples in a b o u t 1175 BCE. Ashkelon b e c a m e a m e m b e r of t h e Philistine pentapolis, along with G a z a , A s h d o d , G a t h , a n d Ekron. T h i s is h o w it is k n o w n in t h e story of S a m s o n (Jgs. 14:19) a n d in o t h e r biblical texts dealing w i t h t h e p e riod of the J u d g e s a n d t h e rise of D a v i d in Israel (Jos. 13:3; Jgs. 1:18; / Sm. 6:17; 2 Sm. 1:20). Ashkelon is n o t m e n t i o n e d again in historical sources until t h e time of Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria, w h o c o n q u e r e d Philistia in 734 BCE (cf. Am. 1:6-8). S o m e years later, at t h e time of S e n n a c h e r i b ' s c a m p a i g n against J e r u s a l e m in 701 BCE, the Assyrian a r m y s u p p r e s s e d a rebellion in w h i c h A s h kelon was involved. F o r t h e r e m a i n d e r of t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n p e r i o d in the seventh c e n t u r y , w e hear only t h a t Ashkelon paid tribute to E s a r h a d d o n and A s h u r b a n i p a l . T h e Philis tine period at Ashkelon finally c a m e to an e n d i n 604 BCE, w h e n die N e o - B a b y l o n i a n a r m y u n d e r N e b u c h a d r e z z a r d e stroyed the city a n d d e p o r t e d its rulers (cf. Jer. 47:4-7). D u r i n g t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d , Ashkelon w a s r u l e d by P h o e nicians from T y r e ( a c c o r d i n g to the f o u r t h - c e n t u r y BCE G r e e k g e o g r a p h e r P s e u d o - S c y l a x ) u n d e r u l t i m a t e Persian suzerainty. It p r o s p e r e d u n d e r this a r r a n g e m e n t as o n e of t h e major ports of Palestine. After A l e x a n d e r ' s c o n q u e s t of t h e Persian E m p i r e , Ashkelon ( n o w A s c a l o n ) b e c a m e a thoroughly hellenized city a n d flourished as a c e n t e r of c o m m e r c e and of the arts t h r o u g h o u t t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n periods. U n d e r b o t h the M a c c a b e e s a n d t h e R o m a n s , in fact, Ascalon enjoyed a u t o n o m y as a free city, e v e n m i n t i n g its o w n coins. Eventually, t h e p a g a n city of A s c a l o n b e c a m e a Byzantine Christian stronghold, the seat of a b i s h o p r i c . I n 636 CE it passed from Byzantine to M u s l i m rule, b u t it r e m a i n e d a p r o m i n e n t a n d wealthy seaport. T h e C r u s a d e r s m a n a g e d to c a p t u r e Ascalon in 1153 b u t lost it t o Saladin in 1187, w h o o r d e r e d its destruction in 1 1 9 1 , lest it fall intact into t h e h a n d s of a n e w a r m y of C r u s a d e r s led b y R i c h a r d t h e L i o n H e a r t . T h e city w a s partially rebuilt a n d served for a time as a C r u s a d e r fortress; its fate w a s sealed in 1270, however, w h e n it was d e s t r o y e d for t h e last t i m e b y t h e M a m l u k sultan B a y b a r s . Since t h e n the site has b e e n u n i n habited. L a d y H e s t e r S t a n h o p e , a n E n g l i s h w o m a n living in Syria, m o u n t e d a t r e a s u r e - h u n t i n g expedition t o A s h k e l o n in 1815. H e r w o r k m e n f o u n d n o treasure b u t did u n e a r t h a R o m a n era building, p r o b a b l y a basilica, a n d a large headless statue. P r o p e r excavation of t h e site w a s n o t a t t e m p t e d until 1920-1921, w h e n J o h n G a r s t a n g , u n d e r t h e auspices of t h e Palestine D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities a n d t h e Palestine E x ploration F u n d , u n c o v e r e d m o r e R o m a n architecture a n d his assistant, W . J. P h y t h i a n - A d a m s , d u g t w o step t r e n c h e s in t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e tell, revealing a cultural s e q u e n c e extending b a c k into t h e I r o n a n d B r o n z e Ages. S o m e fine
ASHKELON
are evident in die e a r t h e n r a m p a r t t h a t encloses t h e city. T h e glacis, or o u t e r face, of t h e r a m p a r t initially consisted of m u d bricks, b u t it w a s later c o m p o s e d of kurkar fieldstones sealed with clay. C o n t e m p o r a r y w i t h t h e earliest p h a s e s of t h e r a m p a r t is a 7-meter-wide street (resurfaced several times) a n d a gate possessing t h e oldest m o n u m e n t a l arch yet f o u n d in t h e N e a r East. T w o phases of c o n s t r u c t i o n are evident in t h e gate (die earliest in c. 2000 BCE), w h i c h enclosed a p a s sageway 2.5 m wide a n d h a d a s e c o n d - s t o r y s u p e r s t r u c t u r e flanked b y m u d - b r i c k towers p r e s e r v e d to a height of 6 m (see figure 1 ) .
ililfPtiiSw.
fit
•
r f
B y t h e e n d of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e (in a b o u t 1550/BCE), t h e r a m p a r t w a s 1 5 m high a n d 30 m thick at its base, with a 40-degree slope o n its o u t e r face. C o n t e m p o r a r y witii t h e last p h a s e of t h e r a m p a r t is a s t r u c t u r e t h e excavator n a m e d t h e S a n c t u a r y of t h e Silver Calf; it lies near t h e b o t t o m of t h e o u t e r slope, along a r o a d w a y leading u p from the sea
ft*
I
ASHKELON.
221
F i g u r e 1. The Middle
X
Bronze Age gate. (Photograph b y
Carl Andrews, courtesy L e o n L e v y Expedition to Ashkelon)
e x a m p l e s of Philistine p o t t e r y c a m e to light at this time. [See the biographies of Stanhope and Garstang.] It was n o t until 1985, h o w e v e r , t h a t extensive excavations w e r e b e g u n o n t h e tell of a n c i e n t A s h k e l o n b y t h e L e o n L e v y E x p e d i t i o n , s p o n s o r e d b y t h e Semitic M u s e u m of H a r v a r d University, u n d e r t h e direction of L a w r e n c e E . Stager. T h e project, still u n d e r w a y , h a s m a d e significant discoveries from all p e r i o d s of o c c u p a t i o n in various p a r t s of t h e site. T h e following s u m m a r y of excavation results is b a s e d largely o n this expedition's findings. Neolithic a n d C h a l c o l i t h i c P e r i o d s . A small N e o l i t h i c s e t d e m e n t w a s excavated o n t h e b e a c h in 1955 b y J e a n P e r r o t a n d J o h n H e v e s y . N o architectural r e m a i n s from t h e Chalcolithic p e r i o d h a v e y e t b e e n discovered, b u t a n u m b e r of cornets w e r e f o u n d d u r i n g t h e r e c e n t excavations in a s e c o n d a r y context in t h e s o u t h e a s t e r n p a r t of d i e tell. E a r l y B r o n z e A g e . A s h k e l o n c o n t i n u e d to b e i n h a b i t e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e Early B r o n z e A g e I—III, j u d g i n g b y p o t t e r y from this p e r i o d f o u n d in later fills. P a r t of a n E B II—III m u d brick b u i l d i n g h a s b e e n e x c a v a t e d a t t h e n o r t h e n d of t h e tell. D u r i n g t h e E B I V p e r i o d t h e r e a p p e a r s t o h a v e b e e n a g a p in o c c u p a t i o n a t A s h k e l o n , as at o t h e r u r b a n sites in Palestine. M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . T h e m o s t striking r e m a i n s of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e f o u n d so far are t h e massive fortifica tions discovered at t h e n o r t h e n d of t h e tell. D u r i n g t h e M B I alone, a t least four c u m u l a t i v e stages of c o n s t r u c t i o n
ASHKELON.
F i g u r e 2 . Bronze
bull calf and shrine. (Photograph by
Carl Andrews, courtesy L e o n Levy Expedition to Ashkelon)
222
ASHKELON
into t h e city. In it was found a finely crafted b r o n z e statuette of a bull calf (originally covered with silver) 10 c m long a n d n c m high a n d weighing a b o u t 400 gm (see figure 2). M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e p o t t e r y has also b e e n f o u n d o n t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e tell, suggesting t h a t C a n a a n i t e Ashkelon already o c c u p i e d t h e entire area (about 150 acres) within t h e arc of t h e earthworks s u r r o u n d i n g t h e site. Excavation at t h e n o r t h end of the tell has s h o w n t h a t t h e M B r a m p a r t w a s reused in later p e r i o d s , which m a y be t h e case elsewhere along the p e r i m e t e r of t h e tell, w h e r e only the final, C r u s a d e r fortifications are n o w visible. L a t e B r o n z e A g e . R e m a i n s from the L a t e B r o n z e A g e are so far confined to a small area o n the s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e tell and consist of a few c o u r t y a r d surfaces a n d silos a n d , m o r e notably, t w o burials in brick-lined vaults d a t i n g to a b o u t 1500 BCE. T h e s e vaults are r e m i n i s c e n t of a n earlier " H y k s o s " burial tradition, n o w k n o w n also at T e l l e d - D a b ' a (ancient Avaris) in t h e N i l e Delta. O n e of the burials at A s h kelon is that of an adolescent girl s u r r o u n d e d b y i m p o r t e d pottery, including t w o bowls t h a t o n c e contained food of ferings; in the o t h e r , a small child w a s interred. I r o n A g e . T h e Philistine period at Ashkelon lasted from a b o u t 1175 BCE until N e b u c h a d r e z z a r ' s destruction of t h e city in 604 BCE. A Philistine m u d - b r i c k t o w e r was in place o n t h e n o r t h e r n r a m p a r t b y 1100 BCE, indicating t h a t t h e
ASHKELON.
Figure
Philistine city w a s n o t confined to t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e tell, as h a d o n c e b e e n t h o u g h t . O n t h e s o u t h tell evidence h a s b e e n f o u n d of t h e earliest Philistine p o t t e r y s e q u e n c e , involving a ttansition from a m o n o c h r o m e style b a s e d o n M y c e n a e a n a n t e c e d e n t s to t h e familiar Philistine b i c h r o m e decoration. A n o t h e r indication of M y c e n a e a n or A e g e a n c o n n e c t i o n s is t h e p r e s e n c e of a large n u m b e r of u n p e r f o r a t e d cylindrical l o o m weights m a d e of u n b a k e d clay, q u i t e different from t h e c o m m o n L e v a n t i n e t y p e b u t k n o w n f r o m C y p r u s a n d G r e e c e d u r i n g this p e r i o d . F i n d s from t h e latter p a r t of t h e I r o n A g e i n c l u d e a n ar chitectural c o m p l e x c o n t a i n i n g several shallow, well-plas tered vats, m o s t likely u s e d in w i n e p r o d u c t i o n . E v i d e n c e h a s also b e e n f o u n d of t h e final fiery d e s t r u c t i o n of Philistine Ashkelon in 604 BCE, i n c l u d i n g t h e c o m p l e t e skeleton of o n e of t h e victims of t h e disaster lying a m i d t h e b u r n t debris. P e r s i a n P e r i o d . T h e e x c a v a t e d r e m a i n s of t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d at A s h k e l o n are 2-3 m thick o n t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e tell. I n m o s t places t h e r e is e v i d e n c e of several p h a s e s of construction, e n d i n g in a large-scale d e s t r u c t i o n in a b o u t 300 BCE. A s e q u e n c e of large w a r e h o u s e s (see figure 3) built successively in o n e area n e a r t h e sea w a s i n t e r r u p t e d for a t i m e in t h e fifth c e n t u r y BCE b y an u n u s u a l burial g r o u n d t h a t c o n t a i n e d h u n d r e d s of individually i n t e r r e d d o g s , m o s t of w h i c h a p p a r e n t l y died of n a t u r a l c a u s e s . T h e s e animals
3. View of the excavated Persian-period warehouses. ( P h o t o g r a p h by Carl A n d r e w s ,
courtesy L e o n Levy Expedition to Ashkelon)
ASSOS m a y h a v e h a d a role t o play in s o m e local cult a n d m a y therefore h a v e b e e n r e g a r d e d as sacred. [See D o g s . ] T h e material culture of A s h k e l o n in t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d reflects i m p o r t s a n d influences from b o t h P h o e n i c i a a n d t h e A e g e a n , i n c l u d i n g Attic black-figured a n d red-figured w a r e s . A s for Persian i m p o r t s , little h a s b e e n f o u n d e x c e p t for a c a r v e d ivory c o m b d e p i c t i n g a h u n t i n g scene. Hellenistic a n d R o m a n P e r i o d s . A n u m b e r of i m p r e s sive G r e c o - R o m a n buildings w e r e e r e c t e d a t Ashkelon. G a r s t a n g e x c a v a t e d a large, r e c t a n g u l a r , c o l u m n e d s t r u c t u r e n e a r t h e center of the tell t h a t S t a g e r identifies as a f o r u m f r o m t h e third c e n t u r y CE. A basilica f o u n d b y L a d y H e s t e r S t a n h o p e lies just n o r t h of t h e f o r u m a n d dates t o t h e s a m e p e r i o d . T h e r e c e n t excavations h a v e u n c o v e r e d , in addition to t h e s e p u b l i c buildings, private villas o c c u p y i n g t h r e e insulae t h a t w e r e built early in t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d b u t w h o s e architectural p l a n r e m a i n e d u n c h a n g e d until B y z a n t i n e times. B y z a n t i n e P e r i o d . T h e R o m a n villas w e r e r e p l a c e d b y a b a t h h o u s e in t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y . H e r e t h e excavators f o u n d nearly a h u n d r e d skeletons of n e w b o r n infants in t h e sewer of t h e b a t h , grisly e v i d e n c e of t h e p r a c t i c e of infanti cide. A n o t h e r notable a s p e c t of B y z a n t i n e A s h k e l o n w a s t h e t r a d e in wine, s h i p p e d in distinctive a m p h o r a e (including t h e so-called G a z a jar) to d e s t i n a t i o n s all over t h e Christian w o r l d , w h e r e w i n e f r o m t h e H o l y L a n d w a s highly prized. A r a b a n d C r u s a d e r P e r i o d s . A s h k e l o n w a s fortified for t h e last t i m e u n d e r t h e F a t i m i d s ( w h o r u l e d f r o m t h e t e n t h t h r o u g h twelfth c e n t u r i e s ) , a n d p a r t s of t h o s e fortifications are still visible. A t t h e n o r t h e n d of t h e tell, n e a r w h a t w o u l d h a v e b e e n t h e Jaffa G a t e (it o p e n e d to t h e r o u t e leading to Jaffa), a lengthy Arabic inscription, e n g r a v e d o n a limestone slab ( n o w b r o k e n ) m e a s u r i n g 149 X 63 X 10 c m , w a s r e cently fished from debris filling a stone-lined d r y m o a t . It c o m m e m o r a t e s d i e c o n s t r u c t i o n of a t o w e r a n d bears a date 2 M a r c h 1150. T h r e e years later t h e C r u s a d e r s c a p t u r e d t h e city a n d defaced t h e inscription, e n g r a v i n g five heraldic shields over t h e A r a b i c text. E l s e w h e r e o n t h e tell, e v i d e n c e of t h e p r o s p e r i t y of t h e A r a b p e r i o d at A s h k e l o n is f o u n d in well-built private h o u s e s , n e a r o n e of w h i c h f o u r pieces of gold filigree jewelry w e r e u n e a r t h e d . O n t h e east side of t h e city, just inside the J e r u s a l e m G a t e , excavators u n c o v e r e d a c h u r c h t h a t was c o n s t r u c t e d as a basilica in t h e fifth c e n t u r y , c o n v e r t e d into a m o s q u e u n d e r the F a t i m i d s , a n d r e s t o r e d as a c h u r c h b y t h e C r u s a d e r s in t h e twelfth c e n t u r y . BIBLIOGRAPHY
T h e first systematic excavations at Ashkelon in 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 2 1 are cov ered in several reports b y J o h n G a r s t a n g and W . J. Phyuiian-Adams, all published in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement ( P E F Q S ) . See Garstang, " T h e F u n d ' s Excavation of Askalon," P E F Q S ( 1 9 2 1 ) : 1 2 - 1 6 , 7 3 - 7 5 , 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 ; " T h e Excavations at Askalon," P E F Q S ( 1 9 2 2 ) ; 1 1 2 - 1 1 9 ; and " A s k a l o n , " P E F Q S ( 1 9 2 4 ) : 2 4 - 3 5 . R e ports by P h y t h i a n - A d a m s include the discovery of a pottery sequence
223
at Ashkelon extending back to t h e Philistine and Canaanite periods; see "History of Askalon," P E F Q S ( 1 9 2 1 ) : 7 6 - 9 0 ; "Askalon R e p o r t s , " P E F Q S ( 1 9 2 1 ) : 1 6 3 - 1 7 1 ; and " R e p o r t on die Stratification of Aska lon," P E F Q S ( 1 9 2 3 ) : 60-84. Jean Perrot provides a brief description of a Neolithic settlement found on the beach at Ashkelon in " N o t e s and N e w s : Ashkelon," Israel Exploration Journal 5 ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 2 7 0 - 2 7 1 . F o r an overview of work at the site, see L a w r e n c e E. Stager, "Ashkelon," in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 1 0 3 - 1 1 2 (Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1 9 9 3 ) . Although quite condensed, this entry is n o w t h e m o s t complete discussion of the ar chaeological excavations, p e n d i n g publication of the final report. A brief discussion of the first two seasons of work by the L e o n Levy Expedition may be found in L a w r e n c e Stager and Douglas Hesse, " N o t e s and N e w s : Ashkelon, 1 9 8 5 - 1 9 8 6 , " Israel Exploration Journal 37 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 6 8 - 7 2 . Stager, the current excavator, has also published a n u m ber of interesting studies on specific aspects of Ashkelon history and culture. See, in particular, " W h e n Canaanites and Philistines Ruled Ashkelon," " W h y W e r e H u n d r e d s of D o g s Buried at Ashkelon?," and "Eroticism a n d Infanticide at Ashkelon," all in Biblical Archaeology Re view 1 7 . 2 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 2 4 - 3 7 , 4 0 - 4 3 ; 1 7 . 3 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 2 6 - 4 2 ; and 1 7 . 4 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3 4 - 5 3 3 7 2 . W r i t t e n for a b r o a d audience, tiiese articles provide detailed descriptions and interpretations of the most important discoveries made at Ashkelon by die L e o n Levy Expedition and include many color p h o tographs. F o r further information o n t h e enigmatic dog burials, consult Paula W a p n i s h and Brian Hesse, " P a m p e r e d Pooches or Plain Pari a h s ? , " Biblical Archaeologist 56.2 (June 1 9 9 3 ) : 5 5 - 8 0 , the most detailed study to date o n the subject, by two leading zooarchaeologists. W i n e a m p h o r a e are discussed in Barbara L . Johnson and Lawrence E. Stager, "Ashkelon: Wine E m p o r i u m of the Holy L a n d , " in Recent Excavations in Israel, edited by S e y m o u r Gitin, p p . 9 5 - 1 0 9 (Boston, 1 9 9 5 ) , a study of the types a n d distribution of L a t e Roman/Early Byz antine a m p h o r a e used to ship wine from Ashkelon and Gaza to the rest of t h e Christian world. See as well Philip Mayerson's interesting studies of the differences between Ascalon and Gaza wine and the a m p h o r a e in which they were shipped during t h e Byzantine period: " T h e Gaza ' W i n e ' Jar {Gazilion) and the 'Lost' Ashkelon Jar {Askalonion)" and " T h e U s e of Ascalon Wine in die Medical Writers of the F o u r t h to the Seventh C e n t u r i e s , " both in Israel Exploration Journal42 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 76-80, and 43 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 6 9 - 1 7 3 . M a y e r s o n ' s sources include papyri, ostraca, and literary a n d medical texts. DAVID SCHLOEN
ASHUR. ASOR.
See Assur.
See A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h .
ASSOS,
G r e e k city in Anatolia rising a precipitous 234 m (768 ft.) from t h e sea t o t h e s u m m i t of a volcanic citadel o n t h e s o u t h e r n coast of t h e T r o a d ( m o d e r n T u r k e y ; 39°29' N ; 26°2i' E ) . T h e site is unequivocally identified by Strabo's description of a naturally fortified, well-walled city with a steep a s c e n t from t h e h a r b o r , set b e t w e e n C a p e L e k t o n and G a r g a r a (Geography 13.1.51, 57-58), Pliny notes t h a t it was also called Apollonia (Natural History 5.32). A t t e m p t s t o a s sign t o Assos a B r o n z e A g e n a m e a n d history r e m a i n u n s u b s t a n t i a t e d b y d i e literary a n d archaeological record. P r o posals i n c l u d e H e i n r i c h S c h l i e m a n n ' s suggestion t h a t t h e
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ASSOS
site was the original C h r y s e of t h e Iliad, a n d J o s e p h T h a t c h e r Clarke's conviction, followed b y W a l t e r Leaf, tiiat Assos was H o m e r i c P e d a s o s (contra S t r a b o 13.1.59; see Clarke, 1882, p p . 60-63; Leaf, 1923, p . 295). Assos acquired its T u r k i s h n a m e , B e h r a m (also M a h r a m , M e n h e r e i n , or P r e h e r a m ) , at the time of the O t t o m a n c o n q u e s t (c. 1330), as a c o r r u p t i o n of t h e last Byzantine leader's n a m e , M a c h r a m e s . T o d a y the village is called Behramkale. A c c o r d i n g to Myrsilos a n d Hellanikos (Strabo 13.1.58), colonists from Aeolian M e t h y m a o n L e s b o s f o u n d e d Assos in t h e seventh c e n t u r y BCE. T h e city served as the strategic a n d commercial center of t h e s o u t h e r n T r o a d for it c o m m a n d e d a superb view of the G u l f of A d r a m y t d u m a n d L e s b o s , was naturally defensible, a n d h a d the best h a r b o r o n t h e n o r t h e r n side of t h e Gulf. Just inland of t h e citadel stretched fertile w h e a t plains w a t e r e d b y t h e T o u z l a River (possibly die H o m e r i c Satnioeis). T h e physical r e m a i n s d o c u m e n t vigorous activity from the early Archaic t h r o u g h t h e early Christian p e r i o d s (seventh century BCE to fifth cen tury CE). Assos r e m a i n e d a viable Byzantine city, despite serious assault a n d o c c u p a t i o n b y t h e Seljuk T u r k s in 1080 CE, t h e F r a n k s in t h e first q u a r t e r of the thirteenth c e n t u r y , a n d finally the O t t o m a n T u r k s in the first quarter of t h e fourteenth century. Its significance declined rapidly t h e r e after. T h e ruins of Assos (identified as B e h r a m ) were first n o t e d from the sea by the T u r k i s h c a r t o g r a p h e r Piri R e ' is in 1521. T h e English chaplain J o h n T . Covel, s t o p p i n g at Assos in 1677, w r o t e a fairly detailed a c c o u n t of t h e agora a n d west e r n necropolis, and t h e F r e n c h c o u n t M a r i e - G a b r i e l - A u guste-Florent Choiseul-Gouffier included a hasty d e s c r i p tion of die site in his geographical survey of t h e T u r k i s h coast m a d e in 1785. D u r i n g t h e first third of t h e nineteentii c e n t u r y , a steady s t r e a m of E u r o p e a n aristocrats, archaeol ogists, and architects visited Assos, writing descriptions t h a t d o c u m e n t t h e d r a m a t i c situation of t h e city a n d its t h e n r e m a r k a b l y well-preserved civic structures a n d m o n u m e n t s . B a s e d o n its setting, u r b a n plan, and architectural r e m a i n s , Colonel William M a r t i n L e a k e declared t h a t Assos gave " t h e m o s t perfect idea of a G r e e k city that a n y w h e r e exists" (Leake, 1820, p p . 253-255). T h e F r e n c h architect Charles T e x i e r carried o u t t h e first brief excavations o n t h e acropolis in 1835, w h e r e h e u n earthed p a r t of t h e archaic D o r i c t e m p l e ' s f o u n d a t i o n . D e sire R a o u l - R o c h e t t e r e t u r n e d three years later to take thir teen architectural reliefs a n d one capital from the t e m p l e to t h e M u s e e d u L o u v r e in Paris. Systematic q u a r r y i n g of m o n u m e n t s to p r o v i d e c u t stone for t h e docks of t h e arsenal in Istanbul d u r i n g t h e 1860s left d i e city gates, g y m n a s i u m , and theater greatly diminished. T h e first excavations s p o n s o r e d b y t h e Archaeological I n stitute of America were c o n d u c t e d at Assos b e t w e e n 1881-1883. A m e r i c a n architects J o s e p h T h a t c h e r C l a r k e
a n d Francis H e n r y B a c o n , aided in t h e s e c o n d a n d third seasons by G e r m a n architect R o b e r t K o l d e w e y , e x p o s e d m o s t of t h e major m o n u m e n t s of t h e city. [See the biography of Koldewey] T h e archaic t e m p l e o n t h e acropolis received greatest attention, b u t e n o u g h excavation w a s c o n d u c t e d in the lower city to reveal t h e p l a n of t h e agora, g y m n a s i u m , city gates, a n d m a n y funerary m o n u m e n t s . F i n d s from t h e excavation w e r e d e p o s i t e d in t h e Archaeological M u s e u m in Istanbul a n d t h e M u s e u m of F i n e Arts i n B o s t o n . A hiatus of nearly o n e h u n d r e d years followed t h e A m e r ican excavations. A n international t e a m u n d e r t h e direction of U m i t Serdaroglu r e s u m e d archaeological w o r k in 1980, concentrating on t h e acropolis a n d w e s t e r n necropolis. A d ditional sculpture from t h e archaic t e m p l e h a s b e e n r e c o v ered, a n d finds from t h e necropolis, i n c l u d i n g s e v e n t h - c e n tury pottery, confirm early activity at t h e site. T h e u r b a n p l a n of Assos follows t h e c o n t o u r s of t h e site with m o n u m e n t s set o n a series of partially e x c a v a t e d t e r races o n the seaward-facing side of t h e citadel. All of t h e buildings are c o n s t r u c t e d of local volcanic andesite. T h e m i d - s i x t h - c e n t u r y t e m p l e c r o w n i n g d i e acropolis r e m a i n s t h e only k n o w n archaic D o r i c t e m p l e in Asia M i n o r a n d is distinctive for the p r o g r a m of architectural s c u l p t u r e d e c o rating its architrave. Below, two multi-storied stoas, o n e built into the scarp of d i e acropolis a n d t h e o t h e r with o n e story facing t h e agora a n d t w o additional stories r e a c h i n g t o a lower terrace, frame a long, trapezoidal a g o r a w i t h a p r o style t e m p l e at one e n d a n d a b o u l e u t e r i o n (council c h a m ber) at d i e other. A g y m n a s i u m with cisterns lies b e t w e e n t h e agora a n d the chief city gate. T h e theater, as well as n u m e r o u s smaller b u i l d i n g s n o t fully excavated, o c c u p y lower terraces to d i e south a n d east. T h e city walls of t h e f o u r d i c e n t u r y encircling d i e acropolis a n d s o u t h e r n region of t h e city, as well as a Hellenistic n o r t i i e r n extension with salient r o u n d a n d s q u a r e t o w e r s , are of excellent w o r k m a n ship a n d have well-preserved m a i n a n d lesser gates (see fig u r e 1). Early archaic burials have b e e n f o u n d in t h e s a m e region as the elaborate Hellenistic a n d R o m a n funerary m o n u m e n t s t h a t line t h e streets leading to t h e eastern a n d w e s t e r n city gates. B o t h within a n d outside d i e walls, several early Christian c h u r c h e s h a v e b e e n identified. G o o d evi d e n c e exists for R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e d o m e s t i c q u a r t e r s t o t h e southeast of t h e akropolis, b u t t h e civic a n d d o m e s t i c quarters of t h e archaic a n d classical t o w n h a v e n o t yet b e e n located. N u m e r o u s architectural elements p r e s u m a b l y b e longing t o moles of t h e ancient h a r b o r lie u n d e r w a t e r at t h e port. F a m o u s sons of Assos i n c l u d e t h e stoic p h i l o s o p h e r K l e a n t h e s . Aristotle a n d X e n o k r a t e s r e s i d e d in Assos (c. 348-345) u p o n the invitation of t h e ruler H e r m i a s , himself a s t u d e n t of Plato; T h e o p h r a s t e r p r o b a b l y joined t h e m . St. P a u l s t o p p e d t h e r e e n r o u t e from Alexandria T r o a s to M i tylene. I m p o r t a n t a n c i e n t sources n o t i n g Assos i n c l u d e
ASSUR
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Sartiaux, Felix. Les sculptures et la restauralion du temple d'Assos en Troade. Paris, 1 9 1 5 . Discerning view of Clarke's work on die archaic temple, largely superseded by Finster-Hotz a n d Wescoat. Serdaroglu, O m i t , et al. Ausgrabungen in Assos. B o n n , 1990. Reports by several autiiors on recent discoveries from the western necropolis. Wescoat, B o n n a D . The Temple of Athena at Assos. Oxford, forthcom ing. Investigation of the architecture, iconography, and reconstruc tion of the archaic temple based on new excavation and fieldwork. BONNA D . WESCOAT
(also A s h u r ; m o d e r n Q a l ' a t S e r q a t ) , site located a p p r o x i m a t e l y 110 k m (68 m i . ) s o u t h of M o s u l , o n t h e west b a n k of t h e T i g r i s river i n n o r t h e r n I r a q (35°28' N , 4 3 ° I 4 ' E ) . T h e ancient settlement is situated s o m e 40 m above t h e alluvial plain of Serqat o n a n a t u r a l , nearly triangular e m i n e n c e at t h e junction of t w o b r a n c h e s of t h e Tigris. T h i s location p r o v i d e d t h e site with natural protection o n two sides. O n t h e third, t h e l a n d w a r d side, its defenses were c o m p l e t e d b y a c r e s c e n t - s h a p e d array of mighty walls en closing an area of nearly 65 h a (161 acres). Inside t h e for tification walls t h e settlement w a s s u b d i v i d e d into t w o parts: t h e Old City ( a b o u t 40 h a or 99 a c r e s ) , w i t h temples, pal aces, a n d s o m e " p r i v a t e " buildings in t h e n o r t h , a n d the s o called N e w City ( a b o u t 15 ha or 37 acres) w h o s e function h a s n o t yet b e e n identified b u t w h i c h is m o s t p r o b a b l y a dwelling area. It is adjacent to t h e O l d C i t y in t h e settle m e n t s ' e x t r e m e southeast. ASSOS. F i g u r e I .
The city gate. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N Y )
S t r a b o , Geography (13.1.51, 57-58, 66); T h e o p h r a s t o s , On Fire (46-47); Pliny, Natural History (2.211, 5.32, 36.131-33); a n d Acts 20.13, I4> BIBLIOGRAPHY Clarke, Joseph T h a t c h e r . Report on the Excavations at Assos. 2 vols. B o s t o n and N e w York, 1 8 8 2 - 1 8 9 8 . V o l u m e 1 includes a history of Assos, a record of early travelers to t h e site, a description of the first season, a n d a preliminary analysis of t h e major m o n u m e n t s with appendices on inscriptions, other sites in t h e southern T r o a d , a n d the local g e ology. V o l u m e 2 concentrates on t h e architecture and sculpture of die archaic temple. T h e p r o p o s e d date of mid-fifth century BCE is not accepted. Clarke, Joseph T h a t c h e r , et al. Investigations at Assos. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 2 1 . Folio v o l u m e (issued in two parts) with text con densed from the Reports and invaluable illustrations of the actual state, individual elements, and restored views of m o s t major m o n u m e n t s , providing the best overview of t h e site. Finster-Hotz, Ursula. Der Bauschmuck des Alhenatempels von Assos: Studien zur Ikonographie. R o m e , 1984. Iconographic study of the sculp ture from die temple, not including new finds. Leaf, Walter. Strabo on the Troad. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 2 3 . See p p . 289-300; a topographical study of the T r o a d based on the work of the ancient geographer Strabo. Leake, William Martin, as printed in R o b e r t Walpole, Travels in Various Countries of the East, p p , 2 5 3 - 2 5 5 . L o n d o n , 1820. See also William M . Leake, Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor. L o n d o n , 1824.
T h e first archaeological investigations at t h e site were car ried o u t in t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y b y A u s t e n H e n r y L a y a r d , H o r m u z d R a s s a m , a n d V i c t o r Place. A l t h o u g h hardly sci entific, their w o r k was of considerable i m p o r t a n c e in i d e n tifying Q a l a ' a t Serqat w i t h t h e first Assyrian capital, Assur. W e l l - k n o w n objects associated w i t h t h e s e early excavations are a statue of S h a l m a n e s e r i l l (854-824 BCE) a n d a clay p r i s m of Tiglath-Pileser I ( 1 1 1 5 - 1 0 7 7 BCE). T h e latter was of considerable i m p o r t a n c e in d e c i p h e r i n g cuneiform writ ing. [See C u n e i f o r m . ] W h a t is k n o w n of t h e city's a r c h a e ology, h o w e v e r , belongs a l m o s t exclusively t o t h e work of t h e G e r m a n excavators w h o b e g a n their investigations at A s s u r in 1903. F r o m t h e n o n w a r d , until 1914, W a l t e r A n drae carried o u t large-scale excavations at t h e site o n behalf of t h e D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesellschaft. A n d r a e ' s c o m b i n e d a c h i e v e m e n t s , in recovering historical information a n d p e r fecting archaeological m e t h o d , have since c o m e to b e g e n erally recognized. N o further w o r k took place at t h e site until 1945. A p a r t f r o m s o m e investigations in t h e following d e c ades b y t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of Iraq, two m o r e G e r m a n c a m p a i g n s , b u t o n a m u c h smaller scale, took place in 1988-1989, c o n d u c t e d b y t h e F r e e University of Berlin u n d e r t h e direction of R e i n h a r d D i t t r n a n n , a n d in 1989-1990, b y t h e U n i v e r s i t y of M u n i c h u n d e r d i e direction of Barthel H r o u d a . In a t t e m p t i n g to resolve specific details and problems, the recent work has provided new topograph-
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ical plan and, for t h e first time, a ceramic s e q u e n c e r a n g i n g from t h e U r I l l - p e r i o d (2112-2004 BCE) d o w n to P a r t h i a n times (250 BCE-256 C E ) . A n d r a e ' s principal excavations took place in t h e elevated p a r t of the O l d City t o t h e n o r t h a n d northwest, w h e r e m o s t of its temples a n d palaces are situated. Because, successive kings h a d c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e restoration a n d multiplication of these public buildings a n d fortifications, t h e chronological s e q u e n c e of their building levels could only b e d e t e r m i n e d with t h e help of associated inscriptions. T h e s e showed, for example, that m a n y of t h e excavated buildings c o n t i n u e d t o b e rebuilt over a p e r i o d of s o m e t w o t h o u s a n d years, even after t h e city h a d ceased t o b e t h e administrative capital of Assyria (beginning of the first millenium BCE). T h e latest architectural remains A n d r a e e n c o u n t e r e d i n his excavations date t o the final p h a s e of the P a r t h i a n p e r i o d (c. 250 CE). T h e m a i n excavated buildings of this p e r i o d are the so-called P a r t h i a n Palace in t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e city a n d an Assur-Serua T e m p l e in t h e extreme n o r t h . T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t buildings of t h e Assyrian era (c. 1813-614 BCE), the city's m a i n o c c u p a t i o n level, are t h e Assur T e m p l e , A s sur Ziggurat, O l d Palace, T e m p l e of Sin a n d S h a m a s h (the m o o n a n d sun g o d s ) , T e m p l e of Ishtar, T e m p l e of A n u a n d A d a d (the sky a n d w e a t h e r g o d ' s ) , N e w Palace, a n d a full circuit of fortification walls including gates, riverside q u a y s , a n d other features. T h e deepest levels r e a c h e d d u r i n g t h e 1903-1914 c a m p a i g n s were in a s o u n d i n g t h a t revealed t h e " p r e - S a r g o n i c " (before 2300 BCE) foundation of t h e Ishtar T e m p l e . However, traces of " p r e - A s s y r i a n " o c c u p a t i o n there, as well as in other p a r t s of t h e city, a r e very scarce. T h e origin of t h e settlement is still u n k n o w n . S o m e traces of h a n d m a d e (?) pottery found below t h e Assur T e m p l e m a y b e of Early Chalcolithic (c. 5500 BCE) date. H r o u d a ' s claim of an U b a i d sherd (c. 4000 BCE) in A§sur h a s to b e considered with caution as well. [See Ubaid.] Indications of an U r u k or Ninevite V horizon (c. 3500-3000 B C E ) — t h e lat ter p r e s e n t at a small tell in the m o d e r n city of Serqat—have never b e e n found i n excavations or on t h e surface at Assur. [See U r u k - W a r k a ; N i n e v e h . ] T h e earliest remains, excavated in level H of t h e Ishtar T e m p l e sounding, b e l o n g to t h e Early D y n a s t i c III p e r i o d (c. 2500 BCE) . M a t e r i a l from this period is also p r e s e n t below the Old Palace, dated t o the s e c o n d millenium BCE, T h e style of the few sculptural r e m a i n s f o u n d in these levels is c o m parable to artifacts from M a r i a n d Kish. [See M a r i ; Kish.] F o r t h e Akkadian p e r i o d (2334-2154 BCE) w h i c h followed, the city of Assur is k n o w n t o h a v e b e e n u n d e r t h e h e g e m o n y of t h e Akkadian E m p i r e . [See Akkade; Akkadians.] Only level G of t h e previously m e n t i o n e d Ishtar T e m p l e s e q u e n c e , with its sculptural finds, a n d , according t o Olof P e d e r s e n , t h e so-called archive 0 1 f o u n d below t h e schotterhofbau (a building w i t h a gravel courtyard) c a n b e dated to this period with a n y certainty. A n Akkadian date for t h e so-called Old Akkadian h o u s e below t h e later T e m p l e of Sin
a n d S h a m a s h is possible b u t n o t p r o v e n . T h e d a t i n g of t w o fragments b e l o n g i n g t o o n e s c u l p t u r e , o n e a m a l e t o r s o f o u n d n e x t t o t h e later T e m p l e of A n u a n d A d a d a n d t h e other a male h e a d f o u n d b y t h e Iraqis in 1982 in t h e area of the Assur T e m p l e , also r e m a i n s u n c e r t a i n . A l t h o u g h a n early s e c o n d - m i l l e n n i u m BCE date s h o u l d n o t b e e x c l u d e d , Evelyn Klengel B r a n d t dates this s c u l p t u r e t o t h e A k k a d i a n period, either to K i n g R i m u s h o r t o M a n i s h t u s h u . A c c o r d ing to Peter A . M i g l u s (1989) t h e schotterhofbau itself, w h i c h is p a r t of a large s t r u c t u r e u n d e r n e a t h t h e f o u n d a t i o n t r e n c h e s of t h e O l d Palace, should b e d a t e d t o t h e following U r III period. Levels F a n d early E of t h e I s h t a r T e m p l e s o u n d i n g m o s t p r o b a b l y d a t e t o t h e s a m e p e r i o d of t i m e . Z a r i q u m , a local ruler of A s s u r , p r o b a b l y r e p r e s e n t e d b y a fragment of a s c u l p t u r e , calls himself a servant of A m a r S u e n , o n e of the kings of t h e third d y n a s t y of U r . [See U r . ] In t h e latest p h a s e of Ishtar E , a sealing w a s f o u n d of a ser v a n t of t h e sakkanakku ( a n official of t h e state) I s i - D a g a n of M a r i , w h o , a c c o r d i n g to J e a n M a r i e D u r a n d , is a c o n t e m p o r a r y of I s h b i - E r r a (c. 2017-1985 BCE) of Isin, t h e f o u n d e r of t h e Isin I d y n a s t y . [See Isin.] I n t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, Assyria was officially declared a state, a n d t h e city of A s s u r w a s t r a n s f o r m e d into t h e religious a n d administrative center of the so-called O l d Assyrian E m p i r e . It w a s at t h a t time t h a t m e r c h a n t s from A s s u r organized a l o n g - d i s t a n c e t r a d e with Anatolia k n o w n as t h e karum t r a d e . Brick inscriptions of t h e third a n d fourth king of t h e local P u z u r - A s s u r d y n a s t y al ready m e n t i o n the A s s u r T e m p l e , E v e n t h e existence of for tification walls a n d A d a d a n d Ishtar t e m p l e s is n o t o u t of tire question for this early p e r i o d of Assyrian history. N e v e r t h e less, t h e first really n o t a b l e Assyrian king w a s S h a m s h i - A d a d I (1813-1781 BCE), a p r o m i n e n t rival of H a m m u r a b i of B a b ylon. [See Babylon.] After h e defeated t h e local king a n d u s u r p e d the t h r o n e , h e e x t e n d e d t h e territory of Assyria a n d created a formidable k i n g d o m . A m o n g o t h e r t h i n g s , this ruler is k n o w n for his i n t e n s e b u i l d i n g activities in a n d a r o u n d Assur. I m p o r t a n t buildings f o u n d e d b y S h a m s h i A d a d I are t h e Enlil Z i g g u r r a t w h i c h was later also identified with t h e g o d A s h u r a n d , a c c o r d i n g t o M i g l u s , t h e O l d P a l ace. T h e first entirely r e c o r d e d g r o u n d p l a n of t h e A s s u r T e m p l e , which w a s n o t m u c h altered b y later kings, w a s created by h i m . Also associated with his reign is a special kind of p a i n t e d p o t t e r y , t h e so-called K h a b u r W a r e f o u n d in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a as well as in n o r t h w e s t e r n I r a n . T h e e n d of S h a m s h i - A d a d ' s reign is m o r e o r less u n k n o w n . After t h e fall of t h e B a b y l o n i a n H a m m u r a b i d y n a s t y (c. 1595 BCE), w h i c h , in its later days, controlled m u c h of Assyria, t h e political v a c u u m was filled b y t h e M i t a n n i r u l ers, w h o controlled major p a r t s of Syria a n d n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . [See Mitanni.] N o t m u c h is k n o w n a b o u t t h e h i s tory a n d archaeology of A s s u r for this p e r i o d . Only t h e T e m p l e of Sin a n d S h a m a s h , w h i c h was e r e c t e d i n t h e reign of A s h u r n i r a r i I is notable. A c c o r d i n g t o t h e inscriptions,
ASSUR this local ruler of A s s u r w a s also e n g a g e d in building activ ities in t h e A s s u r T e m p l e area. It w a s only with E r i b a - A d a d I (1392-1366 BCE) a n d his successor A s h u r - U b a l l i t I (1365-1330 BCE) t h a t Assyria, still w i t h its capital at A s s u r , freed itself f r o m H u r r i - M i t a n n i a n d o m i n a t i o n . A n interesting archaeological find dating t o this p e r i o d is t h e so-called stelenreihe ( " r o w of s t e l a e " ) , a kind of Assyrian c a l e n d a r i u m . Starting with E r i b a - A d a d I a n d c o n t i n u i n g t o a wife of K i n g A s h u r b a n i p a l (668-667 BCE), e a c h stela m e n t i o n s a n Assyrian k i n g o r t h e n a m e of a state offi cial. A s o n e able ruler followed a n o t h e r , Assyria b e g a n t o r e a p p e a r as a major p o w e r at d i e b e g i n n i n g of t h e thirteentii c e n t u r y BCE; b y t h e e n d of t h a t c e n t u r y it w a s again o n e of t h e strongest p o w e r s in t h e N e a r East. T h e Assyrian kings associated with t h e e m e r g e n c e of t h e so-called M i d d l e A s syrian E m p i r e are A d a d - N i r a r i I (1307-1275 B C E ) , his s o n S h a l m a n e s e r I (1274-1245 B C E ) , a n d his g r a n d s o n T u k u l t i N i n u r t a I (1244-1208 BCE). All of t h e m c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e r e s t o r a t i o n a n d r e b u i l d i n g of ASsur. U n d e r d i e reign of A d a d - N i r a r i I, t h e O l d Palace w a s r e built a n d r e s t o r a t i o n w o r k w a s p e r f o r m e d at d i e T e m p l e of Sin a n d S h a m a s h . S h a l m a n e s e r I is k n o w n t o h a v e rebuilt t h e partiy b u r n t A s s u r T e m p l e , a n d T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a I ini tiated a c o m p l e t e l y n e w b u i l d i n g p r o g r a m . D u r i n g his reign a d e e p m o a t w a s d u g a r o u n d t h e fortification walls a n d its old p o s t e r n s , s o m e k i n d of t u n n e l , w e r e a b a n d o n e d . I n t h e n o r t h w e s t e r n angle of t h e O l d City h e erected a n artificial t e r r a c e ( s o m e 29,000 sq m ) w h i c h was u s e d as a f o u n d a t i o n platform for his N e w P a l a c e . U n f o r t u n a t e l y , b e c a u s e of later building activities, only traces of t h e s t o n e f o u n d a t i o n s r e m a i n e d of d i e s t r u c t u r e built o n t o p of it. H e also built a n e w T e m p l e of Ishtar, n o w called I s h t a r - A s h u r i t u ( " I s h t a r of tire city of A s s u r " ) . I n c o n t r a s t t o t h e earlier I s h t a r t e m ples, t h e a l i g n m e n t of t h e g r o u n d p l a n , w h i c h d a t e d b a c k to archaic times, w a s altered b y a p p r o x i m a t e l y 90 degrees, a n d a s e c o n d , smaller shrine of a g o d d e s s called D i n i t u w a s a d d e d t o t h e t e m p l e . E v e n t h o u g h t h e previously m e n t i o n e d b u i l d i n g activities at ASsur w e r e considerable, it is a s s u m e d t h a t early in his r e i g n T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a I built a n e w resi d e n c e , called K a r - T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a , o n t h e o p p o s i t e side of t h e T i g r i s , s o m e 3 k m (2 m i . ) n o r t h of Assur. [See K a r T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a . ] A m o n g t h e finds at A s s u r associated with t h e M i d d l e Assyrian p e r i o d a r e a n altar of T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a I with a relief in w h i c h h o m a g e is p a i d t o t h e s y m b o l of a g o d a n d s o m e cylinder seals c a r v e d i n a characteristic M i d dle Assyrian style. T h e p e r i o d following T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a F s violent d e a t h is, archaeologically speaking, a l m o s t terra incognita. A l t h o u g h A s s u r m o s t p r o b a b l y d i d n o t lose its i m p o r t a n c e , it is only w i t h A s h u r - r e s h - i s h i I ( 1 1 3 3 - 1 1 1 6 BCE) a n d his successors t h a t further b u i l d i n g activities a r e attested at Assur. It w a s A s h u r - r e s h - i s h i I w h o built a n e w Ishtar T e m p l e — b u t n e i t h e r o n t o p of t h e early s t r u c t u r e s f o u n d e d b y I l u s h u m a in t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, n o r o n T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a F s c o n
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struction. T h e T e m p l e of A n u a n d A d a d as well w a s m o s t p r o b a b l y f o u n d e d b y this Icing. A characteristic feature of this t e m p l e a r e t w o small ziggurats, towerlike c o n s t r u c t i o n s , attached t o t h e sanctuaries. A c c o r d i n g t o M i g h t s t h e e x t e n sive building activities e v i d e n c e d at t h e A s s u r Ziggurat should b e attributed t o t h e largely u n k n o w n kings A s h u r nasirpal I (1049-1031 BCE) a n d S h a l m a n e s e r II (1030-1019 BCE). I n a gate b e t w e e n t h e A n u - A d a d c o m p l e x a n d t h e O l d Palace, w h i c h w a s d e v o t e d t o t h e dispensation of justice, several unfortunately heavily d a m a g e d fragments of s c u l p t u r e s , p e r h a p s parts of w i n g e d a n d h u m a n - h e a d e d bulls o r lions g u a r d i n g a n e n t r a n c e , w e r e found. A p a r t from frag m e n t s like these, e v i d e n c e c o n c e r n i n g t h e facade o r n a m e n t a n d external a p p e a r a n c e of buildings a t t h a t t i m e is very scarce. Occasional clues a r e t o b e f o u n d only a m o n g c o n t e m p o r a r y seal designs. I n general, t h e a c c o u n t of buildings at A s s u r m u s t b e confined, at least for d i e O l d a n d M i d d l e Assyrian p e r i o d s , to variations in their g r o u n d plans. Early i n t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE at Assur, a n e w dynasty w a s f o u n d e d b y a king called A s h u r - R a b i II. I n a sense t h e f o u n d i n g of this d y n a s t y m a r k e d t h e b e g i n n i n g of a period at t h e e n d of w h i c h Assyria w a s at t h e apex of its p o w e r . F r o m a n archaeological viewpoint, h o w e v e r , it was only with A s h u r n a s i r p a l I I (883-859 BCE) a n d his successors t h a t t h e so-called L a t e Assyrian E m p i r e (c. 883-609 BCE) w a s b o r n . It w a s A s h u r n a s i r p a l II w h o transferred tire center of gov e r n m e n t from A s s u r t o K a l h u / N i m r u d , t h e Calah of t h e Book of Genesis. [See N i m r u d . ] I t w a s also this king o r o n e of his p r e d e c e s s o r s w h o rebuilt a n d c o n v e r t e d t h e O l d P a l ace, still in u s e at t h e time of Tiglath-Pileser I, into a m a u s o l e u m , in which s o m e of t h e elegant t o m b c h a m b e r s a n d m o n o l i t h i c sarcophagi of t h e Assyrian kings were f o u n d . Al t h o u g h A s s u r ceased t o b e t h e administrative capital, d i e s u b s e q u e n t kings d i d n o t cease tiieir b u i l d i n g activities in t h e city. S h a l m a n e s e r III (858-824 BCE), for e x a m p l e , strength e n e d t h e fortifications, rebuilt the T e m p l e of A n u a n d A d a d , a n d erected a n e w I s h t a r T e m p l e , n o w dedicated t o Belitn i p h a . I n c o n t r a s t to his p r e d e c e s s o r s , his plan of die latter w a s again in t h e tradition of t h e archaic sanctuaries. F r o m t h e archaeological objects associated with his reign a n d t h a t of his predecessors a n d successors, tire glazed a n d colorfully d e c o r a t e d tiles (Assyrian, zigatti) a n d clay orthostats, b o t h u s e d as s o m e kind of f a c a d e o r n a m e n t , a r e notable. W h i l e t h e administrative capital of t h e ever-growing A s syrian E m p i r e w a s transferred for a s e c o n d a n d third time from K a l h u / N i m r u d t o D u r S h a r r u k i n / K h o r s a b a d by Sar gon I I (721-705 BCE) a n d finally to N i n e v e h / K u y u n j i k b y S e n n a c h e r i b (704-681 BCE), n o t m u c h is k n o w n archaeolog ically a b o u t A s s u r itself in t h e eighth-early seventh centuries BCE. It w a s only w i t h S e n n a c h e r i b t h a t t h e so-called Neujahrsfesthaus, a cultic b u i l d i n g situated west of A s s u r out side t h e city walls, a n d t h e P r i n c e Palace, a structure d e d i cated t o his s o n i n t h e soutireast, were f o u n d e d . F u n d a m e n tal changes in t h e g r o u n d p l a n of t h e S i n - S h a m a s h a n d
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A s s u r temples are attributed to this king as well. O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , fragments of a large, heavily d a m a g e d water basin (?) recovered in the O l d Palace are t h e only n o t e w o r t h y a r chaeological finds associated with his reign at Assur. T h e A s s u r T e m p l e as well as t h e Assur-Enlil Ziggurat are k n o w n t o h a v e been subject to s o m e restoration w o r k b y his s u c cessors E s a r h a d d o n (680-669 BCE) a n d A s h u r b a n i p a l (668-627 B C E ) . D u r i n g t h e reign of Sin-shar-ishkun (623-612 BCE), the last of t h e L a t e Assyrian kings, t h e Ishtar T e m p l e b e c a m e p a r t of a n adjacent sanctuary dedicated to N a b u , the g o d of writing a n d writers, a n d his wife, T a s h m e t u . Finally, in 614 BCE, a M e d i a n a r m y invaded t h e A s syrian h o m e l a n d a n d destroyed the city of A s s u r completely. T r a c e s of a post-Assyrian occupation at Assur are scarce. I t is only with the b e g i n n i n g of t h e first century BCE t h a t A s s u r regained s o m e significance as a residence of a P a r t h i a n satrap. T h e P a r t h i a n n a m e of t h e city is still u n k n o w n , b u t , according t o t h e m o s t recent investigations b y Stefan H a u s e r (1994), it was n o t L i b a n a e , as hitiierto a s s u m e d . S o m e of the m a i n excavated buildings dating to this p e r i o d are the A s s u r - S h e r u a T e m p l e erected on t o p of t h e former A s s u r T e m p l e a n d t h e P a r t h i a n Palace in t h e south d e c o r a t e d with colored paintings o n plaster. After t h e destruction of' ' A s s u r " in t h e third century CE b y S h a p u r I (241-272 CE), the former Assyrian capital w a s neither rebuilt n o r resettled. [See also Assyrians; D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesellschaft; Z i g gurat; and the biographies of Andrae and Layard.} BIBLIOGRAPHY A n d r a e , Walter. Das wiedererstaridene Assur. 2 d ed., revised by Barthel H r o u d a . M u n i c h , 1 9 7 7 . Essential summary for anyone interested in the archaeology a n d history of ASsur; extensive bibliography. D i t t m a n n , Reinhard. "Ausgrabungen der Freien Universitat Berlin in Assur u n d Kar-TukultT-Ninurta in den Jahren 1 9 8 6 - 1 9 8 9 . " Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 122 (1990): 1 5 7 - 1 7 1 . Prelim inary report of work at the site. Dittmann, Reinhard. "Assur and Kar-TukultT-Ninurta." American Journal of Archaeology 96 (1992): 3 0 7 - 3 1 2 . Second preliminary re port on the new excavations carried o u t by the Free University of Berlin, 1986, 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 8 9 . Finkbeiner, Uwe, and Beate, Pongratz-Leisten. Examples of Near East ern Cities—Residences of the Assyrian Empire—Assur. M a p B IV, 2 1 , edited by Sonderforschungsbereich des Tilbinger Atlas des V o r deren Orients der Universitat T u b i n g e n . Wiesbaden, 1 9 9 2 . T h e most up-to-date m a p of A§sur, showing the historical development of the archaeological remains. Hauser, Stefan, "Chronologische u n d historisch-polttische u n t e r suchungen zu Srtlichen GerTsa in vorislamische zeit." P h . D . diss,, Freie Universitat Berlin, 1 9 9 4 . H r o u d a , Barthel. "Vorlitufiger Bericht fiber die neuen Ausgrabungen in Asgur Friihjahr 1 9 9 0 . " Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesell schaft 123 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 9 5 - 1 0 9 . Preliminary report on the new investiga tions u n d e r H r o u d a . Larsen, Mogens T . 77M Old Assyrian penhagen, 1 9 7 6 .
City-State
and Its Colonies. C o
Miglus, Peter A. " Z u r Grossen Ziqqurrat in Assur." Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 1 1 7 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 2 1 - 4 5 . N e w information on the Assur-Enlil ziggurat.
Miglus, Peter A. " U n t e r s u c h u n g e n z u m Alten Palast in A s s u r . " Mit teilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 1 2 1 (1989): 9 3 - 1 3 3 . Useful information about the pre-Assyrian history of Assur in the area of t h e Old Palace. Oates, David. Studies in the Ancient History of Northern Iraq. L o n d o n , 1968. Useful information a b o u t the history of Assur. Pedersen, Olof. Archives and Libraries in the City of Assur. 2 vols. Survey of the Material from the G e r m a n Excavations, vols. 1 - 2 . Uppsala, 1 9 8 5 - 1 9 8 6 . Overview and systematic s u m m a r y of the textual finds a n d their corresponding archives. Pedersen, Olof. " D i e A s s u r - T e x t e in ihren archaologischen Z u s a m m e n h a n g e n . " Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 121 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 5 3 - 1 6 7 . A t t e m p t to reconstruct the original setting of some of the textual finds. ROLAND W . LAMPRICHS
A S S Y R I A N S . Little is k n o w n a b o u t p o p u l a t i o n g r o u p s a n d settlement p a t t e r n s in Assyria before a b o u t 2000 BCE. By this date the p e o p l e w e r e speaking a dialect of A k k a d i a n a n d writing it in t h e c u n e i f o r m script. A p e o p l e called A m orites, w h o h a d b e e n s e m i n o m a d s living in d i e S y r o - A r a b i a n desert, m a d e major i n r o a d s into all of M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e y took over m a n y city-states, f o u n d e d n e w dynasties, a n d gradually i n t e r m a r r i e d w i t h t h e older p o p u l a t i o n a n d a d o p t e d its c u l t u r e . T h i s is certainly w h a t h a p p e n e d in A s syria; therefore, t h e " A s s y r i a n s " after a r o u n d 2000 w e r e a m i x t u r e of A m o r i t e s , w h o spoke a Semitic l a n g u a g e , a n d t h e older p o p u l a t i o n , w h i c h spoke A k k a d i a n , also a Semitic lan guage. A b o u t 1200 BCE d i e A r a m e a n s , a n o t h e r g r o u p of S e mitic-speaking s e m i n o m a d s from t h e S y r o - A r a b i a n desert, b e g a n to m a k e significant incursions into Assyria, a n d over the n e x t several centuries t h e y intermingled with t h e Assyr ians, t h u s m a k i n g t h e " A s s y r i a n s " a n even m o r e m i x e d p o p ulation g r o u p . T h e Assyrian p o p u l a t i o n was c o n c e n t r a t e d in a few cities in w h a t is n o w Iraq, mainly Assur, Arbela, N i n e v e h , a n d , after t h e m i d - n i n t h c e n t u r y , K a l h u ( N i m r u d ) . T h e r u r a l p o p u l a t i o n clustered in n u m e r o u s villages from w h i c h t h e y w o u l d v e n t u r e e a c h d a y t o till their fields a n d t e n d their flocks. As t h e e m p i r e was created, Assyrians w e r e settled in s o m e provincial regions w h e r e t h e y r e m a i n e d s o m e t i m e s for centuries. A r o u n d 1900 t h e city-state of A s s u r established s o m e Assyrian m e r c h a n t colonies in Anatolia t o facilitate t r a d e b e t w e e n t h e t w o regions. P o l i t i c a l H i s t o r y . T h e Assyrians n o t only d e v e l o p e d a powerful a n d profitable e m p i r e , b u t also s p o n s o r e d a n d p r o tected t h e activities of t h e religious a n d cultural c o m m u n i ties. It is b e c a u s e of t h e Assyrians t h a t so m u c h of t h e earlier S u m e r i a n a n d Babylonian civilizations h a v e b e e n r e covered by m o d e r n archaeology. T h e political history of t h e Assyrians is divided b y m o d e r n scholars into t h e O l d (c. 2000-1750), M i d d l e (c. 1750-1000), a n d N e o - A s s y r i a n (c. 1000-609) p e r i o d s . T h e r e w a s n o unified n a t i o n " A s syria" at the b e g i n n i n g of t h e O l d A s s y r i a n p e r i o d . T h e r e were just i n d e p e n d e n t city-states, w h i c h s h a r e d a c o m m o n
ASSYRIANS
culture, a n d n o m a d i c tribes in tire s u r r o u n d i n g hills a n d m o u n t a i n s , S h a m s h i - A d a d I (c. 1 8 1 3 - 1 7 8 1 ) , w h o s e a n c e s tors w e r e A m o r i t e s , led his forces slowly u p t h e T i g r i s River to c o n q u e r A s s u r a n d t h e n t h e s u r r o u n d i n g region as far as M a r i o n t h e m i d d l e E u p h r a t e s River. [See Mari.] H e w a s t h e first to establish s o m e political solidarity in t h e region. T h i s u n i t y collapsed, h o w e v e r , s h o r d y after his d e a t h , a n d for over t h r e e centuries (c. 1740-1400) little is k n o w n a b o u t t h e region a n d its p e o p l e . D u r i n g this " d a r k " a g e , a revolution i n warfare, t h e light h o r s e - d r a w n chariot, w a s i n t r o d u c e d into s o u t h w e s t e r n Asia b y I n d o - A r y a n warriors. T h e Assyr ians seized this n e w device a n d u s e d it in their b u i l d i n g of a militaristic state. [See C h a r i o t s . ] T h e p o w e r of t h e M i d d l e Assyrian m o n a r c h s , n o t a b l y
229
T u k u l t i - N i n u r t a I (1243-1207) a n d Tiglath-Pileser I ( 1 1 1 4 - 1 0 7 6 ) , w a s u n p r e c e d e n t e d . T h e y n o t only ruled over a u n i t e d Assyria, b u t t h e y also led their armies o n vigorous c a m p a i g n s a b r o a d , c o n q u e r i n g Babylonia to die s o u t h a n d Syria t o t h e w e s t as far as t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea. I n t h e process tire principles of a n absolute m o n a r c h y , ruling from Assur, w e r e established, a n d d i e idea of imperialism w a s given practical expression. After a p e r i o d of confusion a n d t e m p o r a r y eclipse of A s syrian m i g h t (c. 1000-900), t h e greatest p e r i o d of t h e A s syrian e m p i r e e m e r g e d . O u t s t a n d i n g a m o n g t h e warrior kings of d i e early p h a s e of this era were Ashurnasirpal I I (883-859) a n d S h a l m a n e s e r I I I (858-824). D u r i n g their reigns t h e Assyrian armies t h u n d e r e d o n c e again t o t h e west.
230
ASSYRIANS
reaching the M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d t h e n m o v i n g b o t h n o r t h a n d south along t h e L e v a n t i n e coast. T h e r e w a s , h o w e v e r , little interference in Babylonian affairs. T h e exotic items such as gold, silver, ivory, a n d cedar that they b r o u g h t b a c k from the western expeditions were used t o build a n d d e c o rate n e w palaces a n d temples. M a s s e s of foreign captives, mainly A r a m e a n s , were t r a n s p o r t e d t o Assyria to work o n these building projects or t o develop uncultivated land in o r d e r to feed t h e e x p a n d i n g p o p u l a t i o n of t h e Assyrian cit ies. After another brief interval of weakness, a series of kings r e s u m e d t h e military e x p a n s i o n of the empire. A t its height (c. 680) Assyria laid claim t o a n e m p i r e t h a t e m b r a c e d all of t h e Fertile Crescent, including Egypt, as well as central Anatolia a n d western Iran. B y this time t h e capital h a d b e e n m o v e d to N i n e v e h , w h e r e t h e last great m o n a r c h , A s h u r banipal (668-627), resided. I n 612 N i n e v e h fell t o t h e M e d e s a n d Babylonians, a n d over t h e next few years t h e territory t h a t h a d b e e n t h e Assyrian E m p i r e was taken over b y t h e Babylonians. Social Structure. Assyrian society was m a l e d o m i n a t e d and militaristic in character. Every male in t h e o r y w a s r e quired t o perform military service w h e n called u p o n b y t h e king. T h u s , the social s t r u c t u r e w a s essentially b a s e d o n a r m y rank—the king at t h e t o p a n d t h e p e a s a n t infantry at the b o t t o m . T h e role of w o m e n , w h o were confined t o h a r e m s a n d h a d t o b e veiled, was to care for t h e m e n i n their family, their children, a n d their h o m e s . T h e m e n e n g a g e d in a r d u o u s activity o n t h e battlefield, h u n t i n g g r o u n d , a n d fields a n d pastures. T o a m o d e r n W e s t e r n eye, Assyrian s o ciety a p p e a r s harsh a n d cruel. P u n i s h m e n t s for criminal acts were severe, c o m m o n l y requiring physical mutilation, tor t u r e , a n d execution. A t t h e b o t t o m of t h e social s p e c t r u m w e r e slaves, b u t they did n o t play as vital a role in Assyrian society as they d i d in t h e R o m a n E m p i r e . T h e r e were t w o l a n d s of slaves: (1) Assyrians w h o w e n t b a n k r u p t a n d so b e c a m e debt slaves, a n d (2) foreign prisoners of war. T h e latter h a d n o c h a n c e of freedom, e x c e p t escape or death, b u t t h e d e b t slaves could regain their i n d e p e n d e n c e by gradually p a y i n g off their debts. A b o v e t h e slaves were various levels of free citizens, from rank a n d file t o archers t o n o n c o m m i s s i o n e d a n d commissioned officers, charioteers, a n d cavalry. A b o v e these were t h e chief a r m y c o m m a n d e r s of which t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t was t h e field m a r s h a l , w h o was directly u n d e r t h e king. T h e chief officers c a m e from t h e noble families of t h e Assyrians. Political S t r u c t u r e . T h e king w a s a n absolute m o n a r c h being t h e s u p r e m e c o m m a n d e r of t h e a r m y , t h e chief priest in religion, a n d t h e highest source of appeal i n legal disputes. H e ruled by personal decree, t h e r e b e i n g n o legislative or consultative assembly. T h e only restraints o n his authority were ancient c u s t o m s a n d religious practices, w h i c h h e h a d to observe, a n d t h e attitude of t h e nobility. H e h a d t o keep
his nobles h a p p y b y p r o v i d i n g t h e m with h i g h offices a n d t h e benefits which c a m e therefrom. T h e Assyrian k i n g resided in a p a l a c e w h i c h w a s full of courtiers, m a n y of w h o m were e u n u c h s , of various rank. Only o n e courtier, h o w e v e r , seems t o h a v e h a d regular direct access t o t h e m o n a r c h . All m e s s a g e s , e v e n f r o m t h e royal family, h a d t o b e c o n v e y e d t h r o u g h t h e major d o m o . It a p pears t h a t m o s t Assyrians, i n c l u d i n g t h e king himself, w e r e illiterate. T h e r e w a s a large corps of scribes of w h i c h t h e chief was o n e of t h e king's m o s t i m p o r t a n t advisers. It w a s a hereditary m o n a r c h y , t h e legitimate s u c c e s s o r n o r m a l l y being t h e eldest s o n of t h e previous king. W a r f a r e . T h e Assyrians r e g a r d e d warfare as their m o s t i m p o r t a n t activity. I n r e t u r n for t h e military service w h i c h , in theory, every m a l e citizen h a d t o p e r f o r m , h e w a s given the u s e of a plot of land u n d e r a n a r r a n g e m e n t called t h e ilku. " C a p t a i n s " (rab kisri) lived in t h e v a r i o u s agricultural villages, a n d w h e n t h e call t o arms w a s s e n t out, it w a s their responsibility t o rally a n d p r o d u c e their c o m p a n i e s at t h e a p p o i n t e d place a n d time. By t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n p e r i o d , the a n n u a l military c a m p a i g n , led b y t h e king, h a d b e c o m e the n o r m a n d , later in t h e s a m e era, a s t a n d i n g a r m y , w h i c h served year r o u n d , w a s also established. O n t h e m a r c h , t h e a r m y w a s p r e c e d e d b y t h e divine s t a n dards ( " t h e colors") followed b y t h e diviners, t h e king s u r r o u n d e d by his b o d y g u a r d , t h e cavalry a n d chariots, t h e i n fantry, t h e siege m a c h i n e s a n d other e q u i p m e n t , a n d t h e c a m p followers. E n g i n e e r s were responsible for taking t h e a r m y across rivers a n d for organizing sieges. Rafts w e r e built to t r a n s p o r t e q u i p m e n t across t h e rivers, a n d individual sol diers stripped their clothes off a n d s w a m with t h e aid of inflated goat skins. T h e Assyrians w e r e e x p e r t s b o t h at open-field warfare a n d sieges. I n t h e field their cavalry m a d e the initial attack, followed b y t h e chariots, a n d t h e n t h e i n fantry. Siege warfare, w h i c h was costly a n d time c o n s u m i n g , was u s e d only as a last resort. If a region refused t o s u b m i t voluntarily a n d w o u l d n o t field a n a r m y t o fight, t h e Assyrian a r m y s u r r o u n d e d a strategic t o w n . All traffic i n a n d o u t of the city was c u t off a n d , if this m a n e u v e r d i d n o t b r i n g c a pitulation, t h e a r m y w o u l d a t t e m p t t o p e n e t r a t e t h e walls b y various t e c h n i q u e s : t u n n e l i n g , battering r a m s , o r building earthen r a m p s u p t h e wall. O n c e t h e t o w n w a s taken, it w a s thoroughly pillaged, a n d t h e inhabitants either w e r e taken p r i s o n e r or slaughtered in g r u e s o m e w a y s as a n e x a m p l e t o the other t o w n s in t h e region. Excellent organization a n d tactics, together w i t h m e t a l (first b r o n z e , later iron) w e a p ons, t h e b o w , a n d t h e light h o r s e - d r a w n chariot, m a d e t h e Assyrians t h e m o s t successful fighting p o w e r t h e w o r l d h a d seen. R e l i g i o n . State religion i n Assyria w a s cultic a n d p o l y theistic. T h e r e w e r e a n u m b e r of t e m p l e s , i n c l u d i n g t h a t of the g o d A s h u r (Assur) at t h e city of t h e s a m e n a m e , d e d i cated t o a variety of deities. E a c h t e m p l e h a d a c o r p s of priests a n d servants w h o carried o u t elaborate rituals a n d
ASSYRIANS regularly c a r e d for t h e g o d s b y p r o v i d i n g d i e m with f o o d a n d drink. T h e r e w e r e n u m e r o u s festivals, b u t t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t w a s for t h e n e w y e a r (akitu), w h i c h was celebrated in t h e spring. Festivals often involved p r o c e s s i o n s of t h e g o d s ' statues t h r o u g h t h e city streets. A m o n g t h e chief A s syrian g o d s w e r e A s h u r , N i n u r t a (god of w a r ) , Ishtar ( g o d dess of love), S h a m a s h ( s u n g o d a n d g o d of justice), Sin (moon god), and Adad (storm god). M a g i c , b o t h black ( b a d ) a n d white ( g o o d ) , was p r a c t i c e d , a n d a large b o d y of i n c a n t a t i o n s a n d rituals, o n a variety of t h e m e s , h a s b e e n d i s c o v e r e d o n clay tablets. T h e Assyrians, like t h e B a b y l o n i a n s , believed i n divination. A c c o r d i n g t o them, the gods were constantly sending messages regarding t h e future t o h u m a n beings t h r o u g h a n y n u m b e r of vehicles. It w a s t h e task of h u m a n s t o r e c o g n i z e a n d r e a d tiiese o m e n s . T h e t w o m o s t p o p u l a r vehicles for o m e n s w e r e t h e entrails of a sacrificed animal, particularly a s h e e p ' s liver, a n d t h e m o v e m e n t s of t h e stars a n d p l a n e t s . A n Assyrian Idng w o u l d n o t take a n y decisive action w i t h o u t c o n s u l t i n g his diviners. E c o n o m y . T h e e c o n o m y of t h e Assyrians was f o u n d e d o n agriculture, a n i m a l h u s b a n d r y , a n d foreign t r a d e . I n t h e rolling hills of t h e Assyrian h o m e l a n d w h e r e rainfall w a s r e g ular, d i e fertile fields lent t h e m s e l v e s t o a b u n d a n t yields a n d t h e p a s t u r i n g of s h e e p a n d g o a t s . T h e c r o p s w e r e primarily barley (for b r e a d a n d b e e r ) , linseed oil, a n d g r a p e s , w h i c h w e r e u s e d for b o t h fruit a n d w i n e . G o a t s w e r e a s o u r c e of milk, b u t t e r , a n d c h e e s e , a n d their w o o l , like t h a t of s h e e p , w a s u s e d for textiles, w h i c h w e r e major articles of e x p o r t . T h e Assyrians p a r t i c i p a t e d in a n extensive t r a d i n g n e t w o r k , w h i c h b r o u g h t t h e m m e t a l (silver, gold, tin, c o p p e r , a n d iron) p r e c i o u s s t o n e ( s u c h as lapis lazuli), ivory, a n d various o t h e r i t e m s , b o t h practical a n d l u x u r i o u s . T h e palace h a d c o n s i d e r a b l e control of t h e e c o n o m y , al t h o u g h it is impossible t o give exact d a t a b e c a u s e of scanty sources. T h e t e m p l e s h a d a m u c h smaller role to play in t h e economy, and by the Neo-Assyrian period they had b e c o m e d e p e n d e n t o n t h e king for m u c h of their i n c o m e t h r o u g h royal offerings a n d for t h e m a i n t e n a n c e a n d c o n s t r u c t i o n of their buildings. A l t h o u g h t h e p a l a c e a n d , to a m u c h lesser extent, d i e t e m p l e s w e r e directly involved with agriculture a n d a n i m a l h u s b a n d r y , it a p p e a r s t h a t foreign t r a d e w a s in t h e h a n d s of private e n t r e p r e n e u r s . N e v e r t h e l e s s , d i e palace g a i n e d profit f r o m the t r a d e b y m e a n s of taxation. As t h e e m p i r e w a s e x p a n d e d , a n o t h e r major s o u r c e of i n c o m e b e c a m e t h e a n n u a l t r i b u t e e x a c t e d from t h e p r o v i n c e s a n d t e r ritories. T h e tribute was of t w o types: ( i ) supplies for t h e military garrisons a n d a r m i e s o n c a m p a i g n in t h e f o r m of grain a n d a n i m a l s , a n d (2) l u x u r y i t e m s for t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n a n d e m b e l l i s h m e n t of m o n u m e n t a l buildings. A r t a n d A r c h i t e c t u r e . T h e artists of Assyria w e r e s p o n s o r e d primarily b y d i e state; therefore, m o s t of tiieir works related to t h e d e e d s of t h e king. T h e c a r v e d stone reliefs tiiat lined t h e walls of t h e palaces p o r t r a y e d t h e Assyrian m o n a r c h t r i u m p h a n t l y fighting, h u n t i n g , a n d feasting (see figure
231
1). T h e scenes were a c c o m p a n i e d b y inscriptions explaining tiiese activities. T h e quality of t h e h u m a n figures was high, e v e n if t h e subject m a t t e r w a s repetitious. It was in t h e d e piction of a n i m a l s , h o w e v e r , t h a t t h e Assyrian artists sur p a s s e d themselves. T h e reliefs w e r e p a i n t e d in various col ors, w h i c h h a v e n o w a l m o s t entirely d i s a p p e a r e d . Scenes similar t o those o n t h e reliefs were incised on a n u m b e r of b r o n z e b a n d s o n gates d i s c o v e r e d at B a l a w a t n e a r N i m r u d . T h e palaces w e r e also a d o r n e d with scenes set o u t with glazed ceramic bricks, clay k n o b s , a n d p a i n t e d m u r a l s . A rich h o r d e of finely c a r v e d ivories was excavated at N i m r u d , as w a s a large a m o u n t of jewelry of s u p e r b craftsmanship. N o t e m u s t also b e t a k e n of t h e mythological a n d l e g e n d a r y scenes carved o n t h e stone s t a m p a n d cylinder seals. T h e palaces w e r e c o n s t r u c t e d o n artificially created t e r races a n d consisted of m a n y r o o m s of various types. T h e central r o o m was t h e a u d i e n c e c h a m b e r ; colossal bulls a n d lions s c u l p t u r e d in s t o n e t o w e r e d over t h e palace e n t r a n c e s . T e m p l e s a n d t e m p l e t o w e r s (ziggurats) w e r e also built o n t e r r a c e s . [See Ziggurat.] S t o n e statues of the king, large a n d small, w e r e erected inside t o indicate his continual w o r s h i p of t h e g o d s . A r c h a e o l o g i c a l R e c o v e r y . First excavated in t h e early n i n e t e e n t h century, Assyrian sites in I r a q were a m o n g t h e initial places of investigation in t h e whole of the Fertile C r e s cent. E m i l e Botta, a F r e n c h m a n , c o n c e n t r a t e d o n K h o r s a b a d ( a n c i e n t D u r S h a r r u k i n , " F o r t S a r g o n " ) and A u s t e n H e n r y L a y a r d , a n E n g l i s h m a n , b e g a n w o r k at N i m r u d ( a n cient C a l a h ) . T h e discoveries, w h i c h i n c l u d e d colossal stone w i n g e d bulls a n d reliefs, w e r e a sensation w h e n they were t r a n s p o r t e d to L o n d o n a n d Paris. T h e y g e n e r a t e d increased s u p p o r t a n d also l u r e d o t h e r E u r o p e a n s into Assyrian ar chaeology. By m o d e r n s t a n d a r d s , t h e techniques e m p l o y e d in these early excavations w e r e primitive. T u n n e l i n g was c o m m o n b e c a u s e t h e goal w a s to find as m a n y interesting objects as possible. A m o r e scientific a p p r o a c h finally c a m e witii the G e r m a n e x p e d i t i o n to A s s u r a t t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e twentieth c e n tury. W a l t e r A n d r a e , leader of t h e t e a m , recognized t h e i m p o r t a n c e of m a k i n g a t o p o g r a p h i c a l m a p t h a t divided t h e m o u n d into small carefully labeled, squares. A n d r a e also paid attention to d i e different levels (strata) of t h e site. Avoiding t u n n e l i n g , h e d u g systematically, section b y sec tion. E v e r y object w a s assigned a n u m b e r a n d p h o t o g r a p h e d , a n d its p r o v e n a n c e w a s carefully recorded. A n other i n n o v a t i o n was t h e division of t h e finds. R a t h e r t h a n taking all of t h e objects to Berlin, a significant p o r t i o n w a s h a n d e d over b y a g r e e m e n t to t h e sultan in Istanbul b e c a u s e n o r t h e r n I r a q (the core of Assyria) w a s at this time p a r t of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Before A n d r a e h a d o p e n e d excavations at Assur, t h e site of N i n e v e h ( m o d e r n M o s u l ) h a d attracted die interest of successive British archaeologists, Expeditions from various n a t i o n s have c o n t i n u e d d u r i n g t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y to ex-
232
ASSYRIANS
ASSYRIANS.
Figure i.
Relief showing warriors carrying heads of enemies and throwing them on a heap.
Battle of T i l T u b a . A s h u r b a n i p a l a n d t h e A s s y r i a n s fight T e u m m a n , king of E l a m , o n t h e U l a i R i v e r in 635 BCE. British M u s e u m , L o n d o n . (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N Y )
plore other tells in Assyria. Gradually Iraqi archaeologists have a p p e a r e d on t h e scene, a n d in m o d e r n times they o u t n u m b e r foreigners in t h e field. T h e r e is n o longer a division of t h e finds from foreign expeditions; a strict b a n o n t h e e x p o r t of any antiquities h a s enriched Iraqi m u s e u m s , n o tably die Iraq M u s e u m in B a g h d a d a n d the M o s u l M u s e u m . A major change in t h e direction of archaeology in t h e N e a r E a s t was b r o u g h t a b o u t by m o d e r n irrigation projects, which involved die construction of d a m s a n d the flooding of plains which were full of ancient sites. T h i s d e v e l o p m e n t led to "rescue archaeology"; t h e organization of n u m e r o u s t e a m s of archaeologists f r o m various parts of the world to survey the area a n d excavate s o m e of t h e m o s t significant looldng tells. In Assyria, o n e s u c h project was in t h e Eski M o s u l region o n t h e u p p e r Tigris River just n o r t h of M o s u l . [See Eski M o s u l D a m Salvage Project.] In concluding this
description of archaeological recovery of Assyrian r e m a i n s , it m u s t be stated tiiat only a fraction of d i e a n c i e n t sites in this region h a s b e e n explored, a n d even t h e e x c a v a t e d tells h a v e n o t b e e n fully investigated.
Inscriptions. A major p r o d u c t of archaeological activity in Assyria h a s b e e n t h e discovery of a vast q u a n t i t y of in scriptions. T h e s e a r e in t h e c u n e i f o r m ( w e d g e - s h a p e d ) writ ing system, a n d t h e l a n g u a g e is A k k a d i a n . T h e Assyrians h a d their o w n dialect of A k k a d i a n , b u t t h e y often w r o t e in the Babylonian dialect b e c a u s e they w e r e very m u c h influ e n c e d b y Babylonian culture. C u n e i f o r m a n d t h e A k k a d i a n language w e r e d e c i p h e r e d a b o u t t h e s a m e t i m e t h a t intensive archaeological activity b e g a n , t h a t is a r o u n d 1850. T h e majority of inscriptions are o n clay tablets. H u n d r e d s of t h o u s a n d s have b e e n r e c o v e r e d , b u t t h e r e are m a n y texts inscribed on stone, metal, a n d other materials. T h e c o n t e n t s
ASYUT of t h e inscribed tablets vary considerably. O n t h e o n e h a n d t h e r e are libraries of tablets; m o s t n o t a b l e are t h e libraries of A s h u r b a n i p a l (668-627). I n t h e s e libraries a r e f o u n d m y t h s ( s u c h as t h e creation stories), l e g e n d s (such as t h e F l o o d s t o r y ) , epics (such as t h e G i l g a m e s h e p i c ) , h y m n s , p r a y e r s , magical i n c a n t a t i o n s , m e d i c a l t e x t s , divinatory texts, a s t r o logical texts, a n d m a t h e m a t i c a l texts. T h e r e are also a r chives: t h e d o c u m e n t s a c c u m u l a t e d b y t h e palace a n d m e r c h a n t h o u s e s in the course of daily business. T h e s e i n c l u d e letters, contracts, a n d administrative r e c o r d s . A l t h o u g h ef forts to edit a n d publish all t h e s e inscriptions, w h i c h are n o w in m u s e u m s , have i n c r e a s e d in r e c e n t years, a significant p o r t i o n of t h e m r e m a i n s u n p u b l i s h e d , a n d a n u n k n o w n q u a n t i t y are b u r i e d in a n c i e n t sites. By t h e late p e r i o d of Assyrian history, t h e s p o k e n l a n g u a g e h a d c h a n g e d from A k k a d i a n to A r a m a i c , w h i c h w a s written in a n alphabetic script o n p a r c h m e n t or p a p y r u s . B e c a u s e t h o s e t w o materials p e r i s h e d in t h e Assyrian climate, a l m o s t all A r a m a i c d o c u m e n t a t i o n h a s d i s a p p e a r e d . References t o it exist, h o w e v e r , in c u n e i f o r m inscriptions. [See also A k k a d i a n ; A k k a d i a n s ; A m o r i t e s ; A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d L i t e r a t u r e ; Assur; C u n e i f o r m ; N i m r u d ; N i n e v e h ; and
the biographies
of Andrae,
Botta,
and
Layard,]
BIBLIOGRAPHY A n d r a e , Walter. Das wiedererstandene Assur. 2 d ed. M u n i c h , 1 9 7 7 . A c c o u n t of t h e excavations at Assur a n d their results, written by t h e director of die expedition. Barnett, R i c h a r d D . , a n d M a r g a r e t e Falkner. The Sculptures of AUurndsir-apli II, 883-859 BC, Tiglath-pileser III, 745-729 BC, Esarhaddon, 681-669 BC,from the Central and South-West Palaces at Nimrud. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 2 . Excellent collection of p h o t o g r a p h s a n d c o m m e n t a r y o n Assyrian sculptures; see as well Barnett a n d Lorenzini (below). Barnett, Richard D . , a n d Amleto Lorenzini. Assyrian Sculpture in the British Museum. T o r o n t o , 1 9 7 5 . The Cambridge Ancient History. Vols. 1.2-3.2. 2d a n d 3d eds. C a m bridge, 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 9 1 . T h e relevant chapters in these volumes vary in quality b u t in general are quite authoritative a n d include extensive bibliographies. Collon, D o m i n i q u e . First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East. Chicago, 1988. C o m p r e h e n s i v e t r e a t m e n t of cylinder seals with fine illustrations a n d a s o u n d c o m m e n t a r y . Dalley, Stephanie, a n d J. N . Postgate. The Tablets from Fort Shalma neser. Cuneiform T e x t s from N i m r u d , 3. L o n d o n , 1984. T h e intro duction to diis book is one of die best treatments of administration a n d die army. See also Postgate (below). G r a y s o n , A. Kirk. Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. 2 vols. W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 6 . English translation of all royal inscriptions a n d related texts from t h e beginning of Assyrian history to 859 BCE. See also Luckenbill (below). L a r s e n , M o g e n s T . The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies. C o p e n h a g e n Studies in Assyriology, 4. C o p e n h a g e n , 1 9 7 6 . Authorita tive presentation of the Old Assyrian m e r c h a n t colonies in Anatolia. Luckenbill, Daniel D . Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. 2 vols. Chicago, 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 2 7 . Contains English translations of all Assyrian royal inscriptions k n o w n at t h e time of publication; dated but, except for the first v o l u m e (see G r a y s o n above), there is nothing else yet available. Mallowan, M . E. L . Nimrud
and Its Remains. Vols. 1 - 2 . L o n d o n , 1 9 6 6 .
233
Final report of the excavations a t Calah ( N i m r u d ) conducted by the audior in the 1950s a n d 1960s; extensively illustrated. T h e architec ture was o n e of Mallowan's chief interests. Oates, David. Studies in the Ancient. History of Northern Iraq. L o n d o n , 1968. T h e author excavated for m a n y years in northern Iraq a n d this volume reflects his great knowledge of the region, its ancient history, a n d m o d e r n archaeology there. Olmstead, Albert T . History of Assyria. Chicago a n d L o n d o n , 1 9 2 3 . Olmstead was the first to write a p r o p e r history of Assyria a n d al t h o u g h the book is quite d a t e d a n d p o n d e r o u s , it is still well worth reading. Postgate, J. N . Taxation and Conscription in the Assyrian Empire, Studia Pohl, Series Maior, 3. R o m e , 1 9 7 4 . T h o r o u g h a n d reliable discus sion. Paley, Samuel M . King of the World: Ashur-nasir-pal II of Assyria 883-859 B.C. Brooklyn, 1 9 7 6 . R e a d e , Julian. Assyrian Sculpture. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 9 8 3 . Russell, J o h n M . Sennacherib's Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. C h i cago, 1 9 9 1 . The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Periods. T o r o n t o , 1 9 8 7 - . Scholarly editions, including English translation, of all known A s syrian royal inscriptions. T h r e e volumes have appeared and others are in preparation. Saggs, H . W . F . The Might That Was Assyria. L o n d o n , 1984. C o m p r e hensive a n d up-to-date t r e a t m e n t of Assyrian history and civilization; good introduction for readers w h o know little or nothing of the s u b ject. Stale Archives of Assyria. Helsinki, 1 9 8 7 . Ongoing series of publications of Neo-Assyrian (nonroyal) inscriptions, in standard editions with English ttanslations. T h e introductions to the volumes are particu larly useful for the nonspecialist. A . KIRK GRAYSON
A S Y U T (also G k . , L y c o p o l i s ; 2 7 ° n ' N , 3 i ° i o ' E ) , c a p i t a l of t h e thirteenth U p p e r E g y p t i a n n o m e , or province. Al t h o u g h A n u b i s , Osiris, a n d eventually Hatiior h a d cults in the city or at its n e c r o p o l i s , its principle deity was W e p w a w e t ( " o p e n e r of t h e w a y s " ) , a jackal g o d , w h o held t h e title L o r d of Asyut. T h e G r e e k s t h o u g h t h i m a wolf, w h i c h explains t h e Hellenistic n a m e , Lycopolis. T h e n a t u r e of t h e local t o p o g r a p h y played a significant role in t h e i m p o r t a n c e of this site, w h e r e high cliffs d e m a r cating t h e L i b y a n desert's eastern edge converge with t h e Nile River. T h e s e features effectively forced valley u-affic t o p a s s directly in front of A s y u t , t h u s , allowing it to regulate river passage in either direction. A p p r o p r i a t e l y , the site's a n cient E g y p t i a n n a m e w a s S3wt(j),"sentinel" or " w a t c h m a n " ; the city's m o d e r n n a m e , Asyut, derives from tiiat word. T h e cliffs also p r o v i d e d an a v e n u e into t h e L i b y a n desert, so that caravans traveling s o u t h t o t h e oases a n d S u d a n started from A s y u t (in Islamic times, this r o u t e was t h e D a r b el-Arba'in). M o r e o v e r , B a h r Yusuf, t h e only n a t u r a l b r a n c h of t h e Nile River in E g y p t , diverged f r o m t h e m a i n channel in t h e n e i g h b o r h o o d of t h e city, flowing n o r t h t o w a r d t h e F a i y u m . L a t e O l d K i n g d o m (c. 2465-2150 BCE) references indicate t h a t A s y u t was b y t h e n a r e c o g n i z e d settlement, b u t it is d u r i n g t h e First I n t e r m e d i a t e p e r i o d (c. 2150-2040 BCE) t h a t A s y u t first played a major role in E g y p t i a n history. D u r i n g
234
C
ATLIT RAM
t h a t time, Asyut h o u s e d die thirteenth n o m e ' s local gover n o r s ( n o m a r c h s ) , w h o s e p e r s o n a l armies fought w i t h the Herakleopolitan rulers of t h e ninth a n d t e n t h dynasties in their wars against a T h e b a n dynasty (the eleventh). Asyut's location helped tiiese provincial leaders p r o t e c t H e r a k l e o polis from attack while they l a u n c h e d invasions south. M o s t of the information available on this period has been gleaned from biographical a n d funerary texts found on t o m b walls of the n o m a r c h s K h e t y I a n d II a n d Jtj-jb-j and on coffins from Asyut's necropolis.
d o m t h r o u g h the twelfth dynasty. H o g a r t h excavated m o r e t h a n 1 0 0 t o m b s , a d d i n g s o m e 7 0 0 objects t o t h e British M u s e u m ' s collection, b u t little is k n o w n a b o u t Schiaparelli's work. I n 1 9 2 2 , G e r a l d W a i n w r i g h t , while excavating in Djefa h e p i I l l ' s t o m b , f o u n d a c a c h e of stelae, d a t i n g f r o m t h e N e w K i n g d o m t h r o u g h R o m a n times (c. 1 5 5 0 B C E - 4 9 5 C E ) , d e motic p a p y r i , a n d m u m m i e s of canines. H e also discovered the twelfth dynasty grave of the " s t e w a r d , " H e n y .
I n the twelfth dynasty (c. 1 9 9 1 - 1 7 8 3 BCE), t h e size of the local governor's t o m b s a n d t h e information contained in their inscriptions indicate t h a t s u c h m e n as Djefahepi I, II, a n d III enjoyed a high rank. T h e i r status is confirmed b y the quality of execution of the statue of S e n n u w y , wife of D j e fahepi I (reign of Senusert I, c. 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 2 6 BCE). Only p o w erful officials could h a v e c o m m i s s i o n e d such funerary e q u i p m e n t . Regrettably, n o m o r e is k n o w n a b o u t Asyut's administrative role d u r i n g this period, except that it r e m a i n e d the provincial capital. I n Djefahepi I's t o m b , h o w ever, detailed legal contracts for the m a i n t e n a n c e of his p i ous foundation (personal cult) h a v e provided Egyptologists with insights into die complexity of p r o p e r t y o w n e r s h i p .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
P o s t - M i d d l e K i n g d o m archaeological remains indicate that t h e site was c o n t i n u o u s l y inhabited t h r o u g h o u t the r e m a i n d e r of the p h a r a o n i c a n d p o s t p h a r a o n i c p e r i o d s , b u t w i t h o u t its earlier distinction. D u r i n g the eighteenth a n d early nineteenth centuries, E u r o p e a n scholars t o u r i n g E g y p t b e g a n recognizing Asyut's historical i m p o r t a n c e . T h e t e a m a c c o m p a n y i n g N a p o l e o n ' s w e l l - d o c u m e n t e d visit in 1 7 9 9 were a m o n g die m o s t i m p o r t a n t of these visitors. L a t e r , ar chaeological a n d epigraphic w o r k at A s y u t w a s c o n d u c t e d exclusively in t h e provincial necropolis (smjt nt s^wt, or r j qrrt). B y the end of the n i n e t e e n t h century, Egyptologists such as G a s t o n M a s p e r o ( 1 8 8 0 ) , Adolf E r m a n ( 1 8 8 2 ) , a n d m o s t importantly, F . Llewellyn Griffith ( 1 8 8 6 - 1 8 8 8 ) r e c o r d e d the inscriptions on t h e walls of the necropolis's rockc u t t o m b s . In 1 8 9 3 , a local p e a s a n t discovered a n i m p o r t a n t t o m b , that of a First I n t e r m e d i a t e p e r i o d m a y o r , M e h e s t i . T w o well-known w o o d e n models from tiiis burial depict provincial armies (Cairo M u s e u m , C G 2 5 7 a n d 2 5 8 ) , o n e of w h i c h represents N u b i a n soldiers. Emile Chassinat a n d Charles P a l a n q u e c o n d u c t e d the ce metery's first major excavation in 1 9 0 3 . T h e y discovered twenty-six largely intact graves containing m o r e t h a n sixty coffins. Thirty-five of t h e s e w e r e inscribed a n d form a n i m p o r t a n t corpus of funerary inscriptions from the First I n t e r mediate period. T h e y also u n c o v e r e d the t o m b of t h e wealthy "chancellor," N a k h t i . T h e F r e n c h excavators w e r e followed b y E r n e s t Schiaparelli ( 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 1 3 ) , working for the M u s e o Egizio in T u r i n , a n d D . G. H o g a r t h ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 0 7 ) , w h o was acquiring objects for the British M u s e u m . B o t h t e a m s u n e a r t h e d n u m e r o u s burials containing objects dating from t h e L a t e Old K i n g
Beinlich, Horst. "Assiut." In Lexikon der Agyptologie, vol. I, cols. 489-495. Wiesbaden, 1973. Brief s u m m a r y (in G e r m a n ) of the site's significance. Chassinat, Emile, and Charles Palanque. Une campagne de fouilles dans la necropole d'Assiout, M e m o i r e s de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire, vol 24. Cairo, 1911. A n i m p o r t a n t source for the archaeology of the site, but not widely available. L e o s p o , Enrichetta. " G e b e l e i n and Asyut during t h e First Intermediate Period and die M i d d l e K i n g d o m . " In Egyptian Civilization, Religious Beliefs, edited by A n n a Maria D o n a d o n i Roveri, p p . 82-103. T u r i n , 1988. Uses objects in the M u s e o Egizio, T u r i n , to illustrate a dis cussion of ancient Egyptian religion. See pages 99-103 for a discus sion of Schiaparelli's excavations at Asyut. Daily Life (1988), another publication in this series, is also useful. L e o s p o , Enrichetta. "Assiut." In Beyond the Pyramids: Egyptian Re gional Art from the Museo Egizio, Turin, edited by G a y R o b i n s , p p . 34-38. Adanta, 1990. Brief s u m m a r y of the site's i m p o r t a n c e in a context in which the material from Asyut can be c o m p a r e d to objects from other sites of similar date. Porter, Bertha, a n d Rosalind M o s s . Topographical Bibliography of An cient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts: Reliefs and Paintings, vol. 4, Lower and Middle Egypt. Oxford, 1934. Classic source listing finds from M i d d l e and U p p e r Egyptian sites, including Asyut (see p p . 259-269). Spalinger, Anthony J. " A Redistributive Pattern at Assiut." Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 0 5 . 1 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 7 - 2 0 . Detailed discussion of the mortuary contracts of Djefahepi with diagrams illustrating the economic redistributive systems involved in maintaining Djefahepi's personal cult. D I A N A CRAIG PATCH
C
ATLIT RAM. A b r o n z e w a r s h i p r a m a n d sixteen w o o d e n b o w fragments w e r e all t h a t survived t h e w r e c k of an ancient warship off the coast of n o r t h e r n Israel at 'Atlit, 19 k m ( 1 2 mi.) s o u t h of Haifa. Yet, t h e s e s p a r e r e m a i n s h a v e m a d e i m p o r t a n t c o n t r i b u t i o n s to t h e subjects of naval w a r fare a n d logistics, metallurgy, shipbuilding, a n d art in antiq uity. D i s c o v e r e d only 2 0 0 m from t h e s h o r e , in t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea, the r a m w a s situated 3 m b e l o w t h e surface a n d was p r o t e c t e d b y an o v e r b u r d e n of sand. A t e a m of archaeologists from t h e University of Haifa excavated it in N o v e m b e r 1 9 8 0 a n d r e m o v e d it to the N a t i o n a l M a r i t i m e M u s e u m in Haifa for conservation a n d s t u d y . F u r t h e r e x a m i n a t i o n of t h e site did n o t p r o d u c e any additional material related t o the 'Atlit w a r s h i p . T h e r a m ' s external surface was in relatively g o o d c o n d i -
C
tion, its interior w a s c o m p l e t e l y filled w i t h w o o d a n d c o n cretion. O n l y o n e t i m b e r e x t e n d e d b e y o n d t h e confines of t h e r a m . C o b a l t - s o u r c e r a d i o g r a p h s w e r e u s e d to e x a m i n e t h e interior of t h e a s s e m b l y to d e t e r m i n e t h e m e t h o d s b y which the w o o d and concretion could be separated from the ram without damage. Its s u p e r b w o r k m a n s h i p a n d ingenious design m a k e t h e r a m a beautiful a n d functional w e a p o n , t h e largest a n d m o s t impressive r a m yet discovered, a n d t h e only o n e of its t y p e to b e associated w i t h t h e h u l l of a ship. T h e symbols o n its surfaces suggest t h a t it c a m e f r o m a Hellenistic w a r s h i p , p e r h a p s from a u n i t in o n e of t h e P t o l e m a i c C y p r i o t fleets of t h e late t h i r d or early s e c o n d centuries BCE ( C a s s o n a n d Steffy, 1990, p p . 51-66). L i t e r a r y a n d archaeological evi d e n c e reveal t h a t it b e l o n g e d t o a vessel at least o n e or t w o
ATLIT RAM
235
classes larger t h a n a t r i r e m e ( C a s s o n a n d Steffy, 1990, p p . 72-75)T h e r a m h a d an overall length of 2.26 m a n d a m a x i m u m h e i g h t of 0.96 m . It was cast i n 465 kg of h i g h - g r a d e b r o n z e . Its h e a d , o r striking surface, consists of t h r e e horizontal fins joined by a vertical post, t h e p o s t is 41.1 c m high while the fins h a d a m a x i m u m w i d t h of 44.2 c m a n d were only 2 c m thick at their o u t e r e n d s . T h e shape of t h e fins a n d p o s t c h a n g e s aft of t h e h e a d t o f o r m t h e driving center, a 76c e n t i m e t e r - w i d e t r o u g h t h a t h o u s e d t h e ship's m a i n r a m m i n g timbers, A b o v e t h e driving c e n t e r w a s t h e cowl, which c u r v e d gracefully u p w a r d a n d aftward from t h e h e a d to h o u s e the s t e m a n d other vertical b o w timbers. B e n e a t h t h e driving center, a n u n a d o r n e d b o t t o m plate p r o t e c t e d t h e lower sur-
236
ATOMIC ABSORPTION ANALYSIS
faces of the hull. T h e r a m was attached to all t h e major hull timbers by m e a n s of b r o n z e bolts. T h e r a m bears four different symbols. T h e first, a kerykeion, or "herald's staff," b o u n d with a fillet, is located on the n o s i n g of the cowl. It is t h e only o n e of t h e symbols that appears singly—the other three a p p e a r o n b o t h sides of t h e r a m . T h e fins of the head m e r g e to join a decorative h a n d l e on each side of the after end of the driving center's t r o u g h . T h e s e have b e e n identified as triform t h u n d e r b o l t s , symbols representative of t h e Ptolemaic dynasty. Directiy above the handle devices, on each side of t h e cowl, a w r e a t h e d h e l m e t is m o u n t e d by an eight-pointed star. A fourth symbol in t h e u p p e r , after corner of each cowl side has b e e n identified as the eagle of Z e u s . A variety of sophisticated processes were employed to a n alyze t h e surprisingly a d v a n c e d metallurgical expertise e m ployed in casting t h e r a m ( C a s s o n a n d Steffy, 1990, p p . 40-50). T h e b r o n z e alloy (90 p e r c e n t c o p p e r a n d 10 p e r c e n t tin) was ideal for this military application. Based o n r a d i o g r a p h analysis, t h e n a t u r e of various casting defects, a n d m e a s u r e m e n t s taken a t defect locations, the r a m is believed to have b e e n cast in a f o u n d r y consisting of thirty furnaces placed in a circle. W i t h melt t e m p e r a t u r e s calculated at u p to 1,350° C, these furnaces supplied t h e two-piece s a n d m o l d t h r o u g h an elaborate feeding a n d gating system. T h e timber fragments, w h o s e survival r e p r e s e n t e d only a small fraction of the w a r s h i p ' s b o w , w e r e all in their original orientation. T h e major timber, of a t y p e t h a t h a d n o t b e e n r e c o r d e d before t h e discovery of t h e 'Atlit wreck, was t h e centrally located, six-sided r a m m i n g timber; it survives for a length of m o r e t h a n 2.04 m . A keel a n d thick b o t t o m planks were fastened to its b o t t o m a n d sides, while vertical b o w timbers were m o u n t e d o n its u p p e r surface. F r a g m e n t s of side planking were still attached to t h e aftward raldng stem. A l t h o u g h only fragmentary, t h e preserved w o o d p r o v i d e d n e w information a b o u t t h e construction of classical warships a n d confirmed that, like m e r c h a n t vessels of t h e period, these ships h a d hulls m a d e of thick planks w h o s e edges were joined witii strong, closely s p a c e d m o r t i s e - a n d - t e n o n joints. [See also U n d e r w a t e r Archaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Basch, Lucien. Le mitsee imaginaire de la marine antique. 'Athens, 1987. T h e largest a n d best collection of illustrations of warship rams, along with extensive commentary and fresh ideas on the subject. Casson, Lionel. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. 2 d ed. Princeton, 1986. Definitive work on ancient ships and seafaring. Casson, Lionel, a n d J. Richard Steffy, eds. The Athlit Ram. College Station, Texas, 1990. T h e final project report on the 'Atlit wreck a n d the source for this entry. Casson, Lionel. The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times. 2 d ed. Princeton, 1 9 9 1 . T h e best popular history of seafaring in the ancient Mediterranean. Linder, Elisha, and Yehoshua R a m o n . " A Bronze R a m from t h e Sea of Athlit, Israel." Archaeology 34.6 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 6 2 - 6 4 . Illustrated a c c o u n t of the discovery and excavation of the ram.
Morrison, J. S., and R . T . Williams. Greek Oared Ships, 900-322 B.C. L o n d o n , 1968. Morrison, J. S., and J. F . Coates. The Athenian Trireme. C a m b r i d g e , 1986. History and reconstruction of an ancient Greek warship. M u r r a y , William M . , a n d Photios M . Petsas. Octavian's Campsite Me morial for the Action War. Transactions of the A m e r i c a n Philosoph ical Society, 7 9 . 4 . Philadelphia, 1989. Analysis of the r a m sockets at Octavian's memorial to the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE a n d c o m p a r isons with the shape of the 'Atlit r a m . J. RICHARD STEFFY
A T O M I C A B S O R P T I O N A N A L Y S I S . See N e u t r o n Activation Analysis.
A V D A T , or O b o d a , f o u n d e d as a N a b a t e a n t r a d e r o u t e site o n a m o u n t a i n ridge in t h e N e g e v desert, s o u t h w e s t of the D e a d Sea, a n d identified with m o d e r n - d a y ' A b d a h ( m a p reference 120 X 020). T h e site was n a m e d for O b o d a II (62/ 61-58 BCE), a N a b a t e a n ldng w h o , a c c o r d i n g to U r a n i u s (as cited b y S t e p h e n of B y z a n t i u m ) , w a s b u r i e d a n d v e n e r a t e d t h e r e as a god. His n a m e is retained in d i e Arabic ' A b d a h . T h e first settlement a p p e a r e d at t h e e n d of t h e fourth c e n tury BCE, w h e n c a r a v a n traders from b o t h P e t r a a n d Aila (Eilat) s t o p p e d at A v d a t o n their w a y to d i e M e d i t e r r a n e a n sea a t G a z a . By the e n d of t h e first c e n t u r y BCE, a n d into t h e mid-first century CE, A v d a t was a major religious, military, a n d commercial center, t h e site of magnificent N a b a t e a n temples. After the d e s t r u c t i o n of t h e s e t t l e m e n t b y fire, s o m e t i m e between 40 a n d 70 CE, agriculture r e p l a c e d t r a d e as t h e p r i m a r y s o u r c e of r e v e n u e a n d A v d a t b e c a m e a center of s h e e p , goat, a n d camel b r e e d i n g . P r o s p e r i t y r e t u r n e d u n der t h e R o m a n s , w h o , at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e fourth c e n t u r y , built a fortress t h e r e , m a k i n g the t o w n p a r t of t h e eastern empire's overall defense system. D u r i n g t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y . Christian churches r e p l a c e d t h e N a b a t e a n t e m p l e s a n d wine p r o d u c t i o n played a n i m p o r t a n t role in t h e local e c o n o m y . A v d a t was d e s t r o y e d in 636, d u r i n g t h e A r a b c o n q u e s t of Palestine, a n d was s u b s e q u e n t l y a b a n d o n e d . Various explorers e x a m i n e d t h e site in t h e late n i n e t e e n t h and early twentieth centuries, a m o n g t h e m E d w a r d H . P a l m e r in 1870 a n d Alois Mtisil in 1902 a n d 1904. T h e first c o m p r e h e n s i v e survey w a s c o n d u c t e d in 1904 b y A n t o n i n Jaussen, R a p h a e l Savignac, a n d L o u i s - H u g u e s V i n c e n t , w h o drew a detailed p l a n of t h e site. F u r t h e r e x p l o r a t i o n s were u n d e r t a k e n b y C. L e o n a r d Woolley a n d T . E . L a w r e n c e in 1912 a n d by T h e o d o r W i e g a n d in 1916. L a r g e - s c a l e exca vations were c o n d u c t e d b y M i c h a e l A v i - Y o n a h in 1958 o n behalf of t h e H e b r e w University of J e r u s a l e m a n d b y A v r a h a m N e g e v from 1959 to 1961 a n d again in 1989 a n d b y N e g e v a n d R u d o l p h C o h e n from 1975 to 1977, also o n b e half of t h e H e b r e w University as well as t h e Israel D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities. O c c u p a t i o n a l evidence s p a n n i n g t h e N a b a t e a n t h r o u g h
AVDAT
237
the Byzantine periods has been uncovered. T h e remains
N a b a t e a n acropolis. D w e l l i n g s with e n c l o s e d c o u r t y a r d s
f r o m t h e N a b a t e a n p e r i o d h a v e b e e n assigned t o t h r e e set-
w e r e f o u n d within t h e q u a r t e r , a n d a three-story observation
d e m e n t p h a s e s . T h e first, E a r l y N a b a t e a n (early f o u r d i c e n
t o w e r (9.6 X 9.6 m ) w a s u n c o v e r e d o n its s o u t h w e s t e r n
t u r y - e a r l y first c e n t u r y BCE), is c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y i m p o r t e d
e d g e . D a t e d to 294 CE, t h e t o w e r is t h e latest s t r u c t u r e at
p o t t e r y a n d m i n t e d coins b u t n o a r c h i t e c t u r e ; t h e i n h a b i t a n t s
A v d a t t o i n c o r p o r a t e every c o m p o n e n t of N a b a t e a n a r c h i
p r o b a b l y dwelled in t e n t s . T h i s p h a s e e n d e d with a b a n d o n
t e c t u r e . Also from this p e r i o d are a b u r i a l cave
m e n t , a p p a r e n d y in t h e w a k e of t h e H a s m o n e a n c o n q u e s t
" c a v e of t h e C h r i s t i a n " ) f o u n d o n t h e s o u t h w e s t e r n slope
of G a z a b y A l e x a n d e r J a n n a e u s . P u b l i c buildings w e r e p r o m i n e n t features of t h e s e c o n d
(en-Nusrah,
a n d a t w o - s t o r y k h a n , or rest h o u s e , situated n o r t h e a s t of t h e N a b a t e a n settlement. T h e ashlar s t r u c t u r e (22.5 X 31
p h a s e , d i e M i d d l e N a b a t e a n p e r i o d (50 BCE-50/70 CE). T h e
m ) h a d a large m i d d l e c o u r t (12 X 19 m ) as well as r o o m s ,
m o s t p r o m i n e n t w a s a t e m p l e c o m p l e x (11 X 13.70 m ) t h a t
halls, a n d a k i t c h e n ; it a p p a r e n d y r e m a i n e d in u s e until t h e
c o n s i s t e d of a p o r t i c o s u p p o r t e d b y f o u r c o l u m n s , a hall,
m i d - f o u r t h c e n t u r y CE.
a n d a n a d y t u m d i v i d e d b y a p a r t i t i o n wall. T h e p a n t h e o n of
T h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d at A v d a t seems t o
N a b a t e a n deities w a s w o r s h i p e d i n t h e larger area; O b o d a s ,
c o r r e s p o n d t o d i e d e v a s t a t i n g e a r t h q u a k e of 363, after w h i c h
in d i e smaller area. T h e t e m p l e w a s p l a s t e r e d as well as
t h e p r i m a r y s t r u c t u r e s o n t h e acropolis w e r e built. D i s m a n
p a i n t e d a n d , as i n d i c a t e d b y n u m e r o u s N a b a t e a n d e d i c a t o r y
tled s t o n e s from t h e N a b a t e a n military c a m p w e r e u s e d t o
i n s c r i p t i o n s , w a s in u s e f r o m t h e e n d of t h e first c e n t u r y BCE
c o n s t r u c t d i e B y z a n t i n e citadel o n t h e eastern section of t h e
t o t h e e n d of t h e t h i r d c e n t u r y CE. [See N a b a t e a n I n s c r i p
acropolis. T h e r e c t a n g u l a r fortress, c o m p r i s i n g a n area of
tions.]
a b o u t 0.5 acre, h a d thick o u t e r walls ( u p t o 2 m tiiick) t h a t
A t a later stage of t h e m i d d l e p e r i o d , t h e t e m p l e b e c a m e
e n c l o s e d a large c o u r t y a r d (61 X 41 m ) . T w e l v e towers of
p a r t of a large s a c r e d c o m p l e x b u i l t o n t h e acropolis. S u p
various sizes w e r e p o s i t i o n e d a l o n g t h e four walls (three t o w
p o r t e d b y retaining walls o n t h r e e sides ( n o r t h , west, s o u t h ) ,
ers o n e a c h wall); gates a n d e n t r a n c e s w e r e situated o n all
t h e acropolis could b e e n t e r e d t h r o u g h t h r e e p a s s a g e w a y s .
sides. ( S o m e e n t r a n c e w a y s h a d b e e n b l o c k e d , p e r h a p s t o
O n e w a s a r e c t a n g u l a r g a t e h o u s e (7 x 7 m ) at t h e e a s t e r n
defend against A r a b attacks in t h e m i d - s e v e n t h century.)
e d g e of t h e n o r t h e r n r e t a i n i n g wall. A n o t h e r , m a d e u p of a
T w o Byzantine churches (north and south) were con
small c o u r t (10 X 6 m ) , a n a r c h e d p a s s a g e w a y , a n d a stair
s t r u c t e d o n t h e w e s t e r n p o r t i o n of t h e acropolis. T h e n o r d i
case t o w e r (4 x 3 . 6 m ) , w a s b u i l t i n t h e s o u t h w e s t e r n c o r n e r
c h u r c h dates t o t h e Early B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d . S e p a r a t e d from
of t h e acropolis. D e d i c a t o r y i n s c r i p t i o n s d a t i n g t o t h e r e i g n
t h e fortress b y a large, u n p a v e d s q u a r e (51 X 40 m ) t h a t
of A r e t a s I V (9 BCE-40 CE) w e r e f o u n d a m o n g t h e r u i n s of
h a d b e l o n g e d t o t h e N a b a t e a n s a c r e d c o m p l e x , it is situated
this p a s s a g e w a y , w h i c h led t o t h e p o r t i c o of t h e t e m p l e .
just n o r t h e a s t of d i e N a b a t e a n t e m p l e . It contains a basilica
T h e r e m a i n s of a military c a m p (100 X 100 m ) located
with a single a p s e a n d a n a b u t t i n g r o o m t h a t a r e adjoined
n o r t h e a s t of t h e acropolis also b e l o n g t o tire m i d d l e p e r i o d .
o n t h e s o u t h b y a c h a p e l a n d several service r o o m s . [See
T h e m a i n r o a d leading in f r o m t h e gate divided t h e c a m p
Basilicas.] T w o projections ( b o t h enclosed b y chancels) jut
in half, a n d a n o t h e r wide r o a d d i v i d e d it into q u a r t e r s , e a c h
t e d o u t f r o m t h e a p s e like s h o u l d e r s . I n s i d e of e a c h were d i e
of w h i c h h a d b a r r a c k s . T h e r e p r o b a b l y w e r e c a m e l sheds i n
t r u n c a t e d legs of small altars that s u p p o r t e d containers filled
t h e streets in front of d i e b a r r a c k , a n d halls a n d r o o m s h a d
with religious relics. T o d i e w e s t of t h e c h u r c h , situated at
b e e n built a l o n g t h e inside of t h e e n c l o s u r e wall.
o n e c o r n e r of t h e N a b a t e a n p o r t i c o , w a s a n a r r o w baptistery
T h e e n d of t h e M i d d l e N a b a t e a n p h a s e c o r r e s p o n d s widt
t h a t h a d a c r o s s - s h a p e d m a r b l e f o n t (1.35 m p e r length) as
t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of A v d a t b y p r e - I s l a m i c A r a b i n v a d e r s in t h e
well as a smaller font for i n f a n t b a p t i s m s . [See Baptisteries.]
m i d - t o late first c e n t u r y CE. T h e L a t e N a b a t e a n p h a s e b e g a n
T h e s o u t h c h u r c h , c o n s t r u c t e d a c e n t u r y after t h e n o r t h
w i t h t h e reign of R a b e l II (70-106 CE) a n d c o n t i n u e s , f r o m
c h u r c h , w a s d e d i c a t e d as t h e M a r t y r i u m of Saint T h e o d o r e .
t h e s e c o n d t o t h e m i d - f o u r t h c e n t u r i e s , i n t o w h a t is h i s t o r
I n a d d i t i o n t o a basilica, this c h u r c h c o n t a i n e d a c o m p l e x of
ically t e r m e d L a t e R o m a n b u t c a n just as well b e classified
r o o m s identified as a m o n a s t e r y . [See M o n a s t e r i e s . ] C o l
as L a t e N a b a t e a n b e c a u s e t h e i n h a b i t a n t s r e m a i n e d c u l t u r
u m n s , capitals, a n d o t h e r architectural elements f r o m t h e
ally N a b a t e a n e v e n after 106 CE, w h e n A v d a t a n d t h e rest of
N a b a t e a n t e m p l e w e r e r e u s e d t o d e c o r a t e t h e atrium. P e r
the Negev were annexed b y t h e R o m a n s into the Provincia
m a n e n t reliquaries w e r e f o u n d inside d i e large niches that
A r a b i a . T h e initial L a t e N a b a t e a n s e t t l e m e n t c e n t e r e d a l o n g
h a d b e e n carved into t h e r e a r walls of t h e t w o r o o m s flanking
t h e valleys t o t h e s o u t h a n d w e s t of t h e t o w n , w h e r e t h e first
t h e single apse. I n t h e sixth c e n t u r y t h e s o u t h c h u r c h served
p r i v a t e dwellings w e r e l o c a t e d . D e d i c a t o r y inscriptions o n
as a b u r i a l g r o u n d .
p a i r s of l i m e s t o n e libation altars f o u n d i n t h e s e valleys d a t e
T h e B y z a n t i n e o c c u p a n t s of A v d a t lived i n h o u s e s a n d
to t h e reign of R a b e l LI a n d p r o b a b l y c o m m e m o r a t e tire b e
adjoining caves built into t h e site's w e s t e r n slope. Several
g i n n i n g of N a b a t e a n a g r i c u l t u r e .
h u n d r e d of t h e s e h o u s e - c a v e u n i t s h a v e b e e n f o u n d . A cross
T h e subsequent Late N a b a t e a n remains are concentrated
c a r v e d into t h e ceiling of o n e cave suggests that t h e r o o m
in t h e R o m a n q u a r t e r s i t u a t e d t o d i e s o u t h e a s t of t h e M i d d l e
served as a h o u s e chapel. O t h e r Byzantine r e m a i n s i n c l u d e
238
AVIGAD, NAHMAN
five wine presses a n d associated s t o r e r o o m s , a large f a r m h o u s e (15 X 35 m ) east of the R o m a n quarter, a n d a R o m a n b a t h h o u s e located at the b o t t o m of the slope. [See Baths.] T h e b a d i h o u s e , which contained a cold b a t h , a t e p i d b a t h , a n d two h o t r o o m s , w a s h e a t e d b y flues leading t o outside furnaces. Preserved with its roof, t h e structure is o n e of the b e s t examples of a R o m a n b a t h h o u s e yet u n c o v e r e d in t h e region. [See also C h u r c h e s ; N a b a t e a n s ; Petra, and the biographies of Avi-Yonah, Lawrence, Palmer, Vincent, and Woolley] BIBLIOGRAPHY Negev, Avraham. " N a b a t e a n Capitals in the T o w n s of the N e g e v . " Israel Exploration Journal 24 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 1 5 3 - 1 5 9 . Negev, Avraham. The Nabatean Potter's Workshop at Oboda. B o n n , 1974Negev, Avraham. " T h e Early Beginnings of the N a b a t e a n R e a l m . " Pal estine Exploration Quarterly 108 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 1 2 5 - 1 3 3 . Negev, Avraham, ed. " D i e N a b a t a e r . " Antike Well 7, S o n d e r n u m m e r ( 1 9 7 6 ) . T h e m a t i c issue. Negev, Avraham. " T h e N a b a t e a n s and the Provincia Arabia." InAufstieg und Niedergang der mmischen Welt, vol. II.8, edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, p p . 520-686. Berlin, 1 9 7 7 . Negev, Avraham. " H o u s i n g and City-planning in the Ancient Negev a n d the Provincia Arabia." In Housing in Arid Lands: Design and Planning, edited by G i d e o n Golany, p p . 3 - 3 2 . L o n d o n , 1980. Negev, Avraham. The Greek Inscriptions from the Negev. Jerusalem, 1981. See pages 1 1 - 4 5 . Negev, Avraham. " C h r i s t e n u n d Christentum in der W u s t e N e g e v . " Antike Welt 13 (1982): 2 - 3 3 . Negev, Avraham. Tempel, Kirchen und Zistemen. Stuttgart, 1 9 8 3 . Negev, Avraham. The Late Hellenistic and Early Roman Pottery of Na batean Oboda: Pinal Report. Q e d e m , vol. 22. Jerusalem, 1986. Negev, Avraham. Nabatean Archaeology Today. N e w York, 1986. Negev, Avraham. " O b o d a s the G o d . " Israel Exploration Journal 36 (1986): 5 6 - 6 0 . Negev, Avraham. " T h e Cathedral of Elusa a n d the N e w Typology and Chronology of the Byzantine Churches in the N e g e v . " Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml'LiberAnnuus 39 (1989): 1 2 9 - 1 4 2 . Negev, Avraham. " T h e T e m p l e of Obodas: Excavations at O b o d a in July 1 9 8 9 . " Israel Exploration Journal 41 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 62-80. W e n n i n g , Robert. Die Nabataer: Denkmaler und Geschichte. Gottingen, 1987. Contains a full bibliography (pp. 1 5 9 - 1 7 2 ) . AVRAHAM NEGEV
of Jerusalem, p u b l i s h e d in 1954 as a b o o k , Massebot Qedumot be-Nahal Qidron. T h i s work m a r k e d t h e b e g i n n i n g of his lifelong association w i t h t h e archaeology of J e r u s a l e m . H i s chief m e n t o r in field archaeology w a s Eleazar L . Sukenik, w i t h w h o m h e w o r k e d a t the s y n a g o g u e sites of B e t h A l p h a (1929) a n d H a m m a t h - G a d e r (1932). H e also w o r k e d witii Benjamin M a z a r at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m , a s s u m i n g t h e director ship of t h e elaborate c a t a c o m b excavations there in 1953. H i s work a p p e a r e d as t h e third v o l u m e in t h a t series, Beth She'arim III: The Catacombs 12-23, in 1971. Avigad joined t h e faculty of t h e Institute of A r c h a e o l o g y at H e b r e w University in 1949, later b e c o m i n g a full p r o f e s sor. H e specialized in e p i g r a p h y a n d p a l e o g r a p h y , focusing o n H e b r e w a n d A r a m a i c scripts. H e also p u b l i s h e d a key text of t h e D e a d Sea Scroll c o r p u s , The Genesis Apoayphon 0 9 5 6 ) , jointiy with Yigael Y a d i n . A v i g a d w a s die leading scholar for w o r k o n ancient seals, bullae, a n d jar s t a m p s . H e was p e r h a p s best k n o w n for his excavations in d i e Jewish Q u a r t e r of d i e O l d City of J e r u s a l e m , w h e r e h e w o r k e d almost y e a r - r o u n d from 1969 t o 1983. D u r i n g t h a t t i m e , h e b e c a m e emeritus professor in (1974). H i s s e m i p o p u l a r r e p o r t of his w o r k in t h e Jewish Q u a r t e r , Discovering Jerusalem (Nashville, 1983), was widely acclaimed. H e d i d n o t live t o c o m p l e t e his final r e p o r t , w h i c h will be written by a senior m e m b e r of his staff. T h e areas h e excavated n o w h o u s e t h e p o p u l a r m u s e u m s of T h e B u r n t H o u s e , T h e H e r odian Quarter, a n d H e z e k i a h ' s Wall. Avigad received n u m e r o u s prizes for his scholarship, i n cluding t h e Israel Prize (1977). H e w a s especially h o n o r e d w h e n h e was n a m e d " Y a q q i r Y e r u s h a l a y i m , " " B e l o v e d O n e of J e r u s a l e m " (1984), in recognition of his u n i q u e c o n t r i b u t i o n s to t h e city. H i s scholarship in all p e r i o d s of antiquity, a n d his familiarity with ancient N e a r E a s t e r n a n d biblical, classical, a n d r a b b i n i c texts set h i m apart. It w a s Avigad's c o n c e r n witii their intersection t h a t m a d e his w o r k i m p o r t a n t and enduring. [See also Beth Alpha; B e t h - S h e ' a r i m ; D e a d Sea Scrolls; H a m m a t h - G a d e r ; Jerusalem; and the biographies of Mazar, Sukenik, and Yadin.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
A V I G A D , N A H M A N (1905-1992), Israeli archaeolo gist, epigraphist, a n d paleographer. B o r n in Z a w a l o w in G a licia, formerly Austria, t o d a y d i e U k r a i n e , Avigad studied architecture in B r n o , Czechoslovakia, a n d t h e n i m m i g r a t e d to Palestine in 1925. As a m e m b e r of a Zionist youtii g r o u p in Palestine h e b e c a m e e n a m o r e d of archaeology as h e hiked a n d c a m p e d a r o u n d the c o u n t r y exploring d i e land a n d t h e physical remains of its long history. T h i s field of study, k n o w n as yedi'at ha'aretz, " k n o w i n g t h e l a n d , " was t h e core of the absorption process for all n e w c o m e r s to Palestine. Avigad entered t h e H e b r e w University of Jerusalem in 1929 and received his m a s t e r ' s degree in 1949. T h e subject of his P h . D . dissertation in 1952 was t h e ancient necropolis
M e y e r s , Eric M . " N a h m a n Avigad, 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 9 2 , " Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 58 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 - 5 . "Professor N a h m a n Avigad, 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 9 2 : In M e m o r i a m . " Israel Explo ration Journal 42 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 - 3 . ERIC M . MEYERS
A V I - Y O N A H , M I C H A E L (1904-1974), a r c h a e o l o gist a n d art historian b e s t k n o w n for his synthetic studies establishing t h e f o u n d a t i o n s of classical a n d B y z a n t i n e a r chaeology in t h e land of Israel. B o r n i n L e m b e r g ( m o d e r n L v o v in western U k r a i n e ) , A v i - Y o n a h i m m i g r a t e d to P a l estine as a child. H e b e g a n his h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n at t h e U n i -
AXUM versity of L o n d o n (1925-1928) in Classical archaeology a n d history; m u c h later, after h e h a d already established his c a reer, h e e a r n e d a n M . A . (1943) a n d a P h . D . (1953) from t h e s a m e institution. B e t w e e n 1931 a n d 1948 h e served as t h e k e e p e r of r e c o r d s i n t h e Palestine D e p a r t m e n t of A n t i q uities, a position h e c o n t i n u e d i n for t h e newly f o u n d e d I s rael D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities (1948) until in 1953, h e joined t h e H e b r e w University of J e r u s a l e m as a lecturer i n archaeology a n d art history. As a n archaeologist, A v i - Y o n a h d i r e c t e d several smallscale excavations: tire s y n a g o g u e a t 'Isfiya (1931); t o m b s in N a h a r i y a (1941); t h e t h e r m a e at B e t h - Y e r a h (1945-1946), t h e R o m a n site at G i v ' a t - R a m , J e r u s a l e m (1949); a n d t h e s y n a g o g u e at C a e s a r e a (1956,1962). H e also participated i n t h e first survey of M a s a d a (1955). A v i - Y o n a h ' s b o o k s o n t h e history a n d historical g e o g r a p h y of Palestine are significant c o n t r i b u t i o n s t o t h e field. I n addition, h e w a s t h e editor of two of t h e leading journals of professional archaeology: f r o m 1932 t o 1950 h e edited t h e Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine (QDAF), publishing all fourteen of its issues; a n d h e edited t h e Israel Exploration Journal (IEJ) for m o r e t h a n t w e n t y years. A s t h e a u t h o r of a n u m b e r of i n t r o d u c t o r y b o o k s , dictionaries, a n d atiases, A v i - Y o n a h was a n o u t s t a n d i n g a n d responsible p o p u l a r i z e r of t h e field of archaeology. H e is also well k n o w n for his w o r k o n t h e scale m o d e l of J e r u s a l e m of t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e p e r i o d o n d i e g r o u n d s of t h e H o l y L a n d H o t e l in Jerusalem. T h e m o d e l is a g r a p h i c s t a t e m e n t of A v i Y o n a h ' s lifelong research o n t h e t o p o g r a p h y of Jerusalem in die Second T e m p l e , t h e R o m a n , a n d the Byzantine periods. [See also B e t h - Y e r a h ; C a e s a r e a ; and Jerusalem.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael. " C o n c i s e Bibliography of Excavations in Pales tine." Quarterly 86-94,
of the Department
of Antiquities
of Palestine 1 ( 1 9 3 2 ) :
I39-I49>I63-I99-
Avi-Yonah, Michael. " M o s a i c P a v e m e n t s in Palestine." Quarterly of the Department
of Antiquities
of Palestine
2 (1932): 1 3 6 - 1 8 1 ; 3 (1933):
2 6 - 4 7 , 4 9 - 7 3 ; 4 ( 1 9 3 5 ) : I87-I93Avi-Yonah, Michael. " M a p of R o m a n Palestine." Quarterly of the De partment of Antiquities of Palestine 5 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 3 9 - 1 9 3 . Revised as a book 0erusalem, 1940). Avi-Yonah, Michael. Abbreviations in Greek Inscriptions (the Near East, zoo BC-AD nooj. Quarterly of t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of Palestine, S u p p l e m e n t to vol. 9. Jerusalem, 1940. Avi-Yonah, Michael. "Oriental Elements in the A r t of Palestine in the R o m a n a n d Byzantine P e r i o d s . " Quarterly of the Department of An tiquities of Palestine 1 0 ( 1 9 4 2 ) : 1 0 5 - 1 5 1 ; 13 ( 1 9 4 8 ) : 1 2 8 - 1 6 5 ; 1 4 ( 1 9 5 0 ) : 49-80. Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Holy Ijand from the Persian to the Arab Con quests, 536 B.C.-A.D, 640: A Historical Geography. G r a n d Rapids, M i c h . , 1966. Avi-Yonah, Michael. Gazetteer of Roman Palestine. Q e d e m , vol. 5. Je rusalem, 1 9 7 6 . Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Jews of Palestine: A Political History from the Bar Kokhba War to the Arab Conquest. Oxford, 1 9 7 6 . "Bibliography of M . A v i - Y o n a h " (in H e b r e w ) . Bulletin of the Israel Ex ploration Society 18 ( 1 9 5 4 ) ; 1 1 3 - 1 2 0 .
Salzmann, Milka C . "Bibliography of M . Avi-Yonah." Israel tion Journal 24 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 2 8 7 - 3 1 5 ; 34 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 1 8 4 - 1 8 6 .
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RONNY REICH
A X U M , ancient capital a n d i m p o r t a n t t r a d i n g center in E t h i o p i a ( 1 4 ° 1 0 ' N , 3 8 ° 4 5 ' E ) . L o c a t e d i n t h e highland p l a t e a u of n o r t h e r n Etiriopia, A x u m w a s a large u r b a n center a n d t h e e p o n y m o u s capital of a political state t h a t flourished f r o m t h e first t h r o u g h the seventh o r eighth c e n t u r y CE. D u r i n g t h e p e r i o d of its greatest e x p a n s i o n , it controlled t h e h i g h l a n d plateau a n d coast of n o r t h e r n E t h i o p i a , s o u t h e r n Y e m e n , a n d p a r t of t h e e a s t e r n S u d a n . A x u m w a s t h e s o u t h e r n m o s t o u t p o s t of t h e hellenized N e a r East. Its e c o n o m i c s t r e n g d i d e p e n d e d u p o n its role in t h e international t r a d e t h a t p a s s e d t h r o u g h d i e R e d Sea. T h i s t r a d e w a s d i m i n i s h e d b y Persia's c o n q u e s t of S o u t h Arabia in t h e late sixth c e n t u r y ; its decline c o n t i n u e d with s u b s e q u e n t Islamic d o m i n a t i o n of t h e area. B y d i e e n d of t h e seventh c e n t u r y t h e A x u m i t e state h a d lost its i n t e r n a tional e c o n o m i c standing. Internally, deforestation a n d soil d e g r a d a t i o n a r o u n d die u r b a n center took their toll; b e t w e e n t h e eighth a n d t e n t h centuries A x u m h a d ceased t o b e t h e capital of t h e Christian k i n g d o m of h i g h l a n d Ethiopia. Archaeological investigations h a v e revealed t h e outlines of A x u m ' s relative chronology, b u t its absolute chronology r e m a i n s m o r e p r o b l e m a t i c . K i n g E z a n a converted t o C h r i s tianity a b o u t 333 a n d still r e i g n e d a r o u n d t h e year 356. K a l e b r e i g n e d in 520 b u t h a d given u p t h e t h r o n e before 543 w h e n t h e B y z a n t i n e a u t h o r P r o c o p i u s in his History of the Wars (1.20.8) referred t o K a l e b ' s successor. A m e r c h a n t ' s h a n d b o o k k n o w n as t h e Periplus of the Erythraean [Red] Sea, writ t e n in 40-70 CE, describes t h e R e d Sea p o r t of Adulis a n d n a m e s A x u m as t h e m e t r o p o l i s . T h e clearest indicator of A x u m ' s position in the e c o n o m y of t h e graecized N e a r E a s t is its issue of gold coinage, b e g i n n i n g a b o u t 270 witii t h e coins of K i n g E n d u b i s . Silver a n d b r o n z e coins were i s s u e d for local use, a n d t h e gold coin issues were tied t o t h e R o m a n s t a n d a r d . All coin issues, r e flecting t h e design of R o m a n coinage, s h o w a b u s t o r halflength p o r t r a i t of t h e ruler i n profile, framed by stalks of barley or w h e a t (cereals b e i n g t h e basis of A x u m i t e agricul t u r e ) . C o i n s issued prior t o t h e conversion of E z a n a s h o w a disc a n d crescent, a n d t h o s e issued after show t h e cross. M o s t coins are inscribed i n G r e e k , b u t issues of t h e s e c o n d half of t h e sixth a n d seventh centuries m a y b e inscribed i n G e ' e z , a n E t h i o p i a n Semitic l a n g u a g e of t h e Afro-Asiatic linguistic family. M o n u m e n t a l lapidary inscriptions offer royal p r o p a g a n d a in G r e e k language a n d script a n d in G e ' e z , written either in E p i g r a p h i c S o u t h A r a b i a n o r G e ' e z script. A l t h o u g h G e ' e z letter f o r m s are related t o t h o s e of t h e S o u t h Arabian scripts, a system of vocalization was invented, w h e r e b y vowel m a r k ers are joined t o c o n s o n a n t letter forms. T h e first fully v o -
240
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calized G e ' e z a p p e a r s in a royal inscription of K i n g E z a n a . Royal victories were also c o m m e m o r a t e d b y votive stone t h r o n e s . R e m a i n s of square t h r o n e bases, slotted o n three sides, are visible at A x u m . T h e stability of t h e centralized state (at least until t h e e n d of t h e sixth century) is reflected by the lack of defensive walls at A x u m a n d other A x u m i t e u r b a n centers. Little is k n o w n of A x u m i t e religion prior to E z a n a ' s c o n version. His trilingual inscription m e n t i o n s the deities A s h tar (Ishtar), Beher, a n d M e d e r , u n d e r w h o s e p r o t e c t i o n h e placed himself; it n a m e s h i m as t h e son of M a h r e m , i d e n tified in the G r e e k A x u m i t e inscriptions as Ares, g o d of war. Excavations at A x u m have revealed r e m a i n s of several large elite m a n s i o n s ; foundations of the largest (in t h e D u n g u r area) m e a s u r e 57 X 56.5 m (187 X 185 f t ) . T h e s e m a n sions, dating from t h e late third to t h e late sixth century, incorporated distinctive features of A x u m i t e architecture. T h e i r central pavilions w e r e built u p o n s t e p p e d p o d i a (plat forms) with m o n u m e n t a l e n t t a n c e stairs. Walls were c o n structed of stones laid in m u d m o r t a r , a n d corners of walls a n d podia were reinforced with dressed stone blocks. Walls a n d stepped p o d i a were built with projecting a n d r e - e n t r a n t sections, a design element that i m p a r t s greater strength. D r e s s e d m a s o n r y was u s e d for d o o r w a y s , stairways, pillars, d o o r jambs, a n d lintels. W o o d e n b e a m s , r o u n d a n d s q u a r e in cross-section, w e r e u s e d as roof s u p p o r t s . T h e s e characteristic features of A x u m i t e a r c h i t e c t u r e —
AXUM. F i g u r e 1. Stelae at Axum.
projecting w o o d e n roof s u p p o r t s (so-called m o n k e y h e a d s ) , framed w i n d o w s a n d d o o r w a y s , a n d r e c e s s e d f a c a d e s — o r n a m e n t t h e faces of six giant stelae at A x u m ' s central n e cropolis. T h e s e m o n u m e n t s are d a t a b l e to t h e f o u r t h c e n tury. T h e great o r n a m e n t e d stela t h a t still s t a n d s is 21 m (68 ft.) high (see figure 1). C o n t r a r y to legend, t h e giant stelae fell b e c a u s e of their i n a d e q u a t e f o u n d a t i o n s . T h e i r s u g g e s tion of multiple stories (ten or m o r e ) is t h e sole fantastic element of an otherwise a u t h e n t i c facsimile of a m o n u m e n tal A x u m i t e facade. P o t t e r y h o u s e m o d e l s , datable to t h e later third century, s h o w rectangular h o u s e s with t h a t c h roofs, w h i c h r e p r e s e n t t h e o r d i n a r y dwellings of private i n dividuals. Earlier stelae at A x u m were simple u p r i g h t stones. After t h e fourth c e n t u r y , stelae were n o l o n g e r erected. All w e r e funerary. T h o s e of t h e central necropolis are associated w i t h platforms, terraces, a n d t o m b s t h a t w e r e either d u g into r o c k or built in pits. A r c h e s a n d vaults of b a k e d brick w e r e f o u n d in t o m b s datable to t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y . E x c a v a t i o n s in this area b y t h e British Institute in E a s t Africa, led b y Neville Chittick, were h a l t e d in 1974 b e c a u s e of t h e local political situation. T o m b c o n t e n t s i n c l u d e d a r a n g e of objects, i m p o r t e d M e d i t e r r a n e a n l u x u r y g o o d s , a n d s o m e glass f r a g m e n t s t h a t suggest a local glass industry. W e l l - m a d e A x u m i t e p o t t e r y was p r o d u c e d b y a local craft industry. M a j o r c e r a m i c t y p e s are t h e b u r n i s h e d R e d A x u m i t e w a r e , d a t a b l e t o t h e first or s e c o n d tirrough t h e fifth c e n t u r y , a n d B r o w n A x u m i t e w a r e
(Werner Forman/Art Resource, N Y )
AYYUBID-MAMLUK DYNASTIES t h a t r e p l a c e d R e d A x u m i t e w a r e d u r i n g t h e sixth century. A x u m i t e p o t t e r y is h a n d m a d e , a n d glaze is r a r e . T h e earliest R e d A x u m i t e w a r e shares sufficient elements with p r e - A x u m i t e p o t t e r y to s u g g e s t n o discontinuity in lo cal p o p u l a t i o n s . A x u m itself d o e s n o t overlay earlier c o n struction, a l t h o u g h p r e - A x u m i t e sites, s u c h as Y e h a , are n o t far f r o m A x u m . T h e p r e - A x u m i t e p e r i o d , d a t i n g to t h e sec o n d half of the first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, is n o t well u n d e r s t o o d . I n s c r i p t i o n s d e m o n s t r a t e c o n n e c t i o n s with S o u t h Arabia. I n !993J p r o g r a m s of archaeological research at A x u m a n d its environs r e s u m e d , i n c l u d i n g t h e w o r k of t h e British I n stitute in E a s t Africa led by D a v i d W . Phillipson a n d that of the Instituto Universitario Orientale a n d B o s t o n University Archaeological M i s s i o n , led b y R o d o l f o F a t t o v i c h a n d K a t h r y n A . Bard. [See also Ethiopia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY M u n r o - H a y , Stuart, et al. Excavations at Aksum: An Account of Research at the Ancient Ethiopian Capital Directed in 1972-4 by the Late Dr. Neville Chittick. M e m o i r s of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, no. 10. L o n d o n , 1989. Authoritative m o n o g r a p h on the site of A x u m , with extensive bibliography. MARILYN E . HELDMAN
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e r a n c e figure p r o m i n e n t l y in c o n t e m p o r a r y W e s t e r n sources. Islamic sources place h i m n e x t to a few o t h e r o u t s t a n d i n g rulers in Islam, primarily b e c a u s e of his military a c h i e v e m e n t s . H e m u s t h a v e b e e n a n efficient ruler as well, b u t his political vision did n o t e n c o m p a s s a centralized state. Before his death in 1193, h e divided his r e a l m a m o n g m e m b e r s of his family, w h o r u l e d after h i m as ldngs in E g y p t , D a m a s c u s , A l e p p o , a n d elsewhere. T h e A y y u b i d "federa tion" survived with s o m e success into the m i d d l e of t h e thir t e e n t h century. Following a lengthy p e r i o d of internal struggles for su p r e m a c y within t h e A y y u b i d family, in E g y p t a slave-soldier (mamlukj of T u r k i s h origin n a m e d A y b a k took p o w e r in 1250. H e b e c a m e the f o u n d e r of the M a m l u k dynasty, w h o s e m o r e t h a n fifty sultans b e c a m e the lords of E g y p t a n d Syria for t h e n e x t m o r e t h a n 250 years. I n Syria the A y y u b i d k i n g d o m s w e r e o v e r r u n by t h e M o n g o l s of Htilegu in 1259, w h o in t u r n w e r e defeated b y t h e M a m l u k s in Palestine in the same year. T h i s victory o p e n e d Syria to the M a m l u k s . T h e leader of this M a m l u k a r m y , B a y b a r s , b e c a m e t h e M a m l u k sultan in 1260. I t w a s d u r i n g his long reign (for a M a m l u k ) of seventeen years t h a t t h e foundations of t h e M a m l u k state w e r e established. A n administrative system was laid o u t t h a t u s e d t h e p r e - M a m l u k structure in Syria. In it even a n A y y u b i d p r i n c e , the historian A b u al-Fida of H a m a , was retained. Baybars c o n t i n u e d Salah a d - D i n ' s pol icy of p u s h i n g b a c k the C r u s a d e r s b y military a n d political m e a n s a n d as a result, h o l d s t h e same e s t e e m e d place in Islamic history as his p r e d e c e s s o r . H i s quasi-successor, K a l a u n (1279-1290), e n d e d t h e C r u s a d e r p r e s e n c e in the H o l y L a n d a n d built, o n B a y b a r s ' f o u n d a t i o n s , the basic elements of t h e M a m l u k state. T h e long reign of K a l a u n ' s s o n N a s i r M u h a m m a d (1310-1341) benefited b o t h t h e arts a n d polit ical stability. B a y b a r s , K a l a u n , a n d N a s i r are die m o s t p r o m i n e n t M a m l u k sultans of t h e so-called mainly T u r k i s h Bahri dynasty, w h i c h in 1382 w a s o v e r t h r o w n b y another M a m l u k g r o u p , the mainly Circassian Burji dynasty. T h e Burjis r e m a i n e d in p o w e r until 1 5 1 7 , w h e n a n e w a n d militarily a d v a n c e d p o w e r die O t t o m a n s , w h o i n t r o d u c e d g u n p o w d e r to warfare in the N e a r East, c o n q u e r e d Syria a n d Egypt. c
A Y Y U B I D - M A M L U K D Y N A S T I E S . TheAyyubids (1169-1250) a n d the M a m l u k s (1250-1517) ruled w i t h g r e a t i m p a c t over E g y p t a n d Syria (i.e.. G r e a t e r Syria: P a l estine ( m o d e r n Israel), J o r d a n , L e b a n o n , a n d m o d e r n Syria) for almost t h r e e h u n d r e d a n d fifty years. T o w a r d t h e e n d of t h e F a t i m i d p e r i o d (909-1169), E g y p t w a s in chaos. Internal p o w e r struggles led t o i n t e r v e n t i o n b y t h e C r u s a d e r s , w h o even controlled C a i r o for a s h o r t t i m e , a n d by t h e n e w rulers of Syria a n d n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , t h e Z a n g i d s (1127/ 1 1 4 6 - 1 1 8 1 ) . O n e of t h e Z a n g i d generals, Salah a d - D i n (die Saladin of W e s t e r n s o u r c e s ) , b r o u g h t a n e n d t o d i e deteri orating situation in C a i r o a n d to t h e F a t i m i d s ; c a m e in c o n trol of E g y p t (1169) a n d d i e holy cities of Islam ( M e c c a a n d M e d i n a ) a n d Y e m e n (1173); t o o k T r i p o l i , in m o d e r n L e b a n o n , from t h e N o r m a n s ( 1 1 7 2 ) ; a n d c o n q u e r e d D a m a s c u s (1174), A l e p p o (1178)3 a n d , s o o n after, n o r t h e r n M e s o p o tamia. T h u s , Salah a d - D i n , a ruler of K u r d i s h origin, w a s the k i n g (sultan) of a state t h a t s t r e t c h e d from t h e western b o r ders of E g y p t to the western b o r d e r s of Iran. T h e only r e m a i n i n g e n e m y in t h e territory w a s t h e C r u s a d e r s , w h o c o n trolled p a r t s of the coastal regions of Syria a n d Jerusalem. I n 1187 h e t o o k Jerusalem a n d c o n q u e r e d other C r u s a d e r states t h e following year. T h i s led to d i e T h i r d C r u s a d e (1190-1192), w h i c h left t h e C r u s a d e r s with only a few sites a n d the right (if u n a r m e d ) t o visit Jerusalem. [See C r u s a d e r Period.] Salah a d - D i n ' s political a n d military s t r e n g t h a n d his tol
F e w of t h e sultans w h o followed Baybars a n d K a l a u n c o m p a r e to t h e m . M a n y r u l e d only for a short period a n d m a n y suffered a violent d e a t h . It was the internal political s t r u c t u r e of the M a m l u k state t h a t created instability. W h e r e a s after Salah a d - D i n m e m b e r s of t h e A y y u b i d family ruled over small k i n g d o m s in Syria a n d E g y p t — E g y p t b e i n g t h e m o s t p r o m i n e n t — i n w h i c h t h e ruler of E g y p t , as a rule, w a s the overlord, p a t r o n , o r " k i n g of k i n g s , " the M a m l u k s h a d their o w n u n i q u e system of g o v e r n m e n t a n d practice for choosing their sultan or king. T h e i r system was oligar chic, even t h o u g h t h e r e are a few exceptions w h e r e a s o n followed his father as sultan. I n principle, only a slave-sol dier w h o , as a boy or y o u n g m a n , h a d b e e n b r o u g h t as a slave from the T u r k i s h areas n o r t h of the Black Sea a n d t h e
242
AYYUBID-MAMLUK DYNASTIES
C a s p i a n Sea—in general, a K i p c h a k T u r k — o r a Circassian slave-soldier w h o h a d b e e n b r o u g h t from t h e C a u c a s u s w e r e eligible to b e c o m e sultan. After these y o u n g m e n w e r e b r o u g h t from t h e northeast, they w e n t tirrough t h o r o u g h military and administrative training that sorted t h e weak from t h e strong. T h e strongest, within a very well-organized system, advanced themselves as military leaders a n d g o v ernors of the provinces in the M a m l u k state. T h e strongest, m o s t successful, m o s t c u n n i n g , or m o s t brutal a d v a n c e d higher and higher in rank until they c o m p e t e d for sultanship. T h i s system, for all its brutality, h a d one advantage: a weak s o n rarely followed a strong father. T h e sons of t h e M a m l u k s were n o t permitted to serve in the military, a n d were t h u s excluded from direct political p o w e r . T h e y served in t h e lower ranks of g o v e r n m e n t , w h e r e i m p o r t a n t (handling fi nances) posts were held b y Christians, or in different trades. In this way a u n i q u e interrelated system developed b e t w e e n g o v e r n m e n t a n d business t h a t m a y have b e e n t h e b a s e of t h e longevity a n d relative e c o n o m i c prosperity of t h e M a m luk state. T h e material evidence—remains of buildings a n d sherds classified as A y y u b i d / M a m l u k — d e m o n s t r a t e s t h a t in t h e Ayyubid a n d M a m l u k periods in Syria large areas of l a n d were recultivated t h a t h a d n o t b e e n u s e d since L a t e A n t i q uity. D o c u m e n t s s h o w t h a t a rather efficient feudal system of land administration a n d land ownership existed in Egypt. T h u s , e n o u g h surplus was p r o d u c e d to allow p a t r o n a g e in t h e arts a n d in building construction. Salah a d - D i n built t h e citadel of Cairo, b u t n o n o t e w o r t h y architecture from his reign is left. Literary sources as well as inscriptions b e a r wit ness, however, that this sultan, w h o spent m o s t of his time at war, was a p a t r o n of extensive construction projects. T h e r e were n o innovations in style in Islamic art a n d archi tecture d u r i n g his r e i g n — n o r is t h e r e an Ayyubid style in Islamic art a n d architecture. I n C a i r o , the few m o n u m e n t s remaining from t h e A y y u b i d period are m a t u r e c o n t i n u a tions of a L a t e F a t i m i d architecture. [See Fatimid D y n a s t y . ] T h e best e x a m p l e is t h e M a d r a s a h of N a j m a d d i n (12401249). Like m o s t buildings in Cairo, it was s q u e e z e d into a preexisting u r b a n fabric. T h e style of t h e facade a n d t h e m i n a r e t in its (quasi) center have little to do with t h e archi tectural style of tire building. T h e forms u s e d are those of L a t e Fatimid buildings like t h e M o s q u e al-Akmar or t h e M o s q u e as-Salih T a l a i . T h e building's g r o u n d p l a n , h o w ever, determined t h e layout of future m a d r a s a h s in C a i r o . T w o large iwans (vaulted r o o m s o p e n to t h e c o u r t y a r d ) , elements taken from Iranian architecture via Z a n g i d Syrian buildings, flank t h e courtyard. T h i s future e l e m e n t in I s lamic architecture in t h e w e s t c a m e from the east, w i t h Syria t h e transmitter. F r o m p r e - A y y u b i d times, one of t h e finest examples of i m p o r t e d Iranian architecture is the M a r i s t a n a n - N u r i , built b y the Z a n g i d N u r a d - D i n , in D a m a s c u s , Syria. N u r a d D i n , the building's p a t r o n , c a m e from the east a n d c h a n g e d
architectural forms in Syria. T h e m o s t "classical" b u i l d i n g in M e d i t e r r a n e a n Islamic architecture is p r e s e r v e d in A l e p p o , Syria: t h e M a d r a s a h al-Firdaws. It w a s built in 1237 (?), t o w a r d t h e e n d of A y y u b i d rule in Syria. A clear language of forms a n d a m a t u r e floor p l a n characterize it. T h e c o u r t y a r d is framed b y w e l l - p r o p o r t i o n e d a r c a d e s a n d , in t h e nortit, a large iwan d o m i n a t e s . T h e integrated s t o n e w o r k of t h e mihrab hints at forms later t a k e n u p in M a m l u k architecture in Syria a n d E g y p t . Its p o l y c h r o m e execution (black a n d white stone) b e c a m e a characteristic e l e m e n t of M a m l u k a n d p o s t - M a m l u k architecture in Syria a n d E g y p t , k n o w n as t h e ablak t e c h n i q u e . T h e Z a n g i d - A y y u b i d " c l a s sical revival"—die t e n d e n c y to r e t u r n t o p r e - I s l a m i c M e d i t e r r a n e a n forms a n d c o n c e p t s of p r o p o r t i o n — w a s c o n t i n u e d in B a y b a r s ' buildings in D a m a s c u s a n d C a i r o . I n D a m a s c u s , the M a d r a s a h az-Zahiriya is a c o p y of t h e A y y u b i d M a d r a s a h al-Adiliya across t h e street. Imitations of t h e mosaics in t h e U m a y y a d m o s q u e in D a m a s c u s (which B a y bars o r d e r e d restored) reflect t h e t e n d e n c y to link his sov ereignty with the pre-Islamic p a s t (the U m a y y a d s i n this case). In C a i r o , B a y b a r s built his G r e a t M o s q u e following F a t i m i d e x a m p l e s — t h e m o s q u e of a l - H a k i m a n d t h e m o s q u e in M a h d i y a h , in T u n i s i a , t h e first F a t i m i d capital. Older forms tiiere w e r e c o m b i n e d with a large d o m e in front of t h e m i h r a b , a n eastern element, h o w e v e r . M o r e t h a n t h r e e h u n d r e d years of s h a r e d history u n d e r t h e A y y u b i d s a n d t h e M a m l u k s m i n g l e d aesthetic c o n c e p t s a n d practices in E g y p t a n d Syria into a fruitful m a r r i a g e of t h e "flat" E g y p t i a n form a n d t h e use of space in Syrian forms. E x a m p l e s a r e f o u n d in C a i r o as well as in D a m a s c u s , A l e p p o , a n d Jerusalem. T h e fragile s t r u c t u r e s f o u n d in C a i r o a n d J e r u s a l e m are in contrast to t h e m o n u m e n t a l f o r m of t h e M o s q u e of Sultan H a s a n in C a i r o (1356-1363) a n d t h e p l u m p forms of t h e G r e a t M o s q u e i n A l e p p o rebuilt b y die Mamluks. Characteristic elements of M a m l u k a r c h i t e c t u r e are t h e d o m e , the iwan, a n d p o l y c h r o m y in t h e facades a n d o t h e r parts of buildings. It is botih a synthesis a n d d e v e l o p m e n t of earlier forms—a synthesis of pseudoclassical f o r m s , of east ern, C r u s a d e r , a n d Z a n g i d / A y y u b i d traditions. It led (along with t h e d o m i n a n t O t t o m a n d o m e ) to w h a t is u n d e r s t o o d to b e " I s l a m i c " architecture. [See also C r u s a d e r P e r i o d ; and M o s q u e . In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Ayalon, David. Studies on the Mamluks Ayalon, David. The Mamluk
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of Egypt. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 7 . Society. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 9 .
Burgoyne, M . H. Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study. Buckhurst Hill, 1987. Creswell, K. A. C. Muslim Architecture of Egypt. Vol. 2, Ayyubids and Early Bahri Mamluks. Oxford, 1 9 5 9 . Herzfeld, Ernst. " D a m a s c u s : Studies in Architecture III: T h e Ayyubid M a d r a s a . " Ars Islamica 1 1 - 1 2 ( 1 9 4 6 ) : 1 - 7 1 .
AZRAQ L a p i d u s , Ira M . Muslim Mass., 1967.
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HEINZ GAUBE
C
A Z E K A H , a small o n e - a c r e site, situated on a h i g h ridge of d i e J u d e a n foothills overlooking t h e E l a h Valley, ' A z e k a h (Tell Zakariya) is located 8 k m (5 mi.) n o r t h e a s t of Beit Jibrin, 3.5 k m (2 mi.) s o u t h w e s t of T e l Y a r m u t , a n d 6 k m (4 mi.) s o u t h w e s t of T e l B e t h - S h e m e s h (3i°42' N , 34°54' E ; m a p reference 1440 X 1230). Its strategic location, at 400 m a b o v e sea level, explains its description in Assyrian s o u r c e s from t h e time of S a r g o n II as a " s t r o n g h o l d , w h i c h is situated in t h e m i d [ s t of t h e m o u n t a i n s . . .] located o n a m o u n t a i n ridge like a p o i n t e d d a g g e r " (British M u s e u m 1 3 1 - 3 - 2 3 ; see T a d m o r , 1958). T e l l Zakariya was first identified as biblical 'Azekah of t h e D a v i d a n d G o l i a t h narrative ( r Sm. 17) b y J o z e p h S c h w a r t z , in t h e n i n e t e e n t h century. T h e site's excavator, F r e d e r i c k J. Bliss, favored a n identification w i t h ' A z e k a h ' s sister city, S o coh. H o w e v e r , t h a t site is n o w located at K h i r b e t A b a d ( n e a r K h i r b e t S o c o h ) , 5 k m (3 mi.) t o t h e southwest, a n d Z a k a riya's identification w i t h Israelite ' A z e k a h is generally a c c e p t e d . T h e later, R o m a n - p e r i o d A z e k a h , m e n t i o n e d b y E u s e b i u s (Onomasticon 18:10), is p r o b a b l y to b e located at K h i r b e t el-'Almi, to t h e east. F o r m a l excavations at T e l l Zakariya w e r e c o n d u c t e d for only t h r e e seasons in 1898 a n d 1899, i n w o r k directed by Bliss, assisted b y R. A. S. M a c a l i s t e r a n d s p o n s o r e d by t h e Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d . O n t h e s o u t h w e s t side of the site t h e y explored f o u n d a t i o n s of t h r e e individual towers t h e y initially d a t e d t o t h e R o m a n - B y z a n t i n e era. O n t h e el evated southeast section, t h e y u n c o v e r e d the walls of a r e c t a n g u l a r fortress ( a b o u t 40 X 60 m ) w i t h towers at t h e cor ners a n d at m i d p o i n t s along t h e n o r t h e r n a n d eastern sides. T h e y s u b s e q u e n t l y e x c a v a t e d half of t h e fortress area to b e d r o c k a n d d u g a n o t h e r trial p i t outside it, in the center of the m o u n d to the north. I n t h e Bible ' A z e k a h is m e n t i o n e d in Joshua 10:10-11 in c o n n e c t i o n with J o s h u a ' s defeat of t h e A m o r i t e ldngs; in t h e J u d e a n t o w n lists in Joshua 15:35; a n d , s u b s e q u e n t l y , in t h e D a v i d a n d G o l i a t h story in 1 Samuel 17. I n 2 Chronicles 1 1 : 9 , it is identified as o n e of t h e cities involved in K i n g R e h o b o a m ' s refortification efforts, a n d in Jeremiah 34:7 it is cited, along with L a c h i s h , as a m o n g t h e last fortresses to hold o u t against invading B a b y l o n i a n forces in t h e early sixth c e n t u r y BCE. T h i s last reference seems to b e c o r r o b o r a t e d by t h e m e n t i o n of ' A z e k a h in L a c h i s h letter 4. T h e city is also m e n tioned in Nehemiah 11:30 as o n e of t h e h o m e s of r e t u r n i n g exiles. c
B a s e d o n their excavations, Bliss a n d Macalister c o n c l u d e d t h a t t h e site h a d b e e n o c c u p i e d a l m o s t continuously
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from before 1500 BCE until t h e B y z a n t i n e period; they at tributed t h e construction of t h e southeast fortress to R e h o b o a m (922-915 BCE). E x c a v a t i n g t o b e d r o c k inside t h e for tress, they distinguished four m a i n o c c u p a t i o n periods: p e r i o d A, early pre-Israelite ( ? - i s o o BCE); p e r i o d B , late p r e Israelite (1500-800 BCE); p e r i o d C , Jewish (800-300 BCE); a n d p e r i o d D , Seleucid (300-? CE). A l t h o u g h in b r o a d outline this s e q u e n c e agrees with the m e n t i o n of 'Azekah in the literary sources, t h e stratigraphic p i c t u r e is very u n c e r t a i n . T h e existence of s o m e " p r e Israelite" c o m p o n e n t is attested b y scarabs of T h u t m o s e III a n d A m e n h o t e p II assigned to p e r i o d A . H o w e v e r , royal s t a m p e d jar handles were f o u n d o n surfaces of b o t h periods B a n d C within t h e fortress. T h i s requires t h e ascription of b o t h of t h e s e phases to t h e late eighth c e n t u r y BCE a n d a d mits the possibility t h a t t h e fortress was c o n s t r u c t e d just b e fore t h a t t i m e . Similar n i n t h - a n d eighth-century fortresses n o w excavated elsewhere in t h e region, as well as at Q a d e s h B a r n e a a n d A r a d , s u p p o r t this conclusion. Alternatively, S h m u e l Yeivin ( A v i - Y o n a h a n d Yeivin, 1955) has suggested t h a t t h e fortress was initially c o n s t r u c t e d in t h e p e r i o d of the J u d g e s a n d t h e additional t o w e r s in the s o u t h w e s t r e p r e s e n t Rehoboam's work. [See also the biographies of Bliss and
Macalister.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine. H a r m o n d s worth, 1 9 4 9 . Avi-Yonah, Michael, and S h m u e l Yeivin. The Antiquities of Israel (in H e b r e w ) . T e l Aviv, 1 9 5 5 . Bliss, Frederick Jones, and R. A. S. Macalister. Excavations in Palestine during the Years 1898-1900. L o n d o n , 1902. Horowitz, Gabriel. " T o w n P l a n n i n g of Hellenistic Marisa: A R e a p praisal of Excavations after Eighty Y e a r s . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 2 ( 1 9 S 0 ) : 9 3 - 1 1 1 . M a z a r , Amihai. " I r o n Age Fortresses in the J u d e a n Hills." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 4 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 8 7 - 1 0 9 . T a d m o r , H a y i m . " T h e C a m p a i g n s of Sargon II of Assur." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 12 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 80-84. JOE D . SEGER
A Z R A Q . T h e A z r a q oases lie at t h e center of an internal drainage basin (12,000 sq k m [7,440 sq.mi.]) in n o r t h central J o r d a n (3i°5o' N , 36°5o' E ) . T h e basin f o r m e d within a geosyncline a n d contains L a t e Cretaceous a n d Early T e r t i a r y limestones, m a r l s , a n d cherts. T h e n o r t h e r n sector is overlain b y a c a n o p y of L a t e T e r t i a r y a n d Q u a t e r n a r y basalts. Rainfall t o d a y varies from just over 200 m m along t h e b a s i n ' s n o r t h e r n a n d western m a r g i n s to less t h a n 50 m m in t h e southeast. F o r this r e a s o n m o s t of t h e region is dry s t e p p e or s u b d e s e r t a n d is only suited for seasonal pastoralism. Irrigation cultivation is, h o w e v e r , p r a c t i c e d at A z r a q w h e r e c o p i o u s springs e m e r g e f r o m b e n e a t h the basalt. T h e s e formerly fed extensive tracts of m a r s h l a n d which at-
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tracted large n u m b e r s of m i g r a t o r y birds in spring a n d a u t u m n (Nelson, 1973). D u r i n g the last twenty years, water has been p u m p e d from these springs to serve t h e p o p u l a t i o n centers of A m m a n a n d Irbid, a n d t h e wetlands have largely dried out. I n addition to t h e springs, there is also a large sabkha, or playa, at A z r a q which serves as a central s u m p for runoff in t h e depression. T h i s fills with water in t h e win ter a n d dries o u t in t h e s u m m e r . T h e subsurface aquifer is highly saline and die villagers exploit this for salt p r o d u c t i o n . T h e r e presently are two villages in t h e oases, b o t h of w h i c h were established by refugees in the early p a r t of t h e century: N o r t h Azraq, which was settled b y D r u z e from s o u t h e r n Syria, a n d S o u t h A z r a q , w h i c h was f o u n d e d b y C h e c h e n from the C a u c a s u s (Nelson, 1973). T h e springs at A z r a q h a v e p r o v i d e d a focus for settlement since the Stone Age. In t h e 1950s, mechanical e q u i p m e n t u n c o v e r e d t w o very rich late A c h e u l e a n ( L o w e r Paleolithic) sites close to S o u t h A z r a q w h i c h are likely to b e m o r e t h a n 200,000 years old. B o t h were reinvestigated in t h e 1980s: L i o n Spring ('Ain el-Assad) b y G a r y 0 . Rollefson (1983) a n d C Spring by A n d r e w N . G a r r a r d ( C o p e l a n d a n d H o u r s , 1989). T h e latter contained b o n e s of an extinct rhinoceros and of camel, onager, wild ass, hartebeest, and cattle, in c o n junction with h a n d a x e s , cleavers, a n d other flint tools. D u r i n g the 1980s, G a r r a r d u n d e r t o o k an extensive survey of Epipaleolithic a n d Neolithic sites in tire A z r a q region a n d excavated at six of t h e localities ( G a r r a r d et a l , 1994). T w o of t h e m o s t interesting were t h e Natufian o c c u p a t i o n a t A z r a q 18 and the Neolithic settlement at A z r a q 31, b o t h lying close to S o u t h A z r a q . A z r a q 18 probably dates to b e tween 10,000-9,000 BCE a n d is notable for containing a shal low burial pit with t h e disarticulated remains of a t least eleven individuals. T h e s e r e p r e s e n t t h e only N a t u f i a n b u r ials k n o w n from east of t h e J o r d a n Valley. T h e burial pit was overlain by rich o c c u p a t i o n a l levels containing the b o n e s of wild cattle, ass, a n d gazelle a n d m a n y stone tools ( G a r r a r d , 1991). Azraq 31 is t h o u g h t to date to b e t w e e n 6300 a n d 5500 BCE. R e m n a n t s of s e m i s u b t e r r a n e a n circular or oval dwell ings were found in t h e sixth-millennium levels. T h e s e were similar in design to t h o s e excavated in W a d i el-Jilat, 55 k m (34 min.) to t h e soutiiwest [See Jilat, W a d i el-.] T h e site d o c u m e n t s a shift from t h e exploitation of t h e local wild fauna to i m p o r t e d s h e e p a n d goat (Baird et al., 1992). T r a c e s of cultivated w h e a t a n d barley were also found. Little research has b e e n d o n e on t h e later prehistoric sites of d i e Azraq region, b u t Alison Betts (1988) has u n d e r t a k e n extensive surveys in t h e lava country to the n o r t h a n d east, finding prehistoric h u n t i n g traps (desert " k i t e s " ) , animal corrals, a n d settlement sites of various kinds. T h e classical p e r i o d is better k n o w n as a result of t h e surveys of D a v i d L . K e n n e d y (1982) a n d others. A n inscription indicates t h a t A z r a q m a y have b e e n called Dasianis in R o m a n times ( D a vid L . K e n n e d y , personal c o m m u n i c a t i o n ) . D u r i n g t h e clas
sical a n d Islamic p e r i o d s t h e oases, w h i c h lie at t h e n o r t h western end of W a d i es-Sirhan, are likely to h a v e b e e n an i m p o r t a n t watering p o i n t o n t h e caravan r o u t e s b e t w e e n t h e L e v a n t a n d central Arabia. T w o forts g u a r d t h e a p p r o a c h e s to t h e oases a n d a third stands close to t h e pools in N o r t h Azraq. T h e o n e lying 13 Ion (8 mi.) to t h e soutiiwest, Q a s r el-'Uweinid, stands o n a basalt bluff overlooking W a d i el' U w e y n i d . Its p l a n is trapezoidal with a projecting b a s t i o n containing a tower i n its s o u t h e r n corner. I t contains inscrip tions indicating t h a t it was built d u r i n g t h e reign of S e p t i m ius Severus, p r o b a b l y in 201 CE. N a m e s are given for t h e imperial governor of Arabia, L . M a r i u s P e r p e t u u s , a n d t w o consuls, M . N o n n i u s Arrius M u c i a n u s a n d L . A n n i u s F a b i a n u s . Pottery indicates t h a t the fort c o n t i n u e d in u s e until the late third or early fourth centuries. T h e fort lying 13 k m (8 mi.) n o r t h e a s t of t h e oases, Q a s r Aseikhin, is situated o n a c o m m a n d i n g hilltop. It is square in p l a n a n d contains L a t e R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e pottery. T h e m o s t impressive of t h e forts is that located in N o r t h A z r a q , Q a s r el-Azraq. It h a s b e e n modified a n u m b e r of times in its history: early aerial p h o t o g r a p h s show tiiat it w a s erected within a m u c h larger enclosure. T h e p r e s e n t s t r u c t u r e (79 X 72 m ) h a s angle t o w ers at t h e corners a n d interval towers along t h e walls. R o o m s w e r e a t t a c h e d a r o u n d t h e inside of t h e walls a n d t h e r e is a large central c o u r t y a r d . Inscriptions have b e e n f o u n d dating to t h e late 3rd a n d 4th centuries. T h e overall p l a n is c o m parable with other L a t e R o m a n forts. Modifications did o c cur in later p e r i o d s however. A n A r a b i c inscription a b o v e t h e m a i n e n t r a n c e indicates major b u i l d i n g w o r k s b y t h e A y y u b i d governor A z z e d d i n A y b a k in 1237. T h e m o s q u e in t h e central c o u r t y a r d m a y b e l o n g to this p e r i o d . E v i d e n c e for classical or Early Islamic b u i l d i n g activity h a s also b e e n found a r o u n d t h e pools a n d m a r s h e s at S o u t h Azraq. A well-constructed a n d b u t t r e s s e d wall w a s erected a r o u n d die m a i n spring outlets, creating a large reservoir. A platform was erected at its eastern side a n d a n u m b e r of animal sculptures w e r e f o u n d in association witii collapsed arches ( G h a z i Bisheh, p e r s o n a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n ) . A n a d d i tional buttressed wall e x t e n d e d a r o u n d t h e m a r s h l a n d to t h e s o u t h a n d east. N o traces h a v e b e e n f o u n d o n t h e n o r t h , b u t if t h e wall formed a c o m p l e t e circuit it w o u l d h a v e enclosed an area of several s q u a r e kilometers. A n U m a y y a d f a r m h o u s e , Q a s r 'Ain es-Sol, located 2 k m n o r t h e a s t of t h e fort at A z r a q . R o u g h l y s q u a r e in p l a n , its r o o m s are a r r a n g e d a r o u n d a central c o u r t y a r d . E x c a v a t i o n h a s revealed ovens, olive presses, a n d a n external b a t h h o u s e . BIBLIOGRAPHY Baird, Douglas, et al. "Prehistoric E n v i r o n m e n t a n d Settlement in the Azraq Basin: An Interim R e p o r t on the 1989, Excavation S e a s o n . " Levant 24 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 - 3 1 . Description of a Neolithic site at Azraq. Betts, Alison V. G. " T h e Black Desert Survey: Prehistoric Sites and Subsistence Strategies in Eastern J o r d a n . " In The Prehistory ofjor-
AZRAQ dan: The Stale of Research in 1986, edited by A n d r e w N . G a r r a r d a n d H a n s G . Gebel, p p . 3 6 9 - 3 9 1 . British Archaeological Reports, Inter nationa] Series, no. 396. Oxford, 1988. S u m m a r y of prehistoric structures found in the lava country n o r t h and east of Azraq. Bowersock, Glen W . Roman Arabia. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1983. Brief discussion of classical sites at Azraq. C o p e l a n d , Lorraine, and F r a n c i s H o u r s . The Hammer on the Rock: Stud ies in the Early Palaeolithic of Azraq, Jordan. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 540, Oxford, 1 9 8 9 . Detailed d e scription of L o w e r a n d Middle Palaeolithic sites at Azraq, G a r r a r d , A n d r e w N . "Natufian Settlement in the Azraq Basin, Eastern J o r d a n . " In The Natufian Culture in the Levant, edited by Ofer BarYosef a n d Francois R. Valla, p p . 2 3 5 - 2 4 4 . A n n Arbor, 1 9 9 1 . D e scription of a Natufian site at Azraq. G a r r a r d , A n d r e w N . , et al. " T h e Chronological Basis a n d Significance
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of the Late Palaeolithic a n d Neolithic Sequence in the Azraq Basin, J o r d a n . " In Late Quaternary Chronology and Paleoclimales of the East ern Mediterranean, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef a n d Renee S. K r a , p p . 1 7 7 - 1 9 9 . Radiocarbon, T u c s o n , 1994. S u m m a r y of work on E p i paleolithic a n d Neolithic sites in the Azraq region. K e n n e d y , D a v i d L. Archaeological Explorations on the Roman Frontier in North-East Jordan. British Archaeological R e p o r t s , International Se ries, no. 1 3 4 . Oxford, 1982. Detailed descriptions of Classical sites in the Azraq region. Nelson, Bryan. Azraq, Desert Oasis. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 3 . Description of the environment a n d recent history of the Azraq region. Rollefson, Gary. " T w o Seasons of Excavations at 'Ain el-Assad near Azraq, Eastern J o r d a n . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 252 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 2 5 - 3 4 . ANDREW N .
GARRARD
HI D
c
B A A L B E K , site located in d i e B i q a (Bekaa) Valley, 85 k m (53 mi.) from Beirut, L e b a n o n , at a n elevation of a b o u t 12,540 m . T h e Biqa' Valley, k n o w n as Coele-Syria in clas sical times, is b o r d e r e d o n t h e w e s t b y t h e L e b a n o n m o u n tain r a n g e a n d to t h e east b y t h e A n t i - L e b a n o n r a n g e . [.See Coele-Syria.] T w o springs, R a s al-'Ain a n d ' A i n Lejouj, a s h o r t distance away, p r o v i d e d c a r a v a n s w i t h water in antiq uity. Baalbek is strategically p l a c e d at t h e highest p o i n t o n a well-established t r a d e r o u t e f r o m T r i p o l i t h a t led into t h e B i q a before p r o c e e d i n g t o D a m a s c u s or to P a l m y r a in Syria. Baalbek's n a m e in H e b r e w , Ba'al bi ki, m e a n s " B a a l of t e a r s " ; its G r e e k n a m e , Heliopolis, m e a n s "city of t h e sun." c
c
T h e first survey a n d r e s t o r a t i o n w o r k at t h e site w a s b e g u n b y t h e G e r m a n Archaeological M i s s i o n in 1898 u n d e r t h e direction of B r u n o S c h u l z a n d t h e supervision of O t t o P u c h stein. L a t e r , in 1922, F r e n c h scholars ( R e n e D u s s a u d , S e bastien Rouzevalle, H e n r i Seyrig, a n d D a n i e l S c h l u m b e r ger) u n d e r t o o k extensive r e s e a r c h a n d restoration w o r k o n the site's t e m p l e s . T h e L e b a n e s e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities s u b s e q u e n t l y c o n t i n u e d excavation a n d restoration u n d e r the supervision of E m i r M a u r i c e C h e h a b , director general of Antiquities, a n d H a r o u t u n e K a l a y a n . [See the biographies of Dussaud, Seyrig, and Schlumberger.] H i s t o r y . T e s t excavations at Baalbek in 1964-1965 r e vealed t h e B r o n z e A g e tell b e n e a t h t h e G r e a t C o u r t of t h e Jupiter t e m p l e . T r a c e s of settlements d a t i n g t o t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e (c. 1700 BCE) w e r e f o u n d . O t h e r m i n o r r e m a i n s w e r e d a t e d t o t h e Early B r o n z e A g e . I n t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, w h e n Syria b e c a m e a possession of d i e L a g i d successors of A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t w h o ruled from Alexandria, Baalbek w a s given t h e G r e e k n a m e Heli opolis. T h e M a c e d o n i a n s m u s t h a v e e q u a t e d d i e Baal of t h e Bekaa with t h e E g y p t i a n g o d R e a n d the G r e e k Helios, w i t h t h e p u r p o s e of establishing closer religious ties b e t w e e n their n e w dynasty in E g y p t a n d t h e e a s t e r n M e d i t e r r a n e a n world. I n t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE, t h e Seleucids, successors of Alex a n d e r w h o r u l e d f r o m A n t i o c h , i n v a d e d C o e l e Syria a n d d r o v e t h e L a g i d s b a c k to E g y p t . T h e p o d i u m of t h e Jupiter t e m p l e p r o b a b l y dates to this p e r i o d . [See Seleucids.] B e t w e e n 100 a n d 75 BCE, B a a l b e k w a s r u l e d b y a hellenized A r a b dynasty, t h e I t u r e a n s . I n 63 BCE, t h e R o m a n e m p e r o r
P o m p e y p a s s e d t h r o u g h Baalbek o n his w a y to c o n q u e r Syria. H e was s u c c e e d e d b y his s o n , w h o w a s p u t to d e a t h b y M a r c A n t o n y . M a r c A n t o n y t h e n gave all t h e Syrian ter ritories, including Baalbek, t o C l e o p a t r a . I n a b o u t 16 BCE, A u g u s t u s settled veterans of t h e s a m e R o m a n legions in Bei r u t (Berytus) a n d Baalbek. It w a s t h e n t h a t building was b e g u n o n great T e m p l e of Jupiter. I n t h e second c e n t u r y CE, t h e G r e a t C o u r t , witii its p o r ticoes, two altars, a n d t w o vast lustral basins, was a d d e d to die t e m p l e . A t t h e s a m e time consteuction of t h e B a c c h u s t e m p l e b e g a n . It was c o m p l e t e d in t h e third century, at t h e s a m e time tiiat t h e P r o p y l a e a w e r e erected a n d t h e H e x a g onal C o u r t a d d e d . I n a b o u t 330, Christianity b e c a m e t h e official religion of the region a n d t h e Byzantine E m p e r o r C o n s t a n t i n e closed the t e m p l e s . E m p e r o r T h e o d o s i u s destroyed t h e m a n d tore d o w n t h e Altar of Sacrifice a n d t h e T o w e r in d i e G r e a t C o u r t , replacing d i e m w i t h a Christian c h u r c h in a p p r o x i mately 440. By this time t h e T e m p l e of Jupiter was p r o b a b l y already in ruins as t h e result of a n earthquake. N u m e r o u s architectural elements t a k e n from t h e Heliopolitan Jupiter t e m p l e w e r e r e u s e d in b u i l d i n g t h e c h u r c h . I n 636, after t h e battle of t h e Y a r m u k River, t h e entire p r o v i n c e of Syria fell to t h e A r a b s . M u ' a w i y a h f o u n d e d t h e U m a y y a d d y n a s t y in 661 a n d took possession of the Byz antine m i n t at Baalbek, s h o w i n g the n a m e Baalbek inscribed in Arabic letters o n t h e coins. T h u s , t h e n a m e Heliopolis, w h i c h h a d b e e n in u s e for a b o u t a t h o u s a n d years, was r e p l a c e d w i t h its original Semitic n a m e . T h e t e m p l e area was t r a n s f o r m e d into a citadel a n d Baalbek fell successively into t h e h a n d s of t h e ' A b b a s i d s , t h e T u l u n i d s , a n d the F a t i m i d s . [See U m a y y a d Caliphate; ' A b b a s i d Caliphate; F a t i m i d D y nasty.] D u r i n g t h e eleventli-twelfth centuries, Baalbek suffered from floods a n d e a r t h q u a k e s a n d t h e p a s s a g e of several p l u n d e r i n g armies. T h e city fell to Salah a d - D i n (Saladin), f o u n d e r of t h e A y y u b i d d y n a s t y , in 1175, T h e M o n g o l s a r rived in Baalbek in a b o u t 1260, sacking it a n d destroying its mosques; they were soon overdirown by the Mamluks, how ever. ( T h e M a m l u k s w e r e enfranchised slaves p u r c h a s e d b y t h e last A y y u b i d ruler for his army. T h e y constituted t h e bulk of his a r m y in general a n d of his c o u r t in particular).
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U n d e r the M a m l u k s ( a n d until the O t t o m a n o c c u p a t i o n in t h e sixteenth century) Baalbek enjoyed a period of calm. T h e fine architecture of the city's Fortress m u s t b e attrib u t e d to this period. [See A y y u b i d - M a m l u k Dynasties.] M o n u m e n t s . T h e temples of Baalbek have an e a s t - w e s t orientation. A m o n u m e n t a l stairway provides access to t h e platform of the Acropolis. W h e n the A r a b s t u r n e d this t e m ple area into a fortress, t h e y filled in the spaces b e t w e e n t h e c o l u m n s of t h e portico, which is flanked by two towers. T h r e e doors lead to t h e H e x a g o n a l C o u r t (see a b o v e ) , w h i c h m a y have b e e n u s e d for i n t r o d u c t o r y rites for the pilgrims. T h i s space was covered b y a d o m e at the e n d of t h e third century, transforming it into the C h u r c h of t h e Virgin. T h r e e gates lead o n t o the G r e a t C o u r t (1,452 X 1,221 m ) , built in the second c e n t u r y CE. I m p o r t a n t ceremonies a n d sacrifices were held in front of the facade of the Jupiter t e m ple. T h e court is an artificial platform built over a h u g e area (6,600 m ) of vaulted substructures m a t were u s e d for stables a n d storage. T h e c o u r t contained two altars a n d t w o pools a n d was enclosed b y a succession of rectangular a n d s e m i circular exedras d e c o r a t e d with niches t h a t m u s t h a v e c o n tained statues. Temple of Jupiter Heliopolitan. All t h e temples of Baalbek are R o m a n in construction b u t show considerable Oriental influence in b o t h their art a n d architecture. T h e h u g e T e m p l e of Jupiter (950 X 495 m ) was c o n s t r u c t e d d u r ing the A u g u s t a n era (first century CE), built as a high p o d i u m with m a m m o t h blocks. It was reached by a m o n u m e n t a l stairway 86 m above the courtyard. U n t i l t h e earthquake of 1759, the t e m p l e h a d nine gigantic exterior C o r i n t h i a n c o l u m n s , only six r e m a i n . T h e s e c o l u m n s a n d t h e entablature s u r m o u n t i n g t h e m , which consist of a frieze of bulls' and Hons' h e a d s connected by garlands, give s o m e idea of the vast scale of t h e original temple. [See T e m p l e s , article on Syro-Palestinian T e m p l e s . ] Temple of Bacchus. T h e best-preserved R o m a n t e m p l e in the N e a r East, t h e T e m p l e of B a c c h u s w a s built in t h e s e c o n d century CE. T h e r e is n o evidence for its attribution to B a c c h u s , e x c e p t for s o m e motifs in the gateway carvings (grapes a n d wine leaves) a n d of t h e a d y t u m (dancing b a c chanti). It was built o n a high p o d i u m (746 X 386 m ) . A stairway with thirty-three steps divided into three stages leads to its p r o n a o s . Its exterior portico is m a d e of contrast ing plain a n d fluted c o l u m n s with Corinthian capitals. L a r g e slabs form the ceiling, w h i c h is richly d e c o r a t e d with carved geometric patterns of triangles a n d h e x a g o n s . T h e latter are filled with busts or portraits. T h e e n t r a n c e t o t h e cella t h r o u g h t h e m o n u m e n t a l gate ( m o r e t h a n 139 m high) is o n e of Baalbek's major beauties. T h e u n d e r s i d e of t h e lintel depicts an eagle with a c a d u c e u s , t h e symbol of M e r c u r y , in its claws. T h e interior of t h e cella is richly decorated w i t h engaged fluted c o l u m n s t h a t divide t h e walls into c o m p a r t m e n t s , each with two tiers of n i c h e s — t h e lower with a r c h e d p e d i m e n t s a n d the u p p e r w i t h t r i a n
gular ones. T o t h e rear of t h e cella is t h e a d y t u m , or holy of holies, w h i c h is o n a h i g h e r level, following the Oriental S e mitic tradition. Temple of Venus. L o c a t e d southeast of the Acropolis, the T e m p l e of V e n u s has a u n i q u e circular design. Built in t h e third c e n t u r y CE, its p o d i u m a n d e n t a b l a t u r e are c o m p o s e d of five concave sections c o n n e c t e d by C o r i n t h i a n col umns. Byzantine modifications and remains. T o w a r d the e n d of the third c e n t u r y , w h e n Christianity w a s officially a d o p t e d , t h e o p e n H e x a g o n a l C o u r t w a s c o v e r e d with a d o m e a n d c o n v e r t e d into the C h u r c h of t h e Virgin. At a b o u t t h e s a m e t i m e , u n d e r the rule of T h e o d o s i u s (379-395), t h e two altars of the G r e a t C o u r t were r e m o v e d to m a k e r o o m for the construction of a Christian basilica d e d i c a t e d t o St. Peter. Originally, t h e e n t r a n c e was o n t h e east a n d the apses w e r e placed on t h e stairway of t h e J u p i t e r t e m p l e , b u t this o r d e r was later reversed in c o m p l i a n c e with C h r i s t i a n t r a dition. [See C h u r c h e s ; Basilicas.] Arab period remains. W i t h i n t h e Acropolis, t h e r e m a i n s from the A r a b p e r i o d consist mainly of fortifications, i n cluding curtain walls, towers, a n d b a t t l e m e n t s t h a t can b e seen to the west of t h e T e m p l e of B a c c h u s . B e t w e e n the t e m p l e a n d the curtain walls are the r e m a i n s of a m o s q u e , living quarters, a n d storage r o o m s , all d a t i n g t o t h e twelfth a n d thirteenth centuries. O n t h e s o u t h e a s t of t h e t e m p l e stairway is a fortification tower of t h e M a m l u k p e r i o d (fif t e e n t h century) w i t h typical Islamic corbeled vaulting over t h e door. E a s t of t h e Acropolis t h e G r e a t M o s q u e is o n t h e original location of the R o m a n F o r u m . Built d u r i n g t h e U m a y y a d period, it consists of t h r e e rows of c o l u m n s ( p r o b a b l y r e u s e d ) t h a t s u p p o r t arches on w h i c h the w o o d e n roof m u s t h a v e rested. R e m a i n s of a n octogonal m i n a r e t w e r e f o u n d in the n o r t h w e s t angle of t h e courtyard. BIBLIOGRAPHY Jidejian, Nina. Baalbek: Heliopolis "City of the Sun." Beirut, 1975. Kalayan, Haroutine. "Baalbek: U n ensemble r e c e m m e n t decouvert (Les fouilles archeologiques en dehors de la q a l ' a ) . " Les Dossiers de I'Archeologie 12 ( S e p t e m b e r - O c t o b e r 1975): 2S-35. Krencker, Daniel M . , and Willy Zschietzschmann. Rbmische Tempelin Syrien. Vol. 1. Berlin, 1938. Ragette, Friedrich. Baalbek. L o n d o n , 1980. N e w p a n o r a m i c guide with a detailed, step-by-step description, complete reconstruction, a bird's-eye-view of t h e city, a n d a comprehensive evaluation of the antiquities. LEILA BADEE
C
B A B E D H - D H R A , Early B r o n z e A g e (3300-2000 BCE) site o n the p l a i n southeast of t h e D e a d Sea in J o r d a n ( m a p reference 2006 X 0734). B e c a u s e of its early time r a n g e , its size, a n d its location, s o m e scholars h a v e identified B a b e d h - D h r a w i t h t h e biblical traditions c o n c e r n i n g c
BAB EDH-DHRA' S o d o m , t h e m o s t p r o m i n e n t t o w n of t h e Cities of t h e P l a i n (Gn.
1 9 : 2 5 , 2 9 , Dt. 2 9 : 2 3 ) . A m o n g all of t h e ancient sites
r e c o r d e d o n t h e s o u t h e a s t D e a d Sea plain before t h e H e l lenistic p e r i o d , B a b e d h - D h r a ' is t h e largest (the walled t o w n is 12 acres: see figure 1) a n d h a s t h e l o n g e s t o c c u p a t i o n a l history ( 1 , 1 0 0 years). I n a d d i t i o n t o t h e t o w n area t h e site includes an o p e n s e t t l e m e n t t o t h e s o u t h a n d east a n d a large c e m e t e r y farther t o t h e s o u t h . A l t h o u g h t h e biblical tradition locating t h e Cities of t h e P l a i n c a n also b e i n t e r p r e t e d as referring t o a n o r t h e r n location (Gn. 1 3 : 1 0 - 1 3 , Dt. 3 4 : 1 - 3 ) , m o s t of t h e biblical texts s u p p o r t a s o u t h e r n o p t i o n (cf. e.g., Gn. 10:19, 1 4 : 1 - 1 2 , 1 9 : 2 4 - 2 8 ; Ez. 1 6 : 4 6 ) . Early G r e e k writers ( D i o d o r u s a n d Strabo) vividly d e scribed t h e desolate n a t u r e of t h e region a r o u n d d i e D e a d Sea, a n d ever since a succession of historians, g e o g r a p h e r s , a n d travelers h a s n o t e d its r u i n s , w i t h widely varying degrees of detail. A 1 9 2 4 survey, l e d b y William Foxwell Albright, M . G . Kyle, a n d Alexis M a l l o n , w a s tire first t o describe with clarity a n d date t h e walled area of B a b e d h - D h r a ' , i n t e r p r e t e d b y Albright as a s a n c t u a r y c o m p l e x . Excavations u n d e r t h e direction of P a u l W . L a p p ( 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 6 7 ) c o n c e n t r a t e d o n t h e c e m e t e r y b u t also i n c l u d e d s o m e s o u n d i n g s i n t h e area of t h e walled t o w n . Following a survey i n 1 9 7 3 b y W a l t e r E . R a s t a n d R . T h o m a s S c h a u b t h a t identified sev eral other E B settlements a n d cemeteries farther t o t h e south, t h e S o u t h e a s t D e a d Sea P l a i n E x p e d i t i o n w a s f o r m e d to explore t h e relationship b e t w e e n t h e various t o w n s a n d cemeteries ( S c h a u b a n d R a s t , 1989). A t B a b e d h - D h r a ' , t h e
expedition's interdisciplinary t e a m e x p l o r e d b o t h t h e t o w n site a n d c e m e t e r y in four field seasons ( 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 8 1 ) . Excavations o n h i g h p e r i p h e r a l areas of t h e site a n d care fully c h o s e n areas of t h e interior h a v e d e t e r m i n e d t h e history of o c c u p a t i o n a n d major activity areas. T h e earliest o c c u p a t i o n within t h e t o w n is associated w i t h a village d a t e d to E B I B ( 3 1 5 0 - 3 0 0 0 BCE). R e m n a n t s of m u d - b r i c k a n d stone structures above b e d gravel a n d marl a n d associated w i t h t h e distinctive l i n e - g r o u p p o t t e r y of this p e r i o d w e r e f o u n d in all of t h e lowest areas of t h e site excavated. E v i d e n c e of t h e thriving E B LT—III ( 3 0 0 0 - 2 3 0 0 BCE) u r b a n culture of B a b e d h - D h r a ' is p r o v i d e d b y a massive 7 - m e t e r - w i d e stone wall, built o n t h e site's n a t o r a l m a r l ridges; a s a n c t u a r y area with a b r o a d r o o m building; a c o u r t y a r d with a circular stone al tar; a n d d o m e s t i c a n d industrial areas within t h e walls. T h e wall a n d gate area o n t h e site's w e s t e r n edge u n d e r w e n t a major d e s t r u c t i o n near t h e e n d of E B III. S u b s e q u e n t o c c u p a t i o n in limited areas within t h e walls, including a s a n c t u a r y o n t h e n o r t h e r n ridge, a n d t o t h e s o u t h a n d east reflect a brief r e t u r n t o village life d u r i n g E B I V A ( 2 3 0 0 - 2 2 0 0 BCE) . T h e site w a s s u b s e q u e n t l y a b a n d o n e d . T h e u s e of t h e large c e m e t e r y area t o t h e south basically parallels t h a t of tire t o w n site. T h e area's soft marl a n d clay w e r e c u t into for d e e p shaft t o m b s in E B I A ( 3 3 0 0 - 3 1 5 0 B C E ) , a p p a r e n t l y b y seasonal pastoralists. Shafts 2 - 3 m d e e p lead to d o m e d c h a m b e r t o m b s , varying in n u m b e r from o n e to five, c u t horizontally f r o m t h e b o t t o m of t h e shaft. T h e burial p a t t e r n in these c h a m b e r s usually included a line of skulls t o flie left of a central disarticulated b o n e pile, s u r -
B AB EDH-DHRA' . F i g u r e I . Aerial view of the site. T h e view looks s o u t h a t d i e t o w e r i n t h e n o r t h e a s t c o r n e r of t h e w a l l e d t o w n . ' (Courtesy R. T . Schaub)
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J BAB EDH-DHRA' . F i g u r e z.
Aiw
North,
an EB IA shaft tomb chamber of the Bab edh-Dhra'
cemetery.
T h e typical p l a c i n g of skulls in a line is s h o w n to t h e left of t h e central d i s a r t i c u l a t e d b o n e g r o u p . (Courtesy R. T . Schaub)
r o u n d e d b y distinctive p o t t e r y g r o u p s of bowls, jars, a n d juglets (see figure 2). T h e s e c o n d p h a s e of t h e cemetery is signaled by t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of r o u n d m u d - b r i c k funerary buildings u s e d for successive burials in E B I B . D u r i n g t h e zenith of the t o w n site ( E B II—III), t h e funerary b u i l d i n g s b e c a m e rectangular a n d increasingly larger, with several a p parently in u s e simultaneously. Several of these m u d - b r i c k structures show signs of d e s t r u c t i o n a n d b u r n i n g c o n t e m p o r a r y with the e n d of t h e t o w n site. T h e last t o m b s exca vated in t h e cemetery, d a t e d to E B IV, were also shaft t o m b s , b u t usually stone-lined with single or double c h a m b e r s , a n d c o n t a i n e d b o t h disarticulated a n d articulated skeletal m a t e rial. [See Shaft T o m b s ; Burial Sites; G r a v e G o o d s . ] c
T h e cultural r e m a i n s u n c o v e r e d at B a b e d h - D h r a reflect t h e full d e v e l o p m e n t of ancient Palestine's E B culture. M a n y items suggest extensive t r a d e with other u r b a n centers, in cluding M e s o p o t a m i a a n d E g y p t . A m o n g t h e m o r e u n u s u a l finds are well-preserved textiles; c o p p e r a n d b r o n z e w e a p ons a n d tools, including s o m e early tin/bronze w e a p o n s ; slate palettes a n d c o m b s ; a n extensive collection of cylinderseal impressions, along with t h r e e cylinder seals; a n d a w i d e r a n g e of jewelry, i n c l u d i n g gold items. [See Textiles; W e a p ons; Seals; Jewelry.] Botanical samples reveal t h e p r e d o m i n a n t u s e of barley a n d include wheat, grapes, olives, figs, lentils, pistachios, a n d a l m o n d s . [See Cereals; Olives.] F a u nal finds include t h e usually d o m i n a n t sheep a n d g o a t a n d d o n k e y a n d cow. [See S h e e p a n d G o a t s ; Cattle a n d O x e n . ] Overall, t h e finds from t h e t o w n site a n d cemetery at B a b
e d h - D h r a ' allow for a r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e basic life a n d burial p a t t e r n s of a thriving t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m u r b a n c u l t u r e t h a t w a s n o t m a t c h e d in t h e region until t h e B y z a n t i n e p e riod, m o r e t h a n t w o t h o u s a n d years later. [See also S o u t h e a s t D e a d Sea Plain.] BIBLIOGRAPHY H o w a r d , David M . , Jr. " S o d o m a n d G o m o r r a h Revisited." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 27 (1984): 3 8 5 - 4 0 0 . C o m m e n t a r y on all of t h e pertinent biblical texts concerning the Cities of the Plains, with a discussion of t h e various theories about their location. T h e assessment of archaeological evidence needs to b e supple m e n t e d with die article by Rast (1987a) below. Rast, Walter E. "Bab e d h - D h r a a n d the Origin of die S o d o m S a g a . " I n Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Memory of D. Glenn Rose, edited by Leo G. P e r d u e et al., p p . 1 8 5 - 2 0 1 . Atlanta, 1987a. Examines t h e S o d o m tradition, integrating research on its origins with recent archaeological evidence. Excellent bibliography. Rast, Walter E. " B r o n z e Age Cities along the D e a d S e a . " Archaeology 40.1 ( 1 9 8 7 b ) : 4 2 - 4 9 . Excellent popular s u m m a r y a n d discussion of the results of the excavations at Bab e d h - D h r a ' , with a comparison with the neighboring town of N u m e i r a . Schaub, R. T h o m a s , a n d Walter E. Rast. Bab edh-Dhra : Excavations in the Cemetery Directed by Paul W. Lapp, 1965-67. Reports of the Expedition t o the D e a d Sea Plain, Jordan, vol. 1. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1989. Final report of L a p p ' s cemetery excavations, with analytical a n d synthetic studies of its artifacts a n d interpretation of its cultural a n d historical significance. C h a p t e r 1 contains a s u m m a r y of previ ous work in the southeast D e a d Sea region. Includes a complete bibliography on t h e Early B r o n z e Age of t h e southeast D e a d Sea plain. 1
S c h a u b , R. T h o m a s . " B a b e d h - D h r a ' . " I n The New Encyclopedia
ofAr-
BABYLON chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. I, p p . 1 3 0 - 1 3 6 . Jeru salem and N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . Detailed, u p - t o - d a t e s u m m a r y of the archaeological results for the site and cemetery. R . THOMAS SCHAUB
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t o w e r (probably ' A q a r Quf) a n d its construction (see R. H a k l u y t , The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, L o n d o n , 1589). T h e earliest detailed investigation w a s carried o u t b y t h e Italian noble Pietro della Valle, w h o w e n t t o B a b y l o n in 1616 while trav eling in t h e N e a r East (Viaggi, B r i g h t o n , 1843). H e consid ered t h e ruins of Babel t o b e t h e tower a n d p r o v i d e d m e a s u r e m e n t s a n d a description. Della Valle b r o u g h t t h e first bricks inscribed with c u n e i f o r m writing from Babylon a n d U r to E u r o p e , b u t they p r o v o k e d n o interest. W h e n the fa m o u s traveler C a r s t e n N i e b u h r visited B a b y l o n in 1765, h e was p r e p a r e d for t h e city b y t h e r e p o r t s of H e r o d o t u s , a n d e x p e c t e d t h a t t h e city covered a h u g e area. H e therefore believed t h a t the ruins in B o r s i p p a were t h e Babylonian tower ( N i e b u h r , Reisebeschreibungen nachArabienundandern umliegenden Ldndem, C o p e n h a g e n , 1774).
B A B Y L O N , site located o n d i e b a n k of o n e of the b r a n c h e s of t h e E u p h r a t e s R i v e r , 90 Ion (59 mi.) s o u t h w e s t of B a g h d a d , in m o d e r n I r a q (32°33' N , 44°26' E ) . Babylon, as the n a m e of a city a n d as a cultural c o n c e p t , was t r a n s m i t t e d to E u r o p e a n culture t h r o u g h the H e b r e w Bible a n d G r e e k a n d R o m a n a u t h o r s . C h r i s t i a n cultures h a v e u s e d the c o n c e p t of t h e T o w e r of Babel a n d t h e story of its d e s t r u c tion as s y n o n y m s for h u m a n a r r o g a n c e a n d t h e p u n i s h i n g h a n d of G o d . I n t e r e s t in r e d i s c o v e r i n g B a b y l o n was p r i marily a w a k e n e d by t h e biblical stories, o n w h i c h n u m e r o u s artistic r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of t h e T o w e r of Babel were b a s e d . T h e n a m e Babel was associated w i t h a large hill in the n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e r u i n e d city of B a b y l o n . T h e hill always linked t h e site with biblical B a b y l o n , a l t h o u g h t h e identification of the t o w e r was strongly c o n t e s t e d . T h e n a m e Babylon is t r a c e d t o babil(a), a p r e - E u p h r a t e s n a m e (i.e., neither S u m e r i a n n o r A k k a d i a n ) a n d is inter p r e t e d as a place n a m e . T h e designation w a s u n d e r s t o o d in t h e S u m e r i a n p e r i o d as kd-dingirra, first attested for the A k k a d i a n ldng Sharkalisharri (2217-2193 BCE), w h o m e n t i o n s two t e m p l e s in the city. P r e s u m a b l y , this S u m e r i a n spelling was u s e d as a folk etymology, just as t h e Semitic Bab-ili has b e e n translated as " g a t e of G o d . " B e g i n n i n g with the old B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d , t h e spelling tintirki w a s also u s e d . T h i s p r o b a b l y h a d the s a m e m e a n i n g as t h e o t h e r spellings or w a s a s y n o n y m . T h e spelling Babylon, still c u s t o m a r y , w a s t a k e n from the G r e e k n a m e for t h e city. H i s t o r y of R e s e a r c h . S o m e Islamic a u t h o r s p r e s e r v e d t h e m e m o r y of Babylon; h o w e v e r , t h e y k n e w little m o r e t h a n t h e n a m e a n d a few a l m o s t l e g e n d a r y events. T h e scholar I b n H a w q a l , w h o p r o b a b l y visited B a b y l o n in t h e t e n t h c e n tury, d e s c r i b e d it as a small village. I n Jewish tradition, B a b ylon was t h e city hostile to G o d in w h i c h the Jews h a d b e e n held captive. T h e s e m e m o r i e s as well as an interest in t h e Jewish c o m m u n i t i e s still living t h e r e b r o u g h t R a b b i Benja m i n of T u d e l a to B a b y l o n twice, b e t w e e n 1160 a n d 1173 ( M . N . Adler, ed., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, L o n d o n , 1907). H e , like m o s t later travelers, w a s primarily i n terested in tlie site of t h e t o w e r d e s c r i b e d in d i e Bible. H e m e n t i o n s d i e ruins of the p a l a c e of N e b u c h a d r e z z a r a n d identified t h e t o w e r ruins at Birs N i m r u d / B o r s i p p a as t h e biblical t o w e r . B e t w e e n 1573 a n d 1576, d i e G e r m a n p h y s i cian L e o n a r d Rauwolff visited B a b y l o n a n d described c o n ditions t h e r e (Rauwolff, Itinerarium oder Raysbuchlein, L a u i n g e n , 1583); r u i n s in ' A q a r Q u f (actually ancient D u r Kurigalzu) w e r e t h e r e m a i n s of t h e tower. [See ' A q a r Quf.]
C l a u d i u s J a m e s Rich, w h o k n e w N e a r Eastern languages a n d was interested in the cultures of antiquity, was in B a g h d a d as a resident of the E a s t I n d i a C o m p a n y . Beginning in 1811, h e u n d e r t o o k d i e first systematic investigation of t h e area of t h e ruins, took m e a s u r e m e n t s , a n d presented die r e sults of his investigations in Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon (3d ed., L o n d o n , 1818), w h i c h also c o n t a i n e d drawings a n d p l a n s . I n this work, h e describes t h e still visible walls of the city as well as the ruins o n t h e individual hills, w h i c h h e calls b y their A r a b i c n a m e s . I n his search for t h e Babylonian tower, h e investigated t h e ruins of Babel, w h i c h w a s also called M u d s h e l i b e b y t h e inhabitants. T h e r e h e discovered burials witii small objects. N o t e w o r t h y a m o n g the objects h e took b a c k to E n g l a n d w e r e s o m e cylinder seals, n o w in t h e British M u s e u m .
T o w a r d d i e e n d of the sixteenth c e n t u r y , J o h n E l d r e d , a m e r c h a n t , w h o h a d a similar i n t e r p r e t a t i o n , described t h e
T h e English painter R o b e r t K e r P o r t e r w e n t to B a b y l o n in 1818 a n d was quite e n c h a n t e d with its ruins. I n a b o o k
O f later travelers, only a few will be m e n t i o n e d here. A b b e de B e a u c h a m p , the p a p a l vicar general w h o w e n t t o B a b y l o n in 1780 a n d 1790, r e p o r t e d o n t h e wholesale looting of b a k e d bricks b y t h e i n h a b i t a n t s of the s u r r o u n d i n g areas (J. de B e a u c h a m p , " V o y a g e d e B a g d a d a Bassora le long d e l ' E u p h r a t e , " Journal des Scavans, Paris, 1785; " M e m o i r e sur les Antiquites B a b y l o n i e n n e s qui se t r o u v e n t aux environs de B a g d a d , " Journal des Scavans, Paris, 1790). Local i n h a b itants described h o w walls with pictures m a d e from glazed bricks as well as statues h a d b e e n discovered d u r i n g the loot ing. B e a u c h a m p n o t e d t h e existence of massive inscribed cylinders b u t was u n a b l e to o b t a i n one. H e dated the coins f o u n d in B a b y l o n a c c o r d i n g to c o m p a r i s o n s with examples from the P a r t h i a n period. W i t h respect to identifying the B a b y l o n i a n t o w e r , h e d e b a t e d b e t w e e n t h e ruins of Babel a n d B o r s i p p a . A resident of the East India C o m p a n y , H a r t ford Jones Bridge, w h o visited B a b y l o n briefly, succeeded in obtaining several bricks a n d t h e large stone inscription of N e b u c h a d r e z z a r II d i a t b e c a m e k n o w n as the E a s t India H o u s e inscription.
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t h a t was very well received by the British public, h e w r o t e a b o u t his impressions a n d illustrated t h e m with r o m a n t i c views of t h e ruins. H e too was searching for t h e Babylonian tower, which h e identified with Birs N i m r u d . Like m a n y of his predecessors, P o r t e r a d o p t e d H e r o d o t u s ' s estimate of the city's size. I n an area of t h e ruins at K a s r t h a t c o n t a i n e d pillars, scientist J. S. B u c k i n g h a m believed t h a t h e h a d f o u n d t h e remains of t h e h a n g i n g gardens described b y G r e e k authors. I n t h e following years there was a c o n s i d erable increase in k n o w l e d g e c o n c e r n i n g t h e ruins of B a b ylon. A n officer e m p l o y e d b y t h e East India C o m p a n y , R o b ert M i g n a n , carried o u t s o m e small excavations in B a b y l o n , in t h e course of which h e was able, a m o n g other things, t o find an inscribed clay cylinder in situ. T h e English geologist William K e n n e t t L o f t u s , w h o later b e c a m e k n o w n for his excavations at U r u k / W a r k a a n d Kutalla/Tell Sifr, b e g a n his work in Babylon in 1849. H o w e v e r , h e soon c a m e to c o n sider the work futile, rejecting t h e identification of individual m o u n d s with buildings m e n t i o n e d b y H e r o d o t u s . After Paul Emile Botta a n d A u s t e n H e n r y L a y a r d h a d initiated the first g e n u i n e excavations in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o tamia, t h e latter w e n t t o Babylon, in 1850, to begin a r c h a e ological investigations there. H e b e g a n digging t h e m o u n d of Babel w h e r e he found m a n y , probably late, burials. H e was unable to establish a clear picture of t h e construction in t h e h u g e ruins a n d u n c o v e r e d only insignificant small o b jects. T h e situation was similar at t h e hill of Kasr, w h i c h t h e inhabitants of t h e villages h a d already thoroughly s e a r c h e d for b a k e d bricks. L a y a r d described t h e fragments of glazed bricks h e discovered w i t h o u t recognizing their significance, a n d h e m e n t i o n e d t h e m o n u m e n t a l basalt lion that h a d al r e a d y b e e n noted b y other visitors. In the course of his in vestigations on the m o u n d of A m r a n ibn Ali, h e discovered s o m e clay bowls with A r a m a i c inscriptions t h a t h e c o n s i d ered to be t h e work of t h e Jews taken to Babylon. B e c a u s e of t h e paucity of t h e results, L a y a r d soon decided t o e n d his investigations. A collection of antiquities, mostly seals a n d inscriptions, found its way into the British M u s e u m t h r o u g h L a y a r d . [See the biography of Layard.] A larger expedition u n d e r t h e leadership of t h e F r e n c h m a n Fulgence Fresnel, together with the Assyriologist Jules O p p e r t , arrived in Babylon in 1852. T h e y found n u m e r o u s inscriptions, especially o n bricks. T h e y w e r e ' i n t e r e s t e d in t h e glazed a n d relief-bearing fragments of bricks in K a s r a n d tried to explain t h e m . Fresnel a n d O p p e r t believed t h a t t h e remains of the " h a n g i n g g a r d e n s " w e r e h i d d e n in t h e hill of A m r a n ibn Ali a n d t h a t t h e m o u n d of Babel was t h e grave of Belus (Bel, " L o r d , " w a s a title u s e d for t h e highest g o d , M a r d u k ) . O p p e r t also busied himself with t h e m o u n d of H o m e r a , without, h o w e v e r , recognizing its significance (i.e., t h a t t h e remains of ancient buildings m i g h t b e from t h e T o w e r of Babel). H i s excavations of t h e ancient pier o n t h e E u p h r a t e s , which h e identified t h r o u g h t h e inscriptions of N a b o n i d u s , were i m p o r t a n t . I n 1853, using t r i g o n o m e t r i c
m e a s u r e m e n t s a n d observations, O p p e r t p u b l i s h e d t h e first relatively detailed m a p of Babylon. F o r t h e m o s t part, t h e small objects the e x p e d i t i o n discovered w e r e lost while b e i n g t r a n s p o r t e d o n the E u p h r a t e s . Following a brief excavation in 1854 b y tire d i p l o m a t a n d orientalist H e n r y C r e s w i c k R a w l i n s o n a n d his assistant G e o r g e S m i t h , t h e British M u s e u m c o m m i s s i o n e d H o r m u z d R a s s a m , a s o m e t i m e British vice-consul f r o m M o s u l , w h o served as an assistant t o L a y a r d , to r e o p e n excavations in Babylon in 1876. T h e a g r e e m e n t i n c l u d e d t h e transfer of the finds to E n g l a n d . R a s s a m a r r a n g e d w i t h t h e A r a b s w h o were digging for bricks a n d antiquities in t h e r u i n s t h a t h e w o u l d pay t h e m for all significant finds. I n t h e c o u r s e of his excavations, n u m e r o u s clay tablets c a m e to light, i n c l u d i n g business contracts of t h e h o u s e of Egibi a n d a clay cylinder c o n c e r n i n g t h e c a p t u r e of B a b y l o n b y C y r u s of Persia. R a s s a m also investigated t h e p o r t i o n of B a b y l o n lying o n t h e left b a n k of the E u p h r a t e s w h e r e h e f o u n d a series of c u n e i f o r m tablets. T h e p l u n d e r i n g of t h e r u i n s of B a b y l o n c o n t i n u e d to increase, in addition to t h e b a k e d bricks, t h e locals also took stone m o n u m e n t s , w h i c h they b u r n e d for g y p s u m . I n 1887 t h e British M u s e u m sent Wallis B u d g e , w h o later was keeper of E g y p t i a n a n d W e s t e r n Asiatic Antiquities at t h e m u s e u m , to Babylon to seek a n e n d to this p r a c t i c e . H e r e a c h e d an a g r e e m e n t with s o m e of t h e native dealers, a c c o r d i n g to w h i c h all t h e clay tablets, seals, a n d significant small objects f o u n d were t o b e sold to t h e British M u s e u m (the extraction of bricks w o u l d b e t o l e r a t e d ) . T h e d e s t r u c tion of t h e ruins did n o t e n d , h o w e v e r , a n d m a n y i m p o r t a n t buildings were so t h o r o u g h l y destroyed it w a s later i m p o s sible to identify their g r o u n d plans. E x c a v a t i o n s . I n 1897-1898 a g r o u p of G e r m a n r e s e a r c h ers was sent to M e s o p o t a m i a to find a r u i n e d site suitable for excavation. O n e of the m e m b e r s of t h e g r o u p w a s R o b e r t K o l d e w e y , t o w h o m t h e direction of t h e excavation in B a b ylon was finally e n t r u s t e d . F r o m 1899 to 1914, t h e G e r m a n excavations were carried o u t y e a r - r o u n d with a small t e a m , among whose members were Walter Andrae, Friedrich W e t z e l , O s c a r R e u t h e r , a n d G e o r g B u d d e n s i e g . S o m e of t h e excavations goals w e r e to u n c o v e r t h e city p l a n , t o investi gate Babylonian arcMtecture, a n d t o identify definitively t h e Babylonian tower (the T o w e r of B a b e l ) . [See the biographies of Koldewey and Andrae] O n e p r i m a r y result of t h e excavation w a s t h e e x p o s u r e of t h e layers of t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d , w h i c h d o c u m e n t t h e time of N e b u c h a d r e z z a r a n d his dynasty. B e c a u s e of t h e high level of t h e g r o u n d w a t e r , t h e d e e p e r layers of t h e O l d Babylonian p e r i o d could b e r e a c h e d only rarely. T h e p e r i ods of A c h a e m e n i d , Seleucid, a n d P a r t h i a n settlement w e r e verified partially t h r o u g h excavation a n d b y m e a n s of n u m e r o u s surface finds. T h e plan in t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e riod reveals h o w strongly fortified t h e city w a s , w i t h an o u t e r r i n g of walls altogether 18 k m (11 mi.) long. T h e fortifica tions consisted of a n inner a n d an outer circuit of walls m a d e
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of b a k e d bricks a n d s u p p l e m e n t e d b y a s t r o n g e m b a n k m e n t and a m o a t . H e r o d o t u s h a d m e n t i o n e d t h e u n u s u a l thickness of t h e walls a n d their c i r c u m f e r e n c e , w h i c h h e gave as 120 stadia long ( a b o u t 95 k m or 59 m i . ) — t h i s c o n t r i b u t e d to m a n y later errors in i n t e r p r e t a t i o n . T h e o u t e r wall includes N e b u c h a d r e z z a r ' s s u m m e r p a l a c e , w h i c h covers d i e n o r t h ern p a r t of t h e m o u n d of Babel. T h e i n n e r circuit of walls forms a w i d e rectangle w h o s e p e r i m e t e r is 8,150 m ; t h e E u p h r a t e s divides it into u n e q u a l halves.
d e m o n s t r a t e d , all of w h i c h p r o b a b l y belong t o t h e N e o - B a b ylonian p e r i o d . T h e y are distinguished b y t h e techniques u s e d to d e c o r a t e the walls. T h e first p h a s e is decorated with figures of animals m o l d e d in relief in u n g l a z e d brick; t h e s e c o n d has figures f o r m e d b y glazed brick t h a t are n o t in relief. T h e third c o n s t r u c t i o n p h a s e , raised 15 m a b o v e t h e s u r r o u n d i n g area o n a n e m b a n k m e n t , is d e c o r a t e d with glazed figures of snakelike d r a g o n s (mushussu) a n d bulls m o l d e d in relief (see figure 2).
It has b e e n s h o w n from inscriptions t h a t t h e construction of t h e city walls dates b a c k a t least to the N e o - A s s y r i a n p e riod. E i g h t of its gates w e r e located a n d partially excavated. M o s t of t h e m are k n o w n b y n a m e o n t h e basis of d e s c r i p tions of t h e city t r a n s m i t t e d in c u n e i f o r m . T h e n e t w o r k of streets was laid o u t in a c c o r d a n c e with t h e w i n d directions (northeast, n o r t h w e s t , s o u t h e a s t , s o u t h w e s t ) . T h e m o s t fa m o u s of t h e city's gates, b e c a u s e of its relief decoration in brick, is t h e Ishtar G a t e , w h i c h has b e e n partially r e c o n structed in t h e Vorderasiatisches M u s e u m in Berlin (see figure 1). I n this powerful d o u b l e gate, reinforced with bastions, a n u m b e r of c o n s t r u c t i o n p h a s e s could b e
A processional a v e n u e a b o u t 250 m l o n g a n d 20-24 m w i d e , c o m i n g from t h e n o r t h , led to the Ishtar G a t e . T h e street was s u r r o u n d e d o n b o t h sides b y high walls t h a t d e limited an outlying fortress o n t h e east a n d t h e so-called citadel of N e b u c h a d r e z z a r o n t h e west. T h e lower p o r t i o n of t h e wall is d e c o r a t e d w i t h glazed brick m o l d e d in relief t h a t depicts lions s u r r o u n d e d b y rosettes. A c c o r d i n g t o an inscription, the citadel situated n o r t h of t h e city wall was c o n s t r u c t e d d u r i n g t h e reign of N e b u c h a d r e z z a r . T h e cit adel c o m p l e x a n d tire processional a v e n u e w e r e b o t h set o n a 15-meter e m b a n k m e n t . A series of older sculptures t h a t d i d n o t originate in B a b y l o n w a s f o u n d in t h e citadel, along
BABYLON. F i g u r e 1.
Reconstruction
of the Ishtar
Berlin. (Foto M a r b u r g / A r t Resource, N Y )
Gate of Nebuchadrezzar
II. P e r g a m o n M u s e u m ,
254
BABYLON emonial p a r a d e d u r i n g t h e n e w year's celebration, r a n t o t h e s o u t h e r n c o r n e r of E t e m e n a n k i a n d t h e n c u r v e d in t h e d i rection of t h e E u p h r a t e s , w h e r e a b r i d g e (123 m long) crossed the river. Seven of its walled piers w e r e d o c u m e n t e d . A few t e m p l e s , i n c l u d i n g t h e N i n m a h T e m p l e a n d t h e Ishtar T e m p l e , were located i n t h e city area a n d e x c a v a t e d . I n t h e course of t h e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of the r u i n s of B a b y l o n b y t h e Iraqi Antiquities A d m i n i s t r a t i o n , t h e t e m p l e of N a b u sa h a r e , which b o r d e r s o n t h e E t e m e n a n k i p r e c i n c t a n d c o n tained a large library, w a s u n c o v e r e d in 1978.
BABYLON.
F i g u r e 2. Detail of an enameled tile and ceramic brick bull
from the hhtargate.
P e r i o d of N e b u c h a d r e z z a r I I , 6 0 5 - 5 6 2 BCE. (Er
ich Lessing/Art Resource, N Y )
with other artifacts, leading to..the suggestion ( n o w consid ered doubtful) t h a t t h e r o o m s were a m u s e u m . T h e s o u t h e r n citadel lying inside t h e fortification walls dates back in p a r t to t h e time of t h e Assyrian domination. It consisted of five large courtyard complexes t h a t h a d served official a n d res idential p u r p o s e s . T h e t h r o n e r o o m in t h e third c o u r t y a r d h a d a 56-meter-long frontage decorated with stylized trees of life, rosettes, a n d a lion frieze of glazed bricks. T h e center of B a b y l o n was formed b y t h e t e m p l e p r e c i n c t Esagila, which c o n t a i n e d t h e cult r o o m s of t h e chief g o d M a r d u k , of his wife, of E a (god of water, w i s d o m ) and N a b u (god of t h e scribal craft), a n d of other gods a n d goddesses. T h i s precinct, which lies u n d e r t h e m o u n d of A m r a n i b n Ali, was covered by m o r e t h a n 15 m of s a n d a n d r u b b l e , so that only portions of it could b e o p e n e d t h r o u g h tunneling. T h e t e m p l e p r e c i n c t E t e m e n a n k i , lying t o t h e n o r d i a n d sur r o u n d e d by a t e m e n o s , h o u s e s t h e remains of t h e B a b y l o nian tower, w h i c h h a d b e e n s o u g h t for centuries. I t w a s n o t until 1913 that d i e excavators, thanks t o t h e low g r o u n d water level at t h e time, succeeded in finding t h e building's m u d - b r i c k core, w h i c h w a s preserved t o a, h e i g h t of only a few meters. T h e entire 15-meter-thick baked-brick facing h a d been looted. T h e tower itself, as t h e literary sources testify, h a d b e e n t o r n d o w n in t h e time of Alexander t h e G r e a t with t h e intention of rebuilding it. I t could b e s h o w n t h a t t h e tower h a d covered a surface area of 91.48 X 91.66 m , it h a d consisted of six steps, each o n e set b a c k from t h e one below it, o n t h e t o p , as t h e seventh step, stood a high temple t o t h e cult of M a r d u k . A m o n u m e n t a l o p e n staircase (51.61 m high a n d 9.35 m wide) a n d t w o side stairways led u p t h e south side. T h e processional avenue c o m i n g from t h e Ishtar G a t e , w h i c h w a s specially decorated for t h e cer
A r c h i t e c t u r a l H i s t o r y . A d e s c r i p t i o n of t h e city of B a b ylon w a s c o m p i l e d t o w a r d t h e e n d of t h e twelfdi c e n t u r y BCE. T r a n s m i t t e d o n n u m e r o u s clay tablets it gives t h e n a m e s of ten city districts, eight gates, a n d at least fifty-three t e m p l e s , as well as of n u m e r o u s shrines a n d o t h e r buildings. O n l y a small n u m b e r of t h e s e c o u l d b e located a n d e x c a vated. T h e history of t h e earlier settlements at B a b y l o n is largely o b s c u r e a n d c a n almost only b e r e c o n s t r u c t e d from literary sources. S a r g o n of Akkad is said t o h a v e d e s t r o y e d B a b y l o n in a b o u t 2340 BCE; t w o of its t e m p l e s are k n o w n from t h e time of Sharkalisharri (c. 2270 BCE). Sulgi of U r (2094-2047 BCE) carried off b o o t y f r o m Esagila d u r i n g t h e course of a c o n q u e s t of Babylon, w h i c h is so far t h e earliest m e n t i o n of this t e m p l e . T h e rise of B a b y l o n , w h i c h also b r o u g h t great architec tural changes, b e g a n w i t h t h e A m o r i t e d y n a s t y at t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. E x c a v a t i o n s in t h e r u i n s of t h e M e r k e s (inner city) u n c o v e r e d several residential buildings, from w h i c h O l d B a b y l o n i a n d o c u m e n t s w e r e r e covered. T h e year n a m e s of t h e ldngs of B a b y l o n give evi d e n c e of t h e existence of city walls, gates, a cloister district, a n d n u m e r o u s t e m p l e s , a m o n g t h e m Esagila, as well as t e m ples for Ishtar, A d a d , S h a m a s h , N a n n a , Enlil, M a r d u k , a n d other g o d s a n d goddesses. T h e center of O l d B a b y l o n i a n Babylon was s u r r o u n d e d b y walls a n d w a s c o n c e n t r a t e d in t h e i n n e r city; additional districts, a m o n g t h e m t h e so-called eastern n e w city, w e r e a n n e x e d . Very little is k n o w n a b o u t t h e a p p e a r a n c e of t h e city of Babylon d u r i n g t h e time of t h e Kassite d o m i n a t i o n . A r chaeological investigations w e r e c o n c e n t r a t e d o n s o m e p r i vate h o u s e s a n d graves. T h e description in t h e texts of T i n t i r gives t h e impression t h a t t h e general l a y o u t of t h e city seems to h a v e b e e n similar t o tiiat of later p e r i o d s . T h e statue of M a r d u k t h a t s t o o d in t h e t e m p l e of Esagila w a s r e m o v e d from Babylon as w a r b o o t y a n d r e c a p t u r e d several times, first going t o H a n a in Syria, t h e n t o A s s u r , a n d later t o Susa. O p i n i o n s vary as t o w h e t h e r t h e r e w a s already a t e m p l e tower ( o r ziggurat) in t h e O l d B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d . Its earliest m e n t i o n in a historical inscription, t h a t of S e n n a c h e r i b , w h o c o n q u e r e d B a b y l o n in 689 BCE, says t h a t h e d e s t r o y e d E s a gila a n d t h e t e m p l e tower. T h e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e h o l y structures followed u n d e r E s a r h a d d o n (680-669 BCE) a n d A s h u r b a n i p a l (668-626 BCE). P r e s u m a b l y , t h e m u d - b r i c k core of t h e ziggurat dates f r o m this p e r i o d . N a b o p o l a s s a r
BABYLON
255
(625-605 BCE) a n d N e b u c h a d r e z z a r (605-562 BCE) c o m p l e t e d t h e work. After t h e c o n q u e s t of B a b y l o n b y d i e P e r s i a n king C y r u s II in 539 BCE, t h e city was elevated t o a royal residence; t h e royal fortresses were rebuilt as citadels, a n d u n d e r A r t a x e r xes II (404-359 BCE) an a p a d a n a l i k e pillared b u i l d i n g with colorful decorative b r i c k w o r k w a s c o n s t r u c t e d t h e r e in a d dition t o a palace for t h e c r o w n p r i n c e . E v e n t h e s u m m e r p a l a c e c o n t i n u e d to b e u s e d u p until t h e time of A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t . After a n u m b e r of revolts, t h e city walls were r a z e d a n d various buildings d e s t r o y e d . I n scientific research it w a s a s s u m e d over t h e years t h a t X e r x e s (485-465 BCE) h a d t o r n d o w n t h e m a i n staircase of t h e t o w e r a n d destroyed t h e statue of M a r d u k ; p r o b a b l y t h e E u p h r a t e s also c h a n g e d its c o u r s e at t h a t t i m e a n d flowed t h r o u g h t h e residential section of the city in a large c u r v e . T h e s e a s s u m p t i o n s w e r e b a s e d o n t h e descriptions of H e r o d o t u s . R e c e n t l y , h o w e v e r , scholars have p u b l i s h e d m a n y a r g u m e n t s against this thesis a n d it is doubtful t h a t H e r o d o t u s really did visit B a b y l o n a n d described his o w n i m p r e s s i o n s . H e r o d o t u s h a d written a b o u t t h e h a n g i n g g a r d e n s , w h i c h R o b e r t K o l d e w e y located o n t h e n o r t h e a s t c o r n e r of t h e g r e a t s o u t h e r n palace (this identification also seems d o u b t f u l ; t o d a y scholars p r o p o s e t h a t t h e g a r d e n s w e r e located n o t in B a b y l o n b u t in N i n e v e h ) . As n o t e d a b o v e , H e r o d o t u s also gave a n exaggerated depiction of t h e length a n d b r e a d t h of t h e city walls, w h i c h a r e also doubtful.
provincial capital a n d tiiat t h e administrative district b o r e t h e n a m e Babel. F i n d s . Significant large s c u l p t u r e s f r o m B a b y l o n are at tested only in fragments. I n addition to m o n u m e n t s from M a r i (statues of p r i n c e s ) , f r o m H a l a b / A l e p p o (weather g o d stela), a n d S u h i (reliefs), w h i c h c a m e to light in the so-called m u s e u m in the citadel, is t h e m o n u m e n t a l statue of a lion standing over a m a n ( r e d i s c o v e r e d b y de B e a u c h a m p in 1784; see a b o v e ) , w h o s e d a t e a n d origin are d e b a t e d . V a l u able small finds c a m e f r o m graves from all settlement p e r i ods. C e r a m i c s and pottery m a k e u p t h e largest b o d y of finds, a n d these serve primarily to illustrate daily life. I n addition to building inscriptions o n bricks a n d cylinders, t h o u s a n d s of c o m m e r c i a l a n d legal inscriptions h a v e b e e n f o u n d , as well as all sorts of historical, cultural, a n d astronomical i n scriptions t h a t date all t h e w a y into Babylon's late period (early s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE t o third/fourth century CE). M u c h a b o u t Babylon c a n b e g l e a m e d from cuneiform in scriptions f r o m other r e g i o n s , as well as from texts written in A r a m a i c , P e r s i a n , G r e e k , H e b r e w , a n d L a t i n . B a b y l o n w a s m o r e t h a n a city or a state; it was a cultural center of t h e a n c i e n t N e a r East, a religious center, a n d a scientific center w h o s e influence r e a c h e d E u r o p e .
I n 3 3 1 , A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t e n t e r e d B a b y l o n as c o n q u e r o r a n d w a n t e d t o m a k e it t h e capital of his w o r l d e m p i r e . H e p r o v i d e d for t h e care of t h e traditional holy sites a n d p l a n n e d t o rebuild t h e dilapidated t o w e r . T h e entire u p p e r p a r t of t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n w a s p u l l e d d o w n a n d t h e r u b b l e t r a n s p o r t e d to the n o r t h e a s t of E t e m e n a n k i , w h e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n was b e g u n o n a G r e e k t h e a t e r m a d e from d e c o r a t e d bricks; this construction w a s c o n t i n u e d in t h e Seleucid p e riod. T h e holy area, Esagila, w a s c a r e d for as t h e s t r o n g h o l d of t h e tradition; t h e s u m m e r p a l a c e a n d tire citadel c o n t i n u e d to b e inhabited. T o j u d g e f r o m t h e small objects f o u n d , p a r t s of d i e city r e m a i n e d thickly settled a n d k e p t their N e a r E a s t e r n character.
Andrae, Waiter. Babylon: Die Versunkene Weltstadt und ihr Ausgraber Robert Koldewey. Berlin, 1 9 5 2 . Bergamini, Giovanni. "Levels of Babylon Reconsidered." Mesopotamia 12 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 1 1 1 - 1 5 2 . Dalley, Stephanie. "Babylon a n d the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled." Iraq 56 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 45ff. Fischer, Rudolf. Babylon: Entdeckungsreisen in die Vergangenheit. Stutt gart, 1 9 8 5 . George, A n d r e w R. " T h e T o p o g r a p h y of Babylon Reconsidered." Su mer 44 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 7 - 2 4 . George, Andrew R. Babylonian Topographical Texts. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 40. L o u v a i n , 1992. George, Andrew R. "Babylon Revisited: Archaeology and Philology in H a r n e s s . " Antiquity 67 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 7 3 4 - 7 4 6 .
T h e c o n q u e s t b y M i t h r i d a t e s I ( 1 7 1 - 1 3 8 BCE) was t h e start of t h e t h r e e - h u n d r e d - y e a r P a r t h i a n d o m i n a t i o n of B a b y l o n , d u r i n g w h i c h t h e city gradually declined. N e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e Greek theater was remodeled, Nebuchadrezzar's s u m m e r p a l a c e was t r a n s f o r m e d into a fortress c o m p l e x , and resi dential h o u s e s w e r e built o n t h e citadel. W i t h t h e f o u n d i n g of Seleucia, B a b y l o n lost s o m e of its i m p o r t a n c e ; buildings in t h e residential sector w e r e s i m p l e a n d p o o r . D u r i n g t h e visits of t h e R o m a n e m p e r o r s T r a j a n ( 1 1 5 CE) a n d S e p t i m i u s Severus (199 C E ) , B a b y l o n s e e m s to h a v e b e e n deserted. D u r i n g t h e time of t h e S a s a n i a n d o m i n a t i o n , B a b y l o n is said t o h a v e still b e e n a r e s i d e n c e a n d to h a v e h a d a city wall, s o m e t h i n g yet to b e p r o v e n . F r o m written r e c o r d s from t h e n i n t h a n d t e n t h centuries it is k n o w n t h a t B a b y l o n was a
[See also Babylonians; and M e s o p o t a m i a , article on A n cient M e s o p o t a m i a . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kienast, Burkhart. " T h e N a m e of the City of Babylon." Sumer 35 (1979): 246-248. Klengel, Horst. "Babylon zur Zeit der Perser, Griechen u n d Farther." Eorschungen und Berichte 5 ( 1 9 6 2 ) : 4 0 - 5 3 . Klengel, Horst. " D i e osdiche N e u s t a d t Babylons in T e x t e n altbabylonischer Zeit." In Societies and Languages of the Ancient Near East: Stud ies in Honour of I. M, Diakonoff, p p . 1 6 9 - 1 7 3 , Warminster, 1982. Klengel, Horst. Konig Hamnutrapi und der Alltag Babylons. Rev. ed. Zurich, 1 9 9 1 . Klengel-Brandt, Evelyn. Der Turin von Babylon. 2d rev. ed. Berlin, 1992. Kohlmeyer, Kay. Wiederevstehendes Babylon: Eine antike Weltstadt itn Blick der Forschung. Berlin, 1 9 9 1 . Koldewey, Robert. Das Ischtar-Tor in Babylon. Wissenschaftliche Veroffentlichungen der D e u t s c h e n Orientgesellschaft ( W V D O G ) , 32. Leipzig, 1 9 1 8 . Koldewey, Robert. Die Kdnigsburgen von Babylon, vol. I, Die Sildburg; vol, 2, Die Hauptburg und der Sommerpahsle Nebukadnezars bn Hiigel
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Babil. Edited by Friedrich Wetzel. W V D O G , 5 4 - 5 5 . Leipzig, 1931-1932. Koldewey, Robert. Das Wieder erstehende Babylon. 5th ed., rev. and e x p . Munich, 1990. Contains an up-to-date bibliography. Kuhrt, Amelie, and Susan Sherwin-White. "Xerxes' Destruction of Babylonian T e m p l e s . " In Achaemenid History, vol. 2, The Greek Sources, edited by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg a n d Amelie K u h r t , p p . 6 9 - 7 8 . Leiden, 1987. Kuhrt, Amelie, and Susan Sherwin-White, eds. Hellenism in the East. Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1987. Oates, Joan. Babylon. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 9 . Rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1986. Reuther, Oscar. Die Innenstadt von Babylon (Merkes). W V D O G , 4 7 . Leipzig, 1926. Rollinger, Robert. Herodots Babylonischer Logos: Bine kritische Untersuchung der Glaubwiirdigkeitsdiskussion. Innsbrucker Beitrage z u r K u l turwissenschaft Sonderhaft 84. Innsbruck, 1993. Schmid, Georg. " D e r T e m p e l t u r m Etemenanki zu Babylon." BaghdaderForschungen 17 ( 1 9 9 5 ) . Unger, Eckhard. "Babylon." I n Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 1, p p . 330-369. Leipzig, 1 9 2 8 - . Unger, Eckhard. Babylon, die heiligc Stadt nach der Beschreibung der Babylonier ( 1 9 3 1 ) . 2d ed. Berlin, 1 9 7 0 . Wetzel, Friedrich. Die Stadlmauern von Babylon. W V D O G , 48. L e i p zig, 1930. Wetzel, Friedrich, and F . H . Weissbach. Das Hauptheiligtum des Mar duk in Babylon: Esagila und Etemenanki. W V D O G , 5 9 . Leipzig, 1938. Wetzel, Friedrich. "Babylon z u r Zeit Herodots." In Zeilschrift fur As syriologie und Vorderasiatische Archaologie48 (1944): 4 5 - 6 8 . Wetzel, Friedrich. Das Babylon
der Spdtzeit.
W V D O G , 62. Leipzig,
I957EVELYN
KLENGEL-BRANDT
Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
BABYLONIANS. T h e inhabitants of ancient s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a — t h a t is, of t h e region extending a p p r o x i mately from m o d e r n - d a y B a g h d a d in Iraq, t o t h e shore of die Persian Gulf—are designated Babylonians. T h e n a m e is derived from the place n a m e transmitted in cuneiform script as Babili (already misinterpreted in t h e late third m i l l e n n i u m as "gate of G o d " ) , t h e G r e e k form of the n a m e is Babylon. F r o m t h e early second millennium BCE until into t h e Helle nistic period, this city southeast of m o d e r n B a g h d a d w a s a royal residence a n d o n e of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t u r b a n centers in M e s o p o t a m i a . O r i g i n a n d C h r o n o l o g y . T h e region of Babylonia b e longs to the oldest, highly civilized areas in t h e world. A l t h o u g h Babylonia is p a r t of t h e O l d W o r l d desert belt, a n u r b a n culture based o n irrigation systems c o n s t t u c t e d there h a d already developed in t h e fourth millennium. Beginning in t h e early tliird millennium, tiiere is archaeological as well as written evidence for t h e existence of city-states in t h e area, which were developed b y a population t h a t spoke S u m e r i a n (i.e., n o t Semitic, S u m e r is t h e n a m e for the s o u t h e r n p o r t i o n of Babylonia). Semitic-speaking g r o u p s from m i d dle M e s o p o t a m i a (Akkadians, after t h e source-language n a m e for n o r t h e r n Babylonia) were increasingly a d d e d t o this population. T h e origin of t h e Sumerians is u n k n o w n .
T h e r e is p r o o f of Semitic-speaking g r o u p s as early as t h e so-called Early D y n a s t i c p e r i o d (c. 2800-2400 BCE); t o w a r d t h e e n d of this p e r i o d they attained greater significance b e cause of an i n c r e a s e d rate of i m m i g r a t i o n from t h e p e r i p h eral areas of t h e Syrian desert s t e p p e (possibly as t h e result of t h e onset of a d r y p e r i o d ) . A t t h e t i m e of S a r g o n (c. 2340-2284 BCE) t h e Akkadians b e c a m e t h e political b e a r e r s of t h e earliest M e s o p o t a m i a n territorial state (c. 2340-2100 BCE), which w a s simultaneously striving t o gain c o n t r o l of t h e t r a d e routes leading to t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d t o A n a tolia. Following a p e r i o d of d o m i n a t i o n b y t h e m o u n t a i n dwelling G u t i over p a r t s of Babylonia, t h e ( N e o - ) S u m e r i a n state of t h e third dynasty of U r (2111-2003 BCE) w a s able t o exercise control over almost all of M e s o p o t a m i a . D u r i n g the third d y n a s t y of U r , t h e r e w a s a r e n e w e d influx of Semitic-speaking g r o u p s from t h e n o r t h w e s t ; t h e y w e r e called Amorites ( S u m e r i a n , mar-tu, " p e o p l e of t h e w e s t , " from a Babylonian p e r s p e c t i v e ) . T h e y achieved a ruling p o sition i n m a n y places in Babylonia a n d f o u n d e d dynasties t h a t played a role i n t h e O l d Babylonian p e r i o d ( d u r i n g t h e first half of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE), for e x a m p l e i n Isin a n d L a r s a , Babylon, E s h n u n n a , a n d M a r i . [See A m o r i t e s . ] After struggles for h e g e m o n y b y Isin a n d L a r s a , B a b y l o n u n d e r H a m m u r a b i (1792-1750 BCE, t h e " m i d d l e " c h r o n o l ogy) w a s able t o c o n q u e r all of Babylonia as well as p a r t s of n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a in a b o u t 1760 BCE. N e v e r t h e l e s s , u n der H a m m u r a b i ' s successors B a b y l o n o n c e again declined in i m p o r t a n c e ; in a b o u t 1594 BCE t h e city w a s c o n q u e r e d b y t h e Hittites, w h o w e r e a d v a n c i n g from Asia M i n o r . After their d e p a r t u r e B a b y l o n b e c a m e t h e r e s i d e n c e of a d y n a s t y of n o n - S e m i t i c i m m i g r a n t s , t h e Kassites (sixteenth-twelfth centuries BCE) w h o , h o w e v e r , b o t h linguistically a n d c u l t u r ally rapidly a t t a c h e d themselves t o t h e B a b y l o n i a n tradition. [See Kassites.] I n t h e t h i r t e e n t h a n d twelfth centuries BCE, t h e r e were struggles b e t w e e n B a b y l o n a n d t h e e x p a n d i n g M i d d l e Assyrian k i n g d o m , as well as r e n e w e d conflicts with E l a m ( d i e state b o r d e r i n g Babylonia o n t h e s o u t h e a s t ) , d u r ing t h e c o u r s e of w h i c h B a b y l o n t e m p o r a r i l y c a m e u n d e r Assyrian rule. I n t h e late second m i l l e n n i u m BCE, d i e regional political systems collapsed. I n conjunction with this, t h e r e w a s a n increased i m m i g r a t i o n of n e w Semitic-speaking p o p u l a t i o n g r o u p s , the A r a m e a n s , from t h e n o r t h w e s t . T h e y i n t e r m i n gled with t h e existing p o p u l a t i o n of Babylonia, w h o i n c r e a s ingly u s e d A r a m a i c as their everyday l a n g u a g e , while B a b ylonian r e m a i n e d t h e l a n g u a g e of official c u n e i f o r m inscriptions a n d t h e learned tradition. B e g i n n i n g in t h e n i n t h century BCE, Babylonia was repeatedly t h e object of Assyrian military c a m p a i g n s ; after t h e m i d d l e of t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE it b e c a m e a p a r t of t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n E m p i r e u n d e r its o w n kings; nevertheless, it r e p e a t e d l y rebelled against its A s syrian overlords, Babylon b e c a m e t h e d o m i n a n t p o w e r in t h e N e a r E a s t u n d e r N e b u c h a d r e z z a r II (604-562 BCE), w h o w a s of A r a -
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BABYLONIANS
m e a n ( C h a l d e a n ) origin. By c o n q u e r i n g all of M e s o p o t a
E x c a v a t i o n s . T h e c o r p u s of archaeological i n f o r m a t i o n
m i a , Syria, a n d Palestine, h e b e c a m e t h e f o u n d e r of t h e N e o -
a b o u t Babylonia a n d B a b y l o n i a n s essentially c o m e s from t h e
Babylonian E m p i r e ; d u r i n g his reign there was a large-scale
excavations that h a v e b e e n carried o u t in s o u t h e r n M e s o
e x p a n s i o n of his residence city, Babylon. In 539 BCE t h e
p o t a m i a since the m i d d l e of the n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . E s p e
t r o o p s of the Persian A c h a e m e n i d king C y r u s II c o n q u e r e d
cially in Babylon, S i p p a r , Isin, L a r s a , U m m a , U r , U r u k ,
the city and all of Babylonia. Babylon r e m a i n e d a p a r t of t h e
N i p p u r , a n d G i r s u / L a g a s h , excavation h a s led to t h e d i s
Persian E m p i r e until A l e x a n d e r the G r e a t c o n q u e r e d B a b
covery of textual materials, w h i c h h a v e b e e n s u p p l e m e n t e d
ylonia in 331. In 323, A l e x a n d e r died in Babylon, w h i c h h e
by e p i g r a p h i c finds from outside of B a b y l o n i a — f r o m M a r i
h a d w a n t e d to make o n e of t h e capital cities of his e m p i r e .
on t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s a n d f r o m Assyrian residences.
E v e n during t h e Seleucid a n d P a r t h i a n periods (third c e n
Since t h e b e g i n n i n g of fieldwork, t h e m e t h o d s of excava
t u r y B C E - s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE) Babylonia was still able to p r e
tion—which
serve its own traditions, i n c l u d i n g t h e use of Babylonian a n d
taining interesting objects a n d often p a i d a l m o s t n o a t t e n t i o n
cuneiform writing (especially in m a t h e m a t i c s a n d a s t r o n
to archaeological c o n t e x t — h a v e b e e n c o n s i d e r a b l y refined.
o m y ) . T h r o u g h t h e G r e e k s , R o m a n s , a n d Byzantines, as
T h i s is true n o t only for t h e exact scientific d o c u m e n t a t i o n
well as t h r o u g h E u r o p e ' s e n c o u n t e r s with t h e Arab-Islamic
b u t also with r e g a r d to t h e inclusion of r e s e a r c h p e r t a i n i n g
world, t h e substance of Babylonian tradition even m a d e its
to t h e ancient e n v i r o n m e n t , u s i n g m e t h o d s f r o m t h e n a t u r a l
way into E u r o p e a n culture.
sciences.
originally w e r e primarily c o n c e r n e d with o b
L a n g u a g e a n d W r i t i n g . T h e history a n d culture of B a b
E c o n o m i c F o u n d a t i o n s . Archaeological discoveries a n d
ylonia were t r a n s m i t t e d in a variety of languages a n d m e t h
the t e s t i m o n y of t h e texts p r o v i d e a n insight n o t only into
ods of writing. S u m e r i a n a n d Semitic Akkadian ( B a b y l o
historical ttadition, literature, a n d religion, b u t also into t h e
nian-Assyrian) are t h e essential source languages. W h e r e a s
m e a n s of subsistence. I n c o n t r a s t to t h e Assyrian n o r t h , B a b
S u m e r i a n began to die o u t as a colloquial l a n g u a g e at t h e
ylonia is an alluvial plain, in w h i c h t h e small a m o u n t of r a i n
b e g i n n i n g of the second millennium, Akkadian c o n t i n u e d to
fall ( u n d e r 250-300 m m p e r year) m a k e s agriculture p o s s i
u n d e r g o further d e v e l o p m e n t t h r o u g h a series of stages: O l d
ble only t h r o u g h t h e u s e of river w a t e r . I n o r d e r to enlarge
Babylonian (first half of t h e second m i l l e n n i u m ) ; M i d d l e
t h e a m o u n t of u s a b l e area, canals w e r e d u g l e a d i n g away
Babylonian (approximately t h e s e c o n d half of the s e c o n d
from t h e c o u r s e of t h e river. E v e n kings c o n s i d e r e d e x t e n d
m i l l e n n i u m ) ; Y o u n g e r Babylonian (the literary language of
ing t h e land t h r o u g h canals to b e o n e of their m o s t i m p o r t a n t
the first half of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m ) ; N e w Babylonian (the
functions. T h e lack of d e p e n d e n c e o n rainfall a n d t h e fer
language of t h e d o c u m e n t s a n d letters in the first m i l l e n n i u m
tility of t h e soil favored large, regular harvests; nevertheless,
u p to a b o u t 625 BCE); a n d L a t e Babylonian (the l a n g u a g e of
from a n early date t h e increasing salinity of t h e soil as a result
learned texts d u r i n g t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n , Persian, Seleucid,
of a n i n a d e q u a t e flushing o u t of t h e w a t e r - b o r n m i n e r a l s a n d
a n d Arsacid/Parthian p e r i o d s ) . Nevertheless, already in t h e
the h i g h level of g r o u n d w a t e r p r o v e d to b e a p r o b l e m . D e
early first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, even in Babylonia, ( W e s t ) S e
clining harvests a n d t h e a b a n d o n m e n t of c r o p s r e q u i r i n g
mitic A r a m e a n b e g a n m o r e a n d m o r e to establish itself as
high levels of care, s u c h as w h e a t , in favor of t h e m o r e r e
the colloquial language; in t h e western Persian E m p i r e it was
sistant barley w e r e often t h e result. T h e acquisition of n e w
u s e d even for administrative p u r p o s e s (Imperial A r a m a i c ) .
f a r m l a n d was therefore also a n a t t e m p t at solving this p r o b
B o t h S u m e r i a n a n d A k k a d i a n u s e d cuneiform writing
lem, w h i c h often led to military conflict.
(syllabic signs, w o r d signs, a n d d e t e r m i n e r s ) . T h e t h r e e - d i
I n addition to h o e s , c a t t l e - d r a w n plows w e r e also u s e d for
mensional cuneiform writing was p r e s s e d into wet clay with
tilling t h e soil, leading to t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of b r e a k i n g plows
a stylus or chiseled into s t o n e a n d metal. A r a m a i c , in c o n
a n d plows with seed guides (the latter e n a b l e d a s p a r i n g a n d
trast, u s e d a linear system with an " a l p h a b e t i c " ) script t h a t
regular application of t h e s e e d ) . T h e d a t e p a l m w a s a d d e d
h a d developed in Syria-Palestine. I t w a s , t h u s , suitable for
to grains (wheat, e m m e r , a n d barley) a n d vegetables (es
writing on other materials as well, s u c h as s l d n s / p a r c h m e n t
pecially onions a n d leeks) a n d b e c a m e a n i m p o r t a n t c r o p ;
a n d p a p y r u s . I n f o r m a t i o n , a b o u t Babylonia also c o m e s from
s o u t h e r n I r a q is still o n e of t h e largest d a t e - g r o w i n g r e g i o n s
t h e Hittite tradition in Asia M i n o r , from E g y p t i a n i n s c r i p
in t h e world. Vegetables a n d other useful p l a n t s w e r e often
tions, from t h e b o o k s of H e b r e w Bible, a n d from ancient
g r o w n in the area u n d e r n e a t h t h e d a t e trees. Fertilization of
a u t h o r s writing in G r e e k or L a t i n . T h e majority of t h e c u
the soil c o u l d o c c u r in c o n j u n c t i o n with t h e g r a z i n g of t h e
neiform texts from Babylonia were u-ansmitted in archives
h a r v e s t e d areas b y h e r d s of livestock b e l o n g i n g to t h e l a n d
or libraries as well as o n m o n u m e n t s a n d archaeological
o w n e r s or to s e m i n o m a d i c g r o u p s .
finds. A r a m a i c texts w e r e only p r e s e r v e d w h e n they w e r e
I n t h e raising of livestock, s h e e p a n d cattle p l a y e d t h e m o s t
written o n clay, stone, or other materials d u r a b l e e n o u g h t o
i m p o r t a n t role. T h e sheep w e r e primarily k e p t t o p r o v i d e
withstand the climate of M e s o p o t a m i a . [See S u m e r i a n ; A k
wool. T h e u s e of camels as w o r k i n g animals is first attested
kadian; A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d Literature; C u n e i f o r m . ]
in t h e late s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE; at t h a t t i m e t h e y p l a y e d
BABYLONIANS an especially i m p o r t a n t role i n t r a n s p o r t b e c a u s e they c a n carry quite large loads a n d cover great distances w i t h o u t water. C a m e l b r e e d i n g w a s primarily carried o u t b y s e m i n o m a d i c g r o u p s . I n d i e final analysis, it w a s t h e c a m e l t h a t p r o v i d e d t h e s e g r o u p s w i t h c o n s i d e r a b l e i n d e p e n d e n c e from t h e settled p o p u l a t i o n a n d m a d e t h e m d e s e r t dwellers ( b e d o u i n ) . B e g i n n i n g in t h e m i d d l e of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m , horses w e r e u s e d i n Babylonia for d r a w i n g w a r chariots; it was only later t h a t they w e r e r i d d e n . M o s t i y , h o w e v e r , tiiey w e r e raised i n t h e cooler m o u n t a i n regions of the N e a r East. I n t h e third m i l l e n n i u m , t h e B a b y l o n i a n s w e r e already specializing in crafts, w h i c h c a n b e d e m o n s t r a t e d from t h e textual evidence; t h e y w e r e w o r k i n g i n d i g e n o u s materials (clay, r e e d s , leather) a n d , increasingly, i m p o r t e d material. Special m e n t i o n s h o u l d b e m a d e of their textile a n d leather p r o d u c t i o n , p o t t e r y , m e t a l w o r k i n g , a n d stoneworking. B e cause Babylonia w a s p o o r i n r a w materials, metals a n d s t o n e — i n c l u d i n g g e m s t o n e s — h a d t o b e b r o u g h t into t h e c o u n t r y either t h r o u g h t r a d e o r as w a r booty. W o o d was also i m p o r t e d b e c a u s e t h e i n d i g e n o u s species (especially p a l m s a n d tamarisk) did n o t p r o v i d e suitable c o n s t r u c t i o n material for large b u i l d i n g s , s u c h as p a l a c e s a n d t e m p l e s . T h e B a b y l o n i a n s e x c h a n g e d p r o d u c t s locally a n d r e g i o n ally, w i t h o u t special m a r k e t s , b u t a n e x c h a n g e system e x t e n d i n g b e y o n d t h e regional area was already in place i n t h e p r e s t a t e p e r i o d (before t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m ) . O n c e t h e B a b y l o n i a n s w e r e organized i n a city-state, or territorial state, this e x c h a n g e b e c a m e a w i d e - r e a c h i n g foreign t r a d e d o c u m e n t e d in t e m p l e , p a l a c e , a n d private archives. A l t h o u g h Babylonia's t r a d e w a s originally oriented t o w a r d t h e e a s t — t o w a r d t h e m o u n t a i n c o u n t r i e s t h a t w e r e rich in r a w materials o r t o w a r d t h e c o u n t r i e s o n t h e P e r s i a n Gulf—in t h e early s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE t h e r e was a d e m o n s t r a b l e shift of e m p h a s i s t o w a r d d i e M e d i t e r r a n e a n . N e w p a r t n e r s h a d e m e r g e d t h e r e in t h e p a l a c e e c o n o m i e s of C r e t e a n d t h r o u g h t h e exploitation of t h e c o p p e r deposits o n C y p r u s . A s early as t h e f o u r t h m i l l e n n i u m , a n i m p o r t a n t t r a d e r o u t e f r o m t h e E u p h r a t e s t o Syria a n d Asia M i n o r i n c l u d e d s p u r s That b r a n c h e d off t o t h e w e s t t h r o u g h t h e Syrian desert s t e p p e t o Syria a n d t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n . B e g i n n i n g in t h e late s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m , t h e u s e o f t h e c a m e l as a t r a n s p o r t a n imal even m a d e it possible t o cross t h e desert s t e p p e s o u t h of P a l m y r a a n d t o r e a c h t h e P h o e n i c i a n coastal cities via a direct r o u t e f r o m B a b y l o n . T h e direction a n d intensity of this t r a d e c o n t r i b u t e d significantly t o cultural contacts for t h e Babylonians w i t h t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n area. O r g a n i z a t i o n o f S o c i e t y . I n t h e c o u r s e of t h e a p p r o x i m a t e l y t h r e e millennia d o c u m e n t e d b y t h e t e x t u a l evidence, B a b y l o n i a n society w e n t t h r o u g h a considerable c h a n g e , while preserving certain b a s i c traits. T h e Early D y n a s t i c p e riod ( c . 2800-2400 BCE) s h o w s a city-state structure (a city with settlements o n city territory) a n d a socially stratified p o p u l a t i o n . R e m n a n t s of earlier political organizations, s u c h
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as councils of elders, w e r e s u b o r d i n a t e d to a n d m a d e t o serve t h e g r o w i n g m o n a r c h i c a l p o w e r . T h e t e m p l e s lost their role as t h e central e c o n o m i c a n d political institutions to t h e palace. A t t h e t i m e of t h e territorial states of Akkad a n d U r (c. 2400-2000 BCE), t h e a u t h o r i t y of t h e ruler s u c c e e d e d in establishing itself even against t h e aristocracies of the former city-states t h a t h a d b e e n i n c o r p o r a t e d . T h e deification of t h e ldngs, attested from N a r a m - S i n of A k k a d (2259-2223 BCE) until the O l d B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d (early s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m ) , served firmly t o establish m o n a r c h i c a l rule—the king joined t h e local divinities as t h e g o d of t h e c o u n t r y . R o y a l legisla tion points t o t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of n e w e r , state-regulated a n d controlled n o r m s for c o m m u n i t y life, b u t a t t h e s a m e time hints a t social t e n s i o n s . T h e p r o d u c t i o n of t h e m e a n s of e a r n i n g a living was o r g a n i z e d in t h e f o r m of institutional (i.e., t e m p l e o r palace) h o u s e h o l d s , t o w h i c h t h e individual " h o u s e s " w e r e functionally a n d hierarchically assigned. T h e royal d o m a i n s w e r e a t t h e s a m e time centers for t h e distri b u t i o n of g o o d s in t h e f o r m of rations (barley, oil, a n d other commodities). T h e early O l d B a b y l o n i a n period (early second millen n i u m ) w a s characterized b y t h e individualization of social relationships. F r o m this t i m e o n , t h e palace economies r e p r e s e n t e d themselves primarily as a s u m total of smaller h o u s e h o l d s , w h i c h w o r k e d parcels of l a n d they h a d received subject t o various c o n d i t i o n s . I n e x c h a n g e they h a d t o p r o vide services in t h e f o r m of w o r k o r p r o d u c e . P a y m e n t s in t h e f o r m of p r o d u c e c o u l d b e excused for p e r s o n s w h o p a i d c o r r e s p o n d i n g s u m s of m o n e y t o t h e palace as a d v a n c e l u m p - s u m p a y m e n t s . A t t h e s a m e time, t h e role of leasing land increased i n t h e O l d Babylonian period; family p o s s e s sion of l a n d also seems t o h a v e e x p a n d e d d u r i n g then. T h e " e d i c t s " (misarii) p u b l i s h e d b y t h e O l d Babylonian kings (generally at t h e b e g i n n i n g o f their reigns) primarily signi fied d e b t relief, as well as t h e collection of laws into codices (especially t h e so-called c o d e of H a m m u r a b i ) . T h e y should certainly also b e u n d e r s t o o d as reactions to t h e e c o n o m i c a n d social p r o b l e m s t h a t arose t h r o u g h t h e t h r e a t to t h e i n dividual family as t h e f o u n d a t i o n of p r o d u c t i o n a n d t h e army. In t h e Kassite p e r i o d (c, s e c o n d half of the second m i l l e n n i u m ) , stone p r o c l a m a t i o n s of gifts of land (kudurrus) p o i n t to t h e e m e r g e n c e of a larger private possession of land; nevertheless, this d e v e l o p m e n t does n o t seem to have a d v a n c e d consistently. A t any rate, in t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e riod (6th-5th centuries BCE) private possession o f land d i d n o t play a d o m i n a n t role. T h e t e m p l e a n d t h e palace c o n trolled d i e possession of land a n d all i m p o r t a n t e c o n o m i c activities; b u t they left r o o m for private involvement, as is expressed, for e x a m p l e , i n t h e institution of general leasing, in w h i c h t e n a n t s of large estates (e.g., of temples) f a r m e d o u t smaller areas t o o t h e r t e n a n t s . S o m e of t h e Jews from J e r u s a l e m w h o h a d b e e n d e p o r t e d t o Babylonia b y N e b u -
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chadrezzar II integrated themselves into this system at tiiat time. A r t a n d C t d t u r e . T h e Babylonians' m e t h o d s of earning a living, r e c o r d i n g history, a n d cultivating imagination found expression in tiieir artistic a n d literary legacy. T h e late fourth and early third millennia were a m o n g the m o s t c r e ative periods. M a n y of t h e artistic m e a n s of expression a n d stylistic devices t h a t e m e r g e d t h e n r e m a i n e d basic over t h e centuries t h a t followed. T h e m o s t lasting a c h i e v e m e n t was u n d o u b t e d l y t h e d e v e l o p m e n t b y t h e Babylonians of a sys t e m of writing, which enabled t h e transmission of entire bodies of knowledge. T h e i r architecture reflects t h e e m e r gence of large c o m m u n i t i e s with central cult sites, s u c h as h a v e been excavated especially in U b a i d , U r u k , a n d T u t u b (Khafajeh), w h e r e strong city walls suggest an increase in hostile attacks. T h e m e t h o d of construction was d e t e r m i n e d b y t h e s u n - d r i e d m u d brick, which, in the Early D y n a s t i c periods, a p p e a r e d in the so-called p l a n o - c o n v e x variety. T h e walls in religious buildings consisted of projections a n d indentations ( U b a i d period, fourth m i l l e n n i u m ) . T o stabilize a n d decorate walls, t h e Babylonians p r e s s e d p a t terns of colored clay pegs into die plaster on t h e walls ( U r u k period, early third m i l l e n n i u m ) . T h e i r temples d e v e l o p e d from small, single-roomed structures to m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d ings, in which the central cult r o o m was s u r r o u n d e d b y s y m metrically arranged subsidiary r o o m s ( U r u k p e r i o d ) . B e g i n n i n g in the Early D y n a s t i c p e r i o d (first quarter of t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m ) , the cult r o o m s b e c a m e separate spaces, often situated at the end of a ratiier large series of r o o m s ; cult practice for t h e masses t o o k place entirely in t h e c o u r t y a r d s , however. T h e Early D y n a s t i c buildings in Kish, E s h n u n n a , a n d Eridu that c o n t a i n e d reception r o o m s can be described as palaces. I n the U r u k period a rich artistic tradition developed t h a t is attested by realistically f o r m e d small figurines of h u m a n s a n d animals as well as reliefs o n stone vessels a n d o t h e r items. In the Early D y n a s t i c period a c h a n g e in stylistic d e vices took place. B a b y l o n i a n artists began t o depict h u m a n figures in a m o r e strongly stylized way. T h e y p r o v i d e d their cult statuettes of p r a y i n g figures with a cuneiform d e d i c a tion; they created dedicatory plaques with scenes of b a n queting or supplication; a n d they carved t h e earliest histor ical depictions (of w a r s , victories, festivals) in relief o n s t o n e slabs (the vulture stela of E a n a t u m , ruler of L a g a s h ) . T h e burials of m e m b e r s of t h e ruling h o u s e s , especially t h e royal graves from U r , b e a r witness t o sophisticated craftsmanship in metalworking, w h i c h already h a d a long tradition. Crafts m e n fashioned c o p p e r , often alloyed with arsenic or tin, as well as gold a n d silver, into jewelry, vessels, w e a p o n s , a n d o t h e r objects by m e a n s of a casting process (sometimes t h e lost-wax m e t h o d ) ; t h e y frequently c o m b i n e d metals w i t h semiprecious stones, especially lapis lazuli. L a r g e sculptures w e r e partially m o d e l e d over a b i t u m e n or w o o d core a n d thinly plated with c o p p e r , b r o n z e , or gold (Ur, U b a i d ) . Sol
d e r i n g t e c h n i q u e s were k n o w n a n d g r a n u l a t i o n t e c h n i q u e s were developed. D u r i n g t h e U r u k p e r i o d t h e B a b y l o n i a n s gradually r e placed the s t a m p seal, w h i c h h a d b e e n u s e d since prehistoric times, witii t h e cylinder seal, w h o s e u s e s p r e a d into n u m e r ous regions of t h e N e a r E a s t until t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e riod. T h e cylinder seal m a d e it possible t o r e p r e s e n t m a n y figured scenes tiirough a succession of pictures o n a " r o l l i n g " seal. Sealing witii clay allowed r o o m s a n d objects to be secured. L a t e r , rolling a seal o n a clay t a b l e t b e c a m e a t e c h n i q u e of legal certification of one's p e r s o n a l p r e s e n c e or of o n e ' s office. T h e Babylonians t o o k t h e design motifs of these seals, w h i c h c h a n g e d t h r o u g h o u t different p e r i o d s of u s e , primarily from m y t h i c a n d cultic r e a l m s . Archaeologists u s e t h e m as "type-fossils" to date stratigraphic levels. [See Seals.] Babylonian religious conceptualizations are m i r r o r e d in their visual arts a n d in inscriptions a n d m y t h i c a l texts t h a t w e r e later c o m m i t t e d to writing. A b o v e all, t o t h e B a b y l o nians t h e g o d s i n c o r p o r a t e d whatever w a s n e c e s s a r y for t h e c o m m u n i t y ' s c o n t i n u e d existence. T h e B a b y l o n i a n s c o n ceived a n d d e p i c t e d t h e m a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c a l l y — a s beings acting in h u m a n fashion. T h e epic tradition already told s t o ries of h e r o s w h o w e r e , a t t h e s a m e t i m e , or e v e n p r e d o m inantly, h u m a n beings ( G i l g a m e s h stories). T h e contacts of t h e city-states with each o t h e r furthered t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of a p a n t h e o n , in w h i c h t h e local gods a n d g o d d e s s e s w e r e ar r a n g e d according t o r a n k a n d relationship; Enlil, son of t h e father of t h e g o d s ; A n u m , or g o d , rose t o t h e t o p a n d r u l e d t h e universe witii d i e h e l p of " s p e c i a l i z e d " divinities. T h e Babylonians served their g o d s , p r o v i d i n g t h e m with food a n d drink a n d h o n o r e d t h e m in religious p r o c e s s i o n s or tiirough prayer; for this t h e y e x p e c t e d a service in r e t u r n . A t t h e s a m e time, h o w e v e r , t h e y also s o u g h t to u n d e r s t a n d tiieir natural e n v i r o n m e n t a n d to a r r a n g e it in lists a c c o r d i n g to c o n c e p t u a l g r o u p s . T h e Babylonians o b s e r v e d t h e h e a v enly bodies in r e s p e c t to d i e calendar. I n laying o u t a n d m e a s u r i n g their fields for agriculture t h e y u s e d a n d devel o p e d their a s t r o n o m i c a l a n d m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e . I n Babylonia t h e late t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m w a s m a r k e d b y t h e territorial states of A k k a d a n d U r . W h i l e t h e residence of t h e ruler of Akkad h a s n o t yet b e e n discovered, U r h a s p r o v i d e d p r o o f of extensive building activity. T h e s t e p p e d t e m p l e (ziggurat) d e v e l o p e d from temples o n terraces a n d c o n t i n u e d to be built until into t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d . T h e transition to a b r o a d - r o o m cella with a n altar a n d a cult statue in a niche w a s an innovation. I n c o n t r a s t t o t h e t e m ple, t h e palaces a p p e a r e d to b e i n d e p e n d e n t architectural c o m p l e x e s . Essentially t h e y r e p r e s e n t e n l a r g e d residential h o u s e s i n a s m u c h as they, like t h e c o u r t y a r d h o u s e , w e r e ori e n t e d t o w a r d t h e inside w i t h closed, w i n d o w l e s s exteriors. S u n - d r i e d clay r e m a i n e d t h e p r e d o m i n a n t b u i l d i n g material, b u t f o r m e d into r e c t a n g u l a r bricks. F i g u r i n e s (terra cottas) of h u m a n s a n d animals w e r e less a n d less frequentiy f o r m e d
BABYLONIANS b y h a n d , b u t were p r e s s e d in m o l d s . L a r g e - s c a l e s c u l p t u r e c o n c e n t r a t e d o n r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of rulers; these s h o w e x cellent k n o w l e d g e of a n a t o m y a n d a g o o d m a s t e r y of s t o n e w o r k i n g t e c h n i q u e s in s u c h h a r d s t o n e as diorite. Battle scenes p r e d o m i n a t e in B a b y l o n i a n relief carvings (cf. t h e N a r a m - S i n stela) i n w h i c h t h e h e r o i c ruler is s h o w n s u b j u gating defeated p e o p l e s . I n t h e U r III p e r i o d (late third m i l l e n n i u m B C E ) , scenes of s u p p l i c a t i o n o n c e m o r e c a m e to t h e fore in increased n u m b e r s — a d e v e l o p m e n t also f o u n d in t h e glyptic arts. F r e q u e n t l y , a n "initiation s c e n e " is depicted, in w h i c h the w o r s h i p e r is p o r t r a y e d h o l d i n g t h e h a n d of a n i n t e r m e d i a r y p r o t e c t o r g o d b e f o r e t h e t h r o n e of t h e chief god. I n literature, in addition t o h y m n s to t h e gods, h y m n s to t h e kings a p p e a r as a n e w g e n r e . F r o m t h e time of N a r a m Sin of A k k a d until t h e O l d B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d , t h e deification of s o m e rulers is also k n o w n . T h e y a p p e a r e d as t h e g o d s of t h e state in c o n t r a s t to t h e local g o d s of t h e subjugated for m e r city-states. Eventually, t h r o u g h tire p r o c e s s of integra tion a n d m e r g i n g , t h e n u m b e r of g o d s in t h e B a b y l o n i a n p a n t h e o n w a s gradually r e d u c e d . T h e O l d B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d (first half of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m ) is still relatively p o o r in architectural r e m a i n s . I n B a b y l o n itself, t h e h i g h level of t h e g r o u n d w a t e r has p r e v e n t e d t h e excavation of t h e a r c h i t e c t u r e of H a m m u r a b i ' s dynasty. C o n t e m p o r a r y M a r i , o n t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s , m a y b e t h e b e s t - r e s e a r c h e d e x a m p l e for t h a t p e r i o d . R e m a i n s of palace buildings h a v e b e e n f o u n d in O l d B a b y l o n i a n L a r s a , U r u k , a n d possibly also in E s h n u n n a . T e m p l e buildings are d e m o n s t r a t e d in m a n y places, a n d at Sadupp u m (Tell H a r m a l ) , n e a r B a g h d a d , a n O l d B a b y l o n i a n city, a n d at U r , residential q u a r t e r s are recognizable. T h r e e - d i m e n s i o n a l s c u l p t u r e a n d reliefs are still scantily r e p r e s e n t e d ; t h e b e s t k n o w n is t h e stela of H a m m u r a b i with t h e laws, w h i c h s h o w s t h e k i n g in a gesture of supplication before t h e s u n g o d S h a m a s h , a m o n u m e n t actually f o u n d in t h e E l a m i t e city of Susa. T h e terra-cotta reliefs typical of t h e O l d B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d o c c u r in great n u m b e r s , h o w e v e r , offering a n i m p r e s s i o n of t h e t r e a s u r e trove of motifs from this p e r i o d a n d reflecting t h e literary transmissions. In t h e glyptic arts, it is interesting t h a t initiation scenes m o r e often s h o w t h e w o r s h i p e r directly before t h e e n t h r o n e d g o d h e a d , suggesting p e r h a p s a greater sense of self-worth o n t h e p a r t of t h e h u m a n b e i n g . T h i s c o n c e p t m a y also b e reflected in t h e literature of this p e r i o d , a b o v e all in t h e G i l g a m e s h epic, in w h i c h t h e search for eternal y o u t h is a leitmotif. T h a t h u m a n b e i n g s , in c o n trast to t h e g o d s , g r o w old a n d die c o n t r i b u t e d t o existential d o u b t s a n d t o t h e search for explanations in other c o m p o sitions as well, leading t o a fully d e v e l o p e d o m e n literature as well as to d o u b t s a b o u t t h e righteousness of t h e w o r l d o r d e r established b y t h e g o d s . T h e city g o d of B a b y l o n , M a r d u k , b e g a n t o play a n i m p o r t a n t role a m o n g t h e divin ities of t h e B a b y l o n i a n p a n t h e o n d u r i n g t h e Old B a b y l o n i a n period.
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W i t h r e s p e c t to its a r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e Kassite p e r i o d in B a b ylonia (c. s e c o n d half of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE) is b e s t k n o w n t h r o u g h t h e excavations a t D u r K u r i g a l z u ( m o d e r n ' A q a r Q u f ) , w h o s e ziggurat is still an impressive ruin. F r o m K a s s i t e U r u k c o m e s t h e t e m p l e facade of bricks t h a t depicts t h e w a t e r divinities in h i g h relief. I n s c u l p t u r e t h e so-called kudurrus are n o t e w o r t h y ; in addition to t h e text of a l a n d transfer, these stone p r o c l a m a t i o n s r e p r o d u c e t h e symbols of the divine witnesses a n d also c o n t i n u e to be m a n u f a c t u r e d in file following period. I n t h e literary tradition, t h e Kassite p e r i o d primarily p r e s e r v e d a n d refined w h a t h a d b e e n h a n d e d d o w n ; the G i l g a m e s h stories, for e x a m p l e , were for m a t t e d into a c o h e r e n t e p i c . T h e city g o d of B a b y l o n , M a r d u k , rose t o the t o p of t h e p a n t h e o n . W h i l e there w a s already a recognizable separation b e t w e e n t h e literary l a n g u a g e a n d t h e p o p u l a r language of t h e B a b y l o n i a n s , in t h e K a s s i t e p e r i o d this d e v e l o p m e n t contin u e d in t h e p e r i o d of Assyrian d o m i n a n c e , as A r a m a i c p r o b ably m o r e a n d m o r e b e c a m e t h e B a b y l o n i a n s ' colloquial lan g u a g e . I n their official inscriptions a n d learned tradition, h o w e v e r , t h e Babylonians c o n t i n u e d to u s e the Babylonian l a n g u a g e a n d c u n e i f o r m writing, t h e tradition, essentially, b y w h i c h t h e y are k n o w n t o d a y . It is n o t until t h e N e o B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d (604-539 BCE) t h a t t h e architecture a n d art of t h e Babylonians a r e again better attested. At t h a t time N e b u c h a d r e z z a r II h a d t h e city of B a b y l o n rebuilt as his s p l e n d i d residence city. I n t h e p r o c e s s , large colored glazed bricks w e r e u s e d to cover t h e walls. I n his official inscrip tions, N e b u c h a d r e z z a r consciously affiliated himself with t h e Old Babylonian p e r i o d , w h e n a fairly sizable e m p i r e h a d similarly b e e n ruled f r o m B a b y l o n . [See also Akkade; ' A q a r Quf; Babylon; E r i d u ; E s h n u n n a ; G i r s u a n d L a g a s h ; Isin; Kassites; Khafajeh; K i s h ; Larsa; M a r i ; N i p p u r ; S u m e r i a n s ; U b a i d ; U r ; U r u k - W a r k a ; and Ziggurat. In addition, see M e s o p o t a m i a , article on Ancient Mesopotamia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bottero, Jean. Mesopotamia: 1992.
Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods. Chicago,
Collon, D o m i n i q u e . First Impressions: East. Chicago, 1988.
Cylinder Seals in the Ancient
Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia: gamesh, and Others. Oxford, 1989. F r a m e , G r a n t . Babylonia 1992.
689-627
Creation,
the Flood, Gil
B. C: A Political History.
Frayne, Douglas R. Old Babylonian Period (2003-1595 1990.
Near
Istanbul,
B. C.j. T o r o n t o ,
H r o u d a , Barthel, ed. Der Alte Orient: Geschichte und Kultur des alten Vorderasiens. M u n i c h , 1991. Klengel, H o r s t , ed. Kullurgeschichte Klengel, Horst. Konig Hammurapi
des alten Vorderasien. Berlin, 1989. und der Alltag Babylons. Zurich,
1991. Oates, J o a n . Babylon. Rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1986. O r t h m a n n , Winfried, ed. Der Alte Orient. Propylaen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 14. Berlin, 1975.
262
BADE, WILLIAM FREDERIC
Postgate, J. N . Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. L o n d o n , 1994. Roaf, Michael. Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. N e w York, 1990. Westbrook, Raymond. " C u n e i f o r m Law Codes and the Origins of Leg islation." Zeitschrifl fur Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archdologie 79 (1989): 2 0 1 - 2 2 2 . EVELYN KLENGBL-BKANDT
Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
M c C o w n , Chester C . Tell en-Nasbeh, vol. 1, Archaeological and Histor ical Residts. Berkeley, 1947. W a m p l e r , Joseph C. Tell en-Nasbeh, vol. 2, The Pottery. Berkeley, 1 9 4 7 . Zorn, Jeffrey R. " T h e Bade Institute of Biblical Archaeology." Biblical Archaeologist 5 1 . 1 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 3 6 - 4 5 . Reviews the Institute's history, p u r pose, a n d displays, with m a n y excellent illustrations. Zorn, Jeffrey R. "William Frederic B a d e . " Biblical Archaeologist 5 1 . 1 (1988): 2 8 - 3 5 . T h e latest a n d most comprehensive account of Bade's work, with a bibliography of his scholarly contributions. JEFFREY R . ZORN
BADE, WILLIAM FREDERIC
(1871-1936), p r o fessor of O l d T e s t a m e n t literature a n d Semitic languages a n d excavator of t h e site of Tell e n - N a s b e h n o r t h w e s t of Jerusalem (1926, 1927,1929, 1932, a n d 1935). B a d e t a u g h t at t h e Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, from 1902 until his death. A l t h o u g h n o t teamed as a n a r chaeologist, B a d e carried o u t his excavation at T e l l e n N a s b e h based o n t h e highest s t a n d a r d s of his d a y . H e cleared a b o u t two thirds of t h e site, i n t e n d i n g t o test its iden tification with biblical M i z p a h of Benjamin, w h i c h is n o w generally accepted. T h e m e t h o d h e e m p l o y e d w a s t h e s o called Reisner-Fisher m e t h o d , dividing t h e tell into 10-meter squares and excavating in strips. Following t h e excavation, the strips were filled in. B a d e kept meticulous r e c o r d s , i n cluding p l a n s , p h o t o g r a p h s , a n d descriptions of a b o u t t w e n t y - t h r e e - t h o u s a n d artifacts, all of t h e m d r a w n to scale, Bade's fieldwork ranks above t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y excavations at B e t h - S h e m e s h a n d B e t h - S h e a n , a n d below those a t M e giddo a n d Tell Beit M i r s i m . Bade died after t h e final season at T e l l e n - N a s b e h so t h a t the excavation's final r e p o r t w a s p r e p a r e d b y his colleague, Chester C . M c C o w n , a n d chief recorder, J o s e p h C . W a m pler (1947). B a d e ' s publication o f t h e s i t e i s generally limited to preliminary reports of the early c a m p a i g n s a n d short a r ticles o n specific finds. Although m a n y excavators before h i m h a d written brief s u m m a r i e s of tiieir methodologies as prefaces o r a p p e n d i c e s to their r e p o r t s , B a d e ' s A Manual of Excavation in the Near East was t h e first v o l u m e written as a n i n d e p e n d e n t a c c o u n t of t h e work of an excavation a n d t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of its methodology. T o d a y , t h e B a d e Institute of Biblical A r c h a e ology in Berkeley h o u s e s a m u s e u m whose displays of Tell e n - N a s b e h materials illuminate daily life in t h e ancient I s rael. [See also N a s b e h , Tell en-.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "William Frederic Bade, Jan. 2 2 , 1 8 7 1 - M a r c h 4 , 1 9 3 6 . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 62 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 4 - 5 . Short critical review of Bade's life. Bade, William Frederic. A Manual of Excavation in the Near East. Berke ley, 1934. A must for those interested in the development of archae ological methodology in Syria-Palestine, describing t h e state of the art in the 1930s.
BADIAT ASH-SHAM,
t h e s t e p p e lands of s o u t h eastern Syria, eastern J o r d a n , a n d w e s t e r n Iraq. Rainfall i n this region is insufficient for agriculture, as a result, t h e lands were, a n d still are, primarily u s e d b y n o m a d i c h e r d e r s , vis ited b y h u n t e r s , a n d crossed b y traders. T h e region is divided into t w o distinct e n v i r o n m e n t a l zones, t h e harm, a r o u g h , r o c k - s t r e w n basaltic region, a n d the hamad, o p e n , gravel-covered l i m e s t o n e plains. W a t e r is scarce b u t t h e r e a r e three major oases, a n u m b e r of wells, and also areas w h e r e water is held in pools for s o m e m o n t h s after t h e winter rains. T h e m a i n oases are a t a l - K o w m i n t h e n o r t h , P a l m y r a in central Syria, a n d a l - A z r a q in eastern J o r dan. T h e Badiat a s h - S h a m w a s u s e d sporadically t h r o u g h o u t t h e prehistoric p e r i o d s . Paleolithic sites h a v e b e e n f o u n d a r o u n d t h e oases, b u r i e d u n d e r several m e t e r s of later d e position. K e b a r a n c a m p sites (c. 15,000-10,000 BCE) are also f o u n d near major water sources. I n t h e N a t u f i a n p e r i o d (c. 10,000-9,500 BCE), w h e n settlements in t h e v e r d a n t areas w e r e b e c o m i n g larger a n d m o r e p e r m a n e n t , sites w i t h stone h u t s a n d heavy grinding tools w e r e established o n t h e edges of t h e region, in areas w h e r e t h e rainfall w a s highest. I n t h e early Neolithic p e r i o d (c. 8500-6000 BCE), t h e area was u s e d b y h u n t e r - g a t h e r e r s . T o w a r d t h e e n d of tiiat p e riod, t h e g r o u p s d e v e l o p e d sophisticated h u n t i n g t e c h n i q u e s , u s i n g stone o r b r u s h w o o d enclosures t o t r a p large h e r d s of g a m e . I n t h e late N e o l i t h i c p e r i o d (c. 6000-5000 BCE) sheep a n d goat h e r d i n g were i n t r o d u c e d t o t h e region. S h e e p a n d goat w e r e already b e i n g k e p t as d o m e s t i c a t e d animals in villages of t h e v e r d a n t z o n e , b u t this e x p a n s i o n into t h e steppe m a r k e d t h e b e g i n n i n g of a pastoral n o m a d i c way of life t h a t h a s always b e e n t h e e c o n o m i c m a i n s t a y of the peoples of t h e badia. [See S h e e p a n d G o a t s ; Pastoral N o m a d i s m . ] I n t h e Chalcolithic a n d Early B r o n z e p e r i o d s (fourth-third millennia B C E ) , villages were established o n t h e western margins of d i e s t e p p e , specifically in t h e H a u r a n region. B y t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, a series of fortified settlements a n d stations g r e w u p o n t h e m o r e v e r d a n t fringes of t h e badia. A l t h o u g h t h e a r c h a e o l o g ical r e c o r d for t h e early historic p e r i o d s is still limited, these sites f o r m a b a c k g r o u n d t o m o r e extensive evidence from textual sources, particularly t h e archives of t h e R o y a l Palace at M a r i o n t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s River. I n t h e early s e c o n d
B A G A T T I , BELLARMLNO m i l l e n n i u m BCE, t h e kings of M a r i r u l e d over lands u s e d b y s e m i n o m a d i c s h e p h e r d - f a r m e r s w h o g r a z e d their flocks of s h e e p a n d g o a t s in t h e badia
d o w n as far as P a l m y r a a n d t h e
s t e p p e to t h e east of D a m a s c u s a n d also r a i d e d P a l m y r a a n d n o r t h to Q a t n a . F a r t h e r s o u t h a t this t i m e , t h e badia w a s u s e d in w i n t e r a n d s p r i n g b y h u n t e r - h e r d e r s . By d i e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, camel h e r d i n g w a s i n t r o d u c e d , a n d t h e badia b e c a m e n o t only p a s t u r e l a n d for camel b r e e d e r s , b u t also t h e c r o s s r o a d s of several major t r a d e r o u t e s b e t w e e n u r b a n centers in M e s o p o t a m i a , Syria-Pal estine, a n d Arabia. [See C a m e l s . ] B y t h e time of t h e R o m a n c o n q u e s t of w e s t e r n Asia, d i e n o m a d s of t h e badia w e r e e c o nomically sophisticated a n d m a n y w e r e literate, as is attested b y n u m e r o u s inscriptions a n d graffiti carved o n rocks t h r o u g h o u t t h e region. R e l a t i o n s b e t w e e n t h e R o m a n s a n d t h e A r a b s involved b o t h conflict a n d c o o p e r a t i o n . T h e R o m a n s c o n s t r u c t e d frontier p o s t s (limes Arabians), fort at a l - A z r a q , o n t h e m a r g i n s of t h e badia,
s u c h as t h e
to monitor the
activities of t h e A r a b s . [See L i m e s Arabicus.] By t h e sixth c e n t u r y CE, m a n y of t h e t r i b e s of t h e badia
had converted to
Christianity; s o m e h a d e n t e r e d i n t o a client relationship w i t h t h e B y z a n t i n e g o v e r n m e n t , a s s u m i n g c o n t r o l over t h e s t e p pic b o r d e r l a n d s w i t h t h e P e r s i a n s . T h e s e client " k i n g s " (Ghassanids) began an ambitious building program t h r o u g h o u t t h e area. D u r i n g this time, m o n a s t e r i e s a n d h e r m i t s ' retreats were f o u n d e d in t h e s t e p p e . T h e r e m a y h a v e b e e n o n e s u c h religious e s t a b l i s h m e n t at Q a s r B u r q u ' , d e e p in t h e s t e p p e o n t h e eastern e d g e of t h e harra.
T h e coming
of Islam saw further b u i l d i n g activity in t h e badia, w h i c h p r o d u c e d t h e m u l t i p u r p o s e d e s e r t castles, s u c h as Q a s r alH a y r (East a n d W e s t ) , Jebel Seys, d i e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n at Q a s r B u r q u ' , a n d Q a s r ' A m r a , a m o n g m a n y others. After t h e early ' A b b a s i d p e r i o d , archaeological r e c o r d s are restricted t o inscriptions, mostly of a religious n a t u r e , a n d sherd scat ters at various sites. [See also A z r a q ; M a r i ; P a l m y r a ; Q a s r al-Hayr a l - G h a r b i ; Q a s r a l - H a y r a s h - S h a r q i ; and Q a s r B u r q u ' . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dentzer, Jean-Marie, ed. Hauran I: Recherches archeologiques sur la Syrie du Sud a l'epoque hellinistique et romaine. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 124. Paris, 1985. Study of the H a u r a n in the R o m a n period, including historical geography a n d data from surveys a n d excavations. G r a b a r , Oleg, et al. City in the Desert: Qasr al-Hayr East. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1978. Detailed architectural report o n one of the major m o n u m e n t s of the later historical periods in the Badiat ash-Sham. H e l m s , S. W . Early Islamic Architecture of the Desert: A Bedouin Station in Eastern Jordan. E d i n b u r g h , 1990. Study of an early Islamic station in the badia, with a useful a c c o u n t of t h e history of n o m a d i c peoples in the Badiat a s h - S h a m . M a t t h e w s , Victor H . Pastoral Nomadism in the Mari Kingdom, ca. 1830-1760 B.C. A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental Research, Disserta tion Series, 3. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1978. Detailed discussion of the evidence for pastoral n o m a d s in t h e M a r i archives. Parker, S. T h o m a s . Romans and Saracens: A History of the Arabian Fron
263
tier. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Series, 6. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1986. Intensive a n d detailed survey of the limes Arabicus. Poidebard, Antoine. La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie. Paris, 1934. Early aerial photographs of R o m a n a n d other sites in a n d a r o u n d the Badiat ash-Sham. M a n y of the sites have n o w disappeared. Sartre, M a u r i c e , Trois etudes sur I'Arable romaine at byzantine. Collection L a t o m u s , vol. 178. Brussels, 1982. Detailed study of epigraphic and textual evidence for the pre-Islamic periods in Arabia. ALISON V . G . BETTS
B A G A T T I , B E L L A R M L N O (1905-1990), F r a n c i s c a n p r i e s t w h o s e research a n d discoveries sparked a lively interest in Judaeo-Christianity a n d p r o v i d e d evidence for t h e Christian p r e s e n c e in t h e H o l y L a n d before t h e era of C o n stantine. After obtaining a d e g r e e in Christian archaeology in R o m e , Bagatti t a u g h t at t h e S t u d i u m Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m in Jerusalem for a l m o s t fifty years. H e excavated at C o m m o d i l l a ' s c e m e t e r y in R o m e a n d in different p a r t s of the H o l y L a n d : t h e Beatitudes S h r i n e , t h e Visitation at ' E i n K e r e m , E m m a u s / Q u b e i b e h , B e t h l e h e m , t h e M t . of Olives, Nazareth, M t . Carmel, and Khirbet el-Mukhayyat (Mt. N e b o ) . H i s essays o n t h e C h u r c h e s of t h e C i r c u m c i s i o n a n d of Gentility a n d o n a n c i e n t Christian villages in Galilee, Sa maria, J u d e a ( J u d a h ) , a n d t h e N e g e v are indispensable for a n y o n e interested in t h e history of Christianity in t h e Holy L a n d . Bagatti's m e t h o d o l o g i c a l principle, ever p r e s e n t in his research, w a s a n a p p r o a c h u s i n g b o t h m o n u m e n t s a n d d o c u m e n t s . T h i s a c c o u n t s for t h e n u m e r o u s references to his torical a n d literary sources in his work. [See also B e t h l e h e m ; E m m a u s ; F r a n c i s c a n C u s t o d y of t h e
H o l y L a n d ; Jerusalem; N a z a r e t h ; and N e b o , M o u n t . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bagatti, Bellarmino, a n d J. T . Milik. Gli scavi del "Dominus Flevit" (Monte Oliveto). S t u d i u m Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m (SBF), Collectio Maior, 13. Jerusalem, 1958. See Part 1, " L a necropoli del pcriodo romano." Bagatti, Bellarmino. Excavations in Nazareth, vol. 1, From the Beginning till the XII Century. S B F , Collectio Maior, 17. Jerusalem, 1969. Bagatti, Bellarmino. Ancient Christian Villages of Galilee (1971). S B F , Collectio M i n o r , 13. Jerusalem, in press. Bagatti, Bellarmino. The Church from the Circumcision: History and Ar chaeology of Judaeo-Christians. T r a n s l a t e d by Eugene H o a d e . S B F , Collectio M i n o r , 2. Jerusalem, 1971. Bagatti, Bellarmino. The Church from the Gentiles in Palestine: History and Archaeology. T r a n s l a t e d by E u g e n e H o a d e . S B F , Collectio M i nor, 4. Jerusalem, 1971. Bagatti, Bellarmino, et al. New Discoveries at the Tomb of Virgin Mary in Gethsemane. S B F , Collectio M i n o r , 17. Jerusalem, 1975. Bagatti, Bellarmino, a n d A. Battista. Edizione critica del testo arabo "Historia Iosephi Fabri Lignarii" e ricerche sulla sua origine. S B F , Collectio M i n o r , 20. Jerusalem, 1978. Bagatti, Bellarmino, a n d E m m a n u e l e Testa. / / Golgota e la Croce: Ri cerche storico-archeologiche. S B F , Collectio Minor, 21. Jerusalem, 1978. Bagatti, Bellarmino, Ancient Christian Villages of Samaria (1979). S B F , Collectio M i n o r , 19. Jerusalem, in press.
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Bagatti, Bellarmino, and D o n a t o Baldi. Saint Jean-Baptiste dans les sou venirs de sa Patrie. S B F , Collectio M i n o r , 27. Jerusalem, 1980. Bagatti, Bellarmino. Ancient Christian Villages of Judah and the Negeb (1983). SBF, Collectio Minor, 24. Jerusalem, in press. Bagatti, Bellarmino, and Eugenio Alliata. Gli scavi di Nasaret, vol. 2, Dal secolo XII ad oggi. SBF, Collectio Maior, 17. Jerusalem, 1984. Bottini, Giovanni Claudio. "Bibliografia di Padre Bellarmino Bagatti, ofm." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annutts 40 (1990): 3 9 7 442. Bottini, Giovanni Claudio. " I n memoriam: Bellarmino Bagatti, ofm." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annum 40 (1990): 538-540. Padre Bellarmino Bagatti: Francescano, saccrdote, archeologo, SBF, M u seum 9. Florence and Jerusalem, 1 9 9 1 . Includes a bibliography of Bagatti's work. T e s t a , Emmanuele, et al., eds. Studia Hierosolymitana in onore del P. Bellarmino Bagatti, vol. I , Studi archeologici; vol. 2, Studi esegetici. SBF, Collectio Maior, 22-23. Jerusalem, 976. J
a series of p o n t o o n bridges t h a t could b e c u t f r o m their m o o r i n g s , d e n y i n g potential enemies access t o t h e caliph's flank. T h e built waterways similarly served as n a t u r a l b a r riers in time of attack. T h e first major s t r u c t u r e to b e erected w a s t h e R o u n d City, called M a d i n a t al-Salam. It was built on t h e site of an old h a m l e t on t h e w e s t side of the river t h a t w a s called B a g h d a d . T h a t n a m e was s u b s e q u e n t l y applied t o t h e entire u r b a n area. Before the f o u n d i n g of the ' A b b a s i d city, t h e r e w e r e a n u m b e r of villages in the general area. T h e s e w e r e divided a m o n g four administrative districts o n b o t h sides of t h e Tigris: Q a t r a b b u l , B a d u r a y a , N a h r B u q , a n d K a l w a d h a . A small m a r k e t area k n o w n as t h e T u e s d a y M a r k e t w a s sit-. u a t e d on b o t h sides of t h e river, t o service t h e i n h a b i t a n t s of t h e four districts.
GIOVANNI CLAUDIO BOTTINI
B A G H D A D , t h e major administrative center of the ' A b basid caliphate (750-1258 CE) a n d the capital of t h e m o d e r n state of Iraq (33°26'i8" N , 44°23'9" E ) . T h e city was founded in 762 CE by t h e second 'Abbasid caliph A b u Ja'far al-Mansur. Previously, the ' A b b a s i d rulers h a d established the center of their administration at a n u m b e r of sites in Iraq, each of w h i c h w a s called al-Hashimiyyah. It w o u l d a p p e a r t h a t the 'Abbasids preferred to build their administrative complexes in the vicinity of established u r b a n centers, b u t they always left a discreet distance between an area reserved for the g o v e r n m e n t a n d military a n d the u r b a n p o p u l a t i o n . In this way they h o p e d t o p r o v i d e for security while availing themselves of nearby g o o d s a n d services. T h e p a t t e r n seems to have b e e n e m p l o y e d at B a g h d a d as well. T h e caliph's decision t o seek a new location at w h i c h to build still a n o t h e r administrative center was conditioned by security needs. A l - M a n s u r ' s c u r r e n t administrative center was situated in the general vicinity of K u f a h , a city k n o w n for its residual s u p p o r t of Shi'i causes. After a lengthy search, in which h e followed the course of the Tigris River as far as M o s u l , the caliph decided to c o n s t r u c t a palace complex at tire junction of the Tigris a n d the Sarat Canal, the latter a c o n s t r u c t e d w a t e r w a y t h a t bifurcated from the E u p h r a t e s River. T h i s particular location offered certain strategic a n d geographic advantages. T h e Sarat, w h i c h was d e e p e n o u g h to allow for commercial traffic, e n a b l e d the caliph to utilize I r a q ' s t w o major river systems: t h e Tigris a n d t h e E u p h r a t e s . M o r e o v e r , the city was astride t h e major overland highways a n d pilgrimage routes. B a g h d a d thus b e c a m e the commercial as well as geographic epicenter of t h e newly established ' A b b a s i d regime. T h e palace c o m p l e x itself was s u r r o u n d e d by t h r e e bodies of water: t h e Tigris a n d t h e u p p e r and lower a r m s of t h e Sarat. T h e T i g r i s , a wide, u n d u l a t i n g river, could n o t b e forded at the site of the city. T h r o u g h o u t the history of B a g h d a d , m o v e m e n t across the Tigris was funneled t h r o u g h
T h e construction of a major edifice o n a sparsely settled site r e q u i r e d an organized a n d highly efficient set of w o r k p r o c e d u r e s . It w a s n o t until a large labor force h a d b e e n a s s e m b l e d that c o n s t r u c t i o n was actually b e g u n , a n d it t o o k four years to c o m p l e t e all the major elements of t h e R o u n d City, thus allowing the caliph time to transfer his old capital from near K u f a h . W i t h tens of t h o u s a n d s of workers a s s e m bling from the outlying districts a n d f r o m areas even farther r e m o v e d , t h e skilled a n d unskilled laborers, the artisans, a n d t h e military w h o k e p t o r d e r all r e q u i r e d h o u s i n g a n d access t o established m a r k e t s for services. A l - M a n s u r ' s capital therefore a s s u m e d a quality of p e r m a n e n c e in places b e y o n d the walls, even before t h e R o u n d City w a s c o m p l e t e d . T h e u r b a n area a r o u n d its original walls eventually d e v e l o p e d into a sprawling c o m p l e x of i n t e r d e p e n d e n t e l e m e n t s with m a r k e t s , m o s q u e s , a n d cemeteries. T h e area b e l o w t h e S a r a t C a n a l , w h i c h c o n t a i n e d t h e T u e s d a y M a r k e t , developed into the great c o m m e r c i a l s u b u r b called a l - K a r k h a n d w a s inhabited by t h e general p o p u l a c e . T h e area n o r t h of t h e S a r a t a n d b e y o n d the R o u n d City w a s originally set aside for billeting the a r m y . T h e R o u n d C i t y w a s n o t a c o n v e n t i o n a l city. It c o n t a i n e d n o e c o n o m i c infrastructure whatsoever, a n d strict p r e c a u tions were taken to limit access b y t h e general p o p u l a c e . It w a s m o r e correctly an e n o r m o u s p a l a c e c o m p l e x t h a t h o u s e d t h e residence a n d m o s q u e of t h e caliph, the resi dences of his y o u n g e r children, t h e agencies of g o v e r n m e n t , a n d residences for the g o v e r n m e n t b u r e a u c r a c y t h a t staffed t h e agencies of g o v e r n m e n t as well as a skeleton force of security p e r s o n n e l . T h e size of t h e c o m p l e x , 450 ha (1,132 acres) w a s u n p r e c e d e n t e d . T h o u g h only a p a l a c e c o m p l e x , it was, in fact, larger t h a n any u r b a n settlement in the Diyala plains, the area t h a t was the vast h i n t e r l a n d of B a g h d a d . T h e R o u n d City consisted of four architectural elements: o u t e r fortifications, an i n n e r residential area of s y m m e t r i cally arranged streets, a second i n n e r area of g o v e r n m e n t agencies, a n d , m o v i n g t o w a r d t h e center of t h e circle, a n i n n e r courtyard in w h i c h t h e caliph's p a l a c e a n d t h e adjoin ing F r i d a y m o s q u e w e r e situated. T h e o u t e r fortifications
BAGHDAD w e r e two c o n c e n t r i c walls s e p a r a t e d b y a n intenallum. The i n n e r wall, d i e city's major protective wall, w a s flanked b y r o u n d e l s . Access t o t h e residential area a n d t h e central c o u r t was gained t h r o u g h four e l a b o r a t e gateways a n d arcades b e g i n n i n g at t h e o u t e r wall a n d e x t e n d i n g t o t h e circular c o u r t . T h e four gate c o m p l e x e s w e r e situated along t h e central axis of t h e caliph's residence a n d t h u s f o r m e d t h e city's n o r t h east, n o r t h w e s t , s o u t h e a s t , a n d s o u t h w e s t q u a d r a n t s . T h e y originally c o n t a i n e d security forces p r o t e c t i n g t h e a p p r o a c h e s t o t h e central c o u r t . T h e a r c a d e system w a s s y m bolically, as well as functionally, a n extension of t h e caliph's d o m a i n . T h e p u r p o s e of t h e R o u n d C i t y w a s t o c o m b i n e t h e caliph's r e s i d e n c e a n d m o s q u e w i t h t h e agencies of g o v e r n m e n t , t h e residences of t h e r e g i m e ' s p u b l i c servants, a n d security forces. Access to t h e general p u b l i c was restricted a n d m o v e m e n t to t h e central c o u r t carefully m o n i t o r e d . T h e very size of t h e p a l a c e c o m p l e x , a n d t h e large a n d exclusive p o p u l a t i o n it c o n t a i n e d , m a d e it difficult to service a n d supply. A s a result, v a r i o u s distributive outlets w e r e p e r m i t t e d within t h e walls, b u t following a b r e a c h of security, t h e m e r c h a n t s w h o h a d b e e n p e r m i t t e d entry into t h e city w e r e r e m o v e d . T h e caliph, a w a r e t h a t his original p l a n for discrete g o v e r n m e n t a n d p r i v a t e sectors h a d b e e n c o m p r o m i s e d , m o v e d to a m o r e m o d e s t r e s i d e n c e outside t h e R o u n d City, along t h e T i g r i s . T h e caliph h a d previously b e g u n c o n s t r u c t i o n of a s e c o n d palace c o m p l e x across t h e river. T h i s c o n s t r u c t i o n o n t h e east side of t h e T i g r i s w a s c o m p l e t e d b y his son a n d successor, a l - M a h d i in 776 CE. T h e n e w area, called a r - R u s a f a h , or A s k a r a l - M a h d i , c o n t a i n e d a magnificent p a l a c e a n d F r i d a y m o s q u e t h a t w a s to serve as t h e residence of t h e heir a p p a r e n t . W h e n a l - M a h d i c a m e to p o w e r , h e took u p r e s i d e n c e in t h e palace built e x pressly for h i m . U n l i k e t h e R o u n d City, w h i c h h a d b e e n partiy c h o s e n for its a d v a n t a g e o u s location n e a r t h e T u e s d a y M a r k e t , t h e situating of a r - R u s a f a h was d e t e r m i n e d p r i marily b y its strategic location o p p o s i t e t h e g o v e r n m e n t sec tor o n t h e u p p e r west side of d i e river. T h i s created t w o p r o b l e m s : a lack of water a n d a lack of services in t h e a b sence of a major n e a r b y m a r k e t area. A l - M a h d i therefore e x t e n d e d feeder c h a n n e l s f r o m a canal n o r t h of t h e city a n d established a major m a r k e t n e a r t h e M a i n Bridge. It w a s called t h e T h i r s t M a r k e t a n d w a s likened t o t h e m a r k e t s of al-Karkh. I n t i m e , two large private n e i g h b o r h o o d s were d e v e l o p e d nearby: B a b a t - T a q , n e a r t h e m a i n b r i d g e c o n n e c t i n g arR u s a f a h with w e s t B a g h d a d , a n d a l - M u k h a r r i m , w h i c h ex t e n d e d s o u t h e a s t along t h e river, S u b s e q u e n t caliphs, alH a d i (d. 786 CE) a n d H a r u n al-Rashid (d. 809 C E ) , lived in individual palaces r a t h e r t h a n large c o m p l e x e s . T h e reign of al-Rashid is generally c o n s i d e r e d t h e zenith of g r o w t h in B a g h d a d . T h e city t h e n r e a c h e d its greatest limits in surface area a n d p o p u l a t i o n . T h e caliph's u n t i m e l y d e a t h in 809 b r o u g h t his s o n al~ A m i n t o p o w e r a n d p l u n g e d t h e Islamic state into a debili
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tating civil war. A s e c o n d son, t h e heir a p p a r e n t , a l - M a ' m u n , d i s p a t c h e d an a r m y against t h e capital a n d laid siege t o it. T h e chronicles d e s c r i b e w i d e s p r e a d devastation a n d suffering in graphic t e r m s , b u t closer e x a m i n a t i o n of these texts reveals t h a t t h e d a m a g e is grossly overestimated: all die major structures t h a t h a d b e e n d a m a g e d w e r e r e p a i r e d a n d functioning s h o r d y after d i e conflict e n d e d . D e s p i t e w i n n i n g t h e battle for B a g h d a d , a l - M a ' m u n r e m a i n e d at his stronghold in t h e eastern p r o v i n c e of K h u r a san. W h e n h e finally d i d settle in t h e city, it was in a m o d e s t p a l a c e o n t h e east side of t h e river. E v e n t h e n , d i e caliph, w h o never felt c o m f o r t a b l e in B a g h d a d , preferred to s p e n d his time in K h u r a s a n . W h e n a l - M a ' m u n died in 833, h e w a s s u c c e e d e d b y a third b r o t h e r , Caliph a l - M u ' t a s i m , w h o also resided in a m o d e s t r e s i d e n c e . T h e latter relied heavily o n military contingents r e c r u i t e d from a m o n g T u r k i s h c a p tives. T h e u n r u l y behavior of t h e T u r k s resulted in several altercations w i t h t h e local p o p u l a c e , causing a l - M u ' t a s i m t o leave t h e city altogether. T h e caliph t h e n f o u n d e d a rival administrative center at S a m a r r a , a b o u t 96 k m (60 mi.) u p stream, along t h e T i g r i s . W h e n t h e C a l i p h a l - M u ' t a d i d r e t u r n e d t o B a g h d a d in 892, h e built t h e first of a series of n e w caliphal palaces, collectively called t h e D a r al-Khilafah. T h e n e w caliphal enceinte, which w a s siatated in t h e s o u t h e a s t section of t h e u r b a n area, is described in t h e sources in great detail. M a g n i f i c e n t residences, exquisitely a p p o i n t e d , a n d featuring u n u s u a l elements are m e n t i o n e d t h a t i n c l u d e a zoological g a r d e n a n d fantastic mechanical devices. T h i s i m p r e s s i v e architectural a c h i e v e m e n t w a s to b e t h e last major caliphal c o n s t r u c t i o n effort. Witii t h e cal iphate's declining f o r t u n e s , t h e city b e g a n to shrink in size a n d p o p u l a t i o n . B e g i n n i n g w i t h t h e Buyid h e g e m o n y in 945, d i e caliphs were increasingly r e d u c e d t o t h e role of figure h e a d s . T h e B u y i d s , i n d e e d , w e n t so far as to build a major series of palaces in t h e n o r t h e a s t section of t h e city a b o v e ar-Rusafah t h a t was i n t e n d e d to rival t h e splendid residence of their d e jure p a t r o n s . T h i s c o n s t r u c t i o n was m o r e t h a n offset, h o w e v e r , b y t h e b r e a k d o w n of o r d e r a n d d i e decline of local n e i g h b o r h o o d s . T h e chronicles describing the events of t h e t e n t h a n d eleventh centuries indicate a p a t t e r n of religious conflict, e c o n o m i c dislocation, a n d w i d e s p r e a d decay. W h e n ITulegii, t h e M o n g o l , c o n q u e r e d B a g h d a d in 1258, effectively e n d i n g t h e ' A b b a s i d r e g i m e , h e c o n q u e r e d a hollow shell of a o n c e - p r o u d city. W r i t i n g a b o u t B a g h d a d , t h e great g e o g r a p h e r Y a q u t (d. 1225 CE) describes a series of t r u n c a t e d n e i g h b o r h o o d s at s o m e distance from o n e an other, w h e r e t h e r e h a d a t o n e t i m e b e e n a c o n t i n u o u s line of o c c u p a t i o n . T h i s p a t t e r n c o n t i n u e d until t h e twentieth century, T h e dimensions of t h e m e d i e v a l city and t h e extent of its p o p u l a t i o n are difficult to g a u g e . T h e sources give exact figures for t h e surface area in varying meteorological sys t e m s . If these figures a r e a c c u r a t e , t h e city w o u l d have cov ered m o r e t h a n 7,000 h a (17,290 acres). T h i s w o u l d m a k e
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B a g h d a d five time larger t h a n t e n t h - c e n t u r y C o n s t a n t i n o p l e a n d thirteen times larger t h a n Sasanian C t e s i p h o n , hitherto the largest city k n o w n in t h e Diyala plains. A l t h o u g h this figure reflects B a g h d a d ' s s u b u r b a n districts as well, there is reason to believe t h a t t h e greater metropolitan area w a s heavily occupied. T h e r e is n o hint of a n y census in t h e sources, b u t various c r u d e efforts were a t t e m p t e d t o calcu late the population, usually b y t h e use of multipliers (i.e., the n u m b e r of d o c t o r s , attendants at b a t h h o u s e s , foods c o n s u m e d , a n d so forth). T h e figures obtained from this m e t h o d are, however, unreliable. I n m o d e r n B a g h d a d , t h e density of o c c u p a t i o n i n t h e oldest n e i g h b o r h o o d s is a b o u t 200 people p e r hectare, w h i c h agrees with the m o s t conser vative estimates for t h e p o p u l a t i o n of medieval C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . T h e physical a n d h u m a n dimensions of medieval B a g h d a d m u s t have b e e n vast b y a n y s t a n d a r d of m e a s u r e m e n t , however, b e c a u s e t h e greater u r b a n area did n o t r e p resent a single city b u t a series of u r b a n settlements collec tively known as B a g h d a d . BIBLIOGRAPHY Creswell, K. A. C . Early Muslim Architecture, vol. r, Umayyads, A.D. 622-750 (1940). 2 d e d . Oxford, 1969. Herzfeld, Ernst, a n d Friedrich P . T . Sarre, ArcMologische Reise irn Euphrat- und Tigris-Gebiet. Vol. 2. Berlin, 1940. Lassner, Jacob. The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages: Text and Studies, Detroit, 1 9 7 0 . L e Strange, Guy. Baghdad during the 'Abbasid Caliphate. Oxford, 1900. Salmon, Georges. L'introduction topographique a I'histoire de Baghdad. Paris, 1904. JACOB LASSNER
B A H R A I N . T h e State of Bahrain is a n archipelago of thirty-three islands located in the Arabian Gulf, a b o u t 24 k m (15 mi.) from t h e east coast of Saudi Arabia at r o u g h l y 26 N , 5o°5o' E. Estimates of Bahrain's surface area vary c o n siderably, b u t t h e Bahraini Central Statistics Organisation p u t t h e figure a t 677.90 sq Ion (4,021 sq.mi.) in 1983. A l t h o u g h t h e climate of Bahrain is arid a n d rainfall is insuffi cient t o s u p p o r t d r y farming, t h e islands are underlain b y one of the richest aquifer systems in the world, w h i c h e n dowed Bahrain with a p e r m a n e n t water supply t h r o u g h o u t its history. 0
G e o m o r p h o l o g i c a l research a n d t h e study of sea-level changes in the Arabian Gulf have shown that the m a i n island of Bahrain did n o t b e c o m e separated from t h e A r a b i a n m a i n l a n d until a b o u t 5000-4000 BCE, w h e n t h e t r o u g h b e t w e e n Bahrain, S a u d i Arabia, a n d t h e Q a t a r peninsula b e c a m e i n u n d a t e d a t t h e p r e s u m e d climax of the w o r l d w i d e rise i n sea level k n o w n as d i e Flandrian transgression. T h i s accounts for t h e fact t h a t t h e earliest occupants of B a h r a i n w e r e t h e s a m e late prehistoric, stone-tool using p o p u l a t i o n as that found o n t h e m a i n l a n d in t h e fifth millennium. A l t h o u g h n o t a b u n d a n t , lithic sites have been n o t e d o n B a h r a i n
since the first D a n i s h r e c o n n a i s s a n c e in 1953 directed b y P . V. G l o b of the University of A a r h u s . T h e i n d u s t r y is c h a r acterized b y t h e u s e of pressure-flaked, t a n g e d , a n d / o r b a r b e d a r r o w h e a d s . A small e n c a m p m e n t excavated a t alM a r k h h a s yielded evidence of intensive fishing, as well as 143 sherds of T e r m i n a l o r P o s t - U b a i d 4 p o t t e r y , datable o n stylistic g r o u n d s t o a b o u t 3800 BCE. Interestingly, a later, aceramic p h a s e a t t h e site s h o w e d a substantial increase in sheep a n d goats ( a b o u t 33 p e r c e n t of t h e faunal collection), in h u n t e d m a m m a l s s u c h as d u g o n g a n d h a r e , a n d nearly six times as m u c h flint as f o u n d i n d i e early deposit. W i t h t h e exception of a single s h e r d of p a i n t e d J e m d e t N a s r p o l y c h r o m e p o t t e r y from a c o n t e x t o u t s i d e of t h e m u c h later B a r b a r t e m p l e (see b e l o w ) , n o e v i d e n c e has b e e n f o u n d of later f o u r t h m i l l e n n i u m o c c u p a t i o n o n B a h r a i n . I n d e e d , t h e r e is a g a p in t h e o c c u p a t i o n a l s e q u e n c e of B a h rain until t h e m i d d l e of d i e third m i l l e n n i u m , w h e n Early D y n a s t i c and/or Akkadian-related p o t t e r y a p p e a r s in d i e b a sal levels of the m a j o r settlement Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain. D a t i n g to t h e s a m e p e r i o d is a serie ancienne, o r Intercultural Style, soft-stone vessel, of M e s o p o t a m i a n or I r a n i a n origin, f r o m a grave in t h e burial c o m p l e x a t Saar ( u n p u b l i s h e d b u t il lustrated i n the Bahraini M i n i s t r y of I n f o r m a t i o n ' s c a l e n d a r for 1993). By t h e late t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , pottery, H a r a p p a n weights, a n d glyptic evidence s h o w t h a t B a h r a i n w a s b e c o m i n g i n t e g r a t e d into an international n e t w o r k of t r a d e linking M e s o p o t a m i a , t h e Gulf, Iran, Bactria, a n d t h e I n d u s Valley. It h a s b e e n difficult t o discover settlements of this period, b u t it a p p e a r s t h a t Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain w a s t h e p r i m a r y p o p u l a t i o n center o n B a h r a i n , while t h e t e m p l e s a t B a r b a r a n d D i r a z , t o t h e west, were i m p o r t a n t cult centers. I t w a s a t this t i m e t h a t t h e practice of b u r y i n g t h e d e a d in a b o v e - g r o u n d m o u n d s first b e c a m e c o m m o n . S o m e o f t h e earliest graves at Rifa a a n d H a m a d T o w n contain i m p o r t e d p a i n t e d U m m a n - N a r pottery a n d soft-stone f r o m t h e O m a n peninsula. c
Bahrain's i m p o r t a n c e grew d u r i n g t h e early s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, w h e n it a s s u m e d t h e role of t r a d e e n t r e p o t for w h i c h it is so justly f a m o u s . C o p p e r from M a g a n ( O m a n ) , a n d w o o d a n d ivory from M e l u h h a ( I n d u s Valley?), c h a n g e d h a n d s for silver, textiles, a n d s e s a m e oil from M e s o p o t a m i a . T h o u s a n d s of burial m o u n d s b e a r witness t o t h e thriving p o p u l a t i o n inhabiting the island a t this time. Several h u n d r e d years later, however, B a h r a i n fell p r e y t o t h e K a s site state in Babylonia, a t w h i c h t i m e a g o v e r n e r (Akk., sakkanakku) w a s installed o n the island. A n i m p o r t a n t , b u t only partially excavated building c o m p l e x a t Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain a n d m a n y graves, particularly at al-Hajjar, are t h e m a i n a r chaeological r e m a i n s from this p e r i o d . T h e p r e s e n c e of M i tanni C o m m o n Style cylinder seals a n d a h a n d f u l of c u n e iform tablets p r o v e t h a t B a h r a i n p a r t o o k of t h e s a m e p a n - W e s t Asian cultural t r e n d s a t this t i m e as its n o r t h e r n neighbors. P o t t e r y with post-Kassite a n d Isin II parallels w a s discovered b y a F r e n c h t e a m u n d e r t h e direction of M o -
BAHRAIN n i q u e K e r v r a n ( C N R S , Paris) in n e w s o u n d i n g s on Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain b e t w e e n 1979 a n d 1982, b u t little is as yet k n o w n of t h e late s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE on B a h r a i n . I n d e e d , t h e r e is n o substantial b o d y of data for B a h r a i n until t h e seventh or early sixth c e n t u r y BCE. A large r e s i d e n tial c o m p l e x o n t h e Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain, s o m e t i m e s incorrectly d u b b e d t h e palace of U p e r i (the king of D i l m u n attested in c u n e i f o r m sources from t h e r e i g n of S a r g o n I I ) , shows a g r o u n d p l a n t h a t recalls N e o - A s s y r i a n a n d N e o - B a b y l o n i a n palatial a n d d o m e s t i c a r c h i t e c t u r e . N e o - B a b y l o n i a n a n d / o r early A c h a e m e n i d glazed c e r a m i c b a t h t u b coffins, o n e of w h i c h c o n t a i n e d a n A c h a e m e n i d - t y p e b r o n z e wine set, w e r e d u g into t h e b u i l d i n g after it w e n t o u t of u s e . A h o a r d of scrap silver f o u n d b u r i e d in t h e r u i n s of t h e Kassite-era building described above c o n t a i n e d a p s e u d o - E g y p t i a n scaraboid seal ring, p r o b a b l y of P h o e n i c i a n m a n u f a c t u r e ; t h e h o a r d belongs to a category of silver h o a r d n o w well k n o w n at I r o n A g e sites in ancient Palestine, M e s o p o t a m i a , a n d I r a n d u r i n g t h e p e r i o d just p r i o r t o t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of c o i n age.
267
T h e fate of B a h r a i n u n d e r t h e A c h a e m e n i d s is a m a t t e r for speculation, a n d in spite of t h e large n u m b e r of burials dating to the Hellenistic p e r i o d , as well as building levels at Q a l ' a t al-Bahrain from t h a t era, little is k n o w n of t h e political status of t h e island, k n o w n as T y l o s (while the smaller M u h a r r a q was called A r a d o s ) , at t h e t i m e . T h e r e are, h o w e v e r , a c c o u n t s b y writers s u c h as T h e o p h r a s t u s t h a t describe B a h r a i n ' s flora a n d w a t e r r e s o u r c e s in great detail (Historia Plantarum 4.7.7-8, 5.4.7-8; De Causis Plantarum 2.5.5). S t r a b o (Geog. 16.3.4) a n d Pliny (Nat. Hist. 6.28.147; 12.21.38-23.40; 16.80.221) cover o t h e r topics, such as t h e origin of t h e P h o e n i c i a n s o n B a h r a i n a n d t h e location of t h e islands. I n t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, B a h r a i n w a s briefly ruled b y a s a t r a p of M e r e d a t , t h e king of C h a r a c e n e , w h o m a y h a v e b e e n installed in a fortress located at Qal'at al-Bahrain t h a t was reused d u r i n g t h e medieval era. B a h r a i n , identified b y t h e n a m e M e s m a h i k or M a s m a h i g (cf. S a m a h i g , t h e m o d e r n n a m e of a t o w n o n M u h a r r a q I s l a n d ) , later b e c a m e a p a r t of t h e Sasanian E m p i r e a n d was d i e seat of a N e s t o r i a n C h r i s t i a n bishopric (attested for t h e first time in 410 CE) t h a t b e c a m e involved in 676 CE in a revolt against t h e a u t h o r i t y of t h e h e a d of t h e N e s t o r i a n c h u r c h (catholicos) I s o ' y a h b III. B a h r a i n w a s k n o w n in Early A r a b i c sources as Awal, a n d it w a s n o t until t h e early elev e n t h c e n t u r y CE t h a t t h e celebrated P e r s i a n traveler N a s r - i K h u s r a u called t h e island B a h r a i n . Little remains of t h e Early Islamic era o n B a h r a i n , b u t t h e p r e s e n c e of C h i n e s e coins a n d porcelain in t h e fortress attest to links with S o u t h east Asia a n d lively c o m m e r c e prior to t h e c o m i n g of t h e P o r t u g u e s e in t h e early sixteenth century. [See also Qal'at al-Bahrain.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bibby, Geoffrey, Looking for Dilmun. N e w York, 1969. Popular account of the D a n i s h Gulf expedition, with primary reference to the work carried out on Bahrain and the search for D i l m u n . Hojlund, H e m m i n g , and H . H e l l m u t h Andersen. Qala'at al-Bahrain I. The Northern City Wall and the Islamic Fortress. Aarhus, 1994. First volume of the final publication of the work of the Danish expedition. Khalifa, Shaikha Haya A. al-, and Michael Rice, eds. Bahrain through the Ages: The Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1986. Proceedings of a confer ence held in 1983; touches on most aspects of Bahraini archae ology. L o m b a r d , Pierre, and M o n i k Kervran, eds. Bahrain National Museum Archaeological Collections, vol. I, A Selection of Pre-IslamicAntiquities from Excavations, 1954-1975. Bahrain, 1989. Catalog of objects in the Bahrain National M u s e u m . Potts, Daniel T . "Reflections on the History and Archaeology of Bah rain." Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985): 675-710. Critical review of a n u m b e r of studies in Bahraini archaeology that appeared in the early 1980s; contains a great deal of environmental and demographic information on Bahrain and extensive discussions of questions connected with D i l m u n .
BAHRAIN.
Barbar Temple. V i e w of t h e ashlar m a s o n r y of t h e t e m
p l e . (Courtesy D . Potts)
Potts, Daniel T . The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1990. General survey of die archaeology of the Gulf region, with reference to the occupation of Bahrain in all periods. Sanlaville, Paul, et al. "Modification du trace littoral sur la cote arabe
268
BALAWAT
du Golfe Persique en relation avec l'archeologie." In Deplacements des lignes de rivage en Mediterranee, p p . 2 1 1 - 2 2 2 . Paris, 1987. DANIEL T . POTTS
[See also Assyrians; Libraries a n d Archives; M e s o p o t a m i a , article on A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a ; N i n e v e h ; and the biography of Mallowan.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
B A L A W A T (Balawat), site of the ancient t o w n of I m g u r Enlil ( " T h e god Enlil was favourably i n c l i n e d " ) , located a b o u t 15 k m (9 mi.) n o r t h e a s t of N i m r u d (ancient K a l h u ) in n o r t h e r n Iraq (36°09' N , 43°3o' E ) . T h e t o w n walls e n close an area nearly s q u a r e in p l a n a n d approximately 52 h a (130 acres) in size. T h e m a i n m o u n d , where a palace a n d a t e m p l e dating to the N e o - A s s y r i a n p e r i o d have b e e n u n c o v ered, measures a b o u t 230 X 160 m . T h e p r i m a r y o c c u p a t i o n at t h e site dates to the n i n t h - s e v e n t h centuries BCE, a l t h o u g h evidence of earlier settlement in the U b a i d , U r u k , a n d M i d dle Assyrian periods has b e e n found on the m a i n m o u n d . Because the site was n o t a provincial capital in the N e o Assyrian period, its stibstantial size a n d impressive r e m a i n s at that time suggest that it functioned as a station on t h e r o a d from N i n e v e h to K i r k u k (ancient A r r a p h a ) , possibly situated near junctions with two other routes. T h e site w a s apparently a b a n d o n e d in t h e late seventh century BCE, w h e n the m o s t i m p o r t a n t Assyrian cities w e r e destroyed. E v i d e n c e of later Hellenistic o c c u p a t i o n has also b e e n found on t h e s u m m i t of the m a i n m o u n d . T h e site was first excavated in 1878 by the Iraqi H o r m u z d R a s s a m , acting on behalf of the British M u s e u m a n d p r o m p t e d by t h e accidental discovery at the site of b r o n z e relief fragments by a local gravedigger. R a s s a m u n c o v e r e d parts of a palace a n d discovered sets of b r o n z e b a n d s t h a t h a d b e e n used to decorate two of its m o n u m e n t a l d o o r s . T h e b a n d s depict military a n d h u n t i n g scenes a n d b e a r i n s c r i p tions indicating t h a t one set dates to t h e reign to A s h u r n a sirpal II (883-859 BCE) a n d the other, m o r e impressive set (currently on display in the British M u s e u m ) to the t i m e of his son, Shalmaneser III (858-824 BCE). R a s s a m also exca vated part of a t e m p l e , w h e r e stone foundation inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal w e r e found. T h e king states t h a t h e r e f o u n d e d the t o w n , gave it t h e n a m e Imgur-Enlil, a n d built a palace a n d a t e m p l e dedicated to M a m u (the g o d of d r e a m s ) . At t h e time, d o u b t s were cast on R a s s a m ' s claim that the b r o n z e b a n d s c a m e from this obscure site, b u t w h e n the site was reexcavated for the British School of A r c h a e ology in Iraq by M . E. L . M a l l o w a n in 1956-1957, a t h i r d set of b r o n z e d o o r b a n d s was found in the d o o r w a y leading into the a n t e r o o m of tire t e m p l e of M a m u . T h i s set bears a n inscription dating it to t h e t i m e of Ashurnasirpal II. A n ar chive of forty legal a n d e c o n o m i c d o c u m e n t s dating t o t h e late eighth and the seventh centuries BCE, with the majority c o m i n g from 697-671 BCE, was f o u n d in one r o o m of t h e temple. W o r k o n t h e site was briefly r e s u m e d in 1989 b y a British M u s e u m t e a m , with a surface survey of the area b e ing carried o u t by D . J. T u c k e r .
Curtis, John E. "Balawat." In Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discoveiy: The Work of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1932-1082, ed ited by John E. Curtis, p p . 1 1 3 - 1 1 9 . L o n d o n , 1982. Oates, David. "Balawat (Imgur Enlil): T h e Site a n d Its Buildings." Iraq 36 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 1 7 3 - 1 7 8 , pis. 2 4 - 2 7 . R e p o r t of the 1 9 5 6 - 1 9 5 7 excavations. Postgate, J. N . "Imgur-Enlil." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vor derasiatischen Archaologie, edited by Dietz O. E d z a r d , vol. 5, p p . 6 6 67. Berlin and N e w York, 1 9 7 6 . Concise overview (with a good bib liography) by a noted English scholar, published in the standard reference work for M e s o p o t a m i a n studies. Rassam, H o r m u z d . Asshur and the Land ofNimrod ( 1 8 9 7 ) . Rpt., W e s t m e a d , Eng., 1 9 7 1 . See pages 200-220. T u c k e r , D . J. "Representations of Imgur-Enlil on the Balawat G a t e s . " Iraq 56 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 0 7 - 1 1 6 . GRANT FRAME
B A L K . T h e vertical e a r t h wall b o r d e r i n g a n d facing a n area from w h i c h soil has b e e n r e m o v e d d u r i n g an excavation is k n o w n as a balk. Its w i d t h b e t w e e n t w o excavated areas is usually o n e m e t e r ; its height increases as excavation p r o ceeds d o w n w a r d . O n c e excavation has d e t e c t e d , defined, a n d r e m o v e d the archaeological soils a n d their related fea tures from a particular area, the adjacent balk contains a n d preserves a r e c o r d of t h e m — o f their c o n t e n t , context, a n d sequence. Balks initially help to u n d e r s t a n d a n d c o n t r o l t h e area u n der excavation. I n addition, the t o p of t h e balk facilitates the m o v e m e n t of workers a n d the r e m o v a l of excavated m a t e rial. Balks are also a significant p a r t of t h e survey grid, w h i c h enables the archaeologist t o i n t e r c o n n e c t t h e various p a r t s of the site u n d e r excavation. M o s t i m p o r t a n t is the r e c o r d of h u m a n and geological activity t h a t is p r e s e r v e d in tire balk. T h e face of t h e balk is thus typically closely e x a m i n e d d u r i n g the process of excavation. I n order for t h a t r e c o r d of activity to b e o b s e r v e d a c c u rately, interpreted, d r a w n , a n d p h o t o g r a p h e d for future analysis, the balk face m u s t b e k e p t horizontally level a n d vertically p l u m b (this assures t h a t the r e c o r d is u n i f o r m ) . F r e q u e n t scraping with a trowel, p u t t y knife, or even a b r o a d , flat s p a d e k e e p s it as s m o o t h a n d even as possible. B e c a u s e lighting direction a n d angle p l a y o n t h e level a n d t h e p l u m b (or p e r p e n d i c u l a r ) balk face, t h e y are critical t o t h e successful observation a n d a c c u r a t e r e a d i n g of a balk. O n c e it is d r a w n t o scale a n d p h o t o g r a p h e d u n d e r o p t i m a l lighting conditions, the balk face, or often an e x t e n d e d se q u e n c e of faces r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e side of a long t r e n c h or the cross-section of a building or succession of buildings, enters t h e archaeological r e c o r d as a p e r m a n e n t key to i n t e r p r e t i n g a site. T h i s visual recapitulation b e c o m e s the basis for a n
BALU'
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S«rf.tnjab
BALK.
Record of a balk face, A s a m p l e balk face s h o w i n g t h e spatial a n d c h r o n o l o g i c a l r e l a t i o n s h i p s
b e t w e e n v a r i o u s a r c h a e o l o g i c a l features of a site, i n c l u d i n g walls, debris layers, p i t s , h a r d surfaces or floors,
a n d v a r i o u s o t h e r artifacts. F r o m T e l M i q n e , field I I I , N E u , east s e c t i o n , 1993. (Courtesy
T e l M i q n e - E k r o n Excavation and Publication Project)
i n f o r m e d i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of t h e c o n t e x t a n d associations of a n y archaeological feature in t h e stratigraphic r e c o r d . [See also E x c a v a t i o n Strategy; E x c a v a t i o n Tools.]
B ALU' (el-Balu'), site l o c a t e d s o u t h of W a d i el-Mujib a n d a b o u t 5 k m (3 mi.) east of Jebel Shihan (elevation 1,063 a b o v e sea level), in d i e district of K e r a k , in central J o r d a n , ancient M o a b . B a l u is t h e largest I r o n A g e ruin in the area, in w h i c h all periods of o c c u p a t i o n are r e p r e s e n t e d , from t h e Early B r o n z e A g e t o M a m l u k t i m e s . T h e classical periods are n o t well r e p r e s e n t e d in t h e site's soutiiwestern quarter, w h e r e there are r e m a i n s only of a large M a m l u k village m e dieval A r a b travelers called S h i h a n . Interest in Balu' w a s sparked with d i e discovery m a d e b y R. H e a d in 1930 of t h e Stela of B a l u ' ( a b o u t 1.7 m h i g h ) , w h i c h shows a M o a b i t e " k i n g " b e t w e e n two E g y p t i a n g o d s . F o r iconographic r e a sons, t h e stela h a s b e e n d a t e d to t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. After t h e stela was found, t h r e e s o u n d i n g s b y J. W . Crowfoot were carried o u t a t t h e site (in 1933) b u t b o r e n o specific results. I n 1986, an intensive surface survey of Balu' revealed tiiat m
c
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dever, William G., a n d H . D . L a n c e eds. A Manual of Field Excavation: Handbook For Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. G o o d advice and still in print, this valuable resource offers die m o s t complete treatment of the care and b r e e d i n g of balks. M c i n t o s h , J. The Practical Archaeologist. N e w York, 1986. A n extremely well illustrated a n d readable introduction to the m e t h o d s and p r a c tice of archaeology. Renfrew, Colin, a n d Paul B a h n . Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. N e w York, 1991. In an otherwise useful work which makes extensive u s e of section drawings, Renfrew and Bahn offer a limited and ill-considered view of t h e utility of balks (cf. p p . 92-93). BARRY M .
GITTLEN
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BANIAS
the older part of t h e city (Late B r o n z e a n d Early Iron Ages) is the area immediately east a n d west of the impressive qasr (Ar., " c a s t l e " ) , w h i c h m a y date to t h e I r o n A g e a n d h a s u n d e r g o n e s o m e rebuilding in t h e N a b a t e a n or Early R o m a n period. T h e city h a d a defensive wall of the c a s e m a t e type, with a small gate t h a t faced east. D u r i n g t h e Iron I I A - B period the city limits were e x t e n d e d eastward a n d a n o t h e r defense wall w a s built, enlarging the city by a b o u t 200 m . Soundings in this area b r o u g h t to light a n inscription (. . .]tmlk[. . .) o n a basalt mortarium, or bowl. I n t h e Iron II period t h e city e x p a n d e d east-west for a b o u t 450-500 m. T h e casemate wall r u n s u p to a c o u r t y a r d h o u s e that, based o n its plan, t h e pottery found within it (including A s syrian-type carinated bowls), a n d a scaraboid E g y p t i a n bulla (dated t o c. 725 BCE a n d bearing t h e n a m e mn-k3r'j, c a n b e dated to an Assyrian or Babylonian p r e s e n c e in ancient Pal estine in the eighth-sixth centuries BCE. T h e excavated r o o m s h a d b e e n u s e d as a kitchen, reception hall, a n d a p o s sible chapel, w h i c h w a s concluded from their finds (pilgrim flask, female figurine, small masseba>). Because t h e walls of the h o u s e are still standing (to a height of a b o u t 1.70 m ) , almost all the doors h a v e their lintels in situ. A t t h e w e s t e r n wall of t h e h o u s e in a temenos-like area, t w o s t a n d i n g stones (massebot) still in situ h a v e been discovered. W e d g i n g stones at the foot of each h o l d t h e stones in a n u p r i g h t position. Broken animal figurines, b u r n t ashes a n d b o n e s from t h e immediate area suggest a religious m e a n i n g for these s t a n d ing stones. In t h e partially excavated casemate wall west of the h o u s e , large storage jars a n d kraters were found, as well as several rims of collared-rim jars (of t h e late t y p e ) — t h e first found south of W a d i el-Mujib, b u t in a n I r o n II context. W e s t of t h e qasr, a f a r m h o u s e was partially excavated. O n e r o o m a n d a courtyard represent the m o s t r e c e n t o c cupational s t r a t u m . I n t h e courtyard area a V - s h a p e d enclo sure apparently held goats a n d sheep d u r i n g t h e night. A tabun was located in t h e yard w h e r e t w o additional u n r o o f e d cell-like units h a d b e e n built adjacent to t h e n o r t h wall of the house. T h e c h a m b e r to t h e east contained m a n y r o u n d stones, a grinder, a n d a t r o u g h . D u r i n g a brief s o u n d i n g in 1994 three figurines (two female, o n e male) w e r e u n e a r t h e d u n d e r a n d close to the threshold leading from t h e c o u r t y a r d into the r o o m . T h e m o s t remarkable, almost c o m p l e t e , fig urine is the "pillar-type figurine" holding'a disk. T h e c h a m ber to t h e west was e m p t y , b u t it m a y have b e e n u s e d for storage. T h e areas u n e a r t h e d revealed the latest r e m a i n s of the city of Balu', which b e l o n g to t h e I r o n I I B - C period. T h e y in dicate a flourishing city during M o a b ' s vassalship u n d e r t h e Assyrians a n d Babylonians. [See also M o a b . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Crowfoot, J. W . " A n Expedition to Balu'ah." Palestine Exploration Quarterly Statement ( 1 9 3 4 ) : 7 6 - 8 4 , pis. 1 - 3 .
Fund
Horsfield, G e o r g e , and L . - H . Vincent. " C h r o n i q u e : U n e stele egyptomoabite au B a l o u ' a . " Revue Biblique 41 ( 1 9 3 2 ) : 4 1 7 - 4 4 4 , pis. 9 - 1 2 . Ward,William A,, and M . F . Martin. " T h e Balu'a Stele: A N e w T r a n scription with Palaeographic a n d Historical N o t e s . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of'Jordan 8-9 ( 1 9 6 4 ) : 5 - 2 9 . W e i p p e r t , Helga. Palastina in vorhellenistiseher Zeit. H a n d b u c h der A r chaologie, Vorderasien, 2 . 1 . M u n i c h , 1988. See pages 6 6 5 - 6 6 7 . Worschech, U d o F . Ch., et al. " T h e F o u r t h Survey Season in the N o r t h - W e s t A r d el-Kerak, a n d Soundings at Balu', 1 9 8 6 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 30 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 2 8 5 - 3 1 0 , pis. 57-65. Worschech, U d o F . C h . "Preliminary R e p o r t o n the S e c o n d C a m p a i g n at the Ancient Site of el-Balu' in 1 9 8 7 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : m - 1 2 1 , pis. 7 - 8 . Worschech, U d o F . C h . Die Beziehungen Moabs zu Israel undAgypten in der Eisenzeit. Agypten u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , vol. 1 8 . W i e s b a d e n , 1990. See pages 7 1 - 9 0 , 9 4 - 1 2 0 . Worschech, U d o F . Ch. "Ergebnisse der G r a b u n g von el-Balu', 1987: Ein Vorbericht." ZeitschriftdesDeutschenPalaslina-Vereins 106 ( 1 9 9 0 [ 1 9 9 1 ] ) : 8 6 - 1 1 3 , pis. 1 - 6 . Worschech, U d o F . C h . "Eine keilalphabetische Inschrift von elBalff~i" Ugarit-Forschungen 23 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 3 9 5 - 3 9 9 . Worschech, U d o F . C h . "Collared-Rim Jars aus M o a b : A n m e r k u n g e n zur Entwicklung u n d Verbreitung der Kriige mit 'Halswulst.' " Zeit schrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 107 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 4 9 - 1 7 0 . Worschech, U d o F . C h . "Figurinen aus el-Balu' (Jordanien)." schrift des Deutschen Palaslina-Vereins (forthcoming). Worschech, U d o F . Ch. " A r M o a b . " Zeitschrift fiir die Wissenschaft (forthcoming).
Zeit
alttestamentliche
U D O WORSCHECH
B A N I A S , site of ancient C a e s a r e a Philippi, located at t h e s o u t h e r n extremity of M t . H e r m o n , b e t w e e n t h e n o r t h e r n H u l a Valley a n d t h e w e s t e r n slope of t h e G o l a n H e i g h t s , in a region blessed with a n a b u n d a n c e of w a t e r ( m a p reference 2948 X 2150). T h e c o p i o u s a m o u n t s of precipitation t h a t fall in this rocky region of soluble chalk p e n e t r a t e deeply a n d b u r s t forth in springs at t h e m o u n t a i n ' s base. W h e r e t h e H e r m o n , t h e G o l a n , a n d t h e n o r t h e r n H u l a m e e t at C a e s a r e a Philippi, springs g u s h forth from below a steep wall a t t h e foot of a large cave t h a t , a c c o r d i n g to J o s e p h u s , is t h e w a t e r ' s s o u r c e (War 1.21.3). As early as t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, t h e cave was c o n n e c t e d w i t h t h e g o d P a n a n d , as s u c h , w a s called P a n e i o n , m e a n i n g " c a v e d e d i c a t e d to P a n " (Polybius, Historiae 14.18.19:1-19). H e r o d the G r e a t , in 18 BCE, received t h e entire territory of the s o u t h e r n H e r m o n from t h e R o m a n s a n d built a m a g nificent t e m p l e t h e r e t h a t h e d e d i c a t e d to A u g u s t u s (Josephus, Antiq. 15.360). Following t h e division of H e r o d ' s king d o m , P a n e i o n p a s s e d to his s o n Philip t h e T e t r a r c h (4 B C E 34 CE) w h o , b e c a u s e of t h e area's n a t u r a l b e a u t y a n d strategic i m p o r t a n c e , m a d e it his capital city, c h a n g i n g t h e n a m e t o C a e s a r e a Philippi, i n h o n o r of A u g u s t u s (Josephus, War 1.168). Philip's capital w a s also k n o w n as P a n e a s ( " t h e city of P a n " ) , as t h e s a n c t u a r y of P a n c o n t i n u e d to play a p r i m a r y role in t h e city's cult rituals. D u r i n g t h e reign of A g r i p p a s II (53-93 C E ) , t h e city w a s r e n a m e d N e r o n i a s , in
BAPTISTERIES h o n o r of t h e e m p e r o r N e r o , A g r i p p a s ITs benefactor. U p o n N e r o ' s d e a t h , t h e city again w a s k n o w n b o t h as C a e s a r e a Philippi or P a n i a s . B o t h n a m e s w e r e r e t a i n e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d s a n d u p t o t h e seventh c e n tury. I n 638 CE, following t h e A r a b c o n q u e s t , P a n i a s p a s s e d f r o m B y z a n t i n e into M u s l i m h a n d s . T h e city's n a m e b e c a m e B a n i a s , a distortion of t h e original G r e e k Panias. D u r i n g t h e relatively s h o r t p e r i o d of C r u s a d e r o c c u p a t i o n ( 1 1 2 9 - 1 1 6 3 ) , t h e city was r e d u c e d in size a n d fortified b y massive citadels. Its n a m e b e c a m e t h e Bellina Citadel. W h e n t h e last r e m n a n t of C r u s a d e r rule collapsed, t h e formerly magnificent R o m a n - B y z a n t i n e capital city P a n i a s , or C a e s a r e a Philippi, a n d t h e impressive fortified C r u s a d e r Bellina Citadel declined into a small a n d insignificant h a m l e t n a m e d Banias. Archaeological a n d historical r e s e a r c h at Banias received a powerful b o o s t after t h e Arab-Israeli S i x - D a y W a r in 1967, w h e n access t o t h e area w a s r e n e w e d . S u r v e y s , small r e s c u e o p e r a t i o n s , a n d large-scale excavations w e r e initiated. I n p r o g r e s s are excavations d i r e c t e d b y Zvi U r i M a ' o z at t h e cave s a n c t u a r y of P a n a n d at t h e center of t h e ancient city, w h e r e t h e p u b l i c institutions a n d m o n u m e n t a l buildings of C a e s a r e a Philippi stood. BIBLIOGRAPHY Benvenisti, M e r o n . The Crusaders in the Holy-Land. Jerusalem, 1970. See pages 147-157. C o n d e r , Claude R., a n d H . H. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. i , Galilee. L o n d o n , 1881. See pages 95-113. L e Bas, Philippe, and W . H . W a d d i n g t o n . Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie. Paris, 1870. See volume 3, part V I I - 3 . Meshorer, Ya'acov. " T h e Coins of Caesarea P a n e a s . " Israel Numis matic Journal 8 (1984-1985): 37-58. Tzaferis, Vassilios. "Banias, la Ville d e P a n . " Le Monde de la Bible 64 ( M a y - J u n e 1990): 50-53. Tzaferis, Vassilios, and Avner R a b a n . "Excavations at B a n i a s " (in H e brew). Qadmoniot 23.3-4 ( i 9 9 ° ) : 110-114. VASSILIOS TZAFERIS
BAPTISTERIES.
T h e t e r m baptistery (Gk., baptisterion) d e n o t e s either a b u i l d i n g o r a p o o l (also called a font: G k , , kolumbethra; L a t , fans or piscina) for t h e p e r f o r m a n c e of t h e Christian ritual of b a p t i s m . B e c a u s e t h e practice of b a p t i s m a m o n g t h e earliest Christians has a n t e c e d e n t s i n b o t h Jewish a n d p a g a n p a t t e r n s of ritual w a s h i n g , p a r a d i g m s h a v e often b e e n suggested, s u c h as in t h e Jewish miqveh (a p o o l for ritual ablutions k n o w n chiefly from T a l m u d i c sources) or in t h e pools of t h e settlement at Q u m r a n . [See Ritual B a t h s ; Q u m r a n . ] N e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e b u l k of t h e ar chaeological e v i d e n c e for f o r m a l Jewish ablution installa tions in clearly religious or ritual contexts is later. P a r a d i g m s from ritual w a s h i n g s c o n n e c t e d with t h e initiatory rites of t h e so-called p a g a n m y s t e r y cults also face difficulties b e cause t h e w a s h i n g w a s a p r e p a r a t o r y purification rather t h a n
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t h e initiation p r o p e r . T h e b e g i n n i n g s of Christian b a p t i s m are, therefore, s o m e w h a t c l o u d e d . N o n e t h e l e s s , it a p p e a r s t h a t t h e practice w a s already in use at least in some Christian g r o u p s b y t h e m i d d l e of t h e first c e n t u r y CE, as reflected clearly in t h e letters of P a u l (cf. Rom. 6 : 1 - 1 2 ; Gal. 3:27-28; Col. 2:10-12). G o i n g b a c k to t h e tradition of J o h n the Baptizer, w h o r e portedly w o r k e d in t h e areas a r o u n d t h e J o r d a n River (where, t h e Gospels say, Jesus c a m e to h i m t o b e b a p t i z e d ) , t h e earliest evidence seems to suggest t h a t b a p t i s m was p e r f o r m e d in streams or n a t u r a l p o o l s . By early in d i e s e c o n d c e n t u r y , h o w e v e r , s o m e alternative a r r a n g e m e n t s were al lowed, as indicated in Didache 7, an early c h u r c h o r d e r d o c u m e n t (c. 100-140 CE) f r o m Syria. By t h e m i d d l e of t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y , it a p p e a r s t h a t Christians u s e d other regular sources of water, s u c h as b a t h s or fountains, at least in R o m e (see Justin M a r t y r , Apology 1.61-66; cf. T e r t u l l i a n , OnBaptism 4), b u t t h e r e was n o regularly designated place. [See Baths.] T h e earliest evidence t h a t t h e ritual of b a p t i s m w a s b e i n g b r o u g h t into t h e physical context of a c h u r c h building c o m e s only in t h e third c e n t u r y (cf. Tertullian, On Baptism 8-9; H i p p o l y t u s , Apostolic Tradition 21). P r i o r to this t i m e t h e r e was little or n o regularly identified c h u r c h architecture b e c a u s e m o s t Christians c o n t i n u e d t h e earlier practice of m e e t i n g in u n r e n o v a t e d p r i v a t e buildings, s u c h as h o u s e s . [See H o u s e C h u r c h e s . ] B y t h e fourth-fifth centuries, an elaborate liturgical tradition h a d developed a r o u n d d i e p r a c tice of b a p t i s m , a n d with it a regular architectural form. T h e earliest archaeological evidence for a formal b a p t i s tery c o m e s from t h e C h r i s t i a n building at D u r a - E u r o p o s (c. 241-256 C E ) . [See D u r a - E u r o p o s . ] In t h e renovation of a typical h o u s e to f o r m a domus ecclesiae, o n e r o o m was set aside for b a p t i s m a n d a small font basin (0.955 m high, 2,57 m wide a n d 1.58-1.83 m d e e p ) was installed in it. T h e basin w a s recessed slightly into t h e floor, t h e basin's interior w a s sealed w i t h hydraulic plaster, a n d brick side walls were erected. T h e r o o m ' s c o n s t r u c t i o n r e s e m b l e d t h a t of d i e p u b lic b a t h s at D u r a - E u r o p o s . T h e formality of t h e ceremonies p l a n n e d for this installation are further attested by t h e n a t u r e of t h e o t h e r decorations: a n a r c h e d c a n o p y over t h e font p r o p e r a n d a n elaborate p r o g r a m of representational scenes a r o u n d t h e walls. [See Wall Paintings.] T h e painted p r o g r a m contains a n u m b e r of scenes d r a w n from d i e G o s p e l s in w h i c h d e a t h or water s y m b o l i s m is p r o m i n e n t . Analysis s u g gests also t h a t t h e r e m a y h a v e b e e n a regular processual p a t t e r n a t t a c h e d t o t h e p e r f o r m a n c e of t h e ritual at D u r a - E u r o p o s . A liturgical t r a d i t i o n like t h e o n e f o u n d in d i e Syriac Didascalia (a c h u r c h o r d e r from c. 270) m a y be similar to t h a t u s e d at D u r a , given its location in R o m a n Syria. N o o t h e r p r e - C o n s t a n t i n i a n b a p t i s m a l installations are k n o w n archaeologically, w i t h t h e possible exception of the domus ecclesiae at P a r e n t i u m , Istria. A t least one other early c h u r c h edifice in R o m e (Ss. G i o v n a n i e Paolo) was built a r o u n d a building with a b a t h t h a t m i g h t have b e e n acces-
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BAQ'AH VALLEY
sible to the Christians prior to t h e t i m e of C o n s t a n t i n e . At Aquileia, Istria, t h e first aula ecclesiae of B i s h o p T h e o d o r e (c. 317-319) seems t o have b e e n built over a h o u s e c o m p l e x that continued t o be u s e d as t h e episcopal residence. T h e s e quarters included a b a d i , which a p p e a r s to h a v e served in some capacity related to the baptistery of t h e double-hall church. O f the t w o halls, t h e s o u t h e r n m o s t m i g h t h a v e b e e n especially designed with b a p t i s m in m i n d — a s reflected in the elaborate m o s a i c p a v e m e n t depicting t h e J o n a h story and scenes of fishing a n d m a n y forms of o c e a n life. [See Mosaics.] E v e n so, a n elaborate baptismal font w a s n o t a p a r t of the architectural form. A t Philippi, G r e e c e ( M a c e d o n i a ) , the early f o u r t h - c e n t u r y c h u r c h edifice, t h e c h u r c h of St. P a u l b e n e a t h a n octagonal c o m p l e x , was built i m mediately adjacent to a Hellenistic hero cult t o m b a n d an earlier R o m a n b a t h i n g establishment. I n its later renovation (fifth century) to an octagonal form, o n e of d i e wings of t h e b a t h was a n n e x e d to t h e c h u r c h and was u s e d formally as its baptistery. A later basilica in R o m e (S. Anastasia) was built over a public b a t h near t h e Circus M a x i m u s , b u t there is no direct archaeological evidence t h a t t h e b a t h i n g estab lishment was u s e d by the Christiians prior to t h e c o n s t r u c tion of the basilica. [See Basilicas.] Altogether, t h e r e are m o r e t h a n four h u n d r e d k n o w n sites for baptisteries from t h e third to die seventh centuries CE; m o s t c o m e from t h e later p a r t of this span. T h e r e is a con siderable diversity of architectural forms associated with baptism, ranging from small areas set aside within larger c h u r c h buildings to elaborate freestanding buildings dedi cated just to this act. T h e architectural i c o n o g r a p h y of these buildings was equally diverse. In a n u m b e r of t h e Syrian churches of t h e fifth-seventh centuries, t h e baptistery in a separate building or c o m p l e x of buildings in t h e f o r m of a small basilica (e.g., at D a r Qita a n d Sergilla). [See Sergilla.] At A m w a s / E m m a u s in Israel, tire baptistery was a slightly smaller basilical building beside and oriented o n d i e same axis as t h e m a i n basilical hall of the c h u r c h (dating t o the fifth c e n t u r y ) . [See E m m a u s . ] T h e baptismal font p r o p e r , a recessed pool c u t into t h e floor in t h e shape of a cross, was set into tire c h u r c h ' s small apse. In titese cases, t h e liturgical u s e of t h e architecture would seem to have b e e n p a t t e r n e d directiy o n t h a t of t h e m a i n basilica. I n other cases, t h e ar chitecture developed o n a central plan using either octagonal or d o m e d construction. T h e octagonal plan has strong af finities with R o m a n funerary architecture; the c h u r c h of Sta. C o s t a n z a in R o m e w a s originally built as a m a u s o l e u m b u t was later converted into a c h u r c h a n d u s e d as a baptistery. [See M a u s o l e u m . ] T h e m o s t elaborate baptisteries built o n this octagonal p l a n are t h e O r t h o d o x Baptistery in R a v e n n a , Italy (c. 450)3 a n d t h e baptistery of St. J o h n L a t e r a n in R o m e . T h e latter also contains t h e largest font, a circular pool m o r e t h a n 8.5 m in diameter. Finally, t h e font basin itself t e n d e d , in later periods, to take o n e of t w o basic forms: either circular (or octagonal) or cruciform. A l t h o u g h they range in size, t h e average d e p t h is just u n d e r o n e meter. It
has been suggested t h a t t h e s e f o r m s w e r e e a c h associated with o n e of t h e d o m i n a n t symbolizations of t h e b a p t i s m a l ritual: t h e circle as a s y m b o l of t h e w o m b a n d rebirth; t h e cross as a s y m b o l of d e a t h a n d r e s u r r e c t i o n . I n s o m e cases, a c o m b i n a t i o n of t h e s e architectural a n d artistic symbols was e m p l o y e d w i t h conscious design t o e n h a n c e t h e liturgical experience. F o r e x a m p l e , t h e p l a n of t h e O r t h o d o x B a p t i s tery in R a v e n n a was d e s i g n e d in s u c h a w a y t h a t t h e initiate was led t h r o u g h t h e a n t e c h a m b e r s a n d into t h e great d o m e d r o o m in o r d e r to a p p r o a c h t h e steps d o w n into the font. T h e design placed t h e initiate so t h a t h e or she w a s looking d i rectly u p ( a n d from t h e p r o p e r angle) at t h e magnificent ceiling m o s a i c of t h e b a p t i s m of Jesus in w h i c h h e is sur r o u n d e d b y a procession of t h e twelve apostles. [See also C h u r c h e s ; M a r t y r i o n . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bedard, Walter M . The Symbolism of the Baptismal Font in Early tian Thought. W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , 1 9 5 1 .
Chris
Davies, J o h n G o r d o n . The Architectural Setting of Baptism. L o n d o n , 1962. D e i c h m a n n , F . W . "Baptisterium." In Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum, vol. 1, p p . 1 1 5 7 - 1 1 6 7 . Stuttgart, 1 9 5 0 - . Khatchatrian, A r m e n . Les baptisteres paleochr&tiens. Paris, 1 9 6 2 . Khatchatrian, A r m e n . Origine et typologie des baptisteres paleochretiens. Mulhouse, 1 9 8 2 . Kostof, Spiro. The Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna. N e w H a v e n , 1 9 6 5 . Kraeling, Carl H . The Christian Building. T h e Excavations at D u r a E u r o p o s , Final R e p o r t 8, part 2. N e w H a v e n , 1 9 6 7 . Krautheimer, Richard. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. 3d ed. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1 9 8 1 . Lassus, Jean. Sanctuaires Chretiens de Syrie. Paris, 1 9 4 7 . L . MICHAEL WHITE
BAQ'AH VALLEY,
area located 15 k m (9 mi.) n o r t h west of A m m a n , J o r d a n , at 625 m a b o v e sea level o n tire T r a n s j o r d a n i a n p l a t e a u (32°5'io" N , 35°4o'2o" E; m a p ref erence 168 X 228). T h e region's earliest survey w a s c o n d u c t e d b y N e l s o n G l u e c k in 1939. Since 1977 t h e B a q ' a h has b e e n the focus of o n g o i n g excavations c o n d u c t e d b y t h e University M u s e u m of t h e University of P e n n s y l v a n i a . T h e project is directed b y Patrick E . M c G o v e r n a n d f u n d e d b y t h e m u s e u m , its A p p l i e d Science C e n t e r for A r c h a e o l o g y ( M A S C A ) , t h e N a t i o n a l G e o g r a p h i c Society, d i e J o r d a n i a n D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities, a n d private s o u r c e s . T h e valley's central location, c o m b i n e d w i t h its rich, ar able soil, m o d e r a t e climate, plentiful springs, a n d o t h e r n a t ural r e s o u r c e s , explain w h y t h e B a q ' a h h a s b e e n i n h a b i t e d virtually w i t h o u t a g a p for t h e last fifty t h o u s a n d y e a r s — since t h e late M i d d l e Paleolithic. G l u e c k stated t h a t t h e B a q ' a h was o c c u p i e d only b y n o m a d i c p e o p l e s d u r i n g t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , b u t m o r e r e c e n t e v i d e n c e shows t h a t t h e r e were n u m e r o u s L B settlements in t h e region. Archaeological evidence p o i n t s as well t o o c c u p a t i o n in t h e Early B r o n z e A g e , t h e Early a n d L a t e I r o n A g e (into t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d ) , a n d t h e Early R o m a n period.
C
B A Q A H VALLEY M o s t of t h e excavated s i t e s — a n d e x p o s e d r e m a i n s — a r e in t h e n o r d r w e s t e r n ( U m m a d - D a n a n i r ) region of t h e B a q ' a h , w h e r e there are m o r e s p r i n g s t h a n in a n y other s e c tor of t h e valley. U r b a n s e t t l e m e n t is e v i d e n c e d b y t h e 3.5hectare (g-acre) fortified hilltop site of al-Qasir ( " t h e for t r e s s " ) . P o t t e r y vessels a n d g r i n d i n g stones f o u n d c r u s h e d b e n e a t h a large, circular s t o n e " h i l l o c k " d a t e t o E B II—III (c. 2900-2300 B C E ) , w h e n o c c u p a t i o n w a s m o s t extensive. M a n y b r o a d r o o m h o u s e s d a t i n g t o this p e r i o d also w e r e f o u n d o n t h e surface. B y E B I V (c. 2300-1900 BCE), h o w ever, settlement h a d declined, a n d after 1900 BCE h a d ceased. A n overlapping s e q u e n c e of L B (c. 1550-1200BCE) burial caves o n Jebel al-Qasir a n d J e b e l a l - H a w a y a h attest to t h e u r b a n c h a r a c t e r of t h e U m m a d - D a n a n i r culture, as well as to its international t r a d e . A m o n g t h e i m p o r t s f o u n d i n t h e caves w e r e M i t a n n i a n C o m m o n Style cylinder seals; E g y p tian scarabs a n d a ring; M y c e n a e a n stirrup jars; C y p r i o t base-ring II a n d white-slip I I w a r e s ; a n d n u m e r o u s M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d R e d S e a mollusk shells. I n addition, pieces of w h e e l - m a d e p o t t e r y u n c o v e r e d a t t h e site are c o m p a r a b l e t o dtose f o u n d a t u r b a n c o m m u n i t i e s west o f t h e J o r d a n River. A n o t h e r i m p o r t a n t L B s e t t l e m e n t is situated o n a series of terraces a t K h i r b e t U m m a d - D a n a n i r . C o m p r i s i n g a b o u t 2.5 h a (6 a c r e s ) , t h e site overlooks W a d i U m m a d - D a n a n i r . T h e earliest s t r u c t u r e u n c o v e r e d t h e r e is similar i n p l a n t o a n o t h e r L B s t r u c t u r e , t h e A m m a n A i r p o r t building, located 15 k m (9 m i . ) t o t h e southeast. [See A m m a n A i r p o r t T e m ple.] O f t h e Quadratbau t y p e , b o t h are laid o u t in a s q u a r e with a central c o u r t y a r d s u r r o u n d e d b y o u t e r r o o m s , a n d m a y h a v e served a cultic p u r p o s e . A t U m m a d - D a n a n i r , for e x a m p l e , pottery, silicate jewelry i t e m s , a n d b u r n e d a n d u n b u r n e d a n i m a l b o n e s of c a t d e , d o n k e y s , s h e e p a n d g o a t s , m o u n t a i n lions, a n d gazelles w e r e f o u n d i n a fill u n d e r t h e structure's plastered floor a n d i n its f o u n d a t i o n t r e n c h e s . A freestanding altar (60 X 60 X 60 c m ) with a limestone c a p stone w a s f o u n d n e a r t h e c e n t e r of t h e building, as w a s a fireplace t h a t p r e d a t e s t h e b u i l d i n g a n d tiiat a p p a r e n t l y w a s u s e d in "sacrificing" t h e animals d e p o s i t e d in d i e fill. T h e destruction of t h e b u i l d i n g h a s b e e n d a t e d t o L B I I , b a s e d o n t h e p o t t e r y a n d a n i m a l b o n e s (like t h o s e in t h e fill) f o u n d in pits d u g into t h e d e s t r u c t i o n debris. C a r b o n i z e d r o o f b e a m s o n t h e building's p l a s t e r e d floor indicate t h a t t h e building w a s d e s t r o y e d in a conflagration. O n e of t h e largest Early I r o n A g e ( c . 1200-1050 BCE) t o m b s yet discovered in t h e region is a circular burial cave o n Jebel a l - H a w a y a h . T h e b o n e s of 227 m e n a n d w o m e n of various ages w e r e f o u n d i n t h e cave (4.5 m in d i a m e t e r ) . T h e burial g o o d s w e r e p o o r e r t h a n in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e a n d of local m a n u f a c t u r e , suggesting t h a t t h e s t a n d a r d o f living w a s lower a n d t h a t in t h e I r o n A g e t r a d e was less w i d e s p r e a d . [See T o m b s ; G r a v e G o o d s . ] T h e few n e w p o t tery forms i n t r o d u c e d in this p e r i o d p r o b a b l y reflect a c o n tinuation of t h e coil-building t e c h n o l o g y b e g u n i n L B I I .
273
A m o n g t h e eleven c o m p l e t e pieces of mild-steel jewelry f o u n d i n t h e t o m b w a s a n i r o n anklet or bracelet t y p e ; its similarity t o o n e f o u n d in a n e a r b y L B II burial cave suggests t h a t iron metallurgy h a d already b e e n developed. A large n u m b e r of s t r u c t u r e s dating t o t h e L a t e I r o n / P e r sian (c. 650-400 BCE) p e r i o d h a v e b e e n found in central T r a n s j o r d a n . A m o n g t h e m , a building o n t h e site of R u j m a l - H e n u (West) in t h e B a q ' a h h a s b e e n investigated. P r o b ably a single-phase fortress with c o m p l e m e n t a r y d o m e s t i c a n d agricultural functions, t h e building w a s c o n s t r u c t e d o u t of dry-laid, u n h e w n b o u l d e r s . Its towers w e r e circular a n d rectangular, a n d a n i n n e r c o u r t y a r d w a s s u r r o u n d e d b y c a s e m e n t r o o m s . T h e u p p e r walls ( s o m e p r e s e r v e d as high as 2.5-3 ) collapsed o n t o d i e clay floor (over b e d r o c k ) s o m e t i m e d u r i n g this p e r i o d . A c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s level at K h i r b e t U m m a d - D a n a n i r yielded a n A m m o n i t e inscription o n a storage jar sidewalk T h e inscription reads shema ( " t o h e a r " ) , t h e first w o r d in t h e traditional H e b r e w declaration of faith (Dr. 6:4), b u t w a s m o r e likely p a r t of a n a m e h e r e . It w a s deeply incised in t h e clay before d i e jar was fired. m
Also at K h i r b e t U m m a d - D a n a n i r a large, Early R o m a n III (c. 4 B C E - 7 3 CE) s t r u c t u r e w a s excavated. T h e building w a s discovered just below t h e surface. I t s central r o o m w a s characterized b y a n o r t h e r n wall with seven orthostats s p a c e d a b o u t a half-meter a p a r t , several with their overlying sn-etchers in place, a n d a b e a t e n - e a r t h floor. A collection of Early R o m a n III p o t t e r y a n d artifacts (including glass vessel a n d bracelet fragments, a n intact iron sickle blade, a n d H e r o d i a n - t y p e limestone vessels) help t o date t h e structure, as does a coin of A n t o n i u s Felix (52-62 CE) recovered from u n d e r t h e building's floor. c
T h e ancient identities of sites in t h e B a q a h r e m a i n u n certain. I n t h e list of P h a r a o h T h u t m o s i s Ill's Asiatic t o p o n y m s (c. 1450 BCE) t h a t ostensibly lists sites a n d areas along the King's Highway (which probably r a n through the mid dle of d i e B a q ' a h ) , t h e B a q ' a h Valley h a s b e e n identified with mkrpvjt ("fertile d e p r e s s i o n " ) . T h e Quadratbau-type building a t K h i r b e t U m m a d - D a n a n i r h a s affinities with late M B - e a r l y L B structures a t S h e c h e m . L a t e r biblical tradi tion, as reflected in t h e J a c o b - L a b a n cycle, t h e Israelite set t l e m e n t narratives, a n d t h e story of t h e sacrifice of J e plifhah's d a u g h t e r , p o i n t t o close ties b e t w e e n Gilead, w h e r e K h i r b e t U m m a d - D a n a n i r ( M i z p a h Gilead?) is located, a n d Israel, w h e r e S h e c h e m is located. [See S h e c h e m ; Gilead.] BIBLIOGRAPHY M c G o v e r n , Patrick E. " T e s t Soundings of Archaeological and Resis tivity Survey Results at R u j m a l - H e n u . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 27 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 0 5 - 1 4 1 . Preliminary reports on Late Iron buildings surveyed b y geophysical prospecting instruments a n d excavated by test soundings. M c G o v e r n , Patrick E . The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Central Transjordan: The Baq'ah Valley Project, 1977-1981. University M u seum, M o n o g r a p h y 65. Philadelphia, 1986. Detailed archaeological and technological study of the L B a n d Early Iron Age cemetery, widi preliminary findings on associated setdement sites.
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M c G o v e r n , Patrick E. "Central Transjordan in the Late Bronze a n d Early Iron Ages: An Alternative Hypothesis of Socio-Economic Transformation and Collapse." In Studies in the History and Archae ology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 2 6 7 - 2 7 3 . A m man, 1987. Cultural a n d technological continuity evidenced from the LB into the Early Iron Age in central Transjordan. M c G o v e r n , Patrick E. "Settlement Patterns of the Late Bronze and Iron Ages in the Greater A m m a n Area." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, p p . 1 7 9 - 1 8 3 . A m m a n , 1992. Overview of die area's archaeological a n d architec tural traditions. PATRICK E . M C G O V E R N
R e m a i n s of t h e so-called small s y n a g o g u e w e r e still visible d u r i n g t h e n i n e t e e n t h century. Little is k n o w n of this build ing, although t w o d o o r w a y s w e r e a p p a r e n t i y still in place in the sixteenth c e n t u r y . O n e of these m o n u m e n t a l portals w a s still standing in t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y , w h e n it was d e scribed b y explorers a n d d o c u m e n t e d b y p h o t o g r a p h e r s . T h e s e ruins w e r e d i s m a n t l e d s o m e t i m e before 1905. A p o r tion of t h e lintel b e a r i n g a dedicatory inscription is p r e s e r v e d in t h e L o u v r e m u s e u m . T h i s H e b r e w inscription is p a r t i c ularly i m p o r t a n t for t h e history of s y n a g o g u e s in this region: M a y t h e r e b e p e a c e in this p l a c e a n d in all of t h e places of Israel. Y o s e t h e L e v i t e s o n of L e v i m a d e (or d o n a t e d ) this lintel. M a y
B A R ' A M , a Jewish settlement in t h e U p p e r Galilee in Late Antiquity, located approximately 11 Ion (7 mi.) n o r t h west of Safed a n d 0.5 Ion south of Israel's m o d e r n b o r d e r with L e b a n o n ( m a p reference 1891 X 2701). T h i s locale is n o t m e n t i o n e d in ancient sources, b u t it a p p e a r s as Kefar B a r ' a m in the itineraries of Jewish pilgrims, b e g i n n i n g in t h e fourteenth century. N u m e r o u s n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y explor ers described t h e site, including E d w a r d R o b i n s o n , E r n e s t R e n a n , Victor G u e r i n , a n d m e m b e r s of t h e British Survey of W e s t e r n Palestine. B a r ' a m is o n e of only two settlements in this region (together with G u s h Halav) t h a t is k n o w n t o have had t w o synagogues, which u n d e r s c o r e s its size a n d a p p a r e n t i m p o r t a n c e . T h e larger of the t w o synagogues ser vicing this c o m m u n i t y was excavated by H e i n r i c h K o h l a n d Carl Watzinger o n behalf of the D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesells c h a f t i n 1905. O t h e r areas of t h e village have n o t b e e n ex cavated. T h e large s y n a g o g u e is the b e s t preserved of all extant Galilean-type basilical synagogues. [See Synagogues.] A l t h o u g h M i c h a e l A v i - Y o n a h dated the Galilean type t o t h e second century, it is n o w generally accepted t h a t Galileantype basilical synagogues date to t h e t h i r d - s i x t h centuries. [See Basilicas.] T h e building is constructed of local white limestone ashlars w i t h o u t mortar. T h e facade (15.2 X 20 m ) , which is aligned t o w a r d t h e south, is p r e s e r v e d to t h e u p p e r cornice of t h e lower story. A n exedra (5.35 m wide) s u p p o r t e d by eight columns was constructed along t h e length of t h e facade. T h e building h a d three entrances: a large central portal t h a t led into t h e n a v e a n d t w o smaller portals t h a t led into t h e side aisles. T h e central e n t r a n c e has m o l d e d j a m b s a n d a lintel bearing a w r e a t h flanked b y winged Victories t h a t w e r e intentionally mutilated. It is sur m o u n t e d by a large Syrian arch. O n t h e sill of a w i n d o w above t h e eastern p o r t a l is a H e b r e w dedicatory inscription t h a t reads "Built by Eleazar son of Y u d a n . " T h e central nave is s u r r o u n d e d b y c o l u m n s on three sides. A balcony m a y have b e e n c o n s t r u c t e d above die n a v e o n d i e n o r t h e r n , western, a n d eastern sides of t h e hall. T h e architecture of this building has m u c h in c o m m o n with c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s Syrian c h u r c h architecture. [See Churches.] D u r i n g t h e late 1960s t h e site w a s cleared a n d partially restored.
blessings c o m e u p o n his d e e d s . A m e n .
T h e artisan (or d o n o r ) of t h e lintel a p p e a r s in a similar dedicatory inscription in A r a m a i c in t h e n e a r b y A l m a syn agogue. [See also Basilicas; D e u t s c h e Orient-Gesellschaft; Galilee, article on Galilee in t h e Hellenistic t h r o u g h B y z a n t i n e P e r i ods; S y n a g o g u e Inscriptions; and the biographies of AviYonah, Guerin, Renan, Robinson, and Watzinger.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, N a h m a n . " B a r ' a m . " In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 1 4 7 - 1 4 9 . Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . Survey of t h e architectural history of B a r ' a m . Chiat, Marilyn Joyce Segal. Handbook of Synagogue Literature. Chico, Calif., 1982. Surveys t h e architectural history of the B a r ' a m syna gogues. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. T h e art a n d architecture of the synagogue in t h e c o n text of Jewish and non-Jewish art in L a t e Antiquity (see the index under Baram). Jacoby, Ruth. The Synagogues of Baram: Jerusalem Ossuaries. Jerusalem, 1987. Systematic and comprehensive presentation of the remains of the B a r ' a m synagogues, with a particularly useful bibliography. STEVEN FINE
B A R A M K I , D I M I T R I C O N S T A N T I N E (19091984), archaeologist a n d teacher. B o r n in Jerusalem, B a ramki developed a k e e n interest in t h e cultural heritage of his h o m e l a n d a n d city. After attending St. G e o r g e ' s S c h o o l in Jerusalem a n d t h e A m e r i c a n University of Beirut, h e r e ceived b o t h his B.A. w i t h h o n o r s a n d P h . D . degrees from t h e University of L o n d o n . I n his dissertation, " T h e C u l t u r e a n d Architecture of t h e U m a y y a d P e r i o d , " h e d r e w u p o n t h e results of his excavation a t C a l i p h H i s h a m ' s palace at K h i r b a t al-Mafjar n e a r Jericho (1935-1948). His career in t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of Palestine b e g a n in 1927, a n d in 1945 h e b e c a m e senior archaeological officer. H e served as acting c u r a t o r of t h e Palestine A r c h a e ological M u s e u m (today t h e Rockefeller M u s e u m ) in J e r u salem (1948-1949), H e was t h e n a p p o i n t e d archaeological advisor and librarian at t h e A m e r i c a n S c h o o l of Oriental R e s e a r c h in J e r u s a l e m . F r o m 1951 until his r e t i r e m e n t in
BAR K O K H B A R E V O L T 1975 h e w a s c u r a t o r of t h e Archaeological M u s e u m of t h e A m e r i c a n University in Beirut, w h e r e h e also t a u g h t u s i n g m e substantial collections for t r a i n i n g in t h e study of arti facts. B a r a m k i ' s e x p e r i e n c e m a d e h i m sensitive to t h e n e e d t o m a k e k n o w l e d g e of t h e p a s t available t o t h e p u b l i c at large a n d to establish a r c h a e o l o g y as a n a c a d e m i c discipline in o r d e r to train local archaeologists. In 1952, t h e y o u n g J o r d a n i a n D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities c o u l d only find o n e s t u d e n t of archaeology to s e n d t o t h e A m e r i c a n University of Beirut. S u b s e q u e n t l y , B a r a m k i t r a i n e d n u m e r o u s A r a b a n d foreign s t u d e n t s in t h e p r o g r a m . As a n archaeologist a n d teacher B a r a m k i c o m m u n i c a t e d with astonishing i m m e d i acy w h a t h e k n e w f r o m direct c o n t a c t w i t h t h e archaeology of his h o m e l a n d . I n 1956 h e i n t r o d u c e d t h e vital aspect of fieldwork into t h e a r c h a e o l o g y c u r r i c u l u m of t h e university b y o p e n i n g its first excavation site, t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e settlement of T e l l el-Ghassil o n t h e r o a d to Baalbek. T h e excavations at U m a y y a d K h i r b a t al-Mafjar m a d e B a r a m k i t h e first A r a b archaeologist t o deal with Islamic m a terials, at a t i m e w h e n t h e subject w a s t h e d o m a i n of a r t historians. H i s c o n t r i b u t i o n s t o m a k i n g t h e Islamic cultural heritage accessible to t h e p u b l i c involved m u s e u m exhibits a n d activities a n d publications g e a r e d t o a general a u d i e n c e . [See also Mafjar, K h i r b a t al-.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Baramki contributed a series of articles to the Quarterly of the De partment of Antiquities in Palestine beginning in 1 9 3 5 , as well as t h e Dictionaty of Biblical Archaeology a n d t h e Wycliffe Bible Encyclopaedia. His popular publications have p e r h a p s been m o r e influential in s p r e a d ing archaeological a n d heritage awareness t h a n m a n y scientific publi cations to which the general public h a s n o or only difficult access. See, for example, The Coins Exhibited in the Archaeological Museum of the American University of Beirut (Beirut, 1 9 6 8 ) ; Phoenicia and the Phoeni cians (Beirut, 1 9 6 1 ) ; The Road to Petra: A Short Illustrated Guide to East Jordan ( A m m a n , 1 9 4 7 ) ; and The Art and Architecture of Ancient Pales tine: A Survey of the Archaeology of Palestine from the Earliest Times to the Ottoman Conquest (Beirut, 1 9 6 9 ) . HELGA SEEDEN
BAR KOKHBA REVOLT.
T h e h a r d s h i p s t h e Jews in Palestine e n d u r e d at t h e h a n d s of t h e R o m a n authorities after 70 CE w e r e e m p h a s i z e d b y t h e favorable attitude of t h e s a m e authorities t o t h e n o n - J e w s there, T h i s behavior s h a r p e n e d even m o r e t h e d i c h o t o m y existing b e t w e e n t h e t w o s e g m e n t s of t h e p o p u l a t i o n . T h e n o n - J e w s w e r e in fact t h e major beneficiaries of t h e F i r s t R e v o l t against R o m e (66-70 CE). [See First Jewish Revolt.] W h e n E m p e r o r H a d r i a n r e m o v e d t h e h a t e d g o v e r n o r Q u i e t u s a n d p e r h a p s — i f a late Jewish tradition is t o b e b e l i e v e d — e v e n t o y e d with t h e idea of rebuilding t h e T e m p l e a n d J e r u s a l e m , t h e Jews felt m o r e hopeful, as t h e y r e g a r d e d t h e e m p e r o r as " C y r u s R e d i v i v u s . " W h e n t h e e m p e r o r later d e c i d e d n o t to go t h r o u g h
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with his plans ( a c c o r d i n g t o t h e s a m e l e g e n d ) , their frustra tion was d e e p a n d s t r e n g t h e n e d t h e resolve of radical Jews t o go t o w a r . I n a u t u m n 129, H a d r i a n arrived in Palestine as p a r t of his visit to t h e provinces of t h e East, w h i c h h e h o p e d w o u l d p r o m o t e t h e p r o c e s s of hellenization t h e r e . T h i s b r o u g h t h i m into conflict with t h e Jews of Palestine. A l t h o u g h s o m e specific reasons for t h e revolt c a n b e f o u n d , they should b e c o n s i d e r e d with caution. I t is claimed t h a t d u r i n g H a d r i a n ' s visit it b e c a m e clear t h a t h e h a d d e c i d e d n o t to e x e m p t t h e Jewish p e o p l e from t h e law against castration, w h i c h for the Jews m e a n t a b a n o n circumcision. I t also b e c a m e clear, p r o b a b l y at this j u n c t u r e , t h a t t h e e m p e r o r w i s h e d to rebuild J e r u s a l e m as Aelia Capitolina, a p a g a n city. H o w e v e r , t h e i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t t h e b a n o n circumcision c o m e s from a n unreliable s o u r c e ( t h e Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Life of Hadrian, 14.2). Cassius D i o , w h o does n o t m e n t i o n t h e b a n o n circumcision b u t does m e n t i o n H a d r i a n ' s s c h e m e t o build Aelia Capitolina o n t h e T e m p l e M o u n t , is also u n r e liable as a result of t h e a b r i d g e m e n t of this source m a d e b y Xiphilinus in t h e eleventh c e n t u r y . T h e coinage of Aelia Capitolina does n o t h e l p m u c h b e c a u s e t h e series of Aelia Capitolina c a n only b e d a t e d to t h e s p a n of t i m e 1 3 1 - 1 3 5 CE. T h u s , it is possible t h a t b o t h t h e a b o v e literary source retrojected H a d r i a n ' s p u n i t i v e actions f r o m t h e quelling of t h e revolt in 135 to its start. T h i s w o u l d s u p p o r t t h e s u g gestion t h a t the cause of B a r K o k h b a ' s revolt was t h e revival of zealotism r a t h e r t h a n initial R o m a n suppression. B e t h a t as it m a y , s o m e sort of p r o v o c a t i o n i n d u c e d m a n y Jews t o start a rebellion u n d e r t h e leadership of S h i m ' o n ( S i m e o n ) B a r K o k h b a in spring 132 CE. T h e w a r lasted t h r e e a n d a half years, b u t n o historical survey is available a n a l o g o u s t o t h e ones for t h e M a c c a b e a n Revolt a n d t h e F i r s t Jewish Revolt. T h e rabbinical sources c o n t a i n s o m e information a b o u t t h e events, b u t their reli ability as historical sources is questionable. G r e e k a n d L a t i n sources are helpful b u t brief. T h e w a r started in 132 CE after p r e p a r a t i o n s w e r e m a d e b y t h e rebels ( K l o n e r a n d T e p p e r , 1987). T h e Bar K o k h b a letters reveal t h a t h e h a d a well-organized, disciplined Jewish a r m y , a p p a r e n t l y o r g a n i z e d hierarchically, with different ranks of c o m m a n d e r s — a " h e a d of t h e c a m p " is k n o w n , a n d even t h e n a m e s of s o m e of t h e c o m m a n d e r s . J u d a h b a r M a n a s s e h w a s the c o m m a n d e r at Kiryatli A r a b a y a , a n d J o n a t h a n b a r B e ' a y a n a n d M a s a b a l a b a r S h i m ' o n were t h e c o m m a n d e r s at ' E i n - G e d i . F r o m t h e letters it a p p e a r s that Bar K o k h b a ' s soldiers were G o d - f e a r i n g Jews. ( T h e r e is o n e ref e r e n c e to non-Jews w h o participated alongside t h e Jews.) B a r K o k h b a ' s official title was nasi', w h i c h h a d already b e e n associated with t h e king in t h e H e b r e w Bible (Ez. 12:10) (Yadin, 1971; L e w i s , 1989). I n r a b b i n i c literature t h e r e is a d e b a t e as t o w h e t h e r B a r K o k h b a w a s a king-messiah ( R a b b i Akiba was positive t h a t h e w a s , b u t R a b b i Y o h a n a n b e n T o r t a h said h e w a s n o t of t h e D a v i d i c line; J. T . , Tot an. 4.8.
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68d). Eusebius as well as other c h u r c h fathers denigrated Bar K o k h b a b e c a u s e , according to him (Hist. Eccl. 4.6.2), Bar Kokhba p e r s e c u t e d Christians w h o refused to join h i m in die war against R o m e . [See E i n - G e d i ; J u d e a n D e s e r t Caves.] T h e R o m a n s w e r e c a u g h t by surprise a n d h a d t o send auxiliary forces to J u d e a (Judah) in addition to the two standing legions already there. T w o legions constituted a substantial force for the R o m a n a r m y of the period: t w o legions were stationed only in problematic areas s u c h as U p per G e r m a n y , L o w e r G e r m a n y , a n d Dacia. Because J u d e a was considered a p r o b l e m a t i c place by the R o m a n s long b e fore the Bar K o k h b a war, roads h a d b e e n built in strategic places during H a d r i a n ' s reign as e m p e r o r . T h e intensity of the revolt can b e d e d u c e d by the n u m b e r of t r o o p s t h e R o m a n s used to s u b d u e the rebels ( m o r e t h a n fifty t h o u s a n d ) , as well as from Cassius D i o ' s c o n d e n s e d history: h e claims that during the w a r t h e R o m a n s destroyed 50 of t h e Jewish strongholds a n d 985 of their villages (69.14.1). T h e available sources do n o t say w h e t h e r the rebels c o n q u e r e d Jerusalem before or d u r i n g the w a r , whether they r e n e w e d the sacri fices on the T e m p l e M o u n t , or whether the revolt e x t e n d e d b e y o n d Judea p r o p e r . It is, however, clear from t h e coins that the m a i n aims of t h e rebels were t o rebuild the T e m p l e a n d renew its rituals. S o m e of t h e symbols on the coins are associated with d i e T e m p l e cult a n d with its facade. O t h e r coins m i n t e d by the rebels refer t o " t h e Priest E l e a z a r , " w h o was apparently an i m p o r t a n t figure in those s t o r m y days, a n d w h o m a y h a v e b e e n considered a candidate for t h e high priesthood in the eventual T h i r d T e m p l e ( M e s h o r e r , 1982). Eleazar is sometimes identified with the u n c l e of Bar K o k h b a w h o fought with h i m at Betar a n d was t h e n p u t to death because of accusations t h a t he wished to m a k e p e a c e with the R o m a n s (J. T . , Ta'an. 4.8.68d-69a). c
F r o m the little information available, in particular from the epitomized version of Cassius D i o , it a p p e a r s t h a t the e m p e r o r himself c a m e to Palestine d u r i n g t h e revolt, a n d that troops from R o m a n legions all over the East w e r e sent there. T h e rebels' coinage a n d various legal d o c u m e n t s re veal that a n e w " c a l e n d a r " was created for the e m e r g i n g Jewish state, and tiiat t h e years of the revolt w e r e c o u n t e d according to the "liberation of Israel," or the years of Bar K o k h b a ' s rule ( " T h i r d year of Simeon the son of K o s i b a the nasi' of Israel"), a n d the years of " t h e liberation of Je r u s a l e m . " T h e r e is, however, very little evidence of exactiy which territories the rebels succeeded in liberating d u r i n g t h e revolt. Conflicting evidence m a y indicate t h a t t h e revolt e n c o m p a s s e d , along with Judea, parts of the coastal plain, t h e Galilee, a n d even the G o l a n (Kloner a n d T e p p e r , 1987). O n the n i n t h of A b 135 CE, the last stronghold of the J e w ish rebels, called Betar, near Jerusalem, fell. S h i m ' o n B a r K o k h b a was a m o n g t h e victims.'According to Cassius D i o 580,000 Jews fell in the battle, a n d m a n y others w e r e sold as slaves in die aftermath of the war. If later Jewish traditions
are to be believed, the R o m a n s also enforced restrictive laws o n t h e Jews in Palestine, s u c h as the b a n o n circumcision a n d a prohibition against r e a d i n g the T o r a h in public. T h e m e m o r i e s of t h e s e terrible days are d e p i c t e d in t h e r a b b i n i c literature in a v e r y vivid m a n n e r . T h e story a b o u t t h e t e n m a r t y r s , a m o n g w h o m w a s R a b b i Akiba, is p e r h a p s t h e m o s t f a m o u s (Schafer, 1981). Provincia J u d a e a b e c a m e Syria Palaestina, a n d Aelia C a pitolina was f o u n d e d w i t h a p a g a n t e m p l e in its m i d s t . N o n Jews were settled in t h e n e w colony in place of Jews, a n d Jews w e r e f o r b i d d e n to enter d i e city. M o r e o v e r , any Jew f o u n d there w a s p u t to death. P a g a n cults of B a c c h u s , A s tarte, a n d A p h r o d i t e w e r e established in Jerusalem, a n d on the T e m p l e M o u n t a p a g a n t e m p l e w a s built t h a t c o n t a i n e d a statue of H a d r i a n . [See also Jerusalem.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A p p l e b a u m , S h i m o n . Prolegomena to the Study of the Second Jewish Re volt, A.D. 132-13$. Oxford, 1 9 7 6 . Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1 9 8 8 . Kloner, A m o s , and Yigal T e p p e r , eds. The Hiding Complexes in the Judean Shephelah (in H e b r e w ) . T e l Aviv, 1 9 8 7 . K u h n e n , Hans-Peter. Palastina in griechisch-romischer Zeit. M u n i c h , 1990.
Lewis, Naphtali, et al. The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, Aramaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 9 . Mendels, D o r o n . The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism. N e w York, 1992.
Meshorer, Ya'acov. Ancient Jewish
Coinage. 2 vols, Dix Hills, N . Y . ,
1982.
Meshorer, Ya'acov. The Coinage of Aelia Capitolina. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 9 . Schafer, Peter. DerBar-Kokhba-Anfstand: Studien zum zweitenjudischen Krieg gegen Rom. T u b i n g e n , 1 9 8 1 . Schiirer, Emil. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, ITS B.C.-A.D. 13$. 4 vols. Revised and edited by Geza Vermes et al. Edinburgh, 1 9 7 3 - 1 9 8 7 . Stern, M e n a c h e m , ed. and trans. Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 8 4 . Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt against Imperial Rome. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 . D O R O N MENDELS
BARROIS, AUGUSTIN GEORGES, (18981987), theologian a n d archaeologist. B o r n in Charleville, F r a n c e , Barrois studied in L o u v a i n . H e w a s o r d a i n e d a priest a n d joined the D o m i n i c a n O r d e r in 1924. T h e follow ing year h e was sent to t h e Ecole Biblique et A r c h e o l o g i q u e F r a n c a i s e in Jerusalem, w h e r e h e s p e n t a d e c a d e . H e r e t u r n e d t o F r a n c e in 1935 to b e c o m e professor of O l d T e s t a m e n t studies at die D o m i n i c a n F a c u l t y of Saulchoir. I n 1939 h e m o v e d t o t h e U n i t e d States, w h e r e h e t a u g h t t h e ology in W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , at P r i n c e t o n University, a n d at St. Vladimir's O r t h o d o x T h e o l o g i c a l S e m i n a r y in C r e s t w o o d , N e w York.
BASILICAS I n 1926-1927, Barrois c o d i r e c t e d (with P . Carriere a n d F . M . Abel) t h e excavations at N e r a b , 7 k m (4 mi.) s o u t h e a s t of A l e p p o , Syria, w h e r e t w o A r a m e a n stelae h a d b e e n dis covered in 1891. T h e major discovery of the 1920s h a d b e e n an i m p o r t a n t N e o - B a b y l o n i a n a n d A c h a e m e n i d necropolis. A g r o u p of twenty-five c u n e i f o r m tablets ( D h o r m e , 1928) was also f o u n d . [See N e r a b Inscriptions.] I n 1929 h e took p a r t , u n d e r F r a n c o i s T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , in the excavations at Arslan T a s h (ancient Hadatffju) in n o r t h e r n Syria. T h e fol lowing year, h e joined a H a r v a r d University expedition t o Serabit e l - K h a d e m in Sinai. Barrois is responsible for h a v i n g discovered or s t u d i e d several i m p o r t a n t m o n u m e n t s : a fu n e r a r y chapel in t h e c o n v e n t of St. E u t h y m e in t h e J u d e a n D e s e r t ; s y n a g o g u e s at B e t h A l p h a , east of t h e Jezreel Valley, a n d in Jerash, in J o r d a n ; a n d t o m b s in J e r u s a l e m a n d its vicinity. I n addition, he p u b l i s h e d studies o n biblical m e trology, a n d o n t h e excavations at B e t h - S h e a n , C a e s a r e a , M e g i d d o , a n d H e l b o n ( m o d . K h a l b u n , 25 k m n o r t h of D a m a s c u s ) . M o s t of his p u b l i c a t i o n s a p p e a r e d in t h e Revue Biblique a n d in t h e journal Syria b e t w e e n 1927 a n d 1939. Barrois's m o s t significant p u b l i c a t i o n is his t w o - v o l u m e Ma nuel d'archeologie biblique, a n a m b i t i o u s enterprise covering t h e entire field of traditional biblical archaeology. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barrois, Augustin Georges. Precis d'archeologie biblique. Paris, 1 9 3 5 . Barrois, Augustin Georges. Manuel d'archeologie biblique. 2 vols. Paris, I939-I953-
D h o r m e , Paul. "Les tablettes babyloniennes de N e i r a b . " Revue d'Assyriologie 25.2 ( 1 9 2 8 ) : 5 3 - 8 2 . T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Franipois, a n d A u g u s t i n Georges Barrois, et al. Arslan-Tash. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 6 . Paris, 1 9 3 1 . PIERRE DE MIROSCHEDJI
B A S I L I C A S . D e r i v e d f r o m t h e G r e e k w o r d banlike, "royal h o u s e , " the basilica is " a roofed hall, usually r e c t a n gular or apsidal, a n d often w i t h inner c o l u m n s , serving . . . general social a n d c o m m e r c i a l i n t e r c o u r s e a n d t h e h e a r i n g of lawsuits, for w h i c h it b e c a m e d i e p r i m a r y l o c a t i o n " ( R o b ertson, 1969, p . 268). A t r i b u n a l (or dais) for die presiding magistrate w a s often a feature. Its p l a n m a y b e simple or h a v e two to four aisles f o r m e d b y pillars alongside t h e cenn-al n a v e . S o m e m a k e u s e of t h e clerestory system for illumi nation. Its apse(s) or r e c t a n g u l a r dais(es) m a y b e o n t h e s h o r t or t h e long side, witii o n e or t h r e e e n t r a n c e s facing t h e tribunal. M o d e l s of t h e f o r m are t h e G r e e k hypostyle hall (ibid., p . 180), the Stoa Basilike in the agora in A t h e n s , a n d t h e a u d i e n c e hall i n i m p e r i a l palaces. E a r l y B a s i l i c a s . T h e basilica first a p p e a r s in Italy in r e p u b l i c a n times. T h e oldest k n o w n s t r u c t u r e is t h e Basilica P o r c i a (c. 175 BCE) in R o m e . F r a n k E. B r o w n (1976) p o i n t s to s e c o n d - c e n t u r y BCE basilicas at C o s a a n d A r d u a . T h e b a silica at P o m p e i i (c. 100 B C E ) , d e s t r o y e d in 79 CE, h a d a
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rectangular central space (possibly unroofed) s u r r o u n d e d b y a c o l o n n a d e t h a t c r e a t e d a corridor. Its raised dais was at its w e s t e r n e n d . T h e civil basilica b e c a m e a s t a n d a r d feature of R o m a n cities in t h e early e m p i r e , at A u g u s t a R a u r i c a (Augst, Switzerland), T h a u m a g u s t a ( T i m g a d ) , L e p t i s M a g n a in N o r t h Africa, a n d at T r i e r in G e r m a n y ( n o w a L u t h e r a n c h u r c h ) . L a t e r R o m a n basilicas include t h e Basil ica Aemilia (first c e n t u r y B C E ) , t h e Basilica Julia (first C e n t u r y CE, rebuilt in third c e n t u r y ) , a n d t h e great Basilica of M a x e n t i u s ( c o m p l e t e d b y C o n s t a n t i n e after 313 CE). E a s t e r n B a s i l i c a s . T h e civil basilica first a p p e a r s in the early R o m a n E m p i r e , t h o u g h primarily i n w h a t w e r e essen tially R o m a n cities in t h e east: t h r e e in Corintii (all first c e n t u r y CE), in S h a q q a in Syria, n o r t h of t h e Sea of Galilee (c. 280 CE), a n d in S a m a r i a / S e b a s t e in Israel. T h e so-called Royal Stoa at the s o u t h e r n e n d of tire H e r o d i a n T e m p l e platform in Jerusalem p r e s e n t s s o m e p r o b l e m s . A c c o r d i n g t o B e n j a m i n M a z a r (The Mountain of the Lord, G a r d e n City, N . Y . 1975, p p . 124-125), t h e center of this stoa was " i n the s h a p e of a basilica. " J o s e p h u s (Antiq. 15.411-416) describes t h r e e r o w s of m o n o l i t h i c C o r i n t h i a n c o l u m n s a n d o n e r o w of e n g a g e d c o l u m n s f o r m i n g a tiiree-aisled structure w h o s e central n a v e w a s half as h i g h as t h e t w o aisles. S u c h a stoa w o u l d b e u n i q u e . D i d J o s e p h u s confuse a building like the t w o - s t o r y Stoa of Attalos (with its interior colonnade) in t h e A t h e n s agora with the basilicas h e saw in R o m e ? Its function is u n c l e a r as well, M e i r B e n - D o v (1982, p p . 124-127) h y pothesizes an eastern apse d e c o r a t e d w i t h a m e n o r a h . R i c h a r d M a c k o w s k i (Jerusalem City of Jesus, G r a n d R a p i d s , 1980, p . 125), however, a r g u e s t h a t the T e m p l e functioned as a place w h e r e e v e r y b o d y m i x e d , " e i t h e r for business or t o e x c h a n g e religious a n d political n e w s a n d v i e w s , " like t h e basilicas in R o m e a n d at S e b a s t e a n d t h e Stoa of Attalus. B a s i l i c a l S y n a g o g u e s . T h e basilical p l a n in synagogues a p p e a r s in t h e third or f o u r t h c e n t u r y CE. T h e location of the T o r a h shrine distinguishes t h e l o n g h o u s e plan ( B a r ' a m , Beth Alpha, C a p e r n a u m , Chorazin, Gush Halav, H a m m a t i i - G a d e r , K h i r b e t S h e m a ' , M e i r o n , a n d T i b e r i a s in Israel; o n D e l o s ; a n d in Ostia a n d Stobi in Italy) from t h e b r o a d h o u s e p l a n ( E s h t e m o a a n d K h i r b e t Susiya in Israel a n d D u r a - E u r o p o s in Syria). T h e l o n g h o u s e type s o m e times h a s a n apse for t h e T o r a h shrine, as at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m a n d Betii Alpha in Israel a n d at Sardis in Asia M i n o r . C h r i s t i a n B a s i l i c a s . C o n s t a n t i n e b e g a n building great basilical c h u r c h e s in t h e fourth century. T h e i r typological origins h a v e b e e n a t t r i b u t e d to die a t r i u m h o u s e , secular basilicas or halls, a n d to t h e synagogue. Ecclesiastical basil icas use colonnades t h a t divide the structure into aisles a n d a nave (as at P o m p e i i ) , with a n eastern apse. T h e y have axial e n t r a n c e s on t h e west, often w i t h a n a t r i u m in front of t h e m . C o n s t a n t i n e erected t h e C h u r c h of t h e R e s u r r e c t i o n in J e r u s a l e m , the C h u r c h of t h e Nativity in Betiilehem, a n d St. P e t e r ' s Basilica in R o m e t o set a s t a n d a r d . After C o n s t a n t i n e , t h e b u i l d i n g of ecclesiastical basilicas
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spread rapidly t h r o u g h o u t t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n , e s pecially in Syria-Palestine, which presents a b r o a d s p e c t r u m of basilicas, m a n y of w h i c h are from the fourth to t h e sixth centuries CE. S o m e of t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t are in N o r t h Syria (Antioch a n d inland regions). T h e y r a n g e f r o m simple tiiree-aisled basilicas w i t h o u t an apse (Behyo, N o r t h Syria) or with a single apse ( K h a r e m S h e m s , D e r T u r m a n i n , a n d Q a l b L o u z e h in Syria; U m m er-Rasas a n d t h e series of c h u r c h e s a t G e r a s a — S t . T h e o d o r e , t h e cathedral, a n d Bishop G e n e s i u s — i n J o r d a n ) , to triple-apsed c h u r c h e s ( d e signed b y t h e architect Julianus at Brad; b y a series by M a r cianus Cyris in t h e m o u n t a i n s from A n t i o c h to A l e p p o ; at Rusafa (Sergiopolis), in the desert s o u t h of t h e E u p h r a t e s River; and at Petra, in J o r d a n ) . T h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of t r a n septs, c o u p l e d with t h e d o m e a n d squinch, led to d i e g r a d u a l a b a n d o n m e n t of t h e basilica p l a n a n d t h e a d o p t i o n of t h e Byzantine cross-in-square plan. T h e great basilicas at Santa M a r i a M a g g i o r e , Santa S a b i n a , a n d St. P a u l outside t h e walls of R o m e w e r e built in t h e fifth century. I n tire sixth century, Justinian rebuilt t h e C h u r c h of t h e Nativity a n d erected t h e N e a C h u r c h in J e rusalem. T h e addition t o Sancta Sophia of a d o m e a n d side apses t o t h e basilical p l a n influenced s u b s e q u e n t G r e e k e c clesiastical style. Basilical c h u r c h e s are n u m e r o u s , a n d t h e basilica f o r m clearly b e c a m e t h e s t a n d a r d in b o t h the east a n d w e s t (Milb u r n , 1988, p p . 83-201). Basilical c h u r c h e s have b e e n ex cavated in Israel at A v d a t ( O b o d a ) , T a b g h a ( H e p t a p e g o n ) , H e r o d i u m , K h i r b e t el-Kursi (Gergesa?), L a t r u n , M a m r e , K u r n u b ( M a m p s i s ) , N e s s a n a , a n d Shivtah. T h e basilica w a s also a d a p t e d for martyria. T h e cruciform M a r t y r i o n of St. Babylas at Antioch/Kaoussie has four a r m s without apses. T h e m o s t grandiose is t h e cruciform m a r t y r ion of St. S i m e o n Stylites at Q a l ' a t S i m ' a n in n o r t h e r n Syria, with four basilicas radiating from t h e octagon built a r o u n d t h e saint's pillar. T h e eastern three-aisled basilica t e r m i n a t e d in an apse. [See also C h u r c h e s ; Synagogues; and T e m p l e s . In addition many of the Near Eastern sites mentioned are the subject of in dependent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ben-Dov, Meir. In the Shadow of the Temple, Translated by Ina Fried man. N e w York, 1 9 8 5 . Useful popular report on recent excavations in Jerusalem. Brown, Frank E. Roman Architecture. N e w York, 1976. Very clear, brief account of factors influencing R o m a n architects in planning build ings and cities. Grimal, Pierre. Roman Cities, Translated a n d edited with a descriptive catalog of R o m a n cities by G. Michael Woloch. M a d i s o n , Wis., 1983. Covers R o m a n cities in t h e W e s t only, Hachlili, Rachel. " T h e N i c h e and the Ark in Ancient Synagogues." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 223 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 4 3 - 5 3 . Includes useful synagogue plans. Krautheimer, Richard, a n d Slobodan Curcic. Early Christian and Byz antine Architecture. 4th ed. N e w Haven, 1986.
Milburn, R o b e r t L . P . Early Christian Art and Architecture. Berkeley, 1988. T h e most accessible recent discussion of early church archi tecture. Robertson, D . S. Greek and Roman Architecture. 2 d ed., corrected. L o n d o n , 1 9 4 5 . Classic descriptions, easily accessible to any reader. Shanks, Hershel. Judaism in Stone: The Archaeology of Ancient Syna gogues. N e w York, 1 9 7 9 . T r u s t w o r d i y p o p u l a r r e p o r t o n excavated ancient synagogues. Strange, James F . , and Hershel Shanks. " S y n a g o g u e W h e r e Jesus P r e a c h e d F o u n d at C a p e r n a u m . " Biblical Archaeology Review 9 ( N o v e m b e r - D e c e m b e r 1983): 2 4 - 3 1 . W h i t e , L . Michael. Building God's House in the Roman World: Architec tural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Baltimore, 1990. Fascinating a t t e m p t to describe the development of worship centers from modifications of houses to the construction of special buildings for Mithraism, Judaism, a n d Christianity. EDGAR KRENTZ
B A S S I T , site located o n t h e Syrian coast, as t h e crow flies a b o u t 40 k m (25 mi.) n o r t h of Latakia, 50 k m (31 mi.) from A n t i o c h , a n d 137 k m (85 mi.) f r o m C a p e St. J e a n o n C y p r u s (35°5i'38" N , 35°49'i5" E ) . T h e site h a s b e e n visited b y , a m o n g others, C . L e o n a r d W o o l l e y , C l a u d e Schaeffer, H e n r i Seyrig, P . J. Riis ( w h o identified it w i t h a n c i e n t P o s ideion; see b e l o w ) , G e o r g e S a a d e , a n d J o h n W . H a y e s ( w h o studied t h e site's c o r p u s of s t a m p e d clay basins (Fr., pelves). H e r o d o t u s (3.91.1-3) a n d t h e n various other a u t h o r s ( D i o dorus, Strabo, Ptolemaeus) mention Posideion. T h e name a p p e a r s , m o r e a n d m o r e distorted, o n p o r t o l a n o s , medieval ( f o u r t e e n t h - s i x t e e n t h centuries CE) navigation m a n u a l s ; o n a 1692 m a p (Michelet edition, Paris) t h a t r e a d s Possidie a n d places it o n t h e coast; o n a n 1859 British A d m i r a l t y c h a r t t h a t calls it A n c i e n t Posideion; a n d as el Bouseit, m e n t i o n e d at t h e e n d of t h e n i n e t e e n t h century. Following a 1969 survey, excavations t o o k place from 1971 to 1984 u n d e r t h e direction of P a u l C o u r b i n , a n d w e r e at first limited t o t h e site's ancient t e r r a c e ( n o w called M e i d a n ) , t h e t o m b s in t h e I r o n A g e necropolis, a n d t h e Helle nistic a n d R o m a n acropolis. I n 1973, t h e w e s t e r n valley w a s partly excavated a n d s u b s e q u e n t l y t h e tell ( L a t e B r o n z e A g e I - e n d of t h e R o m a n p e r i o d ) itself w a s excavated. T h e first evidence of settlement dates to a b o u t 1600 BCE. T h e s u r r o u n d i n g w o o d l a n d was cleared to cultivate cereals. [See Cereals.] T h e n a m e of t h e site in t h a t p e r i o d is u n k n o w n , b u t it a p p e a r s t o h a v e b e e n a n a d v a n c e d o u t p o s t of Ugarit. T w o i m p o r t a n t buildings s u c c e e d e d e a c h other t h a t h a d been a b a n d o n e d before t h e arrival of t h e Sea P e o p l e s i n a b o u t 1200 BCE. T h e site w a s i m m e d i a t e l y r e o c c u p i e d , b u t only partially. I t a p p e a r s t h e n t o b e l o n g t o t h e A r a m e a n k i n g d o m of H a m a . M a n y architectural levels follow w i t h o u t i n t e r r u p t i o n d u r i n g t h e Early I r o n A g e . A s a small L e v a n t i n e h a r b o r related b y t r a d e t o central P h o e n i c i a a n d C y p r u s , a n d possibly receiving colonists from t h o s e areas, Bassit devel o p e d contacts w i t h G r e e c e in t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE t h a t c o n tinued into t h e n i n t h a n d eighth centuries BCE; h o w e v e r , t h e r e is n o evidence of a G r e e k p r e s e n c e at Bassit before t h e
BASTA first half of t h e seventh c e n t u r y BCE. T h e site received its n a m e , Posideion, t h e n . M a n y objects f o u n d in t h e e i g h t h s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE necropolis confirm relations with P h o e nicia a n d C y p r u s . T h e s e t t l e m e n t a p p e a r s to h a v e b e e n small a n d its i n h a b i t a n t s p o o r . S o m e s i x t h - c e n t u r y BCE child burials w e r e d u g intra muros. T h e society a p p e a r s to h a v e b e e n b o t h exclusive a n d egalitarian. Following the e n d of t h e s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, relations grew steadily with eastern G r e e c e : Aeolis, Ionia, S a m o s , M i letus (630-520 BCE); m a i n l a n d G r e e c e : C o r i n t h a n d S p a r t a ; a n d even ( a l t h o u g h d o u b t l e s s , indirectly) E t r u r i a a n d t h e n A t h e n s (575-480 B C E ) . T h e P e r s i a n c o n q u e s t (539 BCE) b r o u g h t n o c h a n g e to t h e s e relations. T h e M e d i a n wars seem to h a v e slowed t r a d e d u r i n g m o s t of t h e fifth c e n t u r y BCE, b u t it w a s later r e s u m e d . T h e city m a y eventually h a v e m i n t e d its o w n coinage, before A l e x a n d e r ' s death, as a local coin of A l e x a n d e r ' s is k n o w n . I n t h a t p e r i o d the acropolis was fortified. Following A l e x a n d e r ' s d e a t h , t h e site b e c a m e p a r t of t h e Seleucid k i n g d o m a n d later u s e d t h e Hellenistic koine. E v e n after t h e R o m a n c o n q u e s t (64 BCE), t h e G r e e k l a n g u a g e r e m a i n e d in u s e . F r o m t h e third c e n t u r y CE o n w a r d , t h e t o w n witnessed considerable c o n s t r u c t i o n activity: a n e w pier a n d h a r b o r facilities, a n e w t o w n wall m a d e of m o d u l a r blocks, large h o u s e s , n e w r a m p a r t s , a basilica, c h a m b e r t o m b s t h a t e v e n tually held s a r c o p h a g i , a n d a s y n a g o g u e . It b e c a m e a C h r i s tian cult place. I n a d d i t i o n , pelves (see a b o v e ) w e r e p r o d u c e d a n d e x p o r t e d . T h e site w a s i n h a b i t e d until t h e A r a b c o n q u e s t at d i e b e g i n n i n g of d i e s e v e n t h century. [See also the biographies of Schaeffer, Seyrig, and
Woolley.}
BIBLIOGRAPHY C o u r b i n , Paul. "Bassit." Syria 63 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 1 7 5 - 2 2 0 . Includes fifty-five illustrations. C o u r b i n , Paul. "Bassit-Posidaion in d i e Early I r o n A g e . " In Greek Col onists and Native Populations: Proceedings of the First Australian Con gress of Classical Archaeology Held in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. D. Trendall, Sydney, 9-14 Jidy 198s, edited by Jean-Paul D e s c o e u dres, p p . 5 0 3 - 5 0 9 . Oxford, 1 9 9 0 . Courbin, Paul. Les tombes du Ferll a Bassit. Paris, 1 9 9 3 . C o u r b i n , Paul. " F r a g m e n t s d ' a m p h o r e s protogeometriques grecques a Bassit (Syrie)." Hesperia 62 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 9 5 - 1 1 3 . L e Rider, G e o r g e s . "L'atelier de Posideion et les monnaies de la fouille de Bassit en Syrie." Bulletin de ConespondanceHellenique 110 (1986): 393-408. Perreault, Jacques Y. " C e r a m i q u e et echanges: Les importations attiques au P r o c h e - O r i e n t du Vie au milieu d u Ve siecle avant J. C , les donnees archeologiques." Bulletin de Conespondance Hellinique 1 1 0 (1986): 1 4 5 - 1 7 5 . Perreault, Jacques Y. " L e s emporias grecs du Levant: mythe ou realite," In L'Emporion, edited by Alain B r e s s o n and Pierre Rouillard, p p . 5 9 83. Paris, 1 9 9 3 . PAUL COURBIN
B A S T A , site located a b o u t 20 k m (12 mi.) s o u t h of W a d i M u s a / P e t r a , in s o u t h e r n J o r d a n , 1,460-1,420 m a b o v e sea
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level, at t h e b o r d e r b e t w e e n arable land with rich springs a n d t h e steppic Artemisia (Artemisia h e r b a alba) regions of t h e w e s t e r n Arabian p l a t e a u , w h e r e the m e a n a n n u a l p r e cipitation is 200 m m (3o°i3'47" N , 35°32'o6" E ) . A N e o lithic o c c u p a t i o n was first r e c o r d e d in a survey carried o u t b y the D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of J o r d a n in 1972. H a n s G e o r g G e b e l did a s o u n d i n g in 1984 t h a t revealed a d e e p L a t e P r e - P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c B ( P P N B ) o c c u p a t i o n that was excavated from 1986 t o 1989 a n d again in 1992 b y the Basta Joint Archaeological Project, directed by H a n s J. N i s s e n a n d M u j a h e d M u h e i s e n . G e b e l w a s t h e project's assistant direc tor. T h e settlement was l o c a t e d n e x t to t h e rich spring of Basta, o n a steep wadi slope. T h e surface distribution of P P N B artifacts w a s a l m o s t 14 ha (36 acres). T h e area ex cavated covered a b o u t 900 s q m . T h e evidence at Basta w a s of a shifting site o c c u p a t i o n , w i t h m a r g i n a l refuse d u m p s , activity areas for p r o c e s s i n g food, materials u s e d for c o n struction, a n d possible cultivated areas. T h e L a t e P P N B c h i p p e d lithics a n d architectural p h a s e s excavated h a d r a d i o c a r b o n dates of t h e s e c o n d half of t h e seventh millen n i u m , w i t h parallels at ' A i n G h a z a l , W a d i S h u ' e i b , 'Ain G a m a m , a n d N a h a l Issaron. [See 'Ain G h a z a l ; S h u ' e i b , W a d i . ] T h e cultural layers a n d deposits a b o v e the P P N B architec t u r e revealed a P P N C - a n d Y a r m u k i a n - r e l a t e d c h i p p e d stone i n d u s t r y a n d artifacts. T h e layers w e r e m o r e t h a n 6 m d e e p . B e l o w t h e surface, p r e d o m i n a n d y sixth-millennium colluvials w e r e i n t e r b e d d e d with cultural layers ( Y a r m u kian-related a r r o w h e a d types a n d a few P o t t e r y Neolithic sherds as well as flimsy installations of a p h a s e b e t w e e n t h e L a t e P P N B a n d t h e P N ) covering an u p p e r L a t e P P N B architectural p h a s e . B e c a u s e of t e r r a c e d h o u s i n g o n the slopes a n d rebuilding activities, it is difficult t o s e p a r a t e the m a i n architectural p h a s e from even o n e s u b p h a s e . T h e architectural units are a s s u m e d to h a v e b e e n u s e d for long periods of time. Built o n terraces created b y channel-like grids of d r y - s t o n e m a sonry, t h e y w e r e well p r e s e r v e d ( u p t o 4 m h i g h ) , p r e p l a n n e d , a n d m u l t i r o o m e d . T h e s u b s t r u c t u r e s h a v e parallels at C a y o n i i a n d N e v a h C o r i in T u r k e y . [See Cayonii; N e v a h Cori.] T h e s e s u b s t r u c t u r e s , possibly related t o subfloor cli m a t i c n e e d s (i.e., air circulation), were covered b y stone slabs, a stone fill, a n d t h e b e d s of the first-floor r o o m s , a n d s o m e t i m e s with a finish of b u r n i s h e d plaster stained in a r e d o r c r e a m color. M o s t of t h e " c h a n n e l s " w e r e f o u n d e m p t y ; s o m e h a d b e e n u s e d as a burial g r o u n d a n d a few at least w e r e accessible. (An e n t r a n c e into o n e channel could b e t r a c e d for m o r e t h a n 12 m . ) S o m e of t h e well-built walls on t h e terraces ( d o u b l e r o w s of dressed stones set in m o r t a r , w i t h smaller stones w e d g e d into t h e courses) show traces of m u d plaster, rarely b e a r i n g b u r n i s h e d a n d p a i n t e d plaster. I n o n e case a painting a p p e a r s to r e p r e s e n t twigs with ber ries. T h e g r o u n d p l a n s of t h e larger units a n d r o o m s s e e m e d t o follow the c o n t o u r lines of the slope of t h e terrace. T h e
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central building unit of area B (10 X 15 m ) , h o w e v e r , was constructed o n o n e level, with two single a n d d o u b l e r o w s of small r o o m s (1.3-2 sq m ) a r o u n d a central o p e n space. I n m a n y cases t h e r e was n o evidence of h o w the r o o m s were connected, a n d their function r e m a i n s unclear. T r u e e n trances and stairs w e r e rare, b u t windowlike wall o p e n i n g s (for air circulation, light, a n d accessibility) are attested. T h e evidence is of a long-time use of t h e m a i n walls, a n d two stories c a n n o t be ruled out. Less well-built structures in t h e u p p e r architectural p h a s e were related to an early sixthmillennium occupation. U n m i x e d debitage d u m p s of w o r k s h o p s indicated s p e cialized craftsmanship in naviform core technologies (with exclusive u s e of t a b u l a r flint) that gave place to p r e d o m i nantly flake technologies in t h e P o s t - P P N B layers. A r r o w h e a d types in t h e L a t e P P N B layers are related to t h e Byblos a n d ' A m u q shapes; the ' A m u q - r e l a t e d m o r p h o l o g y d o m i nates. [See Byblos; ' A m u q . ] T h e tool kit comprises all i m p l e m e n t classes k n o w n from p e r m a n e n t P P N B village sites, witii additional types. A rich g r o u n d stone industry is r e p resented b y m a r b l e a n d limestone vessels, standardized m a n o s a n d grinding slabs, as well as items with u n k n o w n functions. T h e b o n e industry is of a L a t e P P N B s t a n d a r d type, including needles a n d t u b u l a r b o n e b e a d s . L a r g e m a r ble plates a n d oval vessels, as well as limestone a n d tiny chlorite vessels, exist at Basta. Vessels m a d e of t e m p e r e d sun-dried or low-fired clay are also well attested in die L a t e P P N B contexts. All sorts of b e a d s m a d e of greenstones, R e d Sea corals a n d mollusks, local a n d exotic minerals, pailletts of m o t h e r of-pearl, a n d tokenlike objects were found. H u m a n faces are represented by t w o Basta " h e a d s " (green m a r b l e , lime stone), a stone carving a n d a m a s k fragment (limestone). F r o m t h e P o s t - P P N B layers (possibly mid-sixth m i l l e n n i u m BCE), a h o a r d of t w o animal figurines a n d two p e n d a n t s carved in different styles a n d raw materials was found; o n e represents a r a m t h a t resembles a phallus w h e n t u r n e d (see figure 1). P r i m a r y burials of complete a n d incomplete corpses as well as secondary deposits of skulls from disturbed burials were found together with dispersed h u m a n r e m a i n s in ar chitectural contexts. It is likely t h a t u n i n h a b i t e d p a r t s of t h e settlement (ruins) were used as a burial g r o u n d . M u l t i individual burials w e r e c o m m o n . Infant mortality is r e p r e sented b y 38 p e r c e n t for z e r o - t w o years a n d 38 p e r c e n t for five-seven years. Well-attested diseases a n d pathological al terations are dental caries, periodontal diseases, stomatitis, scurvy, transversal e n a m e l hypoplasia, possible a n e m i a and/ or A-hypervitaminosis, cribra oribitalia, meningitis, osteo myelitis of t h e skull vault, arthrosis of the large joints, a n d r h e u m a t i c arthritis. In the L a t e P P N B , subsistence' appears to have b e e n 76 p e r c e n t domestic sheep/goats, 1-3 p e r c e n t morphologically wild sheep/goats, 10 p e r c e n t goitered a n d m o u n t a i n gazelle
BASTA. F i g u r e 1. Limestone
ram amulet.
F r o m a Yarmukian-re-
lated c o n t e x t . L e n g t h , 7 . 8 c m . (Courtesy H . G. Gebel)
(possibly also G. dorcas), 4 p e r c e n t morphologically wild a n d possibly d o m e s t i c cattle, very few wild a n d possibly d o mestic pigs, fallow deer, onager, a n d African wild asses. [See S h e e p a n d G o a t s ; Cattle a n d O x e n ; Pigs.] L a t e P P N B ar boreal cover a n d subsistence are r e p r e s e n t e d b y juniper, 7 4 percent; pistachio, 25 p e r c e n t ( m o s t likely P. atlanticd); a n d a few p o p l a r a n d willow trees. T h e i n h a b i t a n t s of Basta col lected a l m o n d s a n d wild figs a n d cultivated t w o - r o w hulled barley a n d e m m e r w h e a t a n d filed p e a s . [See Cereals; A g riculture.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, Cornelia. " T h e Analysis of M a m m a l i a n Bones from Basta, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic Site in Jordan: Problems and Potential." Paleorient 1 7 . 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 5 9 - 7 5 .
Gebel, H a n s G., et al. "Preliminary R e p o r t o n the First Season of E x cavations at Basta." In The Prehistory of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by Andrew N . G a r r a r d and H a n s G. Gebel, p p . 1 0 1 - 1 3 4 . British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 3 9 6 . Oxford, 1 9 8 8 . Nissen, H a n s J., et al. " R e p o r t on the First T w o Seasons of Excavations at Basta, 1 9 8 6 - 8 7 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 31 (1987): 79-II9-
Nissen, H a n s J., et al, " R e p o r t on t h e Excavations at Basta, 1 9 8 8 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 3 5 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 3 - 4 0 . HANS GEORG GEBEL a n d MUJAHED MUHEISEN
BATASH, TEL B A T A S H , T E L (Ar., T e l l el-Batashi), site located in t h e Sorek Valley, 7 k m (4 mi.) w e s t of B e t h - S h e m e s h a n d 5 k m (3 mi.) n o r t h w e s t of T e l M i q n e ( E k r o n ) . T h e site ( m a p reference 141 X 132) can b e safely identified with T i m n a h , a t o w n m e n t i o n e d in the biblical description of the n o r t h e r n b o r d e r of J u d a h as located in t h e Sorek Valley, b e t w e e n B e t h - S h e m e s h a n d E k r o n / M i q n e (Jos. 1 5 : 1 0 - 1 1 ) . T e l B a tash is the only m o u n d b e t w e e n these t w o p o i n t s . T i m n a h is m e n t i o n e d in several additional biblical texts, t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t of w h i c h is the S a m s o n narrative in Judges 1 4 - 1 5 , w h e r e it is d e s c r i b e d as a Philistine t o w n close to the D a n i t e b o r d e r . T i m n a h in Genesis 38:13-14 p r o b a b l y also refers t o this site. T h e t o w n is m e n t i o n e d in tire t o w n lists of D a n (Jos. 19:43), attributed by m a n y scholars to the t i m e of t h e U n i t e d M o n a r c h y . It t h u s a p p e a r s t h a t d u r i n g t h e t i m e of David and Solomon T i m n a h changed hands and became an Israelite t o w n . A c c o r d i n g t o 1 Chronicles 28:18, t h e Philis tines, p r o b a b l y the Ekronites, t o o k the city b a c k from t h e Israelites d u r i n g t h e t i m e of K i n g A h a z . A few decades later, d u r i n g S e n n a c h e r i b ' s invasion of J u d a h , the Assyrians c a p t u r e d T i m n a h , just before E k r o n , w h i c h d u r i n g t h a t t i m e w a s also u n d e r J u d e a n subjugation. T e l B a t a s h covers 6 acres of a flat alluvial plain s o u t h of t h e Sorek b r o o k . T h e m o u n d , rising a b o u t 15 m a b o v e t h e plain, is s q u a r e a n d its sides are o r i e n t e d t o t h e points of t h e compass. E x c a v a t i o n s w e r e carried o u t o n t h e m o u n d in twelve sea sons (1977-1989), s p o n s o r e d b y the S o u t h w e s t e r n Baptist T h e o l o g i c a l S e m i n a r y , in collaboration with t h e Institute of A r c h a e o l o g y of t h e H e b r e w U n i v e r s i t y of Jerusalem. T h e expedition director was G e o r g e L . K e l m , a n d the a r c h a e o logical director w a s A m i h a i M a z a r . A s e q u e n c e of twelve major strata was identified, s o m e w i t h several s u b p h a s e s , covering a s p a n of 1,300 years, f r o m M i d d l e B r o n z e II until the Persian Period. M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e ( S t r a t a X I I - X ) . T h e town was f o u n d e d s o m e t i m e d u r i n g M i d d l e B r o n z e II, p e r h a p s in a b o u t 1700 BCE. Its f o u n d e r s c o n s t r u c t e d a s q u a r e e a r t h e n r a m p a r t , 200 m l o n g on e a c h side, w h i c h s u b s e q u e n t l y c r e ated t h e m o u n d ' s g e o m e t r i c configuration. T h e t o w n d e veloped inside t h e c r a t e r - s h a p e d area. I n area B , in t h e m o u n d ' s n o r t h e a s t e r n corner, t h e r a m p a r t w a s u n c o v e r e d for a length of m o r e t h a n 30 m . It w a s p r e s e r v e d t o a height of a b o u t 6 m , leaning on t h e massive m u d - b r i c k wall of a large s t r u c t u r e , p e r h a p s a citadel. Only t w o r o o m s of this citadel w e r e excavated, in w h i c h t w o c o n s t r u c t i o n p h a s e s ( d e n o t e d strata X I I - X I ) w e r e o b s e r v e d . T h e citadel a p p e a r s to h a v e b e e n d e s t r o y e d before t h e final p h a s e of M B III: o c c u p a t i o n was r e s u m e d o n its ruins following its d e s t r u c tion in s t r a t u m X . Only f r a g m e n t a r y b u i l d i n g r e m a i n s w e r e p r e s e r v e d from this level, a n d it a p p e a r s t h a t t h e fortifica tions (or at least t h e citadel) w e n t o u t of u s e t h e n . T h e p o t tery suggests a d a t e late in t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . S t r a t u m X w a s heavily destroyed b y fire.
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L a t e B r o n z e A g e ( S t r a t a I X - V I ) . F o u r o c c u p a t i o n lev els from the L a t e B r o n z e A g e w e r e identified in area B. E a c h of the lower t h r e e ( I X - V I I , dated t o t h e fifteenth-fourteenth centuries BCE) was d e s t r o y e d violently by fire, indicating a period of unrest a n d instability. It a p p e a r s t h a t d u r i n g this p e r i o d T e l Batash was a t o w n in the k i n g d o m of G e z e r , w h i c h d o m i n a t e d the fertile l a n d of t h e Sorek Valley. As at m a n y o t h e r L B sites in Israel, n o t r a c e of a city wall was f o u n d ; t h e outer walls of h o u s e s served as a defense line, a n d w h e r e streets r e a c h e d t h e e n d of the m o u n d t h e y were b l o c k e d b y walls t h a t closed t h e g a p s b e t w e e n h o u s e s . In each of the three strata t h e r e m a i n s of substantial build ings w e r e found, including t h o s e of large pillared halls with staircases leading to a s e c o n d floor. T h e architecture of these h o u s e s is unparalleled elsewhere; they p r o b a b l y b e l o n g e d t o u p p e r - c l a s s landlords or m e r c h a n t s . R i c h assemblages of pottery a n d other finds w e r e r e c o v e r e d in the d e s t r u c t i o n layers: considerable a m o u n t s of C y p r i o t pottery (mainly in s t r a t u m V I I ) a n d cylinder seals, scarabs from E g y p t , clay figurines, a n d m e t a l objects. It seems t h a t after t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of the p r o s p e r o u s stra t u m VII t o w n (fourteenth c e n t u r y BCE), the site declined. O n l y p o o r structural r e m a i n s a n d a few finds could be at t r i b u t e d t o s t r a t u m VI (thirteenth c e n t u r y BCE). I r o n A g e ( S t r a t a V - I I ) . It is s t r a t u m V at T e l Batash t h a t is to be identified with t h e Philistine t o w n of T i m n a h in the biblical texts, p r o b a b l y built b y t h e Philistines as a b o r d e r t o w n in the territory of the city-state of E k r o n / M i q n e . It was f o u n d e d s o m e t i m e in t h e s e c o n d half of the twelfth century BCE, w h e n Philistine b i c h r o m e p o t t e r y w a s already in use. Unlike n e a r b y E k r o n / M i q n e , T e l B a t a s h p r o d u c e d n o M y c e n a e a n I I I C pottery. T h e B a t a s h w a s destroyed in a b o u t 1000 BCE or slightly later, p e r h a p s w h e n K i n g D a v i d c o n q u e r e d t h e region. T h e Philistine t o w n w a s well built, with m u d - b r i c k structures o n s t o n e foundations. E v i d e n c e for a shallow defensive wall was f o u n d in area C . In the residential areas several phases of c o n s t r u c t i o n were observed, evi d e n c e of t h e longevity of this s t r a t u m . A m o n g the finds were typical Iron I p o t t e r y a s s e m b l a g e s , including Philistine p o t tery a n d s o m e figurines; h o w e v e r , the area of this s t r a t u m excavated t h u s far is t o o limited to allow an i n - d e p t h eval u a t i o n of the material culture. S t r a t u m I V (tenth c e n t u r y BCE) follows the total d e s t r u c tion or a b a n d o n m e n t of t h e previous t o w n . Its n e w struc t u r e s w e r e built on a different p l a n a n d are mainly domestic, p r o b a b l y belonging to a c o m m u n i t y of farmers. N o city wall w a s discovered, b u t t w o t o w e r s a n d a n L - s h a p e d wall are p r o b a b l y t h e r e m a i n s of its city gate. It a p p e a r s that the stra t u m I V p o p u l a t i o n was Israelite, a n d the t o w n w a s p a r t of the k i n g d o m of D a v i d a n d S o l o m o n . T h e pottery is very similar to t h a t f o u n d at o t h e r J u d e a n sites of the period a n d includes vessels covered w i t h a thick, h a n d - b u r n i s h e d r e d slip. T h e s t r a t u m I V t o w n c a m e to an e n d in the late t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, p e r h a p s d u r i n g t h e invasion of P h a r a o h S h i -
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shak. A m o n g t h e finds w a s an incised inscription o n a b o w l fragment t h a t m e n t i o n s " [ s o ] n of H a n a n . " T h e n a m e H a n a n in this context is interesting b e c a u s e E l o n B e t h - H a n a n is m e n t i o n e d as o n e of the cities in this region d u r i n g t h e reign of S o l o m o n ( i Kgs. 4:9). S t r a t u m III represents t h e rebuilding of the t o w n o n a large scale. T h i s t o w n w a s destroyed in 701 BCE d u r i n g S e n nacherib's invasion; h o w e v e r , the date of its f o u n d a t i o n is n o t clear, a n d it is still n o t k n o w n whether t h e r e was an occupation g a p in t h e n i n t h century BCE. T h e r e clearly is n o m o r e t h a n o n e major s t r a t u m b e t w e e n t h e t e n t h century (stratum IV) a n d t h e seventh c e n t u r y ( s t r a t u m I I ) . T h e stratum III city w a s well fortified b y a stone wall o n the crest of t h e m o u n d a n d a lower wall on its slope. A m a g nificent city gate led into t h e t o w n (see figure 1). T h e n a r r o w a p p r o a c h to t h e t o w n was defended b y an outer gate with a large bastion (8 X 24 m ) . A bent-axis a p p r o a c h in t h e outer gate a n d a small piazza led to an inner four-entryway or sixc h a m b e r e d gate structure. S o u t h of t h e gate c o m p l e x , o n t h e crest of the m o u n d , t h e foundation courses of a large public building w e r e discov ered. It appears to have b e e n an administrative s t r u c t u r e , just inside t h e city gate. I n t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e t o w n , a building w a s f o u n d with large storage spaces in w h i c h d o z ens of s m a s h e d storejars, J u d e a n in type, s t a m p e d with royal J u d e a n seal impressions (Jmlk), were found. O n e jar bears t h e seal impression of an official, " T s a f a n (son of) A b i -
BATASH, TEL. F i g u r e Expedition)
m a a s . " T h e building w a s destroyed d u r i n g S e n n a c h e r i b ' s invasion of T i m n a h in 701 BCE, r e c o r d e d in his annals. T h i s fits t h e historical s o u r c e s , w h i c h relate t h a t K i n g H e z e k i a h took control of t h e city-state of E k r o n / M i q n e , exiled its king t o Jerusalem, a n d forced its elders to join h i m against A s syria. T i m n a h , w h i c h t h e Philistines h a d t a k e n from, J u d a h several decades earlier ( a c c o r d i n g t o 2 Chr. 28), was t h u s u n d e r J u d e a n control, a n d t h e jars with royal seal i m p r e s sions m a y have b e l o n g e d to a J u d e a n garrison stationed there. In S t r a t u m II (seventh c e n t u r y BCE), T i m n a h p r o s p e r e d , as did its m u c h larger n e i g h b o r , E k r o n / M i q n e . T h e fortifi cations of the p r e v i o u s city of s t r a t u m III w e r e r e c o n structed, t h e city wall thickened, a n d t h e gate rebuilt. T h e building r e m a i n s indicate t h a t t h e s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y t o w n w a s well p l a n n e d a n d densely built u p . T h e p u b l i c b u i l d i n g soutii of t h e gate was r e p l a c e d b y an industrial a n d c o m m e r c i a l c o m p l e x , w h i c h i n c l u d e d a finely built oil-pressing installa tion. I n t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e t o w n , a large area w a s ex p o s e d t h a t revealed a series of dwellings a n d a p u b l i c b u i l d ing. T h e dwellings are typical I r o n A g e pillared buildings, or f o u r - r o o m h o u s e , featuring a s p a c e o n t h e g r o u n d floor t h a t is divided b y a r o w of m o n o l i t h i c pillars. [See F o u r - r o o m H o u s e . ] A street s e p a r a t e d the h o u s e s f r o m t h e n o r t i i e r n city wall. O u t of t h e four h o u s e s e x p o s e d , t h r e e h a d industrial installations: o n e h a d an oil p r e s s a n d t h e t w o others a n i n -
1. View of the outer gate at Tel Batash, looking northeast.
(Courtesy T e l Batash
BATHS stallation of u n d e f i n e d f u n c t i o n , k n o w n also from n e a r b y Ekron/Miqne. E v e r y h o u s e c o n t a i n e d large quantities of pottery a n d other finds. M a n y of the forms of p o t t e r y vessels are typical of the region of Philistia a n d m a i n l y of E k r o n / M i q n e , t h e others are J u d e a n . E v i d e n c e for l o n g - d i s t a n c e c o n n e c t i o n s is f o u n d in the f o r m of P h o e n i c i a n , T r a n s j o r d a n i a n , a n d E a s t G r e e k pottery. C o n n e c t i o n s w i t h J u d a h are also illus trated b y inscribed s t o n e shekel weights a n d rosette seal i m pressions. S t r a t u m II at T i m n a h w a s p r o b a b l y a t o w n in t h e state of E k r o n / M i q n e t h a t m a i n t a i n e d strong ties with J u d a h a n d c o n d u c t e d extensive industrial a n d c o m m e r c i a l activity. It a p p e a r s t h a t , as at E k r o n / M i q n e , the p r o d u c t i o n a n d e x p o r t of olive oil, p a r t of a " c o t t a g e i n d u s t r y , " was a major factor in d i e t o w n ' s prosperity. I t w a s severely destroyed b y fire d u r i n g t h e B a b y l o n i a n c o n q u e s t of t h e region, p r o b a b l y in 603 BCE. T h e city s u b s e q u e n t l y fell into r u i n s a n d w a s briefly o c c u p i e d b y few squatters. D u r i n g t h e Persian p e r i o d t h e r e was a small s e t t l e m e n t on t h e m o u n d , b u t only a few walls a n d pits c a n b e attributed t o this p e r i o d . [See also M i q n e , Tel.] BIBLIOGRAPHY K e l m , George L . , and Amihai M a z a r . " T h r e e Seasons of Excavations at Tel Batash ( T i m n a h ) : Preliminary R e p o r t . " Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 2 4 8 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 1 - 3 6 . K e l m , George L., and Amihai M a z a r . " T e l Batash ( T i m n a h ) E x c a vations: S e c o n d Preliminary R e p o r t ( 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 8 3 ) . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, S u p p l e m e n t , no, 2 3 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 93-120.
Kelm, George L., and Amihai M a z a r . "Excavating in S a m s o n Country: Philistines a n d Israelites at T e l B a t a s h . " Biblical Archaeology Review 15.1 (1989): 36-49-
Kelm, George L . , and Amihai M a z a r . " T e l Batash ( T i m n a h ) E x c a vations: T h i r d Preliminary R e p o r t , 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 8 9 . " Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, S u p p l e m e n t , n o . 2 7 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 4 7 - 6 7 . M a z a r , Amihai, and George L. K e l m . "Batash, T e l . " In The New En cyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited b y E p h r a i m Stern, vol. 1, p p . 1 5 2 - 1 5 7 . Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . Mazar, Amihai. " T h e N o r t h e r n Shephelah in the Iron Age: Some issues in Biblical History a n d Archaeology." In Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King, edited by Michael C o o g a n , J. C. E x u m , and L a u r e n c e E. Stager, p p . 2 4 7 - 2 6 7 . Louisville, 1 9 9 4 .
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p h r a t e s River, terra-cotta b a t h t u b s w e r e recovered in t h e palace. [See M a r i ; Palace.] B r o n z e b a t h t u b s have occasion ally b e e n u n c o v e r e d from t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE in M e s o p o t a m i a . It seems, h o w e v e r , t h a t in ancient M e s o p o t a m i a t u b s w e r e reserved for the wealthy; t h e p o o r b a t h e d on t h e b a n k s of canals a n d rivers a n d in cisterns or p o u r e d water over a b a t h e r on a plastered or p a v e d surface. [See Cisterns.] In N e b u c h a d r e z z a r ' s B a b y l o n , residences typically included a b a t h r o o m located b e h i n d t h e m a i n r o o m of t h e h o u s e . T h e b a t h r o o m consisted of a fired-brick floor, lined with b i t u m e n a n d p o w d e r e d limestone. T h e waste w a t e r from the b a t h flowed i n t o a s u m p located b e n e a t h the lowest section of t h e floor. N o traces of b a t h t u b s h a v e b e e n recovered, indicating t h a t s h o w e r w a t e r was p o u r e d over t h e bather. Batiitubs a p p e a r o n C y p r u s in the L a t e C y p r i o t II period ( f o u r t e e n t h - t h i r t e e n t h c e n m r i e s BCE) a n d b e c a m e increas ingly p o p u l a r in t h e L a t e C y p r i o t IIIA p e r i o d (twelfth c e n t u r y BCE). [See C y p r u s . ] B o t h limestone a n d terra-cotta e x amples are k n o w n from Ayios Iakovos, Kalavasos Ayios D h i m i t r i o s , E n k o m i , a n d M a a - P a l a e o k a s t r o . [See Kalavasos; E n k o m L ] T h e c u s t o m of b a t h i n g in t u b s is well k n o w n in M y c e n a e a n G r e e c e . It is described in t h e Iliad a n d Odyssey (cf. Odyssey 10.165) a n d can b e associated with the increas ing influence of L a t e B r o n z e A g e G r e e c e o n C y p r u s in t h e L a t e C y p r i o t EC—III. I n d o o r b a t h i n g installations in residences were c o m m o n in Egypt. F r o m M i d d l e a n d N e w K i n g d o m Egypt, excava tions at the royal palace of A m e n o p h i s III in T h e b e s a n d in residences at L a h u n a n d e l - A m a m a h a v e u n c o v e r e d n u m e r o u s e x a m p l e s of b a t h r o o m s . [See A m a r n a , Tell el-.] T h e typical b a t h r o o m was located near the b e d r o o m , in close p r o x i m i t y to a latrine a n d d r e s s i n g r o o m . T h e b a t h r o o m consisted of a slightly s l o p e d stone-slab floor a n d wall-lined with stone slabs. T h e b a t h w a t e r d r a i n e d t h r o u g h a s p o u t located at the lower e n d of t h e stone slab or t h r o u g h a d r a i n age c h a n n e l that r a n t h r o u g h t h e outer wall into a vessel or t o t h e o u t d o o r s . A low wall separated tire b a t h r o o m from the latrine. Similar b a t h r o o m s h a v e b e e n excavated on M i n o a n C r e t e . [See Crete.]
B A T H S . D u r i n g pre-Hellenistic times in t h e N e a r East, the private b a t h , consisted either of a b a t h t u b or b a t h i n g platform. F r o m t h e Hellenistic t h r o u g h B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d s , p u b l i c b a t h h o u s e s b e c a m e t h e p o p u l a r f o r m of bathing. T h e sources for b a t h s in antiquity are archaeological evidence, ancient depictions, a n d w r i t t e n s o u r c e s .
In addition to t h e archaeological evidence, a wall painting f r o m a N e w K i n g d o m t o m b at T h e b e s depicts a w o m a n b a t h i n g in a b a t h installation t h a t resembles those excavated at e l - A m a r n a . [See W a l l Paintings.] T h e w o m a n is shown with four slaves waiting on her. O n e r e m o v e s her jewelry a n d clothing, a s e c o n d p o u r s water over h e r head, t h e third r u b s her a r m s a n d b o d y , a n d a fourth holds a flower to her n o s e as she is b a t h e d . T h e G r e e k historian H e r o d o t u s a n d the R o m a n author Diodorus mention Egyptian bathing cus t o m s , n o t i n g t h a t w a r m a n d cold b a t h s w e r e u s e d by the E g y p t i a n s ; for ordinary ablutions, however, cold water was preferred.
S o m e of t h e earliest archaeological e v i d e n c e c o m e s f r o m M e s o p o t a m i a , from the first half of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. F r o m e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE M a r i , located o n the E u
T h o u g h rare, b a t h i n g installations similar to those f o u n d in E g y p t are k n o w n f r o m C a n a a n . A t T e l l el-'Ajjul a n d B e t h S h e a n , b o t h sites with a strong E g y p t i a n influence, plas-
AMIHAI MAZAR
284
BATHS
BATHS. Hasmonean
ritual bath at Jericho.
tered, pebbled, or shell floors have b e e n interpreted b y die excavators as b a t h r o o m s in which water was p o u r e d over t h e bather. [See 'Ajjul, T e l l el-; Beth-Shean.] B a t h t u b s in ancient Philistia a n d Israel are found only occasionally. T e r r a - c o t t a b a t h s or fragments from t h e m have b e e n ex cavated at several sites, including Tell Qasile, A s h d o d , T e l M i q n e / E k r o n , Tell A b u H a w a m , a n d T e l D a n . [See Qasile, Tell; A s h d o d ; M i q n e , T e l ; A b u H a w a m , Tell; D a n . ] It is n o t e w o r t h y t h a t the first three are Philistine sites, p e r h a p s reflecting an A e g e a n origin for t h e c u s t o m of b a t h i n g . T h e nearly complete t e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE rub from T e l D a n was discovered in t h e sacred precinct a n d it p r e s u m a b l y served a cultic function. [See Cult.] Bathing in t h e m o d e r n , nonreligious sense is s e l d o m m e n tioned in t h e Bible. In Exodus 2:5, P h a r a o h ' s d a u g h t e r bathes in the river; in 2 Samuel 11:2, Bathsheba is observed b y D a vid bathing o n t h e roof. H o w e v e r , washing of t h e face, h a n d s , a n d feet are m e n t i o n e d frequently in t h e H e b r e w Bi ble a n d N e w T e s t a m e n t (cf. Gn. 4 3 : 3 1 , 5 : 3 ; J » . 13). Oval pottery footbaths h a v e b e e n f o u n d at I r o n A g e II Israelite levels at Samaria, T e l l e n - N a s b e h , and M e g i d d o . [See Sa maria; N a s b e h , T e l l en-; M e g i d d o . ]
(Courtesy A S O R Archives)
Private b a t h r o o m s in d o m e s t i c a r c h i t e c t u r e , located in p r o x i m i t y to lavatories, often i n c l u d i n g b a t h t u b s , b e c a m e c o m m o n a m o n g t h e aristocracy in t h e eastern Hellenistic a n d R o m a n world. B a t h t u b s , h e w n f r o m s t o n e , a p p e a r in s u b t e r r a n e a n r o c k - c u t c h a m b e r s b e l o w h o u s e s dating t o t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d from M a r e s h a h , Israel. Several e x a m p l e s of b a t h r o o m s , located o n t h e g r o u n d floor of t h e h o u s e a n d separate from ritual-bath installations, are k n o w n from J u dea (Judah) d u r i n g t h e H e r o d i a n p e r i o d (first c e n t u r y BCE— first century CE). [See Ritual Baths.] T h e c u s t o m of b a t h i n g in p u b l i c b a t h s originated in d i e classical G r e e k w o r l d w i t h t h e rise of t h e p u b l i c g y m n a s i a a n d h o t baths i n d i e f o u r t h c e n t u r y BCE. T h e g y m n a s i u m p r o v i d e d the inspiration for later b a t h i n g c o m p l e x e s t h r o u g h o u t t h e R o m a n E m p i r e t h a t c o m b i n e d physical ex ercise with p u b l i c b a t h i n g . T h e r a p i d s p r e a d a n d p o p u l a r i t y of R o m a n b a t h s are in a large p a r t t h e result of t h e devel o p m e n t of h y p o c a u s t h e a t i n g a n d t h e ability to t r a n s p o r t large quantities of water into cities via an a q u e d u c t . [See Aqueducts.] N u m e r o u s contemporary R o m a n and Byzan tine authors c o m m e n t o n t h e c u s t o m of p u b l i c b a t h i n g . B a t h i n g in R o m a n society was a daily habit, a n d s p e n d i n g
BE'ER RESISIM the afternoon in t h e p u b l i c b a t h s w a s a well-accepted c u s t o m , e x c e p t a m o n g certain g r o u p s — p h i l o s o p h e r s , Jews, a n d C h r i s t i a n s — w h o frowned u p o n t h e d e c a d e n c e of public bathing. T h e major features of R o m a n b a t h s i n c l u d e a n exercise c o u r t y a r d (peristylum) or larger g y m n a s i u m (palaestra), a dressing r o o m ( a p o d y t e r i u m ) , a cold r o o m (frigidarium), often with a p l u n g e b a t h , a n d a w a r m r o o m ( t e p e d a r i u m ) that led to a h o t r o o m (caldarium). B e c a u s e of t h e great v a riety in b u i l d i n g p l a n s , it h a s p r o v e n difficult to devise a typology for-'bathing c o m p l e x e s . P u b l i c b a t h i n g establish m e n t s c a n b e divided into t w o m a i n g r o u p s : thermae a n d balneae. Publicly f u n d e d t h e r m a e were exceptionally large b a t h s t h a t i n c o r p o r a t e d hygienic, athletic, recreational, e d ucational, a n d social activities. P u b l i c b a t h s could also b e located n e a r n a t u r a l h o t springs t h a t also served medicinal p u r p o s e s . O n e of t h e largest of t h e s e t h e r m o m i n e r a l c o m plexes in t h e R o m a n world w a s H a m m a t h - G a d e r , located in t h e s o u t h e r n G o l a n along t h e Y a r m u k River in R o m a n Syria. [See H a m m a t h - G a d e r . ] Balnaea w e r e smaller b a t h s , either publicly or privately o w n e d . I n addition t o p u b l i c b a t h s , b a t h i n g c o m p l e x e s are f o u n d in military c a m p s , s a n c tuaries, a n d private a n d imperial residences. In Asia M i n o r , t h e G r e e k g y m n a s i u m heavily influenced the p l a n a n d function of p u b l i c b a t h buildings. A t P e r g a m o n , R o m a n b a t h s w e r e a d d e d o n to tire Hellenistic g y m n a s i u m ; at Salamis a n d S a m o s , R o m a n b a t h s w e r e built over the Hellenistic g y m n a s i u m ; a n d a t M i l e t u s R o m a n baths o p erated separately from t h e g y m n a s i u m . [See P e r g a m o n ; S a lamis; Miletus.] In t h e larger c e n t e r s t h e y w e r e symmetrical a n d well p l a n n e d . Smaller b a t h s in t o w n s a n d villages w e r e m o r e varied in plan. M o s t of t h e b a t h s in N o r t h Africa date to t h e m i d - s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE a n d later. A l m o s t every major center h a d m o r e t h a n o n e p u b l i c b a t h . Fikret Y e g u l (1992) divides t h e N o r t h African b a t h s into t h r e e m a i n categories: imperial (e.g., t h e H a d r i a n i c b a t h s at L e p t i s M a g n a in L i b y a ) , half-axial (e.g., the Julia M e m m i a b a t h s a t Bulla Regia in T u n i s i a ) , a n d small, asymmetrical establishments (e.g., t h e Baths of G a l lienus at Vollubilis in M o r o c c o ) . [See L e p t i s M a g n a . ] I n J u d e a a n d R o m a n Syria, p u b l i c b a t h s w e r e i n t r o d u c e d by K i n g H e r o d a n d t h e R o m a n legions in t h e late first c e n tury BCE-first c e n t u r y CE. H o w e v e r , t h e majority of t h e p u b lic b a t h s in Syria-Palestine d a t e t o t h e L a t e A n t i q u e a n d Byzantine periods a n d b e l o n g to t h e s m a l l - b a t h category. I n the B y z a n t i n e period, t h e palaestra a n d associated athletic events d i s a p p e a r e d f r o m t h e b a t h . T h i s t r e n d is associated with t h e rise of Christianity in t h e fourth c e n t u r y , w h i c h frowned u p o n t h e g y m n a s i u m , a n institution associated w i t h p a g a n culture. Following t h e Islamic c o n q u e s t of Syria-Pal estine in t h e seventh c e n t u r y , t h e b a t h h o u s e c o n t i n u e d in use, b o t h as p u b l i c b a t h s i n t o w n s (e.g., tire b a t h s at Q a s r al-Hayr E a s t in R o m a n Syria) a n d as private b a t h s in palaces (e.g., K h i r b a t al-Mafjar in t h e J o r d a n Valley in R o m a n
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Syria) a n d in desert castles (e.g., Q u s a y r ' A n t r a in t h e east ern desert of R o m a n Syria). [See Q a s r al-Hayr a l - G h a r b i ; Mafjar, K h i r b a t al-; Q u s a y r 'Amra.] [See also M e d i c i n e ; and P e r s o n a l Hygiene.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Badawy, Alexander. A History of Egyptian Architecture, vol. 2 , The First Intermediate Period, the Middle Kingdom, and the Second Intermediate Period; vol. 3, The Empire (The New Kingdom). Berkeley, 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 6 8 . Excellent general s u m m a r y of all aspects of Egyptian architecture, including bathing installations. Courtois, Jacques-Claude. " U n e baignoire monolithe en calcaire d u Bronze recent a E n k o m i . " I n Studies in Honour of Vassos Kara georghis, edited by G. C. Ioannides, p p . 1 5 1 - 1 5 4 . Nicosia, 1 9 9 2 . D e scription of bathtubs at E n k o m i ( C y p r u s ) . Delaine, J. " R o m a n Baths a n d B a t h i n g . " Journal of Roman Archaeology 6 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 348-358. Critique of recent major publications o n R o m a n b a t h s a n d bathing. G r a h a m , J. Walter. " B a t h r o o m s a n d Lustral C h a m b e r s . " In Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean in Ancient Histoiy and Prehistory; Studies Presented to Fritz Schachermeyr on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birth day, edited by K . H . Kinzl, p p . 1 1 0 - 1 2 5 , Berlin, 1 9 7 7 . Describes M i n o a n b a t h r o o m s and bathing practices; one of the few articles on pre-Hellenistic battling installations. Nielsen, Inge. Thermae et Balnea: The Architecture and Cultural History of Roman Public Baths. A a r h u s , 1 9 9 0 . Catalog of 387 baths in the R o m a n Empire a n d an a c c o u n t of the development of R o m a n public baths. Saggs, H . W . F . Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria. L o n d o n , 1965. S u m m a r y of literary, pictorial, a n d archaeological evidence for daily life in ancient M e s o p o t a m i a . Wilkinson, J. Gardner. The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyp tians. Vol. 3. N e w ed. L o n d o n , 1 8 7 8 . S u m m a r y of literary, pictorial, a n d archaeological evidence for daily life in Egypt. Yegiil, Fikret IC Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity. N e w York, 1992. T h e m a t i c treatment of R o m a n baths in Italy, N o r t h Africa, a n d the eastern provinces, including a detailed description of the development of public b a t h s from classical G r e e c e through Byzan tine times. A N N KILLEBREW
B E ' E R R E S I S I M (Ar., Bir er-Resisiyeh, "well of t h e m o r n i n g - d e w " ) is a small hilltop site in t h e western N e g e v highlands, near t h e N a h a l N e s s a n a (30°49' N , 34°34' E; m a p reference 109 X 026). It is o n e of t h e largest of t h e dozens of Early B r o n z e IV pastoral n o m a d i c e n c a m p m e n t s (c. 2300-2000 BCE) k n o w n in this area of scant rainfall. It w a s excavated in 1978-1980 b y William G . D e v e r a n d R u d o l p h C o h e n , s p o n s o r e d jointly b y t h e University of Arizona a n d t h e Israel Antiquities A u t h o r i t y . T h e ridge above t h e w a d i a n d m o d e r n well below revealed s o m e eighty circular or elliptical stone h u t s , averaging 2.004.50 m in diameter, with walls well preserved u p to 1.50 m (see figure 1 ) , D o o r j a m b s a n d lintels were often intact. T h e roofs were m a d e of chalk slabs, s u p p o r t e d b y w o o d e n b e a m s a n d central stone pillars. F e w furnishings w e r e n o t e d , a p a r t from sporadic stone b e n c h e s , b i n s , h e a r t h s , a n d saddle q u e r n s for grinding grain.
286
BE'ER RESISIM
BE'ER RESISIM. F i g u r e i,
Eliptical
stone hut. A p o r t i o n of the u p p e r walls a n d slab r o o f are r e c o n
s t r u c t e d f r o m original materials. (Photograph by Jonathan Kline; courtesy A S O R Archives)
T h e scant pottery, n o n e of it restorable, consisted of a scattering of Early B r o n z e I V A r e d - b u r n i s h e d wares of T r a n s Jordanian t y p e , dated a b o u t 2300 BCE, b u t m o s d y quantities of Early B r o n z e I V C wares typical of D e v e r ' s " S o u t h e r n / S e d e n t a r y " family, about2ioo-2000BCE. Several c o p p e r awls and daggers were found, as well as a h o a r d consisting of a b r o k e n dagger a n d two triangular-section b a r ingots. Miscellaneous domestic items included stone a n d shell o r n a m e n t s ; m a n y ad hoc flint tools; two small chalk c u p s ; a piece of leather; a n d several fragments of R e d Sea c o n c h shells a n d polished pierced bars m a d e from t h e m , p e r h a p s remains of pectorals. M o s t of the animal b o n e s recovered c a m e from a few large, unroofed stone circles. T h e y were m o r e t h a n 90 p e r cent sheep a n d goat, with a few small b i r d s , desert gazelle, and hares also r e p r e s e n t e d . T h e p r e s e n c e of i m m a t u r e caprids (sheep-goat) indicates winter o c c u p a t i o n of t h e site since titat is w h e n they are slaughtered, b u t t h a t does n o t , of course, rule o u t o c c u p a t i o n in t h e s u m m e r as well. Several off-site structures were investigated or excavated, including isolated stone circles, burial cairns with b o t h ar ticulated a n d disarticulated i n h u m a t i o n s , two large r e c t a n gular hilltop buildings of enigmatic character, a few r e m a i n s of run-off irrigation systems, a n d even a small "satellite vil lage" on a n e a r b y alluvial fan. T h e p l a n of t h e m a i n hilltop settlement, with m a n y nearly
identical r o u n d sleeping h u t s clustering a r o u n d central c o u r t y a r d s , suggests a relatively egalitarian, p o l y g a m o u s s o ciety, with a total p o p u l a t i o n of eighty to o n e h u n d r e d in dividuals at any o n e t i m e . T h e y were certainly pastoral n o m a d s , b u t the c o p p e r ingots a n d a few " e x o t i c " items like t h e c o n c h shells suggest l o n g - d i s t a n c e t r a d e ; t h e g r i n d i n g stones are evidence of s o m e primitive irrigation m e a n s t h a t agriculture was also an e l e m e n t in a m i x e d subsistence sys t e m . T h e s t r o n g similarities of t h e p o t t e r y t o t h a t of t h e m a n y H e b r o n hills s h a f t - t o m b cemeteries (as at Jebel Qa'aqir) p r o b a b l y indicate a p a t t e r n of seasonal t r a n s h u m a n c e over a circuit of roughly 60 k m (100 m i ) . BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohen, Rudolph, a n d William G. Dever. "Preliminary Report of the Pilot Season of the 'Central N e g e v Highlands Project.'" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o , 232 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 2 9 - 4 5 . Cohen, Rudolph, and William G. Dever. "Preliminary Report of the Second Season of die 'Central N e g e v Highlands Project. " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 236 (1980): 4 1 - 6 0 . C o h e n , Rudolph, and William G. Dever. "Preliminary R e p o r t of the T h i r d and Final Season of the 'Central N e g e v Highlands Project.'" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 243 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 57-77Dever, William G . " N e w Vistas on the E B IV ( ' M B I') Horizon in Syria-Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 237 (1980): 3 5 - 6 4 . Dever, William G . "Village Planning at Be'er Resisim a n d Socio-Eco1
BEERSHEBA n o m i c Structure in Early Bronze Age IV Palestine." Eretz-Israel
18
(1984): i8*-28*. H o r w i t z , Liora K. " S e d e n t i s m in Early B r o n z e IV: A Faunal P e r s p e c tive." Bulletin of the American
Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 275
(1989): 1 5 - 2 5 . WILLIAM G . DEVER
BEERSHEBA
c
(Ar., T e l l e s - S a b a ) , a small m o u n d
a b o u t 1 h a (2.5 acres) in area, l o c a t e d in t h e B e e r s h e b a val ley, east of t h e m o d e r n city of B e e r s h e b a in Israel's N e g e v d e s e r t ( m a p reference 135 X 073). T h e settlement w a s built o n a hill at the fork of the B e e r s h e b a a n d H e b r o n riverbeds, w h i c h p r o v i d e d t h e site w i t h n a t u r a l p r o t e c t i o n a n d close p r o x i m i t y t o cultivable alluvial soil, as well as to t h e m a i n crossroad.
287
B i b l i c a l R e f e r e n c e s . T h e m a i n biblical references to B e e r s h e b a c o m e from t h e p a t r i a r c h a l narratives. T h e p a t r i archs a p p e a r as pastoral n o m a d s a n d occasional cultivators in t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e l a n d . G o d revealed himself t o t h e m (Gn. 26:24-25, 46:1-2) a n d they struggled at Beer sheba with A b i m e l e c h over t h e wells (Gn. 21:22-34, 26:1533). T h e n a m e of the site s t e m s from t h e H e b r e w shebu'a ( " o a t h " ) or shiby'a ( " s e v e n " ) (Gn. 21:31,26:33). I n the late p r e m o n a r c h i c a l p e r i o d , Joel a n d Abijah, tire sons of S a m u e l , w e r e stationed in B e e r s h e b a as " j u d g e s over Israel" (r Sm. 8:1-2). B e e r s h e b a a p p e a r s o n t h e list of cities of S i m e o n a n d J u d a h (Jos. 15:28, 19:2, 1 Chr. 4:28). It d e m a r c a t e s t h e s o u t h e r n e n d of t h e l a n d of Israel t h a t stretched " f r o m D a n to B e e r s h e b a " (Jgs. 20:1, 1 Sm. 3:20; 2 Sm. 3:10, 1 7 : 1 1 , 24:15, i Kgs. 5:5). [See Judah.] Elijah passed t h r o u g h Beer sheba o n his j o u r n e y to M t . H o r e b ( 7 Kgs. 19:3), a n d A m o s
BEERSHEBA. Plan of the city. (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
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c o n d e m n e d the p a g a n rites held at Beersheba along with those at D a n , Bethel, a n d Gilgal (Am. 5:5, 8:14). I d e n t i f i c a t i o n a n d E x c a v a t i o n s . Although t h e identifi cation of Tell es-Saba' with biblical Beersheba seems t o b e confirmed by excavation (Aharoni, 1973; Rainey, 1984), s o m e scholars see a contradiction between t h e biblical a c counts and the finds. M e r v y n D . Fowler claims that t h e a b sence of Bronze A g e a n d Late Iron Age remains discredits T e l Beersheba as a patriarchal period site a n d as a city d u r ing Josiah's reign, respectively (Fowler, 1982). N a d a v N a ' a m a n believes that t h e location of ancient B e e r s h e b a m u s t be sought at Bir es-Saba , while locating biblical S h e b a at T e l Beersheba (Jos. i 9 : 2 ; N a ' a m a n , 1980). Patriarchal Beer sheba is well r e p r e s e n t e d in t h e remains d a t e d to t h e twelfth a n d eleventh centuries BCE. A n s o n F . R a i n e y suggests t h a t t w o settlements—one at T e l Beersheba a n d o n e at Bir e s S a b a ' — b o r e the s a m e n a m e (Rainey, 1984). Y o h a n a n A h a roni also suggested identifying T e l Beersheba with t h e " H a gar of A b r a ( h a ) m " of Shishak's list (Aharoni, 1973, p p . 1 1 1 c
"3). Extensive excavations w e r e c o n d u c t e d at T e l B e e r s h e b a by an expedition from t h e Institute of Archaeology at T e l Aviv University. T h e project was directed b y Y o h a n a n A h a r o n i from 1969 to 1975 a n d in 1976, following A h a r o n i ' s death, b y Z e ' e v H e r z o g . Methodologically, a wide h o r i z o n tal-exposure a p p r o a c h was applied, a i m e d at u n c o v e r i n g b r o a d a n d c o n t i n u o u s o c c u p a t i o n levels. Indeed, a c o m p r e hensive picture of t h e city p l a n n i n g in s t r a t u m II was r e vealed. Additional seasons, directed b y H e r z o g , h a v e b e e n carried o u t at the site since 1990 in conjunction with t h e National Parks Authority's preservation of the site. Chalcolithic Period. Scattered sherds from t h e C h a l colithic p e r i o d were found in t h e site's debris. It seems drat any structures from this stage were r e m o v e d b y later c o n struction operations. T h e first I r o n A g e settlers (Iron I, stra t u m I X ) cleaned a n d r e u s e d depressions, or pits, they n o ticed on t h e m o u n d that m a y have belonged originally to d i e Chalcolithic settlement (see below). Iron Age I. T h e best s e q u e n c e of Iron A g e r e m a i n s w a s detected o n t h e southeastern slope of t h e m o u n d , u n d e r t h e o u t e r gate of s t r a t u m V. T h e remains include four strata ( I X - V I ) dating from t h e mid-twelfth to die early t e n t h c e n turies BCE. T h e first settlement (stratum IX) consisted of a series of pits h e w n into t h e hill's natural bedrock. T h e pits range from 5 to 10 m in diameter, a n d from 2 t o 3 m in d e p t h . T h e excavated area yielded parts of seven pits, m o s t of t h e m used for storage, apparentiy of grain. O n e pit, e x cavated almost in its entirety, h a d clearly b e e n utilized for habitation. It was h e w n into t h e b e d r o c k at a n angle, so t h a t the rock provided n a t u r a l protection from above. Its floor was p a v e d with pebbles, a n d storage jars stood in a h e w n niche. A cooking oven, s u r r o u n d e d -by layers of ash, i n d i cates domestic use of the pit. A c o m m u n i t y of a b o u t twenty families could h a v e lived
in this settlement in tents o r huts alongside t h e pits. T h e lack of s t o n e architecture m a y p o i n t to a s e m i n o m a d i c c o m m u nity experiencing t h e first stage of s e d e n t a r y life, a shift g e n erated b y slightiy i m p r o v e d climatic conditions t h a t e n a b l e d t h e m t o g r o w yields. D r y farming is indicated from t h e p r e s ence of cattle b o n e s (12 p e r c e n t ) , b u t m o s t of their subsis tence was still b a s e d o n animal h u s b a n d r y (sheep a n d goats, 74 p e r c e n t ) . [See Cattle a n d O x e n ; S h e e p a n d Goats.] T w o E g y p t i a n scarabs f r o m d i e N e w K i n g d o m , f r a g m e n t s of P h i listine pottery, a n d local w a r e date s t r a t u m I X t o t h e s e c o n d half of tire twelfth a n d the first half of t h e eleventh centuries BCE.
T h e first houses at t h e site w e r e erected in s t r a t u m VIII, although t h e pits w e r e still utilized. T h e single large u n i t erected near d i e well (see below) consists of a b r o a d r o o m a n d a forecourt—a h o u s e t h a t m i g h t b e c o n s i d e r e d d i e p r o totype of die f o u r - r o o m h o u s e . [See F o u r - r o o m H o u s e . ] T h e m e a g e r n u m b e r of objects f o u n d in this s t r a t u m include d i e earliest iron a r r o w h e a d s f o u n d at t h e site. S t o n e - b u i l t h o u s e s indicate a m o r e p e r m a n e n t type of settlement. S t r a t u m VIII is d a t e d to t h e third q u a r t e r of t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE. T h e s t r a t u m V I I settlement w a s built over tire a b a n d o n e d pits a n d houses of s t r a t u m VIII. H o u s e s with solid s t o n e foundations were erected in a belt covering t h e eastern s l o p e — a b o u t half of t h e hilltop. T h e h o u s e s , w h i c h c a n b e r e c o n s t r u c t e d as f o u r - r o o m - h o u s e t y p e s , encircled t h e set tlement, their b a c k walls facing o u t w a r d , f o r m i n g a n e n closed settlement ( H e r z o g , 1984). T h e large o p e n space in the center of the settlement was p r o b a b l y utilized for t h e c o m m u n i t y ' s flocks of s h e e p a n d goats. H o w e v e r , large quantities of cattle b o n e s discovered at T e l B e e r s h e b a , T e l M a s o s , a n d other sites in t h e area m a y p o i n t to t h e g r o w i n g role of agriculture in t h e region's e c o n o m y , m o s t p r o b a b l y from f u r t h e r - i m p r o v e d climatic conditions. [See Agricul ture; M a s o s , Tel.] I n t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE, t h e B e e r sheba valley witnessed t h e m o s t d e n s e o c c u p a t i o n in its p r e m o d e r n history. S t r a t u m V I I yielded rich finds, i n c l u d i n g pottery vessels, jewelry, i r o n tools, a n d fragments of figu rines, t h a t date to t h e late eleventh a n d early t e n t h centuries BCE.
T h e settlement of s t r a t u m VII w a s a b a n d o n e d a n d p a r t s of t h e houses were dismantled. T h e n e x t stage, s t r a t u m V I , is characterized b y a partial reuse of t h e earlier units, o n c e interior partition walls w e r e a d d e d . A single n e w " t h r e e r o o m " h o u s e was c o n s t r u c t e d in this stage. T h e finds from this s t r a t u m are very similar to t h o s e from s t r a t u m VII a n d m u s t date t o die first half of t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. T h e r e m a i n s in s t r a t u m V I are interpreted as b e l o n g i n g t o a n interim stage, d u r i n g w h i c h t h e n e w city (of s t r a t u m V) w a s built. T h e single h o u s e o n t h e slope of t h e hill m a y h a v e served the c o m m a n d e r of t h e project. T h e c o m p a r t m e n t s n e a r it could b e u s e d as stores for e q u i p m e n t a n d shelters for w o r k supervisors. T h e s e r e m a i n s w e r e eventually r a z e d t o w a r d the final stage of t h e construction of t h e n e w city.
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The well. A well 69 m d e e p w a s f o u n d in the center of d i e r e m a i n s of d i e I r o n I settlement. D u r i n g I r o n II, this well was left outside t h e city fortifications b u t c o n t i n u e d to serve b o t h t h e city's inhabitants a n d p a s s e r s b y . A l t h o u g h t h e well was r e u s e d for several c e n t u r i e s , it seems t h a t it was first d u g in o n e of t h e Early I r o n p h a s e s . A h a r o n i (1973) identified this well with t h e o n e m e n t i o n e d in t h e patriarchal narratives (Gn. 21:26). Stratigraphically, t h e well d o e s n o t destroy a n y I r o n I s t r u c t u r e , a n d d i e b u i l d e r s of t h e o u t e r gate of s t r a t u m V clearly took it into c o n s i d e r a t i o n w h e n erecting t h e gate's f o u n d a t i o n s . D u r i n g I r o n II, t h e city's d r a i n a g e system d i r e c t e d r a i n w a t e r into t h e well. T h e finds from t h e fill indicate t h a t t h e well was d e s t r o y e d ( a p p a r e n d y in an e a r t h q u a k e ) a n d filled in d u r i n g t h e L a t e Hellenistic period.
c a s e m a t e city wall a n d a n o t h e r f o u r - c h a m b e r e d gate built in s t r a t u m III a n d reutilized in s t r a t u m II. E a c h of these strata suffered destruction, b u t t h e destruction of strata V a n d II w a s clearly caused b y a m o r e violent a n d w i d e s p r e a d c o n flagration. T h e s e d e s t r u c t i o n s should b e d a t e d , based on t h e rich p o t t e r y finds, to c a m p a i g n s of P h a r a o h Shishak ( S h e s h o n q ) in 926 BCE a n d K i n g S e n n a c h e r i b in 701 BCE, r e spectively. S o m e scholars h a v e , h o w e v e r , challenged d i e date of s t r a t u m II. K a t h l e e n M . K e n y o n (1976) dated Beer sheba II earlier t h a n L a c h i s h III, w h e r e a s Yigael Y a d i n (1976a) correlated it w i t h s t r a t u m II a t L a c h i s h . [See L a chish.] N a ' a m a n (1979) suggests, o n historical g r o u n d s , p u s h i n g t h e c o n q u e s t of B e e r s h e b a b a c k to t h e t i m e of S argon.
Iron Age II. T h e four strata of t h e I r o n II city i n c l u d e r e m a i n s of a small fortified city (2.8 acres) built o n t h e t o p of t h e m o u n d (strata V - I I ) . T h e last occupational p h a s e ( s t r a t u m I) w a s an a t t e m p t to rebuild t h e city t h a t was e v e n tually halted. T w o systems of fortifications w e r e erected at B e e r s h e b a in I r o n II. T h e earlier o n e consisted of a solid city wall with a f o u r - c h a m b e r e d gate built in s t r a t u m V a n d r e u s e d in s t r a t u m I V . T h e later fortifications consisted of a
Israelite city. T h e city of s t r a t u m n at B e e r s h e b a presents a valuable p i c t u r e of an administrative center in a m a r g i n a l region. T h e oval city is small b u t carefully p l a n n e d , with d i e encircling city wall following t h e t o p o g r a p h y of the hill. O n l y o n t h e eastern side of t h e m o u n d does t h e plan e x t e n d to a lower level. T h e w a t e r - s u p p l y system was erected there, a n d in o r d e r to i n c o r p o r a t e it into t h e city, a colossal e a r t h e n r a m p a r t w a s built. A belt of t w o circular streets, parallel to
BEERSHEBA.
View of the Beersheba Gate. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
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BEERSHEBA
t h e outer c o n t o u r of the m o u n d , divided t h e city's interior. A n additional street w a s c u t t h r o u g h its center. All t h e streets converged o n the o p e n gate s q u a r e , t h e city's only piazza, w h i c h could serve as a m e e t i n g place a n d market. T h e gate itself consisted of c h a m b e r s with b e n c h e s u s e d b y t h e city's functionaries in c o n d u c t i n g their business. A n elaborate system of drainage channels was u n c o v e r e d beneath the streets a n d p a v e m e n t s t h a t c o n d u c t e d rainwater outside t h e city quickly. T h i s p r e v e n t e d t h e collapse of t h e walls, which were m a d e of stones p a c k e d with a m u d m o r t a r t o p p e d by s u n - d r i e d m u d bricks. T h e m a i n c h a n n e l , w h i c h r a n u n d e r the gate, c o n d u c t e d t h e water into the d e e p well outside the gate. Water system. A h a r o n i (1973) interpreted a wide flight of stairs he exposed in t h e 1970s as p a r t of a water system. I n 1994, the entire area was excavated a n d a m o n u m e n t a l w a ter-supply system u n e a r t h e d . T h e system was a p p r o a c h e d t h r o u g h a square, vertical shaft, a b o u t 15 m deep. Stairs with a low p a r a p e t led to a s t e p p e d t u n n e l for a n additional 5 m , at t h e b o t t o m of w h i c h a series of u n d e r g r o u n d cisterns is entered. [See W a t e r T u n n e l s ; Cisterns.] Five cisterns, e a c h a b o u t 3 x 6 m a n d a b o u t 6 m high, were h e w n into t h e limestone b e d r o c k a n d covered with thick layers of w a t e r resistant plaster. T h e total capacity of the system w a s a b o u t 500 cu m . W a t e r was directed into t h e system t h r o u g h a tunnel from a n e a r b y riverbed. Because t h e rivers in t h e N e gev flow only for brief periods in t h e winter, the p l a n n e r s h a d to build a d a m t h a t directed floodwater into t h e t u n n e l . In this respect, t h e system at Beersheba differs from its counterparts at H a z o r a n d M e g i d d o — w h i c h offer an a p p r o a c h to the u n d e r g r o u n d water level or cistern. [See M e giddo; Hazor.] T h e systems in b o t h regions w e r e a d a p t e d to the availability of their water resources. Because t h e sys t e m could b e filled only d u r i n g a limited p e r i o d of t i m e (when it rained in w i n t e r ) , water was probably s p a r e d for e m e r g e n c y u s e , w h e n t h e city was u n d e r siege. A s s u m i n g a p o p u l a t i o n of three h u n d r e d in t h e city a n d a n a n n u a l c o n s u m p t i o n rate of a b o u t 1,000 1 p e r person, the city could withstand a siege for as long as o n e year. T h e well outside t h e city gate p r o v i d e d t h e daily n e e d s of the city's i n h a b i t a n t s as well as of m e r c h a n t s , caravans, a n d military units passing b y a n d of the livestock. Pillared buildings. A large (600 sq m ) typical pillared b u i l d ing was exposed n e a r t h e city gate. It consisted of t h r e e u n i t s , each with three long halls separated b y limestone c o l u m n s t h a t are square in section. H u n d r e d s of pottery vessels f o u n d in the building's destruction layer indicate t h a t it was t h e city's m a i n storehouse. T h e goods w o u l d have b e e n col lected as taxes from neighboring villages like byt 'mm a n d tld m e n t i o n e d in an o s t r a c o n found in one of t h e s t o r e r o o m s (see Aharoni, 1973, p p . 7 1 - 7 2 ) . I n addition to storejars for cereals, oil, and wine, the inventory also included objects for food p r e p a r a t i o n a n d serving, evidence t h a t t h e s t o r e h o u s e also was used for cooking a n d serving food to t h e city's a d
ministrative or military p e r s o n n e l (functions h i n t e d at in s o m e of the A r a d ostraca). [See A r a d Inscriptions.] D e s p i t e s u c h clear-cut i n f o r m a t i o n , s o m e scholars are of t h e o p i n i o n t h a t t h e pillared buildings at B e e r s h e b a w e r e h o r s e stables (Yadin, 1976b; H o l l a d a y , 1986). Horned altar. I n t h e fifth season of excavation, unusually well-dressed stones were u n c o v e r e d t h a t w e r e i n c o r p o r a t e d into a wall of t h e s t o r e r o o m s . Peculiar r o u n d e d projections at the t o p of t h r e e of t h e stones (a f o u r t h was c u t off) i d e n tified t h e m as p a r t of a large h o r n e d altar. A d d i t i o n a l stones were f o u n d in t h e eighth season t h a t t o g e t h e r r e c o n s t r u c t a n altar t h a t is a c u b e of 1.6 X 1.6 X 1.6 m . A h a r o n i (1973) suggested t h a t t h e alter h a d originally s t o o d in t h e c o u r t y a r d of a t e m p l e , a p p a r e n t l y in t h e place of t h e later b a s e m e n t building (see b e l o w ) . T h e dismantling of t h e t e m p l e a n d demolishing of t h e alter at b o t h B e e r s h e b a a n d A r a d are viewed as p a r t of t h e cultic reform carried o u t b y H e z e k i a h , ldng of J u d a h . [See A r a d , article on I r o n A g e P e r i o d . ] Y a d i n (1976a) suggested locating t h e altar in a bamd n e a r t h e city gate. Governor's palace. A large u n i t (no. 416) in s t r a t u m II t h a t controlled t h e gate s q u a r e is i n t e r p r e t e d as t h e residence of t h e city's g o v e r n o r ( H e b . , sar hd'ir). T h e b u i l d i n g is c o m p o s e d of ceremonial, residential, a n d service wings. T w o large halls p a v e d w i t h stone p e b b l e s , located o n either side of t h e entry corridor, served as r e c e p t i o n r o o m s . T h e d o o r j a m b s in t h e rear of t h e r o o m s w e r e a d o r n e d w i t h ashlar stones, the only e x a m p l e of s u c h m a s o n r y f o u n d in I r o n A g e Beersheba. A t t h e far e n d of t h e palace, w i t h a s e p a r a t e w i d e e n t r a n c e , w a s a small k i t c h e n a n d a storage r o o m . T h e w e s t e r n wing of the b u i l d i n g consisted of t w o residential units. A n a r r o w stair area offered passage to t h e u p p e r floor from t h e entry corridor. Basement house. T h e s e c o n d large s t r u c t u r e in s t r a t u m II was f o u n d o n t h e w e s t e r n side of t h e city. Its o d d wall f o u n dations were s u n k 4 m d e e p into t h e g r o u n d (all others w e r e only a b o u t .5 m d e e p ) . W h i l e in s o m e r o o m s t h e space was filled with h o m o g e n o u s earth, t w o r o o m s w e r e left e m p t y a n d served as b a s e m e n t s . T h e b u i l d i n g ' s exceptional wall structure a n d e a s t - w e s t orientation led A h a r o n i t o c o n c l u d e t h a t Beersheba's t e m p l e h a d stood there: t h a t in s t r a t u m II, after t h e t e m p l e w a s destroyed d o w n t o its oldest f o u n d a tions, t h e b a s e m e n t h o u s e replaced it. T h e u n d e r g r o u n d r o o m s w e r e c o n n e c t e d b y a d o o r a n d a p p a r e n t l y served as a wine cellar o w n e d b y o n e of t h e city's chief functionaries. Residential dwellings and population. A p a r t f r o m t h e units listed above, t h e city's space was allocated for residential buildings. T h e sections of t h e city e x p o s e d attest t h a t t h e d o m e s t i c units w e r e n o t u n i f o r m , h o w e v e r . A l t h o u g h t h e y resemble t h e f o u r - r o o m - h o u s e t y p e ( m o s t h o u s e s possessed a wall m a d e of s t o n e pillars to s u p p o r t t h e roof), their sizes differ a n d their internal division varies. T h e kitchens a p p e a r to h a v e b e e n located in t h e front r o o m , w h i c h w a s u n r o o f e d . T h e central space, divided b y pillars, m a y h a v e b e e n roofed
BEIDHA a n d u s e d as a storage area a n d as a stable for t h e h o u s e h o l d ' s livestock. T h e rear b r o a d r o o m w a s t h e family's b e d r o o m . I n h o u s e s located at t h e o u t e r b e l t of t h e city, this r o o m was also p a r t of t h e defensive c a s e m a t e wall. A n estimated 300350 p e o p l e could live in t h e seventy-five dwellings at T e l Beersheba. Its h i g h s t a n d a r d of city p l a n n i n g as well as the vast r e sources a n d effort invested in its u r b a n structures—its for tifications, street n e t w o r k , w a t e r system, a n d s t o r e h o u s e s — clearly p o i n t t o an administrative role for it. S u c h efforts w e r e m a d e for t h e k i n g d o m ' s civil service elite; ordinary cit izens lived in villages a n d f a r m s a n d w e r e e n g a g e d in agri culture. T h e i n h a b i t a n t s of Israelite cities w e r e the region's g o v e r n o r ; regional t a x collectors w h o w e r e also responsible also for redistributing taxes in k i n d ; military c o m m a n d e r s a n d local g u a r d s ; officials r e s p o n s i b l e for international t r a d e ; a n d t h e priests w h o controlled religious rites. Late periods. After t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of s t r a t u m II, T e l B e e r s h e b a w a s n e v e r rebuilt as a city. F o l l o w i n g a n u n s u c cessful a t t e m p t to rebuild t h e fortifications ( s t r a t u m I ) , t h e site w a s d e s e r t e d for nearly t h r e e h u n d r e d years. T h e m a jority of d i e finds f r o m t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d are from pits a r o u n d t h e m o u n d ' s p e r i m e t e r . F o r t y A r a m a i c ostraca f o u n d in t h e pits list p e r s o n a l n a m e s of Jews, E d o m i t e s , a n d A r a b s a n d m e n t i o n quantities of w h e a t a n d barley. T h e pits w e r e u s e d , as elsewhere, t o store grain, w h i c h was t h e n s u p plied to t h e Persian army. R e m a i n s of a large Hellenistic fortress with a t e m p l e n e a r b y w e r e f o u n d o n t h e m o u n d . N u m e r o u s objects w e r e u n c o v e r e d infavissae, or pits, d u g in t h e t e m p l e ' s c o u r t y a r d : a clay figurine ( m a d e in a m o l d ) of a p a i r of goddesses; a Babylonian-style cylinder seal; female figurines in b r o n z e a n d b o n e ; a b r o n z e bull figurine; a n d a falcon-shaped fa ience p e n d a n t . I n t h e H e r o d i a n p e r i o d a large palace, i n cluding a b a t h h o u s e , was b u i l t o n t h e m o u n d . T h e latest s t r u c t u r e w a s a fortress f r o m t h e R o m a n p e r i o d ( s e c o n d a n d third centuries C E ) , built as a p a r t of t h e limes Palaestinae. Following a n o t h e r g a p of a b o u t five h u n d r e d years, t h e for tress was r e u s e d as a w a y station in t h e Early A r a b p e r i o d ( e i g h t h - n i n t h centuries C E ) . I n t h e last few centuries t h e m o u n d has served as burial p l a c e for local b e d o u i n . BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n , ed. Beer-Sheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons. T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 3 . Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . Investigations at Lachish: The Sanctuary and the Res idency (Lachish V). T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 5 . Fowler, M e r v y n D . " T h e Excavation at Tell Beer-Sheba a n d the B i b lical R e c o r d . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 4 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 7 - 1 1 . H e r z o g , Ze'ev, et al. " T h e Stratigraphy of Beer-Sheba a n d t h e Location of the Sanctuary." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, n o . 225 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 4 9 - 5 8 . H e r z o g , Ze'ev. Beer-Sheba II: The Early Iron Age Settlements. T e l Aviv, 1984Holladay, J o h n S. " T h e Stables of Israel: F u n c t i o n a l Determinants of Stable Construction and t h e Interpretation of Pillared Building R e
291
m a i n s of the Palestinian I r o n A g e . " In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T . Geraty and Larry G. H e r r , p p . 1 0 3 - 1 6 5 . Berrien Springs, M i c h . , 1986. K e n y o n , Kathleen M . " T h e D a t e of the Destruction of Iron Age BeerS h e b a . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 108 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 6 3 - 6 4 . N a ' a m a n , N a d a v . " T h e Brook of E g y p t and Assyrian Policy on t h e Border of Egypt." Tel Aviv 6 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 68-90. N a ' a m a n , N a d a v . " T h e Inheritance of t h e Sons of S i m e o n . " Zeitschrift des DeutschenPaldstina-Vereins 96 (1980): 1 3 6 - 1 5 2 . Rainey, A n s o n F . "Early Historical G e o g r a p h y of the N e g e b . " In BeerSheba II: The Early Iron Age Settlements, edited by Ze'ev Herzog, p p . 8 8 - 1 0 4 . T e l Aviv, 1984. Yadin, Yigael. "Beer-Sheba: T h e H i g h Place Destroyed b y King Josiah." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 2 2 (1976a): 5 - 1 7 . Yadin, Yigael. " T h e M e g i d d o Stables." In Magnolia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God; Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M o o r e Cross et al., p p . 2 4 9 - 2 5 2 . G a r d e n City,N.Y„ 1976b. ZE'EV HERZOG
BEHISTUN.
See Bisitun.
BEIDHA, site located 4.5 k m (2.8 mi.) n o r t h of P e t r a , 33 k m (20 mi.) from M a ' i n , 101 k m (63 mi.) from ' A q a b a , a n d 180 Ion ( 1 1 2 mi.) from A m m a n in s o u t h e r n J o r d a n . It lies along a 4-kilometer-wide shelf c o m p r i s e d of alluvial valleys i n t e r s p e r s e d b e t w e e n steeply faced C a m b r i a n s a n d s t o n e o u t c r o p s . T h i s n o r t h - s o u t h shelf i n t e r r u p t s a n a b r u p t west erly descent from t h e J o r d a n i a n plateau to t h e lowlands of t h e W a d i ' A r a b a h , w h e r e elevations d r o p from 1,600 m to fewer t h a n 200 m within a distance of 16 k m (10 m i . ) . T h e site's elevation is 1,020 m , o n a n d within a r e m n a n t terrace f o r m e d b y alluviation of d i e W a d i e l - G h u r a b . A thick se q u e n c e of cultural a n d n o n c u l t u r a l deposits, u p to 6 m d e e p , a c c u m u l a t e d . T h r e e p e r i o d s of h u m a n o c c u p a t i o n w e r e identified; a N a t u f i a n e n c a m p m e n t (primarily d u r i n g the eleventh m i l l e n n i u m B C E ) , a P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic B ( P P N B ) village (during t h e seventh m i l l e n n i u m ) , a n d ter r a c e d N a b a t e a n agricultural fields ( s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE—first c e n t u r y CE) . Beidha, initially called Seyl Aqlat, w a s discovered b y D i a n a K i r k b r i d e with t h e aid of B ' d u l b e d o u i n d u r i n g a 1956 r e c o n n a i s s a n c e survey for sites p r e d a t i n g t h e ceramic N e olithic in t h e P e t r a area. S t o n e walls a n d early Neolithic flints e r o d i n g o u t of t h e u p p e r talus slope of a seasonal drainage, a n d white-patinated N a t u f i a n artifacts farther d o w n s l o p e r e vealed t h e site's r e s e a r c h potential. K i r k b r i d e excavated t h e site for eight seasons; seven b e t w e e n 1958 a n d 1967 a n d a final o n e in 1983. S h e supervised t h e excavations, a n d a s e ries of assistants directly supervised local workers, starting i n 1963. T h e digging w a s c o n d u c t e d primarily b y trained Jericho m e n u s i n g a h a n d pick a n d a trowel. E x c a v a t i o n s e x p o s e d 54 sq m of t h e N a t u f i a n o c c u p a t i o n .
292
BEIRUT
revealing a m a x i m u m thickness of 0.6 m of cultural deposits t h a t thinned along the margins. T h e Natufian o c c u p a t i o n , consisting primarily of small lithics, faunal r e m a i n s , a n d small heardis a n d large roasting pits, appears to h a v e b e e n a short-term or seasonal campsite t h a t was occupied r e peatedly over a considerable period of time. M i n i m a l evi dence of plant processing w a s discovered, there w a s a n a b sence of features s u c h as buildings, storage facilities, a n d burials. T h e P P N B settlement lies o n t o p of t h e alluvial terrace. It consists of a small, low tell m o r e t h a n 3 m thick, along with a shallower deposit of associated cultural material b e y o n d the limits of die village. Excavations exposed 1,425 sq m of Neolitiiic deposits a n d sixty-five buildings (1,050 s q m a n d sixty-one buildings within the limits of t h e tell, a n d 375 sq m of i n d e t e r m i n a t e Neolithic deposits outside t h e tell, including four buildings and a series of related features 40 m farther east). Final Neolithic stratigraphic m o d e l i n g dis tinguished three m a i n phases associated with well-preserved buildings a n d a b u n d a n t artifacts o n their floors (including b o n e tools, flaked s t o n e tools, g r o u n d - s t o n e axes, pestles, stone grinders, stone b e a d s , r a w materials, a n d subsistence remains, including gazelle, goat, cattle, cereals, l e g u m e s , a n d pistachios). T h e s e d a t a allowed for considerable insight into the spatial organization of a n Early Neolithic village. T h e Neolithic village appears to have b e e n continuously occupied, during w h i c h time a u n i q u e , indigenous architec tural progression took place from clusters of oval p o s t houses, t h r o u g h individual oval a n d subrectangular build ings, and ultimately t o full rectangular buildings c o m p l e t e widi t w o stories (with a n o p e n u p p e r story a n d a b a s e m e n t consisting of a long corridor a n d u p to seven very small rooms). Initially, the Early Neolithic village consisted of o p e n courtyard spaces a n d small aggregates of buildings. T h e dis tribution of buildings b e c a m e m o r e c o m p a c t e d over t i m e , a n d open space w a s limited to a central courtyard. T h e ear liest buildings were simply organized, interior structural fea tures were absent, a n d storage a n d p r o d u c t i o n shared a n undifferentiated space u s e d for eating, receiving guests, a n d sleeping. P r o d u c t i o n and storage b e c a m e m o r e spatially seg regated within domestic dwellings over time. Interior archi tectural features increased in frequency a n d diversity, fo cusing activities a n d storage in particular locations within domestic buildings. Storage a n d p r o d u c t i o n areas were u l timately restricted t o t h e b a s e m e n t s of t h e two-story d o mestic buildings. Larger, distinct, n o n d o m e s t i c structures were centrally situated tiiroughout t h e village's history. T h e y were inferred to have b e e n d i e v e n u e of s u p r a h o u s e h o l d decision m a k i n g a n d related ceremonial activities. Five uniquely c o n s t r u c t e d m e d i u m - s i z e d buildings off-site were also interpreted as n o n d o m e s t i c , possibly associated with aspects of t h e rich
ideological a n d ritual tradition t h a t flourished d u r i n g t h e PPNB. R e s e a r c h at this Early Neolithic village has p r o v i d e d c o n siderable insights into h o w o n e small c o m m u n i t y a t t e m p t e d t o e m b r a c e die social a n d e c o n o m i c c h a n g e s initiated b y sedentarism a n d food p r o d u c t i o n . BIBLIOGRAPHY Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Francois R. Valla, eds. The Natufian Culture in the Levant. A n n A r b o r , M i c h . , 1 9 9 1 . Bar-Yosef, Ofer, a n d A n n a Belfer-Cohen. " F r o m Foraging to F a r m i n g in the Mediterranean L e v a n t . " In Transitions to Agriculture in Pre history, edited by A n n e Birgitte G e b a u e r a n d T . Douglas Price, p p . 2 1 - 4 8 . Madison, W i s . , 1 9 9 2 . Byrd, Brian F . The Natufian Encampment at Beidha: Late Pleistocene Adaptation in the Southern Levant. Jutland Archaeological Society Publications, vol. 2 3 . 1 . A a r h u s , 1989. Byrd, Brian F . "Public and Private, D o m e s t i c a n d Corporate: T h e Emergence of the Southwest Indian Village." American Antiquity 59.4 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 6 3 6 - 6 6 6 . K e n t , Susan. Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisci plinary Cross-Cultural Study. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 9 0 . Kirkbride, Diana. "Five Seasons at the Prepottery Neolithic Village of Beidha in J o r d a n . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 98 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : 5 - 6 1 . Kirkbride, Diana. "Beidha 1 9 6 5 : An Interim R e p o r t . " Palestine Explo ration Quarterly 99 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 5 - 1 3 . Kirkbride, Diana. "Beidha: Early Neolithic Village Life South of the D e a d Sea." Antiquity 42 ( 1 9 6 8 a ) : 2 6 3 - 2 7 4 . Kirkbride, Diana. "Beidha 1 9 6 7 : An Interim R e p o r t . " Palestine Explo ration Quarterly 100 ( 1 9 6 8 b ) : 90-96. Rollefson, G a r y O., Alan H . S i m m o n s , a n d Z e i d a n A. Kafafi. " N e o lithic Cultures at Ain Ghazal, J o r d a n . " Journal of Field Archaeology 19 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 4 4 3 - 4 7 0 . Wilson, Peter. The Domestication of the Human Species. N e w H a v e n , 1988. =
BRIAN F . BYRD
B E I R U T , capital of L e b a n o n , located o n t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast (33°54' N , 35°3o' E ) . T h e city's ancient n a m e was Biruta and, in t h e classical period, B e r y t u s . T h e n a m e is generally t h o u g h t to b e derived from t h e c o m m o n Semitic w o r d for " w e l l " or " p i t " — i n Akkadian, burtu; H e b r e w , be'er; A r a b i c , bir. Biruta is a plural form. Berytus was r e n o w n e d in t h e R o m a n world as a c o m mercial center b u t m o s t especially for its school of law, w h i c h flourished from t h e third to t h e sixth centuries CE. T h e e a r t h q u a k e of 551 CE devastated t h e city. I n t u r n d i e m e d i eval city fell into ruins, b u t its scattered granite c o l u m n s i m p r e s s e d t h e Persian traveler N a s r - i - K h u s r a w , w h o visited t h e city in 1047. T h e early western visitors, H e n r y M o u n drell (1697), R i c h a r d P o c o c k e (early e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u r y ) , F . B . Spilsbury (1799), a n d William T h o m s o n (1870), all r e alized that t h e scattered r e m a i n s w e r e t h e ruins of R o m a n p u b l i c buildings. E a r l y I n v e s t i g a t i o n s . Beiruit provides only t h e barest a r chaeological evidence of a p r e - R o m a n city. T h e R o m a n city
BEIRUT itself lies b e n e a t h the p o r t area, m a k i n g regular excavations impossible. Prehistoric period. Early investigations a n d limited ar chaeological activity w e r e b e g u n i n 1914 b y a g r o u p of Jesuit scholars at St. J o s e p h University, Beirut. In 1946 H e n r y Fleisch a n d L o u i s D u b e r t r e t , also from St. J o s e p h , m a d e a careful study of d i e m a r i n e t e r r a c e s of R a s Beirut, the p r o m ontory, identifying different levels. D u r i n g this survey of open-air, unstratified sites, F l e i s c h p i c k e d u p a n A c h e u l e a n biface, a w a t e r - w o r n h a n d ax believed to b e the oldest stone tool f o u n d in R a s Beirut. In 1972-1973, Fleisch extracted fifteen L o w e r a n d M i d d l e A c h e u l e a n bifaces, t h e oldest s t o n e bifaces f o u n d in Beirut in a stratified deposit. R a o u l D e s r i b e s f o u n d similar tools at F u r n e c h - C h e b b a k n e a r N a h r (the River) Beirut in a b o u t 1914. Fleisch a n d P a u l San-Laville identified t h e M i d d l e P a leolithic a n d t h e L e v a l l o i s - M o u s t e r i a n cultures by their core a n d flake industries, m a k i n g R a s Beirut t h e earliest M o u s terian site in d i e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n b a s i n (see Saidah, 1970). Fleisch f o u n d evidence of t h e U p p e r Palaeolithic at t w o kinds of sites in the vicinity of R a s Beirut: o p e n - a i r c a m p sites a n d caves a n d shelters. L o r r a i n e C o p e l a n d ' s survey in
BEIRUT. F i g u r e 1.
Nahr
el-Kalb
rock-cat
the early 1960s recognized t w e n t y o p e n - a i r campsites in tire s a n d a r o u n d Beirut (see S a i d a h , 1970). T h e caves a n d shel ter sites b e l o n g mainly t o U p p e r Paleolithic Beirut, a n d diey are r e p r e s e n t e d in the W a d i A m e l i a s area, s o m e 6 k m (4 mi.) n o r t h of Beirut. K s a r 'Akil is a key site for this period a n d for the prehistory of L e b a n o n . [See K s a r 'Akil.] I n 1930 A u g u s t e Bergy identified the earliest k n o w n N e olithic village site, called T e l l Arslan, n e a r t h e Beirut airport. Fleisch r e s c u e d a large n u m b e r of N e o l i t h i c flint tools as well as p o t s h e r d s there t h a t are n o w p a r t of t h e collection at St. J o s e p h ' s M u s e u m of L e b a n e s e Prehistory. I n 1969 R o g e r Saidah located another N e o l i t h i c settlement in the center of t h e city, at t h e ancient tell of Beirut. In 1914, Desribes u n covered a Chalcolithic site called M i n e t e d - D h a l i e h on t h e s e c o n d h e a d l a n d s o u t h of P i g e o n R o c k . T h e site was partly excavated. A b u n d a n t r e m a i n s of flints, blades, a n d flakes litter its surface. Historical periods. Little is k n o w n a b o u t Beirut in h i s torical p e r i o d s before G r e c o - R o m a n times. A l t h o u g h ldngs from E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a h a d stelae carved in the rock cliffs of N a h r el-Kalb n o r t h of t h e city, r e c o u n t i n g tiieir mil itary exploits in the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n (see figure 1 ) , written d o c u m e n t s p e r t a i n i n g to the history of Beirut are
stelae. A t left is A s s y r i a n stela n o . 13; a t right, E g y p t i a n
stela n o . 14 of R a m e s e s II. (Courtesy I. Khalifeh)
293
294
BEIRUT
rare. T h e city is n o t m e n t i o n e d b y H e r o d o t u s a n d it does n o t a p p e a r in t h e H e b r e w Bible. Second millennium. In 1926, n e a r the p o r t area, an E g y p tian sphinx with a royal inscription of A m e n e m h e t I V (eigh teenth century BCE), was u n c o v e r e d that found its w a y to t h e British M u s e u m . I n 1954, a b o u t 100 m n o r t h e a s t of w h e r e t h e s p h i n x was f o u n d , t h r e e t o m b s were discovered containing burials r a n g i n g from t h e seventeenth t o sixteenth centuries BCE. In addition to pottery a n d metal tools, t h e scarabs and alabaster vases found are evidence of t r a d e with E g y p t a n d Palestine. A n o t h e r M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e t o m b w a s discovered at Sin el-Fil, a b o u t 2 k m east of t h e ancient tell. At the tell itself, a L a t e B r o n z e A g e t o m b was f o u n d c o n taining a stone vase fragment b e a r i n g the n a m e of R a m e s e s II. T h e p r e s e n c e of M y c e n a e a n pottery in this t o m b indi cates that Beirut w a s also involved in trade witii t h e A e g e a n . First millennium. W r i t t e n a n d archaeological r e c o r d s for Beirut from the first millenium BCE are scarce. A small ivory perfume vase in t h e form of a standing w o m a n , n o w in t h e A s h m o l e a n M u s e u m in L o n d o n , is said to have c o m e from Beirut. It m a y d a t e as early as t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE. I n 1930, just east of t h e G r a n d Serail, a quantity of baked-clay figurine fragments of h o r s e m e n a n d a small terra-cotta stat uette of a w o m a n , p e r h a p s a g o d d e s s , with an E g y p t i a n hair style were discovered t h a t b e l o n g t o the Persian period. Several of tiiese fragments are p a r t of t h e collection of t h e M u s e u m of the A m e r i c a n University of Beirut. Classical period. F r o m 1907 to t h e late 1950s, n o major
BEIRUT. F i g u r e 2.
archaeological excavations w e r e c o n d u c t e d in Beirut. M a i n l y r e s c u e o p e r a t i o n s a t t e m p t e d t o salvage certain H e l lenistic, R o m a n , or Byzantine architectural e l e m e n t s . I m p o r t a n t s u b u r b s d e v e l o p e d o n t h e s a n d y b e a c h e s s o u t h of Beirut d u r i n g t h e R o m a n period. B e t w e e n J n a h a n d O u z a i several m o s a i c floors w e r e u n c o v e r e d b e l o n g i n g to t h o s e seaside villas. H i g h o n a m o u n t a i n overlooking Beirut, at Beit M e r y , s t a n d t h e r e m a i n s of a R o m a n settlement a n d a t e m p l e . D u r i n g t h e 1960s, t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities excavated t h e area, w h o s e rich finds of R o m a n Beirut a n d its environs are n o w in t h e B e i r u t N a t i o n a l M u s e u m . Beirut's u r b a n p l a n followed t h e p r a c t i c e of all R o m a n city planning: it has t w o major crossroads, a Decumanus Maximus a n d a Cardo Maximus. T h e i n f o r m a t i o n available a b o u t this city w a s a s s e m b l e d into a p l a n f r o m various u n r e l a t e d sources b y Jean Lauffray in 1914. It is still a useful d o c u m e n t (see Saidah, 1969). R e c e n t E x c a v a t i o n s . I n 1968, t h e D e p a r t m e n t of A n t i q uities c o m m i s s i o n e d H a r o u t i n e K a l a y a n to excavate certain m o n u m e n t s in Beirut. 1. A n extensive R o m a n b a t h n e a r t h e G r a n d Serail, w i t h a large cistern a n d r o o m s d e c o r a t e d w i t h frescoes w e r e u n covered and p a r t l y restored 2. A R o m a n defensive t o w e r t h a t h a d b e e n r e u s e d in t h e medieval p e r i o d 3. A stretch of a R o m a n street c o m p l e t e with its p a v e m e n t , c o l u m n s , capitals, a n d an architrave in t h e c e n t e r of P a r liament S q u a r e
Detail of the Roman
baths. (Courtesy I. Khalifeh)
BEIT MIRSIM, TELL 4. A s e c o n d R o m a n b a t h a n d p a r t of a n i m p o r t a n t m u n i c ipal b u i l d i n g (a basilica?) t h a t p r o b a b l y covers t h e Decumanus Maximus I n 1969, t h e D e p a r t m e n t of A n t i q u i t i e s , r e p r e s e n t e d b y R o g e r Saidah, b e g a n t o clear a n area o n t h e ancient tell, n e a r the p o r t area, w h e r e in 1954, M B a n d L B t o m b s h a d b e e n f o u n d (see a b o v e ) . Surface finds i n c l u d e d a N e o l i t h i c h a m m e r s t o n e , s o m e E B c o m b e d w a r e , a n d M B a n d L B sherds. N o Early I r o n A g e material w a s r e c o v e r e d , b u t s o m e sixthc e n t u r y BCE jar h a n d l e s w e r e f o u n d . T h i s excavation was t h e last o p p o r t u n i t y to w o r k o n t h e a n c i e n t tell. Saidah's results r e m a i n u n p u b l i s h e d , as h e died s o o n thereafter. I n 1977, w h e n t h e possibility of r e c o n s t r u c t i n g the m o d e r n city was b e i n g studied, I b r a h i m K a w k a b a n i , u n d e r auspices of t h e L e b a n e s e D e p a r t m e n t of A n t i q u i t i e s , a n d J. D . F o r e s t , from t h e Institut F r a n c a i s d ' A r c h e o l o g i e d u P r o c h e O r i e n t , u n d e r t o o k a series of s o u n d i n g s to look for t h e city's a n c i e n t law school (see a b o v e ) . T h e w o r k s t o p p e d w i t h t h e o n s e t of L e b a n o n ' s civil w a r . T w e n t y s o u n d i n g s w e r e m a d e , p r o d u c i n g finds f r o m t h e Hellenistic, R o m a n , B y z a n t i n e , a n d M a m l u k p e r i o d s . T h e material c u l t u r e u n e a r t h e d i n c l u d e d pottery jars, l a m p s , a n d figurines, s t a m p e d R h o d i a n a n d other jar h a n d l e s , c a r v e d b o n e objects; m e t a l weights, rings, a n d h a n d l e s ; s c u l p t u r e d a n d inscribed reliefs, m o r t a r s , a n d capitals; a n d w e a v i n g utensils. G l a s s , coins, a n d gold jew elry, mainly from t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d , w e r e also r e c o v e r e d but remain unpublished. a n
I n 1977 d 1982, several a t t e m p t s to r e c o n s t r u c t a n d r e store m o d e r n Beirut's central b u s i n e s s district w e r e stalled by security considerations. I n 1983 a n d 1984, r e c o n s t r u c t i o n a n d restoration w e n t f o r w a r d at a considerable p a c e . A s y m p o s i u m called B e i r u t of T o m o r r o w , h e l d at t h e A m e r i c a n University of Beirut in 1983, called for t h e p r o t e c t i o n of h i s toric m o n u m e n t s a n d for a t t e m p t s t o explore t h e ancient tell of Beirut. U N E S C O experts E r n s t Will a n d Rolf H a c h m a n n w e r e invited t o t h e city in 1983 as c o n s u l t a n t s . Early in 1993, U N E S C O c o n s u l t a n t s P h i l i p p e M a r q u i s , J o h n Schofield, a n d J e a n P a u l T h a l m a n n w e r e c o n t r a c t e d t o w o r k with t h e C o u n c i l for D e v e l o p m e n t a n d R e s t o r a t i o n a n d t h e D e p a r t m e n t of A n t i q u i t i e s . O n 10 S e p t e m b e r 1993, w o r k w a s b e g u n in d o w n t o w n B e i r u t in collaboration w i t h t e a m s from t h e L e b a n e s e U n i v e r s i t y , t h e A m e r i c a n U n i v e r sity of Beirut, Britain, F r a n c e , t h e N e t h e r l a n d s , a n d Italy, a n d t h e R o y a l M u s e u m of B e l g i u m . Five s o u n d i n g s w e r e d u g in a t h r e e - m o n t h p e r i o d in tire d o w n t o w n area, with t h e objective of exploring t h e limits of t h e a n c i e n t t o w n . T h e t e a m s w o r k e d d u r i n g 1994 a n d 1995 in a n d a r o u n d t h e a n cient t o w n in a n area of a b o u t 500,000 s q m , e x p a n d i n g t h e n u m b e r of s o u n d i n g s to find t h e Prehistoric, C a n a a n i t e , P h o e n i c i a n , R o m a n , a n d m e d i e v a l cities. Archaeological r e s c u e operations a c c o m p a n i e d t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n in t h e d o w n t o w n area a n d will c o n t i n u e t o d o so.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Badre, Leila. " T h e Historic F a b r i c of Beirut." I n Beirut of Tomorroio, edited b y Friedrich Ragette, p p . 6 5 - 7 6 . Beirut, 1 9 8 3 . Historical out line a n d review of archaeological remains u n e a r t h e d to the date of publication. Forest, J. D . "Fouilles a municipalite de B e y r o u t h , 1 9 7 7 . " Syria 59 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 1 - 2 6 . Primarily the results of soundings that p r o d u c e d R o m a n , Byzantine, and later material. Jidejian, N i n a . Beirut through the Ages. Beirut, 1 9 7 3 . Useful history of Beirut. M o u t e r d e , R e n e , a n d Jean Lauffray. Beyrouth ville romaine: Histoire et monuments. Beirut, 1 9 5 2 . Helpful study of the history a n d archae ology of Beirut in t h e R o m a n period. M o u t e r d e , R e n e . Regards sur Beyrouth; Phinicienne, hellenislique et ro maine. Beirut, 1 9 6 6 . G o o d review of Beirut's historical a n d archae ological m o n u m e n t s a n d remains. Saidah, Roger. "Archaeology in the L e b a n o n , 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 6 9 . " Berytus 18 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 1 1 9 - 1 4 2 . Useful information on archaeological activities in the late 1960s. Saidah, Roger. " T h e Prehistory of Beirut." In Beirut: Crossroads of Cul tures, p p . 1 - 1 3 . Beirut, 1 9 7 0 . G o o d review of archaeological evidence for the prehistoric periods. T u r q u e t y - P a r i s e t , Francoise. "Fouille de la municipalite de Beyrouth, 1 9 7 7 : L e s objects." Syria 59 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 2 7 - 7 6 . G o o d catalog of objects from the R o m a n , Byzantine, a n d later periods. W a r d , William A. "Ancient Beirut." In Beirut: Crossroads of Cultures, p p . 1 4 - 4 2 . Beirut, 1 9 7 0 . Uses t h e scant archaeological remains to reconstruct the history of Beirut, with some freewheeling interpre tations. ISSAM A L I KHALIFEH
B E I T M I R S I M , T E L L , site located in t h e chalk foot hills of t h e eastern S h e p h e l a h , a b o u t 201cm (12 mi.) s o u t h w e s t of H e b r o n a n d 13.5 k m (8 m i . ) southeast of T e l l L a chish (3i°27' N , 34°54' E ; m a p reference 1415 X 0960). I n 1924 William Foxwell A l b r i g h t identified t h e 3-ha (8-acre) site as biblical D e b i r (Jos. 1 5 : 1 5 - 1 7 ; Jgs. 1 : 1 1 - 1 5 ) . T h i s identification, h o w e v e r , h a s b e e n contested, m o s t c o n v i n c ingly, b y M o s h e K o c h a v i , w h o identified D e b i r with K h i r b e t R a b u d . [See R a b u d , Khirbet.] T e l l Beit M i r s i m t h u s r e m a i n s w i t h o u t a k n o w n biblical identification. T h e site w a s first e x c a v a t e d in four seasons (1926-1932) b y a joint expedition f r o m X e n i a T h e o l o g i c a l Seminary a n d t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h , with Albright serving as field director. E x c a v a t i o n s w e r e devoted mainly t o a b r o a d e x p o s u r e in t h e m o u n d ' s southeast q u a d r a n t , r e a c h i n g b e d r o c k in s o m e p a r t s . In t h e n o r t h w e s t sector a large, c o n t i g u o u s area of t h e u p p e r m o s t s t r a t u m (A) w a s cleared. F o r m a n y years Albright's excavation at T e l l Beit M i r s i m was considered a m o d e l of scientific accuracy, a n d his four v o l u m e s of final r e p o r t s (1932, 1933, 1938, 1943) b e c a m e a c o r n e r s t o n e for t h e ceramic typology a n d c h r o nology of biblical Palestine. I n t h e 1970s extensive looting led to t h e discovery of t h e necropolis of T e l l Beit M i r s i m , a n d s o m e thirty t o m b s w e r e investigated b e t w e e n 1978 a n d 1982 b y t h e Israel Antiquities A u t h o r i t y ; as of 1995 t h e s e h a v e y e t to b e published.
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BEIT MIRSIM, TELL
The Mound: Stratification a n d Principal Finds. T e n major strata ( A - J ) , s o m e of t h e m subdivided into p h a s e s , w e r e identified o n the site, representing nearly c o n t i n u o u s settlement from t h e Early B r o n z e A g e to the I r o n A g e II. Albright's excavation m e t h o d a n d s o m e w h a t sketchy strati graphic analyses, w h i c h consist mainly of identifying major b u r n layers a n d h o m o g e n e o u s pottery assemblages, have at t r a c t e d several a t t e m p t s a t a reassessment of the major sttata a n d finds (see bibliography). T h e following description of t h e excavations, while based on Albright's m o s t r e c e n t s u m m a r y (1975), incorporates t h e results of tiiese m o r e r e c e n t reevaluations. Stratum J: Early Bronze Age. N o architectural remains w e r e recovered in s t r a t u m J, which consisted of pottery d e posits in pockets in t h e bedrock. T h e bulk of this p o t t e r y is E B LTI in date—large, p a t t e r n - b u r n i s h e d platters, c o m b e d w a r e jars a n d pithoi; a n d s p o u t e d vats—with possible frag m e n t s of earlier E B forms. Strata I-H; Early Bronze IV. F r a g m e n t a r y p a v e m e n t s a n d m a s o n r y were attributed to strata I - H , w h i c h are sep arated by ash deposits. T h e pottery of the t w o strata is sim ilar a n d consists of typical southern E B TV forms: r i b b e d a n d inverted r i m bowls, ovoid jars, jugs, a n d c u p s with c o m b e d a n d applied decoration, s o m e forms with vestigial lug a n d ledge handles. Strata G-F: Middle Bronze Age I. Strata G - F r e p r e s e n t t h e beginning of intensive occupation o n t h e m o u n d . W h i l e s t r a t u m G a p p e a r s t o b e an unwalled settlement, with gen erously p r o p o r t i o n e d h o u s e s , s t t a t u m F reveals elements of u r b a n p l a n n i n g — a city wall and adjacent structures built at right angles to it. T h e city wall, with massive stone foun dations some 3.3 m wide, is polygonal in plan, with towers placed at each angle. T h e h o u s e s a b u t t h e fortification b y m e a n s of a c o m m o n rear wall r u n n i n g along its i n n e r face. D e s p i t e evidence of considerable building activity i n t h e two strata, their pottery assemblages were indistinguishable, consisting of forms typical of b o t h earlier a n d later phases within the M B I . Strata E-D: Middle Bronze Age II-III. Strata E - D , e a c h subdivided into t w o phases, represent the zenith of C a naanite U r b a n civilization at Tell Beit M i r s i m . I n s t r a t u m E , the fortification wall w a s buttressed b y a massive b e a t e n earth glacis, partiy faced with stone. T r a c e s of w h a t m a y h a v e b e e n a t h r e e - e n t r y w a y gate w e r e u n e a r t h e d b e n e a t h the east gate of the I r o n A g e t o w n . W i t h i n t h e wall a n d parallel t o it, a street furnished with a stone-lined drain was revealed, lined on b o t h sides b y several well-built structures. T h e stra t u m was characterized by a rich, well-made ceramic r e p e r toire. S t r a t u m D c o n t i n u e d the s t r a t u m E layout, w i t h t w o p e rimeter streets a n d connecting radial alleys clearly defined. A large (200 s q m ) , thick-walled c o u r t y a r d building, t h e " p a l a c e , " w a s cleared in t h e west. Finds in this b u i l d i n g in
c l u d e d m a n y storejars, as well as stone, m e t a l , a n d ivory objects—including a g a m e b o a r d w i t h a die a n d g a m i n g p i e c e s — a n d , m o s t i m p o r t a n t , t h e lower p a r t of a cultic stela, interpreted by A l b r i g h t as a " s e r p e n t g o d d e s s " b u t n o w r e c ognized as a r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of a C a n a a n i t e dignitary. A d ditional n o t e w o r t h y finds in this s t r a t u m a r e royal H y k s o s scarabs ( o n e of yqb[hr?]) a n d fine S y r i a n - t y p e cylinder seals. Stratum C: Late Bronze Age. Following t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of t h e M B t o w n in t h e m i d - s i x t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, t h e r e w a s a considerable hiatus in settlement. T h e s u b s e q u e n t a r c h i tectural p h a s e s , C i a n d C 2 , b o t h date to L a t e B r o n z e A g e II a n d r e p r e s e n t a decline in t h e site's u r b a n character. T h e thin, fragmentary p e r i m e t e r wall ascribed to t h e latter p h a s e ( C 2 ) , suggests t h a t t h e t o w n relied o n t h e M B defenses for p r o t e c t i o n , a n d m a n y o p e n spaces b e t w e e n t h e h o u s e s a r e occupied by grain silos. T h e L B settlement w a s d e s t r o y e d in a fierce conflagration, d a t e d b y t h e c e r a m i c assemblage t o a b o u t 1225 BCE. Strata B~A: Iron Age. T h e s t r a t u m C d e s t r u c t i o n w a s followed closely b y a partial rebuilding. Strata B i - B 2 ( I r o n I) are characterized b y fragmentary architectural r e m a i n s a n d a large n u m b e r of stone-lined silos, m a n y of t h e m s u p e r i m p o s e d . T h e p o t t e r y r e c o v e r e d from t h e silos c o n t i n u e s C a n a a n i t e traditions, witii a small a m o u n t of Philistine w a r e , p r o b a b l y i m p o r t e d from t h e coast, a p p e a r i n g i n B2. A major c h a n g e c a m e a b o u t in s t r a t u m B 3 , d a t e d to t h e p e r i o d of the U n i t e d M o n a r c h y . A 4-4.5-meter-wide c a s e m a t e wall w a s built, following t h e line of the M B fortifications. O f t h e few structures f o u n d within the walls, a series of s t o r e r o o m s abutting t h e wall is t h e m o s t p r o m i n e n t . Following t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of s t r a t u m B3 at t h e close of the t e n t h century, possibly b y Shishak, a n e x t e n d e d p e r i o d of relative prosperity set in. T h e fortifications w e r e rebuilt a n d repaired along B3 lines, a n d a n e w t w o - e n t r y w a y gate w a s built in t h e east. T h e gate w a s later rebuilt as a n indirecte n t r y gate, p r o t e c t e d b y towers. T h e t o w n itself w a s densely built u p , with p e r i m e t e r streets a n d radial alleys r e m i n i s c e n t of t h e B r o n g e A g e t o w n plan. H o u s e s w e r e mainly of t h e pillared t h r e e - a n d f o u r - r o o m t y p e , w i t h t h o s e a t t h e p e r i m eter utilizing t h e wall c a s e m a t e s . P u b l i c c o n s t r u c t i o n i n c l u d e d a large b u i l d i n g near t h e center of t h e t o w n a n d a large tower (originally identified b y Albright as a city gate) built over t h e c a s e m a t e fortifications a t t h e w e s t e r n e n d of t h e site. R o c k - c u t cisterns a n d oil presses (Albright's d y e plants) a r e u b i q u i t o u s . Albright attributed t h e destruction of this city t o t h e B a b ylonians, mainly o n t h e basis of a private seal attributed to a servant of Jehoiachin, t h e p e n u l t i m a t e king of J u d a h . L a t e r studies of the p o t t e r y b y Y o h a n a n A h a r o n i ( " T h e Stratifi cation of J u d a h i t e S i t e s , " BASOR 224 [1976]: 73-90) a n d of s t a m p e d jar h a n d l e s b y D a v i d Ussishkin ( " R o y a l J u d e a n Storage Jars a n d Private Seal I m p r e s s i o n s , " BASOR 223 1976: 6 - 1 1 ) h a v e established t h a t t h e d e s t r u c t i o n s h o u l d b e
BEIT RAS attributed to S e n n a c h e r i b ' s 701 BCE c a m p a i g n . T h e r e is slight ceramic a n d stratigraphic e v i d e n c e for a partial r e o c c u p a t i o n of t h e site in t h e s e v e n t h or early sixth c e n t u r y BCE. T h e C e m e t e r y . T e l l Beit M i r s i m ' s c e m e t e r y includes h u n d r e d s of t o m b s — m o s t of t h e m recently r o b b e d — e x t e n d i n g in an arc on t h e s o u t h w e s t a n d n o r t h w e s t slopes of the m o u n d . Salvage excavations by D a v i d Alon a n d Eliot B r a u n w e r e c o n d u c t e d on t h e s o u t h w e s t slope. I n t a c t t o m b s i n c l u d e d E B I V shaft t o m b s ; several M B t o m b s , exceedingly rich in finds; L B t o m b s with m a n y i m p o r t e d goods (and, possibly, evidence of an L B I o c c u p a t i o n ) ; a n d rectangular Iron II loculus a n d shelf t o m b s . T h o u s a n d s of vessels a n d other finds looted f r o m the T e l l Beit M i r s i m c e m e t e r y ( a n d from t h e m o u n d itself) h a v e m a d e their w a y to the antiq uities m a r k e t a n d t h e n c e to p r i v a t e a n d p u b l i c collections all over the world. [See also the biography of Albright.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Excavation Reports Albright, William Foxwell. The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim, vol. 1, The Pottery of the First Three Campaigns; vol. i A , The Bronze Age Pottery of the Fourth Campaign', vol. 2 , The Bronze Age; vol. 3, The Iron Age. Annual of t h e American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 7 , 2 1 / 2 2 . N e w H a v e n , 1 9 3 2 - 1 9 4 3 . T h e s e four volumes of the final excavation report remain the m o s t comprehensive source for information on the site. Albright, William Foxwell. "Beit M i r s i m , Tell." In Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavation in the Holy Ixmd, vol. 1, p p . 1 7 1 - 1 7 8 . Jeru salem, 1 9 7 5 . Albright's latest synthesis of the Tell Beit Mirsim finds. C r i t i c a l R e v i s i o n of S t r a t i g r a p h y a n d M a j o r F i n d s (in o r d e r of strata) Dever, William G., and Suzanne Richard. " A Reevaluation of Tell Beit Mirsim Strattim J." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, n o . 2 2 6 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 1 - 1 4 . Eitan, A. "Tell Beit Mirsim G - F : T h e M i d d l e Bronze IIA Settlement." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 208 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 1 9 - 2 4 . Reassigns the stratum G fortifications to stratum F . Yadin, Yigael. " T h e Tell Beit M i r s i m G - F Alleged Fortifications." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 2 1 2 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 3 - 2 5 . Rejoinder to Eitan (above), suggesting a stratum E date for t h e fortifications. Merhav, Rivkah. " T h e Stele of t h e ' S e r p e n t G o d d e s s ' from Tell Beit M i r s i m and the Plaque from S h e c h e m Reconsidered." Israel Mu seum Journal 4 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 2 7 - 4 2 . Convincing reidentification of one of the m o s t important M B finds at Tell Beit Mirsim. Greenberg, Raphael, " N e w Light on the Early Iron Age at Tell Beit Mirsim." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 6 5 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 5 5 - 8 0 . Stratigraphic discussion and presentation of previ ously unpublished material. RAPHAEL GREENBERG
B E I T R A S , site located in n o r t h w e s t e r n T r a n s j o r d a n , 5 k m (3 mi.) n o r t h of Irbid ( m a p reference 680 X 105). Beit R a s w a s k n o w n as Capitolias f r o m the first t h r o u g h the sev
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e n t h centuries CE a n d was a m e m b e r of the Decapolis con federation. Following Islamic h e g e m o n y over the region (c. 636 C E ) , t h e original A r a m a i c n a m e , Beit R a s , was reinstituted. T o date, n o stratified deposits earlier t h a n the first century CE have b e e n e x c a v a t e d , a l t h o u g h survey has p r o vided s o m e data earlier t h a n the R o m a n period. T h e s e data, primarily pottery, w e r e f o u n d o n t h e ras, t h e highest p o i n t ( a b o u t 600 m ) in t h e i m m e d i a t e vicinity of t h e site, w h i c h m a y indicate t h e use of t h e ras as a lookout p o s t prior t o t h e formation of t h e city. F . K r u s e a n d H . L . Fleischer (1859), c o m m e n t i n g o n U l rich J. Seetzen's travels a n d explorations (1806) were the first to identify Beit R a s with Capitolias. J. S. B u c k i n g h a m (1816), Selah Merrill (1881), Gottlieb S c h u m a c h e r (1890), N e l s o n G l u e c k (1951) a n d Siegfried M i t t m a n n (1970) all visited the site and r e c o r d e d certain of it's elements. G . L a n kester H a r d i n g , director of antiquities for t h e area d u r i n g the British M a n d a t e , n o t e d t h e site's i m p o r t a n c e . T h e Jor d a n i a n D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities h a s c o n d u c t e d salvage ex cavations t h e r e , particularly in t h e necropolis, during the last thirty years. Systematic archaeological research was b e g u n in 1983 w i t h an intensive survey of t h e site a n d its i m m e d i a t e vicinity; excavation, b e g u n in 1985, c o n t i n u e s . Because the village is inhabited, r e s e a r c h c o m b i n e s archaeological strat egies with ethnohistorical r e s e a r c h , oral history, a n d text interpretation, w i t h the a i m of elucidating all of the site's past. I n antiquity, t h e site was walled. T h e excavated portion of t h e wall, built in the s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE of local limestone ashlar blocks, consists of t h r e e gates t h a t face north. T h e gates w e r e altered in the following five centuries, p e r h a p s b e c a u s e of seismiturbation. I n t h e early eighth century CE, o n e gate w a s t u r n e d into a t o w e r . A walled acropolis h a s b e e n excavated on t h e ras, evidencing the s a m e c o n s t r u c tional t e c h n i q u e s a n d alterations t h r o u g h o u t the site's o c c u p a t i o n a l periods as the city wall. T w o levels of a three-tiered m a r k e t p l a c e , k n o w n from lit erary sources, h a s b e e n excavated n o r t h of the m a i n decumanus, k n o w n from t h e city's oral history. T h e u p p e r level consists of n i n e vaults t h a t face n o r t h , b o u n d e d by vaults t h a t face east a n d west. T h e region's n a t u r a l b e d r o c k was u s e d to c o n s t r u c t the m a r k e t p l a c e . T h e rear wall of t h e vaults is c o n t i n u o u s . O n e vault is a R o m a n barrel vault; t h e others w e r e periodically r e c o n s t r u c t e d throughottt Beit R a s ' s history. T h e v a u l t s ' interior a n d exterior are covered b y utilitarian tesselated p a v e m e n t s . M a r b l e facing found in side t h e vaults suggests t h a t the u p p e r level of the m a r ketplace w a s u s e d for selling finished p r o d u c t s . T h i s second story evidences t h e s a m e construction. T h e vaults were altered considerably in t h e thirteenth/fourteentli century. T h e city's m a i n c h u r c h h a s b e e n excavated across from t h e first level of the vaults. Built on t h e r e m a i n s of an earlier
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R o m a n structure, this construction dates to the mid-fifth century. It is likely t h a t it was t u r n e d into a m o s q u e in the early eighth century. A three-tiered water installation ( a b lution pool?) was built against the j u n c t u r e of t h e c h u r c h ' s central a n d s o u t h e r n apses. T h e entire area of the vaults a n d c h u r c h r e m a i n e d p u b l i c space until the t e n t h c e n t u r y CE, w h e n the space was u s e d for domestic a n d m i n o r industrial activities.
BENNETT, CRYSTAL-MARGARET (19181987), first director of t h e British Institute at A m m a n for Archaeology a n d H i s t o r y a n d t h e excavator of t h o s e E d o m ite sites t h a t h a v e b e e n m o s t extensively investigated. B e n n e t t b e g a n her archaeological career relatively late, in 1954, at the Institute of Archaeology in L o n d o n . A t first she p a r ticipated in excavations in E n g l a n d , later joining K a t h l e e n M . K e n y o n ' s final season at Jericho.
A n intricate water system served the city from its i n c e p tion in 97/98 CE a n d subsequentiy. T h e absence of springs in the vicinity m a d e t h e city d e p e n d e n t on rainwater a n d water b r o u g h t from a distance. P a r t of a low a q u e d u c t sys t e m was surveyed west of t h e city, outside t h e city wall. I n side the city, a well-engineered channel run-off system c u t into the b e d r o c k d e b o u c h e d into large cisterns. A reservoir was built on the south side of the city a n d periodically r e furbished d i r o u g h o u t t h e city's history.
In 1958, while taking p a r t in P e t e r P a r r ' s excavations at P e t r a , in J o r d a n , B e n n e t t b e c a m e interested in t h e I r o n A g e " E d o m i t e " site of U m m el-Biyara in t h e center of P e t r a . S h e excavated there (1960-1965), at t h e E d o m i t e site of T a w i l a n (1968-1970, 1982), a n d at Buseirah, t h e p r o b a b l e capital of E d o m (1971-1974, 1980). A l t h o u g h s h e did n o t p r o d u c e a final r e p o r t for a n y of these sites, h e r preliminary r e p o r t s w e r e regular a n d c o m p r e h e n s i v e . H e r results m a d e t h e E d o m i t e s archaeologically visible for t h e first t i m e a n d considerably revised t h e t h e n generally a c c e p t e d c h r o n o logical p i c t u r e of E d o m . T h e three B e n n e t t excavations clearly d a t e d E d o m i t e p o t t e r y t o the s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, r a t h e r t h a n to t h e t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, as was p r e viously t h o u g h t . H e r excavations also revealed s t r o n g evidence for E d o m i t e settlement continuity into the P e r s i a n period.
T h e archaeological research to date indicates t h a t Beit Ras/Capitolias was a p l a n n e d R o m a n city, p r o b a b l y estab lished for military r e a s o n s , a n d t h a t it flourished in t h e p e riod b e t w e e n the first a n d t e n t h centuries. Excavation has yielded quantities of pottery c o m p a r a b l e to t h a t at o t h e r D e capolis cities. N o hiatus in o c c u p a t i o n at the site h a s yet b e e n found, b u t a gradual decrease in size a n d c h a n g e in u s e from public space to private space seems to begin as early as t h e t e n t h century. [See also Decapolis.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by the nineteenth-century explorers and travelers mentioned in this entry are not listed below. T h e s e works are available only in university or other specialized libraries. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine, Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. N e w H a v e n , 1951. L e n z e n , C. J., et al. "Excavations at Tell Irbid and Beit Ras, 1985." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 29 (1985): 151—159. L e n z e n , C. J. "Tall Irbid and Bait R a s . " Archivfur Orientforschung 33 (1986): 164-166. Lenzen, C. J., and E. Axel Knauf. "Tell Irbid and Beit Ras, 19831986." Liber Annuus/StudiiBibliciFranciscani 36 (1986): 361-363. Lenzen, C. J., and E. Axel Knauf. "Beit Ras-Capitolias: A Preliminary Evaluation of the Archaeological and T e x t u a l Evidence." Syria 64 (1987): 21-46. L e n z e n , C. J., and Alison M . M c Q u i t t y . " T h e 1984 Survey of the Irbid/ Beit Ras Region." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 32 (1988): 265-274.
B e n n e t t ' s o t h e r major c o n t r i b u t i o n s w e r e organizational a n d diplomatic. She w a s assistant director of the British School of A r c h a e o l o g y in Jerusalem f r o m 1963 t o 1965, a n d director from 1970 to 1980, overseeing the greater p a r t of t h e m a m m o t h survey of M a m l u k J e r u s a l e m t h a t r e c o r d e d the Islamic buildings in t h e O l d City ( M i c h a e l H . B u r g o y n e , Mamluk Jerusalem, L o n d o n , 1987). By 1970 B e n n e t t h a d r e n t e d space i n A m m a n at h e r o w n e x p e n s e to p r o v i d e an office a n d base for British excavations in J o r d a n . She w a s the p r i m e m o v e r , w i t h K e n y o n , in f o u n d ing the British Institute at A m m a n for A r c h a e o l o g y a n d H i s tory a n d w a s its first director (1980-1983). D u r i n g t h a t time she established t h e institute as a viable b o d y a n d d e v e l o p e d close links with t h e J o r d a n i a n D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities a n d particularly the J o r d a n i a n royal family. [See also British I n s t i m t e at A m m a n for A r c h a e o l o g y a n d History, British School of A r c h a e o l o g y in Jerusalem, Buseirah; E d o m ; T a w i l a n ; and U m m el-Biyara.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
L e n z e n , C.J. "Beit Ras Excavations, 1988 and 1989." Syria 67 (1990): 474-476. L e n z e n , C. J. " T h e Integration of the D a t a Bases—Archaeology and History: A Case in Point, Bayt R a s . " In Bilad al-Sham during the Abbasid Period; Proceedings of the Fifth Bilad al-Sham Conference, vol. 2, edited by M u h a m m a d A d n a n al-Bakhit and Robert Schick, p p . 160-178. A m m a n , 1992. L e n z e n , C. J. "Irbid and Beit Ras: Interconnected Settlements between c. A.D. 100-900." I n Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, p p . 299-307, A m m a n , 1992.
Bienkowski, Piotr. " U m m el-Biyara, T a w i l a n , and Buseirah in R e t r o spect." Levant22 (1990): 91-109. Appraisal of B e n n e t t ' s three major excavations, including a bibliography of h e r principal preliminary reports.
C . J. LENZEN
PIOTR BIENKOWSKI
Homes-Fredericq, D e n y s e , a n d J. Basil H e n n e s s y , eds. Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, Bibliography. Louvain, 1986. See pages 32-33 for a comprehensive bibliography of Bennett's work. T a l b o t , Geraldine. " C r y s t a l - M . Bennett, O.B.E., D . Lift., F.S.A.: A n Appreciation." Levant detail.
19 (1987): 1-2. T r a c e s B e n n e t t ' s career in
BETH ALPHA B E N Z I N G E R , I M M A N U E L , (1865-1935), G e r m a n P r o t e s t a n t theologian, b o r n in Stuttgart. I n 1894 B e n zinger w o r k e d as an assistant at T u b i n g e n , a n d in 1895 as a p a s t o r in N e u e n s t a d t . F r o m 1897 t o 1902 h e edited d i e Zeitschrift of t h e D e u t s c h e r P a l a s t i n a - V e r e i n a n d served o n its executive b o a r d until 1912. F r o m 1898 to 1902 h e was a lecturer (privatdozent) at t h e U n i v e r s i t y of Berlin. H e s p e n t the n e x t t e n years in J e r u s a l e m . I n fall 1903 he replaced Gottlieb S c h u m a c h e r , w h o h a d b e e n called away o n a s p e cial assignment, as director of t h e excavations for the D e u t s c h e r Palastina-Verein at T e l l e l - M u t e s e l l i m / M e g i d d o a n d p u b l i s h e d a preliminary r e p o r t of his work. Benzinger was a professor at t h e University of T o r o n t o from 1912 t o 1915, at Meadville, P e n n s y l v a n i a , from 191510 1918; a n d at the University of R i g a in L a t v i a f r o m 1921 until his death. H e p u b l i s h e d his scholarship o n t h e H e b r e w Bible as well as Bilderatlas zur Bibelkunde (Stuttgart, 1905, 2d ed., 1912) a n d revised K a r l B a e d e k e r ' s travel g u i d e b o o k Palastina und Syrien (Leipzig, from t h e 3d ed., 1890, t o t h e 7th ed., 1910). H i s principal w o r k , h o w e v e r , is Hebraische Archdologie. I n its first edition (1894) u s i n g " a r c h a e o l o g y " as a s o u r c e m e a n t describing a n c i e n t Israel's p r i v a t e , p u b l i c , a n d sacred insti tutions, b a s e d chiefly o n t h e biblical texts. H o w e v e r , in its s e c o n d edition (1907), w h i c h h e w r o t e in Jerusalem, B e n zinger b e g a n to e m p h a s i z e t h e i m p o r t a n c e of excavations a n d their discoveries in o r d e r to r e c o n s t r u c t a history of t h e civilization of Israel. T h i s is e v i d e n t in a n e w discussion o n ceramics a n d n e w a n d m o r e illustrations of archaeological artifacts. I n its third edition (1927), B e n z i n g e r i n c l u d e d m a n y of t h e i m p o r t a n t results of excavations t h a t h a d b e e n m a d e since 1907. B e n z i n g e r w a s a p i o n e e r in p u b l i s h i n g t h e discipline of biblical archaeology. [See also D e u t s c h e r Palastina-Verein; M e g i d d o . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adamovics, Ludvigs. Latvijas Unwersildtes: Teologijas Fakultate, 1919-1939. 2 d ed, Lincoln, N e b . , 1 9 8 1 , Information about Benzinger's activities at Riga and his place in the international c o m m u n i t y . Avi-Yonah, Michael. " B e n z i n g e r , I m m a n u e l . " In Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, p . 574, Jerusalem, 1 9 7 1 . Benzinger's professional activ ities in Jerusalem a n d a list of his m a i n works. Miueilungen und Nachrichten des Deutschen Vereins zur Erforschung Palastinas. Leipzig, 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 1 2 , P r i m a r y source for t h e little biograph ical data available for Benzinger. DIETHELM CONRAD
B E T H A L P H A , also k n o w n as Beit Ufa or Alfa, site located in t h e eastern p a r t of t h e Jezreel Valley, at the foot of M t . Gilboa. B e t h A l p h a w a s settled b y P t o l e m a i c G r e e k s a n d was p a r t of Scythopolis, o n e of t h e cities of t h e R o m a n Decapolis. T h e city is n a m e d after t h e n e a r b y r u i n s of K h i r b e t Beit Ufa; it shows no o c c u p a t i o n before t h e R o m a n p e riod. T h e f o u n d a t i o n r e m a i n s a n d m o s a i c floor of a s y n a g o g u e w e r e accidentally d i s c o v e r e d t h e r e i n 1928 a n d w e r e
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excavated in 1929 by Eleazar L i p a Sukenik of the H e b r e w University of Jerusalem. T h e s y n a g o g u e , built of u n t r i m m e d local limestone, is basilical, with two longitudinal r o w s of c o l u m n s a n d stone b e n c h e s . It includes a c o u r t y a r d witii c o l u m n s on t h e s o u t h a n d enclosing walls o n t h e o t h e r sides. T h e c o u r t y a r d ' s col u m n s also f o r m e d t h e n o r t h side of the n a r t h e x . O n t h e n o r t h , a large central d o o r is flanked b y t w o smaller e n trances. A side d o o r o n t h e w e s t leads into an a n n e x . It is c o n j e c t u r e d t h a t t h e r e w a s an u p p e r gallery over t h e two aisles a n d t h e n a r t h e x . Stairs leading to the gallery are b e lieved to h a v e b e e n located in t h e w e s t e r n a n n e x . It is n o t clear, however, w h a t t h e function of s u c h a gallery w o u l d have been. A semicircular external a p s e at t h e s o u t h e r n e n d of the basilica faced Jerusalem a n d w a s r e a c h e d via three n a r r o w steps. T w o holes on t h e s e c o n d step m a y h a v e held posts for a curtain to close off the T o r a h shrine. E v i d e n c e of an earlier m o s a i c p a v e m e n t w a s discovered below the p r e s e n t m o s a i c floor. I n its p r e s e n t state the entire building c o m p l e x h a s m o s a i c floors. T h e n a v e m o s a i c has t h r e e panels, w h o s e interpretation h a s f o u n d n o scholarly c o n s e n s u s . All t h e panels are sur r o u n d e d b y a w i d e decorative b o r d e r . T h e n o r t h e r n , or low est, p a n e l features the B i n d i n g of Isaac a n d is to b e r e a d from left t o right. A b r a h a m ' s t w o servants are d e p i c t e d with t h e d o n k e y . O n e leads d i e d o n k e y b y its reins, a n d die other s t a n d s b e h i n d it, b u t his legs are n o t visible. A h a n d e m e r g e s from above, symbolic of t h e h a n d of G o d , with the H e b r e w inscription from Genesis 22:12: " D o n ' t stretch forth [your h a n d ] . " A r a m is s h o w n t e t h e r e d to a tree with the H e b r e w inscription from Genesis 22:13: " H e r e is t h e r a m . " N e i t h e r t h e h a n d of G o d n o r the r a m tied to the tree follow the biblical narrative, b u t t h e y are in k e e p i n g with later Jewish a n d non-Jewish sources (see b e l o w ) . A b e a r d e d a n d haloed A b r a h a m b r a n d i s h e s a l o n g knife in his right h a n d ; h e seems to b e grasping Isaac, w h o is s u s p e n d e d in midair, with his left h a n d . B o t h A b r a h a m a n d Isaac have H e b r e w labels. A flaming altar is also depicted, Isaac floating in m i d a i r is f o u n d in early Christian d e p i c tions, b u t in t h e m A b r a h a m is s h o w n g r a s p i n g t h e e n d s of a blindfold. A p p a r e n t l y , t h e provincial B e t h A l p h a artists, M a r i a n o s a n d his s o n H a n i n a , m i s u n d e r s t o o d their C h r i s tian m o d e l , leaving only t h e a n o m a l o u s projections attached t o the b o y ' s neck. T h e m i d d l e p a n e l depicts t h e zodiac w i t h the p a g a n g o d Flelios r i d i n g his chariot. Personifications of the four seasons are s h o w n in t h e four c o r n e r s , b u t they do n o t c o r r e s p o n d t o t h e twelve signs of t h e m o n t h s , w h i c h r u n counterclock wise. B o t h the seasons a n d t h e m o n t h s carry labels witii their H e b r e w n a m e s o n t h e m . T h e practice of placing the zodiac in synagogues finds striking analogies in c o n t e m p o r a r y li turgical p o e m s . T h e s o u t h e r n , or u p p e r m o s t , panel shows t h e T o r a h
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shrine flanked by two three-footed, s e v e n - b r a n c h e d rnenorahs, lions, and s u c h ceremonial objects as t h e shofar, lulav and etrog, incense shovel, and T o r a h shrine curtains. W h e t h e r the objects are symbolic of c o n t e m p o r a r y synagogal celebrations or relate to the destroyed Jerusalem T e m ple cult has n o t b e e n resolved. T h e T o r a h shrine also has a l a m p s u s p e n d e d from it. A l t h o u g h the l a m p is frequendy called ner tdmid, its symbolism is uncertain, as the "eternal light" is n o t k n o w n in synagogue furnishings until the sev enteenth century CE. T h e synagogue is usually dated to the early sixth c e n t u r y CE on the basis of thirty-six coins—the latest dating from t h e reign of the Byzantine e m p e r o r Justinian I — a n d a n A r a m a i c inscription referring to E m p e r o r Justinian. R e c e n t research places tire synagogue in t h e third quarter of the sixth centry, on b o t h stylistic a n d iconographic g r o u n d s . A n e a r t h q u a k e probably destroyed the synagogue shortly after its c o n s t r u c tion. [See also Decapolis; M o s a i c s ; Synagogues; and the biog raphy of Sukenik.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Chiat, Marilyn Joyce Segal. Handbook of Synagogue Literature. Chico, Calif., 1982. Includes a good descriptive summation of research on the Beth Alpha synagogue. Goldman, Bernard. The Sacred Portal: A Primary Symbol in Ancient Judaic Art. Detroit, 1966. Suggestive interpretation of the u p p e r m o saic panel. G u t m a n n , Joseph. "Revisiting the 'Binding of Isaac' Mosaic in the Beth-Alpha Synagogue." Bulletin of the Asia Institute 6 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 7 9 85. Critical study of die mosaic, with an up-to-date bibliography. Sukenik, Eleazar L. The Ancient Synagogue of Beth Alpha. Jerusalem, 1932. Archaeological report of the excavation. JOSEPH GUTMANN
B E T H E L ( H e b . , " H o u s e of [the god] E l " ) , site located 16 k m ( 1 0 mi.) n o r t h of Jerusalem, on the b o r d e r of ancient Israel a n d J u d a h (3i°56' N , 3 5 ° I 4 ' E; m a p reference 172 X 148), at the j u n c t u r e of the t r u n k road from the central hills d o w n to the J o r d a n Valley. Bethel is m e n t i o n e d in the H e brew Bible m o r e times t h a n any site except Jerusalem. It figures prominentiy n o t only as a b o r d e r fortress, b u t in the patriarchal narratives, in the stories of the' p e r i o d of the Judges, a n d as an i m p o r t a n t sanctuary in a c c o u n t s of the Monarchy. T h e site was first identified with the m o d e r n A r a b village of Beitin by E d w a r d R o b i n s o n , die A m e r i c a n explorer, in 1838. Excavations w e r e carried o u t at the site in 1934 b y William Foxwell Albright a n d James L . Kelso for t h e A m e r ican Schools of Oriental Research, and again b y Kelso in 1954,1957, a n d i960. Kelso published these excavations in 1968 as The Excavation of Bethel, 1934-1960. T h e r e p o r t lacks s t r a t u m designations a n d information on p r o v e n i e n c e
a n d mixes factual description with imaginative i n t e r p r e t a tions (usually biblically i n s p i r e d ) , m a k i n g historical r e c o n struction almost impossible, e x c e p t in t h e b r o a d e s t sense. T h e following p o i n t s h a v e b e e n extracted from t h a t r e p o r t , however. T h e site was first o c c u p i e d briefly in t h e L a t e Chalcolithic p e r i o d (c. 3200 BCE) a n d t h e n again in t h e Early B r o n z e A g e I I I - I V (c. 2400-2000 B C E ) — n o d o u b t b e c a u s e of its hilltop location a n d n e a r b y springs. K e l s o ' s claim for an E B I V " t e m p l e " is fanciful, b a s e d as it w a s m o r e o n biblical traditions r e g a r d i n g the Patriarchs t h a n o n the evidence; t h e walls in question are n o m o r e t h a n t h e f o u n d a t i o n s of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e city gate. T h e Middle Bronze Age occupation witnessed a gradual u r b a n b u i l d u p . T h e M B I (c. 2000-1800 BCE) is attested only by sherds a n d tatters of walls. S o m e w h e r e in d i e M B II (c. 1800-1650 BCE), t h e t o w n was d e f e n d e d b y a c y c l o p e a n city wall a n d e a r t h e n glacis. T h e d e a r t h of detail in the r e p o r t precludes saying a n y m o r e . Kelso's description of a n o r t h eastern " g a t e " in this wall suggests t h a t this particular s t r u c ture is R o m a n , o r at least was d e s t r o y e d in t h e R o m a n p e riod. A n o r t h w e s t gate m a y well b e M B II, b u t its p l a n , as published, is enigmatic. T h e m a s o n r y of the t o w n ' s M B II domestic structures was excellent. T h e M B III p e r i o d (c. 1650-1500 BCE) a p p a r e n t l y c o n t i n u e d w i t h o u t i n t e r r u p t i o n , with the building of m o r e houses a n d additions to t h e d e fenses. A n o t h e r " s a c r e d a r e a " (or Ar., haram) claimed for this p h a s e is largely imaginative. T h e r e p o r t is ambivalent a b o u t a d e s t r u c t i o n at t h e e n d of t h e M B III, b u t t h e r e does a p p e a r to b e a g a p in o c c u p a t i o n in the L a t e B r o n z e I A - B (c. 1500-1400 BCE). T h e L B II p e r i o d (c. 1400-1200 BCE), w i t h t w o p h a s e s , seems particularly well attested. D o m e s t i c structures are very well laid out, with c o u r t y a r d s a n d d r a i n s , a n d t h e m a sonry is excellent. A destruction by e a r t h q u a k e is claimed b e t w e e n t h e t w o p h a s e s , w h i c h m i g h t b e C l a u d e F . A. Schaeffer's n o t o r i o u s 1365 BCE e a r t h q u a k e , if it h a s any c r e d e n c e . Kelso m a k e s m u c h of t h e final "Israelite d e s t r u c t i o n " of t h e C a n a a n i t e s (as Albright h a d ) , b u t the little evidence p r e s e n t e d is neither well d a t e d n o r conclusive. T h e b e s t in dication of c h a n g e m a y b e the n e w t o w n p l a n in t h e I r o n A g e I, p r e s u m a b l y in t h e early twelfth c e n t u r y BCE. W h e n K e l s o published, o u r knowledge of this transitional B r o n z e / I r o n A g e h o r i z o n was limited, b u t t o d a y it is possible t o s h o w t h a t the Bethel p o t t e r y is i n d e e d typical of t h e Early I r o n A g e , " p r o t o - I s r a e l i t e " c e r a m i c r e p e r t o i r e in the hill c o u n t r y . T h e four Iron I phases (not n u m b e r e d in t h e r e p o r t ) a p parently extend f r o m t h e early twelfth t o late eleventh/early t e n t h centuries BCE. N O fortifications are m e n t i o n e d . T h e I r o n II p e r i o d (c. 900-600 BCE) is said t o h a v e h a d t h r e e phases (also n o t n u m b e r e d ) . T h e r e p o r t offers s c a n t material for the entire p e r i o d , leaving t h e biblical a c c o u n t s of Bethel's i m p o r t a n c e in t h e D i v i d e d M o n a r c h y w i t h o u t a
BETH-GAN context. P r e s u m a b l y , o c c u p a t i o n at t h e site e n d s with the B a b y l o n i a n destructions in t h e early sixth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e r e p o r t discusses a c o r p u s of s i x t h - c e n t u r y BCE p o t t e r y b u t w i t h o u t a context. T h e r e is s o m e Persian o c c u p a t i o n , a n d t h e t o w n recovered s o m e of its i m p o r t a n c e b y the Hellenis t i c - R o m a n p e r i o d (the p o t t e r y t r e a t e d b y P a u l W . L a p p ) . T r a v e l e r s m e n t i o n Bethel in t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d , from w h i c h t h e r e are s o m e r e m a i n s . BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William F . " T h e Kyle M e m o r i a l Excavation at Bethel." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 56 ( D e c e m b e r 1934): 2 - 1 5 . Dever, William G. "Archaeological M e t h o d s and Results: A Review of T w o Recent Publications." Orientalia 40 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 4 5 9 - 4 7 1 . Kelso, James L . The Excavation of Bethel, 7934-1060. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1968. WILLIAM G . DEVER
B E T H - G A N (also Beit G a n ) , site located at t h e edge of a subdivision of M o s h a v a h Y a v n e ' e l (Jabneel), in t h e eastern L o w e r Galilee, astride t h e D a r b e l - H a w a r n e h , a n a n c i e n t r o a d c o n n e c t i n g A k k o with t h e H a u r a n (32°43' N , 35°3o' E , m a p reference 197 X 235). T h e site is situated o n a n alluvial fan n e a r the w e s t e r n e d g e of t h e Y a v n e ' e l Valley, w h i c h h a s 20 sq k m (12 sq. mi.) of p o t e n t i a l arable land. T h e site's rich soil a n d a m p l e w a t e r s u p p l y are o w e d to its adjacent location to W a d i S a r u n e h a n d n u m e r o u s n e a r b y springs. T h e site is listed in the Survey of Western Palestine as a " r u i n e d A r a b village built of basaltic s t o n e " ( C o n d e r a n d K i t c h e n e r , 1881, p . 382) a n d w a s s u b s e q u e n t l y e x p l o r e d b y Aapeli Saarisalo (Saarisalo, 1927, p p . 37-39), w h o r e p o r t e d finding L a t e B r o n z e , Early I r o n , R o m a n - B y z a n t i n e , B y z a n t i n e , a n d "Early a n d L a t e A r a b i c " s h e r d s , a n d b y Zvi G a l , w h o r e p o r t e d finding I r o n II p o t t e r y (Gal, 1992, p . 33). H a r o l d Liebowitz c o n d u c t e d s o u n d i n g s in 1988 a n d 1989 o n behalf of the University of T e x a s at A u s t i n , a n d f o u n d I r o n I, L a t e B y z a n t i n e , a n d M a m l u k s h e r d s . T h e first small-scale season of excavation was c o n d u c t e d b y L i e b o w i t z in 1992 a n d w a s followed b y excavations in 1994 a n d 1995, w h i c h yielded tire following r e m a i n s . L B II s h e r d s in association w i t h a wall w e r e f o u n d in a p r o b e in s q u a r e F O 2 at t h e close of t h e 1995 season of e x cavation, confirming Saarisalo's r e p o r t of discovery of L a t e B r o n z e A g e s h e r d s a n d c o n f i r m i n g t h a t the L a t e C y p r i o t A g e milk-bowl s h e r d f o u n d o n t h e surface of t h e tell in 1992 was n o t a simple c h a n c e discovery. I r o n I p o t t e r y a s s e m blages w e r e f o u n d i n association with t w o s u p e r i m p o s e d d o m e s t i c structures in the s a m e s q u a r e . I r o n IIA sherds w e r e f o u n d in squares E O 2 a n d E O 3 in association w i t h poorly p r e s e r v e d architectural r e m a i n s , t h e result of M a m l u k dis t u r b a n c e , a n d in a limited p r o b e in s q u a r e B O 3 , w h e r e d e bris adjacent to a d i s t u r b e d 1.9-meter-long a n d 1.30-meter-
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wide wall t h a t r o d e u n d e r t h e R o m a n p e r i o d east-west wall yielded I r o n II p o t t e r y a n d a b r o n z e fibula. T h e Persian p e r i o d is r e p r e s e n t e d by a single restored storage jar f o u n d at t h e base of a R o m a n - p e r i o d locus in square B O 3 and b y large thicked-walled b o w l sherds with external thickening a n d p r o m i n e n t everted ring base ( m o r atoria), found in a s o u n d i n g . T h e R o m a n period w a s r e a c h e d only in a n a r r o w p r o b e , w h e r e p a r t of a wall with a n associated surface with s e c o n d - c e n t u r y CE cooking pots, bowls, storage jars, a n d casserole sherds w e r e found. H o w ever, R o m a n - p e r i o d architectural fragments s u c h as a hearts h a p e d c o l u m n s e g m e n t ( r e u s e d in t h e s u b s e q u e n t L a t e Byzantine p h a s e ) , suggest t h a t t h e r e w a s a synagogue or c h u r c h in the R o m a n p e r i o d i n a s m u c h as h e a r t - s h a p e d col u m n s are generally associated with synagogues or c h u r c h e s . T h e L a t e Byzantine p e r i o d is r e p r e s e n t e d by a large s t r u c t u r e in Area A w h o s e walls contained r e u s e d architectural fragments (door jams, ashlar blocks, c o l u m n bases, a n d a s e g m e n t of a h e a r t - s h a p e d c o l u m n in B O 1 a n d two hearts h a p e d c o l u m n s in s q u a r e A O i ) . T h e p o t t e r y includes terra sigillata bowls, cooking bowls w i t h horizontal handles, a n d storage jars w i t h w h i t e - p a i n t e d decorations. C o i n s f o u n d on the surface s p a n a possible t w e n t y - t h r e e year period, from the reign of Justinian II a n d S o p h i a (565-587 CE) to Tiberias (582-602 CE), A flat b r o n z e cross t h a t resembles examples from Pella, in J o r d a n , suggests a Christian p r e s e n c e or a m i x e d p o p u l a t i o n at the site in this p e r i o d t h a t m a y have h a d c o n n e c t i o n s with t h e p o p u l a t i o n east of t h e J o r d a n River. P a r t s of a Byzantine b u i l d i n g w i t h large flagstones a n d wellcut limestone blocks w e r e f o u n d b e l o w t h e M a m l u k terrace wall in A r e a B . P a r t s of t h r e e M a m l u k s t r u c t u r e s , o n e of which yielded evidence of architectural p h a s e s , were excavated in Area A. P o t t e r y from t h e p e r i o d is c o m p a r a b l e to assemblages of vessels from Y o q n e ' a m a n d Afula. T h e single coin found confirms a f o u r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y CE date for the s t t a t u m . In Area B , L i e b o w i t z f o u n d a M a m l u k terrace wall that was traced for a b o u t 18 m , a n d p a r t s of walls t h a t a b u t t e d the terrace o n the west. Adjacent to the wadi, at the western e d g e of the m o u n d , L i e b o w i t z a n d his t e a m excavated a check p o i n t of a d a m u s e d for w a t e r m a n a g e m e n t datable to t h e L a t e R o m a n / B y z antine period. B e t h - G a n is significant b e c a u s e of its L B o c c u p a t i o n , w h i c h s u p p o r t s t h e idea of a significant presence in the east ern L o w e r Galilee in t h a t period. Unlike the neighboring T e l Y i n ' a m , w h i c h was a b a n d o n e d before t h e Byzantine period, this site w a s o c c u p i e d d u r i n g the L a t e Byzantine and M a m luk p e r i o d s , enabling a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g of t h e regional m a terial culture for these p e r i o d s in t h e Yavne'el Valley. F i nally, B e t h - G a n ' s location along t h e D a r b e l - H a w a r n e h furthers efforts t o r e c o n s t r u c t a picture of intercity a n d in ternational t r a d e in the eastern L o w e r Galilee in antiquity. c
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BETHLEHEM BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conder, Claude R., and H , H. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. I, Galilee. L o n d o n , 1 8 8 1 . Gal, Zvi. Lower Galilee during the Iron Age. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Liebowitz, Harold. "Beit Gan, 1 9 8 8 " (in H e b r e w ) . Hadashot Arkheologiot 93 (1989): 96; 94 (1990): 7Liebowitz, Harold. "Beit Gan, 1 9 9 2 . " Israel Exploration Journal
43.4
(1993): 2 5 9 - 2 6 3 . Saarisalo, Aapeli. The Boundary between Issachar and Naphtali: An Ar chaeological and Literary Study of Israel's Settlement in Canaan. Hel sinki, 1927. HAROLD A . LIEBOWITZ
B E T H L E H E M , m o d e m t o w n occupying t h e site of the ancient town, located 9 k m (5.5 mi.) s o u t h - s o u d i w e s t of Jerusalem, 21.5 k m (13.5 mi.) n o r t h - n o r t h e a s t of H e b r o n , 23.5 k m (15 mi.) w e s t of the D e a d Sea, a n d just east of the main n o r t h - s o u t h ridge r o a d of the central hill c o u n t r y of J u d a h (3i°42' N , 35°i2' E; m a p reference 169 X 123). Bethlehem m a y a p p e a r in the A m a r n a tablets (fourteenth century BCE) as " B i t - L a h m u " Q. A. K n u d t z o n , ed., Die ElAmarna Tafeln, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1915, n o . 290), a p p a r e n d y m e a n i n g " h o u s e of L a h m u , " a n Assyrian god. T h e n a m e m a y have b e e n distorted later to beth-lehem, m e a n i n g " h o u s e of b r e a d . " While Bethlehem is m e n t i o n e d in d i e H e b r e w Bible (cf. Ru. 1 : 1 % Jgs. 12:8) a n d is the city w h e r e Jesus was b o r n (Ml. 2; Lk. 2), it is also identified as E p h r a t h ( a h ) (cf. Gn. 35:19; Ru. 4:11; Mi. 5:1 [Eng. 5:2]). Extrabiblically, B e t h l e h e m is m e n t i o n e d by Justin (Dial. Trypho 78.5-6), in the Protoevangelium of James (18.1), a n d by Origin (Contra Celsum 1.51) refering to a cave in w h i c h Jesus was b o r n . J e r o m e (Epis. ad Paul 58:3) r e c o r d s t h a t H a d r i a n d e s t t o y e d t h e Christian site a n d built a shrine to Adonis in its place. J e r o m e ' s remarks are largely the basis u p o n which t h e c u r r e n t identification of the C h u r c h of the Nativity rests. F e w excavations have b e e n c o n d u c t e d in the t o w n , e x c e p t in the vicinity of t h e C h u r c h of the Nativity. H o w e v e r , as a result of investigations in the caves b e n e a t h t h e c h u r c h a n d in the process of building a new school in Bethlehem, r e m a i n s from the Iron A g e t o w n t e n t h - e i g h t h centuries BCE have c o m e to light. T h e data are insufficient, h o w e v e r , to relate to descriptions in the H e b r e w Bible indicating the presence of a well a n d fortifications at Bethlehem (cf. 2 Sm. 23:15; 2 Chr. 11:5-6). Constantine initiated construction of the C h u r c h of the Nativity in B e t h l e h e m in 326 CE over the traditional cave of Jesus' birth, a n d Q u e e n H e l e n a dedicated it thirteen years later. T h e building was partially destroyed in a S a m a r i t a n revolt in 529, b u t Justinian quickly ordered its r e c o n s t r u c tion. T h e c u r r e n t building reflects' that r e c o n s t r u c t i o n with m i n o r modifications. William H a r v e y ' s excavations in 1934 u n d e r the auspices
of the M a n d a t o r y D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities p r o v e d t h a t the c u r r e n t s t r u c t u r e dates from the time of Justinian a n d n o t C o n s t a n t i n e , a l t h o u g h the Justinian s t r u c t u r e follows m a n y of the C o n s t a n t i n i a n foundations. T h e C o n s t a n t i n i a n c h u r c h consisted of a s q u a r e basilica ( a b o u t 26.5 m to a side), divided b y four r o w s of n i n e c o l u m n s into a 9-meterwide n a v e with two aisles on e a c h side. T h e excavations revealed a p a t t e r n e d m o s a i c floor a b o v e t h e original c o l u m n bases b u t 50-60 c m b e l o w t h e m o d e r n floor. H e n c e , t h e C o n s t a n t i n i a n s t r u c t u r e a p p e a r s to h a v e u n d e r g o n e s o m e modification before its destruction at t h e h a n d s of t h e S a m a r i t a n s . A n octagonal apse stood over t h e traditional grotto. T h e o c t a g o n m e a s u r e d 7.9 m on e a c h side. L a t e r alterations to t h e b e d r o c k in die grotto d e s t r o y e d the original entrance. Justinian a d d e d an a t r i u m to the w e s t e r n e n d of t h e b a silica, e x t e n d i n g its length by 6.5 m , a n d s t r e n g t h e n e d the walls to p r o t e c t the b u i l d i n g from attackers. T h e central n a v e was w i d e n e d to 10.5 m , n a r r o w i n g die adjacent aisles accordingly. U n d e r Justinian's auspices the o c t a g o n a l apse was replaced w i t h a triapsal a r r a n g e m e n t , a n d t h e n o r t h a n d south entrances to t h e grotto w e r e i n t r o d u c e d . All s u b s e q u e n t modifications t o t h e building h a v e b e e n m i n o r . BIBLIOGRAPHY Bagatti, Bellarmino. " B e t h l e e m . " Revue Biblique 7 2 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 2 7 0 - 2 7 2 . G u t m a n , S., and A. B e r m a n . " B e t h l e e m , " Revue Biblique 7 7 ( 1 9 7 0 ) :
583-585. Harvey, William. Structural Survey of the Church of the Nativity, Beth lehem. L o n d o n , 1 9 3 5 . Sailer, Sylvester J. " I r o n Age Remains from the Site of a N e w School at Bethlehem." Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annuus 18 (1968): 1 5 3 - 1 8 0 . Schultz, Robert W . , et al. The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. L o n don, 1 9 1 0 . Stockman, Eugene. " T h e Stone Age of B e d t l e h e m . " Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annuus 17 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 2 9 - 1 4 8 . Vincent, L . - H . , a n d Felix-Marie Abel. BethUem, le sanctuaire de la nativite. Paris, 1 9 1 4 . DALE W . MANOR
B E T H - P E L E T . See F a r ' a h , T e l l el- ( S o u t h ) .
B E T H S A I D A , site located 2.5 Ion (12 mi.) n o r t h of t h e Sea of Galilee a n d a few h u n d r e d m e t e r s f r o m the J o r d a n River ( m a p reference 209 X 257). F o l l o w i n g the d e a t h of H e r o d t h e G r e a t in 4 BCE, the region of Bethsaida b e c a m e a p a r t of t h e tetrarchy of his s o n Philip (Josephus, Antiq. 17.189; LA. 3:1). S o m e t i m e d u r i n g t h e s e c o n d d e c a d e of t h e first c e n t u r y CE, Jesus w i t h d r e w to Bethsaida u p o n h e a r i n g of J o h n t h e Baptist's d e a t h (Lk. 9:10) a n d p e r f o r m e d s o m e of his " m i g h t y w o r k s " there. T o w a r d t h e e n d of Jesus' m i n istry in t h e area, w h e n h e realized t h a t n o t m a n y w o u l d fol low h i m , h e c o n d e m n e d Bethsaida to humiliation, along with
BETHSAIDA C a p e r n a u m a n d C h o r a z i n (Mt. p e r n a u m ; Chorazin.]
1 1 : 2 1 ; Lk. 10:13). [See C a
I n 30 CE, Bethsaida w a s elevated t o t h e status of a G r e e k polis b y Philip H e r o d a n d r e n a m e d Julias, after Livia-Julia, A u g u s t u s ' s wife a n d T i b e r i u s ' s m o t h e r , w h o h a d died a few m o n t h s earlier (Josephus, Antiq. 18.28; War 2.9.1). Josep h u s ' s s t a t e m e n t t h a t t h e r e n a m i n g w a s after Julia, A u g u s tus's d a u g h t e r , s h o u l d b e c o r r e c t e d b a s e d u p o n n u m i s m a t i c evidence. Philip died in 34 CE in B e t h s a i d a a n d was b u r i e d in a magnificent funeral (Antiq. 18.108). I n 65-66, t h e R o m a n armies of A g r i p p a II clashed with rebels in a series of battles t h a t failed t o result in a clear victory for either side Q o s e p h u s , Life 7 1 - 7 3 ) . T h e a r c h a e o logical evidence is t h a t t h e city w a s d e s t r o y e d a n d never r e built. Bethsaida is m e n t i o n e d b y biblical interpreters a n d in pil g r i m s ' a c c o u n t s b e g i n n i n g in t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y . M o s t of t h e s e descriptions p o i n t to a few locations a t t h e n o r t h of t h e Sea of Galilee, p e r h a p s n e i t h e r to t h e correct site, A schol arly c o n t r o v e r s y over its identification b e g a n at t h e e n d of t h e sixteenth c e n t u r y . B a s e d o n John 12:21, w h i c h places Bethsaida in Galilee, a n d J o s e p h u s (Antiq. 18.28) a n d o t h e r G o s p e l citations, w h i c h place it i n t h e G o l a n , scholars d e d u c e d m a t t h e r e were t w o s u c h places: one n a m e d Bethsaida in Galilee—namely, o n t h e w e s t side of t h e J o r d a n R i v e r — a n d t h e other, Julias—on t h e east side. T h e q u e s t for t h e p r o p e r site r e e m e r g e d with t h e rise of m o d e r n biblical r e search. I n t h e first half of t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y , a few scholars p r o p o s e d identifying B e t h s a i d a w i t h a large m o u n d n a m e d et-Tell at t h e n o r t h e r n c o r n e r of t h e B t e h a plain, 2.5 k m (1.5 mi.) from t h e Sea of Galilee. I n t h e 1880s Gottlieb S c h u m a c h e r m a i n t a i n e d t h a t it w a s implausible for a fish e r m e n ' s village t o h a v e b e e n l o c a t e d so far f r o m water. H e p r o p o s e d t w o sites located o n t h e shore: el-Araj, a few h u n d r e d m e t e r s f r o m t h e m o u t h of t h e J o r d a n , a n d e l - M e s a d i yeh, a small r u i n father to t h e southeast. [See the biography of Schumacher] I n 1987 t h e archaeological investigation of t h e site of B e t h saida b e g a n o n behalf of t h e University of Haifa. P r o b e s w e r e carried o u t at T e l l Araj a n d et-Tell. As et-Tell alone yielded levels dating to t h e p e r i o d in question, excavations h a v e c o n t i n u e d exclusively t h e r e . I n 1991 a c o n s o r t i u m of university scholars for t h e excavations of Bethsaida w a s f o r m e d , h e a d e d b y t h e U n i v e r s i t y of N e b r a s k a at O m a h a . Et-Tell/Bethsaida is t h e largest m o u n d n e a r t h e n o r t h e r n Sea of Galilee. Its a n c i e n t r u i n s lie o n a basalt hill, an exten sion of t h e lava plains t h a t f o r m t h e G o l a n H e i g h t s . T h e m o u n d (450 X 200 m ) rises 25 m a b o v e its s u r r o u n d i n g s . T w o p e a k s a n d a saddle f o r m its s u m m i t , a n d steep slopes d e s c e n d f r o m all sides, e x c e p t a t its n o r t h e r n corner. A spring, n o w h i d d e n b y b u s h e s , flows d o w n its w e s t e r n slope t o w a r d t h e J o r d a n , P r o b e s o p e n e d o n t h e s u m m i t revealed four p e r i o d s of o c c u p a t i o n . T h e first settlement dates t o t h e Early B r o n z e I p e r i o d
(3100-2850 BCE) a n d c o n t i n u e d E B II (2850-2650 BCE), w h e n t h e b y a very thick wall built of h u g e h a v e survived t o a height of 1.30
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uninterrupted through the settlement w a s s u r r o u n d e d b o u l d e r s . P a r t s of this wall m.
T h e n e x t p e r i o d of o c c u p a t i o n a t t h e site of Bethsaida o c c u r r e d d u r i n g t h e e n d of I r o n A g e I a n d t h e b e g i n n i n g of I r o n A g e II (eleventh c e n t u r y B C E ) . T h i s w a s a v e i y intensive p e r i o d of o c c u p a t i o n a n d c o n s t r u c t i o n s . A l t h o u g h segments of t h e Early B r o n z e A g e city walls w e r e p u t b a c k into u s e , particularly as r e v e t m e n t walls, a n e w city wall was c o n structed. It w a s built as a series of offsets a n d insets o n t h e exterior a n d t h e interior faces of t h e wall. I n addition t o this, towers were constructed. T h e w i d t h of t h e city wall varies b e t w e e n 6 a n d 7 m . T h e t o w e r t h a t was discovered at t h e east a d d e d 2 m t o t h e city wall. T h e n o r t h e a s t area of t h e m o u n d f o r m s t h e s u m m i t of t h e site a n d t h e u p p e r city. N e w r e v e t m e n t walls w e r e built t h e r e t o loop large basalt b e d r o c k b o u l d e r s t h a t c o u l d n o t b e r e m o v e d . T h i s area was filled w i t h r e d clay material a n d f o r m e d t h e p l a t f o r m of t h e u p p e r city, w h e r e n e w c o n s t r u c tions w e r e a d d e d . A t o w e r t h a t w a s excavated at t h e s o u t h e r n r e v e t m e n t wall m a y indicate t h a t few other towers were c o n s t r u c t e d astride this wall. T h u s far, excavations at t h e s u m m i t reveal t w o m a i n s t r u c t u r e s : o n e in t h e n o r t h a n d the o t h e r in t h e s o u t h of a large plaza, adjacent to t h e city wall a n d tower. T h e massive s t r u c t u r e s w e r e of large a n d heavy basalt b o u l d e r s t h a t m e a s u r e 1.4 m in w i d t h a n d indicate t h a t they w e r e built for p u b l i c p u r p o s e s . T h e b u i l d i n g at t h e n o r t h w a s a r e c t a n g u l a r structure of 20 X 30 m in t h e form of t h e A r a m e a n - A s s y r i a n palaces k n o w n as bit-hilani. Architectural elements, s u c h as a p o r c h , t h a t p r e c e d e d t h e facade w e r e t h o r o u g h l y destroyed b y later c o n s t r u c t i o n s a n d a m o d e r n Syrian military t r e n c h . A t t h e facade a rectangular vestibule r o o m with t w o antae a n d a single large pillar o u t of p r e s u m a b l y t w o , h a v e survived. B e h i n d t h e vestibule a large r e c t a n g u l a r r o o m w a s discovered t h a t is i n t e r p r e t e d to b e a t h r o n e r o o m . W e s t of t h e vestibule a rectangular service r o o m h a s b e e n discovered a n d at the east, a n o t h e r r o o m w a s f o u n d . T h i s r o o m contained an E g y p t i a n statuette k n o w n as P a t a e k o s , highly c o m p e t e n t ar tistically (see figure 1). A r o w of four smaller storage r o o m s w e r e u n e a r t h e d at t h e n o r t h e r n side of t h e palace. O n e o f t h e s e r o o m s c o n t a i n e d m o r e t h a n t w e n t y c o m p l e t e vessels; s o m e of t h e m are C y p r o - P h o e n i c i a n a n d S a m a r i a n ware. I n addition, a n Israelite bulla in P h o e n i c i a n style testifies cor r e s p o n d e n c e w i t h S a m a r i a a n d an existence of an archive w e r e also discovered. I n t h e eighth c e n t u r y t h e p a l a c e m a y h a v e g o n e o u t of u s e as t h e modification a n d alternation of its r o o m s m a y imply. T h e t h r o n e r o o m w a s divided into two halls b y a relatively t h i n n e r p a r t i t i o n wall. L a r g e n u m b e r s of l o o m weights and spindle w h o r l s suggest t h a t s o m e sections of t h e palace w e r e utilized for a g a r m e n t i n d u s t r y . O t h e r changes i n c l u d e d blocking t h e e n t r a n c e s to t h e b a c k storage r o o m s , installa-
304
BETHSAIDA t r a n c e 1.7 m wide built in a n impressive wall. A large, b r o a d r o o m , divided in a later p e r i o d into two sections, is b e h i n d the entrance. A column base and a column d r u m that were f o u n d in a later d e p o s i t m a y originate f r o m t h e area of t h e e n t t a n c e or b e l o n g t o t h e missing p o r c h of t h e bit-hilani. A large cavity w a s excavated in front of t h e e n t r a n c e d u r i n g t h e last p e r i o d of t h e I r o n A g e a n d t h e entire floor a n d w h a t ever w a s in front of it w e r e r e m o v e d .
BETHSAIDA. F i g u r e I . Faience statuette Pataekos.
of the Egyptian
dwarf
god
I r o n A g e II p e r i o d . (Courtesy R. Arav)
tions a t t h e vestibule, a n d two brick benches in t h e n o r t h e r n of these a f o r e m e n t i o n e d halls. In front of this building tiiere was a large, well-paved p i azza. T h e plaza contained a canal tiiat led to a r o w of three standing stones in t h e f o r m of stelae. A t t h e east t h e piazza reached the city wall a n d at t h e south t h e r e w a s a n o t h e r public building. T h e city wall was constructed b y large b o u l ders at the exterior a n d t h e interior faces. T h e core of t h e wall was m a d e of large field stones. T h e w i d t h of t h e wall varies from 5.5 to 6.5 m . A strong t o w e r w a s a d d e d t o t h e wall east of t h e piazza a n d created a majestic w i d t h of 8 m to t h e wall. T h e building at t h e s o u t h was built b y large b o u l d e r s a n d was preserved at o n e p o i n t to an elevation of 2 m . T h e f u n c tion of this building is y e t unclear. T h u s far t h e facade of t h e structure has b e e n entirely excavated. It contains an en
Bethsaida w a s n o t a b a n d o n e d at t h e e n d o n t h e I r o n A g e . A small b u t distinctive layer of o c c u p a t i o n d u r i n g t h e P e r sian p e r i o d w a s discerned d u r i n g t h e dig. U n f o r t u n a t e l y , this layer was t o o p o o r a n d its r e m a i n s too f r a g m e n t a r y t o r e trieve a c o m p r e h e n s i v e g r o u n d p l a n . H o w e v e r , t h e settle m e n t r e s u m e d to a r e m a r k a b l e e x t e n t w h e n d i e n e x t p e r i o d , d i e Hellenistic, e m e r g e d . T h e a n c i e n t city walls m o s t p r o b ably r e m a i n e d at a fairly h i g h level a n d t h e r e f o r e w e r e r e u s e d , as w e r e other sections a n d walls of t h e old I r o n A g e public buildings. T h e overall view of t h e s e t t l e m e n t d u r i n g d i e Hellenistic a n d Early R o m a n p e r i o d s s e e m s t o b e t h o r oughly different f r o m t h e I r o n A g e . S i m p l e private h o m e s o c c u p y the s u m m i t , t h e f o r m e r I r o n A g e u p p e r city r e m a i n s w e r e o b s e r v e d a n d r e u s e d . T h e i m p r e s s i o n w a s of a peculiar c o m b i n a t i o n of a fishing village within city walls. A few p r i vate h o u s e s w e r e excavated t h u s far. T w o of t h e m w e r e p r e served fairly well a n d p r e s e n t a similar g r o u n d p l a n . T h e y were built in t h e typical c o u r t y a r d p a t t e r n . T h e m a i n core of t h e building is a central c o u r t y a r d w h e r e m o s t of t h e h o m e activities, p e r h a p s , w e r e carried out. T h e k i t c h e n is d i e n e x t largest r o o m , o c c u p y i n g t h e eastern section of t h e h o u s e . T h e residential q u a r t e r is located at t h e n o r t h . T h e s o u t h e r n c o u r t y a r d h o u s e c o n t a i n s m a n y fishing i m p l e m e n t s , i n c l u d ing lead n e t weights a n d o t h e r i m p l e m e n t s indicative t h a t t h e o w n e r of t h e h o u s e was a fisherman. T h e n o r t h e r n m o s t of the h o u s e s was p r e s e r v e d to a b e t t e r state. It c o n t a i n e d four iron sickles for h a r v e s t i n g g r a p e s a n d a wine cellar (see figure 2). T h e s e finds imply t h a t t h e o w n e r of t h e h o u s e was a wine dresser. A n interesting discovery at this h o u s e w a s a cross incised o n a s h e r d of p o t t e r y , discovered n e x t to t h e e n t r a n c e to t h e residential q u a r t e r . I n a d d i t i o n , architectural elements a n d r e m a i n s of a m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g w e r e dis covered scattered o n t h e surface. T h e location a n d t h e f u n c tion of this b u i l d i n g are still u n k n o w n . T h e later history of B e t h s a i d a is a history of d e s t r u c t i o n a n d ruin. T h r o u g h o u t t h e f o u r t e e n t h a n d fifteenth centuries CE, t h e site suffered severely from intensive stone looting. L i m e s t o n e blocks, c o l u m n s , capitals, architectural elements a n d decorations, a n d p e r h a p s statues a n d sculptures t h a t once a d o r n e d t h e t o w n w e r e t a k e n away. I n addition t o this, h u n d r e d s of b e d o u i n t o m b s w e r e d u g in t h e m o u n d in t h e last few centuries. T h e excavations h a v e u n c o v e r e d over o n e h u n d r e d t o m b s d u g into t h e walls a n d floors of t h e I r o n A g e a n d Hellenistic buildings. H o w e v e r , t h e m o s t destructive p e riod for the site o c c u r r e d r a t h e r recently, w h e n t h e m o u n d served as a Syrian military s t r o n g h o l d until 1967. Military
BETH-SHEAN
305
Fourth R 4.1 (January 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 - 4 . Short s u m m a r y of Bethsaida re search, including a survey of excavation results. Arav, R a m i , a n d John J. Rousseau. "Bethsaida, ville p e r d u e et retrouv e e . " Revue Biblique ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 4 1 5 - 4 2 8 . Kindler, Arieh. " T h e Coins of the T e t r a r c h Philippus, Son of H e r o d I, and the R e n a m i n g of Bethsaida/Julias." Cathedra 53 (1989): 2 4 26 (in H e b r e w ) . Presents n u m i s m a t i c evidence for the renaming of Bethsaida after Livia-Julia in 30 CE. K u h n , H . - W . , and R a m i Arav. " T h e Bethsaida Excavations: Historical and Archaeological A p p r o a c h e s . " In The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, edited by Birger A. Pearson, p p . 7 7 - 1 0 6 . Minneapolis, 1 9 9 1 . Detailed survey of research, including a preliminary report on the first three seasons. M c C o w n , Chester C. " T h e P r o b l e m of the Site of Bethsaida. "Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 10 ( 1 9 3 0 ) : 3 2 - 5 8 . Pixner, Bargil. "Searching for the N e w T e s t a m e n t Site of Bethsaida." Biblical Archaeologist 48 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 2 0 7 - 2 1 6 . T h e last study prior to t h e excavations, Robinson, E d w a r d , et al. Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions: A Journal of Travels in the Years 1838 and 1852, 3 vols. 2 d ed. L o n d o n , 1856. F o r et-Tell, see volume 2, pages 4 1 2 - 4 1 4 ; for T a b q a as Bedisaida, see v o l u m e 2, pages 404-406, and volume 3, p a g e 358. Rousseau, J o h n J., a n d R a m i Arav. Jesus and His World. Minneapolis, 1995RAMI ARAV
BETHSAIDA. F i g u r e 2 .
Cellar with wmejars.
F o u n d adjacent t o a
H e l l e n i s t i c - E a r l y R o m a n c o u r t y a r d h o u s e in a r e a C . (Courtesy R. Arav)
trenches, b u n k e r s , a n d positions of all kinds crisscross t h e site, leaving u p h e a v a l a n d d e s t r u c t i o n . I n antiquity t h e B e t h s a i d a plain w a s a b a y of the Sea of Galilee. Geological investigations reveal t h a t landslides in the u p p e r J o r d a n River gorge b l o c k e d t h e river a n d formed catastrophic floods. T o r r e n t s of gravel a n d m u d filled t h e bay a n d isolated t h e fishing t o w n of Bethsaida, leaving only a small lagoon b e t w e e n t h e t o w n a n d t h e S e a of Galilee. A n o t h e r flood d u r i n g t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE filled d i e lagoon almost entirely a n d shifted t h e seashore away from t h e city. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arav, R a m i . " E t - T e l l a n d el-Araj." Israel Exploration Journal 38 (1988): 1 8 7 - 1 8 8 ; 39 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 9 9 - 1 0 0 ; "Bethsaida, 1 9 8 9 " Israel Exploration Journal 41 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 8 4 - 1 8 6 ; "Bethsaida, 1 9 9 2 " Israel Exploration Journals (1992): 252-254. Arav, R a m i . " A M a m l u k D r u m from Bethsaida." Israel Journal^ (1993): 241-245,
Exploration
Arav, R a m i , a n d R i c h a r d F r e u n d . Bethsaida, A City by the Shore of the Sea of Galilee, Kirksville, M o . , 1 9 9 5 . Arav, R a m i , a n d J o h n J. Rousseau. "Elusive Bethsaida Recovered." The
B E T H - S H E A N (also B e t h - S h a n ; Ar., Tell e l - H u s n ) , site located at tine intersection of t w o major roads t h a t cross the land of Israel from west t o east ( t h r o u g h t h e Jezreel a n d B e t h - S h e a n Valleys t o w a r d T r a n s j o r d a n ) a n d from n o r t h t o south (along t h e J o r d a n Valley). T h e m o u n d , a b o u t 4 h a (10 acres) in area, is located o n a steep natural hill o n t h e s o u t h e r n b a n k of t h e H a r o d River, in t h e m i d s t of a fertile, wellw a t e r e d valley. T h e site w a s settled intermittently from t h e L a t e N e o l i t h i c p e r i o d until t h e M i d d l e Ages. [See J o r d a n Valley.] A l t h o u g h t h e a p p e a r a n c e of t h e n a m e Beth-Shean in t h e E g y p t i a n E x e c r a t i o n texts of t h e M i d d l e K i n g d o m is q u e s tionable, it does a p p e a r in various E g y p t i a n N e w K i n g d o m sources: t h e t o p o g r a p h i c lists of T h u t m o s e III, Seti I, a n d R a m e s e s II; t h e A m a r n a tablets (in w h i c h it is m e n t i o n e d only o n c e ) ; a n d P a p y r u s Anastasi I also f r o m tire reign of R a m e s e s II. D u r i n g this p e r i o d (sixteenth-thirteenth c e n turies BCE) B e t h - S h e a n w a s a n E g y p t i a n administrative c e n ter, s e c o n d in i m p o r t a n c e only t o G a z a . I n t h e Bible, B e t h S h e a n is o n e of the cities f r o m which t h e Israelites, at tire time of t h e c o n q u e s t , d i d n o t r o u t Canaanites (Jos. 1 7 : 1 1 ; Jgs. 1:27), a n d t h e city o n t o w h o s e walls t h e Philistines "fas t e n e d " t h e b o d y of Saul a n d those of his sons (r Sm. 31:10). L a t e r , it is a city in the fifth district of S o l o m o n (r Kgs. 4:12) a n d is o n t h e list of cities Shishak c o n q u e r e d d u r i n g his c a m p a i g n in t h e l a n d of Israel (c. 918 BCE) shortly after t h e m o n archy was divided. I n t h e Hellenistic, R o m a n , a n d Byzantine p e r i o d s , t h e city w a s k n o w n as N y s a or Scythopolis, d u r i n g w h i c h time it is attested in t h e written record. I t was r e c o r d e d as well b y T h e o d o r i c h of W t i r z b u r g , w h o visited t h e
306
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t o w n in 1172. D u r i n g the Early Islamic p e r i o d , it w a s o n c e again called by its ancient Semitic n a m e , in t h e f o r m of Beisan; a n e a r b y A r a b t o w n preserved t h e n a m e , m a k i n g t h e identification of t h e site certain. T h e University M u s e u m of t h e University of P e n n s y l v a nia carried o u t excavations at B e t h - S h e a n from 1921 t o 1933, u n d e r t h e direction variously of C l a r e n c e S. Fisher, Alan R o w e , a n d G e r a l d M . FitzGerald. T h e y e x p o s e d t h e site's u p p e r m o s t strata (Early Islamic a n d B y z a n t i n e peri ods) across t h e m o u n d , their w o r k o n t h e u p p e r p a r t of t h e m o u n d was m o r e limited, b u t they cleared a n extensive c e m etery to t h e n o r t h of it. As t h e first large-scale stratigraphic excavations c o n d u c t e d in Palestine after W o r l d W a r I, t h e w o r k contributed significantly t o the archaeology of t h e b i b lical period despite deficiencies in excavation m e t h o d s a n d publication. I n 1983, Yigael Y a d i n a n d S h u l a m i t G e v a of t h e Institute of Archaeology of t h e H e b r e w University in Jerusalem excavated briefly o n t h e s u m m i t . Since 1989, Amihai M a z a r h a s b e e n working tiiere, u n d e r t h e auspices of the university a n d t h e t o u r i s m authority a t B e t h - S h e a n ; his on-going excavations have r e e x a m i n e d a l m o s t all t h e site's o c c u p a t i o n layers, refining its stratigraphic s e q u e n c e s . Neolithic-Early Bronze Age: Strata X V I I I - X I . A n 8.5-meter-deep layer of o c c u p a t i o n debris dating f r o m t h e Neolithic p e r i o d to t h e Early B r o n z e A g e attests to t h e i m p o r t a n c e of these periods at B e t h - S h e a n . H o w e v e r , very lit tle is k n o w n a b o u t t h e m . I n s t r a t u m XVTII, t h e P o t t e r y Neolithic p e r i o d (fifth millennium) is r e p r e s e n t e d b y pits d u g into t h e b e d r o c k . I n s t r a t u m X V I I , t h e Chalcolithic p e riod (fourth m i l l e n n i u m ) is r e p r e s e n t e d b y pottery. Strata XVI-XrV, t h e Early B r o n z e I (thirty-fifth to thiity-first c e n turies BCE), p r o d u c e d a n oval dwelling, g r a y - b u r n i s h e d p o t tery, a n d b r o n z e axes, all typical of t h e period. Strata X I I I - X I a p p e a r to b e E B II—HI o c c u p a t i o n layers (thirtieth t o twenty-fourth centuries BCE). A rich assemblage of K h i r b e t K e r a k w a r e , reflecting Anatolian influences, character izes its last p h a s e . T h e latest excavations u n c o v e r e d a very shallow o c c u p a t i o n level, p e r h a p s evidence of a seasonal set tlement of t h e E B TV/Middle B r o n z e I transitional p e r i o d (2300-2000 BCE). P o t t e r y typical of t h e Jezreel a n d B e t h S h e a n Valleys h a s b e e n recovered from m a n y M B I burial caves in t h e N o r t h e r n C e m e t e r y . Middle and Late Bronze Ages: Strata X - V I I . A gap existed in t h e o c c u p a t i o n of t h e tell d u r i n g die first p h a s e of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e (William Foxwell Albright's M B IIA, or M B I, c. 2000-1800 BCE), although t h e t o m b of a warrior from this p e r i o d was discovered in t h e N o r t h e r n C e m e t e r y . T h r e e settlement layers belong t o t h e M B I I B - C periods ( M B II—III; mainly seventeenth-sixteenth centuries BCE) were discerned in t h e recent excavations ( s t r a t u m X in t h e n o m e n c l a t u r e of t h e earlier excavations). Dwellings of this p e r i o d yielded high-quality domestic p o t t e r y a n d l u x u r y objects, indicating a n a d v a n c e d s t a n d a r d of living. N o for tifications were discovered. T h e period's last o c c u p a t i o n
p h a s e is characterized b y p o t t e r y of t h e so-called c h o c o l a t e on-white ware. S e t d e m e n t i n t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e generally reflects E g y p t i a n h e g e m o n y a n d is divided i n t o five p h a s e s . T h e first settlement p h a s e , in L B I, o c c u r s b e f o r e t h e E g y p t i a n o c c u p a t i o n . O f t h e four p h a s e s t h a t followed, strata I X B - A date to t h e fifteenth a n d fourteenth c e n t u r i e s BCE a n d strata Vni-VII to t h e thirteenth c e n t u r y BCE. Five successive t e m p l e s of t h e L a t e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e I p e r i o d s w e r e f o u n d o n t h e s u m m i t of t h e tell. M a z a r ' s excavations revealed t h e earliest t e m p l e in a n o c c u p a t i o n level later t h a n M B s t r a t u m X a n d earlier t h a n L B I I A stra t u m I X , w h i c h s h o u l d b e d a t e d t o L B I. T h i s m o d e s t (11.7 X 14.6 m ) building's p l a n is u n i q u e : it is tripartite a n d i n cludes a n e n t r a n c e hall, a central hall w i t h b e n c h e s a n d raised platforms, a n d a n i n n e r r o o m ( s a n c t u a r y ) w h o s e walls w e r e lined w i t h b e n c h e s . T h e e n t r a n c e s , h o w e v e r , are n o t o n t h e same axis. I n s t r a t u m I X (divided into t w o s u b phases) a large sacred area w a s established in w h i c h various structures s u r r o u n d e d a central c o u r t y a r d . O n t h e east, t h e m a i n p a r t of t h e c o m p l e x i n c l u d e d a m o n u m e n t a l hall a n d an additional cultic r o o m . T h e p l a n of this holy p r e c i n c t is u n i q u e a n d h a s n o parallel at a n y k n o w n t e m p l e s in C a n a a n . O u t s t a n d i n g a m o n g t h e m a n y finds attesting t o a n E g y p t i a n p r e s e n c e is t h e M e k a l stela, a small s t o n e m o n u m e n t c a r v e d with a cultic scene t h a t is E g y p t i a n in style a n d t h a t w a s dedicated b y a n E g y p t i a n official to t h e m e m o r y of his fa ther. T h e i c o n o g r a p h y in t h e scene includes a seated g o d w h o s e dress a n d attributes are C a n a a n i t e . A large b u i l d i n g partially p r e s e r v e d at t h e e d g e of t h e tell s o u t h of t h e s a n c t u a r y yielded o n e of t h e m o s t o u t s t a n d i n g relics of C a n a a n i t e m o n u m e n t a l art: a basalt o r t h o s t a t c a r v e d w i t h t w o scenes, each of w h i c h depicts a struggle b e t w e e n a lion a n d a d o g (or a lioness). T h e s t r a t u m I X t o w n w a s d e s t r o y e d b y a m a s s i v e confla gration b u t w a s s o o n rebuilt o n a n e w p l a n (strata VHI-VTI, thirteenth c e n t u r y BCE), p e r h a p s d u r i n g t h e reign of Seti I. A n e w t e m p l e , w i t h a n e n t r a n c e vestibule, w a s erected o n a n o r t h - s o u t h axis. T h e ceiling of its m a i n hall w a s s u p p o r t e d b y two pillars, a n d its holy of holies w a s raised a b o u t 1.5 m above t h e floor in d i e m a i n hall. A f o u n d a t i o n deposit, f o u n d u n d e r n e a t h t h e steps leading t o t h e holy of holies, yielded a rich assemblage of p r e c i o u s objects, i n c l u d i n g d o z e n s of cyl inder seals a n d n u m e r o u s p e n d a n t s . I n a residential q u a r t e r east of t h e t e m p l e , h o u s e s lined t h e street. R o w e called a massive building s o u t h w e s t of t h e t e m p l e a migdol, a " t o w e r " or i n n e r " c i t a d e l , " w h i c h w o u l d h a v e b e e n t h e seat of the representative of t h e E g y p t i a n g o v e r n m e n t at B e t h S h e a n ; h o w e v e r , b o t h its r e c o n s t r u c t e d p l a n a n d its s u p p o s e d function are suspect. A large r o u n d silo f o u n d n e a r b y m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d b y t h e E g y p t i a n s t o garrison their sol diers, T h r e e locally m a d e basalt E g y p t i a n royal ( n i n e t e e n t h d y nasty) stelae f o u n d in later contexts b e l o n g t o this s t r a t u m ,
BETH-SHEAN evidence of B e t h - S h e a n ' s prestige as an E g y p t i a n a d m i n i s trative center in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e . T h e t e x t o n o n e of t h e t h r e e stelae relates t h a t d u r i n g t h e reign of Seti I, E g y p tian u n i t s p u t d o w n a rebellion i n t h e n o r t h e r n J o r d a n Valley at H a m a t h (Tell e l - H a m m e h ) a n d P e h a l (Pella). T h e t e x t also m e n t i o n s t h e cities of R e h o b , Y a n o ' a m , a n d B e t h S h e a n . A s e c o n d stela f r o m t h e reign of Seti I preserves t h e r e c o r d of military action in t h e hill c o u n t r y against raiding ' A p i r u a n d T h e r u . T h e s e actions w e r e m e a n t t o shore u p E g y p t ' s a d m i n i s t r a t i o n of C a n a a n , which, at t h e e n d of t h e eighteenth dynasty, h a d b e e n w e a k e n e d . T h e third stela bears a s t a n d a r d l a u d a t o r y i n s c r i p t i o n of R a m e s e s EL I r o n A g e I : U p p e r a n d L o w e r S t r a t u m V I . T w o strata (lower V I a n d u p p e r V I ; " l o w e r " a n d " u p p e r " are t h e t e r m s u s e d b y t h e University of P e n n s y l v a n i a excavators) are at tributable to I r o n I. L o w e r s t r a t u m V I is d a t e d to t h e t i m e of t h e t w e n t i e t h d y n a s t y (twelfth c e n t u r y B C E ) , n a m e l y to t h e final stage of E g y p t i a n a d m i n i s t r a t i o n in C a n a a n . I n this s t r a t u m t h e buildings of s t r a t u m VTI w e r e rebuilt, retaining t h e earlier t o w n plan. T h e t e m p l e of t h e s t r a t u m VLT city was rebuilt, b u t c h a n g e s w e r e m a d e in its e n t r a n c e vestibule a n d holy of holies. T o its n o r t h w e r e f o u n d administrative buildings w h o s e architectural details a r e E g y p t i a n in style. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t of t h e s e b u i l d i n g s is t h e G o v e r n o r ' s R e s i d e n c e (building 1500), a s q u a r e s t r u c t u r e w i t h a central hall s u r r o u n d e d b y r o o m s (see figure 1). T w o m o n u m e n t a l pillars s u p p o r t e d t h e ceiling in t h e hall; d o o r sills a n d i n scribed d o o r j a m b s , a n d t w o l o t u s - s h a p e d c o l u m n capitals f o u n d n e a r b y t h a t m a y b e l o n g to it, are all distinctly E g y p tian. A d d i t i o n a l E g y p t i a n friezes, reliefs, a n d inscribed d o o r jambs w e r e r e c o v e r e d from adjacent buildings. T h e i n s c r i p -
u
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.a
a—•.—i"m
BETH-SHEAN. F i g u r e I . Plan of building 1500, the Governor's Res idence. (Courtesy University of Pennsylvania M u s e u m , Philadelphia)
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tions are d e d i c a t i o n s , p r a y e r s , v o w s , p e r s o n a l n a m e s , a n d titles. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t is a d e d i c a t o r y inscription of a n official n a m e d R a m e s e s W e s e r K h e p e s h . H e m a y h a v e b e e n t h e g o v e r n o r of B e t h - S h e a n d u r i n g t h e reign of R a m e s e s i n , w h o s e life-sized statue, f o u n d i n t h e following level, p r o b a bly originated in this s t r a t u m . T h e s e finds, as well as locally m a d e E g y p t i a n pottery, attest to t h e intensive E g y p t i a n p r e s e n c e in t h e city d u r i n g t h e t w e n t i e t h d y n a s t y . D u r i n g t h e reign of R a m e s e s VI or R a m e s e s VLTI, as E g y p t ' s c o n t r o l over C a n a a n was w a n i n g , lower s t r a t u m V I w a s destroyed in a violent conflagration. A m o n g t h e finds i n t h e d e s t r u c t i o n level w e r e b r o n z e stands similar to ones k n o w n f r o m C y p r u s a n d t h e M y c e n a e a n LTIC sherds of ves sels t h a t m o s t p r o b a b l y w e r e i m p o r t e d from C y p r u s . I n t h e N o r t h e r n C e m e t e r y m a n y strata VII a n d VI t o m b s w e r e f o u n d t h a t held f r a g m e n t s from m o r e t h a n fifty a n t h r o p o i d clay coffins (see figure 2). T h e lids of m o s t r e p r e s e n t h u m a n faces, five of t h e m in w h a t is k n o w n as t h e g r o t e s q u e style r e m i n i s c e n t of t h e a n t h r o p o i d coffins from D e i r el-Balah in t h e Sinai D e s e r t . [See D e i r el-Balah.] A n E g y p t i a n funerary influence a n d c o n t e m p o r a r y E g y p t i a n fu n e r a r y c u s t o m s a r e clear. O n t h e forehead of three of the lids is a h e a d d r e s s t h a t r e s e m b l e s t h e one w o r n b y t h e Sea P e o p l e s in t h e wall reliefs a t M e d i n e t H a b u in E g y p t . T h e finds from these t o m b s i n c l u d e b r o n z e vessels, E g y p t i a n style U s h a b t i figurines, jewelry, ivories, a n d w e a p o n s . T h e coffins w e r e p r o b a b l y u s e d t o b u r y E g y p t i a n officials a n d military p e r s o n n e l , a l t h o u g h s o m e of t h e coffins w i t h g r o t e s q u e lids m a y h a v e b e e n for m e r c e n a r i e s w h o originated a m o n g t h e Sea P e o p l e s . T h e r e are n o burials in this c e m e tery later t h a n t h e e n d of t h e p e r i o d of E g y p t i a n d o m i n a t i o n i n C a n a a n (mid-twelfth c e n t u r y BCE). I n u p p e r s t r a t u m V I t h e t o w n w a s rebuilt following t h e violent destruction of lower s t r a t u m VI. S o m e of the streets a n d r u i n e d buildings of t h e p r e v i o u s city w e r e reutilized, while m a n y others w e n t o u t of u s e . T h e material culture is typical of t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE. D u r i n g this period, B e t h S h e a n was p r o b a b l y settled b y C a n a a n i t e s a n d p e r h a p s b y s o m e of t h e Sea P e o p l e s . T h e A m e r i c a n excavators identi fied a p a i r of p u b l i c buildings t h e y u n c o v e r e d a b o v e t h e t e m ples of t h e previous strata as t w i n t e m p l e s : " t h e H o u s e of A s h t o r e t h " (1 Sm. 31:10) a n d " t h e H o u s e of D a g o n " ( i Chr. 10:10) m e n t i o n e d in a c c o u n t s of t h e Philistines r e m o v i n g Saul's a r m o r a n d impaling his h e a d o n t h e wall of B e t h S h e a n . A l t h o u g h a t t r i b u t e d b y t h e excavators to s t r a t u m V , t h e buildings m a y b e l o n g t o u p p e r s t r a t u m V I . T h e s e build ings w e r e d a m a g e d b y later c o n s t r u c t i o n w o r k , so t h a t m a n y details of their plans are lost. Access to t h e s o u t h e r n t e m p l e , a l o n g building, was indirect, t h r o u g h its large e n t r a n c e hall in t h e front. T h e building's m a i n r o o m is a large rectangular hall with auxiliary r o o m s o n its t w o l o n g sides. T h e ceiling of this central hall r e s t e d o n t w o r o w s of three c o l u m n s each. A c c e s s t o t h e n o r t h e r n t e m p l e , w h i c h could b e r e a c h e d from t h e s o u t h e r n t e m p l e t h r o u g h a n a r r o w corridor, was also
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indirect a n d led to a central hall in which four c o l u m n s s u p ported t h e ceiling. T h e rich assemblage of cultic vessels f o u n d in the temples includes a n a s s o r t m e n t of c e r a m i c cult stands. M a n y are multitiered, possibly to suggest m u l t i s t o ried t e m p l e s , a n d are d e c o r a t e d with h u m a n a n d animal fig ures. Others are cylindrical with applied d e c o r a t i o n of snakes in relief. Several of t h e a b o v e - m e n t i o n e d E g y p t i a n m o n u m e n t s of the nineteenth a n d twentieth dynasties were f o u n d in t h e large courtyard in front of t h e n o r t h e r n t e m p l e . A n E g y p t i a n stela dedicated to Antit was discovered in the n o r t h e r n t e m ple. T h e s e Egyptian m o n u m e n t s p r e d a t e t h e c o n t e x t in which they were f o u n d , suggesting that t h e y c a m e to b e v e n erated in local tradition a n d were passed from s t r a t u m to stratum in a cultic context. T h e recent excavations s h o w e d that this t o w n was also destroyed by fire, p e r h a p s d u r i n g t h e c o n q u e s t of B e t h - S h e a n b y K i n g D a v i d in t h e early t e n t h century BCE. I r o n A g e I I : S t r a t a V a n d I V . It is difficult to i n t e r p r e t B e t h - S h e a n ' s d e v e l o p m e n t in d i e t e n t h - e i g h t h centuries BCE because of t h e c o m p l i c a t e d r e m a i n s in s t r a t u m V. T h e orig inal excavators subdivided t h e s t r a t u m into t w o phases: lower V a n d u p p e r V. H o w e v e r , t h e temples attributed to lower V should p r o b a b l y b e d a t e d to t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE ( u p p e r VT). A large, well-planned architectural c o m p l e x n o r t h of t h e t e m p l e s , apparentiy an administrative center, m a y belong to t h e t e n t h century BCE, along with a partially
BETH-SHEAN. F i g u r e 2. Anthropoid Philadelphia)
p r e s e r v e d p u b l i c building t h e r e c e n t e x c a v a t i o n s u n c o v e r e d . T h e latter was severely b u r n e d , p e r h a p s as a result of S h i shak's invasion in a b o u t 918 BCE. It m a y b e t h a t the buildings in t h e n o r t h w e s t section of t h e e x c a v a t e d area, w h o s e c o n struction witii ashlars a n d s t o n e pillars is characteristically Israelite, were also built in t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. O n e of t h e buildings a p p e a r s to h a v e b e e n u s e d as a city gate t h r o u g h w h i c h t h e administrative c o m p l e x o n t h e acropolis c o u l d b e r e a c h e d . A large hall to t h e east of this gate w a s either a royal storehouse or a stable. T h e u p p e r p h a s e of s t r a t u m V, as well as a few p o o r l y p r e s e r v e d buildings a t t r i b u t e d t o s t r a t u m I V ( n i n t h - e i g h t h centuries BCE), indicates a later date for t h e t o w n . T h e n e w excavations revealed a well-preserved large b u i l d i n g t h a t was destroyed b y h e a v y fire, p r o b a b l y d u r i n g T i g l a t h - P i l e s e r I l l ' s c o n q u e s t of t h e region in 732 BCE. A few s t r u c t u r e s m a y r e p r e s e n t a partial r e s e t t l e m e n t following t h e c o n q u e s t . P e r s i a n - R o m a n P e r i o d s : S t r a t u m III. I n t h e P e r s i a n period, t h e tradition of B e t h - S h e a n as a cultic place m a y have b e e n p e r p e t u a t e d in t h e vicinity of t h e t e m p l e s , w h i c h is indicated b y t h e discovery f r o m t h a t p e r i o d of several c e r a m i c figurines o n t h e tell itself. T h e Hellenistic p e r i o d is r e p r e s e n t e d b y a h o a r d of t e t r a d r a c h m a s , as well as b y a n o c c u p a t i o n layer from t h e s e c o n d a n d first centuries BCE identified b y t h e r e c e n t excavations. It a p p e a r s t h a t t h e tell w a s o c c u p i e d after d i e H a s m o n e a n s d e s t r o y e d t h e n e a r b y large s e t t l e m e n t at T e l Istaba. T h e Early R o m a n p e r i o d
sarcophagus in situ. (Courtesy University of Pennsylvania M u s e u m ,
C
BETH-SHE ARIM ( s t r a t u m III) is r e p r e s e n t e d b y w h a t a p p e a r s t o h a v e b e e n an isolated s t r u c t u r e o n d i e s u m m i t . I n t e r p r e t e d as t h e r e m a i n s of a m o n u m e n t a l t e m p l e , it t o w e r e d over t h e civic center t h a t h a d g r o w n u p a r o u n d t h e foot of t h e m o u n d . Several of its architectural e l e m e n t s w e r e a r e c t a n g u l a r stone p o d i u m , c o l u m n fragments, a n d C o r i n t h i a n capitals. L a t e Hellenistic a n d Early R o m a n t o m b s w e r e u n c o v e r e d in t h e site's N o r t h e r n C e m e t e r y . Byzantine, Islamic, and C r u s a d e r Periods: Strata II—I. T h e entire tell w a s resettled in t h e Byzantine p e r i o d (stratum I I ) . A r o u n d c h u r c h , typical of t h e fifth c e n t u r y CE, was c o n s t r u c t e d o n t h e s u m m i t a n d embellished witii a m o saic floor a n d carved capitals. I n t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e tell a residential q u a r t e r filled w i t h g r a n d h o u s e s w a s clustered on a ledge t o t h e east. O n t h e tell itself, a n o t h e r well-pro tected n e i g h b o r h o o d of large, well-built h o u s e s existed, a s u b u r b of t h e large B y z a n t i n e city to t h e s o u t h a n d west. D u r i n g t h e Early Islamic p e r i o d ( s t r a t u m I) a residential q u a r t e r a p p e a r e d h e r e as well. A t t h e n o r t h w e s t e r n c o r n e r of the tell a t h i n c i r c u m f e r e n c e wall a n d a city gate h a v e b e e n identified t h a t p r o b a b l y date to t h e C r u s a d e r period. BIBLIOGRAPHY With the exception of M a z a r ( 1 9 9 3 ) , all of the items below are U n i versity of Pennsylvania reports of t h e excavations. FitzGerald, Gerald M . The Four Canaanite Temples of Beth-Shan: Pottery. B e t h - S h a n 11,2. Philadelphia, 1930. FitzGerald, Gerald M . Beth-Shan Excavations 1921-23: Byzantine Levels. B e t h - S h a n III. Philadelphia, 1 9 3 1 .
The
The Arab and
FitzGerald, Gerald M . " T h e Earliest Pottery of B e t h - S h a n . " The Mu seum Journal24 (1935): 5-22. James, Frances. The Iron Age at Beth Shan: A Study of Levels VI-IV. Philadelphia, 1 9 6 6 . M a z a r , Amihai. " T h e Excavations at T e l B e t h - S h e a n in 1 9 8 9 - 1 9 9 0 . " In Biblical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by A v r a h a m Biran et al., p p . 6 0 6 - 6 1 9 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 3 . R e p o r t of the excavations of the Flebrew University. Mazar, Amihai. "Beth Shean in t h e Iron Age: Preliminary R e p o r t a n d Conclusions of the 1 9 9 0 - 1 9 9 1 Excavations." Israel Exploration Jour nal 43 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 2 0 1 - 2 2 9 . Oren, Eliezer D . The Northern Cemetery of Beth-Shan. Leiden, 1 9 7 3 . Rowe, Alan. The Topography and History of Beth-shan. B e t h - S h a n I. Philadelphia, 1930. Rowe, Alan. The Fourth Canaanite Philadelphia, 1940.
Temple of Beth-Shan.
Beth-Shan II. 1. AMIHAI MAZAR
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B E T H - S H E A R I M (Ar., Sheikh Abreik; m a p refer ence 2344 X 1624), site located in s o u t h w e s t e r n Galilee n e a r m o d e r n T i v ' o n , s o m e 20 k m (12 mi.) east of Haifa, facing the w e s t e r n extremity of t h e Jezreel Valley. T h e identifica tion of this site with t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m of r a b b i n i c literature is c o n f i r m e d b y t h e correlation b e t w e e n t h e archaeological finds from t h e e n o r m o u s n e c r o p o l i s discovered there, sev
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eral literary sources, a n d a n inscription f o u n d at t h e site that m e n t i o n s t h e t o w n ' s G r e e k n a m e , Besa[ra] (see below). Referred t o b y J o s e p h u s as Besara (Life 24. 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 ) a n d in t h e r a b b i n i c literature as B e t h - S h a r e i a n d B e t h - S h a r e i n , the site is first m e n t i o n e d in c o n n e c t i o n with Berenice, the wife of A g r i p p a II, w h o o w n e d p r o p e r t y in t h e Jezreel Valley (Life 24. 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 ) . F r o m t h e early s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE o n w a r d s , at least o n e sage, Y o h a n a n b e n N u r i , was associated specifically with B e t h - S h e ' a r i m (cf., Tosefta, Suk. 2:2). B e t h - S h e 'arim, h o w e v e r , achieved its p r o m i n e n c e owing to the e x t e n d e d residence tiiere of t h e editor of t h e M i s h n a h , R a b b i J u d a h I ( B . T . , San. 32b). A l t h o u g h h e s p e n t t h e last p a r t of his ministry in n e a r b y S e p p h o r i s , R a b b i J u d a h n e v ertheless left explicit instructions t h a t h e wished to be b u r i e d at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m . T h e J e r u s a l e m T a l m u d describes his fu neral cortege in detail (Kil. 9.4.32b), for t h e next century a n d a half, B e t h - S h e ' a r i m served as d i e centtal necropolis for Jews t h r o u g h o u t Palestine a n d t h e D i a s p o r a (cf., J. T . , Mo'ed Q. 3.5.82c). T h e principal excavations at t h e site were carried out in t h e 1930s a n d 1950s. B e t w e e n 1936 a n d 1940, four seasons of excavation were c o n d u c t e d b y Benjamin M a z a r of the H e b r e w University of J e r u s a l e m . Eleven burial complexes w e r e discovered, in addition t o t h e r e m a i n s of a city wall a n d a s y n a g o g u e a n d its various a n n e x e s . B e t w e e n 1953 a n d 1958, N a h m a n Avigad, also of t h e H e b r e w University, dis covered a n additional twelve c a t a c o m b s (nos. 12-23, a n d 30) during his four seasons of excavation at t h e site. I n s u m m e r 1956, M a z a r r e t u r n e d t o B e t i i - S h e ' a r i m for o n e season a n d u n c o v e r e d t h r e e additional c a t a c o m b s (nos. 24-26), as well as a large basilica. Five m a i n building p h a s e s h a v e b e e n identified at B e t h S h e ' a r i m : P e r i o d I (first a n d early s e c o n d centuries CE), sev eral walls a n d isolated burials; P e r i o d II (late second a n d early third centuries CE, t h e p e r i o d of R a b b i J u d a h I ) , exten sive e x p a n s i o n of t h e n e c r o p o l i s a n d t h e erection of otlier p u b l i c buildings; P e r i o d III ( m i d - d i i r d t o m i d - f o u r t h c e n turies CE, w h o s e terminus ad quern is a b o u t 352 CE, evidenced by a d e s t r u c t i o n layer p r o b a b l y from t h e aftermath of t h e Gallus R e v o l t ) , c o n s t r u c t i o n of the majority of c a t a c o m b s a n d a s y n a g o g u e (only sketchily r e p o r t e d ) ; Period I V (Byz antine e r a ) , a small, m o d e s t settlement; a n d P e r i o d V (Arab p e r i o d ) , a very brief s p a n of settlement. T h e various c a t a c o m b s at t h e site differ from o n e a n o t h e r in size a n d style. M o s t consist of a series of c o n n e c t e d caves (or halls), w i t h burial p l a c e s ( t r o u g h - s h a p e d kokhim, or arcosolia) c u t into t h e walls. R e m a i n s of sarcophagi were f o u n d in a n u m b e r of c a t a c o m b s ; t h e largest concentration w a s in c a t a c o m b 20, w h i c h c o n t a i n e d t h e r e m a i n s of 130 sarcophagi. Several c a t a c o m b s (nos. 14,20, a n d possibly 23) w e r e especially m o n u m e n t a l a n d consisted of a spacious outer c o u r t y a r d a n d facade, t h e latter consisting of four e n g a g e d pillars, a large central a r c h , a n d t w o side arches (see figure 1). W i t h i n these arches doors are often decorated with
310
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panels a n d studs a n d c r o w n e d b y a decorated lintel. A b o v e these burial c h a m b e r s a n d carved into t h e side of t h e m o u n tain are semicircular b e n c h e s , probably an e l e m e n t of a n assembly place for those w h o c a m e to memorialize d i e dead. C a t a c o m b s 14 a n d 20, t h e focal points of t h e necropolis, were t h e m o s t elaborate burial sites. C a t a c o m b 20 w a s d i e densest of all t h e c a t a c o m b s , representing t h e entire r a n g e of burial styles, b u t particularly t h e u s e of t h e s a r c o p h a g u s : s o m e 65 p e r c e n t of t h e t w o - h u n d r e d burials in c a t a c o m b 20 were in sarcophagi, of which a third were d e c o r a t e d . T h e s e sarcophagi w e r e m a d e primarily of stone, b u t e x a m p l e s i n marble, lead, a n d w o o d were also found. R a b b i s w e r e b u r i e d in this c a t a c o m b , a n d it is therefore n o t surprising t h a t H e b r e w d o m i n a t e s t h e inscriptions. C a t a c o m b 14 a p p e a r s t o have b e e n a private burial site, as it held far fewer inter m e n t s . T h e n a m e s R a b b a n Gamaliel, R a b b a n S i m e o n , a n d R a b b i Aniana ( H a n i n a ? ) discovered in this c a t a c o m b p o i n t to it as t h e burial site of t h e i m m e d i a t e family a n d circle of R a b b i J u d a h I ( B . T . , Ket. I03a-b). I n d e e d , t h e i n n e r m o s t d o u b l e - t r o u g h burial is very likely t h e resting place of this patriarch a n d his wife. T h e s e c a t a c o m b s are rich b o t h in their o r n a m e n t a t i o n a n d epigraphic r e m a i n s . M a n y reliefs a n d carvings, as well as pictures p a i n t e d a n d incised o n stone, w e r e f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e necropolis; they reflect o n e of the richest depositories of p o p u l a r Jewish art in late antiquity. Floral a n d geometric designs are u b i q u i t o u s , as a r e representations of animals (li ons, oxen, eagles, b i r d s , horses) a n d a n occasional h u m a n figure. Depictions of cuetic objects a b o u n d a n d i n c l u d e t h e T o r a h shrine, lulav, ethrog, shofar, a n d incense shovel. A
BETH-SHE'ARIM.
p r e d o m i n a n t m o t i f is t h e m e n o r a h , w h i c h a p p e a r s scores of times in a variety of shapes a n d styles. T h e a p p r o x i m a t e l y 2 8 0 inscriptions f o u n d a t B e t h S h e ' a r i m give t h e n a m e s a n d titles of t h e Jews interred, as well as their professions a n d places of origin. M o r e o v e r , t h e distribution of t h e languages i n tiiese inscriptions is m o s t revealing: almost 80 p e r c e n t a r e in G r e e k , 16 p e r c e n t i n H e b r e w , a n d t h e r e m a i n d e r in A r a m a i c o r P a l m y r e n e . T h e m o n u m e n t a l c a t a c o m b 1 1 , w i t h its m a n y a n d lavish fragments, indicates t h a t a large building, p r o b a b l y a m a u soleum, was located t h e r e . I n t h e d e b r i s n e a r t h e m a u s o leum, a seven-line inscription written in G r e e k o n white marble was found: H e r e I lie, d e a d , J u s t u s t h e s o n of L e o n t i s a n d S a p p h o After I have p i c k e d ( t h e fruits) of all w i s d o m I left t h e light, m y u n h a p p y p a r e n t s w h o m o u r n continuously, A n d m y brothers, W o e to m e in m y Besara, A n d after I h a v e d e s c e n d e d t o H a d e s , I, J u s t u s , lie h e r e W i t h m a n y o f m y relatives, f o r so d e t e r m i n e d t h e p o w e r f u l Fate Be c o m f o r t e d , J u s t u s , for n o o n e is i m m o r t a l .
T h e r e is n o question t h a t t h e i m p o r t a n c e a n d centrality of B e t h - S h e ' a r i m t o Jewish Palestine i n late antiquity w e r e inextricably linked t o t h e p r e s e n c e of t h e patriarchal family there; Jews f r o m all p a r t s of Israel a n d t h e D i a s p o r a w i s h e d to be i n t e r r e d t h e r e precisely b e c a u s e t h e necropolis w a s associated w i t h t h e patriarch. T h e centrality of t h e office in late antiquity h a s b e e n , h o w e v e r , a controversial subject in m o d e r n historiography. O n t h e o n e h a n d , r a b b i n i c literature
F i g u r e 1. Entrance to catacomb 20. ( C o u r t e s y E . M . M e y e r s )
BETH-SHEMESH following t h e ministry of R a b b i J u d a h I takes a n increasingly d i m view of t h e p a t r i a r c h a t e , a n d b y t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y ei t h e r ignores t h e office or h a s only negative things to say a b o u t it. O n t h e other h a n d , n o n - J e w i s h s o u r c e s , s u c h as t h e T h e o d o s i a n C o d e a n d L i b a n i u s , d e p i c t t h e office as the m o s t i m p o r t a n t o n e within t h e Jewish c o m m u n i t y . E v e n the c h u r c h fathers, w h o s e theological motivations led t h e m to b e critical of t h e p a t r i a r c h a t e , nevertheless attest to its centrality. Archaeological finds at o t h e r sites h a v e c o r r o b o rated t h e results of t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m excavations. F o r e x a m p l e , b o t h a s y n a g o g u e inscription f r o m S t o b i (Yugosla via) dating t o 280 CE a n d a m o s a i c floor in t h e H a m m a t h Tiberias s y n a g o g u e attest to t h e i m p o r t a n c e of this office in the Jewish world. (In t h e f o r m e r , t h e p a t r i a r c h was desig nated as the recipient of a sizable fine o w e d b y t h e p a r t y breaking t h e a g r e e m e n t outlined in t h e inscription; in t h e latter, o n e Severus associated w i t h t h e p a t r i a r c h w a s t h e principal d o n o r to t h e s y n a g o g u e . ) T h e finds at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m , a l o n g with t h o s e from a n c i e n t synagogues in general, have revolutionized o u r c o n c e p t of Jewish art in antiquity. Previously, it h a d b e e n a s s u m e d , o n the basis of very explicit sources f r o m t h e late S e c o n d T e m ple p e r i o d , t h a t Jews t h r o u g h o u t antiquity shied away from all figural r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . T h e archaeological finds h e r e , however, d e m o n s t r a t e t h a t Jews u s e d figural r e p r e s e n t a t i o n from t h e biblical p e r i o d until t h e H a s m o n e a n era, a n d t h a t d u r i n g t h e centuries of t h e L a t e R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e p e riods t h e y o n c e again d e p i c t e d h u m a n s a n d animals figurally to d e c o r a t e their p u b l i c a n d private buildings. B e t h S h e ' a r i m w a s o n e of t h e first a n d certainly m o s t d r a m a t i c expressions of this m o r e liberal p o s t u r e , p a v i n g t h e w a y for a reevaluation of t h e historical a t t i t u d e of the Jews a n d J u daism t o w a r d figural art. T h e necropolis at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m p r o v i d e s evidence of t h e extent to w h i c h Jewish burial c u s t o m s in late antiquity dif fered from t h o s e of t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e p e r i o d . S e c o n d a r y burials, especially in ossuaries, are a l m o s t entirely a b s e n t at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m . T h e u s e of ossuaries was s u p e r c e d e d by t h e t r o u g h - s h a p e d burials a n d s a r c o p h a g i , w h i c h h a d b e e n rare in earlier Jewish funerary c o n t e x t s . M a n y of t h e c u s t o m s evidenced at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m indicate t h e a d o p t i o n b y t h e Jews of t h e forms of burial r e g n a n t in late antiquity in g e n eral. Finally, B e t h - S h e ' a r i m is a d r a m a t i c e x a m p l e of t h e extent of Hellenization within t h e Jewish c o m m u n i t y in L a t e R o m a n Palestine. Its art, a r c h i t e c t u r e , a n d inscriptions attest to the far-reaching influence of c o n t e m p o r a r y forms a n d styles. [See also Architectural D e c o r a t i o n ; Burial Sites; Burial Techniques; Catacombs; Sarcophagus.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael. " T h e L e d a Coffin from B e t h - S h e ' a r i m " (in H e b r e w ) . Eretz-Israel 8 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 4 3 - 1 4 8 . Detailed description and anal ysis of a marble coffin with blatantly p a g a n motifs. G o o d e n o u g h , Erwin R. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. Vol.
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1. N e w York, 1 9 5 3 . Contains an overview of the Beth-She'arim finds ( p p . 8 9 - 1 0 2 ) from the author's particular perspective—the search for mystical, nonrabbinic J u d a i s m in archaeological remains. Levine, L e e I. " T h e Finds from Beth-She'arim a n d T h e i r I m p o r t a n c e for the Study of the T a l m u d i c P e r i o d " (in H e b r e w ) . Eretz-Israel 18 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 2 7 7 - 2 8 1 . A n attempt to relate t h e Beth-She'arim finds to a n u m b e r of larger issues in Jewish history of late antiquity. M a z a r , Benjamin, et al. Beth She'arim. 3 vols. N e w Brunswick, N.J., 1 9 7 3 - 1 9 7 6 . Authoritative report of the excavations a n d findings from Beth-She'arim. Volume 1 describes M a z a r ' s excavations; volume 2, the Greek inscriptions; a n d volume 3, the results of N a h m a n Avigad's work there. Weiss, Zeev. "Social Aspects of Burial in Beth She'arim: Archeological F i n d s a n d T a l m u d i c S o u r c e s . " I n The Galilee in Ijxle Antiqinly, ed ited b y L e e I. Levine, p p . 3 5 7 - 3 7 1 . N e w York, 1 9 9 2 . An a t t e m p t to relate the Beth-She'arim finds with T a l m u d i c literature, elucidating the customs and practices s u r r o u n d i n g Jewish burial procedures. LEE I. LEVINE
B E T H - S H E M E S H ( H e b . " h o u s e / t e m p l e of t h e s u n " ) , site located in t h e n o r t h e a s t e r n S h e p h e l a h , along t h e inner r e a c h e s of t h e Sorek valley t h a t g u a r d e d t h e major ascent t o J e r u s a l e m in antiquity ( m a p reference 1477 X 1286). It is a p r o m i n e n t m o u n d , a b o u t 7 acres in size. T h e H e b r e w n a m e a p p a r e n t l y preserves t h e tradition of a n older C a n a a n i t e t e m p l e (cf. I r - s h e m a s h , " c i t y of t h e s u n " in Jos. 19:41). T h e site's A r a b i c n a m e is Tell e r - R u m e i l a h ; t h e n e a r b y village of ' A i n S h e m s ( " s p r i n g of t h e s u n " ) preserves t h e ancient name. E d w a r d R o b i n s o n identified t h e m o u n d in 1838 a n d D u n c a n M a c k e n z i e excavated it in 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 1 2 u n d e r t h e auspices of t h e Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d . H a v e r f o r d College (Pennsylvania) excavated f r o m 1923 to 1928, u n d e r t h e di rection of Elihu G r a n t , w h o w a s assisted by G. E r n e s t W r i g h t in p u b l i s h i n g t h e final v o l u m e of t h e excavation r e p o r t . Bar-Han University r e s u m e d excavations in 1990, u n der t h e direction of S h l o m o B u n i m o v i t z a n d Zvi L e d e r m a n . S t r a t u m V I consists only of Early B r o n z e I V - M i d d l e B r o n z e I s h e r d s n e a r b e d r o c k . S t r a t u m V represents t h e well-fortified M B II-ILI city w i t h a few patrician houses a n d several t o m b s ( t o m b s 9, 12, 13, 17). M a c k e n z i e h a d identi fied its " s t r o n g w a l l " a n d triple-entry gate. S t r a t u m I V a - b denotes t h e p r o s p e r o u s L a t e B r o n z e t o w n , w h i c h p r o d u c e d s o m e fine domestic s t r u c t u r e s , m a n y cisterns, a smelting furnace, a P r o t o - C a n a a n i t e ostracon, a jewelry h o a r d , a n d several t o m b s ( t o m b s 10, 1 1 ) . Its destruction m a y date to a b o u t 1200 BCE, b u t t h e causes are u n k n o w n . B e t h - S h e m e s h in t h e I r o n A g e I w a s a large b u t relatively u n p l a n n e d village, still s o m e w h a t in t h e L B tradition, b u t with Philistine B i c h r o m e w a r e , (It is M a c k e n z i e ' s " s e c o n d city," s t r a t u m III.) W r i g h t ( G r a n t a n d W r i g h t , 1938-1939) ascribed its destruction to t h e Philistines (c. 1050 BCE). T h e r e c e n t excavations have confirmed t h a t it w a s i n d e e d a m a s sive d e s t r u c t i o n ( M a c k e n z i e ' s R e d B u r n t s t r a t u m ) , b u t it dates s o m e w h a t earlier, t o t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE.
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BETH-YERAH
S t r a t u m II, with phases I l a - c , spans the t e n t h - e i g h t h c e n turies BCE. In s t r a t u m Ha (c. 1000-950 BCE) a c a s e m a t e wall was constructed a r o u n d t h e entire site, and pillared c o u r t y a r d houses characterized the well laid-out city within it. T h e structures i n c l u d e d industrial installations, a fine " r e s i d e n c y , " a large silo, a n d a typical tripartite s t o r e h o u s e (sometimes called stables), which m a y indicate t h a t B e t h S h e m e s h was a regional administrative center d u r i n g t h e U n i t e d M o n a r c h y . H o w m u c h of s t r a t u m Ila is D a v i d i c , if any, is debated. T h e earlier excavations h a d p u b l i s h e d a g o o d deal of pottery slipped with an u n b u r n i s h e d , streaky r e d slip. T h i s pottery also occurs in a b u n d a n c e at n e a r b y sites such as Tell Qasile X I a n d G e z e r X - I X , w h e r e it char acterizes the period from a b o u t 1050 to 950 BCE, p o s t d a t i n g Philistine b i c h r o m e w a r e a n d immediately p r e c e d i n g typical Solomonic r e d - b u r n i s h e d wares. [See Qasile, Tell; Gezer.] T h i s evidence does suggest a D a v i d i c date for s t r a t u m Ila. S t r a t u m l i b (c. 950-700 BCE) and s t r a t u m l i e (700-586 BCE) follow s t r a t u m Ila rather closely. M a n y of the h o u s e s were r e c o n s t r u c t e d several times, a n d some were even built over the s t r a t u m Ila casemate wall. T h e r e c e n t excavations have shown, c o n t r a r y t o M a c k e n z i e ' s a n d W r i g h t ' s view, t h a t the city was scarcely fortified in I r o n II; there was a massive rebuild of the city wall in this period, including a n o r t h e r n gate c o m p l e x . L a r g e olive-crushing installations a n d m a n y Royal s t a m p e d jar handles attest to t h e city's c o n tinued i m p o r t a n c e . Several t o m b s (tombs 14-16) b e l o n g to this horizon. T h e final destruction of s t r a t u m l i e was t h o u g h t by the earlier excavators to h a v e b e e n carried o u t by the Babylonians (c. 586 BCE), b u t the latest excavations have n o t revealed any seventh-century BCE r e m a i n s . T h e d e struction is better related to the well-known J u d e a n c a m paigns of S e n n a c h e r i b in 701 BCE. T h e site's later periods are represented by Hellenistic, R o m a n , Byzantine, a n d medieval materials ( s t r a t u m I ) . A large Byzantine m o n a s t e r y o n the southeast slopes is still visible. [See also the biography of
Mackenzie.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Grant, Elihu. Beth Shemesh (Palestine): Progress of the Haverford ological Expedition. Haverford, 1929.
Archae
Grant, Elihu. Ain Shems Excavations (Palestine, 1928-1929-1930-1031). Parts 1 and 2. Haverford, 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 2 . Grant, Elihu. Rumeileh, Being Ain Shems Excavations (Palestine). Part 3. Haverford, 1934. Grant, Elihu, and G. Ernest Wright. Ain Shems Excavations Parts 4 (pottery) and 5. Haverford, 1938—1939.
(Palestine).
Mackenzie, D u n c a n L. "Excavations at 'Ain S h e m s . " Palestine ration Fund Annual 1 ( i 9 i i ) ; 2 ( 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 1 3 ) .
Explo
WILLIAM G . DEVER
B E T H - Y E R A H (Ar., K h i r b e t Kerak, " t h e r u i n s of the castle"), a low, flat tell (25 h a , or 62 acres) located at t h e southwestern e n d of t h e Sea of Galilee, w h i c h h a s e r o d e d
s o m e portion of the site (32°43' N , 35°34' E ; m a p reference 204 X 236). T h e p r e s e n t outlet of t h e J o r d a n River lies to the south, b u t in antiquity it w a s to t h e n o r t h a n d t h e river flowed along t h e site's w e s t e r n edge. Fortifications o n t h e south a n d west, a n d a R o m a n b r i d g e o n t h e n o r t h , suggest that the river's s o u t h e r n outlet was d u g in t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d or later. F o u r identifications h a v e b e e n suggested for B e t h - Y e r a h / K h i r b e t K e r a k (Maisler [Mazar] et al., 1952, p . 165, n . 1.; A v i - Y o n a h , 1976, p p . 88,95; Esse, 1991, p p . 34-35; H e s t r i n , 1993, p . 255). Pliny a n d J o s e p h u s indicated t h a t t h e site of T a r i c h e a , Vespasian's c a m p s i t e d u r i n g his c a m p a i g n s in t h e Galilee in 67 CE, w a s located at t h e s o u t h e r n e n d of t h e Sea of Galilee (War 3.447; 4.455). M o s t scholars reject this, while s o m e others e q u a t e K h i r b e t K e r a k w i t h Philoteria, w h i c h Polybius said w a s built by P t o l e m y II P h i l a d e l p h u s (Polybius 5.70.3-4). O t h e r s suggest R o m a n S e n n a b r i s or neighboring B e t h - Y e r a h . T h e J e r u s a l e m T a l m u d indicates t h a t B e t h - Y e r a h a n d S e n n a b r i s w e r e walled sites at t h e s o u t h e r n end of the Sea of Galilee (Meg. 70a), while t h e Babylonian T a l m u d notes t h a t die J o r d a n R i v e r b e g a n at B e t h - Y e r a h (Bekh. 51a; Bik. 55a), w h i c h favors t h e identi fication with K h i r b e t K e r a k . T h e n a m e of Khirbet. Kerak in d i e B r o n z e A g e is u n k n o w n . Beth-Yerah is n o t m e n t i o n e d in t h e H e b r e w Bible or in other B r o n z e or I r o n A g e s o u r c e s , b u t die t e r m btyrh, " h o u s e of t h e m o o n , " p l a c e s t h e n a m e within C a n a a n i t e l u n a r traditions. Major excavations at B e t h - Y e r a h i n c l u d e t h o s e of B e n j a m i n M a z a r for the Jewish Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n Society in 1944-1946 (Maisler [ M a z a r ] , 1952) a n d Pierre D e l o u g a z for t h e Oriental Institute of the University of C h i c a g o in 1 9 5 2 1953, 1963, a n d 1964. T h e u n p u b l i s h e d excavations of P e s sah B a r - A d o n (1951-1955) w e r e t h e m o s t extensive. W i l liam Foxwell Albright's surveys of t h e site a n d tire J o r d a n Valley d u r i n g t h e 1920s revealed distinctive Early B r o n z e III r e d - o n - b l a c k b u r n i s h e d pottery k n o w n as " K h i r b e t K e r a k w a r e " (Albright, 1926), t h e s o u t h e r n m o s t manifestation of t h e Early T r a n s c a u c a s i a n or K u r a - A r a x e s tradition, origi nating in the C a u c a s u s region ( B u r n e y , 1989). [See J o r d a n Valley; and the biographies of Mazar and Albright] T h e site was densely settled d u r i n g the Early B r o n z e A g e a n d also reveals Hellenistic, R o m a n , B y z a n t i n e , a n d Early Islamic r e m a i n s . Stratified E B material was r e c o v e r e d in all parts of the site. T h e M a z a r excavation d i s c e r n e d four phases: B e t h - Y e r a h I: Pit dwellings c o n t a i n i n g ashes a n d animal b o n e s . G r a y - B u r n i s h e d W a r e , called L a t e Chalcolithic by t h e excavators, dates t o t h e early E B I. B e t h - Y e r a h II: R e c t a n g u l a r m u d - b r i c k h o u s e s . G r a i n W a s h or B a n d - S l i p p e d w a r e s d a t e to d i e late E B I. B e t h - Y e r a h III: R e c t a n g u l a r m u d - b r i c k buildings witii b a salt foundations a n d possibly a m u d - b r i c k city wall in t h r e e sections (8 m w i d e ) . T h e p h a s e dates to E B II.
BETH-YERAH B e t h - Y e r a h IV: T h e thickest p h a s e , with u p to 2 m of a c c u m u l a t i o n a n d four b u i l d i n g stages. L a r g e stone buildings w e r e f o u n d along w i t h K h i r b e t K e r a k W a r e a n d a n i m a l figurines. W h e t h e r t h e m u d - b r i c k fortifica tion wall w a s u s e d d u r i n g this p h a s e ( E B III) is unclear. L a t e r excavations revealed E B stratification, in k e e p i n g with t h e strata I - I V s e q u e n c e , v a r y i n g in d e p t h a n d n u m b e r of structural p h a s e s (Esse, 1991, p p . 40-41). B a r - A d o n also excavated an E B IV o c c u p a t i o n level, i n c l u d i n g a p o t t e r ' s w o r k s h o p , h o u s e s with c o u r t y a r d s , a n d a p a v e d street. T h e Tell e l - Y a h u d i y e h w a r e f o u n d in a grave is t h e only M B material k n o w n at t h e site. [See Y a h u d i y e h , T e l l el-.] T h e t h r e e - e l e m e n t m u d - b r i c k wall was f o u n d e d o n virgin soil a n d m a y d a t e to E B I b u t is m o r e characteristic of E B II. B a r - A d o n ' s excavation r e v e a l e d t w o s u p e r i m p o s e d gate structures p a v e d with basalt s t o n e s , w i t h steps leading d o w n into t h e city. T h e latter p h a s e h a d flanking g u a r d r o o m s . T h e early p h a s e w a s flanked on its exterior b y several tall basalt stones, p r o b a b l y massebot. T h e s e gates r e m a i n u n p u b l i s h e d (but see p h o t o g r a p h s in Yeivin, 1955, pi. VI: 1; 1955b, pi. 50, fig. 8; a n d t h e p l a n in E p h ' a l , 1964, p p . 365-366). M a z a r also f o u n d a poorly built s t o n e wall 4 m w i d e . B a r - A d o n cleared a p p r o x i m a t e l y 1,600 m of it along t h e s o u t h e r n a n d western e d g e of t h e site. T h e wall w a s c o n s t r u c t e d o n m a s sive stone f o u n d a t i o n s u p to 7 m w i d e a n d 3 m high. T h e f o u n d a t i o n s u p p o r t e d a poorly p r e s e r v e d m u d - b r i c k s u p e r structure c o n t a i n i n g alternating r o u n d a n d s q u a r e t o w e r s . B a r - A d o n d a t e d this wall to E B I V , b u t it is Hellenistic. T h e m o s t n o t a b l e s t r u c t u r e e x c a v a t e d w a s t h e Building with Circles, d a t e d to E B III. It is a r e c t a n g u l a r stone s t r u c ture (30 X 40 m ) s u r r o u n d e d o n t h r e e sides b y p a v e d streets. C o m p r i s e d of a single wall 10 m thick, it s u r r o u n d s a s q u a r e c o u r t y a r d a n d has a r e c t a n g u l a r e n t r a n c e passage. I n t h e wall are eight o r t e n circles 7-9 m in d i a m e t e r , each s u b d i vided b y partition walls. T h e partitions d o n o t r e a c h t h e center of t h e circles. T h e s t r u c t u r e was e n t e r e d t h r o u g h a 7-meter-wide passageway. N a r r o w p a v e d passages led into two of t h e circles. T h e others w e r e e n t e r e d f r o m a higher level. L a r g e a m o u n t s of p o t t e r y , i n c l u d i n g K h i r b e t K e r a k W a r e , b u r n t animal b o n e s , soot, a n d c a r b o n i z e d olive pits were f o u n d . T h e s h a p e of t h e circles' m u d - b r i c k s u p e r s t r u c ture is u n k n o w n . T h e Building w i t h Circles is o n e of t h e largest E B structures k n o w n . T h e excavators suggested four possible functions for it: fortress, g r a n a r y , palace, or s a n c tuary. T h e building r e s e m b l e s t h e m o d e l of a Helladic g r a n a r y f o u n d o n M e l o s , t h e m o d e l of an Old K i n g d o m g r a n a r y from e l - K a b , a n d depictions of granaries from E g y p t i a n t o m b paintings of t h e f o u r t h a n d fifth dynasties.
313
s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e site, i n c l u d i n g a large residence with a c o u r t y a r d dating to t h e P t o l e m a i c period, and h o u s e s , d e c o r a t e d with colored plaster, p r e s e r v e d to their w i n d o w s . T h e R o m a n materials w e r e f o u n d o n t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e site a n d include a b a t h h o u s e . [See Baths.] Its frigidarium w a s p a v e d w i t h m a r b l e slabs a n d c o n t a i n e d a r o u n d pool lined with m a r b l e situated in t h e center of t h e r o o m a n d s u r r o u n d e d b y a r o u n d b e n c h . B e y o n d the b e n c h were pil lars a n d i m p r e s s i o n s of smaller pillars, indicating t h a t there h a d b e e n a d o m e or pavilion a b o v e t h e p o o l . T h e walls w e r e d e c o r a t e d with colored a n d gilt mosaics. [See Mosaics.] A d joining t h e frigidarium w a s a h y p o c a u s t cellar below a cald a r i u m a n d t e p i d a r i u m . T h e h y p o c a u s t h a d thick walls a n d a c e m e n t floor; its b u r n t - b r i c k a n d ashlar pillars in t h e walls h a d s u p p o r t e d floors of u p p e r r o o m s . Walls containing ver tical square ceramic pipes v e n t e d t h e h o t air u p into t h e c a l d a r i u m . T h e c o m p l e x w a s fed b y a clay p i p e t h a t cut across p a r t of t h e Building w i t h Circles a n d c o n n e c t e d to an a q u e d u c t from N a h a l Y a v n e ' e l to T i b e r i a s . T h e t h e r m a l es t a b l i s h m e n t was c o n s t r u c t e d in t h e fourth or fifth c e n t u r y CE, repaired in t h e sixth c e n t u r y , a n d destroyed in t h e sev e n t h . It was partially built a b o v e a square R o m a n foru-ess (60 sq m ) with corner a n d gate towers c o n s t r u c t e d of d r e s s e d stones and witii a r u b b l e core a n d d a t e d to t h e sec o n d or third centuries CE. W i t h i n t h e fortress were f o u n d a t i o n s of a synagogue, in w h i c h t w o rows of c o l u m n s created a nave a n d aisles. T h e n a v e w a s d e c o r a t e d with a m o s a i c depicting plants a n d animals a n d a c o l u m n b a s e was d e c o r a t e d with carved motifs of a m e n o r a h , lulav, etrog, and in cense shovel. T h e a p s e in t h e s o u t h e r n wall was oriented t o w a r d Jerusalem. A large c h u r c h was excavated o n t h e n o r t h of t h e site b y D e l o u g a z a n d R i c h a r d C. H a i n e s . T h i s was a basilica (11.5 X 12.5 m ) with t h r e e apses a n d a r o w of pillars along its l o n g axis, creating a nave a n d aisles. T o m b s , possibly reli quaries, w e r e f o u n d u n d e r t h e floor of t h e nave. T h e n a r t h e x led to a large r e c t a n g u l a r a t r i u m a n d n a r r o w loggia, all later additions. A small diaconicon was a d d e d to o n e side of the basilica a n d d e c o r a t e d with floral a n d geometric mosaics. T h e diaconicon was d e c o r a t e d with a m o s a i c containing a s h o r t G r e e k dedicatory inscription. T h e basilica was c o n s t r u c t e d in the early fifth century; t h e diaconicon was c o m p l e t e d in 528; a n d t h e c o m p l e x was a b a n d o n e d d u r ing the late sixth or early seventh centuries. A building f r o m t h e Early A r a b p e r i o d was partially excavated above t h e c h u r c h t h a t consists of well-built small r o o m s a r o u n d a courtyard.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
P e r s i a n r e m a i n s a r e r e p o r t e d b y excavators b u t are u n published. H o w e v e r , considerable Hellenistic material was excavated at K h i r b e t K e r a k . T h e largest feature is t h e stone fortification wall w i t h t o w e r s . O t h e r materials r e m a i n u n p u b l i s h e d . B a r - A d o n f o u n d several Hellenistic h o u s e s o n t h e
Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Jordan Valley in the Bronze Age." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, vol, 6, p p . 1 3 74. N e w Haven, 1 9 2 6 . Avi-Yonah, Michael. Gazeteer of Roman Palestine. Q e d e m 5. Jerusalem, 1976.
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Bar-Adon, Pessah. " B e t h Ycrah." Israel Exploration Journal 2 ( 1 9 5 2 ) : 142; 3 ( 1 9 5 3 ) : 1 3 2 ; 4 ( 1 9 5 4 ) : 1 2 8 - 1 2 9 ; 5
B E T H - Z U R , site located 30 k m (19 mi.) s o u t h of J e r u salem in t h e hill c o u n t r y of J u d a h , identified w i t h Kliirbet e t - T u b e i q a h ( m a p reference 159 X n o ) . T h e conical m o u n d rises b e t w e e n 22 a n d 100 m above t h e valley floor, c o m m a n d i n g r o a d s n o r t h w a r d to Jerusalem a n d w e s t w a r d t o w a r d the S h e p h e l a h . Its ancient H e b r e w n a m e is p r e s e r v e d in t h e Arabic of n e a r b y K h i r b e t Burj es-Sur. B e t h - Z u r was first identified b y F . - M . Abel, William F o x well Albright, a n d O v i d R. Sellers. Excavations took place in 1931 and in 1957, directed b y Sellers for t h e P r e s b y t e r i a n ( M c C o r m i c k ) T h e o l o g i c a l Seminary a n d t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h . Albright a n d H . Neil R i c h ardson served as archaeological advisers. I n 1931, s o m e 8,000 sq m were cleared to bedrock; in 1957, fields I a n d i n witiiin the city wall a n d field II outside of it w e r e o p e n e d . [See the biographies of Albright and Abel.] Early B r o n z e A g e s h e r d s suggest s o m e t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m occupation, b u t B e t h - Z u r ' s first significant settlement dates to t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e II/HI period. T h e hill w a s inhabited in the seventeenth century BCE, fortified early in t h e six teenth century, destroyed in a b o u t 1550, a n d t h e n a b a n d o n e d until t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e I r o n A g e . Israelite B e t h - Z u r (Jos. 15:59; 1 Chr. 2:45), a r a t h e r p o o r t o w n , was destroyed late in t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE. T h e biblical description of R e h o b o a m ' s fortifying t h e site (2 Chr. 11:7) remains u n s u b s t a n t i a t e d archaeologically. E x c a v a t i o n s
attest to an Israelite o c c u p a t i o n in t h e m i d - s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, at which t i m e t h e city was u n d e f e n d e d . Fifteen lamelekh jar handles are a m o n g t h e finds f r o m t h a t p e r i o d . A r c h a e ological evidence for a 587 BCE d e s t r u c t i o n is a m b i g u o u s . T h e H e b r e w Bible n o t e s t h a t B e t h - Z u r w a s a district c e n ter at t h e time of t h e rebuilding of t h e J e r u s a l e m T e m p l e , b u t remains of t h e fifth-century BCE t o w n a r e sparse (Neh. 3:16). N u m i s m a t i c evidence substantiates a f o u r t h - c e n t u r y Hellenistic city. In t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, B e t h - Z u r attained n e w i m p o r t a n c e , figuring strategically in t h e conflict b e t w e e n t h e Ptolemies a n d t h e Seleucids. I t w a s t h e n t h a t t h e site's p h a s e I citadel w a s c o n s t r u c t e d . B e t h - Z u r , o r B e t h s u r a , as it was t h e n called, r e a c h e d t h e zenith of its prosperity d u r i n g t h e M a c c a b e a n wars ( s t r a t u m II, s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE) a n d t h e reign of A n t i o c h u s I V E p i p h a n e s ( 1 7 5 - 1 6 5 BCE). It w a s t h e site of a m a j o r battle b e tween J u d a h M a c c a b e e a n d t h e Seleucid general Lysias (1 Mc. 4:28-34; J o s e p h u s , Antiq. 12.7.5). I n 164 BCE, d i e vic torious J u d a h r e c o n s t r u c t e d its M B wall a n d built t h e p h a s e II citadel (1 Mc. 4:61, 6:7, 6:26; Antiq. 12.7.7). Lysias retook c o n t r o l of t h e city a l m o s t i m m e d i a t e l y a n d s t r e n g t h e n e d its defenses even further (1 Mc. 6:28-31, 47-50; Antiq. 12.9.4-5; Wari.1.5). T h e p h a s e III citadel w a s built in 161 BCE b y Ms successor, B a c c h i d e s (1 Mc. 9:52). T h e m a n y R h o d i a n wine-jar h a n d l e s f o u n d a t B e t h - Z u r are r e m n a n t s of t w o d e c a d e s of Seleucid o c c u p a t i o n , a n o c c u pation t h a t i n c l u d e d b o t h a military g a r r i s o n a n d s o m e r e n e g a d e Jews loyal to t h e Seleucids (1 Mc. 10:14). I n the last years of t h e H a s m o n e a n king J o n a t h a n ' s reign (160-143 BCE), his b r o t h e r S i m e o n (later h i g h priest) c o n q u e r e d B e t h - Z u r a n d p o s t e d a J u d e a n garrison t h e r e ( / Mc. 11:65-66,14:33). T h i s s t r a t u m I city r e m a i n e d a n i m p o r t a n t J u d e a n b o r d e r fortress until a n o t h e r H a s m o n e a n , J o h n H y r c a n u s , a n n e x e d I d u m e a in 129 BCE, t h u s u n d e r m i n i n g B e t h Z u r ' s significance. By a b o u t 100 BCE, B e t h - Z u r h a d b e e n abandoned. BIBLIOGRAPHY F u n k , R o b e r t W . " T h e 1 9 5 7 C a m p a i g n a t B e t h - Z u r . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 1 5 0 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 8-20. P r i m a r y field report f r o m the 1 9 5 7 season. L a p p , Paul W., a n d N a n c y L . L a p p . " A C o m p a r a t i v e Study of a Flellenistic Pottery G r o u p from B e t h - Z u r . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 1 5 1 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 1 6 - 2 7 . Study of an as semblage of Hellenistic pottery, with s o m e comparative materials. Sellers, Ovid R., a n d William Foxwell Albright. " T h e First C a m p a i g n of Excavation at B e t h - Z u r . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, n o . 43 ( 1 9 3 1 ) : 2 - 1 3 . Field r e p o r t from the 1 9 3 1 sea son. Sellers, Ovid R., The Citadel of Beth-Zur. Philadelphia, 1 9 3 3 , Final r e p o r t of the first excavation, presenting b o t h archaeological data a n d literary references. Sellers, Ovid R., et al. The 1957 Excavation at Beth-Zur. A n n u a l of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 38. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1968. R e p o r t from the 1 9 5 7 season, which includes a synthesis of the earlier material. BETH ALPERT NAKHAI
BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY. T h e movement k n o w n p o p u l a r l y as biblical archaeology is principally a n A m e r i c a n p h e n o m e n o n . Its p a r e n t disciplines are S y r o - P a l estinian archaeology a n d biblical studies. T h e history of b i b lical archaeology can b e divided i n t o four p h a s e s . P r e m o d e r n P e r i o d . T h e e m e r g e n c e of b o t h S y r o - P a l estinian a n d biblical archaeology really b e g a n in the m i d - to late n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y with t h e rediscovery t h r o u g h e x p l o ration of a n c i e n t Palestine, following t h a t of M e s o p o t a m i a a n d E g y p t . T h i s was also t h e p e r i o d tiiat w i t n e s s e d t h e b i r t h of m o d e r n literary-historical criticism of t h e Bible. T h u s , t h e r o m a n c e of discovery a n d t h e challenge of vindicating the historicity of t h e biblical a c c o u n t s c o m b i n e d to create the m o v e m e n t t h a t c a m e to b e called biblical archaeology. Its objective w a s to b r i n g e x t e r n a l " p r o o f s , " p r o v i d e d by archaeological discoveries, t o b e a r directly o n s u c h p r o b lematic issues as the p a t t i a r c h a l a n d c o n q u e s t eras, M o s e s a n d m o n o t h e i s m , a n d o t h e r issues w h e r e faitii a n d history s e e m e d to intersect. T h e m e t h o d of biblical a r c h a e ology was t o excavate (in reality, t o " m i n e " ) select sites t h o u g h t to b e identified w i t h places a n d events i n t h e Bible. F r o m their r e c o v e r e d r e m a i n s a "political h i s t o r y " w o u l d be w r i t t e n — o f g r e a t m e n a n d p u b l i c e v e n t s — t h a t could b e correlated directly with t h e biblical texts for t h e p u r p o s e of c o r r o b o r a t i n g the texts (or at least t h e writers' i n t e r p r e tation of the texts). H o w e v e r , despite m o u n t i n g e n t h u s i a s m for archaeology in biblical circles in late n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y E u r o p e , neither A m e r i c a n biblicists n o r A m e r i c a n scholars in a n y disciplines, e x c e p t for t h e philologist E d w a r d R o b i n s o n , w e r e involved i n Palestinian archaeology until nearly t h e e n d of t h e c e n t u r y . [See the biography of Robinson.] T h e first actual fieldwork in Palestine w a s carried o u t for the British Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d (1865-) b y t h e leg e n d a r y Sir William Flinders P e t r i e , at T e l l el-Hesi i n s o u t h ern Palestine (possibly biblical E g l o n ) in a six-week season in 1890. [See Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d ; and the biog raphy of Petrie.] A m e r i c a n i n v o l v e m e n t in fieldwork finally materialized w h e n F r e d e r i c k J o n e s Bliss directed a followu p season in 1893. [See the biography of Bliss.] It w a s Bliss w h o , in 1903, delivered t h e Ely L e c t u r e s at U n i o n T h e o l o g ical S e m i n a r y in N e w Y o r k C i t y — R o b i n s o n ' s old s c h o o l — u n d e r t h e p u b l i s h e d title The Development of Palestine Ex ploration ( N e w Y o r k , 1906). It w a s t h e first c o m p r e h e n s i v e survey of t h e field. T h e c o m b i n a t i o n of Bible a n d a r c h a e ology, evident at t h e b e g i n n i n g of A m e r i c a n archaeology i n Palestine (dating b a c k in fact to R o b i n s o n ' s explorations in 1838), was to r e m a i n characteristic. S o m e s u b s e q u e n t A m e r i c a n excavations, s u c h as t h o s e of G e o r g e A n d r e w Reisner at S a m a r i a in 1908-1910, w e r e carried o u t u n d e r secular auspices; h o w e v e r , t h e g r o w i n g f u n d a m e n t a l i s t m o d e r n i s t c o n t r o v e r s y of t h e early t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y — n a m e d for t h e six-volume series of Evangelical t h e o l o g y called The Fundamentals (the first ones p u b l i s h e d in a b o u t
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1909—and its divisive i m p a c t o n A m e r i c a n religious life set t h e scene for the flowering of biblical archaeology. H e y d a y : 1 9 2 0 S - 1 9 6 0 S . W o r l d W a r I b r o u g h t a h a l t to all archaeological fieldwork in t h e N e a r East. T h e year 1919, however, m a r k e d t h e d a w n of a n e w era. I n that year the fledgling British M a n d a t o r y G o v e r n m e n t established a D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities i n Palestine a n d p r o m u l g a t e d a m o d e r n antiquities law; a n d A m e r i c a n s f o u n d e d t h e O r i ental Institute at t h e University of C h i c a g o a n d b e g a n t o p l a n for an i n - c o u n t r y institute a n d y e a r - r o u n d field o p e r a t i o n at T e l l M e g i d d o , in t h e Jezreel Valley. P e r h a p s the m o s t sig nificant event, as it t u r n e d o u t , was the arrival in J e r u s a l e m of a y o u n g A m e r i c a n scholar, William Foxwell Albright, at t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of O r i e n t a l Research ( A S O R ) , w h i c h h a d been established in 1900 b u t h a d n e i t h e r a building, a p r o g r a m of fieldwork, n o r a l o n g - t e r m director. [See A m e r ican Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h . ] Albright b e c a m e u n a r guably the m o s t p r o m i n e n t a n d influential Orientalist of t h e t w e n t i e t h century. [See the biography of Albright.] Albright w a s t h e director of A S O R f r o m 1920 to 1929 a n d again from 1933 t o 1936. H e also directed field c a m p a i g n s at T e l l el-Ful (biblical G i b e a h ) in 1922 a n d T e l l Beit M i r s i m (biblical D e b i r ? ) from 1926 t o 1932. His mastery of t h e p o t tery of Palestine a n d his ability to establish the results of excavations i n the b r o a d c o n t e x t of t h e w h o l e of t h e ancient N e a r E a s t quickly placed h i m in the forefront of Palestinian archaeology. F u r t h e r m o r e , it w a s h e w h o really established biblical archaeology as a legitimate enterprise, at least in principle. U n d e r b o t h Ms influence a n d direct tutelage there developed a p a t t e r n t h a t i n c l u d e d t h e deliberate choice of biblical sites for excavation; financial a n d institutional back ing d r a w n f r o m c h u r c h - r e l a t e d organizations (largely P r o t estant); field staffs m a d e u p a l m o s t exclusively of biblical scholars, seminarians, a n d clerics; a n d a n a g e n d a t h a t s u b jugated strictly archaeological m e t h o d s a n d objectives to w h a t w e r e perceived as t h e larger issues of biblical i n t e r p r e tation (largely in t h e H e b r e w Bible). Projects of this t y p e w e r e t h o s e of Albright himself at T e l l el-Ful, Bethel, a n d T e l l Beit M i r s i m in 1922-1934; of the Pacific School of R e ligion at T e l l e n - N a s b e h in 1926-1935; of H a v e r f o r d C o l lege, Pennsylvania, at B e t h - S h e m e s h in 1928-1933; a n d , of c o u r s e , t h e A m e r i c a n excavations in the 1950S-1960S at s u c h sites as D i b o n , H e s h b o n / H e s b a n , S h e c h e m , Ai, T a ' a n a c h , G i b e o n , a n d other sites in m o d e r n Israel a n d J o r d a n (see below). T h e biblical archaeology m o v e m e n t d o m i n a t e d A m e r i c a n Palestinian archaeology ( t h o u g h n o t continental) from t h e 1920s t h r o u g h the 1960s, a n d it still h a s a few wistful d e fenders. I n retrospect, it a p p e a r s t h a t the m o v e m e n t consti t u t e d a c h a p t e r in A m e r i c a n religious life, a n d particularly in theological d e v e l o p m e n t , as seen in c o n n e c t i o n with t h e biblical theology m o v e m e n t i n t h e 1950s by Albright's p r o tege G . E r n e s t W r i g h t a n d others ( D e v e r , 1985,1993). [See the biography of Wright.]
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Albright h a d furthered the original historical aims of b i b lical archaeology, s u c h as t h e a t t e m p t to u s e archaeology to confirm the essential historicity of the patriarchs, of M o s e s a n d early m o n o t h e i s m , a n d of the Israelite c o n q u e s t of C a n a a n . Wright, however, w e n t further in deliberately joining t h e issue of "faith a n d h i s t o r y " — a characteristic t h e m e of t h e N e o - O r t h o d o x theology m o v e m e n t of the 1950s—with developments in Syro-Palestinian archaeology. Unlike Al bright, W r i g h t w a s an ordained clergyman a n d a leading biblical scholar—indeed h e was P a r k m a n Professor of D i vinity at H a r v a r d . As W r i g h t stated the issue: " N o w in B i b lical faith everything d e p e n d s u p o n whether t h e central events [i.e., the call of A b r a h a m , the promise of t h e L a n d of C a n a a n , die c o n q u e s t u n d e r J o s h u a , etc.] actually o c c u r r e d " (God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, L o n d o n , 1952, p . 126). T o m a n y , especially in E u r o p e , W r i g h t ' s position a p p e a r e d dangerously close to fundamentalism, even m o r e so t h a n Albright's historicism. By the mid-late 1960s, however, t h e biblical theology m o v e m e n t h a d w a n e d , a n d t h e stage w a s set for A m e r i c a n Syro-Palestinian archaeology to m o v e t o w a r d i n d e p e n d e n t status. Nevertheless, u p until t h a t time m u c h of postwar A m e r i c a n archaeology in the H o l y L a n d r e m a i n e d in the traditional biblical m o l d . T h a t included Wright's o w n excavations at S h e c h e m (1956-1968); the w o r k of Joseph A. Callaway, a professor at the S o u t h e r n Baptist Theological Seminary, at Ai (1964-1969); the work of P a u l L a p p , a L u t h e r a n clergyman, at 'Iraq el-Amir (1961, 1962), T a ' a n a c h (1963-1968), T e l l e r - R u m e i t h (1967), B a b e d h - D h r a ' (1965-1967), a n d elsewhere; the excavations of James B. Pritchard, professor of religious t h o u g h t at the U n i versity of Pennsylvania, at el-Jib (1956-1962) a n d T e l l esSa'idiyeh (1967); a n d t h e project of Siegfried H . H o r n , L a w r e n c e T . Geraty, a n d others at H e s b a n (1968-1978). " N e w A r c h a e o l o g y " : 1970S-1980S. It m a y b e significant t h a t all the a b o v e excavations were of sites in J o r d a n , w h e r e Americans with a Christian theological b a c k g r o u n d a p p a r ently felt m o r e at h o m e after the partition of Palestine in 1948. Although a vigorous Israeli national school was d e veloping in die n e w State of Israel, there were no A m e r i c a n directed excavations t h e r e until t h e long-lived project di rected by William G . D e v e r , Joe D . Seger, a n d others at G e z e r (1964-1974, w i t h final seasons in 1984 a n d 1990). G e z e r was followed by other projects u n d e r Gezer-trained personnel: at Tell el-Hesi (John E. Worrell, L a w r e n c e E. Stager, a n d others, 1971-1983); at Galilean synagogue sites a n d at S e p p h o r i s , in separate projects (Eric M . M e y e r s a n d C a r o l M e y e r s , a n d t h e n James F . Strange, 197c—1981 a n d 1984-, respectively); at L a h a v (Seger a n d D a n P . Cole, 9 7 6 ~ ) ; at T e l M i q n e ( S e y m o u r Gitin, with T r u d e D o t i i a n of the H e b r e w University of Jerusalem, 1981-); at Ashkelon (Stager and otiiers, 1985-); a n d other sites. O t h e r A m e r i c a n excavations of this a n d later periods in Israel i n c l u d e d large
projects at C a e s a r e a ( R o b e r t J. Bull a n d L a w r e n c e E. T o o m b s , 1 9 7 1 - ) ; at T e l Anafa (Saul S. W e i n b e r g a n d S h a r o n H e r b e r t , 1968-1981); T e l J e m m e h ( G u s v a n Beek, 1970-1982); a n d Be'er Resisim in the N e g e v ( D e v e r , jointiy with R u d o l p h C o h e n of the Israel D e p a r t m e n t of A n t i q u i ties, 1978-1980). T h e G e z e r excavations p r o v e d to b e a m i c r o c o s m of d e v e l o p m e n t s in t h e field of archaeology. T h e y t r a n s f o r m e d "biblical" archaeology b e y o n d recognition, gradually b r i n g ing a b o u t t h e e m e r g e n c e of the discipline of Syro-Palestinian archaeology by t h e mid-1970s. T h e r e o c c u r r e d in tiiis e n terprise w h a t t h e scientist/philosopher T h o m a s S. K u h n (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, C h i c a g o , 1970), h a s t e r m e d a p a r a d i g m shift. In this case it w a s a practical c o n sensus a b o u t i m p r o v i n g field a n d r e c o r d i n g t e c h n i q u e s . It w a s n o t a deliberate a n d p r o f o u n d intellectual r e o r i e n t a t i o n — d i e d e v e l o p m e n t of a systematic b o d y of t h e o r y as this w a s u n d e r s t o o d in other b r a n c h e s of a r c h a e o l o g y or in the social sciences generally (that is, in fact, yet t o o c c u r ) . F r o m t h e late-i96os t h r o u g h the mid-1980s biblical a n d Syro-Palestinian archaeology b o r r o w e d e l e m e n t s of a t r e n d in Americanist N e w W o r l d archaeology t h a t c a m e to b e called the N e w Archaeology. T h e s e " e x t e r n a l f a c t o r s , " as w e shall call t h e m , in t h e d e m i s e of biblical archaeology, n e e d only b e e n u m e r a t e d briefly h e r e , since d i e y h a v e b e e n a m p l y treated elsewhere (Dever, 1993; D r i n k a r d et a l , 1988). T h e principal aspects of t h e N e w A r c h a e o l o g y fol low: 1. A n orientation t h a t is m o r e anthropological t h a n histor ical, away f r o m particularization t o w a r d the study of cul t u r e a n d culture c h a n g e generally 2. A " n o m o t h e t i c " a p p r o a c h t h a t seeks to f o r m u l a t e a n d test t h e lawlike p r o p o s i t i o n s t h a t g o v e r n cultural p r o cesses (thus, " p r o c e s s u a l i s t " a r c h a e o l o g y ) — a n d t h u s t o develop a b o d y of t h e o r y t h a t qualifies archaeology n o t only as a discipline b u t as a science 3. A n ecological t h r u s t tiiat e m p h a s i z e s t e c h n o e n v i r o n m e n tal factors (rather t h a n simply evolutionary trajectories) in the role of a d a p t a t i o n in culture c h a n g e 4. A multidisciplinary strategy t h a t involves m a n y of t h e physical sciences a n d their statistical a n d analytic p r o c e d u r e s in a t t e m p t i n g to r e c o n s t r u c t the ancient l a n d scape, climate, p o p u l a t i o n , e c o n o m y , sociopolitical s t r u c t u r e , a n d o t h e r subsystems (often u s i n g t h e m o d e l of G e n e r a l Systems T h e o r y ) 5. A n insistence o n an overall, u p - f r o n t " r e s e a r c h d e s i g n " for projects t h a t integrate all of t h e a b o v e , a n d t h u s a d v a n c e archaeology as a culturally relevant enterprise.
I
Radical as these t r e n d s w e r e to conventional "biblical ar chaeologists" in t h e 1960s, m a n y aspects w e r e prefigured in d e v e l o p m e n t s already taking place in t h e field of S y r o - P a l -
BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY estinian archaeology, or " i n t e r n a l f a c t o r s " in c h a n g e . T h e s e included t h e following: 1. T h e r e c e n t stratigraphic r e v o l u t i o n led b y K a t h l e e n M . K e n y o n a n d others t h a t p r o m i s e d total retrieval, a u t o matically g e n e r a t i n g data so c o p i o u s a n d varied t h e y r e q u i r e d analysis b y specialists 2. T h e g r o w i n g complexity a n d costs of excavation, e s p e cially in Israel, w h i c h was p u s h i n g t h e field inevitably t o w a r d professionalization 3. Field schools a n d s t u d e n t v o l u n t e e r i s m — w h i c h n o t only constituted a n intellectual challenge b u t b r o k e t h e m o n o p o l y of biblical scholars o n d i g staffs a n d t h u s c o n t r i b u t e d to t h e secularization of t h e discipline 4. T h e increasing sense t h a t "biblical a r c h a e o l o g y " w a s n o t only parochial b u t h a d failed to achieve even its o w n lim ited a g e n d a of historical-theological issues. A n o t h e r major factor in A m e r i c a n Syro-Palestinian a r chaeology's " c o m i n g of a g e " w a s c o m p e t i t i o n with other national schools a n d their a p p r o a c h e s . T h e E u r o p e a n schools, while n o t i g n o r i n g t h e c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n a r c h a e ology in t h e Floly L a n d a n d t h e Bible, h a d taken differing a p p r o a c h e s : s o m e completely secular ( t h e British); others aligned with t h e religious establishment, largely t h r o u g h a state c h u r c h t h a t located Palestinian archaeology a c a d e m i cally in state university d e p a r t m e n t s of theology (the G e r m a n s ) ; a n d still others viewing clerics a n d secular scholars alike involved in N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology generally (the F r e n c h ) . T h e significant difference w a s t h a t n o n e of t h e E u r o p e a n schools was h a u n t e d b y t h e specter of f u n d a m e n t a l ism, as t h e A m e r i c a n school h a d historically b e e n . A t t h e same t i m e , n o n e of t h e s e schools p o s s e s s e d t h e p e r s e v e r a n c e to enable t h e m t o survive as a major force in Syro-Palestin ian archaeology as it evolved into a m a t u r e discipline in t h e 1980s. T h e M i d d l e E a s t e r n countries t h e m s e l v e s h a d developed national schools only in t h e 1960s, well after t h e establish m e n t of t h e State of Israel a n d t h e e n d of t h e m a n d a t o r y g o v e r n m e n t s in Syria, J o r d a n , a n d Iraq. A r a b countries w a n t e d little to d o w i t h either t h e Bible, t h e ancient history of Israel, or t h e search for W e s t e r n cultural a n d theological roots in t h e H o l y L a n d . H o w e v e r , their national schools, as they d e v e l o p e d in t h e 1960s a n d later, d i d n o t m a n a g e to avoid bias t o w a r d p a n - I s l a m i c c u l t u r e or e s c a p e the pull of nationalism. All in all, h o w e v e r , archaeology in A r a b c o u n tries h a s developed recently, w i t h all t h e strengths a n d w e a k nesses of t h e field generally. A m e r i c a n i n v o l v e m e n t from c o u n t r y to c o u n t r y is difficult t o assess b e c a u s e of rapidly changing political configurations. I n t h e early 1990s A m e r ican fieldwork a n d influence in J o r d a n are strong, t h a n k s t o the w o r k of t h e A m e r i c a n C e n t e r for Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A C O R ) in A m m a n since 1968. British a n d G e r m a n insti
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tutes also exist b u t are less c o n s p i c u o u s . A m e r i c a n a n d other foreign projects c o n t i n u e in Syria o n varying scales, while L e b a n o n is virtually closed to all archaeologists. T h e situation in Israel is in m a n y ways u n i q u e . Israelis claim t h a t they c o n n e c t w i t h t h e biblical p a s t n o t necessarily in t h e sense of formal religion, certainly n o t theologically— since m o s t of t h e archaeologists a r e neither personally o b s e r v a n t n o r academically t r a i n e d in Bible a n d religion—but emotionally a n d directly. T h e y m a i n t a i n m a t tire Flebrew Bible is, after all, t h e virtual constitution of t h e m o d e r n state; t h a t for Jews displaced for c e n t u r i e s , even secular Jews, dig ging for their p a s t in t h e soil of t h e H o l y L a n d is a vital m a t t e r of identity, a n existential q u e s t n o o n e h a s t h e right to d e n y t h e m . T h e y h a v e a p o i n t , a l t h o u g h t h e a r g u m e n t is s o m e w h a t d i s i n g e n u o u s , a n d it c a n lead to nationalist e x t r e m e s . I n a n y case, Israeli archaeologists w h o u s e t h e p h r a s e "biblical a r c h a e o l o g y " for p o p u l a r c o n s u m p t i o n , or for an English-speaking a u d i e n c e , d o so w i t h a m e a n i n g t h a t differs from typical A m e r i c a n u s a g e , a n d partly to avoid t h e awk w a r d t e r m " P a l e s t i n i a n . " ( I n H e b r e w , the c o m m o n desig n a t i o n is simply " t h e archaeology of Eretz-Israel, t h e " L a n d of Israel," e x a c d y parallel t o t h e archaeology of J o r d a n or Syria.) T h e m o s t r e c e n t syntheses b y Israelis of archaeolog ical results (Amihai M a z a r , Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000-586 B.C.E., N e w York, 1988; A m n o n B e n T o r , ed., The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, N e w Flaven, 1992) h a v e n o t b e e n m a t c h e d b y A m e r i c a n archaeologists w o r k i n g in Israel. T h e 1990s h a v e , h o w e v e r , b e e n witness to several major a n d a n u m b e r of smaller A m e r i c a n field p r o j ects, m o s t c o o r d i n a t e d w i t h A S O R t h r o u g h the W . F . Al b r i g h t Institute of Archaeological R e s e a r c h in Jerusalem. D e s p i t e t h e c h a n g i n g b a l a n c e of Israeli a n d foreign-spon s o r e d w o r k , it is obvious t h a t t h e leadership h a s shifted to Israeli archaeologists, w h o n o w d o m i n a t e t h e field t h r o u g h extensive excavations, surveys, a n d publications. [See Israel Antiquities Authority; Israel E x p l o r a t i o n Society; Survey of Israel.] T h e overall general i m p a c t of t h e A m e r i c a n - g e n e r a t e d N e w Archaeology m u s t b e assessed. As biblical archaeology m o v e d f r o m a relative b a c k w a t e r into t h e m a i n s t r e a m of ar chaeology in t h e 1970s it w a s considerably influenced b y t h e N e w Archaeology t h e n c u r r e n t , especially b y its m u c h m o r e anthropological t h a n historical orientation, a n d its c o n c e r n with c u l t u r e a n d culture c h a n g e (so-called "processual a r c h a e o l o g y " ) . Yet, if t h e full i m p a c t of t h e N e w Archaeology w a s felt, it w a s so only belatedly: t h e antihistorical attitude a n d theoretical t h r u s t t o w a r d positivist philosophies of sci e n c e w e r e rejected outright; a n d t h e actual changes were m o r e a m a t t e r of style t h a n of s u b s t a n c e . T h e real contri b u t i o n of t h e " N e w A r c h a e o l o g y " lay first of all in its c o m m i t m e n t t o multidisciplinary m e t h o d s a n d its insistence o n explicit, self-conscious s t a t e m e n t s of m e t h o d s a n d p u r p o s e , as we h a v e seen. S e c o n d , t h e b r o a d overriding ecological
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a p p r o a c h placed all archaeological research in t h e b r o a d c o n t e x t in w h i c h it belongs. T h e s e aspects of A m e r i c a n i s t " N e w A r c h a e o l o g y " should r e m a i n features of S y r o - P a l e s tinian archaeology as it m o v e s into the n e x t p h a s e of its o w n development. A still newer a p p r o a c h to recovering t h e p a s t developed in the late 1980s: t h e postprocessualist archaeology. Specif ically identified with several British archaeologists s u c h as C a m b r i d g e ' s I a n H o d d e r (cf. Reading the Past: Current Ap proaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, C a m b r i d g e , 1986), this a p p r o a c h rejects t h e positivism, scientism, a n d deter m i n i s m of t h e m o r e e x t r e m e expressions of t h e N e w A r chaeology. It r e t u r n s t o m o r e traditional, symbolic, ideolog ical (or " m e n t a l i s t " ) , a n d historical explanations of culture c h a n g e . It views " c o n t e x t " ( H o d d e r ' s preferred t e r m ) as b r o a d e r t h a n t h e ecological setting—as e m b r a c i n g t h e c o n c e p t of culture in its widest sense. T h i s m o r e b a l a n c e d a n d eclectic a p p r o a c h m a y b e particularly congenial t o future Syro-Palestinian a n d biblical archaeologists. C u r r e n t S t a t u s : T w o D i s c i p l i n e s . T h e t r e n d s of the 1970s and 1980s resulted in sweeping a n d p r o b a b l y p e r m a n e n t c h a n g e . A m e r i c a n Syro-Palestinian archaeology h a s e m e r g e d as an a u t o n o m o u s academic a n d professional dis cipline, often quite i n d e p e n d e n t of biblical studies, with its o w n a p p r o p r i a t e aims a n d m e t h o d s , T h e c h a n g e of n a m e from biblical to Syro-Palestinian archaeology (reviving A l bright's original designation in t h e 1930s) is n o w widely u s e d , appropriately reflecting the n e w reality. T h a t is t o say, this field is simply a b r a n c h of N e a r E a s t e r n or L e v a n t i n e archaeology—the o t h e r accepted b r a n c h e s being E g y p t i a n , Anatolian, M e s o p o t a m i a n , a n d Iranian archaeology ( C y p riot archaeology m a y straddle t h e b o r d e r b e t w e e n N e a r E a s t e r n a n d classical archaeology). T h e specialization of Syro-Palestinian archaeology fo cuses primarily o n ancient C a n a a n , w h i c h includes biblical Israel in t h e I r o n Age. N o longer " t h e h a n d m a i d e n of h i s t o r y , " as a f o r m e r generation p u t it—and especially n o t of biblical history—Syro-Palestinian archaeology h a s c o m e of age as a parallel b u t u n i q u e m e a n s of investigating t h e past, based n o t o n texts alone b u t primarily o n material culture remains. T h e archaeology of ancient Palestine as a cultural entity is still allied with biblical a n d ancient N e a r E a s t e r n studies, ancillary a n d c o n t r i b u t o r y disciplines. Increasingly, however, it is multidisciplinary, linked also with general ar chaeology, with social a n d cultural a n t h r o p o l o g y , with t h e social sciences, a n d even with t h e natural sciences, w h e n analytical p r o c e d u r e s are required, T h e secularization of Syro-Palestinian archaeology also poses a challenge. T h e l o n g - d o m i n a n t u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the history of a n c i e n t Israel as u n i q u e , or Heilsgeschichte ("sal vation h i s t o r y " ) , has given way to an a p p r o a c h t h a t sees ancient Israel a n d C a n a a n in t e r m s of Siedlungsgeschichte, t h e long, c o m p l e x settlement history of t h e ancient N e a r E a s t generally (similar to la longue duree of F e r n a n d B r a u d e l a n d
historians of t h e annales school). I n v o k i n g t h e d e u s e x m a china of divine p u r p o s e d o e s n o t h i n g t o elucidate t h e actual p h e n o m e n a of culture a n d culture c h a n g e , e v e n in a n c i e n t Palestine. Syro-Palestinian archaeology, as a basically h i s torical discipline, deals with t h e p r o b l e m of r e c o n s t r u c t i n g a n c i e n t events, o r " W h a t h a p p e n e d ? " Exegesis a n d theology deal with t h e question " W h a t did/does it m e a n ? " T h e s e m a y i n d e e d b e c o m p l e m e n t a r y tasks, h o w e v e r , h o n e s t i n q u i r y d e m a n d s t h a t t h e y b e k e p t separate, a t least initially. S y r o Palestinian archaeology has n o w m a t u r e d t o w h e r e it is r e a d y to a s s u m e its p r o p e r role in this a n d o t h e r dialogues. Ironically, it is t h e n e w " s e c u l a r " archaeology t h a t p r o m i s e s t o contribute m o s t to biblical studies, precisely b e c a u s e it is indifferent, in t h e best sense of t h e w o r d ( b e l o w ) . T o w a r d a D i a l o g u e . Biblical a r c h a e o l o g y — o r " t h e ar chaeology of Palestine i n t h e biblical p e r i o d " — i s n o t a s u r r o g a t e for Syro-Palestinian archaeology, or e v e n a discipline a t all in t h e a c a d e m i c sense. It is a b r a n c h of biblical studies, a n interdisciplinary p u r s u i t t h a t seeks t o utilize t h e p e r t i n e n t results of archaeological research t o elucidate t h e historical a n d cultural setting of t h e Bible. In short, biblical a r c h a e ology is w h a t it always w a s , e x c e p t for t h e brief AlbrightW r i g h t period. T h e crucial issue for biblical archaeology is p r o p e r l y conceived as a dialogue to achieve t h e p r o p e r r e lationship b e t w e e n its u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d u s e of archaeology o n t h e o n e h a n d , a n d its u n d e r s t a n d i n g of t h e issues in b i b lical studies t h a t are fitting subjects for archaeological illu m i n a t i o n on t h e other. W h a t is t h a t relationship? T h a t is, w h a t c a n archaeology a n d biblical studies c o n t r i b u t e t o each other? First, a r c h a e ology is u n i q u e in p r o v i d i n g a n i m m e d i a t e c o n t e x t in C a n a a n in w h i c h t o situate t h e places, p e o p l e s , a n d events of t h e B i b l e — m o s t of w h i c h w o u l d otherwise b e w i t h o u t any external witness, a n d therefore are p r o b l e m a t i c for t h e h i s torian. I n particular, m o s t aspects of t h e daily lives of o r d i n a r y p e o p l e w o u l d n o t b e k n o w n b e c a u s e t h e biblical writers a n d editors w e r e , rather, p r e o c c u p i e d w i t h t h e g r a n d s c h e m e s of their o w n b r a n d of t h e o c r a t i c history. T h e Site im Leben ("life-setting") t h a t t h e form-critical a n d traditiohistorical schools of biblical scholarship s o u g h t for specific biblical texts a n d larger blocks of material r e m a i n s at b e s t a Sitz im Literatur, a p a r t f r o m t h e real-life setting archaeology a n d archaeology alone c a n p r o v i d e . S e c o n d , archaeological discoveries, i n c l u d i n g t h e textual evidence r e c o v e r e d t h r o u g h excavation, e n a b l e us t o p a i n t t h e b r o a d e r canvas of a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t e r n p e o p l e s a n d cul t u r e s , against w h i c h Israel's distinctiveness (if n o t h e r u n i q u e n e s s ) c a n b e m o r e accurately p o r t r a y e d a n d fully a p preciated. S u c h c o m p a r a t i v e cultural study, b a s e d o n ar chaeological investigation a n d its u n i q u e angle of vision o n t h e past, p r o v i d e s a perspective t h a t n o other a p p r o a c h can, certainly n o t o n e b a s e d o n m i n u t e internal analysis of t h e texts alone. Finally, archaeology can c o n t r i b u t e t o questions of faith a n d morality, a l t h o u g h n o t b y offering " p r o o f s . " It
BIBLICAL LITERATURE: Hebrew Scriptures d o e s , h o w e v e r , h a v e its limits: a r c h a e o l o g y illuminates, b u t c a n n o t confirm; it brings u n d e r s t a n d i n g , b u t n o t necessarily belief. Y e t , a g r a s p of t h e material reality of a n c i e n t Israel, in all its variety a n d vitality, c a n m a k e d i e Bible b o t h a c c e s sible a n d credible. T h e dialogue c a n b e viewed f r o m t h e o p p o s i t e p e r s p e c tive, t h a t is, w h a t c a n biblical studies c o n t r i b u t e to S y r o Palestinian archaeology? I t c a n i n t e r p r e t d i e texts of t h e B i ble in t h e light of t h e best m o d e r n tools of philology, literary-critical, exegetic, a n d h e r m e n e u t i c principles. B e cause this is a c o m p l e x , highly specialized task, t e a m w o r k a m o n g specialists is r e q u i r e d . H e r e t h e c o n t r i b u t i o n of b i b lical scholarship to archaeology is essential b e c a u s e t h e H e b r e w Bible is virtually all t h e literature t h e r e is for I r o n A g e Palestine. D e s p i t e t h e limitations of theological biases, b i b lical literature provides a wealth of i n f o r m a t i o n o n c o n d i tions in Palestine, as well as a n o u d i n e of its political history a n d i d e o l o g y — a t least of t h e r u l i n g classes, scribal schools, a n d theological circles t h a t p r o d u c e d t h e Bible in its final version. A r c h a e o l o g y is n o t " m u t e " w i t h o u t texts, as biblical scholars s u c h as M a r t i n N o t h a n d others h a v e l o n g m a i n tained; h o w e v e r , its voice is amplified considerably w h e n textual r e c o r d s a r e available a n d h a p p e n to a c c o r d well with t h e interpretation of material c u l t u r e r e m a i n s . T h e r e is little t o be said a b o u t a r c h a e o l o g y a n d N e w T e s t a m e n t studies in this context. Biblical archaeology h a s b e e n a l m o s t exclusively t h e p r o v i n c e of scholars of t h e H e b r e w Bible—largely b e c a u s e of t h e l o n g s w e e p of biblical history, t h e vast setting of t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t , t h e p a u c i t y of direct extrabiblical historical t e s t i m o n y , a n d d i e c o m p l e x historio g r a p h i c issues involved. By c o n t r a s t , t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t covers a brief, extremely w e l l - d o c u m e n t e d p e r i o d in R o m a n Syria-Palestine a n d Asia M i n o r . I n a d d i t i o n , t h e theological issues involved in t h e study of C h r i s t i a n origins h a v e n o t b e e n t h o u g h t a m e n a b l e t o archaeological investigation in t h e s a m e w a y as t h e origins of early Israel. [See also N e w Archaeology. In addition, are the subject of independent entries]
the sites
mentioned
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Dever, William G. Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Re search. Seattle, 1 9 9 0 . Dever, William G . "Biblical Archaeology: D e a t h and R e b i r t h ? " In Bib lical Archaeology Today, 1090: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited b y A v r a h a m Biran and Joseph A v i r a m , p p . 7 0 6 - 7 2 2 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 3 . D r l n k a r d , Joel F . , et al„ eds. Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An In troduction to Palestinian Archaeology Dedicated to Joseph A. Callaway. Atianta, 1988. Glock, Albert E . "Biblical Archaeology: A n E m e r g i n g Discipline." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by L a w r e n c e T . G e r a t y a n d L a r r y G . Herr, p p . 8 5 1 0 1 . Berrien Springs, M i c h . , 1 9 8 6 . K i n g , Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 3 . K u h n e n , Hans-Peter. Palastina in Griechisch-Rdmischerzeit. Handbuch der Archiiologie Vorderasiens, 2.2. M u n i c h , 1990. M a z a r , Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. N e w York, 1 9 8 8 . M e y e r s , Carol L „ a n d Eric M . M e y e r s , " E x p a n d i n g the Frontiers of Biblical Archaeology." Eretz-Israel 20 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : i 4 0 * - i 4 7 * . M e y e r s , Carol L . " T h e Contributions of Archaeology." In The Oxford Study Bible, edited by M . Jack Suggs et al., p p . 4 8 - 5 6 . N e w York, 1992. M o o r e y , P . R . S. A Century of Biblical Archaeology. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 9 1 . N o d i , M a r t i n . " D i e Beitrag der Archaologie zur Geschichte Israels." Vetus Testamentum Supplement 7 ( i 9 6 0 ) : 2 6 2 - 2 8 2 . P e r d u e , L e o G . , et al., eds. Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Memory ofD. Glenn Rose. A d a n t a , 1 9 8 7 . Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Ar chaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917. New York, 1982. W e i p p e r t , Helga. Palastina in Vorhellenisticher zeil. H a n d b u c h der A r chaologie Vorderasiens, 2 . 1 . M u n i c h , 1988. Wright, G . Ernest. "Biblical Archaeology T o d a y . " I n New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by D a v i d N o e l F r e e d m a n and Jonas C, Greenfield, p p . 1 4 9 - 1 6 5 . G a r d e n City, N . Y . , 1 9 6 9 . WILLIAM G . DEVER
B I B L I C A L L I T E R A T U R E . [ 7 b survey the chrono logical range and literary genres of the books of the Bible and to discuss the formation of the formal canon, this entry comprises two articles: H e b r e w S c r i p t u r e s and N e w T e s t a m e n t . ]
Hebrew Scriptures BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e I m p a c t of Archaeology on Biblical R e s e a r c h . " In New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited b y D a v i d Noel F r e e d m a n a n d Jonas C. Greenfield, p p . 1 - 1 6 . G a r d e n City, N.Y., 1969. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, a n d Amihai M a z a r . "Israeli Archaeology." World Ar chaeology 13 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 3 1 0 - 3 2 5 . B e n - T o r , A m n o n , ed. The Archaeology
of Ancient Israel N e w H a v e n ,
1992. Broshi, M a g e n . "Religion, Ideology, a n d Politics a n d T h e i r I m p a c t o n Palestinian Archaeology." Israel Museum Journal 6 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 7 - 3 2 . D e v e r , William G . Archaeology and Biblical Studies: Retrospects andProspects. E v a n s t o n , 111., 1 9 7 4 . Dever, William G . "Syro-Palestinian a n d Biblical Archaeology." In The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, edited by Douglas A . K n i g h t a n d G e n e M . T u c k e r , p p . 3 1 - 7 4 . C h i c o , Calif., 1 9 8 5 .
T h e d r a m a t i c changes in biblical scholarship d u r i n g the late twentieth c e n t u r y h a v e shattered t h e relative c o n s e n s u s that m u c h of d i e field h a d enjoyed since t h e a d v e n t of historical criticism in t h e late 1800s. F e m i n i s t , r e a d e r - r e s p o n s e , d e constructionist, a n d other n e w a p p r o a c h e s h a v e challenged u n d e r s t a n d i n g s n o t only of individual b o o k s a n d passages b u t indeed of t h e Bible's very naftire a n d origins. T h e s e h e a t e d a n d o n - g o i n g d e b a t e s center o n a collection of d o c u m e n t s , m o s t of w h i c h are believed to h a v e b e e n writ t e n in H e b r e w , t h a t are a c c e p t e d as religious c a n o n b y J u d a i s m a n d Christianity. T h e m o d e r n Jewish c a n o n has a tri partite organization: t h e T o r a h ( t h e first five b o o k s , also called t h e P e n t a t e u c h ) ; P r o p h e t s , s u b d i v i d e d into F o r m e r
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BIBLICAL LITERATURE: Hebrew Scriptures
P r o p h e t s (Joshua t h r o u g h Kings) a n d L a t t e r P r o p h e t s (Isa iah t h r o u g h Malachi); a n d Writings (a variety of materials, f r o m Psalms t o Chronicles). T h e early Christian c a n o n r e tained these books as well as deuteroncanonical writings f r o m t h e Greek-speaking world; t o e n h a n c e h o w t h e collec tion would lead t o t h e additional d o c u m e n t s a b o u t Jesus also a c c e p t e d b y tire c h u r c h , Christianity r e n a m e d t h e earlier collection t h e Old T e s t a m e n t a n d m o v e d t h e L a t t e r P r o p h ets to its e n d . T h e P r o t e s t a n t Reformers later r e m o v e d t h e deuterocanonicals, labeling t h e m A p o c r y p h a . H e n c e , while Jews, R o m a n Catholics, a n d Protestants rightly m a y b e said to share t h e books f o u n d in t h e H e b r e w S c r i p t u r e s , each c o m m u n i t y u n d e r s t a n d s differendy t h e signifi cance of a given b o o k within its respective c a n o n , a reality t h a t is also reflected i n t h e ordering of t h e books in each tradition. T h e s e m o d e r n c a n o n s include m a n y different types of lit erature. T h e T o r a h narrates events from t h e creation of t h e w o r l d t h r o u g h t h e d e a t h of M o s e s , interspersing judicial a n d cultic regulations as well as poetry. T h e F o r m e r P r o p h e t s are primarily narrative in form a n d cover Israelite history from t h e entry into t h e land of C a n a a n t h r o u g h t h e fall of J u d a h . Poetic oracles d o m i n a t e t h e Latter P r o p h e t s , al t h o u g h biographical narratives occasionally intertwine. T h e Writings contain liturgical poetry (Psalms), instructions on " w i s d o m " (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Song of Songs), short narratives (Esther, Ruth) a n d miscellaneous b o o k s , such as Lamentations. G e t t i n g a T e x t . S u c h a straightforward description of t h e organization a n d c o n t e n t of these existing c a n o n s can, h o w ever, obscure t h e fact t h a t t h e H e b r e w Bible as a whole a n d its constituent p a r t s h a v e u n d e r g o n e a n e x t e n d e d p r o c e s s of collection, canonization, transmission, a n d translation. A s a result of t h e lack of a u t o g r a p h s (originals), even d e t e r m i n i n g tire text of t h e collection can b e problematic. M o d e r n t r a n s lators rely o n m a n u s c r i p t s (handwritten copies), s o m e of which are r e m o v e d from their a s s u m e d originals by m o r e titan a t h o u s a n d years. T h e t w o principal m a n u s c r i p t s , u s e d exclusively prior t o 1940 a n d still used today, a r e medieval in date. M a n u s c r i p t s found in t h e J u d e a n D e s e r t since t h e 1940s have given scholars m o r e ancient scraps of biblical materials b u t no c o m p l e t e copies of tire whole. Early t r a n s lations (versions) in languages s u c h as Greek, C o p t i c , a n d Syriac also inform textual j u d g m e n t s . Because such m a n u s c r i p t s a n d s u b s e q u e n t codices were created in a n d p r e s e r v e d b y religious c o m m u n i t i e s , deter m i n i n g w h a t is genuinely ancient is a m a t t e r of scholarly j u d g m e n t . D u r i n g t h e history of biblical interpretation, scholars interested in t h e historical information t h e H e b r e w Scriptures c a n p r o v i d e have developed a n u m b e r of critical methodologies, s u c h as source criticism, f o r m criticism, a n d redaction criticism. Recently, however, these m e t h o d s h a v e b e e n challenged—botii in the results they p r o d u c e a n d t h e a s s u m p t i o n s from w h i c h drey work.
F i n d i n g a n A u t h o r . Although m a n y m o d e r n books are t h e p r o d u c t s of a single a u t h o r writing from a consistent p o i n t of view, t h e great variations in c o n t e n t a n d style b e t w e e n a n d within biblical books suggest quite different o r igins. Alert for inconsistencies in style, v o c a b u l a r y , a n d t h e ology, source criticism arose in tire 1800s t o distinguish t h e signs of multiple a u t h o r s . F o r e x a m p l e , Julius W e l l h a u s e n (Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, r e p r i n t , Gloucester, 1983) a r g u e d tiiat t h e P e n t a t e u c h w a s n o t t h e w o r k of M o s e s b u t r a t h e r a c o m p i l a t i o n of four discrete sources, t h e first written d u r i n g t h e M o n a r c h y a n d t h e last in t h e postexilic p e r i o d . F o r m criticism as d e v e l o p e d i n t h e early 1900s claimed t h a t t h e biblical materials are y e t m o r e ancient. H e r m a n n G u n k e l (What Remains of the Old Testament and Other Es says, translated b y A . K . Dallas, N e w York, 1928) a n d his successors interpreted r e c u r r i n g motifs a n d stereotypical formulae as signs t h a t biblical writings p r e s e r v e a prior oral stage. W i t h i n this framework, s o m e of t h e writings n o w f o u n d in t h e H e b r e w Bible m a y b e very ancient, p e r h a p s as old as t h e patriarchs. A l t h o u g h s o u r c e a n d form criticism are still p r a c t i c e d , b o t h have w a n e d in popularity. M y r i a d literary studies of biblical narrative h a v e a r g u e d tiiat s o u r c e " i n c o n s i s t e n c i e s " exist in t h e eye of t h e b e h o l d e r a n d t h a t a n c i e n t Semitic writers worked within a different aesthetic t h a n t h a t of m o d ern E u r o p e a n s . W h i l e studies of folklore a n d a n t h r o p o l o g y c o n t i n u e t o trace elements of orality, f o r m criticism h a s r e cently b e e n c h a l l e n g e d — b y J o h n v a n Seters (In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History, N e w H a v e n , 1983) i n t h e case of t h e P e n t a t e u c h , a n d b y o t h e r literary studies tiiat attribute f o r m u l a e a n d repetitions t o creative a u t h o r s in o t h e r p o r t i o n s of t h e Bible. D a t i n g t h e C o m p o s i t i o n . D e s c r i b i n g t h e time p e r i o d a text talks " a b o u t " is m u c h less difficult t h a n d e t e r m i n i n g " w h e n " it w a s written, a l t h o u g h n e i t h e r m a y b e readily tied to recognized archaeological time p e r i o d s . Biblical history is usually divided a c c o r d i n g t o t h e political history of t h e I s raelite a n d later J u d e a n n a t i o n s , a n d t h u s d o e s n o t directiy coincide with t h e archaeological designations of t h e B r o n z e or I r o n A g e . U s i n g biblical terminology, t h e H e b r e w Bible relates m a terial a b o u t an u n d a t e d prehistory t h r o u g h t h e Hellenistic period. I n r e g a r d t o w h e n it w a s written, greater c o n s e n s u s exists for t h e m o r e r e c e n t p e r i o d s t h a n for early o n e s . F o r e x a m p l e , that p a r t s of t h e Bible w e r e written i n t h e Helle nistic p e r i o d is generally a c c e p t e d (Daniel, Ecclesiastes, p e r h a p s Joel), a n d m u c h material is seen t o derive from t h e Persian p e r i o d ( t h e last of t h e p r o p h e t s , s o m e w i s d o m texts, Ezra, Nehemiah). T h e B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d is well r e p r e s e n t e d (Jeremiahj, Ezekiel, parts of t h e P e n t a t e u c h , p e r h a p s d i e F o r m e r P r o p h e t s ) , as is t h e Assyrian p e r i o d (Isaiah, Amos, Hosea).
BIBLICAL LITERATURE: Hebrew Scriptures H o w m a n y of t h e writings p r e c e d e t h e Assyrian p e r i o d , however, is q u e s t i o n e d . Building o n W e l l h a u s e n , G e r h a r d von R a d (The Problem of the Hextateuch and Other Essays, translated b y E . W . T r u e m a n D i c k e n , L o n d o n , 1984) dated t h e first s t r a n d of d i e P e n t a t e u c h (J) to t h e era of S o l o m o n . F e w m o d e r n scholars place t h e writing of biblical materials before t h e M o n a r c h y , a l t h o u g h t h e S o n g of D e b o r a h (Jg. 5) a n d t h e S o n g of M o s e s (Dt. 32) m a y b e earlier c o m p o sitions. M a k i n g C o m p a r i s o n s . I n d a t i n g discussions, in analyses of literary g e n r e s , a n d in historical r e c o n s t r u c t i o n s , scholars have t u r n e d to other literature f r o m t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t for illumination. C o m p a r i s o n s a b o u n d , offering m u c h fod der for scholarly d e b a t e . S u c h parallels p r o v i d e rich back g r o u n d r e g a r d i n g t h e cosmological, cultural, a n d religious milieu of t h e a n c i e n t N e a r East. M y t h o l o g i c a l texts from M e s o p o t a m i a a n d U g a r i t are particularly helpful in this r e gard. C o n c e r n e d with t h e division of t h e elements from chaos, t h e loss of i m m o r t a l i t y b e c a u s e of a sly snake, a n d t h e ability of o n e m a n to survive a flood o n a b o a t , t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n d o c u m e n t s Enuma elish a n d t h e epics of G i l g a m e s h a n d Atrahasis a p p e a r t o b e t h e b a c k d r o p against w h i c h t h e writers of Genesis w o r k e d . U g a r i t i c m y t h s of Baal's ordeal in t h e u n d e r w o r l d illumine s o m e p s a l m i c a n d p r o phetic l a n g u a g e . Similarly, c o m p a r i s o n of biblical legal material with t h a t of M e s o p o t a m i a n a n d Hittite cultures reveals m a n y similar ities, b o t h in individual laws a n d in their u n d e r l y i n g values. L a w s often c o n s i d e r e d u n i q u e t o Israel (such as s a b b a t h o b servance a n d a n o w n e r ' s responsibility for a goring ox) h a v e Mesopotamian counterparts. In addition, the covenant ide ology in w h i c h biblical law is p r e s e n t e d e m p l o y s diplomatic language typical of Hittite a n d Assyrian treaties. M u c h of d i e Writings section utilizes c o m m o n ancientN e a r E a s t e r n literary types. T h e P s a l m s , for e x a m p l e , often a d a p t M e s o p o t a m i a n , Ugaritic, a n d E g y p t i a n h y m n o d y to t h e m o n o t h e i s m of later Israel. L a r g e p o r t i o n s of t h e Book of Proverbs d r a w f r o m t h e E g y p t i a n w i s d o m text " T h e I n struction of A m e n e m o p e , " a n d t h e b o o k s of Job a n d Ecclesiastes a n d t h e Song of Songs b e a r equally s t r o n g literary ties to other f o r m s of N e a r E a s t e r n literature. A l t h o u g h scholars h a v e l o n g r e c o g n i z e d t h e benefit of s u c h c o m p a r i s o n s in a p p r e c i a t i n g t h e intellectual a n d cul tural e n v i r o n m e n t in w h i c h t h e Bible arose, m u c h m o r e d e b a t e d is t h e a c c u r a c y with w h i c h specific events r e c o r d e d i n t h e H e b r e w Bible c a n b e verified in extrabiblical d o c u m e n t s . A p r i m e e x a m p l e of s u c h d i s a g r e e m e n t c o n c e r n s t h e d a t e of t h e E x o d u s . Followers of W i l l i a m Foxwell Albright (for e x a m p l e , J o h n Bright, A History of Israel, 3d ed., Philadelphia, 1981) insist o n a t h i r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y d a t e for t h e E x o d u s b a s e d o n t h e m e n t i o n of " I s r a e l " o n P h a r a o h M e r n e p t a h ' s victory m a r k e r (1220 BCE) a n d o n a n identification w i t h t h e store cities m e n t i o n e d in Exodus 1:11 w i t h E g y p t i a n sites. Earlier dates for t h e E x o d u s are e m b r a c e d b y scholars w h o
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correlate t h e hapiru m e n t i o n e d in t h e A m a r n a texts with t h e H e b r e w p e o p l e : if C a n a a n i t e rulers w e r e c o m p l a i n i n g a b o u t m a r a u d i n g " H e b r e w s " in t h e f o u r t e e n t h century BCE, t h e E x o d u s w o u l d necessarily h a v e t a k e n place earlier. A g o o d n u m b e r of E u r o p e a n scholars t o d a y are questioning w h e t h e r t h e E x o d u s actually o c c u r r e d . Similar debates have arisen as well over dating the n a t u r e of t h e Israelite o c c u p a t i o n of C a n a a n a n d the historicity of d i e patriarchal narratives. F o r m i n g a C a n o n . U n d e r s t a n d i n g h o w stories a n d books w e r e g a t h e r e d into larger u n i t s a n d t h e n into a single collec tion involves u n d e r s t a n d i n g h o w a n d w h y d o c u m e n t s c a m e t o b e u n d e r s t o o d as canonical. A s t a n d a r d view of this p r o cess identifies t h e first m o v e t o w a r d " s c r i p t u r e " with a r e f o r m m o v e m e n t r e c o r d e d in 2 Kings 22, in w h i c h a b o o k f o u n d in t h e T e m p l e in J e r u s a l e m - ( p e r h a p s Deuteronomy) served as a basis for a c o m m u n i t y covenant. W i t h the c o n c e p t of c a n o n t h u s established, E z r a t h e scribe elevated t h e P e n t a t e u c h in postexilic J u d a h to t h e status of " l a w " a n d i n t r o d u c e d provisions p r o h i b i t i n g e x o g a m y . A c c o r d i n g t o this view of canonical d e v e l o p m e n t , t h e P r o p h e t s w e r e a c c e p t e d as c a n o n b y t h e M a c c a b e a n p e r i o d , t h e Writings, a n d h e n c e d i e w h o l e H e b r e w Bible, were ratified by a rabbinic council at Y a v n e h / f a m n i a in a b o u t 90 CE. Alternatives t o this u n d e r s t a n d i n g of c a n o n d e v e l o p m e n t h a v e b e e n offered. A c c o r d i n g to M a r t i n N o t h (English translation: The Deuteronomistic History, Sheffield, 1981), since Deuteronomy t h r o u g h Kings forms a c o n t i n u o u s n a r rative, Deuteronomy w o u l d h a v e b e e n c o m p o s e d n o t witii t h e rest of the P e n t a t e u c h b u t as p a r t of a longer historical w o r k called t h e D e u t e r o n o m i s t i c H i s t o r y . D a v i d N o e l F r e e d m a n ( " T h e F o r m a t i o n of t h e C a n o n of t h e O l d T e s t a m e n t , " in Religion and Law: Biblical-Judaic and Islamic Perspectives, e d ited b y E d w i n B . F r i m a g e et al., p p . 3 1 5 - 3 3 1 , W i n o n a L a k e , I n d . , 1990) posits t h a t a p r i m a r y history (Genesis t h r o u g h Kings), a l o n g with m u c h of t h e p r o p h e t i c c o r p u s , was c o m plete b y 540 BCE a n d , h e n c e , t h a t Ezra's contribution was t h e reorganization of t h e collections to exalt a P e n t a t e u c h devoid of d i e conquest. R e c e n t studies of A c h a e m e n i d gov e r n a n c e of t h e postexilic c o m m u n i t y suggest that t h e i m p e t u s for codifying t h e c o m m u n i t y ' s laws a n d m e m b e r s h i p criteria m a y h a v e c o m e f r o m Persia. D i s c u s s i o n s since t h e 1960s have challenged the a s s u m p tion t h a t t h e C o u n c i l of J a m n i a finalized t h e c a n o n , since t h e " c o u n c i l " m o d e l m o r e r e s e m b l e s later Christian councils t h a n it does a first-century Jewish gathering a n d since t h e o r d e r i n g of biblical b o o k s r e m a i n e d fluid until at least 400 CE. I n t h e case of J u d a i s m , T a l m u d Bava' Batra' 14b places t h e b o o k of Isaiah after Ezekiel, w h e r e a s in t h e m o d e r n J e w ish c a n o n Isaiah p r e c e d e s Jeremiah. I n Christianity, different canonical orders are given b y E p i p h a n i u s , Cyril of J e r u s a lem, and Jerome. U n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e C u r r e n t D i s c u s s i o n . R e c e n t bibli cal scholarship has p r o d u c e d m a n y critiques of older views of biblical origins a n d c a n o n i c a l d e v e l o p m e n t w i t h o u t p r o -
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viding a n e w c o n s e n s u s in their place. Indicative of t h e late twentieth-century Zeitgeist, newer a p p r o a c h e s offer less cer tainty t h a n they d o discrete a n d passionate voices o n these f u n d a m e n t a l issues in u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e H e b r e w S c r i p tures. [See also H e b r e w L a n g u a g e a n d Literature.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bright, John. A History of Israel, 3d edition. Philadelphia, 1 9 8 1 . Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, Phil adelphia, 1979. Explains the processes and movements of canon for mation. Freedman, David N . " T h e formation of the C a n o n of the Old T e s t a ment." In Religion and Law: Biblical-Judaic and Islamic Perspectives, edited by E. B. Frimage et al., p p . 3 1 5 - 3 3 1 . Winona Lake, Ind., 1990. Gunkel, H e r m a n n . Wlrat Remains of the Old Testament and Other Essays. Translated by A. K. Dallas. N e w York, 1983. Hayes, John H . , and J. Maxwell Miller, eds. Israelite andjudaean His tory. Philadelphia, 1 9 7 7 . Collection of essays balancing the histori cally optimistic views of Albright and Bright. Haynes, Stephen R., and Steven L . M c K e n z i e , eds. To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications. Louisville, Ky., 1993. Provides explanations a n d examples of tradi tional approaches (historical, source, and form criticism), as well as m o r e m o d e r n ones (feminist, poststructuralist). Knight, Douglas A., and G e n e M . T u c k e r , eds. The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters. Chico, Calif., 1985. Surveys contemporary thought on most of the topics discussed in this article, with a review of each of the H e b r e w Bible's major sections. N o t h , Martin. The Deuteronomistic History. Journal for the Study of the Old T e s t a m e n t S u p p l e m e n t Series, n o . 1 5 . Sheffield, 1 9 8 1 . Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. Standard collection of ancient texts offering few explanatory or critical notes; m o r e helpful for gen eral background to the literature than as a source d o c u m e n t for scholars. Rad, Gerhard von. The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Translated by E. W . T r u e m a n Dicken. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 4 . Van Seters, John. In Search of History. N e w Haven, 1983. Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History ofAncient Israel, Glouces ter, 1983. JULIA M .
O'BRIEN
New Testament T h e N e w T e s t a m e n t is a collection of twenty-seven individ ual d o c u m e n t s written b e t w e e n a b o u t 5 0 a n d 1 5 0 CE, t h e p e r i o d following t h e initial f o u n d i n g of t h e Christian m o v e m e n t . T h e y were originally written for small, specific a u d i ences (either congregations or individuals) b u t w e r e col lected d u r i n g t h e n e x t t w o centuries to f o r m a b o d y of literature. Circulation in this form also influenced t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of the c o d e x (or b o o k type) of m a n u s c r i p t p r o duction t h a t b e c a m e p o p u l a r a m o n g Christians i n place of scrolls. O f t h e twenty-seven d o c u m e n t s , t h e majority (twenty were originally written in t h e form of private letters, a n d two m o r e (Hebrews a n d Revelation) i n c o r p o r a t e epis tolary features. B e c a u s e of t h e diverse a n d particular n a t u r e of t h e d o c u m e n t s , t h e process of collection a n d editing to
form the present N e w T e s t a m e n t canon was sometimes complex and contentious. T h e earliest N e w T e s t a m e n t writings are t h e g e n u i n e let ters of P a u l , d a t i n g to t h e A e g e a n p e r i o d of his m i n i s t r y (c. 5 0 - 6 0 CE) . P a u l ' s first letters w e r e w r i t t e n t o fledgling h o u s e c h u r c h congregations of p r e d o m i n a n t l y gentile c o n v e r t s , for w h o m t h e letters served as e n c o u r a g e m e n t or to a n s w e r questions t h a t arose after P a u l h a d m o v e d o n . [See H o u s e C h u r c h e s . ] T h e earliest letter is 1 Thessalonians (c. 5 1 C E ) ; P a u l w r o t e it while in C o r i n t h , a n d within a relatively s h o r t t i m e after he h a d left T h e s s a l o n i k e after f o u n d i n g t h e c o n gregation there. F r o m C o r i n t h , P a u l p r o c e e d e d to E p h e s u s , w h i c h w a s to b e c o m e his base of o p e r a t i o n s for m o s t of this p e r i o d . [See E p h e s u s . ] H e c o n t i n u e d t o m a k e a regular cir cuit of visits, b u t in t h e interim often sent c o w o r k e r s , s u c h as T i m o t h y a n d T i t u s , b e a r i n g a letter from h i m to a c o m m u n i t y . L e t t e r writing in t h e G r e c o - R o m a n w o r l d followed certain highly stylized c o n v e n t i o n s of f o r m a n d a d d r e s s . P a u l a d o p t e d m a n y of t h e m in his writing, a d a p t i n g t h e m t o a given occasion's particular n e e d s or issues. F o r m a l analysis of t h e g e n r e a n d c o n v e n t i o n s h a s b e e n greatly e n h a n c e d b y t h e discoveries of m a n y private letters o n p a p y r u s f r o m E g y p t a n d elsewhere. I n addition to giving advice a n d e n c o u r a g e m e n t , P a u l ' s letters often served as f o r m a l letters of r e c o m m e n d a t i o n in w h i c h h e s o u g h t hospitality for himself (Phlm. 22) or h i s coworkers (Rom. 1 6 : 2 ; Phil 2 : 2 5 - 2 9 ) . T h e N e w T e s t a m e n t contains t w o letters from P a u l to C o r i n t h ( 1 Cor., from c. 5 4 ; 2 Cor., f r o m c. 5 6 / 5 7 ) , b o t h written in E p h e s u s . F r o m internal references (cf. 1 Cor. 5 : 9 ; 2 Cor. 2 : 3 ; 7 : 8 ) , it is clear t h a t P a u l also w r o t e at least t w o other letters t o C o r i n t h t h a t are n o w lost. T h e s e q u e n c e of these letters is, therefore, ( 1 ) letter n o w lost; ( 2 ) r Corinthi ans; ( 3 ) letter lost (partially?); a n d ( 4 ) 2 Corinthians. M o r e over, analysis of 2 Corinthians reveals a later c o m p o s i t e of fragments of several letters, especially ( 3 ) a n d ( 4 ) a n d p e r h a p s one or t w o m o r e . T h e various C h r i s t i a n g r o u p s at C o r inth also wrote letters t o P a u l (cf. 1 Cor. 7 : 1 ) . T h e r e a r e other letters b y P a u l t h a t m a y i n c o r p o r a t e f r a g m e n t s of sev eral letters (e.g., Philippians), a n d t h e r e are several o t h e r lost letters (cf. Phil. 3 : 1 ; Col. 4 : 1 6 ) . All t h e g e n u i n e letters from P a u l were w r i t t e n from 5 0 to 6 0 CE, in t h e A e g e a n ; t h e last was m o s t likely his letter t o R o m e , w h i c h w a s t o p r e p a r e t h e way for his i n t e n d e d mission to S p a i n . Following P a u l ' s d e a t h t h e r e was s o m e c o n c e r n o n t h e p a r t of his followers in t h e s e regions t o p r e s e r v e t h e apostle's legacy a n d teachings. T h i s led to t h e c o m p o s i t i o n of p s e u d o n y m o u s (or p s e u d e p i g r a p h i c ) letters w r i t t e n in his n a m e . Of t h e thirteen letters in t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t a t t r i b u t e d to P a u l , t h e authenticity of seven is d e b a t e d : 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, a n d t h e so-caEed P a s t o r a l Epistles ( 1 , 2 Tm.; Ti). Ephesians a n d t h e Pastorals are t h e least likely to h a v e b e e n w r i t t e n b y Paul. T h e explicit a d d r e s s " w h o are at E p h e s u s " d o e s n o t a p p e a r at all in t h e oldest m a n u s c r i p t s of t h e so-called E p h e s i a n letter; it w a s p r o b a b l y p r o d u c e d
BIBLICAL LITERATURE: New Testament n e a r e r t h e e n d of t h e first c e n t u r y , a t a b o u t t h e time t h a t a collection of P a u l ' s letters w a s first b e i n g a s s e m b l e d . T h e Pastoral Epistles m a y derive f r o m s o m e partially p r e s e r v e d writing b y P a u l (in 2 Tm.); h o w e v e r , in their p r e s e n t form, they w e r e p r o b a b l y p r o d u c e d i n t h e early to m i d - s e c o n d century. T h e r e is a w i d e r a n g e of c o m p o s i t i o n , d a t e , a n d a u t h o r ship questions relating to letters in t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t n o t a t t r i b u t e d t o P a u l . T h e Epistle of James is generally associ ated witii t h e b r o t h e r of Jesus w h o , a c c o r d i n g to tradition, led t h e Jewish C h r i s t i a n c o m m u n i t y in J e r u s a l e m until Iris d e a t h (c. 64 C E ) , just prior t o t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e First J e w ish R e v o l t against R o m e . [See F i r s t Jewish Revolt.] S o m e scholars h a v e suggested, h o w e v e r , t h a t it is a later p s e u d o n y m o u s c o m p o s i t i o n , p r o b a b l y d a t i n g to n e a r t h e t u r n of tire s e c o n d c e n t u r y . T h e t w o epistles a t t r i b u t e d to P e t e r are likely b y different a u t h o r s : / Peter is a p s e u d e p i g r a p h with influences f r o m P a u l i n e t r a d i t i o n (especially t h e d e b a t e d let ters Colossians a n d Ephesians) a n d w a s p r o b a b l y written s o m e t i m e in t h e first d e c a d e of d i e s e c o n d c e n t u r y , in Asia M i n o r . T h e letter 2 Peter a p p e a r s t o b e later still ( p r o b a b l y from t h e 120s o r s o ) ; it d r a w s o n ( a n d is t h u s later t h a n ) t h e Epistle ofjude a n d s e e m s t o reflect a n existing collection of P a u l ' s letters (cf. 2 Pt., 3 : 1 5 - 1 7 ) . T h e situation a d d r e s s e d b y 2 Peter m a y b e similar t o t h a t in 2 Thessalonians b e c a u s e b o t h address d i s p u t e s a n d o p i n i o n s over t h e delay of t h e eschaton. T h e t h r e e J o h a n n i n e letters a r e p r o b a b l y t h e w o r k of t w o distinct schools. T h e letter 1 John w a s p r o b a b l y written b y t h e s a m e g r o u p of followers of J o h n w h o p r o d u c e d t h e G o s pel. L i k e t h e G o s p e l , it can b e d a t e d to b e t w e e n 95 a n d 125 CE. T h e p l a c e of c o m p o s i t i o n is usually t h o u g h t t o b e E p h esus, b u t a Syrian origin ( s u c h as A n t i o c h ) h a s b e e n s u g gested b y s o m e scholars. T h e t w o s h o r t letters, 2 mid 3 John, s e e m to b e b y a single a u t h o r w h o is n e v e r identified e x c e p t as " T h e E l d e r " ; t h e y p r o b a b l y c o m e f r o m early in t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y , from Asia M i n o r . T h e y m i g h t h a v e derived their J o h a n n i n e attribution f r o m t h e fact t h a t a figure k n o w n as J o h n t h e Elder, n o t t h e s a m e as t h e apostle, was p r o m i n e n t at E p h e s u s a t d i e e n d of t h e first c e n t u r y . T h e Book of Rev elation ( w h i c h carries t h e G r e e k title of The Apocalypse) is t h o u g h t b y s o m e t o b e b y this s a m e J o h n t h e Elder b e c a u s e t h e traditional attribution t o t h e apostle J o h n was d i s p u t e d in antiquity; t h e a u t h o r is, h o w e v e r , clearly different f r o m t h a t of 2 a n d 3 John. T h e d a t e of Revelation is traditionally p l a c e d a t a b o u t 95 CE, f r o m P a t m o s , b u t it h a s b e e n variously d a t e d as early as 70 a n d as late as t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y . D e s p i t e tiieir position within d i e c a n o n of t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t , t h e G o s p e l s a n d Acts w e r e p r o d u c t s of a l o n g a n d c o m p l e x c o m p o s i t i o n a l history s t r e t c h i n g into t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y . A c c o r d i n g to prevailing scholarly o p i n i o n , t h e e a r liest of t h e canonical G o s p e l s t o b e w r i t t e n w a s Mark; it is usually d a t e d to b e t w e e n 66 a n d 75 CE. A d a t e s o m e t i m e after t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of J e r u s a l e m in 70 s e e m s t h e m o s t likely,
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given internal references t o these events (cf. Mk. 13:14). T h e dates usually assigned t o t h e o t h e r G o s p e l s follow: Mat thew, 75-85/90 CE; Lh, 80-90/95 CE; a n d John, s o m e t i m e after 95 CE. T h e G o s p e l s w e r e c o m p o s e d b y a u t h o r s or g r o u p s of a u t h o r s w o r k i n g w i t h a c o m b i n a t i o n of oral a n d written s o u r c e materials t h a t t h e y r e w o r k e d with their o w n peculiar stories a n d c o n c e r n s . H e n c e , t h e s e a u t h o r s are p r o p e r l y t h o u g h t of as r e d a c t o r s (or editors) as well. As with m o s t of t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t d o c u m e n t s , t h e actual n a m e s of t h e a u d i o r s r e m a i n u n k n o w n . T h e a u t h o r of Mark, for e x a m p l e , likely h a d available a n early collection of miracle stories a n d a n existing p a s s i o n narrative; h o w e v e r , t h e final narrative of J e s u s ' life w a s t h e p r o d u c t of t h e M a r k a n r e dactor. B o t h Matthew a n d Luke s e e m t o follow t h e basic outiine oiMark, a l t h o u g h t h e y alter s o m e sections radically in s h a p e o r position a n d a d d s o m e n e w material. E a c h a d d s s o m e material peculiar to its a u t h o r , so t h a t it is n o t possible to k n o w w h e t h e r it w a s d e r i v e d f r o m earlier sources or from t h e autiior's o w n c o m p o s i t i o n . S o m e 250 verses are c o m m o n t o b o t h Matthew a n d Luke ( b u t a r e entirely m i s s i n g from Mark); therefore, scholars h a v e p r o p o s e d t h e existence of a lost s o u r c e (called Q ) , w h i c h a p p e a r s to b e an early collection of " s a y i n g s " material. R e c e n t work o n t h e Q d o c u m e n t suggests t h a t it dates from a b o u t 50 to 70 CE a n d t h a t it, too, w a s edited in various stages over t i m e , prior to its i n c o r p o r a t i o n i n Matthew a n d Luke. F u r t h e r c o r r o b o r a t i o n of t h e existence of s u c h a collection of sayings has b e e n given since t h e discovery a m o n g t h e N a g H a m m a d i (Egypt) li b r a r y of a c o m p l e t e C o p t i c t e x t of t h e Gospel of Thomas, a n o n c a n o n i c a l sayings G o s p e l (originally c o m p o s e d in G r e e k , p r o b a b l y in Syria) variously d a t e d either before a b o u t 70 or to b e t w e e n 100 a n d 140 CE). [See N a g H a m madi.] T h e editorial p r o c e s s a t work in each of these Gospels derives in large m e a s u r e f r o m t h e c o n t e x t in w h i c h each w a s u s e d . T h e s e earliest narrative compilations of t h e life of J e sus w e r e t o l d a n d retold within particular Christian c o m m u n i t i e s . T h e t o n e a n d details of t h e narrative w e r e s h a p e d a c c o r d i n g to t h e c i r c u m s t a n c e s of each c o m m u n i t y . Mat thew, for e x a m p l e , w a s w r i t t e n in U p p e r Galilee or in L o w e r Syria (the nearer diaspora) in a c o n t e x t in which e m e r g e n t Pharisaic a n d Christian g r o u p s were c o m p e t i n g to establish their identities. T h e C h r i s t i a n c o m m u n i t y of Matthew's G o s p e l still tiiinks of itself as completely Jewish, b u t it feels p r e s s u r e f r o m other Jewish g r o u p s . T h e vitriolic a n t i - P h a r isaic sentiments a t t r i b u t e d to Jesus in Matthew are in reality a reflection of tiiis tension in t h e p e r i o d of post-70 r e c o n struction, rather t h a n t h e situation in J e s u s ' o w n day. I n s h a r p contrast, b o t h Luke a n d John s e e m t o c o m e from a decidedly G r e e k e n v i r o n m e n t ; e a c h h a s b e e n claimed as h a v i n g b e e n written i n A n t i o c h a n d Asia M i n o r . John's d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e s y n o p t i c tradition seems to favor s o m e highly P l a t o n i c philosophical speculations, similar t o those f o u n d in Philo of Alexandria. It h a s b e e n suggested t h a t John
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BIBLICAL TEMPLE
w e n t t h r o u g h five stages of editing to achieve its p r e s e n t form sometime alter the death of its n a m e s a k e , the a p o s d e J o h n . Luke, on the other h a n d , comes from a later follower of the Pauline tradition, w h o a d a p t s the synoptic tradition to m e e t the m o r e cultured literary tastes of a G r e c o - R o m a n audience. Luke seems to follow the G r e e k genres of history writing and novelistic fiction. W h a t sets Luke a p a r t in the d e v e l o p m e n t of the Early Christian literary tradition is t h a t it was clearly designed from the outset as a t w o - p a r t n a r r a tive t h a t continues in Acts (cf. Lk. 1.1-4 with Acts 1.1). T h e formal preface a n d dedication c o m b i n e with the stylistic fea tures of the writing t o m a k e this the m o s t literary d o c u m e n t in the N e w T e s t a m e n t . N o n e of the writings of the N e w T e s t a m e n t have survived in their earliest m a n u s c r i p t form: all are copies of copies t h a t were preserved chiefly t h r o u g h the process of collection b e ginning in the early to m i d - s e c o n d century. T h e earliest m a n u s c r i p t version of Paul's letters (the Chester Beatty II p a p y r u s [P46], c. e n d of t h e second c e n t u r y ) , however, clearly omits t h e Pastoral Epistles. T h e earliest i m p u l s e to assemble such a collection seems to h a v e b e g u n a r o u n d the legacy of Paul in t h e c h u r c h e s of Asia M i n o r a n d G r e e c e . By t h e n o s , a partial collection of Paul's letters was k n o w n by Ignatius of Antioch, b u t he does n o t reflect a knowledge of the diverse G o s p e l traditions. By the 140s, at least a partial collection of P a u l ' s letters (omitting the Pastorals) was k n o w n and u s e d b y M a r c i o n , b u t h e refused to a c c e p t any G o s p e l other t h a n Luke. M a r c i o n was originally from S i n o p e on t h e Black Sea b u t m i g r a t e d to R o m e , w h e r e h e was even tually e x c o m m u n i c a t e d as a heretic. T h e earliest c a n o n list t h a t resembles the shape of t h e p r e s e n t N e w T e s t a m e n t c o m e s from the so-called M u r a torian fragment, p r e s e r v e d in a later L a t i n m a n u s c r i p t from M i l a n , it dates to a b o u t 180-200 a n d is m o s t likely from R o m e . T h e b e g i n n i n g is lost, b u t the fragment c o m m e n c e s by n a m i n g Luke as the T h i r d Gospel, its s t r e n u o u s defense of d i e authorship of J o h n suggests t h a t it was written in r e sponse to an o n g o i n g d e b a t e . While it includes the d e u t e r o Pauline letters, it omits Hebrews, James, a n d b o t h P e t r i n e letters. It accepts t h e d e b a t e d Apocalypse of John, b u t also included the a p o c r y p h a l Apocalypse of Peter a n d the Wisdom of Solomon. While it k n e w of other c h u r c h e s (notably in A l exandria) that accepted t h e S h e p h e r d of Herm'as, t h e M u r atorian canon list treats it as s e c o n d a r y — t h a t is, suitable for a d m o n i t i o n b u t n o t wortiiy of b e i n g n u m b e r e d a m o n g t h e p r o p h e t s a n d apostles. It seems t h a t this last twofold desig nation was the t e r m b y w h i c h the entire Christian Bible w a s conceptualized in t h e M u r a t o r i a n list, with t h e " p r o p h e t s " designating those books of the H e b r e w c a n o n , a n d t h e " a p o s t l e s , " t h e equivalent of t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t . It is t h e first clear reference t o this t w o - p a r t structure in t h e C h r i s tian tradition. While a core of works (the four Gospels a n d the letters of Paul) seem t o h a v e b e e n fixed from t h e m i d s e c o n d century, o t h e r w o r k s (notably Hebrews a n d Revela
tion) c o n t i n u e d to b e d e b a t e d into t h e fourth c e n t u r y . A t t h e s a m e time, n u m e r o u s o t h e r writings w e r e b e i n g p r o d u c e d , s o m e with p u r p o r t e d apostolic authority. T h e s e divisive is sues w e r e further fueled b y the fact t h a t each g e o g r a p h i c region a n d local sectarian g r o u p often u s e d different collec tions or other c o m p e t i n g works. By t h e time of C o n s t a n t i n e , therefore, calls for u n i t y w e r e b e g i n n i n g , a n d t h e s e e v e n t u ally resulted in the establishment of criteria for c o n s i d e r i n g works as Scripture. E u s e b i u s of C a e s a r e a (c. 325) desig n a t e d three categories: t h o s e " a c c e p t e d " (Gk., homobgoumena) as S c r i p t u r e , t h o s e d i s p u t e d (Gk., antilegomena), a n d those t h a t are spurious (Greek., en wis nothois). H i s final list is less t h a n clear, h o w e v e r , b e c a u s e only t w e n t y writings w e r e in the first category, m o s t of t h e so-called catholic e p i s tles a p p e a r in the s e c o n d , a n d Revelation seems t o b e in t h e last. Athanasius of Alexandria (in his Festal Letter 39 of 367 CE) p r o d u c e d the first list of N e w T e s t a m e n t b o o k s t h a t cor r e s p o n d s to t h a t u s e d t o d a y . T h i s list was eventually ratified by practice rather titan d o g m a t i c assertion in later Christian councils, even t h o u g h s o m e d e b a t e c o n t i n u e d i n t o t h e sixth century. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aland, K u r t , and Barbara Aland. The Text of the New Testament. 2 d ed. Leiden, 1989. C a m p e n h a u s e n , H a n s von. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Phil adelphia, 1 9 7 2 . Ferguson, Everett. " C a n o n M u r a t o r i : D a t e and P r o v e n a n c e . " Studia Patristica 18 (1982): 6 7 7 - 6 8 3 . G a m b l e , Harry. The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning. Philadelphia, 1985. Koester, Helmut. Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2, History and Literature of Early Christianity. Philadelphia, 1 9 8 2 . Koester, H e l m u t . Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Devel opment. L o n d o n , 1990. M c D o n a l d , L e e M . The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Nashville, 1988. Metzger, Bruce M . The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Devel opment, and Significance. Oxford, 1987. Stowers, Stanley K, iMter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Philadel phia, 1986. L . MICHAEL WHITE
B I B L I C A L T E M P L E . T h e biblical t e m p l e is u n d e r stood t o be t h e T e m p l e of S o l o m o n , c o m p l e t e d in a b o u t 953 BCE a n d destroyed in a b o u t 587 BCE ( c o m m o n l y k n o w n as the First T e m p l e ) , a n d t h e T e m p l e of Z e r u b b a b e l , d e d i cated in 516 BCB, substantially e x p a n d e d a n d r e s t o r e d b y K i n g H e r o d b e g i n n i n g in 20 BCE, a n d d e s t r o y e d b y t h e R o m a n s u n d e r T i t u s in 70 CE (a long a n d c o m p l e x p h a s e of t h e biblical t e m p l e c o m m o n l y k n o w n as d i e S e c o n d T e m ple). T h e sole literary s o u r c e for t h e F i r s t T e m p l e a n d t h e Z e r u b b a b e l phase of t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e is t h e H e b r e w Bi ble. T h e H e r o d i a n t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s of the Z e r u b b a b e l T e m p l e
BIBLICAL T E M P L E
are d e s c r i b e d at l e n g t h in t h e writings of t h e ancient Jewish historian J o s e p h u s , w h o w a s an eyewitness to t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e . T h e r e are m a n y o t h e r r e c o r d s d e scribing various aspects of t h e architecture a n d ritual of t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e , chief a m o n g t h e m t h e M i s h n a i c tracts Middot a n d Sheqalim. Also i m p o r t a n t are t h e writings of Philo a n d t h e i n t e r t e s t a m e n t a l A p o c r y p h a a n d P s e u d e p i g r a p h a , particularly Maccabees (Books I a n d 2). T h e N e w T e s t a m e n t also h a s m a n y references t o t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e in its H e r o d i a n p h a s e . F r o m a m o n g t h e D e a d Sea Scrolls, t h e T e m p l e Scroll, a h h o u g h visionary in spirit, p r o b a b l y h a d t h e Z e r u b b a b e l T e m p l e as its p o i n t of reference a n d m a y h a v e influenced t h e a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d d e c o r a t i o n of t h e H e r odian temple. P e r h a p s t h e greatest i r o n y r e g a r d i n g t h e archaeology of t h e N e a r E a s t is t h a t t h e biblical t e m p l e , arguably tire m o s t f a m o u s s a c r e d s t r u c t u r e in w o r l d history, is entirely a b s e n t , in all its p h a s e s , in t h e archaeological r e c o r d . T h e p r i m a r y r e a s o n for this is t h a t t h e T e m p l e M o u n t in Jerusalem, t h e b u i l d i n g site of t h e First a n d S e c o n d T e m p l e s , is also a M u s lim holy site, tire location of t h e D o m e of t h e R o c k , a n d is t h u s unavailable for archaeological excavation or e x p l o r a tion. I n addition, t h e a b s e n c e of any archaeological r e m a i n s of t h e t e m p l e s is t h a t t h e y w e r e d e s t r o y e d m o r e m a n o n c e in antiquity, w h i c h resulted as well in t h e t h o r o u g h looting of p r e c i o u s metals a n d t h e d e s t r u c t i o n a n d looting of ritual objects. T h e b u i l d i n g history of t h e s u b s e q u e n t p h a s e s (in
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cluding t h e p r e p a r a t i o n of t h e f o u n d a t i o n s for t h e D o m e of t h e R o c k in t h e seventh c e n t u r y CE), resulted in t h e clearing away a n d scattering as r u b b l e t h e r e m a i n s of earlier p h a s e s . T h e unavailability of archaeological r e m a i n s h a s led t o t h e extensive u s e of archaeological analogy, in which t h e exca vated r e m a i n s of shrines from a p p r o x i m a t e l y c o n t e m p o r a r y sites in Syria a n d Palestine h a v e b e e n u s e d to achieve a sense of w h a t t h e First T e m p l e , in particular, m a y actually have looked like. A c o m p r e h e n s i v e v o l u m e of architectural plans a n d d i a g r a m s b y G . R. H . W r i g h t (1985) presents c o m p a r ative evidence, and a c o m p i l a t i o n of c o m p a r a t i v e material relating to t h e biblical c o n c e p t i o n s of t h e T e m p l e a n d ritual h a s b e e n p u b l i s h e d b y O t h m a r K e e l (1978). F i r s t T e m p l e . T h e best, i n d e e d t h e only, evidence for t h e floor p l a n , c o n s t r u c t i o n m e t h o d s , decoration, a n d ritual of t h e F i r s t T e m p l e is f o u n d in t h e H e b r e w Bible, primarily 1 Kings 5—6; 2 Chronicles 2—3; Ezekiei 40-47, a n d Psalms. O t h e r related passages i n c l u d e t h e looting b y P h a r a o h Shishak ( S h e s h o n q ) d u r i n g t h e reign of R e h o b o a m (1 Kgs. 14:25-26); e x p a n s i o n t h e " n e w c o u r t " built b y J e h o s h a p h a t , possibly reflecting t h e t i m e of t h e C h r o n i c l e r (2 Chr. 20:5); repairs m a d e d u r i n g t h e reign of Jehoash (2 Kgs. 12); t h e looting of p r e c i o u s metals b y K i n g H e z e k i a h to collect trib u t e for S e n n a c h e r i b (2 Kgs. 1 8 : 1 4 - 1 7 ) ; t h e additions of n o n Israelite altars a n d rituals t o t h e T e m p l e a n d its c o u r t y a r d s b y K i n g A h a z , w h o r e p l a c e d t h e Israelite altar with o n e he had seen in D a m a s c u s , a n d by Manasseh, who introduced
326
BIBLICAL TEMPLE
P h o e n i c i a n altars a n d pillars (2 Kgs. 16:10-16 a n d 2 1 : 1 - 9 , respectively); a n d t h e complete repair, cleansing, restora tion, a n d rededication of t h e T e m p l e u n d e r K i n g Josiah (2 Kgs. 22-23). W h i l e the H e b r e w Bible provides a clear p i c t u r e , even in t h e absence of material r e m a i n s , there are m a n y d i s c r e p ancies in t h e biblical r e c o r d r e g a r d i n g t h e various stages in t h e biblical t e m p l e a n d its ritual: in 1 Kings 6:2, t h e H o u s e is 30 cubits high; in 2 Chronicles 3:4, it is 120 cubits high; i n Ezra 6:3, C y r u s decrees t h a t t h e T e m p l e should b e 60 cubits high; a n d in b o t h t h e Q u m r a n T e m p l e Scroll a n d in J o s e p h u s t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e is said to b e 60 cubits h i g h (11QT 4:10; War 5:215). T h e s e discrepancies are usually attributed to differing social, political, a n d religious conditions a n d points of view b e t w e e n t h e actual events in t h e t i m e of D a v i d a n d S o l o m o n a n d those of t h e t w o m a i n H e b r e w Bible e d itors, t h e D e u t e r o n o m i s t (sixth c e n t u r y BCE) a n d t h e C h r o n icler (fifth c e n t u r y BCE). T h e classic instance of editorial dif ference as it affects t h e T e m p l e a c c o u n t s is / Kings 8, w h i c h depicts K i n g S o l o m o n ' s dedicatory prayer. A c c o r d i n g to t h e earlier biblical view, w h i c h is m o r e in line with C a n a a n i t e ideas, the T e m p l e w a s t h e actual dwelling place of Y a h w e h (Ps. 74:2, 76:3). H o w e v e r , t h e D e u t e r o n o m i s t (see 1 Kgs. 8:17-20, 44, 48), tones this view d o w n considerably: t h e T e m p l e is n o w built t o t h e n a m e of t h e D e i t y , a n d t h e s a n c tuary becomes a h o u s e of p r a y e r (1 Kgs. 8:41-43). I n t h e biblical r e c o r d , t h e T e m p l e is a tripartite building,
BIBLICAL TEMPLE.
of t h e Langraum ( G e r . , " l o n g r o o m " ) t y p e , c o n s t r u c t e d o n a straight axis: it h a d t h r e e distinct b u i l d i n g u n i t s , o r ele m e n t s ; w a s longer t h a n it w a s w i d e (as a w h o l e ) ; a n d t h e m o s t holy place w a s directly o n t h e s a m e axis as t h e w o r shiper standing a t t h e front e n t r a n c e . T h e t h r e e u n i t s , f r o m front to rear, w e r e t h e 'ulam, t h e " v e s t i b u l e , " or " p o r c h " ; t h e hekal, t h e " c e l l a , " or " n a v e " ; a n d t h e debir, t h e " i n n e r s a n c t u a r y , " or m o s t holy place. T h e length of this b u i l d i n g w a s 60 cubits (the royal cubit w a s a b o u t 21 i n c h e s ) , its w i d t h w a s 20 cubits, a n d its h e i g h t w a s 25 cubits. T h e 'ulam w a s 20 cubits wide a n d 10 cubits l o n g (defining it as a breitraum, or G e r . , " b r o a d r o o m , " architectural t y p e ) . T h e hekal w a s 40 cubits long, a n d t h e debir, t h e m o s t holy place, w a s a c u b e , 20 cubits o n each side. T h e holy of holies w a s , t h u s , 5 cubits shorter t h a n the r e s t of t h e building. O f t h e m a n y a t t e m p t s t o explain this difference, t h e m o s t plausible is t h a t t h e i n n e r sanctuary stood over t h e c o s m i c " R o c k of F o u n d a t i o n " — t h a t p a r t of t h e r o c k massif o n t h e T e m p l e M o u n t t h a t s t o o d for t h e place of original creation in Israelite c o s m o g o n y . T h i s does n o t necessarily place S o l o m o n ' s T e m p l e over t h e p r e s e n t - d a y D o m e of t h e R o c k . C o n v i n c i n g a r g u m e n t s h a v e b e e n m a d e placing t h e T e m p l e n o r t h of t h e D o m e of t h e R o c k , o n t h e s a m e line as t h e B y z a n t i n e - p e r i o d G o l d e n G a t e (which, in m m , w a s built o n a m u c h earlier gate) located in t h e n o r t h e r n q u a d r a n t of t h e eastern wall of t h e T e m p l e M o u n t (Yadin, 1975, p . 95). T h e T e m p l e w a s o r i e n t e d east. I n general, t h e T e m p l e ' s floor p l a n m u s t h a v e s u b s u m e d
Temple of Solomon.
(Courtesy M . L y o n )
BIBLICAL TEMPLE within its walls t h e location of t h e biblical T a b e r n a c l e . T h u s , t h e debir h o u s e d t h e A r k of t h e C o v e n a n t a n d t h e protective c h e r u b i m s t a n d i n g o v e r — a n d in all probability f o r m i n g — t h e c o s m i c t h r o n e of t h e deity. T h e hSkal h o u s e d t h e l a m p s t a n d , table of s h o w b r e a d , a n d t h e o t h e r ritual objects d e scribed for t h e T a b e r n a c l e for t h e r o o m i m m e d i a t e l y in front of t h e i n n e r s a n c t u m . T h e T a b e r n a c l e texts (Ex. 25:31, 35:14, 37:17) m e n t i o n a single l a m p s t a n d w h e r e a s t h e sources for t h e F i r s t T e m p l e ( r Kgs. 7:49) indicate t h a t t h e r e were ten lampstands. A t h r e e - s t o r y a n n e x s u r r o u n d e d t h e hekal a n d debir b u t n o t t h e 'Mam. Finely d r e s s e d ashlars, p r e p a r e d offsite i n a q u a r r y , p r o v i d e d t h e b u i l d i n g material. T h e entire i n n e r b u i l d i n g w a s lined with c e d a r a n d t h e n overlaid with gold. G i l d e d olive-wood d o o r s f o r m e d t h e e n t r a n c e s b o t h t o t h e hekal a n d t h e debir. T h e walls of t h e n a v e a n d inner s a n c t u m w e r e c a r v e d with c h e r u b i m , p a l m t r e e s , a n d flowers a n d t h e n gilded. A c c o r d i n g t o t h e C h r o n i c l e r , a veil of b l u e , p u r p l e , a n d c r i m s o n linen, w i t h c h e r u b i m e m b r o i d e r e d o n it, w a s h u n g i m m e d i a t e l y b e f o r e t h e A r k of t h e C o v e n a n t , s e p arating t h e debir from t h e hekal (2 Chr. 3:14). T h i s c o r r e s p o n d s exactly t o t h e veil d e s c r i b e d for t h e T a b e r n a c l e i n t h e desert (Ex. 26:31, 36:35). T h e veil described here s t a n d s in place of t h e o l i v e - w o o d d o o r s of r Kings a n d p r e s u m a b l y r e p r e s e n t e d t h e situation a t t h e t i m e of t h e Chronicler, as it did also in t h e t i m e of J o s e p h u s (Mt. 27:51; Mk. 15:38; Lk. 23:45)T h e 'Mam, w h i c h s t o o d i n front of t h e hekal, m a y h a v e b e e n a n i n n e r c o u r t p r o v i d i n g access t o t h e two i n n e r r o o m s of t h e divine dwelling. T w o hollow, c a s t - b r o n z e pillars (18 cubits high) s t o o d i n front of t h e 'Mam. T h e y w e r e p r o b a b l y freestanding a n d m a r k e d tire e n t r y to t h e i n n e r c o u r t ( L u n d quist, 1982, 1988). T h e pillars h a d 5-cubit-high capitals of p o m e g r a n a t e s a n d lotuses a n d b o r e enigmatic n a m e s , J a c h i n (the s o u t h e r n m o s t ) a n d B o a z (the n o r t h e r n m o s t ) . T h e y car ried c o s m i c c o n n o t a t i o n s , f o u n d i n g t h e T e m p l e i n t h e u n d e r w o r l d , while u n i t i n g it w i t h t h e heavenly sphere, t o tie all t h r e e w o r l d s p h e r e s ( h e a v e n , earth, u n d e r w o r l d ) t o g e t h e r i n t h e universal heavenly T e m p l e . T h e n a m e s o n t h e pillars s y m b o l i z e d t h e c o s m i c u n i v e r s a l rule of Y a h w e h a n d o f t h e D a v i d i c d y n a s t y t h e b u i l d i n g of t h e T e m p l e f o u n d e d a n d legitimized: Jachin m e a n t t h a t Y a h w e h f o u n d e d t h e d y n a s t y a n d t h e T e m p l e , a n d Boaz t h a t Y a h w e h ' s p o w e r e m a n a t e s f r o m t h e T e m p l e ( M e y e r s , 1983). I t w a s this legitimizing p o w e r t h a t m a d e possible t h e p r o m u l g a t i o n of " l a w c o d e s " in t h e t e m p l e s of t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t , as well as t h e e n a c t m e n t of state a n d d y n a s t i c r e n e w a l c o v e n a n t c e r e m o n i e s , s u c h as t h a t d i r e c t e d b y J o s i a h i n front of t h e pillars (2 Kgs. 23:1-3). T h e pillars as g a t e p o s t s also signified t h e e n t r a n c e of t h e b u i l d i n g ' s r e s i d e n t , Y a h w e h , into his dwelling p l a c e a n d of G o d ' s s a n c t i o n of a n d availability t o t h e n a t i o n a l state. T h e structural relationship of t h e 'Mam t o t h e pillars m a y follow t h e E g y p t i a n m o d e l : t h e pillars m a y h a v e f o r m e d a
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m o n u m e n t a l e n t r a n c e , t h e w a y pylons d o in a n E g y p t i a n t e m p l e , giving w a y t o t h e o p e n 'Mam; or, t h e y m a y h a v e b e e n structural m e m b e r s of a n o p e n p o r c h ( t h e 'Mam), ei ther in t h e N o r t h Syrian bit-hilani style or in t h e style of t h e m e g a r o n , with t h e pillars s t a n d i n g i n antis. T h e r e w e r e two c o u r t s i n front of t h e T e m p l e (2 Kgs. 21:5), a n i n n e r (Ez. 40:28) a n d a n o u t e r (Ez. 40:20) c o u r t , also k n o w n as t h e u p p e r , a n d lower c o u r t s . A t t h e n o r t h eastern c o r n e r of t h e i n n e r c o u r t , in front of t h e T e m p l e , was a w o o d e n altar c o v e r e d w i t h b r o n z e for b u r n t offerings, with h o r n s a t e a c h of its four c o r n e r s , a c c o r d i n g t o tire p r e scriptions of Exodus 2 7 : 1 - 2 , b u t c o n s t r u c t e d in t h e t i m e of D a v i d (2 Sm. 24:21, 25). I n his dedicatory p r a y e r S o l o m o n s t o o d ( r Kgs. 8:22) a n d kneeled (1 Kgs. 8:54) before this altar as h e p r a y e d . A r o u n d b r o n z e basin, 30 cubits i n cir c u m f e r e n c e a n d s u p p o r t e d b y twelve cast-bronze o x e n , stood a t t h e s o u t h e a s t c o r n e r of t h e T e m p l e . N o architect is n a m e d , b u t in .the ancient N e a r East, g o d s a n d kings w e r e architects a n d builders. K i n g s received a r chitectural p l a n s f r o m t h e g o d s t h r o u g h direct revelation, often while s p e n d i n g t h e n i g h t in a sanctuary, as w a s t h e case with K i n g G u d e a of L a g a s h (cf. 2 Chr. 1:7-13: " I n t h a t n i g h t G o d a p p e a r e d t o S o l o m o n " — t h a t is, in t h e high place at G i b e o n . ) T h e T e m p l e p l a n is t h e n p r e s e n t e d in 2 Chron icles 2 (cf. 1 Kgs. 3:3-5). T h e b e g i n n i n g of a n e w dynasty, which often m e a n t t h e b e g i n n i n g of a n e w national state, was t h e t i m e for b u i l d i n g a great dynastic t e m p l e . A c c o r d i n g t o this ancient p a t t e r n , t h e king w e n t t o L e b a n o n for cedar (2 Chr. 2:3-10), for o t h e r building materials (2 Chr. 2 : 1 1 16), a n d , as is also stated i n t h e biblical r e c o r d s , for t h e building expertise for w h i c h P h o e n i c i a w a s f a m e d (2 Kgs. 7:13-14, 45). M a t e r i a l s a n d technological assistance m a y h a v e b e e n a c c o m p a n i e d b y a n architectural p l a n — w h i c h m a y m e a n t h a t t h e F i r s t T e m p l e was P h o e n i c i a n i n style— a style strongly influenced b y E g y p t a n d t h a t is d o c u m e n t e d in L e b a n o n as early as t h e E g y p t i a n twelfth dynasty ( 1 9 9 1 1783 BCE; see L u n d q u i s t , 1983b, p p . 205-219). T h e r e was also a l o n g tradition of t e m p l e building in Syria a n d P h o e n i c i a of tripartite, straight-axis t e m p l e s , with a n o p e n breitraum p o r c h o r vestibule with c o l u m n s in antis a n d a langraum n a v e o r antecella. I n m o s t cases, these t e m p l e s h a d a n i c h e in t h e r e a r of the n a v e for t h e statue of t h e deity, r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e m o s t holy place. E x a m p l e s from m o r e r e c e n t excavations a r e T e m p l e D from M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e I E b l a / T e l l M a r d i k l i in N o r t h Syria, a n d t h e three L B t e m p l e s f r o m E m a r / M e s k e n e , o n t h e w e s t b a n k of t h e E u p h r a t e s River, in Syria, just east of A l e p p o (see "Syria a n d t h e T e m ple of S o l o m o n , " 1985, p p . 192-193). T h e overall i m p r e s s i o n of t h e T e m p l e p r e c i n c t i n J e r u salem in t h e t i m e of S o l o m o n is t h a t of a N e a r E a s t e r n c o s m i c t e m p l e , sitting o n t o p of t h e sacred m o u n t a i n — t h e u l t i m a t e arclritectural e x p r e s s i o n of t h e heavenly t e m p l e revealed o n t h e M o u n t a i n of G o d a n d built after t h e p a t t e r n revealed t h e r e (Ex. 25:8-9). T h e primordial waters of t h e
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BIBLICAL T E M P L E
abyss from t h e t i m e of t h e creation were harnessed, p r e s e n t in die symbolism of t h e b r o n z e sea. Everywhere w e r e sacred trees and life-giving vegetation, b o t h real-life a n d carved, representing " t h e p r i m o r d i a l l a n d s c a p e , " t h e state of t h e world at the creation, w h o s e p u r p o s e the t e m p l e r e p r e s e n t s and symbolizes (see L u n d q u i s t , 1990, p p . n 3 - 1 2 3 ) . T h e closer t h e w o r s h i p e r c a m e to t h e inner s a n c t u m , t h r o u g h its s e q u e n c e of courtyards a n d chapels, all o n a sin gle axis, t h e holier a n d m o r e restricted t h e sacred space b e c a m e . T h e m o s t holy place could only b e entered b y t h e high priest (once each year o n t h e D a y of A t o n e m e n t ) a n d , d u r i n g the t i m e of t h e First T e m p l e , b y t h e king himself (2 Kgs. 19:14). A p p r o a c h i n g ever nearer t o the m o s t holy place, along the axis, the p a t h rose in elevation, p e r h a p s to 5 cubits (see above). T h i s is directly analogous to the situation in Egyptian temples, w h e r e the floor level rises at e a c h t h r e s h old, until t h e a d y t o n is r e a c h e d , w h i c h w a s believed t o b e built o n t h e primordial m o u n d of creation. I n the First T e m ple, according to this theory, t h e higher elevation of t h e deblr w o u l d have b e e n created b y t h e rock formation below it, t h e R o c k of F o u n d a t i o n , t h e place creation b e g a n .
S e c o n d T e m p l e . T h e T e m p l e M o u n t lay in ruins for a generation following N e b u c h a d r e z z a r ' s d e s t r u c t i o n of J e r u s a l e m in 587 BCE. W h a t is k n o w n of Z e r u b b a b e l ' s T e m p l e , dedicated in 516 BCE, centers primarily o n t h e difficulties t h e p e o p l e h a d in m a n a g i n g t h e rebuilding, n o t o n t h e details of t h e building itself. Haggai gives a sense of h o w m u c h p o o r e r a n d less g r a n d t h e Z e r u b b a b e l T e m p l e w a s in c o m p a r i s o n to S o l o m o n ' s (Hg. 2; 1-3). A t d i e s a m e time, t h e r e is valuable evidence in Haggai (e.g., 1 : 1 - 1 1 ) for t h e c o m m o n a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t e r n t e m p l e ideology in w h i c h t h e p e o p l e ' s dire e c o n o m i c straits a r e tied directly t o their neglect of t h e T e m ple (see L u n d q u i s t , 1984). P e r h a p s t h e clearest p i c t u r e of w h a t this p h a s e of t h e T e m p l e w a s i n t e n d e d to b e , architecturally a n d in its b u i l d ing m e t h o d s a n d d e c o r a t i o n , is t o b e f o u n d in C y r u s ' s d e c r e e in Ezra 6:1-5: a 60-cubit ( b r o a d ) b y 60-cubit (high) H o u s e of G o d w h e r e sacrifices a n d b u r n t offerings will b e b r o u g h t , c o n s t r u c t e d of ashlars a n d timber, to w h i c h t h e gold a n d silver vessels t a k e n to B a b y l o n b y N e b u c h a d r e z z a r will b e returned. As with t h e biblical a c c o u n t s of t h e F i r s t T e m p l e , t h e m a -
BIBLICAL T E M P L E jor s o u r c e s for t h e H e r o d i a n T e m p l e ( J o s e p h u s , Antiq, War
5; M i s h n a h Mid.)
provide contradictory
15,
information
for m a n y i m p o r t a n t details. F u r t h e r m o r e , t h e T e m p l e Scroll f r o m Q u m r a n (11QT),
w h i c h stands in roughly t h e s a m e
r e l a t i o n s h i p t o t h e t w o p h a s e s of t h e S e c o n d T e m p l e t h a t Ezekiel
40-48 d o e s t o t h e F i r s t T e m p l e , p r o v i d e s a v i s i o n a r y
s o u r c e of a f u t u r e T e m p l e b a s e d i n s o m e d e g r e e — p e r h a p s t o a g r e a t d e g r e e — o n t h e T e m p l e t h a t s t o o d in J e r u s a l e m at t h e time of t h e w r i t i n g of t h e v i s i o n a r y s c r i p t u r e
(Maier,
1989; D e l c o r , 1989). T h e c a n o n i c a l d e m a n d s of t h e biblical p r e s c r i p t i o n s f o r tire T e m p l e d e t e r m i n e d t h a t H e r o d ' s T e m p l e c o u l d n o t b e a l t e r e d i n a n y significant w a y . I t s d i m e n s i o n s w e r e t o b e 60 c u b i t s l o n g , 60 h i g h , a n d 20 w i d e ( e q u i v a l e n t d i m e n s i o n s i n t h e F i r s t T e m p l e w e r e 60, 25, a n d 20). T h e p r i m a r y w a y i n which H e r o d altered the Z e r u b b a b e l T e m p l e , thereby t r a n s f o r m i n g it i n t o t h e l a r g e s t a n d m o s t s p e c t a c u l a r s a c r e d t e m e n o s in a n t i q u i t y , w a s b y g r e a t l y e x p a n d i n g d i e a r e a of t h e p l a t f o r m (to a n a r e a of 67,000 s q m [172,000 s q . y d . ] ) . T h e t e m p l e p r e c i n c t i n c l u d e d a n e l a b o r a t e a r r a y of c o u r t y a r d s , b e g i n n i n g w i t h t h e C o u r t of t h e G e n t i l e s a l o n g tire s o u t h e r n p e r i m e t e r a n d followed b y i n c r e a s i n g l y s a c r e d c o u r t y a r d s i n f r o n t of t h e T e m p l e : f r o m
e a s t t o w e s t , a C o u r t of t h e
W o m e n , t h e n , p a s s i n g tiirough t h e N i c a n o r G a t e , t h e C o u r t of t h e Israelites, a n d finally, j u s t i n f r o n t of t h e T e m p l e , t h e C o u r t of t h e P r i e s t s . H e r o d also h a d t h e o u t s i d e of t h e t e m p l e c o v e r e d w i t h g o l d , w h i c h w o u l d h a v e c r e a t e d a s c e n e of b l i n d i n g i n c a n d e s c e n s e i n t h e s u n l i g h t (War 5:222-223 a n d p a s s i m ; Mid. 2, 3, 4). T h e b u i l d i n g ' s i m p l e m e n t s a n d f u r n i s h i n g s as well w e r e p r o b a b l y crafted o n a m o r e s u m p t u o u s scale t h a n ever b e f o r e . S i m i l a r a r r a n g e m e n t s i n 11QT r e p r e s e n t p a r t of t h e e v i d e n c e for m a n y s c h o l a r s t h a t r i Q T w a s a foundation d o c u m e n t for the Herodian consttuction. [See also J e r u s a l e m ; T e m p l e s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Barker, M a r g a r e t . The Gam of Heaven: Tlie History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 1 . Very important work, excep tionally thorough a n d insightful. Busink, T h . A. Der Tempel von Jerusalem, von Salomon bis Herodes. 2 vols. L e i d e n , 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 8 0 . W o r k of vast learning, fundamental t o all research o n this subject. Delcor, Matiiias. "Is t h e T e m p l e Scroll a Source of the H e r o d i a n T e m p l e ? " I n Temple Scroll Studies, edited by G e o r g e Brooke, p p . 6 7 - 8 9 . Sheffield, 1989. G u t m a n n , Joseph, ed. The Temple of Solomon: Archaeological Fact and Medieval Tradition in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Art. 'Missoula, M o n t . , 1 9 7 6 . Five articles bringing together fundamental a n d fairly inaccessible scholarly literature o n t h e Solomonic T e m p l e in d i e three postbiblical traditions. Hurowitz, Victor. I Have Built You an Exalted House. Sheffield, 1 9 9 2 . T h o r o u g h analysis of temple building i n ancient Israel in relation to M e s o p o t a m i a n a n d n o r t h w e s t Semitic texts. Keel, O d i m a r . The Symbolism of the Biblical World: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of Psalms. N e w York, 1 9 7 8 . L u n d q u i s t , J o h n M . " T h e Legitimizing Role of the T e m p l e in t h e O r
329
igin of the S t a t e . " I n Society of Biblical Literature 1982 Seminar Papers, edited b y K e n t H . Richards, p p . 2 7 1 - 2 9 5 . Chico, Calif., 1982. L u n d q u i s t , J o h n M . " S t u d i e s o n the T e m p l e in the Ancient N e a r E a s t . " P h . D . diss., University of M i c h i g a n , 1983a. Covers the entire ancient N e a r East, with heavy emphasis on t h e First T e m p l e . Very thorough bibliography u p to the time of completion. L u n d q u i s t , John M . " W h a t Is a T e m p l e ? A Preliminary T y p o l o g y . " In The Quest for the Kingdom of God: Studies in Honor of George E. Mendenhall, edited by H . B . H u f f m o n et al., p p . 2 0 5 - 2 1 9 . W i n o n a L a k e , tnd., 1983b. L u n d q u i s t , J o h n M . " T h e C o m m o n T e m p l e Ideology of the Ancient N e a r E a s t . " I n The Temple in Antiquity, edited by T r u m a n M a d s e n , PP. 5 3 - 7 6 . Provo, U t a h , 1 9 8 4 . L u n d q u i s t , John M . ' ' T e m p l e , C o v e n a n t , a n d L a w in t h e Ancient N e a r East a n d in the O l d T e s t a m e n t . " In Israel's Apostasy and Restoration: Essays in Honor of Roland K. Harrison, edited by A v r a h a m Gileadi, p p . 2 9 3 - 3 0 5 . G r a n d R a p i d s , M i c h . , 1988. L u n d q u i s t , J o h n M . " C . G . J u n g a n d the T e m p l e : Symbols of W h o l e n e s s . " I n C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hcnneneutics of Culture, edited b y K a r i n B a r n a b y a n d Pellegrino D'Acierno, p p . 1 1 3 - 1 2 3 . L o n d o n , 1990. L u n d q u i s t , John M . The Temple: Meeting Place of Heaven and Earth. L o n d o n , 1993. Application of the author's temple typology in a p o p ular format, with m a n y p h o t o g r a p h s a n d illustrations. M a i e r , Johann. " T h e Architectural History of the T e m p l e in Jerusalem in t h e Light of t h e T e m p l e Scroll." I n Temple Scroll Studies, edited by G e o r g e Brooke, p p . 2 3 - 6 2 . Sheffield, 1 9 8 9 . Excellent, detailed a c c o u n t of die relationship of u Q 7 ' t o t h e Second T e m p l e . See also D e l c o r (above). M a z a r , Benjamin. The Mountain of the Lord. G a r d e n City, N . Y . , 1 9 7 5 . T h e most comprehensive coverage of the First a n d Second T e m p l e s , including thorough analysis of ancient evidence a n d m o d e r n ar chaeology. Exceptionally well illustrated. M e y e r s , Carol L . "Jachin a n d Boaz in Religious a n d Political Perspec tive." Catholic Biblical Quarterly 45 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 6 7 - 1 7 8 . M e y e r s , Carol L . " T e m p l e , Jerusalem," In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, p p . 3 5 0 - 3 6 9 . N e w York, 1992. F u n d a m e n t a l , comprehensive study of the First a n d S e c o n d T e m p l e s . Ottosson, M a g n u s . Temples and Cult Places in Palestine. Uppsala, 1980. T h o r o u g h coverage, with excellent plans a n d diagrams a n d extensive presentation of the scholarly literature. Parry, D o n a l d W . , et al., eds. A Bibliography on Temples of the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean World. Lewiston, N.Y., 1 9 9 1 . Recent, exhaustive bibliography, with major sections devoted to the biblical temples. Parry, D o n a l d W . , ed. Temples of the Ancient World: Ritual and Sym bolism. Salt L a k e City, 1994. T w e n t y - f o u r articles dealing with m a n y aspects of biblical, ancient N e a r Eastern, a n d Jewish temples, ritual, symbolism, a n d typology. Patai, R a p h a e l . Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual. 2 d enl. ed. N e w York, 1 9 6 7 . O n e of the most important a n d interesting books ever written o n t h e subject; brings together the rabbinic m a terial. Ritmeyer, Kathleen, a n d L e e n Ritmeyer. "Reconstructing H e r o d ' s T e m p l e M o u n t in Jerusalem." Biblical Archaeology Review 15 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 2 3 - 4 2 . T h e most t h o r o u g h compilation a n d analysis of what is k n o w n of the H e r o d i a n achievement. Ritmeyer, L e e n . " L o c a t i n g t h e Original T e m p l e M o u n t . " Biblical Ar chaeology Review 18 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 2 4 - 4 5 , 6 4 - 6 5 . Exhaustive a n d seminal analysis of w h a t is k n o w n of t h e development of the T e m p l e M o u n t from S o l o m o n ' s time o n w a r d , summarizing a n d critiquing t h e vari ous theories of the p l a c e m e n t of die temple on the m o u n t . "Syria a n d t h e T e m p l e of S o l o m o n . " In The World Atlas of Archaeology, p p . 1 9 2 - 1 9 3 . Boston, 1 9 8 5 . Plans of relevant temples.
330
BISITUN
Wright, G.R.H. Ancient Building
in South Syria and Palestine. 2 vols.
H a n d b u c h der Orientalistik, vol. 7. Leiden, 1985. Yadin, Yigael, ed. Jerusalem 1968-1974.
Revealed: Archaeology
in the Holy
City,
Jerusalem, 1 9 7 5 . JOHN M . LUNDQUIST
B I S I T U N (Behistun, O l d Pers., *bagastana, " p l a c e of g o d [ s ] " ) , a strategically located, scenically d r a m a t i c site i n western Iran, s o m e 32 k m (20 mi.) east of B a c t a r a n , for m e r l y K e r m a n s h a h (34°35' N , 47°25' E ) . T h e site is vari ously k n o w n for its r e m a i n s of Paleolithic, p r e - A c h a e m e n i d , A c h a e m e n i d , P a r t h i a n , Sasanian, a n d Islamic date. Preeminentiy, however, Bisitun is associated with t h e rockc u t relief a n d inscriptions t h e A c h a e m e n i d ruler D a r i u s t h e G r e a t (522-486 BCE) chose t o erect, in 520 a n d 519 BCE, o n the precipitous southeast face of t h e Bisitun m o u n t a i n (see figure 1). T h e m o n u m e n t , w h i c h provides t h e only historical a c c o u n t left b y a n A c h a e m e n i d m o n a r c h , stands 70 m a b o v e t h e age-old e a s t - w e s t h i g h w a y t h a t connects t h e h i g h l a n d s of M e d i a with t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n plain. T h e site a p p e a r s as M t . Bagistanon in D i o d o r u s (2.13, after Ctesias). T h e relief is approximately 3 m high a n d 5.5 m w i d e . I t is b o r d e r e d o n t h r e e sides b y trilingual inscriptions, a cir c u m s t a n c e t h a t gives t h e whole composition a height of a b o u t 7 m a n d a n overall w i d t h of 18 m . I n t h e earliest stage of t h e creation of this c o m p l e x m o n u m e n t , t h e carved p a n e l was c o m p l e m e n t e d b y n o m o r e t h a n a single text, i n Elamite, which carried t h e story of D a r i u s ' s career t h r o u g h t h e c o u r s e of his accession year a n d his first regnal year. S o o n after
BISITUN.
w a r d , a Babylonian version of t h e t e x t w a s inscribed o n t h e o p p o s i t e , left side of t h e relief. I n a s t u n n i n g i n n o v a t i o n t h a t followed t h e s u b s e q u e n t invention of t h e O l d P e r s i a n c u neiform script, D a r i u s chose t o i n t r o d u c e , directly b e n e a t h t h e relief, a separate P e r s i a n version of t h e text. T h e n , in r e s p o n s e t o fresh t r i u m p h s in D a r i u s ' s s e c o n d a n d third r e g nal years, t h e existing s c h e m e was arbitrarily e x p a n d e d . T h e r i g h t - h a n d limit of t h e relief was e x t e n d e d into t h e area o c c u p i e d b y t h e original E l a m i t e t e x t — a n d t h e c o n t e n t s of t h a t text w e r e reinscribed in a n e w position, t o t h e left of t h e O l d P e r s i a n text. I n addition, D a r i u s ' s description of his latest a c c o m p l i s h m e n t s c a m e t o b e a c c o m m o d a t e d i n t h e final, fifth c o l u m n of t h e O l d P e r s i a n a c c o u n t . I n t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e Bisitun inscription, D a r i u s is clearly c o n c e r n e d a b o u t bolstering his claim t o t h e t h r o n e . T h u s , special stress is laid o n his s t a n d i n g as a n A c h a e m e n i d , a n d , while his selection as king is a s c r i b e d t o t h e divine "favor of A h u r a m a z d a , " it is also m a d e clear t h a t it w a s t h e personal actions of D a r i u s t h a t w e r e r e s p o n s i b l e for t h e downfall of " G a u m a t a t h e m a g u s " — a n a p p a r e n t i m p o s t o r w h o h a d a b r o g a t e d A c h a e m e n i d rule. T h e greater p a r t of t h e rest of t h e inscription is taken u p w i t h a d e s c r i p tion of t h e fate of t h o s e w h o t h e n s o u g h t t o w r e s t p o w e r from D a r i u s a n d w h o w e r e duly o v e r c o m e , either b y D a r i u s himself or b y his generals. A s far as possible, t h e relief offers a single a b r i d g e d ver sion of t h e full s w e e p of these successive events. T h e tall, c o m m a n d i n g figure of D a r i u s , a r m e d w i t h a b o w , is s h o w n with his leading foot o n t h e p r o s t r a t e b o d y of G a u m a t a , w h o raises b o t h a r m s i n supplication. A n o t h e r n i n e rebel leaders,
F i g u r e I . Relief of Darius I. (Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung T e h r a n )
BISITUN identified, in t h e fashion of D a r i u s a n d G a u m a t a , b y trilin gual labels, p r o c e e d in b o n d s t o w a r d t h e king. S k u n k h a , t h e last of t h e s e , was n o t of c o u r s e a p a r t of t h e initial design; his i m a g e w a s cut into t h e area of t h e adjacent Elamite i n scription after D a r i u s ' s victory over t h e p o i n t e d - c a p p e d Scythians. T h e s c e n e is c o m p l e t e d b y t h r e e unlabeled fig u r e s : t w o a r m e d ( a n d s e e m i n g l y n o b l e ) a t t e n d a n t s , each e l egantly attired, like their sovereign, in t h e full, pleated P e r sian c o s t u m e ; a n d a m a l e figure (with a far m o r e o r n a t e c r o w n t h a n t h a t w o r n b y D a r i u s ) w h o rises o u t of a w i n g e d disk a n d h o v e r s a b o v e t h e r o w of s t a n d i n g , slightly b o w e d captives. T h e identity of this w i n g e d figure in A c h a e m e n i d art is t o d a y a subject of c o n t r o v e r s y (see S h a p u r S h a h b a z i , " A n A c h a e m e n i d S y m b o l . I: A Farewell to ' F r a h a h r ' a n d ' A h u r a m a z d a , ' " Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran n . s . 7 [1974]: 135-144). Y e t , f r o m t h e w a y in w h i c h t h e h o v e r i n g , elaborately c r o w n e d figure at Bisitun a p p e a r s to h o l d t h e ring of kingship in o n e h a n d a n d t o r e c i p r o c a t e t h e g e s t u r e of t h e raised right h a n d of D a r i u s , it d o e s s e e m w a r r a n t e d , at least in this instance, t o identify t h e w i n g e d s y m b o l w i t h A h u r a m a z d a , w h o s e " f a v o r " is so r e p e a t e d l y a c k n o w l e d g e d in t h e a c c o m p a n y i n g text. S u c h an a s s u m p t i o n is m o s t s p e cifically s u p p o r t e d b y D a r i u s ' s e v i d e n t q u o t a t i o n of t h e c o m p l e m e n t a r y motifs of investiture a n d military t r i u m p h t h a t a p p e a r in t h e relief, 150 k m (93 mi.) away, of t h e early second-millennium Lullubi m o n a r c h Anubanini. Anubanini is d e p i c t e d with his f o r w a r d foot firmly l o d g e d o n t h e s u p i n e f o r m of his principal o p p o n e n t , while his gaze rests o n t h e elevated, ring-clasping i m a g e of t h e g o d d e s s I n a n n a . D a r i u s asserts (in p a r a . 70 of t h e O l d P e r s i a n version of t h e Bisitun inscription) t h a t copies of t h e text—itself r e m o t e , b u t indubitably safe, in its lofty situation—were sent " e v e r y w h e r e a m o n g t h e p r o v i n c e s . " T h i s s t a t e m e n t is c o n firmed b y copies of p o r t i o n s of t h e t e x t in A r a m a i c ( G r e e n field a n d P o r t e n , 1982) a n d A k k a d i a n (Voightlander, 1978) discovered at E l e p h a n t i n e a n d B a b y l o n , respectively. F u r t h e r m o r e , t h e possibility t h a t copies of t h e s c u l p t u r e d p a n e l also circulated w i t h i n t h e e m p i r e is raised b y t h e recovery of t h r e e a p p a r e n t l y related relief fragments from B a b y l o n t h a t are e x e c u t e d i n a slightly different style (Ursula Seidl, " E i n relief D a r i o s I in B a b y l o n , " Archaologische Mitteilungen Aus / r a n n.s.9 [1976]: 125-130). Following a l o n g p e r i o d of time, d u r i n g w h i c h t h e t r u e significance of t h e Bisitun m o n u m e n t w a s wholly lost, t h e m o n u m e n t ' s identity as t h e h a n d i w o r k of D a r i u s was r e e s tablished b y H e n r y C r e s w i c k e R a w l i n s o n (1846) w h o , at i n tervals b e t w e e n 1835 a n d 1847, w a s t h e first t o e x a m i n e a n d c o p y t h e inscriptions. [See the biography of Rawlinson.] M o r e o v e r , it w a s this trilingual " e m p r e s s of i n s c r i p t i o n s " t h a t p r o v i d e d , f r o m t h e time of R a w l i n s o n o n w a r d , m a n y of t h e initial clues t h a t led t o t h e d e c i p h e r m e n t of t h e B a b y l o n i a n a n d Elamite c u n e i f o r m scripts. S u b s e q u e n t l a n d m a r k s in t h e s t u d y of t h e m o n u m e n t i n c l u d e L e o n a r d W . K i n g a n d
331
Reginald C a m p b e l l T h o m p s o n ' s publication of b o t h t h e r e lief a n d t h e inscriptions in 1907 (The Sculptures and Inscrip tion of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia, L o n d o n ) a n d t h e n u m e r o u s studies c o n t r i b u t e d b y G e o r g e G . C a m e r o n (e.g., " T h e E l a m i t e Version of t h e Bisitun I n s c r i p t i o n s , " Journal of Cuneiform Studies 14 [i960]: 59-68). L a s t b u t n o t least, t h e m o n u m e n t w a s r e r e c o r d e d and r e e x a m i n e d in m a n y i m p o r t a n t w a y s d u r i n g t h e c o u r s e of t h e e x e m p l a r y surveys of tire locality of Bisitun carried o u t in t h e 1960s a n d t h e 1970s u n d e r t h e direction of H e i n z L u s c h e y o n behalf of t h e G e r m a n Archaeological Institute in Tehran. [See also Elamites; P e r s i a n ; and Persians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Luschey, Heinz. "Bisutun: Geschichte u n d Forschtmgsgeschichte." ArchaologischeAnzeiger 89 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 1 1 4 - 1 4 9 . Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke. The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Be histun Decyphered and Translated. L o n d o n , 1846. T h e pioneer p u b lication. Schmitt, Rtidiger. "BTsotun." In Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 4, p p . 289-305. London, 1987-. Weissbach, F . H . "Bagistana," In Paidys Realcncyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenscluift, vol. 2, cols. 2 7 6 9 - 2 7 7 1 . Stuttgart, 1896.
Archaeology Borger, Rykle. Die Chronologic des Darius-Denkmals am Behistun-Felsen. Gottingen, 1982. Farkas, A n n E . Achaemenid Sculpture, Istanbul, 1 9 7 4 . See pages 2 5 - 8 6 for the beginnings of A c h a e m e n i d drapery style. Kleiss, Wolfram. " Z u r T o p o g r a p h i e des 'Partherhanges' in Bisutun." Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 3 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 1 3 3 - 1 6 8 . N o t e espe cially the detailed site plans in figures 1 and 2. Luschey, Heinz. " S t u d i e n zu d e m Darius-Relief von Bisutun." Ar chaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 1 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 6 3 - 9 4 . Admirable, in p a r ticular for its fine p h o t o g r a p h s . Stronach, David. Pasargadae. Oxford, 1 9 7 8 . See pages 96ff. for a dis cussion of the beginnings of the Achaemenid drapery style. T r i i m p e l m a n n , Leo. " Z u r Entstehungsgeschichte des M o n u m e n t e s Darios' I. v o n Bisutun u n d zur Datterung der Einfiihrung der altpersischen Schrift." Archaologische Anzeiger 82 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 2 8 1 - 2 9 8 .
Texts Greenfield, Jonas C., and Bezalel Porten. The Bisitun Inscription of Da rius the Great: Aramaic Version. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, part 1, vol. 5: T e x t s 1. L o n d o n , 1982. Contains two versions in Ar amaic. Grillot-Susini, Francois, et al. " L a version elamite de la trilingue de Behistun: U n e nouvelle lecture." Journal Asiatique 281 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 9 - 5 9 . T h e Elamite version. K e n t , R o l a n d G. Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon. 2 d ed. N e w Haven, 1953. Schmitt, Rtidiger. The Bisitun Inscriptions of Darius the Great: Old Per sian Text. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, part 1, vol. 1: T e x t s 1. L o n d o n , 1991. Supersedes K e n t . Voightlander, Elizabeth N . von. The Bisitun Inscription of Darius the Great: Babylonian Version, C o r p u s Inscriptionum Iranicarum, part 1, vol. 2: T e x t s 1, L o n d o n , 1 9 7 8 , D A V I D STRONACH and
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BLEGEN, CARL WILLIAM
B L E G E N , C A R L W I L L I A M (1887-1971)- A m e r i c a n pioneer of Aegean prehistoric archaeology, excavator of T r o y a n d Pylos, a n d early advocate of interdisciplinary fieldw o r k a n d surface survey. Blegen's excavations in the C o r inthia at K o r a k o u (1915-1916) a n d Zygouries (1921-1922) established die relative chronology of prehistoric G r e e c e in p r e - M y c e n a e a n times. His stratigraphic excavations at T r o y (1932-1938) clarified t h e stratigraphy of t h e site a n d s u g gested that city V i l a was the T r o y of die H o m e r i c epics. In 1939, Blegen b e g a n excavations in Messenia. A t A n o Englianos he discovered t h e Palace of N e s t o r a n d its archive r o o m ; the rapid transcription of its d o c u m e n t s greatly facil itated the d e c i p h e r m e n t of the L i n e a r B script as M y c e n a e a n Greek. Blegen's scholarly articles were particularly influen tial. H e was the first (1928) to argue that G r e e k speakers m u s t have entered G r e e c e at the beginning of tire M i d d l e B r o n z e Age a n d i n v a d e d C r e t e in the L a t e B r o n z e Age; later (1958) he sparked the " K n o s s o s c o n t r o v e r s y " b y p o i n t i n g o u t discrepancies b e t w e e n the dates of contexts in w h i c h L i n e a r B tablets h a d b e e n found at Pylos, M y c e n a e , a n d K n o s s o s . Blegen a n d his close friend a n d frequent c o a u t h o r A. J. B. W a c e saw (1918) M y c e n a e a n civilization as a n i n digenous d e v e l o p m e n t s h a p e d b y interaction with C r e t e (a "fruit of the cultivated graft set on t h e wild stock of t h e m a i n l a n d " ) , a n d a r g u e d strongly against the t h e n - p r e v a l e n t theory that the G r e e k m a i n l a n d h a d b e e n controlled by t h e M i n o a n s in the L a t e B r o n z e Age. Already in 1939 they saw t h e d o m i n a n c e of M y c e n a e a n pottery over M i n o a n in t h e N e a r East a n d E g y p t as evidence tiiat the G r e e k m a i n l a n d h a d by the second p h a s e of t h e A e g e a n L a t e B r o n z e A g e replaced Crete as the politically d o m i n a n t force in the A e gean; the d e c i p h e r m e n t of L i n e a r B m o r e t h a n a d e c a d e later p r o v e d t h e m right. BIBLIOGRAPHY A n o n y m o u s . "Bibliography of Carl William Blegen." Hesperia 35 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : 287-294. List of Blegen's publications, with the exception of his final reports on Pylos. Blegen, Carl W. " T h e C o m i n g of the Greeks." American Journal of Archaeology 32 (1928): 1 4 6 - 1 5 4 . Blegen, Carl W . " A Chronological P r o b l e m . " In Minoica: Festschrift sum 80. Geburtstag von Johannes Sundwall, edited by Ernst G r u m a c h , p p . 6 1 - 6 6 . Berlin, 1958. Blegen, Carl W. Troy and the Trojans. L o n d o n , 1963. S u m m a r y of the most significant results of Blegen's excavations at Troy. Blegen, Carl W. The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia. 3 vols. Princeton, 1980. Definitive publication of the results of Blegen's excavations. Blegen, Carl W . , and A. J. B. Wace, " T h e Pre-Mycenaean Pottery of the M a i n l a n d . " Annual of the British School at Athens 22 ( 1 9 1 6 - 1 9 1 8 ) : 175-189. Blegen, Carl W., and A. J. B . Wace. "Pottery as Evidence for T r a d e and Colonisation in the Aegean Bronze Age." Klio 32 ( 1 9 3 9 ) : I3I-I47-
Blegen, Carl W , , et al. Troy: Excavations Conducted by the University of Cincinnati, 1032-1038.4 vols. Princeton, 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 8 . Definitive p u b lication of the results of Blegen's excavations.
M c D o n a l d , William A. Progress into the Past: The Rediscovery of My cenaean Civilization. 2d ed. Bloomington, 1990. Biography of Blegen and other pioneers of Aegean prehistory. JACK L . DAVIS
B L I S S , F R E D E R I C K J O N E S ( i 859-1937), a r c h a e ologist, educator, a n d lecairer. B o r n in L e b a n o n , Bliss w a s t h e son of A m e r i c a n missionaries a n d e d u c a t o r s . U n a b l e to hold s t a n d a r d e m p l o y m e n t b e c a u s e of m a r g i n a l health, in 1890 h e was asked b y the Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d ( P E F ) to continue William M a t t h e w Flinders Petrie's p i o n e e r i n g archaeological excavation at T e l l el-Hesi in s o u t h e r n P a l estine. Bliss t r a i n e d u n d e r Petrie in E g y p t before going t o Tell el-Hesi w h e r e , in 1891 a n d 1892, h e c o n d u c t e d t h e first truly stratigraphic excavation in Palestine. Bliss's w o r k c o m b i n e d Petrie's c e r a m i c chronology w i t h his o w n original stratigraphic c o n c e p t , t h e r e b y f o u n d i n g t h e discipline of Palestinian archaeology. Bliss c o n t i n u e d to excavate o n behalf of t h e P E F until 1900: in J e r u s a l e m (1898) a n d later at T e l l Zakariya ( A z e k a h ) , Tell es-Safi, T e l l el-Judeideh, a n d T e l l S a n d a h a n n a ( M a r i s a / M a r e s h a h ) . F o r tiiese sites, h e p r o d u c e d the first m o d e r n archaeological r e p o r t for Palestine (with R. A. S. Macalister, 1902). I n 1900 Bliss w a s dismissed as excavator for d i e P E F primarily b e c a u s e his careful ex cavation m e t h o d s w e r e t o o time c o n s u m i n g a n d did n o t yield finds t h o u g h t sufficient t o raise f u n d s . W i t h i n tiiirty years William Foxwell Albright r e c o g n i z e d this as a tragic mistake. After his dismissal, Bliss p r e p a r e d o n e final ar chaeological m o n o g r a p h (1906), describing t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of Palestinian research from its b e g i n n i n g s until 1902. T h e theoretical f o u n d a t i o n s h e defined for archaeological research in Palestine are still in u s e t o d a y . Bliss served as d e a n of m e n at t h e University of R o c h e s t e r in N e w Y o r k State from 1911 t h r o u g h 1914 a n d as a t u t o r at the Syrian P r o t e s t a n t College in Beirut until the e n d W o r l d W a r I. I n 1 9 1 9 he w a s an adviser t o t h e British general Allenby on the antiquities of Syria a n d Palestine, a n d in 1920 a n d 1921 h e was a n archaeological c o n s u l t a n t t o t h e A m e r ican Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h . H e retired in 1921. [See also 'Azekah; H e s i , Tell el-; J u d e i d e h , T e l l el-; M a r e s h a h ; Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d ; and the biography of Pe trie.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "Bliss, Frederick J o n e s . " In Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 2 2 , suppl. 2, p p . 4 4 - 4 5 . N e w York, 1 9 5 8 . T h e basic biographical sketch of Bliss by s o m e o n e w h o knew him. Bliss, Frederick Jones. A Mound of Many Cities, or, Tell el Flesy Exca vated. L o n d o n , 1894. T h e first major archaeological m o n o g r a p h based on stratigraphic excavation in Palestine. Delightful reading, b u t generally accessible only in major university and research librar ies. Bliss, Frederick Jones. Excavations at Jerusalem, 1894-1807. London, 1898.
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Bliss, Frederick Jones, a n d R. A . S. Macalister. Excavations in Palestine during the Years 1898-1900. L o n d o n , 1 9 0 2 . Bliss, Frederick Jones. The Development of Palestine Exploration. N e w York, 1 9 0 6 . King, Philip J. "Frederick Jones Bliss at Tell el-Hesi a n d Elsewhere." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 2 2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 9 6 - 1 0 0 . Basic review of Bliss's contributions t o the field of archaeology. Matthers, John M . "Excavations by t h e Palestine Exploration F u n d at Tell el-Hesi, 1 8 9 0 - 1 8 9 2 . " In Tell el-Hesi, vol. 4, The Site and the Expedition, edited by Bruce T . D a h l b e r g a n d Kevin G. O'Connell, p p . 3 7 - 6 7 . W i n o n a L a k e , I n d . , 1 9 8 9 . Detailed review a n d m o d e r n critical analysis of Bliss's excavations at Tell el-Hesi. JEFFREY A . BLAKELY
B O A T S . See Ships and Boats.
B O D R U M . See Halikarnassos.
B O G A Z K O Y , site of Hattusa, the capital of die Hittite Empire. The village of Bogazkoy has been renamed Bogazkale and upgraded to a town, but scholars continue to use its former name. Bogazkoy (roughly 4o°oi' N, 34°40' E) is in the province (Tk., i'Z) of Corum, Turkey, 200 km (124 mi.) on the road east of Ankara, 80 km (50 mi.) from Corum; 40 km (25 mi.) from Yozgat; and 19 km (12 mi.) from Alaca Hoytik. It is situated at the southern end of a small, fertile plain. The ancient city rises on a slope between two deeply cut streambeds, filling the angle between their converging courses. The ancient city rises toward the south from about 900 m to about 1200 m above sea level on a length of about 2 km (1 mi.). It covers an area of 414 acres. The modern town lies near the northern end of the ancient city, partly encroaching upon it. Bogazkoy was discovered in 18 34 together with the nearby rock sanctuary Yazilikaya by the French explorer Charles Texier. It was later visited by British and German scholars. In 1893 and 1894 another Frenchman, Ernest Chantre, found some fragments of clay tablets inscribed in Babylo nian cuneiform script, but in a hitherto unknown language. In 1901, J. A. Knudtzon deciphered two letters found at Tell el-Amarna written in a language he recognized as Indo-Eu ropean; they belonged to a correspondence between Phar aoh Amenhotep III and a king of the country of Arzawa. It was soon noticed that the language of these letters closely resembled that of Chantre's tablets. Therefore, in 1905, the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler and Theodore Makridi Bey, second director of the Istanbul Museum, went to Bogazk5y in search of Arzawa. The following year, they be gan excavations at the site under the auspices of die museum but financed in part by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG). They found thousands of tablets and fragments on the west slope of Biiyiikkale, the royal acropolis. Since the introductory formulas on some tablets were written in Ak-
BO6AZK5Y.
Plan of the ancient
city. (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
kadian (Babylonian), Winckler immediately recognized the title "Great King, King of Haiti," which showed that Bo gazkoy had been the Hittite capital. The excavations contin ued in 1 9 0 7 , 1 9 1 I 3 and 1912 and included some storerooms belonging to the Great Temple. Fieldwork brought the total number of tablets to ten thousand, and these became the source material for Hitdtology. In 1907, a team of archae ologists and architects, directed by Otto Puchstein, under the auspices of the German Archaeological Institute, sur veyed and partly excavated the city walls, including five gates and five temples. After World War I the excavations were resumed in 1931 jointly by the German Archaeological Institute and the DOG. Because Winckler had only dug for tablets and Puchstein's work was limited to the great monuments, it be came necessary to establish die site's stratigraphy with mod ern methods. The field director was Kurt Bittel. Interrupted in 1939 by World War II, the work was resumed in 1952
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a n d is still u n d e r w a y . P e t e r N e v e succeeded Bittel u p o n his retirement a n d h e , in 1994, was succeeded by Jtirgen Seher. I n 1931 Bittel started o n Buyukkale, b e c a u s e it h a d an accumulation of debris t h a t would allow for stratigraphic observations. L a t e r , t h e excavations were e x t e n d e d over m o s t of t h e city area. N e v e c o n c e n t r a t e d his w o r k o n t h e U p p e r City. T h e excavations since 1931 have a d d e d several t h o u s a n d tablets to t h o s e Winckler f o u n d . Since 1993 t h e excavation has b e e n e x t e n d e d to Buyukkaya, a n elevation east of t h e A n c i e n t City. T h e earliest settlements in t h e area of the city go back to t h e late p h a s e of t h e Early B r o n z e A g e (before 2000 BCE). F i n d s belonging to t h e p e r i o d ' s earlier p h a s e s a p p e a r e d at sites near Bogazkoy, b u t n o t in t h e city. T h e n e x t major p h a s e at t h e site is t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . It is characterized b y the Assyrian m e r c h a n t colonies t h e n in Anatolia. A set t l e m e n t f o u n d in level 4 of the L o w e r City c o n t a i n e d old Assyrian tablets belonging to t h e later p e r i o d of t h e Assyrian colonies k n o w n from level i b (eighteenth c e n t u r y BCE) at K u l t e p e . [See K u l t e p e T e x t s . ] T h e inscription of t h e early Hittite king Anitta says that h e defeated t h e king of H a t t i , destroyed his city, a n d p u t a curse o n its site. Anitta is at
tested a t K u l t e p e t o w a r d t h e e n d of i b , so t h e settlement at Bogazkoy m u s t a n t e d a t e this d e s t r u c t i o n . A t t h a t t i m e t h e city w a s k n o w n b y t h e n a m e HattuS, in t h e l a n g u a g e of t h e p r e - I n d o - E u r o p e a n p o p u l a t i o n , w h i c h scholars call H a t t i c , to distinguish it from I n d o - E u r o p e a n Hittite. I n Hittite, t h e s t e m was enlarged b y t h e vowel a t o H a t t u s a ( n o m i n a t i v e Hattusas). A b o u t o n e h u n d r e d years later, a Hittite king of a n o t h e r dynasty, disregarding t h e c u r s e , m a d e H a t t u s a his capital a n d w a s given t h e n a m e Hattusili, t h e m a n f r o m H a t t u s a . H e belongs t o w h a t is k n o w n as t h e O l d Hittite K i n g d o m . T h i s is followed b y t h e so-called M i d d l e K i n g d o m (fifteenth c e n t u r y BCE) a n d t h e N e w K i n g d o m (four t e e n t h a n d t h i r t e e n t h centuries BCE), also referred t o as t h e E m p i r e period. A l m o s t all buildings visible t o d a y b e l o n g to this last period. Older levels, particularly t h o s e excavated o n Buyukkale, h a v e b e e n covered u p , so t h a t t h e buildings of t h e e m p i r e c o u l d b e restored. D u r i n g t h e O l d K i n g d o m , only t h e lower p a r t of t h e city a n d Buyukkale were settled. T h e wall s e p a r a t i n g t h e U p p e r a n d L o w e r Cities c a n still b e followed. T h e U p p e r City was apparently only o c c u p i e d in t h e N e w K i n g d o m . T h e s o u t h e r n city wall, w i t h its t h r e e m o n u m e n t a l gates d e c o r a t e d with
BOGAZKOY. Lion gate. (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Typology and Technology s c u l p t u r e — L i o n ' s gate, K i n g ' s G a t e , a n d S p h i n x G a t e — also b e l o n g to d i e E m p i r e p e r i o d . Shortly after 1200 BCE, B o g a z k o y was destroyed. T r a c e s of t h e conflagration h a v e b e e n f o u n d in all p a r t s of the city. T h i s event is usually c o n n e c t e d w i t h t h e migrations of the p e o p l e s m e n t i o n e d in E g y p t i a n s o u r c e s as t h e Sea P e o p l e s . After t h e d e s t r u c t i o n , t h e r e is a settlement g a p . T h e n e x t b u i l d i n g level is datable b y its p a i n t e d pottery, w h i c h strongly resembles t h a t of t h e P h r y g i a n s , k n o w n from their capital, G o r d i o n [See G o r d i o n . ] It is datable to after 1000 BCE. O n Biiyukkale, t h e P h r y g i a n level is s u p e r c e d e d by o n e t h a t lasted into the Hellenistic p e r i o d . I n t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, t h e Celtic Galatians e n t e r e d Anatolia, a n d one of their tribes, the T r o c m a i , settled east of t h e Halys River. B o g a z k o y p r o b a b l y b e l o n g e d to their r e a l m , b u t an earlier theory, a c c o r d i n g to w h i c h a certain class of d e c o r a t e d Hellenistic p o t t e r y was Galatian, is n o l o n g e r a c c e p t e d . U n d e r the R o m a n s , Galatia b e c a m e a p r o v i n c e , b u t t h e R o m a n p e r i o d is p o o r l y attested by scattered r e m n a n t s of buildings, coins, a n d s o m e objects. T h e n a m e of d i e R o m a n city m a y h a v e b e e n Pteria. T h e Christian era is r e p r e s e n t e d by a n apse carved o u t of a r o c k called M i h r a b l i K a y a ( " R o c k w i t h P r a y e r N i c h e " ) a n d a small c h u r c h built of spoils over a Hittite t e m p l e in t h e U p p e r City. U n d e r t h e O t t o m a n s , m e m b e r s of a family called Zulkadir O g u l l a n r u l e d over a large area in central Anatolia. In t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y , a b r a n c h of this family resided at Bogzakoy. Its last m e m b e r , Ziya Bey, was a h o s t to W i n c k l e r a n d later to Bittel.
335
the technologies used to create them, the uses to which they were put, and their overall role in the cultures and societies in which they figure. It comprises four articles: Typology and Technology Artifacts of t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages Artifacts of t h e P e r s i a n t h r o u g h R o m a n Periods Artifacts of t h e B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic Periods The first serves as a general overview, while the remaining ar ticles treat the artifacts of specific periods and regions.]
Typology and Technology A n u m b e r of animal-derived materials were crafted into ar tifacts in antiquity. A l m o s t all w o r k e d b o n e was m a m m a l i a n in origin, although a few pieces of w o r k e d bird b o n e are k n o w n f r o m T e l l J e m m e h a n d Ashkelon. [See J e m m e h , Tell; Ashkelon.] Ivory c a m e f r o m t h e incisors a n d canines of h i p p o p o t a m u s , t h e tusks of wild b o a r s , b u t mostly from t h e u p p e r incisors of the m a l e Asiatic elephant or the male or female African elephant (see figure 1). Artistic and literary evidence suggests the existence of wild elephants in Syria in t h e s e c o n d a n d first millennia BCE until the e n d of the L a t e B r o n z e A g e , w h e n t h e y w e r e h u n t e d to extinction. T h e a b sence of a fossil r e c o r d f r o m t h e N e a r E a s t leaves o p e n t h e question of w h e t h e r these Syrian p o p u l a t i o n s were related to t h e African or I n d i a n form, or evolved separately from o n e o r t h e other g r o u p . O n e scholar ( C a u b e t , 1991) believes
[See also Anatolia, article on A n c i e n t Anatolia; Hittite; and Hittites.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Preliminary reports a p p e a r e d in Mitteilungen der Deutschen OrientGesellschaft, vols. 70 ( i 9 3 2 ) - 7 8 ( 1 9 4 0 ) a n d 86 ( i 9 5 3 ) - i o 6 ( 1 9 7 4 ) a n d in Archaeologischer Anzeiger for the s a m e years and continued yearly. Bittel, K u r t . Kleinasiatische Studien. Istanbuler Mitteilungen, vol. 5. I s tanbul, 1 9 4 2 . Bittel, K u r t . Hattusha: The Capital of the Hittites. N e w York, 1970. Bittel, K u r t , et al. Bogazkoy. 6 vols. Berlin, 1 9 3 5 - 1 9 8 4 . Bittel, K u r t , ed. Bogazkoy-Hattusa: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen. 14 vols, to date. Stuttgart a n d Berlin, 1 9 5 2 - . Gtiterbock, H a n s G. " B o g a z k o y . " In Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 2, p p . 1 1 8 1 - 1 1 8 3 . Chicago, 1 9 7 4 . N e v e , Peter. " H a t t u s a : Stadt der G o t t e r u n d T e m p e l ; N e u e A u s g r a b u n g e n in der H a u p t s t a d t der H e t h i t e r . " Antike Welt, special issue ( 1 9 9 3 ) . Survey of t h e results of die excavations, containing s u p e r b color p h o t o g r a p h s . N e v e , Peter. " H a t t u s h a , City of G o d s and T e m p l e s : Results of t h e Excavations in the U p p e r City." In Proceedings of the British Academy (1991 Lectures and Memoirs) 80 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 0 5 - 1 3 2 . Puchstein, O t t o , et al. Boghazkoi; Die Bauwerke. Wissenschaftliche Veroffentlichung der D e u t s c h e n Orient-Gesellschaft 1 9 . Leipzig, 1 9 1 2 . HANS G . GOTERBOCK
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: T y p o l o g y a n d T e c h n o l o g y . Sections of sawn hippo ivory from Ashkelon.
B O N E , I V O R Y , A N D S H E L L . [This entry surveys the history of bone, ivory, and shell artifacts with reference to
F i g u r e 1,
T h i s is s o m e of t h e e a r
liest e v i d e n c e of b o n e a n d i v o r y w o r k i n g , d a t i n g t o t h e M B I I / L B I levels, (Photograph by Car) A n d r e w s )
336
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Typology and Technology
that m o s t of the ivory w o r k e d at Aegean sites t h r o u g h the end of die L a t e B r o n z e Age was from t h e h i p p o p o t a m u s . Ander, the b o n y o u t g r o w t h of cervid skulls, is a s t u r d y raw material for m a k i n g tools a n d was preferred for objects subject to h e a v y - d u t y use. N u m e r o u s sawn tines a n d sec tions of ander are k n o w n from sites such as A s h k e l o n , T e l M i q n e , a n d T e l Batash in Israel, b u t few complete artifacts have been recovered. [See M i q n e , T e l ; Batash, Tel.] Antler found at L e v a n t i n e sites could derive from fallow, r e d , or r o e deer, b u t almost all of the sawn antler d o c u m e n t e d is from the fallow deer. Antler, shed annually, w a s p r o b a b l y an item of trade. H o r n , t h e keratinous sheath s u r r o u n d i n g t h e b o n y inte rior, or h o r n core, of bovids, was also w o r k e d in antiquity; however, b e c a u s e it is m o r e susceptible t o attritional p r o cesses t h a n osseous tissue, it often has n o t survived t h e rigors of deposition—although a fragment of worked h o r n t h a t m a y have b e e n i n t e n d e d for use as a b o r d e r inlay has b e e n identified from Ashkelon ( W a p n i s h , 1991). I n t h e a b s e n c e of t h e r a w material, h o r n working can b e d o c u m e n t e d from t h e concentrations of s a w n h o r n cores found belonging t o sheep, goat, a n d cattle. [See Sheep a n d G o a t s ; Cattle a n d Oxen.]
tool ldt existed tiiat i n c l u d e d knives, c o a r s e - a n d finet o o t h e d (finishing) saws, drills, g o u g e s , chisels, straight- a n d c o m p a s s - s c r i b e r s , r a s p s , a n d files. W e t s a n d , leather a n d sand (or other m i n e r a l s ) , a n d , b y R o m a n times, t h e coarse skins of fish, shark, or ray w e r e u s e d to s m o o t h a n d polish finished pieces. By a b o u t 1500 BCE, simple lathes w e r e in u s e in t h e w o o d p r o d u c i n g a n d w o r k i n g areas of the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . T h e first lathes were in all likelihood elaborations of t h e b o w drill. T h e object in p r e p a r a t i o n b e c a m e t h e actual stock of t h e drill, secured b e t w e e n t w o fixed p o i n t s ; it was t u r n e d b y a b o w as cutting a n d s h a p i n g tools w e r e applied. E v e n sim ple, early lathes could p r o d u c e pieces w i t h a precise c i r c u m ference. As t h e y b e c a m e m o r e technologically sophisticated, lathes were i n d i s p e n s a b l e to b o n e - c a r v e r s of quality i t e m s , such as furniture embellishments (see figure 2), r o u n d c o m posite b o x e s , jewelry, a n d even h a i r p i n s . [See Jewelry.] B o n e was u s e d for a wide r a n g e of artifacts, from utilitar ian to purely decorative. W i t h any b o n e t o o l t y p e it is i m p o r t a n t t o distinguish b e t w e e n casually w o r k e d b o n e (pieces
B o n e was by far t h e m o s t c o m m o n l y w o r k e d a n i m a l - d e rived material, a n d ivory a distant second. T h e d o c u m e n tation for antler is scarce, a n d for h o r n , n o n e x i s t e n t — e x c e p t for the piece m e n t i o n e d above. Ivory objects h a v e received t h e greatest attention because t h e y were often luxury items carved with m u c h finesse; yet, little is k n o w n a b o u t t h e a c tual process of m a n u f a c t u r e . Studies o n ivory lengthily dis cuss style and typology, b u t n o t m u c h else. W h e n a r c h a e ologists direct m o r e attention to the systematic collection of all animal remains, it will b e possible to d o c u m e n t t h e c o m plex processes of p r o c u r e m e n t , manufacture, a n d distribu tion of m a n y of the objects of daily life crafted from t h o s e materials in antiquity. Present information allows t h e d o c u m e n t a t i o n in any detail only of boneworking. T h e m a n u f a c t u r e of a diverse array of b o n e artifacts found in d i e later historic periods in die ancient N e a r E a s t h a d its beginnings in L a t e Paleolithic b o n e w o r k i n g . Awls, borers, a n d scrapers, m o s t likely m a d e by their u s e r s , w e r e s o m e of the earliest tools fashioned with stone i m p l e m e n t s . W i t h the i n t r o d u c t i o n of c o p p e r , bronze,' a n d (later) iron, metal tools gradually s u p p l a n t e d stone as the p r i m a r y s h a p ers of b o n e . T h e tools u s e d to w o r k animal-derived materials w e r e probably b o r r o w e d from wood-carvers. B e c a u s e these tools are rarely found, their u s e m u s t b e inferred from t h e telltale marks they leave, particularly o n t h e backs of objects a n d o n unfinished pieces. J u d g i n g b y L a t e Chalcolithic artifacts, n u m e r o u s types of tools were already available. Early E g y p t i a n wall reliefs (c. 2500 BCE) show furniture makers usingtaiives, saws (more like large knives with a t o o t h e d e d g e ) , a n d b o w drills. By t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e II period, a sophisticated
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: T y p o l o g y a n d T e c h n o l o g y . Lathe-turned
furniture
mounts.
F i g u r e 2.
T h e s e p i e c e s w e r e often m a d e f r o m
m e t a p o d i a l s , or b o n e s f r o m d i e l o w e r legs. T h e y w e r e a t t a c h e d t o t h e legs of chairs a n d tables as d e c o r a t i o n . M o s t a r e s a w n l o n g i t u dinally, leaving either half or t w o - t h i r d s of t h e t u b e as a n a t t a c h m e n t , p e r h a p s a n i n d i c a t i o n t h a t only t h e fronts of t h e legs w e r e d e c o r a t e d . (Photograph by Carl Andrews)
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Typology and Technology
&r
-
carved figurines, toy dolls w i t h m o v a b l e a r m s (see figure 6 ) , a n d furniture a t t a c h m e n t s a n d inlays, i n c l u d i n g carved p l a q u e s , decorative b o r d e r s , finials, a n d m o u n t s to cover furniture legs. [See Seals; M u s i c a l I n s t r u m e n t s ; F u r n i t u r e a n d Furnishings.]
1
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: T y p o l o g y a n d T e c h n o l o g y . Lathe-made
ligula or handle.
337
F i g u r e 3.
M o s t o f t h e h a n d l e is h o l l o w t o h o l d
t h e t a n g of t h e a t t a c h e d i m p l e m e n t t h a t w a s s e c u r e d b y a m e t a l rivet, t h e h o l e for w h i c h c a n b e s e e n a t o n e e n d . T h i s w a s p r o b a b l y t h e h a n d l e for s o m e s o r t of s p o o n . ( P h o t o g r a p h by Carl Andrews)
m a d e b y t h e user) a n d objects resulting from t h e organized p r o d u c t i o n of professional craftsmen. A f r a g m e n t of long b o n e s h a r p e n e d at o n e e n d into a p o i n t e d tip to serve as a b o r e r or stylus, ankle b o n e s (astragali) p l a n e d a n d s m o o t h e d into g a m i n g pieces t h r o w n like dice, a n d b o n e sections m i n imally modified to s c r a p e a n d dress hides are e x a m p l e s of casually w o r k e d b o n e k n o w n f r o m antiquity t h a t are still b e ing p r o d u c e d . [See G a m e s . ] T h e y testify to t h e fact t h a t b o n e is easy to m o d e l , i n e x p e n s i v e , a n d readily available. U s e r - m a d e tools are f o u n d widely a n d over l o n g p e r i o d s a t m o s t sites b e c a u s e t h e y w e r e m a d e b y simple m e t h o d s a n d served i m m e d i a t e n e e d s . C a s u a l tools w e r e distinct in f o r m a n d t e c h n i q u e from p r o d u c t s of specialized m a n u f a c t u r e ; they w e r e also h e t e r o g e n e o u s in c h a r a c t e r , w h e r e a s items of specialized m a n u f a c t u r e are m o r e u n i f o r m in s h a p e a n d a p p e a r a n c e . C a s u a l tools were m o s t likely crafted in o r a r o u n d the h o m e , w h e r e a s t h o s e of specialized m a n u f a c t u r e a l m o s t certainly w e r e p r o d u c e d in w o r k s h o p s . I n c r e a s e d c o m m u n i t y size a n d d e g r e e of u r b a n i z a t i o n , c o u p l e d witii m o r e sophisticated b o n e w o r k i n g technology a n d professional organization, led to a proliferation in t h e types of objects m a d e from b o n e . B e g i n n i n g in t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d (sixth c e n t u r y BCE) a n d c o n t i n u i n g i n t o t h e later h i s torical p e r i o d s , t h e variety of b o n e artifacts offers a c o m p r e h e n s i v e p i c t u r e of daily life: h a n d l e s for a r a n g e of i m p l e m e n t s (see figure 3 ) , s p o o n s , w h o r l s , b u t t o n s , needles, pins (cloth a n d h a i r ) , spatulas, b e a d s , p e n d a n t s , amulets a n d c h a r m s , rings a n d bracelets, c o m p o s i t e b o x e s (pyxides; see figure 4 ) , cosmetic accessories, single- a n d d o u b l e - s i d e d c o m b s , g a m i n g pieces, paralleliped a n d cubical dice, t h e a t e r tickets, s t a m p seals, hinges for b o x e s a n d chests (see figure 5), c o m p o s i t e elements for m e c h a n i c a l devices, flutes,
G a u g i n g t h e intensity a n d organization of p r o d u c t i o n is difficult. B e c a u s e finished pieces recovered at any given site could h a v e b e e n i m p o r t s , d i e debris of m a n u f a c t u r e — blanks, waste a n d trim, a n d unfinished pieces—is a n e c e s sary indicator of on-site p r o d u c t i o n . B o n e is often n o t in tensively collected d u r i n g excavation; h o w e v e r , even w h e n it is, scraps a n d leftovers are likely to b e overlooked b e c a u s e of a n unfamiliarity with this t y p e of artifact a n d the t e n d e n c y to focus o n finished pieces. A great deal of potential infor m a t i o n is t h u s lost. I n a d d i t i o n , n o actual w o r k s h o p or pri m a r y surface littered w i t h b o n e debris h a s so far b e e n r e p o r t e d from a n y site in Israel, w h e r e m o s t of t h e research is presently b e i n g carried o u t o n t h e s e materials. R e n e w e d excavations at A s h k e l o n since 1985, have, h o w ever, yielded evidence of a large-scale b o n e w o r l d n g industry t h a t b e g a n in t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d a n d c o n t i n u e d until t h e thirteenth c e n t u r y CE ( W a p n i s h , 1991). B o n e w o r k i n g is a c tually d o c u m e n t e d from d i e M B II period o n w a r d at t h e site b u t did n o t r e a c h industrial p r o p o r t i o n s until t h e later p e -
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Two lathe-made
composite
Typology and Technology. pyxides
with similar
turned
F i g u r e 4. decorations.
S e c t i o n s of these h o l l o w e d p i e c e s w e r e j o i n e d t o g e t h e r i n t o a c o m plete b o x . A flat disc fitted to t h e b o t t o m f o r m e d t h e floor of t h e b o x . T h e s h o r t e r , s q u a t t e r p i e c e is m a d e o f e l e p h a n t ivory, a p r e cious m a t e r i a l . T h e l o n g e r s e c t i o n in b o n e is m o s t p r o b a b l y a c h e a p e r v e r s i o n , p e r h a p s a n a n c i e n t "knock-off." Carl Andrews)
(Photograph by
338
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Typology and Technology cess of a large variety of artifacts at A s h k e l o n can b e o b served, h o w e v e r . T h e professional status of A s h k e l o n ' s b o n e - c a r v e r s is manifest in a n u m b e r of factors. T h e t o o l kit alone indicates a degree of specialization u n c h a r a c t e r i s t i c of casually m o d eled b o n e . So, t o o , does t h e k i n d of b o n e u s e d : m o s t l y t h e long b o n e shafts of cattle a n d camel, occasionally d o n k e y , a n d , in t h e rarest instances, h o r s e . [See C a m e l s . ] T h e fact t h a t t h e r a w material derived from t h e largest d o m e s t i c a t e s is particularly significant. Small-scale pastoralists raise t h e s e animals in small n u m b e r s , in quantities insufficient t o p r o d u c e a regular flow of b o n e into t h e p r o d u c t i o n system. O n l y in highly o r g a n i z e d s u p p l y systems, w h e r e b o n e was n o t just a r a w material b u t a c o m m o d i t y , w o u l d crafters b e able to access t h e b o n e s of c a m e l and equids regularly. A t scales of p r o d u c t i o n a b o v e t h e h o u s e h o l d level, t h e b o n e s of s h e e p a n d goats were u s e d only for casually w o r k e d b o n e , w h e n u s e r a n d p r o d u c e r were t h e s a m e .
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: T y p o l o g y a n d T e c h n o l o g y . Hinges
F i g u r e 5.
(three larger pieces) and spacers for hinges (two smaller
pieces).
T h e s e w e r e often m a d e of b o n e for b o x e s a n d larger p i e c e s of fur n i t u r e . T h e y w e r e b o t h hollow a n d solid, like t h e small s p a c e r at t h e lower right. (Photograph by Carl Andrews)
riods. Unfortunately, n o n e of t h e evidence for m a n u f a c t u r e h a s b e e n f o u n d in situ; even concentrations of w a s t e a n d blanks are s e c o n d a r y a n d even tertiary deposits. A clear (if incomplete) r e d u c t i o n sequence in t h e m a n u f a c t u r i n g p r o
S t a n d a r d i z a t i o n is a critical indicator of h o w specialized craftsmen were. A t Ashkelon t h e r e is u n i f o r m i t y at a n u m b e r of points in t h e r e d u c t i o n s e q u e n c e . Initial p r e p a r a t i o n of a w h o l e long b o n e b e g a n w h e n t h e articular e n d s (areas of s p o n g y b o n e u n s u i t a b l e for w o r k i n g ) , w e r e s a w n off, leaving a t u b e of d e n s e cortical b o n e . T h e s e t u b e s w e r e m e n sec t i o n e d into smaller, workable s e g m e n t s t h a t , in t u r n , w e r e r e d u c e d further into blanks of various s h a p e a n d size, d e p e n d i n g o n t h e object to b e m o d e l e d . Blanks w e r e s t a n d a r d ized in f o r m as flat sheets of varying t h i c k n e s s , s q u a r e a n d
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: T y p o l o g y a n d T e c h n o l o g y .
F i g u r e 6. Various
dolls made from
T h e first p i e c e is t h e torso of a c o m p o s i t e doll m a d e f r o m t h e h o l l o w shaft of a c o w
bone.
metacarpal
(lower front leg). T h e c a r v e d a r m s w e r e a t t a c h e d t o t h e torso at t h e s h o u l d e r b y rivets, allowing t h e a r m s s o m e front a n d b a c k m o v e m e n t . N e i t h e r of t h e a r m s s h o w n h e r e g o e s w i t h this t o r s o . T h e s e c o n d a n d t h i r d e x a m p l e s a r e flat, c a r v e d dolls. (Photograph b y Carl Andrews)
B O N E , IVORY, A N D SHELL: Typology and Technology r o u n d rods also of varying t h i c k n e s s , c o m p l e t e a n d halved t u b e s , a n d c h u n k s whittled into s o m e w h a t irregular blocks. T h e p r e p a r a t i o n of b o t h blanks a n d artifacts p r o d u c e d s t a n dardized w a s t e a n d t r i m pieces. T h e p r e s e n c e of a r e d u c t i o n s e q u e n c e with uniformity at s o m e n o d e s argues against o n e individual creating a n object f r o m start t o finish. T h e i n t e n sity of p r o d u c t i o n r e m a i n s a q u e s t i o n in t h e absence of a w o r k s h o p site. H o w e v e r , b e c a u s e s o m e contexts yielded c o n c e n t r a t i o n s of particular unfinished objects a n d / o r offc u t s , it is p r o b a b l e t h a t w o r k s h o p s w e r e specialized b y object a n d t h a t several stages of p r o d u c t i o n existed, with e a c h del egated to a different worker. It is possible t h a t m i d d l e m e n dealing in b o n e as a c o m m o d i t y b r i d g e d t h e gap b e t w e e n abattoir a n d w o r k s h o p . T h e tools u s e d t o work b o n e w e r e also u s e d t o m o d e l ivory, antler, a n d h o r n . H o w e v e r , it is doubtful t h a t d i e s a m e craftsmen w o r k e d b o t h b o n e a n d ivory. B o n e was readily available, i n e x p e n s i v e , a n d u s e d for m a n y m u n d a n e i t e m s , w h e r e a s ivory was r a r e , e x p e n s i v e , a n d m a i n l y u s e d for l u x u r y g o o d s . I n addition, a l t h o u g h t h e carving t e c h n i q u e s m a y be similar, t h e s u b s t a n c e s a r e different. A l t h o u g h b o n e , a n t ler, a n d ivory are r o u g h l y e q u a l in h a r d n e s s (1.5-2.5 o n t h e M o h s ' scale), e l e p h a n t ivory is s o m e w h a t softer a n d easier to carve. B e c a u s e it is c o m p r i s e d of large areas of solid m a t ter, it c a n b e u s e d t o m a k e larger i t e m s , like furniture p a n e l s , figures in t h e r o u n d , a n d especially circular b o x e s . O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , h i p p o p o t a m u s ivory is d e n s e r a n d m o r e difficult to carve, a n d t h e canines a n d incisors of w h i c h it is c o m prised c a n n o t b e u s e d for large objects. T h e s e differences— in carving t e c h n i q u e s , suitability for certain objects, a n d availability of s u p p l y — p o i n t t o a s e p a r a t i o n of b o n e a n d ivory carvers. A n o t h e r issue c o n c e r n i n g b o n e a n d ivory carving for t h e region is w h e t h e r craftsmen w e r e itinerant or sedentary. W h i l e b o t h w o u l d c o n t r i b u t e t o t h e e c o n o m i c activity of a settlement, only s e d e n t a r y c r a f t s m e n w o u l d b e an integral p a r t of t h e social fabric a n d o r g a n i z a t i o n of t h e larger c o m m u n i t y . It is certainly t r u e t h a t all t h e tools n e e d e d , e v e n early lathes, w e r e p o r t a b l e . A t least o n e authority (Barnett, 1982) considers t h a t p r e i n d u s t r i a l craftsmen w e r e highly mobile. H o w e v e r , just h o w r o v i n g specialists p r o v i d e d themselves witii a r a w m a t e r i a l as e x p e n s i v e a n d relatively difficult to obtain as ivory is a q u e s t i o n n o t easily a n s w e r e d . B o n e , t h o u g h , as t h e b y - p r o d u c t of m e a t p r o d u c t i o n , w o u l d be at h a n d in sufficient quantities in a n y large settlement. " I t i n e r a n t w o r k e r s " implies t h a t o n e craftsman w o r k e d e a c h piece from start to finish b e c a u s e t h e logistics of m o v i n g a g r o u p of carvers, e a c h specialized at a certain task, w o u l d m a k e it u n p r a c t i c a b l e at b e s t . H o w e v e r , t h e elaboration of p r o d u c t i o n argues for t h e o p p o s i t e b e c a u s e a m a n u f a c t u r i n g s e q u e n c e , s u c h as existed at A s h k e l o n , could b e carried o u t m o r e efficiently b y s e d e n t a r y craftsmen. D e s p i t e t h e a b s e n c e of w o r k s h o p s , it is possible to s p e c ulate a b o u t s o m e of t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n of b o n e - t o o l p r o d u c tion. (Until c o m p a r a b l e w a s t e materials a n d a m a n u f a c t u r
339
ing s e q u e n c e are k n o w n for ivoryworldng, or t h e working of antier for t h a t m a t t e r , it c a n n o t be a s s u m e d that it was t h e s a m e in organization.) A n c i e n t a n d m o d e r n markets in t h e N e a r East are characterized b y streets o r areas given over to t h e practice of o n e t r a d e or craft. It is possible t h a t d i e m a jority of b o n e - c a r v e r s w e r e so a r r a n g e d in t h e u r b a n settings of their work. C r a f t s m e n a t t a c h e d t o special interests (e.g., state or temple) could h a v e b e e n clustered n e a r their s p o n sor. N o r s h o u l d h o m e crafting o n t h e piecework system be ruled out, with e n t r e p r e n e u r s organizing t h e p r o d u c t i o n . b y p r o v i d i n g t h e r a w material, dictating w h a t a n d h o w m u c h was p r o d u c e d , a n d h a n d l i n g m a r k e t i n g a n d distribution. T h i s is obviously far r e m o v e d from h o m e - b a s e d p r o d u c t i o n of casual tools. A l t h o u g h b o t h types of b o n e w o r k i n g o c c u r at t h e h o u s e h o l d level, d i e y a r e totally different in organi zation, s c o p e , a n d c o n t e n t . C r a f t s m e n in any of tiiese s c h e m e s could have b e e n specialized n o t only b y p r o d u c t , b u t also b y the stage of t h e r e d u c t i o n s e q u e n c e at w h i c h they labored. B e c a u s e these a r r a n g e m e n t s are n o t mutually e x clusive, o n e or several of t h e m could h a v e operated at a given place a n d time w i t h r e s p e c t to a variety of artifact types. A n u m b e r of o t h e r factors m a y be suggested for the or ganization of the craftsmen, a l t h o u g h n o n e c a n presently be d e m o n s t r a t e d . T h e o p p o r t u n i t y to learn a n d practice a given profession m a y h a v e d e p e n d e d o n kinship affiliation. Crafts m e n m a y h a v e b e e n o r g a n i z e d into professional associa tions, with various e c o n o m i c a n d social missions. S u c h g r o u p s a r e k n o w n from R o m a n sources, s u c h as t h e eborarii, or "ivory w o r k e r s , " r e c o g n i z e d as specialized craftsmen in t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE. A professional association of dice a n d t h e a t e r ticket m a k e r s w a s also f o r m e d at this time (Bar nett, 1982). It a p p e a r s t h a t t h e r e were n u m e r o u s associa tions of craftsmen a n d m e r c h a n t s in Asia M i n o r , especially d u r i n g t h e R o m a n p e r i o d (37 BCE-324 CE) . T h e s e m a y have already existed in Hellenistic times (332-37 BCE) as t h e s u c cessors to e x t a n t native guilds prior to t h e G r e e k c o n q u e s t (Koester, 1987), D u r i n g t h e Islamic p e r i o d (610-1919 CE), professional associations of craftsmen a n d m e r c h a n t s b e c a m e p r o m i n e n t features of u r b a n e c o n o m i c life, beginning with ' A b b a s i d rule (750 CE). T h e y c o n t i n u e d as a m a i n s t a y of e c o n o m i c activity t h r o u g h successive caliphates (Perry, 1983). BIBLIOGRAPHY Ariel, D o n a l d T . , et al. " W o r k e d Bone and Ivory." In Excavations at the City of David, 1978-198$, Directed by Yigal Shiloh, vol. 2, edited by D o n a l d T . Ariel, p p . 1 1 9 - 1 4 8 . Q e d e m , vol. 30. Jerusalem, 1990. I m p o r t a n t recent s u m m a r y of worked b o n e and ivory from the Bronze A g e to the Byzantine period. Barnett, R. D . Ancient Ivories in the Middle East ( Q e d e m 1 4 ) . M o n o graphs of the Institute of Archaeology, T h e H e b r e w University of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 2 . Still the most comprehensive overall saidy o n ivory working in the Middle East. M a n y invaluable illus trations of objects. Caubet, Annie. "Ivoires de C a p p a d o c e . " In Marchands,
diplomates et
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BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages
empereurs, edited by D o m i n i q u e Charpin and Francis Joannes, p p . 2 2 3 - 2 2 5 . Paris, 1 9 9 1 . Brief review of fee significance of h i p p o p o t a mus ivory in the Bronze Age. Hutchinson, V. J., and D , S. Reese. " A W o r k e d Bone Industry at Car thage." In The Circus and a Byzantine Cemetery at Carthage, vol. 1.2, edited by J o h n H. H u m p h r e y , p p . 5 4 9 - 5 9 4 . Ann Arbor, M i c h . , 1988. O n e of the few studies to treat boneworking in other t h a n stylistic terms. Koester, Helmut. History, N e w York, 1987.
Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic
Age.
Krzyszkowska, Olga. Ivory and Related Materials. Institute of Classical Studies, Bulletin S u p p l e m e n t 59, L o n d o n , 1990. Excellent c o m p r e hensive review of animal-derived products recovered from archae ological contexts. Perry, G. E. The Middle East: Fourteen Islamic Centuries. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1983. Starling, Katherine, and D a v i d Watkinson, eds. Archaeological Bone, Antler, and Ivory. United K i n g d o m Institute for Conservation, O c casional Papers, n o . 5. L o n d o n , 1987. Several useful discussions of problems in identification and conservation of animal-derived p r o d ucts found at archaeological sites. W a p n i s h , Paula. " B e a u t y and Utility in Bone: N e w L i g h t o n Bone Crafting." Biblical Archaeology Review 1 7 . 4 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 5 4 - 5 7 . Brief sur vey of die boneworking industry at Ashkelon. PAULA WAPNISH
Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages As o p p o s e d to metalwork or glasswork—which involve heat, chemical changes a n d fusion, m o l d s (for c o p p e r a n d b r o n z e ) , a n d h a m m e r i n g — b o n e - , ivory-, a n d shellworking involve relatively simple techniques to p r o d u c e objects of utility and a d o r n m e n t . W o r k e d a n d u n w o r k e d ivory a n d u n -
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: gaming pieces.
B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages.
w o r k e d shell w e r e also items of t r a d e , p r o v i d i n g evidence of long-distance cultural contact. D . S. R e e s e (1985) notes t h a t elephant tusks f o u n d o n M i n o a n C r e t e a n d h i p p o p o t a m u s canines from B r o n z e A g e G r e e c e a n d C y p r u s originated in t h e L e v a n t or E g y p t . T h r e e u n m o d i f i e d h i p p o p o t a m u s i n cisors were recovered from t h e t h i r t e e n t h - or early four t e e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE U l u b u r u n s h i p w r e c k off t h e coast of T u r k e y — e v i d e n c e of t r a d e in u n w o r k e d a n i m a l b o n e . [See Uluburun.] B o n e . I n antiquity, b o n e was u s e d t o d e c o r a t e utilitarian objects a n d w o o d e n b o x e s , to fashion figurines a n d tools, a n d to serve as h a n d l e s for tools a n d w e a p o n s . B o n e sickle hafts with animals c a r v e d in t h e r o u n d are k n o w n from tire N a t u f i a n Mesolithic p e r i o d (c. 8000 BCE) in t h e L e v a n t . H o w e v e r , b o n e s c u l p t u r e s u b s e q u e n t l y suffered a decline, a n d the style of sickle hafts b e c a m e simplified. B o n e strips m a d e from t h e b o n e s of sheep or goats, w e r e u s e d to d e c orate w o o d e n b o x e s in t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e . M e t a l saws w e r e u s e d to cut t h e b o n e to size a n d s h a p e . T h e strips w e r e t h e n incised with a p o i n t e d m e t a l i n s t r u m e n t . A p p l i e d b o n e silhouettes of b i r d s , djed (Egyp., s y m b o l of e n d u r a n c e a n d stability) c o l u m n s , a n d snakes w e r e m o r e c o m p l i c a t e d t o p r o d u c e , b u t in all likelihood r e q u i r e d t h e s a m e c o m b i n a t i o n of sawing a n d incising. B o n e objects s u c h as w h o r l s , needles, awls, and c l u b - s h a p e d p e n d a n t s carved in tire r o u n d i n volved a t e c h n o l o g y t h a t i n c l u d e d splintering a n d s m o o t h i n g with a stone, in addition to carving a n d t h e u s e of a b o w drill w i t h a metal bit for perforation. B o n e is best k n o w n for its u s e for utilitarian objects. I n
F i g u r e 1. Planed astragali
(ankle bones), used as
T h e t w o largest astragali a r e f r o m cattle, t h e o t h e r s are f r o m s h e e p or g o a t s .
graph b y Carl Andrews)
(Photo
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages
a n a t o m i c features suggested b y clusters of incised dotted lines, a p p e a r in t h e O r o n t e s River Valley a t H a m a (East) in a b o u t t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE. C l u b - s h a p e d b o n e p e n d a n t s pierced at o n e e n d a n d incised w i t h dotted circles a n d e n circling horizontal incisions w e r e a l m o s t ubiquitous in I r o n II ( n i n t h - e i g h t h centuries BCE) Palestine.
K i l l !
mMWm
HHHH
mm
_ BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: and small spatulas
341
Bronze and Iron Ages.
F i g u r e 2.
Large
made from ribs. S p a t u l a tools like t h e s e d a t e f r o m
d i e p r e h i s t o r i c t o late h i s t o r i c p e r i o d s at sites in Israel. D e s p i t e n u m e r o u s tiieories, t h e i r u s e r e m a i n s a m y s t e r y , b u t t h e y m o s t likely h a d n u m e r o u s p u r p o s e s . ( P h o t o g r a p h by Carl Andrews)
spite of t h e increase in the u s e of m e t a l for tools t h r o u g h o u t t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages, b o n e c o n t i n u e d t o b e u s e d t o p r o d u c e awls, needles, a n d p i n s . B o n e pins are c o m m o n l y r e p r e s e n t e d in ' A m u q G a n d H (third m i l l e n n i u m ) , at w h i c h time d e c o r a t e d t u b e s b e c a m e p o p u l a r in Syria. [See ' A m u q . ] Highly polished, incised b o n e t u b e s w e r e p o p u l a r in Early B r o n z e III Palestine as well, w h e r e t h e y h a v e b e e n f o u n d a t sites s u c h as M e g i d d o , K h i r b e t K e r a k / B e t h - Y e r a h , Jericho, a n d Ai. [See M e g i d d o ; B e t h - Y e r a h , Jericho; Ai.] B o n e w h i s tles, u n k n o w n in t h e Early a n d M i d d l e B r o n z e Ages, are f o u n d in Palestine in L a t e B r o n z e A g e levels at L a c h i s h a n d ' E i n - G e d i . [See L a c h i s h ; ' E i n - G e d i . ] B o n e g a m i n g pieces are also k n o w n from this p e r i o d (see figure 1 ) , as are b o n e handles for bimetalic knives (also f o u n d w i t h s o m e fre q u e n c y in t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE). [See G a m e s . ] I n t h e I r o n Age, b o n e w a s u s e d for s p a t u l a e t h a t w e r e r o u n d e d at o n e e n d a n d p o i n t e d at t h e other (see figure 2)—in all likelihood u s e d for weaving. D o m e - s h a p e d , vertically perforated b o n e spindle whorls are f o u n d a l o n g w i t h stone spindle w h o r l s in b o t h t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s (see figure 3). B e g i n n i n g in M B IIA in Palestine, r e a c h i n g a zenith in M B IIB, a n d c o n t i n u i n g into t h e L B I p e r i o d , b o n e was u s e d extensively as a decorative e l e m e n t (e.g., as strips with i n cised g e o m e t r i c motifs a n d in a variety of silhouettes applied to w o o d e n boxes; see figure 4 ) . T h e g e n r e is also k n o w n in Syria at R a s S h a m r a / U g a r i t a n d Byblos, in Anatolia, a n d in E g y p t ; h o w e v e r , Palestine w a s d i e a p p a r e n t center for this craft. S u b s e q u e n t l y , ivory r e p l a c e d b o n e for luxury i t e m s . [See Ugarit; Byblos.] F e w e x a m p l e s of b o n e s c u l p t u r e in t h e r o u n d are k n o w n for t h e following p e r i o d s , a l t h o u g h a carved b o n e figurine is k n o w n from I r o n A g e B e e r s h e b a . [See Beersheba.] F r o n t a l a r m l e s s , flat b o n e figurines, w h o s e legs are s e p a r a t e d b y an incised line arid t h a t h a v e o t h e r
I v o r y . T h e ivory u s e d in t h e L e v a n t c a m e from t h e tusks of African elephants t h a t r o a m e d n o r t h e r n Syria in t h e sec o n d a n d first millennia BCE a n d from t h e canines a n d incisors of h i p p o p o t a m i , w h i c h are s u p e r i o r to e l e p h a n t ivory. Ivory, like b o n e , was sawed to t h e desired size for use. B e c a u s e ivory is softer a n d is n o t hollow, it lends itself m o r e readily to carving in the r o u n d , relief carving, o p e n w o r k , a n d t h e hollowing o u t of s q u a r e a n d cylindrical shapes t o fashion containers. T h e carver c u t t h e tusk a c c o r d i n g to t h e s h a p e t h e piece w a s ultimately t o a s s u m e : p l a q u e s for incision, r e lief carving, a n d o p e n w o r k ; or blocks for carving in t h e r o u n d . T h e tools u s e d in ivoryworking included hacksaws to cut t h e tusks, finer saws for detail work, b o w drills to b o r e holes, chisels to shape a n d g o u g e , c o m p a s s e s to outline arcs, a stylus for incising, a n d a n abrasive for polishing. C l o i s o n n e , a t e c h n i q u e t h a t involves cutting depressions into t h e ivory t h a t are t h e n filled w i t h substances of varying colors a n d framed with ivory ribbing, a l t h o u g h well k n o w n in N e w K i n g d o m E g y p t , w a s n o t p o p u l a r in Palestine a n d Syria until the I r o n Age. I n s o m e instances, such as on t h e plaques featuring floral f o r m s from M e g i d d o VIIA, parts of t h e object were p a i n t e d . Ivories from N i m r u d a n d elsewhere are k n o w n t o h a v e b e e n c o v e r e d with gold foil, either to cover blemishes or m a k e t h e objects m o r e resplendent. [See Nimrud.] Ivoryworking r e a c h e d a h i g h p o i n t in d i e Palestinian C h a l colithic p e r i o d , b u t w e n t into a decline in t h e Early B r o n z e A g e a n d only slowly revived in d i e latter p a r t of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e , w h e n ivory, well-suited for decorating c o n t a i n -
^S:^Mj^^§famsS^ i^j^^^s^^^^M'" - i l l
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BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: B r o n z e a n d I r o n n g c s . decorated
whorls.
iriguic 3.
un-
O n t h e left is a knife c u t b l a n k . T h e w h o r l at t h e
c e n t e r is m a d e of b o n e , t h e o n e o n t h e r i g h t of ivory. (Photograph by Carl A n d r e w s )
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BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages
ers, was applied to w o o d e n boxes at least from t h e sixteenth century BCE o n w a r d , d e m o n s t t a t e d b y examples from Pella in T r a n s j o r d a n a n d from silhouettes from el-Jisr in Palestine. [See Pella.] H o w e v e r , t h e r e was a resurgence at t h e b e g i n ning of the L a t e B r o n z e A g e tiiat reached its p e a k in t h e latter part of the p e r i o d , w h e n it w a s u s e d for m a n y kinds of luxury items. T h e m o s t p r o m i n e n t u s e was for ivory plaques worked in a variety of techniques and affixed t o w o o d e n furniture (see a b o v e ) . T h e m o s t c o m p l e x of these plaques feature c o n t i n u o u s narrative scenes, s u c h as t h e mil itary and feast scenes o n examples from M e g i d d o a n d T e l l el-Far'ah ( S o u t h ) . [See F a r ' a h , Tell el- (South).] L e s s finely worked L B ivory p l a q u e s a n d silhouettes with s o m e affinities to those found elsewhere in Syria-Palestine have b e e n f o u n d at Tell Fakhariyah. [See Fakhariyah, Tell.] A l t h o u g h S y r o Palestinian w o o d e n furniture is n o t preserved, the m a n n e r of a t t a c h m e n t a n d t h e u s e of t h e ivory c a n b e reasonably reconstructed b a s e d on E g y p t i a n N e w K i n g d o m chairs a n d o n an Iron A g e chair from Salamis, C y p r u s . [See Salamis.] Ivory was also u s e d in d i e L a t e B r o n z e A g e for freestand ing objects. A n exquisite ivory sculptured figurine was f o u n d in t h e M e g i d d o VILA h o a r d , in w h i c h several ivory female figurine h e a d s w e r e also found. A carved ivory h a n d , a p p a r e n d y from a large sculpture, m u c h of which was m a d e from a different material (probably w o o d ) , w a s f o u n d at L B Lachish. I n t h e I r o n A g e , ivory sculpture in the r o u n d was reserved, b a s e d on w h a t is currently k n o w n , to small-scale objects, such as lion fittings for furniture, as d e m o n s t r a t e d by carved lions in t h e r o u n d from Samaria a n d N i m r u d .
Ivory was also u s e d in t h e L a t e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages for c o m b s . It w a s u s e d less c o m m o n l y for dice (e.g., t h e eightsided die from I r o n II S h e c h e m ) . [See S h e c h e m . ] A l t h o u g h it is generally a s s u m e d tiiat t h e L B ivories f o u n d in Palestine were i m p o r t e d f r o m Syria, a case can b e m a d e , o n t h e basis of style, for s o m e of the L e v a n t i n e - t y p e ivories h a v i n g b e e n m a d e in Palestine. I n addition, u n w o r k e d tusks w e r e discov ered at M e g i d d o . A fascinating ivory b o x with lions a n d c h e r u b s in b o l d relief o n a projecting ledge encircling t h e b a s e of a b o x w a s f o u n d in t h e M e g i d d o VILA h o a r d (see a b o v e ) . T h e missing lid m a y h a v e featured c h e r u b s similar to t h o s e o n t h e t w o o p p o s i n g sides of t h e b o x ; they suggest t h e t y p e of d e c o r a tion t h a t m a y h a v e covered t h e H e b r e w t r i b e s ' Ark of t h e C o v e n a n t . L i d s of cylindrical cosmetic b o x e s ( w h o s e lower parts are generally missing) h a v e b e e n f o u n d at M e g i d d o a n d elsewhere. A t u s k - s h a p e d oil or p e r f u m e c o n t a i n e r witii a s t o p p e r w a s also f o u n d at M e g i d d o , with parallels else w h e r e . O t h e r types of containers are d u c k s h a p e d a n d h a v e m o v a b l e p a r t s . S c e p t e r s o r w a n d s in t h e s h a p e of cylindrical t u b e s fitted into p o m e g r a n a t e - s h a p e d h e a d s h a v e b e e n f o u n d at L B L a c h i s h ; a n I r o n A g e parallel is a n inscribed p o m e g r a n a t e - s h a p e d m i n i a t u r e ivory h e a d p u r p o r t e d to b e from K i n g S o l o m o n ' s T e m p l e in J e r u s a l e m . [See Jerusalem.] I n t h e I r o n A g e , ivory carving enjoyed a g r e a t r e s u r g e n c e in the L e v a n t . M a j o r collections of w o r k e d ivory originating there have been f o u n d at N i m r u d , K h o r s a b a d , A r s l a n T a s h (Syria), a n d Samaria; isolated pieces h a v e b e e n f o u n d else w h e r e in Syria, Assyria, a n d M e s o p o t a m i a , a n d o n C y p r u s
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s . F i g u r e 4. Bone border inlays and mounts.
The
p i e c e s w e r e a r r a y e d a r o u n d t h e edges of b o x e s , caskets, a n d so forth as d e c o r a t i o n . (Photograph by Carl Andrews)
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods a n d in t h e A e g e a n . [See K h o r s a b a d ; S a m a r i a ; C y p r u s . ] R i c h a r d D . B a r n e t t (1982) h a s distinguished b e t w e e n those ivories c o m i n g from N o r t h S y r i a n w o r k s h o p s a n d those originating in P h o e n i c i a . [See Phoenicia.] I n t h e Syrian style old motifs w e r e c o n t i n u e d — a n i m a l c o m b a t , a h e r o a n d a w i n g e d griffin, or a p r o c e s s i o n to a t h r o n e — m o t i f s derived primarily from M e s o p o t a m i a , a n d a figural style d e v e l o p e d with r a t h e r s q u a t bodies a n d faces with either a p r o m i n e n t n o s e a n d eyes or r o u n d , c h u b b y faces. T h e P h o e n i c i a n ivo ries a l m o s t slavishly i m i t a t e d E g y p t i a n motifs a n d p r o p o r tions a n d u s e d t e c h n i q u e s s u c h as p o l y c h r o m y a n d o p e n work. I r e n e J. W i n t e r (1976) h a s raised t h e possibility of t h e existence of a S o u t h Syrian school. T h e n o t i o n of a Pales tinian origin for t h e ivories f o u n d a t S a m a r i a has b e e n ruled o u t basically b e c a u s e , in spite of considerable excavation in Israel, a major collection h a s only b e e n f o u n d at Samaria. Yet, literary evidence p o i n t i n g t o A s s y r i a n s carting off b o o t y including ivory chairs from J u d a h suggests t h e possibility of t h e existence of a Palestinian school. T h e richest assemblage (consisting of several t h o u s a n d pieces) a n d t h e finest ex a m p l e s of I r o n A g e ivories c o m e f r o m N i m r u d , w h e r e they w e r e u s e d o n t h e backs a n d sides of b e d s a n d chairs a n d for wall paneling. A n o t h e r i m p o r t a n t assemblage, primarily of small f r a g m e n t s , w h i c h reflects t h e c o m p l e x i t y of cultural transmission, w a s f o u n d at H a s a n l u in I r a n , in a settlement of u n k n o w n ethnic a n d linguistic b a c k g r o u n d t h a t w a s b u r n e d before t h e e n d of t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE. [See H a sanlu.] T h e majority of t h o s e ivories w e r e locally m a d e ; o t h ers originated elsewhere in I r a n or are said to h a v e originated in N o r t h Syria. T h e smallest class is Assyrian. T h o u g h t h e influence of t h e N o r t h Syrian, P h o e n i c i a n , a n d A s s y r i a n w o r k s h o p s is a p p a r e n t , t h e local a n d otherwise Iranian ex a m p l e s lack t h e intricacy, p r e c i s i o n , a n d richness of t h e for mer. Ivory w a s favored for t h e carving of small l u x u r y items b e c a u s e it w a s soft a n d relatively easy to carve; it w a s e v e n grained, a n d its rich, light color w a s well suited for flesh t o n e s . I n t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE, w h e n t h e e l e p h a n t p o p u lation d w i n d l e d in N o r t h Syria, eliminating t h e locally avail able supply of ivory, t r i d a c n a shells a n d b o n e were u s e d as substitutes.
Shell. Shell, readily available a l o n g t h e shores of t h e R e d Sea, t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast, a n d t h e shores of the K i n n e r e t (Sea of Galilee), p r o v i d e d t h e early i n h a b i t a n t s of t h e L e v a n t with a n a t u r a l , practically r e a d y - m a d e object.for a d o r n m e n t f r o m Mesolithic times o n w a r d . I n later p e r i o d s , it w a s i m i t a t e d in p r e c i o u s m e t a l or c o v e r e d with gold foil. D e s i r e d for its n a t u r a l b e a u t y , it w a s t r a n s p o r t e d over great distances a n d u s e d b o t h in its n a t u r a l state a n d carved into g e o m e t r i c forms. I n their n a t u r a l state, shells r e q u i r e only a perforation to p e r m i t stringing. A t o t h e r t i m e s t h e y w e r e cut to c o n f o r m to varying shapes. Shell b e a d s w e r e s a w e d into disks a n d b o r e d with a b o w drill.
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U s e d for a variety of p u r p o s e s , b u t primarily for jewelry, shell was n o t a p o p u l a r material in t h e B r o n z e Age. It gained p o p u l a r i t y in t h e I r o n A g e , w h e n jewelry in precious metal is f o u n d w i t h less frequency. Clusters of intact small c o n c h shells with perforations for stringing h a v e b e e n found at sev eral Iron II sites. I n other i n s t a n c e s , disks cut from tridacna shells (giant clam shells), with central perforations for stringing, w e r e u s e d as filler b e a d s . E n g r a v e d tridacna shells t h a t p r o b a b l y c o m e from t h e R e d Sea h a v e b e e n f o u n d at n u m e r o u s sites in t h e N e a r E a s t (i.e., K i s h , N i p p u r , B a b y l o n ) . [See Kish; Babylon.] T h e y w e r e widely distributed in Israel, w h e r e they h a v e b e e n f o u n d at S h e c h e m , Jerusalem, B e t h l e h e m , T e l l el-Far'ah ( S o u t h ) , a n d A r a d , a n d in Syria at Alalakh. [See B e t h l e h e m ; Arad.] T h e s e e x a m p l e s m a y have b e e n u s e d as containers for cosmetics o r u n g u e n t s . [See also F u r n i t u r e a n d F u r n i s h i n g s , article on F u r n i s h i n g s of t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s ; and Jewelry.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnett, Richard D . A Catalogue of the Nimrud
Ivories: With Other
amples of Ancient Near Eastern Ivories in the British Museum.
Ex
London,
1957Barnett, Richard D . Ancient Ivories in the Middle East. Q e d e m , vol. 1 4 . Jerusalem, 1982. Caubet, Annie, and Francoise Poplin. " L e s objets de matiere dure an imate: E t u d e du materiau." In Ras Shamra-Ougarit, vol. 3, Le centre de la ville, edited by Marguerite Y o n , p p . 2 7 3 - 3 0 6 . Paris, 1987. K a n t o r , Helene J. " T h e Ivories from Floor 6 of Sounding I X . " In Soundings at Tell Fakhariyah, 1006-1050, by Calvin M c E w a n et al., p p . 5 7 - 6 8 . Oriental Institute Publications, 7 9 . Chicago, 1958. Krzyszkowska, Olga, Ivory and Related Materials: An Illustrated Guide. Institute of Classical Studies, Bulletin Supplement 5 9 . L o n d o n , 1990. Liebowitz, Harold. " B o n e a n d Ivory Inlay from Syria and Palestine." Israel Exploration Journal 27 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 8 9 - 9 7 . Liebowitz, Harold. " K n o c h e n . " In Reallexikon der Assyriologie undvorderasiatischen Archdologie, vol. 6, p p . 4 1 - 4 5 . Berlin, 1 9 8 1 . Liebowitz, Harold. " L a t e Bronze II Ivory W o r k in Palestine: Evidence of a Cultural Highpoint." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 265 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 3 - 2 4 . Mallowan, M . E. L . Nimrud and Its Remains. Vol. 2. L o n d o n , 1966. Muscarella, Oscar White. The Catalogue of Ivories from Hasanlu, Iran. University M u s e u m M o n o g r a p h , n o . 40. Philadelphia, 1980. Potts, T . F. " A Bronze Age Ivory-Decorated Box from Pella (Pahel) a n d Its Foreign Relations." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 5 9 - 7 1 . A m m a n , 1987. Reese, D . S. " A p p e n d i x VII(D): H i p p o p o t a m u s and Elephant T e e t h from Kition." In Excavations at Kition V, vol. 2, The Pre-Phoenician Levels, edited by Vassos Karageorghis, p p . 3 9 1 - 4 0 9 . Nicosia, 1985. Winter, Irene J. "Phoenician and N o r t h Syrian Ivory Carving in His torical Context: Questions of Style and Distribution." Iraq 38 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 1-22. HAROLD A.
LIEBOWITZ
Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods Virtually n o t h i n g is k n o w n a b o u t t h e scale, organization, or physical w h e r e a b o u t s of t h e industries that p r o d t t c e objects from b o n e , ivory, a n d shell f r o m t h e P e r s i a n t h r o u g h t h e R o m a n p e r i o d s . T h e s t u d y of t h e relative uses of these m a -
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BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods
terials at different periods is h a m p e r e d b y a lack of s y s t e m atic archaeological interest in t h e m . As a result, identifica tion often even of objects, material or species is lacking: p r i m a r y attention instead has usually been focused o n their d a t e , decoration, a n d possible function. In addition, there is s o m e confusion over h o w to distinguish between b o n e , ant ler, h o r n , a n d ivory; witiiout laboratory analysis, it is also difficult to distinguish b e t w e e n h i p p o p o t a m u s a n d African elephant or Asiatic (male) e l e p h a n t ivory (although tire p o s sible use of fossilized m a m m o t h , walrus, or whale ivory is less likely in the N e a r E a s t t h a n in nortiiern E u r o p e ) . A n additional p r o b l e m is that, unless artifacts are particularly distinctive or are f o u n d in a single-period c o n t e x t (e.g., a grave), it is difficult to isolate objects—such as b e a d s — a s being residual or deliberately r e u s e d from earlier p e r i o d s . Close study of t h e artifacts themselves, c o m b i n e d with anal yses of b o n e or shell assemblages, can t h r o w s o m e light o n the subject. B o n e a n d shell worldng generally are b y - p r o d ucts of food industries, whereas ivory working reflects d e liberate p r o c u r e m e n t of a scarcer resource u s e d to m a n u
facture m o r e valuable ( " l u x u r y " ) g o o d s . A l t h o u g h t h e r e is a t e n d e n c y in t h e archaeological literature to view b o n e a n d shell (let alone a n d e r a n d h o r n ) as u n i m p o r t a n t artifact cat egories, b r o a d consistencies in style b e t w e e n different regions at specific periods suggest m i n o r b u t p o p u l a r craft traditions. Small n u m b e r s of professional craftsmen are likely to have w o r k e d at or n e a r major centers of d e m a n d (e.g., cities, large military garrisons), while itinerant crafts m e n m a y have served rural p o p u l a t i o n s ; m a n y of these craftsmen m a y also h a v e w o r k e d seasonally. B o n e . A distinctive category of w o r k e d b o n e f o u n d in A c h a e m e n i d (Persian p e r i o d ) graves a n d o t h e r c o n t e x t s from Palestine to s o u t h w e s t e r n I r a n consists of kohl t u b e s . Occasionally f o u n d with applicators in situ, t h e s e w e r e u s u ally d e c o r a t e d w i t h incised horizontal registers of lattice, c h e v r o n , or h e r r i n g b o n e , s o m e t i m e s w i t h d o g ' s - t o o t h inci sion a r o u n d o n e e n d fAtlit, H a z o r , K a m i d el-Loz, D e v e Hoyiik, T i l B a r s i p , N i p p u r , U r , S u s a ) . T h e y w e r e also c o p ied in b r o n z e at D e v e Hoyiik. O t h e r b o n e artifacts i n c l u d e d e c o r a t e d h a n d l e s ( H a z o r , S h i q m o n a ) , spatulae ( T e l H a r o r ,
P e r s i a n t h r o u g h R o m a n P e r i o d s . Assorted cawed ivory and bone artifacts from the Persian through Sasanian periods. T o p left: t w o P e r s i a n - p e r i o d s c a b b a r d tips
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL:
in c a r v e d ivory a n d b o n e ( B M . W A A 1 3 2 9 2 5 , 1 4 0 6 6 6 ) . T o p right: P e r s i a n - p e r i o d d e c o r a t e d b o n e cosmetic tube from Deve Hoyiik ( B M . W A A 108684). Middle: Parthian-period bow-tip reinforce m e n t from Nineveh ( B M . W A A 138666), a horse's-head handle ( B M . W A A 1 3 5 7 1 8 ) , and two "doll" handles from Uruk-Warka ( B M . W A A 1856-9-9, 2 1 4 ; 1 8 8 1 - 1 1 - 3 , 38). Bottom: Sasanian i n c i s e d and colelored b o n e s p i n d l e - w h o r l f r o m D a i l e m ( B M . W A A 1 8 8 1 - 8 - 3 0 , 5 5 8 ) , ( C o u r t e s y T r u s t e e s of t h e British M u s e u m )
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods Tel Michal), coarse-toothed c o m b s (Tel Michal), beaters u s e d in w e a v i n g ( S u s a ) , p e r f o r a t e d tools or objects of u n certain function ( H a z o r , T e l M i c h a l ) , p i n s ( N i p p u r ) , inlays ( H a z o r ) , a n d simple b e a d s ( T e l M i c h a l , D e v e H o y t i k ) . C o r r e s p o n d i n g reliably d a t e d A c h a e m e n i d e v i d e n c e from h i g h l a n d I r a n is sparse. S i m p l e b e a d s , disks, biconical toggles, a pair of " s p a t u l a e , " a n d a p o i n t w e r e e x c a v a t e d at P a s a r g a d a e (Tall-i T a k h t ) b u t derive p a r t l y f r o m p o s t - A c h a e m e n i d c o n texts; an incised s c a b b a r d c h a p e (i.e., a s c a b b a r d - t i p rein f o r c e m e n t ) , a n o t h e r toggle, p i n s , possible g a m i n g pieces, a n d f r a g m e n t a r y possible c o n t a i n e r s w e r e f o u n d at P e r s e p olis. B o n e was u s e d as a c h e a p e r alternative to ivory d u r i n g t h e Seleucid p e r i o d : a possible w o r k s h o p has b e e n identified at Alexandria a n d portraits of P t o l e m a i c q u e e n s a p p e a r o n b o n e finger rings. S o m e utilitarian objects c o n t i n u e d to b e m a d e of b o n e , i n c l u d i n g spindles ( B a h r a i n ) , beaters for weaving, a n d spatulae (Larsa, U r u k , N i m r u d in M e s o p o tamia) . Plates incised with floral motifs were riveted to h a n dles ( T e l Z e r o r ) ; decorative p l a q u e s , carved figures, a n d d o u b l e - s i d e d c o m b s also o c c u r ( U r u k ; H a j a r Bin H u r n e i d in S o u t h A r a b i a ) . A s with later R o m a n work, these w e r e carved u s i n g a knife o r flat chisel, followed b y c o m p a s s drill ing for c o n c e n t r i c incision. T h e i c o n o g r a p h y of R o m a n p r o d u c t s in E g y p t c o n t i n u e d to b e heavily Hellenistic in style, a l t h o u g h it is possible t o distinguish b e t w e e n E g y p t i a n , Syro-Palestinian, A n a t o l i a n , a n d Italian w o r k m a n s h i p . B o n e p l a q u e s a n d p a n e l s , often d e c o r a t e d w i t h scenes from classical m y t h o l o g y , paralleled o n s a r c o p h a g i , p e a k in t h e s e c o n d - t h i r d centuries CE in t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n ( A n t i n o o p o l i s , R a s el-Soda in E g y p t ; H e s b a n , M a m p s i s , N e s s a n a , O b o d a [Avdat], S a m a r i a , A m m a n A i r p o r t C e m e t e r y , Pella i n P a l e s t i n e ) . S o m e of t h e s e m a y have b e e n carved in A l e x a n d r i a , w h e r e other varieties w e r e carved from ivory. M a n y of these p l a q u e s w e r e glued or riveted t o g e t h e r t o form larger c o n t i n u o u s panels a t t a c h e d to cosmetic b o x e s , caskets, b e d s , c o u c h e s , a n d o t h e r objects. T r a c e s of c r i m s o n , d a r k - r e d , p i n k , or black color s o m e t i m e s survive. O t h e r uses of b o n e are a t t e s t e d b y a coffin with b o n e a n d w o o d e n inlays f o r m i n g circles, rosettes, a n d p o m e g r a n ates (Jericho) a n d a w o o d e n casket d e c o r a t e d with N e r e i d s ( D a m a s c u s M u s e u m ) . [See S a r c o p h a g u s . ] B o n e objects c o m p r i s e naturalistic h u m a n figurines, dolls with m o v a b l e limbs, cubical die a n d o t h e r g a m i n g p i e c e s , d o u b l e - s i d e d single-piece c o m b s (also m a d e of w o o d or i r o n ) , h a n d l e s , spatulae, n e e d l e s , s p o o n s , spindles, w h o r l s , beads, and pendants (Tel D o r , Jerusalem, Masada, Samaria, J u d e a n D e s e r t caves, A m m a n A i r p o r t C e m e t e r y , H e s b a n , D u r a - E u r o p o s ) . B o n e p i n s w i t h knife-cut shanks a n d t u r n e d h e a d s c a r v e d in g e o m e t r i c , vegetal, a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c , o r z o o m o r p h i c s h a p e s (e.g., b i r d s , n u d e females), w e r e w i d e s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t t h e R o m a n E m p i r e ( G u s h H a l a v , Sa m a r i a , A m m a n A i r p o r t C e m e t e r y , Pella, Jerash, el-Lejjun, D u r a - E u r o p o s , A n e m u r i u m ) a n d are paralleled in m e t a l a n d
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glass. In s o m e cases, b o n e originals were u s e d to p r e p a r e m o l d s to cast b r o n z e s p e c i m e n s . M o s t p i n s were c u t from t h e sides of large u n g u l a t e l i m b b o n e s ; t h e p r o c e s s destroyed the identifying characteristics, so t h a t t h e original species usually c a n n o t b e identified—although r a r e examples sur vive w h e r e gold leaf was a p p l i e d to t h e h e a d s (Jerusalem). Similar locally m a d e b o n e p i n s are f o u n d at P a r t h i a n - p e r i o d sites in M e s o p o t a m i a (Kish, N i n e v e h , N i p p u r , N u z i , Seleucia on t h e T i g r i s , U r u k ) , C e n t r a l Asia (Akhal, M e r v , N y s a ) a n d elsewhere ( T a x i l a ) . P a r t h i a n b o n e working, especially d u r i n g t h e first-second centuries CE, generally s e e m s to h a v e b e e n m o r e extensive t h a n in t h e later Sasanian p e r i o d . A possible w o r k s h o p has b e e n identified at M e r v . B o n e objects from other P a r t h i a n , K u s h a n , o r c o n t e m p o r a r y sites i n c l u d e belt plates lightly in cised with vigorous scenes of animals, c o m b a t , or m o u n t e d h u n t e r s p u r s u i n g stags a n d b o a r s ( D e d o p l i s M i n d o r i in G e o r g i a , O r l a t in s o u t h e r n U z b e k i s t a n , T a k h t - i S a n g i n ) . O t h e r p l a q u e s d e p i c t female d a n c e r s a n d m a l e acrobats plus s t a n d i n g or seated individuals (Olbia o n t h e Black Sea). D e c o r a t i v e carved inlays are f o u n d , possibly that originally w e r e a t t a c h e d t o small b o x e s (Seleucia o n the Tigris, e d D u r in s o u t h e a s t A r a b i a ) . Small decorative finials or handles carved in t h e s h a p e of lively h o r s e or other animal h e a d s o c c u r a t P a r t h i a n (Seleucia o n t h e T i g r i s ) a n d c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s sites (Petra; Q a r y a t a l - F a u in s o u t h w e s t A r a b i a ) ; b r o n z e versions also exist. I n s c r i b e d P a r t h i a n b o n e knifehandles h a v e b e e n f o u n d at N i n e v e h a n d Seleucia on t h e T i g r i s . A distinctively P a r t h i a n t y p e of cylindrical b o n e h a n dle f o u n d in M e s o p o t a m i a (Babylon, N i p p u r , Seleucia o n t h e T i g r i s , U r u k ) a n d s o u t h w e s t I r a n (Masjid-i Suleiman, Susa) is carved in t h e s h a p e of a c r u d e stylized h u m a n face or figure. T r a c e s of p a i n t survive o n s o m e of these objects: usually described as b o n e dolls they are often f o u n d in chil d r e n ' s graves, b u t their e x a c t function r e m a i n s unclear. O a r e r varieties of plain o r d e c o r a t e d hollow or flat h a n d l e s , s o m e t i m e s m a d e of antler, also o c c u r ( U r u k , Masjid-i S u leiman, Susa, N o r u z M a h a l e in D a i l a m a n , T a x i l a ) . [See Grave Goods.] C o m p o s i t e b o w s w e r e u s e d in t h e N e a r E a s t from t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m o n w a r d , b u t t h e addition of elongated b o n e splints in t h e first-second centuries CE suggests t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of m o r e powerful w e a p o n s . T h e s e occur in b o t h d o m e s t i c a n d funerary c o n t e x t s at P a r t h i a n sites ( N i n e veh in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a ; e d - D u r , Akhal, M e r v ) . Syr ian auxiliaries m a y h a v e b e e n responsible for i n t r o d u c i n g t h e s e b o w s into t h e R o m a n a r m y : similar splints h a v e been f o u n d at several R o m a n military sites from E g y p t (Belmesa) a n d Palestine ( N e s s a n a ) t o S c o t l a n d (Bar Hill o n the A n t o n i n e wall). B o n e arrow n o c k s a n d possible a r r o w h e a d s also o c c u r ( C t e s i p h o n , N u z i , U r u k , T a x i l a ) . O t h e r objects in clude beaters, spindles, a n d s p i n d l e whorls (Nineveh, N i p p u r , N u z i , Seleucia o n d i e T i g r i s , U r u k ; N u s h - i J a n in w e s t e r n Iran; H a s s a n - i M a h a l e in D a i l a m a n ; M e r v ) , s p o o n s ,
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applicators a n d styli ( T a x i l a ) , cosmetic containers (Seleucia o n t h e T i g r i s ) , plain o r incised c o m b s ( N i p p u r , Seleucia o n the Tigris, T a x i l a ) , finger rings ( U r u k ) , belt buckles ( K a m p y r - t e p e in U z b e k i s t a n ) , dice (Uruk, N u s h - i J a n , K a m p y r t e p e , T a x i l a ) , astragali ( T a x i l a ) , flutes (Seleucia o n t h e T i gris), beads a n d " a m u l e t s " (Seleucia o n the T i g r i s ) . Finally, antler a n d b o n e horse-bridle cheek-bars o c c u r in P a r t h i a n period levels at Taxila. C o r r e s p o n d i n g Sasanian evidence is rarer. Objects i n clude pins (Tell Barghutiriat, C t e s i p h o n , T e l l e d - D e r , Kish, T e l l M a h u z , Tell M o h a m m e d A r a b , N i p p u r , N u z i , Y a r i m T e p e , plus K u s h a n o - S a s a n i a n sites in Bactria such as Z a r tepe) a n d rare b e a d s , mostly found in graves (Barghuthiat, Ctesiphon, ed-Der, Kish, M a h u z , Tell M o h a m m e d Arab, U r u k , Y a r i m T e p e , M e r v ) . Cubical dice (Tell M a h u z ) ; g r o u n d a n d polished astragali, or knucklebones ( M e r v ) ; other possible g a m i n g pieces (Kish); b o n e a n d h o r n h a n d l e s (Tell A b a b r a , Tell B a r g h u t h i a t , Kish, Shahr-i Q u m i s ) ; s p i n dle whorls (Tell A b u Sarifa, Babylon, Barghuthiat, C o c h e , C t e s i p h o n , Kish, Tell M a h u z , M e r v , Tell M o h a m m e d A r a b , N i n e v e h , N i p p u r , N u z i , U m m K h e s h m , plus Q a s r - i A b u N a s r in south-central I r a n ) ; a n d miscellaneous tools a n d other objects ( C t e s i p h o n , Tell e d - D e r , Kish, N i p p u r , N u z i ) also occur. I v o r y . Ivory tusks are s h o w n a m o n g East African t r i b u t e depicted on reliefs of D a r i u s I (521-486 BCE) at Persepolis: twenty tusks were said b y H e r o d o t u s ( 3 . 9 7 ) to b e p r e s e n t e d every three years. D a r i u s also obtained ivory from Arachosia (western Afghanistan) a n d Sind, whereas " t h e ivory w o r k e r s " e m p l o y e d in his palace at Susa c a m e from Sardis a c cording to a foundation inscription from this building. F i n ished objects of A c h a e m e n i d date include akinakes (short sword) " s c a b b a r d s " ( T a k h t - i Sangin) a n d dagger c h a p e s . T h e y are carved in low relief at D e v e Hoyiik, are d e p i c t e d at Persepolis, a n d are closely c o m p a r a b l e to surviving e x amples in metal a n d b o n e . A n ivory c o m b found at A s h k e l o n w a s carved with representations of a h o r s e m a n , ibex, lions, a n d a contest scene; other decorated c o m b s have b e e n f o u n d at Susa. Small studs, p r e s u m a b l y for ornate objects ( H a z o r ) ; incised inlays in Egyptianizing, Greek, a n d other styles ( P e r sepolis, S u s a ) ; handles ('Atlit); a n d statuettes (Susa) w e r e also m a d e from ivory. T h e price of ivory within the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n fell d u r i n g the third c e n t u r y BCE, followed b y d i e a p p e a r a n c e of a range of naturalistically carved ivories (e.g., a sword-hilt a n d c h a p e from T a k h t - i S a n g i n ) . A n ivory furniture leg d a t ing from the f o u r t h - t h i r d centuries BCE was f o u n d at A i K h a n o u m near T a k h t - i Sangin. D u r i n g this period, ele p h a n t s were frequentiy depicted in Bactria, particularly o n coins, whereas a t o m b p a i n t i n g at M a r i s a / M a r e s h a h in P a l estine depicts a saddled African elephant. Alternative ivory sources are suggested b y boar tusk fragments ( S a m a r i a ) . Alexandria was a n i m p o r t a n t ivory m a r k e t d u r i n g d i e Seleu cid period a n d ivory p l a q u e fragments, triangular inlays,
p i n s , a n d p r o b a b l e spindle whorls o c c u r at various sites (Al exandria, Bahrain, Failaka, U r u k ) . T h e r e was a heavy d e m a n d for b o t h e l e p h a n t s (for t h e a r m y a n d circus) a n d their ivory d u r i n g t h e R o m a n period. T h e s e were o b t a i n e d mainly via R e d Sea p o r t s , a l t h o u g h a small elephant p o p u l a t i o n still survived in n o r t h w e s t Africa. Associations of ivory workers ( L a t , eborarii) w e r e f o r m e d in R o m e a n d E g y p t , a n d t h e price of t h e ivory itself w a s finally fixed by E m p e r o r Diocletian a t 150 denarii p e r p o u n d . Caligula p r o v i d e d a n ivory stable for his h o r s e ; S e n eca o w n e d five h u n d r e d ivory tripod-leg tables; a n d a friend of Z e n o b i a , q u e e n of P a l m y r a , h a d a p a i r of c o m p l e t e ele p h a n t tusks m a d e into a c o u c h . Ivory w a s r e p o r t e d l y u s e d to m a k e statues, d o o r s , chairs, b e d s , b o x e s , chariots, s c e p ters, hilts, s c a b b a r d s , flutes, lyres, tablets, b o o k covers, b i r d cages, c o m b s , b r o o c h e s , a n d earrings. Archaeological finds from Syria-Palestine are m o r e m o d e s t b u t i n c l u d e carved spindles ( A m m a n A i r p o r t C e m e t e r y ) a n d a figurine d e p i c t ing G a n y m e d e , a subject familiar from E g y p t i a n b o n e carv ings ( S a m a r i a ) . F i n i s h e d ivory pieces w e r e only rarely t r a d e d from India ( P o m p e i i , H a t r a ) . T h e m o s t spectacular P a r t h i a n evidence consists of m o r e t h a n forty-five large ivory rhyta (hornlike p o u r i n g vessels) found within the citadel at t h e first P a r t h i a n capital at N y s a / M i t h r a d a t k e r t ( T u r k m e n i s t a n ) . T h e s e w e r e m a d e from u p to four l a d i e - t u r n e d elements carefully jointed w i t h c o p p e r p i n s , lined with w o o d , inset with s e m i p r e c i o u s stones or col o r e d glass, a n d later r e p a i r e d with silver wire. T h e y m e a s u r e d u p to 60 c m in l e n g t h a n d c o n t a i n e d b e t w e e n 0.5-1.5 1. T h e spouts e n d e d in a n i m a l p r o t o m e s , a n d t h e u p r i g h t portions w e r e d e c o r a t e d w i t h classical scenes. T u r n e d ivory furniture legs, cheek pieces with griffins' h e a d s a n d d e c o rative inlays ( N y s a ) , statuettes, figurines, p a i n t e d o r incised c o m b s , handles, g a m i n g pieces i n c l u d i n g dice, a n d b e a d s also occur ( U r u k , B a r d - i N i s h a n d e h , Masjid-i S u l e i m a n , Susa, D a l v e r z i n - t e p e , K a m p y r - t e p e in U z b e k i s t a n ; B e g r a m , Tillya-tepe in Afghanistan; T a x i l a ) . E v i d e n c e for S a s a n i a n ivory u s e is rare, despite s i x t h - c e n t u r y a n d later references t o its b e i n g i m p o r t e d from E a s t Africa: a fine casket carved with h u n t i n g a n d o t h e r scenes, formerly attributed to Sasanian w o r k m a n s h i p , is p r o b a b l y of Early Islamic date; possible S a s a n i a n p i n s , b e a d s , p e n d a n t s , a n d a stick die (?) from other sites (Tell M o h a m m e d A r a b , Qasr-i A b u N a s r ) m a y b e b o n e r a t h e r tiian ivory. O c casional ivory chess pieces h a v e b e e n f o u n d in M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Central Asia, b u t t h e y p r o b a b l y date to t h e sixth-seve n d i centuries CE ( L a t e / p o s t - S a s a n i a n p e r i o d s ) . A single ivory h a n d l e (Tell D h a h a b ) a n d r i n g bezel inset (Tell e d D e r ) c o m p l e t e t h e list of k n o w n e x c a v a t e d o c c u r r e n c e s of S a s a n i a n ivory. S h e l l . S p o r a d i c uses of shell are f o u n d at A c h a e m e n i d sites, as b e a d s , for i n s t a n c e (Yafit, T e l l e l - M a z a r in t h e J o r d a n Valley; K a m i d el-Loz, Persepolis): species i n c l u d e c o w ries (Cypraea annulus, carneola and moneta) a n d h o r n shell
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods (Cerithium erithraconense). H o r u s - t y p e p e n d a n t s w e r e m a d e of m o t h e r - o f - p e a r l ( T e l M i c h a l ) , paralleled in frit at o t h e r sites ( K a m i d e l - L o z ) . P e a r l b e a d s w e r e u s e d in A c h a e m e n i d jewelry: a h o a r d of 244 w a s f o u n d at P a s a r g a d a e . Coral b e a d s also o c c u r ( K a m i d e l - L o z ) . Finally, M u r e x snail a n d purpura haemastoma w e r e c r u s h e d in lined pits to p r o d u c e p u r p l e dye ( D o r , T e l M i k h m o r e f ) . Pearls are occasionally f o u n d in T y l o s - p e r i o d graves in B a h r a i n ; shell from Seleucid c o n t e x t s i n c l u d e s Pinctada (pearl oyster) w i t h holes p u n c h e d a l o n g t h e edges ( K o u r i o n , P a p h o s ) a n d o t h e r species ( N i m r u d ) . D u r i n g t h e R o m a n p e r i o d , p e r f o r a t e d M e d i t e r r a n e a n (Arcularia/Basket shell, Columbella, Cymatium, Glycymerisj'dog cockle/comb shell), Indo-Pacific/Red S e a / G u l f (Conus, Gypraea, Dentalium, Nerita, Pinctada, Stro?nbusltme c o n c h ) a n d freshwater (Unio) shells w e r e u s e d as b e a d s ( Q u s e i r e l - Q a d i m o n t h e R e d Sea, Jerusalem, A m m a n A i r p o r t C e m e t e r y , A m a t h u s on C y p r u s , Alisar Hoyiik in central A n a t o l i a , T e l l H a d i d i a n d T e l l Sheikh H a m a d in Syria). A n e x c e p t i o n a l i n s t a n c e from H e s b a n was t h e modification of a t i g e r / p a n t h e r cowrie into a small b i r d - s h a p e d c o s m e t i c c o n t a i n e r w i t h a n ivory h e a d a n d tail. C o n c h , h o r n shell, Charonia tritonisjXxiton or t r u m p e t shell, Drupa, Natica/Moon or necklace shell, Olivia/olive. shell, Tectus/top shell, Tridacna, incised Pinctada, a R e d Sea whelklike species u s e d in p e r f u m e , a n d pearls are also f o u n d (Quseir e l - Q a d i m , Hajar b i n H u m e i d , H u r e i d h a , S a m a r i a , el-Lejjun, A m m a n A i r p o r t C e m e t e r y , K o u r i o n ) . Lambisjspi-
d e r c o n c h and Turbo/taxban shell at Quseir e l - Q a d i m p r o b ably r e p r e s e n t food r e m a i n s . D e c o r a t e d shell inlays, possibly b e l o n g i n g to a small b o x , w e r e f o u n d in a P a r t h i a n grave at S h a m i (western Iran) a n d d e p i c t e d archers, h o r s e m e n , a n d a female figure wearing or n a t e jewelry a n d an e m b r o i d e r e d cloak. A Pinctada valve f r o m a t h i r d - f o u r t h c e n t u r y CE burial at M t s k h e t a (Georgia) was incised with an architectural design, a p a i r of birds, a n d a r i b b o n e d investiture d i a d e m . L a r g e bivalves d e c o r a t e d with d o t t e d OLitlines of a n i m a l s w e r e f o u n d at M e r v a n d U r u k ; simple r i n g e d d o t d e c o r a t i o n h a s b e e n f o u n d o n other shells from K o b a d i a n (Bactria). Finally, shell (including cowrie, Engina mendicarialvfh&aa), mother-of-pearl, and coral b e a d s , rings, a n d " b u t t o n s " o c c u r sporadically at P a r t h i a n sites (Seleucia o n t h e T i g r i s U r u k , Masjid-i S u l e i m a n , N u s h - i Jan, N y s a ) . A wide variety of m a r i n e a n d freshwater species, i n c l u d i n g Indo-Pacific scallop, w e r e r e p r e s e n t e d b y u n c u t shells at Taxila. R e d Sea coral w a s a sought-after material for b e a d s in t h e R o m a n E m p i r e a n d m a y h a v e b e e n t r a d e d eastward, judging f r o m archaeological finds (Tell M o h a m m e d A r a b , M e r v ) . Sasanian m o t h e r - o f - p e a r l g e o m e t r i c inlays o c c u r (Qasr-i A b u N a s r ) , closely paralleled b y stone inlays from Ctesip h o n ; m o t h e r - o f - p e a r l was also u s e d to m a k e b e a d s , p e n d a n t s , a n d buckles (Qasr-i A b u N a s r ) . T h e extensive S a s anian u s e of pearls in jewelry ( d r o p earrings, beads) suggests e x p a n d e d local G u l f p e a r l fisheries or i m p o r t s from Sri L a n k a : reliable archaeological evidence for Sasanian o c c u p a t i o n or t r a d e in these respective areas has hitherto b e e n scarce. C o w r y b e a d s are f o u n d in graves (Tell M o h a m m e d A r a b ) a n d other contexts ( C t e s i p h o n , Qasr-i A b u N a s r ) . T h e y w e r e r e g a r d e d in later p e r i o d s as a m e a n s of p r o t e c t i o n against t h e Evil E y e , b u t it is u n c l e a r w h e t h e r similar s u p e r stitions w e r e held at this d a t e . O t h e r shells were u s e d as b e a d s , p e n d a n t s , rings, a n d spindle whorls, although t h e varying p r o p o r t i o n s of shell to o t h e r b e a d materials hints at local fashions (Babylon, C t e s i p h o n , K i s h , Tell M a h u z , T e l l M o h a m m e d Arab, Nippur, Nuzi, U m m Kheshm, Uruk, Y a r i m T e p e , Qasr-i A b u N a s r , M e r v ) . Ostrich-egg c u p s w e r e sent f r o m Persia t o C h i n a ; o n e e x a m p l e was excavated at Qasr-i A b u N a s r . R e m a i n s of a p a i n t e d a n d glided ostrich egg from C t e s i p h o n m a y h a v e served either as a c u p or b e e n attached above a h a n g i n g l a m p : t h e latter w e r e characteristic of B y z a n t i n e a n d later c h u r c h e s in the s o u t h e r n L e v a n t , the dual p u r p o s e being as a c o u n t e r w e i g h t a n d an obstacle to r o d e n t s seeking to drink t h e l a m p oil. T h e source of b o t h t h e Sasanian a n d L e v a n t i n e e x a m p l e s is likely t o have b e e n Arabia. [Many entries.]
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: P e r s i a n t h r o u g h R o m a n P e r i o d s .
terior of a Parthian-period
pearl-oyster shell from
of the sites mentioned
are the subject of
independent
In
Uruk-Warka.
N o t e t h e drilled d e c o r a t i o n s h o w i n g a p a i r of a n i m a l s ( B M . W A A 1 8 5 1 - 1 - 1 , 1 7 7 ) . ( C o u r t e s y T r u s t e e s of the British M u s e u m )
347
BIBLIOGRAPHY A c k e r m a n , P . "Ivory and B o n e D e c o r a t i o n . " In A Survey of Persian Art, vol. 3, edited by Arthur U p h a m P o p e , p p . 2 6 5 9 - 2 6 6 3 . L o n d o n and
348
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods
N e w York, 1938. A brief section within this classic erence work, it is n o w largely superseded by more Amiet, Pierre. " L e s ivoires achemenides de Suse." 1 6 7 - 1 9 1 , 3 1 9 - 3 3 7 . Study of the largest surviving menid ivories.
four-volume ref recent research. Syria 49 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : group of Achae
Barnett, Richard D . Ancient Ivories in the Middle East. Q e d e m , vol. 1 4 . Jerusalem, 1982. Wide-ranging survey including Achaemenid, Se leucid, and R o m a n material. Bernard, Paul. "Sieges et lits en ivoire d ' e p o q u e hellenistique en Asia centrale." Syria 47 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 3 2 7 - 3 4 3 . Comparative study of furniture fragments from Ai K h a n u m , with material from other sites. MacGregor, Arthur. Bone, Antler, Ivory, and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials since the Roman Period. L o n d o n , 1985. Standard work dealing with technology and function, based on excavated finds from northern Europe. M a r a n g o u , Lila I. Bone Carvings from Egypt, vol. 1, Gmeco-Roman Pe riod. Tubingen, 1 9 7 6 . Detailed critical survey of the Egyptian evi dence. Reese, D . S. " T h e T r a d e of Indo-Pacific Shells into the Mediterranean and Europe." Oxford Journal of Archaeology 10 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 5 9 - 1 9 6 . C a t alog of excavated evidence from the Epipaleolithic to postmedieval periods, arranged by m o d e r n country from Jordan to Norway. Rosenthal, Renate. " L a t e R o m a n and Byzantine Bone Carvings from Palestine." Israel Exploration Journal 26 (1976)1 9 6 - 1 0 3 . Review of the excavated data with an attempt to distinguish Palestinian from Egyptian products. Scullard, H. H. The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World. fthaca, N . Y . , 1974. Useful historical study focusing on the military and cir cus roles of elephants, followed by an appendix on ivory. Zavyalov, V. "Bone Toilet Articles from Central Asian Sites of t h e Kushan and Post-Kushan P e r i o d s " (in Russian). Kratkie Soobshtseniya Instituta Arkheologii 209 (1993): 3 1 - 4 1 . Situates within a t y p o logical framework all Partho-Sasanian-period bone pins from C e n tral Asia published to date. ST. JOHN SIMPSON
Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Precious, h a r d , a n d resistant—but less h a r d t h a n m a r b l e a n d therefore easier t o cut—ivory is an excellent material for carving planes in relief. T h e art of carving developed greatly d u r i n g the last centuries of the R o m a n E m p i r e w h e n , with t h e d e c a d e n c e of classical G r e e k culture a n d sculptural art, a pictorial t e n d e n c y prevailed. I m p o r t a n t in this a n d later periods (up to t h e t e n t h century) was the influence of m i n iature painting as a source for t h e m e a n d style (cf., e.g., t h e p l a q u e showing " T h e W a s h i n g of t h e F e e t , " n o w in Berlin at the Staatliche M u s e e n , with t h e painted icon of t h e s a m e t h e m e in tire M o n a s t e r y of St. Catherine in t h e Sinai D e sert) . A m o n g the m o s t notable masterpieces of late imperial art in carved ivory is t h e series of diptychs—double small tables joined by hinges, carved o n their exterior face, a n d covered o n t h e interior with w a x for writing—used as gifts for special state occasions like t h e a p p o i n t m e n t of high state officials, especially consuls, to w h o m , i n d e e d , t h e u s e of diptychs w o u l d later be reserved. T h e several consular diptychs t h a t c o m e mainly from C o n s t a n t i n o p l e are almost all datable to
the fifth and sixth centuries. [See C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . ] O n t h e m , t h e idealized i m a g e of t h e consul exemplifies t h e original style created b y t h e syncretic art of t h e eastern e m p i r e . A m o n g the best of this g r o u p is t h e d i p t y c h of A e r o b i n d u s , consul in 506 ( n o w in Z u r i c h , a t t h e M u s e e N a t i o n a l Suisse), a n d t h e one r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e e m p r e s s A r i a d n e , d a t e d to a b o u t 500 (in F l o r e n c e , at t h e M u s e o N a z i o n a l e ) . T h e d i p tychs are often very useful in establishing a c h r o n o l o g y of c o m p a r a b l e ivory objects as diey often b e a r the n a m e of the official they represent. W h e r e a s Italian imperial cities like R o m e , R a v e n n a , M i l a n , a n d M o n z a w e r e o n c e d r o u g h t to h a v e b e e n t h e m a i n centers for t h e ivory craft, it is n o w clear t h a t m a n y of t h e best ivories c a m e f r o m p e r i p h e r a l areas (Cutler, 1985). A well-known pyxis r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e Sacrifice of Isaac a n d Sts. Peter, P a u l , a n d J o h n , datable to the fourth or fifth c e n tury (Berlin, Staatliche M u s e e n ) , is m o s t p r o b a b l y from A n tioch. [See A n t i o c h o n Orontes.] E g y p t as a s o u r c e of w o r k e d ivory is attested b y b o t h p a p y r i a n d excavations a n d was recently confirmed b y t h e finds at A b u M i n a ( E n g e m a n n , 1987). T h e sixth-century c a t h e d r a of M a x i m i a n u s ( R a v e n n a , N a t i o n a l M u s e u m ) seems t o c o m e from Alexandria, as do other stylistically c o g n a t e artifacts, s u c h as t h e B a r berini ivory dated to a b o u t 500 (Paris, L o u v r e M u s e u m ) , o n which a b a r b a r i a n is r e p r e s e n t e d offering a g i a n t tusk t o t h e e m p e r o r — t e s t i m o n y t o t h e r e p u t a t i o n of ivory in late antiquity as an imperial material. [See Alexandria.] T h e p r o d u c t i o n of carved ivory artifacts in t h e B y z a n t i n e world did n o t cease witii the Islamic invasions in t h e m i d seventh century. T h e masterpieces of t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y p r e s e n t an i c o n o g r a p h i c repertoire t h a t looks b o t h t o w a r d classical antiquity a n d t h e Orient, especially to S a s a n i a n P e r sia. [See Sasanians.] Characteristic p r o d u c t s of t h e eighth a n d n i n t h centuries are caskets a n d h u n t i n g h o r n s (olip h a n t s ) . T h e caskets are usually rectangular, w i t h a flat o r a t r u n c a t e d p y r a m i d a l lid, a n d are d e c o r a t e d with o r n a m e n tal squares or b a n d s w i t h mythological subjects or z o o m o r p h i c subjects in d i e P e r s i a n tradition. O n e of t h e best e x amples is t h e t e n t h - c e n t u r y Veroli casket ( L o n d o n , Victoria a n d Albert M u s e u m ) . A large n u m b e r of Byzantine ivories datable to t h e n i n t h a n d eleventh centuries a r e carved tablets, m a i n l y i n t e n d e d as icons, a n d t h e r e are also examples of ivories sculpted in t h e r o u n d . D o c u m e n t a t i o n for ivory carving after t h e sixth c e n t u r y is scanty. N o t h i n g is k n o w n of m o d e s of p r o d u c t i o n , a n d there is n o i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t h o w s u c h objects w e r e used. T h e r e is only one e x t a n t B y z a n t i n e ivory tablet. It is presently displayed at t h e t e n t h - c e n t u r y great cross/reli q u a r y at S a n F r a n c e s c o a t C o r t o n a , Italy. It w a s p r o b a b l y originally exhibited as it is n o w ( e x c e p t t h a t its elaborate frame is a s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y work) b e c a u s e t h e inscrip tion o n its back r e q u i r e d t h a t it b e displayed i n t h e H a g i a S o p h i a so as to s h o w b o t h its front a n d back.
BONE, IVORY, AND SHELL: Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Ivory objects from t h e Islamic p e r i o d i n c l u d e caskets (both r e c t a n g u l a r a n d cylindrical), c o m b s , oliphants, a n d chess pieces. [See G a m e s . ] Ivories s c u l p t e d in the r o u n d a r e rare. T e c h n i q u e s of d e c o r a t i o n w e r e relief carving, t h e p a i n t i n g or gilding of flat surfaces; intarsia, or m o s a i c d e c oration, on ivory p l a q u e s c o u n t e r s u n k in w o o d ; a d h e r i n g c u t ivory shapes t o a w o o d e n surface; a n d incising dots a n d c o n centric circles o n a surface, s o m e t i m e s filling t h e m i n with colored p i g m e n t s . Excavations at U m a y y a d a n d early ' A b b a s i d sites h a v e yet to reveal ivory objects, a n d t h e r e a r e very few attributable to the Sasanian p e r i o d i n Persia. I n E g y p t , o n t h e other h a n d , C o p t i c craftsmen k e p t alive a n earlier tradition, a n d t h e r e are pieces tiiat, o n stylistic g r o u n d s , can b e attributed to C o p t i c craftsmen of t h e n i n t h a n d t e n t h centuries. F o r t h e eleventh a n d twelfth centuries tiiere are b o n e a n d ivory carved panels from F u s t a t , associated stylistically with F a t imid w o o d carvings. [See Fustat.] C u t in l o w relief a n d d e picting h u n t i n g s c e n e s , isolated animals a n d h u m a n figures are set against a b a c k g r o u n d of scrollwork. T h e s e e x a m p l e s w e r e p r o b a b l y either w h o l e p a n e l s b e l o n g i n g to caskets or insets for larger w o o d e n p a n e l s . Ivory caskets a r e m e n t i o n e d i n a n eye-witness a c c o u n t of t h e treasures of t h e caliph a l - M u s t a n s i r r e p o r t e d b y t h e four t e e n t h - c e n t u r y historian al-Maqrizi. Also t o b e attributed to F a t i m i d E g y p t is a g r o u p of p a n e l s carved in o p e n w o r k (Florence, Bargello M u s e u m ; Berlin, Staatliche M u s e e n ; Paris, L o u v r e M u s e u m ) . T h e s e a r e related in style a n d s u b ject m a t t e r to t h e c a r v e d - w o o d p a n e l s f r o m d i e maristan (hospital) at Q a l a ' u n a n d to s o m e F a t i m i d w o o d e n panels n o w also in t h e L o u v r e . A n o t h e r g r o u p of objects a s c r i b e d t o F a t i m i d E g y p t or to N o r m a n Sicily c o m p r i s e s ivory oliphants a n d caskets. T h e i r style is distinctive a n d c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y relief cutting i n t w o planes; t h e d e c o r a t i o n consists of interlaced circles, each containing a n animal or bird a n d , o n t h e caskets, h u m a n figures. Similar decorative t r e a t m e n t a p p e a r s in M u s l i m Spain, b u t a n attribution to Sicily or s o u t h e r n Italy—whose N o r m a n rulers a r e k n o w n t o h a v e e m p l o y e d M u s l i m crafts m e n — i s likely, as it p r e s e n t s e l e m e n t s c o m m o n to t h e oli p h a n t s a n d caskets m a n u f a c t u r e d in s o u t h e r n Italy. A g r o u p of ivories t h a t h a s given rise t o m u c h discussion consists of p a i n t e d a n d gilded caskets ( a n d c o m b s a n d c r o siers). M a n y of t h e s e f o u n d tiieir w a y t o t h e treasuries of E u r o p e a n c h u r c h e s i n t h e M i d d l e Ages, w h e r e die caskets w e r e u s e d as reliquaries or p y x e s a n d t h e c o m b s for liturgical p u r p o s e s (i.e., u s e d i n t h e c e r e m o n y consecration of a b i s h o p ) . All h a v e certain c o m m o n stylistic a n d technical fea tures. M a n y caskets h a v e i n s c r i p t i o n s a r o u n d t h e r i m of t h e lid in either Kufic or N a s k h i script, generally containing b e n edictory p h r a s e s a d d r e s s e d t o t h e o w n e r . [See A r a b i c ] O c casionally, tiiere are verses of a love p o e m , suggesting t h a t these particular e x a m p l e s w e r e b r i d a l caskets for jewels a n d
349
trinkets. T h e p a i n t e d d e c o r a t i o n includes floral motifs, b i r d s , falconers, a n d i m a g e s o f Christian saints. U n f o r t u nately, n o surviving i n s c r i p t i o n c o n t a i n s a date, or t h e n a m e of eitiier t h e m a k e r or o w n e r . W h i l e it is generally agreed t h a t t h e p a i n t e d ivories can b e assigned t o t h e twelftli or t h i r t e e n t h centuries, o p i n i o n s dif fer r e g a r d i n g their place of origin; o n stylistic g r o u n d s they h a v e been variously a t t r i b u t e d t o Persia, M e s o p o t a m i a , Syria, E g y p t , S p a i n , a n d Sicily. T h e d e c o r a t i o n of o n e dis tinctive g r o u p contains interlaced star a n d g e o m e t r i c o r n a m e n t s so similar to those f o u n d i n t h e a r t of N a s r i d G r a n a d a (Spain) that their attribution to a f o u r t e e n t h - o r fifteenthc e n t u r y G r a n a d a w o r k s h o p s e e m s certain. F o r the others, h o w e v e r , a n attribution to twelfth-century Sicily seems m o s t likely—given the close stylistic c o n n e c t i o n w i t h t h e p a i n t e d pottery of N o r m a n Sicily a n d witii the greatest surviving m o n u m e n t of F a t i m i d p a i n t i n g , the ceiling of the Cappella Palatina i n P a l e r m o . B y far t h e m o s t r e m a r k a b l e e x a m p l e s of medieval Islamic craftsmanship a r e die carved ivories m a d e in M u s l i m S p a i n t h a t include masterpieces to rival t h e b e s t Byzantine a n d W e s t e r n ivories. Unlike m o s t of t h e ivories discussed so far, t h e s e w e r e p r o d u c e d u n d e r royal p a t r o n a g e a n d include s o m e objects m a d e for p r e s e n t a t i o n to royal personages. T h e y b e l o n g t o the years of d i e caliphate of C o r d o b a , having b e e n p r o d u c e d first in C o r d o b a itself a n d t h e n in M a d i n a t a z - Z a h r a ' . T h e d i r e e finest e x a m p l e s are t w o cylindrical p y x e s , o n e , dedicated to a l - M u g h i r a , b r o t h e r of a l - H a k a m II a n d d a t e d to AH 357/968 CE (in t h e L o u v r e M u s e u m ) , a n d t h e other, d e d i c a t e d to Z i y a d i b n Aflah a n d dated to AH 359/ 970 CE (Victoria a n d A l b e r t M u s e u m ) , a n d the casket in the cathedral of P a m p l o n a , d e d i c a t e d to a s o n of a l - M a n s u r a n d d a t e d to AH 399/1008 CE. S c e n e s i n c l u d e t h e p r i n c e with at t e n d a n t s , servants, a n d m u s i c i a n s ; h u n t s m e n with falcons; m e n p e r f o r m i n g rustic tasks; a n d animals attacking their p r e y ; in o n e case a n e l e p h a n t carrying a litter is represented. T h e u s e t o w h i c h these d o m e d cylindrical p y x e s were p u t is suggested by a n e x a m p l e o w n e d b y t h e H i s p a n i c Society in N e w Y o r k C i t y (D752, c. 966 CE): it bears an inscribed p o e m identifying it as a container for m u s k , c a m p h o r , a n d a m bergris, w h i c h were c o n s i d e r e d precious substances, o n a p a r with large a m o u n t s of gold or silver. Plentiful a m o u n t s of ivory w e r e available in d i e M e d i t e r r a n e a n area from the fourth t o t h e sixth centuries; the supply w a s c u t short, however, b y t h e P e r s i a n wars (first half of t h e seventh c e n t u r y ) a n d t h e Islamic c o n q u e s t of S p a i n (711 CE). A n a m p l e flow a p p e a r s t o h a v e b e e n restored b y t h e n i n t h a n d especially t h e t e n t h centuries. B y t h e middle of t h e t e n t h century, it b e c a m e a b u n d a n t in Spain, as a result of flourishing t r a d e contacts with N o r t h Africa. T h e m a i n s o u r c e of ivory in t h e Islamic p e r i o d w a s p r o b a b l y E a s t Af rica, also t h e greatest i v o r y - p r o d u c i n g area in t h e M i d d l e Ages. Surviving Islamic ivories s e e m to b e of elephant tusk.
350
BOSRA
W a l r u s ivory w a s u s e d for t h e h a n d l e s of d a g g e r s . H i p p o p o t a m u s ivory is m o r e elastic a n d c o m p a c t t h a n e l e p h a n t ivory a n d , in g e n e r a l , is less yellow. It is also h a r d e r , a n d therefore m o r e difficult t o w o r k , b u t it is m o r e suitable for small objects, s u c h as knife h a n d l e s . A h i p p o p o t a m u s ivory h o a r d has b e e n d i s c o v e r e d in G a o ( M a l i ) , t h a t w a s d e s t i n e d for e x p o r t , m o s t p r o b a b l y t o Islamic S p a i n . It w a s f o u n d in a n archaeological c o n t e x t t h a t d a t e d it to t h e e l e v e n t h c e n tury. T h e r a n g e of a p p l i c a t i o n for b o n e c a r v i n g e x c e e d e d t h a t for ivory. I t w a s p r o b a b l y w o r k e d b y t h e s a m e c r a f t s m e n , a n d b o n e f r a g m e n t s (e.g., p l a q u e s a t t a c h e d to caskets a n d b o x e s ) h a v e often b e e n m i s t a k e n for ivory. B o n e , u s u a l l y from cattle a n d p a c k a n i m a l s , w a s u s e d for b u t t o n s , k n o b s , a n d s t r u t s , as well as for tools, especially in t h e w e a v i n g t r a d e . I t w a s also u s e d t o craft g a m i n g p i e c e s , c o n t a i n e r s , a n d bird rings. [See Jewelry.] O r n a m e n t a l h a n d l e s for fans or flyswatters f r o m m a n y different p e r i o d s h a v e b e e n f o u n d in excavations in C o n s t a n t i n o p l e (Gill, 1986). Similarly eclectic u s e s for b o n e h a v e b e e n f o u n d in I s l a m i c - p e r i o d c o n t e x t s , a n d it sufficient h e r e to refer to t h e E g y p t i a n finds at K a r a n i s a n d F u s t a t ( w h i c h also i n c l u d e d C o p t i c material; see S c a n l o n , 1976), a m o n g w h i c h w e r e found
figurines,
combs, weaving
tools, g a m i n g
pieces,
d r a u g h t s m e n , a n d c u b i c a n d r e c t a n g u l a r dice. E x c e p t for its s p o r a d i c u s e i n intarsia d e c o r a t i o n , shell does n o t a p p e a r t o h a v e b e e n a m a i n s t r e a m m a t e r i a l in either the Byzantine or t h e Islamic p e r i o d . BIBLIOGRAPHY Contadini, Anna. "Islamic Ivory Chess Pieces, D r a u g h t s m e n , a n d Dice in the Ashmolean M u s e u m . " Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 1 0 ( 1 9 9 5 ) . Survey of the chronology, distribution, a n d typology of Islamic ivory chess pieces from die ninth t o the fifteenth centuries. Cott, Perry B. Siculo-Arabic Ivories. Princeton, 1 9 3 9 . Standard work for the group of Siculo-Arabic painted ivories, illustrating some ninety pieces in which t h e painted decoration is still visible. Curatola, Giovanni, ed. Eredita dell'Islam: Arte islamica in Italia. Milan, 1993. Catalog of a n exhibition at the D o g e ' s Palace, Venice. Includes chapters o n M u s l i m Spain a n d Fatimid Egypt, with new or known ivory pieces reconsidered. Color illustrations. Cutler, Anthony. The Craft of Ivory: Sources, Techniques, and Uses in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 200-1400. D u m b a r t o n Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, 8. Washington, D . C . , 1985. I m p o r t a n t sur vey of the art and craft of ivory from R o m a n to late Byzantine times, illustrating a variety of materials. Cutler, Anthony. The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society in Byzantium, Ninth-Eleventh Centuries. Princeton, 1994. I m portant study of many ivories (especially icons), tiieir techniques, uses, and importance within the Byzantine world (ninth-eleventh centuries). Dalton, O. M . Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era, with Examples of Mohammedan Art and Cawings in Bone in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography of the British Museum. L o n d o n , 1909. Standard catalog on b o n e and ivory material from b o t h Byzantine a n d Islamic periods in t h e British M u s e u m . D i m a n d , M a u r i c e S. A Handbook of Muhammadan Art. N e w York, 1947. Examples of objects found in Egypt (now in t h e Metropolitan
M u s e u m of Art, N e w York City) m a d e b y Coptic craftsmen in t h e ninth a n d tenth centuries (seefig.6 9 ) . D o d d s , Jerrilynn D . , ed. Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain. N e w York, 1992. Catalog of an exhibition held in G r a n a d a a n d at the Metropolitan M u s e u m of Art, N e w York City. Contains m a n y I s lamic ivories from Spain, all r e p r o d u c e d in color, a n d a survey of the present scholarship. E n g e m a n n , Josef. "Elfenbeinfunde aus A b u M e n a / A g y p t e n . " Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum 30 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 7 2 - 1 8 6 . Byzantine ivory finds at A b u M i n a (Egypt). Ferrandis, Jose. Marfdes arabes de Occidente. 2 vols. M a d r i d , 1 9 3 5 - 1 9 4 0 . Standard work o n Islamic ivories m a d e in t h e West, comprising both Siculo-Arabic a n d Spanish types. Gill, Margaret V. I n Excavations at Sarachane in Istanbul, vol. 1, edited by R. M a r t i n Harrison, p p . 2 2 6 - 2 3 1 , 2 5 8 - 2 6 2 . Princeton, 1986. B o n e objects from m a n y different periods found at Constantinople. Goldschmidt, Adolph, a n d K u r t W e i t z m a n n . Die byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X.-XIII. Jahrhunderls. 2 vols. Berlin, 1 9 3 0 - 1 9 3 4 . Standard corpus of Byzantine ivories from t h e t e n t h to thirteenth centuries. Kiihnel, Ernst. Die islamischen Elfenbeinskulpturcn VIII.-XIII. Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Berlin, 1 9 7 1 . U p - t o - d a t e , comprehensive, a n d well-il lustrated survey of Islamic ivories from t h e eighth t o thirteendi cen turies. A fundamental work. L o n g h u r s t , Margaret. Catalogue of Carvings in Ivory, p a r t 1, Up to the Thirteenth Century. L o n d o n , 1 9 2 7 . E x a m p l e s of b o n e a n d ivory carved panels found in t h e ruined m o u n d s at F u s t a t (now in t h e Victoria a n d Albert M u s e u m , L o n d o n , a n d t h e M e t r o p o l i t a n M u seum of Art, N e w York City), a n d associated stylistically with t h e wood carvings of the Fatimid period (see pi. 2 8 ) . F o r examples of comparative items in carved woodwork, see E d m o n d P a u t y , IMS bois sctdptes jusqu'd I'ipoque ayyoubide; Catalogue general du Musee Arabe du Caire (Cairo, 1 9 3 1 ) , a n d Elise Anglade, Catalogue des boiseries de la section islamique, Musee du Louvre (Paris, 1988). Morey, Charles R. Gli oggetti di avorio e diosso delMuseo Sacro Valicano. Vatican City, 1 9 3 6 . G o o d catalog of this i m p o r t a n t collection. Pinder-Wilson, R a l p h H „ a n d C . N . L . Brooke. " T h e Reliquary of St. Petroc a n d the Ivories of N o r m a n Sicily." Archaeologia 104 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 6 1 - 3 0 5 . I m p o r t a n t article updating C o t t (see a b o v e ) , with m u c h new information about the painted Siculo-Arabic ivories, listing some 220 pieces. Scanlon, George T . " F u s t a t Expedition: Preliminary R e p o r t 1968, P a r t II." Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 1 3 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 6 9 89. Ivory a n d b o n e finds from Fustat. A N N A CONTADINI
BOSRA,
site l o c a t e d t o t h e s o u t h of t h e b a s a l t p l a t e a u in
t h e H a u r a n p r o v i n c e of Syria (32°3i' N , 36°29' E ) , 42 k m c
(26 m i . ) east of D e r a a n d a p p r o x i m a t e l y 10 k m (6 m i . ) f r o m the Jordanian border. Although the population has been re d u c e d i n r e c e n t c e n t u r i e s , t h e r e is n o d o u b t t h a t t h e city h a s b e e n inhabited continuously since t h e N a b a t e a n - R o m a n p e riod. Before t h a t p e r i o d , it is u n c e r t a i n w h e t h e r t h e city is t o b e identified witii a site n a m e d bwdznw
in t h e i n s c r i p t i o n o n
a statuette f r o m S a q q a r a f r o m t h e late twelfth d y n a s t y ; w i t h B D N in a list e n g r a v e d o n t h e K a r n a k p y l o n s ; w i t h B u s r u n a in t w o A m a r n a t e x t s ; o r w i t h b d r n o n a g e o g r a p h i c list in t h e funerary t e m p l e of A m e n o p h i s III (1408-1372 B C E ) . T h e site h a s s o m e t i m e s b e e n c o n f u s e d w i t h B o s o r a i n M o a b , w h i c h m a y b e t h e o n e cited i n Deuteronomy
4:43, a n d w i t h
BOSRA B o s o r a (Buseirah) in E d o m . T h e p r e s e n t - d a y A r a b n a m e Basra c o r r e s p o n d s exactly to t h e N a b a t e a n a n d P a l m y r e n e w r i t t e n f o r m BSR', from t h e r o o t basar, " t o m a k e i n a c c e s sible," w h e n d e n n i n g , for e x a m p l e , a fortress. T h e t in t h e G r e c o - L a t i n f o r m Bostra seems d e s i g n e d to facilitate p r o nunciation. T h e excavations by t h e A m e r i c a n University of B e i r u t (1980-1984) in t h e n o r t h w e s t area of t h e city h a v e attested t h e o c c u p a t i o n of the city f r o m t h e Early B r o n z e A g e o n w a r d . J u d g i n g mainly from t h e c e r a m i c materials f o u n d t h e r e , H e l g a S e e d e n (1986) c o n c l u d e d t h a t t h e site was first i n h a b i t e d t o w a r d t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m
351
BCE. I t was n o t enclosed b y a fortification wall, a n d was sit u a t e d in t h e vicinity of a p e r e n n i a l s p r i n g , w h i c h explains settlement in a region w h e r e s p r i n g s are very rare. O l d aerial p h o t o g r a p h s of t h e area to t h e w e s t of Bosra indicate the b o u n d a r i e s of w h a t m a y h a v e b e e n t h e B r o n z e Age settle m e n t . A t least o n e building, c o n s t r u c t e d o n a stone foun dation, h a s b e e n identified at t h e very edge of t h e settlement; r e m a i n s of d o m e s t i c a n d agricultural activity, s u c h as ceramics, basalt utensils, a n d a n i m a l b o n e s , w e r e recovered. T h e excavations c o n d u c t e d b y t h e F r a n c o - S y r i a n mission since 1981 h a v e revealed traces of older o c c u p a t i o n at t h e site. O n t h e e d g e of t h e S o u t h T h e r m a e (see p l a n , n o . 14)
N a b a t e a n arch Eastern front of the N a b a t e a n arch N e w cathedral East reservoir G r a n d reservoir (south) Theater Hippodrome L a t e amphitheater Oval space Main street from the west gate to the Tetrapyle M a i n street between the Tetrapyle and t h e central arch Central arch M a i n street between the central arch a n d the theater
BQSRA. Plan of the city. (Courtesy J. M . Dentzer)
352
BOSRA
a n d of the m a i n e a s t - w e s t street (nos. I O - I I , 16) of t h e city sherds out of context dating to E B I and lithic material w e r e discovered. N e a r t h e N a b a t e a n arch (no. i ) , ceramics also o u t of context date to E B II—III a n d a few sherds to t h e I r o n Age. I n 162 BCE Judas M a c c a b e u s , c o m i n g to the aid of t h e site's Jewish minority, destroyed t h e city of Bosor in Gilead (1 Mc. 5:26, 28). T h e identification of Bosor as Bosra is certain, b u t no trace of this p e r i o d has b e e n f o u n d yet at Bosra. Bosra and t h e s u r r o u n d i n g region were u n d e r t h e a u t h o r ity of t h e N a b a t e a n dynasty from at least the b e g i n n i n g of t h e first century BCE (Aretas III controlled D a m a s c u s b e t w e e n 84 a n d 72 BCE). U n d e r Rabel IPs rule (70-106 CE) at t h e latest Bosra b e c o m e s t h e s e c o n d capital of t h e N a b a t e a n k i n g d o m . T h e F r a n c o - S y r i a n excavations at the N a b a t e a n a r c h (plan, n o . 2) a n d in t h e area to t h e east of it s h o w t h e i m p o r t a n c e of the N a b a t e a n urbanistic activity in Bosra, T h e arch w a s conceived as a structure connecting two areas of the t o w n oriented t o w a r d different directions. Its w e s t e r n front (no. 1) has t h e s a m e orientation as t h e m a i n street whereas the east front ( n o . 2), which bears two N a b a t e a n half columns, m a t c h e s t h e chief orientation of t h e eastern p a r t of the city. A t t h e s a m e time, the western p a r t of t h e city, which was already entirely occupied as attested b y t h e N a b a t e a n ceramics f o u n d in m a n y places within a n d b e y o n d the city, m u s t also h a v e been reorganized. A b o u t 100 meters east of t h e N a b a t e a n arch, t h e F r a n c o Syrian mission discovered remains of a large enclosure wall (plan, n o . 3) with pilasters, decorated with fine limestone slabs and stucco a n d d a t e d to the N a b a t e a n period. In front of it a stylobate b e l o n g e d to a portico. T h e s e structures fol low the alignment of t h e eastern front of t h e structure. It is t e m p t i n g to explain these structures as parts of a vast s a n c tuary (temenos) w h o s e architectural elements, for e x a m p l e the N a b a t e a n capitals, w e r e r e u s e d in t h e Christian c h u r c h built above it. D u s h a r e s , g o d of t h e N a b a t e a n dynasty, as sociated with A ' r a , a local god, was called by inscriptions " t h e god of Rabel, o u r L o r d , w h o is at B u s r a . " Architectural blocks sculpted in the N a b a t e a n style were discovered in t h e center of the city. So it is possible to i m a g ine a N a b a t e a n t e m p l e n o t far from t h e crossroads n e a r t h e n y m p h a e u m (no. 18). T h e role played b y Bosra d u r i n g the period of t h e N a batean k i n g d o m explains w h y , after t h e k i n g d o m ' s a n n e x a tion by R o m e in 106 CE, it b e c a m e t h e capital of t h e P r o v incia Arabia, the h e a d q u a r t e r s of t h e c a m p (plan, n o . 22) of t h e T h i r d L e g i o n Cyrenaica (at t h e n o r t h e r n e n d of t h e city), a n d t h e h u b of a n e t w o r k of r o a d s , t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t of which was the Via T r a j a n a N o v a . T h e city, to w h i c h Alex a n d e r Severus gives t h e status of colony, develops i m p r e s sively: at least four of t h e m a i n streets were d e c o r a t e d with ionic capitals of Severan style. N e a r b y all t h e buildings were
of basalt b u t in t h e street (no. 13) t h a t led f r o m t h e central a r c h (no. 12) to t h e t h e a t e r (no. 6) limestone w a s used. I n t h e m a i n e a s t - w e s t (no. 11) a n d in t h e n o r t h - s o u t h street (no. 20) porticoes a n d s h o p s were built at least partly a b o v e cryptoporticoes. T h e e n d s of t h e e a s t - w e s t m a i n street a n d intersections w e r e m a r k e d b y arches o r a tetrapyle; at t h e western e n d was a n oval-shaped o p e n s p a c e ( n o . 9). A m o n g public buildings t h e best p r e s e r v e d is t h e t h e a t e r c o n s t r u c t e d entirely o n vaulted s u b s t r u c t u r e s , with a n elaborate system of passageways. T h e frons scenae was c o m p l e t e d in t h e Sev eran period. Recently a n a m p h i t h e a t e r (no. 8), p r o b a b l y from a later, n o t yet d e t e r m i n e d p e r i o d , was excavated, as t h e h i p p o d r o m e ( n o . 7) farther south. T h e t w o h u g e t h e r m a e in the center of t h e city h a d vaulted or d o m e d roofings m a d e of volcanic scoria concrete. I n t h e " S o u t h T h e r m a e " (no. 14) t h e big b a y w i n d o w s w e r e closed with d o u b l e glass partitions. T h e r o o m s w e r e initially a r r a n g e d o n o n e line; later, in t h e t h i r d - f o u r t h c e n t u r y , t h e b a t h w a s e x t e n d e d o n b o t h sides of t h e s e r o o m s in o r d e r to allow a s y m m e t t i c a l circulation. A p a r t of it w a s still in use in t h e U m a y y a d p e riod. T h e so-called K h a n e d - D i b s ( n o . 19) w a s a s e c o n d b a t h c o m p l e x created with a s y m m e t r i c a l plan. A t e m p l e of Z e u s H a m m o n , d e d i c a t e d to t h e tutelary god of t h e T h i r d L e g i o n C y r e n a i c a is k n o w n f r o m an inscription ( I G L S , XILI, 9107). A n o t h e r inscription f o u n d in t h e vicinity of t h e N a b a t e a n arch is t h e dedication of a t e m p l e t o R o m e a n d A u g u s t u s ( I G L S , X I I I , 9143). F u r t h e r cults are m e n t i o n e d in inscriptions. T h e lower front of t h e so-called Kalybe ( n o . 17), exca vated by t h e D i r e c t o r a t e of Antiquities of B o s r a in 1994, w a s a r r a n g e d as a m o n u m e n t a l fountain. T h e real u s e of tire s o called n y m p h a e u m (no. 18), w h i c h faces it, is n o t yet proved. I n t h e s u r r o u n d i n g s of Bosra t h e F r a n c o - S y r i a n mission discovered r e m a i n s of several a n t i q u e organized areas of land (gardens n e a r the city, fields farther a w a y ) . O n e of these cadasters, b a s e d o n s q u a r e units (705 m ) m u s t date to t h e R o m a n period. A p e r i o d of t u r m o i l explains t h e restoration of t h e city's r a m p a r t s in a b o u t 249-250 CE. T h e i r layout is still largely hypothetical, particularly in t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of tire city, w h e r e they were subsequently d i s m a n t l e d to furnish c o n struction materials for t h e Islamic citadel. I n fact, an i n c u r sion of P a l m y r e n e t r o o p s u n d e r Z e n o b i a ' s direction p r o b a bly d a m a g e d t h e T e m p l e of Z e u s H a m m o n t h e n , w h i c h w a s restored in a b o u t 273-275 CE. T h e Christian era saw a n e w p h a s e of c o n s t r u c t i o n . D i rectly above t h e N a b a t e a n " t e m e n o s " (plan, n o . 2) a f o u r t h fifth-century s t r u c t u r e , of w h i c h only t h e m o s a i c floors r e m a i n , w a s built; it was excavated b y t h e F r a n c o - S y r i a n mission. I n t u r n , it was overbuilt b y a c h u r c h c o m p l e x t h a t could be a cathedral, similar t o t h e C h u r c h of Sts. Serge, B a c c h u s , a n d L e o n c e b u t even larger ( a b o u t 44 X 62 m ) .
BOTTA, PAUL-EMILE T h e s e t w o c h u r c h e s h a d a similar p l a n : a circular c e n t r a l s p a c e i n s c r i b e d in a s q u a r e , witii f o u r e x e d r a e i n t h e c o r n e r s , a n d d i e s a n c t u a r y a n d s u b s i d i a r y r o o m s o n t h e east. In the Byzantine period u r b a n maintenance a n d i m p r o v e m e n t c o n t i n u e d . A n i n s c r i p t i o n d a t e d t o 517 m e n t i o n s t h e p a v i n g of t h e p o r t i c o b o r d e r i n g d i e s t r e e t ( p l a n , n o . 13) a l o n g t h e s o u t h t h e r m a l . A l a r g e m o n u m e n t a l access l e a d i n g t o t h e e a s t e r n p a l a e s t r a of t h e s o u t h t h e r m a e ( n o . 14) p a s s i n g u n d e r a structure that has a n apse (no. 15; church?). B o s r a w a s t h e first B y z a n t i n e city c o n q u e r e d b y t h e I s l a m i c a r m i e s (634 CE) a n d d i e first S y r i a n city to receive a c o p y of t h e Q u r ' a n . I t o c c u p i e s a p l a c e of e m i n e n c e in t h e h i s t o r y of t h e b i r t h of I s l a m b e c a u s e t h e p r o p h e t is said t o have m e t t h e m o n k Bahira there. T h e American University e x c a v a t i o n s i n t h e n o r t h w e s t p a r t of t h e city h a v e u n c o v e r e d a f a r m f r o m t h e L a t e U m a y y a d era. T h e p o r t i c o e s of t h e n o r t h - s o u t h street ( p l a n , n o . 20), e x c a v a t e d in 1994 b y t h e B o s r a D i r e c t o r a t e of A n t i q u i t i e s , h a v e b e e n o v e r b u i l t b y c r o s s i n g walls to a suq, p r o b a b l y f r o m t h e e i g h t h c e n t u r y . A n e l e v e n t i i - c e n t u r y fortress b u i l t in a n d a r o u n d d i e R o m a n t h e a t e r b e c a m e t h e h e a r t of t h e m e d i e v a l city. A g r o u p of religious b u i l d i n g s ( t h e m o s q u e s of a l - U m a r i , a l - M i b r a k , a l K h i d r , a n d t h e madrasah
al-Dabbagha), dated between the
U m a y y a d p e r i o d a n d t h e t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y , is still s t a n d i n g . O n e of t h e last m a j o r b u i l d i n g s f r o m t h e M a m l u k p e r i o d is t h e hammam
Manjak, recently restored b y a G e r m a n t e a m .
[See also N a b a t e a n s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aalundj F l e m m i n g , et al. Islamic Bosra: A Brief Guide, D a m a s c u s , 1 9 9 0 . Berytus 32 ( 1 9 8 4 ) ; 33 ( 1 9 8 5 ) . Briinnow, Rudolf-Ernst, a n d Alfred v o n Domaszewski. Die Provincia Arabia auf' Gmnd zzoeier in denjahre 1897 und 1898 untemommenen Reisen und der Berichte friihercr Reisender. Vol. 3. Strassburg, 1 9 0 9 . See pages 1 - 8 4 . Butler, H o w a r d Crosby. Ancient Architecture in Syria. Publications of die Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, 1 9 0 4 1905 a n d 1909, Division 2, Section A. L e i d e n , 1907. See pages 2 1 5 295, plates 1 - 4 3 . Cerulli, S. " B o s r a . " Felix Ravenna, n o . 1 1 5 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 7 7 - 1 2 0 . Dentzer, Jean-Marie. " L e s sondages d e l'Arc N a b a t e e n et l'urbanisme de Bosra." Gomples Rendus des Seances de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 6 2 - 8 7 . Dentzer, Jean-Marie. "Fouilles franco-syriennes a l'Est d e l'Arc N a bateen, 1 9 8 5 - 1 9 8 7 : U n e nouvelle cathedrale a B o s r a ? " In XXXV Corso di cultura sull'arte ravennate e bizantina, Ravenna, 22-24 marzo 1988, p p . 1 3 - 3 4 . R a v e n n a , 1988. Dentzer, Jean-Marie, et al. " N o u v e l l e s recherches franco-syriennes dans le quartier est d e Bosra a s h - S h a m . " Comptes Rendus des Seances de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 1 1 7 - 1 4 7 . Dentzer, Jean-Marie, et al. " L e d e v e l o p p e m e n t u r b a i n de Bosra: Quinze a n s d e recherches archeologiques." Annates ArchMogiques Arabes Syriennes. I n press. Farioli [ C a m p a n a t i ] , Raffaella. " G l i scavi della chiesa dei S S Sergio, Bacco e Leonzio a Bosra." Berytus 33 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 6 1 - 7 4 . Farioli C a m p a n a t i , Raffaella. "Relazioni sugli scavi e ricerche della m i s sione Italo-Siriana a Bosra, 1 9 8 5 , 1 9 8 6 , 1 9 8 7 . " I n XXXV Corso di
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cultura sull'arte ravennate e bizantina, Ravenna, 22-24 marzo 1988, p p . 4 5 - 9 2 . R a v e n n a , 1988. Farioli C a m p a n a t i , Raffaella. " B o s r a chiesa dei S S Sergio, Bacco e Leonzio: I nuovi ritrovamenti, 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 8 9 . " I n IM Syrie de Byzance a ITslam: Vlle-VIIIe siecles, edited b y Pierre Carnivet a n d Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais, p p . 1 7 3 - 1 7 9 . D a m a s , 1 9 9 2 , Felix Ravenna, nos. 1 3 7 - 1 3 8 ( 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 1 ) . Finsen, Flelge. Le leve du theatre romain it Bosra, Syrie. C o p e n h a g e n , 1972. Freyberger, Klaus S. " Z u r D a t i e r u n g des T h e a t e r s in Bosra." Damaszener Mitteilungen 3 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 1 7 - 2 6 . Freyberger, Klaus S. "Einige B e o b a c h t u n g e n zur stadtebaulichen E n twicklung des rSmischen B o s t r a . " Damaszener Mitteilungen 4 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 45-60. K a d o u r , M u h a m e d , a n d Helga Seeden. " B u s r a 1980: Reports of an Archaeological a n d Etiinographic C a m p a i g n . " Damaszener Mittei lungen I ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 7 7 - 1 0 1 . Maqdissi, Michel al-. "Sites et materiel d u s u d de la Syrie a I'age d u b r o n z e . " In Le djebel al-Arab: Histoire el patrimoine au Musee de Suweida, edited by Jean-Marie Dentzer, p p . 1 3 - 1 4 . Paris, 1 9 9 1 . Meinecke, Michael. " D e r H a m m a m M a n g a k u n d die islamische A r chitektur von B u s r a . " Berytus 3 2 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 1 8 1 - 1 9 0 . Meinecke, Michael, a n d S. A. a l - M u q d a d . " D e r H a m m a m M a n g a k in Busra . . . Grabungsbericht 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 8 3 . " Damaszener Mitteilungen 2 (1985): 1 7 7 - 1 9 2 . M o u g d a d , Ryad al-, et al. " U n amphitheatre a B o s r a ? " Syria 67 (1990): 201-204. Sartre, M a u r i c e . Bostra: Nos. 9001 a 9472, Inscriptions Grecques et L a d n e s de la Syrie, vol. 1 3 . 1 . Paris, 1982. Sartre, Maurice. Bostra des origines a I'Islam. Paris, 1985. Sartre, M a u r i c e . "Bostra." I n Reallexikon fur Antike und Christenlum. I n press. Seeden, Helga. " B r o n z e Age Village O c c u p a t i o n in Busra: AUB Exca vations o n t h e N o r t h w e s t Tell, 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 8 4 . " Berytus 34 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 1 1 81. Seeden, Helga. "Busra 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 8 4 : Second Archaeological R e p o r t . " Damaszener Mitteilungen 3 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 3 8 7 - 4 1 1 . XXXV Corso du cultura sull'arte ravennate e bizantina, Ravenna, 22-24 marzo 1988. R a v e n n a , 1988. JEAN-MARIE DENTZER
Translated from French by Elizabeth Keller
BOTTA, PAUL-EMILE
(1802-1870), F r e n c h c o n s u l
a t M o s u l , in I r a q , c r e d i t e d w i t h d i s c o v e r i n g A s s y r i a n civili z a t i o n a n d t h u s o p e n i n g t h e w a y for t h e discipline of M e s o p o t a m i a n a r c h a e o l o g y . B o r n in T u r i n , Italy, h e j o i n e d his father, t h e h i s t o r i a n C a r l o B o t t a , in F r a n c e , w h e r e h e s t u d i e d m e d i c i n e . I t w a s as s u r g e o n o n t h e s h i p Hews
t h a t B o t t a first
t r a v e l e d a r o u n d d i e w o r l d (1826-1829). H e s u b s e q u e n t l y traveled
through
Lebanon,
Egypt,
Senaar,
and
Yemen,
w h e r e h e p e r f e c t e d his A r a b i c a n d g a t h e r e d collections for t h e M u s e u m of N a t u r a l H i s t o r y in P a r i s . F o l l o w i n g his a p p o i n t m e n t to M o s u l , h e b e g a n his s e a r c h for N i n e v e h o n t h e instigation of t h e s e c r e t a r y of t h e F r e n c h Asiatic Society, Julius M o h l . B o t t a ' s first e x c a v a t i o n s at K o u y u n j i k w e r e u n successful, b u t i n M a r c h 1843, o n t h e site of K h o r s a b a d , h e d i s c o v e r e d t h e first s c u l p t u r e s of t h e p a l a c e b u i l t for t h e A s s y r i a n k i n g S a r g o n I I i n h i s capital D u r S h a r r u k i n b e t w e e n
354
BOUQRAS
717 and 706 BCE. I n t w o excavation campaigns (1843,1844), with t h e collaboration of t h e painter E u g e n e - N a p o l e o n F l a n d i n , Botta u n e a r t h e d t h e greater p a r t of t h e building. T h e best-preserved sculptures were t r a n s p o r t e d t o Paris t o constitute at t h e L o u v r e t h e first Assyrian m u s e u m in t h e world, inaugurated b y K i n g Louis-Philippe o n 1 M a y 1847. T h e results of Botta's work w e r e r e c o r d e d in t h e i m p o s i n g publication Monument de Ninive decouvert et decrit par M. P. E. Botta, mesure et dessinepar M. E. Flandin (5 vols., Paris, 1846-1850). Botta p u r s u e d his career as a consul in J e r u salem a n d t h e n in T r i p o l i in Libya. Exploration of K h o r sabad was r e s u m e d in 1852-1854 b y Botta's successor at M o s u l , Victor Place (1815-1875), w h o c o m p l e t e d t h e e x cavation of t h e palace a n d drew u p t h e m a p of t h e city. T h e lapidary description t h e novelist F l a u b e r t m a d e of Botta during his short stay in Jerusalem in 1850: " M a n in ruin, m a n of ruins i n the city of ruins; denies everything a n d gives m e t h e feeling of hating everything except w h a t is d e a d " is regrettably severe for a m a n w h o was austere, timid, a n d solitary a n d w h o s e o p e n n e s s of spirit, honesty, a n d g e n erosity were praised b y all w h o c a m e into contact with h i m . BIBLIOGRAPHY Albenda, Pauline. The Palace of Sargon, King of Assyria, Paris, 1 9 8 6 . Bergamini, Giovanni. "Paolo Emilio Botta e la scoperta delta civilta assira." Bollettino della Societa Piemontese di Archeologia e Belle Arti 38-41 (1984—1987): 5 - 1 6 . Botta, Paul-Emile. Lettres de Botta sur les decouvertes a Khorsabad pres de Ninive. Paris, 1 9 4 5 . Botta, Paul-Emile, a n d Eugene-Napoleon Flandin. Monument de Ninive decouvert el decrit par M. P. E. Botta, mesure et dessine par M. E. Flandin. 5 vols. Paris, 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 5 0 . Botta, Paul-Emile. Inscriptions decouvertes a Khorsabad. Paris, 1848. Botta, Paul-Emile. " M e m o i r e sur l'ecriture cuneiforme assyrienne." JournalAsiatique 8.1 (1848): 1 - 1 9 7 , Knowlton, Edgar C . "Paul-Emile Botta, Visitor t o Iiawai'i in 1 8 2 8 . " Hawaiian Journal of History 18 (1984): 1 3 - 3 7 . ELISABETH F O N T AN
B O U Q R A S , Neolithic village site located in Syria o n t h e right bank of the E u p h r a t e s River, just below its confluence with the K h a b u r River (35°5'i2" N , 40°23'so" E ) . B o u q r a s was t h e first Neolithic settlement t o b e identified in t h e E u phrates valley. I t was discovered b y a D u t c h g e o m o r p h o l ogist, Willem J. v a n Liere. H e a n d a F r e n c h archaeologist, H e n r i d e C o n t e n s o n , u n d e r t h e auspices of the C e n t r e N a tional d e R e c h e r c h e Scientifique, exacavated a t B o u q r a s briefly in 1965 t o d e t e r m i n e t h e sequence of o c c u p a t i o n a n d to learn s o m e t h i n g of its material culture a n d e c o n o m y . M o r e extensive excavations were c o n d u c t e d from 1976 t o 1978 b y a D u t c h t e a m led b y P . A . A k k e r m a n s a n d J. J. R o o d e n b e r g of t h e Universities of A m s t e r d a m a n d G r o n ingen. T h e i r m o s t significant contribution w a s t o e x p a n d greatly w h a t is k n o w n of t h e site's layout.
B o u q r a s was a n oval m o u n d nearly 3 h a (7 acres) in e x t e n t and 5 m deep. D e Contenson a n d v a n Liere d u g two trenches t h r o u g h t h e deposits at its center t h a t revealed a s e q u e n c e o f t h r e e phases of o c c u p a t i o n ( C o n t e n s o n , 1985, p . 336). N o p o t t e r y w a s f o u n d i n t h e t w o earliest p h a s e s , I a n d II, b u t p o t s h e r d s w e r e recovered i n p h a s e III; t h u s , it appears that occupation at Bouqras spanned t h e introduc tion of pottery t o this region. T h e D u t c h excavators defined a s e q u e n c e of at least t e n architectural episodes t h a t could b e g r o u p e d in four p h a s e s , n u m b e r e d f r o m surface t o s u b soil. R a d i o c a r b o n dates indicate t h a t t h e village w a s i n h a b ited from a b o u t 6,400 t o 5,900 BP in r a d i o c a r b o n years. T h e village w a s c o m p o s e d of tightly p a c k e d , rectangular, m u d - b r i c k h o u s e s , g r o u p e d a r o u n d o p e n y a r d s a n d along streets ( A k k e r m a n s et a l , 1983, figure 3). T h e h o u s e s w e r e similar in size a n d plan, suggesting t h a t there w e r e n o great differences in status a m o n g t h e inhabitants. T h e artifacts from B o u q r a s w e r e unusually varied for a site of its a g e , attesting t o t h e versatile craftsmanship of its i n h a b i t a n t s . A m o n g t h e m w e r e figurines of h u m a n females a n d animals m a d e of s u n - d r i e d clay, a w i d e variety of b o n e tools, a n d n u m e r o u s small stone dishes a n d b o w l s . C h i p p e d - s t o n e tools, m o r e t h a n 20 p e r c e n t of w h i c h w e r e m a d e of obsidian from eastern T u r k e y , w e r e u b i q u i t o u s . Bones of d o m e s t i c a t e d s h e e p a n d goats a n d s o m e wild animals recovered in t h e 1965 c a m p a i g n p e r s u a d e d t h e e x cavators t h a t t h e inhabitants h a d b e e n h e r d s m e n a n d h u n t ers ( C o n t e n s o n , 1985). Seeds of d o m e s t i c a t e d w h e a t s , b a r ley, lentils, a n d p e a s f o u n d in t h e m o r e r e c e n t excavations indicate t h a t t h e p e o p l e of B o u q r a s h a d b e e n farmers a n d h e r d e r s , a l t h o u g h they h a d still e n g a g e d in s o m e foraging for wild foods. F a r m i n g c a n n o t b e c o n d u c t e d successfully at B o u q r a s t o d a y w i t h o u t t h e aid of irrigation b e c a u s e t h e rainfall is too low. Either t h e climate w a s a little m o i s t e r t h e n , or t h e inhabitants h a d already d e v e l o p e d simple irrigation techniques. S o o n after t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of agriculture i n t h e L e v a n t , farmers e x p a n d e d their area of settlement eastward, as far as t h e E u p h r a t e s . B o u q r a s flourished for several centuries, just as this p h a s e of e x p a n s i o n r e a c h e d its limits. T h e village attests t o t h e p r e c o c i o u s success of t h e n e w w a y of life a n d t h e considerable agricultural skills of its inhabitants. [See also Agriculture.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Akkermans, P . A., et al. " B o u q r a s Revisited: Preliminary R e p o r t o n a Project i n Eastern Syria." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 49 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 3 3 5 - 3 7 2 . S u m m a r y of the results of the second campaign of excavations at B o u q r a s , with plans of the structures in the Neolithic village a n d ample illustrations of the artifacts recovered. Contenson, Henri d e . " L a c a m p a g n e d e 1 9 6 5 a B o u q r a s . " Cahiers de I'Euphrate 4 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 3 3 5 - 3 7 1 . Full description of t h e 1 9 6 5 season of excavation, A . M . T . MOORE
BRAK, B R A K , T E L L , site located n e a r W a d i Jaghjagh o n t h e U p p e r K h a b u r plains, o n e of t h e largest a n c i e n t m o u n d s in n o r t h e a s t e r n Syria, m e a s u r i n g 43 h a (98 acres) in area (c. 800 X 600 m ) a n d 45 m a b o v e p l a i n level (36°46' N , 4 i ° o o ' E ) . W h i l e t h e U p p e r K h a b u r triangle is k n o w n for its agri cultural productivity, Brak's location in t h e relatively d r y s o u t h e r n m a r g i n s indicates t h a t its i m p o r t a n c e lay in its stra tegic position: it served as a n e n t r y p o i n t o n t o t h e K h a b u r plains from t h e southeast, controlling access from t h e Sinjar region a n d — u l t i m a t e l y — s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . C u r r e n t e v i d e n c e strongly suggests t h a t t h e a n c i e n t n a m e of T e l l B r a k w a s N a g a r ( N a w a r ) . E x c a v a t i o n s of tiiird-mill e n n i u m levels yielded a clay bottle s t o p p e r witii t h e inscrip tion Nci-gar ", a n d a seal i m p r e s s i o n from t h e 1937-1938 ex cavations (see below) in t h e A l e p p o M u s e u m is inscribed with t h e n a m e of T a l p u s - a t i l i , " s u n of t h e land of N a g a r . " Finally, a tablet f r o m t h e M i t a n n i p a l a c e (see below) refers to reeds of " N a w a r in t h e p r o v i n c e of T a ' i d u . " 1
I n 1937 a n d 1938, M a x M a l l o w a n c o n d u c t e d t h r e e sea sons at B r a k u n d e r t h e a u s p i c e s of t h e British School of Archaeology in Iraq, excavating t h e E y e T e m p l e a n d t h e N a r a m - S i n " p a l a c e . " E x c a v a t i o n s w e r e r e s u m e d in 1976 b y D a v i d Oates of t h e Institute of A r c h a e o l o g y , University o f L o n d o n , w h o , t o g e t h e r w i t h his wife J o a n O a t e s , c o n d u c t e d the fourteen seasons (1976-1993) responsible for t h e m a jority of w h a t is currently k n o w n of t h e site's history a n d character. I n 1994 a n d 1995, R o g e r M a t t h e w s directed e x cavations t h e r e for t h e British S c h o o l of A r c h a e o l o g y in Iraq, Ubaid Beginnings and Uruk-PeriodUrbanization. As a result of t h e formidable d e p t h of d e p o s i t at Brak, virgin soil h a s yet to b e r e a c h e d . T h e earliest levels excavated, d a t ing to t h e sixth m i l l e n n i u m , derived from d e e p s o u n d i n g s in area C H in t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e site a n d yielded later U b a i d ceramics. D e p o s i t e d a b o v e tiiese w e r e Early U r u k p e r i o d materials (late fifth/early f o u r t h millennia), i n c l u d i n g G a w r a X I - I X type s t a m p e d a n d incised p o t t e r y a n d clay " h u t s y m b o l s , " associated w i t h t h e n i c h e d facade of a p r o b able t e m p l e . T h e s u b s e q u e n t era, t h e m i d t o late f o u r t h m i l l e n n i u m , was of particular i m p o r t a n c e in t h e history of T e l l Brak. J u d g i n g from t h e distribution of surface s h e r d s , t h e entire site was o c c u p i e d , in a d d i t i o n to a set of smaller s u r r o u n d i n g settlements. M o r e o v e r , it is in this p h a s e t h a t t h e relationship of Brak with s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a first conies into s h a r p focus. T h e E y e T e m p l e , so-called b e c a u s e of its l i m e s t o n e plaquettes w i t h eye i m a g e s , h a d s o u t h e r n characteristics in its tripartite p l a n a n d in its colored clay c o n e a n d inlaid stone rosette decoration. [See M o s a i c s . ] I n area T W , t h e earliest excavated a r c h i t e c t u r e w a s built of R i e m c h e n (a s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n style of small bricks t h a t are s q u a r e in section) a n d c o n t a i n e d s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n - s t y l e M i d d l e U r u k p o t t e r y as well as a local chaff-faced w a r e . I n t h e s u c c e e d i n g level m o r e R i e m c h e n architecture c o n t a i n e d
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s o u t h e r n L a t e U r u k p o t t e r y ; a final R i e m c h e n phase yielded J e m d e t N a s r p a i n t e d p o t t e r y , a rare find outside s o u t h e r n Mesopotamia. I n addition to p o t t e r y a n d architectural characteristics, m a n y other aspects of U r u k s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n m a terial culture have e m e r g e d f r o m Brak, including cylinder seals, a clay tablet witii n u m e r i c a l n o t a t i o n s , a n d t w o p i c t o g r a p h i c tablets in a n u n u s u a l style. T h e significance of s o u t h e r n material culture at Brak, as well as Brak's e x p a n sion to full-fiedged u r b a n size, r e m a i n s to b e fully u n d e r s t o o d . O n e view identifies Brak as a s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n " c o l o n y " controlling t h e r o u t e t o t h e c o p p e r m i n e s of east e r n Anatolia; a n alternative perspective suggests that local elites w e r e e m u l a t i n g t h e prestigious styles of s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a in o r d e r to reinforce tiieir o w n status a n d p o w e r . [See Colonization.] R e u r b a n i z a t i o n and A k k a d i a n C o n q u e s t . I n the N i nevite 5 p e r i o d (early t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m ) , it a p p e a r s t h a t B r a k did n o t h a v e t h e extensive size of t h e p r e c e d i n g period, a n d n o t e m p l e s or other public structures h a v e yet b e e n discov ered. H o w e v e r , b y the m i d - t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , Brak h a d again achieved i m p o s i n g u r b a n d i m e n s i o n s a n d w a s probably t h e political a n d e c o n o m i c c e n t e r of a p r o s p e r o u s state. T h i s p e r i o d e n d e d with a major d e s t r u c t i o n evident in t h e b u r n e d architecture of five excavation areas ( C H , E R , D H , A L , S T ) , p r o b a b l y to b e a t t r i b u t e d t o t h e Akkadian rulers of s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . [See Akkadians.] T h e A k k a d i a n c o n q u e r o r s m a d e Brak a n administrative center for t h e control of t h e K h a b u r plains. T o judge from t h e c u n e i f o r m d o c u m e n t a t i o n , t h e A k k a d i a n occupation o c c u r r e d in later S a r g o n i c t i m e s — d u r i n g the reigns of N a r a m Sin a n d Sharkalisharri, T h e N a r a m - S i n palace (95 X 90 m in area, with outer walls 9 m thick), w h o s e association with N a r a m - S i n w a s established via s t a m p e d inscriptions o n m u d bricks, w a s p r o b a b l y a s t o r e h o u s e a n d administrative locus (see figure 1 ) . M a j o r S a r g o n i c building projects were also revealed i n areas F S a n d S S , b o t h of w h i c h included b e n t axis t e m p l e c o m p l e x e s . T h e area S S t e m p l e p r o d u c e d a calcite figure of a r e c u m b e n t h u m a n - h e a d e d bull, p e r h a p s to b e associated w i t h t h e s u n g o d S h a m a s h . B o t h t e m p l e c o m plexes w e r e a b a n d o n e d , after which t h e y w e r e filled in a n d p r o v i d e d with ritual deposits including, in d i e case of area S S , a n u m b e r of d o n k e y s . After a brief r e o c c u p a t i o n , the Akkadian settlement at B r a k suffered a fiery destruction. L a t e T h i r d / E a r l y S e c o n d M i l l e n n i a BCE. After the A k kadian o c c u p a t i o n , t h e site was r e o c c u p i e d a n d t h e N a r a m Sin p a l a c e rebuilt. I n this p e r i o d , Brak evidently functioned as o n e of t h e capitals of t h e H u r r i a n k i n g d o m of Urkes a n d N a w a r . [See H u r r i a n s . ] B y t h e early s e c o n d millennium BCE, however, t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e site w a s a b a n d o n e d . Rel atively little d o c u m e n t a t i o n h a s b e e n retrieved for t h e early s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE t h u s far, b u t evidence of defensive architecture has b e e n o b t a i n e d , as well as a vaulted shrine.
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BREASTED, JAMES H E N R Y edited by J o h n E. Curtis, p p . 62-71. L o n d o n , 1982. Brief description of the site and a s u m m a r y of early results of t h e postwar excavations. Oates, David, and Joan Oates. "Tell Brak: A Stratigraphic S u m m a r y , 1976-1993." Iraq 56 (1994): 167-176. Synthesis of t h e site's occu pation history from the results of die fourteen postwar seasons of excavation; includes a bibliography. Oates, Joan. " S o m e Late Early Dynastic III Pottery from Tell B r a k . " Iraq 44 (1982): 205-219. Pottery from the destruction level at Tell Brak predating the N a r a m - S i n palace, an i m p o r t a n t link between ceramic and historical chronology. GLENN M .
SCHWARTZ
B R E A S T E D , J A M E S H E N R Y (i86 -i935),thefa5
BRAK, TELL.
Figure I.
The palace of Naram-Sin.
(After Mallowan,
1947, plate L X )
ther of American Egyptology. Born in Rockford, Illinois, Breasted received a B.A. from Northwestern (now North Central) College. He then successfully completed a program at Chicago College of Pharmacy, becoming a registered pharmacist in 1886. A personal call to the ministry prompted Breasted to enter the Congregational Institute (now Chicago Theological Seminary), where he excelled in Hebrew. He launched his career as an Orientalist when he decided to continue his studies at Yale University under William Rai ney Harper, a brilliant linguist. Having received his M.A. in 1 8 9 2 , Breasted resolved to study under Adolf Erman of the University of Berlin, who held one of the few chairs in Egyp tology. In 1894, Breasted received his Ph.D., having written his dissertation on the sun hymns of Akhenaten (De Hymnis in Solem
Mitanni Period. In its last period of occupation, Brak was a major center of the Mitanni Empire. Excavations in area H H , on the highest point of the tell, have revealed a residential fortress-palace and adjacent shrine. The palace has produced the oldest extant Mitanni-period text written in Hurrian, as well as legal texts of the time of kings Artasummara and Tusratta. From these contexts also came ivory and wood furniture components, a unique stone statue, and elaborately decorated vessels of glass—a technology appar entiy first developed in the Mitanni heartland. [See Glass.] The palace was destroyed in die thirteenth century BCE, most probably by the Middle-Assyrian kings; Brak itself was abandoned by 1 2 0 0 BCE. [See also British School of Archaeology in Iraq; Mitanni, and
the biography
of
Mallowan.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Mallowan, M . E . L . "Excavations at Brak and Chagar Bazar." Iraq 9 (1947): 1-266, Publication of the 1937-1938 seasons, including the Eye T e m p l e and N a r a m - S i n palace. Matthews, Donald M . , and Jesper Eidem. "Tell Brak and N a g a r . " Iraq 55 (i993): 201-207. Discussion of the evidence supporting the iden tification of Tell Brak as ancient Nagar/Nawar. Matthews, R. J., et al. "Excavations at Tell Brak, 1994." Iraq 56 (1994): 177-194. Report on the first results of Matthews's excavations. Oates, David. "Tell Brak." In Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery,
sub Rege Amenophide
TV
Conceptis).
His first trip to Egypt came after his graduate work when he spent his honeymoon there in 1 8 9 4 , undertakingto collate inscriptions for the preparation of the Worterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache, the great German dictionary of ancient Egyptian language, In subsequent years ( 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 0 1 and 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 0 7 ) , Breasted continued to copy and collate inscrip tions on objects in European museums as well as on mon uments in Egypt, contributing significantly to the Worterbuch's publication. Breasted made significant Egyptological discoveries on these expeditions, including a temple built by Akhenaten at Sesebi in Nubia, and he compiled a large col lection of historical inscriptions. In 1894 Breasted was appointed by the University of Chi cago to the first chair of Egyptology ever in the Western Hemisphere. At Chicago, Breasted began his life-long teaching career. William F. Edgerton, Harold H. Nelson, Caroline Ransom Williams, and John A. Wilson were among his most distinguished pupils. Breasted's collection and translation of historical inscrip tions provided an enormous corpus of information for his next two projects. The first, A History of Egypt ( 1 9 0 5 ) , was a cultural history of ancient Egypt that combined a chron ological outline with information about lifestyle. Subse quently, he published five volumes entitled Ancient Records of Egypt ( 1 9 0 6 ) , a translation of all "historical" texts avail able to Breasted. Although Ancient Records is still in use, the
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History is o u t d a t e d . B r e a s t e d c o n t i n u e d t o publish regularly, often p r o d u c i n g p o p u l a r v o l u m e s . T w o of his publications have lasting scholarly value. A series of lectures for U n i o n Theological S e m i n a r y in N e w Y o r k w a s p u b l i s h e d as De velopment of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912). In 1930, The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus a p p e a r e d . T h i s v o l u m e includes a translation of a p a p y r u s t h a t c o n t a i n e d t r e a t m e n t s for h e a d a n d chest injuries. B r e a s t e d ' s b a c k g r o u n d in p h a r m a c o l o g y as well as his r e m a r k a b l e philolog ical skills resulted in a masterful t r e a t t n e n t of this text.
that discusses Breasted's personality as well as his scholarly achieve ments. D a w s o n , W a r r e n R., a n d Eric P . Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. 2d rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 2 . Highlights i m p o r t a n t places, dates, and publications in Breasted's career and provides a list of references. Wilson, John A. Signs and Wonders upon Pharaoh: A History of American Egyptology. Chicago, 1964. D e v o t e s significant attention to Breas ted's career in the context of the field (see chapters 7, 9, and 10).
T h r o u g h o u t his career, B r e a s t e d ' s professional goals a n d his research w e r e d e d i c a t e d t o u n d e r s t a n d i n g the c o n n e c tions b e t w e e n t h e ancient civilizations of E g y p t a n d t h e N e a r East a n d earlier cultures a n d later W e s t e r n civilization. H e saw these t h r e e cultures linked evolutionarily, convinced t h a t W e s t e r n culture owed a g r e a t d e b t t o these early civi lizations. T h i s belief resulted in his lifelong conviction t h a t every effort should b e e x p e n d e d t o preserve a n d u n d e r s t a n d them.
BRITISH INSTITUTE AT A M M A N FOR AR C H A E O L O G Y A N D H I S T O R Y . British scholars a n d a c a d e m i c institutions h a v e b e e n c o n d u c t i n g a r c h a e o logical research in J o r d a n since t h e n i n e t e e n t h century. T h e w o r k of s u c h pioneers as C l a u d e R. C o n d e r , G e o r g e a n d A g n e s Horsfield, a n d G e r a l d L a n k e s t e r H a r d i n g was fol lowed by t h a t of K a t h l e e n M . K e n y o n , D i a n a Kirkbride, P e t e r Parr, C r y s t a l - M . B e n n e t t , and m a n y others. I n 1978, largely t h r o u g h the efforts of D a m e K a t h l e e n K e n y o n a n d Crystal B e n n e t t , t h e British A c a d e m y f o u n d e d the British Institute at A m m a n for A r c h a e o l o g y a n d History ( B I A A H ) . T h e B I A A H s p o n s o r s , f u n d s , a n d provides logistical s u p p o r t for British research o n t h e archaeology, history, lan guages, e t h n o g r a p h y , g e o g r a p h y , a n d n a t u r a l history of Jor d a n , Syria, L e b a n o n , a n d S a u d i Arabia. It publishes this research t h r o u g h t h e journal Levant ( L o n d o n , 1969-) w h i c h it s p o n s o r s jointly with t h e British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, a n d c o n t r i b u t e s m a j o r reports to the series British A c a d e m y M o n o g r a p h s in Archaeology. T h e B I A A H also presents t h e work of British research in J o r d a n t h r o u g h lec tures, day-schools, conferences, a n d exhibitions.
I n 1919 as a result of a g e n e r o u s gift from J o h n D . R o c k e feller, Jr., Breasted formalized his p l a n s for the Oriental I n stitute at the University of C h i c a g o . T h e institute's overall direction was different from m o r e traditional institutions b e cause Breasted i n t e n d e d t h e Oriental Institute t o b e a place in w h i c h i n f o r m a t i o n g a t h e r e d b y all disciplines w o r k i n g in ancient E g y p t a n d t h e N e a r E a s t w o u l d b e collected. T h e projects t h a t Breasted instituted as director (1919-1935) d e m o n s t r a t e t h e b r e a d t h of his interests a n d interdisciplin ary c o n c e r n s : developing t h e Assyrian dictionary, c o p y i n g the Coffin Texts in t h e Cairo M u s e u m , r e c o r d i n g i n s c r i p tions at K a r n a k a n d M e d i n e t H a b u t e m p l e s in U p p e r E g y p t (these e n d e a v o r s resulted in t h e p e r m a n e n t establishment, C h i c a g o H o u s e , in L u x o r ) , surveying early h u m a n r e m a i n s in t h e Nile Valley, a n d excavating M e g i d d o in Palestine a n d Alisar in Anatolia. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breasted, Charles. Pioneer to the Past; The Story of James Henry Breasted, Archaeologist. N e w York, 1 9 4 3 . Readable and informative biography by his son that includes a list of his books and awards. Breasted, James H . A Plistoiy of Egypt: From the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. N e w York, 1 9 0 5 . Breasted, James H . Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from, the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. 5 vols. Chicago, 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 0 7 . Breasted, James H . Development Egypt. N e w York, 1 9 1 2 .
of Religion and
Thought in
Ancient
Breasted, James H . Ancient Times: A History of the Early World. Boston, 1916. Breasted, James H , The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. Oriental Institute Publications, 3-4. Chicago, 1930. Breasted, James H . The Oriental Institute. University of Chicago Survey, vol. 1 2 . Chicago, 1 9 3 3 . Breasted's presentation of his ideas about the origins of civilization and h o w these thoughts led to t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Bull, L u d l o w , et al. "James H e n r y Breasted, 1 8 6 5 - 1 9 3 5 . " Journal of the American Oriental Society 56 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 1 3 - 1 2 0 . ' T h o r o u g h obituary
DIANA CRAIG PATCH
T h e Institute in A m m a n provides a c c o m m o d a t i o n a n d lo gistical s u p p o r t for visiting individuals a n d t e a m s . Its library, p h o t o g r a p h i c archive, a n d reference collections of pottery a n d a n i m a l b o n e s are o p e n to all scholars a n d students. T h e B I A A H s p o n s o r s n u m e r o u s archaeological, epigraphic, p a l e o e n v i r o n m e n t a l , e t h n o g r a p h i c , historical, a n d other research projects in J o r d a n a n d Syria, covering all p e riods from the prehistoric to t h e Islamic. T h e s e have i n cluded excavations at prehistoric sites in a n d a r o u n d A z r a q , at T e l l I k t a n u , T e l l H a m m a m , a n d T e l l e s h - S h u n a ( N o r t h ) , in the J o r d a n Valley, at t h e Islamic site of K h i r b e t Faris n e a r K e r a k , a n d at T e l l N e b i M e n d / Q a d e s h a n d J e r a b l u s - T a h t a n i in Syria. Archaeological surveys h a v e b e e n u n d e r t a k e n in t h e basalt desert a n d E d o m ; a n d epigraphic surveys in the basalt desert a n d in W a d i R a m . I n r e c e n t years t h e B I A A H h a s also s p o n s o r e d m u c h e t h n o g r a p h i c a n d e t h n o a r c h a e o logical work. M e m b e r s h i p of t h e B I A A H is o p e n t o all. M e m b e r s r e ceive Levant and/or the BIAAH Newsletter, have priority in t h e u s e of t h e institute's hostel a n d e q u i p m e n t and are c h a r g e d at a r e d u c e d rate. M . C . A . MACDONALD
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BRITISH INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY AT ANKARA
BRITISH INSTITUTE OF A R C H A E O L O G Y A T A N K A R A . In 1947, the British Institute of A r c h a e ology at Ankara was f o u n d e d largely on the initiative of the n o t e d archaeologist J o h n G a r s t a n g . It is the only foreign ar chaeological mission established in T u r k e y ' s capital, rather t h a n in Istanbul. T h e institute undertakes research into A n atolian archaeology, folklore, a n d anthropology in T u r k e y a n d collaborates with T u r k i s h universities in organizing in ternational colloquia. It is a center for the study of T u r k e y ' s history, art, archaeology, architecture, a n d k i n d r e d subjects. Between 1968 a n d 1990, t h e institute c o o p e r a t e d with the antiquities authorities in rescue work w h e n d e v e l o p m e n t plans for southeast T u r k e y threatened to d r o w n h u n d r e d s of archaeological sites. A n excavation was b e g u n at M a l t e p e - M u t , near Silifke, o n the M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast, in 1994. T h e site, an i m p o r t a n t Hittite regional center, will b e lost u n d e r the waters of a d a m to b e constructed on t h e G o k s u , ancient C a l y c a d n u s . T h e institute also s p o n s o r s a n d offers financial s u p p o r t to survey projects. T h e s e include the detailed survey of R o m a n r o a d s a n d milestones in Asia M i n o r ; surveys of Hellenistica n d R o m a n - p e r i o d r e m a i n s at Ariassos in Pisidia, at B a l b u r a in Lycia, and at A m a s r a a n d C a n a y e r near T r a b z o n in P o n tus; a n d financial assistance to the excavations at A m o r i u m in Phrygia. T h e institute's interest in the medieval castles of Anatolia continues in w e s t e r n T u r k e y , w h e r e it s p o n s o r s a survey near Nazilli. R e s e a r c h projects carried o u t in m u s e u m s a n d collections include studies into ancient coins a n d glass, prehistoric pottery, a n d u n p u b l i s h e d material from old British digs, notably at M e r s i n , Sakcagozii, a n d T e l l eshSheikh. T h e institute's archaeological library is c o m p r e h e n s i v e , including Anatolian archaeology a n d epigraphy, journals, sherd collections from surface survey work, a p h o t o g r a p h i c archive, and p e r h a p s o n e of the best b o n e a n d seed collec tions for the N e a r East. T h e epigraphic squeeze collection (of Neo-Hittite, N e o - A s s y r i a n , Greek, a n d L a t i n inscrip tions recorded in T u r k i s h m u s e u m s and on surveys) is the only k n o w n collection of its kind in T u r k e y . T h e institute's a n n u a l journal, Anatolian Studies, first a p peared in 1951 ( L o n d o n ) . A variety of occasional m o n o graphs has b e e n p u b l i s h e d over the years, notably in t h e British Archaeological R e p o r t s series, n o w replaced by O x b o w M o n o g r a p h s . T h e Institute contributes to the Oxford University Press/British A c a d e m y joint-publication s c h e m e . [See also the biography of Garstang.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Foss, Clive. Survey of Medieval Castles of Anatolia. British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, M o n o g r a p h no. 7 - Oxford, 1 9 8 5 - . French, David H., ed. Studies in the History and Topography of Lycia and Pisidia. In MemoriamA, S. Hall. British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, M o n o g r a p h n o . 1 9 . L o n d o n , 1994. Lightfoot, C . S., ed. Recent Turkish Coin Hoards and Numismatic Stud
ies. British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, M o n o g r a p h n o . 1 2 . Oxford, 1 9 9 1 . M o o r e , John. Title Hbyiik 1 : The Medieval Period. British Institute of Archaelogy at Ankara, M o n o g r a p h n o . 14, L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 . S u m m e r s , G. D . , et al. Tille Hoyiik 4: The Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age Transition. British Institute of Archaeology at A n k a r a , M o n o g r a p h no. 1 5 . L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 . DAVID H . FRENCH
BRITISH INSTITUTE OF PERSIAN STUD I E S . F o u n d e d i n 1961, the British Institute of Persian Studies served as a very active a c a d e m i c center for field r e search in I r a n until the late 1970s. T h e j o u r n a l of the insti t u t e , Iran, first a p p e a r e d in 1963 a n d , a l t h o u g h the institute's premises in T e h r a n are n o longer formally o p e n , it continues to b e published annually. T h e institute's first director w a s D a v i d S t t o n a c h , a n d the f o u n d i n g p r e s i d e n t w a s M a x M a l lowan. Michael R o g e r s h a s b e e n p r e s i d e n t of t h e g o v e r n i n g council since 1993. D u r i n g the 1960s a n d 1970s, the institute w a s o p e n to visiting scholars f r o m m a n y countries, often w o r k i n g in var ied disciplines, i n c l u d i n g a n t h r o p o l o g y , history, a n d reli gious studies. It m a y b e b e s t k n o w n , h o w e v e r , for the e x cavations c o n d u c t e d in its n a m e . I n chronological o r d e r , t h e y include Y a r i m T e p e on the G u r g a n plain ( S t r o n a c h , early 1960s), P a s a r g a d a e , the capital of C y r u s tire G r e a t (Stronach, 1961-1963); t h e prehistoric site of Tall-i N o k h o d i (Clare Goff, 1961-1962); t h e P e r s i a n G u l f p o r t of Siraf (David W h i t e h o u s e , 1965-1973); the M e d i a n site of T e p e N u s h - i Jan ( S t r o n a c h , 1967-1977); t h e largely P a r t h i a n site of S h a h r - i Q u m i s (John H a n s m a n a n d S t r o n a c h ) , 1967-1978); the late P a r t h i a n fortress of Q a l ' e h - i Yazdigird ( E d w a r d Keall, 1976); a n d tire Early Islamic site of Sirjan ( A n t o n y H u r t , 1970). T h e institute's library c o n t i n u e s to b e a u g m e n t e d a n d m a i n t a i n e d and its c u r r e n t p r e m i s e s , in G h u l a k , in n o r t h T e h r a n , were recently refitted. [See also P a s a r g a d a e ; and the biography of Mallowan] K I M CODELLA
B R I T I S H S C H O O L O F A R C H A E O L O G Y IN E G Y P T . F o u n d e d in 1905 by Sir William M a t t h e w Flin ders Petrie, the B S A E w a s d e p e n d e n t o n t h e E g y p t i a n R e search A c c o u n t ( E R A ) , a n o t h e r organization t h a t Petrie h a d l a u n c h e d in 1894 after appealing for funds to e m p l o y o n e of his students as a fieldworker in Egypt. Petrie visualized t h e transformation of the E R A into a p e r m a n e n t British school in Egypt. T h e B S A E never h a d p r e m i s e s t h e r e , h o w e v e r , a n d w a s r u n from University College L o n d o n , w h e r e a n n u a l exhibitions of the school's finds w e r e held. T h e B S A E h a d m o r e ambitious aims t h a n the E R A b e c a u s e it n e e d e d to s u p p o r t b o t h Petrie's a n d his s t u d e n t s ' w o r k in E g y p t . A p a r t from t h e E g y p t E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d (later Society) the B S A E
BRITISH S C H O O L OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN JERUSALEM was t h e major British excavating organization in E g y p t from its f o u n d a t i o n until 1926. I n t h a t year Petrie transferred its activities to Palestine, in t h e belief t h a t h e a n d his coworkers h a d traced b y fieldwork a n d exploration t h e m a i n outiines of civilization in the Nile Valley, a n d t h e time was ripe to " p r o c e e d w i t h t h e collateral s e a r c h o n t h e E g y p t i a n r e m a i n s in t h e S o u t h of P a l e s t i n e — E g y p t over t h e B o r d e r " ( D r o w e r , 1985, p . 364). T h e c o n s t i t u t i o n of t h e school a c c o r d e d with these aims b e c a u s e it h a d b e e n f o u n d e d " t o work in a n y c o u n t r y t h a t has b e e n subject to E g y p t , a n d so to deal with all b r a n c h e s of t h e E g y p t i a n civilisation" ( D r o w e r , 1985, p . 364). After Petrie's d e a t h in 1942 t h e school, directed b y L a d y Petrie, ceased fieldwork a n d w a s c o n c e r n e d m o r e with publication of field r e p o r t s . T h e school t e r m i n a t e d in 1954. Its crucial role in t h e study of E g y p t i a n culture is clear from the large n u m b e r of publications t h a t b e a r its i m p r i n t . Petrie r e c k o n e d t h a t a b o u t 100 s t u d e n t s p a s s e d t h r o u g h t h e school, a n d t h a t a b o u t half, i n c l u d i n g G u y B r u n t o n , Reginald E n gelbach, a n d J o h n G a r s t a n g , f o u n d p e r m a n e n t positions in E g y p t o l o g y or related disciplines. [See also the biography of Petrie.] BIBLIOGRAPHY See M a r g a r e t S. D r o w e r , Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology ( L o n d o n , 1 9 8 5 ) , for an authoritative biography of die founder of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt. A list of the school's publications ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 5 3 ) , of which Petrie was a u t h o r or contributor, is given on pages 4 6 7 - 4 6 9 . T h e publishing history of the school and the n u m b e r i n g of volumes in the series is somewhat complicated. F o r additional lists, see Ida M , Pratt, Ancient Egypt: Sources of Information in the New York Public Library ( N e w York, 1 9 2 5 ) , p . 3 ; and Pratt, Ancient Egypt, 1925-1941: A Supplement to Ancient Egypt ( N e w York, 1 9 4 2 ) , p . 4 . GEOFFREY T . M A R T I N
BRITISH S C H O O L O F A R C H A E O L O G Y IN I R A Q . F o u n d e d in 1932 as a m e m o r i a l to G e r t r u d e Bell, the celebrated explorer a n d archaeologist w h o was first d i rector of antiguities in Iraq, " t o e n c o u r a g e , s u p p o r t a n d u n dertake t h e study of a n d r e s e a r c h relating t o t h e archaeology of I r a q a n d n e i g h b o u r i n g c o u n t r i e s , including e x c a v a t i o n , " the British School of A r c h a e o l o g y in I r a q h a s , since t h a t time, s u p p o r t e d a l m o s t all British archaeological research in I r a q a n d Syria east of t h e E u p h r a t e s River. T h e school's first director was M a x M a l l o w a n , w h o excavated a t A r p a c h i y a h , C h a g h a r Bazar, T e l l Brak, a n d , after W o r l d W a r II, at N i m rud. T h e S c h o o l ' s m o s t i m p o r t a n t excavations w e r e at N i m r u d , b o t h o n d i e citadel a n d i n F o r t S h a l m a n e s e r , w h i c h w a s investigated b y D a v i d O a t e s , w h o s u c c e e d e d M a l l o w a n as director in 1961. T h e m o s t s p e c t a c u l a r discoveries w e r e t h e f o u n d a t i o n stela of A s h u r n a s i r p a l II a n d magnificent collec tions of c a r v e d ivory. F r o m 1964 to 1 9 7 1 , Oates e x c a v a t e d die i m p o r t a n t s e c o n d - m i l l e n n i u m BCE site of T e l l e r - R i m a h a n d in 1975 r e o p e n e d M a l l o w a n ' s excavations at T e l l B r a k
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in Syria. T h e n e x t director was D i a n a K i r k b r i d e , w h o i n vestigated t h e i m p o r t a n t N e o l i t h i c site of U m m D a b a g h i yeh. F r o m 1975 to 1981 N i c h o l a s P o s t g a t e w a s director a n d started his extensive e x p l o r a t i o n of t h e S u m e r i a n city of A b u Salabikh. Beginning in 1977 the School w a s involved in sal vage projects in Iraq: first in t h e H a m r i n , t h e n at H a d i t h a , in Eski M o s u l , a n d in t h e N o r t h e r n Jezira. In the 1980s t h e B S A I e m b a r k e d o n a detailed survey of t h e Islamic site of S a m a r r a a n d a reinvestigation of t h e site of J e m d e t N a s r . I n addition to s p o n s o r i n g excavations, t h e B S A I has s u p p o r t e d other archaeological as well as Assyriological p r o j ects, t h r o u g h grants a n d a n n u a l fellowships. T h e results of research s u p p o r t e d b y t h e S c h o o l are normally published in t h e journal Iraq. I n addition, t h e r e are various series of m o n o g r a p h s which offer definitive reports o n excavations a n d other research. S u b s c r i b i n g m e m b e r s of t h e British School of A r c h a e o l o g y receive a c o p y of t h e journal as well as in vitations t o the lectures t h e school organizes. D u r i n g t h e sixty years it h a s b e e n in existence, t h e British School of A r c h a e o l o g y in I r a q has played a n i m p o r t a n t role in t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of M e s o p o t a m i a n archaeology in Brit ain. F u r t h e r m o r e , scholars of m a n y nationalities have b e n efited from t h e hospitality a n d assistance of t h e School a n d its staff in Iraq. [See also A b u Salabikh; Brak, Tell; Esld M o s u l D a m Sal vage Project; H a m r i n D a m Salvage Project; J e m d e t N a s r ; N i m r u d ; R i m a h , T e l l er-; S a m a r r a ; and the biography of Mal lowan.] BIBLIOGRAPHY F o r details of the archaeological fieldwork conducted by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, see M . E. L . Mallowan, Twenty-Five Years of Mesopotamian Discovery, 1932-1936 ( L o n d o n , 1 9 5 6 ) , and J o h n E. Curtis, ed., Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery: The Work of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1932-19S2 ( L o n d o n , 1982). F o r further information about the school's activities, see its journal, Iraq, published annually. MICHAEL ROAF
B R I T I S H S C H O O L O F A R C H A E O L O G Y IN J E R U S A L E M . F o u n d e d in 1919 a n d m o d e l e d o n its sis t e r institutions in R o m e a n d Alliens, t h e roots of t h e British School of Archaeology in J e r u s a l e m (BSAJ) are in t h e J e r u s a l e m Literary Society of 1852 and t h e Palestine E x p l o ration F u n d ( P E F ) of 1865. W i t h i n a m o n t h of General A l lenby's e n t r a n c e into J e r u s a l e m in D e c e m b e r 1917, d u r i n g Britain's c o n q u e s t of Palestine, Sir Flinders Petrie was lec t u r i n g o n Britain's responsibility t o t h e antiquities of t h e countries c o m i n g u n d e r h e r control. T h e British A c a d e m y r e s p o n d e d t o a n a p p r o a c h f r o m t h e officers of t h e P E F a n d set u p a n organizing c o m m i t t e e in M a y 1918 chaired b y Sir F r e d e r i c K e n y o n a n d with Sir Israel Gollancz as secretary. J o h n G a r s t a n g was t h e school's first director, as well as t h e first director of t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of t h e G o v -
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e r n m e n t of Palestine. T h e early scholars b e c a m e core m e m b e r s of the later antiquities service. T h e earliest g o v e r n m e n t inspectors did their w o r k from a register of sites p r e p a r e d b y the BSAJ's first assistant director, W . J. P h y t h i a n - A d a m s . T h e school's role was n o t limited to Palestine; o n e or two of t h e m o r e p r o m i s i n g students in Jerusalem were sent t h e r e to study the antiquities of M e s o p o t a m i a as well. F o r several years in tire 1920s, the British School in Jerusalem shared a c c o m m o d a t i o n s with t h e A m e r i c a n School of Oriental Research ( A S O R ) . W a y H o u s e , n e a r St. G e o r g e ' s C a t h e d r a l , was h o m e n o t only to t h e A m e r i c a n library, b u t also to a m u s e u m t h a t w o u l d b e c o m e p a r t of t h e founding collection of t h e Palestine Archaeological M u s e u m (now the Rockefeller M u s e u m ) . Early British hospitality was duly r e p a i d w h e n t h e A m e r i c a n s h o u s e d t h e British library from the early 1930s to t h e early 1950s, while first t h e F r e n c h a n d t h e n t h e m u s e u m stored British digging e q u i p m e n t . A S O R participated at Jericho u n d e r A. D . T u s h i n g h a m in the 1950s, as did t h e Ecole Biblique, u n d e r P e r e R o l a n d de V a u x , in the o p e n i n g seasons of t h e excavations in Jerusalem in t h e 1960s. T u s h i n g h a m also participated in t h e J e r u s a l e m excavations, r e p r e s e n t i n g d i e Royal Ontario M u s e u m . By 1927 the D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities, with G a r s t a n g briefly acting as its director, t o o , formally b e c a m e t h e British school's major t e n a n t , a n d the A m e r i c a n s m o v e d to a h o m e nearby. J. W . C r o w f o o t b e c a m e director of t h e British school in 1927 a n d played a n i m p o r t a n t role in fashioning its n e w character. T h e school's i n d e p e n d e n c e from its erstwhile partners p r o v e d financially precarious. In t h e 1930s a largely American-financed excavation a s s u m e d responsibility for Crowfoot's salary while h e led t h e excavations at S a m a r i a jointly with H a r v a r d , t h e P E F , a n d tite H e b r e w University of Jerusalem. It was there t h a t K a t h l e e n M . K e n y o n , fresh from h e r training u n d e r Sir M o r t i m e r W h e e l e r in E n g l a n d , h a d her first digging experience in Palestine. By 1940, t h e school's work d i m i n i s h e d considerably b e c a u s e of war, t e n sion b e t w e e n P . L . O . G u y (who h a d b e c o m e director in die mid-i930s) a n d the supervisory council, and t h e deatii of Sir R o b e r t M o n d , w h o was n o t only t h e school's first trea surer, b u t also its f o u n d i n g a n d principal benefactor. In 1950, w h e n K e n y o n succeeded to the directorship of the school, plans w e r e already u n d e r w a y to r e s u m e t h e ex cavation of G a r s t a n g ' s still-open trenches at Jericho. Like G a r s t a n g , she w o u l d c o m b i n e h e r directorship a n d h e r lead ership of its major excavations—at Jericho in t h e 1950s a n d in Jerusalem in t h e 1960s—with a vigorous a c a d e m i c role in England. Since t h e mid-1960s t h e school's directors (Basil H e n n e s s y , C r y s t a l - M . Bennett, J o h n Willdnson, a n d R i c h a r d H a r p e r ) h a v e resided in Jerusalem. I n t h e 1970s, t h e school c o n c e n t r a t e d its research o n a survey of M a m l u k Jerusalem, n o t just of the i m p o s i n g facades o n t h e r o a d s leading to the H a r a m esh-Sharif, b u t of all its interior details. T h e survey h a s e n c o u r a g e d interest in restoration wititin t h e M u s l i m quarter. W i t h t h e birth of its sister institute in A m
m a n the J e r u s a l e m school's role in excavations east of t h e J o r d a n River d e c r e a s e d . In t h e 1980s, t h e school excavated at the C r u s a d e r , R e d T o w e r o n t h e coastal plain, at U p p e r Z o h a r in t h e n o r t h e r n N e g e v desert (Late R o m a n / E a r l y B y z a n t i n e ) , a n d at B e l m o n t Castle, w e s t of J e r u s a l e m (a C r u s a d e r castle over a B y z a n t i n e village). A c o n c e r n w i t h field m e t h o d o l o g y , with g o o d training, a n d with accurate publications h a s b e e n a c o n t i n u o u s e m phasis at BSAJ. T h e organization u n d e r t o o k a c o u n t r y w i d e survey of medieval a n d O t t o m a n architecture i n 1989, a m a jor collaborative excavation at T e l Jezreel with t h e T e l Aviv Institute of A r c h a e o l o g y in 1990; a n d a w i d e - r a n g i n g s t u d y of O t t o m a n J e r u s a l e m ' s Islamic m o n u m e n t s w i t h t h e W a q f (religious trusts) Authority late in 1992. T h e Palestine Ex ploration Quarterly (PEQ) w h i c h h a d long b e e n t h e vehicle for d i e school's quarterly r e p o r t s . H o w e v e r , it l a u n c h e d its o w n journal, Levant, in 1969, n o w s h a r e d w i t h t h e institute in A m m a n . [See also British Institute at A m m a n for A r c h a e o l o g y a n d History; Palestine E x p l o r a t i o n F u n d ; and the biographies of Bennett, Crowfoot, Garstang, Guy, Kenyon, Petrie, and Wheeler..] BIBLIOGRAPHY Burgoyne, Michael Hamilton, and D . S. Richards. Mamluk An Architectural Study. L o n d o n , 1987. Franken, H e n k J., and M a r g r e e t L . Steiner. Excavations in
Jerusalem: Jerusalem,
1061-1067, Vol. 2, The Iron Age Extramural Quarter on the South-east Hill. Oxford, 1990. K e n y o n , Kathleen M . , et al. Excavations at Jericho. 5 vols. L o n d o n , 1960-1983. K e n y o n , Kathleen M . Jerusalem: Excavating 3000 Years of History. N e w York, 1 9 6 7 . Kraeling, Carl H . , ed. Gerasa, City of the Decapolis: An Account Embod ying the Record of a Joint Excavation Conducted by Yale University and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (1028-1030), and Yale University and the American Schools of Oriental Research (1930-1031, I933-1934). N e w H a v e n , 1938. Pringle, Denys, et al. The Red Tower. British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, M o n o g r a p h Series, 1. L o n d o n , 1986. T u s h i n g h a m , A. D „ et al. Excavations in Jerusalem, 1961-1967, To ronto, 1 9 8 5 . GRAEME AULD
BUILDING MATERIALS NIQUES. [To survey the history,
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distribution, and role of building materials and techniques throughout the Near East, this entry comprises four articles: A n Overview Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s of d i e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s of t h e P e r s i a n t h r o u g h R o m a n Periods Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s of t h e B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic Periods The first provides a general introduction
that treats
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BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: An Overview materials; historical
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A n Overview G e o g r a p h y a n d t o p o g r a p h y affect t h e availability of c o n struction materials a n d t h e m e t h o d s b y w h i c h they are u t i lized. I n antiquity as well as in traditional c o n s t r u c t i o n m e t h ods still in u s e , clay bricks w e r e t h e principal construction material in t h e alluvial valleys of M e s o p o t a m i a a n d E g y p t , a n d a lack of forests c o m p e l l e d t h e E g y p t i a n s to develop sophisticated stone a r c h i t e c t u r e as well. T h e variety of n a t ural features in a n c i e n t Israel a n d Syria offered builders a choice of materials a n d g e n e r a t e d assorted c o n s t r u c t i o n techniques. T h e size of political g r o u p s a n d a c o m m u n i t y ' s level of technological c o m p e t e n c e w e r e additional factors t h a t influ e n c e d t h e u s e of n a t u r a l materials. L a r g e a n d centralized political organizations w e r e c a p a b l e of investing i m m e n s e resources into c o n s t r u c t i n g f o r m i d a b l e fortifications, or of p r o d u c i n g costly b u i l d i n g materials like ashlar m a s o n r y . Af fluent n a t i o n s could o v e r c o m e t h e s h o r t a g e of local sources by i m p o r t i n g materials f r o m a g r e a t distance: ancient M e s o p o t a m i a , E g y p t , a n d Israel i m p o r t e d cedar b e a m s f r o m Lebanon. E a c h of t h e n a t u r a l materials u s e d in construction h a d advantages a n d disadvantages. S o p h i s t i c a t e d builders w e r e capable of c o m b i n i n g materials to m i n i m i z e t h e d r a w b a c k s of a single o n e . Archaeological data (Yeivin, 1954; R e i c h , 1992), s u p p o r t e d b y e t h n o g r a p h i c evidence ( C a n a a n , 1933; D a l m a n , 1942), indicate t h a t t h e m o s t c o m m o n b u i l d i n g t e c h n i q u e s m a d e u s e of w o o d , clay bricks, a n d different kinds of stones. W o o d . T r e e b r a n c h e s are readily available in n a t u r e a n d are a relatively elastic c o n s t r u c t i o n material. T h e f r a m e w o r k of a h u t c a n b e easily c o n s t r u c t e d b y tying a few t o g e t h e r a n d t h e n covering t h e s t r u c t u r a l skeleton with leaves or a n imal hides to create an effective shelter. Circular w o o d e n h u t s have a p p e a r e d in m a n y p a r t s of t h e w o r l d as the first architectural s t t u c t u r e s (e.g., in t h e N a t u f i a n a n d P r e - P o t tery Neolithic A ( P P N A ) p e r i o d s in t h e ancient N e a r E a s t (Bar-Yosef, 1992). H o l l o w g a p s o n t h e i n n e r face of r o u n d stone h o u s e s at t h e P P N B site o f B e i d h a in m o d e r n J o r d a n indicate t h e u s e t h e r e of w o o d e n p o s t s . [See Beidha.] W o o d has also b e e n utilized in m o r e c o m p l e x s t r u c t u r e s . I n o r t h o g o n a l (right-angled) u n i t s , b e a m s w e r e u s e d for roof ing. T h e m a i n b e a m s w e r e p l a c e d at intervals across t h e r o o m a n d t h i n n e r b r a n c h e s w e r e densely laid over a n d p e r p e n d i c u l a r t o t h e b e a m s . T h e t o p layer w a s m a d e of m u d or lime m o r t a r . I n m a n y cases s e g m e n t s of t h e m o r t a r , b e a r ing t h e i m p r i n t s of b r a n c h e s , a r e observable in t h e d e s t r u c tion deposits. T r e e t r u n k s w e r e c o m m o n l y u s e d as c o l u m n s to s u p p o r t t h e roof b e a m s of large halls. S t o n e bases, w h i c h insulated t h e w o o d from m o i s t u r e in t h e g r o u n d , are testi
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m o n y to their existence. W o o d w a s also u s e d for d o o r lintels a n d doors themselves. I n m o n u m e n t a l buildings, w o o d e n b e a m s w e r e inserted b e t w e e n courses of ashlar m a s o n r y (see b e l o w ) . I n quality c o n s t r u c t i o n t h e walls a n d floors were laid with w o o d , s o m e t i m e s b e a r i n g carved decorations. A d e tailed description of this m e t h o d a p p e a r s in die biblical a c c o u n t of t h e Solomonic T e m p l e (1 Kgs. 6:15). T h e m o s t serious disadvantage of w o o d as a c o n s t r u c t i o n material is its susceptibility to fire a n d decay. T h e severity of t h e d e struction of m a n y ancient cities b y fire w a s t h e extensive u s e of w o o d in their buildings. [See W o o d . ] C l a y B r i c k s . S u n - d r i e d bricks are a simple a n d c o m m o n t y p e of b u i l d i n g material. T h e bricks are p r o d u c e d b y m i x ing soil witii water, s h a p i n g t h e m u d into d i e desired f o r m , a n d drying the final p r o d u c t in t h e sun. T o p r e v e n t cracking d u r i n g drying, c u t sttaw is usually a d d e d to the m i x t u r e (Ex. 5:7-18). T h e earliest bricks w e r e f o r m e d b y h a n d a n d w e r e elliptical. I n P P N Jericho, bricks h a v e b e e n f o u n d t h a t bear t h e fingerprints of the w o r k e r s ( K e n y o n , 1957, pi. 1 1 B ) . Since t h e Chalcolithic p e r i o d , to create uniformly sized bricks t h e m u d has b e e n p l a c e d in a w o o d e n mold (mlbn, lit., " r e c t a n g u l a r , " Na. 3:14). T h i s i m p r o v e m e n t enabled t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of level c o u r s e s a n d allowed for g o o d wall b o n d i n g . Brick size differs d e p e n d i n g o n t h e region a n d t h e p e r i o d , b u t t h e y c o m m o n l y are 1 2 - 1 5 c m high, a size easily g r a s p e d in t h e h a n d . Bricks w e r e affixed to each other b y a layer of m u d m o r t a r . F i r i n g clay bricks required large a m o u n t s of fuel a n d , e x c e p t for a few cases in M e s o p o t a m i a , w a s n o t p r a c t i c e d before t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d (late fourth c e n t u r y BCE). U n f i r e d bricks were always a risky building material b e c a u s e c o n t a c t w i t h w a t e r t u r n s t h e m b a c k into m u d . T o p r e v e n t this f r o m o c c u r r i n g , bricks were isolated from g r o u n d m o i s t u r e b y s t o n e f o u n d a t i o n s . Additional p r o tection against rain was g a i n e d b y covering walls witii a thick layer of m u d plaster, s o m e t i m e s reinforced by t h e addition of c r u s h e d limestone. A n o t h e r m e a n s for decreasing d a m a g e to t h e walls w a s w a t e r - d r a i n a g e channels, aimed at quickly c o n d u c t i n g rainwater o u t s i d e a city. S t o n e . U s e d as a b u i l d i n g material, stone m a y b e s u b d i vided into t h e categories of fieldstone a n d dressed stone. Fieldstones. I n hill c o u n t r y in t h e ancient N e a r East, fieldstones w e r e useful as a construction material. T h e ear liest r o u n d huts were girdled b y low s t o n e walls (e.g., at N a t u f i a n ' E i n a n and S u l t a n i a n [ P P N A ] N a h a l O r e n ) . [See ' E i n a n ; N a h a l Oren.] H i g h s t a n d a r d s of c o n s t r u c t i o n with tabular stone slabs is n o t i c a b l e in P P N B structures at B e i d h a , A i n G h a z a l , a n d Basta. [See 'Ain G h a z a l ; Basta.] T o consolidate walls c o n s t r u c t e d of irregularly s h a p e d field stones, m u d m o r t a r a n d small rocks w e r e set in t h e spaces b e t w e e n individual stones. Fieldstones were c o m m o n l y u s e d in later p e r i o d s as f o u n d a t i o n s for brick superstructures, p r o v i d i n g walls with stability a n d increasing their resistance t o moisture. M o r e f o r m i d a b l e walls consisted of a t least two rows of stones, a b o u t 50-60 c m wide. T h e t o p stone courses c
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were leveled to carry t h e bricks. T h e weakness of a fieldstone structure could b e o v e r c o m e by the additional w i d t h of the walls. In the fortifications of t h e Early B r o n z e A g e cities at M e g i d d o , Ai, a n d T e l Y a r m u t , solid city walls r e a c h e d a total width of 8 m or m o r e . [See M e g i d d o ; Ai; Y a r m u t , Tel.] F o r additional strength, s o m e of those walls w e r e c o n structed of extra-large blocks (megalithic m a s o n r y ) , a n d o c casionally stones were fitted to adjoining ones in a polygonal m e t h o d (i.e., n o t cut at right angles a n d often with m o r e t h a n four sides). Dressed stones. T h e stability of walls could b e increased by dressing the building stones into rectangular blocks, using an iron chisel. T h e straight sides e n s u r e d tight c o n t a c t along the faces of the block w i t h o u t t h e use of m o r t a r . T h e earliest a p p e a r a n c e of d r e s s e d stone is attested in t h e stone bases of s o m e E B A temples at Ai a n d M e g i d d o . D u r i n g t h e M i d d l e Bronze Age, h u g e dressed blocks were utilized as orthostats, mainly facing t h e entrance piers of city gates, as at S h e c h e m , Gezer, Ebla, C a r c h e m i s h , a n d Alalakh. [See S h e c h e m ; Gezer, Ebla; C a r c h e m i s h ; Alalakh.] A m o r e extensive u s e of ashlar m a s o n r y is a p p a r e n t in t h e city gate at M e g i d d o , al r e a d y in existence in t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e Age ( s t r a t u m X ) . Well-dressed basalt orthostats faced t h e lower p a r t s of walls, which were otherwise m a d e of fieldstones, in t h e L a t e B r o n z e Age temples a n d palaces at H a z o r a n d M e g i d d o . [See Flazor.] Ashlar m a s o n r y was u s e d extensively in t h e I r o n A g e II, mainly in t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of Israel—at H a z o r , Samaria, M e g i d d o , a n d G e z e r (Shiloh, 1979). [See Samaria.] A m o r e limited use was applied in J u d a h — i n Jerusalem, L a c h i s h , a n d R a m a t Rahel, A c o m m o n stone u s e d for b u i l d i n g was nan, a chalky rock (Shiloh a n d H o r o w i t z , 1975). [SeeJudah; Lachish; R a m a t Rahel.] T w o types of stone dressing are evident in I r o n A g e ashlar m a s o n r y : o n e in w h i c h t h e stone's entire surface is s m o o t h (e.g., t h e a b o v e g r o u n d courses of t h e acropolis at S a m a r i a ) a n d dressed m a r g i n s in w h i c h t h e center of t h e stone is left as a r o u g h boss a n d only b e t w e e n o n e a n d three of t h e side margins are s m o o t h e d . M a r g i n a l dressing was applied to stones in the f o u n d a t i o n courses, which indicates t h a t its aim was to economize o n c o n s t r u c tion expenses a n d n o t aesthetics. T h e s m o o t h m a r g i n s were necessary to m a i n t a i n a straight line for t h e wall, b o t h h o r izontally a n d vertically. D r e s s e d ashlars b e c a m e a decorative element in later m a s o n r y , especially in t h e Hellenistic a n d H e r o d i a n p e r i o d s , w h e n b o t h t h e margins a n d t h e central boss were carefully w o r k e d . T h e additional strength of ashlar walls was g u a r a n t e e d b y t h e large size of t h e building blocks a n d b y their b e i n g p o sitioned in alternate layers of headers a n d stretchers. T h e 10-20-centimeter-wide gap b e t w e e n ashlar courses o b served at M e g i d d o , H a z o r , and S a m a r i a s h o u l d b e interpreted as t h e location of a w o o d e n (decayed) b e a m . T h e long b e a m s p r o b a b l y p r o v i d e d t h e wall w i t h elasticity, thus minimizing d a m a g e to t h e solid structure b y earth
quakes. E x a m p l e s are f o u n d in b o t h t h e L B ( s t r a t u m VIII) a n d I r o n Age ( s t r a t u m IV) city gates at M e g i d d o . M a s o n ' s marks are f o u n d o n t h e b a c k sides of m a n y ashlars. Ashlar m a s o n r y was also applied in c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s q u a r e pillars u s e d in tire "pillared b u i l d i n g s " at M e g i d d o ( a c c o m p a n i e d b y s t o n e - h e w n t r o u g h s ) , H a z o r , a n d B e e r s h e b a . [See Beer sheba.] T h e explicit m e t h o d of c o n s t r u c t i o n c o m b i n i n g ash lar piers a n d r u b b l e stones to fill g a p s h a s b e e n identified as Phoenician. It a p p e a r e d in Israel in t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, (apparently i n t r o d u c e d by t h e P h o e n i c i a n s ) a n d r e m a i n e d p o p u l a r t h r o u g h o u t t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n region d o w n t o t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d ( V a n Beek, a n d V a n Beek, 1981; Stern, 1992). [See Phoenicians.] W o r k e d ashlars w e r e utilized d u r i n g I r o n II for c e r e m o n i a l a n d decorative p u r p o s e s , as well. T h e design o n t h e m o s t p o p u l a r type of d e c o r a t e d stone block, t h e p r o t o - A e o l i c c a p ital, consisted of a triangle flanked b y two spiraling volutes with u p p e r a n d lower leaves (Shiloh, 1979). B e c a u s e t h e s e capitals are d e c o r a t e d o n either one o r b o t h sides, it is clear t h a t s o m e w e r e freestanding a n d others a b u t t e d a wall p i laster or an e n t r a n c e j a m b . T h e p r o t o - A e o l i c capital o r n a m e n t e d the e n t r a n c e s of royal palaces (e.g., S a m a r i a , M e g i d d o ) . T h e w i n d o w s of such palaces c o u l d b e d e c o r a t e d b y a recessed f r a m e a n d a s t o n e - c a r v e d b a l u s t r a d e , like t h o s e f o u n d a t R a m a t Rahel. A t B e e r s h e b a ( A h a r o n i , 1974) a n d D a n (Biran, 1994), beautifully d r e s s e d stones w e r e u s e d to c o n s t r u c t h o r n e d sacrificial altars. [See D a n ; Altars.] D e c o rated stone bases in t h e N o r t h Syrian style (like t h o s e f o u n d at C a r c h e m i s h , Zincirli, a n d T e l l T a ' y i n a t ) h a v e b e e n f o u n d at T e l D a n ; t h e w o o d e n pilars s t a n d i n g o n t h e bases a p p a r ently s u p p o r t e d a ceremonial c a n o p y . S t e p p e d - s t o n e s t r u c tures identified as wall crenellations h a v e b e e n f o u n d at M e giddo, S a m a r i a , R a m a t Rahel, a n d T e l M e v o r a k h ( S t e r n , 1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . " T h e H o r n e d Altar of B e e r - s h e b a . " Biblical Ar chaeologist 3 7 . 1 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 2 - 2 3 . Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "Building Activities in t h e Prehistoric Periods until the E n d of the Neolithic P e r i o d . " In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited b y A h a r o n K e m pinski and R o n n y Reich, p p . 3 1 - 3 9 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Biran, Avraham. Biblical Dan. Jerusalem, 1 9 9 4 . C a n a a n , Taufik. The Palestinian Arab House: Its Architecture and Folk lore. Jerusalem, 1933, D a l m a n , Gustaf. Arbeit und Sitte in Palastina, vol. 7, Das Haus. Giitersloh, 1942. K e n y o n , K a t h l e e n M . Digging Up Jericho. L o n d o n , 1 9 5 7 . Reich, R o n n y . "Building Materials and Architectural Elements in A n cient Israel." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by A h a r o n K e m p i n s k i a n d R o n n y Reich, p p . 1 - 1 6 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Shiloh, Yigal, a n d Aharon Horowitz. "Ashlar Quarries of the I r o n Age in the Hill C o u n t r y of Israel." Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, n o . 2 1 7 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 3 7 - 4 8 . Shiloh, Yigal. The Proto-Aeolic Capital and Israelite Ashlar Q e d e m , vol. 1 1 . Jerusalem, 1 9 7 9 .
Masonry.
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Bronze and Iron Ages Stern, E p h r a i m . " T h e Phoenician Architectural Elements in Palestine during the L a t e Iron Age a n d Persian P e r i o d . " I n The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited b y Aharon Kempinski a n d R o n n y Reich, p p . 302-309. Jerusalem, 1992. Van Beek, G u s W . , a n d O r a V a n Beek. "Canaanite-Phoenician Archi tecture: T h e D e v e l o p m e n t a n d Distributions of T w o Styles" (in H e brew). Eretz-Israel 15 (1981): 70-77. Yeivin, Shmuel. " C o n s t r u c t i o n " (in H e b r e w ) . In Encyclopedia Biblica, vol. 2, cols. 179-262. Jerusalem, 1954. ZE'EV HERZOG
Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s o f the B r o n z e and Iron Ages In t h e early p a r t of t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , t h e L e v a n t achieved sociopolitical definition as a n u r b a n i z e d r e g i o n w h e r e e a c h t o w n f o r m e d a s e p a r a t e u n i t of g o v e r n m e n t . I n r o u g h l y t h e s a m e period, t h e n e i g h b o r i n g regions of E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a also a s s u m e d tiieir social a n d political character, b u t the p o w e r g e n e r a t e d was of a different o r d e r a n d vastly greater. H o w e v e r , i n spite of t h e p o w e r a n d r e sources disposed b y these t w o r e g i o n s , b e t w e e n w h i c h t h e L e v a n t f o r m e d a c o m m u n i c a t i o n s corridor, b u i l d i n g c o n struction in t h e L e v a n t w a s in n o w a y a n n e x e d to d i e p r a c tices in Early D y n a s t i c M e s o p o t a m i a a n d O l d K i n g d o m Egypt. T h e tradition of substantial b u i l d i n g c o n s t r u c t i o n w a s far older in t h e L e v a n t t h a n i n E g y p t or M e s o p o t a m i a . A t t h e outset of u r b a n d e v e l o p m e n t in t h e L e v a n t , its building t r a dition w a s already a b o u t five t h o u s a n d years o l d — r o u g h l y the s a m e stretch of time t h a t h a s elapsed s i n c e — p e r h a p s twice as long as tiiat for E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a . I n a d d i tion, t h e e n v i r o n m e n t of t h e L e v a n t is overall M e d i t e r r a n e a n , w h i c h c o n t r a s t e d t h e region with E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a . T h u s w h a t e v e r t h e influence E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a exerted t h e r e in o t h e r contexts, t h e first t o w n s in t h e L e v a n t w e r e built w i t h t h e m e t h o d s a n d materials of c o n s t r u c t i o n t h a t h a d specifically evolved in t h e region d u r ing t h e p r e c e d i n g millennia. S o far as c a n b e d e t e r m i n e d , the scale b u t n o t t h e m e t h o d s of b u i l d i n g c h a n g e d . Preurban Building Materials and Methods. T h e L e v a n t h a d a b u n d a n t a n d varied b u i l d i n g material. W h i l e g o o d plastic earth is c o m m o n t h e r e , t h e l a n d is basically r o c k y a n d stones are for t h e gathering. I n a n c i e n t times, t h e land w a s also well w o o d e d . T h e s e basic b u i l d i n g materials w e r e all t h o r o u g h l y u n d e r s t o o d , a n d w e r e b u i l d e r s ' stock i n t r a d e a b o u t 3 0 0 0 BCE. Stone. I n t h e settled areas of Syria-Palestine, t h e lithology is basically l i m e s t o n e (of m a i n l y s e c o n d a r y b u t w i t h s o m e tertiary a n d recent f o r m a t i o n s ) . H o w e v e r , b e t w e e n D a m a s cus a n d A m m a n , e x t e n d i n g across into U p p e r Galilee, t h e r e h a d b e e n w i d e s p r e a d basalt lava flows. W h i l e at t h e s o u t h ern, desertic limits of t h e area, a P r e c a m b r i a n granite shield is e x p o s e d t o g e t h e r with its i m m e d i a t e s e d i m e n t a r y cover of s a n d s t o n e , often m u l t i c o l o r e d ( N u b i a n ' S a n d s t o n e is t h e
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" r o c k " of P e t r a ) . T h e coastal plain, w h i c h is extensive in Palestine, is sandy, b u t w h e r e t h e s a n d d u n e s have b e e n c o m p a c t e d into rock, it is virtually a s a n d y limestone (kurkar). T h u s , a l t h o u g h s a n d s t o n e a n d basalt were u s e d o n o c casion, t h e region's b u i l d i n g stone is generally limestone of s o m e sort, N o t a b l e is d i e " r e - f o r m e d " o r " r e p r o c e s s e d " limestone (httwwaf), c r e a t e d b y t h e leaching o u t a n d s u b s e q u e n t redepositing of c a l c i u m c a r b o n a t e b y g r o u n d w a t e r u n d e r t h e effect of insolation. T h i s forms a surface layer t h a t c a n b e d u g a w a y like m a r l a n d readily c r u s h e d a n d p o w d e r e d to p r o d u c e a cementitious plaster o r m o r t a r . Mud. E a r t h of a r e a s o n a b l e constituency for m u d c o n struction is available in m o s t areas a n d p r e d o m i n a n t in s o m e (e.g., t h e coastal plain a n d t h e central Rift Valley c o n t i n u u m ) . M u d is virtually a natural material for m o r t a r a n d plaster, a n d its use as a m a n u f a c t u r e d material for building units a p p e a r s to h a v e d e v e l o p e d in d i e region b y w a y of tauf, or p u d d l e d m u d ( c o h e r e n t balls of earth set in a plastic state). Tauf occurs at t h e b e g i n n i n g of Neolithic settlements, b u t already in P r e - P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c times, t h e s t a n d a r d m a terial was h a n d - m o d e l e d m u d bricks of various forms (die forms p r o b a b l y derive from characteristic fieldstone s h a p e s ) . W h e r e a s in o t h e r regions (Anatolia, M e s o p o t a m i a ) h a n d - m o d e l e d m u d bricks w e r e r e p l a c e d fairly soon b y m o l d e d m u d bricks, from t h e evidence it a p p e a r s that h a n d m o d e l e d m u d bricks c o n t i n u e d in u s e for long ages, at least in t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e L e v a n t . Timber. G o o d b u i l d i n g t i m b e r was o n c e plentiful in the L e v a n t . A l t h o u g h only a few species e m p l o y e d in very a n cient times have b e e n identified, tiieir availability a n d u s e in the historical periods allow t h e following reasoning a b o u t species usage. F o r general p u r p o s e s (fittings, frames, etc.) s y c a m o r e fig, A l e p p o p i n e , a n d oak (terebinth) were used. T h e s a m e p i n e a n d s y c a m o r e a n d also cypress a n d p o p l a r (in specific instances, d a t e p a l m ) were u s e d in roofing. M t . L e b a n o n was tiien d i e p r e e m i n e n t logging center of t h e a n cient world, a n d t h e c e d a r s of L e b a n o n were t h e m o s t p r i z e d w o o d for magnificent c o n s t r u c t i o n projects. H o w e v e r , fell ing a n d t r a n s p o r t i n g t h o s e great timbers p o s e d p r o b l e m s of organization akin to t h o s e a t t e n d a n t in quarrying stone. F o r t h a t reason it is likely t h a t t h e cedar industry was only d e v e l o p e d o n a large scale w i t h infusion of E g y p t i a n capital, w h i c h b e c a m e available d u r i n g d i e O l d K i n g d o m (c. m i d third millennium). Other materials. O n e or t w o other materials m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d in c o n s t r u c t i o n , a l t h o u g h t h e r e is n o evidence for t h e m in earliest times a n d i n d e e d very little in later periods. M e t a l , particularly c o p p e r , w a s available from t h e Sinai area; b i t u m e n from d i e D e a d S e a (Lake Asphaltitis); g y p s u m , m o r e generally available, w a s u s e d as a n alternative t o lime in plaster a n d m o r t a r . T h e earliest r o u n d buildings i n t h e region (c. 8 0 0 0 B C E ) a p p e a r to h a v e b e e n of f r a m e d c o n s t r u c t i o n — t h a t is, w o o d f r a m e w o r k with, for e x a m p l e , a w a t d e - a n d - d a u b cladding.
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BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Bronze and Iron Ages
H o w e v e r , it was already u n d e r s t o o d b y builders in t h a t p e riod that m a s o n r y walls (of rubble and/or m u d brick) w e r e solid e n o u g h to bear t h e load of an entire structure, includ ing its roof. T h e roof construction p r o p e r to tire r o u n d h o u s e is a corbeled m u d - b r i c k d o m e as can b e seen in the survivals of d i e type in ttaditional m o d e r n building. W i t h t h e i n t r o duction of t h e rectangular p l a n (c. 7000 BCE), a flat m u d roof set over t i m b e r b e a m s b e c a m e standard a n d r e m a i n e d so ever since in village building. U r b a n B u i l d i n g M a t e r i a l s a n d M e t h o d s . T h e basic materials a n d m e t h o d s of construction discussed h e r e sur vived a n d sufficed for village-style construction in t h e region until d i e middle of this c e n t u r y (i.e. for a b o u t five t h o u s a n d years). It n o w r e m a i n s t o indicate t h e d e v e l o p m e n t s b r o u g h t a b o u t b y political changes in society. T h e m o s t salient changes in building techniques a n d m a terials appearing with urbanization ( a b o u t 3000 BCE) were occasioned b y t h e n e e d for massive u r b a n fortifications. Solid walls sufncientiy tall to inhibit escalade a n d with a total r u n of several kilometers h a d t o b e t h r o w n u p quickly (e.g., at A r a d a n d Ai). R u b b l e stone a n d m u d brick were used. H o w e v e r , since there w a s n o basic c h a n g e in t h e quality of t h e m a s o n r y , a n e n o r m o u s quantitative change w a s n e e d e d t o achieve height w i t h t h e necessary stability. T h u s , these city walls were sometimes 5-10 m deep. T h i s in t u r n m e a n t organizing laborers into very large gangs. U r b a n fortifica tions t h e n b e c a m e t h e occasion in the L e v a n t for t h e forced labor system (corvee) e n d e m i c in M e s o p o t a m i a for canals, b u n d s , and levees a n d in E g y p t for p y r a m i d s . Equally m o d ifications were r e q u i r e d in t h e supply of materials. A t this stage, f o r m - m o l d e d m u d bricks o u s t e d t h e h a n d m o d e l e d type. W h a t e v e r other advantages there m a y b e in m o l d e d m u d bricks (stiffer construction a n d better b o n d i n g ) , it was t h e only t y p e of m a n u f a c t u r e a p p r o p r i a t e for m a s s p r o d u c i n g t h e e n o r m o u s quantities r e q u i r e d for t h e great city walls. F r o m t h e beginning, botii square a n d r e c tangular m o l d e d bricks w e r e used. T h e r e was a n d still is a facile theory that s q u a r e m u d bricks are m o r e p r o p e r to M e s o p o t a m i a a n d rectangular bricks t o Egypt. W h e t h e r d i e r e is m u c h significance in this theory, t h e fact remains that botii types w e r e always equally current in t h e L e v a n t . ( N o t h i n g like t h e p l a n o - c o n v e x forms of p r o t o d y n a s t i c M e s o p o t a m i a a p p e a r e d at a n y stage.) T h e b o n d i n g p a t t e r n was and c o n t i n u e d t o b e in t h e simple s t r e t c h e r - b o n d style. A n y evidence of sophisticated b o n d i n g (such as a t D e i r elBalah) is confined t o t h e s o u t h e r n limits of t h e region, w h e r e it is a n Egyptian feature. T h e masses of large r u b b l e stone r e q u i r e d for t h e walls also probably affected h o w supplies w e r e m a d e available, Although there is n o evidence for quarrying, simple surface gathering m a y h a v e involved a n u n e c o n o m i c s p r e a d i n g of d i e work a n d a m o r e intensive w i n n i n g of stone via digging, levering, a n d detaching is p r o b a b l e . It is also possible t o see t h e p l a n n i n g of t h e n e w public
buildings as affecting forms of c o n s t r u c t i o n . F o r e x a m p l e , b o t h palaces a n d sanctuaries d e m a n d e d a larger, o p e n - u n i t plan w h e r e t h e a p p r o p r i a t e form of c o n s t r u c t i o n is t h e p o i n t support—pillar, p o s t , or c o l u m n . T h e principle of primeval framed c o n s t r u c t i o n h a d never b e e n forgotten, b u t i n t h e m a i n , pillars h a d b e e n u s e d in d o u b l i n g a n d reinforcing walls. U r b a n p u b l i c buildings a t A i a n d M e g i d d o , h o w e v e r , show s o m e c o l u m n a r porticoes a n d halls. A t Byblos, as a result of its p r o p i n q u i t y t o a cedar s u p p l y , s o m e t h i n g like primitive hypostyle halls a p p e a r in Early B r o n z e A g e t e m ples a n d m a n s i o n s (cf. t h e Reshef T e m p l e a n d t h e Baalat T e m p l e c o m p l e x e s ) . H o w e v e r , n o t h i n g is k n o w n as y e t of any systematized " o r d e r . " M o n u m e n t a l C o n s t r u c t i o n . T h e highly p r o s p e r o u s city-state regimes of d i e M i d d l e B r o n z e II t h r o u g h t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e ( t h e m i d - s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE) c h a n g e d building c o n s t r u c t i o n in t h e L e v a n t . W h e r e a s t h e b u r n t brick c o n s t r u c t i o n of M e s o p o t a m i a w a s n e v e r a d o p t e d , s o m e t h i n g like o n e t h o u s a n d years after t h e g r a n d i o s e b u i l d ings of O l d K i n g d o m E g y p t , elements of m o n u m e n t a l stone m a s o n r y a p p e a r e d in t h e L e v a n t . A t first tiiis w a s confined t o isolated blocks, b u t d u r i n g d i e L a t e B r o n z e A g e q u a r r i e d a n d finely dressed blocks c a m e t o b e u s e d for m o r e e x t e n d e d passages (cf. t h e Palace a t R a s S h a m r a / U g a r i t , t h e City G a t e at Megiddo, a n d the Orthostat T e m p l e at H a z o r ) . With the increasing resources of t h e nation-state, fine s t o n e m a s o n r y b e c a m e a notable feature of building i n Palestine ( a n d , a c cording t o all circumstantial evidence, i n P h o e n i c i a ) . T h i s m o n u m e n t a l m a s o n r y b e l o n g e d t o a very distinctive style of stone dressing. I t p r e s e n t e d t h e a p p e a r a n c e of finely jointed ashlar o n t h e face of t h e stone ( w h e r e m u c h of t h e dressing w a s d o n e , in situ). H o w e v e r , all t h e joints o p e n e d widely to t h e interior, so t h a t i n reality it w a s ashlar-faced, c o u r s e d rubble. T h i s w a s neither d i e style of p h a r a o n i c E g y p t n o r of t h e later classical G r e e k m a s o n r y . H o w e v e r , it a p p e a r e d in a w i d e c o n t i n u u m e x t e n d i n g t o d i e w e s t ( C y p r u s , Crete) a n d n o r t h ( n o r t h e r n Syria, A n a t o l i a ) . T h e style r e m a i n e d viable over a long p e r i o d ( d o w n t o Hellenistic times) a n d m a i n t a i n e d its rationale vis-a-vis b o t h E g y p t i a n a n d classical m a s o n r y (see figure 1 ) . Parallel with t h e s e d e v e l o p m e n t s in stone m a s o n r y w a s t h e increasing u s e , f r o m t h e m i d d l e of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m o n w a r d , of p o i n t s u p p o r t s . T h u s , L e v a n t i n e b u i l d i n g styles c a m e to o c c u p y a position b e t w e e n t h e almost totally astylar tradition of M e s o p o t a m i a a n d t h e c o l u m n a r style of E g y p t . T h e r e w e r e various ramifications t o this. C o l u m n s c a m e to b e u s e d fairly generally i n palaces a n d temples. F o r t h e most part, they continued to b e arranged across d i e length of a n internal s p a c e — i n a c c o r d a n c e with b r o a d r o o m p l a n n i n g c o n c e p t s . T h e characteristics of t h e c o l u m n s varied. I n t h e native tradition they w e r e p r o b a b l y simple posts devoid of architectural refinements. H o w e v e r , occasionally m o r e formal items a p p e a r e d , b o r r o w e d f r o m n e i g h b o r i n g regions. R e m a i n s of E g y p t i a n p l a n t - f o r m c a p -
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Bronze and Iron Ages
BUILDING MATERIALS: B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s . and Iron Ages.
Figure i.
Monumental
stone masonry,
Late
365
Bronze
( l ) Israelite, S a m a r i a A c r o p o l i s ; (2) Israelite, M e g i d d o ; (3) L a t e B r o n z e A g e , R a s
S h a r n r a P a l a c e . (After Wright, 1985, figs. 315, 317)
itals (e.g., O p e n P a p y r i f o r m ) h a v e b e e n f o u n d in L a t e B r o n z e levels at B e t h - S h e a n , L a c h i s h , a n d M e g i d d o ; the o c tagonal, or faceted, shafts of E g y p t i a n p r o t o - D o r i c c o l u m n s have b e e n f o u n d at L B S h e c h e m a n d L a c h i s h ; t h e n o r t h Syrian o r n a m e n t a l t o r u s p o t or b o w l b a s e has b e e n f o u n d in I r o n A g e levels at D a n ; a n d P e r s i a n - p e r i o d fragments of t h e Persepolitan (Bull P r o t o m e ) o r d e r h a v e b e e n f o u n d at Si don. If t h e region never d e v e l o p e d a c o l u m n a r style of its o w n , in t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE it d e v e l o p e d a pillar/pilaster c a p ital tiiat it e x p o r t e d (e.g., t o C y p r u s ) . T h i s was t h e p r o t o Aeolic capital u s e d t o dignify c e r e m o n i a l portals b y way of e n g a g e d piers at t h e j a m b s a n d , occasionally, a freestanding medial pier. T h i s capital f o r m is basically a stylized tree-oflife design a n d is t h u s allied t o o t h e r p l a n t - f o r m capitals ( A e olic and eventually I o n i c a n d C o r i n t h i a n ) . All c i r c u m s t a n c e s suggest t h a t it was d e v e l o p e d in P h o e n i c i a , b u t all t h e evi d e n c e for it is in Israelite Palestine a n d T r a n s j o r d a n (see figure 2). M o r e n o t a b l e is t h e utilitarian structural d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e pier in t h e Israelite p e r i o d , in w h i c h it took t w o f o r m s : a l o n g pillared hall (articulated into t h r e e aisles) for all-pur p o s e p u b l i c buildings w h e r e p r i v a c y w a s n o t a r e q u i r e m e n t — s t a b l e s , stores, a n d b a r r a c k s . A m o n u m e n t a l variant w a s K i n g S o l o m o n ' s H o u s e of t h e F o r e s t of L e b a n o n . A striking pier a n d p a n e l t y p e of wall c o n s t r u c t i o n also was d e v e l o p e d (see figure 3). A g a i n , it m i g h t s e e m n a t u r a l for this f o r m to h a v e c o m e o u t of P h o e n i c i a b e c a u s e versions
of it are f o u n d in the P h o e n i c i a n colonies of the W e s t , w h e n c e it c a m e t o b e k n o w n as Opus africanum. H o w e v e r , t h e bulk of t h e e x a m p l e s is f o u n d in Israelite Palestine (e.g., at M e g i d d o ) , w h e r e it survived t h r o u g h t h e Persian period ( T e l M e v o r a k h , Jaffa). It w a s to r e m a i n s t a n d a r d in N o r t h Africa until d i e A r a b invasions of t h e s e v e n t h century CE. T h r o u g h o u t this t i m e , t h e structural system e m p l o y e d w a s t r a b e a t e d : m u d roofing o n horizontal timber b e a m s (terra-cotta roofing tiles w e r e a G r e e k invention a n d d o n o t
BUILDING MATERIALS: B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s . F i g u r e 2. Aeolic capital.
Proto-
(1) s t a n d a r d ( M e g i d d o ) f o r m ; (2) v a r i a n t ( H a z o r )
f o r m ; (3) b r o a d ( M e g i d d o ) f o r m ; (4) installation in portal. (After Wright, 1985, figs. 333= 336)
366
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Bronze and Iron Ages
BUILDING MATERIALS:
Bronze and Iron Ages.
Figures.
Pillar construction, ( i ) Pillar h o u s e stable
or stores unit, I r o n A g e II; (2) ashlar p i e r a n d r u b b l e p a n e l m a s o n r y , M e g i d d o g e n e r a l t y p e , I r o n A g e II; ( 3 ) ashlar p i e r a n d r u b b l e p a n e l m a s o n r y , M e g i d d o , S o u t h e r n P a l a c e , I r o n A g e II; (4) c o u r s e d s q u a r e r u b b l e p i e r a n d r a n d o m r u b b l e p a n e l m a s o n r y , Jaffa, P e r s i a n p e r i o d ( 4 5 0 - 3 2 0 BCE). (After Wright, 1985, figs. 245, 322)
appear in d i e region until die Hellenistic age). Nevertheless, the arch was n o t u n k n o w n . T h e M i d d l e B r o n z e City G a t e at T e l D a n has its o u t e r portal built as a true a r c h , with m u d brick voussoirs, b u t to w h a t degree this was c o m m o n p r a c tice in such m o n u m e n t s is u n k n o w n . Also, r u b b l e m a s o n r y was u s e d in M B u n d e r g r o u n d t o m b s at M e g i d d o t o build something like a t r u e d o m e or saucer vault; w h e r e a s at L a t e Bronze A g e R a s S h a m r a , i m p o s i n g u n d e r g r o u n d t o m b s e n tered from t h e c o u r t y a r d of h o u s e s w e r e built with ashlar m a s o n r y with corbel vaulting. In tire Provincial p e r i o d (c. 600-300 BCE), w h e n t h e land w a s ruled from M e s o p o t a m i a , practices in m u d construction belonging to t h a t region were introduced: tall, conical, corbeled silos a n d pitched barrel vaulting in residences a n d stores (e.g., at T e l l J e m m e h ) . A form of pitched vaulting in rubble was also u s e d to roof t h e Lachish Residency (see figure 4 ) . P u b l i c W o r k s E n g i n e e r i n g . T h r o u g h o u t the Bronze and Iron Ages, earthworks of various forms and functions were carried out in c o n n e c t i o n with the city raised u p o n its m o u n d . Quite frequently this involved an-expert u s e of limeplaster surfaces a n d slicks of c r u s h e d huwwar. It is n o t al ways a straightforward m a t t e r to d e t e r m i n e t h e p u r p o s e of this kind of installation—whether its p u r p o s e was military or it w a s a civil consolidation of friable earth skirting. S u c h earthworks are n o t accurately signified by t h e t e r m glacis, once c o m m o n l y u s e d to describe t h e m . R o c k - c u t shafts a n d galleries to ensure a city's w a t e r s u p ply are a n o t h e r public works enterprise of vast s c o p e t h a t was highly developed in Israelite Palestine. I n addition to cisterns a n d reservoirs to store surface runoff water, quite spectacular s c h e m e s were carried o u t to c a p t u r e g r o u n d
water aquifers outside a city a n d b r i n g t h e water into it via s u b t e r r a n e a n a q u e d u c t s (as at G i b e o n , G e z e r , a n d H a z o r ) . Analogies to these s c h e m e s are b e s t k n o w n in Anatolia. C o n s t r u c t i o n M e t h o d s . Little direct evidence is e x t a n t of c o n s t r u c t i o n m e t h o d s in t h e region. Building p r e u r b a n village h o u s e s was very likely a family affair, a n d t h e first specialized m a s t e r builders w e r e p r o b a b l y t h o s e w h o di rected and s u p e r v i s e d the raising of t h e first city w a l l s — a n d t h r o u g h o u t antiquity a m a s t e r builder/engineer possibly r e c o m m e n d e d himself first as a military engineer. T h e basic p r o b l e m of c o n s t r u c t i o n t e c h n i q u e is h o w heavy, massive units c a n b e got u p into place. S o m e city walls s h o w h e a v y b o u l d e r s set a t a considerable height. T h o s e units could h a v e b e e n b r o u g h t into position only b y h a u l i n g along a n d u p construction r a m p s ; traces of s u c h earthworks h a v e b e e n r e p o r t e d against several city walls (e.g., at G i b e o n a n d Jer icho). Since t h e r e is n o evidence in Palestine of lifting d e vices (neither of hoists, w i n c h e s , a n d pulley blocks, n o r of lifting lugs, or lewis holes), w e c a n a s s u m e t h a t all heavy construction basically relied o n t h e s a m e m e t h o d . T h i s was t h e m e t h o d of m o n u m e n t a l m a s o n r y u s e d in E g y p t . It was highly labor intensive a n d so was n o t for everyday applica tion in Palestine a n d Syria. I n s t e a d it w o u l d a p p e a r t h a t m a s sive units w e r e as a rule k e p t close to g r o u n d level (such as a stone socle) a n d t h a t t h e s u p e r s t r u c t u r e consisted of m a terials ( w o o d a n d m u d brick) t h a t c o u l d b e raised a n d set in place b y a few h a n d s a n d b r o a d b a c k s o p e r a t i n g with lad ders, planks, a n d r o p e s , as in traditional village building. In s u m m a r y , it c a n b e said t h a t b u i l d i n g c o n s t r u c t i o n in t h e region of Syria-Palestine d u r i n g t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n Ages w a s entirely a d e q u a t e for its utilitarian p u r p o s e . T h e
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods
BUILDING MATERIALS: B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s . ated construction
in mud brick.
F i g u r e 4.
Arcu
( 1 ) a r c h e d p o r t a l , city g a t e , D a n ,
M i d d l e B r o n z e I I ; (2) p i t c h e d b a r r e l v a u l t i n g , A s s y r i a n R e s i d e n c e ,
367
A u r e n c h e , Olivier. La maison orientate: L'architecture du Proche Orient ancien des origines au milieu du quatri'eme millenaire. 3 vols. Paris, 1 9 8 1 . T h o r o u g h a c c o u n t of the establishment of die region's original build ing tradition. Avi-Yonah, Michael, a n d E p h r a i m Stern, e d s . The Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Oxford, 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 7 8 . Provides extensive coverage of data revealed b y excavation. T h e reader m a y also consult t h e u p d a t e d edition, The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1993). Barrois, A . - G . Manuel d'archeologie biblique. 2 vols. Paris, 1 9 3 9 - 1 9 5 3 . See especially volume 1, chapter 3, " L a technique architecturale." Busink, T h . A . Der Tempel von Jerusalem, von Salorno bis Herodes, 2 vols. Leiden, 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 8 0 . A n academic architect of e n o r m o u s learn ing covers the entire range of building development in t h e region. Clarke, Somers, and Reginald Engelbach. Ancient Egyptian Masomy. L o n d o n , 1 9 3 0 . C o m p a r a t i v e b a c k g r o u n d to t h e different traditions in Syria-Palestine. Hult, G u n n e l . Bronze Age Ashlar Masonry in the Eastern Mediterranean: Cyprus, Ugarit, and Neighbouring Regions. Goteborg, 1983. E x h a u s tive survey of the c o n t i n u u m of stone masonry which includes diat in Syria-Palestine. N a u m a n n , Rudolf. Architektur Kleinasiens. 2d e d . T u b i n g e n , 1 9 7 1 . Technical account of building techniques in n o r t h e r n Syria-Pales tine. Nylander, Carl. Ionians in Pasargade: Studies in Old Persian Architecture. Uppsala, 1 9 7 0 . G o o d characterization of the later stages in the stone m a s o n r y tradition discussed b y H u l t (see above). Shiloh, Yigal. The Proto-Aeolic Capital and Israelite Ashlar Masomy. Q e d e m , vol. 1 1 . Jerusalem, 1 9 7 9 . Basic study of Israelite fine stone masonry. Spencer, A. Jeffrey. Brick Architecture in Ancient Egypt. Warminster, 1 9 7 9 . Very g o o d a c c o u n t of the niceties of brick construction, p r o viding a comparative frame of reference. Stern, E p h r a i m . Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. W a r m i n s t e r , 1982. Detailed account of die p e riod. Weippert, Helga, Palastina in vorhellenistischer Zeit. H a n d b u c h der A r chaologie, vol. 2. M u n i c h , 1988. T h e latest general manual on t h e subject. Wright, G . R . H . Ancient Building in South Syria and Palestine. 2 vols. H a n d b u c h der Orientalistik, vol. 7 . Leiden, 1 9 8 5 . A compilation of references.
T e l l J e m m e h ( P r o v i n c i a l p e r i o d ) . (After Wright, 1 9 8 5 , figs. 2 8 6 , 3 6 7 )
G . R. H . WRIGHT
p o p u l a t i o n a c c e p t e d f o r c e d l a b o r for d i e vital p u r p o s e of u r b a n d e f e n s e (cf. Neh. 3), b u t violentiy o p p o s e d it (cf. 1 Kgs. it
12.18) w h e n t h e H e b r e w m o n a r c h y s o u g h t t o e n f o r c e
generally
for d i s p l a y
purposes
(cf.
1 Kgs.
Materials and Techniques of the
Persian
through R o m a n Periods
5.13-16;
9.20-22). T h i s p u b l i c a t t i t u d e is p r o b a b l y a n u n d e r l y i n g r e a
T h e p e r i o d of b u i l d i n g d e v e l o p m e n t i n t h e m i l l e n n i u m f r o m
s o n w h y d i e c h a r a c t e r of c o n s t r u c t i o n i n t h e r e g i o n w a s s o
a b o v e 650 BCE to 350 CE is t h e m o s t m o m e n t o u s of all from
different f r o m t h a t i n n e i g h b o r i n g E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a .
t h e p r e s e n t - d a y p o i n t of view. D u r i n g this p e r i o d t h e l o n g -
[See also C i s t e r n s ; F o u r - r o o m H o u s e ; F u r n i t u r e a n d F u r n i s h i n g s , article on F u r n i s h i n g s of t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s ; andKoust.
In addition,
many
are the subject of independent
of the individual
sites
mentioned
entries.]
e s t a b l i s h e d m o d e s of m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g e x t e n d i n g b a c k a c r o s s t h e p r e v i o u s t w o m i l l e n n i a a n d m o r e w e n t o u t of u s e forever. S o m e of t h e n e w m o d e s of b u i l d i n g d e v e l o p e d d u r i n g t h i s p e r i o d s u r v i v e d i n p a r t o r w e r e revived i n p a r t to r e m a i n i n c u r r e n c y i n t o m o d e m times. O n t h e o t h e r h a n d ,
BIBLIOGRAPHY A u r e n c h e , Olivier, ed. Dictionnaire illustre multilingue de I'archilecture du Proche Orient ancien. L y o n , 1 9 7 7 . Provides well-illustrated definitions of all relevant topics.
d o m e s t i c b u i l d i n g in t h e r e g i o n h a s a c o m p l e t e l y different h i s t o r y . I t w a s fully d e v e l o p e d several millennia previously a n d in essentials it r e m a i n e d litde c h a n g e d in n a t u r e u n t i l t h e m i d d l e of t h e p r e s e n t c e n t u r y .
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E x i s t i n g B u i l d i n g T r a d i t i o n s . In the m i d d l e of t h e first millennium BCE, three ancient m o d e s of m o n u m e n t a l build ing continued to flourish: M e s o p o t a m i a n massive m u d brick; p h a r a o n i c E g y p t i a n large-block stone; a n d L e v a n t o Anatolian m i x e d building. E a c h h a d a long history a n d survived variously for a n additional half m i l l e n n i u m or more. Mesopotamian Massive Brick Building. T h e oldest type of m o n u m e n t a l building is found in M e s o p o t a m i a a n d was well established b y t h e beginning of t h e third millen n i u m BCE. T h e material of construction was m u d brick (also, on occasions, b u r n t brick) a n d t h e structural system was trabeated a n d n o n c o l u m n a r , with very massive load-bearing walls. H o w e v e r , t h e flat terrace roofs o n timber b e a m s were s u p p l e m e n t e d b y m u d - b r i c k vaulting, generally of t h e cor ridorlike peripheral c h a m b e r s . T h e m a i n a p a r t m e n t s were c o m m o n l y of b r o a d r o o m disposition. T h e individuation of the tradition w a s a m u d - b r i c k artificial m o u n t a i n , t h e zig gurat, in the f o r m of a s t e p p e d p y r a m i d with a t e m p l e at t h e summit. [See M e s o p o t a m i a , Article on A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a mia; Ziggurat.] Pharaonic Egyptian Stone Building. Building with stone was fully evolved in E g y p t b y t h e middle of t h e third millennium. T h e construction was entirely of fine stone m a sonry o u t of large a n d very large blocks, h a u l e d into position a n d dressed almost entirely in situ. I n fact, this system of building has b e e n well characterized as piling u p a n artificial m o u n t a i n a n d t h e n forming a r o c k - c u t m o n u m e n t o u t of it. T h e structural system was a c o l u m n a r , trabeated o n e — t h e flat terrace roofs b e i n g entirely of stone b e a m s a n d slabs. M u d brick w a s used on a large scale in utilitarian s t r u c tures—for e x a m p l e , for outer precinct enclosure walls—and m u d - b r i c k vaulting a p p e a r e d in magazines a n d t h e like, b u t such construction w a s never i n t r o d u c e d into a m o n u m e n t . Both b r o a d r o o m a n d l o n g r o o m design w e r e k n o w n . T h e individuation of the tradition was a stone m o u n t a i n , t h e p y r amid, containing the t o m b of the deified king and/or, in later times, t h e obelisk, a tall pier c a p p e d b y " t h e p y r a m i d i o n " (the benben s t o n e ) . [See E g y p t , article on D y n a s t i c Egypt; Pyramids.] Levanto-Anatolian Mixed Building. L e s s h o m o g e n o u s t h a n p h a r a o n i c stone buildings a n d of later d e v e l o p m e n t (second millennium BCE), Levanto-Anatolian m i x e d build ing is s o m e t h i n g of a residual category. I t r e m a i n e d closer to domestic b u i l d i n g in style. T h e materials of construction were mixed: stone, m u d brick, a n d t i m b e r (for wall rein forcing or framing a n d roofing). T h e (relatively slighter) walls c o m p r i s e d a socle of dressed stone (facing), m u d - b r i c k superstructure i n c o r p o r a t i n g varying degrees of timber, a n d flat, m u d - t e r r a c e roofing (see figure i ) . T h e structural sys t e m was (to s o m e degree) c o l u m n a r (mainly w o o d e n posts) a n d trabeated. Vaulting was entirely absent. B o t h b r o a d r o o m a n d l o n g r o o m design were k n o w n . T h e r e was n o c h a r acteristic " i n d i v i d u a t i o n " m o n u m e n t .
T h e s e t h r e e dissimilar m o d e s of m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g closely m a i n t a i n e d their regional distribution—particularly the highly characteristic M e s o p o t a m i a n a n d p h a r a o n i c structures. O r n a m e n t a l motifs or elements of these latter t w o in a limited w a y m a y h a v e c o m e into u s e elsewhere (e.g., t h e Egyptian cavetto cornice, M e s o p o t a m i a n [ ? ] crow s t e p p i n g ) . H o w e v e r , t h e m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g as a c o m p l e t e u n i t was p r o p e r to its region. M o r e especially, p h a r a o n i c b u i l d i n g w a s restricted to t h e Nile Valley, w h e r e it w a s u n i f o r m from e n d t o end. M e s o p o t a m i a n building was subject t o s o m e regional modification (cf. Assyrian vs. B a b y l o n i a n ) a n d to s o m e m e r g e r in p e r i p h e r a l regions (e.g., at M a r i o n t h e confines of Syria). Nevertheless, in o n e i m p o r t a n t r e s p e c t , these m a r k e d l y dissimilar b u i l d i n g systems h a v e a u n i f o r m e x p r e s s i o n — t h e uniformity of ancient N e a r E a s t e r n society. T h e projects they e m b o d y are confined to t h e s a m e restricted r a n g e of m o n u m e n t s : these a r e , in t h e first place, religious m o n u m e n t s , t e m p l e s ( a n d p e r h a p s with t h e m m a y b e c o n s i d e r e d m o n u m e n t a l t o m b s ) ; m o n u m e n t a l palaces (where applica ble); a n d t h e m o n u m e n t a l features of fortifications (e.g., city gates). O u t of t h e above b a c k g r o u n d , d u r i n g t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE, t w o n e w m o d e s of building (imperial A c h a e m e n i d a n d classical G r e e k ) evolved s u d d e n l y a n d dramatically. Al t h o u g h there w e r e considerable p o i n t s of c o n t a c t in t h e p r o cesses, t h e results w e r e utterly different. I n t e r m s of t h e g e n eral historical succession in t h e N e a r East, t h e A c h a e m e n i d m o d e is outlined first, b u t this does n o t i m p u t e a n y p r i m a c y in influence. T h e t w o formative traditions a b u t t e d g e o graphically i n w e s t e r n A n a t o l i a — n a m e l y in t h e k i n g d o m s of Phrygia a n d L y d i a , w h e r e t h e a n c i e n t b u i l d i n g tradition was Levanto-Anatolian. A c h a e m e n i d B u i l d i n g . Unlike, for e x a m p l e , t h e E g y p tians a n d t h e G r e e k s , t h e Persians g o t a n e m p i r e before they h a d a m o n u m e n t a l architecture to dignify it. T h u s , t h e y h a d to crash develop their m o n u m e n t a l imperial architecture within two generations or s o — a n d tire a c h i e v e m e n t w a s marvelous a n d since t h e r e was n o t h i n g vulgar or b a n a l a b o u t the m o d e , it w a s b o t h graceful a n d dignified. (Incidentally, almost n o t h i n g is k n o w n of t h e d o m e s t i c building of t h e i m perial P e r s i a n s — t h e y could h a v e c o n t i n u e d to live in tents for all t h a t is evident t o t h e contrary.) T h e imperial (aulic) A c h a e m e n i d m o d e of b u i l d i n g is best manifested i n t w o palace-city c o m p l e x e s : t h a t of C y r u s t h e G r e a t at P a s a r g a d a e (c. 550 BCE) a n d t h a t of D a r i u s a n d Xerxes at Persepolis (c. 500 BCE). W i t h this instant achieve m e n t , t h e style r e m a i n e d frozen a n d t h e r e w e r e n o further d e v e l o p m e n t s ( n o r it seems m u c h central b u i l d i n g activity) for t h e e n s u i n g t w o centuries, until Persepolis was c e r e m o nially p u t to flames b y A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t in 331 BCE to m a r k t h e e n d of a n old order. T h i s it certainly d i d , i n t h e architectural sense, since t h a t was t h e e n d of t h e A c h a e m e n i d g r a n d m a n n e r . A l t h o u g h later I r a n i a n dynasties ( P a r -
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods
BUILDING MATERIALS:
Persian through R o m a n Periods.
cesultan in western Anatolia, H a l f
timbered
Figure
369
i. Isometric reconstruction of Bey-
mud-brick construction on rubble foundations. M i x e d
c o n s t r u c t i o n is t y p i c a l of L e v a n t o - H e l l a d i c area, b u t is n o t e w o r t h y h e r e b e c a u s e of t h e u n b r i d l e d u s e of w o o d in a ( t h e n ) heavily forested area. N o t e t h e r e m a i n s of a c h a r r e d w o o d e n d o o r s t a n d i n g i n p l a c e . R e m a i n s d a t e d t o a b o u t 1 5 0 0 BCE. (Courtesy G. R. H . Wright)
thians a n d S a s a n i a n s ) r e g a i n e d a n e m p i r e for t h e P e r s i a n p e o p l e , their building, h o w e v e r explained, w a s in n o w a y a revival of t h e A c h a e m e n i d style. T h e materials of A c h a e m e n i d c o n s t r u c t i o n w e r e m i x e d . E x t r e m e l y fine ashlar m a s o n r y characterizes t h e b u i l d i n g . V e r y large blocks w e r e u s e d t o face t h e g r e a t p o d i a o n w h i c h t h e c o m p l e x e s a r e elevated, while fine s t o n e framing (e.g., d o o r a n d w i n d o w frames) articulates t h e walls of individual buildings. T h e b u l k of t h e wall w a s , h o w e v e r , m u d brick a n d t h e great flat terrace roofs w e r e of m u d brick on e n o r m o u s timber b e a m s . T h e structural s y s t e m w a s a n entirely t r a b e ated o n e , a n d tire a r c h a n d v a u l t w e r e n o t u s e d . P e r h a p s d i e m o s t n o t a b l e structural feature is t h e c o l u m n a r d e v e l o p m e n t a n d tire forests of i m m e n s e l y tall stone c o l u m n s , s o m e w i t h animal capitals or i m p o s t blocks, r e m a i n a w o r l d w o n d e r . A l t h o u g h a b r o a d r o o m t r a d i t i o n w a s evident at P a s a r g a d a e , at Persepolis a highly idiosyncratic design p r i n c i p l e b e c a m e d o m i n a n t — t h a t of centralized ( c o n c e n t r i c ) s q u a r e p l a n n i n g : s q u a r e units set concentrically within s q u a r e u n i t s . P e r h a p s
it m i g h t b e said d r a t t h e g r e a t m a s o n r y p o d i u m w a s tire in dividuation of d i e system. T h e q u e s t i o n of t h e s o u r c e s for this h a r m o n i o u s c o m p o sition of elements h a s always evoked discussion. T h e palace b u i l d i n g inscriptions state t h a t w h e r e a s t h e various o p e r a tions of construction w e r e carried o u t b y subject p e o p l e s , t h e overall design w a s exactiy as t h e " G r e a t K i n g " h a d i n t e n d e d it t o b e , w h i c h h a s b e e n u n d e r s t o o d t o indicate t h a t t h e p l a n n i n g of t h e palace c o m p l e x was entirely d e t e r m i n e d b y P e r s i a n taste. T h i s , h o w e v e r , is n o t a full explanation of t h e style; b e t w e e n t h e client w h o d e t e r m i n e s t h e p l a n n i n g a n d t h e craftsman w h o effects t h e details of construction is t h e architect w h o d e t e r m i n e s t h e overall composition of d e tails in elevation. T h u s , it r e m a i n s unclear w h e t h e r t h e ar chitect of t h e c o m p l e x w a s a Persian (of whatever back g r o u n d ) o r t h e m a s t e r m a s o n ( t h e office which traditionally gives o n t o t h a t of architect) w h o , a c c o r d i n g t o t h e building inscriptions, should h a v e b e e n a L y d i a n (from Sardis) or a n E a s t G r e e k (from t h e n e i g h b o r i n g I o n i a n coast). Certainly
370
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods
t h e general overall a p p e a r a n c e in elevation of t h e A c h a e m e n i d palaces was quite unlike anything k n o w n in t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y d e v e l o p m e n t of G r e e k m o n u m e n t a l building. T h e i m p a c t of A c h a e m e n i d m o n u m e n t a l architecture on t h e building scene of t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y N e a r E a s t is o b scure. T h e archaeological evidence is obviously defective. S o m e smaller a p a d a n a - t y p e " g o v e r n m e n t h o u s e " buildings have b e e n discovered in i m p o r t a n t regional centers (e.g., in Babylon a n d o n t h e P h o e n i c i a n coast). H o w e v e r , littie can be a d d u c e d regarding the significant question of influence a n d hybridization. W h a t appears clear is t h a t A c h a e m e n i d building h a d a negligible i m p a c t o n the great m o n u m e n t a l traditions of E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a . It is in t h e L e v a n t o Anatolian region w h e r e there are indications (or possibili ties) of interaction with an older tradition, h e r e t h e m o s t cognate. H o w e v e r , in the light of existing information, traces a n d effects of A c h a e m e n i d building a p p e a r m o s t recogniz able after t h e end of t h e r e g i m e — a strange m a t t e r w h i c h will be m e n t i o n e d in its historical context (see b e l o w ) . [See P e r sians.] C l a s s i c a l G r e e k B u i l d i n g I n I o n i a . A meaningful p a r t of the d e v e l o p m e n t of classical G r e e k building t o o k place o n N e a r E a s t e r n g r o u n d : the Ionian coast of Asia M i n o r . I n this m e a s u r e it w a s a native N e a r Eastern building style a n d its d e v e l o p m e n t m u s t b e outlined on t h a t a c c o u n t , quite apart from the m o m e n t o u s role it was eventually to play over t h e whole region in virtue of later political history. T h e material of construction of classical G r e e k building is uniform, fine stone m a s o n r y — b u t only u p to t h e roof. T h e highly characteristic roofing was a timber-framed gable roof normally clad with terra-cotta tiling, b u t on splendid occa sions with stone (marble) tiling. T h e structural system e m ployed was trabeated, a n d n o arches or vaults w e r e i n c l u d e d (the ceiling w a s coffered stone slabbing o n stone b e a m s ) . T h e system was hyperessentially c o l u m n a r , a n d this in a novel m a n n e r : t h e external load-bearing c o m p o n e n t s in m a jor structures w e r e rows of c o l u m n s . T h e design form w a s rigorously " l o n g r o o m , " here s u p p l e m e n t e d b y t h e peristyle (peripheral c o l o n a d e ) , t h e whole being set o n a t h r e e s t e p p e d raised platform (the " c r e p i s " ) . Again, t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of this s u p e r b m o d e of building was rapid (entirely within t h e seventh and sixth centuries BCE), and a n y t h i n g b u t obvious. Certainly "there is n o t h i n g in the building history of G r e e c e d u r i n g t h e p r e c e e d i n g t h r e e centuries or so to a c c o u n t for it. T h u s , t h e only m o d e s of m o n u m e n t a l building which could have influenced t h e d e velopment of classical G r e e k architecture were t h e n e i g h b o r i n g L e v a n t o - A n a t o l i a n or Egyptian building. T h e r i d g e d tile roof sets t h e G r e e k t e m p l e a p a r t f r o m all p r e c e e d i n g N e a r Eastern m o n u m e n t a l building—as does t h e o u t w a r d looking peristylar design. T h e profusely c o l u m n e d E g y p t i a n buildings were i n w a r d looldng (as essentially w a s all N e a r Eastern architecture): t h e c o l u m n s w e r e enclosed within halls or internal courts. It is possible to find a r r a n g e m e n t s
s o m e t h i n g like G r e e k in antis or prostyle design in N e a r Eastern building, b u t n o t h i n g like t h e peristyle. O n t h e other h a n d , t h e r e is a b a c k g r o u n d in t h e N e a r E a s t t o classical building in the fine s t o n e m a s o n r y c o m m o n t o b o t h . H o w e v e r classical G r e e k m a s o n r y evolved an u n s u r p a s sed excellence of its o w n . Utterly unlike L e v a n t o - A n a t o l i a n m a s o n r y , it w a s entirely solid t h r o u g h o u t t h e thickness of t h e wall, a n d unlike E g y p t i a n m a s o n r y , t h e blocks w e r e r e g ular orthogonal units of m e d i u m size set in regular courses dressed entirely t r u e o n all t h e joints before setting. T h e blocks w e r e set w i t h o u t m o r t a r a n d fixed o n e to t h e o t h e r b y horizontal c r a m p i n g a n d , o n occasion, b y vertical d o w eling. T h e hairline jointing was facilitated b y t h e p r o c e s s of anathyrosis: t h e rising joints w e r e hollowed o u t , leaving a b a n d like a clear frame a r o u n d t h r e e m a r g i n s to m a k e t h e lateral c o n t a c t b e t w e e n adjacent blocks. A n integral factor in this stone m a s o n r y w a s t h e d e v e l o p m e n t , in a b o u t 5 0 0 BCE, of block-and-tackle lifting devices, so t h a t quite massive blocks could b e cleanly lifted a n d lowered into position. T h e full excellence of this m o d e w a s restricted t o very m o n u m e n t a l walling of m a r b l e or h a r d limestone. D u r i n g the fifth a n d fourth centuries BCE classical G r e e k m a s o n r y s p r e a d into regions c o n t i g u o u s w i t h G r e e k Ionia (cf., e.g., the T e m p l e of Artemis at Sardis; t h e N e r e i d m o n u m e n t at X a n t h o s ; t h e M a u s o l e u m at H a l i k a r n a s s o s ) . H o w ever, with A l e x a n d e r ' s c o n q u e s t of t h e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e a n d the firm e s t a b l i s h m e n t of G r e e k rule in t h e t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE over almost t h e entire a n c i e n t N e a r East, t h e stage w a s set for varied d e v e l o p m e n t s in t h e buildling of t h e region. O r i e n t a l H e l l e n i s t i c B u i l d i n g . Before particularizing r e gional d e v e l o p m e n t s , a n i m p o r t a n t general manifestation of hellenization o n N e a r E a s t e r n b u i l d i n g m u s t b e n o t e d : namely, extension to t h e s c o p e of m o n u m e n t a l building. W i t h hellenization, b o t h newly G r e e k - f o u n d e d t o w n s a n d s o m e old t o w n s were invested with t h e forms of t h e G r e e k city (the polis) t o enable their citizens to lead a truly h u m a n life—that is, t h e public o n e e n c o m p a s s i n g activities political, judicial, e c o n o m i c , a n d cultural-recreational. All these activ ities required facilities, for t h e m o s t p a r t involving s u b s t a n tial m o n u m e n t a l building projects. T h u s , in a d d i t i o n to t h e military, religious, a n d palatial s t r u c t u r e s of t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t (which certainly did n o t decline in significance), t h e r e was a whole n e w a n d varied series of design projects: p u b l i c m e e t i n g h o u s e s a n d law courts (bouleterion, ecclesiasterion, basilica); agorai, stoas, c o l o n n a d e d streets, n y m p h a e a , tri u m p h a l arches; theaters, a m p h i t h e a t e r s , s t a d i u m s , h i p p o d r o m e s , g y m n a s i a , a n d b a t h s . T h e s e p u b l i c buildings r e m a i n e d p a r t of t h e N e a r E a s t e r n u r b a n s c e n e until they d i s a p p e a r e d w h e n t h e area r e v e r t e d o n c e m o r e t o an eastern w a y of life u n d e r Islamic d o m i n a t i o n . T h e r e w e r e , h o w e v e r , o n e or t w o legacies from t h e Hellenistic i n t e r r e g n u m . T h e two institutions w h i c h casual i m p r e s s i o n associates w i t h t h e lifestyle of the traditional N e a r East, t h e suq ( " m a r k e t " ) a n d t h e hammam ( " b a t h " ) , are b o t h d e v e l o p m e n t s of t w o H e l -
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods lenistic feanires i n t r o d u c e d into t h e region: t h e agora a n d the b a l a n e i a / t h e r m a e . If G r e e k architectural forms t r a n s f o r m e d d i e O r i e n t , tiien it is only fair to say t h a t the O r i e n t a n d its wealth h a d its effect o n G r e e k architectural f o r m s . Various civic buildings m e n t i o n e d h e r e w e r e strikingly d e v e l o p e d d u r i n g t h e H e l lenistic period. T h e t h e a t e r a n d t h e g y m n a s i u m , as also t h e agora (cum stoa c o m p l e x e s ) , w e r e simple, i n d e e d primitive, in the 5th c e n t u r y BCE. It was the wealth p u t into circulation by the e x p a n s i o n into t h e O r i e n t w h i c h p r o m o t e d their evo lution into t h e m o n u m e n t a l c o m p l e x e s n o w taken as t h e norm. T h e d e p l o y m e n t of all t h e s e t y p e s of civic building was b o u n d u p w i t h p r o b a b l y the m o s t salient feature helleniza tion b r o u g h t t o t h e N e a r E a s t region: rationalized t o w n p l a n ning, with its regular o r t h o g o n a l grid p a t t e r n of streets a n d its organization of u r b a n s p a c e o n functional lines (i.e., into residential q u a r t e r s a n d p u b l i c q u a r t e r s of various t y p e s ) . T h e G r e e k practice p r o b a b l y originates w i t h t h e r e b u i l d i n g of M i l e t u s after t h e Persian d e s t r u c t i o n early in t h e fifth c e n tury BCE. H o w e v e r , t h e original, r a t h e r m e c h a n i c a l , c o n c e p t was m u c h vivified f r o m t h e t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE o n w a r d b y various m o n u m e n t a l features of design i n c o r p o r a t e d into it. T h e grid w a s diversified a n d articulated into sectors (zon ing) b y c o l o n n a d e d m a j o r streets a n d associated devices: t h e tetrapylon at i m p o r t a n t street crossings a n d t h e t r i u m p h a l arch (or m o n u m e n t a l a r c h e d gate) t o break t h e perspective at d i e e n t r a n c e to different areas (e.g., t h e s a n c t u a r y area, the agora, t h e h a r b o r ) . S u c h features a p p e a r e d c o n t e m p o raneously in Asia M i n o r , Syria, a n d Palestine a n d w e r e doubtless originally a n e x p r e s s i o n of Seleucid e n l i g h t e n m e n t a n d munificence (cf. the f o u n d a t i o n of A n t i o c h on t h e O r o n t e s ) . H o w e v e r , their full a n d t r u e d e v e l o p m e n t took place u n d e r R o m a n r u l e d u r i n g t h e p r o s p e r i t y of t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE (cf., e.g., P e t r a , Gerasa/Jerash, E p h e s u s ) , b y w h i c h time t h e y are to b e f o u n d u n i f o r m l y across t h e w h o l e region t o t h e Atlantic (cf. P t o l e m a i s in C y r e n a i c a , L e p t i s M a g n a in T r i p o l i t a n i a ) . O n e other very generalized m a r k of hellenization o n N e a r E a s t e r n b u i l d i n g w a s in military engineering. A l e x a n d e r ' s e m p i r e was w o n b y t h e s u p e r i o r military science of t h e Greeks over t h a t of Asiatics, a n d t h e W a r s of t h e Successors e n s u r e d the m a i n t e n a n c e of this superiority. Of particular n o t e h e r e w a s the d e v e l o p m e n t of the science of siegecraft (cf. D e m e t r i o s Poliorketes a n d Philo of B y z a n t i u m ) . In this w a y fortifications w e r e r e q u i r e d t o keep p a c e with ever m o r e a n d m o r e powerful m e a n s of d e s t r u c t i o n . G r e e k military e n gineers saw traditional types of fortification over t h e w h o l e region b u t saw n o t h i n g in a d v a n c e of their o w n practice. Accordingly, w h e n fortifications w e r e r e q u i r e d in the hel lenized O r i e n t , t h e y were d e s i g n e d o n G r e e k principles. T h i s involved, in the first p l a c e , b u i l d i n g city walls a l m o s t exclusively of finely dressed s t o n e m a s o n r y (in t h e interest b o t h of s t r e n g t h a n d b e a u t y ) . D e s i g n novelties included t h e
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idea of the G r e a t (or e x t e n d e d ) C i r c u i t — t h a t is, of enclosing within the walls all t h e n e i g h b o r i n g h i g h g r o u n d w h i c h p o tentially could b e u s e d to c o m m a n d t h e terrain (cf. at Priene, Ptolemais in L i b y a ) . Finally, a notable application of t h e classical G r e e k m o d e of building in the E a s t w a s the architecturally developed m o n u m e n t a l t o m b . V a r i o u s traditions of m o n u m e n t a l t o m b s were k n o w n in t h e a n c i e n t N e a r E a s t ; however, by tire m i d d l e of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, generally speaking, traditional t o m b s w e r e u n o b t r u s i v e externally—exceptions w e r e t h e t u m u l u s t o m b s of Anatolia (e.g., at G o r d i o n a n d Sardis) a n d t o m b s with architectural facades c u t in rock cliffs (e.g., in Lycia a n d P e r s i a ) . I n contrast, before Alex a n d e r ' s c o n q u e s t s (e.g., t h e M a u s o l e u m at Halikarnassos, t h e N e r e i d M o n u m e n t at X a n t h o s ) tiiere were m o n u m e n t a l t o m b s in t h e N e a r East e m b o d y i n g die classical orders of architecture a n d afterward these b e c a m e c o m m o n p l a c e . T h e r e w e r e several different t y p e s , b o t h r o c k cut (cf. the elaborate r o c k - c u t facade t o m b s at P e t r a , t h e peristyle h o u s e t o m b s in disused quarries at A l e x a n d r a a n d N e a - P a p h o s ) , while freestanding built t o m b s are w i d e s p r e a d , for e x a m p l e , in Syria ( S u w e i d a ) , E g y p t ( C a p e Z e p h y r o n ) , a n d N o r t h Af rica (Ptolemais). T h e regional distribution of hellenization in building across t h e a n c i e n t East is of g r e a t historical i m p o r t a n c e a n d has hitherto received little close attention. T h e following is a s u m m a r y outline. Anatolia. A very critical region in b u i l d i n g d e v e l o p m e n t d u r i n g this p e r i o d is Anatolia (or, r a t h e r , w e s t e r n Anatolia). O n the o n e h a n d , its w e s t e r n coast was a h o m e g r o u n d of classical G r e e k building; o n die other, the bulk of the region w a s only patchily a n d sparingly hellenized, contrasting strongly in this r e s p e c t with geographically m o r e r e m o t e regions. H o w e v e r , w h e t h e r o n this a c c o u n t or otherwise, the area c a m e to b e o n e w i t h prolific building in R o m a n times ( a n d to a degree in R o m a n m a n n e r s ) . I n this way, m u c h varied construction (e.g., faced m o r t a r e d r u b b l e , solid b u r n t brick) resulted, of i m p o r t a n c e in the ecumenical history of building. A l e x a n d e r ' s c o n q u e s t s h a d little effect on the building of t h e G r e e k cities of Ionia ( h e is said to h a v e personally d e d icated t h e T e m p l e of A t h e n a at P r i e n e ) . T h e y retained their civic status a n d m a i n t a i n e d their building activities in t h e (largely Ionic) G r e e k style t o form a (perhaps the) focal p o i n t for d i e continuation of t h e tradition. As s o m e of t h e earliest G r e e k t e m p l e s w e r e erected in this region, so were s o m e of the latest (e.g., at M a g n e s i a o n t h e M e a n d e r in t h e late s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE, a n d t h e T e m p l e of D o m i t i a n at E p h e s u s , first c e n t u r y CE) . Also, such t e m p l e s c o n t i n u e d to b e built in R o m a n times in t h e interior (cf. the T e m p l e of R o m e a n d A u g u s t u s at A n k a r a ) . D e v e l o p m e n t s here were ones of stylistic evolution a n d it was t h e f a m o u s architect of the r e g i o n , H e r m o g e n e s , w h o w a s the s o u r c e for Vitruvius' ideas a b o u t t h e rules of t h e Ionic order. T h e new Hellenistic
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p o w e r in t h e region was P e r g a m o n , a n d t h e p r o - R o m a n pol icy of t h e local Attalid dynasty w a s of great historical i m p o r t a n c e because it gave R o m e its early foothold in Asia. S o m e of t h e latest m o n u m e n t a l D o r i c building w a s at P e r g a m o n (e.g., t h e T e m p l e of H e r a , c. 150 BCE). A b o v e all, it w a s in t h e Hellenistic building of t h e region t h a t t h e t r u e m a s o n r y arch is first seen expressed in m o n u m e n t a l building (e.g., at P r i e n e a n d M i l e t u s ) . Mesopotamia and Iran. T h e heartland of t h e A c h a e m e n i d E m p i r e w a s formed b y M e s o p o t a m i a a n d I r a n , a n d in t u r n t h e h o u s e of Seleucus immediately established its principal capital i n ( a n d near) Babylon. H o w e v e r , i n 129 BCE the Seleucids definitely lost all control over t h e eastern p a r t of their vast k i n g d o m w h e n those lands passed into P a r t h i a n possession. T h i s does n o t m e a n t h a t thereafter hellenized building c a m e t o a n e n d i n this great tract of land. I t d i d not, a n d indeed there w e r e G r e e k c o m m u n i t i e s which survived o n the far eastern fringes (i.e., o n t h e confines of central Asia a n d India). W h a t it does m e a n is t h a t R o m e n e v e r estab lished any real footing in t h e region, a n d thus building d e v e l o p m e n t c o n t i n u e d there without any r e n e w e d direction from t h e W e s t via R o m a n rule, as in other parts of the N e a r East. It was Seleucus (the "royalest" of m i n d a m o n g Alexan d e r ' s successors) w h o alone carried on Alexander's p r o g r a m for t h e b r o t h e r h o o d of m a n , a n d over r e c e n t years astonish i n g evidence has b e e n f o u n d of a symbiosis of G r e e k archi tectural forms with others native to t h e region. T h i s is t h e architectural expression of w h a t m a y b e called G r e c o - O r i ental art (cf. G r e c o - R o m a n art) a n d it has b e e n considered t h a t it was this style w h i c h w a s a d o p t e d a n d c o n t i n u e d b y t h e Parthian successors of t h e Seleucids a n d thus h a s b e e n t e r m e d P a r t h i a n art (without in fact, having any significant ethnically P a r t h i a n c o m p o n e n t ) . M u c h of t h e evidence o c curs in extraordinarily r e m o t e areas (e.g., Central Asia, I n dia, the Persian Gulf, t h e Syrian D e s e r t ) . T h e evidence is fragmentary, a n d it is impossible t o reassess it in s h o r t c o m pass, Only t h e m a i n strands are indicated here. [See Seleu cids; Parthians.] T h e Seleucids d i d n o t in any way d i s c o u n t e n a n c e local styles. T h e y m a i n t a i n e d intact t h e old M e s o p o t a m i a n m a s sive brick building tradition, providing for t h e restoration of famous old buildings a n d t h e erection of n e w o n e s (e.g., at Babylon a n d U r u k ) . T h i s tradition survived t h r o u g h o u t their regime a n d only c a m e to an e n d i n P a r t h i a n times early in t h e Christian era. I n d e e d , t h e old M e s o p o t a m i a n b r o a d r o o m temple plan, atypically a n d unexpectedly, w a s m a d e u s e of far away (e.g., at Ai K h a n u m ) . H o w e v e r , G r e e k forms b o t h of design a n d construction a p p e a r e d immediately (by 3 0 0 BCE): t o w n s w e r e p l a n n e d on H i p p o d a m i a n lines (e.g., at D u r a - E u r o p o s o n t h e M i d d l e E u p h r a t e s ) , a n d t h e r e were G r e e k theaters (e.g., at Babylon a n d Ai K h a n u m ) a n d r e c ognizable G r e e k t e m p l e s (e.g., at Failaka, b y m o d e r n K u wait, at the h e a d of the Persian Gulf). W h i l e plentiful G r e e k
roofing tiles h a v e b e e n f o u n d (e.g., at B a b y l o n ) . N o n e t h e less, overall d e v e l o p m e n t was s u c h t h a t G r e e k forms w e r e m e r g e d with oriental o n e s — a n d increasingly so with t i m e , culminating in t h e h i g h tide of a n "oriental r e a c t i o n " d u r i n g t h e latter p a r t of t h e first c e n t u r y BCE, w h e n P a r t h i a n political p o w e r w a s at its strongest. T h e principal fact h e r e was t h e p r e v a l e n c e in p l a n n i n g of two local forms: t h e centralized s q u a r e cella a n d a n o p e n fronted hall c h a m b e r , t h e iwan. T h e f o r m e r is, of c o u r s e , t h e typical " I r a n i a n " design n o t e d at Persepolis (whatever b e its ultimate origins), while t h e origins of t h e latter are difficult t o a c c o u n t for. I n a n y event, it w a s t o have a great future, e x t e n d i n g o n into medieval E a s t Islamic architecture. I t w a s these forms, generally brick built with a r c h e d portals a n d barrel-vaulted r o o m s , w h i c h w e r e d r e s s e d with a r c h i tectural o r n a m e n t derived from t h e G r e e k o r d e r . A l t h o u g h in earlier times t h e r e w e r e stone c o l u m n s a n d entablatures (e.g., in w e s t e r n I r a n at K u r r h a a n d K a n g a v a r ) , t h e t e n d e n c y was for this architectural detail t o b e c o m e e x p r e s s e d as engaged facade d e c o r a t i o n i n s t u c c o e d brickwork; this d e v e l o p m e n t t h u s paralleled t h e R o m a n d e v e l o p m e n t of transforming t h e G r e e k orders from s t r u c t u r e t o o r n a m e n t . T h e r e were also reminiscences of A c h a e m e n i d style in t h e details: t h e c o l u m n s slender a n d lofty, s o m e t i m e s with c a m p a n i f o r m bases. T h i s c o m p o s i t e style w a s geographically w i d e s p r e a d — f r o m Ai K h a n u m a n d S u r k h K o t a l o n t h e eastern m a r g i n s t o t h e N a b a t e a n t e m p l e s of Syria (see b e l o w ) . I t is p e r h a p s possible t o see a reflex classical influence f r o m r o m a n i z e d Syria in t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE in n o r t h e r n M e s p o t a m i a , w h e r e , for e x a m p l e , t h e stone-built m o n u m e n t s of H a t r a h a v e affinities w i t h t h o s e of c o n t e m p o r a r y P a l m y r a b u t still s h o w t h e iwan a n d t h e centralized s q u a r e cella p a t t e r n . H o w e v e r , t h e overall line of s u b s e q u e n t d e v e l o p m e n t is clear. I n t h e m i d d l e of t h e third c e n t u r y CE, t h e collapsing P a r t h i a n regime w a s replaced by t h e S a s a n i a n s — P e r s i a n s from t h e province of F a r s , c e n t r e d o n t h e a n c i e n t capital of P e r sepolis. S a s a n i a n building clearly p r o c e e d e d f r o m P a r t h i a n building i n a direction away from its G r e e k c o m p o n e n t . T h e oriental p l a n n i n g elements, t h e s q u a r e cella a n d t h e iwan, r e m a i n e d d o m i n a n t , b u t t h e e x p r e s s i o n evolved m a r k e d l y . T h e d o m e w a s a d d e d t o t h e vault as t h e focus of design in elevation (cf. t h e F i r u z a b a d P a l a c e ) , t h u s affording g r o u n d s for o n e of architecture's m o s t persistent debates: Rom oder Orient (did medieval d o m i c a l b u i l d i n g develop o u t of R o m a n or E a s t e r n p r o t o t y p e s ? ) . A l o n g s i d e brick, m o r t a r e d r u b b l e c a m e into u s e as a staple b u i l d i n g material, with t h e s t r o n g ( g y p s u m ) m o r t a r a basic l o a d - b e a r i n g element. H o w ever, t h e aspect r e m a i n e d t h e stucco r e n d e r i n g , a n d h e r e virtually all reference to G r e e k forms d i s a p p e a r e d a n d t h e stucco decoration a s s u m e d a n entirely oriental all-over style. A s a logical conclusion t o this line of d e v e l o p m e n t , it is n o t always easy t o differentiate b e t w e e n later S a s a n i a n b u i l d i n g
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods a n d Early Islamic b u i l d i n g (cf. t h e P a l a c e at S a r v e s t a n ) . [See Sasanians.] Syria. G r e c o - R o m a n Syria is p r o b a b l y t h e c y n o s u r e of building d e v e l o p m e n t d u r i n g d i e period. T h e native L e v a n t o - A n a t o l i a n style, imperial A c h a e m e n i d , Plellenistic Greek, G r e c o - O r i e n t a l ( P a r t h i a n ? ) , G r e c o - R o m a n , all t h e several m o n u m e n t a l styles p r e v i o u s l y detailed f o u n d ex pression in this region. A c h a e m e n i d rule w a s long a n d p r o s p e r o u s a n d t h e P h o e nician s e a b o a r d w a s a strategically i m p o r t a n t region to t h e Persians. T h u s , t h e r e are to b e f o u n d a n u m b e r of A c h a e m e n i d b u i l d i n g r e m a i n s , b o t h disjecta membra (Persepolitan c o l u m n fragments f r o m S i d o n ) a n d b u i l d i n g plans (funerary m o n u m e n t s a n d s a n c t u a r y from ' A m r i t , a p a d a n a from B y b los). T h e d e g r e e to w h i c h this A c h a e m e n i d b u i l d i n g r e m a i n e d a living force in t h e l a n d across t h e n e x t centuries of Seleucid rule is a m a t t e r of c o n s i d e r a b l e interest in view of t h e surprising profusion of Iranian-style building a b o u t t h r e e h u n d r e d years later, at t h e t u r n of t h e eras. A t this stage in central s o u t h e r n Syria (the H a u r a n ) , t h e n u n d e r N a b a tean rule, a n u m b e r of s a n c t u a r i e s (Seeia, Sahr) occur, showing t h e Persian s q u a r e t e m p l e design w i t h elements of P e r s e p o l i t a n - t y p e o r n a m e n t . Similar building c a n b e f o u n d at this time at K a l a t F a k r a in M o u n t L e b a n o n . T h i s b u i l d i n g activity is generally r e c k o n e d to b e the result of P a r t h i a n influence in t h e region, w h i c h at t h e time t h r e a t e n e d the c o n t i n u a n c e of H e l l e n i s m — a n d t h u s t h e b u i l d i n g is p u t d o w n as p e r t a i n i n g t o the G r e c o - O r i e n t a l style. H o w e v e r , tiiere are gainsaying c o n s i d e r a t i o n s . T h e very m o n u m e n t a l Baris ( " s t r o n g h o l d " ) of t h e T o b i a d s at ' I r a q el-Amir, n e a r A m m a n in T r a n s j o r d a n , belongs to the s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE a n d its massive s t o n e m a s o n r y clearly has m a n y A c h a e m e n i d affinities. F u r t h e r m o r e , a l t h o u g h chronologically c o m p a t i b l e w i t h P a r t h i a n political influence, t h e t e m p l e s in t h e H a u r a n are akin to c o n t e m p o r a r y t e m p l e s on the far eastern m a r g i n of t h e I r a n i a n w o r l d , in India a n d C e n t t a l Asia, rather t h a n to P a r t h i a n buildings of the p e r i o d . It is u n f o r t u n a t e t h a t very little G r e e k b u i l d i n g by t h e S e leucids h a s b e e n p r e s e r v e d in Syria. A b u n d a n t ancient sources let u s k n o w t h a t A n t i o c h o n the O r o n t e s (the west e r n capital of the Seleucids) s o o n c a m e to b e t h e third city in t h e world (after R o m e a n d A l e x a n d r i a ) . H o w e v e r , at t h e G r e a t m e t r o p o l i t a n centers (e.g., A n t i o c h , A p a m e a ) , H e l lenistic building r e m a i n s are overlaid b y massive R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e r e m a i n s . A s a result, later R o m a n d e v e l o p m e n t s h a v e b e e n p r o j e c t e d b a c k o r e v i d e n c e s o u g h t in r e m o t e a r eas. A significant feature at issue h e r e is b a r o q u e design, w h e r e orders are b r o k e n u p i n t o o r n a m e n t a l elements i n conjunction with curvilinear design. T h i s m o d e is p r o m i n e n t d u r i n g later R o m a n b u i l d i n g in Syria (cf. the T e m p l e of V e n u s at B a a l b e k ) , b u t w h e t h e r it is a d e v e l o p m e n t b r o u g h t f r o m R o m e (cf., e.g., d i e curvilinear R o m a n - t y p e theaters in Syria), o r w h e t h e r , o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , R o m a n b a r o q u e derived originally f r o m Hellenistic Syrian e x e m
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plars is still a r g u e d . E x e m p l i f y i n g the d e b a t e are t h e m o n u m e n t s at P e t r a , w h e r e s o m e of t h e t o m b facades manifest postclassical b a r o q u e c o m p o s i t i o n s . T h e date of these m o n u m e n t s has long b e e n in c o n t e n t i o n — w i t h t h e so-called R o m a n t e m p l e t o m b s being variously assigned to t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE or t h e first c e n t u r y BCE. A t all events, t h e floruit of hellenized Syrian building was in t h e second c e n t u r y CE d u r i n g t h e p r o s p e r o u s A n t o n i n e p e r i o d , w h e n t h e grandiose r e m a i n s from, for e x a m p l e , G e r asa, Baalbek, Palmyra, a n d A p a m e a , t o g e t h e r w i t h t e m p l e a n d sanctuary sites, form o n e of the m o s t spectacular a s s e m blages of ancient architecture. T h e embellished H i p p o d a m i a n t o w n p l a n n i n g of t h e s e Syrian cities is notable, a n d as surviving this is almost e n tirely R o m a n period work. T h e c o l o n n a d e d street with its articulating features, while k n o w n in other regions, is stan d a r d in Syria. T h e s e m o n u m e n t a l building p r o g r a m s w e r e effected in finely dressed ashlar m a s o n r y , close jointed t h r o u g h o u t . T h e material, however, is local stone (lime stone, a l t h o u g h o n occasion other stone, such as basalt, was u s e d ) , a n d t h e r e is little evidence for the anathyrosis a n d c r a m p i n g p r o p e r t o classical m a r b l e m a s o n r y . Syria has a l o n g b a c k g r o u n d of fine s t o n e m a s o n r y (e.g., Israelite a n d P h o e n i c i a n ) of the L e v a n t o - A n a t o l i a n t y p e and the later ashlar m a s o n r y is in s o m e m e a s u r e a conformable devel o p m e n t of this. T h e r e are, h o w e v e r , striking examples of a n o t h e r t y p e of m a s o n r y . S o m e blocks (the Trilithon) f o r m ing p a r t of the p o d i u m of the m a i n t e m p l e at Baalbek (early first c e n t u r y CE) are t h e largest blocks surviving from ancient building. T h e y w e r e h a u l e d into position u p long r a m p s from t h e q u a r r y a n d r e p r e s e n t a n o t h e r tradition of m a s o n r y . T h i s work is often ascribed to a survival of A c h a e m e n i d building tradition, b u t the m a t t e r is n o t obvious. T h e great majority of m o n u m e n t a l building remains sur viving in Syria are of religious buildings, t h e famous " R o m a n T e m p l e s in Syria" (at, e.g., Baalbek, N i h a , a n d D m e r ) . T h e s e buildings are very interesting, i n a s m u c h as they speak for the s t r o n g survival of old Syrian tradition in a central p a r t of t h e hellenized world. A n d as o p p o s e d to E g y p t , this takes d i e f o r m of hybridization, for whereas in external a p p e a r a n c e these t e m p l e s give t h e i m p r e s s i o n , for the m o s t p a r t , of R o m a n p o d i u m t e m p l e s (generally prostyle or in antis), d i e reality is quite other. A striking feature of their functional design is that, at the rear of the t e m p l e , raised u p o n a p o d i u m of its o w n , is a u n i t c o m m o n l y referred t o as t h e a d y t o n , a l t h o u g h in view of its special n a t u r e p e r h a p s thalamos is better. Its facade received a full architectural d e v e l o p m e n t , as befits a s e p a r a t e unit; a n d in n u m b e r s of i n stances it is exactly this, b e i n g an aedicule—a small building set in a larger one. In religious t e r m s it has b e e n looked on as the survivor of t h e old Syrian shrine set in n e w hellenized dress. A n o t h e r telling factor i n this c o n n e c t i o n is t h e t e m p l e roofing. A l m o s t universally, t h e a p p e a r a n c e at least of a clas sical r i d g e d roof is a d v e r t e d to b y way of a gabled front, b u t
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w h e t h e r a n d in w h a t m a n n e r a n d to w h a t extent this w a s carried over into reality is a q u e s t i o n w h i c h has to be e x a m i n e d in each case o n its merits. Often, t h e p e d i m e n t a n d horizontal cornice m a s k a terrace roof of i m p o r t a n c e in t h e cult, to which access is gained by stair towers.
nian times, b u t little is k n o w n of its building. T h e N a b a t e a n m o n u m e n t s in t h e Hijaz are virtually restricted to t h e r o c k c u t t o m b facades a t M e d a ' i n Saleh ( H e g r a ) , a n d it is difficult to see in these a n y t h i n g b u t regional versions of Hellenistic building (Alexandrian c e n t e r e d ) .
Finally, it m a y b e n o t e d titat in view of its status as t h e H o l y L a n d , s o m e of the earliest (e.g., C o n s t a n t i n i a n ) m o n u m e n t a l Christian buildings w e r e erected in t h e region (at Jerusalem, Betiilehem). It was once considered t h a t t h e Syr ian temples, s o m e of t h e m apsed, played a p a r t in f o r m i n g Christian c h u r c h architecture, b u t this view has n o t f o u n d m u c h favor and t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of Christian c h u r c h ar chitecture in the region essentially belongs to the s u c c e e d i n g epoch.
Egypt and Its Dependencies. It h a s b e e n a long a c c e p t e d s t a n d p o i n t t h a t in E g y p t t h e r e w a s little c o m m i n g l i n g of G r e e k m o n u m e n t a l building a n d E g y p t i a n m o n u m e n t a l building. I n this r e s p e c t of existence at least, t h e P t o l e m i e s , as o p p o s e d to t h e Seleucids, enjoined a t y p e of " a p a r t h e i d " — t h e y p r o m o t e d b o t h building m o d e s b u t d i d n o t s a n c tion their hybridization. Certainly E g y p t i a n t e m p l e b u i l d i n g in t h e ttaditional p h a r a o n i c m a n n e r thrived greatly u n d e r t h e Ptolemies ( a n d o n into R o m a n times). N u m b e r s of t h e great showpiece E g y p t i a n temples are of this p e r i o d (e.g., K o m O m b o , E d f u , D e n d e r a ) ; n o n e shows t h e slightest i n fection b y t h e G r e e k style in d e s i g n — a n d in all essentials t h e s a m e m i g h t be said for c o n s t r u c t i o n , w h i c h is still largeblock Egyptian m a s o n r y (see figure 2). H o w e v e r , it is p o s sible that o n close e x a m i n a t i o n s o m e s e c o n d a r y details of construction m a y s h o w influence from classical G r e e k m a sonry. In short, t h e p h a r a o n i c style well survived t h e p e r i o d of P t o l e m a i c rule a n d died of old age s o m e w h e r e a b o u t 200 CE, after an incredibly e x t e n d e d life of a b o u t t h r e e t h o u s a n d years. H i e r o g l y p h s were p r o b a b l y t h e p o t e n t vehicle w h i c h conserved t h e life spirit so long, a n d w h e n t h e y fell into g e n eral disuse it m a r k e d t h e e n d . [See Ptolemies.]
Arabia. I n the past, t h e very large geographical region of Arabia has g o n e almost entirely u n n o t i c e d in t e r m s of b u i l d ing history. H o w e v e r , r e c e n t discoveries h a v e s h o w n t h a t d u r i n g t h e periods u n d e r consideration it h a d an i m p o r t a n t and diversified building d e v e l o p m e n t . It is possible to r e c ognize three provinces: W e s t e r n Arabia, E a s t e r n Arabia, a n d S o u t h e r n Arabia. A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a n civilization e x p a n d e d d o w n t h e Persian Gulf (cf. d i e paradisial island of D i l m u n ) , a n d t h e r e are r e m a i n s of traditional M e s o p o t a m i a n building in E a s t e r n Arabia (e.g., the B a r b a r T e m p l e at Bahrain) from early times. T h e n , in d u e course, the Seleucids established sta tions in the area (cf. Ikaros Island sanctuary = m o d e r n F a i laka, off K u w a i t ) . It was, however, p e r h a p s via W e s t e r n Arabia (the Hijaz) t h a t the m o s t significant c o m m u n i c a t i o n w a s held with t h e ancient world. T o this degree, ancient Arabia can in s o m e sense b e r e g a r d e d as an outlier of Syria. W i t h o u t d o u b t , t h e m o s t striking A r a b i a n building is in S o u t h e r n Arabia (the Y e m e n , Arabia Felix). F r o m B r o n z e Age times o n w a r d , i n fluences h a d r e a c h e d t h e region from Syria a n d also from Egypt. T h u s , b y t h e sixth century BCE a very striking r e gional school of m o n u m e n t a l building in fine stone m a s o n r y was already long established there (above all at M a r i b ; cf. t h e famous D a m a n d t h e F l a r a m ) . T h e characteristic of this school was t h e superior large-block m a s o n r y , after t h e E g y p tian m a n n e r ; however, t h e architectural expression (i.e., t h e order) was n o t at all E g y p t i a n inspired. It has a stark, cubist form of its own, m a r k e d b y lofty monolithic piers of r e c t a n gular section. S o m e t i m e d u r i n g the latter half of t h e first millenium BCE, the t e c h n i q u e of stone dressing c h a n g e d to accord m o r e closely with classical Greek practice; b u t it w o u l d seem that it w a s n o t until well on in t h e Christian era ( R o m a n rule was n e v e r established) that naturalistic H e l lenic architectural o r n a m e n t a p p e a r e d in t h e region. O n t h e other h a n d , W e s t e r n Arabia (extreme s o u t h e r n T r a n s j o r d a n , the Hijaz, or Arabia Petraea) shows virtually n o m o n u m e n t a l building prior to t h e rise of t h e N a b a t e a n s . T a y m a ' oasis in N o r t h Arabia was an outlier of M e s o p o t a mia a n d a t e m p o r a r y royal residence in later N e o - B a b y l o
M o s t of G r e e k m o n u m e n t a l building u n d e r t h e Ptolemies w a s c o n c e n t r a t e d in Alexandria, w h i c h b o t h in t h e o r y a n d reality was a G r e e k city b y E g y p t , n o t in it. T h e t o w n p l a n of ancient A l e x a n d r i a h a s b e e n r e c o g n i z e d b e n e a t h t h e over lay of s u b s e q u e n t building—it w a s a very r e g u l a r c h e c k e r b o a r d H i p p o d a m i a n plan as directed b y A l e x a n d e r himself. Unfortunately, h o w e v e r , almost all the s t a n d i n g m o n u m e n t s have d i s a p p e a r e d . K n o w l e d g e of s u c h buildings is therefore available almost exclusively from disjecta membra a n d simu lacra in the r o c k - c u t cemeteries c o n t r i v e d in d i s u s e d quarries a r o u n d t h e t o w n , w h i c h frequently r e p r e s e n t o p u l e n t p e r i stylar houses. A n c i e n t a n d Islamic sources s p e a k of t h e s p l e n d o r of A l e x a n d r i a n building, so m a r b l e d t h a t it dazzled b y day a n d lighted u p t h e night, b u t it is extremely p r o b a b l e t h a t m u c h of this m a r b l e w a s r e v e t m e n t d a t i n g from later R o m a n t i m e s . A t any rate, very little m a r b l e of any sort r e m a i n s ; surviving fragments are a l m o s t entirely of local l i m e s t o n e . So far as can b e judged, s u c h c o n s t r u c t i o n w a s generally of g o o d a s h lar m a s o n r y ; it is doubtful, h o w e v e r , w h e t h e r anathyrosis or cramping was normal. W h a t is revealed b y t h e surviving r e m a i n s at A l e x a n d r i a is a distinct architectural style—that is, a characteristic m a n n e r of u s i n g the G r e e k o r d e r s . Its n o t a b l e features are a h e t e r o d o x t y p e of C o r i n t h i a n capital (lacking cauliculi a n d m e dial spirals), s o m e t i m e s p r e s e n t e d i n draft f o r m (the N a b a t e a n capital), a n d t h e a p p e a r a n c e of modiUions s u p -
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods
BUILDING MATERIALS:
Persian through R o m a n Periods.
Figure
375
2. Temple ofMandoulis at Kalab-
sha (south of Aswan). C o n s t r u c t e d b y d i e R o m a n s i n t h e first c e n t u r y CE i n trie u a d i t i o n a l p h a r a o n i c d e s i g n . T h e m a s s i v e scale o f t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n is s h o w n in t h e p e r s p e c t i v e d r a w i n g a t t h e u p p e r right. L i n t e l s , roofing s l a b s , a n d e n t a b u l a t u r e blocks w e i g h a b o u t 20-25 t o n s a n d w e r e h a u l e d u p into p l a c e o n r a m p s . T h e detail s k e t c h e s s h o w h o w large e n t a b u l a t u r e blocks rising t h r o u g h t w o o r t h r e e c o u r s e s w e r e t r i m m e d i n s i t u for j o i n t i n g w i t h d i e a d j a c e n t n o r m a l b l o c k s . (Courtesy G. R, H . Wright)
p o r t i n g t h e c o r o n a of d i e c o r n i c e (simple equivalents of t h e imperial R o m a n c o n s o l e ) . T h e r e is also t h e b r e a k i n g u p a n d variegating of p e d i m e n t s into decorative c o m p o s i t i o n s of, for e x a m p l e , flanking pinnacles a n d arcs. I n t e r n a l colon n a d e s w e r e c o m m o n a n d t h e solution of t h e angle p r o b l e m a d o p t e d w a s t h e c o r d i f o r m pier, a striking design element. T h e u l t i m a t e origins of these features a r e v a r i o u s , a n d s o m e of t h e m are f o u n d in o t h e r c o n n e c t i o n s ; t h e a s s e m b l a g e is, h o w e v e r , characteristic a n d c a n b e t e r m e d t h e A l e x a n d r i a n school. T h u s , w h e n it is e n c o u n t e r e d elsewhere, in C y r e naica, C y p r u s , s o u t h e r n Palestine, a n d A r a b i a (all parts of t h e P t o l e m a i c E m p i r e o r u n d e r its influence), it indicates a n A l e x a n d r i a n architectural p r o v i n c e . W e l l - k n o w n m o n u m e n t s e v i d e n c i n g this style a r e t h e K h a z n e t o m b facade at P e t r a a n d t h e C o l o n n a d e d P a l a c e at P t o l e m a i s i n Cyrenaica,
b o t h difficult t o date a n d assigned a n y w h e r e b e t w e e n later first c e n t u r y BCE t o s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE. T h i s illustrates t h a t d i e style survived t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of R o m a n rule in s o m e regions a n d p r o b a b l y w a s only s u p p l a n t e d b y t h e imperial o r g a n i z e d " p r e f a b r i c a t e d m a r b l e " style of d i e s e c o n d c e n tury onward. T h e A l e x a n d r i a n style w a s light a n d graceful a n d m a y b e tiiought of as ancient R o c o c o . I t w a s a well-known a n d p o p u l a r i m a g e a n d p r o b a b l y f o r m e d t h e m a n n e r of earlier R o m a n wall-plaster d e c o r a t i o n (cf, t h e P o m p e i a n S e c o n d Style). A s a c o n c l u d i n g r e m a r k , it s h o u l d b e noticed tiiat all discussion of this A l e x a n d r i a n style refers t o a p p e a r a n c e in elevation; it does n o t refer t o a t y p e of b u i l d i n g plan, far less a t e m p l e t y p e — a g a i n , unlike Syria, with its distinct genre of R o m a n t e m p l e s . I t m a y b e possible, h o w e v e r , t o suggest
376
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods
from the decor t h a t the tholos was u s e d as a p l a n n i n g ele ment. B u t this is n o t t h e e n d of the story, although s u c h an i m pression is often given. Within the R o m a n E m p i r e , E g y p t was a very special a n d i m p o r t a n t province—a critical s o u r c e of grain and m o n u m e n t a l building stone (granite); t h u s , of necessity it was well planted with R o m a n administrative centers. As a result, a R o m a n style of m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g s u p p l e m e n t e d the " A l e x a n d r i a n " m o d e m o r e b r u s q u e l y in E g y p t t h a n in the P t o l e m a i c provinces of Cyrenaica a n d C y p r u s , b o t h backwaters of the R o m a n E m p i r e . Certainly b y the second century CE (i.e., in H a d r i a n i c a n d A n t o n i n e times) there was m u c h n e w building in Egypt, a n d it was virtually entirely in the classical m o d e ; by t h a t time, a l t h o u g h relief decoration c o n t i n u e d o n Egyptian temples together with some very m i n o r alterations a n d additions, n o largescale n e w building w o r k was u n d e r t a k e n . T h i s R o m a n building was in n o w a y confined to Alex andria or even to the o t h e r G r e e k cities (Naukratis, P t o l e mais, A n t i n o e ) . It w a s s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t the length of t h e Nile Valley a n d further, in the desert margins a n d t h e oases. M o r e o v e r , at least by t h e second century CE, this R o m a n building was in n o way derived from or m o d e l e d o n t h e Alexandrian school, which h a d ruled d o w n to t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e Christian era (cf. the temple dedicated to A u g u s t u s at Philae). T h i s n e w building was t h e Egyptian c o u n t e r p a r t of t h e Imperial " M a r b l e " style which came in earlier or later in the second c e n t u r y t h r o u g h the various provinces of the empire. Only in E g y p t , for the m o s t part, it w a s a " G r a n i t e " style, where monolithic granite c o l u m n shafts were o r d e r e d prefabricated from t h e A s w a n and M o n s C l a u d i a n u s q u a r ries a n d were p r o v i d e d with capitals a n d bases in white limestone—the capitals, for t h e m o s t p a r t , being Ionic or o r t h o d o x Corinthian. Surviving buildings in the style in clude R o m a n p o d i u m - t y p e temples, baths, theaters, a n d a notable profusion of m o n u m e n t a l arches, tetrapyla, a n d honorific c o l u m n s . T h e r e is also striking evidence for a later stage in this building history. D u r i n g the third century CE, a n d p a r t i c u larly in its closing years (cf. the times of Diocletian), t h e r e was a very considerable conversion of pharaonic m o n u m e n tal complexes (e.g. the L u x o r T e m p l e ) into R o m a n e s t a b lishments (notably fortresses). T h i s indicates t h a t t h e vitality of p h a r a o n i c E g y p t i a n culture was virtually exhausted. Equally, at a s o m e w h a t later time, early Christian energies extended to contriving premises in derelict p h a r a o n i c t e m ples a n d t o m b s , p r o v i d i n g a p p r o p r i a t e interior d e c o r b y cov ering the ancient reliefs with p a i n t e d plaster. H o w e v e r , the architectural d e v e l o p m e n t of Christian Egypt, C o p t i c architecure, is essentially later t h a n Constantinian times. North Africa. I n this era, N o r t h Africa was a p r o s p e r o u s , peaceful region with m u c h m o n u m e n t a l building, so t h a t present-day r e m a i n s are notable. Cyrenaica was a very old
a n d wealthy G r e e k colony. A l t h o u g h A c h a e m e n i d armies r e a c h e d the land, their i r r u p t i o n left n o effect o n building. Alexander himself arrived at its b o r d e r on his visit to t h e oracle of Z e u s A m m o n b u t n e v e r led his armies into t h e territory. Shortly afterward it was b r o u g h t u n d e r P t o l e m a i c control a n d d u r i n g this p e r i o d its old D o r i c b u i l d i n g t r a d i tion c o n t i n u e d , subject to influence f r o m Alexandria, a n d p r o b a b l y in t u r n exercising s o m e influence o n A l e x a n d r i a n building. It p a s s e d u n d e r R o m a n c o n t r o l early in t h e first c e n t u r y BCE, b u t it was p r o b a b l y n o t until t h e late s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE t h a t large-scale i m p o r t a t i o n of prefabricated m a r ble elements b e g a n to c h a n g e the b u i l d i n g scene. Tripolitania w a s colonized by P h o e n i c i a n s , b u t its m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g eventually c a m e to b e a r a Hellenistic a s pect. I n c o r p o r a t i o n into the e m p i r e (first c e n t u r y BCE) b r o u g h t n o radical c h a n g e until t h e I m p e r i a l M a r b l e style arrived in the first half of the s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE. I n this c o n n e c t i o n a n o t a b l e d e v e l o p m e n t w a s at L e p t i s M a g n a d u r i n g the reign of Septimius Severus, a native of the t o w n . T h e r e a f t e r , m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g w a s " i n t e r n a t i o n a l " in e x pression. C i r c u m s t a n c e s w e r e s o m e w h a t different in t h e extensive w e s t e r n areas ( T u n i s , Algeria, M o r o c c o ) . T h i s was very thinly u r b a n i z e d by P h o e n i c i a n colonization. T h u s , w h e n it c a m e u n d e r R o m a n rule (from 146 BCE o n w a r d ) , m u c h of it was land m o r e akin to W e s t e r n E u r o p e a n p r o v i n c e s . I n this way R o m a n settlement of t h e h i n t e r l a n d w a s m a r k e d b y t h e establishment of colonies (e.g., T i m g a d ) w h i c h c a m e t o resemble R o m a n t o w n s in E u r o p e m o r e t h a n cities of t h e E a s t e r n provinces (n.b., b a t h buildings, w h e n on a large e n o u g h scale, w e r e m o d e l e d on t h e R o m a n t h e r m a e a n d concrete c o n s t r u c t i o n w a s i n t r o d u c e d ) . Eventually h e r e also d u r i n g the s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, imperial m a r b l e b u i l d i n g a p p e a r e d . T h e region is of n o t e as p r e s e r v i n g its b u i l d i n g e n ergies well on into t h e fourth c e n t u r y CE. It also p r e s e r v e d to t h e e n d of t h e a n c i e n t world the highly characteristic m o d e of construction w h i c h t h e R o m a n s called opus africanum (see figure 3 ) . T h i s was t h e old C a n a a n i t e S y s t e m ( i n t r o d u c e d by t h e P h o e n i c i a n colonists) of superior stone piers with a p a n e l i n g of l o w e r - g r a d e r u b b l e . R o m a n Building in the Orient: A S u m m a r y . Roman rule in t h e hellenized O r i e n t did n o t radically alter devel o p m e n t s in building t h e r e . T h e i m p a c t of R o m a n rule was quite other t h a n in those provinces previously w i t h o u t m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g (e.g., t h e w e s t e r n p r o v i n c e s in E u r o p e ) . N o n e t h e l e s s , in t h e overall sense, certain modifications t o building resulted in the eastern p r o v i n c e s , a n d it is necessary to summarize them. T h e epochal building d e v e l o p m e n t i n R o m e d u r i n g late R e p u b l i c a n times (first c e n t u r y BCE) w a s opus caementicium (walls formed w i t h a core of m o r t a r e d aggregate laid in b e t w e e n faces of small stones or of flat, brick tiles). T h i s is t o d a y loosely called R o m a n concrete, b u t t h e t e r m is m i s -
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods
377
leading b e c a u s e t h e c o r e was n o t p o u r e d as a viscous m a s s
O r i e n t w e r e dignified b y p r e f a b r i c a t e d m a r b l e architectural
like m o d e r n c o n c r e t e . T h e c o n s t r u c t i o n was in fact essen
o r n a m e n t . T h e t r a d e m a r k of this d e v e l o p m e n t was that s u c h
tially similar to traditional walling in L e v a n t o - A n a t o l i a n
c o l u m n s w e r e m o n o l i t h i c (often of colored m a r b l e shafts
building, w h e t h e r m o n u m e n t a l or n o n m o n u m e n t a l , a n d dif
with c o n t r a s t i n g w h i t e - m a r b l e bases a n d capitals). I n p r i n
fered only to t h e d e g r e e m a t t h e ( p o z z o l a n a ) m o r t a r w a s of
cipal, this d e v e l o p m e n t w a s t o outlast t h e age a n d t o c o n
superior adhesive s t r e n g t h . T h i s c o n s t r u c t i o n was very flex
t i n u e into B y z a n t i n e times.
ible a n d s o o n its logic r e v o l u t i o n i z e d d e s i g n — i t o u s t e d col
T h e r e w a s , of c o u r s e , a further w a y in w h i c h R o m a n rule
u m n s as p r i n c i p a l l o a d - b e a r i n g e l e m e n t s , t h u s r e d u c i n g t h e
c h a n g e d t h e p i c t u r e of b u i l d i n g in the hellenized Orient: by
o r d e r s essentially to n o n s t r u c t u r a l o r n a m e n t ; a n d it p r o
t h e direct e x p e d i e n t of i n t r o d u c i n g n e w a n d
m o t e d curvilinear f o r m , b o t h in p l a n a n d elevation (viz., t h e
c h a n g e d building projects. Certainly t h e a c h i e v e m e n t s of
arch a n d t h e v a u l t ) . T h u s , b y t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, m u c h
R o m a n engineering o n r o a d s , b r i d g e s , a n d a b o v e all o n a q
m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g in R o m e w a s of this n a t u r e (e.g., t h e
u e d u c t s w e r e highly c o n s p i c u o u s . T h e a q u e d u c t was asso
radically
P a n t h e o n ) . T h i s n e w t y p e of c o n s t r u c t i o n w a s n o t to b e
ciated with other projects w h i c h necessitated this u r b a n w a
c o m e a c c e p t e d in t h e eastern p r o v i n c e s of t h e e m p i r e , al
ter s u p p l y o n a n e w scale—primarily t h e vastly increased
t h o u g h a n u m b e r of e x c e p t i o n a l i n s t a n c e s h a v e b e e n f o u n d ,
u s e of p u b l i c b a t h s . A l t h o u g h t h e great leisure establish
mainly in Syria. N e v e r t h e l e s s , b a r o q u e design certainly b e
m e n t s of t h e R o m a n t h e r m a e w e r e n o t t r a n s p l a n t e d to t h e
c a m e p r o m i n e n t in s o m e eastern p r o v i n c e s , b u t this was car
E a s t , p u b l i c b a t h s (either i n d e p e n d e n t or associated with
ried o u t in ashlar m a s o n r y , n o t in " R o m a n c o n c r e t e . "
g y m n a s i a ) b e c a m e e n d e m i c . A n o t h e r very p o p u l a r m o n u
O n the other h a n d the next major building development
m e n t was t h e o r n a t e n y m p h a e u m , a p l e a s a n t amenity in t h e
in R o m e equally affected t h e e a s t e r n p r o v i n c e s . D u r i n g t h e
h o t a n d d u s t y East. Also a n additional R o m a n m o n u m e n t
s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, R o m a n i m p e r i a l r e s o u r c e s p r o m o t e d t h e
w h i c h b e c a m e p o p u l a r in t h e eastern p r o v i n c e s was t h e tri
d e v e l o p m e n t of m a r b l e q u a r r y i n g o n a n e w , e x t e n d e d scale
u m p h a l arch, or a r c h e d gate. T h e n t h e r e w e r e new types of
at quarries in t h e n o r t h e r n A e g e a n (e.g., P r o k o n e s o s ) with
leisure projects in addition to t h e a t e r s ( w h e r e t h e m o r e m o n
adjacent h a r b o r facilities. M e c h a n i z e d m a s o n s ' y a r d s w e r e
u m e n t a l R o m a n design b e c a m e c o m m o n ) , n a m e l y a m p h i
established so t h a t e l e m e n t s of t h e a r c h i t e c t u r a l o r d e r s could
t h e a t e r s a n d h i p p o d r o m e s . Also a r a t h e r u n e x p e c t e d devel
b e d r e s s e d into nearly finished f o r m s a n d d i s p a t c h e d t o
o p m e n t in R o m a n times w a s t h e m o r e f r e q u e n t provision of
m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g sites all o v e r t h e e m p i r e . T h u s , from
p u b l i c libraries. In review, it m a y be n o t e d h e r e that virtually
this t i m e o n w a r d m o n u m e n t s at m a n y sites in t h e hellenized
all s u c h projects in their design involved a m o v e m e n t away
- 7 ^ * " : -
« -
, •
•
-r-*v
-J^
• y.
,^«r«
P e r s i a n t h r o u g h R o m a n P e r i o d s . F i g u r e 3, Example of western Roman building construction in the province ofAfrica (Tunisia). N o t e t h e o p u s africanum w i t h t h e p a n e l infill
BUILDING MATERIALS:
of o p u s r e t i c u l a t u m , a v e r y i n t e r e s t i n g c o n s t r u c t i o n t e c h n i q u e . (Courtesy G. R. H . Wright)
378
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Persian through Roman Periods
f r o m the old rectilinear G r e e k o r d e r s s t r u c t u r e t o w a r d c u r vilinear d e s i g n a n d
arcuated
structure.
[See A q u e d u c t s ;
Baths; Roads; Arches.]
m e n t of t h e R o m a n w o r l d was a w a t e r s h e d in b u i l d i n g d e v e l o p m e n t . W h e t h e r t h e y h a d e n d u r e d for several millennia o r several c e n t u r i e s , all t h e b u i l d i n g s y s t e m s d e s c r i b e d h e r e h a d b e c o m e or b e c a m e e x t i n c t within a s h o r t p e r i o d . T h e m a r b l e perfection of t h e G r e e k t e m p l e did n o t essentially survive t h e m a s s i v e s t o n e or b r i c k of E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a , a n d R o m a n c o n c r e t e c o n s t r u c t i o n was n o t t o b e c o n t i n u e d in C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . E l e m e n t s of c o n s t r u c t i o n
sur
vived: walls of d r e s s e d s t o n e or b a k e d brick, t h e f r a m e d t i m b e r roof, d o m e s a n d vaults, m a r b l e c o l u m n s a n d a s s o ciated o r n a m e n t , p l a s t e r e d d e c o r a t i o n . T h e s e e l e m e n t s w e r e into
styles: Islamic,
a n d Hellenistic Greek styles. Achaemenid Building
C o n c l u s i o n . C o n s t a n t i n e ' s political a n d religious settle
fashioned
its Bronze Age Levantine tradition a n d also received A c h a e m e n i d
Byzantine,
Romanesque,
G o t h i c a r c h i t e c t u r e , t o b e followed b y R e n a i s s a n c e , a n d r e vivals. N o n e of t h e s e styles w a s a direct d e s c e n d a n t of a n y
Herzfeld, Ernst. Iran in the Ancient East. L o n d o n , 1 9 4 1 . Assessment b y a m a n (both architect a n d philologist) of great genius a n d experience in the field. Nylander, Carl. Ionians in Pasargadae: Studies in Old Persian Architec ture. Uppsala, 1 9 7 0 . Detailed study of m a s o n r y tools a n d techniques, serving t o establish the interconnection between A c h a e m e n i d a n d Classical Greek masonry. Classical Greek Building Coulton,J. J. Greek Architects at Work. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 7 . Deals with Greek building from t h e contemporary animating point of view. Martin, Roland. Manuel d'architecture grecque. Paris, 1 9 6 5 . T h e most convenient a n d precise analysis of the structural elements of Greek building. Scranton, Robert L . Greek Walls. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 9 4 1 . O l d t y p o logical study of wall masonry lacking d e p t h b u t providing a useful assemblage of examples.
o n e a n c i e n t b u i l d i n g style, b u t e a c h n e w style was r e c o g n i z ably E a s t e r n or W e s t e r n . T h e e c u m e n i c a l R o m a n
monu
m e n t a l b u i l d i n g of t h e h i g h e m p i r e ( s e c o n d or t h i r d c e n t u r y CE) was n e v e r paralleled. O n l y m o d e r n f e r r o c o n c r e t e b u i l d i n g is again an i n t e r n a t i o n a l m o d e , u n l i m i t e d i n s c o p e a n d provenance but unloved. [See also H o u s e ; P a l a c e ; T e m p l e s . In addition and sites mentioned
are the subject of independent
the regions entries.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Mesopotamian Building T h e r e has been Hide systematic study of structures a n d construction in Mesopotamian building. Hitherto inquiry has concentrated on de sign types. Egyptian Building Arnold, Dieter. Egyptian Building. N e w York, 1990. Recent review of subject matter, extending both scope a n d detail, b u t n o t changing the basics. Clarke, Somers, and Reginald Engelbach. Ancient Egyptian Masonry. L o n d o n , 1930. T h e original vigorous a n d clearcut expose of ele ments, based on good observation.
Oriental Hellenistic Building Busink, T h . A. Der Tempel von Jerusalem, von Salomo bis Herodes, vol. 2, Von Ezechiel bis Middot. Leiden, 1980. Surveys in extensive detail all the developments in Oriental Hellenistic building which could have contributed to H e r o d ' s T e m p l e . Colledge, M a l c o l m A. R. " G r e e k a n d N o n - G r e e k Interaction in the Architecture of t h e M i d d l e East." In Hellenism in the East, edited b y Am61ie K u h r t a n d Susan Sherwin-White. Berkeley, 1 9 8 7 . R e s u m e a n d development of author's previous studies of Parthian art a n d architecture. Stucchi, Sandro. Architettura cirenaica. Monografie di Archeologia L i b ica, vol. 9. R o m e , 1 9 7 5 . Shows t h e effects of the interregionalism of the Hellenistic age on regional building in t h e D o r i c tradition. R o m a n Building in the East A d a m , Jean-Pierre. La construction
romaine. 2 d ed. Paris, 1989. T h e
m o s t recent in a long line of excellent m a n u a l s , providing a conve nient review a n d resume of established data. C r e m a , Luigi. L'architettura
romana. T u r i n , 1 9 5 9 . Encyclopedic survey
presenting the buildings of each successive age according t o struc tural categories a n d functional types. T h e exposition is based on citation of individual m o n u m e n t s , profusely illustrated. D o d g e , H . " T h e Architectural I m p a c t of R o m e in the E a s t . " In Archi tecture and Architectural Sculpture in the Roman Empire, edited b y M ,
Levanto-Anatolian Building Hult, Gunnel. Bronze Age Ashlar Masonry in the Eastern Mediterranean: Cyprus, Ugarit, and Neighbouring Regions. Goteborg, 1 9 8 3 . Detailed, itemized survey establishing d i e existence of a system of masonry widespread in space a n d time; the system did n o t go o u t of u s e at the e n d of the Bronze Age. N a u m a n n , Rudolf. Architektur Kleinasiens. 2 d ed. T u b i n g e n , 1 9 7 1 . Very systematic a n d comprehensive account to the e n d of Syro-Hittite building. Wright, G. R . H . Ancient Building in South Syria and Palestine. 2 vols. H a n d b u c h der Orientalistik, vol. 7. Leiden, 1985. S u p p o r t s an a c count of building development to the e n d of Persian times, with analytical definitions of basic categories of construction a n d design. Wright, G . R. H . Ancient Building in Cyprus. Leiden, 1 9 9 2 . Covers t h e period down to 200 CE, during which time C y p r u s both conserved
Henig, p p . 1 0 8 - 1 2 0 . Oxford, 1990. A n u p - t o - d a t e survey of current discoveries a n d investigations. Kreneker, D . M . , a n d W . Zsoheitzschmann. Romische Tempel in Syrien. Berlin-Leipzig, 1 9 3 8 . A full a n d precise study of a n interesting cat egory representing die adaptation of R o m a n temples t o an old N e a r Eastern tradition of temple building. Lezine, A. Architecture
romaine d'Afrique. T u n i s , 1 9 6 1 . Of special u s e
as dealing with a region often overlooked. M a c r e a d y , S., ed. Roman Architecture in the Greek World. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 . A recent survey containing contributions o n m a n y different aspects of the subject, including developments in m e t h o d s a n d materials of construction. Ward-Perkins, J. B . Roman
Imperial
Architecture.
2 d ed. H a r -
m o n d s w o r t h , 1 9 8 9 . General analytical account, of utility in t h e p r e s ent context for its regional framework.
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Byzantine and Islamic Periods Early Christian Building Krautheimer, Richard. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. 3d ed. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1 9 8 1 . Standard, very detailed manual. White, L . Michael. Building God's House in the Roman World: Architec tural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Baltimore, 1990. Recent examination of the subject, based on social considerations explaining a tradition of " n o n m o n u m e n t a l " construction. G . R . H . WRIGHT
Materials and Techniques of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Building t e c h n i q u e s in early B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic lands were l e a r n e d from t h e R o m a n a n d , to a lesser extent, S a s anian e m p i r e s . I n d i e f o r m a t i o n of an Islamic v o c a b u l a r y , t h e first M u s l i m dynasty, t h e U m a y y a d s (640-750 C E ) , a d o p t e d B y z a n t i n e plans s u c h as t h e centralized rnartyrium, as seen in d i e D o m e of t h e R o c k , J e r u s a l e m (692), a n d ar chitectural o r n a m e n t s u c h as t h e D o m e of t h e R o c k ' s m o s a i c a n d drilled-marble capitals, for e x a m p l e , t h o s e at M a d i n a t a z - Z a h r a ' , n e a r C o r d o b a (936-976). C o u n t e r i n f l u e n c e s , w h i c h w e r e m i n i m a l , d i d n o t o c c u r until t h e late eighth c e n tury. T h e decorative m a n i p u l a t i o n of brick in t h e M i d d l e Byzantine p e r i o d , s u c h as t h e s a w t o o t h - b r i c k b a n d s o n t h e facade of St. M a r y of t h e C o p p e r s m i t h s at T h e s s a l o n i k e (1028) a n d t h e glazed tiles e x c a v a t e d at t h e m o n a s t e r y of C o n s t a n t i n e L i p s in I s t a n b u l (908), m a y h a v e b e e n a r e s p o n s e to Islamic o r n a m e n t a l brickwork. Surviving B y z a n t i n e a r c h i t e c t u r e consists mostly of brick a n d stone c h u r c h e s , virtually all of t h e d o m e s t i c a n d civil architecture built before 1100 h a v i n g v a n i s h e d . As a n u n fortunate result, t h e following d e s c r i p t i o n of early Byzantine architecture is skewed t o w a r d a t y p e of religious building t h a t w a s in fact o u t t r u m b e r e d b y , for e x a m p l e , t h e Justinianic fortifications described b y P r o c o p i u s (c. 555). T h i s sit uation contrasts with the Islamic context, in w h i c h quite a n u m b e r of agricultural estates, p a l a c e s , b a t h s , fortifications, a n d h y d r a u l i c s t r u c t u r e s r e m a i n , giving a fair idea of b o t h secular a n d religious architectural b u i l d i n g t y p e s . A c c o r d i n g t o Glanville D o w n e y ' s study (1948), t h e B y z a n t i n e architect, t r a i n e d in g e o m e t r y a n d physics as well as c o n s t r u c t i o n skills, w a s called either a mechanikos (architect) or architekton ( m a s t e r builder) until t h e sixth c e n t u r y , w h e n t h e t e r m s c h a n g e d t o oikodomos (builder) a n d prolomaister (guildmaster). As stated in L e o M a y e r ' s s t u d y (1956), d i e Islamic architect w a s variously called a mahandis (engineer or e v e n d e s i g n e r ) , banna ( b u i l d e r ) , or a mfmar, w h i c h was r o u g h l y equivalent t o a m a s o n or skilled builder. M a s t e r r a n k indicated b y t h e title of sahib a n d mu'attim (in N o r t h Africa a n d w e s t e r n Asia) o r ustadh ( I r a n , I r a q , Asia M i n o r ) . B e c a u s e of t h e simplicity a n d e c o n o m y of r u b b l e - c o r e wall c o n s t r u c t i o n , m o s t B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic buildings w e r e erected quickly b y a single t e a m of builders. T h e i r p l a n s w e r e rarely innovative: B y z a n t i n e architecture i m p r o
379
vised o n conventional f o r m u l a s , a n d Islamic architecture re lied o n a limited n u m b e r of p l a n s t h a t served a variety of functional p u r p o s e s . A significant p r o b l e m in the study of early Byzantine and Islamic a r c h i t e c t u r e is t h a t n o working drawings h a v e survived. G i v e n t h e relative simplicity of early Islamic building witii its small d o m e s a n d thick-walled t o w e r s , it is believed t h a t Islamic builders relied u p o n a sim ple, numerically b a s e d s y s t e m of geometrical n o t a t i o n for buildings s u c h as t h e G r e a t M o s q u e of Q a y r a w a n (836). I n contrast, B y z a n t i n e architects e r e c t e d c h u r c h e s s u c h as H a g i a S o p h i a (532-537) in w h i c h t h e volumetric realization of a d o m e a p p e n d e d b y half d o m e s a n d buttresses was t e c h nically sophisticated a n d d a r i n g . S u c h c o m p l e x designs w o u l d h a v e r e q u i r e d w o r k i n g d r a w i n g s t h a t m a y have b e e n g e n e r a t e d from geometrical c o n s t r u c t i o n s that, in t u r n , c o u l d b e applied at the b u i l d i n g site. Little is k n o w n a b o u t t h e q u a n t i t y of w o o d available b e fore t h e eleventh c e n t u r y in B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic SyriaJ o r d a n - P a l e s t i n e . I n L e b a n o n , t h e forests diminished s o m e t i m e after t h e sixth century; n a t u r a l forests were m o r e plentiful in C y p r u s , Anatolia, a n d d i e Balkans. In the Islamic c o n t e x t w o o d was available w h e r e irrigation was practiced, as attested b y t h e u b i q u i t o u s u s e of w o o d in tie b e a m s , scaf folding, centering f o r m s , a n d furnishings. I n Byzantine ar chitecture t h r o u g h t h e e i g h t h c e n t u r y , truss-timber roofing was u s e d for s p a n s of 6 m (20 ft.) or less. A l t h o u g h t h e shift t o t h e d o m e d a n d vaulted c h u r c h in t h e n i n t h a n d tenth c e n m r i e s has b e e n attributed to a lack of w o o d , this t h e o r y is speculative until m o r e is k n o w n a b o u t t h e e c o n o m i c s of t h e early B y z a n t i n e l u m b e r i n d u s t r y . T h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n regions supplied a m p l e stone, which w a s quarried in large blocks a n d sent t o t h e construction y a r d to b e t r i m m e d m o r e finely. I n particular, b o t h Islamic a n d B y z a n t i n e architecture u s e d m a r b l e from t h e rich q u a r ries along t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n r i m , from w h e r e it was t r a n s p o r t e d b y s h i p . M a r b l e w a s u s e d for c o l u m n s , carved c a p itals a n d cornices, lintels, w i n d o w grilles, fountains, furnishings, p a v e m e n t s , a n d wall revetments. T h e variation in grain, vein, e m b e d d e d crystals, color, a n d translucency, m a d e m a r b l e an i m p o r t a n t decorative element. T h e m o s t c o m m o n p l a c e was a n off-white m a r b l e with a blue-gray vein from t h e island of P r o c o n n e s u s in t h e Sea of M a r m a r a ; r e d p o r p h y r y f r o m E g y p t w a s t h e m o s t prized; green, yellow, a n d ivory m a r b l e c a m e f r o m L a c o n i a , T u n i s i a , a n d Phrygia respectively. B e c a u s e of t h e e x p e n s e of obtaining rare m a r ble, its p r e s e n c e a d d e d considerable prestige to a building. M a r b l e w a s d i e preferred material for t h e r e v e t m e n t of i n teriors in Byzantine a r c h i t e c t u r e , although p a i n t i n g a n d m o saic w e r e also used. Islamic architecture also valued exotic i m p o r t e d m a r b l e b u t did n o t hesitate t o u s e spolia (reused earlier material) w h e r e available. B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic bricks w e r e m a d e according to tra ditional p r a c t i c e tiiat h a s b e e n s t u d i e d b y c o n t e m p o r a r y e t h noarchaeologists. Bricks w e r e m a d e of clay (hydrated oxide
380
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Byzantine and Islamic Periods
of a l u m i n u m a n d iron, h y d r a ted silicates of a l u m i n u m ) , s o m e sand to r e d u c e shrinkage d u r i n g firing, a n d organic bacteria for plasticity. L i m e s t o n e a n d g y p s u m were naturally occurring impurities a n d , b e c a u s e they cause cracking, were r e m o v e d manually. T h e clay w a s pressed into a w o o d e n form a n d fired at 900-i,ooo°C (1,652-1,832°?) in an oxi dizing a t m o s p h e r e . Byzantine a n d Islamic builders often decorated their buildings with glazed or n a t u r a l terra cotta. Because terra cotta is m o d e l e d , t h e clay b o d y is finer t h a n ordinary brick a n d m u s t b e free of impurities to p r e v e n t distortion d u r i n g firing. C e r a m i c glaze, like glass, was m a d e of g r o u n d silica, soda or potash, a n d chalk. G l a s s m a k i n g was k n o w n in t h e ancient N e a r East a n d R o m a n E m p i r e a n d used in Byzantine a n d Islamic architecture for glazing windows: Hagia S o p h i a h a d 18-centimeter p a n e s set in marble grilles, a n d I b n al-Faqih in 903 stated t h a t t h e D o m e of the R o c k h a d "fifty-six win dows, glazed with glass of various h u e s " (as q u o t e d by Creswell, 1989, p . 24). A l t h o u g h d i e archaeological evidence is inconclusive, it is possible t h a t colored glass was also u s e d in windows in t h e Early a n d M i d d l e Byzantine periods (fourth-twelfth centuries). T h e tiny units u s e d in wall mosaics were m a d e of colored marble and glass. T h e units, called tesserae, were set in a lime-plaster g r o u n d to form a c o n t i n u o u s surface. F o r floors, stone a n d m a r b l e were favored; for walls, a m i x t u r e of marble, a n d glass—including gilded glass—was u s e d to create rich figural a n d decorative representations s u c h as t h e r e k n o w n e d mosaics in t h e C h u r c h of S. Apollinare N u o v o in R a v e n n a (c. 490). Islamic p a t r o n s d e c o r a t e d s o m e of their finest early m o n u m e n t s with mosaics; however, M u s l i m s w e r e n o t able to equal t h e skill of their Byzantine n e i g h b o r s , as indicated b y the i m p o r t a t i o n of Byzantine m a s t e r s a n d tesserae to create t h e mosaics for t h e D o m e of t h e R o c k , t h e G r e a t M o s q u e of D a m a s c u s , a n d t h e G r e a t M o s q u e of C o r d o b a . B o t h the Byzantines a n d M u s l i m s also d e c o r a t e d ar chitectural interiors with wall painting o n plaster, which, t h o u g h n o t as d u r a b l e as mosaic, was certainly less expensive a n d faster. Byzantine buildings w e r e generally m a d e of a m i x t u r e of ashlar (dressed stone) m a s o n r y , brick, a n d r u b b l e core. Walls were m a d e of t w o vertical faces of ashlar sometimes m i x e d with brick a n d filled witii rubble t h a t was held t o gether with plenty of m o r t a r . O n e c o m m o n t e c h n i q u e was to b i n d the ashlar faces horizontally with courses of brick laid across t h e entire wall at regular intervals. Walls were usually two bricks thick o r a b o u t 76 c m (30 in.). Byzantine brick size varied a c c o r d i n g to region; in C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , bricks m e a s u r e d 35.6-38 c m (14-15 in.) o n each side a n d a b o u t 5 c m (2 in.) thick. Arches, vaults, a n d d o m e s were usually m a d e entirely of brick, an outstanding exception b e ing the h u g e (11 m or 36 ft. in diameter) stone roof of t h e t o m b of T h e o d o r i c , R a v e n n a (c. 530). Buildings could b e constructed entirely of brick, although m o r e c o m m o n l y m i x e d with stone (in courses) or o n stone foundations.
T h e m o r t a r w a s m a d e of lime, s a n d , a n d c r u s h e d brick. P e r h a p s as a m e a s u r e of e c o n o m y , t h e m o r t a r layer w a s thicker t h a n t h e brick, w i t h t h e u n f o r t u n a t e result t h a t s t r u c tural deformation could o c c u r as m o r t a r dried a n d buildings settled. Conversely, t h e i n t e n d e d effect m a y h a v e b e e n vi sual b e c a u s e m o r t a r was often g r o o v e d (falsa corona) or in t h e tenth-twelfth centuries m a d e to a p p e a r e v e n tiiicker b y recessing alternate courses of brick. Cyril M a n g o states (1976, p . 10) t h a t Byzantine c o n s t r u c t i o n w a s derived from practices in western Asia M i n o r a n d t h e Balkans of t h e sec o n d a n d third centuries CE. B y z a n t i n e c o n s t r u c t i o n differed from R o m a n ; w h e r e a s buildings s u c h as t h e P a n t h e o n h a d a c e m e n t core t h a t f o r m e d a m o n o l i t h w h e n set (the wall surfaces a n d internal arches serving structurally only until t h e c e m e n t h a r d e n e d ) , Byzantine r u b b l e was loose a n d d e p e n d e d u p o n wall surfaces to contain it; h e n c e the i m p o r t a n c e of b o n d i n g courses. A l t h o u g h B y z a n t i n e c h u r c h e s w e r e generally plain o n t h e exterior, a style of decorative b r i c k w o r k a p p e a r e d in t h e t e n t h century in buildings such as t h e T h e o t o k o s C h u r c h at H o s i a s L u k a s ( 9 4 6 - 9 5 5 ) w h e r e s a w t o o t h b a n d s alternate with courses of brick imitating a Kufic (Arabic) inscription a n d stone framed with brick (called cloisonne). T h i s revival of R o m a n decorative brick t e c h n i q u e w a s clearly stimulated b y t h e extraordinarily t e x t u r e d brick facades of Islamic buildings such as t h e t o m b of Ismail t h e S a m a n i d in B u k h a r a (first half of t h e t e n t h century) a n d t h e B i b M a r d u m M o s q u e in T o l e d o ( 9 9 9 ) . Islamic buildings rested o n stone f o u n d a t i o n s ( e x c e p t w h e r e stone was scarce) t h a t w e r e s u n k e n well below g r o u n d a n d rose .5 m (1.6 ft.) or m o r e a b o v e g r o u n d . A w o o d frame w a s built o n this socle, t h e walls filled in with m u d brick or b a k e d brick. In very tall t o w e r s , s u c h as G u n b a d - i Q a b u s in G u r g a n ( 1 0 0 6 / 0 7 ) , t h e f o u n d a t i o n s w e r e 1 1 m (36 ft.) b e low g r o u n d . I n t w o - s t o r y c o m p l e x e s , like t h e buildings in side t h e large enclosure at Q a s r a l - H a y r E a s t in Syria ( b e g u n 7 2 8 / 2 9 ) , t h e lower story w a s stone a n d t h e u p p e r was brick. M o r t a r , m a d e of g y p s u m or lime, w a s u s e d m o r e to lubricate t h e stone d u r i n g positioning t h a n to h o l d it in place. A c o n crete of m o r t a r a n d p e b b l e s with an exterior r e v e t m e n t of stucco or m a r b l e panels r e p l a c e d brick in t h e ' A b b a s i d p e riod b e g i n n i n g in 7 4 9 . T h e use of colored m a r b l e for d a d o s a n d floors, as in t h e G r e a t M o s q u e of D a m a s c u s ( 7 1 4 / 1 5 ) w a s a d o p t e d from B y z a n t i n e practice. Islamic bricks followed t h e R o m a n a n d S a s a n i a n prefer e n c e for t h e s q u a r e u n i t , altiiough t h e u n i t varied in size a c c o r d i n g to t i m e a n d place. U n b a k e d brick w a s m a d e of earth t r a m p l e d witii an a d m i x t u r e of chaff, straw, a n d w a t e r , p a c k e d into a w o o d e n form, b a k e d b y t h e s u n o n b o t h sides, a n d u s e d immediately. T h e s a m e m u d - s t r a w m i x f o r m e d t h e b o n d b e t w e e n brick courses. A f t e r w a r d t h e walls w e r e coated with m u d m i x e d with lime for greater durability. Terre pisi, or r a m m e d earth, consisted of e a r t h t r a m p l e d w i t h chaff a n d m i n i m a l water. T h e m i x t u r e w a s applied t o t h e wall in large globs, e a c h c o u r s e b e i n g allowed to d r y for
BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Byzantine and Islamic Periods a few days before t h e addition of t h e n e x t layer. T h e walls were b a t t e r e d (sloped u p a n d b a c k ) d i m i n i s h i n g in w i d t h with height. S u c h a p p a r e n t l y i m p e r m a n e n t building m a t e rials could, with p r o p e r m a i n t e n a n c e , p r o v e structurally solid a n d d u r a b l e . F o r e x a m p l e , b o t h m u d brick a n d terre pise w e r e u s e d in L a s h k a r i B a z a r , t h e e l e v e n t h - c e n t u r y pal ace city of t h e G h a z n a v i d s . F l o o r s could also b e m a d e with t h e terre pise t e c h n i q u e , leveling a n d either b e a t i n g or flood ing t h e earth to h a r d e n its surface. A coating of lime m i g h t t h e n b e applied. F i r e d brick w a s dried m o r e slowly t h a n m u d brick a n d b u r n e d for t h r e e days in a kiln fueled with d u n g (wood b e i n g t o o scarce a n d e x p e n s i v e ) . Islamic o r n a m e n t a l brickwork, called hazarbaf, a p p e a r e d in Syria in t h e eighth c e n t u r y in m o n u m e n t s s u c h as t h e great gate of R a q q a ( 7 7 2 ) a n d was p r o b a b l y originally a R o m a n t e c h n i q u e . T h e t e c h n i q u e c o n sisted of bricks laid in p a t t e r n s , p r o t r u d i n g a n d recessed t o create a w o v e n effect w h e n light p l a y e d o v e r t h e surface. Often t h e plaster joints b e t w e e n bricks w e r e o r n a m e n t e d with a w e d g e - s h a p e d i n s t r u m e n t p r e s s e d directly in t h e soft plaster, a n d t h e insertion of c a r v e d c e r a m i c plugs a n d m o l d e d plaster p l u g s in t h e interstices of t h e bricks. T h e u s e of glazed brick in b u i l d i n g w a s a n a n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a n practice revived b y t h e 'Abbasids at least as early as t h e early t e n t h century. R a r e l y w e r e surfaces totally glazed; usually glazed a n d u n g l a z e d brick w e r e u s e d together to m a k e lively p a t t e r n s . C u t b r i c k a d d e d to t h e complexity a n d crispness of t h e design. T h e s e bricks w e r e c u t a n d their
381
edges g r o u n d s m o o t h a n d t h e n a r r a n g e d face d o w n in a veg etal o r g e o m e t r i c design. N e x t liquid plaster w a s p o u r e d lib erally over t h e reversed c o m p o s i t i o n to form a glue. W h e n dry, t h e whole piece was lifted, a n d t h e glazed surface was revealed in a negative g r o u n d of plaster. T h e tile panel was t h e n affixed t o t h e building interior or facade. A n i m p o r t a n t Islamic i n n o v a t i o n in glazed ceramic was luster, a n expensive t e c h n i q u e , w h i c h n o n e t h e l e s s was c o n siderably c h e a p e r t h a n the silver a n d gold it imitated. First d e v e l o p e d for u s e o n glass, it a p p e a r s o n c e r a m i c in n i n t h c e n t u r y Iraq. L u s t e r consisted of t h e application of a silver or c o p p e r c o m p o u n d t o a tile surface with a n oxidized glaze; t h e tile w a s refired in a r e d u c t i o n a t m o s p h e r e until t h e glaze b e g a n t o soften a n d t h e metallic c o m p o u n d b u r n e d away leaving an iridescent stain r a n g i n g in color from red to g o l d e n yellow. L u s t e r w a r e tiles from t h e 'Abbasid palacecity of S a m a r r a were u s e d t o d e c o r a t e t h e mihrab niche of t h e G r e a t M o s q u e of Q a y r a w a n in T u n i s i a ( 8 3 6 ) . Early Islamic architects often r e u s e d R o m a n , Visigothic, a n d B y z a n t i n e c o l u m n s , capitals, decorative or epigraphic fragments, a n d s c u l p t u r e . Spolia was a b u n d a n t l y available in a b a n d o n e d R o m a n a n d fifth-sixth-century buildings, a n d its u s e p r o b a b l y reflected a taste for older pieces at a time in w h i c h I s l a m was s e a r c h i n g for aesthetic m o d e l s . O c c a sionally t h e spolia w a s inverted, as in t h e m i n a r e t of t h e G r e a t M o s q u e of Q a y r a w a n , w h e r e a block of stone with L a t i n letters was deliberately p l a c e d u p s i d e d o w n , or u s e d in n e w c o m b i n a t i o n s , as in t h e e n t r a n c e t o t h e cistern of t h e
BUILDING MATERIALS: B y z a n t i n e a n d I s l a m i c P e r i o d s .
Figure
1. Great Mosque of Cordoba. E i g h t h -
t e n t h c e n t u r y . T h e r e d a n d w h i t e a l t e r n a t i n g v o u s s o i r s of t h e a r c h e s w e r e d e r i v e d f r o m a R o m a n a q u e d u c t in M e r i d a a n d s o o n b e c a m e a sign of royalty a n d l e g i t i m a c y t h a t w a s c o p i e d in later Islamic a r c h i t e c t u r e of t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d N e a r E a s t . (Courtesy D . F . Ruggles)
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BUILDING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES: Byzantine and Islamic Periods
M e r i d a Alcazaba (early eighth century) in S p a i n , p e r h a p s implying d i e superiority of Islam over older religions. M a r ble spolia was favored by the U m a y y a d s b u t t h e supply ran out for ' A b b a s i d s , w h o , building o n a m u c h greater scale, often resorted to stucco imitations. Stucco was m a d e of either g r o u n d g y p s u m or lime, s o m e times m i x e d with finely g r o u n d marble, a n d served as a cheap substitute for carved marble. It could b e m o d e l e d in tiiree-quarter relief for engaged statuary, as in K h i r b a t alMafjar's b a t h s (c. 739-744), carved or m o d e l e d (while soft) directiy o n walls and vaults (as in t h e m i d - n i n t h - c e n t u r y pal aces of S a m a r r a ) or prefabricated in carved o r pierced slabs that were affixed to walls in t h e m a n n e r of marble. As a m e d i u m for wall decoration, stucco h a d t h e a d v a n t a g e of being an inexpensive material that could b e w o r k e d m o r e quicldy a n d easily titan solid stone. Early Islamic architects preferred lavish surface d e c o r a tion to structural or spatial sophistication. H o w e v e r , b e a u tiful spatial effects w e r e achieved using t h e arch as a r h y t h mically repeating element, as evident in arcades of stilted arches at t h e C o r d o b a a n d Q a y r a w a n m o s q u e s (see figure 1). B u t although Islamic architecture is k n o w n for its vast array of a r c h profiles—round, pointed, stilted, a n d c u s p e d —all have B y z a n t i n e p r e c e d e n t s . E v e n t h e h o r s e s h o e arch, which d o m i n a t e d Islamic hypostyle architecture a r o u n d t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a p p e a r e d first in Byzantine c h u r c h e s of t h e third tiirough sixth centuries. T w o - c e n t e r e d parabolic arches are seen at t h e Byzantine c h u r c h of Q s a r I b n W a r d a n , near H o r n s in Syria (561-564). S u c h p o i n t e d arches are structurally superior to r o u n d arches b e c a u s e t h e y send t h e t h r u s t d o w n w a r d instead of laterally, r e d u c i n g t h e n e e d for a c o u n t e r t h r u s t of heavy m a s o n r y a n d allowing taller, m o r e stable buildings. W o o d e n tie beams were usually u s e d to strengthen a n d s u p p o r t arches d u r i n g c o n s t r u c t i o n . A l t h o u g h Byzantine a n d Islamic walls were m a d e of ashlar or brick or a c o m b i n a t i o n thereof, t h e arches, vaults, a n d d o m e s were all m a d e of brick. W h e r e a s R o m a n arches rested on w o o d e n frames t h a t were r e m o v e d after t h e m o r t a r was set, M u s l i m s followed t h e eastern t e c h n i q u e of building u n c e n t e r e d arches w i t h o u t frames (see figure 2 ) . I n t h e lat ter, die barrel or p o i n t e d barrel vault was built as a series of arches, each leaning on t h e previous one; as t h e sides m e t , t h e central space was filled b y a brick p l u g t h a t functioned like a keystone. Vaults m a d e b y this m e t h o d could a n d d i d r e a c h e n o r m o u s size; an outstanding Sasanian e x a m p l e t h a t was k n o w n b o t h to Byzantine a n d M u s l i m architects was the great arch of C t e s i p h o n in Iraq ( t h i r d - m i d - s i x t h c e n tury?). D o m e s a n d groin vaults were built similarly b u t o n four arches. O n e i m p o r t a n t difference b e t w e e n R o m a n vaults a n d Byzantine a n d Islamic ones was the c h a n g e in material. B e ginning in t h e f o u r t h century, a gradual transition was m a d e from heavy concrete m a s s to t h i n m e m b r a n e s of brick. T h e
result was lighter vaults with fewer s u p p o r t s a n d wider in terior s p a n s . T o lessen the weight further in B y z a n t i n e b u i l d ings, inverted e a r t h e n w a r e vases w e r e often p l a c e d in t h e p o u r e d m o r t a r of t h e e x t r a d o s of t h e vault to create a light cellular m a s s . In early B y z a n t i n e buildings o n t h e Italian Peninsula, vaults w e r e m a d e of t u b u l a r c e r a m i c vessels laid end t o e n d in progressively smaller c o u r s e s , as w a s t h e case in d i e apse of S. Apollinaire N u o v o . Early B y z a n t i n e architects e x p e r i m e n t e d with h u g e d o m e s s p a n n i n g large u n i m p e d e d interiors. T h e d o m e s rested o n a system of a r c h e s , s u p p o r t i n g h a l f - d o m e s , a n d p e n d e n t i v e s , the latter often serving as a surface for figural r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . T h e first m o n u m e n t a l B y z a n t i n e d o m e o n four p e n d e n t i v e s was t h e H a g i a S o p h i a . Following in d i e footsteps of t h e S a s anians. Islamic builders from I r a q e a s t w a r d excelled in vaulting, specifically d o m e s a n d iwans (large vaulted halls o p e n on o n e side, having t h e a p p e a r a n c e of a m o n u m e n t a l n i c h e ) . Islamic d o m e s generally relied o n s q u i n c h e s ( a r c h e d corners) r a t h e r t h a n p e n d e n t i v e s for s u p p o r t , t h e s q u i n c h e s c o n t r i b u t i n g to t h e decorative articulation of t h e interior (see figure 3 ) . I n buildings s u c h as t h e m a u s o l e u m of Ismail t h e
BUILDING MATERIALS: B y z a n t i n e a n d I s l a m i c P e r i o d s . A maqarnas
Figure 2.
vault section. T h e s t u c c o v a u l t is s u s p e n d e d f r o m a b o v e
b y m e a n s of a c o m p l i c a t e d s y s t e m of t i m b e r h a n g e r s a t t a c h e d w i t h l u m p s of g y p s u m m o r t a r t o t h e b r i c k or s t o n e s t r u c t u r a l a r c h e s — a n d to e a c h other. ( F r o m G. Michell, ed., Architecture
of the Islamic
World, L o n d o n , 1 9 7 8 , p . 1 4 2 ; courtesy T h a m e s and H u d s o n )
BULL SITE
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Choisy, Auguste. L'art de balir chez les Byzantines. Paris, 18S3. O u t dated in some respects b u t still fundamental. Creswell, K . A . C. Early Muslim Architecture. 2 vols. 2d ed. Oxford, 1969. Essential, detailed survey o f the architectural m e t h o d , style, and typological development i n tire first three centuries of Islamic architecture.
BUILDING MATERIALS: B y z a n t i n e a n d I s l a m i c P e r i o d s . Drawing
showing
mausoleum
a series of squinches
of Umm Qulthum.
F i g u r e 3.
resting upon one another in the
T h i s I s l a m i c m e t h o d of b r i d g i n g t h e
g a p b e t w e e n a s q u a r e b a s e a n d a c i r c u l a r d o m e takes a d v a n t a g e o f b o t h s q u i n c h a n d p e n d e n t i v e . ( F r o m G . Michell, ed., Architecture of the Islamic World, L o n d o n , 1 9 7 8 , p . 1 4 2 ; courtesy T h a m e s a n d H u d s o n )
S a m a n i d , f o u r s q u i n c h e s a l t e r n a t e w i t h four a r c h e s , a b o v e w h i c h is a s i x t e e n - s i d e d b a n d , t h e w h o l e f o r m i n g a p e r f e c d y
Creswell, K . A. C. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Rev. ed. Aldershot, 1989. Useful u p d a t e d abridgment of the original. Davey, N o r m a n . A History of Building Materials. N e w York, 1 9 7 1 . D e scribes construction materials a n d techniques from antiquity to t h e nineteenth century. Excellent descriptions b u t historically n o n s p e cific. D o w n e y , Glanville. "Byzantine Architects: T h e i r T r a i n i n g a n d M e t h ods." Byzantion 18 (1948): 9 9 - 1 1 8 . Definitive study of die role of the architect, based o n G r e e k texts. Grabar, Oleg, a n d Renata H o l o d . " A T e n t h - C e n t u r y Source for A r chitecture." I n Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Eucharisterion: Studies Presented to Omelian Pritsak 3 - 4 ( 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 0 ) : 3 1 0 - 3 1 7 . Discusses the paucity of primary sources on Islamic architecture a n d examines a rare description of building practice in K h u r a s a n . H a s s a n , A h m a d Y. al-, a n d D o n a l d Hill. Islamic Technology: An Illus trated History. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 6 . Basic b u t useful source. Hill, D o n a l d . A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times. LaSalle, 111., 1984. Basic b u t useful source. K r a u t h e i m e r , Richard. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. 3d ed. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1 9 8 1 . S t a n d a r d a n d authoritative work. Lewcock, Ronald. "Architects, Craftsmen, a n d Builders: Materials a n d T e c h n i q u e s . " In Architecture of the Islatnic World, edited by George Michell, p p . 1 1 2 - 1 4 3 . L o n d o n , 1 9 7 8 . Useful description of Islamic building based on a study of "traditional" m e t h o d s practiced today. M a n g o , Cyril. Byzantine Architecture. N e w York, 1 9 7 6 . C h a p t e r 2 p r e sents a n excellent description of materials a n d m e t h o d s in Byzantine construction. Mayer, L e o . Islamic Architects and Their Works. Geneva, 1 9 5 6 . Begins with a brief b u t important discussion of the nomenclature for archi tects. W a r d - P e r k i n s , J. B . " N o t e s o n t h e Structure a n d Building M e t h o d s of Early Byzantine A r c h i t e c t u r e , " I n The Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors: Second Report, edited b y David T a l b o t Rice, p p . 5 2 - 1 0 4 . Edinburgh, 1 9 5 8 . Useful for the early period. Wilber, D o n a l d N . "Builders a n d Craftsmen of Islamic Iran: T h e E a r lier P e r i o d s . " An and Archaeology Research Papers, no. 1 0 ( D e c e m b e r 1976): 31-39. Wulff, H a n s E. The Traditional Crafts of Persia. C a m b r i d g e , Mass,, 1966. Ethnographic s t u d y of traditional building m e t h o d s in Iran, not always historically reliable b u t essential nonetheless. D . FAIRCHILD RUGGLES
c o n c e i v e d z o n e of t r a n s i t i o n f r o m s q u a r e b a s e to d i m i n u t i v e dome. T h e m a n y s h a r e d b u i l d i n g p r a c t i c e s a n d m a t e r i a l s of B y
B U L L S I T E , l o c a t e d o n t h e r i d g e of D a h a r a t e t - T a w i l a ,
z a n t i u m a n d I s l a m is e x p l a i n e d b y t h e i r h i s t o r y a n d g e o g
in t h e n o r t h e r n S a m a r i a hills, east of D o t h a n ( m a p reference
from
1807 X 2016). T h e c h a n c e d i s c o v e r y of a fine b r o n z e figu
i m p e r i a l R o m a n a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d w e r e essentially M e d i t e r
r i n e (18 c m l o n g ) s h o w i n g a z e b u b u l l , l e n t this site its n a m e
r a n e a n societies t h a t c o n f r o n t e d a n d c o m p e t e d w i t h e a c h
(see figure 1 ) . E x c a v a t i o n s c a r r i e d o u t a t t h e site b e t w e e n
raphy.
Both
societies
received
significant
legacies
o t h e r i n d i e L e v a n t . U n t i l after t h e I s l a m i c c o n q u e s t of C o n
1978 a n d 1981 b y A m i h a i M a z a r u n d e r t h e a u s p i c e s of t h e
s t a n t i n o p l e i n 1453, B y z a n t i u m a m p l y p r o v i d e d I s l a m w i t h
H e b r e w U n i v e r s i t y of J e r u s a l e m r e v e a l e d w h a t a p p e a r s to
t y p o l o g i c a l m o d e l s , b u i l d i n g t e c h n i q u e s , a n d m e t h o d s of
b e a u n i q u e e x a m p l e of a bdmd, or " h i g h p l a c e , " d a t e d to
decoration; in contrast, Islam's contribution to Byzantine ar
a b o u t 1200 BCE. T h i s is a s i n g l e - p e r i o d site, with only o n e
c h i t e c t u r e w a s less significant a n d p r i n c i p a l l y i n t h e area of
s t r u c t u r e : a circular e n c l o s u r e s u r r o u n d e d by a wall c o n -
nonfigural decoration.
s t m c t e d of large s t o n e s a b o u t 20 m i n d i a m e t e r . T h e wall is
384
BURIAL SITES plex, m o r e u r b a n i z e d societies). M o s t large settlements w e r e s u r r o u n d e d b y c e m e t e r i e s , b u t m a n y societies m a i n t a i n e d practices of i n t r a m u r a l b u r i a l — i n prehistoric p e r i o d s a n d the M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e in t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t , a n d t h r o u g h o u t preclassical history in M e s o p o t a m i a . Successive i n t e r m e n t of the d e a d in a particular burial site from o n e " p e r i o d " to the n e x t (as defined b y material culture) m o s t p r o b a b l y testifies t o continuity in s e t t l e m e n t as well. T h e reuse of I n t e r m e d i a t e B r o n z e Age shaft t o m b s in t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e Age and L a t e B r o n z e A g e for e x a m p l e (see below) m a y p o i n t to l o n g - t e r m lineage stability a n d cultural c o n t i nuity. Cemeteries of rural agriculturalists a n d pastoralists t h a t featured c o n s p i c u o u s t o m b m o n u m e n t s s u c h as d o l m e n s or tumuli m a y h a v e served as territorial m a r k e r s .
BULL SITE. F i g u r e i .
Drawings
of the bronze bullfigurine.
(Courtesy
A S O R Archives)
poorly preserved as a result of erosion. T h e b e d r o c k is ex p o s e d in m o s t of t h e enclosure except on t h e east, w h e r e a standing stone is fronted b y a small p a v e d area that m a y b e interpreted as a masseba. T h e r e m a y have b e e n a sacred free at t h e center of t h e enclosure. T h e site is t h u s a u n i q u e il lustration of a Canaanite-style high place, like t h o s e m e n t i o n e d frequently in the Bible (r Sm. 9: 13; Dt. 12: 2), a n d t h e bull figurine m a y have served a n i m p o r t a n t cultic f u n c tion. While t h e bull is k n o w n as the attribute and s y m b o l of b o t h El a n d Baal, t h e m a i n C a n a a n i t e gods, it was also a d o p t e d b y t h e n o r t h e r n tribes of Israel as a symbol of Y a h w e h (e.g., t h e golden calves J e r o b o a m set u p in the t e m p l e s at D a n a n d Bethel). T h e Bull Site m a y t h u s have b e e n a high place serving the cluster of I r o n Age I sites f o u n d in archaeological surveys in t h e vicinity. T h e s e sites r e p r e s e n t w h a t is generally identified as p a r t of t h e wave of initial I s raelite settlement in t h e central hill c o u n t r y of Palestine. BIBLIOGRAPHY Mazar, Amihai. " T h e 'Bull Site': A n Iron Age I O p e n Cult P l a c e . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 247 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 27-42. AMIHAI MAZAR
T h e m e a g e r h u m a n skeletal r e m a i n s ascribed to t h e P a leolithic, Epipaleolithic, a n d Early Neolithic p e r i o d s origi n a t e chiefly in subfloor contexts of cave, h u t , or village o c c u p a t i o n s . F r o m t h e Neolithic o n w a r d , a c o m b i n a t i o n of intramural a n d e x t r a m u r a l i n t e r m e n t was n o r m a t i v e for s e d entary o c c u p a t i o n in Syria a n d M e s o p o t a m i a , a l t h o u g h t h e i n t r a m u r a l aspect is often better r e p r e s e n t e d archaeologically. By t h e Chalcolithic p e r i o d , p a r t of t h e m o r t u a r y p r o cess (secondary burial of defleshed b o n e s for t h e m o s t p a r t ) h a d m o v e d b e y o n d t h e limits of settlement, a n d t h e c o n c e p t of a necropolis separate f r o m t h e domicile b e c a m e firmly established in t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t , as c a n b e s e e n at sites such as S h i q m i m , G h a s s u l - A d e i m e h , a n d t h e n e c r o p o l i o n t h e s o u t h e r n coastal plain. Infants c o n t i n u e d t o b e b u r i e d b e n e a t h the surfaces of r o o m s a n d c o u r t y a r d s , b u t m o r e m a t u r e individuals w e r e i n t e r r e d in burial circles ( S h i q m i m ) , in pits a r o u n d a n d within m o r t u a r y t e m p l e s ( G i l a t ) , a r o u n d elite t o m b s (Kissufim), i n cist t o m b s ( A d e i m e h ) , a n d in r o c k - h e w n and cave t o m b s along the coastal plain (Fladera, Azor, B e n - S h e m e n ) , in t h e highlands ( N a h a l Q a n a h ) , a n d in t h e J u d e a n D e s e r t . I n t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t , Early B r o n z e A g e cemeteries seem t o lie almost exclusively b e y o n d s e t t l e m e n t limits. S o m e burial sites—highland cave t o m b s in p a r t i c u l a r — s h o w continuity in utilization from tire Chalcolithic to t h e Early B r o n z e Age (at N a h a l Q a n a h , Beit S a h u r ) . A t Byblos, t o o , subfloor, i n t r a m u r a l burial—particularly in large j a r s — seems to carry t h r o u g h . T h e circles, s t o n e c o n s t r u c t e d g r a v e or nawamis, in t h e Sinai D e s e r t h a v e b e e n d a t e d t o E B I, b u t t h e nawamis cemeteries p r o b a b l y d a t e b a c k to t h e C h a l c o lithic as well. In t h e burial g r o u n d s on t h e east b a n k of t h e s o u t h e r n J o r d a n Valley, t h e Chalcolithic c i s t - t o m b tradition seems to give w a y to t h e t u m u l u s a n d d o l m e n tradition in m o r e pastoralist societies. I n a m o r e s e d e n t e r y c o n t e x t , at B a b e d h - D h r a , early E B I shaft t o m b s w e r e gradually s u p p l a n t e d by above-surface, r o u n d burial s t r u c t u r e s ( E B I b E B I I ) a n d finally b y large rectangular " c h a r n e l h o u s e s " ( E B III). I n t h e E B I V , t h e shaft-tomb tradition w a s revived. H o w e v e r , t h e B a b e d h - D h r a ' above-surface b u r i a l s t r u c c
BURIAL SITES.
In t h e ancient N e a r East, burial g r o u n d s usually reflected either tribal or familial affiliations (tribal in less c o m p l e x societies a n d familial in m o r e c o m
BURIAL SITES tures a n d t h e lengdi of t h e burial s e q u e n c e are u n i q u e t h u s far for the Early B r o n z e Age. O n e of t h e hallmarks of t h e I n t e r m e d i a t e B r o n z e Age in t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t is tire e x i s t e n c e of large cemeteries of shaft, d o l m e n , or t u m u l u s t o m b s often associated with t h e small, n o n - n u c l e a t e d settlements characteristic of this p e riod (at D h a h r M i r z b a n e h , Jebel Q a ' a q i r ) . I n d i e central highlands this p h e n o m e n o n w a s m a i n t a i n e d into t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e ( m a n y of t h e I B cemeteries s h o w c o n t i n u e d use) a n d t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e ( w h e n cave t o m b s containing multiple, successive burials s e e m t o h a v e b e e n t h e n o r m — e.g., at D o t i i a n , S h e c h e m , J e r u s a l e m ) . F r o m t h e I r o n A g e o n w a r d , burial sites are generally allied with settlements, aside f r o m b e d o u i n cemeteries in m a r g i n a l zones. I n t h e M i d d l e a n d L a t e B r o n z e A g e of t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t b o t h e x t r a m u r a l a n d i n t r a m u r a l burial w e r e practiced, s o m e t i m e s coinciding in t h e s a m e settlement, as, for ex a m p l e , at M e g i d d o a n d Jericho. I t h a s b e e n suggested t h a t i n t r a m u r a l burial w a s r e i n t r o d u c e d from t h e n o r t h e r n L e vant, w h e r e t h e p r a c t i c e h a d n e v e r died out. S o m e sites s e e m t o s h o w either exclusively i n t r a m u r a l ( T e l D a n ) or extra m u r a l ( T e l Nagila) i n t e r m e n t ; h o w e v e r , m o s t settlements of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE p o s s e s s subfloor jar burials of infants, regardless of w h e t h e r their m a i n cemetery is extraor i n t r a m u r a l . T h e a b o v e features persevere into t h e Early I r o n A g e in t h e lowland sites of tire s o u t h e r n L e v a n t , w h e r e t h e material culture shows continuity f r o m p r e v i o u s p e r i o d s . T h e hill c o u n t r y sites of t h e " I s r a e l i t e " t y p e are oddly lacking in b u r ial sites, it is generally suggested t h a t n o r m a t i v e burial p r a c tices c h a n g e d , shifting to s i m p l e i n h u m a t i o n in t h e earth or r o c k - h e a p burials w i t h o u t offerings. I n t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, burial sites are c o m p r i s e d of r o c k - h e w n t o m b s b e y o n d settlement b o u n d s . C o n t e m p o r a r y biblical references i m p l y d i e social status i n h e r e n t in t o m b o w n e r s h i p (e.g., Is. 22, 57) a n d indicate t h e p r o h i b i t i o n against i n t r a m u r a l i n h u m a t i o n b y e x c e p t i n g royalty (r Kgs. 2:10, 11:43; Chr. 9:31). O n e of t h e largest a n d b e s t - k n o w n first-millennium BCE n e c r o p o l i in tire s o u t h e r n L e v a n t is in J e r u s a l e m , m o s t of w h o s e I r o n A g e t o m b s w e r e carved i n t o the malleable limestone scarps a n d layers to its east and n o r t h , t h o u g h s o m e of t h e later I r o n A g e t o m b s w e r e p l a c e d t o the west as well (e.g., K e t e f H i n n o m , Mantilla). [See N e c r o p o l i s . ] T h e n u m b e r of k n o w n t o m b s a n d skeletons from this n e c r o p o l i s c a n n o t a c c o u n t for tire city's total p o p u l a t i o n , a n d it is a s s u m e d t h a t only t h e social elite could afford or w e r e p e r m i t t e d s u c h t o m b s . [See D e m o g r a p h y . ] It w a s also d u r i n g this p e r i o d t h a t t h e city's c e m e t e r y b e c a m e inextricably linked w i t h b o t h q u a r r y i n g a n d water storage. Q u a r r i e s b e c a m e c o n v e n i e n t v e n u e s for t o m b carving, a n d t o m b s w e r e often r e u s e d as cisterns o r reservoirs. [See Cisterns; Reservoirs.] T h e s e p a t t e r n s c o n tinued into m o d e r n times. 2
T h e I r o n A g e cemeteries in t h e P h o e n i c i a n cultural s p h e r e
385
c
(e.g., at Atiit, Achziv, T y r e , a n d o n C y p r u s ) featured shaft a n d cist t o m b s a n d c r e m a t i o n s in kraters. A t Achziv these different t o m b types s e e m to b e organized in g r o u p i n g s (by kin?), s o m e t i m e s e n c l o s e d b y a wall. T h e y can include above-surface t o m b c o n s t r u c t i o n ; funerary stelae (massebot) a n d altars; perforations in roofs; a n d e x t r a m u r a l , postburial offerings, all of w h i c h p o i n t t o a n c e s t o r veneration (or o t h e r interaction) a n d beliefs in a n afterlife. T h e cemeteries of t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d initially c o n t i n u e I r o n Age ttaditions. T h e y a r e u n i f o r m l y located outside set tlements b u t generally in close association with t h e m . M o s t of t h e k n o w n cemeteries of this p e r i o d , a n d certainly t h e largest ones, are found o n t h e L e v a n t i n e a n d C y p r i o t coasts at sites s u c h as 'Ain H i l w e h , Achziv, 'Atlit, a n d T e l l elF a r ' a h (South) and T s a m b r e s and Aphendrika, respec tively. T h e d o m i n a n t t o m b t y p e in this coastal " P h o e n i c i a n " tradition is t h e shaft t o m b . O t h e r cemeteries, m o r e often i n l a n d (at G e z e r in Palestine, K a m i d el-Loz in L e b a n o n , a n d T i l Barsip a n d U r in M e s o p o t a m i a ) are characterized b y cist t o m b s or pit graves. O f the m a n y a n d often extensive Syro-Palestinian Helle nistic-, R o m a n - , a n d B y z a n t i n e - p e r i o d necropoli, several h a v e b e e n studied a n d r e p o r t e d o n in d e p t h : P a l m y r a , Jeri c h o , J e r u s a l e m , P e t r a , B e t h - S h e ' a r i m , and M a r e s h a h ( M a r i sa). Other important necropoli have been underexcavated, u n d e r r e p o r t e d , a n d / o r widely p l u n d e r e d or d a m a g e d : G a z a , Ashkelon, B e t h - S h e a n , C a e s a r e a , S e p p h o r i s , T i b e r i a s , a n d C a e s a r e a Phillipi (Banias). Starting with this period, chalk seems t o h a v e b e e n a favored material in w h i c h to quarry o u t cave o r c h a m b e r t o m b s with loculi (burial niches) a n d / or arcosolia (recessed, a r c h e d b e n c h e s or t r o u g h s ) — i n Je rusalem, B e t l i - G u v r i n , a n d B e t h - S h e ' a r i m . W h e r e large chalk e x p o s u r e s were n o t i m m e d i a t e l y available or c o n v e nient, c o n s t t u c t e d cist t o m b s a n d m a u s o l e a were m o r e c o m m o n (e.g., Akko, B e t h - S h e a n , N e a p o l i s , C a e s a r e a , R e h o v o t in t h e N e g e v , G u s h - H a l a v , Mesillot). T h e great necropolis at P a l m y r a i n c l u d e d very large a n d ornate t o m b structures of three kinds: s u b t e r r a n e a n h y p o g e a with loculi (the m o s t f r e q u e n t ) , tower t o m b s (originally p e r h a p s serving as m o n u m e n t s for h y p o g e a ) a n d a t r i u m t o m b s (tire least f r e q u e n t ) . [See M a u s o l e u m . ] D u r i n g t h e L a t e R o m a n a n d Byzantine p e r i o d s , great cat a c o m b s developed at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m a n d B e t h - G u v r i n tiiat i n c l u d e d large halls a n d corridors filled w i t h n u m e r o u s ar cosolia, burial t r o u g h s , a n d sarcophagi. T h o s e at B e t h S h e ' a r i m w e r e i n t e n d e d for t h e i n t e r m e n t of Jews from afar, as well as for local d e n i z e n s , b u t b y this time kinship was n o t a prerequisite. T h e i r c o s m o p o l i t a n d e c o r a t i o n includes figurative portrayals a n d multilingual inscriptions. T h e B e t h - G u v r i n c a t a c o m b s , in contrast, s h o w little d e c o r a t i o n a n d a l m o s t n o figurative art. T h e y also a c c o m m o d a t e d an a d m i x t u r e of Jewish a n d Christian i n t e r m e n t . Several c e m eteries of this p e r i o d reveal structures a n d tables for t h e
386
BURIAL TECHNIQUES (e.g., at limits of example, the main
Zohar, Mattanyah. "Megalithic Cemeteries in t h e L e v a n t . " In Pastor alism in the Ixvant: Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Per spectives, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anatoly K h a z a n o v , p p . 4 3 63. Madison, Wis., 1992. T h e most u p - t o - d a t e synthesis of m e g a lithic burial fields in the L e v a n t that also attempts a socioecological explanation.
It is still an o p e n question for m o s t periods as to w h e t h e r k n o w n burial sites r e p r e s e n t the d e a d of an entire p o p u l a tion, with all its a t t e n d a n t social statuses, or only its elite. I n cemeteries associated with large settlements, t h e total n u m ber of t o m b s a n d skeletons seldom c o r r e s p o n d s to total p o p ulations calculated over long periods of o c c u p a t i o n . T h i s m a y indicate that only p a r t of the p o p u l a t i o n was i n t e r r e d in t h e associated cemetery a n d lead to t h e inference of a m e a s u r e of social stratification. In cemeteries in frontier zones n o t clearly associated with settlements—or only with lower ranking settlements—a m o r e egalitarian order m a y b e expressed a n d a larger p r o p o r t i o n of the total p o p u l a t i o n represented. T o m b t y p e a n d decoration have b e e n u s e d t o d e t e r m i n e class division (wealthy, m i d d l e , a n d p o o r classes) at R o m a n Abila in J o r d a n , t h o u g h such claims can only b e substantiated b y further evidence. O t h e r cemeteries m a y r e flect particular ideologies or lifestyles—examples b e i n g t h e simple cist burials at Q u m r a n or the interments of B y z a n t i n e m o n k s in caves scattered t h r o u g h o u t the J u d e a n desert, b o t h of which reveal a p r e d o m i n a n c e of males.
DAVID ILAN
p r e p a r a t i o n a n d c o n s u m p t i o n of funerary meals Elusa [Halusa] a n d G e r a s a [Jerash]). Beyond t h e large cities, at b o t h B e t h - S h e a n a n d Gerasa, for large, ornate t o m b m o n u m e n t s a n d mausolea lined r o a d s , as they did t h e A p p i a n W a y in R o m e .
[See also Burial T e c h n i q u e s ; C a t a c o m b s ; Cave T o m b s ; Cist Graves; D o l m e n ; G r a v e G o o d s ; and T o m b s . In addi tion, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old T e s t a m e n t , Supplement 123. Sheffield, 1992. Comprehensive study of Iron Age burial practices, t o m b form, and mortuary ideology in Judah, with a strong biblical emphasis. Campbell, S., and A. G r e e n , eds. The Archaeology of Deathinthe Ancient Near East. Oxford, 1994. Articles dealing with mortuary practices from prehistory to the m o d e r n era, including a trove of n e w data. G o n e n , Rivka. Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Canaan. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation ries, 7. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Synthetic analysis that chiefly ers t o m b typology and patterns of geographical distribution, but analysis of grave goods or belief systems.
Age Se cov little
Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. See chapter 4, "Funerary C u s t o m s and Art," for a good synopsis of late Second T e m p l e period burial practices; weak o n Jewish mortuary behavior of the later R o m a n and Byzantine p e riods. Rahmani, L. Y. "Ancient Jerusalem's Funerary C u s t o m s and T o m b s . " Biblical Archaeologist 44 (1981): 171-177,229-235; 45 (1982): 4 3 - 5 3 , 109-119. Delves into religious beliefs and the social and psycholog ical setting of burial, in addition t o illuminating the evolution of the Jerusalem necropolis archaeological!/. Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. Contains a typological, geo graphical, and chronological analysis of Persian-period t o m b forms and burial goods.
BURIAL TECHNIQUES.
T h e consistent p a t t e r n for ancient Syro-Palestinian burial t e c h n i q u e s is t h e p r a c t i c e of multiple b u r i a l s — b o t h p r i m a r y a n d s e c o n d a r y — i n subter r a n e a n c h a m b e r s . D e s p i t e periodic c h a n g e s in t o m b archi tecture and m e t h o d s of i n t e r m e n t , t h e prevailing c u s t o m w a s to b u r y family m e m b e r s together in an u n d e r g r o u n d cave. Early B r o n z e shaft graves h e l d single burials. M i d d l e B r o n z e t o m b s were larger circular u n d e r g r o u n d c h a m b e r s c o n t a i n ing multiple p r i m a r y a n d s e c o n d a r y burials, as well as m i s cellaneous grave g o o d s — i n c l u d i n g jewelry, p o t s , jars, a n d juglets (representative sites i n c l u d e G i b e o n a n d J e r i c h o ) . T h e c u s t o m of multiple burial in small caves of this t y p e c o n t i n u e d into the I r o n A g e , albeit with slight architectural i m p r o v e m e n t s — p l a s t e r e d walls a n d flooring (at L a c h i s h , for example). Significant c h a n g e s in b o t h t o m b a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d m e t h o d s of i n t e r m e n t o c c u r r e d d u r i n g t h e I r o n A g e , w i t h t h e a p p e a r a n c e of t h e " b e n c h " t o m b , a n u n d e r g r o u n d c h a m b e r w i t h waist-high b e n c h e s a r o u n d t h r e e sides, e n t e r e d b y a stairway (e.g. t h e St. E t i e n n e t o m b s in J e r u s a l e m ) . Often, t h e area u n d e r o n e of t h e b e n c h e s was h o l l o w e d o u t as a repository for s e c o n d a r y burial: corpses w e r e laid o n t h e b e n c h e s to d e c o m p o s e , a n d w h e n desiccation w a s c o m p l e t e , t h e bones w e r e g a t h e r e d into t h e repository. O v e r time, t h e repository c a m e t o h o l d t h e b o n e s of a family's a n c e s t o r s , a fact vividly c a p t u r e d in t h e biblical i d i o m " t o b e g a t h e r e d t o o n e ' s f a t h e r s " (2 Kgs. 2 2 : 2 0 a n d elsewhere). B e n c h t o m b s a n d secondary burial r e m a i n e d characteristic into t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE. T h e c o n q u e s t of Syria-Palestine b y t h e P e r s i a n s , G r e e k s , a n d R o m a n s i n t r o d u c e d foreign cultures a n d b r o u g h t a b o u t c h a n g e s in burial t e c h n i q u e s , b u t t h e t r a d i t i o n of multiple burial in u n d e r g r o u n d c h a m b e r s was n o t erased. Cist graves, individual graves lined w i t h stone slabs, a p p e a r e d w h e n t h e exiles r e t u r n e d f r o m B a b y l o n in t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE a n d d u r i n g t h e R o m a n o c c u p a t i o n . W o o d e n coffins a n d stone sarcophagi w e r e u s e d d u r i n g t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e riods (exemplary s p e c i m e n s of e a c h h a v e b e e n f o u n d a t Jer icho a n d o n M t . S c o p u s ) , b u t burial within n i c h e s in t h e walls of s u b t e r r a n e a n c h a m b e r s w a s m o r e typical. T w o types of G r e c o - R o m a n niches proliferated d u r i n g t h e R o m a n period ( 3 7 B C E - 3 2 3 C E ) : t h e a r c o s o l i u m , a b r o a d , a r c h s h a p e d shelf carved along t h e wall of a cave, u s e d for p r i m a r y burial (e.g. t h e T o m b of t h e K i n g s in J e r u s a l e m , a n d t h e t o m b s a t K h i r b e t S h e m a ' ) , a n d t h e koh, a d e e p , n a r r o w slot carved p e r p e n d i c u l a r to t h e cave wall for p r i m a r y or
BUSEIRAH s e c o n d a r y burial (e.g., d i e " C a i a p h a s " t o m b in J e r u s a l e m a n d d i e " G o l i a t h " t o m b in J e r i c h o ) . I n kohtm caves i n t h e R o m a n p e r i o d , ossuaries o r o t h e r repositories—pits, n i c h e s , a n d even s e p a r a t e c h a m b e r s a n d c h a r n e l r o o m s — w e r e f r e q u e n d y u s e d for s e c o n d a r y burial. T h e s e various forms of s e c o n d a r y burial a r e illustrated b y J a s o n ' s T o m b , t h e firstc e n t u r y t o m b s a t J e r i c h o , t h e c e m e t e r y a t D o m i n u s Flevit, a n d t h e excavated t o m b a t M e i r o n . A n c i e n t Syro-Palestinian c o n c e p t s of t h e afterlife c o h e r e closely w i t h these burial t e c h n i q u e s . T h e Israelites, for e x a m p l e , called d i e afterlife Sheol a n d d e s c r i b e d it as a d a r k u n d e r g r o u n d place w h e r e t h e souls of t h e d e a d r e p o s e d (Gn. 37:35; Jb. 17:13; a n d e l s e w h e r e ) — n o t unlike B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s u b t e r r a n e a n burial caves. D u r i n g t h e R o m a n p e riod, beliefs in the r e s u r r e c t i o n of t h e b o d y a n d expiation b y d e c o m p o s i t i o n m o t i v a t e d t h e w i d e s p r e a d practice of sec o n d a r y burial, especially in ossuaries. Syro-Palestinian b u r ial t e c h n i q u e s n e v e r i n c l u d e d efforts to preserve flesh t h r o u g h m u m m i f i c a t i o n , a p r a c t i c e k n o w n i n E g y p t as early as 2600 BCE. [See also Burial Sites; O s s u a r y ; and S a r c o p h a g u s . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for t h e Study of die Old T e s t a m e n t , Supplement 1 2 3 . Sheffield, 1992. Exemplary study of Iron Age burial techniques, p a r ticularly of the development a n d u s e of t h e b e n c h t o m b . G r e e n h u t , Zvi. " T h e ' C a i a p h a s ' T o m b in N o r t h Talpiyot, Jerusalem." 'Atiqot.21 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 6 3 - 7 1 . R e p o r t from a recent excavation of a n Early R o m a n period t o m b containing ossuaries, including one marked with the n a m e Caiaphas. M e y e r s , Eric M . "Secondary Burials in Palestine." Biblical Archaeologist 33-1 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 2 - 2 9 . T h e m o s t comprehensive survey of d i e practice of secondary burial, including all t h e relevant periods a n d sites as well as beliefs about afterlife. R a h m a n i , L . Y. "Ancient Jerusalem's F u n e r a r y C u s t o m s a n d T o m b s . " Biblical Archaeologist 44.3 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 7 1 - 1 7 7 ; 4 4 . 4 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 2 2 9 - 2 3 5 ; 45.1 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 4 3 - 5 3 ; 45.2 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 1 0 9 - 1 1 9 . Readable four-part series by the dean of Israeli t o m b archaeologists, with a useful bibliography. Covers only the area in a n d a r o u n d Jerusalem. Spencer, A. Jeffrey. Death in Ancient Egypt. N e w York, 1982. Lively introduction to t h e archaeology of Egyptian burial practices, partic ularly mummification. BYRON R . M C C A N E
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sketches of the lives a n d t e a c h i n g s of leaders o f the world's major religions. B u r r o w s e x c a v a t e d i n t h e A S O R g a r d e n in J e r u s a l e m , w h e r e h e u n c o v e r e d B y z a n t i n e t o m b s (1932). His 1941 w o r k , What Mean These Stones?, o n t h e p u r p o s e of archaeology a n d its relation t o t h e Bible a n d t h e history of culture, r e m a i n s a l a n d m a r k in t h e field. H i s w o r k o n the D e a d Sea Scrolls, p u b l i s h e d in 1955, w a s a b e s t seller a n d translated into m a n y l a n g u a g e s ; its sequel (1958) w a s equally successful. E s c h e w i n g sensationalism, these schol arly, b a l a n c e d studies deal w i t h all d i e material available a t t h e time. B u r r o w s c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e Revised S t a n d a r d Version ( R S V ) of t h e H e b r e w Bible. I n its o n g o i n g correction a n d revision, his Diligently Compared (1964) p r e s e n t s n u m e r o u s discrepancies previously overlooked. H i s last book, Jesus in the First Three Gospels (1977), is a masterly survey of t h e c o n t e n t of t h e S y n o p t i c G o s p e l s , with critical c o m m e n t and a n appraisal of scholarly opinions. I n 1961, B u r r o w s w a s a w a r d e d a n h o n o r a r y degree b y Yale. T h e o p e n i n g s e n t e n c e of d i e citation appropriately praised his career: " A s archaeologist of t h e N e a r E a s t a n d m a s t e r of its language, as a friend of b o t h Jews a n d A r a b s , as interpreter of t h e D e a d S e a Scrolls a n d translator of t h e Revised S t a n d a r d V e r s i o n of t h e Bible, y o u have m a d e a notable c o n t r i b u t i o n t o t h e life a n d learning of o u r t i m e . " BIBLIOGRAPHY Burrows, Millar. " T h e Byzantine T o m b s in t h e G a r d e n of die Jerusa lem School." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 47 ( 1 9 3 2 ) : 2 8 - 3 5 . Burrows, Millar. What Mean These Stones? The Significance of Archeol ogy for Biblical Studies. N e w York, 1 9 4 1 . Burrows, Millar. An Outline of Biblical Theology. Philadelphia, 1946. Burrows, Millar. The Dead Sea Scrolls. N e w York, 1 9 5 5 . Burrows, Millar. More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls. N e w York, 1958. Burrows, Millar. Diligently Compared: The Revised Standard Version and the King James Version of the Old Testament. L o n d o n , 1964. Burrows, Millar. Jesus in the First Three Gospels. Nashville, 1 9 7 7 . Hyatt, J. Philip, a n d R a y m o n d P . Morris, " A Bibliography of Millar Burrows' W o r k s , " In Essays in Honour of Millar Burrows, p p . 8 7 - 9 6 . Leiden, 1 9 5 9 . P o p e , Marvin H , "Millar B u r r o w s , 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 9 0 , in M e m o r i a m . " Archaeologist 44.2 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 1 6 - 1 2 1 .
Biblical
MARVIN I-I. POPE
BURROWS, MILLAR
(1889-1990), biblical scholar a n d theologian. A professor of Bible a t B r o w n University (1934-1938) a n d of biblical t h e o l o g y a t Yale University (1934-1958), B u r r o w s also served as director of t h e A m e r ican S c h o o l of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A S O R ) i n J e r u s a l e m (1931-1932, 1947-1948) a n d as p r e s i d e n t of A S O R Qerusalem a n d B a g h d a d , 1934-1948). H i s dissertation, " T h e L i t erary Relations of E z e k i e l " (Yale University, 1925), w a s p r i n t e d privately. H e c o m p l e t e d a n d edited t h e last v o l u m e of C . F . K e n t ' s Student's Old Testament (Proverbs, Job, a n d Ecclesiastes). H i s Founders of Great Religions (1931) p r e s e n t s
BUSEIRAH,
site located a b o u t 10 Ion (6 mi.) s o u d i of Tafila, 4 k m (2.5 m i . ) w e s t of t h e K i n g ' s H i g h w a y , a n d 45 k m (28 m i . ) n o r t h of P e t r a in m o d e r n J o r d a n ( 3 i ° i o ' N , 35°4o' E; m a p reference 208 X 018). L y i n g t o d i e n o r t h of t h e p r e s e n t - d a y village, t h e a n c i e n t site, o n a spur r u n n i n g n o r t h - n o r t h w e s t along t h e 1,100-meter c o n t o u r line, is d o m inated b y a m o u n d a b o u t 3,200 sq m in area. It is s u r r o u n d e d o n t h r e e sides b y d e e p ravines a n d is c o n n e c t e d to t h e m a i n land m a s s only t o t h e south, F e i n a n , t h e largest c o p p e r - p r o d u c t i o n area i n t h e s o u t h e r n L e v a n t , heavily exploited d u r -
388
BUSEIRAH
ing the Iron Age, is to its southwest, which helps to explain Buseirah's i m p o r t a n c e . T h e m o d e r n site of Buseirah was first identified w i t h b i b lical Bozrah b y U l r i c h J a s p e r Seetzen, following his trip to the southern e n d of the D e a d Sea in 1806 (Reisen durch Syrien, Palastina, Phonicien, Transjordan-lander, Arabia Petraea und Unter-Aegypten, Berlin, 1854—1859). H o w e v e r , t h e r e is no inscriptional evidence to confirm or d e n y this e q u a t i o n . B o z r a h as a city of E d o m appears several times in t h e t i e b r e w Bible (Gn. 36:33; / Chr. 1:44; Am. 1:12; Is. 34:6, 63:1; Jer. 49:13, 22). It m a y well have b e e n E d o m ' s capital, al-
t h o u g h this is n o t explicitly stated a n y w h e r e . T h e p r o p h e t A m o s predicted B o z r a h ' s o v e r t h r o w , w h i c h w a s taken as symbolic of t h e defeat of powerful E d o m a n d of G o d ' s v e n g e a n c e on his enemies (Am. 1:12). T w o o t h e r places n a m e d Bozrah exist, one in M o a b a n d one in t h e H a u r a n , t h e latter a provincial capital of R o m a n Arabia. N e l s o n G l u e c k w a s t h e first to survey B u s e i r a h . H e at first t h o u g h t t h e site w a s small a n d t h a t its major o c c u p a t i o n w a s in t h e N a b a t e a n period. F o r this r e a s o n , h e felt t h a t t h e i d e n tification of Buseirah with biblical B o z r a h was p r o b l e m a t i c a n d instead identified T a w i l a n with B o z r a h ( " E x p l o r a t i o n s in E a s t e r n Palestine a n d d i e N e g e v , " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 55 [1934]: 14). [See T a w i l a n . ] L a t e r , t h o u g h , he c h a n g e d his m i n d a n d a c c e p t e d t h e e q u a tion Buseirah = B o z r a h (Explorations in Eastern Palestine 2. A n n u a l of t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h 15 [1935]: 83). T h e size of t h e site a n d t h e n a t u r e of t h e r e m a i n s , m o r e impressive t h a n any o t h e r I r o n A g e site in E d o m , together w i t h t h e a p p a r e n t preservation of t h e a n cient n a m e , m a k e t h e identification reasonably secure. C r y s t a l - M . B e n n e t t excavated at B u s e i r a h f r o m 1971 to 1974 a n d again in 1980. H e r four p r i n c i p a l r e a s o n s for e x cavating t h e site w e r e its p r o b a b l e identification w i t h biblical B o z r a h ; the passages in Numbers 20 t h a t tell of t h e king r e fusing passage t h r o u g h his land t o t h e Israelites, a n e v e n t generally dated to a b o u t 1230 BCE; B u s e i r a h ' s p r o x i m i t y t o F e i n a n ; a n d Buseirah's s e e m i n g t h e m o s t likely site to p r o vide t h e first chronological s e q u e n c e for E d o m . B e n n e t t ' s excavations revealed a major E d o m i t e site dat ing to t h e I r o n II period, a n d possibly c o n t i n u i n g into t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d (c. s e v e n t h - s i x t h or fifth centuries BCE), with s o m e evidence of r e u s e in t h e N a b a t e a n a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s . I r o n II Buseirah was a substantial administrative center d o m i n a t e d b y two or t h r e e large buildings a n d fortified b y a t o w n wall. T h e area excavated p r o b a b l y e m b r a c e d only t h e central p a r t of die ancient city, t h e rest b e i n g h i d d e n u n d e r t h e m o d e r n village t o t h e south. N o w a t e r s o u r c e has b e e n found within t h e site; the water s u p p l y p r o b a b l y c a m e from t h e 'Ain Jenin spring a b o u t o n e kilometer t o t h e east. B e n n e t t e x c a v a t e d four m a i n areas: A - D , a n d a small s o u n d i n g , area H . A r e a A , t h e highest p o i n t o n t h e site, h a s a palatial and/or t e m p l e building in two m a i n p h a s e s built o n a d e e p fill or m o u n d . Building B , t h e earlier p h a s e , h a d overall dimensions of 77 X 38 m , with t w o e n t r a n c e s o n t h e n o r t h e a s t , b o t h off-center a n d a p p r o a c h e d b y a r a m p . I n t h e m a i n central c o u r t y a r d water flowed into a cistern t h r o u g h o n e or two drains, o n e e m e r g i n g f r o m a n o t h e r r o o m . A t t h e e n d of the c o u r t y a r d w a s a flight of shallow steps, flanked by plinths which m a y h a v e served as t h e bases of two col u m n s . T h e steps led into a long n a r r o w r o o m . All t h e floors a n d walls w e r e plastered. T h e r e w a s s o m e evidence for a m u d - b r i c k s u p e r s t r u c t u r e . Building B shows e v i d e n c e of d e struction by fire.
BUSEIRAH.
Plan of the site
(Courtesy P. Bienkowski)
Building A was built o n t o p of b u i l d i n g B b u t w a s smaller
BUSEIRAH (48 X 36 m ) . It h a d a large central space s u r r o u n d e d b y r o o m s or corridors. T h e c o r n e r s of the exterior walls s e e m to curve o u t w a r d — h e n c e , its colloquial tide, the W i n g e d Building. T h e m a i n e n t r a n c e w a s n o w o n die o p p o s i t e , soudiwest, side. Building A also s h o w e d evidence of d e struction by fire. Buildings B a n d A h a v e a generic similarity to the s o called Assyrian o p e n - c o u r t buildings in Palestine a n d t o N e o - A s s y r i a n palaces a n d residencies in M e s o p o t a m i a a n d t h e N o r t h Syrian p r o v i n c e s , b o t h in p l a n a n d in their b e i n g situated on a raised artificial citadel. T h e s e r e s e m b l a n c e s strongly suggest t h a t the B u s e i r a h buildings s h o u l d b e c o n sidered palaces, even tiiough t h e y d o n o t necessarily attest t o direct influence f r o m Assyria. T h e b a t t e r e d enclosure wall t r a c e d b e t w e e n areas A a n d B suggests a deliberate division into u p p e r a n d lower t o w n s . A r e a B , adjacent t o area A to d i e s o u t h w e s t , consisted of o r d i n a r y d o m e s t i c b u i l d i n g s , a p o s t e r n , a n d a section of t h e t o w n wall. N o c o m p l e t e p l a n s of the buildings w e r e r e c o v ered, a n d t h e stratigraphy is very c o m p l e x o n t h e u n e v e n b e d r o c k . T h e i m p r e s s i o n is of a series of rebuildings of i n dividual h o u s e s , n o t of unified b u i l d i n g p h a s e s . T h e s t o n e t o w n wall in area B is 3.80 m h i g h a n d p i e r c e d b y a small gate. It m a y b e a c a s e m a t e wall, b u t t h e evidence is i n c o n clusive: t h e " c a s e m a t e s " m a y b e later I r o n A g e houses built over the wall. T h e gate w a s b l o c k e d in t h e final p h a s e a n d t h e whole area u s e d as a p o t t e r y d u m p . A r e a C lies southeast of area A a n d m e a s u r e s a b o u t 67 X 105 m . It c o n t a i n e d a m o n u m e n t a l b u i l d i n g with a b a t h h o u s e t h a t bears s o m e similarity t o t h e area A c o m p l e x , al t h o u g h its c o m p l e t e p l a n w a s n o t r e c o v e r e d . Its two m a i n p h a s e s i n c l u d e a large q u a n t i t y of p o t t e r y from stratified contexts ( o n c e analyzed, it m a y p r o v e t o b e significant t o u n d e r s t a n d i n g the r e p e r t o i r e of E d o m i t e p o t t e r y ) . T h e later p h a s e c o n t a i n e d a cooking p o t d a t e d t o the P e r s i a n period. T h i s is so far the only direct e v i d e n c e from Buseirah for continuity of o c c u p a t i o n into t h e P e r s i a n period. T h e sim ilarity of t h e t o w n plans in areas C a n d A led B e n n e t t t o suggest t h a t the later p h a s e in area A m a y also h a v e c o n t i n u e d into t h e Persian period. Area D , adjacent to area A t o the n o r t h e a s t , a p p a r e n t l y w a s also residential, again w i t h n o c o m p l e t e p l a n r e c o v e r e d . T h e t w o small t r e n c h e s B e n n e t t excavated h a v e a stratified s e q u e n c e of t h r e e p h a s e s . H o w e v e r , t h e stratified p o t t e r y does n o t enable m e a n i n g f u l conclusions: t h e r e is a low i n c i d e n c e of p a i n t e d I r o n II p o t t e r y in t h e earliest p h a s e s , b u t this m a y b e related to t h e low s a m p l e size. A small s o u n d i n g in area H , in t h e far n o r t h e a s t c o r n e r of t h e site, revealed a massive wall a b o u t 4 m wide of c o u r s e d r u b b l e with a r u b b l e core. A later p h a s e of t h e wall a p p e a r s to b e R o m a n . T a k e n as a whole, t h e r e a p p e a r to b e several major ar chitectural p h a s e s at B u s e i r a h , a l t h o u g h each area a n d t r e n c h h a s distinct s u b p h a s e s .
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1. Phase 1. T h e earliest t o w n wall in area B is impossible to date accurately; it m a y b e n o earlier t h a n t h e seventh c e n tury BCE. 2. Phase 2. T h e possible c a s e m a t e t o w n wall in area B , building B in area A, a n d t h e earlier b u i l d i n g in area C a p p e a r to date to the s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. 3. Phase 3. T h e r e is a n i n t e r m e d i a t e p h a s e b e t w e e n build ings B a n d A in area A. 4. Phase 4. T h e later b u i l d i n g in area C , a n d possibly building A in area A, m a y date to t h e Persian p e r i o d , or c o n t i n u e into it. 5. Phase 5. Following t h e possible Persian p e r i o d o c c u pation, the site was a b a n d o n e d . A n inscribed N a b a t e a n altar a n d scatters of R o m a n s h e r d s from the first/second centuries CE, possibly c o n n e c t e d to s o m e rebuilding, are the only ev idence of later reuse. T h e major buildings at B u s e i r a h r e m a i n u n i q u e in E d o m , a l t h o u g h they fit t h e p a t t e r n of palace plans k n o w n from M e s o p o t a m i a , Syria, a n d Palestine in the Late I r o n A g e . T h e y are p r o b a b l y to b e i n t e r p r e t e d as an e x a m p l e of selec tive b o r r o w i n g b y t h e kings of E d o m a n d suggest t h a t B u s e i r a h was i n d e e d their royal city. H o w e v e r , the excava tions revealed little e v i d e n c e of l u x u r y items. Only a small n u m b e r of inscribed ostraca, seals, weights, a n d seal i m pressions on pottery w e r e r e c o v e r e d , all of w h i c h w e r e d a t e d t o a b o u t 700 BCE. T h e p a i n t e d pottery f r o m Buseirah is p a r ticularly fine a n d certainly has t h e widest repertoire of forms in E d o m . T h e dates of o c c u p a t i o n at B u s e i r a h are subject to revision b y future discoveries. M u c h of this u n c e r t a i n t y hinges on t h e d a t i n g of I r o n II p o t t e r y in E d o m . W h i l e t h e pottery f r o m Buseirah c a n n o t at p r e s e n t b e d a t e d earlier t h a n the seventh c e n t u r y BCE, an earlier d a t e , p e r h a p s in t h e eighth or even n i n t h centuries, c a n n o t b e conclusively excluded. T h e r e is n o I r o n I p o t t e r y f r o m B u s e i r a h , so a date earlier t h a n 1000 BCE is definitely e x c l u d e d . T h e e n d of occupation at B u s e i r a h is similarly u n c e r t a i n . A l t h o u g h the Iron II p e r i o d traditionally e n d s with t h e P e r s i a n c o n q u e s t in 539 BCE, the c u r r e n t u n d e r s t a n d i n g of I r o n II pottery in T r a n s j o r d a n s u g gests t h a t it c o n t i n u e d largely u n c h a n g e d into the Persian period. If this was so, o c c u p a t i o n at Buseirah m a y h a v e c o n tinued b e y o n d t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE, p e r h a p s d o w n to a b o u t 400 BCE. [See also E d o m ; F e i n a n ; and the biography
0/Bennett.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bartlett, J o h n R. Edom and the Edomites. Sheffield, 1989. M o s t u p - t o date and comprehensive work on the Edomites, including critical evaluation of the data on Buseirah a n d Bozrah. Bennett, Crystal-M. "Excavations at Buseirah," Levants ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 1 - 1 1 ; 6 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 1-24; 7 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 1 - 1 9 ; 9 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 1 - 1 ° . Preliminary reports that should now be read in conjunction with the reappraisals by Bienkowski (below). Bennett, Crystal-M, "Excavations at Buseirah (Biblical B o z r a h ) . " In Midian, Moab, and Edom: The History and Archaeology of Late Bronze
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and Iran Age Jordan and North-West Arabia, edited by John F . A. Sawyer and David J. A. Clines, p p . 9 - 1 7 . Sheffield, 1 9 8 3 . General overview. Bienkowski, Piotr. " U m m el-Biyara, Tawilan, and Buseirah in R e t r o spect." Levant 2 2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 9 1 - 1 0 9 . Reevaluates the excavations ten years after the last season a n d suggests slight changes in the dating proposed by the excavator (see p p . 1 0 1 - 1 0 3 ) . Bienkowski, Piotr. " T h e D a t e of Sedentary Occupation in E d o m : Ev idence from U m m el-Biyara, Tawilan, and Buseirah." In Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan, edited by Piotr Bienkowski, p p . 9 9 - 1 1 2 . Sheffield, 1 9 9 2 . Surveys the evi dence for the earliest Iron Age occupation at Buseirah (see p p . 101-104).
Oakeshott, Marion F . " T h e E d o m i t e Pottery'-" In Midian, Moab, and Edom; The History and Archaeology of Late Bronze and Iron Age Jordan and North- West Arabia, edited by John F . A. Sawyer a n d David J. A. Clines, pp. 5 3 - 6 3 . Sheffield, 1 9 8 3 . Useful overview of the repertoire of pottery from E d o m , a n d particularly that from Buseirah. Puech, Emile. " D o c u m e n t s epigraphiques de Buseirah." Levant ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 1 1 - 2 0 . Preliminary report,
9
PIOTR BIENKOWSKI
BUTLER, HOWARD CROSBY (1872-1922), p r o m i n e n t A m e r i c a n archaeologist a n d architectural histo rian. Butler b e c a m e a professor of art a n d archaeology at Princeton University in 1905 a n d in 1920 was n a m e d t h e first director of its School of Architecture. I n 1899-1900 h e led a survey expedition t o north-central Syria, w h e r e h e l o cated all of t h e m o n u m e n t s t h a t h a d b e e n n o t e d earlier b y the M a r q u i s de V o g u e , in addition to m a n y m o r e , mostly R o m a n and Early Christian structures of t h e first c e n t u r y BCE t o t h e seventh c e n t u r y CE. I n s u b s e q u e n t expeditions (1904-1905, 1909), h e studied the m o r e i m p o r t a n t sites in detail and explored s o u t h e r n Syria, particularly Philadelphia ( A m m a n , in m o d e r n J o r d a n ) , a n d t h e N a b a t e a n sites in t h e H a u r a n , such as Suweida a n d Seeia, which yielded n u m e r ous inscriptions a n d sculptures. Butler contributed several volumes to t h e t w o publication series resulting f r o m these expeditions: Publications of a n A m e r i c a n Archaeological Expedition t o Syria in 1899-1900 (1903); a n d Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological E x p e d i t i o n t o Syria in 1904-1905 a n d 1909 (1907-1920). At the invitation of t h e O t t o m a n authorities, Butler ex cavated at Sardis, t h e capital of L y d i a , from 1910 to 1914, with a brief season in 1922. Excavation of the city of C r o e sus, particularly t h e f a m o u s temple of Artemis, attracted worldwide attention. Butler i n a u g u r a t e d the Publications of the A m e r i c a n Society for t h e Excavation of Sardis (1922). A later m o n o g r a p h in this series a p p e a r e d p o s t h u m o u s l y (I925)Butler's pioneering success cleared the way for A m e r i c a n archaeology in Syria a n d T u r k e y . A p o p u l a r teacher, h e e m phasized practical studies of architectural t e c h n i q u e . In a d dition to his major w o r k s , he a u t h o r e d several p o p u l a r books. [See also A m m a n ; Sardis; and Suweida.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Butler, Howard Crosby. Scotland's Ruined Abbeys. N e w York, 1 8 9 9 . Leisurely, anecdotal survey with engraved illustrations. Buder, H o w a r d Crosby. The Story of Athens: A Record of the Life and Art of the City of the Violet Crown Read in Its Ruins and in the Lives of Great. Athenians. N e w York, 1 9 0 2 . Athens from mythological to modern times. D a t e d . Butler, H o w a r d Crosby. Architecture and Other Arts. Publications of an American Archaeological Expedition to Syria in 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 0 0 , P a r t 2 . N e w York, 1 9 0 3 . Selective survey of p r e - R o m a n , R o m a n , a n d early Christian architecture of southern a n d south-central Syria, with notes on sculpture, mosaics, and wall paintings. Butler, H o w a r d Crosby. Ancient Architecture in Syria. 2 vols. Publica tions of the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 0 5 and 1 9 0 9 , Division 2. Leiden, 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 2 0 . Results of sur veys and excavations at several sites in s o u t h e r n a n d north-central Syria, including Seeia, A m m a n , Bosra, a n d U m m el-Jimal, with e m phasis on N a b a t e a n , R o m a n , a n d early Christian architecture. N u merous plans and drawings, including some fanciful reconstructions. Buder, H o w a r d Crosby. Sardis: The Excavations, 1910-1914. Publica tions of the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis, vol. 1 , 1 . Leiden, 1 9 2 2 . Foundation for later research at Sardis ( H a r v a r d - C o r nell excavations, 1 9 5 8 - ) . D e v o t e d primarily to excavation of the T e m p l e of Artemis, b u t also Lycian a n d R o m a n t o m b s . Butler, H o w a r d Crosby. The Temple of Artemis. 2 vols. Publications of the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis, vol. 2 . 1 . L e i d e n , 1 9 2 5 . Still the basic work o n the architecture, b u t the historical c o n clusions (archaic a n d Persian phases) have n o w been discredited. Collins, V. Lansing, ed. Howard Crosby Butler, 1872-1922. 1 9 2 3 . Includes full bibliography.
Princeton,
J. MICHAEL PADGETT
B Y B L O S , s e a p o r t located in L e b a n o n , o n t h e eastern coast of t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea, at t h e foot of t h e L e b a n e s e m o u n t a i n s 60 k m (25 mi.) n o r t h of B e i r u t o n t h e T r i p o l i highway, ( a p p r o x . 34 N , 36 E ) . T h e site has b e e n k n o w n t h r o u g h o u t its l o n g history in several variants o n its n a m e : in m o d e r n Arabic as Jebail, Jebeil, Jubail; b y t h e C r u s a d e r s as Gibelet; in biblical H e b r e w as G e b a l (1 Kgs. 5:18,32; Ez. 7 : 9 j Jos. 13:5); in E g y p t i a n as kbn, kpny, kbny; a n d in B a b ylonian as G u b l a . T h e Greeks p r o b a b l y gave t h e city its n a m e at a b o u t t h e e n d of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m B C E — t h e G r e e k bublos, " p a p y r u s scroll." E g y p t i a n p a p y r u s c a m e to G r e e c e t h r o u g h P h o e n i c i a a n d Byblos for t r a n s s h i p m e n t t o t h e A e g e a n area. T h e English w o r d Bible is derived t h r o u g h medieval L a t i n f r o m t h e G r e e k ta Biblia, " t h e b o o k s . " [See Papyrus.] 0
0
2
I n N a p l e s , Italy, in 1881, a s a n d s t o n e b u s t f r o m Byblos surfaced in t h e antiquities market. I t w a s of O s o r k o n I, p h a r a o h of the t w e n t y - s e c o n d dynasty (924-889 BCE), a n d it h a d o n it a c a r t o u c h e a n d a P h o e n i c i a n alphabetic d e d i c a t o r y inscription b y K i n g Elibaal of Byblos. I t w a s sold in Paris in 1910 a n d subsequently d o n a t e d to t h e L o u v r e M u s e u m (where it r e m a i n s ) ; in 1925 R e n e D u s s a u d t r a n s l a t e d t h e inscription. Also i n t h e D r e h e m archives (the U r III archives in D r e h e m , just s o u t h of N i p p u r ) a n d d a t e d t o a b o u t 2050 BCE is the earliest c u n e i f o r m e c o n o m i c t e x t referring to B y b -
BYBLOS los, m e n t i o n i n g I b d a d i , t h e ensi (a tide m e a n i n g " r u l e r " in S u m e r i a n ) of Byblos ( W a r d , 1963). [See the biography of Dussaud.] I n i860 t h e F r e n c h s a v a n t E r n e s t R e n a n , r e p r e s e n t i n g N a p o l e o n I l l ' s mission in P h o e n i c i a , located Byblos, m a d e several s o u n d i n g s (even t h o u g h t w e n t y - n i n e h o u s e s o c c u p i e d t h e site), a n d s k e t c h e d t h e site a n d t h e sacred s p r i n g , t h e a r c h e d , roofed " P o o l of t h e P h o e n i c i a n P r i n c e s s . " I n 1864 h e p u b l i s h e d his findings a n d inscriptions, i n c l u d i n g t h e R e n a n bas-relief n o w also i n d i e L o u v r e . T h e city w a s r e c o g n i z e d as Byblos certainly b y 1899. F r e n c h a r c h a e o l o gist Pierre M o n t e t u n d e r t o o k f o u r c a m p a i g n s (1921-1924) t h e r e , w h i c h u n c o v e r e d t h e so-called E g y p t i a n a n d Syrian t e m p l e s (later identified as t h e single T e m p l e of Baalat G e b a l ) , along w i t h t h r e e m u t i l a t e d l i m e s t o n e colossi a n d m a n y Egyptian O l d K i n g d o m inscriptions, which h e published in 1928 ( M o n t e t , 1928). A landslide in 1922 revealed t h e sar c o p h a g u s of a Byblite k i n g w i t h gifts from t h e E g y p t i a n p h a r a o h A m e n e m h a t III ( c . n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE); eight o t h e r t o m b s were e x c a v a t e d in this royal necropolis. I n 1930 t h e L e b a n e s e g o v e r n m e n t e x p r o p r i a t e d tire h o u s e s built o n t h e site. I n 1926 t h e c o m m i s s i o n e r of F r a n c e in Syria r e o p e n e d t h e excavations, s p o n s o r e d b y t h e L e b a n e s e g o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e F r e n c h A c a d e m y of I n s c r i p t i o n s a n d u n d e r t h e direction of F r e n c h archaeologist M a u r i c e D u n a n d . D u n a n d e x c a v a t e d from 1928 until t h e L e b a n e s e civil w a r in t h e 1970s, u n d e r t h e a u s p i c e s of t h e L e b a n e s e g o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e L o u v r e . [See the biographies of Renan, Montet, andDunand] M a j o r R e m a i n s . Byblos is o n e of t h e few r e m a i n i n g walled cities in L e b a n o n . T h e walls h a v e massive r e c t a n g u l a r t o w e r s , p i e r c e d b y t w o a l m o s t - i n t a c t a r c h e d gates o n t h e east a n d t h e n o r t h ; p a r t of t h e p o r t defenses e x t e n d s 1,000 m t o t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n . T h e r e a r e four e n t r a n c e s : t h e east gate is t h e m a i n e n t r y a n d t h e n o r t h w e s t t o w e r (of six barlongue towers) is t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t . C o n s t r u c t e d in 1197 CE, t h e walls are of m e d i o c r e c o n s m i c t i o n . O n l y from t h e nortii c a n Byblos b e v i e w e d as a walled city. A d e e p excavation m a r k s t h e p o s i t i o n of t h e s a c r e d spring or well t h a t w a s r e a c h e d b y a d e s c e n d i n g r a m p . T h e site is g u a r d e d b y a C r u s a d e r citadel ( o n t h e n o r t h , facing t h e sea), with its original east gate, u n d e r t h e twelfth-century CE chapel of N o t r e D a m e d e la P o r t e . O c c u p a t i o n a l H i s t o r y . Built o n a p r o m o n t o r y with t w o h a r b o r s , close t o L e b a n o n ' s c e d a r - b e a r i n g m o u n t a i n s , B y b los h a s b e e n o c c u p i e d for m o r e t h a n seven t h o u s a n d years. A l t h o u g h o n e legend states t h a t Byblos w a s f o u n d e d b y t h e first of t h e Semitic g o d s , E l , a c c o r d i n g to Philo of Byblos, " K r o n o s p u t a wall a b o u t his h a b i t a t i o n a n d f o u n d e d Byblos in P h o e n i c i a " (Felix J a c o b y , Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, L e i d e n , 1958, n o . 790). A l t h o u g h Byblos h a s b e e n o c c u p i e d since t h e N e o l i t h i c p e r i o d (6000 B C E ) , t h e r e a r e n o early architectural r e m a i n s . I n a b o u t 4500 BCE small m o n o c e l l u l a r h o u s e s a p p e a r w i t h c r u s h e d - l i m e s t o n e floors
391
a n d shallow graves in w h i c h t h e d e c e a s e d were placed o n their b a c k o r i n a half-flexed position. Incised pottery w a s f o u n d i n o n e s u c h grave. O t h e r dwellings with b e a t e n - e a r t h floors held " c r a d l e , " or cyst, burials in w h i c h t h e deceased, in a semiflexed o r flexed position, w e r e s u r r o u n d e d b y u p right stones associated w i t h c e r a m i c bowls witii so-called chicken-scratched d e c o r a t i o n s . Also k n o w n from this p e r i o d are a p e b b l e idol a n d a fine tool r e p e r t o i r e . T h e site's C h a l colithic levels (3500-3000 BCE) a r e k n o w n for their n u m e r ous (1,207) jar burials (with t h e d e c e a s e d in a flexed position a c c o m p a n i e d b y ceramic offerings) a n d large m o n o c e l l u l a r h o u s e s with b e a t e n - e a r t h o r p e b b l e floors, s o m e having i n terior partitions. B y t h e Early B r o n z e A g e (3000-2300 B C E ) , Byblos was a n i m p o r t a n t C a n a a n i t e W e s t Semitic coastal city-state a n d a timber a n d shipbuilding center. Close ties t o O l d K i n g d o m E g y p t a r e revealed in n u m e r o u s inscriptions of the E g y p t i a n pharaohs Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus, Wenis, and Sah u r e , as well as in thirty-six inscriptions bearing t h e n a m e s of P e p i I a n d P e p i II. E g y p t i a n s d o m i n a t e d t h e coastal plain a n d sent t o Byblos for c e d a r w o o d for their shipbuilding, royal s a r c o p h a g i , t o m b , a n d palace construction, as well as for c e d a r oil u s e d in m u m m i f i c a t i o n . T h e h o u s e s dated to 3000 BCE are r e c t a n g u l a r w i t h s a n d s t o n e slab s u p e r s t r u c t u r e s c o n s t r u c t e d i n a h e r r i n g b o n e p a t t e r n . T h e h o u s e s have in terior partitions a n d b e a t e n - e a r t h floors a n d s o m e i n c o r p o r a t e a c o u r t y a r d a n d u s e d w o o d posts t o s u p p o r t t h e roof. T h e t e m p l e of Balaat G e b a l , " l a d y of B y b l o s " ( D u n a n d ' s building 40 [ D u n a n d , 1937-1958]; a n d M o n t e t ' s Syrian t e m p l e [ M o n t e t , 1929]), is a m o n g t h e earliest m o n u m e n t a l structures in Phoenicia. T h e lady of Byblos has a k n o w n relationship t o t h e E g y p t i a n g o d d e s s H a t h o r , a n d t h e t e m p l e p r o d u c e d m a n y i n s c r i b e d E g y p t i a n offerings. B y 2800 BCE, Byblos w a s a p l a n n e d city with massive walls a n d t w o gates, o n e o n t h e land side a n d o n e at t h e seaport; d i e city wall h a d a sloping glacis with cobblestones on t h e n o r t h exterior surface a n d s q u a r e buttresses o n t h e interior (see figure 1). B y 2600 BCE, D u n a n d ' s tripartite Temple ent ( L - s h a p e d temple) w a s c o n s t r u c t e d facing t h e T e m p l e of Balaat G e b a l b u t s e p a r a t e d from it b y a sacred lake. ( S e e Jidejian, 1968, p p . 209-212, for t h e local dynasty of rulers w h o w e r e d e p e n d e n t o n E g y p t from 2350 t o 2333 BCE.) A n A m o r i t e invasion destroyed Byblos b e t w e e n a b o u t 2300 a n d 2100 BCE. A w a v e of n e w c o m e r s s u c c e e d e d it a n d t h e city w a s rebuilt. A jar with nearly o n e h u n d r e d valuable objects, b u r i e d in a b o u t 1950 BCE (seals, amulets, cylinder seals, b a b o o n figurines, a n d m o r e t h a n forty b r o n z e a n d sil v e r t o r q u e s ) , was r e c o v e r e d b y M o n t e t in his excavations in t h e 1920s ( M o n t e t , 1929). I n t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e (1900-1600 BCE), d i e Byblites generally sided with t h e E g y p t i a n s against c o m m o n e n e mies. Byblos, a n international center, also t r a d e d with C r e t e , as evidenced b y t h e K a m a r e s wares f o u n d . T h e M B p e r i o d is distinguished b y t h e n i n e royal necropolis s a r c o p h a g i
392
BYBLOS plays a variety of artistic influences ( E g y p t i a n lotus designs, Hittite c r o u c h i n g lions, a Syrian r o p e design) as well as t h e earliest Archaic P h o e n i c i a n alphabetic inscription, w h i c h is incised a r o u n d t h e lid. [See A h i r a m Inscription.] U n d e r Ashurnasirpal II t h e Assyrians c o n q u e r e d Byblos a r o u n d 877 BCE a n d held t h e city until t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d (after a b o u t 529 BCE). T h e city was a vassal of t h e A c h a e m e n i d s f r o m 539-332 BCE. T h e y reinforced t h e city walls with yet a n o t h e r glacis (the last of seven successive layers e x t e n d i n g f r o m t h e Early B r o n z e A g e to t h e fifth c e n t u r y BCE). A fifth-century stela of Yehawmilk, king of Byblos has b e e n recovered, f o u n d shortly after R e n a n ' s excavations in 1869. E x c e p t for a large platform, there a r e few P e r s i a n traces in t h e city. In 333-332 BCE, A l e x a n d e r t h e G r e a t c o n q u e r e d t h e coast a n d Byblos voluntarily b e c a m e p a r t of his e m p i r e . U n d e r t h e Seleucids, after t h e c o n q u e s t of A n t i o c h u s III in 200 BCE, t h e city b e c a m e completely hellenized. I n t h e s e c o n d c e n tury, tiiis was d i e h o m e of Philo. By 64 BCE, o r the e n d of t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d , t h e city h a d lost m o s t of its i m p o r tance.
BYBLOS. F i g u r e I . Early Bronze Age city walls, (Courtesy M . Jou-
found in u n d e r g r o u n d c h a m b e r s r e a c h e d b y 12-meter-long tunnels h e w n into the cliff. I n this period t h e T e m p l e of Balaat G e b a l u n d e r w e n t modifications. T h e Obelisk t e m p l e which was c o n s t r u c t e d above M o n t e t ' s Syrian t e m p l e , was m o v e d to its p r e s e n t site in the 1930s; it h a d b e e n erected over the ruins of t h e larger E B t e m p l e , a n d D u n a n d rebuilt t h e Obelisk t e m p l e a s h o r t distance away from t h e E B t e m ple so he could excavate it (see figure 2). T h e Obelisk t e m p l e contains m o r e t h a n twenty-six votary obelisks in its c o u r t yard. M a n y precious articles were found in all of these c o n texts. D u r i n g the L a t e B r o n z e A g e (1600-1200 B C E ) , Byblos, like her coastal n e i g h b o r s , felt t h e i m p a c t of t h e Hittites (13 80-1355 BCE) . D u r i n g t h e Iron Age (1200-539 BCE), B y b los was die center for a n extensive p a p y r u s trade with E g y p t a n d an i m p o r t a n t P h o e n i c i a n settlement. A n active seaport, it was referred t o b y Tiglath-Pileser I (ANET, n o . 274), t h e hapless W e n a m u n (ANET, nos. 25-29), a n d t h e E g y p t i a n text of T h u t m o s e III (Breasted, 1906-1907, n o . 492). T h e principal find from the P h o e n i c i a n period is t h e A h i r a m sar c o p h a g u s ( n o w in t h e Beirut National M u s e u m ) , w h i c h dis
R o m a n Byblos (64 BCE-330 CE) w a s t h r e a t e n e d b y t h e I t u reans in t h e first c e n t u r y BCE. It was a hellenized a n d r o m a n i z e d classical city r e s p l e n d e n t with t e m p l e s , shrines, a s u r r o u n d i n g c o l o n n a d e , g r a n d a v e n u e s , villas, a n d m o n u m e n t s ; d u r i n g t h a t time, the settlement s p r e a d to t h e adja cent countryside. T h e R o m a n settlement d e v e l o p e d along t h e same p l a n as t h e Hellenistic city: its R o m a n street e x t e n d e d east from t h e acropolis, t h r o u g h t h e C r u s a d e r - A r a b castie m o a t , a n d into t h e m o d e r n t o w n . T o t h e n o r t h a n d east of the acropolis w a s t h e c o m m e r c i a l a n d residential sec tor. T w e l v e m e t e r s below the acropolis a s e c o n d - c e n t u r y CE c o l o n n a d e d street is positioned going n o r t h e a s t , e x t e n d i n g to m e e t t h e p o r t street. A t a b e n d in t h e r o a d , east of die castle's bridge, is a n apsidal n y m p h a e u m o u t of w h i c h w a t e r flowed into a fluted pool. S c u l p t u r e a d o r n e d its niches, t h e best-preserved of w h i c h is of H y g e i a a n d a g r o u p m a d e u p of Achilles and Pentliesilea a n d O r p h e u s with animals (die fountain is in d i e Beirut N a t i o n a l M u s e u m ) . T o t h e east of t h e n y m p h a e u m was a f o u r - c o l u m n e d p o r t i c o . Little of t h e G r e e k , R o m a n , -and B y z a n t i n e eras r e m a i n s , e x c e p t for p a v e d streets, a C o r i n t h i a n c o l o n n a d e , a theater, a n y m p h a e u m , a n d s o m e s c u l p t u r e a n d mosaics f r o m t h e third c e n t u r y CE. R o m a n mosaics illustrating t h e l e g e n d a r y A t a lanta were u n e a r t h e d b y D u n a n d a n d a large villa t o t h e southeast c o n t a i n e d mosaics d a t e d to t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE. All t h a t r e m a i n s from classical Byblos are r e u s e d stones in t h e citadel; scattered granite c o l u m n s , of w h i c h six h a v e ' b e e n reerected as p a r t of t h e c o l o n n a d e t h a t e x t e n d e d from t h e A d o n i s t e m p l e to t h e lower t o w n t o t h e n o r t h ; t h e n y m p h a e u m ; a n u m b e r of t o m b s ; a n d p a r t of a t e m p l e / c h u r c h structure. T h e b e s t surviving e x a m p l e of classical architec t u r e is t h e late s e c o n d - c e n t u r y CE r e s t o r e d hemicycle t h e a t e r with seven sectors of steps t h a t was m o v e d b y D u n a n d in t h e 1930s a n d r e c o n s t r u c t e d in r e d u c e d f o r m i n its p r e s e n t
BYBLOS
393
position overlooking t h e sea w e s t of t h e acropolis. T h e t h e a t e r ' s orchestra, w h i c h was built a b o u t 218 CE, was e m b e l lished with a delicately crafted m o s a i c of t h e b u s t of B a c c h u s , s u r r o u n d e d w i t h w h i t e tesserae a n d a black b o r d e r , w h i c h also is n o w in the B e i r u t N a t i o n a l M u s e u m . T h e r a m p a r t s of t h e city w e r e o n c e r e c o n s t r u c t e d with t h e aid of H e r o d t h e G r e a t Q o s e p h u s , War 1.422).
blocks. T h e t o p o g r a p h y is so c o m p l i c a t e d that Chalcolithic a n d R o m a n r e m a i n s of g r a y or r o s e - r e d granite can b e found at t h e s a m e level. R e m a i n s are scattered o n t h e land a n d on t h e sea floor, a n d m a n y are built into t h e C r u s a d e r castle, t h e p o r t ' s defense walls, a n d m o d e r n h o u s e s .
I n t h e R o m a n p e r i o d Byblos w a s t h e pilgrim center of tire A d o n i s cult a n d w a s k n o w n for his t o m b site. T h e m a i n t e m p l e to A d o n i s , w h i c h w a s c o n s t r u c t e d a r o u n d a central c o n e - s h a p e d altar, or baetyl, is p i c t u r e d o n R o m a n coins of t h e e m p e r o r M a c r i n u s (217-218 CE). It is n o t clear w h e r e this t e m p l e stood in antiquity. A G r e c o - R o m a n necropolis of multistoried r o c k - c u t t o m b s lies s o u t h of tire p r e s e n t - d a y excavations, in t h e rock cliffs b e t w e e n t h e h i g h w a y a n d t h e sea.
Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Eighteenth-Century Princes of Byblos and the Chronology of die M i d d l e B r o n z e . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 1 7 6 (Nov. 1989): 3 8 - 4 6 . Breasted, James H , Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. 5 vols. Chicago, 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 0 7 . D u n a n d , Maurice. Fouilles de Byblos. 5 vols. Paris, 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 5 8 . D u n a n d , Maurice. " R a p p o r t preliminaire sur les fouilles de Byblos." Bulletin duMusiede Beyrouth 9 ( 1 9 4 9 - 1 9 5 0 ) : 5 3 - 7 4 ; 12 ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 7 - 2 3 ; 13 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 7 3 - 8 6 ; 16 ( 1 9 6 4 ) : 6 9 - 8 5 . Reports by t h e site's most p r o lific excavator.
T h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d (330-634 CE) is poorly r e p r e s e n t e d at Byblos b e c a u s e of t h e later r e u s e of its buildings. R e m a i n s are f o u n d in only t h r e e areas: seven rows of flagstones a t t h e T e m p l e of Baalat G e b a l , a n area n e a r t h e R o m a n c o l o n n a d e with a circular basin a n d a wall, a n d a n e a s t - w e s t street a s sociated with s h o p s . I n t h e t i m e of Justinian (551 C E ) , a se vere e a r t h q u a k e r o c k e d all t h e P h o e n i c i a n cities, i n c l u d i n g Byblos. I n t h e Early A r a b p e r i o d (636-1108 C E ) , Byblos w a s u n d e r t h e control of B a n u A m m a r of T r i p o l i , T h e b r i d g e f r o m t h e site to t h e C r u s a d e r castle was erected then. S t r a t i f i c a t i o n . T h e r e u s e of architectural elements of earlier p e r i o d s has d i s t u r b e d t h e stratigraphy, or a r c h a e o logical levels, at Byblos. M i x e d deposits a b o u n d a n d m o d e r n h o u s e s are built all over t h e site. Byblos also served as a q u a r r y for later builders; e v e n m o d e r n builders u s e t h e old
\MM-
BYBLOS.
Figure
BIBLIOGRAPHY
D u n a n d , Maurice. Byblos: Its History, Ruins, and Legends. 2d ed. Beirut, 1968. Jidejian, Nina. Byblos through the Ages. Beirut, 1968. Comprehensive history of Byblos through tine ages, with strong coverage of ancient, classical, and contemporary references. Includes a good bibliography through the late 1960s. Joukowsky, Mardia Sharp. The Young Archaeologist in the Oldest Port City in the World. Beirut, 1988, Children's book exploring the history and archaeology of Byblos, M o n t e t , Pierre. Byblos et I'Egypte: Quatre campagnes de fouilles d Gebeil 1021-1024. Paris, 1929. C o m p r e h e n s i v e publication of four early ex peditions. Pritchard, James B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Tes~ lament. 3d ed, with supp. Princeton, 1 9 7 8 . Renan, Ernest. Mission de Phenicie. Paris, 1864. One of the earliest works on Phoenician sites. Tufhell, Olga, a n d William A. W a r d . "Relations between Byblos, Egypt, a n d Mesopotamia at t h e E n d of the T h i r d Millennium B . C . " Syria 43 (1966): 1 6 5 - 2 4 1 . Specialized study of the M o n t e t jar and
ft*
2. Temple of the Obelisks.
(Courtesy M . Joukowsky)
394
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its contents; see W a r d and Dever (below) for a recent study of the jar. W a r d , William A. " E g y p t and the East Mediterranean in die Early Second Millennium B . C . " O r 30 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 2 2 - 4 5 , 1 2 9 - 1 5 5 . W a r d , William A. " E g y p t and the East Mediterranean from P r e - D y nastic T i m e s to die E n d of the Old K i n g d o m . " Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 6 (1963): 1 - 5 7 . Survey of political and cultural relations between Egypt, Asia, and the Aegean world. W a r d , William A., and William G. Dever. Studies on Scarab Seals. Vol. 3, Scarab Typologies and Archaeological Context. San Antonio, 1994. See chapter 4 for the most recent study of the M o n t e t jar and its contents. MARTHA SHARP JOUKOWSKY
BYZANTINE EMPIRE. T h e t e r m Byzantium, orig inally t h e n a m e of t h e ancient G r e e k colony o n w h i c h C o n stantinople was f o u n d e d , is u s e d conventionally to designate t h e eastern p a r t of tire R o m a n e m p i r e , which survived after the fall of R o m e i n 4 7 6 CE. T h e Byzantines called themselves Romaioi (i.e., R o m a n s ) , a n d their c o u n t r y Romania, indi cating tire historical continuity with t h e R o m a n empire. T h e fundamental cultural elements of Byzantine civilization w e r e three: G r e e k language a n d education, R o m a n political t h e ory a n d legal system, a n d O r t h o d o x religion. History, Society, E c o n o m y , C u l t u r e . Constantine I (324-337) f o u n d e d tire n e w e m p i r e w h e n h e transferred his capital to B y z a n t i u m , r e n a m e d C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , o n t h e B o s p o r u s a n d recognized Christianity. I n the course of t h e early Byzantine period (324-c. 600) t h e empire gradually b e c a m e Christian. T h i s early p e r i o d is also called "late R o m a n " or "late antiquity" b y those scholars w h o emphasize t h e c o n tinuity with t h e R o m a n past. Julian the Apostate (361-363) in vain tried to restore p a g a n i s m . T h e o d o s i u s I (379-395) strengthened the Christian C h u r c h with a series of m e a sures, a n d at his death t h e e m p i r e was p e r m a n e n t l y divided b e t w e e n die G r e e k East a n d t h e L a t i n W e s t . T h e B y z a n t i n e emperors successfully diverted t h e n u m e r o u s b a r b a r i c in vaders with war or diplomacy. I n 476 R o m e fell to t h e O s trogoths, the R o m a n E m p i r e in t h e W e s t collapsed, a n d Constantinople b e c a m e R o m e ' s heir, t h e second R o m e . T h e pressure of t h e b a r b a r i a n s increased a n d Anastasius I ( 4 9 1 518) attempted t h e r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h e defense system. Justinian I (527-565) u n d e r t o o k large-scale building activity described in P r o c o p i u s ' s Buildings. T h e major w a r s to r e store the frontiers of t h e R o m a n E m p i r e , however, w e a k e n e d the state's r e s o u r c e s , a n d the recovery of large districts in t h e W e s t was t e m p o r a r y . After t h e Justinianic renovatio (reconstruction) t h e e m p i r e suffered serious losses: t h e D a n u b i a n frontier collapsed because of t h e invading Avars a n d Slavs. T h e p e r m a n e n t installation of t h e Slavs in t h e Balkan peninsula from t h e late sixth century created a p r o found crisis in t h e area, a n d its n o r t h e r n territories w e r e lost forever. T o t h e s o u t h in t h e G r e e k m a i n l a n d a slow process of assimilation a n d christianization of t h e Slavs b e g a n . T h e early Byzantine p e r i o d is t h e period of t h e great
Christological controversies. I n t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y t h e fa thers of t h e O r t h o d o x C h u r c h s h a p e d t h e O r t h o d o x d o g m a in their theological works. Ecclesiastical s y n o d s c o n d e m n e d t h e heresies a n d defined t h e d o g m a with a c c u r a c y . T h e c o n troversies t h a t w e r e dealt with b y t h e e c u m e n i c a l councils were Christological (they tried to define t h e n a t u r e of C h r i s t ) . T h e C o u n c i l of N i c a e a I (325) a n d t h a t of C o n stantinople I (381) c o n d e m n e d t h e A r i a n heresy, w h i c h p r o claimed die s u b o r d i n a t i o n of t h e S o n to t h e F a t h e r , a n d d e fined C h r i s t as consubstantial with t h e F a t h e r . T h e C o u n c i l at E p h e s u s (431) c o n d e m n e d N e s t o r i u s , w h o e m p h a s i z e d Christ's h u m a n n a t u r e . T h e C o u n c i l of C h a l c e d o n (451) defined Christ's t w o n a t u r e s u n i t e d w i t h o u t confusion o r division. T h e s e c o n d C o u n c i l of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e (553) at t e m p t e d to reconcile m o n o p h y s i t i s m w i t h O r t h o d o x y , while t h e third C o u n c i l of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e (681) w a s a n a t t e m p t to settle t h e c o n t r o v e r s y of m o n o t h e l i t i s m . T h e s e c o n d C o u n c i l of N i c a e a (787) b r o u g h t a n e n d to t h e first p e r i o d of I c o n o c l a s m . T h e c a n o n s of t h e e c u m e n i c a l councils w e r e accepted as deriving from a n d e x p r e s s i n g t h e b i s h o p s ' c o n sensus (B. Botte, H . M a r a t , et al., Le concile et les conciles, C h e v e t o g n e , i960; Histoire des conciles oecumeniques, 12 vols., P a r i s , 1962-; P . LTIuillier, The Church of the Ancient Councils, C r e s t w o o d , N . Y . , 1986). T h e role of certain e m p e r o r s in this p r o c e s s w a s decisive. Classical e d u c a t i o n was a c c e p t e d b y the C h u r c h in spite of t h e radical views of s o m e ecclesiastics, a n d a l t h o u g h s o m e e l e m e n t s of G r e e k p h i l o s o p h y and literature w e r e rejected, classical tradition r e m a i n e d until t h e e n d t h e c o r n e r s t o n e of B y z a n t i n e civiliza tion. Archaeological excavations s h o w w i t h certainty t h a t in all t h e provinces of t h e e m p i r e t h e r e was g r e a t p r o s p e r i t y a n d an u n p r e c e d e n t e d increase of p o p u l a t i o n (see F o s s , 1977; Russell, 1986). A g r i c u l t u r e , i n d u s t r y , a n d t r a d e flourished. G r e a t building activity is attested e v e r y w h e r e , particularly in t h e fifth and sixtii centuries. L a r g e basilicas w e r e c o n structed, a l t h o u g h their size does n o t c o r r e s p o n d with t h e size of the settlements. Signs of p r o f o u n d t r a n s f o r m a t i o n of u r b a n life, h o w e v e r , a p p e a r already in t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y in t h e literary sources a n d at all excavated sites. T h e principles of ancient u r b a n i s m were gradually a b a n d o n e d : p u b l i c m o n u m e n t s , theaters, h i p p o d r o m e s , t e m p l e s , a n d f o r u m s fell o u t of u s e , a n d a l o n g p r o c e s s of dilapidation started. O r t h o g onal city-planning was replaced b y irregular configurations, a n d t h e ancient social a n d political center of t h e cities (forum) was b r o k e n u p into p a r o c h i a l districts a r o u n d c h u r c h e s , w h i c h b e c a m e t h e n u c l e u s of e c o n o m i c a n d social activity. T h e m u n i c i p a l aristocracy (decuriom) declined, a n d d i e r e sponsibility for p u b l i c w o r k s a n d defense was transferred t o t h e provincial g o v e r n o r s . T h e cities lost tiieir financial i n d e p e n d e n c e , a n d t o g e t h e r with t h e n e w ideological orien tation p r o m o t e d b y t h e C h u r c h t h e interest in p u b l i c life gradually diminished. M o n a s t e r i e s b e c a m e u r b a n institu tions, a c c u m u l a t e d g r e a t wealth, a n d established p h i l a n -
BYZANTINE EMPIRE t h r o p i c f o u n d a t i o n s . T h e R o m a n f o r m of exploitation of l a n d , d i e villa, was still t h e basis of t h e agrarian e c o n o m y . I m p e r i a l legislation indicates t h a t t h e large estates w e r e i n creasing a n d t h a t t h e coloni ( p e a s a n t s a t t a c h e d to t h e land) w e r e b e c o m i n g d e p e n d e n t p e a s a n t s . T h e villages, h o w e v e r , a c c o r d i n g to archaeological e v i d e n c e from Syria a n d P a laestine, were flourishing ( T c h a l e n k o , 1953-1958). A b s o l u t e m o n a r c h y w a s reinforced a n d s u p p o r t e d b y C h r i s t i a n principles of o r d e r a n d p h i l a n t h r o p y . A career in t h e state a d m i n i s t r a t i o n w a s a w a y to social recognition a n d wealth. E t h n i c languages a n d cultures p r o m o t e d diversity a n d national literatures a p p e a r e d (Syriac, C o p t i c ) . In spite of t h e p r o f o u n d hellenization of t h e p r o v i n c e s in t h e E a s t a n d in E g y p t , national differences a n d r e s e n t m e n t for t h e ruling O r t h o d o x G r e e k a d m i n i s t r a t i o n of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e w e r e reinforced b y t h e religious o p p o s i t i o n with significant c o n s e q u e n c e s : t h e m o n o p h y s i t e p o p u l a t i o n s of t h e East d i d n o t resist t h e i n v a d i n g A r a b s in t h e seventh c e n t u r y . T h e s e v e n t h a n d eighth c e n t u r i e s a r e t h e D a r k Ages of B y z a n t i n e history. Early in t h e s e v e n t h c e n t u r y t h e Persians o c c u p i e d E g y p t , Palestine, a n d Syria. H e r a c l i u s (610-641) r e c o v e r e d t h e s e territories (629), b u t t h e y w e r e lost again t o t h e A r a b s in 636 at t h e decisive battle of Y a r m u k . M o s t of t h e cities in t h e E a s t s u r r e n d e r e d peacefully. T h e U m a y y a d A r a b s , with their capital at D a m a s c u s , established a s t r o n g n a v y a n d r a i d e d Asia M i n o r every year. C o n s t a n t i n o p l e w a s b e s i e g e d twice (in 669 a n d 7 1 7 - 7 1 8 ) a n d t h r e a t e n e d d u r i n g t h e w a r of 674-680. T h e n e w caliphate of ' A b b a s i d s (7501258) m o v e d their capital t o B a g h d a d , a n d t h e p r e s s u r e w a s lifted. T h e c o n s e q u e n c e s of t h e A r a b o c c u p a t i o n of t h e east e r n provinces of t h e e m p i r e w e r e decisive: t h e e m p i r e lost tlie areas with the greatest r e s o u r c e s , b u t it gained a reli gious, linguistic, a n d ethnic u n i f o r m i t y . I n t h e last q u a r t e r of t h e sixth c e n t u r y t h e first signs of a crisis a p p e a r e d ; ar chaeological evidence shows t h a t building activity ceased. I n t h e seventh c e n t u r y a d r a m a t i c decrease of p o p u l a t i o n is attested everywhere. M a n y cities tiiat h a d flourished earlier w e r e a b a n d o n e d or r e d u c e d t o insignificant settlements. E c o n o m i c activity, as illustrated in t h e i n t e r r u p t e d n u m i s m a t i c series from e x c a v a t e d sites a n d coin h o a r d s was d i minished. Barter economy h a d apparently replaced m o n e tary in m a n y daily t r a n s a c t i o n s . M o s t of t h e u r b a n centers t h a t survived r e s e m b l e d r u r a l settlements with agrarian s o cial a n d e c o n o m i c s t r u c t u r e . T h e r e f o r m in t h e a d m i n i s t r a tive system i n t r o d u c e d with t h e institution of t h e themes (provinces) led to t h e militarization of t h e e m p i r e : b o t h m i l itary a n d civil p o w e r s w e r e c o n c e n t r a t e d in these a d m i n i s trative u n i t s . T h e i r a r m y was c o m p o s e d of p e a s a n t s - s o l diers. T h e n e w s y s t e m s t r e n g t h e n e d t h e defensive forces of t h e e m p i r e , a n d it w a s efficient in repelling t h e enemies a n d consolidating B y z a n t i n e rule i n t h e r e o c c u p i e d territories. T h e class of i n d e p e n d e n t p e a s a n t s increased. Overall, h o w e v e r , B y z a n t i n e society a c q u i r e d a s t r o n g me dieval character. T h e religious c o n t r o v e r s y of i c o n o c l a s m
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s u p p o r t e d b y t h e e m p e r o r s of die Isaurian dynasty ( 7 1 7 802) has b e e n seen f r o m various angles: as a conflict b e t w e e n cultural a n d religious traditions of t h e East a n d t h e W e s t (the Jewish a n d M u s l i m aniconic [ n o n r e p r e s e n t a tional] c o n c e p t of G o d v e r s u s t h e a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c r e p r e sentation of G o d of t h e G r e e k culture) or as an effort of t h e state to diminish t h e p o w e r of t h e C h u r c h , especially t h e monasteries. In t h e c o u r s e of t h e controversy t h e classical tradition w a s attacked a n d interest in it was diminished. M a n y objects of art were deliberately destroyed. A recovery started w i t h t h e M a c e d o n i a n dynasty (8671025). Syria a n d C r e t e w e r e c o n q u e r e d f r o m t h e A r a b s , a n d several wars against Bulgaria b r o u g h t t h a t n e w state into t h e Byzantine s p h e r e of ecclesiastical a n d political influence ( K i n g Boris I, 852-889, w a s christianized). I n the n i n t h c e n t u r y t h e glagolitic a l p h a b e t (the earliest a l p h a b e t u s e d for writing C h u r c h Slavonic) w a s invented b y Cyril a n d M e t h odius (apostles of t h e Slavs), w h o were s e n t to M o r a v i a as missionaries in 863. T h u s t h e first Slavic literary language, C h u r c h Slavonic, w a s created. T h e R u s (Scandinavians in origin, w h o h a d settled a l o n g t h e rivers of Russia a n d were assimilated with t h e local Slavic p o p u l a t i o n , founding sev eral principalities c e n t e r e d o n Kiev) also were christiani z e d — C h r i s t i a n i t y w a s officially a c c e p t e d in 988. T h e R u s sian attacks against C o n s t a n t i n o p l e w e r e successfully repelled, a n d c o m m e r c i a l relations w e r e established a n d s a n c t i o n e d with treaties. T h e m e t r o p o l i t a n (bishop) of Kiev was placed u n d e r t h e p a t r i a r c h of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . T h e C h u r c h b e c a m e t h e vehicle for B y z a n t i n e cultural influence o n t h e R u s : B y z a n t i n e artists, architects, painters, a n d crafts m e n w e r e sent to R u s s i a . Archaeological evidence suggests t h a t a g r o w t h of t h e u r b a n p o p u l a t i o n started in t h e ninth c e n t u r y a n d t h a t the e c o n o m y was slowly recovering. I m perial legislation a n d o t h e r s o u r c e s testify t o t h e increase of large estates, secular a n d ecclesiastic, w h i c h the M a c e d o n i a n e m p e r o r s tried to control w i t h restrictive m e a s u r e s . T h e e m p e r o r s exercised a r e m a r k a b l e p o w e r over t h e C h u r c h . T h e interest in classical a n t i q u i t y was revived. T h e so-called M a c e d o n i a n R e n a i s s a n c e in literature w a s m a r k e d b y enc y c l o p e d i s m , t h e c o p y i n g of ancient texts a n d selections in anthologies. T h e w o r k of t h e intellectuals was practical: to organize a n d codify t h e k n o w l e d g e of d i e earlier centuries (treatises o n military art, administration, imperial c e r e m o nies, a n d codification of imperial legislation). I n t h e eleventh c e n t u r y t h e schism b e t w e e n t h e O r t h o d o x a n d Catholic C h u r c h e s b e c a m e p e r m a n e n t . T h e split of t h e t w o C h u r c h e s is dated to t h e early B y z a n t i n e period, w h e n t h e q u e s t i o n of p r i m a c y of R o m e a n d t h e privilege of h o n o r a t t r i b u t e d to t h e b i s h o p of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e o n political g r o u n d s ( C o n s t a n t i n o p l e w a s t h e city of N e w R o m e ) w e r e raised at t h e first C o u n c i l of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . D o c t r i n a l dif ferences also a p p e a r e d i n v a r i o u s heretical controversies, e s pecially over A r i a n i s m a n d m o n o p h y s i t i s m (Akakian S c h i s m in 484-519). T h e controversy over t h e filioque
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e m e r g e d in die conflict b e t w e e n Patriarch Photios a n d P o p e Nicholas I (858-867). In t h e eleventii century n e w conflicts a p p e a r e d over disciplinary questions (the celibacy of west ern clergy) and the u s e of t h e azymes in the liturgy. I n 1054 t h e a n a t h e m s spelled against P a t r i a r c h M i c h a e l I K e r o u l a r ios a n d the papal legates ( u n d e r Cardinal H u m b e r t ) final ized die split of t h e two C h u r c h e s , which w e r e already s e p arated by different institutional traditions, theological views, a n d cultural reality. T h e political d e v e l o p m e n t s in t h e fol lowing centuries a n d t h e fall of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e t o t h e C r u saders in 1204 b r o a d e n e d d i e distance b e t w e e n t h e m . I n d i e middle of t h e eleventh c e n t u r y e c o n o m i c prosperity n a t u rally coincided with the d e v e l o p m e n t of the m i d d l e class, represented in C o n s t a n t i n o p l e by the e m p e r o r s of t h e civil party. A further social evolution was prevented b y t h e es tablishment of a military aristocracy represented b y t h e d y nasty of the K o m n e n o i (1081-1185). T h e y developed insti tutions similar to those of western feudal society: ties of kinship a p p e a r e d in t h e aristocracy, and t h e large estates were increased. T h e defeat of t h e Byzantines b y an e m e r g ing n e w p o w e r , t h e Seljuk T u r k s , in M a n z i k e r t in 1071 m a r k e d the b e g i n n i n g of t h e t r o u b l e d years ahead. T h e dy nasty of the K o m n e n o i a t t e m p t e d a major renovation of t h e empire. T h e i r rule was in m a n y respects successful. T h e commercial privileges g r a n t e d to t h e Italian cities, Venice, Pisa, a n d G e n o a , in exchange for military a n d naval s u p p o r t , however, furtiier w e a k e n e d t h e resources of t h e state a n d m a r k the beginning of d e p e n d e n c y o n foreign aid. I n 1176 a second defeat b y t h e Seljuk T u r k s in M y r i o k e p h a l o n r a d ically c h a n g e d t h e situation in Anatolia: i n d e p e n d e n t A r m e n i a n states were established in Cilicia, a n d a large p a r t of Asia M i n o r was definitively lost t o the T u r k s . I n t h e s a m e period the Latin W e s t t h r e a t e n e d B y z a n t i u m for t h e first time. T h e N o r m a n s repeatedly attacked t h e e m p i r e , t h r e a t e n e d C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , a n d o c c u p i e d Thessalonike (1185). T h e Crusaders were successfully diverted to d i e East b y m e a n s of diplomacy. T h e second Bulgarian E m p i r e was es tablished in 1186, a n d t h e Serbs b e c a m e i n d e p e n d e n t . I n the interior the polarization of t h e ruling aristocracy in C o n stantinople a n d t h e heavy taxation led to t h e alienation of t h e provinces. A m b i t i o u s local m a g n a t e s tried to b e c o m e i n d e p e n d e n t , and dynastic conflicts and c o r r u p t i o n of t h e dynasty of t h e Angeloi (1185-1204) weakened t h e e m p i r e . In this climate t h e resistance to t h e Latins of t h e F o u r t h C r u s a d e was unsuccessful. T h e fall of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e to d i e C r u s a d e r s in 1204 marks the beginning of t h e last p e r i o d of Byzantine history (12041453): the empire was divided between L a t i n states, colonies of the Italian m e r c h a n t cities, t h e Byzantine empires in N i caea a n d T r e b i z o n d , a n d t h e D e s p o t a t e of Epiros. In 1261 M i c h a e l VIII Palaeologos (1259-1282) from N i c a e a liber ated Constantinople a n d restored t h e empire. T h e p e r i o d is m a r k e d by t h e a d v a n c e of t h e Serbs, w h o b y 1355 controlled
m o s t of G r e e c e , a n d b y t h e c o n s t a n t p r o g r e s s of t h e O t t o m a n T u r k s , w h o b y 1340 h a d o c c u p i e d all of Asia M i n o r , a n d tiien a d v a n c e d into t h e E u r o p e a n territories. T h e s s a lonike, die s e c o n d m o s t i m p o r t a n t city of t h e e m p i r e w a s o c c u p i e d b y the T u r k s in 1387 a n d 1430. T h e s u p p o r t t h a t t h e W e s t e r n p o w e r s gave to the Palaeologoi b y r e c o g n i z i n g t h e u n i o n of the c h u r c h e s (synods in L y o n in 1274 a n d in F e r r a r a - F l o r e n c e in 1439) was limited. T h e civil wars b e t w e e n the Palaeologoi A n d r o n i c u s II a n d A n d r o n i c u s III (1321-1328) a n d b e t w e e n J o h n V Palaeologos a n d J o h n V I K a n t a k o u z e n o s (1341-1347) w e a k e n e d t h e c o n s t a n t l y d i minishing resources of t h e e m p i r e . M e r c e n a r i e s w e r e u s e d in t h e army; the state finances could n o t recover; t r a d e w a s controlled b y t h e Italians; a n d territories w e r e given t o t h e sons of e m p e r o r s as a p p a n a g e s ( i n d e p e n d e n t , n o n h e r e d i t a r y administrative districts) a n d b e c a m e a u t o n o m o u s . A l t h o u g h t h e p o w e r of t h e state w a s diminishing, t h e C h u r c h t o o k control of m a n y aspects of life. T h e f o u r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y theological controversy of h e s y c h a s m ( p r o m o t i n g a m e t h o d of m o n a s t i c p r a y e r a n d c o n t e m p l a t i o n t h r o u g h w h i c h c o m m u n i o n witii G o d could b e attained) revived t e n d e n c i e s t o w a r d spirituality, a n d it is often seen as a reaction t o t h e Palaeologan R e n a i s s a n c e . T h e C h u r c h n o u r i s h e d t h e a n t i L a t i n feelings of t h e c o m m o n p e o p l e a n d often p r o m o t e d t h e idea t h a t s u b m i s s i o n t o t h e T u r k s w a s preferable t o s u b mission to the L a t i n C h u r c h . T h e intellectuals, h o w e v e r , tried to establish bridges with t h e W e s t a n d t h e r e n e w e d interest in classical antiquity gave b i r t h to G r e e k n a t i o n a l consciousness a n d to d r e a m s of a national rebirth. C o n s t a n tinople fell to t h e T u r k s in 1453. T h e D e s p o t a t e of M o r e a in t h e P e l o p o n n e s o s , w h i c h flourished in t h e fifteenth c e n t u r y fell in 1460, a n d t h e e m p i r e of T r e b i z o n d o n e year later. A r c h a e o l o g y , A r t . B y z a n t i n e archaeology w a s for m a n y years defined as C h r i s t i a n archaeology: t h e s t u d y of t h e ar chitectural styles of c h u r c h e s , t h e influence of t h e liturgy o n tiieir d e v e l o p m e n t , their m o s a i c or fresco d e c o r a t i o n , their sculptural o r n a m e n t s , tiieir i m p l a n t a t i o n in t h e u r b a n fabric. Interest in secular buildings, u r b a n centers or rural settle m e n t s a p p e a r e d only recently. A major restriction o n B y z antine archaeology was t h a t for a long time it r e m a i n e d a b r a n c h of classical archaeology. B e c a u s e t h e excavators fo c u s e d o n classical sites a n d their m o n u m e n t s , B y z a n t i n e r e m a i n s w e r e often destroyed in o r d e r t o r e a c h t h e classical strata or were d i s p o s e d of b e c a u s e t h e y s u p p o s e d l y h a d n o significant artistic value. T h e excavations o n major sites fo c u s e d primarily o n identification of sites a n d m o n u m e n t s . Attention t o t h e evolution of sites has finally b e e n paid, a n d t h e imposition of m o d e r n cities limits t h e archaeological in vestigation to small-scale rescue excavations. Interest in cities, particularly in t h e p e r i o d of transition from t h e early t o t h e m i d d l e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d , has b e e n a late d e v e l o p m e n t . T h e d e b a t e o n t h e discontinuity of u r b a n life in the dark ages a m o n g historians since t h e 1950s, h a s
BYZANTINE EMPIRE o p e n e d t h e way for t h e archaeological investigation of early B y z a n t i n e cities. I n m o s t cities, h o w e v e r , t h e excavations h a v e b e e n limited to t h e classical city centers or in a n d a r o u n d i m p o r t a n t m o n u m e n t s , for e x a m p l e , p a g a n t e m p l e s , h i p p o d r o m e s , a n d theaters. O b v i o u s l y in all sites t h e ar chaeological evidence is f r a g m e n t a r y . A n o t h e r difficulty consists of i n a d e q u a t e r e p o r t s of earlier excavations, w h i c h w e r e n o t c o n d u c t e d a c c o r d i n g t o t h e principles of m o d e r n scholarly investigation. T h i s situation has often b e e n o b served in A t h e n s a n d C o r i n t h , t h e b e s t excavated sites in G r e e c e . T h e B y z a n t i n e r e m a i n s are very p o o r , n o t precisely d a t e d , a n d inaccurately d e s c r i b e d . P r o m i s i n g sites for t h e study of t h e c h a n g i n g c h a r a c t e r of t h e early B y z a n t i n e cities are places t h a t w e r e d e s t r o y e d a n d a b a n d o n e d in t h e e n d of this period: N e a Anchialos in G r e e c e a n d Caricin G r a d in t h e former Yugoslavia. T h e latter, built b y Justinian, r e p resents t h e t r e n d s of B y z a n t i n e u r b a n i s m in t h e sixth c e n t u r y . N u m e r o u s forts h a v e b e e n investigated along t h e D a n u b e a n d tire hinterland. T h e b e s t e x c a v a t e d sites in Asia M i n o r are E p h e s u s , Sardis, M i l e t u s , P r i e n e , a n d A p h r o d i sias. [See E p h e s u s ; Sardis; M i l e t u s ; P r i e n e ; Aphrodisias.] Excavations in B y z a n t i n e Palestine a n d Syria have revealed several cities a n d t o w n s t h a t ceased to exist after t h e A r a b c o n q u e s t . T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t sites are Caesarea M a r i t i m a , G e r a s a (Jerash), Scythopolis ( B e t h - S h e a n ) , Pella, a n d t h e cities of t h e N e g e v desert. [See C a e s a r e a ; Jerash; B e t h S h e a n ; Pella; N e g e v . ] I n t h e latter local e l e m e n t s w e r e m a i n t a i n e d n e x t to t h e B y z a n t i n e features of u r b a n i s m . Since t h e 1960s n e w t e c h n o l o g y has allowed u n d e r w a t e r investigation of s u n k e n coastal sites a n d shipwrecks. Shipwrecks p r o v i d e evidence for trade: t h e sixth c e n t u r y s h i p w r e c k at M a r z a m e m i in s o u t h e a s t Sicily c o n t a i n e d a l o a d of m a r b l e c h u r c h furnishings, a n d t h e wrecks at Serce L i m a r u (eleventh c e n t u r y ) a n d P e l a g o n n e s o s (twelfth c e n t u r y ) h a d cargoes of glasses a n d c e r a m i c vessels, respectively. [See Serce L i mani.] T h e archaeological survey of large areas w i t h o u t e x cavation has b e e n widely u s e d to establish settlement p a t t e r n , n e t w o r k of forts, villages, a n d agricultural installations. Of all b r a n c h e s of art, a r c h i t e c t u r e is m o s t intimately r e lated with archaeological w o r k . B y z a n t i n e architectural types naturally d e v e l o p e d f r o m a n c i e n t p r o t o t y p e s such as tire basilica. O t h e r types a r e t h e m a r t y r i a (shrines h o n o r i n g m a r t y r s ) , baptisteries, a n d m a u s o l e a . [See Basilicas; M a r t y r ion; Baptisteries; M a u s o l e u m . ] T h e great innovations of t h e sixth c e n t u r y were t h e d o m e d basilica a n d t h e very elaborate sculptural o r n a m e n t s . T h e b e s t e x a m p l e of b o t h is t h e c h u r c h of St. S o p h i a in C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . I n t h e m i d d l e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d t h e c h u r c h e s w e r e smaller, centralized with d o m e s , a n d adjoined b y m a n y a t t a c h e d chapels. F r o m t h e twelfth c e n t u r y local characteristics are notable in t h e c h u r c h e s built in t h e p r o v i n c e s , a n d B y z a n t i n e art w a s dis s e m i n a t e d in Slavic countries. A l t h o u g h i c o n o g r a p h y c o n t i n u e d earlier traditions, it d e v e l o p e d a n e w r e p e r t o r y of
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Christian t h e m e s from t h e O l d a n d N e w T e s t a m e n t s a n d t h e lives of saints. D e c o r a t i o n of secular buildings derived mainly from the early centuries. M o s a i c s , t h e m o s t e x p e n sive m u r a l o r floor d e c o r a t i o n , w e r e primarily u s e d to e m bellish d o m e s a n d apses of c h u r c h e s . [See Mosaics.] F r o m t h e sixth c e n t u r y they w e r e also u s e d to a d o r n the walls. T h e best p r e s e r v e d e x a m p l e s a r e f o u n d at H a g i a S o p h i a , St. C a t h e r i n e at Sinai, a n d R a v e n n a . [See also Anatolia, articles on Anatolia from A l e x a n d e r to t h e Rise of Islam and Anatolia in t h e Islamic Period; and Constantinople.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Peter R. L . The World of Late Antiquity. 2d ed. N e w York, 1989. D e i c h m a n n , F . W . Einfuhrung in die christliche Archaologie, Darmstadt, 1983. History of Christian archaeology and treatment of major s u b jects (architecture, development of Christian motives, etc.). Foss, Clive. "Archaeology and die ' T w e n t y Cities' of Byzantine Asia." American Journal of Archaeology 81 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 4 6 9 - 4 8 6 . Account of the archaeological evidence of twenty major cities in Anatolia, d e m o n strating that the changing character of seventh-century cities can be reconstructed from the archaeological finds alone. F r e n d , W . H . C. The Rise of the Monophysitc Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries. 2d ed. C a m bridge, 1 9 7 9 . Grabar, A n d r e . Sculptures hyzantines de Constantinople, IVe-Xe siecle. Paris, 1 9 6 3 . Major study of the Byzantine sculptural ornaments of churches and t o m b s of Constantinople. Grabar, A n d r e . Sculptures hyzantines du moyen age II, Xle-XIVe siecle. Paris, 1 9 7 6 . Major study of Byzantine sculpture mainly in churches. Harvey, Alan. Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900-1200. C a m b r i d g e , 1989. C o m p r e h e n s i v e study of the Byzantine economy and related subjects, such as demographic growth, taxation, m o n e tary circulation, a n d agricultural production. H e n d y , Michael F. Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c. 3001450. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 5 . Technical study of the Byzantine monetary economy, coin circulation and production, and imperial policy, based o n literary sources a n d excavation finds. Hussey, John M . , ed. The Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. 4 . 1 - 2 . C a m b r i d g e , 1966. Comprehensive history of Byzantium covering history, economy, society, a n d culture. Kraudieimer, Richard, and Slobodan Curcic. Early Christian and Byz antine Architecture. 4th ed. N e w H a v e n , 1986. Standard study of Byz antine architecture focusing mainly on religious buildings, Lemerle, Paul, ed. Villes et peuplcment dans ITllyricum protobyzantin: Actes du colloque organise par I'Ecole Francaise de Rome, Rome, 12-14 mai 1982. R o m e , 1984. Collection of studies on Byzantine cities of the western Balkan peninsula based primarily o n the archaeological evidence. M a n g o , Cyril. Byzantium: The New Order of Rome. New York, 1980. M a n g o , Cyril. Byzantine Architecture. 2 d ed. N e w York, 1985. Broad synthesis including study of materials, techniques, architects, and architectural styles of religious and secular buildings, Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500-1453. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 . Major study of the political and c o m m e r cial relations and cultural and religious influence of Byzantium on the Slavic world. Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. Rev. ed. N e w Brunswick, N.J., 1969. T h e most authoritative history of Byzantium. Russell, James. "Transformations in Early Byzantine U r b a n Life: T h e Contribution and Limitations of Archaeological Evidence." In The
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Seventeenth International Byzantine Congress: Major Papers, Dumbar ton OakslGeorgetovm University, Washington, D.C., August 3-8,1986, VP- 1 3 7 - 1 5 4 - N e w Rochelle, N . Y . , 1986. Fundamental work d e m onstrating the importance of archaeological finds for the study of Byzantine historical periods which are not adequately d o c u m e n t e d by literary sources. Also analyzes the limitation of the archaeological evidence, especially in dating the finds witii accuracy. Sellers, R. V. The Council of Chalcedon: A Historical and Doctrinal Sur vey. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 7 .
Tabula imperii byzaniini.
Vienna, 1 9 7 6 - . Exhaustive list of all known
sites from Greece and Asia M i n o r , with reference to all literary sources, archaeological reports, a n d bibliography. Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: Le massif du Belus a I'epoque romaine. 3 vols. Paris, 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 5 8 . Major work on village communities in N o r t h Syria based primarily o n archaeological survey. HELEN SARADI
c t h e h a r b o r , Sebastos—to its b r e a k w a t e r s e x t e n d i n g o u t i n t o the sea, vaulted w a r e h o u s e s for t r a d e g o o d s , statues a p p a r ently of t h e e m p e r o r ' s family o n c o l u m n s at t h e h a r b o r e n t r a n c e , a n d a tower (lighthouse?) n a m e d D r u s i o n , for t h e s o n of A u g u s t u s . O n a n elevated platform above d i e i n n e r h a r b o r , H e r o d erected a t e m p l e to R o m a a n d A u g u s t u s . After 6 CE, w h e n H e r o d ' s g r a n d s o n died, the R o m a n s ruled J u d a e a directly t h r o u g h a governor a n d an adminis tration h e a d q u a r t e r e d at C a e s a r e a . T h e site r e m a i n e d the capital of t h e p r o v i n c e , later r e n a m e d Palestine, until it fell to t h e M u s l i m s in 641 CE. A L a t i n inscription f o u n d in t h e t h e a t e r r e c o r d s t h a t P o n t i u s Pilate, g o v e r n o r in a b o u t 30 CE, d e d i c a t e d a t e m p l e at C a e s a r e a t o t h e e m p e r o r T i b e r i u s (Annales epigraphiques 1963, n o . 104). D u r i n g t h e First J e w ish W a r (66-70 C E ) , t h e R o m a n c o m m a n d e r , Vespasian, w i n t e r e d his t r o o p s t h e r e , a n d after it, as e m p e r o r , h e r e f o u n d e d C a e s a r e a as a R o m a n colony. F o r t h e n e x t t h r e e centuries, R o m a n g o v e r n o r s , soldiers, a n d veterans d o m i n a t e d t h e city. T h e bulk of inscriptions from this p e r i o d a r e in L a t i n . T h e city's constitution was of a w e s t e r n t y p e , with t w o chief magistrates (duumviri) a n d a m u n i c i p a l senate (decuriones). C a e s a r e a profited from close links with R o m e : t h e e m p e r o r s e x p a n d e d its a q u e d u c t system ( H a d r i a n , in c. 130 CE) a n d built a n a m p h i t h e a t e r for gladiators a n d a h i p p o d r o m e for chariot racing, b o t h of western type.
C A A R I . See C y p r u s A m e r i c a n Archaeological R e s e a r c h Institute.
C A E S A R E A , site of a n a n c i e n t G r e e k a n d R o m a n p o r t city, C a e s a r e a M a r i t i m a , located o n t h e coast of Israel, a b o u t 40 Ion (25 mi.) n o r t h of T e l Aviv (32°3o' N , 34°53' E ; m a p reference 1400 X 2120). H e r o d d i e G r e a t f o u n d e d d i e city a b o v e r e m a i n s of a Hellenistic t o w n called S t r a t o n ' s T o w e r . H e n a m e d it C a e s a r e a for C a e s a r A u g u s t u s , his p a t r o n , a n d its adjacent p o r t Sebastos, G r e e k for A u g u s t u s . J o s e p h u s (War, 7.20) calls it C a e s a r e a b y t h e Sea, w h e r e a s o t h e r G r e e k a n d L a t i n a u t h o r s specified " C a e s a r e a near S e b a s t o s , " " S t r a t o n ' s C a e s a r e a , " o r " C a e s a r e a of P a l e s t i n e " to distinguish it from n u m e r o u s h o m o n y m s . R a b b i n i c authors call it Qisri or Qisrin, a n d A r a b i c Qaisariya survived into m o d e r n t i m e s , leaving n o d o u b t a b o u t t h e site's identifica tion. H i s t o r y . S t r a t o n ' s T o w e r w a s a P h o e n i c i a n fortified t o w n ( H e b . , Migdal Shorshon), n o t just a fortress. A l t h o u g h t h e earliest ceramics d a t e from t h e fourth c e n t u r y BCE, a n d scholars h a v e suggested o n e of t w o fourtii-century S i d o n i a n kings as t h e f o u n d e r , t h e earliest textual reference is a p a p y r u s from 259 BCE (P Cairo Zeno 59004), attesting c o m mercial activity a n d a h a r b o r . A local t y r a n t n a m e d Zoilus m a y h a v e fortified S t r a t o n ' s T o w e r n e a r die close of t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE, b u t this did n o t p r e v e n t A l e x a n d e r J a n n a e u s from seizing it in a b o u t 100 BCE for t h e e x p a n d i n g H a s m o n e a n l d n g d o m a n d i n t r o d u c i n g a Jewish p o p u l a t i o n . T o weaken t h e H a s m o n e a n s , t h e R o m a n general P o m p e y a t t a c h e d Straton's T o w e r a n d o t h e r coastal t o w n s to Syria in 63 BCE; in 31 BCE, h o w e v e r , O c t a v i a n r e s t o r e d it to H e r o d ' s k i n g d o m . B y this time S t r a t o n ' s T o w e r lay d e p o p u l a t e d a n d in r u i n s .
Christianity e m e r g e d a t C a e s a r e a soon after t h e Crucifix ion, w h e n St. P e t e r c o n v e r t e d t h e c e n t u r i o n Cornelius (Acts 10). T h e Jewish W a r h a d eradicated t h e large Jewish p o p ulation, a n d m o s t of t h e Christians as well, b u t after the B a r K o k h b a revolt (132-135 C E ) , w h e n R a b b i Akiba was m a r t y r e d at C a e s a r e a , b o t h g r o u p s b e g a n to resettle, attracted b y t h e city's prosperity. T h e rural p o p u l a t i o n was m o s d y Jews a n d S a m a r i t a n s . I n t h e t h i r d c e n t u r y , Caesarea was t h e site of a celebrated r a b b i n i c a c a d e m y a n d the Christian school of Origen, t h e scholar a n d theologian, w h o assembled a notable library a n d c o m p i l e d t h e h e x a p l a text of the C h r i s tian Bible.
H e r o d t h e G r e a t built C a e s a r e a a n d its h a r b o r b e t w e e n 22 a n d 10/9 BCE (see figure 1 ) ; it r a n k s with t h e S e c o n d Jewish T e m p l e as his m o s t s p e c t a c u l a r b u i l d i n g project. In t w o s u c cinct passages (War 1.408-415; Antiq. 15.331-341) t h e h i s t o r i a n J o s e p h u s describes a typical city (polis) of t h e late Hellenistic age, including a theater, a n a m p h i t h e a t e r " a l o n g t h e s h o r e , " a "royal p a l a c e , " m a r k e t p l a c e s , a n d streets laid o n a grid plan. H o w e v e r , h e devotes m o s t of his attention t o
Caesarea r e a c h e d its a p o g e e of p o p u l a t i o n a n d prosperity b e t w e e n t h e fourth a n d late sixth centuries, u n d e r the C h r i s tian E m p i r e . A Christian c h u r c h replaced H e r o d ' s A u g u s t u s t e m p l e o n t h e T e m p l e P l a t f o r m (see figure 2). T h e a u t h o r ities r e p a i r e d a n d e x p a n d e d t h e a q u e d u c t s a n d built n e w
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fortifications t o enclose a m u c h larger inhabited space. A m o n g t h e city's b i s h o p s , m e t r o p o l i t a n s of Palestine, was E u s e b i u s (bishop c. 315-339), w h o w r o t e an ecclesiastical history a n d r e c o r d e d Christian m a r t y r d o m s in Caesarea's a m p h i t h e a t e r d u r i n g t h e G r e a t P e r s e c u t i o n . H i s Jewish counterpart, Rabbi Abbahu, frequented the baths and t a u g h t his d a u g h t e r s G r e e k , w h i c h was t h e n t h e p r e d o m i n a n t l a n g u a g e . T h e classical historian P r o c o p i u s (sixth c e n tury) was a p r o d u c t of t h e city's schools. A l t h o u g h tectonic action a n d t h e coastal surge h a d d a m a g e d t h e breakwaters of H e r o d ' s h a r b o r severely, C a e s a r e a r e m a i n e d an i m p o r t a n t s e a p o r t until t h e seventh c e n t u r y . E m p e r o r Anastasius r e s t o r e d t h e h a r b o r a b o u t 500 CE ( P r o copius of G a z a , Penegyricus 19; Patrologia graeca 87, col, 2817); t r a d e t h r o u g h t h e p o r t helps a c c o u n t for t h e intense u r b a n c o n s t r u c t i o n of c h u r c h e s , streets, a n d p u b l i c b u i l d ings, attested archaeologically a n d in inscriptions t h r o u g h o u t t h e sixth c e n t u r y . I n d i e m e a n t i m e , a series of S a m a r i t a n rebellions c a u s e d severe dislocations in t h e rural e c o n o m y , t h e other s o u r c e of C a e s a r e a ' s p r o s p e r i t y . Like other cities, C a e s a r e a suffered f r o m r e c u r r e n c e s of p l a g u e after 541-542, a n d from c r u s h i n g imperial t a x a t i o n d e m a n d e d for t h e w a r s of t h e e m p e r o r Justinian (d. 565). D e u r b a n i z a t i o n h a d p r o b ably set in before t h e s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y invasions. I n 614, a Persian a r m y i n v a d e d Palestine. Caesarea capit ulated a n d suffered n o physical d a m a g e b u t r e m a i n e d u n d e r P e r s i a n rule until 627. In 641 o r 642, C a e s a r e a fell t o t h e M u s l i m s , a n d t h e R o m a n city c a m e t o a precipitous e n d . M a n y of t h e l a n d h o l d i n g aristocracy, w h o h a d s u p p o r t e d u r b a n life, w e n t into exile d u r i n g t h e invasions. T h e M u s l i m
401
c o n q u e r o r s did n o t favor C a e s a r e a . D u r i n g the U m a y y a d age (to 750) it w a s r e d u c e d to little m o r e t h a n a coastal d e fense station. B y t h e t e n t h a n d eleventh centuries, however, u n d e r F a t imid rule, a p r o s p e r o u s t o w n h a d e m e r g e d o n t h e site, with n e w fortifications e n c o m p a s s i n g a m u c h - r e d u c e d u r b a n space (see figure 3). T h e g e o g r a p h e r s e l - M u q a d d i s i a n d N a s r - i - K h u s r a u praise t h e w a t e r s u p p l y of M u s l i m Qaisariya, its luxuriant g a r d e n s a n d o r c h a r d s outside t h e walls, a n d its G r e a t M o s q u e , p o s i t i o n e d o n w h a t h a d b e e n H e r o d ' s T e m p l e Platform (Palestine P i l g r i m s ' T e x t s Society, vol. 3.3 t 9 7 ] j P- 55; ° l - 4 - U971L P- 20). I n 1101 E u r o p e a n C r u saders t o o k tire F a t i m i d t o w n b y s t o r m , a n d it b e c a m e a Christian principality t h a t lasted, despite episodes of r e c o n q u e s t a n d destruction, u n t i l 1265. A c h u r c h of St. P e t e r s u c ceeded t h e G r e a t M o s q u e o n t h e T e m p l e Platform. I n 1 2 5 1 - 1 2 5 2 t h e F r e n c h king L o u i s I X rebuilt t h e fortifica tions. H o w e v e r , only fourteen years later, t h e M a m l u k sultan B a y b a r s seized C a e s a r e a from tire C r u s a d e r s ; in 1291 his successor leveled t h e walls to m a k e t h e m useless to s u b s e q u e n t i n v a d e r s . C a e s a r e a t h e n r e m a i n e d desolate until m o d ern t i m e s , a l t h o u g h s q u a t t e r villages s o m e t i m e s inhabited t h e ruins. I
I
v
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In 1884, B o s n i a n refugees from E u r o p e resettled ancient Caesarea. T h e i r t o w n survived until 1940, a n d s o m e of its buildings, including a m o s q u e , still exist within t h e medieval fortification perimeter, n o w called d i e O l d City, A r c h a e o l o g y . Recently, archaeological exploration has b e g u n to enrich o u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of C a e s a r e a ' s history, k n o w n previously from literary sources. Archaeologists r e c -
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CAESAREA Yeivin excavated a site t o t h e east of t h e O l d City, w h e r e a tractor from t h e n e i g h b o r i n g kibbutz h a d struck o n e of two colossal R o m a n statues t h a t h a d flanked t h e e n t r a n c e ( p r o p ylaeum) t o an unidentified b u i l d i n g f r o m t h e B y z a n t i n e p e riod. A tessellated p a v e m e n t (11.5 X 13.4 m ) e x p o s e d a c cidentally in 1955, is d e c o r a t e d with m e d a l l i o n s displaying eleven species of birds. T h i s h a s recentiy b e e n identified plausibly as p a r t of a s u b u r b a n villa f r o m t h e B y z a n t i n e p e riod. [See the biographies of Conder, Kitchener, and Yeivin] Excavation o n a large scale dates only f r o m 1959, w h e n archaeologists first c o m p r e h e n d e d C a e s a r e a as a n u r b a n , m a r i t i m e site a n d b e g a n systematic recovery of all p h a s e s of o c c u p a t i o n . I n i960, E d w i n A . L i n k , a p i o n e e r of u n d e r w a t e r exploration, b r o u g h t a t e a m of divers t h a t identified t h e ruins of H e r o d ' s h a r b o r . I n five c a m p a i g n s (1959-1964) t h e Italian M i s s i o n e Archeologica, d i r e c t e d b y A n t o n i o F r o v a , e x p l o r e d t h e o u t e r p e r i m e t e r wall, p r o v i n g it to b e Byzantine; t h e t e a m also e x p o s e d p a r t of a n i n n e r p e r i m e t e r t o t h e n o r t h of t h e medieval fortifications, w h i c h it failed t o date convincingly. T h e M i s s i o n e also e x c a v a t e d t h e H e r o dian theater, t o t h e s o u t h of t h e O l d City, a n d t h e ruins of an i m p o s i n g fortress t h a t s u c c e e d e d it i n d i e sixth or seventh century. B e t w e e n i960 a n d 1964, A v r a h a m N e g e v s u p e r vised clearing witiiin t h e O l d C i t y tiiat b r o u g h t t o light b a r rel-vaulted s u b s t r u c t u r e s f o r m i n g t h e w e s t e r n facade of t h e H e r o d i a n T e m p l e Platform a n d , o n t h e p l a t f o r m itself, t h e ruins of a triple-apsed C r u s a d e r basilica. Fie also cleared t h e m o a t s in front of t h e medieval fortifications a n d r e m o v e d d u n e s a n d from t h e s o u t h e r n p r e s e r v e d section of t h e twin high-level a q u e d u c t s , n o r t h w a r d along t h e s h o r e , t h a t d a t e to t h e R o m a n period.
CAESAREA.
F i g u r e 3. Islamic/Crusader fortifications, eastern range,
looking north. (Photograph b y Aaron Levin)
ognize six periods of occupation, c o r r e s p o n d i n g t o t h e his tory outlined above: Hellenistic (fourth-first c e n t u r y BCE), R o m a n (first-third century CE), Byzantine ( f o u r t h - s e v e n t h centuries). Islamic (seventh-eleventh centuries), C r u s a d e r (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), a n d M a m l u k t o m o d e r n (fourteenth-twentieth centuries). Until thirty years a g o t h e site was k n o w n only from t h e reports of n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y explorers, c h a n c e finds, a n d a few rescue excavations. A m o n g t h e explorers, m o s t i m p o r t a n t were C l a u d e R. C o n d e r a n d H o r a t i o H e r b e r t K i t c h ener, w h o visited Caesarea briefly in 1873. T h e y studied a n d m a p p e d t h e a q u e d u c t s , t h e theater, t h e outer (Byzantine) perimeter wall, which they dated t o t h e R o m a n p e r i o d , a n d also t h e medieval (Islamic a n d C r u s a d e r ) fortifications. I n I94S> J. O r y r e p o r t e d remains of a Byzantine s y n a g o g u e e x p o s e d d u r i n g winter storms t o t h e n o r t h of t h e O l d City, which Michael A v i - Y o n a h e x a m i n e d briefly in 1956 a n d 1962. I n 1950 Benjamin Reifenberg recognized, i n a n aerial p h o t o g r a p h , an a m p h i t h e a t e r (not the o n e m e n t i o n e d b y J o sephus) t o t h e n o r t h e a s t of t h e O l d City. I n 1951 S h m u e l
T h e 1970s a n d 1980s b r o u g h t a h i g h e r level of a r c h a e o logical sophistication t o research at C a e s a r e a , i n c l u d i n g stratigraphic excavation using balks, scientific c e r a m i c anal ysis, a n d m o d e r n u n d e r w a t e r t e c h n i q u e s useful for s t u d y i n g t h e h a r b o r s . B e t w e e n 1971 a n d 1987, t h e A m e r i c a n Joint E x p e d i t i o n to C a e s a r e a M a r i t i m a , directed b y R o b e r t J. Bull, c o n d u c t e d twelve s u m m e r seasons of excavation. T h i s t e a m explored sectors t o t h e south, east, a n d n o r t h of t h e O l d City, including t h e low-level a q u e d u c t , w h i c h it d a t e d t o t h e fourth century; a well-preserved s u b u r b a n b a t h from t h e Byzantine period; a n d a B y z a n t i n e p u b l i c b u i l d i n g t h a t a p p e a r s , from inscriptions i n its tessellated p a v e m e n t s , t o h a v e b e e n p a r t of d i e g o v e r n o r ' s h e a d q u a r t e r s (Gk., prailorion). In 1973 a n d 1974, J o h n H u m p h r e y s t u d i e d C a e s a r e a ' s h i p p o d r o m e , n o w o n e of t h e b e s t - k n o w n facilities of its type from t h e R o m a n East. A m o n g other o u t s t a n d i n g finds w e r e a m a r b l e statue of t h e city g o d d e s s , T y c h e (see figure 4), of Caesarea a n d , t o t h e s o u t h of t h e O l d City, a cult center of t h e R o m a n g o d M i t h r a s , located in a barrel-vaulted w a r e h o u s e ( L a t , horreum), o n e of a c o m p l e x of s u c h vaults dat ing from H e r o d ' s time. T h e Joint E x p e d i t i o n also r e s t u d i e d t h e inner p e r i m e t e r wall, w h i c h it d a t e d to H e r o d ' s original foundation, a n d d e v o t e d special attention t o C a e s a r e a ' s
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T h e project established t h a t J o s e p h u s (Wan. 408-413; An tiq- 15-332-338) h a d d e s c r i b e d t h e breakwaters accurately a n d r e c o v e r e d details of their design a n d construction. I n building Sebastos, H e r o d ' s engineers h a d employed i m p o r t e d materials a n d t h e t e c h n o l o g y of hydraulic concrete developed in Italy. Still u n d e r d e b a t e is the later history of H e r o d ' s h a r b o r a n d w h e t h e r it c o n t i n u e d to function in the R o m a n a n d Byzantine p e r i o d s , despite tectonic action a n d t h e destructive force of t h e sea.
CAESAREA.
F i g u r e 4.
Marble statue of Tyche and the god Sebastos to
the right. H e i g h t , 1.52 m . (Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
streets. B y excavating n u m e r o u s street fragments in various sectors, m o s t l y Byzantine in d a t e , t h e t e a m r e c o v e r e d t h e orientation of t h e original H e r o d i a n grid a n d t h e d i m e n s i o n s of s o m e of d i e city blocks (insulae). I n 1975-1976 a n d 1979, a t e a m from die H e b r e w U n i versity of Jerusalem, directed b y L e e I. L e v i n e a n d E h u d N e t z e r , excavated a sector in t h e n o r t h w e s t of the Old City t h a t contained a w e l l - p r e s e r v e d Islamic dwelling q u a r t e r a n d , b e n e a t h it, r e m a i n s of a large Byzantine p u b l i c b u i l d i n g of u n k n o w n function. N e t z e r also b e g a n exploring t h e P r o m o n t o r y P a l a c e jutting into t h e sea n o r t h w e s t of t h e t h e ater, w h i c h m a y b e t h e royal p a l a c e of H e r o d ' s city. I n 1986, R o n n y R e i c h a n d M i c h a l Peleg, in a r e s c u e excavation, i d e n tified a s o u d i gate of t h e o u t e r (Byzantine) p e r i m e t e r wall b e n e a t h a factory in t h e n e i g h b o r i n g k i b b u t z . M e a n w h i l e , i n 1975, A v n e r R a b a n a n d Haifa University's C e n t e r for M a r itime Studies h a d b e g u n systematic exploration of C a e s a rea's h a r b o r s . I n 1980 R a b a n joined with R o b e r t M . H o h l felder, J o h n O l e s o n , a n d later R . L i n d l e y V a n n in t h e C a e s a r e a A n c i e n t H a r b o u r E x c a v a t i o n Project. T h a t t e a m explored C a e s a r e a ' s h a r b o r s intensively for a d e c a d e . I t studied shipwrecks a n d a n c h o r a g e s to t h e n o r t h a n d s o u t h — f r o m t h e Hellenistic, R o m a n , a n d B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d s — b u t d e v o t e d m o s t of its attention t o H e r o d ' s h a r b o r , Sebastos.
I n 1989 K e n n e t h G . H o l u m a n d t h e University of M a r y land joined R a b a n a n d Haifa's C e n t e r for M a r i t i m e Studies in d i e C o m b i n e d C a e s a r e a E x p e d i t i o n s , a project t h a t con tinues the strategy a n d m e t h o d s of t h e former Joint E x p e dition a n d H a r b o u r Project. T h i s t e a m h a s d e v o t e d its at t e n t i o n again to t h e u n d e r w a t e r e x p l o r a t i o n of Sebastos a n d to t h e o u t e r (Byzantine) p e r i m e t e r wall a n d h a s c o n d u c t e d s u b m a r i n e a n d field surveys, r e m o t e sensing, a n d geological studies inside t h e ancient site a n d to its n o r t h a n d s o u t h along t h e coast. W i t h i n d i e O l d City, it h a s e x p a n d e d t h e limits of t h e Hellenistic a n d H e r o d i a n i n n e r h a r b o r ; identi fied a n d studied a n i m p o r t a n t Early Christian c h u r c h o n t h e T e m p l e Platform, octagonal in plan, tiiat N e g e v ' s clearing o p e r a t i o n h a d first e x p o s e d ; a n d excavated Islamic a n d C r u s a d e r dwellings a n d p u b l i c buildings b o t h above d i e i n n e r h a r b o r a n d o n die T e m p l e Platform. T o t h e s o u t h of t h e O l d City, this t e a m has u n d e r t a k e n the excavation of a c o m plete insula of R o m a n a n d Byzantine Caesarea to study d i achronically t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e u r b a n plan a n d the u r b a n infrastructure in antiquity. U n d e r die C o m b i n e d E x p e d i t i o n s ' auspices, Jeffrey A. Blakely has b e g u n exca vation of a n o t h e r H e r o d i a n horreum vault to exploit die ce ramics f o u n d in its well-stratified a n d p r o t e c t e d context for evidence of t r a d e g o o d s passing t h r o u g h Caesarea's port. U n d e r t h e auspices of t h e University of Pennsylvania, K a t h ryn G l e a s o n a n d B a r b a r a Burrell are excavating t h e P r o m ontory Palace. In 1992 die Israel Antiquities Autiiority organized a large project to excavate extensive sectors of ancient Caesarea, b o t h widiin t h e O l d City a n d to t h e soutii along the coast, for t h e p u r p o s e of establishing a n archaeological park. D i rector of t h e I A A excavations is Yosef Poratii, w h o h a d ear lier c o n d u c t e d i m p o r t a n t research on t h e R o m a n a q u e d u c t system a n d rescue excavations within t h e O l d City. I n t h e m e a n t i m e b o t h d i e University of Pennsylvania t e a m a n d d i e C o m b i n e d Caesarea E x p e d i t i o n s h a v e joined the e x p a n d e d project, d i e latter a d d i n g J o s e p h P a u i c h to its directorate of R a b a n a n d H o l u m . Inside t h e O l d City, t h e project h a s iden tified a sea wall t h a t m a y r e p r e s e n t t h e h a r b o r restoration of E m p e r o r Anastasius (c. 5 0 0 ) , h a s b e g u n excavation a n d res toration of o n e of t h e vaults t h a t f o r m e d t h e western facade of t h e T e m p l e Platform, a n d h a s exposed a well-preserved Early Islamic dwelling q u a r t e r a b o v e d i e landlocked I n n e r H a r b o r . T o d i e s o u t h of t h e O l d City, t h e e x p a n d e d exca vations h a v e u n c o v e r e d , a m o n g o t h e r finds, a c o m p l e x of
404
CAIRO
B y z a n t i n e w a r e h o u s e s u s e d for storage a n d m a r k e t i n g of g r a i n , w i n e , oil, a n d o t h e r t r a d e g o o d s ; a R o m a n / B y z a n t i n e p u b l i c b a t h ; l u x u r i o u s R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e dwellings; a n d t h e s p e c t a c u l a r r u i n s of t h e a m p h i t h e a t e r t h a t H e r o d built, as J o s e p h u s r e p o r t s (Antiq.
15. 341), w h e n h e f o u n d e d C a e
sarea. W o r k in t h e last t w o d e c a d e s d e m o n s t r a t e s t h a t C a e s a r e a is a major site for r e s e a r c h o n t h e evolution of a n c i e n t u r b a n i s m — e s p e c i a l l y its m a r i t i m e c o m p o n e n t — f r o m t h e H e l lenistic p e r i o d t h r o u g h t h e C r u s a d e r o c c u p a t i o n . R e s e a r c h is also a d v a n c i n g o n floral a n d faunal r e m a i n s , glass, m e t a l a n d b o n e objects, a n d o t h e r categories of m a t e r i a l c u l t u r e , i n c l u d i n g c e r a m i c s . C u r r e n t projects are d e p l o y i n g a full r a n g e of scientific strategies a n d t e c h n i q u e s to e x p l o i t C a e sarea's past.
R a b a n , Avner, et al. The Harbours of Caesarea Maritima: Results of the Caesarea Ancient Harbour Excavation Project, 1980-1985, vol. 1, The Site and the Excavations. Edited by John Peter Oleson. British A r chaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 4 9 1 . Oxford, 1989. Comprehensive report o n the h a r b o r project's m a i n seasons, with important topographical a n d geological studies. V a n n , R. Lindley, ed. Caesarea Papers: Straton's Tower, Herod's Har bour, and Roman and Byzantine Caesarea. Journal of R o m a n A r chaeology, S u p p l e m e n t a r y Series, n o . 5. A n n Arbor, M i c h . , 1992. Collection of interpretive essays reflecting current scholarship, i n cluding recent reports of t h e C o m b i n e d Caesarea Expeditions a n d ceramic studies. W e n n i n g , Robert. " D i e Stadtgottin von Caesarea M a r i t i m a . " Boreas 9 (1986): 113-129. Detailed study of t h e Caesarea T y c h e . W i e m k e n , Robert C , a n d Kennetii G . H o l u m . " T h e Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima: Eighth Season, 1979." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 244 (1981): 27-52. I m p o r t a n t for t h e discovery of the street grid south of the O l d City; includes coins a n d ceramics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Blakely, Jeffrey A. Caesarea Marilima: The Pottery and Dating of Vault 1—Horreum, Mithraeum, and Later Uses. T h e Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima, Excavation Reports, vol. 4. Lewiston, N . Y . , 1986. Important for ceramic studies. Bull, Robert J. " T h e M i t h r a e u m of Caesarea Maritima." Textes et memoires 4 (1978): 75-89. Bull, Robert J., Edgar Krentz, a n d Olin Storvick. " T h e Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima; N i n t h Season, 1980." In Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1980-84, edited by Walter E. Rast, PP. 31—55. Bulletin of die American Schools of Oriental Research, Supplement no. 24. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1986. T h i s a n d the following item are comprehensive b u t sketchy preliminary reports with useful photographs a n d plans. Bull, Robert J., Edgar Krentz, Olin Storvick, a n d Marie Spiro. " T h e Joint Expedition t o Caesarea Maritima: T e n t h Season, 1982." In Pre mammary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1982-89, edited by Walter E. Rast, p p . 69-94. Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, S u p p l e m e n t no. 27. Baltimore, 1991. Fritsch, Charles T . , ed. Studies in the History of Caesarea Marilima. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, S u p p l e m e n tal Studies, vol. 19. Missoula, 1975. Essays on Jewish, Christian, a n d Crusader Caesarea, written from literary sources. Frova, Antonio, et al. Scavi di Caesarea Maritima. R o m e , 1966. Final report of die Italian Missione Archeologica. H o l u m , Kenneth G . , Robert L . Hohlfelder, Robert J. Bull, a n d Avner Raban. King Herod's Dream: Caesarea on the Sea. N e w York, 1988. G o o d introducdon to t h e site for the general reader, b u t outdated in part by recent discoveries. Includes a bibliography. H o l u m , Kenneth G. "Archaeological Evidence for the Fall of Byzantine Caesarea." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 286 (1992): 73-85. Interpretive essay on the reasons for ancient C a e sarea's decline. Levine, Lee I. Caesarea under Roman Rule. Leiden, 1975. Authoritative study of the R o m a n period from the literary sources, especially the rabbinic material. Levine, Lee I. Roman Caesarea: An Archaeological-Topographical Guide. Qedem, vol. 2. Jerusalem, 1975. Scholarly guide t o t h e m o n u m e n t s of R o m a n and Byzantine Caesarea, partly outdated by recent finds. Levine, L e e I., a n d E h u d Netzer. Excavations at Caesarea Maritima, 1975, 1976, 1979: Final Report. Q e d e m , vol. 21. Jerusalem, 1986, Includes a helpful guide to earlier excavations. Peleg, Michal, and R o n n y Reich. "Excavations of a Segment of the Byzantine City Wall of Caesarea Maritima." 'Aliqot (English Series) 21 (1992): 137-170.
KENNETH G . HOLUM
CAIRO,
capital of E g y p t (30°04' N , 3 i ° i 5 ' E ) . T h e F a
t i m i d s , a Shi'i M u s l i m g r o u p , i n v a d e d E g y p t i n 967 CE a n d f o u n d e d C a i r o as t h e i r capital t w o y e a r s later. L i k e all S h i ' i s , t h e F a t i m i d s w e r e s t r o n g l y i n c l i n e d t o m y s t i c i s m , w h i c h of t e n led t o a d e e p d e p e n d e n c e o n astrology. T h e y c h o s e t h e t i m e of t h e c o n j u n c t i o n of M a r s a n d J u p i t e r in t h e sign Aries ( t h e r a m ) for t h e i r c o n q u e s t . A p p a r e n t i y t h e capital's o r i g inal n a m e was t o h a v e b e e n a l - M a n s u r i y a h ( " t h e v i c t o r i o u s " ) , n a m e d after a s u b u r b of K a i r o u a n ( Q a y r a w a n , t h e capital of t h e S h i ' i sect a t t h a t time i n T u n i s i a ) . T h e n a m e a l - K a h i r a ( C a i r o ) , w h i c h was given to t h e city later, derives f r o m Kahir
el-Falak
( " t h e c o n q u e r o r of t h e p l a n e t s " ) , t h e
d e s i g n a t i o n of t h e p l a n e t M a r s . After t h e B y z a n t i n e g e n e r a l J a w h a r c a p t u r e d a l - F u s t a t (the early I s l a m i c city f o u n d e d b y t h e A r a b s in E g y p t ) , h e i m m e d i a t e l y b e g a n b u i l d i n g a n e n c l o s u r e of very large u n b a k e d b r i c k s , m e a s u r i n g a b o u t 1,188 s q m (12,915 sq. f t ) , w h i c h w o u l d i n c l u d e a p a l a c e , b a r racks, and administrative buildings. A m a j o r n o r t h - s o u t h street of a l - K a h i r a linked d i e old g a t e s of B a b a l - F u t u h a n d B a b Z u w a y l a ; b o t h are n a m e d after gates at a l - M a n s u r i y a h ( t h e F a t i m i d s ' h e a d q u a r t e r s in T u n i s i a ) . P a r t o f this s t r e e t survives i n t h e m o d e r n S h a r i a a l - M u i z z L i - d i n Illah, O n eitiier side o f this s h e e t , n o r t i i of t h e M o s q u e of a l - A z h a r , s t o o d t h e e a s t e r n p a l a c e , w h i c h w a s laid o u t b y J a w h a r , a n d t h e w e s t e r n p a l a c e b u i l t b y al-Aziz (975-996). B e t w e e n t h e m w a s a v e r y large o p e n
square
called t h e B a y n a l - K a s r a y n ( " b e t w e e n t h e t w o p a l a c e s " ) . N o t r a c e r e m a i n s of t h e e a s t e r n p a l a c e , b u t literary s o u r c e s i n f o r m u s t h a t it c o n s i s t e d of a walled e n c l o s u r e w i t h n i n e g a t e s of s t o n e a n d b u r n e d brick. T h e gates w e r e t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t a r c h i t e c t u r a l f e a t u r e of this p e r i o d . A t t h e s o u t h e r n side of t h e city w e r e t h e d o o r s of B a b Z u w a y l a a n d B a b a l - F a r a g . T h e s e p o r t a l s a r e p r i m e e x a m p l e s of m e d i e v a l military fortification. T o t h e w e s t w e r e t h e gates of B a b S a a d a a n d B a b a l - K a n t a r a . B a b e l - F u t u h
CAIRO ("the c o n q u e s t g a t e " ) a n d B a b el-Nasir ( " t h e victory g a t e " ) were at d i e n o r t h . B a b e i - F u t u h c o n t a i n e d two cylindrical t o w e r s , a n d B a b al-Nasir h a d t w o s q u a r e towers. T h e two eastern d o o r s , B a b B a r q u y a h a n d B a b el-Qarratin, w e r e c o n n e c t e d b y t w o vaulted galleries with d o m e d c h a m b e r s . B a b Z u w a y l a was n a m e d after a t r i b e of t h e s a m e n a m e t h a t lived n e a r b y . D u r i n g t h e M a m l u k p e r i o d , t h e d o o r was called B a b el-Metwalli, " d i e gate of the t a x collector." A c c o r d i n g to tradition, t h e r e v e n u e official w o u l d sit b y the d o o r to collect t h e a n n u a l levy. B a b Z u w a y l a is considered architecturally t h e m o s t beautiful gate. A m o n g the most important m o n u m e n t s that the Fatimids erected is t h e m o s q u e of a l - A z h a r , w h i c h was built in t h e center of C a i r o . A l - A z h a r b e c a m e a n institution for t h e Shi'i rite a n d a f a m o u s Islamic university. D u r i n g t h e A y y u b i d rule, p r a y e r s w e r e n o t p e r m i t t e d a t al-Azhar. T h e A y y u b i d s , w h o w e r e S u n n i , t e r m i n a t e d F a t i m i d rule in E g y p t . T h e y s t o p p e d tile Shi'i ritual a n d closed a l - A z h a r as a center for Shi'i teaching, Altiiough t h e y r u l e d for only eighty years, t h e y h a d a r e m a r k a b l e influence o n t h e arts, a n d particularly o n architecture. T h e m o s q u e w a s r e s t o r e d d u r i n g t h e eigh t e e n t h a n d n i n e t e e n t h centuries CE, b u t t h e central p a r t still preserves its original brick f o r m . M a n y F a t i m i d m o s q u e s r e m a i n in C a i r o , s u c h as alA q m a r at N a h a s e i n , as-Salili T a l a i n e a r B a b Zuwayla, alF a k a h a n i , a n d a l - H a k i m , w h i c h follows t h e s a m e p l a n as al-Azhar. A t t h e e n d of t h e F a t i m i d p e r i o d , C a i r o r e a c h e d its p e a k in t e r m s of art a n d c u l t u r e , a n d b e c a m e a large city w i t h beautiful m o s q u e s , p a r k s h o u s e s , palaces a n d m a r k e t s . T h e first e x p a n s i o n of t h e city o c c u r r e d w h e n Salah a d D i n (Saladin) e x t e n d e d t h e original walls of C a i r o farther s o u t h to enclose s u c h early I s l a m i c cities as al-Fustat, w h i c h w a s built b y d i e A r a b G e n e r a l A m r i b n al-'As in 6 4 1 , alAskar, f o u n d e d b y d i e ' A b b a s i d s in 7 5 0 , a n d el-Qatai, f o u n d e d b y A h m e d ibn T u l u n in 8 7 0 . T h e origin of t h e n a m e a l - F u s t a t is n o t clear; s o m e find t h a t it derives from t h e A r a b i c w o r d m e a n i n g " c a m p s , " a n d o t h e r scholars suggest t h a t it is f r o m t h e G r e e k w o r d phossaton ( L a t , fossatum), m e a n i n g " f o r t r e s s " o r " t o w n . " It is also called " t h e city of t h e t e n t . " T h e site of t h e n e w capital, al-Fustat, w a s p r o t e c t e d b y n a t u r a l hills t o t h e east a n d n o r t h . O n t h e west, t h e city w a s p r o t e c t e d b y t h e N i l e , w h i c h at t h a t time was t h e link b e t w e e n t h e n o r t h e r n a n d soutiiern E g y p t . Early historians a n d travelers, s u c h as a l - K u d a i , wrote that there were 3,600 mosques, 8,000 roads, and 1,700 p u b l i c baths at al-Fustat. W r i t e r s m a y h a v e exaggerated t h e n u m b e r s to s h o w t h e p r o g r e s s of this n e w capital i n t h e I s lamic world. A m r i b n al-'As built t h e al-Atique (old) m o s q u e in 6 4 1 i n t h e center of t h e city. It is t h e oldest m o s q u e in E g y p t a n d is r e g a r d e d as d i e first b u i l d i n g of Islamic architecture. T h e m o s q u e was e x p a n d e d to its c u r r e n t size in t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y d u r i n g t h e U m a y y a d p e r i o d , a n d m a n y additions w e r e m a d e b y s u c c e e d i n g g o v e r n o r s . T h e m o s t impressive c h a r a c t e r
405
istics of early Islamic a r c h i t e c t u r e as seen in this m o s q u e are d i e magnificent large o p e n c o u r t , t h e c o l o n n a d e s , a n d t h e m a r b l e c o l u m n s . Early A r a b historians n a m e d the m o s q u e " t h e c r o w n of t h e m o s q u e s " a n d " t h e m o s q u e of c o n q u e s t . " A m r built a h o u s e for himself to d i e n o r t h of the m o s q u e a n d a n o t h e r o n e to t h e w e s t for his son. W a n t i n g to p r e v e n t t h e c o n q u e s t of t h e city by t h e C r u saders, t h e g o v e r n o r of a l - F u s t a t in t h e twelfth c e n t u r y or d e r e d it to b e b u r n e d . T h e fire lasted for fifty-four days a n d destroyed a l m o s t t h e entire capital, creating a beneficial sit u a t i o n for archaeologists b e c a u s e t h e event p r e s e r v e d t h e entire stratigraphic r e c o r d . Scientific excavation of t h e d e bris of al-Fustat settlement c o u l d p r o v i d e us witii i n f o r m a tion a b o u t t h e s o c i o e c o n o m i c status of t h e p e o p l e , as well as details of early Islamic a r t a n d architecture. D e s p i t e its status, al-Fustat for m a n y d e c a d e s w e n t w i t h o u t scientific excavation. I n 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 1 3 , Ali B a h g a t exca vated a p p r o x i m a t e l y fifty acres and f o u n d d i e wall t h a t sur r o u n d e d al-Fustat, t h e Citadel, a n d C a i r o , built b y Salah a d - D i n . H a s s a n e l - H a w a r y a n d A. M a r z o u k c o n d u c t e d an excavation at t h e site. K . A . C. Creswell, in cooperation with M e h r i z , also w o r k e d at t h e site. Altiiough the Egyptian A n tiquities Organization e x c a v a t e d for m a n y seasons, m o s t of their archaeological r e p o r t s are u n p u b l i s h e d . A t e a m from t h e A m e r i c a n University in C a i r o u n d e r t h e direction of G e o r g e S c a n l o n , as well as a J a p a n e s e g r o u p , has b e e n w o r k ing at al-Fustat. After t h e ' A b b a s i d s defeated d i e last U m a y y a d caliph in E g y p t in 7 5 0 , t h e y o r d e r e d their g o v e r n o r in E g y p t to build a n o t h e r capital for their t r o o p s . T h i s n e w site was called alAskar, " t h e b a r r a c k s . " It w a s built as a s u b u r b to t h e n o r t h east of al-Fustat, in an area k n o w n as a l - H a m r a al-Kuswa a n d e x t e n d e d to t h e Y a s h k u r Hills. T h e ' A b b a s i d s built their h o u s e s a n d t h e g o v e r n o r ' s h e a d q u a r t e r s , k n o w n as D a r el' I m a r a h , in al-Askar. T h e soldiers' barracks a n d the m o s q u e of al-Askar w e r e established b y al-Fadl i b n Salih; d u r i n g his t e n u r e t h e two cities a l - F u s t a t a n d al-Askar m e r g e d to form o n e large city. Witii t h e d e s t r u c t i o n of al-Fustat, al-Askar b e c a m e t h e principal city. A series of sixty-five governors ruled E g y p t from al-Askar o n behalf of t h e 'Abbasids for a p e r i o d of a p p r o x i m a t e l y 1 1 8 years. T h e significance of t h e n e w capital al-Askar did n o t affect al-Fustat, which was still an i m p o r t a n t t r a d e center. A h m e d i b n T u l u n f o u n d e d t h e n e w city of al-Qata'i, " t h e w a r d s , " in 8 7 0 , T h e city was built in a o n e - s q u a r e - m i l e area located b e t w e e n al-Askar a n d e l - M o k a t t a m . I b n T u l u n built his palace, a n d o r d e r e d his p e o p l e to b u i l d n e w h o u s e s , in t h e n e w city. H e built o n e of t h e finest m o s q u e s in E g y p t a n d in t h e Islamic world. It took h i m t w o years to finish it, from 8 7 9 t o 8 9 1 . T h e m o s q u e covers a p p r o x i m a t e l y 6 . 5 acres a n d is t h e largest m o s q u e in t h e Islamic world. It is k n o w n as K a ' l a t e l - K a b s h or "fort of t h e r a m . " T h e c o u r t m e a s u r e s n i n e t y - n i n e m ( 3 2 5 ft.) o n e a c h side a n d is sur r o u n d e d b y arcades resting o n massive s q u a r e brick pillars.
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T h e r e are three h u n d r e d pointed horseshoe arches, con structed of brick a n d covered with stucco decorated with arabesque carvings. S o m e architectural features u s e d in this m o s q u e (such as brick pillars) w e r e n e w to Islamic archi tecture. T h e m i n a r e t with external corkscrew stairs shows M e s o p o t a m i a n influence. T h e pointed arches a n d h a n d m a d e arabesque carvings are the best example of t h e Islamic style of decoration. Salah a d - D i n c o m m i s s i o n e d m a n y i m p o r t a n t m o n u m e n t s t h a t can still be seen t o d a y . T h e Citadel ( i n t e n d e d to h o u s e his administration at el-Mokattam) and its a q u e d u c t were built in 1 1 7 7 . Several buildings were a d d e d to the Citadel d u r i n g the O t t o m a n period. M u h a m m a d Ali P a s h a ex p a n d e d the Citadel, b e g i n n i n g witii his m o s q u e , w h i c h d o m inates the area, in 1 8 4 5 . T h e Citadel later served as d i e royal palace until K h e d i v e Ismail m o v e d it to t h e A b d e e n Palace in 1 8 5 0 . Salah a d - D i n also i n t r o d u c e d the architectural design k n o w n as el-Madrasa, which he a d a p t e d from Syria. Ma drasahs w e r e Islamic institutions u s e d b o t h as schools for S u n n i M u s l i m subjects a n d as m o s q u e s for prayer services. T h e earliest k n o w n madrasah h a d two iwans (porticoes). T h e only surviving madrasah in E g y p t was built b y Sultan as-Salih N a j m e d - D i n (the last ruler of the A y y u b i d period) a n d is an e x a m p l e of t h e i m p o r t a n t A y y u b i d style, which w a s followed by the M a m l u k s . T h e y built madrasahs o n a cruciform p l a n to a c c o m m o d a t e t h e four o r t h o d o x schools of Islam. T h e madrasah c o m p l e x also contained a school, dormitory space, m a u s o l e u m , a n d m o s q u e . T h e M a m l u k "collegiate m o s q u e " style of madrasah was a distinctive fea t u r e in the Islamic architectural vocabulary in E g y p t . A n extant example is the m o s q u e of Sultan H a s a n ( 1 3 5 6 ) , w h i c h stands in front of the Citadel. T h e best s t a t e m e n t t o describe t h a t m o s q u e was written by the historian Makrizi, "(it) sur passed all die m o s q u e s ever built in any p a r t of t h e w o r l d . "
[See also E g y p t , article on Islamic E g y p t ; F a t i m i d D y n a s t y ; and Fustat.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu L u g h o d , Janet. Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious. Princeton, 1971. Buder, Alfred J. The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Ijxst Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion. Oxford, 1902. Creswell, K. A. C. Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, Umayyads, Early 'Abbasids, and Tulunids. Oxford, 1940. D e s m o n d , Stewart. Great Cairo, Mother of the World. Cairo, 1981. G u e s t , A. R. " T h e F o u n d a t i o n of F u s t a t a n d the Khittahs of T h a t T o w n . " Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1907): 4 9 - 8 3 . H a s a n , H a s a n Ibrahim. Al-Fatimiyun ft Misr. Cairo, 1932. H o a g , John D . Islamic Architecture. N e w York, 1975. Kubiak, Wladyslaw. Al-Fustat: Its Foundations and Early Development. Cairo, 1987. Lane-Poole, Stanley. A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages. L o n d o n , 1901. M a c K e n z i e , Neil D . Ayyubid 1992.
Cairo: A Topographical
Study.
Cairo,
Parker, Richard B., and R o b i n Sabin. Islamic Monuments in Cairo: A Practical Guide. 3d ed., revised and enlarged by Caroline Williams. Cairo, 1985. Rivoira, Giovanni T . Moslem Architecture. L o n d o n , 1918. Rogers, John M . " A l - K a h i r a . " In Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 4, p p . 4 2 4 441. N e w ed., L e i d e n , i 9 6 0 - . Sanders, Paula. Ritual, Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo. Albany, 1994. Staffa, Susan Jane. Conquest and Fusion: The Social Evolution A.D. 642-1850. Leiden, 1977.
of Cairo,
ZAHI HAWASS
T h e M a m l u k s ruled for a b o u t o n e h u n d r e d years, leaving a large n u m b e r of i m p o r t a n t a n d beautiful artifacts a n d buildings. F o r t y m o s q u e s are k n o w n from this period, a n d tiieir art a n d architecture are considered b y Islamic scholars a n d historians to b e the m o s t refined in all of E g y p t ' s Islamic history. T h e m i n a r e t was i n t r o d u c e d in this p e r i o d a n d b e came an i m p o r t a n t architectural element of die m o s q u e s . M a n y artists a n d artisans from Syria a n d Iraq came to E g y p t a n d introduced other new features. Cairo attained its c u r r e n t size during the M a m l u k period. N o m o n u m e n t s of distinc tion were a d d e d to Cairo during t h e reign of the O t t o m a n s .
CALLAWAY, JOSEPH ATLEE (1920-1988), A m e r i c a n archaeologist a n d principal excavator of Ai/etTell, in Israel, a representative of t h e "biblical a r c h a e o l o g y " m o v e m e n t ; a n d leading figure in die A m e r i c a n Schools of Oriental R e s e a r c h ( A S O R ) . Callaway was b o r n a n d e d u c a t e d in A r k a n s a s , w h e r e h e g r a d u a t e d from O u a c h i t a C o l lege. H e p r e p a r e d for t h e Christian ministry at t h e S o u t h e r n Baptist T h e o l o g i c a l S e m i n a r y in Louisville. I n addition t o his special interests in the H e b r e w Bible a n d l a n g u a g e , C a l laway developed an interest in N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology u n d e r the tutelage of William H . M o r t o n , professor of O l d T e s t a m e n t a n d biblical archaeology. After earning an M . D i v . degree i n 1 9 5 4 a n d a P h . D . in O l d T e s t a m e n t s t u d ies in 1 9 5 7 , Callaway r e t u r n e d to S o u t h e r n S e m i n a r y t o t e a c h O l d T e s t a m e n t a n d N e a r E a s t e r n archaeology from 1 9 5 8 until his r e t i r e m e n t in 1 9 8 2 .
T o d a y Cairo is the m o s t famous Islamic city, b e c a u s e of its role in the politics of the M i d d l e East as well as its central role in Islam. Al-Azhar M o s q u e remains the oldest a n d larg est Islamic educational institution a n d t h e seat of D a r alF a t w a ("the h o u s e of constitutions") for all M u s l i m s . A thriving u r b a n center with fifteen million inhabitants, it has e n d u r e d centuries of change to prove w o r t h y of its glorious history.
Callaway's desire to relate archaeological findings t o b i b lical study is b e s t illustrated in his general essays a n d in his extensive fieldwork at t h e site of et-Tell ( 1 9 6 4 - 1 9 7 2 ) , w h i c h h e a n d m o s t scholars identified as biblical Ai. O v e r a p e r i o d of t w e n t y years, Callaway modified his views o n t h e histor ical accuracy of the c o n q u e s t narrative (Callaway, 1 9 6 8 ) , c o n c l u d i n g t h a t if t h e r e w a s a " c o n q u e s t " of Ai, it w a s a c c o m p l i s h e d by o t h e r C a n a a n i t e s in t h e eleventh c e n t u r y BCE.
CAMELS Callaway p u b l i s h e d a n u m b e r of influential articles a n d b o o k s a b o u t et-Tell's Early B r o n z e A g e C a n a a n i t e culture (cf. R u s t , 1988, for a b i b l i o g r a p h y ) . H e w a s also deeply c o n c e r n e d with m e t h o d o l o g i c a l issues, including p o t t e r y anal ysis a n d t h e application of t h e sciences to archaeological research. H i s attention to refinements i n controlled strati g r a p h i c excavation (i.e., t h e W h e e l e r - K e n y o n m e t h o d ) s t e m m e d from his pre-Ai field e x p e r i e n c e s at Befhel/Beitin (i960, u n d e r J a m e s L . K e l s o ) , S h e c h e m (i960, 1962, a n d 1964, u n d e r G . E r n e s t W r i g h t ) , a n d J e r u s a l e m (1961 a n d 1962, u n d e r K a t h l e e n M . K e n y o n a n d R o l a n d d e V a u x ) . I n d e e d , K e n y o n ' s suggestion t h a t h e s t u d y t h e Early B r o n z e t o m b s at Ai/et-Tell w a s t h e catalyst in his decision to exca vate t h a t site. J o s e p h Callaway e a r n e d a r e p u t a t i o n as a captivating speaker, c a p a b l e a d m i n i s t r a t o r , a n d skilled excavator, all of w h i c h w e r e e v i d e n c e d in h i s roles as minister, professor, p r e s i d e n t of t h e Albright I n s t i t u t e of Archaeological R e search in Jerusalem, trustee of t h e A m e r i c a n Schools of O r i ental R e s e a r c h , officer in t h e Society of Biblical L i t e r a t u r e , a n d director of the Joint E x p e d i t i o n to Ai. [See also Ai; A m e r i c a n S c h o o l s of Oriental R e s e a r c h ; and Biblical Archaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Callaway, Joseph A. "Biblical Archaeology." Review and Expositor 58 (1961): 155-172Callaway, Joseph A. " T h e E m e r g i n g Role of Biblical Archaeology." Review and Expositor 63 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : 1 9 9 - 2 0 9 . Callaway, Joseph A. " N e w Evidence o n t h e C o n q u e s t of A i . " Journal of'BiblicalLiterature 87 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 3 1 2 - 3 2 0 . Callaway, J o s e p h A. "Archaeology a n d t h e Bible." I n The Broadman Bible Commentary, vol. 1, edited by Clifton J. Allen, p p . 4 1 - 4 8 . N a s h ville, 1 9 6 9 . D r i n k a r d , Joel F . " I n M e m o r i a m . " Biblical Archaeologist 51 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 6 7 . R u s t , Eric C. "Biographical Sketch of Joseph A. Callaway: Christian Minister, Old T e s t a m e n t Professor, a n d Field Archaeologist." I n Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An Introduction to Palestinian Ar chaeology Dedicated to Joseph A. Callaway, edited by Joel F . D r i n k a r d , Gerald L. Mattingly, a n d J. Maxwell Miller, p p . 4 5 6 - 4 6 4 . Atlanta, 1988. T h e m o s t complete source of information on Callaway's life a n d work, including a bibliography of his publications through 1 9 8 5 . Shanks, Hershel. "Joseph A. Callaway, 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 8 8 . " Biblical Archae ology Review 14.6 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 24. c
GERALD L . M A T T I N G L Y
C A M E L S . M o d e r n camels a r e of t w o t y p e s , Camelus dromedarius—the o n e - h u m p e d d r o m e d a r y — a n d C. bactrianus— t h e t w o - h u m p e d Bactrian, b o t h of w h i c h a r e k n o w n only as d o m e s t i c o r feral p o p u l a t i o n s . M o d e r n d r o m e d a r i e s a r e distributed from M o r o c c o t o w e s t e r n I n d i a , a n d Bactrians f r o m Anatolia to M o n g o l i a . T h e i r r a n g e s overlap in A n a tolia, Azerbaijan, a n d regions t o t h e east of t h e C a s p i a n Sea. It is likely t h a t t h e s e distributions w e r e different in antiquity, h a v i n g n o w shifted s o m e w h a t i n r e s p o n s e t o e n v i r o n m e n t a l c h a n g e . N o wild camels exist save for a possible relic p o p
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ulation in the G o b i D e s e r t . Pleistocene r e m a i n s in t h e N e a r E a s t a n d E g y p t include s p e c i m e n s from t h e Paleolithic i n m o d e m J o r d a n , E g y p t , Syria, a n d Israel (best referred t o as Camelus s p e c , given n o m e n c l a t u r a l complications a n d a n u n c e r t a i n fossil history, a n d C. thomasi, a large form k n o w n from s o u t h e r n E g y p t a n d n o r t h e r n S u d a n ) . I n t h e early H o locene, e v i d e n c e for t h e a n i m a l is limited t o a small collec tion from Sihi o n t h e s o u t h e r n R e d Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. I t h a s b e e n r a d i o c a r b o n d a t e d to 8200 BCE (uncalib r a t e d ) , although t h e archaeological deposit within which the b o n e s w e r e found dates stratigraphically to t h e e n d of the second m i l l e n n i u m BCE. E v i d e n c e for camels b e c o m e s m o r e a b u n d a n t in t h e third m i l l e n n i u m BCE with s p e c i m e n s from Jericho, coastal sites a r o u n d t h e A r a b i a n Peninsula, a n d S h a h r - i Sokhta in eastern Iran. T h e s e last are p r o b a b l y Bactrian. D r o m e d a r i e s are usually a s s u m e d t o have b e e n d o m e s t i cated in Arabia before t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , b u t n o clear archaeological evidence exists t o s u p p o r t t h e claim. T h e of ten-cited c a m e l - b o n e collections from late third m i l l e n n i u m U m m a n - N a r , Hili 8, a n d R a s G h a n a d a o n t h e gulf coast of t h e U n i t e d A r a b E m i r a t e s c a n n o t b e s h o w n to contain d o m e s t i c animals. I n fact, t h e associated b o n e finds suggest t h a t t h e y w e r e h u n t e d . R o c k a r t depicting camels is k n o w n in Arabia a n d t h e Sinai b u t is difficult to date. T h e r e f o r e , t h e u s e of this evidence t o s u p p o r t a t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m date for d o m e s t i c a t i o n is inconclusive. Only further excavation in the region will settle t h e q u e s t i o n of t h e domestication of the o n e - h u m p e d camel. A tiny n u m b e r of camel b o n e s is k n o w n from t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m sites in the L e v a n t (Arad, Jer i c h o ) — i n f o r m a t i o n insufficient t o d e t e r m i n e wild or d o mestic status. T h e discovery of d u n g a n d w o v e n camel hair in association with the b o n e s a t Shahr-i Sokhta (2700-2500 BCE) reinforces t h e s u p p o s i t i o n s t h a t these are d o m e s t i c stock a n d t h a t t h e Bactrian w a s d o m e s t i c a t e d slightly earlier at t h e b o r d e r of T u r k m e n i s t a n a n d Iran. A camel-hair r o p e a n d a series of O l d K i n g d o m depictions suggest t h e p r e s e n c e of t h e a n i m a l in E g y p t b u t d o n o t p r o v i d e certain evidence for local domestication. E v e n later, t h e evidence for t h e camel in E g y p t is s p o r a d i c . I t is n o t until the Hellenistic p e r i o d t h a t t h e animal w a s u s e d extensively there. In t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, a t w o - h u m p e d camel w a s depicted on a Syrian cylinder seal (c. 1800 BCE), a n d t h e animal is m e n t i o n e d in c u n e i f o r m texts from M e s o p o t a m i a from t h e O l d B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d o n w a r d . Clay figurines from Y e m e n s h o w i n g d r o m e d a r i e s with saddles m a y b e as old as t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. O n e t h e o r y suggests t h a t camels h a d b e c o m e n u m e r o u s in western Arabia b y 1500 BCE, c o n t r i b u t i n g to tire rise of oases states. H o w e v e r , this p a t t e r n of s h a r p increases i n c a m e l u s e is n o t reflected a t L e v a n t i n e sites. O n l y a very few c a m e l - b o n e finds from M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e sites i n t h e L e v a n t h a v e b e e n r e p o r t e d ( M e g i d d o , Gezer, T a ' a n a c h , el-Jisr, B e ' e r R e s i s i m ) . Only the b o n e s from t h e last site w e r e excavated using m o d e r n
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techniques a n d are stratigraphically reliable. H o w e v e r , n o n e of these bones h a v e b e e n r a d i o c a r b o n d a t e d a n d n o n e c a n b e s h o w n t o be d o m e s t i c . I n t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , camels are still rare. Several specimens are k n o w n from T e l l J e m m e h . A l t h o u g h it has b e e n r e p o r t e d that a large n u m b e r of camel bones were found in tiiirteentli-twelfth-century BCE sites at the c o p p e r mines of T i m n a ' , no r e p o r t of this m a terial has been f o r t h c o m i n g to allow an evaluation. At H e s b a n in T r a n s j o r d a n , only a few camel b o n e s are k n o w n from tiiirteentli-twelfth-century levels. William Foxwell Albright argued tiiat d r o m e d a r y d o m e s tication a n d the s p r e a d of its use did n o t m u c h p r e c e d e the twelfth c e n t u r y BCE. T h i s w o u l d m e a n t h a t t h e m e n t i o n of camels in t h e Genesis narrative (12:16; 24:10 ff.) is a n a c h ronistic. T h e archaeological evidence from t h e L e v a n t still bears out his p o i n t a b o u t the late spread of camel u s e . D u r ing the I r o n A g e , camel b o n e s begin to increase in fre quency. A l t h o u g h substantial collections h a v e b e e n r e p o r t e d from fortress sites dated to the t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE in Israel's N e g e v desert ( H a r - S a ' a d , Q a d e s h - B a r n e a ) , t h e m o s t d r a matic and sustained increase in the u s e of t h e camel, as d o c u m e n t e d from t h e b o n e s , is found at T e l l J e m m e h d u r i n g t h e Assyrian o c c u p a t i o n in the seventh century BCE. T h i s is coincident with t h e textual evidence indicating t h a t camels were u s e d b y t h e Assyrian a r m y as pack animals d u r i n g m i l itary c a m p a i g n s . I n t h e Persian period, t h e n u m b e r of c a m e l b o n e s increased even m o r e , as camels were u s e d to carry t h e international trade in aromatics from the A r a b i a n P e n insula. T h i s further increase in camels at T e l l J e m m e h is roughly paralleled by a similar c h a n g e at the o t h e r e n d of t h e route, in Y e m e n . F r o m d i e textual evidence it is clear t h a t camel m a n a g e m e n t was a specialty of t h e A r a b ttibes inhabiting t h e Syro-Arabian desert a n d n o r t h e r n Sinai. F r o m the Persian p e r i o d until the a d v e n t of gasoline-pow ered vehicles, as their u s e o n t r a d e routes e x p a n d e d , camels b e c a m e m o r e frequent at sites in t h e better-watered p a r t s of t h e N e a r East. It is also from t h e Persian p e r i o d t h a t t h e animal found a n o t h e r use: tiieir b o n e s b e c a m e i m p o r t a n t as a raw material in t h e large-scale m a n u f a c t u r e of b o n e tools a n d objects, an industry a b u n d a n t i y evidenced at t h e p o r t city of Ashkelon i n Israel. [See also A n i m a l H u s b a n d r y ; Ethnozoolbgy; and P a l e o zoology. In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Beebe, H. Keith, The Dromedary Revolution. Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Occasional Papers, 18. Claremont, Calif., 1990. D i s cusses the relationship between die camel and trade in die ancient Near East. Bulliet, Richard W . The Camel and the Wlieel. Cambridge, 1 9 7 5 . Classic exposition of camels and camel use in the ancient world. Grigson, Caroline, et al, " T h e Camel in Arabia: A Direct Radiocarbon Date, Calibrated t o about 7000 B C . " Journal of Archaeological Science
16 (1989): 3 5 5 - 3 6 2 . Discussion of the earliest Holocene evidence for camels in Arabia. Hakker-Orion, D . " T h e Role of the Camel in Israel's Early History." In Animals and Archaeology, vol. 3, Early Herders and Their Flocks, edited by Juliet Clutton-Brock and Caroline Grigson, p p . 2 0 7 - 2 1 2 . Oxford, 1983. Review of the camel in southern Israel and Sinai. Midant-Reynes, Beatrix, and Florence Braunstein-Silvestre. " L e chameau en E g y p t e . " Orientalia 46 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 3 3 7 - 3 6 2 . Presents the ar chaeological evidence from Egypt, emphasizing artistic and textual records. U e r p m a n n , Hans-Peter. The Ancient Distribution of Ungulate Mammals in the Middle East. Wiesbaden, 1987. T h o r o u g h review of the early archaeological a n d osteological record for the camel. Wapnish, Paula. " C a m e l Caravans and Camel Pastoralists at Tell J e m m e h . " Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia Uni versity 13 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 0 1 - 1 2 1 . Links the spread of camel use a n d polit ical and economic processes in the Iron Age and Persian period in the Levant. Wapnish, Paula. "Beauty and Utility in Bone: N e w Light o n Bone Crafting." Biblical Archaeology Review 17 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 5 4 - 5 7 . Illustrates die use of camel b o n e as a raw material. PAULA WAPNISH
CANAAN.
I n H e b r e w , Ugaritic, a n d P h o e n i c i a n / P u n i c C a n a a n is spelled knn, in Akkadian c u n e i f o r m it is spelled ki-na-ah-nu(m) (at M a r i , Byblos, a n d T y r e ) , ki-in-a-nim (at Alalakh), mat ki-na-hi (in Assyria a n d U g a r i t ) , or mat ki-inna-ah-hi (in E g y p t , M i t a n n i , B o g a z k o y / H a t t u s a , B a b y l o n ) ; a n d in E g y p t i a n it is spelled k-3-n--n-3 or k-i-n-'-nw (with m a n y variations). T h e S e p t u a g i n t generally simply translit erates into G r e e k as C h a n a a n . T h e e t y m o l o g y of t h e n a m e has b e e n m u c h discussed, a n d t h e discussion revolves a r o u n d w h e t h e r knn s h o u l d b e u n d e r s t o o d as derived from t h e Semitic r o o t k-n-, " t o b e n d , b e s u b d u e d , " with t h e -n suffix (the c o n s e n s u s at p r e s e n t ; see A s t o u r , 1965); or w h e t h e r the s a m e w o r d as t h e place n a m e Canaan (also spelled kinahhu in several cuneiform sources) s h o u l d b e seen in kinahhu, " b l u e c l o t h " from N u z i (in H u r r i a n or h u m a n ized Akkadian; see Speiser, 1936, d i s p u t e d in L a n d s b e r g e r , 1967). Kinahhu w o u l d p r e s e n t a parallel ( t h o u g h opposite) process t o the G r e e k u s e of a derivative of a w o r d for r e d purple to name the Phoenicians. T h e t e r m Canaan or Canaanite a p p e a r s in t h e e x t a n t ev idence for the first time in an e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE text from M a r i in Syria. A m a n n a m e d M u t - B i s i r c o m p l a i n s to his lord in a letter written from the t o w n of R a h i s u m t h a t "thieves a n d C a n a a n i t e s are in R a h i s u m . " ( D o u b t h a s r e cently b e e n cast on a suggestion t h a t t h e t e r m is to b e seen in ga-na-na(-um) in t h i r d - m i l l e n n i u m texts from Ebla in Syria; see A r c h i et a l , 1993, p p . 229-230.) O t h e r t h a n this text, n o d i i n g a p p e a r s in writing a b o u t C a n a a n or t h e C a naanites until t h e late fifteenth c e n t u r y (in a b o o t y list, A m e n o p h i s II declares t h a t h e h a d d e p o r t e d C a n a a n i t e s ) a n d t h e n several times in t h e f o u r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE A m a r n a letters. " A m m i a in t h e land of C a n a a n " s h o w s u p in t h e " a u t o b i o g r a p h y " of I d r i m i (of A l a l a k h ) , d a t e d vari-
CANAANITES ously b y scholars t o t h e fifteenth-thirteenth centuries BCE. At U g a r i t , in a b o u t 1200 BCE, a list of m e r c h a n t s includes one Y'l, described as a C a n a a n i t e (krfny), along with other p e o p l e with ethnic identifiers, s u c h as E g y p t i a n a n d A s h dodite. B e c a u s e t h e Ugaritians b o t h e r e d t o label these p e o ple w i t h gentilics, it is generally d e d u c e d that they w e r e in s o m e sense outsiders a n d tiiat, therefore, U g a r i t did n o t c o n sider itself a p a r t of C a n a a n . A t a b o u t t h e s a m e time, t h e "Israel stela" of P h a r a o h M e r n e p t a h lists C a n a a n as o n e of t h e c o n q u e r e d lands. T h e l a n d of C a n a a n is d e s c r i b e d in several ancient texts, with predictably varying b o u n d a r i e s . T h r o u g h m o s t of d i e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, C a n a a n ' s b o u n d a r i e s b e g a n in t h e s o u t h at W a d i al-'Arish a n d r e a c h e d n o r t h t o t h e L e b a n o n a n d t h e A n t i - L e b a n o n M o u n t a i n ranges. T h e w e s t e r n b o r der w a s , of course, t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a n d d i e eastern w a s T r a n s j o r d a n (mostly t h e B a s h a n ) a n d t h e J o r d a n River a n d D e a d Sea farther s o u t h . T h e s e b o u n d a r i e s a c c o r d with t h e area covered b y t h e e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE S a q q a r a g r o u p of E g y p t i a n E x e c r a t i o n texts a n d with t h e descriptions of die l a n d of C a n a a n i n Numbers 3 4 : 1 - 1 2 a n d t h e future i n heritance in Ezekiel 47:13-20; 48:1-7, 23-29. ( S e e also t h e s o u t h e r n b o u n d a r y i n Jos. 15:2-4 a n d t h e n o r t h e r n o n e in 19:24-31.) T h e table of n a t i o n s gives a r a t h e r m o r e r e stricted p i c t u r e of C a n a a n i n Genesis 10:19: from S i d o n in the n o r t h t o G a z a in t h e s o u t h ; t o t h e east, t h e area of S o d o m and Gomorrah. Biblical traditions a b o u t t h e l a n d of C a n a a n cluster in t h e genealogies a n d in t h e stories of p r o m i s e a n d c o n q u e s t . T h e w o r d Canaan o c c u r s largely i n Genesis a n d Numbers, a few times in Exodus, Leviticus, a n d Deuteronomy, a n d t h e n m a n y times in Joshua unci Judges ( i n c l u d i n g t h e earliest-dated b i b lical attestation, Js. 5:19). Canaanite o c c u r s frequently in Genesis a n d Exodus a n d a few times in Numbers a n d Deuter onomy, b u t m o s t c o m m o n l y in Joshua a n d Judges. T h e s e m e n t i o n s , of c o u r s e , refer t o t h e land i n w h i c h Israel settled ( c o n q u e r e d , a c c o r d i n g to biblical tradition) a n d t o t h e i n habitants of t h a t l a n d . N e i t h e r w o r d a p p e a r s very m a n y times outside t h e P e n t a t e u c h a n d Joshua a n d Judges, al tiiough a few later o c c u r r e n c e s a r e interesting for their a p p a r e n t u s e of p h r a s e s with t h e w o r d Canaan (once Canaan ite) t o m e a n " m e r c h a n t , t r a d e r " (Jb. 40:30; Ez. 16:29,17:4; Hos. 12:8; Zep. 1:11). Extrabiblical uses of t h e t e r m s Canaan a n d Canaanite e n d for t h e m o s t p a r t with t h e I r o n A g e , with a few e x c e p t i o n s . I n t h e t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE, coins f r o m Beirut r e a d I'dk' 'sbkn'n (in P h o e n i c i a n , " L a o d i k e a w h i c h is in C a n a a n " — t h e G r e e k equivalent of Laodikeia he en Phoinike, " L a o d i k e a w h i c h is in P h o e n i c i a . " T h e P h o e n i c i a n p r i e s t S a k k u n y a t o n ( p e r h a p s m i d - o r late first m i l l e n n i u m BCE), in excerpts from Philo of Byblos (first or s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE), q u o t e d b y E u s e b i u s (fourth c e n t u r y ) , says t h a t C h n a w a s t h e first p e r s o n t o call himself P h o e n i c i a n . B o t h H e r o d i a n u s G r a m m a t i c u s (sec o n d c e n t u r y CE; Peri monerous lexeos, 8.5-9) d S t e p h a n u s a
n
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of B y z a n t i u m (fifth c e n t u r y CE; see u n d e r C h n a ) note t h a t P h o e n i c i a was formerly called C h n a . [See also C a n a a n i t e s ; P h o e n i c i a ; and Phoenicians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Rev. & enl. ed., translated a n d edited b y A n s o n F . Rainey. Philadelphia, 1 9 7 9 . A densely packed presentation of t h e g e o g r a p h y of Israel and of what is k n o w n of the identification of sites, Archi, Alfonso, Paola Piacentini, a n d Francesco P o m p o n t o . ArchiviRealidiBbla. Vol. 2 , 1 n o m i di luogo del testi di Ebla. R o m e , 1 9 9 3 . Listing of occurrences of place names in t h e Ebla texts, with c o m m e n t where appropriate. Astour, Michael C. " T h e Origin of t h e T e r m s ' C a n a a n , ' 'Phoenician,' a n d ' P u r p l e . ' " Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 3 4 6 - 3 5 0 . Discussion a n d evaluation of alternative arguments for t h e origins of the three terms. Attridge, H a r o l d W „ a n d R o b e r t A. O d e n Jr. Philo of Byblos. The Phoe nician History. Washington, 1 9 8 1 . F i n e , accessible version of Sak kunyaton, with introduction and notes. Landsberger, B e n n o . " U b e r F a r b e n i m Sumerisch-Akkadischen." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 2 1 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 3 9 - 1 7 3 . Wide-ranging dis cussion of t h e precise referents of color words. M c C a r t e r , P . Kyle, Jr. " T h e Patriarchal A g e . " In Ancient Israel, edited b y Hershel Shanks, p p . 1 - 2 9 . W a s h i n g t o n , 1988. A n up-to-date in troduction to the possible b a c k g r o u n d of the patriarchal stories in Genesis, in t h e course of which M i d d l e Bronze a n d L a t e Bronze A g e C a n a a n are discussed. M a z a r , Benjamin. " C a n a a n a n d t h e C a n a a n i t e s . " I n Biblical Israel: State and People, edited by S h m u e l Ahituv, p p . 1 6 - 2 1 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Extensive presentation of t h e evidence bearing o n die meaning of the n a m e Canaan. T h e entire work is a collection of M a z a r ' s essays. Rainey, A n s o n F . " T h e K i n g d o m of U g a r i t . " Biblical Archaeologist 28.4 ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 6 5 ) : 1 0 2 - 1 2 5 . S u m m a r y of the excavations, history, administration, and religion at Ugarit; includes the evidence (through the mid-1960s) that Late Bronze Ugarit did not consider itself part of C a n a a n , Speiser, E p h r a i m A. " T h e N a m e Phoinikes." Language 12 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 2 1 126, Discussion and evaluation of three theories about die origin of the G r e e k n a m e for t h e Phoenicians. Jo A N N HACKETT
C A N A A N I T E S . T h e r e a r e several ways to distinguish t h e a n c i e n t Canaanites: as p e o p l e w h o lived i n C a n a a n ( L e b a n o n , soutiiern Syria, Israel, a n d T r a n s j o r d a n ) ; people w h o spoke a C a n a a n i t e l a n g u a g e ; p e o p l e identified in antiquity b y other g r o u p s as C a n a a n i t e s ; a n d p e o p l e w h o identified tiiemselves as C a n a a n i t e s . [See C a n a a n . ] F o r t h e p e r i o d b e fore t h e r e is any evidence of t h e individual C a n a a n i t e lan guages, t h e t e r m Canaanite simply designates p e o p l e w h o lived in ( o r c a m e from) C a n a a n . I t is n o t k n o w n w h e n , e x actly, t h e peoples w h o will later speak C a n a a n i t e languages arrived in C a n a a n , or w h e r e they c a m e from. T h e first cer tain e x t a n t m e n t i o n of " C a n a a n i t e s " is in a n e i g h t e e n t h - c e n tury text from M a r i in Syria. [See M a r i T e x t s , ] T h e cleatb r e a k i n culture in t h e r e g i o n seen a t a b o u t t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, k n o w n as t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e I, a n d s o m e ties b e t w e e n M B I culture
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CANAANITES. Relief showing Canaanite
vassals.
F r o m t h e M e m p h i t e t o m b of g e n e r a l H o r e m h e b at
S a q q a r a . E i g h t e e n t h d y n a s t y , (Courtesy Rijks M u s e u m van O u d h e d e n , Leiden)
o n the coast of Syria a n d Palestine a n d the slightly earlier culture in the interior of Syria, suggest that t h e " C a n a a n i t e s " of the second m i l l e n n i u m BCE c a m e to C a n a a n from Syria. A t any rate, it is n o w evident t h a t there was a major shift at t h e beginning of t h e s e c o n d millennium BCE away from rural pastoralism and t o w a r d living in large, fortified u r b a n c e n ters, such as M e g i d d o , Jericho, T e l l Beit M i r s i m , G e z e r , S h e c h e m , a n d H a z o r . [See M e g i d d o ; Jericho; Beit M i r s i m , Tell; Gezer; S h e c h e m ; Hazor.] Established u r b a n centers w e r e growing, n e w settlements were being f o u n d e d , a n d t r a d e was o n an international scale, including t h e islands of t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n , a n o t h e r sign of prosperity. T h e three-tiered settlement p a t t e r n typical of an u r b a n ized culture can b e seen: m o s t people lived in large u r b a n areas; m o s t of t h e settlements outside the u r b a n areas were small villages ( m a n y were 2 acres or less); a n d in b e t w e e n t h e villages were a few m e d i u m - s i z e d t o w n s . T h i s infor m a t i o n has been gleaned largely from archaeological sur veys; adding to it w h a t has b e e n learned from full-scale ex cavations at a few sites a n d c o m p a r i n g settlement p a t t e r n s in other areas of t h e world and in other periods of time to
help us reach conclusions a b o u t life in M B C a n a a n . T h e s e conclusions are m u c h b r o a d e r t h a n w h a t w e c a n learn from t e x t finds or f r o m t h e few tells that h a v e b e e n e x c a v a t e d intensely a n d well. T h e massive fortifications a r o u n d t h e u r b a n areas usually i n c l u d e d a r a m p a r t (e.g., Akko, T e l Z e r o r , H a z o r , T e l D a n , D o r , Shechem, Ashkelon, Megiddo, Lachish, Gezer). Such fortifications could only b e u n d e r t a k e n w h e r e t h e r e w a s s u r p l u s wealth, a workforce free from s u b s i s t e n c e activities, central control of n a t u r a l resources o u t s i d e u r b a n areas, a n d central p l a n n i n g . T h e y also indicate t h a t t h e r e was a p e r ceived e n e m y or e n e m i e s to w a r r a n t s u c h p r e c a u t i o n s , as d o t h e m o r e m o d e s t city walls f o u n d as defenses at small f a r m ing a n d pastoral villages ( s u c h as M e v o r a k h a n d S h i l o h ) . T h e labor that w e n t into h u g e fortifications w a s p r o b a b l y forced l a b o r — a n a s s u m p t i o n t h a t a c c o r d s well with t h e ar chaeological indicators of a stratified society: large n u m b e r s of rather p o o r living a r r a n g e m e n t s alongside a v e r y few large d o m e s t i c structures as at H a z o r a n d T e l l Beit M i r s i m , T h e transition from t h e M i d d l e to L a t e B r o n z e A g e in C a n a a n entailed s o m e destruction, especially in t h e hill
CANAANITES c o u n t r y a n d in t h e s o u t h , b u t t h a t d e s t r u c t i o n w a s n o t c o m plete a n d , in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e (especially L B II, t h e " A m a r n a a g e " ) , the old sites w e r e largely resettled: H a z o r , M e g i d d o , S h e c h e m , G e z e r , T e l l Beit M i r s i m , a n d T e l l elF a r ' a h ( N o r t h ) r e t a i n e d their p r o m i n e n c e . [See F a r ' a h , T e l l el- ( N o r t h ) . ] I n general, t h e L B city-states d i d n o t build n e w fortifications: w h e r e t h e y c o u l d , t h e y u s e d t h o s e t h a t still stood. T h i s is also a n u r b a n p e r i o d in C a n a a n , b u t m u c h r e d u c e d from t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e Age. T h e r e w e r e fewer sites a n d t h e y w e r e generally smaller, a n d m o s t settlement was along t h e coast a n d in t h e valleys, a l o n g t h e t r a d e r o u t e s (there was very little s e t t l e m e n t in t h e central hill c o u n t r y ) . Until t h e very e n d of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , t h e r e is clear evidence of t r a d e w i t h C y p r u s a n d t h e A e g e a n . [See C y p r u s ; A e g e a n Islands.] A g r i c u l t u r e c o m b i n e d with p a s t o r a l i s m w a s t h e w a y of life for m o s t C a n a a n i t e s — i n w h a t w a s p r o b a b l y a kind of di m o r p h i c society, like t h e o n e k n o w n f r o m e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE M a r i . [See M a r i ; A g r i c u l t u r e ; P a s t o r a l N o m a d i s m . ] R u r a l pastoralists h a d close ties to t h e u r b a n areas, from w h i c h they w e r e supplied w i t h agricultural a n d m a n u f a c t u r e d p r o d u c t s . T h e u r b a n a r e a s , in t u r n , d e p e n d e d o n t h e pastoralists for animal p r o d u c t s . T h e r e is evidence of t h e cultivation of w h e a t a n d barley, as well as olives, g r a p e s , a n d other horticultural p r o d u c t s . [See Cereals; Olives; Viticul
;
ture.] C a t d e , sheep, goats, a n d p i g s were h e r d e d . [See Cattle a n d O x e n ; S h e e p a n d G o a t s ; Pigs.] By t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e t h e t e c h n o l o g y existed to m a k e tools sharper a n d of sturdier b r o n z e t h a n w a s possible in t h e Early B r o n z e Age. I n addition, t h e quality of C a n a a n i t e p o t t e r y w a s extremely fine as a result of a d v a n c e s in c e r a m i c technology. T h e r e is n o indication t h a t t h e C a n a a n i t e u r b a n i z e d t h r e e tiered settlement p a t t e r n , or city-state system, was ever or ganized o n a larger scale, into a t r u e n a t i o n - s t a t e system. ( N o capital city of all C a n a a n h a s so far p r e s e n t e d itself.) C a n a a n w a s ruled b y E g y p t f r o m at least t h e t i m e of T h u t mosis III (early fifteenth c e n t u r y B C E ) , a l t h o u g h E g y p t i a n control of t h e p r o v i n c e w a s s o m e t i m e s very loose. T h e C a naanites of t h e f o u r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y A m a r n a letters lived in f e u d i n g city-states t h a t d e p e n d o n E g y p t to settle their dis p u t e s , a n d t h e r e is archaeological evidence of periodic E g y p t i a n sorties, especially in t h e s o u t h . [See A m a r n a Tablets.] A s t h e era p r o c e e d e d , t h e e v i d e n c e for E g y p t i a n fortress sites a n d " g o v e r n o r s ' r e s i d e n c i e s " increases (e.g., H a r u v i t , T e l M o r , Jaffa, D e i r el-Balah, T e l l esh-Shari'a, A p h e k , T e l l e l - F a r ' a h [ S o u t h ] , a n d T e l l J e m m e h ) , suggesting t h a t t h e city-states' pleas for m o r e p r o t e c t i o n from E g y p t w e r e heeded. A w e a k e n e d E g y p t lost c o n t r o l of C a n a a n in t h e m i d twelfth c e n t u r y BCE, a n d t h e v a c u u m left b y its withdrawal
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Semitic tribespeople dressed in colored
s t r i p e d c o s t u m e s a s k p e r m i s s i o n t o e n t e r E g y p t . D a t e d to t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE, M i d d l e K i n g d o m . K u n s t h i s t o r i s c h e s M u s e u m , V i e n n a . (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N Y )
412
CANAANITES
allowed for the establishment there of i n d e p e n d e n t political units: Israel, M o a b , A m m o n , E d o m , t h e Philistine p e n t a polis, and the P h o e n i c i a n cities in the north. T h i s p r o c e s s in Israel and J u d a h seems to have b e e n a gradual sedentarization of the p o p u l a t i o n , helped along by deforestation and terracing for agriculture, a n d often in areas n o t heavily set tled in the L a t e B r o n z e Age. [See M o a b ; A m m o n ; E d o m ; Philistines, article on Early Philistines; Phoenicians.] W r i t i n g a n d L a n g u a g e s . T h e r e is evidence t h a t t h e C a naanite peoples u s e d several writing systems in t h e M i d d l e Bronze Age a n d later. Akkadian syllabic cuneiform texts have been found at T a ' a n a c h , M e g i d d o , A p h e k , a n d H a z o r . [See Akkadian; C u n e i f o r m ; T a ' a n a c h ; Aphek.] O n e of t h e m , a literary text f o u n d at M e g i d d o , is p a r t of t h e E p i c of Gil gamesh, suggesting t h e existence of a traditional cuneiform scribal school t h e r e in w h i c h students learned t o write in p a r t b y copying " t h e classics." [See W r i t i n g a n d W r i t i n g Sys t e m s ; Scribes a n d Scribal T e c h n i q u e s . ] W h a t is k n o w n as Peripheral Akkadian w a s the lingua franca of m u c h of t h e N e a r East (outside M e s o p o t a m i a p r o p e r ) in t h e L a t e B r o n z e Age. M a n y letters from A m a r n a in E g y p t (ancient A k h e t a ten) exist that w e r e sent to a n d from C a n a a n i t e cities (e.g., from Akko, Ashkelon, Beirut, Byblos, Gezer, H a z o r , J e r u salem, Lachish, M e g i d d o , S h e c h e m , Sidon, a n d T y r e ) a n d a r e written in several of these Peripheral Akkadian dialects. [See A m a r n a , T e l l el-; Akko; Ashkelon; Beirut; Byblos; J e rusalem; L a c h i s h ; Sidon; Tyre.] A much-simplified cuneiform writing system is also k n o w n from s u c h C a n a a n i t e sites as T a ' a n a c h , S a r e p t a , a n d B e t h - S h e m e s h , a l t h o u g h tire vast majority of t h e texts in this system c o m e from t h e Syrian city of U g a r i t ( m o d e r n R a s S h a m r a ) a n d its environs. [See Sarepta; B e t h - S h e m e s h ; Ugarit.] Because n o t all s u c h texts are from Ugarit, there has b e e n a t e n d e n c y in r e c e n t scholarship away from calling mis writing system Ugaritic cuneiform. [See U g a r i t i c ] It is r e ferred to it instead as C a n a a n i t e cuneiform (although this usage also has its p r o b l e m s : strictly speaking, U g a r i t w a s n o t a p a r t of C a n a a n ) . Unlike the Akkadian syllabary, with its h u n d r e d s of signs, this C a n a a n i t e cuneiform writing system (also writing w e d g e - s h a p e d characters with a stylus o n clay tablets) h a s only thirty characters, each of w h i c h represents a c o n s o n a n t in t h e Ugaritic language—or, in t h e case of t h e p h o n e m e 'aleph, represented by three signs, a c o n s o n a n t plus a vowel. It is, therefore, an alphabet rather t h a n a syl labary. T h e system for w h i c h t h e Canaanites are best r e m e m bered, however, is t h e linear alphabet, first e n c o u n t e r e d o n a single sixteenth-century BCE sherd from G e z e r a n d t h e n in large n u m b e r s of fifteenth-century BCE inscriptions f r o m Serabit e l - K h a d e m , a turquoise-mining site in western Sinai where C a n a a n i t e - s p e a k i n g slaves were t h e labor force. ( T h e n a m e Proto-Sinatic was given to t h e corpus.) [See Alphabet; P r o t o - C a n a a n i t e ; P r o t o - S i n a i t i c ] S o m e of t h e signs r e s e m ble Egyptian hieroglyphs, b u t n o consistent system of influ
ence has ever b e e n d e m o n s t r a t e d . E a c h of t h e original twenty-seven symbols represents a c o n s o n a n t a l p h o n e m e . T h e linear a l p h a b e t operates a c c o r d i n g to t h e a c r o p h o n i c principle: each symbol originated as t h e p i c t u r e of s o m e t h i n g w h o s e n a m e in C a n a a n i t e was a w o r d t h a t b e g a n with t h e s o u n d the p i c t u r e r e p r e s e n t s . A p i c t u r e of a h o u s e was t h e original b b e c a u s e t h e C a n a a n i t e w o r d for h o u s e , bayt-, begins with t h e b s o u n d . T h e k is a p i c t u r e of a h a n d , b e cause in C a n a a n i t e " ( p a l m of) h a n d " is kapp-. T h i s linear alphabet—incised in stone, metal, a n d g e m s t o n e s a n d d r a w n in ink o n p o t s h e r d s ( o s t t a c a ) , p a p y r u s , a n d leather—is t h e f o r e r u n n e r of all m o d e r n W e s t e r n a l p h a b e t s , s p r e a d t h r o u g h t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n b y P h o e n i c i a n t r a d e r s . [See O s t r a c o n ; P a p y r u s ; Leather.] S o m e of t h e signs i n t h e earlier C a n a a n i t e cuneiform a l p h a b e t r e s e m b l e this linear a l p h a b e t — i t is as if t h e cuneiformists h a d a t t e m p t e d to d r a w t h e p i c t o g r a p h s rather abstractly with a stylus o n clay. It has therefore b e e n suggested that t h e C a n a a n i t e c u n e i f o r m a l p h a b e t d e v e l o p e d u n d e r t h e influence of t h e linear alphabet. T h e o r d e r of t h e alphabet is t h e s a m e for b o t h , as w i t n e s s e d b y t h e several complete and partial abecedaries discovered in b o t h systems (e.g., from U g a r i t , 'Izbet Sartah, a n d L a c h i s h ) . T h i s linear a l p h a b e t is t h e s o u r c e of t h e later P h o e n i c i a n , H e b r e w , and A r a m a i c scripts (including subsets of each, such as A m m o n i t e a n d E d o m i t e ) ; it is also t h e source of t h e S o u t h Semitic a l p h a b e t — t h e letter s h a p e s in this series s u g gest that it m u s t have b r o k e n off from t h e r e s t b y t h e thir t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. [See P h o e n i c i a n - P u n i c ; H e b r e w L a n guage a n d L i t e r a t u r e ; A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d L i t e r a t u r e ; A m m o n i t e Inscriptions.] T h e earliest inscriptions in this lin ear alphabet so far recovered i n c l u d e (in addition to s o m e largely d e d i c a t o r y Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions) several s h o r t inscriptions likely r e p r e s e n t i n g claims to o w n e r s h i p : b r o n z e arrowheads inscribed with p e r s o n a l n a m e s ; several d e d i c a tory inscriptions, usually written o n t h e d e d i c a t e d objects; a n d an a b e c e d a r y from 'Izbet Sartah. T h e w o r d Canaanite is also u s e d as t h e n a m e of a g r o u p of N o r t h w e s t Semitic languages: Israelite a n d J u d a h i t e H e brew; Phoenician and Punic; Ammonite; Edomite; and M o abite. Also N o r t h w e s t Semitic l a n g u a g e s , b u t differentiated from C a n a a n i t e , are Ugaritic, A r a m a i c , a n d t h e l a n g u a g e of t h e plaster t e x t from T e l l D e i r 'Alia. [See D e i r 'Alia I n s c r i p tions.] (Cf. t h e reference to Elebrew as t h e " l a n g u a g e of C a n a a n " in Is. 19:18.) T h e C a n a a n i t e languages are differ entiated from o t h e r N o r t h w e s t Semitic l a n g u a g e s in at least t h e following t h r e e w a y s . 1. T h e suffix-conjugation forms for tire D ("intensive"; H e b . , pi el) conjugation a n d C ( " c a u s a t i v e " ; H e b . , hip'il) conjugation a r e *qattila a n d *haqtila in P r o t o - N o r t h w e s t S e mitic, b u t t h e y b e c o m e *qittila a n d *hiqtila in H e b r e w , in P h o e n i c i a n , a n d in at least o n e of t h e A m a r n a C a n a a n i t e dialects. 1
2. T h e first-person singular i n d e p e n d e n t p r o n o u n , orig inally *'anaku, b e c o m e s *'anokil ([a] > [o] (the so-called
CANAANITES C a n a a n i t e shift), a n d t h e n dissimilates to *'anokT. C o r r e s p o n d i n g to this n e w f o r m c o m e s t h e c h a n g e from *-tff to *-din t h e suffix-conjugation e n d i n g for t h e first-person sin gular. 3. P r o t o - C a n a a n i t e leveled *-nii for all first-person plural suffixes (on suffix-conjugation v e r b s , o n n o u n s , a n d in t h e objective verbal suffixes), f r o m a n earlier m i x t u r e of *-nU a n d *-na. ( P r o t o - A r a m a i c , o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , leveled *-na.) Obviously, evidence for all t h e s e features is n o t to be found in t h e traditions that exist only in unvocalized form (e.g., M o a b i t e , E d o m i t e , A m m o n i t e ) ; w h e r e tiiere is evidence, h o w e v e r , it s u p p o r t s t h e s e s u g g e s t e d divisions. R e l i g i o n a n d C u l t . T h e p i c t u r e of C a n a a n i t e religion is often d r a w n from t h e texts f o u n d at a n c i e n t U g a r i t (in spheres outside religion, h o w e v e r , m o s t scholars do n o t i n clude U g a r i t within t h e s c o p e of C a n a a n ) . W h i l e the U g a r itians distinguished t h e m s e l v e s f r o m C a n a a n i t e s , Ugaritic religious literature h a s e n o u g h links with later biblical liter a t u r e to place U g a r i t o n a cultural c o n t i n u u m with C a n a a n . T h e c o p i o u s a m o u n t s of m a t e r i a l from U g a r i t m a y , t h e n , suggest w h a t L B C a n a a n i t e religion was like. B e c a u s e t h e later political entities of Israel, M o a b , A m m o n , E d o m , a n d t h e P h o e n i c i a n cities were also C a n a a n i t e , their religious traditions also constitute " C a n a a n i t e religion," a l t h o u g h m a n y biblical texts, for instance, distinguish b e t w e e n Isra elite religion a n d t h e religion of " t h e C a n a a n i t e s , " with t h e latter seen as t h e pre-Israelite i n h a b i t a n t s of t h e land. C a n a a n i t e religion w a s a religion of b l o o d sacrifice, as c a n b e seen n o t only in t h e Bible b u t also o n t h e lists of sacrifices to various deities f o u n d at U g a r i t a n d in t h e n u m b e r of altars f o u n d in t h e vicinity of a n i m a l r e m a i n s at archaeological sites t h r o u g h o u t t h e region. [See Altars.] T h e harvest festi vals k n o w n from t h e Bible are t h o u g h t to b e general C a n a a n i t e , a n d n o t specific H e b r e w , festivals. Several other r e ligious features k n o w n especially from t h e Bible are also confirmed b y t h e archaeology a n d historical g e o g r a p h y of d i e area: outside w o r s h i p at installations called bamot; t h e erection of s t a n d i n g stones; a n d t h e v e n e r a t i o n of m o u n t a i n s a n d hills. [See Cult.] A large n u m b e r of m a l e a n d female deities w a s w o r s h i p e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e area, k n o w n f r o m U g a r i t , t h e Bible, various C a n a a n i t e p e r s o n a l n a m e s , a n d inscriptions. T h e h i g h g o d 'El, t h e father-god, h e a d of t h e council of g o d s , lived o n t o p of a m o u n t a i n at t h e foot of w h i c h was t h e source of fresh water. Of t h e s a m e " g e n e r a t i o n " w a s A s h e r a h , a m a r i n e goddess ('atiratu yammi at U g a r i t ) ; t h e gods at U g a r i t a r e called h e r children a n d s h e is called c r e a t o r of c r e a t u r e s . A s h e r a h was also k n o w n as Q u d s h u , " h o l i n e s s " (in E g y p t as well as at U g a r i t ) , a n d as 'Elat, " g o d d e s s " (e.g., o n a e w e r from L a c h i s h ; see C r o s s , 1954, p p . 19-22). T h e s t o r m g o d , Ba'al H a d a d , a w a r r i o r - g o d , fights battles w i t h b o t h die Sea ( Y a m m ) a n d D e a t h ( M o t ) . ' A n a t , a warrior g o d d e s s , is also typical of t h e N e a r E a s t e r n g o d d e s s r e p r e s e n t e d as an a d o l e s c e n t — n o longer a child b u t n o t yet a w o m a n (like s o m e
413
descriptions of M e s o p o t a m i a n I s h t a r ) . S h e is described in a m a n n e r r e m i n i s c e n t of s o m e i c o n o g r a p h i c representations of t h e I n d i a n g o d d e s s Kali, a d o r n e d w i t h skulls a n d h a n d s (KTU 1.3.2.9-11), T h e g o d d e s s ' A s h t a r t is n o t very well d e v e l o p e d at U g a r i t or in t h e Bible, b u t she is t h e h e a d deity at S i d o n in t h e sixth a n d fifth centuries BCE, w h e r e her cult is p r e s i d e d over by the royal family. D a g o n , god of grain ( k n o w n also from U g a r i t ) , is said in t h e Bible to b e w o r s h i p e d b y t h e Philistines (e.g., 1 Sm. 4), a n d so m a y h a v e b e e n m o r e i m p o r t a n t i n s e c o n d - m i l l e n n i u m BCE C a n a a n t h a n t h e texts suggest. T h e s e deities d e m o n s t r a t e continuity with t h o s e of t h e n a tional religions of t h e I r o n A g e : Y a h w e h in Israel, for in s t a n c e , is a storm god as well as a n 'El figure (patriarch, h e a d of the council). T h e r e is n o evidence t h a t C h e m o s h in M o a b , M i l k o m in A m m o n , a n d Q a w s in E d o m were any different. I n fact, there is s o m e slight evidence tiiat t h e y were similar; t h e y w e r e also n a t i o n a l gods from t h e s a m e time p e r i o d , a n d t h e o n o m a s t i c a are similar; a n d t h e M e s h a stela shows C h e m o s h leading M e s h a in w a r a n d requiring a kind of " h o l y w a r " destruction. T h e P h o e n i c i a n gods vary in n a m e a n d / o r function from city to city. Ba'al S h a m e m ("lord of h e a v e n , " p r o b a b l y a local n a m e for Ba'al H a d a d ) is t h e g o d w h o legitimizes a n d blesses the ruling families of several P h o e n i c i a n ( a n d A r a m e a n ) cities; t h e L a d y of Byblos seems t o h a v e t h e s a m e function at Byblos. [See A r a m e a n s . ] 'Ashtart, m e n t i o n e d a b o v e , was also one of t h e g o d s , along with M e l q a r t , E s h m u n , Bethel, ' A n a t - B e t h e l , a n d various Ba'al figures, w h o served as T y r i a n g u a r a n t o r s of T y r e ' s s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE treaty with t h e Assyrian k i n g E s a r h a d d o n . [See Assyrians.] E s h m u n is t h e P h o e n i c i a n g o d of healing, a n d M e l q a r t ("king of t h e city") a p p e a r s largely in T y r i a n or T y r i a n c o lonial settings. T a n i t (or T i n n i t ) , p r e s u m a b l y a local n a m e for A s h e r a h , is at h o m e in s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y BCE Sarepta in Phoenicia a n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n , especially in N o r t h Africa in die d i i r d - s e c o n d centuries BCE. [See P h o e nicia; N o r t h Africa.] N o local evidence presently exists for d i e kind of sexual m a g i c o - s y m p a t h e t i c religion so often asserted for t h e C a n a a n i t e s — e v e n t h o u g h t h e fertility of h u m a n s , animals, a n d crops was of course a c o n c e r n of ancient N e a r E a s t e r n r e ligions (including t h a t of t h e Israelites a n d Ugaritians). A t Ugarit, Ba'al H a d a d was t h e p r o v i d e r of rain as well as t h e god of fertility for crops; a n d 'El w a s t h e deity a p p e a l e d to for h u m a n fertility, just as Y a h w e h w a s t h e god of fertility in Israel. I n a d d i t i o n to t h e cults of d i e national or city gods of C a n a a n , o t h e r forms of religious activity existed t l i r o u g h o u t t l i e area. B o t h t h e goddess figurines excavated b y archaeologists in Israel a n d the inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud in Sinai offer evidence of goddess w o r s h i p officially or unofficially alongside t h e w o r s h i p of Y a h w e h . [See Kuntillet 'Ajrud.] F r o m t h e coastal areas tiiere is s o m e evidence, mostly i c o n -
414
CAORC
ographic a n d architectural, of a religion peculiar to seafarers: anchors included in t e m p l e architecture, temples o n isolated p r o m o n t o r i e s , and w h a t a p p e a r to b e divinized ships p o r trayed o n coins. [See Seafaring; Anchors.] M o r e o v e r , there appears to b e a f o r m of ancestor religion attested in texts a n d in burials from Israel (e.g., Ps. 1 0 6 : 2 8 ) a n d U g a r i t (es pecially KTU1.161 a n d die D u t i e s of the Ideal S o n repeated several times in KTU 1.17), as well as farther afield in Syria and M e s o p o t a m i a . [See Burial T e c h n i q u e s . ] (Ancestor r e ligion, which exists primarily in patrilineal societies, gener ally includes b l o o d sacrifice; it functions to tie males to a n cestors in t h e genealogy, while seeking blessings as a reward for keeping u p the cultic ties.) T h e g r u e s o m e practice of child sacrifice was also a p a r t of Canaanite religion. It is best k n o w n from t h e P u n i c col onies in N o r t h Africa, b u t inscriptions related t o P h o e n i c i a n child sacrifice have also t u r n e d u p on M a l t a , Sicily, a n d Sar dinia. [See M a l t a ; Sardinia.] T h e r e are m a n y biblical refer ences t o the practice in Israel and its environs (e.g., Dt. 12:31, 1 8 : 9 - 1 0 ; 2 Kgs.
3 : 2 6 - 2 7 , 16:3; Jer.
7 : 3 1 ; Ps.
106:37-
38).
H e b r e w B i b l e . I n t h e H e b r e w Bible, t h e w o r d Canaanite(s) is sometimes u s e d as a general t e r m for t h e pre-Israelite inhabitants of t h e land (Ex. 1 3 : 1 1 ; t h r o u g h o u t Jgs. 1 ) ; the t e r m Amorite(s) is also u s e d (Gn. 15:16; Jgs. 6 : 1 0 ) . M o r e of ten, several p e o p l e s are said to have lived in d i e land before the Israelites, a n d t h e Canaanites are m e n t i o n e d as one a m o n g t h e m (e.g., Gn. 15:19-21; Ex. 3:S;Jos. 3 : i o ) . I n a f e w of diese cases, t h e C a n a a n i t e s are specifically located along t h e c o a s t — p e r h a p s a reflection of the position of Phoenicia in the first half of t h e first millennium BCE (Nm. 1 3 : 2 9 ; J o s . 5:1, cf. 7 : 7 - 9 ) . I n t h e genealogy of Genesis 1 0 : 6 , C a n a a n is
the s o n of N o a h ' s son H a m a n d the b r o t h e r of Ethiopia ( C u s h ) , Egypt, a n d Libya ( P u t ) ; and in 10:15-18 it is the father of Sidon, t h e Hittites ( H e t h ) , a n d t h e Jebusites a n d Amorites ( w h o are elsewhere listed as pre-Israelite peoples in the l a n d ) , as well as die father of the Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Z e m a r i t e s , and Hamafhites. T h e t e r m Canaanite fell o u t of use for t h e m o s t p a r t in about 1 0 0 0 BCE, w h e n it was replaced b y the gentilics of the various Iron A g e nations that grew o u t of C a n a a n . T r a d e in the coastal cities continued to b e active, however, a n d the Phoenicians (see above) eventually set u p a long-distance trade network in the M e d i t e r r a n e a n world. C a r t h a g e , ini tially a P h o e n i c i a n colony, b e c a m e the h e a d of a commercial empire of its o w n in the late first m i l l e n n i u m BCE. [See C a r thage.] In t h e fourth century CE its people, a c c o r d i n g to A u gustine, still called themselves Canaanites ( M i g n e 3 5 , 2 0 9 6 ) . BIBLIOGRAPHY Clifford, Richard J. "Phoenician Religion." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 279 (1990): 55-64. Brief b u t excellent presentation of current thinking about the religion and gods of the Phoenicians.
Coogan, Michael D . Stories from Ancient Canaan. Westminster, 1978. T h e best English translation of die three major mythic narratives from Ugarit. Cross, Frank M o o r e . " T h e Evolution of die P r o t o - C a n a a n i t e A l p h a bet." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 134 (1954): 15-24. Cross, Frank M o o r e . Conversations with a Bible Scholar, edited by H e r shel Shanks. Washington, 1994. A recent a n d informal exposition of Canaanite a n d biblical religion by t h e scholar w h o defined the p a rameters of the discussion in the U n i t e d States. Dever, William G. " T h e M i d d l e Bronze Age: T h e Zenith of the U r b a n Canaanite E r a . " Biblical Archaeologist 50.3 (1987): 148-77. C o m p r e hensive presentation of the era, plus a discussion of the N e w A r chaeology. Halpern, Baruch. The Emergence of Israel in Canaan. Chico, Calif., 1983. Painstaking exposition of the beginnings of Israel in C a n a a n , as r e vealed in Israel's earliest literature. H u e h n e r g a r d , John. " L a n g u a g e s ( I n t r o d u c t o r y ) . " Anchor Bible Dictio nary. Vol. 4, p p . 155-170. N e w York, 1992. Extensive overview of the languages of die biblical world, d i e time periods in which they are attested, and the kinds of texts written in each. M a z a r , Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, ca. 10,000-586 B.c.E. N e w York, 1990. Readable and t h o r o u g h introduction to the ar chaeology of Israel a n d its environs. Miller, Patrick D „ Jr. "Ugarit a n d the History of Religions." Journalof Northwest Semitic Languages 9 (1981): 119-28. T h e best short treat m e n t of the subject of Ugaritic religion. Miller, Patrick D . , Jr., Paul D . H a n s o n , a n d S. D e a n M c B r i d e , eds. Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross. Phil adelphia, 1987. M o r e t h a n thirty scholars address Israel's religion in the context of the ancient N e a r East. M o r a n , William L. The Amarna Letters, Baltimore, 1992. T h e definitive translation, with introduction a n d notes, of the fourteenth-century BCE diplomatic letters, found at el-Amarna in Egypt, between the p h a r o a h a n d his vassals in Syria-Palestine. T h e correspondence is the source of m u c h of what is known of L B C a n a a n . N a ' a m a n , N a d a v . " E c o n o m i c aspects of the Egyptian occupation of C a n a a n . " Israel Exploration Journal 31.3-4 (1981): 172-185. D i s c u s sion of the logic of t h e administration of C a n a a n during the A m a r n a age. N a v e h , Joseph. Early History of the Alphabet. Jerusalem, 1987. Readable survey of the earliest known West Semitic inscriptions a n d the later first-millennium BCE evolution of the script traditions. Jo A N N HACKETT
C A O R C . See C o u n c i l of A m e r i c a n Overseas R e s e a r c h Centers,
C A P E G E L I D O N Y A , s o m e t i m e s also K h e l i d o n y a , or Silidonya B u r n u , a n d m o r e recently k n o w n as T a s h k B u r u n or A n a d o l u B u r n u , the C h e l i d o n i a n p r o m o n t o r y of Pliny (Natural History 5 . 2 7 . 9 7 ) in Lycia. T h e c a p e m a r k s t h e w e s t e r n extremity of t h e B a y of Antalya. R u n n i n g s o u t h from t h e c a p e is a string of five small islands, t h e C h e l i d o n i a e of antiquity, called Celidoni b y Italian sailors, a n d later Selidonlar by t h e T u r k s , b u t t o d a y k n o w n simply as Besadalar ( T k . , "five i s l a n d s " ) . S t r a b o ( 1 4 . 2 . 1 , 1 4 , 3 . 8 ) n o t e d only
three of t h e m a n d Pliny (Natural four.
History
5 . 3 5 . 1 3 1 ) only
CAPE GELIDONYA
415
I n a b o u t 1200 BCE, a m e r c h a n t vessel a p p a r e n t l y r i p p e d its b o t t o m o p e n o n a p i n n a c l e of rock t h a t nears the surface of t h e sea just off t h e n o r t h e a s t side of Devecitasi Adasi, t h e largest of t h e islands ( 3 6 ° n ' 4 o " N , 30°24'27" E ) . Spilling artifacts in a line as s h e sank, tire ship eventually settled with h e r stern resting o n a large b o u l d e r 50 m or so away to t h e n o r t h ; t h e b o w l a n d e d o n a flat sea floor of rock. A t s o m e p o i n t d u r i n g t h e hull's disintegration, t h e stern slipped off t h e b o u l d e r into a n a t u r a l gully f o r m e d b y t h e b o u l d e r a n d t h e b a s e of t h e island. I n 1954, a s p o n g e diver from B o d r u m , K e m a l Aras, s t u m bled on t h e wreck's m a i n c o n c e n t r a t i o n of cargo, b e t w e e n 26 a n d 28 m d e e p . F o u r years later, h e d e s c r i b e d it t o A m e r ican journalist a n d a m a t e u r archaeologist P e t e r T h r o c k m o r t o n , w h o w a s cataloging a n c i e n t wrecks along t h e s o u t h w e s t T u r k i s h coast. T h r o c k m o r t o n w a s able to locate t h e site in 1959 a n d , r e c o g n i z i n g its great a g e , asked t h e U n i versity M u s e u m of d i e University of P e n n s y l v a n i a if it w o u l d organize its excavation. T h e s u b s e q u e n t excavation b y t h e m u s e u m of this L a t e B r o n z e A g e site ( J u n e - S e p t e m b e r i960) w a s t h e first s h i p w r e c k excavation carried t o c o m p l e t i o n o n t h e seabed, t h e first directed by a diving archaeologist, a n d t h e first c o n d u c t e d following t h e s t a n d a r d s of terrestrial excavation. V i s its t o t h e site i n t h e late 1980s b y a t e a m from t h e Institute of N a u t i c a l A r c h a e o l o g y ( I N A ) at T e x a s A & M University, led b y t h e original excavation director, G e o r g e F . B a s s , s h o w e d , after m o r e artifacts w e r e r e c o v e r e d , h o w t h e ship h a d sunk. T h e sinking h a s b e e n d a t e d t o t h e late t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE b y t w o nearly i n t a c t M y c e n a e a n IIIB stirrup jars discovered o n these visits a n d b y a r a d i o c a r b o n date of 1200 BCE ± fifty years f r o m b r u s h w o o d o n t h e wreck. B e c a u s e of a lack of p r o t e c t i v e s e d i m e n t , m o s t of t h e ship's hull h a d b e e n d e v o u r e d b y m a r i n e b o r e r s , especially t e r e d o s . H o w e v e r , its b r u s h w o o d d u n n a g e gave, for d i e first time, m e a n i n g to t h e b r u s h w o o d O d y s s e u s placed i n a vessel h e h a d built (Odyssey 5.257). T h e distribution of cargo orig inally led t o a p u b l i s h e d e s t i m a t e of n o t m u c h longer t h a n 10 m for t h e hull, b u t r e c e n t discoveries suggest t h a t this estimate w a s low. T h e b u l k of t h e cargo c o n s i s t e d of t h e ingredients for m a k i n g b r o n z e i m p l e m e n t s , i n c l u d i n g b o t h scrap b r o n z e tools from C y p r u s , i n t e n d e d to b e recycled, a n d ingots of b o t h c o p p e r a n d tin, m e a n t to b e m i x e d t o f o r m n e w b r o n z e . T h e s c r a p , a t least partly c a r r i e d in wicker baskets, i n c l u d e d b r o k e n p l o w s h a r e s , axes, a d z e s , chisels, p r u n i n g h o o k s , a s p a d e , knives, a n d casting w a s t e . T h e c o p p e r , m i n e d o n C y p r u s , was s h i p p e d as thirty-four flat, f o u r - h a n d l e d ingots, w e i g h i n g o n average 25 k g apiece, of d i e t y p e o n c e d r o u g h t t o imitate dried o x hides i n a p r e m o n e t a r y f o r m of c u r r e n c y (see figure 1 ) ; discoid " b u n i n g o t s , " averaging only a b o u t 3 k g each; a n d fragments chiseled from e a c h t y p e . T h e tin ingots w e r e t o o badly c o r r o d e d to reveal their original s h a p e s , b u t s e a b e d evidence suggests t h a t a t least o n e w a s a
CAPE GELIDONYA. F i g u r e 1. Three oxhide copper ingots. (Copyright Frey/INA)
r e c t a n g u l a r b a r . I n a d d i t i o n , t h e r e w e r e eighteen m u c h smaller, flat, ovoid ingots, at least o n e of t h e m b r o n z e , t h a t s e e m t o h a v e b e e n cast in multiples of 0.5 kg. T h e discovery o n t h e w r e c k of a b r o n z e swage, stone h a m m e r h e a d s of the k i n d s o m e t i m e s u s e d for metalworking, m a n y stone polishers a n d a w h e t s t o n e , a n d a large, flat, close-grained stone t h a t c o u l d h a v e served as a n anvil sug gest t h a t a tinker m a y h a v e b e e n o n t h e voyage. T h e wreck's i m p o r t a n c e derives from d i e historical c o n clusions d r a w n from it. A t t h e time of its excavation, it w a s generally a c c e p t e d tiiat M y c e n a e a n G r e e k s h a d a m o n o p o l y o n m a r i t i m e c o m m e r c e in t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n d u r i n g t h e latter p a r t of t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e , a n d t h a t P h o e n i c i a n sailors d i d n o t b e g i n their great tradition of seafaring until t h e following I r o n Age. I n d e e d , t h e m a i n r e a s o n tiiat H o m e r has b e e n c o m m o n l y d a t e d to t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE b y t w e n tieth-century classicists is his frequent m e n t i o n of P h o e n i cian sailors a n d b r o n z e s m i t h s .
416
CAPERNAUM
T h e C a p e Gelidonya shipwreck suggests new possibili ties. T h e southeast e n d of the wreck, m o s t p r o b a b l y its stern, held what m a y b e c o n s i d e r e d personal possessions of t h e crew or passengers, as o p p o s e d to the mostly C y p r i o t cargo a n d the shipboard m i x t u r e of M y c e n a e a n , C y p r i o t , a n d Syr ian pottery. T h e s e possessions included four scarabs a n d a scarab-shaped p l a q u e , an oil l a m p , stone m o r t a r s , m o r e t h a n sixty stone p a n - b a l a n c e weights (including E g y p t i a n gedets, a n d Syrian nesefs a n d shekels), a n d a m e r c h a n t ' s cylinder seal (see figure 2), all a p p a r e n t l y of Syrian, or C a n a a n i t e , origin; a razor is of E g y p t i a n r a t h e r t h a n M y c e n a e a n t y p e . T h e excavator c o n c l u d e d that t h e ship was p r o b a b l y C a naanite, or early P h o e n i c i a n (the C a n a a n i t e s being simply B r o n z e Age P h o e n i c i a n s ) , a l t h o u g h b e c a u s e so m a n y N e a r Eastern artifacts are f o u n d o n C y p r u s from t h e s a m e p e r i o d , tiiere was the possibility that t h e ship was Cypriot. L i b r a r y research revealed that, with a single exception, c o n t e m p o rary Egyptian artists associated t h e trade in f o u r - h a n d l e d c o p p e r ingots, a n d tin ingots, solely with Syrian m e r c h a n t s (the only k n o w n m o l d for casting four-handled c o p p e r in gots was f o u n d after t h e C a p e Gelidonya excavation, in a palace at R a s I b n H a n i , t h e p o r t of Ras S h a m r a / U g a r i t , t h e greatest of L a t e B r o n z e A g e Syrian p o r t cities). [See R a s I b n
H a n i ; Ugarit.] F u r t h e r m o r e , t h e only foreign m e r c h a n t ships d e p i c t e d in E g y p t i a n art of t h e time are Syrian. All this s u g gested that H o m e r ' s P h o e n i c i a n s are n o t a n a c h r o n i s t i c in t h e L a t e B r o n z e Age of t h e T r o j a n W a r . T h e discovery in 1994 of t h e C a p e G e l i d o n y a ship's S y r o - C a n a a n i t e or C y p r i o t stone a n c h o r bolstered t h e excavator's c o n t e n t i o n t h a t t h e ship was of N e a r E a s t e r n origin. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bass, George F. Cape Gelidonya: A Bronze Age Shipwreck. Transacti ons of the American Philosophical Society, 57.8. Philadelphia, 1967. T h e full excavation report. Bass, George F. " C a p e Gelidonya a n d Bronze Age Maritime T r a d e . " In Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon, edited by Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., p p . 2 9 - 3 8 . Kevelaer, 1 9 7 3 . Additions to the excavation report. Bass, George F. Archaeology Beneath the Sea. N e w York, 197s. See pages 1-59. A popular account of the excavation. Bass, George F . " R e t u r n to C a p e Gelidonya." INA Newsletter 1 5 . 2 (June 1988): 2 - 5 . Discoveries m a d e on site decades after its exca vation. Bass, George F. "Evidence of T r a d e from Bronze Age Shipwrecks." In Bronze Age Trade in the Mediterranean, edited by N . H . Gale, p p . 69-82. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 90. Goteborg, 1 9 9 1 . T h e wreck in light of discoveries m a d e at U l u b u r u n . M u h l y , James D . , et al. " T h e C a p e Gelidonya Shipwreck a n d the Bronze Age Metals T r a d e in the Eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . " Journal of Field Archaeology 4.3 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 3 5 3 - 3 6 2 . Pulak, Cemal, and E d w a r d Rogers. " T h e 1 9 9 3 - 1 9 9 4 T u r k i s h S h i p wreck Survey." The INA Quarterly 21.4 (Winter 1994) 1 7 - 2 1 . T h e discovery of the ship's anchor. T h r o c k m o r t o n , Peter. " T h i r t y - T h r e e Centuries u n d e r the Sea." Na tional Geographic 1 1 7 ( M a y i 9 6 0 ) : 6 8 2 - 7 0 3 . A p o p u l a r account of die discovery of the wreck. T h r o c k m o r t o n , Peter. " O l d e s t K n o w n Shipwreck Yields Bronze Age C a r g o . " National Geographic izi (May 1 9 6 2 ) : 6 9 6 - 7 1 1 . A p o p u l a r account of the excavation. T h r o c k m o r t o n , Peter. Lost Ships: An Adventure in Undersea Archaeology. N e w York, 1964. A popular account of the discovery a n d excavation of the site. GEORGE F . BASS
CAPERNAUM ( H e b . , Kefar N a h u m ) , site located o n t h e n o r t h w e s t s h o r e of t h e Sea of Galilee ( m a p reference 255 X 204), 16 k m (9 m i . ) n o r t h e a s t of m o d e r n T i b e r i a s , 3 k m (2 mi.) n o r t h e a s t of a n c i e n t H e p t a p e g o n ( m o d e r n T a b g h a ) , 3 k m s o u t h e a s t of ancient K h o r a z i n , a n d 5 k m (3 mi.) west of t h e u p p e r J o r d a n River. T h e site is called T a l h u m by local A r a b s .
CAPE GELIDONYA. F i g u r e 2 . A Syrian sion in clay, (Copyright Frey/TNA)
cylinder seal and its
impres
T h e location of t h e site m a t c h e s d a t a p r o v i d e d b y t h e ancient literary sources. E u s e b i u s (fourth c e n t u r y CE) sets C a p e r n a u m 3 k m from K h o r a z i n (Enchiridion Locontm Sanctorum [ELS], p . 305, n. 459), w h e r e a s , a c c o r d i n g to T h e o d o s i u s (530 C E ) , it w a s b e t w e e n H e p t a p e g o n a n d t h e J o r d a n R i v e r — m o r e precisely, 3 k m f r o m H e p t a p e g o n a n d 10 k m (6 mi.) f r o m Bethsaida across t h e river (ELS, p . 267, n. 381). T h e archaeological r e m a i n s st r et ch for a co n si der -
CAPERNAUM able distance along d i e lake s h o r e , w i t h t h e Sea of Galilee t o t h e s o u t h side a n d t h e hills to t h e nortii, 'precisely as d e scribed b y A r c u l p h u s in 670 CE (ELS, p . 176, n. 404). Archaeological excavation at t h e site h a s n o t only p r o v i d e d full confirmation of all t h e p e r i o d s of o c c u p a t i o n r e c o r d e d by d i e literary sources, b u t b r o u g h t to light specific buildings. T h e m o n u m e n t a l s y n a g o g u e a n d t h e c h u r c h e s built u p o n t h e traditional h o u s e of S i m o n P e t e r attracted, in t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d , t h e a t t e n t i o n of s u c h pilgrims as E g e ria, in 384 CE, a n d the A n o n y m u s P l a c e n t i n u s , in 570 CE (ELS, p . 299, n. 443, a n d p . 297, n. 436). T h e identification of t h e r u i n s of T a l h u m with a n c i e n t Kefar N a h u m is also indirectiy s t r e n g t h e n e d b y die fact t h a t n o other ancient settlement exists in this area of t h e lake t o vie with T a l h u m : in fact, K h i r b e t a l - M i n y e h , in t h e G i n n o s a r valley, w h i c h several scholars o n c e t o o k for a n c i e n t C a p e r n a u m , t u r n e d o u t to b e a n U m a y y a d castle, with n o r e m a i n s earlier t h a n the s e v e n t h c e n t u r y CE. I n addition, n o o t h e r ancient settlements h a v e so far b e e n r e c o r d e d along t h e lake s h o r e b e t w e e n t h e J o r d a n a n d H e p t a p e g o n , e x c e p t for t h e evidence of s o m e isolated p o t s h e r d s from t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m BCE collected in surveys. T h e original Semitic n a m e K e f a r N a h u m ( m e a n i n g "vil lage of N a h u m " ) is k n o w n f r o m a B y z a n t i n e inscription f o u n d in t h e s y n a g o g u e at H a m m a t h - G a d e r ; in s o m e p a s sages in t h e M i s h n a h (Midrash Qoh Rabba 1:8 a n d 7:26); a n d , as late as t h e year 1333, w h e n R a b b i I s h a k C h e l o visited t h e site (ELS, p . 301, n. 451). I n n o n - S e m i t i c languages t h e c o m p o s i t e n a m e K e f a r N a h u m is always r e n d e r e d as a single n a m e , a n d t h e g u t t u r a l h is d r o p p e d altogether. I n t h e G r e e k m a n u s c r i p t s of t h e G o s p e l s two spellings occur: C a p h a r n a u m a n d C a p e r n a u m . T h e G r e e k spelling C a p h a r n a u m , closely following d i e H e b r e w p r o n u n c i a t i o n a n d a t t e s t e d also b y Flavius J o s e p h u s (War 3.519), is to b e preferred; t h e spelling C a p e r n a u m (fol l o w e d in m o d e r n E n g l i s h ) w a s p r o b a b l y i n t r o d u c e d as a n i d i o m in t h e district of A n t i o c h in Syria. It is difficult t o tell w h e n , if ever, this old n a m e w e n t o u t of u s e a m o n g the local A r a b p o p u l a t i o n t o indicate t h e r e m a i n s t o d a y called again K e f a r N a h u m . Significantly, as late as t h e year 1668, M i c h e l N a u , a scholar w h o asked t h e local b e d o u i n s to a c c o m p a n y h i m to t h e site of ancient C a p e r n a u m , was i n d e e d led to T a l h u m , a n d could write: " C a p e r n a u m is called at p r e s e n t T e l h o u m " (ELS, p . 304, n . 458). It is equally difficult to k n o w w h e n t h e n e w n a m e T a l h u m was applied to t h e r u i n s of C a p e r n a u m , a l t h o u g h its first o c c u r r e n c e is so far n o t earlier t h a n 1537, t h e year U r i of Biel w r o t e : " T a n h u m . H e r e R a b b i T a n h u m is b u r i e d . " P r o b a b l y , t h e p r e s u m e d t o m b of R. T a n h u m gave t h e n e w n a m e t o t h e ruins. (In a parallel way, t h e village of B e t h a n y , n e a r Jerusalem, w a s r e n a m e d el-Azariyeh in Arabic b e c a u s e of t h e L a z a r i u m — t h e t o m b of L a z a r u s . ) T h e local b e d o u i n s s u b s e q u e n t l y softened t h e p r o n u n c i a t i o n of T a n h u m t o
417
T a l h u m . Finally, several m o d e r n scholars, beginning with N a u , u n d e r s t o o d t h e A r a b p r o n u n c i a t i o n of T a l h u m as T e l l H u m , a n d s o m e o n e w e n t so far as to c o n c l u d e that Tel] H u m could m e a n " t h e ruins (tell) of ( N a ) h u m . " Certainly t h e very preservation of t h e original n a m e Kefar N a h u m , even u n d e r t h e n a m e T a l h u m is additional s u p p o r t for t h e identification of t h e r u i n s . T h e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of T a l h u m as T e l l ( N a ) h u m seems r a t h e r weak, a l t h o u g h etymologically possible. S u r v e y s a n d E x c a v a t i o n s . In 1816 J. S. B u c l d n g h a m published a sketch of T a l h u m , showing w h a t seems t o b e t h e r e m a i n s of t h e B y z a n t i n e octagonal c h u r c h . T h e A m e r ican clergyman E d w a r d R o b i n s o n visited T a l h u m in 1838 a n d correctly identified " t h e p r o s t r a t e ruins of an edifice w h i c h , for e x p e n s e , l a b o u r , a n d o r n a m e n t , surpasses any t h i n g we have yet seen in P a l e s t i n e " as t h e r e m a i n s of a s y n a g o g u e . I n 1864 Sir C h a r l e s W . W i l s o n described two m o n u m e n t a l t o m b s , one of w h i c h is a R o m a n m a u s o l e u m . H i s limited s o u n d i n g s in t h e synagogue yielded n o signifi cant results, b u t they w e r e significant to t h e local b e d o u i n s , w h o started pillaging t h e r e m a i n s , looldng for treasure. T h e site r o b b i n g e n d e d in 1894, w h e n t w o - t h i r d s of die ruins, i n c l u d i n g t h e r e m a i n s of t h e m o n u m e n t a l synagogue, were acquired b y the F r a n c i s c a n C u s t o d i a n s of the Holy L a n d ; t h e r e m a i n d e r of the site, o n t h e east side, b e c a m e t h e p r o p erty of t h e G r e e k O r t h o d o x P a t r i a r c h a t e of Jerusalem. I n 1905, H . K o h l a n d C a r l W a t z i n g e r b e g a n an excavation of t h e s y n a g o g u e that W e n d e l i n v o n M e n d e n e x p a n d e d b e tween 1906 and 1915. G a u d e n z i o Orfali w o r k e d o n an oc tagonal s t r u c t u r e in 1921 t h a t h e tentatively interpreted as a B y z a n t i n e baptistery. H e partially r e s t o r e d the synagogue, w h i c h William F o x w e l l Albright considered " o n e of the m o s t satisfying places t o visit in all Palestine," F r o m 1968 t o 1986, Virgilio C o r b o a n d Stanislao Loffreda c o n d u c t e d n i n e t e e n seasons of excavation o n the F r a n c i s c a n p r o p e r t y , a t t e m p t i n g to u n d e r s t a n d b o t h d i e synagogue a n d t h e o c t a g o n a l c h u r c h in stratigraphic context a n d in t h e context of t h e ancient settlement, w h i c h h a d b e e n extensively exca vated. Finally Vassilios Tzaferis directed four seasons of ex cavation (1978-1982) o n t h e G r e e k p r o p e r t y . [See the biog raphies of Watzinger and Corbo.] P e r i o d s o f O c c u p a t i o n . C a p e r n a u m is m e n t i o n e d for t h e first time in first-century CE sources, namely in Flavius J o s e p h u s , a n d particularly in t h e Gospels. Excavation has, h o w e v e r , p u s h e d b a c k t h e settlement's origins b y t h r e e t h o u s a n d years b y recovering sporadic sherds (band-slip ware) from t h e t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m BCE. S o m e walls, p a v e m e n t s , a n d a considerable a m o u n t of p o t t e r y from t h e s e c o n d millen n i u m BCE ( M i d d l e a n d L a t e B r o n z e ) h a v e also b e e n re c o r d e d . After a c o m p l e t e b r e a k d u r i n g d i e Israelite period (1200-587 BCE), t h e site was resettled in the fifth-century BCE a n d e x p a n d e d progressively in t h e following centuries, r e a c h i n g its p e a k in t h e L a t e R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e periods
418
CAPERNAUM
f o u r t h - s e v e n t h centuries CE. T h e t o w n began to decline in t h e eighth century. S o m e structures were built as late as t h e twelfth a n d tiiirteenth centuries, a n d even later, b u t t h e t o w n as such was already in r u i n s . Material Culture. T h e ruins cover an area of a p p r o x i mately 6 ha (13 acres) suggesting a p o p u l a t i o n of a b o u t 1,500 d u r i n g the t o w n ' s m a x i m u m expansion in t h e B y z antine period. T h e settlement's center, which reveals t o w n p l a n n i n g d u r i n g t h a t p e r i o d of great prosperity, is m a r k e d b y t h e m o n u m e n t a l s y n a g o g u e , a n d only 30 m to t h e s o u t h , b y t h e octagonal c h u r c h . B o t h structures share t h e m a i n n o r t h - s o u t h street, intersected at right angles b y several al leys that form small quarters. A l t h o u g h the two public b u i l d ings were c o n s t r u c t e d of white limestone blocks b r o u g h t from s o m e distance, t h e private structures w e r e b o t h u n pretentious a n d of local basalt. C a p e r n a u m was crossed b y an imperial h i g h w a y leading to D a m a s c u s . It was also a b o r d e r t o w n t h a t received r e v e n u e from collecting c u s t o m s . Its additional e c o n o m i c r e sources were fishing, agriculture, industry, a n d t r a d e . It w a s commercially linked with the n o r t h e r n regions in particular a n d , beginning in t h e fourth century CE, was flooded with elegant wares from Africa, G r e e c e , a n d C y p r u s . It w a s also a p r o m i n e n t center of Christian pilgrimage, b e i n g consid e r e d " t h e t o w n of J e s u s " (Mt. 9:1). Excavation p r o v i d e d archaeologists with sealed a n d su p e r i m p o s e d strata, t h r o u g h which it is was possible, for t h e first time, to classify a n d date t h e regional ware.
north
^ 2
CAPERNAUM.
General plan of the fourth-century
L o f f r e d a , 1985, p , 34)
CE synagogue.
(After
T h e i n - d e p t h e x c a v a t i o n s , b o t h in t h e s y n a g o g u e a n d in t h e octagonal c h u r c h , clarified several p r o b l e m s b u t raised m a n y questions. It is indisputable t h a t t h e s y n a g o g u e a n d t h e c h u r c h were n o t built o n virgin soil, b u t o n p r e v i o u s strata dating b a c k at least to t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d ( u n d e r t h e octagon) a n d t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e ( u n d e r t h e s y n a g o g u e ) . Scholars agree t h a t t h e late fifth-century o c t a g o n a l c h u r c h was p r e c e d e d b y a f o u r t h - c e n t u r y domus ecclesia (a h o u s e u s e d for religious gatherings b y a C h r i s t i a n c o m m u nity). T h e excavators suggest t h a t this c h a n g e h a d already t a k e n place in t h e late first c e n t u r y CE. A t t h e s a m e time, several structures a n d p a v e m e n t s a p p e a r u n d e r t h e m o n u m e n t a l s y n a g o g u e t h a t m a y b e l o n g to earlier s y n a g o g u e s . Finally, t h e two p u b l i c buildings w e r e certainly in u s e for t h e s p a n of t h e B y z a n t i n e period: t h e earliest clear evidence of s o m e stones f r o m t h e s y n a g o g u e b e i n g r e u s e d in p r i v a t e buildings in the village is well after the eighth c e n t u r y . I n s u m , t h e s y n a g o g u e a n d t h e C h r i s t i a n shrines built o n t h e traditional h o u s e of P e t e r w e r e n o t only close t o o n e a n o t h e r , sharing t h e s a m e street, b u t w e r e in u s e side b y side for several centuries. It is true t h a t in t h e late fifth-early seventh centuries t h e s y n a g o g u e was c o m p l e t e l y encircled b y private h o u s e s , in w h i c h a considerable n u m b e r of terra sigillata bowls w i t h s t a m p e d crosses w e r e f o u n d , b u t n o di rect evidence w h a t s o e v e r exists t o indicate t h a t t h e s y n a g o g u e was u s e d as a c h u r c h . W h a t is still highly d e b a t e d is t h e original d a t i n g of t h e m o n u m e n t a l s y n a g o g u e . O n t h e basis of architectural, stylistic, a n d historical c o n s i d e r a t i o n s , several archaeologists consider t h e s y n a g o g u e at C a p e r n a u m to b e the b e s t e x a m p l e of t h e basilica-style synagogues t h a t flourished in Galilee in d i e s e c o n d - t h i r d centuries CE. O n the c o n t r a r y , h o w e v e r , t h e excavators, o n t h e basis of stratigraphic material, c o n c l u d e t h a t t h e s y n a g o g u e ' s p r a y e r hall was built in t h e late f o u r t h c e n t u r y CE a n d t h a t t h e east c o u r t y a r d was a d d e d a c e n t u r y later. A l t h o u g h t h e y a d m i t t h a t several decorative elements from t h e s y n a g o g u e c a n b e d a t e d to t h e t h i r d c e n t u r y , they reject t h e idea t h a t t h e late material f o u n d in sealed levels is to b e e x p l a i n e d as t h e result of m i n o r repairs in t h e building. T h e fifth-century octagonal c h u r c h a n d t h e f o u r t h - c e n tury domus ecclesia are Christian shrines. T h e excavators suggest t h a t s o m e of t h e f r a g m e n t a r y , b u t n u m e r o u s , graffiti (in Greek, A r a m a i c , a n d Syriac) p r e d a t e t h e fourtii-century domus ecclesia, t h e s t r u c t u r e described b y t h e pilgrim Egeria in 384, w h e n she wrote: " T h e h o u s e of t h e P r i n c e of t h e Apostles w a s c h a n g e d into c h u r c h . T h e walls h o w e v e r , are still standing as t h e y w e r e " (ELS, p . 299, n. 443), T h e y also suggest t h a t t h e octagonal c h u r c h is t h e s t r u c t u r e visited b y t h e A n o n y m u s P l a c e n t i n u s in 570, w h o w r o t e : " W e c a m e t o C a p e r n a u m in t h e h o u s e of St. Peter, w h i c h is n o w a basil i c a " (ELS, p . 297, n. 436). T o d a t e , t h e assertion t h a t t h e r e c e n t excavations have identified t h e traditional h o u s e of St. Peter r e m a i n s u n c o n t e s e d . Is t h e traditional h o u s e of St. P e t e r the t r u e h o u s e of Peter? H o w reliable is t h e tradition
CAPPADOCIA
419
CAPERNAUM. General plan of the Insula Sacra. P r i v a t e h o u s e s of t h e H e l l e n i s t i c - R o m a n p e r i o d . H H : T h e f o u r t h - c e n t u r y CE D o m u s - E c c l e s i a . •' : T h e m i d - f i f t h - c e n t u r y CE O c t a g o n a l C h u r c h . (After Loffreda, 1985, p p . 50-51)
concerning the house of Peter, where Jesus lived? The ex cavators are certain of the identification, based on the con siderable body of circumstantial evidence. BIBLIOGRAPHY C o r b o , Virgilio. The House of St. Peter al Capharnaum: A Preliminary Report of the First Two Campaigns of Excavations, April 16-fune 19I September 12-November 26, 1968. S t u d i u m Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m , Collectio M i n o r , 5. Jerusalem, 1972. C o r b o , Virgilio. Cafamao, vol. 1, Gli edif'tci della citta. S t u d i u m Bibli c u m F r a n c i s c a n u m , n o . 19. Jerusalem, 1975. Enchiridion Locomm Sanctorum: Documenta S. Evangelii Loca Respicientia (1955). Edited b y D o n a t o Baldi. Jerusalem, 1982. Loffreda, Stanislao. Cafamao, vol. 2, La ceramica. S t u d i u m Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m , no. 19. Jerusalem, 1974, Loffreda, Stanislao. Recovering Capharnaum. S t u d i u m Biblicum F r a n ciscanum G u i d e s , 1. Jerusalem, 1985. Orfali, Gaudenzio. Capharnaum et ses mines d'apres les fouilles accomplies it Tell-Houm par la Custodie Franciscaine de Tern Sainte, 1905-1921. Paris, 1922. Spijkerman, Augusto. Cafamao, vol. 3, Catalogo delle monete della citta. S t u d i u m Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m , n o . 19. Jerusalem, 1975. Testa, Emrnanuele. Cafamao, vol. 4, / graffiti della casa di S. Pietro. S t u d i u m Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m , n o . 19. Jerusalem, 1972. Tzaferis, Vassilios, et al. Excavations at Capernaum, vol, 1 , 1 9 7 8 - 1 9 8 2 . W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1989. STANISLAO LOFFREDA
C A P I T O L I A S . See Beit Ras.
C A P P A D O C I A . A land dominated by volcanic tuffs in what is central Turkey, the region of Cappadocia was home to Hittite, Greek, Roman, Christian, Seljuk, and Islamic civ ilizations in that order. Evidence for occupation in the area extends back to the Stone Age. Small settlements developed later into trading posts that increasingly served as places of exchange as traffic headed east-west and north-south. At one point the region covered a large area that extended from Lake Tatta to the Euphrates River and from the Black Sea to Cilicia. [See Euphrates; Cilicia.] The northern section came to be known as Pontus and the middle and southern part, Greater Cappadocia. Often, the passes, which are the principal access to the area, were closed by snow in the win ter. The region is almost in die center of ancient Anatolia, The Assyrians understood the area as part of the kingdom of Kanes. The Persians called it Katpatuka. In the classical period it came to be called Cappadocia. Its boundaries var ied through history, but basically the region includes an area bounded by volcanic formations on the south and east (with Mt. Argaeus at the northeast corner and Hasan dag on the
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s o u t h ) , a middle valley formed b y t h e Kizil I r m a k ( R e d River), a n d a depression created in t h e T u z golii (Salt Lake) on d i e southwest. F e w of its areas b e c a m e urbanized. T h e site of K a n e s , located on t h e Hittite t o w n of K u l t e p e near Kayseri, t r a d e d with the region of p r e s e n t - d a y Iran a n d Syria, primarily e x changing copper a n d lead for cloth a n d skins. [See K a n e s . ] A L a t e Hittite text refers t o a n early coalition (c. 2300 BCE) that included seventeen local kings from this region w h o organized t h e " G r e a t R e v o l t " against t h e Assyrian king N a r a m - S i n , S a r g o n ' s successor, a n d offers t h e earliest evi d e n c e of u r b a n d e v e l o p m e n t in d i e region (Frayne, 1991). [See Hittites.] Bogazkoy (ancient H a t t u s a ) t h e Hittite capi tal, indicates t h e i m p o r t a n c e this central region held for t h e Hittite E m p i r e until t h e latter's demise in 1200 BCE. [See B o gazkoy.] In t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE t h e region was i n c o r p o rated into t h e k i n g d o m of Lydia a n d shortly thereafter into the Persian E m p i r e , b u t few n e w settlements are f o u n d until 350 BCE u n d e r Persians h e g e m o n y . [See Persians.] T h e r e gion's rich pastures are a p p a r e n t in t h e Persian kings' d e m a n d of fifteen h u n d r e d horses, fifty t h o u s a n d s h e e p , a n d two t h o u s a n d m u l e s a n d t h e fact t h a t R o m a n e m p e r o r s k e p t stud racehorses t h e r e . I t also h a d quartz, salt, a n d silver m i n e s (Strabo 12.533-540). I n t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n periods large estates controlled m u c h of the good land; s o m e of t h e estates w e r e t e m p l e territories (e.g., M a of C o m a n a [modern G u m e n e k ] a n d Z e u s of V e n a s a ) . T h e strategic i m p o r t a n c e of t h e region for t h e R o m a n s is evidenced b y t h e continual beneficence of the R o m a n s t o w a r d building p r o j ects, beginning with P o m p e y . H e p r o v i d e d significant funds
CAPPADOCIA. torial Archive)
Northwest
to help r e c o n s t r u c t several u r b a n centers after t h e d e s t r u c tive Mithridatic W a r s (88-63 B C E ) . K i n g s ruled t h e area for a time in t h e Hellenistic period, i n c l u d i n g A r c h e l a u s , p u t into p o w e r b y M a r k A n t o n y , w h o r e n a m e d M a z a c a C a e sarea ( m o d e r n Kayseri) a n d f o u n d e d Archelais, formerly G a r s a u r a ( m o d e r n A k s a r a y ) . I n 17 CE C a p p a d o c i a w a s a n n e x e d as a procuratorial p r o v i n c e . V e s p a s i a n b r o u g h t G a latia a n d C a p p a d o c i a together as a n administrative unit, w h i c h lasted until T r a j a n c o m b i n e d it w i t h P o n t u s , a situa tion t h a t lasted until Diocletian's reign. D u r i n g t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s , t h e m a i n t o w n s a n d cities i n t h e region t h a t o c c u p i e d a n c i e n t sites included t h e capital, Caesarea ( M a z a c a - E u s e b e i a ) , T y a n a (Hittite T u w a n u w a ) , a n d S o a n d o s ( b e t w e e n G a r s a u r a a n d Mazaca). T w o main roads running north-south through the region c o n n e c t e d t h e m a i n s o u t h e r n ( e a s t - w e s t ) coastal r o a d with t h e r o a d linking Assyria a n d t h e w e s t e r n coast of Asia M i n o r in d i e eighth c e n t u r y BCE. Little remains f r o m t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s b y w a y of architecture, even in t h e t o w n s directiy u n d e r G r e e k or R o m a n control. A few cult buildings a n d t o m b s h a v e b e e n discovered in s o m e outiying areas (e.g., Sivasa, w h e r e t h e octagonal m a r t y r i u m described b y G r e g o r y of N y s a w a s built; a n d M a v r u c a n , m o d e r n Giizeloz, t h e site of t h e C h u r c h of t h e Stratilates)—notably r e m n a n t s of a t o m b at Avcilar. [See M a r t y r i o n ; T o m b s . ] M a r c u s Aurelius built a t e m p l e for his wife, F a u s t i n a , a t t h e t o w n in C a p p a d o c i a w h e r e she died, r e n a m e d Faustinopolis. I n addition, a t e m ple established u n d e r S e p t i m i u s Severus was built a t C a e sarea, as i n d i c a t e d b y a coin dated t o t h e year 206 CE. A
interior wall and arcade of the main church at Tokali Kilise.
(Courtesy Pic
CAPPADOCIA
CAPPADOCIA.
Earlier style section of church decor at Takali Kilise,
421
exposed by the collapse of the rock
face. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
s e c o n d neocorate (a provincial imperial cult c o m p l e x ) was established u n d e r G o r d i a n (Price, 1984, p . 269). U n f o r t u nately, m o s t of t h e early p e r i o d s h a v e b e e n obliterated b y C h r i s t i a n building activities e x t e n d i n g t h r o u g h t h e B y z a n tine period (roughly from t h e f o u r t h t h r o u g h t h e t h i r t e e n t h centuries). T h e n u m e r o u s B y z a n t i n e c h u r c h e s carved i n t o t h e r o c k follow t h e architectural p a t t e r n s established in t h e east a n d a p p a r e n t l y d o n o t r e p r e s e n t any u n i q u e local traditions. [See C h u r c h e s . ] I n t h e B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d d i e p r i m a r y cities—Andaval, N a zianzus ( D i o c a e s a r e a ) , G a r s a u r i t i s ( C o l o n i a Archealis), S o a n d o s (Hittite H u p i s p a , m o d e r n Eregli), Cybistra, a n d C a e s a r e a ( M a z a c a ) — p l a y e d critical roles as p a r t of t h e mil itary a n d t r a d i n g r o a d n e t w o r k t h a t linked t h e p l a t e a u region with t h e larger e m p i r e , a n d especially t h e city of B y z a n t i u m , [See R o a d s . ] A key r o a d p r o t e c t e d b y a series of fortresses r a n along the s o u t h e r n slope of H a s a n d a g . B e y o n d t h e m a i n traffic p a t t e r n s a series of villages w e r e c u t o u t of r o c k a n d linked b y local r o a d s . N u m e r o u s wells, g a r d e n s , vineyards, olive presses, a n d o t h e r r e m n a n t s of small agricultural c o m m u n i t i e s h a v e b e e n located. M o n a s t i c centers of t h e eastern c h u r c h a n d p a r t of t h e diocese of Caesarea in C a p p a d o c i a (which i n c l u d e d Sogani, H a s a n , G o r e m e , a n d d i e chief t o w n of t h e diocese, C a e s a r e a C a p p a d o c i a e ) h a v e also b e e n d i s covered. T w o B y z a n t i n e e m p e r o r s ( Z e n o t h e Isaurian a n d M i c h a e l II) c a m e f r o m t h e region, as did several f a m o u s theologians, i n c l u d i n g G r e g o r y of N y s a , Basil of C a e s a r e a , a n d G r e g o r y of N a z i a n z u s . H o m e to C h r i s t i a n a n d later M u s l i m mystics, t h e area is
d o t t e d w i t h c h u r c h e s , m o n a s t e r i e s , a n d chapels carved in d i e soft s t o n e . [See M o n a s t e r i e s . ] S o m e structures lent t h e m selves t o u s e b y ascetics ( b o t h Christian a n d M u s l i m ) , n o tably t h e sites at " M o n k ' s V a l l e y " along t h e Zilve r o a d , in t h e P e r i s t r e m a valley (the m o n a s t e r y of K a r a n h k Kale, t h e " D a r k F o r t " ) , a n d G o r e m e , n e a r t h e village of Avcilar (the location of s u c h c h u r c h e s as T o k a l i Kilise (the " B o s s C h u r c h " ) a n d K a r a n h k Kilise (the " D a r k C h u r c h " ) . D u r i n g t h e M u s l i m p e r i o d , a series of caravanserais, or wellfortified way stations t h a t often h a d b a t h s , stables, and l o d g ing, w e r e created for t r a d e r s w h o helped maintain t h e links b e t w e e n t h e east a n d t h e west. [See Baths.] K e y m a r k e t t o w n s s u c h as tire citadel of K a y serf served as the foundation for s u c h i m p o r t a n t t r a d e n e t w o r k s . S e t t l e m e n t in t h e region t e n d e d t o follow a fairly set p a t tern from a n early p e r i o d . T h e accessible a n d flat region of t h e p l a t e a u saw d i e d e v e l o p m e n t of the larger settlements, w h i c h w e r e often d e v o t e d to t r a d e a n d generally were t h e place of r e s i d e n c e for t h e elite classes. In t h e m o r e r u g g e d m o u n t a i n o u s areas, smaller villages built of stone or carved o u t of t h e r o c k p r e d o m i n a t e d . T e m p l e s to local deities have b e e n f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t the region, especially in t h e rural areas. N u m e r o u s C h r i s t i a n c o m m u n i t i e s developed in these r u g g e d areas, often in isolation from t h e m o r e official s t r u c t u r e s f o u n d in t h e larger t o w n s , s u c h as t h e capital, C a e s a rea. T h e r e m o t e n e s s of t h e area often p r o v i d e d a refuge from political authority as well as religious persecution. S o m e of t h e earliest Christian art from t h e iconoclastic p e riod survives b e c a u s e of this isolation.
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P e r h a p s best k n o w n are t h e spectacular u n d e r g r o u n d complexes of i n t e r c o n n e c t i n g r o o m s a n d c h a m b e r s h e w n o u t of t h e tuffaceous rock (e.g., at K a y m a k l t a n d at O r t a hisar, site of C a m b a z l i Kilise, t h e " C h u r c h of t h e A c r o b a t " ) . S o m e u n d e r g r o u n d t o w n s extend for m o r e than ten floors in d e p t h and cover m a n y kilometers. R o u n d stone slabs of ten blocked off passages, indicating the n e e d for security in tire region. X e n o p h o n , in his Anabasis (4.5.25-26) shows that such u n d e r g r o u n d complexes were i m p o r t a n t in this area as early as the fifth c e n t u r y BCE: " T h e dwellings in these villages are u n d e r g r o u n d : they have an entrance like t h e m o u t h of a well, b u t t h e r o o m s are spacious. T h e livestock lives in separate a p a r t m e n t s hollowed out of t h e g r o u n d ; t h e m e n go down into t h e m with ladders. H e r e they r e a r goats, sheep, cows, and h e n s , together with tiieir p r o g e n y ; a n d all these beasts are fed solely o n hay. T h e y keep stores of c o r n , rice, vegetables, a n d barley wine in large jars. . . . " T h e c o m i n g of t h e Seljuk T u r k s in t h e eleventh a n d twelfth centuries altered t h e landscape in C a p p a d o c i a . P r i vate houses h a d few of t h e embellishments sometimes f o u n d in their Byzantine c o u n t e r p a r t s . T h e y did develop elaborate water systems (cisterns, a q u e d u c t s , canals) to irrigate or chards, parks, a n d g a r d e n s a n d to provide plentiful water to b a t h complexes. [See Cisterns; A q u e d u c t s ; Irrigation.] C a e sarea r e m a i n e d t h e leading city a n d capital of C a p p a d o c i a a n d continued its significant military a n d t r a d i n g role. N i g d e a n d Bor took on increasing i m p o r t a n c e as well b e c a u s e they conttolled a critical crossing o n t h e main r o a d to t h e Cilician gates a n d t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea. [See also Anatolia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Arts of Cappadocia. Geneva, 1 9 7 1 . Series of essays that collectively p r o vide one of the best discussions in English on this region. Frayne, Douglas R. "Historical Texts in Haifa: Notes on R. Kutscher's 'Brockman T a b l e t s . ' " Biblioteca Oiientalis 48 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3 7 8 - 4 0 9 . Gwatkin, William E m m e t t , Jr. Cappadocia as a Roman Procuratorial Province. University of Missouri Studies, vol. 5.4. Columbia, 1930. Kostof, Spiro. Caves of God: Cappadocia and Its Churches. Oxford, 1989. Mitford, T e r e n c e B . " C a p p a d o c i a and Armenia M i n o r : Historical Set ting of the L i m e s . " In Anfstieg und Niedergang der romischen Well, vol. II.7.2, edited by Wolfgang Haase, p p . 1 1 6 9 - 1 2 2 8 . Berlin and N e w York, 1980. Orlin, Louis L . Assyrian Colonies in Cappadocia. T h e H a g u e , 1970. Price, S. R. F. Rituals of Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge, 1984. Sullivan, Richard D . " T h e Dynasty of C a p p a d o c i a . " In Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Well, vol. II.7.2, edited by Wolfgang Haase, p p . 1 1 2 5 - 1 1 6 8 . Berlin and N e w York, 1980. Teja, Ramon. "Die romische Provinz Kappadokien in der Prinzipatszeit," In Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt, vol. II.7.2, edited by Wolfgang Haase, p p . 1 0 8 3 - 1 1 2 4 . Berlin and N e w York, 1980. DOUGLAS R. EDWARDS
CAPPADOCIAN TEXTS.
See Kiiltepe T e x t s .
CARAVANSERAIS.
D e n o t i n g a variety of c o m m e r cial, residential, a n d pilgrimage structures in t h e Islamic w o r l d , caravanserais reflect t h e i m p o r t a n c e of t r a d e r o u t e s in d i e history of t h e Islamic lands of t h e N e a r East. C a r a vanserais served as staging posts o n major r o a d s b e t w e e n t o w n s , or as secure c o m m e r c i a l storage w i t h residential fa cilities within t o w n s . T e r m i n o l o g y varies in different c o n texts a n d related buildings include khans, wakalas, fundugs, a n d ribats. T h e i n v o l v e m e n t of central g o v e r n m e n t s in t h e construction of m a n y of t h e s e caravanserais has led to a d e gree of stylistic u n i f o r m i t y in their design. T h e c o m m e r c i a l r o u t e s of t h e pre-Islamic w o r l d m a y h a v e given rise t o caravanserailike a r c h i t e c t u r e , b u t it is in t h e Islamic p e r i o d t h a t the provision of facilities for travelers led to a significant b o d y of architecture. T h e early Islamic g e ographers often refer to w a y stations as manzil, w h i c h m a y b e p r e s u m e d to h a v e b e e n buildings. Khans h a v e also b e e n identified at the U m a y y a d sites of Q a s r a l - H a y r a l - G h a r b i (724-727 CE) a n d Q a s r al-Hayr a s h - S h a r q i (728-729) in Syria a n d t h e location of other U m a y y a d desert sites s u g gests t h a t s o m e m a y h a v e e n c o m p a s s e d a caravanserai role. In t h e late eighth century, t h e ' A b b a s i d caliphs developed t h e D a r b Z u b a y d a h , t h e r o a d from I r a q to M e c c a , building qusur (enclosures, palaces), a n d mazil at staging p o s t s . T h e r e are n u m e r o u s settlements o n t h e r o a d , a n d excava tions at a r - R a b a d h a east of M e d i n a s h o w a m a j o r e i g h t h n i n t h century s e t t l e m e n t with several secure c o u r t y a r d buildings with storage facilities. T h e p r e s e n c e of lusterware a n d other early ' A b b a s i d glazed p o t t e r y p o i n t s t o a luxurious level of provisioning of t h e way stations. T h e Seljuks w e r e munificent builders of caravanserais, r e flecting their interest in m a i n t a i n i n g c o m m e r c e a n d security along d i e extensive r o a d system u n d e r their control. T h e Ribat-i Malik (c. 1068-1080), s o u t h e a s t of B u k h a r a in c e n tral Asia is the earliest e x t a n t Seljuk caravanserai. It has a c o u r t y a r d enclosure p r e c e d e d b y a g r e a t p o r t a l of a t y p e f o u n d in c o n t e m p o r a r y m o s q u e s , a n d its lavish brick d e c o ration is in k e e p i n g with t h e finest architectural d e c o r a t i o n of t h e period. A n o t h e r early Seljuk caravanserai is t h e twelfth-century Ribat-i Sharaf in n o r t h e a s t e r n I r a n t h a t also has m o n u m e n t a l portals, iwans a n d c h a m b e r s a r o u n d t h e c o u r t y a r d s , in a m a n n e r r e m i n i s c e n t of Seljuk m o s q u e s . T h e tradition of t h e caravanserai is c o n t i n u e d in later times in I r a n , C e n t r a l Asia, a n d t h e N e a r East. T h e T i m u rids, O t t o m a n s , a n d Safavids w e r e all involved in m a i n t a i n ing a n d i m p r o v i n g c o m m e r c i a l facilities along t h e r o a d s . E x amples of royal or aristocratic f o u n d a t i o n s o n major r o a d s include t h e series of t w e l f t h - t h i r t e e n t h - c e n m r y Seljuk khans along die A n a t o l i a n r o a d system; a g r o u p of fifteenth-cen tury caravanserais associated with a T i m u r i d official, 'Ali Shir N a v a i , c o n c e n t r a t e d in n o r t h e a s t e r n I r a n ; a n d t h e sev e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y M a d e r - i S h a h caravanserai n e a r Isfahan, built by S h a h ' A b b a s II. Related to s u c h caravanserais are u r b a n khans or
wakalas,
CARCHEMISH w h i c h constituted t h e distribution p o i n t s for g o o d s , as well as the collection p o i n t for c u s t o m s duties. I n m a n y cases, these u r b a n d e p o t s specialized in particular c o m m o d i t i e s , s u c h as oil or soap. T h i s situation is well d e m o n s t r a t e d in D a m a s c u s a n d A l e p p o , w h e r e a n u m b e r of khans still s u r vive within t h e extensive m a r k e t areas. A t Jerusalem, c o m m e r c i a l caravanserais were established to s u p p o r t religious f o u n d a t i o n s in t h e M a m l u k period. T h e Khan as-Sultan, or al-Wakala at J e r u s a l e m , built u n d e r S u l t a n B a r q u q (i386-1387) h a s a covered m a r k e t hall: in a n e i g h b o r i n g t w o - s t o r y c o u r t y a r d s t r u c t u r e , t h e lower floors w e r e for storage a n d t h e selling of g o o d s t o local m e r c h a n t s , t h e c o u r t y a r d w a s for animals, a n d the u p p e r r o o m s a c c o m m o d a t e d visiting m e r c h a n t s . S u c h u r b a n wakalas h a v e p a r allels in Asia M i n o r , Syria, E g y p t , t h e Hijaz, a n d N o r t h Af rica. A quite different t y p e of caravanserai o c c u r s in M a m l u k a n d O t t o m a n times, t o g u a r d pilgrim r o a d s in desert regions. O n t h e R e d Sea coast of A r a b i a , fortications at ' A q a b a , alM u w a y l i h , al-Azlam, a n d a l - Z u r a y b reflect a t t e m p t s to p r o tect t h e coastal r o u t e from E g y p t to the Hijaz. In t h e six t e e n t h c e n t u r y , the O t t o m a n s also built a series of fortified caravanserais t h r o u g h Syria t o t h e Hijaz to garrison the pil g r i m r o a d a n d disperse p a y m e n t s to tribal leaders d u r i n g t h e hajj m a r c h . S u c h structures are m o r e m o r e closely related to t h e caravanserai's security role t h a n its c o m m e r c i a l p u r pose. [See also C a m e l s ; T r a n s p o r t a t i o n . In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aslanapa, Oktay. Turkish Art and Architecture. N e w York, 1 9 7 1 . Burgoyne, Michael Hamilton, and D . S. Richards. Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 . Elisseeff, Nikita. " K h a n . " In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 4, p p . 1 0 1 0 - 1 0 1 7 , Leiden, i 9 6 0 - . E r d m a n n , K u r t . Das anatolische Karavansaray
des 13. Jahrhunderts.
Is-
tanbuler F o r s h u n g e n , 2 1 . Berlin, 1 9 6 1 . G o l o m b e k , Lisa, and D o n a l d Wilber. The Timurid Architecture of Iran and Turan. Princeton, 1988. P o p e , A r t h u r U p h a m . A Suwey of Persian Art. L o n d o n , 1938. Sauvaget, Jean. " L e s caravanserails syriens du Hadjdj de C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . " Ars Islamica4 ( 1 9 3 7 ) : 9 8 - 1 2 1 . Sauvaget, Jean. "Caravanserails syriens d u m o y e n - a g e . " Ars Islamica 6 (1939): 48-55; 7 (1940): i - i 9 Siroux, M a x i m e . Caravanserails d'lran, et petites constructions routieres. M e m o i r e s de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, vol. 8 1 . Cairo, 1 9 4 9 . G . R. D . KING
C A R C H E M I S H , a n c i e n t Hittite city a n d its territory located o n t h e w e s t b a n k of t h e u p p e r E u p h r a t e s River (37°io' N , 38°oi' E ) . T o t h e s o u t h of t h e site circles t h e A l e p p o - M o s u l railway, w h i c h also defines the m o d e r n T u r l d s h - S y r i a n frontier. T h e Syrian village of Jerablus a d
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joins the site t o d i e s o u t h w e s t , a n d a m o r e recent T u r k i s h village n a m e d K a r g a m i s has g r o w n u p t o the northwest. T h e site, u n d e r t h e n a m e of Jerablus (or Jerabis), attracted the notice of travelers from t h e eighteenth c e n t u r y o n w a r d b e c a u s e of its citadel m o u n d , walls, a n d surface m o n u m e n t s . It was identified in 1876 b y the f a m o u s Assyriologist G e o r g e S m i t h as t h e K a r k a m i s k n o w n f r o m Assyrian, E g y p t i a n , a n d H e b r e w s o u r c e s . T h e spelling " C a r c h e m i s h " represents t h e anglicization of krkmys in t h e H e b r e w Bible. C a r c h e m i s h is k n o w n from limited archaeological inves tigations; its history is m u c h m o r e fully d o c u m e n t e d b y the historical sources. T h e British M u s e u m h a s s p o n s o r e d t h r e e archaeological expeditions there: (1) P . H e n d e r s o n , a British c o n s u l in A l e p p o , d u g intermittently from D e c e m b e r 1878 to July 1881 to recover s c u l p t u r e and inscriptions for t h e m u s e u m ; (2) regular excavations w e r e c o n d u c t e d b e t w e e n M a r c h 1911 a n d spring 1914 u n d e r the direction first of D . G . H o g a r t h , t h e n C a m p b e l l T h o m p s o n , a n d t h e n C. L e o n a r d Woolley, b u t these w e r e b r o k e n off by the outbreak of W o r l d W a r I; (3) Woolley's a t t e m p t to r e s u m e operations in spring 1920 w a s again i n t e r r u p t e d by the T u r k i s h o c c u p a t i o n of t h e area in the a u t u m n . T h e s u b s e q u e n t peace settlement established d i e T u r k i s h - S y r i a n frontier, as al ready n o t e d . T h e site's strategically sensitive position has p r e c l u d e d a n y r e s u m p t i o n of excavations u p t o a n d includ ing t h e p r e s e n t time (1995). O n l y t h e operations of 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 1 4 resulted in any signifi c a n t e x p o s u r e of p a r t s of t h e site, w h i c h include three m a i n areas: (1) t h e citadel m o u n d , (2) t h e o u t e r t o w n a n d its for tifications, a n d (3) the i n n e r t o w n a n d its fortifications. O n die citadel m o u n d , little c o h e r e n t architecture was r e covered, e x c e p t for a poorly preserved building first i d e n tified, incorrectly, as Assyrian ( " S a r g o n ' s F o r t " ) a n d s u b sequently identified, w i t h o u t s u p p o r t i n g evidence, as the T e m p l e of K u b a b a . T h e r u b b l e foundations of t h e outer city wall were located at certain p o i n t s b y s o n d a g e , p e r m i t t i n g a reconstruction of its course. W i t h i n this wall, a n u m b e r of private houses des ignated A - H were excavated, a n d a w e s t gate was e x a m i n e d . T h e i n n e r city wall, a h i g h e a r t h e n r a m p a r t , was surveyed a n d its west a n d s o u t h gates excavated. W i t h i n this wall lay t h e m a i n area of die site t o b e exposed, which e x t e n d e d w e s t w a r d from t h e W a t e r G a t e along the southwest foot of t h e citadel. E v e n here few c o m p l e t e buildings w e r e recov ered: t h e S t o r m G o d T e m p l e c o m p l e x , including its exterior facade (the L o n g Wall of S c u l p t u r e ) , the G r e a t Staircase with its G a t e h o u s e a s c e n d i n g to t h e citadel, and t h e poorly p r e s e r v e d hilani (as buildings with c o l u m n e d porticoes are designated by archaeologists, u s i n g the Assyrian t e r m ) . B e sides these, only facades faced witii s c u l p t u r e d a n d inscribed orthostats w e r e revealed: t h e H e r a l d ' s Wall, t h e Processional E n t r y (later r e m o d e l e d by die addition of the Royal B u t tress), a n d the K i n g ' s G a t e . All excavated m o n u m e n t s at the site b e l o n g t o its N e o -
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Hittite floruit (c. 1000-717 BCE). T h e excavation reports of t e n mention d a m a g e d o n e to these by R o m a n foundations, although they were neither r e c o r d e d nor published. T h e sculpture a n d inscriptions found in situ a n d other pieces found out of context give information on t w o d y n a s ties, t h e houses of Suhi and of Astiruwa, dating apparently to the tenth a n d eighth centuries BCE, respectively. T h e for m e r seems to h a v e built m o s t of t h e excavated m o n u m e n t s , to which the latter a d d e d the Royal Buttress a n d , also a c cording to a n inscription, rebuilt t h e T e m p l e of K u b a b a . T h e s e excavated remains represent only a small p e r i o d in t h e site's recorded history. C a r c h e m i s h is already attested in t h e Ebla archives of t h e m i d - t h i r d millennium as a p a r t of t h e trading n e t w o r k of t h e period, a n d in the M a r i archives of the early second millennium as an i n d e p e n d e n t k i n g d o m enjoying g o o d relations w i t h M a r i . I n the m i d - s e c o n d mil l e n n i u m , t h e site was a n i m p o r t a n t outpost of t h e u p p e r M e s o p o t a m i a n k i n g d o m of M i t a n n i . M o s t i m p o r t a n t , however, is its position u n d e r t h e Hittite E m p i r e , w h e n S u p p i l u l i u m a I, after his c o n q u e s t of Syria, c a p t u r e d C a r c h e m i s h a n d in stalled his s o n Piyassili as king. T h i s dynasty lasted for at leastflve generations, surviving t h e fall of the Hittite E m p i r e . Its kings acted as Hittite viceroys of Syria, a n d in t h e absence of any remains of this p e r i o d from the site itself, their activ ities are d o c u m e n t e d in t h e archives of U g a r i t a n d E m a r . T h i s i m p o r t a n t position in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e m a d e C a r c h e m i s h t h e m o s t p r o m i n e n t of t h e N e o - H i t t i t e states. T h e Assyrians t e r m i n a t e d t h e power of C a r c h e m i s h . In 717 BCE they c o n q u e r e d a n d a n n e x e d t h e city, constituting it a province of their e m p i r e , w h i c h it r e m a i n e d until t h e fall of Assyria in 612 BCE a n d b e y o n d . C a r c h e m i s h w a s t h e site of the final battle b e t w e e n t h e Babylonian a n d E g y p t i a n ar mies in 605 BCE, a t w h i c h t h e r e m n a n t of Assyria was oblit erated. T h i s was the city's last a p p e a r a n c e in history. [See also Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia; Hittites; Neo-Hittites; and Syria, articles on Syria in the B r o n z e A g e and Syria in t h e Iron Age.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Hawkins, J. D . " K a r k a m i s . " In Realkxikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archdologie, vol. 5, p p . 426-446. Berlin a n d N e w York, 1980. Comprehensive encyclopedia entry with full bibliography to date of publication. Hawkins, J. D . " K u z i - T e s u b and the 'Great Kings' of K a r k a m i s . " An atolian Studies 38 (1988): 9 9 - 1 0 8 . Important new evidence for polit ical and cultural continuity at Carchemish beyond the fall of the Hittite empire. Hawkins, J. D . "Karkamii,," In Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscrip tions. Berlin and N e w York, forthcoming. Translation of all the hi eroglyphic inscriptions from Carchemish, with historical a n d philo logical commentary. Hogarth, David G. Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis, part 1, Introductory. L o n d o n , 1 9 1 4 . T h e first excavation report, con taining background information on the site and its n a m e and a p r e liminary section o n the excavated inscriptions and sculpture. O r t h m a n n , Winfried. Untersuchungen zur spdthethitischen Kunst. B o n n ,
1 9 7 1 . Detailed analysis of neo-Hittite sculpture, including p r o m i nently that of C a r c h e m i s h , g r o u p e d according to style for the p u r pose of dating. Winter, Irene J. " C a r c h e m i s h sa kiSad puratli."
Anatolian
Studies
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(1983): I 7 7 - I 9 7 -
Woolley, C. L e o n a r d . Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis, part 2, The Town Defences. L o n d o n , 1 9 2 1 . T h e second excavation report, concentrating on the fortifications b u t including a further selection of excavated inscriptions a n d sculpture. Woolley, C . L e o n a r d . " T h e Iron-Age Graves of C a r c h e m i s h . " Liver pool Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology 26 ( 1 9 3 9 ) : 1 1 - 3 7 . P u b lication of the C a r c h e m i s h cemetery excavated at Y u n u s , northwest of the m o u n d . Woolley, C. L e o n a r d , and R. D . Barnett. Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis, p a r t 3, The Excavations in the Inner Town; The Hittite Inscriptions. L o n d o n , 1 9 5 2 . T h e final excavation report, published many years after the work ended. J. D . HAWKINS
C A R M E L C A V E S . M o u n t C a r m e l is a limestone m o u n t a i n o u s block that stretches as a triangular m a s s over a b o u t 350 sq k m . I t w a s surveyed intensively a n d all visible prehistoric sites w e r e r e c o r d e d ( O l a m i , 1984). A series of prehistoric caves is located in t h e w e s t e r n e s c a r p m e n t of M o u n t C a r m e l , facing t h e n a r r o w coastal plain (1-3 k m w i d e ) , w h i c h even d u r i n g glacial regression p e r i o d s did n o t exceed 10 k m in width. E x c a v a t e d sites i n c l u d e N a h a l M e ' a r o t ( W a d i M u g h a r a ) , es-Skhul, E l - W a d , J a m a l , a n d etT a b u n a n d K e b a r a caves. I n t h e wadis t h a t d e s c e n d west w a r d , Sefunim, N a h a l O r e n , a n d A b u U s b a caves w e r e ex cavated as well as Rakefet cave, w h i c h is located in N a h a l Y o q n e ' a m , w h i c h flows eastward into t h e Jezrel Valley. Excavations a t M o u n t C a r m e l w e r e first u n d e r t a k e n b y D o r o t h y A. E . G a r r o d in a project t h a t lasted from 1929 to 1934. S u b s e q u e n t excavators i n c l u d e d F r a n c i s T u r v i l l e - P e tre ( K e b a r a ) , M o s h e Stekelis ( K e b a r a , Sefunim, N a h a l O r e n ) , A r t h u r Jelinek ( T a b u n ) , A v r a h a m R o n e n (Sefunim a n d T a b u n ) , T a m a r N o y a n d Eric H i g g s (Rakefet), Ofer Bar-Yosef a n d B e r n a r d V a n d e r m e e r s c h ( K e b a r a ) , M i n a W e i n s t e i n - E v r o n ( E l - W a d a n d J a m a l ) . T h e s e excavations u n c o v e r e d r e m a i n s from t h e L o w e r , M i d d l e , U p p e r a n d Epi-Paleolithic, as well a few N e o l i t h i c assemblages d e scribed in the following pages. T a b u n C a v e . Originally excavated b y D o r o t h y G a r r o d (1929-1934) in a joint expedition of t h e British School of Archaeology in J e r u s a l e m a n d t h e A m e r i c a n S c h o o l of P r e historic R e s e a r c h a n d later by A r t h u r J. Jelinek (1967-1972) for t h e University of Arizona, T a b u n C a v e is still u n d e r ex cavation by A v r a h a m R o n e n of t h e University of Haifa. T h e cave lies 45 m a b o v e sea level; t h e lower p a r t of its s e q u e n c e of layers ( G , F , half of E ) is filled b y fine-grained, wellsorted sand, r e s e m b l i n g a m o d e r n d u n e . T h e u p p e r p a r t of layer E is increasingly siltier, a n d t h e layer D d e p o s i t r e s e m bles loess. L a y e r C contains t h e r e m a i n s of b r u s h fires in t h e form of ash lenses. T h e sediments are mainly clays t h a t w e r e
CARMEL CAVES w a s h e d in t h r o u g h t h e " c h i m n e y " t h a t w a s f o r m e d b y t h e dissolution of t h e limestone f r o m t h e M t . C a r m e l plateau. L a y e r B a n d t h e " c h i m n e y " w e r e filled i n w i t h similar d e posits with n u m e r o u s limestone cobbles a n d blocks. T h e old shoreline n e x t to t h e cave, 39 m a b o v e sea level, w a s p r o b ably t h e s o u r c e of t h e sand. I t h a s b e e n suggested, b u t n o t confirmed, t h a t t h e cave w a s hfted t o its p r e s e n t location b y t h e tectonic m o v e m e n t s t h a t c h a r a c t e r i z e d t h e Pleistocene era. T h e chronological p l a c e m e n t of T a b u n ' s various layers is an u n r e s o l v e d d e b a t e . Pollen e v i d e n c e is rather scanty b u t i n d i c a t e d fluctuations from w a r m e r t o wetter conditions. T h e r m o l u m i n e s c e n t ( T L ) dates suggest a n average a g e of 170,000 years old for layer C ; 270,000 years old for layer D ; a n d 300,000 years old for t h e u p p e r p a r t o f layer E. E l e c t r o n s p i n r e s o n a n c e ( E S R ) indicates s o m e w h a t later dates, s u c h as a b o u t 80,000-100,000 years old for layer B ; a b o u t 100,000 years old for layer C ; 130,000-150,000 years old for layer D ; a n d m o r e t h a n 200,000 years o l d for layer E . T h e r e are n o dates y e t for layers F a n d G . T h e previously held c h r o n o logical s c h e m e t h a t viewed m o s t of t h e s e q u e n c e in T a b u n as lasting from t h e last interglacial (c. 130,000 years ago) to a b o u t 45,000 years a g o is t h e r e f o r e n o t a c c e p t e d , a l t h o u g h d i s a g r e e m e n t still exists a b o u t t h e ages of t h e older layers. It h a s also b e c o m e evident t h a t t h e kurkar ridge a b o u t 2 k m w e s t of T a b u n , w h e r e t h e r e d l o a m soil is k n o w n as M o u s terian hamra, is m u c h older—150,000-175,000 years old. L i t h i c industries b e g a n i n layer G with w h a t was defined as T a y a c i a n b y G a r r o d a n d later as T a b u n i a n b y F . C . H o w ell (1959). It is a c o r e - c h o p p e r a s s e m b l a g e with a few r e t o u c h e d pieces. L a y e r F c o n t a i n s a n U p p e r A c h e u l e a n i n d u s t r y with ovate a n d c o r d i f o r m bifaces, side scrapers, a n d o t h e r stone tools. L a y e r E w a s originally called M i c o q u i a n b y G a r r o d a n d later A c h e u l o - Y a b r u d i a n o r t h e M u g h a r a n b y Jelinek. T h e A c h e u l o - Y a b r u d i a n is limited t o t h e n o r t h e r n a n d central L e v a n t . I t contains t h r e e industrial facies, o n c e c o n s i d e r e d i n d e p e n d e n t archaeological entities, defined o n t h e basis o f quantitative a n d qualitative studies: T h e Y a b r u d i a n facies contains n u m e r o u s side s c r a p e r s , often m a d e o n thick flakes, w h i c h results in relatively high frequencies of Q u i n a a n d s e m i - Q u i n a r e t o u c h ; a few U p p e r Palaeolithic tools; rare b l a d e s ; a n d few or n o Levallois p r o d u c t s . T h e A c h e u l e a n facies h a s u p t o 15 p e r c e n t bifaces, w i t h n u m e r o u s scrapers fashioned i n t h e s a m e w a y as t h e Yabrudians. T h e A m u d i a n facies—including e n d scrapers, b u r i n s , b a c k e d knives, a n d r a r e b i f a c e s — s e e m s , as t h e result of t h e T a b u n excavations, to b e closer t o t h e A c h e u l e a n t h a n t h e Y a b r u d i a n a n d contains e v i d e n c e for limited practice of the Levallois t e c h n i q u e . T h e M o u s t e r i a n s e q u e n c e b e g i n s with layer D a n d c o n
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tains blades a n d elongated p o i n t s p r e d o m i n a n t l y r e m o v e d from Levallois u n i p o l a r c o n v e r g e n t cores a n d p e r h a p s s o m e blade cores with minimal p r e p a r a t i o n s of t h e striking plat f o r m s . E l o n g a t e d r e t o u c h e d p o i n t s , n u m e r o u s blades, r a cloirs, a n d b u r i n s a r e a m o n g t h e c o m m o n tool types. L a y e r C is characterized b y large, oval flakes t h a t w e r e r e m o v e d from Levallois cores t h r o u g h radial or b i p o l a r p r e p a r a t i o n . Levallois points a p p e a r in small n u m b e r s . I n layer B , blanks w e r e mainly r e m o v e d from u n i p o l a r c o n v e r g e n t Levallois cores with a minority of radial p r e p a r a t i o n . B r o a d - b a s e d Levallois p o i n t s a n d , often, short, thin flakes a n d s o m e blades w e r e all m a d e b y t h e s a m e Levallois r e c u r r e n t m e t h o d . T h e c h i m n e y seems t o h a v e c o n t a i n e d a similar i n d u s t r y a n d n u m e r o u s b o n e s . Jelinek (1973) h a s suggested at t h a t t i m e t h e hole of the c h i m n e y served for t r a p p i n g deer. H u m a n r e m a i n s include a b r o k e n f e m u r in layer E a n d t h e burial o f a w o m a n , t h e e x a c t p r o v e n i e n c e of w h i c h r e m a i n s u n c e r t a i n . I t is traditionally attributed t o layer C b u t could have originated in layer B . A n isolated jaw resembles m o d e r n h u m a n s in t h e Q a f z e h cave, while t h e w o m a n is c o n s i d e r e d to h a v e m o r e r o b u s t features. J a m a l C a v e . G a r r o d believed t h a t t h e Jamal cave w a s e m p t y , b u t in r e c e n t y e a r s , i n t h e course of conservation activities, t h e cave was f o u n d t o c o n t a i n A c h e u l o - Y a b r u d i a n industry in brecciated deposits. It is currently b e i n g exca vated b y M i n a W e i n s t e i n - E v r o n for t h e University of Haifa. S k h u l C a v e . T h e ceiling of Skhul cave, which is located o n t h e n o r t h e r n face of t h e s a m e e s c a r p m e n t in which T a b u n a n d e l - W a d a r e f o u n d , collapsed in prehistoric times, a n d t h e archaeological r e m a i n s are mostly t h e residues of t w o M o u s t e r i a n layers. L a y e r C was f o u n d i n small pockets in t h e b e d r o c k with a small lithic assemblage, mostly a b r a d e d . L a y e r B w a s a b o u t 2 m thick a n d contained t h e r e m a i n s of several M o u s t e r i a n burials. T h e remains of t e n individuals w e r e u n c o v e r e d . T h e best k n o w n are t h e burial of Skhul V , w i t h a pig's m a n d i b l e i n c o r p o r a t e d in t h e grave; Skhul I, t h e skeleton of a n infant; Skhul I V , a semiflexed burial; a n d Skhul I X . T h e skeletal r e m a i n s of this g r o u p served as t h e basis for t h e identification of early m o d e r n h u m a n anatomical characteristics. Stratigraphically, t h e r e m a i n s of t h e Skhul II a n d V s e e m t o b e later t h a n t h e others. T h e lithic i n d u s t r y essentially resembles t h a t of T a b u n C . E S R a n d T L dates indicate a n age in t h e r a n g e of 80,000117,000 years old. L a y e r A c o n t a i n e d s o m e U p p e r P a l e o litliic artifacts. E l - W a d C a v e . A n elongated karstic c o r r i d o r t h a t lies 44.5 m above sea level, t h e E l - W a d cave a n d its terrace were first excavated b y G a r r o d from 1929 t o 1933. I n 1981 t h e terrace was r e e x a m i n e d b y F r a n c o i s R . Valla a n d Ofer Bar-Yosef, a n d from 1988 to 1990 salvage excavations w e r e carried o u t in t h e interior c h a m b e r b y W e i n s t e i n - E v r o n . T h e earlier lay ers w e r e f o u n d only i n t h e cave. L a y e r G contained a late M o u s t e r i a n industry t h a t r e s e m b l e s t h e u p p e r p a r t of t h e T a b u n s e q u e n c e . L a y e r F w a s in p a r t m i x e d , a n d s o m e of
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the artifacts were a b r a d e d b y water. T h e m i x t u r e of tool types, together with E m i r e h points, is related to t h e earliest p h a s e of t h e U p p e r Paleolithic. Layer E contained a L e v antine Aurignacian assemblage with scrapers, carinated a n d n o s e d scrapers, b u r i n s , a n d e l - W a d points. I n addition, seven b o n e a n d antler points were recovered. L a y e r D c o n tained a L e v a n t i n e Aurignacian assemblage ( D 2 a n d D i ) . Carinated a n d n o s e d scrapers, together with ordinary s c r a p ers, are m o s t frequent, with a small n u m b e r of e l - W a d points. L a y e r C w a s characterized b y n u m e r o u s b u r i n s a n d scrapers, originally called t h e A t l i t i a n culture. I n this i n d u s try, the p r o d u c t i o n of flakes is m o r e d o m i n a n t t h a n blades, while n u m e r o u s bladelets were r e m o v e d from carinated cores. L a y e r B c o n t a i n e d t h e remains of a Natufian (c. 1 0 , 0 0 0 8 , 0 0 0 BCE) settlement a n d cemetery a n d covered b o t h t h e frontal c h a m b e r of t h e cave as well as the entire terrace. T h e remains of m o r e t h a n o n e h u n d r e d skeletons w e r e mostly recovered o n t h e terrace, b u t also in the cave. G a r r o d i d e n tified t h e collective burials as typical of t h e Early N a t u f i a n a n d t h e isolated, often flexed burials as L a t e Natufian. I n a few cases, b o d y decorations were found attached t o t h e r e m a i n s (remains of h e a d g e a r , necklaces, belts). M o s t of t h e decorations were m a d e of d e n t a l i u m shells b u t also of b o n e . I n the b e d r o c k of t h e terrace, four m o r t a r s w e r e recovered; n e x t to t h e m G a r r o d identified t h e remains of a terrace wall constructed of large cobbles. T h e lithic industry included n u m e r o u s microliths, a m o n g which lunates w e r e d o m i n a n t . T h e high frequencies of bifacially r e t o u c h e d I i e l w a n lunates is representative of t h e Early Natufian, while subsequently t h e backed lunates are m o r e c o m m o n . O t h e r tool types in clude scrapers, b u r i n s , b o r e r s , a n d awls, as well as m a n y sickle blades. T h e b o n e industry includes points, a few h a r p o o n s and fishhooks, spatulas, a n d sickle hafts, o n e of which was preserved with two blades still adhering. G r o u n d - s t o n e artifacts include pestles, often of basalt, w h i c h w e r e b r o u g h t from t h e Galilee or t h e G o l a n , a n d fragments of bowls a n d portable m o r t a r s . W i t h regard to artistic expression, t h e site is k n o w n for a sickle blade with a carving of a y o u n g u n gulate, a small m o d e l of a h u m a n h e a d in limestone, a n d some schematic h u m a n figurines. Information c o n c e r n i n g subsistence activities was obtained from animal b o n e s , which indicate t h e h u n t i n g of gazelle a n d fallow a n d r o e dear, the t r a p p i n g of b i r d s , and fishing; reptiles w e r e also collected. Pollen spores indicate the importation of b r a n c h e s with flowers of olive and tamarisk; firewood was identified, indicating t h a t t h e cave was occupied d u r i n g spring a n d s u m m e r . C e m e n t u m i n c r e m e n t s of gazelle t e e t h reflect h u n t i n g d u r i n g b o t h w i n t e r a n d s u m m e r , a n d it therefore seems t h a t e l - W a d was a sedentary to semisedentary c a m p site. L a y e r A c o n t a i n e d remains from t h e Neolithic to his torical periods. Also w o r t h n o t i n g is a Hellenistic clay statue of Aphrodite. Since Medieval times, t h e cave h a s b e e n o c cupied mainly b y s h e p h e r d s .
K e b a r a C a v e . L o c a t e d at t h e w e s t e r n e s c a r p m e n t of M t . C a r m e l , t h e K e b a r a cave is a b o u t 13 k m ( 8 mi.) s o u t h of N a h a l M e ' a r o t , at a b o u t 6 0 - 6 5 m a b o v e sea level ( m a p ref erence 1 4 4 2 X 2 1 8 2 ) . T h e first s o u n d i n g n e a r t h e cave e n t r a n c e was m a d e b y M o s h e Stekelis i n 1 9 2 7 (Schick a n d Stekelis, 1 9 7 7 ) . W h i l e excavating t h e caves in W a d i e l - M u g h a r a in 1 9 3 0 , G a r r o d , u n a w a r e of Stekelis's test pit, d u g a small t r e n c h in K e b a r a , w h e r e , below t h e historical deposits, she e n c o u n t e r e d r e m a i n s of t h e N a t u f i a n culture. I n 1 9 3 1 , together with C . A. B a y n e s , F r a n c i s T u r v i l l e - P e t r e exca v a t e d at K e b a r a , revealing a b o u t 3 0 0 sq m of surface area t o a d e p t h of 3 m . Stekelis carried o u t additional excavations from 1 9 5 1 to 1 9 6 5 , a n d a joint project c o o r d i n a t e d b y B a r Yosef a n d B e r n a r d V a n d e r m e e r s c h w a s c o n d u c t e d from 1 9 8 2 to 1 9 9 0 u n d e r t h e auspices of t h e H e b r e w University a n d the F r e n c h M i s s i o n in Jerusalem. T h e c o m b i n e d stra tigraphy, from w h i c h t h e first t h r e e layers w e r e r e m o v e d in their entirety b y T u r v i l l e - P e t r e , follows: Layer A: F r o m t h e B r o n z e A g e t o t h e m o d e r n p e r i o d , layer A w a s a m i x e d s t o n y layer, quite variable in its thickness. Layer B: A b o u t o n e m e t e r thick, layer B c o n t a i n e d a n Early Natufian a s s e m b l a g e with n u m e r o u s b o n e tools, p e n d a n t s , o r n a m e n t s , a n d d e c o r a t e d sickle hafts. T h e lithic a s s e m b l a g e , collected w i t h o u t sieving, i n c l u d e d a p p r o x i m a t e l y five h u n d r e d lunates a n d one t h o u s a n d sickle blades. T u r ville-Petre ( 1 9 3 2 ) also listed a few m o r t a r s a n d pestles a n d a variety of other stone tools, s u c h as shaft straighteners a n d w h e t s t o n e s . A p i t with several b a d l y d a m a g e d N a t u f i a n skel etons was u n c o v e r e d close to t h e cave's e n t r a n c e . Layer C: A microlithic assemblage in layer C ( 2 0 - 4 0 c m thick) serves as t h e type-site for t h e definition of t h e K e b a r a n . T h e d o m i n a n t tool types were t h e obliquely t r u n c a ted b a c k e d bladelet a n d s o m e c u r v e d b a c k e d bladelets. A t t h e rear of t h e cave, s o m e f r a g m e n t a r y c h a r r e d h u m a n r e m a i n s w e r e f o u n d , b u t r e c e n t r a d i o c a r b o n dates o n t h e b o n e s relate t h e m t o t h e Early N a t u f i a n . Layer Di: A L e v a n t i n e A u r i g n a c i a n a s s e m b l a g e d o m i n a t e d by e n d s c r a p e r s , steep (carinated) s c r a p e r s , a n d s o m e b u r i n s , mostly m a d e of flakes, was f o u n d in layer D i . Layer D2: C u r r e n t l y units I—II, layer D 2 w a s similar in its contents t o layer D i ; it h a d a L e v a n t i n e A u r i g n a c i a n a s s e m blage with mainly flake e n d scrapers, steep scrapers ( b o t h n o s e d a n d c a r i n a t e d ) , a few b u r i n s , a n d E l - W a d p o i n t s . T w o b o n e tools w e r e r e c o v e r e d in this layer, o n e a p o i n t w i t h t h e tibia articulation still intact a n d t h e o t h e r a b r o k e n p o i n t w i t h parallel incisions encircling its width. T h e n e w excavations f o u n d a typically A u r i g n a c i a n split b a s e p o i n t a n d p r o v i d e d several r a d i o c a r b o n dates indicating a time s p a n of 3 6 , 0 0 0 2 8 , 0 0 0 years ago. Layer E: C u r r e n t l y units I I - I V , layer E c o n t a i n e d a few M o u s t e r i a n elements, m o s t of w h i c h differ i n their p a t i n a tion from the typical U p p e r Palaeolithic elements. T h e i n dustry is d o m i n a t e d b y blade p r o d u c t i o n ; t h e m a i n tool types are end s c r a p e r s , s o m e steep (carinated) scrapers w i t h
CARMEL CAVES a few b u r i n s , a n d e l - W a d p o i n t s . A series of r a d i o c a r b o n dates ranges f r o m 43,000-36,000 years a g o . Layer F: Originally t e r m e d L e v a l l o i s o - M o u s t e r i a n , layer F r e m a i n e d largely u n t o u c h e d until t h e 1951-1965 Stekelis excavations. T h e U p p e r Palaeolithic layers ( D - E ) contained several h e a r t h s a n d a series of peculiar installations built of limestone slabs laid over small s t o n e s near t h e n o r t h e r n cave wall. T h e M o u s t e r i a n layers w e r e excavated t o varying d e p t h s a n d c o n t a i n e d large quantities of debitage a n d b o n e s . T h e major discovery w a s t h e skeletal r e m a i n s of a b a b y ( e i g h t - n i n e m o n t h s old) f o u n d close t o t h e n o r t h e r n wall a t a level of 6.83-6.90 m . B e d r o c k was r e a c h e d n e a r t h e n o r t h e r n wall in t h e 1 9 8 2 1990 excavations a n d in Stekelis's original s o u n d i n g . U p p e r Paleolithic levels still in place w e r e in t h e s o u t h e r n p o r t i o n of t h e dig a n d were radiometrically d a t e d t o 43,000-28,000 years a g o . I n 1983, t h e excavation in t h e Stekelis d e e p s o u n d i n g u n covered a h u m a n burial. T h e skull is missing, b u t t h e p o s t cranial skeleton is c o m p l e t e . T h i s r o b u s t individual, T L d a t e d t o a b o u t 60,000 years a g o , is i n c l u d e d with t h e other so-called N e a r E a s t e r n N e a n d e r t h a l s . T h e central area w a s c h o s e n for " h o r i z o n t a l " e x c a v a t i o n (exposing everything, leaving it in place for m a p p i n g a n d p h o t o g r a p h y ) . P l o t t e d artifacts a n d b o n e s indicate t h a t t h e h e a r t h s w e r e located t o w a r d t h e e n t r a n c e a n d tire d u m p i n g zones t o w a r d t h e rear of t h e cave. D i a g e n e t i c processes c a u s e d b y intensive water percolation d e s t r o y e d all b o n e s i n t h e s o u t h e r n sector of t h e cave. T h e l o w e r m o s t u n i t is a n a c c u m u l a t i o n of sterile, s a n d y silty deposits (units X V - X I V ) a b o v e t h e u n e v e n b e d r o c k . S u b s i d e n c e into a sinkhole a n d s u b s e q u e n t erosion w e r e fol l o w e d b y s e d i m e n t a t i o n of a depositional a d m i x t u r e created b y intervening activities of b i o g e n i c a n d n a t u r a l agencies. U n i t XIII was t h e first t o a c c u m u l a t e t h e a d m i x t u r e . It c o n tains n u m e r o u s well-delineated h e a r t h s a n d rare artifacts, b u t n o b o n e s . Following a n u n c o n f o r m i t y , u n i t s X I I - V I I a c c u m u l a t e d as a c o n t i n u u m , c o n t a i n i n g ashy deposits, h e a r t h s , b o n e a c c u m u l a t i o n s , isolated h u m a n b o n e s , a h u m a n burial, a n d rich M o u s t e r i a n lithic assemblages. A n a d ditional major event of s u b s i d e n c e in tire sinkhole led t o s l u m p i n g a n d microfaulting of t h e M o u s t e r i a n layers at t h e r e a r of t h e cave, followed b y e r o s i o n a n d b u r r o w i n g . T h u s , t h e cave floor d u r i n g t h e early U p p e r Palaeolithic f o r m e d a basin slanting steeply t o w a r d t h e cave's r e a r wall. C o n t i n u o u s erosion a n d b u r r o w i n g l e d t o t h e m i x e d a c c u m u l a t i o n of U p p e r Paleolithic a n d M o u s t e r i a n artifacts in t h e lower p a r t of this basin. S o m e U p p e r Palaeolithic lithics infiltrated into units V a n d V I , w h i c h primarily c o n t a i n M o u s t e r i a n artifacts, a n d s o m e M o u s t e r i a n e l e m e n t s f o u n d their w a y into u n i t III, primarily U p p e r Palaeolithic. U n i t I V is a t h i n lense; together with u n i t I I , it m a y b e similar t o w h a t T u r ville-Petre (1932) called layer E . L i t h i c studies of t h e M o u s t e r i a n p e r i o d d e m o n s t r a t e t h a t
427
b l a n k p r o d u c t i o n was frequentiy d o n e b y t h e convergent re c u r r e n t Levallois m e t h o d . S h o r t a n d b r o a d - b a s e d Levallois p o i n t s a n d triangular flakes w e r e often t h e e n d p r o d u c t s . D e s p i t e t h e site's proximity t o sources of r a w materials, t h e s e q u e n c e of flake removals was r e p e a t e d until t h e cores were e x h a u s t e d . T h e u p p e r units ( V I I - V I I I ) exhibit a prolifera t i o n of Levallois flakes o b t a i n e d b y unidirectional o r radial r e m o v a l s . R e t o u c h e d pieces in K e b a r a a r e quite rare a n d i n c l u d e a few side scrapers a n d U p p e r Palaeolithic tool types. Levallois points a n d t r i a n g u l a r flakes are rarely r e t o u c h e d b u t bear traces of hafting a n d i m p a c t fractures c a u s e d b y their u s e as projectiles. O t h e r stone tools d e m o n s t r a t e signs of use for w o o d w o r k i n g a n d b u t c h e r y . B o n e a c c u m u l a t i o n s in K e b a r a cave reflect t h e h u n t i n g of gazelle a n d fallow a n d r o e deer a n d t h e gathering of reptiles. C a r b o n i z e d p l a n t remains w e r e mainly of vetch—indicating g a t h e r i n g activities in late spring. F i r e w o o d from the T a b o r oak a n d c o m m o n oak w e r e collected from t h e cave's i m mediate environment. [See also British School of A r c h a e o l o g y in Jerusalem; P a leobotany; Paleozoology; T a b u n ; and the biographies of Garrod, Stekelis, and Turville-Petre.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Arensburg, Baruch. " T h e Hyoid B o n e from the Kebara 2 H o m i n i d . " In Investigations in South I^evantine Prehistory, edited by Ofer BarYosef a n d Bernard Vandermeersch, p p . 3 3 7 - 3 4 2 . British Archaeo logical Reports, International Series, n o . 497. Oxford, 1989. A r e n s b u r g , Baruch, L . A. Schepartz, A. M . Tillier, Bernard Vander meersch, a n d Yoel Rak. " A Reappraisal of the Anatomical Basis for Speech in Middle Palaeolithic H o m i n d s . " American Journal of Phys ical Anthropology S3 (1990): 1 3 7 - 1 4 6 . Bar-Yosef, Ofer, et al. " T h e Excavations in Kebara Cave, M t . C a r m e l . " Currant Anthropology 33,5 ( r 9 9 2 ) : 4 9 7 - 5 5 0 . Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "Middle Paleolithic H u m a n Adaptations in the M e d iterranean Levant." In The Evolution and Dispersal of Modern Hu mans in Asia, edited by T a k e r u Akazawa et al., p p . 1 8 9 - 2 1 6 . T o k y o , 1992. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. " T h e Role of Western Asia in M o d e m H u m a n O r igins." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 3 3 7 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 193-200. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Bernard Vandermeersch. Le Squellete Mousterien de Kebara 2. Paris, 1 9 9 1 . Bar-Yosef, Ofer, a n d Bernard Vandermeersch, eds. Le Squelette Mous terien de Kebara 2. Paris, 1 9 9 2 . F a r r a n d , William R. " C h r o n o l o g y and Palaeoenvironment of Levantine Prehistoric Sites as Seen from Sediment Studies." Journal of Ar chaeological Science 6 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 3 6 9 - 3 9 2 . F a r r a n d , William R. "Confrontation of Geological Stratigraphy a n d Radiometric Dates from U p p e r Pleistocene Sites in the L e v a n t . " In Late Quaternary Chronology and Paleoclimates of the Eastern Mediter ranean, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef a n d R. K r a , p p . 2 1 - 3 1 . T u c s o n a n d Cambridge, 1994. G a r r o d , D o r o t h y A. E., a n d D o r o t h e a M . A. Bate. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: Excavations at the Wady al-Mugluira. Oxford, 1937. G a r r o d , D o r o t h y A. E. "Excavations at the M u g h a r e t Kebara, M o u n t Carmel, 1 9 3 1 : T h e Aurignacian Industries." Proceedings of the Pre historic Society 20 ( 1 9 5 4 ) : 1 5 5 - 1 9 2 .
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Meignen, L., a n d Ofer Bar-Yosef. "Variabilite technologique au Proche Orient: L'exemple d e K e b a r a . " In L'homme de Neandertal, edited by Marcel Otte, p p . 8 1 - 9 5 . Etudes et Recherches Archeologiques de l'Universite de Liege, n o . 34. Liege, 1988. Meignen, L . , et al. " L e s structures de combustion mousteriennes d e la grotte de Kebara ( M o n t Carmel, Israel)." In Nature et fonction des foyers prehistoriques: Actes du colloque international de Nemours, 1213-14 mai 1987, edited by M o n i q u e Olive and Yvette T a b o r i n , p p . 1 4 1 - 1 4 6 . Memoires d u M u s e e de Prehistoire d'Ue-de-France, n o . 2. N e m o u r s , 1989. Mercier, N „ H . Valladas, G . Valladas, J.-L. Reyss, Arthur Jelinek, L . Meignen, a n d J.-L. Joron. " T L Dates of Burnt Flints from Jelinek's Excavations at T a b u n a n d T h e i r Implications." Journal of Archaeo logical Science 22 ( 1 9 9 5 ) : 4 9 5 - 5 1 0 . Rak, Yoel, and Baruch Arensburg. " K e b a r a 2 Neanderthal Pelvis: First Look at a Complete Inlet." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 73 (1987): 2 2 7 - 2 3 1 . R o n e n , Avraham. Sefunim Prehistoric Sites, Mount Carmel, Israel. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 230. Oxford, 1984. Schick, T a m a r , a n d M o s h e Stekelis. "Mousterian Assemblages in K e bara Cave, M o u n t C a r m e l . " In Moshe Stekelis Memorial Volume, ed ited by Baruch Arensburg a n d Ofer Bar-Yosef, p p . 9 7 - 1 5 0 . EretzIsrael, vol. 13. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 7 . Smith, Patricia a n d Baruch Arensburg. " A Mousterian Skeleton from Kebara C a v e . " I n Moshe Stekelis Memorial Volume, edited by Baruch Arensburg a n d Ofer Bar-Yosef, p p . 1 6 4 - 1 7 6 . Eretz Israel, vol. 1 3 . Jerusalem, 1 9 7 7 . Smith, Patricia, a n d A. M . Tillier. "Additional Infant Remains from the Mousterian Strate, Kebara Cave (Israel)." I n Investigations in South Levantine Prehistory, edited b y Ofer Bar-Yosef a n d Bernard Vandermeersch, p p . 3 2 3 - 3 3 5 . British Archaeological Reports, Inter national Series, vol. 497. Oxford, 1989.
OFER BAR-YOSEF
CARTER, HOWARD
(1873-1939), English Egyptol
ogist, discover of T u t a n k h a m u n ' s t o m b . T r a i n e d in d r a w i n g a n d p a i n t i n g b y his father, C a r t e r w a s i n t r o d u c e d to E g y p tology b y a c o i n c i d e n c e . I n 1891, while visiting t h e r e n o w n e d collections of p a i n t i n g s a n d E g y p t i a n a n t i q u i t i e s of L o r d a n d L a d y A m h e r s t a t D i d l i n g t o n H a l l , t h e i r h o m e in B r a n d o n , N o r f o l k , n o t far f r o m t h e C a r t e r r e s i d e n c e in
Swaffham,
b o t h father a n d s o n w e r e i n t r o d u c e d t o t h e E g y p t o l o g i s t Percy Edward Newberry. Subsequently Lady Amherst rec o m m e n d e d y o u n g H o w a r d to the E g y p t Exploration F u n d i n L o n d o n , w h i c h s p o n s o r e d a r c h a e o l o g i c a l w o r k in E g y p t . T h u s , at t h e y o u n g age of s e v e n t e e n , C a r t e r f o u n d h i m s e l f i n E g y p t e m p l o y e d as a d r a f t s m a n for N e w b e r r y ' s w o r k in d i e d e c o r a t e d t o m b s a n d Beni H a s a n . F o l l o w i n g N e w b e r r y ' s m e t h o d of facsimile r e c o r d i n g , C a r t e r h u n g s h e e t s of t r a c i n g p a p e r o n t h e walls directiy over t h e d e c o r a t e d surfaces in o r d e r to t r a c e i n p e n c i l w h a t w a s visible. I n time C a r t e r d e v i s e d his o w n t e c h n i q u e , w h i c h in his o w n w o r d s " c r e a t e d scientifically e x a c t i n g facsimile(s) f r o m t h e originals w i t h a free a n d u n d e r s t a n d i n g h a n d " ( q u o t e d in J a m e s , 1992, p . 22). C a r t e r ' s later w a t e r c o l o r s , w h i c h w e r e m a d e for t h e tourist trade, c o m m a n d respectable prices w h e n occasion ally offered o n t h e a r t m a r k e t . C a r t e r l e a r n e d as m u c h a b o u t all a s p e c t s of E g y p t o l o g y
T c h e r n o v , Eitan. " T h e Biostratigraphy of the L e v a n t . " I n Prehistoire du Levant: Chranologie et organisation de I'espace depuis les origines jusqu'au Vie millenaire, edited by Jacques Cauvin and P a u l Sanlaville, pp. 6 7 - 9 7 . Paris, 1 9 8 1 .
h e w a s a p p o i n t e d chief i n s p e c t o r of a n t i q u i t i e s (or a r c h a e
T c h e r n o v , Eitan. "Biochronology of the Middle Paleolithic a n d D i s persal Events of H o m i n i d s in the Levant." In L'homme de Neandertal, edited by Marcel Otte, p p . 1 5 3 - 1 6 8 . Etudes et Recherches A r c h e o logiques de l'Universite de Liege, n o . 34. Liege, 1988.
near-fatal a u t o m o b i l e a c c i d e n t , p e r h a p s b y G a s t o n M a s -
T c h e r n o v , Eitan. "Biological Evidence for H u m a n Sedentism in S o u t h west Asia during t h e Natufian." I n The Natufian Culture in the Le
as p o s s i b l e . H i s p e r s e v e r a n c e w a s r e w a r d e d i n 1900 w h e n
ologist) for U p p e r E g y p t . I n time h e w a s i n t r o d u c e d t o L o r d C a r n a r v o n , w h o h a d c o m e t o E g y p t t o c o n v a l e s c e after a
p e r o , t h e t h e n h e a d of t h e E g y p t i a n A n t i q u i t i e s O r g a n i z a tion.
From
that
moment
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1908
on
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a
p a r t n e r s h i p , e x c a v a t i n g sites i n T h e b e s u n t i l t h a t fateful d a y ,
CARTHAGE 26 N o v e m b e r 1922, w h e n C a r t e r p e e r e d t h r o u g h a small hole in w h a t p r o v e d t o b e K i n g T u t a n k h a m u n ' s t r e a s u r e l a d e n t o m b , a n d replied t o C a r n a r v o n ' s q u e r y a b o u t w h e t h e r h e could see a n y t h i n g with, " Y e s , wonderful tilings." S u b sequently political m a n e u v e r i n g a n d d i s p u t e s b e t w e e n C a r ter a n d various officials c a u s e d h i m p e r s o n a l p a i n t h a t m i t igated t h e success h e n o w enjoyed. I n fact, his life as a n Egyptologist h a s b e e n c h a r a c t e r i z e d as a " s a d s u c c e s s . " BIBLIOGRAPHY James, T . G. H . Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun. London, 1 9 9 2 . Sober account with copious notes. Reeves, Nicholas. The Complete Tutankhamun: The King, The Tomb, The Royal Treasure. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 0 . Brief discussion of Carter's ca reer. Profusely illustrated narrative a b o u t the discovery of the t o m b . Reeves, Nicholas, and J o h n H . T a y l o r . Howard Carter before Tutank hamun. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 2 . T h o r o u g h account of Carter's early career. Contains m a n y illustrations. ROBERT STEVEN BIANCHI
C A R T H A G E , city o n t h e N o r t h African coast, n o w a s u b u r b of T u n i s (36°5i' N , io°2o' E ) , f o u n d e d a r o u n d t h e e n d of t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE b y settlers from T y r e , w h o called it Q a r t H a d a s h t ( " n e w t o w n " ) . C e n t u r i e s later, T y r e in P h o e n i c i a w a s still h o n o r e d as t h e m o t h e r city, its gods receiving from C a r t h a g e a n a n n u a l offering of t h e first fruits (Polybius, 31.12). T h e P h o e n i c i a n ancestry of Cartilage is reflected i n t h e L a t i n t e r m Punicus, w h i c h is a n adjectival derivation from t h e G r e e k for " P h o e n i c i a n . " T h e designa tion Punic describes a n y t h i n g p e r t a i n i n g t o C a r t h a g e . T h e traditional date for t h e f o u n d a t i o n , 814/13 BCE, thirtyeight years before t h e first O l y m p i c g a m e s , goes b a c k at least to T i m a e u s , a Sicilian G r e e k w h o w r o t e in t h e tiiird c e n t u r y BCE. I n t h e n e x t c e n t u r y M e n a n d e r of E p h e s u s , w h o h a d access t o P h o e n i c i a n s o u r c e s , gives a similar date. Cicero a n d other L a t i n writers follow d i e s a m e tradition, w h i c h r e c e n t excavations t e n d t o confirm. A variant t h a t sets t h e f o u n d a t i o n before t h e T r o j a n W a r m u s t b e rejected. S o u r c e s a n d E a r l y H i s t o r y . N o P u n i c literature sur vives, t h e city's libraries h a v i n g b e e n d i s p e r s e d w h e n C a r t h a g e w a s taken b y t h e R o m a n s (Pliny, Natural History 18.22). T h e r e is material i n t h e works of m o r e t h a n forty G r e e k o r L a t i n writers, b u t t h e s e sources m u s t b e t r e a t e d with skepticism. Polybius, o n e of o u r fullest sources, w h o h a d traveled i n Africa a n d w a s p r e s e n t at t h e sack of C a r t h a g e in 146, is overtiy p r o - R o m a n a n d m e n t i o n s G r e e k h i s torians w h o w r o t e f r o m a C a r t h a g i n i a n s t a n d p o i n t only to dismiss t h e m as worthless (Polybius, 3.20). T h e C a r t h a g i n ians, h e says, a r e a s h a m e d of n o t h i n g if it makes m o n e y (6.56), a n d P l u t a r c h calls t h e m h a r s h a n d gloomy, caring n o t h i n g for p l e a s u r e o r t h e arts (Moralia 799D). S u c h n e g ative stereotypes h a v e b e e n a c c e p t e d uncritically all t o o of ten. Classical writers a r e also often negative a n d ill-informed
429
a b o u t t h e Jews or Syrians as well. F o r t h e Greeks a n d R o m a n s , p e o p l e s of Semitic c u l t u r e were " t h e o t h e r . " P u n i c inscriptions, however, survive in s o m e quantity. C a r t h a g e itself has yielded m o r e t h a n six t h o u s a n d , a n d o n e t h o u s a n d m o r e c o m e from o t h e r sites in Africa or elsewhere in t h e w e s t e r n M e d i t e r r a n e a n . M o s t are merely s t a n d a r d formulae, s u c h as votive o r funerary inscriptions a n d d o c u m e n t s r e g a r d i n g sacrifice a n d religious cult, b u t t h e y give u s m o r e t h a n five h u n d r e d p e r s o n a l n a m e s , plus n a m e s of magistracies, t r a d e s , a n d professions. Otherwise little his torical information can b e g l e a n e d from t h e m , a n d w h e n it c o m e s t o t h e longer texts, t h e r e is often considerable dispute a m o n g experts as t o t h e m e a n i n g , b e c a u s e t h e P u n i c lan g u a g e is n o t perfectly u n d e r s t o o d . T e x t s in P u n i c or in t h e later script k n o w n as " n e o - P u n i c " c o n t i n u e into t h e R o m a n period. A t t e m p t s to r e c o n s t r u c t t h e f o r m of g o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e internal politics of C a r t h a g e f r o m this literary a n d epigraphic material a r e very h a z a r d o u s , especially for t h e early c e n t u ries. W h e t h e r t h e r e w e r e ldngs in C a r t h a g e ' s early years is hotly d i s p u t e d . Oligarchic factions subsequently disputed t h e p o w e r , a n d the literary t r a d i t i o n suggests t h a t the leading families w e r e successively t h e M a g o n i d s , t h e H a n n o n i d s , a n d t h e B a r c i d s , f o u n d e d b y H a m i l c a r Barca, father of t h e great H a n n i b a l , b u t again t h e family n a m e s a n d die dynastic c o n c e p t m a y o w e s o m e t h i n g t o t h e G r e e k historiographic tradition. C a r t h a g e h a d extensive t r a d i n g interests in t h e w e s t e r n M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d b e y o n d a n d fought t o d e f e n d t h e m . W e t h u s find C a r t h a g e in t h e early sixth c e n t u r y unsuccessfully contesting t h e f o u n d a t i o n of a P h o c a e a n colony at w h a t is n o w Marseilles ( T h u c y d i d e s , 1.13), b u t s u c c e e d i n g a r o u n d 535 in alliance with t h e E t r u s c a n s i n driving d i e P h o c a e a n s from their C o r s i c a n base at Alalia ( H e r o d o t u s , 1.166). B y the fourth c e n t u r y C a r t h a g e w a s a major p o w e r , striking gold a n d silver coinage, i m p o r t i n g pottery a n d luxury goods from G r e e c e , a n d e x p o r t i n g h e r o w n m a n u f a c t u r e d goods a n d agricultural surpluses ( h e r agricultural expertise was fa m o u s ) . P u n i c a m p h o r a e of t h e fourth a n d still m o r e the third c e n t u r y a r e particularly c o m m o n in S p a i n a n d southern It aly. P u n i c vessels sailed d o w n t h e w e s t coast of Africa, t h o u g h h o w far they r e a c h e d is m u c h d i s p u t e d , as well as n o r t h w a r d , p e r h a p s as far as Britain. T r e a t i e s b e t w e e n C a r t h a g e a n d R o m e i n 509/08 (Polybius, 3.22) a n d o n subse q u e n t occasions recognized t h e two cities' respective spheres of interest, b u t R o m e ' s e x p a n s i o n eventually b r o u g h t t h e m into conflict over Sicily a n d t h e t h r e e P u n i c W a r s (264-241, 21.8-202,149-146), so n a m e d from t h e R o m a n s t a n d p o i n t , e n d e d w i t h t h e total destruction of C a r t h a g e , w h o s e site thereafter lay a b a n d o n e d for over a century. Archaeological Evidence a n d Topography. T h e urban d e v e l o p m e n t of Cartilage d o w n t o 146 c a n b e traced f r o m well over a century of archaeological excavation, c u l m i n a t -
430
CARTHAGE
ing since 1972 in t h e UNESCO-sponsored Save C a r t h a g e c a m paign, described below. Excavations have n o w s h o w n t h a t t h e earliest city lay b e t w e e n t h e Byrsa hill a n d t h e sea, w h e r e t h e o c c u p a t i o n s e q u e n c e goes b a c k to at least the first q u a r ter of t h e eighth century, dated by i m p o r t e d E u b o e a n p o t tery. T h e Byrsa a n d adjacent hills were first u s e d as c e m e teries, b u t in fourth century the Byrsa b e c a m e a n industrial z o n e with extensive metal-working operations, a n d from t h e e n d of the third c e n t u r y it was a residential area. E x c a v a t i o n corroborates A p p i a n ' s a c c o u n t (Punka 96,128) of t h e steep streets d e s c e n d i n g from t h e Byrsa t o w a r d t h e p o r t s , w h i c h comprised a circular inner h a r b o r for warships with a n is l a n d in t h e center a n d ship sheds all a r o u n d , a n d an outer, rectangular, c o m m e r c i a l harbor. T h e latest r e p o r t s ascribe t h e construction of t h e h a r b o r s to the s e c o n d c e n t u r y , in flagrant violation of the p e a c e treaty at t h e e n d of t h e S e c o n d P u n i c W a r . T h e original p o r t of C a r t h a g e m u s t p r e s u m a b l y have been within w h a t is n o w the L a k e of T u n i s , t h e n m u c h m o r e extensive. R e l i g i o n . Alongside t h e commercial h a r b o r lay t h e reli gious precinct k n o w n t o d a y as the tophet, b y analogy with t h e Old T e s t a m e n t site in t h e valley of H i n n o m (Jer. 7 3 1 32). H e r e were f o u n d u r n s dating from the seventh c e n t u r y o n w a r d , containing t h e c r e m a t e d r e m a i n s of b a b i e s , small children, a n d animals, a n d steles referring to sacrifice (molk) a n d dedicated to t h e g o d d e s s T a n n i t ("face of B a a l " ) a n d h e r consort, Baal H a m m o n . M o s t scholars see this material as corroborating w h a t t h e literary sources attest—that t h e Carthaginians p r a c t i c e d infant sacrifice, which a c c o r d i n g t o Tertullian (Apology 9.2) c o n t i n u e d clandestinely even into the R o m a n p e r i o d . Child sacrifice was certainly p r a c t i c e d by t h e P h o e n i c i a n s , as t h e H e b r e w Bible makes clear (e.g., Jer. 19:5, references assembled b y B r o w n , 1991, p p . 27-29), a n d a t t e m p t s t o explain away t h e evidence a n d t o i n t e r p r e t the tophet as a c e m e t e r y for children w h o died naturally d o n o t carry conviction. T h i s aspect of P u n i c culture s h o c k e d Greeks a n d R o m a n writers, w h o m a y b e s u s p e c t e d of piling o n t h e h o r r o r , a l t h o u g h t h e s a m e writers accepted c o m p l a cently the G r e c o - R o m a n practice of exposing u n w a n t e d i n fants to die o n d u n g h e a p s . Baal H a m m o n is frequently celebrated in t h e o p h o r i c p e r sonal n a m e s like H a n n i b a l a n d H a s d r u b a l ; h e w a s identified in t h e R o m a n p e r i o d with S a t u r n , as was T a n n i t w i t h J u n o , a n d his cult is widely attested. O t h e r divinities of P u n i c C a r thage include A s h t a r t (Astarte), h e r e s u b o r d i n a t e to T a n i t , a n d E s h m u n , identified with t h e G r e e k Asclepius, g o d of healing, whose t e m p l e c r o w n e d t h e Byrsa a n d w a s t h e site of t h e final P u n i c s t a n d in 146; b o t h a p p e a r i n t h e o p h o r i c n a m e s , as in a dedication from t h e tophet b y B o d a s h t a r t , son of A b d e s b m o u n . Inscriptions m e n t i o n M e l q a r t , t h e p a t r o n deity of T y r e , S h a d r a p a , Sid, Sakon, a n d R a s a p ( R e s h e p h ) a n d attest t h e p r e p o n d e r a n t role of sacrifice in w o r s h i p . T h e terminology often recalls drat of t h e O l d T e s t a m e n t , b u t p a r allels m u s t n o t b e p u s h e d t o o far. [See Cult.]
A r t . P u n i c a r t h a s generally b e e n d i s m i s s e d as u n i m a g inative, unoriginal, a n d just plain b a d . N o t h i n g could b e m o r e totally d a m n i n g t h a n M . P . C h a r l e s w o r t h ' s a c c o u n t in t h e original Cambridge Ancient History (vol. 8, 1930, p p . 484-494) c o n c l u d i n g , " I t is h a r d to n a m e a n y t h i n g w h i c h m a n k i n d can b e said t o o w e to C a r t h a g e . " A reappraisal, however, is long o v e r d u e . T w o magnificent statues of a s o called priest a n d priestess o n s a r c o p h a g u s lids in t h e C a r t h a g e M u s e u m reveal a synthesis of E g y p t i a n , Hellenistic, a n d local elements t h a t c a n n o t b e dismissed as merely i m i tative. T y p i c a l l y a n d w i t h o u t evidence, earlier scholars p r o n o u n c e d t h e m as t h e w o r k of G r e e k i m m i g r a n t s ! S o m e ste lae are very fine, t h o u g h m o s t are r o u g h w o r k , t h e local s a n d s t o n e did n o t l e n d itself t o s c u l p t u r e . A p o t r o p a i c ( p r o tective) m a s k s a n d p e n d a n t s of h u m a n h e a d s s h o w great vigour. B o n e a n d ivory, glass, a n d m e t a l w a r e r e a c h e d a h i g h s t a n d a r d , a n d P u n i c furniture was r e n o w n e d . T h e s w a n necked, so-called razors f o u n d in t o m b s are m o s t elegantly engraved, a n d P u n i c jewelry is magnificent. C a r t h a g e a d a p t e d G r e e k a n d E g y p t i a n m o d e l s t o serve h e r o w n n e e d s a n d values, as d i d R o m e later. F o u n d a t i o n o f t h e R o m a n C o l o n y . F o r a c e n t u r y after t h e destruction of C a r t h a g e in 146, BCE, n e i g h b o r i n g U t i c a served as capital of t h e n e w R o m a n p r o v i n c e of Africa. C a r thage w a s a b a n d o n e d , a l t h o u g h the story t h a t t h e site w a s s o w n with salt w a s a p p a r e n t l y i n v e n t e d for t h e Cambridge Ancient History (vol. 8, 1930, p . 484). L i t e r a r y sources a s cribe to G a i u s G r a c c h u s t h e project of f o u n d i n g a c o l o n y in 122, b u t there is n o evidence of u r b a n settlement, t h o u g h G r a c c h u s is p r o b a b l y responsible for t h e R o m a n division of t h e C a r t h a g e p e n i n s u l a into u n i t s of t w o h u n d r e d iugera, which survives in t h e m o d e r n field b o u n d a r i e s . C a e s a r r e vived t h e idea of a colony, b u t it w a s p r o b a b l y A u g u s t u s w h o realized it, laying o u t a street grid parallel to t h e coast a n d leveling t h e s u m m i t of t h e Byrsa t o create a r e c t a n g u l a r esplanade, b u i l d i n g massive retaining walls a r o u n d it, a n d covering the late P u n i c h o u s e s o n its slopes b e n e a t h m a n y meters of fill. A peculiarity of t h e grid w a s t h a t t h e blocks were four times as l o n g from n o r t h t o s o u t h as from east to west. I n the fiat g r o u n d b e t w e e n t h e Byrsa a n d t h e coast, t h e orientation was t h a t of t h e late P u n i c city, a n d elements of this, s u c h as t h e cisterns, w e r e r e u s e d in R o m a n s t r u c tures. Public buildings. O f t h e city u n d e r A u g u s t u s a n d in t h e first c e n m r y CE archaeology tells us little. N o n e of t h e great public buildings in its p r e s e n t f o r m goes b a c k t h a t far, t h o u g h a n earlier p h a s e is n o t e x c l u d e d . T h e a m p h i t h e a t e r has b e e n ascribed to t h e late first or early s e c o n d c e n t u r y , t h e circus was given m o n u m e n t a l f o r m in t h e A n t o n i n e p e riod, a n d t h e t o p of t h e Byrsa w a s also r e b u i l t u n d e r A n t o n i n u s P i u s . B o t h t h e A n t o n i n e basilica o n t h e Byrsa a n d t h e circus are the largest of their k i n d o u t s i d e R o m e . T h e t h e a t e r goes b a c k to t h e early s e c o n d c e n t u r y a n d m a y b e earlier,
CARTHAGE a n d t h e n e i g h b o r i n g O d e o n , t h e largest i n t h e w h o l e R o m a n world, is d e s c r i b e d as n e w in t h e early t h i r d c e n t u r y ( T e r tullian, On the Resurrection of the Dead, 42.8). I n P u n i c times, t h e w h o l e O d e o n hill h a d b e e n a c e m e t e r y . T h e vast A n t o n ine B a t h s o n t h e seashore take their n a m e from a n inscrip tion t h a t p r o b a b l y r e c o r d s A n t o n i n u s ' s c o m p l e t i o n or refur bishing of b a t h s started b y H a d r i a n . T o s u p p l y these b a t h s H a d r i a n h a d c o m m i s s i o n e d t h e a q u e d u c t t h a t b r o u g h t to C a r t h a g e t h e waters f r o m Jebel Z a g h o u a n . T h i s a q u e d u c t is o n e of t h e greatest works of R o m a n e n gineering. I t is over 90 k m (56 m i . ) i n l e n g t h f r o m its s o u r c e at Z a g h o u a n a n d falls almost 265 m (870 ft.) to t h e cisterns o n t h e hill of Bordj D j e d i d i n C a r t h a g e , w h i c h supply t h e A n t o n i n e B a t h s . I t loses nearly half this height, however, i n t h e first 6 Ion (3.7 m i . ) as it d e s c e n d s rapidly to t h e plain of d i e O u e d M i l i a n e at M o g h r a n e , w h e r e it is joined by a n o t h e r b r a n c h , possibly of S e v e r a n d a t e , c o m i n g from Ain D j o u k a r m o r e t h a n 33 Ion (20.5 mi.) away. T h e r e a f t e r from M o g h r a n e t o Bordj D j e d i d t h e a q u e d u c t c h a n n e l falls only 127.93 m (419.7 ft.) in 84.418 k m (52.34 m i . ) , a g r a d i e n t of .15 p e r c e n t , a n d its capacity h a s b e e n calculated at 370 1 (98 gal.) p e r s e c o n d . W h e r e it enters t h e city, t h e a q u e d u c t b i furcates, o n e b r a n c h feeding eighteen cisterns at Bordj D j e d i d , t h e o t h e r t w e n t y - f o u r a t L a M a l g a , e a c h s o m e 102 (335 ft-) l ° g d 7 4 0 m (24.3 ft.) wide. m
n
a n
Christianity and culture. B y t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, only Alexandria rivaled C a r t h a g e as t h e e m p i r e ' s largest a n d wealthiest city after R o m e . I t w a s b e g i n n i n g to b e a center of Christianity a n d p r o d u c e d s o m e notable m a r t y r s . W h e n t h e serious p e r s e c u t i o n s of t h e third c e n t u r y b e g a n , t h e whole of Africa was divided o n h o w to r e s p o n d . O n e result w a s t h e D o n a t i s t m o v e m e n t , rigorist a n d intransigent on doctrinal m a t t e r s , a n d at d i e s a m e time a m o v e m e n t of social p r o t e s t , p o o r against rich a n d c o u n t r y against t o w n ( F r e n d , 1952). C a r t h a g e lay a t t h e h e a r t of t h e controversy, a n d w a s split b e t w e e n t h e t w o parties. W h e n t h e e m p e r o r C o n s t a n tine himself a d o p t e d Christianity in 312, b o t h D o n a t i s t s a n d Catholics b e g a n to build, a n d Cartilage a c q u i r e d its first b a silicas a n d o t h e r Christian b u i l d i n g s , s u c h as t h e late fourth c e n t u r y m a r t y r i u m o n t h e O d e o n hill. A t t h e s a m e time, Cartilage w a s a n intellectual center, sec o n d only to R o m e i n t h e L a t i n - s p e a k i n g W e s t , T h e works of T e r t u l l i a n a n d A p u l e i u s i n t h e late s e c o n d c e n t u r y give s o m e of t h e flavor. I n t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y , A u g u s t i n e n a t u rally gravitates t h e r e from a small t o w n i n the interior a n d finds his intellectual milieu. H e also finds it a city of l u x u r y a n d pleasure: " t h e r e seethed a b o u t m e a c a u l d r o n of u n h o l y l u s t s " (Confessions 3.1). H i s s u b s e q u e n t career led h i m t o Italy, w h e r e h e c o n v e r t e d t o Christianity, t h e n r e t u r n i n g t o Africa to find himself b i s h o p of H i p p o ( A n n a b a ) f r o m 395 until his d e a t h i n 430. A u g u s t i n e s p e n t half t h e year in C a r t h a g e battling for t h e faith, t h e o u t s t a n d i n g personality, a n d intellect of t h e Catholic c h u r c h i n Africa. .
431
V a n d a l a n d B y z a n t i n e C a r t h a g e . B y t h e e n d of t h e fourth c e n t u r y , t h e R o m a n E m p i r e i n t h e W e s t w a s falling apart. I n 410 t h e G o t h s sacked R o m e . Africa, p r o t e c t e d by the M e d i t e r r a n e a n , received refugees, b u t t h e remission was short-lived. T h e V a n d a l s c r o s s e d t h e Straits of Gibraltar in 429, s w e p t along t h e coast, besieged H i p p o as A u g u s t i n e lay d y i n g within t h e walls, a n d finally t o o k C a r t h a g e in 439, d e spite t h e so-called T h e o d o s i a n Wall, w h i c h h a d b e e n built a r o u n d t h e city a b o u t 425 in anticipation of t h e attack. T h e V a n d a l king o c c u p i e d t h e p r o c o n s u l ' s palace o n t h e Byrsa hill, a n d V a n d a l notables took over t h e g r a n d h o u s e s on t h e s e a w a r d slope of t h e O d e o n hill. S o m e p u b l i c buildings were allegedly d e s t r o y e d (Victor Vitensis in J.-P. M i g n e , Patrologia Latina, Paris, 1862, vol. 58, col. 184), a n d archaeology suggests t h a t , a l t h o u g h t h e r e was n o s u d d e n d r a m a t i c c h a n g e in t h e city's c o n d i t i o n , within a generation its t r a d e a n d prosperity h a d fallen off a n d soon t h e outlying p a r t s of t h e city w e r e being a b a n d o n e d . T h e T h e o d o s i a n Wall was also allowed t o fall into disre pair, a n d in 533 t h e B y z a n t i n e general Belisarius c a p t u r e d t h e city with n o great difficulty, repairing t h e wall thereafter. E c o n o m i c r e c o v e r y a n d n e w b u i l d i n g e n s u e d u n d e r Byz antine rule, b u t little less t h a n a c e n t u r y later t h e first A r a b invasions culminated in t h e b a t t l e of Sbeitla (647), in w h i c h the g o v e r n o r G r e g o r y fell, T h e A r a b s d e p a r t e d for a time, b u t their f o u n d a t i o n of K a i r o u a n ( Q a y r a w a n ) in 670 s y m bolized their intention to stay, a n d a r o u n d this time t h e r e o c c u p a t i o n of areas of C a r t h a g e t h a t h a d earlier b e e n a b a n d o n e d m a y b e t o k e n t h e arrival of refugees seeking t h e security of t h e city. If so, it was in vain, b e c a u s e C a r t h a g e fell to t h e A r a b s in 695, a n d after a rebellion it was r e t a k e n a n d d e s t r o y e d in 698. T h e site m a y n o t h a v e b e e n c o m pletely a b a n d o n e d , b u t o r g a n i z e d u r b a n life ceased, a n d T u nis r e p l a c e d C a r t h a g e , s u b s e q u e n d y b e c o m i n g the capital of Ifriqiya, t h e former R o m a n Africa, m o d e r n T u n i s i a . Destruction of C a r t h a g e in Middle Ages a n d History i n M o d e r n T i m e s . C a r t h a g e b e c a m e a stone quarry. B e cause t h e r e is n o g o o d b u i l d i n g s t o n e o n t h e peninsula, m u c h of t h e R o m a n stone w a s either limestone from t h e Jebel Z a g h o u a n region or s a n d s t o n e b r o u g h t b y sea from t h e quarries at El H a o u a r i a o n t h e tip of C a p B o n . It w a s easier to " r e c y c l e " R o m a n stone t h a n to b r i n g in m o r e , C a r t h a g e s u p p l i e d d i e c o l u m n s a n d capitals for t h e Z a y t o u n a M o s q u e in T u n i s a n d t h e g r e a t blocks of t h e fort of Charles V at L a G o u l e t t e g u a r d i n g t h e e n t r a n c e to t h e L a k e of T u n i s . S t o n e w a s also e x p o r t e d : al-Idrisi in t h e twelfth c e n t u r y says t h a t n o b o a t left Cartilage w i t h o u t a cargo of s t o n e , a n d m a r b l e s were s h i p p e d from C a r t h a g e to b u i l d t h e cathedrals of Pisa a n d G e n o a . M e m o i r s a n d archaeological a c c o u n t s right u p to W o r l d W a r II speak of s t o n e - r o b b i n g as a n h o n o r a b l e local profession n o r is it y e t totally extinct. It is t o b e h o p e d t h a t r e c e n t legislation a n d t h e establishment of a national archaeological p a r k will save w h a t r e m a i n s .
432
CARTHAGE
T h e U N E S C O " S a v e C a r t h a g e " C a m p a i g n . T h e site of C a r t h a g e was virtually u n i n h a b i t e d in the nineteenth c e n t u r y , b u t construction of a s u b u r b a n railway along t h e coast from T u n i s to L a M a r s a in 1907 o p e n e d it u p for develop m e n t , which increased after i n d e p e n d e n c e in 1956. By 1972 t h e danger that t h e site m i g h t b e c o m e totally built over led t h e T u n i s i a n authorities t o launch a n international c a m p a i g n of excavation a n d conservation u n d e r the p a t r o n a g e of UNESCO before it was t o o late. A b o u t a dozen countries took p a r t , a n d t h e results have b e e n s u m m a r i z e d in a v o l u m e of articles (see E n n a b l i , 1992). T h e c a m p a i g n officially closed in 1992, a n d a l t h o u g h excavation continues, the e m p h a s i s is n o w m o r e o n conservation a n d t h e creation of an archaeo logical park. T h e c a m p a i g n a d d e d m o r e to o u r knowledge of P u n i c C a r t h a g e a n d of late R o m a n , V a n d a l , a n d Byzantine C a r thage t h a n to tiiat of t h e early empire. F o r t h e P u n i c period, t h e G e r m a n excavations at a n u m b e r of points b e t w e e n the Byrsa hill a n d t h e sea revealed the original P u n i c settlement, going b a c k at least to t h e first quarter of t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE; the F r e n c h laid b a r e several blocks of late P u n i c h o u s i n g o n t h e Byrsa itself, overlying an earlier industrial quarter, a n d preserved u n d e r later R o m a n fill; a n d British a n d A m e r ican teams excavated in the area of the P u n i c p o r t s , b a c k e d u p by geophysical prospection and u n d e r w a t e r exploration along the coast, while t h e A m e r i c a n s also excavated in t h e tophet. T h e British a n d G e r m a n excavations also cast light o n t h e early R o m a n period, a n d a s e c o n d F r e n c h t e a m w o r k e d o u t t h e t o p o g r a p h y of t h e m o n u m e n t a l first- a n d s e c o n d - c e n t u r y forum o n the s u m m i t of d i e Byrsa. T h e A m e r i c a n s helped clarify t h e history of t h e circus, following geophysical prospection by a Polish t e a m , a n d t h e Italians in t h e n o r t h west a n d C a n a d i a n s in t h e n o r t h e a s t of t h e city a d d e d to o u r knowledge of t h e u r b a n t o p o g r a p h y . A second British t e a m carried out a n u m b e r of rescue excavations a n d m a d e o b servations d u r i n g t h e construction of a n e w sewage system. M o s t of t h e great m o n u m e n t s of t h e early e m p i r e , however, h a d been excavated long ago, like the a m p h i t h e a t e r , t h e tiieater, the O d e o n , t h e vast cisterns at L a M a l g a a n d Bordj Djedid, a n d the A n t o n i n e b a t h s , along witii t h e h o u s e s o n the east slope of t h e O d e o n hill, a n d m u c h of t h e information that they m i g h t h a v e yielded to m o d e r n excavation t e c h niques is lost forever. F r o m later periods a n u m b e r of Christian basilicas a n d their adjacent cemeteries, previously excavated at least in part, were reinvestigated, a n d d i e A m e r i c a n s also d u g a m a jor Byzantine cemetery b e h i n d t h e circus a n d one of t h e Vandal p e r i o d just outside t h e city to t h e northwest. G e r m a n s studied t h e enigmatic u n d e r g r o u n d structure k n o w n only as die K o b b a t B e n t el R e y , dating from t h e early fourth century, a n d a C a n a d i a n t e a m showed the " C i r c u l a r M o n u m e n t " west of t h e theater to b e a Christian memoria of t h e later fourth century. A University of M i c h i g a n t e a m exca
vated an ecclesiastical c o m p l e x linked to a basilica in t h e southeast sector of the city a n d built a n e x e m p l a r y site m u s e u m to display tiieir results. T h e S w e d e s excavated a h o u s e w i t h a b a t h c o m p l e x at t h e foot of t h e Byrsa a n d t h e D a n e s a late R o m a n villa on t h e coast in t h e e x t r e m e n o r t h e a s t of t h e city. T h e British, A m e r i c a n s , Italians, a n d C a n a d i a n s all excavated stretches of t h e T h e o d o s i a n Wall, built a r o u n d 425 in anticipation of t h e V a n d a l invasion, a n d t h e C a n a dians a n d D a n e s in d i e n o r t h e a s t , like t h e M i c h i g a n t e a m in t h e southeast, f o u n d evidence of s q u a t t e r o c c u p a t i o n in t h e final years before t h e A r a b c a p t u r e of t h e city in 695. T h i s s u m m a r y necessarily omits m u c h , a n d particularly t h e T u n i s i a n c o n t r i b u t i o n in n u m e r o u s r e s c u e excavations, b u t it indicates h o w i m p o r t a n t t h e UNESCO c a m p a i g n has b e e n , utterly t r a n s f o r m i n g o u r k n o w l e d g e of t h e city, al t h o u g h a d d i n g little to its history in t h e A r a b p e r i o d , w h e n pottery suggests t h a t it w a s largely b u t n o t completely a b a n doned. [See also P h o e n i c i a n - P u n i c ; and Phoenicians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY T h e best known Greek a n d Latin writers are available in die L o e b series, published b y H a r v a r d University Press, with the original text and translation on facing pages. F o r inscriptions, see die following: Corpus inscriptionum semiticamm (Paris, 1 8 8 1 - ) ; Repertoire d'dpigraphie simitique (Paris, 1 9 9 0 - ) ; Corpus inscriptionum latinarum, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1 9 8 1 - ) ; Maria Giulia Amadasi G u z z o , Le iscrizionifenicieepunichedelle colonic in Occidente ( R o m e , 1 9 6 7 ) ; and Alfred Merlin, Inscriptions latines de la Tunisie (Paris, 1944). Secondary sources include the following: Bartoloni, Piero, et al., eds. Atti del I congresso internazionale di studi fenici e punici, Roma, 5-10 novembre 1979. 3 vols. R o m e , 1 9 8 3 . In ternational collection of essays covering a variety of topics in P u n i c Phoenician material culture, history, and language. Useful resource on recent scholarly interests and controversies and primary and sec ondary sources; state-of-the-field summaries. Benichou, Helene. Les tures, inscriptions et valuable account of yses of t o m b types,
tombes puniques de Carthage: Topographic, struc rites funeraires. Paris, 1 9 8 2 . Painstaking and in over a century of excavation reports, with anal inscriptions, and funerary rites.
Bomgardner, D a v i d L. " T h e Cartilage Amphitheater: A Reappraisal." American Journal of Archaeology 93 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 8 5 - 1 0 3 . Study of the a m phitheater as currendy visible, listed here because this is one of the few major m o n u m e n t s of the city not touched in the UNESCO c a m paign. Brouillet, M o n i q u e Seefried, ed. From Hannibal to Saint Augustine; An cient Art of North Africa from the Musee du Louvre. Atianta, 1 9 9 4 . Exhibition catalog with eighteen specialist articles o n Cartilage and N o r d i Africa, about half translated from F r e n c h a n d often conveying ideas a n d information otherwise inaccessible in English. Brown, Susanna Shelby. Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrifi cial Monuments in Tiieir Mediterranean Context. Sheffield, 1 9 9 1 . Sur vey of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence for child sac rifice, with typological a n d iconographic study of stelae from die Carthage tophet. Cintas, Pierre. Manuel d'archeologie punique. 2 vols. Paris, 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 6 . Historical and archaeological evidence for western Phoenician, es pecially Carthaginian, civilization. V o l u m e 1 contains a useful over view of classical and Christian sources, focusing o n the foundation of Carthage and other sites, but generally taking ancient sources too
CARTS literally. Volume 2 deals with the archaeology of Carthage. Both vol u m e s are now largely out of date as far as the archaeology is con cerned, a n d Cintas is just plain w r o n g about the ports. G o o d bibli ography t h r o u g h 1 9 7 5 . Ennabli, Abdelmajid, ed. Pour sauver Carthage: Exploration et conser vation de la cite punique, romaine et byzantine. Paris a n d T u n i s , 1992. T w e n t y - f o u r articles summarizing the results of the UNESCO team, mostly by the directors of the excavations themselves, with complete bibliography to date, which in m o s t cases will lead the reader t o m o r e detailed reports o n which summaries are based. F a n t a r , M ' h a m e d Hassine. Carthage: Approche d'une civilisation. 2 vols. T u n i s , 1 9 9 3 . Detailed discussion of t h e history a n d civilization of P u n i c Carthage; u p to date, full of excellent information, b u t lacks a decent index. T h e r e is nothing remotely comparable in English. O n the tophet and infant sacrifice, see volume 2 , pages 302-306. F r e n d , W . H . C . The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa. Oxford, 1 9 5 2 . Still the fundamental account, although F r e n d ' s views o n the social basis of D o n a t i s m have b e e n challenged by m o r e recent scholarship. Gsell, Stephane. Histoire ancienne de I'Afiique du Nord. 8 vols. Paris, 1 9 2 1 - 1 9 2 8 . Still the basic survey of evidence for Phoenicians a n d natives, Stone Age to R o m a n conquest. Often methodologically a n d archaeologically out of date, b u t never superseded by equally c o m prehensive work, a n d nothing c o m p a r a b l e exists in English. Lancel, Serge. Carthage. Paris, 1 9 9 2 . A c c o u n t of P u n i c Cartilage, p a r ticularly strong on the history of F r e n c h research, with g o o d bibli ography. A n English translation is in preparation (Oxford: Blackwell). M o s c a t i , Sabatino. "II sacrificio p u n i c o dei fanciulli: Realta o invenz i o n e ? " Rendiconti dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 3 - 1 5 . T h e fullest statement to date of the case for supposing that infant sacrifice is a myth. Pedley, J o h n G., ed. New Light on Ancient Carthage. A n n Arbor, 1980. Series of articles by UNESCO participants reporting o n early stages of the campaign. See especially Stager o n the tophet, W i g h t m a n on the layout of the city, a n d H u m p h r e y o n Vandal and Byzantine C a r thage. R a k o b , Friedrich. " D i e romische Wasserleitung von Karttiago." In Joumees d'etudes sur les aqueducs romainslTagung ilber romische Wasserversorgungsanlagen, Lyon, 26-28 mai 1977, edited by Jean-Paul Boucher, p p . 3 0 9 - 3 3 2 . Paris, 1 9 8 3 . T h e definitive account of the Z a g h o u a n aqueduct. R a v e n , Susan. Rome in Africa. 3d ed. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 . T h e only book o n N o r t h Africa in English that is both readable a n d reliable, with C a r tilage playing a p r o m i n e n t role. Soren, David, et al. Carthage: Uncovering the Mysteries and Splendors of Ancient Tunisia. N e w York, 1 9 9 0 . C h a t t y a n d popular in a p p r o a c h , a n d occasionally already out of date, b u t very useful in the absence of any recent scholarly account in English. Sznycer, M a u r i c e . "Cartilage et la civilisation p u n i q u e . " In Rome el la conquete du monde mediterraneen, 264-27 avantJ.-C, vol. 2 , Genese d'un empire, edited b y C l a u d e Nicolet, p p . 5 4 5 - 5 9 3 . Paris, 1 9 7 8 . In valuable survey by a Semitic linguist, covering evidence (especially epigraphic) a n d the m a i n controversies, with a s u m m a r y of m o d e r n bibliography. C O L I N M . WELLS
C A R T S . W h e e l e d vehicles a p p a r e n t l y d e v e l o p e d in S u m e r d u r i n g t h e U r u k p e r i o d , p e r h a p s as early as 3000 BCE. T h e earliest t y p e w a s a h e a v y , four-wheeled, o x - d r a w n w a g o n featuring a boxlike b o d y a n d four solid wheels. E x cavated r e m a i n s reveal t h a t t h e s e early w a g o n s w e r e rela
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tively small, with bodies less t h a n half a m e t e r wide a n d wheels 50-100 c m in diameter. C o v e r e d w a g o n s , with leather or linen covers, are r e p r e s e n t e d in S u m e r i a n m o d e l s as early as 2500 BCE, as well as at C a r c h e m i s h a n d Assur. E x a m p l e s of s o m e of t h e earliest r e m a i n s a n d m o d e l s of var ious types of w a g o n s a n d carts are p r e s e n t e d b y A r m a s S a l o n e n in his Die Landfahrzeuge des alten Mesopotamien (Hel sinki, 1951, p p . 157-158, with a c c o m p a n y i n g plates). F r o m this c u m b e r s o m e w a g o n d e v e l o p e d t h e s o m e w h a t lighter t w o - w h e e l e d cart, w h i c h w a s still a p o n d e r o u s affair, also b o r n e o n solid wheels. S u c h w a g o n s a n d carts a p p e a r t o have b e e n extensively u s e d in t h e ancient N e a r East. I n t h e code of H a m m u r a b i , for e x a m p l e , t w o laws (nos. 271, 272, ANET, p . 177) deal w i t h t h e rental of a w a g o n with or w i t h o u t a driver a n d oxen, a n d at Alalakh, in Syria, " t w e n t y w a g o n s " are m e n t i o n e d in a H u r r i a n list of objects. S h a m s h i - A d a d s e n t instructions t h a t t h e inhabitants of Q a t t u n a n w e r e to t r a n s p o r t s o m e g o o d s from Q a t t u n a n to Shubat-Enlil in w a g o n s . T h e Ak k a d i a n t e r m for w a g o n , eriqqu, o c c u r s frequently in M e s o p o t a m i a n literature a n d i n r e c o r d s f r o m t h e earliest times t h r o u g h t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d (626-539 BCE). W a g o n s a n d carts are also frequentiy r e p r e s e n t e d in the art of the region, particularly d u r i n g t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n period (900-612 BCE). F o r e x a m p l e , a relief from N i m r u d , depict ing a city u n d e r attack, shows several two-wheeled, o x d r a w n carts carrying away w o m e n a n d children prisoners (cf. ANEP, n o . 367, a n d t h e similar relief of S e n n a c h e r i b ' s siege of L a c h i s h , w h i c h s h o w s a two-wheeled cart t r a n s p o r t i n g w o m e n a n d children w h o a r e sitting o n t o p of s o m e b u n d l e s ) . A closed, four-wheeled, covered w a g o n is d e picted o n Ashurnasirpal's obelisk. ( F o r other M e s o p o t a m i a n e x a m p l e s , see ANEP, n o s . 167, 169, a n d 303). Carts a n d w a g o n s w e r e u s e d especially t o t r a n s p o r t heavy loads, s u c h as large quantities of metal, timber, or military supplies (see A n n a l s of S e n n a c h e r i b 1.25). After t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of t h e h o r s e as a draft animal in a b o u t 2300 BCE, a lighter t y p e of two-wheeled cart was n e e d e d . T h i s lighter vehicle, t h e p r e c u r s o r to t h e chariot, eventually evolved, t h a n k s to a n e w technological develop m e n t : b y a b o u t 1500 BCE, M e s o p o t a m i a n craftsmen h a d learned t h e t e c h n i q u e of b e n d i n g w o o d with heat, which e n abled d i e m t o replace h e a v y disc wheels witii m u c h lighter spoked wheels. T h e s e wheels c o m p r i s e d four or six spokes c o n n e c t e d to a r i m of c u r v e d , joined felloes. T h e cart's c u m b e r s o m e all-wood b o d y w a s r e d e s i g n e d with a curved w o o d e n frame overlaid w i t h a hide or wicker covering. T h e n e w , light conveyance b e c a m e highly p o p u l a r , a n d within t w o or t h r e e centuries it h a d n o t only b e c o m e a s t a n d a r d m e a n s of t r a n s p o r t a t i o n in t h e N e a r East, b u t also p e n e t r a t e d as far away as G r e e c e , n o r t h e r n E u r o p e , India, a n d even C h i n a . T h e t y p e of h a r n e s s u s e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e ancient world was d i e yoke, originally d e s i g n e d for hitching a t e a m of oxen.
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It comprised a draft pole extending from the center of die vehicle's front side, witii a horizontal crossbar near the outer end. O n e ox w o u l d b e positioned o n either side of t h e pole, a n d the crossbar (the yoke) w o u l d sit o n the oxen's p r o t r u d i n g shoulders. W h e n horses b e c a m e draft animals, the same yoke was used. Because the horse lacks p r o m i n e n t shoulders, t h e yoke w a s secured by a b a n d that passed over t h e animal's breast, w h i c h unfortunately pressed against the w i n d p i p e a n d p r e v e n t e d it from using its full strength. T h i s design flaw was never rectified in antiquity. D u r i n g t h e R o m a n period t h e m o s t c o m m o n m e a n s of transportation was the o x - d r a w n wagon, normally d r a w n by eight oxen or horses in t h e s u m m e r , ten in t h e winter. H e a v y g o o d s , s u c h as a r m y supplies, were t r a n s p o r t e d by heavy clabulariae, a large, o p e n w a g o n t h a t could carry as m u c h as 1,500 R o m a n p o u n d s . Lighter vehicles included t h e rheda, a m u l e - d r a w n , four-wheeled cart using eight to t e n m u l e s , w h i c h could bear a m a x i m u m load of 450 kg; t h e carrus, a four-wheeled cart, w h i c h carried 270 kg; t h e verreda, d r a w n b y four mules, which carried t w o to three p e r s o n s a n d u p t o 135 kg of g o o d s ; a n d die two-wheeled birota, d r a w n b y three mules, w h i c h carried o n e to t w o passengers a n d a m a x i m u m of 90 kg. [See also R o a d s ; T r a n s p o r t a t i o n ; Wheel.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Casson, Lionel. Travel in the Ancient World. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 4 . N e w ed. Baltimore, 1994. Carts a n d wagons are discussed t h r o u g h o u t , b u t especially on pages 23ff. Casson, Lionel. Ancient Trade and Society. Detroit, 1984. G o o d , u p - t o date overview of trade a n d transportation in the ancient world. Childe, V. G o r d o n . "Wheeled Vehicles." In A History of Technology, vol. 1, From Early Times to the Fall of Ancient Empires, edited by Charles Singer et a l , p p . 7 1 6 - 7 2 9 . L o n d o n , 1954. G o o d survey of the technological development of the cart, wagon, and chariot. Jope, E. M . "Vehicles and H a r n e s s . " In A History of Technology, vol. 2 , The Mediterranean Civilizations and the Middle Ages, c. 700 B.C. to c. 1500 A.D., edited by Charles Singer et al., p p . 5 3 7 - 5 6 2 . L o n d o n , 1956. Well-documented study of the ancient technology of vehicles drawn by draft animals. Littauer, M . A., and J. H . Crouwel. Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East. Leiden, 1 9 7 9 . Relatively up-to-date study of the technology of carts and wagons in the ancient Fertile Crescent. Piggott, Stuart. The Earliest Wheeled Transport: From the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea. L o n d o n , 1983. U p to date and especially valuable for the p r e - R o m a n periods. Pritchard, James B., ed. The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (ANBP). Princeton, 1 9 5 4 . Pritchard, James B . , ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET). Princeton, 1 9 6 9 . Salonen, Armas I. Notes on Wagons and Chariots in Ancient Mesopota mia. Helsinki, 1 9 5 0 . D a t e d , b u t still of some value. Salonen, Armas I. Die Landfahrzeuge
des alten Mesopotamien.
Helsinki,
I95I. DAVID A. DORSEY
C A T A C O M B S . L a r g e u n d e r g r o u n d cemeteries, cata c o m b s typically consist of a n e t w o r k of long, s u b t e r r a n e a n
galleries w h o s e walls h a v e b e e n cut as graves. S o m e t i m e s galleries o p e n into rectangular or q u a d r a n g u l a r r o o m s (cubicula). S u c h r o o m s usually contain r o c k - c u t graves; o c c a sionally, t h e y also contain sarcophagi (stone containers u s e d as coffins). [See S a r c o p h a g u s . ] I n t h e a n c i e n t N e a r East, cat a c o m b s normally consisted of galleries situated o n o n e level. I n the early Christian c a t a c o m b s in R o m e , b y contrast, it is n o t u n u s u a l to find as m a n y as four galleries o n e o n t o p of t h e other. T h e t e r m catacomb derives from t h e G r e e k kata kumben, a t o p o n y m t h a t m e a n s " n e a r the h o l l o w . " I n t h e R o m a n p e r i o d it was u s e d to d e n o t e a particular s p o t o n t h e Via A p p i a , n e a r t h e C a t a c o m b of S e b a s t i a n o a n d t h e C i r c u s of M a x e n t i u s , w h e r e t h e terrain s u d d e n l y d r o p s tangibly. I n exceptional cases, as in Hellenistic a n d R o m a n E g y p t , cat a c o m b s w e r e u s e d to deposit t h e r e m a i n s of m u m m i f i e d a n imals. N o r m a l l y , however, c a t a c o m b s served in t h e burial or reburial of t h e m o r t a l r e m a i n s of h u m a n b e i n g s . D i s c o v eries in R o m a n Palestine a n d in R o m e itself s h o w t h a t b o t h the Jewish a n d t h e early Christian c o m m u n i t i e s u s e d cata c o m b s . I t is n o t clear, h o w e v e r , w h e t h e r t h e idea of burial in c a t a c o m b s first originated in Jewish or in early Christian circles. Burial in c a t a c o m b s was c u s t o m a r y from t h e late s e c o n d to t h e early sixth centuries CE. Extensive r e m a i n s of cata c o m b s h a v e b e e n f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n area, including the N e a r East. Yet, in L a t e A n t i q u i t y , burial in c a t a c o m b s seems to h a v e b e e n particularly p o p u l a r in Italy (e.g., at R o m e , N a p l e s , V e n o s a ) a n d o n t h e islands adjoining it (particularly Sicily a n d M a l t a ) . C a t a c o m b s differ f r o m other types of u n d e r g r o u n d t o m b s in size, formal a p p e a r a n c e , a n d , c o n s e q u e n t l y , in function. I n t h e ancient N e a r E a s t , s u b t e r r a n e a n t o m b s w e r e usually m e r e u n d e r g r o u n d structures ( h y p o g e a ) . T h e y offered a fi nal resting place to a restricted g r o u p of p e o p l e o n l y — t h e m e m b e r s of a n e x t e n d e d family. C o m p a r e d to burial in s u c h family t o m b s , b u r i a l in c a t a c o m b s always r e m a i n e d e x c e p tional in the eastern provinces of t h e R o m a n E m p i r e . O c curring d u r i n g a relatively short p e r i o d of time only, t h e u s e of c a t a c o m b s m u s t b e taken to reflect a particular attitude toward b u r y i n g t h e d e a d . W i t h their l o n g u n d e r g r o u n d gal leries, c a t a c o m b s were designed f r o m t h e o u t s e t to a c c o m m o d a t e d i e r e m a i n s of large g r o u p s of p e o p l e t h a t either h a d to b e or w a n t e d to b e b u r i e d or r e b u r i e d t o g e t h e r in a given locality. I n contrast t o R o m e , w h e r e m o r e t h a n sixty c a t a c o m b s are k n o w n , only a few c a t a c o m b s h a v e b e e n discovered in t h e N e a r East. A m o n g t h e sparse finds, t h e d o z e n or so J e w ish catacombs at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m ( L o w e r Galilee) are cer tainly t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t b e c a u s e of t h e a b u n d a n c e of ar chaeological a n d epigraphic r e m a i n s p r e s e r v e d t h e r e . [See B e t h - S h e ' a r i m . ] N o less significantly, B e t h - S h e ' a r i m is t h e only c a t a c o m b c o m p l e x in t h e region t h a t w a s studied sys tematically b y its excavators (Avigad, 1971; M a z a r , 1973).
CATACOMBS
In the Near East a few early catacombs believed to be Christian, but that may be Jewish-Christian, have also been discovered. One such catacomb came to light in the late nineteenth century CE on the Mt. of Olives in Jerusalem at a site known as Viri Galilei (Schick, 1889). The so-called Tomb of the Prophets, also located on the Mt. of Olives, has also been known since the nineteenth century and is still accessible (Vincent, 1901). It consists of several short, semicircularly shaped galleries. Despite its unusual plan, it too must be considered a catacomb. An early Christian cata comb was discovered and partially excavated in the late 1960s, at Emesa/Homs in Syria (Bounni, 1970). In Alex andria (Egypt), many subterranean Christian tombs, often referred to as early Christian catacombs, were discovered from 1820 to 1890; most of them are now destroyed (Leclercq, 1924). Although adequate documentation on the for mal appearance of these Alexandrinian tombs is often lack ing, the use of the term catacomb to describe them is incorrect. Characteristic of Alexandria's early Christian fu nerary architecture is tire hypogeum—in this case a collec tion of subterranean rooms arranged around a central court yard. Such hypogea were dug in proximity to one another. Not unusually, they were interconnected to form large un derground complexes. Yet, they lack a catacomb's most dis tinguishing feature: galleries dug specifically for the depo sition of the deceased members of an entire community. Because ancient tombs have often been robbed, it is usu ally difficult to establish when precisely a given catacomb came into use or when burial ceased there. Archaeological small finds can, however, point to the approximate period of its use. Thus, it was ascertained that the Jewish catacombs at Beth-She'arim were in use mainly from the late second to the middle of the fourth centuries CE. The precise dating of the catacomb on the Mt. of Olives has not been achieved. It is not unlikely though that burials took place there in the
CATACOMBS.
Cross-section
435
third-fifth centuries CE. The Tomb of the Prophets is dated to the fourth and fifth centuries. The Christian catacomb at Emesa Horns has been dated by its excavator to the thirdseventh centuries (Bounni, 1970). The size and layout of a catacomb's complex network of underground galleries and cubicula are determined by sev eral factors: the workability of the rock, the amount of space needed, and the degree of planning involved. In Rome, for example, the earliest catacombs frequendy consist of a net work of irregular galleries (curvilinear galleries that seem to go into every direction). Galleries in later Roman cata combs, on the other hand, display a much more systematic layout (Brandenburg, 1984). Such developments in plan ning testify to a rise in the popularity of burial in catacombs, as well as to the need to dispose of the ever-increasing num ber of dead in die most rational way. This explains why in many of the catacombs at Beth-She'arim, too, a tendency toward symmetry and tire economic use of space is discern ible. Rock-Cut Graves. In catacombs, different types of rockcut graves were used. Some graves are long, rectangular slots tiiat were cut parallel to the wall. These loculi take up little wall space, and so it is not unusual to find rows of up to seven or eight loculi, one on top of the other. Another rectangular grave, the kokh, is cut at right angles to the wall and goes right into it. The term kokh has a clear association with the practice of secondary burial in the Near East and is borrowed from the East Semitic language groups (Mey ers, 1971). Despite a clear difference in formal appearance, the terms loculus and kokh are often used interchangeably in scholarly literature, which may lead to confusion. A third type of wall-cut grave, known as an acrcosolium, consists of one or more rectangular containers that are dug into the rock and overarched by a vault. The fourth and by far the sim plest type of rock-cut grave is also rectangular: dug into the
of catacomb 13 at Beth-She'arim.
(After Avigad, 1 9 7 1 ; courtesy M a s s a d a Press, Ltd.)
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CATACOMBS ilar in b o t h s h a p e a n d selection of t o m b types to t h o s e f o u n d in c o n t e m p o r a r y h y p o g e a , s u c h as t h e c h a m b e r t o m b s of t h e D o m i n u s Flevit cemetery in Jerusalem. E v i d e n c e from these c a t a c o m b s a n d h y p o g e a shows cumulatively t h a t in second—fourth-century Palestine, t h e a r c o s o l i u m slowly b u t steadily replaced t h e kokh as t h e m o s t p o p u l a r grave f o r m . Similarly, archaeological materials from t h e c a t a c o m b s at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m a n d from h y p o g e a a t M e i r o n , K h i r b e t S h e m a ' , G e z e r , R a m a t R a h e l , a n d H o r v a t T h a l a in R o m a n Palestine d o c u m e n t t h a t in t h e p e r i o d u n d e r discussion t h e s a m e t r e n d s in burial c u s t o m s affected t h e funerary c u s t o m s in c a t a c o m b s a n d h y p o g e a . It is n o w k n o w n , for e x a m p l e , t h a t secondary burial c o n t i n u e d to b e p r a c t i c e d in different p a r t s of R o m a n Palestine t h r o u g h o u t antiquity, b u t t h a t it lost m u c h of t h e p o p u l a r i t y it h a d enjoyed in first-century CE Jerusalem.
CATACOMBS. She'arim.
Plan of Mugharet
el-Jehennem,
a catacomb at
Beth-
(After Mazar, 1 9 7 3 ; courtesy Massada Press, Ltd.)
floor of a gallery or burial r o o m , it is k n o w n as a pit grave, or forma. R o c k - c u t graves of t h e kind listed above normally offered e n o u g h space for one p e r s o n only, t h o u g h in s o m e instances t h e y were u s e d for multiple reburials. T h e y were sealed in various ways: with stones, bricks, rubble, or with a m a r b l e plate that sometimes carried a funerary inscription. I n cat a c o m b s , burial in sarcophagi (coffins m a d e of either stone, terra cotta, w o o d , or lead) is n o t very c o m m o n . U n e x p e c t edly, t h e u n d e r g r o u n d galleries of c a t a c o m b 20 at B e t h S h e ' a r i m were f o u n d filled with 125 well-preserved speci m e n s of large sarcophagi, the great majority of w h i c h are of local limestone (Avigad, 1976). A n o t h e r peculiarity c o n fined to t h e catacombs at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m is the u s e of ossu aries—small stone or w o o d e n containers u s e d for s e c o n d a r y burial. [See Ossuary.] T o g e t h e r with sarcophagi a n d loculi, t h e vast majority of burials at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m w e r e reburials, testifying to the Jewish idea of the i m p o r t a n c e of burial or reburial in t h e land of Eretz-Israel, where resurrection w o u l d occur and where d i e l a n d h a d atoning p o w e r s (Zlotnick, 1966). W i t h t h e exception of ossuaries, which reflect a typically Jewish funerary philosophy (at least in R o m a n Palestine), t h e grave forms listed a b o v e occur in Jewish a n d Christian catacombs alike. I n fact, in t h e s e c o n d - f o u r t h centuries CE, t h e r e are n o major differences b e t w e e n c a t a c o m b s a n d h y p o g e a , either in t e r m s of grave types or burial c u s t o m s . T h e t o m b s in the Jewish c a t a c o m b s at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m a n d in the early Christian c a t a c o m b s at Viri Galilei are r e m a r k a b l y sim
T h e single m o s t i m p o r t a n t factor leading to t h e genesis a n d s u b s e q u e n t evolution of burial in c a t a c o m b s was t h a t large n u m b e r s of p e o p l e could b e b u r i e d t o g e t h e r w i t h o u t taking u p too m u c h space. T h e various stages of this p r o c e s s can best b e seen in R o m e . T h e r e , t h e earliest C h r i s t i a n cat a c o m b s are n o t h i n g b u t a collection of irregularly s h a p e d galleries. Originating in deserted quarries, cisterns, a n d w a ter channels, t h e s e s u b t e r r a n e a n galleries m a i n t a i n e d t h e character of privately o w n e d t o m b s until m o r e space a n d m o r e systematic p l a n n i n g were n e e d e d . I n t h e third a n d fourth centuries, R o m e ' s Christian c o m m u n i t y — a l l p e o p l e w h o h a d t o be b u r i e d — r a p i d l y increased in size, a n d m a n y Christians w a n t e d to b e b u r i e d near t h e r e m a i n s of their m a r t y r s . B e g i n n i n g in t h e p e r i o d of P o p e Z e p h y r i n u s ( 1 9 9 2 1 7 ) 3 w h o a p p o i n t e d o n e Callistus as overseer of a cata c o m b , t h e Christian c o m m u n i t y was e n a b l e d t o fulfill a n obligation it h a d taken u p o n itself—to b u r y t h e Christian p o o r . P l a n n e d c a t a c o m b s w e r e d u g t h a t w e r e n o longer p r i vately o w n e d a n d offered r o o m for all m e m b e r s of t h e Early Christian c o m m u n i t y ( B r a n d e n b u r g , 1984). It is n o t clear w h e t h e r similar factors s h a p e d t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y d e v e l o p m e n t of c a t a c o m b architecture in t h e N e a r East. It is clear, h o w e v e r , t h a t in t h e eastern p a r t of t h e M e d iterranean, c a t a c o m b s w e r e c o n s t r u c t e d b e c a u s e this form of burial offered the s a m e a d v a n t a g e s t h e i n h a b i t a n t s of R o m e h a d c o m e to appreciate. B e g i n n i n g in t h e s e c o n d c e n t u r y CE, B e t h - S h e ' a r i m replaced J e r u s a l e m as t h e m o s t p r e s tigious Jewish n e c r o p o l i s . T h i s h a p p e n e d , in p a r t , b e c a u s e m a n y Palestinian a n d D i a s p o r a Jews alike believed t h a t b u r ial in t h e l a n d of Israel w a s to b e preferred over burial in t h e D i a s p o r a (cf. T o s e f t a , A.Z. 4:3: " H e w h o is b u r i e d in t h e L a n d of Israel is as t h o u g h h e w e r e b u r i e d u n d e r t h e a l t a r " ) . T h e p r e s e n c e , in t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m c a t a c o m b s , of t h e earthly remains of i m p o r t a n t Jewish religious a n d political leaders of the t i m e m u s t h a v e b e e n a major attraction as well. I n t h e historical d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e C h r i s t i a n c a t a c o m b s of Jerusalem, other, c o m p a r a b l e factors are likely t o h a v e p l a y e d a role. Inscriptions indicate t h a t t h e p e o p l e b u r i e d in
CATACOMBS t h e T o m b of t h e P r o p h e t s w e r e pilgrims w h o h a d either died accidentally in J e r u s a l e m or w h o h a d traveled t h e r e with t h e i n t e n t i o n of s e c u r i n g their last r e s t i n g place in p r o x i m i t y t o t h e H o l y City. Little is k n o w n a b o u t those r e s p o n s i b l e for t h e exploita tion a n d a d m i n i s t r a t i o n of c a t a c o m b s . I n f o u r t h - a n d early fifth-century R o m e , specialized gravediggers (fossores) c a n b e s h o w n to h a v e w o r k e d b y o r d e r of t h e c h u r c h . A t t h e s a m e time, h o w e v e r , s o m e of t h e s e fossores are k n o w n to h a v e o p e r a t e d as i n d e p e n d e n t e n t r e p r e n e u r s . W h e t h e r in dividual R o m a n p a r i s h c h u r c h e s e a c h a d m i n i s t e r e d their o w n c a t a c o m b is a h y p o t h e s i s t h a t has frequentiy b e e n a d v a n c e d b u t n e v e r b e e n p r o v e d conclusively ( G u y o n , 1987). T h e inscriptional evidence f r o m B e t h - S h e ' a r i m a n d A c m o n i a (Asia M i n o r ) as well as r a b b i n i c literature suggest t h e existence of Jewish burial societies, b u t it is impossible to d e t e r m i n e w h e t h e r s u c h colleges w e r e also responsible for excavating a n d supervising c a t a c o m b s ( S c h w a b e a n d Lifschitz, 1974). T h e s a m e factors t h a t led to t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of cata c o m b s also c a u s e d its a b a n d o n m e n t in L a t e Antiquity. W i t h t h e d r a m a t i c d r o p in p o p u l a t i o n in s i x t h - c e n t u r y R o m e , b u r ial shifted from c a t a c o m b s t o t h e exterior of c h u r c h e s within t h e A u r e l i a n city wall. B e t h - S h e ' a r i m , p e r h a p s d e s t r o y e d d u r i n g t h e Gallus Revolt of 351-352, h a d already ceased t o b e a center of i m p o r t a n c e . A d e c r e a s e in t h e n u m b e r of Christian pilgrims t o J e r u s a l e m m u s t h a v e b e e n t h e deter m i n i n g factor t h a t led to t h e d i s c o n t i n u a t i o n of burial in cat a c o m b s there. F r o m t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n N e a r East, several u n d e r g r o u n d c o m p l e x e s are k n o w n w h o s e walls are d o t t e d w i t h small niches, k n o w n as c o l u m b a r i a , m e a s u r i n g , o n av erage, 20 X 20 X 15 c m . E x a m p l e s of t h e s e c o l u m b a r i a are p r e s e r v e d in, a m o n g other p l a c e s , R o m a n Palestine ( B e t h Guvrin, D o r , Gezer, Masada, R a m a t Rahel, Samaria); R o m a n Arabia ( P e t r a ) ; a n d Asia M i n o r (Sebaste in Cilicia). S u c h c o m p l e x e s are n o r m a l l y located in t h e s a m e general areas as t o m b s . F o r t h a t r e a s o n a n d b e c a u s e t h e niches t h e y c o n t a i n r e s e m b l e s o m e w h a t t h e niches of s u b t e r r a n e a n c o n structions in R o m e w h o s e funerary function is b e y o n d d o u b t , scholars h a v e suggested t h a t c r e m a t e d h u m a n r e m a i n s w e r e placed i n these N e a r E a s t e r n c o u n t e r p a r t s . I n a s m u c h as tiiere is n o archaeological e v i d e n c e to show t h a t t h e niches in t h e c o l u m b a r i a ever c o n t a i n e d ashes, t h e c o n clusion is p r o b l e m a t i c . O t h e r scholars h a v e suggested t h a t these c o m p l e x e s m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d t o raise a n d keep p i geons. Burial of h u n d r e d s or e v e n t h o u s a n d s of animals in cat a c o m b s is a n exclusively E g y p t i a n p h e n o m e n o n . S u c h a n i mals w e r e first m u m m i f i e d , w r a p p e d in e m b r o i d e r e d cloth, a n d t h e n d e p o s i t e d in either l i m e s t o n e s a r c o p h a g i or p o t t e r y jars. T h e y w e r e layed to r e s t in w i n d i n g u n d e r g r o u n d gal leries t h a t c o u l d b e h u n d r e d s of m e t e r s long. I n Alexandria (Rhacotis), such "animal catacombs" were found to contain
437
t h e m u m m i f i e d r e m a i n s of d o g s . I n M e m p h i s they c o n t a i n e d t h e cadavers of bulls, while c a t a c o m b s in S a q q a r a , Baklija (near H e r m o p o l i s ) , a n d T u n a el-Gebel testify to t h e cultic veneration of the ibis a n d , at t h e latter sites, also to t h a t of t h e b a b o o n . T h e p r a c t i c e of b u r y i n g m u m m i f i e d a n imals in c a t a c o m b s seems t o h a v e b e g u n as early as t h e thir tieth dynasty (380-342 BCE) b u t d i d n o t g a i n w i d e s p r e a d p o p u l a r i t y until t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n p e r i o d s (Kessler, 1983). I c o n o g r a p h y a n d I n s c r i p t i o n s . T h e artistic r e m a i n s f r o m c a t a c o m b s r e p r e s e n t n o t only t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of art in antiquity b u t also burial c u s t o m s , ideas a b o u t death a n d afterlife, social relations, t h e e c o n o m y , a n d g e n d e r ( P e s k o witz, 1993). F o r e x a m p l e , t h e discovery a n d scientific study of t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m c a t a c o m b s p r o f o u n d l y c h a n g e d t h e w a y s in w h i c h scholars view t h e genesis of rabbinic J u d a i s m a n d t h e interaction of Jewish a n d non-Jewish cultures in a n tiquity. Little is k n o w n a b o u t t h e aesthetics of t h e few c a t a c o m b s discovered so far in t h e N e a r East, e x c e p t at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m , w h e r e d i e i c o n o g r a p h y r e p r e s e n t e d o n t h e walls includes m e n o r a h s , t h e A r k of t h e L a w , h u m a n figures, animals, ships, a n d g e o m e t r i c designs. I m p r e s s i v e portals witii elab orately r e n d e r e d stone d o o r s a n d c o u r t y a r d s witii m o s a i c floors lend m o n u m e n t a l i t y t o t h e e n t t a n c e s to its c a t a c o m b s . [See Mosaics.] Inside, m a n y of t h e sarcophagi, mostly of local p r o d u c t i o n , s h o w a r i c h i c o n o g r a p h i c repertoire c o n sisting of crudely c a r v e d h u m a n figures a n d animals, A c o m bination of t h r e e elements characterizes B e t h - S h e ' a r i m ' s ar tistic c o r p u s : a lack of narrative t h e m e s , t h e absence of scenes taken f r o m t h e H e b r e w Bible, a n d a preference for motifs t h a t are n o t only often religiously neutral, b u t that s o m e t i m e s (especially o n s a r c o p h a g i ) are of clear p a g a n der ivation. T h a t the users of these c a t a c o m b s were i n d e e d viv idly aware of the artistic a c h i e v e m e n t s of non-Jewish work s h o p s located o n t h e P h o e n i c i a n coast, or in G r e e c e a n d Asia M i n o r , c a n also b e inferred from t h e remains of i m p o r t e d m a r b l e a n d lead s a r c o p h a g i (Avigad, 1976). A n o t h e r n o ticeable feature a b o u t t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m c a t a c o m b s is t h a t elaborate cycles of wall p a i n t i n g s are absent; this contrasts m a r k e d l y witii the evidence preserved in t h e Jewish a n d Early C h r i s t i a n c a t a c o m b s in t h e w e s t e r n M e d i t e r r a n e a n , w h e r e s u c h wall paintings d o d e c o r a t e m o s t c a t a c o m b s . At Betii-She'arim, m a n y small finds—lamps, pottery, glass vessels, b r o n z e a n d i r o n artifacts, a n d items of p e r s o n a l a d o r n m e n t — f u r t h e r e n r i c h w h a t is k n o w n of ancient art, m a n u f a c t u r i n g t e c h n i q u e s , a n d Jewish burial c u s t o m s a n d h a v e e n a b l e d t h e dating of individual c a t a c o m b s . Often characterized b y great conciseness, p a i n t e d a n d in cised funerary inscriptions as well as graffiti inform a b o u t a wide variety of issues, i n c l u d i n g t h e deceased's social, e c o n o m i c , a n d religious s t a t u s , p l a c e of origin, o n o m a s t i c p r a c tices, l a n g u a g e , a n d religious beliefs a n d practices. T h u s , it is k n o w n t h a t the p e o p l e b u r i e d in t h e T o m b of t h e P r o p h e t s
438
CATAL HOYUK
a n d in die c a t a c o m b of Viri Galilei s p o k e G r e e k , a n d t h a t s o m e of t h e m h a i l e d f r o m s u c h cities as H a r p a g i a (Asia M i n o r ) , Bostra, P a l m y r a , a n d B a t a n e a (Schick, 1989; V i n c e n t , 1901). T h e inscriptions f r o m t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m c a t a c o m b s d o c u m e n t the e x t e n t t o w h i c h t h e G r e e k l a n g u a g e , G r e e k lit erary form, a n d G r e e k ideas a b o u t d e a t h a n d afterlife h a d m a d e i n r o a d s into a c o m m u n i t y in w h i c h t h e r a b b i n i c ele m e n t was u n m i s t a k a b l e , if n o t d o m i n a n t . E i g h t y p e r c e n t of t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m i n s c r i p t i o n s are in G r e e k , o n e of t h e m a m e t r i c inscription c o m p o s e d in H o m e r i c h e x a m e t e r s . O t h e r inscriptions f o u n d at B e t h - S h e ' a r i m are in H e b r e w , p a r t i c ularly in c a t a c o m b 14, w h i c h m a y c o n t a i n t h e grave of J u d a h I t h e P a t r i a r c h , a w e l l - k n o w n r a b b i n i c figure traditionally r e g a r d e d as t h e r e d a c t o r of t h e M i s h n a h . Still o t h e r i n s c r i p tions
are in P a l m y r e n e . [See P a l m y r e n e I n s c r i p t i o n s . ] T o
g e t h e r with t h e G r e e k i n s c r i p t i o n s , t h e P a l m y r e n e e p i t a p h s i n d i c a t e t h a t B e t h - S h e ' a r i m r a p i d l y evolved into a f u n e r a r y c e n t e r of s u p r a r e g i o n a l i m p o r t a n c e : leaders of Jewish D i a s p o r a c o m m u n i t i e s as far a p a r t as B y b l o s , S i d o n , T y r e , B e i rut,
Antioch,
Palmyra,
Nehardea
(Mesopotamia),
and
s o u t h e r n A r a b i a all h a d their m o r t a l r e m a i n s b r o u g h t to B e t h - S h e ' a r i m for final i n t e r m e n t ( S c h w a b e a n d Lifschitz, 1974; N a g a k u b o , 1974). [See also Burial Sites; B u r i a l T e c h n i q u e s ; G r a v e G o o d s ; N e c r o p o l i s ; S a r c o p h a g u s ; and T o m b s . In addition, the sites mentioned
are the subject of independent
many
of
entries]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, N a h m a n , Beth She'aritn: Report on the Excavations during 19531958, vol. 3, Catacombs 12-23, Jerusalem, 1 9 7 1 . Standard treatment on the second part of t h e excavations in the catacombs of BethShe'arim. Bounni, Adnan. " L e s catacombes d ' E m e s e (Homs) en Syrie." Archeologia 37 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 4 2 - 4 9 . T h e only preliminary report presently avail able on the excavations. Brandenburg, H u g o . "Uberlegungen zu U r s p r u n g u n d E n t s t e h u n g der Katakomben R o m s . " Jahrbuch JurAntike und Christentum 1 1 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 1 1 - 4 9 . Standard review essay on the origin a n d development of the Christian catacombs in R o m e . Buhagiar, Mario. Late Roman and Byzantine Catacombs and Related Burial Places in the Maltese Islands, British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 302. Oxford, 1986. Comprehensive study of u n d e r g r o u n d cemeteries o n Malta a n d of their inscriptions; richly illustrated a n d with references to earlier studies on the subject. Fasola, U m b e r t o M . La catacombe di San Gennaro a Capodimonte. R o m e , 1 9 7 5 . M o n o g r a p h i c study of the building history of the largest Early Christian catacomb in Naples.
vation report on t h e ibis catacombs in T u n a el-Gebel; richly illus trated a n d with references t o earlier literature on t h e subject. Leclercq, Henri, "Alexandrie: Archeologie." I n Dictionnaire d'archeologie chretienne et de liturgie, vol. 1 . 1 , cols. 1 0 9 8 - 1 1 8 2 . Paris, 1 9 2 4 . Comprehensive survey of otherwise difficult-to-locate excavation r e ports on d i e early Christian funerary architecture of Alexandria. M a r i n o n e , M , , et al. "Cimetieres inconnus d'ltalie." Les Dossiers de I'Archcologie 19 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 6 8 - 8 1 . Brief a c c o u n t of Early Christian h y pogea a n d catacombs discovered in T u s c a n y , A b b r u z z o , and L a t i u m and on Sardinia. M a z a r , Benjamin, et al. Beth She'aritn: Report on the Excavations during 1936-1940, vol. 1, Catacombs 1-4. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 3 . S t a n d a r d treat m e n t on t h e first part of t h e excavations. M e y e r s , Eric M . Jewish Ossuaries: Reburial and Rebirth. R o m e , 1 9 7 1 . Major study of Jewish reburial into containers a n d various cavities and its theological significance. M e y e r s , Eric M . " R e p o r t o n the Venosa C a t a c o m b s , 1 9 8 1 . " Vetera Christianorum 20 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 4 5 5 - 4 5 9 . English s u m m a r y of the discovery of a hitherto u n k n o w n c a t a c o m b complex in southern Italy. N a g a k u b o , Senzo. "Investigation into Jewish C o n c e p t s of Afterlife in the Beth-She'arim Greek Inscriptions." P h . D . diss., D u k e U n i v e r sity, 1974. Detailed review of the extent to which G r e e k concepts of afterlife entered Jewish epigraphic formulae at Beth-She'arim. Peskowitz, Miriam. " T h e W o r k of Pier H a n d s : G e n d e r i n g Everyday Life in R o m a n - P e r i o d Judaism in Palestine ( 7 0 - 2 5 0 CE), Using T e x tile Production as a Case S t u d y . " P h . D . diss., D u k e University, 1 9 9 3 . Methodologically interesting study (esp. p p . 2 4 4 - 2 9 4 ) o n h o w grave gifts can b e used for writing social history. Rutgers, L e o n a r d V . "Uberlegungen z u d e n jiidischen K a t a k o m b e n R o m s . " Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum 33 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 1 4 0 - 1 5 7 . Critical review of the origin a n d chronology of the Jewish catacombs in R o m e , Schick, C o n r a d . " K a t a k o m b e n auf d e m O l b e r g . " Zeitschrift des deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 1 2 ( 1 8 8 9 ) : 1 9 3 - 1 9 9 . T h e only available report o n an Early Christian catacomb in Jerusalem that h a s since disappeared. Schwabe, M o s h e , a n d B a r u c h Lifshitz. Beth She'arim, vol. 2, The Greek Inscriptions. N e w Brunswick, N.J., 1974^,Standard c o r p u s that should be consulted in conjunction with Avigad (above). Vincent, L . - H . " L e t o m b e a u des p r o p h e t e s . " Revue Biblique 10 ( 1 9 0 1 ) : 7 2 - 8 8 . T h e only substantial study o n this Early Christian c a t a c o m b in Jerusalem. •Zilliu, G. "Antichita paleocristiane di Sulcis," Nuovo Bidlettino Archeologico Sardo 1 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 283-300. Description of Early Christian h y pogea a n d wall paintings o n Sardinia. —. .. Zlotnick, D o v . The Tractate "Mourning" (Semahotj. Yale Judaica Series, vol. 1 7 . N e w H a v e n , 1 9 6 6 . Critical edition of a treatise that is basic to any u n d e r s t a n d i n g of Jewish burial customs. LEONARD V . RUTGERS a n d ERIC M . MEYERS
CATAL HOYUK,
ancient n a m e u n k n o w n , a double
m o u n d l o c a t e d a t 37°o6' N , 32°o8' E , o n t h e K o n y a P l a i n i n s o u t h - c e n t r a l T u r k e y , a b o u t 260 k m (156 m i . ) s o u t h of
G a r a n a , Ottavio. Le catacombe siciliane e i loro martin. Palermo, 1 9 6 1 . Somewhat outdated account of catacomb burial on Sicily; useful for its comprehensiveness a n d illustrations.
A n k a r a a n d a b o u t 40 k m (24 m i . ) s o u t h e a s t of t h e t o w n of
G u y o n , Jean. Le cimetiire aux deux lauriers: Recherches sur les catacombes romaines. R o m e , 1 9 8 7 . Authoritative work on t h e building history of the catacomb of Sts, Marcellinus a n d Peter in R o m e ; especially i m portant for its general methodological observations.
British I n s t i t u t e of A r c h a e o l o g y a t A n k a r a a n d his colleagues
Kessler, Dieter. " D i e Galerie C von T u n a el-Gebel." Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts, Kairo 39 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 0 7 - 1 2 4 . Exca
a g a i n in 1965, r e v e a l e d e x t e n s i v e e v i d e n c e of a large N e o
K o n y a . C a t a l H o y u k , t h e largest N e o l i t h i c site k n o w n o n t h e A n a t o l i a n p l a t e a u , was d i s c o v e r e d b y J a m e s M e l l a a r t of t h e
during
a field
survey in
1958.
Subsequent
excavations,
m a i n l y d i r e c t e d b y M e l l a a r t b e t w e e n 1961 a n d 1963
and
lithic s e t d e m e n t o n t h e east m o u n d ; s m a l l - s c a l e e x c a v a t i o n
CATAL HOYUK
439
other, with a b a n d o n e d h o u s e s a n d o p e n areas serving as courtyards a n d d u m p s . A general tendency toward a more o p e n p l a n is visible after level V I . T h e buildings are c o n s t r u c t e d of s u n - d r i e d , m o l d - m a d e m u d bricks; extensive u s e w a s m a d e of a w o o d e n f r a m e w o r k , especially in t h e earlier levels. F l o o r s a n d walls w e r e plastered, a n d t h e flat roof was c o n s t r u c t e d of b e a m s , lighter t i m b e r , a n d a thick m u d coat ing. M o s t of t h e buildings w e r e e n t e r e d f r o m t h e roof b y m e a n s of a ladder; there are n o d o o r w a y s , e x c e p t b e t w e e n a h o u s e a n d its associated s t o r e r o o m . A d e g r e e of s t a n d a r d ization is visible in m a n y s t r u c t u r e s : t h e ladder is p l a c e d against t h e s o u t h wall, in association with h e a r t h s a n d ovens, b e n c h e s a n d lower platforms a p p e a r in all h o u s e s . O n e of t h e site's m o s t n o t a b l e features, in addition to t h e excellent state of p r e s e r v a t i o n of s o m e of t h e architecture CATAL HOYUK.
Figure i.
Plan of a building,
level VIB.
(After M e l
laart, 1967, fig. 9)
a n d artifacts, is t h e elaborate d e c o r a t i o n evidenced in a c o n siderable n u m b e r of buildings Mellaart classified as shrines (see figure 2 ) . D e c o r a t i o n takes t h e f o r m of wall paintings,
o n t h e west m o u n d i n d i c a t e d t h e p r e s e n c e of a sizable Early Chalcolithic village, b u t t h e full s e q u e n c e of o c c u p a t i o n of t h e site as a w h o l e r e m a i n s t o b e established. N o evidence h a s b e e n f o u n d for o c c u p a t i o n of tire i m m e d i a t e area in t h e A c e r a m i c N e o l i t h i c , b u t m o r e extensive excavation m a y r e veal its p r e s e n c e . F i e l d w o r k o n t h e site w a s r e s u m e d b y a n o t h e r British t e a m u n d e r t h e a u s p i c e s of C a m b r i d g e U n i versity in 1 9 9 3 . T h e oval east m o u n d ( 5 0 0 X 3 0 0 m ) rises t o a h e i g h t of 1 7 . 5 m a b o v e t h e plain. It is s i t u a t e d 2 8 k m ( 1 7 mi.) f r o m t h e n e a r e s t e d g e of t h e plain, in a n agriculturally rich region,
plaster reliefs, c u t - o u t figures, a n d other features that, in s o m e cases, c o m b i n e several t e c h n i q u e s . T h e subjects of t h e wall paintings are g e o m e t r i c designs, s o m e t i m e s r e m i n i s c e n t of textile p a t t e r n s ; animal a n d h u m a n figures, sometimes in c o m b i n a t i o n ; and, in o n e c a s e , a possible l a n d s c a p e with t h e settlement s h o w n with a m o u n t a i n in t h e b a c k g r o u n d . Sev eral h u n t i n g scenes d e p i c t various species of birds a n d a n i m a l s , especially a large r e d bull, in association with n u m e r ous h u m a n
figures,
e a c h d r e s s e d in a k i n d of s p o t t e d
loincloth. S o m e of t h e figures m a y b e d a n c i n g , a n d a general a t m o s p h e r e of levity is i n d i c a t e d . M o r e m a c a b r e are scenes
at a n elevation of a b o u t r o o o m . T h e n a t u r e of t h e soils u p o n
s h o w i n g large r e d b i r d s ( p e r h a p s vultures) h o v e r i n g over
w h i c h t h e s e t t l e m e n t was established is u n c e r t a i n ; it is likely
headless h u m a n figures, n o d o u b t alluding to t h e e x c a r n a -
t h a t a b r a n c h of t h e Carsamba Cay river flowed n e a r b y in
t i o n of b o d i e s before burial.
t h e N e o l i t h i c p e r i o d , p e r h a p s in t h e area n o w b e t w e e n t h e
T h e m a i n subjects d e p i c t e d in plaster relief are animal
east a n d west m o u n d s ; t h e village m a y h a v e b e e n f o u n d e d o n t h e alluvial fan delta of t h a t river. P r o x i m i t y to a p e r e n n i a l river or s t r e a m m a y h a v e m a d e s e t t l e m e n t feasible in this area of low average a n n u a l rainfall ( 2 4 9 m m ) . E x c a v a t i o n o n t h e east m o u n d was principally c o n c e n t r a t e d o n a o n e - a c r e area o n its west side. Virgin soil w a s n o t r e a c h e d in the d e e p e s t e x c a v a t i o n area; a p p r o x i m a t e l y fifteen b u i l d i n g levels w e r e e n c o u n t e r e d ( 0 - X L I I , in d e s c e n d i n g o r d e r , with t w o p h a s e s in level V I ) . A s o u n d i n g i n 1 9 6 3 , close t o the e d g e of t h e m o u n d , is stated to h a v e r e vealed o c c u p a t i o n deposits t o a d e p t h of 5 m b e l o w t h e p r e s e n t plain level; if this is c o r r e c t , a total d e p t h of o c c u p a t i o n of 2 2 . 5 m o r m o r e is to b e f o u n d o n t h e site. Information about the settlement's architecture was p r e d o m i n a n t l y o b t a i n e d f r o m levels V I I I - I I . D e s p i t e t h e p a u city of e v i d e n c e for t h e earliest a n d latest p h a s e s , n o radical architectural c h a n g e s c o u l d b e d i s c e r n e d , a n d m a n y a s p e c t s of t h e site indicate c o n t i n u i t y . I n all levels, t h e building p l a n s are rectilinear (see figure 1 ) . I n t h e b e s t - r e p r e s e n t e d levels,
CATAL HOYUK.
h o u s e s a n d associated s t o r e r o o m s w e r e built against e a c h
1967, fig. 38)
F i g u r e 2. Shrine
VLB. 10, restored. (After Mellaart,
440
CATON-THOMPSON, GERTRUDE
headsj h u m a n figures (sometimes in association w i t h animal h e a d s ) , complete animal figures, a n d rows of w h a t s e e m to b e h u m a n breasts, often m o l d e d over the jawbones or skulls of animals. T h e face, h a n d s , a n d feet of t h e h u m a n figures are always d a m a g e d a n d a p p e a r to have b e e n intentionally mutilated. T h e bodies are a r r a n g e d parallel-sided with their arms and legs b r a n c h i n g out at right angles to the b o d y a n d t u r n i n g u p at the e n d s . O n e figure bears extensive linear painted decoration, p e r h a p s representing a netlike dress. T h e figures m a y b e goddesses, in a birthing position. In s o m e cases a figure is s h o w n immediately above a plaster bull's head. Pairs of leopardlike animals in relief a n d p a i n t e d with spots or rosettes a p p e a r o n t h e walls of several build ings. A representation of a stag looking b e h i n d h i m was found, as were silhouettes of animal h e a d s a n d c o m p l e t e animal figures, also cut into the plaster o n walls w h e r e t h e plaster was thick e n o u g h . T h e features in s o m e buildings are complex: pairs of bull's h o r n s were sometimes set into the sides of benches or into t h e t o p of small, rectangular, free standing m u d - b r i c k pillars. Burial c u s t o m s are well evidenced b y t h e 480 or so c o m plete or partial burials found within t h e settlement below t h e floors of houses. T h e d e a d were usually placed u n d e r t h e platforms, in a c o n t r a c t e d position, on their left side, with t h e head t o w a r d t h e center of the r o o m and the feet n e a r t h e wall. S o m e , if n o t all, of d i e bodies were w r a p p e d in sldns or textiles, placed in baskets, or laid on m a t s . T h e skeletons w e r e sometimes found in rather chaotic h e a p s ; later burials disturbed earlier i n t e r m e n t s . Clear evidence for s e c o n d a r y burial (burial after t h e flesh h a d at least partially d e c o m p o s e d ) was found, a n d s o m e skeletons ( b o t h m a l e a n d fe male) were decorated with ocher or paint. A wall painting t h a t may p o r t r a y a lightly built structure with schematic h u m a n skulls s h o w n below it has b e e n interpreted as a charnel h o u s e , where t h e d e a d were laid o u t for excarnation. G r a v e goods of various types were buried with t h e d e a d , including w o o d e n vessels t h a t w e r e preserved in carbonized form b y t h e fire t h a t destroyed t h e overlying building. H a n d m a d e p o t t e r y in simple shapes was f o u n d in all levels at the site; t h e m o s t characteristic p r o d u c t is a h o l e - m o u t h jar with a dark, streakily b u r n i s h e d surface. Baked clay was also u s e d in t h e m a n u f a c t u r e of s t a m p seals. M a l e a n d fe male figurines m a d e of clay a n d stone were sometimes found in association with animal figurines. O t h e r artifacts include quantities of finely fashioned tools, w e a p o n s , a n d s o m e m i r rors m a d e of obsidian; g r o u n d stone tools; a n d objects m a d e of animal b o n e . D e s p i t e the application of the t e r m Neolithic t o the site, c o p p e r a n d lead h a d b e e n u s e d to m a n u f a c t u r e small items such as b e a d s , p e n d a n t s , a n d rings; a l u m p of c o p p e r slag in level V I suggests t h a t t h e initial steps t o w a r d t r u e metallurgy h a d already b e e n taken. According to a series of twenty-seven uncalibrated r a d i o carbon dates, t h e earlier excavated levels are to b e d a t e d t o t h e late seventh m i l l e n n i u m , whereas level VT a n d t h e later
levels fall after 6,000 BCE. T h e latest levels at C a t a l H o y u k East m a y just overlap w i t h die b e g i n n i n g of t h e L a t e N e o lithic o c c u p a t i o n of Hacilar in t h e Anatolian L a k e District to t h e west of t h e K o n y a Plain. T h e excavations at Catal H o y i i k E a s t cast a completely n e w light o n Neolithic civilization o n t h e A n a t o l i a n p l a t e a u a n d in the N e a r E a s t as a whole. S u b s e q u e n t excavations in T u r k e y a n d elsewhere h a v e still n o t revealed a c o n t e m p o r a r y site with m o r e a d v a n c e d art f o r m s , religious ideology, or general level of sophistication t h a n w e r e f o u n d at Catal H o yiik. [See also Hacilar.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Mellaart, James. "Excavations at Catal Huytik, 1 9 6 5 : F o u r t h Prelimi nary R e p o r t . " Anatolian Studies 1 6 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : 1 6 5 - 1 9 1 . T h e finds of this season are n o t covered in Mellaart ( 1 9 6 7 ) . Mellaart, James. Catal Hiiyuk: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. L o n d o n , 1967. Well-illustrated account of the first three seasons of excavation. T o d d , Ian A. CotalHiiyuk in Perspective. M e n l o Park, Calif., 1976. Brief s u m m a r y of the site, including environmental and odier aspects to die extent that they were k n o w n at t h e time of writing. T o d d , Ian A. The Prehistory of Central Anatolia, vol. 1, The Neolithic Period. Studies in M e d i t e r r a n e a n Archaeology, vol. 60, G o t e b o r g , 1980. Publication of sites with c o n t e m p o r a r y material in central A n atolia, nordi of the K o n y a Plain. Contains a s u m m a r y of the A n a tolian Neolithic, including Qatal Hoyiik, a n d a useful bibliography as of 1 9 7 5 . Yakar, Jak. Prehistoric Anatolia: The Neolithic Transformation and the Early Chalcolithic Period. T e l Aviv, 1 9 9 1 . Valuable, u p - t o - d a t e s u m mary of sites in all areas of T u r k e y , against which t h e excavations at Catal Hoyiik m u s t now be viewed. See also s u p p l e m e n t n o . 1 (1994) by the same autiior. IAN A . T O D D
CATON-THOMPSON,
GERTRUDE
(1888-
t985), p i o n e e r i n g British archaeologist in E g y p t i a n a n d E a s t African prehistory. C a t o n - T h o m p s o n w a s b o r n in L o n d o n a n d in 1921 b e g a n to study archaeology t h e r e w i t h F l i n d e r s Petrie at University College. F r o m 1921 to 1926, she at t e n d e d t h e British School of A r c h a e o l o g y in E g y p t , w h e r e she c o n t i n u e d t o w o r k w i t h Petrie. F r o m 1934 to 1951, she w a s a fellow at N e w n h a m College, C a m b r i d g e . C a t o n T h o m p s o n also did r e s e a r c h o n M a l t a (1921-1924) a n d in Y e m e n , h e r w o r k established for t h e first time s o m e of t h e prehistoric sequences in E g y p t , a n d h e r t h o r o u g h a r c h a e o logical publications usually i n c l u d e d excellent geological studies as well. I n E g y p t , she excavated at A b y d o s (1921-1922) a n d at Q a u and Badari (1923-1925). S h e also c o n d u c t e d a r c h a e ological a n d geological surveys in t h e F a i y u m (1924-1928), F r o m 1930 to 1933, s h e excavated at t h e K h a r g a h oasis. I n 1928-1929 she excavated at Z i m b a b w e , d e m o n s t r a t i n g tiiat t h e culture was n o t as a n c i e n t as h a d b e e n p r o p o s e d . H e r archaeological a n d geological w o r k in t h e H a d h r a m a u t ( n o w
CATS in Y e m e n ) w a s i m p o r t a n t : she e x c a v a t e d a pre-Islamic t e m ple a n d t o m b site at H u r e i d h a (1937-1938). C a t o n - T h o m p s o n received a n u m b e r of a w a r d s a n d h o n ors, including t h e C u t h b e r t P e e k A w a r d f r o m the Royal G e o g r a p h i c a l Society in 1932, d i e Rivers M e d a l from t h e Royal A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l Institute i n 1934, a n d t h e B u r t o n M e d a l from t h e Royal Asiatic Society in 1954. In 1944 s h e b e c a m e a fellow of t h e British A c a d e m y a n d in 1954 was a w a r d e d a n h o n o r a r y d o c t o r a t e f r o m C a m b r i d g e University. [See also A b y d o s ; F a i y u m ; H a d h r a m a u t ; H u r e i d h a ; M a l t a ; Y e m e n ; and the biography of Petrie.] BIBLIOGRAPHY C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , G e r t r u d e , and G u y B r u n t o n . The Badarian Civil isation andPredynastic Remains near Badari. L o n d o n , 1928. Excellent final report dealing primarily with the predynastic villages and t o m b s at Badari, Q a u , and H e m a m i e h . C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , G e r t r u d e . The Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins and Reac tions. Oxford, 1 9 3 1 . Based on careful excavations and artifact par allels; correctly dates the Z i m b a b w e culture. C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , G e r t r u d e , and E. W . G a r d n e r . The Desert Payum. 2 vols. L o n d o n , 1934. Major final reports combining geological and archaeological history. C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , G e r t r u d e , et al. Lake Moeris: Re-Investigations and Some Comments. Cairo, 1937. A small study of the F a y u m that ar gued against a high L a k e Moeris in t h e area. C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , Gertrude. The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha (Hadhramaut). Oxford, 1944. I m p o r t a n t early archaeological exca vation of a S o u t h Arabian temple a n d t o m b site, together with early geological observations about the area. C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , G e r t r u d e . The Aterian Industry: Its Place and Sig nificance in the Palaeolithic World. L o n d o n , 1946. Small study assign ing die Aterian to the U p p e r Paleolithic period. C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , G e r t r u d e . Kharga Oasis in Prehistory. L o n d o n , 1 9 5 2 . Major final report describing the site's Paleolithic-Neolithic remains. C a t o n - T h o m p s o n , G e r t r u d e . The Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins and Reac tions. 2 d ed. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 . U p d a t e d publication of her results, t o gether with radiocarbon data s u p p o r t i n g the later date for the Z i m b a b w e culture. JAMES A. SAUER
C A T S . T h e principal a n c e s t o r of t h e d o m e s t i c cat, t h e wild cat Felis silvestris, is a single species w i t h a w o r l d w i d e distribution t h a t varies in a p p e a r a n c e a n d behavior across t h e n o r t h e r n a n d s o u t h e r n extensions of its r a n g e . B e h a v ioral studies suggest t h a t t h e African/Arabian f o r m of wild cat, F. s. libyca, is t h e m o s t a m e n a b l e to f o r m i n g c o m m e n s a l relationships with h u m a n s a n d habiting their settlements. T h i s behavioral trait, as well as alloenzyme analyses a n d philological a n d archaeological evidence, strongly suggests t h a t t h e libyca f o r m w a s t h e d i r e c t a n c e s t o r of t h e d o m e s t i c cat, formally designated F. s. catus. C a t d o m e s t i c a t i o n p r o b a b l y b e g a n in E g y p t , b u t b e c a u s e t h e skeleton of libyca differs litde from the d o m e s t i c f o r m , it is difficult t o d o c u m e n t t h e earliest stages of t h e p r o c e s s . T h e first p u r p o s e f u l i n t e r m e n t s of F. s. libyca are f o u n d w i t h
441
E g y p t i a n h u m a n burials f r o m t h e early fourth millennium. A l t h o u g h t h e r e is n o evidence to indicate t h a t these cats were d o m e s t i c , die burials m a y signal the b e g i n n i n g of the d o mestication p r o c e s s . O t h e r wild cats from t h e region, n o t a bly t h e larger jungle or m a r s h cat F. chaus, h a v e b e e n iden tified in early burials as well, b u t in smaller n u m b e r s . T h i s led s o m e authorities to suggest tiiat chaus m a y also h a v e c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e d o m e s t i c cat g e n o m e , b u t recent genetic studies s h o w t h a t any significant contribution is unlikely. T h e ancient Egyptians k e p t wild animals in captivity w i t h o u t d o m e s t i c a t i n g t h e m , a n d this w a s p r o b a b l y t h e case with the jungle cat. A fifth-dynasty (c. 2494-2345 BCE) t o m b painting from S a q q a r a depicts a cat w i t h a b a n d t h a t m a y b e a collar a r o u n d its neck. T h i s m a y d e m o n s t r a t e h u m a n control of the animal b u t is n o t p r o o f of domestication. H o w e v e r , by t h e early M i d d l e K i n g d o m p e r i o d (c. 2050-1785 BCE), p i c torial a n d textual evidence p o i n t t o t h e cat as a domesticate. B o t h functional a n d religious r e a s o n s are a d v a n c e d to a c c o u n t for its domestication. A s witii m o s t domestic animals, however, a p r i m a r y s t i m u l u s , a s s u m i n g there w a s o n e , eludes archaeological detection. A n i m a l s played a p r o m i n e n t role in E g y p t i a n religion from t h e p r e d y n a s t i c p e r i o d or even earlier. M o s t deities w e r e associated w i t h one o r m o r e animals t h a t were intrinsic to t h e p e r f o r m a n c e of their cult. C a t s , large a n d small, were s a c r e d to a n u m b e r of E g y p t i a n g o d s . T h e goddess S e k h m e t w a s usually r e p r e s e n t e d b y a lioness, t h e g o d d e s s P a k h e t b y lions a n d cats. T h e m o s t p o p u l a r cat deity, t h e fertility g o d dess Bast w a s p o r t r a y e d as a lioness from t h e protodynastic p e r i o d (c. 3100-1700 BCE) until t h e S e c o n d I n t e r m e d i a t e p e riod (c. 1800-1570 BCE) a n d thereafter mostly as a female cat. In the N e w K i n g d o m (sixteenth-twelfth centuries BCE), t h e solar deity R e is associated with m a l e cats. C a t s , a n d other animals, w e r e kept a n d raised within the confines of t h e t e m p l e s of their special deities. W h e n Bubastis, a center for the w o r s h i p of Bast, a s s u m e d leadership of the c o u n t r y is t h e early first millennium BCE, t h e cat g a i n e d n e w p r o m i n e n c e . Prior to this time, cats a p p e a r t o h a v e b e e n pets of t h e elite. As the symbol of a n a tional p r o t e c t r e s s , h o w e v e r , the cat as a p e t b e c a m e e x tremely p o p u l a r across all classes. By t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d (c. 332-200 BCE), cats h a d b e c o m e big business. Priests raised t h e m by the t h o u s a n d s in a n d a r o u n d t e m p l e p r e c i n c t s , to b e u s e d as votive offerings b y pilgrims. H e r o d o t u s (2.65-68) described at length t h e affection of t h e E g y p t i a n p o p u l a c e for their p e t cats a n d t h e sacred burial g r o u n d s t h a t received their m u m m i f i e d r e m a i n s . Archaeologists h a v e discovered e n o r m o u s n u m b e r s of cats in cemeteries at A b y d o s , Giza, Bubastis, a n d S a q qara, t o n a m e a few e x a m p l e s . N o w h e r e in t h e ancient w o r l d w e r e cats as beloved or i m p o r t a n t t o religion as in E g y p t . I n d e e d , their religious role m a y h a v e h i n d e r e d their e x p o r t , as it g r e a d y o v e r s h a d o w e d
442
CATTLE AND OXEN
the utilitarian role they played in v e r m i n control. E x c e p t for Egypt, the d o m e s t i c cat is n o t m e n t i o n e d in t h e region's ancient texts, a n d there is n o evidence for it b e y o n d E g y p t ' s b o r d e r s until t h e first millennium BCE. Its popularity a p p e a r s to have spread rather slowly, reaching C r e t e in t h e n i n t h century, m a i n l a n d G r e e c e d u r i n g t h e sixth century, a n d C h i n a only in t h e second century BCE. I n neighboring Syria-Palestine, there is little early evi d e n c e for t h e domestic cat. A n ivory statuette from L a c h i s h , d a t e d to a b o u t 1700 BCE, m a y b e of a wild or domestic cat. Osteological evidence for cats of all forms is sparse. Several b o n e s of a small wild cat (probably t h e sand cat, F. margarita) were found in M i d d l e B r o n z e II levels (c. 1900-1600 BCE) at Tell J e m m e h in Israel's n o r t h e r n N e g e v desert. C u t marks consistent with skinning reveal t h a t t h e animals were h u n t e d for their pelts. A small n u m b e r of bones referred to F. chaus h a s b e e n recovered at t h e coastal site of Ashkelon in Israel from various p e r i o d s , some with c u t m a r k s . N o t until the Persian p e r i o d (c. 538/39-332 BCE) d o several b o n e s of domestic cat appear. I n t h e ensuing Hellenistic p e r i o d t h e n u m b e r s b e g a n t o rise, a n d a b o u t o n e h u n d r e d specimens of domestic cat h a v e b e e n identified t o date from Hellenistic t o Islamic deposits at Ashkelon. D o m e s t i c cat b o n e s , a n d t h e occasional skeleton, have b e e n r e p o r t e d from historicperiod sites t h r o u g h o u t t h e ancient N e a r East. T h e n u m b e r s are always small, h o w e v e r , p e r h a p s a n indication t h a t dogs, w h o s e bones are m u c h m o r e c o m m o n , were preferred as pets. BIBLIOGRAPHY Armitage, P. L . , a n d Juliet Clutton-Brock. " A Radiological a n d His tological Investigation into the Mummification of Cats from Ancient Egypt," Journal of Archaeological Science 8 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 8 5 - 1 9 6 . I m p o r tant modern evaluation of domestic cat mummies from nineteenthand early twentieth-century excavations. Baldwin, James A. " N o t e s and Speculations on the Domestication of the C a t in Egypt." Anthropos 7 0 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 4 2 8 - 4 4 8 . A useful survey of the relevant evidence a n d offers a cogent, if not always demonstrable, timetable of cat domestication. Bradshaw, John W . S. The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat. Wallingford, 1992. Malek, Jaromir. The Cat in Ancient Egypt. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 3 . A h a n d s o m e book with a comprehensive study of cats, domestic a n d wild. Morrison-Scott, T . C . S, " T h e Mummified Cats of Ancient E g y p t . " Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1 2 1 ( 1 9 5 2 ) : 8 6 1 - 8 6 7 . Comprehensive discussion of cat m u m m i e s , although some of the conclusions have b e e n superseded b y later findings. Randi, Ettore, and Bernardino Ragni. "Genetic Variability and Bio chemical Systematics of Domestic and Wild C a t Populations (Felis silvestris: Felidae)." Journal of Mammology 7 2 . 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 7 9 - 8 8 . T h e most up-to-date genetic study of wild and domestic cats. Robinson, R. " C a t . " In Evolution of Domestic Animals, edited by I a n L . Mason, pp. 2 1 7 - 2 2 5 . London, 1984. PAULA WAPNISH
CATTLE AND OXEN.
D u r i n g t h e L a t e Pleistocene a n d Early H o l o c e n e , t h e aurochs (Bos primigenius), t h e wild
ancestor of d o m e s t i c cattle, r a n g e d over diverse e n v i r o n m e n t s across t h e N e a r East. A u r o c h s r e m a i n s a r e c o m m o n in U p p e r Paleolithic levels at sites i n t h e s o u t h e r n a n d east e r n L e v a n t . A c c o r d i n g t o artistic evidence, t h e a u r o c h s w a s still p r e s e n t in this region d u r i n g historic times. I t is unclear just w h e n t h e a n i m a l finally b e c a m e extinct. W i t h few exceptions, t h e n u m b e r of identified large bovid b o n e s in N e o l i t h i c sites is small. T h e r e f o r e , criteria b a s e d o n mortality are rarely available a n d t h e e v i d e n c e for d o mestic cattle is primarily osteometric. [See A n i m a l H u s bandry.] D o m e s t i c stock are c o n s i d e r a b l y smaller titan their a u r o c h s ancestors. H o w e v e r , t h e application of this criterion is complicated b y sexual d i m o r p h i s m a n d tire resulting d a n ger of identifying a b o n e from a wild female as o n e f r o m a domestic bull. F u r t h e r m o r e , d e p e n d e n c e o n m o r p h o l o g i c a l signs m e a n s t h a t t h e earliest phases of d o m e s t i c a t i o n will n o t b e recognized. I t is n o t clear h o w t h e i n c o r p o r a t i o n of s u c h a large a n d powerful animal as a n a u r o c h s into h u m a n set tlements w a s m a n a g e d . P e r h a p s t h e provision of salt t o wild h e r d s w a s a strategy for conditioning t h e animals to h u m a n p r e s e n c e a n d initiating t h e process of t a m i n g . H o w e v e r it w a s a c c o m p l i s h e d , t h e first claim for " p r e d o m e s t i c a t i o n , " o n t h e basis of mortality data, c o m e s from P r e - p o t t e r y Neolithic A ( P P N A ) T e l l M u r e y b e t in Syria. O s t e o m e t r i c evidence h a s b e e n cited t o assert t h a t t h e cattle from sixtli-millennium deposits from Catal H o y i i k a n d Hacilar, Neolithic sites i n central Anatolia, w e r e d o m e s t i c , b u t this h a s b e e n challenged. D o m e s t i c or wild, t h e cattle at Catal Hoyiik a r e particularly interesting b e c a u s e t h e site also yielded extensive evidence for t h e animal in a ritual context. N o t only a r e a u r o c h s i n c l u d e d in t h e s p e c t a c u l a r m u r a l art, b u t h o r n s were m o u n t e d o n a b e n c h a n d associated with h u m a n figurines a n d w h a t m a y b e fertility symbols. O n t h e basis of size d i m i n u t i o n , d o m e s t i c cattle a r e certainly p r e s e n t in central Anatolia, n o r t h e r n Syria, a n d t h e L e v a n t b y 5000 BCE, t h o u g h t h e process m u s t h a v e started earlier. T h e sex ratio of morphologically wild P P N B (late seventh millen n i u m BCE) cattle favors females, w h i c h m a y b e evidence for t h e onset of h u s b a n d r y . T h e r e is insufficient evidence t o p i n p o i n t t h e a p p e a r a n c e of d o m e s t i c cattle i n I r a n a n d I r a q p r i o r to t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m . [See M u r e y b e t ; Catal Hoytik; Hacilar.] B e c a u s e cattle a r e extremely a d a p t a b l e t o diverse h a b i t a t s , a degree of isolation b e t w e e n regional p o p u l a t i o n s arose. T h i s resulted i n stock of varied a p p e a r a n c e b y t h e e n d of t h e second m i l l e n n i u m BCE. T h e z e b u , or h u m p e d cattle (Bos indicus), is p r e s e n t in J o r d a n in t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e o n t h e basis of osteological evidence. F i g u r i n e s f o u n d at T e l l J e m m e h i n Israel's n o r t h e r n N e g e v , as well as t h e v e r t e b r a e distinctive of this b o v i d , place it t h e r e i n this p e r i o d as well. Because z e b u c a n n o t always b e reliably distinguished from their taurine cousins, t h e r e is a possibility t h a t t h e y w e r e b o t h earlier a n d m o r e i m p o r t a n t t h a n is currently r e c o g nized. [See J e m m e h , Tell.] A u r o c h s w e r e h u n t e d for their m e a t a n d hides. I t is n o t
CAVE TOMBS k n o w n h o w l o n g it took before d o m e s t i c catde p r o d u c e d sufficient quantities of milk or b e c a m e sufficiently tractable t o m a r k a significant c h a n g e in h o w they w e r e used. T h e earliest reliable e v i d e n c e for d a i r y i n g is from fourth-millen n i u m sites in E g y p t a n d M e s o p o t a m i a . Similarly from the fourth m i l l e n n i u m c o m e s t h e earliest (artistic) evidence for t h e p l o w in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . Osteological evidence for cattle as p l o w or draft a n i m a l s at tiiis time is n o t e d in collections from the L e v a n t a n d Anatolia. T h e a d v e n t of p l o w agriculture utilizing cattle as m o t i v e p o w e r was a m a j o r threshold. B e c a u s e cattle a s s u m e d m u c h of the w o r k p r e viously s u p p l i e d by h u m a n s , s u r p l u s labor could b e redi r e c t e d to o t h e r p u r s u i t s in t h e c o m m u n i t y , t h e r e b y e n h a n c ing t h e potential for i n c r e a s e d s o c i o e c o n o m i c complexity. I n historic periods cattle w e r e usually t h e third m o s t c o m m o n domesticate at a site, after s h e e p a n d goats. H o w e v e r , their larger size a n d utility for draft m a d e t h e m m u c h m o r e valuable, animal for animal, t h a n either of t h e "small cattle." O x e n ( n e u t e r e d bulls) b e g a n t o b e e m p l o y e d in the fourth m i l l e n n i u m BCE, b a s e d on o s t e o m e t r i c data. H o w e v e r , t e x tual evidence from M e s o p o t a m i a a n d t h e H e b r e w Bible is equivocal a b o u t w h e t h e r t h e t e c h n i q u e w a s actually p r a c ticed in all periods. [See also Agriculture; A n i m a l H u s b a n d r y ; E t h n o z o o l o g y ; L e a t h e r ; and Paleozoology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Clutton-Brock, Juliet. Domesticated Animals from Early Times. Austin, 1 9 8 1 . Excellent discussion of domestic bovids.
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b o d i e s w e r e later m o v e d to the sides to clear a space in the center for additional burials. E x t r a m u r a l cemeteries first a p p e a r e d in t h e Chalcolithic p e r i o d (4300-3300 BCE). I n d i v i d u a l r e m a i n s b u r i e d in caves were frequently collected a n d d e p o s i t e d in a ceramic r e c e p tacle s h a p e d like a jar or a h o u s e , called an ossuary (Azor, H a d e r a , Jerusalem, P a l m a h i m , near S h e c h e m ) . [See O s s u ary.] Objects a n d vessels f o u n d in the caves a c c o m p a n y i n g the d e a d include V - s h a p e d bowls, pedestaled bowls, h o l e m o u t h jars, a n d flint tools, m a n y characteristic of the G h a s s u l i a n culture. Ossuaries w e r e n o t u s e d in the t h r e e cave t o m b s at t h e J u d e a n D e s e r t site of N a h a l M i s h m a r : the cave z m a n , w o m a n , a n d four children, a g e d 2-6 years old, w e r e w r a p p e d in b l o o d - s t a i n e d linen cloth and covered with m a t s . T h e d e c e a s e d are t h o u g h t to h a v e b e e n family m e m bers w h o m e t with violence. H i g h l a n d settlers in t h e Early B r o n z e I (3300-3050 BCE) b u r i e d from five to u p to two h u n d r e d " k i n " together in caves (Ai, T e l l e l - F a r a h [ N o r t h ] ) , G e z e r , Jericho, Tell T a ' a n a c h ) , along w i t h p o t t e r y vessels, jewelry, w e a p o n s , a n d o t h e r p e r s o n a l items. A t several sites (Bab e d h - D h r a ' , G e z e r , Jericho, Tell T a ' a n a c h ) skulls w e r e separated from tire o t h e r b o n e s , c o n t i n u i n g a Neolithic practice interpreted as an e l e m e n t in a n a n c e s t o r cult. It is c o m m o n l y a s s u m e d t h a t multiple burial in caves w a s t h e practice of e x t e n d e d families in sedentary agrarian societies, yet n o settlement has b e e n located in the vicinity of the T e l l el-Far'ah ( N o r t h ) cemetery. e
BRIAN HESSE
After a p a u c i t y of burials in E B II—III, a n d divergent p r a c tices d u r i n g E B I V - M i d d l e B r o n z e I, cave burial r e s u m e s in M B II (2000-1550 BCE) with the r e u s e of earlier burial caves at sites including T e l l e l - F a r ' a h ( N o r t h ) , Jericho, a n d M e giddo. By the L a t e B r o n z e A g e (1550-1200 BCE), t h e distri b u t i o n of cave t o m b s w a s c o n c e n t r a t e d in the hill c o u n t r y (Tell e l - F a r ' a h [ N o r t h ] ) , G e z e r , H e b r o n , Jericho, Jerusalem, L a c h i s h ) . A s in the p r e c e d i n g p e r i o d s , n e w or u s e d caves a c c o m m o d a t e d multiple burials with a m o d e s t assemblage of d o m e s t i c pottery a n d few i m p o r t s or metals. G i b e o n a n d H e b r o n p r o v i d e further e x a m p l e s of cemeteries with n o n e a r b y settlements.
C A V E T O M B S . Burial in cave t o m b s w a s practiced from the Chalcolithic p e r i o d o n w a r d , primarily in the hill c o u n t r y of C a n a a n , w h e r e caves o c c u r r e d naturally. B o t h n a t u r a l a n d h e w n caves a p p e a r t o h a v e b e e n conceived of as a n ancestral dwelling for families a n d generations, b a s e d o n t h e selection of m o r t u a r y provisions: c o m m o n h o u s e h o l d c e r a m i c vessels a n d a s s o r t e d items u s e d for food p r o d u c t i o n , clothing, h u n t i n g a n d warfare, f a r m i n g , fishing, a m u s e m e n t , p e r s o n a l g r o o m i n g , symbolic p r o t e c t i o n ( a m u l e t s ) , a n d p e r sonal identification (seals). I n u n d i s t u r b e d e x a m p l e s , i n d i viduals lay e x t e n d e d o n their b a c k , w i t h objects positioned a r o u n d their b o d y , n e a r t h e c e n t e r of t h e cave. B o n e s a n d objects scattered a r o u n d t h e cave's p e r i p h e r y suggest t h a t
T h r o u g h all the social a n d political upheavals of the I r o n A g e , the p a t t e r n of burial practices c h a n g e d little from t h a t in the B r o n z e A g e . C a v e t o m b burials c o n t i n u e d as before, a n d i n several t o m b s ( T e l Aitun, Jericho, L a c h i s h ) skulls were s e p a r a t e d f r o m t h e r e m a i n i n g b o n e s , recalling t h e ear lier practice. A c o m m e n s u r a t e n u m b e r of gifts a c c o m p a n i e d t h e large n u m b e r s of individuals b u r i e d in cave t o m b s . L o cally m a d e bowls, l a m p s , jars, jugs, a n d juglets p r e d o m i n a t e , with a w i d e a s s o r t m e n t of o t h e r ceramic f o r m s , h o u s e h o l d items, a n d personal possessions. T h r o u g h t h e course of the I r o n A g e , as t h e n u m b e r of sites e m p l o y i n g t h e b e n c h t o m b increased, a decreasing n u m b e r of sites b u r i e d their dead in cave t o m b s . T h e r e are t w o likely explanations for the d e creasing u s e of the cave t o m b . O n e possibility is t h a t a d h e r ents of L B highland culture, t h e A m o r i t e s a n d others, lived
Grigson, Caroline. "Size and Sex: Evidence for the Domestication of C a t d e in the N e a r E a s t . " In The Beginnings of Agriculture, edited by Annie Milles et al., p p . 7 7 - 1 0 9 . British Archaeological Reports, In ternational Series, no. 496. Oxford, 1989. T h e most critical, u p - t o date review of the problems of catde domestication in the N e a r East. Mellaart, James. Catal Hiiyuk: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 7 . T h e m o s t comprehensive p o p u l a r book on die site, including m a n y excellent illustrations. U e r p m a n n , Hans-Peter. The Ancient Distribution of Ungulate Mammals in the Middle East. W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 8 7 . Clear a n d comprehensive re view of ancient faunal distributions.
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a m o n g the b e n c h - t o m b - b u r y i n g population (later the J u dahites) a n d c o n t i n u e d t o b u r y their dead in caves. A second possibility is t h a t highland settlers, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, c o n t i n u e d to b u r y their d e a d in caves b e c a u s e caves required less of an investment of t i m e a n d labor t h a n did hewing a b e n c h t o m b . [See also Burial Sites; Burial T e c h n i q u e s ; C a t a c o m b s ; and G r a v e G o o d s . In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael, and Ephraim Stern, eds. Encyclopedia of Archae ological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 7 8 . S u m m a r y of excavations, including results of all earlier expeditions to the sites. B e n - T o r , A m n o n , ed. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. T r a n s l a t e d by R. Greenberg. N e w Haven, 1992. Essays with differing emphases on the Neolithic through the Iron Age II—III periods. Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old T e s t a m e n t , S u p p l e m e n t 1 2 3 . Sheffield, 1 9 9 2 . S u m m a r y and comprehensive catalog of the Iron Age burials. Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. N e w York, 1990. Comprehensive, detailed, well-illustrated survey of biblical archaeology, limited only by the traditionalist biblical inter pretation. S t e m , E p h r a i m , ed. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Jerusalem and N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . Supple ments Avi-Yonah and Stern (above), witii results of m o r e recent excavations and revised interpretations. ELIZABETH BLOCH-SMITH
C A Y O N U , type-site of a Neolithic culture in southeast ern T u r k e y (38°i6' N , 39°43' E ) , with a long a n d u n i n t e r r u p t e d s e q u e n c e from 8250 to 5000 BCE (in uncalibrated years), located along t h e foothills of the E a s t T a u r u s r a n g e , in the plain of E r g a n i , 60 k m (37 mi.) n o r t h of t h e district center of Diyarbakir. T h e site is a low, flat m o u n d (300 X 150 m ) along a small tributary of t h e Tigris River. Evidently, the p a l e o t o p o g r a p h y of the terrain was significantly different in antiquity. A s e c o n d stream, forming a brook or a p o n d , encircled the site o n t h e north, a n d the settlement d e v e l o p e d o n two natural hills, separated by a shallow depression. Cay onii was recovered in 1963 during an extensive surface sur vey of the region. It w a s excavated for sixteen field seasons from 1964 to 1991, within the framework of the Joint P r e historic Project, initially f o u n d e d b y the Prehistory D e p a r t m e n t of die University of Istanbul a n d the Oriental Institute of the University of C h i c a g o , a n d later joined b y K a r l s r u h e a n d R o m e Universities. T h e project was r u n initially b y Halet Carnbel a n d R o b e r t J. B r a i d w o o d (1963-1985) a n d later by M e h m e t O z d o g a n . Culturally, earlier p a r t s of the Cayonii s e q u e n c e r e p r e s e n t the era of Incipient F o o d P r o d u c i n g , m o r e c o m m o n l y k n o w n as the P r e - P o t t e r y Neolithic A ( P P N A ) , w h i c h in time gradually develops into Effective F o o d P r o d u c i n g
( P P N B ) a n d into D e v e l o p e d Village C o m m u n i t i e s (Early P o t t e r y Neolithic). T h i s represents a l m o s t t h e entire r a n g e of t h e transition from a food-collecting to a f o o d - p r o d u c i n g way of life a n d to the f o r m a t i o n of a village e c o n o m y . W i t h an e x p o s u r e exceeding 7,000 sq m , C a y o n t i is t h e m o s t e x tensively excavated Neolithic site in t h e N e a r East. T h e wellpreserved a n d stratified architectural r e m a i n s evince every stage in t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of village a r c h i t e c t u r e , from sim ple, r o u n d huts in wattle a n d d a u b , to very c o m p l e x r e c t a n gular structures in m u d brick. T h e site is also u n i q u e in r e vealing s o m e r e m a r k a b l e aspects of this transitional period; strict rules in t h e plans a n d m e a s u r e m e n t s of buildings; p r e p l a n n e d functional a n d status areas; sophisticated b u i l d i n g t e c h n i q u e s , s u c h as " t e r r a z z o " flooring (see b e l o w ) ; a n d m o n u m e n t a l buildings with special functions, all of w h i c h are indicative of a rigid b u t c o m p l e x social system. Also sig nificant at Cayonti is t h e earliest k n o w n practice of m e t a l lurgy, mainly native c o p p e r a n d malachite. A r c h a e o l o g i c a l S e q u e n c e s . T h e C a y o n t i s e q u e n c e is di vided into t h r e e m a i n phases: t h e P r e - P o t t e r y N e o l i t h i c ( P P N ) , or M a i n C a y o n t i P h a s e (I); t h e P o t t e r y Neolithic (II); a n d later o c c u p a t i o n s of m i n o r i m p o r t a n c e , r a n g i n g from L a t e Chalcolithic t o medieval (III). D u r i n g the later p a r t of t h e Early B r o n z e Age, the settlement shifts t o the other side of t h e river, a n d t h e site w a s u s e d as a burial ground. Phase I. C a y o n t i p h a s e I is s u b d i v i d e d into six s u b p h a s e s . E a c h s u b p h a s e is n a m e d after its prevailing b u i l d i n g t y p e . Round building subphase. T h e earliest structures at C a y o n t i are r a d i o c a r b o n d a t e d t o 10,230 BP a n d are r o u n d or oval h u t s , of wattle a n d d a u b construction, with s e m i s u b t e r r a n e a n floors. I n t h e c o u r s e of this long-lasting period, cov ering at least a t h o u s a n d years, t h e r e is a g r a d u a l d e v e l o p m e n t in c o n s t r u c t i o n t e c h n i q u e s t o structures with stone-lined f o u n d a t i o n s . Grill plan subphase. A s a further d e v e l o p m e n t of r o u n d huts with stone foundations, living floors w e r e raised o n multiple rows of stones laid parallel t o e a c h other, almost resembling a large grill (see figure 1 ) . T w i g s a n d b r a n c h e s w e r e laid over t h e grill-like foundations a n d t h e n coated w i t h a thick layer c o m p o s e d of a m i x t u r e of lime a n d clay. T h i s insulation from g r o u n d w a t e r increased t h e a m o u n t of living area available. T h e grill t e c h n i q u e w a s a revolutionary ar chitectural c o n c e p t in t h e transition f r o m r o u n d to r e c t a n gular plans. T h e grill p l a n at Cayonii developed gradually. T h e stan d a r d m o d e l h a d a tripartite layout, a large living area raised on low-lying grill f o u n d a t i o n s , a closed i n n e r court, a n d a small binlike storage area. W a t t l e a n d d a u b were still t h e m a i n materials u s e d to c o n s t r u c t the b u i l d i n g s ' vaulted u p p e r structures. T h e grill p l a n s u b p h a s e constitutes n u m e r ous building layers, e a c h layer manifesting further elabora tion of t h e building p l a n . H o w e v e r , at any given layer, all buildings are a r r a n g e d in a c h e c k e r b o a r d p a t t e r n , w e r e all
CAYONU
CAYONt). Figure i .
Cell and grill buildings.
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E x c a v a t e d f o u n d a t i o n s of grill b u i l d i n g s a p p e a r at t h e
u p p e r right, cell b u i l d i n g s t o t h e left. (Courtesy M . O z d o g a n )
alike in size, plan, a n d orientation, suggesting a c o m m u n a l c o n s t r u c t i o n effort a c c o r d i n g to a p r e s e t plan. Channeled building subphase. G r a d u a l l y , t h e o p e n i n g s b e t w e e n t h e grill-like f o u n d a t i o n s b e c a m e n a r r o w e r , m e r g i n g into subfloor drainage c h a n n e l s . M u d , as a p r o t o t y p e of m u d brick, was u s e d o n walls for t h e first time. T h e r e w a s also a substantial c h a n g e in settlement p a t t e r n : t h e h o u s e s b e c a m e m o r e sparsely scattered a n d t h e area of t h e settlement ex p a n d e d considerably. Cobble-paved building subphase. A d d i t i o n a l innovation in b u i l d i n g t e c h n i q u e s i n c l u d e d h i g h s t o n e walls, small b u t tresses, a n d possibly a flat roof. D r a i n a g e channels d i s a p p e a r e d a n d insulation from g r o u n d w a t e r was e n s u r e d b y a c o b b l e fill. Cell building subphase. Cell-like small c o m p a r t m e n t s with living floors raised o n stone b a s e m e n t s w e r e u s e d for burials a n d storage (see figure i ) . T h e b u i l d i n g s are considerably larger t h a n in t h e previous p h a s e , with h i g h s t a n d i n g - s t o n e a n d m u d - b r i c k walls. H o u s e s w e r e a r r a n g e d a r o u n d large c o u r t y a r d s in w h i c h all d o m e s t i c a n d industrial activity took place. T h e r e w a s considerable diversity i n p l a n , size, a n d in the artifactual yield of these b u i l d i n g s , i m p l y i n g social a n d functional differentiation. Large-room building subphase. T h e last s u b p h a s e of t h e P P N settlement is p o o r l y d o c u m e n t e d . T h e buildings c o n sisted of o n e or t w o large r o o m s w i t h claylike floors a n d t h e settlement itself b e c a m e smaller. Phase II. Pottery a p p e a r s s u d d e n l y at C a y o n t i (c. 8,020 B P ) , indicating t h a t t h e c o n c e p t was b o r r o w e d from else w h e r e . T h e r e are n o indications of a b r e a k in t h e s e q u e n c e ,
as m o s t e l e m e n t s in t h e material assemblage continue. T h e settlement, t h e n restricted to t h e eastern p a r t of the old P P N m o u n d , s e e m s to have d e v e l o p e d as a c o n g l o m e r a t e of h o u s e s a n d n a r r o w p a s s a g e s w i t h n u m e r o u s annexes a n d alterations. T h r e e distinct h o r i z o n s are a p p a r e n t within this p h a s e . S e t t l e m e n t seems to cease completely d u r i n g t h e H a l afian p e r i o d , just before 7,000 BP. C o m m u n a l B u i l d i n g s a n d A r e a s . Only t h e L a r g e - r o o m Building s u b p h a s e a n d t h e P o t t e r y Neolithic o c c u p a t i o n lacked c o m m u n a l buildings. T h e earliest o n e , a large r o u n d s t r u c t u r e , w a s followed b y a large rectangular building, n a m e d t h e F l a g s t o n e Building b e c a u s e of t h e large polished slabs u s e d for its flooring. M e g a l i t h i c stones were set u p r i g h t into its floor. T h e n e x t p u b l i c b u i l d i n g is t h e so-called Skull Building, n a m e d for t h e r e c o v e r y of seventy h u m a n skulls d u r i n g t h e first e x p o s u r e of t h e building (see figure 2). T h e building was rebuilt at least six t i m e s , with considerable changes in p l a n — b u t it held n u m e r o u s h u m a n skeletons or skeletal fragments in e a c h p h a s e . B o n e s of 295 individuals w e r e collected from t h e building, s o m e p l a c e d carefully a n d others tossed in. T h e last of t h e public buildings is the T e r razzo Building, a large single r o o m with i n n e r buttresses; its floor is of pinkish limestone, elegantly b u r n i s h e d a n d set into a thick lime m o r t a r . D u r i n g t h e c h a n n e l e d building s u b p h a s e a large p a r t of t h e eastern area of t h e s e t t l e m e n t was reserved as a n open area for special functions t h a t are n o t yet u n d e r s t o o d . T w o rows of h u g e s t a n d i n g stones w e r e set into its meticulously leveled a n d p r e p a r e d clayey floor, w h i c h w a s was kept very clean. D u r i n g the cells s u b p h a s e , t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t build-
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CAYONU this assemblage. T h e p r e s e n c e of seashells also indicates long-distance t r a d e . B e a d s , n u m b e r i n g in t h e t h o u s a n d s , m u s t have b e e n a specialized craft a t Cayonii. N a t i v e c o p p e r a n d malachite, available in t h e vicinity of t h e site, were u s e d in t h e grill building s u b p h a s e , b u t t h e r e w a s a n u p s u r g e in metallurgy in t h e p e r i o d of t h e c h a n n e l e d buildings. M e t a l w a s s h a p e d b y heating a n d u s e d in m a k i n g either simple tools or b e a d s a n d inlays. P y r o t e c h n o l o g y i n c l u d e d b u r n i n g lime, w h i c h w a s u s e d b o t h in p r o d u c i n g primitive vessels a n d constructing t h e terrazzo floor. T h e earliest k n o w n " l i m e vessels" a r e from Cayonii. A m o n g specialized crafts, weaving is significantiy d o c u m e n t e d a t Cayonii b y t h e r e covery of a cloth impression m a d e of d o m e s t i c linen, b e i n g t h e earliest k n o w n cloth.
CAYONU. F i g u r e 2. "Skull
building."
(Courtesy M . O z d o g a n )
ings in t h e settlement encircled this o p e n area, w h i c h h a d b e e n e m p t y of buildings. Later, d u r i n g the l a r g e - r o o m b u i l d ing subphase, it w a s t u r n e d into a refuse area. S u b s i s t e n c e a n d S o c i a l S t r u c t u r e . W h e n settlement b e g a n o n C a y o n i i it w a s a sedentary village hosting a c o n siderable p o p u l a t i o n . U p t o t h e e n d of t h e cell s u b p h a s e , however, subsistence d e p e n d e d mainly o n h u n t i n g wild a n imals a n d gatiiering wild fruit—though cultivation of s o m e cereals, including w h e a t a n d lentils, h a d b e e n k n o w n b y t h e latter part of t h e r o u n d - h o u s e subphase. By t h e e n d of t h e cell s u b p h a s e , h e r d s of domestic sheep a n d goat w e r e s u d denly i n t r o d u c e d to t h e site from elsewhere, resulting n o t only in a sharp decline in h u n t i n g activities, b u t also i n t h e collapse of t h e traditional social structure. D u r i n g t h e h u n t ing stage t h e site m u s t h a v e b e e n tightly controlled b y a s o cially stratified society. Status objects, as weE as public buildings a n d t h e a p p e a r a n c e of a n organized settlement, disappear almost completely b y t h e t i m e of t h e l a r g e - r o o m building s u b p h a s e . T e c h n o l o g y , A s s e m b l a g e s , a n d T r a d e . T h e artifactual assemblage includes b o n e a n d g r o u n d , polished, or c h i p p e d stone (mainly basalt, flint, a n d obsidian) objects. T h e latter were traded f r o m a distance of at least 150 k m ( 9 3 m i . ) . L o n g obsidian blades with r e t o u c h e d steep sides, also k n o w n as t h e Cayonii blade, a r e t h e m o s t significant i m p l e m e n t s in
D a t i n g . Cayonii is d a t e d b y a series of radioactive dates. A s n o t e d above, t h e earliest dates for t h e r o u n d h o u s e s u b p h a s e a r e a r o u n d 10,230 B P a n d 8,020 B P f o r t h e p o t t e r y p h a s e . I t is clear t h a t t h e "Cayonii c u l t u r e " is a p a r t of t h e " N e a r E a s t e r n " Neolithic tradition, d e v e l o p i n g along t h e s a m e lines, a n d sharing n u m e r o u s cultural i n n o v a t i o n s . H o w e v e r , in contrast t o t h e other N e a r E a s t e r n cultures of t h e s o u t h e r n semiarid z o n e s , a n almost completely different m o d e l of subsistence seems t o have d e v e l o p e d in t h e envi ronmentally rich areas of t h e E a s t T a u r u s r a n g e . R e c e n t e x cavations of sites s u c h as Hallan Cemi, 150 k m east of Ca yonii, h a s clearly indicated t h e a u t o c h t h o n o u s character, as well as t h e antiquity of this culture, going as early as t h e P r o t o - N e o l i t h i c P e r i o d . T h e earliest s u b p h a s e of Cayonii, being a direct d e s c e n d a n t of H a l l a n Qemi culture, also shares typical e l e m e n t s of N e a r E a s t e r n P P N A h o r i z o n , such as t h e r o u n d buildings, t h e s o called " N e m r i k p o i n t s , " a n d so forth. O f t h e other excavated N e o l i t h i c sites in t h e region, N e v a h Qori revealed architectural layers parallel with the "channeled building" and "cobble-paved building" subphases of Cayonii, while Cafer H o y i i k layers parallel t h e " c e l l " s u b p h a s e a n d t h o s e at Gritille t h e t e r m i n a l p a r t of t h e pre-pottery sequence. [See also
Catal Hoyiik; Hacilar; and N e v a h Cori.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braidwood, L i n d a S., a n d R o b e r t J. Braidwood, eds. Prehistoric Village Archaeology in South-Eastern Turkey. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 138. Oxford, 1 9 8 2 . Browman Morales, Vivian. Figurines and Other Clay Objects from Sarab and Cayonii. Oriental Institute C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , 2 5 . Chicago, 1990. Cambel, Halet, a n d R o b e r t J. Braidwood, e d s . Prehistoric Research in Southeastern Anatolia. Istanbul, 1980. Muhly, James D . " C a y o n i i Tepesi a n d t h e Beginnings of Metallurgy in the Ancient W o r l d . " I n Old World Archaeometallurgy, edited by Andreas H a u p t m a n n et al., p p . 1 - 1 1 . B o c h u m , 1 9 8 9 . Ozdogan, M e h m e t , a n d Ash Ozdogan. "Cayonii: A C o n s p e c t u s of R e cent W o r k . " I n Prehistoire du Levant: Processus du changements culturels, edited b y Olivier A u r e n c h e et al., p p . 3 8 7 - 3 9 6 , Paris, 1 9 9 0 . Ozdogan, M e h m e t , a n d Asli Ozdogan. "Pre-Halafian Pottery of S o u t h eastern Anatolia, with Special Reference t o t h e Cayonii S e q u e n c e , " In Between the Rivers and Over the Mountains: Festschrift for Alba
CENTRAL MOAB Palmieri, edited by Marcella F r a n g i p a n e et al., p p . 8 7 - 1 0 3 . R o m e , 1993. MEHMET OZDOGAN
C E N T R A L M O A B . T h e region immediately east of t h e D e a d Sea, k n o w n as M o a b in a n c i e n t times, consists of a n a r r o w strip of cultivable l a n d b e t w e e n the r u g g e d D e a d Sea e s c a r p m e n t a n d d i e Syrian (or N o r t h Arabian) desert. T h i s is rolling plateau for t h e m o s t part, b u t it is i n t e r r u p t e d by t h e d e e p W a d i el-Mujib c a n y o n t h a t separates n o r t h e r n M o a b from central M o a b , a n d t h e less steep b u t equally formidable W a d i el-Hasa c a n y o n t h a t b o u n d s M o a b on t h e s o u t h . N o r t h e r n M o a b is m u c h better k n o w n from epig r a p h i c sources, the H e b r e w Bible, a n d archaeological e x ploration, b u t p r e s u m a b l y central M o a b , t h e region b e t w e e n t h e M u j i b a n d t h e H a s a , w o u l d h a v e b e e n the heartland of a n c i e n t M o a b i t e settlement. L a t e r , central M o a b was p a r t of die N a b a t e a n realm, until 106 CE, w h e n T r a j a n joined N a b a t e a witii Perea a n d t h e D e c a p o l i s to f o r m the R o m a n p r o v i n c e of Arabia P e t r a e a . W r i t t e n sources from t h e R o m a n period indicate t h a t R a b b a t h m o b a ( p r e s e n t - d a y erRabbah) and Charachmoba (present-day Kerak) were im p o r t a n t cities at the time. B e c a u s e central M o a b is situated b e t w e e n M e c c a a n d D a m a s c u s , it w o u l d h a v e b e e n central t o t h e U m a y y a d caliphate. T h e C r u s a d e r s built a major cas tle at K e r a k to p r o t e c t the s o u t h e a s t e r n flank of t h e L a t i n k i n g d o m of Jerusalem. T h e M a m l u k s e x p a n d e d t h e castle a n d K e r a k flourished d u r i n g the t h i r t e e n t h a n d early four t e e n t h centuries CE, w h e n it served as a favored city of p o litical exiles from the M a m l u k c o u r t in C a i r o . C e n t r a l M o a b e x p e r i e n c e d increasing u r b a n decline thereafter, especially d u r i n g the O t t o m a n period, w h e n it w a s d o m i n a t e d b y fiercely i n d e p e n d e n t b e d o u i n tribes. All t o w n s a n d villages h a d b e e n a b a n d o n e d b y the b e g i n n i n g of t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y CE, e x c e p t for four straggling settlements (Kerak, I r a q , K a t h r a b b a , a n d K h a n z i r a ) , a n d outsiders e n t e r e d t h e region at risk. [See K e r a k ; ' I r a q el-Amir.] T h i s situation c o n t i n u e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y ; t h e results w e r e t h a t while o t h e r p a r t s of Palestine w e r e b e i n g m a p p e d a n d explored for archaeological r e m a i n s , c e n tral M o a b w a s largely b y p a s s e d . A m o n g t h e ttavelers w h o did enter the region a n d n o t e d in their travel a c c o u n t s its m a n y a b a n d o n e d r u i n s w e r e U l r i c h J. Seetzen (1805), J o h a n n L u d w i g B u r c k h a r d t (1812), C h a r l e s L . I r b y a n d J a m e s M a n g l e s (1818), Felicien d e Saulcy (1851), C . M a u s s a n d H e n r i Sauvaire (1866), H e n r y B a k e r T r i s t r a m (1872), C h a r l e s M . D o u g h t y (1875), a n d G r e y Hill (1890, 1895). A s the c e n t u r y d r e w t o a close, h o w e v e r , even the t o p o g r a p h y of central M o a b r e m a i n e d p o o r l y u n d e r s t o o d , a n d n o n e of its ruins h a d b e e n e x a m i n e d in a n y detail. T h e n , b e t w e e n 1894 a n d 1910, the O t t o m a n g o v e r n m e n t reasserted its a u thority in s o u t h e r n T r a n s j o r d a n , r e n d e r i n g central M o a b a n d its archaeological r u i n s m o r e accessible for investiga
447
tion. D u r i n g t h a t brief p e r i o d R u d o l f - E r n s t B r i i n n o w a n d Alfred v o n D o m a s z e w s k i c o n d u c t e d a systematic study of t h e R o m a n r o a d system a n d associated fortifications, while Alois M u s i l explored the g e o g r a p h y of s o u t h e r n T r a n s j o r d a n a n d p r e p a r e d a 1:300,000 scale m a p that included t h e n a m e s a n d a p p r o x i m a t e locations of m o r e t h a n o n e h u n d r e d r u i n s b e t w e e n t h e M u j i b a n d the H a s a . T h e r e a f t e r , e x c e p t for a brief excursion b y William F o x well Albright in 1924, t h e archaeological r e m a i n s of central M o a b received n o further attention of c o n s e q u e n c e until 1930, w h e n R e g i n a l d H e a d discovered t h e B a l u ' stela [See Balu'.] T h i s discovery p r o m p t e d J o h n W i n t e r Crowfoot a n d Albright t o m o u n t a t w o - w e e k e x p e d i t i o n in 1933, at w h i c h time C r o w f o o t m a d e s o u n d i n g s at K h i r b e t el-Balu' a n d Al bright c o n d u c t e d s o u n d i n g s at A d e r . T h a t s a m e year N e l s o n G l u e c k b e g a n his i m p o r t a n t survey of T r a n s j o r d a n . P a u l W . L a p p excavated B a b e d h - D h r a ' in 1965-1967 a n d Fawzi Z a y a d i n e cleared a first-century, BCE N a b a t e a n t o m b n e a r D h a t R a s in 1968. [See B a b e d h - D h r a ' . ] O t h e r w i s e , Glueck's survey r e p o r t , p u b l i s h e d in t h e Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1934,1935, 1939), stood as the final w o r d on the archaeology of central M o a b until the late 1970s. Specifically, in 1976 ( a n d r e t u r n i n g in 1982), Emilio Olavarri (1983) c o n d u c t e d s o u n d i n g s at M e d e i n e t elM u ' a r r a j e h (i.e., K h i r b e t e l - M e d e i n e h n o r t h overlooking W a d i L e j j u n ) , w h i c h p r o v e d t o b e an Early I r o n Age for tress. [See M e d e i n e h , K h i r b e t el-.] T h a t s a m e year S. T h o m a s Parker (1987) b e g a n a study of the R o m a n limes Arabicus in T r a n s j o r d a n ; t h e project has involved, b e g i n n i n g in 1980, excavations at t h e L a t e R o m a n legionary fortress of Lejjun a n d a survey (led by F r a n k K o u c k y ) of a r c h a e o logical features in the i m m e d i a t e vicinity. [See L i m e s A r a bicus.] M e a n w h i l e , from 1978 to 1983, J. M a x w e l l Miller (1991) c o n d u c t e d a general survey of the w h o l e plateau b e tween the Mujib a n d the H a s a , c o m p l e m e n t e d by less e x tensive surveys along t h e wadis leading from the plateau to t h e D e a d Sea. Siegfried M i t t m a n n a n d L i n d a K. Jacobs e x p l o r e d W a d i 'Isal in 1979 a n d 1981, respectively ( M i t t m a n n , 1982; J a c o b s , 1983). U d o W o r s c h e c h e x a m i n e d sites in W a d i I b n H a m m a d a n d t h e n o r t h w e s t q u a d r a n t of the pla teau in 1983-1985. W o r s c h e c h also (1986) b e g a n n e w e x cavations at K h i r b e t el-Balu' in 1985 that p r o d u c e d p r i m a r ily Iron A g e r e m a i n s . R o b i n M . B r o w n (1989) c o n d u c t e d a s o u n d i n g in d i e Palace R e c e p t i o n Hall in t h e K e r a k citadel in 1987 a n d distinguished M a m l u k a n d O t t o m a n phases. J e r e m y J o h n s a n d Alison M . M c Q u i t t y (1989) e x a m i n e d several medieval Islamic sites o n the p l a t e a u in 1986 a n d h a v e excavated K h i r b e t F a r i s [See Faris, Khirbet.] Altiiough attention f r o m archaeologists to central M o a b increased, its archaeological features r e m a i n poorly k n o w n . M u c h of w h a t is k n o w n is derived from surface surveys c o n d u c t e d with benefit of very little stratified pottery from die
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region itself to provide control. It does seem clear, however, t h a t central M o a b w a s o c c u p i e d to s o m e degree t h r o u g h o u t historical times. M o r e o v e r , to the extent that the relative density of sites with surface pottery from a given p e r i o d cor r e s p o n d s to the density of sedentary p o p u l a t i o n d u r i n g t h a t p e r i o d (which m a y n o t b e t h e case), s o m e t r e n d s are n o ticeable. Central M o a b seems to h a v e h a d significant sed entary occupation d u r i n g the Early Bronze Age, for e x a m ple, with the strongest s h o w i n g during E B II—III a n d slightiy less during E B IV. F e w e r sites p r e s e n t surface p o t t e r y for t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e , a t r e n d that seems to have c o n t i n u e d well into the L a t e B r o n z e Age. At that time, a n u p w a r d t r e n d in sedentary p o p u l a t i o n seems to have b e g u n , p r o b ably n e a r the end of the L a t e B r o n z e Age, t h a t c o n t i n u e d until Iron II. T h e transition from I r o n II to t h e Hellenistic/ N a b a t e a n period is unclear, b u t the latter period is strongly represented, especially with N a b a t e a n pottery, t h r o u g h o u t central M o a b . N u m e r o u s sites with R o m a n a n d B y z a n t i n e pottery indicate a c o n t i n u a t i o n of relatively dense sedentary p o p u l a t i o n until early Islamic times. Relatively few sites p r o d u c e d surface p o t t e r y clearly attributable to t h e early Islamic periods, in contrast to t h e A y y u b i d / M a m l u k , w h i c h is well represented. T w o intriguing basalt stelae have b e e n discovered in c e n tral M o a b , t h e Balu stela m e n t i o n e d above a n d the so-called S h i h a n stela, w h i c h actually was discovered at R u j m el' A b d / F a q u ' by de Saulcy in 1851. T h e Balu' stela b e a r s a n illegible inscription a n d depicts three figures, apparently a local ruler flanked b y a g o d a n d a goddess. T h e script a n d language are u n c e r t a i n , b u t t h e scene reflects E g y p t i a n in fluence suggestive of t h e N e w K i n g d o m period—for ex ample, t h e central figure wears a headdress of the sort u s u ally w o r n by Shasu in E g y p t i a n scenes, while the g o d wears t h e d o u b l e c r o w n of u p p e r a n d lower E g y p t a n d t h e g o d d e s s wears a crown similar to t h a t of Osiris. T h e S h i h a n stela presents in bas-relief a m a n in h e l m e t a n d short skirt, h o l d ing a spear, with an animal, possibly a lion, at his left. Sty listic similarities with m o n u m e n t a l art of t h e " N e o - H i t t i t e " cities in n o r t h e r n Syria suggest a n I r o n A g e date. A n in scription fragment, reportedly discovered at Kerak, exhibits parts of four lines in C a n a a n i t e ( M o a b i t e ) script similar to tiiat of the famous M e s h a inscription discovered at D i b o n . In one of the b r o k e n lines it is possible to r e a d "Kfmsyt king of M o a b . " [See D i b o n ; M o a b i t e Stone.] Finally, a large proto-Ionic pilaster capital was found at M e d e i b i t h a t r e sembles those f o u n d at several I r o n Age sites west of t h e J o r d a n River ( H a z o r , Jerusalem, M e g i d d o , R a m a t R a h e l ) . 1
[See also M o a b . ]
1 9 0 4 - 1 9 0 9 . Surveys all published materials relevant to the archae ology of M o a b , up to and including their own study of the R o m a n road and fortification system. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine, Vols. 1 - 3 . Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 4 , 1 5 , 1 8 / 1 9 . N e w H a ven,
I934-I939-
Miller, J. Maxwell, ed. Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau. A m e r ican Schools of Oriental Research, Archaeological Reports, 1. At lanta, 1991. A comprehensive gazetteer of archaeological sites on the central Moabite plateau, widi full bibliography for each site t h r o u g h 1990.
Recent Field Reports Brown, Robin M . "Excavations in the F o u r t e e n t h C e n t u r y A . D . M a m luk Palace at Kerak." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 (1989): 2 8 7 - 3 0 4 . Jacobs, Linda K. " S u r v e y of the South Ridge of W a d i 'Isal, 1 9 8 1 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 27 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 2 4 5 - 2 7 4 , figs. 1 - 1 5 . Johns, Jeremy, and Alison M . M c Q u i t t y . " T h e Paris Project: Prelimi nary Report u p o n the 1986 and 1988 S e a s o n s . " Levant 21 (1989): 63-95M i t t m a n n , Siegfried. " T h e Ascent of L u h i t h . " I n Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited b y A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 1 7 5 - 1 8 0 . A m m a n , 1982. Reports M i t t m a n n ' s survey of W a d i 'Isal. Olavarri, Emilio. " S o n d e o arqueologico en Khirbet M e d e i n e h junto a Smakieh (Jordania)." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 22 ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 3 6 - 1 4 9 . Olavarri, Emilio. " L a c a m p a g n e de fouilles 1982 a K h i r b e t M e d e i n e t al-Mu'arradjeh pres de Smakieh ( K e r a k ) . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of'Jordan 27 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 6 5 - 1 7 8 . Parker, S. T h o m a s , ed. The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Interim Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1080-1085. 2 vols. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 340. Oxford, 1987. Parker, S. T h o m a s . "Preliminary R e p o r t on t h e 1987 Season of the Limes Arabicus Project." In Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1983-87, edited by Walter E. Rast, p p . 8 9 - 1 3 6 . Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, S u p p l e m e n t n o . 26. Baltimore, 1990. Worschech, U d o F . Ch., et al. " T h e F o u r d i Survey Season in the N o r t h - W e s t Ard el-Kerak, a n d Soundings at Balu', 1 9 8 6 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 30 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 2 8 5 - 3 1 0 ,
Inscriptions and Artistic Representations Reed, William L., a n d F r e d V. Winnett. " A F r a g m e n t of a n Early M o abite Inscription from K e r a k . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 1 7 2 ( 1 9 6 3 ) : 1 - 9 . W a r d , William A., a n d M . F . Martin. " T h e Balu'a Stele: A N e w T r a n scription with Palaeographic and Historical N o t e s . " Annual of the Department of Antiqidties of Jordan 8-9 ( 1 9 6 4 ) : 5 - 2 9 . W a r m e n b o l , Eugene. " L a stele de R u f m el-'Abd (Louvre A O 5 0 5 5 ) : U n e image de divinite moabite du IXeme-VIIIeme siecle av. N . E . " Levant is (1983): 6 3 - 7 5 . J. MAXWELL MILLER
CERAMIC ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Briinnow, Rudolf-Ernst, a n d Alfred von Domaszewski. Die Provincia Arabia auf Grund zweier in denjahre 1897 und 1808 unlemammenen Reisen und der Berichte friiherer Reisender, 3 vols. Strassburg,
Archae ologists w h o s t u d y living peoples a n d their p o t t e r y for t h e p u r p o s e of addressing p r o b l e m s e n c o u n t e r e d w i t h ancient p o t t e r y engage in c e r a m i c e t h n o a r c h a e o l o g y . I n c o n t r a s t t o t h e social a n d political topics e t h n o g r a p h e r s investigate
CERAMIC ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY a m o n g extant c o m m u n i t i e s , ethnoarchaeologists e x a m i n e material culture to d o c u m e n t s o u r c e s of variation in c o n t e m p o r a r y artifacts. T h i s enables t h e m to m a k e inferences a b o u t t h e diversity detected in e x c a v a t e d artifacts. O n e goal is to u n d e r s t a n d b e t t e r t h e h u m a n b e h a v i o r responsible for t h e artifacts. All material culture is suitable for e x a m i n a t i o n . C e r a m i c e t h n o a r c h a e o l o g y a m o n g potters practicing tradi tional technologies (i.e., w i t h o u t t h e u s e of electrical o r other m o d e r n conveniences) a n d w h o s e finished p r o d u c t s (cook ing p o t s , jugs, jars, l a m p s ) a r e for u s e b y local clientele r a t h e r t h a n tourists, is especially relevant given t h e a b u n d a n c e of p o t t e r y archaeologists find in excavations. I n t h e a n c i e n t N e a r East a n d M e d i t e r r a n e a n basin, tire material u s e d m o s t c o m m o n l y t o p r o d u c e containers of all sizes a n d s h a p e s w a s clay. P o t t e r y was inexpensive a n d highly breakable. B e c a u s e fired clay b e c o m e s r o c k - h a r d , s h e r d s of b r o k e n p o t s , w h i c h litter a n c i e n t sites, are virtually indestructible. A n c i e n t p o t t e r y is i m p o r t a n t t o archaeologists b o t h b e c a u s e of its h i g h rate of survival a n d t h e rapidity with w h i c h changes in s h a p e a n d d e c o r a t i o n occur. I t h a s b e e n u s e d to establish relative chronologies; t o establish t h e function of buildings; t o t r a c e t h e social a n d e c o n o m i c implications of t h e repertoire of f o r m s ; a n d t o m a k e inferences a b o u t cultic practices. C e r a m i c e t h n o a r c h a e o l o g y e n h a n c e s these studies b e c a u s e it can explain sources of diversity in f o r m a n d finish t h a t m a y h a v e little t o do w i t h c h r o n o l o g y b u t , r a t h e r , reflect cultural preference: archaeologists w a n t to k n o w w h e t h e r t w o jugs w i t h similar b u t distinct p a i n t e d p a t t e r n s reflect different, yet coexisting, s o u r c e s o r t w o consecutive t i m e periods. T h e goal of e t h n o a r c h a e o l o g y is n o t only to observe a n d r e c o r d p o t t e r s a n d their society, b u t t o d o so with t h e i n t e n tion of a d d r e s s i n g t h e specific q u e s t i o n s ancient c e r a m i c s p o s e . E t h n o a r c h a e o l o g i s t s initially state t h e questions u n d e r investigation a n d t h e n select a n a p p r o p r i a t e c o m m u n i t y for a l o n g - t e r m field project. D u r i n g t h e project, wares of a r e p resentative s a m p l e of p o t t e r s are r e c o r d e d u s i n g quantitative m e a n s w h e n e v e r possible. A s a m p l e ideally includes p e o p l e of different g e n e r a t i o n s , g e n d e r , a n d families a n d those b o r n in t h e c o m m u n i t y as well as n e w c o m e r s . It is essential to learn if a n d h o w t h e m a n u f a c t u r i n g t e c h n i q u e , division of labor, family association, a n d p o t t e r ' s age a n d g e n d e r i m p a c t o n t h e finished p r o d u c t . Interviews w i t h p o t t e r s a n d o t h e r m e m b e r s of t h e c o m m u n i t y are p a r t of t h e field research. R a t h e r t h a n rely o n verbal a c c o u n t s alone, e t h n o a r c h a e o l ogists systematically o b s e r v e w h a t e v e r occurs relating t o pottery. O n t h e n e x t level, t h e ethnoarchaeologist m i g h t c o n d u c t a similar s t u d y at a n e a r b y c o m m u n i t y , a c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s p r o d u c t i o n location, t o c o m p a r e w a r e s a n d d y n a m i c s of p r o d u c t i o n , W i t h o u t l o n g - t e r m field w o r k a n d a representative s a m p l e , t h e result m a y b e a d i s t o r t e d a n d i n c o m p l e t e p i c t u r e .
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R e p r e s e n t a t i v e samples ideally include as m a n y variables as possible—a difficult task b e c a u s e t h e n u m b e r of p o t t e r s is d e c r e a s i n g steadily in m a n y parts of t h e world. U n l e s s an a p p r o p r i a t e c o m m u n i t y is selected, t h e results m a y n o t b e suitable for addressing t h e issues archaeological materials raise. A n i n d u s t r y of w h e e l - t h r o w n tourist wares is n o t suit able for c o m p a r i s o n s w i t h a n c i e n t h a n d m a d e wares p r o d u c e d a n d u s e d b y h o u s e h o l d potters a n d sold or b a r t e r e d with a n e i g h b o r i n g c o m m u n i t y . E t h n o a r c h a e o l o g i s t s e x a m i n e topics related to clay p r o c u r e m e n t a n d processing; m a n u f a c t u r i n g t e c h n i q u e s ; sur face t r e a t m e n t s ; firing t e c h n i q u e s ; breakage rates; sales a n d distribution; seasonality; o r g a n i z a t i o n of t h e industry; dis card a n d r e u s e of newly m a d e a n d u s e d w a r e s ; the artifacts, layout, a n d r e m a i n s (material correlates) associated with p o t t e r y p r o d u c t i o n locations; a n d t h e sources of variation in all aspects of t h e industry. A t t e n t i o n is focused o n issues s u c h as vessel longevity, u s e , a n d reuse; t h e relationship b e t w e e n wealth and t h e n u m b e r of p o t s in individual h o m e s ; the n u m b e r of p e o p l e a n d p o t s in a h o m e ; t h e p r e s e n c e a n d u s e of n o n c e r a m i c containers; t h e p o t t e r s ' social status; a n d local n a m e s a n d pottery classification systems. E t h n o a r chaeologists c a n test t h e validity of t e r m s (such as full-time or part-time craft specialists) archaeologists u s e in describing ancient p o t t e r s . T h e considerable a m b i g u i t y in these t e r m s , in light of t h e data from ethnoarchaeological studies, sug gests t h a t t h e t e r m s are t o o rigid a n d divisive. O n e o u t c o m e of r e c e n t r e s e a r c h suggests t h a t at any given time in antiquity t h e c e r a m i c s i n d u s t r y was never a m o n o lithic, static, h o m o g e n e o u s e n t e r p r i s e characterized b y p o t ters w o r k i n g at a single level of p r o d u c t i o n ; it is m o r e a c curately r e p r e s e n t e d as different traditions coexisting. O n C y p r u s t o d a y , for e x a m p l e , p o t t e r s in a secluded rural vil lage c o n t i n u e t o m a k e goat-milking p o t s a n d jars to store cheese a n d water; at t h e s a m e time these old-fashioned ves sels h a v e d i s a p p e a r e d from t h e repertoire of rural village potters w h o live a n d w o r k close to an u r b a n center, yet t h e t w o villages coexist ( L o n d o n , 1989, p . 227). In J o r d a n , vil lage w o m e n c o n t i n u e t o build pots b y h a n d from locally available clays, while m a l e potters n e a r b y t h r o w p o t s m a d e of i m p o r t e d clays a n d surface t r e a t m e n t s ( L o n d o n a n d Sin clair, 1992), Diversity characterizes t h e i n d u s t r y r a t h e r t h a n uniformity. B r o k e n p o t t e r y was recycled t h r o u g h o u t antiquity: sherds w e r e suitable surfaces for writing transactions a n d notes with ink. [See Ostracon.] Ethnoarchaeological research o n C y p r u s ( L o n d o n , 1989) d e m o n s t r a t e s t h a t sherds are also suitable b u i l d i n g materials; animal feeders; protection for seedlings; carriers (of charcoal from t h e kitchen t o t h e lain); w i n d p r o t e c t i o n for candles in cemeteries; a n d for separating p o t s f r o m kiln walls d u r i n g firing. Potters in traditional societies are able t o identify t h e work of individual potters b y considering a vessel's overall p r o -
450
CERAMICS: Typology and Technology
portions, its surface t r e a t m e n t , a n d its finish. T h e s e s a m e criteria can help archaeologists identify the work of individ ual potters in antiquity in order t o address the issues t h a t concern h o w society a n d die industry were organized. [See also Ethnoarchaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Kramer, Carol. " C e r a m i c Ethnoarchaeology." Annual Review of An thropology 1 4 (1989): 7 7 - 1 0 2 . Overview of the subject. L o n d o n , Gloria A n n e . " P a s t a n d Present: T h e Village Potters of C y p r u s . " Biblical Archaeologist 52 (1989): 2 1 9 - 2 2 9 . L o n d o n , Gloria A n n e , et al. Traditional Pottery in Cyprus. M a i n z am Rhein, 1990. Account of one of the few remaining countries in the region with rural potters practicing a traditional technology to p r o duce wares for local use. L o n d o n , Gloria A n n e , and Marlene Sinclair. " A n Ethnoarchaeological Survey of Potters in J o r d a n . " In Madaba Plains Project 2: The 1987 Season at Tell el-' Umeiri and Vicinity and Subsequent Studies, edited by Larry G . Herr et al., p p . 420-428. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 9 2 . Brief report on two groups of Jordanian potters. Longacre, William A „ ed. Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology. T u c s o n , 1 9 9 1 . T h e most recent collection of articles dealing with ceramic ethnoar chaeology worldwide. Nicholson, Paul, a n d Helen Patterson. "Pottery Making in U p p e r Egypt: An Ethnoarchaeological S t u d y . " World Archaeology 17 (1985): 2 2 2 - 2 3 9 . Unlike other places in the N e a r East, pottery p r o duction in Egypt remains a viable livelihood. GLORIA A N N E LONDON
C E R A M I C S . [This entry surveys the history of ceramic artifacts with reference to the technologies used to create them, the uses to which they were put, and their overall role in the cultures and societies in which they figure. It comprises seven articles: Typology and Technology M e s o p o t a m i a n Ceramics of t h e Neolithic t h r o u g h N e o Babylonian P e r i o d s Syro-Palestinian C e r a m i c s of t h e Neolithic, B r o n z e , a n d Iron Ages Ceramics of t h e Persian P e r i o d Ceramics of t h e Hellenistic a n d R o m a n P e r i o d s Ceramics of t h e Byzantine P e r i o d Ceramics of t h e Islamic Period The first serves as an overview, providing a discussion of the importance of typology for dating purposes and the development of specific typologies. The remaining articles treat the artifacts of specific periods and regions]
Typology and Technology Archaeologists excavating ancient sites find t h o u s a n d s of ar tifacts that m u s t b e described, defined, a n d interpreted in order to reconstruct t h e societies responsible for t h e m . C e ramic wares, or pottery, represent o n e of t h e m o s t a b u n d a n t finds t h r o u g h o u t t h e ancient N e a r E a s t a n d t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . Given t h e plastic n a t u r e of clay, t h e raw m a
terial of pottery, a r a n g e of basic shapes c a n b e f o r m e d , a n d w h e n die clay is fired it b e c o m e s virtually indestructible. T o describe t h e pots a n d sherds ( b r o k e n pieces of p o t t e r y ) t h e y find, archaeologists have created typologies, or classifica tions, that g r o u p pieces b a s e d o n stylistic similarities. T o d a y , n e w technological considerations ( h o w a n d of w h a t a p o t was m a d e ) are c o n t r i b u t i n g to t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of t h o s e ty pologies. T h e first goal of a typological o r d e r i n g is t o g e n erate types defined b y specific attributes a n d t h e n to discern the m e a n i n g or significance of t h e t y p e s . T h e c o n c e p t of " t y p e " refers to a g r o u p of artifacts t h a t r e s e m b l e each o t h e r a n d that c a n b e differentiated from o t h e r g r o u p s . D i s t i n guishing attributes include aspects of form: m o r p h o l o g y , or s h a p e , a n d size; style: surface t r e a t m e n t a n d d e c o r a t i o n ; a n d technology: a p o t ' s materials a n d m e t h o d of m a n u f a c t u r e . E a c h typology addresses specific q u e s t i o n s a n d serves a dif ferent, specific p u r p o s e . C e r a m i c T y p o l o g i e s . Initially, c e r a m i c typologies w e r e devised to a d d r e s s chronology. B e c a u s e c e r a m i c w a r e s are fragile, the rate of b r e a k a g e is high; t h u s , t h e r e is a c o n s t a n t n e e d to replace w h a t breaks. A s forms are r e p l a c e d over time, the t e n d e n c y is to c h a n g e their s h a p e a n d surface treat m e n t . It is t h e p e r i o d i c changes d u r i n g r e p l a c e m e n t t h a t m a k e pottery a chronological marker: s e q u e n c e s c a n b e dis c e r n e d for the local culture or for t h e history of a region. C o m p a r a t i v e chronological studies focus o n t h e superficial modifications in vessel m o r p h o l o g y a n d surface t r e a t m e n t ( d e c o r a t i o n ) — t h e m o s t obvious changes over time. B e c a u s e s h a p e and decoration c a n c h a n g e relatively quickly, a r c h a e ologists c a n assign a relative date to each p o t t e r y style. O n c e t h e p o t t e r y is d a t e d , archaeologists c a n date t h e deposit in w h i c h it is f o u n d . B a s e d on ethnoarchaeological studies in C y p r u s , t h e life s p a n of p o r t a b l e jugs u s e d for drinking w a t e r is n o m o r e t h a n six m o n t h s to t w o years before t h e walls b e c o m e clogged with r o c k a n d m i n e r a l deposits ( G . L o n d o n , F . E g o u m e n d i o u , a n d V. K a r a g e o r g h i s in Traditional Pottery in Cyprus, M a i n z , 1989, p . 33). I n contrast, i m m o b i l e w a t e r storejars could last for m o r e t h a n a c e n t u r y . As a c o n s e q u e n c e of t h e differences in their daily u s e , t h e f o r m e r c h a n g e m o r e rapidly t h a n t h e latter. H o w e v e r , finding sim ilar pots at t w o different sites does n o t m e a n t h a t t h e sites w e r e either c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s or similar. T h e p o t t e r y m a y h a v e b e e n c u r a t e d or saved from o n e g e n e r a t i o n t o t h e next, or types m a y h a v e r e a c h e d o n e site a d e c a d e o r m o r e later. S u c h relative c e r a m i c chronologies are i m p o r t a n t , b u t t h e y c a n n o t address t h e c o m p l e x issues of w h e r e , h o w , a n d b y w h o m pottery w a s m a d e . A n s w e r s to those q u e s t i o n s h a v e i m p o r t a n t implications for u n d e r s t a n d i n g h o w ancient s o cieties a n d e c o n o m i e s functioned. T h e earliest typologies focused o n style—on b o t h f o r m a n d finish ( m o r p h o l o g y a n d d e c o r a t i o n ) — r a t h e r t h a n o n m a n u f a c t u r i n g technology. A s p e c t s related t o f o r m are b o d y shape a n d function (bowl, jug, etc.) a n d t h e s h a p e of t h e r i m , base, h a n d l e s , a n d other accessory e l e m e n t s , s u c h as a
CERAMICS: Typology and Technology s p o u t or a lid. Surface finish involves d e c o r a t i o n a n d various t r e a t m e n t s s u c h as a d d i n g p a i n t , slip, or clay a p p l i q u e ; r e m o v i n g clay b y incising a n d carving; t e x t u r i n g b y scoring, s t a m p i n g , i m p r e s s i n g , a n d rouletting; r u b b i n g , polishing, a n d b u r n i s h i n g with a tool; a n d t r e a t m e n t s created b y t h e firing p r o c e s s , s u c h as m o t t l i n g . W h i l e m o s t stylistic attri b u t e s a n d c h a n g e s a r e a p p a r e n t t o t h e eye, subtleties exist t h a t are s o m e t i m e s u n d e r s t o o d subjectively, with e x p e r i e n c e . I n contrast, t h e technological aspects of m a n u f a c t u r e r e q u i r e sophisticated l a b o r a t o r y t e c h n i q u e s (mineralogical a n d chemical analysis, r a d i o g r a p h y ) a n d an u n d e r s t a n d i n g of h o w p o t t e r y is m a d e . A c e r a m i c technologist investigating w h y a p o t looks t h e w a y it d o e s (its f o r m a n d finish) c o n siders its stylistic and technological features. T h e resulting analysis is therefore m o r e objective t h a n a reliance only o n f o r m a n d finish. F o r a typology to b e useful for m a k i n g c o m p a r i s o n s , e a c h t y p e of p o t m u s t b e accurately a n d concisely defined a n d described, b a s e d o n objective criteria: t h e steps t h a t led to its final f o r m a n d surface finish. C e r a m i c T e c h n o l o g y . A technological s t u d y involves discovering t h e p o t t e r ' s choice of clay a n d n o n p l a s t i c i n clusions; m a n u f a c t u r i n g t e c h n i q u e ; surface t r e a t m e n t ; a n d d r y i n g a n d firing. I n creating a c e r a m i c typology, t h e r a w materials m u s t b e c h a r a c t e r i z e d — i n c l u d i n g t h e t y p e , fre q u e n c y , a n d c o n d i t i o n of t h e n o n p l a s t i c e l e m e n t s , r a t h e r t h a n tire clay particles ( w h e n fired, plastic clay particles shrink, while aplastic, or n o n p l a s t i c , r o c k a n d m i n e r a l t e m p e r i n g materials r e m a i n virtually u n c h a n g e d at low t e m p e r atures) . R e c o n s t r u c t i n g a n a n c i e n t c e r a m i c t e c h n o l o g y reveals h o w each stage of p o t creation influences s u b s e q u e n t stages. T h u s , t h e factors t h a t c o m b i n e d to p r o d u c e t h e final p o t — as well as its r a n g e of potential v a r i a t i o n s — e m e r g e . In p a r ticular, clay t y p e influences e a c h of t h e p o t t e r ' s successive decisions. T h e clay's t e x t u r e d e t e r m i n e s m a n u f a c t u r i n g t e c h n i q u e , surface t r e a t m e n t , d r y i n g , a n d firing. F o r e x a m p l e , certain clays are best s u i t e d for c o n s t r u c t i n g p o t s u s i n g t h e coiling p r o c e s s . T h e s e are k n o w n as lean clays, a n d they contain relatively large quantities ( m o r e titan 30 p e r c e n t ) of aplastic material ( t e m p e r i n g material or i n c l u sions) in t h e f o r m of rocks, m i n e r a l s , a n d organic materials. W h e n a p o t t e r works w i t h l e a n clay, t h e n a t u r e of t h e surface t r e a t m e n t h a s already b e e n d e t e r m i n e d : any tool u s e d to i n cise p a t t e r n s into t h e surface will pull u p a n d drag with it s o m e of t h e aplastic material p r o t r u d i n g f r o m t h e surface, unless a slip layer is first applied. A slip is a t h i n coating of very watery clay (with or w i t h o u t t h e a d d i t i o n of a coloring agent) t h a t covers either all or p a r t of a p o t ' s surface. A slip layer allows t h e p o t t e r greater d e c o r a t i n g choices w i t h a p o t m a d e of heavily t e m p e r e d clay t h a n w o u l d otherwise b e fea sible. P a i n t (slip to w h i c h a p i g m e n t h a s b e e n a d d e d ) is a p plied in a p a t t e r n r a t h e r t h a n over an entire surface b e c a u s e p a i n t does n o t a d h e r e well t o a surface f r o m w h i c h inclusions p r o t r u d e . Surfaces t o b e b u r n i s h e d similarly benefit from a n
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initial application of a slip t o coat a n d cover t h e inclusions a n d alleviate " d r a g " lines. F o r this r e a s o n , intentionally b u r n i s h e d p o t s are usually slipped. H o w e v e r , p r i m a r y m a n u facturing c a n p r o d u c e b u r n i s h i n g as well. W h e n p o t s are m a d e in t h e p r o c e s s k n o w n as t u r n i n g , t h e p o t t e r first s h a p e s a thick-walled vessel a n d allows it t o dry slightly. W h e n t h e p o t t e r j u d g e s t h e p o t ready, it is r e t u r n e d to t h e t u r n t a b l e a n d t h i n n e d , or " t u r n e d d o w n , " t o t h e desired thinness. T h i s p r o c e s s will p r o d u c e a b u r n i s h only if t h e clay has r e a c h e d a particular stage of drying a n d if the p o t is fired at a certain t e m p e r a t u r e . If t h e clay is too w e t w h e n it is t u r n e d , b u r n i s h i n g is less likely t o o c c u r . It is t h e clay t h a t largely d e t e r m i n e s t h e two final stages of t h e work, drying a n d firing. H e a v i l y t e m p e r e d pots r e q u i r e shorter a n d less carefully controlled d r y i n g a n d firing. C e r t a i n aplastic inclusions, e s pecially of t h e limestone g r o u p , d o n o t tolerate a high t e m p e r a t u r e unless t h e y have b e e n finely g r o u n d before being a d d e d to t h e clay. B y assessing technological features, questions c a n b e a d d r e s s e d a b o u t w h e r e certain p o t t e r y was m a d e a n d w h o m a d e it ( w h e t h e r it w a s local, regional, o r arrived at a site via international t r a d e ) , t h e continuity a n d breaks in ceramic traditions, a n d t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n of t h e ceramics industry. T h e s e issues a n d o t h e r s are relevant to u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n cient societies. T y p o l o g i e s b a s e d o n style a n d technology n o t only a d d r e s s issues a b o u t relative c h r o n o l o g y , b u t can also explain w h y a n d h o w s o m e s h a p e s c h a n g e d t h r o u g h t i m e — s o m e quickly a n d others barely at all. N u m e r o u s revisions are necessary d u r i n g t h e initial stages of creating a typology, w h i c h can b e e x p a n d e d a t a n y t i m e to include n e w infor m a t i o n . It is, h o w e v e r , difficult to u s e typologies to address issues for w h i c h t h e y w e r e n o t initially designed. F o r ex a m p l e , b y a r r a n g i n g p o t t e r y in t e r m s of w h a t is earlier or later b a s e d o n s h a p e a n d d e c o r a t i o n , it c a n b e difficult to identify o t h e r potential causes for differences in a p p e a r a n c e . P o t t e r y t h a t looks different c a n be t h e w o r k of two w o r k s h o p s o p e r a t i n g at t h e s a m e time, b u t in different c o m m u nities. Differences in t h e s h a p e of rims o r bases, or other diagnostic parts m i g h t reflect t w o distinct p o t t e r y p r o d u c tion locations r a t h e r t h a n chronological differences. By clas sifying p o t t e r y with c h r o n o l o g y as t h e p r i m e consideration, o n e can overlook e v i d e n c e of t h e organization of t h e p o t t e r y i n d u s t r y , o r t h e signatures of individual p o t t e r s w h o w o r k e d at t h e s a m e time, b u t in different villages. O n c e t h e functional p o t t e r y (bowls, jars, jugs, etc.) b e longing t o a single p e r i o d at a site are collected, typologies c a n b e d e s i g n e d t o p r o v i d e relative chronologies. T w o q u e s tions are traditionally p o s e d : h o w does t h e collection differ or coincide with t h e assemblages from t h e p e r i o d s t h a t p r e cede a n d follow it; a n d h o w similar or different is t h e col lection t o c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s material from n e a r b y sites? T h e results a r e chronological/functional typologies. S u c h typol ogies allow archaeologists t o establish relative dating s c h e m e s , w h i c h are critical for sites a n d deposits t h a t lack
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o t h e r internal dating evidence, such as inscriptional remains ( n a m e s or references to kings) a n d organic material. D e v e l o p m e n t of C e r a m i c T y p o l o g i e s . T h e first ce ramic typology w a s designed by William Flinders Petrie in 1890, based on pottery h e h a d excavated from T e l l el-Hesi in southern Israel. T h e r e , stream action h a d cut a vertical section into the tell, p r o v i d i n g a roughly stratified c h r o n o logical s e q u e n c e at t h e site. By recognizing pottery similar to the wares he h a d excavated in Egypt, Petrie could a c c o m m o d a t e t h e Hesi material into the system of s e q u e n c e dating h e h a d developed for E g y p t i a n funerary ceramics a n d epigraphic data. Pottery at Tell el-Hesi p r o v i d e d a stratified sequence of b o t h plain a n d decorated wares t h a t enabled Petrie to d r a w attention to the chronological value of d o mestic u n d e c o r a t e d pottery. Until this d e v e l o p m e n t , classi cal archaeologists h a d relied exclusively o n decorated wares. Nevertheless, u n d e c o r a t e d a n d coarser wares c o n t i n u e d to receive far less attention t h a n decorated wares in s u b s e q u e n t pottery studies a n d typologies. [See H e s i , Tell el-; and the biography of Petrie.] As m o r e sites w e r e excavated a n d n e w pottery forms were discovered, an e m p h a s i s w a s placed on i m p r o v i n g a n d c o m pleting Petrie's initial chronological typology. J. G a r r o w D u n c a n compiled the Corpus of Dated Palestinian Pottery ( L o n d o n , 1930) to p r o v i d e a system for identifying wellk n o w n pottery types a n d to alleviate the repetitious p u b l i cation of such p o t s in future reports. In later excavation r e ports, pottery was sometimes listed according to D u n c a n ' s Corpus identifications, b u t it soon b e c a m e outdated. Its e m phasis was o n whole vessels (sherds belonged only if t h e y bore a special surface t r e a t m e n t ) . H o w e v e r , increasing r e liance on stratigraphic m e t h o d s of excavation a n d r e c o r d i n g the precise location of sherds a n d p o t s , as exemplified b y the work at Samaria of G e o r g e Reisner (see Reisner et a l , 1924), resulted in an increased appreciation a n d u s e of sherds in the N e a r East a n d in t h e N e w W o r l d . Reisner later influenced his students at H a r v a r d to study sherds. [See the biography of Reisner.] Chronological typologies enabled archaeologists to c o m p a r e and cross-date assemblages from different sites, e s p e cially in the early days of archaeological research. A crosscultural s m d y by H e n r i Frankfort ( L o n d o n , 1924) dealt with pottery from M e s o p o t a m i a to Egypt. H o w e v e r , it e m p h a sized chronological questions, ignoring variation within a n d a m o n g local a n d regional wares. L o c a l cultural uniformity (ceramic similarity) characterized the basis for research with few exceptions. C e r a m i c typologies c o n t i n u e d to revise t h e functional/chronological typologies over the years. G . E. W r i g h t ' s i m p o r t a n t study The Pottery of Palestine from the Earliest Times to the End of the Early Bronze Age ( N e w H a ven, 1937) dealt with chronological issues of Early B r o n z e Age material while n o t i n g ceramic analysis's potential t o deal with other issues. A n u n u s u a l typology, based o n g e o m e t r i c shape analysis, by Pinhas Delougaz (1952) for M e s o p o t a
m i a n pottery, a n d analyses of clays b y o t h e r researchers, unfortunately h a s a m i n i m a l i m p a c t on h o w a n c i e n t p o t t e r y w a s studied a n d published. [See the biographies of Frankfort and Wright] I n 1963 Rutii A m i r a n a n d her associates p u b l i s h e d Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land, first in H e b r e w a n d t h e n in an English translation Qerusalem, 1970). I n it, t h e y collected examples of w h o l e pots a n d s o m e s h e r d s typical of different regions in Israel from t h e Neolithic p e r i o d to t h e L a t e I r o n A g e . Little was k n o w n t h e n a b o u t the p o t t e r y of m o r e r e c e n t p e r i o d s , a l t h o u g h publications since h a v e h e l p e d to c o n s t t u c t typologies for d i e m : E p h r a i m S t e r n ' s Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 532-332 B.C. ( W a r m i n s t e r , 1982); a n d P a u l W . L a p p ' s Palestinian Ce ramic Chronology, 200 B.C.-A.D. 70. ( N e w H a v e n , 1961). A m i r a n ' s widely u s e d typology w a s t h e guide for all s u b s e q u e n t studies, as local heterogeneity b e c a m e r e c o g n i z e d with the ever-increasing n u m b e r of sites excavated. Studies of specific types of d e c o r a t e d pottery, from C y p r u s to M e s o p o t a m i a , are t o o n u m e r o u s to m e n t i o n . M o s t , b u t n o t all, concentrate o n stylistic features, w i t h little or n o reference to the w a r e s ' technological aspects. T e c h n o l o g i c a l S t u d i e s . A n exceptional s t u d y for its day is t h e I r o n Age pottery from T e l l Beit M i r s i m excavated b y William Foxwell Albright. J a m e s L . K e l s o a n d J. Palin T h o r ley (1943) studied it, addressing various aspects of its m a n ufacturing t e c h n i q u e s . T h e i r technological analysis w a s s e p arate from the functional/chronological t y p o l o g y Albright devised for the assemblage. William F . B a d e developed a n a p p r o a c h for s t u d y i n g pottery t h a t d r o v e t h e m e t h o d o l o g y a n d t e c h n i q u e s h e u s e d in his excavation at T e l l e n - N a s b e h (A Manual of Excavation in the Near East, Berkeley, Calif., 1934). H e a d v a n c e d t h e idea of p o t t e r y ' s local a n d regional heterogeneity, rather t h a n follow t h e established view of cultural h o m o g e n e i t y in ancient Israel. [See Beit M i r s i m , Tell; N a s b e h , T e l l en-; and the biographies of Albright and Bade.] W i t h the first edition of A n n a O . S h e p a r d ' s Ceramics for the Archaeologist ( W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , 1956) a text to explain ceramic technology b e c a m e available. It h a d considerable i m p a c t in N e w W o r l d archaeology b u t less elsewhere. F r e d erick R. M a t s o n w o r k e d in the N e a r E a s t w i t h b o t h a n c i e n t pots a n d with c o n t e m p o r a r y potters u s i n g traditional t e c h niques. As the editor of R o b e r t E h r i c h ' s Ceramics and Man (Chicago, 1965), a m o n g m a n y o t h e r publications, M a t s o n focused on t h e technology available t o the p e o p l e r e s p o n sible for m a k i n g a n d u s i n g c e r a m i c w a r e s . D e s p i t e t h e n u m ber of studies t h a t c o n c e n t r a t e on n o n c h r o n o l o g i c a l issues, m o s t ceramic typologies c o n t i n u e to p r e s e n t catalog f o r m a t s of pottery, u s e d for chronological p u r p o s e s , t h a t are classi fied according to stylistic criteria alone. A n i m p o r t a n t exception a c c o m p a n i e d t h e p u b l i c a t i o n of t h e excavations at T e l l D e i r 'Alia in J o r d a n . T h e archaeol ogist H . J. F r a n k e n a n d the p o t t e r J a n K a l s b e e k (1969)
CERAMICS: Mesopotamian Ceramics i n t r o d u c e d an a p p r o a c h to c e r a m i c analysis t h a t avoids clas sification b a s e d o n stylistic criteria. It considers p o t t e r y m a k i n g t e c h n i q u e s to b e critical t o t h e p r e s e n t a t i o n of t h e material. After e x a m i n i n g t h e clays at D e i r 'Alia from t h e perspectives of a p o t t e r a n d a geologist, K a l s b e e k s y s t e m atically described a n d defined t h e a n c i e n t p o t t e r y a n d m a n ufacturing t e c h n i q u e s in p o t t e r s ' t e r m i n o l o g y . T h e result is a typology b a s e d o n f o r m a n d function. It begins b y explain ing h o w each f o r m w a s created. T h u s , p o t s t h a t m a y a p p e a r to b e different c a n b e u n d e r s t o o d to r e p r e s e n t a single t e c h n i q u e . K n o w i n g h o w vessel b o d i e s , r i m s , bases, a n d h a n d l e s are m a d e enables an u n d e r s t a n d i n g of tire a n c i e n t p o t t e r s decisions a n d t h e variations in e x c a v a t e d p o t t e r y : if t h e r i m is t h e last p a r t of t h e b o d y to b e m a d e , its length m a y simply b e t h e result of h o w m u c h clay r e m a i n e d b y t h e t i m e t h e p o t t e r r e a c h e d t h e r i m . Variations in r i m f o r m s , t h u s , d o n o t always n e e d to r e p r e s e n t chronological differences, a n d this applies to virtually all of a p o t ' s features, i n c l u d i n g surface t r e a t m e n t a n d decoration. [See D e i r 'Alia, Tell.] I n addition, F r a n k e n a n d K a l s b e e k redefined t h e t e r m s archaeologists c o m m o n l y u s e to describe pottery: wheel t h r o w n , well levigated, a n d self-slip, to n a m e a few. T h e vast majority of ancient w a r e s p u b l i s h e d as " w h e e l m a d e " w e r e m a d e o n a t u r n t a b l e c a p a b l e of m o v e m e n t b u t lacking m o m e n t u m — c o n s e q u e n t l y , t h e p o t s technically w e r e n o t wheel t h r o w n . I m p r e c i s e u s e of t e r m i n o l o g y in archaeological r e p o r t s generally characterizes descriptions of t h e firing p r o cess, as well. Archaeologists t e n d to describe wares as p o o r or well fired d e p e n d i n g o n clay color: if t h e entire piece has fired o n e color, t h e p o t is well fired, b u t if m o r e t h a n o n e color is p r e s e n t in t h e cross section t h e w a r e is said to b e poorly fired. N e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e e n d result w a s a usable p o t , m a d e a n d fired b y a potter w h o m a y h a v e b e e n c o n s c i e n tious a b o u t n o t wasting p r e c i o u s fuel. P o t t e r s could h a v e learned from e x p e r i e n c e t h a t b u r n i s h e d wares fired t o o h i g h lost their sheen. As a result, m a n y b u r n i s h e d vessels are n o t fired r e d t h r o u g h o u t — o f little significance to a p o t ' s u s e life—but h a v e a d a r k e n e d core visible only in t h e profile of a sherd. T h e goal is to create a m o r e objective typology b a s e d o n style a n d t e c h n o l o g y , w h i c h are inseparable. T h e ultimate objectives are to find t h e p o t t e r b e h i n d tire p o t , t h e p e o p l e w h o u s e d it, a n d tire society in w h i c h t h e y lived. O n e a c h i e v e m e n t of technological analyses, w h i c h h a s b e e n d e m onstrated repeatedly in r e c e n t ethnoarchaeological studies of traditional p o t t e r s , is t h a t m o r e t h a n one tradition a n d tech nology c a n a n d will coexist; t h e y are n o t always replaced by a n e w t e c h n i q u e . T h i s discovery has considerable implica tions for every chronological typology. BIBLIOGRAPHY Delougaz, Pinhas. Pottery from the Diyala Region. Chicago, 1 9 5 2 . U n usual ceramic typology arranged according to geometric-shape anal ysis.
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Franken, H. J. "Analysis of M e t h o d s of Potmaking in Archaeology." Harvard Theological Review 6 4 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 2 2 7 - 2 5 5 . General statement on ceramic technology a n d its application to ancient pottery. Franken, H. J., with contributions by Jan Kalsbeek. Excavations at Tell Deir 'Alia, vol. 1, A Stratigraphical and Analytical Study of the Early Iron Age Pottery. Leiden, 1 9 6 9 . Pioneering excavation report using ceramic technology to construct typologies; offers a new way to an alyze, describe, and present ancient pottery. Franken, H. J„ and Jan Kalsbeek. Pollers of the Medieval Village in the Jordan Valley: Excavations at Tell Deir'Alia, a Medieval Tell, Tell Abu Gourdan, Jordan. N e w York, 1 9 7 5 . Application of ceramic analysis to medieval pottery with an explanation of m a n y ceramic terms for archaeologists. Frankfort, Henri. Studies in the Early Pottery of the Near East, vol. 1, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt and Their Earliest Interrelations. L o n don, 1 9 2 4 . Early cross-cultural analysis. Kelso, James L . , a n d J. Palin Thorley. " T h e Potter's T e c h n i q u e at Tell Beit Mirsim, Particularly in S t r a t u m A . " In The Excavations of Tell Beit Mirsim, vol. 3 , 77;e Iron Age, edited by William Foxwell Albright, p p . 8 6 - 1 4 2 . Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2 1 / 2 2 . N e w Haven, 1 9 4 3 . Albright's typological study of Iron Age pottery; separate chapter on technology by Kelso and Thorley. L o n d o n , Gloria A . " D e c o d i n g Designs: T h e Late T h i r d Millennium B.C. Pottery from Jebel Q a ' a q i r . " P h . D . diss., University of Arizona, 1 9 8 5 . History of ceramic analysis in the ancient N e a r East, with an emphasis o n Israel. Available from A n n Arbor: University M i c r o films. Petrie, W . M . Flinders. Tell el Hesy (Lachish). L o n d o n , 1 8 9 1 . Pioneering study in ceramic typology t h a t influenced archaeological research worldwide. Reisner, George A., et al. Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1008-1910. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 2 4 . Oversized format, difficult to ob tain. Rice, P r u d e n c e M . Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook. Chicago, 1 9 8 7 . M o s t recent and comprehensive text describing techniques available for ceramic analysis. GLORIA A N N E LONDON
M e s o p o t a m i a n C e r a m i c s of the Neolithic through Neo-Babylonian Periods A g r o u p of c r u d e , low-fired clay containers found at t h e Syrian site of M u r e y b e t a n d d a t i n g to a b o u t 8 0 0 0 BCE is t h e earliest k n o w n in t h e N e a r East, [See M u r e y b e t ] D u r i n g t h e latter half of t h e eighth m i l l e n n i u m , t h e inhabitants of Ganj D a r e h in west-central Iran also b e g a n m a k i n g vessels of fired clay, b u t a n o t h e r half-millennium w o u l d pass before p o t t e r y c a m e into m o r e general u s e across t h e N e a r East. P r o t o - H a s s u n a t h r o u g h H a l a f P e r i o d s . I n lowland n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , t h e first ceramics were p r o d u c e d early in t h e seventh m i l l e n n i u m . T h e y represent the earliest p h a s e of t h e H a s s u n a s e q u e n c e , k n o w n as t h e p r o t o - H a s suna, Like t h e type-site of H a s s u n a , located near t h e Tigris River s o u t h of M o s u l , sites w i t h p r o t o - H a s s u n a and/or H a s s u n a levels h a v e , for t h e m o s t p a r t , b e e n f o u n d within t h e dry-farming r e g i o n of n o r t h e r n Iraq. T h e b e s t - k n o w n p r o t o H a s s u n a site, U m m D a b a g h i y e h , was located well b e y o n d t h e s o u t h e r n edge of t h e rainfall z o n e , however. [See H a s suna; Tigris.] T h e characteristic p r o t o - H a s s u n a pottery, consisting of
454
CERAMICS: Mesopotamian Ceramics
low-fired vessels formed by h a n d from heavily vegetablet e m p e r e d clay, belongs to w h a t is k n o w n as t h e C o a r s e g r o u p . Jars in this g r o u p typically h a d a low carination s e p arating a convex u p p e r b o d y profile from a lower b o d y that frequentiy h a d a concave profile. Small l u m p s of clay, s o m e times shaped to r e p r e s e n t animal h e a d s or h u m a n faces, w e r e often a d d e d to a vessel's surface. A m o n g t h e m o s t elab orate of tiiese applied designs were whole animals (onagers) a n d t h e u p p e r bodies of w o m e n . Simple painted d e s i g n s — d o t s , circles, lines, a n d squiggles—appeared in early levels at U m m D a b a g h i y e h . Pottery from t h e small site of Ginnig in n o r t h w e s t e r n I r a q m a y represent t h e earliest stage in t h e evolution of M e s o p o t a m i a n ceramics b e c a u s e typologically a n d technologi cally it is t h e simplest assemblage of Coarse ceramics. C o n firmation of this, however, m u s t await further excavation ( C a m p b e l l and Baird, 1990). S h e r d s of a thin, well-fired shell- or s a n d - t e m p e r e d w a r e with a b u r n i s h e d r e d or gray slip have b e e n f o u n d alongside typical p r o t o - H a s s u n a ce ramics. T h i s pottery, w h i c h represents a separate, m o r e a d v a n c e d ceramic tradition, m a y have b e e n i m p o r t e d from Syrian a n d Anatolian sites to t h e west. T h e pottery of d i e S t a n d a r d H a s s u n a g r o u p , t h e principal assemblage for t h e H a s s u n a p e r i o d p r o p e r , r e p r e s e n t s a technological a d v a n c e over t h e C o a r s e ceramics of t h e p r o t o - H a s s u n a . D o m e d , t w o - c h a m b e r e d kilns, e x a m p l e s of which have been excavated in H a s s u n a levels at Y a r i m T e p e I, permitted h i g h e r firing t e m p e r a t u r e s , which p r o d u c e d less p o r o u s , m o r e d u r a b l e vessels ( M e r p e r t a n d M u n c h a e v , 1973). T h e u s e of s u c h relatively sophisticated kilns i n d i cates that pottery m a k i n g was b e c o m i n g a specialized craft at a very early date. T h e S t a n d a r d H a s s u n a assemblage has been divided into incised, painted, and p a i n t e d - a n d - i n c i s e d groups. T h e m o s t c o m m o n was t h e incised g r o u p , with ves sels typically coated w i t h a thick, light-colored slip a n d in cised with simple geometric designs like cross-hatching, chevrons, a n d sprigs.
CERAMICS: M e s o p o t a m i a n .
Painted
Samarra
bowl from
Tell
Has
suna. (After S. L l o y d and F . Safar, " T e l l H a s s u n a : Excavations by the Iraq G o v e r n m e n t Directorate General of Antiquities in 1943 and 1 9 4 4 , with Prefatory R e m a r k s by Robert J. B r a i d w o o d , " Journal of Near Eastem Studies 4 [1945]: fig. 1 )
Archaic P a i n t e d W a r e , a separate pottery g r o u p , c h a r a c terized by highly b u r n i s h e d surfaces a n d glossy r e d - p a i n t e d decoration, was first p r o d u c e d in later p r o t o - H a s s u n a levels a n d continued into t h e H a s s u n a , thus linking t h e ceramic assemblages for t h e t w o periods. T h e distinctive " h u s k i n g t r a y , " an oval basin with a corrugated b o t t o m , chronologi cally overlapped t h e p r o t o - H a s s u n a a n d H a s s u n a as well.
t e r n s , s o m e of w h i c h m a y h a v e been t a k e n f r o m textiles. [See Textiles, article on Textiles of t h e N e o l i t h i c t h r o u g h I r o n Ages.] A m o n g other typical motifs is t h e centrifugal a r r a n g e m e n t of h o r n e d animals a r o u n d t h e b o t t o m of large, shallow bowls. T h e latest S a m a r r a p o t t e r y from C h o g h a M a m i s h o w e d technological i m p r o v e m e n t s b o t h in t e r m s of its firing a n d in t h e quality of its paint. H o w e v e r , it was still similar t o t h e classic S a m a r r a in s h a p e a n d d e c o r a t i o n , altiiough n a t u r a l istic designs h a d largely d i s a p p e a r e d , D u b b e d C h o g h a M a m i T r a n s i t i o n a l , this last stage in t h e evolution of t h e S a m a r r a h a d close affinities with p o t t e r y f r o m b o t h C h o g h a Sefid in I r a n i a n K h u z i s t a n a n d T e l l el-'Oueili in s o u t h e r n Iraq. [See 'Oueili, T e l l el-.]
P a i n t e d S a m a r r a W a r e a p p e a r e d in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a mia toward t h e e n d of t h e seventh millennium. A l t h o u g h it has b e e n f o u n d t o g e t h e r with S t a n d a r d H a s s u n a pottery o n sites in the H a s s u n a heartland, the S a m a r r a , w i t h its g e o metric a n d naturalistic designs in fugitive b r o w n or gray paint, s t e m m e d from a ceramic tradition t h a t originated in t h e region to t h e south a n d southeast, at sites like S a m a r r a , T e l l es-Sawwan, a n d C h o g h a M a m i . [See S a m a r r a , article on Chalcolithic Period.] Characteristic of S a m a r r a designs w e r e horizontal b a n d s filled with a variety of g e o m e t r i c p a t -
T h e Halaf culture, n a m e d for t h e site in n o r t h e a s t e r n Syria w h e r e its distinctive p o t t e r y w a s first discovered, s u c ceeded t h e H a s s u n a in t h e n o r t h e r n rainfall z o n e . [See Halaf, T e l l ] It has frequentiy b e e n i n t e r p r e t e d as intrusive, b u t work in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d Syria suggests t h a t it m a y h a v e developed indigenously o u t of local cultures, in cluding tlie H a s s u n a , d u r i n g t h e early p a r t of t h e sixth m i l l e n n i u m ( C a m p b e l l , 1992). T h e l u s t r o u s p a i n t e d p o t t e r y of t h e Halaf p e r i o d represents a high p o i n t in the history of M e s o p o t a m i a n p o t t e r y in t e r m s of b o t h technical a n d aes-
CERAMICS: Mesopotamian Ceramics thetic a c h i e v e m e n t . A s t h e p o t t e r s achieved mastery over their m e d i u m of expression, dieir g e o m e t r i c designs b e c a m e increasingly elaborate. A n i m a l s occasionally a p p e a r o n early H a l a f vessels, while stylized b u c r a n i a are a c o m m o n e l e m e n t in later designs. T h e s u r p a s s i n g skill of d i e H a l a f potters is b e s t r e p r e s e n t e d b y a g r o u p of intricately d e c o r a t e d poly c h r o m e plates f r o m t h e latest H a l a f level at T e l l A r p a c h i y a h , a site n e a r M o s u l . T h i s was clearly a l u x u r y w a r e p r o d u c e d for t r a d e a n d e x p o r t b y highly skilled a r d s a n s . N e u t r o n a c tivation analysis of p o t s h e r d s has identified major regional centers of p r o d u c t i o n at A r p a c h i y a h a n d a t C h a g h a r B a z a r in n o r t h e a s t e r n Syria. T h e s e centers d o m i n a t e d t h e local p o t t e r y t r a d e a n d a p p a r e n t l y e x p o r t e d ceramics t o locations as far as 200 k m (124 mi.) a w a y ( D a v i d s o n a n d M c K e r r e l l , 1976, 1980). I n the latter p a r t of t h e sixth m i l l e n n i u m , locally m a d e p o t t e r y b e a r i n g designs characteristic of t h e U b a i d 3 culture of s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a b e g a n t o a p p e a r alongside t h e H a l a f in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . After a transitional p e r i o d d u r i n g w h i c h ceramics of b o t h t y p e s w e r e p r o d u c e d , t h e H a l a f w a s finally completely s u p p l a n t e d b y d i e U b a i d . U b a i d . T h e U b a i d culture, w h i c h has b e e n t r a c e d b a c k as far as the early sixth m i l l e n n i u m , takes its n a m e from d i e small site n e a r U r w h e r e its distinctive ceramics (belonging t o t h e p h a s e s n o w called U b a i d 3 a n d 4 ) w e r e originally r e c o g n i z e d . [See U b a i d . ] U b a i d p o t t e r y w a s characterized generally b y g e o m e t r i c d e c o r a t i o n in d a r k p a i n t (black, b r o w n , r e d ) o n a light-colored surface. C h a n g e s over time in t h e designs o n t h e p o t t e r y h a v e b e e n u s e d t o divide t h e p e r i o d variously into five or six p h a s e s . T e l l el-'Oueili, n e a r t h e a n c i e n t city of L a r s a in s o u t h e r n Iraq, h a s yielded t h e earliest k n o w n p h a s e of t h e U b a i d se q u e n c e , s o m e t i m e s referred to as t h e 'Oueili p h a s e of t h e U b a i d . M o r e frequently, h o w e v e r , it is called U b a i d 0 , b e cause t h e p o t t e r y assemblage f o u n d at 'Oueili w a s b o t h ear lier t h a n a n d developmentally related to d i e U b a i d 1. Until t h e mid-1980s, U b a i d 1 h a d b e e n believed to b e t h e earliest p o t t e r y in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e lowest levels at 'Oueili have n o t yet b e e n r e a c h e d , a n d t h e p r e s e n c e of N e olithic-looking sherds o u t of c o n t e x t in h i g h e r levels m a k e it a l m o s t certain t h a t still-earlier p h a s e s will h a v e to b e a d d e d
CERAMICS: M e s o p o t a m i a n .
Polychrome
455
to t h e s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n c e r a m i c s e q u e n c e ( H u o t , 1992). U b a i d 0 vessels w e r e d e c o r a t e d with simple g e o m e t r i c d e signs—zigzags, crosses, a n d parallel vertical lines—in a dull, p o w d e r y black paint. S h e r d s belonging to this p h a s e h a v e t h u s far b e e n identified at only a few sites in a relatively small area in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . H o w e v e r , affinities with c e ramics from C h o g h a M a m i east of B a g h d a d a n d C h o g h a Sefid in K h u z i s t a n (see a b o v e ) indicate t h a t t h e geographic r a n g e of U b a i d 0 c e r a m i c s m u s t h a v e been significantly larger. U b a i d 1 ( E r i d u p h a s e ) p o t t e r y w a s first identified in t h e lowest levels at the site of E r i d u , w h e r e archaeologists were able to excavate a stratigraphic s e q u e n c e containing all d i e p o s t - U b a i d 0 phases. [See E r i d u . ] U b a i d 1 decoration in c l u d e d elaborate geometric designs (particularly o n t h e in teriors of o p e n forms) delicately r e n d e r e d with a shiny, strongly a d h e r i n g d a r k - b r o w n paint. By this p h a s e , U b a i d material culture h a d definitely s p r e a d across s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d into t h e w e s t e r n foothills of t h e s o u t h e r n Z a g ros Mountains. U b a i d 2 (Hajji M o h a m m e d p h a s e ) ceramics were discov e r e d at Hajji M o h a m m e d , a small site n e a r ancient U r u k . T h e site h a d b e e n completely b u r i e d b y several meters of alluvial deposits b u t h a d b e e n c u t tiirough b y an a r m of t h e E u p h r a t e s River, so t h a t it w a s visible in t h e riverbank only w h e n t h e w a t e r w a s low. [See E u p h r a t e s . ] B e c a u s e of heavy alluviation, only a fraction of t h e earliest sites in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a have b e e n located. I n U b a i d 2 there was a m a r k e d c h a n g e in p o t t e r y d e c o r a t i o n . I n c o n t r a s t to t h e del icate designs of U b a i d 1, surfaces w e r e typically almost c o m pletely covered b y p u r p l i s h - b l a c k paint, creating a reserve p a t t e r n of n u m e r o u s small, pale areas. U b a i d 2 vessels m a n u f a c t u r e d in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a h a v e b e e n f o u n d along t h e eastern coast of die A r a b i a n Peninsula, p e r h a p s indicat ing d i e activities of U b a i d t r a d e r s or fishermen. I n d i e latter phases of t h e p e r i o d ( U b a i d 3-4, T e r m i n a l U b a i d ) the U b a i d cultural n a d i t i o n e x t e n d e d across b o t h s o u t h e r n a n d n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a a n d into nortiiern Syria. T h o u g h t h e y display s o m e regional differences, n o r t h e r n a n d s o u t h e r n ceramics w e r e closely related d u r i n g
Halaf plate from Arpachiyah.
(After M . E . L , Mallowan and
J. Cruikshank R o s e , "Excavations at Tall Arpachiyah, 1 9 3 3 , " Iraq 2 [1935]: pi. 13)
456
CERAMICS: Mesopotamian Ceramics of b o t h political a n d technological d e v e l o p m e n t . T h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of t h e fast wheel d u r i n g t h e latter half of t h e fifth m i l l e n n i u m vastiy increased t h e speed a n d scale of p o t t e r y p r o d u c t i o n in t h e s o u t h in o r d e r to m e e t t h e g r o w i n g d e m a n d s of a newly u r b a n i z e d p o p u l a t i o n . T h e w i d e s p r e a d a d o p t i o n of t h e fast wheel, together w i t h t h e n o t - u n r e l a t e d demise of p a i n t e d d e c o r a t i o n , h e r a l d e d t h e a d v e n t of t h e U r u k period. T h e p e r i o d is n a m e d for t h e a n c i e n t S u m e r i a n city w h e r e the t r e n d t o w a r d u r b a n i z e d life m a n i f e s t e d itself m o s t spectacularly. [See U r u k - W a r k a . ] It is t h e only site w h e r e t h e entire Early, M i d d l e , a n d L a t e U r u k s e q u e n c e has b e e n excavated stratigraphically. Paradoxically, t h e m o s t frequently e n c o u n t e r e d a n d m o s t readily recognizable c o m p o n e n t of the U r u k ceramic r e p e r t o r y w a s n o t t h r o w n o n a potter's wheel; it was s h a p e d b y p r e s s i n g coarsely m i x e d , chaff-tempered clay into a m o l d . T h i s was t h e b e v e l e d - r i m bowl, tens of t h o u s a n d s of w h i c h h a v e b e e n f o u n d across t h e N e a r East f r o m s o u t h e r n I r a n to s o u t h e a s t e r n Anatolia. Its discovery attests to t h e e c o n o m i c p e n e t r a t i o n of n e i g h b o r i n g regions b y t h e n e w cities of s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a .
CERAMICS: M e s o p o t a m i a n .
Late Ubaid bowl from Eridu. (After F .
Safar, M . A. Mustafa, and S. Lloyd, Eridu, Baghdad, 1 9 8 1 , fig. 84)
t h e later phases of t h e U b a i d . F o r e x a m p l e , a vessel of u n u s u a l s h a p e , t h e so-called tortoise jar, w a s a p a r t of b o t h t h e s o u t h e r n a n d n o r t h e r n assemblages. T h e designs o n t h e later U b a i d pottery—lines, scallops, chevrons, a n d triangles—be c a m e simpler a n d m o r e horizontally oriented. T h e u s e of m o r e intricate decoration was a b a n d o n e d in t h e face of an evolving technology for the mass p r o d u c t i o n of pottery. I n stead of b e i n g painstakingly applied stroke b y stroke, later U b a i d designs w e r e frequentiy created simply b y holding t h e brush to t h e surface of a vessel t h a t w a s t u r n e d slowly in front of t h e potter. T o w a r d t h e e n d of t h e U b a i d p e r i o d in the south, t h e quality of t h e painted designs deteriorated markedly as vessel p a i n t i n g in general b e c a m e increasingly rare. U b a i d p o t t e r y from M e s o p o t a m i a c o n t i n u e d to b e u s e d at sites along t h e A r a b i a n coast, t h o u g h n o other elements of U b a i d material culture have b e e n f o u n d t h e r e . Affinities in ceramic d e c o r a t i o n indicate that t h e r e w e r e links with K h u z i s t a n as well ( O a t e s , 1983, 1987). U r u k - E a r l y D y n a s t i c I. T h e similarity of material cul t u r e that characterized s o u t h e r n a n d n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a during t h e latter p a r t of t h e U b a i d p e r i o d did n o t e n d u r e as southern M e s o p o t a m i a began to o u t p a c e t h e n o r t h in t e r m s
T h e r e a p p e a r a n c e of m o n o c h r o m e a n d p o l y c h r o m e c e r a m i c d e c o r a t i o n t o w a r d t h e e n d of t h e f o u r t h m i l l e n n i u m m a r k e d die transition to t h e J e m d e t N a s r p e r i o d , itself a short-lived transitional p e r i o d b e t w e e n t h e L a t e U r u k a n d Early D y n a s t i c p e r i o d s (Wilson, 1986). T h e s e a n d o t h e r J e m d e t N a s r characteristics d i s a p p e a r e d early in t h e third millennium with t h e e m e r g e n c e of n e w c e r a m i c features t h a t are diagnostic for t h e Early D y n a s t i c I: fenestrated s t a n d s , solid-footed goblets, a n d , in t h e Diyala River valley a n d ar eas to t h e east, Scarlet W a r e , w i t h its g e o m e t r i c a n d n a t u ralistic designs (plants, fish, b i r d s , q u a d r u p e d s , h u m a n s ) in r e d a n d black p a i n t ( D e l o u g a z , 1952). [See J e m d e t N a s r ; Diyala.] P o s t - U b a i d D e v e l o p m e n t s . In the north, the period that followed the e n d of t h e U b a i d is s o m e t i m e s referred t o as t h e G a w r a p e r i o d . It is n a m e d for t h e site w i t h t h e longest excavated s e q u e n c e of U b a i d a n d p o s t - U b a i d levels, T e p e G a w r a . [See T e p e G a w r a . ] H o w e v e r , t h e G a w r a assemblage is n o t typical for t h e n o r t h as a whole; i n d e e d , each site e x cavated thus far a p p e a r s to h a v e u n i q u e c e r a m i c c h a r a c t e r istics (Roaf a n d Killick, 1987). A d d i n g t o a n already c o m plicated situation, tiiere is a m p l e c e r a m i c evidence f r o m sites along rivers a n d otiier t r a d e r o u t e s attesting t o t h e p r e s e n c e of p e o p l e from s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a in t h e n o r t h t o w a r d t h e e n d of t h e G a w r a p e r i o d (the L a t e U r u k in s o u t h e r n t e r m s ) . T h e p r e s e n c e of L a t e U r u k p o t t e r y influenced c e r a m i c d e v e l o p m e n t in t h e n o r t h , b u t t h e p o s t - U b a i d n o r t h ern tradition r e m a i n e d distinct from t h a t of t h e s o u t h a n d followed its o w n evolutionary trajectory. T h e fast w h e e l b e g a n to b e u s e d in t h e n o r t h m u c h later t h a n it h a d b e e n in t h e south. W h e e l m a d e pots first a p p e a r e d at T e p e G a w r a a n d elsewhere d u r i n g t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m , c o n t e m p o r a r y with t h e L a t e U r u k p e r i o d in the s o u t h , w h e n c o n n e c t i o n s b e t w e e n s o u t h a n d n o r t h w e r e at their closest.
CERAMICS: Mesopotamian Ceramics
457
p r e s e n t state of affairs will persist until additional multiperi o d stratigraphic s e q u e n c e s are excavated a n d published. S e c o n d , t h e historical p e r i o d s , in c o n t r a s t t o the p r e h i s toric p e r i o d s s u r v e y e d h e r e , a r e n o t defined b y their ceramic assemblages b u t b y political events. C e r a m i c s were, of c o u r s e , s o m e t i m e s indirectly affected b y s u c h events—as, for e x a m p l e , w h e n t h e unification of a region resulted in an increasing h o m o g e n i z a t i o n of its pottery. H o w e v e r , even w h e n certain ceramic features h a p p e n e d to b e characteristic for a particular historical p e r i o d , t h e t e m p o r a l range of such features w a s only coincidentally c o t e r m i n o u s with t h e events tiiat defined t h a t period.
CERAMICS: M e s o p o t a m i a n . from
Tell Agrab
in the Diyala.
Scarlet-ware
Dynastic
I)
( F r o m P . Delougaz, Pottery from
jar
(Early
the
Diyala Region, Chicago, 1 9 5 2 , pi. 1 1 ; courtesy Oriental Institute, U n i versity of Chicago)
T h e n e x t n o r t h e r n cultural a s s e m b l a g e , Ninevite 5, w a s n a m e d for s t r a t u m 5 of t h e P r e h i s t o r i c P i t at N i n e v e h , in w h i c h several styles of d e c o r a t e d p o t t e r y w e r e identified— a l t h o u g h their chronological relationships c o u l d n o t be e s tablished. [See N i n e v e h . ] M o r e r e c e n t w o r k has s h o w n t h a t t h e p a i n t e d style was t h e earliest, a p p a r e n d y h a v i n g devel o p e d from a p a i n t e d n o r t h e r n variant of L a t e U r u k p o t t e r y a t a b o u t d i e b e g i n n i n g of t h e d i i r d m i l l e n n i u m (Roaf a n d Killick, 1987). P a i n t e d N i n e v i t e 5 vessels w e r e d e c o r a t e d w i t h all-over g e o m e t t i c designs, as well as birds a n d h o r n e d animals, in r e d or b r o w n paint. C e r a m i c s w i t h incised a n d excised decoration, divided into early a n d late s u b g r o u p s , a p p e a r e d only later in t h e s e q u e n c e . T h e y c o n t i n u e d to b e p r o d u c e d until t h e m i d d l e of the t h i r d m i l l e n n i u m , after d i e p a i n t e d p o t t e r y h a d g o n e o u t of u s e . H i s t o r i c a l P e r i o d s . Several factors c o m b i n e to m a k e it m o r e difficult to p r e s e n t a p e r i o d - b y - p e r i o d ceramic survey for t h e historical p e r i o d s t h a n it is for t h e prehistoric. First, t h e later c e r a m i c s e q u e n c e s — p o s t - E a r l y D y n a s t i c I in t h e s o u t h a n d p o s t - N i n e v i t e 5 in t h e n o r t h — a r e i n a d e q u a t e l y d o c u m e n t e d a n d poorly u n d e r s t o o d , especially in t h e case of n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . O n e of t h e m o s t crucial tasks confronting d i e field of M e s o p o t a m i a n archaeology is t o r e m e d y this situation. A h h o u g h p r o g r e s s is b e i n g m a d e , t h e
Finally, t h e p o t t e r y of t h e historical p e r i o d s , with several notable exceptions, consisted of u n d e c o r a t e d , m a s s - p r o d u c e d vessels in plain w a r e s . T h e i r shapes evolved only gradually, creating, a t least in d i e s o u t h , w h a t a p p e a r s to b e a c o n t i n u o u s s e q u e n c e t h a t e x t e n d e d well b e y o n d t h e final political eclipse of Babylonia in t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE. Aes thetically, t h e n a d i r in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a n pottery p r o d u c t i o n was r e a c h e d in t h e K a s s i t e p e r i o d , d u r i n g the four t e e n t h a n d t h i r t e e n t h centuries BCE. [See Kassites.] A t this time t h e c e r a m i c c o r p u s was r e d u c e d to a regionwide h o m o g e n i z e d a s s e m b l a g e of only six principal forms, n o n e of t h e m d e c o r a t e d and all of t h e m indifferendy, a n d sometimes even crudely, m a n u f a c t u r e d ( A y o u b , 1982; A r m s t r o n g , 1993). A l t h o u g h a t h o r o u g h p r e s e n t a t i o n of d i e ceramic se q u e n c e for t h e historical p e r i o d s is b e y o n d t h e scope of tiiis discussion, d e v e l o p m e n t s in t h e o n g o i n g evolution of c e r a m i c t e c h n o l o g y can b e highlighted. F r o m finds at N u z i , a H u r r i a n city in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a , it is clear that, b y d i e f o u r t e e n t h century BCE, at t h e s a m e t i m e t h e p o t t e r ' s craft in s o u u i e r n M e s o p o t a m i a w a s r e a c h i n g its low point, n o r t h e r n p o t t e r s h a d m a s t e r e d t h e ability to throw vessels w i t h walls of near-eggshell thinness. [See N u z i ; H u r r i a n s . ] H a v i n g s u c h thin walls, t h e s e vessels could n o t be r e m o v e d from t h e w h e e l w i t h o u t b e i n g d i m p l e d , so d i e potter w o u l d a d d m o r e indentations to create a p a t t e r n . I n the early first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, elegant d i m p l e d c u p s c o n t i n u e d to b e p r o d u c e d for use b y t h e wealthy classes of d i e L a t e Assyrian E m p i r e ; e x a m p l e s of these c u p s h a v e b e e n f o u n d a t sites stretching from d i e b o r d e r of E g y p t to s o u t h e r n M e s o p o tamia ( O a t e s , 1959). [See Assyrians.] Glazed ceramic objects b e g a n t o a p p e a r at N u z i in the f o u r t e e n d i century BCE, c o n c u r r e n t l y witii t h e e m e r g e n c e of a substantial glass i n d u s t r y in n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . [See Glass.] Glaze technology at tiiat t i m e seems t o have b e e n at an early e x p e r i m e n t a l stage, n o t fully u n d e r t h e potter's c o n trol. M o r e o v e r , t h e pale b l u e - g r e e n glaze developed was u s e d a t N u z i only o n items associated with t h e religious cult, i n c l u d i n g n u m e r o u s c e r a m i c wall decorations (nails, p l a q u e s ) , several small statues, otiier sculptural items, a n d a n offering table, b u t surprisingly few vessels (Vandiver,
1982.
458
CERAMICS: Mesopotamian Ceramics
CERAMICS:
Mesopotamian.
Glazed bottles from Nippur (c. 600 BCE). (Courtesy J. A r m s t r o n g )
H o w e v e r , it w a s s o o n r e c o g n i z e d t h a t glazed p o t t e r y v e s sels, b e c a u s e t h e i r walls w e r e c o m p l e t e l y sealed a g a i n s t t r a n spiration, w e r e a relatively i n e x p e n s i v e alternative t o s t o n e or glass vessels for storing v a l u a b l e liquids like p e r f u m e s a n d oils. B y t h e early first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, b o t h A s s y r i a n a n d B a b y l o n i a n p o t t e r s w e r e p r o d u c i n g large n u m b e r s of glazed vessels, especially small bottles a n d jars. [See B a b y l o n i a n s . ] D e c o r a t i o n in b o t h t h e n o r t h a n d t h e s o u t h consisted m a i n l y of g e o m e t r i c d e s i g n s in w h i t e , yellow, b l u e , g r e e n ,
and
b r o w n . O n larger A s s y r i a n vessels, stylized flowers a n d even animals s o m e t i m e s a p p e a r e d . After t h e e n d of t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n p e r i o d in t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE, t h e p o l y c h r o m e g e o m e t r i c designs in B a b y l o n i a w e r e r e p l a c e d b y solid-color glazes of b l u e - g r e e n , g r e e n , a n d g r a y d u r i n g t h e A c h a e menid (Persian) period. [See also M e s o p o t a m i a , articles on P r e h i s t o r i c M e s o p o t a m i a and A n c i e n t M e s o p o t a m i a . ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Armstrong, James L . " P o t t e r y . " In Nippur III: Kassite Buildings in Area WC-i, edited by Richard L. Zettler, p p . 6 7 - 8 0 . Oriental Institute Publications, 1 1 1 . Chicago, 1 9 3 3 . Offers a ceramic chronology for southern Mesopotamia in t h e late second millennium BCE. Ayoub, Sa'ad. Die Keramik in Mesopotamien und in den Nachbargebieten: Von der Ur III-Zeit bis zum Ende der kassitischen Periode. Mittenwald, 1982. Pottery typology for the late third-late second millennium BCE; problematic because the excavations on which it is based frequently lacked sufficient stratigraphic control a n d because t h e excavators' attributions of ceramic types to specific periods are adopted uncrit ically. Campbell, Stuart, a n d Douglas Baird. "Excavations at Ginnig: T h e Aceramic to Early Ceramic Neolithic Sequence in N o r t h Iraq." Pa leorient 16.2 (1990): 6 5 - 7 8 .
Campbell, Smart. " T h e Halaf Period in Iraq: O l d Sites a n d N e w . " Biblical Archaeologist 55 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 8 2 - 1 8 7 . Davidson, T . E., a n d H . McKerrell. " P o t t e r y Analysis a n d Halaf Period T r a d e in the K h a b u r Headwaters R e g i o n . " Iraq 38 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 4 5 - 5 6 . Davidson, T . E., a n d H . McKerrell. " T h e N e u t r o n Activation Analysis of Halaf a n d ' U b a i d Pottery from T e l l Arpachiyah a n d T e p e G a w r a . " Iraq 4 2 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 1 5 5 - 1 6 7 . Delougaz, Pinhas. Pottery from the Diyala Region. Oriental Institute Publications, 63. Chicago, 1 9 5 2 . Provides the framework for t h e third millennium BCE ceramic chronology of southern M e s o p o t a m i a , u p d a t e d a n d corrected in detail b y m o r e recent studies. H u o t , Jean-Louis. " T h e First F a r m e r s at 'Oueili." Biblical Archaeologist 55 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 8 8 - 1 9 5 . P o p u l a r account of the recent discoveries at 'Oeuili, which has yielded the earliest ceramics in southern M e s o potamia. M e r p e r t , N . , a n d R. M u n c h a e v . "Early Agricultural Settlements in the Sinjar Plain, N o r t h e r n Iraq." Iraq 3 5 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 9 3 - 1 1 3 . Oates, Joan. " L a t e Assyrian Pottery from F o r t Shalmaneser." Iraq 21 (1959): 130-146. Oates, Joan. " U b a i d M e s o p o t a m i a R e c o n s i d e r e d . " I n The Hilly Flanks and Beyond: Essays on the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia, edited by T . Cuyler Y o u n g , Jr., et a l , p p . 2 5 1 - 2 8 1 . Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, n o . 36. Chicago, 1 9 8 3 . Oates, Joan. " U b a i d C h r o n o l o g y . " I n Chronologies in the Near East, edited by Olivier A u r e n c h e et al., p p . 4 7 3 - 4 8 2 . British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 3 7 9 . Oxford, 1 9 8 7 . T h i s a n d t h e article above represent recent analyses of t h e U b a i d by o n e of t h e foremost scholars of t h e prehistoric p e r i o d s in M e s o p o t a m i a . Porada, Edith, et al. " T h e Chronology of M e s o p o t a m i a , ca. 7 0 0 0 - 1 6 0 0 B . C . " In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vol. 1, edited b y R o b e r t W. Ehrich, p p . 7 7 - 1 2 1 . 3 d ed. Chicago, 1 9 9 2 . Essential ref erence for M e s o p o t a m i a n archaeology, providing t h o r o u g h discus sions of the ceramic evidence a n d an extensive bibliography. Roaf, Michael, a n d R. G . Killick. " A Mysterious Affair of Styles: T h e Ninevite 5 Pottery of N o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . " Iraq 49 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 9 9 230. Convincing n e w analysis of the relative chronology of Ninevite 5 pottery,
CERAMICS: Syro-Palestinian Ceramics Vandiver, Pamela B . " M i d - S e c o n d M i l l e n n i u m B . C . Soda-Lime-Sili cate T e c h n o l o g y at N u z i ( I r a q ) . " In Early Pyrotechnology: The Evo lution of the First Fire-Using Industries, edited by T h e o d o r e A. W e r time and Steven F. W e r t i m e , p p . 7 3 - 9 2 . Washington, D . C . , 1982. Presentation of the evidence for glass technology at N u z i , including the early glazed ceramics. Wilson, K a r e n L . " N i p p u r : T h e Definition of a M e s o p o t a m i a n G a m dat N a s r Assemblage." In Gamdat Nasr: Period or Regional Style?, edited by U w e Finkbeiner and W o l f g a n g Rollig, p p . 5 7 - 8 9 . Beihefte z u m Tiibinger Adas des V o r d e r e n Orients, Reihe B , vol. 62. Wies b a d e n , 1986. JAMES A . ARMSTRONG
S y r o - P a l e s t i n i a n C e r a m i c s of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages T h i s article will treat t h e p o t t e r y of ancient Syria-Palestine with specific reference to t h e history of its analysis; tech nology, form, d e c o r a t i o n , a n d typology; a n d t h e distinguish ing characteristics of archaeological p h a s e s from t h e N e o lithic to t h e I r o n A g e . U s e s of P o t t e r y i n A r c h a e o l o g y . Archaeologists in m a n y fields, n o t just Syro-Palestinian archaeologists, s e e m a l m o s t obsessed with pottery, for g o o d r e a s o n s . P o t t e r y , o n c e it is invented, is relatively a b u n d a n t o n all archaeolog ical sites; w h e n fired it is virtually indestructible; even b r o k e n sherds are diagnostic e n o u g h for analysis; a n d its plastic qualities a n d almost limitless possibilities for f o r m a n d d e c oration are particularly expressive of h u m a n ideas, behavior, a n d even s o c i o e c o n o m i c organization. A s t h e well-known archaeologist R o b e r t E h r i c h h a s p u t it: " P o t t e r y is o u r m o s t sensitive m e d i u m for perceiving s h a r e d aesthetic traditions—in t h e sense that t h e y define e t h n i c g r o u p s — f o r recognizing culture c o n t a c t a n d c u l t u r e c h a n g e , a n d for fol lowing migration a n d t r a d e p a t t e r n s " (1965, p p . vii, viii). B r i e f H i s t o r y of C e r a m i c A n a l y s i s . A l t h o u g h scattered over t h e surface of i n n u m e r a b l e m o u n d s in w h a t w a s ancient Palestine, p o t t e r y w a s n o t a p p r e c i a t e d at first b y early e x plorers. E v e n E d w a r d R o b i n s o n , d i e father of Palestinology, w h o visited a n d correctiy identified d o z e n s of long-lost b i b lical sites in 1838, failed to r e c o g n i z e p o t t e r y as a clue to t h e antiquity of places. T h e great British S u r v e y of W e s t e r n P a l estine (1871-1878) p a i d n o a t t e n t i o n to p o t t e r y ( a n d did n o t , in fact, recognize tells, or m o u n d s , for w h a t t h e y w e r e ) . N o t until t h e brief field trip to Palestine m a d e b y t h e legendary Sir William Flinders Petrie in 1890 did p o t t e r y analysis begin to play a role in archaeology. Petrie h a d already applied his o w n inituitive typological instincts to a large c o r p u s of p o t t e r y from p r e d y n a s t i c t o m b s in E g y p t . H e h a d w o r k e d o u t t h e f u n d a m e n t a l principles of w h a t is n o w k n o w n as seriation (his s e q u e n c e d a t i n g ) , to yield a reasonably a c c u r a t e relative c e r a m i c chronology. N o t i n g t h e a b u n d a n c e of local, u n d e c o r a t e d p o t t e r y on t h e multilayered m o u n d s of Palestine, h e a r g u e d t h a t t h e sys t e m a t i c a n d detailed classification of t h e c o m m o n pottery
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c o u l d yield a suitable c h r o n o l o g y . H e argued, f u r t h e r m o r e , t h a t such a c e r a m i c typology w o u l d b e a useful guide in excavating m o u n d s stratigraphically (creating t h e twin prin ciples of all s u b s e q u e n t archaeological m e t h o d : typology a n d s t r a t i g r a p h y ) . As Petrie p u t it witii characteristic verve: " P o t t e r y is t h e essential a l p h a b e t of archaeology." T o a p p r e c i a t e Petrie's a c h i e v e m e n t , it m u s t b e recalled t h a t before h e laid t h e f o u n d a t i o n s for c e r a m i c typology, almost n o t h i n g f r o m archaeological sites in Palestine could b e dated, even within centuries. N e v e r t h e l e s s , Petrie, w h o did n o t r e t u r n to Palestine t o excavate until t h e 1920s, did n o t follow tiirough o n his o w n original insights. [See the biography of Petrie.] In tiieir excavations in d i e J u d e a n S h e p h e l a h (1898-1900), F r e d e r i c k J. Bliss a n d R, A. S. M a c a l i s t e r developed t h e first ceramically b a s e d s c h e m e of absolute chronology, d e p a r t i n g f r o m Petrie's suggested d a t e s , b u t their idiosyncratic dates w e r e several centuries off. M a c a l i s t e r ' s o w n w o r k at G e z e r (1902-1909), b a s e d o n v e r y faulty stratigraphy, r e p r e s e n t e d s o m e t h i n g of a retrogression. [See the biographies of Bliss and Macalister] Little p r o g r e s s in c e r a m i c analysis was m a d e until t h e w o r k of William Foxwell Albright, w h o in his excavations at Tell Beit M i r s i m (1926-1932) h a d w o r k e d o u t a ceramic s e q u e n c e , with suggested t e r m i n o l o g y a n d a range of dates. W i t h m i n o r modifications, it still serves as t h e basic c h r o n ological f r a m e w o r k for Palestine in t h e B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e s . T h i s brilliant a c h i e v e m e n t alone w o u l d qualify Al b r i g h t to b e r e g a r d e d as t h e father of m o d e r n Palestinian archaeology. [See the biography of Albright] Albright also e n c o u r a g e d o t h e r s in ceramic analysis. D u r ing Albright's t e n u r e as director of t h e A m e r i c a n School of Oriental R e s e a r c h in J e r u s a l e m in the 1920s a n d 1930s, Clar e n c e S. F i s h e r followed u p P e t r i e ' s typical n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y n o t i o n of developing a c o m p l e t e catalog, or c o r p u s , of pottery. T h i s h a d b e e n a t t e m p t e d in Petrie's own two cor p o r a of E g y p t i a n pottery a n d in J. G a r r o w D u n c a n ' s c o r p u s , (1930), b a s e d on Petrie's later excavations at Tell J e m m e h . A l t h o u g h Fisher's work, " A C o r p u s of Palestinian P o t t e r y , " w a s never finished (the m a n u s c r i p t exists at t h e S m i t h s o n i a n Institution, h o w e v e r ) , it h a d s o m e valuable features, s u c h as classification a c c o r d i n g to function, a n d it gave i m p e t u s to t h e ideal of a c o r p u s . [See the biography of Fisher.] Albright's o w n p r o t e g e , G . E . W r i g h t , w o r k e d o u t t h e N e olithic, Chalcolithic, a n d Early B r o n z e A g e pottery, as it was t h e n k n o w n , in his doctoral dissertation (1937). L a t e r , sev eral of W r i g h t ' s students at H a r v a r d a n d elsewhere s o u g h t to c o m p l e t e this enterprise witii dissertations o n t h e Early B r o n z e IV, M i d d l e B r o n z e , I r o n A g e , a n d Hellenistic p e r i o d s (based largely o n W r i g h t ' s excavations at S h e c h e m ) . O n l y P a u l W . L a p p (1961) a n d D a n P . Cole (1984) ever p u b l i s h e d , however. [See the biographies of Wright and Lapp.] M e a n w h i l e , Israeli archaeologists, particularly after t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of t h e State of Israel in 1948 a n d t h e flowering of t h e Israeli national school, w e r e m a s t e r i n g the pottery of
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ancient Palestine, also in t h e Albrightian tradition. T h i s re search culminated in t h e only published effort at a c o m p l e t e c o r p u s , R u t h A m i r a n ' s h a n d b o o k Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land (1970), b u t it stops short of the Persian period. A m i r a n ' s work r e m a i n s , h o w e v e r , t h e indispensable h a n d b o o k a n d basis for all future studies. B e y o n d this general c o m p e n d i u m , there are n o w detailed studies of individual peri ods and p r o b l e m s , as well as m a n y exhaustive c o m p a r a t i v e studies t h a t are p u b l i s h e d in the course of preliminary a n d final field r e p o r t s . T h e r e also are newer m e t h o d s s u p p l e m e n t i n g traditional typological a p p r o a c h e s , to which we now turn.
sel is m a d e a n d finished reveals its technological typology. I t is an a t t e m p t to d e t e r m i n e ways in w h i c h a vessel can b e distinguished from o t h e r vessels: is t h e vessel coil m a d e , w h e e l t h r o w n , o r h a n d b u r n i s h e d ? It includes t h e s t u d y of clay types a n d s o u r c e s , t e m p e r i n g agents (degraissant), f o r m ing m e t h o d s , kiln usage, a n d finishing or decorative t e c h n i q u e s . C e r a m i c technology is a relatively n e w specializa tion, aided substantially by sedimentological and petrological studies; kiln retiring e x p e r i m e n t s ; u s e - w e a r analysis u n d e r a h i g h - p o w e r e d electron m i c r o s c o p e ; a n d es pecially b y n e u t r o n activation analysis to " f i n g e r p r i n t " clays a n d p i n p o i n t their sources.
C e r a m i c T y p o l o g y a n d Its A p p l i c a t i o n . Typological principles in general can be applied to pottery, m e t a l s , h o u s e forms, t o m b s , a n d even ideas. " T y p e " refers t o a cluster of essential attributes t h a t occur frequentiy e n o u g h that t h e y serve to characterize an object, enable it to b e r e c o g n i z e d in other examples, a n d distinguish it from objects of a n o t h e r class. T h e a t t e m p t t o isolate t h o s e attributes that c a p t u r e t h e " e s s e n c e " of a t h i n g or category of things often involves the postulation of a n ideal " p r o t o t y p e , " either real or imagined, from which all t h e actual variations can have derived—a kind of t h e m e , o n w h i c h there are m a n y possible variations. S u c h a p r o c e d u r e , however, is m u c h d e b a t e d a m o n g ar chaeologists, w h o t e n d to divide themselves on t h e question of " d i s c o v e r e d , " or empirical, types t h a t actually exist; a n d " d e s i g n e d " t y p e s , invented for t h e convenience of t h e cat aloged, that do n o t necessarily c o r r e s p o n d to actual reality. Archaeologists w h o hold to t h e latter view are often skeptical a b o u t t h e value of typological analyses of any sort. T h e y are usually reacting, however, to t h e excesses of typology, which is always s o m e w h a t subjective a n d can indeed go to a b s u r d extremes. Nevertiieless, typology, reasonably utilized a n d with presuppositions that are clearly spelled o u t a n d tested against a d e q u a t e stratified data, can be a useful tool.
3. Temporal typology. M o r e familiar in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, t e m p o r a l typology is an analysis of t h e evolving shape of ceramic vessels over time, c h a r t i n g t h e c h a n g e s along a time line a n d a s s u m i n g t h a t t h e o b s e r v e d evolution of f o r m ( a n d often of decoration) c o r r e s p o n d s , m o r e or less, to historical-cultural d e v e l o p m e n t s a n d c a n help t o date tiiese. I n practice, t h e relative c h r o n o l o g y t h a t is first e s t a b lished is c o n c e r n e d only with d e t e r m i n i n g w h i c h are t h e ear lier a n d w h i c h are t h e later d e v e l o p m e n t s . W i t h multiple t o m b g r o u p s or other m i x e d deposits (such as Petrie started w i t h ) , intuition a n d / o r theoretical principles m a y be t h e only recourse. H o w e v e r , stratified materials—preferably from large a n d representative samples o n short-lived living s u r faces—yield t h e only reliable s e q u e n c e s . T h e n , at s o m e stage of research, an absolute c h r o n o l o g y m u s t b e d e v e l o p e d b y fixing as m a n y pegs as possible o n w h i c h to h a n g t h e entire framework. T h i s can b e d o n e only b y correlating ar chaeological assemblages (or g r o u p s of stratigraphically r e lated a n d c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s materials) to events k n o w n in history t h r o u g h datable texts. I n t h e case of ancient P a l e s tine, t h e biblical texts are of s o m e value chronologically. T h e s e d e p e n d in t u r n o n M e s o p o t a m i a n a n d E g y p t i a n ldng lists a n d t h e like, w h i c h are often d a t e d precisely t h r o u g h ancient astronomical observations. T h u s , gradually t h e r e is built u p an elaborate n e t w o r k of s y n c h r o n i s m s t h a t date p o t tery g r o u p s ; a n d t h e basic types of t h e repertoire k n o w n in these fixed contexts c a n t h e n yield relatively accurate h i s torical (i.e., calendrical) dates w h e n t h e s a m e ceramic f o r m s are e n c o u n t e r e d in different a n d otherwise u n d a t a b l e c o n texts. If i m p o r t e d pottery or other artifacts are f o u n d t h a t are datable i n their c o u n t r y of origin, t h e s e can b e i n c o r p o r a t e d into t h e s y n c h r o n i s m . Best of all are written r e m a i n s f o u n d in situ, w h i c h c a n b e i n d e p e n d e n t l y o r epigraphically dated, b u t these are exceedingly r a r e for a n c i e n t Palestine. R a d i o c a r b o n - 1 4 dates p r o m i s e scientific precision, b u t their r a n g e is too b r o a d t o i m p r o v e m u c h o n historically deter m i n e d dates. F o r m o s t p e r i o d s , t h e c o m m o n p o t t e r y of a n cient Palestine can n o w b e d a t e d t o t h e c e n t u r y , a n d often t o one half or t h e other.
Typological analysis of pottery in Syro-Palestinian ar chaeology has from t h e beginning b e e n largely p r e o c c u p i e d with questions of chronology. T h i s is u n d o u b t e d l y because of the d o m i n a n c e of biblical archaeology, with its overriding interest in "political history," a n d die c o n c o m i t a n t p r o b l e m of fixing dates for great public events t h a t could b e corre lated with biblical history. T h e r e are, however, other, m o r e sophisticated aspects of typology that are typical of general archaeology a n d are increasingly appreciated in d i e disci pline. Following D a v i d H . T h o m a s ' s Predicting the Past (1974), several uses of typology can b e distinguished, d e p e n d i n g o n the questions being asked. 1. Morphological typology. W h a t is i n d e e d m o s t funda mental in Palestinian pottery is form. M o r p h o l o g i c a l typol ogy is therefore largely descriptive; it is an a t t e m p t to define what a thing is, in t e r m s of s u c h basic attributes as s h a p e : an ovoid storejar, flat-based cooking p o t , a n d piriform juglet, for e x a m p l e . 2.
Technological typology. T h e investigation of h o w a ves
4. Functional typology. T h e a t t e m p t t o d e t e r m i n e h o w an artifact is u s e d defines functional typology. I n t h e case of pottery vessels, t h e objective is to catalog s e p a r a t e g r o u p s of
CERAMICS: Syro-Palestinian Ceramics vessels o n t h e basis of s u p p o s e d function. D i s t i n g u i s h i n g s o m e types is largely a m a t t e r of observation a n d c o m m o n s e n s e — s e p a r a t i n g cooking p o t s , storejars, a n d d i p p e r j u g lets, for e x a m p l e . T h e u s e of s o m e vessels, m a y r e m a i n e n igmatic, h o w e v e r , unless they a r e subjected t o laboratory analysis t h a t c a n identify food o r o t h e r r e m a i n s in skims or t h e y a r e d u p l i c a t e d a n d actually u s e d experimentally. O f c o u r s e , m a n y vessels m a y h a v e h a d m u l t i p l e uses. Finally, it s h o u l d b e c a u t i o n e d t h a t s o m e functional t e r m s are either whimsical (Early B r o n z e I V " t e a p o t s " ) or b a s e d largely o n guesswork. N o t e t h a t t h e C y p r i o t L a t e B r o n z e A g e bilbil carries a n a d h o c o n o m a t o p o e i c n a m e t h a t duplicates t h e s o u n d of p o u r i n g f r o m t h e restricted neck o f the juglet (al t h o u g h it m a y i n fact have b e e n for o p i u m u s e ) . Vessels t h o u g h t t o h a v e b e e n designed for cultic u s a g e are s o m e times so designated; b u t a p a r t f r o m obvious vessels like kernoi ("trick vessels" w i t h deceptive p o u r i n g spouts) o r c e n sers, cult vessels m a y b e difficult t o identify positively. F u n c t i o n a l typology is surprisingly u n d e v e l o p e d in S y r o Palestinian archaeology. T h e r e is, h o w e v e r , t h e p i o n e e r i n g effort of J a m e s L . K e l s o (1948), a biblical scholar, w h o , u n der Albright's influence, w o r k e d w i t h a professional p o t t e r in a n a t t e m p t t o identify e x c a v a t e d I r o n A g e vessels with t e r m i n o l o g y in t h e H e b r e w Bible. 5. Cognitive typology. D e v e l o p i n g a cognitive typology (getting at t h e a n c i e n t artisan's " m e n t a l t e m p l a t e " ) is t h e m o s t difficult of t h e typological challenges. I t is usually achieved b y extrapolating from all t h e k n o w n individual e x a m p l e s of a p r e s u m e d t y p e , t o arrive a t a theoretical p r o t o t y p e o n t h e basis o f which all t h e variations c a n b e e x plained. T h i s effort, m o v i n g b e y o n d description t o w a r d explanation, reaches t h e o u t e r limits of t h e archaeological inquiry. It asks: W h y is a particular vessel m a d e t h e way it is? W h a t w a s t h e i n t e n t of t h e m a k e r ? W h a t cultural a n d aesthetic values does t h e vessel e m b o d y ? Ultimately, a n swers are n e e d e d to s u c h q u e s t i o n s as: W h y was the p o t t e r y of I r o n A g e Palestine " u t i l i t a r i a n , " while t h a t of C y p r u s was " e x o t i c " ? D o t h e p r e s e n c e of m a n y vestigial features, as in t h e p o t t e r y of t h e Early B r o n z e I V p e r i o d , suggest t h a t t h e p e r i o d in general was o n e of d e c l i n e — t h a t is, does c e r a m i c degeneration signal cultural d e g e n e r a t i o n ? As has b e e n seen, s o m e m o r e functionalist investigators a r e skeptical at this p o i n t — p e r h a p s mindful of L e w i s R . Binford's oft-stated o b servation t h a t "archaeologists a r e p o o r l y e q u i p p e d to b e p a leopsychologists." Clearly, h o w e v e r , artifacts d o express h u m a n b e h a v i o r a n d t h e t h o u g h t b e h i n d it; a n d t h e r e w e r e cultural n o r m s in a n c i e n t Palestine, as in all societies, t h a t g o v e r n e d b o t h . F o r m i d a b l e as t h e task m a y seem, t h e ulti m a t e goal of c e r a m i c typology is precisely t o discover w h a t cultural values did lie b e h i n d c e r a m i c p r o d u c t i o n , n o t just t o fix t h e dates of p o t t e r y f o r m s . T h i s leads t o a c o n c l u d i n g observation o n c e r a m i c t y p o l ogy. A t t e m p t i n g t o " r e a d " p o t t e r y m a y b e c o m p a r e d t o m a s t e r i n g t h e g r a m m a r of a l a n g u a g e . C h i l d r e n a n d native
461
speakers m a y use t h e l a n g u a g e properly w i t h o u t any formal knowledge of t h e principles of g r a m m a r . T h e latter are w o r k e d o u t inductively b y linguists, for their o w n p u r p o s e s , in o r d e r to analyze the l a n g u a g e a n d c o m p a r e it with others, as well as t o enable n o n - n a t i v e speakers to learn it. T h u s , even t h o u g h t h e a n c i e n t p o t t e r s w o u l d h a v e b e e n p u z z l e d by m o d e r n attempts to impose order o n what appears to be c h a o s , t h e effort is legitimate, i n d e e d essential, for a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g of ceramics. A t its best, typology m a y actually enable t h e grasping of s o m e t h i n g of t h e reality of an extinct social system, its technology, its aesthetic values, a n d its c o n tacts with o t h e r cultures. S o m e practical advances in fieldwork, analysis, a n d p u b lication h a v e b e e n m a d e i n r e c e n t years, m a n y of t h e m largely m e c h a n i c a l : t h i n - s e c t i o n m i c r o s c o p i c observation of t e m p e r s , o r ingredients, in t h e clay, a n d t h e n e u t r o n acti vation analysis of clays. I m p r o v e m e n t s in processing p o t t e r y include simple sectioning a n d profile d r a w i n g t e c h n i q u e s t h a t s p e e d u p p r e p a r a t i o n for p u b l i c a t i o n , even in tire field; m o r e sophisticated descriptive m e t h o d s , s u c h as t h e u s e of the Munsell Soil Color Charts t o describe clay a n d p a i n t col ors, a n d the M o h ' s H a r d n e s s Scale t o d e t e r m i n e h o w brittle t h e w a r e is; kiln retiring t o establish t h e original t e m p e r a t u r e at w h i c h t h e vessel w a s fired; m i c r o s c o p i c e x a m i n a t i o n t o d e t e r m i n e b o t h h o w a vessel w a s m a d e a n d h o w it m a y h a v e b e e n u s e d o r r e u s e d ( u s e - w e a r analysis); a n d t h e u s e of s c a n n i n g c o m p u t e r s a n d sophisticated multivariate statisti cal analyses to p r o d u c e c o m p l e t e c o m p a r a t i v e corpora of certain classes of vessels ( s u c h as all t h e M y c e n a e a n wares f o u n d i n Palestine a n d their p r o t o t y p e s ) . S o m e of these r e c e n t a t t e m p t s t o m a k e c e r a m i c s t u d y m o r e precise a n d o b jective, m o r e "scientific," actually g o b a c k m a n y years, t o t h e simple " p u n c h - c a r d " h a n d sorting o f t h e 1960s, w h i c h anticipated c o m p u t e r i z a t i o n . N o t a b l e a t t e m p t s were m a d e to r e d u c e analysis of form, always s o m e w h a t subjective, t o m a t h e m a t i c a l principles as early as 1952 b y P i n h a s D e l o u g a z i n I r a n (Pottery from the Diyala Region, C h i c a g o , 1952). A n n a O . S h e p a r d (1956) h a s a t t e m p t e d t o w o r k o u t a c o m p r e h e n s i v e catalog of virtually all possible ceramic s h a p e s , b a s e d o n easily recognizable g e o m e t r i c f o r m s . P o t t e r y f r o m t h e N e o l i t h i c t o t h e I r o n A g e . T h e major c e r a m i c d e v e l o p m e n t s for each p e r i o d i n t h e long a r c h a e o logical history of Palestine are highlighted here. Neolithic period (c. 6000-4000 BCE). Pottery a p p e a r s almost simultaneously t h r o u g h o u t the L e v a n t i n a b o u t 6000 BCE, a t t h e beginning of w h a t w a s called b y K a t h l e e n M . K e n y o n tire Pottery Neolithic A ( P N A ) a n d b y others N e olithic 3 or D e v e l o p e d N e o l i t h i c . T h i s is s o m e two t o t h r e e millennia after t h e early N e o l i t h i c domestication of plants a n d animals, t h e beginnings of village life, a n d the transition from h u n t i n g a n d g a t h e r i n g t o a f o o d - p r o d u c i n g society a n d e c o n o m y . T h e long delay is surprising, considering t h e u n i q u e utility of ceramic vessels for so m a n y d o m e s t i c f u n c tions, as well as for artistic p u r p o s e s , cultic a n d other s y m -
462
CERAMICS: Syro-Palestinian Ceramics bolic u s e s , a n d t r a d e . N e v e r t h e l e s s , o n c e i n t r o d u c e d , pottery s e e m s t o h a v e c a u g h t o n very quicldy t h r o u g h o u t the ancient N e a r East, C y p r u s , a n d E g y p t (for the latter t w o , in c. 5000 BCE); a n d it developed rapidly, i n t e c h n o l o g y , form, a n d d e c oration. T h u s , t h e delicate p o l y c h r o m e wares of t h e H a s s u n a , S a m a r r a , a n d H a l a f N e o l i t h i c p h a s e s in M e s o p o t a m i a are astonishingly sophisticated. T h e origins of p o t t e r y p r o d u c t i o n p r o b a b l y lie in t h e highly developed p y r o t e c h n i c capabilities of the earlier N e olithic, w h i c h h a d already e x p e r i m e n t e d w i t h minerals a n d clays, as well as w i t h a d v a n c e d kiln-firing t e c h n i q u e s , t o p r o d u c e t h e p e r i o d ' s u b i q u i t o u s fine plaster. I t w a s only a step farther t o apply this t e c h n o l o g y of clays t o p r o d u c e c e r a m i c vessels. T h e actual stages in t h e e x p e r i m e n t a l process are p r o b a b l y reflected i n t h e vaitsah blanches, o r " w h i t e w a r e s " — u n f i r e d plasterlike c o n t a i n e r s of t h e P r e p o t t e r y N e olithic ( P P N ) — f o u n d a t several sites in Syria. T h e N e o l i t h i c p o t t e r y of Palestine is relatively c r u d e : h a n d m a d e , w i t h coarse, low-fired clays; with straw or h e a v y grit t e m p e r ; limited t o a simple, utilitarian repertoire of s h a p e s ; a n d h a v i n g d e c o r a t i o n t h a t consists of heavy slip a p p l i e d like p a i n t in g e o m e t r i c p a t t e r n s , s o m e t i m e s with i n cised c h e v r o n p a t t e r n s . Little i m p r o v e m e n t distinguishes t h e P o t t e r y Neolithic B ( P N B ) p o t t e r y from t h a t of P N A , e x c e p t for a slight i m p r o v e m e n t in w a r e s a n d d i e addition of some new forms. Chalcolithic period (c. 4000-3300 BCE). T h e C h a l c o litiiic p e r i o d in Palestine—the transition b e t w e e n t h e S t o n e A g e a n d the fully d e v e l o p e d u r b a n Early B r o n z e A g e (over l a p p i n g with K e n y o n ' s P r o t o - U r b a n p h a s e ) — w i t n e s s e s t h e flourishing of t h e c e r a m i c i n d u s t r y . A w h o l e n e w repertoire of forms is i n t r o d u c e d , m o s t of t h e m innovative a n d n o t directly related t o t h e Neolithic tradition. T h e s e i n c l u d e a large r a n g e of pithoi (storejars), w i t h a variety of ledge a n d loop h a n d l e s ; large kraters of several l a n d s ; h o l e m o u t h jars, s o m e of t h e m cooking p o t s ; a family of globular a n d flaring bowls; cornets a n d o t h e r globular chalices; pedestal chalices; c h u r n s m o d e l e d after goatskins; a n d even crucibles for c o p p e r w o r l d n g . D e c o r a t i o n i n c l u d e s incision, scalloping, t h u m b m o l d i n g , a n d other plastic devices, as well as quite
A CERAMICS: S y r o - P a l e s t i n i a n . Examples the Chalcolithic,
Bronze,
of Palestinian
pottery of
and Iron Ages, ( i ) L a t e C h a l c o l i t h i c c o r n e t ;
(2) E B I p a i n t e d j u g ; (3) E B I I A b y d o s - s t y l e p i t c h e r ; (4) E B I I I b u r n i s h e d p l a t t e r b o w l ; (5) E B I V " t e a p o t " ; (6) E B I V c o r r u g a t e d c u p ; (7) M B I - I I " T e l l e l - Y e h u d i y e h " juglet; (8) M B III t r u m p e t footed chalice; (9) L B I b i c h r o m e j u g ; (10) L B I I " C a n a a n i t e " storejar (half-scale); ( n ) L B I I c o o k i n g p o t ; (12) L B I I l a m p ; (13) E a r l y I r o n I " c o l l a r - r i m " storejar; (14) t w e l f t h - c e n t u r y BCE Philis t i n e b i c h r o m e k r a t e r ; (15) I r o n I I n e c k l e s s jar; (16) I r o n II d e c a n t e r ; (17) I r o n I I b u r n i s h e d juglet; (18) I r o n I I " b e e r j u g " ; (19) I r o n I I P h o e n i c i a n flask. (After Amiran, 1970)
463
exotic g e o m e t r i c p a t t e r n s in r e d a n d / o r black paint over a c r e a m - c o l o r e d g r o u n d . Clays are well levigated, especially the kaolin-rich " c r e a m w a r e " of the B e e r s h e b a region; a n d high kiln t e m p e r a m r e s p r o d u c e d s o m e titin, quite metallic w a r e s . S o m e vessels, like d i e small flaring bowls with a tilinned rim, a r e finished, if n o t actually f o r m e d , on a rota tion device, p r o b a b l y a simple w o o d e n platform or m a t that could b e rotated. R e e d i m p r e s s i o n s o n t h e bases of some vessels give e v i d e n c e of the latter. A striking p h e n o m e n o n of t h e L a t e Chalcolithic period (c. 3600-3300 BCE) is t h e d e v e l o p m e n t of several regional assemblages that, a l t h o u g h t h e y overlap s o m e w h a t , have distinctive diagnostic features. T h e s e assemblages include, at a m i n i m u m (1) t h e original G h a s s u l i a n culture of t h e D e a d Sea area, together with t h e related c o m p l e x from t h e B e e r s h e b a valley; (2) a central coastal culture a r o u n d m o d e r n T e l Aviv a n d s o m e w h a t inland; (3) the central hill-coun try sites, still poorly k n o w n ; a n d (4) t h e G o l a n H e i g h t s g r o u p , only recently discerned. Early Bronze I—III period (c. 3300-2400 BCE). T h e Early B r o n z e A g e is conveniently divided into an initial p r o t o - u r b a n E B I p h a s e a n d t h e n t h e u r b a n E B II—III phases t h a t are followed b y a decline a n d transition in E B I V (treated separately b e l o w ) . T h e p o t t e r y of E B I (c. 33003200/3100 BCE) follows s o m e w h a t in t h e L a t e Chalcolithic tradition, indicating a basic cultural continuity. T h e r e a r e , h o w e v e r , m a n y n e w forms t h a t herald t h e full-fledged E B II—III era, as well as a decorative tradition t h a t signifies sev eral regional c u l t u r e s — n o t p e o p l e s , a n d certainly n o t n e w c o m e r s , as K e n y o n m a i n t a i n e d . (1) R e d - p a i n t e d wares with parallel b a n d s of decoration (line-group or multiple-brush techniques) are largely confined to t h e s o u t h and parts of t h e J o r d a n Valley, while streaky g r a i n - w a s h wares d o m i n a t e in t h e n o r t h ; (2) a g r a y - b u r n i s h e d class of k n o b b e d bowls a n d footed chalices, possibly a d e s c e n d a n t of d i e earlier w i d e s p r e a d dark f a c e - b u r n i s h e d w a r e , is found at sites a r o u n d t h e Jezreel Valley (giving it t h e n a m e Esdraelon w a r e , first t h o u g h t t o b e L a t e Chalcolithic); a n d (3) r e d b u r n i s h e d wares occur t h r o u g h o u t t h e c o u n t r y , n o w w i d e s p r e a d for t h e first time. A m o n g t h e diagnostic E B I forms are storejars with simple t h u m b - i n d e n t e d ledge h a n d l e s ; h i g h l o o p - h a n d l e d m u g s o r juglets; o m p h a l o s - b a s e d bowls; a n d ear-handled juglets. W h i l e wares are less well m a d e t h a n t h o s e of t h e Chalcolithic, t h e earliest k n o w n potter's wheel (i.e., t h e basalt bearing stone) belongs to this period, f o u n d at B e t h - Y e r a h (Khirbet K e r a k ) o n t h e Sea of Galilee. [See Beth-Yerah.] T h e p o t t e r y of E B II—III, w h i c h c a n b e considered t o gether, develops o u t of t h e E B I repertoire in basic form. H o w e v e r , t h e gray b u r n i s h a n d m o s t of t h e ' r e d geometric p a i n t disappear, while a h e a v y r e d b u r n i s h p r e d o m i n a t e s o n m a n y forms. T h e latter i n c l u d e , in particular, storejars with wavy a n d p u s h e d - u p / s c a l l o p e d ledge h a n d l e s ; large shallow
464
CERAMICS: Syro-Palestinian Ceramics
platters; small carinated bowls in metallic w a r e ; large holem o u t h storejars a n d cooking pots; t w o - h a n d l e d a m p h o r a e ; a n d footed chalices. Particular m e n t i o n should be m a d e of a class of graceful h a n d l e d pitchers a n d jugs in fine r e d b u r n i s h e d w a r e (sometimes a painted geometric decoration) called A b y d o s w a r e because it was first f o u n d by Petrie as i m p o r t e d w a r e in royal t o m b s of the first dynasty at A b y d o s in Egypt. It t h u s gives a valuable synchronism: the first dy nasty (c. 3 2 0 0 / 3 1 0 0 BCE o n w a r d ) equals the floruit of E B II in ancient Palestine. A complete potter's w o r k s h o p f o u n d at Tell el-Far'ah ( N o r t h ) includes a wheel, b u r n i s h i n g tools, clays a n d coloring agents, a n d a kiln. T h e E B III p h a s e (c. 2 6 5 0 - 2 4 0 0 BCE) is m a r k e d princi pally b y the further d e v e l o p m e n t of m a n y f o r m s , s u c h as platters; a few new forms, like s p o u t e d jars a n d flaring g o b lets; and especially by t h e brief a p p e a r a n c e in the n o r t h of exotic r e d - a n d black-burnished vessels of A n a t o l i a n - C a u casian inspiration a n d tire distinctive K h i r b e t K e r a k w a r e ( n a m e d after t h e site on the Sea of Galilee w h e r e it was first distinguished). Early Bronze IV (c. 2400-2000 BCE). T h e pottery of Early B r o n z e IV (Albright's M i d d l e B r o n z e I a n d K e n y o n ' s Intermediate Early B r o n z e - M i d d l e B r o n z e ) , a transitional n o n u r b a n interlude t h a t represents a major socioeconomic decline, is of interest chiefly b e c a u s e of its m a n y distinctive features. T h e s e include a c o m b i n a t i o n of h a n d forming a n d wheel finishing; m a n y u n i q u e vestigial features, s u c h as n o n functional h a n d l e s a n d spouts; very strong a n d consistent regional "families"; a n d a clear influence from the calciform repertoire (cuplike shapes) of central a n d s o u t h e r n Syria. R e d burnish a n d p a i n t are rare, except in the n o r t h ; a n d m a n y wares are incised and/or b a n d c o m b e d , especially in the south. Distinctive E B I V forms include ovoid storejars with vestigial handles; " t e a p o t s " a n d other s p o u t e d jars; m a n y kinds of c u p s , goblets, a n d chalices; flasks; o n e - h a n dled flask-pitchers; offset-shoulder bowls; a n d f o u r - s p o u t e d l a m p s . It has b e e n argued t h a t E B IV pottery has s o m e links with t h a t of t h e first phase of the M i d d l e B r o n z e Age; b u t in fact it represents the last, dying gasp of the long Early B r o n z e A g e tradition.
Middle
Bronze
I-III period
(c. 2000-isoo BCE). Al
bright's M B IIA, B , and C are t e r m e d h e r e , as increasingly by others, M B I - I I I (his M B I having b e c o m e t h e E B I V here). T h i s is the second u r b a n period in ancient Palestine a n d represents t h e zenith of t h e Canaanite culture. T h e p o t tery, w h i c h is entirely n e w in every r e g a r d , clearly reflects the wealth, sophistication, a n d international connections of the c o u n t r y in this period. Although there are recognizable inner divisions (thus t h e M B I - I I I p h a s i n g ) , the strong c o n tinuity t h r o u g h o u t allows t h e M i d d l e B r o n z e A g e pottery t o be treated as a w h o l e . I t begins in M B I with a n e w repertoire of exquisite w h e e l m a d e forms (the first u s e of the fast wheel), m a n y of t h e m related to Syrian styles, as well as fine r e d - b u r n i s h e d a n d p a i n t e d wares. T h e basic repertoire,
CERAMICS:
Syro-Palestinian.
Typical
development
of cooking
pots.
(1) M B III; (2) L B I; (3) L B II; (4) t w e l f t h - e l e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE; ( 5 ) n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE; ( 6 ) e i g h t h c e n t u r y BCE. (After A m i r a n , 1 9 7 0 )
w h i c h continues until the e n d of M B III ( a n d even into t h e L a t e B r o n z e A g e ) , consists mainly of large, t a p e r i n g ovoid storejars; globular cooking pots; large kraters; m a n y styles of graceful jugs a n d juglets (e.g., d i p p e r , piriform, cylindri cal, a n d T e l l el-Yahudiyeh w a r e ) , m a n y of t h e m slipped a n d burnished; platter bowls; globular bowls; sharply carinated bowls (with a shoulder or c y m a profile), s o m e footed; a n d single-spouted saucer l a m p s . Syrian styles of p a i n t are evi dent (the N o r t h Syrian simple w a r e s ) ; a n d the first i m p o r t s from the M e d i t e r r a n e a n n o w o c c u r , principally in C y p r i o t W h i t e - P a i n t e d I V - V I styles. T h e M B II—III p h a s e s are m a r k e d b y general continuity, b u t also b y a certain d e g e n e r a t i o n in f o r m a n d finish. I m p o r t s from C y p r u s increase, h o w e v e r , a n d in t h e late M B III a n u m b e r of n e w Syrian i m p o r t s a p p e a r , s u c h as G r a y L u s t r o u s w a r e . C y p r i o t B i c h r o m e (and its local versions), M o n o c h r o m e , B a s e - R i n g I, a n d W h i t e - S l i p I wares a c c o m p a n y the transition to L B I (below), as does a local C h o c olate-on-WMte w a r e t h a t m a y b e of C y p r i o t inspiration. Late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1200 BCE). T h e L a t e B r o n z e Age represents a final revival of u r b a n C a n a a n i t e culture, b y t h e n in decline. It extends from t h e E g y p t i a n destructions in a b o u t 1 5 3 0 - 1 4 6 0 BCE until the e n d of t h e B r o n z e A g e (c. t20O BCE). T h e pottery, as e x p e c t e d , c o n t i n u e s t h e M B t r a dition, b u t it is e x h a u s t e d by t h e e n d of t h e period. Virtually n o n e w forms a p p e a r , e x c e p t for flasks, kraters, a n d chalices; b u t there are i m p o r t s . T h e i m p o r t s are surprisingly n u m e r ous, a n d t h e y include m o r e f r o m C y p r u s : W h i t e - P a i n t e d I V - V I , W h i t e - S l i p I-LT, W h i t e - S h a v e d , a n d B a s e - R i n g I - I I wares; a few from Syria: r e d - b u r n i s h e d flasks; M y c e n a e a n I I I A - B w a r e s , a n d even a few L a t e M i n o a n vessels; a n d an
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Persian Period occasional vessel from E g y p t . T h e local w a r e s , while r a t h e r poorly m a d e , n o w feature relatively c o m m o n p a i n t e d d e c oration, w i t h b o t h g e o m e t r i c a n d naturalistic a n d a n i m a l motifs (e.g., a pair of ibexes a n d t h e sacred tree; a p a l m t r e e and panel). Iron Age (c. 1200-600 BCE). T h e I r o n A g e witnesses a succession of n e w , local p e o p l e s a n d cultures, replacing t h e B r o n z e A g e C a n a a n i t e c u l t u r e , including " S e a P e o p l e s , " or Philistines, a n d t h e biblical Israelites. T h e c o m m o n I r o n I p o t t e r y of t h e twelfth-eleventh centuries BCE is, however, still strongly in the L B tradition. Philistine b i c h r o m e w a r e , a locally m a d e offshoot of L a t e M y c e n a e a n I I I C : i b w a r e , with beautiful geometric a n d b i r d designs, a p p e a r s in a b o u t 1150, principally along t h e coast. D i a g n o s t i c ceramic f o r m s for t h e I r o n I proto-Israelite settlements n o w increasingly b e i n g b r o u g h t to light include collar-rim storejars, as well as certain types of flanged-rim cooking p o t s (neither exclu sively Israelite, h o w e v e r ) . By the t e n t h c e n t u r y BCE (styled either I r o n I C or I r o n I I A ) , t h e Israelite state e m e r g e s , a n d with it a s t a n d a r d i z e d c e r a m i c repertoire t h a t has few L B reminiscences a n d r e p resents t h e fully d e v e l o p e d local I r o n A g e cultures. I m p o r t e d w a r e s are n o w extremely r a r e , e x c e p t for several C y p r i o t fabrics of the t e n t h c e n t u r y (e.g., Black on R e d II, W h i t e P a i n t e d , B i c h r o m e , R e d Slip) a n d occasional G r e e k i m p o r t s , w h i c h begin sporadically in t h e late eighth c e n t u r y . S o m e P h o e n i c i a n w a r e a p p e a r s along t h e coast, as early as t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y t h a t has locally m a d e derivatives in s u c h l u x u r y wares as d i e nintli-eightii-century BCE S a m a r i a W a r e . A p a r t from i m p o r t s , p a i n t e d d e c o r a t i o n is r a r e in t h e t e n t h seventh centuries BCE. R e d slip a n d b u r n i s h , however, c h a r acterize m u c h of t h e r e p e r t o i r e , particularly on bowls; in t h e t e n t h c e n t u r y it is d o n e b y h a n d , b u t in the n i n t h c e n t u r y wheel b u r n i s h takes over, gradually dying o u t t o w a r d t h e e n d of the period. T h e s o m e w h a t different repertoires of the I r o n II coastal or " N e o - P h i l i s t i n e " culture along the s o u t h e r n coast, as well as the repertoires of the T r a n s j o r d a n i a n states of A m m o n , M o a b , a n d E d o m , are n o w b e g i n n i n g t o b e better k n o w n t o researchers. All in all, the utilitarian p o t t e r y of t h e I r o n II p e r i o d r e p resents the culture of a series of relatively isolated, p e t t y r e gional states. W h e n die N e o - A s s y r i a n s a d v a n c e in die late eighth c e n t u r y , their p r e s e n c e is felt in Assyrian P a l a c e W a r e . By a n d large, the local p o t t e r y c o n t i n u e s , even after t h e B a b y l o n i a n d e s t r u c t i o n s in 586 BCE (in w h a t m i g h t b e called an I r o n III p h a s e ) , t h r o u g h o u t t h e 6th c e n t u r y ) . Later periods. T h e P e r s i a n , Hellenistic, a n d R o m a n B y z a n t i n e periods see Palestine b e c o m i n g p a r t of a larger international, imperial w o r l d . T h u s , t h e p o t t e r y of these p e riods is b o t h p a r t of the classical tradition in t h e eastern Mediterranean and a separate study beyond the purview here. For the subsequent Arabic and Turkish periods, from t h e seventh to the n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y CE, Palestine is p a r t of the Islamic world, a n d t h e local p o t t e r y reflects t h a t reality.
465
BIBLIOGRAPHY A m i r a n , Ruth. Ancient Pottery ojthe Holy Land ( 1 9 6 3 ) . N e w Brunswick, N.J., 1 9 7 0 . Cole, D a n P. Shechem I: The Middle Bronze IIB Pottery. W i n o n a Lake, I n d , 1984. Dever, William G. "Vestigial Features in M B I: An Illustration of S o m e Principles of C e r a m i c T y p o l o g y . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 0 0 ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 7 0 ) : 1 9 - 3 0 . Dever, William G. " N e w Vistas on the E B IV ('MB I') Horizon in Syria-Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 3 7 (Winter 1980): 3 5 - 6 4 . Dever, William G., and H . Darrell L a n c e , eds. A Manual of Field Ex cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1 9 7 8 . D u n c a n , J. Garrow. Corpus of Dated Palestinian Pottery. L o n d o n , 1 9 3 0 . Based on Petrie's excavations at Tell J e m m e h . Ehrich, Robert W . , ed. Chronologies in Old World Archaeology. Chicago, 1965.
Homes-Fredericq, D . , and FI. J. F r a n k e n , eds. Pottery and Pollers, Past and Present: 7000 Years of Ceramic An in Jordan. T u b i n g e n , 1 9 8 6 . Kelso, James L. The Ceramic Vocabulary of the Old Testament. N e w Haven, 1 9 4 8 . L a p p , P a u l W . Palestinian Ceramic Chronology, 200 B.C.-A.D. 70. N e w Haven, 1 9 6 1 . M a g n e s s , Jodi. Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology, circa 200-800 CE. Shef field, 1 9 9 3 . O r t o n , Clive, Paul T y e r s , and Alan Vince, Pottery in Archaeology. C a m bridge, 1 9 9 3 . Sauer, James A. Heshbon Pottery, 1971: A Preliminary Report on the Pot tery from the 1971 Excavations at Tell Hesban. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1973-
Shepard, A n n a O. Ceramics far the Archaeologist. Washington, D . C . , 1956.
Stern, E p h r a i m . Material Culture of the Ijand of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. W a r m i n s t e r , 1 9 8 2 . T h o m a s , David H. Predicting the Past: An Introduction to Anthropological Archaeology. N e w York, 1 9 7 4 . W o o d , Bryant G. The Sociology of Pottery in Ancient Palestine. Sheffield, 1990.
Wright, G. Ernest. The Pottery of Palestine from the Earliest Times to the End of the Early Bronze Age. N e w H a v e n , 1 9 3 7 . WILLIAM G . DEVER
Ceramics of the Persian Period L o c a l Palestinian p o t t e r y in t h e Persian p e r i o d was m a d e of t h r e e different clay c o m p o s i t i o n s , t w o of w h i c h were c h a r acteristic of the coastal region, while t h e third was found mainly in the m o u n t a i n regions of J u d a h a n d Samaria. O n the coastal plain die p o t t e r y was c o m p o s e d m o s t frequently of a yellowish-green or a r e d d i s h clay. T h e visible differ ences in t h e clay (used for p o t t e r y in o t h e r periods as well) m a y h a v e b e e n created d u r i n g firing. T h i s pottery is for the m o s t p a r t crudely m a d e , a n d t h e clay is n o t finely levigated; its m o s t distinctive feature is its very p o o r firing, w h i c h left t h e clay extremely p o r o u s . M o s t of the pottery from J u d a h a n d Samaria, b y contrast, is m a d e of a b r o w n - g r a y clay (a c o n t i n u a t i o n of the material u s e d earlier, in the Iron A g e ) , is well fired, a n d is pleasing i n its shapes. T h e pottery types of d i e Persian p e r i o d can be divided into t h r e e major g r o u p s : (1) local pottery t h a t continues the
466
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Persian Period
ceramic tradition of t h e end of tire I r o n Age; (2) local imi tations of i m p o r t e d p o t t e r y of " e a s t e r n " origin; a n d ( 3 ) local imitations of " w e s t e r n " prototypes. T h e first g r o u p comprises m o s t of the bowls, cooking p o t s , h o l e - m o u t h jars (an i m p o r t a n t jar family, especially those jars that c o n t i n u e t h e tradition of t h e lamelekh t y p e ) , flasks, certain types of jugs a n d juglets, l a m p s , twin vases, funnels, a n d s t a n d s . B e c a u s e t h e p r o d u c t i o n a n d u s e of these vessels were generally confined to t h e areas of J u d a h a n d Samaria, the Israelite ceramic traditions persisted longer t h e r e t h a n in t h e o t h e r parts of Palestine. Vessels belonging t o t h e s e c o n d g r o u p , imitations of " e a s t e r n " p r o t o t y p e s , exhibit Assyrian, Persian, P h o e n i c i a n , and Egyptian influences. T h e Assyrian p o t t e r y , especially the Palace W a r e from t h e close of the seventh c e n t u r y BCE, is now well k n o w n from the excavations at N i m r u d . T h e original vessels a n d t h e Palestinian copies a p p e a r almost si multaneously at t h e e n d of t h e Israelite period; b y t h e P e r sian period they are already a constant feature in t h e local pottery repertoire. A n Assyrian influence is evident mainly in the carinated bowls, in botit pottery a n d metal, as well as in m o s t of t h e bottles. H o w e v e r , in their c r u d e shapes a n d especially in their lack of typical p a i n t e d decoration, t h e ves sels of t h e Persian p e r i o d are inferior to b o t h t h e Assyrian originals and their I r o n Age imitations. N o a t t e m p t s were
m a d e in Palestine to duplicate t h e A c h a e m e n i d p o t t e r y , for its quality was generally very p o o r a n d it w a s n o t c o m m o n l y f o u n d outside t h e b o r d e r s of Persia. A m o n g all t h e p o t t e r y finds in Palestine, only two or t h r e e vessels c a n b e designated with any certainty as direct P e r s i a n i m p o r t s . T h e magnifi cent A c h a e m e n i d m e t a l w a r e , o n t h e other h a n d , w a s a sig nificant source of inspiration for Palestinian p o t t e r s , w h o imitated it in clay. T h e m o s t o u t s t a n d i n g imitations are t h e r h y t o n s . It is also possible t h a t t h e i m p r e s s e d w e d g e a n d r e e d decoration, w h i c h a p p e a r s o n a ramified class of Palestinian pottery in t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d , is m o d e l e d after t h e d e c o r a t i o n o n this metalware. O t h e r Palestinian vessels can b e attrib u t e d to a P h o e n i c i a n origin b y analogy with d i e earlier P h o e nician vessels (from t h e e n d of t h e I r o n Age) discovered at P h o e n i c i a n sites a n d in t o m b s . T h e P h o e n i c i a n influence is particularly m a r k e d in t h e jugs a n d juglets, in t h e face a n d Bes vases, in several types of jars, a n d in t h e l a m p s . E g y p t i a n influence, o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , can b e o b s e r v e d only in t h e alabastra, w h i c h seem to b e copies of a n alabaster original. T h e i m p o r t e d p o t t e r y of t h e p e r i o d w a s mainly G r e e k . T h e earliest G r e e k vases f o u n d in Palestine are L a t e P r o t o G e o m e t r i c , w h i c h dates to t h e end of t h e eighth c e n t u r y BCE. L a t e r G r e e k vessels c a m e from a variety of regions. I n t h e Babylonian a n d Early Persian p e r i o d s , m o s t c a m e from C o r inth, w h i c h t h e n possessed m a s t e r y of t h e seas. T h o s e v e s -
^9
CERAMICS: P e r s i a n P e r i o d . Pottery types from Qadum.
93 (a) c o o k i n g p o t ; (b) krater; (c) jug; ( d ) d i p p e r
juglet; (e) five e x a m p l e s of b o w l s . (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Persian Period
CERAMICS: P e r s i a n P e r i o d .
Pottery
types from
Qadum.
467
(a) t o r p e d o jars; (b) jugs; (c) storage jar.
(Courtesy A S O R Archives)
sels w e r e still rare in Palestine, a n d only a few h a v e b e e n f o u n d . It is only from t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE o n w a r d t h a t i m p o r t s from t h e eastern G r e e k islands increased: f r o m Rhodes, Kos, Cnidus (Knidos), Chios, Samos, and Lesbos, for e x a m p l e , as well as from t h e G r e e k settlements along t h e n o r t h e a s t e r n M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast, s u c h as A l - M i n a . T h e s e E a s t G r e e k vases i n c l u d e d bowls w i t h p a i n t e d b a n d s a n d horizontal h a n d l e s , jugs w i t h b l a c k - p a i n t e d d e c o r a t i o n or g e o m e t r i c designs o n their u p p e r p a r t , a n d vessels in t h e W i l d G o a t style. D u r i n g t h e sixth c e n t u r y BCE, especially t o w a r d its close, G r e e k vessels from A t h e n s b e g a n to arrive. A l t h o u g h initially they only r e a c h e d Palestine in small n u m b e r s , they w e r e quickly i n t e g r a t e d w i t h t h e vessels in c o m m o n use.
t h e w e s t e r n p a r t of t h e m o u n d ; o n t h e basis of this find, t h e excavator, M o s h e D o t h a n , p r o p o s e d t h a t t h e m o u n d ' s n o r t h w e s t section h a d , in t h e P e r s i a n period, c o n t a i n e d a q u a r t e r of rich m e r c h a n t s , m o s t of t h e m G r e e k , a n d t h a t it h a d b e e n t h e finest section of t h e t o w n . I n excavations at Jaffa, a large w a r e h o u s e f r o m t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d w a s f o u n d t o have close affinities w i t h t h e p l a n of t h e recently published w a r e h o u s e s at A l - M i n a . A sizable a m o u n t of p o t t e r y w a s f o u n d o n t h e floor of o n e of t h e r o o m s . All t h e vessels were of a single type a n d all b o r e similar red-figured decoration. It is v e r y likely that, as at t h e n o r t h e r n P h o e n i c i a n p o r t city of A l - M i n a , a g r o u p of G r e e k m e r c h a n t s resided in Jaffa d u r i n g t h e Persian p e r i o d a n d e n g a g e d in t h e wholesale t r a d e of t h e p r o d u c t s of A t h e n i a n potteries.
T h e first G r e e k vessels to arrive w e r e p a i n t e d in black o n a r e d b a c k g r o u n d (black figured). L a t e r , t h e colors w e r e r e versed: figures p a i n t e d in r e d o n a black b a c k g r o u n d (red figured). L a s t to arrive w e r e plain black-glazed t y p e s . T h e c h a n g e s in t h e s o u r c e of tire i m p o r t e d G r e e k w a r e a n d t h e absolute d o m i n a n c e of t h e A t t i c p o t t e r y t h r o u g h o u t tire P e r sian p e r i o d in Palestine is conclusively p r o v e n b y c o m p a rable finds in n e i g h b o r i n g l a n d s a n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n area, as well as o n t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n islands.
A t h e n i a n pottery a p p a r e n t l y was also b r o u g h t t o Tell J e m m e h . T h e discoveries t h e r e i n c l u d e d a b o u t a d o z e n of t h e red-figured c u p s t h a t w e r e evidently p a i n t e d by t h e Pithos Painter; although n o t f o u n d o n t h e s a m e site, t h e y m a y h a v e b e e n p u r c h a s e d at t h e s a m e t i m e in A t h e n s and carried over o n t h e s a m e vessel t o t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast, w h e n c e they w e r e distributed to several m e r c h a n t s . T h e best e x a m p l e s to date of t h e p h e n o m e n o n of G r e e k settlers are p e r h a p s t h e finds from T e l D o r , M e s a d H a s h a v y a h u , a n d M i g d o l . A t m a n y other s i t e s — T e l M i c h a l , Tell el-Hesi, a n d Ashkelon, a m o n g t h e m — a l s o p r o d u c e d rich assemblages of i m p o r t e d G r e e k p o t t e r y , h a v e b e e n u n e a r t h e d , however.
T h e influx of G r e e k g o o d s to coastal sites in t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n b r o u g h t w i t h it G r e e k colonization o n t h e coasts of P h o e n i c i a a n d Palestine. Clear evidence for this p r o c e s s w a s recently r e c o v e r e d at A l - M i n a , T e l l S u k a s , T a b a t e l - H a m m a m , a n d elsewhere along t h e P h o e n i c i a n coast. T h e r e also is evidence for t h e s e t t l e m e n t of G r e e k m e r c h a n t s in Israel. A t T e l A k k o , a rich assemblage of AtticG r e e k p o t t e r y w a s discovered in a w e l l - p l a n n e d q u a r t e r o n
U n d e c o r a t e d e v e r y d a y w a r e from G r e e c e also b e g a n to a p p e a r in Palestine d u r i n g t h e Persian period. It included h e a v y bowls, cooking p o t s , a n d , p r o m i n e n t l y , wine a m p h o r a e f r o m t h e eastern G r e e k islands. It seems t h a t even t h o u g h Palestine p r o d u c e d large quantities of excellent w i n e ,
468
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Persian Period ^8
a n d t h e Palestinian imitations can be readily distinguished. I t is also possible to d e t e c t d i e s o u r c e of t h e copies. T h e r e is a large g r o u p of vessels w h o s e form is nearly identical t o t h e above-three i m p o r t e d w e s t e r n g r o u p s ; h o w e v e r , b e c a u s e they lack distinctive d e c o r a t i o n , it is impossible t o d e t e r m i n e w h e t h e r they a r e i m p o r t s or local p r o d u c t s . T h i s g r o u p in cludes d i e " P e r s i a n " bowls with a flat b a s e , a large g r o u p of straight-shouldered jars, jars w i t h b a s k e t h a n d l e s , a n d a m p h o r a e t h a t w e r e t h e p r o t o t y p e of the R h o d i a n a m p h o r a e of t h e Hellenistic p e r i o d . T h e s e vessels w e r e all u s e d in t r a n s p o r t i n g goods b y sea a n d are f o u n d widely d i s p e r s e d along t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n coast. O n l y mineralogical a n d p e t r o g r a p h i c analyses c a n p r o v i d e m o r e exact conclusions as t o their place of origin. N e v e r t h e l e s s , even if t h e majority of these jars, b o w l s , a n d a m p h o r a e w e r e i n d e e d locally m a n ufactured, their origins are to b e s o u g h t o n t h e E a s t G r e e k islands a n d o n C y p r u s . T h e i r a p p e a r a n c e in tire eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n is certainly c o n n e c t e d with t h e early G r e e k t r a d i n g colonies: A l - M i n a a n d T e l l S u k a s in Syria; M e s a d H a s h a v y a h u in Palestine; a n d M i g d o l , D a p h n a e , a n d N a u kratis in E g y p t . C y p r i o t p o t t e r y , of w h i c h only a small p a r t h a s b e e n s t u d ied, is a m o n g d i e p o t t e r y i m p o r t e d f r o m t h e west. T h e fol lowing survey is b a s e d o n E i n a r G j e r s t a d ' s s u m m a r y . It i n cludes only e x a m p l e s t h a t are clearly C y p r i o t t y p e s , w i t h p a i n t e d decoration. C y p r i o t vessels w e r e often also f o u n d in context with local w a r e of t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d , b u t their dates are as yet unverified. S o m e h a v e b e e n a t t r i b u t e d , a p p a r e n t l y incorrectly, to earlier p e r i o d s . It s e e m s , h o w e v e r , t h a t m o s t b e l o n g e d to t h e W h i t e - P a i n t e d V g r o u p .
CERAMICS: P e r s i a n P e r i o d .
Imported
Attic
vases from
Tel
Dor.
D a t e d from fifth t o f o u r t h c e n t u r y BCE. (Courtesy E. Stern)
a considerable a m o u n t still h a d to be i m p o r t e d from a b r o a d , u n d o u b t e d l y for c o n s u m p t i o n b y the increasing n u m b e r s of Greeks w h o h a d settled there. In the Babylonian-Persian periods, a n d even before, G r e e k pottery was plentiful in Palestine, exerting a s t r o n g influence o n local ceramics. H o w e v e r , while tire eastern v e s sels were for t h e m o s t p a r t merely imitations, a n d often very late ones, t h e western p o t t e r y c o m p r i s e d b o t h i m p o r t e d w a r e a n d c o n t e m p o r a r y local copies. T h i s p o t t e r y was widely i m itated, especially tire types of vessels, t h o u g h t h e Palestinian potters did n o t succeed in duplicating t h e excellent quality and exquisite decoration. T h e E a s t Greek bowls p r o b a b l y were the original m o d e l s for t h e small bowls a n d kraters with horizontal handles t h a t w e r e widespread in Palestine. T h e locally p r o d u c e d closed l a m p s , m a d e of coarse clay w i t h o u t t h e typical b u r n i s h , w e r e certainly p a t t e r n e d after Attic lamps. Juglets f o u n d at T e l M e g a d i m b e a r a close r e s e m blance to the Attic lekythos, a n d o n e from T e l M e v o r a k h imitates t h e laginos. In m o s t cases, t h e difference b e t w e e n t h e i m p o r t e d w a r e
Only o n e vessel a m o n g all of t h e p o t t e r y f r o m t h e P e r s i a n p e r i o d has b e e n i n t e r p r e t e d as an A c h a e m e n i d i m p o r t : it is a c u p m a d e of a light-greenish clay with h i g h , very t h i n ribbed sides. F r a g m e n t s of a n o t h e r c u p w e r e f o u n d lying n e x t to it in an unstratified c o n t e x t at S a m a r i a . E v e n t h o u g h direct i m p o r t s of A c h a e m e n i d w a r e w e r e n o n e x i s t e n t in tire Persian p e r i o d — t h e w a r e was n o t o u t s t a n d i n g either for its quality or b e a u t y — A c h a e m e n i a n m e t a l vases specifically h a d an indirect influence o n r h y t a a n d several types of local Palestinian p o t t e r y (see a b o v e ) . B e c a u s e A c h a e m e n i d p o t tery was almost uniformly dull, a n d b e c a u s e t h e A c h a e m e n ids were n o t colonizers, t h e a d v e n t of t h e P e r s i a n s did n o t change t h e local styles o f p o t t e r y in u s e in t h e N e a r East. [Many entries.]
of the sites mentioned
are the subject of
independent
BIBLIOGRAPHY B o a r d m a n , John. The Greeks Overseas. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1 9 7 3 . Study of die Greek expansion toward the eastern Mediterranean. L a p p , Paul W . " T h e Pottery of Palestine in the Persian P e r i o d . " In Archaeology und Altes Testament, p p . 1 7 9 - 1 9 2 . T u b i n g e n , 1 9 7 0 . Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, $38-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. Study of local Palestinian pottery in the Persian period. See pages 9 3 - 1 4 2 .
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
469
Stern, Ephraim. " T h e Beginning of t h e Greek Settlement in Palestine in the Light of the Recent Excavations at T e l D o r . " In Recent Ex cavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited by Seymour Gitin and William G. Dever, p p . 1 0 7 - 1 2 4 . Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 4 9 . W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 9 . EPHRAIM STERN
Ceramics of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods V a s t a m o u n t s of p o t t e r y for t h e p e r i o d from a b o u t 300 BCE to 300/400 CE (the p e r i o d s c o v e r e d in this survey) h a v e b e e n f o u n d in Israel/Palestine, b u t m a n y questions r e m a i n u n a n s w e r e d . N u m e r o u s p r e l i m i n a r y r e p o r t s , illustrating a few select items, often assigned to unrealistically precise, h i s t o r ically b a s e d p e r i o d s , have b e e n t h e n o r m . Synthetic studies of t h e regional w a r e s b y w a r e a n d / o r s h a p e are few. F i n d s from J o r d a n h a v e generally b e e n h a n d l e d similarly. In other regions (e.g., Syria a n d E g y p t ) , detailed p o t t e r y r e p o r t s exist o n t h e finds from a few widely s e p a r a t e d sites; t h e r e p o r t s in local journals are generally of p o o r quality. A g o o d u n d e r s t a n d i n g of t h e wares in t h e s e countries is n o t close at h a n d . T h r o u g h o u t t h e N e a r East, t h e care lavished o n B r o n z e a n d I r o n A g e wares h a s n o t generally b e e n e x t e n d e d to t h e w a r e s of t h e later p e r i o d s . Statistics of frequency a r e available for relatively few sites, a n d m a n y excavators h a v e n o t r e c o r d e d t h e bulk of their finds before discard. A lack of excavations on kiln sites i m p e d e s o u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of sources a n d of p r o d u c t i o n t e c h n i q u e s . I n general, t h e p o t t e r y of t h e region mixes local traditions (seen in coarse a n d cooldng w a r e s a n d t h e storage jar series) w i t h M e d i t e r r a n e a n Hellenistic a n d R o m a n - t y p e fine t a b l e wares a n d a m p h o r a e ( t r a n s p o r t c o n t a i n e r s ) , b o t h locally m a d e a n d i m p o r t e d from farther west. E a s t e r n (Seleucid, P a r t h i a n ) wares a r e generally a b s e n t , e x c e p t o n sites o n t h e R o m a n frontier o n t h e E u p h r a t e s River, a n d at P a l m y r a , in Syria. T h e N a b a t e a n r e g i o n h a s its o w n distinctive local w a r e s , generally thin-walled: a series of r o u n d - b o t t o m e d p a i n t e d vessels n o t m a t c h e d elsewhere, m a d e alongside a series of close copies of Italian R o m a n vessels ( a n d clay l a m p s ) , o w i n g little to L e v a n t i n e m o d e l s . A similar coexis t e n c e of " n a t i v e " p a i n t e d w a r e s a n d imitation R o m a n p r o d u c t s — i n thin, whitish w a r e s — i s e v i d e n c e d in M e r o i t i c N u bia. E g y p t , commercially largely isolated d u r i n g t h e R o m a n p e r i o d , is a special case: t h e r e , traditional wares a n d P t o l e m a i c derivatives w e r e s u p p l i e d t o a large local m a r k e t . D u r i n g t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, G r e e k - d e r i v e d fmeware types a p p e a r t h r o u g h o u t t h e region. T r u e G r e e k black-gloss w a r e s a p p e a r as i m p o r t s (from A t h e n s a n d , a l t h o u g h rarely, f r o m s o u t h e r n Italy, early in t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, a n d t h e r e after from various ill-defined A e g e a n a n d Asia M i n o r s o u r c e s ) . T h e n u m e r o u s local copies from t h e L e v a n t , i n cluding C y p r u s — J e r u s a l e m w a r e s are a notable e x c e p t i o n —generally h a v e a dull, d a r k i s h slip coating over a buff f a b ric. S u b s e q u e n t l y , t h e m a j o r regional tableware is t h e r e d - s l i p p e d (red-gloss) E a s t e r n Sigillata A w a r e ( o n c e
CERAMICS: Hellenistic
and
Roman
Periods.
Hellenistic
bottles.
S t a n d a r d bottle is s h o w n at left, spindle b o t t l e is s h o w n at right. D a t e d c. 100 BCE. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
t e r m e d P e r g a m e n e ) , f r o m u n l o c a t e d sources ( L e b a n o n ? , s o u t h e r n Syria?), c u r r e n t f r o m a b o u t 150 BCE t o a b o u t 150 CE. T h i s is well studied: a L a t e Hellenistic p h a s e is typified b y platters with very h e a v y feet a n d small floral s t a m p s a r o u n d t h e center (not u n r e l a t e d t o t h e black-gloss C a m p a n a B platters of T u s c a n y i n Italy). T h e s e probably were f o r m e d w i t h t h e aid of m o l d s . Small hemispherical footed cups (not modeled on imports) accompany them. T h e red gloss surface here a p p e a r s earlier t h a n o n other M e d i t e r r a n e a n w a r e s ; it is applied b y a d o u b l e d i p p i n g process, leaving a darker stripe across t h e m i d d l e of t h e vessel (seen later o n s o m e o t h e r eastern fine w a r e s ) . A C y p r i o t ( ? ) c o u n t e r p a r t ( C y p r i o t sigillata) has a m o r e pinldsh- or purplish-red clay a n d slip coloration; t h e slip t e n d s t o w a r d a metallic luster. E a s t e r n Sigillata A is a b u n d a n t t h r o u g h o u t the N e a r East, w h e r e a s t h e C y p r i o t w a r e is s p o r a d i c outside C y p r u s (ex c e p t in t h e lower Nile D e l t a a n d in Israel's N e g e v desert— w h e r e , dubiously, local p r o d u c t i o n has b e e n claimed). B e t w e e n a b o u t 10 a n d 80 CE, t h e classic Eastern Sigillata A w a r e shapes are replaced b y ones m o d e l e d o n those of Italian red-gloss terra sigillata ware, p e r h a p s indirectly t h r o u g h d i e p r o d u c t s of Asia M i n o r (Eastern Sigillata B a n d P e r g a m o n - r e g i o n w a r e s ) . T h e Asia M i n o r wares also b e a r
470
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
CERAMICS: Hellenistic a n d R o m a n P e r i o d s .
s t a m p s inscribed in G r e e k — a rather short-lived fashion. C y p r i o t sigillata shows similar changes. T h e r e a f t e r , n e w shapes (mainly flat-based, with decoratives m o l d i n g s o n the interior) s e e m to owe m o r e t o R o m a n metalware. S o m e late Eastern Sigillata A ware vessels with a s p o n g e d m o t t l e d slip t r e a t m e n t ( c u r r e n t from a b o u t 70 to 120 CE) also attest to these new influences. Similar t r e n d s are p r e s e n t t h r o u g h o u t Eastern Sigillata B w a r e (which can b e fired black or d a r k brown). Red-gloss (sigillata) tablewares and thin-walled ware i m ports, mainly from Italian a n d A e g e a n sources, are quite c o m m o n d u r i n g t h e first century CE, particularly at coastal sites, b u t also as far afield as P e t r a , in Jordan. S o m e serve to m a r k the early R e d Sea trade links with India (where a few specimens h a v e been f o u n d ) , m a n y are p r e s e n t at Quseir e l - Q a d i m , one of t h e Egyptian d e p a r t u r e p o i n t s . A d aptations of these i m p o r t e d shapes are seen in other local p r o d u c t s , from Cilicia a n d Syria to E g y p t ( b u t rarely, if at all, in M e s o p o t a m i a ) . S o m e lead-glazed c u p s , mimicking decorated silverware, were m a d e at T a r s u s from a b o u t 1 to 100 CE. T h e s e m a t c h types m a d e in western Asia M i n o r a n d are quite distinct from the essentially P a r t h i a n alkaline-glazed wares m a d e in M e s o p o t a m i a , of w h i c h s o m e forerunners are seen in later Hellenistic Antioch. F i n d s from D u r a - E u r o p o s in Syria show that the P a r t h i a n series, typically rather heavy a m p h o r a jars with p e a k e d handles a n d g o u g e d o r n a m e n t , lasted b e y o n d 250 CE. O t h e r fine wares include a series of buff-ware bowls w i t h partial t w o - t o n e (red/black) slip a n d double-bulge h o r i z o n tal handles below the rim, c o m m o n in s e c o n d - c e n t u r y BCE
Terra sigillata juglets.
(Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
deposits a t P a p h o s a n d at S h i q m o n a in Israel a n d elsewhere. M a n y versions of t h e Hellenistic lagynos s h a p e (an a n g u l a r b o d i e d , n a r r o w - n e c k e d jug with silhouetted floral p a t t e r n s a n d horizontal b a n d s p a i n t e d in b r o w n o n a c r e a m slip or surface) a p p e a r from a b o u t 175 to 50 BCE o n C y p r u s ( p r o b ably a major s o u r c e ) ; E g y p t i a n a n d o t h e r versions are also k n o w n . Small figured vessels a n d l a m p s m a d e in m o l d s ( s o m e depicting heads) w e r e p r o d u c e d in t h e N i l e D e l t a region (e.g., at M e m p h i s ) from a b o u t 100 BCE t o 100 CE; also f o u n d at this t i m e are r e d - w a r e p a i n t e d jars w i t h erotic m o tifs a n d busts of favored y o u t h s half-hidden 011 t h e interiors. L a t e r Egyptian wares b e a r floral p a t t e r n s in p a i n t or a d d e d raised slip ( b a r b o t i n e ) ; a particular g r o u p of shallow b e i g e w a r e c u p s depicts silhouetted pygmylike figures in black. C o r r e s p o n d i n g t r e a t m e n t s o c c u r o n t h e M e r o i t i c w a r e s of Nubia. R e c o r d e d Hellenistic to R o m a n i m p o r t s i n c l u d e thin car inated bowls f r o m K n i d o s , later relief-ware bowls from C o r inth, a n d m o l d m a d e relief-ware " n o v e l t y " figured vases from K n i d o s (notably a cache in t h e form of p a r t s of t h e h u m a n b o d y , possibly for m e d i c a l u s e , discovered o n P a p h o s ) . I n contrast to t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n - t y p e w a r e s , J e r u salem p r o d u c t s s h o w a r a n g e of thin, well-fired plain w a r e s in t h e tradition of the p r e c e d i n g P e r s i a n p e r i o d . T h i n - w a l l e d Greek-influenced cooking vessels i n s a n d y wares a p p e a r i n Hellenistic t i m e s . A large C y p r i o t series a n d those from t h e N i l e D e l t a s h o w typically G r e e k features s u c h as internally ledged rims (to s u p p o r t lids) a n d , o n t h e shallower " c a s s e r o l e s , " striplike h a n d l e s along t h e exteriors of rims. T h e typical Palestinian version is fairly shallow, w i t h a sagging b o t t o m a n d a short n e c k flanked b y small h a n d l e s ;
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Byzantine Period Early R o m a n e x a m p l e s are particularly thin. H o r i z o n t a l r i b b i n g is a feature of these a n d of related r o u n d - b o t t o m e d jugs a n d flasks, as from d i e later s e c o n d century BCE; t h e treat m e n t is c o p i e d in E g y p t , a n d , m u c h later, in t h e A e g e a n region, a n d is w i d e s p r e a d o n later R o m a n / B y z a n t i n e wares from t h e L e v a n t . I n a b o u t 170-50 BCE, p o r t a b l e braziers set o n tall s t a n d s , with diree internal k n o b s set obliquely t o s u p p o r t a p o t , w e r e m a d e in q u a n t i t y in t h e Alexandria r e g i o n a n d also in t h e A e g e a n ; s o m e copies of t h e m a p p e a r o n C y p r u s a n d elsewhere. T h e i r m o s t distinctive feature, t h e i n ternal k n o b s , is regularly m o l d e d in t h e f o r m of p l a q u e s ( s o m e t i m e s inscribed) b e a r i n g Greek-style Silenos masks or bulls' h e a d s . T h e traditional Palestinian storage jars w i t h ringlike h a n dles at t h e s h o u l d e r c o n t i n u e u n a b a t e d , b e i n g c o m m o n l y a c c o m p a n i e d b y i m p o r t e d w i n e a n d oil a m p h o r a e — i n H e l lenistic times m o s t l y from R h o d e s a n d in R o m a n times f r o m Italy ( C a m p a n i a , Istria, a n d elsewhere) a n d even S p a i n . E n o r m o u s n u m b e r s of Hellenistic w i n e a m p h o r a e from A e g e a n sources (identified b y t h e s t a m p s 011 their h a n d l e s ) are d o c u m e n t e d at Alexandria. T h e s e s p a w n e d local imitations, at first along L a k e M a r e o t i s a n d t h e n t h r o u g h o u t E g y p t . Similar copies a p p e a r o n C y p r u s a n d elsewhere. T h e s e n o r mally h a v e ovoid or long cylindrical b o d i e s a n d distinctive necks flanked b y t w o long, u p r i g h t h a n d l e s ; t h e y t a p e r at t h e b a s e to a solid t o e of variable length. A distinctive version of this s h a p e , with r i b b i n g a d d e d a n d t h e h a n d l e s r e d u c e d t o m e r e loops u n d e r t h e r i m , is seen in E g y p t in R o m a n times. Elsewhere, t h e m o s t c o m m o n local a m p h o r a t y p e s in Early R o m a n times are m o d e l e d o n t h e Italian " p s e u d o K o a n " t y p e (copied from an A e g e a n Plellenistic p r o d u c t ) , witii tall handles f o r m e d of t w o rolls of clay set side b y side. I n Cilicia, a bulging v e r s i o n of t h e Palestinian t o r p e d o s h a p e d jar is supplied w i t h h a n d l e s of this t y p e . L a t e r R o m a n t y p e s , a p p a r e n t l y m o r e diverse, are still i n a d e q u a t e l y studied. P a i n t e d c o m m e r c i a l " l a b e l s " (tituli picti) are seen o n b o t h i m p o r t s a n d copies; t h o s e f r o m M a s a d a in Israel i n c l u d e s o m e labels in L a t i n , i n d i c a t i n g t h e arrival of Italian wines tiiere b y a b o u t 20 BCE. Clay mixing bowls witii gritted interiors (mortaria) are p r e s e n t only sporadically: s o m e w i d e - r i m m e d Italian i m p o r t s b e a r i n g p o t t e r s ' s t a m p s (first-second centuries CE) are k n o w n from C a e s a r e a a n d P a p h o s . In t h e t h i r d - f o u r t h c e n turies, versions of t h e Italian t y p e , in a distinctive d e e p b r o w n w a r e with volcanic grits, w e r e m a d e o n t h e n o r t h e r n Syrian coast (in t h e area of R a s el-Bassit). T h e s e b e a r m u l tiple n a m e s t a m p s in G r e e k ( a n d occasionally in L a t i n ) . T h e y , a n d later u n s t a m p e d n a r r o w - r i m m e d versions, cir culated widely a r o u n d t h e L e v a n t i n e coastlands. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adan-Bayewitz, David. Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade. R a m a t G a n , 1 9 9 3 . Fine all-around study of a regional cooking ware, with clay analyses a n d ancient textual references.
471
' A m r , Khairieh. The Pottery from Petra: A Neutron Activation Analysis Study. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 324. Oxford, 1987. Provides a selection of wares found at Petra and a review of the existing literature. Blakely, Jeffrey A., et al. " R o m a n Mortaria and Basins from a Sequence at Caesarea: Fabrics a n d S o u r c e s . " In Caesarea Papers: Straton's Tower, Herod's Harbour, and Roman and Byzantine Caesarea, edited b y R. Lindley V a n n , p p . 1 9 4 - 2 1 3 . Journal of R o m a n Archaeology, Supplementary Series, n o . 5. A n n Arbor, Mich., 1992. Discusses mortaria (Syrian and Italian imports). Cahiers de la Ceramique Egyptienne. Cairo, 1 9 8 7 - . Series issued by the Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Cairo, which includes studies of Ptolemaic a n d R o m a n - p e r i o d wares. Supplemented by Bulletin de Liaison du Groupe International d'Etude de la Ceramique Egyptienne, which contains brief reports on current excavation finds. C o t t o n , H a n n a h M . , and Joseph Geiger. Masada. vol. 2, The Latin and Greek Documents. Jerusalem, 1989. Greek and Latin dipinti. G u n n e w e g , Jan, et al. The Provenience, Typology, and Chronology of Eastern Terra Sigillata. Q e d e m , vol. 17. Jerusalem, 1983. Study based on selected clay analyses. Hayes, John W . "Sigillate orientali." In Enciclopedia dell'arte antica: At lanta delle forme ceramiche romane, vol. 2, p p . 1 - 9 6 , pis. 1 - 2 3 . R o m e , 1986. Typology of the eastern sigillata wares. Hayes, John W . Paphos, vol. 3, The Hellenistic and Roman Pottery. N i c osia, C y p r u s , 1 9 9 1 . Presents a wide range of ware found throughout the region. Herbert, Sharon, et al. Tel Anafa. 2 vols. Ann Arbor, 1994 Covers ce ramics from an important L a t e Hellenistic site in Israel. Negev, Avraham. The Late Hellenistic and Early Roman Pottery of Na batean Oboda: Final Report. Q e d e m , vol. 2 2 . Jerusalem, 1986. Dis cusses local a n d imported products. Toll, N . P . The Excavations at Dura-Europos, vol. 4 . 1 , fasc. 1, The Green Glazed Pottery. N e w H a v e n , 1 9 4 3 . Covers Parthian-style glazed wares. T u s h i n g h a m , A, D . , et al. Excavations in Jerusalem, 1961-1967. Vol. I. T o r o n t o , 1985. F o r fine wares, see the contribution by J o h n W. Hayes (pp. 1 8 3 - 1 9 4 ) . Vanderhoeven, Michel. Fouilles d'Apamee de Syrie, vol. 9 . 1 , Les terras sigillces, 1066-1972. Brussels, 1989. Covers Eastern Sigillata A and more, with color photos. Vitro, F a n n y . "Potters and Pottery Manufacture in R o m a n Palestine." Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology (University College, L o n d o n ) , no. 23 (1986): 4 7 - 6 4 . Discusses Jewish ceramic use (and some later R o m a n use?). W h i t c o m b , Donald S., and Janet H. Johnson. Quseir al-Qadim, 1978: Preliminary Report. Cairo, 1 9 7 9 . See W , R. Johnson on R o m a n pot tery (pp. 6 7 - 1 0 3 ) . F o r more general works o n the categories mentioned, not restricted to the region, see the following titles: Ettlinger, Elisabeth, et al. Conspectus formarum terrae sigillatae Italico modo confectae. Bonn, 1990. N e w typology. Magness, Jodi. Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology, circa 200-800 CE. Shef field, 1993. Peacock, D . P. S., and D . F . Williams. Amphorae and the Roman Econ omy. L o n d o n a n d N e w York, 1986. Contains a partial typology. JOHN W .
HAYES
Ceramics of the Byzantine Period P o t t e r y of the f o u r t h t o s e v e n t h c e n t u r y found in t h e L e v a n t is generally labeled B y z a n t i n e ; elsewhere in t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n t h e s a m e wares a r e n o r m a l l y designated L a t e R o m a n (the t e r m Byzantine b e i n g reserved for later, typically lead-
472
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Byzantine Period
glazed wares). T h e m o d e r n L e v a n t i n e u s a g e implies close links with political history. Actual fashions in pottery t e n d to lag behind political c h a n g e s , relying o n t h e creation or extinction of markets (which are, in part, affected b y major natural disasters s u c h as plagues a n d earthquakes). T h u s , R o m a n - d e r i v e d wares continued to b e p r o d u c e d t h r o u g h t h e U m a y y a d period; t h e major break in tradition o c c u r r e d in a r o u n d 800 CE. Similarly, in E g y p t , the religious t e r m Cop tic is used to designate pottery of this period, although, in N u b i a at least, the same tradition can be traced d o w n to t h e fourteenth century. Late Roman as a designation should b e viewed here in cultural rather t h a n political terms—for m u c h of the period R o m e (or its successor, C o n s t a n t i n o p l e ) d i d n o t directly rule all t h e areas u n d e r consideration. T h e in fluence of ( R o m a n ) Christianity was generally strong, h o w ever, a n d this influenced pottery decoration.
jor u r b a n centers s u c h as C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . Eventually, t h e m o n e t a r y e c o n o m y of imperial R o m e s h r a n k , a n d o r g a n i zations s u c h as t h e c h u r c h a n d local m a g n a t e s s e e m to h a v e a s s u m e d m o r e control over t h e circulation of t h e s e c h e a p everyday p r o d u c t s .
T h e universal fine c e r a m i c wares of the period are fine textured a n d red bodied, with a reddish slip finish (not a glazed t r e a t m e n t ) . A few major centers of p r o d u c t i o n in N o r t h Africa, western T u r k e y , a n d (probably) C y p r u s led the way, in d u e course providing models for other, m o r e local wares. T h i s concentration of p r o d u c t i o n in a few major centers may reflect t h e t e n d e n c y t o centralized control a n d specialization f o u n d in t h e age of Diocletian a n d C o n s t a n tine. While the potters themselves r e m a i n e d free agents, t h e marketing of their p r o d u c t s seems to have b e c o m e m o r e regulated, with a view to maintaining steady supplies t o m a
F i n e R e d W a r e s . T h e fine red-gloss (terra sigillata) wares of earlier R o m a n times, r e p r e s e n t e d in t h e L e v a n t chiefly b y E a s t e r n Sigillata A a n d C y p r i o t ( ? ) p r o d u c t s , died o u t d u r i n g the late s e c o n d century. A general scarcity of well-dated deposits for t h e period from 150 to a b o u t 300 or so containing fine wares m a y signal r e d u c e d u s e of s u c h i m p o r t s . W i t h t h e fourth c e n t u r y , n e w t r a d e p a t t e r n s emerged: African R e d - S l i p W a r e , a m e d i u m - t o fine-grade tableware with a r e d slip, m a d e in d i e r e g i o n of m o d e r n T u n i s i a , circulated widely in t h e L e v a n t a n d also in E g y p t (a region previously partly closed to i m p o r t s , o w i n g t o its
CERAMICS: B y z a n t i n e P e r i o d . (Courtesy J. W . Hayes)
F i g u r e 1. African
T h e various fine wares h a v e attracted t h e b u l k of scholarly attention, mainly from t h e s t a n d p o i n t s of t y p o l o g y a n d art history. T r a d e a m p h o r a e h a v e also b e c o m e well k n o w n in r e c e n t years. T h e coarser wares are generally m o r e p o o r l y served b y t h e scholarly literature. Statistics of frequency are available for relatively few sites; m a n y e x c a v a t o r s have n o t t r o u b l e d to r e c o r d t h e b u l k of their finds before discard. A lack of excavations o n kiln sites i m p e d e s o u r k n o w l e d g e of sources a n d of p r o d u c t i o n t e c h n i q u e s . C h e m i c a l a n d p e t rological t e c h n i q u e s of analysis h a v e n o t yet b e e n widely u s e d o n t h e wares in question.
Red-Slip
Ware types. F o u r t h - s e v e n t h c e n t u r i e s .
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Byzantine Period
JUL
; ii
CERAMICS: B y z a n t i n e P e r i o d .
M i i M i i i 1i
F i g u r e 2 . Examples
of Cypriot
ys~
Red-
R7are. (Courtesy J. W . Hayes)
p r e - D i o c l e t i a n i c m o n e t a r y isolation; see figure 1). S o m e Af rican wares h a d already a p p e a r e d at D u r a - E u r o p o s (before 256), b u t their m a i n influx w a s later. T h e f o u r t h - c e n t u r y African p r o d u c t s ( T e r r a Sigillata africana C a n d D ) a r e mostly b l a t a n t copies of m e t a l w a r e s h a p e s , with a n a l o g o u s d e c o r a t i o n , either applied or s t a m p e d ; these " m e t a l l i c " types (flat-based dishes a n d small bowls with wide r i m s , for e x a m p l e ) m a y generally h a v e b e e n w h e e l - t h r o w n within m o l d s . T h r o u g h o u t t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y floral s t a m p e d p a t t e r n s , mostly b a s e d o n r a d i a t i n g p a l m - b r a n c h m o t i f s — n o t derived f r o m m e t a l w a r e — p e r s i s t e d . T h e s t a m p e d p a t t e r n s of t h e fifth a n d sixth centuries, largely Christian in c o n t e n t , m o r e closely m a t c h t h e d e c o r of c o n t e m p o r a r y silverware. T h e p r i m a c y of t h e African w a r e s t h r o u g h o u t t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n region is p r o v e d b y n u m e r o u s imitations; in t h e East, these a r e n o t e d t h r o u g h o u t E g y p t , in J o r d a n , a n d i n A t h e n s . T w o major fine-ware c o m p e t i t o r s , widely t r a d e d , a p p e a r e d in a r o u n d t h e 360s: P h o c e a n R e d - S l i p W a r e (for m e r n a m e : L a t e R o m a n C ) f r o m w e s t e r n Asia M i n o r , a n d C y p r i o t R e d - S l i p W a r e (a revival of t h e earlier C y p r i o t Sig illata, w h o s e s o u r c e r e m a i n s u n l o c a t e d ; see figure 2 ) . T h e latter w a r e — c u r r e n t in C y p r u s , w e s t e r n Cilicia, t h e A l e x a n d r i a region, a n d parts of Palestine—is first attested in d e posits from 365 CE(?) at K o u r i o n o n C y p r u s a n d o n a c o n t e m p o r a r y w r e c k at Y a s s i a d a i n s o u t h w e s t T u r k e y . Its principal fifth-century s h a p e m i m i c s a n African t y p e . P h o c e a n R e d - S l i p W a r e , at first influenced b y t h e earlier r e gional (Candarh) w a r e a n d b y t h e s t a m p e d African p r o d u c t s , s o o n d e v e l o p e d a characteristic s h a p e — a shallow b o w l with a n o v e r h a n g i n g (often rouletted) r i m — a l o n g with dis tinctive s t a m p s (see figure 3 ) . T h e classic version (c. 450-550) is c o m m o n o n L e v a n t i n e sites (e.g., at A n t i o c h , in deposits associated with t h e e a r t h q u a k e in 526, b u t n o t in E g y p t , w h e r e local s t a m p e d copies of t h e African w a r e s p r e d o m i n a t e d . T h e p r i n c i p a l d a t e d contexts for this p e r i o d a r e t h o s e at A n t i o c h ( T u r k e y ) , K o u r i o n ( C y p r u s ) , T e l l K e i s a n
473
(Israel), L e j j u n ( J o r d a n ) , Kellia a n d K a r a n i s ( E g y p t ) , a n d Ballana ( N u b i a ) ; their d a t e s are c o n f i r m e d b y finds from m o r e distant sites s u c h as A t h e n s ( t h e A g o r a ) , C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , a n d Cartilage. A n alternative d a t i n g s c h e m e (for t h e 3 5 0 S - 3 8 0 S ) h a s b e e n p r o p o s e d for J a l a m e ( n o r t h e r n Israel), a l t h o u g h exact contexts for t h e p o t t e r y finds t h e r e are u n specified. A suspicious a b s e n c e at Jalame of t h e African types elsewhere c u r r e n t b e t w e e n 360 a n d 390, a n d t h e fre q u e n c y of P h o c e a n a n d o t h e r p r o d u c t s elsewhere assigned to t h e early/mid-fifth c e n t u r y , m a y here p o i n t to a n e e d for reassessment. C y p r i o t R e d - S l i p W a r e of u n u s u a l types is c o m m o n o n this site. R e d u c e d i m p o r t s of t h e P h o c e a n w a r e a n d a revival of t h e C y p r i o t w a r e (after fifty or m o r e years of decline), a c c o m p a n i e d b y changes in their vessel f o r m s , o c c u r in t h e m i d sixth c e n t u r y . T h e n e w p a t t e r n , already just evident at Lejjun (a p r o b a b l e victim of t h e 551 e a r t h q u a k e ) , could b e a c o n s e q u e n c e of t h e p l a g u e of 540-542. I m p o r t s of t h e Af rican w a r e , at a l o w e b b for a c e n t u r y , n o w r e s u m e in q u a n tity. All t h r e e w a r e s a r e w i d e s p r e a d o n n u m e r o u s Palestinian c h u r c h sites for t h e p e r i o d f r o m a b o u t 550 t o 625 (cf. also t h e B e t h - S h e ' a r i m c a t a c o m b s ) . T h e later C y p r i o t p r o d u c t s , typified b y fiat-based dishes b e a r i n g single cross s t a m p s , are particularly c o m m o n in a n d a r o u n d Alexandria. R e n e w e d imitation of, chiefly, t h e African wares is seen in v a r i o u s places. I n n o r t h e r n J o r d a n (at Jerash a n d Pella), dishes in a local thin-walled red-slipped fabric b e a r painted figures or floral o r n a m e n t s in t w o tones (purple a n d yellowc r e a m ) ; s o m e early e x a m p l e s h a v e t h e traditional s t a m p s . I n E g y p t , t h e A s w a n fine-ware factories c o n t i n u e d t o p r o d u c e derivatives of late fifth-/early s i x t h - c e n t u r y African p r o d u c t s (the latest t o b e i m p o r t e d there) for t w o centuries or m o r e (see figure 4 ) . T h e s e exhibit a flaky p i n k fabric a n d a b u r n i s h e d r e d slip (often o b s c u r i n g t h e s t a m p s ) . E x a m p l e s w e r e e x p o r t e d t o C y p r u s a n d elsewhere in t h e late seventh c e n tury, w h e n t h e other fine r e d wares w e r e disappearing. I n d u e c o u r s e , painted c r e a m - b o d i e d wares s u p p l a n t e d t h e m , particularly in N u b i a .
Si--
CERAMICS: B y z a n t i n e P e r i o d . Red-Slip
Figure
Ware. (Courtesy J. W . Hayes)
3.
Examples
of
Phocean
474
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Byzantine Period a n d schematic; t h e Palestinian Syrian series survive into ' A b b a s i d times.
CERAMICS: B y z a n t i n e P e r i o d .
F i g u r e 4.
Egyptian
Red-Slip
A (As
wan Ware). (Courtesy J. W . Hayes)
L e a d - G l a z e d W a r e s . U n t i l t h e seventh c e n t u r y leadglazed wares are absent from the eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . It is then that utilitarian lead-glazed vessels b e g a n to be p r o d u c e d in t h e n e i g h b o r h o o d of Constantinople. T h i s f u n c tional lead glazing, of u n c e r t a i n origins (various short-lived wares are noted in T h r a c e , the Balkans, a n d t h e Alpine regions from the fourth c e n t u r y ) , seems quite distinct from t h e o r n a m e n t a l tradition of Islamic glazed wares in t h e p e riod after 775/800, A m i d - s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y deposit in I s t a n bul proves m e d i u m - s c a l e p r o d u c t i o n (chiefly of internally glazed jars); t h e earliest closely d a t e d examples of t h e series c o m e from t h e Yassiada wreck (c. 625). [See Yassiada Wrecks.] P r o d u c t i o n en masse, chiefly of w h i t e - b o d i e d ta blewares, s u c h as dishes, followed in a b o u t 700, initiating a conservative tradition of plain or minimally decorated wares t h a t persisted for some four centuries. A few early e x a m p l e s of the C o n s t a n t i n o p l e w a r e s , along with occasional deriva tives, are noted from C y p r u s a n d elsewhere o n t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n littoral in t h e s e v e n t h - e i g h t h - c e n t u r y contexts. N o c o m p a r a b l e wares are yet k n o w n from Anatolia. P l a i n W a r e s . M a r k e d differences b e t w e e n regional traditions blur t h e p i c t u r e for plain wares. P a i n t e d d e c o r a tion is n o t c o m m o n in t h e late R o m a n / B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d , except in parts of E g y p t , where lively figural scenes in two colors are k n o w n . A ribbed t r e a t m e n t is m o r e c o m m o n . In E g y p t and Palestine, flasks a n d jugs often feature internal strainers (to keep o u t flies?), a n d small spouts o n t h e shoul der; a few h a v e lids attached by a loop set o n t h e h a n d l e (a feature later copied in C o n s t a n t i n o p l e ) . C o m b e d grooving (mostly wavy lines) a p p e a r s o n s i x t h - s e v e n t h - c e n t u r y A e gean wares. By t h e sixth century, declining s t a n d a r d s are evident in m a n y provincial p r o d u c t s ; simple s q u a t jugs a n d jars, lacking any decoration, b e c o m e frequent. T h e i r bases m a y b e hollowed, with a central k n o b . O n t h e m o l d - m a d e clay lamps of t h e period, t h e o r n a m e n t b e c o m e s m o r e linear
C o o k i n g W a r e s . T h i n - w a l l e d cooking vessels, normally with small h a n d l e s , reflect R o m a n traditions. T h e r i b b e d t r e a t m e n t originating o n Palestinian p r o d u c t s n o w b e c o m e s universal. A r a n g e of typical fifth-sixth-century s h a p e s a p pears on t h e D h i o r i o s kiln site o n C y p r u s . D e e p e r vessel types a p p e a r in w e s t e r n Asia M i n o r a n d t h e A e g e a n . Jewish culinary practices are evident in a class of s t e e p - s i d e d cas seroles with close-fining lids—actually t h r o w n b y t h e p o t t e r in a single piece a n d t h e n partly sliced o p e n . T h e a b r u p t knife-cut separation of t h e two elements, f o u n d first in R o m a n times, is seen o n " B y z a n t i n e " e x a m p l e s f r o m Palestine, C y p r u s , a n d t h e N i l e D e l t a region until t h e eighth c e n t u r y . It is possible t h a t Jewish c o n c e r n s for p u r i t y influenced Christian u s a g e also. S p e c i a l T y p e s . Small m o l d - m a d e clay flasks, " s o u v e n i r s " from Christian pilgrim shrines, p r e s u m a b l y m e a n t to h o l d sanctified oil or water, w e r e c u r r e n t from a b o u t 450 t o 650. T h e s e imitate p r e c i o u s versions in silver a n d o t h e r materials a n d bear c r u d e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of saints or simple Christian symbols in relief, s o m e t i m e s with a n identifying inscription. B e s t k n o w n are t h e St. M e n a s flasks f r o m E g y p t , b u t o t h e r E g y p t i a n a n d Palestinian series exist w h o s e s o u r c e s are u n k n o w n ; a series w i t h string holes replacing small h a n d l e s is native to w e s t e r n Asia M i n o r . R e l a t e d in function are s o m e spindly flasks with signet-impressed s t a m p s (origin u n k n o w n ) . Like t h e M e n a s flasks, they w e r e widely t r a n s p o r t e d . T h e i r s t a m p s e m b r a c e m o n o g r a m s t h a t are C h r i s tian a n d also Gnostic/magical s y m b o l s . C o m m e r c i a l A m p h o r a e . W i t h i n t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n or bit, large t w o - h a n d l e d clay jars r e m a i n e d t h e preferred t r a n s p o r t containers for wine, olive oil, a n d certain dry g o o d s (often indicated b y m a r k i n g s , m o s t l y u n d e c i p h e r e d , m a d e in r e d p a i n t ) . T h e Byzantine e x a m p l e s t e n d to b e rather smaller a n d m o r e r o u n d b o d i e d t h a n their p r e d e c e s sors. Cylindrical storage jars bearing t w o small r i n g h a n d l e s o n t h e shoulder r e m a i n t h e s t a n d a r d Palestinian t y p e ; t h e e x a m p l e s from this p e r i o d are n o r m a l l y finely r i b b e d . A m o n g t h e Palestinian storage jars, buff t o o r a n g e - b r o w n w a r e s p r e d o m i n a t e , b u t o n e widely e x p o r t e d t y p e , from t h e B e t h - S h e a n region in Galilee, h a s a h a r d gray fabric b e a r i n g multiple loops p a i n t e d in white. B o t h buff- a n d g r a y - w a r e t y p e s survived t h r o u g h t h e U m a y y a d period. I n E g y p t , t h e s t a n d a r d local t y p e is a slender c a r r o t - s h a p e d vessel with irregular r i b b i n g a n d c r u d e h a n d l e s , m a d e of coarse darkb r o w n Nile silt. D u r i n g the p e r i o d f r o m a b o u t 380 t o 650, a small n u m b e r of distinctive a m p h o r a t y p e s of L e v a n t i n e a n d A e g e a n origin circulated widely t h r o u g h o u t t h e eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d b e y o n d (e.g., t o C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , N u b i a , a n d even distant Britain). T h e p r i m e t y p e s are, in Riley's (1979) B e n g h a z i classification: L a t e R o m a n T y p e 1 (cylindrical, with a s a n d y
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Islamic Period buff w a r e , u n e v e n ridging, a n d u n e v e n l y g r o o v e d h a n d l e s ) , m a d e in Cilicia a n d C y p r u s ; L a t e R o m a n 2 (nearly globular, w i t h a c u p p e d m o u t h , slanted h a n d l e s , a n d straight or w a v y close-set grooving covering t h e u p p e r p a r t ) , from various A e g e a n s o u r c e s ; t h e G a z a t y p e ( L a t e R o m a n 3 ) , a long, b u l let-shaped variant of t h e c o m m o n Palestinian r i n g - h a n d l e d s h a p e , in a d u l l - b r o w n w a r e ; a n d L a t e R o m a n 10 (small, spindly, a n d r i b b e d , in a silky, m i c a c e o u s b r o w n w a r e ) , f r o m western Asia M i n o r . I n a d d i t i o n , s o m e large cylindrical oil a m p h o r a e f r o m N o r d i Africa (in b r i c k - r e d wares, often fired buff o n t h e o u t e r surface) a p p e a r everywhere. T h e s u c c e s sors of these a m p h o r a e in t h e s e v e n t h a n d eighth centuries are less widely distributed, d o c u m e n t i n g a general decline in Mediterranean trade during that period. BIBLIOGRAPHY A d a m s , William Y. Ceramic Industries of Medieval Nubia. 2 vols. L e x ington, Ky., 1986. C o n s p e c t u s of fifth-to fourteenth-century wares. Cading, Ft. W . " A n Early Byzantine Pottery Factory at Dhiorios in C y p r u s . " Levant 4 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 1 - 8 2 . Dhiorios kiln site. Egloff, Michel. Kellia: Lapoterie copte. 2 vols. Geneva, 1 9 7 7 . I m p o r t a n t for L o w e r Egypt; datable groups. Emery, Walter B., a n d L . P . Kirwan. The Royal Tombs of Ballana and Qustul. 2 vols. Cairo, 1938. Classic study for fourth- to sixth-century N u b i a (see, especially, vol. 1, p p . 3 8 6 - 4 0 5 ) . Hayes, John W . Late Roman Pottery a n d A Supplement to Late Roman Pottery. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 8 0 . Basic classification of fine Red-Slip Wares. H a y e s , John W . Excavations at Sarachane in Istanbul, vol. 2, The Pottery. Princeton, 1 9 9 2 . T h e Constantinople sequence. Johnson, Barbara. Pottery from Karanis. A n n Arbor, 1 9 8 1 . Egyptian wares to about 500 CE. Johnson, Barbara. " T h e Pottery." In Excavations at. Jalame: Site of a Glass Factory in iMe Roman Palestine, edited by Gladys D a v i d s o n Weinberg, p p . 1 3 7 - 2 2 6 . C o l u m b i a , M o , , 1988. Alternative dates for fourth- to fifth-century wares. Landgraf, J. "Keisan's Byzantine P o t t e r y . " In TellKeisan, 1971-1076, edited b y Jacques Briend a n d Jean-Baptiste H u m b e r t , p p . 5 1 - 9 9 . Fribourg, 1980. Study of fifth- t o sixdi-century wares in northern Israel. Metzger, Catherine. Les ampoules a eulogie du Musee du Louvre. Paris, 1 9 8 1 . R e c e n t survey of pilgrim flasks. Riley, John A, "Pottery from the First Season of Excavation in t h e Caesarea H i p p o d r o m e . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 218 (April 1 9 7 5 ) : 2 5 - 6 3 . Statistical treatment of finds at Caesarea. Riley, John A. " T h e Coarse Pottery from Berenice." In Excavations at Sidi Khrebish, Benghazi (Berenice), edited b y J. A. Lloyd, vol. 2, p p . 9 1 - 4 6 7 . Libya Antiqua, S u p p l e m e n t 5. Tripoli, 1 9 7 9 . Classification of standard a m p h o r a types (see especially p p . 1 1 2 - 2 3 6 and a p p e n dices, p p . 4 1 9 - 4 4 9 ) . Smitii, R o b e r t H . , a n d Leslie P . D a y . Final Report on the College cf Wooster Excavations in Area IX, the Civic Complex, 1979-1985, Pella of the Decapolis, vol. 2. W o o s t e r , Ohio, 1 9 8 9 . Useful for sixth- to eightii-century regional wares in J o r d a n (especially p p . 1 0 0 - 1 1 7 ) . Vitto, F a n n y . "Potters and Pottery M a n u f a c t u r e in R o m a n Palestine." Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology, London, n o . 23 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 4 7 - 6 4 . Covers Jewish usages in t h e L a t e R o m a n period. W a a g e , Frederick O . , ed, Antioch-on-the-Orontes, vol. 4 . 1 , Ceramics and Islamic Coins. Princeton, 1 9 4 8 . T h e type site for Syria (especially p p . 4.43-59)-
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Watson, P . M . "Jerash Bowls: Study of a Provincial G r o u p of Byzantine Fine W a r e , " In Jerash Archaeological Project, vol. 2, Fouilles de Jerash, 1984-1988, edited by Fawzi Zayadine, p p . 2 2 3 - 2 6 1 . Paris, 1989. Covers late regional painted wares. JOHN W .
HAYES
Ceramics of the Islamic Period T h e s e v e n t h to eleventh centuries in t h e N e a r E a s t is n o t a m o n o l i t h i c p e r i o d in either historical or ceramic t e r m s . In Palestine, these centuries cover t h e e n d of Byzantine rule ( u p to 640), t h e U m a y y a d p e r i o d (c. 640-750), t h e 'Abbasid p e r i o d (c. 750-969, d u r i n g t h e latter p a r t of which t h e c o u n try was r u l e d b y t h e T u l u n i d s a n d Ikhshidids), a n d t h e F a timid p e r i o d (c. 969-1099). T o date neither c o m p r e h e n s i v e c e r a m i c s e q u e n c e s covering these centuries in all p a r t s of t h e N e a r East n o r definitive regional typological distinctions h a v e b e e n established. T h e s t u d y of Islamic p o t t e r y has b e e n p l a g u e d b y p r o b lems of terminology a n d historical biases. Historically b a s e d typological divisions (e.g., U m a y y a d , ' A b b a s i d , F a t i m i d ) are i n a c c u r a t e b e c a u s e c h a n g e s in p o t t e r y rarely coincide w i t h political events. T h o u g h excavations in Israel h a v e d e m o n strated t h a t the M u s l i m c o n q u e s t was n o t a c c o m p a n i e d b y w i d e s p r e a d destructions, it is still generally held tiiat t h e transition from U m a y y a d t o ' A b b a s i d rule in t h e m i d - e i g h t h c e n m r y m a r k e d the b e g i n n i n g of a d r a m a t i c decline in P a lestine's p r o s p e r i t y b e c a u s e t h e capital was transferred from D a m a s c u s to B a g h d a d . I n archaeological t e r m s , however, this has b e e n a self-fulfilling p r o p h e c y : p o s t - U m a y y a d r e m a i n s h a v e n o t b e e n f o u n d b e c a u s e it w a s a s s u m e d t h a t t h e y do n o t exist. P a r t of t h e failure t o identify these r e m a i n s in t h e archaeological r e c o r d in Israel has b e e n the m i s d a t i n g of Islamic c e r a m i c types b y archaeologists, m a n y of w h o m h a v e i g n o r e d t h e clearer s e q u e n c e in J o r d a n (e.g., Pella, A m man, Hesban, 'Aqaba). Islamic p o t t e r y has traditionally b e e n studied from an art historical perspective, witii an e m p h a s i s o n whole glazed vessels, a t d i e e x p e n s e of t h e fragmentary a n d often unglaz e d material recovered o n excavations. Palestinian sites from w h i c h i m p o r t a n t Islamic c e r a m i c material is published in clude H e s b a n , Pella, ' A q a b a , t h e A m m a n Citadel, K h i r b a t al-Mafjar, A b u G h o s h , C a p e r n a u m , R a m l a , Caesarea, T i berias, K h i r b e t K e r a k , a n d N e s s a n a . K e y sites outside Palestine include Usais in Syria, S a m a r r a a n d Susa in Iraq, F u s t a t i n E g y p t , I s t a n b u l / C o n s t a n t i n o p l e in T u r k e y , a n d Siraf in I r a n . T h i s article focuses on t h e Islamic types c h a r acteristic of Palestine. T h e lack of well-excavated and p u b lished material leaves o p e n t h e question of w h e t h e r s o m e of t h e eighth- a n d n i n t h - c e n t u r y types described here contin u e d i n t o t h e t e n t h a n d eleventh centuries. S e v e n t h - C e n t u r y T y p e s . Byzantine ceramic types con tinued w i t h o u t significant c h a n g e s until t h e e n d of t h e sev e n t h century: L a t e R o m a n R e d W a r e s ; F i n e Byzantine W a r e
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CERAMICS: Islamic P e r i o d .
F i g u r e I. Islamic pottery
types. Black s t o n e b o w l ( n o . 8 ) ; r e d - p a i n t e d
b a s i n fragments ( n o . 4 ) ; a n d a c h a n n e l - n o z z l e oil l a m p ( n o . 1 1 ) . (After P . V. C o r b o , GK scavi di Kh. siyar el-Ghanam
(campo dei Pastori) e I Monasteri dei Dintomi, Jerusalem, 1 9 9 5 , fig. 40)
bowls (see below) with incised wavy lines a n d jars, jugs, a n d juglets with incised gashes; " G a z a " a m p h o r a s , t h e latest of which have a very s h o r t neck a n d pointed base; a n d large candlestick l a m p s , " P e r s i a n " (wheelmade) l a m p s , a n d Jer ash lamps. Painted decoration was rare, except i n t h e case of dark-surfaced, white-painted b a g - s h a p e d storejars from Palestine a n d p a i n t e d C o p t i c wares from E g y p t a n d their imitations (e.g., Jerash bowls). Aside from t h e p a i n t e d wares, all of these types disappeared s o m e t i m e b e t w e e n t h e late seventh and m i d - e i g h t h centuries. Fine B y z a n t i n e W a r e . A g r o u p of vessels of t h e m i d sixth-tenth centuries, distinguished in form, fabric, a n d sur face treatment, are k n o w n as F i n e Byzantine W a r e . I n t h e early eighth century, t h e repertoire of o p e n vessels was e x p a n d e d to include a wide variety of shallow dishes a n d plates. T h e b u r n i s h i n g characteristic of t h e Byzantine p e r i o d continued, b u t p a i n t e d black, white, and/or r e d designs w e r e sometimes a d d e d , p e r h a p s reflecting C o p t i c ceramic influ ence. T h e walls of t h e vessels t e n d t o b e t h i n n e r a n d m o r e delicate t h a n w a s usual in t h e sixth a n d seventh centuries. Islamic small bowls a n d c u p s also differ from Byzantine e x amples in having r o u n d e d , flat, or disk bases, a n d i n lacking t h e incised wavy-line decoration. S o m e h a v e d e e p , h e m i spherical bodies a n d eggshell-thin walls. Local variants of these deep c u p s , with thicker walls a n d c o m b e d b a n d s , are c o m m o n at Islamic sites i n Israel's N e g e v desert.
B l a c k S t o n e a n d C e r a m i c B o w l s . O n e of t h e c h a r a c teristic b o w l types of t h e eighth a n d n i n t h centuries is t h e black bowl with a b r o a d , flat b a s e a n d straight walls (see figure 1). M a n y h a v e ledge h a n d l e s a n d a r e d e c o r a t e d o n t h e exterior with incised linear designs. T h e material is either a h a r d , dark-colored s t o n e described as steatite, or s o a p stone, or a dark, b u r n i s h e d , h a n d m a d e c e r a m i c . A related a n d c o n t e m p o r a r y g r o u p of bowls t h a t seems t o h a v e b e e n u s e d as cooking vessels is distinguished b y its lack of d e c o ration, large size, a n d blackened exterior. T h e t y p e m a y h a v e its origins in t h e n o r t h w e s t Flijaz, w h e r e similar unfinished bowls have b e e n f o u n d in association w i t h ' A b b a s i d p o t t e r y at steatite m i n e s . K e r b s c h n i t t B o w l s . Kerbschnitt, which means "cutw a r e , " describes a g r o u p of thick-walled, h a n d m a d e bowls decorated with deeply c u t p a t t e r n s (see figure 2). T h e d e c orative t e c h n i q u e seems t o b e i n s p i r e d b y w o o d c a r v i n g , while t h e form is clearly related t o t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y black bowls described above. T h e c u t p a t t e r n s b e c a m e c r u d e r d u r i n g t h e course of t h e ' A b b a s i d period. R e d - P a i n t e d W a r e . R e d - p a i n t e d jars a n d basins m a d e of a thick, buff fabric w e r e c o m m o n i n n o r t h e r n Israel, Jor d a n , a n d Syria d u r i n g t h e eighth a n d n i n t h centuries (see figure 1). T h e i r p a i n t e d designs often consist of spirals, w a v y lines, a n d b r a n c h or tree motifs. Bowls a r e also f o u n d decorated with r e d - p a i n t e d designs, t h o u g h t h e y usually
CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Islamic Period
477
by t h e U m m a y a d s in t h e first half of t h e eighth c e n t u r y . H o w e v e r , these "earliest levels" at R a m l a p r o b a b l y r e p r e sent an e x p a n s i o n of t h e site in t h e ' A b b a s i d p e r i o d b e c a u s e neither Mefjer ware n o r glazed p o t t e r y h a s b e e n f o u n d in U m a y y a d levels at sites in J o r d a n , s u c h as Pella, A m m a n , a n d H e s b a n . E v e n at K h i r b a t al-Mafjar, t h e earliest glazed pottery a n d Mefjer w a r e w e r e assigned b y B a r a m k i to t h e ' A b b a s i d p e r i o d (Baramki, 1 9 9 4 ) . T h i s t y p e of buff ware was p r o b a b l y i n t r o d u c e d into P a l estine from ancient M e s o p o t a m i a (areas of m o d e r n I r a n a n d I r a q ) , w h e r e it is f o u n d in s e v e n t h - e i g h t l i - c e n t u r y contexts. It c o n t i n u e d to b e p r o d u c e d t h r o u g h t h e M a m l u k period, as indicated b y its p r e s e n c e a t S a m a r r a in t h e ' A b b a s i d p e r i o d a n d at H a m a in contexts d a t i n g to t h e twelftli-fourteentli centuries. T h o u g h n o typology of Mefjer w a r e exists, c h a n g e s c a n b e distinguished over time. T h e carinated shapes of t h e ' A b b a s i d jars a n d jugs are clearly inspired b y metallic p r o t o t y p e s , as are t h e p r o t r u d i n g k n o b s o n t h e t o p s
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F i g u r e 2 . Islamic
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types.
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a m p l e s of p a i n t e d I s l a m i c v a r i a n t s of F i n e B y z a n t i n e w a r e b o w l s (nos. 8 - 1 6 , 1 9 ) ; red-painted bowls ( 1 - 3 ) ; a n d Kerbschnitt bowls ( n o s . 2 0 - 2 5 ) . (After Baramki, 1 9 4 4 , fig. 6 )
h a v e t h i n n e r , hard-fired walls a n d m o r e elaborate p a i n t e d motifs. S o m e h a v e t h e s a m e flat-based, straight-walled f o r m as t h e black bowls a n d kerbschnitt bowls described a b o v e (see figure 2 ) . T h e designs o n this g r o u p also recall t h e latt e r ' s cut p a t t e r n s a n d t h e incisions o n t h e former. B u f f W a r e . S o m e t i m e in t h e s e c o n d half of d i e eighth c e n t u r y , a n e w g r o u p of vessels m a d e of a p o r o u s buff, c r e a m , or greenish-white fabric a p p e a r e d in Palestine. A r chaeologists in Israel u s e t h e t e r m Mefjer ware to describe jars a n d jugs m a d e of this fabric, w h i c h often h a v e m o l d e d , i m p r e s s e d , incised, a n d / o r a p p l i e d d e c o r a t i o n (see figure 3 ) . T h e w a r e takes its n a m e f r o m t h e site K h i r b a t al-Mafjar, w h e r e it w a s f o u n d b y D . C . B a r a m k i ( w h o did n o t u s e t h e term). According to M y r i a m Rosen-Ayalon and Avraham E i t a n ( 1 9 6 9 ) , b o t h glazed p o t t e r y a n d Mefjer w a r e w e r e p r e s e n t in t h e earliest levels a t R a m l a , w h i c h w a s f o u n d e d
CERAMICS: I s l a m i c P e r i o d . Vaux a n d Steve, 1 9 5 0 , pi. C )
F i g u r e 3.
"Mefjer
Ware."
(After de
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CERAMICS: Ceramics of the Islamic Period
of their handles a n d their incised or i m p r e s s e d decoration. T h e jars a n d jugs of t h e twelfth-fourteenth centuries h a v e r o u n d e d bodies a n d elaborate, b a r b o t i n e decoration t h a t c o m b i n e s incised a n d m o l d e d designs a n d applied a n d i m pressed clay strips. T h o u g h the t e r m Mefjer ware is sometimes u s e d b y ar chaeologists in Israel to describe a n y Islamic vessel m a d e of a light-colored fabric, it p r o p e r l y refers only to t h e d e c o r a t e d jars a n d jugs described above. M a h e s h ware, w h i c h w a s identified by D o n a l d S. W h i t c o m b at 'Aqaba, represents a n other g r o u p of light-colored Islamic vessels ( W h i t c o m b , 1989b). Like Mefjer ware, M a h e s h ware is characterized b y its light-colored fabric. H o w e v e r , it includes s u c h o p e n shapes as c u p s , bowls, a n d basins a n d has simple d e c o r a t i o n consisting of occasional comb-incised b a n d s . M a h e s h w a r e dates to the ' A b b a s i d p e r i o d a n d has b e e n found at m a n y of the e i g h t h - n i n t h - c e n t u r y settlements in the s o u t h e r n N e g e v . G l a z e d P o t t e r y . Aside from an occasional piece of P a r thian glazed ware a n d t h e seventh-century lead-glazed wares from die area of C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , glazed pottery is rarely found outside I r a n a n d I r a q before t h e eighth century. G l a z ing is usually applied to t h e interiors of bowls, t h o u g h it also occurs on d i e exteriors of jars, jugs, a n d oil l a m p s . [See L a m p s . ] In the eightii a n d early nintii centuries, C o p t i c glazed ware was p r o d u c e d in Egypt. It is decorated witii b r o w n and black p a i n t e d designs on a white slip, with or w i t h o u t a t r a n s p a r e n t glaze, a n d covered witii a g r e e n or b r o w n glaze. T h e earliest locally p r o d u c e d glazed pottery in Palestine has a m o n o c h r o m e green or yellow glaze or is d e c orated with p o l y c h r o m e splash glaze (including any c o m bination of b r o w n , yellow, white, green, p u r p l e , a n d black), M o n o c h r o m e a n d splash glazes m a d e their first a p p e a r a n c e in Palestine d u r i n g d i e ' A b b a s i d period, p e r h a p s in t h e early ninth century. W h i t c o m b (1989a) has n o t e d t h a t sim ilar p o l y c h r o m e splash-glazed wares w e r e p r o d u c e d else w h e r e d u r i n g the n i n t h a n d t e n t h centuries, O n e of these is Egyptian F a i y u m i w a r e , which is characterized b y its bold, radiating stripes of color (see figure 4 ) . A n o t h e r is Hijazi ware, which, as its n a m e suggests, seems to have b e e n p r o d u c e d in Arabia. Its dark, r e d - o r a n g e fabric is d e c o r a t e d witii bold p o l y c h r o m e spirals a n d cross-hatched designs. T h e R e d Splash wares c o m m o n at 'Aqaba, w h i c h also fall into this category, i n c l u d e examples decorated with incised (sgraffito) designs. T h e ceramic types characteristic of Sa m a r r a in this period i n c l u d e white-glazed wares, a n d b l u e green glazed b a r b o t i n e storage jars, which m a y h a v e served as specialized containers for dibs, or " d a t e h o n e y . " T h e Sam a r r a n wares, w h i c h are c o m m o n at sites like Siraf, m a y derive from Sasanian p r o t o t y p e s . [See Sasanians.] D u r i n g d i e F a t i m i d period, luster ware (glazed) was a p o p u l a r lux ury item, with local variants p r o d u c e d in E g y p t a n d a r o u n d d i e N e a r East. It derives its n a m e from its shiny metallic gold designs o n a white b a c k g r o u n d . D u r i n g t h e n i n t h a n d t e n t h centuries, glazed cooking wares a p p e a r e d in Palestine.
CERAMICS: Islamic P e r i o d .
F i g u r e 4. Polychrome
splash-glased
ware. (After de V a u x and Steve, 1 9 5 0 , pi. A)
T h e y are r e p r e s e n t e d b y globular cooking p o t s a n d o p e n casseroles m a d e of a b r i t d e , dark, r e d - b r o w n ware with a d a r k - b r o w n or d a r k - p u r p l e glaze o n t h e interior. O i l L a m p s . M o l d - m a d e " c h a n n e l - n o z z l e " oil l a m p s w e r e c o m m o n in Palestine d u r i n g t h e Islamic p e r i o d (see figure 1). T h e n a m e refers to a c h a n n e l t h a t c o n n e c t s t h e filling hole and t h e wick hole. T h o u g h these l a m p s vary from r e gion to region within Palestine, general m o r p h o l o g i c a l changes can be distinguished d u r i n g t h e c o u r s e of t h e p e riod. T h e l a m p s of t h e seventii a n d early e i g h t h centuries still have t h e low circular ring b a s e a n d elongated, oval b o d y of their B y z a n t i n e p r e d e c e s s o r s . T h e y h a v e a small k n o b h a n d l e a n d are s o m e t i m e s d e c o r a t e d with a G r e e k or an A r a b i c inscription, in tire B y z a n t i n e tradition. D u r i n g t h e course of t h e e i g h t h - t e n t i i centuries, d i e b o d y b e c a m e taller a n d shorter, a n d t h e nozzle b e c a m e m o r e p o i n t e d . T h e h a n dle grew larger a n d b e c a m e t o n g u e s h a p e d . T h e low ring b a s e , w h i c h often contains delicate relief p a t t e r n s , m i r r o r e d t h e outiine of t h e p o i n t e d oval b o d y . T h e relief d e c o r a t i o n o n t h e u p p e r half of t h e b o d y usually consists of floral or geometric motifs, s u c h as t h e g r a p e v i n e ( A r n d t , 1987). By
CEREALS the ninth and tenth centuries, these lamps were sometimes covered with a monochrome green glaze. Conclusion. Many of the changes that occurred in the ceramic repertoires of the seventh-eleventh centuries should be understood in light of the reorientation of trade away from the Mediterranean world to the Near and Far East. The fine red-slipped pottery of the Roman world was su perceded by Egyptian-inspired painted wares and glazed pottery influenced by Sasanian wares and Chinese imports. By the eleventh century, the subtle interplay of these changes had transformed the pottery of the Near East, es pecially in die western areas, where contacts with the Med iterranean world had formerly been strongest. [Many entries.]
of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent
BIBLIOGRAPHY A r n d t , M . B. " L u c e r n e arabe con decorazione 'a vite' dallo scavo della P r o b a t i c a . " Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annuus 37 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 4 1 - 2 8 9 . Survey of Islamic channel-nozzle oil l a m p s decorated with the grapevine motif. Baramki, Dimitri C. " T h e Pottery from K h . el Mefjer." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 10 ( 1 9 4 4 ) : 6 5 - 1 0 3 . T h i s site provides the most important published corpus of Islamic pottery in Palestine. H o d g e s , Richard, and David W h i t e h o u s e . Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis. Ithaca, N . Y . , 1 9 8 3 . Reevaluation of the evidence for contacts between the M e d i t e r r a n e a n world a n d the N e a r East after the M u s l i m conquest, with a description of the excavations at Siraf. M a g n e s s , Jodi. Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology, circa 200-800 CE. Shef field, 1993. T y p o l o g y of the late R o m a n , Byzantine, a n d Islamic p o t tery of Jerusalem. M a g n e s s , Jodi. " T h e D a t i n g of t h e Black C e r a m i c Bowl with a D e p i c tion of the T o r a h Shrine from N a b r a t e i n . " Levant 26 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 9 9 206. T h e starting point for a reevaluation of the dating of Islamic pottery. Rosen-Ayalon, M y r i a m , a n d A v r a h a m Eitan. Ramla Excavations: Finds from the Vlllth Century CE. Jerusalem, 1 9 6 9 . Catalog of an exhibi tion at the Israel M u s e u m in Jerusalem; the only publication to date of the finds from the Ramla excavations. Sarre, Friedrich P. T . Ausgrabungen von Samarra, vol. 2, Die Keramik von Samarra. Berlin, 1925. T h e capital of t h e 'Abbasid E m p i r e from 836-882 CE, Samarra thus provides a fixed p o i n t for the pottery (es pecially the glazed wares) f o u n d there. Still the basic publication. Sauer, James A. " T h e Pottery of J o r d a n in t h e Early Islamic P e r i o d . " In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. I , edited by A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 3 2 9 - 3 3 7 . A m m a n , 1982. Synthetic overview of the pottery types of Jordan from t h e U m a y y a d to Fatimid periods. Vaux, Roland de, a n d A . - M . Steve. Fouilles a Qaryet el-Enab, Abu Gosh, Palestine. Paris, 1950. A b u G h o s h is still t h e type-site for ' A b basid pottery in Israel. Walmsley, Alan. " T h e U m a y y a d Pottery and Its A n t e c e d e n t s . " In Pella in Jordan 1 : An Interim Report on the Joint University of Sydney and the College of Wooster Excavations at Pella, 1979-1981, edited by A n thony W . McNicoll et al., p p . 1 4 3 - 1 5 7 . C a n b e r r a , 1982. T h e exca vations at Pella provide one of the m o s t accurately dated corpora of U m a y y a d pottery. Walmsley, Alan. "Architecture a n d Artefacts from 'Abbasid Fihl." I n Bilad al-Sham during the Abbasid Period: Proceedings of the Fifth Bilad al-Sham Conference, vol. 2, edited b y M u h a m m a d A d n a n al-Bakhit
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a n d Robert Schick, p p . 1 - 1 9 . A m m a n , 1 9 9 1 . U p - t o - d a t e discussion of eighth- and ninth-century ceramic types, based on the evidence from Pella. W a t s o n , P . M . " C e r a m i c Evidence for Egyptian Links with N o r t h e r n Jordan in the Sixdi-Eighth Centuries AD." In Trade, Contact, and the Movement of Peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of J. Basil Hennessy, edited by Stephen Bourke a n d Jean-Paul D e s coeudres, p p . 303-320. Sydney, 1 9 9 5 . A t t e m p t to define a n d date some of the Early Islamic ceramic types of Egypt and Palestine, in cluding Egyptian R e d Slip A, B , a n d C Wares; C o p t i c Painted W a r e ; a n d bag-shaped storejars. W h i t c o m b , D o n a l d S. " K h i r b e t al-Mafjar Reconsidered: T h e C e r a m i c E v i d e n c e . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 2 7 1 (1988): 5 1 - 6 7 . Reevaluation of the dating of the site's pottery. W h i t c o m b , D o n a l d S. " C o p t i c G l a z e d Ceramics from die Excavations at A q a b a , J o r d a n . " Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 26 ( 1 9 8 9 a ) : 1 6 7 - 1 8 2 . Discussion of Coptic glazed ware and related wares. W h i t c o m b , D o n a l d S. " M a h e s h W a r e : Evidence of Early Abbasid O c cupation from Southern J o r d a n . " Annual of the Department of Antiq uities of Jordan 33 ( 1 9 8 9 b ) : 2 6 9 - 2 8 5 . Defines this category of Islamic pottery o n the basis of evidence from his excavations at 'Aqaba. JAMES A. SAUER a n d JODI MAGNESS
C E R E A L S . The greatest proportion of the diet of the ancient Near East, as today, was supplied by cereals. These annual grasses were likely the first plants cultivated for food: the signs of domestication appear earliest for wheat and bar ley. Rye may also have been domesticated in the Near East (probably in Anatolia), though, like oats (whose origin is uncertain), it did not become a substantial crop. Millet cul tivation appeared only in the first millennium BCE. T W O other cereals, rice and sorghum, were transplanted from Asia and Africa, respectively, during the Hellenistic and Ro man centuries. Cereals were initially gathered from bounteous naturally occurring stands during the Epipaleolithic period for thousands of years prior to domestication. Gathering un consciously selected for ears that resisted shattering, a cru cial characteristic for the seed's dissemination among wild grains. Some carbonized seed remains from Pre-Pottery Ne olithic (PPN) villages show fracture patterns produced by human threshing rather than natural shattering—unambi guous proof of cultivation. What motivated the transition from cereal gathering in the wild to deliberate cultivation remains an open question. Nevertheless, human sowing, harvesting, and tiireshing cemented the shift to nonshattering (nonbrittle) ears and brought about other changes in growth habit (abandonment of germination inhibition so tiiat seeds sprout upon planting at any time) and morphol ogy (increased size of grains and decreased attachment of grains in their spikelets). Morphological changes permit paleoethnobotanists to differentiate between wild and domes ticated types in the archaeological record. [See Ethnobotany; Paleobotany.] Because wheat and barley are self-pollinating, the changes wrought by domestication were more readily secured from one generation to the next.
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CEREALS
Morphologically distinct cereals a p p e a r at a b o u t 9000 BCE: N e t i v h a - G e d u d a n d Gilgal in Israel's J o r d a n Valley h a v e p r o d u c e d domesticated barley, as has Ganj D a r e h in west ern Iran. [See J o r d a n Valley.] D o m e s t i c a t e d w h e a t (einkorn a n d e m m e r , see below) occurs at t h e Syrian s t e p p e region sites of A s w a d a n d A b u H u r e y r a , as well as at C a y o n i i T u r k e y . [See Cayonii.] Prior to this P P N e m e r g e n c e of farming, wild grain seeds are k n o w n from t h e Epipaleolithic p e r i o d in J o r d a n at A b u H u r e y r a , t o its n o r t h at M u r e y b e t , a n d at N a h a l O r e n o n Israel's M t . C a r m e l spur. [See M u reybet; N a h a l Oren.] Paleoethnobotanists can trace t h e s u b s e q u e n t spread of agriculture t h r o u g h o u t t h e N e a r East a n d b e y o n d . Before t h e e n d of the Neolithic period, villages cul tivated grain o n C y p r u s a n d in G r e e c e . [See C y p r u s . ] By t h e e n d of t h e third m i l l e n n i u m , barley a n d w h e a t h a d s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t d i e western M e d i t e r r a n e a n basin, t h e Nile Val ley, a n d central E u r o p e . m
Seeds a n d floral p a r t s are preserved p r e d o m i n a n t l y in car bonized form, accidentally (over)heated b u t n o t b u r n e d . Occasionally, seed impressions are f o u n d in b a k e d clay. M o r e rarely, fully desiccated kernels a r e recovered. Vegetal remains are routinely retrieved t h r o u g h simple flotation, i n which water is u s e d t o separate carbonized material from soil samples. M o r p h o l o g y . A t t h e h e a d of t h e cereal stalk stands t h e ear: an a r r a n g e m e n t of flowers in a c o m p o u n d spike. T h e ear consists of spikelets arranged o n a central axis o r rachis. If brittle (shattering as i n wild species), t h e ear breaks u p into its c o m p o n e n t spikelets. If t o u g h (nonshattering, as in m o s t domesticated f o r m s ) , t h e rachis remains intact until threshing, which p r o d u c e s r a n d o m fractures. T h u s , rachis fragments can be diagnostic of domestication. T h e spikelet contains t h e flower enfolded by t h e glumes, which c a n b e strong and hold t h e grain tightly in t h e spikelet (glume wheats), or weak, p e r m i t t i n g t h e grain t o separate readily from t h e spikelet (free-threshing wheats). T h e floral parts themselves are s u r r o u n d e d by t w o protective layers (lemma a n d palea), w h i c h are either fused t o t h e grain as it develops (hulled barley) or fail t o a d h e r e (naked barley). T h e grain itself is a layered s t r u c t u r e in w h i c h the active seed is encased by a n u m b e r of coats, tire o u t e r m o s t of which is called t h e bran. W h e a t (Triticum L . ) . Archaeological literature catalogs an assortment of wheats by a variety of n a m e s : t h e older literature possesses even m o r e terminology, as t h e botanical classification s c h e m e h a s b e e n recently simplified. T h r e e of the four chromosomally distinct species of w h e a t regularly a p p e a r in ancient N e a r Eastern contexts. W i t h i n e a c h s p e cies, subspecies differentiate themselves b y t h e characteris tics of tiieir g l u m e attachment. Einkorn (T, monococcum'L.) varieties, b o t h wild ( s u b s p e cies boeoticum) a n d cultivated (subspecies monococcum), are diploid g l u m e wheats. A crucial c o m p o n e n t of t h e earliest agriculture, einkorn's place in t h e village p a n t r y gave w a y to
m o r e productive species. Better suited t o p o o r e r soils, ein k o r n does n o t h a v e attractive rising qualities w h e n b a k e d as bread. E m m e r a n d d u r u m (T. turgidum L.) a p p e a r as wild e m m e r (subspecies dicoccides), cultivated e m m e r (subspecies dicoccum), a n d d u r u m (subspecies duruni). T h e s e are t e t raploid wheats t h a t include b o t h g l u m e ( e m m e r ) a n d freethreshing varieties ( d u r u m ) . E m m e r belongs t o t h e p r e a g ricultural a n d early agricultural c r o p m e d l e y a n d constitutes t h e principal w h e a t of the prehistorical p e r i o d . I t c o n t i n u e d to sustain E g y p t until Hellenistic times. D u r u m ( h a r d w h e a t , m a c a r o n i wheat) evolved from e m m e r early o n a n d b e c a m e t h e d o m i n a n t w h e a t of t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n basin, p r o b a b l y b e c a u s e of its free-threshing quality. B r e a d w h e a t a n d spelt (T. aestivum L.) a p p e a r in culti vated varieties only, likely derived f r o m a cross b e t w e e n a w h e a t of t h e species turgidum a n d a wild grass; b r e a d w h e a t (subspecies vulgare) a n d spelt (subspecies spelta) are h e x a ploid wheats. B r e a d ( c o m m o n , vulgar) w h e a t is free-thresh ing. Finds indicate its availability t o Neolithic farmers. A p parently, b r e a d w h e a t d i d n o t b e c o m e a n i m p o r t a n t c r o p in the N e a r East until m o d e r n times, p e r h a p s b e c a u s e of its susceptibility t o b i r d p r e d a t i o n or seed loss d u r i n g harvest. Spelt a p p e a r e d i n a b o u t 5000 BCE, b u t finds a r e n u m e r o u s only in E u r o p e . B a r l e y (Hordeum sativum v a r . o r Hordeum vulgare L . ) . A l t h o u g h terminological ambiguity exists, barley is t a x onomically m u c h simpler t h a n wheat: a single diploid s p e cies witii variants based o n t h e n u m b e r of grains t h a t d e velop at each site o n t h e rachis. A p a r t f r o m t h e wild variety (H. spantaneum), t h e barleys also differentiate themselves o n the basis of the fusion of t h e hull a n d t h e grain. In t w o - r o w barley (H. sativum var. distichum) only o n e grain develops a t each a t t a c h m e n t o n t h e rachis, resulting i n two rows of fruitful spikelets, like its wild p r o g e n i t o r . M o s t t w o - r o w barleys a r e hulled. T h e i r grains a p p e a r a m o n g t h e earliest cultivars a t t h e i n c e p t i o n of agriculture. Six-row b a r ley (H. sativum var. hexistichum) also a p p e a r e d early, y e t s u b s e q u e n t to t h e t w o - r o w variety at a n u m b e r of sites (e.g., Ali K o s h i n s o u t h w e s t I r a n ) . [See Ali K o s h . ] T h e six rows are p r o d u c e d b y t h r e e fertile spikelets at each a t t a c h m e n t of t h e rachis a n d m a y have arisen as a m u t a t i o n u n d e r irrigated conditions, w h i c h m e e t t h e water n e e d s of the extra flowers. B y t h e fourth m i l l e n n i u m , it h a d replaced t h e t w o - r o w v a riety as t h e d o m i n a n t cereal t h r o u g h o u t M e s o p o t a m i a , p r e s u m a b l y b e c a u s e of its h i g h e r yield. T h e occasional p r e s ervation of triplet spikelets a n d subtie differences i n seed s h a p e p e r m i t p a l e o e t h n o b o t a n i s t s t o differentiate b e t w e e n t h e t w o varieties. Six-row also occurs as a n a k e d grain (var. nudum) i n the prehistorical periods b u t declines inexplicably later on. P r o d u c t i o n . W h e a t d e m a n d s better soil conditions t h a n barley: well-drained clayey soils t h a t h o l d m o r e m o i s t u r e a n d possess greater n i t r o g e n content. Barley d o e s better t h a n
CHALCEDON w h e a t o n less fertile soils a n d t h o s e with higher salinity or alkalinity a n d u n d e r m o r e arid c o n d i t i o n s . B o t h cereals are b r o a d c a s t s o w n or d e p o s i t e d b y dibbling or seed plow, u s u ally after the tilling of t h e field in early w i n t e r (approximately N o v e m b e r - J a n u a r y ) . H a r r o w i n g covers t h e seed, if b r o a d cast. R e p e a t e d irrigations follow in M e s o p o t a m i a , while rain-fed agriculture h o p e s for a b u n d a n t a n d well-timed p r e cipitation. W e e d i n g heightens yields, r e d u c e s undesirable seeds in t h e harvest, a n d p r o v i d e s a f o d d e r resource. H a r v e s t takes place b y u p r o o t i n g or r e a p i n g with a sickle. Barley m a t u r e s m o r e rapidly t h a n w h e a t , a n d its harvest is first. T h u s , sowing b o t h barley a n d w h e a t c a n serve to stretch t h e harvest season in o r d e r b e t t e r t o a c c o m m o d a t e t h e labor supply. Sheaves a r e t r a n s p o r t e d to t h e t h r e s h i n g floor, a n d t h e stalks a r e b e a t e n , t r a m p l e d , or sledged to s e p a r a t e ears from straw a n d t o disarticulate t h e ears. R a k i n g a n d w i n n o w i n g e n s u e , successively refining t h e p r o d u c t , fol lowed by various grades of sieving. T h e grain is t h e n p a c k e d for t r a n s p o r t and storage. A r c h a e o l o g y can identify n u m e r o u s tools a n d installations e m p l o y e d in grain growing. T h e s e i n c l u d e p l o w p o i n t s , h o e s , sickles a n d sickle blades, t h r e s h i n g floors, a n d storage facil ities s u c h as pithoi, stone-lined o r plastered grain pits, silos, a n d granaries. [See G r a n a r i e s a n d Silos.] D e p e n d i n g u p o n t h e species of grain, a variable n u m b e r of additional steps i n t e r c e d e b e f o r e c o n s u m p t i o n . K e r n e l s of g l u m e w h e a t s m u s t b e r e m o v e d from t h e spikelets. T h i s p r o c e s s n o r m a l l y involves p a r c h i n g in a n o v e n . T h e brittle chaff is t h e n b r o k e n away b y p o u n d i n g in a m o r t a r . A d d i tional episodes of sieving a n d h a n d sorting result in clean grain r e a d y for food p r e p a r a t i o n . F r e e - t h r e s h i n g w h e a t a n d barley obviate p a r c h i n g a n d p o u n d i n g . T h e m o s t c o m m o n species of barley, h o w e v e r , r e q u i r e s dehulling for m o s t foods. T h e hull is r e m o v e d b y p o u n d i n g m o i s t e n e d kernels. Sieving cleans t h e grain f r o m t h e h u s k s . F r e e d of spikelets a n d hulls, cereals are p r o c e s s e d into a h u g e variety of f o o d stuffs, from b u l g u r to b r e a d a n d p o r r i d g e to beer. M o r t a r s a n d pestles, cooking p o t s , o v e n s , b r e a d m o l d s , b e e r strain ers, a n d saddle q u e r n s a r e n o t a b l e artifacts of grain p r o cessing. T h e ancient N e a r East's p r e o c c u p a t i o n w i t h cereals e x t e n d s b e y o n d their cultivation, of c o u r s e , t o their control. Its agrarian societies w e r e b a s e d chiefly o n t h e wealth of cereal fields. G r a i n s w e r e t h e f u n d a m e n t a l building block of t h e e c o n o m y a n d principal m e d i u m of t a x a t i o n as well. Cereal p r o d u c t i o n a n d distribution also u n d e r l i e an e n o r m o u s r a n g e of ideas a n d their literary a n d artistic expression, [See also Agriculture.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Charles, M . P. "Introductory R e m a r k s on the Cereals," Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture i ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 1 7 - 3 1 . C o m p a c t and lucid t r e a t m e n t of botanical terminology and characteristics of wheat and barley. Hillman, G o r d o n . "Traditional H u s b a n d r y a n d Processing of Archaic
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Cereals in R e c e n t T i m e s : T h e Operations, P r o d u c t s , and E q u i p m e n t which M i g h t Feature in S u m e r i a n T e x t s . Part I: T h e G l u m e W h e a t s , " a n d " P a r t II: T h e F r e e - T h r e s h i n g Cereals." Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 1 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 1 1 4 - 1 5 2 ; 2 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 - 3 1 . Meticulous and detailed presentation of cereal production and processing, from fieldwork t o food preparation, based on ethnographic work in T u r key. Miller, N a o m i F . " T h e Origins of Plant Cultivation in the N e a r East." In The Origin ojAgriculture: An International Perspective, edited by C . Wesley C o w a n and Patty Jo W a t s o n , p p . 3 9 - 5 8 . Smithsonian Scries in Archaeological Inquiry, 1 6 . Washington, D . C . , 1992. Review of the latest archaeobotanical finds, with an emphasis on the m e t h o d ological aspects of theories of agricultural origins. Renfrew, J a n e M . Palaeoelhnobotany: The Prehistoric Pood Plants of the Near East and Europe. N e w York, 1 9 7 3 . Classic text introduces its discipline a n d discusses with illustrations each of t h e major genera and species of domesticated a n d edible wild plants, their origins, identification (with detailed m o r p h o l o g y ) , cultivation, and use. Zohary, Daniel, and Maria Hopf. The Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Eu rope, and the Nik Valley. 2 d ed. Oxford, 1 9 9 3 . Synthesis of c r o p plant evolution combining data from archaeology and the distribu tion of living plants. Covers cereals, pulses, oil and fiber crops, fruit trees and n u t s , vegetables a n d tubers, condiments and dyes, as well as wild fruits. DAVID C . HOPKINS
CHALCEDON ( m o d e r n K a d i k o y ) , site located o n a small peninsula o n t h e Asiatic side of t h e southern e n d of t h e B o s p o r u s , o n a strait 32 k m (20 mi.) long, b e t w e e n t h e Black Sea a n d t h e P r o p o n t i s , o r Sea of M a r m a r a . T h e city w a s f o u n d e d in 685 BCE b y colonists f r o m t h e D o r i a n city of M e g a r a , reportedly led by t h e colony's founder, Archias. C h a l c e d o n was only a s h o r t distance across the B o s p o r u s from B y z a n t i u m ( m o d e r n I s t a n b u l ) , w h i c h t h e M e g a r i a n s also f o u n d e d in a b o u t 668 BCE, o n t h e T h r a c i a n - E u r o p e a n side ( H e r o d o t u s , Hist. 4.144; S t r a b o , Geog. 12.4.2). T w o riv ers, t h e H i m e r o s a n d t h e C h a l c e d o n , flowed into t h e B o s p o r u s on t h e east a n d w e s t side of t h e peninsula, r e s p e c tively, f o r m i n g small n a t u r a l h a r b o r s t h a t h a v e since silted u p . T h e p e n i n s u l a a n d p a r t of t h e m a i n l a n d (where C h r y sopolis w a s located, farther n o r t h , across from B y z a n t i u m ) w e r e called C h a l c e d o n i a ( X e n o p h o n , Anabasis 6.6.38) a n d , later, Bithynia. B y z a n t i u m h a d a large n a t u r a l h a r b o r a n d was in an ideal position t o control t h e B o s p o r u s a n d i m p o s e tolls o n traffic e n t e r i n g a n d leaving t h e Black Sea. T h e ancients called C h a l c e d o n t h e "city of tire b l i n d " b e c a u s e its M e g a r i a n f o u n d e r s h a d n o t selected t h a t m o r e a d v a n t a g e o u s site ( H e r o d o t u s , 4.144; S t r a b o 7.6.2; T a c i t u s Ann. 12.63; Pliny, Nat. Hist. 5.149). H o w e v e r , it a p p e a r s likely t h a t C h a l c e d o n w a s settled as an agricultural r a t h e r t h a n a t r a d i n g colony. P r e historic remains suggest t h a t it m a y originally h a v e b e e n a T h r a c i a n settlement. C h a l c e d o n a n d h e r sister colony, B y z a n t i u m , controlled t h e Black Sea t r a d i n g traffic (Dionysius of B y z a n t i u m , Anaplus Bospori 19-20). C h a l c e d o n ' s p r o s perity was also b a s e d o n c o p p e r m i n e s a n d o n semiprecious
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stones from the island of Chalcitis. T h r o u g h o u t m u c h of their history, C h a l c e d o n a n d B y z a n t i u m were closely allied. Participation in t h e Ionic rebellion against Persia resulted in the sacking a n d b u r n i n g of C h a l c e d o n in 494 BCE b y t h e Phoenician fleet allied with Persia; the colonists t h e n t e m porarily a b a n d o n e d t h e city a n d , with t h e Byzantines, f o u n d e d M e s a m b r i a on t h e west coast of the Black Sea ( H e r o d o t u s 6.33). D u r i n g t h e ascendancy of A t h e n s following the Persian wars, C h a l c e d o n was a m e m b e r of A t h e n ' s D e lian L e a g u e ; it paid an extremely large tribute to A t h e n s derived from tolls exacted from Black Sea t r a d e . In 416, C h a l c e d o n ' s forces defeated t h e Bithynians ( D i o d o r u s 12.82.2). D u r i n g t h e late fifth century BCE, C h a l c e d o n was o n e of the Greek cities t h a t sided with Sparta. T h e city was again subjugated b y Persia in 387 BCE b u t was later liberated by Alexander (Arrian, Anabasis 3.24.5). L y s i m a c h o s , o n e of Alexander's successors, controlled C h a l c e d o n until his over t h r o w in 281 BCE. T h e fact t h a t B y z a n t i u m a n d C h a l c e d o n m i n t e d c o p p e r coins in c o m m o n during the third century BCE indicates t h a t t h e y h a d formed a sympoliteia (a "civic u n i o n " ) t h a t m a y h a v e b e e n in effect in t h e fourth century
T h e site of C h a l c e d o n - K a d i k o y has n e v e r b e e n s y s t e m atically excavated. T h e r e m a i n s of t h e a n c i e n t city still vis ible in the sixteenth c e n t u r y h a v e since d i s a p p e a r e d . G r e e k a n d L a t i n inscriptions f r o m C h a l c e d o n , n o w widely scat tered, have b e e n collected a n d edited b y R e i n h o l d M e r k e l b a c h (1980). F o u r inscriptions from t h e h i e r o n , or s a n c t u ary, of Z e u s O u r a n i o s a n d t h e T w e l v e G o d s h a v e survived, s o m e in t h e C h a l c i d i a n dialect ( M e r k e l b a c h , 1 9 8 0 , p p . 26-34), b u t it is a m a t t e r of dispute w h e t h e r this h i e r o n , which existed as early as t h e third c e n t u r y BCE, w a s located o n t h e Asiatic (Polybius 4.39.5-6) or E u r o p e a n side ( s c h o lion o n Apollonius R h o d i u s 2.531-533) of t h e B o s p o r u s ( L o n g , 1987, p p . 55-57, 1 5 3 - 1 5 5 ) . M a r b l e fragments from a n ancient t e m p l e w e r e i n c o r p o r a t e d into a castle built in a b o u t 1150 CE in a village called A n a d o l u Kavagli, b u t t h e site from w h i c h t h e fragments w e r e t a k e n h a s n e v e r b e e n identified. A n oracle of Apollo is also k n o w n to h a v e existed in C h a l c e d o n . T h e Byzantine r e m a i n s of C h a l c e d o n , in cluding a palace, a h i p p o d r o m e , a n d several c h u r c h e s , i n c l u d i n g St. E u p h e m i a , w e r e destroyed b y t h e Persians w h e n they c a p t u r e d C h a l c e d o n in 615 CE.
BCE.
C h a l c e d o n m a i n t a i n e d its freedom t h r o u g h m u c h of t h e fifth and fourth centuries BCE. It b e c a m e a free city in 74 BCE, w h e n N i c o m e d e s I V of Bithynia b e q u e a t h e d his king d o m to the R o m a n s . F r e e d o m did n o t m e a n i n d e p e n d e n c e , b u t rather t h e privilege of maintaining ancestral laws a n d c u s t o m s a n d i m m u n i t y from tribute and a military garrison. P o m p e y organized the R o m a n province of B i t h y n i a - P o n t u s in 65-64 BCE. B y z a n t i u m was also p a r t of it, although t e c h nically it was located o n t h e T h r a c i a n - E u r o p e a n side of t h e B o s p o r u s . T h e G o t h s sacked C h a l c e d o n d u r i n g t h e reigns of Valerian (c. 258 CE) a n d Gallienus (267 CE). W h e n , in 330 CE, the e m p e r o r C o n s t a n t i n e f o u n d e d C o n stantinople as t h e Roma Nova, " N e w R o m e , " o n t h e site of B y z a n t i u m C h a l c e d o n was relegated to little m o r e t h a n its s u b u r b . I n 365-366 CE, C h a l c e d o n s u p p o r t e d P r o c o p i u s , t h e imperial rival of Valens. After P r o c o p i u s was o v e r t h r o w n , E m p e r o r Valens h a d C h a l c e d o n ' s walls taken apart a n d u s e d t h e stone t o c o n s t r u c t R o m a n b a t h s , t h e Constantinianae thermae, at C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , as well as an a q u e d u c t ( A m m i a n u s Marcellinus, Historia Augusta 31.1.4; Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica 4.8). C h a l c e d o n is chiefly k n o w n from late an tiquity as t h e site of t h e F o u r t h E c u m e n i c a l C o u n c i l , t h e Council of C h a l c e d o n , c o n v e n e d o n 8 O c t o b e r 451 CE in the c h u r c h of St. E u p h e m i a (martyred u n d e r Diocletian in C h a l c e d o n in 303). M o r e t h a n five h u n d r e d b i s h o p s a n d imperial representatives a t t e n d e d . T h e C h a l c e d o n i a n creed was presented d u r i n g t h e fifth session o n 22 O c t o b e r . I n its final form it e m p h a s i z e d t h a t Jesus C h r i s t was fully h u m a n a n d fully divine a n d t h a t these t w o n a t u r e s should n o t b e confused. C h a l c e d o n w a s c a p t u r e d b y t h e Persians in 615 a n d in 626 was t a k e n b y t h e Arabs d u r i n g their siege of Constantinople.
BIBLIOGRAPHY G r a n t , Michael. A Guide to the Ancient World: A Dictionary of Classical Place Names, N e w York, 1986. See pages 1 3 7 - 1 3 8 . Jones, A. H . M . The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, 2 d ed. O x ford, 1 9 7 1 . Definitive study of the Greek cities of the eastern R o m a n Empire. See pages 1 4 8 - 1 5 2 , 1 5 9 , 1 6 4 - 1 6 5 . L o n g , Charlotte R. The Twelve Gods of Greece and Rome. E t u d e s P r e liminaires aux Religions Orientales dans I'Empire R o m a i n , vol. 1 0 7 . Leiden, 1987. Discusses the hieron, or sanctuary, to the T w e l v e G o d s , which m a y have b e e n located in or n e a r Chalcedon. See pages 5 5 - 5 7 . i53-!54> 186, 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 . Magie, David. Roman Rule in Asia Minor to the End of the Third Century after Christ. 2 vols. Princeton, 1950. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t study of Asia M i n o r u n d e r the R o m a n s , with a brief, but i m p o r t a n t , discus sion of C h a l c e d o n (see vol. 1, p p . 3 0 4 - 3 0 5 ) , Merkelbach, Reinhold. Die Inschriften von Kalchedon. B o n n , 1980. T h e only complete collection of Greek and L a t i n inscriptions, papyri, coins, and literary notices associated with C h a l c e d o n . M e r l e , Heinrich. Die Geschichte der Stadte Byzantion und Kalchedon von ihrer Grundung bis zum Eingreifen der Romer in die Verhiiltnisse des Ostens. Kiel, 1 9 1 6 . T h e only extensive m o n o g r a p h o n Chalcedon. DAVID E . AUNE
CHALDEANS. T h e C h a l d e a n s w e r e a g r o u p of tribes first clearly attested in the n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE in s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a . T h e n a m e Chaldeans c o m e s f r o m d i e G r e e k chaldaioi (cf. H e b r e w kaidim) a n d goes b a c k to t h e t e r m kaldu in M e s o p o t a m i a n cuneiform sources. T h e M e s o p o t a m i a n s u s e d t h e latter t e r m to refer t o b o t h a p e o p l e a n d a land. O u t s i d e of a possible m e n t i o n in a n administrative d o c u m e n t from t h e reign of t h e Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (1114-1076 B C E ) , t h e C h a l d e a n s a p p e a r first in an i n s c r i p tion of t h e Assyrian king A s h u m a s i r p a l II (883-859 BCE)
CHALDEANS w h i c h refers to the l a n d of C h a l d e a in c o n n e c t i o n with t h e king's military c a m p a i g n into s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a in 878 BCE. T h e C h a l d e a n s are best attested from t h e s e c o n d half of tire n i n t h c e n t u r y t h r o u g h t o t h e m i d d l e of the seventh c e n t u r y BCE, b u t c o n t i n u e to b e m e n t i o n e d into the Persian p e r i o d . T h e latest reference t o a C h a l d e a n tribe in cuneiform s o u r c e s p r o b a b l y c o m e s from t h e time of t h e Persian ruler D a r i u s II (423-405 BCE) . I n biblical a n d classical sources the t e r m Chaldeans c a m e t o refer to Babylonians in general a n d priests, magicians, astrologers, diviners, a n d other s u c h scholars in particular. W h e n t h e C h a l d e a n s first a p p e a r in t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE, t h e y are already well settled in s o u t h e r n Babylonia. T h e i r origin a n d t h e m a n n e r in w h i c h t h e y m o v e d into s o u t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a are n o t k n o w n , a l t h o u g h it has s o m e t i m e s b e e n p r o p o s e d t h a t t h e y c a m e f r o m eastern Arabia. N o t h i n g is k n o w n of their language b e y o n d a few n a m e s w h i c h a p p e a r t o b e W e s t Semitic in origin. All the C h a l d e a n kings of Babylonia b o r e traditional B a b y l o n i a n n a m e s , as did m o s t C h a l d e a n s w h o s e n a m e s are k n o w n . It h a s often b e e n stated t h a t t h e C h a l d e a n s w e r e a s u b g r o u p of t h e A r a m e a n s , b u t t h e r e is insufficient e v i d e n c e t o d e c i d e o n this m a t t e r . T h e M e s o p o t a m i a n sources clearly distinguished b e t w e e n t h e two g r o u p s , while frequentiy m e n t i o n i n g t h e m n e x t to o n e a n o t h e r . T h e A r a m e a n s first a p p e a r in s o u t h e r n Babylonia a b o u t a c e n t u r y after t h e C h a l d e a n s ; t h e y w e r e split into m a n y m o r e smaller tribes a n d w e r e less inclined t o a d o p t B a b y l o n i a n c u s t o m s a n d m a n n e r s t h a n C h a l d e a n s . A t times t h e t w o g r o u p s acted in alliance (generally against Assyria) a n d at other times w e r e at e n m i t y with o n e a n o t h e r . A r a m a i c w a s likely the p r e d o m i n a n t l a n g u a g e in M e s o p o t a m i a f r o m a b o u t the m i d d l e of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE a n d C h a l d e a n s a p p e a r to h a v e s p o k e n either this or a dialect of it. T h i s l a n g u a g e c a m e to b e associated w i t h t h e m a n d was e v e n o n occasion called C h a l d e e . T h e C h a l d e a n s s p o k e in A r a m a i c in Daniel 2:4, a n d Daniel 1:4 p r e s u m a b l y i n t e n d s to indicate A r a m a i c w h e n referring to t h e " w r i t i n g s a n d l a n g u a g e of t h e C h a l d e a n s . " [See A r a m e a n s ; A r a m a i c L a n g u a g e a n d L i t e r ature.] T h e C h a l d e a n s w e r e located primarily in s o u t h e r n a n d eastern Babylonia, a n d rarely a p p e a r o u t s i d e of Babylonia. T h e Sealand, a n area of s w a m p s a n d m a r s h e s a r o u n d t h e h e a d of t h e Persian Gulf, a n d likely c o r r e s p o n d i n g to t h e m o d e r n H o r e l - H a m m a r m a r s h e s , c a m e t o b e particularly identified w i t h t h e C h a l d e a n tribe of Bit-Yakin, a n d its rulers w e r e s o m e t i m e s called " k i n g of t h e S e a l a n d " in A s s y r i a n sources. B e c a u s e E l a m b o r d e r e d o n the S e a l a n d to the east, t h e Bit-Yakin w e r e i n f r e q u e n t c o n t a c t w i t h t h a t c o u n t r y a n d often t u r n e d to it for military s u p p o r t against t h e Assyrians a n d for refuge in time of flight f r o m A s s y r i a n p u n i s h m e n t . [See Assyrians.] M o s t C h a l d e a n s p r o b a b l y lived a n o m a d i c or s e m i n o m a d i c existence d e p e n d e n t u p o n a n i m a l h u s b a n d r y , h u n t ing, a n d small-scale agriculture. F r o m t h e earliest times, at
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least s o m e lived a settled existence. T h e y are found dwelling in d i e m a j o r u r b a n centers of Babylonia ( C u t h a , H u r s a g k a l a m a , Kish, N i p p u r , Sippar, U r u k ) , and are said to h a v e h a d n u m e r o u s settlements. S e n n a c h e r i b claims to h a v e c o n q u e r e d 88 walled t o w n s a n d 820 villages belonging t o t h e m , b u t s o m e of t h e s e m a y simply h a v e b e e n settle m e n t s located in the general areas inhabited by the individ ual C h a l d e a n tribes b e c a u s e several old Babylonian cult c e n ters are i n c l u d e d a m o n g t h e t o w n s n a m e d by Sennacherib. [See K i s h ; N i p p u r ; U r u k - W a r k a . ] Five C h a l d e a n tribes are k n o w n : B i t - A m u k a n i , BitD a k ( k ) u r i , Bit-Yakin(i), Bit-Sa'alli, a n d Bit-Silani. T h e lat ter t w o , h o w e v e r , are only attested from t h e reign of the Assyrian Icing Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 BCE) t h r o u g h to t h a t of S e n n a c h e r i b (704-681 BCE). M a n y C h a l d e a n s s e e m t o h a v e b e c o m e " b a b y l o n i a n i z e d , " taldng traditional B a b y lonian n a m e s , b e c o m i n g involved in B a b y l o n i a n political life, a n d t u r n i n g t o agriculture for their livelihood. N e v e r theless, t h e y m a i n t a i n e d t h e i r tribal s t r u c t u r e a n d distinct identity. T r i b e s w e r e referred t o as the " H o u s e of P N , " with P N s t a n d i n g for the p e r s o n a l n a m e of t h e e p o n y m o u s a n cestor of t h e tribe (e.g., B i t - A m u k a n i , " h o u s e of A m u k a n i " ) . E a c h tribe w a s h e a d e d by o n e individual, w h o s e p o w e r a n d authority w a s such t h a t Assyrian royal inscriptions s o m e times referred to h i m as a " k i n g . " L e d b y their o w n sheikhs a n d less settled in particular locations t h a n m o s t Babyloni a n s , the C h a l d e a n tribes r e m a i n e d s e m i - i n d e p e n d e n t of t h e central g o v e r n m e n t . T h e y often play a disruptive role in events a n d frequently led t h e o p p o s i t i o n to Assyrian control of Babylonia. [See Babylon; Babylonians.] T h e first quarter of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE was a time of political instability a n d e c o n o m i c weakness in Babylonia a n d t h e C h a l d e a n s m a d e use of tliis situation. Several n i b a l lead ers gained control of tire t h r o n e a n d c a m e t o be included in t h e canonical lists of B a b y l o n i a n rulers. N o n e of these i n dividuals, however, s u c c e e d e d in establishing a lasting d y nasty. E a c h of the t h r e e m a j o r tribes p r o v i d e d at least o n e ruler w h o was recognized as lung of Babylonia: M a r d u k a p l a - u s u r (end of t h e n i n t h or early eighth century BCE); E r i b a - M a r d u k of Bit-Yakin (at least n i n e years, e n d i n g n o later t h a n 760 BCE); N a b u - s u m a - i s k u n of Bit-Dakkuri (c. 760-748 BCE); ( N a b u ) - m u k i n - z e r i of B i t - A m u k a n i (731-729 BCE); M a r d u k - a p l a - i d d i n a II of Bit-Yakin (721-710 a n d 703 BCE), t h e M e r o d a c h - B a l a d a n of d i e H e b r e w scriptures; a n d M u s e z i b - M a r d u k of B i t - D a k k u r i (692-689 BCE). I n addition to these individuals, t h e tribes p r o v i d e d several i m p o r t a n t rebel leaders in t h e fight against Assyria, in p a r ticular Nabu-zer-kitti-lisir (c. 680 BCE), N a b u - u s a l l i m (c. 680-675 BCE), a n d N a b u - b e l - s u m a t i ( d u r i n g the Samass u m a - u k i n Revolt, 652-648 BCE); all three w e r e descendents of M a r d u k - a p l a - i d d i n a II, w h o was himself a d e s c e n d e n t of t h e earlier ruler E r i b a - M a r d u k . A l t h o u g h the time of t h e N e o - B a b y l o n i a n E m p i r e (625-539 BCE) has often b e e n called t h e C h a l d e a n p e r i o d , t h e r e is in fact n o evidence t h a t
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the rulers of t h a t time were C h a l d e a n s or t h a t C h a l d e a n s played a major role in affairs of t h e period. It is unlikely, however, tiiat their influence just disappeared after t h e in stallation of t h e n e w ruling dynasty. T h e C h a l d e a n tribes are frequentiy f o u n d in opposition to the central Babylonian administration a n d in particular in opposition t o Assyrian forces w h o were trying either to gain or maintain control of Babylonia. T h e C h a l d e a n tribes w e r e t h u s targeted for p u n i s h m e n t b y Assyrian rulers. Assyrian royal inscriptions often m e n t i o n the destruction of C h a l d e a n settlements. T h e y claim t h a t almost a quarter of a million C h a l d e a n s were d e p o r t e d from Babylonia d u r i n g t h e reigns of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II, and these d e p o r t a t i o n s are k n o w n to have c o n t i n u e d u n d e r S e n n a c h e r i b . T h e d e portees w e r e resettled in Assyria p r o p e r a n d in other parts of die Assyrian E m p i r e . T h e tribes of Bit-Sa'alli, Bit-Silani, a n d Bit-Yakin w e r e particularly h u r t b y deportations in the eighth century BCE. T h e various C h a l d e a n tribes did n o t as a rule act in u n i s o n with other g r o u p s in Babylonia against Assyria, a n d this facilitated Assyrian domination. T h e C h a l deans were n o t always in opposition to Assyria; at times s o m e served in t h e Assyrian army. N o archaeological r e m a i n s have b e e n discovered w h i c h can b e assigned to t h e C h a l d e a n s with any degree of cer tainty. Assyrian reliefs depict t h e m engaged in animal h u s b a n d r y (horses a n d c a t d e ) , a n d Assyrian inscriptions state t h a t C h a l d e a n leaders p r o v i d e d a wealth of g o o d s as tribute to die Assyrian rulers (e.g., gold, silver, tin, b r o n z e , precious stones, ivory, e l e p h a n t hides, valuable w o o d s , colored gar m e n t s , a n d aromatic plants). U n d o u b t e d l y , t h e tribal leaders h a d profited h a n d s o m e l y from d i e ttade routes w h i c h r a n tiirough t h e territories controlled b y t h e m , a n d in particular from the sea t r a d e u p t h e Persian Gulf. Very little is k n o w n of C h a l d e a n religious matters. T h o s e rulers of Babylonia w h o were of C h a l d e a n ancestry referred to t h e old, traditional gods of Babylonia in their inscriptions a n d built or restored temples for t h e m . A n u n u s u a l inscrip tion vilifying t h e C h a l d e a n ruler N a b u - s u m a - i § k u n states that he despoiled Esagila, t h e t e m p l e of M a r d u k , t h e h e a d of t h e Babylonian p a n t h e o n , at Babylon, a n d tiien installed in that temple t h e gods of t h e Sealand, t h e C h a l d e a n s , a n d the A r a m e a n s . N o t h i n g m o r e is k n o w n specifically as to w h o these C h a l d e a n gods were. C h a l d e a n s a p p e a r t o h a v e h o n ored their ancestors a n d were c o n c e r n e d for tiieir r e m a i n s . M a r d u k - a p l a - i d d i n a II, for example, took t h e b o n e s of his deceased ancestors w i t h h i m w h e n he fled t o E l a m from Assyrian forces in 700 BCE. ( T h e r e is n o evidence of a connection b e t w e e n t h e m o d ern p e o p l e in I r a q k n o w n as C h a l d e a n s , w h o speak a N e o A r a m a i c dialect sometimes referred to as " C h a l d e a n , " a n d their ancient n a m e s a k e s [see S o l o m o n I. Sara, A Description of Modem Chaldean, J a n u a L i n g u a r u m , Series Practica, vol. 213, T h e H a g u e , 1974]-)
BIBLIOGRAPHY Brinkman, John A. " M e r o d a c h - B a l a d a n I I . " In Studies Presented to A. Leo Oppenheim, June 7, 1964, edited by R o b e r t D . Biggs a n d John A. Brinkman, p p . 6 - 5 3 . Chicago, 1 9 6 4 . Detailed study of the career of the most fascinating of all Chaldean leaders. Brinkman, John A. A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia, 1 1 5 8 - 7 2 2 B.C. Analecta Orientalia, vol. 4 3 . R o m e , 1 9 6 8 . Definitive study of Babylonia during the twelfth tiirough eighth centuries which includes a discussion of the various tribal g r o u p s in that country. Brinkman, John A. "Babylonia, c. 1 0 0 0 - 7 6 4 B . C . " I n The Cambridge Ancient Plisiory, vol. 3 . 1 , edited by J o h n B o a r d m a n et al, p p . 2 8 2 - 3 1 3 . 2d ed. C a m b r i d g e , 1982. Brinkman, John A. Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747-626 B.C. Occasional Publications of t h e Babylonian F u n d , vol. 7. Philadelphia, 1984. Separately printed version of die a u t h o r ' s chapter "Babylonia in t h e S h a d o w of Assyria, 7 4 7 - 6 2 6 B . C . " in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 3.2, p p . 1 - 7 0 , 2d ed. ( C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 9 1 ) , with e x p a n d e d notes and references. E d z a r d , D . O. " K a l d u . " In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 5, p p . 2 9 1 - 2 9 7 . Berlin a n d N e w York, 1 9 7 7 . Concise overview of the Chaldeans written by a noted G e r m a n scholar in the standard reference work for M e s o p o t a m i a n studies. F r a m e , G r a n t . Babylonia, 680-627 B.C.: A Political History. Uitgaven van het N e d e r l a n d s Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, vol. 69. Istanbul a n d L e i d e n , 1 9 9 2 . L e e m a n s , W . F . " M a r d u k - a p a l - i d d i n a II, zijn tijd en zijn geslacht." Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap "Ex Oriente Lux" 1 0 ( 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 4 8 ) : 4 3 2 - 4 5 5 . Deals mainly with the C h a l d e a n leader M a r d u k - a p l a - i d d i n a II b u t also presents a useful s u m m a r y of the history of t h e Chaldeans a n d a bibliography of earlier studies. Zadok, Ran. " Z u r Geographie Babyloniens w a h r e n d des sargonidischen, chaldaischen, achamenidischen u n d hellenistischen Zeitalters." Die Welt des Orients 16 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 9 - 7 9 . Presents details about the areas and settlements inhabited by t h e C h a l d e a n tribes ( p p . 49-63). GRANT FRAME
CHAMPOLLION, JEAN F R A N C O I S (17901832), first p e r s o n to r e c o n s t r u c t t h e a n c i e n t E g y p t i a n lan guage. H a v i n g b e e n a child p r o d i g y with a n insatiable a p petite for languages, C h a m p o l l i o n is generally credited w i t h deciphering a n c i e n t E g y p t i a n hieroglyphs (picture writing) in 1822 w h e n h e p r e s e n t e d his p a p e r Lettre a Monsieur Dacier relative & l'alphabet des hieroglyphes phonetiques t o t h e F r e n c h A c a d e m y . Previous a t t e m p t s at d e c i p h e r m e n t b y E u r o p e a n s were t h w a r t e d b y t h e widely held o p i n i o n t h a t hieroglyphs w e r e allegorical c r y p t o g r a m s with e n c o d e d a r c a n e infor m a t i o n , which h a d to b e " i n t e r p r e t e d " r a t h e r t h a n t r a n s lated. T h i s symbolic a p p r o a c h was so r o o t e d in a c a d e m i c circles t h a t C h a m p o l l i o n himself w a s its p r o p o n e n t as late as 1821. T h e discovery of a stela ( c o m m e m o r a t i v e stone) at R o setta, n e a r Alexandria, in July 1799 b y Pierre B o u c h a r d , a n engineer in N a p o l e o n ' s a r m y a n d its s u b s e q u e n t s u r r e n d e r to t h e British after their defeat of t h e F r e n c h forces in E g y p t in 1801 m a d e s u c h a n i m p r e s s i o n o n E u r o p e a n s t h a t this m o n u m e n t , n o w k n o w n as t h e R o s e t t a S t o n e , b e c a m e t h e focus of intense a c a d e m i c scrutiny.
CHARIOTS T h e Rosetta S t o n e contains a d e c r e e issued b y E g y p t i a n priests in h o n o r of the M a c e d o n i a n G r e e k p h a r a o h of E g y p t , P t o l e m y V E p i p h a n e s , in 196 BCE. T h e text is written in hieroglyphs, d e m o t i c (a cursive script), a n d ancient Greek. W o r k i n g o n t h e inscription f r o m 1814 t o 1818, T h o m a s Y o u n g , a British p o l y m a t h , identified a b o u t eighty w o r d s a p p e a r i n g in all three versions. H e c o m m u n i c a t e d his find ings t o C h a m p o l l i o n b y letter a n d p u b l i s h e d t h e m in a s u p p l e m e n t (1819) to t h e Encyclopedia Britannica. C h a m p o l l i o n n e v e r a d m i t t e d in p r i n t his i n d e b t e d n e s s to Y o u n g . H o w ever, C h a m p o l l i o n ' s k n o w l e d g e of C o p t i c (the latest form of t h e ancient E g y p t i a n l a n g u a g e ) a n d G r e e k enabled h i m t o surpass Y o u n g ' s w o r k a n d to lay t h e scientific f o u n d a t i o n s u p o n w h i c h the systematic s t u d y of ancient E g y p t i a n as a l a n g u a g e is b a s e d . T h e initial w o r k by Y o u n g a n d its p e r fection b y C h a m p o l l i o n are a s t o u n d i n g b e c a u s e of t h e g r e a t n u m b e r of h i e r o g l y p h s — m o r e t h a n seven t h o u s a n d — t h a t existed w h e n t h e R o s e t t a S t o n e w a s written. B y contrast, t h e earlier, classical p e r i o d s of t h e ancient E g y p t i a n l a n g u a g e u s e d seven h u n d r e d signs. [See also E g y p t i a n ; Hieroglyphs.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A n d r e w s , Carol. The Rosetta Stone. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 1 . Ziegler, Christiane. " C h a m p o l l i o n et le dechiffrement des hieroglyp h e s . " In Naissance de Fecriture: Cuneiformes et hieroglyphes, edited by Jean-Paul Boulanger, p p . 3 6 9 - 3 7 5 . 4th ed. Paris, 1982. ROBERT STEVEN BIANCHI
CHARIOTS. I n t h e N e a r E a s t t h e c h a r i o t was a light, o p e n vehicle with' t w o s p o k e d wheels, d r a w n b y h o r s e s yoked o n either side of a d r a u g h t pole. I t w a s u s e d primarily in warfare, b u t also in h u n t i n g a n d p r o c e s s i o n s . T h e first k n o w n e x a m p l e s with these features a p p e a r in A n a t o l i a n glyptics of t h e early s e c o n d m i l l e n n i u m BCE, followed b y t h o s e depicted o n Syrian seals of t h e eighteenth a n d sev e n t e e n t h centuries BCE.
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structed entirely of h e a t - b e n t w o o d a n d rawhide. T h e i r D s h a p e d floors ( a b o u t 1.00 m wide X 0.50 m deep) w e r e m a d e of i n t e r w o v e n t h o n g s t h a t n o t only h e l p e d to keep t h e b e n t - w o o d f r a m e in tension, b u t also p r o v i d e d s o m e s p r i n g iness. T h e a p p r o x i m a t e l y h i p - h i g h siding, in profile s h o w n as r o u n d e d or rectangular, e x t e n d e d a r o u n d t h e sides a n d front, leaving t h e r e a r o p e n for r a p i d m o u n t i n g or d i s m o u n t ing. T h e siding was solid or fenestrated. P a r a d e a n d royal chariots m i g h t h a v e gilded a n d d e c o r a t e d sidings. T h e light, fast vehicle w a s given stability b y a rear axle a n d a wide wheel b a s e (1.54-1.80 m ) . T h e long draft p o l e , w h i c h ran all t h e w a y u n d e r t h e b o d y a n d h e l p e d t o s u p p o r t it, w a s attached only at t h e front, b y b e i n g lashed t o t h e floor frame t h e r e . A pair of r o d s , d r o p p e d diagonally from the front railing to the draft p o l e , restricted t h e t e n d e n c y of t h e floor frame a n d pole to p u l l a p a r t in r o u g h going a n d b r a c e d t h e front of t h e chariot. T w o t h o n g s (so-called yoke b r a c e s ) e x t e n d e d from t h e pole to e a c h a r m of t h e yoke in order to keep t h e latter at r i g h t angles to t h e pole a n d to distribute tractive stress. T h e yoke, an e l e m e n t originally designed for b o v i d s , w a s a d a p t e d t o e q u i n e a n a t o m y b y m e a n s of yoke saddles. T h e s e w o o d e n Y - s h a p e d objects were fastened by their " h a n d l e s " to t h e yoke, while their " l e g s , " secured at either e n d b y a crescentic strap across t h e front of t h e neck, lay along t h e shoulders of t h e h o r s e a n d t o o k the pull in a m a n n e r similar to t h a t of t h e later horse collar. C h a r i o t r y was a n i m p o r t a n t military a r m in this period. T w o - m a n Asiatic a n d E g y p t i a n chariots carrying archers w e r e u s e d as mobile firing platforms t o r u n along t h e face of infantry t o soften it u p or t o play a flanking or p u r s u i n g role (figure 1). B o w cases a n d quivers of arrows attached outside t h e chariot b o d y p r o v i d e d reserve arms. T h e t h r e e m a n chariots of t h e Hittites a n d their allies at t h e battle of Q a d e s h , d e p i c t e d in E g y p t i a n t e m p l e reliefs, carry driver, shield b e a r e r , a n d s p e a r m a n (quivers are absent) a n d m u s t h a v e served essentially as t r a n s p o r t s . E v i d e n c e is scarce in t h e late s e c o n d a n d early first mil lennia BCE, b u t Assyrian p a l a c e reliefs of t h e n i n t h - s e v e n t h
I n M e s o p o t a m i a t h e chariot h a d b e e n p r e c e d e d b y diskw h e e l e d vehicles w i t h b o t h t w o a n d four wheels, p u l l e d b y asses or ass/hemione or ass/horse crosses. Five i n n o v a t i o n s gave the t r u e chariot its superiority: t h e s p o k e d wheel; t h e exclusive u s e of h o r s e draft (with a n a d a p t a t i o n of t h e y o k e for this p u r p o s e ) ; t h e r e p l a c e m e n t of t h e old n o s e - r i n g c o n trol b y a p r o p e r h o r s e bit; t h e u s e of tire b o w as a p r i m a r y chariot w e a p o n ; a n d p r o p o r t i o n s p e r m i t t i n g a crew of t w o to s t a n d abreast. Details of d i m e n s i o n s a n d c o n s t r u c t i o n before a b o u t 1000 BCE c o m e f r o m N e w K i n g d o m E g y p t , w h e r e t h e chariot h a d b e e n i n t r o d u c e d f r o m t h e L e v a n t at s o m e time d u r i n g t h e S e c o n d I n t e r m e d i a t e period. L a r g e n u m b e r s of E g y p t i a n a n d Asiatic chariots are illustrated in reliefs a n d p a i n t i n g s , a n d (all or p a r t s of) eight actual chariots h a v e survived, six of t h e m f r o m t h e t o m b of T u t a n k h a m u n . T h e s e w e r e c o n
CHARIOTS. Medina
F i g u r e 1. Detail
Habu.
of a stone relief of Rameses
(After Littauer a n d Crouwel, 1 9 7 9 , fig. 44)
III,
from
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centuries BCE furnish plentiful d o c u m e n t a t i o n . C y p r i o t chariot models a n d actual chariot remains of t h e eighth a n d seventh centuries BCE provide additional information. T h e y illustrate solid-sided bodies strengthened b y a central frontto-back partition. T h e partition was s u p p o r t e d at its rear by a standing loop that could serve as a h a n d h o l d for m o u n t i n g as well as a fixture o n which to h a n g a shield. E v i d e n c e p e r sists for t h e w o v e n - t h o n g flooring of t h e b o d y , w h i c h s o m e times was large e n o u g h to a c c o m m o d a t e a third o r even a fourth m a n at t h e rear. N i n t h - c e n t u r y BCE Assyrian chariots (figure 2) a p p e a r to have h a d draft poles in the Y form d o c u m e n t e d b y s o m e later models from C y p r u s a n d t h e L e v a n t : t w o poles, one from each side of the chariot, c o m e together in front t o b e c o m e a single pole to t h e yoke. T h e pole s u p p o r t / b r e a s t w o r k b r a c e of the previous period was e x c h a n g e d for a metal rod. A p e a p o d - s h a p e d , apparently rigid element, e x t e n d i n g from t h e breastwork t o p to t h e yoke, further s t r e n g t h e n e d t h e traction system. By, t h e ninth c e n t u r y BCE, draft t e a m s a p p e a r to consist of three or four horses. Only two horses were u n d e r yoke, t h e third a n d fourth being outriggers. T h e rear-axled chariot is still s h o w n as a fast, mobile firing platform for flanking, p u r s u i n g , and harnessing. B e c a u s e only two of t h e horses w e r e u n d e r yoke, the vehicle r e m a i n e d quite m a n e u v e r a b l e . Crossed quivers (containing b o w s a n d arrows a n d sometimes axes) w e r e fixed outside t h e b o d y , and a thrusting spear stood at t h e rear, t h e t w o last, b e i n g short-range w e a p o n s , were for use d i s m o u n t e d or from a standing vehicle. Protective a r m o r was s o m e t i m e s w o r n b y b o t h crew a n d horses.
Reliefs of Tiglath-Pileser III (745-727 BCE) a n d later A s syrian kings d o c u m e n t a m a r k e d c h a n g e in t h e chariot. T h e b o d y evidently h a d a rectangular floor p l a n a n d w a s large e n o u g h to a c c o m m o d a t e four m e n (two a n d two a b r e a s t ) . T h e i c o n o g r a p h i c evidence shows only a single pole with t h e then-prevailing four-horse t e a m u n d e r o n e yoke; h o w ever, t h e fuller C y p r i o t d o c u m e n t a t i o n indicates t h a t two poles m i g h t go to a single four-horse yoke or, m o r e often, to two t w o - h o r s e o n e s . T h e yoke saddles w e r e t h e n a b a n d o n e d in favor of a s h a p e d yoke, w i t h bays for each h o r s e ' s neck. A b o w case w a s vertically a t t a c h e d a t t h e chariot's front corners a n d a s p e a r is still s h o w n at t h e rear. T h e solid siding is often d e p i c t e d as a r m o r e d w i t h small metal plates. Assyrian chariots of t h e late eighth a n d s e v e n t h centuries BCE continue t o b e s h o w n as firing platforms for a r c h e r s , although they w e r e less mobile, as a result of their greater size, heavier fabric, a n d the restrictions o n m a n e u v e r a b i l i t y i m p o s e d by four horses u n d e r yoke. U n d e r A s h u r b a n i p a l (668-627 BCE) a r c h e r s are, for t h e first time, s h o w n shooting from a stationary chariot. T h r o u g h o u t t h e first half of t h e first m i l l e n n i u m BCE, t h e chariots of o t h e r N e a r E a s t e r n states ( U r a r t i a n , N e o - H i t t i t e , a n d L e v a n t i n e ) are usually s h o w n r e s e m b l i n g , in a p p e a r a n c e a n d function, Assyrian m o d e l s . By late in t h e first millen n i u m B C E , military chariotry w a s largely replaced b y m o u n t e d t r o o p s w h o h a d greater mobility, t h e ability to function in m o r e r u g g e d terrain, a n d e c o n o m i e s of m a n - a n d animal p o w e r . T h e t u r r e t e d a n d s c y t h e d chariots of t h e A c h a e m e n i d s a n d others, m e n t i o n e d b y classical a u t h o r s , are n o w h e r e illustrated; it is k n o w n , h o w e v e r , t h a t at t h e
CHARIOTS. F i g u r e 2 . Detail of a stone relief of Ashurnasirpal Crouwel, 1 9 7 9 , fig. 53)
II from 3
Nimrud.
(After Littauer a n d
CHOGHA ZANBIL battles of C u n a x a (401 BCE) a n d G a u g a m e l a (331 BCE) t h e y p r o v e d useless against p r e p a r e d a n d disciplined G r e e k i n fantry. T h e chariots r e m a i n i n g in u s e w e r e eitiier p r o c e s sional ones or ones u s e d in t h e traditional h u n t , in w h i c h beaters d r o v e t h e g a m e from cover a n d across terrain suit able for the chariot t o negotiate. [See also C a r t s ; E q u i d s ; T r a n s p o r t a t i o n ; and W h e e l ] BIBLIOGRAPHY Crouwel, J. H . "Chariots in Iron Age C y p r u s . " Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus ( 1 9 S 7 ) : 1 0 1 - 1 1 8 . Littauer, M . A., and J. H. Crouwel. Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East. Leiden, 1979. Littauer, M . A., and J. H . Crouwel. Chariots and Related Equipment from the Tomb of Tut'ankhamun. T u t ' a n k h a m u n T o m b Series, 3. O x ford, 198s. N a g e l , Wolfram. Die mesopotamische Streitwagen und seine Entwickhing im ostmediterranen Bereich. Berlin, 1 9 6 6 . Piggott, Stuart. Wagon, Chariot, and Carriage: Symbol and Status in the History of Transport. N e w York, 1992. Includes a chapter on chariots and chariotry (pp. 337-368). Spruytte, J. Early Harness Systems. T r a n s l a t e d by M . A. Littauer. L o n d o n , 1983. Includes experiments with reconstructions of Egyptian N e w K i n g d o m chariots (pp. 2 3 - 5 1 ) . J. H . CROUWEL a n d M A R Y AIKEN LITTAUER
CHOGHA ZANBIL ( m o d . P e r s . , "hill of t h e b a s k e t " ; E l a m . , al U n t a s h - N a p i r i s h a , " c i t y of U n t a s h - N a p i r i s h a " ; Akk., D u r U n t a s h , "fortress of U n t a s h " ) , E l a m i t e royal city a n d religious center located o n t h e plain of K h u z i s t a n ( I r a n ) , s o m e 40 k m (25 mi.) southeast of Susa, o n t h e b a n k of t h e A b - e D i z River (32° N , 48°3o' E ) . T h e site covers a b o u t 100 h a (247 acres) a n d is c o m p o s e d of a central ziggurat (still s t a n d i n g at 25 m a b o v e t h e level of t h e plain) s u r r o u n d e d b y t h r e e c o n c e n t t i c walls (see figure 1). Built by K i n g U n t a s h - N a p i r i s h a (c. 1340-1300 BCE) early in his reign, in a previously unsettled area, it w a s mostly a b a n d o n e d after t h e king's death. D i s c o v e r e d in 1935, R o l a n d d e M e c q u e n e m e x c a v a t e d it on a limited scale (1935-1939, 1946) a n d R o m a n G h i r s h m a n u n c o v e r e d m o s t of its r e m a i n s (1951-1962). Functionally, the site consists of t w o p a r t s : a nearly 16-ha (40 acres) central t e m e n o s , o r sacred precinct, enclosed by a wall a n d o c c u p i e d b y a ziggurat a n d several t e m p l e s , t h a t its incriptions (see b e l o w ) call Siyan-kuk ("holy p l a c e " ) — t h e h e a r t of die city a n d its raison d'etre; a n d a royal city of a b o u t 85 ha (210 acres) t h a t is p r o t e c t e d by a r a m p a r t 4 Ion (2.5 mi.) long. Z i g g u r a t C o m p o u n d . T h e center of t h e t e m e n o s is o c c u p i e d by a ziggurat t h a t is itself d e m a r c a t e d by a wall a n d s u r r o u n d e d b y several cultic b u i l d i n g s . Built in m u d b r i c k w i t h a b a k e d - b r i c k casing, t h e z i g g u r a t is a s q u a r e building m e a s u r i n g almost 100 m o n e a c h side, w i t h its angles ori e n t e d to t h e cardinal p o i n t s . I n s c r i p t i o n a l a n d archaeological evidence indicates t h a t its c o n s t r u c t i o n w e n t t h r o u g h differ
487
e n t phases, of w h i c h t w o h a v e b e e n clearly identified by Ghirshman. Initially, it w a s n o t a ziggurat, b u t a m o n u m e n t a l s q u a r e b u i l d i n g consisting of a large o p e n c o u r t s u r r o u n d e d by r o o m s (see figure 2a) .Access t o t h e c o u i t was t h r o u g h large d o o r s in t h e m i d d l e of e a c h side t h a t were g u a r d e d by bulls a n d w i n g e d griffons in glazed terra cotta. T h e r o o m s served as m a g a z i n e s , e x c e p t o n the southeast, w h e r e they c o m p o s e d t w o t e m p l e s , A a n d B , b o t h dedicated to d i e g o d I n s h u s h i n a k (originally the g o d of t h e city of S u s a ) . P r e s u m ably, different rituals w e r e p e r f o r m e d in each t e m p l e . T h i s s q u a r e building of the first p h a s e , as well as the entire t e m e n o s , w a s dedicated to I n s h u s h i n a k , distinguished b y t h e e p i t h e t " l o r d of the Siyan-kuk." L a t e r in t h e lung's reign, this u n u s u a l building was t r a n s f o r m e d i n t o a ziggurat in t h e strict sense of the t e r m (see figure 2 b ) . T h r e e c o n c e n t r i c blocks of brick w e r e erected in the central c o u r t to f o r m t h e second, third, a n d fourth stories of the ziggurat. As tire original s q u a r e building b e c a m e t h e first story, s o m e of its r o o m s a n d I n s h u s h i n a k ' s t e m p l e A w e r e filled u p a n d blocked; I n s h u s h i n a k ' s t e m p l e B , h o w ever, r e m a i n e d in activity b e c a u s e it was entered from t h e parvis (enclosed c o u r t ) . T h e d o o r s in the m i d d l e of each side of t h e original building were t r a n s f o r m e d i n t o i n n e r vaulted stairwells leading to t h e t o p of t h e first story—except o n d i e southwest, w h e r e t h e stairwell w e n t directly t o the t o p of t h e s e c o n d story; from t h e r e , a n o t h e r stairwell, possibly located o n t h e southeast, led to the s u m m i t of the ziggurat. T h e ziggurat's a p p e a r a n c e w a s t h u s quite different from its M e s o p o t a m i a n c o u n t e r p a r t s , w h i c h h a d external stairways applied against one side of t h e tower. T h e ziggurat w a s c r o w n e d by a h i g h t e m p l e , called t h e kukunum in its inscriptions (see b e l o w ) . C u l m i n a t i n g at a height of s o m e 50 m , it w a s lavishly d e c o r a t e d with silvera n d gold-colored glazed bricks. It was dedicated jointly t o t h e g o d s N a p i r i s h a (originally the g o d of the city of A n s h a n in F a r s ) a n d I n s h u s h i n a k , w h o b o t h received t h e epithet of " l o r d of the Siyan-kuk." T h u s , t h e dedication of the ziggurat a n d t h a t of the entire t e m e n o s h a d c h a n g e d b e t w e e n the first a n d d i e s e c o n d p h a s e of c o n s t r u c t i o n . T h e ziggurat c o m p o u n d c o n t a i n e d several shrines a n d cultic installations located at t h e foot of the m o n u m e n t . A l o n g t h e n o r t h w e s t facade a t e m p l e c o m p l e x with shrines was dedicated to I s h n i k a r a b (a g o d of S u s i a n a ) , N a b u (a g o d of Babylonian origin), a n d Kiririsha (Napirisha's c o n sort). T h e s e temples h a v e n o striking architectural c h a r a c teristics b u t r e s e m b l e o r d i n a r y dwellings with a n inner c o u r t y a r d , e x c e p t for N a b u ' s t e m p l e , w h i c h is T - s h a p e d . A large collection of votive objects, i n c l u d i n g several silver a n d b r o n z e axes a n d m o r e t h a n o n e h u n d r e d m a c e h e a d s , w a s f o u n d in Kiririsha's t e m p l e . A l o n g its s o u t h w e s t e r n side a r o w of four r o o m s was i n t e r p r e t e d as " c h a p e l s " ; m o r e t h a n o n e h u n d r e d votive c y l i n d e r seals were discovered in t h e m . Several gates gave access to the ziggurat c o m p o u n d
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A
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. G
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N^-'
CHOGHA ZANBIL. F i g u r e I . Topographic plan of the site. (Courtesy P . de Miroschedji)
t h r o u g h t h e enclosure wall; p a v e m e n t r e m a i n s indicate t h a t drey were linked to d i e gates of t h e t e m e n o s wall b y large processional ways. Immediately outside t h r e e of d i e gates were square t e m p l e s of u n k n o w n designation, except for t h e nortiiern one, w h i c h w a s dedicated t o N a p i r i s h a ; it is larger t h a n the other a n d m a y have h a d a towerlike a p p e a r a n c e . Temenos. E x t e n d i n g a r o u n d t h e ziggurat c o m p o u n d , t h e t e m e n o s was enclosed b y a thick m u d - b r i c k wall with outer buttresses. It w a s occupied by a series of temples dedicated to divinities originating from all parts of t h e e m p i r e . Only some of these temples were preserved a n d cleared. A complex of four temples existed near t h e east corner. T h r e e were built side b y side witii an identical p l a n (a court yard s u r r o u n d i n g a small building c o m p o s e d of an antecella and a cella) a n d dedicated t o Pinikir ( a n Elamite goddess) a n d to two divine couples originating from Susiana ( A d a d a n d Shala, S h i m u t a n d N i n - a l i / M a n z a t ) . T h e fourth t e m p l e consisted of a r o w of four small chapels, each containing a
pair of altars, a n d w a s dedicated t o t h e N a p r a t e p (a g r o u p of local divinities). A l o n g the n o r t h e a s t e r n side of the t e m e n o s t w o o t h e r t e m ples were dedicated t o t h e goddess Ffishmitik a n d t o t h e g o d R u h u r a t i r (divinities from S h i m a s h k i i n t h e Z a g r o s h i g h l a n d ) ; o n e w a s c o m p a r a b l e t o t h e t h r e e t e m p l e s t o t h e east, while d i e o t h e r w a s a n enlarged version of N a p i r i s h a ' s square t e m p l e s . Royal city. T h e royal city e x t e n d e d a r o u n d t h e t e m e n o s . It m a y have b e e n entirely built u p , a l t h o u g h n o t necessarily densely. T h e major buildings w e r e c o n c e n t r a t e d in t h e northeast, also t h e location of t h e m a i n city gate, called d i e Royal E n t r a n c e . T h e gate w a s a d o u b l e gate with a n i n n e r c o u r t y a r d (64 X 62 m ) b o r d e r e d o n t h r e e sides b y elongated r o o m s . It o p e n e d into a sort of "royal q u a r t e r " o c c u p i e d b y three large buildings, p r e s u m a b l y palaces. T h e m o s t elaborate is palace I (70 X 56 m ) also called t h e palace-hypogeum (see b e l o w ) . I t is c o m p o s e d of t h r e e parts:
GHOGHA ZANBIL
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an official section with a large c o u r t y a r d decorated with glazed p o l y c h r o m e bricks a n d s u r r o u n d e d b y long r o o m s ; a private section with a p a r t m e n t s a r o u n d t w o small c o u r t y a r d s ; a n d a (domestic?) section with a series of elongated r o o m s . T h e b u i l d i n g is e x c e p t i o n a l b e c a u s e there a r e several t o m b s u n d e r t h e private a n d d o m e s t i c r o o m s . Built in b a k e d brick set in b i t u m e n a n d plaster, t h e t o m b s were r e a c h e d by m e a n s of a steep staircase a n d consist of o n e or t w o vaulted r o o m s u p t o 4 m high a n d 5 - 6 m long. W i t h a single e x c e p tion, all t h e bodies in t h e t o m b s h a d b e e n c r e m a t e d with their funerary offerings, a u n i q u e e x a m p l e of cremation in Elam.
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CHOGHA ZANBIL.
F i g u r e 2a.
Plan of the ziggurat.
Initial p h a s e o f
c o n s t r u c t i o n . (After G h i r s h m a n , 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 6 8 , vol. 1 )
T h e t w o other palaces m a y h a v e served as quarters for t h e royal e n t o u r a g e . T h e y a r e quite different from t h e p a l ace-hypogeum b u t r e s e m b l e e a c h other in p l a n a n d organi zation. Botii consist of a series of s e p a r a t e a p a r t m e n t s ( i n cluding several b a t h r o o m s ) organized a r o u n d t w o or t h r e e s q u a r e c o u r t y a r d s placed, side b y side (palace III) or a t a right angle (palace I I ) ; t h e organization of each u n i t is orig inal a n d recalls t h a t of t h e first p h a s e of t h e ziggurat c o m plex. S o m e 100 m s o u t h w e s t of t h e palaces, t h e sanctuary of N u s k u is a n u n u s u a l b u i l d i n g , called ipillali instead of siyan ( " t e m p l e " ) b y t h e inscriptions (see b e l o w ) : it is T - s h a p e d , c o m p o s e d of a transversal a n t e r o o m a n d a large longitudinal hall w i t h a h i g h m u d - b r i c k p o d i u m in its center; considering its size (30 m X 13 m ) , t h e hall was probably unroofed. B e c a u s e of N u s k u ' s c o n n e c t i o n with fire a n d light, this s a n c t u a r y is s o m e t i m e s i n t e r p r e t e d as a sort of fire t e m p l e . A hydraulic installation w a s built o n b o t h sides of the city wall to t h e southwest of d i e royal city t o e n s u r e C h o g h a ZanbiPs water supply. L o c a t e d at t h e e n d of a canal, it is c o m p o s e d of t w o b a s i n s t h a t c o m m u n i c a t e t h r o u g h small c h a n n e l s — a large basin of d e c a n t a t i o n o n t h e outside a n d a smaller basin o n t h e inside. F i n d s . T h e vast majority of t h e t h o u s a n d s of inscriptions f o u n d i n t h e excavations a r e building inscriptions on b a k e d bricks; they consist of fifty-two different Elamite texts a n d only five A k k a d i a n texts a n d r e p r e s e n t an invaluable source of information o n E l a m i t e language a n d religion. T h e excavations h a v e yielded n u m e r o u s objects, b u t n o large m o n u m e n t s . A large collection of glazed objects in terra cotta or in frit w a s u n c o v e r e d . M a n y are decorative architectural elements i n t h e s h a p e of glazed plaques with k n o b s or large p e g s of t h e s a m e material; s o m e seven h u n d r e d w e r e f o u n d in o n e of t h e r o o m s in t h e first story of t h e ziggurat. G l a z e d sculptures (bulls a n d w i n g e d griffons), fig urines ( h u m a n a n d a n i m a l ) , a n d vessels of various kinds w e r e also found.
CHOGHA ZANBIL. F i g u r e 2 b . Plan of the ziggurat. c o n s t r u c t i o n . (After G h i r s h m a n , 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 6 8 , vol. 1 )
S e c o n d p h a s e of
A cache i n p a l a c e I I I h a s yielded a g r o u p of alabaster jugs of S y r o - E g y p t i a n t y p e . N o t e w o r t h y from palace I is a m o saic p a n e l of ivory s h o w i n g a w i n g e d goddess a n d a frieze
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of wild goats alternating with a sacred n e e . M e t a l objects are represented b y axes, daggers, a r r o w h e a d s , p l a q u e s , a n d p e r s o n a l o r n a m e n t s . A large collection of stone m a c e h e a d s , inscribed a n d plain, a n d a b o u t 160 cylinder seals, t h e m a jority in faience a n d in glass, w e r e found. T h e y illustrate t h e range of glyptic styles in use in f o u r t e e n m - c e n t u r y BCE S U siana. O t h e r e x a m p l e s of such seals were e x p o r t e d as far as Marlik in n o r t h e r n Iran. [See Marlik.]
Elamite kings r e a p p e a r o n t h e scene in t h e twelfth c e n t u r y BCE, diey have a b a n d o n e d C h o g h a Z a n b i l in favor of S u s a a n d again c h o s e n I n s h u s h i n a k as t h e major deity of t h e e m pire.
T h e r e are relatively few finds from C h o g h a Zanbil b e cause the site w a s generally a b a n d o n e d after U n t a s h - N a p i r isha's reign and cleared of its major m o n u m e n t s b y t h e twelfth-century Elamite kings. A n inscription of K i n g S h u t r u k - N a h h u n t e (c. 1 1 8 5 - 1 1 5 5 BCE) specifically m e n t i o n s t h e transfer of a stela from t h e Siyan-kuk (i.e., C h o g h a Z a n bil) to Susa. T h e r e f o r e , m o n u m e n t s f o u n d in Susa that, based o n inscriptional and/or stylistic a n d i c o n o g r a p h i c ev idence, originally stood in U n t a s h - N a p i r i s h a ' s city should b e a d d e d to t h e finds from C h o g h a Zanbil. [See Susa.] A m o n g these are U n t a s h - N a p i r i s h a ' s stela, a divine b u s t holding two d r a g o n snakes, t h e lower p a r t of a divine statue showing intertwined d r a g o n snakes, various fragments of sculptures a n d reliefs, a large b r o n z e sacrificial table, a n d , possibly, a b r o n z e statue of Q u e e n N a p i r - A s u .
Amiet, Pierre. Elam. Auvers-sur-Oise, 1 9 6 6 . Classical synthesis of Elamite archaeology, with illustrations of the m a i n m o n u m e n t s of Chogha Zanbil.
I n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f t h e F i n d s . C h o g h a Zanbil is b e s t u n derstood as a n e w capital city built a r o u n d a federal s a n c t u a r y in w h i c h t h e major divinities of t h e e m p i r e resided together u n d e r the aegis of t h e gods of A n s h a n a n d Susa. I t entails on t h e p a r t of its f o u n d e r a political vision of u n u s u a l m a g n i t u d e , aiming to achieve t h e unity of t h e Elamite E m pire.
[See also Elamites; Ziggurat; and the biography man.]
of
Ghirsh
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aynard, Jeanne-Marie. Le prisma du Louvre AO 19.939. Paris, 1 9 5 7 . Ghirshman, R o m a n . Tchogha Zanbil (Dur Untash), vol. 1, La ziggurat; vol. 2, Temenos, temples, palais, tombes. M e m o i r e s de la Mission Ar cheologique en Iran, vols. 3 9 - 4 0 . Paris, 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 6 8 . Final publication of G h i r s h m a n ' s excavations. Harper, P r u d e n c e , Oliver, et al., eds. The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre. N e w York, 1 9 9 2 . Includes an up-to-date presentation of the Middle Elamite m o n u m e n t s . Konig, Friedrich W . Die elamischen Konigsinschriften. Archiv fur Orientforschung, vol. 1 6 . G r a z , 1 9 6 5 . Although m a n y translations b e come outdated, this book is not yet superseded. Luckenbill, Daniel D . Ancient Records of Assyria From Sargon to the End. Chicago, 1927.
and Babylonia,
vol. 2,
M e c q u e n e m , Roland de, and J. Michalon, Recherches a Tchogha Zembil. Memoires de la Mission Archeologique e n Iran, vol. 33. Paris, 1 9 5 3 . Publication of de M e c q u e n e m ' s pioneering work at C h o g h a Zanbil. Miroschedji, Pierre de. " L e dieu elamite N a p i r i s h a . " Revue d'Assyriologie 74 (1980): 1 2 9 - 1 4 3 . Study of the god Napirisha and his signif icance. Miroschedji, Pierre de. " L e dieu elamite au serpent et aux eaux jaillissantes." Iranica Antiqua 1 6 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 - 2 5 . Includes a study of U n t a s h Napirisha stela and the publication of fragmentary m o n u m e n t s orig inating from C h o g h a Zanbil and found in Susa.
T h e foundation of t h e n e w city marks a b r e a k f r o m tire past: built on n e w g r o u n d a n d w i t h o u t any direct relation ship to the old capital of Susa, all m e m b e r s of t h e e m p i r e could claim it equally as their capital. T h e t e m e n o s w a s t h e federal sanctuary t h a t u n i t e d t h e major gods of t h e e m p i r e ' s m a i n cities a n d provinces. W i t h its concentric p l a n (the zig g u r a t c o m p o u n d s u r r o u n d e d b y a religious city a n d it in t u r n b y a royal city) t h e site was an ideal image of E l a m .
Porada, Edith. Tchogha Zanbil (Dur-Untash), vol. 4, La glyptique. M e moires de la Delegation Archeologique en Iran, vol. 42. Paris, 1 9 7 0 . Masterly study of the Chogha Zanbil glyptic.
T h e fact that t h e center of this Elamite m i c r o c o s m was a ziggurat initially dedicated to I n s h u s h i n a k suggests t h a t at first Susiana was perceived as t h e center of t h e empire. Only later did U n t a s h - N a p i r i s h a c h a n g e his plan a n d rededicate the ziggurat jointly to N a p i r i s h a a n d to Inshushinak. T h i s placed t h e n e w capital city (and b y die s a m e token t h e w h o l e empire) u n d e r t h e joint auspices of t h e god of A n s h a n a n d t h e god of Susa. T h e new scheme may imply t h a t t h e e m p i r e was thereafter conceived as t h e u n i o n of t h e h i g h l a n d a n d the lowland—a u n i o n further expressed b y U n t a s h - N a p i r isha's parallel tide " k i n g of A n s h a n a n d S u s a . "
Vallat, Francois. "L'inscription de la stele d ' U n t a s h - N a p i r i s h a . " Antiqua 16 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 2 7 - 3 3 .
T h i s grandiose enterprise seems to h a v e e n d e d in failure, however. T h e king died and t h e construction of C h o g h a Zanbil w a s never completed. I n t h e historic r e c o r d , t h e r e is a gap d u r i n g m o s t of t h e thirteenth c e n t u r y BCE. W h e n
Tosefta Menahot
Roche, Claude. " L e s ziggurats de T c h o g h a Zanbil." In Fragmenta historiae elamicae, edited b y L e o n D e Meyer et al., p p . 1 9 1 - 1 9 7 . Paris, 1986. Steve, M . J. Textes Alanines et accadiens de Tchogha Zanbil. M e m o i r e s de la Delegation Archeologique en Iran, vol. 4 1 . Paris, 1 9 6 7 . Editio princeps of the inscriptions found in C h o g h a Zanbil, with references to parallel inscriptions found earlier in Susa. Iranica
PIERRE DE MIROSCHEDJI
CHORAZIN
(also C h o r a z i m ) , a Jewish village in t h e
Galilee in t h e G r e c o - R o m a n p e r i o d identified with K h i r b e t K a r a z e h a n d located a p p r o x i m a t e l y 4 k m (2.5 mi.) n o r t h of t h e Sea of Galilee ( m a p reference 2031 X 2575). C h o r a z i n is first m e n t i o n e d in t h e N e w T e s t a m e n t (Mt. 11:21-24; Lk. 10:13-16) in r e g a r d t o Jesus' ministry. It is m e n t i o n e d in 9:2 ( a n d parallels), a text t h a t dates t o t h e
s e c o n d or p e r h a p s third c e n t u r y CE. E u s e b i u s (c. 260-340 CE) reports t h a t t h e site of C h o r a z i n is 2 R o m a n miles f r o m C a p e r n a u m a n d t h a t t h e t o w n was in ruins in his day
(On-
CHUERA, TELL omasticon 174.23). T h e first m o d e r n scholar t o identify t h e t o w n as C h o r a z i n w a s Charles W i l s o n in 1869. F r o m 1 9 0 5 1907 H e i n r i c h K o h l a n d C a r l W a t z i n g e r partially e x c a v a t e d t h e s y n a g o g u e o n behalf of t h e D e u t s c h e O r i e n t - G e s e l l schaft; it was completely cleared o n behalf of t h e M a n d a t o r y D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities i n 1926. F r o m 1962-1964 Z e e v Yeivin c o n d u c t e d a survey of t h e t o w n o n behalf of t h e Israel D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities, a n d b e t w e e n 1980 a n d 1984 e x cavations w e r e carried o u t u n d e r his direction. T h e s y n a g o g u e a t C h o r a z i n is of t h e Galilean t y p e , w h i c h also includes t h e s y n a g o g u e s of C a p e r n a u m , B a r ' a m , M e i r o n , Arbel, a n d M e r o t . [See Synagogues.] A l t h o u g h M i c h a e l A v i - Y o n a h d a t e d this g r o u p t o t h e s e c o n d century, it is n o w generally a c c e p t e d tiiat G a l i l e a n - t y p e synagogues b e l o n g t o t h e t h i r d - s i x t h centuries CE. T h e building w a s c o n s t r u c t e d in d i e t o w n center of local basalt ashlars o n a b r o a d p o d i u m . A flight of steps led u p t o t h e p o d i u m . T h e facade, w h i c h is aligned t o w a r d t h e south, h a s b e e n partially r e c o n s t r u c t e d u n d e r Yeivin's supervision. I n antiquity a n exedra w a s c o n structed along t h e length of t h e facade. T h e building h a d t h r e e e n t r a n c e s : a large central p o r t a l t h a t led into t h e n a v e a n d t w o smaller portals t h a t l e d into t h e side aisles. A wolf, a M e d u s a , a n d o t h e r figures a p p e a r in bas-relief o n a r c h i tectural m e m b e r s of d i e s y n a g o g u e . R e m a i n s of t w o aediculae as well as a basalt chair b e a r i n g a d e d i c a t o r y i n s c r i p tion w e r e discovered n e a r t h e s o u t h e r n wall of t h e s y n a g o g u e . T h e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of this inscription h a s b e e n t h e subject o f considerable d i s p u t e . A translation of this text, following t h e r e a d i n g of J o s e p h N a v e h (1978) is as follows: R e m e m b e r e d for g o o d Y u d a n s o n of I s h m a e l W h o m a d e (or, d o n a t e d ) this stoa a n d its s t e p s f r o m h i s ( o w n ) p r o p e r t y . M a y he have a portion with t h e righteous.
T h e extensive excavations of t h e B y z a n t i n e - p e r i o d t o w n of C h o r a z i n b e t w e e n 1964 a n d 1984 disclosed t h a t its s h a p e c o n f o r m e d t o t h e t o p o g r a p h y of t h e hill o n w h i c h it w a s built. Its h o u s i n g units are r e m i n i s c e n t of h o u s i n g e x c a v a t e d in t h e n e i g h b o r i n g G o l a n H e i g h t s . U n i t s A a n d B are c o n tiguous r o o m s c o n s t r u c t e d a r o u n d a central c o u r t y a r d , a n arrangement reminiscent of the c o m m u n a l courtyards m e n tioned in n u m e r o u s rabbinic s o u r c e s (e.g., M i s h n a h B. B,, ch. 1, a n d parallels) T h e t o w n is divided into h o u s i n g u n i t s b y streets t h a t join t h e m a i n street o n t h e east a n d west. T h e civic center, w h i c h i n c l u d e d t h e s y n a g o g u e , was built o n a b r o a d n a t u r a l platform in t h e center of t h e t o w n . T h e o u t e r walls of t h e buildings in t h e c e n t e r s e e m t o h a v e b e e n c o n tiguous a n d enclosed t h e civic c o m p l e x . A n elaborate ritual b a t h c o m p l e x was u n c o v e r e d i n b u i l d i n g E , o n t h e n o r t h e r n side of t h e t o w n . [See also B a r ' a m ; C a p e r n a u m ; D e u t s c h e O r i e n t - G e s e l l s chaft; Galilee, article on Galilee i n t h e Hellenistic t h r o u g h B y z a n t i n e P e r i o d s ; M e r i o n ; S y n a g o g u e Inscriptions; and the biographies of Avi-Yonah, Watzinger, and Wilson.}
491
BIBLIOGRAPHY Chiat, Marilyn Joyce Segal. Handbook of Synagogue Literature. Chico, Calif., 1982. Surveys the architectural history of the Chorazin syn agogue. Hirschfeld, Yizhar. Dwelling Houses in Roman and Byzantine Palestine (in H e b r e w ) . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 7 . Utilizes both archaeological a n d lit erary sources (see esp. p p . 3 5 - 3 6 , 1 6 7 ) . N a v e h , Joseph. On Mosaic and Stone: The Aramaic and Stone Inscriptions from Ancient Synagogues (in H e b r e w ) . T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 8 . Discusses the Chorazin inscription a n d t h e various scholarly attempts t o decipher it ( p p . 3 6 - 3 8 ) . Yeivin, Zeev. " C h o r a z i n . " I n The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. i , p p . 3 0 1 - 3 0 4 . Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1993. Survey of the site's archaeological history, written by its principal excavator. STEVEN FINE
CHUERA, TELL, site located almost m i d w a y b e t w e e n t h e valleys of t h e Balikh a n d K h a b u r Rivers in t h e p r o v i n c e of R a q q a , Syria, (36°4o' N , 39°3o' E ) . T h e site belongs t o a special type of settlement n a m e d kranzhugel (Ger., " w r e a t h like m o u n d " ) b y M a x v o n O p p e n h e i m , w h o , d u r i n g his travels in U p p e r M e s o p o t a m i a b e t w e e n 1911 a n d 1913, was t h e first t o recognize t h e m . T h e settlements occur mainly o n t h e s t e p p e b e t w e e n t h e u p p e r courses of the Balikh a n d t h e K h a b u r a n d o n b o t h sides of t h e A b d al-Aziz M o u n t a i n s . T h e y are usually a l m o s t circular, with a line of low hills at their outer e d g e , i n d i c a t i n g t h e existence of a fortification wall, a n d with a flat lower city a n d a central elevated citadel mound. Tell C h u e r a is d i e largest of these settlements, covering a surface of a b o u t 650,000 sq m . E x c a v a t i o n b e g a n with a s o u n d i n g in 1955 carried o u t b y Jean Lauffray o n behalf of t h e Syrian Antiquities D e p a r t m e n t . I n 1958, t h e M a x v o n O p p e n h e i m F o u n d a t i o n b e g a n a l o n g - t e r m excavation p r o ject at Tell C h u e r a , first u n d e r t h e directorship of A n t o n M o o r t g a t (1958-1976), t h e n of U r s u l a M o o r t g a t - C o r r e n s (1982-1985), a n d since 1986, of Winfried O r t h m a n n . Settlement history at T e l l C h u e r a m a y b e divided into two m a i n phases. P e r i o d 1 e x t e n d s from a b o u t 2800 t o 2300 BCE, a n d , after a hiatus, p e r i o d 2 lasts from 1600 t o 1100. Settle m e n t r e a c h e d its largest e x p a n s e d u r i n g p e r i o d I C . T h e site w a s s u r r o u n d e d b y a m u d - b r i c k fortification wall a n d a ditch. T h e lower city, w h i c h covered an area of a b o u t 220,000 sq m , w a s a p p a r e n t l y completely built u p with pri vate h o u s e s . R e c e n t excavations h a v e s h o w n t h a t t h e citadel m o u n d w a s a t least p a r d y s u r r o u n d e d b y an inner fortifi cation. A n i m p o r t a n t s a n c t u a r y c o m p l e x h a s b e e n identified at t h e s o u t h e a s t e r n p a r t o f t h e citadel. It consists of a high ter race, built with rather large s t o n e b o u l d e r s , accessed from t h e east via a r a m p o r staircase; d i e t e m p l e , of w h i c h only a few remains are p r e s e r v e d , p r o b a b l y stood o n this terrace. Several side terraces w e r e a d d e d t o t h e building d u r i n g its
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CHUERA, TELL
existence. A s e c o n d stone building seems to h a v e b e e n a kind of gate to t h e sanctuary. A n o t h e r t e m p l e o n t h e n o r t h side of the citadel is t h e oldest k n o w n e x a m p l e of t h e tra ditional N o r t h Syrian type of sanctuary: t h e building, w h i c h w a s erected on a low terrace, consists of a rectangular cella, entered from an o p e n p o r c h on its east side. A small t e m p l e in the central p a r t of t h e citadel, s u r r o u n d e d b y private h o u s e s , is of the s a m e general type; in the cella a n d its i m m e d i a t e n e i g h b o r h o o d , several stone statuettes h a v e b e e n found tiiat r e s e m b l e figures from t h e Diyala region in M e s o p o t a m i a , dating from the Early Dynastic II p e r i o d . T h e y s h o w tiiat at the time n o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a w a s already influenced b y t h e S u m e r i a n culture to the south. T h e remains of a large palace (about 70 X 60 m ) have b e e n identified in t h e western p a r t of the citadel. E x c a v a t i o n revealed several courtyards a n d a large hall with a dais built against its east wall (probably t h e t h r o n e r o o m ) . I n t h e s o u t h e r n p a r t of t h e citadel, a q u a r t e r with private h o u s e s was excavated. T h e h o u s e s were built one against t h e other along narrow streets. E a c h h o u s e h a d a courtyard, accessed from t h e street t h r o u g h a n a r r o w corridor, a n d a reception r o o m built b e t w e e n t h e courtyard and the street. A b o u t 200 m to t h e east of t h e settlement, a double r o w of irregularly s h a p e d large stelae resembles a megalithic structure. N e a r b y , a sanctuary with two N o r t h Syrian-style shrines has b e e n excavated. D u r i n g t h e p e r i o d of M i t a n n i b e g i n n i n g in p e r i o d 2, T e l l C h u e r a was resettled following a long hiatus. E x c e p t for a
small shrine, few building r e m a i n s h a v e b e e n r e c o v e r e d from this period. T h e M i d d l e Assyrian p e r i o d , w h i c h fol lowed, is r e p r e s e n t e d b y two m a i n b u i l d i n g levels in t h e n o r t h e r n p a r t of t h e citadel. T o the earlier of these levels belongs a well-fortified m a n o r h o u s e t h a t w a s t h e seat of t h e local Assyrian g o v e r n o r . A small archive of c u n e i f o r m t a b lets f o u n d in o n e of its r o o m s belongs t o t h e t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y BCE; it m a d e possible t h e identification of T e l l C h u e r a with the city of H a r b e (or H u r b e ) , m e n t i o n e d in M i d d l e Assyrian texts from D u r K a t i i m m u . BIBLIOGRAPHY Ktihne, H a r t m u t . Die Keramik vom Tell Chuera und Are Beziehimgen zu Funden aus Syrien-Palastina, der Turkei und dem Iraq. Berlin, 1 9 7 6 . Full account of t h e pottery found u p until 1 9 6 4 , with a useful s u m mary of the stratigraphy. M o o r t g a t - C o r r e n s , Ursula. Die Bildwerke vom Djebelet el Beda in Hirer raumlichen und zeitlichen Umwelt. Berlin a n d N e w York, 1 9 7 2 . G e n eral background information on die kranzhilgel type of settlements (see p p . 2 6 - 5 2 ) , M o o r t g a t - C o r r e n s , Ursula. Tell Chuera in Nordost-Syrien: Vorldufiger Bericht ilber die neunte und zehnte Grabungskampagne 1982 und 1983. Berlin, 1988. Preliminary report on the Tell C h u e r a excavations; see, as well, M o o r t g a t - C o r r e n s (1988) and O r t h m a n n et al. ( 1 9 8 6 ) . M o o r t g a t - C o r r e n s , Ursula. Tell Chuera in Nordost-Syrien: Vorldufiger Bericht ilber die elfte Grabungskampagne 1985. Berlin, 1988. O r t h m a n n , Winfried, et al. Tell Chuera in Nordost Syrien, 1982-1983. Berlin, 1986. O r t h m a n n , Winfried. Tell Chuera: Ausgrabungen der Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung in Nordost-Syrien. D a m a s c u s , 1990. S u m m a r y of the excavations u p until 1989. WINFRIED ORTHMANN
THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF
A R C H A E O L O G Y IN T H E NEAR EAST
EDITORS
William G. Dever
Carol L. Meyers
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James D . Muhly
James A. Sauer
CONSULTING
EDITOR
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Javier Teixidor
Giorgio Buccellati William W. Hallo P. R. S. Moorey
David Stronach
Richard L. Zettler
THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE NEAR EAST P R E P A R E D U N D E R T H E A U S P I C E S OF T H E
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data T h e Oxford encyclopedia of archaeology in the Near East / prepared under the auspices of the American Schools of Oriental Research; Eric M . Meyers, editor in chief, p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.
) and index.
1. Middle East—Antiquities—Encyclopedias. 2. Africa, North—Antiquities— Encyclopedias. I. Meyers, Eric M . II. American Schools of Oriental Research. DS56.09
1996
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ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS
ACOR AD AH AIA ALAR
American Center of Oriental Research
BSAI
anno Domini, in the year of the (our) Lord
B.T.
anno Hegirae, in the year of the Hi j rah
CAARI
Archaeological Institute of America (W. F.) Albright Institute of Archaeological Research
c.
CAD CAORC
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem Babylonian Talmud circa, about, approximately Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute
Akk.
Akkadian
cf.
confer, compare
ANET AOS APES Ar. 'Arakh.
chap., chaps.
chapter, chapters
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum
fasc.
fascicle
cm CNRS
'Arakhin col., cols.
Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum centimeters Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique column, columns
Aramaic
1 Cor.
1 Corinthians
Assyrian
2 Cor.
2 Corinthians
Col.
CTA
bom
Colossians
A. Herdner, Corpus des tablettes en cuneiformes alphabiliques
B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
cu
cubic
Bab.
Babylonian
d.
died
BASOR B.B. BC BCE
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bava'Batra' before Christ before the common era
Bekh.
Bekhoroi
Ber.
Berakhol
Bik. BP BSAE BSAI
Bikkarim before the present British School of Archaeology in Egypt British School of Archaeology in Iraq
expanded Ezra
CIS
Zarah
exp.
Exodus
Ezr.
American Oriental Society
'Avodah
Ex.
Ediiopic el sequens, and the following
2 Chronicles
American Schools of Oriental Research
b.
et seq.
et cetera, and so forth
2 Chr.
Aram.
A.Z.
etc.
especially et alii, and others
Ez.
ASOR Assyr.
esp.
1 Chronicles
CIG
Arabic
enlarged
/ Chr.
J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts
American Palestine Exploration Society
enl.
Eth.
of the common era
Amos
Enoch English
Council of American Overseas Research Centers
CE
J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near East in Pictures
En. Eng.
computer-aided design/drafting
American Journal of Archaeology
Am.
Egyptian Elamite
et al.
AJA
ANEP
Egyp. Elam.
DAI
Dn. DOG D.Sc.
Deutsches Archaologisch.es dissertation Daniel Deutche Orient-Gesellschaft Doctor of Science
Dt.
Deuteronomy
EB
Early Bronze
Eccl, ed., eds. ED
ff. fig. ft ft. frag., frags, gal., gals, Geog.
Ecclesiastes Early Dynastic Egyptian Exploration Fund
e.g.
exempli gratia, for example V
figure floruit, flourished feet fragment, fragments gallon, gallons Ptolemy, Geographica German
GIS
Geographic Information Systems
Gk.
Greek Genesis
ha
hectares
Heb.
Hebrew
Hg.
Haggai
Hist.
Herodotus, Histoty
Hitt.
Hittite
Hos.
Hosea
Hur.
Hurrian
IAA
Israel Antiquities Authority
ibid,
ibidem, in the same place (as the one immediately preceding)
editor, editors; edition
EEF
feminine and following
Ger.
Gn.
Institut diss.
fern,
Ezekiel
IDA(M) i.e.
Israel Department of Antiquities (and Museums) id est, that is
ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS
w
Israel Exploration Journal
IES
Israel Exploration Society Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche-Orient
IFAPO Is. IsMEO
Isaiah Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente Job
3b.
Meg. mi.
miles
Mh.
Mark
mm
millimeter
mod.
modern
Mt.
Mount
Mt. n.
Jeremiah Jgs-
Judges
Jn. Jon.
John Jonah Joshua
Jos.
Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society
JPOS
NAA Nat. Hist. n.b.
Neutron Activation Analysis
nolo bene, note well
n.d.
no date
Nm.
Numbers
no., nos.
number, numbers
J.T.
Jerusalem Talmud
n.p.
no place
KAI
H. Donner and W, Rollig, Kanaanaische unci aramaische Inschriflen
n.s.
new series
O.P.
Ordo Praedicatorum, Order of Preachers (Dominicans)
Kelim
p., pp.
Ketubbol
kg
kilogram
PEF
Palestine Exploration Fund
Kgs.
I Kings
Pers.
Persian
2 Kgs.
2 Kings
Ph.D.
km
kilometers M. Dietrich and O. Lorentz, Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugaril
KTU
1 liter 1., 11. line, lines Lat. lb.
Latin pounds
LB
Late Bronze
lit.
literally
Lk.
Luke
LM Lv. m M.A.
meters Master of Arts
masc.
masculine Malachi
Mai. MB
Middle Bronze
Mc.
Maccabees
M.Div.
Phil. pi.
Master of Divinity
paragraph
Philosophiae Doctor, Doctor of Philosophy Philippians plate; plural
PN
Pottery Neolithic
ppm
parts per million
PPN
Pre-Pottery Neolithic
Pro. Ps. pt., pts.
Proverbs Psalms I Peter
2 Pt.
2 Peter
r. RCEA
Societas Jesu, Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
Sm.
i Samuel
2 Sm.
2 Samuel
i
sq St., Sts.
square Saint, Saints
Sum.
Sumerian
supp.
supplement Syriac
Tot an.
Ta'anit
Th.D.
Theologicae Doctor, Doctor of Theology
Ti. Tk.
Titus Turkish
Tm.
I Timothy
2 Tm.
2 Timothy
trans.
translated by
Ugar.
Ugaritic
v. viz. vol., vols. vs.
verse videlicet, namely volume, volumes versus Yadayim
Yad.
Zeilschrift des Detttschen Palastina- Vercins
ZDPV Zee.
Zechariah
* hypothetical; in bibliographic citations, English language pages in Hebrew journals
part, parts
i Pt.
Late Minoan Leviticus
Shabbalh
S.J.
J
Kct.
i
Shab.
page, pages
para.
series Song of Songs
Syr.
Journal of Roman Archaeology
?
uncertain; possibly; perhaps
o
degrees
reigned, ruled
minutes; feet " seconds; inches
Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie arabe Revelations
•1-
plus
rev.
revised
-
minus
Ru.
Ruth
Rev.
SBF SBL
Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Society of Biblical Literature
Epigraphicum
singular
Pliny, Naturalis Hisloria (Natural History)
JRA
Kel.
ser.
Matthew note
Supplemenlum Graecum
SEG
Megillah
plus or minus
=
equals; is equivalent to
X
by yields
c CONTINUED
C H U R C H E S . T h e earliest Christians called their com munities ekkksiai, "gatherings," "congregations," "assem blies." Ecclesia was used throughout the period of Late An tiquity to denote both the local community of Christians gathered in a specific place and the worldwide Christian community, the church universal. T h e early fourth-century adoption of the Greek term kyriakon ("place" or "house" or "temple belonging to the Lord") to denote the place where Christians gathered to worship is a sign of the height ened awareness of physical place mat characterized Chris tianity at the end of the pre-Constantinian period. From the early fourth century onward, kyriakon and ecclesia came to be used interchangeably (and with some frequency) to de note Christian places of worship. Before Constantine. In the Acts of the Apostles, Christians are said to have gathered in private houses in Jerusalem, Caesarea, Jaffa, Damascus, Paphos, Ephesus, Colossae, Philippi, Thessalonike, Corinth and Kenchreai, Alexandria in the Troad, and Rome (Finney, 1984, pp. 208, 209). Dur ing the period of his missionary activity in western Turkey, Paul aimed his message at heads of households, and it is primarily on this basis that the existence is inferred of midfirst-century communities of Christians or ekklesiaigathered in private houses. Archaeology cannot identify the specific buildings used as meeting places within the Pauline mis sionary territory because they were left intact. As structural types, it would be impossible to distinguish them from the local residential vernacular. The oldest surviving house that can be given a positive identification as a building that served a small community of mid-tivird-century Christians is in Syria, at Dura-Europos, a Roman trading city on the west bank of the Middle Euphrates River. Shortly before the mid-third century, the Christian building at Dura was extensively remodeled on the ground-floor level. Thereafter it no longer served as a resi dence. Instead, the first-floor space was given over to com munity-related activities, although the arrangement and as signment of space on the second floor are not known. One of the first-floor rooms was converted into a baptistery; an other—a large, rectangular room created by the consolida tion of two previously small spaces—probably functioned as the worship room. A celebrating priest would have stood on
a raised platform (bema) at the east end and presided in the reading of Scripture and perhaps in a community eucharistic meal. As argued elsewhere (Finney, 1984, p. 224), once the sec ular functions of the Durene first-floor space were replaced, the community had to readjust its symbolic associations with its place of worship. T h e way was opened for a new set of symbolic associations centering on the sacral character of the place and its architectural embodiment. * There are other examples of pre-Constantinian structures (residential, commercial, and possibly municipal) remod eled and retrofitted to make way for an emerging ecclesia, but none is so clear or so dramatic as the Christian building at Dura. Most of the material parallels are found in the "West (Rome, Aquileia, Parentium-Porec, Lullingstone in Kent, England), but there is at least one relatively clear Near East ern example, the so-called Julianos basilica (cf. Piccirillo, 1981, pp. 54-55) at U m m el-Jimal (Butler, 1919,2.A.3; Corbett, 1957) 18 Ion ( 1 1 mi.) southwest of Bosra. [See Umm el-Jimal] Although surviving literary/documentary sources, to gether with bits and pieces of material evidence, favor the view that pre-Constantinian Christians gathered for worship mainly in residential buildings and over time adapted and converted those structures into church buildings, it is also true that this pattern alone does not exhaust the totality of the pre-Constantinian evidence. Other lands of spaces were needed from time to time, particularly where the size of Christian congregations exceeded imposed space limita tions. This became a pressing issue late in the tetrarchy (293-312 CE), as urban churches were increasing their num bers on a dramatic scale. It is in the time frame of the late third century that some Christian communities evidently turned to nonresidential architecture (warehouses and rec tangular municipal halls) to solve the problem. L. Michael White calls this a transitional phase, sandwiched between the so-called house church (domus ecclesiae) period of Chris tian worship and the basilical architectural settings that came in the wake of Constantine's building program (White, 1990s pp. 127-139). T w o examples of early fourth-century hall-like rectangular structures that fit White's typology were designed and constructed de novo as church buildings: the
1
2
CHURCHES
Roman Church of San Crisogono in Trastevere and the church at Qirk Bize, one of the so-called Dead Cities west of Aleppo (and west of Jebel 'Ala) in northern Syria (Tchalenko, 1953-1958, pp. 319-332.; Donceel-Voute, 1988, pp. 259-260; also Georges Tate, "Qirk Bizah," in Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology [hereafter EECAA]). Geographic Setting. The geographic extent of the evi dence in the Near East is impressive. Church buildings and church-related structures (e.g., baptisteries and martyria) that predate the seventh century survive either intact or in fragments over a broad area. [See Martyrion.] In the north and northwest, churches are found in the Caucasus Moun tains (e.g., Georgia [see Kleinbauer, no. 375] and Armenia [see R. Edwards, "Armenia," EECAA]) and in central and eastern Turkey, including the Pontic region (Kleinbauer, 1992, no. 207), Cappadocia (Restle, 1971-), and Cilicia (Hild et al., 1 9 7 1 - ) . At the other end of the Near East, in Africa to the far south, Early Christian architectural remains are attested in die Nile Delta and on both banks of the Nile River, south to Syene/Aswan (Grossmann, 1991, pp. 5 5 2 553; Grossmann, "Egypt," EECAA) In Nubian territory, from Aswan south to the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, there is little or no material that predates the seventh century and can be positively identified as Christian (Ad ams, 1991), but east of Khartoum, on Ethiopian soil (M. E. Heldman, "Ethiopia," EECAA), Early Christian architec tural remains of church buildings appear at several sites, the most important being Adulis, Axum, and Matara. Across the Gulf of Suez in the southern Sinai (Wadi Feiran and the region of Jebel Musa), there are monastic churches and chapels from Late Antiquity (Tsafrir, 1993, pp. 315-350). For the territories opposite Nubia and Ethiopia across the Red Sea—namely Saudi Arabia, Yemen (especially Najran), southern Yemen, and the island of Socotra (at the eastern end of the Gulf of Aden)—literary traditions and selected epigraphic evidence attest the presence of Christians from the late-fourth century onward but no church architecture (Trimingham, 1979). Within the central Near East—Cyprus, the Syro-Palestinian littoral (and the adjacent inland territories), Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and the western third of Iran— there is extensive evidence of Early church buildings. The evidence is greatest in roughly the western quarter, from the Mediterranean coastline east for approximately 300 km, or 186 mi.: in Lebanon (Donceel-Voute, 1988); Israel (Tsafrir, 1993); and Cyprus (Kleinbauer, 1992). There is consider able evidence of pre-seventh-century church buildings on Cyprus. From the late fifth century onward, Cypriot church architecture was substantially influenced by Constantinopolitan models; hence, for the period from about 450 to 650, Cyprus must be studied with particular attention to its Greek progenitors (Megaw, 1974; Papageorghiou, 1986). Inland from the Syro-Palestinian littoral, the western third of Jordan, from the Gulf of 'Aqaba north to the Jordanian/
Syrian border, also contains numerous early Christian church buildings (Piccirillo, 1981, 1993). This distribution pattern continues northward, also within roughly the west ern third of Syria (Butler, 1919-1920) from Bosra (Bostra; Butler, 1919, 2.A.4; Dentzer-Feydy 1985) at the southern end of the so-called lava lands (the Hauran; Dentzer-Feydy, 1985) to Jebal Arab (also known as Jebel Druze and Jebel Hauran) in the south to Halab (Aleppo) in the north and to the architecturally extraordinary territory west of Aleppo, the region of the so-called Dead Cities. The region is one of the richest centers of Early Christian architecture in the ancient world. It is there, for example, that the great mon astery-church of St. Simeon Stylites is located (at Qal'at Sim'an; J.-P. Sodini, "Qal'at Sema'an," EECAA). [See Qal'at Sim'an.] Across the Syrian/Turkish border, in south eastern Anatolia (Osrhoene, fourth-seventh centuries), stretching from Urfa/Edessa to Mardin, Nusaybin, and Cizre on the Tigris River, are remains of numerous church buildings from Late Antiquity (Wiessner, 1981-1993). There are also important Early Christian remains along the Syrian Euphrates River: at Membij/Hierapolis, Rusafa/Sergiopolis (T. Ulbert, "Rusafa," EECAA), Halabiyya/Zenobia, and, of course, at as-Salihiyeh/Dura-Europos (Kraeling, 1967). [See Rusafa; Dura-Europos.] Both Iraq and Iran, within roughly the western third of the Sasanian Empire (226-651), contained an extensive Early Christian ma terial culture—church buildings, chapels, baptisteries, mon asteries—but the surviving remains are meager (Lerner, 1982-). o n c e
The most important urban centers for church architecture in the Near East before the seventh century were Jerusalem and Syrian Antioch (now located in the province of Hatay, Turkey). Alexandria was also an important city for Early Christian culture (Epiphanius and Eusebius; Pearson, 1992) It housed numerous church buildings, but almost no ma terial evidence survives (for a twelfth-century list of Alex andrian churches, many of them alleged to be pre-seventh century, cf. Atiya, 1991). Jerusalem, more firmly rooted (titan Constantinople) in tradition, was arguably the most important center of church architecture from the fourth through sixth centuries. Constantine built two churches there, the Holy Sepulcher (now witliin the city's Christian Quarter; see "figure 1) and the Eleona Church on the Mt. of Olives. Each commemorates events in the life of Jesus, and hence both served martyrial purposes. At Antioch, Con stantine also became a church builder, of an eight-sided church with a gilded roof, of which nothing survives (Klein bauer, 1992, no. 2064). In general, direct material evidence of Early Christian church buildings in Syrian Antioch is slight (excluding the martyrion of St. Babylas outside the city in suburban Kaoussie; Kleinbauer, 1992, no. 1894a). F o u r t h Century. The fourth century was a watershed for church design and construction; it was a period of invention, innovation, diversity and creativity. T h e architectural legacy
CHURCHES of Constantine I the Great cast a long shadow beyond his death in 337 (Krautheimer, 1967). Beginning as early as 305, the emperor and his architects had set about creating a ttadition of Christian church architecture, in both halves of the empire, but especially in the Byzantine Levant. T h e degree to which the emperor was directly involved in design is a matter for debate (Krautheimer, 1967), but he provided fi nancial and logistical support and there can be no question about his commitment and determination to see church buildings in virtually all major urban centers: Bishop Paulinus's church in Tyre; the Holy Sepulcher (Church of the Anastasis) and the Eleona Church on the Mt. of Olives (over a cave associated by tradition with the Ascension of Jesus) in Jerusalem (Taylor, 1993, pp. 143-156); the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (Taylor, 1993, p p . 86-95); die basil ica built at the sacred oak tree in Mamre/Ramat el-Khalil, where God spoke to Abraham; the Hagia Sophia and the Church (or Martyrium) of the Holy Apostles in Constan tinople; and the palace church, called the Golden Octagon, in Antioch. The growth of Christian communities in the fourth cen tury necessitated large interior spaces to accommodate the faithful. Architectural precedents were lacking within pagan tradition, so builders looked to secular spatial and architec tonic paradigms that could be adapted. The best solutions were the imperial halls (aulae) and assembly rooms spread throughout the empire that had been designed as indoor markets, law courts, and audience rooms—large interior spaces that served the interests of bureaucrats seeking to govern Rome's subjects. T h e Constantinian church building came to be known by
3
the epithet basilica, understood as the building belonging to the basileus, or "king." T h e formal architectural precedents of the rectangular building that came to typify it have long been debated (Ward-Perkins, 1954). It is now understood that the term denotes a rectangular building, with two long sides and two short sides, oriented on liturgical and symbolic grounds toward one of the short ends (usually on the east), with or without aisles, with a sanctuary and often an apse (or apses) at one end, and with a gabled roof (often faced with terra-cotta tiles) supported by wooden trusses (Orlandos, 1952-1956). However, for the Constantinian period there was no equivalency between the term basilica and these architectural elements. T h e Holy Sepulcher, the Church of the Nativity, the Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Apostles, and the Golden Octagon are all centrally planned spaces, dominated both spatially and visually by large domes sitting on circular or polygonal perimeters; the domed spaces interrupt the longitudinal flow of space from nave to apse and instead proclaim a rather different symbolic hier archy. In short, the term basilica does not denote a fixed architectural form until the late fourth century—and even at that late date there is still considerable variation in architec tural detail. From the beginning of the Constantinian architectural program, there was a strong pull toward assimilating two distinct functions: community worship and other veneration and/or commemoration of a sacred person, place, thing or event. T h e Holy Sepulcher was constructed over places where Jesus was thought to have been crucified, buried, and risen, and the octagonal domed structure at the east end of the Church of the Nativity was constructed over a cave that
CHURCHES. Figure 1. Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem.
(Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
4
CHURCHES
came to be identified in one tradition as the place where Mary had given birth. In both, the church building func tioned at once as a place for liturgical worship and venera tion of the hero of the Christian story. In the second half of the fourth century, a church building was assimilated to a martyrium (begun perhaps early in the reign of Theodosius I, 379-395) and dedicated to St. Babylas at Kaoussie (Donceel-Voute, 1988, pp. 2 1 - 3 1 ) . Con structed on the model of a Greek cross, this building con tained the buried remains of the saint at the center of the cruciform plan; in the same emplacement aboveground was an altar for celebrating the Eucharist. Fifth-Sixth Centuries. Architecturally, the fifth century was a period of consolidation and standarization. The Con stantinian architectural types were replicated across the Near East. The two basic spatial concepts that animated Early Christian architecture—rectangular, longitudinally oriented, hall-like space and open, centrally planned, do mical vertical space—continued to dominate. Fifth-century remains are extensive. Within the Anatolian realm is the re markable cluster of churches called Bin Bir Kilisse ("the Thousand and One Churches") in southeastern Lycaonia, approximately 80 km (50 mi.) southeast of Konya/Iconium. The Anatolian churches include a few centrally planned structures, but the majority are longitudinally oriented on a rectagonal grid with an apse at one of the short ends. North east of Bin Bir Kilisse, across the Cappadocian highlands (Aksaray, Nevsehir, Kayseri) to the Anti-Taurus range, and then south toward the Cilician coast, and east again across Osrhoene, are numerous remains of church buildings from the late fifth and early sixth centuries. For centrally planned structures and a common architec tural matrix for eastern Anatolia (including Armenia) and the adjacent Levantine territories, especially northern Syria, a fifth-/sixth-century example is the octagonal building (now destroyed) at Sivasa, northeast of Aksaray (Rott, 1908, pp. 249-54). A roofless apse projected from the eastern perim eter of this octagon, reproducing the same plan found in the so-called Church of the House of Peter (Virgilio Corbo in Tsafrir, 1993, pp. 71-76; Taylor, 1993, pp. 268-288) at Ca pernaum in Galilee and the Church of Mary Theotokos (Yitzhak Magen in Tsafrir, 1993, pp. 83-89) on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria. As in the fourth century, the sixth was a period of inno vation dominated by a powerful patron, Emperor Justinian (482-565). Justinian was more directly involved in the de sign and execution of church buildings than was Constantine. The result was a building type (centrally planned, vaulted, and domed) that appears throughout the sixth cen tury, especially in the Near East. T h e paradigm is the cen trally planned Hagia Sophia built in 532-537 (Mainstone, 1988). Along with domed and centrally planned buildings, longitudinally planned churches continued to be built throughout the Near East in the sixth century.
[See also Baptisteries; Basilicas; House Churches; Martyr ion; and Monasteries. In addition to the sites individually cross-referenced above, many other sites mentioned are the sub ject of independent, entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, William Y. "Nubia." In The Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 6, pp. 1800-1801. New York, 1991. Atiya, A. S. "Alexandria, Historic Churches." In The Coptic Encyclo pedia, vol. 1 , pp. 92-95. New York, 1991. Bell, Gertrude Lowthian. The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur 'Ab din. Edited by Marlia M. Mango. London, 1982. Buder, Howard Crosby. Publications of the Princeton University Archae ological Expeditions to Syria in 1904-190$ and 1909. Division II, Sec tion A (Southern Syria) Section B (Northern Syria). Leiden, 1 9 1 9 1920. Valuable for its maps, plans, photos, and line-drawn reconstructions. Corbett, G. U. S. "Investigations at the 'Julianos' Church' atUmm-elJemal." Papers of the British School at Rome 25 (1957): 39-65. Dentzer-Feydy, Jacqueline. "Decor architectural et developpement du Hauran du Ier siecle avant J.-C. au Vile siecle apresJ.-C." In Hauran I, edited by Jean-Marie Dentzer, pp. 2 6 1 - 3 1 0 . Bibliotheque Archeo logique et Historique, vol. 124. Paris, 1985. DSlger, Franz Joseph. "'Kirche' als Name fur den christlichen Kultbau." Antike und Christentum 6 (1950): 1 6 1 - 1 9 5 . Constructive re marks on the terminology of church buildings based on fourth-cen tury literary evidence. Donceel-Voute, Pauline. Les pavements des eglises byzanlines de Syrie el du Liban: Decor, archeologie el lilurgie. 2 vols. Louvain-la-Neuve, 1988. Mosaic inventory, useful also as a handbook of Early Christian churches in Syria and Lebanon, with important observations on the liturgical uses of church buildings. Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology (EECAA). Grand Rapids, forthcoming. Finney, Paul Corby, "TOPOS HIEROS und christlicher Sakralbau in vorkonstantinischer Uberlieferung." Boreas 7 (1984): 1 9 3 - 2 2 5 . Survey of pre-Constantinian literary evidence for Christian practices and attitudes toward sacred place and sacred space. Gerster, Georg. Churches in Rock: Early Christian Art. in Ethiopia. Lon don, 1970. Well-illustrated book of medieval Ethiopian monuments, with a brief but useful bibliography. Grossmann, Peter, "Church Architecture in Egypt." In The Coptic En cyclopedia, vol. 2, pp. 552-555. New York, 1991. Heldman, Marilyn E. African Zion. New Haven, 1993. Catalog of an exhibition on Ethiopian art, primarily concerned with the pictorial arts but including a brief discussion of architecture and a valuable bibliography. Hild, Friedrich, et al, "Kommagene-Kilikein-Isaurien." In Reallexikon zur byzanlinischen Kunst, vol. 4, cols. 1 8 2 - 3 5 5 . Stuttgart, 1 9 7 1 - . Hirschfeld, Yizhar. The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Pe riod. New Haven, 1992. Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture: An Annotated Bibliography and Historiography. Boston, 1992. Now the indispensable lexical tool for the study of Early Christian architec ture; immensely informative. Kraeling, Carl H. The Christian Building. The Excavations at DuraEuropos, Final Report 8, part 2. New Haven, 1967. Krautheimer, Richard. "The Constantinian Basilica." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 21 (1967): 1 1 5 - 1 4 0 . Krautheimer, Richard, and Slobodan Curcic. Early Christian and Byz antine Architecture. 4th ed. New Haven, 1986. Concise introduction to Early Christian architecture.
CHURCH INSCRIPTIONS Lerner, Judith. "Christianity in Pre-Islamic Persia: Material Remains." Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 5, pp. 528-530. London, 1 9 8 2 - . Mainstone, Rowland J. Hagia Sophia: Architecture, Structure, and Liturgy of Justinian's Great. Church. New York, 1988. Mathews, Thomas F. The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy. University Park, Pa., 1 9 7 1 . Description and interpre tation of nine churches (see Muller-Wiener, below, excluding the church of St. Menas), with a brief evaluation of St. John in Hebdomon, outside Istanbul. Megaw, A. H. S. "Byzantine Architecture and Decoration in Cyprus: Metropolitan or Provincial?" Dumbarton Oaks Papers 28 (1974): 5 7 88. An informative survey of church buildings dated before the midseventh century. Muller-Wiener, Wolfgang. "Kirchen." In Bildlexikon zur Topographic Istanbuls, pp. 7 2 - 2 x 5 . Tubingen, 1977. Description with photo graphs and bibliography of nine Constantinopolitan churches (un named buildings in Beyazit and Topkapt Sarayi, Theotokos in Chalkoprateia, St. Sophia, St. Eirene, St. Euphemia, St. John Studios, SS. Peter and Paul/Sergius and Bacchos, St. Polyeuktos), dating to Late Antiquity. A tenth church, by tradition attributed to St. Menas, is perhaps better identified with the lost church of SS. Karpos and Polykarp, a possible early (c. 400) copy of the Holy Sepulcher. Munro-Hay, Stuart. Aksum: An African Civilisation of Ixtte Antiquity. Edinburgh, 1991. Oriandos, Anastasios K. He xylostegos palaiochristianike Basilike tes mesogeiakes lekanes. 3 vols. Athens, 1 9 5 2 - 1 9 5 6 . Wooden-roofed Early Christian basilica in the Mediterranean basin. Papageorghiou, Auhanasios, "Foreign Influences on the Early Christian Architecture of Cyprus." In Acts of the International Archaeological Symposium, "Cypnts between the Orient and the Occident," 8-14 Sep tember igS$, edited by Vassos Karageorghis et al., pp. 489-504. Nic osia, 1986. Pearson, Birger A. "Alexandria." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 152. New York, 1992. Piccirillo, Michele. Chiese e mosaici delta giordania settentrionale. Jeru salem, 1981. Inventory of floor mosaics, also informative as a listing (and in parts a description) of Early Christian church buildings. Piccirillo, Michele. The Mosaics of Jordan. Amman, 1993. More tessel lated floors. An exemplary publication, with splendid photographs, plans of churches, an informative introduction with notes and de scriptions of individual monuments, and a good bibliography. Ponomarew, Wladimir. "Georgien." In Reallexikon zur byzanlinischen Kunst, vol. 2, cols. 662-734. Stuttgart, 1 9 7 1 - . Restle, Marcell. "HShlenkirchen." In Reallexikon zur byzanlinischen Kunst, vol. 3, cols. 247-252. Stuttgart, 1 9 7 1 - . Restle, Marcell. "Kappadokien." In Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, vol. 3, cols. 9 7 5 - 1 1 1 6 . Stuttgart, 1 9 7 1 - . Informative survey of Cappadocian churches, including selected cave churches. Rott, Hans. Kleinasiatische Denkmaler aus Pisidien, Pamphylien, Kapodokien und Lykien. Leipzig, 1908. Taylor, J. E. Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins. Oxford, 1993. Informative and careful study of the pre-Con stantinian cults and religious traditions associated widi the sites that came to be venerated as Christian in the fourth century. Highly crit ical of the theory that Christian material continuity can be traced from the apostolic to Constantinian periods. Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie dit Nord: Le massif du Belus a I'epoque romaine. 3 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 50. Paris, 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 5 8 . Thierry, Jean-Michel. Les arts armeniens. Paris, 1987. Thierry, Michel. Repertoire des monasteres armemiens. Turnhout, 1993. List of Armenian monastic establishments (with churches), most of them medieval. Trimingham, J. Spencer. Christianity among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic
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Times. London, 1979. Brief, popular introduction based on literary and epigraphic sources, with a useful historical survey and bibliog raphy. Tsafrir, Yoram, ed. Ancient Churches Revealed. Jerusalem, 1993. Brief descriptions and interpretations with a bibliography of churches, most of them pre-Islamic and most (except monuments in southern Sinai) in Israel. Ward-Perkins, J. B. "Constantine and the Origins of the Christian Ba silica." Papers of the British School at Rome 22 (1954): 69-90. Intel ligent survey of putative architectural models. White, L. Michael. Building Gad's House in the Roman World: Architec tural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Baltimore, 1990. Informative discussion of the pre-Constantinian period. Advances earlier scholarship by isolating several socioevolutionary stages that set the framework for the gradual development of architectural types. Wiessner, Gemot. Nordmespotainische Ruinenstalten. GSttinger Orientforsehungen, II. Rcihe: Studien zur spatantiken und frtihchristlichen Kunst, vol. 2. Wiesbaden, 1980. Environs of Diyarbakir/Mardin: two fortresses and two Early Christian churches. Wiessner, Gemot. Christliche Kultbauten im Tur 'Abdin. Gottinger Orientforschungen, II. Reihe: Studien zur spatantiken und frtih christlichen Kunst, vol. 4.1-4.8 vols. Wiesbaden, 1981—1993. Careful survey of churches with longitudinal and transverse naves (some of the latter are cave churches) within the region of Mardin Daglan/ Tur 'Abdin east to Dicle; includes a bibliography. PAUL CORBY FINNEY
CHURCH
INSCRIPTIONS.
Epigraphic sources
constitute a major contribution to what is known of the his torical development of a local or regional church, its specific organization, and its beliefs. Inscriptions from the early cen turies of Christianity have been discovered by the thousands and continue to be recovered and published. Only the char acter and contents of church inscriptions written in Greek, the language most commonly used by Christians in Byz antine lands, are considered here. Relevant epigraphy exists in other languages, such as Syriac, Armenian, Georgian and Coptic. [See Syriac; Armenian; Coptic] Although methodical studies on church epigraphy exist, there is no general corpus. However, besides those appear ing in the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (4 vols., Berlin, 1828-1877), inscriptions are published as they are discov ered in the region: in Syria (Jalabert and Mouterde, 1 9 2 9 1959; Moab (Canova, 1954); the Negev desert (Alt, 1 9 2 1 ; Negev, 1981); Jordan (Gatier, 1986; Piccirillo, 1993); Israel (Meimaris, 1986); Madaba (Piccirillo, 1989); and others. Monographs may concentrate on a particular subject, such as magical formulas on the lintels of Christian homes in Syria (see William K. Prentice, American Journal ofArchaeogy 10 [1906]: 1 3 7 - 1 5 0 ) or on a heretical expression typical of Asia Minor (Gibson, 1978). Inscriptions are found in all areas of religious buildings, but especially on the floors of churches and chapels, on liturgic furniture, on column cap itals, and on chancel screens; tombstones; lintels of private houses; and objects of daily use. They may also differ from
6
CHURCH INSCRIPTIONS
one another in style and content. In general, however, they tend to be formulaic and do not deviate from the tradition. Dedicatory Inscriptions. The immediate aim of the dedicatory inscription is to keep a public record of the names and titles of those who contributed in one way or another to the construction, embellishement, or renewal of a religious place or a part of it. This material is of reliable historical value, as much as it records also some information about an inscription's date and circumstances. By way of example, recent excavations of churches in Israel have yielded infor mation about Byzantine emperors as promoters of church construction, such as Justinian I in Jerusalem, or merely as dating references, such as Mauritius Tiberius in Kursi and Tiberius Constantinus in Nessana. References to donors of rank, such as an ex-assessor of the city of Emesa/Homs in such a remote place as Nessana in the Negev (Meimaris, 1986, p. 227), are significant because they reflect the degree of involvement of secular authorities in church life. The names of numerous donors (lit., "fruit bearers" in Greek), however, remain anonymous, even though they are usually the relatives of the person "for whose salvation" a building or some small part of it had been offered. The main contribution of dedicatory inscriptions is in the field of church organization, as by their nature they refer to local clergy, recording their full titles and epithets, from the highest dignitaries to the lowest ecclesiastical orders. Meimaris's monograph on the church of Palestine lists the fol lowing tides: patriarch, metropolitan, archbishop, bishop, country bishop (chorepiscopus), archpresbyter (only two cases), presbyter, assistant presbyter, archdeacon, deacon, deaconess, subdeacon, lector, doorkeeper, periodeutes, oeconomus, and paramonarius (Meimaris, 1986, pp. 165-226). Epigraphic references to church officials, who often oth erwise would not be known to have existed, thus essentially
help in the drawing up of the episcopal lists of a given dio cese in periods for which no literary proofs exist. A case in point is the Madaba region in Transjordan, where a number of recently discovered inscriptions unexpectedly attest to the vitality and organization of that diocese during the 'Abbasid period (Piccirillo, 1989, pp. 322-324). An interesting feature of the dedicatory inscriptions appearing on mosaic floors is the occasional reference to the people who worked on the mosaic, suggesting art schools or mosaic workshops. The mosaists appear to add their own names to the list of dignataries and donors, almost as a prayer: "In the time of. . . this mosaic was completed . . . for the (eternal) rest of Basilides and the salvation of Elias son of Elias the mosaist." Other inscriptions start by mentioning the artisan: "This is the work of mosaists Nahum, Cyriakos, and Thomas. . . ." F u n e r a r y Inscriptions. Mortuary epigraphy is an indis pensable complement to the historic relevance of dedica tions. Inscriptions are found on funerary stelae in open cem eteries as well as on the floors of churches. T o m b slabs are often seen in the nave, aisles, presbytery, diaconicum, an nexed chapels, and baptisteries. Not all of these tombs have identifying inscriptions, but those that do attest to the pres ence of clergy, monks, and lay people—men and women— probably of a certain position and particularly related to that specific church or to its patron saint. [See Burial Techniques; Churches; Baptisteries.] The style and formulas of Christian funerary inscriptions may vary from one region to another, but they are always important inasmuch as they include historical data about the members of a specific community, its hierarchy, and its re ligious culture. Anthropomorphic funerary stelae found at Khueinat in North Sinai, although Christian in intention (they display crosses), include such pagan formulae as "Be courageous. . . . Nobody is immortal!" In other regions they
CHURCH INSCRIPTIONS. Dedicatory inscription from the Nea Church in Jerusalem. Dated to the reign of Justinian, sixth century CE. (Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
CHURCH INSCRIPTIONS consist of a nicely planned text including the full names and titles of the deceased and the exact date of the death and/or the burial. An epitaph from Oboda/Avdat gives even the exact hours of the death and burial, as well as the day, ac cording to the two calendars, for better clarity (Negev, 1981, p. 33). So much precision is an exception, but it exemplifies the kind of historic contribution of such records. The name of the deceased in many cases may reveal eth nic origin (e.g., Arab). T h e frequency of certain Christian and biblical names helps in developing demographic and church statistics (e.g., the number and kind of clergy serving in a specific church) and in comparisons of the distinctive features of certain communities in different periods, such as before and after the Muslim conquest in the seventh cen tury. Unfortunately, this cannot be done for most regions. Where, however, later building activity has not disturbed a site, such as in the cemeteries in the Moab region in Transjordan (Canova, 1954) and the Negev towns (Alt, 1921; Ne gev, 1981), interesting results can be achieved. For example, statistics are available for the monastic element in towns of regions for which no literary records are available. Monastic functions as well as honorary titles and epitaphs have been gathered from the funerary epigraphy in Pales tine: superior (hegumenos), archimandrite, mother superior (hegumene), abbas, our father, monk (monachos, monazon), nun (monacha), recluse, old man (geron), cell dweller (kel-
7
liotes, only in inscriptions from Deir Koziba in Wadi Qelt, probably recent), brother, and sister. [See Monasteries.] A deaconess is described as "Christ's servant and bride" (Mei maris, 1986, p. 51), an expression certainly meaning "con secrated virgin," rather than the epithet parlhenos, "virgin," sometimes also occurring on tomb inscriptions. Actually, one of the most important contributions of such inscriptions concerns women's roles, responsibilities, and general in volvement in the life of the Christian communities in the East. The title of deaconess, often occurring in inscriptions, has not existed in the church since the Middle Ages. The deaconess was ordained by a bishop to perform full eccle siastical functions among women. In the sixth century, the mother superior (hegumene) of a monastery, who could also be a deaconess, became totally independent from an ap pointed father superior, as had been the norm (Meimaris, 1986, p. 240). Hundreds of names in inscriptions refer either to women considered deserving of burial inside the church premises, or to prominent women donors, benefactors, and even founders of churches and monasteries. A case in point is the reference to Lady Maria in a monastery at Scythopolis (Beth-Shean), and the names of two women represented as offering gifts in the mosaic inscription of a monastery church at Kissufim near Gaza (Tsafrir, 1993, p. 280). Devotional Inscriptions. Both dedicatory and funerary inscriptions expressed religious beliefs and theological cre dos. They were an appropriate means to proclaim faith and apologetics. There are also, however, thousands of purely devotional epigraphs in the form of spontaneous invocations and short personal prayers in graffito, rather than in inscrip tions, that recount popular faith and devotion. On the walls of shrines, martyria, and monastic cells, pilgrims and monks wrote or carved personal prayers and invocations addressing the local patron saints, otherwise unknown, that help to identify certain sites. Short invocations such as "Oh Lord, help!" are frequently found on religious structures alongpilgrim routes, such as those leading to Sinai, sometimes ac companied by the name of the patron saint of the place and/ or the name of the writer. Archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the presence of the early Jewish Christians, their veneration of the holy places, and their theology, has been claimed by some schol ars (see, in particular, Emmanuele Testa, II simbolismo dei giudeo-cristiani, Jerusalem, 1962), but there is so far no con sensus of scholarly opinion, as the risk inherent in misdating and interpreting devotional graffiti is great. On the other hand, recent epigraphic support for the presence of Jewish Christian groups in ancient villages in the Golan is claimed by Claudine Dauphin ("Encore des Judeo-Chretiens au Go lan?," in Early Christianity in Context: Monuments and Doc uments. Essays in Honour of Father E. Testa, edited by F. CHURCH INSCRIPTIONS. Tomb inscription from Byzantine BeerManns and E. Alliata, pp. 69-84, Jerusalem, 1993). sheba. T h e inscription contains the name "Stephan son of RegiOther interesting graffiti include a fourth-century ship mus." Dated to the sixth century CE. (Courtesy Israel Antiquities drawn in charcoal accompanied by the Latin words "Domine Authority)
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CILICIA
ivimus" (cf. Ps. 122:1) on a wall in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (Figueras, 1989, p. 1 7 8 0 ) . There are
several instances of the acrostic ICHTHYS, known in in scriptions and graffiti since die late second century CB in Asia Minor and at Dura-Europos on the eastern border of the Roman Empire. [See Jerusalem; Dura-Europos.] From the Holy Land shrines, as well as from known martyr's tombs, such as St. Menas in Egypt, ancient pilgrims took home as eulogiae, or "blessed souvenirs," oil lamps and water or oil in small pottery, glass, or silver bottles decorated with de signs and inscriptions referring to the holy place of origin. Even a piece of the rock of Golgotha was identified by in scription (Bellarmino Bagatti, The Church from the Gentiles in Palestine, Jerusalem, 1971, p. 232,fig.130). Implicit references to the Old and the New Testaments are numerous in all kinds of inscriptions, though their tex tual importance is relative (Gabba, 1958). References to the House of the Lord and its holiness (Ps. 63:5; Meimaris, 1986, p. 3 1 ) and to the Gate of the Lord, where the "righ teous will enter" (Ps. 117:19-20), are found in churches. Biblical saints, and particularly the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are mentioned, either as examples of virtue or of God's fulfilled promises. One tombstone recounts that the deceased has "completed his race in the Lord" (2 Tm. 4:7) and another that a deaconess is simply called the second Phoebe (Rom. 1 6 : 1 ; Meimaris, 1986, p. 1 7 7 ) . The fragmentary mosaic known as the Madaba map, al though replete with biblical references, is of greater value as a sixth-century geographic document for Palestine, with no fewer than 157 extant toponyms (Piccirillo, 1989, pp. 8286). On another church floor, at Umm er-Rasas in Jordan, Palestinian, Arabian, and Egyptian cities are illustrated and labeled. Although its geographic value is questionable, it is a witness to the life and organization of the local community in 785 CE, a late date (Piccirillo, 1989, pp. 2 9 2 - 3 0 1 ) .
[See also Inscriptions, article on Inscriptions of the Helle nistic and Roman Periods; and Synagogue Inscriptions. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of indepen dent entries.]
rael." In Actes du Xle congres international d'archeologie chretienne, Lyon, Vienne, Grenoble, Geneve etAoste, 21-28 septembre 1986, edited by Noel Duval et al., pp. 1 7 7 1 - 1 7 8 5 . Rome, 1989. Revision of all the Byzantine Palestinian epigraphy discovered from one of its most fruitful periods. Gabba, Emilto. hcrizioni greche latine per lo studio della Bibbia. Turin, 1958. The author endeavors to make the best use of ancient epig raphy to study the Bible; should be complemented by Denis Feissal, "La Bible dans les inscriptions grecques," in Bible de tous les temps, vol. 1, Le mondegrec ancien et alBible, pp. 2 2 3 - 2 3 1 (Paris, 1984). Gatier, Pierre-Louis. Inscriptions de la Jordanie, vol. 2, Region centrale (Amman, Hesban, Madaba, Ma'in, Dhiban). Paris, 1986. Promising collection to be completed by the results of more recent excavations by the Franciscan school (see Piccirillo, 1989). Gibson, Elsa. The "Christians for Christians" Inscriptions at Phyrgia. Missoula, 1978. Excellent example of die difficulty in correctly in terpreting certain epigraphic expressions. Gregoire, Henri. Recueil des inscriptions grecques chretiennes d'Asie Mineure. Paris, 1922. The best collection to date of Christian inscrip tions from Asia Minor. Jalabert, Louis, and Rene Mouterde. Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie. 5 vols. Paris, 1929-1959. This result of extended field research complements the better-known collections by W. H. Waddington (1870) and E. D. Littman et al. ( 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 2 1 ) . Lefebvre, Gustave. Recueil des inscriptions grecques chretiennes d'Egypte. Cairo, 1907. The only collection of Christian Greek epigraphy from Egypt published to date. Meimaris, Yiannis E. Sacred Names, Saints, Martyrs, and Church Offi cials in the Greek Inscriptions and Papyri Pertaining to the Christian Church of Palestine. Athens, 1986. The best study to date on the subject; indispensable for further research on Palestinian epigraphy up to the Middle Ages. Negev, Avraham. The Greek Inscriptions from the Negev. Jerusalem, 1981. Systematic collection of all the inscriptions found in the Byz antine cities of Sobota (Subeita), Mampsis, and Avdat. Piccirillo, Michele. Chiese e mosaici di Madaba. Jerusalem, 1989. All the new inscriptions in the mosaic pavements in and around Madaba, including unpublished fragments of the map. Piccirillo, Michele. The Mosaics of Jordan. Amman, 1993. The most comprehensive treatment of Jordanian churches and their inscrip tions. Tsafrir, Yoram, ed. Ancient Churches Revealed. Jerusalem, 1993. Col lection of articles on recent Christian archaeology of the Holy Land, mostly translated from the Hebrew originals, including important epigraphic material. PAU FIGUERAS
BIBLIOGRAPHY The periodical publication Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum up dates epigraphy in general and epigraphy for the ancient Near East in particular. All texts appearing in scholarly publications are being re published and partly commented there by an excellent group of spe cialists. Alt, Albrecht. Die griechischen Inschriften der Palaestina Tenia westlich der 'Araba. Berlin and Leipzig, 1 9 2 1 . Includes materials from all for mer publications; complemented by later collections such as the one by Negev (below). Canova, Reginetta. Iscrizioni e manumenti protocrisliani del paese de Moab. The Vatican, 1954. The particular feature of these texts is their provenance from the simplest layers of the Christian population along the ancient limits of empire in Transjordan. Figueras, Pau. "Decouvertes recentes d'epigraphie chretienne en Is
C I L I C I A . A geographic region in southern Turkey, Cilicia is circumscribed by the Taurus Mountains on the north and west, by the Amanus Mountains on the east, and the Mediterranean on the south. [See Taurus Mountains.] Western Cilicia (Cilicia Aspera) occupies the rough, hilly country between Mersin and Silifke (Seleucia on the Calycadnos) at the mouth of the Goksu Valley. T h e fertile al luvial plains of eastern Cilicia (Cilicia Campestris) are bro ken by three major rivers that drain into the Mediterranean from their headwaters in the Taurus range: Ceyhan (Pyramus), Seyhan (Sams), and Tarsus (Cydnus). Although none is currently navigable, the rock relief of the Hittite king Muwatalli overlooking the Ceyhan River at Sirkili, and
CILICIA the report of Cleopatra arriving at Tarsus on a boat suggest that in antiquity the rivers served as north-south commu nication routes as well as water sources. The road from east to west follows the base of the foothills above the marshy and fertile plains but below the rocky ter rain of the Taurus Mountains. At the junction of river and road lay the major settlements of the region: Adana (the modern capital), Misis (Mopsuestia), and Tarsus. Tarsus sits at the juncture of the east-west road and the route north through the Gates of Cilicia and on to the Anatolian plateau. Four other major sites are near good harbors: Silifke, Mersin, Karatepe, and Iskanderun. The combination of Cilicia's fertile agricultural land and excellent harbors, roads, and passes made it an important crossroads throughout antiquity (Ramsay, 1903). Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods (6300-4500 B C E ) . No Aceramic Neolithic sites have been securely identified in Cilicia. Early Pottery Neolithic occurs at the water-table level at Mersin (Garstang, 1953) and at Tarsus (Goldman, 1956). [See the biographies of Garstang and Goldman.] M. V. Seton-Williams (1954) and others collected surface mate rials from a number of other sites. T h e few excavated re mains represent settled villages with a mixed agricultural economy and fairly simple level of social organization. In style and manufacture, the ceramic vessel and chippedstone industries have links with the 'Amuq plain and coastal Syria rather than the Anatolian plateau. [See 'Amuq.] Ob sidian, however, originated on the plateau and reveals some level of trade. For the Chalcolithic period, excavated re mains illustrate more complex forms of architecture and po litical structure. T h e level XVI settlement at Mersin is for tified by a double-wide common rear wall for the radiating ring of two-room houses (Garstang, 1953, fig. 79). T h e ar chitecture indicates both community cooperation and the need for security. Cilicia's local pottery and stone-tool tra dition continued to develop in form and technique through the Chalcolithic period. Machteld Mellink (1962) discusses the international connections visible in the pottery with Tell Halaf and Ubaid affinities at Mersin and Tarsus. Early Bronze Age (3400-2000 B C E ) . Early Bronze Age levels were excavated at Mersin and Tarsus. The survey noted above collected material from this period from a few sites. T h e EB I levels at Tarsus are contemporary with Amuq F in the North Syria sequence but show more evi dence of interaction in the ceramic repertoire with the south ern Anatolian plateau. This includes the first beak-spouted vessels. T h e small percentage of wheel-made wares is more in line with the north Syrian tradition of ceramic manufac ture. Evidence for architecture exists in wall fragments lining the EB I street, however full architectural units were not recovered until EB II levels. Two-room mud-brick houses with party walls were built, modified, destroyed by fire, and replaced with a town wall. Ceramics in the EB II levels shows increasing contact with northern Syria and Cyprus. c
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The sequence testifies both to internal community cooper ation and external regional conflict, probably the result of the rise of complex society during this period. In EB III, contact with western Anatolian is illustrated by the bellshaped two-handled drinking cup (Gk., depas), known from the site of Troy (Mellink, 1986). Middle Bronze Age (1900-1600 BCE). The early part of the Middle Bronze Age is documented only in the excava tions at Mersin and Tarsus and the survey material collected by Seton-Williams (1954). At the end of the Middle Bronze Age, texts from Bogazkoy, the Hittite capital in central An atolia, and from Alalakh, a town in northern Syria, testify to Cilicia's increasing importance on the international scene (Kummel, 1980). [See Bogazkoy; Hittites; Alalakh.] T h e ce ramic sequence for the early part of the Middle Bronze Age at Tarsus shows a general correspondence with level IV or levels III—lb in the Assyrian trading colony at Kultepe/ Kanes. [See Kanes.] Bowls, jugs and jars painted with par allel lines, triglyph and metope designs, and solid or hatched triangles called Syro-Cilician painted ware can also be found in the 'Amuq and at Ebla in central Syria. [See Ebla.] T h e architectural tradition at Tarsus also shows continuity from the Early Bronze through the middle of the Middle Bronze. Known as Kizzuwatna (Gotze, 1940), Cilicia was at various times an independent state and the vassal of the Mitanni Empire. [See Mitanni.] Cultural and linguistic ties to North Syria correspond to political alliance with the Mitanni (Beal, 1986). T h e break in architectural tradition at Tarsus is ac companied by some new ceramic forms and a cuneiform document that suggest a date in the Hittite Old Kingdom. The historical document is a land deed sealed with the seal of tabarna, a title taken by the Hittite rulers. The presence of a royal land deed suggests that Kizzuwatna had been brought under control of the Anatolian plateau. It is prob ably this level in which the local king, Ispuhtahsu, concluded a parity treaty found in the Hittite royal archives in Bogaz koy. Ispuhtahsu's title is known also from a seal impression found at Tarsus naming him "Great King" of Kizzuwatna. Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE). T h e existence of Ci licia as a semi-independent state ended in the mid-thirteenth century BCE with Suppiluliuma I, who established his son as the high priest of Kizzuwatna and incorporated the territory into his empire. In the thirteenth century BCE the Hittite king Hattusili III married Puduhepa, a Kizzuwatnan princess. During her tenure as queen she gained considerable political power and took an unprecedented interest in foreign rela tions. T h e LB archaeology of Cilicia demonstrates the in corporation of Hittite material culture into a strong local tradition. This is particularly evident in the Hittite fortress at Mersin (Garstang, 1953, fig. 1 5 1 ) and the Hittite temple or administrative building at Tarsus (Goldman, 1956, plan 22). T h e ceramic assemblage contains some handmade items in the local tradition, although the most of the reper toire is inspired by the Hittite bowl and jar sequence. In the
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CILICIA
early part of the Late Bronze Age, the Hittites probably used Kizzuwatna as a staging area for military incursions into Syria. After the limits of the Hittite Empire had been se cured, Hittite interest in Kizzuwatna was as a source of tax able agricultural products and as an outlet to the profitable sea trade with the Levant, Egypt, and Cyprus. T h e mer chants of Ura, against whom the king of Ugarit protested in a letter to the Hittite king Hattusili III, are thought to come from this area. The disruption of the society and economy brought about by the collapse of the Hittite Empire and the movements of the Sea Peoples are reflected in the archae ological sequences at Tarsus and Mersin. A destruction level followed by a rebuilding and continuation of the local ce ramic sequence is followed by a level of pits and unstratified fill with Mycenaean Late Helladic IIIC pottery mixed with local wares at both sites (Mee, 1978). Iron Age (1200-312 B C E ) . The initial centuries of the Iron Age are documented only in the scanty and disturbed archaeological remains at Mersin and Tarsus. Physical re mains of the Late Iron Age exist at Tarsus (Goldman, 19501963), Domuztepe, andKaratepe (Bossertand Alkin, 1947). Like their Neo-Hittite counterparts at Carchemish and Malatya, Cilicia was broken into small territorial states with a capital city from which a local dynasty ruled the surrounding villages and towns. [See Carchemish.] Karatepe is the best documented example in Cilicia. Located in the eastern mountainous region, where the Amanus and the Taurus Mountains meet, a monumental gate sculpture and inscrip tion dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE provide some insight into local dynastic history (Winter, 1979)- The inscription is written in hieroglyphic Hittite (Luwian) and Phoenician, and also testifies to the continuity of the Luwian population base in the area. [See Luwians.] T h e agricultural wealth and proximity to mining regions in tire Taurus made Cilicia a target for Neo-Assyrian expansion in the seventh century BCE. During this time Cilicia was divided into two ldngdoms: Que (classical Cilicia Campestris) on the plain and Hilakku (classical Cilicia Aspera) in the western mountains. Greek colonization of Cilicia is attributed to this period, partly on the basis of the classical legend of Mopsos (Bing, 1968). The Neo-Babylonian Empire took over ad ministration directly from the Assyrians. [See Babylonians.] From the sixth century BCE until the conquest of Alexander, Cilicia was ruled from Tarsus by semi-independent rulers with the title syennesis. Hellenistic and Roman Periods (312 BCE-300 C E ) . For nearly six hundred years, a Greek presence, presumably a merchant class, is documented in Cilicia by the widespread use of imported Greek pottery, the foundation myths of a number of important Cilician cities, and Greek historians (Mutafian, 1988). With Alexander's conquest of the Cilician Gates in 312 BCE, hellenization intensified. Alexander estab lished the first imperial mint at Tarsus, the region's capital. Both Hellenistic and Roman levels are attested in the exca
vations at Gozlii Kule in Tarsus but appear to be outside the major settlement. The Seleucids acquired Cilicia in the aftermath of Alexander's death and established ports at Aegeae, Alexandretta (Iskanderun), and Seleuia on the Calycadnus (Silifke). [See Seleucids.] Royal estates and temple estates formed a major part of the agricultural economy. Sanctuaries included that of Zeus at Olba (Uzuncaburc) and Artemis Perasia at Castabalu (Musti, 1984). In the first century BCE, pirates based in Cilicia Aspera threatened the Roman sea trade. Pompey defeated the pi rates in 67 BCE and took over Cilicia Campestris as well. Recognizing the agricultural potential of the fertile plain, Pompey resettled the area and established new cities, among which was Soli (Pompeiopolis). The presence of citizens who were artisans (linen weavers, dyers, tanners, carpen ters) testifies to highly developed trade and craft (Musti, 1984). In 41 BCE, Antony stopped at Tarsus and summoned Cleopatra from Egypt. Her arrival by ship in the lagoon be low the town is memorialized by the Roman arch the mod ern population of Tarsus calls Cleopatra's Gate. In the fol lowing centuries the cities of Tarsus, Adana, Mopsuestia, and Anazarbus became wealthy through trade in grain, wine, flax, and linen. Given the region's agricultural basis, it is not surprising that St. Paul pursued the trade of tentmaker in his hometown of Tarsus. The prosperity of Cilicia came to an end when the emperor Valerian was defeated in the third century CE and the Sasanian armies overran Cili cian villages and towns on their way through the plain to the Taurus Mountains. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beal, Richard H. "The History of Kizzuwatna and the Date of die Sunassura Treaty." Orienlalia 55 (1986): 424—445. Beal, Richard H. "The Location of Cilician Ura." Anatolian Studies 42 (1992): 65-73. Bing, John D. "A History of Cilicia during the Assyrian Period." Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1968. The most comprehensive discussion of historical and archaeological sources for Assyrians in Cilicia. Bossert, Helmuth T., and U. Bahadir Alkim. Karatepe, Kadirli, and Environments. Istanbul, 1947. Desideri, Paolo, and Anna M. Jasink. Cilicia. Turin, 1990. Garstang, John. Prehistoric Mersin: Yihniik Tepe in Southern Turkey. Oxford, 1953. Gotze, Albrecht. Kizzuwatna and the Problem of Hittite Geography. New Haven, 1940. Goldman, Hetty, ed. Excavations at Gozlii Kule, Tarsus, vol. 1, The Hellenistic and Roman Periods; vol. 3, The Iron Age. Princeton, 1 9 5 0 1963. Goldman, Hetty. Excavations at Gozlii Kule, Tarsus, vol. 2, From the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Princeton, 1956. Kummel, H. M. "Kizzuwatna." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 5, pp. 627-631. Berlin, 1980. Collection and discussion of all historical references to Kizzuwatna in the Bronze Age. Mee, Christopher. "Aegean Trade and Settlement in Anatolia in the Second Millennium B.C." Anatolian Studies 28 (1978): 1 2 1 - 1 5 6 . Discusses and tries to account for Mycenaean pottery at Tarsus and Mersin.
CIMMERIANS Mellink, Machteld J. "The Prehistory of Syro-Cilicia." Bibliollieca Or ientals 19 (1962): 2 1 9 - 2 2 6 . Mellink, Machteld J. "The Early Bronze Age in West Anatolia." In The End of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean, edited by Gerald Cadogan, pp. 1 3 9 - 1 5 2 . Leiden, 1986. Mellink, Machteld J. "Anatolian Chronology." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vol. 1, edited by Robert W. Enrich, pp. 207-220. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. The most recent discussion of comparative chronology through the end of the Early Bronze Age. Musti, Domenico. "Syria and the East." In The Cambridge Ancient Histoiy, vol. 7 . 1 , The Hellenistic World, pp. 1 7 5 - 2 2 0 . 2d ed. Cambridge, 1984. Mutafian, Claude. Cilicie au Carrefour des Empires. Paris, 1988. Collec tion and translation (in French) of all the primary sources and bib liography referring to Cilicia during the Hellenistic and Roman pe riods. Ramsay, William M. "Cilicia, Tarsus, and the Great Tarsus Pass." Geographical Journal 22 (1903): 3 5 7 - 4 1 3 . Seton-Williams, M. V. "Cilician Survey." Anatolian Studies 4 (1954): 121-174. Winter, Irene J. "On the Problems of Karatepe: The Reliefs and Their Context." Anatolian Studies 29 (1979): 1 1 5 — 1 5 1 . BONNIE MAGNESS-GARDINER
C I M M E R I A N S . Since Classical Antiquity it has been believed that the Cimmerians were the early inhabitants of the Pontic steppes, preceding the Scythians there, although an attempt was made recently to use their name only for a small tribe that lived north of Urartu (see esp. A. I. Ivanchik, " K vopprosu o etnicheskoj prinadlezhnosti i archeologicleskoj kulture Kimmerijcev," Vestnik Drevnej Istorii [1994]: 148-168 and [1995]: 3-22). Archaeologically, their culture stems partly from the previous Belozerka culture of the Pon tic area, partly from the Oka-Kama area and Siberia, and partly from the Caucasian tradition of bronzeworking. More distant parallels are also known from other provinces of the eastern koine of the Early Iron Age Geometric styles in Transcaucasia, Iran (Luristan), and the Balkans. Their own archaeological culture in the Pontic area is called Chernogorovka (ninth-early eighth centuries BCE); its late stage— Novocherkassk (late eighth-early seventh centuries BCE)— may have belonged partly to the latest Cimmerians and partly to the earliest Scythians. Cimmerians were among the first mounted nomads to use real cavalry; the objects from their graves include personal ornaments, weapons, and horse harnesses: most importantly horse bits of Nortii Cau casian types (according to H. Potratz, 1966), bimetallic dag gers with an iron blade and bronze handle (the latter either in openwork or tanged, with a mushroom-shaped pommel), socketed arrowheads that are a rhomboid in section, and long spearheads. Natural stone whetstones with a hole for suspension were also part of the equipment of the Cimme rians; in addition to openwork bronze belt finials and "bird cage" rattles, cross-shaped ornaments are sometimes found decorated with spirals. Some of the decorated objects have parallels in Assyria. T h e belt and suspended weapons are
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depicted on so-called stag stones used as grave stelae, but not the human figure. Stag stones are known across the steppes from central Siberia (Tuva) to eastern Bulgaria (Belogradec, near Varna), while most of the characteristic ob jects in metalwork come from the Volga-Oka, Kuban, and North Pontic areas. Of more westerly distribution are re lated Thraco-Cimmerian bronzes from the eastern part of central Europe, evidence of Cimmerian western raids; the Cimmerian and Caucasian influence on the Thracian bronzes from Bulgaria, and Macedonian bronzes from the Axius valley and Chalcidice, may, at the same time, be con nected with Strabo's reports of a military alliance between the Cimmerians and Thracian Treres and Edoni (Strabo, C 61, C 627 and C 329 fragment 1 1 ) . Some Cimmerian dec orated bronzes were probably connected with shamanism (there are ethnographic parallels for this usage; see Bouzek, 1983, pp. 219-220), and were adapted as personal orna ments and jewelry even by the European Hallstatt and Villanovan cultures and in Greek Late Geometric art. There are two groups of written sources on the Cimme rians: Near Eastern and Greek. Most Cimmerians left their country in the Pontic steppes as the Scythians moved west ward under pressure from the Massagetes. Herodotus ( 4 . 1 1 - 1 3 and 6.20) expressively mentions Tyras (Dniestre) as the place where the Cimmerian kings fought a fratricidal battle and were buried, and from where the common people left their homes along the Black Sea, west of the Caucasus as far as the area of Sinope, followed by the Scythians. The first Assyrian references to Gumurru (the Assyrian equiv alent "Cimmerian") date to early in the reign of Sargon II, prior to 7 1 3 BCE; the Scythians are also mentioned within the region of Urartu. [See Urartu.] Some small groups of Cimmerians, however, remained on the shores of the Azov Sea even later, as recorded by Plutarch (Life of Metritis xi). The Cimmerian Bosporus, Cimmerian walls (an earthenwork across the East Crimean peninsula, constructed prior to the Greek colonization there), and Cimmerian peninsula are all in this area and the Araxes River (modern Syr Darya), according to Herodotus (4.11), originally formed die Cim merians' eastern frontier. The battle on the Dniestre apparendy marked the. last stage of the retreat of the Cimmerians, which lasted for a considerable time, just as happened later in Sarmato-Scytiiian relations. During the reign of Sen nacherib (705-681 BCE), the Cimmerians attacked large ar eas of Asia Minor and, according to tradition, destroyed the Phrygian Empire (the Phrygian king Midas committed sui cide). This probably took place in 696/95 BCE (Eusebius's date)—although a date twenty years later cannot be ex cluded. Excavations at Gordion revealed destructions, but no characteristic Cimmerian objects. [See Gordion.] Only the arrowheads are known from Anatolia, while a few weap ons finds and parts of horse harnesses from northeast An atolia can be ascribed either to Late Cimmerians or Early Scythians. A group of Cimmerians probably settied near
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CISTERNS
Sinope; Esarhaddon mentions an Assyrian victory over them in 679 BCE: their leader during the 679/78 military cam paign is called Tuspa in Assyrian records. Another group of Cimmerians may well have entered Anatolia from Thrace. This is suggested by Strabo, when he speaks about an alli ance between the Cimmerians and the Thracian Treres and Edoni (cf. above). The Lydian king Gyges sought an alli ance against them with Ashurbanipal. A second attack in 652 BCE was successful: Sardis (with the exception of the citadel) was sacked and Gyges killed. [See Sardis.] T h e leader of the Cimmerian troops in 652 BCE was called Lygdamis, and there is a parallel name, Tugdammu, in As syrian records. According to Strabo, Lygdamis was later killed in Cilicia. This happened between 637 and 626 BCE and, according to Herodotus (1.16), the last Cimmerians were driven from Asia Minor by Alyattes in about 600 BCE. There are no written records on Cimmerian military ac tivities in the eastern part of central Europe, but the nu merous destructions and so-called Thraco-Cimmerian bronzes recovered in the area make it probable that the mil itary activities there were Cimmerian because they resem bled those of the later Scythians. Because the Thraco-Cim merian bronzes show some development and appear in contexts from the ninth to seventh centuries BCE, the dom inant position of the Cimmerians (or nomads closely related to them) on the Great Hungarian plain must have lasted for more than a century. There were, however, other inhabi tants there, who seem finally to have absorbed the nomadic population.
able. For built cisterns large stones, sometimes with layers of smaller stones above, were used and then coated with a final layer of plaster. A cistern's depth would not normally exceed 6 m, so that water could be drawn with relative ease and the cistern could be cleaned by someone upright in it. Neither its width, length, or diameter, would exceed 6-10 m; consequently, a cistern's maximum capacity is a few dozen cubic meters at the most, and no more than 100 cu m. If its dimensions are greater it is properly designated a reservoir. T h e opening of the cistern was usually narrow in order to prevent falling into it, to prevent evaporation, and to enable convenient pumping. Canals carved into the earth channeled runoff to a small depression or basin at the side of the cistern, where the soil settled or was filtered. T h e water was drawn from the cistern by lowering a pail on a rope from the surface through a vertical opening shaped like the neck of a bottle. Sometimes, a pulleylike device made of wood was built above the open ing to facilitate drawing water. Pails were also of wood. Al-
[See also Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia; Cilicia; Per sia, article on Ancient Persia; and Scythians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bouzek, Jan. Caucasus and Europe and the Cimmerian Problem. Sbornik National Museum, 37.4. Prague, 1983. In English with Czech sum mary. Diakonoff, IgorM. "The Cimmerians and the Scythians in the Ancient Near East" (in Russian). Sovelskaya Arkheologiya, no. 1 (1994): 1 0 8 1 1 6 . Includes an English summary. Potratz, H. Pferdetrensen des alien Orients. Vatican, 1966. Sulimirski, Tadeusz. "The Cimmerian Problem." Bulletin of the Insti tute of Archaeology, University of London 2 (1959): 45-64. Terenozhktn, A. I. Kimmeriity (in Russian). Kiev, 1976. JAN BOUZEK
C I S T E R N S . Designed to collect and store rainwater for drinking, washing, livestock, irrigation, and agricultural in stallations, a cistern was normally cut out of rock and its interior coated with a thick layer of impermeable plaster. When the rock itself was impermeable, only fissures were coated. Where no solid rock stratum was available, a cistern could be built in an excavated pit in the ground, or partially constructed, incorporating whatever natural rock was avail
CISTERNS. View from the bottom of a cistern. Sepphoris, cistern C1 2 5 . (Courtesy E. M. Meyers)
CIST GRAVES though perishable, some have been found in the excavations of the Agora in Athens. Bell-shaped cisterns are first evidenced at the end of the Chalcolithic period or the beginning of the Early Bronze Age at Mesar in Israel. Their form prevents the collapse of the ceiling, which could result if the top of the cistern were too broad. These cisterns are hewn in chalky rock, which allows them to store water without the use of plaster. Cisterns dat ing from the Middle Bronze Age, such as those discovered at Hazor, are bottle shaped. [See Hazor.] Although they are cut into chalky rock, these cisterns show evidence of plaster used to block up fissures. T h e Hazor remains, which are the earliest evidence of plaster in water cisterns, invalidate Wil liam Foxwell Albright's suggestion (1940, p. 212) that the Israelites invented plastered water cisterns after the Exodus and conquest. Bell-shaped cisterns from the Late Bronze period have been found at Tel Beth-Shemesh. [See BethShemesh.] During the tenth century BCE, "open" cisterns were in use in the Negev mountains, whose construction also makes them pools by definition. Hewn from the soft rock, they were designed and constructed to store runoff. The region's inhabitants lacked sufficient technical expertise to enable them to create underground cisterns. T h e depth of the cis terns is not great, and the high rate of evaporation in the region's dry climate suggests that the cisterns were covered with hides to reduce evaporation. Water cisterns are mentioned often in the Hebrew Bible, and indeed, in the Iron Age II period an increase in the number of cisterns is seen. Excavations at Tell en-Nasbeh, near Ramallah, have revealed fifty cisterns dating to this period. [See Nasbeh, Tell en-,] At the Urartian fortress Cavustepe in eastern Anatolia, square royal water cisterns from the eighth century BCE were discovered hewn into the rock, their fissures filled with plaster. In the Hellenistic period there appears to have been a great increase in the private use of cisterns, to the extent that each household had one. Many cisterns were found cut into the chalky rock at Mareshah in Israel. They are unplastered, except for the use made of clay to block cracks, and bell shaped, with a volume close to 100 cu m. [See Mareshah.] The private use of cisterns increased again in the Roman period, reaching its apex during the Byzantine period. Quar ried bell cisterns, constructed cisterns with barrel-shaped arches, and cisterns of indeterminate form all existed side by side. Every household had a cistern, with an average vol ume of 30-50 cu m, that supplied the family with water throughout the year. In the Negev mountain region, under ground cisterns (Ar., haraba) were used in the NabateanByzantine period. They are square, with supporting pillars that allow for increased volume. Water cisterns continue to be used throughout the Near East, in areas where a tradi tional way of life is preserved. [See also Hydraulics; Hydrology; Pools; and Reservoirs.]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. From Stone Age to Christianity, Baltimore, 1940. Brinker, Werner. "Antike Zisternen: Stationen ihrer Entwicklungsgeschichte." Mitteilungen: Leichtweiss-Institut fur Wasserbau der Technischen Universildt Braunschweig 103 (1989): 247-279. Moran, Uri, and David Palmach. Cisterns in the Negev Mountains (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1985. Tsuk, Tsvika. "Survey and Research of Cisterns in the Village of Zikrin (Israel)." Mitteilungen: Leichtweiss-Institut fiir Wasserbau der Technischen Universitdt Braunschweig 103 (1989): 337-356. TSVIKA TSUK Translated from Hebrew by liana Goldberg
C I S T G R A V E S . T o construct a cist grave, a rectan gular space roughly 2 m long and 1 m wide was lined with stones or mud bricks; occasionally, the floor was paved with cobbles and a superstructure erected. T h e form remained the same whether constructed within settlements or in ex tramural cemeteries, for primary interments and secondary burials. T h e earliest Chalcolithic (4300-3300 BCE) examples were for secondary interments in extramural cemeteries. Early in the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BCE), the intra mural cist burial was introduced into Canaan from SyroMesopotamia as an exclusive method of primary burial for wealthy or prominent individuals. Late Bronze (15001200 BCE) and Iron Age (1200—586 BCE) cist graves for pri mary interments in extramural cemeteries are attributed to Egyptian influence. T h e earliest extramural cemeteries are from the Chalco lithic period. In Palestine, in the cemeteries at Adeimah and Shiqmim, in addition to cist burials, contained secondary burials were found. At Shiqmim bones were also collected in ossuaries. During the Middle Bronze II, elaborate stone-lined and capped pits were constructed at Ugarit in Syria and at Megiddo and Aphek, in Palestine. In the Aphek cists, the bodies were flexed and oriented east-west, with their heads facing east. Secondary remains were interred in recesses in the side wall of one grave, and a second grave contained a ceramic vessel whose type shows a strong northern connection. The popularity of extramural cist-grave burial in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages has been attributed to Egyptian influ ence. Burials at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh provide the clearest Egyp tian or egyptianizing features: an east-west orientation, with the heads usually facing west; Egyptian-linen body wrap pings; bitumen-covered bodies; an unusually high incidence of metal artifacts; and an absence of bowls and lamps. Cist graves reached the height of their distribution in Palestine in the thirteenth-eleventh centuries BCE, through the low land regions of the coast, the Besor River valley, and the Jezreel, Beth-Shean, and Jordan River Valleys (Tell Abu Hawam, Afula, Tell el-'Ajjul, Tell el-Far'ah [South], Tell esSa'idiyeh). These were richly provisioned burials for the pri-
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CITIES: An Overview Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth, fudahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 1 2 3 . Sheffield, 1992. Summary and comprehensive catalog of the Iron Age burials. Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. New York, 1990. Comprehensive, detailed, well-illustrated survey of biblical archaeology, limited only by the traditionalist biblical inter pretation. Stern, Ephraim, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Supple ments Avi-Yonah and Stern (above), with results of more recent excavations and revised interpretations. ELIZABETH BLOCH-SMITH
C I T I E S . [To survey the city as a form of human settlement in the ancient Near East, this entry comprises five articles: An Overview Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages Cities of the Persian Period Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Cities of the Islamic Period The overview article treats the emergence of cities and the process of ubanization; the remainder treat the development of cities and urban life through time in specific regions.] A n Overview
CIST GRAVES. MB I burial in a stone-lined inner chamber. Cairn 160, from the central Negev highlands. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
mary interment of one individual and, rarely, two or three. In the case of multiple interments, one of the individuals was frequently an infant or a child. The mortuary provisions were like those in contemporary pit graves, with bowls for serving food predominating along with jugs and accompa nying dipper juglets for liquids, plus luxury items such as jewelry, metal objects, and imported pottery. In some cases, pit graves may have sufficed as a simplified version of a cist grave. In the Tell es-Sa'idiyeh cemetery, the cist graves con tained aesthetically finer and more precious items than did the interspersed simpler interments. [See also Burial Techniques. In addition, the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael, and Ephraim Stern, eds. Encyclopedia of Archae ological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975-1978. Summary of excavations including results of all earlier expeditions to the sites. Ben-Tor, Arnnon, ed. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. Translated by R. Greenberg. New Haven, 1992. Collection of essays with differing emphases on the Neolithic through the Iron Age II—III periods.
Cities were tire physical focus for the rise of civilization in the ancient Near East. While what constitutes a city in the modern world is fairly clear, there is no uncomplicated def inition of a city in the ancient Near East. In the archaeolog ical literature the terms village, town, and city are usually used interchangeably. A working definition of city is that it is a relatively permanent, compact form of human settle ment, having a particular kind of relationship to its sur roundings, and populated by a fairly large number of diverse individuals who are socially differentiated. Clarity of defi nition of the city, and the nature of its relationship to other forms of settlement, emerges only in surveys of the relation ships of settlement forms to their surroundings. Center and Periphery. T o understand what cities were in the ancient Near East, the ideas of center and periphery need to be examined. Cities, and other forms of permanent settlements, were parts of interdependent systems that in cluded a center and its surroundings. Thus, the modern idea of a rural-urban dichotomy is not helpful in understanding the city in the ancient Near East. Many modern rural-urban differences are typical only of industrial-urban, not of preindustrial societies. Because all ancient Near Eastern cities were part of an agriculturally based economic system, the city and its surroundings were interdependent. People living in the area around a city were dependent on the city, and urbanites depended on the sustaining area of the city's sur rounding region. People living in the area around a city were dependent on the city for many things—temples, storage
CITIES: An Overview facilities, security, specialists of various kinds, craftspeople who could process goods, and administration or social lead ership. Definitive urbanization involved the regulation of the agricultural surplus—that portion of agricultural produce not consumed by the primary producers. The capacity to extract and invest this surplus was a principal function of cities and their administrative officials. As payment for this administrative service, urban officials exacted tribute or taxes from the inhabitants of the surrounding area. Simi larly, a city's inhabitants required the agricultural produce of the city's hinterland for their sustenance. The interdependence between center and periphery be comes recognizable in the archaeological record when the people in the city's hinterland are also organized into settle ments, creating a two-level hierarchical system: a city (usu ally walled) and its villages (usually unwalled), as schemat ically pictured in figure i. This interdependence of the city and its surrounding settlements limited the size of such a system. A city and its villages had to be close enough to gether to make continuous exchange possible. If the system was in a geographic area where there were no physical bar riers, it was theoretically possible for it to expand as far as available means of transportation between the center and the most remote village would allow. [See Transportation.] T h e expansion of the system was also a function of the produc tive capacity of a city's surrounding area.
An Overview. Figure lages. (Courtesy F. S. Frick)
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I.
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As cities that were part of such a simple two-tier system expanded, their sustaining areas would begin to encroach on those of neighboring city-village systems. When this hap pened, a competitive situation developed between the cen ters of the two systems. Because of this, a new land of so ciopolitical organization was needed to channel human energy into production rather than destruction. From sev eral systems of two tiers, a new three-tier system was cre ated: a central city that administered an area consisting of several city-village systems (see figure 2). A city that was the center of a two-level system can be thought of as a local center, while the central city in a three-level system is a re gional center in a city-state. Urbanization Process. T h e process of urbanization is not a unitary, universally homogeneous process; it assumes different forms and meaning, depending on prevailing his toric, economic, and cultural conditions. How did urbaniza tion proceed in the ancient Near East and what technologies and forms of social and political organization were involved? The earliest traces of human existence in the Near East come from the Paleolithic period, where strata indicating short periods of occupation with long intervals between them and skeletal remains have been found in caves (e.g., at Shanidar in present-day Iraq and on Mt. Carmel in pres ent-day Israel). This situation changes with the beginning of the Neolithic period, when the first relatively permanent settlements based on a combination of hunting and gather ing and agriculture appear. It is clear, from the fact that archaeological evidence for both phenomena appears at about the same time, that there is a positive correlation be tween the beginnings of permanent settlements and of food production. Neolithic settlements were usually some distance from City , one another and were located in environments where there Village / was ready access to several different ecological niches (food production was still unreliable and had to be supplemented by hunting and food gathering). One of the best-known Ne olithic settlements, Beidha, located southeast of the Dead Sea in modern Jordan, is found in such a setting. Another important Neolithic site is Catal Hoytik in modern Turkey. In addition to being located in a differentiated ecological setting, Catal Hoytik is a settlement where a densely builtup area of about 440 sq m has been excavated, in which there were houses of equivalent size and plan, suggesting a socially undifferentiated community. Neolithic Jericho has often been called a city, mostly because of its massive walls and fortification system. While Jericho and other Neolithic settlements anticipate some developments in later cities, they differ from cities, as defined here, because they were not the center of a settlement system. These Neolithic sites should thus be regarded as protourban settlements. With increasing experience with agriculture came more A city in relationship to its vil dependable food production. T h e necessity of having to set tle at sites that offered the safety net of food gathering de-
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CITIES: An Overview
CITIES: An Overview. Figure 2. A central city in relationship (Courtesy F. S. Frick)
creased, and it became feasible to establish settlements in a wider range of environments and nearer one another. With higher agricultural yields, the cultivated area required to feed a person was also reduced. [See Demography.] With more intensive agriculture, settlements could be located closer to gether, a prerequisite for the creation of structured relation ships between them in the sense of the formation of settle ment systems, which was also a necessary precondition for urbanization. There is, however, no single identifiable cause in the nexus of social, economic, and political transforma tions that was a sufficient cause for the emergence of cities. Changes in social organization induced by commerce, war fare, or technological advances had to be validated by some instrument of authority if they were to achieve institutional permanence. This instrument of authority, rather than any particular form of activity, was the generating force for ur banization. Gideon Sjoberg (The Preindus trial City, Past and Present, Glencoe, i960, pp, 67-68) equates authority with social power. For him, the preindustrial city was a mecha
to its associated city-village
systems.
nism by which a society's rulers could consolidate and main tain their power. Urbanization in Mesopotamia. T h e first true cities emerged in Mesopotamia in tire Early Bronze Age, at the close of the fourth millennium. Habuba Kabira (South), a city on the Upper Euphrates River in present-day Syria, ap peared in this period. It had a rectangular layout, a defensive wall, and evidence of social differentiation in the form of a separate block of buildings for the upper class at the south ern end of the site. [See Habuba Kabira.] By 3600 BCE the development of urban centers was fo cused in southern Mesopotamia. Uruk (modern Warka in Iraq) offers an impressive example of urban development in this early period, when isolated settlements gave way to re gional centers. Uruk was a substantial ceremonial center and became the largest early city in southern Mesopotamia. Around it lay several small towns and villages. Near the be ginning of the third millennium it began to expand rapidly, reaching its greatest size by around 2700 BCE. At that time
CITIES: An Overview its population was forty thousand-fifty thousand and its de fensive walls enclosed an area of 400 ha (988 acres). [See Uruk-Warka.] Uruk has been excavated (intensively in those areas of the city that were temple sites) and is also known from the Gilgamesh epic, which reflects a much older pe riod, although in the form in which it now exists was written later. Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic, was probably the ruler of Uruk in the Early Dynastic I period (c. 2600 BCE), after the city had reached its largest size. At the beginning of the poem, Gilgamesh has oppressed the people of Uruk in order to build up the massive city wall, which has been identified in excavations as having a circumference of 9.5 km (6 mi.), with about nine hundred semicircular towers. Besides the walls of such early cities, evidence leads to the assumption that the highly developed economic organization of such set tlements required not only abstract methods of control, but other forms of social organization. While some early urban sites on the southern Mesopotamian plains had areas of 400 ha (988 acres) or more, those of Upper Mesopotamia appear to have had a maximum size of only about 100 ha (494 acres). This suggests a ceiling beyond which such sites could not or did not grow. Scholars routinely assume that the size of early cities was limited by the productive capacity of their immediate sustaining area. Fundamental to our understanding of early urban systems is the notion that the extraction of agricultural surpluses en abled early centers to expand and to accommodate special ized economic sectors. While some early centers (e.g., early Uruk) may have been self-sufficient for food, typically it was the outlying settlements that produced the surplus support ing the populations and institutions of urban centers. The latter case is illustrated by the Ugaritic texts that record the contributions of outlying settlements to the centralized economy. During roughly the first half of the third millennium, wide areas of the Mesopotamian countryside were significantly depopulated, as most of their inhabitants took up residence in politically organized city-states. In the general vicinity of Uruk, for example, the number of villages and towns fell precipitously from 146 at the beginning of the millennium, to only 24 by about 2700 BCE. Meanwhile, the number of cities (i.e., sites exceeding 50 ha, or 123.5 acres, in area) grew from two to eight. Structural changes occurred simul taneously in the newly emergent cities. Accompanying ur banization was increasing militarism, reflected in the con struction of massive urban fortifications and in a host of myths, epics, and historical inscriptions recounting the in ternecine struggles of these city-states. There was also in creasing social stratification and the decay of kin-based so cial units. T h e cities of southern Mesopotamia were conquered about 2340 BCE by an invasion of Semites from Babylonia to the north, under Sargon (Sharrukin) of Akkad, who is regarded as the first ruler to create an empire—that is, an
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expanded state based not solely on cities, but upon territorial control. Administratively, Sargon created a new capital rather than basing his power on an established city. He thus set a pattern of imperial rule in which the capital city became only an administtative center, not an essential political unit. The Akkadian Empire, however, lasted fewer than two cen turies. It was overthrown shortly after 2200 BCE by the Guti from the north, who exercised loose administrative control for about a century, allowing the reemergence of indepen dent cities. They were succeeded by the first Babylonian kingdom, whose best-known king was Hammurabi (c. 1792-1750 BCE). Paralleling these developments in the south was the ap pearance of a new power in northern Mesopotamia, the As syrians. T h e Assyrians marked the realization of a trend in urban development that had begun with Sargon of Akkad— the transition in the city's role from an independent center to the tool of territorial empire builders, a useful adminis trative unit but no longer an entity that was central to the mentality of ruler or subject. Under Hammurabi, city tem ples no longer managed land, reducing the city's pivotal role. [See Assyrians; Temples, article on Mesopotamian Tem ples.] Thus, "empire" began to be conceived of not as the extension of the control of a city and its ruler, but as the government of a territory by a king and his army. As a con sequence, the basis of power shifted from an urban-centered economic organization, with its exploitation of agriculture and trade, to military conquest of and exaction of tribute from subject peoples. The Assyrians thus represent the final shift from control by a city to control on a territorial basis, perhaps exercised through cities but not connected with any specific one. This was the pattern followed by the Persians, by Alexander, and to some extent by the Roman emperors. Urbanization in Palestine. Urbanization gained mo mentum in Palestine toward the end of EB I and the begin ning of EB II (c. 3000 BCE), as indicated by the sudden ap pearance of many cities, among them Ai, Beth-Yerah, Bab edh-Dhra', Jericho, Megiddo, Tell el-Far'ah (North), and Tel Yarmut. One feature of these early cities was the ap pearance of large public buildings, some of which may have been temples. Toward the end of the Early Bronze Age (EB III, 26502350 BCE), urbanization peaked in Palestine and a period of rival city-states emerged in Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, urban development was linked to changes in water supply, which not only affected agriculture, but influenced settle ment patterns. Because major cities in Mesopotamia were located on watercourses, the receding of water into fewer watercourses must have involved a gradual linkage between the settlements and the remaining watercourses. In addition, it led to the tendency for a few settlements to grow larger at the expense of others. In the area of Uruk, for example, the number of settlements decreased from sixty-two in the Early Dynastic I period to twenty-nine in this period.
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CITIES: An Overview
While urbanization in Palestine peaked in EB III, by the end of EB IV (2350-2000 BCE), there were no urban settle ments left. What caused this disappearance of urban cul ture? Three explanations have been offered. One is ecolog ical and parallels the Mesopotamian situation of scarce water resources. This explanation maintains that there was a decrease in rainfall and a consequent lowering of the water table, which made concentrated settlements impossible. A second explanation suggests that the urban centers were de stroyed or abandoned following incursions from either the north or the south. A third explanation sees the city-state system reaching the point of self-destruction as the result of city-states' raids on one another, as evidenced by the re peated strata of destruction and reconstruction at EB II—III sites. The second urban period in Palestine, the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BCE), saw the reemergence of urban cen ters. MB city walls had towers built at intervals of 20-30 m and in MB II (1800-1650 BCE), a glacis at the base of the walls that formed a smooth, steep slope to protect the walls from attackers. While some MB cities were reestablished on EB sites, MB II also saw new, large cities established that were enclosed with earthen ramparts (e.g., Qatna [100 ha, or 247 acres] in Syria and Hazor [60 ha, or 148 acres] in Israel). [See Hazor.] LB cities in Palestine (1500-1200 BCE) showed continuity with MB cities, with few positive devel opments and a general decline in urban life. In Late Iron Age I and Iron II Palestine (c. 1000-587 BCE), urbanization flourished with the support of the monarchy, for which cities were an essential part of the administrative system. A hierarchical order of settlements developed, rang ing from the capital cities of Jerusalem and Samaria at the top to small fortified sites at the bottom. Between these were major and secondary administtative centers and fortified provincial towns. Most Israelite cities were about 3-7 ha (717 acres) in area, with only the central cities of Jerusalem and Samaria being larger, with an area of 30-50 ha (74123.5 acres). Unlike their Bronze Age predecessors, the Iron II Israelite cities did not accommodate a large number of farmers but were inhabited mostly by families belonging to the political, military, economic, and religious elite. Significance of the City. Although they are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a distinction between the terms city and urbanism. Urbanism implies those character istics that distinguish cities from simpler settlements, but it also refers to the organization of an urbanized society, which includes those settlements associated with cities. A city, on the other hand, is the physical center that manifests many important characteristics of the urban condition. Urbaniza tion refers not exclusively to the processes by which cities are formed and people are incorporated into an urban-cen tered sociopolitical system. It refers also to the acquisition of characteristics associated with city life and to the changes in the patterns of life that are apparent among city dwellers.
Cities become symbols, as well as things. Humans are not neuttal toward cities but surround them with values and be liefs. The city can be seen as the embodiment of good or evil, as representing progress or decline, and as being the site of human alienation or human salvation. Apart from the usefulness of cities for administration and defense, they appealed to those who felt their individuality was repressed by social organization based on kinship. On the positive side, cities offered these individuals a measure of freedom, anonymity, privilege, the opportunity to de velop their skills, and the stimulation of being part of a more heterogeneous sociopolitical unit than a kin-based one. However, the significance of cities in the ancient world was not limited to such opportunities. The status of women, for example, seems to have deteriorated substantially with ur banization. Although archaeologists have only recently be gun to examine such issues, inferences can be drawn from ethnographic studies. T h e advent of permanent settlements initiated changes that led to increased inequality in status between the sexes. The rise of cities also caused more un equal distribution of wealth. Most preurban societies were basically egalitarian with little specialization, except for that determined by age and sex. Urban societies, however, are characterized by specialization of tasks and serious inequal ities in the distribution of wealth. Cities in their physical form are long-lived. At the same time, urban societies change more than any other social grouping. Cities are thus amalgams of physical structures and people. They are settings for daily rituals—the sacred and the secular, the random and the established. Cities are the ultimate memorials of human struggles and achieve ments: they are where the pride of the past is put on display. BIBLIOGRAPHY Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., and Arie Shachar. Society, Culture, and Urban isation. Newbury Park, Calif., 1987. Frick, Frank S. The City in Ancient Israel. Society of Biblical Literature, Dissertation Series, no. 36. Missoula, 1977. Survey of urbanization and the significance of the city in ancient Israel. Nissen, Hans J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. Translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier and Kenneth J. Northcott. Chicago, 1988. Revision and expansion of the author's 1983 work. Nissen uses a unique combination of die analysis of material culture and written data to trace the emergence of the earliest isolated set tlements, the growth of networks of towns, the emergence of citystates, and finally the appearance of territorial states. Redman, Charles L. The Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers to Urban Society in the Ancient Near East. San Francisco, 1978. Al though a bit dated in parts, Redman's work provides a useful sum mary mainly for students of archaeology, anthropology, and ancient history. Organized according to developmental stages rather than regionally or chronologically. Rohrbaugh, Richard L. "The City in the Second Testament." Biblical Theology Bulletin 21 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 67-75. Bibliographic essay that includes discussions of works by both ancient historians and modern social scientists. Trigger, Bruce G., et al. Ancient Egypt: A Social History. Cambridge,
CITIES: Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages 1983. Trigger's chapter, "The Rise of Egyptian Civilization," is a valuable piece on urbanization. Ucko, Peter, ct al., eds. Man, Settlement, and Urbanism. Cambridge, Mass., 1972. Proceedings of the 1970 meeting of the Research Sem inar in Archaeology and Related Subjects. Although somewhat dated, it includes an impressive, wide-ranging, interdisciplinary col lection of essays dealing with settlement patterns and urbanization in various parts of the world. FRANK S. FRICK
Cities of the B r o n z e a n d Iron Ages In the Near East, the type of settlement known as a city, first developed in Mesopotamia during the second half of the fourth millennium and spread to other areas in the region by the beginning of the third millennium. Since that time, the city has embodied a way of life; in the ancient Near East, except in Egypt, "history" has meant the history of cities. A new level of human civilization began with the emergence of urban life, accompanied by other innovations that devel oped in the fourth millennium and came to fruition in the third: religions with personal gods and mythical tales that expressed people's beliefs and worldviews; mastery of metalworking (the smelting and working of copper and bronze), and the invention of writing as a means of preserving trans actions in all areas of society. This ttansitional period in hu man civilization was rooted in certain existing technological features: the building of fixed houses out of a variety of ma terials, the domestication of plants and animals, the use of the wheel, the production of ceramics from clay, and the manufacture of cloth from plant fibers. In spite of the other decisive changes that took place in economic life, in the an cient Near East agriculture remained the basis of the econ omy. T h e city did not supplant other forms of settlement, but coexisted with them. Early S e t t l e m e n t s . T h e founding of settlements begins with the round houses built in the Natufian period (10,000-8,000 BCE). The first round houses at 'Einan ('Ein Mallaha) on Lake Hulah in Israel were constructed of per ishable materials on a stone foundation. [See 'Einan.] In the Neolithic period, which followed (8000-4000 BCE), air-dried mud bricks became the main building material, combining the advantages of easy manufacture and use with the de mands of load-bearing capacity and durability. During this period some settlements already covered a large expanse: Qal'at Jarmo in the region of the Zagros Mountains was about 1 ha (approximately 2.5 acres), Tell Hassuna on the Upper Tigris River was 3 ha (about 7 acres), and Catal H o ytik in Anatolia was approximately 1 2 ha (30 acres). [See Jarmo; Catal Hoytik.] In addition, as the examples of Tell es-Sawwan on the Middle Euphrates River and Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) in the Jordan Valley show, settlements were surrounded by a wall even before it is possible to speak of the city proper. [See Jericho; Jordan Valley.] T o be sure, fortifications were an important, if not a compellingly nec
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essary criterion in laying out a city; in the Neolithic period, however, all the additional features that legitimate the des ignation "city" were lacking. In any event, the Neolithic set tlements that were fortified were the forerunners of the en suing urbanization. Elements of Urbanization. A number of factors inhere in the establishment of the city as a viable community, al though not all of them were present to the same degree. Certain natural prerequisites include land that could be cul tivated, a sufficient water supply to enable the self-suffi ciency of the inhabitants, and a strategic location favorable for commercial traffic. Community life required a stable so cial order as well as social differentiation. The ruler was at the head of a city and at the top of the social pyramid. The inhabitants in turn formed classes—priests, warriors, mer chants, artisans, free workers, peasants, and slaves—in a hi erarchy based on the respect accorded to their occupations and their economic strength. In terms of urbanism's economic foundations, the pro duction of a surplus and the division of labor, which in turn necessitated an exchange of goods and trading activity, is assumed. T h e invention of writing significantly facilitated the differentiated economic and social systems, as did other organizational mechanisms such as calendars, taxes, and le gal systems. In addition to the social, economic, and legal framework, the formal expression of the divine in the form of cult and mythology was a stabilizing element that legiti mated the unequal distribution of resources. T h e combi nation of characteristics in one place justifies speaking of a settlement as a city. T h e external appearance of a city de volved from elements of size and planning, fortification, and public buildings that reflect a high level of cultural devel opment. Earliest Cities. The cities that developed in Mesopota mia in the second half of the fourth millennium had a long history of settlement: the Sumerian settlements at Ur, Uruk, Eridu, and Nippur in southern Mesopotamia and Tepe Gawra on the Upper Tigris. [See Ur; Uruk-Warka; Eridu; Nip pur; Tepe Gawra.] In these sprawling city complexes the temple precincts, which stood on a raised terrace sur rounded by a separate wall, occupied an extraordinarily large area, surpassing the extent of the palace by several fold and reducing the residential quarter to a minimal area of the city. T h e dominant spatial position of the cult precinct, as well as its social, economic, and political role in urban life, also characterized cities founded later in the third and sec ond millennia (Assur, Eshnunna; Khafajeh; Hursagkalama, and many others), even when the residential quarters oc cupied a large area, as at Babylon. [See Assur; Eshnunna; Khafajeh; Babylon.] Only in the Assyrian residence cities like Nineveh, Nimrud, and Khorsabad did the palace of the ruler begin to assume a dominant position, while the space occupied by the temples sharply declined. [See Nineveh; Nimrud; Palace.] The division of cities into distinct regions
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CITIES: Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages
and quarters makes it evident that their layout was planned, a fact also visible in other of its organizational elements, such as the positioning of gates and streets. The city form that was valid for thousands of years came to an end with the decline of the Neo-Assyrian (or Neo-Babylonian) Empire during the middle of the first millennium BCE. [See Assyri ans; Babylonians.] City-States. Even before the end of the fourth millen nium, elements of urbanization appeared in Syria. The city of Habuba Kabira on the Middle Euphrates River shows all die elements of conscious planning. The temple precinct lies in the southern part of the city, and with the "middle-room house" a well-developed house type was in use (although the city's palace has not yet been discovered). A network of streets divided the residential quarter into individual dis tricts, and the straight city wall displays projecting towers at regular intervals. During the third millennium, the construc tion of fortified cities spread throughout Syria, with public buildings, a temple, and a palace occupying a dominant po sition. All die large urban centers—Mari, Alalakh, Ebla, Hama, Ugarit, and Byblos—were founded after 3000 BCE; most of them continued to exist until the invasion of die Sea Peoples at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE. [See Habuba Kabira; Mari; Alalakh; Ebla; Hama; Ugarit; Byb los.] As the area controlled by die city expanded, die palace began proportionally to occupy die largest area. Archives found at sites such as Mari, Ebla, and Ugarit show how the adoption and development of cuneiform script were nec essary to facilitate the administrative and diplomatic corre spondence this expansion created. [See Cuneiform.] Each city was self-sufficient to the extent that its food supply was grown in the surrounding territory and most of its utensils and tools were manufactured within its walls. An extensive trade assured the procurement of necessary raw materials in exchange for certain agricultural products or finished wares. In Syria urbanization led to die establishment of numerouss city-states, whose individual power was reflected in die differing size of the areas under tiieir control. These city-states collapsed during die twelfth century BCE and were not revived until the beginning of the first millen nium by immigrant Arameans. [See Arameans.] In the cen ter of these new urban centers were extensive palace dis tricts grouped around a building of the hilani type, as can be seen at Tell Halaf, Tell Ta'yinat, and Zincirli. [See Halaf, Tell.] Bronze Age Palestine. For ancient Palestine tiiere is a lack of the continuity of urban centers found in Syria. In stead, three distinct periods of urbanization are separated from each other by a nonurban interval. The first urban period is identical with Early Bronze II and III (2950-2350 BCE), the second with Middle Bronze II (1950-1550 BCE) and Late Bronze I and II (1550-1200/1150 BCE). At the be ginning of the first millennium, during Iron II (1000-587
BCE), a reurbanization, representing a new cultural influx, occurred; this phase may be considered a third urban cul ture. Each of the three time periods has a distinct charac ter—they do not collectively represent a single culture. Early Bronze Age. In most places EB I (3150-2950 BCE) open settiements precede the fixed cities of EB II (29502650). This continuity of settlement can be firmly estab lished at Kinneret, Khirbet Kerak/Beth-Yerah, Megiddo, Betii-Shean, Tell el-Far'ah (North), Jericho, Tell eshSheikh Ahmed el-'Areini, and Arad, as well as at other locations. The transition to fortified cities was based on local development and was not die result of foreign influences. [See Betii-Yerah; Megiddo; Beth-Shean; Far'ah, Tell el(North); Arad.] Some cities, such as Hazor and Betii-Shemesh, were founded on previously unsettled territory. [See Hazor; Beth-Shemesh.] Others, such as Tell el-Far'ah (North) and Arad, were abandoned again by the end of the period. However, in EB III (2650-2350 BCE) new cities were also founded in some places, such as Ai, Khirbet Yarmuk, Tell el-Khuweilifeh, Tell el-Hesi, Tell Beit Mirsim, and Khirbet ez-Zeraqun. [See Ai; Hesi, Tell el-; Beit Mirsim, Tell; Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-.] None of the EB cities survived die collapse of urban life that took place during die second half of die tiiird millennium. The large size of some of the EB cities is striking: Kliirbet Kerak, Khirbet Yarmuk, and Tell esh-Sheikh Ahmed el'Areini covered an area of 25 ha (62 acres) or more. Some what smaller cities include Aphek (12 ha, or 30 acres); Ai (11 ha, or 27 acres); Arad (10 ha, or 25 acres); and Megiddo (6 ha, or 15 acres). [See Aphek.] Like the settlements tiiat preceded them, the cities generally lay in the vicinity of wa ter sources on the plains or on hilltops. However, even slop ing terrain could be settled, as at Kinneret, Ai, Khirbet ezZeraqun, and Arad. T h e fortifications varied considerably in tiieir means of construction. In some cases, mud-brick walls 2-6 m thick were erected on stone foundations, from which semicircular or quadrangular towers projected. In other cases, the walls were brought to a width of 8-10 m and more when parallel segments were joined; occasionally, the walls were also protected by a glacis. Openings in the city wall were secured by flanking towers, but a separate gate construction had not yet developed. Numerous posterns in the wall and in the towers provided additional entrances. [See Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages.] In domestic construction the dominant model was the broadroom house, already widely disseminated in die fourth millennium. The single-room basic form could be expanded by extensions and additional rooms, which resulted in farm steadlike entities that were enclosed by a surrounding wall. The process of subdividing and joining rooms created multiroomed houses and shifted the entrance to die narrow side. Haphazard construction resulted in haphazard streets that occasionally broadened into small squares.
CITIES: Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages
CITIES: Bronze and Iron Ages. Plan of Megiddo. V. Fritz)
T h e basic house form was also adopted for public con struction; the broadroom temple received an antechamber, however, as the excavated examples show at Megiddo, Ai, Khirbet Yarmuk, and Khirbet ez-Zeraqun. Temples with courtyard altars and subsidiary buildings usually formed a separate cult precinct, which at Ai and Khirbet ez-Zeraqun lay on the highest point of the city. The only EB III palace thus far discovered is at Megiddo, probably depending on foreign influence; like the temple precincts, it was separated from the rest of the city by an enclosure wall. In contrast to domestic construction, the palace was well laid out in groups of rooms accessible from corridors. T h e ground plan of the palace did not develop from the local types; rather, it is pre sumed to have been adopted from Mesopotamia. Still, al though EB temples and palaces occupied their own districts next to the residential areas, these buildings did not have the spatial dominance characteristic of cities in Mesopotamia. Overall, during EB II and III urbanization was at a very basic level of development. Only the very beginnings of or
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City of stratum IVB, ninth century BCE. (Courtesy
derly layout and construction are recognizable, and social differentiation is expressed only slightly in architecture, given the limitations of the broadroom house type; large buildings occur rarely. T h e defense systems show a great concentration of effort, even though gate construction was not developed. The palace at Megiddo implies the existence of centralized rule and political hierarchy, which can be as sumed for the other cities as well. In spite of tiieir predominantly agrarian character, EB cit ies did not exist in isolation. Agriculture certainly formed their economic foundation; nevertheless, assorted finds point to extensive interregional and intraregional connec tions. Copper weapons and tools presuppose an intensive trade with the deposit sites in Feinan on the eastern side of the 'Arabah. [See Feinan.] T h e presence of various pottery forms as well as die use of cylinder seals and stamps on vessels indicate connections witii Mesopotamia and Egypt. [See Seals.] In addition, pieces of imported Palestinian pot tery found in Old Kingdom graves prove the existence of
22
CITIES: Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages
trade relations with Egypt. Although writing had not yet been invented in this region, the administration of the cities functioned. It is not known why the cities at the end of EB III were abandoned, but in the period that immediately fol lowed, urban culture was virtually nonexistent. Middle-Late Bronze Age. The reemergence of urban ization at the beginning of the second millennium bears die stamp of a new culture, witii no connection to that of EB II and III. Because this culture seems fully formed at its in ception in MB IIA (1950-1750 BCE), it may not have devel oped locally—it may have been introduced by outsiders, by new immigrants. The majority of the cities, most of which were extraordinarily large, were erected in two waves in die twentieth and die eighteendi centuries BCE. The Old EB hill top sites of Dan, Hazor, Megiddo, Shechem, Aphek, Gezer, and Jericho were newly fortified, and previously unoccupied sites were settied, as at Akko, Bethel, and Yavneh-Yam. [See Dan; Hazor; Shechem; Gezer; Akko; Yavneh-Yam.] Only occasionally did an unfortified settlement precede die for tified city, as at Shechem and Gezer. The M B - L B cities surpassed the EB cities in size. Megiddo reached 10 ha (25 acres), while Dan and Akko covered a surface of about 20 ha (49 acres). T h e largest cities, such as Ashkelon and Kabri, were built on about 60 ha (148 acres); Hazor was built on 80 ha (198 acres).
The hallmark of die M B - L B cities is their massive forti fications: in addition to the freestanding wall, which had al ready existed in EB II and III, innovative earthen ramparts were constructed that, including the defensive wall on top of diem, could reach heights of up to 12 m. At Hazor and Yavneh-Yam these wall systems are still visible in the land scape; at Dan, Akko, and many other places they were col lapsed and eroded into massive mounds of ruins. Parallel to new techniques to strengthen the city's fortifications was the development of the gate structure as an independent com ponent of die wall system. Various gate forms developed from the basic idea of towers flanking an entryway. Witiiin die city wall, temples and palaces generally oc cupied a considerable amount of space. In domestic consttuction a previously unknown form, the courtyard house, appeared (see above). Its hallmark is the arrangement of rooms around a centrally positioned open space that can be bordered on two, three, or four sides by rooms of different sizes. In the process, an attempt was frequently made to establish an approximately square ground plan. With die addition of more rows of rooms, the domestic unit could grow significantly. Because the courtyard provided lighting and ventilation for the rooms, several houses could be con tained in individual blocks (the so-called insulae). In each city there was at least one palace as a residence
CITIES: Bronze and Iron Ages. Plan of Tell es-Seba' (Beersheba). City of stratum II, eighth century BCE. (Courtesy V. Fritz)
CITIES: Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages
for the local ruler. A common characteristic of all palaces is the central inner courtyard, around which the rooms were arranged as in the courtyard house. T o expand, two rows of rooms could be laid out one behind the other, or the num ber of inner courtyards could be increased. Akhough large palace complexes have been uncovered at Hazor, Shechem, Megiddo, Aphek, and Lachish, identifying the functions of tiieir spatial components has so far not been possible. [See Lachish.] In temple construction, a new form, the longroom temple, with its entrance on the narrow side, appeared in wide distribution. The type, adopted from a Syrian pro totype, was sometimes modified, as at Shechem and M e giddo, by the addition of flanking towers. Other temple forms were also used. In the course of the millennium, although virtually all the cities were destroyed several times and subsequently rebuilt, their essential elements were maintained. Their complex layout is evidence of a complex social organization: reflec tions of its defense, domestic life, religious practices, and political feattires are all visible. Because the city needed commodities from the surrounding countryside, it estab lished control over its hinterland, which presumably con sisted of farmsteads and villages. Most of the inhabitants of the city were peasant farmers. Its other inhabitants included
23
the ruling family and the political elite, artisans, merchants, and sacral personnel. In all respects, the MB II city repre sents a highly developed culture. Urban culture entered a decline during the Late Bronze Age: the size of cities as well as their number decreased, and the strength of their fortifications diminished. After 1200 BCE, numerous cities were destroyed and not rebuilt. Even at sites such as Megiddo, which were still inhabited in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE, there are signs of a clear break in the material culture, which no longer bears an urban stamp. Explanation for this gradual disappearance of the urban centers in the course of several decades of the twelfth century are still being debated by scholars. Among the pos sibilities are the invasion of the Sea Peoples, internal con flicts, the end of Egyptian hegemony under the later Ramessides, the collapse of trade with the Mycenaean world, and changes in the natural environment. Some combination of these factors is likely. Iron Age Palestine. In about 1150 BCE the urban culture that had existed since the beginning of the second millen nium disappeared from history. Subsequent occupation preserved isolated elements in some places, but the hallmark of the new nonurbanized period was the founding of nu merous small settlements, villagelike in character, outside
24
CITIES: Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages
the territory of the former city-states. It was not until the Israelite kingdom was established in the tenth century BCE, that a reurbanization began within the boundaries of the ter ritorial state. For the royal period the city became the sole settlement form. In that period generally, new cities were founded on the sites of former Bronze Age cities, although occasionally, as at Beersheba, a city could be placed on top of a former settlement from Iron I. [See Beersheba.] The hill-country sites, however, offered the necessary prerequi sites for survival with respect to food supply, water sources, and defense. With this reoccupation of the old settlement sites, an urban tradition can be seen, despite differences in the size and layout of the newly founded cities compared to the Bronze Age cities. The most important element of the Iron Age city was its fortifications. Because all the cities were then under the aegis of a central government, large buildings such as temples and palaces generally declined in significance. Even with some local governance, the Israelite city was subject to the mon archy. The city was thus no longer an independent political entity but was part of a state. The city's agrarian economy meant that its inhabitants were peasants who worked the lands around it. The city's most important function became the protection of its inhabitants. Iron Age urbanization was the product of a new political situation, not the result of a developmental process. Presum ably the establishment of the city was related to the military and administrative demands of the emergent nation-state. Contemporaneous with the spread of the cities, an increase in the population can be seen: on the average, cities were relatively small, with an area of 3 - 5 ha ( 7 - 1 2 acres), the population varied from a few hundred up to two thousand adult inhabitants. On the basis of tiieir spatial organization, the cities excavated so far can be divided into three groups. 1. Residential cities. No form of planning is apparent in residential cities, and as a result their streets form a maze. As in the pre-nation-state villages, the houses are crowded ad hoc within the circuit of the walls. There are no public buildings and a single gate provides access, as, for example at Tell en-Nasbeh (Mispe) and Tell Beit Mirsim. [See Nasbeh, Tell en-.] 2. Cities with limited administrative or military functions. Unlike residential cities, cities with limited administrative or military functions are exemplified by careful planning throughout (e.g., stratum II at Kinneret, stratum II at Beer sheba, and stratum VA at Megiddo, even though it lacks an ordered pattern for its streets). A number of pillared houses that served as public buildings appear in the immediate vi cinity of the city gate. Residential houses were arranged in rows or in blocks, and the streets either ran parallel to the city wall or were laid out in straight lines and led into an open area in front of the gate. Although the largest portion of the city's total area was taken up by residential buildings.
the city presumably served a broader military or administtative function. 3. Administrative or military centers. T h e development of the city as an administrative or military center appears to have first taken place following the Divided Monarchy, when the demands on and possibilities of the kingdom in creased. Buildings with a public function predominated, al though a certain number of residential buildings have been excavated (e.g., Lachish strata IV-II, Megiddo stratum IVB). At Lachish a large palace and its subsidiary buildings occupy the center of the site. If this complex was indeed the official residence of a regional governor, Lachish could be described as the earliest provincial capital. At Megiddo sev eral complexes of pillared houses, which may be related to military provisioning, and a palace occupy the largest amount of space. Because troops may have been stationed there, Megiddo may have been a garrison city. Similar ar rangements can be assumed for the kingdom's capital cities, Jerusalem and Samaria. In Jerusalem Solomon's royal palace and the Temple and its subsidiary buildings were all in the northern part of the city. [See Jerusalem.] In Samaria the palace formed an independent complex with its own sur rounding wall in the center of the city. [See Samaria.] The early Israelite city was therefore not a uniform entity; its divisions were structured by function—by different eco nomic and political concepts. The three types of city appear in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. It is not yet known whether they already existed in this form during the United Monarchy in the tenth century BCE. In spite of their differ ences, the three types of cities share characteristics: a more or less strongly pronounced oval configuration linked to their strategic siting on a tell or a hilltop (cities on a slope, such as Kinneret stratum V, are the exception); a strong circumvallation system, which included massive walls, case mate walls, inset/outset walls, towers projecting from a linear wall; egress and exit through a single gate, which, in the absence of other structures, served civil and defensive func tions and could be expanded to a massive building with up to six chambers; and predominating domestic construction (the Israelite pillared house, the three-room house, and the four-room house). [See Four-room House.] A number of cities, such as Jerusalem, Meggido, and Hazor, had their own water systems, which represent not only significant technical achievements but a strong social organization. [See Water Tunnels.] Many of the cities founded after the beginning of the mo narchic period show systematic planning. Only a state with the desire to expand must factor in the need for defense and take corresponding protective measures. Iron II urbaniza tion in Israel, in that it coincided with the formation of the state, was integrally related to political concerns. The settle ment was placed within a circumvallation expressly to pro vide security for its inhabitants in time of war. T h e technical
CITIES: Cities of the Persian Period execution of this arrangement was adapted to the country's construction traditions and topography. Almost all of these cities were destroyed either during the Assyrian conquest in the second half of the eighth century BCE or in the Neo-Babylonian campaigns at the beginning of the sixth century BCE; they were never rebuilt. The more than two-thousand-year-old continuity of urban construc tion in the hill country came to an end with the termination of monarchic rule. T h e few settlements assigned to the end of the Judean monarchy generally lie outside the area of old settlement sites. With the conquest by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the development of cities in the southern Le vant was brought to an abrupt end. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert McC. The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopota mia and Prehistoric Mexico. Chicago, 1 9 7 1 . Amiran, Ruth. "The Beginning of Urbanization in Canaan." In Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nel son Glueck, edited by James A. Sanders, pp. 83-100. Garden City, N.Y., 1970. Barghouti, Asem N. "Urbanization of Palestine and Jordan in Helle nistic and Roman Times." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 209-229. Amman, 1982, Frick, Frank S. The City in Ancient. Israel. Missoula, 1977. Fritz, Volkmar. Die Stadl im alien Israel. Munich, 1990. Hammond, Mason. The City in the Ancient World. Cambridge, Mass., 1972Herzog, Ze'ev. "Israelite City Planning Seen in the Light of the BeerSheba and Arad Excavations." Expedition 20 (1978): 38-43. Kempinski, Aharon. The Rise of an Urban Culture: The Urbanization of Palestine in the Early Bronze Age. Jerusalem, 1978. Mellaart, James. The Neolithic of the Near East. London, 1975. Shiloh, Yigal. "Elements in the Development of Town Planning in die Israelite City." Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978): 3 6 - 5 1 . Tcherikover, Avigdor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. Philadel phia, 1966. Ucko, Peter, et al., eds. Man, Settlement, and Urbanism. Cambridge, Mass., 1972. VOLKMAR FRITZ Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
Cities of the P e r s i a n P e r i o d Although a large number of sites in Palestine were settled in the Persian period (538-332 BCE), too few remains have been uncovered and insufficient evidence preserved to allow us to reconstruct city plans. T h e poverty of architectural remains is surprising, for this is a relatively late period, in which, in Persia and Greece, a high standard of building was reached. The scarcity of finds is considered by some schol ars to be a result of the widespread destruction in Palestine at the end of the First Temple period. Carl Watzinger main tained that town life in Judah ceased entirely in the Persian period, a view William Foxwell Albright accepted, noting that the results of excavations indicated that the resettlement
25
of Judah was a slow process, and it was not until the third century BCE that the country recovered anything like its old density of population. Kathleen M. Kenyon, in her general discussion of this period, speaks of the decline in town life in Palestine and the concentration of the population in vil lages. As evidence, she cites both the Persian-period stratum at Tell en-Nasbeh, in which rich finds were discovered with out building remains, and the situation at Samaria, where a densely populated urban area was converted into a garden for the Persian governor. However, these theories reflect less the actual situation at that time than the fragmented re mains. Three characteristic features of Persian-period strata have contributed to the archaeological picture and the disappoint ing results from the excavations at the large mounds: (1) after the Persian period, numerous mounds were abandoned and never resettled (e.g., Megiddo, Tell el-Hesi, and Jericho, among others), and because the sttatum from this period was the topmost on the site, it was exposed to the dangers of denudation; (2) at those sites where settlement continued (at Samaria, Shechem, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Ramat Rahel, for example), the Persian-period level of occupation was severely damaged by intensive building activities in the Hellenistic-Roman period; and (3) at most of the large sites excavated (such as Hazor, Megiddo, Tell Jemmeh, Tel Sera', Lachish, and Tell el-Far ah [South]), the mound was largely occupied by a palace-fort or other large building. City Planning. Surveys and excavations of Persian-pe riod settlements throughout Palestine reveal that the coastal plain and perhaps Galilee were very densely populated, while a full account of the cities in the mountain region is yet to be made. The contemporary Greek historian Herod otus describes Gaza as "not inferior to Sardis" ( 3 . 5 ) . Indeed, architectural remains in Gaza reveal several examples of well-planned settlements. Outside Palestine, most cities were built according to the Hippodamic plan (principles of town planning developed by Hippodamus of Miletus in Asia Minor, in the fifth cen tury BCE). T h e plan divides residential areas into symmet rical blocks, separated by streets that cross each other at right angles. Different functions were assigned to different parts of the town: residential, public, cultic, and recreational (for sport). A fine example of the classic Hippodamic plan is Olynthos, in Macedonia. There are also examples of well-planned towns along the coast of Palestine, such as at Akko. In the latest city at Tell Abu Hawam, the front of a building was uncovered facing a main road that ran roughly parallel to the city's longitu dinal axis. At Shiqmona, a residential quarter consisting of two streets set at right angles to one another contained houses built with considerable symmetry. A similar discov ery was made in the excavations at neighboring Tel Megadim, where a quarter was found to be intersected by a broad, c
26
CITIES: Cities of the Persian Period
straight thoroughfare. The large blocks of buildings flanking the road were separated by lanes that crossed the main road at right angles. T h e houses themselves were divided into a number of smaller units with a similar plan. Along the south ern coast, excavations at Jaffa and Tell el-Hesi have revealed a similar well-planned Persian-period sttatum. The recent large-scale excavations at Dor have uncovered another coastal town in which all the strata and remains from the Persian period were strictly laid out according to the Hippodamic plan. Dor's residential quarter is the finest and best-preserved example of Hippodamic planning yet found in Palestine. Its closest parallel is Olynthos. T h e picture emerging at Dor is that a row of stores and workshops stood along the length of the inner face of the Persian-period city wall. The doors of the shops opened onto a ruler-straight street running parallel to the north-south wall. On the op posite side of the street, whose width is about 2 m, is a fine facade belonging to a long, narrow residential block of build ings. The eastern door of each unit in the row opens onto the street opposite the row of shops. The building is about 20 m wide. Its western side, which faces a street that runs parallel to one on its east, was also uncovered. This elon gated block of buildings, preserved to a height of more than 2 m and traced for a length of dozens of meters, was prob ably crossed by passages leading from one street to the other, but these seem to fall outside the areas excavated so far. Another, identical, building or block of houses existed to the west of this second street. Partition walls divided the block by length and width into small units, or "apartments," whose doors opened, in each case, onto the closest street. In one or two places there are traces of basements. It seems also that tire easternmost street, between the residences and the stores, was originally roofed, to provide shelter for pe destrians. Based on the finds, the latter structures were in use throughout the Persian and Hellenistic periods. There is no indication of violent destruction, but rebuilding took place periodically. With each reconstruction the floor was raised, which resulted in as many as two Persian and three Helle nistic floor levels: the openings were blocked and the walls rebuilt on a higher level. Thus, from one phase to the next, the inner divisions of the building and the function of its rooms varied; for example, in one stage, two small plastered water reservoirs were added. However, none of the altera tions affected the external walls. Many coins were found on the different floors, as well as stamped handles from Greek wine amphorae, especially from Rhodes and Knidos, that yielded reliable dates for the building stages. T h e outer walls of the building were constructed in the style of the period, mostly of well-hewn, hard sandstone ashlars laid in headers. The inner walls and divisions, however, were built in typical Phoenician style: ashlar piers with a rubble fill. The surprising feature of these plans is that, while the town plan of Olynthos seems to belong to the fourth century
BCE—after the time of Hippodamus—Dor was probably laid out in its earliest form in the late sixth century BCE. Dor may thus have served as one of the models from which Hippo damus developed his theories. Domestic Architecture in Palestine. Remains of houses as well as fortresses and public buildings have been uncovered at Ayyelet ha-Shahar, Hazor, Megiddo, Akko, Gil'am, Tell Abu Hawam, Shiqmona, Tel Megadim, Dor, Tel Mevorakh, Tel Michal, Tell Qasile, Tell el-Ful, Lachish, Tell el-Hesi, Ashdod (fortress north of Ashdod), Tell Jemmeh, Tell el-Far ah (South), Tel Sera', 'Ein-Gedi, Tell esSa'idiyeh, and elsewhere. The plan of these structures in dicates that design and construction in the Persian period were surprisingly uniform, whether buildings were private or public. T h e plan, known as the open-court plan, features an open court surrounded by rooms on several or all sides. T h e one exception is the Residency at Lachish, which, in addition to an open court, also has two monumental en trances flanked by two columns, typical of the hilani type. There is no scholarly consensus on the origin of the two building types. 1
Open-Court Plan. W. F. Petrie sought parallels for tire fortress he discovered at Tell Jemmeh and in the two for tresses he had excavated earlier at Daphnae and Naukratis in Egypt. Unfortunately, the data were inadequate for dat ing. Carl Watzinger accepted Petrie's chronology but re jected his correlation with the Egyptian fortresses, maintain ing that fortress A at Tell Jemmeh derived from a Babylonian or an Assyrian source. When similar buildings were subsequently discovered at Megiddo, particularly the fortress and building 736, its excavators, Robert S. Lamon and Geoffrey M. Shipton, recognized the similarity between Building 736 and the earlier open-court buildings at the site, such as buildings 1052 and 1369. They made the compari son with the Residency at Lachish, but their conclusions were too general to be useful. Later assessments usually agree on a Mesopotamian source, either Babylonian or As syrian (Shmuel Yeivin; Amiran and Dunayevsky, 1958). Ruth Amiran and Immanuel Dunayevsky, after a compre hensive typological analysis of examples from Palestine, Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia, concluded that this type of open-court building was Assyrian and reached Palestine as Assyria's influence spread. Their distinction between an "Assyrian plan," which has rooms flanking the court on all sides, and a "Persian plan," which has rooms only on three sides, may be too fine. The excavators of Megiddo, for ex ample, stated that their fortress may very well have had a fourth row of rooms but that, built so close to the edge, it slid down the slope. This may also have been the case for their building 736, which lacked rooms on the fourth side, perhaps lost to a trench dug by Gottlieb Schumacher that damaged the building on that side. A survey of the plans of. the open-court buildings from the Persian period discussed by Amiran and Dunayevsky
CITIES: Cities of the Persian Period and those discovered later reveals that although the basic layout is retained, it is not always uniform. In the Persian period, as in the Iron Age, the arrangement of rooms around a court took on different forms. At Hazor, the rooms of the fortress and the farmhouse enclosed the four sides of the court, a layout also found at Tell el-Hesi in F. J. Bliss's city VII and in phase 5d of the recent excavations; at Tell Jem meh in building B; at Tell Sera' in area D , stratum V; in die fortress recendy discovered north of Ashdod; and in the for tresses at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh. T h e courts are surrounded on only diree sides in area A at Akko, at Tell Qasile, and in building A at Tell Jemmeh. In some instances, die grouping of rooms varies from place to place (Shiqmona, Tel M e vorakh, Lachish building G / 1 2 / 1 3 , and Ein-Gedi building 234); in others, it is impossible to ascertain (Ayyelet ha-Shahar, the stratum I buildings at Megiddo, Gil'am, Tell Abu Hawam, Tel Megadim, Ashdod, Tell el-Hesi, and Tell elFar'ah (South), although all the available evidence points to a central court enclosed by rooms. It seems reasonable, nonedieless, to conclude that the open-court plan was intro duced into Palestine at the end of the Assyrian period and continued without modification into die Babylonian and Persian periods. c
Lachish Residency. Of all the buildings in Palestine at tributed by their excavators to the Persian period, only die palace at Lachish deviates in construction from the rest. T h e main distinction is the two Mara'-type entrances, not found elsewhere in Palestine. Olga Tufnell (in her final report of Lachish) concurred witii Watzinger's earlier interpretation of die building as "Syro-Hittite." Like Watzinger, she en countered difficulties locating appropriate parallels. T h e closest she found is the palace of die Assyrian governor at Arslan Tash (whose plan it in no way resembles). Finding examples similar to the Lachish Residency led Albright to a strained comparison to early Parthian palaces, such as the small palace at Nippur in Babylon. Yohanan Aliaroni's as sessment of the plan of the Residency as a combination of a Syrian hilani building and an Assyrian open-court house accurately conveys its essence, which is a fusion of two dis tinct building styles. Moreover, architectural fusion is a characteristic of provincial Persian palaces. The Lachish Residency therefore clearly seems to have been constructed under Achaemenid influence. T h e reason for its unique ap pearance among the buildings of die Persian period in Pal estine may be tiiat it is die only building that can be inter preted with certainty as a palace; die others may have served different purposes. [See Lachish.] T h e Fortifications. Defensive walls assigned by their ex cavators to the Persian period have also been uncovered at Akko, Tell Abu Hawam, Megiddo, Gil'am, Tel Megadim, Tel Mevorakh, Jaffa, and Tell el-Hesi. These towns are on the coast and in the Shephelah, the region between the coast and the Judean hills. Remains of other walls have been cleared at Samaria, Jerusalem, Tell en-Nasbeh, and Lachish,
27
as well as at Rabbat Amnion and Heshbon in Transjordan. In the Late Persian period, many city walls were demolished and replaced by smaller fortresses: at Hazor, Megiddo, Dor, Tell Qasile, Tell Jemmeh, Tel Sera', Tell el-Hesi, Ashdod, and Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, for example. At Tell Abu Hawam, a wall was discovered surrounding phase B of stratum II on the south and east. It was built in small sections—each of which stood at a slightly different angle—of fieldstones, with ashlars added for reinforcement at each of its turns. Anotiier small segment of this wall was discovered on the west side of the site. A very similar multiangled wall was also found at Gil'am belonging to die site's second phase of the Persian-period settlement (fourth cen tury BCE). The wall, which enclosed a rectangular area 100 X 200 m, consisted of two faces of worked or otherwise welldressed stones taken from the preceding settlement. Be tween the two faces was a fill of fieldstones. Two segments of this wall, each about 30 m long, were uncovered, one on the east and the other on the north. T h e settiement at Tel Megadim was also defended by a wall that enclosed a rectangular area of about 15 dunams (approximately 4 acres). It was built of bricks on a stone foundation. Three sections of the wall have been uncovered so far: about 170 m on the west, about 100 m on die nortii, and 20 m on the south. This was a typical casemate wall, whose outer and inner walls were divided into rooms that served as dwellings and storerooms. It was apparendy erected in stratum III and may have been in use in stratum I. A similar casemate wall was uncovered at Tel Mevorakh in stratum IV (fourth century BCE). T h e Persian settiement at Tell Abu Zeitun was fortified with a brick wall only in its last phase, according to its excavator, Jacob Kaplan. Stratum II at Jaffa, which Kaplan assigned to the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourtii centuries BCE, was also enclosed by a city wall. One section, about 12 m long and 2.5 m wide, discovered on the east side of the city, was built of well-dressed local sandstone. The stones were shaped like bricks lying on tiieir sides and were set perpendicular to the wall, like headers. At set intervals titey were strengthened by piers of stretchers. At Tell el-Hesi, the remains of a wall that enclosed botii the early and the later phases of the city were found. According to Bliss, its excavator, the north sides of the buildings of city VII (500-400 BCE) leaned against the city wall. This wall continued in use in city VIII (400-332 BCE), during which time it was broadened and sttengthened. At Sheikh Zuweid, according to Petrie, city F, which he dated to 497-362 BCE, was enclosed by a thick wall on die west. It was a continuation and repair of the previous wall of city G. It is difficult, however, to establish die true date of the various strata from Bliss's excavation report, leaving the chronology in doubt. The second group of defense walls from the Persian pe riod in Palestine comes from the cities of Judah. In Jerusa lem, Kenyon in her excavations (1961-1967) on the crest of
28
CITIES: Cities of the Persian Period
the eastern hill, discovered a fragment of the city wall from the Persian period (which she called Nehemiah's wall) erected on high bedrock. She found settlement levels from the fifth-fourth centuries BCE against it (to which a large tower had been added in the Hasmonean period). Jerusalem in the Persian period had therefore been confined to a nar row strip on the summit of the eastern hill. In Kenyon's opinion, the "Valley Gate," or western gate, uncovered by J. W. Crowfoot, also belonged to the fortifications of that city. The walls were built of large, worked stones whose in terstices were filled with smaller stones, a method of con struction considered by the excavator to parallel that of the Valley Gate. At Tell en-Nasbeh, Joseph Wampler assigned a small wall erected outside the large Iron Age city wall to the later phase of stratum I. He interpreted this wall as a modification of the city's defenses which took place after the destruction of the large (previous) wall. Wampler dated this wall to 575-450 BCE. Clearer remains of Persian-period city fortifications were uncovered at Lachish, where their date parallels that of the Residency (450-350 BCE). Aside from the area of the city gate, which will be discussed subsequently, remains of a wall assigned to stratum I were discovered above the lower wall of the First Temple period. A section of wall investigated was constructed above a 2-m layer of collapsed debris that had piled up after the destruction of the last wall of the First Temple period (stratum II). The upper courses were of worked stones, most of them taken from earlier buildings. The spaces between the stones were filled with clay or small stones. One section of this wall cleared in square E-19 was constructed of fieldstones. The wall was built at a right angle to the road and blocked direct access to the outer gates. The main upper city wall (on the summit of the mound) was built above the course of the stratum II wall. Two sections of this wall were uncovered flanking the gate; in comparison with the previous wall, they were badly constructed. These meager data suggest that the towns in the Judean hills were also fortified, albeit poorly, in the Persian period. [See Ju dah.] Towns in Transjordan were also fortified at this time, as is evidenced by recent excavations at Heshbon. A stone wall, 1.10 m thick and preserved to a height of 3-5 m, has been assigned by its excavators to the Persian period. T h e wall defended the acropolis. Remains of a tower and perhaps also the beginning of a gate were discovered on the eastern side of the excavated area. It recently became clear that the for tresses encircling Rabbat Ammon definitely continue into the Persian period. Throughout most of the Persian period, Dor's fortifica tions were the last Iron Age city wall, actually the "Assyrian" wall, with insets and offsets and a two-chambered inner gate. The wall protected the city for the length of time it was a provincial capital: at first of an Assyrian, then of a Babylo nian, and finally of a Persian province. It seems that this was
also the case at Megiddo. T h e massive and sophisticated fortification system at Dor was destroyed under Ptolemy II, when the great Phoenician revolt against Persian rule was suppressed in the mid-fourth century BCE. Judging from the archaeological evidence revealed in the excavations, a new fortification system was built at Dor very shortly after, in the late Persian period. A significant feature of this fortification system is its method of construction: it is clear that the Phoenician build ing tradition was still alive in Palestine in the mid-fourth century BCE. T h e outer wall and all of the inner dividing walls were built in its characteristic style: ashlar piers built of headers and stretchers—one stone laid lengthwise and two widthwise across the pier, with a fieldstone fill. As far as we know, all the city walls of coastal Palestine and Phoe nicia were built in this way from the tenth to the ninth cen turies BCE, as seen at Megiddo and Tyre, down to the third century BCE, at Dor and Jaffa and elsewhere along the coast. T h e gate of the wall at Dor has not yet been cleaned. Some parts of this Phoenician wall have been preserved to a height of more than 2 m and are among the most impressive ex amples of their kind yet found in Palestine. In the third century BCE, when this last "Phoenician" wall from the fourth century, together with its adjacent buildings, was apparently still standing, the city received a new forti fication system. This time the wall was built in the Greek style previously encountered only rarely in Palestine (in par ticular at Samaria, Akko, and Mareshah [Marisa], which had become Greek settlements at the very beginning of the Mac edonian conquest). This new wall was built entirely of large, thick rectangular blocks of sandstone (about 1 m long), most of them laid in headers facing the exterior. T h e relative flexibility of sand stone and its ability to receive blows without breaking en abled the blocks to withstand the advanced siege machines of the period. It was a massive construction, about 2 m thick, whose foundations cut through all the preceding walls on its eastern side. Square towers, set about 30 m apart and built in the same style, projected beyond the wall. Two of these towers have been uncovered so far, the earliest examples of their type in Palestine. The new wall's distinctive style and towers are unmistakably Greek innovations. The change at Dor from fortifications built in the Phoe nician style to those in the Greek style represents the final stage in the transformation of the Palestinian city from a largely "oriental" city to a Hellenistic one—a process begun much earlier. With this change in the walls, the gates of the eastern tradition, such as those at Megiddo and Dor, were replaced by purely Greek-style gates. These changes were certainly the result of the introduction of the new Greek siege weapons, such as the ballista, as has recently been shown by Ilan Sharon (1991). The picture that emerges in Ilan Sharon's discussion of Dor's fortifications and tiieir resemblance to those at nearby
CITIES: Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Megiddo makes it necessary to reevaluate the latter's forti fications. Scholars have long accepted that the Assyrians es tablished stratum III at Megiddo, rebuilding the offset-inset wall and constructing the two-chambered gate. The findings at Dor will now enable the exact date of the destruction of that advanced system of fortifications at Megiddo to be fixed. Persian-period remains at Megiddo consisted of three complexes. T h e third complex, in area D , was interpreted by Ephraim Stern as the entrance gate of the city and dated to stratum I. It includes a building in the north, near the gates from the Israelite period. T h e building stands some what south of these Iron Age gates. Its two parallel rectan gular rooms (nos. 603 and 604) are constructed at a distance from each other and are oriented in a line with the Israelite gate. Two other structures near the "gate" are also attrib uted to the Persian period: a complex of three rooms (nos. 634-635, 576), which is joined by wall 1045 and with it con stitutes a separate fortified area; and another complex of rooms (nos. 1346-1348). These two complexes have been interpreted as the barrack of the garrison force. T h e wall, gate, and settlement at Megiddo were destroyed in about 350 BCE by the Persian army during the Phoenician revolt. Thus, at both Dor and Megiddo, a two-chambered gate and offset-inset wall existed from the time of the As syrian conquest to the mid-fourth century BCE. The fortress in area C at Megiddo was built above the offset-inset wall, replacing it, and was the only fortification on the site. Built after the rebellion, this fortification was in place until the city's final destruction by the Greek army and its abandon ment in 332 BCE. T h e phase at Dor contemporaneous with the fortress at Megiddo contains the "casemate wall," or more precisely, the row of houses that formed a wall around the periphery of the city. These too were built after the destruction of the offset-inset wall in approximately 350 BCE and were later replaced by a solid Hellenistic wall erected by Ptolemy II. It is possible that the Persians—after their bitter experience with the Phoenician rebellion—refused to permit strongly fortified settlements. This may be why so many fifth- and especially fourtii-century BCE Palestinian sites have no city walls and small fortresses. For example, at Hazor (strata I I I II), the date of fortress III could not be established because it yielded no datable remains. T h e date of fortress II was fixed by coins to the late fourth century BCE, specifically to the reign of Artaxerxes III (359/8-338/7 BCE). Destroyed during the conquest of Alexander the Great, that fortress also existed only during the last phase of the Persian period, exactly as at Megiddo and Dor. Fortresses with a similar plan, dating to the same period, have been found at other sites—at Tel Michal, Tell Qasile, Ashdod, Tell Jemmeh, Tell el-Hesi, Tel Sera , and Tell esSa'idiyeh among them. T h e poverty of the remains of Pal estinian fortifications from the Persian period provides us c
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with only the barest hint of the period's construction prac tices. What is clear is that the major towns of Palestine in the Persian period were either thoroughly fortified or de fended only by fortresses. This can be deduced both from the historical sources and from what is known of the siege techniques of the period, such as those described by the Greek historian Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War. [See also Dor; and Furniture and Furnishings, article on Furnishings of the Persian Period. In addition, many of the other sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries^ BIBLIOGRAPHY Amiran, Ruth, and Immanuel Dunayevsky. "The Assyrian OpenCourt Building and Its Derivations." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 144 (1958): 2 5 - 3 2 . Sharon, Ilan. "Phoenician and Greek Ashlar Construction Techniques at Tel Dor, Israel," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 267 (August 1987): 2 1 - 4 2 . Sharon, Ilan. "The Fortifications of Dor and the Transition from the Israelite-Syrian Concept of Defense to the Greek Concept" (in He brew). Qadmoniot 24 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 0 5 - 1 1 3 . Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. Covers the architecture of Palestine in the Persian period (pp. 1-67), Stern, Ephraim. "The Walls of Dor." Israel Exploration Journal 38.1 (1988): 6 - 1 4 . Stern, Ephraim. Dor, the Ruler of the Seas: Twelve Years of Excavations at the Israelite-Phoenician Harbor Town on the Carmel Coast. Jerusa lem, 1994. Discussion of the introduction of Hippodamic city plan ning in the Levant. EPHKAIM STERN
Cities of the Hellenistic and R o m a n Periods Unlike the Mesopotamian temple-cities that emerged in about 2700 BCE whose view of the world was sacral and which were controlled by a priestly caste, the earliest forms of the Greek cities show signs of competing forms of preurban social arrangements—aristocratic warlords, status, property, and kin groups. A radical reorganization in the emerging polis was called for, by which arete, or courage, as the supreme value, was transformed into loyalty to the city and its institutions. Religious commitment played an essential role in terms of devotion to the patron god or god dess, bequeather of the constitution which bound all to gether. From its very inception, therefore, the Greek city fostered a more independent character, furdier developed in the clas sical period as various forms of government—monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic, and democratic—established them selves successively between 800 and 400 BCE. The political circumstances of Greece's wars with Persia had led to the formation of various intercity leagues in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, while leaving intact those institutions that had developed, the hallmark of polis society—the demos, or peo ple, ekklesia, or "general assembly," and the boule, or coun-
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CITIES: Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
cil. These and other institutions had received theoretical underpining through the writings of Plato and Aristotle and hence became a permanent legacy of the Greek city to West ern civilization. In addition, certain architectural features had also emerged, distinct visual expressions symbolic of the city's self-understanding. Alexander is reputed to have established seventy cities, as his all-conquering campaign took him to the heart of the Persian Empire and beyond. Even if Plutarch's numbers are exaggerated and not all foundations were of equal splendor, the city of Alexandria demonstrates that for Alexander the Greek city had a cultural as well as a defensive or adminis trative role to play in his grand scheme. Natives were invited to join with Greek settlers to wed east and west into one great cosmopolis. New cities were established and older, Oriental ones were transformed from their hieratic and ar istocratic character in accordance with the Greek ideals. T h e typical institutions of the polis spread the Greek way of life, as can be seen from the many architectural remains, inscrip tions, and other signs of the Greek presence in the East. Despite his best intentions, Alexander initiated a subtle change in the role of the city, which was accentuated in suc ceeding centuries, first under the Hellenistic monarchies and later by Rome (Jones, 1971). T h e city was to become the instrument of empire and those aspects of its character that impeded this had to be adapted to meet the new agenda. Thus, the Ptolemies and Seleucids continued the policy of establishing new cities, upgrading older ones, or bringing about a synoecism of smaller settlements in their various territories. Some, such as Alexandria, Antioch on the Orontes, and Palmyra were to continue to flourish because of their political and/or strategic locations on the main trade routes between East and West. [See Alexandria, Antioch on Orontes; Palmyra.] Thus the increase in the commercial life of the city in the Hellenistic age, as new trade routes were opened and travel between cities was greatly developed, led to an increase in the ethnic mix within cities and to the es tablishment of separate quarters in some instances—as, for example, the Jewish quarter in Alexandria. Because cities were no longer fully free and autonomous but subordinate to monarchical rule, the democratic style of government was considerably curtailed. New elites of wealth emerged, fa vored by central administrations in a patron/client relation ship. This in turn meant architectural development, as local wealthy people vied with each other in honoring their patron in the form of public buildings or, as in the case of Herod the Great and his sons, actually founding cities in their honor (Samaria/Sebaste, Caesarea Maritima, Caesarea Philippi, Tiberias). [See Samaria; Caesarea; Tiberias.] Even external appearances were modified as the classical Greek style was blended with more ornate Oriental ones or made to conform to Roman conservative taste, for example, regarding nudity. These developments continued under the Romans, as they gradually replaced the Hellenistic monarchies from the
second century BCE onward (Stambaugh, 1988). The role of the cities then had less to do with the spread of culture than being administrative centers within the provincial system or being rewards for veterans of various campaigns through the founding of colonies. Older cities Rome had destroyed (Carthage, Corinth, Philippi) were reestablished by Julius Caesar. [See Carthage.] These colonies were closely tied to Rome, both politically and culturally, imitating Rome's sen atorial form of government and even its architecture: aq ueducts, bathhouses, and amphitheaters. [See Aqueducts; Baths.] In some instances their citizens were allowed to vote in Rome itself. Gradually, the right of Roman citizenship was extended to some provincials, thus replacing the privi lege of being a citizen of an individual city with the rights of citizenship of the mother of all cities (Acts 21:39, 22:38). Despite these close bonds with Rome, the provincial ad ministration remained intact, acting as a kind of watchdog at the regional level, on behalf of Rome (Sherwin-White, 1963). Cities allowed to mint their own coins, a mark of some independence, had to ensure that the coins bore em blems of Roman imperial rule. Local magisttates were par ticularly concerned not to prevent anything that could be construed as civil disturbance because this could cause trou ble with Rome, as in the case of Paul's visit to Thessalonike (Acts 17:5-9). Yet, they were caught between the task of maintaining law and order and not offending Roman sen sibilities when a citizen was involved (Acts 16:37-39). In the Byzantine period, previous policy with regard to cities continued—namely, to develop them wherever pos sible, provided there were enough locals willing and able to take on the administrative burdens, particularly the collec tion of taxes. Throughout the third century CE, there was a serious decline in imperial rule, arrested militarily by Dio cletian (r. 284-305). A centralized bureaucracy developed which in time became unwieldy—one reason the Byzantine emperors sought to support local municipalities wherever possible. A network of loyal clients, they allowed local elites to reemerge, curtailing the power of the central civil service. Constantine's declared policy to found new cities and revive others resulted, by the sixth century, in almost all imperial territory being ruled by the cities, with the remnants of the old provincial system carved up among them. In the process, the cities were reduced in importance, their status almost wholly dependent on their performance as outposts of im perial rule. Increasingly, the number of men of substance who might fulfill the role of decurions or magistrates de clined, either because they were drawn into the imperial ad ministration or because they decided to withdraw from pub lic life entirely. T h e architectural trappings of grandeur were maintained, with the development of domed roofs and the free representation of classical motifs, but internally the life had been drained from the towns in supporting a tottering empire. Increasingly, the large villas in the countryside, and of course the Christian monasteries, were the places where
CITIES: Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods the cultural role of the cities of a previous age were main tained and carried forward. [See Monasteries.] Architecture of Ancient Cities. Many handbooks on town planning and architecture are known from Hellenistic and Roman times (e.g., Vitruvius), as well as from the ac counts of travelers and geographers, such as Strabo and Pliny, which add to what is known of the visual aspects of ancient cities. T h e period eclectic styles and conceptions— Etruscan, Greek, Roman, and Semitic—influenced each other at different locations. (Pompeii's state of preservation by the lava from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE pro vides a unique example of that eclecticism.) Certain char acteristic features emerge with great regularity, however, confirming that it is possible to talk about the ancient city and about architecture playing a role in determining when a settlement was a city. There is ample evidence to suggest that proximity to a plentiful supply of water was the determining factor in set tling most ancient sites, and elaborate measures were taken to ensure one, as can be seen from the arrangements at Ha zor, Megiddo, and Jerusalem itself. [See Hazor; Megiddo; Jerusalem.] In addition to the supply from a local source, the numbers of cisterns, underground storage pools, chan nels and conduits which have been unearthed indicate that collection of rainwater was important, for both civic and domestic purposes. [See Cisterns; Reservoirs.] T h e aque duct, often carrying water from a considerable distance, is associated with Roman hydraulic engineering. It is estimated that in the first century CE Rome itself had as many as nine different ones drawing water from sources 19-80 km ( 1 2 50 mi.) away. The remains of aqueducts are scattered throughout the Roman territories, tire one at Caesarea Maritima being the most notable in ancient Palestine. The ab sence of such an amenity was noted and to be remedied at the citizens' expense. Despite the preponderance of Roman remains, however, there is evidence that the Greeks had mastered the technique earlier (Owens, 1991, p. 158). Sometimes water was transported through underground channels, such as at Sepphoris in Galilee, which is fed from two springs, 3 and 5 km (2 and 3 mi.) from the city and with an elaborate system of storage and pressure tanks at various levels along the way. A similar installation has been found at Gadara, Jordan, possibly designed by the same architect (Tsuk, 1995). Population increase meant an extra demand on the water supply, and this was further accentuated in Roman times with the introduction of the public baths, found at almost every significant site from the first century CE onward. Health needs also demanded sewer and drainage systems. The location of many cities on elevated ground was a natural aid, but the existence of the famous cloaka maxima, from the sixth century BCE, still in use in Rome, shows how early this feature had become a part of town planning. At Cae sarea there is evidence to suggest that Herod's architects
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designed the underground sewer chambers so that maxi mum advantage could be gained from the tides to wash the city's waste out to sea. This feature of Roman towns in par ticular has been attributed to Ettuscan influences on the ba sis of the evidence from Veii, where rock-cut and stone-built channels have been found. T h e literary evidence suggests that the sanitary conditions in many cities, especially in the poorer quarters, were virtually nonexistent, however. Thus, the building of public latrines, often ornately decorated on the outside, became a feature of many Roman towns. The acropolis/aw was the city's highest point and also its religious focal point. The temple of the city's chief patron deities (the Parthenon of the goddess Athena in Athens and the temples of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva in Rome) and their cultic personnel were located on it. It both symbolized the city's freedom and independence and served as a place of refuge, at least for the chief citizens in times of attack. Hence, the notion that walls were essential for the true city was prevalent, even when this was not always the case. Sometimes natural features, such as deep ravines, deter mined the siting of cities on jagged promontories or inac cessible hills (Pergamon in Asia Minor). [See Pergamon.] Josephus's description of Gamla, where Galilean Jews re sisted the Romans in 66 CE, also shows a consciousness of the value of natural terrain for defense (War 4.4-10). [See Gamla.] T h e Greeks seem to have developed walls as a sys tem of fortification independently of the street plan, so there were interior open spaces which could cause problems if the city came under attack. T h e Romans, on the other hand, integrated streets and walls to the point that casemate houses formed part of the wall and could function as further sup port in times of attack or siege. In the late Roman period walls made a symbolic state ment. City walls were poorly constructed in terms of de fense, yet functioned as clearly demarcating spatial distinc tions between insiders and outsiders: interior walls separated patrician from plebeian quarters and religious from secular ones, and provided toll boundaries and controls for the movement of goods both into and within the city. Walls could also function as status symbols similar to public mon uments. In particular, gates took on this feature of public adornment, becoming the focal point for commerce and meeting, sometimes rivaling the agora or forum, which was always located at the center of the settlement. In later times, the streets leading to the gate and from there to the forum were also suitably adorned and were occasionally inter rupted with smaller squares which provided for social inter action. Such places also provided welcome for the visitor on the approach to the forum, which otherwise might have ap peared forbidding and hostile. T h e agora, or forum, was thus the most important central place within the city, not merely for commercial transactions but also for legal, administrative, and religious functions. Their developing location within the overall city plan dem-
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CITIES: Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
onstrates the ways in which the institution of the polis was itself transformed over time. As a human community, the polis institution portrayed an ordered way of life in which law was supreme. The idea of a town plan is associated as early as the fifth century BCE, with Hippodamos of Miletus, to whom the notion of the grid system of streets crossing each other in a regular pattern is attributed. [See Miletus.] This plan seems to have been almost universally accepted at a relatively early period. In Roman times cities were bissected by a main thoroughfare, running north-south, the cardo maximus, which usually led to, and sometimes through the forum. This was intersected by an east-west main street, the decumanus, or "tenth street." Shops and other public buildings were located along these two main axes, while the residential areas, the insulae, or blocks of apartments, were on narrower and sometimes unpaved streets. In some instances, the cardo formed a T junction with the decumanus and did not carry on beyond the forum, termi nating in a basilica, portico, or temple. [See Basilicas.] This represented a more conservative approach to spatial orga nization, suggesting a less open perspective to the visitor. The actual forum area itself seems to have developed from an open area in which everyone intermingled freely to being walled in from the Augustan Age onward, and therefore with controlled entry and egress, as can be seen in the various imperial fora in Rome itself. This development would seem to suggest a concern with policing crowds and the possibility of a more differentiated approach to public social relations between urban elites and ordinary people. Amphitheaters, as enclosed areas for the live animal shows, and bathhouses, both hallmarks of Roman architecture, even when the am phitheaters were not located centrally, indicate similar atti tudes: the desire of the imperial administration to offer en tertainment and leisure for the masses, while avoiding popular movements of unrest. Despite these developments, architectural evidence for ongoing and varied activity in the forum, essential to the life of the city as a political commu nity—temples, law courts, senate house, rostta, shops—is clear. The theater, which already was very much a feature of the Greek city, continued into Roman times. It was cen trally located, which indicates its continued importance to civic life. [See Theaters.] In an honor/shame culture, the endowment of buildings was seen as an act of piety and a demonstration of munifi cence or generosity, thereby gaining public esteem for the donor. Wealthy people vied with each other in honoring their political master, which from the first century CE onward was the emperor or some member of his family. The Herodian building program in Palestine is an outstanding ex ample, corresponding to the watershed in art and architec ture of the Augustan Age generally (Zanker, 1988). T h e aim was to celebrate Rome's victory in the new age of peace that had dawned. The buildings are larger, more majestic and ornamental; the decorative art was more elaborate, exploit
ing suitable themes from the classical period to express the new order symbolically—the ultimate political realization on a universal scale of classical ideals. T h e new artistic expres sion combined the best traditions of Greek aesthetics and Roman virtue. Statues and busts were not just used for pro paganda but to adorn the fora and main thoroughfares; fountains and water houses (nymphaea) were a constant feature, even in private houses. The adornment of buildings with marble facades and the erection of columns, commem orative niches, stairways, and stoas along main thorough fares all contributed to a splendor which celebrated Rome's glory. Mosaic pavements and frescoed walls were standard decorative elements of both public and private buildings, imposing a uniformity of style and taste throughout the vast territory, often at the expense of local traditions and native habits. [See Mosaics; Wall Paintings.] City as Social System. T h e Greek polis was first and foremost a community rather than a settlement (astu) and this involved political, economic, and cultural organization. These aspects were already well defined in the classical pe riod, and while modifications inevitably occurred under the Hellenistic monarchies, and to an even greater extent under Roman imperial administration, the essential function of its institutions nevertheless continued in place. Political life. Essential to the very notion of the city was the demos, or people, the body of free citizens who shared in all the rights and privileges associated with such mem bership and who felt obligated to the maintenance of the polis institutions through services of various kinds as cir cumstances demanded (Finley, 1983). Not everyone in the settlement was a citizen—slaves, foreigners, and other unpropertied inhabitants were not. In theory, women were equally capable of discharging the duties of the citizen, but in practice their role was restricted to that of the private sphere, except in exceptional circumstances of the wealthy. Thus, despite the evolution from oligarchy to democracy in both Greece and Rome, citizenship was a privilege, not a right. Regular assemblies (ekklesiai) of all the citizens were held, but the running of the city's affairs on an on-going basis was delegated to the bottle, or council, elected from the citizens with one of its members acting as chief (politarch or archon). There was in addition, a host of other city officials, such as the market manager (agoranomos), the chief of police, and tax collectors, among others. As well as the privileges of citizenship there were also responsibilities (leitourgiai)—to support a war effort, to sponsor a theatrical performance or religious ceremony, or, in Roman times, to pay for a temple, statue, or other public building. Under the empire the tendency was to revert more and more to the oligarchic style of government as the one which could best be trusted to maintain Roman interests (MacMullan, 1974). Some of the older cities of the east, such as Tyre, were al lowed to continue to mint their own coins, as well as Roman imperial ones. [See Tyre.] When the right was granted to
CITIES: Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods other, newer foundations, such as Sepphoris (66 CE) and Tiberias (100 CE), Rome was always clearly acknowledged in the emblems and the legend. [See Tiberias.] Rome came to rely more and more on the towns to impose and maintain imperial rule, a policy already well exemplified in the first century through the increased urbanization of Palestine after the First Jewish Revolt (Jones, 1931). [See First Jewish Revolt.] Michael Avi-Yonah (1966) has at tempted to map the boundaries of the various cities on the basis of such archaeological remains as milestones and such literary sources as Eusebius's Onomasticon. More recent ar chaeological work based on central-place theory and relying on archaeological surveys has developed computer-aided models to understand the role of towns as centers within larger administrative and commercial configurations (Rihll and Wilson, 1991). These sttidies help to underline the fact that the institution of the city with its own territory was deemed to have on-going relevance in political terms, long after its independence had been drastically curtailed in the interests of empire. Polis as economic system. T h e preindustrial city was very dependent on resources available from the immediate hinterland. Scholars agree that the relationship was quite dif ferent from that obtaining since the industrial, public health, and transport revolutions. T h e relationship was symbiotic, but without both benefiting equally from the single most important resource, namely the land (Finley, 1985; Hopkins, 1978, 1980; Wallace-Hadrill, 1991). There is a need to dif ferentiate among the urban elites (a small minority of the total population), the retainer and merchant classes, and the poor, on the one hand, and the large landowners (who often resided in the city and formed an important segment of the urban elite), the small freeholders, the lessees, day laborers, and agricultural slaves, on the other. Thus, access to the basic resource was uneven, and the few at the top of the social pyramid that was the polis stood to gain much more from its successful exploitation than those farther down the social scale. Urban elites needed the peasantry in order to live the life of luxury, and those among the peasantry who had a disposable surplus of grain or other produce needed the cities as places of local demand or as depots and col lecting centers for the larger market. Scientific study of the pottery of Galilee shows that certain villages specialized in supplying the household wares for a wide region, including the urban center of Sepphoris (AdanBayewitz, 1993). [See Galilee, article on Galilee in the Hel lenistic through Byzantine Periods.] This is a sign of a de veloping economy, in which the notion of the village as remote hamlet where peasants lived in total isolation from the larger culture has to be considerably modified, at least beginning in the Hellenistic period, A similar pattern re peated itself in Egypt and Syria as well (Harper, 1928; Bagnail, 1993), so that the prevalent idea of the ancient city as being totally parasitic on the surrounding countryside, fol
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lowing the influential studies of Moses Finley (1977, 1983, 1985), is perhaps overstated (Whittaker, 1990). Neverthe less, it remained true that, as far as peasants were concerned, the countryside was not die city and different norms pre vailed. (The peasantry is said to have formed a subculture radier than an independent class.) It was only in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods that die signs of affluence associated with the city flowed into the countryside, as wealthy Romans abandoned crowded cities for their country villas. Within die confines of die city conceived in narrower terms of die urban center itself, financial considerations loomed large: the costs of building a city and maintaining its public space, even when forced labor and the freely ren dered tasks, or munera, of die citizens could be relied on to cover a wide range of services. According to a later version of a letter attributed to Hadrian (fl. 130 CE), philosophers, rhetoricians, schoolteachers, and doctors were exempted from the responsibilities of the gymnasium, marketplace, priesdioods, maintaining the supply of corn and oil, jury service, embassies, and obligations to local and provincial offices. However, these exceptions were rare and honor de manded undertaking diem with a display of munificence. The competition among die wealdiy for popular esteem had its own hazards, as tiiey were expected to make cash hand outs to all comers at weddings and other family celebrations. The financial pressures even on the elites were considerable, and the financing of the urban system, which on die whole was not economically productive, was ultimately draining. Littie wonder tiiat in some instances, especially at the lower end of the spectrum, people sought to avoid die duties of office. The situation varied enormously from one city to an other, especially in the case of older cities in the east that had their own constitutions and other wealtii-generating ac tivities, such as their location or a hinterland. By the end of the tiiird century CE, there were signs of increasing state compulsion with regard to the assumption of office, a clear indicator of how the old order had been eroded (Brown, I97U-
Cities as cultural systems. As mediums of culture, cit ies functioned in many different ways and at several differ ent levels. T h e spread of Greek as die lingua franca is widely attested from inscriptions, coins, and literary sources. Ini tially, this was partiy the by-product of the cities as admin istrative and commercial centers, a system in place since Alexander and his immediate successors settled veterans and otiier Greeks in the new cities. A policy of active hellenization was also part of die underlying philosophy of die new cities witiiin the "one world" vision tiiat inspired the encounter between Greece and the East. Thus, the gym nasium, or Greek school, became one of the essential fea tures of the city, where the epheboi, or "elite youth," were given a special education according to Greek ideals com prising both literary and physical aspects. T h e links between
34
CITIES: Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
epheboi training and citizenship were very strong, but not absolute: these youths could be disqualified from citizen sta tus on other grounds, such as not being freeborn (Tcherikover, 1964; Doran, 1990). The links between the educa tional system and citizenship remained very close, however. Religion, as well as education, was intimately bound up with the life of the city and life in the city, from the per spective of a worldview in which there was no separation between the sacred and the secular (Zaidman and SchmittPantel, 1992) T h e very act of foundation was itself associ ated with the religious rite of consulting an oracle or the auspices (auguries). Failure to do so might provoke the ire of the gods. The whole subsequent life of the citizens was surrounded by various rituals, private and public, enshrined in laws often inscribed in stone in public places. While cer tain officials were designated to carry out religious functions on behalf of the citizenry, essentially this was the responsi bility of the whole demos. The city's charter was a gift from the patron deity, and its due observance meant divine pro tection for all who dwelt within its walls. The temple in honor of the patron deity; other temples in the fora of the larger cities; shrines, including those in private houses, and sacred groves; and mosaics and frescoes with religious themes all indicate the pervasive role religion played in the life of the average inhabitant of the Greco-Roman city. It would be a mistake to see the official religious practice of the city as a purely formal affair, devoid of any devotional appeal for the individual. Nevertheless, the Hellenistic pe riod witnessed an amazing increase in the mystery religions, offering the experience of personal intimacy with the divine and mutual support of the members of the various cult groups (collegia), in addition to the public religious cere monies of the city (Cumont, 1956). The various mysteries— Isis, Magna Mater, Dionysus, and Mithras being the most popular and most widely diffused—became a feature of the cosmopolitanism of the age. Originating as local cults in Egypt, Phrygia, and Syria, they traveled widely, even to Rome itself, where they were treated with suspicion, if not downright hostility, at first. Gradually, however, their pop ularity grew, and the Roman army played a significant role in disseminating them in the West, especially the cult of Mithras. This phenomenon is highly significant to under standing the social situation within the cities and the need for social organizations other than those of the city itself and the extended family or tribe. In addition to the mystery cults, burial associations ensured a decent interment for their members, often consisting of the poor and slaves. [See Cat acombs.] The insight into urban social relations that can be gleaned from these developments of religion in the city sug gest a considerable amount of isolation, even alienation, es pecially as far as the lower orders were concerned. They also indicate a growing preoccupation with individual identity and uncertainty about life's meaning in an "age of anxiety" (Dodds, 1965). This was fertile soil in which Early Christian
groups could sprout. T h e evidence from the Pauline letters, Acts of the Apostles, and the correspondence between Pliny and the emperor Trajan make clear that within less than a century of its inception, the religious movement which had originated in rural Galilee had adapted well to the urban life of the empire (Meeks, 1983; MacMullan, 1984; Stambaugh and Balch, 1986). In this they were merely following patterns already established by Jews in the Diaspora synagogues (Kasher, 1990; Feldman, 1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY Adan-Bayewitz, David. Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade. Ramat Gan, 1993. Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Holy Land from the Persian to the Arab Con quests, $36 B.C.-A.D. 640: A Historical Geography. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966. Bagnall, Roger. Egypt in Late Antiquity. Princeton, 1993. Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity. New York, 1 9 7 1 . Childe, V. Gordon. "The Urban Revolution." Town and Planning Re view 21 (1950): 3 - 1 7 . Cumont, Franz. The Oriental Religions of Roman Paganism. New York, 1956. Dodds, E. R. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Cambridge, 1965. Doran, Robert. "Jason's Gymnasion." In Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins, edited by Harold W. Attridge et al., pp. 99-109. New York, 1990. Feldman, Louis H. Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World. Princeton, 1993. Finley, Moses I. "The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond." Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977): 305-327. Finley, Moses I. Politics in the Ancient World. Cambridge, 1983. Finley, Moses I. The Ancient Economy. 2d ed. Berkeley, 1985. Frick, Frank S. The City in Ancient Israel. Missoula, 1977. Harper, George McLean. "Village Administration in the Roman Prov ince of Syria." Yak Classical Studies 1 (1928): 1 0 5 - 1 6 8 . Hopkins, Keith. "Economic Growth and Towns in Classical Antiq uity." In Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology, edited by Philip Abrams and E. K. Wrigley, pp. 35-77. Cambridge, 1978. Hopkins, Keith. "Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire, 200 BC-400 AD." Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980): 1 0 1 - 1 2 5 . Jones, A. H. M. "The Urbanization of Palestine." Journal of Roman Studies 21 ( 1 9 3 1 ) : 78-85. Jones, A. H. M. The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces. 2d ed. Ox ford, 1 9 7 1 . Kasher, Aryeh. Jews and Hellenistic Cities in Eretz Israel. Tubingen, 1990. Lapidus, Ira M. "Cities and Societies: A Comparative Study of the Emergence of Urban Civilization in Mesopotamia and Greece." Journal of Urban History 1 2 (1986): 257-292. MacMullen, Ramsay. Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C. toA.D. 2S<ji.New Haven, 1974. MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100-400. New Haven, 1984. Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven, 1983. Owens, E. J. The City in the Greek and Roman World. London, 1991. Perring, Dominic. "Spatial Organisation and Social Change in Roman Towns." In City and Country in the Ancient World, edited by John Rich and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, pp. 273-295. London, 1991.
CITIES: Cities of the Islamic Period Redfield, Robert, and Milton Singer. "The Cultural Role of Cities." Economic Development and Social Change 3 (1954): 5 7 - 7 3 . Rich, John, and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, eds. City and Countiy in the Ancient World. London, 1991. Rihll, T. E., and A. G. Wilson. "Modelling Settlement Structures in Ancient Greece: New Approaches to the Polis." In City and Country in the Ancient World, edited by John Rich and Andrew Wallace-Had rill, pp. 59-96. London, 1991. Rohrbaugh, Richard L. "The City in the Second Testament." Biblical Theology Bulletin 21 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 67-75. Safrai, Zeev. The Economy of Roman Palestine. London, 1993. Sherwin-White, A. N. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Tes tament. Oxford, 1963. Sjoberg, Gideon. The Preindustrial City. Glencoe, 111., i960. Stambaugh, John E., and David Balch. The Social World of the First Christians. London, 1986. Stambaugh, John E. The Ancient Roman City. Baltimore, 1988. Tcherikover, Victor. "Was Jerusalem a Polis?" Israel Exploration Jour nal 14 (1964): 61-78. Tsuk, Tsvika. "The Aqueducts of Sepphoris." M. A. thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1985. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. "Elites and Trade in die Roman Town." In City and Country in the Ancient World, edited by John Rich and An drew Wallace-Hadrill, pp. 2 4 1 - 2 7 2 . London, 1991. Weber, Max. "Die Stadt." Archivfiir Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47 ( 1 9 2 1 ) : 6 2 1 - 7 7 2 . Translated by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirrh in The City. Glencoe, 111., 1958. Whittaker, C. R. "The Consumer City Revisited: The vicns and the City." Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 (1990): 1 1 0 - 1 1 8 . Zaidman, Louise B., and Pauline Schmirt-Pantel. Religion in the Ancient Greek City. Translated by Paul Cartiedge. Cambridge, 1992. Zanker, Paul. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1988. SEAN FREYNE
Cities of the Islamic P e r i o d Islamic urbanism maintained and built upon the traditions of die ancient cities and civilizations of die Near East, cre ating a vibrant urban culture, but one with numerous re gional variations in architecture and morphology. Most of what is known about cities in die Islamic period comes from written historical sources and analyses by art and architec tural historians of existing monuments published in journals and edited collections. Archaeological excavations of Islamic sites are the exception rather than the rule: many contem porary cities in Nortii Africa and Southwest Asia are built over core Islamic settlements and even earlier ancient sites, inhibiting major excavations. Islam began in the early sevendi century CE and was con fined principally to the region of Mecca and Medina until Muhammad's deatii in 632. Yet, witiiin the next several years most of the Arabian Peninsula was conquered, fol lowed quicldy by the Arab conquests to the north in which die weakened Sasanian Empire and the eastern parts of the Byzantine Empire were soon absorbed into the caliphate, the greater Islamic state. [See Sasanians; Arabian Peninsula, ar ticle on The Arabian Peninsula in Islamic Times.] Damascus fell in 636 and northern Syria by 641; Iraqi cities were taken
35
widiin the first years of the conquests; Hamadan/Ecbatana, Isfahan, and the main cities of western Iran fell by 644; Egypt was conquered by 642 and the rest of North Africa by 7 1 1 ; Spain was absorbed between 7 1 1 and 759; and Bu khara and Samarkand were taken in 712 and 713, respec tively. [See Damascus; Ecbatana; Isfahan.] Within a century after Muhammad's death, the Islamic state reached from Spain and Morocco to Transoxania. T h e Muslim conquerors usually established tiiemselves on the outskirts and suburbs of established cities, becoming the ruling and military elites. T h e local population was sub ject to taxation but otherwise left to continue its commerce, agriculture, and local customs, including religion. Conver sions to Islam for most of the conquered peoples did not, in fact, take place for several centuries (and fully developed Muslim urban societies emerged only by the eleventh and twelfdi centuries). Some new garrison towns were initially founded, and these amsar (sg., misr) housed many of the bedouin warriors from the Arabian Peninsula. Basra and Kufah in Iraq and Fustat in Egypt were the three most im portant amsar, being used as military bases for furthering the Arab conquests. Fustat, founded in 642 just nortii of the Byzantine fortress of Babylon on the Nile River, is the only early amsar that has been excavated. [See Fustat.] Damascus became the capital of the Umayyads (661750), the first major Islamic empire. T h e transformation of the Greco-Roman street grid of this city into a more irreg ular pattern under Islam (Jean Sauvaget, "Esquisse d'une histoire de la ville de Damas," Revue des Etudes Islamiques 8 [1934]: 421-480) became the classic case study that helped promote the erroneous view that all Islamic cities lacked form and order. Baghdad was the newly built capital of the second great Islamic empire, the 'Abbasids (750-1258), a round city possibly based on a Sasanian, Parthian, and/or Median city plan. Located on the southern, or right bank, of the Tigris River, in the center of contemporary Baghdad, there is no trace of the round city today. Continuing an an cient tradition, 'Abbasid caliphs often built new palaces, or even capitals, which sometimes lasted only the lifetime of the ruler. Samarra, located 100 km (62 mi.) north of Bagh dad, was such a nintii-century capital. Strung along the Ti gris River for many kilometers, the now long-abandoned capital has been the focus of considerable archaeological work, including the German excavations by Ernst Herzfeld in the early twentietii century and die more recent survey operations sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. [See Baghdad; Samarra, article on Islamic Period.] Islamic cities in Spain often developed on the foundations of Roman towns that had deteriorated for several centuries under the Visigoths. Cordoba, Toledo, Seville, Valencia, and Zaragoza were revived as cities. They contributed to a brilliant Hispano-Arab civilization that, however, began to decline by the eleventii and twelfdi centuries and was finally
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CITIES: Cities of the Islamic Period
ended by the Christian reconquista and the fall of the last Islamic dynasty of Granada in 1492. There were several smaller and newly planned royal cities, including Medina alZahira and Medina al-Zahra, the latter on die outskirts of Cordoba and the focus of extensive archaeological excava tions by the Spanish. In Iran many of the Islamic cities were built on Sasanian foundations, which in some instanced represented even ear lier settlements. Hamadan, for example, was built on die Median and Achaemenid capital of Ecbatana. Siraf, one of the few excavated Iranian Islamic sites, was built pardy over the Sasanian port city of Gur. The Congregation, or Friday, Mosque in many of the first Islamic cities in Iran was often founded on existing Zoroastrian fire temples, providing an additional sacredness to die location and making a symbolic statement: an Islamic building was replacing die principal Zoroastrian place of worship (similar to the Dome of die Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). The importance of the religion of Islam in the lives of the inhabitants of the Near East led to die idea by Western Ori entalists that there was a unique Islamic city. This model, begun in particular by French scholars working in North Africa, is largely a myth. The cities of the Islamic period resembled their antecedents in morphology and character istics, except that many Islamic towns became considerably larger and were less likely to be located on a tell. The struc ture of die towns was often determined by settlements ex panding into adjacent agriculture fields; hence, as in many Iranian cities, irrigation systems could also influence mor phology. There were palaces, city walls, fortresses, principal places of worship and shrines, residential quarters, and ma jor commercial areas. Major streets were rather straight (only sometimes influenced by the Greco-Roman grid sys tem, as in Herat and Damascus), while residential areas of ten consisted of numerous dead-end alleyways. Courtyard houses were common in both die ancient and Islamic peri ods, and where tiiere are tall, multiple-stories buildings, as in Yemen, these types also existed in pre-Islamic times. [See Yemen.] The city continued to be a center for a local agri culture-based hinterland, with long-distance trade being characteristic of certain setdements as well. By at least the eleventh century, Islamic cities did begin to have some specific characteristics and institutions: reli gious schools (madrasah) for training clergy; mosques, shrines, and mausolea, which proliferated; great bazaar complexes; religiously endowed property (waqf); and mer chant guilds (serif). There also developed a ratiier distinctive separation of public and private space, encouraged by some local interpretations of Islam. How this division differs from the use of space by ancient cities of die Near East is still poorly understood. Significantly, however, there are considerable similarities in form and function between ancient and Islamic cities
within a region, while there are even greater differences in morphology among Islamic cities (and ancient cities) from one region to anotiier. Islamic urbanism, in the guise of a new religion, continued the traditions and patterns of the cities of die ancient Near East. [See also Mosque.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu-Lughod, Janet L. "The Islamic City: Historic Myth, Islamic Es sence, and Contemporary Relevance." International Journal of Mid dle East Studies 1 9 (1987): 1 5 5 - 1 7 6 . The historical evolution and problems of the concept of the Islamic City. Bonine, Michael E. "The Morphogenesis of Iranian Cities." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69 (1979): 208-224. An anal ysis of the formation and evolution of Iranian settlements; shows how morphology often reflects traditional irrigation and agricultural sys tems. Bonine, Michael E., et al. The Middle Eastern City and Islamic Urbanism: An Annotated Bibliography of Western Literature. Bonn, 1994. More than seventy-five hundred entries; focuses particularly on the liter ature on Islamic urbanism in English, French, and German. Creswell, K.A.C. A Bibliography of the Architecture, Arts, and Crafts of Islam to 1st January i960. Cairo, 1 9 6 1 . Classic and indispensable reference work for studies of architecture and individual monu ments, although neither urban nor social studies are included. Sup plements appeared in 1973 and 1984. Creswell, K.A.C. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Revised and supplemented by James W. Allan. Aldershot, 1989. Creswell's 1958 edition of this work was an abbreviated version of his monu mental Early Muslim Architecture, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1 9 3 2 - 1 9 4 0 ) . His meticulous plans, drawings, and photographs are still largely unri valed, although many of his dogmatic interpretations have been su perseded by subsequent studies and broader viewpoints. Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art. New Haven, 1973. The art and architecture of the Islamic city, including the symbolic signifi cance of the mosque, palace, and ouher elements. Hakim, Besim Selim. Arabic-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Prin ciples. London, 1986. Using principally Tunis as an example, this work shows the influence of Maliki Islamic law in many architectural and urban structures, including street widths, use of joindy owned walls, and building heights. Hourani, Albert, and S. M. Stern, eds. The Islamic City. Oxford, 1970. One of the classic collections of papers on the Islamic city, resulting from a symposium at Oxford University in 1965. Lapidus, Ira M. "The Evolution of Muslim Urban Society." Compar ative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973): 2 1 - 5 0 . Analyzes the components and evolution of Muslim urban society, particularly the role of schools of Islamic law and religious institutions; demonstrates that a true Muslim urban society did not emerge until about the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE. Von Grunebaum, G. E. "The Structure of the Muslim Town." In Von Grunebaum's Islam: Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, pp. 1 4 1 - 1 5 8 . London, 1955. The characteristics of the Islamic city; helped perpetuate and popularize a simplified and mostly erroneous stereotypical model of the Islamic city. Wirth, Eugen. "Die orientalische Stadt: Ein Uberblick aufgrund jiingerer Forschungen zur materiellen Kultur." Saeculum 26 (1975): 4 5 94. The continuities of characteristics of the Islamic city derived from the ancient city of the Near East; emphasizes that many features attributed to the Islamic city are also found in many earlier cities. MICHAEL E. BONINE
CLIMATOLOGY C L E R M O N T - G A N N E A U , C H A R L E S (18461923), French epigrapher, archaeologist, Orientalist, and diplomat and pioneer in the study of ancient Palestinian in scriptions. Born in Paris, Clermont-Ganneau excelled as a student of Semitic languages and was sent to Jerusalem in 1867 as dragoman-chancellor for the French consulate. In 1869, he was the first to recognize the significance of the Mesha stela discovered at Dibon (Dhiban) in Moab. [See Moabite Stone; Dibon.] He subsequently facilitated its pur chase and transfer to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Among his later epigraphic discoveries in Jerusalem were the eighthcentury BCE Hebrew inscription in the Siloam Tunnel and the Greek inscription from the Herodian period prohibiting the entry of Gentiles into the Temple Court. [See Siloam Tunnel Inscription.] After a transfer to another diplomatic post in Constanti nople in 1871, Clermont-Ganneau returned to Palestine in 1873-1874 on special assignment for the British-sponsored Palestine Exploration Fund. His wide-ranging researches in cluded studies of the history of the Dome of the Rock and of ancient Jewish burial customs in Jerusalem and architec tural surveys of Gaza, Nablus (Shechem), and Jericho. In his discovery of bilingual Greek-Hebrew boundary inscrip tions in die vicinity of Tell Jezer, he was die first scholar to identify the site conclusively witii ancient Gezer. [See Shechem; Jericho; Gezer.] Clermont-Ganneau alternated for die next few years be tween diplomatic and scholarly careers: in 1874, he was ap pointed to the faculty of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris; in 1881, he served as French vice-consul in Jaffa; in 1882, he was chief translator for the foreign ministry in Paris; and in 1883 he was the French consul in London. Following his appointment in 1891 to a professorship in archaeology and epigraphy at the College de France, Clermont-Ganneau devoted himself entirely to antiquarian studies. He led an expedition to Crete and Cyrenaica in 1895 and undertook excavations at Elephantine Island in Egypt in 1901. [See Crete; Elephantine.] Clermont-Ganneau was an aggressive and outspoken critic of artifacts he considered forgeries. In 1873, he ex posed as modem fakes die so-called Moabite pottery pur chased by the Berlin Museum and succeeded in turning scholarly opinion against the Deuteronomy manuscript frag ments brought to London by a Jerusalem antiquities dealer, Moses Shapira, in 1882. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allegro, John M. The Shapira Affair. Garden City, N.Y., 1965. Clermont-Ganneau, Charles. Archaeological Researches in Palestine dur ing the Years 1873-1874. 2 vols. London, 1896-1899. Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Ar chaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917. New York, 1982. NEIL ASHBR SILBERMAN
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CLIMATOLOGY. Paleoenvironmental reconstruc tions for die ancient Near East rely in part on investigating past weather patterns. These investigations are based on the presumption that a better understanding of ancient climate, should help us know more about the conditions under which a number of civilizations flourished and declined. T h e re gion is one in which agriculture and animal husbandry were often marginal even under the best climatic conditions. Temperature and Precipitation Records. In the Near East, where written records have existed for millennia and significant temperature and precipitation records might be expected to have been kept, there exist, in fact, very few sets of meteorological station records that cover more than one hundred years. The most extended instances of record keeping available were begun in the nineteentii century: Samsun, Turkey (1819); Haifa, Israel (1842); Beirut, Leb anon (1842); Jerusalem (1846); Athens, Greece (1858); Kom el-Nadura, Egypt (1868); Rome, Italy (1871); Tehran, Iran (1884); Nicosia, Cyprus (1887); Baghdad, Iraq (1888); and Hebron, then Jordan (1896). Other stations have been in existence for only a few decades, so die prospect of de veloping a long set of gridded records—in which the data from each station are compared with those nortii, south, east, and west and tiien analyzed for internal accuracy—is not promising; in addition, die range in time is severely lim ited for most of die area. T h e Cyprus Meteorologist's re mark about the quality of his own data might well serve as a commentary on that of the rest of the Near East: "Some gauges have been moved so often tiiat they can fairly be described as perambulating. Details are generally, and per haps mercifully, lacking." A few nongovernmental records exist such as the diaries of British Residents in Smyrna, Turkey, but at best these cover only die nineteenth century. Some Ottoman archival records were sent to Berlin for analysis at about die time of World War I, but die building in which they were housed burned down. Thus, insttumental data—specifically, tem perature and precipitation records—have severe temporal limitations. The data exist for little more tiian a century and a half at best. Even more limited in time and number of stations reporting are such records as soil moisture, soil tem perature, wind speed and direction frequencies, and sun shine, or solar radiation. Pollen Records. Proxy records, substitutes for thermometric and rain gauge records, such as pollen analyses from stratified cores taken from geological or lake sediments are another step toward developing a climatological record. T h e most notable work in the Near East has been by Willem van Zeist and his coworkers (1975) in Iran and Turkey; by Aharon Horowitz (1979) in Israel; and by Donald George Sullivan (1994) in Turkey. T h e spatial coverage is sparse (only two cores for all of Israel, for example); yet, Van Zeist concludes that, although diere have been relatively minor fluctuations, diere has been no significant change in the cli-
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CLOTHING
mace over the past 7,500 years. Hans J. Nissen (1988) echoes these conclusions for Mesopotamia, Karl W. Butzer for Iran, and Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse for the Late Roman and early medieval world. The potential for pollen records can be measured in millennia, but where hun dreds of cores would be desirable in order to get a complete picture of the Near East, only a dozen or two long cores have been taken and properly published. Another problem with pollen cores is dating. Unless multiple radiocarbon de terminations are made, which is not always possible with the amount of material available, the time control for each core is severely limited. Recent work by Harvey Weiss and others (1993) at Tell Leilan in Syria is a useful attempt to extract climatic information from a single site, although the method is controversial. Dendroclimatology. Another proxy technique only now in its initial stages of being exploited in the Near East is dendroclimatology. The work of the Aegean Dendrochro nology Project (Peter I. Kuniholm et al.) has produced some six thousand years' worth of tree-ring chronologies, and the tree-ring data are being linked to the observed meteorolog ical record for the last century and a half. T h e project hopes to extrapolate backward in time to the Early Bronze Age and perhaps even earlier. T h e potential is for several millennia of information, but limited to the areas where long tree-ring records can be built. This includes all of the Anatolian Pla teau, the Taurus Mountains, the Anti-Taurus, and the Leb anon. The method is accurate to the year and sometimes to a specific season. Historical Climatology. The development of a historical climatology, in which the written record for several millennia is merged with other climatological observations, is the most tantalizing aspect of any consideration of Near Eastern cli mate. To date, no reliable corpus exists of the entire hiero glyphic, cuneiform, biblical, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ot toman, and other records. Once that has been built, the cause-and-effect relationship between a climatic event and a historical event will remain to be demonstrated. T h e rec ord of Nile floods and tiieir effect on the Egyptian economy is one such example (Lyons, 1905; Bell, 1 9 7 1 , 1975); the time spanned is four to five millennia but with a very uneven distribution of information. Tentative steps, linking several of the methods noted above, are reported by Kuniholm (1990). For example, a four-decade-long drought in the late 1500s and early 1600s observed in the tree-ring record coincides with a long list of shortages, crop failures, and famines in the same years re corded in the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul. T h e same kind of linkage among proxies for an instrumental record should some day be possible for the ancient Near East as well. Sig nificant perturbations, still under investigation and not with out controversy, include a possible climatic event around 1159 BCE (probably the eruption of Hekla III) associated with the end of the Late Bronze Age; another linked to the
eruption of Thera in 1627/28 BCE that pins down the tran sition from Late Minoan IA to IB; and a possible event in the twenty-third century BCE that interferes with life in the Early Bronze Age in northern Syria. [See also New Archaeology; Paleoenvironmental Recon struction.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bell, Barbara. "The Dark Ages in Ancient History: I. The First Dark Age in Egypt." American Journal of Archaeology 75 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 - 2 6 . Bell, Barbara. "Climate and the History of Egypt: The Middle King dom. " American Journal of Archaeology 79 (1975): 223-269. Bryson, R. A., et al. "Drought and the Decline of Mycenae." Antiquity 48 (1974): 46-5°Butzer, Karl W. "Quaternary Stratigraphy and Climate in the Near East." Bonner Geographische Abhandlungen 24 (1958): 103-128. Carpenter, Rhys. Discontinuity in Greek Civilization. New York, 1966. Hodges, Richard, and David Whitehouse. Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis. Ithaca, N.Y., 1983. Horowitz, Aharon. The Quaternary of Israel. New York, 1979. Seepages 211-230. Kuniholm, Peter I. "Archaeological Evidence and Non-Evidence for Climatic Change." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Ijondon, series, A, 330 (1990): 645-655. Kuniholm, Peter I. "Overview and Assessment of the Evidence for the Date of the Eruption of Thera." In Thera and the Aegean World III: Proceedings of the Third International Conference, Santorini, Greece, 3-9 September 1989, vol. 3, Chronology, edited by D. A. Hardy et al., pp. 13-18. Athens, 1990. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000. Rev. ed. New York, 1988. Lyons, Henry G. "On the Nile Flood and Its Variation," Geographical Journal 26 (1905): 249-272, 395-421. Neumann, J„ and Simo Parpola. "Climatic Change and die EleventhTenth-Century Eclipse of Assyria and Babylonia." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 46 (1987): 161-182, Nissen, Hans J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. Chicago, 1988. Sullivan, Donald George. "Palynologtcai Evidence of Human-Induced Holocene Vegetation in Western Turkey." Geoarchaeology (1995). Weiss, Harvey, et al. "The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization." Science 261 (1993): 995-1004. Zeist, Willern van. "Late Quaternary Vegetation History of Western Iran." Review of Paleobotany and Palynolagy 2 (1967): 3 0 1 - 3 1 1 . Zeist, Willem van, and H. E. Wright. "Preliminary Pollen Studies at Lake Zeribar, Zagros Mountains, Southwestern Iran," Science 140 (1963): 65-67. Zeist, Willem van, et al. "Studies on Modern and Holocene Pollen Precipitation in Southeastern Turkey." Palaeohistoria 1 0 (1968): 19-39. Zeist, Willem van, et al. "Late Quaternary Vegetation and Climate of Southwestern Turkey." Palaeohistoria 17 (1975): 5 3 - 1 4 3 . PETER IAN KUNIHOLM
C L O T H I N G . Archaeological remains of garments are scarce, with usually only fragments of textiles recovered. What is known about clothing often can be deduced from accessories, which are generally of metal; from the tools used to manufacture cloth—spindle whorls, loom weights, pat-
CLOTHING tern sticks, spools, and needles; and from representations of garments on stone and terra-cotta statuary cut in stone re liefs, engraved on ivory or metal, painted on ceramic, or executed in mosaic. There are text references, but relating them to the archaeological evidence is not reliable. [See Tex tiles.] In the ancient Near East, the basic garment for men was a simple wraparound skirt—a strip of cloth perhaps 60-75 cm wide wrapped around the waist, descending to just above the knee. In Egypt it was worn to just below the knee and was of plain white linen (ANEP 3, 16); in Syria-Palestine it was a brightly patterned linen or wool fabric and often had colored fringes (ANEP 3, 6, 35, 36). Early Sumerian carv ings show this skirt made of fleece, with hanging locks of wool (ANEP 23, 24, 27, 163). Reliefs and wall paintings show this cloth skirt held in place by a sash of woven cloth, usually in a colored pattern and ending in knotted fringes and tassels (ANEP 6, 40, 56). T h e pin found in burials at the hip of skeletons indicates that it could also be pinned. [See Grave Goods.] This was the garment commonly worn by workers (ANEP 84, 85, 106) and soldiers (ANEP 1, 177) in warm weather; addi tional upper-body clothing would have been necessary in the cold rainy season (ANEP 35). In Syria the basic garment for women was also wrapped and draped over one shoulder, leaving the arms bare, and reached to mid-calf or slightly below. It was held in place by a pin at the shoulder and was woven in a great variety of bright patterns (ANEP 3). In Egypt women wore plain white linen wrapped around the torso and sometimes held in place by a strap over the shoulder. A more elaborate version was gracefully pleated (ANEP 407, 408). Men too wore an over-one-shoulder garment (ANEP 3) or sometimes a long garment formed of two separate lengths of cloth woven in elaborate design that were wrapped around the lower body to reach the ankles. T h e upper ends covered the chest and back and were brought forward over the shoulders to form a cape (ANEP 43, 52, 54; ANEP II, 3). They may also have worn a separate cape (ANEP 5,62). In tomb paintings and stone reliefs, in addition to the sash, common clothing fasteners are frequently illustrated: the simple pin, toggle pin (Bronze Age), and fibula (Iron Age and later). T h e first was of metal or, more commonly, of bone (it can be distinguished from a needle because the nee dle, whether of metal or bone, has a hole in its upper, thicker end). T h e bone pins found in many excavations are 5 - 1 0 cm (2-4 in.) long, smoothly polished so as not to snag or tear the cloth, and usually have a small head to keep them from slipping through fabric. Many also have decorative bands incised around their circumference. Fashioned out of the bones of domestic animals, they were probably the cheapest clothing fasteners to produce, except perhaps for pins of wood or thorn, which have not knowingly been
39
found in excavations. Small, graceful bone pins were used in all periods to fasten light clothing of linen or wool. T h e toggle pin was metal, 15-25 cm long. [See Jewelry; Metals.] It had a hole through it halfway down the shaft, through which a fastening cord passed, and decorative bands were worked around it (ANEP II, 5). Its size, diam eter, and weight indicate that it fastened a coarsely woven heavy woolen cloak rather than a light summer garment, as it would damage a fine fabric. T h e fibula (Lai, "safety pin") is a light metal rod fine enough to be bent into a circle and a half in the middle, to form a spring. To use it, both ends are squeezed together and the sharp end is placed into a bend at the other end; when the pressure is released, it fits there firmly. The bent end is sometimes in the form of a tiny metal hand, whose fingers clasp the pointed end; this whimsical form endured for centuries. Both plain and "hand" fibulae are frequently found in excavations. T h e number of needles excavated attests to how extensive sewing was in the ancient world. The needles are of metal or bone. [See Bone, Ivory, and Shell] Sewing was essential for tent making, for joining tent panels, and for reinforcing the bands that kept the tent poles from piercing the roof panel. [See Tents.] Sewing was also essential in agriculture: folded lengths of heavy cloth were stitched up their sides to make the numerous bags needed for storing the year's har vest of wheat, barley, and lentils; after the bags were filled, they were sewn closed across the top. Sewing was less essential in the manufacture of clothing because the most common garments had no seams (see above). However, garments did need mending or the dec orative colored stitching apparent in carvings and paintings. Those garments that would have needed sewing had an opening at the neck (ANEP 3), down the front, or at the arm openings. Garments with sleeves (tubular sleeves, in con trast to a fold of cloth hanging off the shoulder) also would have required sewing. Egyptian tomb paintings show men's robes from Syria with sleeves to the wrist; the seams are covered with decorative embroidery in a contrasting color (ANEP 2, 4, 5,45= 46, 47)Common headgear for both men and women was a head band tied to hold the hair in place (ANEP 3,4, 5, 6, 27, 43, 54). What may be a hat from the Neolithic period was found in a cave in Nahal Hemar in Israel. T o judge from stone reliefs, hats were also commonly worn by men in particular social classes and reflect status or public office (ANEP 1 1 , 26, 36, 37, 61; ANEP II, 47). Tall, elaborate, and symbolic hats identify deities in monumental stone reliefs and small sculptures, distinguishing them from humans; special hats or crowns commonly appear on reliefs of kings and digni taries. Ivories from Late Bronze Age Megiddo show women in stiff caps with fabric hanging down behind, like a short veil, but one that does not cover either the face or the ears. (ANEP frontispiece, 125) In the Assyrian relief of the con-
40
CODEX
quest of Lachish (ANEP 373), women wear hooded cloaks. [See Megiddo.] Sumerian reliefs show men wearing fleece skirts and jack ets. Leather was used for shoes and clothing—probably more commonly for military clothing—but it is difficult to identify it in art. Two types of shoes are, however, identifi able in reliefs and paintings: the sandal and the closed shoe. In Egypt, at Beni Hasan, a tomb painting shows women wearing closed shoes with high tops that reach above the anlde; the men are wearing sandals (ANEP 3, 39, 40). Both kinds of footwear appear to be of leather, although less costly sandals of woven plant fibers were probably common. Hit tite reliefs show men wearing closed shoes that are turned up at the toes, to facilitate walking on rocky terrain (ANEP 36). The earliest reference to the different fit of right and left shoes also comes from Hittite culture, from about 1500 BCE.
The Mari tablets and other ancient contracts stipulate tiiat workers are to receive one new garment a year as part of their wages. This rule of thumb indicates that in good times each person would possess more than one garment—per haps one best dress and several worn ones. The latter would gradually be cut down for children's clothes and the scraps reused for household and pastoral/agricultural purposes. Scraps of cloth could be used to patch other garments, to strain milk, wrap cheese, drain yoghurt, tie small packages of spices, hold seeds, cover the udders of goats when wean ing the young, and to wash with; they were also useful as diapers, as parts for donkey and camel harnesses, and as saddle blankets. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. Prince ton, 1991. Barber, E. J. W. Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York, 1994. This and the work above are careful and thorough surveys of textile evidence; because so few garments exist, the study of clothing before the Coptic and Byzantine periods relies on scraps or pictures of textiles. Houston, Mary G. Ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Persian Cos tume. 2d ed. London, 1954. Well-illustrated work that considers gar ments mainly from a technical perspective, analyzing their construc tion. Pritchard, James B. The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (ANEP). Princeton, 1954. Pritchard, James B. The Ancient Near East, vol. 2, A New Anthology of Texts and Pictures (ANEP II). Princeton, 1975. Schick, Tamar. "Perishable Remains from the Nahal Hemar Cave." Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society 19 (1986): 84-86, 95*-97*. DOROTHY IRVIN
C O D E X . Roman administrators throughout the empire used wooden tablets (Lat., codices; sg., codex) as registers. Eventually, codex became a technical term for an accounting or other financial book or authoritative collection of official
or legal writings (cf. code). This is how the Romans in the imperial period, the romanized people of the East, and the Byzantines, who succeeded the Romans in the East, under stood the word codex, regardless of the material out of which it was made. In modern usage the term refers to ancient or medieval transpositions of an archaic wooden book onto sheets of soft material (papyrus or parchment). These sheets were usually folded down the middle, to form leaves that were then su perposed or gathered in various ways. Modern paper books are still codices in form. Historically, this format replaced the papyrus roll (Lat., volumen) which, in the Classical East, had been the standard medium for literary, religious, and official writings. T h e historical problem with the codex is to determine how it came so successfully to rival the scroll in use. This question can be set out in chronological, technical, economic, and cultural terms. The first archeological examples of ancient codices come from Egypt. Among the literary texts, the codex first ap peared in the second century CE. In the third and fourth centuries, it challenged the scroll more and more strongly, eliminating its use by the fifth century. Among administra tive texts, the codex appears later (first half of the fourth century); its triumph over the scroll is also late (seventheighth century) and not so complete. Although these dates are somewhat precarious, depending in part on paleographic considerations, the Egyptian evidence suggests that the co dex appeared during the Roman imperial period, that it was most probably a Roman innovation, and that its diffusion in the East was a correlate of the romanization of the ancient Mediterranean world. Although it eliminated the scroll (except in Jewish litur gical practice, where it remains in use), the codex borrowed from it a part of its Greek or Latin terminology (e.g., tome, volume, page). Moreover, contrary to the prevalent modern opinion linking codex and parchment, many ancient codices were papyrus books, whose sheets were nearly always cut from rolls. The codex thus appears to be an adaptation of or an improvement on its predecessor: the codex is genu inely technically superior to the scroll (e.g. it gives easier access to a given place in the text and is easier to cross ref erence). T h e material out of which the codex is made, with its attendant physical properties and its economical constraints, determines the shape of the final product and, to some ex tent, its internal features. Papyrus codices often preserve the height of the roll from which tiieir leaves and sheets were cut (usually about 25-30 cm). T h e sheets (e.g., in the wellknown Nag Hammadi Gnostic manuscripts) were fre quently gathered in single quires, sometimes to a consider able thickness. Such an assemblage is not only technically weak, but also unfeasible with parchment sheets, which were always gathered, as paper is today, in superpositions of thin quires, most often of two sheets and four leaves (Lat., qua-
COINS territories, hence, "quire")- Being an inexpensive and ubiq uitous material, papyrus had a broader range of use than parchment. Although luxury papyrus codices, with callig raphy and illuminations, do exist, most known codices are of average or low quality and contain mundane texts, such as accounts or private copies of literary works. Expensive parchment was generally preferred for luxury editions or for reference or professional works (e.g., liturgy and law). Given its Roman background and its coarse wooden ar chetype, the codex must at first have been perceived by the hellenized Eastern upper classes as a pedestrian format, alien to the liberal Classical culture, whose texts were nor mally on scrolls. The codex eventually won out, as a con sequence of the growing importance in the Roman Empire of religious and intellectual milieux, that had no prejudice for established book standards, namely the Christians and the local academies. If there is one clear conclusion that the Egyptian evidence permits, it is that the codex was favored by Christians as the exclusive medium for their Holy Scriptures. In addition to the societal generality described in the preceding paragraph, there is no obvious explanation for this fact. Some scholars see the preference as an aspect of the Christian break with the synagogue, where the use of the Torah scroll has sur vived. It is also possible tiiat the codex appeared to the Christians a better tool than the scroll for teaching purposes. Thanks to Roman peace and prosperity, many schools flourished in the East, as did other scholarly activities, such as philology and law. This was a time of didactic and prac tical culture, with bookish tendencies, and that culture was disseminated by a proliferation of handbooks, lexicons, col lections of texts, encyclopedias, and codes, for which the practical format of the codex was more suitable than the scroll. [See also Literacy; Nag Hammadi; Papyrus; Parchment; Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Scroll; and Writing Mate rials.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blanchard, Alain, ed. Les debuts du codex. Bibliologia, vol. 9. Turnhout, 1989. Original views on the beginnings of the codex. Robinson, James M., et al. The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices: Introduction. Leiden, 1984. Important for the physical prop erties and the making of the early papyrus codex. Turner, Eric G . The Typology of the Early Codex. Philadelphia, 1977. Standard work on the subject, based on extensive descriptions of material. Wouters, Alfons. "From Papyrus Roll to Papyrus Codex: Some Tech nical Aspects of Ancient Book Fabrication." Manuscripts of the Mid dle East 5 ( 1 9 9 0 - 1 9 9 1 ) : 9-19. Contains an up-to-date bibliography. JEAN GASCOU
C O E L E - S Y R I A , the Greek name ("hollow Syria") for the Biqa' Valley in southern Syria, between the Lebanon and
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Anti-Lebanon ranges north of Palestine (i.e., in modern Lebanon)—in the Hellenistic era, considered the southern province of coastal and inland Syria. Under the Ptolemies and Seleucids, all of Phoenicia, and even Palestine, could be designated Coele-Syria. Some modern historical geogra phies have used the term Coele-Syria to distinguish Palestine east of the Jordan River (i.e., Transjordan). This usage de rives from Josephus (Antiq. I4.ix.5), based on the fact that Herod ruled this territory under the Romans, calling it Coele-Syria in contrast to Judea (Judah), Samaria, and Gal ilee west of the Jordan River. In the New Testament period, Coele-Syria designated part of the tetrarchy of Philip in northern Transjordan (Josephus, Antiq. i2.xiii.3). [See also Phoenicia; Ptolemies; and Seleucids.] WILLIAM G . DEVER
C O I N S . By interesting coincidence, the initial time range of coinage coincides closely with that of recorded history of the Greek tradition. As strictly defined, its first appearance occurs during the seventh century BCE. By the last quarter of the sixth century it had developed varied and sophisti cated forms. Its first currency was in the Lydian kingdom of eastern Anatolia, reflected in the proverbial association of such Lydian rulers as Gyges (c. 679) and Croesus (560-546) with wealth and possession of gold. Simultaneously or soon afterward, coinage began to appear in the Ionian merchant cities of the eastern Aegean, such as Miletus, Ephesus, and Phocaea. Thereafter the spread of coinage continued to par allel that of Greek culture, and its decorative types are noted as fully representative of Greek art. Thus students of Greek and ancient culture and history follow closely the develop ment of coinage and emerging numismatic evidence. In con trast, coin evidence has been of less relevance to prehistorians; and indeed to Assyriologists, though in recent years it has become clear that monetary evidence of a sort was widely present, if formerly unrecognized, in the earlier Me sopotamian archaeological evidence. Though not strictly coinage, this material, broadly categorized as "ingot cur rency" or "bulk silver," can provide, when studied on nu mismatic lines, economic and even political data. T h e classic definition of coin is that provided by Aristotle in Politics 1257a: When the community's partners, from whom to import require ments, and to whom to export a surplus, began to extend farther afield, the employment of coinage was devised. For natural com modities are not conveniently transported. Consequently for ex change purposes a medium was agreed to pay and receive, which itself was useful, and had a convenient application in everyday life, such as iron or silver. At first this was measured by size and weight. Eventually an emblem was impressed upon it, so as to free (the users) from the need to measure it. For the emblem (itself) was an indication of the quantity-
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COINS
Thus, in true coinage the units bear a stamp of authentic ity applied by the authority responsible for weight and con tent. This authority was in most demonstrable cases the state. Suggested ascriptions to merchant guilds, goldsmiths, and other commercial bodies have rarely been substantiated, though these groups may have been responsible for certain punchmarks found on coins. The issue of temple tokens provides a special province of numismatics, going back even to Assyrian times, and later well represented at Palmyra. T h u s the emblems struck on coins designate the issuing states, often indicating the place and, inferentially, the date of issue. Explicit dates, however, are almost completely con fined to the Parthian, Roman, and Islamic series. Because different states maintained specific standards of weight and composition, these—especially the weight—are also char acteristic of the issuers. Serious losses could be incurred by a mint issuing precious metal if the weights were inaccurate; therefore, great care was taken to ensure exact standards. Almost invariably, throughout the history of coinage— normally a prerogative of the state—coins were produced by striking. A blank, which might be cold or hot, depending on size and the practice of the mint in question, was suitably adjusted for dimensions and weight. It was then placed be tween two dies of bronze or iron, or, by the Islamic period, of steel. The lower die was often fixed in a wooden block, or placed in a fitted recess of an anvil. The upper die, often a punch held freely in the hand or with tongs, was struck once or repeatedly with a sledge-hammer to produce the impression. T h e decorative subjects of the coins were en graved on the dies in intaglio, commonly freehand, so that every die was distinctly individual. Only in some later peri ods, and especially in the Islamic era, is there evidence of mass production of the dies by casting or by hubbing, a process of marking out the design on the die by striking this with a punch bearing the subject in relief, before finishing with tools. The official production of coins by casting has been em ployed only sporadically, especially in the early Roman, and in the Indian series. Casting from genuine coins is of course tire simplest proceedure for producing coin forgeries, de tectable by their "soapy" surface, and prevalence of bub bles. In some periods, ancient counterfeits were also pro duced by casting, and may occasionally even reflect genuine varieties not currently available (Morton, 1975, p. 163). Since the anvil- or obverse (sometimes also called the "staple") die lasted longer in use, it was customary to en grave here the more difficult or sophisticated subjects. Dur ing periods of portrait coinage, especially in Hellenistic times, the royal portrait, the most difficult part of the work, was engraved on the obverse die, whence the present-day terminology of "heads" and "tails" for obverse and reverse. T h e more ephemeral reverse dies lasted only half, or a third, the life of the obverse. Thus we find coins which are "die duplicates" (i.e., obverse and reverse struck from the same pair of individual dies), and others which share only an ob
verse (or less frequently a reverse) die, and are said to be "die-linked." It is normally assumed that die-linked coins would be products of the same mint, and close together in time. At the same time, rare instances are known of coindies under the Seleucids, and possibly other Hellenistic king doms, being sent to branch mints that are far distant, so that they are linked with issues from totally different series. From considerable bodies of coinage (coin hoards or mu seum collections) die-sequences of linked issues can be built up, establishing the chronological series, even when explicit evidence of date is lacking. T h e rule is now broadly accepted that if in a coin series six examples from each die are present, it may be assumed that every die in the series is known. If however there are some dies represented by fewer than six specimens, allowance must be made for the possibility that several dies are missing, and the sequence consequently in complete. The reverse dies (sometimes also called punch dies, or trussels) might for striking, as already noted, be held loose in the hand. The "die-axis," or relation between the orien tation of obverse and reverse types upon the resulting coin, would then be haphazard. Sometimes however it appears that guiding lines were marked on the punch die, and upon the anvil, enabling the worker to line up the two dies con sistently, though only, of course, with approximate accu racy. Again, in certain series, especially that of Periclean Athens, square-headed dies appear to have been used, which would fit in one of four possible orientations. In other cases, the dies appear to have been hinged, so that a single, mechanically accurate orientation was achieved. This was usually either upright f f , or reversed } J,; and can be expressed more simply with a single arrow as f , or 1 . In some periods, variations in die axis help to distinguish the output of different mints or define the chronology of blocks of coinage. The earliest coinages, in seventh-sixth-century BCE Lydia and Ionia, had a decorative subject engraved only in the obverse die. T h e reverses were impressions of simple punches, single or double, and designated as "incuse" squares or rectangles. On some thin Greek coinages of southern Italy, the reverses, cut in relief on the dies, closely followed the outlines of the obverse types, producing what are sometimes called "repousse" coinages. From the late sixth century onward, however, it became customary to en grave both obverse and reverse dies in intaglio, each pro ducing relief impressions on the resulting coins. The obverse of a coinage is usually distinguished by its convexity, the reverse being concave, a feature resulting from the blow of the die. However, in Islamic coinages, characteristically thin and flat, it is difficult to determine the "technological" obverse. Consequently cataloguers have re sorted to the convention that the face bearing the name of Allah and the declaration of faith (shahadah) should be con sidered the obverse. Sometimes the true obverse can be de tected as a result of a striking-error known as a brockage, in
COINS which a struck flan adheres to the punch die; and the next blank receives, instead of the reverse impression, an intaglio version of the obverse, which thus appears on both faces of the succeeding coin (Bacharach and Awad, 1973, pp. 187-188.) In this way it will be seen that the technology of coinage, here only briefly outlined, provides special facilities for the analysis of the extensive numismatic evidence surviving from ancient and medieval times (cf. Philip Grierson, Nu mismatics, London and Oxford, 1975, p. 94ff) • The printing of motifs and inscriptions on the metal of coinage preceded by many cenmries the introduction of printing on paper. Thus it came to provide perhaps the first historical medium for communication between governments and population. Though full exploitation of this potential for official pro paganda was characteristic of the Roman Empire, eastern monarchies such as those of the Parthians and Sasanians used coinage to present an image of the ruler, and to display the ideology and aspirations of the realm. Coins have several characteristics helpful for conveying historical information. T h e output of individual mints form sequences, from which the chronology of succeeding issues can be deduced. Again, during ancient times, especially in periods of upheaval, a frequent practice was to bury deposits of coins for security. Such coin hoards often come to light, and constitute time capsules, conveying chronological infor mation. For study purposes, it is important first to determine which are the latest specimens in each hoard. The sequences contained in overlapping hoards then throw special light on the order of successive issues. "Treasury hoards" consist of stocks of fresh and related coins. "Cumulative" and "sav ings" hoards may cover long periods of accumulation. "Foundation" deposits (as at Persepolis) have a distinctive character. Sporadic coin finds, on the other hand, carefully plotted on the map, throw light on the places of issue when the mints are unknown. "Area finds" recovered in excava tion illustrate the economic history of a settlement, and "lo cation finds" contribute to the dating of structures. Even before the destruction of Assyria in 614-612 BCE by the Babylonians and the Medes, "ingot currencies" of sev eral types circulated in the Near East (see figure 1). It is now realized the "silversmiths' hoards" mentioned in old exca vation reports were not mere working stocks, but had a mon etary character. The oldest forms in circulation were prob ably "ring money" of several types, especially the so-called "earrings," also perhaps worn on ringlets of hair. These forms seem characteristic of Babylonia, possibly from the early second millennium. Their weight approximates that of the shekel, but often on standards older and higher than that of the typical Babylonian shekel of 8.40 g. Current later were the rare "slab ingots," monetary "torques," and "cake in gots" (German Silberkucheri). These last are known from Zincirli (Luschan, 1943, pp. 1 1 9 - 1 2 1 ) and bear the inscrip tion, incised not impressed, BRRKB BR P N M W , naming
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a local ruler who held office around 712 BCE. Although this person is the first ruler named on currency, his ingots do not count as coins since the legend was not mass-produced by stamping; and the weights, though some approach the Babylonian mina of 504 g, are very irregular. Cake ingots were also found, widt Greek coins among other items, in the Syrian Ras Shamra hoard (Thompson et al., 1973 [hereafter IGCH], 1478; Schaeffer, 1939, pp. 464, 466, 486), and in several hoards from Egypt, notably those of Beni Hasan (IGCH 1651), Damanhur (IGCH 1611), and Mit Rahineh (IGCH 1636). Another form of ingot currency, found at Nush-i Jan in Iran, are the "bar ingots," apparently characteristic of the Median Empire in Iran (seventh-sixth century BCE). T h e thirteen specimens in this find illustrate a weight range of 12, 18, 24, and 100 g, suggesting a shekel standard around I2g, and representing units of 1, 1V2, 2, and 8 shekels. As mentioned, a single piece at 8.40 g represents the Babylonian standard, later revived by the reform of Darius the Great. This last unit, the most influential weight standard of the 2
Ingot cmrency. From Nush-i Jan, Iran, seventh century BCE. NOS. 1-6, "cut-silver" pieces; nos. 7-9, ring-money (shekels); nos. 10-11, large rings ("torques"). (Courtesy David Stronach) COINS. Figure I.
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ancient Near East, is hexagesimal, and gives rise to the fol lowing correspondences: 60 minas = 1 talent = 30,240.00 g 60 shekels = 1 mina = 504.00 g 1 shekel = 8.40 g 1 zwz (drachma) = V2 shekel = 4.20 g Bar ingots apparently continued in use under the Achae menids, inspiring the development of the bent bar and punch-marked coinages of ancient India. Finally, "cut-sil ver" (Ger., Hacksilber) makes its appearance as a monetary form, which consists of small chunks of silver cut from larger ingots, bars, or slabs to provide small denominations, usually shekels and their halves. T h e weights of such fragments are very approximately adjusted, small scraps of silver being used to make up units of weight and bulk payments being weighed out on the balance. Because the shekel standard often fluctuated in the system of ingot currency, payments in silver were simply reckoned on the balance, using the standard weights in force at the time. An increase or reduc tion of the standard—such as for taxation purposes—could be effected by simply increasing or reducing the weights. By die end of the sixtii century BCE and the beginning of fifth, deposits of bulk silver recorded in Asia east of the Tau rus and in Egypt begin to include, together witii ingot cur rency of several kinds, quantities of coined Greek silver, mainly from the areas of silver extraction in Greece (see figure 2). Such regions are the Thraco-Macedonian area; Siphnos, island source of silver used in the Aiginetan "turtle" coinage; and also Athens, a noted producer from the Laurium mines. The mints of Phoenicia, especially Tyre, Sidon, Byblos (Jubayl), and Aradus, probably ob tained their bullion by international trade. Hoards of this type are those of Ras Shamra (c. 510-500), the Taranto hoard of 1911 (500-490) with its rare slab ingot, Asyut (c. 475), and the "Jordan 1967" hoard (c. 445). Close dates can be established from the Greek coins present, often heavily chopped or gashed with a chisel—a test for purity of silver probably imposed by die Achaemenid treasuries. T h e "bulk silver" content probably consisted of pieces retained in cir culation from earlier periods. By the second half of the fiftii century BCE, the widely distributed hoards of Greek silver in Asia tend to consist entirely of coins. As the study by Daniel Schlumberger (1953) shows, this coinage, received in the Achaemenid Empire by tribute or trade, was widespread in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Afghanistan—a phenomenon illus trated by die hoards of Malayer (discovered 1934), of the Chaman Huzuri at Kabul (discovered 1933), and by C. J. Rich's Tigris Hoard described by G. K. Jenkins (1964). Aldiough a "silver standard" thus prevailed in the Aegean and in Asia beyond die Taurus, a "gold standard" domi nated in the east Anatolian kingdoms of Lydia and Phrygia and the cities of the Aegean coast. The earliest issues were in electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. These were
"dumps" marked with parallel striations on the obverse, and threefold incuse punch on the reverse. Coins with the legend Walwes are ascribed by some to Alyattes, king of Lydia (c. 580), and must come early in the series. Later, respective gold and silver issues of "heavy" standard (about 10.9 g), with types of a confronted lion and bull, are ascribed to Croesus, king of Lydia (560-546). They are followed by issues on a lighter standard witii similar emblems, in gold and silver respectively, now increasingly ascribed to Cyrus, king of Persia (550-530), after his conquest of Lydia. These issues, of which the silver denominations reckoned twenty to the gold shekel, weighed respectively 5.4 g and 8 g. Ex amples were found in the Persepolis foundation deposit to ward 5 1 1 BCE (Herzfeld, 1938, pp. 413-414; Schmidt, 1957, p. 1 1 3 ) . They were quickly followed by the famous "daricsiglos" series, inaugurated no doubt by Darius die Great. The obverse featured a Persian archer, and the reverse had rectangular incuse. It is now known that die sequence of types for both silver and gold was as follows: (1) half-length figure (daric 8 g, siglos 5.4 g); (2) archer shooting with bow (daric 7.87-8.34 g, siglos 5.4 g); (3) archer running with bow and spear, two pellets vertically beneath ear (daric 8.35 g, siglos 5.4 g); (4) archer running with bow and spear, no pellets beneath ear (daric 8.35 g, siglos 5.60 g); and (5) archer running with bow and dagger (daric 8.35 g, siglos 5.60 g). Although the silver coin is known in Greek as the siglos (i.e., shekel), it was in fact the gold daric which was to weigh 8.35 g, representing (witii a small discount for seign iorage) the standard of the Babylonian shekel (8.40 g) re vived by Darius's monetary reforms. T h e silver denomina tion of 5.4 g or 5.6 g was adjusted so that it rated twenty to the daric at a silver/gold ratio of 13:1 or 13.3:1. The small fluctuations in the weight standards of silver and gold gave critical clues to the sequence of the daric issues, otiierwise differentiated only by details of posture and ornament. Thus, the famous Persian archer series of daric and siglos, effectively the coinage of the Lydian satrapy at Sardis, is recognized by numismatists as typical of the Achaemenids. It is represented in finds far across the empire, although the siglos was treated as bullion in the eastern satrapies (prov inces), where there were still no mints for the manufacture of circular coinage until the advent of Alexander the Great. Reports of the minting of sigloi under the Achaemenids else where in the Near East than Sardis (e.g., in Egypt under Aryandes, in Anatolia, or in Babylon) have not yet been confirmed decisively. If die gold daric was typical of the Lydian satrapy, in some of the Greek cities and islands coinage of the gold-silver alloy electrum persisted. Sometimes it was the natural metal, but increasingly produced as artificial alloy, which was called by numismatists white gold. Important centers were Phocaea and Mytilene. Because the Achaemenid satrapy of the Hel lespont in northwestern Anatolia produced no coinage of its own, however, the electrum staters (units) of Lampsacus
COINS.
Figure 2.
Typical contents o/Ncar
Isust silver hoards. Nos. t - 1 7 , from K a b u l , C h a m a n Huxuri
hoard, .1933 (courtesy Kabul M u s e u m , 1962): ( 1 ) Kcrkyra, (2) Acanthus, (3) Alliens (archaic), (4) Alliens (c. 430 isi.a;), (5, 6) Aigina, (7) Chios, (8) Sarnos, (9) l..csbos, ( 1 0 ) Phasclis, (1 1) Aspcndos, ( 1 2 ) Soioi, ( 1 3 ) T a r s u s , ( 1 4 ) Mallus, ( 1 5 ) Kiiion (King A/.haal), (16) Sulamis ( C y p r u s ) , ( 1 7 ) Paphos. Nos. 1 8 - 1 9 , British M u s e u m (Courtesy of the Trustees): ( 1 8 ) Sidon, ( 1 9 ) T y r e . Note chisel cms typical of Achaemenid treasury usage. All fifth-fourth century was.
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and especially of Cyzicus appear to have supplied the need and played an international role in the Black Sea trade. The Cyzicene series, current from the late sixth century until the advent of Alexander, had an extensive repertoire of chang ing types, always characterized by the accompanying sym bol of the tuna fish, the local product. The main stater de nomination was adjusted to a standard of 16.05 g, and the hekte ("sixth") was a common subdivision. T h e electrum series of Lampsacus bore the winged forepart of a horse and weighed about 15.35 g- Both these coinages bore on the re verse the incuse impression of a plain "mill sail" punch. Toward 400 Lampsacus gave up electrum and produced a distinguished coinage in pure gold with changing obverse types, weighing 8.40 g. This was exactly the standard of the daric and presumably valued against it at par. Important Greek silver coinages of the fifth century BCE circulating in the Near East were the Aiginetan "turtles," the Athenian "owls," the large Thraco-Macedonian pieces and issues of the Phoenician cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Aradus, together with Citium (Kition) in Cyprus. Hellenistic and Parthian Coinage. Only under Alex ander die Great (332-321) was the attempt made to impose a uniform coinage across his territories extending from Macedonia to Iran. T h e imperial obverse type for gold was a helmeted Athena with her head to right, and the reverse featured a winged Victory holding die stylis, a nautical at tachment. Athena's helmet was usually ornamented with a coiled serpent, but on some late varieties there was a eaglegriffin, lion-griffin, or sphinx. Remarkably this series seems to have commenced before any victory had actually been won. T h e silver had die obverse head of Heracles (Herakles) attired in the lion scalp, and on the reverse the Olympian Zeus is enthroned, holding an eagle on his right hand. Sep arate issues are distinguished in botii series by symbols or monograms or both; and the mints, even when not so dif ferentiated, have often been recognized from die links and engravers' styles. Initially the main mints are thought to have been Amphipolis and Pella. Later, as the conquests ad vanced, coins were issued in many regional centers. The most easterly mint in Alexander's lifetime appears to have been Ecbatana (Hamadan) in Iran. Further east, mixed coinage, "bulk silver," and bars continued to circulate. The obverse type of Alexander's coinage was not origi nally a portrait but was quickly taken as such. After the con queror's death and deification, his portrait in various forms appeared on the coins of the Hellenistic monarchies: on that of Antigonus in Phrygia retaining the Heracles; on that of Ptolemy in Egypt wearing the elephant-scalp commemora tive of the Indian conquests; and on that of Lysimachus in Thrace with the ram's horns recalling his sojourn in Egypt. This last was a coinage widely diffused and known through out the Near East. Ultimately the diademed portrait of the living ruler be
came the characteristic obverse of die Hellenistic monar chies, producing some of the finest known Greek portrai ture. The Attic standard introduced by Alexander, with a teffadrachm of 17.2 g (.6 oz.), became die most common metrology, but it soon slipped marginally to 16.8 g (.6 oz.), coinciding with the long familiar Babylonian shekel at 8.40 g (.30 oz.), of which it thus represented the double. The Seleucid kingdom (312-88) in its heyday stretched from the Aegean to Central Asia, and the studies of its mints by Edward T. Newell (1938, 1941) still constitute a model of numismatic method. A characteristic reverse type de picted the god Apollo seated on the Delphic omphalos (a rounded stone in his temple regarded as the center of the world) and holding his bow and arrows. Their number, one to three, indicated die mint. Soon the Seleucid eastern ter ritories fell either to die independent Bactrian kingdom or to die advancing Parthians, who pressed forward down the Asian highway from the Caspian to Qumis-FIecatompylos, Rayy (modern Tehran), Hamadan and Seleucia on the T i gris. At first their coinage largely conformed to the Helle nistic pattern, but later the bearded obverse portrait was nor mally turned to the left. The reverse was soon standardized as the dynastic founder, Arsaces, seated on the omphalos or on a throne and holding his bow and arrows. T h e royal name was inscribed simply as Arsaces, usually accompanied by tides. Thus the absence of the ruler's personal name causes difficulties of identification. Although the drachma denom ination was copiously issued at the cities on the Iranian pla teau, the large tetradrachms were struck exclusively at Se leucia on the Tigris, where the practice was established of inscribing dates according to the Seleucid era of 3 1 2 and frequently also the exact month. Frontal portraits represent pretenders to the Arsacid throne. The Greek inscriptions on Parthian coins became increas ingly conventionalized, and by the reign of Vologeses I (51-78 CE) they are supplemented by initially abbreviated inscriptions in Parthian indicating die royal names, such as W L for Vologeses, later wlgsy mlk' ("King Vologeses"). These have the advantage of designating the ruler individ ually.
COINS. Figure 3. Early Sasanian coins. Coins 3 , 1 2 , and 1 5 are > gold; ouierwise all are silver. N o . 1 , Shapur (207 CE), king of Persis. Nos. 2 - 3 , Ardashir I (208-223-241 CE) with successive crowns as king of Persis; no. 4 (223 CE) after defeat of Artabanus V; no. 5 (226 CE) witii mural crown after capture of Ctesiphon; no. 6, witii definitive crown as Shahanshah, after 228 CE; no. 7, with prince Shapur as heir. N o . 8, Shapur I ( 2 4 1 - 2 7 2 CE) with eagle crown as successor in accession year; nos. 9 - 1 0 , Shapur I with plain crown and crown with cheek-piece. No. 1 1 , Ohrmazd I (272-273 CE). NO. 1 2 , Vahram I (273-276 CE). N o . 1 3 , Vahram II (276-293 CE). N O . 1 4 , Vahram III (293 CE). NO. 1 5 , Narseh (293-302'CE). British M u seum (Courtesy of the Trustees).
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Besides the main series of Parthian coinage, the subordi nate kingdoms that were a feature of the Arsacid dispensation—Persis, Elymais, and Characene—intermit tently issued their own coinages. Persis indeed produced au tonomous tetradrachms and drachms of the Attic standard soon after the death of Seleucus I in 280 BCE. The series is sometimes styled the "Fratadara" coinage from a reading by Ernst Herzfeld (1938) that is now known to be incorrect but nevertheless provides a useful label for the series. These is sues bear the Aramaic inscription frtrk' zy 'lhy\ apparently "administrator o f (i.e., appointed by) "the gods," in op position, presumably, to those appointed by the Seleucid kings. Rulers named include Bagadata, Oborzus (whwbrz), Artaxerxes ('rthstr), and Autophradates (wlprdt), besides others less clearly decipherable. T h e usual types show the ruler on obverse, wearing the satrapal tiara, and a fire temple or fire altar on the reverse. Subsequent coinages on a lighter standard continue until the advent of the Sasanian dynasty (see below). Elymais, the kingdom in the Zagros foothills east of Susa and Alivaz, also produced a coinage under its founder, Kamnaskires, a title deriving from that of the Achaemenid treasurers residing at Susa. This quaint designation long re mained the throne name of tire Elymaean kings. Soon after the start of the Christian era, Greek types and inscriptions gave way to "Oriental" portraits and legends in a local form of Aramaic, naming as kings Phraates, Orodes (wrwd), and Chosroes. At the head of the Persian Gulf again lay Char acene, a state founded by a chief named Hyspaosines (c. 125), who once more struck large silver coins with Greek legends, beardless portraits, and Heracles on the reverse. His successors Apodakos, Tiraios, and Artabazos continued the tradition until 48-47 BCE. Under later rulers there was pro gressive debasement of the silver denominations, and here too after about 143 CE, Greek was replaced by a variety of tire Aramaic alphabet. Sasanian Dynasty (223-631 CE). In 223 CE Ardashir I, the local prince of Persis, rebelled against his Parthian over lords, defeated Artabanus V (Ardavan V, sometimes also numbered Artabanus IV), the last Arsacid king, and em barked on the consolidation of Iran. Rigorous reforms were introduced in every theater. Military, administrative, and re ligious centralization were accompanied by a complete ren ovation of the coinage. The debased Parthian silver was re placed by a brilliant series in gold and fine silver respectively, the former commemorative, the latter constituting hence forth the principal currency (see figure 3). The weight stan dard of the silver at 4.1 g, was effectively that of the Attic drachma. The characteristic types showed the royal bust on the obverse now turned toward the right and identified by a specific individual crown. On the reverse was the fire altar symbolic of the dynasty's Zoroastrian faith. This image in the following reigns was flanked by two "guardians." In the
initial period the Pahlavi inscriptions were often blundered because the engravers were not literate. The legends were intended to give on the obverse the name and titles of the ruler with the formula "Mazda-worshiping lord N . , king (of kings) of Iran (and non-Iran, whose descent is from the gods)," and on the reverse "fire of N . " is written with ref erence to the royal sacred fires established for every ruler at his accession. With the passage of generations the individual crowns become increasingly complex, occasional mint names appear on the reverses and are eventually standard ized in abbreviated form (see figure 4). By the reign of Kavad (488-531 CE), such abbreviations regularly appear to the right of the fire altar, and the regnal date of the issue is indicated in words on the left. The script evolves from the "epigraphic Pahlavi" witii its separate characters to the cur sive "Book Pahlavi" forms. The volume of coinage was greatly increased under Khusrau I Anushirvan (531-579), revenue thereafter being levied in cash rather than kind. The epic wars against Byzantium waged by Khusrau II Parvez (592-628) demanded vast output of coinage, no doubt often struck from the enormous booty. T h e Sasanian drachma was by this time a fiat and thin module with widely spread flan. It provided the pattern not only for certain Byzantine silver coinages but especially for the dirhams of Islam. Islamic Coinages. When in 637 the Muslim Arab armies overran Syria and Mesopotamia, they entered a world of two distinct currency systems. That of the Byzantine Empire, based on gold and bronze, functioned farther to the west. That of Sasanian Iran, consisting chiefly of silver, was active to the east. At first the huge quantities of coinage available as tribute or booty sufficed for current needs. Yet already there was being laid the foundation of a coinage system in all three metals. As the Arab armies advanced through Iran, drachmae of the Sasanian pattern continued in issue. Pro totypes were naturally coins of the last Sasanian ldng, Yazdgird III (632-651), dated to regnal year 20, his last, but with slight variations of detail and decoration. For some dec ades dating continued in Yazdgird's era. The numerous is sues of Khusrau II were also imitated and soon began to predominate. Typically, short inscriptions in Arabic appear in the second quarter of the obverse margin, especially biismi'llah ("in the name of Allah") and jayyid ("excellent"). The names of the Arab governors, replacing the name of Khusrau, came to be written in Pahlavi in front of the con-
COINS. Figure 4. Early Sasanian drachmae with mint names. N o . • 1, Vahram I (273-276 CE), mint, rev. above fire altar, Skst'n (for Sistan). No. 2, Vahram II (276-293 CE), with consort, and to right, hier; mint, rev. above fire altar, Ldy for Rayy. N o . 3 , Ohrmazd II (302-309 CE); mint, rev. on fire altar, Ldy for Rayy. Enlarged about 2X. Note ornate individual crowns of kings. N o . 1 , Indian National Museum, Parieck Collection. Nos. 2 - 3 , British Museum (Courtesy of the Trustees).
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ventionalized portrait. Eventually around AH 60/679-80 CE, the Muslim Hijrah reckoning was introduced for the dates. With die transfer of the caliphal capital to Damascus by die Umayyads, under die caliph 'Abd al-Malik, die quest began for a definitive Islamic coinage. In gold, die Byzantine "tiiree emperors" type of Heraclius was progressively modified by elimination of the crosses: the "cross on steps" and those on the crowns. Finally, die Arabic declaration of faith appears in the reverse margin. A similar type in silver with die central figure in an attitude of prayer was issued for Bishr ibn Marwan at al-Kufah (Aramaic Aqula) and Basra, respectively in 73/692-93 and 75/694-95. Next, the "standing caliph" type appears on the obverse of gold issues for 76/695-96 and on silver from Damascus dated 75/694-95 (cf. Walker, 1956). A remarkable type 0172/691-92 from Sistan has die Muslim Declaration of Faith in Middle Persian written in the Pahlavi script. The definitive Islamic typology (the "reformed coinage") appears in 77/696-97 for gold and in 79/698-99 for silver. Figural representations are now banned. The types are ex clusively inscriptional, obverses bearing simply the Decla ration of Faitii (shahadah) in the central area and the "Pro phetic Mission" (Qur'an 9:33) in die margin. The reverse has die Surat al-Ikhlas (Qur'an 1 1 2 : 1 - 3 ) in die central area. These words—"Allah is one, Allah is eternal, He did not beget, nor was He begotten"—were a formula said to have been inscribed on the banners of armies marching to fight the Byzantines. In the reverse margin is the date-legend witii the numeral written in words. On gold, mint names are un common. It is assumed that the bulk of coinage was issued at Damascus, although the mint names Ifriqiyah (Africa), al-Andalus (Spain), and Ma'dan Amir al-Mu'minin hi alHijaz ("Mine of the Caliph in the Hijaz") are sometimes found. On silver, mint names appear for more than sixtysix provincial and district centers, constituting the main in terest of die series. On the Umayyad gold and silver coinage, remarkably no name of any ruler is found. The extensive copper coinage, issued from innumerable local municipali ties, at first has only religious formulae. Mint names, names of governors, and ultimately dates progressively make tiieir appearance. Although of humdrum appearance, Islamic copper coinage, which every excavated site introduces in new varieties, has probably the greatest research potential in Near Eastern numismatics. Local knowledge is required to attribute the many "mintiess" varieties.
sues chiefly by the replacement in the reverse legend of the Surat al-Ikhlas by the words "Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah." In 146/763-64, the official name of the new Abbasid capital—Baghdad—appeared as Madinat es-Salam ("the city of peace") in the margin. T h e second city of the 'Abbasids was Rayy, the ancient predecessor of Tehran, under the designation al-Muhammadiyah. Although the Abbasid gold dinars continued the Umayyad form largely unchan ged, the dirhams evolved a slender and elongated Kufic script, which persisted until after the death of Harun alRashid in 170-193/786-809. Gradually the brief names of officials begin to appear on the coinage: mint supervisors, princes, ministers, governors, and eventually, the caliph himself with full titles. It was only in the tenth century CE with the increasing fragmentation of caliphal power that lo cal princes bearing the tide amir became effectively sover eign. They issued coinage, often even gold, in their own names, but still always acknowledging in the legends the Abbasid caliph as overlord. Such rulers were the Saffarids and Ghaznavids in Afghanistan; the Samanids and Qarakhanids in Central Asia; the Buyids, Zaydids, and Musafirids in Iran; and the Hamdanids and Marwanids in Syria and Mesopotamia. Finally, the Turkish dynasty of the Great Seljuqs overshadowed all lesser rivals, and from their capital at Isfahan established perhaps the most stable dispensation, dominating Asian Islam from 429/1038 until 590/1194. Dur ing this last phase a "silver famine," variously explained, overtook the treasuries of Islam, coinage seemingly being confined to gold and some copper. This interlude as a whole provides material of striking variety, issued by a galaxy of local mints, and documenting every stage of the complex history. After the brief interlude of the Khwarazmshahs, Ala ad-Din Tekish (567-596/1172-1200), and his son Ala alDin Muhammad b. Tekish (596/617-1200-1220), the Mon gol avalanche swept away the 'Abbasid caliphate and its sat ellites. Their onslaught utterly destroyed the old world of Islam and introduced in due course the late medieval coin age of the Near East with its Naskhi script and innovative designs.
The classically angular Arabic script on these early Islamic coins is designated "Kufic." The diacritical points distin guishing letters of similar form are sparingly found, but they do occur sporadically. Although evolving in detail, forms of the angular script continued until the later twelfth century CE when they were replaced by the joined and flowing "Naskhi" style. Coins of the 'Abbasid dynasty, who ousted the Umayyads in 132/749-50, are distinguished from earlier is
Balmuth, Miriam S. "The Monetary Forerunners of Coinage in Phoe nicia and Palestine." In International Numismatic Convention, Jeru salem, 1 7 - 3 1 December 1963, pp. 25-32. Tel Aviv, 1967. Balmirth, Miriam S. "Origins of Coinage." In A Survey of Numismatic Research, 1966-1971, vol. 1 , Ancient Numismatics, edited by Paul Naster et al., pp. 2 7 - 3 5 . New York, 1973. Balmuth, Miriam S. "Jewellers' Hoards and the Development of Early Coinage." In Actes du 8eme congris international de numismatique, New Yorlt-Washington, September 1973, edited by Herbert A. Cahn and Georges Le Rider, pp. 27-30. Paris and Basel, 1976.
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[See also Weights and Measures. In addition many of the ruling dynasties and individual sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ingot Currency and Archaic Greek Coinage
COINS Bivar, A. D. H. "A Hoard of Ingot-Currency of the Median Period, from Nush-i Jan, near Malayir." Iran 9 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 9 7 - 1 1 1 . Illustrates archaeological evidence for the context of bar-ingots. Bivar, A. D. H. "Bent Bars and Straight Bars: An Appendix to the Mir Zakah Hoard." Sludia Iranica 1 1 (1982): 49-60. Bivar, A. D. H. "Achaemenid Coins, Weights, and Measures." In The Cambridge Histoiy of Iran, vol. 2, The Median and Achaernenian Pe riods, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, pp. 610-625. Cambridge, 1983. Carradice, Ian. "The 'Regal' Coinage of the Persian Empire." In Coin age and Administration in the Athenian and Persian Empires: TheNinth Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, edited by Ian Carradice, pp. 7 3 - 9 5 . British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 343. Oxford, 1987. Herzfeld, Ernst. "Notes on the Achaemenid Coinage and Sasanian Mint-Names." In Transactions of the International Numismatic Con gress Organized and Held in London by the Royal Numismatic Society, June 30-July 3, 1936, on the Occasion of Its Centenary, edited by J. W. Allan et al., pp. 4 1 3 - 4 2 6 . London, 1938. First publication of the Persepolis foundation deposit, and the pioneer use of Sasanian bullae to elucidate the mint signatures on coins. Jenkins, G. K. "Coins from the Collection of C. J. Rich." British Mu seum Quarterly 28 (1964): 88-95. Literary records of a vast find of Greek coins and ingot currency on the Tigris bank not far from Baghdad. Kraay, Colin M., and Max Hirmer. Greek Coins. London, 1966. Su perbly illustrated survey of Greek coinage. Kraay, Colin M., and P. R. S. Moorey. "Two Fifth-Century Hoards from the Near East." Revue Numismatique 1 0 (1968): 1 8 1 - 2 3 5 . A "Jordan hoard" and a "Syrian hoard" of mixed Greek coins and scrap silver. Kraay, Colin M. Archaic and Classical Greek Coins. London, 1976. Kraay, Colin M., and P. R. S. Moorey. "A Black Sea Hoard of the Late Fifth Century B. C." Numismatic Chronicle 141 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 - 1 9 . Luschan, Felix von. Die Kleinfunde von Sendschrift (Ausgrabungen in Sendschirli V). Berlin, 1943, pp. 1 1 9 - 1 2 1 . Powell, Marvin A. "A Contribution to the History of Money in Mes opotamia Prior to tire Invention of Coinage." In Festschrift Lubor Matous, edited by Blahoslav Hruska and Geza Komoroczy, pp. 2 1 1 - 2 4 3 . Budapest, 1978. Survey of cuneiform texts illustrating the mechanism of ingot currency and confirming numismatic evidence that weight denominations were only approximately adjusted. Price, Martin, and Nancy Waggoner. Archaic Greek Coinage: TheAsyut Hoard. London, 1975. The latest and most complete publication of a large hoard of Greek silver coins from Egypt, buried c. 475 BCE. Reade, Julian. "A Hoard of Silver Currency from Achaemenid Baby lon." Iran 24 (1986): 79-87. Robinson, E. S. G, "A 'Silversmith's Hoard' from Mesopotamia." Iraq 12 (1950): 4 4 - 5 1 . Robinson, E. S. G. "The Beginnings of Achaemenid Coinage." Nu mismatic Chronicle 18 (1958): 1 8 7 - 1 9 3 . Fundamental breakthrough in elucidation of the sequence and weight-standards of the Achae menid coinage of Sardis. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. "Une trouvaille de monnaies archai'ques grecques a Ras Shamra." In Melanges syriens offerts a M. R. Dussaud, vol. 1, pp. 461-487. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 30. Paris, 1939. Schlumberger, Daniel. "L'argent grec dans l'empire achemenide." In Tresors monetaires d'Afghanistan, by Raoul Curiel and Daniel Schlumberger, pp. 3-64. Memoires de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Afghanistan, 14. Paris, 1953. Publication of the Tchaman-i Hazouri (Kabul) hoard of fifth-fourth century Greek coins and bent bars. Also describes the Malayer hoard of fifth-century Greek coins. Schmidt, Erich F. Persepolis II. Chicago, 1957, pp. 1 1 3 , pi. 84.
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Sellwood, David. "Parthian Coins" and "Minor States in Southern Iran." In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 . 1 , The Seleucid, Par thian, and Sasanian Periods, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, pp. 279-314. Cambridge, 1983. Includes excellent illustrations. The second article covers the coinage of Persis, Elymais, and Characene. Thompson, Margaret, et al. An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards. (IGCH). New York, 1973. Hellenistic and Parthian Coinage Ingholt, Flarald, et al. Recueil des lessercs de Palmyre. Bibliotheque Ar cheologique et Historique, vol. 58. Paris, 1955. Catalogue of Palmyrene temple tokens (tesserae). Jenkins, G. K. "Coin Hoards from Pasargadae." Iran 3 (1965): 4 1 - 5 2 . Two hoards of Alexander-coinage and of Seleucus. Le Rider, Georges. Suse sous les Seleucides et les Parthes: Les trouvailles monetaires et I'histoire de la ville. Paris, 1965. Morkholm, Otto. Early Hellenistic Coinage: From the Accession of Alex ander to the Peace of Apamea, 336-1S6 B.C. Cambridge, 1991. Newell, Edward T. Royal Greek Portrait Coins. New York, 1937. A most useful general survey. Newell, Edward T. The Coinage of the Eastern Seleucid Mints, from Se leucus I to Antiochus III. New York, 1938. Fundamental analysis of the eastern Seleucid coinage and mint-structure, still indispensable today. Covers the mints of Seleucia on the Tigris, Ecbatana, Susa, and Bactria. Newell, Edward T. The Coinage of the Western Seleucid Mints, from Seleucus I to Antiochus III. New York, 1 9 4 1 . Price, Martin Jessop. The Coinage in the Name of Alexander the Great and Philip Arrhidaeus. 2 vols. Zurich and London, 1991. Sellwood, David. An Introduction to the Coinage of Parthia. 2d ed. Lon don, 1980. Very serviceable description of Parthian coinage, with tables for the conversion of Seleucid and Parthian dates (pp. 1 1 — 1 3 ) . Sasanian and Early Islamic Coinage Bacharach, Jere L., and H. A. Awad. "The Problem of Obverse and Reverse in Islamic Numismatics." Numismatic Chronicle (1973): 183-191. Broome, Michael. A Handbook of Islamic Coins. London, 1985. Gobi, Robert. Sasanian Numismatics. Braunschweig, 1971. Careful de scription of the coinage. Gobi, Robert. "Sasanian Coins." In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 . 1 , The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, pp. 322-338. Cambridge, 1983. Gyselen, Rika. "Tresor de monnaies sasanides trouve a Suse." Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran 7 (1977): 61-74. Gyselen, Rika. "Un tresor iranien de monnaies sasanides." Revue Num ismatique 23 (1981): 133—141. Gyselen, Rika, and Ludvik Kalus. Deux tresors monetaires des premiers temps de I'lslam. Paris, 1983. Mixed hoards of Sasanian and early Islamic coins from Syria, witii a valuable appendix on the Sasanian mint signatures. Gyselen, Rika. "Un tresor de monnaies sasanides tardives." Revue Numismatique 32 (1990): 2 1 2 - 2 3 1 . Herzfeld, Ernst, "Notes on the Achaemenid Coinage and Sasanian Mint-Names." In Transactions of the International Numismatic Con gress Organized and Held in London by the Royal Numismatic Society, June 30-July 3, 193d, on the Occasion of Its Centenary, edited by J. W. Allan et al„ pp. 413-426. London, 1938. Malek, Hodge Mehdi. "A Seventh-Century Hoard of Sasanian Drachms." Iran 31 (1993): 77-93. Up-to-date treatment of a hoard of 296 drachmae of Khusrau II acquired by a collector from Quetta. Malek, Hodge Mehdi. "A Survey of Research on Sasanian Numis matics." Numismatic Chronicle 153 (1993): 227-269. Valuable survey
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with a comprehensive bibliography of 292 publications in the field (from which the present selection may be supplemented). Mochiri, Malek Iradj. "A Pahlavi Forerunner of the Umayyad Re formed Coinage." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1981): 168-172. Remarkable Arab-Sasanian issue from STstan, dated 72/ 691-692, rendering die Muslim declaration of faith in Middle Per sian, written in the Pahlavi script. Mochiri, Malek Iradj. "A Sasanian-Style Coin of YazTd b. Mu'awiya." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1982): i37-i4i.Pseudo-Sasanian drachma, attesting in Pahlavi script "Year 1 " of an unspecified ruler YazTd. Morton, A. II. "An Islamic Hoard of Forged Dirhams." Numismatic Chronicle (1975): 1 5 5 - 1 6 8 . Paruck, F. D.J. Sasanian Coins. Bombay, 1924. Comprehensive work for its day, illustrating a wide range of coinage; now increasingly out of date. Plant, Richard J. Arabic Coins and How to Read Them. 2d ed. London, 1980. Useful introduction to the inscriptions on early Islamic coins. Simon, H. "Die sasanidischen Miinzen des Fundes von Babylon: Ein Teil des bei Koldeweys Ausgrabungen im Jahre 1900 gefunden Mtinzschatzes." In Varia 1976, pp. 149-337. Acta Iranica, vol. 1 2 . Tehran, 1977. Walker, John. Catalogue of Muhammadan Coins in the British Museum, vol. \,Arab-Sassanian Coins. London, 1941. Fundamental study of this series, now somewhat dated. The arrangement by governors' names, radter than by mints, sometimes seems confusing since tentires of office were interrupted. Also the author's transliteration of Pahlavi legends, though logical, was idiosyncratic. Despite such mi nor shortcomings, this work is essential for serious research. Walker, John. Catalogue of Muhammadan Coins in the British Museum, vol. 2, A Catalogue of the Arab-Byzantine and Post-Reform Umaiyad Coins. London, 1956. Indispensable research work for early Islamic coinage, though considerably supplemented in subsequent publica tions. Walker, John. "Some New Arab-Sassanian Coins." Numismatic Chron icle 12 (1956): 1 0 6 - 1 1 0 . Four notable additions to the repertoire of Arab-Sasanian coinage, including the astonishing Arab-Hephthalite issue of YazTd b. al-Muhallab from Guzgan. A. D. H. BIVAR
C O L O N I Z A T I O N . The term colonization has strong semantic associations with imperialism, especially that of nineteenth-century Europe where colonies were the politi cal, military, and economic possessions of metropolitan powers, held by force and controlled by a bureaucratic ma chinery. Typical colonial situations involved dominant for eign minority populations that enjoyed juridically privileged access to land, labor, and raw materials, and that retained adherence to metropolitan imperial powers. Ancient em pires differed from modern empires in their political struc ture and in their general emphasis on war loot and tribute payments. Even so, ancient systems minimally involved gar risons and bureaucratic outposts; the Akkadian "palace" at Tell Brak and the Gasur (Nuzi) archive reflect this military and administrative presence in northern Mesopotamia dur ing the twenty-third century BCE. Imperialism could also in volve direct control of land, whether by settling soldiers in the margins of empire (e.g., the Ur III state in the twentyfirst century BCE and also the Athenian and Roman empires
of later times), or by creating latifundia, large plantations worked by bound or slave labor (e.g., Achaemenid Persians in Babylonia). The Assyrian and Babylonian policy of de porting conquered peoples to create pacified labor pools in the first millennium counts as another form of imperial col onization. New F o u n d a t i o n s . Although these imperial situations contain aspects of colonialism, several other kinds of situa tions in the ancient world created nonimperial colonies. The new Phoenician and Greek foundations around the Medi terranean basin during the Iron Age (eighth-sixth century) exemplifies one of these situations. Here, a population em igrated from an existing city-state to establish another. Un like imperial colonies, these new communities were politi cally and economically independent from the founding city-state and displaced the indigenous population. T h e mo tives for the colonizing movement were variable, including competition for land and for the wealth that land represents, creation of ttading stations with access to new markets, relief from overpopulation and food shortage in the mother citystate, and exile of disaffected political factions. T r a d e Colonies. Commercial communities that formed foreign quarters in cities were another, common "colonial" situation in the ancient Near East. In such cases, the for eigners were temporary residents who invested in financial instruments, not land or labor. The activities of these com munities were commonly based on agreements between the local ruler and the trading association or foreign state in or der to make more predictable (reduce risks) the commercial colony's legal standing, the conditions of trade, and protec tion costs. These agreements also acted to limit the political, and even economic, power of trading communities. Desig nated ports-of-trade established analogous legal conduits of trade in which trading privileges and restrictions were es tablished by the local authority. Commercial colonies should be distinguished from trade diasporas in which dispersed members of an ethnic group (e.g., Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Indians in more recent Asian history) possessed special status as traders across vast regions, but did not enjoy con nections to a metropolitan government. The Akkadian word karum refers to the port or commer cial quarter of Mesopotamian cities in general where explicit rules of conduct enforced peaceful and profitable trade with neighboring city-states and with more distant regions. The karum institution could operate in both nonimperial and im perial settings. For example, the karum at Sippar in northern Babylonia provided the institutional setting for traders from other Babylonian kingdoms and from Assur, early in the second millennium; Sippar also hosted permanent com munities from Eshnunna, Isin, and other Mesopotamian cit ies. Similarly, the Assyrian empire maintained karums for trade with Egypt and witii Arwad (and from there with the Mediterranean), in order to regulate and supervise trade witii places still outside direct imperial control. Other ex-
COLONIZATION amples of a similar system, though less well known, include the community of Old Babylonian traders in the Persian Gulf (the alik Dilmun), and the Greek emporia (trade cen ters) at al-Mina (Syria) and Naukratis (Egypt). The Old Assyrian Cappadocian karum system provides the best-known example of ancient commercial coloniza tion. In operation during the early centuries of the second millennium, the karum system involved the presence in au tonomous (and previously existing) cities of Central Ana tolia of Assyrian traders and their families (which often in cluded local wives). T h e traders represented private family firms or joint investment ventures based in Assur, under the provisions of treaties between die local Anatolian king and the Assyrian authorities. T h e traders formed their own in stitutional structure and offices, to regulate the activities of, and to adjudicate disagreements between, members of the karum community, and to represent the karum in the local royal court. The best-known Assyrian karum in Anatolia is Kanes (Kultepe) in Cappadocia; the textual evidence indi cates that Assyrian trading colonies also existed at Alisar, Bogazkoy (die later Hittite capital), and other places. T h e Kanes archives record the transactions of Assyrian traders bringing woolen textiles and tin to Kanes and beyond, where these commodities were exchanged for silver and other commodities to be trafficked in Assur. Archaeological Cases. As the review of colonies in the ancient Near East suggests, many of the clearest examples date to the second and first millennia BCE, when the textual sources provide most of the evidence. In earlier periods or in less habitually literate areas of western Asia at any time, archaeological evidence suggests colonialism in certain cases. The Uruk expansion. T h e Late Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia presents very strong evidence for a colonial expansion into the surrounding regions. T h e archaeological evidence falls into several distinct patterns. In the Susiana plain of western Iran, an essentially Uruk assemblage re placed the indigenous culture. T h e transformation was vir tually complete; die previous tradition of painted pottery and stamp seals disappeared, replaced by Uruk pottery and the Uruk administrative technology (cylinder seals, jar sealings, bullae [impressed tags of metal or clay that in Uruk times formed hollow balls] and tokens, and eventually nu merical notation tablets). This cultural replacement strongly suggests colonization and cultural absorption of the Susiana plain into southern Mesopotamia. New foundations outside southern Mesopotamia repre sent a second pattern, best seen at Habuba Kabira, Tell Qannas, and Jebel 'Aruda on the middle Euphrates in Syria. Habuba Kabira South, the town, and Tell Qannas, the acropolis, formed a walled settlement at least 2 0 hectares ( 5 0 acres) in size. T h e settlement possessed regularly laid-out streets, and gives every indication of being a planned foun dation. Just to the north Jebel Aruda contained monumental c
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buildings surrounded by residential structures, and may have been the administrative center for the Uruk commu nities in the area. The material culture in these sites was almost entirely Uruk in nature, including a wide variety of southern Mesopotamian pottery, administrative devices, and styles of public and private architecture. Habuba Kabira and its sister sites seem to have been occupied 1 5 0 years or fewer, toward the end of the Late Uruk period. Godin, in the Zagros mountains of southwest Iran, pre sents another distinctive pattern; Uruk materials are asso ciated with a walled compound that contains small rooms arranged around a courtyard (Godin V) within an otherwise local settlement (Godin VI). Inside the Uruk compound, roughly one-third of the pottery is local and the rest Uruk related; in addition to the pottery, Uruk materials include seals and sealings, and numerical notation tablets. Like Ha buba Kabira, the Uruk presence at Godin V appears to have been relatively short-lived and dates toward the end of the Late Uruk period. Some scholars have attributed Godin V to die slightiy later Proto-Elamite phenomenon. Other sites combine Uruk and local traits. For example, at Hassek Hoyiik in southeastern Turkey the architecture is strongly Uruk in character, but the local Late Chalcolithic pottery outnumbers the Uruk-related assemblage and both local and Uruk seals occur. Elsewhere, southern Mesopo tamian materials, often only beveled-rim bowls and a few other pottery types, appear as minor elements in otherwise local Late Chalcolithic sites in western Iran, Syro-Mesopotamia, and eastern Anatolia. Southern Mesopotamian ma terials even appear in the eastern Nile Delta, at Tell Fara'in (Buto). The Uruk expansion has received several different inter pretations. Some have considered it to represent flight from the growing power of state government in southern Meso potamia. Otiiers have appealed to a Greek analogy, thinking of colonization as relief from overpopulation as well as a search for trading opportunities. T h e most common expla nation is commercial, in which the Uruk settlements and enclaves were optimally situated to direct both riverine and overland traffic into southern Mesopotamia. In its strongest form, this argument considers the Uruk expansion to have been a conscious, state-directed policy of empire, probably the consequence of competition among the emerging citystates. Although sites like Habuba Kabira and Godin V date to the late Late Uruk period, the Uruk expansion actually began in Middle Uruk times. T h e expansion therefore was not simply a sudden explosive state-administered enterprise, and took several distinct forms (e.g., new foundations, com mercial colonies) through time, for which no single expla nation can adequately account. Egypt in Early Bronze Age Palestine. A similar situa tion appears in southern Palestine and northern Sinai during Early Bronze (EB) Age I times (c. 3 4 0 0 - 3 0 0 0 ) . Surveys and excavations in northern Sinai and southern Palestine have
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revealed a complex picture of intensifying Egyptian involve ment with the southern Levant. Early Gerzean (Naqada II) pottery, both imported and locally made, appeared in sites like Tel 'Erani, Fara H, and Taur Ikhbeineh during the early EBA I period, and die evidence hints that some Egyptians lived in soutiiern Palestine (e.g., the concentration of Egyp tian artifacts in a single building at Fara FI). In the reciprocal direction, notable amounts of early EB I pottery and some cast copper objects in Palestinian forms appeared at Maadi and Minshat Abu Omar in Lower Egypt. These early EB I manifestations of an Egyptian involvement with southern Palestine culminated during die late EB I, when evidence for colonies becomes widespread. The two best-known sites are Tel 'Erani and 'Ein-Besor. Egyptian pottery appears virtually throughout the Tel 'Erani sequence, and accounts for nearly half die pottery in stratum V, to which is also assigned a serekh (palace-facade design pattern) of dynasty o (3200-3100 BCE). Petrographic anal ysis of the Egyptian pottery indicates that most of it was made in southern Palestine, and only a small proportion was imported from Egypt. The pottery locally made in Egyptian styles significantiy has a diversity of functional forms, whereas the imported pottery is mostly containers. At 'EinBesor III, roughly 90 percent of the pottery is Egyptian in style, and most of it seems to have been imported; as at Tel 'Erani, the pottery assemblage covers a wide range of func tional forms, and otiier Egyptian objects also occur. A small house built according to Egyptian standards contained a corpus of Egyptian-style clay bullae used to track grain and other goods collected as taxes, and their subsequent distri bution. Petrographic analysis indicates that the bullae were locally made, and the seals impressed on the bullae differ in workmanship and sign combinations from those found in Egypt. The bullae seem to reflect the internal administrative regulation of an Egyptian community at the site. Clusters of very small sites of this period are strung out along the northern Sinai coast. The heavy erosion or defla tion of tiiese sites may account for the lack of stratigraphy and the apparent absence of architecture. T h e sites contain cooking and baking installations, domestic pottery (includ ing baking trays and bread molds), and stone tools. Roughly 80 percent of the pottery is Egyptian (dynasties c—1, c. 32002900 BCE); petrographic analysis indicates-that it was pro duced in Egypt. In contrast to the wide functional range of die Egyptian pottery, the local pottery consists mostly of storage jars. The EB I episode of an Egyptian presence in soutiiern Palestine has been variably interpreted. Most recent assess ments of Egyptian colonization indicate diat it endured some 150 to 200 years and involved at least several hundred people whose communities performed the full range of ac tivities expected in both domestic and public administrative contexts. Some scholars see these communities as Egypt's first military foray into the area. In this scenario, the Egyp
tian settlements in northern Sinai and southern Palestine represent way-stations and forts in a crown-sponsored sys tem of administered trade. Other interpretations strip away the aspect of military control, and describe die Egyptian communities as forming a purely peaceful commercial net work. State sponsorship of the commercial network is un necessary to this interpretation, and the local nature of the 'Ein-Besor sealings suggests minimal, direct crown involvement in this community. In botii scenarios, the basic incentive for colonies was improved access to Asiatic com modities, which may have included various woods, resins, honey, turquoise, and copper. Other early cases. T h e Proto-Elamite period (c. 3 1 0 0 2900) of southwestern Iran witnessed a phenomenon of ex pansion similar to that of Uruk Mesopotamia. During this period, an assemblage of beveled-rim bowls, painted pot tery, Proto-Elamite seals and sealings, and Proto-Elamite tablets appeared at Susa (immediately after the Late Uruk period) and at Tal-i Malyan in Fars (die Banesh phase). This same complex of items also appeared in local contexts at places like Tepe Sialk on the Kashan plain and Tepe Yahya in Kirman, and elements of the complex have been found as far east as Shahr-i Soklita in Seistan and Hissar on the Damghan plain. The Proto-Elamite expansion is often seen as an effort to control trade routes and to acquire foreign materials; less thoroughly documented than the Uruk case, however, its use of commercial colonies, new foundations, and/or imperial colonization remains uncertain. The Indus (Harappan) civilization provides a final ex ample of early colonization, revealed by an enclave of small Harappan settlement in eastern Bactria, and strongly Har appan settlements around the Gulf of Oman. Shortugai in Bactria and approximately 700 Ion (435 mi.) from the Indus Valley contains a completely Indus assemblage, including painted pottery, inscribed sherds, stamp seals, and construc tion along Indian standards. On the southeastern Arabian coast, the buildings at Ras al-Junayz belong neither to local nor to Harappan architectural traditions; but the artifacts from these buildings include numerous Indus-style objects (painted pottery, inscribed sherds, seals, beads, and ivory objects) alongside pottery painted in local Arabian styles and locally made stone bowls. The location of Shortugai and Ras al-Junayz at strategic points on trade routes or near raw ma terials (lapis lazuli, copper, possibly tin) have lead many scholars to interpret them as trading communities. But tiiese settlements represent different situations—Shortugai ap pears to have been a thoroughly Harappan settiement in habited by people from the Indus valley, whereas Ras alJunayz expresses a strong Indian presence in a local context. Conclusions. In the above examples, a basic distinction is made between nonimperial and imperial varieties of col onization. The clearest examples of nonimperial coloniza tion were commonly associated with trade. In many cases, commercial colonies were permanent communities that op-
COMPUTER MAPPING erated under formal agreements between local authorities and the metropolitan government or trade association. Greek colonization of the Mediterranean basin aside, these commercial colonies typically were uninterested in agricul tural land or labor. Ancient empires focused on extracting tribute payments, rather than direct control over land and labor. This kind of imperialism required that military gar risons and bureaucratic officials be stationed in subject ar eas, but often did not encourage the presence of wider seg ments of the dominant society. Accordingly, colonization was a secondary aspect of ancient empires before the Achaemenids. Moreover, empire and trading colony were alter native ways of acquiring foreign goods, and trade often led to empire. An early (literary) example is Sargon's excuse for campaigning in eastern Anatolia to protect Mesopotamian traders there, and the Akkadian habit of referring to places by their desirable products (e.g., the Silver Mountain). The Late Uruk expansion may present an older example, in which new foundations at places like Habuba Kabira may have attempted direct control over trade that previously had been less formally conducted. [Most of the sites and civilisations mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Algaze, Guillermo "The Uruk Expansion: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Early Mesopotamian Civilization." Current Anthropology 30 (1989): 571-608. Review of evidence for the Uruk expansion and presenta tion of the informal empire and control of trade argument. See as well Algaze's The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Early Meso potamian Civilization (Chicago, 1993), together with critical com mentaries from other scholars. Amiet, Pierre. L'dge des echanges inter-iraniens. Paris, 1986. Magisterial overview of interregional connections on the Iranian plateau during the fourth and third millennia BCE, addressing Late Uruk, ProtoElamite, Indus, and Central Asian materials. Ben-Tor, Amnon. "New Light on the Relations between Egypt and Southern Palestine during the Early Bronze Age." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 281 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3 - 1 0 . Recent summary of the evidence for the Egyptian presence in southern Pal estine during the EBA I, presenting the commercial colonies inter pretation. Boardman, John. The Greeks Overseas. Rev. ed. London, 1980. Stan dard review of Greek colonization in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Curtin, Philip D. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge, 1984. Reviews "trade diasporas" and commercial colonization in his tory, with special attention to Asia and Africa, providing a set of useful concepts for understanding these phenomena. Doyle, Michael. Empires. Ithaca, N.Y., 1986. Comparative study of die sociology of ancient and modern empires, with special attention to understanding the conditions of formal versus informal empire and colonization. Finley, Moses I, "Colonies: An Attempt at a Typology." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 5, vol. 26 (1976): 1 6 7 - 1 8 8 . Thoughtful investigation into the varieties of colonialism in the an cient and modern world. Francfort, H.-P. Fouilles de Shortugai. Paris, 1989. Final report on the French excavation at this Indus site in eastern Afghanistan.
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Joffe, Alexander. "Early Bronze I and the Evolution of Social Com plexity in the Southern Levant." Journal of Mediterranean Archae ology 4.1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3-58. Interpretive essay on the antecedents to EBA II—III urbanism of the southern Levant that assigns a limited role to EBA I Egyptian colonization. Kemp, Barry J. "Imperialism and Empire in New Kingdom Egypt, c. 1 5 7 5 - 1 0 8 7 . B.C." In Imperialism in the Ancient World, edited by P. D. A. Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker, pp. 7-57. Cambridge, 1978. Review of Egyptian imperialism and colonization that distinguishes the situation in Nubia from that in Syro-Palestine during the Late Bronze Age. Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. "The Proto-Elamites on the Iranian Pla teau." Antiquity 52 (1978): 1 1 4 - 1 2 0 . Review of evidence for the Proto-Elamite involvement on the Iranian plateau, seen in the con text of trade. Larsen, Mogens T. The Old Assyrian Cily-Siale and Its Colonies. Co penhagen, 1976. Standard discussion of the political, legal, and eco nomic organization of the Old Assyrian Cappadocian trade. Larsen, Mogens T., ed. Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires. Copenhagen, 1979. Collection of essays on the motives and representations of imperialism in ancient western Asia, and discus sions of the relationship between trade and imperialism. Oren, Eliezer D. "Early Bronze Age Settlement in Northern Sinai: A Model for Egypto-Canaanite Interconnections." In L'urbanisalion de la Palestine a l'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan el perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Collogue d'Emrnaiis, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 389-405. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Presents the imperial control interpretation of the Egyptian presence in southern Palestine during the EBA I. Stolper, Matthew W. Entrepreneurs and Empire: The Murasu Archive, the Murasu Firm, and Persian Rule in Babylonia. Leiden, 1985. Ex amines the financial and administrative impact on land-tenure and taxation of die Achaemenids in Babylonia. CHRISTOPHER EDENS
C O L O R . See Munsell Chart.
C O M P U T E R M A P P I N G . Geographic information systems (GIS), also known as computer mapping technol ogies, are digital databases that store, manipulate, capture, analyze, create, and display spatially referenced data. The spatial component of these systems make them readily ap plicable to archaeological research, where archaealogists record location information for everything from individual artifacts to sites in a regional survey. Many projects also record environmental data and such modern features as roads and villages. All of these data are spatially referenced and often best understood when stored as maps, an easy and relatively inexpensive task for a GIS. Data for building a GIS can come from a number of sources. Remotely sensed data, such as satellite images, aer ial photography, and geographic positioning systems, along with more traditional sources, such as paper maps and ar chaeological databases, can be used to construct a GIS. Un like paper maps, which store multiple data themes on a sin gle sheet, GIS store data themes in individual layers: a layer
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for roads, a layer for elevation, a layer for Iron Age sites. Because tiiese map layers are referenced to a common co ordinate system, they can be electronically overlaid to create any combination of data themes. The advantage of this type of system is obvious: maps can be quicldy and easily revised as new data become available without the expense of tradi tional cartography. GIS come in two basic types, vector and raster. Because of the differences in how they manage spatial data, each has its own particular strengths and weaknesses. Vector-based GIS are easily understood because, like paper maps, they store their data as points, lines, and polygons. These entities form the basic data units of a vector GIS, for which spatial information must be explicitly encoded. For example, if a road network is put into a vector GIS as a series of lines, specific X and Y coordinate data must be encoded for each line before the spatial relationships between the various road segments have meaning. The strengths of vector-based systems lie principally in their familiar format, accuracy, high-quality cartographic output, connectivity to powerful databases, and the rela tively small amounts of computer space they require. These strengths make vector-based systems ideal for managing data across large regions and producing detailed and accu rate maps. For example, archaeological resource man agement on a state or national level would be an ideal application for a vector-based system, especially if publication-quality maps are needed. The weaknesses of a vector GIS stem primarily from the necessity to encode spa tial data explicitly. This means that continuously changing surfaces, such as elevation and slope, must be generalized as elevation contours or polygons representing slope cate gories. These are ultimately unsatisfactory for many types of archaeological modeling. In a raster-based GIS, data are stored in a grid of columns and rows, much like a spreadsheet, that represent X and Y coordinates in the real world. The intersection of each row and column is known as a cell. Each cell represents a specific area in the real world and contains a Z value, or number that can represent anything from elevation values, to sites, to soil types. Unlike vector systems, the basic data unit in a raster GIS is a spatial unit (the cell) for which entity infor mation must be explicitly encoded. For example, if a road network is put into a raster GIS, the X and Y coordinates are implicit because they are determined by their position in the grid; however, Z values corresponding to the various components of the network must be explicitly encoded in each cell for them to have meaning as roads. The strengths of raster systems are found principally in their ability to manage data that are continuous across a sur face, in their simple data structure, and in their ability to use remotely sensed data, such as satellite images, which are stored in a raster format. These strengths make the creation of complex mathematical models possible. For instance,
with a raster GIS, it is possible to reconstruct large portions of the paleoenvironment, especially terrain-related data, as continuous surfaces. Rather than representing elevation as a series of contours, each cell in a raster GIS contains a Z value corresponding to the elevation at that location. Be cause these surfaces are constructed of numbers in cells, they can be subjected to sophisticated mathematical manip ulation to create new surfaces. Any equation that can be devised, such as surface i 4- surface 2 = surface 3 , can be carried out in a raster GIS. T h e disadvantages of a raster GIS lie principally in file size and cartographic output. Ras ter files use large amounts of computer disk space. Even grids representing relatively small areas will contain tens of thousands of cells, and grids with hundreds of thousands of cells are common. Also, because of the raster structure, the traditional cartographic output of points, lines, and polygons is less accurate and of generally poorer quality. An example of the types of analysis possible with a GIS can be drawn from the Tell el-'Umeiri regional survey in Jordan. The ceramic record from this region indicates a sub stantial increase in human activity with the change from Iron I to Iron II. T o investigate how this increased activity may have modified subsistence strategies, a raster GIS containing several environmental variables was constructed. Eight of the variables were selected and probability models based on a logistic regression were created. This modeling process involved a comparison of the sites from each period witii a random sample of 2 5 0 nonsite locations. T h e environmental variables were then weighted, according to their relative im portance as revealed by the regression, and summed to cre ate models of the environmental signature for sites from each period. The models illustrated that during the Iron I period the areas considered environmentally suitable for set tlement were limited, but that the pressures of increased hu man activities forced a change in subsistence strategies dur ing the Iron II period, leading to an expansion into areas previously considered unsuitable. [See also Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpreta tion.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Kathleen M. S., et al, eds. Interpreting Space: GIS and Archae ology. London, 1990. Collection of articles with the stated purpose to "provide archaeologists with the information to be able to evalu ate, purchase, and apply GIS to their work" (p. ix). Practical ex amples and a theoretical discussion of die relationship between ar chaeology and GIS, along with discussions of hardware/software considerations. Burrough, P. A. Principles of Geographical Information Systems for Land Resources Assessment. Oxford, 1986. Standard introduction to the fundamentals of GIS, Kvamme, Kenneth L. "Geographical Information Systems in Regional Archaeological Research and Data Management." In Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 1, edited by Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 139-203. Tucson, 1989. Introduction to using GIS in archaeological research, with a good discussion of the possibilities and practicalities
COMPUTER RECORDING, ANALYSIS, AND INTERPRETATION of GIS, including data management and the differences between vector and raster systems. Kvamme, Kenneth L. "A Predictive Site Location Model on the High Plains: An Example with an Independent Test." Plains Anthropologist 37 (1992): 19-40. Accessible example of a probability model based on logistic regression. An understanding of mathematics and statis tics is helpful, but not necessary, for understanding the basic prin ciples used to create the model. Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago, 1991. Clever, witty, and informative introduction to basic cartographic techniques; an enjoyable way to gain a basic understanding of maps and map pre sentations, including some problems specific to GIS. The chapters on maps used for propaganda and disinformation are especially good. GARY L. CHRISTOPHERSON
COMPUTER RECORDING, ANALYSIS, A N D I N T E R P R E T A T I O N . T h e introduction of microcomputers in 1 9 7 6 began to change dramatically and substantively the way in which archaeologists record and analyze data. Suddenly, what had been a scarce resource was nearly universally available. As this technology evolves, researchers will be developing applications not yet envi sioned. W o r d Processing a n d Desktop Publishing. Using computer technology, archaeological reports can be pre pared quickly and revised conveniently. Archaeologists can now take portable computers into the field to record infor mation at the excavation site. With the advanced capability of software for text manipulation and word-processing soft ware becoming more like desktop publishing software, ar chaeologists can create reports that include photographs, charts, graphs, diagrams, and drawings in a format ready for publication, substantially decreasing the time between ex cavation and publication. Powerful new technologies for the dissemination of archaeological information in hypertext format, both on compact disk and on the World Wide Web, are transforming tire nature of archaeological publication. D a t a b a s e M a n a g e m e n t . Most archaeological projects deal with vast numbers of artifacts. The use of an electronic database to catalog artifacts improves the efficiency of this essential recordkeeping. It is possible to obtain information about excavated material that was once time-consuming or labor intensive: database management programs can quickly sort and reorganize data, making it possible to query, for example, all objects of a particular material or type, from a particular period, and associated with a particular context. Such processes allow a researcher to detect patterns and re lationships and to form hypotheses for further investigation that might not have emerged from a simple handwritten or printed catalog. Optimal results are obtained when the soft ware chosen is a fully relational database system, which al lows the user to combine information drawn from several different files or catalogs (e.g., an artifact registry, a pottery registry, a file of information about individual loci). T h e
57
software should allow the inclusion of graphical information (photographs or drawings) and extensive notation. The abil ity to export data for use in other computer programs (e.g., for inclusion in reports prepared using a word processor or desktop publishing program or in a spreadsheet or other program for statistical analyses) is very important. Similarly, interactive connections to other computer programs, partic ularly computer-aided design (CAD) software, are very use ful. The context of a particular item recorded in a database can be displayed by a symbol inserted into a drawing to show precisely where the artifact was unearthed. Selecting a par ticular symbol in a drawing will retrieve the associated in formation from the database file and display the complete (or selected) material from the catalog. Database manage ment programs easily produce reports that can guide exca vation and enhance publication. Quantitative Analysis a n d Statistics. Recording and reporting the presence of materials of a particular type (i.e., cooking pots, lamps, nails) or from a particular period (i.e.. Early Bronze II, Iron I, Early Roman), is quantitative infor mation that can be very useful in the interpretive process. If the pottery from a particular locus, to take one example, includes a high percentage of vessels used to prepare and consume food, it could support the conclusion that die area in which it was excavated was a kitchen or dining facility; the presence of a very small quantity of such wares, as a percentage of the whole, would weigh against such a con clusion. Similarly, quantitative information about the ce ramics from a particular historical/cultural period can be very revealing. When one period is compared with another, relative quantities of material can indicate an increasing or decreasing population, the extent to which an area was used in a given period, or other changes in the demographics or economy that might have occurred over time. The record ing, manipulation, and reporting of such numerical infor mation about artifacts constitutes descriptive statistics, which are extremely important for tire careful reporting of archaeological excavation and the effective presentation of conclusions drawn by the investigators. More important, however, are analytical statistics, also re ferred to as inferential statistics. Archaeology involves the reconstruction of the human past on the basis of the material evidence, and archaeologists' hypotheses about human ac tivity are based on a very small sample of the surviving ma terial. This may be envisioned as follows: 1. Life assemblage. In the past there was a complete ma terial culture, including numerous structures and artifacts that were part of a society of living, active human beings. 2. Deposited assemblage. When one cultural environment is replaced by another (whether by abandonment, destruc tion, or natural evolution), there is a residue from the earlier period of those artifacts that come to rest or remain at the site. 3 . Preserved assemblage. Only a portion of the deposited
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COMPUTER RECORDING, ANALYSIS, AND INTERPRETATION
assemblage will survive the ravages of time and subsequent activity and be available for excavation and collection. 4. Sample assemblage. Only a small portion of the pre served assemblage will actually be recovered and studied by archaeologists. It is important to note drat the several assemblages re ferred to above become increasingly smaller as the list moves from 1 to 4. This is why analytic, or inferential, statistics are crucial. As the archaeologist theoretically moves from sam ple data to conclusions about larger populations, there are many computer programs available that will enhance the sophistication and efficiency of statistical analyses. Computer-Aided Design a n d Drafting. CAD (or CADD) software offers great potential for recording and interpretating archaeological data. Related tasks, not treated here, are mapping and surface modeling. Drawings are a staple in archaeological recordkeeping, ranging from simple schematic diagrams, to accurate "stone for stone" drawings of individual areas of excavation, to composite drawings of larger fields or sites. They include drawings of individual artifacts (such as the technical rendering of individual pot sherds) and projections of buildings and other structures that illustrate their complete form and function. Electronic ("digitized") drawings have many advantages over their pa per counterparts: they can be more easily edited, more easily combined into larger wholes, and more easily and precisely compared. If drawing to a different scale or combining el ements from several drawings into a new, composite whole is needed, it can be accomplished quickly and easily. Fur thermore, with drawings produced accurately to scale, mea surements of size or distance and calculations of area be come trivial tasks, as "overlays" can be easily and dynamically manipulated. As with numerical data, CAD drawings allow archaeologists to engage in "what i f explo rations of hypotheses. That can both guide excavation and assist interpretation. Archaeologists employ several methods to produce CAD drawings. The following are among the procedures in use: 1. Tracing. Conventionally produced drawings can be traced, using a digitizing tablet, to produce an electronic copy of the original. 2. Scanning. Conventional drawings, photographs, or slides can be scanned to create copies that can be imported into CAD software. Scanning, however, produces rasterized (bit mapped) images that require raster-to-vector conver sion in order to obtain drawings that exploit the full potential of CAD technology. Even with the use of autotrace utilities conversion can be very labor intensive and slow. 3. Direct entry. A drawing can be generated electronically from directly entered x-y (or x-y-z) coordinates. These co ordinates can be obtained and entered manually or directiy through linked electronic surveying equipment.
4. Photogrammetry. A number of techniques exist for ob taining digital images from conventional film or digital pho tography. Photogrammetry can produce highly precise graphic images in either two or three dimensions. Digital Photography and Scanning. Digital images have become increasingly important for archaeological re cording. Whether they are obtained indirectly (e.g. by scan ning slides or photographs produced using conventional photography) or directiy (i.e, using a digital camera or "frame grabber" and video camera), they offer many ad vantages over conventional photography. Photographs taken with a digital camera are almost instantiy available be cause they do not require the processing associated with photographic film. Furthermore, digital images, especially those stored on optical disks, are much more stable than images on photographic film. If the electronic data remain intact (multiple backup copies can be maintained to ensure this) die quality of the image will not deteriorate over time. Digital images are also more efficientiy kept in archives, where they require far less space and are more easily cata loged and accessed. They can be easily edited (cut, cropped, and enhanced) and quickly imported into documents (from field notes to final publications) or database records. It is quite feasible for a catalog of artifacts, maintained as an elec tronic database, to include pictures of each object along with text information. Furthermore, digital images can be sent, almost instantiy, over computer networks to others through out the world. Finally, Quick Time™ images, (essentially digital motion pictures) allow an object to be displayed dy namically and seen from all sides and with changing light and shadow, to reveal important detail. Such images can be included with other information as a part of a permanent archeological record or report. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Re mote-Sensing and Global-Positioning Systems. Several computer technologies have had an impact on archaeolog ical data collection and interpretation. Geographic infor mation systems (GIS) provide a dynamic link between com puter-generated maps or CAD drawings and database files. Thus, the location of any item in a database file can be shown on a map or drawing. Similarly, objects on a map or in a drawing can be linked to related information in a da tabase file. Furthermore, GIS software allows the researcher to explore the spatial relationship of objects to each other as well as to other spatial relationships. Using a survey map and its associated data, relationships can be explored among occupied sites along with their relationship to such ecolog ical and topological features as the availability of water, the proximity of roads, and the nature of the terrain. Similarly, the plan of a building can be used to show the relationship of the artifacts found in it, providing the archaeologist with data to determine the kinds of human activity that took place in it and in its vicinity after it was destroyed or abandoned.
CONDER, CLAUDE REIGNIER Remote-sensing and global-positioning systems offer the ar chaeologist means for more rapid and accurate data collec tion and recording, particularly during surveys, than manual techniques allow. Advances in computer technology are encouraging ar chaeologists to adopt standards for data collection and re cording and to share information more easily. Computer software programs are facilitating the collection and storage of data and enabling the results from many excavation proj ects to be drawn together to enhance the understanding of increasingly wider geographic regions and more extended periods of human history. [See also Computer Mapping; Recording Techniques; and Statistical Applications.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aldrich, Frank, et al. Computer Graphics in Archaeology; Statistical Car tographic Applications to Spatial Analysis in Archaeological Contexts. Arizona State University, Anthropological Research Papers, no. 15. Tempe, 1979. Archaeological Computing Newsletter. Published quarterly by Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, this newsletter contains brief articles reporting current work in archaeological computing. Blakely, Jeffrey A., and William J. Bennett, Jr., eds. Analysis and Pub lication of Ceramics: The Computer Data-Base in Archaeology. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 551. Oxford, 1989. CSA: Newsletter of the Center for the Study of Architecture. Published quarterly by the Center of Architecture at Bryn Mawr College, this newsletter covers a broad range of computer applications of interest to archaeologists and very often includes information about classical and Near Eastern archaeology. Gaines, Sylvia W., ed. Data Bank Applications in Archaeology. Tucson, 1981. Gardin, J.-C, with O. Guillaume. Artificial Intelligence and Expert Sys tems: Case Studies in the Knowledge Domain of Archaeology. Translated by Richard Ennals. Chichester and New York, 1988. Klein, Richard G., and Kathryn Cruz-Uribe. The Analysis of Animal Bones from Archaeological Sites. Chicago, 1984. Provides an excellent and easily understandable discussion of statistical theory with an ap plication particularly instructive for archaeologists interested in sta tistical analyses. Lock, Gary, and John Wilcock. Computer Archaeology. Princes Risborough, 1987. A useful overview of archaeological computing. Lock, Gary, and Jonathan Moffett, eds. Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology 1991. British Archaeological Re ports, International Series, no. S577. Oxford, 1992. The most recent in a series of annual volumes of the same title (often with different editors), and the most valuable resource available for those who wish comprehensive and detailed information about applications and ad vances in archaeological computing. Richards, J. D., and N . S. Ryan. Data Processing in Archaeology. Cam bridge, 1985. One of the Cambridge manuals in archaeology, this volume provides a good general treatment of the topic, although one that is rapidly becoming outdated. Whittlesey, Julian H. Photogrammetry for the Archaeologist with Calcu lator Programs for Cartographic Plotting. Auburn, N.Y., 1979. Al though not related to Near Eastern archaeology, this volume pro vides useful information about photogrammetry. THOMAS R. W . LONGSTAFF
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C O N D E R , C L A U D E R E I G N I E R (1848-1910), principal surveyor for the Survey of Western Palestine ( 1 8 7 1 - 1 8 7 7 ) . Conder, who as a colonel was to spend much of his career attached to the Ordnance Survey of Great Brit ain, was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1870, having distinguished himself in surveying and drawing. Af ter a two-year professional course at die School of Military Engineering at Chatham, his services were requested by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) for the Survey of West ern Palestine, which he joined, as officer in charge, in 1872. Conder also earned honorary Doctor of Civil Law and Doc tor of Laws degrees (the latter from Edinburgh, 1 8 9 1 ) . The survey's ambitiously wide-ranging undertaking em braced not only tire topographical survey itself, but also the recording and investigation of all potential biblical sites, ge ology, and natural history. T o all this, Conder brought his graphical skills and undoubted learning, but these were not matched by his ability to interpret the evidence correctly and many of his identifications were subsequently disproven. Like Charles Warren before him, Conder lacked the tech nical skills which characterized excavations of the last dec ade of the nineteenth century and beyond. His outstanding contribution to the archaeology of Palestine lay in his major share of the production of the twenty-six-sheet map of west ern Palestine which die PEF published at a scale of 1:63,360 in 1880. This project is acknowledged to have contributed more to the understanding of the archaeology and ancient history of Palestine than any other undertaking in the nine teenth century. Conder's popular account of the survey, Tent Work in Palestine, first published in London in 1878, had achieved six editions by 1 8 9 5 . Apart from the maps, the most important publication to result from tire survey was T h e eight-volume Survey of West ern Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hy drography, and Archaeology ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 8 8 5 ) , of which Conder was a principal author and which includes the earliest siteby-site reconnaissance of Palestine. Misinterpretations are substantially compensated for by tire richness of meticulous detail Conder recorded. Similarly, his unfinished Survey of Eastern Palestine ( 1 8 8 1 ) is notable for tire recording and drawing, in the published maps and Memoirs, (London, 1 8 8 9 ) , of the unusually large number of dolmens in that region. In addition to his prolific contributions over thirtyfive years to the PEF Quarterly Statement, Conder was the author of fifteen major books on subjects related to the an cient Near East. [See also Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biography of Warren] BIBLIOGRAPHY
No full biography of Conder has been published, but a brief resume of his life is given in the Dictionary of National Biography, supp. vol. 1, pp. 401-403 (Oxford, 1912). Information on Conder's life and work
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CONSERVATION ARCHAEOLOGY
is available in the Archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Lon don. Conder, Claude R. Tent Work in Palestine. London, 1878. Conder, Claude R., and H. H. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology. 8 vols, and set of maps. London, 1881—1885. Conder, Claude R. The Survey of Eastern Palestine: Memoirs of the To pography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archaeology. London, 1889. Watson, Charles M. "Memoir of Colonel C. R. Conder." Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund (April 1910): 93-96. YOLANDE HODSON
CONSERVATION ARCHAEOLOGY. In the past, archaeologists treated most sites as mere sources of objects and information, eventually abandoning them to erosion and neglect. Only unusual sites like Jerash Jordan), Babylon (Iraq), and Qumran (Israel) were treated with conservational care similar to that devoted to the objects taken from them. Today, both regional autiiorities and archaeol ogists are becoming more conscious of the archaeological site itself as an object subject to policies and theories of con servation, and rules and strategies for site conservation are being installed everywhere in the Near East. In Jordan, for example, implementation of such strategies has become a cooperative venture involving the local Department of An tiquities, local universities, foreign research institutes and their archaeologists, and cultural and development agencies of foreign governments. International standards for site con servation are overseen by UNESCO and other agencies. Regional strategies for conservation include setting pri orities for exercising damage control on a vast number of known sites, rescuing new sites accidentally exposed, caring for new sites exposed by archaeologists, and developing sites with spectacular cultural remains for touristic and scholarly use. T o develop such priorities, ongoing cultural resource management (CRM) programs are essential. C R M involves advance planning, including systematic regional surveys to locate and identify all knowable sites, computer catalogs of those sites with basic archaeological information and signif icance-priority ranking, archaeological site assessment in ad vance of commercial site development, rescue archaeology, regulating touristic use of antiquities, setting priorities for sites and site elements for conservation, selecting sites and site features for restoration and antiquities park develop ment, and, tragically, setting criteria under which a site's destruction is to be permitted. Rescue and maintenance conservation can overwhelm lo cal agency resources. Rescue is frequently built into the planning of major development projects, but a C R M pro gram also must be able to deal with the unexpected, such as the 1993 discovery of a Late Antique mosaic under a mod ern street in Jerash. T h e rapid rate of modern development is presently exposing ancient stone surfaces to damage rang ing from the tourist's touch to automobile-generated pollu tion.
New-site conservation follows rescue and maintenance. Primary selection principles are monumentality and extent of preservation. Jerash, for example, has been the focus of numerous Jordanian and international efforts since the 1930s, including the restoration by a French team of the Temple of Zeus and the South Gate, and the restoration by a Polish team of the Hippodrome. Such a site deserves at tention not only because its remains are spectacular, but also because it is perceived as an essential component in a widely appreciated human cultural heritage. Other sites may be se lected because of specifically focused interests: the mundane architecture at Qumran might not have received such care ful attention had it not been associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. T h e difficult conservation of the friable granite and sandstone masonry of Islamic Ayla (Aila/Eilat) in 'Aqaba received international funding and local support because of its importance to Jordan's Islamic heritage. Similarly, the extensive reconsttuction and development of the antiquities at Sepphoris, in Israel, have received government and pri vate support because of that site's importance for early Ju daism and Christianity. Places like Jerusalem, Petra, Giza, Palmyra, and U r receive conservation attention because of their universal appeal and touristic value. National conser vation strategies will tend to count tourism potential in set ting priorities. On-site conservation strategies may range from the com plete rebuilding of structures based on archaeologists' the oretical reconstructions, to limited restoration based on components available from collapse debris and to consoli dation to prevent still-standing masonry from further col lapse and erosion. A classic example of the first is Arthur Evans's restoration of Knossos, Crete, in which the palace superstructure was reconstructed without sufficient archae ological evidence. Although still practiced on occasion, such a procedure is no longer acceptable. Its obvious disadvan tages are that the result is more the product of the historical architect's design than a restoration of the ancient structure; the high percentage of new masonry causes the building to lose its aura of antiquity, even if the architectural shape is a faithful reproduction; and such massive reconstruction can not be reversed to incorporate revisions based on subse quent studies. In limited restoration, missing fragments may be replaced with newly dressed stones in order to maximize the reuse of existing pieces. A precedent-setting example is the Erechtheion restoration on the Athenian acropolis, which pro vided the methodological inspiration for the limited resto ration of the Temple of Hercules in Amman. Another is the French restoration of the Temple of Zeus temenos wall at Jerash. T h e most conservative and usually preferable ap proach is the consolidation only of surviving in situ masonry. This may involve the resetting of dry-laid masonry or the injection of compatible materials into mortar-laid walls. In all these cases the obvious prerequisite is the careful
CONSTANTINOPLE study remains by historical architects, including the prepa ration of preconservation drawings of remains, historical re construction drawings of structures, and a detailed method for implementing conservation procedure. Such drawings can be used both for scholarly publications and for site dis plays to supplement the conserved remains. Whatever degree of consolidation, conservation, or res toration is adapted, specific technical/structural principles must be followed. T h e primary one is reversibility, which means that it must be possible to undo all consolidation pro cedures in case subsequent research indicates contrary pro cedures. Another is compatibility, which means that new materials introduced into the ancient architectural environ ment must be in structural balance with it. For example, the structural density of patching mortar has to match that of the masonry being patched, in order to prevent the intro duction of stresses destructive to the ancient masonry. For professional results, it may be necessary to engage trained conservation architects and structural engineers to plan and oversee the work. [See also Artifact Conservation; Field Conservation; Tourism and Archaeology. In addition, many of the sites men tioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cleere, Henry, ed. Approaches to Archaeological Heritage: A Comparative Study of World Cultural Resource Management Systems. Cambridge and New York, 1984. Fagan, Brian. In the Beginning: An Introduction to Archaeology. 8th ed. New York, 1994. Chapter 19, "Management of the Past," gives a good overview of the role of conservation in cultural resource man agement. Kanellopoulos, Chrysanthos. The Great Temple of Amman: The Archi tecture. Amman, 1995. An excellently illustrated and written example of the right way to conserve a building. Renfrew, Colin and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories Methods andPractice. London, 1991. Chapter 14, "Whose Past? Archaeology and the Public," gives an excellent treatment of the role of ethics in conser vation. BERT DE VRIES
CONSTANTINOPLE, capital of the eastern Roman empire built by Constantine I in 324 CE on the site of the ancient Greek colony Byzantion (4i°02' N , 28°57' E) and inaugurated in 330. Situated on the Bosporus, Constanti nople (modern Istanbul) controlled the entrance to the Black Sea and roads to the East and the West. T h e devel opment of Constantinople in the early Byzantine centuries was rapid. It extended to the west without disrupting the layout of the ancient city (see figure 1 ) . Constantine I built the Great Palace next to the Roman hippodrome and ex tended the central colonnaded avenue (known as Mese) to the west outside of the ancient walls. There was built the new circular forum of Constantine and the Capitolium at a distance of 1.2 km (.75 mi.). T h e first line of land fortifi
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cations was built by Constantine I and completed by Constantius II in 413. Theodosius II built the second line of walls 1.5 km (,9 mi.) to the west, 6 km (3.7 mi.) long with six gates. Parts of the latter survive. T h e sea walls along the Propontis and the Golden Horn were built in 439. A third line of fortifications 45 km (28 mi.) long was added by Anastasius at a distance of 65 km (40 mi.) from the city. It was abandoned in the seventh century. Constantine I built the churches of St. Irene (Peace) and the two martyria (shrines to martyrs) of St. Acacius and St. Mocius. In the course of the fourth century, large-scale building construction secured provisions and water supply: to the two ancient harbors on the Golden Horn, the Julian harbor was added in 362 (later renamed Sophia), and the largest Theodosian harbor around 390 with a total length of 4.5 km (2.8 mi.). Several granaries were constructed near the har bors. T h e long aqueduct of Valens brought water from a distance of 100 Ion (62 mi.). In the area between the Constantinian and the Theodosian walls three huge open cis terns were built (of Aetius in 421, of Aspar in 459, and of St. Mocius by Anastasius) with a total capacity of 1,000,000 cu cm (59,319 cu. in.). Of the eighty covered cisterns the most impressive is the Basilike cistern (Yerebatan Sarayi) with 336 columns. T h e forum of Theodosius or Forum Tauri (c. 393) has a spiral-fluted column, two triumphal arches of which one survives, and a basilica copied from Trajan's forum in Rome. In the fifth century were built the forum of Arcadius (c. 403) with arches and a monumental column whose pedestal survives, and the Forum Bovis (after 425). The next phase of Constantinople's development was marked by a great construction of churches. In the second half of the fifth century and in the early sixth century, large districts of the capital were destroyed by fires and civil riots, the most famous being the Nika revolt in 532. T h e great building activity of the emperor Justinian (527-565), ex pressing the spirit of the time focused on Christian struc tures, churches (thirty-three are mentioned), and philan thropic institutions (Procopius, Buildings 1 ) . After die beginning of tire seventh century construction in Constan tinople ceased, The harbors were reduced to one quarter of their former size; of the five granaries only one survived. T h e system of water supply was neglected, and the foun tains and public baths were closed. T h e size of the popu lation declined dramatically. This development was a con sequence of die unfortunate military circumstances and reduced economic conditions created by the loss of the east ern provinces and Egypt to the Arabs and by the invasion and permanent installation of the Slavs in most of the Balkan territories. In the ninth century Constantinople emerged as a clearly medieval city: there was no longer interest in public buildings other than palaces and churches. Excavations at tire Great Palace started after the fire of 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 1 3 burnt down the district southwest of St. Sophia
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CONSTANTINOPLE
CONSTANTINOPLE. Figure I . Plan of the city. (After A. Kazhdan, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Byzan tium, New York, 1991)
I
_ I
( 9 3 5 9 3 8 1 9 5 2 - 1 9 5 4 ) . Most important are the remains of an apsed hall, in front of which a peristyle court ( 6 6 X 5 5 m [216.5 * 1 8 0 ft.]) is adorned with a magnificent, mo saic probably Justinianic. (Today, contrary to the govern ment's restrictions, most of the area of the Great Palace is covered by new buildings.) The Roman hippodrome, to which Constantine I added an exedra (open recess frequentiy containing seats), was no longer used for athletic competitions but for imperial proclamations, triumphs, and other ceremonies. T h e spina (median) dividing the arena in 3
two parts was adorned with obelisks, statues, and other or naments. In 1 2 0 3 the west wing burned down, and in 1 2 0 4 the Crusaders, who occupied Constantinople, melted the bronze statues and removed the four gilded horses to dec orate the facade of S. Marco in Venice. The east wing of the hippodrome is preserved, and part of the west wing was excavated in 1 9 5 2 . Three of tire monuments of the spina survive: the Egyptian obelisk of Thutmosis III (c. 1 4 7 9 - 1 4 2 5 BCE) on a marble basis with reliefs depicting the emperor attending the games (obelisk of Theodosius from 3 9 0 ) ; the
CONSTANTINOPLE serpent column, the central shaft of the Delphic tripod ded icated to Delphi after the battle of Plataea (479 BCE); the obelisk or colossus with an inscription of Constantine VII. Two palaces of Byzantine magnates have been excavated. The palace of the praepositus sacri cubiculi (grand chamber lain) Antiochus was built around 410-420 CE and confis cated by the emperor about 420. Early in the sixth century its central hexagonal hall was transformed into the church of St. Euphemia. T h e palace of Lausus was built around 420-430; it included a famous collection of classical statues. After it burned in 476, a hospice was constructed on the same site. T h e church of St. Sophia (Holy wisdom) was built near the Great Palace and the hippodrome by Constantius LI, (which was inaugurated in 360). Burned by the supporters of the bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, in 404, it was rebuilt by Theodosius II in 415. T h e colonnade of die facade of the atrium belongs to this period. Destroyed by fire during the Nika riot in 532, it was rebuilt by Justinian and dedicated 27 December 537. The technical problems that the architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Mi letus encountered in building this domed basilica and their solutions are described in Procopius's Buildings 1.1.21-78. The dome collapsed in 558, and it was rebuilt by Isidorus the Younger and rededicated on 24 December 562. The complexity of the architectural plan and the splendor of the mosaic and sculptural decoration are praised in the ekphrasis (rhetorical praise) by Paul Silentiarius (P. Friedlander, Jo hannes von Gaza undPaulus Silentiarius: Kunstbschreibungen justinianischer Zeit, Leipzig, 1 9 1 2 , pp. 227-265). The north baptistery survives. T o the south was attached die patriar chal palace with offices for the ecclesiastical administration. To the southeast a passage led to the Great Palace. The second largest church (domed basilica) that survives in Constantinople, the church of St. Irene, was perhaps built on the site of a pagan temple by Constantine I, and it was the cathedral until 360. Forming an architectural complex witii St. Sophia, it shared a common administtation. The lower part of the church belongs to the Justinianic restora tion of 532. T h e basilica of the Holy Apostles built by Con stantius II next to the mausoleum of Constantine I was re built by Justinian in the shape of a cross imitating the plan of the church of St. John at Ephesus with a second mauso leum. T h e Byzantine emperors were buried there until 1028. The church was demolished and the mosque of Mehmed II Fatih was built on the site. Several imperial sarcophagi are preserved. Of the monastic complex of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus only the church survives. It was built by Justinian and Theodora in die palace of Hormisdas, its octagonal nave inscribed in a rectangle with a dome. Founded before 454, the original three-aisled basilica of St. John Stoudios is par tially preserved. T h e monastery with a renowned library and scriptorium became famous in the fight against the icono clasts (end of the eight century). T h e church of St. Polyeuktos, which was built by Anicia Juliana between 524 and 527
63
on her estate (district of Constantianae, modern Saraghane), was identified after blocks with the dedicatory epigram (known from the Anthologia Graeca 1.10) were discovered in i960 (Cyril Mango and Ihor Sevcenko, "Remains of the Church of St. Polyeuktos at Constantinople, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 15 [1961]: 243-247). Part of the church and a baptistery are excavated. Their sculptural decoration is very elaborate. After it was abandoned in the twelfth century, the architectural ornaments were stolen (e.g., the Pilastri Acritani near the soudiwest corner of St. Mark's in Venice). Of the church of St. Mary of Chalkoprateia (the copper mar ket), built by the empress Pulcheria or Verina, the apse and parts of the north and south walls survive. [See also Byzantine Empire.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Literary sources include the Notitia urbis Constantinopolitanae, edited by Otto Seeck in Notitia dignitatum, pp. 229-243 (Berlin, 1876), a list of important monuments of Constantinople and account of the features of its urban fabric dating from circa 425. An account of the Justinianic buildings in Constantinople by the sixth-century historian Procopius, Procopii Caesariensis opera omnia, has been edited by Jakob Haury and Gerhard Wirth in volume 4 of De aedificiis (Leipzig, 1964). Texts on topography and monuments of Constantinople, widt related legends, appear in Averil Cameron and Judith Herrin, eds., Constantinople in the Early Eighth Century: The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai (Leiden, 1984). For additional research, see the following: Dagron, Gilbert. Naissance d'une capitate: Constantinople et ses institu tions de 330 a 451. Paris, 1974. The most authoritative work on the early history of Constantinople, with superb treatment of the literary sources. Ebersolt, Jean. Constantinople byzantine et les voyageurs du I^evant. Paris, 1918. Important source for identification of sites and monuments, with information from Western travelers in Constantinople. Guilland, Rodolphe Joseph. Etudes de topographic de Constantinople by zantine. 2 vols. Berlin, 1969. Collection of studies on districts and particular monuments of Constantinople based primarily on literary evidence. Harrison, R. Martin. Excavations at Sarachane in Istanbul. 2 vols. Princeton, 1986. Detailed report of the excavations of the church of Saint Polyeuktos, with discussion of the excavated remains and anal ysis of the literary evidence. Janin, Raymond. Constantinople byzantine: Developpement urbain et re pertoire tapographique. 2d ed. Paris, 1964. Detailed study of Constan tinople's topography, focusing primarily on the evidence of written sources, which are treated critically. Janin, Raymond. La geographic eccl&siastique de I'empire byzantin I: Le siege de Constantinople et le palriarcal oecumenique, vol. 3, Les eglises et les monasteres. 2d ed. Paris, 1969. Study of the churches and mon asteries of Constantinople, with identification of the monuments and a detailed account of the sources. Mamboury, Ernest. "Les fouilles byzantines a Istanbul." Byzantion 11 (1936): 229-283; 13 (1938): 301-310; 21 (1951): 425-459- History of the excavations in Istanbul from the nineteenth century to 1951. Mango, Cyril, Studies on Constantinople. Aldershot, 1993. Selection of studies on the development of Constantinople and its monuments. Mango, Cyril, and Gilbert Dagron, eds. Constantinople and Its Hinter land. Papers from the Twenty-seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993. Aldershot, 1995. Muller-Wiener, Wolfgang. Bildlexikon zur Topographic Istanbuls: Byzantion-Konstantinupolis-Istanbulbis zum Beginn des 1 7 . Jahrhunderts. Tubingen, 1977. Lavishly illustrated lexicon of the topography of
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COPPER SCROLL
Constantinople with a description of the monuments, reference to their history, information of travelers, modern excavations, and bib liography. Stamatopoulos, Kostas, and Akylas Mellas. Constantinople: Seeking the Ruling City (in Greek). Athens, 1990. Contains excellent photo graphs of surviving buildings and monuments. HELEN SARADI
C O P P E R SCROLL.
The manuscript designated
3Q15, the Copper Scroll, was discovered in a cave near Qum ran, on the shore of the Dead Sea, on 20 March 1952 by a joint expedition of the Ecole Biblique, the American School of Oriental Research, and Jordan's Department of Antiq uities. The scroll contains a list of buried treasure, engraved in Hebrew on thin copper sheets. The sheets were found rolled and so thoroughly oxidized they crumbled to the touch (see figure 1 ) . In 1955-1956, the scroll was opened at the Manchester College of Technology by H. WrightBaker, professor of mechanical engineering, who sawed it into twenty-three segments using an electric circular slitting saw. The nature of the scroll's contents was made public in a press release on 1 June 1956, but the official edition of the Hebrew text, accompanied by a French translation and ex tensive commentary by J. T . Milik, a Polish member of the international team assembled to edit the Dead Sea Scrolls, was not published until 1962. In tire interim, John M. Alle gro, a British member of the team, who had supervised the cutting open of the scroll, had published an edition and an English translation of his own in i960 and had organized unsuccessful attempts to find the buried treasure.
In many ways, the Copper Scroll is unique among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is distinct not only in its subject matter and in the material on which it is written, but also in its script, orthography, language, and literary structure. More over, it is the only one of the documents found near Qumran that appears to be an autograph, an original manuscript, rather than a copy. The text of the Copper Scroll breaks down into sixty-four short sections, each typically containing the description of a hiding place and the treasure hidden in it. Enigmatic greek letters appear at the end of sections 1, 4, 6, 7, and 10. The first section establishes the pattern for the text: "In the ruins which are in the Valley of Achor, under the steps which go eastward, forty rod-cubits: a strongbox of silver and its ves sels—a weight of seventeen talents." Most of the identifiable hiding places are located in or near Jerusalem, and the treas ures usually consist of a specified number of talents of silver and gold, and sometimes other valuable items such as scrolls and cultic vessels or vestments. Section 64 states that a du plicate of the Copper Scroll, "and its explanation" (wprwsh) is included in the last treasure. If the numbers in the treasure descriptions are to be taken at face value, the total weight of the buried treasure is in excess of 200 tons. Scholarship on the Copper Scroll has been sharply divided on two pivotal issues of interpretation: its authenticity and its date. Allegro and others have argued that 3Q15 is an authentic record of buried treasure and is to be dated to around 68 CE, when it was hidden near Qumran together with the other scrolls. Milik and others have claimed that it is a fiction, that it is to be dated well after 68 CE, and that it
COPPER SCROLL. Figure 1, The Copper Scroll, in situ. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
COPTIC has nothing to do with the other scrolls. Still others, like Frank M. Cross, have followed the original press release of 1956 in suggesting that the Copper Scroll, while not describ ing real treasure, does belong in date with the other scrolls. Finally, we have those, like E. M . Laperrousaz and B. Z. Luria, who accept the authenticity of"3Qisbut date it to the time of the Second Jewish Revolt in 135 CE. Although there are significant difficulties with each of these positions, it is likely that the majority of scholars are correct in accepting the authenticity of the Copper Scroll. (It is possible that the mysterious "explanation" mentioned in the last of the sixty-four sections might be the key to inter preting the improbably high numbers in tine treasure de scriptions, as well as the puzzling Greek letters.) Further more, the archaeological evidence reported by Bargil Pixner suggests that the Copper Scroll was hidden at the same time as tire manuscript fragments found in the same archaeolog ical context. If die treasure was real, it almost certainly belonged to tine fabled wealth of tine Jerusalem Temple and was hidden shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. A connection with the Temple may also be indi cated by the high incidence of cultic terms used in the scroll. It is even possible, as Norman Golb has suggested, that 3Q15 had nothing to do with sectarians at Qumran but should be explained simply as a Temple document. Apart from its possible historical value, the Copper Scroll is also significant for the history of the Hebrew language. In morphology, syntax, and vocabulary, the language of the Copper Scroll shares with Mishnaic Hebrew linguistic fea tures that distinguish the latter from the Hebrew of the Bible and the other Dead Sea Scrolls. This suggests that a Hebrew dialect similar to Mishnaic Hebrew was spoken in Palestine in the first century CE. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls; Qumran.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Allegro, John Marco. The Treasure of the Copper Scroll. Garden City, N.Y., 1960. Racy account of the discovery and contents of the Cop per Scroll, with an imperfect preliminary edition of the Hebrew text and its English translation. Baker, H. Wright. "Notes on the Opening of the 'Bronze' Scrolls from Qumran." Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 39 (1956-1957): 45-56. Contains the text of the 1956 press release. Golb, Norman. "The Problem of Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124.1 (1980): 1-24. As an autograph record of real Temple treasures, the Copper Scroll provides prime evidence for Golb's theory that the Dead Sea Scrolls come from Jerusalem. See especially pages 5-8. McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr. "The Copper Scroll Treasure as an Accumu lation of Religious Offerings." In Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects, edited by Michael O. Wise et al, pp. 133-142. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 722. New York, 1994. Milik, J. T. "Le rouleau de cuivre provenant de la grotte 3Q (3Q15)." In Ijes "petites grottes" de Qumran, pp. 199-302. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, vol. 3. Oxford, 1962. Standard scholarly edition of the Copper Scroll.
65
Pixner, Bargil. "Unravelling the Copper Scroll Code: A Study of the Topography of 3Q15." Revue de Qumran n . 3 (1983): 323-366. An attempt to identify a geographic pattern for the hiding places cited in the Copper Scroll, valuable for its archaeological information (pp. 327-329, 334-335), extensive bibliography, and independent English translation. Wolters, Al. "Apocalyptic and the Copper Scroll." Journal ofNear East ern Studies 49.2 (1990): 145-154. Critique of the legendary interpre tation of die Copper Scroll. Wolters, Al. "The Copper Scroll and the Vocabulary of Mishnaic He brew." Revue de Qumran 14.3 (1990): 483-495. Identification of fifty lexical items the Copper Scroll shares with Mishnaic Hebrew, as dis tinct from biblical Hebrew. Wolters, Al. "History and the Copper Scroll." In Methods of Investi gation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects, edited by Michael O. Wise et al., pp. 285-295. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 722. New York, 1994. AL WOLTERS
COPTIC. Tine latest form of the Egyptian language, Coptic was used from tine third century CE onward. The origin of Coptic was concurrent with the rise of Christianity in Egypt and the term Coptic is often also applied to the Christian inhabitants of Egypt, their church, and their cul ture. Coptic remained in use as a language of daily life as late as the twelfth century, although Arabic had already be gun to supplant Coptic as early as the ninth century. Coptic as a literary language was moribund by the fifteenth century but was never entirely replaced by Arabic and is still used as a liturgical language. Coptic and earlier forms of Egyptian constitute a special language group that falls into the Afroasiatic language fam ily. Coptic is very similar to its immediate predecessors, De motic and Late Egyptian, which favored external marking of forms over the internal changes common in Old and Mid dle Egyptian. T h e vocalization of Coptic is more certain than that of its predecessors but is still largely theoretical; the modern pronunciation of liturgical Coptic is heavily in fluenced by Arabic and is of little use for reconstructing Coptic phonology. Coptic was the only form of Egyptian to indicate vowels and thus the only form in which morphology can be known with certainty. In general, Coptic is charac terized by consonantal clusters (especially at the beginnings of words) and doubled vowels in certain contexts; vowelless syllables were marked by a superlinear stroke. Syntactically Coptic developed many features of Demotic and Late Egyptian. Coptic used nominal, verbal, and ad verbial clauses, which were paralleled by nominal, verbal, and adverbial uses of words and phrases. Nouns distin guished number and gender, which were morphologically marked in some cases but usually indicated by articles; case was indicated by sentence position or prepositions. The sys tem of independent, prefix, and suffix pronouns extended and streamlined Demotic and Late Egyptian usage. Adjec tives were almost entirely replaced in Coptic by adjective
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COPTIC
verbs or the attributive use of nouns. The different forms of the verbal infinitive and stative (or qualitative) were often morphologically differentiated; verbs could be conjugated and marked for tense by prefixed conjugation bases or pre ceded by subject and other markers. As in Demotic, adverbials were usually prepositional phrases placed at the end of a clause. Both verbal and nonverbal clauses could be further marked by converters for preterite, circumstantial, or rela tive meaning; another converter was the "second tense" marker, which was used to emphasize an adjunct. Negation was accomplished by negative particles, conjugation bases, or infixes (bound morphemes inserted into words), and pas sive voice was indicated by an impersonal use of the third person plural. Although Coptic is morphologically and syntactically a direct descendant of Demotic, it marks a radical break in terms of script. Coptic was written with an alphabet of thirty letters (thirty-one in some dialects), twenty-four of which are Greek letters. The remaining letters are derived from Demotic signs. Unlike the Demotic system of ideographic and phonetic characters, die Coptic alphabet included vow els and was much simpler to write and read. It also lacked pagan associations, which made it attractive to the early Christians. Given the importance of Greek in Egypt during the development of Coptic, it is not surprising that Coptic vocabulary derived from both Egyptian and Greek words. Greek terms in Coptic were primarily theological, admin istrative, or technical; they were treated grammatically as Coptic and were not inflected (except for a few set expres sions) . A limited number of Latin and Semitic words came into Coptic indirectly through Greek transcription, and later Coptic texts sometimes include transcriptions of Arabic names and words. Scholars have identified at least ten major dialects of Cop tic, with many additional subdialects. Scarcity of evidence makes the earliest dialect history of Coptic uncertain. The main dialect from about the fourth to the eleventh century was Sahidic, in which most early Coptic literary texts were written. Exceptions were mostly regional: the Bohairic dia lect prevailed in parts of northern Egypt, and Faiyumic, Akhmimic, and Lycopolitan (among others) are named af ter their regions of origin in central and southern Egypt. The language of nonliterary texts was highly variable and re flected the dialect geography of Coptic. Most dialects died out by the ninth century, but Bohairic survived and replaced all other dialects. Bohairic remains the dialect of liturgical texts in Coptic to the present. Although the earliest occurrences of Coptic are in pagan texts, Coptic was ultimately the language of Christianity in Egypt. The earliest Christian writings in Coptic were trans lations of Greek originals for Egyptians: the New Testa ment, the Septuagint, apocryphal and patristic works. Early Coptic translations also include important Gnostic and Manichaean texts, including the Nag Hammadi codices, the
Pistis Sophia, and the Manichaean Kephalaia. Original com positions in Coptic are known after the third century. T h e fifth-century abbot Shenoute, the most important author whose works were originally written in Coptic and not Greek, was one of the earliest writers to treat Coptic as a vehicle for literary expression. Later Coptic authors and ttanslators were highly prolific, resulting in a large body of original compositions, adaptations and translations of a wide range of literature. Saints' lives, homilies, and martyrdoms were popular among monastic audiences, and an extensive body of liturgical texts served the needs of the church. His toriography was limited mostly to church histories, although there are fragments of chronologies and historical "ro mances." Coptic poetry is attested in a number of forms, culminating in a lengthy poem called the Triadon. The de cline of Coptic led to the compilation of Coptic-Arabic vo cabulary lists known as scalae, as well as Arabic grammars of Coptic. Magical texts that combine elements of paganism and Christianity are well attested in Coptic, as are medical, alchemical, astronomical and other scientific writings. Cop tic epigraphic texts (mostly stelae and graffiti) and docu mentary texts (including letters, legal documents, and ac counts) are important sources for the economic and social history of Late Antique Egypt. Coptic texts of all genres are essential sources for Christianity and the Christian Com munity in Egypt. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cram, Walter E. A Coptic Dictionary. Oxford, 1939. Standard source for Coptic morphology and vocabulary. Emmel, Stephen. "Nag Hammadi Library." In The Coptic Encyclope dia, vol. 6, pp. 1771-1773. New York, 1991. Frandsen, Paul John and Eva Richte-Air0e. "Shenoute: A Bibliogra phy." In Studies Presented to Hans Jakob Polotsky, edited by Dwight W. Young, pp. 147-176. East Gloucester, Mass., 1981. Kasser, Rodolphe, ed. "Appendix: Linguistics." In The Coptic Encyclo pedia, vol. 8, pp. 13-227. New York, 1991. Important, up-to-date survey of Coptic language, especially good for its survey of dialects. Volumes 1-7 of the encyclopedia also contain useful articles on Cop tic literature. Lambdin, Thomas O. Introduction to Sahidic Coptic. Macon, Ga., 1983. Standard teaching grammar. Mallon, Alexis. Grammaire copte. 4th ed. Beirut, 1956. Standard gram mar for Bohairic dialect of Coptic. Meyer, Marvin, and Richard Smith. Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. San Francisco, 1994. Anthology of Coptic magical texts in translation. Orlandi, Tito. Coptic Bibliography. Rome, 1985-. Annually updated bibliography of Coptic studies, especially thorough for language and literature. Orlandi, Tito. "Literature, Coptic." In The Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 5, pp. 1450-1459. New York, 1991. Polotsky, Hans Jakob. "Coptic." In Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 6, Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa, edited by Charles A. Ferguson et al., pp. 558-570. The Hague, 1970. Republished in Afroasiatic: A Survey, edited by Carleton T. Hodge. The Hague, 1971. General guide to scholarship on the Coptic language. Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3d ed.
COSMETICS New York, 1990. Standard English translation of the Nag Hammadi codices. Shisha-Halevy, Ariel. Coptic Grammatical Chrestomathy: A Course for Academic and Private Study. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, vol. 30. Louvain, 1988. Excellent teaching chrestoraathy for Coptic, based on the writings of Shenoute, and a thorough guide to literature on specific aspects of Coptic grammar. Till, Walter C. "Coptic and Its Value." Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 40 (1957): 229-258. Timbie, Janet. "The State of Research on the Career of Shenoute of Atripe." In The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, edited by Birger A. Pearson and James E. Goehring, pp. 258-270. Studies in Antiquity and Christianity, 1. Philadelphia, 1986. TERRY G. WILFONG
CORBO,
VIRGILIO
C.
( 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 9 1 ) , Franciscan
priest, teacher, and archaeologist who excavated in die Holy Land: at Jerusalem, Herodium, Magdala, Daburiya, Machaerus, Capernaum, and in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. After obtaining a degree in Oriental sciences in Rome, Corbo spent his life in the Holy Land. Among his personal discoveries were a number of monasteries in the Judean Desert and St. Peter's house at Capernaum. These monuments were known only through ancient literary sources. It is as a result of his research and archaeological excavations that the location of these sites has been deter mined. For each site he published a final report; although diey are not rich in bibliographic data, they are extremely meticulous. His findings contributed considerably to a better understanding of the structural, historical, and environmen tal character of the places he excavated. [See also Capernaum; Franciscan Custody of tire Holy Land; Herodium; Jerusalem; Machaerus; and Magdala.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bottini, Giovanni Claudio, et al., eds. Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land, New Discoveries; Essays in Honour of Virgilio C. Corbo. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (SBF), Collectio Maior, 36. Jerusalem, 1990. Includes a bibliography of Corbo's work. Bottini, Giovanni Claudio. "In memoriam: Virgilio C. Corbo, ofm, 1918-1991." Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annum 41 (1991): 616-625. Includes a bibliography. Bottini, Giovanni Claudio, ed. Padre Virgilio C. Corbo: Una vita in Terra Santa. SBF, Museum, 12. Jerusalem, 1994. Includes a bibliography of Corbo's work. Corbo, Virgilio. Gli scavi diKhirbet Siyar el-Ghanam (Campo deiPastori) e i monasteri del dintomi. SBF, Collectio Maior, 11. Jerusalem, 1955. Corbo, Virgilio. "L'ambiente materiale della vita dei monaci di Palestina nel periodo bizantino." In // monachesimo orientate: Atti del convegno di siudi orientali, Roma, 9-12 aprile 1958, pp. 235-257. Orien talia Christiana Analecta, 153. Rome, 1958. Corbo, Virgilio. Riccrche areheologiche al Monte degli Ulivi. SBF, Col lectio Maior, 16. Jerusalem, 1965. Corbo, Virgilio. The House of St. Peter at Capharnaum: A Preliminary Report of the First Two Campaigns of Excavations, April 16-June 19I September 12-November 26, 1968. SBF, Collectio Minor, 5. Jerusa lem, 1969. Corbo, Virgilio, et al. La sinagoga di Cafamao dopo gli scavi del 1969. SBF, Collectio Minor, 9. Jerusalem, 1970.
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Corbo, Virgilio. Cafamao, vol. 1 , Gli edifici della cilia. SBF, Collectio Minor, 19. Jerusalem, 1975. Corbo, Virgilio. "La fortezza di Macheronte: Rapporto preliminare della campagna di scavo, 8.09-28.10.1978." Studium Biblicum Fran ciscanuml'Liber Annuus 28 (1978): 217-231. Corbo, Virgilio. "Macheronte, la reggia-fortezza erodiana: Rapporto preliminare alia II campagna di scavo, 3.09-20.10.1979." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 29 (1979): 315-326. Corbo, Virgilio. "La fortezza di Macheronte (al Mishnaqa): Rapporto preliminare alia III campagna di scavo, 8.09-11.10.1980." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 30 (1980): 365-376. Corbo, Virgilio, and Stanislao Loffreda. "Nuove scoperte alia fortezza di Macheronte: Rapporto preliminare alia IV campagna di scavo, 7.09-10.10.1981." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml'Liber Annuus 31 (1981): 257-286. Corbo, Virgilio. // Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme: Aspetti archeologici dalle origini al periodo crociato. SBF, Collectio Maior, 29. Jerusalem, 1982. Includes an English summary by Stanislao Loffreda. Corbo, Virgilio. Herodion, vol. 1 , Gli edifici della reggia-fortezza. SEF, Collectio Maior, 20. Jerusalem, 1989. Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome. "Review of Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land: New Discoveries." Revue Bibliqae 88 (1993): 615-617. Also appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review 19 (1993): 3-4. GIOVANNI CLAUDIO BOTTINI
C O S M E T I C S . In the ancient Near East the popular use of cosmetics began with the dawn of civilization and later spread westward, to Greece and then to Rome. Until the advent of Christianity cosmetics were extremely popular, at times even used to excess. Christian thought, which stressed the life of tire spirit while rejecting bodily pleasures, led to a decline in die demand for cosmetics and perfumes, although in the East the Arabs continued to enjoy them. In antiquity, cosmetics first served magicoreligious and healing purposes. T o propitiate the gods, cosmetics were applied to their statues and to the faces of their attendants. From this, in the course of time, the custom of personal use developed, to enhance the beauty of the face and to conceal defects. The most extensive information on personal hygiene and cosmetics in the third and second millennia BCE comes from Egypt. Written and pictorial depictions, as well as rich ar chaeological finds, all show how important body care and aesthetic appearance were in the lives of the Egyptian aris tocracy. For example, bathing for pleasure was a common practice in Egypt, while among other peoples of the ancient Near East it was limited mainly to religious requirements— although it also had hygienic associations. [See Baths; Per sonal Hygiene.] The use of oils and ointments was prevalent in order to protect the face and body from sun, dust, and dtyness. These perfumed oils and ointments were not re garded as luxuries and were used by men and women in all strata of the population. It is known that during tire reign of Rameses III, the gravediggers of Thebes went on strike to protest a decline in the quality of the food and the quantity of the oils supplied to them.
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COSMETICS
The Hebrews used ointment in the Temple in Jerusalem and in coronation ceremonies, as recorded in the description of the anointing of David (i Sm. 16:13). T h e Bible makes no mention of other uses of cosmetics during the First T e m ple period, but there is evidence of their use for secular pur poses in the Second Temple period. Over time, this custom presumably became quite commonplace: in the Talmud it is said that a husband is obliged to give his wife ten dinars for her cosmetic needs (B.T., Ket. 66b). Cosmetic preparations included powders, ointments, per fumes, and fragrant oils, which were produced from various plants and resins mixed with vegetable oil or animal fat. Be cause of their high price, all these cosmetic substances were marketed in small quantities. This led to the development of an entire industry for the manufacture of tiny containers that became beautifully fashioned luxury articles in their own right. T h e containers were made of such materials as stone and alabaster, which kept their contents cool. In Egypt, most containers were made of stone, whereas in Greece and Rome they were made of exquisitely painted pottery. When the technique of glassblowing developed in the first century BCE, the perfume industry immediately adopted this lightweight and impermeable material for mak ing perfume containers. Many perfume containers have been found in tombs, where they were funerary offerings—gifts to the dead or buried with them as cherished personal belongings. T h e large quantities of perfume bottles found indicate that they were also brought in to freshen the air in the tombs during burial (Mk. 16:1; Jn. 19:39-40). Great importance was attached to the care of the hair in antiquity. Long hair has always been considered a mark of beauty, and kings, nobles, and dignitaries grew their hair long and kept it well groomed. Ordinary people and slaves usually wore their hair short, primarily for hygienic reasons: they could not afford to invest in the kind of care that long hair required. T h e art of hairstyling and hair care reached its apogee during the Roman period, as can be observed from the numerous heads of statues that have survived from that time. Very early evidence of the use of facial makeup is available from ancient Egypt: cosmetic utensils and materials, nu merous written records, and artistic depictions of the sub ject. The eyes played a central part in facial makeup. Paint ing the eyes, besides being part of magicoreligious ritual, also served a medical purpose: it protected against eye dis eases. Eye paint repelled the little flies that transmitted eye inflammations, prevented the delicate skin around the eyes from drying, and sheltered the eyes from the glare of the desert sun. When Egyptian women realized that the painted frame also emphasized the eyes and made them appear larger, they began using makeup to enhance their beauty. Egyptian women used to paint their upper eyelids and eye brows black and the lower line of the eye green. They also
rouged tiieir lips and cheeks, coloring their face dark red with hematite and red ocher. T h e Babylonians, too, used red ocher for facial makeup, but the Sumerians preferred yellow (Dayagi-Mendels, 1989, pp. 36-37). T h e Babyloni ans painted their faces with vermilion and white lead and their eyes with kohl (qukhlu; see R. J. Forbes, Studies in An cient Technology, vol. 3, Leiden, 1965, p. 18). Whereas the purpose of makeup was to embellish the face and emphasize its features, ointments were used to soften and protect the skin, to preserve its freshness, and rejuvenate its appearance. Ointments were prepared from vegetable oils or animal fat, at times in combination with aromatic resin or perfumed beeswax. An Egyptian papyrus from the sixteenth century BCE contains detailed recipes for ointments to remove blemishes, wrinldes, and other signs of age. Al most nothing is known of the makeup practices among He brew women during the Israelite period. However, there is no reason to doubt that malting up the face was customary in Israel, mainly because of the many implements and ac cessories found in excavations, whose shapes attest that they were used for makeup. The use of kohl for painting the eyes is mentioned three times in the Bible, always with disapprobation (2 Kgs. 9:30; Jer. 23:40; Jb. 42:14). By the Second Temple period, makeup was considered part of a woman's adornment (B.T., Mo'ed Q. 9b). Jewish sources distinguish between makeup used for therapeutic purposes and makeup meant merely to embellish the eyes. It was customary to put lightred makeup on the cheeks, and the Mishnah mentions a white cosmetic powder made of flour (Pes. 3 : 1 ) . In Greece and Rome, facial tteatment was very highly developed and women devoted hours to it (Dio Chrysostom, 7.117). They used to spread various creams on the face and apply makeup in vivid and contrasting colors. Greek women would cover their face with a "beauty mask" that consisted mainly of flour, leaving it on all night. T h e next morning, they would wash it off with milk. This mask was intended to remove blemishes and to endow the skin with a smooth and fresh appearance, ready to receive makeup. Creating and manufacturing cosmetics and perfumes have always been important and intriguing occupations. People working in this field had to be endowed not only with skill and knowledge, but also with a memory for fragrances and an ability to identify them and to distinguish tiieir com binations. Perfumers in antiquity guarded the secrets of tiieir trade closely, passing on their skills from father to son. T h e Bible mentions various plants from whose flowers, fruits, leaves, bark, or resin perfumes and ointments were pro duced (aloe, myrrh, frankincense). Although there is much to be learned in ancient sources about the uses of perfumes, very few describe methods of preparation. Tablets from the second millennium BCE found in Pylos, Greece, list the al location of raw materials for perfumes but contain no pre cise recipes. More extensive literary information about per-
COUNCIL OF AMERICAN OVERSEAS RESEARCH CENTERS fume production has come down from various classical sources (Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny). The equip ment required for perfume manufacture was similar to that in an ordinary kitchen: basins, small pots for steeping and mixing, large jars for storing the oil, and juglets for storing resin. As perfumes and spices were considered a precious com modity, they were stored with silver and gold. It is recounted in the Bible that when King Hezekiah of Judah received royal guests from Babylon, "he showed them all his treasure house, the silver, and the gold, and the spices, the precious ointment" (2 Kgs. 20:13). Classical sources emphasize the widespread use of perfumes in sixth-century BCE Greece, as well as their central place in cultural and social life. Perfum eries functioned as meeting places for all strata of die pop ulation (Athenaeus, 12.526A; Xenophon, Conviv. 2.3). Phi losophers, statesmen, artists, and writers who wished to discuss matters of state would gather in such establishments, and their presence attracted others. Some, however, frowned on such self-indulgence: the renowned fifth-cen tury BCE Athenian statesman Solon prohibited the sale of perfumes and ointments in his state, and the Spartans ban ished the perfumers from their city. T h e most lavish con sumers of perfumes were tire Romans, who perfumed each part of their body with a different scent, sprinkled perfume on their guests at banquets, and even perfumed the walls of their bathrooms. In the houses of tire wealthy, beds and ban quet couches were filled with fragrant dried flowers. Pliny criticized this excessive and wasteful use of scent, com menting that, despite their costliness—sometimes more than 400 denarii an ounce—perfumes gave pleasure only to oth ers because the user cannot smell them (Nat. Hist. 13.2022). Perfumes were also commonly used in Palestine during the Second Temple period, and not only among women. The Talmud mentions the priests of the Abtinas family, who maintained a monopoly preparing incense for the Temple. T h e family refused to let others share in the knowledge of their craft, fearing it might be used for profane purposes. Also, to prevent suspicion that they might be exploiting their skills profanely, their wives were forbidden to use scent, even when they were brides (B.T., Yoma' 38a). It is also recorded that perfumers took strict precautions to protect the secrets of their craft and to prevent imitations. Perfumes were sold in shops located in the market, which was often a meeting place for harlots, who used especially large quan tities of perfumes (Shemoth Rabbah 43:7). T h e plants and resins used in producing perfume had to be imported from distant lands, mainly southern Arabia and the Far East. To facilitate their transport, extensive trading networks developed, and the countries the caravan routes ttaversed enjoyed great economic prosperity as a result. Ma jor land and sea routes led to all the great trading centers in the ancient world. In Palestine the Nabateans functioned as
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middlemen in tire perfume and spice trade. The country played an important role in the overland transportation of those luxury goods to the Mediterranean coast and to tire West. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbadie, Jeanne Vandier d'. Les objets de toilette egyptiens au Musee du Louvre. Paris, 1972. Dayagi-Mendels, Michal. Perfumes and Cosmetics in the Ancient World. Israel Museum Catalogue, 305. Jerusalem, 1989. Egypt's Golden Age: The Art of Living in the New Kingdom, 1558-1085 B.C.: Catalogue of the Exhibition. Boston, 1982. See pages 184-227. Faure, Paul. Parfums et. aromates de Tantiquile. Paris, 1987. Paszthory, Emmerich. "Salben, Schminken und Parffime im Altertum." Antike Welt 21 (1990): 1-64. MICHAL DAYAGI-MENDELS
COUNCIL OF AMERICAN OVERSEAS RE S E A R C H C E N T E R S . Established by the U.S. Con gress in 1981, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) is housed in the Smithsonian Institution, with which it is directly affiliated and through which its lim ited budget for staff is funded. Originally eleven members, and in the mid-1990s fourteen, CAORC's original mandate was to speak with a unified voice in petitioning rite govern ment for funds; to act a resource base and clearinghouse for ideas and for other funding; to facilitate and promote over seas research centers; to clarify the role of research centers in enabling cultural exchange, academic programs, and field projects across national boundaries; to promote area studies as a viable discipline; and, where appropriate, to establish new centers. The three centers of the American Schools of Oriental Research (AS OR)—in Jerusalem, Amman, and Nicosia—were among the founding group of eleven. All of tire member centers were formed in response to American interest in fostering primary research in the host country. Their interests are mainly in the humanities and social sciences, though some centers have a keener interest in the natural and technological sciences, which is especially appropriate where archaeology is pursued. CAORC's pri mary vehicle for promoting scholarly exchange is fellow ships for pre- and postdoctoral scholars and senior scholars. Research at the centers is normally devoted to studying ei ther the particular host culture or that of an adjacent region. Most centers were established as consortia of universities in the United States and are governed by the member institu tions. Each is independently incorporated as a private, notfor-profit organization. One of CAORC's important roles is to bring together the centers' leadership to exchange schol arly ideas, share management experience, and seek support from government agencies. In addition to the AS OR group of three centers, CAORC acts as the umbrella for maintaining ties to the following organizations where research pertains to the Near East: the
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American Institute for Yemeni Studies, American Institute of Iranian Studies, American Research Center in Egypt, American Research Institute in Turkey, American Academy in Rome, and American School of Classical Studies at Ath ens. CAORC publishes occasional monographs and papers. It is housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. [See also American Institute for Yemeni Studies; Ameri can Institute of Iranian Studies; American Research Center in Egypt; American Research Institute in Turkey; and American Schools of Oriental Research.] ERIC M . MEYERS
CRESWELL, KEPPEL ARCHIBALD CAM E R O N (1879-1974), prominent British archaeologist who specialized in Islamic architecture. Creswell was educated at Westminister College in London and began studying Is lamic architecture in 1910. He first traveled to the Near East while serving in the Royal Air Corps during World War I. After the war he was assigned to conduct a survey of the monuments in Syria and Palestine. When this was com pleted, he launched a project to study tire history of Muslim architecture in Egypt. In 1931, he was appointed to the fac ulty of the Egyptian University in Cairo, where he founded and directed the Institute of Muslim Art and Archaeology. In 1956, as a result of the Suez Canal crisis, all British citi zens were to be exiled and forced to leave their possessions behind. Creswell, then 75 years old, refused to leave Egypt and his extensive library; he took refuge at the American University in Cairo, where he served as Distinguished Pro fessor and Chair of Muslim Architecture until his death in 1974. His personal library, now known as the Creswell Li brary of Islamic Art and Architecture, still houses one of the most extensive collections on the subject in the world. His publishing record, which includes several bibliographies of Islamic art and architecture, reflects his passion for the sub ject and is an invaluable resource for archaeologists. Cre swell is best known for his two-volume work Early Muslim Architecture (1932-1940), which serves as compendium of the subject. He later condensed and updated his magnum opus as v4 Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (1989). BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burns, Kristie. "Cairo's Creswell Collection: A Legacy of Love. "Amer ican Libraries 22 (1990): 940-944. A look at Creswell's life and the establishment of a research library from his personal library. Creswell, K. A. C. Early Muslim Architecture. 2 vols. Oxford, 19321940. Creswell, K. A. C. A Bibliography of the Architecture, Arts, and Crafts of Islam to istjan. i960. Cairo, 1961. Creswell, K. A. C. A Bibliography of the Architecture, Arts, and Crafts of Islam: Supplement, Jan. i960 to Jan. 1972. Cairo, 1973.
Creswell, K. A. C. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (1958). Revised and supplemented by James W. Allan. Aldershot, 1989. "Creswell, K. A. C." In Contemporary Authors: Permanent Series, vol. 1, pp. 147-148. Detroit, 1975. Summary of Creswell's life and work, with a valuable bibliography. Geddes, Charles L., et al. Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture in Hon our of K, A. C. Creswell Cairo, 1965. Festschrift that includes an overview of Creswell's contribution to the field and a valuable bib liography. Grabar, Oleg, ed. Muqamas: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture. Vol. 8, K. A. C. Creswell and His Legacy. Leiden, 1991. A collection of papers given at a symposium at Oxford University, which focuses upon Creswell's contribution to the field and includes a short biog raphy. JOHN D . WINELAND
C R E T E . The largest island in the Aegean Sea, Crete is 260 km (about 161 mi.) from east to west. T h e island is diverse in its geography, with high and rugged mountains, fertile plains, and many low hills that were suitable for flocks and herds as well as agriculture. T h e climate is Mediterra nean, with dry, hot summers and cool winters. Neolithic Period. The first settlers in Crete arrived in the Early Neolithic period, possibly even before pottery was be ing used. T h e earliest pottery on the island, from the second level above sterile soil at Knossos, has affinities with Ana tolia. In the subsequent development of the island, this pat tern of contacts with die East would never be broken for long: the history of Crete always included a give-and-take with the cultures of West Asia. T h e Neolithic period was a time of slow development. Animal husbandry and agriculture were established as the society's economic base, and they would remain such throughout antiquity. By the end of the period, the island was sparsely settled from one end to the other. Contact with the more eastern regions was never close during this time, but it was frequent enough for Crete to benefit from new discoveries, such, as better kilns for pottery. A few new set tlers seem to have arrived from time to time, especially to ward the end of the period. T h e earliest phase of the culture known as Minoan is called the Final Neolithic. It must begin well before 4000 BGE, but its dates are far from secure. T h e phase is first recognized by tire beginning of several new cultural traits, probably signaling the immigration of new people into the island. The most important trait for tracing the overseas connections is a dark-burnished pottery in shapes that in clude jugs with high spouts that look Anatolian. The first beehive-shaped tombs (called tholos tombs) date from this period. The Final Neolithic folk were farmers and herds men, and they were probably seafarers as well. They used obsidian from the island of Melos, and their technology for ceramics was on a par with contemporary developments in the Cyclades and Anatolia.
CRETE Early B r o n z e Age. On Crete, the Early Bronze Age is divided into three periods: Early Minoan I, II, and III. In the middle phase of the second period (Early Minoan II), the first real cultural explosion since the advent of the Final N e olithic took place. New objects testify both to an increased technological skill and to a desire for new possessions: sealstones, stone vases, new types of pottery, figurines; and metal objects in a surprising variety of designs. Some writers have seen metallurgy, in its new form as portable wealth, as tire main stimulus behind these changes. Certainly, metals played a vital role. Copper was used for jewelry, for tools, and especially for daggers. Silver and gold assumed new roles as symbols of prestige. Because Crete is poor in me tallic ores, it is likely that all or almost all of this metal was imported. Some of the jewelry gives us our best hints about the sources for these new metals. T h e rich Early Minoan II—III tombs at Mochlos in northeastern Crete have yielded hun dreds of pieces of jewelry. They include earrings and pen dants with strong stylistic parallels with Troy and nearby parts of the northeast Aegean and with a number of ties to Mesopotamia; quadruple spirals, complex link chains, pierced bands, and flowers and leaves all occur both at Ur in Mesopotamia and at Mochlos on Crete. In addition, the technology of fusing with added fluxes to create filigree and granulation also appears in both areas. Although the lines of transmission are mostly lost, and they were surely distant and indirect, the situation suggests that a general level of technology and a few stylistic details were being transmitted over extremely long distances. Although invasions and cultural disruptions occurred in Greece and the Cycladic Islands at the end of the Early Bronze Age, Crete does not seem to have been affected. T h e Middle Minoan period lasted from about 2 0 0 0 BCE until just after 1 7 0 0 BCE. T h e Old Palaces were built during the period, and there is evidence that Crete may have been di vided into several kingdoms then, administered from palaces at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, and other centers. T h e volume of Minoan objects in the East and of Eastern objects on Crete increased appreciably. They suggest economic links in several directions. Egyptian scarabs and a few other objects occur at several Middle Minoan sites. Minoan pottery, especially the fine Kamares ware of M M II, found its way to Egypt in enough quantity to suggest that it was traded for its own sake rather than as a container. Most of this pottery is palatial (most likely from Knossos), suggesting that the palaces were taking the lead in foreign trade. Objects from Syria, Anatolia, and Cyprus can also be identified on Crete. Among these loca tions Cyprus is most important, and it may have acted as an intermediary between Crete and ports farther to the east. Eastern products that can be identified from this period in clude ivory, a few stones, and metals.
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Late B r o n z e Age (Late M i n o a n I). At the beginning of the Late Bronze Age on Crete (the Middle Bronze LIB in Palestine and Syria), a group of important Minoan wall paintings appears in the East. Examples survive from three sites: Tell ed-Dab a in Egypt, Tel Kabri in Palestine, and Alalakh in Syria. At Tell ed-Dab'a, the Hyksos capital of Avaris, the paintings included bull leapers, Aegean floral motifs, several animals, and abstract designs of Cretan type. Floral ornaments and other designs decorate the palace of Yarimlim at Alalakh. Both a gridded floor and a miniature fresco with buildings, a landscape, and human figures were found at Tel Kabri. In all cases, the technique is true fresco, an Aegean practice previously unknown in Egypt and West ern Asia. Apparently, Minoan painters were called in to dec orate some of the finer local buildings at this time, using Cretan motifs and techniques. [See Dab'a, Tell ed-; Kabri, Tel; awd Alalakh.] Late Minoan I also marks a new height for Cretan trade with the East. Imported commodities are sometimes difficult to trace, but they make a long list. Raw materials include stones like blue lapis lazuli from Afghanistan; white-spotted obsidian from the island of Ghyali; copper; and possibly also tin, ivory, ostrich eggs, gold, silver, and the many products that leave no trace, such as woods, spices, and leathers. If the archaeological record is any indication, finished goods were mostly made at home on Crete. Eastern pottery is rare on Crete. A few pieces came from Knossos, Kommos, Zak ros, Pseira, and a few other places, but they were mostly closed containers presumably brought in for their contents. Sealstones from the period are a tiny percentage of the local Minoan seals. Minoan metal objects from this period were almost all manufactured on Crete. It is reasonable to con clude that Crete was an agricultural and a manufacturing center that traded mostly for its raw materials. It must have exported foods, textiles, and especially finished metal goods. The manufacture of metal objects must have played a large role in this scenario. T h e final evidence is not in yet, but the best guess is that copper and tin came from some where to the east. Large stores of copper ingots must have been needed to supply the bronze-working industry. Hoards of copper ingots have been found at Aghia Triadha and at Zakros, but studies of the ingots by lead isotope analysis have produced a pattern with no known parallel from the eastern Mediterranean. T h e copper must come from a Precambrian ore body that has not yet been identified. Geo graphical candidates are Afghanistan or the Caucasus, but little archaeological work has been done in this region. A shipwreck from near Bulgaria, in the Black Sea, with copper ingots on board and with clay weights that are disk-shaped, with holes near tile margins (an, Aegean shape), raises the possibility of a seaborne trade in the right direction, but too little research has yet been done to reach any firm conclu sions. c
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At the end of Late Minoan IB, most Cretan sites were destroyed. Many of them were abandoned in L M II, and diose that survived have an increased amount of evidence from Mycenaean areas of southern Greece. Most scholars believe that this date marks die arrival of the Mycenaeans on Crete. Knossos continues to be important in the years of My cenaean domination, and it must have participated in the international Mycenaean trade in L M III that knit together a great economic network in the eastern Mediterranean. In L M III, the language of Crete was Mycenaean Greek, pre served on tablets written in the script called Linear B. T a b lets come from Knossos and Khania on Crete as well as from Mycenae, Pylos, and other sites on the Greek mainland. The tablets, all tallies and other economic documents, describe a thriving economy. Weaving, bronze working, and other crafts were done for the international market as well as for home consumption. Crete's dominant position in the wool trade is demonstrated by the fact that the clay tablets from Knossos list more than 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 sheep. By the thirteenth cen tury BCE, iron began to be used in larger quantities than pre viously, and new customs such as cremation began to ap pear. Early Iron Age. Toward the end of the second millen nium BCE, all of the Mycenaean world was experiencing dis ruption. Wars were frequent, and by 1 2 0 0 BCE most of the great centers had been attacked. A wave of new settlers on Cyprus at about this time coincides with the abandonment of several of the Mycenaean sites. This is the period of the "Sea Peoples," displaced populations who attacked Egypt during the reign of Rameses III. One group of the Sea Peo ples, with Aegean population elements, setded in Palestine and became the Philistines. Other groups are more difficult to trace. The coasts of Crete, were so insecure at the time that many harbors were abandoned as people moved inland. Refuge sites on high peaks like Karphi, Vrokastro, and Kavousi-Kastro testify to the new need for defense, rather than access to the coast for trade. In this period of the Early Iron Age, the Dorians can first be recognized archaeologically on the Greek peninsula and Crete. They spoke a dialect of Greek that was distinct from that of their Mycenaean predecessors, and by the eighthcentury BCE they were dominant throughout Crete. T h e new society was aristocratic, based on land tenure managed by wealthy citizens and worked by slaves and a serf population that was probably the remnant of the island's Bronze Age residents. Trade revived in the Early Iron Age, and by the ninth century Crete was again a stepping-stone from east to west. In the north, Knossos remained the most important site. In the south, the port of Kommos, on the prosperous plain of the Mesara, was a busy port of call. A temple here, with a shrine of standing stones of Phoenician type and many eastem offsprings, suggests that the Phoenicians used the port
on their way east or west. As before, Crete was a link be tween the eastern and western Mediterranean. [See also Cyprus; and Minoans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evans, Arthur. The Palace of Minos,. 4 vols, in 6. London, 1921-1935. Publication of the discoveries at Knossos. Gale, N. H., ed. Bronze Age Trade in the Mediterranean. [Goteborg], 1991. Papers on trade delivered at a conference held at Oxford, De cember 1989. Lambrou-Phillipson, C. Hellenorientalia: The Near Eastern Presence in the Bronze Age Aegean, ca. 3000-1 too B.C. Goteborg, 1990. Sum mary of the Western Asian-Aegean interrelations, with a list of East ern objects found in the Aegean and an extensive bibliography. Muhly, James D. "The Nature of Trade in the LBA Eastern Mediter ranean: The Organization of the Metals Trade and the Role of Cy prus." In Early Metallurgy in Cyprus, 4000-500 BC: Acta of the In ternational Archaeological Symposium, edited by James D. Muhly et al., pp. 251-266. Larnaca, Cyprus, 1982. Discussion of the trade in metals. Renfrew, Colin. The Emergence of Civilisation. London, 1972. Discus sion of the Cyclades and adjacent areas in the third millennium BCE. Sandars, Nancy K. The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterra nean, 1250-1150 B.C. London, 1978. Discussion of the end of the Bronze Age. Seager, Richard B. Explorations in the Island of Mochlos. Boston, 1912. Publication of the objects from the Early to Middle Bronze Age cem etery at Mochlos, including the gold jewelry. Smith, William Stevenson. Interconnections in the Ancient Near-East. New Haven, 1965. Valuable treatment, especially of art objects. PHILIP P . BETANCOURT
CROWFOOT, JOHN WINTER ( 1 8 7 3 - 1 9 5 9 ) , di rector of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem ( 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 3 5 ) . Crowfoot, the son of John Henchman Crow foot, chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, was educated at Marl borough College and Brasenose College at Oxford Univer sity. His early and lifelong devotion to archaeology led in 1 8 9 7 to a year of travel in Asia Minor and Greece. He was a lecturer in classics at Birmingham University for two years before going to Egypt as assistant master of education. In 1 9 0 3 he became deputy principal of Gordon College, Khar toum, in the Sudan. Returning briefly to Egypt as an in spector in the Ministry of Education in 1 9 0 9 , he married Grace Mary Hood, who became a pioneer in the study of ancient and modern textiles and women's crafts, As director of education and principal of Gordon College ( 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 2 6 ) , he also oversaw the Antiquities Department as well. He was appointed C.B.E. (Companion of the British Empire) for wartime service. In Palestine from 1 9 2 6 he directed the British School-Yale University excavation at Jerash (Gerasa) in Transjordan ( 1 9 2 8 - 1 9 3 0 ) ; the joint expeditions to Samaria/Sebaste ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 5 ) ; and excavations for the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) on the Ophel in Jerusalem. On his return to England, he became chairman of the P E F ( 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 5 0 ) . In
CRUSADER PERIOD 1 9 5 8 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford University. As recalled by R. W. Hamilton, late keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, who first worked with him at Je rash, Crowfoot was known for his tolerance and humor. These qualities proved particularly important in the British School's excavations at Samaria, where his direction facili tated cooperation between his British School, the PEF, the British Academy, Harvard University, and tire Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem. Perhaps his most important achieve ment was his innovativeness at a time when archaeologists in Palestine were obsessed with the desire to "prove" the truth of the Hebrew Bible. Crowfoot instead turned the ac tivities of the school and its students to Early Christian ar chaeology, so rich in its architecture, art, and epigraphy, as well as to the classical roots of Western society. [See also British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; Je rash; Jerusalem; Palestine Exploration Fund; and Samaria.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crowfoot, John Winter. Churches at Jerash: A Preliminary Report of the Joint Yale-British School Expeditions to Jerash, 1928-1930. London, 1931. Crowfoot, John Winter. Early Churches in Palestine. London, 1941. Crowfoot, John Winter, and Grace Mary Crowfoot. Early Ivories from Samaria. Samaria-Sebaste: Report of the work of the Joint Expedi tion in 1931-1933 and of the Work of the British Expedition in 1935, no. 2. London, 1938. Crowfoot, John Winter, Kathleen M. Kenyon, and Eleazar L. Sukenik. The Buildings al Samaria. Samaria-Sebaste: Report of the Work of the Joint Expedition in 1931-1933 and of the Work of the British Expedition in 1935, no. 1, London, 1942. Crowfoot, John Winter, Grace Mary Crowfoot, and Katheleen M. Kenyon. The Objects from Samaria. Samaria-Sebaste: Report of the Work of the Joint Expedition in 1931-193 3 and of the Work of the British Expedition in 1935, no. 3. London, 1957. ELISABETH CROWFOOT
C R U S A D E R P E R I O D . On 2 7 November 1 0 9 5 , Pope Urban II issued a call at Clermont in the Auvergne, France, for European Christians to go to the aid of tiieir Eastern Christian brethren in the Holy Land and to wrest control of the holy sites from the infidels who had desecrated and de stroyed them. T h e four main armies of the First Crusade marched to Constantinople in 1 0 9 6 - 1 0 9 7 and set off across Asia Minor in June 1 0 9 7 . History. T h e First Crusade entered Syria-Palestine in 1097, taking Antioch and Edessa in 1 0 9 8 . Continuing south, the Crusaders occupied Bethlehem in June 1 0 9 9 and con quered Jerusalem on 1 5 July 1 0 9 9 . Nazareth was taken later in the year by Tancred. Godefroy de Bouillon was elected Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri and retained the office until his death on 1 8 July 1100. Baldwin of Boulogne was crowned king of Jerusalem in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on Christmas day 1100. Gibelin of Aries became the first
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uncontested patriarch of Jerusalem in 1108. On 1 2 July 1109, Tripoli fell to Crusader forces. Thus, during a tenyear period the gains of the First Crusade were slowly con solidated into the establishment of four Crusader states: the Principality of Antioch, ruled by Bohemond of Otranto and his nephew, Tancred; the County of Edessa, ruled by Bald win of Boulogne and Baldwin of Le Bourg; the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ruled by Baldwin I; and the County of Tripoli, ruled by Bertram, son of Raymond of St. Gilles. By 1 1 1 0 most of the important port cities on the Mediterranean coast had been taken, with the conspicuous exceptions of Tyre and Ashkelon, which were still in Fatimid hands. In the newly organized Crusader states, fortifications and churches were needed everywhere. T h e early kings of Je rusalem, Baldwin I ( 1 1 0 0 — 1 1 1 8 ) and Baldwin II ( 1 1 1 8 -
1 1 3 1 ) sponsored important castle building in Syria-Palestine near Ashkelon (Israel), at Shaubak (Jordan), and on the Isle de Graye (in the Gulf of Aqaba); other patrons built Jubayl (Lebanon) and Saone (Syria). Important commercial ar rangements were made by which the Genoese, the Pisans, and the Venetians were given holdings in the port cities, providing the means of trade and a de facto Crusader navy. Coinage generated the earliest Crusader artistic images, in many cases distinctive amalgamations of Byzantine-influ enced designs and Western currency types. Metalwork, and especially reliquaries, also proved to be much in demand. A relic of the True Cross became the ensign of the Latin King dom and was carried by the patriarch on all important cam paigns. By the time Fulk of Anjou became king, crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1 1 3 1 , the second genera=
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CRUSADER PERIOD. Figural lintel. A lintel from the south transept facade (west portal) of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, c. 1150. Scenes from left to right include Jesus raising Lazarus; Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of James and John, meeting Jesus; and Jesus directing his dis ciples to prepare for the Last Supper. (Courtesy Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem)
don of settlers was in place and social and cultural interpenetration was a feature of life in "outremer" (as the Frankish East was known). As an example of royal intermarriage, the king came from France, but his queen, Melisende, was Greek Orthodox, born of an Armenian mother. Melisende became the most remarkable woman in the Crusader East—daughter, wife, and mother of kings, and patroness of the arts. For her the Melisende psalter was done, the most re markable illuminated Crusader codex produced in die twelfth century. She, Fulk, and the patriarchs of Jerusalem were responsible for the rebuilding and redecoration of die Church of the Holy Sepulcher: pilgrimage church par excellance, state coronation church, and burial church of the Crusader kings. The aedicule of the Holy Sepulcher had been refurbished immediately after 1099, but an ambitious plan to unify Calvary and the Prison of Christ with the ae dicule in a single church was initiated after 1 1 3 1 with most
of the construction carried out in the 1140s. The church was dedicated on 15 July 1149, after the members of the ill-fated Second Crusade had returned home. The Holy Sepulcher was the first major holy site to be redone in a distinctive Levantine-Romanesque style of ar chitecture, with complex programs of sculpture and mosaics on the interior and exterior. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was also redecorated in 1 1 6 7 - 1 1 6 9 , in a unique joint patronage arrangement between Amaury, king of Je rusalem, the Byzantine emperor, Manuel; and Bishop Ralph of Bethlehem. This church dated to the sixth century CE, but a completely new program of Byzantine- and Crusader-in spired mosaics and frescoes transformed its interior and grotto. By contrast, a third holy site, the Church of the An nunciation in Nazareth, was rebuilt with a very extensive program of figural sculpture making it distinctively different from its predecessors. These holy places strongly shaped the
CRUSADER PERIOD Crusader artistic agenda in the twelfth century. The Tem plar and Hospitaller orders, founded in the early part of the century, grew in military power and in their control of casdes used to defend these sites and their pilgrims. Otherwise, the Crusaders were less successful on the political and military fronts. Although the Crusader states proved viable commercially there was tire constant threat of Muslim incursions. Edessa had fallen in 1144 and the Second Crusade could do nothing to restore it. It became increasingly evident that the threat from the Turks in the north and the Fatimids in Egypt could successfully be warded off only while the Muslims were di vided. When the Crusaders failed to enlist the Byzantines in an efficacious alliance to conquer Egypt in the 1160s and 1170s, Saladin (Salah ad-Din) unified Muslim forces against the Crusaders. Saladin evenmally invaded tire Latin King dom and inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Crusaders at the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1 1 8 7 . By tire end of that year, tire Crusaders held only Tyre and Beirut and a few major castles, such as Crac des Chevaliers and Marqab (Syria); all of the major holy places were again in the hands of tire in fidels. T o regain these sites, the Third Crusade was mounted in 1189. Although it was led by three crowned heads of Europe, including Richard tire Lionheart, who delivered Cyprus into Crusader hands, and although it restored the coasdine to the Crusaders, symbolized by the retaking of Akko (Acre) in 1 1 9 1 , the Third Crusade failed to regain a single major holy site or to damage a single Muslim center of power. Mindful
75
of this failure, Pope Innocent III organized the Fourth Crusade. It was, however, diverted to Constantinople in 1203-1204. After a terrible sacking of that city in April 1204 a Latin Empire was established for fifty seven years. With Constantinople as its capital, the empire included the terri tories of Romania, Thessalonike, the Morea, and Crete. Yet, other expeditions were attempted. The Crusade of Pelagius (papal legate and leader of the Crusade to Damietta) at tacked Egypt directly in 1 2 1 8 - 1 2 2 1 but was forced to withdraw. Ironically, only Frederick II, twice excommunicated in the process, was able to restore the holy places to Cru sader control, by treaty—not by force of arms—with Sultan al-Kamil in 1229. Crusader jurisdiction over the holy sites after 1229 was tenuous because their military and political power was largely consumed by civil war between 1229 and 1243 and was thus inadequate to reestablish control. In 1244 the Khwarazmian Turks overran Jerusalem, definitively remov ing the holy city from Crusader access. Yet another Crusade was organized: King Louis IX came east, but his attempt to attack Egypt was repulsed. He then went directly to the Latin Kingdom to aid the Holy Land. Residing in Akko (1250-1254), he set about rebuilding the fortifications at Caesarea, Akko, and Tyre, and he built a new castle at Sidon. He seems to have reinvigorated Crusader painting with his commissions of royal manuscripts, such as the Arsenal Bible. He personally visited the holy site of Nazareth to refocus Crusader goals, but he was unable to restore a single holy site to Crusader control.
CRUSADER PERIOD. 'Atlit castle. T h e Norm Tower wall, looking east with remains of vaulting and three corbels, 1 2 1 8 CE. (Photograph by J. Folda)
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Witii the Mongol invasion in 1258-1260 and the rise to power of the Mamluk Sultan Baybars, the future of the Cru sader states was put in serious jeopardy. Baybars pursued a policy of conquest and destruction, and by 1268 he had taken Nazareth and Antioch. The alarm was sounded and a new Crusade was organized, with Louis IX once again leading the expedition. Louis died in Tunis, en route, in 1270 but Edward I of England continued on to Palestine. Even he could not deter Baybars, however, and in 1271 the Mamluks captured one of the greatest of Crusader castles, Crac des Chevaliers. Only Baybars's death in 1277 foiled his resolve to eradicate the Franks. In 1280 Baybars's successor, Qalawun, resumed the Mamluk assault on die Crusaders. By 1289 Tripoli had fallen, and Qalawun prepared to attack Akko. Qalawun failed to take Akko only because he died on the march that began the siege; however, his son, Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil, assumed command and the battle was joined. St. Jean d'Acre fell on 28 May 1291. By August, the Mamluks had pushed the Crusaders into the sea, having taken every main land Frankish fortification. The Latin Kingdom was termi nated in Syria-Palestine, and only Cyprus and parts of Greece remained in Frankish hands. Art a n d Archaeology. The study of Crusader art was essentially founded and initially carried out by the great French "archeologues" such as Melchior de Vogtie, Em manuel Rey, Charles Clermont-Ganneau, L.-H. Vincent and F.-M. Abel, and continued by Prosper Viaud, Camille Enlart, and Paul Deschamps, with significant connibutions by certain Englishmen such as Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener, William Harvey, and C. N . Johns between i860 and World War II. In this period the early investigation of the major castles and churches was done with intensive work during the French and British Mandates after 1917, at Crac des Chevaliers and ' Atlit; the site of the Church of the An nunciation, Nazareth, was excavated; archeological studies were done on the Crusader churches of Jerusalem; and spe cific architectural surveys were carried out on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem, and the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem. Since World War II, archeological investigation has con tinued with important investigations of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and specifically the aedicule of the tomb, the castles of Belvoir and Belmont, the Crusader cities of Acre (Akko) and Caesarea, and Crusader settlement in the plain of Sharon. There have been important investigations of the coins and pottery from the Crusader period as well. However, significant art historical research also appeared, starting with the work of T. S. R. Boase, H. Buchthal, and K. Weitzmann. In contrast to the archaeological reports and studies on sites and architecture, the art historical publica tions have focused more on painting (manuscript illumina tions, frescoes, mosaics, and icons), sculpture, and metalwork. These studies have emphasized the figural arts and
have made considerable progress in redressing the balance between archaeological and art historical research. For ar chitectural history and archaeology the British School of Ar chaeology in Jerusalem has recently sponsored important surveys of Mamluk architecture in Jerusalem and a corpus of Crusader churches from the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, of which the first volume has appeared (Pringler, 1986). A significant group of Israeli art historians located at Jerusa lem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa has also begun making important contributions on painting, sculpture and the minor arts since about 1980. Of the four Crusader States on mainland Syria-Palestine, the greatest number of Crusader sites and monuments (churches, castles, fortified cities, and towers), including the most important holy places for pilgrimage, is found in the territory of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which includes today Israel and parts of soutiiern Lebanon, and western Jordan between the Dead Sea and 'Aqaba. In the County of Edessa (Urfa; 1098-1144), which now includes parts of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, there are some im portant castle remains, and in the Principality of Antioch (1098-1268), which includes today mainly northwestern Syria and a bit of southern Turkey, there are also important fortifications, but few Crusader churches are extant in either area. The County of Tripoli (1109-1289) was the smallest of tiiese states, running along the coast from Gibelet (Jubayl, Byblos) to the Castle of Marqab (Margat), that is, northern Lebanon and a part of western Syria. Significantly, however, the most impressive extant Crusader castles are located in this region—Crac des Chevaliers. Marqab, and Saone (Sahyun), all in present-day Syria, of which the latter two have never been seriously investigated archaeologically. Indeed, few Crusader castles have been excavated, although several, such as Crac des Chevaliers, have been cleared. Finally, two of the finest extant Crusader churches, at Gibelet and Tortosa (Tartus) are also found in the region of Tripoli. Jerusalem in the twelfth century and Acre during the thir teenth century were the two primary Crusader artistic cen ters, along with the important pilgrimage sites such as Beth lehem, Nazareth, and St. Catherine's on Mount Sinai in the Sinai Peninsula. Apart from the decoration of their churches. Jerusalem and Acre were centers for manuscript illumination; in Jerusalem there was also a thriving quarter for goldsmiths and metalwork; and in Acre and at St. Cath erine's are found important Crusader panel painting. No Crusader manuscripts from other important centers such as Antioch, Tripoli, or Cyprus have been identified for certain at present, but Antioch may have been important for met alwork, and Lydda, Tripoli, and Nicosia have had Crusader panel paintings attributed to them recently. As with all por table works of art, however, the archaeological evidence for the sources of works such as manuscript painting, icons, and metalwork is difficult to identify in tiiese locations.
CTESIPHON [See also Akko; Antioch on Orontes; Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties; Byblos; Caesarea; Constantinople; Fatimid Dy nasty; Jerusalem; Sidon; Tyre; and the biographies of Abel, Clerrnont-Ganneau, Conder, Kitchener, Vincent, and Vogue.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bagatti, Bellarmino. Gli aruichi edifici sacri diBetlemme. Jerusalem, 1952. Bagatti, Bellarmino, and Eugenio Alliata. Gli scavi di Nazaret, vol, 2, Dal secolo XII ad oggi. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 17. Jerusalem, 1984. Benveniste, M. The Crusaders in ihe Holy Land. Jerusalem, 1970. Biddle, M. "The Tomb of Christ: Sources, Methods and a New Ap proach." In Churches Built in Ancient Times: Recent Studies in Early Christian Archaeology, edited by K. Painter, pp. 73-147. London, 1994. Boase, T. S. R. "Ecclesiastical Art in the Crusader States in Palestine and Syria" and "Military Architecture in the Crusader States in Pal estine and Syria." In The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States, edited by Harry W. Hazard, pp. 69-164. A History of the Crusades, vol. 4. Madison, Wis., and London, 1977. Buschhausen, Helmut. Die siiditalienische Bauplastik im Konigreich Je rusalem von Kbnig Wilhelm II. bis Kaiser Friedrich II. Vienna, 1978. Clerrnont-Ganneau, Charles S. Archaeological Researches in Palestine during the Years 1873-1874. 2 vols. London, 1896-1899. Conder, Claude R., and H. H. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. 1, Galilee; vol. 2, Samaria; vol. 3, Judaea. London, 1881-1883. Corbo, Virgilio. II Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme. 3 vols. Studium Bib licum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 29. Jerusalem, 1981-1982. Dean, Bashford. "A Crusaders' Fortress in Palestine." Palestine Explo ration Fund Quarterly Statement (1928): 91-97. Deschamps, Paul. Les Chateaux des Croises en Terre-Sainte, vol. 1, Le Crac des Chevaliers; vol. 2, La defense du royaume de Jerusalem; vol. 3, IM defense du Comte de Tripoli et de la Principaute d'Antioche. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vols. 19, 34, and 90. Paris, 1934-1973. Enlart, Camille. Les monuments des Croises dans le royaume de Jerusalem: Architecture religieuse et civile. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vols. 7-8. Paris, 1925-1928. Folda, Jaroslav, et al. "Crusader Frescoes at Crac des Chevaliers and Marqab Castle." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 36 (1982): 177-210. Folda, Jaroslav. The Art of the Cmsaders in the Holy Land, 1098-1187. New York and Cambridge, 1995. One additional volume is planned. Johns, C. N . "Excavations at Pilgrim's Castle ('Atlit)." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine 1 (1932): 111-129; 2 (1933): 41-104; 3 (1934): 145-164; 4 (1935): 122-137. Johns, C. N. "The Citadel, Jerusalem: A Summary of Work since 934-" Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine 14 (1950): 121-190. Kennedy, H. Crusader Castles. Cambridge, 1994. Kuhnel, Bianca. Crusader Art of the Twelfth Century. Berlin, 1994. Kuhnel, Gustav. Wall Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Berlin, 1988. Lane, Arthur. "Medieval Finds from Al-Mina in North Syria." Archaeologia 87 (1937): 19-78. Malloy, A. G., I. F. Preston, and A. J. Seltman. Coinage of the Crusader States, 1098-1291. New York, 1994. Metcalf, David M. Coinage of the Crusades and the Latin East in the Ashmolean Museum. London, 1983. Poree, B. Un aspect de la culture materielle des Croisades: Introduction d I'etude de la ceramique, Xl-XIIIe siecles. Paris, 1991. I
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Pringle, Denys. "Medieval Pottery from Caesarea: The Crusader Pe riod." Ijevant 17 (1985): 171-202. Pringle, Denys, et al. The Red Tower (al-Burj al-Ahmar): Settlement in the Plain of Sharon at the Time of the Cmsaders and Mamluks, A.D. 1099-1516. British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, Monograph Series, 1. London, 1986. Pringle, Denys. The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Coipus. Vol. 1. Cambridge, 1993. Two additional volumes are planned. Rey, Emmanuel-Guillaume. Etude sur les monuments de ['architecture militaire des croises en Syrie et dans Tile de Chypre. Collection de Doc uments Inedits sur lTIistoire de France, ser. 1: Histoire Politique. Paris, 1871. Sailer, Sylvester J. Excavations at Bethany, 1949-1953. Studium Bibli cum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 12. Jerusalem, 1957. Schick, Conrad. "The Muristan, or, The Site of the Hospital of St, John at Jerusalem." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1902): 42-56. Schultz, Robert W., et al. The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. Lon don, 1910. Ulbert, Thilo. Resafa, vol. 3, Der kreuzfahrerzeitliche Silberschatz aus Resafa-Sergiupolis. Mainz am Rhein, 1990. Viaud, Prosper. Nazareth et ses deux eglises de I'Annonciation et de SaintJoseph d'apris les fouilles recentes. Paris, 1910. Vincent, L.-H., and Felix-Marie Abel. Jerusalem: Recherches de topographie, d'archeologie et d'histoire, vol. 2, Jerusalem nouvelk. Paris, 1926. Vogiie, Melchior de. Les eglises de la Terre Sainte (i860). Toronto, 1973. The reader should also take note of the archaeological/art historical surveys and excavations in progress (as of 1993). For instance, Israeli and ASOR excavations in Jerusalem and at Caesarea, Belvoir, Acre (Akko), and Ashkelon are regularly reported in the Revue Biblique and Israel Exploration Journal. The British School of Archaeology is con ducting excavations at Belmont castle, west of Jerusalem, reported in Levant, and the Lebanese Antiquities Service is currently working at Tyre and Tripoli. Erica Dodd is surveying all the extant Crusaderperiod frescoes in Lebanon. Martin Biddle's studies of the aedicule of the Holy Sepulcher (with photogrammetry) have appeared in various English archaeological journals as well as the Illustrated London News. Other works in progress include surveys of Crusader sculpture in the Latin Kingdom by Zehava Jacoby; mosaics in the Latin Kingdom by Gustav Kuhnel; and metalwork by Bianca Kuhnel. JAROSLAV FOLDA
CTESIPHON,
city located on the east bank of the Tigris
River, 3 5 km ( 2 2 mi.) south of Baghdad in Iraq, and op posite the Seleucid capital of Seleucia on tire Tigris and tire nearby Sasanian "round city" of Veh Ardashir. Ctesiphon flourished as tire Partho-Sasanian capital from tire second century BCE until the Arab conquest in 6 3 7 CE. T h e origins and meaning of tire Latin name Ctesiphon are unknown (Gk., Ktesiphon; Syr., qtyspwn; Parthian, Pahlavi, and Sogdian, tyspwn; Ar., Taysafun). Contemporaneous classical, Christian, Jewish, and Arab sources refer to several other centers in the vicinity known as "the cities," which has led to considerable confusion as to Ctesiphon's precise location. T h e most likely site is al-Ma'aridh, where limited German excavations uncovered large Late Sasanian private houses (Kroger, 1 9 8 2 ) . T h e origins of Ctesiphon are obscure. It appears to have been founded as a Parthian city following
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their capture of Mesopotamia from the Seleucids and west ward transfer of their capital. It was used as a place of cor onation and royal winter residence with treasuries and a gar rison; according to one classical author (Ammianus Marcellinus, 23.6.23), the city walls were built by Pacorus I. Owing to its position on the left bank of the Tigris, Ctesiphon was well sited for communicating with the Iranian plateau. (Seleucia, the Parthian foundation of Vologesocerta/Abu Halefija, and the Early Sasanian city of Veh Ardashir controlled access to Babylonia, particularly along ca nals linking the Euphrates River with the Tigris at this point.) Parthian Ctesiphon was sacked on three occasions by Roman armies, namely by Trajan (116 CE), Avidius Cassius (165) and Septimius Severus (198). In 224 the Parthians were overthrown by Ardashir, crowned in Ctesiphon in 226 as the first ruler of the Sasanian dynasty. Thereafter, Ctesiphon remained die Sasanian cap ital, place of coronation, royal mint, and one of the empire's most important administrative, and cultural centers. It was strongly fortified with walls of fired brick and a moat. Odenathus of Palmyra unsuccessfully besieged the city in 261, but it was sacked by Cams in 283; Julian attempted to capture it in 363 but failed (Frey, 1967). Ctesiphon was physically connected to Veh Ardashir by a pair of bridges, one of which may have been constructed by Shapur II. Its diverse pop ulation included important Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian communities. Ctesiphon was the birthplace of the catholicos Elisha, the archdeacon Mar Aba, and Rabbi Hiyya. Mani, the founder of the Manichaean sect, was educated but later crucified at Ctesiphon, and within tire city there was a market frequented by local Jews. Fleraclius attacked Ctesiphon in 627, and a decade later an Arab army com manded by Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas captured Ctesiphon and huge quantities of booty after first taking Veh Ardashir and fording the Tigris. Major monuments at this time included a large "White Palace," whose founder was then unknown— suggesting that it was already an old building. Several un identified mosques were founded after the Arab conquest and Ctesiphon became known as "the ancient city." Despite an unhealthy reputation owing to mosquitoes and malaria, it was occupied by "men of the nobility and distinguished houses of Kufa" (a city on the Euphrates River) with "nu merous fighters to watch possible disturbances" (Tabari, I, 2677, 2483; II, 980). With the later foundation of Baghdad, the remaining Sasanian public buildings and fortifications suffered heavily through demolition and removal of bricks for reuse. [See Baghdad.] Islamic and later European writers have left numerous de scriptions of the Ctesiphon area, particularly focusing on a huge vaulted iwan popularly known as the Throne of Khusrau (Taq-i Kisra). Several attempts have been made to re construct the historical topography of the site, notably by Claudius Rich (1836), who recognized that eroded mounds on either bank of the present course of the Tigris belonged
to a single round city later cut by tire river. This he presumed to be Seleucia and the Taq-i Kisra to mark Ctesiphon. Other writers have proposed the existence of a second iwan op posite the first; in 1908, half of the remaining vault and facade of the Taq-i Kisra collapsed, following flooding. Between 1903 and 1911 Ernst Herzfeld conducted architec tural surveys in the area. In 1915, there was fierce fighting on the site between Turkish and British armies. Aerial pho tographs taken during the 1920s confirmed a suggestion that the extensive mounded area immediately west of the round city probably represented Seleucia, as it was laid out on clas sical principles of urban planning. Seleucia had been founded by Seleucus Nicator at the junction of a royal canal and the Tigris. [See Seleucia on the Tigris.] A shift in patronage under the Seleucids stimulated its growth at the expense of Babylon. [See Babylon.] Seleucia was fortified; it straddled the canal and was said to have had a population of up to 600,000. It functioned as a mint throughout the Parthian period and was only deserted in the third century when Veh Ardashir was founded. Thereafter, Seleucia was referred to by Syriac and classical authors as "deserted Seleucia" (Sliq kharawata or deserta civitas) and was used as a place of execution and burial. T h e city was first excavated by American expeditions initiated by Leroy Waterman in 1927 and concluded by Robert McDowell in 1936-1937. These focused on Tell TJmar and on an insula near the center of the city (Waterman, 1933; Hopkins, ed., 1972). However, because of the water table, the earliest lev els were not reached; much of the published material actu ally dated to die Parthian period. T h e round city was as sumed to represent Ctesiphon, and excavations were conducted both there and across the present course of the Tigris by German expeditions directed by Oscar Reuther (1928-1929) and Ernst Kiihnel (1930-1931). Large quan tities of Sasanian decorative stucco were recovered from Tell al-Dhaba'i, Tell Dhahab, al-Ma'aridh, and U m m asSa'atir; the church at Qasr bint al-Qadi and a Parthian cem etery were excavated nearby (Kroger, 1982; Hauser, 1993). Further discoveries of stuccoes at other sites in Mesopota mia and Iran stimulated intense interest in tire Sasanian pe riod. Archaeological research in the Ctesiphon area resumed in 1964 with Italian expeditions from the University of Turin directed by Giorgio Gullini (1966) and later by Antonio Invernizzi (1976). At Seleucia, a large Archive Square build ing, associated with the administration of a salt tax, and a later terra-cotta workshop were excavated. Within the round city, work was concentrated on a stretch of the city walls and an artisans' quarter within (ceramic, glass, and metalworking). Occupation there is dated from the reign of Ardashir I to the fifth-sixth centuries CE, after which low-lying areas of the city were abandoned because of flooding; later oc cupation was confined to the mound of Tell Baruda (Venco Ricciardi and Negro Ponzi Mancini, 1985). T h e excavated
CULT sequences from the round city, and its location relative to Seleucia and the Taq-i Kisra, demonstrate that this was the site of the city of Ardashir (Veh Ardashir, Bahursir), rather than Ctesiphon. Veh Ardashir was founded by Ardashir on the site of an earlier village known as Kokhe, closer to tire Tigris, whose course had shifted slightly. It was intended to replace Seleucia and was, hence, called New Seleucia. Veh Ardashir enjoyed a close relationship with Ctesiphon and was also known as the western city of al-Mada'in or the near city in Arab sources. T h e fortifications enclosed an esti mated area of 7 0 0 ha ( 1 , 7 2 9 acres) of housing separated by
cambered asphalted roads and smaller alleys. Public build ings included a major Zoroastrian fire temple, a rabbinic academy, and a citadel or prison called Garondagan or Aqra d'Kokhe; a hay market is also attested in Syriac sources. Early Islamic descriptions indicate that Ctesiphon lay on the Tigris opposite Veh Ardashir and a mile north of a "great Iwan" that formed part of the separate Late Sasanian royal city of Asbanbur (al-'Ali, 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 6 9 ) . T h e latter was
presumably founded because Ctesiphon had become too cramped to allow the large-scale construction necessary for the administration of the expanded Sasanian Empire. This iwan is the Taq-i Kisra, and possibly the same palace of Khusrau said by the Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta to have been constructed using "Greek" marble and with the help of "craftsmen skilled in ceilings" sent by Jus tinian. In 6 1 4 the remains of the " T r u e Cross," captured by the Sasanians in Jerusalem, were taken to a royal treasury, probably at Asbanbur. A church, royal stables, parks, and an aviary were located nearby. There were several other im portant urban centers in this area, including a city founded by Khusrau I after he sacked Antioch in 5 4 2 . Known as Khusrau's City of Antioch (Veh-Antiokh-Khusrau, also known as Rumiya); its public buildings included a hippo drome and baths and it was populated with Syrian deport ees. Located south of Ctesiphon, that city should be iden tified with the site of el-Bustan. Finally, although the Sasanian palaces were stripped of their decoration after the Arab conquest, richly decorated private houses continued to be built nearby at Salman Pak as late as the tenth century (excavated by German and later Iraqi expeditions; see Abdul Khaliq, 1 9 8 5 - 1 9 8 6 ) .
[See also Parthians; Sasanians; Seleucids.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abdul Khaliq, 'Hana. "Al-Mada'en." Sumer 44 (1985—1986): 111-138. Full preliminary report on more recent Iraqi excavations of Early Islamic housing at Salman Pak. 'Ali, S, A. al-. "Al-Mada'in and Its Surrounding Area in Arabic Literary Sources." Mesopotamia 3-4 (1968-1969): 417-439. Detailed study of Arab historical sources, fundamental for the correct identification of cities and monuments in the Ctesiphon area. Fiey, J. M. "Topography of al-Mada'in (Seleucia-Ctesiphon area)." Sumer23 (1967): 3-38. Reasonably accurate reconstruction of events at Ctesiphon in 363 CE, based primarily on Syriac sources.
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Gullini, Giorgio. "Problems of an Excavation in Northern Babylonia." Mesopotamia 1 (1966): 7-38. Summary of research prior to the Italian excavations, with the mistaken assumption that the round city is Cte siphon rather than Veh Ardashir. Hauser, Stefan R. "Eine arsakidenzeidiche nekropole in Ktesiphon." Baghdader Mitteilungen 24 (1993): 325-420, pis. 125-137. Thorough publication and discussion of Parthian tombs excavated at Coche. Hopkins, Clark ed. Topography and Architecture of Seleucia on the Tigris. Ann Arbor, 1972. Detailed historical reconstruction and archaeolog ical report, with summary of excavated finds. Invernizzi, Antonio. "Ten Years' Research in the al-Mada'in Area, Se leucia and Ctesiphon." Sumer 32 (1976): 167-175. Useful account of the early results of Italian fieldwork at Seleucia and Veh Ardashir. Keall, E. J. "Ayvan-e Kesra." In Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 3, pp. 155159. London, 1987. Summary of earlier research on the Taq-i Kisra at Asbanbur near Ctesiphon. Kroger, Jens. Sasanidischer Stuckdekor. Mainz am Rhein, 1982. Detailed and lavishly illustrated final publication of the stratigraphy and stucco from the German excavations in die Ctesiphon area and com parative discussion of Sasanian-Early Islamic art. Kroger, Jens. "Ctesiphon." In Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 5, pp. 446448. London, 1987. The most up-to-date, concise, and accurate de scription of the site. Kuhnel, Ernst. Die Ausgrabungen der zweitcn Ktesiphon-Expedition (Win ter 1931132). Berlin. Preliminary report. Oppenheimer, Aharon. Babylonian Judaica in the Talmudic Period. Wiesbaden, 1983. Critical gazetteer of places mentioned in the Bab ylonian Talmud, with a useful section on the Ctesiphon conurbation under "Mahoza." Reuther, Oscar. Die Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Ktesiphon-Expedition im Winter 1928I29. Wittenberg. Preliminary excavation report. Rich, Claudius James. Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan. London, 1836. A two-volume account of travels in Iraq between 1808 and 1821, with early descriptions of Ctesiphon, Seleucia, and other ar chaeological sites. Venco Ricciardi, R., and M. M. Negro Ponzi Mancini. "Coche." In The Ijand between Two Rivers: Twenty Years of Italian Archaeology in the Middle East. The Treasures of Mesopotamia, edited by Ezio Quarantelli, pp. 100-110. Turin, 1985. The most useful summary of the Italian excavations at Veh Ardashir, published in an exhibition cat alog. Waterman, Leroy. Second Preliminary Report upon the Excavations at Tel Umar, Iraq. Ann Arbor, 1933. Summary excavation report. ST. JOHN SIMPSON
C U L T . Scholars in religious studies and related disciplines use the term cult to refer to the various forms of religious devotion attested for a civilization. This entry will focus on the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere, which in the period before 3 3 2 BCE included much of the coastal and inland Le vant, from north of present day Syria and Iraq and south to the Sinai Peninsula. In the mid- to late second millennium BCE, the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere also included the Nile Delta in Egypt. During the first half of the first millen nium, that cultural sphere moved west with the Phoenician colonization of much of the western Mediterranean. North west Semitic is a linguistic term used to describe Canaanite and Aramaic, the two primary languages spoken by the in habitants of the coastal and inland Levant during much of the period before 3 3 2 BCE; it is also used by specialists to
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describe the civilizations of the area and their cults. Canaanite dialects include Phoenician, Punic (Phoenician of the western Mediterranean), Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite, Edomite, and Ugaritic (though some scholars would dispute this categorization of Ugaritic, viewing it as a separate lan guage). Various Aramaic dialects are also attested in firstmillennium BCE texts. A number of important sources are available for recon structing religious devotion in the Northwest Semitic cul tural sphere. Among these are nonliterary material remains from various excavated sites: altars, temples, cultic utensils, and organic matter (e.g., charred bones from sacrifices); tombs and other burials; figurines, plaques, statues and en graved stelae with representations of deities or their symbols. In addition, literary materials of various sttipe are well at tested: cycles of myth, "epic" texts, royal inscriptions, trea ties, pantheon lists, personal names, dedications to deities, and inscriptions on sarcophagi. The major Northwest Se mitic literary corpora from the second millennium of signif icance for reconstructing cult include the Ugaritic texts (the extant archives of a cosmopolitan center on the nortiiern Levantine coast destroyed in c. 1200 BCE); the Mari docu ments (letters and other materials from the eighteentir cen tury BCE); and various Egyptian inscriptions from the New Kingdom (c. sixteenth-eleventh century BCE). From the first millennium, the most important sources include the Hebrew Bible (an anthology of Israelite literature spanning 1,000 years); various Phoenician, Punic, and Aramaic inscriptions; and the Canaanite mythic lore attributed to a Phoenician priest, Sakkunyaton, preserved by Philo of Byblos (late first/ early second century CE), and transmitted in fragmentary form in Greek by the fourth-century church father Eusebius of Caesarea (in his Praeparatio evangelica). Various aspects of Northwest Semitic cultic devotion have received significant attention from specialists in recent dec ades. These include general topics that transcend particular cults, such as the relationship of mythic texts to ritual; the functions of sacrifices and offerings; cultic devotion to dead ancestors; gender and the cult; and the relationship of offi cial and popular religion, including attempts to define pre cisely what constitutes each. In addition, topics pertaining to particular cults, especially that of Israel, have attracted much interest. These include the place of child sacrifice and the role of a goddess or goddesses in the cult of Yahweh, and the broader question of tire relationship of Israelite re ligion to its Northwest Semitic environment. Although all of these topics have attracted sustained attention from the scholarly community and frequently engendered passionate debate, in many cases no broad consensus has been reached. Deities. Many gods and goddesses appear as actors in mythic and epic texts; they receive dedications from wor shipers, support rulers and dynasties according to royal in scriptions, and function as witnesses in treaties; their names are listed in pantheon tabulations and appear as theophoric
elements in personal names. Gods receiving cultic devotion are frequently imagined as beneficent parents or kin, pro viders of progeny and the earth's good bounty to their wor shipers. The Ugaritic epic stories "Kirta" and "Aqhat," and Genesis 15, each evidence the motif of the heirless patriarch or king provided with a son by his divine benefactor. Various Ugaritic texts state that Baal's rains bring fructification to the earth; in "Kirta," El's command cures Kirta's disease. Names such as Binbaal ("son of Baal"), Bodtannit ("in the hand of Tannit"), Ashtartyaton ("Ashtart gave"), and Yoab ("Yahweh is father") well illustrate the manner in which worshipers imagined their relationship to the divine. Deities such as El, Asherah, Baal/Hadad, and Yahweh are imagined as creators—of the gods, of creatures, of the world. T h e name Yahweh may in fact be a causative form of the verb to be, meaning "he creates" with the object seba'ot "(the heav enly) armies" (Cross, 1973, pp. 60-71). Northwest Semitic gods were typically paired with god desses, as in other ancient Near Eastern cults: El with Ashe rah or Ashtart (according to Sakkunyaton); Baal/FIadad with Anat, Ashtart, Pidray or other goddesses; Yarih with Nikkal (KTU 1.24). God and goddess pairs are attested among the hundreds of divine figurines discovered through out the Levant. According to some scholars, Yahweh was probably no exception to this pattern. Inscriptions discov ered in the 1970s at Kuntillet 'Ajrud in the Sinai Desert, as well as biblical texts, such as Deuteronomy 16:21, suggest the probability of a consort relationship between Yahweh and Asherah, both in popular devotion and in non-Deuteronomistic state religion. However, this view remains contro versial (see further, Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, Atlanta, 1988; for a different approach, see P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., "Aspects of the Religion of the Is raelite Monarchy: Biblical and Epigraphic Data," in Ancient Israelite Religion, edited by Patrick D. Miller, Jr., et a l , pp. 137-55= Philadelphia, 1987). It is clear that the idea of a pantheon or divine council was widespread throughout the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere, including in Israel. In the mythic and epic materials from Ugarit, El heads the divine council; in biblical texts such as Psalm 89:6-9 [Eng. 5-8], Yahweh, Israel's national god and likely a manifestation of El, is described similarly (see further, Cross, 1973, on the relationship of El, Baal, and Yahweh). "While, the lesser gods in Yahweh's council are nameless and may possess no independent will or authority, this is not the case in the Ugaritic texts, where gods and goddesses are frequently described in conflict, vying for power. In the Baal cycle, Sea claims kingship over the gods, only to be vanquished by Baal; Anat threatens her father El, head of the council; Shapsh, the Sun, threatens Death in the name of El. A number of scholars have argued that El's authority over the pantheon erodes over time, but this re mains unproved; in some formulations, El is thought to be displaced by Baal as head of the council (see, for example,
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COLT. Warrior god figure, perhaps Bdal-Hadad. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
Late Bronze Age.
Marvin Pope, El in the Ugaritic Texts, Leiden, 1 9 5 5 ; and, more recently, U. Oldenburg, The Conflict Between El and Baal in Canaanite Religion, Leiden, 1 9 6 9 ) . A tendency to elaborate tine pantheon through the fusion of divine names to produce new deities is a widely attested phenomenon (e.g., Tannit-Ashtart, Arshaph-Melqart, Eshmun-Ashtart); tine divinization of a deity's attributes (e.g., holiness, justice), cultic elements and weapons (e.g., censer, lyre, lance), or the cult place itself (e.g., temple) is also well known in sec ond and first millennia texts. Israel's religion as attested in biblical sources is better de scribed as monolatry than as monotheism; even biblical texts that insist on the worship of one god acknowledge tine ex
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istence of others (e.g., Dt. 4 : 1 9 - 2 0 , 2 9 : 2 5 ) and divine council scenes are not uncommon in biblical narrative. Yahweh's claim to exclusive worship was one component of his covenantal bond with Israel; in a typical ancient Near Eastern suzerain-vassal covenant, after which the Yahweh-Israel bond was modeled, the suzerain demands exclusive rights from the vassal. Israel's monolatry was not altogether dif ferent from the national cults of the other kingdoms that emerged in the area at about the same time. What little we know of the cults of Moab, Ammon, and Edom suggest that they too were focused on the worship of a national deity, although devotion to that god was very likely not exclusive. T h e preeminent gods of mythic and epic texts, royal ded ications, and pantheon lists were sometimes the deities who were most frequently worshipped by elements of tine wider populace in a given place at a given time, but not necessarily. A god such as Baal Hadad, a major actor in tine mythic cycles from Ugarit and Sakkunyaton's lore, whose name appears near the top of extant pantheon lists from Ugarit, enjoyed widespread popularity in the second and first millennia, among Aramaic as well as Canaanite speakers, given the frequency of his appearance in dedications, treaties, and personal names. A conttasting case is the goddess Astarte, a consort of Baal in some contexts. Though Astarte played a significant role in the official cult of New Kingdom Egypt, appearing in a variety of royal inscriptions, very few per sonal names compounded with Astarte are attested, sug gesting that her role in popular worship might have been limited in that context. More difficult to explain is the evi dence attested for the worship of tine goddess Tannit (prob ably an epithet of Asherah) in the Punic colonies of the west ern Mediterranean. Tannit appears in literally thousands of dedications from the mid- to late first millennium, yet per sonal names compounded with Tannit are rare. Here we touch on the complex problem of the relationship between official and popular religion on the one hand and of various modes of popular devotion on the other. A deity important in tine official cult may not necessarily be important in the quotidian lives of worshipers; a god or goddess important in one class of evidence for popular devotion may hardly ap pear in another class contemporaneous with it. Such dis junction suggests that there is still much we do not under stand about the religious devotion of the ancients. T h e study of myth and epic has been the focus of much attention since the initial discovery of ancient Ugarit more than sixty years ago. Three great poetic compositions, the mythic Baal cycle, and the epic stories "Kirta" and "Aqhat," written in a Canaanite dialect in an alphabetic cuneiform script, were unearthed; many lesser mythic texts of interest have appeared as well, some as recently as the last thirty years (see, for example, texts in Ugaritica, vol. 5, Jean Nougayrol et a l , eds., Paris, 1 9 6 8 ) . These critical discoveries supplement the largely Phoenician mythological lore of Sakkunyaton from the first millennium; they tend to confirm
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the basic authenticity of much of Sakkunyaton's lore, even though the latter is frequently shrouded in a hellenized, euhemerized form. Together, these two corpora form the basis for any serious discussion of Canaanite mythology. The Baal cycle tells of the storm god Baal's battles with two foes: the forces of chaos represented by Sea (Yamm) or sea dragon (Lotan; cf. the cognate biblical word Levia than) and the forces of sterility and death personified in the deity Death (Mot). T h e battles with Sea and sea dragon are alloforms, both ending in victory for Baal; a third version of this conflict pattern, in which Baal is vanquished by Sea, occurs in Sakkunyaton's lore. This mythic pattern of conflict is widespread, attested elsewhere in the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere, in various Hebrew Bible texts (for example, Ps. 2 9 : 1 0 , 8 9 : 6 - 1 3 [Eng.
5 - 1 2 ] ; Is. 2 7 : 1 ) and in the Meso
potamian myth Enuma elish, and has been the subject of much scholarly discussion. The details of each version may differ, but the general pattern is usually the same: Sea or sea dragon, a threatening force, is vanquished by a warrior god (Baal, Yahweh, Marduk) who assumes kingship after vic tory. The Baal cycle from Ugarit, which is incomplete and sometimes fragmentary, tells of the building of Baal's temple after his victory and his assumption of divine kingship but contains no creation story; in contrast, the Enuma elish tells of the creation of the heavens, earth, and humanity by vic torious Marduk. Enuma elish begins with theogony; in con trast, the Baal cycle contains no theogonic narrative. No consensus has been reached on whether the Baal cycle rep resents a primitive version of the conflict myth without the ogonic and cosmogonic elaboration, or it is incomplete in its present form, lacking a theogonic and/or cosmogonic ele ment that was once present. The precise relationship between myth and ritual has been widely debated for many decades, and on this no consensus has been reached. Many scholars believe that mythic and epic materials such as the Baal cycle, "the Birth of Dawn and Dusk" (KTU 1.23) and "Kirta" had a ritual, or cultic, setting; however, the function of the narrative in such a set ting has been difficult to delimit. Some have even argued that ritual drama played a role in the Israelite cult. We know from a colophon that the Baal cycle extant from Ugarit was recited by the chief priest Attanu-Purlianni in tire fourteenth century BCE under royal sponsorship (Niqmaddu II, c. 1375—1345), but the purpose of this recitation appears to have been the production of an official written version for the temple archives (KTU 1.6 VI 5 4 - 5 8 ) . It has never been demonstrated convincingly that the Baal cycle, "Kirta," or any other mythic or epic narrative was actually acted out in the cult in some kind of ritual drama, (see further I. Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East, Uppsala, 1 9 4 3 , and Helmer Ringgren, Religions of the Ancient Near East, Philadelphia, 1 9 7 3 , pp. 1 6 2 - 1 6 4 , for favorable articu lations of the myth and ritual position). Temples. A deity was worshiped in a holy place that was
sometimes located on an elevation, frequently within the confines of a city. A temple, the god's dwelling, or house, often stood within the sanctuary grounds. Divinities were enthroned within their temples; they were served by cultic functionaries—specialists responsible for the upkeep of the sanctuary and its proper functioning. In addition to a cultic image or stelae, the typical temple might also contain in cense stands or altars; offering tables, dishes, bowls, or ba sins; votive items, such as ornaments of precious stone, metal objects, or beads; and burial pits for discarded cultic materials. Where there is evidence for an altar of burnt of ferings, it stood outside of the house. A broadhouse struc ture from Middle and Late Bronze Age Hazor (beginning with stratum III) had a rectangular platform in its courtyard with a drainage channel, evidence of the presence of an altar. An altar of unfinished stones and soil, with plastered chan nels, was found in the court of the Iron II Israelite temple at Arad (ANE 2, picture 1 0 5 ) . At Beersheba, a deconstructed horned altar of ashlar blocks was found. Engraved stelae portray deities receiving offerings from kings (e.g., Yehawmilk of Hyblos,ANE 1, picture 1 3 0 , where the goddess, the "Lady of Byblos," raises her right hand in a gesture of blessing). In some cults, royal personages served as hereditary priests or priestesses for their patron deities; Sidon is one example of this, as evidenced in the Tabnit and Eshmunazar inscriptions (KAI13 and 14; English transla tions in ANE 2 . 2 2 7 - 2 2 9 ) . [See Eshmunazar Inscription.] Kings frequently boasted of their temple building activities, a pattern ubiquitous in the ancient Near East. When Israel emerged as a significant regional power in the tenth century, a national shrine was constructed under royal patronage for Yahweh in Jerusalem, the imperial capital. A house of cedar, it stood next to the royal palace, a symbol of order, stability, and the eternal rule of both the Davidic dynasty and its pa tron god. Evidence for the king as a quasi-divine figure, the adopted son of his patron god, is found both in "Kirta" and in Judean royal propaganda (e.g., Ps. 2 : 7 - 9 , 8 9 : 2 0 - 3 8 [Eng., 1 9 - 3 7 ] ; -2 Sm. 7 : 1 1 0 - 1 6 ) .
A number of architectural patterns are attested for tem ples in the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere. The most common temple design in Canaan proper was the "broad house," with an entry on one long side into a single room; often, a niche was placed in the wall opposite the entrance, within which a divine image or images might rest. This tem ple design is exceedingly ancient, predating the beginnings of the so-called Bronze Age at Chalcolithic Ein-Gedi in Is rael (Aharoni, 1 9 8 2 , pp. 4 3 - 4 5 ) ; it was utilized at such sites as Hazor, Megiddo, Jericho, and Lachish, as well as at Is raelite Arad. Another temple pattern, the "temple tower," is attested at such sites as Shechem, Megiddo, and Hazor in Israel at Alalakh in Syria; it was a broad room with towers flanking the entry area. A third model, the "long house," was used for the Jerusalem temple built by Solomon in the tenth century BCE. It consisted of three rooms, with an entry c
CULT on one short side. T h e closest architectural parallel to the Jerusalem temple comes from Neo-Hittite Tell Ta'yfnat (ninth century BCE) . It has been argued that this version of die long house, along with other Neo-Hittite cultural fea tures, was borrowed during the tenth century BCE, Israel's imperial era. Many cultic icons have been unearthed, some of which stood on platforms, in cultic niches, or elsewhere within temples. Some of these are clearly representations of deities or divine pairs in a variety of poses; otiiers, such as images of bulls, appear to have served as thrones for deities; in some instances, deity and throne were discovered attached. Icons were often cast in metals such as bronze or copper; some were covered with silver, gold, or electrum. These figurines are generally quite small, especially in comparison to M e sopotamian examples. One example of a divine image is the seated stone figure found in the niche of the Late Bronze Stela Temple excavated at Hazor (ANE 2 , picture 1 0 3 ) . Along with the statue of the deity, diere were a number of standing stones (stelae), well-known symbols of divinity found elsewhere. Interesting metal icons from the Levant include a divine couple standing on the back of a bull (Ora Negbi, Canaanite Gods in Metal, Tel Aviv, 1 9 7 6 , no. 14) and a consort pair in a chariot (no. 2 2 ) . Though the cult of Yah weh apparently eschewed images of the deity, the use of stelae to symbolize Yahweh's presence was probably com mon before die Deuteronomistic reforms of the eighth and seventh centurie BCE, to judge from the archeological finds
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at Israelite Arad and the textual evidence (e.g., Gn. 2 8 : 1 1 - 2 2 ; 35:14, 2 0 ) . Besides stelae, some Israelite temples contained icons that functioned as thrones upon which the invisible Yahweh was seated (e.g., the bulls found at Bethel and Dan and, according to biblical texts, cherubs in the Je rusalem Temple). An asherah, likely a stylized wooden tree symbolizing the goddess Asherah, stood in various Yahwistic sanctuaries in Israel and Judah, according to a variety of biblical texts; it is also mentioned in inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud, Khirbet el-Qom, and Tel Miqne. Sacrifices. Animal sacrifice and the cultic collection of the products of agriculture and horticulture were activities widely practiced throughout the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere. Sacrifices and offerings had many purposes: they were intended as gifts for deities, from whom worshipers frequently sought blessing; they served as food for the gods; and they were a form of taxation to support the cultic es tablishment. Other attested purposes include the correction of sin, the fulfillment of vows, and communion with the de ity. The system of sacrifices and offerings evidenced in the most detail is Israel's, but there are significant data from Ugarit and the western Phoenician colonies. In many re spects, Israelite sacrifice resembled that of other Northwest Semitic peoples. Israelites offered up unblemished sheep, goats, and cattle; birds such as turtledoves and pigeons; oil, wine, and grains in various forms; and incense. From sac rificial lists found at Ugarit there is evidence that cows and sheep were offered to deities of the city's pantheon (CTA 34> 35= 3 6 ) . "Kirta" describes impressionistically a sacrificial ritual in which a lamb and bird are offered, wine is poured out, and prayer is directed toward heaven. Punic sacrifices included goats, sheep, cattle, birds, and grain products. Much Israelite sacrificial terminology is not unlike that found in inscriptional evidence from the Punic west, Ugarit, and elsewhere. Sacrificial tariffs from Marseille (KAI 6 9 ; English translations in ANE 1 . 2 2 1 - 2 2 3 ) and Carthage (KAI 7 4 ; translations in ANE 1 . 2 2 3 - 2 2 4 ) list offerings that include such sacrificial terms as sbh, Ml, and mnht, all with biblical cognates [see Marseille Tariff]; they bear witness to sacrifices shared by priests and worshipers, as in Israel's cult (cf. Heb., selamim, "sacrifices," in Lv. 3 ) . Differences between Israelite sacrifice and that of other Northwest Semitic cults are evident. While the manipulation of blood played a central role in the former, there is little or no indication that it did at Ugarit or in first-millennium Phoenicia or the Punic west (cf. Mesopotamia, where blood played no significant role). Furthermore, purity concerns, so central for Yahweh's cult, are virtually unattested outside of Israelite sources. For example, the Hebrew term tame' ("unclean") and other derivatives from its root, are unat tested in the Ugaritic-Phoenician lexicon (however, note the apparent concern for the purity of the sanctuary in Lucian's description of the cult at Hierapolis [The Syrian Goddess CULT. Bronzefigurineof warrior god standing on an oxhide ingot. 5 2 5 3 ] and the evidence for purity concerns in the cult in From Enkomi, height 3 5 cm. (Archives CFA Schaeffer, Paris)
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Mesopotamia). There are indications that a feeding and pleasing element was present in Israelite sacrifice to Yahweh, but it was at best vestigial (see Gn. 8:20-21; Lv. 21:22; Nm. 28:2; and Dr. 33:10, where it occurs). Textual and archeological evidence indicates drat child sacrifice was practiced in much of dre Northwest Semitic cultural sphere, including Israel. Sacred precincts (tophets) have been unearthed at a number of sites in the central and western Mediterranean where the Phoenicians had estab lished colonies (e.g., Nora, Sulcis, and Tharros in Sardinia; Motya in Sicily; Car±age and Hadrumetum [Sousse] in North Africa); in the east, tire only major site to have been discovered thus far is at the Amman Airport in Jordan. T h e largest site was found at Carthage. This precinct, which was utilized for nearly six hundred years, contains thousands of burial urns filled with the charred bones of infants, children, or small sacrificial animals and birds, which very likely func tioned as substitutes for children; the burials were marked in some phases by stelae, some of which record dedications to Baal Hamon (very likely an epithet of El) and his consort Tannit (very likely an epithet of Asherah). Sakkunyaton rec ords two versions of a myth in which El (called Kronos) sacrifices his "only son" in a threatening situation (war/ plague). Various Greek and Latin sources bear witness to Punic child sacrifice and may even allude to the myth of El recorded by Sakkunyaton (e.g., Diodorus of Sicily, Library of Histoiy 20.14.7; Tertullian, Apology 9.4). El and Asherah appear to be the preeminent deities of child sacrifice, at least in the Punic West; for the East only conjecture is possible. A technical term, molk, occurs occasionally in Phoenician and Punic inscriptions, usually compounded with a second term (e.g., *wo/fe 'adorn; *molk ba l; *molk 'amor); in such compounds, molk seems to mean a type of sacrifice, either of a child or of an animal substitute for a child (see Eissfeldt, ! 9 3 5 ) - The biblical molek is best explained as a sacrificial term cognate to the Punic molk, although some scholars ar gue that molek is the name of a god of child sacrifice (e.g., George C. Heider, The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment, Shef field, 1986; John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament, Cambridge, 1989). Child sacrifice in Is rael was more likely directed to Yahweh than a supposed god Molek, as the development of the so-called law of the firstborn (Ex. 1 3 : 1 - 2 , 1 1 - 1 6 , 22:28b-29 [Eng. 29b~3o], 34:19-20; Nm. 3 : 1 1 - 1 3 , 4 1 ) , certain prophetic texts (Ez. 20:25-26; Mi. 6:6-8), and Genesis 22 all strongly suggest. The cultic function of child sacrifice is not entirely clear. Evidence suggests that parents sacrificed their children to fulfill a vow; to petition for blessing, health, and happiness; to give thanks for blessings received; or to obey the order of a patron god. Some texts present child sacrifice as a re sponse to crisis and danger (2 Kgs. 3:27; Diodorus of Sicily; tire El myth recorded by Sakkunyaton); Micah 6:6-8 sug gests that such sacrifices to Yahweh were presented as sin offerings. Whatever the function of child sacrifice, animal c
substitution was a widely attested option for parents (see especially the second/third century CE Ngaous inscriptions from Algeria, which contain substitution ritual formulas [Eissfeldt, 1935, pp. 1-7]). Ancestor Cults. Life after death, the abode of the dead, tire archaeology of death, the ritual state of mourning, and cults devoted to dead ancestors have all attracted serious attention from tire scholarly community in recent years. An cestor cults were apparently quite widespread, attested among both Aramaic and Canaanite speakers, to judge from the archaeological and textual evidence. Various sources suggest that members of royal and aristocratic elites, and perhaps others, communed with dead ancestors in the home, in temples, and possibly in tire context of a propertyowning, feasting society called the marzeah (there is, how ever, much that we still do not understand about this insti tution, including the extent of its associations with ancestral cults). The Hadad inscription from eighth-century Zincirli (KAI214) mentions the obligation of the heir to invoke the name of the dead king in Hadad's temple in a sacrificial context. This notion of the heir involdng tire dead father's name occurs in the Hebrew Bible as well, where the erection of a memorial stela by David's son Absalom is mentioned (2 Sm. 18:18; cf. the Ugaritic "Aqhat," where the heir is obliged "to set up a stela for his divine [dead] ancestor," KTU 1.17 I 26). The heir may have cared for and fed the dead, as in Mesopotamia, although the exact nature of this activity has been tire subject of vigorous debate (see Theo dore J. Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit, Atlanta, 1989, for a discussion). It seems clear that the dead were deified, even in Israel (1 Sm. 28:13 and possibly Is. 8:19), but tire exact nature of their "divine" status remains unclear. Ugaritic pantheon lists typically begin with or in clude 'il'ib, most convincingly explained as "the divine (dead) ancestor." A class of ancestors called Rephaim is mentioned in materials from both the second and first mil lennia BCE. The meaning of their title ("hale ones"; "heal ers"; "weak," or "sunken, ones"; and even "great ones"?) and even their status as dead ancestors has been much dis cussed. No consensus has emerged regarding the meaning of their title, but most scholars now view tire Rephaim as dead ancestors rather than living heroes. Cultic Specialists. Religious practitioners and cultic functionaries such as priests, prophetic figures, mediums, diviners, and professional mourners are all attested in texts from the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere. Each special ization had its own area of influence and control; each prob ably mediated skills through forms of apprenticeship. T h e priesthood controlled the sanctuary complex, collecting and processing offerings and sacrifices from worshipers; they oversaw the care of the property, provided for the music and song of cultic rites, blessed worshipers, and practiced divination in some contexts. Evidence suggests that priests also functioned to mediate mythic and epic lore and prob-
CULT ably other forms of knowledge (see for instance the role as cribed by tradition to Sakkunyaton, allegedly a Phoenician priest, or the activity of Attanu-Purlianni in fourteenth cen tury BCE Ugarit, as witnessed in the Baal cycle colophon [KTU 1.6 VI 5 4 - 5 8 ] ) . Aside from priests, other specialists and functionaries are attested in various Northwest Semitic cults. A Phoenician inscription from Kition in Cyprus mentions, among others, "servants" (nrm), "sacrificers" (zbhm), "barbers" (glbm), "masons" (hrstn), and a chief scribe (rb sprtn); other lists mention singers, musicians, male and female "holy ones" (some claim these were cult pros titutes, others deny it. See further, Kavel van der Toorn, "Female Prostitution in Payment of Vows in Ancient Is rael," Journal 0/ Biblical Literature 1 0 8 [ 1 9 8 9 ] : 1 9 3 - 2 0 5 , on the problem of sacred prostitution). Sacrifices and offerings functioned partially to support the cult and its specialists, a form of taxation in land. There is evidence that at least some temple complexes also had their own flocks and herds: lists of cultic functionaries from Ugarit mention nqdm, "herd ers," along with the priests and other temple officials. In Israel, the priesthood of Yahweh was all male, in contrast to the cults of other Northwest Semitic deities, where women sometimes played a priestly role (e.g., Sidon and Carthage). There is evidence that at least some priesthoods were he reditary elites. A stela from Carthage lists three generations of high priests from the same family (KAI 8 1 ) ; a tomb in scription lists five generations of priests. In Israel the priest hood developed over time from a group of specialists (Levites) open to the adoption of outsiders as apprentices (e.g., Samuel) into an increasingly exclusive, hereditary elite. Conflict between various priestly clans is well attested in biblical sources. Prophetic activity associated with the cult is attested in Israel and elsewhere in the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere. Through the oracles of prophets, often delivered in an ecstatic state, a god's message to a king or community was mediated. T h e twelfth-century narrative of Wenamun, a cultic official from Karnak, reports an incident in which an attendant of Zakarbaal, ruler of Byblos, entered an ec static state during a sacrifice and delivered a divine oracle (see ANE 1.18). T h e Mari texts attest to the activity of male and female prophetlike figures (e.g., apilu and apiltu, muhhu). T h e Aramaic Zakkur inscription from Hamath claims that Baal Shamayn (Baal Shamem) spoke to the king through intermediaries (KAI 2 0 2 ) . Various anthologies of prophetic oracles survive from Israel, where prophets claimed to mediate Yahweh's word. Intermediation was ac complished by persons peripheral to the cult, as well as by those who occupied a central position, and positions could change over time (see further, R. R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel, Philadelphia, 1 9 8 0 , for an interest ing comparative perspective). Prophetic figures, like priests and others, practiced forms of divination. Other religious specialists included mediums and necro-
CULT.
85
Gypsum statuette from Tell Asmar. (Courtesy Oriental Insti
tute of the University of Chicago)
mancers and professional mourners. Mediums and necro mancers, many of whom were women, consulted the dead on behalf of the living ( 1 Sm. 2 8 ; Is. 8:19); some texts suggest that the dead possessed useful information that the living might want to know, as well as the power to bring well-being to those who survived them. Mediums and necromancers apparently communicated with the dead by means of imi tating their characteristic speech: bird sounds (Is. 8:19, 29:4, 1
3 8 : 1 4 ; and cf. "Gilgamesh," AMS 1.58; "Descentof Ishtar,"
ANE 1.81; and "Nergal and Ereshkigal," ANE 2 . 9 , for M e sopotamian texts in which the dead have the appearance of birds and/or make birdlike sounds). Because they competed with priests and prophets in the arena of divination, medi ums and necromancers were attacked by their increasingly powerful rivals in Israel during and following the period of the Divided Kingdom (Dt. 1 8 : 1 0 - 1 2 ; Lv. 1 9 : 3 1 ; 2 0 : 6 , 2 7 ) .
Professional mourners, frequentiy women skilled in weep ing, wailing, and the composition of lamentations, are at tested in a number of contexts ("Kirta"; Jer. 9 : 1 6 - 1 8 , 1 9 - 2 0 [Eng. 1 7 - 1 9 , 2 0 - 2 1 ] ; 2 Sm. 1:20, 2 4 ) . It is clear that women
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articles by Pope on this subject. Audacious, controversial, stimulat ing. at least some Northwest Semitic cults. Pritchard, James B., ed. The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts [See also Arad; Beersheba; Canaanites; Kuntillet 'Ajrud; and Pictures (ANE). 2 vols. Princeton, 1958-1975. Easily accessible Mari Texts; Temples, articles on Mesopotamian Temples translations of important texts, as well as photographs of sites, in and Syro-Palestinian Temples; Ugarit. In addition, most of scriptions, and coins. An abridgment of his Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1950), and The An the other sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] cient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1954). BIBLIOGRAPHY Stadelmann, Rainer. Syrisch-Paldstinensische Gottheilen inAgypten. Lei Aharoni, Yohanan. The Archaeology of the Land of Israel. Translated by den, 1967. Interesting study of the data from Egypt on the worship Anson F. Rainey. Philadelphia, 1982. of Northwest Semitic deities there. Albright, William F. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (1968). Reprint, Stager, Lawrence E. "The Rite of Child Sacrifice at Carthage." In New Winona Lake, Ind., 1990. Classic reconstruction, by one of this cen Light on Ancient Cartilage, edited by John G. Pedley, pp. 1 - 1 1 . Ann tury's most talented and influential scholars. Arbor, 1980. Excellent recent overview of the archaeological and ep Anderson, Gary A. Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel. Atlanta, igraphic evidence. 1987. Recent contribution to our understanding of sacrifices and Vaux, Roland de. Ancient Israel. 2 vols. New York, 1961. Classic re offerings in Israel and the Northwest Semitic cultural sphere. construction of social and religious institutions in Israel, by this cen Anderson, Gary A. A Time to Mourn, a Time to Dance: The Expression tury's most accomplished French scholar. of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion. University Park, Pa., 1991. In Vrijhof, Pieter Hendrick, and Jacques Waardenburg, eds. Official and sightful study of mourning and rejoicing as ritual antitypes. Popular Religion: Analysis of a Theme for Religious Studies. The Hague, Attridge, Harold W., and R. A. Oden,Jr.,cds. and trans. PhiloofByblos: 1979. Useful text on a widely discussed issue. The Phoenician History. Washington, D.C., 1980. Useful text, trans SAUL M . OLYAN lation, and introduction to the Sakkunyaton material. Baumgarten, Albert I., ed. and trans. The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos: A Commentary. Leiden, 1981. Alternative to the edition by C U N E I F O R M . T h e first descriptions of cuneiform Attridge and Oden. Ben-Tor, Amnon, ed. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. New Haven, writing were brought to the West by travellers in the sev 1992. Recent survey, period by period, by one of Israel's leading enteenth century. T h e y used terms such as pyramid, triangle, archaeologists. and delta to express the configurations of the eye-catching Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the wedge-shaped heads on top or to the side of strokes incised Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 123, on clay tablets. T h e use of cuneiform writing covers more Sheffield, 1992. Excellent, comprehensive survey of archaeological materials pertaining to death, burial, and ancestor cults in Israel. than three millennia from the time of its invention (pictoCoogan, Michael David, ed. and trans. Stories from Ancient Canaan. graphic precursors) at the end of the fourth millennium to Philadelphia, 1978. Helpful translation and introduction to the the latest datable text attested in 7 4 / 7 5 CE. mythological and epic material from Ugarit. G. F. Grotefend's epoch-making thesis, presented in GotCraigie, Peter C. Ugarit and the Old Testament. Philadelphia, 1983. tingen in 1 8 0 2 , "Provisional Report on the Reading and Ex Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. Cambridge, Mass., 1973. planation of the So-Called Cuneiform inscriptions of Per Cross, Frank Moore. "The Epic Traditions of Early Israel: Epic Nar sepolis" used cuneatus, "wedge shaped," in its Latin title. rative and the Reconstruction of Early Israelite Institutions." In The T h e term cuneiformis, "in the form of a wedge," has given Poet and the Historian, edited by Richard Elliott Friedman, pp. 13-39. rise to the modern designations cuneiform writing, ecriture Chico, Calif., 1983. The author develops his position on tire use of cuneiforme and Keilschrift. the term epic to describe material such as JE in the Pentateuch and "Kirta" and "Aqhat" from Ugarit. T h e incision made on wet clay with a stylus, usually cut Dietrich, Manfried, Oswald Loretz, and Joaquin Sanmartin. Die keifrom a reed, automatically leaves a "wedge" at one end of lalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit, vol. 1, Transcription. Neukirchenthe stroke, where more pressure is exercised. In the period Vluyn, 1976. of the Akkadian dynasty (c. twenty-third century BCE) the Donner, Herbert, and Wolfgang Rollig. Kanaandische und aramdische wedge was already seen as so characteristic of the writing Inschriften. 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 1962-1964. Eissfeldt, Otto. Molk als Opferbegriff im Punischen und Hebrdischen und that, although unnecessary, it was used in inscriptions das Ende des Gottes Moloch. Halle, 1935. carved in stone or—more rarely—incised in metal as well. Halpern, Baruch. " 'Brisker Pipes Than Poetry': The Development of Independently of its formal aspects, the term cuneiform is Israelite Monotheism." In Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel, edited used today for a whole system of writing that is distinct from by Jacob Neusner et al., pp. 77-115. Philadelphia, 1987. Interesting the other early Near Eastern invention, Egyptian hiero and insightful treatment of a daunting problem. glyphic script. T h e system of the so-called Proto-Elamite Herdner, Andree, Coif us des tablettes en cuneifonnes alphabetiques decouvertes a Ras Shamra-Ugarit de 1929 d 1939. Paris, 1963. script has not yet been fully evaluated because of its still Ottosson, Magnus. Temples and Cult Places in Palestine. Uppsala, 1980. imperfect state of decipherment and scholars' inadequate Very useful survey of the archaeological data up to the late 1970s. knowledge of the (Old) Elamite language. Pope, Marvin H. "The Cult of the Dead at Ugarit." In Ugarit in Ret T h e cuneiform system consists of signs denoting a word rospect: Fifty Years of Ugarit and Ugaritic, edited by Gordon D. played an important role in death-related specializations in
Young, pp. 159-179. Winona Lake, Ind., 1981. One of a number of
(including morphologic affixes or not); signs denoting a syl-
CUNEIFORM lable, most of these being phonetic abstractions of the sound of a word sign (e.g., da, "side"; syllable da); and number signs. The system of syllabograms is remarkable (as com pared widr other syllabographic systems, both ancient and modern) in that it not only denotes v(owels) alone—[a], [i]—or c(onsonant) + v(owel)—[ba], [gu], [ne]—but also v + c—[ab], [id], [ug]—and even c + v + c—[bar], [kal], [rum]. With this system, during the last quarter of the third millennium, scribes handling cuneiform script were already able to yield "visible speech" with a relatively high degree of phonetic exactitude. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing and Writing Systems.] Syllabography as described above does not include con sonantal clusters—*[tra], *[stra], *[art], *[arst], *[bart]. This means that languages having such clusters had to break them up in writing—si-pa- for [spa] in Hittite. In the course of history, cuneiform writing has been ap plied to far more languages than Sumerian (a language with out known linguistic affiliation) and Akkadian (a Semitic language). T h e number of "cuneiform languages" includes Amorite (Semitic, practically restricted to the notation of proper names); Hurrian and Urartian (of Caucasian de scent); Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic (Indo-European); Hattian (in central Anatolia); and Elamite (perhaps a remote cognate of the Dravidian languages). For Ugaritic (Semitic, fourteenth and tlrirteentlr centuries BCE only) and Old Per sian (Achaemenid Empire) signs have been invented that are formally cuneiform but are part of a system only loosely related to the one described so far (see below). [See Sume rian; Akkadian; Hurrian; Hittite; Ugaritic] Writing Cuneiform. From the inception of cuneiform writing, a distinction has been required between the stroke, or line, incised with the sharp end of the stylus and the im pression of circles, semicircles, ovals, and triangles admin istered with its truncated end. The stylus was cut from a reed as a rule, but there were also luxury examples made of precious metal. It is difficult to reconstruct the exact way the stylus was held in tire hand, but modern experiments suggest that it was held somehow between outstretched fin gers rather than in a closed fist: only in the first manner would it be possible to keep the stylus at a relatively low angle to the tablet. Whereas in the earliest texts both strokes and curved lines occur, there soon was a tendency toward straightening curves and replacing them with two or more strokes. Be cause the great majority of signs were composed of two to more than ten strokes or impressions, there most probably were set rules for their sequence, as is the case, for example, with Sino-Japanese signs. T o date, almost no research has been devoted to reconstructing stroke and impression se quences. There has been a long debate on the direction in which ancient scribes of a given period read and how, conse quently, cuneiform signs are supposed to read. Pictographic
87
precursors, such as the signs for bird, fish, or the head of a dog only make sense if viewed in their natural position. On stone, the abstract forms descending from the original signs were still written—and certainly were read—in their original sense as late as the eighteenth century BCE, an example being the stela inscription of the code of Hammurabi. On tire other hand, everyday writing on clay tablets, as early as the begin ning of the second millennium BCE and sometimes even ear lier, only makes sense if read at an angle of 90 degrees turned to the left. Therefore, during several centuries two ways must have existed of looking at a cuneiform inscription—one vertical and one horizontal. It is only in about the middle of the second millennium BCE that stone inscriptions begin to be found that are to be read horizontally. Because inscriptions from tire first millennium BCE were the first to be known, Assyriologists have become used to reading any cuneiform inscription horizontally, even if it is from tire mid dle of the third millennium, Modern copyists arrange their specimens horizontally. T h e reason for the change of direc tion, whenever it definitely took place, can only be surmised and is not of primary concern here. Ancient Mesopotamians did, in some way, realize that they were practicing "cuneiform." T h e individual signs had names (like the names of letters of the alphabet), and the name of the vertical wedge, DlS with the reading santag, in Akkadian santakku, became the geometric term for triangle. Also, as mentioned above, the wedge-formed heads were deliberately imitated in stone where, theoretically, strokes alone would have been sufficient. Origin of Signs. It is mainly the research of Denise Schmandt-Besserat that has elucidated the prehistory of cu neiform writing (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992). Until the 1970s, the general opinion was held that writing was an ad hoc invention for administrators in southern Mesopotamia at tire end of tire fourth millennium. However, the system atic inspection of small, variously shaped clay objects found frequently in prehistoric strata at Near Eastern sites, but also in North Africa and India, has shown that such clay objects, or tokens as they have come to be called, were not haphazard items but part of a system. There is, in fact, a great variety of these objects: spheres (full, three-quarter, half-, or quarter sized), or disks, with or without incision and/or perforation; cylinders, cones, tetra-hedrons, pyramids; and skittles, sometimes with tire suggestion of an animal head. At Susa, in Elam, such tokens have been found enclosed in hollow clay balls. T h e idea therefore arose that these tokens were meant to represent quantities of given things or animate be ings. In a few cases, a strong resemblance can be shown to exist between a token and an archaic cuneiform sign. Con sequently, it is possible to conclude that certain three-di mensional tokens were transformed into two-dimensional impressions on clay. [See Susa.] Because there are no inventories of tokens for any given site, it is not possible to tell how widespread a consensus
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there may have been on forms and "meanings." Be that as it may, die fact that there seems to have been, even with local variations, a certain series of one-to-one correspon dences between a token and a meaning justifies declaring die tokens to be precursors of writing. This would not be little the achievement of the real invention of writing, which was the arrangement of signs, in an invariable position, on a two-dimensional surface, with the purpose of communi cating an idea or, adversely, with the aim of changing visible speech (writing) back into audible signs (hearing). The earliest cuneiform texts attested so far are from the southern Babylonian city of Uruk. In their great majority, these texts combine number signs with signs denoting things counted. Thus, the predominantly economical and admin istrative character of the earliest Mesopotamian writing be comes apparent: it seems in fact to have been the needs of economics—and not of historiography or religion—that prompted citizens of early Sumer to "visualize speech," however rudimentary that may have been. [See UrukWarka.] Sign Types. In general, cuneiform signs can be classified in the following ways: 1. Signs that were, originally at least, the more or less un abbreviated reproduction of the thing they denote—boat, reed, head, hand. 2. Signs where one part stands for the whole (pars pro toto)—different heads of animals standing for the respec tive animal, or a penis for a man. 3. Other kinds of abbreviations—three hills for mountain, mountainous country, foreign country. 4. Signs where the thing reproduced serves as a symbol—a radiating star (or sun) denoting the sky or a divinity and the reed-bundle, symbol of the goddess Inanna standing for the goddess herself. 5. A token impression. 6. Free invention (difficult to prove, but certainly feasi ble)—signs for which the form had no association what soever with its meaning. 7. A rather complicated system of number and measure signs (measurements of length, area, weight, and capac ity) in which only the digits 1 - 9 are multiplications of 1, with 1 0 corresponding to an invented sign (see above). Relatively simple signs were soon exhausted when scribes began putting together a system. This is why one of the means of creating new signs was to combine two (or, more rarely, three or even four) individual signs to produce a new meaning. There were three ways of doingthis: juxtaposition, incorporation, and ligature or monogram: r. Juxtaposition. Two (or more) signs are grouped and not given their original meaning (and pronunciation)—that is, A.B = a.b, but the combination of the two (or more)
signs yields a new meaning (and pronunciation)—SLA =fc * si.a, but diii(g), "exceeding." 2. Incorporation. One sign is written within another one, B within A, or, as Assyriologists are used to formulating: A X B ("A times B")—NINDA, "bread" within KA, "mouth," yields gu , "to eat." 3. Ligature and monogram. In a ligature (joining), signs A and B are put together more closely than would be the case in a simple enumeration of A, then B: for example, MINUS, "woman" + KUR, "foreign country," stands for "slave woman" (geme). The border between ligature and juxtaposition is however, a fluid one. A monogram is the ligature of two signs where one element (stroke) is common to botii. T h e sign for total (sunigiri) is very frequently written as a ligature of the signs SU and NIGIN, the final vertical wedge of SU and the initial vertical wedge of N I G I N being identical. The system of cuneiform signs may have been created in the course of a few generations, but it never ceased evolving. Signs fell out of use and were completely forgotten; others were newly created, and, most important of all, the forms of the individual signs changed throughout the centuries. Paleography. The science of studying writing on a given material, with special regard to diachronical change and to different scribal "hands" within a given period, is known as paleography. In die field of cuneiform studies, paleography would ideally imply an ability to determine complete sign inventories for each of a series of narrowly defined periods. Such is not the case, however, in spite of the fact that most publications of cuneiform texts are hand copies of originals that represent individual "hands"—that is, manuscripts in the exact meaning of the word. The most general tendencies observed in the evolution of cuneiform writing are the elimination of wedges that came to be considered redundant and the reduction of angles at which a stroke or wedge might be written, from the original sixteen to finally only four (horizontal, vertical, oblique up ward, and oblique downward). It should be possible, of course, to describe the general aspect of a scribal hand, but next to no preliminary studies have yet been done. One of the most urgent needs of cuneiform paleography is, as was suggested above, to know the sequence in which the wedges or impressions of an individual sign were made. Close inspection of original cuneiform tablets, but also of first-quality photographs, often shows which of two inter secting wedges or strokes was incised first and which one second: it is frequently possible to see that one incision cuts through or overlaps another. Large-scale work on originals and photos would make significant progress in this area. Numbers of Signs. Very few cuneiform signs have only a single reading (or value); the great majority have two, three, or, less' frequently, even more possible readings. In Sumerian, a single sign may denote only a word or it may 7
CYPRUS also have a syllabic value—ra as a verb means "to strike"; as a syllabogram it denotes the dative (-ra) in lugal-ra, "to the king." In Akkadian, certain Sumerian word signs are used with their Akkadian reading (so-called Sumerograms)—LUGAL is the equivalent of sarrum, "king." RI as a syllabic sign may be read ri or dal, tal, depending on the context. In Hittite, there are three levels: syllabic signs, Sumerograms, and Akkadograms—that is, Akkadian words spelled syllabically but read in Hittite. This polyvalence contributed considerably to reducing the maximal number of signs needed to write literary or highly specialized texts with rare words as well as all sorts of proper names (persons, gods, places). Margaret W. Green's list of die signs found in die corpus of the oldest tablets from Uruk (c. 3000 BCE) contains 771 entties plus 58 number signs (Green and Nissen, 1987). One millennium later, die sign inventory at die dme of die Third Dynasty of Ur had about eight hundred signs (no exact count is avail able) . A scribe of the Hammurabi period (eighteendi cen tury BCE) could manage to write Akkadian—entirely exclud ing Sumerograms—witii a minimum syllabary of a little more than eighty signs, and die Old Assyrian merchants in their trading colonies in Asia Minor (nineteenth century BCE) used a syllabary of only sixty-eight signs. Considering these widely differing figures, it is possible to suppose that there were various degrees of literacy. A merchant could handle his correspondence and accounts with five-or sixdozen signs but would have been unable to read (or write) a literary text spelled in a more sophisticated way. Derived Systems. In the harbor and trade city of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast, a system of only thirty signs was invented in the fourteenth century BCE to write the local Semitic language. Twenty-seven of these signs denote con sonants and die other three stand for aleph with inherent a, i, or u—that is, 'a, 'i, and 'u. Formally this writing is cune iform because the components (one-five) of die individual signs are indeed wedges incised or impressed on wet clay. As a system, however, Ugaritic cuneiform has its closest cognates in the Egyptian one-consonant signs and in various consonantal writing systems of Syria and Palestine. T h e Ugaritic variety of cuneiform did not survive the invasions of the Sea Peoples in the thirteenth century BCE. The origin of Old Persian cuneiform is still debated. It was Darius I (521-486 BCE) or one of his predecessors who had writing "invented" for the purpose of representing their tongue. T h e system comprises three vowel and thirty-three consonant signs with inherent vowels a (twenty-two signs), i (four), and u (six). T h e sign components similar to Uga ritic cuneiform, but totally independant of it, are wedges, varying between three and five per sign. There were, addi tionally, eight "logograms" (e.g., for Xerxes, Ahuramazda) tiiat are more complicated. Old Persian cuneiform was ex clusively used for monumental inscriptions, whereas the ad
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ministration of the empire used either Elamite (on clay tab lets) or Imperial Aramaic. The system was in use until Artaxerxes III (358-338 BCE). BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borger, Rykle. Assyrische-babylonische
Zeichenliste. 3d ed. Kevelaer,
1986. Cooper, Jerrold S. "Cuneiform." In International Encyclopedia of Com munications, vol. 1, pp. 438-443. New York, 1989. Edzard, Dietz O. "Keilschrift." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 5,
pp. 544-568. Berlin, 1976-. Englund, Robert K., et al. Friihe Schrift und Technik der Wirtschaftsvertoaltung im Alien Vorderen Orient. Berlin, 1991. Gordon, Cyrus H. Ugaritic Textbook: Grammar, Texts in Transliteration, Cuneiform Selections, Glossary, Indices. Analecta Orientalia, 38.
Rome, 1965. Green, Margaret Whitney, and Hans J. Nissen. Zeichenliste der archaischen Texteaus Uruk. Berlin, 1987. Kent, Roland G. Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon. 2d ed. New
Haven, 1953. Labat, Rene, and Florence Malbran-Labat. Manuel d'epigraphie akkadienne. 5th ed. Paris, 1976. Pallis, Svend Aage. Early Exploration in Mesopotamia. Copenhagen,
1954. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. Before Writing. Vol. 1, From Counting to Cuneiform; vol. 2, A Catalogue of Near Eastern Tokens. Austin, Tex.,
1992. D. O. EDZARD
C Y C L A D E S . See Aegean Islands.
C Y P R U S . T h e third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea (9,251 sqkm, or 3,572 sq. mi.), after Sicily and Sardinia, Cyprus has a strategic location in the northeastern corner of die Mediterranean tiiat has proved to be both a blessing and a curse throughout its past twelve thousand years of settie ment. Positioned some 70 km (44 mi.) soutii of Turkey and some 95 km (64 mi.) west of Syria, Cyprus was drawn into the trade and commerce tiiat went east and west between the Aegean and die Levant, as well as north and south be tween Anatolia and Egypt. Prosperity stimulated plunder and conquest, however. Cyprus caught die eye of die war rior as well as tiiat of the merchant, and there may often have been little difference in motivation between diose who came to trade and diose out to loot and conquer. During its long history, Cyprus has been ruled by many groups of people not native to the island: Hittites; Greeks; Phoenicians; Romans (30 BCE-330 CE); Byzantine Greeks ( 3 3 0 - 1 1 9 1 ) ; Crusaders, including the Knights Templar, Lusignans, and Venetians ( 1 1 9 1 - 1 5 7 1 ) ; Ottoman Turks (1571-1878); and die British (1878-1960). In i960, Cyprus became an independent republic but was torn asunder only fourteen years later by the Turkish invasion of 1974. Cyprus
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remains divided, with tire northern 37 percent of the island under Turkish military rule. While this historical pattern of foreign rule has been an obvious force in Cypriot history, it has had a subtle impact on the modern study of Cypriot prehistory and archaeology. Developments on Cyprus came to be seen in terms of for eign invaders and foreign cultural influences, often at tire expense of the contribution of native Cypriots to the island's culture. The Greek element in particular, stemming from a colonization of (initially) the western part of the island in the eleventh century BCE (placed by some scholars in the twelfth), had such a profound effect on the island's subse quent history that many modern Greek-speaking Cypriots look on Cyprus as part of the Greek world. T h e scholarly consequences of that invasion were the cessation of archae ological work in the north, where many of the best-known archaeological sites on Cyprus lie, including Enkomi, Lapitiros, Salamis, Soloi, and Vouni. [See Enkomi, Lapithos; Salatnis; Soloi; Vouni.] Many Byzantine churches in northern Cyprus have been desecrated. [See Churches.] T h e inter national trade in looted icons, mosaics, and wall paintings from these churches has resulted in legal cases that have attracted worldwide interest and resulted in important leg islation relating to the shipment and sale of illegally exported antiquities. Prior to 1974, with most archaeological work on Cyprus carried out in the north and northeast, the tourist industry was focused on that general area and especially on the sites of Kyrenia and Ammochostos/Famagusta. Archae ology and tourism are today focused in the south, making Cyprus a tragic example of the ways in which modern pol itics impacts on the study of the past. [See Nationalism and Archaeology; Ethics and Archaeology; Tourism and Ar chaeology.] Cyprus has a geology and an environment that, in many respects, are as unusual and distinctive as its history. Con trary to what was once believed, the island was not originally part of the Anatolian mainland but emerged through vol canic activity from the sea bed. The main mountain range— the igneous rocks of tire southern Troodos Mountains—was formed during late Oligocene or Early Miocene times; the sedimentary rocks of the northern Kyrenia range (also known as the Pentadaktylos) emerged during the Late Mi ocene. Between these two mountain ranges lies the great central plain known as the Mesaoria, access to which is through three main passes from the northern coast. The is land has a series of natural harbors, including those atMorphou and Kyrenia on the north coast, Salamis and Ammochostos on the east, Kition and Hala Sultan Tekke and Amathus on the south, and Paphos on the west. [See Kition; Hala Sultan Teke; Paphos.] The special geological history of the Troodos, with their ophiolite copper deposits located in the pillow lavas of the southern part of the range, gave Cyprus its mineral wealth. From the Bronze Age down to
modern times, that wealth has been the decisive factor in both tire internal and the external affairs of the island. Even a brief survey of the prehistory and ancient history of Cyprus, seen in light of modern archaeological work on the island, has to include the following periods: Pre-Neolithic Aceramic Neolithic Ceramic Neolithic Chalcolithic Bronze Age Iron Age Archaic Period Classical Period Hellenistic Period Roman Period
c. 10,000 BCE c. 7000-5500 c. 5000-3700 c. 3700-2400 c. 2400-1125 c. 1125-800 c. 800-500 499-323 323-30 30 BCE-33O CE
The dating of all periods prior to the Late Bronze Age is based almost entirely upon calibrated radiocarbon dates. The use of such dates is, in some quarters, still regarded as somewhat controversial, but without them it is not possible to study Cypriot prehistory. What gives Cypriot prehistory its special character is that every period prior to the Iron Age has its own group of sites. Long occupation is characteristic of individual sites in tire Aegean, Anatolia, the Levant, Iraq, and Iran, but not of Cyprus. For reasons not yet understood, the occupational history of archaeological sites on Cyprus almost never exceeded a single cultural period—nor was a former site ever reoccupied after being abandoned for some period of time. This means that there are no tells in Cypriot archaeology and no long, stratified sequences at major sites, which gives Cypriot prehistory its distinctive episodic char acter. The Pre-Neolithic period has only come to light since tire mid-1980s and is known only from one site, Akrotiri Aetokremnos. This is a rock-shelter at the tip of the Akrotiri pen insula, tire southernmost part of Cyprus. It has produced a number of chipped-stone tools plus tens of thousands of fragments of pygmy hippopotamus bones together with a few bones of dwarf elephants (excavated by A. H. Simmons, University of Nevada at Las Vegas). Full-sized elephants and hippos must have made their way to Cyprus during the Last Glacial Maximum, when the distance between tire is land and tire mainland was reduced to about 40 km (25 mi.). These animals, through genetic isolation, evenmally evolved into tire dwarfed endemic forms (known from Cyprus and from Malta). [See Malta.] The human population at Aetokremnos, presumably of Anatolian origin, seems to repre sent the initial (apparently unsuccessful) colonization of the island and must also have played some role in the extinction of the island's Pleistocene fauna. At present it is not possible to make any connection be tween this pre-Neolithic episode and the following aceramic period, long known as the Khiroldtia culture because it was
CYPRUS first discovered and is still best documented at the site of Khirokitia Vouni (first excavated by Porphyrios Dikaios; current excavations directed by A. LeBrun, CNRS, Paris). The circular, domed houses of Khirokitia, built of river stones and mud brick, were arranged to form a village that is certainly indicative of some degree of town planning and social organization. Ceramics were not in use, but bowls, trays, and figurines of gray-green stone attest to a high de gree of technical skill, as well as to a feeling for form and design. One of the houses at die related site of Kalavasos Tenta even produced a wall painting, executed in red pig ment on an interior plastered wall. It is roughly contempo rary with the wall paintings from the site of U m m Dabaghiyah in Iraq (excavated by Diana Kirkbride) and die more elaborate examples from the Anatolian site of Catal Hoyiik. [See Wall Paintings; Catal Hoyiik.] Following tire Aceramic Neolithic of the Khirokitia cul ture, now known from at least twenty-five sites on Cyprus, there seems to be another break in the archaeological record. There is no evidence relating to the Khirokitia culture later than about 5 5 0 0 BCE, and nothing from the following Sotira culture (or Ceramic Neolithic) seems to be earlier than about 5 0 0 0 BCE. Whereas it is conceivable (if unlikely) that the initial human population on Cyprus died out following the abandonment of Akrotiri Aetokremnos, (with the Khi rokitia culture thus representing a recolonization of the is land), it is simply impossible that anything comparable could have happened during the (apparent) hiatus between Khirokitia and Sotira. A deterioration in the climate may have resulted in a change in lifestyle and settlement pattern and the disappearance of major "urban" settlements during tire second half of die sixth millennium. The Sotira culture, named after the site of Sotira Teppes (excavated by Dikaios), saw not only the introduction of pottery, but also a significant increase in population. Yet, the period's material culture, as known from such sites as Sotira Teppes and Ayios Epiktitos Vrysi, has much in com mon with the earlier aceramic culture. An even greater de gree of cultural continuity can be documented for the tran sition from the Sotira to the Erimi (Chalcolithic) culture, named after tire site of Erimi Pamboula) (also excavated by Dikaios). Some fifty sites contain traces of both cultures, a very unusual state of affairs in Cypriot prehistory. As indicated by the use of the term Chalcolithic, it is during the period of the Erimi culture that the first evidence exists for the use of metal on Cyprus. It takes the form of a number of small copper artifacts from tire sites of Erimi Pamboula, Lemba Lakkous, Kissonerga Mosphilia, and KissonergaMylouthkia (all excavated by Edgar Peltenburg, University of Edinburgh). It is now claimed (by N . H. Gale, 1 9 9 1 ) that these objects were not made of Cypriot native copper and, at least in one case, not even of copper smelted from Cypriot copper ores. Thus, the existence of an otherwise unattested
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copper ttade is implied, presumably between Anatolia and Cyprus. T h e Erimi culture represents a great expansion in settle ment and population, with more than 125 sites known from across the island. At these sites significant evidence is found for social patterning, emerging social ranking, and control by local elites. A remarkable deposit from Kissonerga Mos philia, including a house (or shrine) model and a number of clay figurines (one of which shows a woman in the act of giving birth), must relate not only to contemporary religious beliefs, but also to some sort of communal ritual activity. [See Cult.] T h e clay figurines from Kissonerga Mosphilia must be related to the numerous stone cruciform female figurines made of picrolite, the most distinctive artifact from Chalcolithic Cyprus. T h e transition from Chalcolithic to Early Cypriot (mark ing the beginning of tire Bronze Age) is one of the most controversial episodes in Cypriot prehistory. The problem concerns the existence of a distinctive archaeological assem blage known as the Philia culture and the position of that culture in the chronological sequence: is it Late Chalcolithic, Early Bronze, or both? What further complicates the issue is that tire Philia culture seems to be associated with major developments in metal technology—including the first use of gold, the use of arsenical copper, and perhaps even tire use of bronze—and ceramic links with southern Anatolia, especially the site of Tarsus. All this has suggested to many scholars that the Philia culture (and thus much of tire sub sequent Early Cypriot period) was brought to Cyprus by invaders (or colonists) from southern Anatolia (cf. Manning and Swiny, 1 9 9 4 ; Mellink, 1 9 9 1 ) . It seems best presently to discount any strong influence from Anatolia and to regard tire Philia culture as a transi tional phase, covering a period of about one hundred years (c. 2 5 0 0 - 2 4 0 0 BCE), containing elements of the previous Chalcolithic and the forthcoming Early Cypriot periods. For this reason, A. Bernard Knapp ( 1 9 9 0 ) has proposed that what is represented by Late Chalcolithic, the Philia culture, and Early Cypriot I—III be brought togetiier as Pre-Bronze Age I (with Middle Cypriot I—II being Pre-Bronze Age 2 ) . There is much to be said for this suggestion, save for the fact that changes in terminology almost always create more problems than they solve. In the Early and Middle Cypriot periods, Cyprus truly became part of the international world of tire eastern Med iterranean and the Near East. Prior to the mid-third millen nium, imported material was very rare, with the exception of obsidian from Anatolia. Now pottery and metalwork im ported from Early Minoan Crete have been found, as well as faience beads and perhaps even the board games Senet and mehen from Egypt, and certain metal types from Ana tolia. [See Glass; Vitreous Materials; Games.] T h e pair of gold earrings from tomb 6 at Sotira Kaminoudhia (excavated
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CYPRUS
by Stuart Swiny; Cyprus American Archaeological Re search Institute), the earliest gold objects known from Cy prus, are typologically almost certainly of Anatolian origin. There are some 2 7 0 Early and Middle Cypriot sites, but almost all of them are cemeteries without associated settle ments. There are virtually no Bronze Age settlements known on Cyprus that are earlier than about 1700 BCE. With tire excavation of an Early Cypriot settlement at Sotira Kaminoudhia and Middle Cypriot ones at Alambra Mouttes (ex cavated by J. E. Coleman and J. A. Barlow, Cornell Univer sity) and Marki Alonia (excavated by D. Frankel and J. Webb, LaTrobe University), this may change. Agricultural practices underwent major changes during the Early Cyp riot period with the introduction of cattle and the ox-drawn plow (although there is new, very surprising evidence from the site of Paraklesia Shillourokampos (excavated by J. Guilane, CNRS, Paris) that would put cattle on Cyprus as early as the Aceramic Neolithic). [See Agriculture; Cattle and Oxen.] The introduction of equids (asses or horses) at this time must have facilitated overland transport on tire island. [See Transportation.] During the Middle Cypriot period, the copper industry underwent a great expansion. T h e first direct evidence for
the mining of copper ores has appeared at Ambelikouv4/em. This evidence comes from tire early second millennium BCE and is contemporary with the first references, in Babylonian cuneiform texts from Mari, to copper from the land of Alashiya. [See Cuneiform; Mari.] Although there has been con siderable controversy over the identification, it now seems virtually certain that Alashiya was tire name used in the Near East (Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia) to designate the island of Cyprus. As Cypriot international re lations and copper exports intensified during the Late Cyp riot period (c. 1 6 2 5 - 1 1 2 5 BCE), there was a corresponding increase in the number of textual references to Alashiya, especially to copper from Alashiya. With tire end of the Bronze Age—on Cyprus and in the eastern Mediterra nean—no more is heard of Alashiya. Kypros, tire Greek name for the island, appears early—in Mycenaean Greek— and has survived to tire present. [See Metals, article on Ar tifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.] The beginning of tire Late Bronze (Late Cypriot) period is marked by the establishment of Enkomi (excavated by Dikaios and, in a separate project, by Claude F . A. Schaeffer), on the northeast coast of the island. Enkomi quickly became the most important site on Cyprus and is most prob-
CYPRUS. Figure 1. Map showing LB distribution of copper oxhide ingots. (Courtesy J. Muhly)
CYPRUS ably to be identified as the capital of die kingdom of Alashiya. The Late Cypriot period had its own distinctive ce ramic repertoire, with Middle Cypriot Red-Polished and White-Painted wares being replaced by Base-Ring, WhiteSlip, and White-Shaved Late Cypriot wares. These distinc tive Late Bronze fabrics seem to have quickly gained pop ularity outside Cyprus and have been found in considerable quantity at sites in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The Uluburun ship that sank off the southern coast of Turkey at the end of the fourteenth century BCE had a cargo that included a large pifhos packed with freshly made Late Cypriot pot tery, much like a modern "china barrel." [See Uluburun.] This pottery must have been destined for western markets. Late Cypriot wares have now been found as far west as the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. In addition to Enkomi, other important Late Cypriot sites are Kition, Hala Sultan Tekke (also known as Larnaca Alyki), Kalavasos Ayios Dhimitrios, Maroni Vournes, and Alassa Paleotaverna (for references, see Knapp et al., 1 9 9 4 ) . [See Kalavasos.] All were connected with copper production and the copper trade and, in some cases, with the production and storage of olive oil. [See Olives.] Hala Sultan Tekke seems exceptional in its wealth of foreign imports, especially from Egypt. T o m b 1 2 at Ayios Dhimitrios, dating to the late thirteenth century BCE, produced a remarkable Hittite silver figurine depicting a male, almost certainly King Tudaliya IV, standing on a stag. [See Tombs; Hittites.] This is one of the few known works of Hittite art in precious metal to be found in a controlled excavation (most examples come from the antiquities market). Its presence on Cyprus probably has something to do with Hittite claims of control over Alashiya in the late thirteenth century BCE (during the reigns of T u daliya IV and Suppiluliuma II). It appears that Enkomi dominated the Cypriot copper in dustry from 1 6 0 0 to 1 3 0 0 BCE. Then, in the thirteenth cen tury BCE (Late Cypriot IIC), a decentralization of authority resulted in the establishment of a number of regional centers along the island's south coast. Inland villages, such as Apliki Karamallos (excavated by J. DuPlat Taylor), housed the personnel connected with the mining and smelting of the copper ore. [See Apliki.] Cypriot copper, in the shape of socalled oxhide ingots (representing one talent, or about 2 9 kg of copper), were shipped across the Mediterranean, as far west as Sicily and Sardinia (see figure 1). [See Sardinia.] T h e ingots are even found in the Black Sea, at the Hittite capital of Hattusa in central Anatolia (modern Bogazkoy), and as far east as the Kassite capital of Dur Kurigalzu (modern 'Aqar Quf). [See Bogazkoy; Kassites; 'Aqar Quf.] On the basis of present evidence, such ingots represent the form in which raw (or blister) copper was shipped over seas in the Late Bronze Age (see figure 2 ) . Their distinctive oxhide shape is known only from LB contexts. T h e question is whether all such ingots were cast on Cyprus, of Cypriot copper. T h e answer is apparently that they were not—the
93
only mold for casting such ingots comes from the Syrian site of Ras Ibn Hani, not otherwise known as a metallurgical site. [See Ras Ibn Hani.] Moreover, all the examples known from Minoan Crete—from Ayia Triadha, Gournia, Knossos, Mochlos, and Zakros—seem, on the basis of lead isotope analysis, not to be made of Cypriot copper. All examples from Cyprus itself, on the other hand, as well as those from the Cape Gelidonya and the Uluburun shipwreck, do seem to be made of Cypriot copper. T h e same origin is claimed for the oxhide ingots from Sardinia—all on the basis of lead isotope analysis. Clearly, Cypriot copper was in wide use across the Mediterranean world, especially in the thirteenth century BCE, but all conclusions based on lead isotope evi dence are now under review. T h e international character of the Late Bronze Age seems to have come to an end in the early twelfth century BCE, in a sequence of events associated with the invasions and mi grations of the Sea Peoples. [See Philistines.] Cyprus seems to have suffered less destruction than other areas at this time, perhaps because Bronze Age Cyprus had never developed
CYPRUS. Figure 2.
Copper oxhide ingot, probably from Enkomi.
(Courtesy Cyprus Mines Company, H. Mudd Collection, Los Angeles; photograph by Tamara Stech)
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CYPRUS
the highly centralized palace economy so typical of contem porary cultures in the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Levant. [See Palace.] Not having been locked into that rigid organization, Cypriots seem to have been better able to respond to the rapidly changing conditions that characterized the Mediter ranean world of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE. T h e ability to innovate seems to have been crucial—especially in developing the technology necessary for working in iron, the new metal that achieved such prominence the following cen turies come to be known as the Iron Age. The centuries from about 1100 to 8 0 0 BCE were long seen by modern scholars as a dark age—a period of poverty, iso lation, and general cultural decline. All knowledge of writing was said to have been lost for several hundred years, along with advanced technological skills in stoneworking, ivory carving, and metal working (precious and base), and that all these skills had to be relearned in the eighth century BCE. [See Writing and Writing Systems.] Oriental (especially Phoenician) scribes and craftsmen would have played a key role in this "recivilizing" of the eastern Mediterranean/Ae gean world. [See Phoenicians; Scribes and Scribal Tech niques.] However, this interpretation of the Iron Age is no longer tenable. T h e evidence now indicates that there was almost unbroken contact between the Aegean (especially Euboea and Crete), Cyprus, and the Levant during those centuries. Three inscribed bronze spits, or obeloi, are known from late eleventh-century Cyprus, from tomb 4 9 at Palaipaphos Skales (excavated by Vassos Karageorghis). One of them is not only inscribed in Greek, but in the Arkadian dialect (in accordance witii the later Greek literary tradition that claimed Arkadia as the homeland of the Greeks who colonized Cyprus in the years just after the Trojan War). [See Greek.] Fragments of bronze tripods and stands from Iron Age Crete, once seens as heirlooms from a thirteenthtwelftii-century BCE workshop at Enkomi, are now regarded as products of local Iron Age Cretan workshops. Changes certainly did take place. In the mid-eleventh cen tury BCE Salamis replaced Enkomi as the dominant site in eastern Cyprus, while the Phoenicians moved into Kition. According to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, in an inscrip tion dated to 6 7 3 / 7 2 BCE, ten kings of Cyprus ruled over ten separate kingdoms. [See Assyrians.] Some of these kings had Greek and some had Semitic names, testifying to the ethnic diversity of Cyprus in the first half of the first millennium BCE. Little is known about the early history of these king doms, but they almost certainly go back to at least the elev enth century BCE. The gold scepter from Kourion Kaloriziki (early eleventh century BCE), with its pair of Eleonaro's fal cons perched on a globe, all decorated with gold and cloi sonne work, is quite possibly the standard of authority wielded by one of the early kings of Kourion. [See Kourion.] For Iron Age Greeks, as for tiieir Mycenaean ancestors, Cyprus was called Kypros. For the contemporary Assyrians,
however, Cyprus was Yadnana, a land "in the midst of the sea." Esarhaddon (see above) even states that "all kings of the midst of the sea, from Yadnana [Cyprus], the land of Yaman [Ionia], to the land of Tarsisi, bowed down at my feet. I received tiieir heavy tribute." This passage has been the subject of much confused speculation, with Tarsisi even being turned into a reference to Tartessos (in southern Spain). What it really means is that Cyprus, along with the adjacent Anatolian coast (with Tarsus, the principal city, standing for the entire region) was, for the Assyrians, in habited by eastern Greeks, the Ionians. They are the same Ionians against whom the Assyrian king Sennacherib fought when he sacked the city of Tarsus in 6 9 6 BCE. Relations with Assyria and the Near East were a signifi cant element in the history of Archaic Cyprus. T h e Assyrian ldng Sargon II ( 7 2 2 - 7 0 5 BCE) even claimed the conquest of Cyprus in 7 0 7 BCE, an event commemorated by the erection of an inscribed stela, apparently in the vicinity of Kition. (The stela was found by chance in the late nineteenth cen tury and is now in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.) This so-called conquest seems to have left no more of a trace in the material remains of eighth-century BCE Cyprus than did the earlier conquest claimed by the Hittite king Suppiluliuma II, at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. Both the Hittite and the Assyrian kings claimed tribute from Cyprus, but tiiese claims probably belong more to the realm of rhet oric than of reality. Of the ten kingdoms of Archaic Cyprus, the most is known about Salamis as a result of the discovery and ex cavation of its necropolis by Dikaios and Karageorghis for the Cypriot Department of Antiquities. [See Salamis; Ne cropolis; and the biography of Dikaios,] The nine so-called royal tombs in this necropolis, which dates to between about 8 0 0 and 6 0 0 BCE, produced a rich asemblage of burial goods, including bronze horse trappings and chariot fittings, carved ivories tiiat originally decorated pieces of furniture, and ves sels of clay (some even tin-covered) and bronze. [See Grave Goods; Bone, Ivory, and Shell, article on Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages.] T h e dromos of tomb 7 9 at Salamis (end of the eighth century BCE) produced a remarkable bronze cauldron on an iron stand (total height: 1.25 m); the rim of the cauldron is decorated with protomes in the shape of griffins and with bearded sirens. Such cauldrons are known from Delphi, Olympia, and Etruria. All examples date from about 7 2 5 to 6 5 0 BCE and were most likely man ufactured at one or more workshops in Syria (not, as com monly believed, in Urartu). Similar "royal" tombs are known from the capitals of some of the other Cypriot kingdoms, especially Idalion and Tamassos (excavated by H.-G. Buchholz). [See Idalion.] T h e grave goods from these tombs testify to the wealth and international connections of the rulers of Archaic Cyprus. T h e latest of the Salamis tombs (no. 3 ) dates to the early
CYPRUS sixth century BCE, shortly before the situation changed dra matically: a short-lived Egyptian rule was followed by the Persian conquest of Cyprus under Cyrus I. Something of the old Archaic lifestyle survived the Persian conquest of about 5 4 5 BCE, for Evelthon, king of Salamis in the second half of the sixth century, struck his own silver coins, and the two royal tombs from Tamassos also date to the latter part of the sixth century BCE. Persian rule over Cyprus seems to have had no more ef fect on local culture than earlier episodes of foreign rule, although the Persians remained in nominal control down to the conquest of Alexander the Great in 3 3 0 BCE. The island seems to have been divided between pro-Greek and proPersian camps, a situation that became critical when Cyprus joined the Ionian Revolt in 4 9 9 BCE. The intermittent con flicts between Greeks and Persians in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE frequently involved fighting on Cyprus. In 4 9 9 the Athenian general Kimon replaced the pro-Persian ruler of Marion with a pro-Greek one—who was then installed in the fortress-palace at Vouni (Nielsen, 1 9 9 4 , pp. 5 4 - 6 1 ) . Ki mon, however, was killed shortiy thereafter, thus putting an end to this episode of Greek intervention in the affairs of Cyprus. During the second half of the first millennium BCE, Greek influence was dominated on Cyprus. This can be seen in the numerous terra-cotta figurines from recent excavations (by W. A. P. Childs, Princeton University) at ancient Mar ion (modern Polis Chrysochous), as well as in the Attic pot tery and the Attic-inspired grave reliefs from older (infor mal) excavations at that site, from the magnificent more-than-life-sized bronze head of Apollo from Tamassos (now in the British Museum and known as the Chatsworth head), and the solid cast-bronze cow from the Vouni palace, in the style of the Greek sculptor Myron. One of the great surprises of recent years was the discov ery that there was still a strong Phoenician presence on Cy prus in the fourth century BCE—not only during the first half of the first millennium BCE, the time of die Phoenician tem ple at Kition. A Phoenician inscription from a fifth-century BCE tomb near Alassa refers to a metalworker named M e lekram, and a fourth-century BCE Phoenician inscription from Kition refers to one Eshniounadon, ambassador of the king of Tyre. Recent excavations at Idalion have produced dozens of Phoenician inscriptions, written in black ink on small pieces of local marble. They are administrative texts and, on the basis of an associated coin of Evagoras II, king of Salamis ( 3 6 1 - 3 5 1 BCE), can be dated to the fourth century BCE.
In return for its support, and a gift of one hundred ships, Alexander granted Cyprus its independence. After his death in 3 2 3 BCE, however, Cyprus found itself caught up in the power struggle between Ptolemy and Antigonus, two of Al exander's generals. [See Ptolemies.] T o avoid being cap tured by Ptolemy, Nicocreon, the last king of Salamis, com
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mitted suicide in 3 1 1 , as did his wife Axiodiea and all members of the royal family. In 3 0 6 BCE those involved in this mass suicide were given a proper burial in a grand cer emony organized by Demetrios Poliorketes, son of Antigo nus and, at that time, ruler of Cyprus. The platform and tumulus erected on that occasion were excavated by Karageorghis in 1 9 6 4 as Salamis tomb 7 7 . Among the finds, a series of clay portrait heads, in the style of the Greek sculptor Lysippos, are of special interest as they seem to depict mem bers of the royal family. In 6 7 BCE, after more than two hundred years of Ptolemaic rule, Cyprus was annexed by Rome and administered, from 5 8 BCE onward, as part of the province of Cilicia. [See Cilicia.] T h e great orator Cicero was one of the early proconsuls of Cilicia. The Romans bled Cyprus dry, with high taxes and money (to pay those taxes) lent at outrageous rates of interest (as much as 4 8 percent). Although Salamis contin ued to be of great importance, the real capital of Roman Cyprus was at Paphos. T h e harbor town of Nea Paphos (modern Kato Paphos), originally built in the late fourth century BCE, became the center for the Roman administra tion of the island. Several Roman villas, decorated with won derful mosaics and dating to the third century CE, have been excavated at Nea Paphos. These include the Villa of The seus (excavated by W. A. Daszewski on behalf of the Polish Mission to Cyprus) and die House of Dionysus (excavated by Kyriakos Nicolaou on behalf of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities). Similar mosaics are known from Kourion, especially from the House of the Gladiators (end of the tiiird-beginning of die fourth century CE; excavated by D. Christou, Cypriot Department of Antiquities). [See Villa; Mosaics; Paphos.] The monumental (more than 2 m high) bronze statue of Emperor Septimius Severus ( 1 9 3 - 2 1 1 CE), found at ancient Chytroi (modern Kythrea), also attests to the importance of the Roman presence on Cyprus in the third century. The pagan era on Cyprus essentially came to an end with the devastating eartiiquake of 2 1 July 3 6 5 . Following the earth quake, Cyprus was rebuilt as a Christian culture, best seen in the House of Eustolios at Kourion, a public building of the fifth century. A beautiful stone mosaic inscription from this house, written in epic-style verse, proclaims that "In place of big stones and solid iron, gleaming bronze and even hardened steel, this house is girt with the much-venerated signs of Christ" (Soren and James, 1 9 8 8 , pp. 2 0 - 2 3 ) . BIBLIOGRAPHY
The literature on the archaeology of ancient Cyprus is quite vast. It is impossible to list individual site reports. Recent scholarship on Cyp riot archaeology has tended to appear in congress and symposia vol umes, most of which have been edited by Vassos Karageorghis on be half of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities (of which he was director from 1963 to 1988). This bibliography includes only some general works on Cypriot archaeology, followed by a few specialized studies.
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General Works Catling, H. W. Cypriot Bronzework in the Mycenaean World. Oxford, 1964. Basic study of Cypriot bronze artifacts, within an Aegeocentric context. Chypre: Au coeur des civilisations mediterranecnnes. Les Dossiers d'Archeologie, no. 205. Paris, 1995. Short articles on recent archaeolog ical work on Cyprus, from Pre-Neolithic to Roman times. Gjerstad, Einar. Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus, Uppsala, 1926. Marks the beginning of the modern study of Cypriot archaeology. Hill, George F. A History of Cyprus, vol. 1, To the Conquest by Richard Lion Heart. London, 1940. For many years the standard account of early Cypriot history. Karageorghis, Vassos. Cyprus: From the Stone Age to the Romans. Lon don, 1982. The first general synthesis based on work since i960. Karageorghis, Vassos, ed. Archaeology in Cyprus, 1960-198 $• Nicosia, 1985. Collection of synthetic studies published on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Department of Antiquities. Karageorghis, Vassos. I^es anciens Chypriotes: Entre Orient et Occident. Paris, 1991. Contains a valuable list of all archaeological expeditions conducted on Cyprus. Knapp, A. Bernard, and John F. Cherry. Provenience Studies and Bronze Age Cyprus: Production, Exchange, and Politico-Economic Change. Monographs in World Archaeology, no. 21. Madison, Wis., 1994. Comprehensive analysis of the scientific evidence for Bronze Age trade in ceramics and metals. Peltenburg, Edgar, ed. Early Society in Cyprus. Edinburgh, 1989. Im portant collection of papers on Cypriot prehistory, from Neolithic to Roman times. Sjoqvist, Erik. Problems of the Late Cypriote Bronze Age. Stockholm, 1940. The first important synthesis of the Late Bronze Age on Cy prus. Specialized Studies Catling, H. W. "Patterns of Setdement in Bronze Age Cyprus." Opuscula Atheniensia 4 (1962): 129-169. The basis for all future survey work on Cyprus. Gale, N. H. "Metals and Metallurgy in the Chalcolithic Period." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 282-283 (1991): 37-61. Beginnings of metallurgy on Cyprus. Knapp, A. Bernard. "Production, Location, and Integration in Bronze Age Cyprus." Current Anthropology 31 (1990): 147-176. An impor tant theoretical interpretation of the field that, up to this time, had strongly resisted such interpretation. Knapp, A. Bernard, et al. "The Prehistory of Cyprus: Problems and Prospects." Journal of World Prehistory 8 (1994): 377-453. Interpre tive synthesis of current work in Cypriot prehistory, to the end of the Bronze Age, with a rich bibliography on current excavations. Manning, Start, and Stuart Swiny. "Sotira Kaminoudhia and the Chro nology of the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus." Oxford Journal of Ar chaeology 13 (1994): 149-172. Evanuation of the role of radiocarbon dating in Cypriot prehistory. Mellink, Machteld J. "Anatolian Contacts with Chalcolithic Cyprus." Bulletin of the American Schools of Orienal Research, no. 282-283 (1991): 167-175. Nielsen, Inge. Hellenistic Palaces: Tradition and Renewal. Aarhus, 1994. Excellent discussion of Vouni phase. Rupp, David W. "The 'Royal Tombs' at Salamis (Cyprus): Ideological Messages of Power and Authority." Journal of Mediterranean Ar chaeology 1.1 (1988): 111-139. Argues for the beginning of Archaic kingdoms in the eighth century BCE. Soren, David, and J. James. Kourion: The Search for a Lost Roman City. New York, 1988. Excavation of Roman Kourion. J. D. MUHLY
CYPRUS AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE. Although archaeological exploration on Cyprus dates back to tire mid-nineteenth century when French scholars showed an interest in the dis tinctly Greek style of sculpture with its perplexing eastern traits, systematic investigation of the island's cultures only began in the 1920s with the arrival of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. Of considerable importance, however, were the large and rich late nineteenth-century collections made by antiquarians, specifically Luigi Palma di Cesnola, United States consul to Cyprus (1865-1875) and tire first American to show an active interest in Cypriot antiquities. Despite the island's proven archaeological wealth, interest in its past was limited and tire founding of a foreign school was not con templated until 1974 when George Ernest Wright, director of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) Ex pedition to Ancient Idalion proposed such a move. In 1978 tire president of ASOR, Philip J. King, with the backing of the United States ambassador to Cyprus, ap proached the Department of Antiquities about establishing a research center to promote dialogue between American and Cypriot scholars and to provide services and facilities for researchers in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, history, literature, and related disciplines. T h e proposal was supported by the far-sighted antiquities direc tor, Vassos Karageorghis. As a result the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) came into being and began operating in premises not far from tire Cyprus Museum. The board of trustees, which was presided over by Norma Kershaw, appointed Anita Walker as its first di rector in 1978. Ian A. Todd followed in 1979, and then Stu art Swiny from 1980 to 1995. Initially, the institute's contri bution to archaeological research was severely hampered by lack of funds; its impact on Cypriot studies was minimal, being restricted to a one-day symposium on current exca vation projects supplemented by the occasional lecture. In 1984, however, tire creation of several Fulbright fellowships offered on a yearly basis, the purchase of Claude F.-A. Schaeffer's research library and the reorganization of the board of trustees under tire presidency of Charles U. Harris, signaled a change in direction and a period of rapid growth. The combination of library resources, pre- and postdoctoral researchers, as well as increasingly comprehensive reference collections, soon left its mark on American involvement in Cypriot studies. The emphasis on traditional art historical or archaeolog ical research concurrently began to make way for more problem-oriented, multidisciplinary, and theoretical ap proaches. A similar evolution occurred in the focus of ASOR-affrliated field projects, both excavations and sur veys, which began to be regional and to span several periods. As CAARI's commitment to Cyprus-based research grew, so too did the number of users, of all nationalities— there is no other foreign archaeological center on tire is-
CYRENE land—and the search for larger, permanent facilities became a priority. In June 1991 the president of the Republic of Cyprus formally inaugurated spacious new premises pur chased and renovated through the efforts of CAARI's board of trustees. These fulfilled the requirements of an efficient archaeological research center with a sufficient residence ca pacity, operating in the 1990s and beyond. T o date the institute's main goals have been to develop its library holdings, to offer more scholarships, to increase its programmatic activities, and to continue sponsoring its own archaeological projects. Since 1984 the availability of diverse fellowships has sig nificantly expanded the scope and number of researchers in Cypriot studies. In addition to those sponsored by ASOR, there are on average seven grants offered each year by CAARI, lasting from one to ten months. T h e stipends in clude travel funds and support for two junior scholars wish ing to undertake research projects on ASOR-sponsored ex cavations. T h e institute currently offers a full program of lectures and site tours. It also organizes symposia and is now considering a summer teaching program. In 1981 the first ASOR-sponsored CAARI excavation be gan work on the Early Bronze site of Sotira Kaminoudhia. Other affiliated projects have investigated Akrotiri Aetokrernnos, ancient Idalion, ancient Kourion, Kalavasos Ayios Dhimitrios, Kopetra, and Tenia, as well as Koletria Ortos. Surveys have been undertaken in the Vasilikos Valley, around Kouklia and Mitsero, as well as underwater in die harbor of Paphos. Since 1986 CAARI News has appeared as an annual news letter. A major publication project in the form of a directory of Cypriot sites is planned as a cooperative project for die future. The growth of CAARI over a period of fifteen years to a research center offering a fine library, reference collections, fellowships, and excavation programs, has encouraged clas sicists and Aegean scholars to turn their gaze east, while urging Near Eastern researchers to look west. Once again, Cyprus is assuming its traditional role as stepping stone be tween the Orient and the Occident. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; Idalion; Kalavasos; Kourion; Paphos; and the biographies of di Cesnola, Schaeffer, and Wright.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Thomas W. "A History of American Archaeology in Cyprus." Biblical Archaeologist 52 (1989): 163-169. The most detailed overview to date of American archaeological research on the island. Harris, Charles U. "The Role of CAARI in Cyprus." Biblical Archae ologist 52 (1989): 157-162. Presents the first history of CAARI writ ten by tire one person who was instrumental in its creation and de velopment. King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Ref erence work for ASOR's role in Near Eastern scholarship. CAARI
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would never have been founded without King's belief in die value of a Cyprus center when he was president of ASOR. STUART SWINY
C Y R E N E , meu-opolitan capital of both Cyrenaica and the Libyan Pentapolis during Hellenistic and Roman times (32°48' N , 2i°52' E). Cyrene is located about 175 km (109 mi.) northeast of Benghazi, 300 1cm soutii of Crete and 320 km (198 mi.) west of the Libyan-Egyptian border, and 12 km (7 mi.) inland from the coast on the crest of the Gebel Akhdar or "Green Mountain" at an elevation of 622 m (2,041 ft.). The old village of Shahhat, whose former name Grennah or Gueranna is an obvious corruption of the an cient toponym, has been linked with Cyrene since European ttavelers first began to seek out its ruins in the early eigh teenth century. T h e story of Cyrene's foundation around 631 BCE by Therans led by a certain Battus is exhaustively related by Herodotus (4.150 ff.). T h e founder established a hereditary monarchy tiiat endured foreign attack and internal rebellion until around 440 BCE when Cyrene's last king, Arcesilaus IV, was assassinated. Monarchy was followed by slightly more tiian a century of erratic republican government, which fi nally came to an end when Cyrene was brought under Ptol emaic administration in 322. T h e Hellenistic period saw the creation of die Pentapolis, or land of the five cities: Cyrene, Apollonia, Ptolemais, Tauchira, and Berenice. Cyrenaica's last Greek ruler, Ptolemy Apion (116-96), willed the region to the Roman Senate, which limited its involvement to collecting die rents from the royal lands previously owned by die Ptolemies. Then, in 74, Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus was sent out as a quaes tor (provincial magistrate) to establish Cyrenaica as a Ro man province. T h e emperor Augustus linked die region ad ministratively with Crete to form a single senatorial province. The unbroken years of prosperity that followed were shattered by a major revolt in 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 CE when die province's Jewish inhabitants desttoyed much of Cyrene's civic and religious infrastructure. Timely intervention by die emperor Hadrian's government provided a limited recovery, but by the early third century gradual drying up of the cli mate, extensive earthquake damage, and ttibal incursions from the desert renewed die decline. Diocletian (284-305) detached the province from Crete and renamed it Upper Libya or Pentapolis. Its years as a christianized outpost of the Byzantine Empire produced a modest renewal of urban life until the city, along witii die rest of die province, fell to the Arabs in 643. From i860 to 1861, R. M. Smith and E. A. Porcher led an expedition to collect sculptures for the British Museum. In 1910 R. Norton undertook an investigation, which was aborted, of the acropolis for the American Institute of Ar chaeology. The subsequent principal excavations at Cyrene
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fall into two phases. The first was tire exclusive domain of Italian archaeologists working between tire two world wars to clear tire agora-forum area and the sanctuary of Apollo. The second phase, which was initiated shortly after World War II by the British and continues to the present, reflects separate efforts by the Libyan Department of Antiquities (Valley Street and Roman city center, Theater 2 , markettheater complex) and by foreign missions: Italian (agoraforum, sanctuary of Apollo, temple of Zeus) and American (sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone). A rich archaeological record for the city's monarchic pe riod is provided by the physical remains, which consist of civic and religious buildings, locally produced and imported sculpture and pottery and other miscellaneous objects from the city's agora and two principal sanctuaries (Apollo, Demeter and Persephone). Important additional information has also been acquired by the excavation of Cyrene's mon umental temple of Zeus, a group of intentionally buried votives (bronze and stone sculptures, columnar sphinx mon ument) from a unidentified archaic-period precinct, and its various cemeteries lining tire major roadways leading from the city. The line of Archaic defenses has yet to be located. Archaeological data that includes inscriptions recovered from the agora, main religious sanctuaries, and tombs pro vides a somewhat sketchier account of the republican years that intervened before Cyrene's absorption into the Ptole maic empire in 3 2 2 BCE. Excavation of the same areas have brought to light a full range of Hellenistic remains. Short stretches of the defensive wall system girdling the Ptolemaic city are preserved. The city's Roman and Byzantine phases have been well documented by the excavation of the Caesareum (monu mental complex dedicated to one of the Caesars) and nearby Roman forum area, the Roman city center, tire market the ater complex, and the city's intramural cathedral, along with
the already mentioned santuaries, necropoleis and the agora. On the other hand, the massive acropolis hill and the extra mural "caravanserai" and hippodrome all await excavation. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chamoux, Franco. Cyrene sous la Monarchic des Battiades. Bibliotheque des Ecoles Francaises d'Athenes et de Rome, 177. Paris, 1953. Fun damental study of the city from its foundation until the end of the Battiad monarchy, ca. 440 BCE. Goodchild, Richard G. Cyrene and Apollonia: An Historical Guide. 3d ed. [Tripoli], 1970. Written by die former Controller of Antiquities for eastern Libya, this remains the most accessible guide in English but should be supplemented by Goodchild's posthumously pub lished guide in German cited below. Goodchild, Richard G. Kyrene and Apollonia. Ruinenstadte Nordafrikas, 4. Zurich, 1971. The site's definitive archaeological guide. Goodchild, Richard G. Libyan Studies: Select Papers of the Late Richard Goodchild. Edited by Joyce Reynolds. London, 1976. Compilation of articles that includes die author's otherwise unpublished history of Cyrene's exploration and excavation, "A Hole in die Heavens" (pp. 268-341). Laronde, Andre, et al. "Cyrene, Apollonia, Ptolemais: Sites prestigieux de la Libye antique." Les Dossiers d'Archeologie 167 (January 1992): 1-80. Well-illustrated popular survey of Cyrene and two of its im portant neighboring towns which includes the most accessible infor mation on work conducted in Cyrenaica during the past decade. Stucchi, Sandro, et al. L'Agord di Cirene. 4 vols. Monografie di Archeologia Libica, vols. 7, 15-17. Rome, 1965-1984. Final publica tions of the Italian mission's work in the Agora, fundamental for understanding the city's urban development. Stucchi, Sandro. Architettura cirenaica. Monografie di Archeologia Li bica, vol. 9. Rome, 1975. Classic architectural study by Cyrene's premiere excavator that includes an analysis of virtually every mon ument found at Cyrene. White, Donald, et al. The Extramural Sanctuary of Demeter and Per sephone al Cyrene, Libya: Final Reports. 5 vols. University Museum Monographs, 52, 56, 66, 67, 76. Philadelphia, 1984-1993. The most complete publication of the stratigraphical record and various classes of artifacts of a specific complex. DONALD W H I T E
D
DAB'A, TELL ED- (ancient Avaris), site located in the
building was likely the residence of an Egyptian official, per haps with tlie title "overseer of foreign countries" tiiat was found preserved on a magnificent official amethyst and gold seal. While the tombs of the residential officials display Egyptian funerary architectural traditions, the burial cus toms, such as donkey sacrifices, were Asiatic, as were the Middle Bronze weapons. During the thirteenth dynasty, one of several kings of Asi atic origin took the throne for a short time. His name was 'Amusa Hornedjherjotef and he was very likely a native of Tell ed-Dab'a. His statue was found in a funerary chapel by Habachi, together with statues of the last queen of the twelfth dynasty, Sobeknofru. The above-mentioned palace dates to approximately this time, as does a smashed colossal limestone statue of a seated Asiatic dignitary with a red mushroom-shaped hairstyle who is holding a throw stick against his shoulder. T h e destroyed statue and the sudden abandonment of the palace suggest internal political turmoil during the thirteenth dynasty. Soon afterward, the material culture and specific tomb types suggest that new immigrants from Palestine, as well as from Syria and Cyprus, had moved in (stratum G). T h e percentage of foreign pottery rose from 20 to 40 percent. In the second half of the eighteenth century BCE there is some evidence that a plague decimated the settlers at Tell ed-Dab'a. Emergency tombs were dug, and bodies were thrown into shallow pits sometimes only 20 cm deep. Changes in the settlement pattern can also be observed be tween strata G and F, and the eastern part of the town was completely deserted. Soon afterward, an interesting sacred precinct was consttucted (stratum F, E/3). In its center was a major Middle Bronze temple of Syro-Palestinian type (ap proximately 32.7 X 21.4 m). In front of the temple was an altar on which several charred acorns were found. The tem ple likely belonged to a cult of Asherah, originally the con sort of the Canaanite god El, later also considered the con sort of Baal. Another broadroom temple in this compound had a separate tower. T o judge from inscriptions on door blocks from this area, it seems that this temple precinct, which was surrounded by cemeteries with Egyptian-type mortuary temples, was founded during the reign of King 'Aasehre' Nehesi. (His father, whose name is not known,
northeastern Nile Delta in the province of el-Sharqiya, 8 km (5 mi.) north of the market town of Faqus (30°47'i5" N , 3i°49'20" E). T h e site was die capital of the Hyksos and the southern part of the Delta residence of the Ramessides (nineteenth and twentieth dynasties) under the late name Piramesse (Raamses in the Masoretic Bible text; Ramesse in the Septuagint). Excavations at Tell ed-Dab'a were begun in 1885 by Edouard Naville. They were resumed in 1941-1942 by Labib Habachi, who suggested the identification with Avaris. Between 1951 and 1954, Shehata Adam discovered a Middle Kingdom temple at 'Ezbet Rushdi. From 1966 to 1969 and from 1975 onward, Manfred Bietak carried out systematic excavations at the site for the Archaeological Institute of Austria, Cairo Department. Stray finds from the Naqada III period and the beginning of the first dynasty show tiiat the settlement was already inhabited in the fourth millennium. However, the real origin of the settlement at Tell ed-Dab'a was the result of a royal settlement foundation (hzvi) of King Amenemhat I (c. 1963-1934 BCE) to the east of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile River. It probably replaced an older royal foundation of the Herakleopolitan period with the name Hwt. R3w3tj Htj ("royal settlement"), "the two roads" of the Herakleopolitan king Khety. The center of this settlement during the twelfth dynasty was a royal temple and a palatial building for local officials. An orthogonal, planned workmen's quarter southwest of the town belongs to the consu-uction of this settlement. In the late twelfth dynasty (c. 1800 BCE) Asiatic immigrants were settled to the south of the Middle Kingdom town (stratum H). The type of Middle Bronze weaponry indicates that the settlers were originally soldiers and probably also ship car penters and sailors in the Egyptian service. Their tombs were found in cemeteries within the settiement, in a layout that is very un-Egyptian. Foreign architectural types also appeared during this period, including a typical Syrian Mittekaal ("middle hall") house and a broadroom house. During the thirteenth dynasty, the settlement was en larged to approximately a square kilometer and probably served trading and mining expeditions. A wide palatial
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had split off from the thirteenth dynasty and had founded a small kingdom in the northeastern Delta whose capital was at Tell ed-Dab'a.) From this time onward, the settlement is known as Avaris ("royal foundation of the desert edge"). Nehesi was the first king with the epithet "beloved of the god Seth, the lord of Avaris" (or "lord of Ro-achet," "door of the fertile land"). A cylinder seal found in the earlier palace of the thirteenth dynasty carries a representation of a Syrian storm god. On the basis of this seal, it is assumed that the god Seth of Avaris was syncretized widi the northern Syrian storm god Baal, introduced by Asiatic settlers during the late twelfth dynasty. It was only a matter of time before die kingdom of Avaris was replaced by a local Asiatic dynasty that would form the core of the later kingdom of the Hyksos ("rulers of the for eign countries"). Indeed, from the beginning of the Flyksos period (c. 1640 BCE) the town dramatically enlarged to about 2.5 sq Ion (1.6 sq. mi.)—that is, it was a provincial center that became a metropolis. Very distinct changes appear in the material culture, especially in the pottery. It is tempting to explain the situation as having been created by an influx of new immigrants from Canaan, probably from the south ern region around Tell el-'Ajjul (Sharuhen), except that the settlement pattern shows continuity. If there was a popula tion influx, it took place with the consent of the lords of Avaris, Before the beginning of the Hyksos period there are al ready very un-Egyptian cemeteries of families arranged around temples and tombs within house precincts. T h e con struction of the tombs shows types of vaulting that were unknown in Egypt but have parallels in ancient Palestine. In domestic architecture the complete adaptation of Egyptian types had taken place during the thirteenth dynasty. Increas ing social differentiation can be observed from stratum F onward, with large houses surrounded by smaller houses belonging to the servant class. Typical for the period shortly before the Hyksos, and for the first half of the Hyksos pe riod, are warrior tombs equipped with weapons. Some con tain the burial of pairs of donkeys in front of the tomb en trance. Such burials have Palestinian parallels. In 1 9 9 1 , at the exu eme western part of the town, situated directly at the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, remains of a cit adel of the Late Hyksos period and of the early eighteenth dynasty were found (sttata D 2 and C). Along the river there was a fortification wall, 1 0 Egyptian cubits ( 5 . 2 5 m) strong, with buttresses set in regular intervals of 4 5 cubits ( 2 3 . 6 m). It is at present unclear if this was the city wall or the enclo sure of the citadel. The wall was later enlarged to 1 6 cubits (8.4 m) and so were the buttresses. Within this wall two layers of garden remains with tree pits and possibly a vine yard were discovered. This scenario—towering fortification walls and gardens—fits perfectly the one referred to in the insulting speech delivered by Kamose against the Hyksos Apophis during his short campaign to Avaris, known to us -
from the Kamose stela no. 2 . In it he spoke about the wives of the Hyksos peeping through the loopholes in the castle. He also threatens to pull out the trees and to drink the wine from the vineyards of his Asiatic overlord. At present the structure of the Hyksos citadel is unclear because of the later eighteenth dynasty installations in which older building materials were reused. A part of a monumen tal doorway of the hitherto unknown Hyksos with the north western Semitic name Skr-hr (= Sikru Haddu, which means "Memories of god Haddu" according to Thomas Schnei der, unpublished) was found in the eighteenth-dynasty level (stratum C). It is the first monumental inscription where the title hq3-h3swt (= Hyksos, ruler of the foreign countries) is used officially. Within this precinct also the stela of the Hyk sos Yinassi, who can be identified with the Iannas of the Manethonian list, was found. According to this stela he was the son and probably successor of the great Hyksos Khayan. A house altar dedicated to the Hyksos princess Tany, the sister and possibly consort of the Hyksos Apophis was re trieved by recent channel-dredging within this citadel area. King Ahmose conquered Avaris about 1 5 3 0 BCE. From this period there is evidence of an intensive reuse of the citadel after a partial destruction. Near the river was found a palatial consttuction on a raised platform of 1 3 5 X 9 0 Egyptian cubits ( 7 0 . 5 X 4 7 m) with a doorway and an access ramp cut through the fortification walls from the riverside. The gardens of the Hyksos period were reestablished, An other much larger palatial compound with huge magazines was constructed south of the platform waiting for future in vestigation. Both buildings were furnished with Minoan wall paintings, executed by Minoan artists in genuine Minoan style and technique. Motifs such as bull leaping, bull grap pling, acrobats, hunting scenes, lions and leopards chasing fallow deer and mountain goats, and representations of grif fins display Minoan ideology of hierarchy in nature and are an international scholarly puzzle. Dynastic links with the court of Knossos may explain the wall paintings, which would belong only in a royal palace. It cannot be excluded at present that a part of the Minoan paintings, found in a secondary dump, date from the late Hyksos period, but the only securely dated frescoes came from die early eighteenth dynasty palatial quarter. Perhaps the riddle of the title of the mother of King Ahmose, Queen Ahhotep, as hnwt idbw H^w-nbwt, "Mistress of the coasts of Haunebut," a country sometimes associated with the Aegean islands, can contrib ute in future toward an understanding of this puzzling evi dence. The raised platform building must have been in use for a very limited time, as against its weathered eastern face was constructed a very humble settlement of the first half of the eighteenth dynasty, using the platform already as a quarry for building materials. It seems at present that the citadel was used as a royal residence only for a very short time, perhaps during the last years of Ahmose during his cam-
DALIYEH, WADI EDpaigns in Canaan. At that time and subsequendy the citadel must have been used as an army stronghold. T h e presence of Nubian mercenaries can be established by remains of Su danese Kerma-household pottery and by numerous arrow heads of bone and silex. According to numerous finds of royal name scarabs the settlement of the citadel must have continued at least till the time of Amenlrotep II. T h a t it probably continued until the Ramesside period is inferred from the discovery in 1 9 9 3 of a huge temple complex to the north of the former citadel. Early in the eighteenth dynasty foreign trade flourished again, as in the Hyksos period: amphorae with olive oil and wine were imported in large numbers from Canaan, and Cyprus became a strong trading partner. While most of Avaris, except for the citadel, was abandoned, the quarter of tire temple to Seth, in the eastern central part of the site, shows continuity (according to the dating of a lintel its use was renewed). This renovation was carried out during the time of the restoration of the ttaditional cults in Egypt under tire ldngs Tutankhamun and Horemheb, in the late fourteenth century BCE. New building projects at the temple were carried out under Seti I, the last of which was a large temple to Seth. According to Papyri Anastasi II and IV ( 1 . 4 - 5 and 6 . 4 - 5 , respectively), it is referred to
as the southern topographical fixed point of the Ram esside town. According to tire archaeological evidence, the area surrounding this temple was covered with groves of trees. T h e continuity of the Seth cult from tire Hyksos period to the Ramesside period can be documented by tire so-called "Four-hundred-years stela" that probably originally stood in Avaris/Piramesse. This stela was commissioned by Rameses II, whose family most likely originated in Avaris; it can be viewed as a kind of propaganda designed to legitimize the rule of tire new dynasty. Seth, in the image of an Asiatic god, with horns and a high crown with a pommel, is pre sented as the "father of the fathers"—as the ancestor of the new dynasty. In the Third Intermediate period, Avaris was severely plundered. It had the same fate as tire Ramesside town of Qantir and served as a quarry for the new residences of the twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties at Tanis and Bubastis. This explains the secondary use of stone monuments in tire last two towns. T h e plundered monuments are im portant sources for the history of Avaris and Piramesse. In tire fourth century BCE, cults of the gods of Rameses II ap peared independently in Tanis and Bubastis. The cults orig inated from the cult statues that had been transported there. This situation obscured what was known about the original location of the Rameses-town, which had serious conse quences for attempts to locate the biblical town of Rameses and its environment (Ps. 7 8 : 1 2 , 4 8 ; Gn. 4 6 : 2 8 - 2 9 [Septua-
gint]). [See also Delta; and Hyksos.]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, Shehata. "Report on the Excavations of the Department of Antiquities at Ezbet Rushdi." Annales du Service des Antiquiles de I'Egypte 56 (1959): 207-226. Bietak, Manfred. Tell ed-Dab'a. Vol. 2. Vienna, 1975. Bietak, Manfred. "Avaris and Piramesse: Archaeological Exploration in the Eastern Nile Delta." Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979): 225-290. Bietak, Manfred. "Canaan and Egypt during the Middle Bronze Age." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 281 (1991): 27-72. Bietak, Manfred. Tell el-Dab'a. Vol. 5. Vienna, 1991. Includes an upto-date bibliography (pp. I7ff.). Bietak, Manfred. "Minoan Wall-Paintings Unearthed at Ancient Avaris." Egyptian Archaeology 2 (1992): 26-28. Bietak, Manfred, et al. "Neue Grabungsergebnisse aus Tell el-Dab'a und 'Ezbet Helmi im dsdichen Nildelta, 1989-1991." Agypten und Levante 4 (1993): 9-80. Bietak, Manfred, and Nanno Marinatos. "Minoan Wall Paintings from Avaris." Egypt and the Levant 5 (1995). Bietak, Manfred, et al. Pharaonen und Fremde, Dynastien im Dunkel. Exhibition catalog, Rathaus, City of Vienna, 8 September-12 Oc tober 1994. Vienna, 1994. Bietak, Manfred. Avaris, The Capital of the hlyksos: New Excava tion Results. The Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lectures in Egyptology, no. 1. British Museum Publications. London, 1996. Habachi, Labib. "Khata'na-Kantir: Importance." Annales du Service des Antiquities de I'Egypte 52 (1954): 443-559. MANFRED BIETAK
D A L I Y E H , W A D I E D - , valley sloping down, some times precipitously, from tire centtal ridge of Palestine, northeast of Bethel, all the way to the Jordan Valley, north of Jericho (32°oo' N , 3 5 ° 2 5 ' E). Its steep, clifflike walls are honeycombed in places with caves, one complex of which was discovered in 1 9 6 2 by the Ta'amireh bedouin, who had been the first, in 1 9 4 8 , to locate what became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. T h e cave that took the name Wadi edDaliyeh was excavated on behalf of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1 9 6 3 - 1 9 6 4 by Paul W. Lapp, after a cache of Aramaic papyrus documents, now known as the Samaria papyri, appeared on tire illegal antiquities market. T h e source of the papyri had proved to be one of the caves in the complex, tire Muhgaret Abu Shinj eh, later called Cave I. Another cave, 'Araq en-Na'asaneh, or Cave II, was also excavated. Cave I produced material that was largely from tire Per sian period, thus yielding an appropriate date for tire papyri in tire late fourth century BCE. This included typical PersianEarly Hellenistic horizon pottery, to which must be added the papyri; some 1 2 8 clay sealings from the papyri; coins purchased with the papyri from tire cave robbers (plus one that was excavated), all of the same period; a scarab; nu merous well-preserved textile fragments; pieces of leather
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sandals and other leather fragments; samples of basketry and wooden implements; glass; and beads and jewelry. T h e skel etal remains of many individuals were found, all of which had been disturbed by the robbers, who reported finding as many as three hundred skeletons, most of them badly burned. It appears from die finds that Cave I had been used as a dwelling and no doubt as a hiding place, in this case by Samaritans fleeing the wrath of Alexander and the Mace donians after a revolt in the late fourth century BCE in which the prefect of Syria, Andromachus, had been burned alive. It is likely that Alexander's forces found the Samaritan ref ugees in the caves in the Wadi ed-Daliyeh and slaughtered them there. The papyri, which have been extensively treated by Frank M. Cross, support this reconstruction. One mentions "[Yesha]yahu, son of Sanballat, governor of Samaria." An other was "written in Samaria." Other documents bear ex act date formulae, reckoned from known Persian adminis trators in the province of Samaria. The range of these dates is about 3 7 5 - 3 3 5 BCE. Many of the papyri are legal or ad ministrative documents, such as refugees would be inclined to take with them. Not only do the personal names, many of them Yahwistic, reveal a great deal about the half-Jewish Samaritan community, they also tell us a good deal about the complex religious and political situation that the return ing Jewish exiles met in Palestine in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. This series of several dozen, closely dated his torical documents provides valuable fixed dates for the study of Aramaic and Paleo-Hebrew paleography for the period just preceding the earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Finally, the papyri have increased our knowledge of the Samaritan community, enhanced our understanding of the history of the Samaritan Pentateuch, and contributed to textual studies of the Hebrew Bible and its transmission. Cave II produced some one hundred pieces of late Early Bronze Age IV pottery (c. 2 1 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 BCE) that has been published by William G. Dever. T h e corpus belongs to his Family CH (for Central Hills), with some overlap with Fam ily J (for Jerichojordan Valley). The group is important partly because it is mostly not from burials but constitutes an assemblage of domestic types, rare in this region of Pal estine. It is also evidence for the widely held theory that many EB IV folk were nomadic pastoralists who lived part of the year in caves and other temporary shelters. Also from Cave II was a small collection of Late Roman pottery and objects, indicating a final occupation, probably by refugees during the Second (or Bar-Kokhba) Jewish Revolt in 1 3 5 CE. [See also Samaritans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cross, Frank Moore. "Papyri of the Fourth Century BC from DaJiyeh." In New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel
Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, pp. 45-69. Garden City, N.Y., 1969. Lapp, Paul W., and Nancy L. Lapp, eds. Discoveries in the Wadi cdDdliyeh. Cambridge, Mass., 1974. W I L L I A M G . DEVER
DALMAN, GUSTAF
( 1 8 5 5 - 1 9 4 1 ) , theologian and first director of the German Protestant Institute of Archae ology in Jerusalem. Dalman was born in Niesky, in south eastern Prussia, a community dominated by Moravians. Af ter studying Protestant theology he taught at the seminary of the Moravian fraternity in nearby Gnadenfeld ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 8 8 7 ) . During a stay in Leipzig in 1 8 8 3 , he was pro moted to doctor of theology. In 1 8 8 7 he moved to Leipzig to become an assistant at the Institutum Judaicum, where he earned his Ph.D. He was appointed director of the insti tute in 1 8 9 3 . Dalman also taught Old Testament at the Uni versity of Leipzig, where he became an associate professor in 1896. In 1 9 0 2 he was elected the first director of the newly founded Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes in Jerusalem. During World War I he was forced to give up that position because of the political situation. In 1 9 1 7 he became a full professor in Greifswald, where he founded an institute for research of Palestine. Following his retirement in 1 9 2 3 , Dalman dedi cated his life to his magnum opus, Arbeit und Sitte in Palastina. He died in Herrnhut, a Moravian village not far from his birthplace.
The Aramaic language was the focus of Dalman's work prior to his directorship at the German institute. He pub lished a grammar and a dictionary of Palestinian Aramaic and a volume on the language of Jesus. In Jerusalem, he collected data on Palestinian customs and manners that is still an important resource for recovering a rapidly vanishing world. His knowledge of the Holy City and its ancient sites, as well as the topography of the land of Israel, appears in his books Orte und Wegejesu and Jerusalem undsein Gelande. His exploration of Petra and its vicinity led to his publishing the first description of the now famous site. Dalman pub lished most of the enormous amount of ethnographic ma terial he had gathered before World War I in seven volumes, under the title Arbeit und Sitte in Paldstina ( 1 9 2 8 - 1 9 4 2 ) . [See also Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes; Petra.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dalman, Gustaf. Paldstinischer Diwan. Leipzig, 1901. Dalman, Gustaf. Grammatikdesjudisch-paldstinischenAramaisch. 2ded. Leipzig, 1905. Dalman, Gustaf. Petra und seine Felsheiligliimer. Leipzig, 1908. Dalman, Gustaf. Neue Petra-Porschungen und Der heilige Felsen von Je rusalem, Leipzig, 1912, Dalman, Gustaf. Jesus—Jeschua; Die drei Sprachen Jesu; Jesus in der Synagoge, aufdem Berge, beim Passahmahl, am Kreuz. Leipzig, 1922.
DAMASCUS Dalman, Gustaf. One und Wegejesu. 3d ed. Gtitersloh, 1924. Dalmarij Gustaf. Aramaische Dialektproben. ad ed. Leipzig, 1927. Dalman, Gustaf. Arbeit und Sitte in Paldslina. 7 vols, in 8. Gtitersloh, 1928-1942. Dalman, Gustaf. Jerusalem und sein Gelande. Gtitersloh, 1930. Dalman, Gustaf. Die Wortejesu. 2d ed. Leipzig, 1930. Dalman, Gustaf. Aramaisch-neuhebrdisches Handwbrlerbuch zu Targtim, Talmud und Midrasch. 2 vols. 3d ed. Gottingen, 1938. Mannchen, Julia. Gustaf Dolmans Leben und Wirken in der Briidergemeinde, fur die Judenmission und an der Universitat I-xipzig, 1855-1902. Wiesbaden, 1987. Mannchen, Julia. Gustaf Dalman als Palastinawissenschafller in Jerusa lem und Greifswald, 1902-1941. Wiesbaden, 1993. VOLKMAR FRITZ
DAMASCUS, current capital of modern Syria, located in a basin east of the Anti-Lebanon range, at the foot of Mt. Qasiyun (33°3o' N , 36°i8' E). Rainfall in the area is fairly meager (about 250-300 mm/year), but the plain is well wa tered by the Barada River. T h e river, augmented with sev eral major irrigation canals, has allowed Damascus to pros per as one of the great oases of Southwest Asia. Because the city has been occupied since antiquity, often playing an important role in the history of the Levant, very little excavation has been possible in Damascus, and to date, virtually no remains of the city prior to the Roman period are known. However, literary sources from the Late Bronze Age onward refer to Damascus and make it possible to con struct its general history from that period through Hellenis tic times, in spite of the lack of archaeological data. History of the City. Although Damascus is popularly called tire oldest continuously occupied city in the world, evidence for its existence currently goes back only to the time of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmosis III, who lists Da mascus as one of the cities whose rulers were captured at the siege of Megiddo in the early fifteenth century BCE. In the Amarna letters, Damascus appears as a town in the land of Upu/Upi, an area under Egyptian sovereignty during vir tually the entire Late Bronze Age. T h e Amarna and other Egyptian texts give no indication that Damascus had any major political significance during this period. During the Iron Age, specifically in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, however, Damascus became the capital of one of the leading Aramean states of tire Levant. It played a significant role in the political life of tire kingdoms of Israel and Judah, usually as an antagonist, but sometimes as an ally against die encroachments of Assyria. Portions of the history of this period are known from biblical texts (especially Kings, Chronicles, and Isaiah), Assyrian records, a few scat tered references in Aramaic inscriptions from northern Syria, and the recently discovered Aramaic Stela from Tel Dan in northern Israel (Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan." Israel Explo ration Journal 43 [1993]: 81-98).
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In the mid-ninth century BCE, Damascus and the kingdom of which it was the capital (usually called Aram or Aram Damascus) became the preeminent political power in the Levant, and its king, Hadad-idri, led an anti-Assyrian coa lition of states in battle against Shalmaneser III in four con frontations between 853 and 845. T h e reign of Hazael (c. 842-800 BCE) saw Damascus become the head of a substan tial empire, dominating most, if not all, of ancient Palestine, including Israel, Judah, and Philistia, and perhaps control ling some parts of northern Syria as well. A decline set in during the reign of Hazael's son, Bir-Hadad, which was not reversed until about 738, when the last independent king of Aram Damascus, Rasyan (biblical Rezin), came to power and led another anti-Assyrian coalition that included Israel, Philistia, and Tyre against Tiglath-Pileser III. This attempt to secede from Assyrian control was unsuccessful and led to disaster for Damascus, which was captured by tire Assyrians in 732 BCE and annexed into the Assyrian provincial system. Because of its important position on the major trade routes of the Levant, Damascus remained a significant city through the rest of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian periods. T h e Hellenistic period brought important changes. Following Alexander's conquest of the Levant (333 BCE), the city became the site of a Macedonian colony and was sub stantially expanded and rebuilt, with new fortifications. In i n BCE, tire city became tire capital of Phoenicia and Coelesyria. Following a brief period under die control of the Nabateans, from 85 to 64 BCE, it was incorporated into the Roman Empire. During the Roman period a number of em perors lavished funds on Damascus for public construction: its main temple was spectacularly reconstructed, the city wall was rebuilt, and major colonnaded streets were con structed. T h e Byzantine period has provided few significant remains, but the city experienced another brief time of glory when it became the Umayyad capital in 661 CE, which cli maxed with the building of the Great Mosque. Unfortu nately, this period of splendor was short-lived, for in 750 CE the 'Abbasid caliphs moved the Islamic capital to Baghdad, leaving Damascus without power. Archaeology of t h e Site. Archaeological information about the pre-Hellenistic periods of Damascus is scarce in the extreme. Although several limited excavations have been undertaken, none have found tiiose levels. Even the exact location and extent of the ancient site are not yet defined. Scholars generally place the original city within the bound aries of the current "Old City," and propose that die great Umayyad mosque, located on a large, flat plateau in the northwest part of the city, was probably built on the site of the main temple of Iron Age Damascus, which was dedi cated to Hadad-Ramman (cf. 2 Kgs. 5:18). Some scholars argue, however, that the rest of the city was located to the west and south of the temple, while others propose that a group of hills to the east and southeast of the mosque area
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DAMASCUS
covers the remains of tire settlement. One hill, located some 3 0 0 m to the south of the mosque, is generally thought to be the prime candidate for tire location of the Iron Age cit adel. Only excavation will further illuminate the problem of the location of the original city. Although no artifacts from Bronze Age Damascus are known, a few items, discovered in secondary contexts, in cluding a carved orthostat, ivories, and bronze ornaments, can be attributed to tire Iron Age. The orthostat (about 8 0 X 7 0 cm) is basalt and is decorated with a carved relief of a crowned sphinx, stylistically datable to the ninth century BCE. It was found incorporated into the substructure of the wall around the Umayyad mosque and probably belonged to the temple of Hadad-Ramman. Of the two ivories, one was found in tire Assyrian fortress town of Til Barsip in northern Syria and the other at the Assyrian capital Kalah, or Kalhu (Ninrrud), in Mesopotamia. They are inscribed with dedications to "our lord Hazael," who may be the Damascene king of that name. Presumably, the ivories were part of the booty taken from Damascus by the Assyrian kings in the eighth century BCE. Each of two bronze horse ornaments, one found on the island of Samos, the other in Eretria in Greece, has an Aramaic inscription mentioning a Hazael, who may be the Damascene king. The ninth-cen tury Bir-Hadad, or Melqart, stela from the North Syrian town of Breij, often attributed to a Damascene king, BirHadad, is now thought by several scholars to belong to the king of a northern Aramean state rather than Damascus (see Wayne T. Pitard, "The Identity of the Bir-Hadad of tire Melqart Stela," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 2 7 2 [ 1 9 8 8 ] : 3 - 2 1 ) . Little is preserved from the Hellenistic period as well, al though most scholars agree that the general plan of the cur rent Old City is based on the Hellenistic reconstitution of Damascus. Jean Sauvaget ( 1 9 4 9 ) argued that a rectangular city wall was constructed during the Hellenistic period, and this appears likely. However, clear evidence for this wall has yet to be found. T h e remains of a hippodrome to the north of tire Old City probably belong to this era. Several elements of Roman Damascus are still visible. The most notable examples of Roman architecture are the remains related to the great temple of Damascene Jupiter (Hadad-Ramman) found in the area of the Umayyad mosque. This temple complex, perhaps the largest in Ro man Syria, can be reconstructed from the existing remains. Two inscriptions, which can be dated to 1 5 / 1 6 and 3 7 / 3 8 CE, indicate the time of the initial construction of the complex. The Temple of Jupiter was surrounded by two concentric enclosure walls. T h e almost-rectangular outer wall encom passed an area of about 3 8 0 by 3 1 0 meters, creating a large outer court for the temple. The interior side of the wall was covered by a portico, which was occupied by a bazaar. Parts of both the eastern and western gates of this enclosure wall still stand in situ, as do some of the columns from the interior
colonnade of the eastern side. Toward the end of the first century, the west and northwest sides of the outer wall were doubled in thickness to create more space for shops. This section was called the gamma, after the Greek letter it re sembled. Within the great courtyard was a second rectangular temenos wall that surrounded the temple proper. It enclosed an area of about 1 5 6 by 9 7 meters and had entrances on all four sides. T h e exterior was decorated with pilasters, and there were square towers at each of the four corners. A con siderable percentage of this enclosure wall is still preserved as the foundation of the current wall surrounding the Umayyad mosque. Much of the principle entrance on the east side, with its impressive propylaeum still exists, as does almost all of tire western wall and the lower sections of the south wall. Within the enclosure, all traces of tire Temple of Jupiter have disappeared, and even its location within the enclosure is uncertain. A study by Klaus S. Freyberger ( 1 9 8 9 ) has shown thatthe entire complex was substantially refurbished during tire reign of Septimus Severus ( 1 9 3 - 2 1 1 ) , including major re constructions of the south and east gates of the inner temenos wall. In addition to the temple complex, tire main street of Ro man Damascus, usually identified with the "Street called Straight" in Acts 9 : 1 1 , can be reconsmtcted. This street was the city's main artery and was oriented east-west. The east ern city gate that opened onto the street (today called Bab esh-Sharqi) is well preserved and has undergone restoration. The gate has three entries, the largest in the center, which opened onto the street itself. This entry indicates that the street was 13.68 m wide. T h e other two entries opened onto tire sidewalks, which were colonnaded porticoes that flanked the road all the way across the city. T h e gate has usually been dated to the early third century CE, but Freyberger ar gues that the decor includes elements that belong to the early first century CE. Thus, the gate and tire grand street were probably constructed in the first century and refurbished during tire reign of Septimus Severus, as the temple complex was. About 5 0 0 m west of the Bab esh-Sharqi are the remains of an arch that was also related to tire street, although its function is not clear. This arch and one about 2 5 0 m farther west (no longer in existence) marked spots where the street made a slight shift in direction (thus, Sttaight Street was not straight). T h e west gate has not been preserved. T h e current wall around the Old City dates largely to tire twelfth century CE, and none of it, besides the east gate, to the Roman period, although many Roman stones have been reused in the current wall. Most of the line of the ancient wall remains unknown, although it is commonly believed that it followed the line of the rectilineal Hellenistic wall, rather than that of tire current, oval-shaped one. Most re-
DAMASCUS constructions of the Roman wall show the current wall over lapping the Roman one only near some of the gates. During the reign of Diocletian ( 2 8 7 - 3 0 5 ) a fortress was built to The west of the temple complex. It is not clear whether it was outside or inside the city wall because the line of the western wall has not been firmly established. How ever, its location became the site of the medieval citadel that stands today. In the reign of Theodosius ( 3 7 9 - 3 9 5 ) , the temple area became the site of a church, dedicated to St. John the Bap tist. It is not known whether Theodosius simply converted the old temple into a church or destroyed the temple and constructed a new building within the inner temenos. Very little architectural evidence of this period survives. Virtually nothing is known of the church and the inner court during this period because the entire area within the temenos wall was cleared to build the mosque in the early eighth century. However, the courtyard area between the inner and outer temenos walls was divided up by the erection of colonnades between the entry gates of the outer and inner walls on the north, east, and west. This apparently was done to allow the rest of the outer court to be filled in with new construction while maintaining open ways into the church courtyard. T h e southern part of the outer court became the site of a new palace at this time. None of the latter has survived, but sec tions of the western and northern colonnades are still in situ. The city came under Islamic control in 6 3 6 CE, and in 6 5 6 the caliph Mu'awiyah made Damascus his capital. This de velopment did not have an immediate impact on the archi tecture of the city. Mu'awiyah occupied the older Byzantine
DAMASCUS.
Thirteenth-century
105
palace and simply shared part of the inner court of the tem ple area with the Christians who worshiped in the church. Caliph al-Walid ( 7 0 5 - 7 1 5 ) , however, confiscated the entire complex shortly after coming to power, demolished every thing inside the temenos wall, and built the Great Mosque, one of the crown jewels of Muslim architecture. The inside of the temenos was completely changed. A huge sanctuary ( 1 3 6 m east-west and 3 7 m north-south) was built along the southern side of the court. Its interior is divided by two rows of columns into three almost-equal aisles. T h e center is intersected by a transept surmounted by a dome. T h e interior of the sanctuary was paneled with marble to a height of about 3 m, above which were extensive mosaics. T o the north of the sanctuary was a large open courtyard, paved with white marble and flanked on the north, east, and west by a two-tiered arcade built to match the style of the sanctuary's northern facade. T h e entire face of the court yard was decorated, the lower part with marble paneling and the upper part with mosaics depicting landscape motifs. T h e mosaics in the Great Mosque covered the largest surface ever put to this use. Only a small portion of the marble pan eling and mosaics has survived the several disasters that have struck the mosque over the centuries. T h e most famous sur viving section of mosaic is the lovely depiction of trees on the northern face of the transept, although a long section on the back wall of the west portico is equally impressive. The Umayyad mosque in Damascus had a very strong influence on Muslim architecture and is referred to in Is lamic documents as one of the wonders of the world. Al-
mausoleum ofRukn
ed-Din. (Courtesy K. Toueir)
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DAMASCUS DOCUMENT
DAMASCUS. Umayyad mosque. T h e interior court. (Courtesy W. T. Pitard)
though much of its original splendor has been lost, it remains an imposing complex. Damascus went into a serious decline with the end of the Umayyad dynasty and the rise of the 'Abbasids, when the capital was moved to Baghdad. In 7 5 0 , the new rulers sacked Damascus and demolished its city wall. The city lost its im portant position and went into a long eclipse, marked by little architectural development. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Creswell, K. A. C. Early Muslim Architecture. 2 vols. 2d ed. New York, 1979. Volume 1 includes the best study of the Umayyad mosque available. For an abridged and less technical version of this work, see A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, revised and supple mented by J. W. Allan (Aldershot, 1989). Dussaud, Rene. "Le temple de Jupiter Damascenien et ses transfor mations aux epoques chretienne et musulmane." Syria 3 (1922): 219-250. Significant analysis of the temple complex; still very useful, although it should be read in light of Creswell's (above) analysis. Freyberger, Klaus S. "Untersuchungen zur Baugeschichte des JupiterHeiligtums in Damaskus." Damaszener Mitteilungan4 (1989): 61-86. Important study concerning the date of the Jupiter temple. Pitard, Wayne T. Ancient Damascus: A Historical Study of the Syrian City-State from Earliest Times until Its Pall to the Assyrians in y$2 B.C.F.. Winona Lake, Ind., 1987. Reconstruction of the historical development of Damascus through the Iron Age. Sack, Dorothee. Damaskus: Entwickhing und Struktur einer orientalischislamischen Stadt. Mainz am Rhein, 1989. Important study of the development of the city from the Iron Age to modern times. Sauvagetjean. "Le plan antique deDamas." Syria 26 (1949): 314-358. Classic and still useful study of the development of Damascus through the Byzantine period. Watzinger, Carl, and Karl Wulzinger. Damaskus: Die Antike Stadt. Wissenschaftliche Veroffentlichungen des Deutsch-Tiirldschen Denk-
malschutz-Kommandos, 4. Berlin and Leipzig, 1921. Foundational study of the archaeological remains of Damascus, detailed, brilliant, and still very useful. WAYNE T . PITARD
DAMASCUS DOCUMENT.
In 1 8 9 6 , Solomon
Schechter of the University of Cambridge, England, discov ered two Hebrew manuscripts in the genizah (a storeroom for valued texts) of a Qaraite synagogue in Cairo. He brought them to Cambridge, England, where they were sub sequently published, in 1 9 1 0 , as tire Damascus Document. The first of the two, manuscript A (tenth century CE) con tains eight sheets of parchment; manuscript B (eleventh/ twelfth century) contains one sheet. Both sides of a sheet were used. Schechter numbered the sheets pages 1 - 1 6 and 1 9 - 2 0 , respectively; page 1 9 of manuscript B parallels, with
some important differences, pages 7 - 8 of manuscript A, thus enabling a continuous, but conflated, text to be re stored. Page 2 0 is not paralleled in manuscript A. The document is comprised of two sections. A paranetic section, the Admonition(s), contains Israel's history, the preservation of a righteous remnant after the Babylonian Exile, and criticism of current religious practice ( 1 - 4 . 1 2 ) ; laws governing a sectarian organization ( 4 . 1 3 - 7 . 1 0 ) ; and
threats
of punishments
to outsiders
and defectors
( 7 . 1 0 - 8 . 1 9 ; 1 9 - 2 0 ) . T h e second section is a collection of
laws governing settlements in "camps" and in "cities" ( 9 - 1 6 ) . T h e name Zadokite Fragments derives from a ref erence in the work to the sons of Zadok; tire alternate des-
DAN ignation Damascus Document derives from a reference to an exile in Damascus. Fragments of texts that either parallel or are similar to the Cairo manuscripts (designated CD for Cairo Damascus) have been found in three caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea (designated 4Q[umran]D[amascus]a-h, 5 Q D , 6 Q D ) . With the aid of these fragments, some scholars reconstruct an "original" Damascus Document in which CD 1 5 and 1 6 directly precede C D 9 and other Cave 4 fragments are in serted before CD 1 and after C D 14. However, fewer than half of the QD fragments actually parallel C D . Schechter and otirers recognized C D as the product of a Palestinian Jewish sect from the Hellenistic period. Since tire Qumran discoveries, C D has played a central role in the dating and identification of the Qumran community. It is acknowledged to contain the most extensive account of the historical and ideological roots of tire group that produced it, traced back to the Babylonian Exile, when God revealed to it "the hidden things in which all Israel had gone astray" (3.14)—namely, calendrical and legal observances. These issues surface in other Qumran texts and seem to represent the original cause for the adoption by certain Jews, perhaps in the third or second century BCE, of a segregated life-style governed by a solar year of 3 6 4 days (not the standard Jewish lunar year of 3 5 4 days) and by their own interpretation of the law of Moses. Their settlements were governed by a mebaqqer ("overseer") and a priest, and dealings with the Temple, and with other Jews and Gentiles, were strictly con trolled. They regarded themselves as living in an "age of wickedness," in which God's anger with Israel would persist, until "there will arise one who will teach righteousness at the end of days" ( 6 . n ) . The relationship between the Damascus communities and the community of the Qumran text known as the Rule of the Community (the yahad) remains unclear. Some scholars identify tire two as one because of references in CD to a Teacher of Righteousness as the initiator of a recent peni tence movement (CD 1 ) . Many prefer, however, to regard the yahad as a splinter group because of its clearly different manner of organization and ideology. If so, tire yahad must have written its own creation into tire CD's history, perhaps in the light of its belief that tire "one who will teach right eousness" had actually arrived. Parts of CD 2 0 appear to be directed from within the yahad against those who rejected tire "Teacher." Schechter attributed C D to an otherwise unknown Zadoldte sect from which tire Dositheans were descended; Is rael Levi ( 1 9 1 1 ) regarded them as Sadducees, but not of tire kind depicted in the works of Josephus; Robert H. Charles ( 1 9 1 2 ) saw them as reformed Sadducees. All these scholars identified the Pharisees as the opponents of the sect, al though Louis Ginzberg found their laws to be essentially Pharisaic. Since the Qumran discoveries, an Essene identi fication has been popular; recent studies on CD's legal
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traditions (which are congruent with the Temple Scroll) again favor the Sadducees, however. T h e origins of the Da mascus community have commonly been ascribed to the Maccabean period, but this conclusion is becoming less cer tain. Reference to "Damascus" may be taken literally, but Frank M. Cross has proposed that it means Qumran, while Jerome Murphy-O'Connor (followed by Philip R. Davies) has argued that it refers to Babylon. Recent publication of the 4 Q D fragments has revived the study of the Damascus communities, whh emphasis on the important part legal differences played in creating ancient Jewish sects. The nonlegal material in CD (to which the Qumran texts add little) also maintains a central place in research into the historical and ideological context of the Qumran scrolls, although no theory currently dominates. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baillet, Maurice. "Document de Damas." In Le "petites grolles" de Qumran, pp. 128-131. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 3. Oxford, 1962. Publication of the 5QD and 6QD fragments. Broshi, Magen, ed. The Damascus Document Reconsidered, Jerusalem, 1992. Critical text edition, including plates and apparatus, incorpo rating some Q materials by Elisha Qimron; an essay on the 4QD materials by Joseph Baumgarten; and a bibliography (1970-1989) by Florentino Garcia Martinez. Cross, Frank M., Jr. The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies. New York and London, 1958. Davies, Philip R. The Damascus Covenant: An Interpretation of the "Da mascus Document," Sheffield, 1982. Analysis of the Admonition, in cluding a discussion of the history of research on CD. Ginzberg, Louis. An Unknown Jewish Sect (1922). New York, 1976. Fullest discussion of the legal material, though the identification of the group concerned is widely challenged. Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome. "An Essene Missionary Document? CD II, 14-VI, 1." Revue biblique 77 (1970): 201-229. Argues that the Damascus Community (identified as the Essenes) immigrated into Palestine from Babylon and formed a sect in the face of opposition to tiieir laws. Rabin, Chaim, ed. and trans. The Zadokite Documents. 2d rev. ed. Ox ford, 1958. Includes text, translation, and notes, but no introduction. Schechter, Solomon. "Fragments of a Zadokite Work." In Documents of Jewish Sectaries (1910). Reprint, New York, 1970. Contains a bib liography for 1910-1969, and an updated introduction by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, correcting several misreadings in the original edition's in troduction. Wacholder, Ben Zion, and Martin G. Abegg, comps. and eds. A Pre liminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four. 2 vols. Washington, D.C., 1991-1992. Contains a computer-generated reconstruction of 4QD ~' based on concordance entries, plus a concordance of CD passages paralleled in the 4Q fragments. See, in particular, pages 1-57, 102. l,
1
PHILIP R. DAVIES
D A N (Ar., Tell el-Qadi), site located at the northeast end of tire Flula Valley, at the foot of Mt. Iiermon and at the headwaters of the Jordan River's most important source (map reference 2 1 1 2 X 2 9 4 9 ) . T h e site is a rectangular, era-
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ter-shaped mound diat was formed by massive ramparts constructed in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. It was first identified with biblical Laish/Dan by Edward Robinson in 1 8 3 8 , an identification that has been accepted unani mously since. A bilingual (Greek-Aramaic) stone inscription found at the site also refers to the place name Dan. Laish is mentioned in the Egyptian Execration texts, where its king, Horon-Ab is named, and in the Mari texts, in connection with Hazor, in correspondence concerning tin shipments. [See Mari Texts.] Later, in the fifteenth century BCE, Laish is again mentioned in tire list of cities conquered by the Egyptian king Thutmosis III. Dan is extensively referred to in tire Bible, particularly in passages reflecting the Iron Age
evidence on tire north and east side of the tell and there is a possible gate complex in area K. T h e pottery sequence makes Dan a type-site for distinguishing earlier (EB II or early EB III) from later (EB III) assemblages. Key finds include animal figurines, models of couches, cylinder-seal impressions (one of the largest groups in the Levant), a bone cylinder, Khirbet Kerak ware, and metal implements. [See Seals.] Middle Bronze Age (Strata X I I - I X ) . Tel D a n was oc cupied during the Intermediate Bronze Age (EB IV), but without leaving more than some flimsy wall remains and pottery sherds. It is not yet possible to say whether there was a gap in settlement over parts of this period or whether it milieu (e.g., Jos. 19:47; Jgs. 1 8 ; 1 Kgs. 1 2 : 2 9 - 3 1 , 1 5 : 1 6 ff.). was partially contemporary with either the previous Early T h e latest ancient reference is that in the Onom.ast.icon of Bronze Age or tire subsequent Middle Bronze Age. The M B Eusebius (entry no. 3 6 9 ) , who located the place 4 mi. from is represented by four strata (IX-XII) that, in area B, Panias (Banias). achieved an accumulation of 4 - 5 m, excluding the interior embankment. Trial excavations at the site were carried out in 1 9 6 3 by Zeev Yeivin, and in 1 9 6 6 salvage excavations were initiated The most prominent features of the M B occupation are by tire Israel Department of Antiquities under the direction its robust fortifications and its uniquely intact mud-brick of Avraham Biran. In 1 9 7 4 the project was transferred to gate. T h e initial phases of settlement in stratum XII utilized the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology of the the remains of the existing EB fortification. Late in this stra Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, still under Biran's di tum, or perhaps in stratum XI, these fortifications were sup rectorship. As of 1 9 9 5 tire expedition was still active. Seven plemented by additional embankments and superstructures excavation areas were opened: A, B, H, K, M , T , and Y. All on tire north and east; on the south, a new rampart was areas except H and M straddle the perimeter of the tell, constructed by erecting, in stages, a vertical stone core with exposing the Bronze Age fortifications. The fortifications embankments sloping down to either side. This core was 6.5 enclose springs on the west side of the tell, where a high m thick and preserved to a height of 10.5 m. T h e width of water table and dense vegetation thwart excavation. the rampart at its base was approximately 5 0 m. T h e upper part of the rampart has long since eroded away, and it is not Neolithic P e r i o d ( S t r a t u m XVI). The earliest occupa known whether it was crowned with a freestanding wall. tion discerned at Tel Dan dates to the Pottery Neolithic (PN) period, perhaps early in the Wadi Rabah phase (c. A triple-arched mud-brick gate flanked by two towers 5 0 0 0 BCE). Occupation remains were encountered in area B, may have been built at the same time, possibly on the site where a deep probe at the base of tire MB rampart core of an earlier EB gate. At the time of its discovery, it was reached bedrock. Five stratigraphic phases were distin preserved almost to its original height. This edifice had been guished here in 2 m of accumulation. A subsurface infant plastered in antiquity. Apparently, however, it was unstable burial in a jar was uncovered. Significant quantities of P N and prone to collapse, as evidence was found of unsuccess material were also found in areas M and T , in tire fills of the ful attempts at shoring it up. In the end, it was blocked up lowest levels, indicating a fairly extensive area of habitation. and covered by the earthen embankment, resulting in the The material culture features a characteristic flint industry, gate's almost total preservation. A new gate, of stone this worked-basalt objects, bone utensils, and pottery—includ time, was apparently built in area AB on tire tell's south ing several complete vessels—of plain, slipped and bur crest. nished, and incised wares. T h e remains inside tire M B ramparts (and under them, Early Bronze Age (Strata XV-XIV). Surprisingly, Tel in the case of stratum XII) seem comprised of rather prosaic Dan seems to be almost devoid of Chalcolithic and EB I courtyard dwellings with baking ovens and cooking and occupation. (The exceptions are three or four sherds and a storage facilities. Some of these may have had more than possible "violin figurine," all from fills, objects that may one story. Particularly evocative were the stone-built cham have been transported from elsewhere in a later period.) ber and cist tombs and infants buried in jars under the floors. This implies at least fifteen hundred years of abandonment. No extramural cemetery was found, though a few M B I and EB remains have been found in all the deep exposures (areas II tombs have been found at the nearby sites of Hagoshrim, A, B, K, M, T , Y)—even those outside the limits of later Gonen, and Kefar Szold. T h e chamber tombs (of which fortifications—attesting that the EB settlement was the most three were excavated) accommodated the remains of adult extensive of all. Massive stone and brick fortifications are in and adolescent males and females and included tire richest
DAN finds: pottery, weapons, bone-inlaid boxes, scarabs, jewelry, and food offerings. Cist tombs held the remains of children above the age of two years and jar burials contained infants or fetuses. The latter two burial types usually included one or two pottery vessels and a scarab or so. These practices appear to be indicative of social status dependent on age. T h e artifacts from both the tombs (which contain many complete forms) and the floors above them provide a long sequence of material culture from which both typological development and social evolution can be inferred. T h e M B settlement was destroyed by a great conflagration sometime in the sixteenth or early fifteenth century BCE. [See Tombs; Grave Goods.] Late Bronze Age (Strata VIII-VII). Inside the perim eter of the M B fortifications, LB remains were found in all areas where sufficient depth was attained: stratum VIII rep resents the LB I and stratum VII the LB II. T h e occupa tional remains of stratum VIII were built over the desttuction layer of the previous M B stratum and exhibit a similar material culture and a continuation of mortuary practices. At this time the first evidence for metallurgy is found at Tel Dan in the form of melting furnaces, crucibles, slags (es pecially in area B), and a mold. In area K, a portion of a well-preserved stone-built structure was excavated that contained a terra-cotta mask, a javelin head, and the afore mentioned mold (for a scepter?). Stratum VII was often truncated by the pitting and build ing activities of the subsequent Iron I strata, VI and V. Its remains testify, however, to public architecture and some degree of wealth. A flagstone pavement or street bordered by structures on either side extended north from the area AB gate. A terra-cotta plaque depicting a dancing figure playing a musical instrument was found under this pave ment. During this stage, a metallurgy industry based chiefly on recycling copper and bronze is indicated in areas B and Y by furnaces, slags, blowpipe nozzles, and the like. How ever, the most impressive assemblage of this period (four teenth-thirteenth centuries BCE) was found in a large, cor belled, stone-built tomb ( T . 3 8 7 ) in the MB style, the so-called "Mycenaean tomb." Approximately forty individ uals—men, women, and children—were interred over time, with older burials pushed aside to make room for later bur ials and offerings. Almost five hundred objects were counted among the burial goods, including sheep or goat bones (meat offerings), 108 pottery vessels—28 of which were im ported from either the Aegean or Cyprus—alabaster and basalt vessels, bronze tools, weapons and vessels, decorated bone and ivory items, and glass, silver, and gold jewelry. Iron I (Strata VI-V). Some indications of continuity from the previous period appear in the Iron I strata. In gen eral, pottery forms and metal utensils are clearly descended from LB types. Metallurgy remained an important aspect of the economy, though the Iron I industrial remains are more
109
extensive titan those of the previous period. In Iron I the emphasis is on intensive recycling, and there was a cultic association in area AB in the form of a small appended sanc tuary containing such ceremonial objects as a miniature shrine. Nevertheless, important differences and innovations are also present. Myriad deep, often stone-lined, pits are featured in almost all of the excavated areas. Frequently these contained a wide variety and large number of pottery vessels—from large pithoi to small pyxides—animal bones, organic residues, and ash. Particularly suggestive are the many collared-rim pithoi found with pithoi of Galilean and Phoenician types. The collared-rim pithoi are most at home in the central highlands of Samaria and are rare in the north of the country, except at D a n and at a few sites in the east ern, Upper Galilee highlands. Their significant presence at Dan has been attributed to the migration of the tribe of Dan described in Judges 18. [See Ceramics, article on SyroPalestinian Ceramics of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.] T h e floors and architecture of stratum VI (c. twelfth cen tury BCE) were rarely preserved, except for pits. This oc cupation seems to have been a more ephemeral one, but the lack of preservation is chiefly the result of heavy building and leveling in stratum V (late twelfth-mid-eleventh cen turies BCE), one of the most substantial levels at Tel Dan. Stratum V shows a dense array of domestic and industrial architecture in almost every area of the tell. Some of these structures were clearly two stories high. This stratum was destroyed in a great conflagration that apparently enveloped tire entire tell, resulting in a rich and varied assemblage of artifacts. Interestingly enough, no burial remains were found from this or the succeeding Iron Age. Iron Age II (Strata IV-II). Dan's eminence as a cultic center for the Israelite kingdom was responsible for its more or less continuous prosperity and growth in Iron II. The high place in area T and the gate complexes in areas A and AB show a series of major building phases that utilized fine con struction and masonry techniques. The excavator discerned three major building phases in the Iron II high place and attributed them to prominent Israelite kings: 1. Bama A: Dating to the late tenth century BCE Qeroboam I), the stratum-IV bama is represented by a row of massive rectangular dressed stones laid out under the soutii ern foundations of bama B. An ashlar-constructed altar plat form, a libation installation (or olive press), and several other richly endowed rooms were associated with this massive substructure. 2. Bama B: The ninth-century BCE (stratum III, reign of Ahab) bama gave the structure its present form. It is com prised of headers and stretchers dressed with margins in the classic royal Israelite fashion found at Samaria and Me giddo. Cedar beams were integrated at horizontal intervals (cf. 1 Kgs 7:12). The altar platform was augmented and a
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belt of chambers erected around the temple podium and altar precinct, creating an enclosed temenos (or altering the previous one). The in situ work of the stonemasons left a thick yellow travertine floor surrounding this stage's struc tures. 3. Bama C: The eighth century BCE (stratum II, reign of Jeroboam II) bama represents a phase of minor alterations and supplements. It was also the phase that revealed a series of cultic objects—altars, incense shovels, a scepter head, and sacrificial remains—in the exterior belt of rooms surround ing tire cultic precinct. This was also the stage to which most of tire epigraphic material could be attributed. Like the cultic precinct, the gate complexes also seem to show successive augmentation and aggrandizement. The tenth- and early ninth-century BCE fortification and gate plans have only been recovered in difficult-to-decipher frag ments under the well-preserved remains of the assemblage from the ninth-eighth centuries BCE. By tire time of bama B, the high place and the gates on tire southern periphery of
the tell were connected by means of a monumental slabpaved avenue found in areas A, M, and T . T h e excavator has assigned this and its coeval four-chambered gate and buttressed solid fortification wall to Ahab. T h e last upper gate and some related architecture have been dated to the eighth century BCE and are associated with Jeroboam II. An impressive array of cultic paraphernalia was excavated in and around tire gate complex, including an ashlar canopy platform, decorated stone column bases and capitals in the Assyrian style, groups of massebot in small "chapels," altars, groups of complete pottery vessels presumed to have a cultic function, and more. Most significant of all is the recent ( 1 9 9 3 - 1 9 9 4 ) discovery of fragments of a stela (see figure 1 ) , inscribed in Aramaic, that mentions a ldng of the House of David and a king of Israel (perhaps Jehoram). Though much conttoversy surrounds its interpretation, most schol ars are now dating its placement to the second half of the ninth century BCE and its shattering to tire first half of the eighth century BCE. The last phase was destroyed in
DAN. Figure 1. Aramaic inscription fragment. Found in the wall bordering the outer Iron Age gate plaza. The text recounts the exploits of a victorious Aramean king, probably Hazael, and mentions a king of Israel and the house of David. Dated c. 850-800 BCE. (Courtesy Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem)
DAN
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DAN. Figure 2. Bilingual inscription. Found in the cultic precinct; Greek above, Aramaic below. T h e text reads " T o the God who is in Dan, Zoilos made a vow" and comprises forceful evidence for the identification of Tell el-Qadi with biblical Dan. Dated c. 200-150 BCE. (Courtesy Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem)
die eighth century BCE, in a great conflagration that pre served these finds. Iron Age III (Stratum I). T h e period of Assyrian rule over ancient Israel is surprisingly well represented at Tel Dan. While most of the Galilee was devoid of settlement, and even sites of former prominence (Hazor, Tel Kinnerot) were either abandoned or occupied by fortresses alone, Dan experienced a population explosion of sorts. The entire tell was densely occupied by an orthogonal network of domestic structures and streets. Wide-ranging trade relations are ev idenced by the presence of Assyrian, Phoenician, Ammon ite, Judahite, and Corinthian pottery and other finds. Later Iron Age remains adjacent to the high place were apparentiy removed by Hellenistic-period modifications, but cultic ac tivity probably continued there because new monumental buildings were erected nearby. Some of these show Assyr ian-style pilaster construction. In contrast, the fortifications and gate complexes—perhaps desttoyed by the Assyrians— were left in disrepair. T h e large number of complete vessels and other artifacts found in this stratum indicate sudden abandonment, though no real destruction layer was detected in most parts of the tell. Persian, Hellenistic, R o m a n , and Medieval Periods. Tel Dan appears to have lost much of its grandeur and, by inference, part of its original cultic importance, in the Per sian through the medieval periods. Occupation was appar ently confined to the environs of the high place, where cultic activity did continue. A large cache of Persian-period figu rines was recovered in one of the rebuilt temenos chambers. From the Hellenistic period in particular, there is evidence
of the construction of a new cultic precinct based on the same principles that had guided the Iron Age one: a belt of rooms surrounding an open space containing the central platform and altar court. These latter edifices were also sup plemented. T h e most important find from this period came from the area of the cultic precinct: a bilingual (Greek-Ar amaic) stone inscription mentioning "the god who is in Dan" (see figure 2 ) . T h e upper gateway in area AB also continued to function as a passage, if not an actual gate. T h e Roman period saw the surfaces in the cultic precinct raised and a new temenos wall constructed. A thick plaster floor was laid over the Iron Age platform. An ashlar-built fountain house was uncovered, fed by terra-cotta pipes drawing water from the nearby spring. All across the south ern flank of the tell, above the remains of the Iron Age gates, similar pipes were found in articulation. These carried spring water to irrigate the outlying fields. By this time the cult place at Dan had been largely supplanted by the one at nearby Banias, though the two clearly coexisted over a long period of time. [See Banias.] By the end of the Roman pe riod, Tel Dan was abandoned, except for an ephemeral early Ottoman occupation found in area M and its corresponding cemetery found along the margins of the tell, close to the surface. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Naveh. "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan." Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993): 81-98. Detailed ac count and analysis of the recently discovered stele mentioning the "House of David," including a description of the archaeological con text.
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Biran, Avraham. Biblical Dan. Jerusalem, 1994. Well-illustrated, pop ular book summarizing twenty-seven seasons of excavation and the excavator-audior's interpretations of the finds. Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Naveh. "The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment." Israel Exploration Journal 45 (1995): 1-18. Biran, Avraham, David Ilan, and A. Greenberg. Dan I: An Excavation History, the Pottery Neolithic, the Early Bronze Age and the Middle Bronze Age Tombs. Jerusalem, 1996. Ilan, David. "Mortuary Practices at Tel Dan in the Middle Bronze Age: A Reflection of Canaanite Society and Ideology." In The Archaeology of Death in the Ancient Near East, edited by S. Campbell and A. Green. Oxford, forthcoming. Summary of the MB burial data and an analysis of its cultural significance. Stager, Lawrence E., and Samuel R. Wolff. "Production and Com merce in Temple Courtyards: An Olive Press in the Sacred Precinct at Tel Dan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 243 (i 981): 95-102. Alternative explanation (olive press) for the "li bation installation" found in the sacred precinct and attributed to stratum IV. Wapnish, Paula, and Brian Hesse. "Faunal Remains from Tel Dan: Perspectives on Animal Production at a Village, Urban, and Rural Center." ArchaeoZoologia 4.2 (1991): 9-86. Revelatory examination of animal husbandry at Tel Dan, showing differing utilization in different parts of the town, exploitation of the site's hinterland, and changing patterns over time. Yellin, Joseph, and Jan Gunneweg. "Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis and the Origin of Iron Age I Collared-Rim Jars and Pithoi from Tel Dan." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 49 (1989): 133-141. Scientific analysis of a particular pottery type, demonsttating both its local and distant origins.
road; she made an outstanding contribution in providing water facilities by digging wells and cisterns along the pil grim route and by building rest houses and lodgings. Arab geographers such as al-Harbi and Yaqut and the ttavelers Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Batutah have recorded vivid details of the constructions, facilities, and provisions provided by Zu baydah along the Kufah-Mecca road. She acquired a great reputation for her work. Several places were named after her, that is, Zubaydiyah (known as U m m Ja'far). Later, the road acquired the name Darb Zubaydah. So far, about one hundred sites on the route have been recorded. Of these thirteen are located within Iraq, and the remaining are situated in Saudi Arabia. According to early geographers, there were twenty-seven main and as many secondary pilgrim stations on the road. There were several other rest places established along the main branches of tire road. The most famous of these were al-'Aqabah, Zubalah, Fayd, Samirah, an-Nuqrah, ar-Rabadhah, Ma'din Bani, Sulaym, and Dhat 'Irq. The 'Abbasid caliphs provided mile stones, which had Kufic inscriptions giving distances be tween the stations. Historians such as al-Tabari and Ibn al-Afhir furnish details of the erection of milestones and de tails of the distances along the road starting from Kufah. The road was also provided with road-signs (a'lam) and fire signals.
DAVID ILAN
Along the road, Kufic inscriptions are found on rocks at places such as as-Suwargiyah, Hadha, and Samirah. The condition of the road was maintained regularly; it was cleaned and cleared from various obstacles. It was paved in the sandy areas; steep hills and mountains were cut; and smooth ttacks were made with steps at some places. Of archaeological interest are the ruins surviving on the Darb Zubaydah. These are the pilgrim stations, water tanks, wells, forts, rest houses, milestones, and inscriptions (alRashid, 1 9 8 0 ) . Early Islamic pottery, glass, and coins are die main finds along the Darb Zubaydah. The pottery sherds are of a great variety—luster-painted, tin-glazed, splashed, monochrome green-glazed, and unglazed ware with or with out decoration. Fragments of soft stone vessels have also been recovered. Minted in different cities, gold dinars, silver dirhams, and bronze coins of the Umayyad and 'Abbasid caliphates have been discovered along the route. The most remarkable station is ar-Rabadhah about 2 0 0 Ion ( 1 2 4 mi.) southeast of the city of Medina (Madinah alMunawwrah). At al-Rabadhah excavations under the direc tion of Sa'ad al-Rashid since 1 9 7 9 have produced fine ar chitecture and numerous archaeological finds in great variety, such as masonry foundations of houses, mosques, cemeteries, tombstones, and reservoirs and wells. T h e architecmre of the residential houses reveal typical Rabadhah style; independent units are surrounded by strong walls. The structure of the house are defended by towers built along the walls and on the corners. Remains of other buildings, public facilities, small streets between the houses, industrial
D A R B Z U B A Y D A H , pilgrimage road beginning at Kufah in Iraq and ending at Mecca (Makkah) in Saudi Ara bia. According to the Qur'an, a "pilgrimage to the Ka'bah (at Mecca) is a solemn duty to God, for all who are able to make dris journey." Thus roads from all Islamic countries converged at Mecca. T h e origin of the Darb Zubaydah may be traced in sections to the early sixth century CE as a trade route linldng the Hijaz and central Arabia with al-Hira in Iraq. It was during the 'Abbasid period, however, that its importance grew, and it developed into a full-fleged high way. The transfer of the 'Abbasid capital from Damascus to Baghdad in AH 1 3 2 / 7 5 0 CE necessitated establishment of di rect communication between the political and religious cen ters. The Kufah-Mecca road, existing prior to the 'Abbasid period was linked to Baghdad by extending it farther north. Several earlier 'Abbasid caliphs, especially, Abu'l 'Abbas asSaffah, Abu Ja'far al-Mansur, al-Maholi, and al-Rashid, took an interest in the establishment of the Kufah-Mecca road and made arrangements for the provisions and facilities essential for travelers. The 'Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid ( 1 7 0 - 1 9 3 / 7 8 6 - 8 0 9 ) several times visited Mecca accompanied by his wife, Zu baydah. They realized the conditions on the route and lack of facilities available to the pilgrims. Queen Zubaydah took keen interest in the improvement of the Baghdad-Mecca
DATING TECHNIQUES units, washrooms, and sewage disposal channels have been found. Recent research and archaeological studies on the road has revealed abundant information about the archae ological sites and remains of facilities on the road. From Rabadhah come a variety of metal objects, such as an iron dagger, a spouted receptacle, kohl containers, a dagger sheath, an iron chain, a fragment of an instrument, and an imal figures, glass, and jewelry in wood, bone, and ivory. Two large limestone reservoirs, one circular and the other square at Rabadhah are unique features. T h e circular struc ture has a diameter of 6 4 . 5 m ( 2 1 1 . 6 ft.) and its walls rise up to 4 . 7 m ( 1 5 . 4 ft.) above a gypsum floor. Adjacent to it is filter tank of 5 5 X 1 7 X 3 . 1 5 m ( 1 8 0 . 4
X
55-8 X 1 0 . 3 ft.)
through which the reservoir received flood water after fil tering. T h e reservoir dates to the tenth century, is still in good condition, and had a capacity of 1 4 , 2 5 0 cu m. T h e square reservoir, which measures 2 6 X 2 6 m ( 8 5 . 3 X 8 5 . 3 ft.) has gypsum-plastered walls, strengthened by semicir cular buttresses. It has two main inlets, one of them fed by a dam. These reservoirs along with about one hundred tanks of different dimensions and capacity are suggestive of water engineering that existed at Rabadhah and the importance attached to a water supply. Caliph Harun al-Rashid and his wife Zubaydah not only took keen interest in the establishment of the road but spent large sums for its maintenance and protection. They ap pointed regular officials for its upkeep and provision of fa cilities essential for the comfort of travelers. When the road was threatened soldiers were despatched. T h e traffic on the road was constant and considerable. Caravans by the thousands occasionally traveled at the same time. T h e road declined from the ninth century CE because of the incursions of various ttibes and later by the raids of the Qarmatians. The fall of Baghadad in 1 2 5 8 to the Mongols was cata strophic for the road. From an archaeological point of view, the Darb Zubayadah is an excellent example of early road systems in Arabia. T h e excavations along the road, espe cially at al Rabadhah attest to the flourishing of and ad vanced civilization and to the mingling of different Islamic countries along the road. [See also 'Abbasid Caliphate; Arabian Peninsula, article on The Arabian Peninsula in Islamic Times; Mecca; and M e dina.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Atlal: The Journal of Saudi Arabian Archaeology 1-6 (1977-1982). HarbT, Ibrahim al-. Kitdb al-manasik wa-amakin turuq al-hajj wama'alim al-Jazirah. Edited by Hamad al-Jasir. Riyadh, 1969. Ibn al-Athlr, Izz al-DTn. Al-kamilft al-tdrikh. 9 vols. Cairo, 1929-1938. Ibn Batutah. Rihlatlbn Batutah. 2 vols. Cairo, 1928. Ibn Jubayr, Muhammad ibn Ahmad. The Travels of Ibnjubayr. Edited by M. J. de Goeje. Leiden, 1907. Ibn Khurdadhbih. Al-masa/ik •wa-mamalik. Edited by M. J. de Goeje. Leiden, 1889.
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Ibn Rustah, Ahmad ibn 'Umar. Kitdb al-a'ldk an-Nafisa. Edited by M. J. de Goeje. 2d ed. Leiden, 1892. Jasir, Hamad al-. "Al-Rabadhah fi Kutub al-Mutaqaddimin." Al-Arab 1 (1967): 5-8. MuqaddasI, Muhammad ibn Ahmad. Ahsan al-laqdsim ft ma'rifat alaqalim. Edited by M.J. de Goeje. Leiden, 1877. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. "Ancient Water-Tanks on the Haj Route from Iraq to Makkah and Their Parallels in Other Arab Countries." Atlal 3 (1979): 55-62, pis. 28-43. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. "New Light on the History and Archaeology of AlRabadhah (Locally Called Abu Salim)." Seminar for Arabian Studies 9 (i979): 88-101. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. "A Brief Report on the First Archaeological Exca vation at al-Rabadhah." Seminar for Arabian Studies 10 (1980): 8 1 84. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. Darb Zubaydah: The Pilgrim Road from Kufa to Mak kah. Riyadh, 1980. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. Al-Rabadhah: A Portrait of Early Islamic Civilisation in Saudi Arabia. London, 1986. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. "Nuqud Islamiyya MuktashaFah ft Darb Zubay dah." Al-Yarmuk Lil-Maskukat 3.1 (1991): 41-56. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. "A New "Abbasid Milestone from al-Rabadha in Saudi Arabia." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 3 (1992): 138H3. SamhudT, 'AIT ibn 'Abd Allah al-. Wafa" al-wafd' bi-akhbar Ddr alMustafd. 4 vols. Edited by Muhyi al-DTn 'Abd al-Harmd. Cairo, 1955. TabarT, al-. Tdrikh al-rusul wa-al-muluk. 15 vols. Edited by M. J. de Goeje et al. Leiden, 1879-1901. Yaqut ibn 'Abd Allah al-HamawT. Mu'jam al-bulddn. 5 vols. Beirut, 19S5-I957SA'AD ABDUL Aziz AL-RASHID
D A T I N G T E C H N I Q U E S . Many artifacts and skel etal remains can be dated by reference to an established typological framework. T h e chronology of such a frame work, except within a well-documented historical period, is ultimately based on a chronometric technique such as radiocarbon, thermoluminescence, or dendrochronology. These and other techniques are also used for placement within the framework. T h e essential characteristic of nearly all tiiese is that they are "absolute," in the sense of giving a date tiiat is based on currently measurable quantities; hence, they are objective, being independent of existing chronolo gies. T h e techniques outlined below are: ( 1 ) radiocarbon, (2) dendrochronology, ( 3 ) luminescence, ( 4 ) elecnon spin resonance, ( 5 ) uranium-series, ( 6 ) potassium-argon, ( 7 ) fission tracks, ( 8 ) amino acid racemization, (9) obsidian dating, ( 1 0 ) other chemical techniques, ( 1 1 ) archaeomagnetism, and ( 1 2 ) pollen analysis, climatic change, oxygenisotope stages, and the Milankovitch timescale. Error limits are quoted at the 6 8 percent level of confidence (i.e., 1 sigma). R a d i o c a r b o n Dating. T h e carbon in the carbon dioxide in tlie atmosphere consists mainly of nonradioactive carbon1 2 and carbon-13; there is also a minute amount of wealdy radioactive carbon-14 resulting from the interaction of cos mic-ray neutrons with the nitrogen in the upper atmosphere.
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Carbon dioxide mixes rapidly throughout the atmosphere, and by photosynthesis enters plant life and hence into ani mals; atmospheric carbon dioxide also enters the oceans as dissolved carbonate, so that this too contains carbon-14—as do any shells and deposits formed from it. The totality of atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans is known as the carbonexchange reservoir. The concentration ratio between car bon-14 atoms and nonradioactive carbon atoms is approx imately the same (about one in a million million) throughout the reservoir; it also stays approximately constant with time. In organic matter that is no longer exchanging its carbon with the reservoir, the carbon-14 lost by radioactive decay is not replenished; this is the case, for instance, in the cel lulose molecules of wood. From tire time of formation, the concentration ratio decreases at a rate determined by the immutable 5,730-year half-life of carbon-14; this means that wood 5,730 years old will have a carbon-14 concentration that is one half of its value at formation; for wood that is 11,460 years old, the concentration will be one quarter of the formation value, and so on—or, the concentration de creases by 1 percent every eighty-three years. Hence, com paring the concentration measured in an ancient organic sample with the assumed value at formation can determine the amount of time that has elapsed. In practice, tire method is useful for the period four hun dred to four thousand years ago—although, with special measurement installations, some sample types can reach substantially furtiier back, to about seventy thousand years ago. The error limits on the calendar-year date (i.e., after calibration; see below) are typically in the range ± 50-150 years, being smaller in some millennia than others. Measurement. The carbon-14 concentration in a sample can be determined by converting the carbon of the sample into a gas or into benzene and measuring the emission rate of beta particles in an appropriate detector system. Since the late 1970s, direct measurement of the concentration by means of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) has been increasingly employed. Although such an installation is very expensive, it has the important advantage that the size of the sample required is less by several orders of magnitude—a few thousandths of a gram of carbon instead of a few grams. Sample types. An essential characteristic of a sample is that over the centuries of burial it should not.have acquired any fresh carbon from the atmosphere (e.g., by fungal growth). A minute amount of modern carbon can cause the date that is determined to be substantially too recent, par ticularly for samples near the forty-thousand-year limit. Conversely, tire incorporation of "dead" carbon at forma tion can cause the opposite effect. Although tire sample ma terial itself may have high integrity, intrusive contamination may have been acquired during burial; the humic acids car ried in percolating groundwater are an example. It follows that the extent to which a sample is reliable is bound up with the stringency of the laboratory pretreatment that can be
applied. T h e severity that a laboratory can afford to use is dependent both on tire size of the initial sample and on tire amount of carbon required by the measurement facility; the severity needed depends also on the age. For wood the use of extracted cellulose avoids lignin and humic acids. For precise dating, a serious problem with wood and charcoal is estimation of tire extent to which the wood's formation predated the archaeological event of in terest. For bone, use of the extracted protein fraction (col lagen, gelatin) is necessary. Unfortunately, the amount remaining decreases with age and in some burial environ ments, among them the Near East, too little is left in bones from periods earlier than, say, the Neolithic. Charred bone is a good alternative. Grain can be dated reliably, particu larly if charred. Single grains can be dated with the AMS technique, but site association is a severe problem. Among other datable sample types are shell, peat, sediment and soils, ivory paper and textiles, straw in mud bricks, and traces of charcoal in iron objects. The golden rule in sample collection is prior discussion with tire relevant laboratory. Calibration. A raw age from a laboratory is given in con ventional radiocarbon years BP ("before tire present," de fined as 1950). This is not the same as the age in calendar years (i.e., sidereal years) because the carbon-14 concentra tion in the biosphere varies slightly from decade to decade and century to century: thus, wood formed at some time in the past does not necessarily have the same carbon-14 con centration as wood formed today. T h e variation occurring over the last ten thousand years has now been established by measuring samples of wood for which tire age has been determined by dendrochronology. By using this "calibration curve," ages in radiocarbon years can be converted into ages in calendar years or calendar dates—denoted by cal BP, cal BCE, or cal CE. Extension of the calibration curve further back in time is being undertaken by intercomparison with the ura nium-series technique using samples of coral. The terminology just given, BP and so forth, is specific to radiocarbon dating. Most other techniques yield ages di rectly in calendar years and the use of BP is then confusing (because, it implies radiocarbon years rather than calendar years); exceptions to this are amino-acid dates and obsidian dates calibrated by reference to radiocarbon. Dendrochronology (Tree-Ring Dating). For some spe cies of trees growing in some climatic conditions, visually recognizable rings form annually with a climatically deter mined width pattern. This width pattern allows cross dating between trees felled in different periods (the pattern shown by the inner part of a recent tree can be matched with that shown by the outer part of a tree that was felled earlier). In this way a master chronology can be established for a region and building timber of unknown age can be dated by dis covering where its pattern fits onto tire master chronology. If sapwood is present on the timber, high accuracy is pos sible; even so, a degree of uncertainty remains as to how
DATING TECHNIQUES many years elapsed between felling and usage on the site concerned. T o obtain a reliable fit onto the master chronol ogy, the piece being dated needs to contain a minimum of about fifty rings. T h e Californian bristiecone pine chronology and the Eu ropean oak chronology have made possible the conversion of radiocarbon years to calendar years. T h e trees concerned are remarkably long-lived and by leapfrogging back from recent trees to successively older fossil trees, as indicated above, it has been possible to cover the last ten millennia. Luminescence Dating (LD). Thermoluminescence (TL) and optical dating (OD) comprise luminescence dat ing (LD); O D utilizes optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). These are based on tire cumulative effect of nuclear radiation on the crystal structure of certain minerals, mainly quartz and feldspar. The nuclear radiation is provided by ttace amounts of potassium-40, rubidium-87, thorium, and uranium that are naturally present in the sample and its sur roundings. T h e dating signal is obtained, in the case of T L , by heating grains extracted from the sample and measuring the light they emit by means of a highly sensitive photomultiplier; in the case of OSL, the measurement is obtained by shining light on the sample; lasers and halogen lamps can be used, as well as infrared-emitting diodes—in which case the luminescence may be termed IRSL. T h e T L technique was first applied to pottery, the event dated being the firing by the ancient potter (thereby setting to zero the previously accummulated T L ) . It was subse quently extended to stalagmitic calcite (which has zero T L at formation) and to burnt flint (heated accidentally by hav ing fallen into fire, or deliberately). T h e latter application, along with the ESR dating of tooth enamel, has had a par ticular impact on hypotheses concerning the relationship be tween anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals. T h e T L and OSL signals from quartz and feldspar can also be set to zero by exposure to daylight. Thus, windblown sedi ment (such as loess) is set to zero during its transportation, as is waterborne sediment, though in this case the zeroing process is less effective and the OSL method has a strong advantage over T L . For either method it is necessary to evaluate the dose rate of nuclear radiation that the sample was receiving during burial. This is done partly by radioactive analysis in the lab oratory and partly by on-site measurement (of the pene trating gamma radiation that reaches the sample from sur rounding soil and rock, up to a distance of about 0.3 m). It is also necessary to estimate the water content of the sample and soil/rock because any water present attenuates the nu clear radiation. Uncertainty about water content (averaged over tire burial period) can limit the accuracy obtained; sites which have always been bone-dry have an advantage. For pottery and burnt flint, a half-dozen fragments not less than 3 0 mm across and 1 0 m m thick are required. For sediment, about half a kilogram is typically needed. Great
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care must be taken to avoid exposure to daylight, particu larly if the OSL method is being used. Hence, the sample collection of sediment should be done by laboratory spe cialists with appropriate equipment (e.g., a short steel tube which is driven into tire section; the material at the exposed ends is discarded in the laboratory); otiierwise, the samples should be collected at night and secured in thick, opaque plastic bags. Even slight exposure to light may cause the evaluated age to be too recent. Age range is highly dependent on sample type and site; several hundred thousand years is a typical upper limit for flint, calcite, and sediment—although with the latter there is a tendency (if some types of feldspar are present in the sam ple) for the age to be underestimated, particularly beyond fifty thousand years. T h e lower limit is on tire order of one thousand years. With pottery, the lower limit can be on the order of a decade in some cases; the upper limit is usually beyond ten thousand years. T h e accuracy attainable is usu ally in the range 5 - 1 0 percent of the age (i.e., ± 1 5 0 - 3 0 0 years at 1 0 0 0 BCE, ± 3 0 0 - 6 0 0 years at 4 0 0 0 BCE). Hence, the main sttength of the technique is for sites where there are no samples suitable for radiocarbon and on Paleolithic sites beyond the range of radiocarbon. Electron Spin Resonance (ESR). Another way of mea suring the cumulative effect of nuclear radiation is with elec tron spin resonance (ESR). Its principal archaeological ap plications have been to tooth enamel and stalagmite calcite. ESR reaches back several million years; its lower limit is a few thousand years. T h e above remarks about dose-rate evaluation apply here, but with additional complexity in tire case of tooth enamel because of uranium migration. As a result, two ages are quoted, based on the assumptions of early uptake (EU) and linear uptake (LU), respectively (in some cases the EU age is substantially lower than tire L U age). Large teeth (elephant, mammoth) are preferred; usu ally, separate determinations on about a dozen samples are averaged. Uranium-Series Dating. Stalagmite calcite and other forms of that mineral and also some products from volcanic eruptions lend themselves to uranium-series dating. At for mation, only uranium is present in die sample material. With time, radioactive daughter products (thorium-230, protactinium-231) build up slowly; determination of the ratio of daughter product to parent uranium allows the age to be evaluated. Measurement is conventionally by alpha spec trometry, but recentiy thermal ionization mass specttometry (TIMS) has been used, which gives much higher precision and needs less of a sample. With T I M S , the age range is approximately 5 0 0 - 5 0 0 , 0 0 0 years; with alpha spectrometry, 2 , 0 0 0 - 3 5 0 , 0 0 0 years. In good circumstances, the error limits using T I M S can be as low as ± 1 percent of the age; with alpha spectrometry the limits are usually in the range of ± 5 percent to ± 1 0 percent. Potassium-Argon Dating. Of crucial importance in the
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study of early hominids, potassium-argon dating is a tech nique based on the accummulation, in volcanic lava, for ex ample, of argon-40 produced from tire slow decay of potassium-40. During a volcanic eruption, previously accumulated argon (a gas) is released, which is tire event which is dated. Obviously, to be useful, human occupation must be reliably associated with volcanic products—for ex ample, between two lava beds. Its age range is enormous: from ten thousand years to about four hundred million years. Fission Track Dating. The main impact of fission track dating has been on the study of early hominids. Its one or two applications to Neolithic obsidian artifacts are to be re garded as exotic rather than useful. The technique is based on the counting of the miniscule tracks left in some minerals by nuclear fragments immediately after the occurrence of spontaneous fission undergone by uranium nuclei present as impurity. Amino-Acid Racemization. Dating by amino-acid racemization is based on the slow conversion within a protein molecule of an amino acid (such as aspartic) from its L form, at formation, to its D form, until an equilibrium mix ture of the two is reached. Epimerization of isoleucine is another reaction utilized, notably in tire dating of ostrich eggshells. These processes are strongly influenced by envi ronmental conditions—by temperature in particular; siteby-site calibration against radiocarbon is usual, along with extrapolation for samples that are beyond tire limit of the latter technique. In its early application the technique acquired a reputation for unreliability, particularly for poorly preserved bone. However, good reliability is now being obtained when sam ple types are selected carefully (such as ostrich eggshell, well-preserved bone, and tooth enamel), when strict atten tion is paid to the validity of the radiocarbon dates used for calibration, and when stringent laboratory procedures are followed. Using aspartic acid the last 5 0 , 0 0 0 - 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 years can be covered; using the epimerization of isoleucine, reach ing a half million years is feasible. In addition to the exten sion of age range, another advantage over radiocarbon is the comparative ease of measurement and, hence, the lower cost. An archaeologist can undertake a much wider sampling of site with amino-acid racemization than could be afforded using radiocarbon only. Obsidian Dating. Another technique sttongly influenced by environmental conditions, particularly temperature, is obsidian dating. It is based on the slow formation of hydra tion rims on freshly cleaved obsidian. Until the late 1970s, tire favored approach was by regional calibration using known-age samples. Since then tire emphasis has been on obtaining absolute ages, independent of other techniques or archaeological chronology. This approach requires two ma jor evaluations (in addition to measurement of the hydration rim itself): the effective burial temperature and laboratory
measurement (at elevated temperature and pressure) of tire rim growth rate for each type of obsidian that is dated. Dates have been reported in the age range from 2 0 0 to 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 years ago. Growth rates vary widely between different parts of the world; the comparatively rapid hydration rates in tropical countries allow more recent dating than in Arctic regions. Other Chemical Processes. The movement of fluorine and uranium into bone and loss of nitrogen are other pro cesses by which some indication of age can be obtained. T h e bulk contents are strongly dependent on the burial environ ment; however, this dependence is very much weakened if the depth profile, as measured by a nuclear microprobe, is used instead. Nuclear techniques measuring penetration depth of nitrogen can be used to distinguish between freshly cut surfaces of jade, for example, and those cut in antiquity. Archaeomagnetic Dating. The direction of the earth's magnetic field (e.g., magnetic north as indicated by a com pass) changes very slowly, but it is perceptible over a dec ade. A fossilized record of past direction is provided by the weak, but permanent, magnetization that is acquired by clay and stones on cooling down after baldng and by sediment during deposition (or consolidation). T h e variation differs from region to region and does not follow a well-defined pattern. Hence, for each region of application it is necessary to establish a calibration curve using kilns, hearths, and silted-up ditches of known age. Consequently, the avail ability of a reliable archaeological chronology is a necessary prerequisite for applying tire method. An alternative possi bility is to make measurements on radiocarbon-dated lake sediment, obtained as a long core extracted from the lake bottom. On a larger time scale, complete reversals of the earth's field provide a worldwide geomagnetic chronology, cali brated by means of tire potassium-argon technique. The most recent event (named the Blake event) which is well established and generally accepted occurred at about 1 1 0 , 0 0 0 years ago; this was a comparatively brief reversal lasting not much more than ten thousand years. Earlier, at 7 8 0 , 0 0 0 years ago, there was tire transition from the Matuyama reversed polarity epoch to tire present Brunlres epoch. Pollen Analysis and Other Climatic Indicators. An archaeological site carries a record of past climate notably through preserved tree and plant pollen. Other indicators are faunal assemblage and soil type. This record allows tire levels of a Paleolithic site to be described as cold or warm and to be related—often through the intermediate step of a locally defined climatic sequence—to the worldwide climatic chronology, based on oxygen-isotope stages. T h e successive cold and warm stages of this chronology are defined by the isotope ratio (oxygen-18-oxygen-16) found in marine fossil microfauna. Finest climatic detail is given by tire isotope ratio variations measured in long cores drilled into the polar ice cups.
DCP SPECTROMETRY Absolute dating of the marine stages was initially based, via sedimentary remanent magnetization, on potassium-ar gon dating supplemented by radiocarbon and uranium se ries. The chronology so obtained has now been refined by reference to the Milankovitch astronomical predictions of the climatic variation resulting from changes in the earth's orbital parameters. T h e marine stages are now the funda mental time divisions of the Quaternary epoch. Pollen characteristics (such as the dominant species of tree) can be used to define pollen assemblage zones (PAZ). The succession of such zones can be used as a basis for chronozones, defined in terms of radiocarbon years. For ex ample, at a type-site the boundaries of the major PAZ are dated by radiocarbon and those dates then define the chron ozones. Arboreal pollen, expressed as a percentage of total tree and herb pollen, is a useful broad indicator of climate, being high in warm/wet periods and substantially lower oth erwise. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aitken, Martin J. Science-Based Dating in Archaeology. London, 1990. Comprehensive discussion of the techniques outlined in this article. Aitken, Martin J., et al., eds. The Origin of Modern Humans and the Impact of Chronometric Dating. Princeton, 1993. Papers based on a meeting held at the Royal Society, London, February 1992. Aurenche, Olivier, et al., eds. Chronologies in the Near East. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 379. Oxford, 1987. Papers based on an international symposium sponsored by the Cen tre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon 1986. MARTIN J. AITKEN
D C P S P E C T R O M E T R Y . Direct current plasma (DCP) spectrometry provides an effective means of analyz ing the chemical composition of ancient pottery. Similar to inductively coupled plasma spectrometry (ICP), a related spectroscopic method, D C P offers a highly accurate means of determining the presence of a wide range of elements in any given sample, a necessary first step in all provenance studies. By obtaining chemical "fingerprints" of reference materials (e.g., kiln wasters) of known origin and finding compositional "matches" to pottery samples, one is often able to pinpoint the source of manufacture. T h e first application of D C P on archaeological artifacts was conducted in 1994: select fired and unfired Jerash bowl fragments recovered from deposits associated with tire late Byzantine pottery kilns in the hippodrome at the ancient Decapolis city of Gerasa (Jerash, Jordan) were examined (Lapp, 1994). In combination with petrographic thin-sec tion analyses, D C P subsequently proved invaluable for the chemical characterization of clay oil lamp samples collected from sites once comprising Roman Palestine (Lapp, forth coming). T h e team of F. A. Hart and S, J. Adams first used ICP to determine the provenance of select Romano-British pottery from Hampshire (Hart and Adams, 1983). The re
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cent examination of early Bronze Egyptian pottery from Ca naan by means of petrography, neutron activation, and ICP analyses successfully combines the analytical strengths of these archaeometric methods for determining provenance (Porat et al., 1991). D C P centers on the analysis of samples prepared as so lutions. T h e sample itself, whether a ceramic fragment of a Roman oil lamp or of a Persian storage jar, is brought into solution using a lithium metaborate fusion technique. Fol lowing the method outlined by E. M. Klein (1991), Lapp mixed 0.1 g of powdered Jerash bowl sample with 0.4 g of ultra-pure lithium metaborate flux and fused the mixture in preignited crucibles at io40°C for 13 minutes (Lapp, 1994). After fusion, the pebble-shaped melt was dissolved in 0.24 ml of nitric acid; the resulting concentrated solution was then ready to be analysed for trace elements. For the major elements, a dilute solution of each sample consisting of 0.25 ml of tire concentrated solution with nitric acid plus lithium was prepared. Once in solution, the sample was nebulized and its aerosol directed at the plasma. T h e plasma itself is created by ini tiating an electrical discharge within a stream of argon flow ing between two electrodes (Potts, 1987). After nebulization, the aerosol particles of the sample solution experienced des olation, vaporization, and atomization. This occurred in the "excitation zone" where die sample temperature ranges be tween 5700 and 6000 K (Potts, 1987). At this temperature, the elements' atoms undergo transitions to lower electronic states and emit their excess energy as a quanta of light. Be cause these wavelengths of light are specific to the emitting element, die identification of a tested element can be dis cerned by a proper specttometer. The intensities of emission are measured by the spectrometer, measurements of which indicate the elemental abundances in any given sample. Potts notes that samples atomized in a direct current plasma experience significandy lower atomization temperatures than those atomized in tire inductively coupled argon plasma of ICP analysis (Potts, 1987). D C P spectrometry has proven to be an effective, acces sible, and affordable means of major and trace element anal ysis of terracotta wares and lamps alike. Undoubtedly, it should also prove useful in future characterization studies with respect to nonceramic objects, as has already been demonstrated by the related archaeometric method of ICP applied to metal artifacts from late Bronze Age hoards in Slovenia (Trampuz-Orel et al., 1991). [See also Neutron Activation Analysis; and Petrography.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Hart, F. A., and S.J. Jones. "The Chemical Analysis of Romano-British Pottery from the Alice Holt Forest, Hampshire, by Means of Induc tively-Coupled Plasma Emission Spectrometry." Archaeometry 25.2 (1983): 179-185. The first landmark analysis of ancient pottery using ICP spectrometry.
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Klein, Emily M., Charles H. Langmuir, and Hubert Staudigel. "Geochemistry of Basalts From the Southeast Indian Ridge, H5°EI38°E," Journal of Geophysical Research 96. B2 (1991): 2089-2107. The methods of sample preparation and procedure for DCP analysis as presented and outlined by Klein were adopted and followed by Lapp in his analysis of Jerash bowl fragments. Lapp, Eric C. "A Comparative Clay Fabric Analysis of Fired and Unfired Jerash Bowl Fragments by Means of Petrography and Direct Current Plasma (DCP) Spectrometry," In Proceedings of the 1994 Byzantine and Early Islamic Ceramics Colloquium in Syria-Jordan (Vth-VIIIlh Centuries), edited by Estelle Villeneuve and Pamela M. Watson. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique. Paris, forthcom ing. Results of the first application of DCP spectrometry to deter mine the chemical composition of archaeological artifacts. Lapp, Eric C. "The Archaeology of Light: The Cultural Significance of the Oil Lamp from Roman Palestine." Ph.D. diss., Duke Univer sity, forthcoming. Demonstrates the usefulness of DCP spectrome try in combination with archaeology and epigraphic investigations into the cultural function of oil lamps in ancient daily life. Plank, Terry A. "Mantle Melting and Crustal Recycling in Subduction Zones." Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993. Highly technical work, written with the geochemist in mind. A model study for un derstanding the application of DCP spectrometry as it pertains to clay-sediment analysis. Porat, Naomi, et al. "Correlation between Petrography, NAA, and ICP Analyses: Application to Early Bronze Egyptian Pottery from Ca naan." Geoarchaeology 6.2 (1991): 133-149. Provenance findings and the value of multiple archaeometric techniques for determining prov enance of manufacture. Potts, P. J. A Handbook of Silicate Rock Analysis. Glasgow, 1987. Gen eral and succinct introduction to the technique of DCP spectrome try, supplemented with schematic diagrams of the instrumentation involved (see esp. pp. 192-197). Trampuz-Orel, N., et al. "Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emis sion Spectrometry Analysis of Metals from Late Bronze Age Hoards in Slovenia." Archaeometry 33.2 (1991): 267-277. Pioneers the ap plication ofTCP-AES on metal artifacts, as opposed to pottery. ERIC C. L A P P
D E A D S E A S C R O L L S . The phrase Dead Sea Scrolls is used in two senses, one generic and one particular. In the generic sense the phrase denotes documents and literary texts discovered at various sites along the shore of the Dead Sea and extending up to Jericho. These sites include Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Se'elim, Nahal Mishmar, Khirbet Mird, and Ketef Jericho. In the particular sense the phrase specifies the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek literary texts found in eleven caves near the site of Qumran. Q u m r a n Caves 1 - 1 1 . The first seven of what have since come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls (in the particular sense) appeared in the summer of 1947 in Bethlehem. Com ing from tire hands of bedouin, their original provenance was unknown. As the significance of these scrolls became apparent, authorities made efforts to determine precisely where they had originated. Qumran Cave 1 was soon iden tified, and excavations began there in February 1949. These excavations lasted for about one month. The excavators dis
covered many text fragments, along with pieces of cloth and wood, olive and date stones, leather phylactery cases, and pottery sherds. Some of the text fragments belonged to the seven scrolls the bedouin had offered for sale, thus clinching the identification of the original findspot. From this time began a competition of sorts between the authorities concerned with preserving manuscripts and re cording archaeological details and the bedouin, who were concerned with making a small fortune from the sale of scroll materials. Both groups sought new manuscript-bear ing caves. In February 1952, bedouin found Cave 2 and sold some of its fragments. Officials immediately set to investi gating the cave systematically, along with all the rock cliffs in the Qumran region. Cave 3 thereupon yielded up its treasures to authorities. Subsequently, two additional rockcliff caves bearing manuscripts were discovered: Cave 6, found by the Arabs in 1952, and Cave 1 1 , found in 1956. The latter cave contained some of the most important and complete scrolls. In addition to tiiese natural caves, six caves artificially hol lowed out of marl terraces eventually came to light: Caves 4, 5, and 7 - 1 0 . By far the richest manuscript remains be longed to Cave 4, which was discovered first by the bedouin and then, after it had been badly pilfered, excavated by of ficials in September 1952. This cave contained portions of hundreds of different manuscripts, many showing evidence of deliberate destruction in antiquity. This same 1952 cam paign succeeded in identifying Cave 5. It remained for the campaign of 1955 to discover Caves 7-9. T h e tenth cave, discovered in the vicinity of Cave 4, contained no manu scripts, only an ostracon inscribed in Hebrew. Altogether, the manuscripts found in Caves 1 - 1 1 number approxi mately 825. Khirbet Q u m r a n . T h e presence of eleven manuscriptbearing caves that seemed to radiate north and south from the place known by the Arabic name Khirbet Qumran (its ancient appellation is uncertain) suggested that the site itself ought to be excavated. T h e Jordanian Department of An tiquities, the Palestine Archaeological Museum (now the Rockefeller Museum), and the Ecole Biblique et Archeolo gique Francaise de Jerusalem undertook joint campaigns, beginning in 1951 and continuing for five seasons. T h e re sults of those excavations were never published scientifi cally, although preparations to do so are now underway. Preliminary descriptions written by Roland de Vaux, who headed the project, distinguished four basic occupational levels: one in the seventh century BCE and three others from about 100 BCE to shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Recently, questions have been raised about a direct con nection between the scrolls and Khirbet Qumran that may lessen the interest of the archaeological data. For example, Pauline Donceel-Voute, one of those responsible for full
DEAD SEA SCROLLS publication of the de Vaux excavations, has shown that the principal evidence for the "scriptorium"—the plastered "ta bles" upon which scribes were imagined to have copied out the scrolls—points instead to a triclinium (a dining room). The tables may have been couches on which the diners would have reclined. Furthermore, the identification of hun dreds of individual scribal hands for tire scrolls and scroll fragments is difficult to square with tire notion that Qumran scribes exclusively produced the scrolls at the site. Were that the case, many fewer hands and many more texts traceable to a given scribe could be expected. Recent archaeological investigation has failed to reveal any paths leading from the site to the caves where the texts were cached. This discovery is a formidable obstacle to the popular conception that a community living on the site would have retired to the caves—especially to Cave 4—to study their holy writings. Finds from O t h e r Sites. Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Se'elim, Nahal Mishmar, Khirbet Mird, and Ketef Jericho have all yielded documentary texts of the late Second Temple period, and in a few cases literary texts were also found. Excavations at Masada from 1 9 6 3 to 1 9 6 5 , led by Yigael Yadin, discovered seven biblical and nine nonbiblical literary texts. Almost all of tire nonbiblical texts seem to have some connection with the Qumran texts, and in at least two cases copies of the same literary work were found at both sites (see below). T h e Masada excava tions also yielded numerous ostraca inscribed in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, although only the Semitic ma terials are certainly connected with tire Jewish occupation of the years 6 6 - 7 3 ( 7 4 ? ) CE. [See Masada.] Excavations in 1 9 5 2 , combined with bedouin cave comb ing in tire several caves in Wadi Murabba'at, resulted in the discovery of nearly one hundred texts, many dating to the time of the Bar Koklrba Revolt ( 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 CE). These finds comprised biblical and nonbiblical literary materials, He brew and Aramaic letters and contracts, Greek and Latin documentary materials (mostly from a later date), and five Arabic texts from later centuries. [See Murabba'at.] Nahal Hever, Nahal Se'elim and Nahal Mishmar were explored by a joint expedition from tire Hebrew University, tire Israel Exploration Society, and the Israel Department of Antiquities in 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 6 1 . T h e finds from Nahal Hever number some sixty-five texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Nabatean, and Greek. Primary among these finds are the Babatha archive (tirirty-seven Greek, six Nabatean, and three Ara maic contracts), the so-called Archive of the En-Gedites (six Hebrew and Aramaic conttacts leasing state lands), and a packet of fifteen letters to military leaders in charge of 'EinGedi at tire time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Indeed, like tire Murabba'at texts, all of the important Nahal Hever finds date to that approximate period, as do those from Nahal Se'elim and Nahal Mishmar.
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T h e materials originally thought to have come from Nahal Se'elim were discovered by bedouin in 1 9 5 1 or 1952 and sold to authorities. Later, additional fragments belonging to some of these "Nahal Se'elim" manuscripts were discovered by archaeologists at Nahal Hever, thereby suggesting that tire bedouin finds actually originated there and not at Nahal Se'elim. The designation remains as a matter of conve nience. These materials include four very fragmentary bib lical manuscripts, phylacteries, some fifteen Hebrew and Ar amaic documents, five Nabatean deeds, two Greek legal texts, and a scroll of the Minor Prophets written in Greek. Written materials from Nahal Mishmar are exiguous, com prising papyrus lists of names in Greek. From Khirbet Mird come portions of a lectionary, an in scription, a letter, and a magical text—all inscribed in Chris tian Palestinian Aramaic—and one hundred Arabic papyri. [See Palestinian Aramaic] These texts date a millennium later than the Qumran texts. Excavations by the Israel An tiquities Authority at Ketef Jericho in 1 9 8 6 and 1 9 9 4 uncov ered portions of at least six economic documents in Aramaic and Greek dating to the period of Bar Kokhba, and two documentary texts dating to the third or fourth centuries BCE.
Biblical Texts from Caves i - r r . Among the manu scripts that have emerged from the Qumran caves scholars have identified about two hundred biblical scrolls and frag ments. T h e number of texts of each book so far identified (tire numbers continue to change somewhat as study con tinues) is as follows: Genesis ( 1 5 ) , Exodus ( 1 5 ) , Leviticus ( 8 ) , Numbers ( 6 ) , Deuteronomy ( 2 5 ) , Joshua ( 2 ) , Judges ( 3 ) , Ruth ( 4 ) , Samuel ( 4 ) , Kings ( 3 ) , Isaiah ( 1 9 ) , Jeremiah ( 4 ) , Ezekiel ( 6 ) , Minor Prophets ( 8 ) , Psalms ( 3 0 ) , Job ( 5 ) , Proverbs ( 2 ) , Ecclesiastes ( 1 ) , Song of Songs ( 4 ) , Lamentations ( 4 ) , Esther ( 0 ) , Daniel ( 1 9 ) , Esra-Nehemiah ( 1 ) , and Chronicles (1). As the list shows, every book of the Hebrew Bible appears among tire Qumran caches, except for Esther. It is hard to know whether the absence of this book is purely fortuitous or is meaningful. In the same way, it may or may not be legitimate to draw conclusions from the relative frequency of the various books. The Dead Sea Scrolls have revolutionized textual criti cism of tire Hebrew Bible. Previously, scholars had no He brew manuscript of any book antedating the medieval pe riod. Now there is access to the Hellenistic and Roman periods, revealing texts in substantial agreement with the Masoretic text as well as widely variant forms. Readings dif fering from the Masoretic version often agree with known streams of textual tradition, particularly those represented by the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. The fact that the major versional types of texts are already present in tire Qumran manuscripts has naturally led to attempts to explain the emergence of the later text families. Three basic
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positions have resulted. The first, known as the theory of local texts, is particularly associated with Frank M. Cross. This theory sees different text forms developing in Baby lonia, Palestine, and Egypt—that is, in the three major cen ters of Jewish civilization in the crucial period 200 BCE-200 CE. Few scholars find this theory convincing; it is simply too artificial and does not account for the complexity of the ev idence. A second approach is championed by Shemaryahu Talmon, who hypothesizes that the key to the survival of any particular text type was its acceptance by a definable community. The inference would follow that many text types disappeared in ancient times. The third position is that of Emanuel Tov, for whom the scrolls do not confirm the existence of given text types as such. Rather, because they resist typological differentiation (unlike, e.g., the Byzantine text type of tire New Testament), the Masoretic text, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch are representa tive merely of three texts. One thing is certain: the farther back in time tire texts go, the less uniform they are. Pluriformity, not uniformity, was the rule. This realization has heightened appreciation of the versional evidence vis-a-vis the Masoretic text. T h e Septuagint, in particular, has grown in scholarly estimation. Of course, the scrolls bear on many other critical matters involved with the Hebrew Bible, of which a few examples must suffice. The absence of verses 42:12-17 from the ep ilogue of Job as represented in 11Q Targum Job (the desig nation 11Q means that tire text was discovered in Cave 1 1 at Qumran) may support tire view that the prologue and epilogue (that is to say, the prose portions of die book) are linguistically late and were added recently in the book's his tory. Text nQPsalms" raises numerous questions, focusing particularly on the problem of canon in the Second Temple period. The order of the psalms in the 1 1 Q text differs from die Masoretic version, and at least once, the scroll contains a canonical psalm in a different recension (Ps. 145). Certain smaller groupings of psalms, such as tire Song of Ascents and the Passover Hallel—viewed by the Masoretic text as units—are scattered throughout the Qumran psalter. Taken together with other "deviant" Psalms scrolls, such as n Q P s , 4QPs', and 4QPS' , and with the many that appear identical to the Masoretic text, 1 iQPs" indicates that differ ent forms of the. biblical book circulated, all apparently equally acceptable to user communities. Various nonbiblical texts described below, which may have had "canonical" sta tus for some groups, support the conclusion arising from the biblical texts: at least the third division of the canon, the Writings, was still fluid at the time of the scrolls. b
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Nonbiblical Writings from Caves 1 - 1 1 . Important as tire biblical materials are, for the student of Second Temple Judaism the real treasures are tire nonbiblical scrolls. After all, the books of the Bible have long been known, whereas most of the six hundred-odd nonbiblical texts are new. They
increase exponentially what was known of Jewish intellectual life in that period. Most were written in Hebrew, generally in a form of late Biblical Hebrew, but sometimes in a form of the language nearer to die spoken dialects. Slightly more than one hundred texts are inscribed in Aramaic; about twenty are in Greek (mostiy from Cave 7). These materials are so rich that the following description pretends to nothing more than a partial and provisional survey. Legal and regulatory texts. A substantial proportion of the Dead Sea Scrolls are legal and regulatory texts of various lands. Two of the longest and most common are the Da mascus Document and tire Rule of the Community. [See Da mascus Document; Rule of the Community.] A third legal work, extant in six copies from Cave 4, is known as 4QMMT (an anagram for the Hebrew words "Some of the Laws of the Torah"; 4Q394-399). At least one copy of this text begins with a calendrical exposition. Legal rulings on about twenty-three topics follow, all involving temple purity and priestly gifts. T h e final section of the work is an admonition to right practice. T h e MMT text may have been a letter, although the names of the writer and the ad dressee have not survived. The work purports to address its urgings to a ldng. Scholars are still uncertain whether this king was a Hasmonean or a first-century CE figure such as Agrippa I; for adherents of paleographic dating, only the first option seems possible. Other legal texts include 4Q1593 Ordinances, extant ap parently in two additional copies (4Q513-514). This work interprets biblical laws governing gleaning by the poor, the half-shekel Temple tax, and the prohibition on selling an Israelite into slavery. Text 4Q251 combines portions from tire Rule of the Community and the Damascus Document— with slight differences—with legal materials drawn from other sources. Text 4Q274, ToharotA, treats seven-day im purities incurred by touching the dead, skin diseases, and menstruation. Texts 4Q 276-277, known as Toharot B, deal inter alia with the law of the red heifer (Nm. 19). Text 4Q477, known by the title Decrees of the Sect, is a record of legal discipline that includes actual proper names—a great rarity among the scrolls. One man, Hananiah Nitos, is re proved for "turnfing] aside the spirit of the community." A major legal work, one copy of which extends for sixty-six columns, is the Temple Scroll (11Q19-20). [See Temple Scroll.] Biblical interpretation. Numerous Dead Sea Scrolls pursue other sorts of biblical interpretation than legal appli cation. Perhaps the most important scrolls here are the socalled pesharim. These writings understand prophetic por tions of the Flebrew Bible (including Psalms, conceived as prophecies) to describe the interpreter's own time. Scholars commonly group these works into two categories: thematic pesharim and continuous pesharim. Thematic pesharim con stitute unconnected biblical portions organized around a
DEAD SEA SCROLLS central theme. Continuous pesharim comment seriatim on biblical verses or even whole books. At least fifteen scrolls fit into this latter category. Continuous pesharim. ignore what is considered the literal meaning of the biblical text. Their interest is in explaining mysterious truth revealed only to the author and his group. T h e most complete of tiiese commentaries is the pesher Habakkuk. [See Habakkuk Commentary.] It preserves thirteen virtually complete columns, covering Habakkuk 1-2. T h e pesher Psalms ( 4 Q 1 7 1 ) is also relatively complete, preserved portions commenting on Psalms 3 7 : 7 - 4 0 , 4 5 : 1 - 2 , and pos sibly 6 0 : 8 - 9 . The writer finds his group's enemies in the biblical text and interprets events in terms of eschatological justification. For the historian, the commentary on Nahum ( 4 Q 1 6 9 ) is doubtless the cornerstone of the continuous pe sharim. T h e author mentions a "Demetrius, King of Greece" and refers cryptically to a Jewish ruler who cruci fied great numbers of his opponents. These references seem to be to the Seleucid ruler Demetrius III Eucaerus ( 9 5 - 8 8 BCE) and the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus, who did in deed—according to the Jewish historian Josephus—put many Jewish insurgents to death in the course of a civil war. Other fragmentary pesherim interpreting Micah, Zephaniah, Isaiah, and certain psalms have survived. Of the thematic pesharim, none has aroused greater inter est than 11 QMelchizedek ( 1 1 Q 1 3 ) . Thirteen fragments pre serve the remains of three columns. T h e work comments on isolated Hebrew Bible portions, including Leviticus 2 5 : 9 - 1 0 , 2 5 : 1 3 ; Deuteronomy 1 5 : 2 ; Isaiah 6 1 : 1 ; and Daniel 9 : 2 6 . T h e events connected with these biblical texts are to take place in "the end of days," which is further identified with the "tenth jubilee." According to the text, Melchizedek will free those who belong to his "inheritance" and (if suggested res torations are correct) "atone for their iniquities." He will further exact divine vengeance upon Belial and those of his "lot." This work presents a conception of Melchizedek ap proximately contemporary with Hebrews, chapter 7 , con necting him with heavenly judgment, a day of atonement and a primary role among God's angels. Also of interest is Melchizedek's possible identification with the herald of Isa iah 52:7. This identification would represent a combination of scriptural figures and motifs comparable to the New Tes tament characterization of Jesus. Two additional thematic pesharim are 4QFlorilegium ( 4 Q 1 7 4 ) and 4QTestimonia ( 4 Q 1 7 5 ) . T h e first work com bines various biblical portions with interpretive comments relating to the "end of days," when God will have a new "temple of Adam" built. Thus, the author employs an urzeitl endzeit typology, according to which those faithful to God will one day return to an idyllic state of peace. T h e second writing is a catena of quotations that seem to focus on mes sianic expectation, including a prophet like Moses (Dt. 1 8 : 1 8 - 1 9 ) . Though they do not overlap, some scholars be
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lieve that tiiese two manuscripts are actually two copies of the same literary work. The Genesis Apocryphon was one of the original seven scrolls found by bedouin and represents a previously un known example of "rewritten Bible" (a frequent exegetical technique in the Second Temple period that wove com ments and expansions into the words of the biblical text it self. [See Genesis Apocryphon.] A vaguely similar work, bearing the erroneous preliminary title Pesher Genesis (the work is not a pesher), survives in three copies ( 4 Q 2 5 2 - 2 5 4 ) . This writing comments on various problems raised by a close reading of Genesis. For example, why did God curse Canaan, the son of Ham, when it was actually Ham who "uncovered his father's nakedness" (Gn. 9:26)? The author explains that since God had already blessed Noah's sons, he could not retract that blessing, and, a curse being required, it had to fall on the next generation. Also in the realm of biblical interpretation are the three Aramaic targumim (translations, or paraphrases) so far iden tified among the scrolls. By far the longest and most com plete has already been mentioned, the targum to Job from Cave 1 1 ( 1 1 Q 1 0 ) . The importance of this work is consid erable because it represents the only incontestably preChristian targum of any appreciable length. The surviving portions cover parts of chapters 1 7 - 4 2 , with the last six chapters of Job the least damaged. The Flebrew vorlage of the scroll seems to have been the Masoretic text. The other two targumim are extremely fragmentary: 4 Q 1 5 6 renders Le viticus 1 6 : 1 2 - 1 5 and 1 8 - 2 1 into Aramaic and 4 Q 1 5 7 , an other targum to Job, covers portions oijob 3 : 5 - 9 and 4 : 1 6 5:4. Both translations are literal rather than expansive. Pseudoprophetic works (so-called from the modern per spective; it is doubtful they were so regarded by ancient readers) are notable among the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to Josephus, the biblical prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel each wrote more than one book, so the discovery in Cave 4 of works attributable to those men is intriguing. An apocryphal Jeremianic work is extant in perhaps five copies ( 4 Q 3 8 3 - 3 8 4 , 3 8 5 , 387 '', and 389"; their identification is pre liminary) . Five copies of Pseudo-Ezckielalso survive ( 4 Q 3 8 5 , 3 8 6 3 3 8 7 , 3 8 8 , and 3 9 1 ) , in which some fragments are of considerable length, allowing the reader to get some feel for the whole. One portion interprets the Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (Ez. 3 7 ) in terms of individual resurrection; another declares that in the future "sovereignty will devolve upon the Gentiles for many years . . . in those days a blas phemous king will arise among the Gentiles and do evil things." Pseudo-Ezekiel may date from the third century BCE. A whole series of works is connected witii the figure of Daniel. Some of these writings may antedate the biblical book, whereas others are clearly derivative attempts at in terpreting some of that book's riddles. In the former cate gory belongs the Prayer ofNabonidus ( 4 Q 2 4 2 ) . This des cripB
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tion of a skin disease afflicting Nabonidus (the last of the Neo-Babylonian kings), his healing by an unnamed Jewish exorcist, and his subsequent prayer of thanksgiving may lie behind the story of Nebuchadrezzar in Daniel 4. PseudoDaniel (4Q243-245) falls into the second category, describ ing what Daniel saw on one or more occasions when he stood before king Belshazzar (cf. Daniel 5). The content of the visions given on those occasions goes beyond that of the biblical book, but not much more can be said of it, given the work's extremely fragmentary condition. The Son of God text (4Q246) actually quotes Daniel, chapter 7, and de scribes a future figure of some sort. Whether that figure is messianic, angelic, or even a Roman emperor is debatable. Texts 4Q552-553 are two copies of a Danielic work titled the Four Kingdoms. They apparently relate to the visions of Daniel 2 and 7, wherein four world kingdoms rule in suc cession until the dawning of a final kingdom of God. This work symbolizes each kingdom not by a bizarre animal or metal, however, as in the biblical book, but by a tree. Finally, two other writings are less certainly related to Daniel. Text 4Q558, an extremely fragmentary visionary text inscribed on papyrus, uses important Danielic phraseology. Text 4Q550, Story Set at the Persian Court, has been claimed as a precursor to the Book of Esther, but it appears rather to be a series of tales about successful Jews in a foreign court, much like Daniel and his friends in the Hebrew Bible. Also in the category of prophetic works are some dozen pseudo-Mosaic writings of various types. Four copies of a Pentateuchal Paraphrase (4Q364-367) admix previously un known materials—poetry and Temple descriptions—with the books of the Pentateuch. Text 1Q22, the Words ofMoses, is a type of rewritten Bible. It requires the appointment of priests "to clarify . . . all these words of the Torah." Text 4Q375 relates to tire discussion of false prophets in Deuter onomy 13 and r8 and raises a point not considered by the biblical portions: What can be done about a false prophet whom one tribe claims is not false? "Then you shall come, with that tribe and your elders and judges . . . into the pres ence of the anointed priest." A ceremony follows, which would presumably reveal the truth about the disputed prophet. The pseudo-Mosaic Three Tongues of Fire (1Q29 and 4Q376) provides guidance on the use of the Urim and Thummim for divination of God's will. A final example of this genre, 4Q390, is particularly concerned with chronol ogy, and also mentions Belial and the angels of Mastemoth. T h e writing may have been known to the autlror(s) of the Damascus Document, for its view of the apostasy of Israel is similar: "From the end of that generation, corresponding to the seventh Jubilee since the desolation of the land, they will forget law and festival, sabbath and covenant." Only a mi nority would later know the truth that Israel generally had forgotten. Calendrical
texts. Scrolls concerned at least implicitly
with matters of chronology—particularly as measured in ju bilee periods of forty-nine years or related to Daniel's sev enty weeks (Dn. 9:25-27)—and the peculiar "Qumran cal endar" number in the hundreds. Indeed, concern with calendric and chronological matters is tire greatest common denominator among tire nonbiblical texts. T h e calendar is a purely solar, 364-day system that begins on a Wednesday— because that is the day on which tire heavenly lights regu lating time were created (Gn. 1 : 1 4 - 1 9 ) . T h e great advantage of this calendar over lunisolar rivals is that it results in fixed dates for the major festivals. This calendar also guarantees that any given day of any month will always fall on tire same day of the week forever. One calendrical text, 4Q321 Mishmarot. B, tabulates not only the solar year and the holy days thus measured, but also the rotation of tire priestly courses into and out of ser vice in the Temple in Jerusalem. The text further deals with the moon, though it is still unclear whether this aspect is an attempt at synchronizing the solar and lunisolar calendars or whether lunar movements are being calculated for other reasons. A second work, 4Q320, Mishmarot A, provides three years of such correspondence between the solar cal endar and lunar cycles. These two writings list as festivals only those found in the Pentateuch, but some Qumran ca lendrical works add new, nonbiblical festivals. One such is 4Q3 5i Mishmarot D, which assigns a Festival of New Wine to the third day of the fifth month and a Festival of Wood Offering to the twenty-third day of the sixth month. These festivals and their dates are also known from the Temple Scroll and 4OMMT. What this apparently fundamental dis agreement on festivals may imply about the use of the "Qumran calendar" in Second Temple Judaism is a ques tion worth pursuing. The scroll known as Otot (Heb., "signs"; cf. Gn. 1:14) evidently calculates those years in which, on tire vernal equi nox, the sun and moon were aligned as they had been at tire creation. The work seeks to align that cycle with both the seven-year cycle of sabbatical years and the jubilees, which measured longer periods of time. Two other Qumran writ ings concern themselves particularly with lunar movement, one (4Q503) for liturgical purposes and tire other (4Q317) to concord the moon's phases with tire 364-day calendar. Text 4Q317 is inscribed in a cryptic writing known as cryp tic script A; cryptic scripts B and C also existed, and a fourth system of encryption appears in 4Q186 (see below). T h e full significance of such systems within the context of tire Qumran corpus as a whole has yet to be worked out, but it is unsurprising to find one copy of a second calendrical work, Mishmarot C, written in cryptic A. Calendrical mat ters were numinous, inasmuch as these holy patterns were facts not merely observed, but revealed. Not everyone was worthy to read calendrical texts. 2
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Mishmarot C (extant in six copies, 4Q322-324,324", 324 ,
DEAD SEA SCROLLS and 3 2 4 ° ) is noteworthy in another respect: along with priesdy courses and holy festivals, this calendrical work chronicles historical events important to die work's author(s). This writing would be of surpassing importance to the historian, were it only better preserved. It may still be possible to ferret out certain historical data. For example, one line reads "Hyrcanus rebelled." Although the line breaks after tiiese words, it can be inferred that the context is die civil war between Hyrcanus II and his brother Aristobulus in die years 6 6 - 6 3 CE. It further appears that die writer favored Aristobulus's faction—otherwise he would not describe Hyrcanus's bid for power as rebellion. Where such points will lead to understanding the historical signifi cance of the Qumran caches remains to be seen. Wisdom literature. After the period of the biblical writ ings, wisdom literature continued to develop, and various types are well represented in die Dead Sea Scrolls. One par ticular sapiential composition is extant in at least six copies Q
( 1 Q 2 6 , 4 Q 4 1 5 - 4 1 8 , and 4 Q 4 2 3 ) , but its rationale and per
spective are not yet really understood. One clear portion reads: "Honor your father in your poverty and your mother by your behavior, for a man's father is like his arms, and his mother is like his legs. Surely tiiey have guided you like a hand, and just as He has given them authority over you and appointed (them) over (your) spirit, so you should serve them." Text 4 Q 4 2 4 is a collection of proverbs, several quite pithy. For example, one suggests "Do not send the hard hearted man to discern thoughts because his intuition does not measure u p . " T h e Qumran scrolls are rich in one particular type of wis dom literature important in the Second Temple period, the testament. Thus far, testaments of Levi, Kohath ( 4 Q 5 4 2 ) , Amram, and Naphtali have been identified, and some schol ars have seen, in meager fragments, testaments of Jacob ( 4 Q 5 3 7 ) > Judah ( 4 Q 5 3 8 ) , and Joseph ( 4 Q 5 3 9 ) as well. T h e Testament ofLevi is extant in at least two fragmentary copies ( 4 Q 2 I 3 - 2 I 4 ) and may be represented by several other man uscripts as well (e.g., 1 Q 2 1 and 4 Q 5 4 0 - 5 4 1 ) . Texts 4 Q 2 1 3 2 1 4 directly align not with die Greek Testament of Levi (part of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs), but with the re lated, yet very different, Aramaic Testament of Levi. Scholars have known this work from medieval manuscripts. The Tes tament of Naphtali (4Q215)—unlike the others written in Hebrew, not Aramaic—partially overlaps the long-known Greek Testament of Naphtali. It also contains portions un paralleled anywhere in Greek and has an eschatological thrust absent from the Greek version. T h e Testament of Am ram ( 4 Q 5 4 3 , 5 4 5 - 5 4 8 ) is notably dualistic in outlook, a p proaching in this respect the doctrine of the two spirits in the Rule of the Community. Liturgical texts. Whether a given text is liturgical is often debatable—and can be argued for a fair number of writings among the Qumran caches. T h e Hodayot (Hymns of Praise) are perhaps the most notable; these are extant in seven cop
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ies (iOHodayot, 4 Q 4 2 7 - 4 3 2 ) . T h e Cave 1 exemplar com prises eighteen columns and sixty-eight originally unplaced fragments, some of which can now be located with the aid of the Cave 4 texts. The order of the hymns varies from manuscript to manuscript; all begin with either "I thank You, Lord," or "Blessed are You, O Lord." Some of the hymns may be the work of the Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in the pesharim and the Damascus Document. They seem appropriate to his situation, but such historical identifications are virtually impossible to prove. A large group of poetic writings is similar to the Hodayot. One is the work known after its incipit as Barki Naphshi (Bless, O My Soul; 4 Q 4 3 4 - 4 3 8 ) . The poetic quality of all these compositions is uneven, but some passages are strik ing. In 4 Q 4 3 4 , for example, one reads of God: "He opened His eyes to the downtrodden and, inclining His ears, hear kened to the cry of die orphans. In His abundant mercy He comforted the meek, and opened their eyes to behold His ways, and their ears, to hear His teaching. And He circum cised the foreskin of tiieir hearts, and saved them because of His grace. . . ." T h e Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice is partially preserved in eight copies from Cave 4 ( 4 Q 4 0 0 - 4 0 7 ) , as well as in frag ments from Cave 1 1 ( 1 1 Q 1 7 ) and, significantly, Masada. It describes heaven as a complicated temple consisting of seven sanctuaries, attended by seven chief prince-priests, their deputies, and seven angelic priesthoods. Simultaneous with earthly sacrifice performed in the Temple in Jerusalem, the truly efficacious equivalents take place in heaven. T h e work is especially important for the study of angelology and early Jewish Merkavah mysticism. Other notable liturgical writings include the Words of the Luminaries ( 4 Q 5 0 4 - 5 0 6 ) and Berakhot ( 4 Q 2 8 6 - 2 9 0 ) . Frag mentary remaining instructions show that the Words were intended to be recited on given days of the week. With but one exception—the composition recited on the Sabbath, tra ditionally a joyous occasion—the mood of the daily texts is penitential. Long passages of the Berakhot are similar to the Angelic Liturgy and strike the reader as an ecstatic visionary recital. Other portions are equally unrestrained but are di rected toward cursing; for example, "They shall answer and say, 'Cursed be Belial in his devilish scheme, and damned be he in his guilty rule. Cursed be all the spirits of his lot in their evil scheme, and may they be damned in the schemes of their unclean pollution.' " One final liturgical work is most significant for its possible historical implications. This is the Paean for King Jonathan ( 4 Q 4 4 8 ) , apparently celebrating Alexander Jannaeus, whose Hebrew name was Jonathan. T h e "superscription" de scribes the work as "A sacred poem for King Jonathan and all die congregation of Your people Israel, who are spread in every direction under heaven." The historical implica tions concern the work's mere presence among the Dead Sea Scrolls, since from early on in scrolls research, most
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scholars have thought the scrolls to be anti-Hasmonean. Ev idently, die reality was more complicated. Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. A fair number of the Qumran writings might easily be designated apocryphal or pseudepigraphic. Copies of some such works known long before the discovery of the scrolls have now turned up in the caves. Most numerous are copies of Jubilees, which is represented by fourteen or fifteen manuscripts—more than for any biblical book, except for Deuteronomy and Psalms. In addition, there are several works designated PseudoJubilees (Pseudo-Jubilees ~ ; 4 Q 2 2 5 - 2 2 7 ) , each apparently a separate composition. These Jubilee works, together with tire Genesis Apocryphon, Pesher Genesis, a Flood Apocryphon ( 4 Q 3 7 0 ) , and Traditions on Genesis ( 4 Q 4 2 2 ) — t o name a few—prove just how lively interest was in interpretating Genesis. First Enoch and other Enochic writings (Pseudo-Enoch and the Book of Giants) are also numerous among tire scrolls. All together, they comprise sixteen manuscripts ( 4 Q 2 0 1 - 2 1 2 , 5 3 0 - 5 3 3 ) . At one time, much was made of the absence of the Book of Parables (1 En. 3 7 - 7 1 ) from the Qumran Enoch texts, but today that lack is no longer considered evidence of a post-Christian origin for tire Parables. Another pseudepigraphic writing, this one not known be fore the discovery of the scrolls, is the Psalms ofJoshua, rep resented by two copies ( 4 Q 3 7 8 - 3 7 9 ) and a quotation in the Testimonia described above. As for the Apocrypha, there are five or six copies of Tobit ( 4 Q 1 9 6 - 2 0 0 ; 4 Q 4 7 8 is perhaps another copy): four are in Aramaic and one or two in He brew. Which language was original is still uncertain, al though there is little question that the most reliable Greek manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus, had an Aramaic vorlage. Ecclesiasticus also appears among the scrolls ( 2 Q 1 8 ; a second copy was found at Masada). Miscellaneous. Some of the most interesting Dead Sea Scrolls resist classification into the admittedly arbitrary cat egories outlined above. One is a manual for tire conduct of holy war, designated tire War Scroll ( i Q M ) . Actually, it is inaccurate to refer to it as "the" War Scroll, despite scholarly convention, because the Cave 4 copies ( 4 Q 4 7 1 , 4 Q 4 9 1 - 4 9 6 ) and related writings ( 4 Q 4 7 1 " and 4 Q 4 9 7 ) demonstrate that there were various recensions of tire work. In this respect, the War Scroll is analogous to tire Rule of the Community and the Damascus Document. T h e weapons and tactics employed in the scroll indicate Roman, rather than Greek, military strategy. For this reason the Cave 1 copy cannot antedate the later decades of the first century BCE. Those reading the final form of the War Scroll doubtless conceived of it as a guide to an ultimate revolt against Rome, the foreign power interpreted as tire "fourth kingdom" in Daniel and related writings. [See War Scroll] The Copper Scroll ( 3 Q 1 5 ) appears to be a list of ft-easure removed from the Temple in Jerusalem for safekeeping some time during the First Jewish Revolt. Vastly superior a
c
new photographs and renewed scholarly interest in this unique work, inscribed on copper in a "Mishnaic" Hebrew dialect, promise to place it where it belongs: at the heart of discussion about the origins and significance of the Qumran caches. [See Copper Scroll.] Scarcely less intriguing are the several magical and astro logical writings found among the scrolls. Magical works in clude iiQPsAp"; a ritual for exorcism, 4 Q 5 1 0 - 5 1 1 , which contain hymns intended "to scare and alarm" demons; and 4 Q 5 6 0 . This last work was once tentatively identified as a collection of proverbs, but it is actually an Aramaic incan tation against various types of demons, including male and female "wasting demons"—fever, chilling, and chest-pain spirits. Text 4 Q 3 1 8 is an Aramaic brontologion and lunary, based on the distribution of die signs of the zodiac over tire days of the 364-day year. If thunder were heard on a day when the moon stood in a given portion of the sky, this text would enable its reader to divine the future. Text ^.QCryptic ( 4 Q 1 8 6 ) is another scroll that presupposes astrological no tions. Strictly speaking, it is concerned with physiognomy, but it combines references to astrological signs with that method of divination. Written in Hebrew, it is encrypted by the techniques of transposition and substitution. Text 4 Q 5 6 1 is an Aramaic physiognomic writing that may be re lated to 4 Q 1 8 6 , although it differs in important respects. Perhaps it is fitting to conclude this overview of the con tents of the Qumran texts with a mention of what might be tire most important of all the finds, if claims for it are ever proven. A Greek fragment from Cave 7 , 7 Q 5 , has been iden tified as a portion of tire Gospel of Mark. Very little survives of the text, and if tire portion is from Mark, it contains a previously unattested textual variant. Virtually all Qumran scholars are sceptical of J. O'Callaghan's identification, pre ferring to see the portion as the remains of an unknown Old Greek version of the Bible, or even as a line from Homer. The most recent and thorough analysis of the question con cludes, however—on the basis of sophisticated statistical techniques—that O'Callaghan's claim cannot be falsified. The question must remain open. Significance of Written Materials from O t h e r Sites. The manuscripts from Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Se'elim, Nahal Mishmar, and Ketef Jericho are par ticularly important for the light they shed on the period of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. They illumine the course of that revolt, Bar Kokhba's administration, and tire prosopography of individuals who took part in those events. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt.] In addition, the texts provide information on legal and religious practice, the economics of secondcentury Palestine, Jewish literacy, and onomastics. T h e lin guistic information they supply is considerable; inter alia they clearly prove tire use among the Jews of that period of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabatean. T h e circum stances of each language's use—that is, tire sociolinguistic situation—has yet to be worked out, but the materials have
DEAD SEA SCROLLS the potential to document such analysis. T h e texts also pro vide substantial new information on the development of the Jewish script, especially the cursive varieties, and on the Nabatean cursive and formal scripts. The Masada discoveries are also important for the lin guistic information hhey supply. In particular, the ostraca are a precious witness to the development of Mishnaic Hebrew dialects. T h e Masada finds as a whole greatly illumine as pects of the First Jewish Revolt. In this respect, they have the potential to improve understanding of the phenomenon of the Qumran caches because this was when they were hid den. [See First Jewish Revolt.] Unlike the vast majority of the Qumran scrolls, die finds from the other Dead Sea Scroll sites are, as noted, docu mentary autographs: contracts, letters, bills of sale, leases, and the like. They are the primary sources for which his torians have the greatest use. Extracting history from literary texts such as tire Qumran materials is a tricky and tenuous process at best. The discovery of so many documentary ma terials highlights the anomaly of their virtual absence among the Qumran scrolls. For some scholars this problem is suf ficient in itself to raise the question of whether the texts in caves I - I I really did come from Qumran—because any group resident there presumably also possessed autographic and ephemeral written materials of the sort found at the other sites. Thus, the finds at sites other than Qumran are important both intrinsically and paradigmatically. Essene Hypothesis for Q u m r a n Text Origins. Shortly after the original seven scrolls from Cave i came to be known, Eleazar L. Sukenik queried whether they might not be the writings of an obscure Jewish sect, the Essenes, men tioned by a few classical authors. This view came shortly to be the consensus, maintained to this day, although many advocates concede that a large proportion of the Dead Sea Scrolls are not sectarian and presumably could have been agreeable to most Second Temple Jews. Essentially, the the ory rests upon two pillars: the identification of Khirbet Qumran with the Essene dwelling place to the west of the Dead Sea mentioned by Pliny the Elder in Natural History 5 . 7 3 , and a series of correspondences between Josephus's descriptions of the Essenes (mainly War 2 . 1 1 9 - 1 6 1 ) and the contents of .the scrolls, the Rule of the Community in partic ular. Many of these parallels are quite general, but the most remarkable—precisely because they are specific and not of general application—are perhaps the rules governing spit ting and defecation. A recent monograph by T o d d S. Beall compiles and analyzes as many of the parallels as he could identify. [See Essenes.] Objections to t h e Essene Hypothesis. The evidence fa voring the Essene view has impressed many scholars, but certain thorny problems have yet to be satisfactorily re solved. T h e question with regard to Pliny is whether he is describing a postbellum or antebellum situation. If he de scribes a postbellum (post 7 0 CE) group of Essenes, he can
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not be referring to the site of Qumran because the archae ological research indicates that Romans occupied the site after the war. As for the correspondences between the Rule of the Community and Josephus's Essenes, most involve rules for the communal organization of the groups being de scribed. T h e Essenes are the only Jewish group of the period known to have this communal structure, but they are also one of the few about which we have any substantive infor mation. Many Jewish sects existed: a sample of those named in the sources includes Baptist Pharisees, Boethusians, Gal ileans, Hemerobaptists, Masbotheans, Samaritans, and Zadokites, in addition to the three groups (Sadducees, Phari sees, Essenes) Josephus mentions. Various other sects are not given names. Together with a proper appreciation of our ignorance, the recent work by Moshe Weinfeld (The Organizational Pattern and the Penal Code of the Qumran Seel, Gottingen, 1 9 8 6 ) must be factored into the question of Essene identification. He shows tiiat many brotherhood groups of the period—in Egypt, Greece, and elsewhere— shared basic organizational characteristics. Also problematic are certain fundamental discrepancies between the Essenes of Josephus and the contents of the scrolls. Prominent here are the questions of Essene celibacy and opposition to slavery. None of the scrolls advocates or describes celibacy, and the legal texts regulate slavery just as they do marriage. T o handle such discrepancies scholars choose one of two paths. One way is to argue that, whenever his description conflicts with the contents of the Qumran texts, Josephus was wrong. He was wrong either because he did not know the truth, or because the facts had changed over time. T h e other way of handling the discrepancies is to say that the Dead Sea Scrolls are not Essene texts. Thus, a sizable num ber of Qumranologists do not subscribe to the Essene hy pothesis, preferring instead to speak of "the sect." Over the years, several more particular theories have com peted with the Essene hypothesis. The most recent chal lenger is the Jerusalem hypothesis proposed by Norman Golb. This theory holds that the Dead Sea Scrolls represent deposits made by the inhabitants of Jerusalem during the First Jewish Revolt. The texts were not composed at Khirbet Qumran (which Golb believes was actually a fortress), but come from numerous libraries in Jerusalem. In support of this theory, Golb cites the hundreds of scribal hands found in the scrolls—difficult to explain given a thesis tiiat a small group copied texts over several generations. He notes that, with one exception, unlike the other Judean Desert finds, none of the Qumran scrolls is an autograph; all are scribal copies, again problematic if people living at Qumran were responsible for the scrolls. T h e single exception is the Cop per Scroll, and for Golb this one autographic text points to Jerusalem as its own place of origin. In his view, the Dead Sea Scrolls are not the work of a single sect, but represent much of the literary heritage of Palestinian Judaism.
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While many scholars agree with Golb that a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls probably come from elsewhere, most continue to believe that a sectarian group living at Khirbet Qumran was connected with the texts and was responsible for gathering them into the wilderness caves. Perhaps the most telling objection raised against Golb's position con cerns the interrelationship of the texts. In his view, the scrolls should essentially be a random grouping. A few texts might be interrelated, but no intentional principles should link the whole corpus. Yet, most scholars believe such links exist, although they do not always agree on what they are. Other suggested groups responsible for—or at least con nected to—the scrolls include the "Zealots," the Sadducees, and Jamesian Christians. The Zealot connection was argued early on in Qumran scholarship, particularly by C. Roth and G. R. Driver, but was never taken seriously, in part because the editorial team working on the scrolls said that it was wrong. With the recent publication of the materials found at Masada, however, it has become apparent that virtually all of the nonbiblical literary texts found there have connec tions with tire Qumran writings. This new evidence may lead scholars to reconsider some sort of Zealot connection with the scrolls, at least in the final decades before they were hidden. The Sadducean theory of J. Sussmann and Laurence Schiffman is associated particularly with 4QMMT because one or two of its laws agree with positions labeled Sadducee in rabbinic literature. This theory has yet to resolve prob lems of definition (e.g., What does rabbinic literature mean by "Sadducee"? Is that what classical sources mean by the term? How does the term function in each literary context?) and faces the general problem of how—indeed, whether— to use rabbinic literature to write history. Furthermore, many of the scrolls refer to angels and other concepts (e.g., resurrection) that classical sources on Sadducees explicitiy say they rejected. Finally, many scholars have recognized important con nections between the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christian ity, especially with John the Baptist. Robert Eisenman, how ever, has gone much further, arguing for a direct connection between the scrolls and early Christians gathered around James in Jerusalem. For Eisenman, the scrolls are Chris tian—but only because he defines that term much.differently than do other scholars. How a collection of texts could be Christian without once mentioning the name of Jesus, Ei senman has yet to explain. His tireory has garnered virtually no scholarly support. Qumran research presendy stands only at the end of tire beginning. More than half of the texts just recentiy became available to tire generality of scholars, which has had the promising effect of reopening basic issues in the interpre tation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. [See also Judean Desert Caves; Murabba'at; and Qumran.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allegro, John M. Qumran Cave 4, vol. 1, 4Q158-4Q186. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, vol. 5. Oxford, 1968. Includes several important pesharim, including die pesher Nahum. The volume has been criticized harshly for its many problematic readings and dubi ous manuscript reconstructions. See the detailed review by John Strugnell, "Notes en marge du volume V des 'Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan,"' Revue de Qumran 7 (1971): 163-276. For bibliography to the individual texts, see the guide by Joseph A. Fitzmycr, "A Bibliographic Aid to the Study of Qumran Cave IV Texts 158-86," Catholic Biblical Quarterly?,! (1969): 59-71. Baillet, Maurice. Qumrangrotte 4, vol. 3,4Q482-4Q520. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 7. Oxford, 1982. Good presentation of ex tremely fragmentary texts. Baillet, Maurice, J. T. Milik, and Roland de Vaux. Le "petites grottes" de Qumran. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, vol. 3. Ox ford, 1962. Publication of the texts from caves 2, 3, 5-7, and 10, the most important being the Copper Scroll. (3Q15). The review by Jonas C. Greenfield, "The Small Caves of Qumran," Journal of the Amer ican Oriental Society 89 (1969): 128-141, offers many important ob servations and corrections. Barthelemy, Dominique, and J. T. Milik. Qumran Cave I. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 1. Oxford, 1955. Publication of 1Q1-72, including 1 QS and 1 QS , originally part of the same manuscript as iQS, and 1Q33, which flaked off the main scroll of the War Scroll. Beall, Todd S. Josephus' Description of the Essenes Illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Cambridge, 1988. Convenient collection of a substantial amount of material from die Qumran texts that, in spite of grave methodological deficiencies, can serve as a starting point for a more nuanced investigation of the points under discussion, Beyer, Klaus. Die aramdischen Texte vom Toten Meer. Gottingen, 1984. Gathers then-known Aramaic materials from many scattered pub lications. The adventurous interpretations and reconstructions must be used with caution but are often suggestive. Idiosyncratic on gram matical and linguistic points. Broshi, Magen, ed. The Damascus Document Reconsidered. Jerusalem, 1992. Certain to become the standard edition of the Cairo Genizah texts of the Damascus Document, with new photographs and an ap paratus eriticus that collates variant readings from the Cave 4 Qum ran copies. Burrows, Millar, ed., with John C. Trevor and William H . Brownlee. The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark's Monastery, vol. 2, fasc. 2, Plates and Transcription of the Manual of Discipline. New Haven, 1951. Orig inal and still standard publication of the Rule of the Community from Cave 1 (iQS). Cross, Frank Moore. The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modem Bib lical Studies. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y., 1961. Classic introduction to the scrolls by one of the original editors, arguing unambiguously for the Essene hypothesis. Covers most of the basic questions in volved with the texts as seen by die team of editors at about die time they had finished their preliminary reading and transcriptions. Cross, Frank Moore. "The Development of the Jewish Scripts." In The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, edited by G. Ernest Wright, pp. 133-202. Garden City, N.Y., 1961. Extremely influential essay detailing the paleographic method of dating the scrolls. The method itself is perhaps dubious because of unproven basic assumptions and the complete lack of dated texts among the scrolls, but a sizable group of Qumranologists continues to rely on Cross's darings. a
b
Cross, Frank M., and Shemaryahu Talmon, eds. Qumran and the His tory of the Biblical Text. Cambridge, Mass., 1975. Useful but dated collection of articles on the scrolls and biblical textual criticism;
DECAPOLIS should be supplemented with Eugene Ulrich's "Horizons of Old Testament Textual Research at the Thirtieth Anniversary of Qum ran Cave 4," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984): 613-636. Dimant, Devorah, and Uriel Rappaport, eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of Research. Leiden, 1992. Eisenman, Robert, and James M. Robinson. A Facsimile of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2 vols. Washington, D.C., 1991. Contains nearly 1,800 pho tographs of virtually all unpublished materials from caves 4 and 11. See as well, Emanuel Tov et al., eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls on Mi crofiche: A Comprehensive Facsimile Edition of the Texts from thejudean Desert (Leiden, 1993). Eisenman, Robert, and Michael O. Wise. The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncov ered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of Fifty Key Documents Withheld for Over Thirty-Five Years. Dorset, 1992. Tran scription, translation, and analysis of fifty Cave 4 texts, many alto gether unpublished, some previously published in part. Eisenman, who wrote die analysis, applies his Jamesian Christian approach to these new materials; readers who are unpersuaded may still find the preliminary transcriptions and translations useful. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study. Rev. ed. Atlanta, 1990. A very helpful guide to the mass of bibliography generated by the Qumran site and texts, organized both topically and by caves. For die recently released Qumran texts, Fitzmyer's book can be supplemented by the article by Emanuel Tov, "The Unpublished Qumran Texts from Caves 4 and 11," Jour nal of Jewish Studies 43 (1992): 101-136, and Stephen Reed's list (below). Fitzmyer's work also provides bibliography for Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Se'elim, Nahal Mishmar, and Khirbet Mird. Golb, Norman. Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran. New York, 1995. Full statement of the "Jerusalem hy pothesis." Holm-Nielsen, Svend. Hodayot: Psalms from Qumran. Aarhus, 1961. Important presentation of the hodayot (though it is not the editio princeps), including an analysis of how each hymn reuses the biblical text. Horgan, Maurya P. Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books. Cadiolic Biblical Quarterly, Monograph Series 8. Washington, D.C., 1979. Full treatment of the pesharim, including the Hebrew text, dis cussion of readings and reconstructions, and interpretive analysis. Milik, J. T. The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4. Oxford, 1976. Includes virtually all of the Enoch material from Cave 4. The notes and introductions are almost equally valuable for their discussions of various unpublished texts. Milik, J. T. Qumran grotte 4, vol. 2.2, Tefdlin, muzuzol et Targums (4Q128-4Q157). Discoveries in die Judaean Desert, vol. 6. Oxford, 1977. Publication of tefillin, mezuzot, and two targums, 4Q156 and 4QI57. Newsom, Carol. Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Edition. At lanta, 1985. Includes the materials from Cave 4, Cave 11, and Ma sada, with an exemplary reconstruction of the original literary work. Weak on historical issues. Qimron, Elisha. The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Atlanta, 1986. The only grammar devoted exclusively to the Hebrew writings among the scrolls. Generally reliable, but questionable at points on phonology and does not include the Copper Scroll or, of course, many of the most recently available texts. Qimron, Elisha, and John Strugnell. Qumran Cave 4, vol. 5, Miqsat Ma'aie ha-Torah. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 10. Oxford, I994^ Reed, Stephen. Dead Sea Scroll Inventory Project: List of Documents, Photographs, and Museum Plates. Claremont, Calif., 1991-1992. The fourteen fascicles of this project provide an invaluable guide to what
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there is and where to find it for the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the generic sense. Photograph numbers and other matters of designation are listed for each item. Note as well the author's Dead Sea Scrolls Cat alogue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers (At lanta, forthcoming). Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (nQPfj. Ox ford, 1965. Original publication of the "deviant" Psalms Scroll, with photographs, transcriptions, and translations. Schuller, Eileen. Non-Canonical Psalms from Qumran: A Pseudepigraphic Collection. Atlanta, 1986. Publication of 4Q380 and 4Q381, with a fine discussion of related issues such as Hebrew psalmody in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Sukenik, Eleazar L. The Dead Sea Scrolls of the Hebrew University. Je rusalem, 1955. Publication with photographs of iQHodayot and iQWar Scroll. Vaux, Roland de. Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. London, 1973. Preliminary English publication of the results of five seasons of ex cavation at Khirbet Qumran. Much of the analysis is debatable, not least because new comparative material has subsequently emerged from Hellenistic-Roman sites at Herodium, Jericho, and Masada, among others. Until the scientific publication of the results becomes available, however, this volume is the place to begin on any point of archaeology. Compare Ernest M. Laperrousaz, Qoumran, Telablissement essenien des bords de la MerMorte: Histoire et archeologie du site (Paris, 1976). Vermes, Gcza. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. 3d ed. Sheffield, 1987. The most accessible collection of texts in English translation, now badly incomplete (even the 1987 edition was insufficiently revised in relation to the 1975 second edition). See, as well, Florentine Garcia Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in En glish (Leiden, 1994), the largest collection available to date. Vermes, Geza, and Martin D. Goodman, eds. The Essenes according to the Classical Sources. Sheffield, 1989. Helpful collection of the most important Latin and Greek sources on the Essenes, with original text and facing-page translation. For more obscure sources, compare Al fred Adam and Christoph Burchard. Anlike Berichte iiber die Essener, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1972). Wacholcler, Ben Zion, and Martin G. Abegg, comps. and eds. A Pre liminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four. 3 vols. Washington, D.C., 1991-. Based on the readings of the original editors, taken from a concor dance and reconstructed into complete texts by computer. For vol umes 2 and 3, the authors have compared photographs and other sources, thus offering a critical analysis of the original readings, which they do not always adopt. Volume 1 contains the 4QDamascus Document materials and calendrical texts; volume 2, a great variety of materials, including many sapiential works; and volume 3, the 4QRule of the Community materials, MMT, 4QJubilees texts, and Toharot texts, among others. Wise, Michael O., et al., eds. Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site. Annals of the New York Acad emy of Sciences, vol. 722. New York, 1994. Woude, Adam S. van der, and J. P. M. van der Ploeg. Le Targum de Job de la grotte XI de Qumran. Leiden, 1971. Fine original publication of the targum to Job, sometimes weak on linguistic analysis. For that aspect of the scroll, see Michael Sokoloff, The Targum to Job from Qumran Cave XI (Jerusalem, 1974). MICHAEL O. W I S E
D E C A P O L I S (Gk., "ten cities"), an administrative dis trict or region of Greek cities located in northern Transjor-
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DECAPOLIS
dan, southern Syria, and nortiiern Palestine. The original cities, ten in number, were attached to the Roman province of Syria in the first century CE. The earliest sources to men tion the term date to the first century CE. The Decapolis appears twice in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus is said to have passed through "die region of the Decapolis" ( 7 : 3 1 ) , and a healed demoniac proclaimed Jesus' miracle "in the Decap olis" ( 5 : 2 0 ) . The term is also mentioned in die Gospel of Matthew ( 4 : 2 5 ) . The most important ancient source is Pli ny's Natural History ( 5 . 7 4 ) . Pliny states that die Decapolis adjoined die Roman province of Judea (Judah) and names the ten cities: Damascus, Philadelphia, Raphana, Scythopolis, Gadara, Hippos, Dion, Pella, "Galasa" (usually emended as "Gerasa" [Jerash]), and Canatha. Pliny admits, however, that there was some disagreement about specific cities. Josephus, in his account of the first Jewish Revolt against Rome ( 6 6 - 7 0 CE), notes that "the chief men of the Syrian Decapolis" complained to the Roman emperor Ves pasian about attacks on their territory by Jewish insurgents (Life 4 1 0 , cf. 3 4 1 - 3 4 2 ) . Josephus also claims that Scythopolis was "the largest city of the Decapolis" (War 3 . 4 4 6 ) .
in northwest Jordan. Others suggest Dium is Tell el-Ashari, in southern Syria. N a t u r e of the Decapolis. Scholars long regarded the De capolis as a league or confederation of Greek cities orga nized by the Roman general Pompey when he brought the region under Roman control in 6 4 - 6 3 BCE. However, no an cient source refers to the Decapolis as a political league or confederation. There is no evidence that there were any spe cial political, military, or commercial arrangements among the member cities, nor was there any sort of federal govern mental machinery. Instead, the sources refer to the Decap olis as a region or a district formed by the contiguous ter ritories of the Greek cities. A late first-century CE Greek inscription from the Balkans refers to a Roman prefect of die Decapolis in Syria. This suggests tiiat the Decapolis was tiien an administrative district attached to the Roman prov ince of Syria under the supervision of a single imperial of ficial. Each city retained local autonomy and administered an extensive rural hinterland. Epigraphic and literary sources provide some evidence as to the territorial bound aries of the individual cities.
Later sources include Ptolemy, the second-century CE ge ographer, who provides the only otiter list of Decapolis cities (Geography 5 . 1 4 - 2 2 ) . His list includes nine of Pliny's origi nal ten cities (Raphana is missing) and adds nine new ones, for a total of eighteen: Heliopolis, Abila, Saana, Hina, Abila Lysanias, Capitolias, Edrei, Gadora, and Samulis. An in scription of 1 3 4 CE found in die region of Palmyra in Syria mentions "die good-messenger-Abila of the Decapolis." Somewhat surprisingly, only one other inscription mention ing the Decapolis is known, despite the fact that hundreds of inscriptions have been found in its various cities. Eusebius (Onomasticon 1.16), in about 3 0 0 CE, refers to the Decapolis as "situated near Peraea around Hippos, Pella, and Ga dara." A few more references to the term are found in Byz antine works of the fourth and later centuries. Stephen of Byzantium notes that die Decapolis once included fourteen cities, further evidence that the number of cities varied. Individual Cities. Most of the Decapolis cities can now be identified with a fair degree of certainty. Scythopolis, the only city of the Decapolis situated west of the Jordan River, is Beth-Shean (Beisan), in Israel's southern Galilee. The southernmost city, Philadelphia, is Amman, in Jordan. Mov ing north, Gerasa is Jerash in ancient Gilead (modern Jor dan), Pella is TabaqatFahil, on the eastern side of the Jordan Valley; Gadara is Umm Qeis, just southwest of the Sea of Galilee; and Hippos is Qal'at el-Husn, at the top of a hill on its eastern shore. Farther east, in northern Jordan, Abila is Qweilbeh, and Capitolias is Beit Ras. Most of the remaining Decapolis cities are located in soutiiern Syria. Raphana is probably to be identified with er-Rafe, and Canatha is prob ably Qanawat. The location of Dium remains a problem. Some identify it witii Tell el-Husn, Kefar Abil, or Edun, all
Archaeological Evidence. The sites of most Decapolis cities have been surveyed and several have been extensively excavated. Undoubtedly, the best-preserved and most thor oughly excavated city is Gerasajerash. [See Jerash.] The city developed on both banks of a perennial stteam, with most public buildings on the west side and most domestic struc tures on the east. T h e city was laid out in a typical Roman grid pattern, with a main north-south street (cardo) inter sected by two major east-west streets (decumani). These paved streets were decorated by colonnades lined with shops and other buildings and terminated at monumental gate ways. The city was protected by massive walls studded witii projecting towers. Other public structures included a "fo r u m " (actually an oval agora, or marketplace), several tem ples, a theater, an odeon (concert hall), baths, hippodrome (racetrack), triumphal arch, and nymphaeum (fountain house). During the Byzantine period many churches were erected. The other Decapolis cities display similar features typical of Greek cities in the eastern Roman Empire. T h e most extensively excavated are Philadelphia, Pella, Scythop olis, Gadara, Abila, and Capitolias. History of the Decapolis Cities. Nearly all the sites of the Decapolis cities were occupied in some fashion in the preclassical period. Yet, most of the cities claimed to have been founded as Macedonian colonies by Alexander the Great or one of his immediate successors in the late fourth century BCE. Philadelphia was founded by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the early third century BCE. Excavations at Pella, named for the capital of Macedonia, have also produced evidence of this period. T h e archaeological evidence for early Hellenistic occupation is lacking at some of the exca vated cities, however. The cities were generally established
DECAPOLIS on strategic sites, astride major roads, and within fertile ag ricultural districts. The conquest of Palestine and Transjordan by Antiochus III in 2 0 0 BCE brought the entire Decapolis region under the control of die Seleucid Empire. Antiochus and his successors continued to foster the development of the cities, as suggested by their later coins, which reveal Se leucid dynastic toponyms such as Antioch and Seleucia. In fact, it may only have been under Seleucid rule, in the sec ond century BCE, that many of these settlements developed into true urban centers. [See Pella; Seleucids.] The decline of Seleucid power and the consequent rise of die Hasmonean Jewish and Arab Nabatean states in the late second and early first centuries BCE threatened the very existence of these cities. T h e Hasmoneans conquered Scythopolis, Gadara, Abila, Dium, and Pella, and the Nabateans occupied Philadelphia. When Pompey arrived to es tablish Roman control in 6 3 BCE, he posed as a champion of the Greek cities. All the towns were freed from Jewish and Nabatean control, granted "freedom" (i.e., municipal au tonomy), and placed under the administrative control of the Roman governor of Syria. Many of the cities adopted a new Pompeian era on their coinage, to celebrate their liberation and express gratitude to their liberator. The Roman emperor Augustus, in 3 0 BCE, assigned two of the cities (Hippos and Gadara) to the kingdom of his loyal client Herod tire Great, despite the objections of their in habitants. Both cities regained their autonomy and were re turned to the province of Syria upon Herod's death in 4 BCE. T h e outbreak of the Jewish revolt in 6 6 CE witnessed at tacks by Jewish forces against the territories of several De capolis cities, including Scythopolis, Pella, Gerasa, Gadara, and Hippos. T h e people of several of these cities responded by massacring the Jewish minorities in their midst. T h e peo ple of Gerasa notably did not follow this example, but es corted their Jewish minority safely out of the city. Scythopolis served as an important base for the Roman army of Vespasian during the suppression of the revolt. Eusebius (History of the Church 3 . 5 . 3 ) asserts that the Christian com munity of Jerusalem fled to Pella before Jerusalem fell in 7 0 CE.
The conversion of die Nabatean kingdom into the new Roman province of Arabia by the Roman emperor Trajan ( 1 0 6 CE) resulted in the effective demise of the Decapolis, for its individual cities were then divided among the Roman provinces of Syria, Arabia, and Palestine. However, the in dividual cities continued to flourish economically and cul turally for many centuries. Culture of the Decapolis. The uniqueness of the De capolis was its cultural identity as a group of Greek cities, sharply differentiated from the neighboring Semitic popu lations. T h e city plans, individual buildings, tombs, sculp ture, and divinities are Greek or Roman, although there are many traces of Near Eastern influences. The vast majority
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of inscriptions are Greek, with some Latin. Some inscrip tions suggest that many of the urban populace were hellenized Semites, although it is entirely possible that some fam ilies were descendants of the original Greek or Macedonian colonists. Naturally, much less is known about the popula tion of the rural hinterlands, where Semitic culture may have remained dominant. T h e high Greek culture of the Decap olis is also clearly reflected by the numerous philosophers, poets, jurists, and other intellectuals from these cities. Among the most famous are the poet Meleager of Gadara (c. 1 4 0 - 7 0 BCE); the rhetor Theodorus of Gadara (late first century BCE), who was a teacher of the emperor Tiberius; and the mathematician Nichomachus of Gerasa (c. 1 0 0 CE) . [Many of the cities of the Decapolis are the subject of inde pendent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barghouti, Asem N. "Urbanization of Palestine and Jordan in Helle nistic and Roman Times." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 209-229. Amman, 1982. Bietenhard, Hans. "Die syrische Dekapolis vonPompeius bis Trajan." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der romisclien Well, edited by Mildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, vol. II.8, pp. 220-261. Berlin, 1977. Accepts the traditional view of the Decapolis as a league. Isaac, Benjamin. "The Decapolis in Syria: A Neglected Inscription." Zeilschrifi. fitr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 44 (1981): 67-74. Argues convincingly that the Decapolis was an administrative district at tached to Syria and under the supervision of a Roman official. Kraeling, Carl H., ed. Gerasa, City of the Decapolis. New Haven, 1938. Indispensable, detailed report of the excavations conducted in the 1920s and 1930s; some of its conclusions have been modified by recent work. Lenzen, C. J., and Alison M. McQuitry. "The 1984 Survey of die Irbid/ Beit Ras Region." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 32 (1988): 265-274. Suggests continuity of occupation in the terri tory of Capitolias through the pre- and postclassical periods. Mare, W. Harold. "Quweilbeh." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denys Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 472-486. Louvain, 1989. Summary of what is known about Abila. McNicoll, Anthony W., et al. Pella in Jordan 1: An Interim Report on the Joint University of Sydney and the College of Wooster Excavations at Pella, 1979-1981. Canberra, 1982. Parker, S. Thomas. "The Decapolis Reviewed." Journal of Biblical Lit erature 94 (1975): 437-441. Rejects die long-held view that the De capolis ever formed a league or confederation. Seigne, Jacques. "Jerash romaine et byzantine: Developpement urbain d'une ville provinciale orientale." In Studies in the History and Ar chaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, pp. 331-341. Amman, 1992. Smith, Robert Houston. The 1967 Season of the College of Wooster Ex pedition to Pella. Pella of the Decapolis, vol. 1. Wooster, Ohio, 1973. Smitii, Robert Houston, and Leslie P. Day. Final Report, on the College of Wooster Excavations in Area IX, the Civic Complex, 1979-198$. Pella of the Decapolis, vol. 2. Wooster, Ohio, 1989. Spijkerman, Augusto. The Coins of the Decapolis and Provincia Arabia. Jerusalem, 1978. Weber, Thomas. "A Survey of Roman Sculpture in the Decapolis:
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Preliminary Report." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 34 (1990): 351-355' Weber, Thomas. "Gadara of the Decapolis: Preliminary Report on the 1990 Season at Umm Qeis." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 35 (1991): 223-235. Contains a detailed bibliography on earlier work at the site. Yeivin, Zeev, et al. "The Bet Shean Project." Excavations and Surveys in Israeli (1988): 7-45. Zayadine, Fawzi, ed. Jerash Archaeological Project, 1981-1983, vol. 1, The Hashetnite Kingdom of Jordan. Amman, 1986. Zayadine, Fawzi, ed. Jerash Archaeological Project, vol. 2, Fouilles de Jerash, 1984-1988. Paris, 1989. S. THOMAS PARKER
DECIPHERMENT. Of the thousands of languages spoken before modern times, a handful developed scripts. The descendants of a few of those are still in use; of a hand ful of the outers, traces have survived the millennia to be discovered by travelers or excavated by archeologists. If the modern descendants diverged considerably from the ances tors, or if there are none, the ancestors need to be deci phered. It is always a script, rather than a language, that is deciphered; if an (ancient) record can be pronounced, but not understood (as with Etruscan), the problem is one of interpretation rather than decipherment. D e c i p h e r m e n t of Scripts. The prerequisite to decipher ment is accurate reproduction of the enigmatic inscription. This may seem trivial now that photography has been com monplace for a century and a half, but before 1 8 5 0 or so— during the quarter millennium when most of the ancient scripts were first found—only the artist's subjective eye served to disseminate an inscription's appearance. T h e ar tist's drawings further passed through the engraver's burin and, at the end of the period, the lithographer's crayon. Only witii photography, perhaps, does it become apparent how subjective the artist's vision is: witness the depictions of the Sphinx at Giza or the Assyrian bulls that vary with stylistic fashion and the drafting skill of individual artists. The task is especially difficult when the artist is trying to reproduce unfamiliar writing, where apparently trivial details may dis tinguish two characters (compare the Roman letters C and G), but rather great differences may be completely insignif icant (a Roman "t" may be made with or without the lower curve to the right, on the writer's whim). Successive at tempts to delineate ancient inscriptions—but not with in creasing accuracy—have been published (Daniels, 1 9 8 8 ) . Methodology. Given accurate copies of a graphic image, it must first be decided whether the image is in fact writing. The first cuneiform inscriptions, found on doorframes and such at Persepolis, were sometimes considered mere deco ration. [See Persepolis.] Kufic Arabic inscriptions in mosques are so stylized as to be almost purely decorative rather than linguistic. [See Mosque Inscriptions.] The ma sons' use of South Arabian letters to guide the arrangement of paving stones at Hajar Kohlan provided the first clue to
the canonical order of tiiat script. [See South Arabian.] The letters' use was functional rather than linguistic, but their function derived entirely from an incidental property of scripts that their characters are learned in a fixed order. It is uncertain whether "potters' marks" dating to the era of the presumed development of Proto-Canaanite writing that might be letters of a script are in fact such or are arbitrary designs with some function or other. [See Proto-Canaanite.] Two modes of decipherment ensue when the marks are es tablished as writing. In the exceptional case, the decipherer is very lucky and the new script occurs alongside an inscrip tion in a known language—in a bilingual text. Usually, it is safe to assume that the two texts render the same content— one is a translation of the other (or both are translations of a third). More often, the unknown script stands alone, and it is up to the ingenuity of the decipherer to discover a virtual bilin gual: some stretch of text in a known language that can be presumed to equate to some stretch of text in the unknown one. Most commonly, virtual bilinguals have been at a pho netic level (personal or place names)—although a morpho logical/semantic level (numbers) figured in at least one case—and sometimes purely graphic (shapes of letters in a known script). This last category comes into play whenever a new text, even in a very familiar language, is unearthed because the ductus of no two scribes is identical. In addition, ancient inscriptions are sufficiently rare that normal varia tion in script or language will be magnified by the absence of intermediate forms. The history of decipherment is stud ded with examples of poorly chosen virtual bilinguals, how ever, and it is difficult to dissuade the proposers from their beliefs. While the decipherer may formulate a hypothesis about the identity or relationship of the language concealed behind the enigmatic script, this has sometimes proved to be a mis step, misdirecting the investigator. (Most notably, the as sumption that Linear B must be some pre-Greek substrate language such as Etruscan delayed success on that script.) It is more useful simply to identify and count the different characters: a small number, about thirty, suggests an abjad (consonantary) or an alphabet; greater variety, about one hundred or more, suggests a syllabary or an abugida, and several hundred or more, a logosyllabary (or a logography— no purely logographic script, if such has ever truly existed, has been deciphered; candidates include Proto-Elamite, In dus Valley script, and Easter Island script). [See Writing and Writing Systems.] Case studies. T h e surest results have been achieved by those who concentrated on proper names. Such cases in clude both the first, (Palmyrene, by Jean-Jacques Barthelemy, in 1 7 5 6 ) , and the two most familiar decipherments (Egyptian, by Jean-Francois Champollion, in 1 8 2 3 , and Lin ear B, by Michael Ventris, in 1 9 5 3 ) , as well as the one that is arguably the most important of all, the Old Persian and
DECIPHERMENT Mesopotamian cuneiform scripts, whose decipherment was begun by Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1802) and climaxed by Edward Hincks (1846-1852). [See Cuneiform.] The de cipherments of Ugaritic and Himyaritic illustrate different lands of virtual bilinguals (see Daniels, 1995; Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 9). [See the biography of Champollion.] Palmyrene. Palmyra was an independent pagan monarchy on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire. It was fairly well known in the eighteenth century from classical historians. Monuments written in its language, known to be similar to Syriac, had been known in Europe since antiquity and had received the attention of antiquarians since the early 1600s. It was not until 1753 that adventurers traveled to the ruins of the city and brought back accurate copies of some of its inscriptions. Many of the inscriptions in the Palmyrene script and language were accompanied by Greek inscrip tions, and it took no great insight to guess that tire pairs were equivalent. Barthelemy ( 1 7 1 6 - 1 7 9 5 ) , in fact, reports that it took him no more than two days to decipher the script. From the thirteen inscriptions that had been accurately published by Robert Wood and James Dawldns (English adventurers who traveled to the ruins of the city in 1753 and brought back accurate copies of some of its inscriptions), Barthelemy chose one in which the Greek parallel began with a proper name, Septimios. The seventh letter of the Palmyrene in scription was the same as the first, so (omitting short vowels) there seemed to be a correspondence; the next word, Ouoroden in tire Greek, confirmed tire (w) that spelled [o] and gave (r) and (d) as indistinguishable (a characteristic of Ar amaic scripts of the period). When the twenty-two letters were identified, their resemblance to the corresponding He brew and Syriac forms became clear. A handful of verb forms were nearly identical to Syriac words that could trans late the Greek, demonstrating that the language was Ara maic as well (Daniels, 1988). [See Palmyra; Palmyrene In scriptions; Greek; Aramaic; Syriac; Hebrew Language and Literature.] Mesopotamian cuneiform. Grotefend (see above) used the virtual bilingual of Persian kings' names (known from He rodotus and from formulae in recently deciphered Sasanian inscriptions) to begin the decipherment of the Old Persian version of the trilingual inscriptions from Persepolis. Work on them was greatly advanced by such pioneers of IndoEuropean and IndoTranian studies as Rasmus Rask and Christian Lassen. Henry Creswicke Rawlinson replicated tire decipherment of Old Persian, using the huge trilingual inscription at Bisitun that he copied at great personal risk, but he probably knew of Grotefend's insightful virtual bilin gual. Rawlinson usually receives credit for deciphering Me sopotamian cuneiform, but his work lagged behind that of Hincks. Although Rawlinson was stationed in Baghdad, he was kept abreast of Hincks's discoveries by a quite efficient postal system. [See Sasanians; Persepolis; Bisitun; Cunei form; and the biography of Rawlinson.]
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Edward Hincks (1792-1866) was a Church of Ireland country pastor. Unlike the celebrated Champollion and Veneris (see above), he was not a young man when he achieved his decipherment. He was immensely learned in all areas of classical and Oriental (i.e., Near Eastern) studies, and in his first approach to Old Persian he hoped better to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs. In his first lecture on the subject, on 9 June 1846, at the Royal Irish Academy in Dub lin (and published in its Transactions), he demonstrated that tire Old Persian characters denoted consonants plus partic ular vowels and not a wide variety of consonants. He also showed that the second of the three languages was written with syllabic characters that could be used in the consonantvowel pattern C V V ; C (ta-as, not ta-s). (The second lan guage is what is called Elamite, and it was decades before real progress was made in interpreting it.) [See Elamites.] The most important discovery reported in Hincks's second lecture (30 November) was the equivalence between two styles of cuneiform, which he called lapidary and cursive. This made available a great mass of material, which was being brought to the British Museum and the Louvre in Paris by the first excavators in Mesopotamia. In a third lec ture ( n January 1847), he refined his readings of many signs and presented the cuneiform system of numerals. The nu merals were taken from extensive inscriptions copied in the late 1820s by F. E. Schulz in western Armenia (now eastern Turkey) but not published until 1840 in Paris, and not seen by Hincks until 1846. r
It was Schulz's inscriptions, in a language now called Urartian, that proved to be tire most important to the deci pherment. [See Urartu.] T h e longest one is a royal annal covering thirteen years; each year is introduced by the same formula, but the formula is not always written identically. Hincks discovered certain signs to be optional and identified them as vowel signs. This enabled him to verify the vowel included in preceding CV signs. Moreover, he analyzed the Urartian texts grammatically; his results, including the read ings of 1 1 0 signs, were published in tire prestigious Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1848). Six months later, Hincks dealt with the inescapable fact that many signs had more than one phonetic value, and semantic values as well. At that point, he suggested tire possibility that a different language could underlie tire script. Two years later, on 29 July 1850, at the Edinburgh meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he asserted that the writing system was devised for a non-Semitic language. At that meeting, also, he showed grammatical patterning in the Assyrian lan guage that was fully parallel to that in Hebrew. Rawlinson's treaffnent of the Assyrian version of the great Bisutun inscription was published in January 1852. Hincks's last article pertaining to the decipherment per se is dated 24 May 1852: it gives values to 252 characters and identifies elements of Rawlinson's publication that were taken from Hincks's work without acknowledgment. It also includes the
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first mention of ancient textual material mat signaled the close of the decipherment phase of the interpretation of cu neiform. This was a fragment of a lexical list, which Hincks saw comprised a list of signs accompanied by a rendition of their pronunciation. Hencefordi, most signs were to be iden tified from their appearance in such documents, of which thousands of fragments have been recovered from through out the cuneiform world. Hincks's accomplishment was rec ognized in his own time; his undeserved eclipse by Rawlinson may be attributable to the personalities of the two men. Hincks was shy and unambitious, with no academic posi tion, rarely leaving the village of Killyleagh, in Ulster. Rawlinson was energetic, well placed in the military and the Brit ish Museum, and endowed with dual hagiographers in his brother, a prolific historian, and the immensely powerful E. A. Wallis Budge, who ruled British Oriental studies for dec ades. Both authors downplay—and distort—Hincks's role. Subsequent chroniclers and historians have not known of the existence of the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (for details and references, see Cathcart and Donion, 1 9 8 3 ; Daniels, 1 9 9 4 ) .
Ugaritic. It is Ugaritic that was deciphered by means of numerals, and also by the use of grammatical information. T h e first texts were excavated at Ugarit in 1929 and pub lished immediately; Charles Virolleaud, the epigrapher, sup posed from the location and date of the site and the finds that their language was likely to be Northwest Semitic. He was fortunate enough to discover a tablet that resembled Mesopotamian accounting documents and, in a column that might contain numbers (their names were spelled out), a sequence of symbols like XYX appeared. About the only common word in Semitic with such a consonant pattern is talat, "three." Meanwhile, the eminent scientist Hans Bauer analyzed the letters that appeared at the beginnings or ends of words, or both, and compared them with the limited in ventory of affixes in Semitic. Edouard Dhorme noted that a phrase at the beginning of what looked like a letter was identical to a phrase on a sword, with the addition of one letter at the beginning. He surmised that this was the letter 1, representing the preposition to. The work of the three scholars converged, and the Ugaritic script was soon worked out (Corre, 1966). The unique use of three letters for d, i, and u was established by Johannes Friedrich. .[See Ugarit; Ugaritic; Ugarit Inscriptions; and the biography of Virol leaud.] Himyaritic. A Near Eastern script deciphered via the shapes of the characters is the Himyaritic (i.e., Sabaean), as it was called by early researchers. Emil Rodiger discovered two unrelated Arabic manuscripts that contained lists of let ters said to be musnad, "Himyaritic." The two lists were strikingly similar, suggesting that they might preserve a gen uine tradition; indeed, when the first inscriptions from South Arabia were published in 1 8 3 7 >d 1838, Rodiger was able to interpret them fairly successfully, using the manuscript ar
abecedaries. Flis teacher, the eminent philologist Wilhelm Gesenius, mistrusting that evidence and relying more on comparative philology and limited data from a newly dis covered South Arabian language, had an earlier success but went further astray. Unfortunately, the first somewhat ex tensive text available (ten lines) contained almost nothing but proper names (Daniels, 1 9 8 6 ) . [See Himyar.] I n t e r p r e t a t i o n of Languages. With tire decipherment of ancient scripts came the discovery that they could be used for languages other than those for which they were devised. T h e recovery of many intermediary forms has enabled the demonstration that all tire West Semitic scripts (including Palmyrene, Ugaritic, and Himyaritic, as well as Hebrew and Arabic) belong to a single tree of descent. A productive as sumption, as has been seen, was that the languages associ ated with the unknown scripts were similar to the known Semitic languages: Flebrew, Syriac (Christian Aramaic), Jewish Aramaic, and Arabic. The affinity of the Semitic lan guages had been recognized since the Middle Ages (previ ously called Oriental, they did not receive the name "Se mitic" until 1 7 8 1 ) . The four classical Semitic languages are Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopic, or Ge'ez; the lan guage of the Aramaic portions of the Bible was called Chaldee, as were the languages of the rabbinic writings. It is not yet clear when the Aramaic languages were identified as a group (characterized by the phonological change of Semitic interdentals to stops and by a particular selection of the an cestral verb stems); Barthelemy does not use the term of Palmyrene, but it was established by the mid-nineteenth century. As the decipherment of cuneiform proceeded, several scholars came to believe that cuneiform Assyrian was a Se mitic language. This was an assumption rather titan a dem onstration; however. It was not until Hincks identified the similarity in grammar as well as vocabulary that the identi fication could be regarded as certain. T h e other cuneiform languages are more difficult. Those for which the most ma terials are available are Sumerian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, and Urartian. [See Sumerian; Hittite; Hurrian.] The interpretation of Sumerian was aided somewhat by the discovery, early on, of tablets containing grammatical paradigms. T h e first interpretations coincided with a vogue for typological classification of language. T h e German-En glish philologist Friedrich Max Muller assigned nearly all tire non-Indo-European, non-Semitic languages of Eurasia to a phylum he called Turanian (encompassing many more lan guages than the modern term Altaic), largely on the basis of their so-called agglutinative structure. Early Sumerologists, finding similar patterning in Sumerian, believed it, too, be longed in the phylum. They found a worthy opponent in Joseph Halevy (who was actually familiar with a number of Turanian languages). He, however, was of the opinion that Sumerian was not a real language at all, but a code devised by Assyrian priests to maintain the secrecy of the cult (Coo-
DEDAN per, 1991). The discovery in the late nineteenth century of archives, notably at Telloh, of the most mundane docu ments written in Sumerian disproved the notion. Over the following century, attempts have been made to connect Su merian with virtually every language family on the globe— most recently the Nostratic superphylum encompassing Indo-European and most of its neighbors. So little infor mation is accessible to nonspecialists, however, that no cre dence can be given to these attempts. The limited amount of Elamite material and its formulaic nature—even though it crosses several periods in nearly three millennia—make it difficult to analyze. The proposal by David McAlpin to connect it with the well-studied Dravidian family has attracted much notice and entered the handbooks, but it is not accepted by the small corps of Elamitologists. A dispassionate linguist will be immediately sus picious because McAlpin seems to have a Dravidian ety mology for every Elamite word, an unthinkable occurrence. With cuneiform Hittite, the interpretation is certain. T h e Czech scholar Bedfich Hrozny (Daniels and Bright, 1996) noted a word that could be transcribed as ivatar in a context that demanded the meaning "water" and successfully inter preted the language as Indo-European. Urartian (so impor tant in the decipherment of cuneiform) resisted interpreta tion for decades. Extensive studies were published by Archibald H. Sayce in the 1880s, but the ergative type of language was not yet familiar to philologists. Hurrian is known from essentially one document—physically, the larg est cuneiform-inscribed clay tablet known—and from many enigmatic ritual bilingual texts with Hittite equivalents. All that can be said is that Hurrian and Urartian are related. It has been suggested they are ancestral to some languages of the Caucasus. Lexical connections with (Indo-European) Armenian have been proposed. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cathcart, Kevin J., and Patricia Donlon. "Edward Hincks, 1792-1866: A Bibliography of His Publications." Orientalia 52 (1983): 325-356. Cooper, Jerrold S. "Posing the Sumerian Question: Race and Schol arship in the Early History of Assyriology." Aula Oricntalis 9 (1991): 47-66. Corre, Alan D. "Anatomy of a Decipherment." Proceedings of the Wis consin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 55 (1966): 11-20. Daniels, Peter T. "'To Prove Him with Hard Questions': The Deci pherment of Himyaritic." Appendix 1 of "How to Decipher a Script," in Writing!Eaiture, edited by Pierre Swiggers and Willy Van Hoecke. Louvain, forthcoming. Daniels, Peter T. '"Shewing of Hard Sentences and Dissolving of Doubts': The First Decipherment." Journal of the American Oriental Society 108 (1988): 419-436. Daniels, Peter T. "Edward Hincks's Decipherment of Mesopotamian Cuneiform." In The Edward Hincks Bicentenary Lectures, edited by Kevin J. Cathcart, pp. 30-57. Dublin, 1994. Daniels, Peter T. "The Decipherments of Near Eastern Scripts." In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol, 1, edited by Jack M. Sasson et at, pp. 81-93. New York, 1995.
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Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. The World's Writing Sys tems. New York, 1996. Friedrich, Johannes. Extinct Languages. Translated by Frank Gaynor. New York, 1957. Gordon, Cyrus H. Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and De cipherment. 2d ed. New York, 1982. Pope, Maurice. The Story of Archaeological Decipherment from Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Linear B. New York, 1975. PETER T. DANIELS
D E D A N , site identified with the ruins of al-Khuraybah in the al-'Ula oasis in Saudi Arabia by Eduard Glaser in 1890, mainly on the basis of geography (26°3y' N , 37°5o' E). This is one of the most fertile valleys in northwest Ara bia, where the main route used by the incense trade and pilgrim traffic is restricted by forbidding sandstone moun tains, sand desert, and harm ("lava flows"). References to Dedan in the Hebrew Bible make it clear that it was one of the most important caravan centers in northern Arabia. The site had been visited by a number of European travelers prior to Glaser, but it was Antonin Jaussen and Raphael Savignac (1914) who were the first (1907-1910) to describe its ruins adequately and to record the many rock inscriptions (in various pre-Islamic Arabian scripts) that amply confirm the identification. Their work remains basic, although it has been supplemented by the more recent, though still very superficial, examination of the site by Fred V. Winnett and William L. Reed (1970), Peter J. Parr and others (1970), and Garth Bawden (1979). T h e biblical citations most likely refer to the sixth century BCE, in about the middle of which the site is mentioned (as Dadanu) in an inscription from Harran, in southern Turkey. T h e inscription records a number of North Arabian centers which the king of Babylon, Nabonidus, attacked at die time of his sojourn in Tayma'. Winnett (Winnett and Reed, 1970)3 whose reconstruction of the history of Dedan based on the epigraphic material is probably the most reliable, pos tulates the existence of a short-lived, independent "Dedanite" kingdom in about 500 BCE, after the collapse of the NeoBabylonian Empire and before the Achaemenid rulers had had time to impose their own control over this strategic part of Southwest Asia. Northern Arabia seems to have pros pered under Persian rule, and by about 400 BCE an indepen dent—or semi-independent—kingdom, known from the in scriptions as Lihyanite, was centered at Dedan. By about this time also a small trading colony of Minaean merchants from southwest Arabia was established there, leaving in scriptions in their own language and script. Minaean traders were also to be found in Egypt, and Dedan was probably in contact with them, across the Red Sea. Relations with Egypt seem to have been maintained after the fall of the Persian Empire and the establishment of the Greek Ptolemaic dy nasty; Ptolemy II is known to have been active in promoting the Red Sea trade and may well have supported the Lih-
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yanite rulers in tire face of the rising power of the Nabateans, based farther north at Petra. Nevertheless, Winnett has ad vanced evidence to suggest that the native Lihyanite dynasty was in fact overtiirown by a Nabatean adventurer, Mas'udu, in the second or early first century BCE. Shordy, thereafter, it seems that Dedan was replaced as a trading center by die Nabatean town of Hegra (Meda'in Saleh), a few kilometres farther north. [See Meda'in Saleh.] In addition to the inscriptions, tire archaeological remains at al-Khuraybah comprise a number of simple tomb cham bers cut into the cliffs, two of which are flanked by pairs of crudely carved lions, and a low mound of ruins, some 800 X 250 m in extent and just a few meters high. The tomb has been badly disturbed by digging for building material— much of it for tire Hejaz Railway, which cuts through it—and only a few traces of ancient walling and much bro ken pottery can be seen on the surface. Jaussen and Savignac were able to detect part of the plan of a monumental struc ture, adjacent to which were four statue bases with Lihyanite inscriptions. Winnett (1937) dated them to tire late fourth or early third century BCE. Fragments of several nearly lifesized sculptures found close by clearly come from these ba ses, and presumably represent rulers; their style shows marked egyptianizing characteristics of the late dynastic or Ptolemaic period. All of these remains lay close to the sur face of the mound and evidently belong to the last major period of building. Apart from a handful of Nabatean graf fiti, there is little evidence for a Nabatean occupation of the site. [See also Nabateans; and the biography of Winnett.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Bawden, Garth. "Khief El-Zahra and the Nature of Dedanite Hege mony in die al-'Ula Oasis." Atlal 3 (1979): 63-72. Most useful for its brief account of recent Saudi Arabian excavations at the site. Jaussen, Antonin J„ and Raphael Savignac. Mission archeologique en Arabic II. Paris, 1914. Long out of print but still the most complete description of the site, and the principal publication of its epigraphic remains. Nasif, Abdallah A. Via: An Historical and Archaeological Survey with Special Reference to Its Irrigation System. Riyadh, 1988. Account of recent work by Saudi Arabian archaeologists, with numerous illus trations (including color plates), but concentrating on the Islamic remains. Pair, Peter J., et al. "Preliminary Survey in North West Arabia, 1968." Bulletin of the Institute ofArchaeology, University of London 8-9 (1970): 193-242. Adds important detail to Jaussen and Savignac's descrip tion (see above). Parr, Peter J. "Aspects of the Archaeology of North-West Arabia in the First Millennium BC." In L'Arabie preislamique etson envirannement historique el culturel: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, edited by Toufic Fahd, pp. 39-66. Leiden, 1989. Primarily a discussion of controver sial issues relating to the archaeology and chronology of another im portant Arabian oasis center, Tayma', but surveys the history of Dedan as well. Winnett, Fred V. A Study of the Lihyanite and Thamudic Inscriptions. Toronto, 1937.
Winnett, Fred V., and William L. Reed. Ancient Records from North Arabia. Toronto, 1970. PETER J. PARR
DEH LURAN ("place of the Lurs," an Indo-Europeanspeaking ethnic group in western Iran), site located in south western Iran near the northwestern edge of tire Deh Luran plain (32°42' N , 47°i4' E). The plain is bounded by the Kuh-i Siah range of the Zagros Mountains to the northeast; Jebel Hamrin, a low anticlinal ridge to the southwest; and the small Dawairij and Mehmelr Rivers on the east and west. The plain lies from 32°3o' to 32°42' N and 47°o8' to 47 24' E at an altitude of about 150 m and receives an average of 300-350 mm of precipitation during the winter rainy season. The Deh Luran plain, about 60 km (37 mi.) northwest of Susa, is situated between the base of tire Zagros Mountains and the international border with Iraq. It is best known for a series of excavations and surveys of archaeological sites that elucidate tire region's history from the oldest agricul tural settlements in 9000 BP to the modern era. This small, fertile plain lies about midway between passes that lead into the mountains near modern Dizful and Mandali. Because of the limited availability of fresh water and pasturage, Deh Luran has served as a stopping point for travelers and trad ers; however, settlement there has generally been sparse and always rural in comparison with Khuzistan, to the southeast. 0
Most of the natural vegetation has been stripped from this region, leaving it barren and treeless, but pistachio trees once grew along the seasonal streams and there were jujube trees scattered across the steppe. The precipitation is sufficient to grow crops without irrigation during average years, but rain fall is quite variable in intensity and timing so that agricul tural success is always uncertain. There is seldom frost in the winter but summer temperatures can rise above 40°C, with high winds, leaving all vegetation scorched by late spring. Because of the heat and summer drought, herders usually take their flocks into the mountains. The history of Deh Luran reflects that of the surrounding regions: Mesopotamia, Khuzistan, and the Zagros Moun tains. As early as tire third millennium, and subsequently throughout history, Deh Luran comprised part of one or another larger polity or lay in a boundary zone between those polities. No cuneiform texts have yet been found in the limited excavations at historic sites, but the large walled site of Mussian has been tentatively identified as ancient Urua, an Elamite city. By the second millennium BCE, trade may already have passed through Deh Luran on the route used later by the Achaemenid kings traveling between their capitals at Susa in Khuzistan and Ecbatana at modern Hamadan in the mountains. The first archaeological investigations were undertaken by Joseph Gautier and Georges Lampre of the French mission to Iran in 1903. They excavated at Tepes Mussian, Khazi-
DEH LURAN neh, Aliabad, and Mohammed Jaffar (later known as Ali Kosh) and reported the existence of numerous otirer tells. Frank Hole and Kent V. Flannery with support from Rice University and the National Science Foundation surveyed the plain in 1961 and began an excavation at Ali Kosh. In 1 9 6 3 , diey returned with James Neely, who excavated at Tepe Sabz while Hole and Flannery continued at Ali Kosh and briefly reexamined an old French trench at Tepe Mussian. In 1 9 6 9 Hole excavated at Chogha Sefid (see figure 1 ) , Neely carried out an intensive survey of the plain, and Mi chael Kirkby of Bristol University investigated its geomorphic history. Henry Wright of the University of Michigan excavated at Tepe Farukhabad in 1 9 6 8 . The history of human use of Deh Luran is closely related to changes in the land itself. When people first settled at Ali Kosh and Chogha Sefid, tire surface of tire land was quite different from what it is today. Flash floods deposited silt washed down from the mountains over the entire plain, re generating its fertility and creating marshes that abounded with fish, attracted game and migratory fowl, and provided easily tilled, moist soil for agriculture. As the deposition of silt continued, the marshes gradually filled in; by the second millennium, some 4 m of silt had accumulated. T h e rivers became entrenched, and silt ceased to build up on the plain, leaving much of it unsuited to agriculture except by irriga tion. Today, except during winter flooding, both rivers have only meager, brackish flows; the small springs on tire pied mont are also brackish. The American teams focused on prehistoric sites, from
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the beginnings of human settlement in 7 0 0 0 BCE to the third millennium. Most of this research was ecologically oriented, widr emphasis given to the recovery of seeds, animal bones, and small finds that would inform on environment, agricul tural practices, and trade. Ali Kosh and Chogha Sefid doc ument the first settlements by people who combined limited agriculture and stock raising with hunting and collecting. By 6 0 0 0 BCE, irrigation was introduced during the Chogha Mami period by people who had developed the technology along the Tigris River. Although there were notable changes in the numbers of sites through tire various archaeological periods, until the third millennium settlements were small and scattered and populations sparse. Although tire earlier French excavations were not suc cessful in recovering tablets, they did find abundant Jemdet Nasr-Early Dynastic I-style ceramics in proto-Elamite tombs (c. 3 2 0 0 - 2 6 0 0 BCE) at Khazineh and Aliabad, con temporary with substantial settlements at Mussian and Fa rukhabad. By the early second millennium, populations had declined and the Ur III kings of Mesopotamia were shipping valuable highland commodities such as silver and timber through Deh Luran. Although new towns were established in Deh Luran at Tepes Patak and Goughan during the last half of die second millennium, these had disappeared by the end of the millennium, perhaps victims of the incessant war fare waged between Middle Elamite kings and Babylonia. The Neo-Elamite period (c. 1 0 0 0 - 5 2 0 BCE) is one of appar ent depopulation of the lowlands, perhaps reflecting unset tled conditions in Mesopotamia generally.
DEH LURAN. Figure 1 . Excavation trench in the prehistoric site of Chogha Sefid on the Deh Luran plain. (Photograph by Frank Hole)
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A number of sites were situated on irrigation canals during the Achaemenid, Seleucid and Parthian periods (520 B C E 226 CE). It is probable tiiat the irrigation system was built on Elamite predecessors because several of the towns are in the same locations. The demographic pattern changed dramat ically with the Sasanian and Early Islamic periods (c. 226-800 CE), when an entirely new technique of irrigation, based on the qanat system of subterranean channels, dis tributed water to the northern half of the plain. [See Irriga tion.] This was augmented by a second system that used terraces and check dams to distribute water from the many seasonal streams as a supplement to both irrigation and rain fall. A similar and much more extensive system was also constructed in the previously unsettled piedmont zone. Each of these local systems was designed to serve one or more homesteads. A third Sasanian innovation was a system that took water from springs through canals and drop towers from tile upland hills to fields and houses below. One such system, along which there were twenty-two drop towers, has been traced through a course of 6.5 km (4 mi). T h e drop towers served as penstocks for mills where the force of the falling water turned the blades of a millstone. As a result of these various systems, some 40 percent of the Deh Luran plain was occupied and settlement probably reached its highest total ever. The later Islamic periods saw a gradual decline in popu lation. From 800 to 950 CE, much of the piedmont system, including the drop towers, was abandoned, as was the qanat, system that fed the upper plain. Population may have dropped to half that of the previous period. From 950 to 1250, only two functioning irrigation systems remained, one near the modern town of Deh Luran, the other near Tepe Mussian. By 1250, the plain was devoid of settlements, a situation that existed until the twentieth century. The recent history of the plain has seen seasonal occu pation by tribal Luri, Arab pastoralists, and the Wali of Pusht-i Kuh (an Ottoman title), who used Deh Luran as his winter camp and built a fort on top of Chogha Sefid. In the twentieth century, a customs post was established, the Brit ish Petroleum Company briefly exporting petroleum prod ucts from a natural tar seep by means of a narrow gauge railroad, and the towns of Deh Luran, Mussian, and Bayat were founded. Seismic work established the presence of a major oil deposit beneath the international border, but pro ductions wells were not developed. Until the late 1960s, fresh water was available in Deh Luran only through rain water or from A i n Girzan, the only freshwater spring on the plain. In the 1970s, pumps to deliver fresh groundwater were installed, agriculture was transformed by modern ir rigation systems, and bridges were built over the rivers. Dur ing the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, Deh Luran was invaded and captured by Iraq and subsequently retaken by Iran. For the prehistoric periods, Deh Luran has one of the best-known sequences in the Near East, and the information
on the late historic irrigation and settiement systems is unique. Despite its small size and remote location, Deh Luran continues to hold much potential for elucidating the dynamic history of this region. [See also Ali Kosh; Elamites; Tepe Farukhabad; and Tepe Mussian.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Excavation and Survey Reports Gautier, Joseph, and Georges Lampre. "Fouilles de Moussian." Memoires de la Delegation en Perse 8 (1905): 59-149. The first survey and excavations on the plain, including Tepes Mussian, Khazineh, and Mohammad Jaffar, a.k.a. Ali Kosh. Hole, Frank. "Archeological Survey and Excavation in Iran, 1961." Science 137 (1962): 524-526. Discovery and initial excavation of Ali Kosh. Hole, Frank, and Kent V. Flannery. "The Prehistory of Western Iran: A Preliminary Report." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 33 (1967): 147-206. General survey of prehistoric sites, including Deh Luran. Hole, Frank, et al., eds. Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran. University of Michigan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, no. 1. Ann Arbor, 1969. Final site report on the excavations at Ali Kosh, Tepe Sabz, and Mussian. Hole, Frank, ed, Studies in the Archaeological History of the Deh Luran Plain. University of Michigan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthro pology, no. 9. Ann Arbor, 1977. Final report on the excavation at Chogha Sefid, with a study of geomorphology and obsidian. Neely, James A. "The Deh Luran Region." Iran 8 (1970): 202-203. First report on the survey of die plain. Neely, James A. "Sassanian and Early Islamic Water-Control and Ir rigation Systems on the Deh Luran Plain, Iran." In Irrigation's Impact on Society, edited by Theodore E. Downing and McGuire Gibson, pp. 21-42. University of Arizona, Anthropological Papers, 25. Tuc son, 1974. Description of irrigation systems and mills. Neely, James A., and Henry T. Wright. Early Settlement Patterns on the Deh Luran Plain: Village and Early State Societies in Southwestern Iran. University of Michigan, Technical Report of the Museum of An thropology, no. 26. Ann Arbor, 1994. Description of all prehistoric sites and settlement patterns on the plain as known through survey, from the Bus Mordeh Phase to ED III. Wright, Henry T., ed. An Early Town on the Deh Luran Plain: Exca vations at Tepe Farukhabad. University of Michigan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, no. 13. Ann Arbor, 1981. Final report on the excavation at Tepe Farukhabad. Environmental Reconstructions Helbaek, Hans. "Plant Collecting, Dry-Farming, and Irrigation Agri culture in Prehistoric Deh Luran." In Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran, edited by Frank Hole et al„ pp. 383-426. University of Mich igan, Memoirs of the Museum of Andiropology, no. 1. Ann Arbor, 1969. Analysis of carbonized seeds from Ali Kosh and Tepe Sabz, Kirkby, Michael J. "Land and Water Resources of the Deh Luran and Khuzistan Plains." In Studies in the Archaeological History of the Deh Luran Plain, edited by Frank Hole, pp. 251-288. University of Mich igan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, no. 9. Ann Arbor, 1977. Geomorphological study of the history of the Deh Luran and Khuzistan plains. Woosley, Anne, and Frank Hole. "Pollen Evidence of Subsistence and
DEIR 'ALLA, TELL Environment in Ancient Iran." Paleorient 4 (1978): 59-70. Environ mental and economic reconstruction based on pollen from the sites. Trade and Exchange Renfrew, Colin, et al. "Further Analysis of Near Eastern Obsidians." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 34 (1969a): 319-331. Renfrew, Colin. "Sources and Supply of the Deh Luran Obsidian." In Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran, edited by Frank Hole et al., pp. 429-433. University of Michigan, Memoirs of the Museum of An thropology, no. 1. Ann Arbor, 1969b. Renfrew, Colin. "The Later Obsidian of Deh Luran: The Evidence of Chogha Send." In Studies in the Archaeological History of the Deh Luran Plain, edited by Frank Hole, pp. 289-311. University of Mich igan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, no. 9. Ann Arbor, 1977. Deh Luran in the perspective of the entire Near East. Wright, Henry T. "A Consideration of Interregional Exchange in Greater Mesopotamia, 4000-3000 B.C." In Social Exchange and In teraction, edited by Edwin Wilmsen, pp. 95-105. University of Mich igan, Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers, no. 46. Ann Arbor, 1972. Evidence for trade and manufacturing in Deh Luran. Wright, Henry T., et al. "Early Fourth Millennium Developments in Southwestern Iran." Iran 13 (1975): 129-147. Results of survey in Deh Luran and Luristan. Ancient History and Works of Synthesis Carter, Elizabeth. "Elam in the Second Millennium B.C.: The Ar chaeological Evidence." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1971. Synthesis based on survey and excavations. Carter, Elizabeth, and Matthew W. Stolper. Elam: Surveys of Political History and Archaeology. Berkeley, 1984. Includes Deh Luran in a general review of Elamite history. Hole, Frank, and Kent V. Flannery. "The Prehistory of Western Iran: A Preliminary Report." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 33 (1967): 147-206. General survey of prehistoric sites, including Deh Luran. Hole, Frank. "Chronologies in the Iranian Neolithic." In Chronologies in the Near East, edited by Olivier Aurenche et al„ pp. 353-379. British Archaeological Reports, International Scries, no. 379. Ox ford, 1987a. Assessment of carbon-14 dates and chronology of west ern Iran. Hole, Frank. "Settlement and Society in die Village Period." In The Archaeology of Western Iran, edited by Frank Hole, pp. 79-105. Wash ington, D.C., 1987b. Deh Luran is compared to oflier regions of western Iran. Wright, Henry T., et al. "Early Fourth Millennium Developments in Southwestern Iran." Iran 13 (1975): 129-147. Results of survey in Deh Luran and Luristan. Wright, Henry T., and Gregory A. Johnson. "Population, Exchange, and Early State Formation in Southwestern Iran." American Anthro pologist 77 (1975): 267-289. Comparison of developments in Deh Luran and Khuzistan. FRANK H O L E
D E I R ' A L L A , T E L L , site located in the Ghor Abu Obeideh in modern Jordan, east of the Jordan River and 4 km (2.5 mi.) north of the bridge over the Zerqa River (map reference 209 X 178). Before considering an identification with a site known from tire Bible, the nature of the ruins as Tell Deir 'Alia and its culture must be identified. c
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The tell was inhabited from the eighth century BCE until late Persian times and was mentioned by nineteenth-century travelers to the Holy Land (including G. A. Smith and Selah Merrill). Excavation has been underway since i960, first by the University of Leiden, under the direction of H. J. Franken, and, since 1978, by that university in cooperation with Yarmouk University, Jordan. Excavations have shown that in the Bronze and Iron Ages Deir 'Alia was a large sanc tuary with auxiliary buildings—storerooms, workshops, and dwellings. B r o n z e Age. The site's Middle Bronze remains have not as yet been excavated. In the sixteenth century BCE, an ar tificial hill was constructed that covered the MB ruins. This hill was restricted to tire eastern half of tire tell and measured more than 90 meters along its northern slope. Its northsouth axis was probably the same length. On its north side, which is 7 meters high, a 2-meter-high podium was built of mud bricks, oriented north-south. The podium held a cella ( n m wide and probably 20 m long) built of large river stones. A towerlike structure on this building's north side contained three small rooms. As the mud-brick buildings and mud roofs adjacent to the cella weathered, they caused tire surface area to rise, and several times tire cella had to be rebuilt on a higher level. In this process, the cella's thick walls served as retaining walls for the platform on which each new cella was erected. The entrance to the latest Late Bronze cella has not been excavated, as it is buried deep within tire tell. An earthquake destroyed the building shortly after 1200 BCE. Storerooms and workshops were built to the west of the cella, against the podium. On the east, rooms were found containing precious objects and clay tablets pertaining to the administration of the temple. Farther east were the living quarters for temple personnel. The nature of these remains creates a question about tire function of the complex. It is not part of a village or town; it is a freestanding sttucture on the plain of Succoth. Petrographic analysis of the pottery revealed that about 20 percent came from areas at a consid erable distance from tire site, such as basalt areas. Because there was a strong Egyptian influence, tire most likely identification is that tire temple served the trade be tween Egypt and Gilead. This trade is known from biblical sources, in which Midianite and Islrmaelite caravans travel between Gilead and Egypt (Gn. 37:28). It was an entrepot for Gilead's products, collected and harvested by the local population in the hills to the east and north of the site. In tire cella, the storerooms, tire treasure room, and in one of the houses, fenestrated pots that could be closed were found that had not been used as ossuaries. They may have con tained a "document" that testified to special bonds between the sanctuary and certain groups, such as families or tribes. Each pot may have represented a priestly family whose duty it was to serve during a certain period in the temple. An Egyptian drop vase with the cartouche of queen T a -
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(
DEIR ALLA INSCRIPTIONS
wosert demonstrates that Egyptian trade interests had not yet waned in tire early twelfth century BCE. It is not known whether that trade ended with tire earthquake that struck shortly thereafter, destroying the sanctuary. While there would have been enough space for tire markets in the sur rounding fields, the destruction of the administrative center and locations where conn-acts could be placed under divine authority must have had a disastrous effect on the people's livelihood. At some point in the early Iron Age, metalworkers leveled part of the surface of the ruined site and, for a short period, settled the tell, where they produced bronze objects. Little is known about this period because the excavation was fo cused on only a small area. However, there are indications that large buildings had been erected on the east side of the tell—perhaps a new temple complex serving trade, although no longer tied to Egypt. In the following centuries, after the smiths had left the site, there is a rather nondescript collec tion of small buildings and open spaces at the center of the tell. At one point the area may even have been walled, with a gate between two small watchtowers. Iron Age. The tradition of Deir 'Alia as a sacred place was not lost, and in the eighth century BCE a sanctuary ex isted, designated phase IX, of which a large area was exca vated. It is this phase "proto-Aramaic" texts were found in which the prophet Balaam son of Beor plays a role (Nm. 22-24) • The texts were written on a wall in a room belonging to the large complex of work and storage rooms. East of this complex, of which twenty-two rooms have been excavated, is another complex of ordinary houses with courtyards. No architectural parallel to this layout has as yet been found in the region. Although this building was also de stroyed by an earthquake that shifted walls at ground level, it was still apparent that some rooms could only be entered through/ a high window or from the roof. This gives the rooms the quality of an artificial cave. It appears that the room in which the Aramaic texts were written belonged to this group. T h e complex resembles what is described in myths as a labyrinth, although a small one—a place of death and victory over death, a typical theme in religion in tire ancient Near East. According to the Balaam text people believed that there was a pantheon of gods (Heb., 'elohim) with a leading god dess, probably Ishtar and Shadday, mythological beings (Dt. 32:17). This was a feature of religion in Syria that persisted into the Roman period in Hierapolis (Manbij), where the great Syrian goddess resided. Because the Hebrew prophets describe Canaanite religious practices derogatorily: "under oaks and poplars and terebinths" (cf. Flos. 4:13), modern readers may forget that these attributes belonged to a proper religion. Thus, the cult practiced in eighth-century Deir 'Alia was a primitive "mystery" religion, and not the "state" religion—as was the contemporary cult of Osiris in Egypt and of Attis in Syria itself. T h e mystery for the living in the
latter two cults was the beneficial rising of the Nile water in Egypt and the return of the winter rains in Syria, respec tively. In Israel, dre traces of the high places dedicated to Baal disappeared as the hilltops eroded. In Jordan, however, at Tell Deir 'Alia, later construction buried the remains of a Baal high place and the fertility religion practiced there. A flint inscribed with the name of Shar'a (the name used by bedouin today for the Jordan River, the "great watering place") was found in a four-room complex with an over sized loom weight and other weaving tools and a libation vessel. Among others, these objects may point to weaving for a water spending deity, a goddess holding power over the water clouds, in the sanctuary. Tell Deir 'Alia has often been identified with biblical Succoth (Heb., "huts"), a settlement with "elders" but other wise unspecified (Jg. 8, 16). Succoth may not have been the name used by the local people, but rather was a biblical in dication of a place of pagan religion in the Bronze and Iron Ages: the site's sanctuary may have been known as a holy place belonging to certain deities with local names like BethShar'a (see below). The place name Tar'alah is Talmudic (J.T. Shevi'it 9.2) and comes from the Hebrew root rl; the verb is used in connection with drunkenness or to quiver, shake, or reel. It may be that exiles expelled from Jerusalem by tire Romans settled in tire area and took Psalm 60 to refer to their situation: that is, instead of calling the area Succoth they called it Tar'alah ("thou hast made us to drink tire wine of astonishment", Ps. 60-63), from which the corruption Deir 'Alia followed. [See also Deir 'Alia Inscriptions.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franken, H. J., with contributions by J. Kalsbeek. Excavations al Tell Deir'Alia, vol. 1 , A Slraligraphical and Analytical Study of the Early Iron Age Pottery. Leiden, 1969. Franken, H. J. Excavations at Tell Deir Alia, the Late Bronze Age Sanc tuary. Louvain, 1992. Hoftijzer, Jacob, and Gerrit van der Kooij. Aramaic Texts from Deir 'Alia. Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui, vol. 19. Leiden, 1976. Hoftijzer, Jacob, and Gerrit van der Kooij, eds. The Balaam Text from Deir'Alia Reevaluated: Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Leiden, 21-24 August 1980. Leiden, 1991. H . J. FRANKEN
D E I R ' A L L A I N S C R I P T I O N S . Several groups of inscriptions, now in the Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan, were found in the various excavations begun in i960 at Tell Deir 'Alia (ancient Penuel or Sukkot?) in the Middle Jordan Valley. In the site's Late Bronze Age level (c. 1200 BCE), an Egyp tian cartouche of queen Tawosert (Yoyotte, 1962) and three small clay tablets inscribed in a linear script were discovered
C
DEIR ALLA INSCRIPTIONS (Franken, 1964). Although various commentators have pro posed interpretations for them, no reading seems satisfac tory and they must be classified as undeciphered. It is pos sible, nonetheless, to hypothesize from the general shape and the vertical stance of the letters that they are Old Ara bian script, Nortii and South. Indication for such a reading is to be found in a tablet from Beth-Shemesh in Israel, an abecedary, in the order of the letters in the South Arabian tradition (Sass, 1991). Because the tablets are contempora neous, this conjecture for the Deir 'Alia inscriptions appears plausible. In level M/IX (c. 800 BCE) of H. J. Franken's excavations (1967), several inscriptions attest to the use of Aramaic script. Two incised inscriptions mention "the gate" (sir") and another contains the beginning of an abecedary. In scriptions on plaster found at the site in 1967 are also written in Aramaic script, in black and red ink. These texts, prob ably originally written on wall plaster (wall no. 36), were found in many pieces among debris. T h e details of their language, restoration, script, reading, and interpretation are still under discussion; however, following a preliminary paleographic dating to the Persian period, and then in the editio princeps to about 700 BCE (Hoftijzer and Kooij, 1976), most commentators now agree that the paleography fits the dating of the archaeological context: about 800 BCE (Hoftijzer and Kooij, 1991) or the first half of the eighth century BCE. In deed, the earthquake that destroyed level M/IX at Deir 'Alia could well be the one mentioned in Amos 1:1 (cf. also 4 : 1 1 , 6:8-11, 8:8, and 9:1; and Zee. 14:5), dated to about 760 BCE. Although some scholars prefer to describe this script as Am monite, and others have attempted to classify it as Hebrew, Midianite, or North Arabic, the texts linguistic features seem to contradict these classifications. Most specialists agree that the writing is either an un known Canaanite dialect (Gileadite?) or Old Aramaic. Sev eral linguistic features make the second interpretation more probable: the writing of q for *d; the third-person masculine singular suffix -wh in 'Iwh (cf. also the plural ending -ri); the third-person feminine singular -t. of the perfect tense in the verb in hrpt and hqrqt, and the verb 'tyhdw, among otiiers. This classification fits the archaeological and historical con text: during phase M/IX, Deir AUa seems to have been un der Aramaic (Damascene) influence. The restoration of the broken plaster pieces has produced two principal groups of fragments known as combinations I and II. Even if problems with the details remain, it seems possible to restore most of the ten first lines of combination I. Most commentators agree that line 1 contains the title of this combination, written in red ink: spr (b)Tm(.br b')r.' s.hzh 'Ihn, "Text of (Ba)laam (son of Be)or, seer of the gods." The text tells the story of the seer Balaam's vision: " T h e gods came to him at night and spoke to him according to these words and told to Balaam son of Beor as follows. . . ." Even though the oracle is difficult to read and interpret, the next
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lines seem to tell how, on the following morning, Balaam fasts and weeps before telling his vision to his people. T h e content of this vision is on a plaster fragment and so is in complete, but it seems to depict a topsy-turvy world over shadowed by an oracle of doom. Combination II is still more difficult to understand because none of the lines can be re stored completely (see figure r). However, from what re mains of these two combinations, it is clear enough that they contained literary texts, brief sections of which—probably the most important ones (title, oracle)—were written in red ink. The original disposition of the text, in one or two col umns, also is still debated. Because the inscription on the plaster of wall 36 was in columns, however, it probably re sembled a manuscript—a literary text copied from a manu script by a professional scribe, for the handwriting is both regular and beautiful. T h e language of these inscriptions may be an archaic di alect of Aramaic—earlier than the Old Aramaic of the be ginning of the eighth century BCE. T h e redaction of the Ba laam text may antedate the Deir 'Alia copy by one or two centuries, making the Balaam Aramaic text the oldest extant
c
DEIR'ALLA INSCRIPTIONS. Figure I . Part of Combination Deir 'Alia Inscriptions.
(Courtesy ASOR Archives)
TTof the
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DEIR EL-BALAH
Aramaic literary text. This example of an Aramaic literary tradition is probably close in time to the origins of the bib lical traditions regarding the foreign seer Balaam (especially Nm. 22-24). In addition to an incised "two-shekel" weight (registration number DA 2632) and an Ammonite seal from the seventh century BCE (DA 2550; Kooij and Ibrahim, 1989, p. 106), several Ammonite inscriptions on jars and on ostraca (DA 2555, 2712, 2755; ibid., pp. 103-106) were found in level VI and may date to about 600 BCE. The jar inscriptions have not yet been properly edited but are said to consist princi pally of personal names, mostly Ammonite. A few Aramaic ostraca (DA 2600, 2768) from tire Persian period (fifth cen tury BCE), one of which mentions "stones" ('bnri) also awaits a proper edilio princeps. [See also Aramaic Language and Literature; Deir 'Alia, Tell] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aufreeht, Walter E. A Bibliography of the Deir 'Alia Plaster Texts. News letter for Targumic and Cognate Studies, Supplement 2. Toronto, 1985. Eph'al, Israel, and Joseph Naveh. "The Jar of the Gate." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 289 (1993): 59-65. Study of the Aramaic "gate" inscriptions. Franken, H. J. "Clay Tablets from Deir 'Alia, Jordan." Velus Testamenturn 14 (1964): 377-379. Hoftijzer, Jacob, and Gerrit van der Kooij. Aramaic Texts from Deir Alia. Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui, vol. 19. Leiden, 1976. Editio princeps of the Balaam text. Hoftijzer, Jacob, and Gerrit van der Kooij, eds. The Balaam Text from Deir Alia Reevaluated: Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Leiden, 21-24 August 1989. Leiden, 1991. Various linguistic, lit erary, and archaeological studies dealing with the Balaam text. Kooij, Gerrit van der, and M. H. Ibrahim. Picking Up the Threads . . .: A Continuing Review of Excavations at Deir Alia, Jordan. Leiden, 1989. Sass, Benjamin. "The Beth Shemesh Tablet." Ugarit-Forschungen 23 (1991): 315-326. Shea, William H. "The Inscribed Tablets from Tell Deir 'Alia." An drews University Seminar Studies 27 (1989): 21-37. Yoyotte, Jean. "Un souvenir du 'pharaon' Taousert en Jordanie." Vetus Testamentum 12 (1962): 464-469. ANDRE LEMAIRE
DEIR EL-BALAH (Ar., "house of the dates"), site lo cated in the Gaza Strip, about 13 km (8 mi.) south of tire city of Gaza, close to the Mediterranean coast. In antiquity, it was the easternmost point on the ancient road leading across the Sinai desert from Egypt to Canaan. At the site's virgin soil level, a flourishing Late Bronze Age, Egyptiantype outpost, complete with an Amarna-style residence and artificial pool was excavated between 1972 and 1982 on be half of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and tire Israel Exploration Society, under the direction of Trude Dotlran. Superimposed on this stratum
was a fortress and an artisans' quarter from tire time of Ram eses II and a contemporary adjacent cemetery. Above these richly documented levels were traces of Philistine, Israelite, and Byzantine settlements, after which the site was aban doned to the encroaching sand dunes. There were no modern topographic indications of an an cient settlement because of centuries of shifting sand dunes. A bedouin watchman inadvertently discovered the cemetery when an area was cleared for an avocado grove in the late 1960s. Subsequently, the cemetery was emptied by tomb robbers. It was only the sudden appearance of LB burial gifts and anthropoid coffin fragments in the antiquities' mar ket in Jerusalem that alerted the archaeological community to it. [See Grave Goods; Ethics and Archaeology.] The site was first examined by archaeologists in 1968, but because of its precarious security situation excavation could not commence until 1972. Every effort was made prior to ex cavation to locate, register, and photograph all the artifacts that had been purchased by private collectors and museums. Among the artifacts were some fifty anthropoid coffins, the largest and richest group from Canaan so far known; Egyp tian scarabs; jewelry; alabaster and bronze vessels; and fine Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery. The first few seasons were spent excavating the cemetery to the edge of tire 132-meter-high sand dunes that bounded the area. Three more anthropoid coffins were found in situ, all containing burials of several individuals. From these bur ials and those already recorded, it was evident that the cof fins had been placed in groups of three or more, with hun dreds of simple burials between them, and marked above ground by a Canaanite storage jar. Alongside the coffins were crude, locally made pottery vessels and a diverse as semblage of imported Mycenaean, Cypriot, and New King dom Egyptian vessels. Inside tire coffins were bronze objects such as mirrors, bowls, a wine set, and knives, apparently once wrapped in linen; alabaster goblets; and jewelry—carnelian and gold beads, gold amulets, gold earrings, scarabs in gold and silver settings, palnrette gold pendants, and seal rings. [See Jewelry.] Though distinctive Canaanite traits were manifest in tire workmanship of some of the jewelry and pottery, the dead were evidently Egyptians or were un der Egyptian cultural and religious influence—but losing touch with the cultic significance of tire Egyptian symbols. Four local sandstone Egyptian funerary stelae were also found in the cemetery, bearing hieroglyphic inscriptions and depictions of Mut and Osiris, similar to nineteenth-dynasty stelae from Deir el-Medineh in Egypt. At some distance from the cemetery, mud-brick walls were found that continued under the high dunes. Eventually 175,000 metric tons of sand were removed, revealing an area of 2,000 sq m down to the settlement's earliest occupation level, the mid-fourteenth century BCE. From the architec ture, ceramic finds, and other indications, tire closest par-
DELTA allels to this stratum are with Tell el-Amarna, the Egyptian capital city of King Akhenaten ( 1 3 7 9 - 1 3 6 2 BCE). A number of the rooms had well-preserved beaten-earth floors on which were found some locally made Canaanite cooking pots, juglets, bowls, and flasks and a preponderance of Egyptian-type vessels, many painted with "Amarna blue" and some with die additional black and red decoration that was especially popular during the late eighteenth dynasty. Adjacent to the building was a pool or reservoir, also typical of Amarna. [See Amarna, Tell el-.] Of striking interest were ten cylindrical pieces of carnelian and blue frit, dotted with traces of gold and pierced by a square aperture—parts of a scepter or flail, whose closest parallel comes from the tomb of Tutankhamun. Because flails were a symbol of authority, they can be adduced as evidence that the building complex was either a governor's palace or an administrative residence. T o the west of the residence a pit, possibly a favissa, was excavated in which there was a clay bulla, or seal, bearing four hieroglyphs—two udjats and two nefers—another par allel with Amarna. Superimposed upon the residence was a fortress that ap pears to have been two stories high, with supporting walls more than 2 m thick. T h e fortress ( 2 0 X 2 0 m) contained fourteen rooms. It had four corner bastions, which indicated that it had been built in royal Egyptian style, similar to the fortresses shown on the relief of Seti I at Karnak, depicting the ancient route from Egypt to Canaan, "the Way of Ho rns." Another area contained an artisans' village, in which traces were found of nearly every craft connected with the production of coffins and burial gifts. There were also frag mentary walls of private buildings, apparently the homes of the artisans, that contained typical such kitchen installations as tabuns ("clay ovens") and cooking pots. Whereas the later archaeological levels were shallow, in the new area layers of ash, rubble, and animal skeletons were packed with enormous amounts of crude pottery fragments, sometimes 6 m deep. Gradually, the semicircular outline of a brick structure built on the fill (of the pool) became evi dent. Its collapsed domed roof and vitrified walls indicated a pottery kiln, one of several that were found. There was also a large, well-planned building with a water installation in one room, used most likely in the preparation of the clay for the pottery-coffin industry. T h e installation was built of large slabs of worked sandstone, inlaid with shells and plas ter. Also found were large fragments of coffins and a flat, perforated clay disk similar to the coffin bases discovered in the cemetery. Hoards of bronze nails and scraps, a fragment of a divine concubine in carved stone, and spinning bowls used in the production of textiles were also found, as were chunks of ocher for coloring the coffins. Because of the local topography and .the site's unique ge
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opolitical conditions, only a small area was excavated. The site's full size is not known. Nevertiieless, the excavations at Deir el-Balah provide an in-depth picture of an Egyptian outpost and cemetery in southern Palestine toward the end of Egyptian influence there. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dothan, Trude. "Notes and News." Israel Exploration Journal 22 (1972): 65-72; 23 (1973): 129-146; 28 (1978): 266-267; 31 (1981): 126-131. Dothan, Trude. Excavations at the Cemetery of Deir el-Balah. Qedem, vol. to. Jerusalem, 1979. Dothan, Trude. "Deir el-Balah." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeo logical Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by Ephraim Stern, vol. r> PP- 343 347- Jerusalem and New York, 1993. -
TRUDE DOTHAN
D E L T A . T h e Nile Delta extends about 2 0 0 km ( 1 2 0 mi.) northward from the area of Cairo to the Mediterranean Sea. In antiquity this flat plain, roughly the shape of an inverted triangle, was traversed by seven branches of the Nile River. Today, only two branches survive: the eastern one emerges near Damietta, while the western one reaches the sea near Rosetta. The Delta's principal topographical features have evolved through the deposition of Nile alluvium and the in trusion of the Mediterranean Sea. Beach ridges, lagoons, and salt marshes are common near the northern coast, while farther south the region is crossed by canals and water chan nels, and swamps are found frequently in the low-lying areas. Ancient settlements often developed on the small hills ris ing above the alluvium, close to the Nilotic branches. T h e region's economy was based primarily on farming and cattle herding. Other significant economic activities included fish ing, commerce, and, in the eastern Delta, viniculture. The local Egyptian population was supplemented by influxes of Asiatics, Libyans, and, especially in the first millennium BCE, people from Cyprus, Anatolia, and the Greek world, T h e Delta is much less well known archaeologically dian the Nile valley. Many ancient sites are buried beneath either the alluvium or modern occupation. Others have been robbed out by peasants searching for old mud brick for fer tilizer or ancient building stone for construction. Little is known about the Delta in Neolithic times; remains of that period probably lie beneath the high water table and modern alluvium. T h e earliest excavated village is at Merimde Beni Salame, a large Late Neolithic (early fifth mil lennium) town on the periphery of the Delta some 5 9 km ( 3 7 mi.) northwest of Cairo. Evidence of human activity increases somewhat for the Chalcolithic period. Recent excavations at Buto in the west ern Delta and at Tell Ibrahim Awad and et-Tell el-Iswid (South) in the east have revealed stratigraphic sequences covering the Late Chalcolithic-Early Dynastic periods. The
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DEMOGRAPHY
earliest levels at Buto relate archaeologically to finds made years ago at Maadi, which today lies in the southern suburbs of Cairo. In the first half of tire fourth millennium, Maadi was a large town that prospered through copper worldng and trade with Palestine. Buto has also provided evidence for early ties with Mesopotamia, probably via Syria. Finally, a large cemetery from the late fourth-early third millennia at Minshat Abu-Omar in tire northeastern Delta has yielded pottery and other imports from Palestine; this site reflects tire incursion of Upper Egyptian people into tire Delta in the late predynastic period and the expansion of Egyptian trade with the southern Levant. In pharaonic times tire Delta (i.e., Lower Egypt) had a separate series of administrative distticts, or nomes, from the Nile valley (i.e., Upper Egypt). Pharaoh ruled over the two halves of the land as "long of Upper and Lower Egypt." The Delta became especially important in tire seventeenthsixteenth and thirteenth-eleventh centuries BCE, and then again during the first millennium BCE. In the fifteenth dy nasty ( 1 6 4 8 - 1 5 4 0 BCE), Asiatic rulers known as the Hyksos dominated northern Egypt from their residence at Avaris (modern Tell ed-Dab'a), along the former Pelusiac branch of the Nile in the eastern Delta; other Asiatic sites of that period have been found elsewhere in the eastern Delta and in tire Wadi Tumilat. In the nineteenth-twentieth dynasties, the Ramessid pharaohs made their home at Piramesse (PerRameses), which today encompasses an enormous area ex tending from Tell ed-Dab'a north to Qantir. The Delta reached its cultural and political zenith during the first millennium BCE, when several dynasties came from that area. At Tanis, on the former Tanitic branch of the Nile, a huge capital developed during the twenty-first dynasty. Many earlier monuments removed from other Delta sites have been found there; Tanis also contained a large temple complex dedicated to tire god Amun, as well as tire tombs of several kings of the twenty-first and twenty-second dy nasties. Bubastis, situated farther to tire south, was the home of tire twenty-second dynasty. This town, founded during the Old Kingdom (c. 2 7 0 0 - 2 1 9 0 BCE), had a temple dedi cated to tire lioness goddess Bastet, along with large cat cem eteries. [See Cats.] The twenty-sixth dynasty ( 6 6 4 - 5 2 5 BCE) made its resi dence at Sais in the western Delta. In this region, from the sixth century BCE on, there was also a Greek trading colony at Naukratis (modern Kom Ge'if). Located near tire old Canopic branch of tire Nile, Naukratis was an important commercial center until Ptolemaic times, when the founding of Alexandria on tire Delta's northwest coast (in 3 3 2 - 3 3 1 BCE) led to tire former's decline. The few archaeological re mains surviving from Greco-Roman Alexandria include the enormous Column of Diocletian ( 2 9 7 CE) and the theater at Kom el-Dik. [See also Alexandria; Hyksos; Naukratis.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Archaeology, Geography, and History of the Egyptian Delta in Phar aonic Times: Proceedings of a Colloquium, Wadham College, 29-31 Au gust. 1988, Discussions in Egyptology, no. 1. Oxford, 1989. Pro ceedings of a conference held at Oxford in 1988 on a variety of subjects and historical periods relating to the Delta. Contains several good papers, but the contributions often lack adequate illustrations. Baines, John, and Jaromir Malek. Atlas of Ancient Egypt. New York, 1980. Contains a brief, illustrated introduction to the Delta's major archaeological sites (pp. 166-177). Bietak, Manfred. Tell el-Dab'a, vol. 2, Der Fundort im Rahmen einer archdologisch-gcographischen Unlersuchung ilber das dgyptische Ostdelia. Vienna, 1975. Excellent study of the ancient geography and political organization of the eastern Delta, witii special emphasis on the identification of Tell ed-Dab'a as die Hyksos city of Avaris and the Ramessid residence known as Piramesse. Brink, Edwin C. M. van den, ed. The Archaeology of the Nile Delta, Egypt: Problems and Priorities. Amsterdam, 1988, Proceedings of a conference held'in Cairo in 1986 on die major archaeological prob lems of the Delta; includes several excellent synthetic contributions. Brink, Edwin C. M. van den, ed. The Nile Delta in Transition: Fourth-Third Millennium B.C. Tel Aviv, 1992. Well-illustrated, valu able work containing papers from a 1988 conference on the Delta in late predynastic and early dynastic times. Bulzer, Karl W. "Delta." In Lexikon der Agyptolagie, vol. 1, cols. 1043-1052. Wiesbaden, 1975. Solid overview of the geology, geomorphology, and economic basis of the Nile Delta in antiquity. Eraser, P. M. Ptolemaic Alexandria. 3 vols. Oxford, 1972. Standard ref erence work on the history and culture of Alexandria in Hellenistic times. Hoffman, Michael A. Egypt before the Pharaohs. Rev. ed. Austin, 1991. Part 4 (pp. 167-214) provides a survey of the major prehistoric sites in the Delta region. Kees, Hermann. Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography. Translated by Ian F. D. Morrow. London, 1961. Chapter 8 (pp. 83-121) gives a useful political and economic survey of die Delta in antiquity; the archaeological data, especially for the eastern Delta, are largely out dated. JAMES M.
WEINSTEIN
D E M O G R A P H Y . For periods in antiquity, where so cieties are similar and where similar methods of construction and traditions of habitation exist, a fixed coefficient of pop ulation density can be determined. More elaborate and ad vanced techniques, made possible by excavation, surveys, and interpretations of ceramic, faunal, and floral material, will allow future scholars to venture precise estimates for all periods. Considerable evidence exists to show that in tire premodern Near East the average density coefficient was very near 2 5 0 inhabitants per hectare (or per 2.5 acres). That figure stems from two systems of calculating population density: by analogy with present-day settlements in traditional soci eties (the ethnoarchaeological method) and by analysis of the layout of excavated sites. The first approach shows that tire density in villages in various communities in the Near East (Palestinian Arab, Iraqi, and Iranian) averages 2 5 0 per hectare. It should be
DEMOGRAPHY noted though that in ten contemporary "old" cities in the Levant for which data are available, density is 400-500 per sons per hectare. Urban settlements in antiquity, as in preindustrial modern cities, must have been considerably denser than in nonurban settlements. Using the second approach, it can be shown that the mean density of four Iron Age II settlements was fifty-four houses per hectare. If it is assumed that those buildings were oc cupied by nuclear families, each of five persons on the av erage, 270 people per hectare can be assumed. Ancient Sources. Almost invariably, ancient sources supply us with inflated population numbers. T h e most of ten-quoted example is the number of Israelites of army age counted during die Exodus—603,550 (Nm. 1:45-46 and similar numbers in other places). Because this figure refers to men older than twenty, the total population during the Exodus (the ratio of men of army age to total population is estimated to be 1 3 - 3 . 5 ) would have to have been more than two million—an impossibility. The resources of the Sinai Desert could not have provided enough food or water for such a crowd. T h e Hebrew Bible contains a wealth of such population figures. Salo W. Baron discusses 345 of them in Ancient and Medieval Jewish History (New Brunswick, 1972, pp. 25-38), including the grossly exaggerated results of King David's census: 1,570,000 "sword drawers," which would bring the general population to more than five million (r Chr. 21:5 and elsewhere) and the one million soldiers of Zerah the Ethiopian (2 Chr. 14:8). The figures given by almost all ancient sources are simi larly inflated. Flavius Josephus, the first-century Jewish his torian who is an otherwise reliable author, supplies mostly fantastic figures when it comes to population estimates. He claims that in 70 CE, during the First Jewish War against Rome, there were 204 villages in the Galilee, the smallest of which numbered 15,000 (War 3.43; Life 235). This, how ever, would swell the number of inhabitants in the Galilee in that period to well over three million. It is believed today that at the time the whole country had a population of fewer than one million. Josephus avers that the number of people killed in Jerusalem was 1,100,000 (War 5.420)—a figure the city could not possibly have sustained (it must already have been overcrowded, accommodating part of the Roman army). There are, however, data in Josephus that have the ring of accuracy: the number of the defenders of Jerusalem in 70 CE having been 23,400 (War 5.248) and the unrounded numbers and detailed breakdown of troops—how many led by John of Gischala and how many by the Zealots, for ex ample—and their plausible magnitude. Similarly, Josephus's estimate of the number of the inhabitants of Egypt men tioned in the oration of Agrippa II (7,500,000, exclusive of Alexandria) is plausible (War 2.385). T h e reliability of tiiese figures rests on tiieir most probably having been copied from
143
Roman military records, the hupomnemata (Gk., "commen taries") to which Josephus had access. T h e best way to achieve a trustworthy estimate of ancient populations is through a combination of agricultural data, which dictates the carrying capacity of a place, and archae ological data, which helps to estimate population densities. Estimating Population Size Using Modern Archae ological Data. Western Palestine (modern Israel and the West Bank) is perhaps the most excavated and best-sur veyed area in the world. T h e results of the intensive and extensive surveys and excavations carried out since 1967 en able quite accurate maps of the country to be drawn for certain key chronological periods: 2600 BCE (Broshi and Gophna, 1984), 1800 and 1600 BCE (Broshi and Gophna, 1986); 734 BCE (Broshi and Finkelstein, 1992); and 541 CE (Broshi, 1979)- T h e maximum population ancient Palestine wit nessed—about one million inhabitants—was in the year 541, a level not reached again until 1931. That was the heyday of the Byzantine Empire and just one year before the onset of one of the three pandemic plagues recorded in history. It decimated the population of the entire country. Ancient Palestine. T h e ability of a given area to support life is its carrying capacity. It is derived from the sum of many factors that limit the amount of food an area can pro duce. In other words, the carrying capacity of a region is an upper limit. Usually, according to D. J. Greenwood (in W. A. S. Tini, Nature, Culture, and Human History, New York, 1977, p. 394), the limiting factors will keep population lower than the theoretical maximum. For ancient Palestine, two ways suggest themselves for estimating carrying capac ity: an assessment of its grain-growing capacity and an es timate of its overall food-producing capacity. These meth ods are based on three assumptions: that annual per capita consumption of food in general and grain products in par ticular can be calculated, that the country's annual graingrowing capacity can be reckoned; and that Palestine in an tiquity was self-sufficient in grain growing and, indeed, in raising all basic commodities but not in refining metals. Ancient sources, as well as modern parallels, suggest that the annual per capita consumption of ancient Palestine was about 200 kg. Including grain for sowing (20 percent), waste (20 percent), and animal feed (10 percent), the gross con sumption reached about 300 kg. It seems that the graingrowing capacity of Palestine is well represented by the har vests of the years 1940-1942. These three years during World War II saw peak harvests, not supplemented with imports. Prices soared and every piece of arable land was cultivated. The 1940-1942 average annual yield of grains (wheat, barley, sorghum, and maize) was 266,411 tons. This amount could feed about 900,000 people. There is ample evidence to show that ancient Palestine was self-sufficient as far as food production is concerned. Thus, the country was supplying bread to fewer than one million people.
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DENON, DOMINIQUE VIVANT
Overall food-production capacity is a quantification method that tries to compute the amount of land needed to feed one person according to the agrotechnical standards of ancient Palestine. Grain was tire country's main staple, the source of more than 50 percent of the caloric intake. To produce 300 kg of grain, 0.4 ha (one acre) is needed. With fallow land—a minimum of one-third of the cultivable land—the grain-producing area should reach at least 0.6 ha (1.5 acres). To supply the other components of the food basket, more area was needed—for vegetables, fruits, legumes, wine, and oil. A certain amount of land also was required for growing fibers for textiles, mostly flax. It is difficult to estimate ac curately how much land was needed for these crops, but it seems that 0.4 ha is the bare minimum. Thus, the minimum area necessary to feed one person is one hectare (2.5 acres). Of the 2,600,000 ha (6,500,000 acres) of Western Pales tine, only 937,000 ha are cultivable. For purposes of com putation and because a certain amount of arable land has deteriorated in the last thirteen centuries, the number of ar able hectares in antiquity can be rounded to one million. Thus, ancient Palestine could have fed some one million people. Although this estimate is lower than most others that are current, it is supported by detailed estimates. Antony Byatt (1973) collected thirteen estimates of the population of ancient Palestine. Only one of them ascribes to Roman Palestine fewer than one million people. The rest run be tween 1,500,000 and 6,000,000. Ancient Mesopotamia. The only Near Eastern country other than Israel to benefit from archaeological investiga tions in assessing demographic history is modern Iraq. A series of reconnaissance projects carried out by Robert McC. Adams and his colleagues between 1956 and 1975, under the auspices of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, covered most of southern Iraq. Adam's work enabled him to draw conclusions about tire settlement his tory of Sumer, Akkad, and later of Babylonia. Ancient Mes opotamia was entirely dependent on vulnerable irrigation systems that can only be maintained by a stable centralized administration. As a result, it suffered more drastic vicissi tudes than most Near Eastern countries. Population peaks can be shown for the Late Uruk, Ur III, Neo-Babylonian, and Parthian periods, with marked lows in between, when there was no strong central government. Although Adams refrains from offering absolute population numbers, his data on settlements and their size do enable the development of sound demographic assessments. [See also Agriculture; Ethnoarchaeology; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert McC. Land behind Baghdad. Chicago, 1965. Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement
and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. Adams, Robert M c C , and Hans J. Nissen. The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies. Chicago, 1972. Broshi, Magen. "The Population of Western Palestine in the RomanByzantine Period."Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 236 (Fall 1979): 1-10. Broshi, Magen. "Methodology of Population Estimates: The Roman Byzantine Period as a Case Study." In Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Ar chaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by Avraham Biran and Joseph Aviram. Jerusalem, 1993. Broshi, Magen, and Israel Finkelstein. "The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 287 (August 1992): 47-60. Broshi, Magen, and Ram Gophna. "The Settlements and Population of Palestine during the Early Bronze Age II—III." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 253 (Winter 1984): 41-53. Broshi, Magen, and Ram Gophna. "Middle Bronze Age II Palestine: Its Setdements and Population," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 261 (February 1986): 73-90. Byatt, Antony. "Josephus and Population Numbers in First Century Palestine." Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1973): 51-52. Stager, Lawrence E. "The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Is rael." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 260 (November 1985): 1-35. MAGEN BROSHI
D E N O N , D O M I N I Q U E VIVANT (1747-1825), French diplomat, artist, colleague of Napoleon Bonaparte, and founder of the Louvre in Paris. This truly universal man may well be considered the first Egyptologist for the detailed and profusely illustrated observations that he published fol lowing his participation in the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1798-1801). In his fifties and distinguished as a dip lomat, art connoisseur, and artist, Denon was one of the more senior and brilliant members of the commission of science and arts attached to the general staff of Napoleon's army of Egypt. Denon proved to be an energetic explorer and tireless re corder, often working under the most difficult and danger ous conditions as he followed General Desaix's army through Egypt, sketching monuments and recording his im pressions in writing. He discovered the zodiac on a ceiling in the temple of Dendera, which tire French were the first Europeans to view. Because some of the temples that Denon documented with precision no longer survive, the Descrip tion d'Egypte and his additional works preserve the only rec ords. When Bonaparte abandoned his troops in Egypt in Au gust of 1799, he took Denon back to Paris with him. From his large collection of drawings, Denon published his Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egyple (1802), in two volumes with 141 plates, which appeared twenty years before the Com mission of Science and Arts' Description, and thus gave to the West the first professional portrayal of the wonders of
DER, TELL EDEgypt. T h e book was enormously popular, and went through forty editions, was translated into English and Ger man, and provided tire inspiration for the Egyptian revival in architecture and the decorative arts that marked the early nineteenth century. Denon was appointed director general of museums by Napoleon and went on to be the founder of what is now the Louvre. He played a major role in forming its collections when he accompanied Napoleon on subsequent campaigns in Europe giving advice on the choice of artistic spoils from vanquished cities. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dawson, Warren R., and Eric P. Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. 2d rev. ed. London, 1972. Denon, Dominique Vivant. Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte (1802). Paris, 1990. Nowinski, Judith. Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, 1747-1825. Ruth erford, N.J., 1970. BARBARA SWITALSKI LESKO
145
D E R , T E L L E D - , site located in northern Babylonia, halfway between tire Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, 25 km (15.5 mi.) south of Baghdad ( 3 3 V N , 44°i8' E). Tell edDer covers an area of about 50 ha (123.5 acres). The site was probably founded slightly before the Ur III period (2112-2004 BCE), but its name at that early stage in its his tory is not known. However, the information yielded from the archives found in the area its excavators call operation E ascertain its identification with the Old Babylonian town of Sippar-Amnanum that appears in written sources during the reign of Sinmuballit (1812-1793 BCE); on the other hand, Dominique Charpin (1992) has shown that the names of Sippar-Amnanum, Sippar-AnnunTtum, Sippar-rabum and Sippar-durum probably designate the same town. Later on, only Sippar-AnunTtu is cited by the Assyrian king TiglathPileser I (1114-1076 BCE) among his conquests—the name that remained until the Persian period (539-333 BCE). The meaning of Der as "cloister" or "enclosure" has not yet been established with certainty.
DER, TELL ED-. Figure 1. Operation E. View of the house of Ur-Utu, chief dirge singer of the goddess Annunitum. (Courtesy H. Gasche)
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DEUTSCHE ORIENT-GESELLSCHAFT
In 1 8 9 1 , E. A. W. Budge drew many diousands of clay cablets out of die mounds at ed-Der. Three years later, Vic tor Scheil made a more modest find but presumed that an cient Sippar-Amnanum lay hidden underneath the ruins. Walter Andrae and Julius Jordan visited the site in 1927 and drew the first precise plans; it was not until 1941 that ex cavations were organized, by Taha Baqir and Mohammad Ali Mustafa under Iraqi government auspices. Since 1 9 7 0 a Belgian team directed by Leon De Meyer and Hermann Gasche has systematically investigated the site. In the area the excavators call operation A an area with private houses was selected for stratigraphic analysis: seventeen successive building stages are represented by some 6 m of cultural de bris, from the twenty-first to the end of tire eighteenth cen turies BCE. T h e considerable information gathered is fea tured in various synthetic studies (e.g., urbanization, domestic architecture, graves, pottery, terra-cotta figurines, texts). The results of the work undertaken on the imposing pe ripheral levee (operation B) were unexpected. This impres sive mass does not hide a traditional city wall, as had been anticipated, but an earthen dike (with a width of a least 4 5 m; see De Meyer, Gasche, and Paepe, 1 9 7 1 , plan 1), whose function was to protect the town from flooding. It is known, however, that Sippar-Amnanum was encircled by a real for tification wall because King Samsuiluna ( 1 7 4 9 - 1 7 1 2 BCE) mentions it in a letter. This wall can now be identified with a structure 6 m wide that appeared under the slightly later earthen dike mentioned above. Archaeological evidence has ascertained that the wall was destroyed by floods and then replaced by the earthen dike that, prior to tire Kassite period ( 1 5 9 5 - 1 1 5 5 BCE), was raised several times. The most important discoveries were made in operation E and came from the house of Ur-TJtu (see figure 1), chief dirge singer (gala.mah) of Annunitum, the main goddess of Sippar-Amnanum. More than two thousand tablets give in valuable information not only concerning social, economic, and religious life but also about the mutable commercial ac tivities of Ur-Utu, a highly placed religious dignitary at that time. Ur-Utu's house was burned in 1629 BCE, that being tire date of the latest text found in the archives. T h e ruins were totally covered with a sandy sediment, which indicates a period of abandonment of the area until it was reoccupied in about 1 4 0 0 BCE. Installations from that reoccupation were cleared in operation E 3 , where tire most recent remains are probably from the time of Sagarakti-Surias ( 1 2 4 5 - 1 2 3 3 BCE).
The excavations at Tell ed-Der have not yet revealed ma terial from tire Neo-Babylonian period. The question, then, is where the Temple of Annunitu, commemorated in an in scription of Nabonidus ( 5 5 5 - 5 3 9 BCE) as the work of that king, is to be found. [See also Babylonians; Cuneiform; Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; Sippar; and Tablet.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charpin, Dominique. "Sippar: Deux villes jumelles." Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientate 82 (1988): 13-32. Essential study of the toponyms in the area of Sippar in the Old Babylonian period. Charpin, Dominique. "Le point sur les deux Sippar." Nouveltes Assyriologiques Breves et Utilitaires, no. 114 (1992): 84-85. Supplement to the aforementioned study. De Meyer, Leon, Hermann Gasche, and Roland Paepe. Tell ed-Der I. Louvain, 1971. Preliminary reports on the first excavation season at Tell ed-Der (Old Babylonian period). De Meyer, Leon, ed. Tell ed-Der. Vols. 2 and 4. Louvain, 1978-1984. Progress reports including reports of excavations, publication of texts, cylinder seals, metal vessels and metal analysis, studies on re gional geomorphology, fauna and botanical remains (Ur III, IsinLarsa, and Old Babylonian periods). Gasche, Hermann. La Babylonie au 17c siecle avant notre ere: Approche archeologique, problemes et perspectives. Ghent, 1989. The house of UrUtu, gala.mah of Annunitum, followed by a study of the declining Old Babylonian period. Gasche, Hermann, et al. "Tell ed-Der, 1985-1987: Les vestiges mesobabyloniens." Northern AkkadProject Reports 6 (1991): 9-94. Reports on the Kassite remains found at Tell ed-Der, including the pottery, epigraphic finds, and die fauna. Lerberghe, Karel van, and Gabriela Voet. Sippar-Amnanum: The UrUtu Archive. Vol. 1. Ghent, 1991. Publication of 106 texts found in the Ur-Utu archives, with a study of the seal impressions and sealing practices. L E O N D E MEYER
DEUTSCHE
ORIENT-GESELLSCHAFT.
Founded in 1 8 9 8 and charged with conducting excavations in the ancient Near East, tire Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG) carried out numerous projects under their direction of such noted archaeologists as Robert Koldewey, Walter Andrae, and Rudolf Borchardt. These include Babylon ( 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 1 7 ) , Assur ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 1 3 ) , J e r i c h o ^ 9 0 8 / 0 9 ) , AbuSir ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 0 7 ) , Amarna ( 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 1 4 ) , Bogazkoy (since 1 9 0 6 ) ,
Uruk-Warka (beginning in 1 9 1 2 / 1 3 ) , and at many other sites. This period of active fieldwork came to end with World War I, but some of the research was later continued in cooperation with the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut (German Archaeological Institute). T h e necessary funds were contributed by tire more than one thousand members of the D O G , the German emperor, and tire government of Prussia. The DOG's most important sponsor was James Simon, a Jewish merchant from Berlin, who donated the finds from Amarna to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Publication of the excavation results began in 1 9 0 0 with a new series, Wissenschaftiiclre Veroffentiichungen der Deutschen OrientGesellschaft, edited by tire secretary of tire society. More than fifty volumes appeared between 1 9 0 1 and 1 9 3 6 , when Bruno Griterbock held the office. After 1 9 3 3 , the society lost most of its members; in 1 9 4 9 , it was restituted and Andrae was elected president. Publication of tire rich harvest from DOG's early excavations continued with thirty volumes of
DEUTSCHER PALASTINA-VEREIN the Wissenschaftliche Veroffentiichungen and a new series, Abhandlungen, was established. Independent fieldwork began again in 1 9 6 8 , with exca vations at Habuba Kabira and Munbaqa in Syria, under the presidency of Ernst Heinrich. This work continues, as does publication of the results and the finds from earlier projects. Of special significance is the rich material from Assur housed in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, which is in an advanced stage of preparation for publication. Recent papers appear in the periodical Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft. Today the society has about eight hun dred members and is actively engaged in scholarly work concerning the ancient Near East, with an emphasis on Mesopotamia and northern Syria. [See also the biographies ofAndrae and Koldewey.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nagel, Wolfram. "Die Deutsche Orientgesellschaft: Riickblick 1976." Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft 108 (1976): 53-71. Schuler, Einar von. "Siebzig Jahre Deutsche Orientgesellschaft." Mit teilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft 100 (1968): 6-21. VOLKMAR FRITZ
DEUTSCHER PALASTINA-VEREIN. By 1 8 7 6 the need for a scientific society to coordinate and support the efforts of German scholars exploring Palestine—Arabists, archaeologists, geographers, historians, Orientalists, theologians—became urgent. In addition the religious and scientific interests of scholars and scientific societies in Pal estine were in competition. T h e initiative to establish tire Deutscher Paliistina-Verein (German Palestine Society) fi nally came from the Basel rector Carl Ferdinand Zimmermann (d. 1 8 8 9 ) . He met at Bale with the biblical scholar Emil Kautzsch and the Arabist Albert Socin, who was at Tubingen in summer 1 8 7 6 to discuss founding a Palestine society. Their recommendation was then sent to fifteen dis tinguished scholars who might serve as its governing com mittee. T h e three men presented their plans to the members of the Deutsche Morgenlaiidische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) that same year. T h e conceptualization of the future society was refined and a new proposal was sent to about seventy scholars in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Russia requesting support. In 1 8 7 7 Kautzsch, Socin, and Zimmermann distributed a proposal to the general pub lic bearing the signatures of fifty-two respected individuals. Within a short time about fifty members enrolled in the new society. T h e three initiators held a meeting of the constitu ents at Wiesbaden, on 2 8 September 1 8 7 7 , the Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palastinas (German Society for the Exploration of Palestine) was formally founded; rules for the society were adopted and a committee of nineteen and an executive committee of five established. T h e society's goals are to advance all aspects of the sci
147
entific exploration of Palestine and to make those activities accessible to a wide audience. Their aims were to be achieved through the publication of a journal and by sci entific research in Palestine, be carried out by a German field expedition. T o that end, a portion of the membership fees and other monies would contribute to an expedition fund. The legal seat of the society was to be atLeipzig. From 1 8 7 7 to 1903 the society's affairs were managed by the first members of the executive committee: Hermann Guthe, Kautzsch, Otto Kersten, Socin, and Zimmermann. Begin ning in 1 9 0 3 , one member of the committee served as chair: Kautzsch ( 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 1 0 ) ; Guthe, ( 1 9 1 1 - - 1 9 2 5 ) ; Albrecht Alt (1925-1950);
Martin
Noth
(1952-1964);
( 1 9 6 4 - 1 9 7 4 ) ; Herbert Donner
Otto
Ploger
( 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 9 2 ) ; and Helga
Weippert (since 1 9 9 3 ) . Membership remains relatively con stant: in 1 8 7 9 it was 2 6 8 ; from 1 9 1 1 onward it was more titan 4 0 0 ; in 1 9 2 0 it dwindled to 2 7 3 but reached a new peak in 1 9 2 9 of 3 9 1 ; it fell again to 2 5 5 in 1 9 4 2 and to 1 1 4 in 1964. Since then membership has climbed to 3 6 0 ( 1 9 9 5 ) . T h e founders of the society planned a journal, the Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina Vereins (ZDPV), to report on topographic, ethnographic, historical, numismatic, epi graphic, and archaeological problems as well as on subjects in tlie natural sciences (e.g., geology, climatology) relevant to the study of Palestine and its neighboring countries—ar ticles that would advance knowledge of the Bible. It was also to contain critical summaries of relevant foreign scholarly literature and statistical and political news about the condi tions of life in modern Palestine. The first issue appeared in April 1 8 7 8 ; volume n o appeared in 1 9 9 4 . The editors were Guthe
( 1 8 7 8 - 1 8 9 6 ) ; Immanuel Benzinger
(1897-1902);
Carl Steuernagel ( 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 2 8 ) ; Noth ( 1 9 2 9 - 1 9 6 4 ) ; and Ar-
nulf Kuschke ( 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 7 4 ) . Since 1 9 7 4 Siegfried Mittmann and Manfred Weippert have been co-editors; Weippert was succeeded by Dieter Vieweger in 1994. News about the society and reports on different general subjects were published separately from 1895 to 1 9 1 2 as Mitteilungen und Nachrichten des Deutschen Vereins zur Er forschung Palastinas (edited by Guthe until 1 9 0 1 and then by Gustav HSlscher). In addition, from 1 9 1 4 to 1 9 2 7 the society published Das Land der Bibel: gemeinverstandliche Hefte zur Palastinakunde, a more popular series (edited by Holscher and then by Peter Thomsen), T o supplement the ZDPV, a new series, Abhandlungen des deutschen PaldstinaVereins, was established in 1 9 6 9 to publish longer mono graphs. Another prominent institution, the German Protestant In stitute of Archaeology of the Holy Land, directed from 1 9 0 2 to 1 9 1 7 by Gustav Dalman, is organized and financed by the German Protestant Churches; it is completely indepen dent of the German Palestine Society, but a close coopera tion exists between them and they share a roster of promi nent members, mostly biblical scholars and theologians. [See
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DEUTSCHER P ALAS TIN A-VERELN
Deutches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes.] The history of tire German Palestine Society can be di vided into four periods, with the activities of major figures often belonging to more than one of them. 1 8 7 7 - 1 9 1 8 . As documented in the ZDPVand other pub lications, tire society shaped the various aspects of the new discipline of Paldstinakunde (the historical geography and archaeology of Palestine). Research on the architecture and topography of Jerusalem and its surroundings was carried out by such pioneers at Conrad Schick ( 1 8 2 2 - 1 9 0 2 ) who, in 1880, discovered the Siloam Tunnel inscription (ZDPV 3, 1 8 8 0 ) : Schick published about fifty articles in tire ZDPV. [See Siloam Tunnel Inscription; and the biography of Schick.] In 1881 Guthe conducted the first excavations on behalf of the society. His work on Jerusalem's southeastern hill (the Ophel) was carried out on a small scale, before systematic excavation methods had been developed (ZDPV5, 1 8 8 2 ) . [See Jerusalem.] Gottlieb Schumacher ( 1 8 5 7 - 1 9 2 5 ) , tire ar chitect and cartographer, began surveying parts of Transjordan in 1 8 8 4 on behalf of the society; between 1 9 0 6 and 1 9 2 4 he published the maps tire work produced. From 1 9 0 3 to 1905 Schumacher directed the society's first (and last) large-scale excavation at Megiddo, except the fall season of 1 9 0 3 , which was led by Benzinger (Silberman, I 9 8 2 , p . 1 6 9 ) . [See Megiddo; and the biographies of Schumacher and Benzin ger.] Max Blanckenhorn, a geologist, investigated the geol ogy of Palestine; beginning in 1 8 9 4 he installed a series of weather bureaus for the society and published the results of his observations (e.g., temperature, rainfall, wind) in the ZDPFannually. In 1 9 0 1 the society underwrote the drawing of the mosaic map of Madaba discovered in 1884. [SeeMadaba.] This was completed by the Jerusalem architect Paul Palmer and was subsequently published in 1 9 0 6 by him and Guthe. The excavations of Ernst Sellin ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 0 4 ) at Ta'anach, with Schumacher's temporary assistance, and at Jericho ( 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 0 9 ) with Carl Watzinger, as well as his pre liminary work at Shechem ( 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 1 4 ) , belong to this pi oneering period. In particular, the exactness of the descrip tions in the report on Jericho ( 1 9 1 3 ) makes it still useful. [See Ta'anach; Jericho; Shechem; and the biography of Sellin.] T h e research of Heinrich Kohl and Watzinger on syna gogues in Galilee (published in 1916) represent another as pect of the discipline, now also covering the New Testament period. Gustaf Dalman's research on topography and eth nology was intensive during this period as well. Already in 1908, 1 9 1 3 , and 1 9 1 5 - 1 9 1 7 Albrecht Alt worked in Jerusa lem. [See the biographies of Watzinger, Dalman, and Alt.] 1 9 1 9 - 1 9 3 2 . In spite of Germany's political and economic difficulties after World War I, tire interdisciplinary, interreligious, and international cooperation of the society and its foreign members grew constantiy. A new generation
came into office: Alt was elected to the society's executive committee in 1 9 2 3 and became chairman in 1 9 2 5 ; Noth be came editor of the ZDPV in 1 9 2 9 (see above). Whereas the society's only project in Palestine was its series of weather bureaus, the Deutsches Evangelisches Institut in Jerusalem (see above), directed by Alt from 1 9 2 1 to 1 9 2 3 , gained new importance: German scholars assembled there to continue their research. From 1 9 2 4 to 1 9 3 1 , Alt conducted an annual lehrkurs (seminar) for a period of three or four months. He placed more emphasis on the history of Palestine than on ethnology, as Dalman had done. During field trips, recon naissance of small areas was carried out by thorough surveys and ceramic sherds at settlement sites were collected and read as basic sources for the history and patterns of those settlements. The stress Alt placed on the close connection between research on tire land (archaeology through survey and excavation) and critical readings of the biblical text (ex egesis) in reconstructing a history of Palestine was the main conttibution he (and his generation) made to the discipline of biblical archaeology. Other major figures working in Palestine during this pe riod include Sellin at Shechem ( 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 2 7 , 1 9 3 2 and 1 9 3 4 ) ; Kurt Galling at Shechem with Sellin ( 1 9 2 6 ) and at Tell Beit Mirsim with William Foxwell Albright ( 1 9 3 0 ) . Joachim Jeremias a New Testament scholar did research in Jerusalem ( 1 9 3 1 , 1 9 3 2 ) ; and Noth, scholarship student at the institute in 1 9 2 5 , was a guest there of tire lehrkurs ( 1 9 3 1 , 1 9 3 3 ) . This group of distinguished scholars subsequently published im portant books or articles based on the research they devel oped during their respective stays in Palestine. 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 6 4 . Hitler's rise to power in 1 9 3 3 was very soon felt by Alt and others as a danger to the work of the society (and the instiuite) at home and in Palestine. Because the Nazi authorities did not make sufficient foreign exchange available to the institute and because of the political distur bances in Palestine, Alt was no longer able to offer the lehr kurs. In addition, he and a few other scholars could travel to Palestine only sporadically and work there for only some months respectively doing their research: Alt was there in 1 9 3 3 and 1 9 3 5 , also taking some field trips. From July to September 1 9 3 5 Galling continued Dalman's research on the necropolis in Jerusalem and finished it (Palastina Jahrbuch 3 2 [ 1 9 3 6 ] : 7 3 - 1 0 1 ) ; he took some short field trips in 1 9 3 7 and 1 9 3 8 . His Biblisches Reallexikon was published 1937. In it, for die first time, mainly archaeological findings were used to describe the subjects of the entries, a first at tempt to develop within the discipline of biblical archaeology the topic of "systematic archaeology." [See the biography of Galling.} The beginning of World War II put a stop to re search in Palestine, only the ZDPVwas still published, from volume 6 2 ( 1 9 3 9 ) to volume 6 7 ( 1 9 4 4 ) . In 1 9 4 3 the society lost its entire archive in Leipzig: all its files and stock of
DEUTSCHES ARCHAOLOGISCHES INSTITUT, ABTEILUNG DAMASKUS publications from 1 8 7 7 onward, its library, and its ethnolog ical and archaeological collections. From 1 9 4 5 to 1 9 5 2 the society's activities were—out of political and even legal rea sons—completely suspended and therefore die ZDPV could not be published. Instead from 1 9 4 6 onward Noth edited three issues of Beitrage zur biblischen Landes- und Alterumskunde, 1 9 5 1 , which was counted as volume 6 8 of the ZDPV. By 1 9 5 0 the society, whose legal seat was still at Leipzig, was liquidated by the East German authorities, but on 3 1 July 1 9 5 2 , it was reestablished in West Germany, in Bonn. Noth, still editor of the ZDPV, also became its chairman. [See the biography of Noth.] After that the ZDPV'has been published again continuously from volume 6 9 ( 1 9 5 3 ) onward. Slowly, studies in Paldstinakunde, mainly by the above-named schol ars, began again. T h e lehrkurs at the institute, then located in the Old City of Jerusalem (Jordan), was resumed in 1 9 5 3 , tire first conducted by Galling. Since 1 9 6 5 . The ZDPV, again a journal of international repute, is publishing more articles by foreign scholars. In 1 9 6 4 Noth was nominated director of the institute in Jeru salem. However, expectations for furthering Paldstinakunde were destroyed by his early death in 1 9 6 8 . Since 1 9 7 0 young German scholars have begun taking part in excavations: Kuschke, Mittrnann, Martin Metzger, Ute Lux, and August Strobel in Lebanon and Jordan; and Volkman Fritz and Diethelm Conrad in Israel. T h e society now organizes sym posia, the first two of which took place in 1 9 7 7 and 1 9 8 2 . Since 1 9 8 8 they have been held every two years. It is through these activities that the German Palestine Society and its members hope to make a special contribution to Paldstina kunde, or biblical archaeology, further developing the best traditions of Alt and Noth. [See also Biblical Archaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
To date, no comprehensive history of the society has been published. Because die archive of the society was destroyed in 1943, all facts had to be extracted from the society's publications: Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldslina-Vereins, vols. 1-67 (Leipzig, 1878-1944/45), and vols. 69/110 (Wiesbaden, 1953-1994); Mitieilungen und Nachrichien (Leipzig, 1895-1912); and from Paldslinajahrbuch des Deutschen Evangelischen Instivuts filr Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes zu Jerusalem (Leip zig, 1905-1941). The latter is die organ of the institute, with news on its activities and important articles on results of research. The reader may also consult the following: Alt, Albrecht. "Protokoll der 24. Generalversammlung des Deutschen Vereins zur Erforschung Palastinas (23. August 1928 in Bonn)." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldslina-Vereins 51 (1928): 302. Remarks on the fifty-year-old society. Kautzsch, E. "Vorwort." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 1 (1878): 1-9. Preface to the first volume of ZDPV, containing details about the founding of the society. Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Ar chaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1709-1917. New York, 1982. Explores the connections between religiously motivated scientific exploration of Palestine in the nineteenth century and the
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political struggles among rival European powers for dominance in the region. Steuernagel, Carl. "Ein Ruckblick auf 50 Jahre der ZDPV." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldslina-Vereins 51 (1928): 1-4. Review of the main stages of the then fifty-year-old journal. Zobel, H.-J. "Geschichte des Deutschen Evangelischen Instituts fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes von den Anfangen bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 97 (1981): 1—11. The first short history of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, from its founding to World War II, with comparative assessments of Dalman and Alt. DIETHELM CONRAD
D E U T S C H E S A R C H A O L O G I S C H E S INSTI T U T , A B T E I L U N G D A M A S K U S . The founding of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut (DAI; German Archaeological Institute) in Damascus in 1980 came out of the long-standing tradition of German archaeological re search in Syria. The institute, which opened in 1981, works in close cooperation with the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums. T h e institute supports the inves tigation of all archaeologically relevant periods in Syria and its neighboring regions. At present, the emphasis of its re search is on the Late Bronze Age, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. In addition to numerous small survey and conservation projects, work is underway at the following sites: at Late Bronze Age Tell Bazi at Tishrin (rescue ex cavations directed by Berthold Einwag); Roman (first-third centuries CE) temple complexes in the Hauran (at Atil, Brekeh, Mushennef, Qanawat, as-Sanamain, directed by Stefan Freyberger); a Roman (second-third centuries CE) temple complex in Middle Syria, (Temple of Esriye, with a survey of the adjoining settlement, directed by Rudiger Gografe); a third-century temple grave at Palmyra (no. 3 6 , a joint pro ject of the DAI and die Antiquities Administration of Pal myra, directed by Andreas Schmidt-Colinet and Khaled al-As'ad); the first-sixth-century limes on the Middle Euphrates River (Qseir es-Seile/Tetrapyrgium and Sura, di rected by Tilo Ulbert and Michaela Konrad); Rusafa/Sergiopolis (first-thirteentii-century martyr's city of St. Sergius, directed by Ulbert); ar-Raqqa, the eighth-century palace city of the 'Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (rescue excavations directed by Michael Meinecke until his death); and the fourteenth-century Hammam Mangak at Bosra (restoration and construction of a small Islamic museum, a joint project of the DAI and the Antiquities Administration of Bosra, directed by Meinecke and Riad al-Muqdad). T h e institute houses a specialized library, which is open to the public and currently contains about eight thousand volumes, as well as a photo library with about twenty-five thousand negatives and a slide library. Its publications are Damaszener Mitieilungen (JDaM) a periodical with essays by international researchers covering the institute's entire field
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of activity—so far volumes i (1983) through 6 (1993) have appeared; and Damaszener Forschungen (DaF) a monograph series, of which five volumes have appeared. [See also Bosra; Palmyra; Raqqa, ar-; and Rusafa.] T I L O ULBERT Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bittel, Kurt. Beitrage zur Geschichle des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts 1929 bis 1979. Das Deutsche Archaologische Institut, Geschichte und Dokumente, 3. Mainz, 1979. See pages 65-91. "Jahresbericht des Deutsches Archaologisches Instituts 1989." Archdo logischer Anzeiger (1990): 590-600. W O L F KOENIGS
D E U T S C H E S ARCHAOLOGISCHES INSTI T U T , A B T E I L U N G I S T A N B U L . One of dre nine branches of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin in countries in the Mediterranean basin and the Near East, the institute in Istanbul was founded in 1929 to orga nize German archaeological research in Turkey. That re search had begun with surveys and excavations in Anatolia in 1828 b y F . E. Schulz, A. D. Mordtmann, HeinrichSchliemann, Karl Humann, Theodor Wiegand, Wilhelm Dorpfeld, and many others. As a result of the interest the newly established Republic of Turkey took in the country's history, the goals of the DAI in Istanbul were defined in a much wider sense than just archaeology. They comprise research and publications on all tire cultures of Anatolia from pre historic times until the end of tire Ottoman Empire. The DAI's staff of thirty in Istanbul includes eight German scholars in prehistorical and classical archaeology, Byzan tine studies, tire history of architecture, and turcology. The institute cooperates with Turkish universities in research and teaching and provides a library of about 55,000 vol umes, including 245 scholarly periodicals. An archive of about 150,000 photographs of archaeolog ical objects and sites in Anatolia also includes a collection of negatives and prints from i860 to 1920. Under the auspices of the institute, prominent scholars have made considerable contributions to what is known of Anatolia's history and cul ture: Kurt Bittel in prehistory and the Hittites; Rudolf Naumann in Hittite and classical architecture; Martin Schede in classical archaeology and architecture; Alfons Maria Schnei der in the history of Byzantium; Wolfgang Mtiller-Wiener in the topography of Istanbul; Paul Wittek in Ottoman his tory; and Kurt Erdmann in Islamic art. Currently, the institute is involved in archaeological ex cavations and to some extent in restoration at the Hittite capital city of Bogzkoy/Hattusa, the ancient city of Miletus, the classical cities of Aizanoi, Miletus, Pergamon, and Priene, and the classical sanctuary at Didyma. In Istanbul, topographic surveys and research on single monuments have always been part of the institute's program. The institute publishes the yearbook Istanbuler Mitteilungen (Tlibingen, 1966-) with occasional monographs and the series of Istanbuler Forschungen (Berlin, 1932-). Some of its reports appear in the Archdologischer Anzeiger, Berlin. [See also Bogazkoy; Didyma; Miletus; Pergamon; Priene; and the biography of Schliemann]
DEUTSCHES EVANGELISCHES INSTITUT FUR ALTERTUMSWISSENSCHAFT DES H E I L I G E N L A N D E S . T h e German Protestant Insti tute for Archaeology of tire Ploly Land, located in Jerusalem, was founded in 1900 by Germany's Protestant churches and has been sponsored by them ever since. T h e first director, Gustaf Dalman (1902-1917), initiated a wide range of ac tivities—his own major fields having been the ethnography of Palestine, tombs in the vicinity of Jerusalem, and Petra. During the British Mandate, Albrecht Alt was appointed director; Alt did not actually reside in Jerusalem but, con ducted the famous summer courses about aspects of his re search in historical geography in the country. T h e institute was closed during World War II but was reopened by Mar tin Noth in 1964. After Notir's untimely death in 1968, Ute Lux served as director until 1982. Lux excavated at Gadara (Umm Qeis). A branch of the institute was founded in Am man in 1973. T h e institute in Jerusalem was directed, from 1982 until 1992, by August Strobel, who undertook several excavation projects in Jordan. Volkmar Fritz, appointed di rector in 1994, is continuing the tradition of geographic re search and archaeological projects. From the beginning, tire work of the institute was handi capped by the lack of its own building. Then, in 1982, a house in tire compound of the German Augusta Victoria Compound on Mt. Scopus was made available as the insti tute's center. A board of trustees representing German churches and theological faculties is responsible for its bud get and staffing. Between 1905 and 1941, the institute published a year book, Paldstina Jahrbuch, founded by Dalman and later ed ited by Alt. In 1989, Strobel revived it as the Jahrbuch des Deutschen Evangelischen Instituts fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heilingen Landes. Articles on the activities of the institute also appear in the Zeilschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins (ZDPV). [See also Historical Geography; Jerusalem; Petra; U m m Qeis; and the biographies of Alt, Dalman, and Noth] VOLKMAR FRITZ
D E V A U X , R O L A N D . See Vaux, Roland de.
DEVELOPMENT AND ARCHAEOLOGY DEVELOPMENT
AND
ARCHAEOLOGY.
Nowhere has the dialogue between tire past and the present had a greater impact on current economic, political, and religious realities than in the modern nation-states of the ancient Near East. There, the past is visible in nearly every field, village, town, and city, often creating a sense of identity and continuity, or in some cases alienation, for its modern inhabitants. Throughout all periods of time, the past was visible as ruins above the surface, inspiring curiosity and speculation from travelers and pilgrims, who saw in them their own religious and political heritage, and from local in habitants, who saw the ruins as landmarks and as part of the natural landscape, often connected with local legend or holding traditional significance. Since the nineteenth century, archaeological excavation, or the systematic recovery and recording of ancient ruins, has revealed the concealed past. During the period of dom ination of the Near East by foreign powers and until World War II, most archaeological investigations were directed and sponsored by individuals or private institutions from the in dustrialized Western world who had religious or academic research goals; they, in turn, were often encouraged by na tional or government institutions having an imperialistic agenda in the Near East. T h e excavations were almost ex clusively financed by private or foreign government funds and were initiated because of a site's historic or biblical sig nificance—Jerusalem, Megiddo, Beth-Shean, Samaria, and Jericho in Palestine. [See Jerusalem; Megiddo; Beth-Shean; Samaria; Jericho.] However, during the last half of the twen tieth century, with the creation of independent nation-states and their increasing economic prosperity, locally directed and locally funded excavations often outnumber foreign ex peditions. [See Nationalism and Archaeology.] Today, archaeology is financially accountable to eco nomic forces. Private and government agencies concerned witii conservation and the presentation of public sites em ploy large numbers of trained archaeologists and are keen to promote contract archaeology connected with land de velopment. Fewer and fewer sites are being excavated purely for research purposes: they are being excavated be cause of their impending destruction or tiieir commercial, national, or touristic value. A recent phenomenon is the growing influx of foreign tourism to the region of the ancient Near East as a result not only of the romantic appeal of its great cultures and their religious significance, but to the open borders resulting from peace treaties between Arab nations and Israel. T h e massive rise in revenues from foreign tourism has added incentive to preserving and presenting ancient ruins: the past is now understood to be a valuable natural resource. T h e use of archaeology to encourage tourism and economic develop ment in an underdeveloped town or region has made it a tool for solving social and economic problems, as well.
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Thus, archaeological excavation for the sake of tourism is an impetus to development, and development creates a need for more archaeological work in the form of salvage exca vation. Conflicting needs exist however: excavation, pres ervation, and publication costs compete for funds with con struction and development and the desires of local populations. This competition often forces difficult com promises between economic profit and the ideal of preserv ing the past. I m p a c t of the Past. Although development affects ar chaeological remains and historic buildings throughout the world, in the Near East the situation is especially complex because multilayered, or stratified, tells characterize many sites. T h e overlay of periods, cultures, and peoples requires choosing which part of the past is to be preserved: whether the Hittites, Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Israelites, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Ro mans, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottoman Turks, or Pa lestinians (both Jewish and Arab) are to be highlighted on the personal, political, or economic criteria of the body within the society that chooses to initiate a project. In short, the "victor" writes and interprets the past. Economic development and archaeology have been es pecially intertwined in modern Egypt. Under colonial rule, Egypt experienced massive looting of its ancient treasures, particularly by European explorers, conquerors, and schol ars. Following independence from British colonial rule, many Egyptians closely identified with the glories of pharaonic Egypt—most notably during the governments of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Today, however, Islamic fundamentalists view the pharaohs as the evil op pressors they have been portrayed as in Islamic literature and Muslim tradition. It is the ancient monuments of the pharaohs, visited by millions of tourists each year, that pro vide one of Egypt's most important sources of foreign cur rency. The significance of tourism generated by the archae ological treasures of Egypt and the vulnerability of this source of income are illusn-ated by the attacks on tourists by Islamic fundamentalist groups attempting to influence po litical developments. Ancient Nubia, located in modern southern Egypt, is the site of perhaps the best-known international archaeological rescue operation of the twentieth century. [See Nubia.] In the 1960s, the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser were cre ated in this region of Upper Egypt, where the New Kingdom pharaoh Rameses II constructed numerous rock-cut tem ples. As a result of the construction, a number of those mon uments were removed and reconstructed at different sites, following an appeal by the United Nations Educational, Sci entific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to its mem ber states to assist in a rescue operation. At Abu Simbel, the site of the most spectacular temples, the temple facades and walls were dismantled and re-sited next to Lake Nasser. T o -
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day, tiiese temples are one of Egypt's most popular tourist spots. [See Abu Simbel.] Ironically, the very source for much of Egypt's economic development also is the greatest threat to its future: Egyptian authorities have become increasingly concerned with con serving die country's treasures—its pyramids, sphinx, and several of the decorated New Kingdom tombs at ancient Thebes. The tomb of Nefertari has been the subject of an extensive renovation and conservation project by the Egyp tian Antiquities Organization and the Getty Conservation Institute in California. Now reopened, only a limited num ber of tourists are allowed to view the tomb, under carefully controlled conditions. During the 1970s, Carthage, an important Phoenician and Roman port located near Tunis, the modern capital of T u nisia, was the focus of a second international campaign com missioned by UNESCO. Rapid urban and tourist develop ment along the Tunisian coast was threatening the ancient remains of Carthage. With the cooperation of the Institut National d'Archeologie et d'Art, the Tunisian authority re sponsible for antiquities, and under the aegis of U N E S C O , international teams were invited to assist in the excavation and presentation of the city's archaeology. Ten foreign mis sions participated in the Save Carthage Project in the 1970s and early 1980s. They were required, in addition to funding the excavations and their publication, to finance its touristic presentation. Today, Carthage appears on the World Her itage List and is a national park. [See Cartilage.] In the Republic of Turkey, considerable funding has been allotted to excavating Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Asia Minor, especially ancient Hittite sites, with an eye toward highlighting Turkey's glorious non-Islamic past. [See Hit tite s.] More recently, with the massive growth of tourism, especially along Turkey's western coast, the focus has shifted to the splendors of classical Turkey in the Hellenistic and Roman periods: Ephesus, Pamukale, Aphrodisias, Sar dis, and Pergamon have been extensively excavated and re stored for tourism, completely transforming the economic base and development of many villages and towns, such as Kusadasi, Bodrum/Halikarnassos, Marmaris, and Antalia. [See Ephesus; Aphrodisias; Sardis; Pergamon; Iialikarnassos.] Since achieving independence in i960, Cyprus has also had to contend with the pressures of local development, es pecially following the 1974 partition that divided the island into two sections, a Turkish enclave in the north and a Greek Cypriot one in the south. [See Cyprus.] This resulted in a migration of Greek refugees to the south and compounded pressures on the island's infrastructure. During the 1970s and 1980s, Cyprus's rapidly developing economy encour aged private, commercial, and government construction. In addition to the needs generated by an increased population, tourism to the south (especially in Limassol and Paphos)
demanded rapid development of the coastal cities. [See Pa phos.] During the course of construction activities, a num ber of significant sites requiring salvage excavation were re vealed. Kafavusos-Ayios Dhimitrios (an important Late Bronze Age settiement located between Nicosia and Limas sol), Skales (an Iron Age cemetery near Palaipaphos), and Amathus (a Phoenician settlement east of Limassol) have undergone emergency salvage excavations by both the Cyp riot Department of Antiquities and foreign expeditions. [See Kalavasos; Amathus.] The premiere site and major tourist attraction on Cyprus, Nea-Paphos, was the capital of ancient Cyprus during the Hellenistic and Roman periods and played an important role in the spread of Christianity. The archaeological site, the only open space in an otherwise overdeveloped area, is known for its richly decorated mosaic pavements dating to the Roman period. [SeeMosaics.] The site, which since 1980 has appeared on UNESCO's World Heritage List, has be come a symbol of Greek Cypriot cultural heritage for its modern inhabitants, especially since the division of the is land. Today, Nea-Paphos is a major source of revenue and economic development for modern Paphos. Jordan, a region largely undeveloped and unexcavated un til the 1970s, is now a focus of increasing archaeological ex ploration and economic development. In 1987, the Jorda nian government adopted an organized approach to the problem of archaeological heritage and economic activities, combining governmental, private, and academic agencies and organizations into a cooperative program referred to as the Jordan Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Project. It is supported by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). [See American Center of Oriental Research.] Its goals include encouraging communication and coordination among the departments, organizations, and agencies in volved in preserving Jordan's cultural heritage and devel oping its economy; assisting in salvage excavations at en dangered sites; and training and educating professional staff—local and international members of the archaeological community. C R M contributed to the development of a computerized database for ancient sites in Jordan: the Jordan Antiquities Database and Information System (JADIS), de signed to assist in planning the future development and pro tection of cultural resources. Initially, the CRM project fo cused on salvage excavations—especially in the rapidly growing metropolis of Amman, but in areas outside the cap ital city as well—and on cultural resource management. [See Amman.] In the 1990s, USAID funding of archaeological activities in Jordan shifted from rescue excavations and cul tural resource management to tourist-oriented projects, such as those at Aila (the ancient Islamic port of Aqaba), restoration of the Amman Citadel, the Madaba Urban Dec
DEVELOPMENT AND ARCHAEOLOGY velopment Project, the U m m Qeis/Gadara Museum, the Pella rest stop, and the Petta Church Project. [See Aqaba; Madaba, Umm Qeis; Pella; Petra.] Antiquities in Lebanon, a country devastated by civil war from 1975 to 1990, were not only damaged during hostilities but were victims of large-scale looting. During the chaos that reigned following the mid-1970s, the country's heritage was plundered for profit on die antiquities market. Although an illicit antiquities market exists throughout the region, Leb anon has been the most severely affected by illegal excava tions, to supply the demands of primarily foreign private collectors. [See Ethics and Archaeology.] Lebanon's economic recovery from civil war, beginning in the early 1990s, included the massive development and reconstruction of many of its cities. Its population's urgent needs and the desire for rapid economic recovery clashed with preserving an archaeological heritage tiiat spans the Canaanite, Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, and Islamic periods. An international team of archaeologists from Europe and Lebanon began conducting salvage ex cavations in 1993 over an area of about 48,000 sq m in down town Beirut, currently being rebuilt by SOLIDERE, Leba non's largest commercial enterprise. [See Beirut.] While die fate of many of these ancient structures remains in question, on 6 November 1995, Reuter Information Service in Beirut reported increasing public interest and personal identifica tion with the antiquities being uncovered in salvage exca vations in the city's center. Archaeology played a key role in the modern State of Is rael's political, cultural, and economic development even before die establishment of die state in 1948. With the in creasing Jewish immigration to Palestine following World War I, Palestinian Jewish scholars became involved in the archaeology of ancient synagogues, finding personal iden tification and political justification in discovering Israelite and early Jewish remains. T h e focus of Israel's newly estab lished Department of Antiquities was on the excavation, preservation, and restoration of sites exhibiting clear evi dence of a Jewish presence in antiquity. In the 1950s, the Government Committee for the Preservation of Landscape and Antiquities (today the Israel National Parks Authority) was created to administer archaeological sites considered to be of national interest. Attention during the 1950s and 1960s was directed toward die excavation and reconstruction of monumental Crusader castles, such as those at Caesarea and Belvoir, and of Christian Byzantine churches, in order to attract Christian pilgrims. [See Crusader Period; Caesarea; Churches.] The only two biblical sites open to the public were Megiddo, excavated between die two world wars by die Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and Ha zor, excavated witii support from James A. de Rothschild, die Anglo-Israel Exploration Society, and the Government of Israel, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. [See Hazor.]
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In die 1960s, Masada was excavated and soon became the most visited site in Israel. [See Masada.] Located in the Judean Desert on a cliff overlooking the Dead Sea, the visual impact of the site and evocation of the events that took place there during die First Jewish Revolt against Rome inspired an entire generation of Israelis who saw in Masada a ro mantic symbol of the besieged modern state. [.See First Jew ish Revolt] The 1960s also witnessed heightened archaeo logical activity in die Negev desert, a by-product of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's vision of developing the Ne gev for Jewish immigration. [See Negev.] Large-scale exca vations and reconstruction were conducted at a number of Nabatean sites there—at Avdat, Kurnub, and Shivtah/Subeita—and were opened to the public by the National Parks Authority. [See Nabateans; Avdat; Kurnub; Subeita.] Following the Six-Day War in 1967 and die resulting Is raeli sovereignty over the eastern part of Jerusalem, historical and biblical Jerusalem became accessible to Israelis for die first time since 1948. T h e impact of a unified Jerusalem on the city's economic and archaeological development is re flected in die three large-scale excavations begun in its east ern part shortly after die Six-Day War: along the soutiiern and western walls of the Temple Mount, in the historic Jew ish Quarter within die walls of Old City, and later in the City of David, located at the edge of die Kidron Valley in the Arab village of Silwan. [See Jerusalem.] The renewed excavations (1978-1984) in the City of Da vid were sponsored by the City of David Society, the Insti tute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University, the Israel Exploration Society, and the Jerusalem Foundation. [See Is rael Exploration Society.] T h e goals were to excavate, pre serve, and restore the archaeological remains on government lands in Jerusalem's historic core. Since the conclusion of diose excavations, the site has at times become a focal point of debate regarding land ownership and residential devel opment in Jerusalem. Today the site is an archaeological park. It was there that the opening ceremonies took place in 1995 to mark the three-thousand-year anniversary of die es tablishment of Jerusalem as King David's capital. The renovation of the Jewish Quarter by the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of die Jewish Quarter, established by die Israeli government and the In stitute of Archaeology of die Hebrew University of Jerusa lem, entailed extensive excavations of and below pre-1948 (medieval- and Ottoman-period) buildings. Significant Roman- and Byzantine-period remains are incorporated or preserved as part of or below the restored and reconstructed houses in die Jewish Quarter, and several underground ar chaeological sites are now open to the public. Jewish families who inhabited die quarter before 1948 were encouraged to return to live in its renovated houses as a means of engen dering a strong identification and sense of continuity with the past. Because many Arab families were relocated to ac-
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commodate the demographic change, tire Israeli excavations in the Jewish Quarter and near the Western Wall of the Temple Mount met with considerable criticism on a political level. A similar renovation project underway in the Old City of Akko in Israel is the combined restoration of currently in habited houses and structures of historic interest with the excavation of the well-preserved Crusader city beneath the modern dwellings. [See Akko.] This endeavor, under the auspices of the Israel Government Tourist Corporation, die Old Acre Development Company, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the Ministry of Tourism, involving one of the best-preserved towns of the Ottoman period in the re gion, is proceeding without displacing the inhabitants. [See Israel Antiquities Authority.] Archaeological sites in Israel are occasionally excavated and developed because of local interest and national iden tification. The modern Jewish city of Qazrin, located in the Golan Heights, was established in the mid-1970s because of its proximity to the ancient site of Qasrin, a Jewish village and synagogue dating to the Byzantine period (fourtheighth centuries CE). Excavations and subsequent recon struction of the village, under the auspices of the Qazrin Local Council and the Israel Government Tourist Corpo ration, have created a popular tourist site that provides em ployment opportunities for residents. Ancient Qasrin has also become, for many Golan residents, a symbol of modern Jewish settlement in the Golan and is the setting for com munity celebrations and political rallies. [See Qasrin; Golan.] A different, and largely ignored, past is significant to tire Palestinian population. The Palestinian link with tire past is mainly through the traditional village—the settlement type that predominated for tire last thirteen centuries of Palesti ne's history. From 1948 to t9S0, during and following the establishment of the State of Israel, many of those villages were obliterated, severing the connection many Palestinians had with the land. As a result, there has been limited interest by, and even the alienation of, the Arab population in the archaeology of Israel. Today, there is renewed interest among Palestinian scholars in documenting and preserving traditional houses in towns such as Ramallah and in exca vating Ottoman villages such Jenin and Ta'anach on the west bank of the Jordan River. [See Ta'anach.] The 1990s ushered in a new era of archaeological inves tigation in Israel closely tied to national economic interests. This coincided with the establishment in 1990 of an inde pendent authority, the Israel Antiquities Authority, with ex panded jurisdiction over archaeological sites in Israel, re placing the Israel Department of Antiquities. The decade has been characterized by the excavation of major archae ological sites of national significance undertaken to encour age tourism and development. The year-round excavations at the classical (Hellenistic-Byzantine periods) sites ofBeth-
Shean, Caesarea, and Mareshah/Beth-Guvrin were initiated primarily to solve local social and economic (employment) problems. [See Mareshah.] In addition, large-scale construc tion (tire response, in part, to massive immigration from countries belonging to tire former Soviet Union), has re quired unprecedented salvage excavations at hundreds of sites yearly. The large residential communities currently un der construction in tire northern suburbs of Jerusalem, in Modi'in (north of Jerusalem), and in Beth-Shemesh; tire construction of Highway 6 transversing tire country from north to south; and a series of bypass routes on the west bank of tire Jordan have not only resulted in an unprece dented number of excavations, but have transformed tire local topography. [See Beth-Shemesh.] A landscape has been created that never existed. Although a number of sites will be preserved or not excavated, the new residential com munities will create artificial "islands" of cultural heritage cut off from their natural setting. Thus, in the 1990s in Israel archaeology became inseparable from tourism, economic development, and growth. This rapid development and tire resulting increase in sal vage excavations and attempts to preserve Israel's cultural heritage have been challenged by several sectors of the Is raeli populace. At a number of construction sites, Jewish tombs have been inadvertently uncovered, requiring salvage excavations. The removal of human bones from their final resting place, forbidden by Jewish religous law, and their disturbance by bulldozers or archaeologists have provoked violent demonstrations and political upheaval. Compromise solutions have included the rerouting of major roads or the cessation of excavations and tire sealing of tombs thought to be Jewish. Development has also been prevented on the Haram eslr-Sharif (the Temple Mount), the region's most significant site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Today, it is under Muslim jurisdiction, with Israel honoring an ar rangement made when the eastern part of Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule before 1967. Because of Muslim con cerns over the character and future of the site and of fears enforced by several attempts in recent decades to destroy Islamic structures on tire Haram, all archaeological activity there is forbidden. The battle over whose past is presented in Jerusalem has extended to tire south of the Temple Mount, where excavations uncovered not only the glories of Herod's Jerusalem but also public structures dating to the Umayyad period. [See Umayyad Caliphate.] Municipal plans to reconstruct and preserve the Umayyad monuments were met with demonstrations by nationalistic groups in Is rael who oppose presenting Islamic Jerusalem to the public. F u t u r e of the P a s t . T h e threat to the past presented by development in the majority of modern nation-states in the ancient Near East is unprecedented in history as a result of population growth, economic prosperity, and the earthmoving machines used in today's building projects. T h e
DEVELOPMENT AND ARCHAEOLOGY ideal is a balanced approach to preserving cultural heritage without unnecessarily impeding economic growtir and de velopment. Several measures need to be taken in advance of planned development, including surveys and inventories of sites and historic buildings. This policy has been imple mented, with varying degrees of success in Israel and Jordan, and on a smaller scale in surrounding countries. Close co ordination needs to be encouraged and enforced by govern ment agencies, municipalities, and private contractors on the one hand, and by departments of antiquities on the other, to minimize damage to archaeological sites and to avoid unnecessary delays or expense to contractors and in vestors. Cooperation during initial planning stages can often benefit all parties. Local and foreign tourism are encouraged through well-conserved sites accessible to the public and by public buildings and residential neighborhoods in which ar chaeological remains are preserved or incorporated into modern structures. T o effectively manage historical and archaeological re sources, clear legal, planning, policy, and academic frame works are necessary. Such well-defined guidelines can assist greatly in resolving the conflicts of interest that are unavoid able when development affects archaeological remains. Rel evant information must be accessible to decision makers in volved in planning and development as well as to those protecting archaeological resources. T h e management of ar chaeological sites, particularly in an urban environment, re quires a well-trained, professional staff as well as funding and other resources to collect and record archaeological re mains and to implement policy. Tourism requires infrastructure and facilities for visitors to sites in order to avoid adverse effects on the environment of a region and on ancient remains. [See Tourism and Ar chaeology.] In addition to the legal, administrative, and eco nomic factors of archaeological resource management, per haps tire most important aspect of cultural heritage is tire relationship between the archaeological site and the public. Public awareness and education are crucial to the conser vation of cultural heritage and planned development and can be encouraged through local associations and societies, in schools, and in the media. This communication is essential to raising awareness of the value of archaeological heritage as an endangered finite natural resource. The past is perceived through the eyes of tire living, and as contemporary values and beliefs change, so will interpre tations of the past. Historic remains are not static, and each site may have a diversity of meanings for different publics. As interpreters of cultural heritage, it is the task of archae ologists to convey the relevancy of the past, to promote di alogue between professionals and lay persons, and to en courage constructive cooperation between those desiring to preserve archaeological resources and developers respond ing to the needs of a modern society.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Broshi, Magen. "Religion, Ideology, and Politics and Their Impact on Palestinian Archaeology." Israel Museum Journal 6 (1987): 17-32. Survey of tire development of Palestinian archaeology and its signif icance for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Economic Development and Archaeology in the Middle East. Amman, 1983. Booldet published by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, American Schools of Oriental Research and the American Center of Oriental Research, outlining current Jordanian policy regarding de velopment and archaeology. Glock, Albert E. "Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian Past." Journal of Palestine Studies 23 (1994): 70-84. Ar ticle presenting tire largely ignored Palestinian past. Greene, Joseph A . "Preserving Which Past for Whose Future? The Dilemma of Cultural Resource Management in the Mediterranean Region." In Interpreting the Past: Presenting Archaeological Sites to the Public, edited by Ann Killebrew and G. Lehmann. Forthcoming. Detailed account of government policy regarding cultural resource management in Tunisia, Cyprus, and Jordan. Kempinski, Aharon. "Synagogues, Crusader Castles, and Nabatean Cities: Restoration in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s." In Inter preting the Past: Presenting Archaeological Sites to the Public, May 30thJune 4, 1993 (Abstracts), edited by Ann Killebrew, p. 39. Haifa, 1993. Summary of lectures delivered at an international symposium. Knoop, Riemer. "Public Awareness and Archaeology: A Task for the Voluntary Sector." Antiquity 67 (1993): 439-445. Article on the im portance of local community involvement in the preservation and protection of historic and archaeological sites. Leone, Mark P, "Archaeology's Relationship to the Present and the Past." In Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us, edited by Richard A . Gould and Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 5-13. New York, 1981. Essay on the interaction between the public and the archaeo logical site, stressing die importance of changing interpretations and its relevance to modern society. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, 1985. Fascinating, well-written account of modern society's interest in the past. McManamon, Francis P. "The Many Publics of Archaeology." Amer ican Antiquity 56 (1991): 121-130. Essay on die importance of public education and involvement in archaeology. Miller, Daniel. "Archaeology and Development." Current Anthropology 21 {1980): 709-715. Important article on archaeology and develop ment outlining various approaches to archaeology and its relation ship to local communities. Miller draws on his experiences in the Solomon Islands as a case study of archaeology and development in non-Western countries. Rabinovich, Abraham. "Inside the Israel Antiquities Authority." Bib lical Archaeology Review 20.2 (1994): 40-45. Brief account of the re cent reorganization of die Israel Antiquities Authority, including its new mandate and goals for the future of archaeology in Israel. Reich, Ronny. "The Archaeologist's Dilemma." In ICOMOS Inter national Symposium, "Old Culture in New Worlds,"vo\. 2, pp. 10091015. Washington, D.C., 1987. Problems relating to the preservation and presentation of archaeological remains on multilayered tells. Reid, Donald M. "Indigenous Egyptology: The Decolonization of a Profession?" Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985): 233-246. Development of an Egyptian approach to Egyptology. Seeden, Helga. "Lebanon's Past Today." Berytus 35 (1987): 5-12. Summary of the disastrous affects of Lebanon's civil war on its ar chaeological sites and antiquities. Silberman, Neil Asher. Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Natioitalism in the Modern Middle East. New York, 1990. Series
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of essays on different countries in the Middle East that demonstrates how the past and present are linked as modern nation-states using archaeology to reinforce their international prestige. Tilly, Christopher. "Archaeology as Socio-Political Action in the Pres ent." In Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology: Essays in the Philosophy, History, and Socio-Polilics of Archaeology, edited by Val erie Pinsky and Alison Wylie, pp. 104-116. Cambridge, 1989. Dis cusses the importance of relating archaeology and the past to con temporary culture and society. Uzzell, David L., ed. Heritage Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Natural and Built Environment; vol. 2, The Vistor Experience. London, 1989. A two-volume collection of papers dealing with all aspects of world heritage management and interpretation and its interaction widr the public. Wainwright, G. J. "The Management of Change: Archaeology and Planning." Antiquity 67 (1993): 416-421. Charts recent develop ments in archaeological site and landscape management in England. Wensinck, A. J., and Georges Vajda. "Fir'awn." In The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed„ vol. 2, pp. 917-918. Leiden, i960-. Muslim atti tudes toward pre-Islamic pharaonic history in Egypt. A N N KILLEBREW
DE VOGUE, MELCHIOR. See Vogue, Melchior de.
DHRA', site located about 5 km (3 mi.) east of die famous Early Bronze Age city Bab edh-Dhra', which is in the Lisan area of the Dead Sea in modern Jordan (3i°i4'3o"N, 35°35' E; map reference 204 X 073 [Bennett, 1980, p. 30; Raikes, 1980, p. 56]). T h e name Dhra' is identified with the Arabic word for "arm." Dhra' was first discovered and investigated in 1976 under auspices of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan by Thomas D. Raikes, who emphasized that its flint industry, which included Khiamian points, could be compared with that of other late ninth- and early eighth-millennium BCE sites in Jordan, Israel, and Syria. Queisa and Sabra I in southern Jordan are similar to and contemporaneous with Dhra' in the very early stages of the Neolithic period. Wadi Dhra', a perennial stream that runs to the northeast of the site, supplies it with water. Dhra' has been described as a flint-tool factory because of tire large number of unfin ished tools and wasters found there (Raikes, 1980, p. 56). Blade cores, long thin blades, scrapers, chisels, arrowheads, polished basalt axes, chipped and limestone objects of horn or phallus shape were collected. Raikes also noted the pres ence of Roman buildings, graves, and a well. Crystal-M. Bennett made soundings at the site briefly in 1979, excavating six areas. In area I, the largest (27 m northsouth X 5 m east-west), she laid out four one-meter-square probe trenches on the east. Bennett (1980) published tire flints from these test trenches. She reached bedrock in this and other areas, encountering very well-defined floors as well as a destruction level above floors 5 and 6 (Bennett, 1980, p. 33). In area I, she found pit dwellings with floors
ending at thin walls of pise and stone. Mud brick was also used. The published pottery from Dhra' all comes from area IV, immediately under the topsoil. Bennett reached bedrock in this area at a depth of 85 cm in the northeast corner and at 40 cm in the northwest corner. T h e pottery corpus is comparable to Jericho stratum IX, Pottery Neolithic A (PNA), although the Dhra' ware is not crumbly and had been fired at a higher temperature. Bennett argued that some of this pottery assemblage, particularly the thinner ware, seems closer to Jericho VHI/Pottery Neolithic B (PNB) than to Jericho IX/PNA (1980, p. 36). However, other PNA and PNB sites in Jordan, such as Wadi Shu'eib, 'Ain Ghazal, and Dharih, have also recently been sounded or excavated. [See 'Ain Ghazal; Shu'eib, Wadi.] Although Bennett did not find the Khiamian points in good stratigraphic contexts, this does not necessarily mean that the site was not occupied in the Early Neolithic period. Dhra' may have been a base camp during the earliest phase of the Neolithic and a farming village in the sixth and fifth millennium. [See also the biography of Bennett] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bennett, Crystal-M. "Sounding at Dhra', Jordan." Levant 12 (1980): 30-39. Raikes, Thomas D. "Notes on Some Neolithic and Later Sites in Wadi Araba and the Dead Sea Valley." Levant 12 (1980): 40-60. ZEIDAN A . KAFAFI
DIBON, village in modern Jordan (3i°3o' N , 35°42' E) on the ancient, but still used, main north-south road (the "King's Highway" of Nm. 20-22), located about 64 km (40 mi.) south of Amman and 3 Ion (2 mi.) north of Wadi elMujib (the Arnon River of Nm. 2 1 : 1 3 , 14, 24, 26; 22:36; Dt. 2:24; Jgs. 11:26; Is. 16:2; Jer. 48:20). An adjacent hill, north west of this village, is tire site of the ancient Moabite city of Dibon, pronounced DIbon in Hebrew and possibly Daibon in Moabite (Septuagint of Jos. 13:17) and transliterated as DhTban in modern Arabic. Its natural defenses are deep valleys on the southwest, west, and north; on the east, erosion from the tell has made the contour less steep. The southeast corner, however, slopes down more gentiy and is joined by a saddle to the next hill, on which the modern village lies. When excavation was begun, this area was marked by two knolls: the eastern one supported a ruined building surmounted by a sheikh's tomb; the western knoll remained unexcavated until re cently, when illegal digging revealed a small square stone tower, possibly Roman. Between them, the slope is slightiy concave; this came to be known as the gateway area. The site has no natural water supply except from the win ter rains that are still conserved in scores of cisterns. T h e
DIBON site's economic importance was guaranteed by its key p o sition at the crossroads of the main north-south road already mentioned and a less obvious east-west track that passes immediately south of the site and joins grain-raising and sheep-goat-rearing lands to the east and west. It was also a major center politically for any power wishing to control territory north of the Arnon River gorge. Evidence for the site's long occupation was the presence, until fifty years ago, of ruins on its surface dating from Byzantine and Arab times. There seems never to have been doubt that this was the site of the ancient city of Dibon, but the discovery there, in 1 8 6 8 , of a stela bearing an inscription memorializing the deeds of King Mesha (hereafter MI) focused attention on the site. [See Moabite Stone.] T h e inscription refers to events and persons until then known only from the Bible (e.g., 1 Kgs. 1 6 : 2 3 - 2 4 ; 2 Kgs. 3 : 4 - 2 7 ) -
History. Such references make it possible to reconstruct, in part, the history of Moab and Dibon. [See Moab.] T h e earliest references occur in the biblical accounts of Israel's traditional movement from Egypt to Canaan via Transjor dan. In them (Nm. 2 1 : 2 1 - 3 1 ) Sihon, king of the Amorites, whose capital was at Heshbon, had seized the land of the king of Moab as far south as the Arnon River, including Dibon. T h e Israelites, having apparently bypassed that part of Moab south of the Arnon (Nm. 2 1 : 1 1 - 1 3 ) , defeated Sihon's forces and took possession of the land north of the Arnon. T h e tribe of Reuben was assigned this territory (Jos. 1 3 : 1 5 - 2 3 ) , but it seems to have been partly occupied by Gad (Jos. 1 3 : 2 4 - 2 8 ; Nm. 3 2 : 3 4 ; M I 1 0 ) . Israelite control of the
Transjordanian kingdoms was not assured, however (Jgs. 3 : 1 2 - 1 4 , 1 1 : 1 - 4 0 ; 1 Sm. 1 2 : 9 , 1 4 : 4 7 ) , until David conquered
Moab north of the Arnon (2 Sm. 8 : 2 ) and even included it in his general census (2 Sm. 2 4 : 5 ) . Israel's control, while it probably continued under Solomon, no doubt ceased with tire breakup of David's empire under Rehoboam. Two events—the attack by Moab and its allies against Ju dah (2 Chr. 2 0 : 1 - 3 0 ) and the counterattack (?) by Israel and Judah (2 Kgs. 3 : 4 - 2 7 ) against Mesha's (?) rebellion—should probably be attributed to the time of Mesha's father, Kemosh[yat], for both are routed south of the Dead Sea; the latter is directed against Kir-Hareset, Moab's southern cap ital (usually identified witii modern Kerak). It was Omri of Israel who subdued Moab (MI 4 - 9 ) , and his heirs held it until Mesha, Icing of Moab and residing at Dibon, revolted and extended his ldngdom some 3 5 km ( 2 2 mi.) northward, as far as Nebo (modern Khirbet el-Mukhayyat). T o give thanks to his god Kemosh and to celebrate his victories, Mesha built a new royal quarter adjacent to the earlier city, which he called Qarhoh "the prominent" or "the eminent" (MI 2 1 - 2 6 ) . It contained a high place for Kemosh, a palace, an acropolis with gates and towers, and houses for the growing population (each of which was to be provided to have a cistern). Finally, he set up his stela, recounting his
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achievements, quite possibly in Kemosh's high place near where it was found. There is little information about the history of Dibon and Moab immediately after Mesha. T h e statement in 2 Kings 1 0 : 3 2 - 3 4 ) that Hazael of Damascus had seized from Israel the lands as far south as the Arnon River suggests that those lands had reverted to Israelite control. It is, however, diffi cult to see how, in the face of Syrian threats, Israel could have accomplished this. It is to be noted that Amos ( 1 : 3 ) seems to restrict HazaePs conquests to Gilead (in central Transjordan), while the reported raids ( 2 Kgs. 13:20) by Moabites suggest that Moab was by no means powerless. There is no evidence that Jeroboam II was able to restore Israelite control. Furthermore, there is no sign of violent de struction at Iron Age Dibon. T h e Moabite kingdom and Dibon came under Assyrian domination by 7 3 1 BCE, when a king of Moab paid tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III and continued to do so under three subsequent Moabite kings. T h e capital appears to have re mained at Dibon (Is. 15:2 RSV; Jer. 4 8 : 1 8 ) . Such pussilanimity (or so it was interpreted by Judah) was infuriating and led to dire oracles against Moab (Is. 1 5 , 1 6 : 6 - 1 3 , 2 5 : 1 0 - 1 2 ; Jer. 4 8 ; Ez. 2 5 : 8 - 1 1 ; Zep 2 : 8 - 1 1 ) , but it was the key to sur
vival. Finally, however, Moab, too, joined a general revolt against Nebuchadnezzar that led to the state's destruction in 5 8 2 BCE. Archaeological R e s e a r c h . Excavation at Dibon did not begin until 1 9 5 0 , when Fred V. Winnett, director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, initi ated a series of campaigns in the site's southeast quadrant, where the Moabite stone had been found. Expeditions under a succession of directors were in place in 1 9 5 1 - 1 9 5 3 , 1 9 5 5 - 1 9 5 6 , and 1 9 6 5 . T h e most recent archaeological re sults were achieved by William H . Morton on the summit and northern part of the site. Here, for the first time, Dibon's complete archaeological history was defined: from its begin ning in the Early Bronze Age it continued directly—without any trace of Middle or Late Bronze Age occupations—into Iron Age II (Moabite), Nabatean, Roman (?), Byzantine, Umayyad, and later deposits. T h e Moabite levels included a north gateway (much mod ified in the Nabatean period), silos for grain, and, nearby, carbonized grain similar to that found by William L. Reed in the southeast quadrant (Winnett and Reed, 1 9 6 4 , p p . 4 8 - 5 0 ) . Most significant were the remains of a major rec tangular stone building ( 4 2 . 9 m X 2 1 . 1 0 ) that Morton called the Moabite Palace Complex (Morton, 1 9 8 9 ; pp. 2 4 4 - 2 4 6 ) . This palace apparently had an adjoining sanctuary, for cultic objects, including a proposed Iron I incense stand and fer tility figurines were found in the vicinity. Perhaps this was the sanctuary of Ashtar-Memosh (MI 1 7 ) . "Winnett's work in 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 1 in the southeast quarter (Winnett and Reed, 1 9 6 4 ) identified vertical retaining walls and a great battered stone wall supporting a 10-meter-deep
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artificial fill extending to bedrock. He traced tire outer slop ing wall for about 1 2 m, including two sharp right-angled turns in its course to enclose a square stone tower (about 6 X 6 m). The wall rests on bedrock and still reaches a height of 1 0 m in places (section E-E in Tushingham, 1 9 7 2 ) . The tower was excavated internally for about 1 1 m without reaching bedrock; its original entrance, approached from in side the city, stands at least 1 2 m above bedrock. T h e heavy battered wall has also been found at tire south side of the quadrant (Tushingham, 1972, pi. V. 1, 2 and Section G-G [wall]). It was in this area that Reed discovered, on bedrock, tire remains of domestic occupation. Its contemporary pot tery and quantities of charred grain could be Carbon-14 dated to about 8 5 0 BCE. Resting on this deposit or on bed rock were heavy stone walls Reed thought could be defen sive. This area was engulfed by a great artificial fill whose depth probably averages about 3 m, as compared with the 1 0 m of the fill above bedrock Winnett had traced. As all of this fill must postdate about 8 5 0 BCE and required both sta bilizing walls and the great stone retaining wall revealed on both the east and south sides of the area (see above), it is logical to consider it the podium of Mesha's royal quarter. Its original surface is not preserved anywhere in the area excavated, but tire entrance to the stone tower is. It and other clues establish the level on which Mesha's buildings were founded. Few of these can, at present, be identified, but it seems probable that Kemosh's high place lay beneath the later Nabatean temple. It was near here that the Mesha in scription was found. Several Moabite tombs were excavated, one containing a clay sarcophagus, with quantities of jewelry and pottery that were, however, so mixed they could not provide a datable sequence. These were probably family tombs. For about five and a half centuries the site was deserted. Then, with the renaissance in Transjordan under the Nabateans, Dibon again became important. The walls on tire summit were rebuilt, as was a north gate overlying the M o abite gate. In the southeast quarter, a major temple, remi niscent of the main temple at Petra, was erected; it was sur rounded by an unwalled sacred precinct approached by a grand staircase leading up from the south. It is to be dated to the first century CE. [See Petra.] Two inscriptions and the remains of a bath indicate that there was a Roman garrison here in the 3rd century CE. After another break, Dibon shared in the general pros perity of the Byzantine period. Architectural features in clude a large church dated to tire sixth century. There were also many burials in the general area, with some sarcophagi inserted into tire ruins of the Nabatean temple. The Umayyad period was brief but left evidence of con struction, including two small, but virtually complete, domed buildings on the summit Morton, 1989, p. 245). The Ayyubid/Mamluk occupation is evidenced by the reuse of Byzantine and Umayyad remains—in many cases scrappily
preserved because of a later cemetery. Coins and pottery, however, are sufficient to indicate the presence and date of this occupation. T h e ancient site of Dibon was abandoned (except as a cemetery) when tire village moved to its present location, probably in the 14th century CE. [See also the biography of Winnett.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bienkowski, Piotr, ed. Early Edam and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan. Sheffield Archaeological Monographs, 7. Sheffield, 1992. Dearman, Andrew, ed. Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab. At lanta, 1989. Dornemann, Rudolph Henry. The Archaeology of the Transjordan in the Bronze andiron Ages. Milwaukee, 1983. Freedman, David Noel. "A Second Mesha Inscription." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 175 (1964): 50-51. Morton, William H. "Report of the Director of the School in Jerusa lem." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 140 (1955): 4-7Morton, William H. "Dhiban." Revue Biblique 64 (1957): 221-223. Morton, William H. "A Summary of the 1955, 1956, and 1965 Exca vations at Dhiban." In Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab, edited by Andrew Dearman, pp. 239-246. Atlanta, 1989. Murphy, Roland E. "A Fragment of an Early Moabite Inscription from Dibon." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 125 (1952): 20-23. Mussell, Mary-Louise. "The Seal Impression from Dhiban." In Studies in the Mesha Inscriptions and Moab, edited by Andrew Dearman, pp. 247-251. Adanta, 1989. Reed, William L., and Fred V. Winnett. "A Fragment of an Early Mo abite Inscription from Kerak." Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 172 (1963): 1-9. Tushingham, A. D. "An Inscription of the Roman Imperial Period from Dhiban." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 138 (1955): 29-34. Tushingham, A. D. The Excavations at Dibon (Dhiban) in Moab: The Third Campaign, 19$2-53. Annual of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, 40. Cambridge, Mass., 1972. Tushingham, A. D. "Three Byzantine Tombstones from Dhiban, Jor dan." In Studies in the Ancient Palestinian World, edited by John W. Wevers and Donald B. Redford, pp. 29-33. Toronto, 1972. Tushingham, A. D. "Dhiban Reconsidered: King Mesha and His Works." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 34 (1990): 183-191. Tushingham, A. D., and Peter H. Pedrette. "Mesha's Citadel Complex (Qarhoh) at Dhiban." Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 5, pp. 151-159. Amman, 1995. Winnett, Fred V., and William L. Reed. The Excavations at Dibon (Dhi ban) in Moab: The First Campaign, 1950-51, and the Second Cam paign, 1952. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 36/37. New Haven, 1964. A. D.
TUSHINGHAM
D I C E S N O L A , L U I G I P A L M A ( 1 8 3 2 - 1 9 0 4 ) , sol dier, diplomat, antiquarian and ultimately museum director. Throughout his long life Emmanuele Pietro Paolo Maria Luigi Palma di Cesnola was always a colorful and contro versial figure. After seeing military action in Italy and the Crimea, he traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman
DIDYMA Empire and then emigrated to tire United States. During the American Civil War, Cesnola distinguished himself as a colonel in the Union cavalry; he was wounded, captured, and exchanged in a release of prisoners. Without private means, he was fortunate later to be offered a consulship in Cyprus, then a backwater of the Ottoman Empire. Shortly after arriving there, Cesnola emulated his French and British consular colleagues by collecting ancient Cypriot art, a pur suit that became a major preoccupation and lucrative source of income. Ultimately, it also brought him fame. With de termination tire consul toured the island from 1865 to 1 8 7 5 witii his gangs of laborers, opening thousands of tombs and cursorily "exploring" numerous ancient city and temple sites. The resulting collection of antiquities, ranging from over life-size statues to fine jewelry, numbering in the tens of thousands, was offered to various great museums around die world. Some works went to London and Paris; but after much negotiating the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City purchased more than four thousand items, the nucleus of its antiquities collection. They also received Ces nola, who, for better or for worse, became the first director. His tenure was beset by allegations of unethical practices concerning the restoration of statues and the provenance of the so-called Treasure of Curium. T h e latter, much like Priam's Treasure excavated by Heinrich Schliemann (who Cesnola attempted to upstage) was not a single deposit but a heterogeneous collection of gold jewelry and other valua bles from local tombs. Although much criticized today for his lack of scientific method, Cesnola must be given credit for propelling Cypriot art onto the world stage for the edi fication of future generations. BIBLIOGRAPHY Di Cesnola, Luigi P. Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples. 2d ed. New York, 1878. Reprint, with a forward by Stuart Swiny. Limassol, 1991. Cesnola's embellished and often inaccurate account of his activities on Cyprus over a decade. Nonetiieless, an important work, the first detailed publication of a large and representative sam ple of Cypriot antiquities, and an entertaining introduction to con temporary life on the island. Di Cesnola, Luigi P. A Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection of Cyp riote Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 3 vols. Boston and New York, 1885-1903. Fine quarto publication, repro ducing the best pieces in the collection. Available in major libraries, these massive volumes are now collector's items. McFadden, Elizabeth. The Glitter and the Gold: A Spirited Account of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's First Director, the Audacious and High-Handed Luigi Palma di Cesnola. New York, 1971. Very well researched. The subtitie is no overstatement! Myres, John. Handbook of the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities from Cy prus (1914). New York, 1974. Standard reference work to the col lection by the leading expert of the day. Wright, G. R. H. "Louis Palma di Cesnola and Cyprus," Archivfiir Orientforschung 38-39 (1991-1992): 161-167. The only work to ques tion the psychology of this nineteenth-century adventurer, with in
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teresting comparisons to Henry Austen Layard and Heinrich Schlie mann. STUART SWINY
D I D Y M A (formerly Branchidai; modern Yenihisar, for merly Yoran), site in Vilayet Aydm, a regional sanctuary in the area of the Carian-Ionian border (Strabo 14.1.2) situated on a limestone plateau 7 5 m above sea level on the Gulf of Akbiik. Didyma became famous as a spring/oracle of Apollo (He rodotus 1.92, 2 . 1 5 9 ; Pausanias 7 . 2 . 6 ) and for the size of the
Temple of Apollo (Strabo 14.1.5), one of the best-preserved large-scale buildings from antiquity. From 1765 to 1 8 5 6 in vestigations were carried out at Didyma by English scholars, and between 1 8 7 3 and 1 8 9 6 a French mission researched the Temple of Apollo. From 1 9 0 6 to 1 9 2 5 , excavations and the conservation of the temple were conducted by the Berlin Museum; those activities have been continued, since 1962, by the German Archaeological Institute. [See Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul.] In addition to the Temple of Apollo, a sanctuary in the nordiwest, which was built over in modern times, has been investigated. T h e oldest archaeological remains date to about 7 0 0 BCE, al though obsidian artifacts from the Neolithic period were found 4 km ( 2 mi.) to die south at Didim plaji. Written traditions concerning the site's pre-Greek foundation first appear in the Hellenistic-Roman periods. More than six hundred inscriptions are related to cult, donations, building activities, the "sacred grove," and the settlement. [See Cult.] From the seventh century BCE until the seventh century CE, Didyma was the best-known oracle shrine of Apollo in Asia Minor. The core of the cult place was the freshwater springs on which the shrines of the main god, Apollo, and of Artemis developed. According to cult legend, the union of Zeus and Leto took place in Didyma (SIG 5 9 0 ) . In the pre-Greek period (Herodotus 1.157; Pausanias 7.2.6) a female nature divinity was probably worshiped there. In the pre-Hellenistic period, the Branchidae, likely an association of members of the local oligarchy, were the cult's prophets and priests and gave their name to the place. Royal donations were given by Pharaoh Necho at the end of the seventh century BCE) and by the Lydian King Croesus in the mid-sixth cen tury BCE (Herodotus 2 . 1 5 9 , L 9 2 ) . The Persian king Darius is said to have confirmed in writing the shrine's right of asy lum (Tacitus, Annals 3 . 6 3 ) . N o archaeological evidence ex ists for the "looting and firing" by the Persians recorded by Herodotus ( 6 . 1 9 ) ; its dating to the time of Darius in 4 9 4 BCE or to Xerxes in 4 7 9 BCE, "during the second defection of Ionia" from the Persians (Herodotus 9.104; Pausanias 8 . 4 6 . 3 ) , is controversial.
Processions from Miletus to the shrine were reestablished in 4 7 9 / 7 8 BCE. [See Miletus.] T h e purported surrender of the
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sanctuary to tire Persians by the Branchidae (Strabo 1 4 . 1 . 5 , 11.11.4) is explained as a Milesian invention. Beginning in the last third of die fourth century BCE, at the instigation of Miletus, the organization and activity of the oracle (Strabo 17.1.43) were fundamentally changed, based on the model of Delphi. An annual official of the polis functioned as the prophetes and sacrificing priest of Apollo. A hydrophoros, or the female water-bearer, performed the office of the priest ess of Artemis. In this period new building activities took place (Temple of Apollo III), while the older structures were maintained. The Seleucids supported the sanctuary and returned the city's votive statue of Apollo, the work of the sculptor Kanachos, to Miletus, which the Persians had stolen (Pausanias 1 . 1 6 . 3 , 8 . 4 6 . 3 ) . [See Seleucids; Persians.] The Didymeia were celebrated as a five-year festival, beginning in about 2 0 0 BCE. The sanctuary was looted in 2 7 7 / 7 6 BCE by pirates. In 4 4 BCE Caesar enlarged the site's area of asylum as a sanc tuary. Otherwise, only occasional evidence exists for a Ro man presence in the first century BCE. Under Emperor Tra jan, the Sacred Way (see below) and the pavement within the sanctuary were rebuilt. "Emperor worship" began under the name of Kommodeia in 177 CE. In the fourth and seventh centuries CE the sanctuary was destroyed by earthquakes. Cult practices came to an end with the advent of the fourth century. The first evidence of the presence of Christians in the sanctuary also dates to the beginning of the fourth century. In the fifth-sixth and tentli-twelfth centuries, new building activities took place at the site, and the seat of a bishop was installed. At the end of the fifteenth century, the site was again destroyed by an earthquake; it was only reoccupied at the end of the eighteenth century. Architectural R e m a i n s . For the most part, local lime stone was used as the building material at the site. The spring precincts of Apollo, located in a hollow, and of Ar temis, to the northwest on a rocky ledge, have existed since about 7 0 0 BCE. Sanctuary of Apollo. In the western part of the adytum, foundation remains of the mud-brick walls of a courtyard ( 1 0 X 3 0 m, reconstructed) have been excavated. T h e cult monument of the spring had been located in the courtyard (Sekos I). About 1 0 0 m east of the spring precinct was a slope marked by five steps. South of it a supporting wall for a terrace was found that had held two hall-type buildings. The slope formed a bow-shaped boundary for an area with an unroofed, round construction. The latter has been called the sanctuary's main altar, but that designation is question able. In the first half of the sixth century BCE, the spring precinct was enlarged when the Temple of Apollo (II) was constructed, along with a two-winged surrounding colon nade. The building materials used were limestone, poros, and marble. In the western part of the cult courtyard lime
stone foundations with five pilasters have been preserved. Also preserved are the remains of walls in the so-called naiskos, whose function was presumably that of a springhouse to protect the cult monument and the seat of the oracle (manteion). T h e sanctuary's most recent construction phase, according to the entablature reliefs, which show gorgons, belongs to about 5 0 0 BCE. Sometime after the mid-fourth century BCE, the buildings were systematically demolished and construction of the Hel lenistic-Roman marble temple (III) begun. This temple was erected upon a seven-stepped foundation that, with the re tention of lire enlarged cult courtyard and the surrounding colonnades (see above), covers 2.5 times the surface area of its predecessor (the stylobate was 5 1 . 1 3 X 1 0 9 . 3 4 ) ' In scriptions (third-second centuries BCE) and sketches of the construction on the inner courtyard walls document the building process. Marble quarries have been discovered near Heraklea sub Latmus. In about 170 BCE, the sanctuary's central building, with a cult courtyard and prodomos, was erected. A pedestal in the courtyard was 5 m high and the courtyard's upper walls, with pilasters, were 2 0 m high. T h e prodomos (a columned hall) was a dodecastyle with two tun nel passages leading to the cult courtyard and to a Great Gate whose unpassable threshold was 1.5 m high. Still standing are a hall with two columns and staircases, a wall with three doors in it, and an open stairway to the cult court yard. The construction of the surrounding colonnades (in terior 8 X 1 9 columns; exterior 1 0 X 2 1 columns) and its roof was never completed. Literary sources testify that a grove (alsos, Strabo 1 4 . 1 . 5 ) was planted inside and outside the temple precinct. m
After 2 5 0 CE, the spaces between the columns on the east side were walled up, and steps were built in front of the Great Gate. In the fifth-sixth centuries, a gallery basilica was erected in the cult courtyard. [See Basilicas.] After the earth quakes in the seventh century, the temple was fortified; the fortifications were destroyed by fire in the tenth century. The temple itself was finally destroyed in an earthquake in 1 4 9 3 ; its stones were looted in the nineteenth century. Sanctuary of Artemis. T h e worship of Artemis is at tested from the sixth century BCE. Evidence exists for a hieron and a cult statue in the third century BCE. Structures on a rocky ledge in the spring precinct have been identified with the Artemis cult (hydrophoria). In about 7 0 0 BCE, the southern spring basin was enclosed by a wall; the precinct was enlarged in the sixth century BCE, and in the third-first centuries BCE the spring basins, which had dried out, were replaced with wells. Leveling and the construction of a com plex of individual buildings reached the sanctuary's north ern boundary. Walls separated the sanctuary from the Sa cred Way; colonnades of limestone columns with wooden entablatures were erected in front of the walls. In the second century CE, the sanctuary was remodeled. It was destroyed
DIKAIOS, PORPHYRIOS in the fourth century, probably by an earthquake, and was dren abandoned. Sacred Way. T h e construction of a 5-6-meter-wide road more than 2 0 Ion ( 1 2 mi.) long overland from Miletus to Didyma is attested su-atigraphically for the second half of the sixth century BCE and also by tire cult regulations of tire Molpoi pertaining to processions with stations for local di vinities. From about 5 3 0 to the fourth century BCE, at tire top of the pass, there was a cult precinct with a group of seated statues in the middle and sculptured sphinxes. It is assumed that in tire last section of the processional road the course veered to the west and south of the Apollo temple (called the "stadium" by Theodor Wiegand). Hellenistic-Roman constructions. At Didyma, near the Sa cred Way and beyond it, burial sites have been identified, mostly dating to the Roman period. The settlement and some secular buildings have also been excavated from the period. Byzantine constructions. During the fifth-sixth centuries, the Sacred Way was furnished with an arcaded hall, and a basilica was built within tire Temple of Apollo. There is ar chaeological evidence of a village settlement, including churches and interments, from the ninth-tenth centuries. [See Churches.] Finds. Didyma is tire site of the richest source of Early Greek sculpture in Anatolia. Starting in tire early sixth cen tury BCE, all the important types are represented: kouroi and korai, male and female seated statues, standing and reclining clothed male statues, lion and sphinx statues, or architec tural sculpture. In about 5 0 0 BCE Kanachos of Sikyon made a bronze statue of Apollo commissioned by tire city of Mi letus (Pliny, Nat. Hist. 3 4 . 7 5 ; Pausanias 2 . 1 0 . 4 , 9 . 1 0 . 2 ) . Honorific bronze stames from the Hellenistic-Roman peri ods can only be inferred from their bases. In addition to these, only fragments from a few marble statues and reliefs and terra cottas have been preserved from the period. T h e ceramic ware is local, and imports are rare. T h e metal finds consist mostly of vessels but do include weapons and stat uettes, however rarely. [See Weapons and Warfare.] Only a few pre-Hellenistic coins have been found—the others date to the fourth century BCE-seventir century CE. In addition to animal bones from burnt offerings, there are deposits of unburned bones, which would be in accordance with a "Carian" ritual (Suidas s.v. karikon thyma). Divinities. Cult places for Apollo and Artemis have been identified through inscriptional evidence (Callimachus Lyr. 2 2 9 v. 1 1 ed. Pfeiffer; Schol. Clem. Alex. Protr. 4 5 . 2 ) . Such evidence also exists for precincts of Aphrodite, Zeus Soter, Zeus Kataibates (?), Angelos, and Phosphorion (Hecate? Artemis?). Most of the dedications are to Apollo and Arte mis Pytheie; in addition, there are dedications to Hecate, Zeus and Leto, Dionysus, Kurotrophos, Aphrodite Urania and Katallakteria, Soteria, Pan and the Nymphs, the Muses,
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Cybele, Telesphorion, Zeus Hyetios and Telesiurgos, Po seidon Seisichthon, Agathe Tyche, Osiris, Serapis-Isis-Anubis, and the Sebastoi. Except for nameless altars from the archaic period, there are altars for Artemis Lykeie, the Curetes, Zeus Phaneios and Hypsistos, Asphaleios Poseidon, Asclepius Soter, Demeter Karpophoros, Sotira Kore, and Tyche. [See Altars.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Didyma Wegweiser. Vols. 1-31. Berlin, 1984-1993. Series of brief cur rent reports. Drerup, Heinrich, et al. "Bericht iiber die Ausgrabungen in Didyma 1962." Archaologischer Anzeiger (1964): 333-383. Fontenrose, Joseph. Didyma: Apollo's Oracle, Cult and Companions. Berkeley, 1988. Gunther, Wolfgang. Das Orakel von Didyma in hellenislischcr Zeit: Bine Interpretation der Slein-Urkunden. Istanbuler Mitteilungen, 4. Tu bingen, 1971. Haselberger, Lothar. "Bericht iiber die Arbeit am Jiingeren Apollontempel von Didyma." Istanbuler Mitteilungen 33 (1983): 90-123. Haselberger, Lothar. "The Construction Plans for the Temple of Apollo at Didyma." Scientific American 253 (1985): 126-132. Knackfuss, Hubert. Didyma I: Die Baubeschreibung. 3 vols. Berlin, 1941. Rehm, Albert. Didyma II: Die Inschriften. Berlin, 1958. Schneider, Peter. "Zur Topographie der Heiligen Strasse von Milet nach Didyma." Archaologischer Anzeiger (1987): 101-129. Schneider, Peter, et al. "Em Temenos an der Heiligen Strasse von Milet nach Didyma." Archaologischer Anzeiger (1989): 147-217. Tuchelt, Klaus. Die archaischen Skulpturen von Didyma: Beilrage zur frilhgiiechischen Plaslik in Kleinasien. Istanbuler Forschungcn, 27. Berlin, 1970. Tuchelt, Klaus. Vorarbeiten zu einer Topographie von Didyma: Eine Untersuchung der inschriftliehen und arckdologischen Zeugnisse. Istanbuler Mitteilungen, 9. Tubingen, 1973. Tuchelt, Klaus. "Didyma orBranchidai." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, pp. 272-273. Princeton, 1976. Includes the schol arly literature up to 1975. Tuchelt, Klaus. Branchidai-Didyma: Geschichte und Ausgrabung elites antikan Heiligtums. Zaberns Bildbande zur Archiiologie, vol. 3. Main, 1992. Includes additional scholarly literature up to 1990. KLAUS TUCHELT
DIKAIOS, PORPHYRIOS
( 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 7 1 ) , one of the most infuential Cypriot archaeologists. Dikaios studied at tire universities of Athens, Liverpool, Lyons, and the Sorbonne. In 1 9 2 9 he was appointed assistant curator of the Cyprus Museum, and two years later he became curator. In 1 9 6 1 , after Cyprus became an independent republic, Di kaios became the first Cypriot director of the Department of Antiquities. In 1 9 6 3 he left Cyprus for the United States, where he taught at Princeton and Brandeis for the following three years. He then became professor of archaeology at the University of Heidelberg, a post he held until his death in 1971.
While in the Department of Antiquities, Dikaios played a leading role in die reorganization of its administtative sys tem. Fie was also responsible in 1 9 3 5 for introducing a new,
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scientifically based system for cataloging finds and present ing exhibits in the Cyprus Museum. This accomplishment was followed by the publication of the first modern Guide to the Cyprus Museum (Nicosia, 1947; 2d ed., 1953; 3d ed., 1961; Greek ed., 1951). One of tire founders of modern Cypriot archaeology, Dikaios excavated and published widely on a variety of sub jects, concentrating mainly on Cypriot prehistory. With his publications of his excavations at Khirokoitia, Troulli, Kalavasos, and Sotira, Dikaios defined the character and lay tire foundations for all subsequent studies on Neolithic Cy prus. Fie also investigated the Chalcolithic Period at Erimi, Ambelikou, and Kalavasos and tire Early Bronze Age at Vounous and Philia. Of great importance is his work on the Late Bronze Age sites of Yyla-Kokkinokremos, Maa-Palaeokastro, and, above all, Enkomi which was the subject of one of his major publications (Enkomi Excavations, 1948-1958, 4 vols, Mainz, 1969-1971). Dikaios also excavated the Iron Age necropolis of Salamis, and located a large number of sites, several of which were later excavated by other archae ologists. He lectured widely in the United States and Europe and was honored by many institutions. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dikaios, Porphyrios. Khirokitia. London, 1953. The starting point for any study of this important site and Neolithic Cyprus in general. Dikaios, Porphyrios. Sotira. Philadelphia, 1961. A touchstone in Cyp riot prehistory. Dikaios, Porphyrios, and James R. Stewart. Swedish Corpus Expedition, vol. 4.1 A, The Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus. Lund, 1962. Still the basic work on the subject. Ieromonachou, Lyghia. "Bibliography of Porphyrios Dikaios." In Stud ies Presented in Memory of Porphyrios Dikaios, pp. 216-217. Nicosia, 1979. Contains a full bibliography of Dikaios's work. The Large Cypriot Encyclopaedia (in Greek). Nicosia, 1986. See volume 4, pages 267-268. Nicolaou, Kyriakos. "Porphyrios Dikaios: Necrology" (in Greek). Re port of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus (1973): 226-229. DEMETRIOS MICHAELIDES
D I L M U N , the Sumerian name (cf. Akk., Tilmun; Gk., Tylos/Tyros; Lat., Tyrus) given to a country bordering the body of water known in cuneiform sources as the Lower Sea (Persian/Arabian Gulf). Culturally and territorially outside the bounds of Mesopotamia proper, Dilmun is attested as early as the late fourth millennium in the Archaic texts from Uruk-Warka. During the late Early Dynastic period (c. 2500-2350 BCE), Dilmun emerged as an important source of raw materials for the Idngs of the city-state of Lagash. UrNanshe (c. 2550 BCE) "had ships of Dilmun transport timber from foreign lands" to his city, while Lugalanda (c. 2400) and Urukagina (c. 2380) purchased copper in exchange for milk and cereal products, fat, silver, and wool. Sargon of Agade (c. 2334-2279 BCE) boasted that ships from Dilmun, Magan (Oman peninsula), and Meluhha (Indus Valley?)
docked at the quay of his capitol, Agade (Cooper, 1986, p. 22ff.). During the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods, Dilmun was most famous as a retailer of copper (probably of Omani origin) to the seafaring merchants of Ur, such as one Ea-nasir, some of whose letters were found by Leonard Woolley during his excavations there (Leemans, i960). At the same time, diplomatic ties linked Dilmun with the Old Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad and his son Yasmakh-Adad, and caravans are known to have traveled up the Euphrates River between Dilmun and Mari. In the Middle Babylonian period, as two letters found at Nippur show, Dilmun was under the control of a Kassite governor with close family ties to the elite of Nippur. By the Neo-Assyrian period Dil mun, though perhaps independent, was nevertheless tribu tary to Assyria. T h e Dilmunite kings Uperi and Ahundara, who lived, "like a fish, thirty double-hours away in the midst of the sea of tire rising sun" (e.g. Annals ofKhorsabad, Sar gon II, section 4 1 ) , both brought gifts to Sargon II, and a later king called Hundaru sent tribute to Ashurbanipal's court at Nineveh. A Babylonian "administrator of Dilmun" (Akk., '"bel pihati Dilmun'") is mentioned in 544 BCE during the reign of Nabonidus. In addition to these historical and economic references, literary sources attest to the special regard in which Dilmun was held in Mesopotamia. In the Sumerian myth Enid and the World Order, for example, Enid is said to have "cleaned and purified the land of Dilmun," while in Enki and Ninhursag, Dilmun is described as a pure, bright and clean land flowing with the "water of abundance." Given the relatively abundant written references to Dil mun, it is hardly surprising that many scholars, from the mid-nineteenth century CE onward, have tried to fix the pre cise location of this land. The French Assyriologist Jules Oppert was the first scholar to link the Akkadian toponym Tilmun with the Greek name Tylos, the descriptions of which (e.g., by Theophrastus, Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian) leave no doubt of its identity with the largest of the Bahrain islands. The only problem with this identification for the earliest phases of Dilmun's existence (i.e., pre-Old Akka dian) is tire complete lack of archaeological evidence for set tlement on Bahrain during the late fourth and early third millennia. By contrast, tire northeast Arabian mainland con tains many sites, such as Tarut Island just opposite the Qatif oasis, Abqayq, U m m an-Nussi, and U m m ar-Ramad, that were inhabited then and show evidence (pottery, carved soft-stone vessels, and statuary) of contact witlr JemdetNasr through Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, It has therefore been suggested that the original center of Dilmun lay on the main land, and that only toward the end of the third millennium did it shift to Bahrain. Archaeological investigations on Bahrain since 1879 have documented the existence there of more than one hundred thousand burial mounds dating to the Bronze and Iron Ages, as well as large cemeteries (e.g. at Karranah and Abu Saybi)
DIYALA of Hellenistic and Parthian date. Danish archaeological ex cavations led by Peter Vilhelm Glob and T. Geoffrey Bibby from the University of Aarhus during the 1950s and early 1960s revealed for the first time the existence of several setdements (e.g., Qal'at al-Bahrain, Saar) and a number of sanctuaries (e.g., Barbar, Diraz, A i n U m m es-Sejour) on the island as well. The British archaeologist T . Geoffrey Bibby proposed a comprehensive periodization for Bahrain, based on die Danish work at Qal'at al-Bahrain, using the terms city I-VI to denote individual periods. A distinctive type of circular stamp seal with a high, perforated boss was developed on Bahrain at die very end of the third millen nium and was further elaborated during the first centuries of the second millennium BCE (see figure 1 ) . By contrast, cylinder seals were rarely used except during the Middle Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian periods. A local ceramic in dustry grew up during the city I (so-called chain-ridged ware) and city II (red-ridged ware) periods (i.e., c. 2300-1600 BCE). In addition, Bahrain has always been in contact with neighboring parts of Mesopotamia, Iran, Oman, and the Indus Valley, and the ceramic repertoire found there is accordingly varied. Shortly after 2000 BCE, a satellite settlement was founded on the island of Failaka off tile coast of Kuwait. T h e material culture of the earliest set tiement there is so identical to tiiat found on Bahrain at the same time that it is certain the foundation must have been a Dilmunite colony, probably of merchants and their fami lies. T h e rich system of aquifers underlying eastern Arabia en-
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sured a plentiful supply of water on Bahrain in antiquity, permitting the cultivation of dates, cereals, and other fruits. Freshwater springs emerge both on land and in the shallow waters offshore. It was its role as a commercial center in international trade, however, that made Dilmun famous— although die goods it sold to Mesopotamian merchants were not local products but originated farther east. Copper from the Oman peninsula, tin from Afghanistan (?), exotic woods and ivory from India were purchased by Dilmunite mer chants and dien reexported to cities like Ur, Lagash, and Mari. Throughout most of the third, second and first mil lennia BCE, Dilmun was Babylonia's most important south ern source of copper, timber, and exotic goods; and at Ur, "Dilmun merchants" (Akk,, alik Tilmun) formed a partic ular subgroup of merchants engaged in trade with the Lower Sea. [See also Bahrain; Failaka; Girsu and Lagash; and Qal'at al-Bahrain.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibby, Geoffrey. Looking for Dilmun. New York, 1969. Popular account of the Danish Gulf expedition, with primary reference to the work carried out on Bahrain and the search for Dilmun. Cooper, Jerrold S. Sumerian and Akkadian Royal Inscriptions. New Ha ven, 1986. Reliable, up-to-date translations of third millennium royal texts concerning Dilmun. Khalifa, Shaikha Haya A. al-, and Michael Rice, eds. Bahrain through the Ages: The Archaeology. London, 1986. Wide-ranging proceedings of a conference held in 1983; touches on many aspects of Dilmun's history. Larsen, Curtis E. Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarcheology of an Ancient Society. Chicago, 1983. Geoarchaeological ap proach to ancient Bahrain which must be read critically. Leemans, Wilhelmus F. Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period. Leiden, i960. Basic study of Ea-nasir's activities. Potts, Daniel T., ed. Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early History of Bahrain. Berlin, 1983. Collection of essays on Dilmun, primarily by Assyriologists, on the cuneiform sources of various pe riods, as well as a number of archaeological studies. Potts, Daniel T. "Reflections on the History and Archaeology of Bah rain." Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985): 675-710. Critical review of a number of studies in Bahrain! archaeology which appeared in the early 1980s; contains a great deal of environmental and demographic information on Bahrain and extensive discussions of questions connected with Dilmun. Potts, Daniel T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1990. General survey of the archaeology of the Gulf region, with a discus sion of Dilmun in all periods. D. T. POTTS
D I Y A L A , a tributary of die Tigris River tiiat catches its water from the Zagros Mountains nortiieast of Baghdad. After it escapes from die mountains, the Diyala crosses two plains: a triangular basin northeast of a low row of prom ontories, Jebel Hamrin, and the alluvium surrounding the DILMUN. Figure 1. Circular stamp seal. A typical stamp seal of river soutii of the Hamrin before it joins the Tigris at Bagh early second millennium BCE, showing human and animal figures. dad. T h e Diyala region is traditionally divided into three (Courtesy D. T. Potts)
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DIYALA
zones: the Upper Diyala, referring to tire course of tire river through tire mountainous Zagros; the Middle Diyala, which includes the Hamrin basin and immediate catchment areas; and the Lower Diyala, the areas southwest of the Hamrin range. The Diyala River traverses the central western Zagros Mountains and die northeastern part of the Mesopotamian alluvium. One of die oldest known trade routes, the Silk Road, is located in this region. Connecting tire Mediterra nean with China, the route is also called the Great Khorasan Road between Baghdad and Kermanshah. The route fol lows the Diyala River up from Baghdad through the Ham rin, where it crosses to the Iranian plateau through passes in the Zagros Mountains. These geographic details are impor tant in reconstructing ancient human exploitation of the region. In archaeological terms, the Diyala traditionally refers to the Lower Diyala region and includes the countryside re ceiving water from the Diyala River by irrigation canals. Re cent archaeological results from the Hamrin make it plau sible to include this region as well. The Lower Diyala region has been identified at the province of Eshnunna, an impor tant city-state during the Isin-Larsa period. Eshnunna is modern Tell Asmar. Other important sites have also been identified, such as Khafajeh as the ancient town of Tutub. The first systematic archaeological investigation of the Lower Diyala plain took place from 1930 to 1938 with the Iraq Expedition, directed by Henri Frankfort. It was the first large-scale expedition from the Oriental Institute of the Uni versity of Chicago to Iraq. Among others, the staff also in cluded Thorkild Jacobsen as epigrapher, Seton Lloyd, Gor don Loud, and Pinhas Delougaz. One reason for choosing the Diyala region was tire increasing number of clay tablets and art objects being brought to tire antiquities market in Baghdad from illicit digging into the mounds in the area. It was also assumed that the region was historically important and that Tell Asmar was indeed the ancient city of Esh nunna. The Oriental Institute expedition concentrated on tire excavations of four sites: Khafajeh, Tell Asmar, Tell Agrab, and Ishchali. It built its expedition house at Tell As mar. [See the biographies of Frankfort, Jacobsen, and Lloyd.] Extensive surveys of the Lower Diyala plain combined with excavations were carried out in 1957-195 8 by Thorkild Jacobsen, Robert McCormick Adams, and Fuad Safar un der the Diyala Basin Archaeological Project. [See the biog raphy of Safar.] The project, aimed at investigating agricul tural history and irrigation—the salinity of irrigated fields and its impact on social and economic subsystems—map ped the cultural landscape through more than six thousand years. It was the first comprehensive archaeological regional analysis of the Mesopotamian alluvium. During the 1970s, intensive archaeological rescue opera tions took place in the Hamrin Basin as a result of construc
tion for a new dam at the point where the Diyala River cuts through tire Hamrin Mountains. T h e aggregated archaeo logical investigations of the Diyala region have made it one of the best-documented provinces of Mesopotamia. The excavations at Tell Asmar, Khafajeh, Tell Agrab, and Ishchali resulted in the development of a long-range chro nology for the Lower Diyala region. These sites cover a pe riod from tire Late Uruk into the Old Babylonian Period (c. 3500-1800 BCE). Their stratigraphic sequences partly over lap and provide the basis for a diachronic study of architec ture and artifacts. In 1952, Delougaz (1952) published a comprehensive pottery corpus, still one of the most useful references for studying tire third- and early second-millen nium BCE pottery of Mesopotamia. The repertoire of seals also has contributed essentially to establishing a sequence for glyptic styles in Mesopotamia (Frankfort, 1955). T h e architectural remains from the beginning of the third mil lennium, in particular temple buildings, have resulted in the subdivision of tire E D period into three phases: I—III (De lougaz and Lloyd, 1942). T h e terminology Frankfort and others introduced does differ at some points from that tra ditionally used (e.g., tire Protoliterate period equals the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods; late ED III is labeled the Protoimperial period). Robert McC. Adams's 1957-1958 surveys added details about settlement patterns and canal systems from the Ubaid period through the nineteenth century CE. The intensive in vestigation of the Hamrin basin by many international ar chaeological teams extended the chronology for the entire Diyala region and widened its geographic range. Except for a single aceramic site, the earliest settlements in the Hamrin date to the Samarra period (c. 6000-5500 BCE). This could be expected, as the region is in the middle of traditional Samarran territory, the marginal zones for dry farming. The first substantial human activities can be attrib uted to tire Ubaid period (5500-4000 BCE). At Tell Abada, located south of tire Diyala River in tire Hamrin, almost an entire Ubaid village was excavated by an Iraqi expedition under the direction of Sabah Abboud Jasim (1985). T h e village consists of several building compounds in which a central building differs both in size and finds from tire rest and suggests an advanced state of social stratification in the order of chiefdoms. Houses show a typical tripartite ground plan, with a T-shaped central room. These are prototypes for tire following Uruk and E D temple and house plans. At Tell Madhhur, in the northern part of tire Hamrin, a partic ularly well-preserved house with almost a complete house hold inventory was excavated by a British-Canadian team (e.g., Roaf, 1989). In tire Lower Diyala Region, sparse Ubaid remains were observed, but the location of sites shows the basic outline of tire irrigation canal system. There, as at several other Mesopotamian sites, the fact that Ubaid re mains were found under the major urban sites shows that
DIYALA the principle urban settlement pattern took shape during the Ubaid with the establishment of villages at natural or artifi cial watercourses. [See Ubaid.] Few finds are available from the Uruk period ( 4 0 0 0 - 3 1 0 0 BCE) . In the Hamrin, villages founded during the Ubaid dis appear, while in tire Lower Diyala region there is an increas ing area of land under exploitation. This development can be tied to the urbanization process for tire entire region, in which centers experiencing strong population growth be came large towns. During the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic periods ( 3 1 0 0 - 2 4 0 0 BCE), the Diyala region experienced steady pop ulation growth, to judge from the increase in the number of sites and in settlement size. In the Lower Diyala region, ur ban centers surrounded by a pattern of sites in hierarchical clusters developed at Khafajeh, Tell Asmar, and Tell Agrab. Of ninety-six surveyed sites, ten can be classified as large towns (greater than 1 0 ha, or 2 5 acres), nineteen as small towns ( 4 - 1 0 ha, or 9 - 2 5 acres), and sixty-seven as villages (fewer than 4 ha, or 9 acres). T h e ED period is one of the best documented in the region. Extensive excavations at sites in tire Lower Diyala and the Hamrin give a compre hensive impression of the architecture, burial traditions, art, and material culture in the early third millennium. At Kha fajeh and Tell Asmar, sequences of temples were found, some of them identified by historical sources. In Khafajeh a sequence of temples dedicated to Sin dates back to tire Jem det Nasr period. T h e temple type is initially ttipartite but evolves into a closed compound with internal courtyards. In contrast to contemporary and earlier temples, these temples were originally built on the ground floor. In the ED II period, a large temple complex was constructed at Khafajeh, char acterized by two large oval enclosure walls. Between the two walls was a house interpreted as the house of tire priest. In side tire oval enclosure walls tire temple rose on a platform. It was surrounded by workshops, perhaps a production cen ter administrated by the priest of the temple (Delougaz, 1 9 4 0 ) . At Tell Agrab a monumental temple was dedicated to Shara. The ground plan shows a traditional Mesopota mian building pattern, in which tire cella is located within a large square complex of rooms and courtyards and the entire building is enclosed with a heavy outer wall. At Tell Asmar, the temple sequence produced several spectacular finds. Best known is tire hoard of sculptures from the E D II period found in a pit under tire floor of the so-called Square T e m ple. T h e sculptures are carved in stone and are typically Sumerian in style and dress. E D domestic architecture is less well known. In tire Hamrin remains of round sttuctures were found that are dated to the beginning of tire ED period. Both at Tell Gubba and Tell Razuk, complete round buildings were preserved to a degree that had left part of the corbelled vaulted ceilings intact. These round structures are assumed to have served as fortifications along tire northeastern fron
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tier, constructed and maintained by the large town centers in the Lower Diyala region. One reason for setting up such strongholds was to protect the vulnerable outlets for the vital irrigation canals at the point where the Diyala River cuts through tire Hamrin Mountains. T h e excavation of ED sites gives detailed insight into tire technological and artistic level of the population. In partic ular many cylinder seals, bronze tools, sculptures, and carved relief plaques were recovered. The pottery ttadition during the ED I—II periods shows regionalization at tire southeastern fringe of Mesopotamia: polychrome painted Jemdet Nasr pottery develops into local styles; and in the Lower Diyala and the Hamrin, so-called Scarlet Ware, a jar painted in red and black with geometric and naturalistic mo tifs, appears. This distribution of ceramic styles makes it possible to recognize the Diyala region as one cultural entity during E D I—II. In the Akkadian period ( 2 4 0 0 - 2 2 0 0 BCE), tire region con tinues to develop along the lines laid out during tire ED pe riod. At Tell Asmar, private houses and monumental build ings have been exposed. The Northern Palace, a large building complex with several domestic sectors, may have already been built at tire end of ED III. While the palace was apparently ruined with tire Guti invasion at the end of the Akkadian period, the private houses and dwellings con tinued in use. T h e town lost its administrative function, but it remained inhabited. In the Hamrin, Akkadian cuneiform tablets have been found, probably within an administrative context (Whiting, 1 9 8 7 ) . T h e archaeological record remains poor through the Ur III dynasty, during which period Eshnunna/Tell Asmar was controlled by governors appointed by the kings of Ur. Dur ing the following era, the Isin-Larsa period (c. 2 0 0 0 - 1 8 0 0 BCE), the region reached a political peak, beginning with tire move toward independence by the governor of Eshnunna, Ituriya. Although the settlement pattern continued, there was a tendency for a few centers to grow, perhaps as a result of tire centtalization of administrative institutions and power in Eshnunna. The importance of the region and its history during the Larsa period is well documented because of the finds of archives and inscriptions. Large temple complexes were constructed, and, in the case of the Shu-Sin temple at Eshnunna, the temple was combined with a palace. At Ish chali, the monumental temple of Ishtar-Futitum comprises interior courtyards and broadroom antecella and cella tem ple plans. From this era, several sites in the Hamrin that most likely profited from the interest of Eshnunna have pro duced remains, particularly towns that dominated tire main routes. The flourishing of tire Diyala during tire hegemony of Eshnunna ended with the reign of Hammurabi of Babylon. According to survey results (Adams, 1 9 6 5 ) , tire larger towns entered a period of decline that lasted for several hundreds
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of years. Data from the Hamrin speak of a population settled primarily in villages scattered over the plains. A regeneration of the settlement pattern and population growth first occurs in the Seleucid-Parthian period. Despite poor archaeological documentation, survey data suggest extensive urbanization. Development culminated in the Sasanian period, during which the region, in ecological terms was brought to its lim its. As the agricultural hinterland for the Sasanian capital at Ctesiphon, large canal systems were laid out and the agri cultural potential expioided to a maximum. During the Is lamic period, the Diyala region again experienced a decline in organization and population size, despite the rise of Bagh dad. [See also Eshnunna; Hamrin Dam Salvage Project; and Khafajeh.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert McC. Land behind Baghdad. Chicago, 1965. The most comprehensive study of ancient settlement patterns in the Diyala. Delougaz, Pinhas. The Temple OvalAtKhafajah. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications (OIP), 53. Chicago, 1940. Excavation report. Delougaz, Pinhas, and Seton Lloyd. Pre-Sargonid Temples in the Diyala Region. OIP, 58. Chicago, 1942. Excavation report with a description of the Sumerian temples found at Tell Asmar, Khafajeh, and Tell Agrab (except the Oval Temple). Delougaz, Pinhas. Pottery from the Diyala Region. OIP, 63. Chicago, 1952. The basic reference book for Mesopotamian pottery. Delougaz, Pinhas, et al. Private Houses and Graves in the Diyala Region. OIP, 88. Chicago, 1967. Frankfort, Henri. Sculpture of the Third Millennium B.C.from Tell Asmar and Khafdjah. OIP, 44. Chicago, 1939. Detailed presentation of Su merian sculptures from die Diyala. Frankfort, Henri, Seton Lloyd, and Thorkild Jacobsen. The Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers at Tell Asmar. OIP, 43. Chicago, 1940. Excavation report. Frankfort, Henri. More Sculpture from the Diyala Region. OIP, 60. Chi cago, 1943. Detailed presentation of Sumerian sculptures from the Diyala. See as well Frankfort (1939). Frankfort, Henri. Stratified Cylinder Seals from the Diyala Region. OIP, 72. Chicago, 1955 Gibson, McGuire, ed. Uch Tepe I. The Chicago-Copenhagen Expe dition to the Hamrin, Hamrin Report 10. Chicago and Copenhagen, 1981. A broad review of the settlement history and archaeological results from the Hamrin basin, together with a detailed report on the excavation of the ED round fortification at Tell Razuk. Hill, Harold D., et al. Old Babylonian Public Buildings in the Diyala Region. OIP, 98. Chicago, 1990. Conclusive report on the excava tions of the Kititum Temple at Ishchali. Jacobsen, Thorkild. Salinity and Irrigation: Agriculture in Antiquity. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 14. Malibu, 1982. Based on manuscripts twenty years older than the year of publication. Jasim, Sabah A. The 'Ubaid Period in Iraq: Recent Excavations in the Hamrin Region. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 267. Oxford, 1985. Report on the important finds of an Ubaid village, with a summary of the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia based on the new finds. Roaf, Michael. "Social Organization and Social Activities at Tell Madhhur." In Upon 'This Foundation—the Ubaid Reconsidered, edited by E. F. Henrickson and Ingolf Thuesen, pp. 91-145. Copenhagen, 1989. Comprehensive analysis of an Ubaid period household.
Whiting, Robert M., Jr. Old Babylonian tetters from Tell Asmar. Uni versity of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Assyriological Studies, 22. Chicago, 1987. The most recent and detailed scholarly work on let ters from the archives at Tell Asmar. INGOLF THUESEN
D O D E C A N E S E . See Aegean Islands.
D O G S . T h e dog (Canis familiaris) evolved from the wolf (Canis lupus) in a number of parallel and independent epi sodes of domestication. Domestication is inferred in the ar chaeological record from skeletal changes in the teeth and skull—in particular, crowding of the tooth row. Additional changes include an overall diminution in size and increased variability in domesticates. The earliest claim of domestic dog in the Near East comes from the Palegawra cave in Iraq, in a deposit dated to about 1 0 , 0 0 0 BCE. However, both the date and the morphological identification of this canid is contested. In Natufian levels (c. 9 6 0 0 BCE) at Ein Mallaha in northern Israel, a woman was buried with a wolf or dog puppy. Although, the wild or domestic status of the puppy cannot be determined, it documents the first ceremonial re lationship between humans and canids in the region. c
The ceremonial treatment of dogs took several forms. In terment, with or without accompanying human burial, is known throughout the ancient eastern Mediterranean, but only in Egypt and Israel was it practiced on a large scale. Dogs were used in sacrificial and exorcistic rites in Anatolia. Among the western Semites, puppies were specified for sac rifice to conclude a covenant. In Mesopotamia and Anatolia, dogs and puppies played a role in cultic healing and rites to eliminate impurity. Dogs were used in healing rituals in Greece, but they were also sacrificed and apparently eaten in conjunction with human burials. In Egypt, in a few cases, dogs have been found accom panying human burials in deposits as early as the Neolithic and Badarian periods. Large-scale burial of mummified re mains are known from the Hellenistic and especially Roman periods. At the Chalcolithic cemetery at Gilat in the Negev, two dogs with grave goods were recovered. Also in southern Israel, more than 1 2 0 0 dog interments were excavated from Persian and Early Hellenistic levels at the site of Ashkelon. In Mesopotamia, the dog was associated witii the goddess Gula in her function as healer, and a number of puppies and adults were found in a ramp of her temple at Isin (c. 1 0 0 0 BCE) . Dog burial was widespread but does not seem to have been similarly motivated in each region. At Ashkelon, for example, the dogs were carefully interred in separate pits, but no grave goods accompanied them, and the burials were not associated with architecture of any notable scale. T h e reason for their burial remains a mystery. [See Gilat; Ash kelon; Isin.] Egyptian and Mesopotamian art contains numerous im-
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ages of dogs that have been identified as representing an cient breeds, often greyhounds and salukis or mastiffs. These are not confirmed by the osteological evidence from Egypt and the Near East, however. Reconstructions of the size, weight, limb proportions, and head shape of ancient dogs shows that prior to the Roman period selective dog breeding was not practiced in a way that produced distinc tive populations. Rather, the osteological evidence reveals that tire dogs of the region can be referred to the "pari ah"—medium-sized animals varying in body and head from a sheep dog to a greyhound type. [See also Animal Husbandry; Cult; Ethnozoology; and Paleozoology.]
Haddon, Kathleen. "Report on a Small Collection of Mummy Dogs." In The Cemeteries of Abydos, part 1 , 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 1 0 : The Mixed Cemetery and Umm el-Ga'ab, by Edouard Naville, et al., pp. 40-48. Memoir of the Egyptian Exploration Society, 33. London, 1913. Despite its age, the best zoological evaluation of the dog "types" in Egyptian mummified remains. Olsen, Stanley J. Origins of the Domestic Dog: The Fossil Record. Tucson, 1985. Global review of die osteological evidence for dog domesti cation. Wapnish, Paula, and Brian Hesse. "Pampered Pooches or Plain Pari ahs? The Ashkelon Dog Burials." Biblical Archaeologist 56.2 (1993): 55-80. Aluiough focused on the burials at Ashkelon, the article pro vides a regionwide review of dogs in the historic period.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DOLMEN. A megalitiric burial structure shaped like a
Churcher, C. S. "Dogs from Ein Tirghi Cemetery, Balat, Dalkhleh Oasis, Western Desert of Egypt." In Skeletons in Her Cupboard, ed ited by Anneke Clason et al., pp. 39-59. Oxbow Monograph, 34. Oxford, 1993. Critical survey of appearance of dog types in ancient Egypt. Day, Leslie P. "Dog Burials in the Greek World." American Journal of Archaeology 88 (1984): 21-32. Reviews the evidence for Greek dog sacrifice and its underlying motivations.
DOLMEN.
PAULA W A P N I S H and BRIAN HESSE
table (from whence its Breton name) a dolmen is usually comprised of a capstone resting on upright stones. It most often occurs in groups and is frequently associated with en igmatic stone circles, one-course stone rows, and tumuli. Dolmens can take on a number of forms. Though their typologies do not completely coincide, both Claire Epstein ( 1 9 8 5 ) and Mattanyah Zohar ( 1 9 9 2 ) have discerned six gen
eral types, based on shape, size, depth, and association with
Dolmen with a carved stone aperture from ed-Damiyeh, Jordan. (Courtesy D. Ilan)
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other feattires such as stone mmuli, rings, and walls. The simplest type, tire trilitiion, is the most common form. Dif ferent forms often occur together, but specific fields and certain regions generally show a preponderance of a partic ular type—perhaps an expression of tribal traditions. Many dolmens show signs of originally having been enclosed by tumuli, and it is possible drat all were. [See Tumulus.] In the Levant, dolmen fields are concentrated along the Syro-African Rift, as far north as southern Turkey and as far south as Ma'in in Jordan. They do not occur in the south ern deserts of Sinai, Arabia, and the Negev, nor are they found in southern Mesopotamia or northern Anatolia. Dol mens most commonly occupy lands best suited for pasture and that are less amenable to field-crop agriculture, leading most researchers to associate them with nomadic pastoralist populations. However, Lipaz Vinitzky (1992) has shown a clear nexus between Early Bronze Age settlements and dol men fields in Israel's Golan Heights and Galilee region. Topographically, dolmens tend to be concentrated on es carpment piedmonts (e.g., Shamir in Israel or Adeimah in Jordan) and along wadi slopes (e.g., the Golan Heights), where large slabs can be transported downslope, or in places of prominence on extensive plateaus. It is now recognized that dolmens were erected at least as early as the late fourth millennium (EB I) and at least as late as the second or early third millennium BCE (Intermediate Bronze Age). Disagree ment exists as to whether the floruit of the phenomenon came about in the Early Bronze (e.g., Vinitzky) or the In termediate Bronze Age (Zohar, Epstein). Finds indicate that some monuments continued to be utilized throughout the second millennium BCE and even later. Dolmens are most often found empty or containing only fragmentary and exiguous artifacts. Nevertheless, the fact that a few dolmens have been found to contain human skel etal material has lead virtually all researchers to conclude that they functioned as tombs. The scarcity of bones sug gests to some that dolmens were intended for primary burial, after which the bones were moved elsewhere for final, sec ondary burial; tiris is unlikely, however, because few, if any, necropoli containing secondary burials can clearly be related to dolmens. They may represent a netherworld abode or locus of transition between the realms of life and death. For the living, they may have served as local territory markers— particularly in times of scarce pasture—or as symbols of power and ideological affiliation. [See also Burial Sites; Cave Tombs.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Epstein, Claire. "Dolmens Excavated in the Golan." 'Atiqot (English Series) 17 (1985): 20-58. Contains a good sample of dolmen forms and recovered artifacts that illustrate reuse from the Intermediate Bronze Age through the Late Bronze Age. Prag, Kay. "The Dead Sea Dolmens: Death and the Landscape." In The Archaeology of Death in the Ancient Near East, edited by Stuart
Campbell and Androny Green. Oxford, 1995. Regional study utiliz ing ethnographic and ecological data to interpret the dolmen phe nomenon and their appearance in EB I. Vinitzky, Lipaz. "The Date of the Dolmens in the Golan and the Gal ilee: A Reassessment." Tel Aviv 19.1 (1992): 100-112. Regional study incorporating recent data to show that the floruit of dolmen building occurred during the Early Bronze Age in association witii settlements. Zohar, Mattanyah. "Megalithic Cemeteries in the Levant." In Pastoralum in the Levant; Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Per spectives, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anatoly Khazanov, pp. 4 3 63. Prehistory Press Monographs in World Archaeology, no. 10. Madison, Wis., 1992. The most up-to-date synthesis of dolmens in the Levant and one of two studies that attempt serious socioecological explanation (the other is Prag, above). DAVID ILAN
D O R , eastern Mediterranean seaport mentioned in bibli cal accounts in connection with the Israelite conquest of Ca naan. The site is located on the Carmel coast, about 21 km (13 mi.) south of Haifa, at the site of modern-day Khirbet el-Burj. History. An Egyptian inscription found in Nubia that dates to the reign of Rameses II (thirteenth century BCE) contains the earliest known reference to Dor in a list of SyroPhoenician coastal cities. Dor is cited also in the account of the Egyptian emissary Wenamun's journey to Byblos (c. 1100 BCE), as is Dor's ruler, Beder, king of the Tjeker (Sikels), one of the marauding Sea Peoples who invaded tire Levant in the twelfth century BCE. In the Bible, the king of Dor is listed among the many defeated Canaanite rulers whose lands were distributed to the Israelites (Jos. 12:23). Material remains suggest, how ever, as does Joshua 1 7 : 1 2 - 1 3 , that the site, allotted to the tribe of Manasseh, was populated by Canaanites until the reign of King David in the tenth century BCE, when Dor was finally conquered by the Israelites. Later, when King Solo mon reorganized Israel into administrative districts, he made Dor the capital of the fourth administrative district, with his son-in-law Ben-Abinadab as governor (1 Kgs. 4 : 1 1 ) . After the entire coastal region of the northern kingdom was conquered by Tiglath-Pileser III in 732 BCE, Dor be came the capital of an Assyrian province extending from the Carmel range to Jaffa. Sidon apparently ruled Dor in the Persian period (sixth-fourth centuries BCE), but in the Hel lenistic period the city became a powerful fortress that two Seleucid kings were unable to take, either by land or sea. Dor and its fortified neighbor, Straton's Tower (later Caesarea), were ruled by the despot Zoilus until tire two cities were conquered by Alexander Jannaeus in the late second century BCE. [See Caesarea.] The Hasmoneans then ruled Dor until 63 BCE, when the Roman general Pompey con quered the city but granted it independence. Coins minted at Dor during the Roman period indicate that tire inhabi tants worshiped Zeus and Astarte, but there are literary ref-
DOR erences to a Jewish community and synagogue during the reign of Agrippa I ( 4 1 - 4 4 CE). At the beginning of the third century Dor was abandoned. In the late fourth century CE, St. Jerome described Dor as lying in ruin, but excavators have uncovered two distinct periods of Byzantine church constructions, beginning in the fourth century and ending in the seventh century CE, outside and at the front of the mound. T h e area lay uninhabited until the eleventh century, when the Crusader fortress of Merle was built on the mound; it was destroyed shortly thereafter. Excavations. T h e first excavations at Dor were con ducted in 1 9 2 3 and 1 9 2 4 by the British School of Archae ology in Jerusalem under the direction of John Garstang. J. Leibowitz, on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities, excavated north of the mound in 1 9 5 0 and 1952. Leibowitz discovered sections of a Roman theater as well as the Byz antine church mentioned above. Located east of the mound, the church complex, comprising about 1,000 s q m , was fully excavated between 1 9 7 9 and 1 9 8 3 by an Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums team led by C. Dauphin.
T
•(.
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Beginning in 1 9 8 0 , large-scale excavations were resumed at the site by Ephraim Stern under the auspices of the In stitute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusa lem and the Israel Exploration Society. Findings from seven main areas of the mound indicate that Dor was first inhab ited at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age IJA (c. 2 0 0 0 BCE) and was occupied virtually without a gap until the third century BCE. After Herod the Great built the harbor at Cae sarea in the first century BCE, Dor began to decline and even tually was abandoned. Archaeological R e m a i n s . A few MB IIA buildings were uncovered along the western edge of the site, which the sea has eroded to bedrock. No Late Bronze buildings were un covered, but scarabs and pottery from the period were found. A massive mud-brick wall running north-south along the eastern fringe of the mound is the characteristic feature of Early Iron Age Dor. This wall (about 3 m high and 2 . 5 m deep) was reinforced along its exterior by a sand rampart. Two rooms were partially excavated along the wall's interior and several vessels, similar to ones uncovered at other sites
ill-
•
DOR. View of excavated areas from the east. (Courtesy E. Stern)
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DOR
along the Syro-Phoenician coast, were found in situ. These rooms were destroyed by a conflagration, after which tire wall went out of use. These Early Iron remains at Dor prob ably date from 1 1 5 0 to 1 0 5 0 BCE and likely are evidence of an impressive fortified Sikil settlement. Several new settlement phases dating from the second half of the eleventh century BCE were uncovered in various areas of the mound. Among the important material finds from these Iron Age strata were Early Cypriot vessels, some Phoe nician bichrome ware and black-on-red vessels, and local pottery. Dor was destroyed at the end of the tenth century BCE, probably at the hands of tire Egyptian pharoah Sheshonq (biblical Shishak). T h e town was refortified during the ninth century BCE with the addition of a solid offset-inset wall and a four-chambered gate. Not long after the destruc tion of this fortification by Tiglath-Pileser III, at the end of the eighth century BCE, the Assyrians rebuilt the wall and added a two-chambered gate; this fortification system lasted until the mid-fourth century BCE, when it was probably de stroyed in the Sidonian revolt against the Persians ( 3 4 8 BCE) . Dor's cosmopolitan character during the Persian period is indicated both by abundant and varied material remains and by evidence of imported city planning. T h e eastern part of the mound was a residential district laid out according to tire orthogonal Hippodamian plan, in which living units were divided into long, narrow blocks (about 1 5 m wide) separated by streets intersecting at right angles. Lengthwise streets ran parallel to the city wall. Unusually large quantities of local and imported pottery, especially Attic ware, were uncovered in two Persian period strata; some types were rare—such as large wine amphoras, the first found in coastal Israel. Many figurines, statuettes, and seals also were un covered, as were several ostraca—among them the first Greek inscriptions from tire Persian period discovered in Israel—and many Phoenician cult objects, primarily pottery figurines, stone statuettes, and faience amulets, some recov ered in situ. The orthogonal layout remained virtually unchanged dur ing the Hellenistic period, when urban planning was evident in the southern as well as eastern areas of the mound. Houses at least two stories high were built on tire same nar row blocks as in the Persian period, but with different par titions between them, and in the same Phoenician style, with outer walls of alternating ashlar piers and a nibble fill. Some residences had cellars. T h e remains of some of the largest temples yet uncovered in Israel were exposed on the western slope of the mound. These temples—all located near tire seashore—probably were built in the Hellenistic period but continued in use into the Roman period. A virtual ceramic typology of Hellenistic Palestine was uncovered in these strata. By this period Dor had become a thoroughly Greek city, as indicated by such pagan finds as a marble head of Hermes, the head of a pot
tery figurine (probably of Aphrodite), and a "temple-boy" pottery figurine. Late Roman remains were uncovered in two main strata. In the earlier stratum a spacious piazza was discovered at the intersection of the city's main street, which extended out from the eastern gate, and a long north-south street. A well had been dug in the center of the piazza, which was paved with large, dressed stones. A drainage system, with its main drain running east-west and auxiliary channels joining it from the north and south, was uncovered under tire pave ment of the street and the piazza. Public buildings sur rounded the piazza in this period. One of them—a store house, khan, or barrack—had an internal courtyard surrounded by rows of rooms. One row abutted and ran parallel to the long north-south street; each of its rooms opened onto tire courtyard, but only the entrance hall also opened onto the street. Other building remains from the earlier Roman stratum included a spacious and well-planned residential quarter with intersecting streets and a large ashlar structure; the latter was uncovered at the foot of the mound, indicating that construction in this period extended beyond the boundaries of the mound. Four large square piers were exposed outside and east of the city gate. These piers mark the western terminus of the Roman aqueduct through which water was brought to Dor from springs in the Carmel range. A paved path ran between the piers, at least one of which apparently had an arch. A sacred enclosure on the western slope of tire mound seems to relate to a massive retaining wall whose orientation fol lows that of an earlier north-south street just east of it that was die main access road to the Hellenistic temples (see above). In tire later Roman period tire street was blocked by the retaining wall. Sherds were uncovered along the wall of tire enclosure that seem to belong to tire foundation trench of the retaining wall—further evidence that these remains belong to the later Roman stratum. Also part of that stratum was a large piazza at tire center of the mound. T w o massive foundations north of the piazza extend east and west of it and may have carried a portico that surrounded the city's forum. Two more structures dating to the later stratum were uncovered on tire mound's western slope. One was a bath, in which two rooms, perhaps the caldarium and tepidarium, were excavated. T h e other structure, which had a barrelvault roof, was only partially excavated. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dahl, George. "The Materials for the History of Dor." Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 20 (1915): 1-131. Gen eral study of all written sources related to the city of Dor. Stern, Ephraim. Dor, the Rider of the Seas: Ten Years of Excavations in ~ the Israeli-Phoenician Harbor Town on the Carmel Coast. Jerusalem, 1994. Summary of the recent excavations at Tel Dor. EPHRAIM STERN
DOUARA DOTHAN (Ar., Tell Do than), site located in the north ern Samaria Hills on the east side of the Dothan Valley, some 22 km (about 14 mi.) north of Shechem. Dothan is a prominent mound, composed of nearly 15 m of stratified remains superimposed on a natural hill nearly 45 m high. T h e summit comprises approximately 10 acres, and the oc cupied area of tire slopes includes another 15 acres. T h e plain has always been of strategic importance as tire most easterly of the three main passes of the coastal plain from the Sharon to the Jezreel Valley through the mountainous ridge created by tire northern Ephraimite hill country and the Carmel ridge. Dothan has been identified with the biblical city of the same name, mentioned in Genesis 37 as the place where Joseph found his brothers in the course of their wanderings with their father's flocks. T h e narrative describes tire in trigue that led to Joseph's being taken to Egypt by a caravan of Ishmaelites (or Midianites) traveling via Dothan from Gilead. During the period of the monarchy, Dothan is de scribed as a well-fortified city to which the Aramean king sent emmisaries in search of the prophet Elisha (2 Kgs. 6:13-14). Other literary references include three notations in the Book ofJudith and one in the Onomasticon of Eusebius. The site was excavated by Joseph P. Free of Wheaton College, Illinois, in nine seasons between 1953 and 1964. According to the excavator, Dothan yielded a nearly contin uous occupational sequence from the Chalcolithic (3200 BCE) through the Byzantine period with later occupation as late as tire fourteenth century CE. T h e site was investigated in six major areas of excavation (T, B, A, D , L, and K, moving from east to west.) T h e western cemetery is located in area K. From i960 to 1964, Robert E. Cooley excavated three tombs in area K. T o m b 1 is the western cemetery's largest, richest (more than 3,400 objects), and best-preserved of the burial chambers. In addition to an abundant collection of human bones, a variety of small finds was recovered from it: pyxides (most with painted decoration), lamps, bowls, biconical jars, kraters, chalices, flasks, juglets, stirrup jars, jewelry, bronze weaponry, beads, bone-carved objects, an important group of scarabs, and several unique artifacts, such as a figurine lamp. T h e tomb's architectural plan is tripartite: a basically rec tangular tomb chamber with rounded corners, a stepped entryway on the west, and entry through a vertical shaft. The shaft gave access to the stepped entryway that, in turn, led into tire tomb chamber. Eight loculi, or crypts, were located along the walls of the chamber, whose orientation is west-east. T o m b 1 is a successive multiple-burial tomb. Five distinct levels of sttatification were discerned, dating from the Late Bronze 1 1 period into the Early Iron Age. T h e total number of burials has been calculated to be between three hundred
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and five hundred. Although tombs 2 and 3 appear to share the chronology of tomb 1, they were not stratified. Area D , on tire south side of the summit of tire tell, yielded a massive city fortification that was dated to the earliest phases of the Early Bronze Age. Area T , located on tire high est part of the mound, was designated by Free as the acrop olis area. Notable among the discoveries there was a medi eval fortress-palace from the fourteenth century CE. Published data for area B are exceptionally lean and consist only of the observation that the area embraced remains from the Roman and Hellenistic periods. T h e central section of the top of tire mound (area A) was occupied by a Hellenistic settlement, embracing the third and second centuries BCE. Substantial remains of an Iron Age settlement were uncov ered beneath the Hellenistic occupation. Notable among the architectural features of the Iron Age was a substantial sec tion of a wide street (33.5 m long and 1.20 m wide) bordered by well-preserved structures. T h e largest of the areas of ex cavation was area L, on tire western summit of the mound. The sloped section of this area yielded substantial fortifi cations from the Early Bronze Age. T h e area also produced sections of the city's Middle and Late Bronze Age fortifi cations. Substantial remains of an Iron Age administrative building were also discovered in this area. Several structures were uncovered in area L that were reminiscent in architec tural plan of the so-called open-court building regarded as a hallmark of Assyrian influence. The associated pottery was clearly in the Assyrian tradition of tire eighth-seventh cen turies BCE. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cooley, Robert E. "Garnered to His People: A Study of a Dothan Fam ily Tomb." In The Living and Active Word of God: Studies in Honor of Sameul J , Schults, edited by M. Inch and R. Youngblood, pp. 47-58. Winona Lake, 111., 1983. Free, Joseph P . "The First Season of Excavation at Dothan," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 131 (1953): 16-20. Free, Joseph P . "The Second Season at Dothan." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 135 (1954): 14-20. Free, Joseph P. "The Third Season at Dothan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 139 (1955): 3-9. Free, Joseph P. "The Fourth Season at Dothan." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 143 (1956): 11-17. Free, Joseph P . "The Fifth Season at Dothan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 152 (1958): 10-18. Free, Joseph P . "The Sixth Season at Dothan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 156 (1959): 22-29. Free, Joseph P . "The Seventh Season at Dothan." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 160 (i960): 6-15. ROBERT E . COOLEY and GARY D . PRATICO
DOUARA, cave located about 18 Ion (11 mi.) northeast of Palmyra in central Syria (34°38'42" N , 38°25'58" E). Ex cavation has shown that the site was inhabited during the
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Middle Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic periods. Douara is un usual because it is one of the few Paleolithic sites that have been excavated in Syria's semiarid interior. The sequence of occupation at Douara is unusually long, although the ep isodes of use were separated by long intervals of abandon ment. The material recovered has provided extensive infor mation about the history and nature of its human occupation. The cave is set in tire south face of a steep rock scarp on the southern edge of the Jebel Abu Rujmein, a range of hills that extends northeastward across central Syria. The cave is more than 1 0 m wide at the entrance and extends 1 4 m back into the hillside. The site was identified in 1 9 6 7 by a Japanese team from the University of Tokyo and was excavated by them in 1970 (under the direction of Hisashi Suzuki), 1 9 7 4 (Kazuro Hanihara), and again in 1 9 8 4 (Takeru Akazawa). The archaeological sequence consisted of two upper de posits, horizons I and II, and two lower ones, horizons III and IV (Endo et a l , 1 9 7 8 , pp. 8 8 - 9 3 ) . Horizon I contained mainly modern and Neolithic material. The deposits of ho rizon II filled a pit 1.5 m in diameter near tire cave's en trance. The artifacts in this horizon were characteristic of the Geometric Kebaran phase of the Epipaleolithic period. The two lower horizons were much older: both contained Middle Paleolithic artifacts that were presumably made by Neanderthal people. The flint tools from horizon III were typical of the Levantine Levalloiso-Mousterian culture, whereas the assemblage from horizon IV, although still with Middle Paleolithic affinities, was significantly earlier (Aka zawa, 1987, pp. 1 5 5 - 1 5 6 ) — i t was principally composed of flint blades that had been struck from prismatic cores. T h e lower part of horizon IV, level IVB, consisted of a large hearth full of ashes. T h e excavators experienced some difficulty in determin ing the ages of these deposits, in part because horizons III and IV were too old to be dated satisfactorily by the radio carbon method. They obtained a fission-track date of about 7 5 , 0 0 0 BP for a burnt pebble from the IVB hearth. The date was confirmed by the thermoluminescence dating of other burnt pebbles from tire same deposit. This date is probably of tire right order of magnitude for the horizon IV deposits, although horizon III could be twenty thousand years younger. A weathered layer at the junction of horizons III and IV suggested that tire site was little used'by humans between these two episodes of occupation. The horizon II Epipaleolithic deposits would date to about 1 3 , 0 0 0 - 1 4 , 0 0 0 years B P , based on analogy with other sites. The main animals hunted by the inhabitants of the cave in all periods were wild sheep, goats, camels, and a small equid. These species are typical of a semiarid steppe like that around Douara today, suggesting that conditions were quite similar to the present during each period of occupation (Payne, 1 9 8 3 ) . The inhabitants also collected seeds of pe rennial steppe plants and the fruits of hackberry trees tiiat
grew in the hills behind the site. People probably occupied the cave seasonally, perhaps during the winter and spring. BIBLIOGRAPHY Akazawa, Takeru. "The Ecology of the Middle Paleolithic Occupation at Douara Cave, Syria." In Paleolithic Site of the Douara Cave and Paleogeography of Palmyra Basin in Syria, part 4, 1984 Excavations, edited by Takeru Akazawa and Yutaka Sakaguchi, pp. 155-166. Uni versity of Tokyo, University Museum, Bulletin no. 29. Tokyo, 1987. Summary of the results of the excavations and studies of Douara's environment. Akazawa, Takeru, et al. "1984 Excavations at Douara Cave: Methods and Techniques." In Paleolithic Site of the Douara Cave and Paleo geography of Palmyra Basin in Syria, part 4 , 1 9 8 4 Excavations, edited by Takeru Akazawa and Yutaka Sakaguchi, pp. 41-48. University of Tokyo, University Museum, Bulletin no. 29. Tokyo, 1987. De scription of the final excavation season. Endo, B., T. Fujimoto, T. Akazawa, and K. Endo. "Excavation at the Douara Cave." In Paleolithic Site of Douara Cave and Paleography of Palmyra Basin in Syria, part 1, Stratigraphy and Paleography of Pal myra Basin in Syria, edited by Kazuro Hanihara and Yutaka Saka guchi, pp. 83-98. University of Tokyo, University Museum. Tokyo, 1978. Payne, S. "The Animal Bones from the 1974 Excavations at Douara Cave." In Paleolithic Site of the Douara Cave and Paleogeography of Palmyra Basin in Syria, part 3, Animal Bones and Further Analysis of Archeological Materials, edited by Kazuro Hanihara and Yutaka Sakaguchi, pp. 1-108. University of Tokyo, University Museum, Bulletin no. 21. Tokyo, 1983. Definitive analysis of the faunal re mains from the second season of excavations and their interpretation for human use of the site and its environment. Suzuki, H., and I. Kobori. "Report of the Reconnaissance Survey on Palaeolithic Sites in Lebanon and Syria." In Bulletin of the University Museum (University of Tokyo), no. 1 (1970): 41-48. Account of the discovery of Douara cave. A . M . T . MOORE
DUNAND, MAURICE
( 1 8 9 8 - 1 9 8 7 ) , French archae ologist best-known as the director, for more than fifty years, of the excavations at Byblos in Lebanon. Dunand was born and died in Haute-Savoie. His interest in Levantine archae ology began when he participated in the 1 9 1 9 - 1 9 2 0 French military campaign in Syria. After graduating from the Ecole du Louvre, he continued his education at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem ( 1 9 2 4 - 1 9 2 5 ) . While working at the 1 9 2 4 Palmyra and Byblos excavations, he initiated excavations at Eshmun, near Sidon. In 1 9 2 5 , he undertook epigraphic expeditions to Safa, the Hauran, and on Jebel al-Druze and reorganized tire Museum of Suweida. In tire following year he excavated in Syria in the Ledja and the Jezireh and farmer east, at Arslan Tash, Til Barsip, and Luristan. From 1 9 4 0 to 1 9 4 5 , Dunand served as director of the French high commission for Syria-Lebanon and excavated Hellenistic U m m el-'Amad ( 1 9 4 3 - 1 9 4 5 ) - In 1 9 4 8 , with the end of the French Mandate, tire Lebanese Department of Antiquities authorized him to continue the Byblos excava tions. With his wife Mireille, he developed a ceramic typol-
DURA-EUROPOS ogy, plus field techniques using the io-m X io-m site grid and die excavation of 20-cm levels. Byblos architecture and forty-five thousand artifacts were analyzed by level, as op posed to natural sttatigraphy. This now-outmoded system was Dunand's attempt to objectify excavation. From 1954 to 1974, Dunand excavated the Greco-Persian temple of Amrit (Syria) and Tell Kazel on the Syrian coast. From 1961 to 1976 he continued his work at the Eshmun temple. The French government awarded Dunand the Legion of Honor and made him an honorary conservator of the na tional museums. He left Lebanon during the civil sttife of the 1970s. His prolific publications include five Byblos vol umes, Fouilks de Byblos (1937-1958), Ottmm el-'Amed (1962), and Le Temple d'Amrith (1985), and his bibliography appears in fasicle I of Melanges de I'Universite Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth (1970). [See also 'Amrit; Byblos; Kazel, Tell al-; Suweida; and Til Barsip.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dunand, Maurice. Fouilks de Byblos. 5 vols. Paris, 1937-1958. Dunand, Maurice. "Rapport preliminaire sur les fouilles de Byblos." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 9 (1949-1950): 53-74; 12 (1955): 7-23; 13 (1956): 73-86; 16 (1964): 69-85. Dunand, Maurice. Oumrn el-'Amed, une ville de I'epoque hellenistiqueaux echelles de Tyr. Paris, 1962. Dunand, Maurice. Byblos: Its History, Ruins, and legends. 2d ed. Beirut, 1968. Dunand, Maurice. "La Piscine du Trone d'Astarte dans le Temple d'Echmoun a Sidon." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 24 (1971): 19-25. Dunand, Maurice. "Le Temple d'Echmoun a Sidon: Essai de chronologie." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 26 (1973): 7-25. Dunand, Maurice. Article in Melanges de I'Universite Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth 48 (1974-1975): 3-8. Dunand, Maurice. Le temple d'Amrith dans la piree d'Aradus. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 122. Paris, 1985. Melanges de I'Universite Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth 46.1 (1970): 3-8. Bib liography of Dunand's work to 1970. MARTHA SHARP JOUKOWSKY
D U N A Y E V S K Y , I M M A N U E L (1906-1968), con sulting architect for many important early excavations in Is rael. Born in Odessa (Ukraine) and educated as a structural engineer, Dunayevsky emigrated to Palestine in 1934. He worked first as an engineer, but after participating part-time at Benjamin Mazar's excavations at Beth-She'arinr, BethYerah, and Tell Qasile (1949-1951), he abandoned engi neering and joined Yigael Yadin's excavation at Tel Hazor as staff architect (1955). Dunayevsky joined the Department of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, until his death, served either as the architect or consulting architect for the excavations at 'Ein-Gedi, Hammath Tibe rias, Masada, and Megiddo, among many others. In addition to surveying and preparing and drawing final plans, Dunayevsky applied himself to architectural and
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stratigraphic analysis, in which he was gifted and insightful. Through on-site checking of walls, floors, and their inter relationships, he established the true sequence of strata and the architectural history of a site. It was, perhaps, because he was not trained as an archaeologist that he was free of the burden of preconceived theories. Dunayevsky was a master at reading a site's relative chronology, as preserved in its architectural history. His contribution to tire Hazor expedition (1954-1956,1968), was tire final and perhaps the best example of his work. [See also the biographies of Mazar and Yadin. In addition, the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Netzer, Ehud. "A List of Selected Plans Drawn by I. Dunayevsky." Erelz-Israel I I (1973): i3*-24*. (I. Dunayevsky Memorial Volume). Netzer, Ehud, and Aharon Kempinski. "Immanuel (Munya) Duna yevsky, 1906-1968: The Man and His Work." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods: In Memoiy of Immanuel (Munya) Dunayevsky, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. vii-ix. Jerusalem, 1992. RONNY REICH
D U R A - E U R O P O S , site located near the modern vil lage of as-Salihiyeh, 92 km (57 mi.) southeast of Deir ezZor (Dayr az-Zawr), Syria, on a promontory along the southern bank of the Euphrates River (34°46' N , 4o°46' E); the escarpment down to the river formed a natural rampart on the east with deep wadis on the north and south. The ancient city covered approximately 180 acres, with its main gate facing west, toward Palmyra. The ruins were first noted in the late nineteenth century by travelers and archaeologists but were generally assumed to be Arab because Greek, and, especially Roman, sites were not thought to extend this far east. A city with the double name "Dura, called Europos by tire Greeks" was known from tire first-century geographer Isidore of Charax/Bosra, but tire name had been erroneously attached to the unexcavated tell at Abu'l Hassan. The ruins at as-Salihiyeh yielded some ancient materials in a 1912 sur vey by Friedrich Sarre and Ernest Herzfeld, but the advent of World War I precluded further investigation. [See the bi ography of Sarre.] The site was rediscovered in 1920 by a company of British soldiers in the aftermath of World War I. While digging em placements for bivouac among the visible ruins, they un covered "some ancient wall paintings in a wonderful state of preservation . . . in the west corner of tire fort." After reporting to the garrison commander at Abou Kemal (now in Iraq), a request was made to James Henry Breasted, who had been surveying potential excavation sites in the region, to confirm the find. He viewed the finds (located in what is now known as the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods) and identified the scene from the depiction and dipinto as the Roman tribune Julius Terentius in the act of sacrifice. It was
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to date the easternmost find of any Roman remains. Another dipinto from the same painting referred to tire Tyche ("For tune") of Dura, thus providing clear identification with tire double-named city of Isidore. [See the biography of Breasted.] In the following years, the area came under the French Mandate. In November 1922 and October-November 1923, the first brief seasons of archaeological work were conducted by Franz Cumont under the auspices of tire French Acad emy of Inscriptions and Letters in Damascus. While some initial discoveries were made, largely in the northwest corner of the city, tire excavations had to be abandoned because of political unrest. When relative peace was restored in 1926, the site's remoteness hindered resuming work until a joint expedition between the French Academy and Yale Univer sity was arranged. Mikhail I. Rostovtzeff, who had just joined the Yale faculty, was eager to involve the university in the burgeoning archaeology of the region. The first joint expedition was conducted in 1928, and ten campaigns were completed through 1937. Cumont and Rostovtzeff initially served as the project directors, with Maurice Pillet of the French Academy as field director. The field directorship continued under Clark Hopkins (1931-1935) and Frank E. Brown (1935-1937), both of Yale. The field seasons were published serially under the title Excavations at Dura-Europos: Preliminary Reports (New Haven, 1929-1952). Subse quent research and analysis of the finds removed to the Da mascus Museum and tire Yale University Art Gallery resulted in a series of Final Reports (New Haven, 19431977), as yet incomplete. The site may have been settled in earlier periods, but no significant levels of occupation are known prior to the es tablishment of the Hellenistic city by Seleucus I Nicator in about 300 BCE. In 1 1 4 BCE it was ceded to the Parthians, who remained in control until the Roman expansion under Tra jan (116). Following the Roman withdrawal (118), it re turned to Parthian control. [See Parthians.] Eventually, the campaign of Lucius Verus (168) brought the entire region firmly under Roman control. The city was a fortified station along the ancient trade routes between Seleucia/Ctesiphon and Charax/Bosra to the east, and to the west either Antioch (by way of Ciresium and Aleppo) or Damascus (by way of Palmyra). In 209-211 it was garrisoned by the Romans and in the 220S-230S was further reinforced against tire rising Sasanian kingdom. After withstanding an initial attack under Ardashir in 239, it was besieged in 253/54 by his son Shapur I (240-264). Despite substantial defense efforts, including sacrificing the area along the interior of the western city wall as fill for an embankment, it fell and was razed in 256. While much of Dura is now known through excavation of the foundation plans and debris from the destruction, it is the embankment that has yielded the most remarkable finds left intact from the time they were buried (see below). Excavation of this single-stratum site revealed a complex and intersecting pattern of habitation that included influ
ences from periods of Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman control as well as local cultures including Persian, Palmy rene, Aramaic, Safaitic, and other Semitic linguistic groups. The Hellenistic and Early Parthian city was grouped around the central area. The western defense wall and the main gate (called the Palmyra Gate) were added by the Parthians, probably sometime in tire late first century BCE. Under the Romans (or later tire Parthians), a regular grid plan was imposed on the city; it provides the basic plan from which the excavators developed their reference notation (see figure 1). Epigraphic, papyrological, and documentary remains have been found in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Palmyrene, Sa faitic, and Middle Iranian (Pahlavi). At least by the later Parthian and Roman periods, Dura seems to have had strong cultural, commercial, and administrative ties to Pal myra. In addition to the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods (J35; a triad of military deities associated with Bel and Iarhibol), the Tyche of Palmyra was publicly displayed. There is also a Temple of Palmyrene Gad(de) ( H i ) . Other regional cults include two temples for the Parthian deities Aphlad (N8) and Artemis-Azzanathkona (E7). T h e latter is a compound of Anat; the name and iconography suggest affinities to Atargatis (also called Dea Syria), where Aphlad would be the expected consort. In addition, there is a separate temple to tire Syrian/Phoenician Atargatis (H2) with her regular consort, Hadad. Traditional Hellenistic and Roman cults are represented by temples to Adonis (L5), Greek Artemis (H4), Zeus Kyrios (N7), Zeus Theos (B3), Zeus Megistos (C4), and Jupiter Dolichenus (X7). In several of these cases the central cult figures, either in frescoes or reliefs, were also found. These religious monuments clearly show the mixture of regional Syro-Phoenician, Palmyrene, and Parthian traditions with both Hellenistic and Roman elements. [See Phoenicians; Palmyra.] Zeus Kyrios is identified with Ba'al Shamin (Ba'al Shamem), and Zeus Theos is depicted in Parthian-style dress. The art also shows a mixture of Hel lenistic and so-called orientalizing influences and has some times been labeled proto-Byzantine, especially in its use of frontality. The temples span several phases in the occupation of the city and continued in use to the end, with some reflecting continued expansion. Some peculiarities in their plan and architecture are collectively known as "tire Durene temple type." This type of planning seems to have stretched from the Late Hellenistic occupation of the city down through end of the Roman period. Typically, these Durene temples em ployed a spacious walled temenos (sacred precinct), often with multiple small chapels or dining rooms around the outer walls. The main sanctuary of the god(s) was a smaller enclosure (the naos proper), usually set off at one end and sometimes with flanking chambers. T h e archaeological ev idence further indicates that considerable renovation and enlargement occurred in these temples (especially of the Palmyrene Gods) over time; some of the temples were built
DURA-EUROPOS
DURA-EUROPOS
DURA-EUROPOS.
Figure t.
Plan of the city.
175
1— Temple of Aphlad 2—Temple of Zeus Kyrios 3-Baths 4—Christian Building 5-Baths 6-Synagogue 7-Temple of Adonis 8-Mithraeum 9-Templeof the Palmyrene Gods (Bel) 10—Temple of Artemis Azzanathkona 11-Praetorium 12-Amphitheater 13-Bath 14-Temple of Jupiter Dolichenus (Dolicheneum) 15 - Palace of the Dux Ripae 16—Military Temple 17-Temple of Zeus Theos 18 - House of Nebuchelus 19—House of the Frescoes 20-Temple of the Gadde 21 -Temple of Atargatis 22-Temple of Artemis-Nanai 23 - House of the Large Atrium 24-House of Lysias 25-Temple of Zeus Megistos 26-Redoubt Palace
(Drawing by David O. Kiphuth, Courtesy ASOR Archives)
on or from existing residential areas (especially those of Atargatis and Gadde). T h e Hellenistic city was clustered in tire center of the walled area around an open central agora ( G i - 8 ) that had, in earlier stages, functioned like a bazaar. By the Roman period, the agora had been developed architecturally into a market center, with less open space. A proliferation of do mestic blocks and other, larger buildings during the late sec ond and early third centuries CE filled the walled areas, es pecially along the city's western and southern sections. This phase of civic building corresponds to tire consolidation of Roman control and the period of reinforcement of the gar rison under the Severan emperors. At this time, tire northern section of the city was partitioned off for the military gar rison, and a new palace ( X 3 - 5 ) of tire river commander and a bath ( E 3 ) were begun in upper part of tire city. [See Palace; Baths.] T h e garrison incorporated the areas around the tem ples of Azzanathkona and the Palmyrene Gods; added to the same area was a sanctuary of Jupiter Dolichenus, a fa vorite among the legions. Under Caracalla, the city was re inforced by troops from the Fourth Scythian and Sixteenth Flavia Firma Legions, under tire commander Antonius Valentinus. Later detachments of the Third and Fourth Cyrenaica (from Bosra) are also recorded. In its final days, the
city was the headquarters of the Twentieth Palmyrene Co hort, under tire military tribune Julius Terentius. A graffito records that the Persians first attacked the city in 2 3 9 CE, at which time Julius Terentius was killed. T h e city was further reinforced by elements of the Second Paphlagonian (Galliena Volusiana) Cohort. In addition to numerous inscrip tions, contracts, and literary documents, the excavations yielded a number of military records, including pay rosters and census records. A number of the records referring to Roman cleruchs indicate that Dura was considered a colony for veterans of these eastern legions. Military accouterments were well preserved in the fill. One such find was a Roman wooden shield with decorated leather covering; among the painted decorations was a ship and a list (partially damaged) of the posts of the legionnaires from the Black Sea to Dura. Individual studies of parchments and papyri, coins, textiles, glassware, and several ceramic classifications appear in the Final Reports. T h e excavations along tire city's western wall produced the most interesting finds because of their level of preser vation (they had been buried during the final siege of the city). One such edifice was a suite of rooms renovated from two neighboring houses drat had served as the offices of a scribal guild. Most of the areas along the western wall had
176
DURA-EUROPOS mithraeum should not be overlooked as a contribution to the study of the Roman cult of Mithras, it is really the other two that have attracted the most attention. T h e Christian building at Dura is the earliest clearly identifiable church building from the Roman world. The Jewish edifice is one of the earliest known synagogue sites from the Diaspora and is especially important for its development of synagogue planning and decoration. [See Churches; Synagogues.] T h e synagogue (block L 7 ) was originally installed in a house facing the western wall in the middle of an insula of ten houses. The house was typical of Durene private archi tecture: several rooms were grouped around a central open court, from which a corridor gave access to the street. The function of some of tire rooms in the house continued to be domestic, but one room was adapted for use as a Hall of Assembly. There is some evidence of minimal decoration and seating in this early hall. The first synagogue installation
earlier been domestic blocks (insulae) of contiguous private homes. Three of the most significant discoveries for the ci ty's religious history were found in such houses along the western wall. In each case, the existing domestic edifice had been renovated in one or more stages for use as a religious center. These include a sanctuary of Mithras (or mith raeum; see figure 2), a synagogue, and a Christian building. The mithraeum (block J7) went through three distinct phases of renovation and enlargement from its original form as a private house; the first occurred shortly after tire Roman takeover in 168 CE, and abundant graffiti and inscriptions make it clear that the membership was largely from the mil itary. In tire middle phase (c. 209-211), when a major struc tural renovation project transformed the building into a more formal religious hall, the main donor was tire garrison commander Antonius Valentinus. The final renovation (c. 240s) included an elaborate decorative program. While the
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177
dates to the last quarter of the second century CE. Numis matic evidence indicates that there might have been Jews present in the city from the earlier Hellenistic and Parthian periods, especially during the Hasmonean dynasty (late sec ond-first centuries BCE) . N o other direct evidence exists for a permanent synagogue community prior to the adaptation of the house, however. It would appear tiiat the early Hall of Assembly had a Torah niche or ark ('aron ha-qodes) installed along the west ern wall, aldiough it may have been a secondary installation. Nonetireless, it would be one of tire earliest known Torah niches from all ancient synagogues. In approximately 2 4 4 2 4 6 CE this edifice was extensively remodeled to form an even larger and more formal synagogue. T h e renovation in volved gutting the interior of the earlier house (including tire hall) and tearing down two exterior walls. New, heavier walls were built, and tire area of the earlier house was divided into two main areas: a large, rectangular Hall of Assembly and an entry court with tristoa colonnade. In addition, tire ad jacent house to the east was annexed to the synagogue build ing and used as a suite of entty chambers and for tire quar ters of a resident caretaker. Thus, the total area of the new complex was more than double that of the earlier one. Within a few years of the renovation, the Hall of Assembly was further decorated with an elaborate series of figural paintings depicting biblical scenes. [See Wall Paintings.] These paintings seem to be a professional commission, per haps by Jewish artists from Lower Mesopotamia using an established pattern of artistic renderings of biblical stories. Many of the paintings are signed with Pahlavi dipinti, while the other signatures on the paintings and inscriptions in the hall are in Greek and Aramaic. The paintings are grouped in patterns around the center of tire hall's long, western wall, in which an integral single-block Torah niche had been in stalled opposite the room's main door. Stepped benches also lined the walls. T h e plan of the hall and tire paintings clearly reflect a focal orientation toward the Torah niche. There is no indication of other areas for assembly in tire later syna gogue hall.
Christian leaders. On the other side of tire courtyard, a small room in the northwest corner of the house was converted into a baptistery. [See Baptisteries.] It is, to date, tire earliest known from archaeological sources. The square baptismal font (approximately one meter deep) was set into tire floor; above, an arched canopy was carried by two columns. The room was fitted with a low ceiling just above tire canopy. The baptistery was finished with a program of figural paint ings depicting a combination of biblical scenes (Adam and Eve, David and Goliath) and scenes from tire life of Jesus (the Samaritan Woman at die Well, the Healing of a Lame Man, and Jesus and Peter Walking on Water). The central scene in the arch lunette of the canopy above the font is that of a Good Shepherd. Unfortunately, the rear portions of the room were more heavily damaged and die upper register of the artistic program is lost. In the lower register, the main scene stretched as a single narrative composition from the rear (east) wall around die side (north wall) and up toward the font itself. It seems to depict five women bearing torches in procession toward a sarcophagus. T h e scene is usually read as the Women at the T o m b of Jesus. T h e fact that there are five women likely comes from a blending of the different Gospel stories, such as in Tatian's Diatessaron, a secondcentury harmonized version of tire four Gospels known to have been used in some Syrian churches. A fragment of a Greek version of the Diatessaron on parchment, the earliest manuscript evidence for the document, was also found in the fill along the western wall, although not in the immediate context of the Christian building.
The Christian building was installed by a single stage of renovation of a private home (block M8) just a little farther to the south. [See House Churches.] A graffito in tire undercoating of the wall plaster indicates that the house was built (or rebuilt) in 2 3 1 CE; therefore, the renovation for Christian usage likely occurred in about 2 4 1 . No other direct archaeological evidence of a Christian presence in the city is known prior to the renovation. The basic domestic plan was retained, but regular household activities ceased. T h e renovations were concentrated in two main areas. On the south side, the partition wall between two adjoining rooms was removed in order to create a long, rectangular hall ori ented toward a low dais on the eastern end. No other dec oration or accouterments are known from this room, except for some damaged graffiti that seem to refer to some of the
1032-1972. Chambcrsburg, Pa., 1973. Hopkins, Clark. The Discovery of Dura-Europos. New Haven, 1979. In cludes a complete list of the preliminary and final reports published to date. Kraeling, Carl H. The Synagogue. The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report 8, part 1. New Haven, 1956. Kraeling, Carl H. The Christian Building. The Excavations at DuraEuropos, Final Report 8, part 2. New Haven, 1967.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Cumont, Franz. "The Dura Mithraeurn." In Milhrak Studies, vol. i, edited by John R. Hinnels, pp. 151-214. Manchester, 1975. Pub lished posthumously from notes and edited by E. D. Francis. Francis, E. D. "Mithraic Graffiti from Dura-Europos." In Milhraic Studies, vol. 2, edited by John R. Hinnels, pp. 424-445. Manchester, 1975-
Gilliam, James F. Roman Army Papers. Amsterdam, 1986. Gutmann, Joseph. The Dura-Europos Synagogue: A Re-Evaluation,
Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD 337. Cambridge, Mass., 1993, Perkins, Ann. The Art of Dura-Europos. Oxford, 1973. Rostovtzeff, Michael. Dura-Europos and Its Art. Oxford, 1938. Welles, Charles Bradford. "The Epitaph of Julius Terendus." Harvard
Theological Review 34 (1941): 79-102. Welles, Charles Bradford. "The Population of Roman Dura." In Stud
ies in Roman Economic and Social Hisloty in Honor of Allan Chester Johnson, edited by Paul R. Coleman-Norton, pp. 251-274. Prince ton, 1951.
178
DUSSAUD, RENE
White, L. Michael. Building God's House in the Roman World: Architec was then under French mandate. There he presided over tural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians, Baltimore, 1990. the opening of the Byblos excavations and ensured French White, L. Michael. The Social Origins of Christian Architecture. 2 vols. expeditions to Ras Shamra/Ugarit and Mari. Minneapolis, 1995. Dussaud was codirector of the Revue de I'histoire des reli L. MICHAEL WHITE gions, and in 1 9 2 0 founded the periodical Syria. In 1 9 2 3 he was appointed to the Academie des inscriptions, replacing his mentor, Clermont-Ganneau. He continued to research CaD U S S A U D , R E N E ( 1 8 6 8 - 1 9 5 8 ) , French Orientalist naanite cults and their interconnections with the Hebrew and archaeologist who organized the Syrian Antiquities De Bible in a two-volume work, L'art phenicien du lie millenaire partment and, over a period of twenty years, various French expeditions to Syria. Dussaud graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, with an assured career in engineering. He chose to investigate the Near East ern world of his father, who had worked on tire Suez Canal. Trained in tire classics, Dussaud embarked on learning Ar abic and Classical Flebrew. He was encouraged in his work by Charles S. Clermont-Ganneau, whom he accompanied on several archaeological missions to Syria and Lebanon. Dussaud was an energetic scholar who published Nabatean, Greek, and Latin inscriptions. Submitting his thesis to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in 1899, he thereafter published Introduction a I'histoire des religions ( 1 9 1 4 ) and LesArabes en Syrie avant ITslam ( 1 9 0 7 ) . Dussaud theorized about Near Eastern cultural ex changes. Enthusiastic about Arthur Evans's discoveries on Crete, he visited the island and in 1 9 1 0 produced Les civi lisations prehelleniques dans le bassin de la mer Bgee ( 1 9 1 4 ) . Following World War I, Dussaud returned to Syria, which
(1949)-
[See also Mari; Ugarit; and the biography of ClermontGanneau.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dussaud was a prolific writer, interested in many fields, including philology, epigraphy, numismatics, and archaeology. He published ar ticles on Safaitic, Nabatean, Greek, Arabic, Aramean, Phoenician, and Neo-Punic. His early bibliography, listing almost three hundred articles and volumes, appears in Melanges Syriens 30 (1939). Other works by Dussaud include the following:
Les Arabes en Syrie avant ITslam. Paris, 1907. IJIS civilisations prehelleniques dans le bassin de la mer Egie. Paris, 1914. Introduction a I'histoire des religions. Paris, 1914. Les origines cananeennes du sacrifice Israelite. Paris, 1921. Topographie historique de la Syrie antique et medievale. Paris, 1927. l^es decouvertes de Ras Shamra (Ugarit) et TAncien Testament, Paris, 1937. Les religions des Hillites et les Hourrites. Paris, 1945. L'art phenicien du lie millenaire. 2 vols. Paris, 1949. La penenlration des Arabes en Syrie avant I'Islam. Paris, 1955. MARTHA SHARP JOUKOWSKY
17 t
J
E A S T A F R I C A . See Ethiopia; Nubia.
E B A L , M O U N T , located some 5 0 Ion ( 3 0 mi.) north of Jerusalem, one of the highest peaks in Israel, rising to about 9 4 0 m above sea level. It is located in the Manasseh tribal allotment in the heart of tire hill country of Samaria. Opposite, to the south, is the slightly lower Mt. Gerizim, widr several excavated ruins. Between the two mountains, in a well-defined pass, lies Shechem (Tell Balatah), once the capital of ancient Israel, on tire main road leading north from Jerusalem to the Esdraelon Valley. No archaeological sites on Mt. Ebal were known before 1 9 8 0 , when a survey team, led by Adam Zertal, discovered what appeared to be an Early Israelite mountaintop high place on a rocky ridge high on the eastern slopes, 8 0 0 m above sea level (map reference 1 7 7 3 X 1 8 2 9 ) . T h e survey covered 2 , 0 0 0 sq km (or 1,240 sq. mi.) of tire Manasseh hill country. T h e site overlooks tire eastern Samaria hill country, the Wadi Far'ah region, and parts of Transjordan. It was excavated by Zertal in the course of eight seasons ( 1 9 8 2 1 9 8 9 ) , on behalf of Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities and the Israel Exploration Society. The site was founded during the Late Bronze Age IIB/ Iron Age IA transitional period (late thirteenth century BCE). T h e dating is based on pottery, including a few Mycenaean IIIC sherds, a dated stone seal, and two egyptianized scarabs from tire latter part of the reign of Rameses II (c. 1 2 4 0 - 1 2 1 5 BCE).
Both of its levels were excavated. In level 2 (c. 1 2 4 0 - 1 2 0 0 BCE), a small stone circle 2 m in diameter was found filled with ash and animal bones; near it were two walls and an area covered with large potsherds. T h e circle had been ar ranged directly on the bedrock. Sections under later court yards (level iB) revealed intensive use of fire on the rock and many animal bones. O n a lower terrace west of the cir cle, between a low rock cliff and an enclosure wall built with large boulders, a structure resembling an Iron Age fourroom house was excavated and attributed to level 2 . [See Four-room House.] Southeast of it, along the same wall, a portion of a storehouse was unearthed, with eleven large pithoi of the collared-rim type lying in stone "cells." 179
Sometime in the early twelfth century BCE, the site under went major changes (level iB), without evidence of destruc tion or abandonment. At the center of the site was a struc ture measuring about 9 X 1 4 m; built of large, undressed stones, it is preserved to a height of 3.25 m. Two walls led from tire structure's outer section to its inner section, which was filled with stones, ash, burnt animal bones, sherds, and other debris. T h e excavators distinguished four fill levels in the debris, which seemed to have been sealed over by a stone pavement. Surrounding the central level iB sttucture on three sides, and about 0.8 m lower than it and connected to it, was a stone wall about 1 m wide. A double stone ramp led up from the outside to the central structure: the main ramp, leading to the top, was 1.2 m wide; the secondary ramp, joined to it and leading to the surrounding wall, was 0.8 m wide. T h e structure was built as part of a stone en closure ( 2 6 X 2 6 m) whose southwestern side consisted of two adjoining, stone-paved open-air courtyards. Built into these courtyards were eleven pitlike installations, containing ash, animal bones, and pottery vessels. Some ninety similar installations were found outside the central structure on all sides. These contained metal objects, seals and scarabs, and vessels of different types. Other changes in level i B included the closing and cov ering over of the level 2 four-room house, converting it into an open square in front of the central strucmre, and the building of a double temenoslike enclosure with a central complex inside it. The two enclosures were connected by a flight of three stone steps 7.5 m wide. Level iB was occupied for fifty-seventy years (c. 1 2 0 0 - 1 1 3 0 BCE); pottery finds in dicate that it did not survive into the eleventh century. T h e site was systematically abandoned: there was no sign of de struction or fire, and it had been deliberately sealed with a stone cover (level iA). The excavators suggest a connection between the twelfthcentury BCE level iB complex and the traditions in Deuter onomy 2 7 : 1 - 9 and Joshua 8 : 3 0 - 3 5 . These describe a large, stone-built sacrificial altar erected by Joshua on Mt. Ebal, under the command of Moses, where the people of Israel gathered and an important ceremony took place. Evidence for this identification—one of the few instances in Syro-Palestinian and biblical archaeology where a structure men-
180
EBLA
tioned in biblical texts can be correlated with a specific ar chaeological discovery—is seen in the level iB complex as a whole. It is interpreted as a raised altar surrounded by a temenos wall. The stone installations, intended for offerings; the absence of living quarters in level iB; some special types of pottery; and, particularly, the nearly three thousand ani mal bones, 9 6 percent of which are from cattle, sheep, goats, and fallow deer ( 1 7 percent of the total sample of burnt material) attest to the area's cultic use. All but fallow deer are considered sacrificial animals in biblical and later rab binic traditions. T h e installation itself can be compared with similar altars mentioned not only in Deuteronomy and Joshua, but also in Ezekiel, in the writings of Josephus, in the Temple Scroll, and in the Mishnah. Moreover, the site con forms with the biblical account in date, in the character of the place, and in geographic setting. The cultic and biblical interpretation of the site, while strongly maintained by the excavator, has not gone unchal lenged. Some archaeologists (Aharon Kempinski, 1986; An son F. Rainey; and William G. Dever) deny the cultic con nection altogether and suggest that this be seen as an isolated house or watchtower. Other specialists, however, concur as to its cultic nature, but interpret it differently: Michael Da vid Coogan suggests a non-Israelite cult; Israel Finkelstein ( 1 9 8 6 ) accepts tiiat it is an early Israelite cultic high place, but not an altar; and Amihai Mazar ( 1 9 9 0 ) concurs with its possible biblical connection. Such biblical scholars as Moshe Anbar ( 1 9 8 5 ) and Andre Lemaire ( 1 9 9 0 ) accept the site's cultic character but go no further. Finally, some historians (Nadav Na'aman and Gosta W. Ahlstrom) suggest that the Mt. Ebal installation may be the biblical "Tower of Shechem," the cultic center of Israelite Shechem mentioned in Judges 9. Nevertheless, there is wide agreement over the dating of the site to the late tiiirteenth/early twelfth centuries
Lemaire, Andre. 1M protohistoire d'lsrael. Paris, 1990. See pages 199201.
Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Ijxnd of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E, New York, 1990, See pages 348-351. Tonneau, Raphael. "Le sacrifice de Jostle sur le Mont Ebal." Revue Biblique 35 (1926): 98-109. Zertal, Adam. "Has Joshua's Altar Been Found on Mount Ebal?" Bib
lical Archaeology Review 11.1 (1985): 26-43. Zertal, Adam. "How Can Kempinski Be So Wrong!" Biblical Archae
ology Review 12.1 (1986): 42-53. Zertal, Adam. "An Early Iron Age Cultic Site on Mount Ebal: Exca vation Seasons 1982-1987." Tel Aviv 13-14 (1986-1987); 105-165. ADAM ZERTAL
EBLA (mod. Tell Mardikh), large Bronze Age site in
northern Syria, located 6 0 Ion ( 3 7 mi.) south of Aleppo. The tell, a slightly irregular oval, has a surface area of nearly 6 0 ha ( 1 4 8 acres). T h e large lower town surrounds the acrop olis, which reaches a height of 4 3 1 m and is located almost at the center of the settlement. At the tell's extreme periph ery, the outline of the town's ancient outer fortification, 2 2 m higher than the level of the surrounding fields, is relatively visible. The Italian Archaeological Expedition of the Uni versity "La Sapienza" of Rome has worked at the site every year since 1 9 6 4 , under the direction of Paolo Matthiae. Before the excavations at Tell Mardikh, Ebla was known from two copies of Old Akkadian royal inscriptions by Sar gon and Naram-Sin of Akkad, who both boasted of con quering the town; from the Sumerian statue B of Gudea of Lagash as the region of provenance of precious wooden ob jects; and from economic texts of the Third Dynasty of Ur. [See Akkadian; Akkade; Lagash; Ur.] During the seven teenth and fifteenth centuries BCE, Ebla appears in rare quo tations in the texts of Alalakh VII and IV; after its final de struction, at the beginning of the fifteenth century BCE, Ebla BCE. is mentioned in a Hurrian fragment dealing with ritual from The vigor of the debate concerning the Mt. Ebal site is the archives of Hattusa and on the hieroglyphic list at Karrelated to its importance regarding the problem of the date nak of Pharaoh Thutmose Ill's Syro-Palestinian conquests. of the Israelite settlement in Canaan, the origins of Israel, [See Alalakh.] The identification of Tell Mardikh with Ebla and, above all, the historicity and dating of the pentateuchal was made in 1 9 6 8 after the discovery, in the western part of traditions, thought by many to be late and ahistorical. the acropolis, of a basalt torso with an inscription of Ibbit[See also Altars; Samaria; Samaritans; and Shechem.] Lim, son of Igris-Khep, king of Ebla, dedicated to the god dess Ishtar (c. twentieth century BCE). T h e formative period BIBLIOGRAPHY of Mardikh I (c. 3 5 0 0 - 3 0 0 0 BCE) is known from fragmentary Anbar, Moshe. "The Story about the Building of an Altar on Mount levels of its central and final phases on the acropolis. Ebal." Das Deuteronomium 68 (1985): 304-309. S t r a t u m ILB. T h e city's development peaked in Mardikh Brandl, Baruch. "Two Scarabs and a Trapezoidal Seal from Mount IIBi (c. 2 4 0 0 - 2 3 0 0 BCE), the period of Royal Palace G and Ebal." Tel Aviv 13-14 (1986-1987): 166-173. of the cuneiform tablets in the state archives (see below). Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Period of Settlement and Judges (in Flebrew). Tel Aviv, 1986. See pages 82-85. [See Cuneiform; Tablet.] The extent of the urban center Harper, Henry A. "Ebal and Gerizim." Palestine Exploration Fund probably reached nearly 5 0 ha ( 1 2 4 acres) before the end of Quarterly Statement (1896): 85-86. Mardikh IIBi, whose destruction is attributed to Sargon II Horwitz, Liora K. "Faunal Remains from the Early Iron Age Site on of Assyria. [See Assyria.] That destruction brought to an end Mount Ebal." Tel Aviv 13-14 (1986-1987): 173-189. a phase of great economic and political expansion. The set Kempinski, Aharon. '"Joshua's Altar': An Iron Age I Watchtower." tiement was then reduced in size and may have been limited Biblical Archaeology Review 12.1 (1986): 42-53.
EBLA to only its northern region in Mardikh I I B 2 (c. 2 3 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 BCE).
T h e Mardikh I I B 2 period corresponds to the chronolog ical horizon of 'Amuq J. [See 'Amuq.] It is thus far repre sented in the lower town on tire northwest only by an im posing building, called the Archaic Palace, nearly 5 0 0 sq m of whose trapezoidal plan have been exposed. The still poorly known intermediate palace of Mardikh IIIA was erected over part of this building, and, later, the large and quite well-preserved northern palace of Mardikh IIIB (see below). T h e Archaic Palace was quite probably the royal residence contemporary with the Third Dynasty of Ur. [See Palace.] S t r a t u m III. Following a presumed second destruction, a renaissance took place in the urban center in the Mardikh IIIA phase (c. 2 0 0 0 - 1 8 0 0 BCE), whose ceramic horizon largely corresponds to Hama H (twentieth century BCE). [See Hama.] T h e settlement at Ebla was rebuilt according to a precise urban pattern: the town had a double fortification wall composed of an inner wall surrounding the citadel, and an outer circumference wall with four imposing gates that enclosed a belt of large secular and religious buildings in the lower town and public buildings on tire citadel. The outer wall, nearly 3 km long, was a typical earthen rampart that enclosed nearly all of the site's 6 0 ha. It was limited at the bottom by a revetment of large stone blocks; a relatively shallow wall was constructed at the top, lost almost every where except east of tire southwest gate. The inner wall also had a high sloping revetment rising out of stone blocks at its base; a high slope in the middle was dug from the side of the ancient tell on the acropolis; and, at the top, a mud-brick wall had a deep scarp at its base, also constructed of mud brick. The stratum IIIA buildings underwent reconstruction in tire following phase, Mardikh IIIB (c. 1 8 0 0 - 1 6 0 0 B C E ) . After the total destruction of Mardikh IIIB (c. 1 6 0 0 B C E ) , provoked by tire invasion of the Old Hittite king Hattusili I (or, more probably, of his successor, Mursili I), a large part of tire town was finally abandoned. [See Hittites.] Palace G. Large sectors are known of the extensive Royal Palace G, from the first great period at Mardildi (IIBi), which corresponds to Early Bronze IVA. Nearly 2 , 4 0 0 sq m of the palace have been excavated, mostly on the western and southern slopes of the acropolis; the complex probably extended across the top of tire acropolis. T h e peripheral quarters of its western wing specialized in food production, and the southern wing was devoted to storage; both are quite badly preserved. T h e well-preserved area on the southwest slope was the most important: it included a large exterior space with a porch, called the Court of Audience; the royal dais was on its north. On the east, a monumental stairway ( 2 2 m long) overcame the nearly 6-meter difference in the level between the lower town and the acropolis. South of the gateway, which was really the main entrance to the palace, the administrative quarter was divided into a limited outer
181
sector below the porch and an inner sector with a court (also with a porch) that opened, to the south, to tire throne room (L. 2 8 6 6 ) ; the throne room was nearly 1 6 X n m in size. Archives. The cuneiform tablets of the state archives, which include more than seventeen thousand inventory numbers of complete and fragmentary documents, were placed in tire major archive room (L. 2 7 6 9 ) in tire outer sector of the administrative quarter; a smaller number were found in a lesser archive (L. 2 7 1 2 ) below the eastern porch of the Court of Audience, but north of the gateway, in a trapezoidal storeroom (L. 2 7 6 4 ) . [See Libraries and Ar chives.] The archives, which include economic, administra tive, juridical, and lexical accounts and literary texts and let ters, offer exceptional documentation of the city's social and economic structure, as well as information about adminis trative organization, religion, and literature. Particularly im portant is the contribution they make to linguistics: the lan guage of tine archives is a very archaic Semitic language that some scholars consider to be a dialect of Old Akkadian; oth ers believe to be an older, independent Semitic language called Eblaic; and still others consider an antecedent of later Northwestern Semitic languages. The texts cover a period of not more than forty or fifty years and are contemporary with Kings Igris-Halam, Irkab-Damu, and Isar-Damu, who ruled with the help of some very high officials—Ibrium, Ibbi-Zikir, and Dubukhu-Adda, who also succeeded from father to son, like the kings. Small finds. The discovery, in the inner court of the ad ministrative quarter, of several fragments of Egyptian bowls of diorite and alabaster from the pharaonic period and a lid with the name of Pharaoh Pepi I of the sixth dynasty, offers a basic synchronism between Sargon of Akkad, Pepi I of Egypt, and Isar-Damu of Ebla, at about 2 3 0 0 BCE. In the royal palace of Mardikh IIBi (see above), whose ceramic horizon corresponds to phases J 8 - 6 at Hama, and perhaps to the final phase of 'Amuq I, several fragmentary master pieces have been found of ancient palatial furniture. Among these, of primary importance are two steatite plaques of headdresses, originally belonging to two royal figures, a male and a female; wooden carvings with mother-of-pearl inlays, primarily of animal figures, decorating a chair and a table; several fragments of composite panels of a series of figures of officials, carved in high relief in wood, covered with gold leaf, and completed with limestone, steatite, and lapis-lazuli detailing for tire clothing and headdresses; and cylinder seals known from impressions on clay sealings with friezes of ath letic contests typical of the late Early Dynastic tradition in Mesopotamia, but widr several typically Syrian figures (e.g., the great goddess dominating wild animals and the cow woman, inspired by the figure of the bull man). The note worthy Standard of Ebla that was discovered belongs to an early phase of Mardikh IIBi (c. 2 4 0 0 BCE). Several of its figural marble inlays are preserved, with scenes of triumph and divine figures representing tire lion-headed eagle over
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two human-headed bulls, a symbol of an early Syrian deity of war—of the Sumerian Ningirsu or Ninurta type. [See Sumerians.] Sacred and royal architecture. T h e citadel also con tained temple D , dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, with a longitudinally tripartite typology. T h e temple may be con sidered a very old antecedent of Solomon's Temple in Je rusalem, built in the tenth century BCE. [See Jerusalem.] In the lower town, a belt of sacred buildings surrounded a large part of the acropolis. In the northeast sector was the temple of the god Shamash. T o the northwest were the northern palace and the sacred area of Ishtar, with the great temple P 2 and monument P 3 , an imposing cult terrace with a court that hosted the sacred lions of the goddess. In tire west and southwest sectors were die large western palace (more than 7 , 5 0 0 sq m); temple B of the god of the netherworld, Re-
sheph; and sanctuary B 2 , dedicated to the cult of the royal deified ancestors. The northern palace was a ceremonial building related to kingship, and the western palace was the residence of the crown prince. Necropolis. It is meaningful that the area of tire royal necropolis was situated among the western palace, temple B, and sanctuary B 2 . [See Necropolis.] Three important tombs, dating from between 1 8 2 5 and 1 6 5 0 BCE, were ex cavated: tire Tomb of the Princess (c. 1 8 0 0 BCE), the only intact one, from which a group of jewelry (including six bracelets, an earring decorated with granulation, a pin with a star-shaped head, and a necklace) and more than sixty clay pots were recovered; the Tomb of the Lord of the Goats, found with gold jewelry, bronze weapons, stone vases, ivory talismans, more than seventy clay pots, and an Egyptian cer emonial mace belonging to Pharaoh Hetepibre Harnejheryotef (r. 1 7 7 0 - 1 7 6 0 BCE); and the Tomb of the Cisterns, closed in about 1 6 5 0 BCE, but sacked at the time of the con quest of the town in about 1 6 0 0 BCE. [See Tombs; Jewelry; Weapons.] Art and iconography. Several fragments of very impor tant sculptures were found in the Old Syrian town of the end of Mardikh IIIA, and of the first and central phases of Mardikh IIIB: carved double basins with ritual and mythical reliefs from temples B, D , and N (c. 1 8 5 0 - 1 7 5 0 BCE) and large fragments of important royal statues, particularly from temple P 2 , of a seated long and of a standing queen (c. 1 7 0 0 BCE). These were the first evidence of the great statuary of inner Syria, contemporary with the classical style of the Old Syrian culture. Although at Ebla remains of Old Syrian glyp tics are rare, several impressions on jars from the western palace produced a dynastic seal belonging to a crown prince, king Indilimgur's son (reigned c. 1 6 5 0 BCE), with the figures of Hadad, Khebat, and of tire owner, who receives life from the two great gods. Another significant example of art pro duced in Mardikh IIIB is the ivory carvings, in an egyptianizing style, discovered in the northern palace: elegant fig
ures, carved in the ajoure technique, represent the gods in the Egyptian pantheon, from Horus to Sobekh and Hathor to Montu; heads wearing Osiris's atef crown presumably are representations of deified Old Syrian kings. These ivories probably date to about 1 7 0 0 - 1 6 5 0 BCE; they likely decorated tire back of a throne or of a ceremonial bed. Other ivory pieces, probably slightly older, include a miniature figure in the round of an offering bearer carrying a gazelle and an ajoure figure of a king wearing the typical ovoid tiara. These pieces are evidence of the activity at Ebla of workshops whose output was in the Old Syrian style. S t r a t a IV-VI. T h e remains of Mardikh IVA-B (c. 1 6 0 0 1 2 0 0 BCE) are scattered and limited to sectors on tire acrop olis. Traces of rural settlement mark the Mardikh VA phase (c. 1 2 0 0 - 9 0 0 BCE); the settlement was enlarged in Mardikh VB-C (c. 9 0 0 - 5 3 5 BCE) . In a central phase of Mardikh VIAB ( c 5 3 5 - 6 0 BCE), a small rural palace was built on the northern part of the acropolis. During the second century BCE, or slightly afterward, the tell was totally abandoned. T h e last evidence of a human presence at Tell Mardikh is scant: traces of scattered houses belonging to a third-century CE agricultural settlement; some remains, as yet unexcavated, of a poor monastic settlement that may date to the fourth-fifth centuries; and, in a peripheral region, some reused stone blocks with short Arabic inscriptions in Kufic script that may date to the ninth century—the period in which the First Crusade passed through the region and in which the name Mardikh appears in written sources for the first time. [See also Eblaites; Ebla Texts; Furniture and Furnishings, article on Furnishings of the Bronze and Iron Ages; and Syria, article on Syria in the Bronze Age.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ebla retrouvee. Histoire et Arch6ologie, Dossier 83. Dijon, 1984.
Lebrun, Rene. Ebla et les civilisations du Proche-Orienl ancien. Louvainla-Neuve, 1984. Matthiae, Paolo. "Empreintes d'un cylindre paleosyrien de Tell Mar dikh." Syria 46 (1969): 1-43. Matthiae, Paolo. "Princely Cemetery and Ancestors Cult at Ebla during Middle Bronze II: A Proposal of Interpretation." Ugarit-Forschungen 11 (1979): 563-569Matthiae, Paolo. "Scavi a Tell Mardikh-Ebla, 1978: Rapporto sommario." Studi Eblaili I (1979): 129-184. Matthiae, Paolo. "Campagne de fouilles a Ebla en 1979: Les tombes princieres etle palais de la ville basse a l'epoque amorrheene." Comp-
tes Rendus de TAcademie des Inscriptions et Belles-Letlres (1980): 94118. Matthiae, Paolo. Ebla: An Empire Rediscovered. Translated by Chris topher Holme. Garden City; N.Y., 1980. Matthiae, Paolo. "Fouilles a Tell Mardikh-Ebla, 1978: Le Batiment Q et la necropole princiere du Bronze Moyen II." Akkadica 17 (1980): 1-51. Matthiae, Paolo. "The Princely Tombs of Middle Bronze II at Ebla and the Contemporary Syro-Palestinian Cemeteries." Studi Eblaiti 2 (1980): 195-204.
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Matthiae, Paolo. "Sulle asce fenestrate del 'Signore dei Capridi.'" Studi Eblaiti 3 (1980): 53-62. Matthiae, Paolo. "Two Princely Tombs at Tell Mardikh-Ebla." Ar
Semitic languages utilized in Syria (in particular, the roughly contemporary Amorite and the later-attested Aramaic). T h e majority of the evidence favors the latter opinion. T o cite chaeology 33 (1980): 8-17. one example, the Eblaite first-person independent pronoun Matthiae, Paolo. "A Hypothesis on the Princely Burial Area of Middle Bronze II at Ebla." Archiv Orientdlni 49 (1981): 55-65. l i s 'ana, exactly as in Amorite and Aramaic. It is thus pref Matthiae, Paolo. "Osservazioni sui gioielli delle tombe principesche di erable to speak of the Eblaites as West Semites. [See Semitic Mardikh IIIB." StudiEblaiti4 (1981): 205-225. Languages.] Matthiae, Paolo. "Fouilles a Tell Mardikh-Ebla, 1980: Le Palais Oc T h e deities attested at Ebla likewise share greater similar cidental de l'epoque amorrheene." Akkadica 28 (1982): 41-87. ities with the West Semitic world than with the East Semitic Matthiae, Paolo. "Fouilles de 1982 a Tell Mardikh-Ebla et a Tell Touqan: Nouvelles lumieres sur l'architecture paleosyrienne du Bronze world. Important gods are Dagan, Hadd/Baal, Rashap, AshMoyen I—II." Comples Rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Bellestar, Kamish, Malik, and Qura (as well as the sun and moon Letlres (1982): 299-331. deities whose Eblaite names are unknown because SumerMatthiae, Paolo. "Die Furstengraber des Palastes Q in Ebla." Antike ograms always are used). T o illustrate connections with the Welt 13 (1982): 3-14. West Semitic world, the god Kamish may be highlighted. Matthiae, Paolo. "The Western Palace of die Lower City of Ebla: A New Administrative Building of Middle Bronze I—II." Archiv fur OrThis deity appears in the city name Kar-Kamish (Carche ientforschung 19 (1982): 121-129. mish) in northern Syria; is attested in the pantheon of Ugarit Matthiae, Paolo. "Ebla Discovered." In Ebla to Damascus, Art and Ar on the Syrian coast; and appears much later as the national chaeology of Ancient Syria: An Exhibition from the Directorate-General god of the Moabites (written almost always as Kamosh of Antiquities and Museums of the Syrian Arab Republic, edited by [Chemosh], but in one biblical passage as Kamish). Harvey Weiss, pp. 134-139. Washington, D.C., 1985. Matthiae, Paolo. I tesore di Ebla. 2d ed. Rome, 1985. Although the Eblaites can be seen to have been West Sem Matthiae, Paolo. "Le palais royal d'Ebla." Archeologia 238 (1988): 34- ites, it is important to note that they had intimate connec 43tions with Mesopotamia. Because the Eblaites were based in Matthiae, Paolo. Ebla, alle origini della civilta urbana: Trent'anni di scavi a major urban center (unlike other West Semites, who may in Siria dett'Universita di Roma "La Sapienza." Milan, 1995. Catalog have been more rural or pastoral), the links with the large of an exhibition held in Rome in 1995. cities of Mesopotamia were strong. This will explain the fact Mazzoni, Stefania. Le Impronte su Giara Eblaite e Siriane nel Bronzo Antico. Materiali e Studi Archeologici di Ebla, 1, Rome, 1992. that about fifty different Ebla texts (especially lexical texts) Pinnock, Frances. "Nota sui 'sonagli' della 'Tomba del Signore dei are duplicates of texts known from sites such as Fara and Capridi."' Studi Eblaiti 1 (1979): 185-190. Abu Salabikh. Especially close cultural contacts appear to Pinnock, Frances. Le perle del Palazzo Realc G. Materiali e Studi Ar have existed with Kish; for example, it is known from one cheologici di Ebla, 2. Rome, 1993. Scandone Matthiae, G. "Un oggetto faraonico della XIII dinastia dalla text that a mathematics professor from Kish worked or 'Tomba del Signore dei Capridi.'" Studi Eblaiti I (1979): 119-128. taught at Ebla, The city of Mari presumably served as the Scandone Matthiae, G. "Ebla und Aegypten im Alten und Mitderen conduit through which much of Mesopotamian culture Reich." Antike Welt 13 (1982): 14-17. reached Ebla. [See Fara; Abu Salabikh; Kish; Mari.] PAOLO MATTHIAE In conclusion, the Eblaites were a West Semitic people, similar to other peoples of Syria (e.g., the Amorites). How ever, because their culture was urban based, there were EBLAITES. Scholars utilize the ethnonym Eblaites to strong influences from Mesopotamia. refer to the people of Ebla, a major Bronze Age city-state in [See also Ebla; Ebla Texts.] northern Syria. Discussions about the identity of peoples, especially in the Near East, typically rely on factors such as the identification of the language utilized and the gods wor shiped. Thus, because the eblaite language is Semitic and many of the gods worshiped at Ebla occur elsewhere in the pantheons of other Semitic peoples, it is generally accepted that the Eblaites were a Semitic people. However, a host of problems specific to refining this statement continues to be debated. T h e classification of tire Eblaite language within the Se mitic family of languages is the center of a sharp debate. Some scholars view Eblaite as a dialect of Old Akkadian, in which case it would be proper to speak of the Eblaites as a branch of the East Semites (Akkadians, Assyrians, and Bab ylonians) . Other scholars view Eblaite as a branch of West Semitic, with an especially close relationship to other West
BIBLIOGRAPHY Buccellati, Giorgio. "Ebla and the Amorites." In Eblaitica: Essays on the
Ebla Archives and Eblaite Language, edited by Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg, vol. 3, pp. 83-104. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Addresses the problem of the relationship between the Eblaites and the Amorites. Gelb, I. J. "The Language of Ebla in the Light of the Sources from Ebla, Mari, and Babylonia." In Ebla, 1975-1985, edited by Luigi Cagni, pp. 49-74. Naples, 1987. Final article written by the leading scholar of Akkadian, Amorite, and Eblaite languages. Gelb, I. J. "Mari and the Kish Civilization." In Mari in Retrospect: Fifty
Years of Mari and Mari Studies, edited by Gordon D. Young, pp. 121-202, Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Article prepared for publication by the editor, following Gelb's deatii. Matthiae, Paolo. Ebla: An Empire Rediscovered. Translated by Chris topher Holme. Garden City, N.Y., 1980. Written by the chief ar-
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chaeologist of Tell Mardikh, with particular attention to Ebla's ar chaeological and historical significance. Pettinato, Giovanni. Ebla: A Nazi) Ijjok at History. Translated by C. Faith Richardson. Baltimore, 1991. Synthesis of the epigraphic finds from Tell Mardikh by the excavation team's former chief epigrapher. Rendsburg, Gary A. "Monophthongization of am/ay > a in Eblaiteand
All the texts come from Palace G. The central archive was preserved in one room (locus 2 7 6 9 ) , on the east side of the internal portico of the Audience Hall (see figure 1 ) . T h e tablets ( 1 , 7 2 7 of them) that are either complete or preserved in large part come from there, along with 9 , 4 8 3 fragments in Northwest Semitic." In Eblaitica: Essays on the Ebla Archives andand numerous chips. The original number can be estimated Eblaite Language, edited by Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rends at 2 , 5 0 0 documents. Except for the large tablets, which were burg, vol. 2, pp. 91-126. Winona Lake, Ind., 1990. Argues for a Syrian Semitic Sprachbund consisting of Eblaite, Amorite, and Ara placed directly on the ground, the tablets were stored on wooden shelving, which was completely burned. From the maic. Stieglitz, Robert R. "Ebla and the Gods of Canaan." In Eblaitica: Essays adjacent vestibule (locus 2 8 7 5 ) come, in addition to 2 7 6 on the Ebla Archives and Eblaite Language, edited by Cyrus H. Gordon texts, fragments of bone that could belong to styluses and a and Gary A. Rendsburg, vol. 2, pp. 79-89. Winona Lake, Ind., 1990. stone for smoothing the surface of a tablet, an indication Discusses the West Semitic identification of the major and minor that this was one of the places where tire tablets were written. deities in the Eblaite pantheon. Records concerning foodstuffs consumed at the court ( 2 4 2 GARY A. RENDSBURG texts) were found in a small room in the northeast corner of the Audience Hall. An additional twenty-two texts were found on a wooden table about 1 0 m west of there. A small E B L A T E X T S . The tablets discovered in Royal Palace archive of predominately agricultural texts, consisting of G at Ebla in Syria by Paolo Matthiae of the University of seventeen lenticular tablets and more than one thousand Rome are written in cuneiform script and dated to about the fragments, was found in the vicinity of an internal courtyard. first half of the twenty-fourth century BCE. The texts were Another room contained a group of thirty-two lenticular excavated between 1 9 7 4 and 1976; since that time there have tablets. been only sporadic discoveries. The tablets recount activity Most of the texts are administrative in character and relate during the reigns of three generations of sovereigns: Igristo palace activity. Also preserved in the central archive were Halab, Irkab-Danru, and Isar-Damu, for a period estimated to cover forty to fifty years. The only synchronism with guides for the correct use of the cuneiform script, which, in other previously known dynasties is with Iblul-Il, king of addition to syllabic signs for the Eblaite language, made use Mari, who is mentioned in two documents that refer to the of numerous Sumerian logograms. Some forty lists contain first contacts between the two Syrian cities. The lid of a vase Sumerian words arranged by subject: names of professions, with the cartouche of Pepi I, found in the same level as tire of cities, of animals, and of objects. These are of Mesopo tablets, constitutes a terminus post quem for tire destruction tamian origin and present a canonical arrangement already of the palace. fixed in the examples known from the archives at Shuruppak
EBLA TEXTS. Figure 1 . Ebla tablets in situ. (Courtesy A. Archi)
EBLA TEXTS
185
The most consistent group of economic documents is made up of 5 4 3 monthly statements concerning the distri bution of clothing to foreign kings and their officials and to dependents of the Eblaite administration; altogether it cov ers at least forty years. Twenty-seven annual registers (large tablets with up to thirty columns per side) concern consign ments of gold and silver articles on the part of the administtation. Sixty tablets are devoted to the palace revenues (mu-DU) remitted by the more important officials. Thirty of these date back to the most ancient phase (the reign of Igris-Halab); the others are dated to the vizier Ibrium and to his son and successor Ibbi-Zikir (seventeen and thirteen documents, respectively) and show an annual pattern. Other groups of texts are concerned witii the assignment of fields, with accounts regarding agricultural production (primarily barley but also olive oil and wine) and the raising of animals, and with consignments of sheep for sacrifices to the gods and for meat consumption at the palace. In addition, there are hundreds of small- and medium-sized tablets with in dividual administrative records. EBLA TEXTS. Figure 2. The Sumerian-Eblaite vocabulary. (Courtesy A. Archi)
and Abu Salabikh. Another eight lists, with words or ex pressions arranged according to acrophonic principles (the longest has 1,204 terms), were composed at Ebla. One of these served as the basis for bilingual Sumerian-Eblaite lists, which are the most ancient dictionaries known (see figure 2 ) . Manuscripts A and C contain approximately 1,200 Su merian words, the greater number of which are given an Eblaite translation. T h e list continues in A , which has about 3 5 0 additional words. Manuscript D , consisting of five smaller tablets, stops at number 8 8 0 . A more recent recen sion is B, a large tablet that includes the entire list. Another eighteen smaller texts give various sections. Literary texts are represented by one Sumerian hymn and two Semitic hymns (one of these and the Sumerian one are also known in versions from Abu Salabikh) as well as by eighteen incantations, the majority of which are in Sume rian. A long ritual for the enthronement of the royal couple, in two parallel versions written on tire occasion of the mar riage of the last two kings, describes cult rites for the gods and the deceased sovereigns. T h e chancery texts include political agreements (with Mari, Thai, and Abarsal; this last one is made up of a long series of symmetrical clauses fol lowing a pattern that will reappear a millennium later in Syr ian-Anatolian treaties), diplomatic reports, letters, and royal decrees. One letter from Enna-Dagan, king of Mari, in which he describes the conquests of his own ancestors, comes from the chancery of that city. [See Mari.] Compared to the economic documents, these texts show a less freqttent use of Sumerograms. 2
Eblaite is the oldest documented Semitic language and was spoken in all of northern Syria, although there may have been dialectic variants. It belongs to the archaic Semitic type, which continued in Mesopotamia witii Akkadian, and of which some elements were preserved in the second mil lennium BCE in Ugaritic and surface later in the most ancient dialects of the southern Arabian Peninsula. However, Eb laite presents its own innovations (such as verbal nouns with the prefix t- and the infix -t-), and does not share some of those to be found in Akkadian (such as the declension of pronominal suffixes in the dual). [See Akkadian; Ugaritic] The archives reveal the history of central Syria in the third millennium. T h e entire area was organized into city-states that had their center in a palace, where the king and the queen, mal(i)kum maliktum, resided. [See Palace.] One of fering list (ARET[=Archivi Reali di Ebla. Testi] 7 . 1 5 0 ) gives the names of ten kings of Ebla in chronological order: AburLim, Agur-Lim, Ibbi-Damu, Baga-Damu, Enar-Damu, Isar-Malik, (I)kun-Damu, Adub-Damu, Igris-Halab, IrkabDamu. This list appears again (TM [= Tell Mardikh] 74. G. 1 2 0 ) giving twenty-six royal names, from Kulbanu, the most ancient, to Isar-Damu, the successor of Irkab-Damu and the last king of Ebla. T h e dynasty therefore goes back to about the twenty-seventh century BCE, proving that Se mitic populations had settled in northern Syria by at least the beginning of the third millennium and that they are re sponsible for the process of "secondary urbanization" that took place in that epoch. Ebla became a regional state under Irkab-Damu, when its territory included the plain of Antioch, Carchemish to the north, and Hama to the south. It finally succeeded in setting itself up in opposition to Mari, to which it had to pay a tribute for a period of fifteen years (from Iblul-Il to EnnaDagan) that in its entirety amounted to 1,028 kg of silver
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and 63 kg of gold. Under Irkab-Damu, Ibrium was placed at the head of the administration, a post he held for at least fifteen years, during which time there was an annual flow into tire palace of 200-300 kg of silver, 200-500 kg of copper, 3-5 kg of gold, and about 2,000 pieces of clothing. With Ibbi-Zikir, Ibrium's son, who became vizier during tire reign of Isar-Damu, there was a notable increase: 420-730 kg of silver, the same amount of copper, 2-20 kg of gold, and at least five thousand garments. The structure of the state was strongly centralized: about five thousand lower officials, ar tisans, and workers, and eight hundred women—practically the entire active population of the city—depended directly on the palace. The production of woolen cloth was well de veloped, as was metallurgy, which employed as many as five hundred workmen. It is not possible to deduce from the texts which enemy brought an end to this period of splendor. The pantheon included Semitic divinities and local ones. Among the latter is Kura, the principal god of the city, along with his wife Barama, tire goddess Ishara (more important than Ishtar), and possibly Idabal. Semitic gods are the weather god Hadda of Halab (Aleppo), the sun goddess (written with the Sumerogram Ufa), Dagan, Rashap, and Kamish. His a frequent element in the theophorous personal names, but it does not appear in the lists of gods; it expresses the visible manifestation of the divine (originally of the di vinity of the group), but found no place in Ebla's polytheistic system. Il/EI, the lord and father of gods and men described in the Ugaritic myths, is the product of later theological speculation. The series Archivi Reati di Ebla. Testi (Rome, 1981-) is dedicated to the publication of the texts; other documents have been published in the series Materiali epigrafici di Ebla (Naples, 1979-). [See also Cuneiform; Ebla; Eblaites.]
logical Evidence." In Cuneiform Archives and Libraries, edited by Klaas R. Veenhof, pp. 53-71. Leiden, 1986. Milano, Lucio. "Food Rations at Ebla." Man: Annates de Recherches Inlerdisciplinaircs 5 (1987): 519-550. Study of the alimentary supply for the Eblaite court.
Pettinato, Giovanni. The Archives of Ebla: An Empire Inscribed in Clay. New York, 1981. The first evaluation of the archives, which needs extensive revision. ALFONSO ARCHI
Translated from Italian by Susan I. Schiedel
E C B A T A N A (modern Hamadan, at 34°48' N , 48°3i' E and 1,800 m above sea level), site located at the base of the eastern slope of the 3,571-meter-high Kuh-e Alvand range in the Zagros mountains of west-centtal Iran. The city is bisected from south to north by the Alusjerd River. T h e identification of the site with Hamadan is solidly based on both historical and archaeological evidence. T h e ancient name of the city appears in the Bisitun inscription of Darius II in Old Persian ha '"gtnatana, Elamite ag-ma-da-na, and Akkadian a-ga-ma-ta-nu and is usually interpreted as *hangmata "(place of) gathering." In classical, biblical, and other sources, the name variously occurs as Agbatana, Ecbatana(s), Ecbatanis Partiorum, Ekbatan, Achmetha, Ahmatan, Hamatan, and Ahmadan. Founded as the capital of the state of Media (Herodotus, Hist. 1.97), the city subsequentiy served as tire satrapal seat of the province of Media from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian period. In addition, it served as a royal treasury and summer residence. It was in Ecbatana that Cyrus's order for the rebuilding of the Jeru salem Temple was found (Ez. 6:2). T h e city fell to Cyrus II in 550/49 BCE, to Alexander the Great in 330 BCE, to Seleucus I in 305 BCE, to Mithridates I in 147 BCE, to Ardashir I in 226 CE, and to the Muslims in 642 (AH 23), after which it became a provincial capital, which it has remained.
Ecbatana's location provides strategic control over the major east-west route, the so-called High Road, through the Archi, Alfonso. "The Archives of Ebla." In Cuneiform Archives and Libraries, edited by Klaas R. Veenhof, pp. 72-86. Leiden, 1986. De central Zagros mountains. An extensive fertile plain lies to the east and, in antiquity, the area was famed for its horse scription of the archives and general classification of the texts. Archi, Alfonso. "How a Pantheon Forms: The Cases of Hattian-Hittite rearing and wheat production (Polybius, History, 544.1). Anatolia and Ebla of Third Millennium BC." In Rcligionsgeschicht- The city's major topographical features are al-Musalla, an liche Beziehungen zwischen Kleinasien, Nordsyrien und dem Allen Tes 80-meter-high natural rock outcrop in the southeastern tament im 2. und 1. Jahrtausend, edited by Bernd Janowski et al., pp. quarter, topped by the ruins of a rectangular citadel, prob I—iS. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, vol. 129. Gottingen, 1993. The ably of the Parthian period (238 BCE-224 CE). The barren first classification of the Eblaite pantheon. Archi, Alfonso. "Trade and Administrative Practices: The Case of hill of Sang-i Shir lies on the city's southeastern perimeter Ebla." Altorientalische Forschungen 20 (1993): 43-58. and features a colossal stone lion, possibly from the Helle Conti, Giovanni. // sillabario della quarta fonte delta lisla lessicale bilingue nistic period. Nearby is Tell Hagmataneh, a 30-meter-high eblaita. Quaderni di Semitistica, vol. 17. Florence, 1990. Results of mound in the city's northeastern quarter, which has been study of a section of the lexical lists. identified by chance finds and archaeological investigation Fronzaroli, Pelio. "Per una valutazione della morfologia eblaita." Studi as tire site of the Median citadel and of subsequent Achae Eblaiti 5 (1982): 93-120. Short grammar of the Eblaite language. Fronzaroli, Pelio, ed. Literature and Literacy Language at Ebla. Quaderni menid royal construction. T h e so-called T o m b of Esther di Semitistica, vol. 18. Florence, 1992. Up-to-date presentation of and Mordechai, associated by long tradition with Esther, tire the literary and lexical texts. Jewish bride of Alrasuerus (Xerxes I or Artaxerxes I), and Matthiae, Paolo. "The Archives of the Royal Palace G of Ebla: Distri her uncle, Mordechai, is more likely tire sepulcher of Shubution and Arrangement of the Tablets According to the Archaeo BIBLIOGRAPHY
ECOLE BIBLIQUE ET ARCHEOLOGIQUE FRANCAISE shan-Dukht, the Jewish consort of Yazdigird I (399-420 CE). T h e most detailed and probably the most reliable ancient description of the city, renowned in antiquity for its vast wealth and splendid royal architecture, is provided by Polybius, History, ( 1 0 . 2 7 . 1 - 1 3 ) , who describes the palace area as having a circumference of nearly seven stades (1.4 km), a measurement that corresponds closely to the circumfer ence of Tell Hagmataneh. Various early u-avelers recorded observations of Persepolis-style column bases and other an cient masonry reutilized in later sttuctures or lying in heaps in the river. They identify the city as a source of an extensive trade in antiquities and forgeries. French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan collected numerous antiquities in Ham adan in the late nineteenth century. Charles Fossey directed the earliest archaeological excavations in 1 9 1 3 , under the auspices of the French archaeological mission in Iran (see Chevalier, 1989). In 1920 and 1923, two large tteasure troves, both probably from the reign of Artaxerxes II (404359 BCE) or later, surfaced in the city, but their precise provienience is unknown. In 1956, road construction cut through the western slope of Tell Hagmataneh to a depth of 7 m and revealed a massive zigzagging outer defensive wall constructed in mud brick that is probably Median (sev enth century BCE; see Dyson, 1957). In 1971, Stuart Swiny conducted an archaeological survey of the area around Hamadan for the British Institute of Persian Studies, and Massoud Azarnoush of the Iranian Archaeological Service partially excavated a Parthian cemetery from the first cen tury BCE to the first century CE partially excavated in the city's southeast quadrant, near Sang-i Shir (see Swiny, 1975; Azarnoush, 1975). Two trilingual (Old Persian, Neo-Babylonian, and Elamite) rock-cut inscriptions are located at Ganj Nameh, 12 1cm (7 mi.) southwest of Hamadan, in a 2,000-meter-high pass over die Kuh-e Alvand. T h e texts praise Ahura Mazda and record the royal lineages and con quests of Darius I (521-485 BCE) and Xerxes I (485-465 BCE).
[See also Medes; Persia, article on Ancient Persia; and Sa sanians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Azarnoush, Massoud. "Hamadan: Excavation Report." Iran 13 (1975): 1S1-182. Brown, Stuart C. "Ecbatana." In Encyclopaedia Iranica. New York, in press. Detailed discussion of pre-Islamic Hamadan, with extensive bibliography. Chevalier, N. "Hamadan 1913: Une mission oubliee." Iranica Antiqua 24 (1989): 245-253. Dyson, Robert H. "Iran, 1956." University Museum Bulletin (Philadel phia) 21.1 (1957): 27-39. Frye, Richard N. "Hamadhan." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 3, pp. 105-106. Leiden, i960-. Brief history of Hamadan in the Is lamic period. Swiny, Stuart. "Survey in North-West Iran, 1971." East and West 25 (1975): 77-96STUART C . BROWN
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ECOLE BIBLIQUE ET ARCHEOLOGIQUE FRANCAISE. The oldest graduate school for biblical and archaeological studies in the Holy Land was opened in Jerusalem by Father Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P., on 15 November 1890, on the premises of the Dominican Mon astery of St. Stephen, which had been established in 1882. He named it the ficole Pratique d'Etudes Bibliques (The Practical School of Biblical Studies) in order to underline its distinctive methodology—combining text and monument; the Bible would be studied in the physical and cultural con text in which it had been written. The name was modified in 1920 when the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, rather dian create a sister in Jerusalem to the celebrated Ecole Francaise de Rome and die renowned Ecole Francaise d'Atiienes, decided to recognize the achievements of the Ecole Biblique by designating it the Ecole Archeologique Francaise. T h e honor, as will become apparent, was well merited. Alone of the national archaeo logical schools in Jerusalem, it has a developed teaching pro gram and offers a doctorate (but no lower degrees) in bib lical studies. Its extensive library holdings are made accessible by a uniquely detailed subject index. None of the original staff, apart from Lagrange himself, had any professional qualifications. Very quicldy, however, he selected and trained a faculty envied by all, drawing from among the Dominican novices forced to study in Jerusalem by anticlerical laws in France. Marius Antonin Jaussen (1871-1962) became a pioneering Arabic ethnographer. Louis-Hugues Vincent (1872-1960) developed into the pre eminent Palestinian archaeologist of his generation. Antoine Raphael Savignac (1874-1951) made his mark as a Semitic epigrapher, particularly for his work during three dangerous expeditions to northern Arabia with Jaussen in 1907, 1909, and 1 9 1 0 - 1 9 1 2 . The acute critical judgment of Felix-Marie Abel (1878-1953) focused his vast erudition into unrivaled mastery of die Greek sources for the history and geography of Palestine. Edouard Paul Dhorme (1881-1966) became a noted Assyriologist and was the first to decipher Ugaritic and produce a continuous translation of the original tablets discovered in 1929. In die fifty years of their intense interdisciplinary coop eration (1890-1940), the members of this small group pro duced 42 major books, 682 scientific articles, and more than 6,200 book reviews. T h e two latter categories appeared in die Revue Biblique (founded in 1892) and the former in die series Eludes Bibliques (begun in 1900). They also trained tiieir own successors, who began to ap pear in die 1930s. Bernard Couroyer (1900-) published ex tensively in Egyptology but also taught Coptic and Arabic. Roland de Vaux (1903-1971) was noted for both biblical scholarship and field archaeology. Raymond Tournay (1912-) is renowned for producing the best translation of the Psalms in any language. Pierre Benoit (1906-1987) and Marie-Emile Boismard (1916-) produced highly significant
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work in New Testament. It was they who, with tire survivors of the first generation, gave Lagrange's ideal its ultimate ex pression with the publication of La Bible de Jerusalem (1956). The quality of the introductions, translations, and notes re flected the best of contemporary ecumenical scholarship, and the layout both delighted the eye and facilitated com prehension—for example, by printing poetry as poetry. A radical break with traditional presentation, it set the standard for all subsequent modern bibles and has been ttanslated into most major languages (The Jerusalem Bible 1966; 2d ed., 1985). This Bible highlights the central place of biblical studies at the Ecole Biblique. Digging the foundations for the monastic church in 1889 became an archaeological excavation when elements began to come to light of the fifth-century basilica erected by tire empress Eudocia to receive the relics of St. Stephen. It was to be a long time before tire Ecole Biblique could afford another excavation. Instead, it focused on a critical reevaluation of all topographical references, combined with in tense and systematic surface exploration that involved all its professors and students. Particular attention was paid to the recovery of inscriptions. A simple listing of the reports in the Revue Biblique must suffice to indicate tire scope of these expeditions: Masada, Transjordan, and southern Lebanon (1894); the Jordan Valley (1895, 1 9 1 0 - 1 9 1 3 , 1931-1932); Sinai (1896); Petra (1897); the Hauran (1898); Gezer (1899); Philistia (1900); Avdat (1904-1905); tire Dead Sea (1909-1910); the coastal plain (1914); Palmyra (1920); Qadesh Barnea (1921, 1938); central Samaria (1922-1923); southern Transjordan (1935); and Ephraim (1946). For the same financial reasons, the Ecole Biblique was attracted to the study of monumental complexes that did not need excavation. The Church of die Nativity in Beth lehem (1914) and the Haram el-Khalil in Hebron (1923) were studied in exhaustive detail by Vincent with the assis tance of Abel for the former and of E. J. H. Mackey and Abel for tire latter. From tire first article in tire first fascicle of tire Revue Biblique (by Lagrange in 1892), which desttoyed the then current consensus by correctly locating the biblical Mount Zion on the Ophel ridge, Jerusalem provided an inexhaustible subject. A systematic research program was established in 1912 under Vincent's direction. Over and above his listed collaborators, he mobilized the resources of the Ecole for the publication of the massive volumes Jeru salem Antique: Topographie (Paris, 1912); Jerusalem Nouvelle (Paris, 1914, 1922, 1926), with Abel; and Jerusalem de I'Ancien Testament (1954-1955), with A.-M. Steve. A mem ber of the Ecole Biblique, Charles Coiiasnon (1904-1976), served as architect for the Latin community in tire restora tion of the Holy Sepulcher from 1959 to his death. His 1972 Schweich Lectures of tire British Academy on the architec tural evolution of the monument were published as The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem (London, 1974). Inevitably, the British mandatory authorities drew on the
accumulated expertise of the Ecole Biblique for salvage op erations. In 1919 the Ecole Biblique both cleared the syna gogue at Na'aran, near Jericho, and mapped tire monumen tal tomb at Khirbet Askar in Nablus, to which it returned for a more in-depth study in August 1921. In December 1921 the Ecole Biblique cleared the magnificent mosaic floor at Beth-Guvrin, and excavated the entire Roman villa there in 1924 to establish its context. In 1937 tire discovery of a "cities" mosaic floor at Ma'an in Jordan led to the excava tion of a Byzantine church. The first full-scale dig undertaken by the Ecole Biblique was in 1924-1925, when Vincent excavated tire churches at Imwas. Abel contributed tire textual evidence to the final report, Emmaus: Sa basilique et son histoire (Paris, 1932). This quickly led to others. In 1926, A. G. Barrois began a two-season excavation at Nerab, near Aleppo in Syria; his conclusions were published in Syria and the Revue Biblique. Mobilized into tire French consular service during World War II, de Vaux was directed, in 1944, to research the his tory of the French government property at Abu Ghosh. His conclusions appeared as Foidlles a Qaryet el-Enab, Abu Gosh, Palestine (Paris, 1950). In 1945-1946 he and Steve excavated and published the baptistery, monastery, and fortress at 'Ain el-Ma'amudiyeh, west of Hebron. Such small excavations prepared the Ecole Biblique to at tempt a major site. With the financial support of the French government de Vaux, who had become director of the Ecole in 1945, selected Tell el-Far'ah (North), 1 1 km (7 mi.) northeast of Nablus. Between 1946 and 1962 he excavated there for nine seasons, each year publishing preliminary re ports in the Revue Biblique. Unfortunately, he died before writing a final report, largely because of his involvement in the purchase of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the excavation at Qumran and the nearby caves. In 1951 tire Ecole Biblique participated in tire excavation of Cave 1 at Qumran, together with tire Palestine Archae ological Museum (now tire Rochefeller Museum) in Jeru salem, over whose trustees de Vaux presided, and with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, headed by Gerald Lankester Harding. The latter's preoccupations in Amman, however, meant that daily responsibility devolved on the Ecole Biblique and, to a lesser extent, the museum, both represented by de Vaux. Thus, the Ecole Biblique excavated at Qumran in four seasons (1953-1956), and spent one sea son each in tire caves of Wadi Murabba'at (1952) and at 'Ain Feshkha (1958). In 1952, with the aid of tire American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, it conducted a systematic search of 270 caves in the vicinity of Qumran. Preliminary reports appeared annually in the Revue Biblique; the closest to a final report is the English version of de Vaux's 1959 Schweich Lectures, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (London, 1973). Dominique Barthelemy, O.P. (b. 1921), was tire only member of the Ecole Biblique to belong to the original group
EDOM of three entrusted with publishing the scrolls in 1952; the other two were Josef Tadeuz Milik and Maurice Baillet. Recognizing that the material was too abundant and poten tially too sensitive to be dealt with by this small group of Roman Catholic priests, de Vaux called on scientific orga nizations and eminent scholars for nominations to an inter denominational and interconfessional team of eight that would publish the scrolls. Once these had been selected and the documents divided among them (described in the Revue Biblique 63 [1956]: 49-67), neither de Vaux nor the Ecole Biblique had any control over the fragments. Pierre Benoit, O.P. (1906-1987), also a professor at the Ecole Biblique, was coopted to edit the few Greek and Latin fragments and, because he had published his assignment, he was named to succeed de Vaux as general editor of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert when the latter died in 1971. Emile Puech of the French National Center for Scientific Research, who re sides and teaches at the Ecole Biblique, is still working on unpublished texts from Qumran. [See Qumran; Dead Sea Scrolls.] The cooperation of the Ecole Biblique in Kathleen M . Kenyon's excavation on the Ophel ridge (1961-1963) was cut short by political objections to the proximity of the squares to the Haram esh-Sharif. Just before his death in 1971, de Vaux selected Tell Keisan, between Haifa and Akko, as the next major excavation of the Ecole Biblique. Between 1971 and 1980 a series of directors—JeanPrignaud, Jacques Briend, and Jean-Baptiste Humbert—conducted eight campaigns there. T h e first part of the final report ap peared as Tell Keisan (1971-1976), une cite phenicienne en Galilee (Fribourg, 1980). In order to provide a context for die inscribed Syro-Palestinian tombstones discovered by Savignac in 1924, the Ecole Biblique dug for six seasons at Khirbet es-Samra (1978-1986), some 50 1cm (36 mi.) nortii of Amman, under the direction of Humbert. The latter, however, was less interested in churches of the seven-eighdi centuries than in die Aramean migrations in the Iron Age; in 1986 he moved his team to el-Fedein, close to the Jor danian border with Syria. There he had die misfortune to find extensive Umayyad ruins, which the Jordanian govern ment decided to preserve. In exchange, the Ecole Biblique was invited, in 1988, to excavate the third terrace of the lower city of the citadel in Amman, in cooperation with the Department of Antiquities. A preliminary report of the first three seasons (1988--1991) appeared in the centenary issue of die Revue Biblique (1992). [See also the biographies of Abel, Barrois, Lagrange, Vaux, and Vincent]
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1988. Full bibliographical references for all the archaeological work of the fZcole Biblique to 1986. Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome, with a contribution by Justin Taylor. The
Ecole Biblique and the New Testament: A Century of Scholarship, 18901990. Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus, vol. 13. Fribourg, 1990. Profiles of tire Ecole's seven New Testament professors, with full bibliographies.
Vesco, Jean-Luc, ed. L'Ancien 'Testament: Cent ans d'exegese a I'Ecole Biblique. Cahiers dc la Revue Biblique, vol. 28. Paris, 1990. Surveys and evaluates the contribution of the Ecole Biblique to biblical, intertestamental, and Oriental studies. Viviano, Benedict T. "Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise de Jerusalem." Biblical Archaeologist 54 (1991): 160-167. Current fac ulty and work of the Ecole Biblique. JEROME MURPHY-O'CONNOR, O.P.
E D O M . The early history of Edom, a small Iron Age Kingdom southeast of Judah, is obscure. It flourished under the Assyrians (eighth-seventh centuries BCE) and was de stroyed by die Babylonians in about 550 BCE. The Hebrew name Edom ("red") primarily referred to the mountains south of the Dead Sea and east of the Wadi 'Arabah, but Edomites also settled in the region west of the Wadi 'Arabah, their western boundary abutting Judah's between Qadesh and the southern end of die Dead Sea (cf. Nm. 34:3ff.; Jos. 1 5 : 1 - 4 ; Dt. 2:8). This western region was called Seir (cf. Jos. 1 1 : 1 7 ; 1 Chr. 4:42ft.), a name in some biblical texts virtually synonymous witii Edom (cf. Gn. 32:3, 36:8ft.; Jg. 5:4). Scholarly exploration of Edom began in the nineteenth century with Ulrich J. Seetzen (1806-1807); Jean Louis Burkhardt (1812), who rediscovered Petra; Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles (1818); Leon de Laborde (1828); Edward Robinson (1838); and others. Louis Lartet and Ed ward Hull published geological studies (1876, 1883). Alois Musil (1896-1898, 1900-1902), and Rudolf Ernst Brunnow and Albert von Domaszewski (1897-1898) recorded visible ruins. In 1933-1935 Nelson Glueck explored Edom; in 9 3 7 9 3 8 he excavated die Nabatean site of Khirbet etTannur and in 1938-1940 die Iron Age Tell el-Kheleifeh. In the 1950s and 1960s Diana Kirkbride excavated at Beidha, Peter Parr at Petra, and Crystal-M. Bennett at Umm el-Biyara, Tawilan, and Buseirah. In the 1980s Ste phen Hart excavated in south-central Edom, Manfred Lind ner explored west-central hilltop sites, and Andreas Hauptmann and others studied mining sites in the 'Arabah. The 1970s and 1980s saw important surveys in die Wadi el-Hasa region (Burton MacDonald, Manfred Weippert), at Ras enNaqb (Hart), in the Hisma region (William Jobling), and in the Ghor and northern Wadi 'Arabah (Walter Rast and Thomas R. Schaub, and MacDonald). I
_I
Edom's prehistoric sites have been researched by Donald Henry, Mary O. Rollefson, and others. Human activity is evidenced through the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleo Benoit, Pierre. "French Archaeologists." In Benchmarks in Time and lithic, Epipaleolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic periods (c. Culture: An Introduction to Palestinian Archaeology Dedicated to Joseph 100,000-3,000 BCE), especially in more moist periods when A. Callaway, edited by Joel F. Drinkard et al., pp. 63-86. Atlanta, BIBLIOGRAPHY
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settlement could spread from the terraces of the scarp to the central plateau, where grazing animals might be hunted. A number of Epipaleolithic-Natufian sites are known from the eleventh-temh millennia in the Wadi el-Hasa, near Petra, and in the Wadi Judaiyid. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic period is well evidenced at Beidha. There is little Pottery Neolithic, but Chalcolithic sites appear south of Ras en-Naqb and in the Wadi 'Arabah, where copper was mined and smelted. Early Bronze Age sherd scatters on the plateau evidence temporary settlements and pastoral activity. Surveys show an absence of MB pottery, but a handful of sites with late Bronze pottery suggests the start of renewed population growth. In the Wadi 'Arabah, however, carbon-14 datings from charcoal suggest smelting activities at Khirbet enNahas in MB II and at Feinan in LB II. Smelting took place at Timna' under tire Egyptian nineteenth and twentieth dy nasties. The Egyptians knew Edom and Seir's inhabitants as shosu ("wanderers"), bellicose pastoralists who migrated to Egypt in times of hardship. LB Transjordan was subject to Egyptian control and lay on the very fringe of the wealth ier Aegean world, whose trade reached tire Jordan Valley. In Iron Age I, the population and number of settlements increased. Terraces, houses, small farms, a cemetery, a pos sible village, and a possible fortress suggest an agricultural community, mainly in the west-central region. In Iron II the population grew significantly. Surveys reveal buildings, hamlets, unwalled villages, a significant number of fortresses on the plateau, and a number of mountaintop settlements in the west (cf. Ob. 3). Defense seems to have been important, with the fortresses perhaps defending official interests in trade and agriculture and the minor clifftop settlements de fending the local population against intruders. Crystal-M. Bennett excavated a short-lived seventlr-century BCE do mestic settlement on the top of U m m el-Biyara, an eighthfifth century BCE unfortified agricultural town at Tawilan, and an eighth-fifth (?) century BCE major city at Buseirah (biblical Bozrah), witii a casemate town wall, domestic buildings, and an enclosed acropolis with an Iron II palace or temple, succeeded by a smaller "winged" building pos sibly built for the Persian administration. Glueck excavated Tell el-Kheleifeh, assigning it five occupation levels from Solomon to the Persian period; however, recent study has demonstrated two levels, a casemate-walled fortress and a larger, solid-walled fortress, dated by the Iron II pottery to the eighth-fifth centuries BCE. The site is now identified with Uzziah's Eilat (2 Kgs. 14:22), rather than with Solomon's Ezion-Geber (1 Kgs. 9:26). Evidence of an Iron II copper industry, active from tire eighth to the fifth centuries BCE, perhaps encouraged by the Assyrian administration, ap pears at Feinan and elsewhere in the 'Arabah (cf Jb. 2 8 : 1 4); it produced enough copper to leave 100,000 tons of slag.
36:31-39, an Israelite compilation of monarchic date or later, offers uncertain evidence for the early period but may sug gest some regionalism in Edom, Bozrah, and the land of the Temanites (tire southern region?) being clearly well known. Political development could begin only when Judah's rule ended; monarchy was established in about 850 BCE (2 Kgs. 8:20). Population expansion, the appearance of villages, hill top settlements, fortresses, towns, a major city, the copper industry, and evidence of foreign trade belong, together with vassaldom to the Assyrians, to tire eighth-seventh centuries BCE; Edomite tribute is mentioned in the records of AdadNirari I, Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal; the last two kings required mil itary service also. Assyrian rule may help explain Edom's relative prosperity and security.
Thus, early Edom was primarily a rural society of subsis tence farmers and pastoralists, presumably tribal in struc ture. Central administration was probably first imposed by Judah (2 Sm. 8:14). The "Edomite king list" of Genesis
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Edom's material culture was similar to that of its Transjordanian neighbors. Standard pottery shapes include plat ters, bowls, cups, cooking pots, jugs and juglets, storage jars, and lamps. Plain coarse ware is found everywhere, but fine painted ware, presumably for tire wealthier classes, is found especially at Buseirah (and also at some Iron II sites in the Negev). Assyrian bowls and cups are also found. More dec orative objects include cosmetic palettes, carved tridacna shells, seals, beads, and jewelry. Major inscriptions are lack ing, but the seventh-sixth-century BCE seals, seal impres sions, and ostraca, with some fiftlr-fourtlr-century BCE evi dence from Tell el-Kheleifeh, suggest that the script was of Phoenician origin, increasingly influenced by tire Aramaic script used by the Assyrian administration. T h e language was a variant of Northwest Semitic, close to Hebrew, Am monite, and Moabite. Archaeological evidence for religious practice is limited. Buseirah's building B, with its courtyard, cisterns, and steps flanked by pillar bases leading to an inner room, was prob ably a palace rather than a temple (cf. Am. 1:12), Censers witness a common cultic practice, female figurines perhaps indicate devotion to Astarte, and a scarab from Tawilan pic turing a crescent on a pole may symbolize the moon god Sin of Harran in Syria. T h e evidence of seals, ostraca, and biblical Edomite names suggests that tire deities Baal, Hadad, and El were known. T h e element qws in theophoric names from later seals, ostraca, and inscriptions suggests that Qos (personifying the bow?) was worshiped in Edom. Qos was a war or weather god of North Arabian origin, but when this cult was introduced into Edom is not clear. T h e Israelites knew Edom as tire home of Yahweh (Jgs. 5:4) and recognized the Edomites as their brothers and fellow Yahweh-worshipers (Dt. 23:8; 1 Sm. 21:7). [See also Beidha; Buseirah; Feinan; Kheleifeh, Tell el-; Tawilan; and U m m el-Biyara.]
This entry is based mainly on archaeological reports and research published in archaeological journals. Full bibliographies will be found in the works of Bartlett and MacDonald cited below.
EGYPT: Prehistoric Egypt Bartlett, John R. Edom and the Edomites. Sheffield, 1989. First major scholarly syndiesis of the evidence for the history of Edom since Frantz Buhl's Geschichte der Edomiter (Leipzig, 1893), with detailed bibliography of die scholarly literature. Bienkowski, Piotr, ed. The An of Jordan, Stroud, England, 1991. Series of scholarly articles accompanying an exhibition of artifacts from Jordan, including ancient Edom. Note especially the chapters on sculpture, pottery, art and technology, and writing. Bennett, Crystal-M. "Excavations at Buseirah." Levant 5 (1973): 1-11; 6 (1974): 1-24; 7 (1975): 1—15; 9 (1977): 1-10. Reports of excavation at Edom's major city.
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because intensive erosion has destroyed most of the deposits in which settlements might have been preserved. Our infor mation is a little more complete for the next 200,000 years (tire Middle and Upper Paleolithic), but it is not until almost 20,000 BP, in the Late Paleolithic, that we really begin to be able to reconstruct the functioning of prehistoric Egyptian societies, the character of their food economies, and the dis tribution of their settlements across the landscape. Lower Paleolithic. T h e earliest evidence of human pres Burckhardt, Jean L. Travels in Syria and the Holy Land. London, 1822.ence consists of crude handaxes, classified as Middle AcheuClassic of early exploration, full of well-observed detail. lean, found in older stream gravels at a few localities along Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vols. 1-3. Annual ofthe Nile and in the Sahara. None of these sites is dated or the American Schools of Oriental Research, 14, 15, 18/19. New Ha has associated fauna. Several more localities in Egypt have ven, 1934-1939. Glueck's surveys in Edom, Moab, and Ammon. yielded the more evolved handaxes of the Late and Final Glueck based his results on a pottery classification that has since been Acheulean, probably dating between 250,000 and 400,000 considerably refined. His work must now be interpreted in the light of subsequent field research by Burton MacDonald, Stephen Hart, BP, but again none seems to occur in a primary context, and Manfred Lindner, Manfred Weippert, William Jobling, and others. only one locality (Bir Sahara East in tire Western Desert) Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan (1940). Rev. ed. Cam has any associated fauna. There is good sedimentary evi bridge, Mass., 1970. Popular account of Glueck's surveys and ex dence, however, for Lower Paleolithic occupation of tire Sa cavations in modern Jordan in which he revises some of his original hara during intervals of greatly increased rainfall, when large conclusions. Hadidi, Adnan, ed. Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan. permanent lakes and at least ephemeral streams existed. Vols. 1-3. Amman, 1982-1987. Presentations delivered at three in Middle Paleolithic. T h e data on the Middle Paleolithic ternational conferences by leading scholars of the history of Jordan. in Egypt are considerably more numerous than those for tire Note especially papers by Peter J. Parr, Manfred Weippert, and earlier period. Most Middle Paleolithic tools are made from Crystal-M. Bennett in volume 1; and E. Axel Knauf and C. J. Lenzen, Manfred Weippert, and Gerrit van der Kooij in volume 3. large stone flakes, often produced by a prepared-core tech MacDonald, Burton. The Wadi el Hasa Archaeological Survey, 1979nique known as Levallois. Almost all of the assemblages in 1983, West-Central Jordan. Waterloo, Ontario, 1988. Results of a clude high frequencies of unretouclred Levallois flakes detailed survey of the region immediately south of the Wadi el-Hasa (most of which are rejected tool blanks), sidescrapers, denin northern Edom. MacDonald, Burton. "Archaeology of Edom." In The Anchor Bible Dic ticulates, and retouched pieces. Some assemblages also in clude high proportions of burins and endscrapers, and oth tionary, vol. 2, pp. 295-301. New York, 1992. Survey, with a detailed bibliography of literature in archaeological journals. ers have a few bifacial foliates and stemmed tools. Most of Sawyer, John F. A., and David J. A., Clines, eds. Midian, Moab, and the assemblages are generally similar to the Mousterian of Edom: The History and Archaeology ofLate Bronze and Iron Age Jordan Southwest Asia and western Europe. and North-West Arabia. Sheffield, 1983. Includes important studies The best information on the Middle Paleolithic in Egypt on Edomite pottery (Marion F. Oakeshott) and "Midianite" pottery comes from the two neighboring depressions of Bir Tarfawi (Benno Rothenberg and Jonathan Glass). and Bir Sahara East, some 350 Ion (about 220 mi.) west of JOHN R. BARTLETT Abu Simbel. Both basins have a sequence of five Middle Paleolithic wet intervals with permanent lakes, dating be tween about 175,000 and 70,000 BP. The numerous Middle E G Y P T . [This entry provides a broad survey of the history Paleolithic sites associated with tire lakes occur in a variety of Egypt as known primarily from archaeological discoveries. It of settings, which seem to have been used for different pur is chronologically divided into five articles: poses. Several sites were in fossil soils that developed in Prehistoric Egypt swamps adjacent to tire lakes; others were in beaches formed Predynastic Egypt with considerable wave action. Both of these settings were Dynastic Egypt used as secondary workshops and for processing marshland Postdynastic Egypt plants. T h e paucity of bones suggests that meat was not an Islamic Egypt important food during the season when these sites were oc In addition to the related articles on specific subregions and sites cupied. refened to in this entry, see also History of the Field, article on Most of our information on the late Middle Paleolithic Archaeology in Egypt.] comes from a series of quarries on the west bank near Qena in Upper Egypt. Thermoluminescence dates for the Late Prehistoric Egypt Middle Paleolithic aggradation indicate that it occurred be tween 62,000 and 45,000 BP; the quarries probably date Although Egypt has been inhabited for at least 500,000 somewhere in that interval. Irregular trenches and pits testify years, unfortunately, we know almost nothing about tire way to the ability of the people to quarry for stone, although their of life in Egypt for at least the first half of this period, largely
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efforts were neither as systematic or efficient as those seen at the Upper Paleolithic quarries in the same area. Near the end of the Middle Paleolithic, the river began a cycle of downcutting, incising a deep channel to a level near that of the river today. There are no sites in Egypt that can be correlated with this period, although some are known north of the Second Cataract in Sudan. Upper Paleolithic. Around 33,000 BP, the Upper Pale olithic appeared in Upper Egypt. It is characterized by a new technology based on the production of long, narrow blades, rather than the short, wide flakes of the Middle Paleolithic. Our only information comes from quarries north of Nag Hammadi, which consist of a systematic series of deep pits, galleries, and chambers excavated to extract flint cobbles. The oldest human skeleton from Egypt is associated with one of these quarries. It is a Homo sapiens sapiens, slightly more primitive than, but of the same type as, the skeletons found at several Late Paleolithic sites in this area. The late Upper Paleolithic is known from three settle ments dating to about 25,000-22,000 BP. The tools are made on large blades and include denticulates, retouched pieces, burins, and endscrapers, backed blades are rare. T h e asso ciated fauna are mostly wild cattle, hartebeest, gazelle, a'nd a few fish. At this time, the Nile was probably very similar to that of the late Middle Paleolithic, and once again the valley began to fill with silt. Late Paleolithic. Around 21,000 BP, stone technology shifted from large to small blades or bladelets. This change marks the beginning of the Late Paleolithic, which lasted for more than ten millennia in the Nile Valley. A complex series of Late Paleolithic industries has been defined for both Lower Nubia and Upper Egypt, each with a distinctive tool kit. Similar modifications in artifacts occurred at about the same time throughout the Valley, with intervals of cultural turmoil and rapid change. A few of these changes are so numerous and abrupt that they must represent new popu lations. The beginning the Late Paleolithic saw more use of Nilotic resources: fish, shellfish, migratory water fowl, and marshland plants. Large animals were still hunted, but they were now a relatively minor part of a rich and highly diverse subsistence. From Wadi Kubbaniya, north of Aswan, came the best data on subsistence. The onset of the Nile flood in summer was an important time for food collection. At this time cat fish moved to tire edge of the floodplain to spawn and were easily taken in great numbers. The Kubbaniya sites contain thousands of their bones. Some of the fish may have been dried or smoked for later consumption, as suggested by sev eral suitable pits with burned areas on tiieir floors. The in habitants also began to collect seeds of marshland plants, such as chamomile and club rush. In winter, they harvested the tubers of nut grass and club rush, both of which contain complex carbohydrates and volatile toxins and excess fibers. They can be made edible by grinding and roasting, and the
Kubbaniya sites contain heavily worn grinding stones and charred fragments of several varieties of the wetland plants. As with the catfish, surplus tubers may have been processed for later use. In the late winter and spring, when the river was at its lowest level, the inhabitants moved to the mouth of the wadi and other localities where bedrock outcrops and shoals facilitated the gathering of the Nile oyster and other shellfish. Late Paleolithic human remains are all of the same phys ical type: the robust but fully modern Mechta el-Arbi type found throughout North Africa between 20,000 and 10,000 BP. They resemble the contemporaneous Cro-Magnons of southwestern Europe. Many of the Late Paleolithic skele tons show signs of violence. A skeleton of a male found at Kubbaniya, for example, had several healed wounds and two bladelets in the abdominal cavity that were presumably the cause of death. More dramatic is the Late Paleolithic graveyard at Jebel Sahaba, where 40 percent of the fifty-nine men, women, and children had artifacts embedded in tiieir bones or showed other signs of trauma. This graveyard has a radiocarbon date of 13,740 BP, and may contain the earliest evidence of warfare. It certainly suggests that the Late Pa leolithic was a period of intense competition in the Nile Val ley. Around 13,000 BP, temperatures increased in East Africa, and there was more rainfall in the headwaters of the Nile. The river became a massive stream more like that of today. After a series of large floods about 12,500 BP, the river began to cut a deep channel into the silts. From the onset of this downcutting until shortly before 8000 BP, the only site known in the valley is a small camp, occupied about 11,500 BP; it differs little from the sites occupied a thousand years earlier. Several eightii-millennium sites have been excavated in the Faiyum, where they are associated with sediments that accumulated when Nile floodwaters entered the Faiyum de pression and formed a large lake. Other sites include a group at el-Kab in Upper Egypt, and a small cave in Egyptian Nubia. All of these localities have yielded numerous fish bones, together with a few presumably wild cattle, harte beest, and gazelle; fishing, hunting, and probably plantgathering continued as major economic activities. There are no traces of pottery or domesticated species. Neolithic on t h e Nile. As recently as 7000 BP, the Egyp tian Nile was still occupied by small groups of people whose subsistence patterns were similar to those of the Late Pale olithic—fishing, collecting, and hunting. About 6000 BP (5200 BCE), there was a dramatic change in cultural devel opments. In Lower Egypt, in the Faiyum depression and farther nortii on the edge of the Delta, a complex Neolithic economy appeared suddenly and without local antecedents. It was based on domesticated species from southwestern Asia, used in combination with the already known wild foods.
EGYPT: Prehistoric Egypt The earliest attested of these Neohthic sites are in the Faiyum and date to 5230-4450 BCE. T h e sites are much larger than before and were probably occupied for several months after tire summer floods, when fish could be easily harvested in the cut-off pools and swales and also when cereals were planted for harvest in winter. There are no traces of per manent houses, only a few post holes suggesting temporary huts made of poles covered with brush, reeds or mats. Deep accumulations of cultural debris, however, exist. The sites contain numerous bones of fish, domestic cattle, sheep or goat, pig, and a variety of wild fauna, including hartebeest, gazelle, hare, hippopotamus, crocodile, turtle, and water fowl. Plants include emmer wheat and barley. Pottery is abundant and very different from that in con temporaneous sites in the southern Western Desert. There are many large storage jars, which are fiber tempered, rough, and undecorated, and a few small, open bowls, which are sand tempered, frequently smudged, and either smoothed or burnished. None of the pottery is painted. T h e Faiyum Early Neolithic villages may each have con tained two hundred people. Because all of the known sites were inundated by the summer floods (except tire granary pits, which were above the inundation level on an adjacent hill), they cannot have been occupied year round. We do not know where the Faiyum Neolithic people went during the rest of the year. There are several sites in the Sand Sea, near the Libyan border, with similar fiber-tempered pottery, a comparable range of lithic artifacts, including concavebased arrowheads, and of about the same age. Some of the Faiyum groups may have included the Sand Sea in their seasonal movements, or the similarities may indicate only that the two groups were closely related. Although the sudden appearance of die Faiyum Neolithic just as the drying desert was becoming uninhabitable sug gests a Saharan origin, there is little evidence to support such a hypothesis. Indeed, the origin of the Neolithic anywhere in the valley is obscure and controversial, and there is no firm evidence that Saharan groups played a significant role in these developments in Lower Egypt. The importance of Levantine domesticates, the distinctive fiber-tempered pot tery, and the presence of several lithic elements not known in the desert (such as maceheads) may indicate that deri vation or influence from southwest Asia. However, the ap parent absence of similar complexes in tire Sinai, southern Israel, and southern Jordan argues against migration. Merimde Beni Salame, at the western edge of the Delta, was first occupied only slightly later than the Faiyum Neo lithic and was partially contemporaneous with it. Merimde is one of the largest prehistoric sites in Egypt, and at its maximum, there may have been more tiian a thousand peo ple living there. T h e houses in the lowest levels were oval huts with walls of upright poles covered with mats or brush, similar to those suggested for tire Faiyum. They had firepits equipped with burned clay firedogs to support a cooking
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pot, and some had pots sunk into their floors. Near each house was a large storage pit. Burials were placed in simple oval pits within the village and without grave offerings. In the upper levels of Merimde, dating to around 4,300 BCE, tire houses were more substantial, partly dug into the ground with the above-surface walls made of mud bricks. The entries to tire houses, all on the same side, had thresh olds of hippopotamus tibiae. T h e interiors were sometimes partitioned into activity areas by posts set into the floor. The houses were separated by reed fences and arranged in irreg ular rows on either side of a street or alley. Large storage jars, baskets, and pits were placed near the houses. The size of the community, the alignment of the houses, and the abundance of the storage features suggest that around 4,300 BCE, Merimde witnessed a new level of village organization, which provides the basis for the early Predynastic period of Lower Egypt, which is documented at such sites as el-Omari and Maadi, near Cairo. [See Merimde.] In Upper Egypt, the earliest-known Neolidiic phase is the Badarian, recorded at forty habitation sites and a similar number of cemeteries, south of Asyut. These are clustered into three large communities, each consisting of several dis persed villages and homesteads. T h e Badarian represents a sharp break from the fishing, hunting, and gathering groups of less ± a n a millennium earlier, and, like the early Neolithic period in Lower Egypt, appears suddenly and without local precedent. T h e possible role of the Desert Neolithic in this is difficult to evaluate. Cultural complexity is evident earlier in the desert, and there are similarities in the pottery and some of the stone tools, particularly with the Saharan Late Neolithic, which suggest that the desert people did contrib ute. Unfortunately, our lack of data from the Nile between 6,000 and 5,000 BCE prevents further evaluation. The Badarian phase is not well dated. Several thermoluminescence dates on pottery range from 5,580 to 4,510 BCE, but all have large standard deviations, and the higher dates seem to be too old when compared to the dates for the fish ing and hunting sites at el-Kab and the small cave in Egyp tian Nubia. The best indication of tire age of the Badarian phase is that it is older than the Amratian, a Predynastic complex that has several calibrated radiocarbon dates of around 4,200 BCE, and is thus of about tire same age as the upper level at Merimde. T h e earliest Badarian phase was probably contemporaneous with the oldest Faiyum Neo lithic. Badarian villages have simple brush- or mat-covered huts, with large storage pits and pens for sheep or goats. Their economy was based on the cultivation of wheat, barley, and chickpeas. They also gatirered nut-grass tubers, fished in tire Nile, and did some hunting. Their economy and houses were thus not very different from those in the Faiyum, and they also had comparable concave-based projectile points. However, their other crafts were more developed. They had well-made pottery, almost all of it polished, red or black in
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EGYPT: Predynastic Egypt
color, or red with a black rim. Some had comb-impressed designs on the exterior, often partially obliterated by polish ing. A few pots were decorated with incised geometric de signs. There were carefully shaped stone palettes and quan tities of red and green pigments. Animal and human clay figurines, and carved ivory tools also indicate the Badarian emphasis upon ornamentation. It is in burials, however, that the Badarians differ most from their contempories in Lower Egypt. Most burials were not in the villages, but in separate graveyards. Most of them also have offerings, including pottery, beads and other or naments. Some graves were much richer than others, indi cating that there were differences in wealth and status. These Badarian traits were further emphasized in the Pre dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt, and reached their apogee in pharaonic civilization.
of Bir Kiseiba. Dallas, 1984. Contains the most recent information on Holocene archaeological remains in the Western Desert of Egypt. Following A. Gautier in the same volume, the authors propose that the cattle found in early Holocene sites are domestic; however, for a contrary view see A. B. Smith, "The Origins of Food Production in
Nortiieast Africa," in Palaeoecology of Africa and the Surrounding Is lands, edited by J. A. Coetzee and E. M. Van Zinderen Bakker, pp. 327-324 (Rotterdam, 1982).
Wendorf, Fred, et al. The Prehistory of Wadi Kubbaniya. Vols. 2-3. Dallas, 1989. Technical report describing tire Late Paleolidlic oc cupation near Aswan, with important new data on the food economy. The conclusions in volume 3 will be useful to the general reader. FRED WENDORF and ANGELA E. CLOSE
Predynastic Egypt
The later Neolithic in Egypt, known as the predynastic pe riod, represents the transition to a single unified state in about 3100 BCE. T w o separate ceramic and lithic traditions [See also Delta; Faiyum; Lower Egypt; Nag Flammadi; are evidenced during this era—one in northern, or Lower, Nile River; and Upper Egypt.] Egypt and tire other in Southern, or Upper, Egypt (which BIBLIOGRAPHY extended into Lower Nubia). Both the ceramics and litlrics Caton-Thompson, Gertrude, and E. W. Gafdner. The Desert Fayum. can be equated with finds from tire Sudan and belong to a characteristically African technology. T h e type-site for the London, 1934. The best available study of the early Neolithic in the Fayum. Subsequent studies show that the Fayum A to Fayum B Upper Egyptian culture was excavated by William Matthew sequence is reversed. Flinders Petrie at Naqada; through his development of se Caton-Thompson, Gertrude. Kharga Oasis in Prehistory. London, quence dating, or sedation, he was able to order his material 1952. Classic study of Lower and Middle Paleolithic remains in the chronologically through stylistic development. [See Na Egyptian Sahara. Recent research, however, suggests that die pro qada.] posed cultural and climatic sequences should be used with caution. Close, Angela E. "Living on the Edge: Neolithic Herders in the Eastern Petrie divided his finds into various phases. T h e first is Sahara." Antiquity 64 (1990): 79-96. Describes the use of the hyperknown as the Arnratian period, named for the site of elarid Safsaf sandsheet by Holocene herding groups. Amra, near Abydos. This period, which dates to between Hoffman, Michael A. Egypt before the Pharaohs. Rev. ed. Austin, 1991. 4200 and 3700 BCE, is characterized by red-fired Nile-silt Excellent popular summary of Egyptian prehistory, with several in ceramics and vessels that often have a black top and that teresting stories about early personalities. Klees, Frank, and Rudolph Kuper, eds. New Light on the Northeast occasionally are decorated with yellowish or white pigment. African Past. Cologne, 1992. Contains several excellent summaries The second period, the Gerzean, shows a change in ceramic of die prehistory of Egypt, ranging from the Lower Paleolithic to the technology that is represented by the use of higher-fired, Neolithic. white-to-buff marl clays, sometimes ornamented with pat Paulissen, Etienne, and Pierre M. Vermeersch. "Earth, Man, and Cli terns in red ocher. This period dates from 3700 BCE to tire mate in the Egyptian Nile Valley during the Pleistocene." In Prehis beginning of the first dynasty, although it is sometimes sub tory of Arid North Africa: Essays in Honor of Fred Wendorf, edited by Angela E. Close, pp. 29-67. Dallas, 1987. Excellent survey of Pleis divided into a later phase known as Late Gerzean. Petrie tocene prehistory in the Nile Valley, particularly good for Upper termed this last period the Semainean and equated it with a Egypt. dynastic race that migrated into tire Nile Valley and brought Vermeersch, Pierre M., et al. "33,000 Year Old Chert Mining Site and Related Homo in die Egyptian Nile Valley." Nature 309 (1984): 342- about a unified state (Petrie, 1921). Helene Kantor (1952) however, clearly disproved the theory of such a massive 344. Describes the excavation of an early Upper Paleolidlic flint mine and associated human remains. population influx and demonstrated that, aside from a few Wendorf, Fred, ed. The Prehistory of Nubia. 2 vols. Dallas, 1968. Vol imports, the material culture of the Upper Egyptian pre ume 2 contains technical reports on several prehistoric sites in Egyp dynastic sequence and that of dynastic Egypt belonged to tian Nubia. This was the first "modern" study of Nubian prehistory the same tradition. and has now been largely replaced by Wendorf et al. (1989). Wendorf, Fred, and Romuald Schild. Prehistory of the Nile Valley. New The sequence dates Petrie assigned to these periods began York, 1976. Describes and dates several Late Paleolithic industries, with the number 30, to leave room for earlier cultures, particularly useful for the Fayum. should they be discovered. This turned out to be the case Wendorf, Fred, and Romuald Schild. Prehistory of the Eastern Sahara. with the Badarian culture of the prehistoric period. T h e evo New York, 1980. Technical study of the prehistory of the Western lutionary framework for this period, set by Petrie a century Desert of Egypt; for more recent information see Wendorf et al. ago, now has largely proven correct. Further refinements (1984).
Wendorf, Fred, et al. Cattle Keepers of the Eastern Sahara: The Neolithic were added by Werner Kaiser (1957), however. Kaiser sub-
EGYPT: Predynastic Egypt
195
EGYPT: Predynastic. Figure i. Paintingfrom the "Decorated Tomb" at Hierakonpolis. The painting depicts some Mesopotamian motifs, including the "divine hero" holding off two lions at the lower left. Dated to the Naqada II period, c. 3 5 0 0 BCE. (Courtesy P. Lacovara)
divided the Amratian into Naqada I A, B, and C, the Gerzean into Naqada II A, B, C, D i , and D2; and the Late Gerzean into Naqada III A i , A2, and B. The Lower Egyptian sequence is less well documented, but it appears to be related to ceramic and tool types found in Syria-Palestine. There is a greater amount of material from settlements rather than graves, which may exaggerate the difference between the north and south. T h e principal sites here are in the area of the Faiyum and at Maadi near Cairo. [See Faiyum.] Lower Egyptian ceramics appear far more utilitarian than Upper Egyptian examples. They are usually of simple, baggy shapes with thick walls and abun dant chaff temper. The only large settlement site to be extensively explored from this period in Upper Egypt is that of Hierakonpolis. Excavations there by Michael Hoffman revealed a temple and settlements dating to the Naqada I and II periods (Hoff man, 1982). In addition, a series of kilns found along the desert margins of the site may have been employed to pro duce ceramics for mortuary use. Often, the ceramics found in Upper Egyptian graves show no sign of use and may have been especially made for burial. [See Grave Goods.] Such pottery is characterized by fine wares with simple, elegant shapes and decoration in red or white pigment. Some ex amples have applied decoration in the form of animal figures or symbols. Other types imitate the appearance of stone ves sels, which were made of a number of hard and soft stones such as basalt, granite, breccia, and alabaster (calcite or trav ertine) . Elizabeth Finkenstaedt (1980) has shown that several schools, or local styles, of painted pottery are to be found in predynastic ceramics that may point to the development of regional centers or small states. Eventually, the tradition of
painted pottery died out, perhaps replaced by the growing production of stone vases to equip the tombs of the elites. [See Tombs.] For this era, the cemeteries excavated dem onstrate an increasing social stratification, with more and more elaborate tombs provided for the wealthy. One partic ular tomb at Hierakonpolis had a painted mural decoration (see figure 1) that contained motifs related to the art of Mes opotamia. [See Wall Paintings.] Foreign influence, as evi denced by both imported materials and adaptations of stylistic motifs (animal phyle, "divine hero," composite monster), suggest that the exchange of ideas with the Near East at this juncture played a pivotal role in the develop ment of art, writing, and the formation of the pharaonic state. [See also the biography ofPetrie.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arkell, Anthony J„ and Peter TJcko. "Review of Predynastic Develop ment in the Nile Valley." Current Anthropology 6 (1965): 145-166. Baumgartel, Elise J. The Cultures of Prehistoric Egypt. 2 vols. Oxford, 1947-1960. Finkenstaedt, Elizabeth. "Regional Painting Style in Prehistoric
Egypt-" Zeitschrift fur Agyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 107 (1980): 116-120. Hoffman, Michael. The Predynastic of Hierakonpolis. Cairo, 1982.
Holmes, Diane L. The Predynastic Lilhic Industries of Upper Egypt. 2 vols. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 469. Cambridge, 1989. Kaiser, Werner. "Zur Inneren Chronologie der Naqadakultur." Ar-
chaeologia Geographical (1957): 69-77. Kantor, Helene J. "Further Evidence for Early Mesopotamian Rela
tions with Egypt." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 11 (1952): 239250.
Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Corpus of Prehistoric Pottery and Palettes. British School of Archaeology, Publications, no. 32. London, 1921. PETER LACOVARA
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EGYPT: Dynastic Egypt Dynastic Egypt
In his History of Egypt (Gk., Aegypliaka), the early thirdcentury BCE Egyptian priest Manetho organized the kings of Egypt from Menes to Alexander of Macedon (c. 3100-332 BCE) into thirty consecutive "dynasties," or families. A thirty-first dynasty was later added to Manetho's treatise, which is preserved only in corrupted and fragmentary form in the epitomes of later authors. Some of his dynasties prob ably have no historical basis, while others were overlapping rather than successive. T h e relative chronology of the dynastic period is based on a number of sources in addition to Manetho. These in clude Icing lists, genealogical data, historical and biographi cal texts, dated monuments and papyri, and archaeological remains. Conversion of Egypt's relative chronology into an absolute chronology has been achieved through the use of astronomical data; historical synchronisms between Egyp tian kings and several Hittite, Babylonian, and Assyrian rul ers; classical sources; and radiocarbon dating. The archaeology of dynastic Egypt can be divided into two major categories of material remains: one relating to the elite, the other to ordinary people. Most books and articles focus on the Icings and members of the royal family, the
bureaucrats and provincial officials, the military, and the temple priesthood. These groups together constituted only a small percentage of the country's inhabitants, but their wealth and material achievements vastly exceeded those of the illiterate peasants, whose existence probably changed lit tle over several thousand years of dynastic rule. Hence, the "archaeology of ancient Egypt" largely reflects the material culture of the country's political, religious, and military in stitutions. Early Dynastic Period (First and Second Dynasties: c. 3100-2700 BCE). Egyptologists sometimes group the rul ers of Upper Egypt just prior to the beginning of the early dynastic period (such as Ka and Scorpion) as dynasty 0. Later tradition records that a king Meni (Glc, Menes), from This in Upper Egypt, united the two halves of the country and founded a new capital at Memphis, situated just south of Cairo. Menes is probably to be equated with Narmer, a king whose large commemorative palette found at Hiera konpolis in Upper Egypt shows him wearing the White Crown of Upper Egypt on one side and the Red Crown of Lower Egypt on the other. The reign of Narmer (c. 3100 BCE) inaugurated the first dynasty and the beginning of the early dynastic period (see figure 1). T h e early dynastic period was a formative era in the evo-
EGYPT: Dynastic. Figure 1. Palette of King Narmer. To the left, King Narmer is seen holding a captive by the hair, and he wears the crown of Upper Egypt. On the reverse side, to the right, King Narmer appears as the largest human figure in the upper scene, wearing the crown of Lower Egypt. Dated c. 3100 BCE. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
EGYPT: Dynastic Egypt lution of Egypt's political and religious institutions. An im portant element in the development of these institutions was writing, which first appeared (possibly as the result of cul tural influence from Mesopotamia) at the end of the pre dynastic era. Other significant achievements of tire early dy nastic period included the development of major elements of the Egyptian artistic canon and the first use of stone in construction (though most buildings of the period were made entirely of mud brick). In foreign affairs, the lungs of the first dynasty cam paigned against Nubian and Libyan tribes. Trade with Pal estine, which had been extremely active in late predynastic times and dynasty o, declined during tire course of the first dynasty. Domestically, tire country was politically stable during the first dynasty, but conflict between Upper and Lower Egypt appears to have broken out in the early second dynasty. The history and material culture of this period are known principally from Abydos and Saqqara. Both sites have yielded rectangular mastaba tombs containing the names of early dynastic kings. T h e kings of the first dynasty and of the end of tire second were probably buried at Abydos, whereas the rulers of the early second dynasty may have been interred in subterranean galleries at Saqqara. T h e rich contents of the Abydos and Saqqara tombs included in scribed sealings, labels, and stelae; copper and stone tools and weapons; stone vessels; ivory and stone statuary; wood and ivory furniture; and jewelry. Old Kingdom (Third-Sixth Dynasties: c. 2700-2190 BCE). T h e Old Kingdom is frequently labeled the Pyramid Age. T h e country was administered by a strong, highly cen tralized government headed by a monarch whose absolute authority and divinity were reinforced during the fifth dy nasty by his formal claim to be the son of tire sun god Re. On a day-to-day basis, the government was run by a large bureaucracy managed by high officials who often were members of tire royal family. T h e Old Kingdom was a period of economic prosperity and political unity. Commercial and military expeditions traveled south to Nubia, which in pharaonic times provided Egypt with such items as ivory, ebony, gold, and animal skins. T h e turquoise mines of western Sinai were opened up for exploitation at least as early as the third dynasty. T h e coastal cities of the northern Levant, especially Byblos, were visited by Egyptian diplomatic and commercial missions, and several military campaigns were conducted in Palestine as well as against the Libyans. Large state building projects were undertaken, especially for pyramid complexes and, in the fifth dynasty, temples for the solar cult. Most of the la borers on these projects were peasants, whose work in the fields came to a halt during tire Nile's annual inundation. Memphis was the capital and royal residence throughout the period. Stretching many kilometers north and south of
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Memphis were the great royal and private cemeteries. T h e first pyramid was erected at Saqqara during the early third dynasty. Designed by Imhotep for King Netjerikhet (later called Djoser), this step pyramid is the oldest major building constructed entirely of stone. T h e first true pyramid was built at Dahshur at the beginning of the fourth dynasty. T o that dynasty also belong the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure (Gk., Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus) at Giza. Later Old Kingdom pyramids were smaller and not as well constructed. Around each Old Kingdom pyramid complex were large mastaba tombs for the king's relatives and other officials who wished to share in their ruler's eternal life. The mastabas of the fifth and sixth dynasties were larger than their predecessors, and the interior rooms of their su perstructures were decorated with scenes of daily life. The absolute power of tire monarchy began to deteriorate during tire fifth dynasty. T h e decline is attributable to the growing importance of tire solar cult at Heliopolis (which increased the power of that cult's priesthood) and tire in creasing wealth of the nobility, who now often were provin cial governors (nomarchs) rather than royal relatives and who could pass their offices on to their sons. Exemption from taxation for temples and the great royal mortuary cults also took its toll on the treasury. In about 2200 BCE, shortly after the extended reign of the sixth dynasty king Pepi II, the country's central government collapsed. First Intermediate Period (Seventh-mid-Eleventh Dynasties: c. 2190-2033 BCE). For about half a century after the demise of tire Old Kingdom, tire lungs of the sev enth and eighth dynasties attempted to maintain order from the capital at Memphis. Eventually, the country broke up into several independent political units, famine and anarchy were rampant in the land, and Asiatic nomads wandered into the Delta. T h e literature of tire period speaks of eco nomic and social hardship. T h e closing of the royal ateliers in the old capital led to the development of crude provincial art styles. Contemporary with the eighth dynasty, a line of Herakleopolitan princes (Manetho's ninth and tenth dynasties) united tire middle reaches of the Nile valley under their rule. Civil war later broke out between Fferakleopolis and the newly emerging town of Thebes in Upper Egypt. Eventu ally, the eleventh-dynasty Theban ruler Nebhepetre Mentuhotep (2033-1982 BCE) defeated the Heraldeopolitans, bringing about a new era of national unity and prosperity. Middle Kingdom and Early Second Intermediate Pe riod (Mid-Eleventh-Thirteenth Dynasties: 2033-1648 BCE). The late eleventh dynasty saw mining expeditions once again going to Sinai and trade missions setting out for tire Levant. Nebhepetre Mentuhotep's principal building achievement was his funerary complex at Deir el-Bahari in western Thebes; tire early eighteenth-dynasty pharaoh Hatshepsut used Mentuhotep's complex as a model for her own
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magnificent funerary complex immediately to the north. Following a brief period of disorder at the end of the elev enth dynasty, the throne of Egypt was secured by Amenemhet I, whose reign begins the twelfth dynasty (1963-1786 BCE).
Amenemhet I moved tire royal residence from Thebes to Itjtawy, located in the vicinity of Lisht in the Faiyum region. In the Faiyum itself, the kings of the twelfth dynasty under took major irrigation projects to reclaim a large amount of land for farming. Throughout tire twelfth dynasty, the ldngs were buried in pyramids. Following the reign of Amenemhet I, the pyramids were built of mud brick supported by inte rior stone crosswalls; later on, they were constructed of mud brick witir a limestone casing. Around the pyramid com plexes stood the mastabas of their officials. The provincial authorities continued to wield substantial authority until Senwosret III (1862-1843 BCE) put an end to their power (see figure 2). The institution of coregency, whereby the king took his son as coruler to ensure a smooth transition of power, became a regular feature of the mon archy in the twelfth dynasty, and a middle class began to develop. Scarabs inscribed with royal names and the names and titles of officials first appear in the Middle Kingdom.
The foreign policy of the twelfth dynasty included several campaigns into Nubia, where a line of fortresses was erected in the second cataract region to protect Egypt's southern frontier. Egyptian armies also campaigned northeast of the Nile valley, possibly even reaching the northern Levant dur ing the reign of Amenemhet II (1901-1866 BCE). Expedi tions went out to the mines of Sinai on a regular basis, and trade and political contacts with Syria were on a larger scale than ever before. At Byblos, along the southern Syrian coast, the local rulers employed Egyptian hieroglyphs for writing their names and used Egyptian titles. Egyptian hieratic in scriptions on clay figurines and pottery bowls contain curses (the so-called Execration Texts) directed against rulers and places in Syria-Palestine, Libya, and Nubia; these docu ments reflect Egypt's extensive knowledge of foreign lands and, perhaps, the extent of her power and influence. T h e Middle Kingdom was a golden age for Egyptian lit erature and art. This was the time of Middle Egyptian, the classical phase of the Egyptian language. Famous works of the era, such as the Story of Sinuhe and the Instruction of Amenemhet I, were copied as schoolboy exercises for hun dreds of years thereafter. T h e art is notable for its royal por trait sculpture: the serious, often somber look on the faces of the kings is unique in the history of pharaonic art. T h e jewelry is exquisite, yet simple, and includes some extraor dinary inlaid pieces. The kings of the thirteenth dynasty (1786-1648 BCE) con tinued to reside at Itjtawy, and the art, pottery, and seals of tire period reflect a continuation of Middle Kingdom traditions. Nonetheless, a rapid turnover in occupants of tire throne, the end of pyramid construction, and, toward the end of the eighteenth century BCE, the decline or abandon ment of a number of sites in the Faiyum region herald a weakening of tire central government. At the same time, an influx of Asiatics into the eastern Delta led to a deterioration in royal control over that part of Lower Egypt. Eventually, in 1648 BCE, the ruler of Avaris (modern Tell ed-Dab'a), the center of Asiatic activity in the Delta, captured the old Egyp tian capital at Memphis and took over northern Egypt. Late Second I n t e r m e d i a t e P e r i o d (Fifteenth-Seven t e e n t h Dynasties: 1648-1540 B C E ) . A nineteenth-dynasty king list preserved in Turin reports that six "rulers of foreign countries" (i.e., Manetho's fifteenth, Hyksos Dynasty) con trolled Egypt for 108 years. During the late seventeenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries BCE, Asiatics came to dominate the Delta, Memphis, and part of the Nile Valley, while a line of Theban princes (tire seventeenth dynasty) controlled southern Egypt. The Asiatics adopted many as pects of Egyptian culture, including the use of the hiero glyphic script for writing their documents and transcribing their personal names. Recent excavations at Tell ed-Dab a have revealed extensive contact with the Levant, Cyprus, and the Aegean world. In the mid-sixteenth century BCE, the c
EGYPT: Dynastic. Figure 2. Head of Senwosret III. Red granite; nineteenth century BCE. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
EGYPT: Dynastic Egypt Theban ruler Kamose recaptured Memphis and drove the Hyksos back to Avaris. His brother and successor, Ahmose, the first king of tire New Kingdom, captured Avaris and drove the Hyksos out of Egypt. New K i n g d o m ( E i g h t e e n t h - T w e n t i e t h Dynasties: i550-ro69 B C E ) . Several Idngs of the early eighteenth dy nasty—most notably Ahmose (1550-1525 BCE), Amenhotep I (1525-1504 BCE), and Thutmose I (1504-1492 BCE) and III (1479-1425 BCE; see figure 3)—campaigned widely in the Levant and Nubia, establishing an empire that, at its height, extended from Napata in the northern Sudan to the Eu phrates River in western Syria. T h e inhabitants of this em pire provided Egypt with a wide variety of tribute and trade goods. Commercial relations, which throughout pharaonic times were conducted under royal authority, were active with the Aegean world, Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, Mesopo tamia, and Nubia. For tire next several hundred years, Egypt was the wealthiest country in tire ancient world, a phenom-
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enon reflected in the enormous temples and magnificent royal and private tombs at Thebes. During most of the eighteenth dynasty (1550-1295 BCE) tire royal residence was at Thebes, whereas in the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties (1295-1069 BCE) the kings lived at Per-Rameses in the eastern Delta. T h e pharaohs were bur ied in large rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings in the Theban necropolis, while tire nobility were buried in tombs cut in the nearby hills. Memphis continued to function as a major administrative center during the New Kingdom. In the mid-fourteenth century BCE, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV abandoned the worship of the god Amun, changed his name to Akhenaten, and with his family and a small coterie of followers moved north from Thebes to Amarna, where he could worship the sun in its manifestation as tire sun disk (the Aten). A hoard of several hundred cuneiform tablets found at Amarna and written mostly in Babylonian, the lin gua franca of the Near East in the Late Bronze Age, contains letters addressed to the Egyptian royal court from the major rulers of western Asia and the vassal princes of SyriaPalestine, as well as archival copies of a smaller number of letters sent from Egypt in the opposite direction. Following Akhenaten's death, his second successor, T u tankhamun, departed from Amarna. Not long after, a new dynasty arose in Egypt, under the leadership of a military officer named Rameses (who was the first of eleven kings to use that nomen). For more than two centuries, the Rameside ldngs ruled Egypt as Manetho's nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. The greatest challenge to Egypt in the early nineteenth dynasty came from tire Hittites in Anatolia. Rameses II (1279-1213 BCE) fought tire Hittites to a standstill at Qadesh on the Orontes River in western Syria, but much of the Egyptian Empire in Syria was subsequently lost. Egypt con tinued to prosper during tire nineteenth dynasty, despite in ternal political problems in the early twelfth century BCE. The art and jewelry of die period are gaudy and inferior to that of the eighteenth dynasty; the scenes in the tombs of the nobles focus more on the afterworld than daily life; and the temple architecture and royal sculpture are more notable for their monumental scale than their artistic quality (the temple of Rameses II at Abu Simbel being a fine example). In the eighth year of Rameses Ill's reign (1184-1153 BCE), in the early twentieth dynasty, much of the eastern Medi terranean world was overwhelmed by tribal groups from the northern Mediterranean known collectively as the Sea Peo ples. After devastating Asia Minor and the Levantine coast, they were defeated by the Egyptians and forced back into Palestine. Egypt managed to sustain its empire in parts of Palestine for another generation or two, but what was left of the empire collapsed in about tire third quarter of the twelfth EGYPT: Dynastic. Figure 3. Statue of Thutmose III. Fifteenth cen century BCE. From then on, Egypt began a long period of political, economic, and social decline. The Nubian portion tury BCE, (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
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of the empire was lost in the early eleventh century BCE, and shortly thereafter tire country once again split apart. Third I n t e r m e d i a t e Period (Twenty-first-Twentyfifth Dynasties: ro6g-664 B C E ) . The Third Intermediate period opened with the kings of the twenty-first dynasty re siding at Tanis in tire northeastern Delta and a line of high priests of Amun dominating Upper Egypt from Thebes. For the next four hundred years, the country lurched from one political and military crisis to another. During the twentyfirst dynasty (1069-945 BCE) there were competing rulers at Tanis and Thebes. The twenty-second dynasty (945-715 BCE) saw a line of rulers of Libyan origin dominating Egypt from Bubastis in the eastern Delta. The first of these ldngs, Sheshonq I (945-924 BCE), campaigned in Palestine and pil laged the temple in Jerusalem. Later in the dynasty tire coun try again fragmented, leading to competing ldngdoms at Sais in tire western Delta, Thebes, and Herakleopolis (the period of the twenty-third dynasty). In tire mid-eighth century BCE, a Sudanese king, Kashta, gained control of Thebes. Soon thereafter, another Napatan ldng, Piye (otherwise known as Piankhi), swept north into Egypt and established Kushite domination of tire country as far downstream as Memphis; his successor, Shabako, finished the conquest of northern Egypt. The twenty-fifth (Napatan) dynasty (747-656 BCE) rebuilt and enlarged Egypt's temples, especially those fa voring the god Amun, and reasserted the country's old traditions. In 664 BCE, however, the Assyrians marched into the Nile valley and captured Thebes. Because most of the capitals of the Third Intermediate period are in the Delta, relatively little is known about the archaeology of this period. Many of the sites are buried be neath the alluvium or modern occupation, or have had their stone monuments completely robbed out. At Tanis, an enormous temple complex associated with the god Amun has been excavated. Within the temple enclosure was a royal necropolis for several kings of the twenty-first and twentysecond dynasties. Late Period (Twenty-sixth-Thkty-first Dynasties: 664-332 B C E ) . Threats against their empire from the east soon forced the Assyrians to leave Egypt. They entrusted control of the country to a number of local princes, one of whom, Psammeticlrus, soon became ldng, founding tire twenty-sixth dynasty (664-525 BCE) at Sais. During the Sai'te dynasty, tire country regained its independence; rebuilt its military forces (which now included large numbers of for eign mercenaries, many of whom settled in Egypt); and ex panded its commercial activities throughout the eastern Mediterranean. An attempt by Pharaoh Necho II (610-595 BCE) to reestablish Egyptian hegemony in the Levant led to a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Babylonians at Carchemish in 605 BCE. The strongly nationalistic views of tire period are reflected in the archaizing features of the art, which hearken back to tire Old Kingdom. In 525 BCE, a Persian army under Cambyses defeated the
last Sai'te king, Psammeticlrus III, at Pelusium, bringing Egypt into the Achaemenid Empire. During the twenty-sev enth (Persian) dynasty (525-404 BCE), tire bureaucratic lan guage was Aramaic rather than Egyptian. Egypt regained its independence during the twenty-eightlr-thirtieth dynasties (404-343 BCE). T h e thirtieth dynasty is notable for tire ex tensive temple-building activity undertaken by Nectanebo I and II. In 343 BCE, the Persians recaptured Egypt, but they held it for only a short time. In 332 BCE, Alexander of Macedon led his army into Egypt and made the country part of his burgeoning empire. [See also Abydos; Dab'a, Tell ed-; Delta; Heliopolis; Hyk sos; Lower Egypt; Memphis; Pyramids; Saqqara; andUpper Egypt.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Baines, John, and Jaromir Malek. Atlas of Ancient Egypt. New York, 1980. Well-illustrated, semipopular introduction to ancient Egypt. Gardiner, Alan H. Egypt of the Pharaohs. Oxford, 1961. History of an cient Egypt, based almost entirely on textual sources, by the leading British Egyptologist of die twentieth century. Gardiner, Alan H., T. Eric Peet, and Jaroslav Cerny. The Inscriptions of Sinai. 2 vols. Egyptian Exploration Society, Memoir 45. 2d ed. London, 1952-1955. Basic publication of Egyptian inscriptions from the mining areas of western Sinai.
Grimal, Nicolas-Christophe. A History of Ancient Egypt. Translated by Ian Shaw. Cambridge, Mass., 1992. Good history of ancient Egypt, much more balanced in its use of source material than Gardiner's book; contains a lengthy bibliography.
Hayes, William C. The Scepter of Egypt: A Background for the Study of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2 vols. New York, 1953-1959. Examination of Egypt to the end of the New Kingdom, illustrated by objects in die museum's collection. Chapters on the Middle and New Kingdom are especially valuable because of the richness of die museum's collections for these periods.
Helck, H. Wolfgang. Die BeziehungenAgyptens zu Vorderasienim 3. und 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr. 2d ed. Wiesbaden, 1971. The only compre hensive study of Egyptian relations with the Near East during the Bronze Age. The text is out of date for some periods and must be used widi caution. Helck, Wolfgang, and Eberhard Otto. Lcxikon der Agyptologie. 7 vols. Wiesbaden, 1972-1991. Massive reference work containing articles in English, French, and German on virtually every topic relating to ancient Egypt; includes extensive notes and bibliography.
Kemp, Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. London, 1989. Original and interesting socioeconomic interpretation of the devel opment of the Egyptian state, administration, and economy.
Kitchen, K. A. The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt, 1100-650
B.C.
2d ed. Warminster, 1986. Dry but authoritative history of Egypt dur ing a long period of decline. Kitchen, K. A. "Egypt, History of (Chronology)." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 2, pp. 322-331. New York, 1992, Up-to-date over view of the current status and major problems of Egyptian dynastic chronology. Lichtheim, Miriam, comp. Ancient Egyptian Literature. 3 vols. Berkeley, 1973-1980. Excellent translations of many important Egyptian texts.
Lucas, Alfred. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries. 4th ed., rev. and enl. by J. R. Harris. London, 1962. Classic work in the field, now outdated in such areas as metals and faience but still extremely use ful. Quirke, Stephen, and A. Jeffrey Spencer, eds. The British Museum Book
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of Ancient Egypt. London, 1992. Excellent introduction to the history and material culture of ancient Egypt, illustrated by objects in the British Museum.
Redford, Donald B. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Prince ton, 1992. Stimulating, somewhat idiosyncratic history of Egyptian relations with Palestine. Strouhal, Eugen. Life of the Ancient Egyptians. Norman, Olda., 1992. Beautifully illustrated survey of die daily life of the ancient Egyptians, providing a perspective on ancient Egypt different from other books cited here.
Trigger, Bruce G., et al. Ancient Egypt: A Social History. Cambridge, 1983. The social, economic, and political history of dynastic Egypt. Each chapter contains its own bibliography. The first three chapters were originally published in volume 1 of The Cambridge Histmy of Africa (New York, 1975). Waddell, W. G., ed. and trans. Manetho. Cambridge, Mass., 1940. Greek text and English translation of the epitomes of Manetho's
Aegyptiaka. JAMES M . WEINSTEIN
Postdynastic Egypt Research into the history and culture of Egypt from the ar rival of Alexander the Great in November of 332 BCE to the conquest by the Islamic forces of Amr ibn al-As in 640 CE are currently in a state of flux because of an intensive inter disciplinary approach to this very complex era. Much of what has been written in the past is no longer valid, and some of what is to be stated herein is only provisional. T h e brunt of these assertions are immediately evident on ex amination of the brief stay of Alexander the Great in Egypt. It is now generally acknowledged that Egyptian Alexan dria was already inhabited at Alexander's arrival and that, far from founding a new city, the conqueror merely replanned the existing one. Growing evidence also suggests that there was a flourishing, contemporary cult of Osiris-Apis in the city, which Alexander (of Macedonian-Greek birth) em braced under the name of Serapis. The contours of the city, compared to that of a chlamys (Macedonian riding cape) emphasized its Greek, not Egyptian, sociopolitical orienta tion, which was reinforced by its name, Alexandria ad Aegyptum ('Alexandria by the side of [but not within] Egypt"). Ever the pragmatist, Alexander did little to interfere with the existing administrative bureaucracy of the land. In fact, many former officials who had served with distinction under the Persians, who had occupied Egypt before Alexander, were permitted to remain in their same offices. When Ptol emy I Soter declared himself pharaoh in 305/304 BCE, he did little to change this system. T h e administration of Ptolemaic Egypt is currently regarded as self-generated, addressing is sues on an ad hoc basis as the need arose; it was not a con sciously developed administration. T h e ethnicity of Ptolemaic Egypt has been much dis cussed, in particular the relationship between the native Egyptians and the Macedonians and other Greeks who were encouraged to immigrate to Egypt early on to serve in the
EGYPT: Postdynastic. Statue of an official. The figure is wearing a ttaditional Egyptian tripartite costume. Black granite; height 1.165 m. Provenance unknown (perhaps Dendera). Metropolitan Mu seum of Art. (Rogers Fund, 1965)
armies of the Ptolemies or in other capacities in exchange for prime arable lands. T h e consensus is that the culture of Ptolemaic Egypt can be characterized as one of two soci eties, the immigrant Greek and the native Egyptian; both were separate and mutually unequal in tiieir spheres of ac tivity. This opinion masks the existence of numerous other nationalities and languages in the cultural record of the Ptol emaic Period, from Aramaic to Carian and Phoenician. De spite the continuity of these diverse peoples and tiieir native tongues, there is a certain uniformity in the material culture, at least on the pharaonic side, to suggest that the native Egyptians were themselves highly resistant to foreign influ ences. Indeed, the attraction of Egypt was so great that all immigrants were soon acculturated to Egyptian norms. With the passing of time, the indigenous Egyptians be came more assertive. There are at least ten documented re volts by the Egyptians during the Ptolemaic Period, the most famous of which saw the Thebaid (that region of Upper Egypt, extending roughly from Coptos in the north to Edfu in the south, that was under the administrative authority of Thebes) effectively gain a modicum of independence and local autonomy from the crown during the reigns of Ptolemy IV Philopator and Ptolemy V Epiphanes when two Egyp-
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tians, Horwenenefer and Anhkwenenefer (perhaps father and son) established themselves as counter-kings in succes sion. The revolt of the Delta city of Lycopolis was particu larly long-lived and bloodily quelled only in 186 BCE. Whereas some may ascribe the causes of these armed in surrections to economic or social inequities, the xenophobia of the Egyptians toward their Greek overlords cannot be overlooked as a prime contributing factor. The frequency with which asylum decrees are promulgated, granting Egyp tian felons immunity from persecution, are indicative of just how far the Ptolemies would go in order to pacify a generally hostile population. It is within this broader cultural context that one can understand why, perhaps, Cleopatra VII was the only member of her dynasty to speak Egyptian. The precipitous return to Egypt from Syria by Ptolemy III Euergetes I, which effectively enabled the Seleucids to regroup and eventually to invade Egypt, was probably due to his need to address such a rebellion at home. T h e overseas empire of Ptolemaic Egypt, which was won by Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his sister-consort, Arsinoe II, was now threatened by the Seleucids. The successful invasion of Egypt by the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III Epiphanes was reversed by Roman intervention in the form of the ul timatum tiiat Popilius Laenas personally issued to Antio chus. Certain important details to this episode, recorded by Polybius and Livy, have now been recovered from an Egyp tian archive unearthed at Saqqara, from which one learns the name (Nounenios) of the envoy dispatched by Ptolemy IV Philopator to thank the Roman Senate for Laenas's in tervention. From that moment on, Egypt was to be drawn into the affairs of Rome. Those interactions accelerated dur ing the course of the first century BCE, but here again a re visionist approach to many of the events is currently gaining favor. So, for example, the alleged will of Ptolemy X Alexander I (r. 110—109; again 107-88 BCE) in which he is said to be queath his kingdom to Rome is based on a misinterpretation of the evidence. A careful reading of the relevant passages in Cicero in conjunction witii Egyptian sources reveal that Ptolemy X borrowed money from Rome, which was depos ited at the city of Tyre. Upon his demise, the Romans at tempted to recover the principal. The agreement, as it can now be reconstructed, merely grants the Romans the right to repayment; it does not name them heirs to his kingdom. It was for similar financial considerations that Ptolemy XII Auletes (r. 80-58; again in 55-51 BCE) fled to Rome in 58 following his ouster by the Alexandrians. He was reinstated in 55, having returned with Roman legions commanded by Gabinius. The financial affairs of Ptolemy XII were man aged by Gaius Rabirius Posthumus in an attempt to recover the debt of 10,000 talents of silver, which Auletes had bor rowed earlier. Before his death, Ptolemy XII Auletes elevated his daugh ter Cleopatra VII, aged seventeen, to the throne as coregent
together with his son Ptolemy XIII, aged six. T h e queen, far from being illegitimate (as implied by Strabo) asserted her right to the throne and issued at least three documents in which she is named as Egypt's sole monarch. Julius Caesar, pursuing Pompey to Alexandria in the wake of Rome's civil wars, arrived in Alexandria to find a city divided by inter necine strife. In short order, Caesar sided with Cleopatra, and the two embarked on a conscious campaign of political domination. Cleopatra aspired to restore Egypt to her for mer glory and thus decorated Egyptian temples, such as Dendera, where she is depicted as the legitimate successor of the pharaohs of old. T h e untimely assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE left the queen without an ally, but she soon asso ciated herself with Marc Antony, the politically weaker of the two. Together Cleopatra and Antony challenged the might of Rome. In the waters off A c t u m , a promontory of southwestern Greece, the combined naval forces of Cleopatta and Antony confronted those of Octavian, thereafter called Augustus, Julius Caesar's heir and future first em peror of Rome. Contrary to popular opinion, Cleopatra her self planned the strategy for the battle and was in command of part of the fleet, which consisted of some of the largest men-of-war ever constructed in the ancient world. T h e battie lost, Cleopatra and Antony withdrew to Egypt and there elected suicide rather than capture and disgrace. T h e death of Cleopatra VII ended the Ptolemaic period, one of Egypt's most brilliant cultural epochs. In general, native pharaonic art forms were continued during the Ptolemaic period. There is virtually no evidence whatsoever of foreign intrusions into the form or functions of such a major temple at Edfu, which was built and consttucted entirely during the Ptolemaic period. There the Ptolemies are depicted in several scenes as the dutiful offi ciants, solemnly offering a variety of items to the various deities of the temple. Their appearance masks the fact that the most important theological aspect of this temple revolves around the falcon-deity Horus in his role as the universal monarch. As a result, the image of this aspect of Horus at Edfu enabled the native priesthood to conduct their rituals in the name of this falcon-pharaoh rather than in the name of one of the Ptolemies, with whom the priesthood was often at odds. Likewise, the funerary stelae (commemorative tablets) and statues of officials eschew Hellenistic forms and remain loyal to pharaonic sculptural tenets. On occasion one sees what appears to be Hellenistic-looking hair on the heads of some of these officials, who may also be holding foreign attributes. In the final analysis, however, those coiffures and emblems are rendered in accordance with the mimetic prin ciples of ancient Egyptian art and cannot be cited as ex amples of foreign influence on native traditions. On the other hand, the Macedonian-Greek overlords of the land did attempt to incorporate into their art aspects of Egypt's long cultural heritage. This process could be accom-
EGYPT: Postdynastic Egypt plished in several ways. On a basic level, the Hellenistic art ists could simply sculpt, for example, an image of the god dess Isis in classical style. Several such examples are known. On the other hand, Egyptian concepts were often clothed in Greek garb. So, for instance, the Macedonian appropriation of the native Alexandrian deity Osiris-Apis, who represented the deified and resurrected Apis bull, was given Hellenistic form as Serapis, represented in art as a full bearded, long haired male deity, resembling Zeus or Hades but bearing as his attribute a modius (corn measure) on his head. T h e completely Hellenistic idiom in which these images are sculpted belies the fact that these images can only be fully understood witir reference to the cult of the Egyptian god Osiris. In other cases, tire Macedonians felt compelled to inscribe an epitome, usually in Greek, on a pharaonic-styled object, which served as a gloss explaining the nature of the statue to an audience not familiar with Egyptian art. There is no corresponding example of a Hellenistic work of art inscribed in Egyptian for the benefit of the Egyptians. These artistic differences are graphically understood by a comparison of the architecture and decoration of the three extant Hellenistic tombs at Mustafa Kamal in Alexandria with the temple of Horus at Edfu. In the former, Egyptian elements, such as the sphinx, are used decoratively to sug gest an Egyptian ambience, whereas there are no analogous quotations from the Hellenistic record at Edfu. Furthermore, borrowing of visual motifs and other art forms is not the only manifestation of Macedonian appro priations of pharaonic culture. Recent studies suggest that the idea behind the creation of the great library at Alexandria as a repository for books was a Macedonian response to the "Houses-of-Life," tire scriptoria (writing centers) that were attached to the temples of ancient Egypt (Bianchi, 19891990, p. 3). Manetho, for example, writing during the reign of Ptolemy II (285-246), had access to such scriptoria when he wrote a history of pharaonic Egypt in Greek for the ben efit of tire Macedonians. N o Greek penned a similar history in Egyptian. This appropriation of tilings Egyptian by the Greeks of Egypt is nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the so-called Romance ofAlexander the Great, in which the Macedonian conqueror is depicted as the son of the Egyp tian god Amun and the legitimate successor of Nectanebo II, the last native pharaoh of the thirtieth dynasty (360-342). T h e defeat of Cleopatra and Antony at Actium, the last naval battle of antiquity, and their suicide the following year in 30, left Octavian master of the known Mediterranean world. Fearing that another Egyptian may again rise up to challenge his authority, Augustus, the former Octavian, de creed Egypt the private domain of the Roman imperial household and forbade Romans from visiting the land with out first having obtained his authorized visa. As part of this conscious policy, Augustus named Gallus to be fire first pre fect (governor) of the land. Shortly thereafter, Gallus be came inebriated with Egyptian culture and soon erected
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monuments in his own name near the great pyramids at Giza and at other sites throughout the land. Augustus re called him, and Gallus, disgraced, committed suicide. When a revolt in southern Arabia forced Augustus to dispatch his Egyptian legions under the direction of his second prefect to the troubled area across the Red Sea, the southern frontier of Egypt revolted, led this time by another woman, the Candace (queen), of the Nubians. Her forces succeeded where Cleopatra's had failed by successfully defeating the Roman legions sent against her in combat. In time, the third prefect, Petronius, reached an accommodation with this Nubian Candace, whereby Roman taxes were remitted and a com mon border between the Kingdom of Meroe, the Candace's realm, and Roman Egypt was established. [See Meroe.] This frontier would be respected until the time of the Roman emperor Diocletian, when the marauding tribes of the Blemmyes brought instability to the region. The cultures that developed during the course of the early Roman Empire in Egypt are difficult to define with any pre cision because ideology is not often made manifest in art. T o be sure, classical art forms continued, as revealed by the marble images of Roman emperors Augustus, Hadrian, and otirers found in Egypt and now on view in the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria. T h e cults of the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome as well as cult of Serapis in his Mac edonian form were popular, but worship of these deities was not permitted within Egyptian temples proper, In time the Romans attempted to discourage the pagan Egyptian practices in Egypt. T h e most graphic expression of this curtailment of religious rights is seen within the tem ple of Luxor. T h e central doorway, giving access to the in ner sanctum or barque station, was intentionally blocked up and converted into a niche in which the image of the reign ing emperor was duly erected. T h e entire room was then covered with plaster and adorned witir frescoes depicting the emperor and his entourage, This remodeling of the Luxor temple effectively prevented tire Egyptian priests from car rying the sacred barques of the gods in procession during the annual festivals, thereby depriving the Egyptians of the most popular means of worshiping their deities. During the course of the first and second centuries CE Egypt prospered, and the city of Alexandria flourished, pro pelled doubtless by the pharaonic canal that the Roman em peror Trajan reopened to link the Nile and the Red Sea, along which many trading centers were established. As a result, tire luxury goods of the Orient—spices and silk—be gan to appear in quantity in Mediterranean markets. It was doubtless such mercantile interests that caused the Palmyrenes, in the person of Queen Zenobia, to occupy Egypt in the late third century CE. T h e armed struggles between the forces of Zenobia and those of the Roman emperor Aurelian in the decade between 270 and 280 CE effectively reduced tire city of Alexandria to rubble. It has been suggested that drese disturbances were the major factors contributing to the
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damage to the Great Library and the tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria herself (see P. M. Frazer, Ptolemaic Al exandria I, Text, Oxford, 1972, p. 16). At the same time, Christianity, traditionally arriving in Egypt with St. Mark in the first century CE, began to make inroads. By tire third century Christians formed thriving communities in Egypt as elsewhere in the Mediterranean world. Soon, for reasons that are too complex to outline here, Christians were subjected to persecutions by the pa gans. The pogroms against tire Christians in Egypt initiated under Emperor Decius (r. 249-251) were so destructive that the Copts, the present Egyptian Orthodox Christians, mark the beginning of their liturgical calendar with the age of the martyrs who fell during that time. The persecutions esca lated in time and culminated during tire reign of Diocletian (284-305), who vented his anger not only against the Chris tians in Egypt but also against the pagans in Alexandria, whose massacre he ordered in 295 CE. To commemorate this triumph, Diocletian erected a single column in Alexandria, which is known locally but erroneously as Pompey's Pillar.
Egyptian Christians and their coreligionists wherein the na ture of Christ was monophysite, meaning that Christ's di vine and human nature were commingled simultaneously. Insulted by the decision, the Egyptian Christians returned home and steadfastly refused to abide by the decision of the Council, thereby causing an early schism within the Church. Their tenacious embrace of the monophysite ("one na ture") doctrine led to an awkward situation among the Christian community in Egypt because the recognized cler ical authority in Alexandria, the Christian patriarch, ap pointed by the council, was at theological odds with the ma jority of his fellow Christians throughout the land. The rift was never healed. T o this day the Copts of Egypt, de scended from those pagan Egyptians who converted to Christianity, remain monophysites. Their limrgical lan guage, Coptic, is itself an alphabetic script based on hiero glyphs and employs letters based on the Greek alphabet to which have been added seven signs modified from demotic, the most cursive form of the ancient Egyptian language. [See Coptic]
The Edict of Milan, issued in 312 and reaffirmed in 323, granted all tire freedom to practice the religion of one's choice. Christians were not favored by the Edict, they were simply no longer persecuted for their beliefs. In 324 Constantine the Great transferred the capital of the Roman Em pire from Rome to Byzantium, changing the name of that city to Constantinople; the Byzantine period was thereby inaugurated, and Christianity was openly encouraged. Christian theologians soon began heated theological debates among themselves regarding such matters of doctrine as the nature of Christ. Alexandrian clergymen, doubtless because of the long intellectual tradition enjoyed by the city because of its Great Library and numerous institutions of higher learning, played major roles in these lively dialogues. In 325 the views of Arius, an Alexandrian prelate, on the less-thandivine nature of Christ were condemned by the Council of Nicaea. Between the years 379 and 395, the Roman emperor Theodosius formally declared Christianity the religion of the empire and systematically closed down all pagan institu tions, a process that led to the physical destruction by zeal ous Christians of the great temple of Serapis in Alexandria. Nevertheless, some pagans continued to practice their older religion. As late as 4 T 5 , Hypatia, a fascinating woman who is traditionally regarded as die last pagan intellectual in Alexandria, was savagely stoned to death by Christian monks goaded on by the patriarch, Theophilos. Despite these attacks, pagan Egyptians remained loyal to their tra ditional beliefs. The very last pagan Egyptian inscription ever carved in Egypt is a demotic graffito on the island of Philae dated to 452, one year after the fateful meeting of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. During the proceedings of this, the fourth ecumenical council, the assembled clerics debated the nature of Christ. The council condemned as heretical the position of the
The struggles between the monophysitic Copts and their nominal rulers, the administrators and prelates dispatched to Egypt from Constantinople, created friction within the Christian community. T h e Sasanians, or Persians, led by Chosroes II, invaded Egypt in 619, having defeated the ar mies of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius. Three years later in 622, the Prophet Muhammad embarked on the Hijrah, his "flight" from Mecca to Medina, thereby firmly estab lishing Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. In 626 Heraclius ex pelled the Sasanians and regained Egypt for Byzantium. For tire next fourteen years, Fleraclius was engaged in a series of military confrontations with tire leaders of Islam, whose defeat of the Persians in 637 at al-Qadisiya signaled tire end of the Sasanian Empire. T h e Byzantines and Muslims now engaged in a struggle to control the lands of the Middle East. In 640, Amr ibn al-'As, the general of tire Islamic caliph 'Umar, overran the Egyptian outpost at Pelusium and de feated tire Byzantine garrison at Babylon, today Old Cairo. The Copts perhaps acquiesced to this takeover, preferring to pay taxes to the caliph in exchange for their religious free dom, rather than to be subjects of their adversarial coreli gionists. Amr ibn al- As he proceeded to Alexandria, and captured it in 642. T h e city was freed by tire Byzantine fleet in 645, only to be retaken by Amr ibn al-'As the following year. Egypt had fallen, and the path to Spain across North Africa lay open to the Muslims. c
During their formative period, Christians and their pagan counterparts were not clearly distinguished. In some in stances, the blurring of distinctions among disparate sects existed in antiquity, as the gnostic archive from Nag Flammadi and the religious books recently uncovered at Ismant in the oasis of Dakhleh reveal, in which there appears to be an unmistakable mixture of Christian and decidedly pagan elements. [See Nag Hammadi.]
EGYPT: Islamic Egypt As difficult as it is to separate Christians from pagans, it is often more problematic to distinguish monophysitic Copts from Byzantine Christians on the basis of the mon uments without recourse to textual information. That data enables identification of the clerics within the monastery of Abu Jeremiah at Saqqara as monophysitic Copts. Neverthe less, more progressive academics are beginning to regard Christian art produced in Egypt as a branch of Byzantine art. There is a growing tendency as well to dismiss as Chris tian many of the monuments, often sculpted in the soft, local limestones, the motifs of which are taken over directly from tire repertoire of classical, not pharaonic, Egyptian mythol ogy (Johnson, ed., 1992). Although these monuments are often called "Coptic," they are better regarded as examples of pagan art, created for those living in Egypt during the Roman Empire, whose roots and traditions can be traced back to the Macedonian-Greek immigrants.
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thrall either to the Sasanian padishah or the Byzantine em peror. Within five years Jerusalem, Damascus, and Ctesi phon were in fealty to the caliph in Medina and very soon thereafter Muslim armies had entered Anatolia and crossed the Oxus River. Amr ibn al- As convinced the caliph, 'Umar, that with Greater Syria and Iraq under Muslim control, the logical step would be an invasion of Egypt. Commanding an army of about four thousand horsemen, Amr entered Egypt at alArish in AH 18/639 CE, took the port city of Pelusium, and arrived at the Byzantine fortress of Babylon early in 640. With reinforcements sent from the Hijaz, Amr proceeded to invest the fortress since it proved impossible to take by storm. Amr positioned his army slightly north of the fortress in a very large encampment surrounded by a ditch where the troops were assigned living areas on the basis of tribal affiliation. In April 641 Babylon fell. Amr continued his campaign toward Alexandria without fear of rear attack. [See also Alexandria; Alexandrian Empire; Byzantine Em Parts of the original army invaded the Faiyum and eventu pire; Ptolemies; Roman Empire; Saqqara; and Seleucids.] ally conquered Middle and Upper Egypt up to the First Cat BIBLIOGRAPHY aract at Aswan. By the end of the year Alexandria was in Muslim hands. Alexandria and Alexandrianisms: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in May, 1993. Malibu, forthcoming. By 'Umar's orders Amr returned to Fustat and made it Bianchi, Robert Steven. Cleopatra's Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies. Brook his headquarters and capital ('asimah) from which to plan lyn, 1988. the further conquest of the contingent portions of the south Bianchi, Robert Steven. "The New Alexandriana: A Personal View of ern littoral of the Mediterranean and the assimilation of die History of the Great Library of Alexandria and die Current Plans for its Revival." Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt, Egypt into the ever-expanding dar al-Islam (Muslim terri no. 148 (Winter 1989-1990): 1-5. tory) . Although this action triggered a certain eclipse of Al Bowman, Alan K. Egypt after the Pharaohs: 332 BC-AD 32. Berkeley, exandrian prominence, it laid the foundation for the modern 1986. city of Cairo. Dack, E. van't, et al. The fudean-Syrian-Egyptian Conflict of 103-101 B.C.: A Multilingual Dossier Concerning a "War of Sceptres." CollecIt is difficult to understand fully the reasons that facilitated tanea Hellenistica, 1. Brussels, 1989. the seemingly easy conquest of so rich and vitally important Johnson, Janet H., ed. Life in a Multi-Cultural Society: Egypt from Cam-a part of the Byzantine Empire. Egypt had been rent by the byses to Constantine and Beyond. University of Chicago, Oriental InSasanian invasion of 619 and the subsequent decade of oc stitute, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 51 Chicago, cupation, a ravaged pawn in the larger unresolved power 1992. snuggle of the Sasanian and Byzantine polities. The reli Pearson, Birger A. "Earliest Christianity in Egypt: Some Observa tions." In The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, edited by Birger A. gious doctrinal strife that accompanied the advent of Chris Pearson and James E. Goehring, pp. 132-160. Studies in Antiquity tianity was fully echoed in Egypt where the Melkites (those and Christianity, 1. Philadelphia, 1986. loyal to the Orthodox church) proved unequal to the task of Ray, J. D. The Archive of Hor. Egypt Exploration Society, Texts from converting the very strongly monastic-oriented CopticExcavations, Memoir 2. London, 1976. speaking masses (the Monothelites). Whereas the Melkites Samuel, Alan E. The Shifting Sands of History: Interpretations of Ptole maic Egypt. Publications of die Associations of Ancient Historians, might be seen as dominating the cities and fortresses along 2. Lanham, Md., 1989. the Nile, the Copts won the allegiance of the peasantry. ROBERT STEVEN BIANCHI Their apparent neutrality during the Arab conquest facili tated Amr's progress and thus guaranteed sympathetic treat ment at his hands. Culturally, the countryside had been but Islamic E g y p t lightly hellenized, insuring the longer life of Coptic as com pared witii Greek in the slow arabization of Egypt. Following the death of the prophet Muhammad in M e dina in AH 10/632 CE his community of believers quickly con Immediately following the conquest, three parallel and in solidated tiieir control of Muslims, particularly among those termingling processes can be identified. First, Arabic tribes people who believed that their submission to the replaced Greek as the linguistic medium of government, and prophet was personal, hence temporary. T h e way became the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ordered Hellenic and Sa clear for carrying the message of Islam to the northern and sanian effigies to be removed from the coinage. All the in northeastern areas of the Arabian Peninsula, which were in scriptions were in Arabic. Bilingual documents were gradc
c
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ually replaced by entirely Arabic texts written by a new scribal class, most of whom were recruited from among the large number of early converts to Islam or the swell of im migrants arriving from the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Arabian Peninsula. So great was the prominence of Arabic as the mode of contact with the authorities that even the religious teaching texts of the Coptic church became bilin gual toward the end of the tenth century. Second, as the scanty sources imply, there was very little pressure on the Egyptian population to convert. However, advancement and full admission to governing status entailed conversion to Islam. Early in tire eight century local Coptic dignitaries were replaced by Arabic-speaking Muslims as tax collectors and adjudicators, and the scene for accelerated conversion was set. Exact figures are rare, but the greater part of the population seems to have been Muslim at the time of the Fatimid conquest in AH 358/969 CE. Third, a process of acculturation began with soldiers from the conquering army who settled down in Egypt and im migrants in ever-increasing numbers from Greater Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and even Iran. The long history of the Nile Valley dictated an adaptation to the mores and regulations (particularly agricultural) so delicate that to im pose others too harshly would disturb the rich ebb and flow of daily life. Very soon the settlers found themselves cele brating national feasts of pharaonic origin, utilizing the mil lennial norms of planting and harvesting to schedules that followed Ptolemaic and Coptic formulas and finding them selves accommodating rather than dictating. Politically, Egypt mirrored the shifts of power within the dar ai-hlam without substantial injury. The seizure of the caliphate by the 'Abbasids in AH 132/750 CE signaled little to the population except at Fustat when a new government precinct called al-Askar appeared slightly to the north. When Ahmad ibn Tulun became governor in 254/868, the calm was somewhat broken as he assumed autonomous au thority. He reduced the revenues paid to Baghdad and used this extra income to raise his own army with which he ar rogated the role of protector of Syria. These new moneys also permitted an ambitious building program centered on Ibn Tulun's new ruling quarter of al-Qata'i ("the fiefs," which were parceled to his most loyal officers) to tire north east of Fustat-Askar. Ibn Tulun's crowning works were his palace at tire foot of the Muqattam Hills; his Friday mosque, one of the pearls of Islamic architecture, on Jabal Yashkur; and an aqueduct to carry water to al-Qata'i. [See Mosque.] Nevertheless, the Tulunids remained loyal to the 'Abbasid caliphate. Egypt was prosperous and generally at peace. However, a new and powerful threat attended from the west where the heterodox Isma'ili Fatimid dynasty had estab lished its own caliphate. Baghdad reacted quickly, sending in 292/905 an army under Muhammad ibn Tughj, who ruled under the title of al-Ikhshid. T h e 'Abbasids repelled the early Fatimid attacks and concentrated their efforts on maintain
ing the prosperity of the countty. A large number of Iraqi Arabs and Turks came to Egypt as soldiers and bureaucrats. Eventually, Baghdad was too strapped to send yet another army when the Fatimid forces under Gawhar appeared in 358/969. Egypt was taken and loyalty was sworn to a Shi'i caliphate for the next two centuries. The Fatimid dynasty (AH 358-567/969-1171 CE) repre sents a watershed in Egyptian Islamic history. Because the Fatimids could not destroy the Sunni 'Abbasid caliphate and were unable to maintain their ascendancy in the Maghrib, they concentrated on Egypt. They gave to the country an independence that capped the autonomy achieved by the Tulunids. Egypt enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity based on improved agriculture; on control of the trade with China and southwestern Asia; and on discovery of large gold de posits in the Wadi Allaqi in Nubia. The Fatimids regularized trade between Egypt and inner Africa, which offered slaves and ivory, and welcomed European and Byzantine mer chants with whom they expanded their commercial and in dustrial endeavours, particularly in textiles. The Fatimids had a high sense of their mission to win the allegiance of the entire dar al-Islam and particularly to pro pagandize of their family descent from the Prophet's daugh ter. It would seem that they were imbued with an almost Byzantine sense of ritual and ceremonial. All of these aspi rations were bodied forth in their splendid new walled cap ital of Cairo (Ar., al-Qahira, "the Victorious"), laid out as a formally divided rectangle with eight gates to the northeast of the amalgamated Fustat-Askar-Qata'i. Within were two palaces divided by a plaza and al-Azhar Mosque, originally an institution for training Fatimid propagandists. Later the mosque of al-Hakim was built immediately adjacent to the two principal northern gates and dedicated in 400/1010. Fatimid piety echoed tire ancient Egyptian veneration of tire dead and tire importance of the tomb structure. Domed mausolea appeared in the Southern Cemetery honoring an cestors and immediate family. The purported head of the Prophet's grandson Husayn was interred in a splendid mausoleum-cum-mosque within the royal quarter. All of these shrines were visited and venerated by Sunni and Shi'i alike. This glamour and prosperity were threatened. T h e Seljuk Turks who took over tire 'Abbasid hegemony declared an aim of destroying the heretical Fatimid dynasty. Despite the conquest of Anatolia and the incursion of tire Crusaders against the Seljuks, the Fatimids did not take advantage of their reprieve, except to rebuild the walls of Cairo in stone and to enclose the mosque of al-Hakim. They could not govern either their armies or their bureaucracy. Succession was attended by family friction, deceit, and tire mishandling of policy by successive viziers, some of whom were Chris tians and Jews, who were proof of Fatimid tolerance. Low Nile floodings caused famine. The new Seljuk principates of Syria were pressing upon the Crusader states; both hun gered for the riches of Fatimid Egypt and by 564/1169 both
EGYPT EXPLORATION SOCIETY were marching on it. The vizier Shawar set fire to the older parts of the city, particularly Fustat, and tiien invited the Syrian army to enter Cairo to protect it from the forays of the Crusader army. The commander, Shirkuh, had himself proclaimed vizier, and after his death his nephew, Salah adDin (Saladin) assumed command and deposed the Fatimid caliph in 567/1171. T h e peaceful transition of religious allegiance to the Abbasid Sunni caliphate was proof of just how little the Fatimid ideology had penetrated the Egyptian community. Salah adDin introduced strict Sunnism on Egypt inspired by the thrust of what can be termed tire "Seljuk dispensation." With the introduction of the madrasah (theological school), he insured an orthodox legal system and a cadre of specifi cally trained bureaucrats. He imposed the iqta system whereby the productive land of Egypt was tied to the main tenance of the army with a consequent diminution of private property. When his nominal ruler, Nur ad-Din of Damas cus, died, Salah ad-Din assumed tire title of sultan and took charge of the counter-Crusade that eventually restored Je rusalem to the dar al-Islam and secured Greater Syria to the rule of his dynasty, tire Ayyubids. T h e final portion of tire dispensation, the khanqah (a convent for tire training of Sufis to eliminate the possibility of any ShiT strain taldng root), was firmly established in Egypt through the patronage of the sultan and his family. c
In all other respects the Ayyubids built on the heritage of the Fatimids. They destroyed none of the mausolea, which through visitation and invocation had become part of Cairene life; indeed they went further by turning the idea toward Sunni ends with the erection of the large domed structure in the Southern Cemetery, which housed the remains of Imam ShafTi (d. 204/820), the founder of the madhhab (legal school) now professed by the majority of Egyptians. Where taste was concerned, tire earlier Fatimid tendencies toward revived classical and Maghribi models were replaced by those emanating from Greater Syria. This was particu larly noticeable in the great Citadel (initiated by Salah adDin) built on the middle peaks of the Muqattam hills with walls spreading to take in al-Qahira to tire north and much of Fustat to the south. By tire end of the twelfth century CE Egypt was orthodox in belief, prosperous, well protected, and connected to tire markets of the Mediterranean, tire Far East, and southeast Asia. In the following century, this strong entity eliminated the Crusader states and protected itself from tire Mongols. [See also 'Abbasid Caliphate; Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynas ties; Cairo; Fatimid Dynasty; and Fustat.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
For the only synoptic surveys of Islamic Egypt, see Stanley Lane-
Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (London, 1901,) and Gas ton Wiet, L'Egypte arabe (Paris, 1937.) A deeper, more idiosyncratic study of the evolution of Egypt's history in thelslamic period is avail
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able in Jean-Claude Garcin, Espaces, pouvoirs et ideologies de I'Egypte medievale (London, 1987.) The classic study of the Conquest remains Alfred J. Butier, The Arab Conquest of Egypt, edited by P. M. Fraser (Oxford, 1978.) A far more mettiesome argument is conveyed in Vassilios Christides' article on the period 602-750, "Misr," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, newed., vol. 7, pp. 152-160 (Leiden, i960-). For the development of the capital tiirough the Fatimid period, see die article on Fustat. For more particular aspects of the Fatimid period, see Leila Al-Imad, The Fatimid Vizierate, 969-1172 (Berlin, 1990), and
Paula Sanders, The Court Ceremonial of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt (Syracuse, 1994). Important economic data is provided in Claude Cahen, Makhzumiyyat (Leiden, 1977). Wheeler M. Thackston's fully
annotated translation, Nasir-i Khusraw's "Book of Travels" (Albany, N.Y., 1986), adds depth to the received view of Cairo's apogee of pros perity in the first half of the eleventh century CE. The architecture of
the period is surveyed in K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1940,) and The Muslim Architecture of Egypt, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952-1959.) Short though it was, the Ayyubid period was of vast importance in that it set the scene for the Mamluks. See the crucial bibliography in Heinz Halm, "Misr," Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed„ vol. 7, pp. 164165 (Leiden, 1960-), covering the period 1171-1250 CE. For the urban growth of Cairo, see Neil D. Mackenzie, Ayyubid Cairo: A Topograph
ical Study (Cairo, 1992). GEORGE T. SCANLON
E G Y P T E X P L O R A T I O N S O C I E T Y . Founded in 1882 by Amelia Edwards, an English writer who had vis ited Egypt in 1873 - d had seen the need for organized ex cavation, the Egypt Exploration Society of London aims to undertake surveys and excavations at ancient sites in Egypt and to publish the results of this work. The earliest exca vations concentrated on trying to establish links between ar chaeological remains in the Nile Delta and the stories of the Hebrew Bible, but activities soon expanded to cover all areas of tire country and all periods of ancient Egyptian history. Many excavators have worked for tire society including one of the most influential figures in Egyptian archaeology, Sir W. M. F. Petrie. T h e society is currently working at a number of sites. The Survey of Memphis aims to illuminate the topography of the ancient capital. At Saqqara a joint expedition with the National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, The Netherlands, concentrates on tire New Kingdom cemetery in which the tombs of important officials are being recorded. At Amarna, the city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the society has resumed excavation and survey in a place of major importance. Qasr Ibrim, tire last surviving site available for excavation in Egyptian Nubia, is a fortress-town and religious center that has yielded vast quantities of material remains and written documents. an
In addition to reports of excavations and publications of texts, the society publishes an annual periodical, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. Since 1991 the J E / l h a s been joined
208
EGYPTIAN
can be divided into two main stages, characterized by a ma jor typological change from synthetic to analytic patterns in the nominal syntax and in the verbal system. Each of these two stages of tire language can be further subdivided into three different phases, affecting primarily the sphere of gra phemes. Older Egyptian. The forms of Older Egyptian consisted of tire language of all written texts from 3000 to 1300 BCE, surviving in formal religious texts until the second century CE. It has three main phases: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyp tian, and Late Middle Egyptian. BIBLIOGRAPHY Old Egyptian. The language of the Old Kingdom and Dawson, Wan-en R., and Eric P. Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. the First Intermediate Period (3000-2000) is known as Old 2d rev. ed. London, 1972. Brief biographies of major figures in the Egyptian. The main documents of this stage of the language history of exploration and excavation in Egypt. A third edition is in are represented by the religious corpus of tire Pyramid Texts press. and by a sizable number of so-called autobiographies on tire Drower, Margaret S. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. London, external walls of tire rock tombs of the administrative elite. 19S5. The period of Petrie's work for the Egypt Exploration Society is covered in early chapters. Middle Egyptian. Also termed Classical Egyptian, Mid Edwards, Amelia B. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1S77). London, dle Egyptian lasted from the Middle Kingdom to the end of 1982. Edwards's account of her visit to Egypt in the winter of 1873— tire eighteenth dynasty (2000-1300). Middle Egyptian is tire 1874. classical language of Egyptian literature, expressed in a va James, T. G. H., ed. Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Exploration Society, riety of texts that can be classified according to two main 1882-1982. London, 1982. Illustrated history of the Society's work, genres. The first, the "Instructions," are wisdom texts nor published to coincide with its centenary. mally addressed from a father to a son, which conveyed the PATRICIA SPENCER educational and professional expectations of Egyptian so ciety. The most renowned examples are the Instructions of the Vizier Ptahhotep and the Instructions for Merikare. Some E G Y P T I A N . T h e language of ancient Egypt represents of these moral texts, such as the Admonitions oflpu-Wer, are an autonomous branch of one of the most widespread lan in fact philosophical discussions ex eventu on tire state of the guage families in the world, variously called Afroasiatic, country taking as a point of departure the political evolution Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic and comprising, from from the Old to the Middle Kingdom, a period generally antiquity to the present time, the entire area of the eastern refered to as the First Intermediate Period. The second, the Mediterranean, northern Africa, and western Asia. The six Tales, are narratives relating the adventures of a specific hero individual branches of the Afroasiatic family are Ancient and representing the vehicle of individual, as opposed to Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic, Omotic. An societal, concerns. The most famous specimens of this genre cient Egyptian shows tire closest relations to Semitic and are the Tale of Sinuhe and the Shipwrecked Sailor. Some Berber, more distant ones to Cushitic (except Beja, a North texts, such as the Eloquent Peasant, combine features and ern Cushitic language possibly derived from tire language of contents of both main genres. fire people called md^w in Egyptian texts) and Chadic. Af roasiatic languages are generally characterized by the follow Late Middle Egyptian. In use from the late New King ing linguistic features not all of which are shared by Egyp dom to the end of Egyptian civilization, Late Middle Egyp tian: the presence of bi- or triconsonantal lexical roots; a tian is the language of mainly religious texts (rituals, mytho consonantal system displaying a series of ejective, emphatic, logical inscriptions, hymns). It maintains the linguistic or glottalized phonemes (sound units) alongside tire voiced su-uctures of the classical language, but especially in the and tire voiceless series; a vocalic system originally limited Greco-Roman period (Ptolemaic Egyptian: third century to tire three phonemes /a/ /i/ /u/; a nominal feminine suffix BCE-second century CE), it shows an enormous extension in *-at; a rather rudimentary and often lexicalized case system; its set of hieroglyphic signs. a nominal prefix m-; an adjectival suffix -i, called nisba; a Older Egyptian is characterized by its preference for syn basic opposition between prefix (dynamic) and suffix con thetic grammatical structures. It displays a full set of mor jugation (stative) in the verbal system; a conjugation pattern phological suffixes indicating gender and number; it exhibits 1st sg. *'a-, 2d *£-, 3d masc. *y~, fern. *Z-, 1st pi. *«-, with no definite article: rmt "the man," "a man"; it maintains the supplementary suffixes in tire 2d and 3d fern. pi. verb-subject-object order in verbal formations (sdm=k n=f "may you listen to him"). The history of the Egyptian language, which remained in use over more than four millennia (c. 3000 BCE-1300 C E ) , L a t e r Egyptian. The forms of Later Egyptian are docby a color magazine, Egyptian Archaeology, which presents excavation reports and other articles in a more popular form. T h e Egypt Exploration Society remains one of the major excavating bodies in Egypt and has an international mem bership now amounting to nearly three thousand individuals and libraries. Membership is open to all with an interest in the civilization of ancient Egypt. [See also Amarna, Tell el-; Saqqara; and the biography of Petrie.J
EGYPTIAN umented from the nineteenth dynasty to the Middle Ages (1300 BCE-1300 CE) and consisted of Late Egyptian, Coptic, and Demotic. Late Egyptian. In use from 1300 to 700 BCE, Late Egyp tian was the language of written records from the second part of the New Kingdom. It primarily conveys the rich en tertainment literature of the nineteenth dynasty, consisting of both traditional forms, for example, the Tale of the Two Brothers, the Tale of Wenamun, or the Instructions ofAni and the Instructions of Amenemope, and of new literary genres, such as the mythological tale or love poetry. Late Egyptian was also the idiom of the Ramesside bureaucracy: for ex ample, archival documents from the Theban necropolis or school texts such as the Miscellanies. Demotic. In use from the seventh century BCE to the fifth century CE, Demotic was the language of administration and literature during the Late Period (seventh-fourth century BCE). Although grammatically it closely continues Late Egyptian, Demotic differs radically from it in its graphic system. Important texts in Demotic are the narrative cycles of Setne-Khaemwase and of Petubastis and the instructions of Papyrus Insinger and Onkhsheshonqi. Coptic. In use from the fourth through fourteenth cen turies CE, Coptic was the language of Christian Egypt, writ ten in a variety of the Greek alphabet completed by six or seven Demotic signs to indicate Egyptian phonemes absent in Greek. As a spoken language Coptic was superseded by Arabic from the ninth century, but it survives to the present in the liturgy of tire Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt. As opposed to Older Egyptian, Later Egyptian developed analytic features. Suffixal markers of morphological oppo sitions are dropped and functionally replaced by prefixal morphemes, the demonstrative "this" and the numeral "one" evolving into the definite and the indefinite article respectively. Periphrastic patterns in the order subject-verbobject supersede older verb-subject-object verbal forma tions. Unless otherwise specified, the following grammatical sketch refers to Older Egyptian, more specifically to the lan guage of classical Middle Egyptian literature. Writing System. The language of Ancient Egypt was written in a monumental script and its cursive varieties. T h e monumental script is known as hieroglyphs. These are pictographic signs that represent living beings and objects, such as gods or people, animals, parts of the human or animal body, plants, stars, buildings, furniture, containers, and so forth. T h e number of hieroglyphic signs varied from ap proximately one thousand in the Old Kingdom down to about 750 in the classical language, but—following the de cline of a centralized school system—increased dramatically to many thousands during the Ptolemaic and Roman rule in the country. In this writing system, phonological and ideographic prin
209
ciples appear combined: a written word consists of a se quence of signs, called phonograms, which convey a sub stantial portion of its phonological structure: normally all the consonants, occasionally also the semivocalic phonemes. Each phonogram can express one, two, or three consonants of the language. The sequence of phonograms is usually followed by a "determinative," which indicates iconically the semantic sphere of the word: for example, a sitting god expresses the lexical sphere of "god, divine," a scribe's outfit indicates the semantic realm of "writing," a stylized desert landscape denotes the word as a foreign toponym. Although some words in common use may be written only with pho nograms, many items of the basic vocabulary are expressed by hieroglyphic signs that represent, evoke, or symbolize their own meaning: these are called logograms or ideograms: for example, the hieroglyphic sign representing a human head is used to signify the lexeme "head." T h e use of a hieroglyphic sign as logogram or ideogram is made visually explicit through a vertical stroke following the sign. As part of its inventory of phonograms, hieroglyphic writ ing displayed a set of twenty-four "alphabetic" signs that expressed one consonantal phoneme. Each of these signs corresponded to one consonantal or semiconsonantal pho neme of Egyptian; in this way, we can obtain an insight into the complete phonological system of the language, the only exception being the consonant /l/, for which a distinct graph eme appears only in Demotic. In spite of the presence of this exact correspondence between monoconsonantal signs and the phoneme inventory, hieroglyphs never developed a genuine alphabetic system. This was due to the culturally significant connection between the hieroglyphic sign and its pictographic content, a connection that in the later periods of the history of the hieroglyphic system, especially in Ptol emaic Egyptian, led to the emergence of hitherto unknown signs, of new phonological values for known signs, and of cryptographic solutions. The hieroglyphic system was mostly used for monumen tal purposes, and only rarely in a cursive form adopted in religious texts of the Middle and the New Kingdom. During the three millennia of their productive use, hieroglyphs de veloped two manual forms: while Hieratic (2600 BCE-third century CE) represents a direct cursive rendering, with lig atures and diacritic signs, of individual hieroglyphs, Demotic (seventh century BCE-fifth century CE) modifies completely the writing conventions by introducing a sim plification of hieratic sign-groups. In Coptic, the hiero glyphic-based system is replaced by an alphabet derived from the Greek one, with the addition of six or seven De motic signs for the indication of phonemes absent from Greek. The basic orientation of the Egyptian writing system, and the only one used in the cursive varieties, is from right to left; in epigraphic, that is, monumental texts, this order is
210
EGYPTIAN FABLE I . Consonants of Older Egyptian Consonants
Labial
Apical
Stops Voiceless Voiced
plvl b/b/
Fricatives Voiceless Voiced
flil
sN zM
Nasals
m /ml
Alveo-palatal
Palatal
Velar
Uvular
tN
t/cl
d/H
k lixi ilsl
k, qlq/
did/
hM
h/x/
*/«/
h/h/
Glottal
h/h/
in
n In/
3, »> r IV
Lateral Vibrant
r/R/
J/R/
w /w/
Glides
yjjlil
often inverted for reasons of symmetry or artistic compo sition. Phonology. T h e exact phonological value of many Egyp tian consonants is obscured by difficulties in establishing re liable Afroasiatic correspondences: Vocalism and prosody can only be reconstructed by combining tire contemporary Akkadian transcriptions of the second millennium with the later Greek transcriptions of the Late Period (corresponding roughly to spoken Demotic) and the Coptic evidence of the first millennium CE. For Older Egyptian, we can posit the phonological inven tory shown in table i (the conventional Egyptological tran scriptions are indicated in italics). T h e Egyptian phonolog ical system does not display the "emphatic" phonemes common to many Afroasiatic languages. Voiced stops, how ever, were often articulated as "globalized" consonants; thus, IA/ = [t'] 1)1 = [c'] Igl = [k']. The phoneme conven tionally transcribed 3 (aleph), originally a uvular vibrant probably articulated like r (grasseye) in French, corresponds to Afroasiatic *r or */. T h e existence of a phoneme /l/ in Egyptian is well established on the basis of Afroasiatic cor respondences and of its presence in Coptic; yet, unlike all other consonantal phonemes, /l/ shows no unequivocal graphic rendering, being expressed in different lexemes by <3>, (n), or (nr). T h e opposition between voiced and voiceless consonants tends to be progressively neutralized into tire voiceless vari ant. During the second millennium, the following sound changes took place: (a) the uvulat vibrant /R/ acquired the articulation /?/ (glottal stop); (b) the point of articulation was progressively moved to the front—velar to palatal, pal atal to apical; (c) oppositions between fricatives in the pal atal region (/§/, /c/, /x/) tended to be neutralized into /s/; and (d) final /r/ and ft/ tended to become /'/, then to disappear. During the first millennium, the opposition between ayin /r/ and 'aleph /?/ was also neutralized. The original set of vowels (see table 2) underwent a cer tain number of historical changes, Already during the sec ond millennium, short stressed /i/ and /u/ merged into /e/, s
Pharyngeal
s
c
and long /u:/ turned into /e:/. Around 1000, long /a:/ became /o:/, a phonetic evolution similar to the contemporaneous "Canaanite shift" in Northwest Semitic. There was also a change in the short tonic from /a/ to /o/, but Coptic shows that this affected only a portion of tire Egyptian linguistic domain. Egyptian unstressed vowels progressively lost pho nological status and became realized as schwa (a). In the classical language, the stress could lie only on the ultimate or penultimate syllable. Although both closed and open syllables are found in pretonic position, tire only pos sible structure in syllables following the stress is the closed syllable with short vowel. The stressed vowel of a penulti mate open syllable is long; some scholars posit the existence of extralong syllables under oxytone stress. In addition to final /;/, /w/, /t/ and /r/, unstressed vowels were dropped be tween 2000 and 1600. Morphology. T h e basic Egyptian morphological unit of nouns is a biliteral or triliteral root, which is modified by fiectional suffixes (see table 3 ) . Although some scholars de tect remnants of the Afroasiatic case system in tire Egyptian verbal paradigm, the syntactic structure of classical Egyp tian was so rigid that cases could not have played a produc tive role in the language in historical times. Short unstressed vowels in final position are not posited for classical Egyptian. Adjectives are morphologically and syntactically treated like substantives. Very common is the derivational pattern called nisbation, in which a morpheme -j is added to a noun to form its corresponding adjective: ntr, "god," ntrj "di vine." T h e three types of pronouns are listed in table 4. Inde-
TABLE 2.
Vowels
Vowels of Older Egyptian Short
Long
Front
HI
/i:/
Middle
/a/
/a:/
Back
M
/u:/
EGYPTIAN TABLE 3. Nominal Morphology in Older Egyptian
Singular Dual Plural
Masculine
Feminine
.cp, .w .wj .cb, .io, .ww
.t •tj • U jjt, -wt
pendent pronouns are used for tire topicalized subject of sentences witir nominal or adjectival predicate in the first person (jnkjtj=k "I am your father") and for the focalized subject of nominal or verbal cleft sentences: ntfz3 Wsjr "he is Osiris' son"; jnkjnj=j sw "it is I who shall bring it." D e pendent pronouns are used as the object of a transitive verb (sdm=fwj "he will hear m e " ) , as tire subject of a qualifying nominal sentence (nfr tw hn=j "you are happy with me") and of an adverbial sentence in the first and second persons only after an initial particle (mk wj m-b3h=k "Look, I am in front of you"). Suffix pronouns are used as the subject of verbal forms, as possessive pronoun, and as object of prep ositions: dj=k r=k n=j h.t=j "you shall truly (lit., to-you) give me (= to-me) my possessions." Demonstratives are characterized by a deictic (specifying) element preceded by the indicator of gender and number (masc, pn, pf, pw; fern., t.n, tf, tw; rmt pf "that man"; hjm.t tn "this woman"). They normally follow the noun to which they refer. T h e plurals nn, nf, nn are also used with following genitive as pronouns in partitive constructions: nn nj srjw.w "these officials." Later Egyptian developed a set of definite articles from the proclitic demonstrative series p3, t3, pi. n3; p3-rm(t) "the man"; t3-hm(.t) "the woman"; n3-srj.w "the officials," as well as an indefinite article from the numeral w'j "one": w'-rrnt "a man." T h e relative pronoun is masc. ntj; fern, nt.t; pi. ntj.w"whoj
TABLE 4.
Personal Pronouns in Older Egyptian Independent
Singular I c. 2 m.
2f. 3 m. 3 i.
jnk nth, twt} ntt, tmt} ntj, swt nts, stt
Dependent
wj
Suffix
tn sw sj, St
=j =k =t =/ =s
nttnj ntsnj
nj tnj snj
=nj =tnj =snj
jnn nttn ntsn
n tn sn, st
=n =tn =sn
1
1
yt
w
Dual I c.
2
C
3 c.
Plural I c.
2 C. 3 c.
Uwt, tmt, swt, and stt are archaic forms found mainly in Old Kingdom religious texts.
211
which/that." It only refers to specific (i.e., semantically determined) antecedents because in Egyptian indefinite antecedents are not resumed by a relative, but by a circumstantial, clause: rmt ntj rh.n=j sw "the man whom I know" (lit., "man that I know him," as opposed to rmt rh.n=j sw "a man that I know," lit., "man—I know him"). Peculiar to Egyptian is the presence of a relative pronoun, which semantically incorporates negation: masc. jwtj, fern. jwt.t, pi. jwtj.w "who/whiclr/tlratnot." Basic interrogative pronouns are m "who?", "what?", jh "what?", jsst "what?". They can be combined with prepo sitions or particles to form complex pronouns:;K-m "who?", literally, "Focus-who"; hr-m "why?", literally, "on-what?". T h e most common numerals show etymological connec tions with other languages of the Afroasiatic family: w'j "one," sn.wj"two," hmt.w "three,"j/i/.w "four," dj.w "five," srs.w "six," sfh.w "seven," htnn.w "eight," psd.w "nine," mdw "ten," dw.tj "twenty," m'b3 "thirty," km "forty," ty.w "fifty," sjsy.w "sixty," sfhy.w "seventy," hmny.w "eighty," psdy.w "ninety," sn.t "one hundred," h.3 "one thousand," db' "ten thousand," hfn "one hundred thousand," hh "one million." It is noteworthy that five is etymologically a nisba of Afroasiatic *yad "hand," which is no longer a productive word in historical Egyptian, that "twenty" is an old dual of "ten," that "thirty" and "forty" are independent lexemes but cardinals from "fifty" to "ninety" represent the plural forms of tire respective units "five" through "nine." Num bers are seldom written out; they are mostly rendered graph ically, strokes indicating the units, and special hieroglyphs being used for the powers of "ten." Ordinals are derived from cardinals through the addition of a suffx .nw (from 2 to 9, e.g., hmt.nw "third"), or the prefrxation of the participle mh "filling" to tire cardinal number (from 10 onward, e.g., mh-20 "twentieth"). Finite verbal forms are built by annexing a suffix pronoun to the root, either directly or after a morpheme indicating tense, aspect, or voice features. The most important verbal indicators are .n (past tense; sdm.n=j "I heard"), .t (perfec tive, sometimes prospective aspect, n sdm.t=f"he had not heard," jw.t=f"he shall come"), .w (prospective aspect and passive voice, jrj.w =f "it has been/shall be done), .tw (pas sive voice, sdm.tw=k "you are heard"). Classes of so-called "weak" verbal roots, whose third radical is a semiconsonantal j or w, show the reduplication of tire second radical and the presence of a stressed vowel between tire two con sonants in a form indicating in Semitic languages the imperfective aspect or the factitive stem, such as the imperfective in Akkadian and the D-stem throughout Semitic: In Egyptian this form, which is conventionally called emphatic, fulfills the function of pragmatic "theme" of the sentence in which it appears: mrr=s wj "(the-fact-that-)she loves me." In such sentences, the attentional stress normally lies on an adverbial modifier. The nonreduplicated verbal form is fur ther subdivided into temporally unmarked or future func-
212
EGYPTIAN
tions, depending on the temporal setting of the context. T h e imperative has no suffix element in the singular, but some times, especially with weak verbs, a suffix .w or ,y in the plural. Egyptian also exhibits a verbal form, variously called old perfective, stative, or pseudoparticiple, which indicates the wide semantic range of verbal "perfectivity," from perfec tive aspect with intransitive verbs to passive voice with tran sitive verbs. This form displays a set of suffix pronouns that are etymologically linked to the forms of the Semitic suffix conjugation. Examples are prj.kw "I have come forth," hpr.tj "you have become," and rdj.w "it has been given." Nonfinite forms of the Egyptian verb are (i) the participle (nomen agentis), which exhibits nominal morphology and is derived from the verbal stem (2) the infinitive (nomen actionis), which shows a suffix .0 in the regular verbs and a suffix ,t in some classes of weak verbs (mrj.t "to love," "love"). A special type of infinitive characterized by a suffix .10 is used after verbs of negative predication, such as tm "not to do." It is a matter of scholarly dispute whether the radical element in finite forms was originally a nomen agentis (m)7=/"*a-loving-one-is-he" > "he loves") or a nomen actionis (m?y=/"loving-of-him" > "he loves"). Verbal predi cations could also be expressed by prepositional construc tions (sw hr sdm "he is on hearing" > "he is hearing"; jw—f r mrj.t "he is toward loving" > "he is going to love," "he will love"); constructions such as these characterize the evo lution of the verbal system in Later Egyptian. The most frequent prepositions are m "in," "with"; n "to," "for"; r "toward"; mj "as," "like"; hr "on"; hr "un der"; hn "with"; hft "according to"; and hntj "before." Prepositional phrases follow the noun or the verb they mod ify. Particularly noteworthy is the presence of the preposi tion hr "near", whose original semantic value (A hr B "A is near B") was applied to any situation in which the two par ticipants A and B find themselves at different hierarchical levels, A being socioculturally higher than B (sdd=fhr msj.w "he will speak to the children") or vice versa B higher than A (jmshy hr ntr '3 "honored by the great god"). The basic negative particle is n (cf. Semitic *la ): n rh.n=f "he does not know": A variant of this, conventionally ttanscribed nn, is used as predicative negation: nn m3'.tjw "there are no trustwortiiy people." Syntax. Egyptian exhibits three sentence types, nominal, adverbial, and verbal, which are classified on the basis of the syntactic nature of their predicate—the subject being always a nominal phrase. 1. Nominal sentences, in which the predicate is either a substantive or an adjective. In categorical statements or qualifying adjectival sentences, the normal order of constit uents is predicate-subject: R'10 pw "this is Ra"; nfr mtn=j "my path is good." This sequence is modified into subjectpredicate in identifying sentences when both the subject and the predicate are semantically determined or specific (sn.t=f 1
spd.t "his sister is Sirius"), or in cleft sentences, when the subject is focalized (jn sn.t=f s'nh m=f'"it is his sister who causes his name to live"). Topicalization is achieved by means of extraposition, the topicalized syntagm being re sumed by a coreferential pronoun in the main clause. 2. Adverbial sentences, in which the predicate is an ad verbial or prepositional phrase; the order is always subjectpredicate: jzu NNjrp.t " N N is towards heaven"; hr.t=k m prw=k "your rations are in your house." 3. Verbal sentences, with verbal phrase; in which the order is predicate-subject (-object): h'.y=k "you shall appear"; h'm.n=fwj "he charged me." In Egyptian sentences, verbal forms often appear embed ded as theme or rheme of the utterance. In the Egyptological literature, this phenomenon is known as "transposition." The theme-rheme sequence is labeled "complex adverbial sentence": wgg 3s.n=fwj "(as for) weakness, it has seized m e " > "weakness has seized me". Thus, Egyptian syntax displays a comparatively high degree of topicalization and focalization phenomena. The bare verbal sentence with the sequence predicate-subject appears less frequently than in related languages, being limited to modal (including pro spective) functions. [See also Hieroglyphs.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, James P. The Inflection of the Verb in the Pyramid Texts. Bibliotlieca Aegyptia, vol. 2. Malibu, 1984. Cerny, Jaroslav, and Sarah I. Groll. A Late Egyptian Grammar. 3d ed. Studia Pohl, Series Maior, vol. 4. Rome, 1984.
Doret, Eric. The Narrative Verbal System of Old and Middle Egyptian. Cahiers d'Orientalisme, vol. 12. Geneva, 1986. Edel, Elmar. Altagyplisehe Grammatik. 2 vols. Analecta Orientalia, vols. 34-35. Rome, I955-I964Englund, Gertie, and Paul J. Frandsen, eds. Crossroad: Chaos or the
Beginning of a New Paradigm; Papers from the Conference on Egyptian Grammar, Helsinger, 28-30 May 1986. Carsten Niebuhr Institut Publications, 1. Copenhagen, 1986. Erman, Adolf, and Hermann Grapow. Worterbuch der dgyptischen Sprache. 7 vols. Leipzig and Berlin, 1926-1963.
Faulkner, Raymond O. A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. Ox ford, 1962.
Frandsen, Paul J. An Outline of the Late Egyptian Verbal System. Co penhagen, 1974.
Gardiner, Alan H, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs. 3d ed. Oxford, 1957. Johnson, Janet H. The Demotic Verbal System. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 38. Chicago, 1976.
Junge, Friedrich. Syntax der mittelagyptischen Literatursprache. Mainz, 1978. Loprieno, Antonio. Das VerbalsystemimAgyptischenundimSemitischen:
Zur Grundlegung einer Aspekttheorie. GSttinger Orientforschungen, vol. IV.17. Wiesbaden, 1986.
Loprieno, Antonio, ed. Crossroads II: Proceedings of the Second Interna tional Conference on Egyptian Grammar, Los Angeles, October 17-20, 1990. Lingua Aegyptia, vol. 1. Gottingen, 1991. Ossing, Jiirgen. Die Nominalbildung des Agyptischen. 2 vols. Mainz, 1976.
EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS Polotsky, Hans Jakob. Collected Papers. Jerusalem, 1971. Polotsky, Hans Jakob. "Les transpositions du verbe en egyptien clas-
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B1.1; 2.3; 3.3; 4.4). All other texts were written in columns on a roll held horizontally, parallel to tire fibers and perpen sique." Israel Oriental Studies 6 (1976): 1-50. dicular to the joins. At tire end of the fifth century a few Polotsky, Hans Jakob. Grandlagen des koptischen Satzbaus. 2 vols. Amer contracts were also written this way (TAD B4.6; 7.1-3). ican Studies in Papyrology, vols. 28-29. Decatur, III, 1988-1990. Schenkel, Wolfgang. Einfilhrung in die altagyptische Sprachwissenschaft.Letters. Letters may be classified according to four cat Darmstadt, 1990. egories—private, communal, official, and satrapal. At least Shisha-Halevy, Ariel. Coptic Grammatical Categories. Analecta Orien- eighteen letters may be assigned to the first category (TAD talia, vol. 53. Rome, 1986. A2.1-7; 3 . 1 - n ) . They are dispatched by peripatetic corre Vernus, Pascal. Future al Issue: Tense, Mood, and Aspect in Middle Egyp tian; Studies in Syntax and Semantics. Yale Egyptological Studies, vol.spondents, Jewish and Aramean soldiers receiving govern ment allotments (pre [TAD A2.3:8, 3.3:3; 64.2:6]). Their 4. New Haven, 1990. letters send and seek greetings, communicate matters of ANTONIO LOPRIENO concern, issue instructions, enter requests, and occasionally contain such a significant piece of historical information as EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS. [The tables re the succession to the throne of Nepherites in Epiph (= 27 ferred to throughout this entry appear as an appendix in volume September-26 October 399 BCE [TAD A 3.9]). 5.] Aramaic texts from the twenty-sixth dynasty through the The ten papyri in the communal archive of leader and Ptolemaic period were written (or found) in Egypt on pa perhaps chief priest Jedaniah, son of Gemariah, are histor pyrus, parchment, wood, ostraca, stone out croppings, sar ically the most significant of the Elephantine texts (TAD cophagi, funerary stelae, altars, jars, bowls, coins, statuettes, A4.1-10). T h e fragmentary Passover letter sent to him in seals, and bullae. Major centers of discovery were Memphis419/18 by one Hananiah instructs the Jewish garrison in tire Saqqara and Elephantine from the Persian period and Edfu proper observance of the two festivals (TAD A4.1). Three from the Ptolemaic period, but graffiti have turned up all other letters attest to the tension between the devotees of along the Nile from northern Giza to Nubian Tumas. The YHW and of Khmim (TAD A4.2-4) that ultimately led to particulars of discovery and publication of papyri, ostraca, the destruction of the Jewish temple on the island by the and jar inscriptions are listed chronologically in tabular form Khnum priests in connivance with the Persian governor Viaccording to category of text (tables 1, 14-15). Other texts, dranga (TAD A4.5-10). T h e most informative pieces are including ostraca and jar inscriptions, are arranged typologtwo drafts of a petition addressed to Bagohi, governor of ically and listed alphabetically according to museum or li Judah, on 25 November 407 BCE by Jedaniah and his col brary (tables 2-13). leagues, with a copy to the sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria (TAD A7-8). In an oral memorandum, Bagohi and P a p y r i a n d P a r c h m e n t s . These documents fall into six Delaiah, son of Sanballat, agreed to a limited reconstruction categories: (1) thirty-six letters on papyrus and fourteen on of tire temple "on its site as it was formerly" but omitted parchment, plus numerous fragments. Twenty-eight papyri permission to offer animal sacrifices (TAD A4.9). Blood on belong to Elephantine (TAD [= Porten and Yardeni, the altar was to be the exclusive prerogative of Jerusalem. 1986-1993] A3.1-10; 4.1-10; 5.2, 5; 6.1-2) or Syene (As T h e Jews at Elephantine accepted the limitation and in a wan; TAD A2.1-4) and seven elsewhere—el-Hibeh (TAD further petition to "our lord," perhaps Arsames, offered him A3.11), Luxor (TAD A2.5-7), Saqqara (TAD A1.1; 5.1), a rich reward if he would allow reconstruction of the temple and an unknown locality (TAD A5.3, 4). A unique letter is (TAD A4.10). T h e last contract of the Anani(ah) archive from Adon, ldng of Ekron (c. 604-603 BCE), seeking aid (13 December 402 BCE) records the continued presence of from the pharaoh against the Babylonian onslaught. (2) tire temple of YHW (TAD 63.12:18-19), indicating that if forty-three contracts from Elephantine Island, mostly intact it had not yet been rebuilt, its place had not been taken by (495-400); one from el-Hibeh (515 [TAD B1.1]) and frag another structure. mentary court protocols from Saqqara (TAD B8.1-12). (3) two or three literary texts—The Words ofAhiqar (TAD C1.1) Five fragmentary letters may be classified as official, two and one or two fragmentary reworked Egyptian tales (TAD from Elephantine concerning an hereditary land lease (TAD C1.2). (4) one historical text—a fragmentary version of Da A5.2, 5), one from Saqqara dated 436/35 BCE (TAD A5.1), rius' Bisitun inscription (TAD C2.1). (5) tirirty accounts and two of unknown provenance (TAD A5.3-4). The per from Elephantine and Saqqara in the Persian period and sons involved in these letters are either Persians or Egyp Edfu in tire Ptolemaic period (TAD C3.1-29). (6) nine lists, tians. The letters associated with tire satrapal house of Ar likewise from Elephantine and Saqqara (TAD C4.1-9). sames (TAD A6) illustrate well tire bureaucratic procedures pursued in handling complaints and issuing instructions and There was a distinctive mode of writing for each type of orders. document. Letters and contracts were written in a single Legal D o c u m e n t s . T h e most intact of all the papyri are column on a roll held vertically, perpendicular to the fibers those acquired by purchase on the antiquities market. These and parallel to the joins. Although a letter frequently contin constitute two family archives. T h e other legal documents ued on the verso, contracts rarely did (exceptions are TAD
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(loosely referred to as "contracts") may be divided into five categories—deeds of obligation (TAD B4.1-6), conveyances (TAD B5.1-5), documents of wifehood (TAD B6.1-4), ju dicial oaths (TAD B7.1-4), and court records (TAD B8.112). Representative documents from the first three catego ries appear also in the family archives. The parties regularly (except for Egyptians), and witnesses and neighbors occa sionally, were identified by ethnicity (Aramean, Babylonian, Bacttian, Caspian, Jew, Khwarezmian), occupation ([mem ber] of a [military] detachment, builder, boatman, [temple] servitor), and usually by residence (Elephantine, Syene) as well. T h e numerous witness signatures attest a high degree of literacy among the colonists. T h e Mibtahiah archive contains eleven documents and spans three generations (471-410 BCE) of one of Elephantine's leading Jewish families. Mahseiah ("YH is refuge"), son of Jedaniah, may have named his daughter Mibtahiah ("YH is trust") with the biblical verses Psalms 91:2, 118:89 (hsh > bth) in mind, and she gave her two sons the patronyms Jedaniah and Mahseiah. Mibtahiah was twice mar ried, the second time to an Egyptian, Eshor, later known as Nathan. She accumulated three houses and four slaves; the houses passed on to her eldest son and the slaves were di vided between her two sons (TAD B 2 . 1 - I I ) . The Anani(ah) archive contains thirteen documents and spans two generations (456-402 BCE) of two interrelated families. The first family consists of the minor temple official Anani(ah), son of Azariah; his Egyptian slave-wife, Ta(pa)met; their two children, Pelatiah/Pilti and Jehoishma; and their son-in-law, Anani(ah), son of Haggai. The second family consists of the creditor and slave owner Meshullam, son of Zaccur, and his son, also named Zaccur, T h e elder Anani(ah) had but one house, acquired as a piece of aban doned property from a Caspian couple (TAD B3.4 [437 BCE]) and disposed of in parts and stages by bequest and sale, first to his wife (TAD B3.5), then to his daughter (TAD B3.7, 10, 11), and finally to his namesake son-in-law (TAD B3.12). When the elder Anani(ah) married the handmaiden Ta(pa)met, her master Meshullam barely provided her with a dowry (TAD B3.3), but Anani(ah)'s emancipated daugh ter was handsomely endowed by her adoptive brother, Zac cur (TAD B3.8). Literary a n d Historical Text. Eleven sheets containing fourteen columns of the Ahiqar text from Elephantine are preserved (TAD C1.1). T h e first five columns are narrative, relating the story of the "wise and skillful scribe . . . coun selor of all Assyria and [be]arer of the seal" for King Sen nacherib and his son, Esarhaddon. Decipherment of the erased customs account (TAD C3.7) underlying the Ahiqar text corroborates the present order of the narrative, man dates a rearrangement of the plates with the proverbs, and suggests that the conclusion of the narrative followed the end of the proverbs. Being on the outside of the scroll, it was lost (introduction to TAD C i . 1-2). T h e two fragments
of The Prophecy ofHor and The Demise ofRighteousness (TAD C1.2) are joined together by a thin strip in the middle (as proposed by Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni). T h e upper half of a fragmentary column is preserved on each side. On the recto the Egyptian magician Hor, known also from de motic texts, elusively tells the pharaoh "your bones shall not go down to Sheol." T h e verso details the breakdown of so cial order followed by a divinely proclaimed redeemer. The one historical text is a fragmentary copy of the orig inal Bisitun inscription dispatched by Darius I to centers throughout the empire recording his victory over nineteen rebels in one year (TAD C2.1). T h e original Aramaic text must have consisted of eleven columns of seventeen to eigh teen lines each, yielding a total of approximately 190 lines, of which seventy-nine have been recovered. A date in the Record of Memoranda on the verso (year 7 = 417 BCE [TAD 03.13:34]) suggests that the present copy may have been written to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the great victories of Darius I, which fell shortly after the ac cession of his later namesake. Accounts a n d Lists. There are significant accounts from the three major sites, dealing with the disbursement or re ceipt of such commodities as silver (TAD C3.2, 4-5, 7, 11, 5> 25), grain (TAD C3.13-14, 16-18, 25-28), wine and oil (TAD C31, 7, n - 1 2 , 18, 28-29). Only a few are intact. T h e most significant religiously and onomastically is the eightcolumn Collection Account from Elephantine, probably of 400 (TAD C3.15), listing 128 Jewish contributors of two shekels each, initially designated for Y H W the God but at the end divided up between him and the deities Eshembethel and Anathbethel. Economically, the most significant text is the newly deciphered (Yardeni and Porten) Customs Ac count (TAD C3.7). Written on both sides of a fifty-sheet scroll in 475 BCE at one of Egypt's custom's stations, either Migdol (Jer. 44:1, 46:14; Ez. 29:10, 30:6; TAD A3.3:4), Daphne-Tahpanhes (Jer. 43:9), or Memphis (TAD C3.8IIIA:n, IIIB:i6), it was subsequently erased to make way for the Words of Ahiqar. It attests to forty-two sailings in ten months of four different lands of ships (thirty-six Io nian and six "Phoenician") and the duty (mndt') in kind paid on entry and the dues (tsy = t3 siy.i) paid on exported natron. The import duty on the Greek ships includes gold staters, silver, Ionian wine, oil, a wooden support(?), coated and uncoated jars. T
The "Phoenician" ships bring a variety of items—Sidonian wine of year 10 and of year 11; two kinds of iron (pkrn and sny), bronze, and tin; wood by weight and by number, including four different cuts of cedar (sy ["beam"?], mlwt ["board"?], pq ["plank"?], and p'my [translation un known]); two kinds of wool, designated by their village of origin; and clay. T h e turnaround time is one to three weeks, and a certain Glaphyros is known to have sailed twice (TAD C3.7Kv2:22f; Gr2:i$f). Some Babylonian-Egyptian double dates allow tire reconstruction of several sheets from the
EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS Memphis Shipyard Journal for tire years 473-471 (TAD C3.8). North Saqqara has yielded several very fragmentary land registries (TAD C3.20-24), using Persian words to de scribe tire type of property (rstkh, 'wpsth) and measuring the area in arouras ('sin). Third-century BCE accounts, probably from Edfu, display Greek names (e.g., Apollonios, Bacchios, Heraldeides, Hermias, and Jason) alongside a few northwest Semitic ones (e.g., Abdi, Abieti ['byty], Judah, Nathan, and Shabbethai). Ethnically, tire nine lists (TAD C4.1-9) display the cos mopolitan nature of society in the Persian period. A single onomastic group usually dominates each list. Lacking or missing title, they conceal their intent. Perhaps they consti tuted military units, collection lists (TAD C3.15), or ration lists (TAD C3.14, 27). Ostraca and J a r Inscriptions. Ostraca are texts written on pot shards and limestone flakes, while jar inscriptions were written, incised, or inked on the jar, usually at the top, at tire time of its manufacture, transport, or storage. Some 330 Aramaic ostraca have been discovered, almost all from excavations at Elephantine (table 2). Unlike the papyri, which appeared in major collections, tire ostraca were never assembled into one publication and there is no standard method of citation. There are twenty-six jar inscriptions, mostly fragmentary, from Elephantine, Saqqara, and Edfu (table 3). T h e ostraca may be divided into four groups—letters, lists, accounts, and two abecedaries. T h e largest category is letters. Almost all of the Elephantine ostraca were written by a single scribe in the first quarter of the fifth century BCE taking dictation at Syene from soldiers needing to commu nicate with their family and friends in Elephantine. The let ters were written on randomly shaped ostraca that measured roughly 7 X 1 0 cm, beginning regularly on the concave side and continuing on the convex and averaging a dozen lines. A ferry service plied the waters of the Nile between Syene (Aswan) and Elephantine (Gazirat al-Aswan) in Persian times as today, and these notes were sent with tire boatman of these ships. Communication was meant to be immediate, and often a sense of urgency pervades tire letters. They are full of reports and requests for objects and information. One osttacon reports an unsettling experience—"Now, lo a dream I saw and from that time I am very hot. May Jhamoliah see my wellbeing" (table 2.1). In the realm of religion, they are a valuable source of information on divine epithets, divine intervention in personal affairs, tire Jewish temple, oaths, Sabbath, Passover, and purity. T h e divine name spelled Yi^W^in the later papyri is written in tire early papyri and in all these ostraca YHH. Orthographic evidence indicates that it was pronounced something like "Yaho" and not "Yahu." One of the strangest instructions, backed by an oath-supported threat, is contained in a letter to tire woman Islah, "Now, behold, legumes I shall send tomorrow. Meet tire boat tomorrow on the Sabbath. Lest, if they get lost, by
215
tire life of YHH, if not ( = surely) yo[ur] life I shall take. Do not rely on Meshullemeth and on Shemaiah" (table 2.63). Almost as cryptic is the query of Hoshaiah, "Send me (word) when you will do (observe/perform) the Passover" (table 2.40). Is it a matter of calendar or purity? One ostracon may be reconstructed to read, "Do not dispatch to me bread without it being sealed (htm). Lo, all the jars are im pure (tm'n). Behold, the bread which [yo]u dispfatclred] to me yesterday is imfpure]" (table 2.62)." The marzeah, barely alluded to in the Bible (Jer. 16:5; Am. 6:7), appears prominently in one of the ostraca (table 2.46). Fifteen ostraca may be classified as lists (table 2a), twelve as accounts (table 2b), and they bear the same features as their papyrus counterparts. Some are onomastically homo geneous (all Jewish [tables 2.8 = 2b.3] or all Egyptian [tables 2.6 = 2b.2]), and others are mixed (tables 2.79 = 28.14). One exclusively Egyptian list, uniquely written on both sides, includes a couple names that are popular in demotic documents but otherwise absent from the Aramaic texts— Es(p)metsheps ('smtsbs ["He of the glorious staff']) and Espetensene ('sptnsny ["He of him who is in Bigeh"]) (tables 2.80 = 2a.15). The ostraca accounts are all Ptolemaic and probably all, with but one exception, from Edfu. The names are followed by monetary or other notations. The names in one account are distinctly mixed—Greek (Theodore [twdrs], Egyptian (Taba), Hebrew (Shabbethit and Abram), and Aramaic (Abieti) (tables 2.3 = 2b. 1). Several of the Jewish names are characteristic of the Ptolemaic period and do not appear in Achaemenid Elephantine—Abieti ("[my] father will come"), Abram, Dallui, Jidleh, Jotakum ("YW, may you arise"), Judith, and Simeon. The abecedaries come from Elephantine (table 2.78) and North Saqqara (table 2.81). Eight of the Elephantine jar inscriptions were written by the same scribe (table 3.3, 7-8, 10, 13-14, 16, 18). Two reconstructed Elephantine jars show three names each, one written in Aramaic by this scribe at the top of the jar near the handle and two in a different hand in Phoenician farther down, one below the other (table 3.13-14) A large percent age of the Phoenician theophorous names are compounded with Ptah or Apis, the deities of Memphis, and so the jars must have subsequently passed into the hands of Phoeni cians there and only later made their way down to Elephan tine. Numerous sherds bear tire Phoenician inscription Imlk followed by tire ter-like sign (believed by some to mean "royal measure" [Orli Goldwasser and Joseph Naveh, " T h e Origin of the Tet Symbol," Israel Exploration Journal 26 (1976): 15-19]), and two sherds carry this formula in Ara maic (table 3.5). Two jars from Abu Sir contain an un explained fragmentary text—Islk'm Ibws' h III III III (table 3.1-2). One fragmentary inscription reads "To Psamshek . . . cohort commander (rb ksr'; table 3.15). T h e Saq qara jars contain an incised potter's mark (bb [table 3,19a]), an inked notation of contents (mglt or simply mg [table 3.22,
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26], "scroll," that is, papyrus rolls), or a dedication " T o Nabu" (table 3.23), known to have a temple at Syene (TAD A2.3:i; table 10.8). Sundry Inscriptions with N a m e s . The inscriptions on other small objects (stone plaques [table 4], wood [table 5], seals and bullae [table 6], statuettes [table 7], silver bowls [table 8], mummy labels [table 9], and coins), as well as on sarcophagi (table 10), and tombstones (table 11) are mostly names. The seals, bullae, and coins, some of the wooden inscriptions, a bowl, a statuette, two mummy labels, three sarcophagi, and a tomb inscription all have but a single name each. Once more, the outstanding feature about these fifteen names is their onomastic and presumably ethnic diversity— Aramean (Ahinuri, Hadadezer, and Ezer [seals (tables 5.6, 6.1, 4)]; Ammishezib [wooden palette (table 5.3)]; Sharah [mummy label (table 9.7)], Assyrian (Belsarusur [statuette (table 7.1]), Egyptian (Harkhebe [seal (table 6.6)], Hor [sar cophagus (table 10.2)]), and Teehur [mummy label (table 9.8)]), Hebrew (Shabbethai [sarcophagus (table 10.1)] and Uri [tombstone (table 11.6)]), and Persian (Bagamarazdiya [seal (table 6.2)] andBukhsha [sarcophagus (table 10.15)]). As recently read by Naveh, one seal bears the Arabian name Ubaid son of Siniyad (table 6.5). Most of the names recorded on mummy labels (table 9), sarcophagi (table 10), and tombstones (table 11) give both prenomen and patronym. As expected, Elephantine shows Jews (Shabah, son of Hosea [mummy label (table 9.1)]; see also table 4.2) and Syene, Arameans (Abutai, daughter of Shamashnuri [sarcophagus (table 10.3)]). The material from South Saqqara displays a mixed Aramean-Egyptian ambience with a touch of Persian. Burial proximity and prosopographical considerations on six sarcophagi permit the reconstruction of three family groups—(1) f Agri(ya), son of fBethelzabad, son of Eshemram (tables 9.3, 6; 10.10); (2) Heremnathan, son of Besa, son of Zabdi (table 9.5; 10.12); (3) Heremnathan, son of Pet(e)esi, son of Sharah, son of Pasi (table, 10.7, 16-17, 20). At least three of the dead were temple officials, one far from home—tire priest Heremshezib, son of Ashah (table 10.5); "Sharah the ser vitor" (table 9.7), who may be the same as the above Sharah; and Sheil, a priest of Nabu at Syene (table 10.8). T h e names of two brothers appear on either side of a ceramic mummy label (table 9.4)—Pahe, son of Bagadata, and Bagafarna, son of Bagadata. Perhaps they died young and belong to the twin heads from a fragmentary unpublished coffin lid (Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JE 55246). Four of the buried parties are women. T h e mummy labels were usually placed on the chest of the deceased. The coffin inscriptions were written twice or three times, either inscribed and painted or just painted above the head or on the chest of the lid and on the side, usually at the shoulders on the outside, but twice on the inside (table 10.9, 13), allowing the deceased to "look" at his name. Twelve Jewish tombstones of the Ptolemaic period have been uncovered—three at the necropolis at elIbrahimiya in Alexandria and nine in Edfu. Only one of the
Alexandrian inscriptions is fully intelligible (table 11.2) and it bears the unique Hebrew names Akabiah, son of Elioenai ("to YW are my eyes [directed]"). Is he related to one of the last biblical Davidic descendants, Akkub, son of Elioenai (1 Chr. 3:24)? Like the Arameans of Saqqara, the Jews of Edfu were buried with their families. Obadiah, son of Sim eon, written on a reused offering table (table 11.5), and Nathn(a)i, son of Simeon, (table 11.7) were probably broth ers. A third Edfu stone (table 11.4) bears four names, ap parently father and children—Azgad, son of Mdy/Mry and the three persons related to Azgad, namely the woman Shelomzi(o)n, Zebadiah, and Meshullam. Azgad appears as the name of a family head among the Judean repatriates (Ezr. 2:12, 8:12; Neh, 7:17, 10:16), and tire name Shelomzion ("welfare of Zion") is well known in Second Temple times, as are Nafhn(a)i, Obadiah, and Simeon. A unique memorial inscription of uncertain provenience (table 11.14) reads " T o Anan ('nn), son of Elish ('lys), the priest of Baal, husband (b'l) of Anotlr ('mot)." Neither of the personal names is attested elsewhere, and the form of the divine name is strange. Some scholars doubt the inscrip tion's authenticity. Other items inscribed on these small ob jects include accounts on both sides of a wooden palette (table 5.5), a duplicate date formula ("On the 24th of Ab, year 2 Artaxerx[es]") incised and inked on a triangular lime stone plaque from the Apries palace in Memphis (table 4.1), and the words 'wy ly, ("woe unto me"?) incised on a small figurine (table 7.3). Funerary, Votive, a n d Dedicatory Inscriptions. T h e Aramaic-speaking peoples in Egypt were not only buried in Egyptian style but they also produced Egyptianizing funer ary stelae and offering tables (table 12). The stelae depict familiar funerary scenes in two or three upper registers with a one- or four-line Aramaic inscription at tire bottom (table 12.1-3) or between two registers (table 12.5-6). One stela (table 12.1) also has a hieroglyphic inscription. T h e em balmed deceased is lying on a (lion) couch above four canopic jars (table 12.2-3), flanked by the goddesses Neplrthys and Isis (table 12.3) and anointed by the god Anubis (table 12.1, 3-4). A second register depicts mourners in Semitic garb and coiffure (table 12.1, 4-5). The third register, usu ally the upper one, shows offerings being made by tire de ceased to Osiris (table 12.1, 3), witir Isis (and Nephthys) standing behind him. Most of the names and patronyms or matronyms of these defunct Arameans are Egyptian and they are to be blessed by Osiris—Taba, daughter of the woman Tahapi (table 12.3); Ankhohapi, son of the woman Tahabes (table 12.5); Tumma (tm' [Aramaic]), daughter of Bocchoris (bkmp) (table 12.2); and Peteesi, son of Yh'. . . (table 12.4). T h e mixed onomastic situation is best illus trated by a dated stela (Mehir, year 4 of Xerxes = 21 M a y 19 June 482 BCE [table 12.1]) prepared by tire Aramean Absali for his Aramean father, Abah, son of Egyptian Hor and Aramean mother, Ahatabu, daughter of the Jew Adaiah. A new reading (Yardeni) shows that the couple came from the
EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS city hstmh = H3SJ Tmhy, near Marea on the Lybian border (Herodotus, 2.30; Henri Gauthier, Dictionnaire des nomsgeographiques conlenus dans les textes hieroglyphiques, vol. 4, Cairo, 1927, p. 159). One stela with three Egyptian loan words (table 12.3) is a quatrain of three four-beat bicola with an occasional hint of internal rhyme and a concluding threebeat bicolon—"Nothing of evil has she done/Nor slander of anyone has she spoken at all." T h e four-line inscription on the offering table (table 12.6) begins "the offering table (htpy) for the offering (Iqrbt) of Banit to Osiris-Hapi ( = Serapis) made Abitab, son of Banit, for her" (Ih [sic, ac cording to Yardeni]). The milieu of tiiese stelae may be Egyptian, but the in scription genre background is West Semitic. Comparison may be made with the four inscribed libation bowls from Tell el-Maskhuta in the eastern Delta (table 8.1-4). These votive offerings are inscribed "to Han-Ilat" (Ihn'lt); "which Seha, son of Abdamru Cbd'mrw), offered to Han-Ilat"; "which Qainu, son of Geshem, king of Qedar offered to Han-Hat"; "Harbek ["Horus (the) falcon"], son of Pasiri, offered to Han-Ilat the goddess." A generation after Geshem the Arabian opposed Nehemiah's fortification of Jerusalem (Neh. 2:19, 6:1-2, 6), his son and others bearing Egyptian names were worshiping at the shrine of an Arabian goddess in the Nile Delta. A similar bowl, also presumably from Egypt and dated a century later, is inscribed with a single Persian name Tirifarna (trypm [table 8.5]). T h e presence of Persians in Aramaic dedicatory inscrip tions is evidenced from a sandstone building inscription from Aswan (table 12.7). An upper panel is possibly miss ing; what is visible reads "this shrine (brzmdn'), garrison commander of Syene, made in the month of Sivan, that is Mehir, year seven of Artaxerxes the king (= 6-14 June 458 BCH). . . . " T h e inscription follows a pattern known in early Phoenician dedicatory inscriptions (KAI 7) and continued into contemporary Aramaic inscriptions from Cilicia (KAI 258 = Gibson, no. 33). In both the Cilician and Elephantine inscriptions the object described is indicated by a Persian word—patikara- and *brazmaddna- respectively. Another Old Persian loanword, dnut ("welfare"), must have intro duced the concluding blessing to be bestowed upon the gar rison commander (the reading Vidranga is excluded) who built the shrine and set up the inscription. Graffiti. Almost fifty Aramaic graffiti have been located at eleven locations in Egypt from Giza, Ma'sarah, and Dah shur near Memphis, through Wadi Sheikh Sheikhun, Abydos, Wadi Hammamat, and Wadi Abu Qwei north of Thebes, Gebel Abu Gurob, Wadi el-Shatt er-Rigal, Aswan, and Wadi el-Hudi, and as far south as Tomas in Lower Nubia (table 13). Almost all of these sites have yielded nu merous inscriptions, small and large, and the Arameanwriting travelers followed in the path of their predecessors and contemporaries. Most inscriptions remain in situ and require collation. One was a royal dedicatory inscription of unknown provenance with an incised prenomen (table
217
13.51). The Egyptian-Aramean ambience is again promi nent here—for example, Abitab son of Shumtab, Zur son of Kamam, Belhabeh ("Bel, give him"), Heremnathan, Heremshezib, Jinamiom (yn'mywm, "may day be pleasant" [unlocated]), Nabunathan, and Shumieti (table 13.3-4, 9, 19, 22, 27, 33-34, 51) are Aramean, andEshor, Hori,Patou, Petemun, Peteesi, and Peteneesi son of Petosiri are Egyptian (table 12.7-8, 13-14, 20, 23-24, 26-27). One name is Bab ylonian ([Mar]dukshumukin [table 13.1]), another possibly Arabian (Haggag son of Ablat [table 13.12]), and a couple may be Anatolian (table 13.17-18). Not one is distinctly Jew ish. At some sites the traveler simply wrote his name (Ma'sarah, Dahshur, Gebel Abu-Gurob, and Tomas). Of ten he incised a proskynema, that is, an obeisance—"blessed be PN (son of PN) to/before D N . " At the temple of Seti I in Abydos (table 13.7-18), the visitor came, along with so many others, as a pilgrim to Osiris. Elsewhere other deities were invoked—Horus, Isis, and Khnum at Wadi el-Shatt erRigal (table 13.37-41); the god of the eastern desert, Min, at Wadi Abu Qwei and probably at Wadi Sheikh Sheikhun (table 13.6, 26-29); and Shamash (or Sun), "the great god," the god of the rock and the god of Egypt in Wadi el-Hudi above Aswan (table 13.43-45,47). The Giza graffito records the arrival of a caravan (table 13.1); that in Wadi Hamma mat is an abecedary (table 13.25); and A. H. Sayce imagined the word by, "house," written three times at the Aswan sandstone quarry (table 13.42). The longest graffito is dated, runs nine lines (table 13.47), and contains a blessing formula whose first part is unique and whose second half is reminis cent of an epistolary praescriptio—"blessed be he who wrote this inscription before the god of the mountain and the god of Egypt that they grant me welfare and favor . . . and blessed be he who will read this inscription]" (cf. TAD A4.3:2-3, 4.7:1-2]). A R o m a n c e ? Last but not least and perhaps the most fascinating of all the Aramaic texts is an extremely fragmen tary seventeen-panel inscription in a cave some 8 lain (5 mi.) northeast of Sheikh Fadl. It was discovered by Flinders Petrie while excavating at Bahnasa (Oxyrynchus) and reported by Noel Aime-Giron (Ancient Egypt 2 [1923]: 38-43). T h e text mentions King Taharqa, Pharaoh Necho, and a Psamtik/Psammetichus (but not the king of that name). A tan talizing line reads V 'kl 'sbqnh 'skb 'mh rhm 'nh Ihy [according to Ada Yardeni, not Ihy/sgy, "I cannot leave her. I shall lie with her. I love her abundantly." A cryptic colophon men tions "year 5." [See also Aramaic language and Literature; Elephantine; Giza; Oxyrhynchus; and Saqqara.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aime-Giron, Noel. Textes arameens d'tlgypte. Cairo, 1931. Publication of 112 items (papyri, sarcophagi, graffiti, mummy labels) discovered by French expeditions, mostly at Saqqara, Contains a valuable in troduction and topical treatments, although readings must be checked against later publications.
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EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
Aime-Giron, Noel. "Adversaria semitica." Bulletin de TInstitut Francois Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z, Szubin. "Litigation Concerning Abandoned d'Archeologie Orientate 38 (1939): 1-63. Corrigenda and continuation Property at Elephantine (Kraeling 1)." Journal of Near Eastern Stud ies 42 (1983): 279-284. of Textes (1931), from nos. 113 to 121 (new material from Saqqara and Edfu). Porten, Bezalel. "The Jews in Egypt." In The Cambridge History ofJu daism, vol. 1, edited by W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, pp. Aime-Giron, Noel. "Adversaria semitica." Annales du Service des An372-400. Cambridge, 1984. Update of Porten (1968), with basic bib liqintes de I'Egypte 39 (1939): 339-363. Continuation of "Adversaria liography. semitica" from numbers 122 to 124 (unique graffiti from Wadi elHudi). Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z. Szubin. "Hereditary Leases in Aramaic Let Brcsciani, Edda. Missione di scavo a Medinet Madi (Fayum-Egitto). ters." Bibliotheca Orientalis 42 (1985): 283-288. Porten, Bezalel, and Ada Yardeni. Textbook of Ancient Aramaic Docu Milan, 1968. ments from Ancient Egypt (TAD A, B, C). 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1986Bresciani, Edda. "Una statuina fittile con inscrizione aramaica dell'Egitto." In Hommages a Andre Dupont-Sommer, pp. 5-8. Paris, 1971. 1993. The most up-to-date collection of Egyptian Aramaic papyri Corpus inscriptionum semitkarum. Part 2.1. Paris, 1888—1893. Publica and parchments, including letters (TAD A), contracts (TAD B), lit erature, accounts, and lists (TAD C), witii detailed excurses. Each tion of all known Aramaic texts to date (funerary stelae, graffiti, os text is newly collated at die source and reproduced in hand-copy. traca, papyri, seals), with valuable plates and a commentary in Latin. Cowley, Arthur E. Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C. Oxford, TAD D is in preparation and will include papyrus and parchment fragments and inscriptions on material other dian papyrus. 1923. The most convenient collection of all papyri published to that date. Readings must be checked against later publications. Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z. Szubin. "A Dowry Addendum (Kraeling Driver, Godfrey R. Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century B.C. Ox 10)." Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 (1987): 231-238. Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z. Szubin. "Litigants in die Elephantine Con ford, 1954. Superb publication of parchment letters sent from out tracts: The Development of Legal Terminology." Maarav 4 (1987): side Egypt to satrapal officials, witii excellent full-size plates. 45-67. Abridged and revised (without plates) in 1957 and 1965. Dupont-Sommer, Andre. "Un ostracon arameen inedit d'Elephantine Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z. Szubin. "Royal Grants in Egypt: A New (Collection Clerrnont-Ganneau no. 44)." In Hebrew and Semitic Interpretation of'Driver 2." Journal ofNear Eastern Studies 46 (1987): Studies Presented to G. R. Driver, edited by D. Winton Thomas and 39-48. W. D. McHardy, pp. 53-58. Oxford, 1963, Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z. Szubin. "An Aramaic Deed of Bequest Ebers, Georg. The Hellenic Portraits from the Fayum. New York, 1893. (Kraeling 9)." In Community and Culture, edited by Nahum M. Waldman, pp. 179-192. Philadelphia, 1987. Fitzmyer, Joseph A., and Stephen A. Kaufman. An Aramaic Bibliogra phy, part I, Old, Official, and Biblical Aramaic. Baltimore and Lon Porten, Bezalel. "The Calendar of Aramaic Texts from Achaemenid don, 1992. Complete listing of all texts and extensive bibliography and Ptolemaic Egypt." In Irano-Judaica, vol. 2, Studies Relating to for each. Classification according to TAD sigla where available; oth Jewish Contacts with Persian Culture throughout the Ages, edited by erwise classification is cumbersome. Shaul Shaked and Amnon Netzer, pp. 13-32. Jerusalem, 1990. De Greenfield, Jonas C , and Bezalel Porten. The Bisitun Inscription of Da tailed examination of every date, with discussion of dating patterns rius the Great: Aramaic Version. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, in contracts, letters, and accounts, and synchronous BabylonianEgyptian dates. part 1, vol. 5: Texts 1. London, 1982. New edition with restored text, with a comparison to the Akkadian version and papyrological treat Porten, Bezalel. "Elephantine Papyri." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ment. Minor revisions in TAD C2.1. vol. 2, pp. 445-455. New York, 1992, Detailed survey of discovery Grelot, Pierre. Documents arameens d'Egyptc. Paris, 1972. French an and contents of all Elephantine papyri, with an elaborate bibliogra phy. notated translation of 109 texts, including papyri, ostraca, and other small inscriptions, plus an elaborate onomastic treatise. Repertoire d'epigraphie semitique. Paris, 1901—1917. Most convenient sin Hinz, Walther. Alliranisches Sprachgui der Nebeniiberlieferungen. Wies gle collection of nonpapyrological epigraphic material for those baden, 1975. years. Kraeling, Emil G. Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri: New Documents Sachau, Eduard. Aramaische Papyrus und Ostraka aus einer jiidischen of the Fifth Century B. C. from the Jewish Colony in Elephantine. New Militarkolonie zu Elephantine. Leipzig, 1911. Publication of seventyHaven, 1953. Publication of the Anani(ah) family archive discovered five papyrus items and numerous inscriptions on shards, jars, wood, in 1893 by Charles Edwin Wilbour, with a comprehensive introduc stone, and leather, mostiy from the 1906-1908 Elephantine excava tion. Readings must be checked against later publications. tions by Rubensohn and Zucker. Indispensable plates, Naveh, Joseph. "The Development of the Aramaic Script." Proceedings Sayce, A. H„ and Arthur E. Cowley. Aramaic Papyri Discovered at Asof the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 5 (1970): 21-43 .Basicsuan. London, 1906. Mibtahiah archive plus several ostraca. Con work for palaeographical dating of all Aramaic texts. tains full-size plates and an excellent bibliography of all Aramaic Parlasca, Klaus. Mumienportrats und verwandte Denhnaler. Wiesbaden, texts to date by Seymour de Ricci. Readings must be checked against 1966. later publications. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. The Palace ofApries (Memphis II). London, 1909.Segal, Judah B. Aramaic Texts from North Saqqara. London, 1983. Pub Porten, Bezalel. Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish lication of 202 papyrus items and 26 Aramaic and Phoenician ostraca Military Colony. Berkeley, 1968. The most comprehensive synthesis found by Walter Emery (1966-1967) and Geoffrey Martin (1971of the material. A thoroughly revised edition (Brill) is planned for 1973). Elaborate apparatus but disappointing plates. Readings must 1998. The treatment of legal topics is updated in joint studies by be checked against reviews and later publications. New collation es Porten and Szubin. sential. Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z. Szubin, "'Abandoned Property' in Elephan Szubin, H. Z., and Bezalel Porten. '"Ancestral Estates' in Aramaic tine: A New Interpretation of Kraeling 3." Journal of Near Eastern Contracts: The Legal Significance of the Term mhhsn." Journal of Studies 41 (1982): 123-131. the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1982): 3-9. Porten, Bezalel, and H. Z. Szubin. "Exchange of Inherited Property at Szubin, H. Z., and Bezalel Porten. "Testamentary Succession at Ele Elephantine (Cowley 1)." Journal of the American Oriental Society phantine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 102 (1982): 651-654. 252 (1983): 35-46.
'EIN-BESOR Szubin, H. Z., and Bezalel Porten. "A Life Estate of Usufruct: A New
219
and generally contained more than one individual. One spe Interpretation of Kraeling 6." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oricial grave is covered by a rock pile and contains the remains ental Research, no. 269 (1988): 29-45. of four-eight individuals. Based on cranial morphologies Szubin, H. Z., and Bezalel Porten. "An Aramaic Joint Venture Agree from these burials, the population from 'Einan is believed ment: A New Interpretation of the Bauer-Meissner Papyrus." Bul to be descended from local Levantine Upper Paleolithic letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 288 (1992): 6784. groups. Weigall, Arthur E. P. A Report on the Antiquities of Lower Nubia, Oxford, 'Einan's lithic industry led Valla to propose the subdivi 1907. Weigall, Arthur E. P. Travels in the Upper Egyptian Deserts. London,sion of tire Natufian into four stages of lithic development. The dominant types are microliths, especially Helwan lun1909. ates in the lower part of the sequence, and increasingly dom BEZALEL PORTEN inant backed lunates. Burins from another important group, with fewer endscrapers, sickle blades, and a few elongated picks considered the forerunners of Neolithic axes. The E L N A N (Ar., 'Ain Mallaha), an important Natufian site ground-stone industry is rich in mortars and pestles, and a located 72 m above sea level near a freshwater spring in very large goblet-shaped basalt mortar should be noted in Israel's Hulah Valley. The site was excavated by Jean Perrot particular. Numerous whetstones and shaft straighteners (1955-1971), who was joined in 1971 by Francois R. Valla, were recovered. Artistic activity was expressed in a series of who later continued excavation in the uppermost layer. Ex schematic figurines, mainly carved or incised in stone. cavation exposed four major building strata, all constructed Although plant remains were not preserved, the presence within tire slope of colluvial deposits. T h e lowest strata (IVof siclde blades probably indicates the harvesting of wild III) were assigned to tire Early Natufian and sttata II and I cereals. Animal bones are numerous and consist mainly of to the Middle and Late Natufian, respectively (c. 10,000gazelle and deer, witir a noticeable presence of wild boar. 8,000 BCE). Other important food sources were tortoises, fish from Lake T h e earliest building, which was found in stratum IV, is Hulah, and waterfowl, especially migratory species present a large subterranean house, 9 m in diameter. Its rear walls in winter. Animal bones and marine shells provided raw ma were constructed as terraces and still stand to a height of terial for jewelry; shells were brought mainly from tire Med one meter. Six well-preserved postholes indicate that wood iterranean Sea, with a few specimens from the Red Sea and supports probably held the structure's roof. Two fireplaces the Nile Valley. were found in the floor, as well as more than twenty multi The site of 'Einan was probably one of the major villages colored pebbles and three whetstones. A large number of of tire Natufian culture in the Levant. Although the site was stone and bone tools were found, along with broken mortars abandoned several times, the presence of domesticated an and pestles. T h e round houses of strata III and II are 3-6 m imals and the evidence for a seasonal disttibution of food in diameter, all with semisubterranean stone foundations. indicate that when the settlement was occupied, habitation While little is known about their superstructure, the interiors was nearly year-round. of several of these houses reveal squarish fireplaces. T h e houses of stratum I are smaller in diameter but always have BIBLIOGRAPHY a central fireplace. In this layer, numerous bell-shaped sub Bouchud, Jean. La faune du gisement Natoufien de Mallaha (Eynan) Is terranean pits were found, some one meter deep and with rael. Memoires et Travaux du Centre de Recherche Francaise de sides coated with a thick layer of clay. Other, shallower pits Jerusalem, 4. Paris, 1987. were covered with a thin lime plaster and may have been Perrot, Jean, and Daniel Ladiray. I*es hommes de Mallaha, Eynan, Israel. storage facilities, although they were often used secondarily Memoires et Travaux du Centre de Recherche Francaise de Jeru salem, 7. Paris, 1988. for burials. Valla, Francois R. "Aspects du sol de l'Abri 131 de Mallaha (Eynan)." Both single and communal burials were found in strata III Paleorient 14.2 (1988): 283-296. and IV, mostly in a semiflexed to flexed position. Several of Valla, Francois R, "Les Natoufiens de Mallaha et l'espace." In The the skeletal remains exhibit decorated headpieces of dentalNatufian Culture in the Levant, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Fran cois R. Valla, pp. 111-122. Ann Arbor, 1991. ium beads, as well as necklaces or bracelets made of these OFER BAR-YOSEF or other shells. T h e burials, even when found under floors, had originally been dug outside tire structures. It has been suggested that some were dug in family burial grounds. One distinctive grave was of an older woman interred with a ' E L N - B E S O R (or 'En Besor), site located in Israel's puppy, illustrating the special relationship between humans northwest Negev desert, on a small loess hill of about oneand domesticated animals. T h e stratum II burials often lack half acre in area, approximately 350 m south of the Besor decoration and are less flexed tiran the earlier ones. T h e springs ('Ain SheUala; map reference 1013 X 0795). During burials in stratum I were commonly pits i n secondary use excavations carried out from 1970 to 1983 by an expedition C
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'EIN-BOQEQ
on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities and the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University headed by Ram Gophna and Dan Gazit, about 400 sq m were exposed at the site. Three Early Bronze Age strata and one Hellenis tic stratum were uncovered. In stratum IV (EB IB) the slope of the eastern hill was sparsely settled. A round silo base was excavated as well as the solitary remains (partial floors) of structures. Also re covered were sherds of tire period, flint tools, bones of sheep and goats, and a variety of carbonized agricultural products (wheat, barley, peas, grapes). This settlement was aban doned, but die material culture of the following new stratum (III) is also dated to EB IB. Part of a brick building, A (ap proximately 85 sq m), was excavated at the top of the tell that had been constructed directly above remains of stratum IV. The finds it and its surroundings produced, tire dimen sions of the mud bricks used (8 X 12 cm), and the bricklay ing and bonding techniques indicate drat tire builders were Egyptian. T o the east of the building's west wing, which was used as a residence, was an open courtyard. Several indus trial installations (probably a bakery and a brewery) were uncovered in building A's south wing. Most of the finds from building A and its refuse pits were characteristically Egyptian in style or design: ceramics, flint knives and sickle blades, a copper pin and harpoon, a marble bull's-head pen dant, the bottom half of a faience statuette of a baboon, a cylinder seal, a sherd incised with a serekh (a rectangular frame, with the name of an Egyptian king in hieroglyphs), and quantities of unfired clay bullae bearing impressions from Egyptian cylinder seals that had been used in Egypt to seal receptacles in which dry food products were stored. [See Seals.] Stratum III "Egyptian" sherds were subjected to petrographic and chemical analyses that showed most to be of pots of local origin. [See Petrography.] Building A was first dated to the first dynasty—that is, to tire EB II—based on A. R. Schulman's deciphering of the impressions on the unfired bullae (see figure 1) and tire ser ekh. He identified the names of three first-dynasty lungs, high-ranking Egyptian officials (Schulman, 1983). How ever, subsequent dating of these materials (first suggested by Siegfried Mittmann) to the beginning of the first dynasty, or even earlier—to the end of dynasty 0—shifts the date of stratum III back to the conclusion of EB IB,, a date further comparative analysis of the Egyptian pottery corroborated. The petrographic tests demonstrating that the clay is local indicate that the seals on the storage receptacles (see above) were applied in Canaan. The building's construction was likely the work of a royal Egyptian expedition to establish a way station on tire route from northern Sinai to Canaan. The route traversed the area midway between the wells in North Sinai and the springs on the central coastal plain. From 'EinBesor, tire Egyptians exercised control over the largest pe rennial water sources between the desert and the sown land. The stratum II remains (dated to tire end of EB II/begin-
'EIN-BESOR. Figure 1.
Egyptian cylinder seal impressions. (Courtesy
R. Gophna)
ning of EB III) include part of a broadhouse (building B). It and the local pottery were uncovered on the mound's southeastern slope. T h e stratum's ceramics included frag ments of storages jars, jugs, and ledge handles. Graves dug by bedouin on tire summit of tire hill destroyed almost all of tire stratum I remains, which are from the Hellenistic period. Dated to the second-mid-first century BCE, sections of a wall and a floor, sherds, and a coin (surface find) represent the stratum I occupation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Gophna, Ram. "Excavations at 'En Besor." Atiqot 11 (1976): 1-9. Gophna, Ram. "Excavations at 'En Besor, 1976." Aliqol 14 (1980): 916. Gophna, Ram. "The Egyptian Pottery of En Besor." Tel Aviv 17 (1990): 144-1(12. Gophna, Ram. "The Early Bronze I Settlement at 'En Besor Oasis."
Israel Exploration Journal 40 (1990): 1-11. Gophna, Ram, and Dan Gazit. "The First Dynasty Egyptian Resi dency at En Besor." Tel Aviv 12 (1985): 9-16. Gophna, Ram, and Erich Friedmann. "The Flint Implements from Tel 'En Besor." Tel Aviv 20 (1993): 147-163. Quack, Joachim F. von. "Die Datierung der Siegelabdrucke von Tel
'En Besor." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 105 (1989): 18-26. Schulman, A. R. "On the Dating of the Egyptian Seal Impressions from
'En Besor." Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 13 (1983): 249-251. RAM GOPHNA
c
E I N - B O Q E Q , oasis in Israel on the southwest shore of the Dead Sea (3i°io' N , 35°2o' E; map reference 1854 X 0676). Its ancient name is unknown. After a Late Roman castellum was constructed here, it may have been known as Tetrapyrgia (cf. Anastasius Smart., Interrog, in J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, Paris, 1857-1886, 89, col. 744). The site's ideal growing conditions for pharmaceutical
'EIN-BOQEQ plants,, such as balsam, and choice fruits such as the Nicolaus date, caused die Hasmoneans (perhaps under Alex ander Jannaeus) to extend dreir most lucrative plantations, maintained in neighboring 'Ein-Gedi, to 'Ein-Boqeq. A tower of typical Hasmonean chisel-smoothed whitish ashlar, pottery, and two coins connect the initial terracing and field enclosures with them. Because aqueducts—one 1.2 km long and the other 300 m long—and reservoirs (which served tire oasis in later periods) were a precondition for settlement here, their construction must also be attributed to the Has moneans (in the site's phase I). At its greatest expanse, per haps in the Byzantine period, the cultivated area covered 180,000 sq. m. T h e Officina. Under King Herod the products of the plantations, supplemented by asphalt from tire Dead Sea and ingredients provided by the Arabian caravans passing to the south of it, were used to operate a factory (officina) for producing pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. The of ficina was a nearly rectangular building (20 X 20 m). Its walls, preserved to a height of 1.5 m, are 80 cm thick, have two faces of roughly dressed stones set in mud mortar, and have a rubble core. T h e rooms are arranged around a central courtyard that runs from the northern to the southern (main) entrance. T h e evidence suggests that tire main entrance chamber gave access on the left into a storeroom for precious raw materials and on the right to a workroom furnished with two low, plastered basins. One basin has a postirole and may have been a bag press operated by a single worker. T h e relatively small site of these basins and most of the other installations at the site attests to how delicate the raw ma terials—petals, buds, and leaves—were, as well as to tire small quantities of liquids, resins, and powders extracted. T h e main production line was in the southeastern part of tire courtyard. This industrial compound included, in its most elaborate phase (phase II), a stone chest for raw ma terials, a fireplace for preheating (esp. boiling); a grinding platter; a stone vat, or mortar; and an upper and lower bee hive-shaped oven that created regulated temperature to heat vessels set upon the opening in their apex. These installa tions served processes such as crushing, pounding, mixing of ingredients, their maceration (dipping in hot fats and oils), decoction (boiling down to essence), evaporation, or sublimation (non-liquid condensation). (The same tech niques of production existed already in Old Testament times, as proven by Egyptian wall paintings.) Two addi tional ovens, in work areas created by walls that jut into the courtyard, served or were served by the production line. Room 4 (10 X 3.75 m), west of the courtyard, was heavily plastered. T h e floor in its northern part, also plastered, sloped slightly toward a sunken pit (55 X 35 X 50 cm) that collected the substances squeezed out of plants by treading or crushing. In the opposite room (no. 6), a handmill or similar device seems to have been operated in phases I—II
221
on a round table surrounded by a round flagstone floor. The Hasmonean tower, incorporated into the structure's south west corner, provided security. The plantation's four phases of occupation of tire factory are allocated to Herod, the first procurators, Agrippa I and the second procurators, and to a haphazard refurbishing by Bar Kokhba following the de struction that took place during Vespasian's war against tire Jews. T h e Castellum. The subsequent history of 'Ein-Boqeq is obscure until a courtyard-type castellum, or fortress, was built by Constantine or, more probably, his sons. The fort is a typical quadriburgus (16.5 X 16.5 m). Its walls, built with two roughly dressed faces and a rubble core, are 1.80-2 m thick and are 6 m high. T h e four corner towers (each is 6 X 6 m) provided complete protection for a garrison of fortyfive to sixty-five men (based on a reconsttuction of the bar rack blocks), with either one or two stories. The barracks were leaning onto the curtains and used their inner face as a back wall. Considerable skill was exercised in setting this structure firmly into a mound of loose gravel and making it almost completely resistant to tire shock of earthquakes or attempts at separate capture. Yet, such attempts have left their imprint: destruction layers separate the four phases during which it functioned as a stronghold at the Dead Sea of the limes Palestinae (the fortified borders of Roman Pal estine). Phase I extended to Valentianus, phase II to the mid-fifth century (?), phase III to the Persian invasion (614 CE), and phase IV to Heraklius (c. 624 to the Arab conquest, c. 634 CE). Although the plantations ceased to operate at about the time of tire Arab conquest, life went on for two or three more generations in tire castellum. It became a collection center for nitrates gathered from tire Dead Sea, which were used for fertilizer and in the manufacture of glass. BIBLIOGRAPHY Fischer, Moshe. "En Boqeq: An Industrial Compound from Herodian Times" (in Hebrew). Nophim 11-12 (1979): 21-38. Discusses the
functioning of die officina. Fischer, Moshe, and Tzvi Shacham. "The Water System of the En Boqeq Oasis" (in Hebrew). In Aqueducts of Ancient Palestine, edited by David 'Amit et al., pp. 289-298. Jerusalem, 1989. Gichon, Mordechai. "Das Kastell En Boqeq." Bonner Jahrbiicher 171 (1971): 386-406. Gichon, Mordechai. "Excavations at En-Boqeq: The First Season." In
Roman Frontier Studies 1969, edited by Eric Birley et al., pp. 256262. Cardiff, 1974.
Gichon, Mordechai. En Boqeq: Ausgrabungen in einer Oase am Town Meer. Mainz, 1993. Final excavation report of die castellum, includ ing historical background and a detailed comparative discussion of die small finds. Sheffer, Avigail, and Amalia Tidhar. "The Textiles from the En Boqeq Excavation in Israel." Textile FHstory 22.1 (1991): 3-46. Technical treatise on the production and composition of die textiles produced at 'Ein-Boqeq, of special importance for research into the textiles of Byzantine Palestine. MORDECHAI GICHON
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EIN-GEDI, oasis located on the western shore of the Dead Sea and named for the perennial spring that flows from a height of 200 m above it (map reference 1870 X 0965). Biblical and Historical References. 'Ein-Gedi was part of the wilderness territory assigned to Judah after the Isra elite conquest of Canaan (Jos. 15:62). It was also where Da vid took refuge from Saul (/ Sm. 23:29). The fruitful vine yards of 'Ein-Gedi are mentioned in the Song of Songs (1:14)5 and it is included in a prophetic image of prosperity related by Ezekiel (47:10). According to Josephus, 'Ein-Gedi was a Roman head quarters in the first century CE (War 2.55), and Pliny men tions its destruction during the First Jewish Revolt against the Romans in 66-70 CE (Nat. Hist. 5.73). [See First Jewish Revolt.] During the Second Jewish Revolt, the town was one of Bar Kokhba's military and administrative centers. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt.] By the early second century it was the site of a Roman garrison. In his Onomasticon (fourth century CE), Eusebius refers to 'Ein-Gedi as a large Jewish village (86.18), which apparently was celebrated for its dates and for balsam, which was used in the manufacture of perfume. The Jewish settiement was destroyed by fire in the sixth cen tury CE (see below). Excavation History. The initial survey of the oasis was carried out in 1949 by Benjamin Mazar for the Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem. Two additional surveys, both on behalf of the Hebrew University, were conducted in 1956 and 1957, the first directed by Yohanan Aharoni, the second by Joseph Naveh. Yigael Yadin, Nahman Avigad (in the 1960s), and Gideon Hadas (1980s) surveyed Jewish tombs in the oasis. [See the biographies of Mazar, Aharoni, Yadin, and Avigad.] Mazar excavated at 'Ein-Gedi from 1961 to 1965 and D a n Barag and Yosef Porath from 1970 to 1972, both projects on behalf of the Hebrew University. The excavations were focused on Tel Goren, the most prominent area of the oasis; structures were also uncovered to the east and northeast of the mound. The earliest remains date to the Chalcolithic period, but most finds are much later, dating to the Late Iron Age and beyond. Chalcolithic Period. The only Chalcolithic (fourth mil lennium BCE) structure uncovered was a sacred enclosure situated on a terrace, about 150 m north of the spring. Within the enclosure were two buildings linked by a stone wall. A circular structure about 3 m in diameter stood at the center of the enclosed courtyard. Excavators found no evi dence of multiple construction stages or repairs, and they determined that the enclosure, which probably served as a cultic site, had not been destroyed but abandoned. Iron Age. A Late Iron Age settiement (630-582 BCE) was uncovered at Tel Goren. Among the numerous finds from this stratum were large barrel-shaped pithoi and numerous pottery vessels characteristic of the period. Based on a group of similar buildings cleared on the mound's northern slope,
excavators conjectured that 'Ein-Gedi had been a center of perfume production in this period, perhaps in the royal ser vice. T h e settlement was destroyed by fire, perhaps in 582581 BCE, during Nebuchadrezzar's conquest of Judah. [See Judah.] Persian Period. T h e most impressive remains from the Persian period stratum (fifth-fourth centuries BCE) were those of a large building on the mound's northern slope. This structure (about 550 sq m in area) was probably a dwelling of one of the town's officials; it had twenty-three rooms, enclosed courtyards, and various storerooms. Most of the pottery was characteristic of the period and included Attic ware. Among the seal impressions was a jar handle stamped Yhwd. [See Seals.] Hellenistic Period. A few coins and potsherds dating from the late fourth to the early second centuries BCE were found, but most of the relatively few Hellenistic remains dated to the Hasmonean period, especially between the reigns of Alexander Jannaeus and Herod the Great (103-37 BCE) . A Late Hellenistic citadel built in two separate sections was uncovered on the top of the mound. This defensive system was destroyed in 40 BCE, during the Parthian invasion and in the last war of Hasmoneans against Herod (Josephus, War 3.55, 4402). Roman Period. An impressive citadel and a large, rec tangular tower, both destroyed during the First Jewish Re volt, were uncovered on top of the mound. T h e pottery from the tower, which resembles the ceramic material from nearby Qumran and Masada, was used to date this stratum to the period of the Herodian dynasty (4 BCE-68 CE). How ever, the level may be earlier than 4 BCE. [See Qumran; Ma sada.] Late Roman-Byzantine Period. Tel Goren was not a permanent settlement in the Late Roman-Byzantine period, but on the nearby plain, between Nahal David and Nahal 'Arugot, excavators uncovered several structures dating from the second to the sixth centuries CE. One of these struc tures was a Roman bathhouse (40 X 50 m) that dates to between 70 CE and 132 CE. Several synagogues were excavated east of the summit. The earliest, which was probably built at the end of the sec ond century or at the beginning of the third century CE, was a trapezoidal (13.5 m long on the east, 15.5 m long on the west, and 9-10.5 m wide). T h e orientation of its northern wall, which had two entrances, was toward Jerusalem. A mo saic pavement with a nonfigural design was executed in coarse white stones and black and colored tesserae. It is un clear whether the entire pattern was laid at the same time. [See Mosaics.] When this synagogue was renovated, the cen tral entrance in the northern wall was turned into a niche where the Torah ark apparently was placed. A stepped seat was added to this wall, and three stepped benches were built along the southern wall. Pillars divided the interior—for merly one large hall—into a nave and two aisles, and three
'EIN-GEV entrances were added on the west. T h e mosaic pavement continued in use. A new synagogue was built in tire late fifth century. It featured a rectangular wooden structure that housed tire Torah ark and a new mosaic pavement executed witir colored tesserae that contained numerous inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic, one of them biblical. This syna gogue, along with tire rest of the settlement, was destroyed in the sixth century.
223
Iron Age strata, one from the Persian period and one from the Hellenistic period. Final correlations for the stratigraphy of the various excavated areas is not yet possible, but the conclusions reached by the recent excavation are presented here. In su-atum V two thick, parallel walls were found at the foot of the acropolis. T h e inner wall (1.7 m wide) was built of large basalt boulders and its foundations were sunk more than 4 m in the ground. This wall supported the fill for the BIBLIOGRAPHY acropolis and served as a defense wall as well. A more shal low counterpart of this wall ran parallel to it, and the space Barag, Dan, et al. "The Synagogue at En-Gedi." In Ancient Synagogues Revealed, edited by Lee I. Levine, pp. 116-119. Jerusalem, 1981. between the two was left open as a ditch. A 1.5-meter-thick Story of the discovery of the ancient synagogue at 'Ein-Gedi. layer of black decomposed organic material mixed with Hadas, Gideon. "Nine Tombs of die Second Temple Period at 'Ein sherds was found in the ditch. T h e lowest layers of pottery Gedi." 'Atiqot 24 (1994). dated to the tenth century BCE and the uppermost to the Mazar, Benjamin, et al. "En-Gedi: The First and Second Seasons of eighth. This fortification system resembles the one found by Excavations, 1961-1962." 'Atiqot 5 (1966). The final excavation re tire rescue excavation's stratum IV on the lower tell. port on the Tel Goren dig. Ussishkin, David. "The Ghassulian Shrine at En-Gedi." Tel Aviv 7 In stratum IV fragmentary remains of a public building at (1980): 1-44. Study of die Chalcolithic shrine found at 'Ein-Gedi. least 18 m long were uncovered. It was probably a store EPHRAIM STERN house. T h e stratum III tripartite pillar buildings were built on top of it, following the same orientation. The pillars are square-section monoliths without holes in them or troughs 'ELN-GEV (Ar., Khirbet el- Asheq), site located at the between them. The function of these buildings was probably estuary of the 'Ein-Gev River on the eastern coast oftireSea connected with the trade of goods that took place on the of Galilee (32°48' N , 35°22' E; map reference 210 X 243). main road from tire Bashan to Akko and to the Via Maris. T h e houses of Kibbutz 'Ein-Gev are built over most of the In the Iron Age II, well-fortified and with important public ancient site (250 m long X 120 m wide). T h e suggested buildings, 'Ein-Gev assumed the economically central role identification witir Aramean Aphek of 1 Kings 20:26-30 and previously played by Iron I Tel Hadar, 7 Ion (4 mi.) to the 2 Kings 1 3 : 1 4 - 1 7 is supported by the results of the regional north. [See Hadar, Tel.] archaeological exploration conducted by the Land of GeThe rescue excavation exposed a room rich in finds at the shur Project (see below). T h e ancient place name is pre southern end of the site. There, a complete storage jar with served at the site located by the springs of the 'Ein-Gev the word L§QY (Aram, le-shaqya, "belonging to tire cup River, 6 km (4 mi.) uphill, known in Arabic as Fiq, and in bearer") inscribed on its shoulder was found. "Cup bearer" the name of the Second Temple period village of 'Afiqa, was a title carried by very high officials in the courts of lungs modern Kibbutz Afiq. N o Iron Age remains have been at in the ancient Near East. T h e importance of'Ein-Gev in the tested there. Iron Age Tel Soreg, at the foot of Kibbutz Afiq, Aramean Kingdom of Damascus is thus attested by these proved, after excavation, to have been just a small hill fort, finds. [See Arameans.] which does not comply witir the biblical description of the In stratum II pits from the Persian period were cut into war witir tire Arameans that took place on the plain and of the debris of the last Iron Age town, which was probably Aphek being a major base for the Aramean army. 'Ein-Gev destroyed during Tiglath-Pileser Ill's onslaught on Damas is, however, located on tire plain and excavation has shown cus and northern Israel in 732 BCE. The site was resettled in that it was an important fortified Aramean town in the ninth the Hellenistic period (stratum I, third-second centuries century BCE. [See Aphek.] BCE). Private houses, but no fortifications, were found on In 1961 Benjamin Mazar and others undertook rescue ex tire acropolis. Hellenistic 'Ein-Gev was the harbor town of cavations at the southern and northern tips of tire site on the newly established city of Hippos/Susita, 2 km to the east. behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities. In 1990BIBLIOGRAPHY 1992, in tire framework of Tel Aviv University's Land of Geshur Project, three seasons of excavations were con Aharoni, Yohanan. The Land oj the Bible. 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1979. ducted by the Japanese Expedition to 'Ein-Gev headed by Identifies 'Ein-Gev with Aramean Aphek (p. 335). Dothan, Moshe. "Aphek on the Israel-Aram Border and Aphek on the Hiroshi Kanaseki and Hideo Ogawa. As most of the lower Amorite Border" (in Hebrew). Eretz-Israel 12 (1975): 63-65. Iden tell is built up, the expedition concentrated its efforts on tire tifies 'Ein-Gev with Aramean Aphek. northern tip of the tell, the acropolis. T h e rescue excavation Kochavi, Moshe. "Israelites, Arameans and Geshurites East of the Sea discerned five Iron Age strata on the lower tell and four on of Galilee" (in Hebrew). Ariel 102-103 (1994): 98-109. Latest treat the acropolis. The Japanese expedition distinguished three ment of the subject. c
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'EIN-SHADUD
Mazar, Benjamin, et al. "Ein-Gev: Excavations in 1961." Israel Explo ration Journal 14 (1964): 1-49. Report on the rescue excavation. MOSHE KOCHAVI
'EIN-SHADUD, site located about 200 m east of Tel Shadud (map reference 1724 X 2294), on the northwest edge of Israel's Jezreel (Esdraelon) plain. The site, unknown to archaeologists until 1979, was almost completely de stroyed by modern construction. Its ancient name is ob scure, its present identification is derived from the name of an adjacent spring. Salvage excavations were carried out under the direction of Eliot Braun and Shimon Gibson of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums in two areas, A and B. Sepa rated by an unexcavated strip 20 m wide, the areas yielded evidence of two successive occupational strata. Stratum II, the earlier stratum, was established on virgin soil and was represented by a number of disjointed, frag mentary stone wall foundations and one partially sunken rectangular broadroom. Its pebble-paved floor, bench-lined interior, and large flat stone pillar bases are in keeping with Early Bronze I architectural traditions. One corner was oc cupied by a basalt-paved grinding installation on which sev eral basalt querns were found. The stratum I houses, constructed directly on top of the remains of the earlier buildings, were similarly oriented. Al though somewhat better preserved, the structures in this level suffered from changes in elevations that produced a warping effect: originally horizontal layers were pushed up in places and were undulating rather than level. A sausage-shaped house with parallel walls ending in two opposing, curvilinear apses—otherwise typically a broad room with internal benches and stone pillar bases—was as sociated with this stratum. Its affinities with early northern EB I curvilinear constructions, such as those found at Yiftahel II (Braun, 1985-1986), Tel Teo V-IV (Eisenberg, 1989), and Palmahim Quarry 3, are somewhat modified by its broadroom. Similar contemporary structures have been uncovered at Qiryat Ata II (Eliot Braun and A. Golani, "Kiryat Ata," HadashotArcheologiot, in press [Hebrew]), Tel Kabri (Scheftelowitz, 1992), and Megiddo, stage IV (Engberg and Shipton, 1934, fig. 2). Completely rectilinear buildings, some with deliberately rounded corners, are also associated with the stratum I oc cupation at 'Ein-Shadud. They exhibit two building phases, in the latter of which there is a marked tendency toward thickening walls. Additional structures—including a double broadroom with a flagstone floor, several curvilinear walls, and frag mentary pebbled surfaces—were also encountered in the ex cavations. However, because of the site's poor state of pres ervation, they could not be attributed to either stratum. In agreement with the architectural evidence for conti
nuity is a collection of well-stratified diagnostic pottery types that show strata II and I to be roughly contemporary and of relatively brief duration. A quantity of late-style bowls of Gray-Burnished (Esdra elon) Ware emphasizes a somewhat early date on the EB I horizon for the overall occupation. Ceramics typical of this assemblage, indicating a somewhat advanced (post-Yiftahel II) and northern facies of the EB I, include red-slipped and burnished vessels, rail-rim and bow-rim pithoi, hemispher ical bowls with conical projections, and grain-wash deco ration. The flint tool kit (Rosen, 1985), based on analysis of all artifacts, including cores and debitage, is significant for its sizable collection of locally produced "ad hoc" tools and an imported Canaanean blade component, including sicldes. Evidence that grains were harvested and flour produced is found in sickle blades with gloss and numerous grinding stones. An osteological study (Horwitz, 1985) suggests tiiat animal husbandry must also have played a significant part in the economy of the 'Ein-Shadud villages. Sheep, goat, cattle, pig, and ass appear in quantities sufficient to suggest their utilization for primary and secondary products, as well as possibly being employed as beasts of burden. Trade and outside contacts seem to have been limited and probably extended only over short distances. Shared archi tectural and ceramic styles; lithic imports, including flint and some ground stone objects; and occasional instances of the use of cylinder seals, probably by itinerant potters, brought this village into contact with contemporary settlements, es pecially within the Jezreel plain. Presumably, small surpluses would have been used to barter for imported goods. [See also Yiftahel] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braun, Eliot. En Shadud: Salvage Excavations at a Farming Community in the Jezreel Valley, Israel. British Archaeological Reports, Interna tional Series, no. 249. Oxford, 1985. Braun, Eliot. "Of Megarons and Ovals: New Aspects of Late Prehistory
in Israel." Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 6 (19851986): 17-26. Eisenberg, Emmanuel. "Chalcolithic and Early Bronze I Occupations
at Tel Teo." In L'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Em maiis, 20-24 octobre 19S6, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, vol. 1, pp. 29-40. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Engberg, Robert, and Geoffrey Shipton. Notes on the Chalcolithic and
Early Bronze Age Pottery of Megiddo. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilizations, no. 10. Chicago, 1934. Horwitz, Liora K. "Appendix C: The En Shadud Faunal Remains."
In En Shadud: Salvage Excavations at a Farming Community in the Jezreel Valley, Israel, edited by Eliot Braun, pp. 168-177. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 249. Oxford, 1985. Rosen, Steven A. "Appendix B: The En Shadud Lithics." In En
Shadud: Salvage Excavations at a Farming Community in the Jezreel
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Valley, Israel, edited by Eliot Braun, pp. 153-167. British Archaeo of a tunnel hewn horizontally into tire hill. At one end of the logical Reports, International Series, no. 249. Oxford, 1985. tunnel, rainwater filtering through tire rock was collected in Scheftelowitz, Na'ama. "Area B: Architecture, Stratigraphy, and Pot a cave. T h e tunnel opens into a series of plastered channels tery." In Excavations at Kabri 6: Preliminary Report, of tagi Season, leading to several pools that regulated the amount of water edited by Aharon Kempinski and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, p. 1. Tel used for irrigation. Two levels of channels beneath tire mod Aviv, 1992. ELIOT BRAUN
'EIN-YA'EL (map reference 16687 X 12777), terraced farm at a hand-dug spring in the Rephaim Valley, 3 1cm (5 mi.) soudrwest of Jerusalem. T h e ancient name of the site is unknown, but in Arabic it is called 'Ain Yalu. Based on archaeological survey, tire site has been inhabited from the Canaanite period (2000-1600 BCE) until modern times, al though not continuously. Excavation has revealed structural remains from the First Temple (800-700 BCE), Roman (100-300 CE), Byzantine (400-640 CE), Early Arab (700-800 CE), and Ottoman (1516-1917) periods. The remains of agricultural terraces surrounded by stone fences can still be seen in aerial photographs and topograph ical maps of the Judean hills. As far as is known, such ter races were first built in this region at the beginning of the Iron Age (twelfth-eleventh centuries BCE) and continued to be used until modern times. The farm at 'Ein-Ya'el was built near tire foot of the hill and consisted of eight terraces constructed along its con tours. The terraces were surrounded by a stone fence with access on both its west and east sides. In all periods of set tlement at 'Ein-Ya'el, the buildings were constructed at the uppermost part of the farm. T h e terraces were irrigated by a water system consisting
C
ern channels attest to the similarity of the modern and an cient water systems. T h e imprints of metal tools are still visible on tire rock walls of tire tunnel and tire cave. The terrace walls were laid on bedrock and tire empty space created between the wall and the slope was filled with soil and stone. The earliest structure excavated is a corner of a building dated to tire First Temple period. Pottery and stone tools were found scattered on its floor. Among the inscriptional finds are two seal impressions, the first with an undeciphered personal name in the Hebrew script common to tire period and the second with a Imlk (lamelekh) seal im print on a jar handle. On the three highest terraces, the remains of a Roman villa (approximate area, 4,500 sq m) were discovered and partially excavated. On tire uppermost terrace, the frescoed, stone walls of a corridor, a room, and a triclinium (formal dining room) were uncovered, all with mosaic floors (see figure 1). Scattered on the floor of the triclinium were hun dreds of fragments of fresco decorated with flowers and hu man faces and chunks of plaster with a painted diamond pattern that had probably fallen from the ceiling. A stuccoed frieze decorated with stylized flowers, geometric patterns, and human faces adorned the room's edges. One panel of the mosaic floor features the sea goddess Tethys surrounded by fish and sea creatures; depictions of Medusa flank the scene. T h e second panel of this mosaic bears scantily clad
EIN-YA'EL. Figure 1. Overall view of the villa's mosaicflooring.(Courtesy Lucille Roussin)
226
'EIN-YA'EL
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nereids seated on the tails of ichthyocentaurs (creatures with the head, arms, and bust of a man; the forelegs of a horse; and the tail of a fish) (see figure 2); this scene is bordered by depictions of fish and ducks flanking two cupids riding on dolphins. In the center of this second panel, a marble slab forming part of a fountain was found together with a bronze nozzle; lead pipes through which tire water circulated were found under the mosaic. The mosaic in the corridor consists of four panels, each containing a personification of one of the four seasons, with birds in each corner. An additional rectangular panel con tains a scene of a satyr weaving garlands, while a figure car rying a basket approaches from behind. Only the last word, kale ("good"), of the Greek inscription below the satyr has been read. The triclinium opened onto a small room with a mosaic floor displaying a medallion with a badly preserved face. A bird is depicted in each corner of tire floor and an animal is depicted on each edge. Two theatrical masks on this floor allude to the cult of the wine god Bacchus. On the second terrace of the villa, the remains of a Roman bathhouse were uncovered. Sections of two of its rooms still stand from floor to ceiling, one with a domed roof. The roof of the second room was barrel vaulted, and beneath the floor brick arches were found that supported tire hypocaust. Pot tery pipes—part of the heating system—were found at tached to the walls of both rooms. A cross painted on one wall of the domed room confirms the ceramic evidence of occupation during the Byzantine period, whereas an oven was dated to the Early Arab period.
On the villa's third terrace, the remains of a pool were found; its position indicates that it formed part of the Roman irrigation system. Well-preserved rooms from a second Ro man bath were excavated on this terrace. In the two rectan gular rooms, the mosaic floor above the hypocaust was sup ported by columns. The floor had mostly collapsed in these rooms, but a mosaic depiction in a third (circular) room resembles a magen David (Heb., "shield of David"). T h e wall of the circular room had frescoes painted with geomet ric lines and swirls and representations of fruit. A layer of plaster painted with colored lines was applied on top of this fresco; this layer is not clearly dated. T h e mosaic floors and the ceramic as well as the numismatic finds in the villa date to the Late Roman period (late second to third century CE); additional pottery sherds were dated to the Early Arab pe riod. On top of this material lay roof tiles, some bearing seals of the Roman Tenth Legion, and boulders that had slid from the hill. T h e Roman villa at 'Ein-Ya'el was built after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 CE) and the expulsion of the Jews from all of Judea [see Judah]. T h e villa forms part of tire romanization of Judea, which included the construction of Aelia Gapitolina on tire ruins of the city of Jerusalem. T h e earlier farms surrounding Jerusalem were probably replaced by Roman-style farms and villas similar to those at 'EinYa'el. Some of the villa's buildings were in use more than four hundred years later, until the earthquake that shook Jerusalem in 732. All the remains of the villa were deliberately covered with soil, probably during tire Ottoman period, and the site was
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EIN-ZIPPORI, T E L
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used as a farm. Today tire site houses the Ein-Ya'el Living Museum.
least 1 1 X 15 m) is oriented northeast-southwest, with two primary interior dividing walls perpendicular to each other. One interior wall carries a stone bench along its northern BIBLIOGRAPHY face. Both walls have well-hewn stones as door jambs. T h e Applebaum, Shimon. Judaea in Hellenistic and Roman Times. Leiden, complex has two building phases. The destruction debris 1989. found within the complex included a great deal of burned Edelstein, Gershon. "What's a Roman Villa Doing Outside Jerusalem?" mud brick. Biblical Archaeology Review 16.6 (1990): 32-42. In field II a series of terraced, well-integrated domestic Edelstein, Gershon, and Ianir Milevsky. "The Rural Settlement of Je buildings and alleys was uncovered. T h e southernmost ter rusalem Re-valuated: Surveys and Excavations in the Rephaim Val race wall is more than 1 1 m long and more than 1 m wide, ley and Mevasseret Yerushalaim." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 126 (1994): 2-23. suggesting a large, well-planned residential area. Rectan Gibson, Shimon, and Gershon Edelstein. "Investigating Jerusalem's gular rooms with domestic ceramic assemblages, including Rural Landscape." Levant 17 (1985): 139-155. three cup-and-saucer vessels, were found along both sides Hopkins, David C. The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the of this east-west wall. Another large rectangular building was Early Iron Age. Sheffield, 1985. found in field II that was partially cobbled and contained GERSHON EDELSTEIN several large column bases. A drainage system on tire upper terrace channeled runoff away from the structure's south western corner. ' E I N - Z I P P O R I , T E L , site located in Israel in the T h e strata III-IV remains of a large building complex in Lower Galilee, along the Nahal Zippori, 5 Ion (3 mi.) from field II are dated to the thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE. The the modern city of Nazareth (32°45' N , 35°i5' E; map ref complex is oriented east-west and opened onto a large un erence 1761 X 2374). It is adjacent to one of the only cur roofed courtyard area to the north. Several large storejars rently active springs and spring-fed streams in the Galilee. were set in the courtyard and used as small tabuns or jar T h e site is well positioned to take advantage of neighboring stands. Along with local pottery, imported Cypriot wares arable land and a perennial water supply. Tiin-Zippori was ; initially surveyed by Zvi Gal (Lower Galilee during the Iron Age, Winona Lake, Ind., 1992), and two seasons of exca vation were carried out (1993, 1994) by the Sepphoris Re gional Project, sponsored by Duke University, Wake Forest University, and the University of Connecticut at Storrs, un der the direction of Eric Meyers, Carol Meyers, Ken Hoglund, and J. P. Dessel. Tel Ein-Zippori is approximately 1.5 ha (4 acres) in size. Its northern and western sides were cut, probably during tire last two hundred years, to increase the area of the valley under cultivation. Other recent modifications of the tell in clude the construction of a well on the eastern slope. Based on its construction style and on ethnohistorical data, tire well was also built within tire last two hundred years. Closer to tire center of the tell there are indications of another well. T h e depth of the archaeological deposits reaches at least 4 m. Excavation exposed a sequence of occupation from the Late Bronze Age I (1550 BCE) through the Iron Age II (ninth century BCE). The highest and most pronounced part of the tell has two terraces: an upper terrace (field I) and a lower terrace (field II). A 2-meter vertical face separates them. Field III is located along tire western edge of tire tell. Stratum I (ninth century BCE) is most clearly seen in field III. The remains of a stratum I pillared building were found along the western slope of the tell. Excavation on these slopes also clearly demonstrated that tire site was unfortified in Iron II. Stratum II (tenth century BCE) contained a large, E I N - Z l P P O R l , TEL. Figure 1. Eastern portion of a large tenth-cen well-constructed, multiroomed building in field I that has tury BCE building complex in field I. (Courtesy Sepphoris Regional Project) been partially excavated (see figure 1 ) . The complex (at
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EKRON
were found, including Base Ring II and White Slip II. T h e building was consttucted in LB II and reused, with some modification, in Iron I. Stratum V is represented by a narrow exposure that re vealed a rich assemblage of LB I pottery smashed on a sur face. The remains of at least thirteen restorable vessels in cluded several large pithoi; the Bichrome Ware and imported Cypriot White Slip I pottery suggest an LB IA date. In summary, Tel 'Ein-Zippori has five main occupational strata. Little is known about the LB I village, but it appears to end abruptly. In LB II the site was rebuilt along a different orientation, and there is complete continuity from LB I into Iron I. In the tenth century BCE the site was rebuilt for the third time, again with a different architectural plan. There is good evidence for large monumental buildings. This oc cupation ends in a partial destruction. The orientation of a ninth-century BCE pillared building differs significantly from die tenth-century architecture. It appears that the site was temporarily abandoned sometime in the late tenth century BCE. Although Tel 'Ein-Zippori was undoubtedly a village, the size and construction of the buildings suggest a degree of rural complexity for the tenth century BCE. J. P . DESSEL
EKRON. See Miqne, Tel.
ELAMITES. From the early third through mid-first mil lennia BCE, Elam was one of the major powers in the ancient Near East. Its territory encompassed parts of southern and western Iran, and comprised both lowland (modern Khu zistan) and highland Zagros Mountain components (Fars, and parts of Kerman, Luristan, and Kurdistan). Susa, in central Khuzistan, and nearby sites in die Khuzistan low lands have been the primary focus of research. [See Susa.] Anshan (modern Tall-i Malyan) was the major highland site, 500 km (310 mi.) to the southeast, in western Fars. [See Malyan.] Carter and Stolper (1984) provide the es sential synthesis of Elamite history and material culmre, and the following discussion draws on the framework that they have established and the evidence tiiat they present. The modern name Elam derives from the biblical Hebrew 'elam, Akkadian elamtu, Sumerian elam(a), and ultimately native Elamite hatami and haltamti, Elamite was not closely related to any known ancient language, and no direct de rivative survives. Throughout Elamite history, the balance between the highland and lowland regions shifted back and forth. While the geographic distributions of archaeological assemblages (material culture) can be defined through fieldwork, linking the ancient political and cultural geographies referred to in texts to the topography and assemblage disu-ibutions re
mains difficult. Historical sources document political ties of varied strengths among the regions as changing with time, as did the material culture. Because of its ease of access, lowland Elam was periodically involved in Mesopotamian political developments and even incorporated into Meso potamian states. Elamite polities in the Zagros highlands from the north to the southeast, however, were better able to sustain some autonomy, protected by the rugged topog raphy. At times, the highland polities developed sufficient cohesion to be able to dominate the lowlands. Native Elamite textual sources are sparse and episodic, leaving long periods of history obscure. Most of die texts come from Susa, where Mesopotamian influence often was strong. Almost no highland sites have yielded texts. Much of Elamite history must thus be extracted from tendentious, often hostile Mesopotamian texts. Their links between Elamite and Mesopotamian history provide the basic chro nology for Elam, Archaeological data are the major indigenous source for Elamite cultural history. Although excavation and survey had concentrated on Khuzistan, especially the area around Susa, the research ended by political events in 1978-1979 had begun to illuminate basic highland developments. Throughout Elamite history material culture, such as ce ramics, was strongly regional. Thus, the absence of a single distinctive "Elamite" style exacerbates the problem of de fining even the geographic scope of Elam. Elam's historical geography remains problematic, especially in the highlands, as a result of a dearth of native textual sources and the es sential Mesopotamian ignorance of the highlands. T h e lo cation of toponyms, cities, regions, and even important pol ities often remains uncertain. Texts and rock reliefs document an Elamite presence throughout lowland Khuzi stan, southward along the Persian Gulf to at least Bushire (ancient Liyan), and eastward in the highlands into Fars (ancient Anshan in the Marv Dasht). T h e Elamite sphere in the highlands to the north of Khuzistan remains ill de fined. Physical Geography. Differences in gross topography, climate, ecology, and natural resources yielded a regionally diverse mosaic of subsistence and economic potentials that were ultimately reflected in cultural regions. Khuzistan is an extension of the Mesopotamian lowlands east of the Tigris River. [See Tigris.] Although dry farming is possible, irri gation provides a more dependable agricultural base. [See Irrigation; Agriculture.] Resource poor, Khuzistan de pended on die surrounding highlands for many basic materials, such as metals, hard and semiprecious stones, and wood. [See Wood.] River valleys, particularly those of the main rivers, provide the primary routes into die highlands through the rugged parallel ridges of die Zagros Mountains. East of Khuzistan, in Fars, almost half of the Kur River basin (2,200 sq lam, or about 1,350 sq. mi.), at an elevation of 1,600 m in die Zagros Mountains, is arable. There lay
ELAMITES Anshan, the ancient name of both the regional polity and tire largest known Elamite site (mod. Tall-i Malyan) in the highlands. North of Khuzistan, the intermontane valleys of Luristan and southern Kurdistan tend to be relatively small, with a mixed agricultural-pastoral economy. Limited routes lead northward to the Great Khorasan Road, the primary east-west route linking the Iranian plateau and areas farther east to central Mesopotamia, where it entered the lowlands along the Diyala River. [See Diyala.] Sociopolitical organi zation has tended to be tribal throughout history, with marked cultural and ethnic regionalism. Farther to the east, the Kerman range provides a link between the eastern val leys of the central Zagros and the great salt deserts (Dashti Kavir and Dasht-i Lut) of the central Iran. R e s e a r c h on E l a m . Susa, always an important center, underpins the archaeology and history of Elam. T h e early excavations there, directed by Jacques de Morgan (18971908) and Roland de Mecquenem (1908-1946), who had both trained as mining engineers, were massive in scale. Mud-brick architecture, characteristic of southwest Asia, was not recognized, so that the excavations essentially yielded artifacts, monuments, graves, and occasional bakedbrick structures without contexts. Roman Ghirshman (di rector from 1946 to 1967) concentrated on the second mil lennium BCE, excavating a residential area of almost 10,000 sq m on the Ville Royale mound at Susa, as well as temples and the city wall at the nearby monumental site of Chogha Zanbil. [See Chogha Zanbil.] Under Jean Perrot (director from 1967 to 1990), stratigraphic excavations at Susa and at smaller sites on the surrounding plain yielded a detailed se quence for the region. Between the late 1950s and the revolution in 1978-1979, the scope of excavation and survey expanded greatly. In Khuzistan, Pinhas Delougaz and Helene Kantor excavated at Chogha Mish, concentrating on the prehistoric phases, and Etat O. Neghaban worked at Haft Tepe. [See Haft Tepe.] Numerous surveys and smaller-scale excavations throughout Khuzistan and the Zagros piedmont clarified the history of Elamite settiement. In Fars, Louis Vanden Berghe and later William M. Sumner constructed the Kur River basin sequence. Sumner's excavations at Tall-i Malyan/Anshan dramatically increased the geographic scale of Elam and highlighted the role of the highlands. Excavations at sites in the Kerman range, such at Tepe Yahya, Tall-i Iblis, Tepe Sialk, and Shahdad, yielded evidence of the exploita tion of natural resources and contacts with the Elamite west. [See Tepe Yahya.] Growing numbers of surveys and exca vations began to clarify developments in highland Luristan and southern Kurdistan and their relationships to lowland Khuzistan. T . C. Young's excavations at Godin Tepe pro vided a dependable archaeological sequence for the late fourth through late second millennia BCE. [See Godin Tepe.] Although changes in archaeological assemblages do not often proceed in lockstep with political events, tire following
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historical periodization corresponds workably (dates are ap proximate) . P r o t o - E l a m i t e E r a (c. 3400-2600 BCE). Elamites are first identified historically in the Proto-Elamite era; ethnic affinities in prehistory are problematic. Early stages of writing. T h e Acropole I excavation by Alain Le Brun at Susa have distinguished several stages in the development of writing, although it is not certain that the innovation itself first took place there (Le Brun and Val l a t e 1978). [See Writing and Writing Systems.] Small, vari ously shaped clay tokens were used as counters or, as Denise Schmandt-Besserat suggests represent set amounts of spe cific commodities. By level 18 (3200 BCE), tokens were placed inside a hollow clay ball (bulla) whose surface was impressed with one or more seals to provide a sealed record. [See Seals.] Sometimes, signs corresponding to the shape and number of the enclosed tokens were impressed on the exterior. In level 17 (3200-3100 BCE) numerical tablets re placed bullae, counters, and tallies. [See Tablet.] A more complex system of numerical signs, in which various shapes and sizes of marks had specific values, was impressed on pillow-shaped lumps of clay. T h e limited information re corded suggests short-term administrative records for local use. In levels 16-14B (and Ville Royale I, levels 1 8 - 1 3 ) , pictographic signs were added to identify the item counted. This developed into the Proto-Elamite A script, consisting of perhaps four hundred to eight hundred distinct charac ters, one hundred of them common, and suggesting a pre dominantly logographic writing system. T h e Proto-Elamite B script dates to the late third millennium BCE and is found on statues, vessels, and large clay tablets at Susa and Shah dad; fewer than one hundred characters are known. T h e basic script on Proto-Elamite tablets is similar to scripts of southern Mesopotamia, but it is distinct in all de tails, suggesting a different language and perhaps parallel but independent development. Proto-Elamite script was probably used to write an early form of Elamite and may thus define the minimal geographic extent of early Elam. In the later third millennium BCE, the Mesopotamian cunei form writing system displaced Proto-Elamite script for writ ing Elamite. [See Cuneiform.] Material culture Khuzistan. During the later Susa II period (3500-3100 BCE), which corresponds to the Late Uruk in Mesopotamia, the population of Susiana had declined and was concentrated into two enclaves focused on the towns of Susa and Chogha Mish, separated by an empty zone 14 km (9 mi.) wide. Scenes of organized warfare in seals and sealings il lustrate conflict. Numerical tablets, found at Susa in LeBrun's Acropole I excavation levels 1 8 - 1 7 (see above), pro vide evidence for deep penetration into the highlands at Godin (V), Sialk (IVi), and Tall-i Ghazir. In about 3000 BCE, Susiana separated culturally from the Mesopotamian world, and a polity began to emerge at Ma-
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lyan 500 km (310 mi.) to the southeast, in Fars. During the Susa III period (3100-2700 BCE), Susa expanded, while the overall settlement density in Susiana remained low. The ce ramic assemblage was basic: common types include coarseware goblets and ttays, beveled-rim bowls, red-slipped ba sins, and jars. A new glyptic style emerged, using deep linear engraving to depict animals in human stances. Glazed ste atite seals (the surface vitrified by heating) have geometric or sometimes plant or animal motifs.; this "piedmont" style extended into the highlands. Proto-Elamite A tablets and associated pottery and glyptic, found at Malyan (Banesh pe riod, 3400-2600 BCE), Sialk (IV2), Yahya (JVC), and even Shahr-i Sokhta/Sistan provide evidence for an even more extensive outreach into the highlands. On the Deh Luran plain, 60 Ian (37 mi.) to the northwest, the population peaked. [See Deh Luran.] The ceramic assemblage was much more Mesopotamian in character, with parallels to the Jemdet Nasr-Early Dynastic I Diyala region; red- and blackpainted ware was related to Early Dynastic I—II Scarlet ware. Fars. The Banesh period (see above) corresponds to late Susa II—III. Malyan reached 50 ha (124 acres) in size in the early third millennium BCE. In area ABC, large public build ings had painted wall decoration, while area TUV yielded a more "industrial area," with Proto-Elamite A tablets and Susa III ceramics. [See Wall Paintings.] By the late Middle Banesh period (c. 3000 BCE), a massive city wall was built. Kerman. Proto-Elamite A tablets, Susa III pottery, and glazed steatite seals in a single large building on top of the mound at Tepe Yahya mark an extended reach to the east into Kerman. Numerical tablets and Susa III pottery also are found at Tepe Sialk (IVi), near the crossing of northsouth routes with the Great Khorasan Road. Tall-i Iblis, a copper metallurgical site, yielded Susa III pottery. Luristan. At another junction of north-south routes and tire Great Khorasan Road, an oval enclosure on top of Godin Tepe (period V) yielded Susa III ceramics and nu merical tablets. The surrounding settlement, however, con tinued to use the local traditional pottery. Other sites along important routes through Luristan have also yielded late fourth-early third millennia lowland types of pottery, sug gesting a network of lowland-connected sites in the high lands. Proto-Elamite phenomenon. The distribution of nu merical and Proto-Elamite A tablets deep into the highlands suggests an outreach toward resource areas and routes. At sites like Godin V and Yahya IVC, late Susa II or Susa III pottery and tablets were essentially confined to a single building complex within a settlement where the preexisting local material culture continued with only slight changes. The presence of blank tablets at highland sites (Godin and Yahya) implies local use. Impacts on the highlands were highly variable. In many regions the lowland emplacements were short-lived. Banesh Malyan, however, developed into a sizable city. During Susa III, Elamite culture was becom
ing less Mesopotamian. It was then, at the very beginning of Elamite history proper, that the pattern of highland-low land interrelationship, which was to characterize Elam throughout its history, first appeared. Late Third Millennium (c. 2600-2100 B C E ) . Refer ences to Elam appear in Sumerian historical and literary texts of the mid-third millennium BCE from southern Mes opotamia. [See Sumerians.] For example, the Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta epic recounts an expedition to Anshan and beyond for metals, lapis lazuli, and craftsmen; inscrip tions from Early Dynastic Lagash already record conflicts with Elam, especially Susa (c. 2450-2375 BCE). T h e Sume rian King List includes a dynasty of Awan, an Elamite cen ter. In the Old Akkadian period (c. 2350-2200 BCE), Meso potamian texts record Akkadian kings waging war and di plomacy against both lowland and highland Elam, although the historical geography, and thus the scope, remains prob lematic. [See Akkadians.] Susa and the Khuzistan plains were vassals or may have been incorporated into the Ak kadian state; Susa has yielded Old Akkadian texts, school tablets, and other evidence of typical Mesopotamian admin istrative activity. Flighland regions experienced both military and diplomatic pressure (Akkadian royal inscriptions record campaigns to Anshan). Texts document commercial ties among Umma in soutiiern Mesopotamia, Susa, and areas farther east. Material culture Khuzistan. At Susiana, the population gradually returned to levels reached in the fourth millennium. Susa itself grew from 10 to 46 ha (25 to 106 acres) in area. Small settlements were scattered across the plain, with two weak clusters, one of them centered on Susa. In Deh Luran, Tepe Mussian remained a large town (14 ha, or 35 acres). Eastern Khu zistan, however, seems to have lacked permanent settlement. [See Tepe Mussian.] Evidence for the later third millennium at Susa is frag mentary. Banded plain-ware pottery typical of Susa III dis appeared. Susa IV monochrome painted buff ware had dec oration arranged in registers on the upper body; focal motifs included naturalistic, geometric, and abstract designs. This ceramic tradition is closely related to the early phases of the Godin III tradition in Luristan. Painted wares decreased in frequency through Susa IV, as Mesopotamian types of Ak kadian date, such as jars with ribbed shoulders, became more common. Increasing Mesopotamian cultural impact is evident in the styles of cylinder seals, wall plaques, and vo tive sculpture. T h e Proto-Elamite A script went out of use, and the increasing use of Akkadian-style glyptic and ceram ics reflected Akkadian domination of Khuzistan, Fars and Kerman. In Fars, a gap separated the ProtoElamite Banesh (3200-2600 BCE) and Kaftari (2200-1600 BCE) periods (see below). Kerman was culturally distinct from the Elamite regions but long-distance trade contacts
ELAMITES continued. "Intercultural style" chlorite bowls link Tepe Yahya IVB (2800-2300 BCE), lowland Elam, and Early Dynas tic II—III (2700-2400 BCE) Mesopotamia. Made at Yahya and other (still unknown) sites, such vessels had their sur face covered with incised decoration; characteristic motifs include intertwined snakes, humpback bulls, date palms, ea gles with lion heads, and architectural facades whose geo metric patterns seem to portray reed-mat, bundled-reed, and brick construction. All other aspects of material culture, such as glyptic and ceramics, show that Yahya's ties were to the Indo-Iranian traditions to tire south and east. North of Yahya, Shahdad lies between the Kerman range and the Dasht-i Lut desert, astride major trade routes. Its material culture seems to have derived from tire Proto-Elamite tra dition, but it developed as part of the northeastern Iranian and south-central Asian world. Luristan. In Luristan, the Godin Tepe III monochromepainted buff-ware ceramic tradition, related to and perhaps derived from that of Susa IV, spread northward through the eastern valleys. Godin Tepe itself overlooks the junction of north-south routes from Khuzistan and the Great Khorasan Road. T h e expansion of the monochrome-pottery distri bution may reflect an early Elanrite attempt to tap, or per haps even control, the flow of materials from the Iranian plateau to the Mesopotamian lowlands. In the western val leys (the Pusht-i Kuh), the economy seems to have been predominantly pastoral. Megalithic stone-built communal tombs (lihaqs, 6-13 m long) yielded bronze artifacts and monochrome-painted buff ware associated with the early Godin III tradition. [See Tombs.] Dynasty of Shimashki a n d t h e S u k k a l m a h (c. 21001600 BCE). A century after the collapse of the Old Akkadian state, Ur under the U r III dynasty reunified southern Mes opotamia and again moved against Elam (2100-2000 BCE). [See Ur.] Susa and the Khuzistan lowlands were incorpo rated into the Ur III provincial system. Although the polities in tire highland Zagros maintained their basic autonomy, they experienced military and diplomatic activity. This in tensive Ur III pressure on highland polities stimulated de fensive alliances. From this emerged tire Shimashki dynasty (c. 2100-1900 BCE), which regained the lowlands and led the destruction of the U r III state. Shimashki probably lay to the north of Khuzistan in the highlands. T h e decentralized gov ernment structure characteristic of the following sukkalmah period may have emerged at this time. Conflict with Mes opotamia continued after the fall of the Ur III dynasty. T h e Suldcalmah era (c. 1900-1600 BCE) is the best-docu mented period of Elamite history, based on building and cylinder-seal inscriptions and royal texts. T h e transition from the dynasty of Shimashki to the Sukkalmah remains unclear. As seen in texts from Susa, power was held by the sukkalmah ("grand regent"), the sukkal of Elam and Shi mashki ("senior co-regent"), and the sukkal of Susa ("junior co-regent"), all drawn from a dynastic family. If more were
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known from other regions, such as Anshan, the picture might well become more complex. Although Elam was a major independent power, private legal documents from Susa, and the names of many individuals in them, were writ ten in Akkadian or Sumerian rather than Elamite, although some legal terms and usages were non-Mesopotamian. By the early eighteenth century BCE, Elam was one of tire largest states in the area. It extended southward along the Persian Gulf and eastward into Fars (Anshan), although its ultimate eastern and northern limits remain uncertain. Elam exerted influence, if not actual control, over tire city-states along the eastern edge of Mesopotamia, north to the Diyala River and beyond to the Lower Zab River; its diplomatic and economic contacts stretched across Mesopotamia and northern Syria to tire Mediterranean coast. Susa's role in the tin trade is clear in texts from Mari on the Middle Euphrates River. [See Mari; Euphrates.] In tire mid-eighteenth century BCE, Elam and Mesopotamian allies campaigned into north ern Mesopotamia and Syria, before finally being pushed back by Hammurabi of Babylon. [See Babylon.] Elam then seems to have spent several centuries in decline. Material culture Khuzistan. In Khuzistan during the Shimashld period, Susa was the only city (85 ha, or 210 acres); most of the population lived in towns (4-10 ha, or 10-25 acres) rather than villages. [See Villages.] Under tire sukkalmah, three ad ditional settlements grew to cities (of greater than 10 ha, or 25 acres) and the number of Jiages increased. Susa and its hinterland grew. (Political disarray in southern Mesopota mia and Elamite independence would have encouraged such growth.) T h e population in Deh Luran declined, and the plains in eastern Khuzistan seem not to have had permanent occupations. At Susa, elaborate administrative and religious buildings stood on the Acropole, and perhaps tire Apadana mound, but they were badly damaged by later building activity. A temple with terra-cotta lions may have stood on the Ville Royale. A dense urban residential neighborhood on the Ville Royale had streets that intersected obliquely and alleys be tween houses. T h e typical house plan consisted of mudbrick rooms around a courtyard. Burials were placed below house floors or courtyards. [See Burial Techniques.] Shimashki-era burials tended to be placed in an inverted, tub like terra-cotta sarcophagus. [See Sarcophagus.] During the Sukkalmah period, vaulted tombs built of baked brick were used for repeated (family?) burials, a practice tha* continued into the first millennium BCE. Pottery from the early second millennium BCE bears a close resemblance to that from contemporary Mesopotamia, despite political independence. During the Sukkalmah pe riod, new forms related to the Kaftari assemblage at Fars appeared. Shimashld glyptic was very similar to Ur III M e sopotamian types; with presentation scenes the typical mo tif. Sukkalmah glyptic includes both Mesopotamian types, v
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such as Old Babylonian-style worship scenes, and local types made of bitumen or soft stones with scenes of ban quets, files of animals, or dancing. Vessels made of bitumen have handles, feet, and spouts in animal forms, for which there are parallels from Larsa-period Mesopotamia (20001800 BCE). Chlorite bowls, flasks, and compartmented con tainers are associated with Persian Gulf seals and suggest trade among southern Mesopotamia, Susa, the Gulf, and soutiiern Iran. Popular art includes molded naked female figurines with headdresses, jewelry, and belts. [See Jewelry.] Fars. Following an apparent occupational hiatus after the Banesh period, population grew during the Kaftari period in Fars (2200-1600 BCE). Malyan was a large regional center (150 ha, or 371 acres) dominating a four-level hierarchy of site sizes. The regional distribution of sites suggests a com plex irrigation network. Excavations at Malyan uncovered substantial buildings and portions of the city wall. Ceramic parallels between the sukkalmah phase and the Kaftari as semblage reflect die close lowland-highland political con nections. The black-painted buff ware of the Kaftari ce ramic assemblage tended to have overall decoration. Plain and painted red wares provide parallels to Susa. Kaftari glyptic has both Susian-style scenes (a worshiper facing a table with food) and Mesopotamian types. Cuneiform texts from Malyan reflect Mesopotamian scribal traditions but are not written in Elamite, despite Elamite autonomy. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] Along routes from Susiana to Malyan (Kurangun) and from Malyan to the Iranian plateau (Naqsh-i Rustam), are rock carvings that may have been shrines. [See Naqsh-i Rus tam.] In each, the central scene shows worshipers approach ing a divine couple seated on serpent thrones beneath flow ing streams. Luristan. The later phase of the Godin III monochrome painted tradition is found throughout the region. T h e ce ramic assemblage is quite standardized, although red-slip or bichrome-painted decoration marks regional variants. Set tlement density reached a peak, and valleys had central towns surrounded by villages. T h e western, outer Zagros valleys seem to have been essentially deserted, except by pastoralists, as a buffer against lowland Mesopotamian states. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] By the middle of the sec ond millennium, BCE the density of settlement and com plexity of the economy seem to have declined markedly. Transitional a n d Middle Elamite Periods (1600-1100 BCE). Elam regained strength throughout the fourteenth century BCE, and the titulary of the king at Susa claimed control of Anshan. By the thirteenth century BCE, Elam had reemerged as a major power, with a geographic scope com parable to that under the sukkalmah. Kings undertook ex tensive building programs. Untash-Napirisha carried out large construction projects at a number of centers in Khu zistan—the largest was the building of a new center, Al U11tash Napirisha (modern Chogha Zanbil), 40 km (25 mi.) southeast of Susa. [See Chogha Zanbil] In the twelfth cen
tury BCE, Elam had major military and political impacts on Mesopotamia, ousting the Kassite dynasty in Babylonia and effecting dynastic changes in other cities as well. [See Kassites.] At the zenith, under Shilhak-Inshushinak, Elamite forces again pushed deep into Mesopotamia, as far nortii as the Lower Zab and as far west as the Euphrates. Material culture Khuzistan. T h e Middle Elamite state reached its zenith in the thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE and represents some thing of a break with the past. T h e much broader use of Elamite for inscriptions and the development of a distinctive style of art and architecture all served to illustrate and em phasize Elamite power and independence. Although the area west of Susa seems to have been aban doned as a buffer zone against southern Mesopotamian states, settlement across Khuzistan grew. Susa itself seems to have declined in size and importance, while a series of large new settlements, which may have been funerary cult centers, were founded outside central Khuzistan. [See Cult.] Susa's role as a religious center must have suffered. At first, the number and size of villages and small towns remained unchanged, later, however, population seems to have con centrated in large towns along major routes. T h e depopu lation of Deh Luran continued. Stamped baked bricks attest to repeated royal renovations of the Temple of Inshushinak at Susa, for which molded glazed frit bricks may have been used as a facing. T h e tech niques used to make the molded-brick facade of another temple to Inshushinak were similar to those used by the Kassites in Mesopotamia. Large houses on the Ville Royale had a standard plan, distinct from the ones in contemporary Mesopotamia, with courtyard(s) surrounded by rooms; a large rectangular room with pilasters probably served as a reception room. Haft Tepe (ancient Kabnak[?]) 20 Ian (12 mi.) south of Susa was built by Tepti-ahar (c. 1375 BCE). N O houses have been excavated there. A funerary temple complex consisted of a walled compound with a baked-brick pavement. Two halls opened off of a portico; beneath each was a large vaulted tomb chamber. Some bodies had been carefully laid out and covered with ocher; others had been interred much more haphazardly. Two mud-brick terraces were found nearby, one of which was 14 m high and surrounded by halls with polychrome painted decoration. Crafts at the site in cluded elephant-bone working, tablet firing, potting (ce ramic kiln), and metalworking. Untash-Napirisha (1260-1235 BCE) founded Chogha Zanbil (ancient Al Untash-Napirisha) on a ridge overlook ing the Diz River after Haft Tepe was abandoned. Within an area of 100 ha (247 acres) enclosed by a city wall were a ziggurat complex and several monumental buildings. [See Ziggurat.] Courts, shrines, and temples to various gods in side a double wall surrounded the ziggurat with its temple to Inshushinak and Naparisha (the complex had undergone several major changes of plan). Decorated pegs attached
ELAMITES glazed riles to doorjambs, wooden doors had glass-bead dec oration, and glazed frit griffins and bulls guarded the zigurrat's staircases. [See Glass.] In die eastern corner of the city, three monumental complexes consisted of large courtyards surrounded witir rooms and storerooms; one contained five underground vaulted tomb chambers. Through tire second millennium BCE, the Elamite pottery assemblage became more uniform and simpler, which sug gests more centralized production. The Middle Elamite as semblage included wide varieties of jars and goblets. Pottery at Deh Luran had more Mesopotamian Kassite parallels, while eastern Khuzistan had parallels to the Qaleh pottery tradition of Fars. Royal Elamite seals from the seventeen to fourteenth cen turies BCE display a deity seated on a serpent throne. Middle Elamite glyptic includes scenes of banqueting and hunting, mythical beasts, and geometric patterns; other seals have Old Babylonian or Kassite Mesopotamian parallels. Middle Elamite craftsmen were skilled in metalwork, glass, faience, and glazing. A fragmentary monumental stone stele shows Untash-Napirisha and his family in a religious procession. A massive solid bronze statue of Napirisha (although incom plete it weighs 1,750 kg), a serpent offering table, and a re ligious-offering tableau demonstrate bronze-casting skill. Fars. In Fars, die regional population declined. On a high point at Malyan, a building whose plan consisted of a rec tangular courtyard surrounded by corridors off of which rooms opened, yielded Middle Elamite pottery and account ing tablets dealing with precious metals, food, and animal products. Only Malyan itself has pottery with clear lowland connections. Distinct local ceramic assemblages seem to be at least contemporary with one another, suggesting a frag mentation of local (material) culture. T h e Qaleh assemblage is related to the earlier Kaftari in forms and decoration. The handmade Shogha assemblage has black-painted decoration on an orange ground, with animal, plant, and geometric mo tifs. Teimurran pottery is wheelmade, with exttemely reg ular decoration that was probably painted on a turntable. Luristan. Ceramic distributions suggest a complex cul tural situation in Luristan. Elamite goblets and some related forms are found throughout tire southern and western val leys. Eastern Luristan was either abandoned or had perhaps shifted to a heavily pastoral economy. Elements of the Iron I—II western gray-ware assemblage characteristic of north western Iran (e.g., Hasanlu V-IV), such as button-base gob lets, appear in graves in the northern and eastern valleys of Luristan. [See Hasanlu; Grave Goods.] Local ttaditions, if any, are difficult to identify. T h e beginnings of the elaborate "Luristan bronze" tradition also appear, probably drawing on the lowland Elamite bronzeworking tradition. Neo-Elamite P e r i o d (1100-500 BCE). Nebuchadrezzar I (1125-1104 BCE) defeated Elam but seems not to have gained long-term control. After a period of historical obscu rity, Elam again reemerged as a political refuge for Baby lonian opponents of Assyria; at the same time, the Assyrians
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were moving into tire central western highlands and estab lishing control along the valleys along die Great Khorasan Road. [See Babylonians; Assyrians.] By the second quarter of the first millennium BCE, Elam was under ever-increasing pressure from all sides: the Assyrians and Babylonians from the west, the Medes and Assyrians in the northern high lands, and the Persians in tire southeast. [See Medes; Per sians.] From about 750 to 650 BCE, Elam experienced a slow decline during nearly constant political and military conflict with Mesopotamian powers. Finally, in 646 BCE, the Assyr ian lung Ashurbanipal conquered Khuzistan and sacked Susa. Assyrian palace reliefs provide detailed information on dress, architectural facades, and other aspects of Elamite material culture. Fragments of Elam, mostly in the highlands, maintained a political identity, but by the mid-sixth century BCE, former Elamite areas had fallen under Achaemenid control. Elam ceased to exist as a power. Under the Achaemenids, the Elamite language continued in use for display inscriptions, such as at Bisitun, and in administrative documents. [See Bisitun.] Although references to Elamites persist into the Hellenistic era, Elam's importance and independent identity had come to an end. Lowland Elam had been in decline by the beginning of the first millennium BCE. T h e number of villages decreased, and many Middle Elamite towns were abandoned by about 1000 BCE (cultural developments in the highlands may have played a major role in this). During the second half of the second millennium BCE, many indigenous traditions disap peared as new groups appeared. T h e changes in the high lands accelerated through tire first millennium BCE, sweeping away the past. Susa revived as a regional center by the end of the eighth century BCE. Neo-Elamite architecture shows a strong continuity with the past in location and ornamen tation: a small temple on the Acropole had green-glazed bricks, and tire pegs attaching glazed frit tiles to the walls bear knobs in the form of animal forequarters, humans, or bull men. Burial practices continued second-millennium BCE practices, including the use of painted clay funerary heads. Neo-Elamite I pottery (1000-700 BCE) is little known; Neo-Elamite II pottery (700-500 BCE) is simple and demonsttates continuity. This is noteworthy because die Assyr ian conquest of Elam and die sack of Susa in 646 BCE had little effect on the ceramic assemblage and other types of artifacts. T h e second half of tire first millennium BCE is poorly known archaeologically. [See also Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; and Persia, article on Ancient Persia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amiet, Pierre. Glyplique susienne: Des origines a Tepoque de Perses-Ache menides. Memoires de la Delegation Archeologique en Iran, 43. Paris, 1972. Comprehensive study of Susiana glyptic. Amiet, Pierre. "Archaeological Discontinuity and Ethnic Duality in
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the most detailed synthesis of die archaeological evidence for the Elam." Antiquity 53 (1979): 195-204. Important essay on the low fourth and tirird millennia BCE. land-highland dynamic of Elamite history. Amiet, Pierre. L'dge des echanges inter-iraniens. Paris, 1986. Synthesis of ROBERT C . HENRICKSON interregional connections.
Berghe, Louis Vanden. Bibliographic analytique de I'archeolagie de Than ancien. Leiden, 1979. This and the two supplements below are an E L E M E N T A L A N A L Y S I S . See Neutron Activation exhaustive bibliographic resource, site by site. Analysis. Berghe, Louis Vanden, and E. Haerinck. Bibliographic analytique de
Tarcheologie de Than ancien: Supplement 1, 1978-1080. Leiden, 1981. Berghe, Louis Vanden, and E. Haerinck. Bibliographic analytique de
Tarcheologie de Than ancien: Supplement 2,1081-1985. Leiden, 1987. E L E P H A N T I N E (Egyp., 3bw; Aram., Jeb [or Yeb]; Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran. Paris, 1 9 7 1 - . Gk., Elephantine; Ar., Geziret-Aswan), tire southern fron Reports on the French excavations at Susa and otiier prehistoric tier town of pharaonic Egypt, situated on an island in tire Khuzistan sites since 1967. Carter, Elizabeth, and Matthew W. Stolper. Elam: Surveys of Political Nile River opposite modern Aswan, whose ancient prede Histoty and Archaeology. Berkeley, 1984. Essential synthesis of Elam cessor it is (24°6' N , 32°54' E). The modern remains consist ite history and archaeology. of a tell u p to 15 m high about 350 m in diameter. Gasche, Hermann. La poterie elamite du deuxieme millenaire A.C. MeThe first excavations, by missions of the Berlin Museums moires de la Delegation Archeologique en Iran, 47. Paris, 1973. Sec and the Paris Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, ond-millennium BCE Elamite pottery corpus from Ghirshman's Ville took place at tire beginning of tire twentieth century and Royale excavations at Susa. Harper, Prudence, Oliver, et al., eds. The Royal City of Susa: Ancient were primarily aimed at recovering papyri. A comprehen Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre. New York, 1992. Catalog fromsive examination of the city by the German Institute of Ar an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, chaeology together with the Swiss Institute for Architectural with numerous illustrations, extensive essays on many aspects of Research, has been underway since 1969; it is allowing the Elamite art and culture from Susa, and recent bibliography. Hinz, Walther, and Heidemarie Koch. Elamisches Worterbuch. Archaol- most important features of its history to be determined with ogische Mitteilungen aus Iran, vol. 17. Berlin, 1987. increasing accuracy. Hole, Frank, ed. The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and SocietyThe earliest traces of settlement so far determined date to from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest. Washington, D.C., 1987. tire Middle Naqada period (c. 3500 BCE) and are concen Comprehensive survey of development in western Iran, providing trated on the eastern part of the island, which was at that the Iranian context of Elam. time still divided into two flood-free granite ridges. T h e sa LeBrun, Alain, and Francois Vallat. "L'origine de I'ecriture a Suse." Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran 8 (1978):cred 1 1 - precinct of the antelope goddess Satet, tire historical 60. Stratigraphic evidence from Susa for the development of writing. "mistress of the city," which at first consisted of nothing Memoires de la Delegation en Perse, Memoires de la Mission Archeologique more than a modest brick hut between three towering gran en Iran, Memoires de la Delegation Archeologique en Iran (series name ite rocks, can be traced at least as far back as the Late Na changes over time). Paris, 1900-. Reports of the French excavations, qada period (c. 3200 BCE). It is, however, unclear whether primarily at Susa, by Jacques de Morgan, Roland de Mecquenem, and Roman Ghirshman. the inhabitants of the early settlement consisted largely of Mesopotamie el Elam: Acles de la XXXVeme rencontre assyriologique In egyptianized Nubians, whose settlement area then extended ternationale, Gaud, 10-14 juillet '989. Ghent, 1991. to the north, beyond the first cataract, or whether tire oldest Miroschedji, Pierre de. "Fouilles du chantier Ville Royale II a Suse, Elephantine was already an extended outpost of Egypt I 9 7 5 9 7 7 i I: Les niveaux filamites." Cahiers de la Delegation Ar cheologique Francaise en Iran 1 2 (1981): 9 - 1 3 6 . The first millenniumproper. Its function, at the northern end of the hard-to-navigate cataract region, must have been related primarily to BCE sequence at Susa. Nicholas, Ilene M. The Proto-Elamite Settlement at TUV. Malyan Ex trade with the south. -I
cavation Reports, vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1990. Report on the area TUV excavation at Malyan.
With tire final development of tire Egyptian state, the function of state border post was added to that of exchange Pittman, Holly. The Glazed Steatite Style: The Structure and Function of place; during the course of the first dynasty (c. 3000/2950an Image System in the Administration of Protoliterate Mesopotamia. Berlin, 1994. 2800 BCE), a fortress protected by towers was erected on tire Sumner, William M. "Proto-Elamite Civilization in Fars." In Gamdat highest point of the east island, close to the bank; it was, so Nasr: Period or Regional Style?, edited by Uwe Finkbeiner and Wolf far as can be determined, staffed with nonlocal—but cer gang RSllig, pp. 1 9 9 - 2 1 1 . Beihefte zum Tiibinger Adas des Vorderen tainly Egyptian—forces. A little later, the entire settlement Orients, Reihe B, vol. 62. Wiesbaden, 1986. area was also surrounded with a strong brick fortification. Sumner, William M. "Anshan in the Kaftari Phase: Patterns of Settle From the third/fourth dynasty onward (c. 2600 BCE), the city ment and Land Use." In Archaeologia Iranica et Orientalis: Miscella nea in honorem Louis Vanden Berghe, edited by L6on De Meyer andgained in significance because of increased quarrying of its E. Haerinck, pp. 1 3 5 - 1 6 1 . Ghent, 1989. valuable hard stone, of which the so-called Aswan granite, Vallat, Francoise. Suse el I'Elam. Paris, 1980. in particular, remained one of Egypt's most beloved mate Voigt, Mary M., and Robert H. Dyson, Jr. "The Chronology of Iran, rials for monumental buildings, statues, and stelae through ca. 8000-2000 B.C." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, edited out the pharaonic period. by Robert W. Ehrich, pp. 1 2 2 - 1 7 8 . 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Provides
ELEPHANTINE With the conquest of Lower Nubia by Sesostris I (c. 1950 BCE) in the early twelfth dynasty. Elephantine, for the first time, lost its function as a frontier town; however, as com pensation, it became an even more important administrative and ttading center for traffic to the south, beyond the first cataract. The western island, which had served primarily as a cemetery, was increasingly included in the settlement area of the city. Sesostris I had the first stone temple erected to the city goddess Satet; next to it he built a festival court for the celebration of the Nile flood, which, according to Egyp tian belief, had its point of origin in Elephantine. At about this time, the ram-headed god of the cataracts, Khnum, also received his own temple in the city. A third sacred precinct that had already developed in the course of the eleventh Dy nasty (c. 2050 BCE) was refurbished for the worship of a former governor of Elephantine by the name of Heqaib. In the difficult period during which the Old Kingdom declined, Heqaib apparently distinguished himself, so that he was made the protective saint of the city after his death. Even his successors in the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties (c. 2000-1650 BCE) all erected their own commemorative chap els in his precinct, in addition to tiieir rock-cut tombs on the east side of the Nile; other officials, even from outside Ele phantine, dedicated statues and stelae there. T h e disintegration of the Egyptian state in the second in terregnum (c. 1650-1550 BCE) returned the southern bound ary of Egypt to Elephantine for a while. When the kings of the early eighteenth d3'nasty (c. 1550-1300 BCE) renewed their conquest of Nubia, this time extending beyond the fourth cataract, a new period of prosperity began for the city. Its boundaries expanded once more (they can no longer
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be precisely determined under the modern village toward the north). Hatshepsut and Thutmosis III (c. 1490-1440 BCE) had new and larger temples erected to Satet and Khnum; especially the one to Khnum was considerably en larged during the later eighteenth and the nineteenth/twen tieth dynasties (c. 1300-1020 BCE). T h e two temples, together with their administrative and commercial buildings, occupied almost a third of the city's preserved surface area. It is, therefore, probably no coincidence that at this same time Syene (modern Aswan) made its first appearance in Egyptian texts. With the beginning of the third interregnum (1080-710 BCE), Nubia's independence, and Egypt's continually erupt ing internal conflicts, Elephantine's significance must have again been predominantly military. During the Persian oc cupation of Egypt (525-404 BCE), Elephantine's renewed character as a fortress was most probably not directed solely against possible threats from outside Egypt. The garrison stationed by the Persians, which consisted at least in part of members of the Aramaic/Jewish colony (which had its own temple to Yahweh in Elephantine before the Persian period) points in this direction. Nothing of the Yahweh temple re mains, probably as a result of the enlargement of the Khnum temple during the thirtieth dynasty (380-342 BCE); there are, however, probably remains of a number of houses of a nonEgyptian type, from which important papyrus finds relating to early Judaism have been recovered. [See Papyrus.] With the last native kings of the thirtieth dynasty, another extended period of prosperity began for Elephantine, even though it was soon under Greek and then (from 30 BCE on ward) Roman rule. Nectanebo II (360-342 BCE) began a
:: ;-_
ELEPHANTINE. Plan of the Greco-Roman city. (Courtesy W. Kaiser)
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large restoration of the Khnum temple. The Ptolemies (305330 BCE), especially Ptolemy VI and VIII, continued the work, which was finally completed under Augustus with a large riverside terrace. The restoration of tire considerably smaller Temple of Satet was begun by Ptolemy VI and was also outfitted with a riverside terrace and a Nilometer. Dur ing the Roman period there was additional construction along the bank between the two temple terraces; to the north, at some distance to the Nilometer of the Satet temple, a monumental staircase with a sacred precinct to tire Nile was erected at the city's port. Two more temple buildings, whose exact location has not yet been determined, were built inside the sacred area; with its administrative and commer cial buildings, this area ultimately occupied almost half of tire old area of the city. At tire same time, the everyday life of trade and probably also administration shifted more and more to Syene; this helps to explain why, with tire triumph of Christianity in the early fourth century CE, Elephantine fell decisively behind modern Aswan. Arabic sources from tire early Middle Ages still report a cloister and two churches in Elephantine. Remains of a small church from the early sixth century and the scattered remains of a somewhat later large basilica are preserved. [See Churches; Basilica.] How ever, witir the increasing islamization of Egypt, even this last Christian phase in tire history of the city did not last long. In the absence of the tell's upper layer, the definitive end of the settlement cannot be determined precisely. It can, how ever, hardly be later than the tenth or twelfth century.
ephantine und ihrc Erweitemngen. Cairo, i960. See especially pages 2-3 for the earlier excavations. Valbelle, Dominique. Satis et Anoukis. Mainz, 1981.
Ziermann, Martin. Befesligungsanlagen und Stadtenlwicklung in der Friihzeit undimfriihen Alien Reich. Elephantine, vol. 16. Mainz, 1993. WERNER KAISER
Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
EMAR (mod. Meskene), site located on the right bank of the Euphrates River in Syria. Today it is submerged under tire Tabqa dam, el-Assad lake. Emar/Meskene is situated at the juncture of the region's land and water routes (eastwest) and its two main topological features—the steppe, on which the site leans, and a fluvial plain, rich and fertile as a result of irrigation. Farther southeast on the Euphrates are the cities of Tuttul and Mari; to the north is Carchemish and Anatolia; to the west, where transportation to Cyprus and the Mediterranean Sea would have been available, are the cities of Aleppo (Yamhad), Qatna, and, on the coast, Ugarit; Damascus is to the south; and to reach Canaan it was necessary to go through Hazor. In short, Emar was a vital crossroads for trade, east-west relations, and travel by water to Babylon, Mari, and the lands of the Hittites. Until 1972, Emar was known only through the archives of Mari, Nuzi, and Ugarit, as their political or commercial part ner. The construction of the Tabqa dam where tire Eu phrates, after leaving the mountains of Anatolia, turns to ward Mesopotamia and tire Persian Gulf, led to the exploration of Emar/Meskene, directed by Jean-Claude BIBLIOGRAPHY Margueron, under the auspices of the French Commission Dreyer, Giinter. Der Tempel der Satet. Elephantine, vol. 8. Mainz, 1986. of Excavations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In six campaigns (1972-1978), archaeological and epigraphic doc Franke, Detlef. Das Heiliglum des Heqaib auf Elephantine. Heidelberg, umentation was recovered that opened a new chapter in the 1994. Gempeler, Robert D. Die Keramik romischer bis Jriiharabischer Zeit.history El of Late Bronze Age Syria. The city uncovered was ephantine, vol. 10. Mainz, 1992. not, however, the one mentioned in the Middle Bronze Ebla Grossmann, Peter. Kirche und spdtantike Hausaniagen im Chnumtemor Mari texts but a city erected entirely in the Late Bronze pelhof. Elephantine, vol. 2 Mainz, 1980. Age on a site prepared especially for that purpose. None of Habachi, Labib. The Sanctuary of Heqaib. Elephantine, vol. 4. Mainz, the soundings showed any trace of a city earlier than the LB 1985. Jaritz, Horst. Die Tenassen vor den Tempeln des Chnum und Satet. city, Ele which existed only until tire beginning of the fourteenth phantine, vol. 3. Mainz, 1980. century BCE, when it was violently destroyed—a little after Jenni, Hanna. Die Dekoralion des Chnumtempels durch Nektanebos 1187 II. BCE (Arnaud, 1975). Elephantine, vol. 15. Mainz, forthcoming. The contradiction between the texts and tire archaeolog Junge, Friedrich. Funde undBauteile. Elephantine, vol. 11. Mainz, 1987. ical reality has led investigators to believe drat the city of tire Kaiser, Werner, et al. "Stadt und Tempel von Elephantine, 2ist/22nd Grabungsbericht." Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archdologischen Instithird and second millennia BCE was actually located several luts Kairo 51 (1995): 99-187. Includes references to the first twenty hundred meters away from tire excavated city, at the foot of excavation reports for the site. the mound, in the valley itself. Doubtless eroded away by a Kraeling, Emil G. The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri. New York, meander of tire Euphrates and close to disappearing in tire 1953. See especially pages 7-18 for the earlier excavations. Late Bronze Age, it would have been reconstructed on the Laskowska-Kusztal, Ewa. Die Dekorfragmente der spaten Tempel. Ele phantine, vol. 14. Mainz, forthcoming. edge of the plateau in order to avoid erosion by the river. Pilgrim, C. V. Grabungen in der Stadt des Mittleren Reiches. Elephantine, The work would have been sponsored by the Hittite king vol. 18. Mainz, forthcoming. Suppiluliuma I (1380-1340 BCE), who dominated North Porten, Bezalel. Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Syria at the time, or by his son Mursili II (1339-1306 BCE), Military Colony. Berkeley, 1986. Ricke, Herbert, and Serge Sauneron. Die Tempel Nektanebos' II. in El to safeguard a vital commercial link. Abandoned after its
EMAR destruction in 1187, in the first millennium BCE, tire site was partly reoccupied in the Roman period by a modest city named Barbalissos. Within the walls of the Byzantine period lay the medieval city of Balis that continued to exist until the end of the Ayyubid period. T h e Ebla archives provide evidence that Emar existed in the mid-third millennium—a dynastic alliance facilitated commercial relations between the two cities. At the begin ning of tire eighteenth century BCE, the archives of Mari show Emar to be a true economic hub, connecting the great Syrian centers (see above). [See Ebla Texts; Mari Texts.] T h e discovery of several hundred texts (a priest's library of private and royal archives) that cover the period of nearly a century and a half from the end of the fourteenth century to 1187 BCE, has permitted the history of the LB city to be written. Emar, then tire capital of a Hittite province named Astata, was accountable directly to the ldngdom of Carchemish, itself dependent upon Hattusa (Bogazkoy), tire center of the Hittite Empire; a ranking general called tire Head of the Chariots represented the central power. T h e texts are concerned, for the most part, with judicial, legal, and eco nomic matters—the society and its system of relationships based on economics and trade. It is always risky to link LB tablets to the Bible, even though they shared a cultural domain. T h e most obvious parallels among LB texts and some of the biblical narratives involve tire institution of the family and societal customs— for example, the customs of inheritance and the sale of fam ily property owned by the eldest in the texts from Emar are reminiscent of customs in other patriarchal societies, such as Nuzi and Ugarit. The importance of soothsayers from Babylon and prophets are documented in the Emar texts as is tire ordination of priests and priestesses and other rituals that took place during important celebrations. T h e LB builders chose an arm of the rocky, rectangular plateau that borders tire valley on its southern edge—a mountainous location, not one in the plain or valley, as was the Syrian tradition. They completely altered the topogra phy by creating staggered terraces and cutting an artificial channel or ravine (about 500 in long, 50 m wide, and more than 20 m deep), to create a site whose commanding view of the surrounding area made it easy to defend and conve nient for commerce. T h e residential quarters were built upon that infrastructure. T w o were excavated extensively (trenches A and D ) . The buildings were constructed grad ually, as a need evolved. Elsewhere, the plan of the city and its natural and hewn topography suggest that the main gates were located in the middle of the sides of the quadrilateral, about a kilometer to a side. One portion of its rampart was located on the western side of tire site, along tire artificial ravine. T h e ruins of a fortress responsible for the defense of Emar, at Tell Faq'us, a site about 10 Ion (6 mi.) down stream, was excavated by tire French team in its last cam paign in 1978.
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The plans of the thirty or so private houses that were ex cavated are quite uniform: at ground level a large, rectan gular room opens directiy onto tire street; opposite the en trance are two small rooms of equal size, with separate entrances. T h e method of construction, the frequent ap pearance of interior steps, and the traces of charred wood in the debris suggest that this group of rooms was roofed and that another story extended over some, if not all, of them, while a terrace provided an open-air space. This par ticular architectural plan seems to have been popular on this bank of the Euphrates, in North Syria in general, and some times in neighboring regions in tire second millennium BCE. Terra-cotta models of houses or temples were found among the ceramic remains during excavation. The palace belonging to tire governor or local "king" who deferred to the overlordship of the Hittite ldng was uncov ered. Installed on tire northwest promontory, it dominated both the valley and tire port. It takes the form of a hilani, the distinctive residence of Iron Age North Syria. T h e hilani is characterized by a facade (see figure 1) with a columned portico leading to a pair of oblong rooms, the second of which here certainly served as a throne room, and upper floor. This is the earliest known example of a hilani in Syria. It was provided with additional rooms installed at various levels more than a meter apart on the southern slope of the promontory, which make its plan difficult to understand be cause of the differences of level of each part of the dependancies of tire building (see figure 2). A Hittite origin for this architectural formula seems probable. Four temples have been excavated. They all belong to the northern long style of temple formed by an elongated room that served as a holy space, with an offering table, a podium for the god, and some furnishings used in carrying out rit uals; this room was fronted by a vestibule that opened to tire exterior via a porch with columns. Associated with the tem ple, a large esplanade or raised terrace was equipped with an altar where sacrifices and possibly otirer rites were prac ticed. The principal sanctuary was formed by two temples ded icated to Baal and to Astarte, both situated at the highest point of the site on both sides of a street that led to tire sacrificial terrace. A third temple, dedicated to all the gods, was attended by a priest whose reputation had reached the court of the Hittite ldng; his library and archives constitute one of tire most important discoveries at Emar because they explain the progress of divination by observation of animal livers from Mesopotamia toward Anatolia and the classical Mediterranean world. A fourth temple, whose dedicant re mains unknown, preserved especially rich furnishings. The city of Emar never played a particularly important political role, but from the third millennium, as a point of exchange in the relations between Syria and Mesopotamia, it was one of tire principal elements in the system that dom inated the economic life of tire Near East during tire Bronze
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EMAR.
EMAR.
Figure I . Facade of the hilani. (Courtesy J.-C. Margueron)
Figure 2. Tiered structures at the rear of the hilani. (Courtesy J.-C. Margueron)
EMAR TEXTS
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Age. Emar provides a clear idea of the life of a Hittite prov ince at the time of die greatest expansion of the empire, of the organization of the territory, and of the role that this crossroads played in international life. [See also Babylon; Bogazkoy; Carchemish; Ebla; Emar Texts; Hittites; Mari; Nuzi; and Ugarit.]
bend of the Euphrates River, yielded some eight hundred cuneiform tablets and fragments. Internal evidence shows that the texts date from the end of die fourteentii to the beginning of the twelfth century BCE. Four languages are represented in the cuneiform script at Meskene. A few texts are Hittite, including a royal letter (there are also seals with hieroglyphic Luwian legends). Sev BIBLIOGRAPHY eral Hurrian texts were also found. Neither the Hittite nor the Ffurrian texts have as yet received full publication. Most Arnaud, Daniel. "Les textes d'Emar et la chronologie de la fin du Bronze Recent." Syria 52 (1975): 87-92. of the texts are Akkadian and Sumerian and have been pub Arnaud, Daniel. Emar VI: Textes sumericns et accadiens. 4 vols. Paris, lished in copy, transliteration, and translation in four large 1985-1987.
volumes (Arnaud, 1 9 8 5 - 1 9 8 7 ) .
Badre, Leila. Lesfigurinesanthropornorphes en terre cuite d I'Age du Bronze A wide range of genres is represented in the Sumeroen Syrie. Paris, 1980. Includes some unpublished material on Emar. Akkadian tablets. There are roughly 1 5 0 economic texts Beyer, Dominique, ed. Meskene-Emar: Dix ans de travaux, 1972-1982. Paris, 1982. Succinct presentation of aspects of the city and the finds, (records of deliveries, inventories, lists of sacrifices, lists of with a bibliography of all articles appearing before 1982. personnel, memoranda); 2 0 0 contracts (adoptions; antiBunnens, Guy. "Emar on the Euphrates in the Thirteenth Century chretic contracts; debt payments; guarantees; inheritance di B.C.: Some Thoughts about Newly Published Cuneiform Texts." visions; lawsuits; loans; property exchanges; purchases of Abr-Nahrain 27 (1989): 23-36. fields, houses, orchards, and slaves; ransoms; sales of chil Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Les fouilles francaises de Mesk6ne-Emar dren, houses, orchards, and slaves; verdicts; wills); and (Syrie)." Comptes Iiendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1975): 201-211. about twenty letters (between nonroyal persons). These Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Quatres campagnes de fouilles a Emar, texts reveal many details about everyday life in Late Bronze 1972-1974." Syria 52 (1975): 53-85. Emar. Texts recording purchases and sales of real estate are Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Rapport preliminaire sur les deux premieres normally provided with specific references to the location of campagnes de fouille a Meskene-Emar, 1972-1973." Annates Arthe property in question, including mention of the property cheologiques Arabes Syriennes 25 (1975): 73-86. on all sides; tabulation of this information might well yield Margueron, Jean-Claude. "La campagne de sauvegarde des antiquites de 1'Euphrate." Kttma 1 (1976): 63-80. a detailed layout of at least some parts of the town. Margueron, Jean-Claude. "'Maquettcs' architecturales de MeskeneMany Mesopotamian canonical texts were also discov Emar." Syria 53 (1976): 193-232. ered at Emar. There are, for example, more than sixty lexical Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Un cxemple d'urbanisme volontaire a texts and more than one hundred omen texts, in both cases l'epoque du Bronze Recent en Syrie." Ktema 2 (1977): 33-48. Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Un 'Hilani' a Emar." Annualof the American reflecting many of the canonical series; also represented are Schools of Oriental Research 44 (1979): 153-176. incantations and rituals. Literary texts are few in number, Margueron, Jean-Claude, ed. Le Moyen Euphrate, zone de contacts etbut include fragments of Gilgamesh (tablets 4 and 6) and d'echanges: Acts du collogue de Strasbourg, 10-12 Mars 1977. Leiden, of T h e Tamarisk and the Date Palm. A significant discovery 1980. Includes articles by Margueron, Daniel Arnaud, Dominique was a wisdom text also known from Ugarit and from Hattusa Beyer, and Emmanuel Laroche. but not yet found in Mesopotamia. Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Aux marches de l'Empire hittite: Une cam pagne de fouille a tell Faq'ous (Syrie), citadelle du pays d'Astata." Certainly die most unexpected texts unearthed at Mes In La Syrie au Bronze Recent: Recueil public a I'occasion du cinquankene are the roughly two hundred tablets and fragments that tenaire de la decouverte d'Ugarit-Ras Shamra, pp. 47-66. Paris, 1982. describe otiierwise unknown festivals and rituals, shedding Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Rapport preliminaire sur les 3e, 4e, 5e et 6e much new light on Late Bronze Syrian religious practices. campagnes de fouilles a Meskene-Emar, 1974-1976." Annates ArT h e festival texts include lengthy descriptions of the instal cheologiques Arabes Syriennes 32 (1982): 233-249. ceremonies of the priestess of the storm god and a Mari: Annates de Recherches Interdisciplinaries 6 (1990). Special issuelation of die journal entitled "Imar avant le Bronze Recent," edited by Jeanpriestess called a mas'artu, and of festivals called kissu Marie Durand and Jean-Claude Margueron, including articles by ("throne"?) and zukm ("commemoration"?); the level of Alfonso Archi, Dominique Beyer, Bernard Geycr, Joannes F. Geyer, detail presented in these documents is quite unprecedented. Durand, and Margueron. Odier types of local religious texts are annual and monthly Tsukimoto, Akio. "Emar and the Old Testament: Preliminary Re marks." Annual of the Japanese Biblical Institute 15 (1989): 3-24. liturgies, offering lists, and rituals for Anatolian deities (Fleming, 1992). JEAN-CLAUDE MARGUERON and MARCEL SIGRIST Besides the texts edited in Arnaud ( 1 9 8 5 - 1 9 8 7 ) , several Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand and Monique Fecteau hundred tablets from the immediate vicinity of Emar have also been published in die last decade (see, e.g., Arnaud, 1 9 8 7 , 1 9 9 1 ; Beckman, 1 9 8 8 ; Dalley and Teissier, 1 9 9 2 ; Huehnergard, 1 9 8 3 ; Tsukimoto, 1 9 8 8 , 1 9 9 0 , 1 9 9 1 , 1 9 9 2 ) . E M A R T E X T S . Excavations in die mid-1970s at the T h e majority of these are economic and legal texts. Syrian site of Meskene (ancient Emar), located at the great
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The Akkadian texts that were not copied from Mesopo tamian originals betray in their grammar the fact that they were written by scribes whose native language was not Ak kadian. Like contemporary Akkadian texts from Ugarit, Alalakh, and el-Amarna, these texts frequentiy betray elements of the scribes' own tongues. The most obvious of these el ements are the large number of unusual words found in the Emar texts, some of which, at least, appear to derive from a Northwest Semitic language. In the legal and economic texts and in the letters, too, most of the names of the local Emarites are Northwest Semitic. [See also Akkadian; and Emar.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnaud, Daniel. "Les textes d'Emar et la chronologie de la fin du Bronze recent." Syria 52 (1975): 87-92. On dating the Meskene text finds. Arnaud, Daniel. Emar VI. 4 vols. Paris, 1985—1987. Official publication of the tablets found during the French excavations in die 1970s. Arnaud, Daniel. "La Syrie du moyen-Euphrate sous le protectoral hit tite: Contrats de droit prive." Aula Orientalis 5 (1987): 211-241, An edition of seventeen texts.
sequently the capital of a Herodian toparchy. As an outpost opposite the mainly pagan plains, during the Second T e m ple period it acquired its character as a center of religious fervor and, at times, of armed militancy. Gaius Cassius sold Emmaus's inhabitants into slavery. Following Herod's death, Athronges led his rebellion against Rome from Emmaus and was crushed there by Varus, then governor of Syria. During the Jewish War of Vespasian and Titus, the Fifth Legion was based at Ernmaus, and in Bar Kokhba's time, the Twelfth Legion may have been annihilated nearby (Ekhah Rabbah 2.4.22a). T h e literary and archaeological ev idence points to Judean-Samaritan and later also to Chris tian coexistence in Emmaus. The site's epigraphic material consists of tombstones of soldiers of the Fifth Macedonian Legion (first-second centuries CE) and inscriptions on lintels from a Samaritan synagogue and from the mosaic floors in a fifth-century church (see below).
Emmaus has been identified, but not later than by Eusebius (Onomasticon 90.16), with the locality of Christ's rev elation to his disciples in the aftermath of the crucifixion (Lk. 24). One of the major Byzantine basilicas in the Holy Land Arnaud, Daniel. Textes syriens de Tdge du Bronze recent. Aula Orientalis was erected there and refurbished by the Crusaders in the Supplementa, 1. Barcelona, 1991. An edition of 197 texts. twelfth century. The identification witir the Emmaus in Luke Beckman, Gary. "Three Tablets from the Vicinity of Emar." Journal rests on the preference of tire fourth-century Codex Sinaiof Cuneiform Studies 40 (1988): 61-68. ticus, Palestinian Syriac (based on sundry Greek translations Dalley, Stephanie, and Beatrice Teissier. "Tablets from the Vicinity of Emar and Elsewhere." Iraq 54 (1992): 83—111. and the Peshitta), and other fifth-sixth-century texts, which Fleming, Daniel. The Installation of Baal's High Priestess at Emar:quote A 160 stadia as its distance from Jerusalem, against the Window on Ancient Syrian Religion. Harvard Semitic Studies, 42. At 60 stadia given by various Latin, Greek, and other sources lanta, 1992. In-depth study of one of the longest local festival texts commencing with die fourth-century Codex Vaticanus. and a discussion of its cultural context. These encouraged rival identifications, up until the Cru Huehnergard, John. "Five Tablets from the Vicinity of Emar." Revue d'Assyriologie 77 (1983): 11-43. Five texts and a summary of die sader period: al-Qubaibah (map reference 1631 X 1386), grammatical features of Emar Akkadian. Qaloniye (map reference 1656 X 1338), or Abu Ghosh Tsukimoto, Akio. "Sieben spafbronzezeitliche Urkunden aus Syrien." (map reference 1604 X 1349). Acta Sumerologica Japan 10 (1988): 153-189. Publication of texts Villa a n d C h u r c h e s . The oldest remains recovered be from Emar and vicinity. neath the site's two Byzantine churches were of a fourthTsukimoto, Akio. "Akkadian Tablets in the Hirayama Collection."/tea Sumerologica Japan 12 (1990): 177-259; 13 (1991): 275-333; 14 fifth-century CE building, possibly a villa rustica. T h e older (1992): 289-310. Publication of texts from Emar and vicinity. (?), fifth-century church was an elongated basilica (18 X 10 Wilcke, Claus. "Die Emar-Version von 'Dattelpalme und Tamariske': m), divided by two rows of six columns each into a nave Ein Rekonstruktionsversuch." Zeitschrift. fur Assyriologie 79 (1989): and two aisles, with a triple entrance. Its mosaic floors were 161-190. Detailed consideration of one of the Mesopotamian literary decorated with guilloches and floral, bird, and animal de texts found at Meskene. signs. It was probably joined with tire large sixth-century JOHN HUEHNERGARD basilica to its right (but cf. Avi-Yonah, 1976). T h e basilica (46.4 X 24.4 m) was constructed of very large, smooth ash lar blocks. Two rows of thirteen columns formed its broad EMMAUS, important market town and spa in the Judean nave and narrow aisles. On its exterior, the central apse was piedmont, halfway between Jaffa and Jerusalem (31 "50' N , trapezoidal. T h e side apses are preserved u p to and includ 34°57' E; map reference 1494 X 1388). Its Greek name de ing their exquisite hemispherical ashlar vaulting. A smaller rives from Hamath or Hamta ("hot springs"; Ecclesiast.es Romanesque Crusader church incorporated tire nave and Rabbah 106b). Granted a town charter by Elagabalus in central apse of the destroyed Byzantine basilica, adding to about 230 CE, it took the name Nicopolis-Antoninopolis. the size of its hall (23 X 10.25 ) with a vault carried on Emmaus's strategic location made it the site of many bat four pointed arches that rested on a solid buttressed wall. tles, from Joshua's Ayalon valley campaign to the British general Allenby's campaign in 1917 CE and beyond. T h e site B a t h h o u s e . The third-century thermae belong to monis first mentioned in 1 Maccabees 3:40 as the site of Judas's oaxial bathhouses, all of whose installations are arranged ad great victory in 166 BCE over the Seleucids, and it was sub jacent to each other on a straight line. Parts of the building m
ENKOMI collapsed during one of the earthquakes recorded for tire fourth-fifth centuries. The surviving sttucture was partly buried to its roof by a subsequent landslide, which explains its state of preservation. The thermae were built of smooth and well-fitting ashlars. The walls measured between i and 1.5 m. The extent of the refurbished part is 14 X 7.5 nr. After the refurbishing, tire entrance was through the former tepidarium, which had been converted into a frigidarium. Passage was then available into a former caldarium, then the tepidarium; the second adjoining caldarium retained its function. The sweat chamber was built over the boiler room on tire west. Another room preserved an entire original stone cupola, constructed of four hemispherical segments that leaned against each other, leaving an air-regulation aperture in its apex (cf. Vitruvius 5.10.5). Two other rooms contained two apses each in opposing walls. Each has a barrel-vaulted roof constructed of tiles and rubble cement, respectively. T h e former is of Byzantine and the latter of Ottoman date. T h e original ashlar vaults caved in at the same time the rest of tire building collapsed. Some of the pottery pipes are preserved drat heated the wall of the suspensura. T h e latter was composed of an upper floor con structed of marble slabs on cement that, in turn, had been spread on large tiles resting on rows of brick arches (cf. Vi truvius 5.10.2). These combined resilience, so important in this earthquake-prone region, with good air circulation. Three interconnected tanks provided, one each, cold, tepid, and hot water (cf. Vitruvius 5.10.1). Yizhar Hirschfeld (1989) traced two parallel aqueducts for 1.5 km from Tun Eqed to the town. Their method of construction changed from subterranean tunnels to rock-cut or stone-built channels. T h e tunnel has an inspection cham ber with a pointed Byzantine-period (?) arch. [See also Aqueducts.]
241
The typological reasons are unclear as well as the proposed relation ship of the supposedly coexisting edifices.
Bagatti, Bellarmino. / monumenti di Emmaus et Qubeibeh e dei dintorni. 2 vols. Jerusalem, 1947. Chen, Doron. "On the Golden Gate in Jerusalem and the Baptistry at
Emmaus-Nicopolis." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldslina-Vereins 97 (1981): 171-177. Examination of the baptistry and its dating to the fourth century CE as terminus a quo. Crowfoot, J. W. "Emmaus: Sa basilique et son histoirc. Reviews." Pal
estine Exploration Fund Quarterly 70 (1935): 40-47. Crowfoot, J. W. Early Churches in Palestine. London, 1941. See pages 71, 125, and 145.
Finegan, Jack. The Archeology of the New Testament: The Life of Jesus and the Beginning of the Early Church. Princeton, 1969. Ovadiah, Asher. Corpus of the Byzantine Churches in the Holy Land. Bonn, 1970. Proposes the most logical reconstruction of the eastern basilica, including the baptistery (see pp. 63-65, fig. 54). Thermae and Aqueducts Gichon, Mordechai. "Roman Bath-Houses in Eretz Israel" (in He brew). Oadmoniot 11 (1978): 22-35. The 'Ein-Boqeq thermae and their typology within the framework of bathhouses discovered in Is rael. Gichon, Mordechai. "The Roman Bath at Emmaus: Excavations
1977." Israel Exploration Journal 29 (1979): 101-110. Gichon, Mordechai, and Robert Linden. "Muslim Oil Lamps from Emmaus." Israel Exploration Journal 34 (1984): 156-169. Examina tion of the conch-shaped, open oil lamp, a continuing Iron Age tra dition. Gichon, Mordechai. "The Bath-House at Emmaus." Bulletin of the An
glo-Israel Archaeological Society 6 (1986—1987): 54-57. Hirschfeld, Yizhar. "The Aqueducts of Emmaus-Nicopolis." In The Aqueducts of Ancient. Palestine (in Hebrew), edited by David 'Amit et al., pp. 197-204. Jerusalem, 1989. Includes a discussion of the early pointed arch of die inspection chamber in one of the aqueduct's tunnels.
MoRDECHAr
GICHON
EN . For toponyms beginning with this element, see under Ein-. c
BIBLIOGRAPHY For the identification of Emmaus, see the bibliography collected in
Yoram Tsafrir et al., Tabula Imperii Romani: ludaea-Palacslina, p. 105 E N K O M I , site in Cyprus (35°io' N, 33°53' E), named (Jerusalem, 1994). after tire village located 1 tar (.6 mi.) to the east. It extends Churches some 46 km (29 mi.) east of Nicosia, 8 km (5 mi.) northwest Vincent, L.-H., and Felix-Marie Abel. Emmaus, sa basilique et son his- of Famagusta, and 3 km (2 mi.) southwest of Salamis on toire. Paris, 1932. Comprehensive excavation report and historical ground that slopes gently from east to west, from the foot discussion, although it lacks clear stratigraphic data and the chron of a low cliff down to the bed of the river Pediaios. In an ological conclusions arc suspect. tiquity, the estuary of tire river probably reached inland as Vincent, L.-H. "Chronique: Autour du groupe monumental far as Enkomi and sheltered its harbor. d"Amwas." Revue Biblique 45 (1936): 403-415. Official excavations started in 1896 with tire British Mu Vincent, L.-H. "La chronologic du groupe monumental d"Amwas." Revue Biblique 55 (1948): 348-375. seum Expedition, which was led by A. S. Murray. Numer ous campaigns followed: Sir John My res and Menelaos The following items are critical discussions of die findings and dating of Vincent and Abel. Markides in 1913, on behalf of the Cyprus Museum Com Avi-Yonah, Michael. "Emmaus." In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex mittee; Rupert Gunnis in 1927; the Swedish Cyprus Expe cavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 362-364. Jerusalem and En- dition (SCE) under Einar Gjerstad and Erik Sjoqvist in glewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976. In this critical evaluation of the relative 1930; Claude F.-A. Schaeffer in 1934; and a French dating of the two basilicas (repeated in die 1993 Hebrew edition), expedition, led by Schaeffer from 1946 to 1970, later by Avi-Yonah proposes to predate the larger basilica to the smaller one.
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Olivier Pelon from 1971 to 1973. From 1948 to 1958, a Cyp riot team directed by Porphyrios Dikaios joined the French expedition. The Cypriots worked on their own and in sep arate areas. The 1974 war put an end to field research. [See the biographies of Myres, Gjerstad, Schaeffer, and Dikaios.] The first excavators considered Enkomi as a Bronze Age necropolis of an unknown settlement. They dug through the upper archaeological layers, taking no notice of them or re garding them as medieval. The British Museum pioneer ex cavations yielded some of the most impressive objects ever found in Enkomi, such as an ivory game box with relief decoration, a bronze cultic stand, ivory mirror handles, and a large Egyptian necldace of gold with paste inlay. The pub lication (Murray, 1900) made Enkomi a major site for tire Cypriot Late Bronze Age. The Swedish expedition pub lished twenty-two tombs (Sjoqvist, 1934, 1940). Careful study of tire stratification in each tomb provided new firm ground for the relative and absolute chronology of the Late Bronze Age. In 1934, Schaeffer soon realized that the walls he had encountered while digging for tombs belonged to the Bronze Age. He laid bare a building made of ashlar (dressed) masonry with a hoard of bronze objects (tire socalled Maison des Bronzes). The way was open for the exploration of the ancient town of Enkomi. Its equation with Alashiya, the capital of tire kingdom of Alashiya, was proposed by Dussaud and by Schaeffer. It is generally rejected, but final decision must await new textual evidence. Some significant points in tire chronology of Enkomi have not yet been settled. Schaeffer's and Dikaios's stratigraphies cannot be precisely correlated. For simplicity's sake, a division into three phases is used here, corresponding roughly to tire traditional partition of the Late Cypriot Bronze Age: I (c. 1600-1450/1400 BCE), II (1450/1400-0. 1200), III (c. 1200-1050). Phase I (c. 1600-1450/1400) has been studied extensively only by Dikaios. In his Area III (and grid area iW, see be low), at the northern limit of the town, Dikaios uncovered a long rectangular building that he understood to be a for tress, in which he identified a metallurgical workshop. In Area I (4W), near the center of tire settlement, were small houses. The destruction of this phase is ascribed to an earth quake. Two exceptional built tombs, irregular tholoi (bee hive-shaped tombs), can be dated to phase I (SCE tomb 21, probably in 6W) and to early phase II (French tomb at point 1336, in 5E). Phase II (1450/1400-c. 1200) eventually saw a radical de velopment in the urban organization of Enkomi from an open, loosely occupied town to a fortified, dense, and strictly planned city, and a boom in metallurgical activity. Accord ing to Dikaios, this boom was caused by Mycenaean settlers during phase II, but the geometrical town plan, the final construction of the rampart, and tire introduction of ashlar masonry all belong to the beginning of phase III, after a destruction and the arrival of newcomers related to the so-
called Sea Peoples, with a strong Mycenaean element among them. For Schaeffer, tire changes date back to a time well before the end of tire thirteenth century and belong to phase II. Recent discoveries (ashlar masonry of the thir teenth century at Kition and Kalavasos, for example) have in the main confirmed Schaffer's reconsttuction. [See Ki tion; Kalavasos.] The city wall encloses a roughly semicircular area, some 406 m (1,332 ft.) north-south and 350 m (1,148 ft.) eastwest. Basically, it consists of an inner wall with an upper part of mud bricks and of an outer strengthening of very large, minimally hewn rocks. It is in places protected by small bastions. A northern and a western gate have been found. The town is divided by one north-south street and ten east-west streets into large rectangular blocks, which mea sure approximately 33 X 170 m (108 X 558 ft.) numbered i W to 12W and iE to 12E, starting from the north. This geometrical grid was in use until the final destruction. A paved square (from the beginning of phase III in its present state) marks the center of tire city. In grid area 6E is a rectangular tripartite construction of large ashlar masonry, probably a temple. A square base sup ports a pillar with a stepped capital, a type also known from Kition, Palaipaphos, and other Cypriot sites. Along street 5, in grid area 5W, extends Building 18, named after Swedish T o m b 18 discovered by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition (see figure 1). It was erected around the middle of the thir teenth century BCE, apparently as a residence for a wealthy leader, the earliest indication of a political authority in the city. The facade, nearly 40 m (131 ft.) long with four wide doors, is partly made of blocks of ashlar masonry, one of them no less than 3 m (10 ft.) long. This technique, although reminiscent of Ugarit, is used here in a way peculiar to Cy prus. The central part of the building recalls Building X at Kalavasos, near Limassol. Four chamber tombs of ashlar masonry of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries in areas 3E and 4E may indicate that some aristocratic families from Ugarit had settled in Enkomi. During phase II there is a great increase in industrial pro duction, exchanges, and prosperity. T h e funerary furniture becomes very rich with a wealth of imported Mycenaean pottery. Many copper smelting and working places are at tested, especially in area i W . At the beginning of phase III (c. 1200-1050) although Building 18 had lost its aristocratic character, a large residence of ashlar masonry was built in area 4W. It comprised a series of three communicating spaces, one of them with a central hearth, a feature equated by Dikaios (1969-1971, p . 187) with the Mycenaean "megaron." T h e whole settlement was destroyed by a violent fire, ascribed to the Sea Peoples around 1190 BCE. Activity and wealth, again based on metallurgy, were rap idly restored. Nevertheless the dwellings are usually smaller than in phase II. Profound cultural changes are noticeable
ENKOMI in the funerary customs. Shaft graves supersede rock-cut chamber tombs. Judging by the small number of intra muros inhumations, most of tire dead were buried outside the set tlement. The bulk of tire local painted pottery now reflects Mycenaean tradition. T h e sanctuaries of the "horned god" and the "ingot god" are of particular interest. T h e rituals for both deities show great similarities—libations and offerings of bucrania (oxen skulls)—that reflect Aegean, Near Eastern, and local tradi tion. The sanctuary of the horned god occupied tire profoundly remodeled residence in area 4W. Oxen skulls and other of ferings lay on tire floors. T h e cult statue was set in the south ernmost part of the former megaron where 276 one-handled libation bowls have been found. T h e bronze figure, 55 cm high, shows a young athletic god wearing a short kilt and a curly cap from which two ox horns emerge. T h e attitude is static, tire right hand extended with its palm facing down wards. T h e god has been tentatively described as an archaic Apollo, a protector of tire cattle. A space was also dedicated to a female deity, represented by a tiny bronze figurine with a headdress resembling that of the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The sanctuary of tire ingot god, in area 5E, is quite dif ferent in its layout. Its main feature is a large rectangular, partly covered hall. West of it, nearly 250 fragments of clay figurines have been collected. They were originally standing in circles on disk-shaped bases, clearly an Aegean tradition.
In the hall are a hearth and a sacrificial altar. Benches run along the walls; on or near them have been found most of the offerings, such as oxen and fallow-deer skulls, possibly used as ceremonial masks, notched animal shoulder-blades, libation bowls, and two large painted clay figurines of dou ble-headed sphinxes (see figure 2). The 35-centimeter-high bronze cult statue found in a small room arranged in the northeast corner of the hall is that of an oriental smiting god standing on an ingot in the shape of an oxhide. It is a base added to characterize the deity as a protector of metallurgy. A figurine of a goddess standing on an ingot, probably from Enkomi, is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. At tire end of the twelfth century, Enkomi suffered new desttuction, possibly by an earthquake. A vivid revival ended witir a final destruction before 1050. Part of the pop ulation probably moved to Salamis. [See Salamis.] This description of the excavation can convey but a faint idea of Enkomi's conttibution to the study of Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age, on matters such as the presence and role of the Aegeans, the transition to the Iron Age, the problem of tire Sea Peoples, and the religion. The material (pottery, jewelry, ivories, faience, stone vases, and cylinder and stamp seals) illustrates how Cyprus, in close contact with Egypt, the Aegean, and the Asiatic Near East, took part in the elab oration of the aristocratic international culture of tire Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age. Worthy of mention are the funerary gold "mouthpieces" with stamped decoration, tire silver bowl with gold and niello bull heads, faience goblets
Figure 1. The southern facade of building 18, along east-west street no. 5. Looking eastnortheast, during 1950 excavation. (Archives CFA Schaeffer, Paris) ENKOMI.
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244
ENTERTAINMENT
m
Murray, A. S. In "Excavations at Enkomi, 1896." In Excavations in Cyprus, by A. S. Murray et al., pp. 1-54. London, 1900. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Missions en Chypre, 1932-1935. Paris, 1936. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. "Note sur l'enceinte mycenienne d'Enkomi
(Chypre)." In Melanges d'archeologie et d'histoire offerts a Charles Picard a I'occasion de son 65c anniversaire. Vol. 2, pp. 926-935. Paris, 1949.
Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Enkomi-Alasia: Nouvelles missions en Chypre, 1946-1950. Paris, 1952. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A., et al. Alasia. Vol. 1. Paris and Leiden, 1971.
Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Corpus des cylindres-sceaux de Ras Shamra-Ugaril et d'Enkomi-Alasia. Vol. 1. Paris, 1983. Sjoqvist, Erik. "Enkomi, the Necropolis." In The Swedish Cyprus Ex
pedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus,
1927-1931,
vol. 1, by Einar Gjerstad et al., pp. 467-575. Stockholm, 1934.
Sjoqvist, Erik. Reports on Excavations in Cyprus. Stockholm, 1940. JACQUES LAGARCE
ENTERTAINMENT. See Games; Stadiums; Theaters. ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY. Inter est in what is now called environmental archaeology was probably stimulated by the long-discredited views of Ells worth Huntington, who, in the first decade of the century, proposed that climatic change had played a major role in the rise and fall of civilizations in the Near East. For ex ample, he claimed tiiat purported desiccation in early post ENKOMI. Figure 2. Front view of a painted terra-cotta doubleglacial times had forced people to congregate in river valleys, headed "sphinx" or "centaur." Found in the sanctuary of the ingot where they began to domesticate plants and animals. Simi god. Height, 31 cm. (Archives CFA Schaeffer, Paris) larly, he believed that the abandonment and desertification of Palestine in the Late Byzantine period were a result of in the shape of a woman's or an animal's head. Metallurgy desiccation, just as he claimed periodic nomadic eruptions is illustrated by a great variety of bronze tools, weapons from Central Asia could be explained by climate. Climate (swords of the Nenzingen type), armor (bronze greaves of became the engine of history and with it, "environmental SCE Tomb 18), figurines (seated drinking deities, cult-char determinism" took root. iot), molds, and copper oxhide ingots (the main export of The Huntington legacy was insidious. Despite repeated Cyprus, a symbol of richness and power). Iron appears in and effective refutation, some scholars continue to explain phase III. Cuneiform archives are missing as yet, but a archaeological displacements or sociopolitical discontinu wealth of information may be hidden in the undeciphered ities by "climatic change." Recently, climatic change was Cypro-Minoan texts. linked to the Aegean dark age and the "Peoples of the Sea" (after 1225 BCE), as well as to the fall of the Akkadian Empire BIBLIOGRAPHY and synchronous political collapse in adjacent regions (c. Courtois, Jacques-Claude. Alasia, vol. 2, Les tombes d'Enkomi: Le mob- 2200 BCE). On the other hand, there has also been to ex ploring flexible environmental constraints on particular eco ilierfuneraire (fouilles C. F. A. Schaeffer, 1947-1965); vol. 3, Les objels des niveaux stratifies d'Enkomi (fouilles C. F. A. Schaeffer, 1947-1970). nomic activities and the possible complementary role of ad Paris, 1981-1984. verse environmental trends in more complex, systemic Courtois, Jacques-Claude, Jacques Lagarce, and Elisabeth Lagarce. En crises. komi et le Bronze ricent d Chypre. Nicosia, 1986. Courtois, Jacques-Claude, and J. M. Webb. Mission archeologique fran In 1925, the British archaeologist Gertrude Catoninvited a geologist, Elinor Gardner, to assist her caise d'Alasia: Les cylindres-sceaux d'Enkomi (fouilles francaises,Thompson 19571970). Nicosia, 1987. with prehistoric projects in the Faiyum and Khargah oases Dikaios, Porphyrios. Enkomi: Excavations, 1948-1958. 3 vols. Mainz, in Egypt. [See Faiyum; and the biography of Caton-Thomp1969-1971. son.} Gardner helped to tie various archaeological sites into Dussaud, Rene. In Comptes rendus de I'Academie des inscriptions et bellesspecific landscapes, both temporal and spatial, by establish lettres, January-March, 1949, p. 20. Lagarce, Jacques, and Elisabeth Lagarce. Alasia, vol. 4, Deux tombes du ing a succession of environmental changes. Thus, a site was Chypriote recent d'Enkomi (Chypre): Tombes 1851 et 1907. Paris, 1985. contemporary with a particular lakeshore or spring deposit,
ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY which provided a relative date as well as a unique environ mental setting (Caton-Thompson and Gardner, 1934). This was achieved by interpreting the conditions of geological formation, relating them to other features in stratigraphic terms, and using associated molluscan collections to amplify or confirm ecological inferences. This prototype of multidisciplinary fieldwork was also pioneered elsewhere. It did not become an instant success in tire Near East but received significant impetus in the 1950s through the efforts of Rob ert J. Braidwood. Frustrated by the difficulty of analyzing agricultural origins, Braidwood collaborated with a geologist and brought in a zoologist to study animal bones (to deter mine whether potential livestock were domesticated), a paleobotanist to study seed grains, and eventually a palynologist to identify the pollens in cores drilled into nearby lake or marsh beds (to provide a detailed and often continuous record of vegetation change). He also worked with a ceramicist (to examine pottery-making techniques and identify clay sources) and an ethnographer (to observe village life in remote areas and provide analog information on a broader range of material culture and its social replication) (Braid wood and Howe, i960). The numbers and specializations of collaborating envi ronmental scientists and their opportunities to influence ex cavation strategies and publications continues to vary. In creasingly, environmental archaeologists seek independent funding: much of tire information now available for tire Near East, mainly for the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, was generated independently. Environmental archaeology is still all too rarely applied to historical time periods, such as at Bronze and Iron Age settlements. Environmental archaeology can be categorized at differ ent operational and conceptual levels. Paleoenvironmental studies are the most common, and have direct and indirect applications to archaeology—primarily as background in formation for local or regional settlement histories (Brice, 1978; Bintliff and van Zeist, 1982). Such macroscale re search is complemented by site-specific studies that document local geographies and settings (with reference to patterns of topography, soils, and vegetation) or directly ad dress site-formation processes (geoarchaeology) or site economies (zooarchaeology and archaeobotany) (Butzer, 1982, i960, 1959). Finally, a number of regional or local studies also explicitly address such broad issues as subsis tence and settlement patterns and resource opportunities, utilization, and management (Butzer, 1981, 1976; Larsen, 1983). At whatever scale, the work emphasizes the complex interdependence of multiple variables, the role of feed back—positive (change enhancing) or negative (change buffering)—shifting equilibrium levels, and tire impact of human land use on environment. Agricultural Origins in W e s t e r n Asia (c. 10,000 B P ) . One old and tenacious explanation of agricultural origins is known as tire oasis-propinquity theory.. It holds that the ini tial domestication of plants and animals was the result of
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climatic stress. It is based on the incorrect assumption that glacial-age climate in the Near East was wetter than today and became markedly drier at the beginning of the Holocene or Recent period, in about 10,000 BP. Hunter-gatherers would have been faced with declining game resources and plant foods, as forests were reduced to dry scrub and grass lands to sparse steppe. Confronted with ever-scarcer surface water, people and game would have gravitated to reliable sources of water along more richly vegetated riverine low lands or scattered oases. There, the enforced proximity of hunter-gatherers witii game and residual plant foods should have favored a symbiosis that brought the domestication of plants and animals. Numerous pollen and geological studies provide a very different picture: glacial-age climates were harsh in the Near East and Mediterranean basin; forests were very rare (widely spaced trees were found mainly at intermediate el evations), with steppic grasslands in what are now subhumid environments, particularly on south-facing slopes in hill counuy; rivers were more seasonal; and oases were few. Ar chaeological investigations in northeast Africa show human settlement limited to the Nile Valley (c. 20,000-10,000 B P ) , with no traces of habitation in the Saharan oases. At the beginning of the Holocene, Saharan climate became moister for several millennia; however, in the highland belt, from Greece and Anatolia to Syria-Palestine and the Zagros ranges, forest recolonization was slow, taking up to fifteen hundred years in tire west and more than four thousand years in the east (Bintliff and van Zeist, 1982; van Zeist and Bottema, 1991). Thus, the hill country of Southwest Asia, where tire crit ical steps to early domestication were taken between perhaps 12,000 and 8000 B P , was overwhelmingly open and grassy. This matches the habitat preferences of the earliest plant domesticates—barley and wheat—which cannot compete in closed woodlands, as well as the first animals to be domes ticated—goat and sheep—both adapted to open environ ments. [See Cereals; Sheep and Goats.] If anything, initial domestication of these key plants and animals was facilitated by their wider distribution and greater abundance. This al lowed intensive collecting or hunting of the wild forms, and presumably also initial manipulation and experimentation, over a vast area of open, hilly environments (Butzer, 1990, 1982). Agricultural expansion into the riverine floodplains of western Asia was in fact delayed by several millennia, until agricultural communities first settled the woodlands of the western Mediterranean and central Europe. While forests gradually recolonized the hill country of western Asia, mar ginalizing that environment, it is more probable that de mographic expansion led to agricultural colonization farther afield. After all, woodlands along tire Mediterranean coast lines and deep inside Europe were being occupied, implying that people had acquired skills for clearing forests by fire or by stripping leaves from tree branches to reduce tire canopy.
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Settlement of riverine fioodplains demanded similar skills because the areas were partly wooded and required accom modation to periodic flooding. Between 7900 and 7300 BP (end of tire Pre-Pottery Neo lithic B) a crisis occurred in tire agricultural development of much of the Fertile Crescent. For a time there is very little archaeological visibility, suggesting settlement retraction. When sites reappeared in quantity, there seems to have been an adaptive change between a previously flexible mix of hunting-gathering and herding-farming to a more standard ized form of primarily agricultural settlement. Mobility also seems to have been reduced. A climatic crisis is commonly assumed during the intervening centuries, but a fundamen tal social transformation can be posited: increasing popula tion may have led to greater competition for and pressures on limited resources. On the desert margins of Transjordan, for example, excessive exploitation of trees had previously destroyed the open oak woodlands. The question of agricultural origins in Southwest Asia il lustrates the importance of investigating the changing en vironment as a context for socioeconomic transformation. Synthesis of a wide range of paloenvironmental information provides insights in systemic terms. The global perspective of independent agricultural origins in other parts of the world, in a broadly similar time range but witir distinctive domesticates and in radically different environments, sug gests that the evolutionary ttajectory of that larger system was related to the dynamism of human culture, not to en vironmental change. Desert Adaptations in the E a s t e r n S a h a r a (c. 90004500 BP). In about 9000 BP there is evidence of increasing rainfall, rising water tables, and the formation of numerous ephemeral or semipermanent lakes in the lowlands of the Sahara. There also is higher archaeological visibility after more than twenty millennia. The greater moisture persisted, with fluctuations, and, during the next forty-five hundred years or so, several peoples left a discontinuous settlement record across much of that great desert. There is a good possibility that the southern margins of the Sahara were an independent center of agricultural in novation; pottery making is verified there by 9000 BP, some fifteen hundred years earlier than in Syria-Palestine. African sorghum and millet were grown in a small, south Egyptian oasis in 8000 BP, with a clear morphological indication that the sorghum was in tire process of domestication (Wasylikowa etal., 1993). By then, cattle bones are sufficiently com mon to suggest domestication, a millennium or more before the appearance of domesticated sheep/goat of western Asian origin: sheep or goats suitable for domestication were not found in Africa, but the wild progenitors of cattle were long indigenous to the Egyptian Nile Valley. [See Cattle and Oxen.] Yet, throughout this period, until 6500 BP in Egypt and 4700 BP in central Sudan, archaeology shows that oc cupation was limited to hunters, fishers, and gatherers. [See Plunting; Fishing.]
Climatic amelioration in the Sahara toward 9000 B P cre ated new but modest opportunities for a mobile and pre carious subsistence by hunters and fishers, following a num ber of different trails between waterholes, marshes, and small lakes. The geoarchaeology at several such oases indi cates that there was little lag between improving ecological conditions and initial colonization efforts; furthermore, maximum archaeological visibility matches optimal water availability. Final abandonment of a deteriorating location appears to have been delayed, perhaps as people tried to find solutions to growing resource scarcity. Groups occupying the rich riverine environments along the Nile remained "conservative" in their subsistence pur suits, despite their adoption of pottery and their inevitable awareness of alternative subsistence strategies, such as herd ing and cultivation (Butzer, 1982). Presumably, fishing, hunting, and plant gathering provided an ample and reliable food supply, with less labor investment. Nonetheless, when agriculturalists did finally appear on the Nile floodplain, their subsistence activities were able to support much larger populations, in greatly expanded and more clearly nested settlements. By contrast, those groups that moved from one desert oa sis to anodrer appear to have been unusually innovative. Their mainstays were hunting, trapping, or fishing, but they also carried seed grains from the Nile margins or the Sahel to new marginal or ephemeral habitats, deliberately or in advertently propagating such plants. They also somehow controlled and drove cattle from the thickets of the Egyptian Nile into the Sahara to sparse seasonal pastures (transhumance). Ecologically, this is the only way cattle can have survived in the Sahara, given their fodder and water require ments. Such a process will have selected for small and lean stock, quite possibly used for blood-letting rather than milk, in analogy to the practice of Nilo-Saharan-speaking cattle pastoralists in East Africa (verified arclraeologically since 4000 BP). Eventually goat/sheep were acquired from south western Asia, while leaving no imprint along the Nile; such small stock were much less difficult to adapt to desert transhumance. These pioneers in desert colonization were not tire victims of increasing aridity, but, rather, adventurous and innovative groups developing a versatile, adaptive rep ertoire that has persisted (or was reinvented), in various forms, in Arabia and other arid environments under the guise of nomadic pastoralism. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] There are also some commonalities in lithic technology between the Nilotic hunter-fishers of Egypt and the desert pastoralists and between the pottery traditions of the latter and of hunter-fishers in the central Sudan. More significant is diat the lithic assemblage found with the Faiyum Neolithic (the earliest known agricultural group in Egypt—6500-5500 BP) is close to that of hunter-gatherers near the Khargah oasis (7200 B P or earlier) and near the Dakhla oasis (62005100 BP). Yet, the Faiyum Neolithic combined fishing (a Nilotic adaptation), wheat and barley planting (Near East-
ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY ern domesticates), and stock raising (a desert adaptation of African and Near Eastern origins). In about 5800 B P atMerimde, next to the Nile Delta, and after 5500 B P at Khargah, similar lithic assemblages incorporated sickle blades, a Near Eastern tradition of long standing. [See Merimde.] T o what extent the agricultural ttaditions in Lower and Upper Egypt that subsequently evolved autochthonously into the predynastic cultures of the Nile floodplain and Delta initially involved information exchange or small-scale pop ulation movements is obscure, but Egypt at that time should be seen as an open system with diverging adaptations and increasing interchange. When most of the desert popula tions (always very small) disappeared from the record (c. 4500 BP), some of those small groups may have trickled into the Nile Valley. E n v i r o n m e n t a l Crisis (c. 2200 BCE?). Between about 2300 and 2100 BCE, the Aegean world and much of the Near East was engulfed in turmoil commonly attributed to invad ers from the Balkans, the Zagros Mountains, the Syrian de sert, and elsewhere. From the Balkans to Mesopotamia and Palestine, most urban sites were abandoned, destroyed, or reduced in size. Even where settlement was not abandoned, the archaeological components or the dynasties changed— the end of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia and the Old Kingdom in Egypt (both perhaps c. 2230 BCE) . Equated witii the end of the Early Bronze II in Anatolia or the Early Bronze III in Palestine, this sociopolitical discontinuity could have transpired within less than a century or been more complex and prolonged. Subsequently, reduced ar chaeological visibility (e.g., the EB IV in Palestine) may have spanned some three centuries, to about 1900 BCE. Such apparently synchronous events have led some schol ars to invoke a super-regional causal mechanism such as climatic change. Weiss and others (1993), base their sug gestion on studies of northeastern Syria (Khabur plains), where wind-borne deposits, arid conditions of soil alteration, and long-distance volcanic ash mark the onset of perhaps three centuries of drier climate—fixed at 2200 BCE, the date of tlie abrupt abandonment of Tell Leilan. [See Leilan, Tell.] It is even speculated that a cataclysmic eruption by an un known volcano may have caused a "volcanic winter," de stabilizing global climate (Courty, 1994). T h e evidence for a period of drier climate comes from widely separated locations, but is by no means universal: 1. Lake Van. Enrichment of the isotope 0 was experi enced by Lake Van near the Anatolian headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (c. 2300-2100 BCE), based on varve correlation and dating from the lake bed (Degens and Kurtmann, 1978). T h e implication is reduced precipitation in the catchment, and if the dating can be trusted, would argue for a diminution of river discharge in Mesopotamia (Kay and Johnson, 1981), and mighthelp explain increasing salinization and declining crop productivity (2350-1850 BCE), although land-use problems appear to have played a key part in this (Adams, 1981). l 8
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2. Lake Zeribar. A single pollen profile, from Lake Zeribar in the Zagros Mountains (van Zeist and Bottema, 1991), shows an abrupt decline of oak pollen (by 40 percent), dis appearance of maple and willow, and a corresponding in crease of grass and composite pollen (c. 2200 BCE). Recov ery of the high-elevation woodlands was delayed by perhaps six hundred years. However, Holocene forest recolonization of the mountain ranges around Lake Van (see above) was only briefly interrupted at this time, judging by a core from that lake. 3. Lake Beysehir. T h e pollen profile from Lake Beysehir in southcentral Anatolia offers dubious support for greater aridity in about 2200 BCE (300-cm level, interpolated from carbon-14 dates)—namely, a strong decline of pine and ce dar and an increase of grasses; however, oak and ash began to increase steadily at the same time. Equally problematic is the oxidation of pollen in a core from Lake Koycegiz in southwestern Anatolia, perhaps by a temporary drying out of the lake at roughly this time. Examination of some two dozen other pollen profiles from Lake Urmia (northeastern Iran), Syria, northwestern Ana tolia, soutiiern and northern Greece, Dalmatia, and North Africa fails to reveal evidence of a woodland decline or drier ground conditions from about 2300 to 1800 BCE; in general, the period from about 2700 to 1500 BCE was climatically uneventful in these areas, except for scattered episodes of anthropogenic disturbance (Bottema et al., 1990). In Pal estine, Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) shows a submaximum of deciduous oak pollen (c. 1900 BCE), as does Lake Hulah (c. 2250 BCE), while 0 readings on dated land snails in the Negev suggest a wetter climate phase (2450-2050 BCE) prior to a rapid shift to essentially modern conditions. Stream be havior in western Asia is ambiguous. T h e Khabur River in dicates a shift to a semiarid, periodic flow regime (braiding, then channel incision) in about 4000-2000 BCE, before re suming a more equitable, meandering flow, by perhaps 1800 BCE (Courty, 1994). In Palestine, Nahal Lachish, near the tell of that name, had a broad, "wet" floodplain from the EB into the M B II period, when slope soils were eroded; only thereafter did the stream cut down its channel and strip away its agriculturally attractive floodplain (Goldberg, 1986; Rosen, 1986). The only other environmental "event" in about 2200 BCE was in the Nile Valley, where the Old Kingdom state dis solved amid dynastic anarchy and disastrous famines (e.g., c. 2200, c. 2100, and 2002 BCE). Various textual elaborations of failing Nile floods, famine, abandoned farmland, dislo cated people roaming the counteyside, and even cannibalism illustrate the scope of this disaster (Butzer, 1984). The texts are complemented by information from the Upper Nile re gion, where Lake Rudolf abruptly switched to a shallower and more alkaline lake (c. 2300 BCE), while the discharge of the Omo River, draining western Ethiopia, reached a min imum shortly after 2200 BCE, before recovering somewhat in about 2150-1950 BCE. T h a t rapid recovery was evident in 1 8
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the Faiyum Depression in Egypt, where a flood surge filled most of the basin witir water in about 2000 BCE. The data, however, support only one interval of Nile failure, during the rule of the Upper Egyptian governor Ankhtifi (c. 22102185 BCE). The available evidence, although scant, suggests that Nile failures did not unleash decentralizing forces and chaos that took almost two centuries to tame. Central autirority de clined markedly during the sixth dynasty (c. 2380-2230 BCE); during its second half there was progressive economic decline and impoverishment in the capital and some of the provinces, while tire aristocracy began to create local power bases (Butzer, 1984). In an even broader perspective, two centuries of political fragmentation preceded any Nile-re lated disasters, although these may have triggered the social unrest that ultimately led to a reassessment of traditional values. Because periodic Nile failures could have begun as much as a century earlier, and the destruction of Byblos by invad ers had already taken place within the reign of Pepi II of Egypt (died c. 2250 BCE), it is helpful to look at another agricultural crisis (c. 1170-1000 BCE) that may have brought down the New Kingdom (Butzer, 1984). [See Byblos.] Spiraling and wildly fluctuating food prices are documented, peaking in 1130 BCE. There were food riots; the temple gra naries were empty, in part through embezzlement; and tire countryside was increasingly abandoned because of over taxation and banditry. However, corruption had already been rampant before the subsistence crisis began; two for eign invasions (1207 and 1177-1171 BCE) took place prior to the rise in food prices; and two bouts of civil war were not reflected in food-price fluctuations. This suggests that although environmental stress and the resulting economic crisis were implicated in tire disempowerment of the last New Kingdom pharaohs, the sociopolitical processes of devolution were far more complex. Indeed, this crisis period with its foreign invaders and widespread political disconti nuity in the Near East (the fall of the Hittite Empire) had been underway some thirty years before Egypt plunged into ecological crisis. A synoptic overview of the environmental evidence for tire crisis of 2000 BCE suggests a trend to aridity only within tire area between the Euphrates River and the Zagros Moun tains. [See Euphrates.] Syria-Palestine, Greece, and north western Anatolia, as well as northwest Africa, did not ex perience greater aridity; any anomalies favored a moister climate and forest expansion or recovery. Even within the region possibly affected by drought, tire Khabur River had documented an increasingly semiarid stream regime since 4000 BCE, and in tire Zagros forests expanded steadily until about 2200 BCE. Climatic trends were not in phase, and whatever environmental crisis there may have been, or how ever severe it may have been locally, was limited to a cir cumscribed area. As the relevant archaeological record becomes more tan
gible, it suggests great circumspection in interpretating ep isodes of urban decline and political simplification. Thus, in Palestine (Miroschedji, 1989), EB III urban sites were largely destroyed or abandoned between 2250 and 2200 BCE. However, ruralization rather than depopulation followed, and during the next three or four centuries, the Negev and Sinai were the focus of countless small settlements. Only at the end of EB IV (c. 1850 BCE) were these desert areas aban doned—until the Roman-Nabatean period. [See Nabateans.] Even on the Syrian Euphrates renewed urbanism ap pears as Tell Leilan declines. The inherent complexity of crisis periods may, thus, stem from the systemic interde pendence of larger political entities; the latent, sociopolitical instability of some; and the advantages of technological, mil itary, or adaptive innovations within the larger region (which also applies to hypotheses invoking climate to explain the end of Mycenaean and Minoan civilization after 1200 BCE and tire political devolution of Mesopotamia in the eleventh century BCE. Cultural T r a n s f o r m a t i o n of the L a n d s c a p e . More productive than climate and migration as explanatory mod els is the human use of and impact on environmental re sources. While Near Eastern hunters and gatherers (20,00010,000 BP) utilized natural resources in increasingly complex ways, their environmental impact probably was both local ized and ephemeral. Agricultural land use is another matter, involving vegetation clearance, soil manipulation, irrigation works, and potentially heavy grazing. [See Irrigation.] With the emergence of the high civilizations, tied to dense rural populations and growing urban centers, resource pressures and ecological impacts take on yet another dimension, in cluding an insatiable demand for timber and fuel wood. This is fundamental to understanding tire geographic stage on which socioeconomic and political history was played out in the Near East. The single most important tools currently available to identify and gage human impact on tire environment are palynology and the identification of botanical and animal remains from archaeological sites. Pollen cores can provide a continuous trace of composite ecological change, com monly from lakes or swamps at some distance from settle ment centers—primarily a macroscale approach. Paleobotanical remains from sites provide more discontinuous records, from close proximity to settled areas. They empha size plants and animals of economic importance and tend to offer a more finely textured picture, complementing that of the pollen profiles that document change through time (Van Zeist and Bottema, 1991). Equally important is evidence for human impact on the soil mantle. Erosion leaves thinned soil profiles or exposed rock; eroded soil material accumu lates downslope as hill wash or is swept away by stream floods, to be deposited on floodplains farther downstream. D r y - F a r m i n g a n d P a s t o r a l i s m . T h e impact of Neo lithic agricultural or pastoral land use was localized and mainly ephemeral, exerted primarily through the use of fire
ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY to clear woodland for cultivation and perhaps also as pas ture. Subsistence was still heavily dependent on hunting, and even on wild plant foods. This does not preclude almost complete clearance of woodland in proximity of occupation sites—whether for cultivation, construction timbers, or fuel. Neolithic dispersal was also directed toward more arid en vironments and rudimentary irrigation was practiced in some places. Noteworthy is the first settlement of the deltaic wetlands of southern Mesopotamia a little after 7000 BP, where people probably practiced simple fioodwater farming. There is no correlation between cultural designations such as Neolithic and permanent or prominent settlements. Some of tire latter, witir rectangular houses witir stone foundations, predate the Neolithic, while in parts of tire Mediterranean basin some agricultural peoples moved between caves and clusters of seasonal huts as late as 2000 BCE. It also is not self-evident that mobile hunter-pastoralists witir supplemen tary seasonal farming had less ecological impact than clus ters of farming villages. Sedentary farmers could not persist indefinitely in a particular area without developing conser vationist strategies based on cumulative experience. Longterm success is predicated on minimizing both long-term environmental damage and short-term subsistence risk (Butzer, 1996). That may be easy enough on level land with productive soils, but when expanding populations required the cultivation of fragile soils on steeper hill country (e.g., olive groves or vinyards on terraced hillsides), long-term productivity could only be assured with considerable and sustained labor input. [See Viticulture.] T h e archaeological record appears to approximate such a model. Agricultural landscapes witir prominent villages are found scattered across sttetches of fertile, level land from Mesopotamia to central Europe by 5000 BCE. Permanent hillside cultivation seems to have been associated with the expansion of olive and grape orchards beginning as early as 3500 BCE in Syria-Palestine and a millennium or so later in Greece. This Mediterranean-style pattern of land use, em phasizing arboriculture, emerged in a subhumid environ ment witir mild winters and sustained large populations during later parts of the Bronze Age and again in HellenisticRoman times. It did not lend itself well to irrigated desert in arid settings—despite their best efforts, the Egyptian elite had to import considerable olive oil and wine from Syria. A similar form of land use did not develop in the hill country east of tire Euphrates, at least not until Hellenistic times and on a local scale. There, agriculture tended to remain on the valley floors, except in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, where orchards of fruit trees substituted for olive groves and vinyards. Pollen records suggest that deforestation or other vege tation disturbance became increasingly common in the hill country of the Near East and Greece after about 5000 BCE, before the establishment of Mediterranean-style farming (Butzer, 1996). This can best be attributed to early pastoral activity, which subsequendy became more directly linked to
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agricultural pursuits—the same villages farmed, planted or chards, and moved herds of livestock up into the hills and back in a seasonal round. This promoted a more judicious form of pastoral land use, favoring greater ecological stabil ity. Slowly, the initially small patches of planted fields, pas tures, and secondary woodland expanded until, by tire Late Bronze Age, about 1500 BCE (Bottema et a l , 1990), the warm-temperate hill countty west of the Euphrates exhib ited large tracts of well-tended agricultural landscape. The ecological record is by no means one of harmony between land use and the environment. Episodes of destruc tive impact were commonly limited to land abandonment, either in the course of political devolution, or in the wake of intrusive populations with a greater emphasis on pastoral herding (Butzer, 1996). New pastoral colonists from humid, northerly woodlands probably lacked experience with the more fragile ecology of an unfamiliar Mediterranean envi ronment. One such period was the Early Iron dark age, but impact on vegetation was not synchronous: 1500-400 BCE in Epirus; 1100-1000 BCE in Macedonia; and 1000-900 BCE in southwestern Anatolia. Much the same happened in medi eval times: in about 400-1100 CE in Palestine; 1200-1350 CE in southwestern Anatolia; and 1000-1500 CE in Epirus and North Africa—involving Vlach and Slavic pastoralists or Arab bedouin. Local land-use histories have varied, and broad generalizations are prone to be simplistic. Overall, the marginal agricultural lands of Syria-Palestine were aban doned at different times, in part as a result of Byzantine-era insecurity, in part because of economic decline, following the shift of power from Umayyad Damascus to 'Abbasid Baghdad after 750 CE. [See Umayyad Caliphate; 'Abbasid Caliphate.] It was this abandonment, which persisted into the 1920s, that gave Huntington tire impression of climatic deterioration. The location of major pollen cores at some distance from major urban sites limits information on whether large and expanding towns may have so depleted their environmental resources as to contribute to local population decline or even abandonment. A record of discontinuous but repeated soil erosion from Hellenistic to late Byzantine times in the Ae gean region suggests that this is at least a possible scenario. T h e irrigated floodplains of tire arid Near East present a distinctive land-use trajectory, with different environmental repercussions. Nile Valley Irrigation. Agricultural settlements began to proliferate in the Nile Valley in about 4000 BCE. Preferred site locations gradually shifted from the desert edge to the naturally raised levees running along the margins of the Nile and its secondary channels. The Nile floodplain was sub divided into shallow basins, as a result of tire intersection of various active and older levees (Butzer, 1976). These basins flooded naturally at the time of annual inundation (August or September), the excess water draining back out into the channel six to ten weeks later, as the flood waned. T h e clayey soils retained sufficient moisture to bring a crop
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seeded in October or November to harvest in February or March. This natural pulse of irrigation was adequate to cul tivate extensive floodplain tracts without artificial irrigation. Technological intervention was incremental, first by means of controlled breaches in the levees that regulated tire influx as well as outflow of water from the basins. Short canals were eventually built to disttlbute water within basins that were subdivided into more manageable units by transverse earthen dikes. T h e bucket-and-lever device, known in Ar abic as a shaduf, was introduced about 1500 BCE to allow the small-scale, mechanical lifting of water for vegetable and pleasure gardens. [See Gardens, article on Gardens in Preclassical Times.] Large-scale water lifting was only possible with the animal-drawn waterwheel, or saqiya, however, first verified in Ptolemaic times. Human modification of the Nile Valley, thus, took place gradually, beginning in predynastic times. During the Old Kingdom, fruit orchards were widely planted on new estates in the southern delta, with vineyards placed along the delta margins (Butzer, 1976). Middle Kingdom development ap parently focused on controlling the quantity of water enter ing the Faiyum Depression, where settlement was probably expanded. The New Kingdom and late periods saw land reclamation in the delta marsh fringe and greater irrigation control in the less manageable, larger basins of Middle Egypt. There never was a tall, dense riparian forest, and from the earliest times, acacia represented the key local tim ber; productive groves of date palms probably soon domi nated the riparian fringe. Finally, salinization was not a problem in flood basins flushed on a regular basis. Thus, the Nile Valley and Delta were not degraded, but progres sively converted into a carefully tended, cultural landscape that was indefinitely sustainable. M e s o p o t a m i a n Irrigation. The alluvial and deltaic plains of Lower Mesopotamia were different from those of Egypt (Adams, 1981). T h e narrow Tigris floodplain is en trenched well below the alluvial land created by the Eu phrates, and the Tigris was therefore quite difficult to har ness for more extensive irrigation. Whereas tire Nile floods were modulated, to allow winter cultivation (as elsewhere along the Mediterranean coastlands), tire Euphrates was er ratic and often violent. Its floods reflected the snow cover in eastern Anatolia, and when and how quickly it melted. Sweeping down a much shorter ttajectory, floods arrived between late April and early June, breaking out from the shifting channels to drain into a vast marshland, instead of filling shallow basins before emptying back into the main river. Simple floodwater farming had only limited scope, and the floods were hazardous to settlements. Accumulating across broad, marshy zones in tire lower delta, dissolved salts were retained and built up in the soil and groundwater. In addition, the Euphrates silts included less fertile clay than did the Nile muds. Mesopotamia, therefore, required substantial modifica
tion and costly maintenance to achieve productive, irrigated landscapes. T h e main channels had to be tapped by long feeder canals that fanned out across the plain and replaced former flood breaches and temporary overflow channels. These required massive reconstruction and cleaning out af ter most flood seasons, before labor would be available for planting crops downstream; by then, however, water volume had sharply diminished. This may explain why ttaditional irrigation farming could not take advantage of a possible postflood crop season, delaying planting until river dis charge slowly increased again in October or November. One advantage of an almost flat plain was that canals could tap river water even at an intermediate stage of flow. T h e dis advantage was that regular incremental tapping of canal wa ter implied evaporation of slightly saline water in the fields, creating salinization over time. Effective water control in Mesopotamia consequently meant a quantum change in potential agricultural produc tivity; it also required an elaborate canal network and costly labor input (Adams, 1981). Such a system was probably inaugurated by Early Uruk times (c. 4000-3500 BCE), and the transformation of natural Euphrates tributaries into a great network of artificial canals completed by 2000 BCE. Maintenance could not be guaranteed during periods of po litical devolution, however, resulting in periodic abandon ment of much of the arable land. Overirrigation further led to salinization of the lower ends of the irrigation system, possibly favoring an upstream shift of the prime agricultural lands and, with them, the clusters of population. Equally so, this upstream shift may have enabled protection of towns from destructive floods by the new technology of massive rings of dikes. The conversion of Lower Mesopotamia into an agricul tural landscape was a less harmonious affair than in Egypt. The system was more fragile, its operation discontinuous, and its ecological impact negative. Unlike Egypt, which re mained a breadbasket without interruption, most of Lower Mesopotamia lay waste from about 1000 CE until after World War I. Furthermore, the creation and management of this system required either centralized control or unusual levels of cooperation among the various polities embedded within it. That assigned a major role to mediating "bureau cracies" and enhanced the dependency of individual culti vators—unlike in Egypt, where irrigation was managed lo cally, well into tire last century. Tells. The potential to produce a detailed site history ex ists at excavations where archaeologists and environmental archaeologists collaborate on-site. In the Near East, a tell, or artificial hill, typically formed by the residues of mud (adobe) bricks used across successive occupations to build houses, public buildings, and fortifications, is an anthropo genic landform that can be in excess of 50 m deep (Rosen, 1986). It usually incorporates between 1 million and 10 mil lion cu m of sediment. Many of the larger abandoned tells
ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY on the plains of northern Syria are sufficiently prominent to be visible on conventional satellite imagery. Similar town sites on the Nile floodplain are equally large, but tiieir forms are low and less conspicuous, as a result of protracted alluviation of the surrounding floodplain. Such mounds record millennia of settlement history, doc umented not only by architectural structures and archaeo logical inventories, but also by a detailed sedimentary record that reflects the use and disposal of a perishable building material (Butzer, 1982). Individual houses are built, even tually collapse, and must be rebuilt with new mud bricks, as older debris is reworked into a prepared "floor." New quar ters of a town grow, while old ones decay. Middens of highly organic, ashy or sandy refuse accumulate in disused rooms, abandoned houses, or decaying quarters. A whole town is destroyed or abandoned and a new one is raised on its ruins. As sediment continues to accumulate, with little net loss of material, the mound progressively increases in elevation. Each occupation phase included multiple levels of house floors, each structure partially filled by several thin strata. These levels not only record the progression of local con struction and collapse, or site growth and decay, but also provide details about each room's original function, as well as the physical processes of microaccumulation. Until very recentiy, archaeologists limited tiieir attention to the three-dimensional architectural matrix of mounds and the artifacts therein. As a result, no tell has yet been com prehensively studied by a geoarchaeologist, despite a num ber of exploratory efforts, to identify the changing nature of domestic occupation, microenvironmental dynamics, and demographic trends. [See Demography.] T h e processes of chemical alternation or enrichment within a site, or the agen cies of contemporary or subsequent deposition of erosion, might highlight a climatic signal. A particularly useful link between the tell and its environ mental context is provided by mud bricks (Rosen, 1986). Their texture, color, and calcium-carbonate content are di agnostic markers that vary remarkably from site to site. Even within a single site, mud bricks can identify the different materials used for monumental structures and simple houses, or clay sources quarried at different times—includ ing some sources exposed, buried, or exhausted during spe cific periods. Tell-derived hill wash from different ages also tends to be distinctive and traceable to specific microstratigraphic units exposed in an adjacent alluvial profile. That, in turn, may allow correlation between settlement and land scape histories, in regard to changing human use of, and impact on, the environment. The point of this example is that Bronze Age and histor ical settlement sites remain the most neglected arena of po tential research in Near Eastern environmental archaeology. T h e tons and tons of sediment excavated from such sites every year could be used to richly complement standard ar chaeological interpretation. But in the past it has simply
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been thrown out, without the excavators drawing in the req uisite geo-archaeological expertise. Perspectives. Ideally, the scope of environmental ar chaeology goes well beyond data gathering to explore fresh vistas for major issues. In terms of the rise and fall of em pires, for example, the most tangible variables are political centralization/decentralization, economic expansion/dissi pation, and demographic growth/decline. Two of the questions to be answered are which was dependent and which independent and whether change was externally or internally stimulated. A systemic analog, instead of a caus ality model, allows for external inputs and brealdng away from biological systems centered on energy flows (e.g., eco nomic and geopolitical priorities). Systemic thinking is pri marily heuristic, designed to enhance sophistication in an alyzing change, rather than to predict or retrodict outcomes (Butzer, 1990). If indeed a climatic anomaly is demon strated, the questions should be who was affected, where, and how; what risk-minimizing strategies were in place; what experience was available to cope with subsistence shortfalls or to adapt to a recurrence of such a crisis; and which institutions could be mobilized to mitigate social stress? Questions might next shift to the resilience of the economic and political structures of a particular state under external or internal "siege." Answers are usually difficult to provide, but the questions ideally upgrade the sophistication of research designs and the categories of empirical investi gation. Human populations have always interacted with their en vironment in multiple ways, using it, shaping it, and devising alternative ways to bend its constraints—but also abusing and sometimes degrading it. At the core of human history is a long tradition of persistence in the face of adversity and resilience in the throes of crisis. Especially in an era with increasing interest in the impact of long-term land use on sustainability or ecological equilibrium, environmental ar chaeology has a unique capability to examine such issues empirically (Butzer, 1996). Five millennia of intensive ag riculture and town life in the Near East provide an unusual opportunity to monitor human impact on the environment. [See also Computer Mapping; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnobotany; Geology; Historical Geography; New Archaeology; Paleobotany; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction; and Paleozoology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. Bintliff, J. L., and Willem van Zeist, eds. Palaeoclimates, Palaeoenviron-
and Human Communities in the Eastern Mediterranean Region in Later Prehistory. Oxford, 1982. Bottema, Sytze, et at, eds. Man's Role in the Shaping of the Eastern Mediterranean landscape. Rotterdam, 1990. menUy
Braidwood, Robert J., and Bruce Howe, eds. Prehistoric Investigations
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in Iraqi Kurdistan. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Studies in Ancient Civilization, no. 31. Chicago, i960.
called Arsinoeia, but after his death the traditional name was maintained. During the Byzantine period, after the main Brice, William C , ed. The Environmental History of the Near and Middle town was abandoned, the site around the hill, east of tire East since the Last Ice Age. London, 1978. Artemision (temple sacred to the goddess Artemis), was Butzer, Karl W. "Environmental and Human Ecology in Egypt during Predynastic and Early Dynastic Times." Bulletin de la Societe de Geo called Ayasoluk, which nowadays is the Turkish town of graphic d'Egyple 32 (1959): 43-87. Selcuk. Butzer, Karl W. "Archeology and Geology in Ancient Egypt." Science Ephesus and the surrounding area have been settled since 132 (i960): 1617-1624. the Bronze Age. During Mycenaean times the hill of Aya Butzer, Karl W. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cul soluk and the Artemision showed remains of occupation. tural Ecology. Chicago, 1976. Until now little was known about the earlier Ionian migration Butzer, Karl W. "Rise and Fall of Axum, Ethiopia: A Geo-Archaeological Interpretation." American Antiquity 46 (1981): 471-495. period, but since tire eighth century BCE, Ephesus has played Butzer, Karl W. Archaeology as Human Ecology: Method and Theoryanforimportant role within the Ionian civilization. Remains be a Contextual Approach. Cambridge, 1982. low the lower agora of the Roman town and a peripteros in Butzer, Karl W. "Long-Term Nile Flood Variation and Political Dis continuities in Pharaonic Egypt." In From Hunters to Farmers, edited the central base of the Artemision underline tire specific sig nificance of the site (see figure 1 ) . Other than the Artemi by J. Desmond Clark and Steven A. Brandt, pp. 102-112. Berkeley, 1984. sion, little is known about the remains of tire site in the sixth Butzer, Karl W. "A Human Ecosystem Framework for Archaeology." and fifth centuries BCE. In the fourth century the temple of In The Ecosystem Approach in Anthropology, edited by Emilio F. Artemis remained the center of activities, but after a new Moran, pp. 91-130. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990. town was founded by the diadoch (follower of Alexander the Butzer, Karl W. "Ecology in the Long View: Settlement Histories, Great) Lysimachos, Ephesus began to flourish. T h e new Agrosystcmic Strategies, and Ecological Performance." Journal of Field Archaeology 23 (1996). urbanization was the basis for the development of Ephesus Caton-Thompson, Gertrude, and E. W. Gardner. The Desert Fayum. into a metropolis in the Roman empire. 2 vols. London, 1934. Courty, M.-A. "Le cadre paleogeographique des occupations humaines dans le bassin du Haut-Khabour, Syrie du Nord-Est." Pa leorient 20 (1994): 21-60. Degens, Egon T., and Fikret Kurtmann, eds. The Geology of Lake Van. Ankara, 1978. Goldberg, Paul. "Late Quaternary Environmental History of the Southern Levant." Geoarchaeobgy 1 (1986): 224-244. Kay, P. A., and Douglas L. Johnson. "Estimation of Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow from Regional Paleoenvironmental Proxy Data." Cli
Although Ephesus has been visited by many people since the time of Cyriacus of Ancona, one of the first scholarly travelers (1446 CE), archaeological investigations did not be gin until the second half of the nineteenth century. John Turtle Wood began excavating there in 1864 and continued his archaeological work until he discovered the Artemision in January, 1870. Some of tire marbles that he excavated can now be seen in the British Museum. In 1904 and 1905 the mate Change 3 (1981): 251-263. British Museum undertook another excavation in the Ar Larsen, Curtis E. Life and luind Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoar temision and David G. Hogarth discovered tire earlier su-ata chaeobgy of an Ancient Society. Chicago, 1983. of the sanctuary. T h e Austtians started their work at Eph Miroschedji, Pierre de, ed. L'urbanisation de la Palestine a Vage du esus in Bronze ancient Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Acles du 1895, an ongoing undertaking that has been inter rupted only by the two world wars. T h e emphasis of the Colloque d'Emmaus, 20-24 octobre 1986. British Archaeological Re ports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Austrian research was on tire Roman town; however, since Rosen, Arlene Miller. Cities of Clay: The Geoarchaeobgy of Tells. Chi 1965 the Artemision has also been included in the activities. cago, 1986. T h e Artemision. The temple of Artemis is situated out Wasylikowa, Krystyna, et al. "Examination of Botanical Remains from side tire Roman town in the plain, east of the hill of Aya Early Neolithic Houses at Nabta Playa, Western Desert, Egypt." In The Archaeology of Africa, edited by Thurstan Shaw et al., pp. 154- soluk, and its remains lie partly in the groundwater. In the 164. London, 1993. center of the temple a peripteros (colonnaded rectangle) 9.5 Weiss, Harvey, et al. "The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium m (31 ft.) wide and 13.3 m (43.5 ft.) long witir columns North Mesopotamian Civilization." Science 261 (1993): 995-1004. arranged four by eight, was excavated (see figure 2). Within Zeist, Willem van, and Sytze Bottema. Late Quaternary Vegetation of the cella (inner part) is a rectangular base surrounded by six the Near East. Wiesbaden, 1991. column bases of green schist. Beneath it a hoard of jewelry KARL W . BUTZER was found, perhaps the necldace for the xoanon (statue in wood of the goddess). T h e whole construction is to be dated in the eighth century. T h e eastern part of the cella was re used in the middle of the sixth century as a foundation for a shrine in marble, perhaps tire shelter for a new cult statue. EPHESUS, major ancient Greek city now in western Therefore the coins of electrum (alloy of gold and silver) Turkey, situated on the western coast of Asia Minor (37°5o' found below its floor give a terminus ante quern of around N , 27°i5' E). There has never been any question about the 560, the year in which Croesus gained political power. site's identification. In the Late Bronze Age the name of tire site was perhaps Apasa, the capital of tire empire of Arzawa. Two other large constructions. Temple C, as designated Under the first Hellenistic lung, Lysimachos, the town was by Hogarth, in tire center of the temple, and orthogonal to
EPHESUS it the so-called hekalompedos in the west, existed before the first big marble temple was erected. Designated after an early temple to Athena on the Acropolis in Athens, the hekatompedos (meaning "one hundred feet long" in Greek) was the first construction at the site made with marble and measured 100 Ionian feet long. Temple C had antae (pilas ters) on the west side. This arrangement implies that around 600 BCE two main cults existed at tire site. Numerous votive offerings in gold and ivory, some of them female figurines, as well as tire animal bones of the sacrifices, emphasize tire special character of the early cults at the site. Pigs were es pecially common as a sacrifice, more in the central base than at the other locations; however, donkeys, dogs, bears, and lions were also used as a sacrifice to the goddess. Even hu man sacrifices, called pharmakos by the Lydian poet Hipponax, are archaeologically evident. The great marble temple, also called the temple of Croe sus, was 59.9 m (194.5 ft.) wide including the krepidoma (solid base of tire building); however, its length is not yet known. Eight of the thirty-six Ionian sculptured columns, which stood at the entrance, and the sima (gutter) in marble, which was covered by a sculptural frieze, were some of the remainders from the temple, which was burnt down in 356 BCE. This temple was rebuilt with the same dimensions but on a higher level. Once again some of the column pedestals and drums were sculptured. Pliny tells us that 127 columns existed and of them thirty-six were sculptured. Some of the remains of both these columns and tire archaic columns are now in tire British Museum. With the erection of the marble
temple of Croesus all earlier cults were suppressed, and the worship of Artemis alone was established. An archaic sac rificial area, consisting of a ramp and two bases with a water pipe made of lead, was surrounded by a courtyard, axial to tire temple of Croesus. Their foundations were reused in the fourth century, and a new altar with a screen wall was built on them. This screen wall was composed of a frieze on a socle and was topped with an Ionian colonnade. T h e cella of the temple was reused as a church in early Byzantine times. Hellenistic a n d R o m a n Town. Lysimachos of Thrace (322-281) founded a new city between the two hills Panayirdag and Bulbtildag. It was designed in a rectangular grid system that was oriented to tire axis of the Artemision. T h e Embolos (Gk., "wedge," in general also late antique streets) was not adapted to this hippodanric (rectilinear) system, but instead, it used tire archaic processional road in the valley between the two hills. T h e new urbanization included an archaic settlement, which was probably the ancient town Smyrna, at the valley's entrance. The town walls enclosed a big area that went along tire ridges of the two hills. During tire Roman times the Hellenistic urbanization was completed. Some of the main constructions included a shel tered harbor north of the Bulbtildag and the water supply from the surrounding mountains to the town. A procession road partly covered by the sophist and philosopher Damianos led around tire Panayirdag to the Artemision. T e m p l e s . Many shrines for the cult of tire emperors ex isted in the Roman towns, srtch as a twin shrine perhaps one
Figure 1. The Roman town. View from above the embolos with the monument of Memmius in front. The harbor gymnasium can be seen toward the rear. (Courtesy A. Bammer) EPHESUS.
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west of the Monument of Memmius. Along the Embolos stood the hydrekdocheion ("water castle") of Trajan (IvE, nos. 415-416, 419, 424, 435-436, 4249), and near the street to the Magnesian gate another fountain for the same em peror was erected. South of the upper agora a semicircular water container was built, and at the southwest corner of the upper agora stood the hydrekdocheion of Laecanius Bassus (IvE, nos. 232-421). Public Squares and Administrative Buildings. T h e upper agora had a political connotation. Its northern front was covered by the basilica with three naves, sponsored by C. Sextilius Pollio and his wife, Ofilia Bassa (IvE, no. 404). It was decorated with bull-head capitals on the inner col onnade. Behind it stood the prytaneion (headquarters of the city administrative body) with the sanctuary for Hestia, which in late antiquity was decorated with heart-leaf col umns. The lower agora seems to have served more for com merce, but a Doric stoa on a higher level at its eastern edge had perhaps also an administrative purpose. T h e agoras and main streets were divided by arches and gates. In late antiq uity the public squares, like the agoras, were built over by private buildings. Their function was taken over by larger streets with colonnades like the Arkadiane from the theater EPHESUS. Figure 2. Peripteros in the Artemesion. Eighth century to the harbor or the stoa of Servilius to the stadium. BCE. (Courtesy A. Bammer) Private Buildings. Private buildings were on the slopes of the Panayirdag and the Bulbuldag, but only two insulae (squares surrounded by streets) south of the Embolos have been completely excavated. They are composed of flats ly ing on several terraces. The dwellings themselves were for the Divus Iulius and the other for Dea Roma (Dio Casmostly composed around a courtyard, often a peristyle. T h e sius, 5120.6) near the Prytaneion at the upper agora, a tem walls of the rooms were decorated with paintings and marble ple for Domitian and Titus (Die Inschriften von Ephesos revetments. Among the paintings scenes of dramas and [IvE], nos. 232-242, 1498, 2048) south of the courtyard of comedies of Euripides and Menander should be mentioned. Domitian, a small temple for Hadrian at the Embolos, built The floors were worked in mosaics. Remains of the furni by C. Quintilius (IvE, no. 429), and a huge temple in Hadture in bronze and ivory have also been found. T h e decor rianic times, maybe the Olympieion (Pausanias, Periegesis ations as a whole belong to tire most outstanding in Asia 7.2.6) at the harbor. Sanctuaries for non-Greek gods are still Minor. more difficult to identify, but at the upper agora stood a temple, possibly for Isis (or Dionysos?) and a sanctuary, Heroa and Tombs. Among the tombs outside the city perhaps for Serapis, was discovered west of the lower agora. wall, only one along the street to Magnesia, which today is beside the street to Aydin, has been excavated, and it has Gymnasia a n d B a t h s . Because gymnasia needed much the form of a tholos (beehive-shaped structure). Within the space, two of them were built near the northern and eastern city wall the monument of Pollio, the sponsor of the aque city wall, two in the plain between the theater and the harbor, duct over the River Marnas and the basilica is known. At one east of the upper agora and only one, the baths of Varthe courtyard of Domitian, the monument for C. Memmius, ius, later restored by Scholastikia, at the Embolos in the cen a grandson of Sulla (IvE, no. 403) in the form of a tetrapylon ter of the town (IvE, nos. 431, 453, 500, 1313-1315, 3008). with niches at the same place, was erected around 51 BCE. Most of the gymnasia were constructed in the second and The octagon, a grave for a maiden, perhaps Arsinoe IV, third century CE, and all of them were restored up to the killed by Cleopatra VII, stands at the Embolos. Next to it fourth and fifth century. another heroon (shrine for a deified deceased person) is sit Fountains. Most of the fountains stood in the upper part uated, which may have been built by Androklos. At the end of the town, near the upper agora, the courtyard of Domi of the Embolos the library of Celsus Polemaeanus (IvE, no. tian, and the Embolos. A fountain with a big niche was con 5101) erected around 117 CE was built over the sarcophagus structed by the proconsul Calvisius Ruso in honor of the of its sponsor. emperor Domitian (92 CE), and then another one was built
EQUIDS C h u r c h e s in L a t e Antiquity. Smaller churches and chapels were built all over the town, one in the northern wall at the stadium, another one into the gymnasium close to the eastern city wall. T h e biggest church was tire church of Holy Mary in dre harbor area perhaps used for the council of Ephesus 431 CE. T h e basilica of St. John at the hill of Aya soluk was first built in the fifth century, then rebuilt under Theodosius in the sixth century. T w o churches were built into the Cemetery of the Seven Sleepers at the east side of dre Panayirdag. Finally, dre church in the courtyard of the Artemision must be mentioned, also one of the largest and earliest churches. Sculpture. Although Ephesus did not have a sculptural school like tire one at Aphrodisias, sculptures played a great role in decorating buildings. T h e richly decorated Artemi sion has certainly been a model. Also of great importance are the Statues of Amazons dedicated in the fifth century to the Artemesion but only conserved as copies from Roman times. Androldos, tire mythical founder of Ephesus, is often represented. For instance, he is represented in a frieze at the heroon near the octagon, in the frieze of the temple of Ha drian, and in the sculptures of the fountain for Trajan. At the end of tire Roman republic the monument of Memmius was highly decorated with caryatids at the pillars and offi cials and soldiers on the surrounding frieze on top of the arches. T h e facade of the substructure of tire temple of D o mitian was decorated in the second floor with male and fe male barbarians. In the prytaneion three statues of Artemis Ephesia have been found. T h e library of Celsus was deco rated with the allegories of the virtues of Celsus. However, the most important frieze is that of the so-called monument of the Parthians with battle scenes and the adoption of L u cius Verus. T h e foundation of this important altar still has to be identified.
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Oster, Richard E. A Bibliography of Ancient Ephesus. Metuchen, N.J., 1987.
Rogers, Guy M. The Sacred Identity of Ephesos: Foundation Myths of a Roman City. London, 1991. Strocka, Volker M. "Zeus, Marnas und Klaseas, Ephesische Brunnenfiguren von 93 n. Chr." In Festschrift fur Jale Inan, pp. 79-92. Istan bul, 1989. Thiir, Hilke. "Arsinoe IV: Eine Schwester Kleopatras VII, Grabinhaberin des Oktogons von Ephesos?" Jahreshefte des Oslerreichisches
Archdologisches Institut 60 (1990): 43-56. Torelli, Mario. "II monumento efesino di Memmius." Scienze dcll'Antichita 2 (1988): 403-426. ANTON BAMMER
EPHRAIM, SURVEY OF. See Southern Samaria, Survey of.
EPIGRAPHY. See Inscriptions.
E Q U I D S . T h e horse, ass, and onager, all members of the genus Equus, family Equitlae, order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates), are found in the ancient Near East both as wild and domestic stock. T h e equids were secondary domesti cates—chronologically later additions to husbanded sheep, goat, cattle, and pig—apparently more valued for their labor than for meat, milk, fiber, or hides. T h e wild ass, Equus africanus, is known from Nubia and the eastern desert of Egypt; it recently was identified in southwest Asia. Previ ously thought to have been domesticated only in Egypt, it now appears that this could have occurred in the Syro-Arabian region as well. Remains of the domestic ass, E. asinus, appear in fourth-millennium deposits in both areas. Among the earliest remains from Israel are those in Early Bronze I II levels at Arad. In all periods after the beginning of the second millennium BCE, the ass was tire most common equid, used for plowing and as tire primary beast of burden. Remains of caballine wild horse, E. ferns, are known from BIBLIOGRAPHY Pleistocene sites in die Levant. Once thought to have dis appeared from there at the end of the Ice Age, recently iden Bammer, Anton. Ephesos: Stadt an Fluss und Meet: Graz, 1988. tified remains from a Chalcolithic deposit in tire northern Bammer, Anton. "A peripteros of the Geometric Period in the Arte Negev have provisionally been identified as E. ferus. This mision of Ephesus." Anatolian Studies 40 (1990): 137-156. Engelmann, Helmut. "Zum Kaiserkult in Ephesos." Zeitschrift fur Pa- would mean that tire species persisted later into the Holopyrologie und Epigraphik 97 (1993): 279-289. cene and farther south than previously thought. Current Foss, Clive. Ephesus after Antiquity. Cambridge, 1978. opinion on the domestication of the horse, E. caballus, places Friesen, Steven J. Twice Neokoros, Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Fla it on tire Eurasian steppe in the late Neolithic. From there vian Imperial Family. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 116. it spread to various regions, reaching tire ancient Near East Leiden, 1993. in the first half of the third millennium. T h e earliest archae Die Inschriften von Ephesos UvE). 8 vols. Bonn, 1979-1984. ological evidence places the domestic horse in Mesopotamia Knibbe, Dieter. Via sacra Ephesiaca I. Berichte und Materialen, 3. Vi in about 2300 BCE. T h e domestic horse in Israel is noted enna, 1993. from a slightly earlier context, again from Early Bronze I—II Le Monde de la Bible, no. 64 (1990). Special issue entitled "Ephese, la levels at Arad. [See Arad, article on Bronze Age Period.] cite d'Artemis." In greater Mesopotamia tire onager, or half ass, E. hemMuss, Ulrike. Die Bauplastik des archaischen Artemesions, Sonderschrifionus, ranged from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Seas. ten, vol. 25. Vienna, 1994.
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ERANI, TEL
During the Neolithic, according to evidence from such sites as Umm Dabaghiyeh in Iraq, the animal was hunted for its meat and skin. It was once thought that the onager had been domesticated in Mesopotamia, but recent summaries of die philological, osteological, and behavioral evidence make clear that onagers were and are intractable. Onagers were used as studs to produce hybrids with donkeys during the early dynastic period in Mesopotamia. However, this prac tice seems to have died out with the arrival of the horse. Mules (hybrids produced by crossing a horse witii an ass) have been attested on the basis of bone finds, the earliest are from Iran at die end of the third millennium BCE. Equids figured in ritual activity. In Mesopotamia, equids were interred with humans and even wheeled vehicles, be ginning in the late fourth and continuing until the first half of the second millennium BCE. Among the western Semites, as documented at Mari, asses were sacrificed to conclude a covenant. During the Middle Bronze Age both asses and horses were buried by western Asiatics in southern Canaan and the Egyptian Delta in ritual contexts. At Tell el-'Ajjul, near ancient Gaza, horses and asses were interred with hu man remains. At the Hyksos capital of Avaris in the Delta, asses accompanied some human burials. This was repeated at other sites in the southern tier of Canaan and the Delta as well. The Canaanite material also may have been sacri ficial meals, for many of the equid skeletons are missing limbs or pelvic parts. At Tell el-'Ajjul and nearby Tell Jem meh in southern Canaan, equids were also used as foun dation deposits. In Egypt, outside the time and sphere of Asiatic influence, equids were occasionally interred with hu mans as part of the great Egyptian preoccupation with pro viding familiar and necessary items for the deceased's after life. [See Ajjul, Tell el-; Jemmeh, Tell.]
Boessneck, Joachim. Die Tie)-welt des Allen Agypten: Untersucht anhand Kulturgeschichllicher und Zoologischer. Munich, 1988. Presents sum maries of the Egyptian evidence by a zoologist who studied the faunal remains from hundreds of sites throughout the ancient world.
ClutLon-Brock, Juliet. Domesticated Animals from Early Times. Austin, 1981. Global summary of the equids, with a useful review of their biology and behavior. Meadow, Richard H., and Hans-Peter Uerpmann, eds. Equids in the Ancient World. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1986-1991. Important studies of the philology and osteology of the Old World equids by J. N. Postgate, Uperpmann, Pierre Ducos, Juris Zarins, Juliet Clutton-Brock, and Meadow. PAULA W A P N I S H and BRIAN HESSE
'ERANI, TEL (also 'Areini; Tel Gath), site located on Israel's southeastern coastal plain, on Nahal Lachish (Wadi Qubeiba), at the twenty-fourth kilometer of the historical Ashkelon-Hebron road, north of the modern town of Qiryat Gat, The tel contains an acropolis and a high and low ter race. It is 60-90 acres in size and 120-152 m above sea level. Although the site has been identified as Libnah by Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener, as Gath of the Philistines by Hermann Guthe, as mrnst of the Imlk impressions and as Eglon by Shmuel (1958, p. 276; Yeivin 1961 p. 10), and as Makedah (Kallai, 1986, p. 381) it still lacks a solid identifi cation. Its Hebrew name derives from the tomb (Ar. well) of Sheikh Ahmed el-'Areini that stood on the acropolis (area E).
Victor Guerin visited the site in 1863, Conder in 1875, and William Foxwell Albright in the 1920s. Yeivin and Sha lom Levy carried out six seasons of excavations from 1956 to 1961, on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, with the participation of Antonia Ciasca and Gherardo Gnoli of die Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente in Rome in the last tiiree seasons. In 1985, Throughout the ancient Near East, horses were always 1987, and 1988 Aharon Kempinski and Isaac Gilead exca associated witii elite classes, most often in tiieir capacity to vated in area D-II on behalf of Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion draw light chariots and, later, in the development of Universities (Kempinski and Gilead, 1991; Kempinski, mounted cavalry. The equipment used to handle equids 1992; 1993). Smaller excavations and inspection work at the seems to have derived from that used for cattle. The earliest southern part of the site were undertaken in i960 by Ephrat true bits appear in the sixteenth century BCE, but earlier ev Yeivin (area Y), in 1966 by David Ussislikin (area U ) , in idence of mouth gear is known from marks left on teeth. 1983 by Arieh Rochman-Halperin (area R), and in 1994Because they conferred considerable prestige on their own 1995 by Eliot Brown and Edwin C. M. van den Brink (area ers, horses were highly prized. The horse is one of the few O), on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority (reports are animals for which there is a demonsttated ancient interest in the Antiquities Authority archive). in selective breeding. Horse texts from second-millennium The excavation results are mainly Yeivin's. More than Nuzi record genealogies, a parallel component of modern thirty-two strata were observed, but only preliminary reports breed maintenance. [See Nuzi.] Mid-second-millennium have been published. Yeivin's independent sequences (areas Ugaritic texts include a discussion of veterinary issues in A/G, D) are reported here out of necessity; Yeivin's and horse husbandry. Kempinski's interpretations differ on several points. T h e [See also Animal Husbandry; Cult; Ethnozoology; analysis of the Early Bronze and Iron Age finds is not yet Leather; and Paleozoology.] complete, so tiiat die following stratigraphic and chronolog ical picture is provisional, especially regarding Iron II. BIBLIOGRAPHY Azzaroli, Augusto. An Early History of Horsemanship. Leiden, 1985. In Chalcolithic Period. N o architectural remains were ex posed for the earliest settiement (stratum pre-XII [Brandl, cludes extensive discussion of Near Eastern traditions of horseman ship. 1989, p. 365, n. 4], areas D and D-II). Its finds wererecov-
'ERANL TEL ered in later contexts and include basalt fenestrated bowls and pottery cornets. Early B r o n z e Age I. Strata XII-IV in area D and strata D to early B in area D-II reflect the most important period at dre site, when it was the center of the Egyptian coloni zation of dre coastal plain and lowlands of Canaan and reached its greatest size (Brandl, 1992). [See Canaan.] Ac cording to the Canaanite pottery, the lower four strata be long to dre earlier part of the period and the upper five to its later part. The exposed area of the former is limited, but it is clear that dre strata, except for stratum XII, which in cluded only pits, reflect tire same Egyptian architectural tra dition as the later EB I strata: no stone foundations, brick bonding techniques, and matting on the floors. Parts of sev eral buildings were uncovered. More than two thousand of the finds are Egyptian in character—most are locally made, as is indicated by their clay and tire flint and other stones. Early B r o n z e Age II. T h e site may have been smaller in EB II than in EB I but was larger than in EB III, as tire city wall of the latter was built on EB II wall stumps. It is not clear if tire Egyptians stayed on during this period (strata III—II, area D ; late stratum B, area D-II). T h e pottery finds include Abydos jars and other forms that are parallelled at Arad. [See Arad, article on Early Bronze Age Period.] T h e seven skeletons found in a room destruction are among tire few human remains of EB II date uncovered in Palestine. Early B r o n z e Age III. T h e settlement (stratum I, areas D, F, K - O ; stratum A, area D-II), with its massive city wall, glacis, and possible indirect-entry gate in area N (attributed by Yeivin to stratum VI; Brandl, 1989, pp. 379-383), seems to extend across the high terrace. T h e material culture was purely Canaanite, its pottery including Metallic ware and some Khirbet Kerak vessels. [See Canaanites.] T h e nature of the architecture may be similar to area G at Tel Yarmut. [See Yarmut, Tel.] Late B r o n z e Age II B. During the thirteenth century BCE, after a long gap, a new settlement (areas A, B, F, G; stratum A, area D-II [Kempinski and Gilead 1991]) covered the entire acropolis and perhaps a little beyoird. Traces of a massive structure (palace?), originally identified as a gate, were found in area G under the Iron II fortifications. Two tombs were discovered in area D-II. T h e pottery reflects the international contacts of the period as well as tire Egyptian colonization under Rameses II: Cypriot Base Ring II, White-Slipped and White-Shaved Wares, and locally made Egyptian vessels. I r o n Age I. T h e settlement (areas B, F, G), in Iron I was most probably Philistine and covered tire same area as the previous one. It contained Philistine Bichrome pottery, in cluding mourners and Ashdoda figurines. [See Philistines, article on Early Philistines.] I r o n Age II. T h e site (sttata XIII-IV, areas A, E-H, K, R, U) seems to have been a border town of Judah in Iron II. [See Judah.] The settlement was concentrated on tire forti fied acropolis, while potters' kilns and other polluting man
257
ufacturing were located on the high terrace. The proximity to Philistia may account for the few Ashdod Ware vessels recovered. The excavators had assigned thirteen Iron II strata to the Hellenistic period in areas A and G. The low ermost four were identified only in the fortifications in a trench west of area G. Their relationship to stratum IX is still an open question, and they may have to be "moved" upward. Of stratum IX, only a large plastered surface (a piazza inside a now eroded gate?) was exposed. In stratum VIII two ninth-century BCE buildings with inner courtyards were constructed over the piazza, possibly reflecting population growth. Stratum VII was originally dated to the late eighthearly seventh centuries BCE, but should be redated to tire mid-eighth century, following tire redating of stratum VI. Remains of two buildings with inner courtyards and a street, which continued the previous outline of this area, were un covered, together with smashed pottery vessels, one with tire Hebrew inscription lyhz'. Stratum VI is dated to the late eighth century BCE, on the basis of a complete stamped Imlk jar found in situ. Alto gether twenty Imlk impressions and one official impression (Itnhm mgn), most from later or mixed contexts, can be at tributed to this stratum. Two four-room houses were also uncovered. [See Four-room House.] This stratum was de stroyed by tire Assyrians in 701 BCE, as is attested by nu merous slingstones, mainly from Area A. Stratum V represents the Judean, post-Assyrian rebuild ing of the seventh century BCE. The acropolis was refortified: an upper wall and its glacis were found in area G and its lower supporting wall in area F. A structure that Yeivin be lieved to be a great square inner tower seems to be another Israelite house. Among tire finds are a jar handle with a ro sette impression, East Greek pottery (including wine jars from Chios and Lesbos), oenochoes, and Ionic cups. An other find attributable to this stratum is a fragment of a bearded human terra-cotta head (Yeivin, 1961, pi. 111:3), probably from an anthropomorphic vessel similar to finds from Horvat Qitmit and Flaseva. [See Qitmit, Horvat.] Stra tum IV (beginning of the sixth century BCE) was heavily disturbed by Persian-period silos. It seems drat this last Ju dean stratum was destroyed by the Babylonians. P e r s i a n P e r i o d a n d L a t e r . In strata III and II (fifthfourth centuries BCE), as at many sites in Palestine, the acropolis was partially abandoned and its summit pitted by numerous silos. Only one undisturbed room was found in stratum III, while tire main settlement moved to the high terrace. The excavators identified almost no architecture; the settlement is deduced from the wide distribution of Per sian-period pottery, such as high-footed mortaria and Attic Ware from areas A, B, D - G , and K - M . Afavissa in area D contained fragments of stone statuettes and terra-cotta fig urines, pointing to the existence of a temple on tire high terrace. Stratum I (Hellenistic period) was a smaller settlement. It
258
ERIDU
yielded much-disturbed remains in area A and pottery in areas B, C, and F. During die Byzantine and Mamluk periods, graves were dug into several areas. T h e settle ment, a village, moved to the south (this may have already occurred in the Roman period), where the later village of 'Iraq el-Manshiyyeh was located. A Mamluk inscription of AH 717 (1317 CE) mentioning the construction of a khan, presumably nearby, was found in secondary use in the weli. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Late Predynastic-Early Dynasdc Period." In The Nile Delta in Tran
sition: Fourth-Third Millennium B.C., edited by Edwin C. M. van den Brink, pp. 433-440. Tel Aviv, 1992. Rosen, Arlene Miller. "Early Bronze Age Tel Erani: An Environmental Perspective." TelAviv 18 (1991): 192-204. Rosen, Steven A. "A Preliminary Note on the Egyptian Component of the Chipped Stone Assemblage from Tel 'Erani." Israel Exploration Journal 38 (1988): 105-116. Slatkine, A. "Comparative Petrographic Study of Ancient Pottery Sherds from Israel." Museum Haaretz Yearbook 15-16 (1972-1973): I O I - I I I .
Smith, Patricia M. "The Skeletal Biology and Paleopathology of Early Bronze Age Populations in the Levant." In L'urbanisation de la Pal
estine a I'age du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches ac Albright, William Foxwell. "Notes and Comments: One Aphek or
tuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emmaus, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by
Four?" Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 2 (1922): 184-189.
Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 297-313. British Archaeological Reports, Brandl, Baruch. "Observations on the Early Bronze Age Strata of Te! International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Erani." In [.'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan Smith, Patricia M. "People of the Holy Land from Prehistory to the
et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emmaus, 20- Past." In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, edited Recent 24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 357-387. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Brandl, Baruch. "Evidence for Egyptian Colonization in the Southern Coastal Plain and Lowlands of Canaan during the EB I Period." In
by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 58-74. New York, 1994. Weinstein, James M. "The Significance of Tel Areini for EgyptianPalestinian Relations at die Beginning of the Bronze Age." Bulletin
of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 256 (1984): 61-69.
The Nile Delta in Transition; Fourth-Third Millennium B.C., edited Yeivin, Shmuel. "Notes and News: Tell Gatii." Israel Exploration Jour by Edwin C. M. van den Brink, pp. 441-477. Tel Aviv, 1992. Ciasca, Antonia. "Tel Gat." Oriens Antiquus 1 (1962): 23-39. Ciasca, Antonia. "Un deposito di statuette da Tell Gat." Oriens Antiq uus 2 (1963): 45-63Ferembach, Denise. "Les restes humains de Gat." In Preliminary Re
nal?, (1958): 274-276. Yeivin, Shmuel. "Chronique archeologique: Tell Gath." Revue Biblique 67 (1960a): 391-394Yeivin, Shmuel. "Notes and News: Tell Gatii." Israel. Exploration Jour nal 10 (1960b): 122-123. port on the Excavations at Tel Gat (Tell Sheykh Ahmed et 'Areyny), by Shmuel. "Early Contacts between Canaan and Egypt." Israel Yeivin, Shmuel Yeivin et al., pp. 12-20, pis. 11-12. Jerusalem, 1961. Exploration Journal 10 (1960c): 193-203. Horwitz, Liora K., and Eitan Tchernov. "Animal Exploitation in the Yeivin, Shmuel, et al. Preliminary Report on the Excavations at Tel Gal Early Bronze Age of the Soudiern Levant: An Overview." In L'ur(Tell Sheykh Ahmed el 'Areyny): Seasons 1956-1958. Jerusalem, 1961. banisation de la Palestine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives Yeivin, Shmuel. "Further Evidence of Narmer at 'Gat.'" Oriens Antiq des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emmaus, 20-24 octobre uus 2 (1963): 205-213. 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 279-296. British Archae Yeivin, Shmuel. "The Chalcolithic Cultures of Canaan." In VI Conological Reports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989, greso Internazionale delle Scienze Preistoriche e Prolosloriche, vol. 2, Ilan, Omit, and Michael Sebbane. "Metallurgy, Trade, and the Ur Communicazioni, sezioni I-IV, pp. 355-357- Rome, 1965. banization of Southern Canaan in the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Yeivin, Shmuel. "A New Chalcolithic Culture at Tel 'Erani and Its Age." In L'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'age du Bronze ancien; Bilan Implications for Early Egypto-Canaanite Relations." In Fourth World
et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emmaus, 20— Congress ofJewish Studies, pp. 45-48. Jerusalem, 1967. 24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 139-162. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989.
Yeivin, Shmuel. "Additional Notes on the Early Relations between Ca
naan and Egypt." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 27 (1968): 37-50. Kallai, Zecharia. Historical Geography of the Bible: The Tribal Territories Yeivin, Shmuel. "El-'Areini, Tell Esh Sheikh Ahmed (Tel 'Erani)." In of Israel. Leiden, 1986. Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, Kempinski, Aharon. The Rise of an Urban Culture: The Urbanization ofpp. 89-97. Jerusalem, 1975Palestine in the Early Bronze Age. Jerusalem, 1978. Yeivin, Shmuel. '"Erani, Tel." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeolog Kempinski, Aharon, and Isaac Gilead. "New Excavations at Tel Erani: ical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 417-419, 421-422. Je A Preliminary Report of the 1985-1988 Seasons." Tel Aviv 18 (1991): 164-191. Kempinski, Aharon. "Reflections on the Role of the Egyptians in the Shefalah of Palestine in the Light of Recent Soundings' at Tel Erani."
rusalem and New York, 1993. BARUCH BRANDL
In TheNileDelta in Transition: Fourth-'ThirdMillenniumB.Cedited by Edwin C. M. van den Brink, pp. 419-425. Tel Aviv, 1992. E R I D U , Sumerian city and cult center located on tire Kempinski, Aharon. '"Erani, Tel: Area D." In The New Encyclopedia southwestern periphery of the southern Mesopotamian of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 419-421. floodplain (30°52' N , 46°3' E). It is the site of e-abzu, temple Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Mayer, Leo A. "Satura Epigraphica Arabica I." Quarterly of the De of Enid (Akkadian Ea), god of the subterranean freshwater ocean, and consists of seven mounds, whose occupations partment of Antiquities in Palestine 1 (1932): 37-43. Moscati, Sabatino. "L'archeologia italiana nel Vicino Oriente." Oriens range in date from die Ubaid to die Persian period. T h e Antiquus?, (1964): 1-14. main mound (mound no. 1) is called Abu Shahrain or Abu Porat, Naomi. "Local Industry of Egyptian Pottery in Southern Pal Shuhur but is also reported to have been called Nowawis in estine during the Early Bronze I Period." Bulletin of the Egyptological the late nineteenth century. Either French Assyriologists Seminar 7 (1986-1987): 109-129. Charles Francois Lenormant or Joachim Menant first idenPorat, Naomi. "An Egyptian Colony in Southern Palestine during the
ERIDU tified Abu Shahrain as ancient Eridu (Zehnpfund, 1909, pp. 291-298), apparently on the basis of inscribed bricks from the site. The first archaeological work at Abu Shahrain was carried out in 1854, when J. E. Taylor undertook excavations there on behalf of the British Museum. In a paper read before the Royal Asiatic Society on 5 May 1855, Taylor described his work at the site as "unproductive of any very important re sults" (Taylor, 1855, p. 404). In i 9 i 8 , R . Campbell T h o m p son carried out a season of excavation at the site, also on behalf of the British Museum. In the following year, Harry R. Hall continued the museum's work with a single season of work. From 1946 to 1949, Fuad Safar, Mohammad Ali Mustafa, and Seton Lloyd undertook extensive excavations at Eridu on behalf of the Iraqi Directorate General of An tiquities. [See the biographies of Safar and Lloyd.] Eridu is best known for its sequence of temples excavated by tire directorate general. Eighteen building levels above a 30-centimeter-thick layer of occupational debris (level XIX), spanning a period from the Early Ubaid period into the Late Uruk period, were uncovered. The earliest temple identified in this sequence belongs to level XVI. It consisted of a small rectangular mud-brick building with a deep recess in its northwest wall. T h e building had a podium, perhaps an offering table, in the center of its main room and a second one—in all likelihood the pedestal on which the cult statue would have stood—in a niche in the northwestern wall. A circular oven was found outside the temple's south wall. As the level XVI temple was rebuilt time and again, the building grew larger and more elaborate. T h e later temples, whose ground plans consisted of a long rectangular central room flanked by rows of rooms on its northwestern and south eastern sides, were set elevated on platforms and had elab orate niched and buttressed facades. Inside the central room was a high podium or offering table; against the southwest ern wall was a second podium or pedestal on which the cult statue would have stood. Large quantities of fish bones were found on the floors of the level VII temple and mixed with ashes on and around the podium in tire central room of the level VI temple. T h e bones are likely tire remains of offerings to Enid. Of the Uruk-period temple levels (V-I), only por tions of tire temple platforms remained. [See Ubaid; UrukWarka.] Joan Oates (i960) used the Eridu sequence of temples and painted pottery recovered from them to divide the Ubaid period into four phases: Ubaid 1, or Eridu (levels XIX-XV); Ubaid 2, or Hajji Muhammad (levels XIV-XII); Ubaid 3, or Ubaid (levels XII-VIII); and Ubaid 4, or Late Ubaid (lev els VTI-VT). A phase (Ubaid 0, or 'Oueili) that antedates the Ubaid 1, or Eridu, phase was subsequently recovered at Tell el-'Oueili (Huot, 1987, pp. n - 1 2 0 ) . [See 'Oueili, Tell el-.] T h e Eridu temple sequence provides archaeological support for a lengthy, in-place cultural development in southern
259
Mesopotamia from the earliest-known prehistoric period to the point when tire written language can be identified as Sumerian; it has been used to argue that tire Sumerians were the original inhabitants of the southern floodplain (Oates, i960, pp. 44-50). [See Sumerian; Sumerians; Ur.] T h e topography of tire main mound at Eridu is dominated by a large ziggurat dated to the Ur III period. This ziggurat, constructed of a mud-brick core and an outer facing of baked bricks set in bitumen, is 61.8 m long X 46.5 m wide. Its eroded ruins stand 9.5 m high. Construction of tire zig gurat was initiated by Ur-Nammu (2112-2095 E ) and completed by his grandson Amar-Suen (2046-2038 BCE). Stamped bricks also provide evidence that a ldng of Larsa, Nur-Adad (1865-1850 BCE), carried out work on the zig gurat. [See Larsa.] A single inscribed brick bearing the name of Nebuchadrezzer II (604-562 BCE) was found lying to the west of tire ziggurat, probably in a secondary context. Althought there is a gap in the temple sequence between tire Uruk levels and the Ur III ziggurat, the ziggurat can be viewed as tire culmination of a long developmental sequence of Mesopotamian temple architecture stretching back to the Ubaid period. One of the largest Ubaid cemeteries known was excavated at Eridu by tire Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities. The burials date to the end of the Ubaid period. Of an estimated 800 to 1,000 burials in the cemetery, 193 were excavated. T h e burials, cut through a layer of rubbish containing Ubaid 2 or Hajji Muhammad pottery, consisted of a square shaft lined with mud-brick walls. One or more individuals were placed in this shaft along with burial goods; the chamber was then filled with earth and sealed with mud brick. Other areas excavated at Eridu include the Hut Sounding, a small excavated unit located 80 m southeast of the zig gurat. The Hut Sounding included fourteen levels of Ubaidperiod occupation and the Early Dynastic palaces excavated on tire North Mound (mound no. 2). Considered to be among the oldest cities in Mesopotamia, antedating the Flood, and tire first city to hold kingship, Eridu figures prominently in Sumerian literature (Green, 1975, 1978). [See also Ziggurat.] B C
BIBLIOGRAPHY Coon, Carleton S. "The Eridu Crania." Sumer 5 (1949): 103-106. Flannery, Kent V., and Henry T. Wright. "Faunal Remains from the 'Hut Sounding' at Eridu, Iraq." Sumer 22 (1966): 61-64. Green, Margaret Whitney. "Eridu in Sumerian Literature." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975. Green, Margaret Whitney. "The Eridu Lament." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 30 (1978): 127-167. Hall, Harry R. A Season's Work al Ur. London, 1930.
Huot, jean-Louis. Larsaf ioe campagna, 1983) et Oueilifaecampagne, 1983): Rapport preliminaire. Paris, 1987. Lloyd, Seton, and Fuad Safar. "Eridu: Preliminary Communication on the First Season's Excavations, January-March 1947." Sumer 3 (1947): 84-111.
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ERMAN, ADOLF
Lloyd, Seton, and Fuad Safar. "Eridu: Preliminary Communication on the Second Season's Excavations, 1947-1948." Sumer4 (1948): 115127, 276-283. Oates, Joan. "Ur and Eridu: The Prehistory." Iraq 22 (i960): 32-50. Seminal division of the Ubaid period into phases. Safar, Fuad. "Excavations at Eridu." Sumer 3 (1947): 219-235; 5 (1949): 116-117, 159-173; 6 (1950): 27-38. Safar, Fuad, et al. Eridu. Baghdad, 1981. Taylor, J. E. "Notes on Abu Shahrein and Tel el Lahm." Journal of the
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Erman, Adolf. Life in Ancient Egypt. London, 1894. Erman, Adolf, and Hermann Grapow. Worterbuch der agyptischen Sprache (1926). 7 vols. 4th ed. Berlin, 1982. DAVID P . SILVERMAN
E S D A R , T E L , a 2-ha (5 acre) loess hill located 3 km (2 mi.) north of Tel 'Aro'er in the Negev desert (3i°09' N , Thompson, R. Campbell. "The British Museum Excavations at Abu Shahrein in Mesopotamia in 1918." Archaeologia 70 (1920): 101-145. 34°59' E; map reference 1475 X 0645). T h e site was dis Zehnpfund, Rudolf. "Die Lage der Stadt Eridu." Hilprecht Anniversary covered by Nelson Glueck in 1956 (his site 308; Glueck, 1957) and excavated by Moshe Kochavi on behalf of the Volume, pp. 291-298. Leipzig, 1909. Israel Department of Antiquities in 1963-1964. Five periods MICHAEL D . DANTI and RICHARD L. ZETTLER of occupation were discerned in three areas of excavations. Avraham Biran proposed identifying Tel Esdar with 'Aro'er in the Davidic cycles (r Sm. 30:28) because no Iron Age I E R M A N , A D O L F (1854-1937), eminent German remains were found in his excavation at nearby Tel Aro'er Egyptologist. Born in Berlin of Swiss descent, Jean Pierre (Biran, 1993). [See'Aro'er.] Adolphe (Johann Peter Adolf) Erman became one of the Stratum IVB, found in all the excavated areas, belongs to best-known and most influential Egyptologists in the world. the Beersheba culture (Chalcolithic period). It consisted of He was trained in Leipzig and Berlin by Georg Ebers and several beaten-earth living surfaces with fireplaces and ash Richard Lepsius. By 1884, he was the director of the Egyp pits. T h e small finds were typical of the culture: churns, tian and Assyrian Department of the Egyptian Museum in decorated bowls, flint axes, and an agate pendant. Stratum Berlin and professor of Egyptology. IVA, also found in all the excavated areas, belongs to the Erman was one of the "founding fathers" of modern Early Bronze Age II. Several living floors constructed of Egyptology, for it was he who first organized ancient Egyp pebbles and some stone-lined silos were among its remains. tian into three separate phases: Old, Middle, and Late. He Besides the pottery, known from Arad and EB II Sinai and followed this groundbreaking theoretical division with the Negev sites, a cache of giant fan scrapers was found on one publication of grammars of the stages. Erman also wrote of the floors. T h e scrapers were made of tabular flint and about the relationship between ancient Egyptian and Se incised with different patterns on their backs; some of the mitic languages. His talents, however, were not limited to motifs resemble those from Megiddo stratum XIX. philological theory, for he was a gifted translator and an avid Tel Esdar was the first of the Iron I sites excavated in the scholar of all aspects of Egyptology. His many volumes of Negev. In stratum III several buildings were found arranged translated texts were invaluable to scholars and represented in a defensive circle on the spur of the tell (area C). A test the means by which the public could understand and ap pit was dug in the area they surrounded but no remains were preciate the wealth of Egyptian literature. found, indicating that the area had been used as an open Erman wrote a monograph on the hieroglyphic inscrip space. Of the eight buildings excavated, the plan of only one tions accompanying the figures decorating the walls of Old was preserved in its entirety; however, sufficient evidence Kingdom tombs. He recognized that these texts represented was left to show that all had followed approximately the the figures' actual conversations. They are, therefore, much same plan. These were three-room houses, with dividing like the speech balloons that appear near the characters in walls formed by rows of pillars and a main entrance in the our modern cartoons. Erman's extensive knowledge of every long wall, facing an interior open space. Dozens of smashed aspect of ancient Egypt civilization was the source for his vessels were found on the floors, indicating a violent de book Life in Ancient Egypt (1894), which is still in use today. struction. T h e crude, undecorated pottery dates the destruc His works on art, archaeology, history, and religion are tion to the late eleventh century BCE. Many comparisons equally valuable sources of information. could be found between it and the pottery of Tel Masos III— Royal Asiatic Society 15 (1855): 404-415.
Erman's most ambitious project, for which he is best known, was his dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language. The Worterbuch der agyptischen Sprache, produced jointly with Grapow, was in progress when Erman died in Berlin. It stands today as a fitting monument to this enormously talented individual whose innumerable contributions were instrumental in unraveling the many mysteries of ancient Egypt.
II. [See Masos, Tel.] Of special importance are the thirtysix complete storage jars, all of the same distinctive transi tional type, and tine use of chalices as stands for oil lamps. In stratum II, three structures, dated to the tenth century BCE, had been constructed close to one another on the slope of the tell. They were situated beyond the stratum III enclo sure and built on a different plan and consisted of a farm house and its related buildings. They suffered no sudden
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destruction and only a few red-slipped sherds and many stone agricultural implements were found on their floors. Stratum I consisted of agricultural terrace walls. Pottery sherds of the Roman-Byzantine period define tire stratum. In summary, the earliest levels of occupation at Tel Esdar fit well with the pattern of settlement in tire Chalcolithic Beersheba culture and EB II in tire Negev. These two pe riods of occupation are well represented in the BeershebaArad valley and the long gap of occupation between them and the Iron Age finds a good comparison at Tel Arad. [See Arad, article on Early Bronze Age Period.] Tel Esdar stratum III is to be interpreted either as a satellite of Tel Masos or as its small rival, destroyed by the inhabitants of the larger, much sttonger community. Stratum II was part of tire re vival of the valley in the tenth century BCE, when Tel Malhata was resettled and strongly fortified.
beard, and falcon-headed usech, or broad collar—is typically Egyptian. Most likely fashioned in Egypt, the coffin may have been brought to Sidon as booty or as a purchased or der, where it was inscribed following Eshmunazar's death. The text is inscribed below tire funerary mask. In the first four lines we read that King Eshmunazar, son of King T a b nit, reigned for fourteen years and lived a short life. Esh munazar describes himself as an "orphan, the son of a widow"; Tabnit apparently died before or shortly after his son's birth, malting Eshmunazar a child-king and his mother, the regent. After imprecations directed toward would-be grave plunderers (11. 4-13), tire text recounts the cultic shrines Eshmunazar and the queen-mother (re) built (11. 13-18), a notable one being the Temple of Eshmun. It further declares that the "lord of kings," most probably the king of Persia, ceded Levantine territory, particularly tire cities of Dor and Jaffa, to Sidon in return for services ren BIBLIOGRAPHY dered (11. 18-20). The nature and date of these rendered Biran, Avraham. "Aroer (in Judah)," In The New Encyclopedia of Ar services remain unknown: perhaps Persia ceded the territory chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, p. 1272. Jerusalem to Sidon for assisting Cambyses' invasion of Egypt in 525 and New York, 1993. Proposes an identification with 'Aro'er. BCE or for naval support during tire battle of Salamis in 480 Cohen, Rudolph, "Tel Esdar, Stratum IV." Israel Exploration Journal BCE or because of changes in Persian satrapy boundaries in 28 (1978): 185-189. Corrects the dating of stratum IV and divides it the generation after 480 BCE. Additional imprecations com into IVA and IVB. plete the inscription (11. 20-22). Glueck, Nelson. "The Fifth Season of Exploration in the Negeb." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 145 (1957): 14.The first thirteen and a half lines also appear in seven lines First description of the site, but the dating is incorrect. on the head end of the base. T h e reason for tire duplication Kochavi, Moshe. "Excavations at Tel Esdar." 'Atiqot 5 (1969): 2*-5*, may be that the inscriber could not fit the full text there or 14-48. Publication of the excavation. wanted to start anew after committing several writing errors. Kochavi, Moshe. "Esdar, Tell." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeo logical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, p. 423. Jerusalem and The text, because of its length and degree of preservation, New York, 1993. Short description of die excavation with corrected provides significant insight into the characteristics of the stratigraphy. Phoenician language in general and the Tyro-Sidonian di MOSHE KOCHAVI alect in particular. The inscription also reveals meaningful affinities with other Semitic languages, seen, for example, in its idioms, word pairs, and use of repetition. ESHMUNAZAR INSCRIPTION. The discovery [See also Phoenician-Punic; and Sidon.] in 1855 of an anthropoid sarcophagus near the Phoenician BIBLIOGRAPHY port city of Sidon brought to light an important Phoenician text. The stone coffin belonged to a Sidonian ldng, EshGibson, John C. L. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 3, Phoe munazar II, who most likely reigned in tire first half of the nician Inscriptions Including Inscriptions in the Mixed Dialect ofArslan Task. Oxford, 1982. Discusses historical circumstances and dating fifth century BCE; on the lid of the sarcophagus was inscribed (pp. 101-102), and includes Hebrew transliteration, English trans the twenty-two-line text now known as the Eshmunazar In lation, philological analysis of the text, and bibliography (pp. 105scription. 114, Text 28). On 19 January 1855, workmen hired to hunt for tteasure Jidejian, Nina. Sidon through the Ages. Beirut, 1971. Discussion of the discovery of the sarcophagus and the excavations at the Temple of on behalf of the chancellor of the French consulate general Eshmun, with bibliography in the side margins. See figures 5-9 for in Beirut discovered tire basalt sarcophagus within an an photos and drawings of the sarcophagus. cient necropolis, a rocky knoll and grotto known as MugPeckham, J, Brian. "Tyre, Sidon, and Vicinity." Chapter 3 of The De harat Ablun, about a kilometer southeast of Sidon's port. velopment of the Late Phoenician Scripts. Harvard Semitic Studies, no. T h e large sarcophagus (110 X 225 cm) had been buried 2 20. Cambridge, Mass., 1968. Discussion and bibliography about the m deep in an open rock-cut grave and, in antiquity, appar issues involved in dating Eshmunazar's reign (pp. 77-87). ently had a small stone-built entrance chamber to protect it. GARY ALAN LONG Disinterred, the sarcophagus was shipped to France, where it resides in the Louvre Museum. T h e style of the features carved on tire lid of the stone coffin—an almond-eyed face, chest-length striated wig, chin
ESHNUNNA (modern Tell Asmar), site located in the Diyala River basin, about 81 Ion (50 mi.) northeast of Bagh-
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dad, Iraq, in a very arid region in which the productivity of the land was exhausted through overirrigation in antiquity (33°32' N , 44°58' E). Eshnunna was also the name for the entire region of which Tell Asmar/Eshnunna was the main town and often the administrative center. Excavations con ducted at Tell Asmar by the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in the 1930s uncov ered important and monumental remains from the early third through die early second millennia BCE. The results of tire excavations there provide the basis for tire Mesopota mian chronology used today. The name of the town may have been pronounced "Eshnun" in the Akkadian through Ur III periods; the long form, Eshnunna, appeared first in the Ur III period. Although tire name Eshnunna was known from historical texts to the first scholars of tire ancient Near East, the site was not located until 1930. Bricks inscribed with the name Eshnunna were already turning up on the antiquities market in tire late nine teenth century. Some of those inscriptions were published in 1892 by French antiquarian and Assyriologist Henri Pognon, who, for obscure reasons, refused to divulge the loca tion of tlie site from which the inscriptions came. Edward Chiera of the Oriental Institute had collected some bricks inscribed with the names of rulers of Eshnunna from Tell Asmar; the site was chosen for archaeological exploration partially on the basis of his observations. In addition to the Oriental Institute's excavations under the direction of Henri Frankfort, the Diyala Basin Archaeological Project was car ried out between 1957 and 1958 under the direction of Thorkild Jacobsen. T h e project was conceived as both a tex tual and field investigation of settlement and irrigation in the whole Diyala region. [See Diyala; and the biographies of Frankfort and Jacobsen.] Although regional surveys have indicated that the earliest settlements in the Diyala River basin date to the Ubaid pe riod (fifth-early fourth millennia), at Tell Asmar, virgin soil underlay remains of the late fourth millennium. Ubaid sherds were found at Tell Asmar, but they were in secondary association with later materials; there was no primary Ubaid deposit. The Early Dynastic period was a period of sub stantial growth in the Diyala, in which Tell Asmar was at the high end of a hierarchy of towns and villages. During the Ur III and Isin-Larsa periods, although there was con tinuity of settlement in the Diyala, there was a trend toward more dispersed rural settlement witir a decline in tire total amount of built-up areas occupied by towns as opposed to villages. The northwest area of tire mound of Tell Asmar seemed to have been the site of die Early Dynastic-early Ur III period town. The town gready expanded during the later Ur III and Isin-Larsa periods. The main loci of habitation shifted, so that the previously sparsely occupied southern two-thirds of the mound became the site of the most im portant monumental public buildings of the city of the Late Ur HI through the Isin-Larsa periods. Tell Asmar was aban
doned in the Old Babylonian period, presumably at or about tire time of the conquest of Eshnunna by Hammurabi of Babylon in 1763 BCE or of the final Babylonian conquest of Eshnunna by Samsuiluna. [See Ur; Ubaid; Isin; Larsa.] The most important early remains from Tell Asmar are a long series of temples built one on top of another, perhaps indicating continuity in religious tradition. The latest of the temples was apparently dedicated to the local god, Abu (the earlier ones may also have been devoted to tire cult of this deity). The stratigraphy of the temples and the associated objects provided the basis for determining the chronology of the Early Dynasdc period. The excavators divided it into three distinct phases based on the identification of three main phases in the Abu Temple above an early Protoliterate period (late fourth millennium) shrine: the Archaic Shrine dating to Early Dynastic I, the Square Temple dating to Early Dynastic II, and the Single Shrine dating to Early Dy nastic III and tire so-called Protoimperial periods. This schema has since been modified. The Square Temple (Early Dynastic II period) consisted of three separate shrines around a square central room. Each shrine had a rectangular altar at one end. In one of the shrines, the excavators found a hoard of sculpted figures, both males and females, buried beneath the floor in a recess north of the altar. T h e findspot of the hoard may actually predate the temple. It is not possible to determine whether the statues were made as a group and dedicated at the same time or were accumulated by the temple over a period of time. They are characterized by rather naive, abstract geo metric forms the excavators thought were typical of the ED II style throughout Mesopotamia. However, it is now be lieved that because Eshnunna was a provincial town, the unsophisticated style of the statues cannot be considered typical of Mesopotamian art in general. In addition, the socalled Early Dynastic II pottery from the Square Temple consists of types that continue from ED I to ED III or that can be found either in ED I or ED III. According to the current trend of thought, ED II as a distinct period may only have validity in the Diyala, where it was contemporary with the late ED I period in southern Mesopotamia. The most important structure of the Akkadian period was the so-called Northern Palace. Abutting that building to the soudi was a house adjacent to the Abu Temple. T h e earliest version of the Northern Palace, dating to the very Early Ak kadian period seemed to have served as a residential com pound, perhaps somehow associated with the nearby Abu Temple. There is also evidence that some industrial activity may have taken place within the complex. This evidence consists of a rather elaborate system of drains, several rooms identified as toilets or bathrooms by the excavators, and a large cistern. Whatever the function of this early version of the Northern Palace, the succeeding phase, called die main level, was not a palace at all but rather a large building de voted to manufacturing. It consisted of a central block of
ESHNUNNA
ESHNUNNA.
Composite plan showing relative positions of buildings of various periods. (Courtesy Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago)
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ESHNUNNA.
Projected plan of the Gimikin Temple and the Palace of the Riders in the reign of Ilushuila.
(Courtesy Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
rooms with a large courtyard, a northern group separated from the main suite by a long vestibule, and a southern wing identified by the excavators as a women's residential quar ters. This level also contained an elaborate drainage system with many drains, some with large vats at their heads, and floors paved with bitumen. Several of the rooms containing water installations had drains that emptied into a sewer in the street. Although the excavators speculated that the large number of water installations in the building suggested a leather workshop, it now seems more likely that textiles dyeing took place there and that the establishment was devoted to textile production, probably employing numbers of female work ers. Weaving and dyeing were not the only industries there. [See Textiles, article on Textiles of tire Neolithic through Iron Ages.] There were also workshops for stone and shell inlay and ornamental stoneworking, as well as a food-pro cessing and storage area, probably to feed the workers in tire
various operations, and perhaps a potter's workshop. Above the palace were some fragmentary remains of what appears to have been flimsy rebuildings of the Northern Palace of the Ur III and perhaps the very early Isin-Larsa period. Some Akkadian tablets found in robber holes cut into the palace walls refer to a "women's house" in which women worked in a textile industry. Excavations in the northwest section of the mound re vealed a large residential area that was occupied continu ously from the late ED III through the Early Isin-Larsa pe riods. Some of the houses of the Akkadian period included what could have been shops fronting the street; some others appeared to have altars, perhaps for private or family de votions. The Late Akkadian period occupation in this area may have been the most extensive; by the Late Ur III period, the main focus of occupation had already shifted south. Late in the Ur III period, the isakku, or city ruler, of Esh nunna, Ituriya, had a temple built to his overlord, the deified
ESKI MOSUL DAM SALVAGE PROJECT king of Ur Shu-Sin, in the southern area of the site, where there had been no monumental buildings before. This build ing is unique among Mesopotamian temples in that the deity worshipped in it was a ruler actually living at the time it was built and dedicated. The temple was very regular in plan, with exceptionally wide walls. It was square, with a square, central courtyard with regular rooms arranged around it. The state temple was a testimony to the suzerainty of Ur over Eshnunna, an important administrative center near the border of the limits of the area controlled directly by the central government at Ur. Somewhat later, at tire time Eshnunna was brealdng away or had just broken away from the authority of Ur, the Palace of the Rulers was built abutting the Shu-Sin Temple. As the palace underwent alterations, tire temple, which had ceased being used for divine service, was eventually fully incorpo rated into tire palace. The palace, an administrative building rather than a residence for the ruler, was altered many times by rulers throughout the twentieth century BCE, or the Early Isin-Larsa period. In that period Eshnunna was often in dependent but was sometimes subordinate to the rule or influence of Elam to the east. [See Elamites.] Many admin istrative texts dating to tire twentieth-nineteenth centuries BCE were found in this building. The mound of Tell Asmar was seriously eroded so that, although there is historical evidence that Eshnunna was very powerful until Hammurabi conquered it in 1763 BCE, the expedition was able to find only the foundations of massive buildings of tire late nineteenth and early eighteenth centu ries BCE but no stratified deposits. T h e remains of those monumental public buildings in the southern sector of tire mound only hint at tire power and prestige of Eshnunna in the late nineteenth and early eighteenth centuries BCE, when it was one of the important players on the international po litical scene.
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Frankfort, Henri. Stratified Cylinder Seals from the Diyala Region. OIP, 72, Chicago, 1955. Henrickson, Elizabeth F. "Non-Religious Residential Settlement Pat terning in the Late Early Dynastic of the Diyala Region." Mesopo tamia 16 (1981): 43-133. Henrickson, Elizabeth F. "Functional Analysis of the Elite Residences in the Late Early Dynastic of the Diyala Region: House D and the Walled Quarter at Khafajah and the 'Palaces' at Tell Asmar." Mes opotamia 17 (1982): 5-33. This and Henrickson's article above rep resent an interesting attempt at a functional analysis of the use of space in the residential quarters at Tell Asmar and nearby Khafajeh.
Jacobsen, Thorkild. Salinity and Irrigation: Agriculture in Antiquity. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 14. Malibu, 1982. Report on the results of the Diyala Basin Archaeological Project's regional survey.
Whiting, Robert M„ Jr. Old Babylonian Letters from Tell Asmar. Uni versity of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Assyriological Studies, 22. Chicago, 1987. Good, up-to-date source for the chronology of the rulers of Eshnunna. ELISE AUERBACH
ESKI MOSUL DAM SALVAGE PROJECT. A
long-planned dam on the Tigris River, just upstream from Eski Mosul (Balad) in Iraq was built between 1981 and 1985. As with tire Hamrin and Haditha Dam Salvage Projects, Iraqi and foreign expeditions cooperated in investigating the sites to be flooded in tire Esld Mosul Dam Salvage Project (later called the Saddam Dam Basin Salvage Project). The major crossings of the Tigris River are outside tire area of the project at Nineveh, Balad (Eski Mosul), and Cizre, but the Tigris can be readily crossed when it is not in flood and routes cross tire region at Abu Dhahir and at Zummar. In general, however, the main routes avoid tire broken terrain beside tire river and follow courses outside the area. T h e main road north from Nineveh sldrted the southeastern part of tire area of the project, however. The geomorphology of tire region has not been adequately investigated, but excavations at sites such as Tell Kutan and Kharabeh Shattani showed that there has been considerable BIBLIOGRAPHY erosion and deposition. After rainstorms, the wadis were very active. It would be unwise to infer that tire present to Adams, Robert McC. Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains. Chicago, 1965. Excellent source for information pography closely resembles the ancient, but it is likely that on the topography, hydrology, land use, and setdement history of in general tire environment has not changed greatly since the entire Diyala region. prehistoric times. Beside the river was a narrow floodpain Delougaz, Pinhas, and Seton Lloyd. Pre-Sargonid Temples in the Diyala bordered by rolling hills, often with the bedrock emerging: Region. Oriental Institute Publications (OIP), 58. Chicago, 1942. De indeed, tire area had been used as a quarry. The region is tailed description of the series of ED temples said to be dedicated to the god Abu. cut by a series of wadis draining into the Tigris. Most of Delougaz, Pinhas. Pottery from the Diyala Region. OIP, 63. Chicago, these are dry for most of tire year, but the Baqaq stteam is 1952. perennial. T h e annual rainfall is about 450 mm and, where Delougaz, Pinhas, et al. Private Houses and Graves in the Diyala Region. the soils were suitable, it was possible to practice dry farm OIP, 88. Chicago, 1967. Includes a detailed description of the North ing. There is evidence for small canals, particularly along ern Palace and the residential areas at Tell Asmar. tire Baqaq stream, that seem to be associated with a series Frankfort, Henri. Sculpture of the Third Millennium B.C.from Tell Asmar and Khafajah. OIP, 44. Chicago, 1939. Detailed description of the of water mills of fairly recent date rather than with irrigation. hoard of stone statues from the Abu Temple. The top of the dam is 317.5 m above mean sea level and Frankfort, Henri, et al. The Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers about 435 sq larr (270 sq. mi.) is to be flooded. The lake at. Tell. Asmar. OIP, 43. Chicago, 1940. Publication of the Isin-Larsa extends about 70 km (43 mi.) upstream, as far as tire Syrian period public buildings at Tell Asmar; see the introduction for a good border, and covers a ribbon of land which at its widest point though outdated discussion of the site's history.
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is fewer than 8 km (5 mi.) from the old river course. In the original survey of the area by the Iraqi State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage, 149 sites were identified. There were only a few large sites: tire most impressive (550 X 300 m) was Tell Jikan Qigan), where Victor Place had excavated briefly in the nineteenth century; also impressive were Tell Selal and Tell Abu Dhahir, which also covered several hec tares. These major sites were situated where wadis and rel atively easy routes reached the Tigris and where the im mediate terrain was quite flat and suitable for agriculture. Most of the sites in the region were small and occupied for limited periods. Some sixty-three sites were excavated in the course of the project, including twenty-one not located in the original survey. Most of the excavated sites were situated in the southeastern part of the area and along the south side of tire river. For security reasons, only a few sites were in vestigated farther upstream on the north side of the river. The Iraqi State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage excavated some twenty-diree sites. The University of Mosul excavated four important sites on the south side of the river, Abu Dhahir, Mseifneh, Tell Dhuwaij, and Tell Selal. British teams from the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the British Museum, the University of Edinburgh, and the Uni versity of Manchester worked on some fifteen sites, mostly in tire southeastern part of the area and in the region near Abu Dhahir. Japanese archaeologists from Kokushikan Uni versity worked on seven sites near Jikan and near Zummar. A Polish team excavated sites near Rifan Ulya and at the Aceramic Neolithic site of Nemrik. In addition, Austrian, French, German, German/Italian, Italian, and Russian teams worked on a smaller number of sites. A Polish survey in the region of Rifan identified some twenty-two locations where Lower Paleolithic tools were found; sixty Middle Paleolithic and twenty-three Upper Pa leolithic tools also were recovered. Hand axes were occasionally found elsewhere in the project area. Two PrePottery Neolithic sites were excavated. At Nemrik, which lies just above the area to be flooded, semisunken round houses with tauf (Ar., similar to terra pise) and mud-brick walls were found. At Der Hall, an aceramic level was found, but tire artifacts were not in situ. Five Hassuna sites were excavated. The Hassuna remains at Tell Abu Dhahir could be traced over an area of about 2 ha (5 acres). At Kharabeh Shattani, the Hassuna level was covered by a compacted silty layer 1.2 m thick, on which a Halaf settlement was built. Only one site was excavated for which Samarra pottery has been published, but as many as nine sites were excavated with Halaf pottery. At Kharabeh Shattani several round houses (tholoi) were uncovered. At Khirbet Derak a series of bullae with stamp-seal impressions on them were found. At Derak and at Khirbeh Hatareh there was evidence for a gradual transition from the Halaf to the Ubaid pottery style, with intermediate types being recog nized. Some eight sites with Ubaid pottery were excavated.
No substantial architecture of the period has been pub lished. Early Uruk or Gawra period occupations were identified on four sites. At Tell Mishrifeh houses with possibly tripar tite plans and at Tell Karraneh 1 and 2 megaron-type build ings like those from Tepe Gawra levels IX-XI were found. T h e impression given by the results of the investigations in tire Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project strongly supports the view that the Gawra period precedes the Late Uruk period. It has been suggested that two rival cultures coexisted in northern Mesopotamia; a local one typified by Gawra and a second heavily influenced by the southern Uruk civiliza tion represented by level IV at Nineveh. This southern-in fluenced culture was thought to have formed an elite dom inating the local culture. T h e idea, however, receives no support from the excavations in the Eski Mosul region. Local Late Uruk occupations characterized by beveledrim bowls, incised jars, and spouted vessels, for example, were found on some eight sites. Excavations at a number of sites, particularly at Tell Mohammed Arab, have elucidated tire sequence from the Late Uruk to the Ninevite 5 period and have resolved some of the long-standing problems of ceramic development in this period. A gradual transforma tion from tire painted Uruk pottery to the painted Ninevite 5 and from the fineware Uruk vessels to the Ninevite 5 could be shown. The gradual introduction and development of incised gray ware and excised gray ware were demonstrated by the stratigraphic excavation at Tell Mohammed Arab and by a comparison with assemblages from shorter-lived sites. Also for the first time, an exposure of architecture re vealed that small two-room rectangular dwellings were the norm in the Ninevite 5 period. Some nineteen sites with Ninevite 5 levels were excavated. Most of these occupations were small and were not long-lived. Thus, although the number of sites was large, the population in any one period could have been quite small. It should be noted that Painted Ninevite 5 pottery was found in widely separated soundings on Tell Jikan, suggesting that an extensive area, perhaps as much as 15 ha (37 acres), was occupied in this period. T h e fine decorated gray ware of tire Ninevite 5 period appears to have been the forerunner of the distinctive hard fineware of dre Taya period. The transition from one to the other has not been found in excavations to date, and there seem to be important changes that occurred witir tire intro duction of this new style. In particular, at Tell Jikan the con struction of the city wall was associated with this new style. Similar indications of urbanization have been found else where in northern Iraq and in' the Klrabur region in this period. At Tell Karraneh 1 an interesting group of six terra cotta objects was recovered, five shaped like phalli and tire sixth with a molded stylized human head. In tire Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, nine sites of this period were exca vated, which corresponds roughly to the Akkadian and Ur III periods in the south.
ESKI MOSUL DAM SALVAGE PROJECT The largest number of sites excavated (twenty-two) be longed to the Khabur period. On many of these, areas of housing consisting of large buildings with many rectangular rooms were excavated. Nuzi ware was recovered at about a dozen sites, but for the most part tiiese were occasional sherds and did not form a large proportion of the pottery assemblage. A similar number of sites belonging to the Middle Assyr ian period was excavated. Tell Mohammed Arab provided a good sequence of pottery and associated buildings. At this site a characteristic plan of a rectangular building with one large rectangular room and three or four smaller squarish rooms was identified. Expectations that important Late Assyrian remains would be found were high, as inscribed bricks of Sargon II had been published as coming from Jikan; it was also speculated that Jikan might have been ancient Kurbail. Further research showed that the bricks in question came from Khorsabad, and excavations at Jikan failed to reveal substantial buildings of the Late Assyrian period. At Tell Baqaq 2, beside the main road leading north, however, the remains of a small palace were found. It included several courtyards, a throne room with stone tramlines, (parallel lines of stone paving, commonly found in the throne rooms of Assyrian palaces, perhaps used for a brazier on wheels), a bathroom, and a few cuneiform tablets dated to about 800 BCE. At Khatuniyeh, the vivid remains of the site's destruction, presumably at or near the time of the destruction of Nineveh, were re vealed. About a dozen other sites with less substantial re mains of the period were excavated, but it does not seem to have been a time of particular prosperity in the region. It seems probable that in the Late Assyrian period arable farm ing was concentrated on the more fertile plains of northern Mesopotamia, and tiiat areas such as that of the Esld Mosul region were used for animal husbandry, perhaps including horse rearing. Following the destruction of Nineveh it is uncertain whether northern Iraq was under the control of the Medes, the Babylonians, or neither. In the second half of the sixth century BCE it became part of the extensive empire of the Persian king Cyrus, but details of the history of northern Iraq under the Achaemenids are not known. It was, there fore, surprising to find an extensive (but shallow) site at Khirbet Qasrij of the sixth or fifth centuries BCE with evi dence for industrial activities, though Xenophon (Anabasis) mentioned extensive settlements when the ten thousand (the Greek mercenaries) retreated through this area at the end of the fifth century BCE. In the Hellenistic period, perhaps with the revival of po litical stability, there were numerous relatively rich agricul tural villages in the area. Apart from the pottery, which in cluded fish plates with stamped palmettes, the most characteristic feature of these settlements was the number of deep bell-shaped grain silos dug into the ground. A small
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building (18 X 5.5 m) at Tell Deir Situn has been inter preted as a police post or waystation close to the main route from Nineveh leading north. Parthian remains were identified at a few sites, but it was not clear how Parthian sites were distinguished from Hel lenistic—and indeed the reports on many sites combined the two periods. In the early centuries of the first millennium CE, this region at times lay on the borders between the em pires of Rome and Iran. T h e site of Sell Qubba may have been an outpost of Roman rule on the west bank of the Tigris, and traces of a mosaic floor were found. The site stayed in use in the Sasanian period, the walls of the city, which encircle an area of more than 100 hectares (247 acres), may have been built then. T h e Sasanian period was recognized at about ten sites. T h e only site with substantial architectural remains was at Mseifneh, where a monastery with a fine basilican church constructed from worked stone was uncovered. This build ing may have been constructed in the fifth century CE; it remained in use (though perhaps not as a Christian religious building) until the U-Khanid period. A cemetery at Tell M o hammed Arab provided evidence for the burial customs of the period. Most of the inhumations lacked funeral offer ings, but a few were plentifully supplied with jewelry (e.g., beads, seals, earrings, rings, bracelets) and with glass bottles that may have held perfume. As might be expected, almost half the sites excavated had remains from the Islamic period. Sometimes these were a few burials, but some sites had substantial buildings. At Tell Khirbet Saleh a stone and mortar structure with columns was interpreted as a heathen temple built in the Abbasid period. At Deir Situn a church was dated to the thirteenth century, but fragmentary architectural remains may belong to an earlier church, perhaps originally constructed in the Sasanian period. At Mishrifeh village, a khan built in the Abbasid period remained in use until the Il-Khanid period. At Tell Baqaq 3, another khan in use in the Il-Khanid period was found. At Kharabok a large courtyard building con structed in the 'Abbasid period was rebuilt in the Il-Khanid period, when an elaborate water system was installed. Tell Selal had substantial fortifications from the Middle Islamic period. T h e project area has no natural boundaries and is divided by the Tigris River and the wadis flowing into it. The ma jority of sites in the project were small and occupied for short periods. One consequence of this is that only very few cu neiform tablets were recovered: two Middle Assyrian tablets from Tell Madhhur, two Late Assyrian tablets from Tell Baqaq 2 , and a curious hemerological tablet (tablets that list activities to be done on different days of the month) from a Hellenistic pit at Tell Fisna. These do not contribute greatly to a deeper understanding of the history of the region. The archaeological results, however, were extremely interesting: in particular, the elucidation of the chronology of the Late
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ESSENES
Uruk and Ninevite 5 periods is of importance for the whole of northern Mesopotamia.
ymological guess of hosios, Josephus's transliteration of tire Hebrew hosen as essen, and Epiphanius's spelling of this Jew ish sect as Ossaioi and Ossenoi. This Hebrew solution was BIBLIOGRAPHY proposed long before the Qumran discoveries (see, e.g., Jost, 1839); while it accords well with the evidence, no consensus For preliminary reports on the sites excavated in the Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, see die following: Robert Killick and Michael yet exists. Roaf, comps., "Excavations in Iraq, 1981-82," Iraq 45 (1983): 207Sources on Essenes. Several ancient descriptions of tire 220; Robert Killick and James Black, comps., "Excavations in Iraq, Essenes have survived in Greek and Latin texts. Among the 1983-84," Iraq 47 (1985): 227-239; W. Ball and James Black, comps., most important are those by the three earliest authors, Philo, "Excavations in Iraq, 1985-86," Iraq 49 (1987): 234-250. The State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage has published Researches, on Josephus, and Pliny. Later accounts by Hippolytus and Epithe Antiquities of Saddam Dam Basin Salvage and Other Researches phanius, among others, also preserve important additional (Baghdad, 1987), a special volume containing reports on many of the observations (see Adam and Burchard, 1972; Stern, 1976excavated sites. New information about the Ninevite 5 period is sum 1984; and Vermes and Goodman, 1989). Most of tirese an marized by Michael Roaf and Robert Killick in "A Mysterious Affair cient accounts were addressed to non-Jewish audiences, of Styles: The Ninevite 5 Pottery of Northern Mesopotamia," Iraq 49 which influenced the selection of Essene characteristics and (1987): 199-230. The same period is given comprehensive treatment in The Origins of North Mesopotamian Civilization: Ninevite 5 Chronol the manner in which they were described. These texts show ogy, Economy, Society, edited by Harvey Weiss (in press), based on philosophical (especially Stoic) and ethnographic interests proceedings of a conference held at Yale University, New Haven, Con typically found in Hellenistic history and geography texts. necticut, 15-19 December 1988. Evidence for settlement in the Zummar region is discussed in W. Ball, ed., Ancient Settlement in the ZummarSeveral of these descriptions relied on earlier, now-lost texts, including Region: Excavations by the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq in the at least one Greek source earlier than Philo, whose Saddam Dam Salvage Project, ig8$-S6 (in press). account is the earliest extant. Posidonius, Strabo, and Mar MICHAEL ROAF cus Vipsanius Agrippa are among the likely authors of nowlost descriptions of Essenes (see Goranson, 1994). E S S E N E S . Known primarily in the late Second Temple period, especially from about 146 BCE to about 70 CE, the Essenes were a movement within Judaism, a communal as sociation, entered by initiation. They considered themselves to be the predestined remnant of those who truly observed God's will and pursued their own interpretation of Torah and prophecy. Although Essenes influenced the develop ment of rabbinic Judaism and of Christianity, neither of those groups affirmed the Essene's self-description, and the history of dre Essenes has often been considered enigmatic. T h e N a m e Essenes. T h e name Essene has two forms in Greek, Essaioi and Essenoi; the English pronunciation comes from the latter form, but the Essaioi spelling appears to be the earlier and more Semitic form. Because the solution is crucial, more than fifty different etymologies have been pro posed, but no scholarly consensus has yet been achieved. Some have proposed another Greek word to explain the or igin of the name, for example—a similar, though not iden tical, name for certain priests of Artemis in Ephesus, Essenas. Most scholars have concluded, however, that the Greek forms of the name Essene derive from a Semitic (He brew or Aramaic) root. The two most often-repeated guesses involve two Aramaic words, hasayya ("pious") and 'asayya ("healers"), but neither appears in any known an cient text in a reference to the Essenes. A Hebrew proposal is the root 'asah in the participle form 'osin and the construct form 'ose hatorah ("doers of torah"); this appears as a selfdescription in several Dead Sea Scrolls. It parallels some other relevant group self-understandings (e.g., Samaritans as "keepers" of torah), and it corresponds with Philo's et
The Q u m r a n Evidence. Pliny located an Essene settle ment near the Dead Sea. In the analysis of most scholars, the ruins at Qumran and tire scrolls from surrounding caves belonged to a group of Essenes. While a few argue tiratKhirbet Qumran might have been a fort or a winter villa, the majority of historians and archaeologists regard Qumran as one of the Essene settlements. Other settlements or com munity centers were located in Jerusalem and in tire "land of Damascus" (beyond the Jordan River) and elsewhere. According to Philo, the Therapentae, who lived in Egypt, were related to the Essenes. Several of the Qumran manuscripts include parallels to the teaching, practices, and self-description of the Essenes (see, e.g., Beall, 1988). Surely some of the texts found at Qumran are Essene, including tire Serek ha-Yahad (Rule of the Community or Manual of Discipline), several Bible commentaries (pesharim), and the text designated 4QMMT, Miqsat Ma'ase ha-Torah (Certain Enactments of the T o rah). Such texts as Jubilees and portions of Enoch and Tes taments of the Twelve Patriarchs likely are pre-Qumran texts written within the Essene (or pre-Essene) movement. Many new publications concerning the texts and the archaeology of Qumran will continue to appear whose conclusions may modify some currently held views. Beliefs a n d Practices. Essene teachings shared much with those accepted by other Jews, such as the Torah and the writings of the Prophets, but they claimed a special, sometimes esoteric interpretation of Scripture. Essenes re garded tire Jerusalem Temple high priests (sometimes as sociated with Sadducees) as misled, following wrongful practices and tire wrong calender. Although Essenes were
ETHICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY careful in their legal deliberations, drey never referred to this exercise as "halakhah, instead alluding to that term only in a repeated and negative pun against Pharisees as the "seek ers of smooth things" (dorese ha-halaqdt). Essenes observed Torah strictly but according to their own interpretation and described themselves as doers of torah. Essene beliefs in cluded predestination, important roles for angels, and res urrection, but not necessarily including bodily resurrection (Josephus and Hippolytus differ on this; see Puech, 1993). They expected a messiah, or, in some descriptions, priestly and royal messiahs. The Essene apocalyptic and dualistic worldview is more similar to tire Book of Daniel than to 1 and 2 Maccabees. (The latter are not found among the eight hundred or so texts from Qumran; God and the angels— not men—will destroy tire community's enemies.) The Essene communal organization had rules for initia tion and punishments, including expulsion. Some Essenes were celibate and some observed periods of celibacy limited to certain times or places. Essenes kept no slaves, and at least the full members held property in common. Agricul ture was their main occupation; they made no weapons. They avoided the courts of outsiders. Their rules for ritual purity were strict. T h e extent to which they participated in the Jerusalem temple cult is an issue still debated. History of the Essenes. Josephus wrote that Essenes ex isted in 146 BCE (Antiquities 13.171), probably because his source, Strabo, began his History then. N o year of origin can be pinpointed with tire evidence available, perhaps because tire Essene movement developed gradually or because the movement preceded the Greek form of its eventual name. Three of tire four Essene individuals mentioned in Josephus are known for prophecy and were present in Jerusalem. Jo sephus also located an Essene gate in southwest Jerusalem (War 5.145). The fourth, John the Essene, who joined the Zealots, is less typical; John—a common name—was given the additional descriptive, Essene, because it was not usual to find an Essene relying on human weapons. Qumran texts describe certain individuals, especially an Essene Teacher of Righteousness and his opponent, the Wicked Priest—some scholars suggest there was more than one of each. Jonathan (161-143/2 BCE) is considered by many to be the best candidate for tire Wicked Priest, but Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE) is another possible con tender. Although most scholars believe that tire Teacher of Righteousness cannot be identified with any known histor ical personality, a potential candidate is Judah tire Essene. Josephus (War 1.78-80; Antiquities 13.3n) places him teaching in about 104 BCE, soon before Alexander's rule. He may be the same Judah recorded in the Babylonian Talmud (Qid. 66a), in which he asks Alexander to give up tire priest hood, and perhaps also in the Habbakuk Commentary from Qumran ( i Q p H a b 12.4). T h e Essenes' negative view of the latter Hasmoneans was shared by Strabo, who wrote (Ge ography 16.2.35-40) that Alexander was. among the tyran
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nical and superstitious leaders who departed from the hon orable teachings of Moses. The Essenes disappeared from history sometime after the First Jewish War against Rome (66-70). While considerable debate continues concerning the many aspects of the mov ement's history, research has succeeded in revealing much diversity within late Second Temple Period Judaism. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls; and Qumran.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, Alfred, and Christoph Burchard. Antike Berichie fiber die Essener. 2d ed. Berlin, 1972. The most comprehensive available collection of ancient texts on Essenes, with useful notes and bibliography. In cludes selected texts from seventeen authors and extensive refer ences to other writers who, witii more or less small variations, re peated the earlier accounts of Essenes.
Beall, Todd S. Josephus' Description of the Essenes Illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Cambridge, 1988. A worthwhile comparison of selected passages from Josephus with some Qumran texts; not the last word on the subject because additional observations have been made, some using recently published texts. Goranson, Stephen. "Posidonius, Strabo, and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa as Sources on Essenes." Journal ojJewish Studies 45 (1994): 295-298. According to proposals here, Posidonius and Strabo were among the sources for Philo and Josephus, and M. Agrippa was a source for Pliny. Jost, IsakM. "DieEssaer." Israelitische Annalen 19 (1839): 145-147. On the etymology of the name. Puech, Emile. La croyance des Essinicns en la vie future. 2 vols. Paris, 1993. Discusses die issue of resurrection as it appears in ancient descriptions of Essenes and in some texts from Qumran.
Stern, Menachem, ed. and trans. Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1976-19S4, Fine collection in which the reader may compare ancient descriptions of Essenes, including those by or addressed to non-Jews, with the broader category of descrip tions of Jews. Vermes, Geza, and Martin D. Goodman, eds. The Essenes according to the Classical Sources. Sheffield, 1989. Selection of texts from six an cient authors, with English translations, an introduction, brief notes, and a bibliography; a handy volume but considerably less compre hensive than Adam and Burchard.
Wagner, Siegfried. Die Essener in der wissenschaftlichen Diskussion. Ber lin, i960. Extensive survey and bibliography of the vast pre-Qumran scholarship and speculation on Essenes, witii special attention to nineteenth-century German writers. STEPHEN GORANSON
ETHICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY. Ethics are stan dards of moral judgment and conduct to which individuals or groups subscribe. Ethics flow from the ongoing life of a community as it questions whether its practices are appro priate or valid. Each community discusses these questions in order to define standards for its members. Smaller groups or individuals then translate tire standards to fit their partic ular situations. In effect, ethics represent values and ideals that are continually negotiated by those who subscribe to drem, based on factors within and outside the group. Ethics constantly evolve, but they are .fundamentally conservative
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in that they are meant to protect the group and its members from internal discord and from external attack by those who might have an interest in the community's activities. Archaeological etiiics exemplify tiiese principles. T h e community primarily defines itself as having an interest in exploring and understanding the past. Subgroups form around these interests, and each then defines its ethics. For example, formal or informal groups may form around the study of archaeology from a certain region, such as the Near East or North America. Others may form around study of a particular time period, such as the Upper Paleolithic or the Ottoman Empire. Still others may form around speci alities, such as museum studies or heritage management. An overlapping of interests and standards is common among subgroups, but to assume that there is or ever can be a single set of ethics would be erroneous. At the same time, groups do deal witii similar issues as they define their ethics. Among the first and most important questions addressed by each group is: Who is or is not an archaeologist? As cul tural resources management specialist Leslie Wildesen has pointed out (in Greene, ed., 1984), this usually means who is or is not a "real" archaeologist. The distinction is drawn between archaeologists as members of a peer group and out siders who lay claim to membership but are not accepted by the group. These outsiders may range from amateurs to journalists to dealers in antiquities. The integrity of the group is assessed on the basis of the integrity of its members. Groups therefore may demand tiiat its members have welldefined credentials—formal education, often at least a grad uate degree, and other sorts of training, such as internships or attendance at field schools, where proper excavation tech niques are learned and practiced. Membership standards have changed dramatically since archaeology began. People such as Heinrich Schliemann and Jean-Baptiste Belzoni, who in their own time were ac cepted as archaeologists, might now be labeled as little more than looters, grave robbers, or publicity seekers—at best, "historical figures" or sophisticated amateurs. These stan dards are obviously subject to changes in the group's intel lectual climate. To some degree, members may reflect the views of outsiders, who may, for example, be concerned with matters of cultural patrimony. As segments of the ar chaeological community professionalized and established formal organizations, these associations took it upon them selves to establish minimal standards for membership. Some, as in the cultural resources management community in the United States, lobbied outside entities to codify these standards into government regulation. The membership standards have sometimes been hotly debated, but the issue has been relatively simple because the group involved is rel atively small and controllable. Vastly more complex is die question of die accountability of group members. T o whom should archaeologists be accountable? From the early days of archaeology into the present, some archae
ologists have believed they should be held accountable only to their profession (i.e., subgroup). Their primary respon sibility, some believe, is to their "science" or to "the past" or to another abstract entity. Most archaeologists recognize, however, that from the outset, archaeology has almost al ways been conducted for a client—whether a patron, a mu seum, or a government agency. Clients have vested interests, and thus a say in how every aspect of archaeology is done, from excavation to the interpretation and use of informa tion. At the same time, archaeologists have recognized that they are themselves members of other groups, whose views influence archaeological practice. In other words, archae ology is done within a framework of die larger society. Ques tions of accountability result in a profoundly more difficult matter: Who sets the agenda for archaeology? Another way of phrasing this might be: For whom do ar chaeologists do archaeology? Certainly one answer is that they do it for tiiemselves. Archaeology can both provide a livelihood and satisfy curiosity about the past. Some would maintain that this is enough. Professional archaeologists, at the very least, question their role in relation to the sciences and humanities. They understand that their theoretical ap proaches and excavation techniques have an impact on the sites and materials they study. Most also recognize that their discipline plays a role in the larger society. Therefore, most realize that tiiey are accountable to outsiders as well as to their profession. Awareness of these other constituencies to archaeology has only come in recent decades. Initially, as archaeology became professionalized, the group's definition took prec edence, as did clarifying appropriate methods and tech niques of archaeology. As archaeology began to look out ward, it noted the concerns of outside groups and the issues became both complex and intertwined. Among die most important of these issues is the preser vation of archaeological sites from destruction by forces such as those accompanying economic development. Ar chaeologists have been extremely vocal in demanding that outside groups pay attention to the loss of sites that many maintain are part of the world's heritage. They have called for site protection on national and international levels and have succeeded to some degree. For example, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, ratified in 1923, outlined the excavation and preservation of archaeological remains. All league nations were given equal rights to excavation, overseen by a Department of Antiquities whose director could requisition land for excavations, deny permits to un qualified archaeologists, and punish looters of antiquities. In the United States, antiquities received some protection un der the Antiquities Act of 1906, but vastiy more under the Historic Preservation Acts of 1966 and 1974 and the Ar chaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. Under these laws and their accompanying regulations, any federal gov ernment action involved in disturbing the landscape must
ETHICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY provide for the location, protection, or mitigation of the loss of sites (usually by excavation) that are potentially eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. While, however, preservation of sites may seem a noble goal, it raises difficult problems. By working toward implementing preservation policy and law, archaeologists recognize their dependency on govern ments, thereby legitimizing nonarchaeological interests and giving them a voice in archaeological practice. Among the most knotty problems is preservation for what and for whom? T h e dilemma is a simple one: How is potential eco nomic benefit from a development project to be weighed against potential scientific and humanistic benefit from an archaeological site? The interests behind economic devel opment are vast and often very powerful. A government, for example, may promote an open-pit mine tiiat will allow it to compete more powerfully in the import-export market. Increased revenues may bring jobs and a higher quality of life to citizens. At the same time, construction of the mine may destroy important sites from which everyone can learn important lessons about their heritage (which also may be said to improve quality of life). While some archaeologists would urge protection of the pit-mine site, others would urge excavation if it could not be preserved. Excavation benefits archaeologists scientifi cally; it can also benefit financially, if a developer pays for the excavation and analysis of the artifacts. Archaeologists can find themselves in an ethical dilemma: wanting to pre serve sites, while wanting access to the information and funds for excavation. In fact, developers, the public, and government agencies have accused archaeologists of stop ping progress or of seeldng personal gain through laws the archaeologists sought to implement. Additional questions relate to how a site's significance is determined: Who is most capable of maldng such a determination? Archaeologists maintain tiiat they are. Again, the question of self-interest can be raised. Once the economics of excavating is settled, other issues come into play. If a site is preserved as a part of peoples' heritage, how it is to be treated raises additional internal eth ical problems: Should the site even be excavated? Excava tion is, after all, a destructive process. Some archaeologists urge no excavation, preferring preservation. As David Lowenthal (1985) cautions, however, preservation reveals that permanence is an illusion. Even untouched, a site and its significance are continually altered and reinterpreted. Other archaeologists suggest conservation, by which, subse quently, one part of a site might be excavated while the rest is left undisturbed, in expectation of renewed study at some point in the future when advanced theories and techniques may be available. Whether the decision is preservation or conservation, nonarchaeologists still have a say. If sites are in fact a public heritage, they should be accessible. What then is archaeo
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logy's responsibility in interpreting sites for the public? At a minimum, archaeologists recognize that they must complete the analysis of their work and publish their findings. How sensitive, then, do archaeologists need to be to the accusa tion that they often use jargon incomprehensible to nonspecialists. Many archaeologists believe tiiat they have an ob ligation beyond publication to educate the public about what they do. In many countries they have developed public ed ucation programs: ninety-seven countries are linked in the Associated Schools Project (ASP) affiliated with UNESCO. One ASP project, the Fifth Lyceum School on Cyprus, de cided to explore four rescue archaeology operations: Nubia and Philae, Borobudur, the Acropolis, and Paphos on Cy prus. Such projects raise a question already asked: Whose agenda is paramount in educational projects, those of teach ers, archaeologists, government entities, or other interested parties? Closely tied to projects like these are entities linked to the protection and presentation of the past of which museums are the most visible. Although archaeologists are frequently associated with museums, the objectives of the two are not always compatible. Museums have their own ethical con cerns, which sometimes involve purchasing or trading an tiquities. Many archaeologists believe that assigning a mon etary value to antiquities promotes the looting of sites. As a result, some professionals have recently debated whether, ethically, the discipline of archaeology can include the study objects in a museum that were purchased or otherwise ob tained under ethically questionable circumstances. Govern mental entities have sometimes determined that the past can be used for financial gain through tourism. This may involve support for museums, but it may also encompass developing certain important monuments or archaeological sites as tourist attractions. During the mid-1960s, concerns about how such sites should be treated led to the development of a set of princi ples to guide the conservation and restoration of sites and monuments. T h e International Council on Monuments and Sites and associated committees were formed to promote these principles. Crucial ethical concerns about the protec tion and development of archaeological sites involve the ex penditure of funds and who decides what will be developed. Developing sites whose significance is questionable depletes funds available for locating, exploring, and interpreting sites of equal or greater potential scientific merit. A case in point is the (High Dam) Nubian rescue cam paign in Egypt in the 1960s. Might the $63 million spent on moving and restoring Abu Simbel (whose inscriptions had long been recorded and that some argue is aesthetically me diocre) been better applied to locating and excavating un recorded sites that would have given a more complete pic ture of Nubian archaeology before the dam also covered them witii water? Might a fraction of that money have been usefully dedicated to upgrading die Cairo Museum, which
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houses Egypt's most significant national treasures? Some Egyptologists argued the case, contending that the overall scientific goals at Abu Simbel were more important. In the end, the decision to save Abu Simbel was made by Egyptian politicians acting on behalf of the Egyptian public. Archae ologists who questioned whether the scholarly community was capable of judging Abu Simbel's worth supported the politicians. Was the decision vindicated by tire more than a thousand tourists per day who paid to visit the site, more than tire number who formerly saw it in a month? Archaeologists face other challenging problems relating to site protection: What should be the role of archaeologists in instances of international, regional, or civil conflict, when important archaeological sites are endangered? During the Gulf War, Allied bombing jeopardized numerous sites in Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia). Nine of tire seventy-seven nations ratifying tire 1954 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Con flict were directly involved in the conflict (the United States never ratified the agreement). The Department of Defense of the United States, a major participant in the war, report edly did not give these matters much thought, for which it was strongly criticized. Civil conflict produces similar situ ations. During Lebanon's civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, the National Museum was looted, vandalized, and hit by shelling. Museum staff attempted to protect its well-known Roman and Phoenician sarcophagi by encasing them in con crete. Roman and Iron Age Phoenician cemetery sites in Tyre were looted and their gold, jewelry, and pottery sold to antiquities dealers. A 1988 decree passed by the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism, which oversees the Department of Antiquities, makes dealing in antiquities illegal. The Leba nese army has stopped most site looting, and transportation audrorities have been on the lookout for antiquities smug gling. Archaeologists who involved themselves directly in saving sites and seeking solutions to tire postwar return of antiquities did so at some personal risk. Even when political situations stabilize, matters of funding are primary. How is limited money best spent: in repairing sites, monuments, and museums or in returning and caring for Lebanese an tiquities? Governments recognize that the past is a very powerful tool and they have used it as such, sometimes with the com plicity of archaeologists. The history of archaeology is inti mately linked with colonialism. Some of tire field's first knowledge of the past was directly related to conquest. Neil A. Silberman (1982) recounts tire international struggle for control of the archaeological resources of the Holy Land, where Western (largely Christian) nations, Jews, and Mus lims have contested conttol of the region's antiquities for generations. Governments have also used the results of ar chaeological investigation for nation building. During the Gulf War, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, hoping to build internal support for his regime's activities, compared his em
pire with that of ancient Mesopotamia. Modern Israel is a powerful example of archaeology effectively used to provide direct historical links to a land. Its archaeological and polit ical agendas have often been fundamentally the same, as in the excavation in the 1960s of Masada, whose historical re construction has only recently undergone critical reexami nation. The siege of Masada became a national symbol for a besieged Israel and a connection to a heroic past. For a time national defense forces used Masada as a place for swearing in new tank corps recruits who vowed that "Ma sada shall not fall again." New analyses suggest that archae ological evidence may not support the first interpretations of events at the site. At the same time, Israeli archaeologists and the government remain at odds about antiquities traffic. The government allows some traffic in Holy Land relics as a means of promoting the centrality of the nation: it enables Jews and Christians in other countries to possess something of ancient Palestine in the hope that they will support Israel politically. Some of that country's most important archae ological finds were looted and turned up in dealers' shops, the best-known example being the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ar chaeologists' own perception of tireir role varies. Most rec ognize tire ethical dilemmas posed by die traffic in antiqui ties. Archaeology in a postcolonial world poses other ethical quandaries. Among the most delicate are matters of cultural patrimony, indigenous rights, and representations of the past; the three are usually integrally linked. Some nations, recognizing the power of the past as a nation-building tool, have demanded the return of antiquities taken from their territory. These demands have especially been aimed at mu seums in North America and Europe and pose major prob lems. Notable examples include the so-called Elgin Marbles, which reside in the British Museum but were taken between 1803 and 1812 by Lord Elgin (Thomas Bruce) from the Parthenon in Athens. T h e legal complexities of Priam's Treasure, now in Russia at dre Pushkin Museum, suppos edly taken from Hissarlik/Troy by Schliemann in 1873, are tangled. No fewer than five nations have some claim to it. These claims range from rights of possession and war claims (United States and Russia), to rights of the excavator (Ger many), to rights of location (Turkey), to rights of cultural patrimony (Greece). Indigenous peoples or religious groups in some regions have demanded the return of sacred objects and the skeletal remains of their ancestors. Groups now pro test fire excavation of any archaeological sites by outsiders, or at least place limits on their work. In Israel, archaeologists and rabbis often struggle over excavations, especially those involving burials. Sarcophagi recently recovered in rescue excavations in Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood and just outside the Old City walls near the Jaffa Gate were turned over by the director of dre Antiquities Autirority to a burial society for immediate reinterrment under Jewish re ligious law. Archaeologists have filed legal action so that they
ETHIOPIA can study the caskets. Across the Middle East, Muslim la borers have had to be assured that they were not excavating tire remains of Muslims. In part out of cultural patrimony and in part of Muslim sensibilities, tire Egyptian government requested return of mummies and their display in museums has been curtailed. Many peoples have also claimed that because the archae ology done in tire past on their lands was done by outsiders, the past created was a colonial tool used to dominate them. They protest that their oral histories are neglected in im personal archaeological models and chronologies. As a con sequence, some groups employ only archaeologists sympa thetic to their concerns, train their own citizens to do archaeology, or in some cases outlaw archaeology alto gether, stirring international debate among archaeologists. There is concern among some archaeologists that return ing artifacts and remains destroys the archaeological data base. They ask whether artifacts will be properly cared for if repattiated or, as has been documented, they will end up on the antiquities market. Those who believe that archaeo logical sites and artifacts are a universal heritage have been outraged when objects fall under the control of a nation or an ethnic group drat keeps them forever out of reach of oth ers to see or study. There is also concern about the limits set on academic freedom by religious and political groups by dictating research agendas. Archaeologists who recognize the colonial nature of their enterprise have attempted to reach compromises. In the United States, for example, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, passed over tire objection of many archaeologists, was supported by others, who helped to write it and lobbied for its passage. It requires the U.S. government to fund museums and laboratories to inventory sacred objects and skeletons and make a goodfaith effort to return them. T h e law also demands consul tation with tribal groups over how archaeological research is carried out on tribal lands. Some organizations have come to recognize that archae ology is fundamentally a political exercise that places ar chaeologists in tenuous ethical positions. For example, the explicit goals of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), formed in 1986, are to incorporate archaeologists from underdeveloped counuies and indigenous peoples and to examine the political and ethical ramifications of archae ology. These issues are central themes at their meetings and in the numerous WAC publications in the One World Ar chaeology series. At the 1990 W A C 2 meeting in Venezuela, the WAC Executive passed a code of ethics for dealing with the primacy of indigenous peoples to control any archae ology that studies their pasts. Significantly, tire code was generated by indigenous peoples. At no time in tire history of archaeology have archaeolog ical ethics been under greater scrutiny than since the early 1980s. At no time in the past was there greater disagreement
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about what is or is not ethical practice. T h e issues are com plicated and there are few easy solutions. For each subgroup formed and for each ethical question posed, a continuum of opinion exists about how to behave ethically. What is un deniable is that by continually reassessing ethics in archae ology, the discipline undergoes continual change. [See also Nationalism and Archaeology; Tourism and Ar chaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, William Y. "Science and Ethics in Rescue Archaeology." Bo
reas: Uppsala Studies in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Civ ilizations 13 (1984): 9-15. Discussion of the interaction of science, public interest, and rescue archaeology during the Nubian rescue campaign of the 1960s.
Cleere, Henry F., ed. Archaeological Heritage Management in the Modern World. One World Archaeology, 9. London, 1989. Thorough ex amination of issues surrounding heritage management, with case studies from all continents. Fleming, Arlene Krimgold. "Securing Sites in Time of War." Archae ology 44.3 (1991): 43. Deals with the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict dur ing the Gulf War.
Greene, Ernestene L., ed. Ethics and Values in Archaeology. New York, 1984. Twenty-six chapters explore issues relating to an archaeolo gist's responsibilities to the profession and the public, giving die eth ical codes of several American organizations.
Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, 1985. Examines complex process by which views of the past become sub ject to the needs of the present.
Maisels, Charles K. The Near East: Archaeology in the Cradle of Civili zation. London, 1993. Current research agendas in the Near East and several factors influencing them are examined in the final chap ter. Raschka, Marilyn. "Salvaging a Scarred Land." Archaeology 47.1 (1994): 64-67. Case study of archaeological responses to the destruc tion of antiquities during the civil war in Lebanon.
Silberman, Neil A. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archeol ogy, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy IMUCI, 1709-1917, New York, 1982. Explores the connection between religion and archaeology in the Holy Land.
Silberman, Neil A. Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East. New York, 1990. Essential reading about Middle East governmental uses of archaeology for national political agendas, with case studies from the Balkans, Tur key, Cyprus, Israel, Egypt, and South Arabia. Stone, Peter, and Robert MacKenzie, eds. The Excluded Past: Archae ology in Education. London, 1990. Case studies detail concerns of both archaeologists and indigenous people over how the past is pre sented in archaeological education programs. Watzman, Herbert M. "Religious Dispute over Excavations of Burial Sites Pits Israel's Archaeologists against Rabbis." Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 March 1993: A31. Describes debates over research agendas, in which questions have been raised similar to diose in dis putes over the treatment of indigenous remains. LARRY J, ZIMMERMAN
E T H I O P I A . The name Ethiopia was adopted into tire Ge'ez dialect in early Christian times by the Axumites in tire northern part of the land from the Septuagint equivalent of
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Hebrew Kush. T h e name Eritrea/Ertera, or more commonly Bahra Ertera in Ge'ez, referred to the Red Sea until modern times when it came to designate the northern plateau of the Horn of Africa after it was colonized by the Italians at the end of the nineteenth century. There are many ancient names that refer to one or another part of Ethiopia. The Egyptian Punt or biblical Put referred to one or another part of the Horn of Africa. Three identifiable biblical names also designate Ethiopia and those parts of modern Sudan and Yemen that were once controlled by the Axumite Empire. Kush is known from about fifty references to individuals, peoples, and lands, their merchandise, and political influ ence. It is also associated with the Garden of Eden river Gihon, the name Ethiopians give the Blue Nile, Sheba re calls the famous queen, who was visitor of King Solomon. Hawilah, like Kush, was one of the lands of the Garden of Eden; its river, Pishon, was once identified with the rivers of Ethiopia, those tributaries of the Nile called Gihon in Ge'ez literature. Habashat, from which the modern name Abyssinia is de rived, is one of the toponyms found in the Proto-Ethiopic/ Sabean inscriptions. It was once thought to be the name of a major tribe that entered Ethiopia from Yemen. The epigraphist A. J. Drewes first noted in 1962 that the name ap pears in Yemeni inscriptions but not until about 350 CE in Ethiopian inscriptions. Others have subsequently argued that the name is topographical and the territory most rea sonably covers the Ethiopian regions. Origin. The origin of ancient Ethiopia as a political state goes back to the first millennium BCE, a centralized kingdom with Axum as its capital came into being in the north. There exist extensive archaeological and epigraphic evidence about this kingdom gathered from the surroundings of Axum and from such sites as Matara, Qasqase, Taconda, Qohaito, and others in the neighboring state now known as Eritrea. Ac cording to these archaeological sources, ancient Ethiopia, from about the fifth century BCE until the early Christian period, was an area comprising the wedge-shaped, north ernmost Ethiopian plateau, including the Eritrean seacoast where the ancient international port of Adulis was located. With the conquest of many of the surrounding peoples and states, the original kingdom expanded far into the interior highlands and eventually gave rise to a large kingdom, which came to call itself Ethiopia in early Christian times. Archaeological evidence, internal inscriptions, and exter nal information show that the large kingdom grew into an empire at the dawn of the period we call the Middle Ages in Europe. Comprising a territory almost the size of western Europe, Ethiopia's borders extended from beyond the island of Meroe to Marib in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula. Only Rome and Persia could compare to it in size and power until the about the eighth century CE. Prehistoric Archaeology. Some of the earliest human remains have been found in the Awash River valley, the
Omo River valley, Malka Qunture, and other regions throughout the Ethiopian Rift valley. These regions link the Paleolithic Rift valley with historic Nile civilizations. Among the most recent discoveries is one of the most complete (nearly 60 percent) skeleton of a hominid named Australo pithecus afarensis, popularly known as Lucy, and believed to be over three million years old. Discovered in 1974 by a joint Ethiopian-American expedition, it is now thought to be an important link between humans and apes. This skeleton and other recent discoveries, which are coming to light even now, point to the Ethiopian Rift valley as an important area of early human evolution, if not indeed the place of our or igin Qohanson and Edey, 1981). [See Hadar.] Evidence from the Neolithic period (c. 10,000) also points to the existence of African peoples who developed in Ethi opia various agricultural techniques such as terrace farming and crops such as millet, sorghum, and cotton. Cotton is thought have developed in southwestern Ethiopia from a primitive herbaceous plant. According to some botanists, all prehistoric survey evidences point to Ethiopia as a major center of ancient agricultural evolution and the birthplace of most African crop plants. Connection with Ancient Egyptian Archaeology. About 2200 a group of people described as the C-group by Egyptologists, entered the Meroitic region and eventually western Eritrea. This group left its impression through its rippled pottery found at Agordat. Not much earlier, in the time of the Egyptian pharaoh Sahure (c. 2458-2446), the earliest expedition to the land of Punt (which had the epithet "god's land" in Egyptian) took place. The identity of Punt is still a matter of debate, but the goods brought from there—resins, frankincense, oint ment, myrrh, electrum (gold with silver alloy), and ebony— point to the Horn. Although myrrh grown in the Horn of Africa was already known in the time of the first and second dynasties (c. 2920-2649), and a slave from Punt was present in Cheop's court (fourth dynasty, c. 2575-2465), this is the first time specific mention of an expedition to the land of Punt is mentioned. Likewise, the Egyptian reference to an island prince who claims to be a serpent and conttols spice and animal trade, may also point to the same region. Other pharaohs, up to at least the time of Rameses III (c. 1198-1167), sent expeditions to Punt. It was in the time of Queen Hatshepsut (c. 1473-1458) of the eighteenth dy nasty, however, that the most extended expedition took place to the land of Punt. It took beads, daggers, bracelets, to Punt and brought back fragrant woods, ebony, fresh myrrh trees, myrrh resin, incense, gold, ivory, panther skins, and live animals (panthers, monkeys, baboon, and cattle) and people. Carlo Conti Rossini as early as 1928 argued that Ethiopia is best identified with this combination of mer chandise in antiquity (for a more recent confirmation of this view, see Kitchen, 1993). This expedition was truly a glo rious one, recorded on the impressive temple reliefs of Hat-
ETHIOPIA shepsut's mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari on the western bank of Thebes at modern Luxor. Although no doubt contact between Ethiopia and Egypt persisted throughout history, we do not find enough ar chaeological evidence about it on Edriopian soil until tire time of the Ptolemies. Ptolemy II Philadelphus (c. 285-246) fought against the Seleucids with elephants possibly brought from Etiriopia. One of his successors, Ptolemy III Euergetes (c. 246-221) left an inscribed tablet at the ancient port of Adulis. A x u m i t e Archaeology. Excavations at Axum and the surrounding regions have uncovered many objects, includ ing altars, incense burners, decorated pottery, buildings, dams, stelae, coins, and many more objects, which throw light on the artistic trends current in Axum at the time. T h e art of stonecutting and engineering was perfected at Axum as evidenced by the still-standing stelae, the ruins of tire pal ace of Enda Mika'el, the 66.8-meter-long dam at Qohaito, and the temple at Yeha, among other works. T h e later Christian kings continued this skill to build churches, such as the church at Abba Garima by Emperor Gabra Masqal (c. 550-575), the monastery of Dabra Damo,
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or even the famous church of gold and marble at San'a in Yemen built by the Ethiopian viceroy Abraha. The foun dations of tire famous church of Axum, where Ethiopians believe the original Tablets of the Law given to Moses or the Ark of the Covenant are found, go back to this period. Both tire type of earth and the artistic style of Axumite architecture and pottery have been influential in Marib and pre-Christian Yemen (Van Beek, 1967). T h e northern sluice of the great dam at Marib constructed between the fourth and sixdr centuries with headers protruding beyond the face of the wall was an Axumite technique with no real construc tion antecedent in South Arabian architecture or evidenced in the Marib region (Van Beek, 1967). One of the most important archaeological sites in Ethiopia is the commercial port of Adulis, not far away from the mod ern port of Asab in Eritrea. Probably going back to the late Hellenistic times or the early period of dre Roman Empire, Adulis came to international prominence. In later times, es pecially tire reign of Emperor Kaleb (513-547), it was a base of an important military fleet. It controlled international maritime trade moving through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, connecting Asia with the Near East and tire Medi terranean world. Adulis traded in ivory, tortoise shell, apes, hippopotamus hides, and obsidian (used for jewelry and mirrors). Trade enhanced die ancient Ethiopian Empire to establish cultural interchange not only witir Asia but also witir Rome. Archaeological remains point to Adulis as tire area where tire early Christian missionaries, who were Red Sea traders and travelers, began their evangelizing activities. Adulis was sacked in 640 CE by an Arab force. In the nineteenth century, the first almost simultaneous discovery of Sabaean or Proto-Ethiopic inscriptions in Ye men and Ethiopia by David Heinrich Muller (1894) and Theodore Bent (1893) respectively, and by J. Halevy subsequently in both countries opened a new era of archaeo logical and epigraphic research in the region. Eduard Glaser (1891, 1895) in Yemen and Enno Littmann in Ethiopia (1913) advanced the research for these inscriptions which continue to be discovered up to today but which still require a more extensive survey. Many of the inscriptions found in and around Axum help us outiine and understand not only the history of Ethiopian wars and expeditions and political state but also the character of ancient Ethiopian society and religion. Even in pre-Christian times, the author of tire Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, who visited Axum around the second century BCE and wrote of its important commercial relations with the Greco-Roman world, observed that the Edriopian king "Zoskales" was well acquainted with Greek literature. Numerous Greek inscriptions, including die im portant trilingual inscription of Ezana, have also been found in northern Etiriopia. ETHIOPIA. Early Ethiopian altar dedicated to the moon godAlmaqah. Among dre numerous stone stelae witir detailed inscrip From Malazo, near Axum; dated to the fifth century BCE. Archae tions are three inscriptions of Emperor Ezana (c. 320-360). ological Museum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (Werner Forman/Art Re The first of tiiese is a ttilingual inscription about the war source, NY)
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the spiritual center of the nation and Axum the national holy city. The techniques of stonecutting and building continued. There have been discovered all over northern and central Ethiopia more than two hundred churches hewn out of rock. Beginning in the tenth century there was a cultural reawak ening. A city of rock-hewn churches was built at new site called Lalibela, supposedly named for the king who founded the city. Although general and artistic descriptions of these churches abound in modern writings on Ethiopia, and Lal ibela itself is a major tourist attraction, very little archaeo logical work has been done in and around its churches. One of the most important archaeological finds in Ethio pia is a diverse and large amount of ancient coins dating from the third to the seventh century CE. In many of the ruins of the great Structures of Axum and the surrounding regions, large finds of coins have been made. These coins not only reflect upon tire wealth of ancient Ethiopia, but they also bear an important record of history and help us directly with reconstructing Axumite chronology and ancient Ethi opian history. Ethiopia was the only ancient kingdom in all of Africa to issue its own coinage. The use of foreign money by international merchants in Adulis, which is reported first in the Periplus of the Ery thraean Sea about two thousand years ago, has been con firmed by the discovery of foreign coins in recent excava ETHIOPIA. Altar with Sabaean inscription in the service of the moon tions, which have also brought to light diverse indigenous god Almaqah. From Melazo, near Axum, dated to die fifth century Ethiopian Axumite coinage. Originating from at least early BCE. Archaeological Museum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (Werner ForChristian times, it was struck of gold, silver, bronze, and man/Art Resource, NY) other metals overlaid with gold. The coinage exhibits the royal head, the crown, and, in later times, the cross. Other coin finds feature half-length profile busts of kings wearing with Tsarane in nonvocalized Ge'ez, Sabaean (Protofringed robes and necldaces, bracelets, and armlets or hold Ge'ez), and Greek. The second written in Ge'ez and Greek ing a sword, a spear, or a hand cross and framed by two deals with the conquest of the Beja, a nomadic and warlike stalks of wheat. Some coins have a double representation of tribe. The third, perhaps dre most important, deals with the the royal image thought to be unique in ancient coinage. conquest of the Noba, who occupied much of Nubia. The first two inscriptions call Ezana the son of the god Mahrem, The most common reverse motif on silver and bronze son of Ares, whereas the third is dedicated in the name of coins after tire conversion of Ezana in 330 CE is the cross the Lord of Heaven. From this evidence, historians have (Latin and Greek, diamond-shaped, and other variants). deduced drat Ezana was the first Ethiopian king to be con According to Bent Juel-Jensen (1991) and Stuart Munroverted to Christianity. Others, however, hold that inscrip Hay (1984), the Axumite kings were the first Christian rulers tions of the later centuries including those of Emperor Kaleb to display tire cross on their coins. Less common motifs de (c. 514-546) that call upon tire Trinity are evidence not only pict an architectural reverse. One type shows an arch sup of Ethiopia's conversion to Christianity but of Christianity's ported on double columns. The second (of Armah) depicts triumph in Africa. the columns supporting a central gold-inlaid cross flanked by two others with a key-shaped object under the arch. Ac After about the middle of the seventh century Ethiopia cording to the numismatist Munro-Hay (1989a, 1993), these lost control over the Red Sea trade, which had been a major pieces may refer to both the conquest of Jerusalem by the source of economic and international strength, and entered Persians in 614 and either to Calvary or to the Holy Sepula period of isolation. T h e decline of its maritime trade be cher. came one of the main reasons for an interest in Ethiopia's hinterland for other areas of economic wealth and stability. Greek was used primarily on gold coins, but Ge'ez came Probably in the tenth century tire capital was moved to Agaw to predominate later on coins of otiier metals. King Wazeba in the middle highlands, where Christianity was translated used Ge'ez on his gold and silver coins. On earlier coins the into indigenous African cultural terms. The north remained inscriptions call the kings "Son of Mahrem." Some of the
ETHIOPIA earliest Christian coins depict the cross framed by the words "May this please the people." Other phrases and statements "by the grace of God," " M H D Y S , by this cross he will con quer," "joy and peace to the people," "Christ is with us," or "mercy and peace." T h e inscriptions also reveal the names of a dozen wellknown and about two dozen lesser-known kings of Axum. They span approximately the late third and the seventh cen turies, representing the period of the rise and decline of the Axumite Empire. Among the finds are thin gold coins of kings Allamidas, Ella Gabaz, Ioel, Hataz/Iathlia, Israel, and Gersem. Emperor Kaleb, whose famous campaign against Dhu-Nawwas in Yemen took place about 525, is one of the last Axumite kings who issued a large number of gold coins. Axumite coinage fluctuated in weight. According to Munro-Hay (1984, 1993), the fluctuations parallel those of Roman coinage. T h e heaviest gold coins equal the Roman half-aureus standardized at about i.6g, like the Roman tremissis of the monetary reforms of Constantine the Great. T h e gold content also varies, the earlier coins being up to 90 percent. In the mid-fourth century King Ezana's issues were 80 percent. Fifth- and sixth-century coinage was 60-70 per cent, Kaleb's coins had 64.2 percent; and Ella Gabaz' and Yoel's coins possessed only 50 percent. Numismatists think that the decline in the gold content of the coinage must have caused tire collapse of the monetary system in the seventh century. T h e oldest extant coins date to the fourth quarter of the third century and depict King Endubis, king of Axum, and his divine symbol. T h e king wears a helmet, depicted on both the obverse and reverse of his gold coins. Aphilas, Endubis's successor, issued coins made of gold, silver, and bronze with different sizes and designs. These exhibit vari ously the disk and the crescent, which were religious sym bols, above an elaborate high tiara situated on a colonnade or a tiered bust. Although the reverse was inscribed, the ob verse had no text. T h e Axumite Empire is distinguished among many an cient states not only for its production of coinage but also for the minting of gold coins, as in Rome and Persia. T h e coins witness the great economic and political influence of the empire and its international trade connections with the Roman and Persian empires and the Indian continent. Un fortunately, with the decline and disintegration of the Red Sea trade in the seventh century, the Ethiopian capital moved further inland, and the international monetary sys tem was no longer of use. With the demise of Axum, the production of coins dwindled and thereafter ceased proba bly around 630. Archaeological P o t e n t i a l of Ethiopia. Ethiopia is still a largely unexplored archaeological paradise. Even many structures that stand above ground have not been fully re corded and studied. According to Ethiopian Church tradition, the Ethiopian
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eunuch of the Book ofActs (8:27-39), was the first Christian missionary to Ethiopia. Christian missionary activities must have indeed begun all along the Red Sea regions beginning in the first century. Scholars believe that Ethiopia did not adopt Christianity as the state religion until the fourth cen tury, when Ethiopia was at the height of its political, military, and economic power. T h e claim that Christianity did not gain eminence until the sixth century that occasionally is aired is speculation based on the tradition that the first Ethi opian Christian ldngs were Abraha and Asbaha, who ruled in that later period. In a highly africanized form, Christianity gave rise to the dominant culture of Ethiopia—its literature, art, music, law, and architecture. During the fourth and fifth centuries the entire Ethiopian plateau in the north was so thoroughly christianized that Cosmas, the famous Egyptian monk who visited Ethiopia about 525, returned impressed that there were "everywhere churches of the Christians, bishops, martyrs, monks, and hermits, by whom the gospel . . . is proclaimed." The sites of many ancient churches still remain unexcavated. During the fifth through fifteenth centuries, there arose in the east several Muslim states such as Ifat, Dawaro, Hadya, Saho, Bali, and Afar that were assimilated into the Ethiopian empire. Little archaeological work has taken place in these regions. Likewise, many Christian sites of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries await excavation. This era, which was a period of ecclesiastical revival, consists of the Zagwe dynasty (1137-1270) and the so-called Solomonid dynasty (1270-15 27). [See also Adulis; Axum; Fladar; Matara; awdMeroe.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Alvares, Francisco. Prester John of the Indies, Translated by Lord Stan ley of Alderley. Edited by C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford. Cambridge, 1961. Anfray, Francis. "Chronique archeologique, 1960-64." Annates d'Eth-
iopie 6 (1965): 3-48. Anfray, Francis. "Le Musee Archeologique d'Asmara." Rassegna di
Studi Etiopici 21 (1965): 5-15. Anfray, Francis. "Enselale, avec d'autres sites du Choa, de 1'Arssi et un ilot du lac Tana." Annates d'Ethiopie 11 (1978): 153-180. Athanasius. Historical Tracts. Translated by John Henry Newman. Ox ford, 1843. See pages 182-183,
Athanasius. Apologia ad imperatorum Constantium. In Patrologia graeca. Vol. 25. Paris, 1857. See page 636. Azai's, Francois, and Roger Chambard. Cinq annees de recherches archeologiques en 6thiopie. 2 vols. Paris, 1931.
Bent, J. Theodore. The Sacred City of the Ethiopians. London, 1893. Bianchi Barriviera, Lino. Le chiese in roccia di Lalibela e di altri luoghi del Lasta. Rome, 1963. Bureau, Jacques. "Note sur les eglises du Gamo." Annates d'Ethiopie 10 (1976): 295-303. Caquot, Andre. "Note sur Berber Maryam." Annates d'Ethiopie 1 (1955): 109-116. Caquot, Andre, and Pierre Nautin. "Une nouvelle inscription grecque d'Ezana, roi d'Axoum." Journal des Savants 72 (1970): 260-274.
Casson, Lionel, ed, and trans. The "Periptus Maris Erylhraei": Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton, 1989,
278
ETHIOPIC
Munro-Hay, Stuart C. "The al-Madhariba Hoard of Gold Aksumite Cecchi, Antonio. Da Zeila alle frontiere del Cajja. Rome, 1886. and Late Roman Coins." Numismatic Chronicle 149 (1989a): 83-100. Cerulli, Enrico. "Documenti arabi per la storia deU'Etiopia." In MeMunro-Hay, Stuart C , et al. Excavations at Aksum: An Account of Re morie della Reale Accademia del Lincei, 6th ser., vol. 4. Rome, 1931. Cerulli, Enrico. Etiopi in Paleslina: Storia della comunita etiopica di Gersearch at the Ancient Ethiopian Capital Directed in 1972-4 by the Late usalemme. 2 vols. Rome, 1953-1957. Dr. Neville Chitlick. Memoirs of the British Institute in Eastern Af Cerulli, Enrico. Storia della lelteratura etiopica. Milan, 1956. rica, no. to. London, 1989b. Christliche Kunst am Alhiopien und Nubien. Vienna, J 964. Exhibition Munro-Hay, Stuart C. "A New Silver Coin of King Aphilas of Ak catalogue, Museum fiir VSlkerkunde. sum." Numismatic Chronicle 150 (1990): 238. Conti Rossini, Carlo. Storia d'Etiopia. Bergamo, 1928. Munro-Hay, Stuart C. "Aksumite Coinage." In African Zion: The Sa Cosmas Indicopleustes. The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egypcred Art of Ethiopia, edited by R. Grierson. New Haven, 1993. tian Monk. Translated and edited by John W. McCrindle. London, Oddy, W. A., and Stuart C. Munro-Hay. "The Specific Gravity Anal 1897. ysis of the Gold Coins of Aksum." Metallurgy and Numismatics 1 Drewes, Abraham J. Inscriptions de TElhiopie antique. Leiden, 1962. (1980): 73-82, pis. 2-4. Gerster, Georg. Churches in Rock: Early Christian Art in Ethiopia. Lon Procopius. De bello Persico. Translated by H. B. Dewing. Cambridge, don, 1970. Mass., 1914. Gigar, Tesfaye. "Inscriptions sur bois de trois eglises de Lalibala." Schneider, Madeleine. "Steles funeraires arabes de Quiha." Annates Journal of Ethiopian Studies 17 (1984): 107-126. d'Elhiopie 7 (1967): 107-122. Glaser, Eduard. Nochmals die Adulitanische Inschrift. Das Ausland, Schneider, Madeleine. "Documents epigraphiques de l'Ethiopie.'Mra1891. nales d'Elhiopie 9 (1972): 103-113; 10 (1973): 8 1 - 9 3 ; (t974): Glaser, Eduard. Die Abessier in Arabien und Afrika. Munich, 1895. 133. Groom, Nigel. Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Schneider, Madeleine. "Trois nouvelles inscriptions royales d'AxTrade. London, 1981. oum." In IV congresso internazionale di studi etiopici, vol. I, pp. 767Heldman, Marilyn E. "Early Byzantine Sculptural Fragments from Ad 786. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Quaderno 191. Rome, 1974. ulis." Paper presented at the Tenth International Conference of Schneider, Madeleine. "Deux inscriptions ethiopiennes." Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Paris, 1988. Ethiopian Studies 15 (1982): 125-130. Heldman, Marilyn, et al. African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, edited Schoff, Wilfred H., ed. and trans. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, by Roderick Grierson. New Haven, 1993. New York, 1912. Huntingford, G. W. B., ed. and trans. The Periplus of the Erythraen Sea.Strelcyn, Stefan. "Quelques inscriptions ethiopiennes." Bibliotheca Or London, 1980. ientalist (1979): 137-156. Ibn Hisham, 'Abd al-Malik. Kitdb sirat Rasiil Allah. 2 vols. Edited by Uhlig, Siegbert. Athiopische Paldographie. Athiopistische Forschungen, Ferdinand Wustenfeld. Gottingen, 1858-1860. 22. Stuttgart, 1988. Isaac, Ephraim, and C. Felder. "Reflections on the Origins of the Ethi Van Beek, Gus W. "Monuments of Axum in die Light of South Ara opian Civilization." In Proceedings of the Eighth International Confer bian Archaeology." Journal of the American Oriental Society 87.2 ence of Ethiopian Studies, vol. 1, pp. 71-83. Addis Ababa, 1984. (1967): 113-122. Johanson, Donald, and MaiUand Edey. Lucy: The Beginnings of EPHRAIM ISAAC HumanKind. New York, 1981. Juel-Jensen, Bent. "Was the Design of One of Offa's Coins Inspired by the Silver of King Abana of Aksum?" Spinks Numismatic Circular 97 (1989): 296. Juel-Jensen, Bent. "A New Aksumite Coin from the Early Christian E T H I O P I C . A language belonging to the Ethiopie Se Period." Spinks Numismatic Circular 99 (1991): 39. mitic subcategory of the southern group of Semitic, Ethiopie Kitchen, Kenneth A. "The hand of Punt." In The Archaeology ofAfrica: is more specifically known as classical Ethiopie or Ge'ez Food, Metals, and Towns, edited by Thurstan Shaw et al., pp. 587(Eth., gd'dz, perhaps derived from a rootg'z "become free"; 608. London and New York, 1993. less probably, "depart," "change camp"). Ethiopie Semitic, Kobischanov, Yuri M. Axum. Translated by Lorraine T. Kapitanoff. State College, Pa., 1979. a highly differentiated family of some fifteen languages, Lepage, Claude. "Les monuments C h r e t i e n s rupestres de Degum, e n probably developed out of a lingua franca based on one or Ethiopie (rapport preliminaire)." Cahiers Archeologiques 22 (1972): more varieties of South Semitic imported into die Horn of 167-200. from Southern Arabia (modern Yemen), perhaps in Littmann, Enno. The Legend of the Queen of Sheba in the Legend ofAfrica Ak connection witir Soutiiern Arabian migration or trading ac sum. Leiden, 1904. tivity Littmann, Enno. Publications of the Princeton Expedition to Abyssinia. 4 at some time during the first millennium BCE. Ge'ez vols. Leiden, 1910-1915. belongs to tire Northern group of Ethiopie Semitic lan Littmann, Enno, et al. Deutsche Aksum-Expedition. 4 vols. Berlin, 1913.guages, as does its close relative Tigrinya, the language of MaqrTzT, Ahmad ibn 'All. Historia regum Islamiticorum in Abyssinia. modern Eritrea). It is attested in its full classical form by the Translated and edited by Friedrich Theodor Rink. N.p., 1790. Moberg, Axel, e d . and trans. The Book of the Himyarites. Lund, 1924. fourth century CE but probably had disappeared as a spoken language by the tenth century. Ge'ez has survived as an ec Moore, E. "Ethiopian Crosses from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Cen tury." In Proceedings of the First International Conference on the History clesiastical and liturgical language. Until the nineteenth cen of Ethiopian Art, London, 1986, pp. 110-114, figs. 148-182. London, tury, it was, for all practical purposes, the sole written lan 1989. guage of Ethiopia. T h e official language of modern Etiriopia Muller, David Heinrich. Epigraphische Denkmaler aus Abessinien. Berlin, is Amharic, one of a dozen or more languages making up 1894. the Southern group of Ethiopie Semitic languages. Munro-Hay, Stuart C. The Coinage of Aksum. New Delhi, 1984. 11
I 2 8 _
ETHIOPIC Ethiopia writing systems. Columns 1-8 show the Ethiopia syllabary (each sign represents the row/column consonant-vowel combination); columns 9 - 1 0 show the Old South Arabian alphabet (OS A signs for s , theta, delta, z, and gamma not used in Ethiopic). TABLE I .
3
1 h
I h
m §
r s q
b t
3 Cu
4 Ci
u A 1I1 on
O A ,lv on. W 4.
V. A, ih.
Hi
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ft
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p
T
q
w
V
ca
V
a. 04. T.
8 Co
K. A. A. "1
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IT A
1
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T
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c
C
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/,
7 Ca
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h
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q
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n
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11
k
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T h e writing system used for all Ethiopic Semitic lan guages (see table 1 ) clearly developed from a South Semitic consonantal script of the type attested in Epigraphic South Arabic. A unique feature distinguishing this from all other West Semitic scripts is its evolution in tire direction of a syllabary by the introduction of a distinct modification of the basic consonantal character for each of the seven vowels (/i e a a 3 0 u/) of the language. There is, however, no special sign for a consonant not followed by a vowel (the Cd sign is used), or for consonant gemination (doubling), an impor tant feature of Ge'ez morphology. T h e consonantal inven tory of Ge'ez contains most of the "emphatic" and laryngeal consonants expected in a Semitic language. It is important to note, however, that the set of consonants is unique in having both an "emphatic" (globalized) /p'/ and a class of "labio-velar" consonants (velars with a zo-offglide) /k g q h /. In verbal morphology Ge'ez shares with other Western Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic) tire de w
w
w
w
279
velopment of a perfective (past) tense based on suffixed subject elements; its irnperfective (present-future), how ever, preserves an archaic construction found elsewhere only in Akkadian. In the paradigm of the base form of the perfective and irnperfective of the verb qtl ("kill") shown in table 2, note also the /k/ in the first person singular and sec ond person perfective subject suffixes, instead of the /t/ found in the other languages. Of the three Common Semitic nominal case suffixes, nominative /-u/, genitive /-i/, accusative /-a/, only the accu sative survives in Ge'ez. Like Arabic and South Arabian, Ge'ez forms the plural of a large portion of its nouns by replacing the vowel pattern of the singular: kalb/aklab "dog/ dogs," wald/wdlud "son/sons," kanfarlkandfdr "lip/lips." Syntactically, Ge'ez tends to follow tire verb-subject-object clause word-order pattern favored in West Semitic lan guages but less rigorously than some of the other languages. T h e written attestation of Ge'ez starts with a limited num ber of monumental inscriptions in an archaic nonvocalized form of the script. By the time of the fourth-century CE king Ezana, we find a number of long, vocalized, and monumen tal texts on stelae (essentially campaign narratives) from the capital, Axum, monotheistic (presumably Christian) in con tent, which show both the language and script in their es sentially classic form. There are earlier polytheistic texts in nonvocalized Ethiopic script from the same ruler. Some of these texts are accompanied by Greek translations and tran scriptions into South Arabian script. Properly speaking, the earliest period of Ge'ez literature seems to date from the evangelization of Ethiopia, perhaps from the sixth century. (Few, if any, of the preserved Ge'ez manuscripts can be dated confidently before dre twelfth century.) This literature consists largely of translations and adaptations from Greek and possibly Syriac: the Bible and Apocrypha, liturgical texts, rules of Pachomius, collections of exttacts from the Church Fathers, and hagiographical accounts. After a "dark period," which began in tire eighth century and lasted for several hundred years, the literary tradition picks up again in connection with new monastic foundations and reestablishment of a link with the Alexandria patriarchate in the eleventh century. There is still a strong translation compo nent, now largely from Arabic (itself in turn frequently a translation from Greek, Coptic, or Syriac), but there are also
TABLE 2.
Perfective and Irnperfective of the Verb Qtl ("Kill") PERFECTIVE
I 2 m 2f
3 m 3f
IMPERFECTIVE
Sg.
PI.
Sg.
PI.
qatal-ku qatal-ka qatal-ki qatal-a qatal-at
qatal-na qatal-kdmmu qatal-kfln qatal-u qatal-a
6-qattdl td-qattfl tt-qattal-i ya-qattdl td-qattdl
nfl-qattdl tfl-qattal-u td-qattdl-a y3-qattdl-u y3-qattdl-a
280
ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY
new, original, and indigenous works in an ecclesiastical vein. These works include hagiography, local chronicles, and li turgical, devotional, and apocalyptic literature. Further more, court literature includes royal chronicles, a "national epic" (Kdbra Nagast.—"The Glory of Kings"—recounting the origins of the ruling dynasty from a union of Solomon and Sheba, here, an Ethiopian queen), and legal documents. A tradition of magical texts continues into the twentieth cen tury, its most visible manifestation being the ubiquitous "magic scrolls" composed in Ge'ez for individual clients by learned clerics and worn as an amulet, rolled up in a leather case. [See also Semitic Languages.]
the material culture. Some scholars therefore restrict the term ethnoarchaeology to describe and define problem-ori ented fieldwork. Others prefer a broader definition and refer to problem-oriented field archaeology as either action ar chaeology (Kleindienst and Watson, 1956) or living archae ology (Gould, 1977). Archaeologists and anthropologists have used ethno graphic data to aid in interpretation and reconsu-uction since at least the mid-eighteenth century. Initially those data were used to study hunting-and-gathering societies. They were usually collected to study modern examples of those soci eties and were only secondarily applied to archaeological in terpretation. In 1900, J. W. Fewkes used the term ethnoar chaeology to describe this type of research, but for much of BIBLIOGRAPHY the twentieth century the term has been only loosely defined Dillmann, August. Lexicon linguae aethiopicae. Leipzig, 1865. The basic(Gould and Watson, 1982). In the last forty years, advances lexicographic work, with Ethiopic script, textual citations, headwords in methodology have allowed ethnoarchaeology to emerge ordered according to script order, and translations into Latin. The as a distinct discipline within the fields of anthropology and etymologies are unreliable and should be consulted with Leslau archaeology. Two important changes have taken place: (1987). there has been a linkage between archaeological and eth Dillmann, August. Ethiopic Grammar. 2d ed. London, 1907. The basic nographic fieldwork, so that the primary purpose of collect grammar. Hetzron, Robert. Ethiopian Semitic: Studies in Classification. Journal ing of ethnographic data is to assist in reconsu-uctions; and Semitic Studies, Monograph no. 2. Manchester, 1972. Consult for scholars have consciously expanded the boundaries of eth the relations of Ethiopic Semitic languages to one another, and to noarchaeology to include virtually all preindustrial soci Semitic generally. eties—horticultural, agrarian, herding, nomadic, and mari Lambdin, Thomas O. Introduction to Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez). Harvard time. Semitic Studies, no. 24. Missoula, Mont., 1978. Good for self-in
struction; exercises and grammar given in Roman transcription only. Methodology. Ethnoarchaeologists generally agree that Leslau, Wolf. An Annotated Bibliography of the Semitic Languages ofEthi the primary purpose of ethnoarchaeology is to aid archae opia. La Haye, 1965. ologists and anthropologists in the difficult task of interpre Leslau, Wolf. Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic). Wies tation. This occurs primarily in two ways: hypotheses con baden, 1987. Entries and subentries in Roman transcription, ordered by transcription alphabet, widi up-to-date and reliable etymologies. cerning the use and origin of particular artifacts or Leslau, Wolf. Concise Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic). Wiesba architectural remains in ancient cultures are generated, and den, 1989. Same basic vocabulary coverage as above, excluding ety theories explaining the relationship between material re mologies. Entries are given in Ethiopic script, according to Ethiopic mains and the human culture that produced them are de script order. veloped and tested (Gould and Watson, 1982, pp. 356-357). Ricci, Lanfranco. "Etiiiopian Christian Literature." In The Coptic En cyclopedia, vol. 3, pp. 975-979. New York, 1991. Contains extensive However, debate continues over the role of "analogy" or bibliography. "analogical reasoning" in the interpretative process. Specif G E N E GRAGG ically, questions remain about the appropriate limits and controls for the use of analogy. Some suggest loose controls (Robert Ascher, "Analogy in Archaeological Study," South ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY. The wide variety of ap western Journal of Anthropology 17 [1961]: 317-325, Yellin, proaches, methodologies, and questions designed to en 1977); others propose that the scientific method be imposed hance archaeological interpretation through the application rigidly on the interpretive process (Binford, 1967, 1982). of ethnographic data to material remains recovered through While most recognize the need for caution in applying anal excavation is collectively known as ethnoarchaeology. More ogy, a minority of scholars suggest tiiat analogical reasoning technically, ethnoarchaeology refers to ethnographic study should be abandoned altogether on the grounds that it is conducted for the purpose of applying it to a particular ar circular and overly subjective (Freeman, 1968; Gould, in chaeological problem, such as tool construction and use, Gould and Watson, 1982). population density, use of domestic space, or pottery pro In analogical reasoning, archaeologists seek analogs, or duction. Archaeologists observe a living culture that is sim points of comparison, between a source society (contem ilar in both environmental setting and cultural character to porary, but premodern) and a subject society (ancient, often the ancient culture they are attempting to reconstruct. The prehistoric). Those who favor the use of analogy generally data from the living culture are then applied to the ancient agree that for analogical reasoning to be valid, several levels setting in order to allow a more informed interpretation of of similarity must exist—in cultural organization, environ-
ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY mental setting, subsistence strategy, and technology—be tween tire ethnographically documented culture and the archaeologically documented culture (Kramer, 1979). In his programmatic article, Ascher (1961) drew attention to dre need for a more sophisticated methodology to govern analogical reasoning. He points out that anthropologists frequendy applied data directiy from one cultural context to another (in what he called the direct-historical approach) with little sensitivity to the levels of continuity or disconti nuity between the analog and the culture to which it was applied. He suggests that ethnoarchaeologists adopt a more nuanced approach to the data to include the use of multiple analogs in interpretation; ranking the usefulness of those an alogs; incorporating more ethnographic data in interpreta tion; and showing greater sensitivity to tire differences be tween living and dead cultures under study. Lewis Binford (1967) argues that Ascher's suggestions are inadequate and that if analogy is to be used in archaeological reconstructions it must be governed by scientific method. He called for ar chaeologists to state clearly the assumptions underlying their research and to frame and test hypotheses concerning the cultures being studied. Patty Jo Watson (Gould and Watson, 1982) and Alison Wylie (1985) claim that analogical reasoning is indispens able to the interpretative process. Wylie maintains that a major reason for the resistance to analogical reasoning is its early naivete, its evolutionary determinism, and its lack of adequate controls. She further argues that because ethnoar chaeologists have advanced more sophisticated metiiodologies, the distrust of analogy is no longer valid—drat, at its core, all archaeological interpretation is analogical. Accord ing to Watson, the purpose of ethnoarchaeology is twofold: to collect analogs from as many contexts as possible and to develop theories and methodologies to govern the applica tion of these analogs to the archaeological record. She readily admits the tentative nature of analogical inference but seeks to offset any subjectivity through evaluating each proposed analog for its degree of similarity between source and subject culture. In addition, Watson emphasizes the need of further scientific testing drat would demonstrate both similarities and differences among tire cultures under question. According to Richard Gould, analogy is fundamentally flawed. He objects to its use on three points: analogical rea soning tends to be circular, it assumes a high degree of con tinuity (when it observes real or apparent parallels it claims to prove the uniformity that it has assumed); and apparent similarity among cultures does not prove that specific rela tionships actually exist between present and past practices or cultural patterns. Gould insists that analogical reasoning, and tire apparent continuity it claims to prove, cannot ade quately explain the variables inherent in human culture. Thus, he suggests that ethnoarchaeologists should concen trate on levels of cultural dissonance and .anomaly rather
281
than seek to demonstrate cultural similarities through anal ogy. Gould and others who oppose analogical inference frequendy cite "cautionary tales" to demonstrate the weak nesses of analogy and to call eitirer for better methodology or for the abandonment of analogical reasoning. These tales generally demonstrate that the proposed relationship be tween an ancient artifact and its contemporary analog does not exist, based either on problem-oriented research or newly gathered ethnographic information. The concerns regarding tire use of analogy are particularly important when prehistoric, hunter-gatherer societies are the focus of the study. In such cases, tire time gap between the society from which the ethnographic data are gathered and the culture to which they are applied often approaches thirty tirousand-forty thousand years. In the case of the ear liest hominid remains, in which tool production or even sub sistence patterns may be studied, die gap may increase sub stantially into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Generally, the greater the time gap between the two cultures being studied, tire more difficult it is to show that analogies truly exist and the more speculative die conclu sions. As noted, most early ethnoarchaeological research fo cused on prehistoric cultures. However, recent ethnographic studies have been applied to historical societies for which scholars may possess both written and archaeological re mains; in these cases, levels of continuity or discontinuity may be more easily discerned and analogy applied with greater accuracy. Despite the concerns expressed by Gould and other scholars, analogy will probably continue to play an impor tant role in ethnoarchaeological studies. Gould's criticisms have prompted scholars to be more sensitive to similarity and dissonance (or anomaly) between source and subject cultures; ethnoarchaeologists continue to be self-critical and more objective in tire ways in which they apply analogical reasoning to the archaeological record. Ethnoarchaeology a n d t h e Biblical World. As eth noarchaeology has emerged as a separate discipline, it has increasingly been applied to the archaeology of the ancient Near East. Several important studies have been conducted throughout die region, from Cyprus to tire Zagros Moun tains, and have contributed to a greater understanding of numerous cultural patterns, including use of domestic space, pottery manufacture, population, pastoral nomad ism, architecture, technology, and production. Among these issues three stand out as most significant in dealing with ancient Israel: pastoral nomadism, population, and produc tion. Pastoral nomadism. One of the major tiieories about the origins and emergence of Israel claims that the earliest Israelites were pastoral nomads who, for various socioeco nomic reasons, chose a sedentary lifestyle over nomadism. This theory initially applied analogical parallels from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century models of bedouin
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culture and camel nomadism to the biblical texts (see, for example, Johannes Pederson, Israel: Its Life and Culture, London, 1926; W. Robertson Smitir, Lectures on the Religions of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions, Edinburgh, 1889). Albrecht Alt (1925) and Martin Noth (The History of Israel, New York, 1958) then used this model in their "peaceful infiltration" theory to explain Israel's emergence in Canaan. George Mendenhall (1962) subsequently showed the weaknesses of tiiis theory, particularly because it relied on relatively late and highly idealized pictures of nomadism, and proposed an alternative model for Israel's origins. [See Israelites; and the biographies of Alt and Noth.] Recent scholarship has refined die model of pastoral no madism through ethnoarchaeological and anthropological studies of various types of nomadic societies; rather than use one rigid model of nomadism, scholars are now able to dif ferentiate among transhumant pastoralism, camel nomad ism, and traditional pastoral nomadism (see, in particular, Biblical Archaeologist 56.4 [1993]). One of the difficulties in reconstructing nomadic societies and testing their applicability to earliest Israel has been the paucity of material remains such societies leave. However, new techniques of investigation (some developed from in tensive studies of living nomadic societies) allow archaeol ogists to retrieve data even from scant archaeological re mains of ancient nomadic groups (Rosen and Avni, and Banning, in Biblical Archaeologist, 1993). Other studies con centrate on the complex social forces involved in the process of sedentarization, tire origins of the four-room or broadroom house, the way in which traditional and nomadic so cieties maintain ethnicity, subsistence strategies, and settle ment design. While these studies cannot prove or disprove the peaceful infihration theory proposed by Alt, they have allowed for its refinement and for a more nuanced under standing of a societal type that was present in Syria-Palestine in antiquity. Population. Perhaps the least controversial use of etirnoarchaeology is its application to population density in an tiquity. Ethnoarchaeologists have examined various aspects of population density in rural villages in Iran and Syria-Pal estine (including areal density and spatial patterning). Ar chaeologists most commonly use areal analysis to estimate the population of ancient Syria-Palestine. The density of population in a contemporary village is studied, and a pop ulation-to-area coefficient is applied to ancient settlements. Early studies suggested that as many as 450 to 500 persons lived on one hectare (2.5 acres) of settled space, which led to somewhat inflated estimates of population of cities and villages in antiquity. As a result of several recent and more accurate studies of population density, the most widely accepted populationto-area coefficient is now 250 persons per hectare (25 per sons per metric dunam [0.25 acre]). T o compute popula
tion, archaeologists estimate a site's total settled area and then multiply the figure by the population coefficient. For example, a series of articles on the population of Syria-Pal estine for the Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, Iron II, and Roman-Byzantine periods indicates that there were three population peaks for Syria-Palestine: tire Middle Bronze Age II, Iron Age II, and Roman-Byzantine periods (Broshi and others: 1979, 1984, 1986, 1992). Such studies allow for a better understanding of the settlement and population pat terns in particular periods and throughout the history of an entire region and thus for more accurate reconstructions of the larger socioeconomic and cultural patterns in antiquity. (Broshi, one of the pioneers in population studies, initially used the higher 450 persons per hectare coefficient; some of his early results should be recalculated using 250 persons, which will reduce estimates by about 45 percent.) [See De mography.] Production. Cultural reconstruction also involves the mode and types of production. Scholars examine such fea tures as crop types and yields, the relative importance of particular crops in production; technological innovations that affect crop types or yields, economic interrelationship among villages, and the degree to which villages were ex ploited by larger cities and their social elites. With the assistance of tire allied fields of ethnobotany and paleobotany, it is relatively easy to assess the types of crops that were most significant in the overall agrarian regimen. [See Ethnobotany, Paleobotany.] Similarly, technological shifts tend to be well represented in tire archaeological rec ord. However, additional sources of information are needed to answer questions about agricultural production and so cioeconomic interrelationships. Israel Finkelstein (The Ar chaeology of the Israelite Settlement, Jerusalem, 1988) and Baruch Rosen ("Subsistence Economy of Stratum II," in Izbet Sarta. An Early Iron Age Site near Rosh Ha'ayin, Israel. Ox ford, 1986), for example, have turned to two sources to sup plement the archaeological data: sixteenth-century CE taxa tion and census documents from tire Early Ottoman period in Syria-Palestine and documents and statistics from tire early British Mandate of Palestine (1917-1948). Although these materials were not compiled to assist archaeological interpretation, their use would be allowed under a definition of ethnoarchaeology that views archival data as legitimate for analogical inference. Using the data from these two sources, Finkelstein and Rosen attempt to reconstruct the levels of crop yields pos sible for a particular region of Syria-Palestine. These recon structions form the basis of their detailed analysis of village and regional economies, which shows how patterns of sur plus or deficit affect the production of certain crops and how patterns of trade among villages offset environmentally in fluenced patterns. However, the data from the sixteentirand early twentieth-century studies have been applied di-
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Its Settlements and Population." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 261 (February 1986): 73-90. Broshi, Magen, and Israel Finkelstein. "The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 287 (August 1992): 47-60. Carter, Charles E. "A Social and Demographic Study of Post-Exilic Judah." Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1992. Includes a discussion of ethnoarchaeological method and devises testable hypotheses to eval uate the assumption of continuity tiiat underlies recent attempts to use premodern data from Palestine to reconstruct economic patterns of that region in antiquity. David, Nicholas. "Integrating Ethnoarchaeology: A Subtle Realist Per spective." Journal ofAnthropological Archaeology 11 (1982): 330-359. Ethnoarchaeology shows significant potential for helping Study of methodological issues confronting ethnoarchaeologists, dis archaeologists interpret and understand the remains they ex tinguishing between two basic models: the "Binfordian" model, cavate. It sheds light on the problematic archaeological is which concentrates on material remains, and the "Hodderian" sues of cultural patterns, socioeconomic setting, means of model, which focuses on ideational aspects of culture. Freeman, Leslie G., Jr. "A Theoretical Framework for Interpreting Ar production, population, ethnicity of ancient societies, and cheological Materials." In Man the Hunter, edited by Richard B. Lee the relationship between ideological and material aspects of and Irven DeVore, pp. 262-267. Chicago, 1968. Calls for the aban culture. donment of analogical reasoning, suggesting that the similarities be tween ancient and modern societies and/or behavior are only appar ent and that analogical inference impedes the interpretive process. BIBLIOGRAPHY Gould, Richard A. "Some Current Problems in Ethnoarchaeology." In Alt, Albrecht. "Die landnahme der Israeliten in Palastina: TerritorialExperimental Archaeology, edited by Daniel Ingersoll et al., pp. 359— geschichtliche studien." Leipzig, 1925. See also the English transla 377. New York, 1977. Presents a broadly based definition of the term tion in Essays in Old Testament History and Religion. Oxford, 1968, ethnoarchaeology and suggests that problem-oriented ethnographic pp. 135-169research should be called living archaeology. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Anatoly Khazanov, eds. Pastoralism in the Levant: Gould, Richard A., and Patty Jo Watson. "A Dialogue on the Meaning Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Perspectives. Prehistory and Use of Analogy in Ethnoarchaeological Reasoning." Journal of Press Monographs in World Archaeology, no. 10. Madison, Wis., Anthropological Archaeology 1 (1982): 355-381. Opposing viewpoints 1992. Important contribution to the discussion of pastoralism, in on the use of analogy present and a discussion of the appropriate cluding reports of ethnographic research, discussions of anthropomethods of ethnoarchaeological interpretation. logical and ethnoarchaeological method, and examinations of pas Heider, Karl G. "Archaeological Assumptions and Ethnographical toralism in specific archaeological periods, regions, or sites in Facts: A Cautionary Tale from New Guinea." Southwestern Journal antiquity. of Anthropology 23 (1967): 52-64. Uses ethnographic research to Biblical Archaeologist 56.4 (1993): "Nomadic Pastoralism: Past and show that certain assumptions concerning tool use in prehistoric Present." Includes five articles on ethnoarchaeology as it relates to hunter-gatherer societies, arrived at through analogical reasoning, pastoral nomadism and as recorded in archaeological remains and are incorrect; advocates greater caution in applying analogy to the Near Eastern texts (see the articles by Augustin F. C. Holl and archaeological record. Thomas E. Levy, Use Kohler-Rollefson, Stephen Rosen and Gideon Kleindienst, Maxine, and Patty Jo Watson. "'Action Archaeology': The Avni, David C. Hopkins, and E. B. Banning). Archaeological Inventory of a Living Community." Anthropology To Binford, Lewis R. "Smudge Pits and Hide Smoking: The Use of Anal morrow 5 (1956): 75-78. Pioneering article on the nature of eth ogy in Archaeological Reasoning." American Anthropology 32 (1967): noarchaeology. 1-12. In this and the article below, Binford discusses the uncritical Kramer, Carol, ed. Ethnoarchaeology: The Implications of Ethnography use of analogy and advocates the application of scientific method for Archaeology. New York, 1979. Essential introduction to the recent and die development of testable hypothesis as a means of bringing use of ethnoarchaeology and ethnography in the archaeology of the greater control to analogical reasoning. ancient Near East, including a critical introduction to ethnoarchaeol Binford, Lewis R. "Meaning, Inference, and the Material Record." In ogy and several studies in which ethnographic information from the Ranking, Resource, and Exchange, edited by Colin Renfrew and Ste Near East is applied to the archaeological record of tiiat region in phen Shennan, pp. 160-163. Cambridge, 1982. antiquity. Broshi, Magen. "The Population of Western Palestine in the RomanMendenhall, George. "The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine," Biblical Byzantine Period." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re Archaeologist 25 (1962): 66-87. search, no. 236 (Fall 1979): 1-10. This and the following articles by Wylie, Alison. "The Reaction against Analogy." In Advances in Ar Broshi, Gophna, and Finkelstein represent studies of population and chaeological Method and Theory, vol. 8, edited by Michael B. Schiffer, demography based on edmoarchaeological assessments of popula pp. 63-111. New York, 1985. Perhaps the best synopsis of the recent tion density. They show the methodological advances in such stud discussion of tile use and abuse of analogy, suggesting that all eth ies, demonstrating die use of population studies in the reconstruction noarchaeological inference is analogical. Wylie attempts to show that of wider social and economic patterns. recent developments in methodology make the objections to analogy groundless. Broshi, Magen, and Ram Gophna. "The Settlements and Population of Palestine during the Early Bronze Age II—III." Bulletin of the Amer Ycllin, John E. Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Re ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 253 (Winter 1984): 41-53. constructing the Past. New York, 1977. Pragmatic treatment of the problems involved in archaeological reconstructions that identifies Broshi, Magen, and Ram Gophna. "Middle Bronze Age II Palestine: rectly to the past without enough sensitivity to the sources of data or to the possible differences between the source and subject cultures (Carter, 1992). Although the approach may hold promise for future economic reconstructions of ancient Syria-Palestine, testable hypotheses need to be devised to determine whether the apparent continuity between these traditional cultures and those of antiquity is genuine. Only when adequate similarity between source culture and sub ject culture is demonstrated can the data be applied to an cient Israel.
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past problems and recent advances in ethnoarchaeological method ology. CHARLES E . CARTER
ETHNOBOTANY. By examining modern plant use and the interrelationship between humans and their envi ronment, archaeologists and paleoedrnobotanists can gain insight into ancient uses of plants and the processes respon sible for the deposition of the variety of botanical remains found at archaeological sites. Among the many uses of plants, that of food is perhaps the most critical. Past subsis tence practices, diet, and nutrition can be reconstructed by observing traditional methods and tools used in food prep aration and processing. To understand how plants have been used for food, how they were deposited, and how they were collected, it is helpful to turn to the practices of com parable modern societies. Studies have been carried out in Turkey and Greece to identify the by-products of crop processing activities, witir a view to determining which plants and plant parts are likely to be preserved in various contexts at a Neolithic or Bronze Age site. One such study (Hillman, 1984) identified nearly thirty different steps necessary to process emmer wheat. From threshing, winnowing, and sieving, to final sorting be fore grinding, each step in the process produced various weed seeds, chaff fragments, or odrer plant parts that were ultimately deposited elsewhere on the site as fodder, mudbrick temper, or refuse. The disposal of certain by-products in hearths or middens that are subsequentiy burned, or the accidental destruction of a storage or processing facility by fire, will result in at least some of tire specific by-products being carbonized and tirus potentially preserved. It may then be possible to correlate similar types of deposits on archae ological sites with the processing step(s) used. The edrnobotanist observes seasonal plant use, often for several years within a given community or region, in order to observe how some plants are stored while others are eaten immediately upon collection or harvest. In the course of sev eral years it may also be possible to examine plant reactions to stresses such as crop failure from drought or other cli matic disasters, depletion of wild resources as a result of the expansion of agricultural lands, or loss of wood for fuel as a result of deforestation. Most or all of these stresses were probably also felt by societies and communities in the an cient Near East at one time or another. It is, tirus, possible to formulate hypotheses about the reactions of ancient pop ulations based on a modern society's methods of coping with tire stress on flora. There is some uncertainty attendant in tiris type of eth nographic analogy: the by-products of different processing steps may not have been mixed in the same deposit, partic ular tool types found on sites may not always have been used for the same purposes, and people may not, in fact, always
react in the same ways to similar stresses. Still, ethnobotany provides a framework for speculation. It also allows an ex amination of the archaeological data from a different per spective, in order to reach the most reasonable explanation of the ancient record. [See also Agriculture; Cereals; Ethnozoology; Paleobot any; and Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Forbes, Mary. "Gathering in the Argolid: A Subsistence Subsystem in
a Greek Agricultural Community." In Regional Variation in Modem Greece and Cyprus: Toward a Perspective on the Ethnography of Greece edited by Muriel Dimen and Ernestine Friedl, pp. 251-264. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 268. New York, 1976. A look at some wild plant foods that would not be preserved archaeologically and might, therefore, be overlooked as part of the an cient diet. Hillman, Gordon. "Interpretation of Archaeological Plant Remains: The Application of Ethnographic Models from Turkey." In Plants
and Ancient Man: Studies in Palaeoethnobotany, edited by Willem van Zeist and W. A. Casparie, pp. 1-41. Rotterdam, 1984. Discusses crop-processing activities observed in Turkey over a number of years, the various by-products from each step, and analytical meth ods useful for grouping archaeological samples for comparison with an ethnobotanical counterpart. Jones, Glynis E. M. "Interpretation of Archaeological Plant Remains: Ethnographic Models from Greece." In Plants and Ancient Man: Studies in Palaeoethnobotany, edited by Willem van Zeist and W. A. Casparie, pp. 43-61. Rotterdam, 1984. Statistical analysis of weed seeds to identify the most likely steps in the processing sequence by which archaeological samples were produced. JULIE HANSEN
ETHNOZOOLOGY. The study of the way people and animals interact in a particular zoocultural system, ethno zoology seeks appropriate cultural definitions for animals as economic, symbolic, and ritual markers in a society. T o study communities and their animals in the past, etirnozoology follows ethnoarchaeology in observing how modern societies use animals to discern patterns of behavior. From diis, appropriate models are constructed against which the archaeological record can be tested. Because much etirnozoology has been directed to revealing how in the past peo ple produced animals and animal products, it has focused its research on modern pastoral societies. The limitations of ethnoarchaeology in general have applied here: extinct cul tural processes cannot be found through ethnographic anal ogy. Its potential to inform, however, is great, if appropriate examples are chosen. In tire ancient Near East, the range of animals (sheep, goat, cattle, pig, donkey, camel) exploited for food and labor was small and has not changed apprecia bly for much,of the region—with the possible exception of the increased use of domestic chicken and the decrease, since late antiquity, in the use of pig. T h e great difference between ancient and modern stock is tire introduction of improved breeds since World War II. However, because
EUGENICS MOVEMENT such animals are found only in the most sophisticated cen ters, sophisticated breeding techniques do not confer a sub stantial increase in product potential. T o study animal production systems, ethnoarchaeologists have lived with modern pastoral societies and learned much about how their management choices are influenced by en vironmental, social, political, and economic factors. These field studies have contributed enormously to models of the domestication process. Ethnozoological research also con cerns the mechanisms for the distribution of animal prod ucts. Both ethnographic and ethnohistoric records have been evaluated to produce models of the kinds of animals— by age, sex, and class—that are manipulated by central po litical authorities and markets. Together these studies have produced a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between tire "desert and the sown" and the significance of pastoral resources in the construction of political and eco nomic power. They have been significant in the evaluation of the extensive cuneiform record of centralized animal management. Another aspect is the study of cuisine, an eth nographic understanding of cooking and meal presentation in different social settings. This has proved beneficial in in terpreting archaeological data at tire household level. A final ethnoarchaeological aspect is actualistic studies of taphonomy (the study of processes that affect remains between their deposition and recovery). Bones are subject to numer ous biases—that is, to processes associated with burial that differentially destroy them. Experimental research has pro vided techniques for minimizing tire distortion these biases might bring to tire historical interpretation of archaeological materials. Ethnozoology also refers to the way people conceptualize animals. T h e study of folk taxonomy, a subdiscipline of cog nitive anthropology, has revealed universal patterns in the way folic categorize and group animals. Because the basic level in studying animal production systems is predicated on animals as scientific categories that may have little or no intersection with the folk category, any complete under standing of how such a system functioned must compre hend both. T h e underlying psychology of folk taxa and their arrangements explicates tire similarities and differences be tween folk and scientific systems. In studying tire past, folk taxonomic principles can usefully be applied to ancient texts to facilitate a more accurate identification of animal terms. For example, philologists translating ancient animal terms would try to use contextual clues about morphology and behavior to match with a modern animal identified as a Linnaean category in a scientific classification. While this is a proper route to identification on one level, few philologists have understood modern zoological classification well enough to use it effectively: many times a term is equated with a modern species when there is insufficient evidence to make such a judgment, or when the folic category is, in fact, closer to a higher-level scientific grouping. In most in
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stances, there has been little recognition that the ancients had no concept of Linnaean categories, and so only one side of the equation was revealed. T h e starting point of all "ethno-" study is to discover culturally conditioned units for investigation. Textual evidence can provide important eth nozoological data when critically evaluated. [See also Animal Husbandry; Camels; Cattle and Oxen; Equids; Etirnoarchaeology; Ethnobotany; Paleobotany; Paleozoology; Pigs; and Sheep and Goats.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atran, Scott. Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an An thropology of Science. Cambridge, 1990. Penetrating study of the uni versal patterns underlying the cognition and arrangement of animate, as opposed to inanimate, objects and their influence on modern stud ies of natural science.
Aurenche, Olivier, ed. Nomads and sedentaires: Perspectives ethnoarcheologiques. Centre Jean Palerne, Memoires, 4. Paris, 1984. Important detailed studies of communities in Syria and Iraq. Berlin, Brent, et al. "General Principles of Classification and Nomen clature in Folk Biology." American Anthropologist 75 (1973): 214-242. Major initial statement of the principles of folk classification.
Berlin, Brent. Elhnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton, 1992. In corporates Berlin's many studies of ethnobiological classification and presents fresh insights into his pioneering theories. It will stand for many years as the seminal work in the field of folk classification. Cribb, Roger. Nomads in Archaeology. Cambridge, 1991. Important eth noarchaeological study of nomads in Turkey and Iran with broad utility in the construction of models for the ancient Near East.
Kramer, Carol. Village Etirnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in Archaeological Perspective. New York, 1982. Pioneering study of the implications of the characteristics of a village in Iran for archaeological reconstruc tions.
Watson, Patty Jo. Archaeological Ethnography in Western Iran. Tucson, 1979. Important details about animal management in a sedentary society. PAULA W A P N I S H
E U G E N I C S M O V E M E N T . The term eugenics, de fining a theory of human evolutionary genetics and "racial improvement" that exerted a profound influence on archae ological interpretation in tire Mediterranean basin and Near East, was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, A widely re spected Victorian statistician and social critic, Galton sought to apply the principles of Darwinian "natural selection" to the improvement of the human race. According to tire ge netic theory first detailed in Galton's most famous work, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences (New York, 1870), human races possess varying levels of intelligence and physical capabilities. Indeed, the ability of each race—so the theory went—could be measured, to pro vide a clear hierarchy of racial groups. The movement of history, Galton contended, was pro pelled by the effects of this hereditary inequality, with "su perior" races naturally conquering and subsequently dom inating "inferior" ones. Galton and his followers further
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believed that uncontrolled interbreeding between superior and inferior races led inevitably to the degeneration of the former, and to their inevitable conquest by yet purer and superior racial groups. The early supporters of the eugenics movement in England were primarily concerned with mod ern racial issues: the social effects of massive immigration into the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the often problematic relationship between British imperial administrators and the millions of Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners they presumed to rule. Yet, one of the most important intellectual tasks undertaken by the supporters of eugenics was to demonstrate that racial inequality had been an operative factor throughout history— and that uncontrolled "race mixing" had uniformly disas trous results in all societies in which it occurred. William M. Flinders Petrie was among the first archae ologists to be deeply affected by Galtonian eugenics in the reconstruction of past societies. In 1885, Petrie accepted em ployment by Galton to travel up the Nile River and photo graph ancient Egyptian reliefs. The expectation was that the standard complement of human races, identifiable by their standard facial and bodily characteristics, could be traced back to pharaonic times. The result of this expedition was Petrie's book Racial Photographs from the Egyptian Monu ments (1887), which was among the first archaeological works to describe the various ethnic groups of the ancient Near East with modern racial terminology. Petrie further elaborated the idea of racial hierarchy in the ancient Near East in his later excavations both in Egypt and Palestine. His recognition of successive strata of occupation at every site was linked to a sequence of historical conquests. Indeed, Petrie and the generation of Near Eastern archaeologists he trained and influenced grew accustomed to associating the appearance of new classes of artifacts at stratified sites such as Gurob in Egypt and Tell el-Hesi in Palestine with the arrival (and conquest) of aggressive and technologically su perior ethnic groups. The legacy of Petrie's eugenical thinking continued to ex ert an effect on the implicit racial thinking of Near Eastern archaeology until long after his death in 1940. The statistical assumptions underlying the seriation techniques used to construct a chronological typology of ceramic types (pio neered by Petrie at Naqada, Hu, and Abadiya in Egypt) were based on the acceptance of the inevitability of a risefloruit-fall cycle in every aspect of human cultural produc tion—implicitly paralleling the supposed genetic rise-floruitfall of every interbreeding racial or ethnic group. Moreover, the identification of external invasion as the primary moti vation for the major cultural breaks in every major archae ological period, from the Chalcolithic to the end of the Cru sader period, served to transform modern archaeological research, at least partially, into an ideological justification for the aggressive expansion into the Near East of the profess
edly superior European imperial powers. The assumptions of Petrie and his followers about the cultural superiority of the supposedly northern Hyksos or Aegean-based Philis tines are two cases that illustrate his eugenical belief about the effect exerted by superior, or more innovative, races on the basically uncreative culture of Palestine. Racial terminology and eugenical thinking remained prominent in archaeological thinking through the 1930s. Considerable attention was paid by scholars to the racial origins of excavated skeletal remains and the racial connec tions of cultural forms and artifact types. Through the con tinuing use of Petrie's basic methodology of distinguishing discrete strata often uncritically linked to invasions of his torically mentioned ethnic groups, race remained a promi nent (though scientifically unverified) element in recon structions of ancient Near Eastern history. In the continuing, uncritical acceptance of rise-floruit-fall cycles in pottery types, and in the undefined attribution of social or cultural change to outside "influence" or internal "disinte gration," some scholars may still implicitly promulgate the basic concepts of eugenical history. When, or if, they do, those concepts are promulgated as inherited ideology rather than empirically verified fact. In die wake of World War II, however, die scientific bases for eugenical theories were largely undermined. Revulsion at die Nazis' final solution to the problem of "racial degen eration" ultimately paved the way for die final fall of eugen ics, both as a modern social program and a scientific theory. In the 1950s and the 1960s, with the discovery of D N A and the beginning of research into population biology and the complexity of genetic inheritance, it became clear that the concept of "races" as distinct or even measurable entities was a dangerous oversimplification. New approaches—eco nomic adaptation, innovation, cultural borrowing and ex change—in addition to invasion, came to be examined as tire cause for changes in patterns of material culture. [See also the biography of Petrie] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cowan, Ruth S. "Francis Galton's Statistical Ideas: The Influence of Eugenics." Isis 63 (1972): 509-528.
Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Con sequences. New York, 1870. Kendall, David G. "A Statistical Approach to Flinders Petrie's Se
quence Dating." Bulletin of the International Statistical Institute 40 (1963): 657-681.
Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses ofHuman Heredity. New York, 1985. Lorimer, Douglas. "Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropol ogy, 1870-1900." Victorian Studies 31 (1988): 405-430.
Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Racial Photographs from the Egyptian Monuments. London, 1887. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. "The Earliest Racial Portraits." Nature 39 (1888): 128-130. Silberman, Neil Asher. "Petrie and the Founding Fathers." In Biblical
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Archaeology Today, 1900: Proceedings of the Second International cu Con m per year), just below ar-Raqqa, draining a large area gress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by to the north, and finally the Klrabur at Bouqras (1,575 cu m Avraham Biran and Joseph Aviram, pp. 545-554. Jerusalem, 1993. per year). T h e river crosses into Iraq at Abu Kemal, near N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN the site of ancient Mari. [See Carchemish; Raqqa, ar-; Bouqras; Mari.] From the Khabur south, until Ramadi, the Middle Eu EUPHRATES. In Sumerian the name of the Euphrates phrates area is often called the Lower Jezireh (steppe), and River is BURANUN; in Akkadian, lD.KIB.NUN.KI (lit., the river is entrenched between this landform to the east and "Sippar River"); in Assyro-Babylonian, Purattu; in Old Per tire Arabian plateau to the west. It does not enter the Me sian, Ufratu; and in Greek, Eufrates. T h e river originates in sopotamian fioodplain until well south of Hit, 160 Ion (99 eastern Turkey and flows into the Arab-Persian Gulf, a dis mi.) from the Iraqi-Syrian border (Sanlaville, 1985, p. 19). tance of almost 2,700 km (1,674 ) j making it the longest T h e current 250-millimeter isohyet in this region of the Je river in western Asia. It currentiy traverses tirree modern zireh determines the difference between dry farming, irri Near Eastern states and a tiny part of a fourth. The total gation, and the development of pastoral nomadism (Zarins, area of tire Euphrates basin is 444,000 sq km (275,280 sq. 1990, fig. 3; Sanlaville, 1985, p . 20). [See Agriculture; Irri mi.), of which 27 percent (125,000) is found in Turkey, 18 gation; Pastoral Nomadism.] T h e Lower Euphrates consists percent (76,000 sq km) in Syria, 40 percent (177,000 sq km) of a series of subgeonrorphological units: in Iraq, and 15 percent (66,000 sq km) in Saudi Arabia Alluvial plain. A typical alluvial plain of braiding streams (Wakil, 1993, p. 67); 84 percent of its waters originates in creates natural levees, or river embankments, characterized Turkey, 13 percent in Syria, and 3 percent in Iraq. South of by seasonal inundation and alluvial flats. Siltation and salt tire Balikh and Klrabur Rivers, rainfall ceases to be an im become problems as transported silts in the water (from re portant contributing factor to the Euphrates flow. T h e an peated evaporation in alluvial basins or irrigated flats) cause nual rate of flow fluctuates, depending on the climatic con channel closing and salinization. The river reaches its closest ditions affecting runoff and recharge. During the flood stage point to the Tigris River near ancient Sippar and modern (March-June), when meltwater from eastern Anatolia Tau Baghdad. [See Sippar; Baghdad.] There, it enters the delta rus ranges and spring rains are at their peak, 70 percent of plain and divides into two branches. the annual flow is generated. T h e summer low Quly-OctoDelta plain. The main branch in the delta plain, tire Hinber) generates only 10 percent of the annual flow, and the diyah, flows to Samawa; the minor branch, the Hilla, con rainy season (November-February) creates die remainder: tinues past ancient Babylon and Kish to Diwaniya, joining 20 percent of annual flow. T h e rate of flow fluctuates cor the Hindiyah past Samawa. [See Babylon; Kish.] respondingly. Within die Middle Euphrates area, reports of Marsh/lake. The river creates a marsh/lake environment rate flow vary from 840 to more tiran 1,000 cu m per second) as it flows past Nasiriyyah, skirting north of Lake Hammar, (Hardan, 1993, pp. 75-78; Tomanbay, 1993, p. 60; Akkerthen joining the Tigris at Qurmat Ali. The combined mans, r99oa, p. r23; Sanlaville, 1985, p. 24). The annual streams form tire Shatt al-Arab in the estuarine zone. rate also varies from year to year, witir a typical average for Estuarine zone. T h e single stream of the Shatt al-Arab several years reported at 2,600 million cu m per year (San flows past Basra, where it is joined by the Karun and Karlaville, 1985, p. 24). kheh Rivers from Iran. All four flow past Abadan and create T h e river can be divided into a number of distinct geo a delta near Fao as drey empty into tire Arab-Persian Gulf. graphic units, depending on geomorphological conditions. In this area, the pinching Batin and Karun and Karkheh First, the Upper Euphrates is found in eastern Anatolia, River deltas constrict the modern Shatt al-Arab (Buringh, Turkey (from the Turkish perspective, the Lower Euphra 1957; Sanlaville, 1989). tes). There, two separate branches can be considered the T e n existing dams are currentiy operating on tire river source of the river. T h e western branch, the Kara Su, begins system. T h e Hindiyah barrage is dre oldest, having been in a small lake north of Erzurum and flows west. The eastern built in 1911-1914. (The others are the Keban, Karakaya, branch, dre Murat Su, also begins as a small lake east of Atatiirk, Tabqa, Haditha, Baghdadi, Ramadi, Falluja, and Erzurum and flows west, paralleling the Kara Su. T h e two Hilla.) The latest dams, such as the Ataturk in Turkey, were branches join north of Malatya to form the Euphrates (Tk., completed in 1990. On-line (i.e., functioning) dams such as Firat) proper. Crossing the Taurus and the front range, tire the Keban in Turkey, the Tabqa in Syria, and Haditha in river then flows several hundred kilometers in a southerly Iraq have created unique archaeological opportunities in ar direction, until it enters tire Syrian plain at ancient Carcheeas otherwise poorly known (see below). Additional dams mish. There, the Middle Euphrates (sometimes called the are in various stages of construction or planning on the river Upper Jezireh) receives its Syrian tributaries; first, the Sador its tributaries—particularly in Turkey and Syria (Khata, jur (100 million cu m per year), then tire Balikh (190 million Birecik, Carchemish, Saab, Shouher, Taaf). As a result of m L
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modernization plans, annual usage will be increased dra matically both for agricultural and industrial use. Because the river flows through three countries, future regulation of the Euphrates's waters is essential—a situation exacerbated by increasing competition for its waters and an incomplete understanding of tire amount of water available annually. Geological examination of the river's history has been spotty. Little is known from the source areas and the upper region; the Lower Euphrates has been more intensively ex amined. Initial work in the Middle Euphrates area suggests that the entire system originated in the Miocene graben, or depression, with subsequent Pliocene-Pleistocene depres sions leading to tire creation of a modern Euphrates. Tec tonic movement during those two periods largely deter mined the course of fossil and present-day streams (Akkermans, 1990a, p. 122; 1990b, pp. 15-17). In Syria, ter race remains are attributed to multiple periods, from tire Lower through tire Upper Pleistocene. At Mari, Paul Sanlaville suggests that a four-terrace system (T4-T1) can be recognized, with the highest at +40 m. The middle terrace (+20-30 m) belongs to the Lower Paleolithic (c. 250,000 BP), and the + 5-8-meter terrace has been identified as be longing to the Wiirm (Sanlaville, 1985, p. 22, fig. 4). In Iraq, researchers have suggested that three or more ter race systems may belong to the Middle Pleistocene (Paepe, 1971). Perhaps as far back as 500,000 years ago, and as re cently as 10,000 years ago, the Euphrates on the central Iraqi alluvial plain was part of a single river system emanating from Wadi Tharthar. Alluviation and tectonic activity not only created terraces but the current Euphrates River valley. (Paepe, 1971). Bifaces found on several of the highest ter races suggest a clear-cut Lower-Middle Paleolithic affilia tion. The Wadi Rimah/Wadi al-Batin complex, draining some 70,000 sq km (43,400 sq. mi.) in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also follows a graben system and was a tributary system to an ancient Euphrates basin in the Late Pliocene and Pleis tocene. [See Kuwait.] While ephemeral flow has been noted only for the last five thousand years, the latest water data suggest that 32 million cu m per year flow past stations in tire Wadi Rimah basin (Sowayan and Allayla, 1989, p. 482). At least two or three terraces of fluvial/eolian origin are noted of Quaternary date (Sanlaville, 1989, fig. 3, p. 10). Aquifer water studies confirm tire Pleistocene nature of the stream flow. By Early Holocene times, the Middle Euphrates river was in its present form. Western tributaries in Iraq and Syria traversing the desert are almost always associated with Early Holocene industries, suggesting active river systems. These flowed into either the current Euphrates or playa lakes west of the modern river (Khor Habbaniya, Abu Dibbis/Bahr alMilh; Zarins, 1990, p. 50). One of the main Early Holocene channels then passed Ramadi to Kerbala-Najaf. According
to J. Boerma, the Upper Euphrates channelization has been entrenched since 8000 BCE (Boerma, 1983, p. 362). Archae ologists have also suggested that the Tigris-Euphrates em anated south of Baghdad as one stream, out of which nu merous branches emerged (Crawford, 1991, p. 8; Adams, 1972, maps 2-3; Adams 1981, figs. 9, 27). By the sixth mil lennium, only the main channel remained in tire middle of the alluvium. Even as late as tire third and second millennia BCE, branches of the Euphrates continued to dominate the Sippar area (Gasche, 1985, p. 581). Subsequently, in the late first millennium BCE, the river began its migration westward, to its present position. In the marsh/lake region, prior to 5000 BCE, the Euphrates ran across what is today the south ern Khor al-Hammar to Zubair and then to U m m Qasr, forming two channels past Bubiyan Island (Zarins, 1992, fig. 1). The Wadi Batin river and delta near Zubair may have been reactivated in this period as well. The effects of tire Flandrian Transgression affected tire Euphrates Delta, and the marine shoreline was considerably inland in historical times (c. 5000-2500 BCE). By 2000 BCE, the more modern conditions were reached (Sanlaville, 1989; Zarins, 1992, fig. 1). Archaeological associations with the river are numerous (for a recent summary, see Wright, 1992). T h e most recent detailed work has taken place in the Upper Euphrates re gion. Sites threatened by flooding brought archaeologists to examine the Altinova plain associated with the Keban dam—and more recently sites associated with the Ataturk dam. A rich association of tell sites stretching from the PrePottery Neolithic (Cafer Hoyiik, Hayaz Hoyiik) through the Ceramic Neolithic/Chalcolithic (Tepecik, Norsuntepe, Korucutepe) to the late third millennium BCE (Hassek Hoyiik, Kurban Hoyiik, Lidar Hoyiik) suggests that the archaeology of the region has close ties to the Middle Syrian Euphrates region to the south (Mellink, 1992, pp. 208-214). These and other sites (e.g., Samosata, Zeugma-Apamea, Tille) also cast light on later historical groups—Hittites and NeoHittites, Assyrians/Urartians, Arameans, and ParthoRomans—and on the Islamic period (Ward, 1990). [See Hittites; Assyrians; Urartu; Arameans.] In the Middle Euphrates region, archaeological sites are to be found associated directly with the river, with the Balildr tributary, the Khabur triangle, and areas to the west, such as Jebel Bishri and the el-Kowm region. Archaeological work in the region has increased considerably as a result of nowcompleted or ongoing dam construction. Sites in the Taqba dam reservoir have, in particular, changed the perception of dre region. Especially important are the sequences from Mureybet and Abu Hureyra, which shed light on the agri cultural revolution from tire tenth to sixth millennia (San laville, 1985, p. 18). [See Mureybet.] From the Late Uruk period, sites such as Habuba Kabira, Jebel 'Aruda, and other have shown direct connections with the Late Uruk of south-
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ern Mesopotamia, suggesting the establishment of Late Uruk "colonies" from the south. [See Habuba Kabira; Col onization.] In addition to well-known tributary sites such as Tell Halaf and Chaghar Bazar, recent work has considerably advanced what is known of the prehistoric to historical pe riods. Tell Leilan, identified with Shubat-Enlil, in the Kha bur triangle, may be the most important recent discovery. [See Halaf, Tell; Leilan, Tell.] T h e site of Mari, known from the French excavations begun in the 1930s, has yielded not only tremendous second-millennium BCE textual and artifactual data, but recently data stretching back to the Early Dynastic I period (Schwartz and Weiss, 1992, pp. 221-243) • North of Mari, ongoing work at Dura-Europos will also elu cidate the problems of the classical period both within the Euphrates valley and in such desert centers as Palmyra. [See Dura-Europos; Palmyra.]
of the other Sumerian towns of the delta alluvium as the primary centers of Sumerian political and religious focus left its imprint on biblical studies as well (especially Gn. 1 - 1 1 ) — in the Flood stories, Creation accounts, and the explanation for the origin of cities (Kramer, 1963, pp. 269-299).
From the Middle Euphrates Haditha dam reservoir in Iraq the sites of the Early Dynastic-Ur III periods are particularly important, painting a picture of Sumerian civilization on the Middle Euphrates hitherto only vaguely known (Roaf and Postgate, 1981, pp. 192-198; Killick and Roaf, 1983; AbdulAmir, 1988; Porada et al., 1992). [See Sumerians.] T h e Eu phrates entered the Mesopotamian alluvial plain south of Ramadi; survey work in the region, principally by Adams (1972), has shown that few sites are to be found there. Rather, civilization got its start on the delta plain beginning at ancient Sippar. This area is divided archaeologically and historically into two parts: Akkad, covering the northern portion, and Sumer, to the south. The main channel(s) of the Euphrates in Akkad in the fifth-third millennia lay well to the east of the present Euphrates course and, upon reach ing Sumer, it (they) became extremely diffuse, or braided (Adams, 1981, fig. 9). Hans J. Nissen has suggested tiiat with the lowering sea level in the fourth millennium, Sumer re quired less natural irrigation, population became consoli dated in towns, and social stratification became more ex treme (Nissen, 1988, pp. 65-71, 74, 129-132). City states were created, which led to buffer zones and more constant warfare. Lack of raw materials heightened long-distance trade and the subsequent empire building became charac teristic (Wright, 1992, p. 723). Akkad relied less on such changes and became a distinct entity, based in part on the Euphrates channelization and the active tributaries to the western plateau (Steinkeller, 1992; Zarins, 1990). T h e Euphrates's principal channels and offtake canals had been cre ating silt and salt for the region at least since the third mil lennium (Jacobsen and Adams, 1958). These factors, plus the shifting of the Euphrates westward, eventually brought about tlie dissolution of Mesopotamian civilization.
changements culturels, vol. 2, edited by Olivier Aurenche et al., pp. 122-134. Paris, 1990. Akkermans, P.M.M.G. Villages in the Steppe. Amsterdam, 1990. Boerma, J. "Bouqras Revisited: Preliminary Report on a Project in
T h e Euphrates as the dominant source of water for Akkad and Sumer, and later for Babylonia, played an integral role in agriculture, communications, and the creation of political structures in the region. T h e occupation of Eridu and later
BIBLIOGRAPHY Abdul-Amir, Sabah J. "Archaeological Survey of Ancient Settlements and Irrigation Systems in the Middle Euphrates Region of Meso potamia." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988. Adams, Robert McC. "Settlement and Irrigation Patterns in Ancient Akkad." Appendix 5 in McGuire Gibson's The City and Area ofKish, pp. 182-208. Miami, 1972.
Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. Akkermans, P.M.M.G. "The Neolithic of the Balikh Valley, Northern
Syria: A First Assessment." In Prehistoire du Levant: Processus du
Eastern Syria." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 49 (1983): 362365. See the section "Environmental Conditions." Buringh, P. "Living Conditions in the Lower Mesopotamian Plain in Ancient Times." Sumer 13 (1957): 30-46. Crawford, Harriet. Sumer and the Sumerians. Cambridge, 1991. Gasche, Hermann. "Tell ed-Der et Abu Habbah: Deux villes situees a la Croisee des Chemins nord-sud, est-ouest." Mari 4 (198s): 579583.
Gibson, McGuire. City and Area of Kish. Miami, 1972. Hardan, Adai. "Sharing the Euphrates: Iraq." National Geographic: Re
search and Exploration 9 (1993): 73-79Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Robert McC. Adams. "Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture." Science 128 (1958): 1251-1258. Killick, R. G., and Michael Roaf. "Excavations in Iraq, 1981-1982." /?-^ 45 (1983): 199-224.
Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago, 1963. Lloyd, Seton. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest. London, 1978. Mellink, Machteld J. "Anatolian Chronology." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, edited by Robert W. Enrich, vol. 1, pp. 207-220, vol. 2, 171-184. 3ded. Chicago, 1992.
Nissen, Flans J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. Chicago, 1988. Paepe, Roland. "Geological Approach of the Tell ed-Der Area." In Tell ed-Der I, edited by Leon De Meyer et al„ pp. 9-27. Louvain, 1971. Porada, Edith, et al. "The Chronology of Mesopotamia, ca. 7000-1600
B.C." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, edited by Robert W. Enrich, vol. 1, pp. 77-121, vol. 2, 90-124. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Roaf, Michael, and J. N. Postgate. "Excavations in Iraq, 1979-80." Iraq 43 (1981): 167-198. Sanlaville, Paul. "L'espace geographique de Mari." Mari 4 (1985): 1526. Sanlaville, Paul. "Considerations sur revolution de la Basse Mesopotamie au cours des derniers millenaires." PaBoiient 15 (1989): 5-27. Schwartz, Glenn M., and Harvey Weiss. "Syria, ca. 10,000-2000 B.C."
In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vols. 1-2, edited by Robert W. Ehrich, pp. 221-243, 185-202. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Sowayan, A. M., and R. Allayla. "Origin of the Saline Ground Water
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in Wadi ar-Rumah, Saudi Arabia." Ground Water 27 (1989): 481In the early aceramic Neolitiric, the Mureybetian period 490. (8000-7600 BCE)—represented at Mureybet (phase III), Steinkeller, Piotr. "Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium B.C." In The
Tell Sheikh Hassan (excavated by Jacques Cauvin), and Tell Jerf al-Ahmar (excavated by Thomas McClellan and M. Mottra)—is part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) ographic: Research and Exploration i) (1993): 53-61. Wakil, Mikhail. "Sharing the Euphrates: Syria." National Geographic: culture that is better known in the southern Levant. Al Research and Exploration 9 {1993): 63-71. though round houses continue to be used, internal divisions Ward, Diane R. "In Anatolia, A Massive Dam Project Drowns Traces made with straight walls begin to be found in some. Recti of the Past." Smithsonian Magazine 21 (1990): 28-41. Wright, Henry T. "Prehistory of Mesopotamia." In The Anchor Bible linear buildings appear for the first time in history at Jerf elAhmar, in phase III at Mureybet, and at Sheikh Hassan. Dictionary, vol. 4, pp. 720-724. New York, 1992. Zarins, Juris. "Early Pastoral Nomadism and the Settlement of Lower Female figurines are found in stone and clay from Murey Mesopotamia." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, bet, and at Jerf el-Ahmar geometrically decorated shaft no. 280 (1990): 31-65. straighteners and a limestone human head with carefully Zarins, Juris. "The Early Settlement of Southern Mesopotamia: A Re modeled hair reveal a complex symbolic repertoire. view of the Recent Historical, Geological, and Archaeological Re Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, pp. 724-732. New York, 1992.
Tomanbay, Mehmet. "Sharing die Euphrates: Turkey." National Ge
search." Journal of the American Oriental Society 112 (1992): 55-77. The degree to which cereals were gathered or cultivated JURIS ZARINS is debatable, depending on how modern specialists define this important transition. Another problematic issue is the extent of sedentarism. In fact, this was dre time for dre tran sition to full village life, a process some call neolithicization. EUPHRATES DAMS, SURVEY O F . During the Jacques Cauvin, the excavator of Mureybet and Sheikh Has second half of the twentieth century CE, nine dams were built san, stresses the mental transformation of the society re or were under construction on the Euphrates River. The flected in the new cult of the female deity (represented by enormous number of antiquities lost from those projects was the figurines at Mureybet), the new cult of the bull (first offset in part by intensive archaeological salvage efforts. The observed in Mureybet phase II), and new burial practices. largest dam in Syria, the al-Thawra (Ar., "revolution"), T h e emergence of agriculture is yet another result of whose reservoir (625 sq km, or 387 sq. mi.) is called Lake changes in societal organization, according to Cauvin, ratirer Assad, was constructed at the village of Tabqa in the late than its underlying economic or technological cause, as pos 1960s and early 1970s. Just above it construction of a second, tulated by some cultural evolutionists such as Marvin Har theTishreen (Ar., "October") dam, begun in the late 1980s, ris, Elman Service, and Julian Steward. will be completed by the twenty-first century; its reservoir (70 sq km, or 43 sq. mi.) will extend about 60 km (37 mi.) The Pre-Pottery Neolitiric B (PPNB) period is known at north, almost to Jerablus (Carchemish) and the Turkish bor Mureybet (phase IV), Abu Hureyra II, Tell Halula (exca der. During the 1970s in the Lake Assad flood zone, exca vated by Miguel Molist), and Tell Dja'de el-Mughara (ex vations were conducted at more than twenty-five sites; in cavated by Eve Coqueugniot). Byblos points and large "nadre early 1990s fifteen sites were excavated in the Tishreen viform" blades distinguish the lithics, and rectangular innundation area. The results of those excavations enable houses become common. At Halula a P P N B "city gate" and the charting of the early trend to sedentarism, the emergence portions of a "city wall" have been discovered. Cereal cul of agriculture, the formation of states, and the incorporation tivation and animal husbandry combined to form tire full of tire Middle Euphrates into empires and world systems. agricultural system that became common to the Near East. In the Chalcolithic period (5500-3400 BCE), the Halaf and In dre Epipaleolithic (Mesolithic; 12000-8000 BCE) period Ubaid cultures, both of which are thought to have had tiieir the cultural sequence is Kebaran, Natufian, and Late Na origins farther east, successively extended across northern tufian, although there is some question whether the term Syria. The Halafian is best known from the site of Tell Natufian can properly be used for Euphrates sites so distant Shams ed-Din Tannira (excavated by Selina al-Radi and from its core area. The site of Nahr al-Homr, which pro Helga Seeden) and is well represented at Halula, whereas duced a Kebaran lithics assemblage, is succeeded in the Na Tell Abr (excavated by Hamidu Hammade and Yayoi Ko tufian period at the sites of Tell Abu Hureyra (excavated by ike) provides important evidence for the western Ubaid tra A. M. T. Moore) and Tell Mureybet. During period I at dition. Abu Hureyra, in which deposits span 11500-10000 BCE, there were semisubterranean round houses 2 m in diameter. T h e Uruk period (3400-3100 BCE) in tire Thawra and Subsistence was based on hunting, predominantiy gazelle, Tishreen dam areas marked what historians refer to as the and collecting plants, of which 150 species have been iden beginning of civilization and anthropologists call the emer tified. Phases I and II at Mureybet are assigned to the late gence of complex society and the process of state formation. Natufian and transitional Khiamian, respectively. Subsis It was not an indigeneous development in northern Syria tence there was diversified: hunting (mainly gazelle) fishing, but was introduced from soutirern Mesopotamia. Excava and gathering. tions at tire sites of Habuba Kabira South and Jebel 'Aruda c
EUPHRATES DAMS, SURVEY OF in the Lake Assad region revealed the expansion of Uruk culture far from its core region. These sites have not merely borrowed southern Mesopotamian cultural traits, they are in fact Uruk colonies. Habuba Kabira South was a large fortified city in which residential dwellings are grouped into city blocks. Within Habuba Kabira South, a complex called Tell Qannas (excavated by Andre Finer) was found to con tain back-to-back temples with decorative mud-brick but tressing, one of which has a tripartite layout—both are fea tures of Uruk temples in southern Mesopotamia. Several kilometers away and 60 m above the river plain, on a spur of tire mountain Jebel Aruda (excavated by G. van Driel), was a second, smaller Uruk settlement. It was dom inated by two Uruk-style temples (although some scholars question their having been temples), with a tripartite layout, mud-brick construction, and decorative buttressing. Asso ciated with the temples are a number of large domestic structures, tripartite in plan, that are similar to those at Ha buba Kabira South. Both sites exhibit typical Uruk, southern Mesopotamian traits, including beveled-rim bowls, jars with nose lugs and drooping spouts, Protoliterate seals and sealings, tokens, counters, and tablets for numeration. Uruk as semblages have also been encountered at Tell Sheikh Has san, Tell Jerablus Tahtani, Tell 'Abr, and Tell Banat. T h e discovery of two major and numerous minor Uruk settlements on the Middle Euphrates in northern Syria raised several issues regarding the transmission of cultural ideas and traits to the less developed area (periphery) of northern Syria. Using the core-periphery model popularized by Immanuel Wallerstein, Guillermo Algaze has seen tirese sites as colonies that were part of a large trading network in which the resource-poor Uruk homeland of lower Meso potamia exploited peripheral zones for such raw materials as timber and metals. The relationship to local populations is unclear, but a hierarchy of Uruk settlements is thought to have included colonies (Habuba Kabira South and Jebel 'Aruda), stations, and outposts. Both Habuba Kabira South and Jebel 'Aruda were occupied for short time spans of no more than 150 years; they were built on virgin sites and after their destruction were never reoccupied. Uruk occupation at Sheikh Hassan lasted for a considerably longer period. Northern Syria, including the region of the two dams, is thought by some to have undergone a gap in occupation after the destruction of the Uruk colonies and tire collapse of Uruk cultures in southern Mesopotamia. Consequently, the introduction of complex societies into Syria in about 3300-3100 BCE was abortive and had no lasting effect on the cultures of the region. Following this scenario, the first indigeneous Syrian states may not have emerged until later, in about 2600 BCE—not along river courses but in dry-farm ing areas—with tire emergence of Ebla and large settlements in the Khabur Triangle, such as Tell Chuera and Tell LeiIan. An alternative reconstruction of the period sees a re duced, but unbroken, cultural continuity at sites along the
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Euphrates in the first half of the third millennium (Early Bronze Age). Tell Hadidi has produced "EB I" and "EB II" material (see below), and some of the strata at Tell Halawa date to tire first half of the third millennium. There are indications that a continuous sequence exists at a cluster of four EB sites centered at Banat. No consensus exists for the terminology of the Early Bronze Age (c. 3100-2000 BCE); the first half (3100-2500 BCE) is often called EB I and II, or sometimes Mesopotamian terms are applied: Jemdet Nasr, Early Dynastic I—III. The second half of tire period (2500-2000 BCE) is generally re ferred to as EB IV; none of these terms are fully satisfactory. The third millennium is well represented by sites in the Thawra and Tishreen dam regions: Tell Hadidi, Tell Ha buba Kabira North, Tell Halawa, Tell Tawi, Tell Sweyhat, Tell Selenkahiyeh, Tell Munbaqa, Tell Ahmar, and Tell Ba nat, including Tell Kabir and Tell Banat North, and Tell Qara Qusaq. At Halawa (excavated by Winfried Orthmann) there was an EB occupation on tells A and B. On tell B, dating to the first half of the third millennium, three phases of a temple, entered from tire structure's broad south side, were constructed on a large platform. The orientation changed in a final phase to tire structure's broad east side. Three strata of tell A date to the second half of the third millennium; in the earliest, stratum 3, portions of the settle ment excavated contained a defensive wall, city gate, do mestic dwellings, and a stone, long-room temple in amis (with columns set between two piers) that opened toward the east. A similar structure was found at Tell Kabir (ex cavated by Anne Porter) in tire Tishreen dam flood zone. At Tell Banat (excavated by Thomas McClellan) there are fragments of a public building, possibly a palace, with large limestone column bases. Cemeteries of the period were re covered at Tawi and Halawa; tire Hypogeum T o m b at Ah mar (excavated in the 1930s by Francois Thureau-Dangin and Maurice Dunand) was an elite burial that contained more than a thousand vessels and a rich collection of bronzes. Another high-ranking burial at Banat dates to about 2600 BCE and contained Plain Simple Ware, Euphra tes Banded Ware, Metallic Ware, and Red-Black Burnished Ware. In the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1600 BCE), Old Baby lonian texts indicate that Carchemish (which lies at the northern end of the Tishreen flood zone) and Emar (old Meskene) were important centers, but occupation from this period has never been located archaeologically at Emar. Ex cavations at Tell Qara Qusaq (excavated by Emilio Olavarri and Gregorio del Olmo Lete for the University of Barce lona) show that it was a storage depot in which circular stone-lined silos were found to contain barley, perhaps for shipment to Mari. At el-Qitar part of a structure with or thostat dados was excavated, and there are also occupation layers at Kabir, Halawa, Habuba Kabira North, and Hadidi, with ceramic repertoires produced at tire latter.
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Large portions of settlement plans for the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE) have been recovered at Munbaqa/ Ekalte (excavated by Dittmar Machule) and el-Qitar/TilAbnu and a major archive at old Meskene/Emar. Some of drese sites may have been destroyed in the Euphrates cam paign of Thuunosis III. There were three long-room tem ples at Munbaqa and three at Emar. Regarding fortifica tions, at Munbaqa an offset-inset mud-brick city wall was found encased in massive ramparts of river pebbles. Several city gates were excavated, including the northwest gate, in which a mud-brick arch across tire passageway was pre served. At el-Qitar two city gates had limestone orthostat piers. Cuneiform tablets have also been found at Hadidi, Munbaqa, Tell Fray, and el-Qitar. The Iron Age is best represented by occupations at Car chemish and Tell Ahmar (Til Barsip), as well as Tell Jurn Kabir (excavated by Jesper Eidem and Karin Putt). At Tell Ahmar Aramean stelae were noted by travelers in the late nineteenth century, and in the early 1930s, a major NeoAssyrian palace with extensive wall paintings was found. Re cently, Guy Bunnens has found more Neo-Assyrian build ings, one with a black-and-white checkerboard pebble mosaic, along with a constructed burial vault, cuneiform texts, ivory objects, and Assyrian Palace Ware. The mountain Jebel Khalid (excavated by Graeme Clarke and Peter Connor) was the site of a major Hellenistic for tress in the third century BCE. During dre Roman period, the Middle Euphrates sometimes became the frontier in a longrunning conflict between the Roman/Byzantine empires in the west and the Persians (Parthians/Sasanians) who, on oc casion, reached Balis (Meskene). Small tumuli from this pe riod may reflect the burial customs of European troops sta tioned in the region during dre Roman Empire. Occupation on this part of the Euphrates was not dense in the Islamic period, although there are surface indications of small vil lages and farmsteads; the main setdement was Balis, tire site adjacent to LB Emar and on the outskirts of tire modern town of Meskene. The fortress at Qal'at Nejim guarded a crossing point in late medieval times. [See also Carchemish; Chuera, Tell; Colonization; Ebla; Emar; Euphrates River; Habuba Kabira; Hadidi, Tell; LeiIan, Tell; Mureybet; Qitar, E1-; Ubaid; and Uruk-Warka.]
1975 und 1978. Saarbriicker Beitrage zur Altertumskunde, 38. Bonn, 1984. Machule, D., et al. "Ausgrabungen in Tall Munbaqa/Ekalte 1990."
Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orienl-Gesellschaft 124 (1992): 11-40. See other preliminary reports in volumes 117-123.
Margueron, Jean-Claude, ed. Le Moyen Euphrate, zone de contacts et d'echanges: Acts du colloque de Strasbourg, 10-12 Mars 1977. Stras bourg, 1980. Essential collection of preliminary reports. Moore, A. M. T. "A Pre-Neolidtic Farmers' Village on the Euphrates."
Scientific American 241.2 (1979): 62-70. Olmo Lete, Gregorio del, ed. Tell Qara Quzaq I: Campanas 1-111(19891991) Barcelona, 1993 Orthmann, Winfried. Halatva 1977 bis 1979. Saarbriicker Beitrage zur Altertumskunde, 31. Bonn, 1981. Orthmann, Winfried. Halawa, 1980-1986. Saarbriicker Beitrage zur Alterumskunde, 52. Bonn, 1989. Radi, S. al-, and Helga Seeden. "A Stone Age Village on die Euphrates: I. The AUB Rescue Excavations at Shams ed-Din Tannira." Berytus 28 (1980): 87-126. See Berytus 28-30 for parts II-V.
Strommenger, Eva. Habuba Kabira: Eine Stadt vor $000 Jahren. Mainz am Rhein, 1980. Siirenhagen, Dietrich. "The Dry Farming Belt: The Uruk Period and
Subsequent Developments." In The Origins of Cities in Dry-Farming Syria and Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium B. C, edited by Har vey Weiss, pp. 7-43. Guilford, Ct., 1986.
Siirenhagen, Dietrich. Keramikproduktion in Habuba Kabira-Siid. Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica 5/6. (1994-1995), pp. 43ft". Thureau-Dangin, Francois and Maurice Dunand. Til-Barsib. Paris, 1936. Van Driel, Govert, and Carol Van Driel-Murray. "Jebel Aruda, 1977-
78." Akkadica 12 (1979): 2-28. Van Driel, Govert, and Carol Van Driel-Murray. "Jebel Aruda: The 1982 Season of Excavation." Akkadica 33 (1983): 1-26.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System. Vol. 1. New York, 1974. THOMAS L. M C C L E I X A N
EVANS, ARTHUR (1851-1941), principal excavator
of Knossos, Crete, and preeminent scholar of the Cretan Bronze Age. T h e son of antiquarian-industrialist Sir John Evans, Arthur was educated at Harrow and Brasenose Col lege, Oxford, where he read history and graduated in 1874. He became involved in Balkan politics as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. As a champion of the Slavic independence movement, Evans carried out archaeological researches, later published in his "Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum" in 1885—1886. He became keeper of the AshBIBLIOGRAPHY molean Museum, Oxford, in 1884. Evans's involvement with Crete began in 1894 when he Algaze, Guillermo, The Uruk World System. Chicago, 1993. Beyer, Dominique, ed. Meskene-Emar: Dix ans de travaux, 1972-1982. traveled the island in search of seal stones bearing "preParis, 1982. Phoenician" script, which he published in the Journal of Hel Bunnens, Guy, ed. Tell Ahmar: 1988 Season. Supplement to Abr-Nahlenic Studies (1894, 1897); the journeys are recorded in let rain, 2. Louvain, 1990. ters to The Academy. During this time he identified remains Freedman, David Noel, ed. Archaeological Reports from the Tabqa Dam Project—Euphrates Valley, Syria. Annual of the American Schools ofof the "Minoan" civilization suspected to be earlier than the Oriental Research, 44. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1979. Mycenaeans of Greece and bought the tell called T o u TseHammade, Hamido, and Yayoi Koike. "Syrian Archaeological Expe leve he Kephala (the headland or bluff of tire local Turkish dition in the Tishreen Dam Basin: Excavations at Tell al-'Abr 1990 landowner) near the classical Greek and Roman remains of and 1991." Damaszener Mitteilungen 6 (1992): 109-175. Kampschulte, Ingrid, and Winfried Orthmann. Grdber des 3. Jahrtau- Knossos, where others had found traces of pre-Hellenic an sends v. Chr. im syrischen Euphrattal, vol. 1, Ausgrabungen bei Tawi tiquities. He excavated at a number of sites in the Knossos
EXCAVATION STRATEGY valley during large-scale intensive campaigns from 1900 to 1905. Evans concentrated his efforts, however, on the tell that had covered the successive phases of the complex ar chitectural remains called the "Palace of Minos" after the legendary ruler of Crete. Detailed preliminary reports on the palace appeared in the Annual of the British School at Athens (7-11 [1901-1905]), and final reports on late cemetery sites in the region were published in Archaeologia in 1905. T h e stratigraphy at Knossos formed the basis for Evans's proposed tripartite relative chronological sequence for the Cretan Bronze Age, which he called Early, Middle, and Late Minoan with further mpartite subdivisions. His Minoan scheme was adapted for the neighboring Cycladic islands and Greek mainland and remains the most useful relative chronology for the Aegean Bronze in the absence of absolute dates.
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any strategy is flexibility in meeting the new problems, ques tions, and goals that will emerge during excavation. With the advent of processual archaeology (also referred as the New Archaeology) in the 1960s, archaeologists began to ask questions of intention prior to going into the field. This process of developing a hypothesis and then testing it has reshaped the way archaeological excavation is under taken today. Prior to processual archaeology, much of Near Eastern archaeology was more site oriented, with archaeol ogists interested primarily in cultural history. That approach stressed the excavation of large, multiperiod sites, especially prominent tells, to discover unusual art objects or "museum pieces," to uncover monumental remains, and to establish the political history of a site. [See New Archaeology.] Since the early 1960s the theoretical component of ar chaeology has become a driving force in determining how, why, and where excavation will be initiated. Most archae Evans's re-creation of the Bronze Age Cretans, whom he ologists now begin with a problem orientation and from it called "Minoans," is set out in the rambling chapters of The derive a theoretical model they will test with empirical data. Palace of Minos, published in four volumes between 1921 Problem orientation is more formally developed as a re and 1935. Initially conceived as the final report on his work search design, which articulates how specific archaeological at Knossos, it became a widely ranging synthesis of archae methodologies employed at a specific site or in a specific ological research in the Aegean and the leading role Evans region will address theoretical goals. Thus, a site must be felt the Minoans to have played. There can be little doubt selected tiiat best meets the needs of the research design. that Evans was very intuitive, but his preoccupation witii Although there is no guarantee that the questions archae associating the early Cretans with the later Greeks and thus ologists ask will ultimately be answered by the material they modern Europeans led to the frequent use of Greek myths excavate, there is almost always an attempt to link a problem as possible explanations for the early Cretan iconography orientation to an excavation strategy. without full consideration of Near Eastern and Anatolian possibilities. Nonetheless, The Palace of Minos remains the A good excavation strategy is the means by which to con most influential and basic source for students of the Aegean nect theory to data and must be predicated on the purpose Bronze Age. or function of the proposed excavation. A strategy employed in salvage archaeology, where time is a critical factor, will T h e first biography of Evans, Time and Chance: The Story greatly differ from the strategy used in a research excava of Arthur Evans and his Forebears, was published by his halftion. The type of site will also directly affect the excavation sister, Joan Evans, in 1943; a second, The Find of a Lifetime: strategy employed. Single-period sites are excavated much Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos, by Sylvia Hor differently than multiperiod, or tell, sites. Prehistoric sites, witz appeared in 1981. Neither was critical of Evans's work. classical sites, and underwater sites all have distinct archae [See also Aegean Islands; Minoans.] ological configurations and attendant methodological ap BIBLIOGRAPHY proaches. However, almost all archaeologists are interested in the interpretation of archaeological data, rather than mere Evans, Arthur. "Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum, I—II and III—IV." collection and/or description. T o that end, most archaeolog Archaeologia 48 (1885): 1-105, 49 (1886): 1-167. ical investigations in the Near East now include a multidisEvans, Arthur. Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script. London, ciplinary orientation and some degree of interest in environ 1895. Evans, Arthur. The Prehistoric Tombs of Knossos. London, 1906. mental data. Archaeologists are increasingly turning to Evans, Arthur. The Palace of Minos. 4 vols, in 6. London, 1921-1935. computers to assist in statistical analyses, data storage, ar Evans, Joan. Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and EEs Fore tifact and architectural reconstruction, and systems model bears. London, 1943. ing. [See Statistical Applications.] Horwitz, Sylvia. The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Dis covery of Knossos. London, 1981. T h e first step in almost any archaeological excavation is J. ALEXANDER MACGILLIVRAY preexcavation research. Any previous excavation or survey of the site is studied, along with relevant maps, historical documents, drawings, and photographs. Geological and EXCAVATION STRATEGY. There is no one uni other types of areal research or survey are reviewed. This versal excavation strategy because developing one depends phase of research should also include historical and ethno in part on the type of site being excavated and the purpose graphic assessments of the area under investigation, includ of an excavation. Therefore, an important characteristic of ing visits to local museums and conversations with local pro-
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fessional and amateur archaeologists and any local residents familiar with the site or its environs. [See Site Survey.] Following this phase of research, the site itself is surveyed and mapped. Artifacts from the site are collected system atically and then analyzed. The site is mapped and examined for signs of human or natural modifications. Areal photo graphs are also useful in discerning anomalies or other note worthy characteristics. T h e site's environment is also sur veyed in order to understand its ecological context. A thorough preexcavation investigation is crucial because it will help refine the problem orientation and define specific research goals. However, as the excavation progresses, new hypotheses will be generated and new problems and ques tions will arise that should be systematically integrated into the research design and then field tested. Specific research problems lead to the collection of specific types of data. T h e method of collection, analysis, and publication is shaped by the research design. The research design should also help the archaeologist better define and determine appropriate methodological approaches. The preexcavation phase can be the most important part of an archaeological project. In this formative period sites, regions, research hypotheses, and excavation methodologies are linked. In effect, the actual excavation should be putting a well-conceived and detailed research design into opera tion: the actual process of gathering empirical data with which to assess a theoretical model. The better crafted the research design, and the more thorough the preexcavation research, the more likely the research goals are to be met. Once the formulation of the problem orientation and preinvestigation research is complete, tire excavation, or ac quisition of data, can begin by utilizing one of two standard approaches. A research design involving diachronic issues— such as culture change and continuity over time—will usu ally utilize a penetration methodology, probing subsurface deposits with deep trenches. This method stresses stratigraphic relationships (the vertical layering of artifacts and architecture). For synchronic issues a horizontal, or clear ing, methodology stressing the spatial arrangements of ar tifacts and architecture at one point in time is more useful. Most excavation strategies employ both approaches in order to achieve the best possible context for all the archaeological data. With either method, the types of data collected and how they are collected should be systematically articulated in the research design. Once the data are collected, they must be analyzed. Data analysis is as important as fieldwork. This phase of an ex cavation project generates tire inferences on which archae ological interpretations and reconstructions are based. The analysis phase is often mediated by specialists who should be familiar with the field methodology in order to avoid in herent biases, which could affect interpretation. The final stage of an excavation project is publication. Deciding which data will be published and how they will be
presented are part of the excavation strategy. How the pub lication is organized is predetermined by the research de sign, excavation methodologies, and types of analyses. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dever, William G. "Two Approaches to Archaeological Method: The Architectural and the Stratigraphic." Eretz-hrael I I (1973): i * - 8 * . Clear and concise description of the horizontal and stratigraphic methods of excavation used in Syria-Palestine. Dever, William G. "The Impact of the 'New Archaeology' on Syro-
Palestinian Archaeology." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 242 (1981): 15-29. Useful overview of the history of the discipline in terms of field methodology for Syria-Palestine.
Drinkard, Joel F., et al., eds. Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An In troduction to Palestinian Archaeology Dedicated to Joseph A. Callaway. Atlanta, 1988. Very useful volume that includes articles addressing the history of the discipline of archaeology, techniques and methods of excavation practiced in the Near East, and theoretical overviews of different approaches to archaeology.
Joukowsky, Martha Sharp. A Complete Manual of Field Archaeology: Tools and Techniques of Field Work for Archaeologists. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980. Excellent how-to guide for fieldwork; useful for anyone involved in the field, from the inexperienced volunteer to the excavation director. Details fieldwork techniques used internation ally. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. New York, 1991. Valuable, up-to-date sourcebook on all aspects of archaeology. Sharer, Robert J., and Wendy Ashmore. Archaeology: Discovering Our Past. Palo Alto, Calif., 1987. Comprehensive introductory textbook for archaeology. J. P. DESSEL
EXCAVATION TOOLS. A fundamental develop ment took place in tire range of tools used in Near Eastern archaeology once field operations were resumed following World War II. During the first century.or so of archaeolog ical fieldwork, the two primary tools of exploration had been borrowed from road construction: a large pickax for break ing up soil and a broad-bladed hoe for scooping loosened soil into baskets to be carried away. As long as the basic strategy of digging was to locate buried wall segments and expose them down to their founding surfaces, those tools were adequate. Beginning in tire 1950s, an important development in dig ging strategy led to a dramatic increase in tire use of small hand tools, nearly rendering the large pick and hoe obsolete. T h e initial primary interest in architecture moved to a con comitant concern for the careful separation of soil layers to gain better stratigraphic control, more complete retrieval of data, and a clearer interpretation of tire evidence. In Pales tine, Kathleen M . Kenyon's excavations at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) in 1952-1957 and her use of the so-called WheelerKenyon grid technique demonstrated the need for small tools to provide closer control of the digging process. [See Excavation Strategy.] Most of the newer small tools have also been borrowed
EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY from other endeavors—from geology and mountain climb ing (hand pick) to dentistry (dental pick). Three tools have come to dominate: the handpick, the trowel, and the softbristled hand brush. Light vertical downstrokes using the handpick's flat chisel-headed blade can dislodge small clumps of soil, thus exposing potsherds and small artifacts in situ. Used in this way, the handpick also allows the ex cavator to notice changes in the color and consistency of soil that can signal the transition to a different layer. A mason's trowel is commonly used in conjunction with the handpick. Alternating vertical strokes of the pick with horizontal scrap ing motions of the trowel brings newly loosened soil toward the kneeling digger. This process turns over the loosened earth to reveal still-hidden objects and clears it away to allow the digger to see soil changes more clearly. A soft-bristled hand brush is then used to clear away the smaller particles of loosened soil, further revealing the character of the newly exposed earth below. The brush is later used to prepare the area for photography. A variety of even smaller implements has been employed to clear soil from delicate objects (such as skeletal remains, mosaic tiles [tesserae], or necldace beads) or multielement complexes. Some of the tools found useful in such delicate work are teaspoons, dental picks, and soft-bristled artists' brushes. The process of removing dirt from the excavation area has also undergone refinement. Reed baskets gave way by midcentury to buckets, known as gufas (or goufas, from Ar abic), made from discarded automobile or truck tire tube casings. Those are now increasingly being replaced with plastic pails. The long-handled hoe, used to scoop up soil, has given way at most excavations to the trowel, hand brush, and dustpan. Between the digging area and the dump, a fine-mesh sieve is frequently used to sift excavated soil in order to reveal small objects (such as beads, coins, bone fragments, and stone-tool flakes) that might otherwise have eluded workers. Where there is a concern for retrieving an cient seed and pollen data, fine sieves or flotation devices are also used to recover material from the soil being dis carded. An increasing array of utensils and supplies now finds its way into the archaeologist's field ldt. Laying out an area for excavation requires stakes and string, a measuring tape, and a line level to set balk lines, taking elevations of excavated features requires a transit and range rod; collecting and transporting potsherds, bones, flints, and other artifacts re quire buckets, paper bags and boxes, and cotton padding; and the all-important recording and registering of finds util ize a variety of tags, gummed labels, and waterproof mark ing pens. [See Recording Techniques.] In the excavation camp, a complementary assortment of tools completes the recording and conservation process: toothbrushes and cotton swabs for cleaning finds and rulers,
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calipers, and circumference gauges for measuring potsherds and other objects that are to be drawn. [See Conservation Archaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cole, Dan P. "Archaeological Tools and Their Use." In A Manual of
Field Excavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists, edited by William G. Dever and H. Darrell Lance, pp. 123-145. Cincinnati, 1978. Proper use of tools. Heizer, Robert F., and John A. Graham. A Guide to Field Methods in
Archaeology: Approaches to the Anthropology of the Dead. Palo Alto, Calif., 1967. Brief discussion of excavation tools (see chap. 5.A); of comparative value because it reflects New World conditions and methods. D A N P . COLE
EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY. Archae ologists design experiments to re-create or reproduce an cient artifacts, technologies, and behaviors to help interpret ancient material culture and events. The experiments re construct the human and natural causes of the manipulation, damage, wear, breakage, deposition, and disintegration of artifacts prior to, during, and subsequent to their deposition. Researchers ask questions about the relationship between the person and the product; how manufacture influences the appearance of artifacts; and the sources of diversity and variation in the artifacts. Experimental archaeology began in Europe in the eigh teenth century when bronze horns were found in Scandi navian and British peat bags. A certain Dr. Robert Ball from Dublin died as a result of blowing an Irish horn too hard. In recent decades there has been a resurgence in such studies with an emphasis on the rigorous control of well-docu mented, recorded, and repeatable experiments. Experimen tal settings vary, depending on the questions under investi gation. For example, pottery firing techniques can be studied by using a gas kiln in a laboratory or by firing wood in a pit dug in tire ground. T h e purpose of each test would be to create and control the causes of firing time and tem peratures. What would be learned would be the effect of each variable on the finished product. Archaeologists begin by explicitly stating an experiment's theoretical basis,its variables, s elected materials, and -meth ods; finally, they state its results. Controlled experiments in volve the use of pertinent materials, ideally those that would have been available to a society in antiquity, such as local clays or stones. Experiments should include as many vari ables as possible. To learn the impact of dung added to clay as a tempering material ideally means varying the clays, the size of the dung fragments, the proportions of clay to dung, and the firing temperatures. As the clay is worked its plia bility, workability, elasticity, and the ease with which pots can be made from it are assessed. The effects are observed, recorded, and interpreted as inferences for archaeology.
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Experimental archaeology involves the reproduction of human behaviors associated witir the use of artifacts: butch ering studies reveal the physical appearance and deposition of bones after the flesh has been removed with a stone im plement. Observing the collapse of walls leads to the ability to identify the archaeological remains of such an event and so to understand the difference between a deposit that is the direct result of tire collapse and one that is evidence of scav enging, reuse, or other disturbances. In addition to studies replicating or imitating ancient ar tifacts and behaviors, experimental archaeology includes testing the usefulness of metirodological assumptions. For example, one can test the validity of population estimates based on animal bone counts by studying what happens to bones when animals are killed. Retrieval techniques can be
assessed to learn if plant remains collected by dry sieving provide valid samples of ancient flora and/or diet. Finally, some consider ethnoarchaeology to be a type of experimen tal archaeology. [See also Ethnoarchaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Coles, John M. Experimental Archaeology. London, 1979. Overview of the topics and results. Ingersoll, Daniel, John E. Yellen, and Wm. Macdonald. Experimental Archaeology. New York, 1977. Individual experiments concerning ancient technologies; quantitative methods; and site formation. London, Gloria Anne. "Dung-Tempered Clay." Journal of Field Ar chaeology^ (1981): 189-195. A series of experiments adding dung to clay. GLORIA A N N E LONDON
i
F A I L A K A , an island (approximately 1 4 X 5 1cm, or 9 X 3 mi.) in the State of Kuwait, located at the mouth of Kuwait Bay, at the northern end of the Arab-Iranian Gulf (29°26' N, 48°2o' E). Excavations by Danish teams (1958-1962) revealed what continue to be the earliest (c. 2000 BCE) traces of habitation on Failaka Island. T h a t Bronze Age settlement, at the island's southwest corner, consists of clusters of small domestic structures executed in a casual stone-mortar con struction. T h e principal feature of the tallest tell (designated F-3, 6 m above sea level) is an open-air platform temple. Associated with the three architectural levels of the temple and surrounding buildings are hundreds of fragments of decorated soft-stone vessels. A number of the fragments with representational designs have parallels with complete dated bowls excavated at sites in Mesopotamia; other com parable, but not securely stratified, material is found at T a rut (eastern Arabia), Susa, and Tepe Yahya (Iran). [See Susa; Tepe Yahya.] T h e Failaka fragments, some dated as early as 2500 BCE, must have been retrieved from temple destructions in southern Mesopotamia and brought as votives by sailors coming from Sumer—their first sheltered port would have been the harbor at Failaka. One of the most historically interesting of tire vessel fragments carries tire in scription "Temple of Inzalc." According to Mesopotamian texts, Inzalc is the titular deity associated with the land of Dilmun," one of several reasons for the suggestion that Ku wait together with Bahrain, and the eastern coast of Arabia were regarded as Dilmun by the Mesopotamians in the late third and early second millennia BCE. [See Dilmun.] Equally signifieanramong the Bronze Age finds are hun dreds of circular stamp seals, also of soft stone. The ico nography and style of Gulf seals (including those from Bah rain) constitute a unique group featuring elements of Gulf culture (e.g. date palm, gazelle, reed stool, water bird, bullman) . Yet, the evidence for foreign contacts is far ranging, extending north to Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, and Turkey; south to Oman and Egypt; and east to Margiana, Bampur, Dasht-i-Lut, and tire Indus Valley. A substantial amount of the excavated material relates to the bronzeworldng industry: metal slag, copper ingots, metal objects, and tools. This indicates that ingots were imported 297
from Iran even in the early settlements, and a reasonable number of objects were manufactured for export or ex change. Many of the bronze tools identified would have been used in seal cutting, shellworking, and woodworldng. Some 200 m north of the harbor settlement mound, on a lower, sprawling tell, the Danes located the Ruler's Villa, a modest building containing reception and administrative rooms in the front, a central court marked with four square corner pillars (presumably to support a loggia), and resi dential quarters to the rear. Other finds throughout the site included imported pottery, square stamp seals, cylinder seals, and metal materials, attesting to foreign contacts with Mesopotamia, Abu Dhabi, and Oman and, in the second millennium BCE, tire Indus Valley. [See Oman.] Major architecture from the Hellenistic period consisted of a square enclosure with quadrangular corner bastions. Two entrance doors permitted access to this "fortified" area, which contained tire site's earliest Greek settlement (300-250 BCE); the central portion consisted of a religious precinct that may have included two sanctuaries. One was a small Greek cella constructed in well-dressed stone ma sonry with two columns in antis. T h e capitals betray an Ionic influence, and tire bases are inspired by Achaemenian pro totypes. In the latest Hellenistic phase the entire enclosure was surrounded by a dry moat. A large inscribed stela that had fallen from its original position was found in front of the temple. This public letter to the people of Ikaros (tire Greek name for Failaka Island) gives instructions for moving tire Artemis Temple and es tablishing a gymnasium. T h e inscription is dated to a Greek satrap at Susa in the late third century BCE, Another stone inscription from Tell Khazneh, a kilometer to the north, also mentions Artemis, together with Zeus Savior and Poseidon Savior. It has been suggested that the Greek goddess Arte mis may have been assimilated with Ninsikilla, the original goddess of Bronze Age Dilmun, noted in Sumerian my thology as the place where all animals live in peace. Another rectangular building with many rooms located on the seashore and referred to as the Terracotta Workshop contained a number of figurines, as well as ancient molds for terra cottas of types familiar in the Hellenistic world.
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Other figurines found tirroughout the sites illuminate the va riety of cults and diverse artistic influences: Mesopotamian, orientalizing Greek, and Hellenistic Tanagra styles. American excavations by Theresa Howard-Carter for the Johns Hopkins University under auspices of the Kuwait Ministry of Information (1973, 1974) exposed an industrial and crafts area adjacent to the Ruler's Villa, identified by at least six large circular kilns. Raw materials were stored in vats constructed of stone slabs. The contents of the vats were used in the manufacture of a gypsum organic building material, hunks of which appeared in tire fill. T h e kilns were commonly used for firing pottery and baiting bread. A trench along the outer wall of the Villa revealed a sophisti cated stone-built sewage system with a covered drain run ning under dre wall to a large, covered cesspool outside. Finds in the crafts workshops next to the Villa included fragments of soft-stone bowls with figural decoration; stamp seals in steatite, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and jasper; imported cylinder seals and inscribed Indus seals; jewelry of bronze, silver, gold, agate, carnelian, and lapis; and bronze tools and implements, shields, greaves, and otiier armor. The French excavations under the direction of Yves Calvet, Jean-Francois Salles, and Jacqueline Gachet of La Maison de l'Orient of the Universite de Lyon (1983-1989) in the same area revealed a large, important, and badly de nuded stone building whose internal features (water basins and drains) suggest a religious use. The thick walls and prominent staircase indicate some sort of temple tower, which would have been visible to passing ships. The buil ding's meager contents—tripods, seals, decorated soft-stone vessel fragments, bronze tools, and ceramics comparable to those found at Bahrain—indicate that it was constructed at the turn of the second millennium BCE. [See Bahrain.] It is not possible to identify distinct architectural remains on Failaka between the Late Kassite and Hellenistic periods. A number of Neo-Assyrian inscriptions from Mesopotamia mention Dilmun as located on the mainland, but it is not ascertainable whether die border was in the southern Iraqi marshes or Kuwait, or on the eastern Arabian shore. Some small finds, including a cylinder seal, attest to limited As syrian contact. The Neo-Babylonian period is more tangibly represented by a stone architectural member bearing ,an inscription of Nebuchadrezzar. Other Neo-Babylonian epigraphic mate rials refer to a temple now presumed to have been situated on Failaka; a scarcely definable building at the inland sanc tuary site of Tell Khazneh is a possible candidate. Terra cotta figurines from tiris period date to the Neo-Babylonian and Seleucid periods. The Achaemenid period is further represented in pottery types and characteristic bronze ar rowheads. The French added two new Hellenistic sanctuaries to the architectural corpus, one of them on the beach to the east of dre fortress. Dedicated to Artemis, it dates to the first half
of the second century BCE. The other sanctuary, at Tell Khazneh, is constructed over the earlier Neo-Babylonian/ Achaemenid building. Much additional work has been done to clarify the archi tecture and stratification of buildings within the Hellenistic fortress. Two hoards of coins found in tire complex date to Antiochus III; others imitate the "Alexander style." Numis matic evidence from the Artemis sanctuary on the beach point to the mint at Gerrha; the numerous Seleucid coins were minted either at Susa or Seleucia on tire Tigris. A location called al-Qusur ("the casties") in the center of the island has traditionally been identified as an archaeolog ical site because it is marked by stone walls and ceramic debris. Initial exploration by the French team led to the dis covery of three steps of a staircase and fragments of a stucco frieze bearing an unmistakable Christian cross. Excavation revealed a church (36 X 19 m) constructed basically of mud brick/tore pise with some courses of small-stone facing; a thick white plaster overlaid all its walls and floors. T h e buil ding's bipartite structure consisted of the "public" nave (narthex and aisles) and the "restricted" area (two aisles with chapels, the choir, and dependencies utilized for priestiy functions. T h e stucco crosses presumably date to the fifth-sixth centuries CE; however, the pottery associated with the church's establishment is Sasanian/Early Islamic (first half of seventh century). The building was abandoned in tire second half of the eighth century and reused for do mestic quarters in the late eighth/ early ninth centuries. [See also Kuwait.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernard, Vincent, et al. "L'eglise d'al-Qousour Failaka, Etat de Kow-
eit." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 2 (1991): 145-181. Calvet, Yves. "Failaka and the Northern Part of Dilmun." Proceedings
of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 19 (1989): 5-11. Connelly, Joan Breton. "Votive Offerings from Hellenistic Failaka: Ev
idence for a Herakles Cult." In L'Arabie preislamique el son environnement historique et culturel: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, edited by Toufic Fahd, pp. 145-158. Leiden, 1989.
Hajlund, Flemming. Failaka/Dilmun: The Second Millennium Settle ments, vol. 2, The Bronze Age Pottery. Jutiand Archaeological Society Publications, 17.2. Aarhus, 1987. Howard-Carter, Theresa. "Modern Excavations on Failaka Island,"
Arts of the Islamic World: Kuwait Supplement 3.1 (1985): 70-73, 96. Howard-Carter, Theresa. "Voyages of Votive Vessels in the Gulf." In
DUMU-E -DUB-BA~A: Studies in Honor of Ake W. Sjoberg, edited 2
by Hermann Behrens et al., pp. 253-266. Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 11. Philadelphia, 1989.
Kjffirum, Poul. Failaka/Dilmun: The Second Millennium Settlements, vol. 1.1, The Stamp and Cylinder Seals. Jutiand Archaeological Society Publications, 17.1. Aarhus, 1983.
Potts, Daniel T., ed, Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early History of Bahrain. Berliner Beitrage zum Vorderen Orient, vol. 2. Berlin, 1983. Potts, Daniel T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1990. Salles, Jean-Francois, et al. Failaka: Fouilles francais. 3 vols. Travaux de la Maison de l'Orient, nos. 9, 12, 18. Lyon, 1984-1990. Salles, Jean-Francois. "The Arab-Persian Gulf under the Seleucids."
FAIYUM In Hellenism in the East, edited by Amelie Kuhrt and Susan SherwinWhite, pp. 75-184. London, 1987. THERESA HOWARD-CARTER
FAIYUM. T o the ancient Egyptians, the lake at the cen ter of tire Faiyum Depression was a holy place, sacred to Sobek, the crocodile god, whose material manifestations swarmed the lake's beaches. T h e high religious significance of the lake was paralleled in several periods witii consider able economic importance, based on the fecundity of the Faiyum's well-watered farmlands and fish, fowl, and other resources from the lake itself. In modern Arabic, the lake is known as Birket Qarun. In ancient Egyptian it was originally She-resy ("southern lake") and later divided into She-resy and Mer-wer ("The Great Lake"). In early antiquity the Faiyum lake was fed by a branch of the Nile, therefore the lake rose and fell annually with the river, and in the flood season it covered a large area. Begin ning probably in the twelfth dynasty (c. 1991-1783 BCE) the water flow into the lake was artificially restricted, probably in order to reclaim land for farming. Land reclamation over the centuries eventually reduced the lake to less than 20 per cent of its original extent. In the early 1990s water runoff from agricultural fields has increased the size of the lake slightly and made it so saline that most aquatic animal spe cies disappeared. Traces of human activity in the areas around the Faiyum Depression region go back hundreds of thousands of years, but the earliest substantial and well-preserved occupations date to about ten thousand years ago when hunters and gatherers began intensive exploitation of the rich terrestrial and lake resources along the shore. Remains of these early occupations are marked by many small chert blades and other tools (known as the Qarunian Industry) and include numerous remains of fish, gazelle, hartebeest, hippo, and other animals. These early Faiyum groups appear not to have been in the process of domesticating plants or animals, or using these domesticates in any form of agriculture. About 7,500 years ago, the Faiyum hunter-fisher-foragers were replaced, displaced, or "converted" (the evidence is still uncertain) to "Neolithic" cultures, which were based in part on domesticated wheat, barley, sheep, goats, and cattle. Artifacts and sites of this period are found in heavy concen trations on most of the perimeter of the lake. There is no question that these people cultivated wheat and barley. In the 1920s archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson (Caton-Thompson and Gardner, 1934) found silos full of wellpreserved wheat and barley that also contained sickles and other tools of these early cultivators. Except for a few pos sible traces of poles for huts, no dwellings of the Faiyum Neolithic have been found, and it seems likely that these people lived in reed huts. The Faiyum seems to have been nearly abandoned soon
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after 4,000 BCE, but only a few sites that date to 4000-3000 have been found, perhaps because the main Nile Valley of fered better conditions for agriculture than the Faiyum. Only a few sites dating to 3000-1550 have been found in the Faiyum. Stone quarries on the northern side of the lake were worked during this period, and a small temple (known as Qasr el-Sagha) was built there in the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640). King Amenemhetl of the twelfth dynasty (c. 1991-1962) moved the administrative capital of Egypt and his royal res idence from Thebes to Itjtawy—now known as Lisht— which was located on the west bank of the Nile between the Faiyum and Memphis. Little remains of the town except two small pyramids and some tombs and cemeteries, but the emergence of Lisht as an important settlement probably re sulted in attempts to develop the Faiyum. Amenemhet III (c. 1844-1797) built a temple in the southern Faiyum at Medinet Madi, as well as a pyramid at Hawara, at the east ern entrance to the Faiyum. Underground burial chambers near the Hawara pyramid were probably the "Labyrinth" described by the Greek historian Strabo. Amenemhet III is also associated with two large stone constructions at Biahmu, which apparently were the bases of two colossal statues of him. Once on the shore or actually in the lake, they were described by Herodotus and perhaps were still partially preserved in the seventeenth century CE, according to travelers' reports, but no longer exist. Between about 300 BCE and 300 CE, the Greco-Roman era, the Faiyum became one of the richest and most important provinces of Egypt. During this time the agricultural pro duce of the Faiyum was exported to many towns and cities, some of them outside of Egypt, and several Faiyum towns grew into major metropolises. Some of these cities, such as Dimai on the northern shore of the lake and Karanis at the eastern entrance to the Faiyum, are remarkably well pre served even today. We know much of this period because thousands of documents have been found, almost all of them written on papyrus in demotic Egyptian or Greek and doc umenting the social and economic life of these communities. T h e Faiyum prospered during the medieval and modern periods as well, and today it is one of the most densely settled and agriculturally productive regions in Egypt. BIBLIOGRAPHY Caton-Thompson, Gertrude, and Eleanor Gardner. The Desert Fayum. London, 1934. Ginter, Bronislaw, and J. K. Kozlowski. "Investigations on Neolithic Settlement." In Qasr el-Sagha 1980, edited by J. K. Kozlowski, pp. 37-67. Warsaw, 1983. Wendorf, Fred, and Romauld Schild, Prehistory of the Nik Valley, New York, 1976. Wenke, Robert, Janet Long, and Paul Buck. "The Epipaleolithic and Neolithic Subsistence and Settiement in the Fayyum Oasis of
Egypt." Journal of Field Archaeology 15.1 (1988): 29-51. ROBERT J. WENKE
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FAKHARIYAH, T E L L
F A K H A R I Y A H , T E L L , site, whose modern Arabic name means "mound of sherds," located immediately south of the modern town of Ras al-'Ain ("fountainhead") in Syria ( 4 0 ° o i ' N, 3 6 ° 0 9 ' E ) , 6 5 km ( 3 8 mi.) northwest of the mod
ern city al-Hasakah (Hasseke) and about 100 km ( 6 2 mi.) west of the modern town of Qamishli (Nisibin). Hundreds of springs in the environs form the headwaters of dre Khabur River. This part of Syria is called Jezireh ("island") and is equivalent to Upper Mesopotamia. Tell Fakhariyah was first observed by Baron Max von Oppenheim in 1 8 9 9 , during his visit to tire source of the Khabur. Von Oppenheim worked at Tell Halaf from 1 9 1 1 to 1 9 1 3 , in 1 9 2 7 , and in 1 9 2 9 , searching for the Mitanni capital, Wassukanni. However, his work indicated that JJalaf was the ancient city of Guzana (Aram., gzozri). He moved to Tell Fakhariyah in 1 9 2 9 , to supervise a survey of tire tell, which produced a contour map but no excavation. Later, in 1 9 4 0 , the Oriental Institute of Chicago decided to change the focus of its research from the 'Arnuq region in Syria to Mesopotamia. Its goal was to clarify the cultural relationship between tire 'Amuq basin and Upper Meso potamia in dre second millennium BCE, in the belief that Wassukanni, the capital of Mitanni, was located at Tell Fa khariyah. In 1 9 4 0 , the institute received permission to excavate from the French High Commission of Syria. The expedition con sisted of Calvin W. McEwan and his wife, the former as director; Harold D . Hill as architect; and Abdullah Said Osman al-Sudain as superintendent. The American expedition came to an unexpected halt when von Oppenheim protested to the Vichy French government about its presence. Al though the Americans withdrew from the field, dre baron did not excavate the site himself. In 1 9 5 5 , Anton Moortgat received a license to excavate Tell Fakhariyah in the name of dre Oppenheim Foundation. [See the biography of Moort gat-] In the short time they were in the field, the Americans were able to make nine separate soundings, distinguishing eight levels: the upper four yielded Arab/Islamic, Byzantine, Roman, and Hellenistic remains. The fifth level belongs to the Aramaic period (or Iron Age, 9 0 0 - 6 0 0 BCE), the sixth to tire Middle Assyrian period (thirteenth century BCE); and die seventh to the Mitannian period (fifteendr-fourteenth cen turies BCE). So-called Klrabur ware was found in level eight (first half of tire second millennium BCE). Moortgat made similar observations. T h e results from both excavations are described here. The tell was settled in the Umayyad period. In the pre ceding Byzantine and Roman levels, the settlement was for tified. Sections of a double city wall were uneartired: two limestone walls running roughly parallel to each other. T h e inner wall was clearly die more important, as it contained a series of curtains with projecting towers and buttresses. In level five, in sounding IX, dre American expedition par
tially exposed a palace dated to the Aramaic period (Iron Age II, sixth-seventh centuries BCE). It is essentially a hilani (or pillared) type of sttucture. In 1 9 7 9 , at the southwestern edge of the tell, a tractor turned up a basalt statue ( 1 . 6 5 m high) of the Aramean king Hdys'y, King of gwzn, skn, and 'zm. It was consecrated to the god Hadad of Sikani (Aram., Haddzy skn). The most important level at Tell Fakhariyah is level six, the Middle Assyrian period. Many small objects, among them ivory pieces and seal impressions, were found in this level. The ivories were recovered in sounding IX, from floor 6, below the Iron Age palace. They are very fragmentary and appear to have been ornamental inlays for furniture or boxes. Only five pieces are undecorated; the majority are decorated with geometric designs, flower patterns, animal and human figures, Hathor heads, winged sun disks, and a griffon/demon. In a building dated to the thirteenth century BCE, twelve cuneiform tablets, ten with 1 1 6 seal impressions on tirem, were found. The style of most of the seal designs is exactly that of the Middle Assyrian seal impressions on tablets from Assur dated to dre tirirteenth century. T h e rep ertoire of designs is relatively small: recurring elements are ritual scenes, heroes and animals, monsters and animals in conflict, and animals in tranquil settings, In addition to these seal impressions, tirere were an old Babylonian cylinder seal, tirirteenth-century BCE stamp seals, and typical Late Assyr ian (Iron Age) scaraboids and bulla bearing the impression of a scarab. Of the twelve tablets and tablet fragments found at Fakhariyah in sounding VI, four are letters and eight are legal/economic documents. Four of the legal documents bear names of Limmu: of tiiese four eponyms, one belongs to the reign of Shalmaneser I ( 1 2 7 2 - 1 2 4 3 BCE) and one to
the reign of his son, Tukulti-Ninurta ( r 2 4 2 - 1 2 0 6 BCE). In level seven, there were traces of tire Mitanni at Tell Fakhariyah, as well as of earlier periods. These remains, rep resented mainly by pottery sherds, were not as well attested as the quantity of Assyrian remains from the following pe riod. The American and German expeditions expected to find Wassukanni at Tell Fakhariyah. Instead, tiiey found Sikani, an identification confirmed by the inscription of King Hadys'y, who placed his statue in tire Temple of Hadad at Sikani, the statue found at Tell Fakhariyah. [See also Mitanni.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Assaf, Ali Abou, et al, La statue de TellFekherye et son inscription bilingue assyro-arameenne. Paris, 1982. McEwan, Calvin, et al. Soundings at Tell Fakhariyah. Oriental Institute Publications, 79. Chicago, 1958. Moortgat, Anton. Archdologische Forschungcn der Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung im nbrdlichen Mesopotamien ia$S- Cologne, 1957. Moortgat, Anton. Archdologische Forschungen der Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung in nbrdlichen Mesopotamien 1956. Arbeitsgemein-
FARA schaft fur Forschung des Lands Nordrhein-Westfalen, Wissenschafdiche Abhandlungen, vol. 7. Cologne, 1957. ALI ABOU ASSAF
FAKHARIYAH ARAMAIC INSCRIPTION. The inscribed statue of a bearded male, Hadad-Yis'i, with hands crossed on dre stomach, was discovered accidendy in 1979 at Tell Fakhariyah in northeast Syria. T h e statue stands 1.65 m high. T h e subject is clothed in a shawl and a long tunic with a fringed border and his feet are clad in sandals. The statue's bilingual inscriptions, in Akkadian and Ara maic, are divided into two parts. T h e Akkadian text, thirtyeight lines long, is engraved on the front of the tunic; the Aramaic, twenty-three lines long, is on tire back. In the Ar amaic text words are separated by two dots, occasionally three, vertically oriented. This text contains new paleographic elements, and the iconography of tire statue has proven useful for dating. The inscriptions are similar in structure: they are dedi cations to the storm god Hadad; the identity of the dedicator is Hadad-yis'i, son of Shamash-nuri king of Gozan; they wish for a long, prosperous life; and they offer threats to anyone who would uy to erase his name. A second inscrip tion follows in both languages: the dedicator has increased his territory; restored or reengraved his dedications; and threatens whomever would erase his name from the prop erty of tire Temple of Hadad (the threatened punishment would be accomplished by Hadad and Iris consort, Shala/ Sawl, supported by Nergal). Many of the phrases in the Aramaic version are more adaptation than translation, but it does contain elements that are not common to both ver sions. In the version intended for their Assyrian masters, Hadadyis'i and his father Shamash-nuri are called governor of Guzana (sakin), but in the Aramaic version, intended for their underlings, they are called ldng of Gozan (mlk). In the Akkadian, the god resides at Guzana, in the Aramaic at Sikan. Perhaps at first two statues were erected, one at Guzana and one at Sikan, each inscribed with the Akkadian (11. 118) and the Aramaic (11. 1-12) texts. T h e second text (Ak kadian, 11. 19-38; Aramaic, 11. i2b-23) may have been writ ten later, after the annexation of Sikan and 'Azran, no doubt with Assyrian help. T h e threats, brief in tire first part, are more detailed in the second. Were these copied from a vassal treaty linking the dynasty of Guzana to the long of Assyria? Some Aramaic words are borrowed from the Akkadian, and sometimes the word order copies the Akkadian with the verb at the end of the sentence. The inflection of nouns in the nominative plu ral (nswn, "women") and in the oblique case (I'lhyn, "for the gods") recall tire case system of classical Arabic. T h e last part of the Aramaic texts contains images present in the Bible: 1. 22, Aramaic, 1. 35ff., Assyrian (cf. Lo. 26:26).
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T h e Aramaic writing does not preclude a date of about 1100 BCE (Naveh, 1987, pp. 214ft'., 221), but the statue and tire costume suggest a date within the ninth century BCE (Spycket, 1985, p. 67f.; Sader, 1987, pp. 26ff.). The latter date is supported by the following historical data: the As syrian eponym for the year 866 BCE is Shamash-nuri, and in the eighth century BCE the succession of eponymous gov ernors in Tushan and Guzana is frequent, as in 794-793, for example. If this custom existed in the ninth century, the eponym of 867 being governor of Tushan, that of 866 called Shamash-nuri could have been the governor of Guzana. Furthermore, some details of the Assyrian are characteristic of the period of Ashurbanipal (c. 850 BCE) . Some of the Aramaic letters are archaic (e.g., /D/ and I'ayinj); others are known in the tenth century BCE, or even in the ninth (e.g., /B/, /Z/, and /H/), while others anticipate tire writing of the eighth century BCE. T h e /W/ with a foot, the [L/ in the form of a question mark, tire upright /M/, the /N/ with a right angle, and the /S/ are all unusual forms. A new argument may be adduced dating tire inscription to about 800 BCE: word dividers are identical to those of more ancient Greek inscriptions from about 750 BCE Qeffery, 1982, fig. 104, pp. 82off., 823). That fact also reinforces the traditional idea that the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet in the eighth century, probably by still-undiscov ered northern channels. T h e Aramaic inscription from Tell Fakhariyah remains for the time being a unique example of this northern graphic tradition. [See also Fakhariyah, Tell.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Assaf, Ali Abou, et al. La statue de Tell Fekherye el son inscription bilingue assyro-arameenne, Paris, 1982. Fitzmyer, Joseph A., and Stephen A. Kaufman. An Aramaic Bibliogra phy, part 1, Old, Official, and Biblical Aramaic. Baltimore and Lon don, 1992. See pages 36ff. Jeffery, Lilian H. "Greek Alphabetic Writing." In The Cambridge An cient History, vol. 3,r, edited by John Boardman et al., pp. 819-833. 2d ed. Cambridge, 1982. Naveh, Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet. 2d ed. Jerusalem and Leiden, 1987. Sader, Helene. Les etals arameens de Syrie depuis leurfandation jusqu'a leur transformation en provinces assyriennes. Beiruter Texte und Studien, vol. 36. Beirut, 1987. Spycket, Agnes. "La statue bilingue de Tell Fekheriye." Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Arckeologie Orientale 79 (1985): 67-68. "The Tell Fakhariyah Bilingual Inscription." Newsletterfor Aramaic and Targumic Studies, Supplement 4 (1988): 1-7. PIERRE BORDREUIL Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
F A R A , city mound in Iraq, located about halfway between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, on the dry bed of tire ancient Euphrates River (3i°42' N , 45°32' E). The mound is large (220 ha, or 524 acres) and low (10 m at its maximum
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FARA
height). It was visited by three Europeans before serious excavation was begun: by William Kennett Loftus in 1850, William Hayes Ward in 1885, and Hermann V. Hilprecht in 1900. A pottery cone with an inscription of Halada, ensi (gov ernor) of Shuruppak, son of Dada, ensi of Shuruppak, found by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft expedition on the sur face of the mound, identified Fara as Shuruppak in 1902. In Near Eastern literature, Shuruppak is the home of Utnapishtim, the hero of die Babylonian Flood story. It appears as one of the five antediluvian cities on the Sumerian king list. [See Sumerians.] Excavations and surveys indicate that the first settlement at Fara took place shortiy before 3000 BCE. There is a Jemdet Nasr, or Late Uruk, level about 2 m thick at die base of the mound. [See Jemdet Nasr.] The site was then continuously occupied until shortly after 2000 BCE. Although a large city in Early Dynastic (ED) I, it does not appear among the ED III dynasties on the Sumerian king list. Shuruppak was one of eighteen ewM'ships under die control of Ur in the Ur III period (2112-2004 BCE). [See Ur.] There are few traces of later habitation; presumably, the site was abandoned as the Euphrates changed course. [See Euphrates.] Archaeologically, Fara is remarkable for having ED ILIA and II remains at surface level in most areas, later deposits having eroded away. The Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG) excavated at Fara for nine months beginning in June 1902 (Heinrich, 1931). [See Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft.] In that time, ap proximately two hundred men under two supervisors ex cavated twenty-one trenches consisting of about 855 3- X8-meter "squares." In the last few months of the excavation, the archaeologists began recognizing and tracing mud-brick architecture, and a few house plans were recovered. From this massive earth-moving effort, about twenty-five hundred objects were recovered and registered. Of these, about eight hundred were early cuneiform tablets, about thirteen hundred were seal impressions, and 171 were com plete pots or decorated sherds. [See Cuneiform; Tablet; Seals.] The tablets, found at twenty-four sites across the mound, were ED IIIA in date. They attest the organization of large numbers of workers by a number of large admin istrative units within the city. Most of die seal impressions were found either in a large dump area (trench Id-e, ED I—II) or in houses with E D IIIA tablets. These huge collections of seal designs have been vital to the study of Early Dynastic glyptic (see figure 1), although the exact dating of the mixed I—II group is still debated. In 1931 Erich Schmidt excavated at the site for three months for the University of Pennsylvania (Schmidt, 1931). His deep sounding in DE 38/39 established the presence of a thick Jemdet Nasr stratum followed by a "Flood stratum"
FARA. Figure 1. Seal impression. (Courtesy H. P. Martin)
Early Dynastic Ilia period.
and then more than 6 m of E D I—II deposits. E D IIIA tablets were found in drainpipes penetrating the debris from later, now eroded, levels. Schmidt excavated Early Dynastic II house remains in F G 42/43 and E D IIIA remains in HI 47/ 48/58. In addition, he cleared two of the massive Early Dy nastic "silos" that dot the site. [See Granaries and Silos.] These had filled with rubbish, dating from die E D III through Old Babylonian periods. Between 1968 and 1982, Flarriet P. Martin, while doing doctoral research at the University of Chicago, reexamined all of the finds and records from both excavations and con ducted a surface survey of die site (Martin, 1983, 1988). This enabled her to establish findspots for many of the ob jects from the D O G excavations and to put them in context by fully publishing Schmidt's excavations. Using Schmidt's records, Martin defined a corpus of E D II pottery for central and southern Babylonia (Martin, 1982). She also suggested a stylistic and chronological clas sification of die E D I—II seal impressions; it has been widely debated, however, largely because the total cultural assem blages of these periods have not been defined through pub lished excavation: Schmidt's excavations were too small in scale to do tiiis and die D O G ' s were too crudely executed. The D O G trenches can still be discerned on Fara's surface, broken in places by more recent illegal excavations. [See also Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; and the biography of Hilprecht] BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources for Archaeological and Philological Material Deimel, Anton. Die Inschriften von Fara, vol. 1, Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen; vol. 2, Schultexte aus Fara; vol. 3, Wirtschaftstexte aus Fara. Wissenschafdiche Veroffendichungen Deutsch Orient-Ge sellschaft, 40, 43, 45. Leipzig, 1922-1925. Heinrich, Ernst, and Walter Andrae, eds. Fara: Brgebnisse der Ausgrab ungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in Fara und Abu Hatab 1902I 3. Berlin, 1931. Jestin, Raymond R. Tabletles sumeriennes de Sumppak conservees au Mu-
FAR'AH, TELL ELsie d'htanbul. Memoires de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archeologie d'lstanbul, 3. Paris, 1937. Testin, Raymond R. Nouvelles lableues sumiriennes de Suruppak au Musee d'htanbul. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archiologie d'Istanbul, 2. Paris, 1957. Kramer, Samuel Noah. "New Tablets fromFara." Journal of the Amer ican Oriental Society 52 (1932): 110-132. Martin, Harriet P. "The Early Dynastic Cemetery at al-'Ubaid: A Reevaluation." Iraq 44 (1982): 145-185. Martin, Harriet P. "Settlement Patterns at Shuruppak." Iraq 45 (1983): 24-31. Martin, Harriet P. Fara: A Reconstruction of the Ancient City of Shurup pak. Birmingham, 1988. Schmidt, Erich F. "Excavations at Fara, 1931." University of Pennsyl vania Museum Journal 22 (1931): 193-235. Biblical and Literary References Although Shuruppak has indirect biblical connections as the home of the Babylonian "Noah" (Utnapishtim), it is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. Shuruppak appears in ancient literature because there was an antediluvian dynasty there mentioned in three king lists; the Instruc tions of Shuruppak were a type of ancient wisdom text in which "Shu ruppak," a man, is passing on advice to his son; and the hero of the Babylonian Flood story (known variously as Ziusudra, Utnapishtim, or Atrahasis) is king of and/or comes from the city of Shuruppak. Some principal works related to this literature are: Civil, Miguel, and Robert D. Biggs. "Notes sur des textes sum6riennes archai'ques." Revue d'Assyrologie et Archeologie Orientate 60 (1966): 1-5 • Finkelstein, Jacob J. "The Antediluvian Kings: A University of Cali fornia Text." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 17 (1963): 39-51. Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Sumerian King List. Oriental Institute, Assyriological Studies, 11. Chicago, 1939. Jacoby, Felix. Die Fragmente dergriechischen Historiker, part 3, Geschichte von Slddlen und Volkern (Nongraphic und Ethnographic). Leiden, I955-
Lambert, W. G. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford, i960. Langdon, Stephen H. Sumerian Epic of Paradise: The Flood and the Fall of Man. University of Pennsylvania, the University Museum Publi cations of the Babylonian Section, vol. 10.1. Philadelphia, 1915.. Langdon, Stephen H. The Weld Blundell Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, vol. 2, Historical Inscriptions, Containing Principally the Chronological Prism, W-B 444. Oxford, 1923. Poebel, Arno. Historical and Grammatical Texts. University of Penn sylvania, the University Museum Publications of the Babylonian Section, vol. 5. Philadelphia, 1914. Thompson, R. Campbell. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Oxford, 1930. HARRIET P. MARTIN
FAR'AH, TELL EL- (North), site located in the Sa maria hills, 10 km (6 mi.) northeast of Nablus (map refer ence 1823 X 1882). Situated on a high bluff at the western end of Wadi Far'ah, a major east-west avenue from the hill country to the Jordan Valley, the site overlooks the valley and perennial springs of 'Ain el-Far'ah and 'Ain el-Duleib. T h e mound's area is approximately 10 ha (25 acres). T h e site is called Tell el-Far'ah (North), to distinguish it from Tell el-Far'ah (South) in Nahal Besor. Tell el-Far'ah (North) is identified with biblical Tirzah,
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briefly the royal residence and capital of the northern king dom of Israel until Omri's founding of Samaria (r Kgs. 16:23-24). The identification was made by William Foxwell Albright (1931). Gustaf Dalman and Albrecht Alt suggested that the site was Ophrah, home of Gideon; and Felix-Marie Abel suggested that it was Beth-Baralr. The name Tell elFar'ah (Ar., "mound of the elevated ridge") offers no clue as to the site's ancient identity. T h e site's excavator, Roland de Vaux, agreed with the identification of Tell el-Far'ah with Tirzah (see Vaux, 1956). However, while tire identification remains persuasive, the archaeological evidence is ambigu ous. [See the biographies of Albright, Dalman, Alt, Abel, and Vaux.] De Vaux excavated at Tell el-Far'ah for the Ecole Bib lique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem for nine sea sons, from 1946 to i960. D e Vaux died before writing final reports. T o date, reports have been produced for the Middle Bronze IIA and IIB-C by Joel Mallet (1973, 1988) and the Iron Age by Alain Chambon (1984). De Vaux's field meth ods emphasized large architectural exposures, giving little attention to stratigraphy. T h e architectural stratigraphy and poor recording do not allow a detailed picture of the site's internal development. Nevertheless, Tell el-Far'ah stands with Megiddo and Hazor as foundations for understanding tire hill country and northern Canaan. [See Megiddo; Flazor.] T h e site's first significant material comes from tire Chal colithic period. An important Chalcolithic tomb, "grotto U," was excavated in a cave on the southern edge of the tell and was the first discovery of the Beersheba-Ghassul hori zon in tire north. T h e material de Vaux called Late Chal colithic is now understood as early Early Bronze I, repre sented by pottery and circular pit dwellings. T h e primary evidence from EB I comes from the extensive cemeteries to tire south, north, and recently along Wadi Far'ah northeast of the tell. The majority of the tomb material is EB I, with only 10 percent belonging to EB II, and none to EB III. There are at least five EB phases on the tell, which are com prised of rectilinear buildings with common walls around streets or lanes. Remains of the earliest known up draft kilns and pottery workshops were found there. T h e site was partially surrounded by a fortification wall of mud-brick on stone. T h e wall defended it on its open flank to the west. Steep slopes to the east and south made walls unnecessary. Other features included rectangular tow ers and a gateway. T h e gate was a narrow passageway set between projecting mud-brick towers. The gate was rebuilt in a later phase, then blocked, and then rebuilt entirely. In a later, EB II phase, part of the wall was reconstructed in stone on the remains of the earlier wall; at tire same time, another section of mud-brick wall was strengthened with a stone wall and rampart. Still later a glacis was added to the rampart.
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There is disagreement about the dating of Tell el-Far'ah in the Early Bronze Age, witir de Vaux arguing that the first two phases date to the EB IB and the rest to EB II. Refine ments in ceramic chronology suggest that all tire phases could be placed in EB II. There is no material from the tell or tombs from EB III or IV. The site was resettled in the MB IIA. A large village was built above tire ruins of the EB II town. Excavated remains are limited, consisting of fragmentary walls and sherd ma terial. A dozen tombs were found containing MB IIA or IIB burials. The MB IIC remains are more substantial and in clude a mud-brick-on-stone fortification wall and a layered stone and earth glacis built on top of the ruins of the EB wall. A large two-entryway gate with offset entry was incor porated into the wall. Two cult installations are attributed to MB IIC. One, temple 1-2, may have been a dome-shaped granary. The gate shrine near the city gate may have been a cultic installation. Continuity is suggested by an overlying sanctuary and Iron Age masseba and olive oil press. Do mestic remains of the M B IIC show continuity and accu mulation from the previous phase. Houses, courtyards, and installations were found, as well as infant jar burials beneath floors. The Late Bronze Age strata are poorly preserved and re ported. The only significant structure, the sanctuary, was erected above the gate shrine. It is a long room with a two rows of pillars, in which a small bronze statue of Hatiror covered in silver was found. This structure has been reas signed to tire Iron Age and reinterpreted as a four-room pillared house. [See Four-room House.] Few stratified re mains can be assigned to the Late Bronze Age. The ceme teries continued to be used, and there were infant jar burials beneath floors. The date and circumstances of the site's abandonment remain unclear. The Iron Age strata are better preserved than those of the Late Bronze Age. Chambon's final report provides a fuller picture of the site in that period (Chambon, 1984). Four basic strata are evident. The site was reoccupied in dre twelfth century BCE. The first Iron Age stratum, Vila (de Vaux's 4), is fragmentary and contains partial remains of four-room houses. The next stratum, Vllb (de Vaux's 3), is more substantial, with four-room houses oriented on a rec tangular plan. This stratum is dated to the tenth century. A problem arises with stratum VIIC (de Vaux's Inter mediate). De Vaux deemed one structure, building 411, an "incomplete building," regarding it as an unfinished palace abandoned by Omri's shift of the Israelite capital from Tirzah to Samaria. This is not, however, supported by tire ev idence. Virtually no material or other structures can be as signed to this stratum, and Thomas L. McClellan's reanalysis of the stratigraphy (1987) indicates that tire in complete building should be reassigned to stratum VTId (de Vaux's 2). Similar problems appear with stratum Vlld (de Vaux's 2), in which de Vaux saw a socioeconomic gap be
tween rich and poor during the eighth century BCE. McClellan shows that "poorer" buildings should be reas signed to the earlier stratum Vllb (de Vaux's 3). T h e fourroom houses and courtyards remaining in stratum Vlld (de Vaux's 2) are highly standardized, with little evidence of so cioeconomic differentiation. Tell el-Far'ah was destroyed by the Assyrians in 723 BCE. Its final Iron Age stratum, Vile (de Vaux's 1), shows evi dence of a rebuilding of the administrative building of the previous stratum and of Assyrian pottery. At the end of tire seventh century BCE, Tell el-Far'ah was abandoned and was never reoccupied. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "The Site of Tirzah and the Topography of Western Manasseh." Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 11 (1931): 241-251. The first identification of Tell el-Far'ah (North) with Tirzah and an extensive discussion of classical sources. Chambon, Alain. Tell el-Fdr'ah F. L'dge du fer. Paris, 1984. Final report of the Iron Age strata. Dever, William G. "Review of J. Mallet, Tell el-F&r'ah (Region de Naplouse)." Journal of Biblical Literature 94 (1975): 607-608. Dever, William G. "Review of Tell el-Far'ah II, 1; 2. Le Bronze moyen." Paliorient 15.2 (1990): 154-158. This and the review above help place the MB materials from Tell el-Far'ah (North) in their larger Canaanite context, something not attempted by the authors of the final reports. Huot, Jean-Louis. "Typologie et chronologic relative de la ceramique du Bronze ancien a Tell el-Far'ah." Revue Biblique 74 (1967): 517554. Fairly comprehensive publication of the EB pottery typology; marred by poor drawings and now outdated comparative materials. Mallet, Joel. Tell el-Far'ah (Region de Naplouse): L'installation du moyen Bronze anterieure au remparl. Paris, 1973. Mallet, Joel. Tell el-Far'ah II, 1; 2. Le Bronze moyen stratigraphie des vestiges du Bronze moyen II. Paris, 1988. McClellan, Thomas L. "Review of A. Chambon, Tell el-Far'ah I." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 267 (1987): 84— 86. Review of the final report on the Iron Age strata and an important reanalysis of some of the stratigraphy. Vaux, Roland de. Excavation reports. Revue Biblique 54 (1947): 394433. 573-589; 55 (1948): 544-58o; 58 (i95i): 393-430; 59 (1952): 551-583; 62 (1955): 541-589; 64 (1957): 552-58o; 68 (1961): 557592; 69 (1962): 212-253. Vaux, Roland de. "The Excavations at Tell el-Far'ah and the Site of Ancient Tirzah." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 88 (1956): 125-140. Elegant summary statement of die work at Tell el-Far'ah by the ex cavator; identification of the site with Tirzah. Vaux, Roland de. "Tell el-Far'a North." In Encyclopedia of Archaeolog ical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 395-404. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976. Final summary of the work at Tell el-Far'ah by the excavator; too general to be useful. ALEXANDER H . JOEFE
F A R ' A H , T E L L E L - (Soutir), site located on the west bank of tire Wadi Gaza, about 29 Ion (18 mi.) southeast of Gaza, at 3i°i7' N and 34°29' E (map reference 100 X 076). The tell, covering approximately 15 acres and protected on three sides by natural slopes, is one of the largest in the northwestern Negev. T h e site sits along a route linldng tire
1
FAR AH, TELL ELcoast to Beersheba in the north-central Negev. The site is designated "south" to distinguish it from the northern Pal estinian site of the same name. Tell el-Far'ah (South) was excavated in 1928-1929 by W. M. Flinders Petrie, who misidentified the site as biblical Beth-Pelet. William Foxwell Albright subsequently con nected the site with Sharuhen, an Asiatic stronghold cap tured by the Egyptian king Ahmose at the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty (c. 1540 BCE) . Albright's view was widely accepted until the mid-1970s, when Aharon Kempinski sug gested that Sharuhen should be placed at Tell el-Ajjul in tire Gaza district. Kempinski's proposal has gained support from an increasing number of archaeologists (although re cently Anson Rainey has proposed that Tell Abu Hureirah [Tel Haror] should be identified with Sharuhen); it leaves Tell el-Far'ah (South) without a known ancient name. Occupation on the mound is attested starting in the Mid dle Bronze II—III period. At that time the town had a defense wall, glacis, and fosse and counterscarp on the west and a triple-entryway gate with a pair of flanking towers on the south. A cemetery (designated cemetery 500 by Petrie) was in use northwest of the tell; a scarab from tomb 550 con tained the name of the Hyksos (i.e., fifteenth dynasty) ruler Maaibre. T h e site was abandoned in the second half of die sixteenth century BCE, possibly as the consequence of an early eighteenth-dynasty Egyptian military campaign; it was not reoccupied until the fourteenth century BCE. In the thirteenth century BCE, a large brick building was constructed on top of the M B II rampart at the north end of the mound. Fronted by a paved courtyard and containing an entrance and external stairway at one corner and a central courtyard with rooms on all four sides, dais Egyptian-style structure (designated die Residency by its excavator) was probably erected in connection with Egyptian administtative and military control of Palestine during the Ramessid pe riod. A jar fragment found in the building's central court yard contains the cartouches of the nineteenth-dynasty Egyptian king Seti II (1200-1194 BCE). A smaller building on the west side of the Residency probably was used for offices. Cemetery 900, which belongs to the thirteenth-early twelfth century BCE, contained numerous Egyptian objects. There was an important Philistine component at die site in the mid-twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE. T O this period belong several large rock-cut chamber tombs in cemetery 500 that contained pottery and other goods associated with the Philistines; tombs in several other cemeteries around the mound yielded similar remains. Two of the cemetery 500 tombs (nos. 552 and 562) contained anthropoid coffins, a burial custom adopted by the Philistines from the Egyptians. T h e Philistines apparently settled at Tell el-Far ah while the town was still under Egyptian control and remained diere after die Egyptians withdrew from southern Palestine in about the third quarter of die twelfth century BCE. T h e evidence for human activity at the site during the first c
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millennium BCE is scattered. There appears to have been limited occupation during die tenth-early nintii centuries BCE (most of die tombs in cemetery 200 belong to this pe riod) and dien again during die seventh-sixth centuries BCE. Occupation in the Persian period is attested by burials in several cemeteries. A rich tomb of that period, number 650, contained a silver dipper and fluted bowl. Another decline in activity followed that lasted until the Early Roman period, when a small fort was constructed at the nortii end of the mound. Several coin hoards helped to date the structure to the first century CE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohen, Rudolph. "Tell el-Far'ah (South)." Israel Exploration Journal 27.2-3 (1977): 170. Brief report on the discovery of Iron Age remains at the site in 1976. Dothan, Trade. The Philistines and Their Material Culture. New Haven, 19S2. Comprehensive study of Philistine archaeological materials, including those at Tell el-Far'ah (South). Kempinski, Aharon. "Tell el-'Ajjul—Beth-Aglayim or Sharuhen?" Is rael Exploration Journal 24.3-4 (1974): 145-152. Questions die iden tification of Tell el-Far'ah (South) with ancient Sharuhen, suggest ing that Tell el-'Ajjul is a more likely candidate. Macdonald, Eann, J. L. Starkey, and Lankester Harding. Beth-Pelet, vol. 2, Prehistoric Fara; Beth-Pelet Cemetery. British School of Ar chaeology in Egypt, Publications of the Egyptian Research Account, no. 52. London, 1932. Final report on Petrie's 1929 season at Tell el-Far'ah (South), written by members of his staff. Maxwell-Hyslop, K. R. "A Silver Earring from Tell el-Farah (South)." In Archaeology in the Ixvant, edited by Roger Moorey and Peter Parr, pp. 180-182. Warminster, 1978. Publication of a Persian-period ear ring from Tomb 725 at Tell el-Far'ah (South). Oren, Eliezer D. " 'Governor's Residencies' in Canaan under the New Kingdom: A Case Study of Egyptian Administration. "Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 14 (1984): 37-56. Analysis of a group of F.gyptian-style buildings in Canaan during the thir teenth and twelfth centuries BCE, including the Residency at Tell elFar'ah (South). Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Beth-Pelet. Vol. 1 . British School of Archaeology in Egypt, Publications of the Egyptian Research Account, no. 48. London, 1930. Petrie's final report on his 1928 season at this site. Price-Williams, David. The Tombs of the Middle Bronze Age II Period from the "500" Cemetery al Tell Fara (South). University of London, Institute of Archaeology, Occasional Publication, no. 1. London, 1977. Detailed reexamination of the principal Middle Bronze Age cemetery at the site. Rainey, Anson F. "Sharhan/Sharuhen—The Problem of Identifica tion." Eretz-Israel 24 (1993): I 7 8 * - I 8 7 * . Disputes the identification of Tell el-'Ajjul widi Sharuhen; proposes Tell Abu Hureirah (Tel Haror) as a better alternative. Waldbaum, Jane C. "Philistine Tombs at Tell Fara and Their Aegean Prototypes," American Journal of Archaeology 70.4 (1966): 331-340. Attributes the tombs in Cemetery 900 to a pre-Philistine group of Aegean Sea Peoples and the tombs in Cemetery 500 to die Philis tines. The latter claim is now generally accepted; the former is not. Weinstein, James M. "Egypt and the Middle Bronze IIC/Late Bronze IA Transition in Palestine." Levant 23 (1991): 105-115, Compares the evidence for Tell el-'Ajjul and Tell el-Far'ah (South) as Hyksosperiod Sharuhen, favoring the former site. JAMES M. WEINSTEIN
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FARIS, KHIRBET, ruined agricultural village, located 3 km (2 mi.) northeast of al-Qasr in Jordan (31 "24' N , 35°44' E). From tire eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, Khirbet Faris was known as Khirbat Tadun; it derives its present name from Faris al-Majali, its owner, who was buried there in about 1930. There is evidence of occupation at the site since the Bronze/Iron Age. Khirbet Faris was visited by several nineteenth-century European travelers including Ulrich J. Seetzen, Felicien de Saulcy, and Alois Musil, and surveyed by J. Maxwell Miller (1991) and Udo Worschech (1985). It was excavated be tween 1988 and 1993 by the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History and the University of Oxford, un der the direction of Jeremy Johns and Alison McQuitty. The excavation set out to investigate a specific set of problems. Regional surveys in Jordan had indicated dramatic fluctua tions in the pattern of Islamic settlement, generally attrib uted to the varying ability of the state to keep the bedouin from invading the settled region. The excavations at Khirbet Faris sought to test this model by studying a rural commu nity from the seventh century to the present, reconstructing its material culture and socioeconomic structure through a combination of excavation and postexcavation analysis of finds, architectural survey, paleoenvironmentology, field survey, historical studies, and etirnoarchaeology. Preliminary results suggest that human occupation at Khirbet Faris is best understood not in terms of settlement or abandonment, but rather as a continuum of differing in tensities of occupation, ranging from permanent, yearround settlement in structures built de novo, to seasonal oc cupation involving the reuse and slight modification of existing structures. Khirbet Faris was always occupied at some level on this scale, and there was extensive de novo building or major architectural modification of domestic and agricultural structures in the first-second centuries CE, fifthmid-eighth centuries CE, twelfth-sixteenth centuries CE, and late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries. The postexcava tion analysis of finds, especially of the organic remains, is providing evidence for the socioeconomic trends behind the variations in the scale of occupation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Johns, Jeremy, and Alison M. McQuitty. "The Faris Project: Prelimi nary Report upon the 1986 and 1988 Seasons." Levant 21 (1989): 63-95Johns, Jeremy. "Islamic Settlement in Ard al-Karak." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, pp. 363-368. Amman, 1992. Johns, Jeremy. "The Longue Duree: State and Settlement Strategies in Southern Transjordan across the Islamic Centuries." In Village, State, and Steppe; The Social Origins of Modern Jordan, edited by Eugene L. Rogan and Tariq Tell, pp. 1-31. London and New York, 1994. McQuitty, Alison M., and Robin Falkner. "The Faris Project: Prelim inary Report on the 1989, 1990, and 1991 Seasons." Levant 25 (1993): 37-6i.
Miller, J. Maxwell, ed. Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau. At lanta, 1991. Worschech, Udo F. Ch. Northwest Ard el-Kerak, 1083 and 1984: A Pre liminary Report. Munich, 1985. JEREMY JOHNS
FARMSTEADS. Research into the rural zone has bur geoned in tire past two decades. Archaeologists of tire Greek and Italian countryside offer studies ranging from luxurious wine-producing villas like Settefinestre to small-holdings of Roman colonists (Potter, 1987). In the Near East, surveys have produced a great body of data identifying and docu menting tire hinterland's farmstead—tire buildings, fields, and activity loci of a farm—as a conspicuous feature of the ancient landscape and a telling indicator of the ebb and flow of settlement. Surface dating has demonstrated the associ ation of farmsteads with periods of high-intensity land use, a barometer of tire growth of the urban sphere and its sway over the surrounding territory. Thus, the appearance of farmsteads is related to heightened security conditions and the burgeoning demand for specialized economic goods— that is, marketable commodities. Nevertheless, there re mains precious little published archaeological data regarding the hinterland's farmstead. A host of difficulties hinder the detailed investigation of the farmstead: chief among these is tire normally limited ac cumulation and eroded condition of artifact-bearing sedi ments that hamper the dating of the structures. Neverthe less, probes alongside the walls of rural buildings in the vicinity of Tell el-'Umeiri (Jordan), for example, often have been successful in pinpointing the buildings' period of con struction. [See 'Umeiri, Tell el-.] Architectural typologies— building size and materials—help to date those farmstead structures that themselves lack significant stratified remains. Still, the installations and features that surround a rural building almost always lack a stratigraphic context. How ever, certain features regularly appear in association with farmstead buildings. Rock-cut wine presses, cupholes, res ervoirs, cisterns, and caves, along with terrace and perimeter walls, comprise a constellation of activity loci that was prob ably consttucted contemporaneously with the farmstead building. T h e advantages of farmstead residence include a decrease in time lost to commuting back and forth to the fields from town and a greater ability to devote constant attention and surveillance to the farm and its holdings. Both of these ad vantages permit a farming family to make more use of its labor force or a commercial enterprise to supervise its hired or enslaved labor force. The farmstead also offers greater efficiency in developing a holding of contiguous land units (as opposed to the fragmented holdings that characteristi cally surround villages). T h e disadvantages of rural resi dence include social isolation and vulnerability—greater risk
FATIMID DYNASTY through the inability to call upon neighbors for defense and reciprocal labor exchanges. Khirbet er-Ras, just south of Jerusalem is a well-published farmstead (Edelstein et a l , 1983). A fieldstone perimeter wall surrounded the site, enclosing an area of about 1.8 ha (4.5 acres) located on a slope just above a wadi floor. Ter races ran laterally across die farmstead, which also included two buildings, cisterns, a cave, a beam-type wine press, and otiier walled enclosures. T h e central house (about 12.8 X 9.7 m) is a courtyard ("four-room") house with remnants of paved flooring. Among the Late Iron II pottery (mosdy holemoudi jars and bowls), its excavators recovered two jar handles with Imlk ("die king's") seal impressions. These finds link die farmstead and its winery directiy to die royal Judean economic program and suggest diat the occupants of the farmstead were related socially and politically to the elite leadership. Though the term farmstead connotes the rural residence of a hardscrabble farming family, Iron Age farmsteads may well represent the penetration of die coun tryside by the managerial arm of the city-based administra tion. [See also Agriculture.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dar, Shim'on. Landscape and Pattern: An Archaeological Survey of Sa maria, Soo B.C.E.-636 CE. 2 vols. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 308. Oxford, 1986. Decade-long survey with some excavation of sites. The rich rural life of this hill country re gion—lime kilns to threshing floors—is amply documented in word, line drawing, and photograph. Edelstein, Gershon, et al. "Food Production and Water Storage in the Jerusalem Region" (in Hebrew). Qadmoniot 16.1 (1983): 16-23. Re ports the authors' study of 'Ein-Yalu, Khirbet er-Ras, and el-Tauvil. See also Gershon Edelstein and Shimon Gibson, "Ancient Jerusa lem's Rural Food Basket," Biblical Archaeology Review 8.4 (1982): 46-54Hopkins, David C. The PEghlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age. Sheffield, 1985. Contains a systematic, anthropolog ically oriented presentation of the nature of agriculture and its par ticular manifestations in Early Iron Age Palestine. Potter, Timothy W. Roman Italy. Berkeley, 1987. Contains a succinct review of archaeology in the Italian countryside. Younker, Randy W. "Architectural Remains from the Hinterland Sur vey." In Madaba Plains Project 2: The 1987 Season at Tell el-Vmeiri and Vicinity and Subsequent Studies, edited by Larry G. Herr et al. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1992. DAVID C . HOPKINS
FATIMID DYNASTY. Shi'i in origin, the Fatimid dy nasty takes as its eponym Fatimah, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad and the wife of 'Ali, the fourth of the earliest "rightly guided" caliphs. But for its real individual ity, one must look to the schism within the Shi'i movement, which divided on politically strategical lines when Ismail, the oldest son of the sixth Imam (in direct line from the sons of 'Ali and Fatimah), was superseded by his younger
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brother. Part of the Shi'i community remained loyal to the senior line and espoused a policy of political intervention and subterfuge toward achieving legitimacy. This group was known as the Isma'ili branch, and those who followed the younger Imam down to die twelfth and last Imam are termed Ithna 'Ashari, or "Twelver," a group regnant in Iran and espoused by a significant percentage of the present pop ulation in Iraq and Lebanon. It has been difficult to forge direct lineage between the family of the Imam Isma'il and the founder of the Fatimid branch, Ubaydallah. Believers hold that the Imamate was vouchsafed to the fatiier of Ubaydallah, Maymun al-Qaddah, by one of the heirs of Isma'il. This claim was so difficult to prove that the 'Abbasid caliphate refused to consider Fat imid legitimacy, denouncing them as impostors both to the Prophetic family and to die religious legitimacy, which it unwillingly acknowledged of the sons of AH and Fatimah and tiieir heirs. (Such acknowledgement motivated the 'Ab basid caliph al-Ma'mun to surrender his power temporarily to the Twelver Imam, 'Ali ibn Musa al-Kadhim, in AH 201/ 817 CE.) Nevertheless, Ubaydallah operated out of Salamiyah in Syria, setting up a network of undercover agents whose objective was to secure him a base of power from which to begin his vaunted quest to unseat the 'Abbasid caliphate. By shrewd and secret propaganda, drese agents secured such a base among the Kutama Berbers, long disgruntied with the 'Abbasid/Aghlabid hold on the eastern half of the Maghrib. By 297/909, Ubaydallah was in die Maghrib and declared himself the rightful imam and caliph, taking the almost prophetic regnal tide of al-Mahdi. He con structed a new capital, al-Mahdiyah south of the old seat of power in Ifriqiyah, Qayrawan. (Soon after the Umayyad ruler of Spain, 'Abd al-Rahman III, also assumed caliphal rank; tiius by die mid-tenth century there were three caliphs in the dar al-Islam [Islamic world].) Ubaydallah's success brought large sections of the Berber population to his side witii whom he and his son, al-Qa'im, were able to subdue all of the Maghrib and, for a time, Sicily. Inevitably forays were made against Egypt, most signally in 913-915, 919-921, and 925. Eventually, the Fatimid general Jawhar (a slave of Sicilian origin) entered Fustat in Cairo in July 358/969 and welcomed his master, the caliph al-Mu'izz in 362/973. Very soon thereafter, die regents left in charge of the Fatimid dominions in the west returned to the Sunni allegiance, recognizing die suzerainty of die 'Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. (In the next century, the Fatimids of Egypt wrought their revenge by allowing free passage of the ma rauding tribes of Sulaym and Flilal through Egypt and into the Maghrib, which tiiey proceeded to devastate.) Until 567/1171 Egypt was the center, indeed the linchpin of Fatimid power. T h e Fatimids paid lip service to the quest toward the east and Baghdad, a quest that necessitated the conquest of most (but never all) of Greater Syria. (Yet for one year, 451/1059, the Fatimid caliph replaced the 'Abbasid
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caliph in the khutbah in Baghdad.) In time the Fatimids were thwarted by two successive phenomena, the rise of the Sel juk (Saljuq) dynasty, which was adamantly Sunni, and the appearance of the Crusaders toward die end of the eleventh century CE. Indeed, it was to the crusaders drat the Fatimids lost their last holding in Syria, Ashkelon, in 548/1153. [See Crusader Period.] With a few hard years following low Nile floods and sub sequent dysynchronous famine (i.e., intermittent but related to the flooding pattern), the Fatimid period represents the apogee of wealth of medieval Egypt. On the economic side, one may cite three strokes of fortune: a superb, even re formed, agricultural system, which permitted three harvests in one year and found rich return in exporting the surplus of cereals, sugar, and linen; tire presence of a supply of gold in the Wadi Allaqi in Nubia, so bounteous that there was very little silver coinage in the eleventh century and so well controlled that Egypt essentially set the prices for its im ports, thereby freeing itself from the medieval vagaries of the barter system; and control of the Indian and Far Eastern trade, which shifted to the Red Sea sometime after the be ginning of the eleventh century as a measure of how trem ulous the Persian Gulf route had become. Although it is true that the effects of the famines in 446/1054-55 and 457-464/ 1065-1072 were almost catastrophic (all sources agree on the suffering), so much so drat the caliph al-Mustansir was forced to disgorge the treasures of his palace to allay the disaster, it is equally true drat the recovery was quick and dre prosperity renewed. This process held true to the very end of the dynasty. In pursuit of wealth, a protean economic endeavor, the Crusader states at tire behest of Venetian and Genoese merchants attacked Egypt in 563/1168 without cause. To counter such trespass Egypt was forced to call on its sworn Sunni enemy, Nur ad-Din of Damascus, to assist the dynasty already in the throes of its political dessication. From tire beginning, the Fatimid dynasty sought to call attention to its legitimacy and its ambitions. A whole new "city" was laid out to house the caliph and his entourage, the military and the governmental bureaus to dre northeast of the conglomerate capital of Fustat/al-Askar/al-Qata'i. This royal quarter was dubbed al-Qahira (Mars, "the con quering star," was in the ascendant when the urban lines were laid out), which was transliterated Cairo by Italian mer chants. Al-Azhar was founded a year after the conquest as a training school for the propagandists (sg., al-ddi) of tire creed. Eventually, the caliph al-Hakim (386-411/996-1021) built a Friday mosque directly adjacent to the earlier brick north wall, which had a beautiful facade with an imposing monumental entrance (a copy of the one at the mosque of al-Mahdiyah) and superb stone minarets at either end. T o ward the end of tire long reign of al-Mustansir (427-487/ 1036-1094) and under the stress of Seljuk incursions into Greater Syria, a second set of stone walls was erected, which enclosed dre mosque of al-Hakim on the nortir side. Through its three superb gates, Bab al-Nasir and Bab al-
Futuh on the north and Bab al-Zuwaylah on tire south, passed not only the population of the expanded capital (for the old one had simply crept up and glued itself unto alQahira), but men from all over the Mediterranean and dre dar al-Islam, particularly those of the Isma'ili persuasion. One other quite surprising aspect of the Fatimid rulers of Egypt, which contributed to their phenomenal success within Egypt, was tire constant display of tolerance. It is true that some unusual forms of practice were introduced, par ticularly in the adhan (the call to prayer) and the Qur'anic verses used in inscriptions and recited during public cere monies; nevertheless, Sunni allegiance was hardly touched during their two centuries of dynastic rule. Craftsmen and scholars were welcomed and lavishly patronized. Men of all religious persuasions assumed the wazirate (vizierate) or headed the various governmental diwans (adminisu-ative of fices), and, in some cases, held military command. Though some converted, tiiere was no policy of enforced conversion. Perhaps only the leadership of tire duwwat, the system of ttaining and directing the Fatimid propagandists, was allo cated specifically to a Fatimid Isma'ili Shilte. T h e Shi'ite worship of the 'Alid and Imamate families, which accorded with Egyptian traditions concerning the dead and their mon uments, in taldng the form of rather splendid mausolea and tireir visitation, struck a sympathetic chord throughout Egypt. (It is interesting to note that not a single Fatimid public inscription was destroyed or defaced by Salah ad-Din and his successors.) In their public rituals, public ceremo nies, and court etiquette tire Fatimids raised the tone of so ciety to a level that had only been touched during tire Ptolemaic period. Quite another aspect of dre Fatimids' effect upon Egypt was in tire realm of art and architecture. They freed artists from tireir implicit dependence on 'Abbasid models, as is quite obvious from tire two sets of stucco decoration at alAzhar. On tire one hand, dre pre-Islamic classical style, which is preserved in Coptic monasteries, reemerged par ticularly in tire variations on tire vine and rinceau (circle or spiral) themes; on the other hand, a whole cycle of courtly motifs came to dominate the arts. These decorations were available to the bourgeois as well as the royal patrons. Insin uating all was tire apogee of floriated Kufic calligraphy, which is easily traced on tire buildings of the period. In ar chitecture the pattons of the Fatimid period respected in novation above all; there was no low point, no tapering off of form or decoration, from al-Azlrar to the mosque of asSalilr Tala'i built in 555/1160. Unlike the Mamluks style, the Fatimids had an aesthetic of decorous verve subsuming the undercurrents of millennial Egyptian motifs and influences from countries as diverse as Tunisia, China, Byzantium. In the Fatimid epoch, marriage contracts were woven in silk; chess was played witir rock crystal figures; family tombs were replete witir mosque and bath; luster ware and im ported porcelain were readily available; and the textiles of the world could be had for a bride's trousseau.
FATIMID DYNASTY Yet for all the public prestige and prosperity, the conti nuity was internally challenged from the beginning. Legiti macy may have been the constricting problem. Although European merchants and Byzantine diplomats beat a path to Cairo, Sunni Islam was as determined to destroy the Fa timid dynasty as to retrieve the lands usurped by tire Cru saders. T h e overwhelming majority of Egyptians did not convert to Isma'ilisnr; hence the need for external military personnel. T h e Berbers were undependable and melted back to the Maghrib; tire black troops (Nubians and Ethio pians) were obstreperous and a civil menace; Daylami Per sians never came in sufficient numbers; and itinerant Turks made manifest their quixotic loyalties. A strong caliph such as al-Hakim went to extremes in ordering a decent Alid society, including burning the Church of tire Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in 400/1009-10. Others came to depend on mil itary strong men, such as Badr al-Jamali, a converted Ar menian, who restored order in Cairo and built the second set of walls. He was succeeded by his son al-Afdal who in terfered in the succession process following the death of alMustansir in 487/1094 and had a more pliable second son, al-Musta'li (487-495/1094-1101) put on tire throne rather than al-Nidhar the eldest, thus repeating the pattern of the imam Isma'iPs rejection. Once broken, it was almost im possible to resurrect caliphal influence and direction; one caliph, al-FIafidh (525-544/1130-1149) was only a cousin of his predecessor. T h e weak and tire young succeeded one another; they were pawns of unstable wazirs and/or pow erful generals, who had to be eliminated at great cost to the dynasty's prestige. All such fissiparous tendencies did not impinge on tire public prosperity of Fatimid Egypt, but they weakened whatever direction the dynasty signaled to tire populace. When the Crusaders attacked, help had to be sought from the Sunni constituencies, making the return to orthodoxy inevitable. c
In September 567/1171 Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin) had tire khutbah (the Friday sermon) read in the name of tire 'Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. As sultan of Egypt, he used its resources to commence his conquest of Greater Syria and his counter-Crusade, which culminated in the retaking of Jerusalem in 583/1187. He treated the Fatimid family with great kindness, simply making sure there was very little pro creation. T h e dynasty was remembered outside Egypt through two movements: the Druze in Greater Syria, who maintained a sacral reverence for the caliph al-Hakim; and the Nizari Isnra'ilis known more familiarly as tire Assassins, from which today the Iranian, Indian, and African branches give alle giance to the family of the Aga Khan. Within Egypt, tire memory faltered after the advent of the Ayyubids and the dominance of tire Mamluks who moved the center of gov ernment from al-Qahira to the new Citadel. The two para disiacal palaces of the Fatimids along the great north-south artery were reduced and then removed to.make way for im posing religious structures. Only in the very beginning of
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tire fourteenth century does a glimmer of interest reappear in the quest of the historian al-Maqrizi to understand the Fatimid effect in Egypt's history. The people of Cairo have continued to visit and venerate tire Fatimid tombs to the present time. Perhaps in tire pomp and prestige they evinced, however, the historian senses the move from the puissant autonomy of the Tulunids to an achieved indepen dence of Egypt within the fuller medieval Islamic polity. This Fatimid legacy has proven more important than their chimerical origins. [See also Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties; Cairo; Egypt, ar ticle on Islamic Egypt; and Fustat.] BIBLIOGRAPHY For the best digest of the primary sources and analysis of the research up to c. 1970 on the subject, see the incomparable article by Marius Canard, "Fatimids," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 2, pp. 850862 (Leiden, i960-). (The accompanying article on Fatimid art by Georges Marcais needs serious updating.) A number of new editions of older sources have appeared which tiirow considerably more penetrating light on the history of the Fatim ids. See, for example, al-Musabbihi, Al-juz' al-arba'in min akhbar misr, edited by Thierry Bianquis and Ayman Fu'ad Sayyid (Cairo, 1978); Ibn al-Ma'mun al-Bata'ihi, Nusus min akhbar misr, edited by Ayman Fu'ad Sayyid (Cairo, 1983); and, though later, Claude Cahen's various studies on the known fragments of the bureaucrat al-Makhzumi, which can be extrapolated to take in the final part of die Fatimid dynasty, collected in Makhznmiyat (Leiden, 1977). For die death and veneration of al-Hakim, see Joseph van Ess, Chiliastische Erwariungen und die Versuchung der Gattlichkeit der Kalif al-Hakim (386-41 T H.) (Heidelberg, 1977)All the new subgroup Fatimists are hugely in debt to the extraordi nary work of S. D. Goitein based on die examination and rescension of the Geniza documents. Canard surveyed all the printed preparations toward Goitein's five-volume study, A Mediterranean Society (Berkeley, 1967-1988), but would have been very slightly dismayed to find that the materials were more pertinent to the twelfth than die eleventh cen tury. A sixth volume of referential indices has been published jointly by Goitein and Paula Sanders (Berkeley, 1993). For the analysis of the Fatimid financial/commercial system, in a sense the first "spin-off of Goitein's survey, see Abraham Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Me dieval Islam (Princeton, 1970). Two very important monographs have recently appeared which flesh out Canard's rather acute analysis of the subjects: Paula Sanders, Rit ual, Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo (Sarasota Springs, N.Y., 1994), and Leila Al-Imad, The Fatimid Vizierate, 960-1172 (Berlin, 1990). Yaacov Lev's Slate and Society in Fatimid Egypt (Leiden, 1991) is much less convincing as a commentary on Canard's precis. For die most insightful analysis of die propaganda bureau (duwwat), see Paul Walker, "The Ismaili Da'wa in the Reign of the Fatimid Caliph alHakim," Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 30 (1993): 161-182. For die marriage contract on linen, see Y. Ragib, "Un contrat de marriage sur soie d'Egypte fatimide," Annales Islamologiques 16 (1980): 31-37. Two important articles by Oleg Grabar discuss the artistic wealth of the Fatimids and its meaning: "Imperial and Urban Art in Islam: The Subject Matter of Fatimid Art," in Colloque international sur Thistoire du Caire, pp. 173-191 (Cairo, 1969), and "Fatimid Art: Pre cursor or Culmination," in Isma'ili Contributions to Islamic Culture, ed ited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, pp. 207-224 (Tehran, 1977). Two im portant studies on the architecture of Fustat during the Fatimid period are Antoni A. Ostrasz, "The Architectural Material for the Study of the Domestic Architecture at Fustat," Africana Bulletin 26 (1977): 5 7 -
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86, and Wladyslaw B. Kubiak and George T. Scanlon, Fustat Expedi tion: Final Report, vol. 2, Fustat-C (Winona Lake, Ind., 1986). The recent work of Roland Gayraud on the Fatimid Funerary Complex at Stabl Antar in Fustat has not been fully published, but see his reports in Annates Islamologiqu.es 23 (1987): 55-72; 25 (1991): 57-88; and 27 (1993): 225-232. Nothing specifically Fatimid has been published from die Polish excavations at Kom el-Dikka in Alexandria; however these results should form a governor to the excavations at Fustat and else where in Egypt. A newer light on the question of Chinese imports and their influence can be found in George T. Scanlon, "Egypt and China: Trade and Imitation," in Islam and the Trade of Asia, edited by D. S. Richards, pp. 265-274 (Oxford, 1970); and B. Gyllensvard, "Recent Finds of Chinese Ceramics at Fustat," Bulletin of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm), no. 45 (1973): 99-119, and no. 47 (1975): 99-119. For a more searching survey of the post-Canardian bibliography, the reader should consult the Index Islamicus for the work of scholars such as Ayman Fu'ad Sayyid, Thierry Bianquis, Abbas Hamdani, Oleg Grabar, Y. Ragib, and George T. Scanlon, as well as the article "Fustat," infra. GEORGE T. SCANLON
F E L N A N , site located at the eastern margin of the Wadi 'Arabah, halfway between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea (3°°37'3 " N , 35°29' E). The Byzantine ruins of Feinan (Fenan, Phinon, Punon) are but one prominent archaeolog ical site in a copper ore district drat covers about 500 sq km (310 sq. mi.). It is part of the original sedimentary copper deposit of Timna'-Feinan-Eilat-Abu Kusheiba, which is di vided by dre tectonic activities of the Wadi 'Arabah rift val ley. [See Timna' (Negev)]. In the Feinan area, more than 250 ancient mines and 150,000-200,000 tons of slag were discovered. The history and development of metallurgy in the area has been studied by archaeologists and scientists from the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Bochum, Germany, and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities since 1984. The area has been intensively surveyed and settlements from different periods and mines have been excavated (Wadi Ghwair 1, Tell Wadi Feinan, Wadi Fidan 4, Khirbet Hamra Ifdan, Barqa el-Ffetiye, Wadi Khalid, Qalb Ratiye). Analytical work for provenience studies and reconstructions of smelting processes is done in the laboratory on ore, slag, and metal. D
Archaeological excavation and the radiocarbon dating of fifty-two samples have made it possible to trace the exploi tation of the ore deposit over a period of nine thousand years. The earliest settlements belonged to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, when copper ores ("greenstones") were utilized for making beads and for cosmetic purposes. The ores were traded as far as Ain Ghazal in Transjordan and Jericho in ancient Palestine. Samples of pure copper ores have also been found at Tell Wadi Feinan (sixth/fifth mil lennium), some 2 km (1 mi.) west of die ruins of Feinan. Pyrometallurgy developed in the middle of the fourth mil lennium. Metal was smelted on a small scale inside of set tlements ("household metallurgy"). High-grade secondary ores were used that left only very small amounts of slag. c
Copper ore was also traded to Abu Matar, Shiqmim, Wadi Ghazzeh, and Tell Maqass/'Aqaba, where it was smelted inside the Chalcolithic settlements. [See Shiqmim.] At Feinan, mining and smelting peaked in the Early Bronze Age II—III (first half of the tiiird millennium). New technologies, such as the use of manganese oxide for fluxing, increased the exploitation of ores considerably. Twelve slag heaps in the area of Feinan point to a large-scale copper production tiiat was die basis for the export of metal to cities in the Levant. T h e survey produced only sparse evidence for metal production there in the Middle Bronze Age. As at Timna', production increased again in the Late Bronze Age. Excavations at Barqa el-Hetiye/Feinan revealed Midianite pottery from the thirteenth/twelfth centuries BCE. Innovations in mining and smelting developed during the Iron Age IIB and IIC, and copper was produced on an in dustrial scale. T h e industry was organized by the Edomite towns on the Jordanian plateau, such as Buseirah and U m m el-Biyara. [See Buseirah and U m m el-Biyara.] Remote parts of the ore deposit were made accessible by sinking shafts as deep as 70 m. Smelting was concentrated at two major cen ters—at Khirbet en-Nahas ("ruins of copper") and at Feinan—and led to the formation of the largest slag heaps in the southern Levant. This copper boom, which is paral leled in other copper districts in the Old World, arose in a period when the popularity of iron and steel increased. Major mining activity resumed centuries later, in the Ro man period (first century BCE—fiftir century CE). By then dre richest minerals appear to have been so completely ex hausted that the Romans had to resort to low-grade copper ore. The church fathers Eusebius and Hieronymus (see Geerlings, 1985) describe the cruelty of the work in the mines of Feinan (" damnatio ad metallam"). One of the most impressive technological monuments is the mine at U m m el-Amad (6,600 sq m), some 15 1cm (9 mi.) south of Feinan. It is tire only complete mine known from the Roman period. The Romans transported the ore over a distance of 12 Ion (7 mi.) to a central site located very close to die ruins of Byzantine Feinan. The large amount of metal produced here is demonstrated by the 50,000-70,000 tons of slag left be hind. After 500 CE, Feinan's role as a major copper supplier in die southern Levant ended; however, textual evidence and the remains of churches and a monastery indicate drat the town maintained a certain importance as the bishop's see in the Early Byzantine period. In the Mamluk period, some minor mining and smelting activities took place there. The copper produced at Feinan throughout history is characterized by a low trace-element content—except for lead, which sometimes ranges up to the percent level. This indicates that high-purity copper must not necessarily derive from native copper, clearly distinguishing Feinan copper from the copper-arsenic-antimony alloys found at Chalco lithic sites such as Nahal Mishmar, Shiqmim, and Tell Abu
FIELD, HENRY Matar. The lead isotope ratios are clearly different from ore deposits in Cyprus, Anatolia, and the Aegean Sea, but it is difficult to distinguish between T i m n a ' and Feinan. [See also Mines and Mining.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Russel, and Hermann Genz. "Excavations at Wadi Fidan 4: A Chalcolithic Village Complex in the Copper Ore District of Feinan, Sotuhern Jordan." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 127 (1995). Fritz, Volkmar. "Ergebnisse der Grabungen in Barqa el-Hetiya im Gebiet von Fenan, Wadi el-Araba (Jordanien)." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palaslina-Vereins (in press). Geerlings, Willem. "Zum biblischen und historischen Hintergrund der Bergwerke von Fenan in Jordanien." Der Anschnitt 5-6 (1985): 158162. Hauptmann, Andreas, et al. "Archaometallurgische und bergbauarcha'ologische Untersuchungen im Gebiet von Fenan, Wadi Arabah." Der Anschnitt 5-6 (1985): 163-195. Hauptmann, Andreas. "The Earliest Periods of Copper Metallurgy in Feinan." In Old World Archaeometallurgy, edited by Andreas Haupt mann et al., pp. 119-135. Der Anschnitt, Beiheft 7. Bochum, 1989. Hauptmann, Andreas, et al. "Early Copper Produced at Feinan, Wadi Araba, Jordan: The Composition of Ores and Copper." Archeomaterials 6.1 (1992): 1-33. Hauptmann, Andreas, et al. "Chalcolithic Copper Smelting: New Ev idence from Excavations at Feinan/lordan." Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Archeometry. Ankara, 1995. Knauf, E. Axel, and C. J, Lenzen. "Edomite Copper Industry." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 83-88. Amman, 1987. Najjar, Mohammed, et al. "Tell Wadi Feinan: The First Pottery Ne olithic Tell in Southern Jordan." Annual of the Department of Antiq uities of Jordan 34 (1990): 27-56. ANDREAS HAUPTMANN
FIELD, HENRY (1902-1986), physical anthropologist, active in Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Europe, and Northeast Africa and prolific writer and editor. Field was born in Chicago and received his B.A. (1925) and D.Sc. (1937) from Oxford University. His appointments in anthropology include the Field Museum, Chicago (19261941); United States Navy, Washington, D.C. (1941-1945); Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts (19501986); and the University of Miami, Florida (1966-1986). He directed the Field Research Projects, Coconut Grove, Florida (1963-1986), issuing an eclectic series of reports be gun in 1953 at the University of Miami Press, The series focused on the anthropology, archaeology, and natural his tory of Southwest Asia. Under his curatorship at the Field Museum, the influential Halls of Prehistoric Mankind and of the Races of Mankind were created in 1933. The cooperative efforts involved were described in Field's The Track of Man: Adventures of an An thropologist (New York, 1953). T h e great range of modern humans throughout the world was represented in the exhi bition by bronze figures sculpted from life by Malvina Hoff man.
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Expeditions to Iraq and Iran provided material for Field's memoir on the Arabs of central Iraq (Field, 1935), volumes on these peoples (Field, 1939; 1952), and many short arti cles. An expedition to Northeast Africa yielded anthropo logical contributions on the Sudan and Egypt (Field, 1949; 1952). Field reviewed and interpreted anthropological re search reported from eleven countries in Southwest Asia (Field, 1956; 1961). His 1925-1950 survey work in Jordan, Arabia, and Iraq was published in i960 (Field, i960). Ex peditions to India and Pakistan widened his views on this link in human history (Field, 1970). Field is altogether cred ited with more than six hundred publications. As a naval officer and anthropological adviser to U.S. presidents Roosevelt and T r u m a n (1941-1945), Field and his coworkers reviewed world literature on patterns of mi gration and settlement (Field, 1969). His bibliographies of Southwest Asia (Field, 1953-1961) remain central for stu dents and advanced researchers studying the region. BIBLIOGRAPHY Field, Henry. Arabs of Central Iraq: Their History, Ethnology, and Phys ical Characteristics with Introduction by Sir Arthur Keith; Field Mu seum-Oxford University Joint Expedition to Mesopotamia. Field Mu seum of Natural History, Anthropology Memoirs, vol. 4. Chicago, 1935. Pioneering presentation containing more than a thousand pho tographs and anthropometric data on modern Arabs of the Kish area. The text is expanded in the 1939 report (below) and supplemented by Field with articles in 1937, 1940, 1943, 1950-1952, and 1955. Field, Henry. Contributums to the Anthropology of Iraq. 2 vols. Field Mu seum of Natural History, Anthropological Series, vol. 29.1-2. Chi cago, 1939. Extends early work at Kish, with discussions of land, people, and physical anthropology of racial groups. Field, Henry. The Northern Sudan. University of California, African Expedition Scientific Paper, no. 1. Berkeley, 1949. Basic early an thropological data. Field, Henry. The Anthropology of Iraq. 3 vols. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 46.1-3. Cambridge, Mass., 1951-1952. Kurds and other groups. Field, Henry. Contributions to the Anthropology of the Faiyum, Sinai, Sudan, and Kenya. Berkeley, 1952. Early observations and interpre tations, some of seldom-studied groups. Field, Henry. Bibliography of Southwestern Asia. 7 vols. Coral Gables, Fla., 1953-1961. Indispensable source of selected titles in anthro pology, anthropogeography, and natural history from Anatolia to the Arabian Sea, from the Nile River to the Indus Valley. Access is fa cilitated by subject indices released by Field and others. See as well the eight supplements compiled by Field and E. M. Laird (Coconut Grove, Fla., 1968-1973). Field, Henry. Ancient and Modern Man in Southwestern Asia. 2 vols. Coral Gables, Fla., 1956-1961. Original observations and sources from the literature, with extensive andiropometric data, maps, and graphs. Twenty-nine plates show Paleolithic and Neolithic imple ments from Saudi Arabia. Field, Henry, et al. North Arabian Desert Archaeological Survey, 192$50. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 45.2. Cambridge, Mass., i960, Field, Henry. "M" Project for F.D.R.: Studies on Migration and Settle ment. Coconut Grove, Fla., 1969. Definitive summary of 665 reports, compiled in 1943-1945 at the Library of Congress, Washington,
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D . C , on world population, refugees, migration, and settlement, that are essential for understanding these historic problems. Field, Henry. Contributions to the Physical Anthropology of the Peoples of India. Coconut Grove, Fla., 1970. Physical observations interpreted in support of the author's late views on the subcontinent's role in the historical distributions of human populations. WILLIAM C. OVERSTREET
FIELD CONSERVATION. Each archaeological dis covery, from the merest fragment of an object to a very com plex structure, should be maintained with care, ensuring that it can be admired and studied by future generations. This is a generally accepted premise, but of the considerable amount of material buried in antiquity, only a fraction sur vives. What does survive can be said to have achieved an equilibrium between itself and its environment: when ex cavated material is exposed to atmospheric conditions dif ferent from those to which it was accustomed, its equilib rium is upset and, if no care is taken, the material will eventually disintegrate. Some archaeological discoveries are portable and can be lifted and transferred to a safer location for conservation and study. Others (i.e., remains of built structures) cannot be moved and must be treated and pro tected in situ. Portable Artifacts. Classified into organic and inorganic, recovered portable objects are crafted or otherwise pro duced in a variety of materials. Organic material. Leather, bone, ivory, wood, and tex tiles are among the organic materials that rarely survive. When they do, their condition is usually fragmentary and very fragile. Organic material buried under favorable con ditions—in permanently dry, wet (as a bog), or freezing cir cumstances—has the best chance of survival. For example, if an ivory object excavated from damp soil dries quickly, it will crack or warp. [See Bone, Ivory, and Shell; Textiles.] Inorganic material. Objects out of stone, terra cotta, metal, and glass are more resistant to decay than those out of organic materials, but, for example, if a stable, dry bronze object gets wet, it will begin to corrode. [See Metals; Vitreous Materials.] When an object of any kind is found in the field, it must first be protected so that the equilibrium that existed be tween it and the environment will not be radically disturbed. Before it is removed from the ground, however, photo graphs must be taken of it in situ, so that its exact position, condition, and relationship to its surroundings are recorded. This information will be useful to the laboratory conservator and restorer. How carefully an object is removed from the ground increases or diminishes the success of the available preservation techniques that can be used on it in the labo ratory. [See Recording Techniques; Restoration and Con servation.] An artifact, whether it is recovered from an archaeological excavation, survey, or rescue operation, or it is a chance find
(see below), must be lifted and transferred for treatment and protection. When it is not possible to lift an object in one piece—as with a very fragile artifact or one that is not flat (e.g., a skeleton or a rhyton)—the block-lifting method is recommended: the object is lifted together with the soil that surrounds it (in a "block") and is then transferred to the laboratory for treatment. If an object needs consolidation before it is lifted, it must be cleaned well, in situ, using the least possible quantity of consolidant, which subsequently often will have to be removed in the laboratory. An emulsion will be needed, for example, when the object is damp and needs consolidation. In any case, when used, the consolidant must be allowed to dry before the object can be lifted. T h e packaging, transfer, and storage of objects found in the field are also components of field conservation. Their objective is to keep the artifact in a stable condition until it undergoes conservation treatment in a conservation labo ratory. S t r u c t u r a l R e m a i n s . Built structures, usually out of stone, brick, mud brick, wood, or some combination of these materials, are stationary artifacts. Because wood is an or ganic material that survives only under very favorable con ditions, "building material" usually refers to stone, brick, and mud brick. Secondary materials used in construction are mortar, fresco, and mosaic. [See Wall Paintings; Mosa ics.] All of tiiese materials must be protected immediately upon discovery, and on a long-term basis must be protected against weathering (Price, 1984). Systematic Excavation. Conservation complications begin in the field, when important late remains are built on top of earlier ones that also need excavating (Sease, 1992). Ideally, the latest structure can be transferred as intact as possible to a nearby location. However, an excavation's bud get and intentions toward protecting the site, structures, and artifacts may be incompatible. Thus, moving a structure is rarely practical because of lack of funds, space, or personnel or because its building material is in reuse (belongs to an earlier period) or the existing structures were used in more than one period. When, however, a built structure is to be dismantled or transferred, photographs, drawings, measure ments, and other documentation must be made before it is disassembled, and its individual stones must be numbered for re-placement. When the last layer to be excavated is exposed, it must be protected immediately, as must its portable discoveries (see above). It is best to build a shelter for it. Some opposition to this method exists, based on the argument that a shelter will disturb the environment. If, however,, the shelter or roof ing is compatible in material, shape, and color, it has a better chance of being accepted (Getty Conservation Institute, 1991). Features associated with structures, such as mosaics or frescoes, should be sheltered within the structure. If there is no danger of theft, all should remain in situ. Otherwise, they
FIRST JEWISH REVOLT must be lifted and transferred to an otherwise protected lo cation. When a site is of archaeological, historical, etirnic, reli gious, or touristic interest and will likely draw many visitors, padrs should be built to protect both the visitors and the site. When a site is discovered accidentally and excavation is ei ther postponed or initiated but then halted, or if a site is isolated and protection against theft or weathering may not be possible, full recording procedures should be followed, including photographs and drawings. T h e site should then be backfilled, including using geotextiles, a patented syn thetic substance, separating the finds from the fill. In a res cue excavation the only option is usually to remove struc tures, after documenting them as completely as possible. Only rarely will it be possible to transfer them to another location. [See also Artifact Conservation; and Photography, article on Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dowman, Elizabeth A. Conservation in Field Archaeology. London, 1970. Deals with newly excavated finds. Getty Conservation Institute. The Conservation of the Orpheus Mosaic at Paphos, Cyprus. Marina del Rey, Calif., 1991. Describes the pro cess of rolling, treating, reinstalling, and protecting a mosaic with a specially designed shelter. Hodges, Henry, and Miguel Angel Corzo, eds. In Situ Archaeological Conservation: Proceedings of the Meetings, April 6-13, 1986, Mexico. Marina del Rey, 1987. Deals with the in situ conservation of different materials. Price, N. P. Stanley, ed. Conservation on Archaeological Excavations with Particular Reference to the Mediterranean Area. Rome, 1984. Collec tion of essays on the treatment and protection of excavated finds: mosaics, stucco, mud-brick structures. Sease, Catherine. A Conservation Manual for the Field Archaeologist, 2d ed. Los Angeles, 1992. Excellent manual for field conservation, ANDREAS GEORGIADES
FIRST JEWISH REVOLT. The main source for the First Jewish Revolt, also called the Great War, is Josephus' Jewish War (books 2-7) as well as his autobiography, the Vita. The events of tire first century leading up to the war can be found in his Antiquities (books 18-20, with parallels in his War books 1-2). Except for Tacitus's Histories 5, very little is known about tire revolt from gentile Greek and Latin sources. T h e revolt, which started in 66 CE had several causes. It ended with tire total defeat of the Jews and the destruction of their Temple in Jerusalem. Scholars have pointed to socioeconomic causes—that is, to tire growing rift between the rich and the poor in Palestine. They have em phasized tire polarity between Jews and non-Jews there, re ligious conflicts with the Romans, and Rome's alienation from the ruling class (see below). T h e circumstances that brought about the war were primarily the cruel and foolish behavior of some of the later Roman procurators and the
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hostile activity of the extreme Jewish groups usually identi fied with the Zealots and tire Sicarii. In the years that led to the outbreak of the revolt tire latter two became factions in the so-called Fourth Philosophy group, which claimed that no ruler except God could rule the Jews, and therefore the Jews must free themselves from the yoke of Roman rule in Palestine. T h e first Jewish Revolt was preceeded by intensive fight ing between tire gentiles and the Jews in tire mixed cities of Palestine. In April/May 66 CE, both the emperor and the Roman governor of Palestine, Florus, sided with the nonJews of Caesarea in a conflict there. Florus irritated the Jews even more by his confiscation of seventeen talents from the Temple's treasury. As a result there was a disturbance in Jerusalem that led to the seizure of the Temple by the crowds and to clashes between the Jews and the two Roman cohorts brought up to Jerusalem from Caesarea. When Agrippa II, king of the former tetrarchy of Philip, heard of these stormy events, he hurried to Jerusalem and attempted to stop the insurrection. His speech is given at length by Josephus (War 2.345-401). Agrippa's attempts turned out to be futile, and the situa tion in Jerusalem worsened when Eleazar, the son of Ananias the high priest, who was a clerk in the Temple, persuaded his colleagues to stop tire daily sacrifice offered on behalf of the emperor. Most of the more moderate circles in Jerusalem were against this decision, but they could not oppose tire militant majority. This led to civil sttife within Jerusalem in summer 66 CE. The Jewish leaders of Jerusalem and the high priests called in an army, provided by both Florus and Agrippa II, and fought the rebels who were holding the lower city and tire Temple Mount. Within a short time the rebels, together with the Sicarii, managed to gain the upper hand against Agrippa's soldiers, the Romans, and the moderates, who were concentrated in the upper city. While doing so tire rebels caused a great deal of damage: they set fire to the public archives in order to gain sympathy from the debtors in tire city. In addition, the high priest Ananias was mur dered; Agrippa's troops were driven out; and the Roman soldiers were killed, in spite of an agreement they had reached beforehand with the rebels. The Sicarii left Jerusa lem after one of their leaders, who had gone to sacrifice in tire Temple arrayed in royal robes, was murdered. They retreated to Masada and did not thereafter participate in tire war in Jerusalem. [See Masada.] While tiiese events were taldng place in Jerusalem, a ter rible war broke out all over tire country between non-Jews and Jews, in places such as Caesarea, Philadelphia (Am man), Gerasa (Jerash), Scythopolis (Beth-Shean), and Ash kelon. As a result of these events, Cestius Gallus, the gov ernor of Syria, attempted to quell tire fighting. He advanced with the Twelfth Legion and forces he had collected from various towns and then made his way toward Jerusalem (September/October 66 CE). The Jews managed to crush the
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Twelfth Legion, an event that, tragically, encouraged them to read tire military and political map falsely. They began to prepare for their own political independence as early as 66 CE, as can be seen clearly from the first series of coins they struck at the time (Meshorer, 1982). T h e nature of the Jew ish central government created at tiiis juncture, as well as of tire generals chosen to command the different regions of Palestine is revealing. All were selected from among the moderate section of the aristocracy and from the priestly order; no Zealots were included. At this point many still thought that God had led them into the war, and that they would succeed. The central government in Jerusalem was active during the winter of 66 and in the first montirs of 67 CE, but it had difficulty imposing its influence on the different regions in tire country. Some local leaders, such as Shim'on bar Giora acted independentiy. He, with a private army, terrorized and robbed the rich in tire region of Akraba in Samaria and later terrorized the Jews in tire region of Idumea. There was also tension between the central government and Josephus (Y0seph ben Mattithias), who was the general in the Galilee. The support the central government gave to Josephus's fierce opponent, John of Gischala (Gush Halav), at the be ginning of 67 CE shows that it did not control the country very decisively Qosephus, War 2.583-594; Life). By tire time the Roman general Vespasian landed in Pal estine in spring 67 CE, there was no united Jewish front against Rome. It does seem, however, that the majority did support the first stages of die war, which had been presented as a defensive war against Rome and the gentiles living in die land of Israel. Opposition to the war was symbolized by cities such as Sepphoris, which minted coins in 68 CE witir the inscription "the city of peace" (Meshorer, 1982). [See Sepphoris.] T h e Galilee fell quickly to the Romans after the immediate collapse of Josephus's army. He himself was be sieged by die Romans in Jotapata (Yodefat). T h e fortress there fell to die Romans in June or July 67 CE. [See Jotapata.] Josephus surrendered to the Romans, and when he appeared before Vespasian prophesied to him that die general would become the future emperor of Rome. By the end of 67 the Romans had managed to regain control of the whole of the Galilee and part of the Golan (War 4.1-83). Thousands of Jews were killed or deported to be sold as slaves. During this time the Roman forces also demolished Jaffa and killed 11,600 Samaritans (War 3.414-431; 3.307-315). T h e cam paign of 67 CE ended with the conquest of Jamnia and Ashdod. After a winter break, Vespasian resumed opera tions, and by the end of spring 68, the whole of Transjordan, Judea (Judah), and Idunrea were subdued. Only Jerusalem and Masada were left unconquered. Thus started the last stage of the war. Meanwhile, civil strife had begun in Jerusalem, caused in part by the defeat of tire Jews of Palestine. Vespasian's op erations in Palestine in late spring 68 resulted in a terrible
refugee problem in the capital. Many Jews had escaped from the Romans to Jerusalem, which was still firmly in Jewish hands. One group that reached there safely in autumn 67 was led by John of Gischala. In June 68, Nero committed suicide, and a great turmoil ensued in the empire. In sum mer 69, the legions declared Vespasian emperor. Titus, his son, was left to continue the war in Judea, but he did not manage to continue the operation against Jerusalem until spring of 70. Thus, for about two years the citizens inside the city, instead of preparing for an imminent war, carried out dreadful attrocities against each other. T h e Zealots fought both each other and the moderate groups and, among many others, murdered two of the most distinguished mod erate leaders, Hanan the high priest and Joseph ben Gurion. It was because of, and during, these fights that the moderate Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai left Jerusalem for Javneh. Ac cording to a rabbinic tradition, it was ben Zakkai who alleg edly greeted the emperor with the words "Vive domine imperator" when he met him (B.T., Git. 50 a-b). In spring of 70 Titus besieged Jerusalem. John of Gischala managed to penetrate the courts of the Temple compound and brought the Zealots under his control. Simeon bar Giora became the high commander of most of die city, while John of Gischala was responsible for dre Antonia fortress and the Temple Mount. Nevertheless, a great deal of fighting con tinued within the city during the siege, described by Jose phus, who was with tire Roman forces outside die city (War 5-6). Josephus made continuous attempts to encourage the besieged Jews to surrender, but his attempts were in vain. The city fell to the Romans on the tenth of Tammuz (sum mer 70 CE), and the Temple was destroyed. T h e so-called Burnt House and other archaeological remains excavated in the upper city of Jerusalem are mute evidence of the city's last hours (Avigad, 1983). Masada fell in spring of 73, after a three-year siege. T h e Jewish Revolt was over, and the whole of Palestine was again subdued. Reactions to the desttuction of Jerusalem and the Temple can be found in cer tain of the Gospels, Luke-Acts, in 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, as well as in rabbinic sources. [See also Biblical Temple; Jerusalem.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, Nahman. Discovery Jerusalem. Nashville, 1983. Cohen, S. J. D. Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian. Leiden, 1979. Goodman, Martin D. The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt against Rome, A.D. 66-yo. Cambridge, 1987. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. Hengel, Martin. The "Hellenisation" ofJudaea in the First Century after Christ. London, 1989. Hengel, Martin. The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70S AD. Edinburgh, 1989. Kasher, Aryeh. Jews and Hellenistic Cities in Eretz Israel. Tubingen, 1990.
FISHING Kuhnen, Hans-Peter. Paldstina in griechisch-romischer Ze.it. Munich, 1990. Mendels, Doron. The Rise and Pall of Jewish Nationalism. New York, 1992. Meshorer, Ya'acov. Ancient Jewish Coinage. 2 vols. Dix Hills, N.Y., 1982. Rajak, Tessa. Josephus: The Historian and His Society. London, 1983. Schurer, Emil. The History of the Jewish People in the Age ofJesus Christ, ITS B.C.-A.D. 7 j j . 4 vols. Revised and edited by Geza Vermes et al. Edinburgh, 1973-1987. Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews under Roman Rule from Pompey to Di ocletian. Leiden, 1976. Stern, Menachem, ed. and trans. Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1976-1984. DORON MENDELS
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of Palestinian Pottery," remained unfinished at the time of his death. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; BethShean; Beth-Shemesh; Giza; Megiddo; Memphis; Samaria; and the biography of Reisner.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Fisher, Clarence S. Excavations al Nippur. Philadelphia, 1905. Glueck, Nelson. "Clarence Stanley Fisher in Memoriam." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 83 (1941): 2-4. King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Reisner, George A., Clarence S. Fisher, and David G. Lyon. Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908-1010, vol. 1, The Text; vol. 2, Plans and Plates. Cambridge, Mass., 1924. NEIL ASHER SILBERMAN
FISHER, CLARENCE STANLEY (1876-1941), American archaeologist and architect, innovator in die tech niques of stradgraphic analysis at excavations in Egypt and Palestine. Born in Philadelphia, Fisher was trained as an ar chitect at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1898, after a brief period of professional employment in St. Louis, he joined die university's expedition to Nippur. He spent the next few years as a research fellow in Babylonian architec ture at the University Museum. In 1909, Fisher was re cruited for the Harvard University Expedition to Samaria and began a close partnership with Egyptologist George An drew Reisner. At Samaria, the two men paid close attention to patterns of debris deposits and fills. Indeed, Fisher's care fully drawn stratigraphic sections from Samaria became prototypes for subsequent generations of archaeological ar chitects. Fisher remained in the Near East throughout World War I, working as a volunteer on various humanitarian relief mis sions; later in life he would devote considerable time, energy, and personal funds for charitable works in Jerusalem. Dur ing his extended wartime stay in Egypt, Fisher expanded his research interests and was named chief archaeologist and Egyptologist in Cairo for the University of Pennsylvania Museum. In the early 1920s, Fisher alternated his time be tween Egypt and Palestine. From 1921 to 1925, he served as director of the University of Pennsylvania excavations at Tell Beth-Shean, where he and his team uncovered a se quence of New Kingdom temples and directed limited soundings down to Neolithic levels. He also devoted part of every year to his work witii Reisner, serving as chief architect at Reisner's important excavations at Girga, Giza, Mem phis, and Luxor. Fisher was also later called on to direct the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's excavations at Megiddo (1925-1927) and Haverford College's expedition to Beth-Shemesh (1928-1929), Fisher was named professor of archaeology at the Amer ican School of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Jerusalem in 1925 and participated in many of the school's field projects. T h e last major project of his career, an ambitious "Corpus
FISHING. Long considered a humble occupation, fish ing has been part of human activity in the Near East since the beginnings of setded habitation, eidier temporary or per manent, near bodies of water. Although fishing and hunting may have evolved at about the same time and may share origins, the mythology of hunting involves the braver "royal huntsman," whereas fishing involves those of more humble social standing. In an Egyptian papyrus from 2000 BCE, the Satire of the Artisans, a pupil is warned by his teacher, a scribe, about die hardships and dangers of fishing—that is, about the at tendant high taxes on the fish caught and about the croco diles in the Nile River. In the Hellenistic period, taxes on a catch came to 25 percent of its value. Herodotus (2.164) classifies those who fish at the lowest of all social levels—die seventii—together with sailors. Those for whom fishing was an occupation sometimes also held political office, however. T h e mayor of Tiberias at the time of die first Jewish Revolt against Rome in Galilee was the head of the "marine union," which undoubtedly included both fishermen and sailors (Josephus, Vita, 12). Together with the fishermen of Magdala, they represented the uncompromising forces of Jewish nationalism, as against the Peace party of die rich (Josephus, War, 2.21.3). Two hundred years later, the Talmud describes the powerful fish ermen's unions of Tiberias and Akko as differing in their readiness to work during the intermediate days of Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles (J.T., Mo'ed Q. 2.5; B.T., Mo'edQ. 13.2). Ancient fishing techniques and technologies can be re constructed based on existing documentation: Egyptian re liefs and tomb paintings beginning in the third millennium, texts from Mesopotamia, references in the Bible and the Talmud, and excavated fishing implements. The similar cli mate found throughout die Levant and die cultural ex changes made among ancient societies resulted in a unifor mity of fishing techniques. Many Near Eastern sources
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FISHING. Ancient fishermen catching barbels with hook and line. Top: Egyptian; bottom: Assyrian. (After Nun, 1989)
record catching and preserving fish as a well-developed and important industry. Fish were transported, alive or pre served (by drying, salting, or pickling), across considerable distances and constituted both an article of trade and of tax payment. Competition regarding fishing waters and conces sion rights created conflicts as early as tire third millennium in Sumer and, in tire biblical period, in tire Sea of Galilee. For large industrial catches, however, fishermen in Egypt, as elsewhere, used nets. All industrial fishing in the world today is based on methods that originated in tire ancient Near East. The oldest and most important type of net is tire dragnet, or seine (Gk., sagene; Av.Jarf; Heb., herein). Men tioned nine times in tire Hebrew Bible (more than any other method) and once in the Parable of tire Seine in the Gospels, the dragnet is a kind of wall of netting spread from a boat parallel to the shore and then dragged to land with the catch. It is 250-300 meters long, 2 meters high at its "wings," and 4-5 meters high at its center. A foot rope, weighted with stone or lead sinkers, is used with the dragnet, as are papyrus or wood floats to keep the wall upright. T h e first ancient nets were made of plant fibers; later examples are of linen or cotton. As a result of the region's dry climate, nets from
the second millennium BCE have been found in Egyptian tombs as at Gebelin, and a piece of a net from the second century CE was discovered in the Cave of tire Letters near the Dead Sea. The cast net (Gk., amphiblestron; Ar., shabakeh; Fleb., qeld) was popular in antiquity and is still used. It is circular, 6-8 meters in diameter, with stone or lead sinkers attached to its edge. It is tossed by a lone individual who stands on the shore, in shallow water, or in a boat; the net lands like a parachute and sinks into the water. Complete cast nets from the second millennium BCE have been found in Egyptian tombs as at Deir el-Bahari. The Talmud (B.T., B.Q. 81b) and the Gospels (Mk. 1:16; Mt. 4:18) contain references to them. Netting needles, the tool used to weave and repair nets, have been found in Egyptian tombs and at sites on the Med iterranean coast of Israel near Gaza and Jaffa. O n the Sea of Galilee, these needles have been found at Beth-Yerah, and at Magdala, in first-century contexts. Made of bone, bronze, iron, or wood (and today, plastic), the netting needle is from 10 to 30 centimeters long. It differs from tire sewing needle in that tire thread used is wound right on the needle. In Sumer, fishing rights belonged to temples and local rulers, who leased them to fishermen. T h e right to fish in canals belonged to owners of tire adjacent lands, who re ceived these rights as compensation for maintaining the ca nals. As elsewhere, line and cast-net fishermen worked alone; those using larger nets worked in groups. At Khafajeh, near Baghdad (2700 BCE), fifty ring-shaped ceramic sinkers (5-6 cm in diameter) were discovered, a few of which still had small pieces of netting attached. Bronze fishhooks have been recovered at Ur (third dynasty), in Egyptian tombs, at Capernaum, and elsewhere. Stone and lead net sinkers, stone net anchors, and stone boat anchors are the most commonly found of all fishing accessories. Sumerian and Akkadian mythologies contain many ref erences to fishing in parables and analogies, a tradition also found in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Gilgamesh, the hero of a Mesopotamian flood myth, is depicted carrying a catch of fish, and tire major Sumerian deity, Ea, the allwise earth and water god, is described as owning a fishnet.
FISHING. Egyptian fishermen with a dragging net. Sixteenth century BCE. (After Nun, 1989)
FOOD STORAGE His son Adapa is the hero of a remarkable adventure in volving providing fish for the gods. T h e first maritime empire was ruled by the Minoan civi lization on Crete. At its height (c. 1600 BCE) it controlled the islands in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas. Depictions of fish and fishing are prominent in Minoan wall paintings and on tireir ceramics, and tire figure of a fish was typically placed on the prow of a ship. T h e Philistine "Sea Peoples," who probably originated in the Aegean, brought tireir knowledge of techniques for catching and preserving fish to ancient Palestine. [See Minoans; Philistines.] None of the several references to fishing in the Hebrew Bible includes a single personality occupied with fishing or tire name of a single fish. Only the prophets, notably Ezekiel (26:5, 1 4 ) and Isaiah (19:5), mention fishing in tireir para bles. T h e coastal tribes of Zebulon and Asher, along with the Phoenicians, probably fished on the shore of tire Medi terranean (G«. 49:13). According to a tradition preserved in the Talmud (Tosefta, B.Q. 8), the tribe of Naphtali was given exclusive fishing rights by Joshua, entitling them to "set seines and spread cast nets" around tire entire shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. The New Testament Gospels include fishing vignettes on the Sea of Galilee, the scene of most of Jesus' ministry and where his earliest disciples fished. However, dre descriptions of the Miraculous Drought (Lk, 5 : 1 - 7 ; Jn. 2 1 : 1 - 9 ) are not
technically accurate, perhaps because the authors were al ready distant in time and place from the experience of fish ing in the Galilee. Problems of translation (especially of "dragnet" and "cast net") add to the lack of accuracy. Nev ertheless, it is safe to say that fishing methods on the lake have not changed greatiy since Second Temple times. In February 1986, a sensational discovery was made on the muddy beach near Migdal (Magdala), on dre Sea of Galilee: an ancient wooden boat, dating to the first century CE, miraculously preserved by the m u d into which it had sunk. The boat is 8.8 meters long, 2.5 meters wide, and 1.25 meters deep, almost exactly the measurements of the boats used by seine net fishermen in the Sea of Galilee until tire mid-twentieth century. T h e planks were made of cedars of Lebanon and the ribs of unworked oak branches. The boat was likely used for both transportation and fishing. [See Gal ilee Boat.] Otiier important finds were made at tire same location between 1989 and 1991, when drought drastically reduced tire water level in the Sea of Galilee. Hundreds of stone net sinkers, net anchors, and boat anchors of varying sizes and shapes were recovered, objects that will contribute greatly to what is known about early fishing technology. [See also Anchors; Hunting; Ships and Boats.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brandt, Andres von. Fish Catching Methods of the World. 3d ed., rev. and enl. Farnham, England, 1984.
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Dalman, Gustaf. Arbeit und Sitte in Paldstina. 7 vols, in 8. Gtitersloh, 1928-1942. Frost, Honor. "From Rope to Chain: On the Development of Anchors in the Mediterranean." The Mariners Mirror 49.1 (1963): 1-20. Hooke, S. H. Middle Eastern Mythology. Middlesex, 1963. Hornell, James. Fishing in Many Waters. Cambridge, 1950. Nun, Mendel. Ancient Jewish Fishery (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv, 1963. Nun, Mendel. "Fishing" (in Hebrew). In Encyclopaedia Mikrait (Bib lical Encyclopaedia), vol. 6, pp. 720-726. Jerusalem, 1971. Nun, Mendel. The Sea of Galilee and Its Fisherman in the New Testament. Kibbutz Ein Gev, 1989. Radcliffe, William. Fishing from the Earliest Times. 2d ed. London, 1926. MENDEL NUN
FOOD STORAGE. T h e need to store food arose early in human history. Food had to be saved in times of plenty for times of need, especially when human resourcefulness created a surplus either by hunting and gathering or by pro duction drrough domestication. With the evolution of social structures, surplus could be traded, a notion that made stor age attractive. T o carry out food storage successfully, two issues needed to be addressed: food processing and contain ers. In some environments food tends to spoil, hence, it has to be processed so that it can be stored for long periods. Processed foods were not only consumed locally, but also sold or bartered. Food processing took the form of drying, salting, smoldng, or producing by-products, such as wine. Because most vegetables were not processed, they were used as seasonal foods. Certain fruits, such as grapes, figs, dates, and apricots, could be hung on string for drying and storage, pressed into cakes, or kept in containers. In addition, grapes, and other fruit were crushed and tireir juice processed into wine, syrup, and vinegar and stored in containers. Olives were crushed and pressed, producing an oil that was also stored in containers. Treating raw olives witir salt or other additives for consumption was introduced in the Hellenistic or Roman period (Borowski, 1987, p. 1 2 3 ) . [See Olives; Vit iculture.] Odrer raw foods could also be processed for long storage and transport. Both meat and fish were preserved by being dried, salted, or smoked in thin snips. Fish bones discovered at sites distant from any body of water suggests drat drey had been transported there after being processed. Milk was churned, turned into cheese, and dried in blocks that could be reconstituted witir water, a practice still prevalent among nomadic bedouin. Grain for consumption could be preserved for a long pe riod by heating to kill the germ, after setting aside seed for future seasons. This practice was not a common one, how ever. Grain was stored in bulk or in containers. T o protect tire seed from spoilage and rodents, it was fumigated (Bo rowski, 1987, p . 156). Because it was not processed before it was used, it was ground daily for baking and cooking. Storing flour was neither customary nor efficient, although
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a case is known of wheat flour stored in a Roman amphora (Renfrew and Bahn, 1991, p. 241). In most instances, pottery vessels were used for food stor age. Prior to the invention of pottery, in its absence, or for special purposes, however, containers were made out of an imal skins, tree bark, wood, rush mats and baskets, and stone. Some of the earliest stone vessels found in villages in Mesopotamia, as at Maghzaliyeh, date to 6500-6000 BCE and were made of gypsum, in the tradition of Zagros Moun tain societies (Huot, 1992, p. 189). Whether storage was in private or public hands, special areas and facilities were set aside in the community, with an eye toward ease of use and efficient collection and distri bution (Borowski, 1987, p. 82). Studies of space utilization at archaeological sites demonstrate that the majority of pri vate dwellings contained areas designated for food prepa ration and storage (Daviau, 1990). This is corroborated by ethnoarchaeological studies that show well-defined space for food storage in dwellings (Kramer, 1979, pp. 144-145). In the Chalcolithic period, food-storage installations were built in the courtyard, which was surrounded by rooms (Porath, 1992, p. 45). In the Early Bronze Age, food was stored in large pithoi, and the jars were placed on the floors of rooms and courtyards or sometimes sunk into the floor (Ben-Tor, 1992, p. 67). In the Middle Bronze Age, with the develop ment of the courtyard house, space for food storage was set aside in the courtyard and in some of the rooms, a practice continued into the Late Bronze Age (Ben-Dov 1992, pp. 100-104). With the development of the two-story residence, foodstuffs were mostly stored on the ground floor, in small rooms surrounding a central space, possibly a courtyard. Whether the ground-floor space was covered is still being debated. Iron Age houses in ancient Palestine are often found with storage rooms (Borowski, 1987, p. 82). Although cellars were not as common as storage rooms in dwellings or in public buildings, examples have been uncovered at Tell Beit Mirsim, Beersheba, and Tell Jemmeh (Borowski, 1987, PP- 75-76). In dwellings, foodstuffs were stored mostly in jars, whose shape and size changed based on new influences in a period and needs. While storage jars in EB Palestine had a char acteristic flat bottom, M B storage jars featured a pointed bottom that allowed the sediments in such liquids as oil and wine to settle. Such jars were also used to store grain, when used in large numbers, they were placed close to each other for support and cushioned with chaff and straw against breakage, as at Gezer (Borowski, 1987, p. 69). Individual jars were placed in corners, along walls, inside depressions in the floor, and in round clay stands. The soft limestone bedrock of the Shephelah was hewn to create underground work and storage spaces, as at Ma reshah (Marisa) as early as the Hellenistic period. During the Roman period, in part for reasons of security, the soft rock was hewn to create underground storage facilities for
agricultural produce. Of interest are four rooms found at the Ahuzat Hazan hiding complex, where the floors were hewn with rows of depressions for storage jars, each connected to the other by a narrow channel in which spilled oil could be directed into a collection basin (Kloner and Teper, 1987, pp. 115-127). The size of this installation and the quantity of oil that could have been stored (10,500 liters) suggest that it did not belong to an individual, but may have played a role in the community's preparation for the impending tur moil that culminated in the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135). Certain food-processing activities, such as wine making, required particular storage facilities, such as those evident in the winery at Gibeon. [See Gibeon.] T h e excavator found a series of caves, used as fermentation cellars, in which the wine was kept undisturbed at a constant temperature until it was drinkable (Pritchard, 1964, pp. 1-27). Public storehouses, under the control of the civic or reli gious autltorities, were placed in a city's administrative sec tion, near the main gate, near the governor's or the ldng's palace, or inside the cult compound. Most public storage installations were repositories for grain, oil, and wine—com modities that could be distributed to functionaries. For their daily needs, palaces and temples stored foodstuffs in facili ties similar to those in private dwellings. These practices were common throughout the Near East: at the palaces at Ebla and Mari, in Syria, documents related to food supplies and agricultural production were found in tire former, and related to food storage and disbursement in the latter. At Amarna, in Egypt, granaries and storage areas were uncov ered, and at Kuntillet Ajrud, a way station and cult center in the Sinai Desert, large pithoi found in long, narrow rooms demonstrate how foodstuffs were stored. Long and narrow rooms were popular for storage of foodstuffs, as evident from the ttipartite buildings in Beersheba, Tel Hadar, and other sites. Although their function is still being debated, the Samaria ostraca deal with the collection of oil and wine in ancient Israel, either as taxes in kind, provisions for the palace, or produce from royal estates shipped for certain functionaries (Smelik, 1991, pp. 56-57). [See Samaria Ostraca.] Distri bution of food by the central government in ancient Israel is illustrated by the Arad ostraca, which contain instructions for rationing certain measures of bread or flour, wine, and oil to functionaries, possibly Greek mercenaries. From the ostraca it appears that the ration was one loaf of bread per person per day, and the bread remained edible for four days. [See Arad Inscriptions.] Beyond this period, flour was given in the amount of one liter per loaf. Wine was rationed at a quarter to a third of a liter per person per day (Smelik, 1991, p. 106). Additional information about the collection and dis tribution of foodstuffs by the central government in ancient Israel are the Imlk stamped jar handles, dated to the time of Hezekiah's revolt against Sennacherib in 701 BCE. T h e pres ent consensus among scholars is that these stamped jar han-
FORTIFICATIONS: An Overview dies designated containers used for supplying Judean cities with provisions to withstand the Assyrian siege. Foodstuffs were transported from one location to another on land by wagons and pack animals, mostiy donkeys, and on sea by boats. On land, liquids were transported in jars as well as in skins. Other foodstuffs were probably transported in jars or sacks. Transport by boat involved tire use of amphoras, tall jars designed to fit in the hold and stabilized by tying their large handles to beams in tire body of tire boat. There are very few references to food storage in the He brew Bible. From i Kings 17:12, 14, and 16 it appears that household flour was kept in a jar (kad) and oil was stored in a flat jar (sappahat), possibly the Iron Age type known as a pilgrim's flask. Two terms are clearly associated with public food storage facilities: 'bsarot (Jl. 1:17; Neh. 12:44; 13:12; 1 Chr. 27:25,27-28; 2 Chr. 11:11) and miskenbt (2 Chr. 32:28). However, their literary context implies that these facilities were not used exclusively for foodstuffs. What is known about food storage in antiquity will in crease as the technology of archaeology advances. That is, chemical analyses of storage jars and other vessels will give more accurate assessments of tire commodities they held. More sophisticated studies of space utilization will help to identify the configurations of storage space and the nature and quantities of the goods stored in them. [See also Granaries and Silos.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ben-Dov, Meir. "Middle and Late Bronze Age Dwellings." In The Architecture ofAncient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 99-104. Jeru salem, 1992. Ben-Tor, Amnon. "Early Bronze Age Dwellings and Installations." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 60-67. Jerusalem, 1992. Borowski, Odecl. Agriculture in Iron Age Israel. Winona Lake, Ind., 1987. The most recent work on the topic; combines biblical and archaeo logical information. Daviau, Paulette M. Michele. "Artifact Distribution and Functional Analysis in Palestinian Domestic Architecture of die Second Millen nium B.C. (Bronze Age)." Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1990. Study of space utilization. Huot, Jean-Louis. "The First Farmers at Oueili." Biblical Archaeologist 55 (1992): 188-195. Early Mesopotamian settlement; issue devoted to the region. Kloner, Amos, and Yigal Tepper. The Hiding Complexes in the Judean Shephelah (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv, 1987. The only treatment of the topic, Kramer, Carol. "An Archaeological View of a Contemporary Kurdish Village: Domestic Architecture, Household Size, and Wealth." In Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for Archaeology, edited by Carol Kramer, pp. 139-163. New York, 1979. Comparison of space utilization in a modern village with archaeological finds. Netzer, Ehud. "Domestic Architecture in the Iron Age." In The Archi tecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 193-201. Jeru salem, 1992. Porath, Yosef. "Domestic Architecture of the Chalcolithic Period." In
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The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 40-48. Jerusalem, 1992. Pritchard, James B. Winery, Defenses, and Soundings at Gibeon. Phila delphia, 1964. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Balm. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. New York, 1991. Excellent work on the topic. Smelik, K. A. D. Writings from Ancient Israel: A Handbook of Historical and Religious Documents. Translated by Graham I. Davies. Louis ville, 1991. Excellent treatment of written records from ancient Israel. ODED BOROWSKI
FORTIFICATIONS. [7 0 survey the historical develop ment, forms, and functions offortifications, this entry comprises five articles: An Overview Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages Fortifications of the Persian Period Fortifications of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods Fortifications of the Islamic Period The first provides a general typology and morphology of forti fications, particularly in Syria-Palestine; the remainder treat remains of specific periods.} An Overview Fortifications are an important component of the ancient urban settlement, aimed at preventing access of hostile ele ments as well as demarcating the limits of the city. Their consft-uction necessitated die mobilization of many mem bers of the community. As part of the urban matrix, forti fications share both military and civic functions; their struc ture usually reflects a compromise between those conflicting roles. Attempts to associate the shape of fortification systems directiy with the invention of new weapons (Yadin, 1963) are not supported by the accumulating factual data. [See Weapons and Warfare.] Rather, die nature of the fortifica tions appears to have been dictated by a variety of combi nations of military, political, economic, demographic, and ideological factors. The history of alterations in shape, struc ture, and building materials of fortification systems dem onstrates the shifting priorities made by the community within the scope of the military-civic continuum. Fortification systems consist of several different elements: the circumf erencial unit drat provides the physical barrier or the demarcation line of the settlement; a gate or gates; pos terns; towers and bastions; and glacis and water systems, Circumferencial Defense Systems. The use of dre term circumferencial defense systems instead of the popular desig nation city walls denotes the wide range of functions that should be attributed to the structure of the settiements' boundaries, beyond an exclusive military role. The following typology reviews the various ways in which communities
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FORTIFICATIONS: An Overview
shaped the edges of their cities and towns in order to meet their military and socio-economic needs. Solid city walls. A solid wall appears to be the earliest type of fortification, the concept stemming, perhaps, from the fences built around animal pens in sedentary farming communities. Solid walls were the simplest structure that could provide a physical barrier against intruders or attack ers. In the Early Bronze Age the walls were made of field stones, sometimes constructed in segments, with narrow in tervals to diminish damage from earthquake, such as at Megiddo XVIII. At many sites additional lines of solid walls were added outside the first one (totaling more than 15 m in width) to gain better protection (e.g., Ai, Tel Yarmut). The walls of Middle Bronze Age cities were commonly con structed of clay bricks and were of modest width (2-3 m) but reinforced by a well-constructed glacis. In Iron Age II, ashlar blocks were used sparsely in the outer faces of solid walls. At Megiddo and Tell en-Nasbeh a type of offset-inset wall was in place. [See Megiddo, Nasbeh, Tell en-.] The wall was made of sections about 6meter-long that alternately projected and receded and was constructed of fieldstones faced with ashlars. This method provided more stability to the wall with minimal cost for material and labor. Balconies used to protect the "dead area" at the foot of the wall could be constructed over the insets on their outer side. At Beersheba and Arad, such solid walls were built in a sawtooth fashion, in which sections de viate at intervals in the same direction (some 0.3-0.5 m ) — like teeth on the blade of a saw. [See Beersheba; Arad, article on Iron Age Period.] This technique may have been meant to create vertical shadow, which would have made the wall appear higher and more formidable. Casemate wall. A unique type of fortification, common in Iron Age II, was composed of two parallel walls with a space between them: the casemate wall. This method was evidently applied as a way to economize on construction costs by decreasing the amount of material and labor; it was also a means to gain additional storage space within the city. Casemate walls were often integrated into dwellings inside the city, as at Beersheba and Tell Beit Mirsim. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell.] The casemate rooms served in these cases as the rear broadroom of a house. At Hazor, the casemate wall was built as an independent structure: a street separated the wall from neighboring houses. [See Hazor.] In a few in stances, such as at Samaria, the casemates were filled with soil and served as structural foundations. [See Samaria.] In Anatolia and Northern Syria, underground "boxes" com pletely filled with soil and debris, termed Kastenmauer, were used as structural foundations from the Middle Bronze Age (Naumann, 1971, pp. 249-256). At Hazor and in the fortress of Arad, casemate walls were converted into stronger solid walls by the intentional filling of the casemates with soil and stones.
Earthen rampart. Several M B cities were surrounded by magnificent earthen ramparts. The most prominent ex ample is the Lower City of Hazor, where the rampart rises to 90 m. These structures were considered by many scholars (Albright, i960; Yadin, 1963; Mazar, 1968) to be a new type of defense introduced by the Hyksos, [See Hyksos.] Inves tigations by Peter J. Parr (1968) and Jacob Kaplan (1975), as well as new data from the sites of Dan, Akko, and Tel Yavneh-Yam, indicate that earthen ramparts already existed in the MB IIA period. [See Dan; Akko; Yavneh-Yam.] Fur thermore, it has been clarified that nowhere was a city wall incorporated into an earthen rampart; thus, their function must be considered to have been a means for demarcating the city's limits (Herzog, 1992) or providing a psychological deterrent (Finkelstein, 1992). Belt of houses. Communities tiiat could not afford the cost of constructing an elaborate fortification system chose to protect tiieir settlement by arranging an outer belt of houses. The rear wall of these structures provided the nec essary barrier, at least against thieves or robbers. This con cept is commonly found at Late Bronze Age and Iron I set tlements. Glacis. Consolidated layers of soil, bricks, or stone to protect the slopes of a mound are known as a glacis. T o assure drainage, layers of different types of soil were alter nated. The foot of the glacis was retained by brick or stone walls. Occasionally, the outer face of the glacis was covered with stone paving. Earthen or stone-built glacis were also considered a Hyksos invention. However, Parr (1968) con vincingly demonstrates that the phenomenon has a wider chronological range and already existed at EB cities. For practical reasons, every fortification system had to include some kind of glacis to prevent damage to the wall's foun dations by erosion. A glacis also provided smooth slopes around the walls that obstructed attackers from climbing them. Indeed, glacis were applied in every period in which cities were fortified by walls. T h e common use of mud bricks for MB city walls may have necessitated the devel opment of more elaborate glacis in that period. Moat. A deep ditch was cut at the foot of some mounds in order to increase their height. This method was especially important in places were the natural hill was not sufficiently prominent to invest and attack. In many cases, the moat can be considered to be a by-product of removing much needed soil and stone for earthen fills and construction. Digging the soil in the area around the mound created a ditch that im peded the enemy's attack. A moat was exposed on the west ern side of the M B II Lower City at Hazor and around the newly exposed fortified Iron II city at Tel Jezreel. [See Jez reel, Tel.] In addition, because these moats were cut deep into the bedrock, they probably served as a quarry for con struction stone. Moats were also observed at the Hittite cap ital of Hattusa (Bogazkoy) in central Anatolia, in northern
FORTIFICATIONS: An Overview Syria at Carchemish, and at Tell Halaf in northern Meso potamia (Naumann, 1971, pp. 305-308). [See Bogazkoy; Carchemish; Halaf, Tell.] Gates. City gates dramatically represent the architectural dilemma created by a settlement's military and civil needs. As an entrance to the city, the gate needed a wide opening and a location at the easiest approachable point, however, defensive considerations demanded a narrow and hard-toenter location. The planners of city gates throughout tire ages had to find an adequate compromise between these two conflicting demands. The following typology of city gates portrays different solutions developed to cope with the di lemma. Gates with projecting towers. The simplest way to pro tect a gate was to flank tire approachway between two tow ers. T h e top of tire city wall above the gate and the roof of tire projecting towers provided the defenders with strategic firing platforms that controlled the area in front of tire gate from three sides. This arrangement also minimized the size of the dead area next to the foot of the wall. Wooden doors were reinforced with strips of metal to prevent their burning. A well-preserved example of this type are the EB II gates at Tell el-Far ah (North). [See Far'ah, Tell el- (North).] When the main gate was erected inside the fortification line, the protection of the area was achieved by constructing an outer gate. Such installations were popular at such Iron Age cities as Tel Beersheba, Dan, and Megiddo. Fort gates. A unique type of gate was developed in the MB II period, apparently initiated at cities demarcated by earthen ramparts. In these unfortified cities, the ruling class needed strongholds to protect them both from outside en emies and inside rebels. Such double protection was accom plished by erecting city gates as separate forts. These forts consisted of two huge towers with internal rooms and a gate way narrowed by three pairs of pilasters. T h e location of door sockets indicates that the gates were shut off by two pairs of doors, facing the outer and inner sides of the city. When tire doors of these gates were closed, the structures were transformed into independent strongholds in which members of the ruling class could find shelter in an emer gency. Gates with two, four, or six rooms. During the Iron Age, city gates often consisted of two large towers flanking the gateway. However, unlike the shallow recesses between the piers of M B II gates, the long rooms of tire towers opened fully into the gateway. Another essential difference is the location of the doors. Instead of two sets of doors, as in M B II, the Iron Age gates were closed only by a single pair of doors located behind tire first set of piers. This ar rangement indicates that tire function of the gate rooms at the floor level was civil and not military. Iron Age gates differ in the number of their rooms. T h e most common are gates with four or six rooms; a few were c
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equipped with only two rooms. Yigael Yadin (1963) as sumed that the number of rooms changed during the period and affected the protective strength of the gates. Detailed analysis (Herzog, 1986) indicates that these gate types were used simultaneously throughout the period, with the num ber of rooms reflecting the intensity and diversity of a gate's uses. In addition, the gate rooms could be used by guards, as well as by political, judicial, religious, and commercial institutions. T h e military role of some gates was reinforced by adding an outer gate in front of the main gate. Ceremonial gates. At least one gate, in stratum XV at Megiddo, seems to reflect a ceremonial function. T h e gate was furnished with two wide, straight, parallel gateways with stairs that led up to the cultic compound. Secondary gates and posterns. Multiple narrow, sec ondary gates were used as civilian passageways through the city walls, mainly during the EB II—III period. These gate ways were 0.80-1 m wide and allowed the farmers a shortcut to their fields. In the Iron Age, narrow posterns were utilized for escaping from a besieged city or for a surprise attack on the enemy. Bastions a n d Fortresses. T h e rise of a military estab lishment demanded appropriate structures for its use. These needs were best met by bastions or forts, erected in connec tion with a fortification system. A large bastion was built next to the water system at Arad in EB II, and several huge bastions were erected at Tel Yarmut in EB III. [See Arad, article on Bronze Age Period; Yarmut, Tel.] The gate forts of tire MB IIA, described above, are another type of inde pendent stronghold. Isolated Iron I forts have also been ob served in the hill country of Judah. [See Judah.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, i960. Finkelstein, Israel. "Middle Brone Age 'Fortifications': A Reflection of Social Organizations and Political Formations." Tel Aviv 19 (1992): 201-220. Herzog, Ze'ev. Das Stadttor in Israel und in den Nachbarlandern. Mainz am Rhein, 1986. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Settlement and Fortification Planning in the Iron Age." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 231-274. Jerusalem, 1992. Kaplan, Jacob. "Further Aspects of the Middle Bronze Age II Fortifi cations in Palestine." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 91 (1975): 1-17. Mazar, Benjamin. "The Middle Bronze Age in Palestine." Israel Ex ploration Journal 18 (1968): 65-97. Naumann, Rudolf. Architektur Kleinasiens: Von ihren Anfangen bis zum Ende der hethitischen Zeit. 2d ed. Tubingen, 1971. Parr, Peter J. "The Origin of the Rampart Fortifications of Middle Bronze Age Palestine and Syria." Zeitschrift des Deutschen PalastinaVereins 84 (1968): 18-45. Yadin, Yigael. The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands in the Light of Ar chaeological Study. 2 vols. New York, 1963. ZE'EV HERZOG
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FORTIFICATIONS: Bronze and Iron Ages Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages
Fortifications were a fundamental aspect of urbanization in antiquity. While the need to protect a settlement arose with tire development of social institutions, the very existence of fortifications generated the evolution of the military estab lishment. T h e size and the nature of fortifications were de termined by the community's level of social complexity, which was affected by the role of the site within larger ge opolitical units. Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods. The appearance of what seemed to be a fortified city in Pre-Pottery Neolithic Jericho has puzzled scholars since its discovery. [See Jeri cho.] A satisfying solution suggests interpreting the struc tures not as fortifications but as a retaining wall against floods and a tower for ceremonial purposes (Bar-Yosef, 1986). Enclosure walls of temenoi at Chalcolithic sites such as Ein-Gedi and Teleilat el-Ghassul in Israel may have been the conceptual inspiration for the first defensive walls. [See 'Ein-Gedi; Teleilat el-Ghassul] c
Early Bronze Age. T h e earliest fortifications so far un covered in modern Israel belong to the Early Bronze Age IA (Kempinski, 1992a). At Tel 'Erani/Tel Gatir, on the south ern coastal plain, excavation exposed a 3-meter-wide city wall, an outer glacis, and two towers in a limited area, con temporary with a public building inside the settlement. [See 'Erani, Tel.] From about the same time (late fourth millen nium), an elaborate fortification system was found at Ha buba Kabira in Syria. [See Habuba Kabira.] It consisted of a 3.40-meter-wide city wall constructed on the western side of the city in a straight line, for about 600 nr. Rectangular towers were spaced at regular intervals of 14 m and in front of them a thin (.70 m) outer wall was added. There were two identical city gates in the main wall, each with two tow ers and two doorways, and an additional outer gate through the outer wall (Strommenger, 1980). Evidently, toward the end of EB I, more sites were forti fied: Jericho, with a city wall 1.10 m wide and semicircular towers; Tell Shalem, protected by two parallel walls (inner wall, 4.5 m wide; outer wall, 2.80 m wide); and Aplrek, with a city wall 2.90 m wide. [See Aphek.] The first phase of the fortification systems at Tell el-Far ah (North) and Ai is atttibuted by some scholars to late EB I and by others to EB II. [See Far'ah, Tell el- (North); Ai.] At Tell el-Far'ah (North), a city wall 2.20 m wide is joined to a remarkable city gate. The gate consists of two huge towers that project 7 m outward from the wall; each tower is about 8 m wide. The towers commanded a 4-meter-wide approach that nar rowed to a 2-meter-wide entrance. The gate was closed by double doors, as is evident from tire two door sockets found in situ. At Ai, the first city wall (C), 5-5.50 m thick, was built of large stones and strengthened by semicircular tow ers. Two narrow (only 1 m wide) passages were uncovered, but no main gate has so far been found. c
In EB II, fortified cities became common all over the Le vant (Richard, 1987). In addition to the above-mentioned sites, fortified cities have been found at Beth-Yerah, Me giddo, Ta'anach, Khirbet Makhruk, Dothan, Tel 'Erani, Tel Yarmut, Arad, and Bab edh-Dhra'. [See Beth-Yerah; Me giddo; Ta'anach; Dothan; 'Erani; Tel; Yarmut, Tel; Arad, article on Bronze Age Period; Bab edh Dhra'.] A typical fea ture at most of these sites was the attempt to increase the strength of the city walls by malting them very thick and by erecting additional parallel walls with fills between them. These accumulative fortification systems of walls and fills reached unusual widths (and apparently considerable heights)—up to 15 m wide at Tell el-Far'ah (North) and more than 10 m wide at Ai (walls C and B). T h e wall at Arad is only 2-2.50 m thick, indicating the site's lessened role as a fortified urban center. In some cases, such as at Megiddo and Jericho, the city wall was constructed in sec tions approximately 20 m long, with narrow gaps of about 0.20 m between them—presumably to prevent the collapse of the wall in the event of an earthquake. The EB II cities are also characterized by the existence of more then one gate (Herzog, 1986a, pp. 12-23). Each city had at least one large gate (more than 2 m wide), such as the main gates at Tell el-Far'ah (North) and Arad, through which fully laden beasts of burden could pass. In addition, many cities had several narrow passages (only .80-1 m wide), often called posterns. This duality reflects attempts to counterbalance the conflicting military and civilian re quirements of very large cities inhabited mostiy by agricul turalists: multiple passages saved tire farmers from traveling a distance of several kilometers in order to reach their fields. Vulnerability was minimized by making the secondary gates as narrow as feasible. Such gates could be blocked quickly in case of an emergency or effectively defended from the top of the ramparts. An additional defensive aspect of tire system was provided by towers projecting outward from the wall, thus enabling flanking fire. Most common are semicircular towers at tached to the wall and incorporating a narrow doorway, like the ones at Arad, where the towers were built at intervals of 25-40 m. In some cases the towers were rectangular; such towers are depicted on Egyptian pallets (Yadin, 1963, pp. 122-125). An interesting innovation is the massive (25 m long and 13 m wide) bastion attached to the city wall at Tel Yarmut. A similar structure (18 X 8 m) at Arad dominated the reservoir inside the city. At several sites, such as at Tell el- Far'ah (North), Klrirbet Makhruk, and Jericho, the slopes around the city walls were reinforced by a glacis—a structure consisting of alternating layers of different kinds of soils and/or stones. T h e glacis served to prevent erosion, to force an attacking enemy to climb a slippery ascent, and to make any attempt to under mine the city wall more difficult. The bastion at Tel Yarmut is surrounded by an imposing stone glacis at least 6 m wide.
FORTIFICATIONS: Bronze and Iron Ages EB III settlers exploited dre fortifications of tire preceding period witir few alterations. Basically, the technique was to increase the width of the earlier city walls. T h e addition of wall A at Ai created a complex of fortifications 17 m wide, and wall 4045A at Megiddo doubled the widtii to 8.50 m. At Tel Yarmut, the fortifications in EB III reached a total width of 36 m. Rectangular towers were a typical feature in this phase. T h e bastions incorporated into the circumference of the city wall became more popular in EB III. They were con structed of heavy walls with inner divisions into rooms, some of which were narrow stairwells that led to upper stories. Such bastions are found at Jericho (16 X 7 m), Tell el-Hesi (18 X 9 m), and Ta anach (10 X 10 m). [SeeHesi, Tell el-.] In the absence of fortified palaces or acropola, these bastions served as a power base for the city's military elite. T h e city gate in stratum XV at Megiddo had a ceremonial rather tiran a military function. T w o wide parallel gateways witir stairs led up to the temple area, between three rectan gular units. At Betir-Yerah, stairs between two solid towers led down into the city. Middle B r o n z e Age. During the Middle Bronze Age I, there was no urban settlements in Israel—the population be ing rural or nomadic. However, there are fortifications at tributable to this period in Transjordan, specifically at Khir bet Iskander, where a 2.50-meter-wide perimeter wall with reinforced corners and a two-chambered gate was exca vated. [See Iskander, Khirbet.] Fortified cities reappeared in Israel in M B IIA, at first along the coastal plain and the interior valleys (Koclravi et a l , 1979). Fortification systems included city walls, mighty city gates, towers, glacis, and earthen ramparts. T h e walls were made of sun-dried bricks above stone foundations witir a moderate width of about 2 m. In some cases, such as at Megiddo and Aphek, the wall was reinforced by pilasters on the exterior. [See Megiddo; Aphek.] The common use of bricks as dre main constructional ma terial stimulated the wide introduction of dre glacis, which protected the bottom of tire city wall on its outer side and the slope immediately below it. T h e elaborate MB IIA glacis at Tel Gerisa is composed of several courses of bricks (up to drirteen in one spot) laid on the slope of the mound and covered by a layer of crushed sandstone. [See Gerisa, Tel.] This was a great improvement over the earthen glacis of the Early Bronze Age. [See Building Materials and Techniques, article on Materials and Techniques of the Bronze and Iron Ages.] In addition to fortified cities built on hills or tells, large settlements surrounded by earthen ramparts were erected outside the tells in the lowlands. These ramparts were built by a variety of techniques: with or without a stone core; with internal, boxlike brick constructions; or, most commonly, witir sloping layers of alternating soil types. There is not a single case where a city wall was found to be incorporated c
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within the rampart. This absence of a defensive wall means that these earthen ramparts cannot be interpreted as forti fications against military attack: they were neither designed to prevent the access of chariots nor could they provide a response to tire battering ram, allegedly introduced at tiiat time (Yadin, 1955). It is more likely that tire earthen ram parts were a quick and easy means to demarcate die city limits of unusually large communities during peaceful times (Herzog, 1986b, 1992a; Bunimovitz, 1992; Finkelstein, 1992). These communities could erect an earthen rampart within a few months, witir their own hands, without invest ing in professional builders and expensive materials. Such enclosures are known at the huge sites of Qatna and Tell Mardikh/Ebla in Syria and at Hazor, Yavneh-Yam, Tel Kabri, Tel Dan, and Akko, in Israel. [See Ebla; Hazor; YavnehYam; Dan; Akko.] They were erected over areas of 20-100 ha (49-247 acres) during M B IIA-B. T h e incorporation of city gates within earthen ramparts does not contradict the demarcation function but rather supports i t The gates were not attached to any city wall; they were merely anchored to the rampart by short walls (as for tireir function, see below). City gates in MB IIA present several competing conceptional approaches (Herzog, 1986a). A gate with an approach constructed at right angles to the gateway has been found at Megiddo, stratum XIII, forming a bent entrance, which was easier to defend then a straight entrance. T h e stepped ap proach to the gate indicates that only pedestrians or pack animals, but not wheeled vehicles, could enter the city. A second gate type was found at Tel Akko. It consisted of a gate chamber (8.25 X 7 m) with a 10-meter-long corridor, almost on die same axis. However, there also the narrow (1.75 m) entrance and two steps in front of the corridor prevented use by wagons or chariots. The long stepped approach leading to the gate at Tel Dan points to similar constraints, but the plan of the gatehouse is different. It is a roughly square building (15.45 X 13.50 nr) divided into four large rooms, two on each side of the gateway. T h e gate, including the front arches and half-barrel roof (all made of mud brick), is exceptionally well preserved because it was intentionally and totally buried by the build ers of tire slightiy later earthen rampart. The MB IIA gate at Dan bears a strong resemblance to the Iron Age II fourroom gate type. The fourth type of gate, which developed in Syria at Tell Mardikh/Ebla and was introduced into Israel at YavnehYam in MB IIA, has six piers. T h e type became dominant in MB IIB. City gates in this group are composed of for midable pairs of towers flanking straight gateways that are narrowed by three piers on each side. The towers' thick walls (2 m and more) point to their considerable height, witir rooms on several floors. Some of these rooms served as stair wells; otirers were probably used as barracks for the city guards as well as to store their equipment and food. The gates of dris type had wide, straight entrances (2.80-4.00 m)
324
FORTIFICATIONS: Bronze and Iron Ages
FORTIFICATIONS: Bronze and Iron Ages. Examples of Iron Age Fortifications, (i) 'Ein-Qadesh; (2) Atar ha-Ro'a; ( 3 ) Horvat Haluqim; ( 4 ) Horvat Rahba; ( 5 ) Horvat Ketef Shivta; ( 6 ) Ramat Matted. (After A. Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible)
and no stairs in either the approach or in the gateway. This clearly indicates daily use by wheeled vehicles. The interpretation of the function of the six-pier gate type is based on the location of the door sockets at both the front and rear ends of the gatehouse (Herzog,1986a, pp. 62-66). This proves that tire gate passage was closed off by two sets of doors, one set toward the exterior of the passage and the other on the city side. T h e dual closure system converted the gate into an independent defensive unit, a kind of fort; it was vital in cities enclosed by earthen ramparts and lacldng proper city walls. This fort controlled tire wheeled trans portation in and out of the city and could serve as the only defensible structure for tire local elite. In fortified cities, a gate with a dual closure system may indicate internal social tension and an attempt by tire ruling class to protect itself against attack from within the city, as well as from without. Six-pier city gates are known in Syria at Tell Mardikh/ Ebla (14.70 X 22 m), Qatna (36 X 29 m), Carchemish (25 X 18 m), and Alalakh (23 X 17 m); all of these cities were
enclosed by earthen ramparts. [See Carchemish; Alalakh.] In Israel such gates have been found attached to the eardren enclosures at Yavneh-Yam (25 X 18 m) and Hazor (20.60 X 16.20 m). They were also adapted for use in walled cities at Megiddo (18 X 10 m), Shechem (17 X 19 m), Gezer (22 X 14 m), Beth-Shemesh (16.50 X 12.40 m ) , and Tell elFar'ah (South; 21.60 X 18 m), [See Shechem; Gezer; BethShemesh; Far'ah, Tell el- (South).] Bastions incorporated into city walls, which, like the gla cis, seem to revive an EB III tradition, are another typical component of MB II fortifications. Moderately sized bas tions (10 X 5 m) have been found at Tel Zeror, Tel Poleg, and Megiddo, while large bastions were uncovered at Gezer (26 X 16 m) and Tell Mardikh/Ebla (65 x 3 0 m). [See Zeror, Tel.] Late B r o n z e Age. The people of the Late Bronze Age for the most part reused the fortification systems of the pre vious period and seldom erected new elements. One of the exceptions was in the newly built city at Tell Abu Hawam,
FORTIFICATIONS: Bronze and Iron Ages which had a city wall 2 m wide. [See Abu Hawam, Tell] Usually, when the earlier walls were destroyed, cities (e.g., Megiddo) were surrounded solely by a belt of houses and not by an independent city wall. Egyptian accounts and re liefs referring to captured LB cities in Canaan relate in many cases to the ldng's palace rather than to a fortified city (Herzog, 1986a, p. 73). On Israel's southern coastal plain, a series of forts or "gov ernors' palaces" evidently served the Egyptian administra tion in Canaan (Oren, 1984). These solid square structures (about 20 X 20 m) are found from Tel Mor to Deir el-Balah, in addition to the one at the Egyptian center at Beth-Shean. [See Mor, Tel, Deir el-Balah, Beth-Shean.] These forts or palaces are usually isolated structures and are not incorpo rated into a fortification system. This indicates that not only the Canaanites, but also their Egyptian overlords, refrained from constructing fortified cities, perhaps to prevent their potential use as bases for revolt against Egypt. I r o n Age. Real fortification systems are also absent in Iron Age I. T h e new setdements of the twelfth-eleventh cen turies BCE adapted the principle of a peripheral belt of houses, creating either an enclosed settlement (with an empty central courtyard) like the one at 'Izbet Sartah, stra tum II, and Beersheba, stratum VII, or as a settlement village (with dwellings filling the inner space), as at Ai and BethShemesh. [See Tzbet Sartah, Beersheba.] T h e earliest Iron Age city wall seems to be at Ashdod, stratum 10, belonging to a Philistine city of the late eleventh century. [See Ashdod, Philistines, article on Early Philis tines.] The city has a brick wall 4.50 m wide adjoining a fourroom gate protected by two solid towers. At Megiddo, stra tum VIA, a simple two-room gate was incorporated in die belt of dwellings that encircled the city then. Yigael Yadin developed a theory of chronological-typological attribution regarding Iron II fortifications: he assumed that only case mate walls and six-room gates were used in the tenth century BCE, during the reign of Solomon, and that they were without exception replaced by solid walls and four-room gates in the ninth century BCE, during the reign of Ahab (Yadin, 1963, pp. 322-325). However, the wide variety of fortification sys tems now observed in every century of Iron II disproves Yadin's schematic approach (Herzog, 1992b). Tenth century B C E . All three types of city gates were used in the tenth century BCE. A peripheral belt of houses was still in use at Megiddo, stratum VA; Gezer, stratum 6; and Lachish, level V. [See Lachish.] A casemate city wall unconnected to dwellings has been found at Hazor, stratum X, and apparently at 'Ein-Gev, stratum IV. [See 'Ein-Gev.] Casemates integrated with dwellings are attributed to this phase at Tell Beit Mirsim, stratum B3. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell.] Simple solid walls encircled the cities at Ashdod, stra tum 9; Beersheba, stratum V; and, eventually, at Tel Dan. An offset-inset city wall was built at Megiddo, stratum IVB, while a solid wall with towers protected Lachish, level IV,
325
and Gezer. Six-room gates were used at Ashdod, stratum 9; Hazor, stratum X, Gezer, stratum 6, Megiddo, stratum IVB; and Lachish, level IV. Four-room gates were used at Beer sheba, stratum V; Megiddo, stratum IVA; and, eventually, at Dan. Two-room gates were found at Megiddo, stratum VA, and at Tell Beit Mirsim, stratum B3. Four-room gates were also popular in North Syria from the tenth century onward at sites such as Carchemish and Tell Halaf. [See Halaf, Tell.] Ninth century B C E . A casemate city wall integrated with dwellings was built at Beersheba, stratum III, and casemates filled with earth were built at Samaria, stratum II, and at Hazor, stratum VTI. A solid wall with towers has been found at Tell en-Nasbeh attached to a four-room city gate at an early stage and to a two-room gate in the final stage. [See Nasbeh, Tell en-.] A four-room gate was also erected at Beersheba, stratum III. Eighth-seventh centuries B C E . During die eighth-seventh centuries BCE only solid city walls were constructed. Simple solid walls have been found in Jerusalem; at Tel Batash, stratum HI; and at Lachish, level II; a solid wall witii towers was built at Hazor, stratum VA. [See Jerusalem.] T h e six-room city gate reappeared in the eighth century BCE at Tel 'Ira; a two-room gate was erected at Tell Beit Mirsim, stratum A2, and in the Assyrian city of Megiddo, stratum III. [See 'Ira, Tel.] A gate complex in the form of an elab orate fort is represented at Lachish, stratum II. Fortresses a n d Their Functions. Iron II military units were mainly fortresses erected along borders and trade routes. Whereas architects in Judah preferred rectilinear forms at the southern end of tiieir kingdom, the round type of fort seems to have been chosen at the eastern front of the
FORTIFICATIONS: Bronze and Iron Ages. The Iron Age Gate at Timna'. (Drawing by L. Ritmeyer; copyright G. Kelm)
326
FORTIFICATIONS: Persian Period
kingdom of Israel. [See Judah.] A sequence of six square forts (about 50 X 50 m) dating from the tenth through the sixth centuries BCE has been uncovered at Arad. [See Arad, article on Iron Age Period.] Periods of shorter use (eighthsixth centuries BCE) are ascribed to the rectangular fortresses at Qadesh-Barnea (60 X 40 m) and Horvat 'Uza (51 X 42 m). [See Qadesh-Barnea.] All these units had elaborate for tified walls with towers and gates, systems for water supply and storage, and at Arad even a royal temple. Unlike their southern counterparts, tire circular forts of tire northern kingdom (late tenth or ninth century BCE), like the one at Khirbet Maldrruk, were small—only 19.50 m in diameter (about 300 sq m). The small space was filled by three con centric walls, leaving room for only a few soldiers and their equipment. The diversity of Iron II fortifications as described above establishes that no single factor was responsible for all of them. Rather, it seems plausible that the decision as to which type of defensive system was suitable for a certain city was dictated by tire state's general economic conditions, by the role of the city within the hierarchy of the royal administra tion, and by the location of the city in terms of the state's overall defense lines. These considerations affected dre choices: economical enclosure by a belt of houses, a case mate wall with its savings in space and construction costs, or tire more costly—but much stronger—solid city wall. Similarly those considerations influenced the decision be tween two-, four-, or six-room gates and whether to use inexpensive mud bricks, fieldstones, or ashlar masonry as the construction material. The complexity of the roles city gates played is very clear in their construction when they served daily as civilian en trances into the city. Along with the variety of forms, Iron II city gates also display uniformity in one basic feature: deep rooms open to their full width to tire passageway. This characteristic is particularly striking when compared to MB II gates, whose rooms were enclosed in the towers and where only short piers projected into the passageway. Another im portant difference in the Iron Age was the presence of a single pair of doors closing off the entrance into the city from the outside only; they allowed free access into the gatehouse from the city side. These characteristics indicate that, in contrast to MB II gates, Iron Age gates had civilian functions above and beyond their purely military/defensive role. This conclusion is further supported by several installations in or next to the gates. Large plazas adjoining the gate inside the city, which could accommodate large audiences or serve as a marketplace, were found at every site. Reservoirs outside tire gate (such as at Megiddo and Beersheba) mainly served caravans and bypassers. [See Reservoirs.] Ceremonial in stallations (e.g., at Megiddo and Dan) testify to cultic activ ities conducted near the gate. [See Cult.] Benches found built into some of the side rooms (e.g., at Dan, Gezer, and
Beersheba) were outfitted for use by merchants, judges, and prophets. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "The Walls of Jericho: An Alternative Interpretation." Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 157-162. Bunimovitz, Shlomo. "The Middle Bronze Age Fortifications in Pal estine as a Social Phenomenon." Tel Aviv 19.2 (1992): 221-234. Finkelstein, Israel. "Middle Bronze Age 'Fortifications': A Reflection of Social Organization and Political Formations." Tel Aviv 19 (1992): 201-220. Flerzog, Ze'ev. Das Stadttor in Israel und in den Nachbarldndern. Mainz am Rhein, 1986a. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Social Organization as Reflected by the Bronze and Iron Age Cities of Israel." In Comparative Studies in the Development of Complex Societies, vol. 2, edited by T. C. Champion and M. J. Rowlands. Southampton, Eng., 1986b. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Administrative Structures in tile Iron Age." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 223-230. Jeru salem, 1992a. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Settlement and Fortification Planning in the Iron Age." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 231-274. Jerusalem, 1992b. Kempinski, Aharon. "Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Temples." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 53-59. Jerusalem, 1992a. Kempinski, Aharon. "Middle and Late Bronze Age Fortifications." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 127142. Jerusalem, 1992b. Kochavi, Moshe, et al. "Aphek-Antipatris, Tel Poleg, Tel Zeror, and Tel Burga: Four Fortified Sites of the Middle Bronze Age IIA in die Sharon Plain." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 95 (1979): 121-165. Oren, Eliezer D. '"Governors' Residencies' in Canaan under the New Kingdom: A Case Study of Egyptian Administration." Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 14 (1984): 37-56. Richard, Suzanne. "The Early Bronze Age: The Rise and Collapse of Urbanism." Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987): 22-43. Strommenger, Eva. Habuba Kabira, eine Stadt vor $ooo Jahren: Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft am Euphrat in Habuba Kabira, Syrien. Sendschrift der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 12. Mainz, 1980. Yadin, Yigael. "Hyksos Fortifications and the Battering Ram." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 137 (1955): 23-32. Yadin, Yigael. The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands in the Light of Ar chaeological Study. 2 vols. New York, 1963. ZE'EV HERZOG
Fortifications of the P e r s i a n P e r i o d A primary means of defense in the Near East was the wall systems surrounding cities. In the case of the Persian Em pire, a distinction must be made between urban fortification systems witirin the traditional Persian heartland and the for tifications in those areas acquired by conquest and conse quently under imperial control. T h e varying Persian ap proach to urban fortifications is best seen by comparing the
FORTIFICATIONS: Persian Period
EJZI m
mm
Jf T North of Ashdod
Horvat Mesora
Tell es-Sa'idiyeh
Persian Period. Plans of excavated mid-fifth cen tury fortresses. (Courtesy K. G. Hoglund)
FORTIFICATIONS:
fortifications of the traditional capitals of the empire with urban areas outside dre Iranian plateau. Cyrus the Great (560-530 BCE), founder of the Persian Empire, established the imposing site of Pasargadae as his capital. N o remains of major fortifications have been found relating to Cyrus's rule, although under his successors a sig nificant complex of mud-brick and stone structures was built at the site. Witirin the complex was a structure the ex cavators identified as a citadel. It consisted of a large, nearly square courtyard (31 X 32 m) with rooms along its eastern and western sides. Its overall form was rectangular. T h e cit adel and its surrounding structures were enclosed by a mudbrick double wall 8 m thick. There is evidence that large towers projected from die walls at regular intervals. [See Pa sargadae.] Darius I at his accession in 522 BCE selected anotirer city, Susa, to be tire capital of tire Persian Empire. Although Susa had been largely ruined, the king had it completely rebuilt. A large citadel was built on the acropolis, and the combined palace and residential district was contained within a rec tangular enclosure wall of unbaked mud brick more than 20 m thick at its base and tapering upward. Entering the palace of Darius, the Apadana, required passing through a second mud-brick enclosure some 17 m wide at its base. [See Susa.] Persepolis, a Persian capital also established by Darius, was built on an expansive terrace. There is scattered evi dence of a massive mud-brick wall surrounding the whole
327
terrace, and certain areas were protected behind bulky mudbrick defenses. A wall 10 m thick and an estimated 1 1 m high, sheltered an important administrative building the ex cavators identified as the Treasury. [See Persepolis.] In general, these imposing defensive works seem to have functioned less as effective protection from external enemies than as intimidating symbols. Ancient Persia's fortification systems were part of a larger design based on the spatial impact of the royal cities. They could not fail to impress on visitors tire awesome power of the empire. In contrast to those territories securely witirin the heart land of dre Persian Empire, urban centers lying in con quered territories could present a threat if fortified. There was no priority for fortifying cities outside of the Iranian plateau. Babylon under Persian domain is a clear example of the threat a fortified urban center could pose. Though appar ently receptive to Cyrus's conquest of the city in 539 BCE, Babylon attempted to revolt when Darius I came on dre throne. Once the city was pacified, Darius ordered the inner walls of its citadel to be destroyed. Babylon attempted to revolt again in 484, when Xerxes came to die throne; follow ing die reassertion of Persian control, Xerxes had tire outer city walls destroyed. Deprived of its defenses, in the future Babylon would have faced die unchecked military force of the empire should it have sought independence. [See Bab ylon.] A similar concern over the danger presented by urban fortifications can be seen in the biblical narratives surround ing the rebuilding of dre walls of Jerusalem during the Per sian period. Apparentiy, imperial officials rapidly stopped an early attempt to erect city walls without authorization, ostensibly because of Jerusalem's history of revolt against imperial rulers (Ezr. 4:7-23). When the Persian monarch Artaxerxes formally authorized a refortification effort to launch the career of Nehemiah, neighboring rulers raised the specter of revolt against the empire in an effort to derail the work (Neh. 6:5-9). T h e archaeological remains of a city wall around Jerusalem that best correlate with these biblical no tices suggest tiiat die wall was quite rough but was some 2.75 m drick (Katiileen M. Kenyon, Jerusalem: Excavating 3000 Years of History, London, 1967, pp. 110-112). It would appear drat tiris rapidly constructed fieldstone wall enclosed only the eastern hill of the city, the area known as the City of David. [See Jerusalem.] Without fortified urban centers, the Persian Empire di rected its strategic planning toward establishing an intricate network of small and medium-sized forts. Staffed by im perial troops, these forts were positioned along the essential routes tiiat tied the vast areas of the empire together. The importance of these forts is evidenced both in written sources and in the archaeological record. Several ancient Greek writers make specific reference to the essential function of forts in the context of Persian im-
328
FORTIFICATIONS: Persian Period
FORTIFICATIONS: Persian Period. Plan
detail of a fortification
wall outside of Persepolis.
(After
Schmidt, 1953)
perial administration. Xenophon, in his Cyropaedia and Oeconomicus, emphasizes the necessity both of garrisoned forces for maintaining Persian imperial security and of tax ing local populations to support those installations. Xenophon's comments have led some scholars to suggest that these garrisons served the empire as the primary collecting stations for imperial taxes, even though tire evidence is am biguous on this point (see C. Tuplin, "Persian Garrisons on Xenophon and Other Sources," Achaemenid History 3 [i 88]:6 -70). An analysis of inscriptions, historical references, and a few contemporary documents yields a total of approximately 139 forts constructed throughout the empire. This number is undoubtedly only a fraction of the number of forts actually established, however, because many in addition to those named in literary sources have been uncovered in archaeo logical excavations. In Palestine, a number of forts have been recovered. As a result of increased imperial concern over this region follow ing a serious revolt in Egypt, many forts were constructed in the mid-fifth century BCE. In general, they are located on 9
7
elevated sites overlooking trade routes, often removed from settled areas. They are square, with a central courtyard and rooms arranged along all four sides. T h e exterior wall is usu ally about one meter thick and made of fieldstones. These forts range from 20 to 40 m on a side, their overall size being determined by that of the garrison to be stationed there. T h e following examples demonstrate the typical forms of these forts. In 1969, a Persian fort was excavated north of the ancient site of Ashdod along Israel's Mediterranean coast. T h e fort occupied a hilltop, although there was no sign of a Persian settlement nearby. T h e structure was nearly 30 m square with an exterior fieldstone wall approximately 1.5 m thick. T h e central courtyard was 16 m square and surrounded by sixteen rooms. Imported Greek pottery found within the structure placed the use of the fort in the mid-fifth century BCE. [See Ashdod.] In Jordan, the excavations at Tell es-Sa idiyeh encoun tered a building exactly 22 m square on the upper part of the site. Its exterior fieldstone wall was 1.25 m thick, and the central courtyard, surrounded by ten rooms; was 9.5 X 8 m. c
FORTIFICATIONS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods T h e few excavated remains in the structure suggest that its first phase dates to the mid-fifth century BCE, aldrough drere was no evidence of any occupation of the tell in the Persian period as a whole. [See Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-.] At Tel Michal, on Israel's Sharon plain, excavators en countered a series of small forts. In the first Persian phase at the site a fort, 15 m square was constructed, with rooms on at least one side (the preservation of this phase was poor) and walls approximately 1.2 m wide. A number of grain silos were associated with this structure. T h e presence of im ported pottery dated the phase to tire late sixth century BCE. By the end of the fifth century BCE, a new fort was con structed, with fieldstone walls 1 m thick and a central court yard some 11 m square. It is not preserved well enough to recover the entire plan, but there is evidence for rooms ar rayed around tire courtyard on some sides. An impressive stairway led up to the fort. This same fort saw use with little alteration until tire end of the Persian period. [See Michal, Tel.] Although it is not certain how widely distributed these Persian forts were, it appears that, in some areas of Palestine small forts were placed at 5-8 km (3-5 mi.) intervals over seeing major routes. This pattern suggests that one of the most pervasive archaeological indications of a Persian im perial presence would be dre remains of such forts. It also suggests that tire local populations under imperial control were faced with a constant reminder of the military power the Persian monarchs could direct. [See also Cities, article on Cities of the Persian Period; and Building Materials and Techniques, article on Materials and Techniques of the Persian through Roman Periods.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Herzog, Ze'ev, George Rapp, and Ora Negbi, eds. Excavations al Tel Michal, Israel. Publications of the Institute of Archaeology, no. 8. Minneapolis, 1989. Hoglund, Kenneth G. Achaemenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Pal estine and the Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah. Society of Biblical Lit erature, Dissertation Series, no. 125. Atlanta, 1992. Study linking the historical and archaeological evidence, including remains of forts, for an increased Persian military presence in Palestine in the mid-fifth century BCE, with the biblical narratives recalling this period. Parrot, Jean. "L'architecture militaire et palatiale des Achemenides a Suse." In 1 ;o Jahre Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, 1829-1970, pp. 79-94. Mainz, 1981. Concise overview of several decades of the work of French excavators at Susa. Pritchard, James B. Telles-Sa'idiyeh: Excavations on the Tell, 1964--1966. University Museum, Monograph 60. Philadelphia, 1985. Schmidt, Erich F. Persepolis, vol. 1, Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions. Uni versity of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 68. Chicago, 1953Stronach, David. Pasargadae. Oxford, 1978. Tuplin, Christopher. "Xenophon and the Garrisons of the Achaemenid Empire." Archaeologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 20 (1987): 167-245. Exhaustive discussion of the literary sources for Persian forts, in cluding a comprehensive catalogue of garrisons. Williamson, H.G.M. "Nehemiah's Walls Revisited." Palestine Explo ration Quarterly 116 (July-December i984):-8i-88. Up-to-date sur
329
vey of the archaeological and literary evidence for Nehemiah's refortification of Jerusalem in the mid-fifth century BCE. KENNETH G. HOGLUND
Fortifications of the Hellenistic, R o m a n , and B y z a n t i n e Periods T h e historical development, forms, and functions of forti fications from Alexander tire Great (336-323 BCE) to the rise of Islam in the seventh century present a complex picture. Primary sources are mostly archaeological, although literary sources provide useful details and especially aid in under standing the function of various fortifications. Also helpful are depictions of fortifications in mosaics and other contem porary art. [See Mosaics.] T h e following survey will proceed chronologically, from tire beginning of the Hellenistic period to the Muslim conquest. Hellenistic Period. Fortifications in the Hellenistic pe riod witnessed some assimilation between intrusive GrecoMacedonian and indigenous Near Eastern cultures. Near Eastern peoples had a long tradition of sophisticated forti fications, prompted by the efficiency in siege warfare among many Near Eastern peoples, such as the Assyrians. In the Greek Aegean, in contrast, relative backwardness in siege warfare meant that fortifications were rarely taken by assault before the fourth century BCE. Fortified Greek cities nor mally fell only to starvation or through internal tteachery. Improvements in siege warfare and artillery in the fourth century BCE changed the balance in favor of tire besiegers: assault causeways, mounds, wheeled towers, battering rams, mines, and catapults were employed effectively by Alex ander during his conquest of the Near East. Even seemingly impregnable fortress cities, such as the island of Tyre, fell victim to Macedonian siege warfare. [See Tyre.] T h e challenge improved siegecraft posed was met by de signers of fortifications in the Hellenistic period. Stone was tire preferred building material, although mud brick re mained common in regions lacking suitable stone, such as Mesopotamia. Ditches or other obstacles in front of curtain walls were designed to obstruct the approach of siege en gines. Curtain walls, often of ashlar construction, became thicker and stronger, both to resist siege engines and to sup port artillery. In some cases crenellated parapets, which would have been vulnerable to artillery bombardment, were replaced by solid screen walls pierced by windows. Interval towers were erected closer to each other and at higher ele vations. These towers projected from the curtain in order to direct enfilading fire at attackers. Towers above all func tioned as platforms for defensive artillery, and tirus required stronger foundations and internal walls. Gates, which were naturally the weakest point of tire defensive perimeter, were flanked by projecting towers and further strengthened by gate courts with both inner and outer entrances. Attackers who penetrated the outer entrance merely broke into a gate
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FORTIFICATIONS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods
court, a small area open to missile fire from all sides. Pos terns or sally ports, sometimes hidden behind towers, gave the defenders the opportunity to launch surprise assaults to disrupt attackers and destroy siege equipment. Finally, a heavily fortified citadel was often built within the curtain wall to enable the defenders to continue resistance even after the curtain had been breached. Virtually all these elements, with tire exception of artillery, were well known in the Near East long before Alexander, however. Hellenistic military architects seem merely to have made marginal improvements in Near Eastern fortifications. On tire other hand, there is some evidence for a Near East ern influence on Greek fortifications in this period. T h e use of mortar as binding material, for example, long known in the Near East, was introduced into the Greek Aegean in the Hellenistic era (Winter, 1971, pp. 93, 95). Hellenistic city fortifications in the Near East may be best appreciated by examining the new foundations laid by Alex ander and his successors. [See Cities, article on Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods.] Unfortunately, little is known about some of the most important, such as Alexan dria in Egypt or Seleucia on the Tigris. [See Alexandria; Se leucia on the Tigris.] Better-preserved examples of Helle nistic urban fortifications include the Seleucid foundations of Antioch on the Orontes and Dura-Europos. T h e de fended area of Antioch, founded in 300 BCE, eventually mea sured 3.2 X 1.2-1.5 km- This huge expanse was apparentiy deemed necessary by the inherent tactical weakness of tire site on the east bank of the Orontes River, which was dom inated by Mt. Silpius. The city walls were thus extended far up the mountain slopes, even though this resulted in exten sive uninhabited areas within the fortifications; the walls ter minated in a citadel on top of the mountain to prevent its use by attackers. In stark contrast, Dura-Europos, also founded in about 300 BCE, exploited a tactically strong po sition on the Middle Euphrates River. Its curtain wall on three of its four sides zigzagged to exploit defensible ground. T h e east wall direcdy overlooked the Euphrates; the nortir and south walls were erected on top of the banks of steep ravines, leaving tire western wall to bar the only approach over relatively flat ground. Rectangular interval towers pro jected from the curtain and flanked the main gateway in the west wall. Within the fortifications a citadel was built against dre east wall, overlooking tire river plain. [See Antioch on Orontes; Dura-Europos.] Even towns of more modest size were protected by sub stantial fortifications in the Hellenistic period. The city of Dor on the Palestinian coast has yielded important evidence suggesting change in fortifications that may reflect cultural distinctions. A rebuild of the city's walls in the fourth cen tury BCE remained in the Phoenician tradition of ashlar pil lars surrounding a rubble fill. In the third century BCE, how ever, the walls were rebuilt "in the entirely different Greek Style" of header-stretcher masonry with projecting rectan
gular towers (Stern, 1993, p. 366). [See Dor.] Tel BethYerah (Khirbet Kerak), on the southwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, was defended by a brick wall erected on top of a massive basalt rubble foundation 4.8-7 m wide and 3.5 m high. The wall was defended by alternating rectangular and circular interval towers (Hestrin, 1993, pp. 255, 258). [See Beth-Yerah.] Round towers were in fact common in the Hellenistic period, attested at such sites as Caesarea, Ptolemais (Akko), and Sebaste (Samaria). [See Caesarea; Akko; Samaria.] The Hellenistic cities and their hinterlands were often de fended by outlying fortifications. A relatively well-preserved and closely dated example is dre fort on top of Jebel Sartaba, 2 km (1 mi.) southeast of Pella in the Jordan Valley and surmounting the highest elevation in the region, witir views up to 25 km (16 mi.) away. T h e fort measures about 55-70 m on each side. It was defended by a curtain wall approxi mately 2 m thick and by eight towers projecting from the curtain, all of local cherty limestone. T h e towers were lo cated at each corner and in the middle of each side of tire curtain wall. Access was provided by four posterns one on each side and each directly adjacent to a projecting tower. Within tire fort, two rock-cut cisterns sealed with cement held the water supply (McNicoll et al., 1982, pp. 64-67). In addition to fortified cities and forts, fortified palaces constitute an important strand in the Hellenistic tradition in the Near East. Especially notable are tire Herodian fortified palaces of the late first century BCE, such as Masada, Herodium, and Machaerus. T h e palace on top of Masada, for example, occupied a flat-topped mountain rising 100-400 m above dre surrounding terrain. The curtain wall was of case mate construction witir thirty rectangular towers spaced at irregular intervals of 35-90 m, as dictated by tactical con siderations. T h e four original gates were all of the courtyard type, with inner and outer entrances. Machaerus similarly occupied a mountaintop. Herodium was built on top of a hill about 60 m above the surrounding terrain but formed a double circular enclosure about 62 m in diameter. A corridor about 3.5 m wide ran between the two walls and provided access to four semicircular towers spaced equidistant from one odrer at the cardinal points. Both the towers and outer wall were founded on a series of vaults. [See Masada; Her odium; Machaerus.] R o m a n Period. T h e advent of Roman rule in the first century BCE did not significantly affect city fortifications in the Near East: Rome's many client rulers in the region con tinued Hellenistic traditions. When Rome annexed most of its clients, by the late first century CE, Roman forces were deployed along a military frontier stretching from the Black Sea to the Red Sea. There was a sporadic threat in the nordr from Parthia, and low-intensity raids by Arab nomads re curred in the south, but neither possessed significant siege capability. [See Limes Arabicus.] The Romans introduced their own distinctive military ar-
FORTIFICATIONS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods chitectural tradition into the Near East. Roman armies on campaign usually constructed a temporary camp at the end of each day's march. These so-called "marching camps" were simply constructed of earth and timber. T h e soldiers dug a ditch enclosing a rectangular area sufficient for the entire army. They piled the excavated earth from the ttench into a rampart, often topped by wooden stakes carried by each soldier. The army tiien camped that night within the defended enclosure. These rectangular marching camps typically had rounded corners, giving rise to the term "play ing-card forts" by modern scholars. Such forts are attested in the Near East in the early Roman period. These include bodi temporary siege camps, such as those in the circum
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vallation at Masada, and permanent forts, such as the late first-century CE playing-card fort on the summit of Tell elHajj on the Syrian Euphrates. The fort (about 120 X 160 m) shared key characteristics with contemporary forts in the Western empire: rounded corners, nonprojecting internal towers, and a relatively thin (about 1.2 m wide) curtain wall fronted by a ditch (Bridel, 1972). Aerial photography sug gests that otiter early Roman playing-card forts probably await excavation in the region (Kennedy and Riley, 1990, pp. 9 5 - n o ) . Otherwise, die Romans were content to base a significant portion of their Near Eastern units in towns and cities, which were usually fortified. It is likely that the situation at Dura-
FORTIFICATIONS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods. Figure I . Plan of el-Lejjun (ancient Betthorus). A later Roman legionary fortress east of the Dead Sea. Built around 300 CE for legio IV Mania. (Courtesy S. T. Parker)
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FORTIFICATIONS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods
Europos, garrisoned by the Romans beginning in about 165 CE, was typical. There the garrison simply walled off a quar ter of tire city for its exclusive use. At Bosra, capital of pro vincial Arabia, tire legionary base was attached as an annex to the city's northern curtain wall. [See Bosra.] At Satala in Cappadocia, the late first-century CE legionary fortress com pares closely in size and plan with contemporary examples from the Western empire. [See Cappadocia.] Forts with pro jecting rectangular towers appear no later than the late sec ond century, as revealed by new evidence from Humeima (ancient Avara) in southern Jordan. [See Humeima.] Noticeable changes occur in fortifications in the late third century. These are no doubt connected with the increased threats posed by the Sasanians, with their sophisticated siege capability, and the nomadic Arabs, with their fine light cav alry (but still lacking siege technology). Warfare between Rome and Persia from the third century onward usually cen tered on sieges of well-fortified strongpoints. Many fortified cities fell to determined assaults, such as Dura-Europos to the Sasanians and Palmyra to the Romans. The late thirdcentury defenses of Palmyra in Syria graphically illustrate hurried attempts at refortifrcation by many cities in this pe riod. The so-called Zenobia's wall at Palmyra incorporates much spolia (reused architectural fragments) and several preexisting monuments along its line. The curtain is de fended by projecting towers of varied sizes and plans (Gawlikowski, 1974). [See Palmyra.] In contrast, the fortifications at Gerasa (Jerash) in Transjordan present a fairly regular program. The curtain wall (3.5 m wide) was defended by a series of 101 rectangular towers spaced at intervals of 16-22 m and projecting from the curtain. Although tire fortifica tions at Gerasa were long dated to tire end of the first century CE, recent excavations around the south gate suggest that at least this portion of the fortifications, and perhaps the entire circuit, actually date to the turn of the fourth century (Seigne, 1992). [See Jerash.] Late Roman military architecture reflects a marked change from the previous period. The playing-card plan was completely abandoned in favor of rectangular forts de fended by projecting towers. There was also a marked re duction in areal size, presumably corresponding to the re duced strength of individual garrison units. The tetrarchic legionary fortress at el-Lejjun, for example, was only 20 per cent the size of legionary fortresses of the principate (see figure 1 ) . Similar reductions are observable in Late Roman auxiliary forts, which usually ranged from about 35 to 60 sq nr (0.12-0.36 ha). Although smaller in size, the Late Roman forts were more heavily fortified, with thicker walls, larger and higher projecting towers, and strongly defended gates. One notable change was the shift in tire construction of cur tain walls from solid ashlar masonry to a rubble core sur rounded by two faces of coursed mortared masonry. The towers were intended partly as platforms for defen sive artillery. In smaller forts most interior rooms were built
as casemates against the curtain wall, surrounding a central courtyard. An especially well-preserved example of a Late Roman fort is Qasr Bshir (castra praetorii Mobeni), erected in 293-305 CE of roughly cut, dry-laid masonry (see figure 2). Four large angle towers, each of three stories with a cen tral staircase, dominate tire plan and two smaller interval towers flank the main gate. A sally port in one wall and slit windows in the tower walls illustrate key elements of the defenses. T h e internal rooms against the curtain wall were built in two stories: the lower story apparently served as sta bles, tire upper story as a barrack. Diverse types of towers were employed in the Late Ro man period, at times even in the same structure. U-shaped towers, which may have been imported from the lower Danubian frontier by Roman military architects in the late third century, project from both Near Eastern city walls, such as Singara in northern Mesopotamia, and legionary fortresses (el-Lejjun and Udruh in Transjordan). These two latter for tresses also were protected by large (about 20 m in diameter) semicircular towers at each corner. These corner towers contained several internal rooms on each floor, connected by an interior staircase that wound around a central pier. Rectangular towers, usually projecting from the curtain wall, are attested at numerous sites. Rectangular towers were pre sumably easier to construct than U-shaped or semicircular towers, but the right-angled corners of rectangular towers were more vulnerable to battering rams and other siege en-
FORTIFICATIONS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods.
Figure 2. Plan of Qasr Bshir (castra praetorii Mobeni). A late Roman castellum erected in Moab between 293 and 305 CE, probably de signed for a cavalry unit. (Courtesy S. T. Parker)
FORTIFICATIONS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods gines. Towers also stood as independent structures, often on high elevations with extensive views. Epigraphic evidence reveals that these were constructed both by the Roman sol diers and by civilians, presumably for a multiplicity of pur poses. Byzantine Period. The basic type of fortifications with rectangular towers projecting from the curtain wall contin ued through the Byzantine period in the Near East, as evi denced by such examples as Sergiopolis (Rusafa) in north ern Syria and Zenobia (Halabiyya) on the Syrian Euphrates. [See Rusafa.] T h e preeminent example, of course, dating to tire mid-fifdr century, is tire Theodosian wall of Constanti nople (Foss and Winfield, 1986; pp. 41-77). [See Constan tinople.] Interestingly, however, some Byzantine castella, such as the early fifth-century forts at Qasr el-Ba'iq and the contemporary barracks at U m m el-Jimal, lack projecting towers (Parker, 1986; pp. 24-29). [See U m m el-Jimal] All this suggests considerable variation in the types of fortifi cations in the Byzantine period. An interesting feature of Byzantine fortifications is the re vival of a fortified citadel within the walled enclosure, an element found in Hellenistic and earlier Greek fortifications but generally lacking in the Roman tradition. Zenobia on the Euphrates provides a good example, where the surviving remains can be compared to a detailed description by Procopius (De Aedificiis 2.8-25). T h e walls form a triangle whose base rests on the right bank of tire Euphrates. T h e two remaining sides of the curtain extend up the slope to meet at a citadel on top of a hill that dominates the site. T h e citadel itself was further strengthened by a glacis at the base of its walls. The curtain walls were punctuated by closely spaced rectangular towers that projected quite far beyond the line of tire wall (Lauffray, 1983). Representations of various urban fortifications depicted in Byzantine mosaics, such as tire Madaba map and the city vignettes from the Church of St. Stephen at U m m er-Rasas/ Kastron Mefaa in Transjordan offer important evidence for the superstructure of curtain walls and towers. [See U m m er-Rasas.] T h e mid-sixtir-century Madaba map, for exam ple, depicts Jerusalem as defended by interval towers that rise above the curtain wall; windows are visible in the upper story of some of the towers. Each gate is flanked by twin interval towers. Further details of Jerusalem's defenses are depicted in the mosaic of the Church of St. Stephen. T h a t vignette also shows interval towers of three stories rising above the curtain wall. T h e towers have flat roofs, presum ably to facilitate their use as fighting platforms. Windows are visible in both the towers and curtain wall and the entire circuit of walls and towers is topped by a crenellated parapet. [See Jerusalem.] T h e vignettes of other cities in Palestine, Egypt, and Transjordan depicted in die mosaic, including that of Kastron Mefaa itself, display similar features (Piccirillo, 1993). It is useful to compare these elements witii tire detailed descriptions of fortifications in Procopius. These
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basic principles of Byzantine fortifications continued well into the medieval period, as seen for example in tire Byz antine fortifications of Armenian Cilicia (Edwards, 1987). [See also Alexandrian Empire; Byzantine Empire; and Ro man Empire.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bridel, Philippe. Tell el Hajj in Syrien. Bern, 1972. Edwards, Robert W. The Fortifications of Armenian Cilicia. Dumbarton Oaks Studies, 23. Washington, D.C., 1987. Foss, Clive, and David Winfield. Byzantine Fortifications: An Introduc tion. Praetoria, 1986. Focuses almost exclusively on Anatolia and the Balkans. Gawlikowski, Michal. "Le defences de Palmyre." Syria 51 (1974): 231242. Hestrin, Ruth, "Beth Yerah." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, pp. 255-259. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Karnapp, Walter. Die Stadtmauer von Resafa in Syrien. Berlin, 1976. Kennedy, David L., and Derrick N. Riley. Rome's Desert Frontier from the Air. Austin, 1990. Essential for its rare aerial photographs and accompanying line drawings of many key Roman fortifications. Lander, James. Roman Stone Fortifications: Variation and Change from the First Century A.D. to the Fourth. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 206. Oxford, 1984. Valuable synthesis of Roman fortifications throughout the empire, although the material on the Roman Near East is now somewhat dated in light of recent excavations. Lauffray, Jean. Halabiyya-Zenobia: Place forte du limes oriental el la Haute-Mesopotamie au Vie siicle, vol. 1, Les duches frontaliers de Mesopotamie et les fortifications de Zenobia; vol. 2, L'architecture publique, religieuse, privee et funeraire. Paris, 1983. McNicoll, Anthony W., et al. Pella in Jordan 1: An Interim Report on the Joint University of Sydney and the College of Wooster Excavations at Pella, 1979-1981. Canberra, 1982. Netzer, Ehud. Greater Herodium. Qedem, vol. 13. Jerusalem, 1981. Netzer, Ehud. Masada 3: The Buildings, Stratigraphy, and Architecture. Jerusalem, 1991. Parker, S. Thomas. Romans and Saracens: A History of the Arabian Fron tier. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Series, 6. Winona Lake, Ind., 1986. Contains plans of most Roman and Byz antine fortifications in Jordan. Parker, S. Thomas, ed. The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Interim Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980-1985. 2 vols. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 340. Oxford, 1987. Includes detailed architectural and stratigraphic analysis of several Late Roman fortifications east of the Dead Sea, including el-Lejjun and Qasr Bshir. Parker, S. Thomas. "The Typology of Roman and Byzantine Forts and Fortresses in Jordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 5, edited by Safwan Tell. Amman, forthcoming. Parker, Safwan Thomas. "Roman Legionary Fortresses in the East." In Roman legions and Their Fortresses. London, forthcoming. Piccirillo, Michele. The Mosaics of Jordan. Edited by Patricia M. Bikai and Thomas A. Dailey. American Center of Oriental Research, Pub; lications, 1. Amman, 1993. Lavishly illustrated with detailed photo graphs. Seigne, Jacques. "Jerash romaine etbyzantine: Developpement urbain d'une ville provinciale orientale." In Studies in the History and Ar chaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, pp. 331-341. Amman, 1992. Major reinterpretation of the history of this Decapolis city. Stern, Ephraim. "Dor." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex-
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FORTIFICATIONS: Islamic Period
cavations in the Holy iMnd, vol. i, pp. 357-368. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Winter, Frederick E.. Greek Fortifications. London, 1971. Still the stan dard survey of the topic. S. THOMAS PARKER
Fortifications of the Islamic Period A fortified castle or urban citadel served both for defense and to forestall an attack by its mere presence. Fortresses protected against incursions of a nearby foe; they were even more necessary when the vulnerable area was sparsely pop ulated, as was often the case in Islam's frontier zones. For tifications also served for the surveillance and control of the domestic landscape, particularly in areas where a minority of Muslims ruled over a larger non-Muslim majority. How ever, there was always the danger of a fortress becoming the seat of internal revolt, as in the case of Ibn Hafsun, who held out against the Umayyad emirs of Cordoba at Bobastro in the mountains above Malaga. Situated at important points in the landscape, such as mountaintops, seaports, fords and bridges, fortresses regulate the passage of traffic from one critical point to another and prevent an enemy from gaining access. A fortress is often part of a large network, such as the littoral ribats stretching along the coast of Tunisia in the Aghlabid period. T h e Tunisian ribats, furthermore, were linked by the ability to communicate via signals emitted from their lighthouse towers. Such communication was hardly unusual: Islamic Spain had a similar system of tow
ers, which could relay a smoke signal from Soria to Cordoba in half a day. Islam's earliest fortifications were the late classical, Byz antine, Sasanian, and Soghdian fortresses taken over by Is lamic armies and the newly founded garrison cities (amsar), such as Kufah, Basra, Wasit, Fustat, and Kairouan (Qayrawan), which secured the territory held by Islam and pro vided stations from which to launch campaigns farther afield. There is very little information on the early state of these centers; utilitarian at first, the construction of a con gregational mosque and governor's residence (dar al-imarah) soon followed. In addition to wholly defensive fortresses guarding critical points in the landscape, there was a variety of other fortified buildings where defense was secondary. One was the iso lated agricultural estates, such those built by the Umayyads in Syria and Transjordan in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. In the course of conquering the Levant, Islam had encountered Roman fortifications from the Gulf of 'Aqaba to Damascus and from Damascus to Palmyra. Moreover a great many of these fortresses, such as Qasr al-Hallabat (213-217, 529 CE) in Transjordan, served as temporary res idences to Umayyad princes. Thus, when the Umayyad pa trons began to build large residences in their so-called desert estates—Jabal Says and Khirbet al-Minyeh (705-715), Qasr al-Hayr West (c. 727), Qasr al-Hayr East (729), Khirbat alMafjar (c. 725-750), and Qasr al-Meshatta and Qasr alTuba (c. 744)—they adopted the appearance of the defensive architecture inherited from the Romans, although their mil-
• • l
••••••• 3
W® - - ^'M-^s^^^^ j ft* 1
4«f
. FORTIFICATIONS: Islamic Period. Figure 1. Qasr al-Hayr East. Small enclosure with facade entrance gate with machicolation. (Courtesy D. F. Ruggles)
FORTIFICATIONS: Islamic Period itary service was minimal. Buildings such as the large and small enclosures at Qasr al-Hayr East had tall, windowless stone walls with corner towers from which the surrounding area could be watched. Access was limited to a few closely guarded portals flanked by half-round towers and over looked by a machicolation on three brackets with two open ings. [See Qasr al-Hallabat; Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi; Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi; Mafjar, Khirbat al-; and Qasr alMeshatta.] Machicolation consists of a high balcony projecting on brackets with gaps in tire floor for dropping heavy objects or hot liquids. Although western Europe did not learn the device until tire late twelfth century, K. A. C. Creswell (1952) states that it was known in pre-Islamic Syria. T h e first construction of machicolation in Islamic architecture occurred at Qasr al-Hayr East (see figure 1). An older and more rudimentary machicolation with only one opening may be found at Qasr al-Hayr West; it was part of an exist ing monastery tower incorporated into one side of the Qasr's enclosure walls. A second semifortified type was the caravanserai, which offered overnight lodgings to merchants traveling along key
FORTIFICATIONS: Islamic Period. Figure 2. L'Architecture Musulmane d'occident, Paris, 1954)
335
commercial arteries. Inns, such as the Ribat-i Malik (c. 1068-1080), which proliferated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Iran and Central Asia, were built not to with stand the direct attack of armies but rather to offer safe ha ven against bandits. Thus caravanserai portals are more dec orative than formidable, yet their outer walls are tall, windowless, marked by corner towers, and pierced usually by a single well-guarded entrance. [See Caravanserais.] A third type was tire well-fortified ribat, a frontier outpost inhabited by warrior monks (murabitin and ghazi). T h e Sousse Ribat (771-788, tower 821) consisted of an impen etrable square enclosure with stone walls that now rise 8.5 m (28 ft.) above ground level and are supported by eight towers (see figure 2). T h e walls were topped by a crenelated battlement consisting of raised merlons (the solid parts of the wall between tire openings) alternating with open cre nels; Sousse's crenelations are somewhat unusual in that the merlons were pierced by narrow windows for shooting ar rows. Inside are two stories of small unadorned living cells intended for individuals rather than families. One of the tow ers soars above the rest: 15.38 m (50.45 ft.) high, it offers a magnificent view of the coast and could communicate with
The ribat at Sousse, Tunisia.
(After Georges Marcais,
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FOUNDATION TRENCH
the Monastir Ribat ( 7 9 6 ) to the south as well as other ribats, if pirate ships were sighted off the Tunisian coast. Fortifications exploit natural topographic features such as height, sheerness of rock face, or the isolation of a peninsula as at Mahdiyah ( 9 1 2 ) . Additional measures for security were implemented by architectural design. The Merida Alcazaba ( 8 3 5 ) , for example, had an ample interior for tire storage of food and an internal cistern with which to withstand long sieges. More direct implements and methods of attack such as ladders for scaling the walls, catapults (manjaniq and 'arradd), battering rams (kabsh) for breaching the walls, siege towers on wheels (burj), or digging under the foundations could be withstood by a portcullis, the doubling of thick stone walls, and steeply sloping glacis foundations (zalhqa) that exposed would-be scalers and made undermining im possible. Calatrava la Vieja in Spain and Raqqa in Iraq (both ninth century) had moats. The portcullis, an iron grate that could be raised or lowered along grooves to block an en trance, was an ancient Near Eastern device that was em ployed at Ukhaidir ( 7 6 4 - 7 7 8 ) . Rather than preventing in gress, tire portcullis was used to trap enemy soldiers between the outer and inner walls of the portal where they could be assailed by archers above. Additionally, running all the way around Ukhaidir's outer walls at a height of five m (16.5 ft.) was a gallery with openings in its floors through which ar rows and projectiles could be fired at attackers. Fortification had a psychological as well as military pur pose, giving the impression of invincibility and formidable strength to allies and enemies alike. In situations in which full-scale military attack was not expected, architecture could be embellished with a fortified exterior that was un necessary or even nonfunctional but served a symbolic role. The city of Baghdad (begun 7 6 2 ) was located at tire center of the 'Abbasid realm where attack was unlikely, yet the round city was surrounded by double walls, 3 5 - 4 0 m ( 1 1 4 . 8 - 1 3 1 . 2 ft.) apart. T h e walls were tall (outer 1 4 m [ 4 6 ft], inner 1 7 m [55.8 ft.]) and thick (outer 4 m [13.1 f t ] , inner 5 m [16.4 ft.]), and the inner wall was crenelated. The walls were flanked by 1 1 2 towers and pierced by four gates, one of which was described by a medieval historian as hav ing a bent entrance. According to Creswell ( 1 9 5 2 ) , the bent entrance was known to neither tire Romans (who employed only oblique entrances) nor the early Byzantines. Its origins are to be found in Central Asia, and the appearance of the device in Islamic architecture at this time is the result of the 'Abbasids' orientation toward Iran rather than the Hellenis tic Mediterranean. A bent entrance prevented direct access into an enclosure and instead forced tire intruder through a short maze of two turns, The strategic advantage was that the enemy encountered his opponent at a right angle, with his right side exposed (the left hand holding the shield, the right clenching tire sword). Bent entrances existed in a va riety of configurations and were used both for defense and visual privacy. [See Baghdad.] The improved fortification of Cairo's city walls in 1 0 8 7
by Badr al-Jamali included many defensive features, includ ing slippery stone glacis foundations. Today a portion of tire original walls and three stone gates survive: the Bab al-Nasir, Bab al-Futuh, and Bab Zawayla. T h e Bab al-Nasir's portal had a rampart walk with a crenelated parapet. Its square towers were three storied and solid in their lower two stories. They flanked a vaulted passageway ( 2 0 . 8 9 high X 2 4 . 2 2 m wide X 2 0 . 4 7 m long [68.5 X 7 9 . 5 X 67.2 ft.]). Above was another passage in the floor out of which were five open ings, similar to those at Ukhaidir, for Arrowing projectiles at tire enemy beneath. Halfway up tire first story there were stone columns laid horizontally as a bond between the inner rubble core and the outer ashlar (dressed masonry) facing. More importantly, the columns also supported the walls in tire event that a battering ram was applied to the base, a tunnel was dug under tire walls and set on fire, or the stones were pried loose by miners. Such elaborate and expensive precautions were deemed strategically necessary at the time they were built. Almost impossible to destroy by fire, un dermining, and battering, Cairo's monumental gates have withstood the ravages of time equally well. [See Cairo.] m
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bosworth, Edmund. "Armies of the Prophet: Strategy, Tactics, and Weapons in Islamic Warfare." In The World of Islam, edited by Ber nard Lewis, pp. 201-212. London, 1976. More useful on the subject of objects and practice than architecture. Creswell, K. A. C. "Fortification in Islam before A.D. 1250." Proceed ings of the British Academy 38 (1952): 89-125. Excellent though con servative discussion of Islamic fortification techniques and their or igins, focusing on center lands and largely ignoring the Maghrib and Central Asia. Creswell, K. A. C. Early Muslim Architecture. 2 vols. 2d ed. Oxford, 1969. Archaeologically reliable survey of Islamic architecture from the beginning through the ninth century CE. The reader may consult an abridged version, which has the advantage of including recent discoveries and theories: A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (Aldershot, 1989). Grabar, Oleg. "Palaces, Citadels, and Fortifications." In Architecture of the Islamic World, edited by George Michell, pp. 65-79. London, 1978. Nicely complements Creswell's 1952 article because it is the matic rather than chronological, stresses the history of conquest rather than architectural typology, and examines the means as well as psychology of fortification, Hogg, Ian. The History of Fortification, New York, 1981. Discusses for tifications in all places and periods, and thus skims lightly over Islam, but includes a description of medieval techniques of attack, siege, and defense. Zozaya, Juan. "The Fortifications of al-Andalus." In Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, edited by Jerrilynn D. Dodds, pp. 62-73. New York, 1992. Short but useful discussion of fortification systems in Spain. D . FAIRCHILD RUGGLES
FOUNDATION TRENCH. In order to support the base of a wall or other construction element, ancient builders dug foundation trenches. A trench for a wall generally ran
FOUR-ROOM HOUSE for the length of the wall. T h e depth and width of the trench depended on both the stability of the matrix on which the wall was founded and the weight of the structure being sup ported. If bedrock, an earlier wall, or firm soil formed a sta ble foundation for supporting a wall, the foundation trench did not need to be wider tiran the wall laid in it. Builders frequendy bedded walls in an unstable tell matrix, which necessitated a wider trench to spread the weight of tire wall and its foundation over a greater surface and thus prevent the wall from sinking. Occasionally, sand was spread in the bottom of the trench to facilitate drainage away from the base of the wall. Two methods were commonly employed in constructing tire foundation. In the first, a foundation trench with vertical sides was prepared. Then stones were laid against dre sides and the core was filled with stones and perhaps mortar. In many cases, the stones of the superstructure or wall formed a smoother vertical edge than those of the foundation trench, so even at sites where floor surfaces have not been pre served, it is possible to tell, when excavating, when the bot tom of the foundation trench is reached. In the second type, the foundation trench was cut wider than the foundation wall, usually in a V-shaped configuration, to minimize soil cave-ins and to simplify digging. After the wall was con structed in the center of the trench, the space between it and the trench's sloping sides was filled with small stones and earth. This second type is more easily detected in excava tion. On sites that are tells—that is, at sites where there is a buildup of material from earlier occupation and construc tion—builders often simplified their work by reusing stones from earlier walls. Thus, all that may remain of a wall and its foundation is a "robber's trench," an empty trench that follows the course of the original foundation trench. [See also Stratigraphy.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Kempinski, Aharon, and Ronny Reich, eds. Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Concise and well-illustrated introduction construction methods, followed by essays
The Architecture of Ancient Periods. Jerusalem, 1992. to building materials and on each period.
ELIZABETH M . BLOCH-SMITH
F O U R - R O O M HOUSE. Together with the threeroomed variation, the four-room house was the dominant house form in ancient Israel (see figures ia and lb respec tively). A shed was sometimes added along one side (see figure ic). An uncommon two-roomed variant lacked the characteristic transverse rear room. For functional and structural reasons the form was highly standardized. As a result, unusual or extensively elaborated plans should be closely examined to ensure that drey do not represent ar chitectural reconstructions of more than one building or stratigraphic phase. This distinctive house is found through
337
out Israel and Judah, from the earliest hill settlements (Marquet-Krause, 1949; Callaway, 1983; Stager, 1985) to the lat est Iron II towns. [See Judah.] While not the only house form seen in Israelite cities, it is found nearly universally in lightly fortified desert farms (Cohen, 1979), farming hamlets and villages, towns, and military outposts. Door placement and other details apart, the form was highly stylized almost from tire start (e.g., at Khirbet Radannah and Ai), although it could be fitted into an existing space by tapering its overall shape (or by repositioning the rear room or even eliminating it) if alternative storage space were available nearby. [See Radannah; Ai.] Ethnographic parallels and architectural analysis support the conclusion that this house was highly adapted to normative Israelite family structure, modes of production (mixed peasant dryfarming and/or horticulture and animal husbandry: Hop kins, 1985) and socioeconomic organization (Holladay, 995> PP- 3 9 3 9 3 ) ' T h e sporadic earlier appearance of sim ilar houses in Late Bronze Age Syria is of interest and may have something to say about the emergence of early Israel. Palestinian House Forms and Ethnicity. In Palestine, with the exception of a few examples at tenth-century BCE Philistine sites (e.g., see Maisler [Mazar], 1951), all occur rences of the four-room house known to date seem to be limited to Israelite or Judean sites. Typical Philistine houses were quite different (Dothan, 1971; Gitin, 1989). [See Phil istines.] The form also appears in Transjordan, with other styles of pillared house construction, but not enough is known of its dating or archaeological contexts there to allow for a clear interpretation. In general, however, even when the form appears at a non-Israelite site, it does so during such periods of overwhelming Israelite hegemony as the United Monarchy. In those cases, the buildings may well have housed ethnic Israelites. Though data are sparse, the form does not seem to have survived the Babylonian Exile. For all these reasons, it seems legitimate to call this the Is raelite house. Architectural Reconstruction and Functional Inter pretation. Extremely few four-room houses are preserved to the second story, most being known only from their stone foundations and floor surfaces. Thus, details of the upper story or stories, roof, and so forth must either be extrapo lated from a few known details or inferred from construc tional features (see below). Similarly, functional interpre tations must proceed on tire basis of inference from architectural details in the light of ancient and etirnographic parallels, along witir a smattering of meaningful artifact dis tributions. As a negative case in point, rows of storejars in the stabling areas of houses destroyed by enemy action may reasonably be construed as exceptional, reflecting prepara tions for siege and not normal storage patterns (cf. Holladay, 1986, p. 160). As is often tire case in archaeology, even the name four-room house is misleading, describing only the main structural divisions of the ground floor—one or two side aisles, a misnamed "courtyard," and a rear room in the l
I_
338
FOUR-ROOM HOUSE
A
C
4
D
FOUR-ROOM HOUSE: Figure I. House plans, (a) Four typical four-room houses, and one slightly atypical three-room house, from Tell el-Far'ah (North) (Chambon, 1984); (b) three typical and one "squeezed in" three-room house from Tell en-Nasbeh (McCown, 1947, survey map); (c) four-room house with added side-hall or shed from Shechem (Wright, 1965, fig. 76); (d) a proposed secondfloor plan of the house figured in (c) above. (Courtesy J. S. Holladay)
usual terminology—and ignoring both the characteristic sec ond story (the structural reason for dre massively pillared construction) and the frequent divisions in the side and back "rooms." In fact, apart from tireir very unitary character (each household clearly is an independent social unit), the pillars and cobbled side aisles are the chief distinguishing characteristics of these houses. The pillars are of a variety of locally available materials—from well-shaped caprock (Ar., nan) monoliths to stacked, roughly dressed stone drums or slabs to heavy wooden or mud-brick pillars. Oc casionally, the beams borne by the pillars were also stone monoliths or were complexly built up of cantilevered stone slabs. Only high loading factors would ensure the integrity of the stacked stone-boulder or stone-slab construction; the massiveness of all tire other forms similarly attests to the tremendous load-carrying capacity of tire line or lines of pillars. Floor surfaces range from hardened surfaces composed of cobbles or flagstones bedded in ashy soil for the pillared side aisle/s to relatively clean packed earth, often multilaminated, with a few flat-lying sherds and occasional slivers of bone, for the rear room, small side rooms, and the center room or courtyard. Rarely, tire center room was white washed or surfaced with a thin white marly "plaster." Some small side rooms lack clear surfaces and may be interpreted as mirey, uncleaned stalls for the penned-up "fatted c a l f (iSm. 28:24; Am. 6:4; see below). Ethnographically, the first five floor surfaces noted here are associated with such dif ferent functions such as stabling (Holladay, 1 9 8 6 ) , store
rooms and kitchens (the latter having an ashy floor), living rooms, and nonhardened (lacking cobbles or flagstones) do mestic stables (Kramer, 1 9 7 9 , pp. 1 4 7 - 1 4 9 ; Watson, 1 9 7 9 , p. 1 2 1 ) . That tire so-called center room or "courtyard" is an interior surface is easily tested by an objective (e.g., granulometric) comparison of its surfaces with other surfaces known to be exterior (e.g., streets and other open areas: Kra mer,
1 9 7 9 , pp. 1 4 8 - 1 4 9 ; Watson, 1 9 7 9 , pp. 1 5 7 - 1 5 9 , pis.
5.3—5), as well as by the fact that, although the "courtyard" surfaces are often lower tiran exterior street levels, with high thresholds to keep water out, no provision was made for the internal drainage required if they were open to the sky. Stairways are commonly noted and can be reconstructed in other instances. From everything presently known, the first story was low, averaging under 2 m, with considerably less clearance under the beams. It was, thus, unsuited to human habitation. Interior F e a t u r e s . Most houses had stub walls between the supporting pillars with, where preserved, mud-andstone mangers on top. T h e mangers are similar to those found in stables at Hazor and Beersheba and would have been used for donkeys and, probably, cattle (the standings are too short for horses). [See Hazor, Beersheba, Stables; Cattle and Oxen.] Semicircular ground-level mangers ("bins") are common and may have been used for sheep and goats, but possibly also for cattle. [See Sheep and Goats.] Fire pits or hearths in the courtyard are character istic at Radannah and at Tel Masos, but in general they are rarely found. [See Masos, Tel.] Other types of hearths are
FOUR-ROOM HOUSE found occasionally, mostiy in the central space, or "court yard" (e.g., the "pi"-shaped hearths in the Drainpipe House at Ta'anach and in house 1727 at Shechem, and in the hearths contained in the overturned upper portions of storejars sunk into tire ground in buildings at Shechem, Hazor, and Mesad Hashavyahu). A large industrial hearth, which replaces an earlier wine press at Shechem in house 1727 seems to be unique. [See Ta'anach; Shechem; Mesad Hashavyahu.] Hearths are by no means commonly found. However, it is clear that every household must not only have had cooldng facilities (cooking pots are one of the most common vessel types), but, in most parts of the land, also hearths for heat in winter. (Ovens served for bread making, not cooldng.) Ethnographically, hearths are one of the chief markers of living rooms (Watson, 1979, p. 122, fig. 5.2; Kramer, 1979, pp. 147-148). These are rooms within which the entire nu clear family cooks, entertains, eats, sleeps, and performs daily indoor activities. Families having two living rooms use the second one for entertaining or rent it. At Patty Jo Wat son's "Hasanabad" and "Ain Ali" bread ovens were not used: one hearth served for winter warmth, cooldng, and— through dre use of the saj, tire modern descendent of the baldng tray—baldng (Watson, 1979, pp. 205, 283). During the summer, cooldng fires were relocated into exterior court yard spaces. Carol Kramer (1979, pp. 147-148, emphasis added) presents illuminating data: "Hearths are peculiar to living rooms. . . . In contrast to ovens, such hearths, found throughout the Zagros. . . and elsewhere in Southwest Asia, are often situated in second-story rooms, and as such have been found at an archaeological site near Shahabad." Ovens, on the other hand, are generally placed out of the wind at points of easy access from outside (e.g., Tell el-Far'ah [North]; Chambon, 1984); tirey are not normally found in or adjacent to every house. This implies communal use, as in presentday traditional villages. [See Far'ah, Tell el- (North).] Silos or grain pits have been found in tire rear room and elsewhere (Watson, 1979, pp. 125-126, fig. 5.4). Multiple exterior grain pits were common before and during the United Monarchy but are not characteristic of later periods (Holladay, 1995, p p . 377-379, table 3). Vermin-resistant above-grade grain and flour bins or chests constructed of mud and chaff are common in etirnographically witnessed villages in Iran (Kramer, 1979, pp. 144, 147; Watson, 1979, pp. 67, 162, figs. 5.42-43), suggesting that they might have been used for domestic storage in Israel; none have yet been identified, however. Where cisterns were used, they would have been located either beneath the house or outside. [See Cisterns.] In some cases, houses may have been built over preexisting cisterns. Functional Aspects of t h e G r o u n d - F l o o r P l a n . T h e ground floor in dre four-room house falls entirely within dre family's economic domain. Stalls for donkeys and large cattie are readily identified by tiieir similarity to standings in chariotry stables (cobbled or flagstoned surfaces, bench-
339
style mangers, pillared construction). Floor-level mangers may attest to the feeding of sheep and goats. By analogy with modern European modes of veal production, small rooms with blocked doorways and miry surfaces may have housed the "fatted calf." Small storerooms with packedearth or mud-plaster surfaces probably served for special ized storage, while the back room seems to have been the main locus for heavy storage: ethnographically, the items stored in such rooms change with die season. In ancient Israel tirey would have included young animals, bulk quan tities of wine and oil, fodder, grains and legumes, reserved seed grain, straw, dung, twigs and dung cakes (the primary fuel source), pottery vessels not in use, timbers, raw mate rials for craft production, and a plow, yoke, and other farm implements (DeBoer andLathrup, 1979,pp. u o - i 2 i ; H a l l , McBride, and Riddell, 1973; Jacobs, 1979, p. 179; Kramer, I979> PP- 144= 47= 154; Watson, 1 9 7 9 , pp. 160, 294-296). Light items—dried fruits and dairy products, spices, textiles, and other domestic goods—would have been stored on tire second floor (Kramer, 1982, p. 1 0 5 ) . T h e large central space seems to have functioned by day as a work area and is where large limestone mortars (used with long wooden pounders for pearling barley?) were typically located. At night and during winter storms tiris area would have served as a secure folding area for die family's small sheep and goat herd (Hopkins, 1985, pp. 245-250). 1
It has often been suggested that the rear room served as the family's living room, and that the Israelite house evolved from this original nucleus, perhaps originally imitating a no mad's tent (Fritz and Kempinski, 1983, pp. 31-34; Herzog, 1984, pp. 75-77). However, there is absolutely no evidence for this type's existence in the second millennium BCE. Against this, the mean width of ninety-five identifiable rear rooms in Frank Braemer's catalog (1982, pp. 160-269) is 1.98 m, while tire mean widths of ethnographically described living rooms range from 2.78 m at "Hasanabad" to 2.9 m at Asvan to 3.02 m at "Aliabad" (Watson, 1979; Hall, M c Bride, and Riddell, 1973; Kramer, 1982)—their widdr being determined by the length of the available roofing timbers. In short, a family of four to five persons cannot live, work, cook, eat, entertain, and sleep in a 2-meter-wide hallway with 1.52 m of head room. Second Story. A second story must be inferred for the four-room house on the basis of its constructional charac teristics: its massive load-bearing pillars in a roofed-over courtyard and lack of provision on the ground floor for living quarters or, in most cases, for cooldng or heating facilities. Given the lack of these facilities on die ground floor, the second floor should constitute the family's "living domain": the living rooms should have widtirs and overall floor areas similar to those in the etirnographic literature—or an average living room size of between 15 and 20 sq m (Kramer, 1979; Watson, 1979), although larger and smaller ones do occur. Living rooms should have other dimensions (e.g., head room), facilities (e.g., hearths), and functionality not avail-
340
FOUR-ROOM HOUSE
able on the ground floor (cf. Hopkins, 1985, pp. 144-148). An entry hall at the head of the stairs, used to store outer clothes and men's portable tools, is suggested by the eth nographic data. Kitchen facilities and one or two light stor age rooms would round out tire second floor plan (see fig ures 2b, 3). The second story's walls may have been thinner because of their reduced load-carrying requirement. This would have increased its area slightly. A third-floor 'aliyyct, "upper room, or roof chamber," preferably accessed by an external staircase, might also be present, whether for rent or use as a guest room (see figure 3). Balustraded windows, unsuitable for ground-floor use, would be perfectly in place in the higher stories, providing good light and ventilation. Domestic versions would have been more rustic than the palatial one featured in the "woman at the window" ivories from Nimrud. [See Nimrud.] Roofs were flat, of packed mud and chaff ("straw"), with new layers applied annually. Following a rainstorm they were rolled with limestone rollers or carefully compacted by foot (Wright, 1965, p, 161, fig. 80; Watson, 1979, pp. 119120). Sprouted grain on the rooftops was a proverbial sign of spring (Ps. 129:6; Is. 37:27). Parapets, stipulated by Deuteronomic legislation (Dt. 22:8), were necessary to enable the use of the roof as an outdoor workspace (i.e., it would have functioned analogously to enclosed courtyard space) and as a safe place for women and their small children to socialize. With no roof overhang, rainwater runoff would
have eroded the mud-brick (adobe) fabric of the house. Thus, jutting wooden (or ceramic) "gargoyles" (Watson, !979J P- 159) or internal drainpipes leading to an in-house cistern (Lapp, 1967, pp. 2-39, fig. 14), would have been needed to drain the roof. The gargoyles' individual splash areas or runoff channels (Watson, 1979, p. 159) would have been visible on exterior, street, or lane surfaces. Ethno graphic parallels show that brush shelters (biblical sukkot, Neh. 8:16) are set up to soften tire summer sun and that during the hottest months, families often sleep on the roof. Ethnographically, this is tire woman's domain—house tops being tire common pathways between closely packed neigh boring households in some modern walled villages (Jacobs, 1979, p. 179). There, and by parallel in ancient Near Eastern cities and villages, cultic ceremonies are conducted on roof tops (Jer. 19:13; Zep. 1:5), as were corporate mourning and rejoicing (Is. 15:3, 22:1), sleeping (/ Sm. 9:25), bathing (2 Sm. 11:2), washing, and clothes drying, basket making, bak ing, and drying food and fodder for storage, dung and brush for fuel, and flax and other agricultural products for pro cessing (Jos. 2:6). They probably were also used for storing beams and large household and farming implements during the rainless months Jacobs, 1979; Kramer, 1982, p. 111; cf. Hall, McBride, and Riddell, 1973, p. 248). E c o n o m i c Significance. Except for the large numbers of grain silos (averaging a storage capacity of about a ton each) occasionally found near certain houses prior to and
FOUR-ROOM HOUSE: Figure 2. Selected ethnographically documented peasant housing, (a) One-story house from Hasanabad, Iran (Watson, 1979); (b) two-story house from Aliabad, Iran (Kramer, 1982, fig. 4.7); (c) two-story house from Asvan, Turkey (Hall et al., 1973, fig. 4). (Courtesy J. S. Holladay)
FOUR-RO OM HOUSE
3 41
5m FOUR-ROOM HOUSE: Figure 3 . Reconstruction of the house in figure i: c-d, featuring 'dliyya, or upper room. (Drawing by Megan Williams; courtesy J. S. Holladay)
during the Solomonic era (Greenberg, 1987; Finkelstein, 1986, pp. 1-20, fig. 4), but not met with later, large-scale facilities for accumulated agricultural surpluses are not known from the period of the Israelite monarchy. This stands in marked contrast to die military and economic pol icies of the Persian period, as witnessed by the large number of great store pits at such sites as Tell el-Hesi (Bennet and Blakely, 1989, p. 67) and Beersheba (Naveh, 1973). [See Hesi, Tell el-.] Nor are redistributive mechanisms, such as the large-scale bakeries found in conjunction with granaries in Sake through Ptolemaic Egypt (at Tell el-Maskhuta) known from either Israel or Judah. Even tire three hundredodd jars filled with oil, wine, and grain in tire Phoenician "fort" excavated by Zvi Gal (1992) at Horvat Rosh Zayit fall into different focus when it is realized tiiat it would have taken at least ninety-one jars to store the subsistence and seed-grain requirements of one typical Israelite household and its flocks and herd, to say nothing of their olive oil and wine. In terms of scale, tire storage capacity of the back rooms of only thirty-one typical Israelite houses more than equaled die capacity of silo 1414 at Megiddo, the largest storage facility presently known for either Israel or Judah (Holladay, 1995, p. 393). Except for chariotry, frontier forts such as Tell Arad, pal aces, and—perhaps—the cultus, neither ancient Israel nor Judah seems to have operated on a redistributive basis: there could have been no widespread issuing of grain and other rations to large numbers of the civilian population. Simply put, Israelite peasant farmers operated with a house (and agricultural regime) specifically designed to accumulate sur pluses. T h e specific mechanisms by which those surpluses entered either domestic or international commerce are mat ters for future research, although it should be noted that a
a hypothetical
whole series of small ports, conveniently spaced about a half-day's journey apart, existed along the Palestinian coast during the Iron II period, providing a cost-effective mech anism for the long-range movement of such low-value, highbulk goods. [See also Building Materials and Techniques, article on Materials and Techniques of the Bronze and Iron Ages; Ethnoarchaeology; and House, article on Syro-Palestinian Houses.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan, ed. Beer-sheba I: Excavations al Tel Beer-sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons. Tel Aviv, 1973. Bennett, W.J.,.Jr., and Jeffrey A. Blakely. Tell el-Hesi: The Persian Period (Stratum V). The Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi. Vol. 3. Winona Lake, Ind., 1989. Braemer, Frank. L'architecture domestique du Levant a I'Age du Per. Paris, 1982. Callaway, Joseph A. "A Visit with Ahilud." Biblical Archaeology Review 9 (1983): 42-53Chambon, Alain. Tell el-Farah 1: L'age du Fer. Paris, 1984. Cohen, Rudolph. "The Iron Age Fortresses in the Central Negev." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 236 (1979): 61-78. DeBoer, Warren R„ and Donald W. Latiirup. "The Making and Breaking of Shipibo-Conibo Ceramics." In Ethnoarchaeology: Impli cations of Ethnography for Archaeology, edited by Carol Kramer, pp. 102-138. New York, 1979 Dothan, Moshe. Ashdod II—III: The Second and Third Seasons of Exca vations 1963, 1965: Text and Plates. 'Atiqot, English series, 9-10. Je rusalem, 1971, Finkelstein, Israel. 'Izbet Sartah; An Early Iron Age Site near Rosh Haayin, Israel. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 299. Oxford, 1986. Fritz, Volkmar, and Aharon Kempinski. Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf der Hirbet el-MsaS (Tel Masoi) 1972-197$. Weisbaden, 1983.
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Gal, Zvi. "Hurbat Rosh Zayit and the Early Phoenician Pottery." Le vant 24 (1992): 173-186. Gitin, Seymour. "Tel Miqnc-Ekron: A Type-Site for the Inner Coastal Plain in tire Iron Age It Period." In Recent Excavations in Israel: Stud ies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited by Seymour Gitin and William G. Dever, pp. 23-58. Annual of die American Schools of Oriental Re search, 49. Winona Lake, Ind., 1989. Greenberg, Raphael. "New Light on the Early Iron Age at Tell Beit Mirsim." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 265 (1987): 55-80. Hall, G„ S. McBride, and A. Riddell. "Architectural Analysis." In Asvan 1968-1072: An Interim Report, edited by David French et al., pp. 245-269. Anatolian Studies (1973): 71-309. Hamlin, Carol Kramer. "Sen Gabi, 1973" Archaeology 27 (1974): 274277. Herzog, Ze'ev. Beer-sheba II: The Early Iron Age Settlements. Tel Aviv, 1984. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Administrative Structures in the Iron Age." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 223-230. Jeru salem, 1992. Holladay, John S., Jr. "The Stables of Ancient Israel: Functional De terminants of Stable Construction and the Interpretation of Pillared Building Remains of the Palestinian Iron Age." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies, Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T. Geraty and Larry G. Herr, pp. 103-165. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. Holladay, John S., Jr. "The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic Centralization in die Iron IIA-B (ca. 1000-750 BCE)." In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy lxrnd, edited by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 368-398. London, 1995. Hopkins, David C. The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age. Sheffield, 1985. Jacobs, Linda K. "Tell-i Nun: Archaeological Implications of a Village in Transition." In Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for Archaeology, edited by Carol Kramer, pp. 175-191. New York, 1979. Kempinski, Aharon, and Ronny Reich, eds. The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. Jerusalem, 1992. Kramer, Carol. "An Archaeological View of a Contemporary Kurdish Village: Domestic Architecrure, Household Size, and Wealth." In Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for Archeology, edited by Carol Kramer, pp. 139-163. New York, 1979. Kramer, Carol. Village Ethnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in Archaeological Perspective. New York 1982. Lapp, Paul W. "The 1966 Excavations at Tell Ta'annek." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 185 (1967): 2-39. Maisler (Mazar), Benjamin. "The Excavations at Tell Qasile, Prelim inary Report." Israel Exploration Journal 1 (1951): 61-76, 125-140, 194-218. Marquet-Krause, Judith. Les fouilles de 'Ay (ct-Tell), 1933-1933: Entreprises par le Baron Edmond de Rothschild . .. La risurrection d'une grande cite biblique. Bibliotheque archeologique et historique, 45. Paris, 1949. McCown, Chester C. Tell en-Nasbeh I. Berkeley, 1947. Naveh, Joseph. "The Aramaic Ostraca." In Beer-sheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-sheba, 1969-1971 Season, edited by Yohanan Aharoni, pp. 79-82. Tel Aviv, 1973. Stager, Lawrence E. "The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Is rael." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 260 (1985): 1-35. Watson, Patty Jo. Archaeological Ethnography in Western Iran. Tucson, 1979. Wright, G. Ernest. Shechem: The Biography of a Biblical City. New York, 1965. JOHN S. HOLLADAY, JR.
FRANCISCAN CUSTODY OF T H E HOLY LAND. T h e order of the Franciscan Friars, founded by Francis of Assisi (Italy), became a presence in the Near East in I22ijthe same year it was officially approved by the Pope. T h e founder himself visited the region in order to preach the Gospel to the Muslims, whom he saw as brothers. T h e mission resulted in a meeting with the sultan of Egypt. T h e Franciscan Province of the East extended to Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, and tire Holy Land (ancient Palestine). Before the Muslims took Akko in 1291, there were Franciscan friaries there and in Sidon, Antioch, Tripoli, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. At the end of tire Latin Kingdom, the Franciscans took refuge on Cyprus, where they began planning their return to Jerusalem, given the goodwill between Christian govern ments and the Mamluk sultans in Egypt. In about 1333, a friar, Ruggero Garini, succeeded in buying the Cenacle on Mount Zion and some nearby land on which to build a mon astery for the friars, using funds provided by the king and queen of Naples. In 1342, Pope Clement IV, in two papal bulls (Gratias Agimus and Nuper Carissimae) approved and created tire new entity, which became known as the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land (Custodia Terrae Sanctae). The friars came from the order's provinces and were placed under the jurisdiction of the father-guardian (superior) of the monastery on Mt. Zion. They were in stated in the Cenacle and in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and in the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Their principal activity was to ensure liturgical life in those Christian sanctuaries, to give spiritual assistance to pilgrims and merchants coming from the West, and to have a direct and authorized relationship with the Christian oriental communities. In 1 s s i the Turkish Authority expelled tire friars from the Cenacle and the adjoining monastery. However, they were granted permission to purchase a Georgian monastery for nuns in the city's northwest quarter, which became the new center of the Custody in Jerusalem, and they developed tire Latin Convent of St. Savior (Ar., Dayr al-Latin). In 1620 the Franciscans received Mt. Tabor in Galilee and the ven erated Grotto of the Annunciation in Nazareth from Fakhr ed-Din, the Druze amir of Sidon. In the following year they were permitted to rebuild part of the church of St. John the Baptist at 'Ein-Kerem near Jerusalem, and open a new fri ary. In the nineteenth century, new churches and monas teries were built at other, already venerated sites, above the ruins of older churches: the Chapel of the Flagellation along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem (1838); a chapel at Emmaus/ Qubeibeh (1872); tire church at Cana (Ar., Kafir Kana; 1880); and a chapel each in the village of Nairn (1885), at Bethpage (1883), and at Dominus Flevit (1891)—the latter two on the Mt. of Olives. New basilicas were built at Emmaus/Qubeibeh (1901); at Nazareth (the so-called Church of Nutrition; 1911-1914); at Gethsemane (Basilica of the Agony; 1919-1924); and on Mt. Tabor (Basilica of the Transfiguration; 1921-1924). New chapels followed:
FRANCISCAN CUSTODY OF T H E HOLY LAND the Chapel of the Good Shepherd in Jericho (1924); the chapel on the west bank of the Jordan River (1934); and dre Chapel of Primacy at Tabgha, on the shore of die Sea of Galilee. Church buildings and additions included the Church of the Visitation at 'Ein-Kerem (1938-1940); a church in Bethany (1952-1954); a chapel at Shepherds' Field, outside the village of Beit Sahur/Bethlehem; and a new chapel at Dominus Flevit (1955). T h e new great Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, begun in 1955, was conse crated in 1969, and the Memorial of St. Peter at Capernaum was completed in 1990. T h e Franciscan presence in the Floly Land has provided continuity in the recording of local tradition since the Cru sader period. Since 1342 they have functioned as custodians of the Christian shrines on behalf of die Catholic church, as guides for Christian pilgrims to the Floly Land, and as autirors of many publications intended to increase the knowl edge of the Holy Land among the Christians of Europe. The restoration and rebuilding during the nineteenth cen tury of sanctuaries owned by dre Custody of tire Holy Land resulted in the archaeological exploration of those sites. Such projects are entrusted to tire archaeologists of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (SBF), an institute founded in 1923 to continue the work done by the Franciscan fathers in previous centuries. As a scientific institution, the SBF is closely related to the Franciscan presence in the Holy Land. A Roman Catholic faculty teaches biblical and archaeolog ical studies, sponsored by the Franciscan Custody of Terra Sancta. T h e SBF is located in die Old City of Jerusalem, in tire Monastery of the Flagellation, at the Second Station of the cross, on the Via Dolorosa. As a research center, the SBF fosters work on New Testament sites, as well as the study of the early Christian church in the Holy Land, by means of literary sources and excavations. It publishes re ports on excavations annually in the review Liber Annum, begun in 1950, and in the series Collectio Maior and Collectio Minor. Exegetical studies are published in the series Analecia, and the archaeological collections of the SBF are illus trated in the series Museum. As a learning center, the SBF is presently authorized to confer pontifical academic degrees of baccalaureate, licentiate, and doctorate in biblical theol ogy. T h e SBF opened an archaeological museum in 1902 in tire Monastery of St. Savior, whose collection was trans ferred to the Monastery of the Flagellation in 1931. Findings from SBF excavations, along with liturgical Latin codices from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a treasure of liturgical medieval objects from the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and eighteenth-century pots from tire phar macy in the Monastery of St. Savior, are displayed tirere. The collection also includes a numismatic section special izing in the city coins of Palestine, the Decapolis, and the Provincia Arabia. SBF-sponsored archaeological fieldwork includes the fol lowing sites. T h e excavations in Nazareth were begun by
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Prosper Viaud at the beginning of the twentieth century and were resumed by Bellarmino Bagatti in 1954. Along witir the discovery of die ancient village, he found the first signs of a Christian presence there in graffiti scratched on plaster found under the Crusader and Byzantine Basilica of the An nunciation. [See Nazareth; and the biography of Bagatti] At Capernaum, the excavations in the synagogue initiated by Gaudenzio Orfali in 1921 were resumed in 1968 by Virgilio Corbo and Stanislao Loffreda and are still underway. The excavators have discovered tire insula sacra (the area of sa cred buildings) among the ruins of the houses in the ancient village, with the domus ecclesia (house-church) of St. Peter under the Byzantine octagonal basilica. They have also un earthed structures under the synagogue that date to the Late Roman period. [See Capernaum.] T h e excavation of the pal ace at Herodium, near Bethlehem, was carried out by Corbo, between 1962 and 1967. He also directed the exca vations of the Herodian fortress of Machaerus in Jordan, in which, according to Josephus Flavius, John the Baptist was jailed and murdered. [See Machaerus.] One of dre institute's main excavation and restoration projects is on Mt. Nebo in Jordan. T h e project was begun in 1933, under the direction of Sylvester Sailer. T h e work was focused mainly on the Memorial Church of Moses Prophet and M a n of God. This memorial was built by Christians in the region in the fourth century, on the western peak of Siyagha. A monastery de veloped around it in the Byzantine period. Excavations were expanded to the nearby ruins of Khirbet el-Mukhayyat on the southern peak of Mt. Nebo, where an Iron Age fortress and Roman-Byzantine village identified with Nebo are lo cated. [See Nebo, Mount.] Since 1984, the SBF has been excavating two Byzantine churches in the valley of 'Ain Musa and a monastery in tire valley of 'Ayn al-Kanisah, simultaneously cooperating witir the Jordanian Department of Antiquities in excavating several monuments in the city of Madaba, such as die Church of the Virgin, the Hippolythus Hall, the Cathedral, and the Burnt Palace. [See Ma daba.] In summer 1986, work started at U m m er-Rasas, in the steppe 30 km (19 mi.) southeast of Madaba, where the an cient name of the ruins, Kastron Mefaa, was rediscovered in the inscriptions in the rich mosaic floor of the church of St. Stephen, built in tire Umayyad period. [See Umm erRasas.] Moreover, a city plan of Kastron Mefaa was found along with the inscriptions. In summer 1989, a second plan of the city of Kastron Mefaa, depicted in the mosaic floor of the Church of the Lions, was unearthed. It is now possible to accept the identification of U m m er-Rasas/Kastron Me faa with biblical Mepha'at proposed by Eusebius (Onomasticon 128.21; Jos. 13:21, 21:27; J - 48:21). er
BIBLIOGRAPHY Amico, Bernardino. Trattato delle piante et imagini de i sacri edificii di Terra Santa/Plans of the Sacred Edifices of the Holy Land (1620). Studium Biblicum Francescanum, Publications, no. 10, Jerusalem, 1953.
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Bagatti, Bellarmino. Museo della Flagellazione in Gerusalemme. Jeru salem, 1939. Bagatti, Bellarmino, ed. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum nel 50° della fondazione, 1923-1073. Jerusalem, 1973. Goluhovich, Girolamo. Biblioteca bio-bibliografica della Terra Santa e dell'Oriente Francescano. Vols. 1—14. Florence, 1906-1933. Niccolo da Poggibonsi. A Voyage beyond the Seas, 1346-1350. Trans lation of // libro d'oltramare by T. Bellorini and E. Hoade. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Publications, no. 2. Jerusalem, 1945. Piccirillo, Michele, ed. La custodia di Terra Santa e TEuropa. Rome, 1983. Piccirillo, Michele. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Afasezfm. Jerusalem, 1983. Quaresmo, Francesco. Histoiica theologica et moralis Terrae Sanctae (The Illustration of the Holy Land). 2 vols. Antwerp, 1639. Rossi, Berardo. The Custody of the Holy Ijand. Jerusalem, 1981. Suriano, Francesco. // trattato di Terra Santa e dell'Oriente (Treatise on the Holy Land; 1485). Milan, 1900. MICHELE PICCIRILLO
FRANKFORT,
HENRI ( 1 8 9 7 - 1 9 5 2 ) , eminent scholar of the ancient Near East. Born in the Netherlands, Frankfort began his studies in history at the University of Amsterdam but subsequendy transferred to London to work with Flinders Petrie at University College. He obtained his M.A. there in 1 9 2 4 and his Ph.D. at the University of Leiden in 1 9 2 7 . From 1925 to 1929 Frankfort served as director of exca vations for the Egypt Exploration Society, chiefly at Tell elAmarna, Abydos, and Armant. In 1929, he was invited to take charge of the University of Chicago's recendy orga nized Oriental Institute Iraq Expedition and served as its field director until 1 9 3 7 . In 1 9 3 2 , Frankfort was appointed Research Professor of Oriental Archaeology at the Oriental Institute of tire University of Chicago and concurrently held the position of Extraordinary Professor in the History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at the University of Amsterdam. When World War II ended the field activities of the Iraq Expedition, Frankfort took up residence in Chi cago to concentrate on research, publication, and teaching. During the war years, he served as acting chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures. In 1 9 4 9 he accepted the directorship of tire Warburg Institute and a professorship of the history of preclassical antiquity at the University of London. The various archaeological expeditions that Henri Frank fort directed rank among the most carefully conducted, most fruitful, and best published of any of his time. Frankfort's numerous seminal published works range over many fields of ancient Near Eastern stadies. They include excavation reports of work in both Egypt and Iraq, major synthetic monographs that sought to organize large quantities of data into meaningful frameworks for the relatively new field of ancient Near Eastern studies, and sensitive and penetrating essays. Frankfort traveled to the Near East for tire last time in the fall of 1 9 5 2 as a Guggenheim fellow to research and
write The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, which was published in 1954. BIBLIOGRAPHY Delougaz, Pinhas, and Thorkild Jacobsen. "Henri Frankfort." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14 (1955): 1—13. Frankfort, Henri. Studies in the Early Pottery of the Near East. 2 vols. London, 1924. Frankfort, Henri, ed. The Mural Painting of El-'Amarneh. London, 1929. Frankfort, Henri. The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos. 2 vols. Egypt Ex ploration Society, Memoir 39. London, 1933. Frankfort, Henri. Preliminary Report of the Iraq Expedition, isl-sth, r93ol3r-i934l35. 5 vols. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Communications, nos. 13, 16, 17, 19, 20. Chicago, 1931-1936. Frankfort, Henri. Cylinder Seals: A Documentary Essay on Art and Re ligion of the Ancient Near East. London, 1939. Frankfort, Henri. Sculpture of the Third Millennium B.C. from TellAsmar and Khafajah. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 44. Chicago, 1939. Frankfort, Henri, et al. The Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers at TellAsmar. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 48. Chicago, 1940. Frankfort, Henri. More Sculpture from the Diyala Region. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 60. Chicago, 1943. Frankfort, Henri, et al. The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. Uni versity of Chicago, Oriental Institute Essays. Chicago, 1946. Ex panded and later published as Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Ad venture of Ancient Man. Baltimore, 1967. Frankfort, Henri. The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. Harmondsworth, 1954. Frankfort, Henri, with a chapter by Thorkild Jacobsen. Stratified Cylinider Seals from the Diyala Region. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 72. Chicago, 1955. Frankfort, Henri. Kingship and the Gods. University of Chicago, Ori ental Institute Essays. Chicago, 1978. KAREN L. WILSON
FRENCH ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSIONS. In France, the archaeology of the Near East has long been a concern of tire state. Since the nineteenth century, French political authorities have concerned themselves with archae ological exploration, often on tire heels of military expedi tions. The best example of this land occurred at the begin ning of the nineteenth century in the company of the expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt. The artistic, archaeological, and scientific observations (from botany to zoology and ethnography) of the enterprise produced tire monumental work Description de I'Egypte. France, like other European countries, were later attracted to other parts of the Near East, such as Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Iran. French teams sought to discover the history of civilizations in which the common past of humanity could be seen (and in which the Bible played an important role). The quest for inscriptions was a prime motivation. Furthermore, archae ological research aimed to enrich museums. T h e formation of the great Near Eastern collections of the Louvre in Paris dates from this period, as also the British Museum in Lon-
FRENCH ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSIONS don, and the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin, as well as in numerous other museums of Europe and America, not to mention private collections. A first phase, begun in the 1840s, could be considered the "period of the diplomats." First, in Mesopotamia, the French consul Paul-Emile Botta discovered the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad in 1843-1844. Interest in the Bible also explains the innumerable expeditions undertaken under di verse sponsorship (public and private) in Syria and Palestine (then under Ottoman rule), notably by Felicien de Saulcy in Jerusalem in 1850. In i860, accompanying tire French army of the Levant, the Mission de Phenicie (Phoenician Expedition) was officially sent by the government of Na poleon III under the direction of Ernest Renan, in tire name of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The campaign led by Melchior de Vogue to Cyprus comple mented tire work in Phoenicia. A coherent policy of archaeological research developed in France and England at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the "period of the engineers." France wished to undertake large, long-term excavations in the Near East at prestigious sites, as had been done earlier by French expe ditions in Delphi in Greece. In 1884 Marcel Dieulafoy ini tiated archaeological study of Iran with the exploration of Susa, which entailed the creation of a permanent organiza tion in 1897, the French Delegation in Persia, under the di rection of Jacques de Morgan. In Mesopotamia, Ernest de Sarzec opened dre way to the discovery of the Sumerians with tire excavation of Tello beginning in 1877. In the twentieth century, tire "scientific phase" of Near Eastern archaeology with the creation of archaeological ser vices, museums, and the foundation of archaeological insti tutes and schools. France participated actively in these places of research in foreign countries. Beginning in 1912, Roland de Mecquenem resumed ex cavations at Susa. After World War I, Abbe Henri du Verdier de Genouillac continued tire excavations in southern Mesopotamia at Tello. He was replaced by Andre Parrot, who subsequently excavated at tire neighboring site of Larsa. In the Levant, after the fall of tire Ottoman Empire, the creation of a French Antiquities Service of the Mandate in Lebanon and Syria made the excavations of large sites pos sible: Byblos on the Mediterranean coast, previously dug by Pierre Montet in 1921-1924 and then by Maurice Dunand beginning in 1926; Ras Shamra/Ugarit beginning in 1929 by Claude Schaeffer; and Mari on tire Euphrates, excavated by Andre Parrot beginning in 1933. Currentiy official archaeological activity outside French territory is state-run under tire Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Modern French archaeological policy began with the crea tion of a special commission of this ministry in 1947, the "Commission Consultative des Fouilles," since 1970 "Com mission Consultative des Recherches Archeologiques a l'Etranger" (Consulting Commission for Foreign Archaeo
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logical Research), under the authority of the General Direc torate of Cultural, Scientific, and Technical Relations. This commission, which meets annually, submits proposals to the Foreign Ministry about the allocation of subventions to tire French archaeological missions in different countties. A great diversity exists among the "missions." Some large projects include multidisciplinary programs extending over many years. The oldest in progress is the excavation at Ras Shamra/Ugarit in Syria. Other projects, however, involve surveys that are limited in time and area, such as emergency exploration required in some countries (for example, build ing projects such as dams that will permanently inundate archaeological sites). T h e state provides financing of the projects through dre recommendation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but also through other public institutions which occasionally provide their own contributions. In fact, government's scientific pro grams that support the missions in the Near East also rely on various research institutes, such as those at tire univer sities of Paris, Lyon, and Strasbourg, the teams of research ers of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), tire Department des Antiquites Orientales au Musee du Louvre (Department of Eastern Antiquities, Lou vre Museum), which in turn come under tire jurisdiction of various ministries: the Ministry of National Education, the Ministry of Research, the Ministry of Culture, and of course, the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. T h e French archaeological missions around the world are divided into five subcommittees of the Committee of Ex cavations of the Ministty of Foreign Affairs. The Near East currentiy represents about a third of tire activities. Thus, for 1994, of 205 applications for 46 countries, 68 requesting subventions were designed to conduct research in the coun tries of the Near East subcommission: Syria (22), Jordan (10), Lebanon (3), Israel (8), Turkey (13), Cyprus (5), Greece (4), and intercountry programs (3). In other Near Eastern countries political turmoil has interrupted several missions of long duration (e.g., Susa in Iran or Larsa in southern Mesopotamia/Iraq). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also maintains several in stitutions that represent French archaeology of dre Near East within the host countries. Financed by public money, these institutes support a large number of archaeological projects carried out under the auspices of the French gov ernment. The Institut Francais d'Archeologie de Beyrouth (IFAB), founded after World War II with Henri Seyrig as its first director to accommodate fellows and a specialized library, has become today the Institut Francais d'Archeo logie du Proche-Orient (IFAPO), witir offices in Beirut, Da mascus, and Amman. Other institutions ensure the official presence of French archaeology in the Near East: dre Institut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes (IFEA) in Istanbul (Tur key), the Institut Francais de Recherches en Iran (IFRI) in Teheran, the Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iraq
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(DAJFTQ) in Baghdad, the Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale (IFAO) in Cairo, as well as a section of the Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes de Damas (IFEAD) in Syria for the medieval period. Among private scientific undertakings, the Jesuit-run Universite Saint-Joseph (USJ) in Beirut has received sub ventions from the French government for archaeological and museographical projects. The Ecole Biblique et Ar cheologique Francaise (EBAF) in Jerusalem, a Dominican monastery, has also received subsidies from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for excavation projects as well as stipends contributed by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. [See also Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise; In stitut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient; Institut Francais dArcheologie Orientale; Institut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes d'Istanbul; Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes; and the biographies of Botta, Dunand, Montet, Parrot, Renan, Saulcy, Schaeffer, Seyrig, and Vogue. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY Caubet, Annie. "Donateurs du Louvre: Archeologiques et fouilleurs." In Les donateurs du Louvre, pp. 55-67. Paris, 1989. Chevalier, Nicole. "L'administration de la recherche archeologique francaise dans le Moyen Orient du milieu du XIXe siecle a la seconde guerre mondiale." Ph.D. diss., University of Paris I, 1993. MARGUERITE YON
Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
is still not accepted by all scholars. However, no other ex cavated site in the area indicates occupation in the periods necessary to correlate with the biblical traditions. The American explorer Edward Robinson describes Tell el-Ful in his Biblical Researches in Palestine (vol. 1, 1874, p. 577), and Charles Warren carried out the first excavations there, of two weeks' duration, in 1868. Warren for the Pal estine Excavation Fund published a brief description of his work (PEP Quarterly, 1869-1870, p. 66), and his plans were published by Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener in 1883 (The Survey of Western Palestine, vol. 3). Albright (1924) excavated the site for seventeen months (1922-1923) and promptly published his results. He returned to the site for about a month in 1933 (Sinclair, i960). T h e most recent excavations were Lapp's 1964 six-week salvage operation prior to modern building operations there. T h e expedition's final report (Lapp, 1981) reexamines the evidence from the earlier excavations and the new (1964) data, distinguishing five periods of occupation. T h e first, Iron LA (c. 1200-1150 BCE), is brief and without extensive finds. It is usually as sociated with the Benjaminites as recorded in Judges 19-20. T h e second period, Iron IC (c. 1025-950 BCE), is the period of Saul's fortress, which was the principle standing ruin at die site. It was largely excavated by Albright, but Lapp gen erally confirmed his conclusions in 1964 and refined his plans. It is the assignment of the date of construction of this fortress to the time of Saul that is the principle reason for Tell el-Ful's identification witii Gibeah.
F R E S C O E S . See Wall Paintings.
By the time of Lapp's excavations, pottery dating had been sufficiently refined to date period III to Late Iron II and the period of the Exile (c. 700-538 BCE). T h e fortress was probably rebuilt during Josiah's reign (640-609 BCE) with a casemate wall. That fortress was most likely destroyed in Nebuchadrezzar's campaign (588-587 BCE), but some oc cupation continued at the site until 538 BCE. During the pe-
F U L , T E L L E L - (Ar., "mound of beans") site situated on the crest of the watershed about 5 km (3 mi.) north of the Old City of Jerusalem, rising 862 m above sea level (map reference 172 X 137). Tell el-Ful is not sttictly a tell; it rises about 30 m above the surrounding plain with occupational debris usually less than 2 m deep in an area approximately 150 X 90 m, north-south and east-west, respectively. Tell el-Ful's identification with Gibeah of Saul (1 Sm. 10:26, 14:2, 15:34) was confirmed by William Foxwell Al bright's excavations for the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) in 1922, after a lively debate of more than eighty years. Albright's identification was widely accepted until the 1960s when the debate resurfaced. Although Paul Lapp's excavations under the auspices of ASOR and the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (1964) largely confirmed Albright's conclusions, the site's identification with Gibeah
N. L. Lapp)
F R E N C H S C H O O L (Jerusalem). See Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise.
FUL, TELL EL-.
Revetment against the southwest tower. (Courtesy
FUNERARY MONUMENTS: Hellenistic and Roman Periods riod-IV Hellenistic occupation (175-63 BCE), which flour ished toward tire end of the second century BCE, tire tower was rebuilt, elaborate bath installations were added, and the casemate rooms were reused. In addition to tire pottery, coins, and stamped jar handles (yrslm and yrd + symbol), as well as an ostracon (Aramaic, c. 100 BCE), provide chron ological pegs. Period V was a brief Roman occupation in about 70 CE. [See also the biographies of Albright, Conder, Kitchener, Lapp, Robinson, and Warren.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. Excavations and Results at Tell el-Fill (Gibeah of Saul). Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 4. New Haven, 1924. Final report of the first campaign, including the original publication of the fortress and important finds. Lapp, Nancy L., ed. The Third Campaign at Tell el-Fid: The Excavations of 1064. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 45. Cambridge, Mass., 1981. Takes into consideration earlier campaigns and presents the finds and various archaeological problems of the site. Lapp, Paul W. "Tell el-Ful." Biblical Archaeologist 28 (1965): 2-10. Summarizes the results of the third campaign. Sinclair, Lawrence A. An Archaeological Study of Gibeah (Tell el-Ful). Vol. 1. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 34. New Haven, i960. Report of the 1933 campaign, generally less re liable dian earlier or later publications. NANCY L . LAPP
FUNERARY MONUMENTS. [To provide a mor phology and typology of funerary monuments and a survey of their development, forms, and functions in the ancient Near East, this entry is chronologically divided into two articles: Monuments of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods and Monuments of tire Late Roman through Islamic Periods.] Monuments of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods The funerary architecture of the Near East is eclectic and resists easy categorization, having offered scope for the pub lic display of status, wealth, and, to a much lesser extent, personal beliefs. In Anatolia, monumental funerary archi tecture is attested as early as the Archaic period, where the rich variety of tomb types is represented by such monu ments as the prominent tumuli and rock-cut tombs of Phrygia in central Anatolia, tombs on podia witir pyramidal roofs found in the western coastiands, and the elevated sarcophagi and pillar tombs of Lycia in southwest Asia Minor. By the fourth century BCE, a fusion of Greek religious architecture and indigenous, elevated tomb types had taken place, the first example of such a structure being the Nereid monu ment at Xanthos in Lycia. T h e construction of tombs that resembled religious monuments (with, for example, perip teral columns) was to have a profound impact on the de velopment of funerary architecture in the Near East. An out
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standing Anatolian tomb of the Hellenistic period is the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, no longer extant but tenta tively restored on the basis of ancient testimonia and sur viving fragments. The Mausoleum, one of the Seven Won ders of tire ancient world, was the tomb of Mausolos, a satrap of Caria, and was completed in about 350 BCE. The tomb was the location for lavish sculptural displays depict ing mythological battles. Above a tall podium was a perip teral cella of Ionic columns, surmounted by a pyramidal roof; its form influenced tomb design not only in Anatolia, but throughout tire eastern Mediterranean. At Belevi, near Ephesus, a tomb of uncertain patronage mimics the Mau soleum in form, witir its tall lower story, centtal cella of free standing columns, and probable pyramidal roof. [See Mau soleum.] Throughout the Hellenistic period the notion of the hero cult played a role in the funerary architecture of Anatolia. Such burial locations, known as heroa (sg., heroon), are found at Termessos in Pisidia and Golbasi-Trysa in Lycia, both dating to the Early Hellenistic period. These heroa sug gest the apotheosis or divinization of the deceased with some provision for ritual or cultic activity—for example, a tomb in tire form of a temple or the presence of an altar or a sacred temenos enclosure in which the tomb structure itself is not necessarily the dominant feature. Farther east in Anatolia, the influence of Syrian (and North African) tombs becomes apparent in such monuments as the early first-century BCE tower tomb at Olba-Diocaesarea in Cilicia (see figure 1). In addition to these freestanding tombs, rock-cut facade tombs were common in mountainous regions in Anatolia, for ex ample in Lycia and Caria in the southwest and in Phrygia. T h e tomb monuments of Roman Anatolia continued the Hellenistic traditions of visibility in the landscape and reli ance on cut-stone construction, combined with tire new pos sibilities provided by the western Roman podium temple. Monumental temple tombs, often enclosed within a teme nos and elevated on a tall podium approached by a frontal staircase, are preserved throughout Anatolia (e.g., at Pergamon, Iasos, and Side). Such tombs preserve the idea of dre Hellenistic heroon, yet their ostentation and lavish use of marble reflect die new economic conditions of tire Roman Empire. As in Anatolia, in Syria-Palestine evidence for monumen tal tomb architecture predates the Hellenistic period; mausolea of considerable size, dating to tire fifth century BCE, are also preserved in dre Arabian Peninsula. It is to tire Helle nistic period, however, that many outstanding tombs of Syria-Palestine belong. In the Kidron Valley north and east of Jerusalem, a number of monumental tomb complexes are extant, all unique in form but often combining familiar ar chitectural elements; the so-called Tomb of Zachariah (late first century BCE; see figure 2), with its half-columns engaged to a cubic central story surmounted by a pyramidal roof, and the nearby T o m b of Absalom, another freestanding
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FUNERARY MONUMENTS: Hellenistic and Roman Periods
FUNERARY MONUMENTS: Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Figure i. Temple-tombs. Located near the ancient site of Olba-Diocaesarea, near the modern Turkish village of Demicirli, in southeastern Asia Minor. Second century CE. (Courtesy S. H. Cormack)
tomb with engaged Ionic columns, Doric entablature, and concave conical roof, exemplify the eclecticism and impos ing scale of the Late Hellenistic Kidron Valley tombs. Other tombs near Jerusalem are rock-cut, with substantial exterior courtyards and Doric architectural facades screening an in terior burial chamber(s) (e.g., the Cave of Umm el-Ammed, the Deir ed-Derb tomb, and the Sanhedrin tombs nortii of Jerusalem). Outside Jerusalem there is little evidence for monumental tomb architecture, although ancient authors such as Josephus do refer to the existence of such monu ments (Antiquities 1 3 . 2 1 1 - 2 1 3 , 20.95). In Syria and Lebanon, freestanding monuments such as the Tomb of Hamrath at Suweida and the tomb at Hermel are further representatives of the Hellenistic monumental stone tomb with one or more cubic stories, engaged col umns, and an imposing pyramidal roof. In the former tomb the burial took place below ground level, with the architec tural superstructure serving as a symbolic marker. The im posing tomb at Kalat Fakra (central Lebanon), more than 37 m in height, with a staircase, central cubic element, and pyramidal roof, dates to the Claudian period (41-54 CE) and
reveals the lingering influence of monumental Hellenistic tombs into the Roman period. T h e rock-cut temple tomb tradition is well represented at Petra (Jordan), where more than live hundred tombs are preserved. Although the most common tomb type at Petra is the pylon tomb, a simple rock-cut facade tomb with a central doorway and, in the attic zone, crenellated relief carving of non-Greek inspiration, there are a number of os tentatious, two-storied rock-cut tombs, among them the elKhazneh ("treasury"), the Deir ("convent"), and the Palace Tombs, hr the first two, a central doorway in the lower story is flanked by engaged columns and recessed niches; the cen tral feature of the upper story is a partially freestanding tliolos, or circular structure, flanked by broken pediments. These tombs are without local precedent in Nabatean ar chitecture, and the intrusion of the Hellenistic Greek archi tectural vocabulary, perhaps via Alexandria, is clear. T h e elaborate Petra tombs are controversial in date and patron age, with suggested dates ranging from the early first century BCE to the second century CE; it is likely that they were com missioned by local rulers, [See Petra.]
FUNERARY MONUMENTS: Hellenistic and Roman Periods The city of Palmyra (Syria) preserves a vast necropolis with more than 150 tombs of tire Hellenistic and Roman periods. T h e tombs belong to three basic types: hypogea (underground tombs with loculi for cremation burials), fu nerary towers of up to five stories, and funerary temples. The hypogea are the earliest burials at Palmyra and continue a tradition of Syrian hypogeum burials; they are categorized typologically according to the interior layout of their rooms. Funerary towers, the latest example of which dates to 128 CE, were originally provided with loculi at their lowest level; gradually, tire entire interior of the tower was exploited and was often lavishly decorated with busts of the deceased. Fu nerary temples first appear at Palmyra in the second century CE; their interior arrangement allowed for either cremation burial in loculi or inhumation burial in sarcophagi. [See Pal myra; Sarcophagus.] In North Africa, there are well-preserved tombs of the Hellenistic period at Cyrene and Alexandria in the east, and tower tombs of the Greco-Punic type farther west, at Sabratha (Libya), Dougga (Tunisia), and El-Khroub (Alge ria). At Cyrene, elevated sarcophagi, mausolea, stone-re vetted tumuli, and courtyard tombs are found. At the many necropoli in Alexandria, the courtyard tomb, with sunken peristyle, vestibule, and burial chamber(s), predominates. In many of the Alexandrian tombs (e.g., the Mustafa Pasha cemetery), the decorative details (painted scenes of gar lands, horsemen, and the like) betray a Macedonian influ ence. In Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the Helle nistic tower tombs combine elements of the multistoried tombs of Anatolia, with indigenous Punic features such as
relief sculpture in native designs, Phoenicio-Cypriot capi tals, and concave-sided pyramids as crowning elements. Mausoleum B at Sabratha (also known as the tomb of Bes, or Bisu) is a unique creation in the realm of funerary archi tecture, having a triangular base with concave sides, a mid dle story with a false door of Egyptian design, an upper story decorated with colossal statues above seated lions, and a crowning pyramid. The monument, which attained a total height of about 24 m, dates to tire early third century BCE. Similar monuments with varying degrees of architectural elaboration were constructed at Dougga, El-Khroub, and Siga (Algeria). T h e North African tower tomb with a py ramidal or an obelisk-shaped roof had a long history, as a number of tombs in Algeria dating to the first-third centu ries CE indicate. In addition to these North African tower tombs, there are circular North African tombs with applied architectural el ements; these represent tire transformation of an earlier, in digenous circular tomb type with rings of stones (known as a bazind) into an architecturally developed monument. The Medracen and the tomb at Kbour er-Roumia (also known as the T o m b of the Christian Woman), both in Algeria, are two examples of monumental tumulus burials, with a cyl inder of engaged columns surmounted by a conical stepped pyramid. The Medracen is an early example of Numidian tumulus architecture, perhaps dating to the early third cen tury BCE (although a second century BCE date has also been proposed), whereas the Kbour er-Roumia tomb is later, per haps suggesting links with tumulus burials from Republican Italy in tire first century BCE. That the cylindrical type sur-
Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Figure 2. Tomb ofZechariah near Je rusalem. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive) FUNERAEY MONUMENTS:
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vived well into tire Roman period is attested by the tomb of Q. Lollius Urbicus, prefect of the City of Rome, built in the second century CE in Algeria. [See also Burial Sites. In addition, many of the sites men tioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY Browning, Iain. Palmyra. Park Ridge, N.J., 1979. See especially pages 192-214 for an accessible, well-illustrated account of die tombs. Burns, Ross. The Monuments of Syria: An Historical Guide. New York, 1992. Historical guidebook for the Western traveler, with clear maps and plans; useful entry on tombs at Palmyra (pp. 167-170). Cassels, J. "The Cemeteries of Cyrene." Papers of the British School at Rome 23 (1955): 1-44. Still the primary publication in English. Colvin, Howard. "The Romans and Their Monuments." In Colvin's Architecture and the After-Life, pp. 55-100. New Haven and London, 1991. Clear, concise, and well-illustrated account of funerary archi tecture of the Roman period, incorporating Italian and Western monuments in addition to those of the Near East. Extensive bibli ography. Dent, J. "Burial Practices in Cyrenaica." In Cyrenaica in Antiquity, ed ited by Graeme Barker et al., pp. 327-336. British Archaeological Reports, vol. 14. Oxford, 1985. Overview of Cyrenaican tombs, in cluding a discussion of tomb morphology (with a debt to Cassels's work in the area duly noted), chronology, and the relationship be tween tomb type and social structure. Fedak, Janos. Monumental Tombs of the Hellenistic Age: A Study of Se lected Tombs from the Pre-Classical to the Early Imperial Era. Toronto, 1990. Fundamental and concise survey of Hellenistic tombs through out the ancient world, lavishly illustrated, with full bibliographic ref erences. Gawlikowski, Michal. Monuments funeraires de Palmyre. Warsaw, 1970. As there is no monographic treatment of the tombs at Palmyra in English, this remains the fundamental publication of this vast Syrian necropolis. McKenzie, Judith. The Architecture of Petra. London, 1990. Complete and up-to-date treatment of die rock-cut tombs at Petra, including an immensely useful discussion of the Hellenistic tombs at Alexan dria and their relationship to the tombs at Petra. The author bases her chronology on a stylistic analysis (where secure dating evidence is lacking). Extensive bibliography; richly illustrated. Ridgway, Brunilde Sismondo. Hellenistic Sculpture, vol. I , The Styles of ca. 332-200 B.C. Madison, Wis., 1990. Thorough,English-language treatment of the controversial tomb at Belevi near Ephesus in Turkey (pp. 187-196), reviewing arguments for its chronology and discuss ing the placement of the sculpture. Roos, Paavo. The Rock-Cut Tombs of Caunos. 2 vols. Studies in Medi terranean Archaeology, vol. 34. Goteborg, 1972. Roos, Paavo. South-Eastem Caria and the Lyco-Carian Borderland. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 72. Goteborg, 1985. This and the volume above provide thorough publication of the im pressive rock-cut tombs of Caria in southwest Turkey, with detailed analysis of the small finds and pottery. Sartre, A. "L'architecture funeraire de Syrie du sud." In Archeologie et histoire de la Syrie, vol. 2, La Syrie de I'ipoque achemenide a I'avinemen t de Tlslam, edited by Jean-Marie Dentzer and Winfried Ortlimann, pp. 423-446. Saarbriicken, 1989. Discusses the major typological groups of Syrian funerary architecture and their possible derivation from outside Syria; extensive bibliography, mainly in French. Toynbee, Jocelyn M. C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971. Although now out of print, this useful handbook of fu nerary monuments throughout the Roman Empire includes a sum mary of tombs in the eastern Mediterranean, arranged by type.
Waelkens, Marc. "Hausahnliche Graber in Anatolia vom 3. Jht. v. Chr. bis in die RSmerzeit." In Palasl und Hiitte: Beitrage zum Bauen und Wohnen im Altertum von Archdologen. Vor- und Friihgeschichtlern, ed ited by Dietrich Papenfuss and Volker M. Strocka, pp. 433-445. Mainz am Rhein, 1982. In the absence of an English-language study of Anatolian tombs of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, this article provides a useful summary of the major types. The role of domestic architecture in the formation of Anatolian funerary architecaire is stressed, at the expense of religious architecture. SARAH H . CORMACK
M o n u m e n t s of the Late R o m a n through Islamic Periods Funerary monuments of the Near East in late antiquity var ied in their morphology, based upon local environmental situations, the economic or social status of tire deceased, and religious convictions. As a result, no unilinear typological evolution encompasses the variety of monuments in tire Near East from the fourth through tire eleventh centuries CE. T h e morphology of funerary monuments from late an tiquity, when separated from associated epigraplric and ma terial evidence, can thus provide only a meager indication of a burial's chronological and socioreligious context. Fu nerary monument and sepulchral typology falters because of the continuous and contemporaneous use of types by di vergent religious groups. Pagan Funerary Monuments. From tire Late Roman period onward, pagan funerary monuments preserved the variety of forms, such as inscribed stelae and supraterranean structures, of tire Greco-Roman period because pagans were generally free from religious restrictions. These mon uments are identified by inscriptions indicating devotion to the gods of the pagan pantheon, the presence of pagan grave goods, and tire absence of formulaic expressions and sym bols of monotheistic piety. In pagan monuments, inscrip tions typically identify the owner of a tomb and the owner's greatest accomplishments, such as service in the imperial armies. These monuments attempted to preserve an eternal memory among the living. T h e ostentatious style of the pa gan funerary monuments of the Greco-Roman periods, such as the mausoleum at Quweismeh in Jordan, continued to be followed, but new constructions declined in tire fourth century and disappeared in the fifth, as a result of economic constraints, philosophical changes, and eventually the pres sure of the antipagan legislation of tire Christian emperors. Jewish Funerary Monuments. In late antiquity the Jew ish community of the Near East built upon ancient Hebrew traditions in erecting funerary monuments and grave mark ers. Hebrew traditions and teachers such as Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel minimized the utilization of portraiture and the construction of ostentatious monuments. T h e most common Jewish funerary monument was a simple, uninscribed, annually whitewashed stela that served to protect passersby from ritual defilement or to warn against the pur-
FUNERARY MONUMENTS: Late Roman through Islamic Periods suit of activities prohibited in cemeteries, such as grazing animals. Because these grave markers were of ritual signif icance, they were highly regarded and were maintained by family members. T h e practice of adorning funerary mon uments with Jewish religious symbols such as the shofar and menorbt ("lamps") increased over time; they often adorned the lintel of tire entrance to polyandria or multiperson burial grounds, as well as the interior walls of hypogea, or cata combs. Jewish religious convictions regarding ritual defilement through contact witir the dead made funerary monuments necessary; at tire same time, such monuments were not os tentatious because there was no belief that spiritual benefits might be obtained or that one's afterlife depended on the retention of one's memory. T h u s , while Talmudic literature mentions the use of graves, family sepulchers, and mausolea, tirey were not places of worship, and graves were not located in synagogues. Christian Funerary Monuments. T h e Byzantines uti lized a variety of funerary monuments because Christian scriptures have no specific restrictions about them. Chris tian attitudes toward worldliness did provide some restraint, but some tombs, such as those at el-Kahf, near Amman, Jordan, were quite elaborate. Most Christians were buried in cemeteries in single graves or in hypogea, where the bed rock permitted tire excavation of polyandria. These polyan dria served as family tombs that were enlarged at times, over generations, and could also be developed into catacombs, which, used as communal burial places, were of more ex tended public usage. Beyond these subterranean burial places, for which there was access, supraterranean sepul chral monuments included mausolea, ciboria, and martyria. Headstones stood over Byzantine graves, displaying the name of tire deceased and religious symbols, such as the cross. The decoration and quality of these monuments var ied with the deceased's status. Examples of such gravestones can be seen at tire village of Nebo in Jordan. Christians who retained Jewish ttaditions combined crosses and Jewish sym bols. Undergound, die walls of hypogea provided space for funerary monuments. Arcosolia provided a tympanum, or recessed space, beneath the arch for paintings incorporating Christian symbolism. Christians buried in loculi within po lyandria also had their tombs decorated with painted plaster. Epitaphs in tirese areas were typically brief, with the name of the deceased, such expressions of piety as crosses or doc trinal statements, and the date of death. Many Byzantine burials utilized polyandria from earlier periods and even closed shaft graves with pellaicon (especially shaped stones with notches on the sides or holes in them that allowed a tool to be inserted or provided a handhold), which facilitated the removal of sealing stones and the grave's reuse. T h e Christians who reused graves generally left no independent funerary monument.
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Funerary monuments intended for public display in churches and martyria were typically those of wealthy pattons of the church or of pious persons tire community ven erated. Such sepulchral monuments proliferated with the evolution of tire belief that spiritual benefits could be ac quired drrough venerated Christians. Islamic Funerary Monuments. Religious restrictions played a key role in the minimization of Islamic funerary monuments among the faithful in the early centuries. M u hammad considered elaborate funerals and monuments to be a retention of paganism and subsequendy prohibited the plastering of the surface above graves and the construction of memorial structures on graves. Islamic burials of the faithful thus were typically very simple shaft graves sur mounted by a vertical stela at the head and foot. These gravestones were occasionally inscribed with an epitaph, but iconography was not utilized. Less rigorous and proud in dividuals, such as tire 'Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, or dered mausolea to be built for themselves, however. In spite of Muhammad's proscriptions against funerary monuments and his condemnation of those who made graves of prophets and venerated places of worship and prayer, mosques and canopy tombs appeared over burials in the Umayyad and 'Abbasid periods, such as at the Cave of the Seven Sleepers near Amman. The proliferation of complex funerary monuments greatly increased after the eleventh century, with the belief that benefit might be gained from prayers in such places. [See also Burial Sites; Burial Techniques; Catacombs; Cave Tombs; Martyrion; and Mausoleum.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bagatti, Bellarmino. The Church from the Circumcision: History and Ar chaeology of Judaeo-Chrislians. Translated by Eugene Hoade. Jeru salem, 1971. Contains examples of Jewish-Christian funerary mon uments. Bagatti, Bellarmino. The Church from the Gentiles in Palestine: History and Archaeology. Translated by Eugene Hoade. Jerusalem, 1971. Contains examples of non-Jewish-Christian funerary monuments. Canaan, Taufik. "Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine." Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 4 (1924): 1-84:5 (1925): 163203; 7 (1927): 1-88. An account of nineteenth-century practices, with reference to early monuments. Creswell, K. A. C. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Rev. ed. Aldershot, 1989. Goldziher, Ignacz. "On the Veneration of the Dead in Paganism and Islam." In Muslim Studies, vol. 1 , edited by S. M. Stern, pp. 229238. London, 1967. Kurtz, Donna C , and John Boardman. Greek Burial Customs. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971. Kyriakakis, James. "Byzantine Burial Customs: Care of the Deceased from Death to the Prothesis." Greek Orthodox Theological Review 19 (1974): 37-72. Rahmani, L. Y. "Ancient Jerusalem's Funerary Customs and Tombs." Biblical Archaeologist 44 (1981): 171-177,229-235; 45 (1982): 43-53, 109-119. Rush, Alfred C. Death and Burial in Christian Antiquity. Edited by Jo-
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hannes Quasten. Studies in Christian Antiquity, vol. i. Washington, D.C., 1941. Sailer, Sylvester J., and Bellarmino Bagatti. The Town ofNebo (Khirbet el-Mekhayyal) with a Brief Survey of Other Ancient Christian Monu ments in Transjordan (1949). Jerusalem, 1982. Examples of Christian funerary monuments and information regarding the veneration of martyrs. Toynbee, Jocelyn M. C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971. Zlotnick, Dov. The Tractate "Mowning." Yale Judaica Series, vol. 17. New Haven, 1966. ROBERT WAYNE SMITH
F U R N I T U R E A N D F U R N I S H I N G S . [This entry surveys the history of domestic furniture and furnishings as pre served in the archaeological record. It comprises five articles: An Overview Furnishings of the Bronze and Iron Ages Furnishings of the Persian Period Furnishings of the Flellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods Furnishings of the Islamic Period Following the overview, which provides a general introduction to the subject, the remaining articles treat the artifacts of specific periods and regions.]
An Overview Permanent settlement was a precondition for the emergence of furniture: nomads would have had little use for it. This discussion of furniture consists of primarily utilitarian, mov able household pieces such as low- and high-back chairs, stools, tables, stands, beds, and couches. Ancillary furnish ings consist of secondary movable pieces such as boxes and chests, pottery and metal vessels, gameboards, rush mats, and built-in items such as shelves and benches. T h e existing data suggest that several millennia passed between perma nent settlement and the introduction of furniture. There is no evidence for the existence of furniture in Egypt or Mes opotamia before the beginning of the third millennium. Nevertheless, since die earliest Egyptian furniture already displays a remarkable virtuosity diere was, in all likelihood, a period of gestation of unknown duration. The introduction of furniture for general use represented a significant degree of sophistication and refinement origi nally reserved for royalty and diose in the highest ranks of society. No longer content with sleeping on reed mats, or sitting on die floor to eat food spread on platters on the ground, or leaving clotiiing in a bundle up against a wall, ordinary people of Egypt and elsewhere in the Near East began to fashion beds, chairs, stools, tables botii for eating and to support gaming boards, chests, and boxes to contain jewelry, cosmetics, and other sundries. Nevertheless, as can
readily be observed in scanning the evidence from Egypt, the furniture recovered from the royal tombs is far more elegant and sophisticated than the furniture found even in the tombs of the nobles. Yet, ancient dwellings were sparsely furnished. The Shunemite couple's construction of bed, ta ble, chair, and lampstand for the prophet Elisha (2 Kgs. 4 : 1 0 ) would have represented a fully furnished room and a considerable investment. However, in addition to the utili tarian function of furniture, such archaeological and picto rial evidence as exists suggests designs intended to create not only functional, but also beautiful objects to decorate the home. Sources. Because almost all ancient furniture was made from wood, which for the most part deteriorated in the wet climate zones, any reconstruction of furniture in the ancient Near East remains incomplete. T h e examples of ancient fur niture preserved in the dry climate of Egypt and the desert of western Palestine, as well as artistic representations and models of furniture, do provide invaluable information. T h e Egyptian repertoire is based on furniture from Egyptian Old Kingdom to Late Period tombs (Queen Hetepheres at Giza, Yuya and Thuya and Tutankhamun at the Valley of the Kings) wall paintings and reliefs, statuary, and models of furniture. The picture of Mesopotamian furniture is more difficult to reconstruct because in contrast with Egypt, few furniture remains are preserved as a result of that area's heavy annual rains. With exception of the Mari palace, which yielded schematized pictures of stools, no significant wall decorations depicting furniture are known until the Neo-Assyrian period. Nevertheless, a general picture of Me sopotamian furniture is reconstructed on the basis of such Early Dynastic finds as die furniture depicted on the Royal Standard at Ur (Strommenger and Hirmer, 1 9 6 4 , fig. 7 2 ) , cylinder seals and stone sculpture, and seals and sculpture of the Akkadian to Kassite periods where both stools and high backed chairs are in evidence (Frankfort, 1 9 6 3 , pis. 5 4 A , 5 7 ; Strommenger and Hirmer, 1 9 6 4 , figs. 7 3 , 1 2 8 above, 1 2 9 right, 1 5 7 , 1 5 9 ) . Though a harpist on a terra cotta relief sits on a folding stool, folding stools are rare in Mesopotamian art (Frankfort, 1 9 6 3 , pi. 5 9 B ) . Likewise, the enthroned god depicted on the top of the stele of die Code of Hammurabi rests his feet on a footstool (Strommenger and Hirmer, 1 9 6 4 , fig. 1 5 9 ) , footstools are relatively rare in Mesopotamian art. T h e most detailed views of Mesopota mian furniture are preserved in Neo-Assyrian wall reliefs tiiat depict palace furniture (Strommenger and Hirmer, 1 9 6 4 , figs. 1 9 5 , 2 4 1 below, and 2 6 0 below). Archaeological remains of ivory plaques (the largest assemblage coming from Nimrud [Mallowan, 1 9 6 6 , figs. 3 8 1 - 5 8 3 ] ) and bronze furniture parts help to complete the picture. [See Mari; Ur; Nimrud.] T h e Palestinian repertoire is based on the generally warped, fragmentary, yet informative furniture remains
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: An Overview from Middle Bronze Age tombs at Jericho, sculpture from Late Bronze Age Hazor and Tel Sippor in the Philistine plain; LB ivories from Megiddo and Tell el-Far'ah (South) and Iron Age ivories from Samaria, terra-cotta models and wall reliefs from Sennacherib's throne room drat depict As syrians carrying off furniture from Lachish. Though Ugarit has provided an important assemblage of LB ivories that originally come from wood furniture, the furniture has de teriorated. T h e ivories thus provide little information about the furniture they decorated. However, the Iron Age ivories from Nimrud, Arslan Tash, and Samaria enable die recon struction of a more vivid picture of Syrian style furniture in the Iron Age. [See Hazor; Megiddo; Far'ah, Tell el- (South); Samaria; Lachish.] Style a n d Repertoire. Furniture from Egypt and the Near East shared a repertoire, materials, and technology. It also shared in the conceptual transference of the idea of four-legged animals as tire model for four-legged furniture. Nevertheless, in furniture as in art chronological and re gional differences exist. For example, while bovine legs characterized Egyptian Archaic period furniture, Old King dom furniture is characterized by lions' legs. Furniture pro ceeds generally from simple forms and unostentatious dec oration as in the furniture from the fourth-dynasty tomb of Queen Fletepheres, to more complex and ornate forms seen particularly in the New Kingdom examples from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun and in wall paintings and reliefs. Furniture represented in Mesopotamian third millennium statuary and cylinder seals is simpler and less ornate, and has softer, rounder forms that accord witir Mesopotamian art in general. Thus, extrapolation can only be taken so far for example, to Early Bronze Age Palestinian and Syrian furniture (for which there are no data) from Egyptian Old Kingdom furniture, where third-millennium furniture is best represented. Indeed, comparing Egyptian Middle Kingdom furniture witir the known examples of M B furni ture from Jericho illustrates the problem. While the furniture from both regions generally shares techniques, the remark able similarity among tire Jericho examples demonstrates that this assemblage, which differs from the characteristic Egyptian furniture, was made at a location other than Egypt. Indeed, it may have been made locally or at least at some location in Syria-Palestine. Some of the earliest-known furniture, consisting of tire ivory bovine legs of couches and gameboards, comes from a first-dynasty cenotaph at Abydos, Egypt. [See Abydos.] Furniture items, consisting of two low-backed chairs with side rails, a curtain box, a bed and neck rest, and a litter entirely covered with gold foil, are among the reburied finds belonging to Queen Hetepheres (fourth dynasty) and are restored masterpieces of Egyptian furniture. By tire Old Kingdom period, all the furniture types that characterize the furniture of the ancient world, and for that matter modern
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furniture, and all of the basic Egyptian woodworking tech niques were already known. Like Egyptian art in general, Egyptian furniture is shaped at right angles and consum mately crafted. Evidence of high-backed chairs, a major contribution by Egypt to the evolution of furniture design, comes from Egyptian furniture (Manuelian, 1982, figs. 37, 38), from LB stone sculpture from Hazor (Yadin, i960, pi. 197; i96i,pls. 326-330) and Tel Sippor in the Philistine Plain (Biran and Negbi, 1966, pi. 23), from ivory carving in the round from Megiddo (Loud, 1939, pi. 4:3), from an incised ivory plaque from Megiddo (Loud, 1939, pi. 4:2), from a wall painting from Kuntillet 'Ajrud, and from a painted sherd found at Samaria. [See Kuntillet 'Ajrud.] A variety of stool types are well-known from Egypt, where the folding stools frequently ended in ducks' feet. Remains of stools have been found at M B tombs at Jericho; stools are also depicted on LB ivories from Megiddo (Loud, 1939, pi. 32) and Tell el-Far'ah (Soudi). Both Egyptian statuary and reliefs and Palestinian ivories (Loud, 1939, pis. 4, 32) provide evidence of foot stools. Beds are best represented in Egypt, where tirey are known from Old Kingdom times onward. Though beds are known from biblical literature, terra-cotta models found at several Palestinian Iron Age sites are tire only evidence. A variety of chests to hold clothing and boxes for wigs and cosmetics are well known in Egypt, but are not represented in Syria and Palestine. However, cosmetic or jewelry boxes inlaid with bone strips and silhouettes are well known from Palestine in the MB (and continue into the very beginning of the LB). The existence of plaited sttaw mats has been demonstrated by impressions on the bases of EB ceramic vessels. Materials, Tools, a n d Techniques. Wood was die pri mary material used to produce furniture. Local woods used in Egypt include acacia, almond, fig, date palm, dom-palm, persea, sidder, sycamore, tamarisk, and poplar. Imported woods included ash, beech, box, carob, cedar, cypress, eb ony, elm, fir, and juniper. Sycamore, pine, and oak, in ad dition to well-known fruit trees, were available locally in Pal estine. More expensive furniture was made from a combination of wood and ivory, or overlaid with gold foil. In Egypt copper was sometimes used to raise the carved animal legs off the ground. Stools were frequently plaited witir rushes; however, in Egypt there is also evidence for the use of leopard sldn. This must have been viewed as a major luxury item because in some instances leopard skin is imi tated in painted wood. [See Wood.] The repertoire of carpenter's tools, reconstructed on the basis of recovered Egyptian tools (fine examples of which were found in a foundation deposit in the tomb of Hatslrepsut at Deir el-Balrari), model tools and wall paintings and reliefs, included ripping saws, bow drills, axes, adzes, mal lets, mortising chisels, squares, and awls (Hayes, 1953, figs.
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189, 190; 1959, fig. 4 7 ) . Excavations in Palestine yielded saws, adzes, chisels, and awls. Methods of joinery were so phisticated; Jericho provides several examples, including ev idence of the mitred bridle joint and tongues (mortising). Ancient carpenters bored holes through the frames of stools with bow drills in order to plait rushes. However, although veneering was common in Egypt, no evidence exists for its use in Syria and Palestine. Several Egyptian wall paintings and reliefs depict carpenter shops, tools, and carpenters at work. Furnishings. Like furniture, furnishing varied both diachronically and synchronically. Moreover, it is difficult to determine the nature of Syro-Palestinian objects in their role of furnishings in particular since excavation reports rarely describe finds in the context of the rooms in which they were found, and there are no supporting artistic renditions of in teriors. Yet, general observations can provide initial ap proaches to the topic: in palaces and in the homes of the wealthy, sitting or reception rooms would have been fur nished with stools and high-back chairs, tables and stands, mixing bowls (kraters) and drinking cups, lamps, gameboards, and possibly musical instruments. Areas serving as offices in all likelihood contained shelves for papyrus and parchment scrolls. Fixed stone benches along walls, upper and lower millstones, grinding stones, ovens, cooking pots, and baking trays would have furnished courtyards, and were in most cases placed against or near the benches. In excep tional cases where bedrooms existed, they would have been furnished with beds, small tables, chests, lamps, and boxes containing toilet items. Sleeping areas for children most likely contained mats, toys, and chests. Humbler homes would have been more sparsely furnished with perhaps a few stools, mats, small tables, ceramic vessels, and mill stones. Though no archaeological evidence for rugs exists, geometric patterns on Egyptian wall paintings suggest rep resentations of rugs, which would corroborate biblical ref erences to rugs. Shields and quivers may have adorned the walls of homes of fighting men, as finer pottery set out on shelves may have adorned the walls of the more peaceful. BIBLIOGRAPHY Biran, Avraham, and Ora Ncgbi. "The Stratigraphic Sequence of Tel Sippor," Israel Exploration Journal (1966): 160-173. Frankfort, Henri. The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. 3d ed. Baltimore, 1963. Hayes, William C. The Scepter of Egypt: A Background for the Study of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part I: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Middle Kingdom. New York, 1953Flayes, William C. The Scepter of Egypt: A Background for the Study of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of An. Part II: The Hyksos Period and the New Kingdom (1675-1080 B.C.). New York, 1959. Loud, Gordon. The Megiddo Ivories. Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 52. Chicago, 1939. Manuelin, Peter der. "Furniture." In Egypt's Golden Age: The Art of Living in the New Kingdom 1558-1085 B.C. Boston, 1982.
Mallowan, Max. Nimrud and its Remains. Vol. 2. London, 1966. Strommenger, Eva, and Max Hirmer. 5000 Years of the Art of Meso potamia. New York, 1964. Yadin, Yigael. Hazor II: An Account of the Second Season of Excavations, 956. Jerusalem, i960. Yadin, Yigael. Hazor II: An Account of the 'Third and Fourth Seasons of Excavations, 1957-1958. Jerusalem, 1961, !
HAROLD A. LIEBOWITZ
Furnishings of t h e B r o n z e a n d Iron Ages A discussion of the furniture and furnishings of Bronze Age Canaan and Iron Age Israel requires familiarity not only with the artifacts themselves, but also with the types of ac tivities that took place in the Canaanite and Israelite home. The primary purpose of housing was to supply a safe venue for sleeping and eating, but houses in antiquity were also the locus of other important activities that varied according to geographic and social setting. Rural and urban dwellers, pastoralists, farmers, and merchants, nuclear and extended families all required different configurations of domestic quarters and different furniture and furnishings to support their requisite specialized activities. Financial well-being and social class also affected the ability of Canaanites and Isra elites to furnish their houses with both utilitarian objects and objects of beauty. Canaanite and Israelite houses incorporated many stan dard features. They were typically one or two stories high, with access to the second story provided by stairs or a ladder. T h e roof, reached by a ladder, often functioned as a terrace. A large central space in which multiple activities took place was common in Bronze and Iron Age housing. It is often difficult, however, to determine whether this space was roofed (living room) or unroofed (courtyard). Even small, one-storied houses provided multiple loca tions for various domestic activities. A room used for foodrelated chores and other tasks during the day often served as a sleeping area at night. Domestic activities also took place in the courtyard and other outdoor areas. In many houses, the roof provided an additional venue for daytime chores, socializing, and sleeping. Because garment production was often a domestic activ ity, a number of specialized tasks, including carding, spin ning, weaving, and sewing, took place in Canaanite and Is raelite homes. There is little evidence for where in a home a loom would have been located, but other tools for textile production—ceramic spinning bowls, whorls and loom weights; bone picks/shuttles, needles, spindles, and awls— are commonly found. Roof maintenance required roof rollers: large cylindrical stones used to flatten rooftops and make roofing materials compact. Rollers were left on the rooftops, along with tools for other rooftop projects. Additional tools for housecleaning and maintenance, as well as for agricultural and live stock-related activities, were sometimes stored in small first-
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tombs. A wooden bed was found in one Jericho tomb, but in homes rush mats more commonly provided the sleeping surface. Stools have also been found, but only rarely. T a bletops were made of wood; the seats of stools and the large horizontal surfaces of beds were of woven materials. Stone and metal sculpture, remnants of furniture, and pieces of ivory inlay were found at LB Megiddo, Tell elFar'ah (South), and Hazor and at Iron Age Samaria. Sen nacherib's reliefs of the plunder of Lachish include depic tions of furniture. Because the context of most of these pieces is either sacred or royal, and most of the represen tations are of thrones, this furniture cannot be considered typical for the average Canaanite or Israelite house. Additional evidence for furniture has been excavated in Iron Age tombs at Beth-Shemesh, Lachish, and Tekoa, as well as at Samaria trench E207 and in Jerusalem Cave 1 (Holland, 1977; Tufnell, 1953). At these sites, Iron Age clay models of furniture (chairs, beds, and couches) imitate the simple forms of the full-sized originals. Kitchen Furnishings. Other tiran sleeping, the most ba sic activities that took place in the Canaanite and Israelite house were food storage, preparation, and consumption. Ar chaeological remains of indoor food-centered activities from tire Middle and Late Bronze Ages account for more than 90 percent of the artifacts excavated for those periods. There is no evidence to suggest that this is significantly different F U R N I T U R E A N D F U R N I S H I N G S : Bronze and Iron Ages. Carbon for the Iron Age. ized wood armrest of an Assyrian chairfrom Ebla, with shell decoration. Installations associated with food preparation, consump Dated from 2400 to 2250 BCE. National Museum, Aleppo, Syria. tion, and storage included ovens and/or hearths, benches (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) and/or shelves and bins, storage jars fixed in place, silos, floor "closets" that opened into dre central living space or the courtyard. Certain of the furnishings of Bronze and Iron Age houses were constructed as part of the houses themselves. Such furnishings were permanent fixtures, reused over decades and longer. They include benches and shelves raised above floors, niches cut into walls, depressions or rings of stones set into floors to support storage jars, and cooldng pots and storejars partially sunk into floors. F u r n i t u r e . In antiquity, furniture was not considered in dispensable to domestic comfort. What furniture there was was most often constructed of a combination of organic ma terials such as wood, rush, ivory, and leather. In conse quence, few examples of domestic furniture are available for study; those that are preserved come primarily from tombs. Many well-preserved pieces of furniture were found in tire late MB tombs at Jericho. Economic status determined tomb contents, but most contained a limited assortment of fur nishings. Included were low rectangular tables with three legs, beds, stools, and small tables. T h e legs varied in form from simple to decorated; most were geometrical in shape. Wooden tables were tire most typical furniutre in the Jericho
Bronze and Iron Ages. Drawing of a Phoenician ivory throne from tomb 79 in Salamis, Cyprus. The F U R N I T U R E AND F U R N I S H I N G S :
ivory was set directly onto a wooden frame. Dated to the late eighth century BCE. (After Karageorghis, 1969: plate 6)
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cisterns, and/or pits. Because most of these installations had multiple functions, the best identifier for the location of food-related activities is tire oven. In the Middle Bronze Age, less than 5 percent of courtyards contained ovens, indicating that most cooking took place indoors. At the same time, seasonal considerations undoubtedly influenced the locus of food-related activities. Tools for processing foodstuffs were permanent domestic features and include querns and grinding stones, mortar and pesdes, pounders, and blades. The ceramic assemblage in cluded cookware such as baldng trays, mixing bowls, and cooking pots; serving vessels such as kraters, jugs, and juglets; and shallow bowls from which food was eaten. Food products, including grains, were commonly stored indoors in covered or lidless storage jars placed in stands on the floor or set into depressions in it. Bins were built above ground, in corners of rooms, or against walls. Silos, cylin drical or bell-shaped, lined with plaster-coated stone or brick, were also used to store food products. Crudely ex cavated pits were occasionally used for storage and for re fuse. The ceramic assemblage associated witir food and wa ter storage (in in-house cisterns) included small jars and juglets for dipping, scoops and small bowls for scooping, and funnels and strainers. Various aspects of wine making and milk processing took place in houses or in courtyard areas. Other food prepara tion, including tire slaughtering of animals and the initial processing of grains, took place outdoors, often in venues other than the family courtyard. It is often assumed that animals were kept in or around houses, although little evidence from tire Middle and Late Bronze Ages supports this idea. Animal care required stor age bins for feed and troughs and mangers in which to place water and food. Containers. Containers of various sorts were commonly found in Bronze and Iron Age houses. They were used to hold cosmetics, jewelry, combs, mirrors, and other personal items, as well as hand tools and other small items. Baskets and decorative pottery and wood, ivory, and leather con tainers have all been found in domestic settings. L a m p s and H e a r t h s . In Bronze and Iron Age houses heartirs were used for indoor heating. In the Iron Age, die houses of the wealthy often contained braziers (firepans of metal or clay). In both periods artificial lighting was obtained from ceramic lamps. Sometimes lamps were placed in niches built into the walls; alternatively, they stood on shelves, benches, tables and stools, or on the floor. [See Lamps.] Business transactions often took place in Canaanite and Israelite houses. Furniture used for these transactions in cluded tables, stools and benches used for seating and writ ing, and shelves and special containers for storing docu ments and materials. Artifactual evidence of business dealings includes weights, cylinder seals, and scarabs.
The primary biblical source for the discussion of furniture from ancient Israel is 2 Kings 4:10. In this passage, an un named Shunammite woman fitted out an upper-story cham ber for the prophet Elisha. In it she placed a bed (mittd), a table (sulhari), a seat (kise), and a lamp (menord). The Bible also documents Hebrew terminology for several additional parts of houses and items of furniture. [Most of the individual sites mentioned are the subject of in dependent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Beebe, H. Keith. "Ancient Palestinian Dwellings." Biblical Archaeologist 31.2 (1968): 38-58. Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 123. Sheffield, 1992. Daviau, Paulette M. Michele. Houses and Their Furnishings in Bronze Age Palestine: Domestic Activity Areas and Artifact Distribution in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Sheffield, 1993. Holladay, John S., Jr. "House, Israelite." In the Anchor-Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman, vol. 3, pp. 308-318. New York, 1992. Holland, Thomas A. "A Study of Palestinian Iron Age Baked Clay Figurines, with Special Reference to Jerusalem: Cave 1." Levant 9 (1977): 121-155. Kenyon, Kathleen M. Excavations at Jericho, vol. 1, The Tombs Exca vated in 1952-54. London, i960. Kenyon, Kathleen M. Archaeology in the Holy Land. 3d ed. New York, 1970. Tufnell, Olga. Lachish III: The Iron Age. London, 1953. BETH ALPERT NAKHAI
Furnishings of the Persian P e r i o d Some remains of furniture and large assemblages of metalware, alabaster, faience, and glass have been found in oc cupational strata and in tombs of the Persian period in Palestine (sixth-fourth century BCE). Favorable trade con ditions seem to have been the stimulus for the sudden in crease in luxury articles during that period. T h e objects re flect the society's standard of living, technical capability, and artistic level, as well as dre foreign influences current in Pal estine. Of these objects, most were imported—from Persia, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Greece—and are examples of the crafts in which a high level of skill and production had been achieved in their country of origin: alabaster, faience, mir rors, and cosmetic utensils from Egypt; weapons and gold jewelry from Cyprus; weapons and cosmetic articles from Greece; and furniture, decorated metal bowls, and jewelry from Phoenicia. The importation of luxury items seems to have inhibited local production and stifled its growth. T h e small number of objects that can be attributed to a Palestin ian source are generally inferior in quality and workmanship and are imitations of foreign (Persian or Greek) models. In a tomb (no. 650) at Tell el-Far'ah (South), a great deal of metalware was discovered, including the bronze joints of
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A clay mold discovered by the Harvard expeditions to Sa maria may be further proof that this material originated in Samaria. T h e mold, in two parts, is strikingly similar to the bronze cylinder mentioned above. It might also have been used to cast the cylindrical sections of a throne's legs. A pair of bronze candelabra were found on the floor of the tomb of tire Sidonian ldng Tabnit, from the beginning of tire Persian period. T h e candelabra are some 1.5 m high and are entirely Phoenician in style since their design and technique continue the type, in bronze and ivory, found in late Iron Age graves in the Phoenician cemetery at Salamis on Cyprus. Two other large bronze candelabra, one of dis tinctly Phoenician manufacture and the other of Persian or igin, were found side by side in a fifth-century BCE tomb at Shechem. Many household utensils from the Persian period made of metal, alabaster, and faience have been uncovered. They mainly include bronze and silver bowls, but a small, threelegged bronze pot (about 15 cm high) was found in a tomb in Gaza that resembles larger examples of much finer work manship also known from Iron Age Phoenician graves at Persian Period. Figure i. Stool, reconstructed after its bronze joints. From a Persian-period tomb (no.
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS:
650) at Tell el-Far'ah (South). (Courtesy Israel Museum; provided by E. Stern)
a couch and stool (see figure 1 ) ; the furniture's wooden parts were not preserved. Following cleaning and restoration, the bronze was studied by J. H. Iliffe, who recognized dre style of dre furniture—and in particular the pairing of a stool and couch—from its frequent depiction on Greek pottery, sug gesting a Greek origin. Cleaning revealed several Phoenician letters incised on some of tire joints, one letter in each corner. The marks were apparently intended to implement the as sembly of tire parts (like tire use made of masons' marks). T h e Phoenician letters in turn suggest that tire furniture was produced in a Phoenician workshop that may have special ized in imitations of luxury imports. Fragments of an Achaemenid throne from Samaria were studied by Tadmor (1974), who concluded that, despite its Achaemenid style, it had been produced in Samaria. Three of its components—two bronze lion's paws 13.7 cm high (see figure 2) and a bronze cylinder 22 cm high—are now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. They were acquired in Samaria, where they allegedly had been found. These bronzes were probably also manufactured in Samaria, a Per sian province and the seat of its governors and therefore a likely location for objects that reflect Persian imperial art. A throne so similar to that used by the Achaemenid kings might have belonged to their representative, the governor of Samaria, with close connections to the Persian court. Similar bronze paws found in other parts of tire Persian Empire such as Egypt and southern Russia strengthen this assumption.
Persian Period. Figure 2. Bronze leg of a governor's throne. From Samaria. Note the end in die shape of a lion's paw. (Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority) FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS:
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Salamis. The vessels discovered in Palestine date mainly to the first part of the Persian period (end of the sixth and the fifth centuries BCE) and bear a strong resemblance to con temporary bowls found in Persia proper—at Persepolis, Susa, and Ecbatana. Some of tiiese bowls may have been imported from manufacturing centers in Persia (which ex celled in the production of metalware), but there is no doubt that the majority came from Phoenician centers of produc tion on the Syrian coast. It appears that in the Persian period die Phoenicians primarily copied Achaemenid designs, rather than the Assyrian or Egyptian motifs that had served them as prototypes in earlier periods. Phoenicia was also the source of other metal vessels in Palestine, such as jugs, chal ices, ladles, and strainers, which were rendered in a similar Achaemenid style. The most common cosmetic article found was the mirror, of which two types have been distinguished: one of Egyptian origin and the other Cypriot. Kohl utensils, imported from Egypt, are frequentiy found in women's graves. T h e mirrors are of bronze, bone, wood, or paste. Only kohl sticks have been preserved, for the most part; kohl tubes are rarely found. Persian period tombs also contained many scores of alabaster vessels of two types: alabastra, or bottles, and flatbased, small bowls. T h e alabastra vary in shape from long and narrow to broad and squat and apparently held different amounts of oil or perfume. On several, probably containers for spices or bath oils, the amounts are designated on the outside. Small alabaster bowls appear less frequentiy and may have been used for grinding spices. In this period they seem to have replaced the well-attested Iron Age limestone bowls decorated with incised geometric motifs. T h e general consensus among archaeologists is that the alabaster vessels originated in Egypt, which possessed a long tradition of ex pert craftsmen in this field. After what had been an extended period of decline, the manufacture of alabaster objects was revived in Egypt at the end of the Babylonian period. I. BenDor's study of these vessels revealed that the majority were imported; only a small group of crude examples was made out of the local alabaster. Similar vessels in other materials— such as glass, pottery, and bone—may also have been pro duced locally. It can be assumed that the Palestinian man ufacture of these vessels was renewed as a result of its resumption in Egypt because they generally imitate the Egyptian prototypes of the time. [See also Ecbatana; Far'ah, Tell el- (South); Persepolis; Persians; Salamis; Shechem; and Susa.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ben-Dor, I. "Palestinian Alabaster Vases." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities, Palestine n (1945). Discussion of the alabaster finds in Palestine. Gubel, Eric. Phoenician Furniture. Studia Phoenicia, 7. Louvain, 1987. Essay on fine development of furniture in the Levant. Iliffe, J. H. "A Tell el Far'a Tomb Group Reconsidered." Quarterly of
the Department of Antiquities, Palestine 4: 182-186. Discussion of the furniture finds at Tell el-Far'ah (South). Tadmor, Miriam. "Fragments of an Achaemenid Throne from Sa maria." Israel Exploration Journal 24 (1974): 37-43. Publication of the unique throne found in Samaria. EPHRAIM STERN
Furnishings of the Hellenistic, R o m a n , and Byzantine Periods The furniture of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine pe riods developed directly out of earlier classical Greek traditions. The major types of furniture include the throne (solium), chair with a curved back (cathedra), stool or bench (subsellium), couch (lectus), footstool (scamnum; suppedarium), table (mensa), chest (area, arcula, cista, capsa, scrinium, loculus), shelf (pegma, loculamentum, pluteus), cupboard (armar ium), and sideboard (abacus). These types occur throughout the hellenized world and in the later Roman Empire, well into the Early Islamic periods in the ancient Near East. Fur niture and its components are uniform in widely separated parts of the Roman world, from Britain in the west, to North Africa in the south, and Asia Minor and Syria-Palestine in the east. Furniture was crafted out of various types of wood, stone (especially marble), and bronze. The wealthy often had furniture, especially beds, out of more precious metals, such as silver or even gold, and prided themselves on pieces inlaid with ivory or gems. Furnishings such as mattresses, pillows, covers, curtains, draperies, and canopies were dec orative accessories for couches and chairs, adding to their comfort. What is known of ancient furniture and furnishings in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods comes from three principal sources. Occasionally, pieces have been re covered from excavations, mostly from Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy, but less frequentiy from sites in North Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria-Palestine. More nu merous are Roman and Byzantine reliefs, wall paintings, sculpture, and mosaics that depict furniture, albeit mainly of the wealthy classes. [See Wall Paintings; Mosaics.] T h e largest collection of reliefs and wall paintings depicting fur niture and furnishings in the Near East comes from the east ern Roman cities of Palmyra and Dura-Europos in Syria. [See Palmyra; Dura-Europos.] Lastly, contemporary au thors, especially Pliny and Pollux, provide detailed descrip tions of furniture. Later rabbinic writings, such as the Mishnah and Talmud also are an important source of in formation on the furniture in use during the Late Roman and Byzantine periods in Roman Palestine. Chairs. Several different types of chairs are known. T h e throne, with four turned or rectangular legs and solid sides, and the armchair, popular in the Roman period, were used mainly for official or public occasions. This type of seat did not usually appear in a domestic context. Latin authors,
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods such as Martial (3.63.7) in the first-century CE describe the cathedra, a chair with a curved back, as essentially a woman's chair. Depictions of banqueting scenes confirm this descrip tion, portraying men reclined on couches and women often seated on chairs or stools. In a funerary plaque of the midsecond century CE depicting a banqueting scene from Pal myra, Malku's wife (Malku was an important Palmyrene) sits on a cathedra. From the end of the second century CE, a Palmyran relief shows tire goddess Leto seated on a similar basket chair. The cathedra was also used as a litter for the wealthy. Two types of stools, one with perpendicular legs and a second with folding legs, are known from the classical Greek world and continued to be used commonly in the Roman period. One of dre few existing examples of a Roman-period stool is represented by a wooden leg excavated at Rifeh, Egypt. A cross-legged stool with a seated woman appears on a wall painting depicting a banquet in a private house at Dura-Europos; a similar stool appears in tire third-century CE scene of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba from the Dura-Europos synagogue. On a Palmyran second-century CE tessera (a small token issued for ritual banquets for the distribution of food stuffs), an artisan is shown seated on a folding stool. Often, stools were elaborately decorated with carved animal-head finials and terminated witir animal feet, such as in tire early third-century CE honorific statue of Ogeilu from Palmyra. Benches were the most common form of seating in antiq uity. T h e third-second-century BCE Roman writer Plautus (Stichus 2.36) describes benches as the seats of tire "hum ble." Later rabbinic sources mention benches on many oc casions in different contexts, including benches in private houses (Tosefta, Ber. 4.8; see also Tosefta, B. Q. 2.9 for a legal discussion regarding a broken bench). Erwin R. Goodenough (1953-1968, vol. 1, p. 106) even suggests that most Jews of this period preferred eating on benches rather than couches, although rabbinic sources refer to dining on couches (Tosefta Ber. 4.8). Couches. The couch was used for reclining at meals (lectus tricliniaris), for sleeping (lectus cubicularis), and for read ing or writing (lecticula lucubratoria). An additional nondomestic function of the couch was at funerary banquets. During the classical Greek period, beds had either rectan gular or turned legs. In the Roman period, turned legs ap peared more commonly, probably on couches of tire more well-to-do. Simple couches, or beds, included legs on which a rectangular frame and flat surface, probably of interlaced leather cording, was constructed; bedding was placed on top. Later, head- and footboards were added that became higher and more elaborate in the Roman period. Occasion ally, a couch with a back appears. Couches varied in height, from those that are lower than modern beds to those that are much higher, even requiring a footstool to reach the sur face. Though most of what is known about couches depicts
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and describes the dining couch, it should be noted that the bed is mentioned in rabbinic sources as an essential piece of furniture in all households—not just for the wealthy (see, e.g., Tosefta Ket. 6.8, which states that the community had to provide a bed to an orphan setting up his household). The dining couch was usually arranged in groups of tirree, as indicated by the Greek word for the dining room, triclin ium (from the Gk., Mine, "couch"). Couches were often arranged in a horseshoe-shaped or semicircular arrange ment, with shared tables or one placed next to each couch. Tosefta Ber. 5.5-7 describes the appropriate seating ar rangement where the middle couch, the lectus medius, was reserved for tire most honored guest. T h e placement of the couches tiremselves is sometimes indicated in the mosaic pavement of the triclinium, as in the recentiy excavated Dionysos mosaic in an atrium building from Sepphoris, Is rael, dating to tire third century CE. [See Sepphoris.] Con temporary depictions demonstrate that a mattress was placed on top of dre couch with one or two pillows to sup port the reclining diners. No complete couch used in a domestic setting has sur vived. A few fragments of wooden couches have been pre served in Egypt's dry climate, including two pairs of legs and parts of three top rails on display in the Berlin Museum (incorrectly restored as a stool). A pair of lion-headed couch legs (originally belonging to a funerary couch?) from Illahun, Egypt, and several otirers, whose provenance is un known, have also been preserved (Petrie, 1927). A few more pairs of legs from Roman Egypt are die only lathe-turned couch legs of the kind imitated in other materials and ap pearing in reliefs, wall paintings, and sculpture of the period. Pieces of a marble couch (second century BCE) were found at Pergamon in Turkey. [See Pergamon.] In contrast, a rel atively large number of bronze couch fittings, including ful cra (head- and footboards), turned legs, and parts of sheath ing for rails, have been found in North Africa and Asia Minor. [See North Africa.] T h e central part of the couch, which was originally constructed of wood, has not been pre served. One of tire richest collections of bronze components from couches was discovered in Volubilis, Morocco (Boube-Picot, i960). These Roman couches are similar to those found at first-century CE Pompeii and Fferculaneum. Other parts of bronze couches, dating to the HellenisticRoman periods, have been found at Lixus (Morocco), Mahdiyya (Tunisia), Alexandria (Egypt), and Pergamon andPriene (Turkey). [See Alexandria; Priene.] Popular motifs for the finials of the fulcra belonging to these couches include the heads of mules, horses, satyrs, maenads, swans, ducks, geese, lions, elephants, and dogs and figures of Aphrodite. Heads of mules, often witir gar lands, were especially common; Latin authors, such as Ju venal (11.96.98), refer to ornamental garlanded asses' heads on dining couches. Decorations typically incised on the frame of a couch include floral and geometric patterns.
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FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods
Couches are seen usually in banqueting scenes and on tombstones depicting funerary banquet motifs. The scenes reached their peak in popularity in the second and third cen turies CE. From Palmyra, one very detailed and monumental depiction from a foundation relief for Kitot (40 CE) shows a couch with turned legs and a very thick, richly decorated mattress and pillow. In tire third century CE entire banquet ing scenes of groups of diners appeared on Palmyran tombs. One well-preserved example is the banqueting scene from the tomb of Malku (c. 200 CE). In one of tire private houses at Dura-Europos, a banqueting scene shows three guests with garlands above them reclining on a couch and propped on pillows. Several beds appear in the third-century CE Dura-Europos synagogue wall paintings—beds with turned legs, upon which Jacob is propped with large pillows, are illustrated in two scenes of Jacob's Blessing; a canopied bed with animal legs appears in the scene of Elijah reviving the widow's son. Footstools. In order to mount couches and some types of chairs, footstools were necessary. Often the stools ended in animal paws or were even whole figures. A second type of footstool was rectangular and box shaped. Footstools are often shown in Roman- and Byzantine-period depictions, either with beds, as in Jacob's Blessing (see above) or with thrones, as in David, "king over all Israel," both scenes from the Dura-Europos synagogue wall paintings. Tables. The Roman-period table had many more func tions than it did in tire preceding Greek period, where the most common three-legged rectangular table was used chiefly for dining. Many types of tables are known, including altar tables, honorary tables, funerary tables, domestic cult tables, apotropaic tables, dining tables, bedroom tables, ta bles as statue bases, tables for drinking vessels, and tables in shops. However, in tire domestic context, tables were still used mostly for eating and serving meals. G. M. A. Richter (1906) distinguishes five main categories of tables: rectan gular tables with three legs; rectangular tables with four legs; rounded tables with three legs; rounded or rectangular tables on a single support; and rectangular tables on two solid sup ports. All five types are known from contemporary depic tions. Tables were often constructed of wood or stone, in cluding marble, or a combination of the two, as mentioned in the Tosefta (Kel, B. B. 1.10). Rabbinic sources (Mishnah, Shab. 21.3) also speak of portable tables that could be dismantled. A few wooden tables are known from Egypt. The bestpreserved example is an elegant wooden round tabletop with three legs, dated to tire Hellenistic period, from Luxor, Egypt. The legs of the table are in the shape of water birds at the top, with canine three-clawed feet at the base. A sec ond circular turned wooden tabletop was recovered from Faiyum, Egypt. Stone tables, mainly out of marble, are found in large numbers throughout the Roman Empire, especially from
Pompeii and Herculaneum. Marble tables—and marble fur niture and sculpture in general—begin to appear in secondcentury BCE domestic contexts and coincide with the rise of the more materialistic society of imperial Rome. Colored marble was especially prized by the upper classes of Roman society. Several stone tables from domestic contexts were discov ered in first-century BCE-first century CE contexts in exca vations in the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City (Avigad, 1983). [See Jerusalem.] The tabletops and supports were locally produced out of soft limestone, hard reddish Jerusalem limestone, a black bituminous stone, or imported black granite—similar to contemporary marble tables found at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The two types of stone tables found in Jerusalem are a round table on three low legs and a rectangular table on a high central support. T h e round tables from the Jewish Quarter measure about 50 cm in diameter. Three depressions are visible on the un derside of the tabletops, where three wooden legs had been attached (Avigad, 1983). Based on Hellenistic and Roman paintings and reliefs, the legs most likely were in tire form of animal legs, such as are depicted in a Hellenistic tomb at Mareshah/Marisa in Israel and on several Herodian coins. [See Mareshah.] In contemporary depictions, these round tables with three legs are usually shown used at meals, sur rounded by guests reclining on couches. However, it is note worthy that in reliefs from Palmyra, three-legged tables ap pear only rarely in banqueting scenes. T h e rectangular table on a single support, corresponding to Richter's fourth type, was extremely rare in classical and Hellenistic Greece (Richter, 1906). According to the firstcentury BCE Roman military historian Livy (39.6), the table with one leg was one of the types of furniture among the booty brought from Asia Minor and first introduced to Rome during Roman campaigns in the second century BCE. The first-century BCE Roman scholar Varro describes a ta bletop resting on a single small column upon which bronze vessels were placed. Rabbinic sources (Tosefta, Kel, B. B. 3.4) also mention tables with one support in tire context of a halakhic ruling regarding tire contamination of tables by unclean liquids. The rectangular tabletops excavated in the Jewish Quarter measure about 45 X 85 cm and rested on a single leg that was shaped like a column. The edges of these tables often were decorated in relief on three sides. T h e motifs include stylized wreath, meander and rosette, laurel sprig, and otirer geometric and floral decorations, similar to those designs on furniture depicted in the Palmyran reliefs (see above). A fish with meander and floral decorations is the only faunal motif found in Herodian-period Jerusalem. T h e rectangular tables with a single leg were used as serving tables to hold drinking vessels, as is illustrated in a relief decoration on tire edge of a stone tabletop purchased on the Jerusalem antiquities mar ket (Avigad, 1983).
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods Marble rectangular tabletops resting on two solid trans verse supports are known in large numbers from Italy. This table, used primarily for outdoor functions, corresponds to Richter's fifth type (Richter, 1906). It had Hellenistic ante cedents, as is indicated by its occurrence at Pergamon, and elsewhere in the second century BCE. Containers a n d Shelves. Several different furniture types were used for storage and display: chests, cupboards, sideboards, and wall shelving. T h e cupboard probably ap pears for the first time in the Hellenistic period. Cupboards were usually rectangular, with either a gabled or flat top two doors tiiat reached from top to bottom. T h e interior had shelving, on which items were placed. T h e Torah shrine, a type of ceremonial cupboard used for the storage of scrolls in synagogues, is shown in numerous depictions, including mosaic pavements and the Dura-Europos synagogue wall paintings. [See Synagogues.] T h e sideboard was in two parts: the lower section was a table on which shelving was constructed. It was another type of furniture tiiat, according to Latin authors Livy (39.6.7) and Pliny (36.8.14), was brought to Rome following the Roman conquest of Asia Mi nor in 187 BCE. Furnishings. By modern standards, ancient furniture and furnishings in their domestic setting would be considered scanty. T h e interiors of large mansions were decorated with wall paintings, stucco, and mosaics. T h e walls of simpler domiciles were covered with mud plaster. Wall paintings were designed to be decorative and often were related to a room's function. Frescoes from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome are the most important source of information about this ldnd of decor. T h e four "styles" of Pompeian wall paintings still provide the framework for the classification of all Roman-period frescoes. From Roman Palestine, numerous wall paintings and fresco fragments in the Pompeian "architectural" or Second Style have been uncovered in late first-century BCE Herodian-period build ings at Jerusalem, Masada, Jericho, Herodium, and Samaria. At Jericho, ceramic vessels containing remains of the ground pigment powders used in the wall paintings indicate tiiat the Jericho artist was familiar with Roman techniques and ma terials. Stucco refers to a slow-setting lime plaster used for pro ducing a hard, durable surface or a quick-setting gypsum plaster used for producing sharp impressions. Stucco dec oration originated in the Hellenistic cities of Asia Minor and reached Rome late in the Flellenistic period. Molded stucco was applied for ornamental purposes to the walls and ceil ings of the mansions and palaces of the wealthy, reaching its peak in popularity during Late Republican times. Dec oration in stucco appears throughout the Roman Empire. In Judea (Judah) in the late Second Temple period (first century BCE-70 CE), the walls of several mansions and pal aces in Jerusalem, on Masada, and at Herodium were dec orated with white-stucco ornamentation, imitating ashlar
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masonry. Pieces of stucco from a coffered ceiling with geo metric ornamentation were recovered from the Herodian mansion in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem (Avigad, 1983). Other types of furnishings, being of perishable organic materials, are rarely preserved in the archaeological record. The main sources of information about them are from sev eral ancient lexicographers (Hesychios, Suidas, Pollux), who mention mattresses, pillows, mats, covers, curtains, and draperies, supplemented by contemporary depictions of these objects. Couches are usually shown with a mattress covered with a richly decorated fabric and one or two pil lows, on which the guest reclines. A leather mattress, prob ably similar to those on beds and couches, was excavated in association with Hellenistic coffins in the Jericho cemetery from the Second Temple period (Killebrew and Hachlili, 1983). Valances and loose draperies and, occasionally, can opies over the couch are portrayed in sculpture, wall reliefs, and wall paintings. From fragments of textiles that have been recovered at Palmyra, Dura-Europos, and several sites in Egypt, it is pos sible to reconstruct many aspects of these furnishings. [See Textiles, article on Textiles in the Classical Period.] The main materials used to manufacture these furnishings in clude wool, linen, camel hair, cotton, silk, leather, and sheepskin. Wool was the material used most commonly for mattress and cushion covers. Many of the second- and third-century CE fabrics from Palmyra and Dura-Europos were probably woven and embroidered in Roman Syria. The largest collection of textiles dates to Roman and Islamic Egypt, or to what are referred to as Coptic textiles. Among these preserved pieces are fabrics used for cushion and mat tress covers, draperies, and wall hangings. Popular designs included floral, geometric, and figurative motifs, sometimes in a medallion pattern. They resemble the patterns used in other media, such as in contemporary mosaic pavements and in stucco, the ornamentation of walls and ceiling coffers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, Naliman. Discovering Jerusalem. Nashville, 1983. Popular ac count of the excavations in the Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem, including a description of the furniture and furnishings discovered in the He- odian mansions. Boube-Piccot, Christiane. "Les lits de bronze de Mauretaine tingitane." Bulletin d'Archeologie Marocaine 4 (i960): 189-286. Extensive discussion of bronze couches from Volubilis, Morocco. Colledge, Malcolm A. R. The Art of Palmyra. Boulder, Colo., 1976. General volume, including numerous depictions of furniture of the Roman period. Goodenough, Erwin R. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. 13 vols. New York, 1953-1968. Basic reference work for Jewish art dur ing die Greco-Roman period; volumes 1-9, dealing with Dura-Eu ropos, are especially relevant. Hill, D. K. "Ivory Ornaments of Hellenistic Couches." Hesperia 32 (1963): 293-300. Description of elements of Hellenistic- and Ro man-period couches. Killebrew, Ann, and Rachel Hachlili. "Jewish Funerary Customs during
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the Second Temple Period, in Light of the Excavations at the Jericho Necropolis." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 115 (1983): 109-132. Moss, Christopher F. "Roman Marble Tables." 4 vols. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1988. Detailed discussion, typology, and cat alog of Roman-period marble tables. Perkins, Ann. The Art of Dura-Europos. Oxford, 1973. General survey. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Objects of Daily Use. London, 1927. Catalog of objects from ancient Egypt, including furniture and furniture fit tings. Ransom, Caroline L. Studies in Ancient Furniture: Couches and Beds of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Chicago, 1905. Extremely useful but somewhat dated. Richter, Gisela M. A. The Furniture of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Ro mans. London, 1906. Still the standard work. Thompson, Deborah. Coptic Textiles in the Brooklyn Museum. Brook lyn, 1971. Good introductory book. Vermeule, Cornelius C. "Bench and Table Supports: Roman Egypt and Beyond." In Studies in Ancient Egypt, the Aegean, and the Sudan: Essays in Honor of Dows Dunham on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday, edited by William Kelly Simpson and Whitney M. Davis, pp. 180192. Boston, 1981. Discussion focuses on depictions from Italy. Veyne, Paul, ed. A Histoiy of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., 1987. General work on different aspects of daily life. Weitzmann, Kurt, and Herbert L. Kessler. The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art. Washington, D.C., 1990. In-depth dis cussion. Zevulun, Uzah, and Yae! Olnik. Function and Design in the Talmudic Period. Tel Aviv, 1979. Catalog of an exhibition at Haaretz Museum, Tel Aviv, on daily life in the Talmudic period, based on archaeolog ical evidence and rabbinic sources.
function of the cushions, apart from providing comfort to those who used them, was probably to introduce color to the interior, to contrast with the surrounding monochro matic desert landscape found in many countries in the Is lamic world. T h e proper bed (firash) was a single piece of furnishing tiiat was long enough to stretch out on and was usually kept apart from a family's daytime quarters. Some times the firash was made of costly materials, such as im ported silks; in many cases a less expensive local fabric was used. T h e covers for die bed included a padlike collection of fabric called barda'a. T h e proper blanket was tire lihaf, which was stored in a chest during the day (it also carried a symbolic meaning of "conjugal blanket," and for tiris reason was the most precious item of furnishing). T h e lihaf was usually made of Byzantine or Maghribi brocade or of a spe cial type of damask called siqlatun. A multicolored killa (a "canopy" or "mosquito net") made of fine linen completed tire bed's nighttime outfit.
ANN KILLEBREW
Furnishings of the Islamic Period As a general rule, the interior of houses in the Islamic world contained very lime furniture but plenty of furnishings. The most dominant feature apparent at a glance on entering a home—be it in the Maghrib or the Mashriq—was a profu sion of muldcolored fabrics scattered on the floors or hang ing from the ceiling. T h e best carpet took pride of place on dre sadr (the wall opposite the main entrance of a room and its most prestigious side), either covering it or spread in front of it. Placed against the sadr was the martaba (lit., "step"), a sort of sofa for seating during the day, composed of piles of fabrics and cushions and bolsters of diverse types ar ranged to enhance comfort. In more modest households, tire martaba was replaced by a single piece of furnishing, die matrah, a word from which the English mattress is derived together witii its Italian, French, and German equivalents. The most expensive furnishing, for the quality of its fab rics, usually silk produced in Tabaristan, was the majlis ("seat," also the name for the sitting or living room) that replaced the martaba in the houses of wealthy families. The interior of the home was very much enlivened by the colorful cushions and bolsters on sofas and divans and on the floors, which were covered with simple mats. The cushions, usually quadrangular or oblong rather than round, were covered with fabrics with motifs of flowers, animals, and birds. T h e
Islamic Period. Figure 1. Wool textile fragment. Possibly a curtain from eighth-century Iran or Iraq, 18.75 12 in. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1950, 50.83)
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: x
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: Islamic Period In the house there were many curtains (Ar., sutur) and hangings, also expensive furnishings (see figure i ) . They were not used to prevent too much light from filtering through windows, however: in the Islamic world, pierced screens performed that function and also allowed ventila tion. Where wood was scarce, though, such as in Egypt and in the Maghrib, curtains replaced doors, serving as portieres, and probably covered open bookcases and multiple recesses in walls. In Anatolia and in the eastern Islamic countries, where wood was more abundant and less expensive, doors were certainly more common than curtains. In private homes, curtains were hung across a room to allow privacy, when needed; otherwise they were raised, to make a room more spacious. T h e sources have transmitted many stories in which curtains are mentioned, among which tire most famous is that concerning the palaces of tire 'A.bbasid caliph al-Muqtadir (r. 908-932 CE): the palaces were covered with thirty-eight thousand curtains made of gold brocade em broidered with gold and adorned with representations of el ephants, horses, camels, lions, and birds (Khatib al-Baghdadl, b. 1071 CE, quoted in Lassner, 1970, pp. 88-89). Umayyad princes had a curtain drawn between them and their audience (Grabar, 1987, p. 149). One of them, the fu ture caliph al-WalTd II (from 743 CE), had a curtain drawn across a pool filled with wine, into which he would dive after each song performed by a singer on the other side of tire curtain (Serjeant, 1972, p. 203). T h e best curtains were pro duced at Basinna in Khuzistan; Bahnasa in Egypt; Mawsil in northern Jazira; Wasit in Iraq; and Tirmah in Transoxiana, among other places. T h e curtains were usually in scribed with an embroidered tiraz (calligraphic decorative band) attesting to their place of manufacture (Gervers, 1977. PP- 74-75). Carpets (namat, tunfusa, bisat) were also commonly found in houses, especially in tire eastern Islamic countries, where they were produced in great number. T h e best were as prized as the most expensive textiles; carpets, like textiles, were placed over mats to cover the floor almost entirely. A room's carpet arrangements were completed by long, small rugs laid between the entrance door and the central carpet (the best of tire house, placed in front of tire sadr) in order to protect its edge; such small carpets were called 'atabas (lit., "doorsill" or "threshold"). A special function of the carpet was religious. Ernst Herzfeld's reconsu-uction of the arrangement of carpets in tire audience hall of the 'Abbasid caliphs shows a large frontal carpet (the sadr) bordered on its sides by two runners called musallas ("prayer carpets") that show an arched pattern symbolizing multiple prayer niches (Herzfeld, 1948, p. 222). A similar arrangement, composed of small, single prayer rugs, must also have been present in private homes because a Muslim is not compelled to go to the mosque five times a day for the prayer but may pray at home in a sacred space (a carpet with a prayer niche). However, not all floor coverings were textiles, es
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pecially in hot regions, where mats made of reeds or rushes were preferred. These usually covered rooms wall to wall and were made to order in a single piece. T h e most re nowned center of production was Alexandria, Egypt, which exported its mats all over North Africa. Many other places in Egypt provided this commodity, as did Abbadan in Iran. In the Early Islamic period, the floors of both large congre gational mosques and of smaller ones were covered, as a rule, by mats rather than carpets. Two small mats, probably for religious buildings, have survived in exceptionally good condition: one was made in Tiberias in Palestine and tire other, very close in date (tenth century CE), in Greater Syria (see figure 2). Hides or leather mats (anta, sg. nat ) were c
•••••••••^•1
——ML—. HHHHHHHHHHJHJL •
i
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: Islamic Period. Figure 2.
Hemp
and straw mat. Dyed brown and black with two inscriptional bands containing blessings to the owner. From Greater Syria (Palestine?), first half of the tenth century, 63.375 X 33.875 in. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pulitzer Fund, 1939, 39-H3)
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FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: Islamic Period
also used as spreads beneath a dining tray or for other uses, although rarely. This information represents a reconstruction of the fur nishings in homes in the first centuries of Islam. It is infor mation that relies exclusively on written sources (by far the most informative of which are the documents that were found in the Cairo Geniza [Goitein, 1967-1983, esp. vol. 4, pp. 105-129]) because textiles, wood, and leather are among the most perishable materials. They rarely survive intact even in the driest climates. For this reason, only fragments of textiles are preserved in any number, in particular from Egypt (Fustat, i.e., Old Cairo, and Bahnasa); none can be identified positively as part of a curtain, a bed, a hanging, or of a garment, however. In only one case can a multicol ored wool fragment showing a human head surrounded by running hares and bearing an inscription stating that it was made at Bahnasa perhaps be considered part of a curtain because Bahnasa was famous for this particular commodity. In general, the thickness of the fabric could be of some help in identifying its function—although many outer garments were probably as thick as draperies and curtains. Fragments of carved and painted wood have also been
found in good number, some at excavated sites (e.g., from Samarra, north of Baghdad, tire capital of the 'Abbasids for a few decades in die tenth century) and others still in situ when discovered (e.g., ornamental wooden beams from one of the Fatimid palaces in Cairo). However, ordinary do mestic furnishings were probably undecorated. Among the objects found in houses were baskets (qafas) of different vegetal materials with covers made of palm fronds or decorative lacing. Baskets were used to store earth enware and glass vessels and writing materials. Light and heat were certainly among a household's first necessities. Hundreds of small oil lamps (usually called siraj) made of clay, metal, stone, or glass have been collected in excavations all over the Islamic world (e.g., Nishapur in eastern Iran). Hanging glass lamps as well as lanterns made of metal or glass (misbah), inside of which a small glass vessel containing oil was suspended, were also used (sometimes they were hung for votive purposes). Pottery or stucco portable lan terns, also found at Nishapur, were used to circulate light inside and outside the house at night. Bronze or copper candleholders in various shapes, sometimes decorated, com pleted the lighting system and were provided with beeswax candles. Candleholders were less common than lamps and lanterns because wax candles were quite expensive. Al though almost nothing for heating purposes has survived from before the thirteenth century, metal braziers, firepots, and coal pots have been found in houses, even in countries with the hottest climate. Finally, fumigators were common pieces of furnishing in the houses of the middle and upper classes: square or cylin drical, surmounted by a domical cover and standing on four legs, or animal-shaped (usually birds or felines) widi a hinged opening on the chest or with a detachable head and standing on their legs (see figure 3). Pierced incense burners or censers (mijmara, possibly made only of silver; mibkhara, of bronze; and midkhana, of bronze or other materials) could be of any size and range from undecorated to sump tuously ornamented. A large number of them, sometimes with provenience, can be seen in museums all around the world. [Many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
FURNITURE AND FURNISHINGS: Islamic Period. Figure 3. Incense burner in the shape of a feline. Cast bronze with openwork decora tion, from Khurasan, Iran, dated to AH 577/1181-82 CE, height 33.5 in., length 31,5 in. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1951, 51-56)
Ashtor, Eliyahu. A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages. Berkeley, 1976. Briggs, M. S. "The Saracenic House." Burlington Magazine 38 (1921): 228-238, 289-301. David-Weill, Jean. Catalogue general du Musee Arabe du Caire: Les bois a epigraphes jusqu'a I'epoque mamlouke. Cairo, 1931. Ettinghausen, Richard. "The 'Beveled Style' in the Post-Samarra Pe riod." In Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst. Herzfeld, edited by George Carpenter Miles, pp. 72-83. Locust Valley, N.Y., 1952. Gervers, Veronika, ed. Studies in Textile History in Memory of Harold B. Burnham. Toronto, 1977.
FUSTAT Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. 4 vols. Berkeley, 1967-1983. Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art, Rev. and enl. ed. New Ha ven, 1987. Herzfeld, Ernst. Ausgrabungen von Samarra, vol. 6, Geschichte der Stadt Samarra. Berlin and Hamburg, 1948. Kuhnel, Ernst. Islamische Stoffe aus agyptische Grabern. Berlin, 1927. Kuhnel, Ernst, and Louisa Bellinger. Catalogue of Dated Tiraz Fabrics: Ummayad, Abbasid, Fatimid. Washington, D . C . , 1952. Lassner, Jacob. The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages: Text and Studies. Detroit, 1970. Marzuk, Muhammad 'Abd al-'AzTz. History of the Textile Industry in Alexandria, 331 B.C.-1S17 A.D. Alexandria, 1955. Pauty, Edmond. Les bois sculptes jusqu'd Tepoque ayyoubide. Cairo, 1931. Serjeant, R. B. Islamic Textiles: Material for a Histoiy Up to the Mongol Conquest. Beirut, 1972. Stillman, Yedida K. "Female Attire of Medieval Egypt: According to the Trousseau Lists and Cognate Material from die Cairo Geniza." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1972. Weibel, Adele C. Two Thousand Years of Textiles: The Figured Textiles of Europe and the Near East. New York, 1952. STEFANO CARBONI
FURTWANGLER, ADOLF (1853-1907), German historian of ancient art and field archaeologist. In 1874, Furt wangler completed his doctorate at Munich and soon after spent three years (1876-1879) traveling and excavating in Italy and Greece. These laid the foundations for a remark ably varied series of studies of prehistoric Greek, Etruscan, classical Greek, and Roman art that demonstrated his par ticular talent for tire stylistic and historical organization of enormous corpora of artifacts. In Greece, Furtwangler col laborated with Georg Loschcke in publishing Heinrich Schliemann's pottery from Mycenae (1879) and in con structing a typology for Mycenaean ceramics (1886). Furt wangler published (1890) the more than fourteen tiiousand, mostly fragmentary bronze votives and other small finds of Geomeuic, orientalizing, and later styles from die Olympia excavations in Greece in which he had participated (18781879). Beginning in 1881, he devoted himself to organizing museum collections in Berlin, producing inter alia a com prehensive study of the development of Greek vase painting (1885), as represented by examples in the Antiquarium at the Royal Museum in Berlin, and an encyclopedic study of Greek and Roman gems in relation to the art of die Near East and Etruria (1900). His justifiably famous Meisterwerken der griechischen Plastik followed in 1893 (1895 in English translation). In 1894, Furtwangler assumed the chair of clas sical archaeology at the University of Munich. In 1901, he began new archaeological investigations at tire Temple of Aphaia on Aigina, at the center of the classical city-state, and at tire sanctuary of Zeus Hellenios on Mt. Oros. T h e excavations of the Temple of Aphaia, published promptly in 1906, allowed a more accurate sculptural history of its pediments and produced the first evidence for a Mycenaean presence on Aigina. Among the many projects underway at
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the time of his death was his monumental publication of select Greek vases, Griechische Vasenmalerei, BIBLIOGRAPHY Church, J. E., Jr. "Adolf Furtwangler: Artist, Archaeologist, Professor." University of Nevada Studies 1-3 (1908-1911): 61-66. Affectionate appraisal by an American acquaintance. Furtwangler, Adolf. Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays on the History of Art. London, 1895. Translation of Furtwangler's masterwork. Furtwangler, Adolf, and K. Reichhold. Giiechische Vasenmalerei: Auswahl hervorragender Vasenbilder. Munich, 1900-1932. Furtwangler, Andreas E. "Adolf Furtwangler, 3oJune 1853—11 October 1907." In Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, edited by Ward W. Briggs and William M. Calder III, pp. 84-92. New York, 1990. Frank assessment of Furtwangler's contributions as a scholar and teacher, including a bibliography of his principal schol arly works, biographies, and necrologies. Lullies, Reinhard. "Adolf FurtwSngler." In Archdologenbildnisse, edited by Reinhard Lullies and Wolfgang Schiering, pp. 110-111. Mainz, 1988. Brief study of Furtwangler's career. Schuchhardt, Walter H. Adolf Furtwangler. Freiburg, 1956. Assessment of Furtwangler's contributions to die development of an art histori cally oriented classical archaeology. JACK L . DAVIS
FUSTAT, original site from which Cairo grew. When Amr ibn al-'As led an army into Egypt in AH 18-19/639 CE after the quick and spectacular Muslim victories in Greater Syria, the first objective was the capture or reduction of the Byzantine fortress of Bab al-Lun (Babylon) just opposite the Nile island of Roda. Not only was this locus die clear access point to the Delta and, therefore, the land route to Alexan dria (the second and supreme objective of the campaign), it also formed die terminus of the river traffic coming from Upper Egypt. Because Amr found it impossible to take the fort or the island by storm, he sustained its slow reduction. T o accomplish this attrition he established a campsite to the north of the fortress, arranged his troops relative to tribal origins, and built a ditch around dre encampment complete with caltrops (pronged ground-lying weapons) to repel cav alry sorties. This trench configuration is known as fustat. in Arabic, no doubt deriving from the Latin fossatum. (In later European fortifications it is termed & fosse.) Bab al-Lun capitulated. Amr led his army up the Delta, attacked Alexandria, and arranged its surrender. It was as sumed that Alexandria, with its unrivaled position relative to the trade and culture of the Mediterranean, would be come the capital of the newest Islamic province. The caliph in Medina, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, however, ordered Amr to return to Fustat and make it the capital and base for further conquests westward. He acquiesced, returned to tire camp site, removed the palisade and ditch, and assigned land grants to die various tribes represented in his army. These grants ensured setdement north to tire present aqueduct, east to the edge of the Muqattam quarries, and south to the
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area known as Stabl Antar in the early sources. Sensing the riches to be gained in Egypt, many Syrians and Arabs from the peninsula migrated throughout the seventh and eighdi centuries CE, as well as a continuous movement of craftsmen and artists from Alexandria, to serve and seek die patronage of the new governing class centered now at Fustat. The growth of die original Fustat was agglutinative be cause each new set of rulers founded new quarters and the old city grafted onto them. In AH 132/750 CE the 'Abbasids went to the north to establish al-Askar while Ahmad ibn Tulun went in 254/868 to the nortiieast to found yet another capital at al-Qata'i, which contained his famous mosque on the height of Jabal Yashkur. From this elevation eastward to the Muqattam hills he not only gave a northern boundary to die sprawling mettopolis, but he also connected it with the old foundation area and the cemetery area to die east and farther southeast to the settiement around Stabl Antar. All the intervening area filled up gradually (but never totally) along three axes: one continued along the eastern bank of the Nile eventually reaching to Helwan, anotiier went roughly from die mosque of Amr towards the mosque of Ibn Tulun, and a third went from the latter mosque east and southeast to the cemetery areas culminating in Stabl Antar. This somewhat compact urban mass reached its apogee with die founding of the Fatimid quarter of al-Qahira (Cairo) in 969 CE. This was a fully planned and walled city replete with administrative, military, and religious personnel presided over by an Ismaili caliph, who promptly arrived from Mahdiyya in Tunisia. The compact earlier city did not disappear although it was more often called Misr or Masr than Fustat. At first it remained distinct from Cairo; but eventually the heretofore stable border of al-Qata'i moved north to attend the southern wall. T h e older axial arrange ment continued, but an exact emphasis became visible when the Qarafa road connected the Bab al-Zawayla to the shrine of Sayyida Nafisa. A secondary route also now connected the mosque of Amr witii die Fatimid city. Thus, old Fustat was reenergized and experienced its apex of prosperity in die Fatimid period. This new and most profitable dispensation was shattered in 564/1169. T o prevent its falling into the hands of an army of Crusaders poised to the south of Stabl Antar, the grand vizier, Shawar, put all the southern unwalled portions to the flames and the entire population fled to the north toward alQahira. Salah ad-Din (Saladin) ordered die resettlement of the old quarters after his seizure of power in 567/1171, and built a girdling wall to protect die much-contracted area of settlement. There are also records of industries during the Mamluk era. Otherwise, Fustat simply decayed and was abandoned, except for the area around the mosque of Amr. Potters from Ballas fartiier south arrived in the latter half of the eighteenth century. With riverine commerce, Old Cairo (now termed Misr 'Atiqa and not Fustat) presented a sizable habitation strung out along the Nile. Behind this bustiing
facade, however, the mounds of the former chief emporium of the country stretched to the Muqattam Hills and abutted the cemetery areas to the south. These mounds were ransacked by searchers for sibakh, the nitrogenous layer above the architectural remains, and became the haunts of free-lance excavators in search of an tiquities. A more rational approach toward the tumuli was instituted by Ali Bey Bahgat in 1912 when a concession was granted to the Museum of Arab Art (now the Islamic M u seum). He probed over a wide area and by 1924 had un covered a substantial area to the east of the mosque of Amr. By modern standards Bahgat's excavations were wanting in chronological precision, but they did reveal the general con figuration of the urban fabric of the Fatimid period. His work was continued and expanded after World War II by Cairo University (much further to die east of Bahgat's rev elations and among the building remains of the more south erly cemetery) and by the Egyptian Antiquities Organiza tion, excavations which stretched out from Bahgat's perimeters. Although very little of this latter work has been published, it did confirm the street context and housing modules revealed by Bahgat. In 1965-1966 a house with an upper story intact was uncovered under the direction of Gamal Mehrez; this has been preserved but only partially published. After the 1952 revolution a four-lane highway was thrust dirough the mounds to connect Giza with the back route to Heliopolis and the Cairo airport. T h e land between this road (now known as Sharia Salah Salem) and the standing re mains of the aqueduct became available for low-income housing. Apart from some emergency probes there was no archaeological investigation of this huge area. By 1963 the Cairo Governorate announced plans for further housing de velopments soutii of Sharia Salah Salem, which alerted the Antiquities Organization to seek outside assistance toward a rapid investigation of the threatened area. Three concession areas were granted to the American Research Center in Egypt, which began its excavations in 1964. [See American Research Center in Egypt.] The 1967 war diverted attention from the scene, but by 1973 it was clear that the Governorate had again turned its attention to the open spaces of Fustat and large-scale commercial, industrial, and domestic proj ects (generally unlicensed) ensued. These latter activities re sulted in two new problems: the cemetery areas were no longer sacrosanct and large parts of the unexcavated reaches had become the dumping ground of the Cairo Governorate in a move to achieve an all-over level for building and street projects. The American concessions were worked between 1964 and 1981. They achieved the chronological profile lacking in earlier excavations, more particularly through the strati fication of die ganglia of streets. They confirmed the same profile when cuts were allowed into the streets revealed by Bahgat. Because there was no grid plan, the narrow, curling
FUSTAT streets dictated the plans of the housing units, which were quite asymmettical externally and variations of the Tulunid Samarra module internally, centering on one, two, or even three courtyards. Some housing units reached five stories, each in essence a series of fiats as described in the Geniza documents or combinations of domestic housing and com mercial units in the huge conglomerations of the Geniza merchants. (The Geniza, which means "synagogue" in Ar abic, was dre place where Jewish merchants deposited their commercial archives.) This endeavor also corrected the im pression left by Nasir-i Khusrau that the Fustat houses reached heights of ten and twelve stories. He had not taken into account the upward slope of the jebel (hill), which was about 12 m (39 ft.) between the mosque of Amr and the present mosque of Abu Su'ud. Sections of tire main funerary route, the Darb al-Ma'asir, the widest street in tire medieval settlement, now stand clear as well as a serdab (underground hot-weather living space) dating from die early eighth century CE, the earliest Islamic instance of tire phenomenon so far recorded, along its north ern edge. Over 200 m (656 ft.) of a rough aqueduct came fortir in tire area directly adjacent to Bahgat's work, a mon ument that he overlooked. It is not mentioned in any of the known texts. This aqueduct served the bourgeois area at tending die Darb al-Ma'asir, an area drat contained one Fat imid complex complete with a small bath (hammam). This combination had been associated heretofore only witir Mamluk palaces. Of more interest to the social historian is tire workers' quarter revealed in 1980. Tireir dwellings were built not on the jebel but on accumulated rubble, malting them extremely unstable. T h e presence of such a quarter, which is associated with tire huge pottery kilns uncovered by the Antiquities Organization in an adjoining mound, con tradicts S. D. Goitein's theory of class homogenization as deduced from tire Geniza documents. The pottery yields from the subsequent excavations gen erally paralleled Bahgat's but showed a greater variety of imports. It is now clear drat Chinese pottery first entered the Egyptian markets in the ninth century CE and was preferred (as proved by their imitation) through the seventeentir cen tury. There was substantial representation of tire wares of Spain and North Africa; Greater Syria, Iraq, and Iran; tire Crusader states and Cyprus; and the excellent slip-painted (but unglazed) wares of Christian Nubia. Very few ceramics from Ottoman Turkey have been found. Glass finds were plentiful, and it is now reasonable to as sume that lustering began on glass in Egypt probably in the early seventh century. T h e bowl of a stemmed goblet lustered on both sides carried the name of 'Abd al-Samad ibn Ali, granduncle of Harun al-Rashid and governor of Egypt in 155/771-72. Only in the 1980 season were discoveries of textile fragments plentiful. Among them was an example of resist-dye decoration of the eleventh century, probably ear lier than any reported from India, the natural home of the c
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technique. That same season yielded substantial paper and parchment fragments among which were a complete wed ding contract dated to 348/959, a rare rental receipt dated 432-433/1041, and a block-printed amulet text dated to the eleventh century. Two other sets of excavations have begun at Fustat. One, begun in the 1970s under the aegis of Waseda University and directed by Dr. Kawatoko, has limited itself to the area between the southwest limit of Bahgat's excavation and the mosque of Amr. The purpose has been to discover the po sition and extent of the area known from tire sources as ahl al-raya, that area taken by Amr ibn al- As and his tribal com manders and directiy contingent to the early mosque. T o date dre publications (in Japanese) have produced litde to ward attaining the stated goal; rather the finds and most of the plans echo the work of Bahgat and of tire Fustat Expe dition/American Research Center in Egypt. The other, on going excavation, which was begun in 1984 under tire aegis of the Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire is concentrated in an area connected witir tire ancient cemetery at Stabl Antar. [See Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orien tale.] Menaced on all sides by an ever-growing settlement of permanent housing, the French have been most fortunate in their small area. Approximately 230 m (754 ft.) of the Atfih Aqueduct running from the Birket al-Habash and ser vicing die cemetery have now been revealed, providing an earlier parallel to the Aqueduct of Ibn Tulun in the Basatin area. Very early (late seventh- and early eighth-century CE) remains of habitation, which were never subsequentiy built upon, provide a sharper chronological gauge than has been hitiierto realized in areas witii more complex patterns of re use and amalgamation. Ancillary structures including a hammam of what might be Fatimid family royal funerary establishments have recentiy come to light along with some tombs of tire tenth and eleventh centuries. If the work is unhampered by further building projects, these excavations will provide unrivaled insights into the social and religious contexts of the Stabl Antar section far to the soutiieast of Bab al-Lun and the mosque of Amr and add significant tes serae to tire mosaic of what we are getting to know of Fustat. [See also Cairo; Fatimid Dynasty.] c
BIBLIOGRAPHY The original Arabic sources have been analyzed in three important publications: A. R. Guest, "The Foundation of Fustat and the Khittahs of That Town," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1907): 49-82 plus map; Paul Casanova, Essai de rcconstitution topographique de la ville d'alFoustat on Misr, Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, Memoire 35 (Cairo, 1919); and Ali Bey Bahgat and Albert Gabriel, Fouilles d'alFoustat (Paris, 1921). These sources are again analyzed in the light of archaeological discoveries by Wladyslaw B. Kubiak, Al-Fustat: Its Foun dation and Early Urban Development (Cairo, 1987). For a reworking of Casanova's reification of Fustat from these sources, see Sylvie Denoix, Decrire le Caire Fustat-Misr d'apres ibn Duqmaq et Maqrizi (Cairo, 1992), For a general introductory essay, but one which does not incor-
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porate any archaeological findings post-Bahgat, see Jacques Jomier, "Al-Fustat," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 2, pp. 957-959 (Leiden, i960-). Andre Raymond, /_£ Caire (Paris, 1993), surveys the results of excavations subsequent to Bahgat's findings (see pp. 18-55). To supplement these views of Fustat, it is now mandatory to consult research based on the reports and letters of the soi-disant Geniza mer chants who either lived in or passed through Fustat from the mid-tenth century CE to the burning of Fustat in the late twelfdi century CE. Though rather lean for the period of Fustat's economic dominance (eleventh century CE), these original sources complement, correct, or extend the results garnered from archaeology and the standard Arabic sources. S. D. Goitein has published the material in five volumes as A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Volume 4, Daily Life (Berkeley, 1983), is particularly important. The results of the Fustat Expedition/ARCE excavations are best gleaned seriatim from the preliminary reports published in the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 4 (1965), 5 (1966), 6 (1967), 10 (1973). " (1974). 13 (1976), 16 (1979), 17 (1980). 18 (1981), 19 (1982), and 21 (1984). For the short season in 1973, see George T. Scanlon, "Fustat Expedition, Preliminary Report 1973: Back to FustatA," Annates Islamologiques 16 (1981): 407-436. For a full analysis of the "workers' quarters," now inundated by the Governorate's dumping process, see Wladyslaw B. Kubiak and George T. Scanlon, Fustat Ex
pedition: Final Report vol. 2, Fustat-C (Lake Winona, Ind., 1988). For consideration of some unique discoveries, see George T. Scanlon, "The Archaeology of al-Fustat: Some Novelties," Bulletin de ITnstitut d'Egypte 68-69 (1990): 1-16. For an appendage to Kubiak's version of the early site, see George T. Scanlon, "Al-Fustat: The Riddle of the Earliest Settlement," in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Middle East, vol. 2, Imxd Use and Settlement Patterns, edited by G. R. D. King and Averil Cameron, pp. 171-180 (London, 1994). For a synoptic coverage of Fustat housing types up through 1977, see Antoni A. Ostrasz, "The Archaeological Material for the Study of the Domestic Architecture of Fustat," Africana Bulletin 26 (1977): 57-86. To date, the French excavations have been published as preliminary reports by Roland Gayraud in Annates Islamologiques 22 (1986): 1-26; 23 (1987): 55-72; and 25 (1989): 57-87. The preliminary reports by Dr. Kawatoko can be found in Bulletin of the University Museum (Uni versity of Tokyo), nos. 341 et seq. (coauthored with K. Sakurai, in Jap anese). The house with an intact upper story has been partially pub lished (in Arabic with French abstract) by Gamal Mehrez, "Les habitations d'al-Fustat," in Colloque international sur I'histoire du Caire, pp. 321-322 (Cairo, 1972). A short report has been published about the excavations carried out by the University of Cairo: S. Maher, "Hafa'ir Kulliyat al-Athar be jahir madinat al-Fustat," Majallat Kulliyat alAthar 1 (1976): 95-126. GEORGE T. SCANLON
G GADARA. See U m m Qeis.
GALILEE. [To survey the archaeological history of the Gal ilee region, this entry is chronologically divided into two articles: Galilee in the Bronze and Iron Ages and Galilee in the Hel lenistic through Byzantine Periods.]
Galilee in the Bronze and Iron Ages The Galilee region in northern Israel consists of the Upper and Lower Galilee and the upper Jordan Valley, thus incor porating both the hill country and the surrounding plains. T h e diverse nature of the subregions is reflected in the num ber and scale of their tells and in their settlement history. Only a few tells have been excavated in the Galilee, none of which are in the hill country. Most of our information about the region has been gained from the excavations car ried out at Hazor and Dan and from the periodic surveys conducted in the twentieth century—from the early 1920s (by William Foxwell Albright, John Garstang, Appaly Saarisalo, and others) through the 1950s (Ruth Amiran, Yohanan Aharoni, and Nehemyah Zori). Since the 1970s, sys tematic surveys have been carried out on behalf of die Israel Archaeological Survey (Yaaqov Olami, Raphael Frankel, Avner Raban, Zvi Gal, and others). In the Chalcolidiic period (fourth millennium), a few subregional pastoral cultures dominated die Galilee. The first settlements in die area, small rural sites, appeared in the Early Bronze I period (3100-2800 BCE). These were re placed in the Early Bronze II—III period (2800-2200 BCE) by large, flourishing urban centers. A dense occupation is in dicated by a network of large sites, all of which were fortified cities. Among the main sites are Tel 'Alii, Tel Gat-Hep her, Tel Hannaton, Nahaf, and Tel Rechesh in the Lower Gal ilee; Jish, Me'ona, Tel Qedesh, and Tel Rosh in die Upper Galilee; and Dan, Hazor, and Tel Na'amah in the upper Jordan Valley. T h e limited evidence gathered from the ex cavations at Hazor, Dan, Tel Na'amah, Tel Qedesh, and Me'ona focuses on the enormous scale of their fortifications. These sites represent the well-developed urban life that ex isted in the region throughout the Early Bronze II—III period. 369
The enclosures at Horvat Shahal and at Farod are unusual and are known mostiy in die neighboring Golan; they apparently were fortified camps for large herds of cattle. In the Intermediate Bronze Age (2200-2000 BCE), the Gal ilee's population was seminomadic, as is evident from die burial caves tiiat comprise most of the archaeological data. On the basis of the pottery, it seems that die region was dominated by a single cultural group. Only a few settiement sites have been found, including that of Murhan on the soutiiern margins of die eastern Lower Galilee, the dwelling caves at Tel Harashim, and die cultic cave near Tel Qedesh. An elaborate settlement hierarchy developed during the Middle Bronze II (2000-1550 BCE) that is characterized by major cities and many small rural sites. The main sites in the hill country include Tel Gat-Hepher, Tel Hannaton, Tel Qedesh, Tel Rechesh, and Tel Rosh. However, in die upper Jordan Valley, some of the finds from the large cities of Dan and Hazor, such as the former's mud-brick gate and the latter's liver model and cuneiform tablets, suggest that these cities were culturally associated with northern Syria, or even Mesopotamia. This view is also supported by a few of the Mari texts, which mention commercial and political con nections between Mari and Hazor and Mari and Laish (Dan). During die Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BCE), while the cities of the upper Jordan Valley (Hazor and Dan) flour ished, the Galilean hill country was poorly settled. It is this period to which the Bible refers when it describes Hazor as "the head of all diose kingdoms" (Jos. 11:10). The inter pretation of the Egyptian texts, especially die list of Thutmose III (fifteentii century BCE), by some scholars as support for a major occupation of the hill country in diis period is not borne out by field surveys, which postulate on the con trary, a distinctly sparse occupation. Only a few large sites were settled in the Lower Galilee, of which Tel Hannaton was the largest. The Upper Galilee was even more sparsely occupied, the main site being Tel Rosh (equated with bibheal Beth-'Anat). One of the el-Amarna texts confirms this situation: it describes the region between Hazor and Tyre as settled by the Apiru and under dispute between the two cities. The settiement process in the Iron Age I (1200-1000 BCE) should be understood in the light of this reality.
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GALILEE: Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods
Toward tire close of tire thirteenth century BCE, the large Canaanite cities were destroyed, as is evident from the ex cavations at Hazor, Dan, and Tel Qarnei-Hittin. Either si multaneously, or just a short while later, a network of rural sites in the Galilee was settled, of which Tel Harashim, HarAdir, and Horvat Avot, as well as Hazor and Dan, have been excavated. The pottery found at these sites exhibits Phoenician as well as local characteristics, suggesting that they were occupied by both Israelites and Phoenicians. The Bible describes the battle at Merom (Jos. n ) as a major episode in this period; its location should be looked for at Tel Qarnei-Hittin. The finds at Dan may illustrate the mi gration of the Danites into the Galilee (Jgs. 18:28). During the period of the United Kingdom (tenth century BCE), the Galilee reached its settlement peak. An elaborate settlement pattern consisting of fortified cities, villages, farms, and other small sites sprang up. The fortifications, fortress, storehouses, water system, and domestic structures at Hazor and the gate and the cultic bama at Dan demon strate that development. Political, commercial, and cultural relations were estab lished between Israel and other nations—with Phoenicia in particular. The result of King Solomon's exchange of the "Land of Cabul" (equated with parts of the Akko plain) for Phoenician supplies (/ Kgs. 9:10) is represented by the Phoenician fortress excavated at Horvat Rosh Zayit, in west ern Galilee. The ninth century BCE was marked by military clashes between Israel and the Aramaeans (1 Kgs. 20) and in the campaign of the Assyrian ldng Shalmaneser III in 841 BCE. There is evidence of these events in tire archaeological rec ord at various sites such as Rosh Zayit. The campaign of Tiglath-Pileser III in 732 BCE brought an end to Iron Age settlement in the Galilean hill country. This end is described both in the Bible (2 Kgs. 15) and in Assyrian sources and is evident at excavated sites such as Hazor, Dan, and Me giddo. The valley settlements survived, however, and be came a part of the new Assyrian administrative system. Ac cording to the archaeological evidence, the Galilean hills were almost completely deserted for more than a century. They were reoccupied only in the late sixth century BCE, a harbinger of the Galilee's dense postbiblical settlement. [See also Amarna Tablets; Dan; Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages; Hazor; Jordan Valley; Mari Texts; and Settlement Patterns.] c
BIBLIOGRAPHY The Galilee has been somewhat neglected in archaeological research, therefore published material is lacking, especially in English. The reader may consult the following: Aharoni, Yohanan. The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in the Upper Galilee (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1957. One of the first modern works conducted in the Galilee. Aldiough some of its conclusions are no
longer valid, its importance lies in a close acquaintance with the re gion and the use of new research methods. Aharoni, Yohanan. The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Rev. ed. Translated and edited by Anson F. Rainey. Philadelphia, 1979. Provides a summary oudine of the history of the Galilee based on Aharoni's book above. Biran, Avraham. Dan: 25 shenot nafirot be-Tel Dan (Dan: 25 Years of Excavations at Tell Dan). Tel Aviv, 1992. The only comprehensive study of the history of this important site, based on the results of the excavations carried out there. Frankel, Rafael. "The Upper Galilee in the Transition from the Late Bronze to Iron Age." In From Nomadism to Monarchy, edited by Israel Finkelstein and Na'aman Nadav. Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., 1994. Updated study of the Iron Age I in the hill-country, based on new evidence from field surveys. Gal, Zvi. Ramat Issachar: Ancient Settlement in a Peripheral Region (in Hebrew with English summary). Tel Aviv, 19S0. Study of the set tlement history of the eastern lower Galilee, from the Chalcolithic period to the Iron Age, based on field surveys. Gal, Zvi. Lower Galilee during the Iron Age. American Schools of Ori ental Research, Dissertation Series, vol. 8. Winona Lake, Ind„ 1992. The only comprehensive study of the historical geography of the lower Galilee, based on new evidence from field surveys and ar chaeological excavations. Gal, Zvi. "The Iron I in die Lower Galilee and the Margins of the Jezreel Valley." In From Nomadism to Monarchy, edited by Israel Finkelstein and Na'aman Nadav. Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., 1994. Study of the Iron Age I, combining new evidence from both field surveys and excavations with the written sources. Yadin, Yigael. Hazor. London, 1972. Stady of the results of the exca vations at Hazor and its history, in relation to some major case studies on the MB II and IA I periods.
Zvi GAL
Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods There are hints in the literary sources of a greater Galilee than the territory entrusted to Josephus at tire outbreak of the first revolt (cf. Antiquities 18.4; War 2.218, 3.35-39). Ar chaeological remains can confirm such a picture, since ar chitectural forms, ceramic styles, and language patterns do not recognise the boundaries that political expediency im poses. Other factors such as climate, natural resources, and access in terms of travel also determine human habitation. In this regard it is worthwhile to recall the Mishnah's divi sions of the region into Upper and Lower Galilee and tire valley and Josephus's description of the fertility of the Plain of Gennesar (Mishnah, Shev. 9.2; War 3.516-521). The results of the limited survey of some nineteen sites where synagogue remains existed convinced the members of the Meiron Excavation Project of a cultural continuum between Upper Galilee and western (Lower) Golan (Mey ers, Strange, and Groh, 1978). [See Golan.] They based their conclusion on the obvious similarities in architectural styles for synagogues, including the absence of representational art; the predominance of Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions, and the similar pottery types. The sites were technically vil lages rather than cities, and therefore, might be thought to
GALILEE: Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods have lacked a broader cultural horizon, especially because the area's mountainous terrain makes Upper Galilee rela tively remote. Even in Late Roman times, Upper Galilee was known as Tetracomia (lit., "tire four villages"), despite the fact that a policy of urbanization prevailed elsewhere in Pal estine for administrative reasons, especially from the second century CE onward. T h e distinctive profile this region presents on both sides of tire Jordan River is not one of cultural isolation, however, but that of strong group identity in terms of adherence to the Jewish way of life despite participation in other aspects of the surrounding culture. Undoubtedly, the migration to the north that was the direct result of the Bar Kokhba revolt, meant an increase in Jewish presence. [See Bar Kokhba Re volt.] The archaeological data suggest that this area was cho sen because of an earlier well-established Jewish presence there, at least in Upper Galilee (Aviam, 1993), and to a lesser extent in the Golan, which was sparsely populated until the Late Hellenistic/Early Roman period (i.e., second-first cen tury BCE; Urman, 1985). A study of tire pottery has estab lished tire presence of household ware originating in Galilee competing at various sites with local Golan ware from dre early Roman period onward (Adan-Bayewitz, 1993). This would seem to suggest that from the very beginning of Jew ish expansion in the north under the Hasmoneans tire Upper Galilee/Lower Golan formed a continuous region as far as the population of the north was concerned. On the basis of the Meiron Survey it was concluded that the cultural continuum between Upper Galilee and the Go lan was not maintained in respect of Lower Galilee (Meyers, 1976 and 1985; Meyers, Strange, and Groh, 1978). There, different influences could be discerned that brought the area more into line witir tire cultural life of the Greek cities of the Decapolis and the coast. [See Decapolis.] The results of on going excavations at Sepphoris in Lower Galilee seem to support this view (Meyers, 1986 and 1992; Strange, 1992), provided tire overall perspective is maintained that Jewish identity was well-established in both Upper and Lower Gal ilee, certainly from the early Roman period onward. Despite the emergence of Sepphoris and Tiberias as important ad ministrative and market centers in Lower Galilee in tire first century CE, introducing such trappings of Greco-Roman life as the theater, it is noteworthy that neither of these centers has so far yielded evidence of pagan worship such as statues, dedicatory inscriptions and temples that are found, for ex ample, nearby Scythopolis/Beth-Shean or in the Phoenician coastal cities. [See Sepphoris; Tiberias.] Even when the ma terial culture shows far greater signs of a non-Jewish pres ence at Sepphoris, as witnessed, for example, by the thirdcentury CE Dionysiac mosaic and the Byzantine Nile mosaic, there was at the same time a thriving Jewish intellectual pres ence at these centers corresponding to that which has left its traces in the great synagogue remains of Upper Galilee and the Golan (Miller, 1984; Meyers, Meyers-, and Netzer, 1992;
371
Netzer and Weiss, 1994). Synagogue remains in Lower Gal ilee, such as Hammath Tiberias, Horvat ha-'Amudim, and Sepphoris with mosaic floors do appear to adopt a different attitude to the question of representational art (Levine, 1981 and 1987) to diose in Upper Galilee, except for the Ark of Nabratein with the two lions and the decorated mosaic floor tirat has been overlain on the original stone one in the fifthcentury CE Meroth synagogue (Meyers, 1993; Ilan, 1993). When all differences are allowed for, including climatic and geophysical realities, the material remains do not support a completely different profile for Upper and Lower Galilee in terms of lifestyle, openness to wider cultural influences, and opportunities (Edwards, 1988 and 1992; Overman, 1988 and 1993)Population. Some of the most pressing problems in re gard to Galilean history are those concerned with tire issues of demography and ethnography. Archaeology contributes greatly to clarifying tire changes from one period to another, and surveys have not only produced relative figures for set tlement densities, but in some instances have identified their ethnic affiliations from dre material remains. Pottery anal ysis, utilizing the most up-to-date metiiods—neutron acti vation analysis, binocular microscopy, xeroradiography, and thin-section analysis—has made it possible to draw much more precise conclusions about the provenience, manufac ture, and distribution of those goods (Adan-Bayewitz and Wieder, 1992). The findings of Zvi Gal's survey of Iron Age III sites (i.e., seventh-sixth centuries BCE) challenge Albrecht Alt's con tention, argued from the literary sources for tire most part, tirat tire Israelite population in the Galilee was relatively un disturbed throughout centuries, thus providing the frame work for the incorporation of the region into the ethnos ton Ioudaionby the Hasmoneans in the second century BCE (Gal, 1992; Alt, 1953). Alt believed tirat Galilee had fared better in the first Assyrian onslaught in 732 BCE tiran Samaria did in 721, when tire native population was replaced by people of non-Israelite stock (2 Kgs. 15:29; 17:6, 24). The absence from eighty-three surveyed sites in lower Galilee of four dif ferent pottery types, dated to tirat particular period on the basis of stratified digs at Hazor and Samaria, has convinced Gal tiiat there was a major depopulation of the area in the century after the fall of Samaria. Only additional stratified digs will decide whether this population gap was the result of the Assyrian aggression or was due to the migration of the country people to larger settlements. It was only in tire Persian and Early Hellenistic periods tirat signs of new settlements began to appear in this area once more. Preliminary results from the Archaeological Sur vey of Israel for Upper Galilee show an upward curve from 93 sites in die Hellenistic period to 138 for the Roman and 162 for the Byzantine periods, respectively (Aviam, 1993)This trend corresponds to the results of Dan Urman's sur vey of tire Golan carried out for the Association for tire Ar-
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GALILEE: Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods
chaeological Survey of Israel and the Israel Antiquities Au thority (Urman, 1985). It is best explained in terms of the incorporation of the whole Galilee/Golan region into the Jewish state and the need for new settlements and military outposts on both sides of the Jordan. The further increase of settlements in the Roman and Byzantine periods is di rectly attributable to internal Jewish migration for the most part, both in the wake of the second revolt and as a result of the increased Christian presence in the south from the fourth century CE onward. These suggestions raise more acutely the issue of the eth nic mix of Galilee. Josephus reports (Antiq, 13.318ft.) on the enforced judaization by Judah Aristobulus I (in 105 BCE) of the Itureans, a semi-nomadic Arab people who became sedentarized in the Hellenistic period and who are associated with the Hermon region (Dar, 1988). The claim is that with the breakup of the Seleucid empire during the second cen tury BCE, the Itureans infiltrated Upper Galilee—according to some (Schtirer, rev. ed., 1973-1987^01.2, pp. 7-10, e.g.), almost all of Galilee—which was hitherto sparsely popu lated. Archaeological considerations give rise to a number of difficulties with this scenario, however. First, Upper Gal ilee was not as sparsely populated in the early Hellenistic period as the results of the Archaeological Survey already alluded to make clear (Aviam, 1993). Nor is the character of the settlements similar to those confidendy identified as Iturean in the Golan (e.g., Khirbet Zemel), since the Upper Galilean settlements reflect an agricultural rather than a pas toral milieu, so obvious in the Golan remains (Hartel, 1987). According to Mordechai Aviam (1993) many of these set tlements were abandoned in the Hellenistic period, only to have been replaced by others (regarded as Jewish from the period of die expansion in the second century BCE, based on the preponderance of Hasmonean coins). T o complicate the matter further, sherds which, in terms of clay composition (pinkish brown with coarse grits) and style (from large stor age jars, poorly finished) are not dissimilar to so-called Itu rean ware from Hermon/Golan (Epstein and Gutman, 1972; Urman, 1985,pp. 162-164; Hartel, 1989,pp. 124-126),have also been found in Upper Galilee. The current political sit uation has prevented surveying the western Hermon region, which might reveal a greater Iturean presence that can be postulated at present. In any event the notion that most of the Galileans who appear in the first-century CE literary sources were forcibly converted Itureans receives no sup port from the archaeological data. The evidence indicates rather that if there were Itureans in Upper Galilee in the Early Hellenistic period, they left with the advance of the Hasmonean armies of conquest, an option which they were given according to Josephus (Antiq. 13.318ft.). As already indicated, the marked upsurge in setdements from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine period is understand able in light of Jewish history. In some instances the syna gogue remains alone, with their distinctively Jewish iconog
raphy, inscriptions, and liturgical architecture leave no doubt about the strength of the Jewish presence, especially in Upper Galilee/Golan from the Middle Roman to die Early Arab period at least. Architectural remains of syna gogues from Lower Galilee are less well preserved, with a few notable exceptions (Chorazin, Capernaum, Hammath Tiberias), nonetheless a recent survey of some seventy sites shows almost as many remains for Lower as for Upper Gal ilee (Ilan et al., 1986-1987). [See Chorazin; Capernaum.] Based on stratigraphic evidence and literary sources, it can confidendy be asserted that several of these later sites in both Galilees were Jewish setdements beginning in at least the Late Hellenistic period. It is surprising, therefore, tiiat with die exception of Gamla and possibly Magdala, no remains of pre-70 CE synagogues have been identified [See Gamla; Magdala.] This may merely mean that in some instances at least they were insignificant edifices, and possibly smaller setdements had no communal building before the destruc tion of the Temple (Ma'oz, 1992). On the other hand the presence of miqva'ot (ritual batiis) at such sites as Sepphoris, Jotapata, Gamla, and Khirbet Shema' from the Middle Ro man period are clear indications that a sizable number of the population of such places were concerned with issues to do with ritual purity and its attendant way of life. [See Jo tapata; Shema', Khirbet; Ritual Baths.] Presumably, the pat tern did not differ greatly in the many other Jewish or predominantiy Jewish setdements in the Galilee in the same period. The absence of any human or animal representa tions on the coins of Herod Antipas, the first to be struck in Galilee itself, would appear to support strongly such a con clusion. The map of known Jewish settlements, especially where synagogue remains have been claimed, shows a concentra tion of sites in certain areas of both Galilees. In those dis tricts there are few or no remains of a non-Jewish presence, whereas outside diose subregions the evidence is unmistak able. The situation is most obvious in Upper Galilee where a Roman temple from the second century CE at Qedesh points to a thriving pagan culture (Aviam, 1985; Fischer et a l , 1984). Farther north the bilingual inscription from Dan ("To die God who is in D a n " ) , as well as the grotto of Pan at Banias from Seleucid times at least, show tiiat the region soutii of Hermon was thoroughly hellenized from an early period (Biran, 1981; Tzaferis, 1992b). [See Dan; Banias.] Herod the Great dedicated a temple to Augustus at Caesarea Phillipi (War 1.404-406; Antiq. 15.360). No material re mains of Jewish presence have been found above a line that runs just nortii of Sasa, Bar'am, and Qazyon, all of which show unmistakable signs of having been Jewish communi ties. [See Bar'am.] T o the west-southwest no synagogal re mains have been found west of the line from Peqi'in to Rama in Upper Galilee, and a similar situation obtains in Lower Galilee west of the line running from Rama through I'billin to Tiv'on (Ilanet a l , 1986-1987; Aviam, 1993). In die soutii
GALILEE: Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods no clear evidence of Jewish communities have been found south of the Nazareth ridge. Outside these lines one is mov ing in the orbit of the Greek cities, especially Beth-Shean/ Scythopolis and Akko/Ptolemais, while to the north Tyre was tire dominant urban influence, even on Jewish Galilee. [See Akko; Beth-Shean; Tyre]. It is noteworthy that as well as the absence of synagogues, dedicatory inscriptions to pagan gods have so far been found only on the fringes of Galilee, such as the third-century CE inscription addressed in Greek to the Syrian gods Hadad and Atargatis from the region of Akko/Ptolemais, or the one addressed to the Heliopolitan Zeus on Mt. Carmel (AviYonah, 1951 and 1959). On the other hand, the only remains of pagan worship from Jewish Galilee (apart from some per sonal votive objects from Sepphoris) is the Syro-Egyptian shrine at Har Mispe Yaminr in the Hermon massif, a site which was abandoned already in tire second century BCE (Frankel, 1992). T h e Jewish and non-Jewish areas were not hermetically sealed from one another, however. T h e evi dence points only to the predominant ethnic identities being localized. T h e literary evidence that there were Jews living in the city territories of Palestine and that some non-Jews were also to be found in Jewish areas, is not negated. In both instances they would have constituted minorities that were more or less influential on their immediate environment at different periods. This distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish elements in Galilee is strikingly confirmed by Christian remains. Early archaeological work concentrated on the important Chris tian sites associated with the life of Jesus, such as Nazareth, Mt. Tabor, Capernaum, and Tabgha. [See Nazareth; Tabglra; Tabor, Mount.] In these areas it would seem that Jews and Christians lived side by side from the Middle Ro man period (i.e., second cenmry CE onward) until the Per sian conquest in 614 CE (Bagatti, 1971). In western Galilee Aviam (1993) has found many Christian settlements, iden tified by the number of crosses as well as dedicatory inscrip tions on remains of tombs and churches, however. Some of the inscriptions are in Syriac and others are in Greek, sug gesting that some of the local Semitic, non-Jewish popula tion may have converted to Christianity. This concentration of a Christian presence in western Galilee seems to corrob orate the fact that in that area at least, bordering on the territories of the Phoenician cities, tire non-Jewish element continued to predominate from pre-Christian to Christian times. T r a d e a n d C o m m e r c e . T h e literary sources presuppose a rural Galilee thickly populated with towns and villages, and well endowed with natural resources, not least the lake of Gennesar, with its thriving fish industry (Freyne, 1988, 995a). This has been dramatically corroborated, not just by the discovery of the Galilean boat, but also by tire survey of the many anchorages, breakwaters, harbors, and fish pools, often Roman in date, discovered, around the lake r
373
when the water levels were very low in 1985 and 1986. (Nun, 1988; Wachsmann, 1990). [See Galilee Boat.] The names of two settlements on or near tire lake, Tarichaea (Gk., "salted fish")/Magdala and Betirsaida, are directly associated with the fishing industry, the former in particular alluding to the practice of salting fish for export, introduced in Hellenistic times. [See Betirsaida.] T h e boat's discovery and the analysis of its construction underline the ancillary industry of boat building which must have been considerable, especially if Josephus's figures are anything to go by (War 3. 522-531). In light of recent analysis of the pottery (see above), it seems that the interior of Galilee also could boast of a thriv ing industry from the Early Roman to the Byzantine periods. Three important centers of pottery manufacture, both known in Talnrudic sources for their wares, have been iden tified: Kefar Hananyah, on tire borders of Upper Galilee overlooking the Beth-ha-Kerem valley (where a large, fourth-century CE kiln has been excavated; see Adan-Bayewitz, 1986 and 1989); Shikhin, tentatively identified with a site close to Sepphoris (Strange et al., 1994), and Nahf in western Galilee where two kilns have been uncovered (Vitto, 1983-1984). [See Kefar Hananyah.] Adan-Bayewitz's (1993) study of the pottery of Galilee not only distinguishes typologies as in previous studies (Diez Fernandez, 1983), but also traces provenience and distribution patterns in or der to determine local (intra- and interregional) trade. Pot tery sherds from seventeen excavated and one surveyed site in Galilee and the Golan were subjected to a chemical anal ysis of the clay, enabling three separate provenience groups to be determined: Kefar Hananyah, Shikhin, and Golan wares. It was concluded that the two Galilean centers pro vided the majority of the household wares for all of Galilee in addition to a sizable minority of the Golan wares over a considerable period of time. T h e wares from Kefar Hananyah and Shikhin are distinguishable from each other by both form and clay components. Thus, two local man ufacturing centers emerge in what would technically be de scribed as Galilean villages (and no doubt there were others like Nahf), each with its own specialization and use of local resources. This points to a rapidly developing market econ omy, that is interested in supplying surplus goods within a regional trading network of some significance for Galilee as a whole (Adan-Bayewitz and Perlman, 1990). Kefar Hananyah provided 10-20 percent of household wares in the Golan from tire Early to Late Roman periods, but no Golan ware has so far been found in Galilee, ac cording to David Adan-Bayewitz's (1993) findings. The fact that the Galilean wares are found not just at Jewish Golan sites such as 'Ein-Nashut and Dabiye but also at Tel Anafa and Hippos/Susita, both Hellenistic foundations, shows that the trade was not just interregional but also interethnic, something that is confirmed by the presence of the Kefar Hananyah ware at Akko/Ptolemais also. [See Anafa, Tel.] The fact that no Galilean ware was found among tire pottery
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remains of sites south of the Nazareth ridge, such as Samaria and Beth-Shean/Scythopolis, as well as at tire more southerly sites in Transjordan, is surely significant in terms of the ex tent of the trade. This may be due to several factors: trans portation difficulties, ritual concerns to do with vessels, in terregional—or, in the case of Samaria, interethnic and religious—rivalries, or competing local ware (as in the case of the Golan, where a local pottery trade could be identified, but which clearly was not sufficient to meet all the local needs). T h e pattern of local trade emerging from this study of tire pottery is also substantiated by a consideration of the coins to be found at Galilean sites. Money played an important role in the development of more sophisticated modes of ex change in ancient economies (Freyne, 1995b). Galilee had its own coinage, albeit of modest proportions, under Herod Antipas, for whom three strikings of bronze coins have so far been identified. In addition, the cities of Sepphoris/Diocaesarea (from 67 CE) and Tiberias (from 100 CE) struck coins, but the scale appears to be limited by contrast with such important trading centers as Tyre (Meshorer, 1985). The coinage of Tyre (both autonomous city coins and Ro man imperial ones struck there) predominates at both U p per and Lower Galilean sites, as well as in the various hoards of coins that have been unearthed. No coins from Lower Galilee occur at any of the Upper Galilean sites, however (Ben-David, 1969; Barag, 1982-1983; Hanson, 1980; Raynor and Meshorer, 1988). Thus a pattern emerges in which Tyre continued to be the predominant outiet for Galilean produce, as suggested by tire prophet Ezekiel (chap. 27) al ready in the sixth century BCE (Diakonoff, 1992). In turn, it depended on the hinterland for its own needs, grain and oil in particular, as well as benefiting from the export trade. T h e identification of olive and wine presses from western Galilee in particular conforming to a typology found in the SyroPhoenician region generally, confirms this network of ev eryday influences that transcends ethnic and cultural affili ations (Frankel, 1992). It is probable that there were regional exchange centers witirin Galilee also, such as the sites ex cavated by tire Meiron Expedition (Khirbet Shema', Meiron, Gush Halav) and equally Sepphoris for Lower Galilee, where storage cisterns as well as a weight inscribed with die word agoranomos (a Greek magistrate who oversaw trans actions in the marketplace) has been discovered (Meyers et al., 1986). Of the excavated Galilean sites in Upper Galilee, only Nabratein does not seem to conform fully to this pattern. T h e coin profile there is quite different from the other sites ex cavated by the Meiron Expedition, with Tyrian coins poorly represented. At the same time tire evidence from many plas tered storage pits is that it, too, served as a collection center for local produce, wine, and oil. This suggests tirat its lo cation pointed Nabratein in a more easterly orientation, to ward the Hulah valley and beyond for its trading contacts.
This conclusion underlines the adaptability of the Jewish population to its larger environment, and in the case of Na bratein, animal representation in the synagogue shows how this diversification is echoed in religious expressions also, but within a thoroughly Jewish framework. Even at the other Upper Galilean sites that might be labeled conservative in terms of their religious observance, the detailed excavation reports of the Meiron team note dre presence of imported fine ware from Cyprus, North Africa, and the East in tire late Roman period. This shows tirat these places were thriv ing economically, and suggests that their religious views did not isolate them from tire trappings of affluence, as ex pressed in luxury household wares in the region generally (Meyers, Strange, and Groh, 1978). Charting of the road systems contributes greatly to an un derstanding of Galilean trading patterns, even when devel opments in this regard for the Roman period are associated with the greater military presence in Palestine rather than with trading, after the two revolts, especially that under Ha drian (132-135 CE). The presence of milestones and paving, often on top of older tracks from tire Hellenistic period, can help in the dating of this process (Roll, 1983 and 1994; Strange, 1994). Earlier discussions of the road systems tended to concentrate on the through roads, particularly tire Via Maris, which was believed to bifurcate on crossing tire Jordan below the Sea of Galilee, one branch traveling south via Beth-Shean/Scythopolis to Jerusalem and the other heading for the coast through the Great Plain. In addition a road Uniting Tyre witir Damascus through Banias is also suggested (Avi-Yonah, 1966). The more recent archaeolog ical evidence fills out this picture considerably for Lower Galilee through the discovery of milestones: a road from Akko/Ptolemais to Sepphoris and on to Tiberias (nine mile stones, seven before and two after Sepphoris, going west); a road from Tiberias, south to Beth-Shean/Scythopolis (nine milestones); a second-century road from Beth-Shean/ Scythopolis to Legio in the Jezreel Plain (fifteen milestones); another second-century road from Legio to Akko/Ptolemais (five milestones); a road from Legio to Sepphoris (tirirteen milestones), and a road from Betirsaida-Julias nortirwest past Chorazin, possibly lurking to Akko/Ptolemais (Roll, 1983 and 1994). Further exploration will undoubtedly un cover a much more complex network of local roads than is possible to document at present, especially around tire larger settlements, such as those reported for the Sepphoris region by Strange (1994). Language. Language is a general indicator of a wider pat tern of cultural affiliation. Inscriptions alone, therefore, are of only limited value in determining everyday language pat terns. They may be stylized and atypical, depending on tire circumstances in which they occur, as well as on other, more far-reaching factors to do with language, such as its use for administrative or commercial purposes and the possibility of bi- or trilingualism in mixed etirnic contexts. In the Gal-
GALILEE: Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods
375
ilee setting the foremost archaeological data for language patterns are the many inscriptions from the necropolis of Beth-She'arim in western Lower Galilee. These are nor mally dated from the period of Rabbi Judah the Prince (c. 200 CE) . [See Beth-She'arim]. T h e site continued as a ne cropolis until after the Gallus Revolt in the mid-fourth cen tury CE. Some have suggested that chambers 6 and 11 where only Greek is found should be dated to die first century CE (Lifshitz, 1965). Even then, however, the question is raised about how representative this evidence is of the linguistic habits of Galileans. T h e Greek is, in many cases, "vulgar" rather than cultured in style, which may point to its being rooted in the region's colloquial practices. T h e location of Beth-She'arim, however, on the borders of the district of Akko/Ptolemais might be seen as malting it unrepresenta tive, even for Lower Galilee. T h e practice of secondary burials from the Diaspora also needs to be borne in mind in evaluating the significance of the language of burial inscrip tions.
gogue remains in Lower Galilee; and the rabbinic sources, though written in Aramaic and Hebrew, show a high inci dence of Greek loan words, pointing to a situation in which Aramaic was the lingua franca, but with a gradual infiltration of Greek. T h e attempt to produce a comprehensive picture of Gal ilean society on the basis of the archaeological evidence alone, highlighted by this discussion of the epigraphic evi dence for linguistic practices, inevitably must be tentative and open to constant revision. New discoveries are made yearly and more and more sophisticated methods are ap plied to examine the data from the region from which two world religions have emerged. Archaeological evidence and literary descriptions must be critically correlated, a task that calls for considerable methodological sophistication in sev eral disciplines. Literary theorists have made us aware that all texts are tellings rather than showings; archaeology pro vides a showing in need of a critical telling.
In Upper Galilee, where it might be expected tiiat Greek would be well represented at sites as a result of made links, Hebrew and Aramaic were found to dominate. A few scat tered examples of Greek have emerged—an ostracon and ring from Gush Halav, an inscribed storage jar from Meiron, and a bilingual inscription from Firim (modern Rosh Pinah), and the well-known inscription from Qatsyon (pos sibly from a Jewish site) honoring Emperor Septimius Severus (Meyers and Strange, 1981; Meyers, 1985, p. 120). [See Gush Halav.] This is in sharp contrast to the linguistic picture emerging further north in the non-Jewish areas from sites such as Qedesh, Banias, and the Hermon region gen erally (Fischer et a l , 1986; Tzaferis, 1992; Dar, 1992). It seems tiiat in Upper Galilee, a conservative linguistic pattern corresponded to an equally conservative attitude toward re ligious art, despite the readiness of the Jewish inhabitants to trade with the most influential commercial center in the area, Tyre, with its pagan associations. In Lower Galilee the regional differences in terms of eth nic mix and openness to the surrounding culture (see above) come into play. In addition to the possibly exceptional site of Beth-She'arim, Greek appears at sites along the western shores of the lake and in the lower part of central Lower Galilee, the very areas where, on the basis of both the literary and architectural remains, the Jewish population was lo cated. Yet those Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions that are found in lower Galilee also occur in tiiese regions. This sug gests a pattern of bi- or even trilingualism for Jews in Lower Galilee (Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew), as distinct from U p per Galilee, where die pattern is Aramaic/Hebrew. How ever, several factors urge caution: the majority of Greek in scriptions are at Christian sites and date from the Byzantine period; there is a relative paucity of Hebrew/Aramaic in scriptions, which may not reflect the actual picture, but may simply be the result of the poorly preserved state of syna
BIBLIOGRAPHY Adan-Bayewitz, David. "Kefar Hananya." Israel Exploration Journal 37 (1986): 178ft".; 39 (1989): S7ff. Adan-Bayewitz, David, and Isadore Perlman. "The Local Trade of Sepphoris in the Roman Period." Israel Exploration Journal 19 (1990): 153-172. Adan-Bayewitz, David, and Moshe Wieder. "Ceramics from Galilee: A Comparison of Several Techniques for Fabric Characterization." Journal of Field Archaeology 19 (1992): 189-205. Adan-Bayewitz, David. Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade. Ramat Gan, 1993. Alt, Albrecht. "Galilaische Problemen." In Alt's Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel, vol. 2, pp. 363-435. Munich, 1953. Aviam, Mordechai. "The Roman Temple in Kedesh in the Light of Certain Northern Syrian City Coins." Tel Aviv 12 (1985): 212-214. Aviam, Mordechai. "Galilee: The Hellenistic to Byzantine Periods." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 452-458. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Avi-Yonah, Michael. "Mount Carmel and the God of Baalbeck." Israel Exploration Journal. 2 (1951): 118-124. Avi-Yonah, Michael. "Syrian Gods at Ptolemais-Acho." Israel Explo ration Journal 9 C'959): 1-12. Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Holy Land from the Persian to the Arab Con quests, 5 5 6 B.C.-A.D. 640: A Historical Geography. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966. Biran, Avraham. "To the God Who Is in Dan." In Temples and High Places in Biblical Times, edited by Avraham Biran, pp. 142-151. Je rusalem, 1981. Bagatti, Bellarmino. Antichi villaggi cristiani di Galilea. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Minor, no. 13. Jerusalem, 1971. Barag, Dan. "Tyrian Currency in Galilee." Israel Numismatic Journal 6-7 (1982-1983): 7 - I 3 Ben-David, Arye, Jerusalem und Tyros: Ein Beitrag zur Paldstinenischen Miinz- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Basel, 1969. Dar, Shim'on. "The History of the Hermon Settlements." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 120 (1988): 26-44. Dar, Shim'on. "The Greek Inscriptions from Senaim on Mount Her mon." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 124 (1992): 9-25. Diakonoff, Igor M. "The Naval Power and Trade of Tyre." Israel Ex ploration Journal42 (1992): 168-193. Diez Fernandez, Florentine Cerdmica cormin romana de la Galilea: Ap-
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proximaciones y diferencias con la ceramica del rcsto de Paleslina y regiones circundantes. Jerusalem and Madrid, 1983. Edwards, Douglas "First-Century Rural/Urban Relations in Lower Galilee: Exploring the Archaeological Evidence." In Society of Bib lical Literature Seminar Papers, edited by David J. Lull, pp. 169-182. Atlanta, 1988. Edwards, Douglas. "The Socio-Economic and Cultural Ethos of the Lower Galilee in the First Century: Implications for the Nascent Jesus Movement." In The Galilee in iMte Antiquity, edited by Lee I. Levine, pp. 53-73. New York, 1992. Epstein, Claire, and Shmaryahu Gutman. "The Golan" (in Hebrew). In Judea, Samaria, and the Golan: Archaeological Survey, 1967-1968, edited by Moshe Kochavi, pp. 243-298. Jerusalem, 1972. Fischer, Moshe, et al. "The Roman Temple at Kedesh, Upper Galilee: A Preliminary Study." Tel Aviv 11 (1984): 147-172. Fischer, Moshe, et al. "The Epigraphic Finds from the Roman Temple at Kedesh in the Upper Galilee." Tel Aviv 13 (1986): 60-66. Frankel, Rafael. "Har Mizpe Yamim, 1988/89." Excavations and Sur veys in Israel 9 (1989-1990): 100-102. Frankel, Rafael, "Some Oil-Presses from Western Galilee." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 286 (1992): 39-71. Freyne, Sean. Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian, 323 B.C.E. to 13s C.E.: A Study of Second Temple Judaism. Wilmington, Dela., and Notre Dame, 1980. Freyne, Sean. Galilee, Jesus, and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations. Dublin and Minneapolis, 1988. Freyne, Sean. "Jesus and the Urban Culture of Galilee." In Texts and Contexts: Texts in Their Textual and Situational Contexts; Essays in Honor of Lars Hartman, edited by Tord Fornberg and David Hellholm, pp. 597-622. Oslo, 1995a. Freyne, Sean. "Herodian Economics in Galilee: Searching for a Suit able Model." In Modelling Early Christianity: Social-Scientific Studies of the New Testament in Its Context, edited by Philip F. Esler, pp. 2 3 46. London, 1995b. Gal, Zvi. Lower Galilee during the Iron Age. American Schools of Ori ental Research, Dissertation Series, no. 8. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Goodman, Martin D. State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 1 3 2 - 2 1 2 . Totowa, N.J., 1982. Hanson, Richard S. Tyrian Influence in the Upper Galilee, Cambridge, Mass., 1980. Hartal, Mosheh. "Khirbet Zemel, 1985/86." Israel Exploration Journal 37 (1987): 270-272. Hartal, Mosheh. Northern Golan Heights: The Archaeological Survey as a Source of Local History (in Hebrew). Qasrin, Israel, 1989. Ilan, Zvi, et al. "Galilee: Survey of Synagogues." Excavations and Sur veys in Israel 5 (1986-1987): 35-37. Ilan, Zvi. "Meroth." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Exca vations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 1028-1031. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Levine, Lee I., ed. Ancient Synagogues Revealed. Jerusalem, 1981. Levine, Lee I., ed. The Synagogue in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia, 1987. Levine, Lee I., ed. The Galilee in Late Antiquity. New York, 1992. Lifshitz, Baruch. "L'hellenisation des juifs de Palestine a propos des inscriptions de Beshara (Beth She'arim)." Revue Biblique 72 (1965): 520-538. Ma'oz, Zvi. "The Synagogue in the Second Temple Period: Architec tural and Social Interpretation." Eretz-Israel22 (1992): 33i*-344.*. Meshorer, Ya'acov. City-Coins of Eretz-Israel and the Decapolis in the Roman Period. Jerusalem, 1985. Meyers, Eric M., "Galilean Regionalism as a Factor in Historical Re construction." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 221 (1976): 93-101. Meyers, Eric M., James F. Strange, and Dennis E. Groh. "The Meiron Excavation Project: Archaeological Survey in Galilee and Golan,
1976." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 230 (1978): 1-24. Meyers, Eric M., and James F. Strange. Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity. Nashville and London, 1981. Meyers, Eric M. "Galilean Regionalism: A Reappraisal." In Approaches to Ancient Judaism, vol. 5, Studies in Judaism and Its Greco-Roman Context, edited by William Scott Green, pp. 115—131. Atlanta, 1985. Meyers, Eric M., et al. "Sepphoris, 'Ornament of All Galilee.'" Biblical Archaeologist 49 (1986): 4-19. Meyers, Eric M. "Roman Sepphoris in Light of New Archaeological Evidence and Recent Research." In The Galilee in Late Antiquity, edited by Lee I. Levine, pp. 321-338. New York, 1992. Meyers, Eric M„ Carol L. Meyers, and Ehud Netzer. Sepphoris. Wi nona Lake, Ind., 1992. Meyers, Eric M. "Nabratein." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeolog ical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 1077-1079. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Miller, Stuart S. Studies in the History and Traditions of Sepphoris. Stud ies in Judaism and Late Antiquity, vol. 37. Leiden, 1984. Netzer, Ehud, and Zeev Weiss. Zippori. Jerusalem, 1994. Nun, Mendel. Ancient Anchorages and Harbours around the Sea of Gal ilee. Ein Gev, 1988. Overman, J. Andrew. "Who Were the First Urban Christians?" In So ciety of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, edited by David J. Lull, pp. 160-168. Atianta, 1988. Overman, J. Andrew. "Recent Advances in the Archaeology of the Gal ilee in the Roman Period." In Current Research in Biblical Studies, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Philip H. Sellew, pp. 35-58. Sheffield, 1993. Raynor, Joyce, and Ya'acov Meshorer. The Coins of Ancient Meiron. Winona Lake, Ind., 1988. Roll, Israel. "The Roman Road System in Judea." Jerusalem Cathedra 3 (1983): 136-181. Roll, Israel. "Roman Roads." In Tabula imperii romani: Iudaea-Palaestina, edited by Yoram Tsafrir et al., pp. 21-22. Jerusalem, 1994. In cludes a detailed map. Schiirer, Emil. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 17S B.C.-A.D. 1 3 $ . 4 vols. Revised and edited by Geza Vermes et al. Edinburgh, 1973-1987. Strange, James F. "Six Campaigns at Sepphoris: The University of South Florida Excavations, 1983—1989." In The Galilee in Late An tiquity, edited by Lee I. Levine, pp. 339-356. New York, 1992. Strange, James F., et al. "Excavations at Sepphoris: The Location and Identification of Shikhin, Part 1." Israel Exploration Journal 44 (1994): 216-227. Strange, James F. "First-Century Galilee from Archaeology and from Texts." In Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, edited by David J. Lull, pp. 81-90. Atlanta, 1994. Tzaferis, Vassilios. "Cults and Deities Worshipped at Caesarea Philippi-Banias." In Priests, Prophets, and Scribes: Essays in Second Tem ple Judaism in Honour of Joseph Blenhinsopp, edited by Eugene Ulrich, pp. 190-203. Sheffield, 1992a. Tzaferis, Vassilios. "The 'God Who Is in Dan' and the Cult of Pan at Banias in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods." Eretz-Israel 23 (1992b): I 2 8 * - I 3 5 * . Urman, Dan. Tlie Golan: A Profile of a Region during the Roman and Byzantine Periods. British Archaeological Reports, International Se ries, no. 269. Oxford, 1985. Vitto, Fanny. "A Look into the Workshop of a Late Roman Galilean Potter." Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society (19831984): 19-22. Wachsmann, Shelley. The Excavations of an Ancient Boat in the Sea of Galilee. 'Atiqot, vol. 19. Jerusalem, 1990. SEAN FREYNE
GALILEE BOAT G A L I L E E B O A T . A two-thousand-year-old vessel was discovered in the Sea of Galilee in 1986, south of Kibbutz Ginosar. Found by Moshe and Yuval Lufan, the boat was entirely buried in sediment on an expanse of exposed lake bed. A severe drought had lowered the lake's water level. The Israel Department of Antiquities carried out a probe that indicated that much of the lower portion of the hull had survived in good condition. Initial investigation revealed that its strakes (planking) had been edge-joined one to the other with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints. This method is known to have been used in the construction of Mediter ranean seacraft at least by the Late Bronze Age; it continued in use at least until the end of the Roman period. Upon tire vessel's discovery, tire media termed it the Jesus Boat, causing a great stir and initiating a chain of events that threatened tire hull's well-being. T o prevent any danger to it, the Department of Antiquities carried out an unusual sal vage excavation, assisted by volunteers from the Yigal Allon Center, Kibbutz Ginosar, and Moshav Migdal. During the excavation the project's conservator, Orna Cohen, invented a novel method for packaging the hull for transport using fiberglass frames and polyurethane. Once excavated, the boat was sailed out onto the lake and brought to tire Allon Center, where a specially built conservation pool was built to conserve it (see figure 1). T h e boat's dating was determined by the techniques used in its construction, by pottery found in its proximity, by a battery of carbon-14 tests, and by historical considerations. While no one of these methods is sufficient by itself, together they strongly suggest that tire boat was in use on the Sea of Galilee between 100 BCE and 67 CE. During the excavation, noted ship reconstructor J. Rich ard Steffy carried out a preliminary study of the hull (see figure 2). Its method of consttuction was typical in the Med iterranean basin at the time, when it was the practice to build the shell first: after laying the keel and posts, the builder(s) edge-joined the planking one to the other with mortise-andtenon joints. Only after the hull was raised to a sufficient height were frames inserted into it. [See Seafaring.] The boat's preserved length is 8.2 m; its maximum width is 2.3 m. At the stern, where it is best preserved, it is 1.2 m high. Two timbers were joined with a scarf to form the keel, which is rectangular in section and rockered (curved so that it is deeper amidships than at the boat's extremities). It has no rabbets (grooves). Instead, the abutting garboard strakes are attached horizontally to tire keel with mortise-and-tenon joints into which pegs were driven from above. The forward part of the keel contained a row of mortise scars indicating that it had seen previous use. T h e hull's planking is somewhat unusual. In many cases the strakes are peculiarly narrow, apparently the result of at least some of the planks also having been recycled from ear lier vessels. This would have required the removal of the mortise-and-tenon scars on the lateral and dorsal edges,
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Figure 1. The Galilee Boat in its conservation pool. (Photograph by D. Syon, courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
GALILEE BOAT.
which resulted in the narrowing of the planks. The mortiseand-tenon joints are placed at 1 2 - c m intervals and locked with tapered pegs driven from inside tire hull. The "floor and half-frame" framing pattern is also typical of contemporary Mediterranean ships. Frames were fash ioned from timbers poorly suited to their purpose, so that at times they spring significantly from tire planking. Some frames still have their bark attached. The boat's construction suggests that it was built by someone familiar with the ship building techniques prevalent on tire Mediterranean coast. However, the boatwright used timber of inferior quality to that normally in use on the Mediterranean. Forty-one of the boat's timbers have been identified by E. Werker. T h e majority of the strakes studied were fashioned from Lebanese cedar (Cedrus); most of tire frames were made of oak (Quercus) branches. Five additional types of wood have been identified in the boat's construction: sidder (Ziziphus spina-christi, also known as christ-thorn or jujube)
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GALILEE BOAT
Figure 2. Preliminary line drawings of the boat. (Drawing by J. R. Steffy, courtesy Institute of Nautical Archaeology) GALILEE BOAT.
for tire aft part of tire keel; Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis) for one of the planks; and single examples of frames from haw thorn (Crataegus), willow (Salix), and redbud (Cercis siliquastrum). With dre exception of the cedar, all these trees grow, or grew, in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee and its environs. The use of a variety of different woods (some of which are inappropriate for naval construction) is highly un usual. Taken together with the evidence for the recycling of wood, this suggests either a deficit of wood or that the boat's owner could not afford better timber. T h e boat could have been propelled by oar or sail. It had had a long work life, as evidenced by numerous repairs to tire hull. Some repairs had been made by strengthening the planking with large iron staplelike fastenings where the mortise-and-tenon joints had given way. This type of boat appears to have been built specifically for use with tire large seine net (Gk., segena) by means of which fish were caught near the shore (Mt. 1 3 : 4 7 - 5 0 ) . [See Fishing.] It was probably tire largest type of boat on tire lake. Boats of similar size, termed Arabiye in Arabic, were used for fishing with the seine net on the Sea of Galilee into the twentieth century. In addition to fishing, the boat probably served a variety of other purposes, including transporting passengers and supplies around the Sea of Galilee. Some parts of the hull had been intentionally removed in
antiquity, among them tire stem construction, the sternpost, the mast step, and several of the frames. Some of the most memorable Gospel stories deal with voyages and fishing on the lake. T h e Sea of Galilee and its fishermen and sailors serve as the backdrop to Jesus' min istry. Until the discovery of the Galilee boat, however, vir tually nothing concrete was known concerning the boats used on the lake then. A boat depicted in a first-century CE mosaic from Migdal carries two oars and a quarter rudder on its port side, thus requiring a minimum crew of five: four oarsmen and a helmsman/captain. [See Mosaics.] Steffy postulates that a similar number of crew would have been required for the Galilee boat. Furthermore, references to the boats of Zebedee and Simon/Peter—the only two boats specified in the Gospels—indicate that they also had crews of five or more men (Mk. 1:20; Jn. 2 1 : 2 - 3 ) . Thus, all these sources refer to the same type of boat. Similarly, Josephus, in describing a "sham" fleet he brought against the citizens of Tiberias dur ing the first Jewish Revolt against Rome, mentions placing skeleton crews of four sailors in each of the (fishing) boats in his fleet; elsewhere he refers to helmsmen, indicating that his boats were manned by crews of five men (Life 32.163; War 2 . 6 3 5 , 6 4 1 ) . [See First Jewish Revolt.] Despite popular belief, it is not possible to determine how
GAMES many individuals took part in any of the boat trips recorded in the Gospels. Josephus, however, indicates that a boat of this type could hold up to fifteen men (Life 32.164; 33.168; War 2.639). T h e boats used by Josephus in his sham fleet are apparendy the same ones later used by Jewish forces in their naval batde against Vespasian's troops, following the fall of Migdal, in fall 67 (War 3.522-531). During the Roman investi ture of the city, some Jews managed to escape in a fleet of fishing boats that had been prepared in anticipation of the Roman advance. Against this fleet Vespasian's forces built makeshift vessels, perhaps catamarans constructed from Jewish boats that had been left behind—and vanquished the Jews. A pyramidal iron arrowhead found in the sediment inside the Galilee boat is apparentiy of foreign origin and may have been fired by a Roman auxilia archer during the battie. Fourteen similar arrowheads were found at Gamla, the next Jewish city conquered by Vespasian after Migdal. [See Gamla.] The arrowhead was not found in an archaeological context, however, and therefore does not indicate that this particular boat participated in the batde. Rather, the evi dence suggests that, at the end of a long work life, the boat was brought ashore to have all its reusable parts cannibal ized. What remained of the hull was then pushed into the lake, there soon to be buried under sediment. During the excavation portions of two additional hulls were found in the immediate vicinity of the Galilee boat, suggesting tiiat the boat's find site was an area of boat-build ing activity in antiquity. T h e Galilee boat has provided valuable information about a type of large boat in use on the Sea of Galilee during the first centuries BCE and CE. However, there presently is no evidence to suggest that this vessel took part in any of the events mentioned in contemporary literary sources. [See also Anchors; and Ships and Boats.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Steffy, J. Richard. "The Kinneret Boat Project, Part II: Notes on the Construction of the Kinneret Boat." International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 16 (1987): 325-329. Prelim inary report on the Galilee boat's construction. Steffy, J. Richard. Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Ship wrecks. College Station, Tex., 1994. Includes a summary description of the Galilee boat's construction (see pp. 65-67). Wachsmann, Shelley, et al. "The Kinneret Boat Project, Part I: The Excavation and the Conservation of the Kinneret Boat." Interna tional Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 16 (1987): 233-245. Preliminary report on the discovery, excavation, and transportation of the boat. Wachsmann, Shelley, et al. The Excavations of an Ancient Boat in the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret). 'Atiqot, vol. 19. Jerusalem, 1990. Ex cavation report. Wachsmann, Shelley. The Sea of Galilee Boat: An Extraordinary 2000-
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Year-Old Discovery. New York, 1995. Popular account of the dis covery, excavation, and research. SHELLEY WACHSMANN
GALLING, KURT (1900-1987), Hebrew Bible scholar and archaeologist. Born in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, Gall ing, after completing his gymnasium studies in Berlin in 1917, joined the army, in which he served until the end of World War I. He went on to study theology and oriental studies at the universities of Berlin and Jena. He completed his thesis "Licht und Beleuchtung in Vorstellung und Darstellung israelitisch-judischer Kultur" in 1921 and was pro moted to doctor of theology. Continuing his studies in clas sical archaeology, Galling received a Ph.D. with the thesis "Der Altar in den Kulturen des Vorderen Orients." In 1925, having written a third thesis, "Die Erwahlungstraditionen Israels," he was promoted to lecturer for Old Testament and biblical archaeology at Berlin's Humboldt University. Be tween 1928 and 1946 he taught at the university in Halle, where he was an associate professor. From 1946 to 1955, as a full professor, he held an Old Testament chair at the Uni versity of Mainz and then, from 1955 to 1962, at the Uni versity of GSttingen. He served as director of the Institute of Biblical Archaeology at Tubingen University from 1962 to 1969. He lived in Tubingen until his death. Galling combined the philological and archaeological as pects of Old Testament studies. Although he had partici pated in the excavations at Shechem and Tell Beit Mirsim, he never took an active part in fieldwork. Nonetheless, he wrote numerous articles on archaeological subjects and in 1937 published the Biblisches Reallexikon, with the intention of illustrating biblical terms, texts, with information about the archaeology of Palestine and other lands of the Bible (a second edition appeared in 1977). Galling's primary area of research was the history and archaeology of the Persian pe riod. As editor in chief he succeeded in publishing the third edition of the theological encyclopedia Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. At the end of his academic career, in 1970, he was honored witii a Festschrift, Archctologie und Alles Testament, that includes articles written by his col leagues and pupils from all over the world as well as a com prehensive bibliography of his work. BIBLIOGRAPHY Weippert, Manfred. "Kurt Galling." Zeitschrift des Deutschen PalastinaVereins 104 (1988): 190-194. VOLKMAR FRITZ
GAMES. Play is one of the central human expressions. Although anthropologists suggest that human beings have always played games, they have not always produced play-
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GAMES
tilings for use in their games. Objects that are clearly iden tifiable as toys do not appear in the ancient Near East until the Neolitiric period. In general, games and toys can be re constructed using literary, epigraphic, archaeological, and iconographic sources. Ethnological findings complement and secure the overall picture. The legitimacy of such pro cess of reconstruction is greatly strengthened by the essen tially conservative character of most games: a majority of fire games played in the various cultures of the ancient Near East were played in the same or a similar manner. Many games have preserved their continuity over centuries and millennia into the modern period. As a whole, however, the historical reality can only be partially recaptured. Because an appreciable portion of ancient playthings was produced of perishable materials such as leather, wood, and unburnt clay or consisted of living animals or were the spontaneous inventions of children, it is clear how littie the evidence for the reconstruction approaches historical reality. In addition, the lack of evidence for a game does not necessarily mean tiiat it was unknown in the region under consideration. For example, neither swings nor seesaws are evidenced in an cient Palestine, yet drey are well attested among various other pre- and post-Hellenistic cultures in the Near East. Thus, it can be deduced, with probability bordering on cer titude, tiiat Palestinian children of tire first millennium BCE played with swings and seesaws, even without direct mate rial evidence. From botii a phenomenological and an em pirical perspective, practically anything can become a toy. Therefore, definitions of playing and playthings are delib erately avoided here (Vandenberg, 1982).
tested in Bronze and Iron Age Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, and Mesopotamia: a string run through two holes would be by stretched and then relaxed, making the disk whirl, jump, and emit a buzzing or humming sound. This type of disk, known as a buzz or a bull-roarer in English, was called an iygx in the Greek world and an iunx (iynx) in Latin (Van Beek, 1989). Both children and adults played with astragali, or animal knucklebones. Astragali are not only tire most widely at tested but also among the earliest evidenced toys in the an cient Near East. Owing to their four long sides, they were used as four-sided dice. Astragali could be reproduced in other materials, such as stone, metal, and glass. Games em ploying astragali were played until modern times. Asttagali could also be used as dice for board games or as lots for divination. In addition, a number of games were played solely with astragali, including pentelitha ("five stones," a game of skill); ludere par impar ("to play odds and evens," a guessing game); and tropa (also called orca) and omilla (two types of "marbles" games; see the Carchemish relief). In the Middle Bronze Age, six-sided dice in the shape of cubes or truncated pyramids were also used. In the centuries that followed, astragali and dice were used concurrentiy. Dice, which can be manufactured from a wide range of ma terials, have, like astragali, been used by children and adults in dice and board games and as lots. In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, playing (throwing) dice is evidenced both iconographically and literarily (Nonnos, metaphrasis Evangelii Ioannis 19:23-24; Gk., morra, and L a t , digitis micare) .
The first toy played witir by young children was probably the archaeologically well-attested rattle. Older children en joyed playing with live birds (cf. Jb. 40:29) and turties, as tire votive statues from tire Eshmun sanctuary in Bustan eshSheikh near Sidon (fourth century, BCE) indicate. Other ar chaeologically and literarily attested toys include terracotta model wagons, miniature dishes, and beds and animals made of clay, wood, and other materials (cf. Lucian, somn. 2; Arabic Infancy Gospel 26:1 f). Indirect evidence for playing in the sand is found in Ezekiel 4-5. Isaiah 22:18 attests to play with balls made of scraps of wool and cloth; they also appear iconographically in Mesopotamia and archaeologi cally in Egypt. Boys probably liked to play hunting and war games with various weapons, while girls enjoyed playing house with dolls. Togetiier they probably played hide-andseek (cf. Arabic Infancy Gospel 40:1), tire "royal game" of basilinda (cf. Philo of Alexandria, In Flacc. 36-129; Arabic Infancy Gospel 42:2) and even kollabismos (Gk., a game of teasing; Pollux 9.129). Children in the ancient Near East often played with tops. A series of tops made of wood and other materials is preserved from pharaonic and postpharaonic Egypt. On an eighth-century BCE relief from Carche mish, youths are depicted rotating tops by means of straps. Small (clay) disks in which holes are bored are widely at
Among the various board games attested archaeologically in the Near East, the most popular was the thirty-field game called Senet in Egypt. Evidence for the game has been found from the prehistoric through the Ptolemaic periods (Pusch, 979)- The board consisted of three parallel rows of ten square fields each. T h e rules are largely unknown, although it is clear that the pieces were advanced by two players by throwing dice. The game was known in Palestine as early as the Neolitiric period; in die Bronze and Iron Ages, evidence of the game has been found in Syria, Phoenicia, Mesopo tamia, Iran, and on Cyprus. Varieties of the game were played into the Hellenistic-Roman period. Of equal popu larity was a game that consisted of a board with 4 + 4 + 12 (= 20) fields (and variations; see, e.g., ANEP, 2d ed., no. 212). It was played as of tire Middle Bronze Age in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and on Cyprus (ANEP, 2d ed., no. 214). In addition, board games usually evidencing about fifty-eight holes were widespread in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Anatolia in the Bronze and Iron Ages (ANEP, 2d ed., nos. 213, 215). Nine Men's Morris (merels), checkers (draughts), and mancala are board games that are still being played. T h e first appeared in the Near East in the Roman-Byzantine period, as did a twelveline dot game (Lat., Indus duodecim scripta or tabula; Ar., x
GAMES
GAMES. Middle Bronze Age gaming stone found at Episkopi-Phaneromeni, Archives)
tawila or nard) that is similar to modem backgammon. T h e gaming pieces used vary widely in form and material. Board games, like other games, could be played not only by the living, but by the dead (cf. grave inventories) and by the gods (cf. Is. 22:18; Jb. 40:29; Ps. 104:26; and Plutarch, De hide et Osiride 12). T h e inhabitants of both cities and villages were enter tained by jugglers, jesters, fire (Jerome, Apol. contra Rufin 3:31) and sword swallowers, wandering musicians, and ac robats, as indicated, for example, on reliefs in Turkey at Alaca Hoytik (fourteenth century BCE) and Zincirli (eighth century BCE), and by later literary sources (Jerome, epistle 58:4; Tosefta, San. 67b; B.T. Suk. 53a; see Blocher, 1992). Exhibitions of strength, such as weightlifting (Jerome, In Zaccharaim 12:3; vita Hilarionis 17), wrestling, and boxing, were also included (cf. ANEP, 2d ed., nos. 218, 219; Tes tament ofJob 4:10; 27:3-4; Armenian Infancy Gospel 21:6-7). Traditional games that belonged to the private sphere (e.g., tops, astragali, board games) continued to be played in the Hellenistic-Roman period. Hellenization and its cul tural and economic opportunities brought with them a gam ing culture that had hitherto been largely unknown in the Near East. It was a culture in which the indigenous inhabi tants were passive onlookers, rather than participants. If at first these games consisted of athletic and musical contests in the Greek tradition (cf. Plutarch, Alexander 72), in the Roman period the most popular ones were horse and chariot races, wrestling and boxing matches, gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, and naval battles. In order t o organize these
Cyprus.
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(Courtesy ASOR
mass entertainments, most large cities in the Roman Empire built theaters and odeums (odeons); gymnasiums, orpalestras; and amphitheaters and hippodromes. (The latter often cannot be distinguished because they were erected as mul tipurpose structures.) T h e level of distribution of these archaeologically well-attested structures decreased from west to east. Nonetheless, theaters (or odeums) are to be found in Syria at Palmyra and Dura-Europos, and gymnasiums are found in Babylon and at Ai Khanum on the Oxus in Af ghanistan. The new gaming culture also left behind many traces in the native languages of the Near East: in Aramaic and in Syriac, for example, many Greek and Latin loan words appear, among them theater, stadium, and circus. [See also Odeum; and Theaters.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Blocher, Felix. "Gaukler im Alten Orient." In Aupenseiler und Randgruppen, edited by Volkert Haas, pp. 79-111. Constance, Germany, 1992. Decker, Wolfgang. Sports and Games in Ancient Egypt. Translated by Allen Guttmann. New Haven, 1992. The authoritative work on sports, games, and toys in pharaonic Egypt. Decker, Wolfgang, and Michael Herb. Bildatlas zwn Sport im Alten Agyptcn: Corpus der bildlichen Quellen zu Leibesiibungen, Spiel, Jagd, Tanz und verwandten Thernen in pharaonischer Zeil. 2 vols. Leiden, 1993. Frezouls, Edmond. "Les edifices des spectacles en Syrie." In Archeologie et histoire de la Syrie, vol. 2, La Syrie de I'epoque achemenide a I'avenement de ITslam, edited by Jean-Marie Dentzer and Winfried Orthmann, pp. 385-406. Saarbrtlcken, 1989. Hiibner, Ulrich. Spiel und Spielzeug im antiken Palastina. GSttingen,
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GAMLA
1992. The first monographical treatment of games, toys, and sports in ancient Palestine from prehistoric times to tire Middle Ages, in cluding all important archaeological parallels and literary, epigraphic, iconographic, and ethnological sources in the ancient Near East and an exhaustive bibliography (pp. 149-200). Joucr dans Vantiquite. Marseilles, 1991. Fine catalog of an exhibition held at the Musee d'Archeologie Mediterraneenne, Marseilles, con taining short essays and summaries of different aspects of games and toys in the ancient Mediterranean world. Laser, Siegfried. Sport und Spiel. Gottingen, 1987. Authoritative work on sports, games, and toys in early Greek regions. Pusch, Edgar B. Das Senet-Bretlspiel im Allen Agypten. Berlin, 1979. Authoritative work on Senet, an ancient Egyptian game. Van Beek, Gus W. "The Buzz: A Simple Toy from Antiquity." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 275 (1989): 53-58. Vandenberg, B. "Play: A Concept in Need of a Definition?" In The Play of Children, edited by D. J. Pepler and K. H. Rubin, pp. 15-20. Basel, 1982. ULRICH HUBNER Translated from German by Carl S. Ehrlich
G A M L A , Jewish town in the southern Golan Heights at the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (map ref erence 219 X 256). It is first mentioned by the Jewish his torian Josephus Flavius in connection with Alexander Jannaeus's military campaign in the region in about 83-80 BCE (War 1.105; Antiq. 13.394). The town was conquered by the Roman legion and destroyed in the fall of 67 CE. Josephus describes in some detail the city and the topography of the hill on which the town was constructed (War4.1-83). Based on this description, Y. Gal first identified a rocky spur be tween the branches of Nahal Daliyyot near the village of Deir Qeruh in the southern Golan at Gamla. The site, called es-Sunas in Arabic, was surveyed by Shmaryahu Gutman in 1970. The lower flank of the spur was excavated under his direction beginning in 1976 on behalf of the Israel De partment of Antiquities and Museums. The excavations confirmed Gal's hypothesis. Remains recovered at Gamla date mainly to tire Late Sec ond Temple period through the Jewish Revolt of 66-74. The earliest numismatic remains date to the reign of Antiochus I Soter (280 BCE); the latest are a coin of Akko from the time of Vespasian and six Jewish coins of the First Revolt with the legend "For the redemption of h[oly] Jerusalem," a coin type found only at Gamla. During the first century, Gamla had a fortification wall that extended for about 350 m to the east of the settlement Gutman excavated along the wall for its entire length, both within and outside the city. The excavations revealed resi dential areas and an olive press. On its other sides the town was protected by tire hill's steep cliffs. On the east, a large public building identified as a synagogue was discovered ad jacent to the town in the first season of excavation. During the Roman siege, the wall was breached at this place. It was repaired once by the defenders and reopened by the Ro mans.
The synagogue building was constructed of local basalt. It was a rectangular structure (25.5 X 17 m) situated on a northeast-southwest axis. T h e main entrance was on the west, with an exedra and an open court in front of it. A ritual bath (miqveh) was uncovered to the right of the court. T h e center of the hall (13.4 X 9.3 m) is unpaved and surrounded (except for the main entrance) by stepped benches. Col umns divided the unpaved area into two sections: the section on the west is aproximately 7.0 X 6.5 m, and the one on the east 4.0 X 6.5 m. Above tire benches is a broad, paved plat form with benches that adjoin the exterior walls. T h e hall is surrounded by four raised platforms. A small basin that the excavator believes was used for hand washing was uncov ered (Gutman, 1993). It was fed by a water channel that passed through the wall at the northern part of tire basalt paved platform above the four benches on the east. T h e lintels and capitals of this building, also of basalt, were carved with ornamentation. Several rooms were discovered to the east of the syna gogue, within the first section of tire city wall. Gutman sug gests that during the siege the room adjacent to the syna gogue was filled in to strengthen the wall. Benches on the sides of this room, and what apparently is a window through to the synagogue, were uncovered there. Gutman identifies this as a study room. He suggests that the synagogue, ad joined by a study room, a ritual bath, and a courtyard con stituted a community center of sorts for study and prayer. His model for this interpretation is the medieval European synagogue complex, a form that (like synagogue prayer) is presently still unattested. T h e function of this study room is unknown. [See also First Jewish Revolt; Golan; and Synagogues.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Gutman, Shmaryahu. "The Synagogue at Gamla." In Ancient Syna gogues Revealed, edited by Lee I. Levine, pp. 30-34. Jerusalem, 1981. Early report of the synagogue excavation. Gutman, Shmaryahu. "Gamala." In The New Encyclopedia of Archae ological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 459-463. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. The most complete report of the excavation available. Ma'oz, Zvi. "The Synagogue of Gamla and the Typology of SecondTemple Synagogues." In Ancient Synagogues Revealed, edited by Lee I. Levine, pp. 35-41. Jerusalem, 1981. The synagogue in the context of other Second Temple period synagogues in Israel. STEVEN FINE
G A R D E N S . [To provide a general typology and morphol ogy of gardens, this entry comprises three articles: Gardens in Preclassical Times Gardens of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Gardens of the Islamic Period Each article surveys the historical development, forms, and func tions of gardens during the periods in question.]
GARDENS: Gardens in Preclassical Times Gardens in Preclassical Times In Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt, gardens and parks were generally irrigated land enclosed for collections of cultivated plants and animals; in Lebanon and in temperate areas, managed native habitats or reserves are attested. Gardens are differentiated from other cultivated areas by the water supply and labor regime needed to maintain them, by the language and images used to describe them, and often by their association with architecture. Few gardens have been excavated, but landscape archaeology is an emerging subdiscipline; as cultivated sites are excavated, the textual and art historical evidence will grow. M e s o p o t a m i a . Gardens in Mesopotamia existed in parks, palaces and estates, and temples. Parks. Gardens first appear in tire texts of tire third mil lennium (Postgate, 1994, p. 174). T h e Epic of Gilgamesh describes a park. Gilgamesh and his companion enter a bounded wood in the Amanus Mountains. T h e fearsome Flumbaba guards its straight paths and tends the cedars. The story raises tiremes constant in Near Eastern garden history: fascination witir foreign landscapes and plants; the admirable, essentially human order of the straight path and plantings; and the violent act of cutting down tire trees of one's vanquished enemy. Stephanie Dalley (1986) points out that in the Sumerian language no distinction is made between an orchard of trees and a garden. Kings boast of large parts of cities devoted to these parks, of the great irrigation works that feed them, and of the distant lands from which the plants and animals are gathered. Tiglath-Pileser I (1114-1076 BCE) created a com bined zoological park and arboretum of exotic animals and trees. Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) created a garden/park at Nimrud (Kalhu) by diverting water from the Upper Zab River through a rock-cut channel for his impressive collec tion of foreign plants and animals. [See Nimrud.] Sennach erib (704-681 BCE) makes a similar claim for Nineveh. [See Nineveh.] Parks are beautifully represented on the reliefs from Sargon IPs (721-705 BCE) palace at Khorsabad, in which a variety of trees and a small pavilion witir protoDoric columns are depicted. [See Khorsabad.] Otirer reliefs depict lion hunts and facolnry in the parks. A clay tablet from Babylon names and locates vegetables and herbs in the garden of Merodach-Baladan II (721-710 BCE). [See Baby lon.] In the palace reliefs of Ashurbanipal, dre garden sym bolizes the abundance and pleasures of peace after bravery in battle (Albenda, 1977). Not only are plants collected, but so are entire landscapes. One of Sennacherib's parks is rare in garden history: a rec reated marsh of the southern Euphrates River, with canebrakes, wild boar, and roosting herons. [See Euphrates.] Elsewhere, terracing provided the three-dimensional evo cation of mountains. T h e famous Hanging Gardens of Bab ylon of Nebuchadrezzar II (605-562 BCE) were described as
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being in imitation of the alpine landscape of Media. An ar chaeological identification of their location on the Euphrates has been rejected, however (Dalley, 1986, p. 370). Palace and estate gardens. Gardens also formed part of the architecture of the ancient Near East. Texts locate a garden in the internal courtyard of the royal palace at Mari (nineteenth century BCE), featuring palm trees and an or namental pool. [See Mari.] In fifteenth century BCE Ugarit, texts speak of a court with a large stone pond and another with plants and walkways, a pavilion, and a large trough. [See Ugarit.] Other texts range from fables that take place in gardens to ration lists, indicating that gardeners were members of a palace's staff (Pritchard, 1950). Most known palace courtyards still await excavation. [See Palace.] Firstmillennium BCE estate records indicate tirat nonroyal resi dences of the wealthy in northern Mesopotamia featured gardens widi vines, fruit trees, vegetables, pools, ponds, and gardeners' cottages. Temple gardens. Temple gardens for the provision of fresh offerings are attested but poorly known. According to the excavator of the ziggurat at Ur, trees and shrubs were planted on its tiers, but there is no physical evidence. [See Ziggurat; Ur.] At the Temple of the New Year Festival at Assur, rows of planting pits for shrubs and trees are cut into the rock of the inner courtyard and surrounding area. [See Assur.] Esarlraddon's records describe a temple garden with water channels and vegetable beds. Nebuchadrezzar's tem ple (see above) included cypress and juniper groves, as well as gardens that supplied offerings for Marduk. P e r s i a n G a r d e n s . The Persian pairidaeza are first at tested in the works of the Greek Xenophon, who saw these enclosed gardens in Anatolia and Persia. The source of the paradeisos, paradise, pardes (Heb.), parcus, and park—mon umental, geometric gardens—are dre Achaemenid Empire's most enduring cultural contribution. They are known from texts, reliefs, and archaeological remains at Pasargadae, Per sepolis, and Susa. [See Pasargadae; Persepolis; Susa.] A re cent field survey on tire Persepolis plain, compared with tex tual evidence, gives the first regional sketch of Achaemenid royal and nonroyal estates. There is no clear distinction between parks and palace gardens; in fact, at Pasargadae tombs are part of the com plex as well (Strabo 15.3.7). [See Tombs.] The palaces are pavillions set into shady, irrigated parks laid out orthogo nally. Excavations at Pasargadae revealed the first-known quadripartite, or chaharbagh garden (Cyrus is referred to in Babylonian texts as "king of die four quarters"). The axial "vista of power" down the center from the main pavillion allows a glimpse into the political role gardens played (Stronach, 1994). From the throne in his pavillion, Cyrus could view his paradeisos in the heat or the day, or festivals and recreation at otirer times. The Achemaenid paradeisoi may have been influenced by gardens of palaces taken over by the Persian satraps
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throughout the empire. Paradesoi are found at Sardis, Daskyleion, and Kelainai in Anatolia and at Sidon and Lachish in Syria/Palestine, as well as at the unlocated palace of Belyses, satrap of northern Syria. [See Sardis; Sidon; Lachish.] Xenophon's description of Cyrus the Younger's garden at Sardis (c. 407 BCE), is definitive: fine trees set in even rows with clean angles, a place rich in fruit and pleasant scents— and cultivated by the satrap himself (Oeconomicus 4.20-24). Lydian gardens are later a part of the classical topos for luxury (cf. Atlrenaeus, Deipnosophists). The remains of a Lydian stone pavilion have been found on the terraced site presumed to be the palace of Croesus. The Achaemenid kings rebuilt the Median capitol of Ecbatana in the Zagros Mountains as a summer residence. [See Ecbatana.] With its terraced gardens, orchards and vineyard, natural streams, and high altitude, it is the place tire Median wife of Nebu chadrezzar II sought to recreate in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Diodorus, however, attributes the gardens to an Achaemenid king. Archaeological evidence suggests that a change in the course of the Euphrates destroyed the earlier gardens, and the Achaemenids rebuilt them on a new site (Dalley, 1986). Egypt. The Egyptians probably cultivated gardens in the Nile Valley as early as the fourth millennium. However, ev idence from texts, images, and archaeological excavation be gins in the second millenium BCE. The regular flooding of the Nile and the annual need to re-mark the boundaries of fields and gardens is cited by Herodotus as the origin of geometry—"land measurement." The rectilinear order of irrigation channels structures tire overall design of Egyptian gardens and fields south of tire Delta throughout antiquity. [See Delta.] Palace and house gardens. Palace gardens are known from excavations at Tell ed-Dab a in the eastern Delta (1782-1650 BCE), which have revealed walled vineyards, flowerbeds, and tree pits (Wilkinson, 1990). The pharaonic palaces at Amarna (Akhenaten) and the Malkata palace (Amenhotep III) at Thebes contained zoological gardens, parks, lakes, and pavillions. [See Amarna, Tell el-.] The pal ace of Apries (588-563 BCE) continued this long tradition, including an impressive approach avenue and grand fore court (Nielsen, 1994). Information about walls, planting de sign, and details of life and horticulture is available from tomb paintings. [See Wall Paintings.] The large gardens of rich officials usually featured pools, shade-tree plantings, and shrines. The great abundance of paintings in tombs attests to the variety and vivacity of royal and official estate gardens. Even those who had just a small strip beside their house planted trees in pots. In the workers' village at Amarna, where conditions were crowded, gardens were located outside the housing quarters (Kemp, 1987, pp. 36-41). Temple and tomb gardens. " T h e garden was the place of creation from which grew the temple with its vegetal ar chitecture and the habitable world. The pool represents the c
water of Nun from which life originally sprang" (Wilkinson, 1990, p. 202). Gardens are associated with many types of religious buildings, from the small chapel courtyards in the workers' village at Amarna to the great mortuary temples of the pharaohs. They provided offerings during life and after. The earliest archaeological remains are from Amun's temple at Karnak; they are illustrated further in the tombs of eigh teenth-dynasty officials and in texts that describe the trees later brought back from Punt, Palestine, and Syria by Ram eses III (1182-1151 BCE). Sycamore fig, tamarisk, and palm trees had particular significance. Queen Hatshepsut, whose paintings at Deir el-Bahari also indicate journeys made to collect plants for Amun, created gardens between Karnak and Luxor for the Feast of Opet, confirming her right to rule. Like that of Mentuhotep (for which there is a stone plan), Hatshepsut's mortuary temple was reached by a long avenue lined with T-shaped pools for papyrus and sycamore figs found by the excavators to have been cut down, perhaps in damnaio memoriae by her son. A similar processional alley was found in the temple at Hermopolis, its flanking trees set into brick-ringed pits. Even tire most modest of sacred gar dens possessed T-shaped or rectangular pools, and those at the main chapel at Amarna seem to have been rotated in their use, some filled with water, others with soil. Generally, tire gardens provided for the pleasure of the deceased were not planted but painted in the tomb chamber: representations of water and fruit provided nourishment, while tire trees allowed the soul to perch. Many garden paintings are quite elaborate, and it can be difficult to dis tinguish the fictional from the actual. Archaeological re mains of tomb gardens are known from Amarna, Abydos, and Thebes. [See Abydos.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albenda, Pauline. "Landscape Bas-Reliefs in the BTt-Hilani of Ashurbanipal." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no, 224 (1976): 49-72; no. 225 (1977): 29-48. Important attempt to under stand the overall landscape significance of these reliefs, though some what controversial. Badawy, Alexander. A History of Egyptian Architecture, vol. 2, The First Intermediate Period, the Middle Kingdom, and the Second Intermediate Period. Berkeley, 1966. The best collection of illustrations of ancient gardens. Brown, John Pairman. The Lebanon and Phoenicia: Ancient Texts Illus trating Their Physical Geography and Native Industries, vol. I , The Physical Setting and the Forest. Beirut, 1969. Buckler, W. H., and D. M. Robinson. Sardis VII: Greek and Latin In scriptions, Part 1. Leiden, 1932. Dalley, Stephanie. "Mesopotamia, Ancient." In The Oxford Companion to Gardens, edited by Geoffrey Jellicoe et al., pp. 368-370. Oxford, 1986. The most authoritative summary, until older assessments are reevaluated in light of advances in translations of Akkadian and Su merian texts. Kemp, Barry J. "The Amarna Workmen's Village." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 73 (1987): 21-50. See especially pages 36-41, for the evidence for farming. Moynihan, Elizabeth. Paradise as a Garden: In Persia and Mughal India. New York, 1979. Readable, well-illustrated work with important chapters on pre-Islamic gardens.
GARDENS: Gardens of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Nielsen, Inge. Hellenistic Palaces: Tradition and Renewal. Aarhus, 1994. Peterman, Glen L. "Conservation of the Petra Papyri." Biblical Ar chaeologist 57 (1994): 242-243. Postgate, J. N. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. Rev. ed. London, 1994. Discusses gardens within the larger agricultural structure of die landscape. Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Princeton, 1950. Stronach, David B. "Parterres and Stone Watercourses at Pasargadae: Notes on the Achaemenid Contribution to the Evolution of Garden Design." Journal of Garden History 14 (1994): 3-12. One of several important articles on ancient gardens to appear in tliis journal recendy. Wilkinson, Alix. "Gardens in Ancient Egypt: Their Locations and Symbolism." Journal of Garden History 10 (1990): 199-208. Useful syndiesis and bibliography. KATHRYN L. GLEASON
Gardens of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Gardens of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Sasanian periods draw heavily on the Persian paradeisos, as interpreted by Alexander the Great at Alexandria. However, in this period, paradeisos also refers to any land witir trees or orchards in terspersed with crops, even grain. Gardens are frequentiy mentioned in texts and depicted in wall paintings and mo saics throughout the classical and Byzantine eras. Evidence for common domestic gardens and garden practice is abun dant in Egyptian and Palestinian papyri, the Hebrew Tal mud and Mishna, and die Hebrew and Christian Bibles, as well as in the archaeological remains of intensive agriculture practiced by the Nabateans and other cultures in tire arid countryside. The writings of Theophrastus outline botanical knowledge gained during Alexander's campaigns, while Pliny the Elder provides important knowledge of gardens and plants of the Roman Empire. Egypt. T h e basileia of Alexandria, a great built landscape of palaces, theaters, temples, sanctuaries, and tombs inter spersed among groves and parks, provided tire model of tire garden for the entire Hellenistic and Roman world. Inge Nielsen (1994) demonstrates that the palaces in which Alex ander stayed during the course of his campaigns influenced the creation of the city of Alexandria. [See Alexandria.] Al though little remains archaeologically, the city's plan has been approximated, and Strabo (Geog. 17.1.9-ro) provides a detailed description of the basileia, which occupied one third of Alexandria. Ptolemy VIII Physcon wrote a treatise on the birds of the palace area, so that zoological and bo tanical gardens are perhaps a pharaonic rather than a Per sian legacy (Nielsen, 1994, p. 133). T h e Thalamegos, a Nile festival barge of Ptolemy IV, fea tured a pavilion and grottoes with statuary, set against tire cultivated shoreline of tire Nile (Nielsen, 1994, p. 136). Ni lotic landscapes inspired gardens, mosaics, and paintings throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods, from Rome to Palestine. The abundant letters, daybooks, and official documents
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written on papyrus dealing with gardens and agriculture contribute another view of the estate garden: the logistics of its upkeep. The Paradise or Garden of the Holy Fathers (Budge, 1907) gives a similarly detailed view of gardens in the Christian monasteries on the Nile from 250-400 CE. [See Papyrus; Monasteries.] Judea/Palestine/Nabatea. T h e gardens of ancient Pal estine mixed Babylonian and Alexandrian influences. In Ptolemaic Palestine, the palace of Hyrcanus the Tobiad (d. 168/69 BCE), the Qasr el- Abd near I r a q el-Amir (Tyros), has a preserved, extensive wadi-based irrigation system that served a large park and lake set within an estate described by Josephus (Antiq. 12.4.1). [See I r a q el-Amir; Irrigation.] T h e Hasmonean royal palace in the dynasty's capital, Je rusalem, is not preserved; however, die Hasmoneans (16838 BCE) built a series of palaces in Wadi Qelt, near Jericho, that featured swimming pools and dining rooms, amid bal sam and palm groves watered from springs in tire surround ing Judean hills. [See Hasmoneans.] The buildings for public entertainment and sacred buildings characteristic of other Hellenistic palace complexes are notably absent in this rec reational palace of the Jewish priestly class. [See Palace.] Herod the Great played an important role in Roman gar den history, as a friend of die emperors Augustus and Agrippa, who brought eastern elements into their culture; in turn, Herod drew upon Italic traditions, integrating them with Hasmonean and Alexandrian precedents. Josephus gives a detailed description of the gardens of Herod's palace in Jerusalem (War 5.177-183), of which only the platform remains. His palaces at Masada, Herodium, and Caesarea bear traces of gardens, but the best-preserved examples are at Jericho. [See Jerusalem; Masada; Herodium; Caesarea; Jericho.] In addition to the Hasmonean gardens, Herod built a Roman-style entertainment complex spanning Wadi Qelt, Archaeologists have found the locations of its peristyle gar dens, ambulatory walks, and great sunken garden (see figure 1). In many areas flower plots used for propagation and transport were planted witir shrubs (perhaps balsam), thus giving a configuration to the general design. An artificial tell with a pavilion on top permitted visitors to admire the great estate of balsam groves and rare palms. Gardens figure in Hebrew halakhic and aggadic literature. Halaklric discussions give valuable information about culti vation, including such specific features as flowerpots. Ag gadic descriptions portray distinctly Hellenistic houses with their gardens (Tdan. 9b; B. T . Meg. 12a). Gardens are used in veiled political commentaries by rabbis and sages in re jecting Persian and Hellenistic influences. Gardens and groves are also mentioned in the official documents among the Dead Sea Scrolls. T h e Nabateans, described as a nomadic people who cul tivated nothing (Diodorus Siculus 19.94.1-6), are in fact known for their intensive cultivation of the desert. [See Na bateans.] Their capital at Petra, as described by Strabo (Geog. 7.353), possessed irrigated gardens, probably for cene
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turies—as attested in recently discovered Byzantine papyri. [See Petra.] The papyri cite the names of owners, the loca tions and sizes of gardens, and the houses and agricultural land south of the city (Glen L. Peterman, "Conservation of the Petra Papyri," Biblical Archaeologist 57 [1994]: 243.) Syria. T h e Seleucids continued the Persian tradition of building paradeisoi at their new capitals of Antioch and Se leucia. [See Seleucids; Antioch, Seleucia on the Tigris.] The royal sanctuary at Daphne, south of Antioch, featured large groves of frees, fountains, and streams that served as a place of festivals (Strabo 16.2.4-5). The site was recaptured in the fine mosaics of the Roman and Byzantine eras. The Alex andrian novelist Achilles Tatius (second century CE) sets Clitophon andLeukippe in Sidon (1.15-17), with a vivid de scription of a villa garden. Theophrastus (Inquiry 5.8.1, 3) describes paradeisoi, royal parks of managed cedar forest, in the mountains of Syria. [See Sidon.] At Tyre the remains of an enclosed Roman funerary garden include niches, irriga tion channels, basins, and planting beds for. produce; the latter provided a subvention for the upkeep of the monu ment. [See Tyre.] Asia Minor. T h e kings of Pergamon drew less from Per sian examples than from Macedonian ones, which strongly influenced the gardens in Rome. [See Pergamon.] The pal aces of the Pergamon kings were tightly grouped alongside the temples and theater on the terraced acropolis. The courtyards typically were paved, except for the garden per istyle in palace V of Eumenes II (d. 160), the most monu mental palace in the group. His brother and heir, Attlalus II (220-138 BCE), had a well-known garden in which he culti
vated poisonous plants (Nicander of Colophon wrote poems on vegetable poisons and their antidotes). The writings of Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 12) give a fanciful picture of garden luxury in coastal Asia Minor, while a rather different picture emerges from Hellenistic and Roman inscriptions at Sardis (Sardis 8:1, 1932, no. 12.6). [See Sardis.] T h e sacred grove of the Greeks is seen in the verdant temple garden of Aphrodite at Knidos. A wall paint ing in the "hanging houses" at Ephesus, dated to the second century CE, depicts a lush garden in the manner of paintings from Pompeii. [See Ephesus.] Parthian and Sasanian Gardens. During the second and third centuries CE, Persia was held by the Parthians, who received embassies from China bearing new garden plants such as peaches and apricots. [See Parthians.] Sasanian rul ers adopted the Achaemenid paradeisoi as hunting parks and as settings for their palaces. [See Sasanians.] Pools have been found within the palace of Ardashir (226-240 CE) in Fars. Khusrau I (531-579 BCE) built a palace at Ctesiphon on the Tigris River. [See Ctesiphon; Tigris.] T h e palace was known for its 30-meter-long Winter Carpet, the legendary model for all Persian garden carpets. Khusrau II built an extensive ten-aced garden at Taq-i Bostan, of which only the grottoes remain. Its reliefs depict royal ceremonies, vegetation, and hunting scenes. Another paradeisos of Khusrau II and his lover Shirin, on the slopes of the Zagros Mountains at Qasri Shirin, is known from an aqueduct, a 900-meter pool, and the terraces of a 300-acre estate. [See Aqueducts; Pools.] Shabusti (ninth century CE) tells of a fourth-century Chris tian monastery at Marmi in which gardens adjoined each
GARDENS: Gardens of the Islamic Period monk's cell, watered by canals and shaded with fruit trees. [See Monasteries.] Otirer Early Arab sources note the gar dens and parks of the settlements they first encountered throughout Iran. BIBLIOGRAPHY Buckler, William H., and David M. Robinson. "Greek Inscriptions from Sardes I." American Journal of Archaeology 16 (1912): 11-82. Important but little known discussion of textual evidence for paradeisoi in Hellenistic Asia Minor (see pp. 78-79). Budge, E. A. Wallis, trans, and ed. The Paradise or Garden of the Holy Fathers: Being Histories of the Anchorites, Recluses, Monks, Coenobites, and Ascetic Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt. 2 vols. London, 1907. Ch6hab, Maurice. Fouilles de Tyr: La Necropole. Vol. 1. Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth, vol. 33. Paris, 1983. Excavation of tomb gar dens. Gleason, Kathryn L. "A Garden Excavation in the Oasis Palace of Herod the Great at Jericho." Landscape Journal 12 (1993): 156-167. Account of the excavation of a peristyle garden, with additional ref erences to Jericho's gardens and a general bibliography. Grimal, Pierre. Les jardins romains. 3d ed. Paris, 1984. Still the best assessment of eastern Mediterranean influences on Roman garden development. Levi, Doro. Antioch Mosaic Pavements. 2 vols. Princeton, 1947. Beau tifully reproduced images of mosaics with landscape elements. Miller, Naomi F., and Kathryn L. Gleason. The Archaeology of Garden and Field. Philadelphia, 1994. Overview of current techniques used in excavating garden sites. Moe, Dagfinn, et al. Garden History: Garden Plants, Species, Forms and Varieties from Pompeii to 1800. PACT, vol. 42. Rixensart, Belg., 1994. Moynihan, Elizabeth. Paradise as a Garden: In Persia and Mughal India. New York, 1979. Chapter 2 is devoted to the Sasanian garden. Netzer, Ehud. "The Winter Palaces of the Judean Kings at Jericho at the End of the Second Temple Period." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 228 (1977): 1-13. Newman, Julius. The Agricultural Life of the Jews in Babylonia between the Years 200 CE and 500 CE. Oxford, 1932. Although poorly in dexed for gardens, they are discussed within the context of agricul tural life as described in the Talmud. Nielsen, Inge. Hellenistic Palaces: Tradition and Renewal. Aarhus, 1994. The most recent work on palaces, with exhaustive treatment of Near Eastern cultures; the only overview avaiable on gardens. Shimoff, Sandra R. "Gardens from Eden to Jerusalem." Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods 26 (1995): 145-155KATHRYN L. GLEASON
Gardens of the Islamic Period A number of Arabic and Persian terms (djanna, rawda, bagh, bustdn, gulistan) are included under the English designation garden. Gardens in Islamic times rested on historical and sacred foundations. Eastern Roman gardens, particularly in association with country villas, established a tradition of sheltered, irrigated, and agriculturally productive retteats in Palestine and Syria that continued in early Islamic times, especially under the patronage of Umayyad caliphs (661750 CE), but it is likely that pre-Islamic Iranian prototypes exercised tire greatest influence on tire development of royal and aristocratic gardens in Islam. T h e Achaemenid ruler,
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Cyrus tire Great (550-529 BCE), constructed numerous walled gardens: at Pasargadae the garden had two pavilions with pillared porches (talar) that served as transitional spaces between building and garden. The best-known site in preIslamic Iran, the Tmarat-i Khusrau at Qasr-i Shirin built for Shah Khusrau II Parviz (591-628 CE), was a vast walled gar den (pairidaeza) with an eastern entrance leading to a long rectangular pool and palace from which tire garden could be viewed. Subsequently, a pool or pools, watercourses, view ing platform, and pavilion or palace, often sited on an axis with the main gate, became central elements in most Islamic gardens. The Muslim conquerors of Iran found not only walled gardens, but also works of art replete with garden references. Sasanian (224-651 CE) silver dishes showed emperors re clining, drinking, and listening to music in garden settings, and early Arab writers referred to a carpet made for Shah Khusrau Anushirvan (531-579) that was intended for the audience hall at Ctesiphon near Baghdad: destroyed when this palace was captured in 637, tire Spring of Khusrau carpet is said to have measured 30 X 150 m (98.5 X 492 ft.) and to have had a garden design with tree branches shown in silver thread; earth rendered in gold thread; watercourses limned with crystals; and leaves, petals, and roots made of colored silk and jewels. References to springtime meadows, gardens, and water abound in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, reflecting the impor tance of water and verdure in an arid environment and in dicating that gardens were probably accessible to the well born and wealthy of the Hijaz: the Qur'an's description of the garden of Eden (djanndt 'adn) and of paradise (djanna) as "gardens underneath which rivers flow" (surah 2:25 and many times thereafter) was connected to a long-established upper-class ideal. Paradise is the most sensually developed image in tire Qur'an: it has four rivers (surah 47:15), foun tains, cool pavilions, cushions, couches, brocades, beautiful youths, green pastures, palm trees, pomegranates, and two kinds of every fruit. Subsequent worldly gardens thus pre sented immediate sacred references and provided a perva sive language of garden imagery in Islamic mystical poetry, such as the legend of Shaddad, the pre-Islamic king of South Arabia, whose garden of Iram, built to rival paradise in splendor, brought divine retribution on the patton. Surah 55:46-75 mention a total of four gardens in paradise and may be the source for the predilection that Islamic patrons and builders had for the chahdr-bagh, four-part gardens di vided by cruciform water courses and walkways. Paradise also had multiple levels, and growing there are the tUba tree, more slender than tire cypress but providing great shade, and the sidra tree (lote-tree). Metaphors for tire loveliness of gardens came from both pagan and pious sources: the eleventh-century Iranian poet Manuchthri Damghani could compare a springtime orchard to the idol temple at Farkhar, its birds to the priest, and its rose bushes to the idols but
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could also liken an orchard to a rnosque, for dre trees' branches bent down in prayer, and a dove issued the call to prayer. A self-contained architecture within its walls that al lowed few references from tire outside world, the garden supplied an internal, moderate, and distinctive nature pro tected from wild and threatening nature outside. A place of coolness, calm, peace, and plenty, as well as an ordered landscape under the direction and control of the owner, the garden supplied valued and repeated metaphors: tire rose was compared to the beloved's face or cheeks, her figure to the slender cypress, the jasmine to her hair. Although no gardens from the Umayyad period (661750) have survived intact, the pre-Islamic or early Islamic gardens in or around Damascus were likely the inspiration for the mosaics of the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damas cus, and the Rusafa garden in the same city was memorable enough so diat the first Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus, 'Abd al-Rahman I (755-788), tried to replicate it in exile in Cor doba. In his Lata'if al-Ma'arif the Iranian scholar alTha'alibi (961-1038) elaborately praises the Ghuta of Da mascus as one of the four wonders of the world and an earthly likeness of paradise. The late Umayyad palace at Khirbat al-Mafjar had a garden pavilion, and country villas, like Qasr al-Hayr East, were centers of agricultural estates and must have had gardens, both for entertainment and food. The widespread use of medieval Arabic manuscripts based on translations of the Materia Medica of Dioscorides suggests that such estates, as well as smaller households, nurtured herbal and medicinal gardens, like their monastic counterparts in Europe. Witir the 'Abbasid (750-1258) dynasty's predilection for pre-Islamic Iranian models of kingship and culture, and its vigorous promotion of imperial culture, the form of the Ira nian garden was spread to other parts of the Islamic world. Al-Khatib describes Baghdad in 917 as having one royal gar den that served as a wild animal park and another so exten sive that it contained four hundred palm trees, as well as citrus and other fruit trees. Most amazing of all was the gar den around the Palace of the Tree, for it contained a great circular pool that had in its center an artificial tree with gold and silver branches on which sat gold and silver birds tirat sang when the wind moved tire branches: the entire con struct may have been intended to replicate the design of the Sasanian Spring ofKhusrau carpet. In the Jawsaq al-Khaqani palace (836) in tire 'Abbasid capital of Samarra there were 69.6 ha (171.9 acres) of walled gardens with reception halls and pavilions, and the palace was approached on the east through a vast garden reminis cent of the 'Imarat-i Khusrau. Samarra's Balkuwara Palace (849-859) contained three successive four-part courtyards at the end of which was a four-part garden, flanked by pa vilions overlooking the Tigris. They indicate the continu ance of two basic palace-garden types from pre-Islamic Iran, namely die large walled garden that contained the palace
within it, and the inner court garden (generally referred to as a bustan) that was contained within the palace. Aristo cratic houses also had interior gardens. Agriculture ex panded vigorously thanks to capital investments in irrigation made possible by tire empire's wealth and to a commercial market stretching from India to Spain. Royal and aristo cratic gardens and orchards were sometimes experimental grounds for new fruits and vegetables, as well as for inno vations in farming techniques; instead of growing staples, they cultivated new and exotic produce that underscored sharp distinctions between the diets of the urban ruling classes and the agricultural lower class. Likewise, an abun dance of water, particularly when its principal purposes were to create a cool and pleasant ambience and to sustain luxury produce, was a sign of wealth, and the ordered layout of water channels, pools, and fountains was an expression of control and power over this vital resource: mausolea sit uated witirin geometric gardens continued this imagery of power by the expectation that tire deceased, buried in an earthly paradise, would eventually be lodged in the paradise described in the Qur'an. T h e widespread use of garden im agery in poetry, ceramics, manuscripts, ivories, metalworks, carpets, and other arts also implies that enclosed gardens were maintained by those who had power and could afford them and that their wealth enabled them to create tomb gar dens for their dead. Religious establishments maintained gardens too as expressions and producers of wealth and as places of contemplation that prefigured paradise. Although Muslim Spain is outside the area of the Near East, it provides invaluable evidence for tire structure and function of the gardens that served as models and that are no longer extant in the central Islamic lands. Designed to emulate tire eighth-century Rusafa garden in Damascus, the Rusafa garden in Cordoba was praised by Ibn Sa'id, the thirteenth-century Andalusian historian and man of letters, for its irrigated gardens. It was also famous for plants and animals brought from all over the Islamic world, Turkestan, and India. Most of Cordoba's considerable area was taken up by gardens and orchards that belonged to the city's mosques and palaces, and the courtyard of the Great Mosque was occupied by neat rows of orange trees fed by stone-edged water channels. T h e most elaborate gardens, however, were in the royal precinct of Medina al-Zahra. T h e Upper Garden was divided into four parts, and at the cross ing of the channels was a pillared rectangular pavilion bor dered on each side by a pool, and the Prince's Garden was centered on a rectangular pool with a raised viewing plat form on its north side. Observation points such as this one underscored royal perspective and the central authority of the caliph: gardens functioned not only as places of beauty and refuge but also as focused demonstrations of power and prestige. Evidence indicates that rather than being in massed beds, plantings were individual or in small groups. Flower and
GARROD, DOROTHY ANNIE ELIZABETH orchard beds were frequently sunk below the level of the walkways, so that a visitor strolling on the paths would have had the sensation of walking on a living and luxurious floral carpet. Gardens in Spain functioned also as grave sites: the eleventh-century poet Ibn Shuhai'd was buried in a garden in Cordoba that was described by Ibn Khaqan as having symmetrically rowed trees and a white marble courtyard with a curving water channel and a lower basin into which the water fell, presumably down a waterslide. Luxury ob jects carried garden themes as well: an ivory pyxis made in 1004-1008 for the Cordoban royal chamberlain Sayf alDawlah clearly shows a walled garden with arcades along its sides. Because ivories were originally painted, it would have offered an even more vivid resemblance to a garden. T h e Arab historian Muqaddisi (d. 1000) reported that the Buyid ruler of Iran and Iraq, 'Adud ad-Daulah (949-983), built a two-story, 360-room palace in Shiraz with orchards around it and water channels flowing through its ground floor rooms and arcades. Their successors, the Seljuks (1038-1194), further developed the concept of the bagh, or garden with a pavilion or palace, and fourteenth-century manuscript paintings indicate that these buildings were multi-colored and multi-storied: Malik Shah (1072-1092) is credited with constructing four gardens of this type in late eleventh-century Isfahan. T h e metaphoric content of gar den imagery continued to be exploited. T h e tulip (lakh) had all the same letters of the symbol of Islamic power, the cres cent (hildl), and the name of the God (Allah), and the rose (gul) was considered the most perfect manifestation of divine beauty on earth. A ruler like the Seljuk sultan Malik Shah (1072-1092), may even be compared to a doorkeeper (ridwdn) guarding a garden containing streams, fruits, trees, and flowers of paradise; elaborating the metaphoric link be tween the ordered garden and the ordered universe, the Sel juk court poet Mu'izzi (d. 1147) described a royal garden filled with streams, herbs, fruits, trees, and flowers like those of paradise, and compared the sultan to the sun and his throne to the seventh heaven. [See also 'Abbasid Caliphate; Baghdad; Ctesiphon; Da mascus; Mafjar, Khirbat al-; Pasargadae; Qasr al-Hayr ashSharqi; Samarra, article on Islamic Period; and Umayyad Caliphate.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ansari, A. S. Bazmee. "Bustan." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 1, pp. 1345-1348. Leiden, i960-. Brookes, John. Gardens of Paradise: The History and Design of the GreatIslamic Gardens. London, 1987. Environmental Design 2 (1986). Special issue entitled "The City as a Garden." Gardet, Louis. "Djanna." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 2, pp. 447-452. Leiden, i960-. Golombek, Lisa, and Donald Wilber. The Timurid Architecture of Iran and Turan. Princeton, 1988.
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Lehrman, Jonas. Earthly Paradise: Garden and Courtyard in Islam. Berkeley, 1980. MacDougall, Elisabeth B., and Richard Ettinghausen. The Islamic Gar den. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Ar chitecture, 4. Washington, D.C., 1976. O'Kane, Bernard. Timurid Architecture in Khurasan. Costa Mesa, Calif., 19S7. Ruggles, D. F. "The Mirador in Abbasid and Hispano-Umayyad Gar den Typology." Muqarnas 7 (1990): 73-82. Ruggles, D. F. "MadTnat al-Zahra"s Constructed Landscape: A Case Study in Islamic Garden and Architectural History." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991. Schimmel, Annemarie. "The Celestial Garden in Islam." In The Islamic Garden, edited by Elisabeth B. MacDougall and Richard Ettinghau sen, pp. 11-39. Washington, D.C., 1976. Watson, Andrew M. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Fanning Techniques, 700-1100. Cam bridge, 1983. Wilber, Donald. Persian Gardens and Garden Pavilions. Rutland, Vt., 1962. ANTHONY WELCH
GARROD, DOROTHY ANNIE ELIZABETH (1892-1968), prehistorian whose work at the Tabun, Skhul, and el-Wad caves in the Carmel range in Israel provided what became a standard chronological and cultural scale for the region, beginning with the Upper Acheulean and ending with the Natufian culture. Garrod studied at Newnham Col lege at Cambridge (1913-1916). In 1921 she enrolled in the archaeology-anthropology program under R. Marrett at Oxford, and in 1922 she became a student of Abbe Breuil at the Institut de Paleontologie Humaine in Paris. She worked at the site of La Quina in southwest France under Henri Martin and published a summary volume on the Brit ish Upper Paleolithic in 1926. Following Breuil's suggestion, she excavated Devil's Tower, a Mousterian rock-shelter on Gibraltar (1925-1927), where a broken juvenile skull cap was uncovered. In 1927 she was invited to participate on the European committee that examined the Glozel figurines, which turned out to be forgeries. In 1928 she excavated the Shukbah cave in Palestine and named its previously un known microlithic and bone industry the Natufian culture, after the wadi by that name. She later dug two small caves in northeastern Iraq: Hazar Nerd, a Mousterian site, and Zarzi, where the microlithic assemblage was named Zarzian. In 1929 she began, as a salvage project, excavations in the caves at the outlet of Nahal ha-Me'arot (Wadi Mughara) in the Carmel range. Upon completing the fieldwork there in 1934, she published, in 1937, together with Dorothea Bate, who did the faunal analysis, the seminal volume The Stone Age of Mount Carmel. In 1938, after a survey in Anatolia, Garrod excavated the cave of Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria and uncovered an early Aurignacian industry. From 1939 to 1952 she was Disney Professor at Cambridge University, a position interrupted during World War II, when she served in the army (1942-1945). From 1948 to 1963 she partici-
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pated in the excavations of Suzanne de Saint Mathurin in Anglees sur l'Anglin, a Magdalenian rock-shelter rich in re lief representations of animals and humans. From 1958 to 1963 Garrod conducted excavations in tire Bezez, Zumoffen, and Ras el-Kelb caves in Lebanon, where Acheulo-Yabrudian and Mousterian layers were exposed. These led her to provide a new synthesis of the Near Eastern Middle Pa leolithic that was published in 1962. [See also Carmel Caves.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Caton-Thompson, Gertrude. "Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod." Pro ceedings of the British Academy 55 (1969): 339-361. Garrod, Dorothy A. E. The Upper Palaeolithic Age in Britain (1926). New York, 1979. Garrod, Dorothy A. E., and Dorothea M. A. Bate. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: Excavations at the Wady al-Mughara. Report of die Joint Expedition of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and die American School of Prehistoric Research, 1929-1934, vol. 1. Oxford, 1937. Roe, Derek A., ed. Adlun in the Stone Age: The Excavations of D. A. E. Garrod in the Lebanon, ip$8-1963. 2 vols. British Archaeological Re ports, International Series, no. 159. Oxford, 1983. Ronen, Avraham, ed.. The Transition from Lower to Middle Palaeolithic and the Origin of Modern Man: International Symposium to Commem orate the Fiftieth Anniversary of Excavations in the Mount Carmel Caves by D. A. E. Garrod. British Archaeological Reports, Interna tional Series, no. 15. Oxford, 1982. OFER BAR-YOSEF
G A R S T A N G , J O H N (1876-1956), British archaeolo gist who began his academic career in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford University, but while still an undergraduate turned his attention to archaeology. His first fieldwork was done in Egypt, where, at the age of twenty-three, he joined Flinders Petrie. Fie then worked in Anatolia (1904-1909), returning for a final season of excavations at Sakcagozii in 1911. His influential work, The Land of the Hittites, was pub lished in 1910. While still very young (he was twenty-six), he was appointed honorary reader in Egyptian archaeology at Liverpool University. Five years later (in 1907) he became professor of the methods and practice of archaeology, a post he held until his retirement in 1941. From 1909 until 1914 he excavated in the Sudan, at Meroe, capital of an ancient Nubian kingdom. Garstang was the founding director of tire British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem in 1920. In that same year, he made what is probably his most lasting contribution to ar chaeology by becoming tire founding director of the British Mandatory Department of Antiquities of Palestine, a post he held until 1926. In that capacity he drafted the country's antiquities laws, which were notably liberal, enlightened, and practical. Garstang used the material belonging to tire Ot toman Palestine Museum as the basis of the collection for the Palestine Museum in Jerusalem, now the Rockefeller
Museum. Garstang carried out tire first post-World War I excavations in Palestine at Ashkelon, followed by a series of soundings at sites across the country. In 1922, at a historic meeting with William Foxwell Albright of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and Louis-Hugues Vincent of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, Garstang formulated the terminology still used for the clas sification of the archaeological material of tire southern Le vant. From 1930 to 1936 he carried out a major excavation at Jericho, funded by Charles Marston. Although this ex cavation was poorly published, and although Garstang's views of Jericho regarding the accounts in Exodus and re garding the Israelite conquest are no longer accepted, his work there provided the first information about the existence of an aceramic Neolithic culture. Following World War II, Garstang returned to Anatolia, where he became the founding director of tire British Insti tute of Archaeology at Ankara (1947). His final excavation was at the site of Mersin, in Cilicia, where he discovered important remains of tire Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages. Two days before his death, though very ill and weak, he was able to realize his wish to revisit this site, coming ashore from the boat on which he was enjoying a last cruise. [See also Ashkelon; British Institute of Archaeology at An kara; British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; Cilicia; Jericho; Meroe; and the biographies of Albright, Petrie, and Vincent] BIBLIOGRAPHY FitzGerald, G. M., et al. "John Garstang." Anatolian Studies 6 (1956): 27-34. Brief remembrances from several colleagues and a photo graph portrait. Garstang, John. Land of the Philistines. New York, 1910. Garstang, John. Joshua-Judges. New York, 1931. Garstang, John. Heritage of Solomon: An Historical Introduction to the Sociology of Ancient Palestine. London, 1934. Garstang, John. Prehistoric Mersin, Yumuk Tepe in Southern Turkey. Oxford, 1953. Parrot, Andre. "John Garstang." Syria 34 (1957): 401-402. Obituary. Weidner, E. "John Garstang." Archiv fiir Orientforschung 18 (1958): 228-229. Obituary. RUPERT CHAPMAN
G A U L A N I T I S . See Golan.
G A Z A (site). See 'Ajjul, Tell el-.
G E N E S I S A P O C R Y P H O N . One of tire seven scrolls found by bedouin in Cave 1 at Qumran in spring 1947 is tire Genesis Apocryphon (iQApGen). Together with three other scrolls from that cave, it was sold to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Metropolitan attached to
GEOLOGY St. Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem. Unlike the otirer scrolls, the Genesis Apocryphon was not opened until it was sold— to the State of Israel, in June 1954. After tire sale, authorities turned the scroll over to J. Biberkraut for unrolling. The scroll's beginning and end were missing and, of the twentytwo columns that survived, only the last three—the scroll's innermost portions, as it was rolled—were more or less com pletely preserved. T h e opening portions had suffered greatiy from exposure to the elements and from the mordant ink with which the scroll was inscribed. T h e ink had eaten into tire leather, so that many of the words are blurred. Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad published a prelimi nary edition of tire scroll in 1956—only the five columns (2, 19-22) that could readily be deciphered. They never pub lished dre other columns, a project that recently was turned over to two Israeli scholars, Jonas Greenfield and Elisha Qimron. They have, to date, published an additional column of the scroll, column 12. In addition, J. T . Milik published fragments belonging to the missing beginning of the scroll as 1Q20. He did not succeed in reading much of the text on what are very badly darkened fragments, but recently new photographs enabled Michael Wise and Bruce Zuckerman to read and reconstruct the 1Q20 fragments as "column 0." Moreover, Zuckerman has brought to light a previously un known portion of column 1, dubbed tire Trever fragment. T h e importance of the Genesis Apocryphon lies in two principal spheres: language and interpretation. T h e scroll is written in Aramaic; as a fair amount of text has been pre served, it constitutes one of die primary witnesses to the literary use of tirat language in late Second Temple period Palestine (200 BCE-70 CE). T h e interpretive method of the scroll belongs to dre category designated "rewritten Bible," in which biblical stories are retold with explanatory changes and additions. T h e Genesis Apocryphon is an early and sig nificant witness to this method of biblical interpretation, witir important connections to the pseudepigraphic Jubilees. Largely following the analysis by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, the contents of the scroll can be broken down as follows: col umns 0-2, the birth of Noah; 6-10, Noah and tire Flood; 11, Noah's covenant; 12-?, Noah's division of the earth among his sons; 18, Abram in Ur and Haran; 18-19:10, Abram in Canaan; 19:10-20:33, Abram in Egypt; 20:33-21:22, Abram in the Promised Land; 21:23-22:26, Abram defeats the four lungs; and 22:27-?, Abram's vision of an heir. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, Nahman, and Yigael Yadin. A Genesis Apocryphon. Jerusalem, 1956. Editio princeps; it includes a descriptive narrative, photographs, a transcription, and an English translation of columns 2, 19-22. Barthelemy, Dominique, and J, T. Milik. Qumran Cave I. Oxford, 1955. includes Milik's treatment of the 1Q20 fragments (pp. 86-87 and pi. 17) which, even under infrared light, were extremely dark and thus difficult to read. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave I. 2d rev.
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ed. Rome, 1971. Contains the Aramaic text, English translation, and line-by-line commentary, with an introduction to the issues raised by the scroll. Excellent treatment, but rapidly becoming outdated. Greenfield, Jonas C , and Elisha Qimron. "The Genesis Apocryphon Col. XII." In Studies in Qumran Aramaic, edited by Takamitsu Muraoka, pp. 70-77. Abr-Nahrain, Supplement Series, vol. 3. Leiden, 1992. Includes photograph, transcription, and English translation, with philological analysis. Only about ten new lines are clearly legi ble. MICHAEL O . WISE
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS. See Computer Mapping.
GEOLOGY. T h e consulting relationship between geol ogists and archaeologists/historians is designed to achieve a fuller understanding of a site's occupational and socioeco nomic story, ideally as excavation is taking place. Another term for archaeological geology is geoarchaeobgy, the activity in which a geological scientist engages in historical/archae ological analyses and diagnoses from an empirical base. The locus, a fundamental unit of archaeological su-atigraphy, has discrete geological analogues in the bed, tongue, or layer units of a sequence of rock strata in any exposure/ outcrop of unconsolidated sediments anywhere on earth. Sedimentary analytic techniques can be applied to a locus to determine its geological makeup: texture, fabric, particle size, micro/macrobedding, mineral/lithic, and material sci ence diagnosis, (the identification of any artifact and its chemical composition and its function in human applica tions). [See Locus.] Studies propose multiple working hy potheses, which set forth probable agencies/events of origin and form the operational archaeological geological research basis. Geological investigations in historical environmental re mains may draw from various subsciences to address the action and interaction of human and natural depositional and erosional activities in, about, and regionally near a site: mineralogy (elements, salts, compounds), sedimentology (origin, movement, accumulation of particles), stratigraphy (forms of layering), structure (spacial geometry of any lithic body), pettology (igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock origin and description), geomorphology (genesis and shape of the earth's surface), aerial photography (database for mapping), geohydrology (presence and behavior of groundwater), pedology (soil science), and especially soilclay mineralogy, geophysical survey (archaeomagnetism witir magnetic- and resistivity-force mapping), tephra (volcanitic ejecta—ash, shards), chronology, radiometric dating (radioactive elements and their isotopes, especially carbon), geochemical analyses (including trace element and isotope, useful for provenance), palynology (pollen and spore iden tity), and floral or plant inventories (including phytofiths),
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and coastal paleogeography (ancient shore-zone environ ments and locations). These and other disciplines form the geological framework through which the depositional record of natural and human agencies are interpreted. Agents of earth sculpture that are active on/or in terrestrial and submarine surfaces include weathering; erosion; move ment and deposition of earth materials by means of atmo spheric interaction witii mineral, rock, and plant material; gravity-slope kinetics; streams; underground water; waves and currents; wind; ice; and even volcanic activity. Vertical land movement and sea-basin volume changes may need to be considered (site elevation, submergence with associated effects). Physiographic surface environments express socio economic settlement-opportunity options often governed by the demands that specific cultures require. The topographic configuration of a specific site locale is a function of rock and sediment body resistance to forces of degradation (removal) and aggradation (surface buildup), whose rates of progress determine how quickly human pres ence alters a surface. The difference between the highest and lowest elevations is mapped as a contour (the interval is de termined by the steepness of slope and the amount of detail required). An overlay of geologic rock outcrops affords a convenient means of illustrating those formations that were affected by a site's occupants in construction phases. Other surface environments to be understood in archaeohistorical research include plains, plateaus, mesas, hills, mountains (volcanic, folded, fault-block), canyons, basins (graben or rift valleys), alluvial fans, valleys (stream and glacial), allu vial terraces, floodplains, deltas, beach/shore zones, glacial moraines, till plains, and outwash terrains. Historically, these natural depositions formed human-site contexts in temperate, tropical, arid, and polar settings in which settlers would need to control terrain, water, food acquisition/pro duction, trade, roads, and defensible shelter. Geologic activities that affect human-settlement decisions include water supply—springs, streams, water tables, and even artesian flow. Geothermal (heated) waters find ex pression as hot springs. Other water-bearing geochemical activities in the earth's crust generate mineral (ore) deposits (ion concentrations) yielding metals such as copper, tin, iron, lead, and zinc. Certain igneous reactions yield other ore deposits. The earliest metal acquisition by humans in volved mining naturally occurring elements. As smelting/re fining extraction techniques from the ores of those metalic compounds were discovered, the metals were incorporated into tool and weapon economies, recording the historical results of metallurgy. [See Metals.] Precious metals and stones also occur because of geologic concentration condi tions. Such utilitarian metal ores were mined for noble and royal use: jewelry, tableware, and (by the end of the seventh century BCE) coins. The geochemical generation of petro leum and its by-products—bitumin, naptha, and sulfur and
the organogenesis of woods, fibers, amber, spices (fra grances), foods, and shell remains—has heavily influenced human behaviors, as recorded in archaeological remains. Knowledge of the local and regional bedrock—its stratig raphy and structure—gave ancient masons of both stone and mud brick and quarrymen construction resources with which to erect, pave, wall, arch, and bridge for human re quirements in urban, domestic, and defensive structures. Some rock types exhibit cutting properties that would pro duce poor to excellent architectural and sculptural results— cemented beach sands, rock and shell fragments (impre cisely termed poros), versus the finely crystalline limestones employed for Herodian structures in Roman Palestine and white marble for sculpture. A brief inventory of common construction, building, and sculptural stone utilized throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East consists mainly of limestones, chalks, caliche (such as nari), coquina, travertines, quartz and bioclastic sandstones/conglomerates, quartz (and other lithic) sand stones, chert, various lithic-type conglomerates (such as kurkar), siltstones, marls, shales, alabasters, halites (from Mt. Sedom, a salt-block feature near the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea), granites, diorites, gabbros, lavas (basalt, from which Levantine and Mediterranean millstones were often crafted), and porphyrys, tuffs, slates, schists, gneiss, marbles, quartzites, and greenstones. No less vital in human history has been the function of clays, formed mostly in the soil-genesis process, in grazing grasses and food crops. T h e mineralogical agricultural fer tility of floodplain environments (river-valley sediments forming terraces) is well known. These clays and clay min erals have historical significance because they were utilized as tokens, tablets, and letters, mud bricks and mortars, terra cottas (sculptures and ovens), tiles (roofing, flooring, water and drainpipes), and, finally, as pottery. Commonly, analytic studies and procedures in archaeo logical geology include, sediment-body (locus) identifica tion, working hypotheses as to origin (source and agent), and sediment surface recognition; architectural buildingstone type and source; historical geological/geographic site area-surface morphology; water source and management; pottery composition and provenance; evidence of the pres ence/absence of bedrock soil-cover depth and extent; stone and ore sources and their proximity to a site; clay/mud sources and their employment throughout the site's cultural history; the encouragement of multidisciplinary site and en vironmental studies (botany, entomology, zoology, and ecology). Some of the most important geoscientific methods in ar chaeological research are petrology (e.g., study of rocks, pottery, bricks, roofing, tiles) in hand specimens and micro scopic thin-sections to ascertain mineral makeup, texture, and ultimately, provenance; sedimentology (mineral com-
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position and particle size—from clays to boulders), along with hypotheses concerning agency of deposition; ore and gemstone identification and qualitative analysis from wet chemical to X-ray spectroscopy; laser-probe spectroscopy of metals and gems; and core drilling in sediment strata, inand off-site, to determine shore/harbor boundaries. [See Spectroscopy.] Typical field-geology research tools and equipment serve most of the study requirements. A binoc ular stereo-zoom microscope of 10-45 X has been found in dispensable in the dig house. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and James L. Phillips, eds. Prehistoric Investigations in Gebel Maghara, Northern Sinai. Qedem, vol. 7. Jerusalem, 1977. Bullard, Reuben G. "Geological Studies in Field Archaeology." Biblical Archaeologist 33 (1970): 98-132, Butzer, Karl W. "The Ecological Approach to Prehistory: Are We Re ally Trying?" American Antiquity 40 (1975): 106-111. Gladfelter, Bruce G. "Geoarchaeology: The Geomorphologist and Ar chaeology." American Antiquity 42 (1977): 519-538. Gladfelter, Bruce G. "Developments and Directions in Geoarchaeol ogy." In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 4, edited by Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 343-364. New York, 1981. Goldberg, Paul. "The Archaeologist as Viewed by the Geologist." Bib lical Archaeologist si (December 1988): 197-202. Hassan, Fekri A. "Sediments in Archaeology: Methods and Implica tions for Palaeoenvironmental and Cultural Analysis." Journal of Field Archaeology 5 (1978): 197-213. Levy, Thomas E., ed. Shiqmim, vol. 1, Studies Concerning Chalcolithic Societies in the Northern Negev Desert, Israel, 1982-1984. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 356 Oxford, 1987. Liebowitz, Harold, and Robert L. Folk. "Archaeological Geology of Tel Yin'am, Galilee, Israel." Journal of Field Archaeology 7 (1980): 23-42. Limbrey, Susan. Soil Science and Archaeology. New York, 1975. Marks, A. E., ed. Prehistory and Paleoenvironments in the Central Negev, Israel. Vols. 1 and 3. Dallas, 1976-1983. Piperno, Dolores R. Phytolith Analysis: An Archaeological and Geological Perspective. San Diego, 1988. Rapp, George, Jr. "The Archaeological Field Staff: The Geologist." Journal of Field Archaeology 2 (1975): 229-237, Rapp, George, Jr., and Stanley E. Aschenbrenner, eds. Excavations at Nichoria in Southwest Greece, vol. 1, Site, Environs, and Techniques. Minneapolis, 1978. Rapp, George, Jr., and John A. Gifford, eds. Archaeological Geology. New Haven, 1985. Rosen, Arlene Miller. Cities of Clay: The Geoarchaeology of Tells. Chi cago, 1986. REUBEN G . BULLARD
G E R A S A . Seejerash.
G E R I S A , T E L (Ar., Tell Jerishe), a medium-sized mound (2.6 ha or 6.5 acres) located in the Yarkon valley at the fork of the Yarkon and Ayalon Pdvers (32° 05' N , 34 48' E). This location suggests that the site served as a main harbor city during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. T h e
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modern Hebrew name of the site is adapted from the Arabic name of a small nearby village. It is also known by the local population as Napoleon's Hill, a name confirmed by Jacotin's map (prepared by Napoleon's engineer during their campaign to Palestine in 1799). The site is marked as the location of a military camp under the command of one of Napoleon's generals. Topographically, the mound forms a saddle, with the southern summit higher than the northern one. A deep depression on its western side is undoubtedly the location of the city gate. On the opposite side, on the east, the kurkar bedrock is exposed, apparently the result of continuous quarrying for building material. Benjamin Mazar identified the site with the Levitical city of Gat-Rimon (Maisler [Mazar], 1950-1951), but this identification is ne gated by geographic considerations and because the only find for the tenth century BCE was a small farmstead (Rainey, 1987-1989). [See Farmsteads.] T h e site was excavated by an expedition from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, directed by Eleazar L. Sukenik for five seasons spread over twenty-five years (1927-1951). No excavation report was published, but a short summary of tire work, written by Nahman Avigad (1976), is available. In 1976 Yigael Yadin and Shulamit Geva cut a small probe into the remains exposed in the 1951 season and concluded that the city wall and its glacis had been erected during Middle Bronze IIB period (Geva, 1982). Exploration of tire site was renewed in 1981 by a Tel Aviv University expedition di rected by Ze'ev Herzog. By 1993, nine seasons had been conducted in four areas, A - D (Iierzog, 1993). T h e eleventh season was scheduled to begin in June 1995. Bronze Age. The earliest occupation of the site took place in the Early Bronze Age, remains of which were found in tire stratigraphic trench cut at tire southern end of tire mound (area A) and in area C. In both cases shallow de pressions in tire kurkar contained EB III pottery sherds in an ashy debris, pointing to an agricultural settlement. An unfortified village was also erected early in Middle Bronze IIA, whose remains consist of walls belonging to residential units and a circular clay silo. T h e first fortified city was erected in the second occupational phase of this period. T h e earliest city wall (1.70 m wide) was made of mud bricks laid on a single course of stone foundations. T w o floors, the low est covered by a thick layer of burnt debris, join this wall inside the city, and a sloped glacis is laid against its outer face. A second M B IIA city wall (2.20 m wide), made solely of clay bricks, was erected about 90 cm farther into the city. Two floors were also laid against this wall; the upper one contained pottery typical of the period's latest phase. On its outer side a new and formidable glacis was erected out of sloping brick layers, with a coating of crushed kurkar. Area A's high elevation, the thick walls found there, and some luxurious pottery vessels all suggest that this was the location of tire ruler's palace.
GERISA, TEL During MB LIB, a third fortification system was con structed. A 3-meter-wide brick wall was built above the ear lier remains, and a third glacis was laid over the solid remains of the former ones. Inside the city a large building abutted the city wall, which contained four square rooms and a long corridor. Many large storage jars were found smashed on the floors of the rooms, indicating that the rooms had been used as storehouses. T h e city wall was reused in the Late Bronze Age I, but then only small rooms of a domestic na ture were built against it. T h e ruler's palace was apparently moved to the lower part of the city. During one of the M B subphases—the only period in which the city was fortified—a water system was constructed at Tel Gerisa. T h e project's impressive remains consist of a circular shaft (6 m in diameter) hewn into the kurkar (see figure i ) . Narrow stairs were carved out of the rock along the side of the shaft tiiat descend to the water source, about 22 m below the top of the shaft. So far only the upper 5 m have been exposed. T h e shaft was converted into a stonelined well, with space between the well and the original hewn shafted filled in, in the Iron Age I (see below). Excavation exposed widespread LB remains at the center of the mound (area C), in an area unoccupied in later pe riods. Its main feature is a large (17 X 16 m), square building located in the center of the tell, directly in front of the citygate area. The building features a stone-paved courtyard of similar size adjacent to it on the north. T h e building, whose outer walls are 1.90 m thick is divided into three rows of rooms. T h e large room in the central row might have been a throne room. The building was artificially elevated by a fill
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of sandy red soil and retained by a stone revetment. T o the west of the palace, immediately south of the presumed location of the city gate, a large open space was covered with thick white plaster. This area and the structure around it are interpreted as the local marketplace, a function supported by the large quantities of Mycenaean and Cypriot imported vessels, Egyptian scarabs and pottery, and several weights found on and around the plastered floor. There was no LB city wall at Tel Gerisa. The easternmost walls in area C were constructed over the remains of the MB IIB city wall. Most of the site, except for the palace, was covered by domestic buildings in the LB IIB period, as re vealed by the small probes cut into those levels (under the Iron Age I remains) in areas B and D. A large refuse pit, found full of ashy debris, had been dug into the debris of the older acropolis (area A). I r o n Age. During the Iron Age the size of the settlement at Tel Gerisa was considerably reduced. The remains of the Iron I settlement consist of dwellings and storage pits at both the soutiiern and the northern summits of the mound. The center of the mound was not settled and may have been used for horticulture. It has been suggested by Tsvika Tsuk, ex cavator of the water system, that the well built into the old water system was constructed to irrigate the cultivated plots. T h e settlements belonged to two separate small villages or farmsteads, each rebuilt several times during the period. Philistine sherds of monochrome (Late Mycenaean III:Ci ) ware, bichrome pottery, and late red-slipped wares indicate occupation of the site during Iron IB. The central site of
GERISA, TEL. Figure 1. Hewn shaft of a water system, (Courtesy Z , Herzog)
b
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Philistine occupation in the region was at Tell Qasile, lo cated 1.5 km across tire Yarkon River. [See Philistines, article on Early Philistines; Qasile, Tell.] Sukenik's expedition cleared a large part of the settlement at tile southern end of the site. Remains exposed by the renewed excavations consisted of two houses with stone ba ses that had held wooden columns as internal partitions. One of the houses had been destroyed by fire. In the destruction layer among the finds recorded were ceremonial pottery ves sels and a pair of small bronze cymbals. Nearby a carved five-sided pyramidal seal and a female pillar figurine were found. The occupation on the northern end had been poorer, and in its final stage contained mainly deep storage pits, eventually reused for garbage. In Iron IIA the occupation at Tel Gerisa was even more limited and was restricted to the southern summit. Remains of a single domestic building were exposed right under the surface. The house had been used in two phases, both dated to the tenth century BCE. Following the destruction of the last phase, the site was deserted for two millennia. Habita tion was renewed at the northern end of mound for a short time in the Early Arab period (tenth century CE), BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, Nahman. "Jerishe Tell." In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 575-578. Engelwood Cliffs, N.J., 1976. Geva, Shulamit. Tell Jerishe: The Sukenik Excavations of the Middle Bronze Age Fortifications. Qedem, vol. 15. Jerusalem, 1982. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Gerisa, Tel." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 480-484. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Maisler [Mazar], Benjamin. "The Excavations at Tell Qasile: Prelimi nary Report." Israel Exploration Journal 1.2 (1950-1951): 61-76. Rainey, Anson F. "Tel Gerisa and die Danite Inheritance" (in He brew). Eretz-Israel Museum Yearbook: Israel—People and Land 5-6 (1987-1989): 59-72. ZE'EV HERZOG
GERMAN SCHOOL (Jerusalem). See Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes. GEZER, ancient site identified with modern Tell el-Jezer in Israel (35°5i' N , 34°55' E; map reference 142.5 X 140.7), 8 1cm (5 mi.) southeast of modern Ramla. The prominent 33-acre mound, about 650 yards long and 240 yards wide, is about 225 m above sea level (see figure 1). It is the last of the foothills of the Central Hills where they slope down to join the northern Shephelah, guarding the western end of the Valley of Ayalon. Gezer is thus at the crossroads of the Via Maris and the trunk road leading up to Jerusalem and beyond.
Gezer was correctly identified in 1871 by Charles Cler rnont-Ganneau, on the basis of several of the now wellknown bedrock inscriptions reading "boundary of Gezer" (see below). It was excavated by Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister in 1902-1909 for the Palestine Exploration Fund, in one of the first large-scale modern projects, published as The Excavation of Gezer (3 vols., 1912). Alan Rowe con ducted brief soundings in 1934, again for the PEF. The He brew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusa lem, with the Harvard Semitic Museum, carried out major excavations in 1964-1974, directed by G. Ernest Wright, William G. Dever, and Joe D . Seger (again in 1984 and 1990 by Dever, sponsored by the University of Arizona). History. The excavations have brought to light twentysix strata, from the Late Chalcolithic to tire Roman era. Stratum XXVI. Gezer was founded in the Late Chal colithic period, about 3500 BCE. Most of tire material (in cluding some of Macalister's "Pre-Semitic") comes from flimsy dwellings on bedrock. The pottery and other material overlaps with both the Beersheba and coastal cultures. Stratum XXV. T h e Early Bronze I material from Field I (including some of Macalister's "Pre-Semitic," "First Se mitic," and "Troglodyte" cave materials) suggests an ex panded settlement, about 3200-3100 BCE. In addition to fragmentary house walls, there are natural and enlarged caves in the bedrock that were used extensively for dwellings and storage. One of them, Cave I.3A, produced an assem blage of storejars and other vessels, as well as stone imple ments. The scant pottery of Stratum XXV is typical of Early Bronze I, including some red-slipped and "trickle-painted" wares. Strata XXIV-XXIII. During Early Bronze II, roughly 3100-2600 BCE, Gezer expanded considerably, but it still did not boast city walls such as many other sites had. House walls in Field I were well constructed and had several phases of continuous occupation. T h e pottery repertoire includes typical red-burnished vessels, Abydos-style pitchers, and a few Egyptian imports. Gezer was abandoned from the end of the Early Bronze II period through Early Bronze IV, dur ing which time a deep layer of humus-like soil formed at the surface (now deeply buried, of course). Stratum XXII. After a long gap, Gezer was reoccupied sometime in the late Middle Bronze I period, about 1900 BCE. Some of Macalister's "Second Semitic" and several of his tombs, including one typical cist-tomb (in.3) belong to this horizon. A small statuette of Heqab, probably a twelfthdynasty Egyptian official, also belongs here. Our material, which comes only from Field VI, consists of a partly sub terranean plastered granary; a few domestic dwellings; and several infant jar burials. The pottery includes fine redslipped and burnished carinated bowls. Strata XXI-XX. Gezer appears to have grown into a rel atively large urban site in Middle Bronze II. Much of Ma-
GEZER
calister's "Second Semitic" belongs here. In Field VI there is a continuous development of domestic dwellings; houses are now constructed along terraced slopes and share large courtyards and cisterns fed by runoff water conducted through well-built drains. The pottery is unexceptional but typical of Middle Bronze II, about 1750-1650 BCE. Stratum XIX. Late in Middle Bronze II or early in Mid dle III, around 1650 BCE, Gezer was first fortified. Macalis ter's "Inner Wall" and "South Gate" belong here. In Field I Dever's team reexcavated the "Outer Wall" and its ad joining "Tower 5017." Macalister's plans show the wall en circling the entire site, a length of perhaps 1,300 yards, and incorporating many rectangular towers. T h e walls of the tower, constructed of dressed Cyclopean masonry, are 53 feet wide and still stand to a height of 15 feet. T h e super structure is entirely missing today, but tire building, proba bly a citadel, must have stood originally three or four stories high. In Field IV to tire west, Macalister's "South Gate," a typical three-entryway monumental gateway, was reexca vated. Its mud-brick superstructure still stands more than 25 feet high, and the springers of tire arches are still visible. Late in this stratum, or early in the next, "Glacis 8012" was added to tire "Inner Wall." It was carefully constructed of alternating layers of tamped chalk and occupational debris, rising at a slope of 45 degrees to a preserved height of nearly 20 feet.
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Also to be attributed to Stratum XIX is Macalister's "High Place," reexcavated by Dever's team in Field V (see figure 2). It consists of a north-south alignment often large stand ing stones (the biblical massebot), some nearly 10 feet high, surrounded by a plastered pavement and a low stone curb. Quantities of burned animal bones and teeth associated with the pavement suggest animal sacrifice at an outdoor cultic installation, perhaps a covenant-renewal sanctuary. In Field VI on the acropolis, remains of a massive citadel adjoining a cobbled street were found, as well as established houses, courtyards, and cisterns, continuing tire strata X X I XX tradition. Stratum XVIII. Middle Bronze Age Gezer was brought to a violent end by a fire that was evident in several fields. This may have been the work of Pharaoh Thutmose III, who mentions Gezer in his Karnak inscription, among sites con quered on his first Asiatic campaign about 1468 BCE. Just inside the connector wall between "Tower 5017" and tire "South Gate," several destroyed houses yielded almost two hundred pieces of pottery. There was also a cache of gold jewelry, including two foil female figurines, found under the skeleton of a young women who had been crushed by rooffall. Stratum XVII. Gezer was probably abandoned for a time following the massive destruction of Stratum XVIII, through most of Late Bronze IA-B. The only evidence of occupation
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consists of the earliest burials in Cave I.ioA (below). T h e scant Bichrome ware found by Macalister may belong early in this or the preceding phase. Stratum XVI. By Late Bronze IIA, around 1400-1300 BCE, Gezer is flourishing again. In Field VI, "Palace 14120," although badly ruined later, was a splendid, multistoried building, its few remaining contents speaking of consider able wealdr and sophistication. Like Macalister's "Canaanite Castie" in Field XI, it may have been an Egyptian-style "res idency" of the Amarna Age. From Amarna itself there are ten letters from Gezer, from three different kings. T o this general horizon belongs one of Macalister's cuneiform tab lets, apparently from an Egyptian official who is summoning someone or something to Kiddimu, perhaps nearby Tell Ras Abu Hamid (biblical "Gittaim"?). A number of Macalister's tombs and parts of his "Second" and "Third Semitic" be long to this horizon. Macalister's "Outer Wall" is now dated to the stratum XVI horizon. This wall, built on bedrock, is about 15 feet wide and is preserved in places some 12-14 f high. It runs some 1,400 yards around the site outside the perimeter of the "Inner Wall." T h e excavators have dated this wall to tire Amarna Age, both on stratigraphic and pragmatic grounds, although others date it to the Iron Age, largely because of the ashlar towers built into it (see below). Some of the most spectacular finds came from the major period of burials in Cave I.ioA in Field I, just outside the eet
"Outer Wall." There were sixty-eight individuals—adults, juveniles, and children—interred in this cave from around 1450 to 1300 BCE. Many suffered from advanced artereosclerosis. Yet in addition to dozens of ordinary local pots and bronzes, there were imported luxury items such as Cypriot vessels, and Egyptian alabasters, scarabs, ivory pieces, and a fine cast sand-core glass vase. Stratum XV-XIV. During the Late Bronze IIB period, about 1300-1200 BCE, Gezer gradually declined. T h e end may have come around 1207 BCE in the campaign of Phar aoh Merneptah, whose famous "Victory Stela" names Gezer among conquered cities and peoples in Canaan. In Field II there is a major late thirteenth-century BCE destruc tion; in Field VI a period of disruption and abandonment is followed by deep pitting and trenching operations. Among Macalister's finds is a carved stone sundial bearing the car touche of Merneptah. Stratum XIII-XII. At the transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age, about 1200 BCE, Gezer shows both continuity and discontinuity. T h e disruptions in Fields II and VT have already been noted. In Field I, however, there are new structures in the early twelfth century BCE but no fundamental changes. Also, the ceramic repertoire in all ar eas shows marked continuity from the mid-thirteenth until at least the mid-twelfth century BCE. The major changes are in Field VI, where above tire filledin trenches noted above a large, multiroomed public granary
GEZER. Figure 2. The "High Place." Middle Bronze III period, c. 1600 BCE. (Courtesy W. G. Dever)
GEZER was constructed, surrounded by an extensive threshing floor with many burn-layers. T h e first typical Philistine Bichrome pottery appears precisely with the earliest floors of this building. T h e building goes through three building phases interspersed by disruptions, with a massive destruction at the end, about 1150 BCE. T h e debris produced many restorable vessels, numerous miscellaneous objects, and three contemporary Egyptian scarabs. Stratum XL By the late twelfth century BCE the granary had been replaced by two large, well-constructed courtyard houses flanking a lane. Both were violently destroyed in a fire after the first phase; partially rebuilt and destroyed again; and finally abandoned after a third, poorer phase. By the last phase, in the mid-eleventh century BCE, Philistine wares are disappearing, and a few red-slipped wares appear. From the destruction layers came two ceramic swan's heads and a terra-cotta circumcised phallus. Structures of this horizon were also brought to light in Fields I and II, but they were unexceptional. Stratum X-IX. The late eleventh-early tenth-century BCE horizon is represented mainly by several poor structures and a distinctive "post-Philistine/pre-Solomonic" pottery covered with a thin, streaky red wash. Stratum VIII. This stratum, spanning the mid- to late tenth century BCE, sees major changes, especially in Fields II and III. In Field III, Macalister's "Maccabean Castle" was reexcavated; Yigael Yadin had already interpreted it, sight unseen, as a four-entryway city gate and stretch of casemate wall, like those at Hazor and Megiddo. He cited die refer ence in 1 Kings 9:15-17 to Solomonic defenses at all three sites. Yadin turned out to be correct, the Gezer date con firmed by red-slipped and hand-burnished pottery in the deep constructional fills underlying the walls and first road way. Low benches ran around the walls of each chamber, and a large stone basin was in one chamber. At the two jambs the masonry was fine ashlar, but elsewhere large boul ders were used in the construction. After die first two resurfacings of the roadway, a deep drain was cut into the roadway and downslope diat was incorporated into a twoentryway lower gatehouse. At this time "Palace 10,000" was also added, to the west of the gate. T h e upper gate was connected on both sides to a short stretch of casemate wall. This wall continued west to Field II, where it was ceramically dated to the late tenth century BCE by hand-burnished wares. Downslope from the gate, die gatehouse was connected on both sides to the "Outer Wall," which was now rebuilt with the addition of several courses of somewhat different masonry, a much higher roadway, and an ashlar tower. In the excavators' opinion, tiiis tower would go with the twenty-five or more ashlar towers that Macalister says were "inserted" in the "Outer Wall" tiiat is now dated to the Late Bronze Age. In Field VI, on the north side of the mound, we also found two markedly different
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phases of die "Outer Wall," although the one ashlar tower excavated there seems to go with a third phase of the wall, probably ninth century BCE in date. Both the upper gate and portions of the casemate wall were destroyed by a fire that left the structures severely damaged, probably to be asso ciated with the well known raid of Pharaoh Shishak (Sheshonq) about 920 BCE. Stratum VII. T h e nintii century BCE is not well repre sented at Gezer. T h e Field III upper gate, badly damaged, was reinforced and rebuilt as a three-entryway gate (see fig ure 3). Either in the late ninth or early eighth century BCE, "Palace 8,000" replaced "Palace 10,000" west of the gate. In Field VI, the third phase of the "Outer wall" and some of die ashlar towers probably belong to Stratum VH. Stratum VI. Stratum VI belongs broadly to the eighth century BCE. In Fields II, III, and VI die casemate wall and "Outer Wall" and towers continue, the Field III gate being rebuilt as a two-entryway gate. In Field VII, several fine courtyard houses belong to this horizon (although some may have been built first in the tenth-nintii century BCE) . Stratum VI ends in a violent conflagration. In Field VII the houses are partially destroyed. In Field III die upper gate, the casemate wall, "Palace 8,000," and the lower ga tehouse all show dramatic signs of this destruction. Within the casemate walls there is a heavy burn-layer, which pro duced mid- to late eighth-century BCE pottery encrusted with molten lime, more than 100 fire-baked loom weights, and several unique ceramic inkwells. T h e lower gate was fired, cracking some of the ashlar stones; and the "Outer Wall" was partially breached, hastily repaired, then finally heavily burned. This destruction is certainly that of TiglathPileser III in his early Asiatic campaigns, about 733 BCE. A relief found by Austen Henry Layard in the Palace of tiiis Assyrian king at Nimrud depicts a siege machine battering the city wall and gate of a Palestinian town, with die name gaz (ru), "Gezer," written at die top in cuneiform characters. Stratum V. Gezer never really recovered from die As syrian destruction. Stratum V spans die late eighth-early sixth century BCE, but the remains are unimpressive. T h e city gate and walls in Fields II and III seem not to have been rebuilt. The Field VII private houses do continue, but in decline. That Gezer was now reckoned with Judah, not Is rael, is indicated by a few royal stamped jar handles and shekel-weights found both by Macalister and the later ex cavators, and two Neo-Assyrian tablets. The end came with the Babylonian destruction of Judah in 598-586 BCE, evi dence of which is clear in the Field VII houses. Stratum IV. The Persian period, the sixth-fourth cen turies BCE, is poorly represented at Gezer. There are ephem eral remains of domestic structures in Fields II and VI. Among Macalister's Persian materials, however, are several rich tombs (his "Philistine Tombs"), a few yehud seal im pressions, and some small limestone incense altars.
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GEZER, Figure 3. Plan offieldIII gateway, showing outer and inner city walls, (1) drain; (2, 12) casemate walls; (3) outer gatehouse; (4-9) palace 10,000. (Courtesy W. G. Dever)
Stratum III. The early Hellenistic period, the late fourththird century BCE, sees Gezer recover slighdy, although few remains have been found in any of the excavations. Stratum II. The second-century BCE witnesses a last re vival of Gezer, especially during the Maccabean period, af ter about 170 BCE. The Iron Age gate in Field III was par tially rebuilt as a single-entryway gate, with repairs made in bossed, marginally drafted masonry. Macalister's "Building H " over the eastern half of the gate dates to this period. Many of the ashlar towers of the "Outer Wall" were now surrounded by semicircular bastions, and upper courses were added to die wall here and there. In Fields II, VI, and VII domestic houses are in evidence, particularly in the latter field. Here a large house produced a horde of iron tools; an inscribed lead weight; stamped amphorae handles, and a coin of Antiochus VII, about 133 BCE. Stratum I. From the early-mid-Roman period, there is little evidence, except for some domestic remains in Field II. However, the several "boundary inscriptions" found by Macalister and by the later excavators belong to this period and suggest that Gezer was now part of a private estate. These inscriptions, cut into the bedrock, read in Hebrew, tehum gezer, "boundary of Gezer"; and in Greek, Alkiou, "belonging to Alkios," presumably the owner of the estate. After that, Gezer was virtually abandoned, the only later material being Macalister's several Byzantine tombs and a few medieval and Crusader remains in the vicinity. [See also the biography of Macalister.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dever, William G. "Excavations at Gezer." Biblical Archaeologist 30.2 (1967): 47-62. Dever, William G., et al. Gezer I: Preliminary Report of the 1064-66 Seasons. Jerusalem, 1970. Dever, William G., et al. "Further Excavations at Gezer." Biblical Ar chaeologist 34.4 (1971): 94-132.
Dever, William G., et al. Gezer II: Preliminary Report of the 1067-70 Seasons in Fields I and II, Jerusalem, 1974. Dever, William G. "Solomonic and Assyrian 'Palaces' at Gezer." Israel Exploration Journal 35 (1985): 217-230. Dever, William G., et al. Gezer IV: The 1060-71 Seasons in Field VI, the "Acropolis." Jerusalem, 1986. Dever, William G. "Late Bronze Age and Solomonic Defenses at Gezer: New Evidence." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 262 (May 1986): 9-34. Dever, William G. "Further Evidence on the Date of the Outer Wall at Gezer." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 289 (1993): 33-54Gitin, Seymour. Gezer III: A Ceramic Typology of the Late Iron II, Per sian, and Hellenistic Periods at Tell Gezer. Jerusalem, 1990. Lance, H. Darrell. "Gezer in the Land and in History." Biblical Ar chaeologist 30.2 (1967): 34-47. Macalister, R. A. S. The Excavation cf Gezer, 1002-1005 and 1007-ioog, 3 vols. London, 1912. Reich, Ronny, and Baruch Brandl. "Gezer under Assyrian Rule." Pal estine Exploration Quarterly 117 (January-June 1985): 41-54. Schwartz, Joshua. "Once More on the 'Boundary of Gezer' Inscriptions and the History of Gezer and Lydda at the End of the Second Tem ple Period." Israel Exploration Journal 40.1 (1990): 47-57. Seger, Joe D. Gezer V: The Field I Caves. Jerusalem, 1988. WILLIAM G . DEVER
GEZER CALENDAR. The so-called calendar text, discovered at Tel Gezer in 1908, is a showpiece of early Hebrew inscriptions, in spite of various linguistic problems. T h e text does constitute a "calendar," in tire sense that it outlines the principal agricultural activities over a twelve month period; however, it names tire months only by their characteristic activities and presents some activities as span ning two months. This brief text, inscribed rather roughly on a limestone plaque (see figure 1), may be translated as follows: "Two months of ingathering [lit., its two months are ingathering], two months of sowing, two months of late sowing, one
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lean more positively in the direction of a Phoenician classi fication: the forms {w} (yrhw) and {0} (yrh) for the thirdperson masculine dual (/plural); third-person masculine sin gular pronominal suffixes are characteristic of early Byblian (the feature is as yet unattested in Northern Hebrew), while the proleptic use of these suffixes is more characteristic of Phoenician than of Hebrew (Pardee, 1987, p. 139, n. 20; add to the bibliography cited there Honeyman, 1953, and Rai ney, 1983, p. 630). On the lower left corner of the calendar is a partially pre served word generally taken as a personal name, perhaps that of the author/scribe: {'by [.. .]}. Some reconstruct the name as Yahwistic (e.g., Albright, 1943, p. 22), but the el ements {'b} and {-y-} also appear in Phoenician names; the correct reconstruction of the name and the ethnic identifi cation of its bearer are thus unknown. [See also Gezer; Hebrew Language and Literature; and Phoenician-Punic] BIBLIOGRAPHY
GEZER CALENDAR. Figure i. Archives)
The Gezer Calendar, (Courtesy ASOR
month of chopping flax, one month of barley harvest, one month of harvest and completion [i.e., the wheat harvest ends the grain-harvesting season], two months of grape cut ting, one month of summer fruits." T h e precise meaning of some of the terms is uncertain, but it is clear that the text refers to a sequence of twelve months, beginning with the fall equinox. In spite of imprecise stratigraphic results from the early excavations at Gezer, the archaeological and paleographic indicators agree on a date for this text of roughly 900 BCE (Albright, 1943). T h e script, however, as many scholars have remarked, shows no features characteristic of Hebrew (cf. Naveh, 1982, p. 65); the linguistic identification is there fore dependent on internal analysis. T h e text is generally classified with the Hebrew inscriptions, with one feature in dicating a Northern Hebrew or Phoenician classification: the writing {qs}, "summer fruits," is unusual for Judean inscrip tions, where {qys} is expected, but it is characteristic of both Northern Hebrew (Borowski, 1987, pp. 43-44) and Phoe nician (Dahood, 1983, pp. 597-598). T w o other features
Albright, William F. "The Gezer Calendar." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 92 (1943): 16-26. Cogent remarks on archaeological and paleographic dating, with bibliography. One cannot, however, accept that die inscription "is good biblical He brew" (p. 22). Borowsld, Oded. Agriculture in Iron Age Israel. Winona Lake, Ind., 1987. Gezer text discussed in the broader context of the agriculture of the time, drawing parallels with the Bible, archaeological finds in SyriaPalestine, and Egyptian representations of agricultural activities. Dahood, Mitchell. "Some Eblaite and Phoenician Month Names." In Atti del I Congresso inlernazionale di studi fenici e punici, Roma, j-ro Novembre 1979, vol. 2, pp. 595-598. Rome, 1983. Dalman, Gustaf. "Notes on the Old Hebrew Calendar-Inscription from Gezer." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1909): 118— 119. Parallel with agricultural practices and Arabic terms in use at Dalman's time. Gray, G. B„ Mark Lidzbarski, and E. J. Pilcher, "An Old Hebrew Cal endar-Inscription from Gezer." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement. (1909): 26-34. The excavator, R. A. S. Macalister, en trusted the editio princeps to three scholars, each of whom produced an independent reading and interpretation. Honeyman, A. M. "The Syntax of the Gezer Calendar." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1953): 53-58. Correct analysis of the forms yrhw and yrh. Naveh, Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet. Jerusalem, 1982. Pardee, Dennis. "Review of John C. L. Gibson, Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 46 (1987): 137142. Rainey, Anson F. "Review of Ziony Zevit, Ancient Hebrew Epigraphs." Journal of Biblical Literature 102 (1983): 629-634. Ronzevalle, Sebastien. "La tablette hebraique de Gezer." Melanges de la Faculte Orientale de I'Universite St. Joseph 5 (1911): 90*-io4*. Contains two excellent new photographs (pi. 16), each from a dif ferent lighting angle, and a photograph of the reverse (pi. 17). DENNIS PARDEE
GHIRSHMAN, ROMAN (1895-1979), archaeologist who devoted his career to research in Afghanistan and Iran.
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Born in Karkhov, Russia, Ghirshman left his country during the revolution and arrived in Paris in 1923, where he studied history and Orientalism at the Sorbonne and the Ecole du Louvre. Ghirshman worked at Tello in Iraq in 1930, and in 1931 was made director of the Louvre's new mission to Iran. There he worked at Tepe Giyan, near Nehavend, accom panied by his wife Tania, a dental surgeon, who became his collaborator as an illustrator and restorer. Between 1933 and 1937, Ghirshman explored two necropoleis from the second and first millennia BCE at Tepe Sialk, near Kachan. His main research began after World War II, as director of the French archeological delegation in Iran. He excavated at Susa for twenty-one seasons, until 1967, establishing its stratigraphy from Islamic times until tire end of the third millennium and contributing greatly to what is known of the Elamites and their culture. [See Susa; Elamites.] He simul taneously explored a temple city of tire fourteenth century BCE at Chogha Zanbil, near Susa, with its ziggurat, a huge five-story tower of which only two stories remain. [See Chogha Zanbil.] In 1959-1960, tire Iranian National Petro leum Company invited Ghirshman to dig at Kharg Island in tire Persian Gulf, where he cleared a Greek temple, a Nestorian church, a Sasanian fire temple, and a mosque. Until the age of seventy-seven, Ghirshman excavated in tire Baldrtiari Mountains, at Bard-i Nislrandeh and Masjid-i Suleiman, Parthian and Sasanian period sites, respectively. Ghirshman published the results of his excavations as well as other scholarly works, including twenty-three volumes and more than two hundred articles in scientific reviews. He was a member of the Institut de France and of several in ternational academies and received many honors. He exhib ited great energy and enthusiasm up until his death, in Bu dapest, during an international congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ghirshman, Roman. Iran from the Earliest Times lo the Islamic Conquest. Harmondsworth, 1954. Ghirshman, Roman. Persian Art, 249 B.C.-A.D. 651: The Parthian and Sassanian Dynasties. New York, 1962. Ghirshman, Roman. Ancient Persia: From the Origins to Alexander the Great. London and New York, 1964. This and the 1962 publication, first published in French, are fully illustrated and include many pre viously unpublished documents. Ghirshman, Roman. Tchoga-Zanbil (Dur Untashj. Vol. 1, La Ziggourat; vol. 2, Temenos, Temples, Palais, Tombes. Memoires de la delegation archeologique en Iran, vols. 39 and 40. Paris, 1966-1968. Ghirshman, Roman. Tenasses sacrees de Bard-e-Nechandeh etMasjid-iSulaiman, Memoires de la delegation archeologique en Iran, vol. 45. Paris, 1976. Ghirshman, Tania. Archeologue malgre mot: Vie quolidienne d'une Mis sion Archeologique en Iran. Neuchatel and Paris, 1970. Daily life of an archaeological expedition as recorded by Ghirshman's wife between 1932 and 1967; includes a preface by the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer. AGNES SPYCKET
GHRUBBA, site located on the southern side of Wadi Nimrin in Jordan, about 2 km (1 mi.) west of the police station in the village of Shunah (South), on the main Am man-Jerusalem road (3i°53'43" N , 35°34'54" E). T h e extent of tire site has not been determined, but it is estimated to be about one meter high. Soundings were made at the site in 1953 by James Mellaart (1956, pp. 14-40). In 1976 the site was resurveyed by Moawiyah Ibrahim, James Sauer, and Khair Yassine under aus pices of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, the Uni versity of Jordan, and the American Center of Oriental Research (Yassine et al., 1988, pp. 191, 194) and tire col lected material studied by Zeidan Kafafi (Kafafi, 1982). In his soundings Mellaart observed sixteen layers. Layers 1-4 had been partially disturbed by a modern burial and pro duced pottery sherds related to the Ghassulain culture. Sealed by these layers was a pit dug through a layer of un stable gravel down to the underlying soft limestone. The pit appeared oval in shape, measured about 5 x 3 m , and is 1.80 m deep. Inside this pit twelve layers (5-16) of ash and gravel were registered. Only one floor (layer 15a) was re corded. T h e pottery from layers 5-16 was mostiy handmade. Mel laart distinguished four categories: plain or coarse ware; painted and incised ware; burnished ware; and painted ware. In the plain and coarse ware collection, bowls with knobs and with flaring sides, as well as small jars with lug handles, were noted. Straw temper was visible only in the case of a few coarse white bowls (Mellaart, 1956, p . 30). Bow-rim jars similar to those from Jericho VIII were found in layers 12, 14, and 16 at Ghrubba (Mellaart, 1956, fig. 4, pp. 40-42). The second group was characterized by a red or brown paint or wash covering the vessels, as well as incised decoration— a horizontal band below the rim of the bowls or at the base of the neck of the jars. In the case of jugs the decoration passed through the opening of the loop handles. Below the horizontal band were usually zigzag or herringbone deco rations. The painted ware is the most common at Ghrubba. It was handmade and well fired. T h e surface of the vessels is buff, pink, or whitish, and evidently no slip was used. T h e decoration consists mostiy of triangles, chevrons, diagonal parallel lines, and dots. Mellaart argued that Ghrubba rep resented a different painted pottery tradition than that at Jericho, comparing it with Hassunian Archaic painted ware (Mellaart, 1956, p. 31). Because Ghrubba yielded some pottery forms distinct from those of Jericho IX and at Sha'ar ha-Golan and that reflect contact with the earliest painted pottery at Mersin and 'Amuq B, Mellaart placed Ghrubba in the later phase of the Hassuna period and earlier than Jericho IX and tire Yarmukian (Mellaart, 1956, pp. 31-33). While Ghrubbahas its own characteristics, it may not be earlier than Jericho IX and Sha'ar ha-Golan, however. For instance, bow-rim jars
GIBEON like those from Jericho VIII have been found at Ghrubba. However, when Mellaart excavated at Ghrubba in 1953, no other sites related to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods except Sha'ar ha-Golan, Jericho, and Ghassul had been ex cavated in the Jordan Valley. A. M. T . Moore, on the odier hand, has suggested that Ghrubba should be related to the Early Chalcolithic period and not dre Neolithic, stressing tirat the pottery Mellaart published strongly resembles the Ghassulian (Moore, 1973, p. 60). This argument was not confirmed by the pottery collected during the 1976 survey (see above), which resembled the pottery of Late Neolithic (Kafafi, 1982, p. 200). Based on the results of the excavations in the Jordan Val ley at Munhata (Perrot, 1964, 1966), Tell Tsaf, and Abu Hamid (Dollfus and Kafafi, 1993) and in Jordan's hill coun try, at Abu Thawwab, Ghrubba is either a Yarmuldan site or, like Abu Hamid, it is postclassical Yarmuldan. Its painted pottery resembles tiiat found at Abu Thawwab (Kafafi, un published), except that no "classical" incised or painted pot tery was evident. [See also Jordan Valley. In addition, many of the sites men tioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dollfus, Genevieve, and Zeidan A. Kafafi. "Recent Researches at Abu Hamid." Annual of the Department aj Antiquities of Jordan 37 (1993): 241-262. Kafafi, Zeidan A. "The Neolithic of Jordan (East Bank)." Ph.D. diss., Freie Universitat, 1982. Kafafi, Zeidan A. "Jebel Abu Thawwab (Er-Rumman) Excavations." Unpublished manuscript. Mellaart, James. "The Neolithic Site of Ghrubba." Annual of the De partment of Antiquities of Jordan 3 (1956): 24-40. Moore, A. M. T. "The Late Neolithic in Palestine." Levant 5 (1973): 36-69. Perrot, Jean. "Les deux premieres campagnes de fouilles a Munhata, 1962-1963: Premiers resultats." Syria 41 (1964): 323-345. Perrot, Jean. "La troisieme campagne de fouilles a Munhata (1964)." Syria 43 (1966): 49-63. Yassine, Khair, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1976." In Ar chaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports, edited by Khair Yassine, pp. 189-207. Amman, 1988. ZEIDAN A. KAFAFI
GIBEAH. See Ful, Tell el-.
GIBEON. A site of some importance in the Bible, located approximately 9 km (5 mi) north of Jerusalem ( 3 5 ° n ' N , 3i°5i' E; map reference 167.6 X 139.7). T h e best-known biblical references to Gibeon describe a battle there between tire Israelites and the Amorites. T h e Israelites, led by Joshua and newly allied with the people of Gibeon, protected the city from an Amorite attack led by Adonizedek of Jerusalem. In dre battle, Joshua drove back the Amorites and asked God
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to make tire sun stand still at Gibeon until the Israelites were fully victorious (Jos. 10:9-14). Gibeon was first identified by the American explorer Edward Robinson in 1838, although two traveler's accounts had suggested die identification as early as 1666 and 1738. Robinson saw the modern Arabic name el-Jib as a corruption of the ancient town name of Gibeon. The identification was confirmed by the excava tions carried out by James B. Pritchard for tire University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, between 1956 and 1962. During those excavations, tiiirty-one Iron Age jar handles were found, inscribed with tire name gb'n (Gibeon), A survey of the site carried out by the Palestine Exploration Fund was published in 1870, a plan of the water tunnel was published in 1889 by Conrad Schick of the PEF, and an Iron Age tomb was discovered and published in 1950 by Awni Dajani of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. A recent survey, done by Hanan Eshel of the Flebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983-1984, documented additional Iron Age burial caves. T h e University of Pennsylvania excavations at Gibeon re vealed several periods of occupation. The earliest, on die top of the tell, dates to the Early Bronze Age. Unfortunately, much of this level was disturbed in botii ancient and modern times, and littie can be said about it. There are few occu pational deposits but many tombs from the EB IV. The tombs consist of shafts cut into the limestone slope of the tell that lead to circular chambers containing die inhuma tion. Burial goods include ceramic vessels for food and drink, metal tools, and adornments for the deceased. Some of tirese tombs were reused for burials in die Middle Bronze II period and in the Late Bronze Age, when additional tombs were cut. A few remains of M B domestic architecture were found, but the main excavations on the tell concentrated on the Iron Age occupation. [See Shaft Tombs.] Gibeon has a large and impressive water system that was built in two stages, botii within the Iron Age. The first part of tire system was probably begun in the Iron I period. It consists of a long spiral staircase dug to reach a deep pool of groundwater within the city walls. T h e second system was designed slightly later, perhaps to enhance the pool's water supply. This system involves a stepped tunnel whose mouth is inside the city. The tunnel was cut down to a water cham ber that, in turn, had a feeder tunnel connecting it to an underground spring. T h e water chamber had another point of access in addition to the tunnels, in the form of a door tirat led outside the city walls and could be sealed in times of siege. [See Water Tunnels.] A winery was discovered that belongs to the eighth and seventii centuries BCE. It contained many wine presses, channels, and basins, as well as sixty-three large vats, cut deep into the limestone. T h e vats were used as wine cellars for temperature control and once contained hundreds of storage jars as evidenced by the broken jar fragments as well
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as one complete jar that were found. Much of the wine pro duced at Gibeon was probably exported; many jar handles inscribed with the name gb'n were found in this industtial area. There is very little evidence for occupation at Gibeon be tween the end of the Iron Age and the Roman period. In the Roman period, however, although the site was reoccupied it was not fortified. Excavation of the later remains revealed baths and an elaborate columbarium tomb. BIBLIOGRAPHY Eshel, Hanan. "The Late Iron Age Cemetery of Gibeon." Israel Explo ration Journal 37 (1987): 1-17. Piitchard, James B. The Water System of Gibeon. Philadelphia, 1961. Pritchard, James B. Gibeon Where the Sun Stood Still. Princeton, 1962. Pritchard, James B. The Bronze Age Cemetery at Gibeon. Philadelphia, 1963. Pritchard, James B. Winery, Defenses, and Soundings at Gibeon. Phila delphia, 1964. Pritchard, James B . "Gibeon." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeolog ical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 511-514. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. RACHEL S. HALLOTE
G I L A T , a Chalcolithic commercial and cultic center lo cated in the northern Negev desert, along the eastern bank of Nahal Patish, about 20 1cm (12 mi.) northwest of Beer sheba. The site (about 10 ha, or 25 acres) is comprised of a large mound (about 8 acres) that rises more than 2.5 m above some 7 ha (17 acres) of surrounding plain. Gilat was discovered in the early 1950s by David Alon, who, based on the surface discovery of hundreds of artifacts characteristic of the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500-3700 BCE), first recognized the site's archaeological significance. Under the sponsorship of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Alon conducted three seasons of excavations between 1975 and 1977. More recently, in 1987 and from 1990 to 1992, exca vations were carried out on behalf of the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Jerusalem under the direction of Thomas E. Levy and Alon. Largely as a result of its proximity to both the coastal plain and the inland footiiills, Gilat served as one of the earliest ritual centers in western Palestine. Sim ilarly, its development as a regional center of exchange can be explained by its central location among the area's large Chalcolithic village sites—south of Gerar, west of Abu Hof, east of the Nahal Besor sites, and north of the Beersheba valley sites, among them, Shiqmim, Abu Matar, Horvat Beter, and Bir es-Safadi. Because of this commercial and ritual importance, Gilat held a special status in Israel's pro tohistory. In tire 1970s, working in the eastern portion of the site, the excavators uncovered an area of approximately 450 sq m and delineated four main strata. T h e H U C excavations uncovered an area of about 800 sq m, with seven occupa
tional phases distinguished. All architectural remains from the latest occupational level (stratum I) were destroyed by plowing (tire site is in the field of Moshav Gilat), as was stratum II in the east; in the west, however, this stratum was subdivided into subphases Ha, lib, and lie (tire last labeled stratum III in the first published reports). Remains from stratum III were found all over the site, whereas those from stratum IV, the earliest occupational level, were uncovered in only a few places, in probes dug into a small Pleistocene hill rising above the plain. An unusually large number of exotic artifacts made of nonlocal materials were uncovered during the H U C exca vations. Among these finds were 58 violin-shaped figu rines—more than at any other site in the eastern Mediter ranean—54 enigmatic tokens, 82 stone palettes, 54 pendants, some 200 fenestrated stands (incense burners) made of ceramic and basalt, 150 spindle whorls, 28 mace heads, and a host of additional objects made of obsidian, green stone, and other materials. Intrasite spatial analysis has not revealed a statistical correlation between the finished stone objects and the raw materials found on site, an indi cation that the violin-shaped figurines, palettes, fenestrated stands, and other exotica were manufactured elsewhere and brought to tire site in finished form. Petrographic studies of the unique Gilat "torpedo" jars also confirmed nonlocal production. These findings, viewed in conjunction with the site's location, indicate that Gilat controlled access to graz ing lands on the Negev coastal plain, access that seasonal herders gained by bringing offerings to tire sanctuary. Ob jects found in connection with the architectural remains in strattmr lie suggest a variety of cultic activities. About sev enty of the cult objects were discovered in the stratum's main cult room, designated room A (about 3 X 4.5 m). T h e most important of these finds were tire Gilat Ram and Lady. T h e other finds with cultic significance were recovered in the courtyards linked to this room. Well-preserved architecture was excavated in the western part of stratum lib: the remains of three broadroom build ings; three circular, mud-brick and stone platforms; and a large, mud-brick lined silo. A building complex from stra tum lie was exposed in tire eastern sector. T h e stratum lib structures, which also produced many ritual objects, were connected by a hard mud-brick floor about 10 cm thick. After stratum lib was abandoned, much of the area was pre pared for new construction (stratum Ha)—numerous struc tures that were short-lived. BIBLIOGRAPHY Alon, David. 118. Alon, David. 40 (1977): Alon, David, 37 (1987):
"Two Cult Vessels from Gilat." 'Atiqot 11 (1976): 116"A Chalcolidlic Temple at Gilath," Biblical Archaeologist 63-65. and Thomas E. Levy. "Gilat." Israel Exploration Journal 283-84.
GILEAD Alon, David, and Thomas E. Levy. "Gilat-—1987." Excavations and Surveys in Israel7-8 (1988-1989); 63-64. Alon, David and Thomas E. Levy. "The Archaeology of Cult and the Chalcolithic Sanctuary at Gilat." Journal of Meditenanean Archae ology 2 (1989): 163-221. Amiran, Ruth. "Note on the Gilat Vessels." 'Atiqot 11 (1976): 119-120. Frankel, David. "A Possible Relative of the Gilat Woman." Israel Ex ploration Journal27 (1977): 38-39. Gilead, Isaac, and Yuval Goren. "Petrographic Analyses of Fourth Mil lennium B.C. Pottery and Stone Vessels from die Northern Negev, Israel." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 275 (1989): 5-14. Levy, Thomas E. "The Chalcolithic Period: Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine." Biblical Archaeologist 49 (1986): 82108. Mozel, liana. "A Male Partner for the Gilat Woman." Tel Aviv 6 (1979): 26-27. Rowan, Yorke M., and Thomas E. Levy. "Proto-Canaanean Blades of the Chalcolithic Period." Levant 26 (1994): 167-74. Yadin, Yigael. "Note on the Violin-Shaped Figurine from Gilat." 'Ati qot 11 (1976): 121. THOMAS E. LEVY
GILEAD, region named in the Hebrew Bible, located on the rocky, and in those days forested, parts of the eastern side of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, roughly between the Arnon River (Wadi el-Mujib) in the south and the Yarmuk River in the north. T h e Jabbok River (Nahr ez-Zerqa) divides the area in two: "half the Gilead" is used to cite both (Dt. 3:12; Jos. 12:2-5). T h e inhabitants are called Gileadites (Nm. 26:30, 36:1; 1 Chr. 7:17) and belonged to die Israelite tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh. Machir, a son of Manasseh, is the "father of Gilead" (Jos. 17:1). T h e word-stem gl'd is to be found in Ugaritic (Gordon, Texts 170 and 301), but the geographic connection is not well de fined. In Akkadian, ga-al'a- a?-(za) (III R 10.2; K 2649) is bordering Aram, possibly Ramoth Gilead, during die reign of Tiglath-Pileser III. T h e name Gilead is certainly pre served in the Arabic Khirbet Gel'ad (or Jel'ad), a site in the area of es-Salt, Culturally, Gilead is related to Cisjordan. There is evi dence of homo sapiens in the area about two million years ago (at Abu el-Khas, Wadi Hammeh, and Pella). The pre historic finds are comparable with those at 'Ubeidiya for the Early Paleolithic period. In Mesolithic times, nomadic hunt ers became sedentary and food producing and were influ enced by the Natufian culture. In tire Pottery Neolithic period (5500-4500 BCE), climatic conditions changed in Palestine. Transjordan gradually dried out and became desertic and settlers moved to new agricultural communities. They built circular, and tiien later, rectangular, houses arranged in communities, such as at 'Ain Ghazal in Amman. In tireir burial practices they pre pared the skulls of the dead with plaster and shells as at Jericho. T h e following period, the Chalcolithic (4000-3200 BCE), is substantiated at Teleilat el-Ghassul and in the Go
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lan. Ghassul is then a fortified village with dwellings clus tered around courtyards measuring 15 X 5 m, made of hand-modeled, sun-dried mud bricks. Of special interest are the buildings' geometric wall paintings in white, black, red, and brown. The beginning of city life appears in the Early Bronze Age (3200-2100 BCE). On the Bab edh-Dhra' plain and in Khir bet Iskander, Pella, and Khirbet ez-Zeraqun, fortified cities with irrigation systems were founded. More than 200,000 graves have been discovered at Bab edh-Dhra', and at Zeraqun a cultic area witir the same layout as the one at contemporary Megiddo was found. Parts of central and northern Gilead were populated in the Middle Bronze Age (1900-1550 BCE), during which time Pella was heavily for tified. The Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BCE) has been re garded as a dark age in Transjordan. However, at Irbid and Tell el-Fukhar prosperous towns existed with defense walls built with large boulders and cobble chinking. Temple ar chitecture is known from U m m ed-Dananir and Amman, and there was a citadel at Lehun in the south. T h e transitional period into the Iron Age is represented at Tell el-Fukhar, which was then transformed into an un fortified settlement on large stone pavements. Remains of pillared buildings and sherds of collar-rim jars belong to this period. In tire Iron Age (1200-600 BCE), according to the Bible, many dramatic events took place in Gilead: King Saul rescued Jabesh Gilead (1 Sm. 11), and his son Ishba'al gov erned his kingdom from Mahanaim (2 Sm. 2:8), a town at Wadi Zerqa, in an area densely settled throughout the pe riod; King David besieged his son Absalom in the forest of Ephraim (2 Sm. 18:6); and King Solomon cast the pillars for the Jerusalem Temple in the Jordan Valley (1 Kgs. 18:6). There are, however, no Iron II A-B remains at Tell el-Fu khar. Surveys in the Hesban and Madaba regions show that there was an agricultural expansion throughout the Iron Age, using land belonging to the former LB towns along the King's Highway. The "balm of Gilead" was famous (Jer. 8:22; 46:11). Inscriptions in Moabite, Ammonite, and Ara maic dialects are found at Dibon/Dhiban (the Mesha Stone) at Tell Deir 'Alia (tire Balaam texts), Amman (the Siran bottle), and Tell el-Mazar and Tell es-Sa'idiyeh (ostraca). T h e Persian period is represented by a square building at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh in the Jordan Valley. T h e same architec tural style appears in the Hellenistic period at some sites. At 'Iraq el-Amir the Tobiad Hyrcanus built a fortress he called Tyros, and there is evidence of a Hellenistic villa at Tell elFukhar. Gilead may not have been ruled by the Nabateans, whose culture straddled the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but their main caravan roads passed it. During the Roman period some towns of the Decapolis were situated in Gilead (Gadara, Pella, and perhaps Tell el-Husn). Well-built bridges and roads can still be seen, and the Via Nova Trajana was not far away. Many graffiti written in Safaitic script have been found, especially to the east. In the Byzantine
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GILOH
period, the population increased and the towns prospered. Gadara's mosaics and the churches in the Madaba region with their mosaic floors and original motifs (including the mosaic map of ancient Palestine) reflect tiieir great wealth. The Crusaders seem not to have been interested in Gil ead. However, in the Ayyubid period (i 174-1263 CE), cas tles were built at Rabadh and es-Salt. Iron was mined and smelted at Mugharat el-Warda. [Many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY Boling, Robert G. The Early Biblical Community in Transjordan. Shef field, 1988. Hadidi, Adnan, and Ghazi Bisheh, eds. Studies in the History and Ar chaeology of Jordan. 4 vols. Amman, 1982-1992. Homes-Fredericq, Denys, and J. Basil Hennessy, eds. Archaeology of Jordan. 2 vols. Louvain, 1986-1989. Homes-Fredericq, Denys, and H. J. Franken, eds. Pottery and Potters, Past and Present: 7000 Years of Ceramic Art in Jordan. Tubingen, 1986. McGovern, Patrick E. The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Central Transjordan: The Baq'ah Valley Project, 1977-1081. University Mu seum, Monograph 65. Philadelphia, 1986. Ottosson, Magnus. Gilead: Tradition and History. Lund, 1969. Specific citations of original texts and inscriptions refer to the fol lowing works: C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook: Grammar, Texts in Transliteration, Cuneiform Selections, Glossary, Indices (Analecta Orientalia, 38; Rome, 1965); III R 10.2 refers to H. C. Rawlinson, The Cu neiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (London, 1870), vol. 3, pi. 10, no. 2; K 2649 refers to Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum (London, 1918), pt. 35, pi. 39, K 2649, rev. 1. 3. MAGNUS OTTOSSON
G I L O H (map reference 165 X 125), Iron Age site ap proximately 2 acres in area located in a southern suburb of modern Jerusalem tiiat bears the same name. Giloh is lo cated on a high ridge 830 m above sea level, overlooking the entire Jerusalem and Bedilehem area. Small-scale salvage excavations were directed here between 1978 and 1982 by Amihai Mazar, on behalf of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Depart ment of Antiquities. The ancient name of the site is un known; it should not be confused with biblical Giloh, which must be located south of Hebron (Jos. 15:51). It may be the Ba'al-Perasim mentioned in 2 Samuel 5:20 or the HarPerasim in Isaiah 28:21. Giloh is one of the few Iron Age I sites excavated in the central hill country. It was abandoned after the Iron Age and subsequently destroyed by erosion and human activity. A shallow defensive wall surrounded at least its southern part. A solid square stone structure (11.58 X 11.15 m) atits north ern part may be the foundation of a building, perhaps a fortified tower. T h e site was divided by long walls into large, subsidiary
areas that may be animal pens. Dwellings were constructed along the defense wall and near some of the inner dividing walls. It thus appears that the settlement was divided into family units consisting of dwellings attached to animal pens. The one house that was excavated appears to be an early version of the pillared houses that are typical of the Iron Age in Palestine—an early example of a four-room house. [See Four-room House.] No cisterns were found at the site, so that water was probably transported from springs located in the Sorek Valley farther to the north. It is estimated that about a dozen families settled here, living on stock breeding and some agriculture. T h e enclosure wall and the solid tower suggest that the settlement faced challenges to its security, which its proximity to Jebusite Jerusalem may have created. Giloh's Iron I material culture resembles that at other cen tral hill country sites. Collared-rim store jars, small storage jars, and cooking pots comprise most of the rather limited ceramic assemblage. The pottery is made in a local Ca naanite tradition, but no decorated pottery was found. T h e site appears to have been settled in the twelfth century BCE and may have been abandoned in the eleventh. The inhabitants' socioeconomic status is similar to that apparent at many other Iron I sites in the hill country. It has been suggested that these settlers were part of an Iron I wave of settlement in the hill country that is commonly identified with the appearance of the Israelites in this region. In the Iron II (8th~7th centuries BCE), an isolated, large (10 X 10 m) tower was constructed at the summit of the site. Its massive stone walls created a podium on which an unpreserved superstructure would have been constructed. The tower was probably part of Jerusalem's defense system. It would have been used for observation and to give warning to the city by fire signals. BIBLIOGRAPHY Mazar, Amihai. "An Early Israelite Setdement Site Near Jerusalem." Israel Exploration Journal 31 (1981): 1-36. Mazar, Amihai. "Iron Age I and II Towers at Giloh and the Israelite Setdement." Israel Exploration Journal 40 (1990): 77-101. AMIHAI MAZAR
G I R S U A N D L A G A S H , urban centers, along with Nina-Sirara, in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash in ancient Mesopotamia tiiat also comprised several smaller settle ments. Girsu (modern Telloh) was located at 3i°3i' N , 46°i2' E; Lagash city (modern al-Hiba) at 3i°25' N , 46°24' E; and Nina-Sirara (modern Zurghul) at 3i°2i' N , 46°35' E. Inscriptions from Telloh identify the site as the ancient city of Girsu in the state of Lagash, while excavation and survey have enabled identification of al-Hiba as Lagash City and Zurghul as Nina-Sirara. Inscriptions and other archae ological evidence have demonstrated the great importance of Lagash, particularly during the later Early Dynastic and
GIRSU AND LAGASH immediately post-Akkadian periods. T h e three main cities of Lagash have received varying amounts of archaeological investigation. Girsu ( M o d e r n Telloh). T h e mounds of Telloh, ancient Girsu, cover an area of more than 100 ha (247 acres), rising to a height of 15 m. They are located approximately halfway between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The site is made up of a series of adjacent mounds that in ancient times were connected by a substantial waterway to al-Hiba and Zurghul to the south. Telloh was the first Sumerian site ever to un dergo archaeological investigation. Encouraged by local re ports of inscribed statuary, the French vice-consul at Basra, Ernest de Sarzec, conducted a series of campaigns at Telloh from 1877 to 1900. His spectacular discoveries, the first ex cavated evidence of Sumerian art and culture, caused a sen sation when exhibited in Paris in the 1880s. In 1879, Hormuzd Rassam excavated at Telloh for three days in de Sarzec's absence. Subsequent excavations at Telloh, all French, were undertaken by Gaston Cros (1903-1909), Henri de Genouillac (1929-1931), and Andre Parrot (1931!933)> amounting to a total of twenty field seasons. Between legitimate field seasons Telloh suffered badly from illicit ex cavations, especially prior to 1900, which produced up to forty thousand cuneiform texts from tell V, principally of tire Ur III period. There have been no excavations at Telloh since 1933. Little is known of Telloh's prehistory, beyond the pres ence of Ubaid period pottery and other artifacts in the lower levels of de Genouillac's large sounding on tell K. Many objects appeared higher up in this sounding, including cyl inder and stamp seals, metalwork, and pottery of both the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, often as deliberate deposits within graves. Very few remains dated to Early Dynastic I and II have been identified at Telloh. It is not until the Early Dynastic III period tirat the importance of the site comes into focus, helped by significant finds of inscribed material. Many details, however, remain obscure, partly because of poor excavation standards. T h e Early Dynastic III texts from Telloh survive principally in the form of royal inscrip tions giving details of building projects, irrigation works, and warfare. From these texts something of the political history of the state of Lagash and its neighbors can be reconstructed from roughly 2550-2350 BCE, during which time, at least, the city of Girsu was the capital city of Lagash State. Lagash. The earliest attested rulers of Lagash state are Lugalsha-engur, a contemporary of Mesalim, ldng of Kish, and Enhegal, both of whom date to the early part of the Early Dynastic III period. Royal inscriptions at Telloh from about 2500 BCE attest the existence of nine successive rulers, con stituting the first dynasty of Lagash. Surprisingly, this dy nasty does not feature in the Sumerian king list, despite its considerable achievements in the late Early Dynastic period. T h e first of these rulers, Ur-Nanshe, tells of his many build ing projects in Lagash, some involving the ttansport of tim
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ber by ships of Dilmun (tire modern island of Bahrain) from distant foreign lands. Ur-Nanshe also provides accounts of his wars against other Sumerian city-states, such as Ur and Umma. Conflict with Umma, in particular, was to continue more or less unabated for centuries thereafter, caused by dispute over territory located between tire two city-states. Few texts survive from the time of the next ruler, Akurgal, but his successor, Eanatum, has left a substantial record of his activities. Again the Lagash-Umma border conflict fig ures large in Eanatum's inscriptions, most spectacularly on tire Stela of the Vultures monument. Other texts tell of his defeat of Elam, Uruk, Ur, Akshak, Subartu, and Mari, an indication of far-ranging military achievements that to some extent presage those of Sargon of Akkad some 150 years later. More building activities are attested in the inscriptions of Enanatum I, while his successor, Enmetena, tells of con tinued conflict with Umma. At the same time, tire inscrip tions of Enmetena mention interstate relations, including "establishing brotherhood," between Lagash and Uruk, Larsa and Badtabira, rare hints of the pattern of shifting alliances that is likely to have characterized Sumerian citystate politics at that time. Inscriptions of the next three rul ers, Enanatum II, Enentarzi, and Lugalanda, relate to tem ple construction. The last ruler of the first dynasty of Lagash, Uruinimgina (also known as Urukagina), left many interesting inscriptions, not only relating to his prodigious building feats and strife with Umma, but also telling of his social and religious reforms, implemented, he asserts, at the command of the chief god of Lagash, Ningirsu. Contem porary texts from the Bau Temple at Girsu indicate the wide range of economic activities engaged in by a Sumerian tem ple. In about 2,350 BCE, Uruinimgina was defeated by Lugalzagesi of Umma, immediately prior to tire conquest of all Sumer by Sargon of Akkad. In spite of tire wealth of historical information about tire Early Dynastic III period from excavations at Telloh, much less is known of this period than might have been the case: inadequate excavation techniques failed to place the in scribed material within any meaningful architectural con texts. Indeed, the excavators of Telloh identified very few Early Dynastic III buildings. Two small structures, tire Con struction Inferieure and the Maison des Fruits, are probably religious buildings dating to Ur-Nanshe and earlier. Of the artifacts from this period, tire inscribed Stela of the Vultures is an unquestioned masterpiece of Sumerian art, showing on one face a scene of battle and conquest, with the ldng in a chariot, and on the other face a more mythological scene of the ldng with a lion-headed eagle. Inscribed stone wall plaques of Ur-Nanshe also display scenes of royal activities, Other important artifacts include inscribed copper founda tion figurines, copper daggers and animal heads, and an im pressive silver vase of Enmetena engraved with cultic scenes and dedicated by him to Ningirsu. Of the subsequent Akkadian period (c. 2350-2230 BCE)
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GIRSU AND LAGASH numbers of economic texts show that the city was active, while respecting the suzerainty of the city of Ur. A few texts indicate a low level of activity at the site in the subsequent Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods, with scattered evi dence of occupation through the late second and early first millennia BCE. In the second century BCE, during the Par thian period, Telloh enjoyed a brief revival. A ruler called Adadnadinahe constructed an impressive palace on tell A, whose inscribed bricks give his very Mesopotamian name in both Aramaic and Greek. The latest evidence of occupation at Telloh is in the form of Sasanian seals. Al-Hiba. Located 25 km (16 mi.) southeast of Telloh is the mound of al-Hiba, ancient Lagash City. In area, al-Hiba is one of the largest mounds in the ancient Near East, reach ing up to 600 hectares (1,482 acres) at its greatest extent, but with a maximum height of only 6 m. Study of inscrip tions from al-Hiba and Telloh has established that al-Hiba's ancient name was Lagash City, at some time the capital of Lagash State, in a manner analogous to New York City, the capital of New York State. It is not known when al-Hiba was the capital of Lagash State, but it may have been during the earlier part of the Early Dynastic period, when al-Hiba reached its maximum size and before Telloh/Girsu assumed
GIRSU AND LAGASH. Shepherd carrying a lamb. Sumerian terra cotta figure; early second millennium. Musee du Louvre, Paris. (Er ich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
there is almost no direct evidence from Telloh, apart from some inscriptions of Rimush, son of Sargon, and of NaramSin. For the century or so after the Akkadian period, artifacts and inscriptions from Telloh once more thrust the site into the historical limelight. At that time the city of Girsu appears to have attained its maximum extent. The most famous ob jects from this period are the statues of Gudea, many ex amples of which now grace the Louvre Museum in Paris. These statues consist of standing and seated representa tions, carved in diorite, of Gudea, ruler of Lagash. Inscrip tions detail his achievements, largely in terms of building projects at Girsu, Lagash City, and Nina-Sirara, involving the procurement of raw materials from far-flung areas of the ancient Near East. During this period Lagash was clearly once more a city-state of major significance within Meso potamia, but again the architectural remains at Telloh are disappointing. Little has been identified beyond platform structures, a series of circular brick pillars, and a large baked-brick structure that almost certainly functioned as a water regulator within the city. Following the Akkadian period, the city of Girsu settled into a long, gentle decline. During the Ur III period large
GIRSU AND LAGASH. Seated dioritefigureof Gudea, king of Lagash. Dated to 2120 BCE. Musee du Louvre, Paris. (Erich Lessing/Art Re source, NY)
GIZA the role of capital in Early Dynastic III times. The earliest excavations at al-Hiba were conducted in 1887 by a German expedition led by Robert Koldewey. Houses and streets were uncovered, but the abundance of intramural burials led Koldewey to conclude mistakenly tiiat the entire site was a necropolis. Brief archaeological surveys in the region of alHiba were carried out in 1953 and 1965. A new program of excavations was initiated in 1968 by Donald P. Hansen for tire Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and tire Metropolitan Museum of Art. Six field seasons have been conducted. As with Telloh, little is known of al-Hiba's prehistory, al though there is some slight evidence for Ubaid and Uruk period occupation. T h e recent excavations have uncovered buildings, including a large oval precinct probably belonging to a temple, dating to the Early Dynastic I. Substantial de posits from this period remain to be excavated. Most of die excavated remains at al-Hiba date to the Early Dynastic III period, when much of tire city was devoted to religious buildings: indeed, one ancient epithet of al-Hiba was Uruku, "holy city." T h e chief god of Lagash was Ningirsu, whose temple precinct was called the Bagara. Part of this complex has been located and excavated in tire central western part of the mound. A building with a buttressed facade and baked-brick pavements contained within a curtain wall yielded inscribed objects dating to Eanatum, in the Early Dynastic III period, indicating that the building was part of the Bagara of Ningirsu. A nearby building contained fea tures and texts that have led to its interpretation as a brewery for the Bagara complex. At the city's southwestern limit, another temple complex has been excavated: the Ibgal of Inanna. This complex takes the form of a building with elab orate foundations set witirin an oval precinct wall. Inscribed foundation figures identify the builders of the Ibgal as Urnanshe and Enanatum I, successor to Enantum. These tem ple structures are the earliest known Mesopotamian build ings that can with certainty be associated with historically known figures. Elsewhere on the mound a large administra tive building was excavated that provided tablets and sealings dating to Eanatum and Enanatum I and an extremely early example of a die. There appears to have been a widespread abandonment of al-Hiba at tire end of the Early Dynastic III period, per haps as a consequence of the conquest of Lagash state by Lugalzagesi of Umma. A few Akkadian texts have been found. On die highest central part of the mound there is evidence for the rebuilding of the Bagara by Gudea; an Ur III ldng, Amar-Sin, is also textually attested. There are traces of further rebuilding in die Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods, with tablets dating to the ruler Sin-iddinam of Larsa (1849-1843 BCE). There is no evidence of any later occu pation at al-Hiba. T e n kilometers (6 mi.) southeast of al-Hiba is tire smaller mound of Zurghul, ancient Nina-Sirara, which is 15 m high
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and covers some 65 hectares (161 acres). Koldewey carried out the only excavations at Zurghul, in 1887, prior to his work at al-Hiba. He also mistakenly concluded tirat Zurghul was an ancient necropolis. As at Telloh and al-Hiba, there is some evidence for the Ubaid and Uruk periods at Zurghul. The main occupation belongs to the Early Dynastic and im mediately post-Akkadian periods, however, as indicated by finds of inscribed bricks and cones relating the construction undertaken by Enanatum I and Gudea, including tire a tem ple for Nanshe. [See also Isin; Larsa; and Ur.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauer, J., and Donald P. Hansen. "Lagas." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 6, pp. 419-430. Berlin, 1928-. Excellent account of textual (in German) and archaeological (in English) discoveries at al-HibaLagash. Biggs, Robert D. Inscriptions from al-Hiba-Lagash: The First and Second Seasons. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, vol. 3. Malibu, 1976. Thorough account of inscriptions from al-Hiba discussed in tiieir architectural contexts. Buchanan, Briggs, "The Prehistoric Stamp Seal: A Reconsideration of Some Old Excavations." Journal of the American Oriental Society 87 (1967): 525-540. Detailed and critical reappraisal of H. de Genouillac's prehistoric sounding on tell K at Telloh, including, in particular, much information on the prehistoric burials. Cooper, Jerrold S. Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The Lagash-Umma Border Conflict. Sources from the Ancient Near East, vol. 2.1. Malibu, 1983. Sound historical analysis of an extended ep isode in the history of Lagash State. Cooper, Jerrold S. Presargonic Inscriptions. Sumerian and Akkadian Royal Inscriptions, vol. I. New Haven, 1986. Excellent English trans lations and discussion of all Pre-Sargonic royal inscriptions from Mesopotamia, with special focus on the Lagash evidence. Crawford, Vaughn E. "Excavations in the Swamps of Sumer." Expe dition 14.2 (1972): 12-20. Entertaining, general article on work at alHiba from 1968 and 1971. Crawford, Vaughn E. "Lagash." Iraq 36 (1974): 29-35. Short, pithy account of the identification of al-Hiba as ancient Lagash City. Falkenstein, A., and R. Opificius. "Girsu." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 3, pp. 385-401. Berlin, 1928-. Good summary in German of textual and archaeological information from Telloh Girsu. Hansen, Donald P. "Royal Building Activity at Sumerian Lagash in the Early Dynastic Period." Biblical Archaeologist 55 (1992): 206-211. Excellent firsthand account of archaeological results from al-Hiba, written by the site's most recent excavator. Parrot, Andre. Tello: Vingt campagnes de fouilles, 1877-1933. Paris, 1948, Adequate survey of work by the French at Telloh, now comple mented by die excavations at al-Hiba. R. J. MATTHEWS
G I S C H A L A . Sea Gush Halav.
G I Z A , originally a village (30°oo' N , 3i°i3' E) established in 642 CE on the west bank of the Nile opposite Fustat-Masr, has also come to designate the much larger ancient site of the fourth-dynasty (c. 2575-2134 BCE) Sphinx; the pyramids
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GIZA
of Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus; and the adjacent cemeteries of nonroyal persons (see figure i ) . Giza lies on a plateau, which is part of the Libyan mountain range in Egypt's western desert, and stretches approximately 1,000 m (3,280 ft.) from north to south and 2,000 m (6,562 ft.) from east to west. Bounded by two wadis (dried-up river beds) and dominating the surrounding plain from a height of some 40 m (131 ft.), Giza is one of the cemeteries of the
Memphite region drat forms an unbroken line from north to south between Abu Roash and Dahshur. The site was already famous in antiquity, first in Greece and then in Rome. T h e pyramids were ranked as one of the wonders of the world. Arab historians and Western travelers had mentioned Giza in their writings since the Middle Ages, but more systematic explorations did not begin until the first half of the nineteenth century. Giovanni B. Caviglia, Henry
^ ancient royal ., * rest house
to the valley of Cheops
Sphinx temple rock-cut tombs
////
*'/Mniin>"/iim«'
GIZA. Figure 1. General plan of the site. (Courtesy C. Zivie-Coche)
GIZA Salt, Giovanni B. Belzoni, R. W. Howard Vyse, John S. Perring, and Patrick Campbell uncovered and explored the pyr amids' mortuary chambers, which had been ransacked in antiquity. Later C. Richard Lepsius, Auguste Mariette, W. M. Flinders Petrie, and Gaston Maspero excavated the royal complexes and mastabas (tombs). In the earlier twentieth century, the plateau was divided into large concessions that were excavated by Austrians (Hermann Junker), Americans (George A. Reisner), and die Egyptian Antiquities Service (Pierre Lacau and Selim Hassan). Excavations continue and have yielded discoveries of a "satellite" pyramid next to the great pyramid of Cheops, even more mastabas in the western cemeteries, and other tombs belonging to the workers and overseers who built the various pyramids at Giza. [See the biographies of Mariette, Petrie, Maspero, and Reisner.] Although the most spectacular monuments belong to the fourtii dynasty, Giza had a very long history, extending practically without interruption from predynastic times up to the Roman period. Located in soutiiern Giza, the earliest monumental remains are the mastabas from the first three dynasties. As evidenced by lithic objects and ceramics, how ever, the site had been occupied already in predynastic times. T h e toponym Ra-setau ("entrance to the under world") probably dates to these initial periods of settlement. Mentioned in the Pyramid Texts, ancient Egypt's oldest ex tant funerary literature, Ra-setau was associated with a cult of Osiris that was maintained until the Late Period. During the fourth dynasty the three pyramids of Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus and their families were erected rather rapidly, using methods of transportation and con struction that remain uncertain. These architecturally flaw less constructions, which served as royal tombs, had differ ent plans for the burial chambers, which were uninscribed. (Not until the end of the fifth dynasty did the Pyramid Texts appear on die walls of royal burials.) Each of the three prom inent pyramids at Giza comprises only parts of four ele ments in a complete royal funerary complex; the others, of ten drastically destroyed, were a "high" mortuary temple adjacent to the pyramid, a "low" temple in the valley, and an avenue or causeway connecting the two. Almost nothing remains of these temples at the Cheops complex, but die Chephren structures are relatively well preserved. The low temple in the valley was associated with rituals connected to the actual royal burials, whereas the high temple functioned as the site for the postmortem cult of the king. Large dis assembled boats, which are known as "solar barques" be cause the king supposedly traveled in them across the sky in his role as sun god, were buried in hull-shaped pits cut in the rocky plateau. One of them was reassembled and housed in its own museum near its place of discovery. Chephren added an important element to his pyramid complex by erecting a monumental sphinx with his own image for the head and the body of a lion. T h e Sphinx was carved from a single knoll of rock north of the pyramid
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causeway. It was preceded by granite temple, no doubt used for a solar cult. Impressive statues of Chephren were found in his valley temple. Close family members of the pharaohs—children, moth ers, and wives—were also buried on the Giza plateau. The royal wives were sometimes honored with small "satellite" pyramids but more often witii decorated mastabas. Hetepheres, wife of Snefru and mother of Cheops, was buried not far from her son's pyramid in an underground tomb that had no superstructure. In 1925 Reisner, director of a joint expedition sponsored by Harvard University and the Mu seum of Fine Arts, Boston, discovered Hetepheres' remark able funerary furniture and jewelry that had escaped the depredations of ancient tomb robbers. Another queen, Khentkaues, had a mortuary complex including a vast tomb, albeit a commemorative pyramid was erected for her farther south at Abu Sir. Cemeteries for private persons were carefully planned and built by royal decree around the royal pyramids. The large necropoleis to die east and west of the Cheops pyramid are particularly significant for their gridlike arrangement; the "streets" formed by the rectilinear plan of the tombs are especially visible in the eastern cemetery. The mastabas found in all die private cemeteries are so named for the Ar abic word for "bench." T h e elaborate design features a large rectangular superstructure covering rock-cut underground rooms, including cult chapels and burial chambers. The walls of these tombs were originally built for die kings' rel atives or prominent members of die royal court and, like the tombs at Saqqara, were decorated with reliefs (usually painted) of remarkable quality, featuring scenes of daily life and practically devoid of religious symbols. Placed in the tombs were admirable statues of the deceased, such as the famous bust of Ankhkhaef, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as the so-called reserve heads, which probably served as spares in case the real head of the mummy was damaged. After the fourth dynasty, the pharaohs were buried else where, but the private cemeteries continued to grow. Indeed some of the "reserve heads" from Giza burials date to the fifth or sixth dynasty or even a little later. After the end of die Old Kingdom, however, when burials were no longer assured by die ldng, the site was gradually abandoned. It was forgotten for several centuries; no documents from the Middle Kingdom have been found there. Witii the rise of the New Kingdom (eighteenth-twentieth dynasties, c. 1550-1070), Giza benefited from the growth of tire nearby city of Memphis, which was Egypt's administra tive center. Residence of kings and princes, Memphis was of great economic, military, and artistic importance. More over, Heliopolitan religious traditions returned to favor with the growth of the cult of the sun god Amun at Thebes. For these two reasons, Giza became an important pilgrimage site, both for kings and crown princes (as revealed by the " > , 1
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GJERSTAD, EINAR
stelae or commemorative tablets of the pharaohs Amenophis II, Thutmosis IV, Seti I, and Rameses II) and for individ uals, who left votive offerings. The focus of worship was the great Sphinx of Chephren, uncovered and protected from tire desert sands by Thutmosis IV and known by the names Horemakhet ("Horus-in-tire-Horizon") in Egyptian and, later, Harmachis in Greek. Chephren's image was reinter preted as a form of the sun god, guarantor of royalty and divine protector, but also accessible to mere mortals. T h e Sphinx was also linked to a Syro-Palestinian deity, Hauron, worshiped in Egypt since tire beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, along with Reshep and Astarte. Hauron appeared on stelae and in sculpture as a sphinx or hawk. At the same time, several texts indicate the continuation of the Osiris cult at Ra-setau, which had a chapel at least in the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. Beginning in the eighteenth dy nasty, the goddess Isis was also worshiped at Giza at her chapel not far from the pyramid of Cheops. During the Third Intermediate period (twenty-firsttwenty-fifth dynasties, c. 1070-712), under the reigns of Psusennes and Amenemope, the chapel of Isis, who was known thereafter as "tire lady of the pyramids" and was thus the tutelary deity of Giza, was rebuilt and enlarged. There were several subsequent additions and reconsttuctions, par ticularly during the twenty-sixth dynasty (c. 664-525). A document of that time, an inscription, the so-called stela of the daughter of Cheops, names precisely the deities wor shiped at Giza: Isis, lady of the pyramids; Hauron-Harmachis; and Osiris of Ra-setau. The cults of the ancient kings regained their prominence, the plateau of Giza being considered by the Egyptians as a historical site with a long and never-forgotten tradition. At the same time, Giza was once again used as a private cemetery. Ancient mastabas were reused and new tombs were built, particularly near the Chephren causeway. On such tomb contained the sarcoph agi of the wife and a son of the twenty-sixth dynasty pharaoh Amasis (c. 570-526). The discovery of numerous inscribed shawabtis (small magical funerary figurines) provides a par tial index of the persons buried in the necropolis. In Greek and Roman times, Giza was a prestigious destination for both tourists and religious pilgrims, who inscribed prayers on tire paws of the Sphinx. [See also Pyramids.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Edwards, I. E. S. The Pyramids of Egypt. Rev. ed. London, 1991. Hassan, Selim. Excavations al Giza. 10 vols. Cairo, 1932-1960. Hassan, Selim. The Sphinx: Its History in the Light of Recent Excavations. Cairo, 1949. Jenkins, N. The Boat beneath the Pyramid: King Cheops's Royal Ship. London, 1980. Junker, Hermann. Giza: Grabungen auf dem Friedhof des Alien Reiches bei den Pyramiden von Giza. 12 vols. Leipzig, 1929-1955. Lauer, Jean-Philippe. Les mysteres des Pyramides. New ed. Paris, 1989.
Lehner, Mark. The Pyramid Tomb of Helep-heres and the Satellite Pyr amid of Khufu. Mainz am Rhein, 1985. Reisner, George A. A History of the Giza Necropolis. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass., 1942. Reisner, George A., and William Stevenson Smith. A History of the Giza Necropolis, vol. 2, The Tomb of Hetep-heres, the Mother of Cheops. Cambridge, Mass., 1955. Simpson, William Kelly, ed. Giza Mastabas. 5 vols, to date. Boston, 1974-1994. Zivie-Coche, Christiane. Giza au deuxieme millenaire. Cairo, 1976. Zivie, Christiane M. "Gisa." In Lexikon der Agyptologie, edited by Wolf gang Helck and Wolffian Westendorf, vol. 2, cols. 602-613. Wies baden, 1977. Zivie, Christiane M. "Sphinx." In Lexikon der Agyptologie, edited by Wolfgang Helck and Wolfhart Westendorf, vol. 5, cols. 1139-1147. Wiesbaden, 1984. Zivie-Coche, Christiane. Giza au premier millenaire: Autour du temple d'lsis, dame des Pyramides. Boston, 1991. CHRISTIANE ZIVIE-COCHE Translated from French by Monique Fecteau
G J E R S T A D , E L N A R (1897-1988), Swedish historian and classical archaeologist; father of Cypriot archaeology. Having first excavated in Cyprus from 1923 to 1924, Gjerstad published his results in his Ph.D. dissertation entitled Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus (1926). Here he presented a fundamental account of the prehistory of the island. Gjerstad was leader of a Swedish expedition to Cyprus from 1927 to 1931 and excavated together with Alfred Westholm and Erik Sjoqvist at nearly twenty different sites cov ering the periods from Aceramic Neolithic to Late Roman. The greatest finds consisted of two thousand terra-cotta fig ures of the sixth century BCE at the cult center Ajia Irini and the Vouni palace, which dates to the fifth century BCE. T h e excavated material was published in the tirree-volume Swed ish Cyprus Expedition (SCE, 1934-1937). The six volumes of conclusions, published together as SCE volume 4, ap peared between 1948 and 1972. T h e finds were divided be tween the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm and the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. Gjerstad was director of the Swedish Institute in Rome from 1935 to 1940 and professor from 1940 to 1957 and research professor from 1957 to 1972 at the University of Lund. Having devoted twenty-five years (1923-1948) mostly to Cypriot archaeology, Gjerstad spent the same amount of time (1948-1973) to research on early Rome. In 1949 he presented his sensational theory that Rome was not founded in 753 BCE, the traditional date, but around 575, when the first floor was laid on the Roman forum. There fore, according to Gjerstad, the period of the Roman kings lasted from 575 to 450, instead of the commonly accepted 753-509, and the Roman Republic thus started around 450. Gjerstad published the material from the Roman forum and its vicinity in Early Rome (1953-1973). Although Gjerstad's hypotheses about Cyprus were widely accepted, his theories about early Rome are contro-
GLASS versial. Recent studies have lowered the date of dre first floor of the Roman forum from 575 to 625. Gjerstad's importance lies in his development of the stratigraphical method of ex cavation, his formulation of the typology of Cypriot pottery and sculpture, and his brilliant synthesis of historical and archaeological evidence from botii ancient Cyprus and early Rome. [See also Cyprus; Vouni; and History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Cyprus.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Callmer, Maj. "The Published Writings of Einar Gjerstad." In Opuscula Atheniensia IV, pp. 305-310. Lund, 1962. Callmer, Maj, and Christian Callmer. "The Published Writings of Ei nar Gjerstad, 1962-1977." In Scripta Minora 1977-1978, in honorem Einari Gjerstad, pp. 3-8. Lund, 1977. Gjerstad, Einar. Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus. Uppsala, 1926. Gjerstad, Einar, et al. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus, 1927-1931. 4 vols. Stockholm, 19341972. The fundamental work on Cypriot archaeology. Gjerstad, Einar. The Cypro-Gcometric, Cypro-Archaic, and Cypro-Classical Periods. Swedish Cyprus Expedition, vol. 4.2. Stockholm, 1948. Considered die bible of Cypriot archaeology. Gjerstad, Einar. "Scavi stratigrafici nel Foro Romano e problemi ad essi relativi." Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Communale di Roman (1949-1950): 13-29. Presentation of sensational theories on Early Rome. Gjerstad, Einar. Early Rome. 6 vols. Lund, 1953-1973. The fundamen tal work. CARL-GUSTAF STYRENIUS
GLASS. Glassmaking emerged from a long period of ex perimenting with glasslike materials. Craftsmen had discov ered faience prior to 4000 BCE by heating granules of crushed quartz until their surfaces melted, so that, upon cooling, they fused into a solid mass. By 2000 BCE, beads and other small objects were being manufactured out of glass—that is, out of silica (crushed quartz or sand) and plant ash or tire min eral natron (alkalis that act as fluxes). Small amounts of lime, probably introduced unintentionally, made the glass chem ically stable. T h e first glass vessels were made in western Asia in about 1550 BCE and in Egypt shortly afterward. Their manufac turers used a variety of techniques, including casting in open molds; malting "mosaic glass" (in which preformed ele ments were fused); and, most frequentiy, core forming (in which the hot glass was formed around a removable clay core). Far more ancient Egyptian glass has been recovered than glass from Mesopotamia. T h e great majority of the vessels were core formed and decorated with brightly col ored trails with featherlike, polychrome designs. Egyptian glassmakers created a number of different forms to contain cosmetic preparations and liquids for drinking. All of these objects are small because there was a limit to the size of the vessel that could be formed around a core, and perhaps also
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a limit to the quantity of glass that could be melted in prim itive furnaces. Between 1500 and 1150 BCE, the Egyptians produced some of the world's first glass masterpieces. At the same time, craftsmen in parts of the eastern Mediterranean made rather simpler objects. On Cyprus, tirey imitated Egyptian core-formed vessels shaped like pomegranates. In southern Greece, Mycenaeans cast beads and pendants in molds made of stone, using raw glass imported in the form of in gots. In the twelfth century BCE, dre civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean collapsed, and technology (glassmaking included) declined. Glassmaking was revived in the eighth century BCE in two regions where civilization itself revived: in Mesopotamia and on tile Syro-Palestinian coast. In Mesopotamia, tire Assyri ans produced core-formed containers for perfumes and other cosmetics, as well as objects that were cast and finished by tire lapidary techniques of cutting, grinding, and polish ing. On the Mediterranean coast, Phoenician glassmakers produced colorful beads and pendants in the form of human and animal heads (see figure 1 ) . T h e Phoenicians created one of the leading cultures in the eastern Mediterranean between 800 and 300 BCE; anotirer such culture was created by the Greeks. In parts of die Greek-speaking world (most probably, the islands in the eastern Aegean), craftsmen produced large numbers of small, core-formed perfume bottles, using techniques bor rowed from the Near East. T h e Greeks also experimented witii the use of glass as architectural ornament, and the fifthcentury BCE sculptor Pheidias created statues with drapery made of cast-glass panels. Iran emerged as a new world power in the sixth century BCE, under the Achaemenid dynasty. T h e finest glass of the Achaemenid period consisted of cast, cut, ground, and pol ished vessels. Careful selection of the raw materials resulted in glass that was almost colorless, like rock crystal; the ex-
•t \ - . TV*
GLASS. Figure 1. Phoenician glass beads, c. 500 bce. (Courtesy Pictoral Archive)
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GLASS
pertise of glassmakers enabled them to produce the most accomplished cold-worked glass that had ever been made. Between 334 and 323 BCE, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire. Following Alexander's death, the em pire was divided among his generals, who established in dependent kingdoms. The Ptolemys became the ldngs of Egypt, creating a culture that combined Greek and Egyptian elements. In this Hellenistic culture, glassmakers exploited old and new techniques to manufacture exotic luxury ob jects. Between the fourth and the first centuries BCE, Helle nistic workshops were producing a dazzling array of table ware and perfume bottles out of mosaic glass; reticelli, or lace-mosaic glass (with twisted canes of colorless and white glass); and gold sandwich glass (with designs cut out of gold foil sandwiched between two closely fitting vessels fused to form a single object). In the first century BCE, Rome's leader, Octavian (the fu ture emperor Augustus), annexed Egypt, and emerged as the ruler of an empire. At its greatest extent, the Roman Empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf and from the Rhine River to the Sahara. The Romans were the last great glassmakers in the ancient world; they inherited the Hellenistic tradition and adapted it to create stunning luxury glass. Some of the finest examples were made between about 30 BCE and 70 CE. Wealthy Romans could purchase multicolored ribbon mosaic glass (made from ribbonlike canes arranged in geometric patterns); goldband glass (a variation of ribbon mosaic glass that includes strips of gold leaf); and cameo glass (overlays of one or more different colors in which the upper layers are carved, ground, and polished; at the end of the process, the object has an ornament in low relief on a background of a different color). The most popular Roman combination was white on dark blue. Cameos were the most costly glass objects made in the Early Roman Empire. The least expensive objects were made by blowing, a technique discovered in the region of Syrian-Palestine between about 75 and 50 BCE. In the next hundred years, glass vessels took their place beside earth enware in all but the poorest households in the Mediterra nean. By 50 CE, glass manufacturers were also operating in several European provinces. It was a short step from discovering that glass could be blown to discovering that it could be blown into molds. Blowing into decorated molds enabled glassmakers to pro duce large numbers of identical, often highly ornate objects quickly and inexpensively. Blown glass can be decorated in a number of other ways while it is hot. One of the techniques used by the Romans was to roll the hot glass on a surface strewn with chips of colored glass, to give a vessel a multicolored appearance. Another, more common technique was to make patterns by trailing molten glass over the surface. Glass can also be dec orated when it is cold, by painting, cutting, or engraving. Roman wheel-cutting varied in complexity from simple hor
izontal lines to faceting and pictorial designs with figures, landscapes, and inscriptions. In late third- and fourth-cen tury workshops, for example, vessels were produced with hunting scenes, episodes from pagan mythology, and scenes from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Hellenistic glassware had included vessels with gold foil sandwiched between two fused layers of glass. A similar technique was practiced in the third and fourth centuries, with glassmakers producing medallions decorated with por traits and roundels forming the centerpieces of dishes or bowls. The rarest of all Late Roman luxury glass consisted of objects with "cages" made by cutting and grinding the glass when it was cold. The best known of these open-work ves sels are cage cups: bowl- and beaker-shaped vessels whose bases and sides are enclosed by open-work cages attached to the wall by posts. T h e entire object—bowl, cage, and posts—was cut from a single piece of glass. T h e Roman Empire disintegrated in the fifth century. In western Europe, Roman rule was replaced by the kingdoms of the Franks and other Germanic nations; in the eastern Mediterranean, the Byzantine Empire was taking shape. In the west, the Franks and their neighbors used basic glassworking techniques to fashion a variety of drinking vessels. In the Byzantine Empire, sixth- and early-seventh-century glass included mold-blown vessels with Christian or Jewish symbols. In both regions, however, glassmakers' skills had declined and elaborate objects ceased to be made. When, centuries later, glassmaking was revived in Europe, the greatest achievements were not luxury tablewares, but stained-glass windows for churches. Meanwhile, in Iran, the Sasanians made vessels that in cluded cups witii wheel-cut facets or bosses. Sasanian glass never achieved the technical mastery of the finest Roman products, but it was prized all over Asia; examples have been found in fourth- to seventh-century tombs and treasuries in China, Korea, and Japan. In 622 CE, the prophet Muhammad proclaimed a new re ligion: Islam. Within the next one hundred years, Arab ar mies carried Islam from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indus Valley in the east to Morocco in the west. T h e Byzantine Empire was reduced to a fraction of its former extent, and the Sasanian Empire was swept away. Islam's expansion created a multinational community in which styles and tech niques spread rapidly, with the result that similar products appeared almost simultaneously in widely separated areas. Early Islamic glassmakers continued to make traditional products. Indeed, it is often impossible to decided whether objects from Syria, Egypt, and Iran were made just before or just after the Islamic conquest. At the same time, Islamic glassmakers were responsible for important innovations, such as the development of luster. This shiny effect was achieved by painting copper or silver oxide on the object, which was then fired at a relatively low temperature in ox-
GLUECK, NELSON ygen-free conditions that fixed a film of metallic oxide on the surface. T h e first dynasty of Islamic rulers, the Umayyads, lived in Damascus, Syria. In 750, they were overthrown by die 'Abbasids, who founded a new capital at Baghdad, Iraq. There, the presence of the court attracted artists and crafts men who developed a distinctive decorative style, in which Iranian elements came to the fore. Sasanian glassworkers had finished vessels by cutting and grinding, techniques re vived under the 'Abbasids. 'Abbasid wheel-cut objects are among the finest achievements of Islamic glassmaking. Ves sels were decorated by relief cutting, in which the entire background was removed, leaving the ornament in relief. Hundreds of relief-cut glass objects have been found in northern Iran. Many scholars associate this style with the city of Nishapur in Khurasan. [See Nishapur.] By far tire rarest variety of Islamic cut glass is cameo glass. Islamic cameo glass almost invariably consists of colorless objects cased with another color (usually blue or green) and cut, ground, and polished so that the design is outlined in color on a colorless background. T h e latest major group of Islamic glass was decorated with gilding and colored en amels made from powdered glass mixed with an organic medium, painted on the surface, and fixed by firing at a low temperature. Usually, the decorative elements are outlined in red and filled with gilding or enamel. A high proportion of Islamic gilded and enameled glass was made in Syria, the only other known center of production being in Egypt. T h e Mongol ruler Timur (Tamerlane) is said to have de ported the glassmakers of Damascus to Samarkand in cen tral Asia in 1400, which may have put an end to the man ufacture of fine Islamic glass in Syria. T h e Venetians seized the opportunity and invaded the market. A number of fif teenth-century enameled beakers from Syria are believed to be Venetian, as are Islamic-style enameled lamps from Egypt. Brascha of Milan, a traveler who visited the Holy Land in 1480, tells how tire captain of his ship " s e n t . . . to Damascus glass vessels from M u r a n o " (quoted in Carl Johann Lammu, Mittelalterliche Glaser und Steinschnittarbeilen aus dem Nahen Osten, Berlin, 1930, vol. 1, p. 494). T h e golden age of Islamic glassmaking was over and Venice was about to set new standards for glassmakers all over the world. [See also Vitreous Materials.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Barag, Dan. Catalogue of Western Asiatic Glass in the British Museum, vol. 1. London, 1985. Contains discussions of the chronology and provenance of glass made between about 1500 BCE and zoo CE. Foy, Daniele, ed. Le Verre de I'Antiquite tardive et du haut Moyen Age. Guiry-en-Vexin, 1995. Nineteen papers, in French and other lan guages, on glass of the period between 300 and 700 CE in Europe and the Mediterranean. Contains a great deal of information on recent excavations. Grose, David Frederick. Early Ancient Glass. New York, 1989. Catalog
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of Late Bronze Age to early Roman glass in the Toledo Museum of Art, with an authoritative survey of the glass produced in this period. Harden, Donald B., Hansgerd Hellenkemper, Kenneth Painter, and David Whitehouse. Glass of the Caesars. Milan, 1987. Catalog of a major exhibition, with extensive introductions to the main types of glass produced by the Romans. Jenkins, Marilyn. Islamic Glass: A Brief History. New York, 1986. Based on objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this appeared as The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 44, no. 2. Journal of Glass Studies. Has appeared annually since 1959. The journal contains papers on glass and glassmaking of all periods and regions. Volume 32 (1990) contained a monograph on the Portland Vase. Naumann-Steckner, Friedericke, ed. "Romisches Glas des 2. bis 6. Jahrhunderts." Kolner Jahrbuch fur Vor- und Frilhgeschichte 22 (1989): 5-203. Twenty-seven papers on Roman glass from archae ological contexts. Newby, Martine and Kenneth Painter, ed. Roman Glass: Two Centuries of Art and Innovation. London, 1991. Twelve studies of Roman glass made between about 50 BCE and 100 CE. Salden, Axel von, A. Leo Oppenheim, Robert H. Brill, and Dan Barag. Glass and Glassmaking in Ancient Mesopotamia. Corning, 1970; re print, 1988. Edition of the cuneiform texts that contain instructions for glassmakers, with a catalog of surviving objects. Stem, E. Marianne and Birgit Schlick-Nolte. Early Glass of the Ancient World 1600 B.C.-A.D. 50. Ostfildern, 1994. Contains a long (in places, controversial) section on techniques that may have been em ployed by early glassmakers. Tait, Hugh, ed. Five Thousand Years of Glass. London, 1991; rev. ed., 1995. Includes chapters on Pre-Roman, Roman, and Islamic glass, and a section on techniques by William Gudenrath, which should be compared with Stern and Schlick-Nolte (see above). Whitehouse, David. "La verrerie." In Splendeur des Sassanides, edited by B. Overlaet, pp. 109-113 and 257-270. Brussels, 1993. Introduc tion to Sassanian glass, with examples from the Corning Museum of Glass and other collections. DAVID WHITEHOUSE
G L U E C K , N E L S O N (1900-1971), pioneer of the ar chaeology of ancient Israel and a leading figure in the de velopment of Reform Judaism in the United States. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Glueck was ordained in 1923 at the He brew Union College (HUC) there. In 1927, he earned his Ph.D. at the University in Jena, Germany, writing on the biblical concept of hesed (Heb., "goodness," "divine kind ness"). That year, he also became a student of William Fox well Albright's at the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Jerusalem (now Lite Albright Institute); in 1930 and 1932, he worked with Albright in the excavations at Tell Beit Mirsim. While holding a faculty position at H U C , Glueck also served as director of ASOR in Jerusalem (1932i933> 1936-1940, and 1942-1947) and as field director of ASOR's Baghdad school (1942-1947). During World War II, Glueck worked with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. In 1947, he was elected president of H U C and in 1949 be came president of the combined Hebrew Union CollegeJewish Institute of Religion, a position he held until his death. In 1963, under Glueck's leadership, the H U C Biblical and Archaeological School was opened in Jerusalem. In
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1972, its archaeological component was renamed the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology. Between 1932 and 1947, Glueck explored Transjordan, surveying more than one thousand sites (for the most part previously unknown) in Moab, Ammon, and Edom. In 1937 he excavated the Nabatean temple at Khirbet et-Tannur, and in 1938 he dug at Tell el-Kheleifeh, which he believed to be Solomon's seaport at Ezion-Geber. [See Tannur, Khir bet et-; Kheleifeh, Tell el-.] Between 1952 and 1964, he identified more than five hundred archaeological sites in Is rael's Negev desert. Among Glueck's seminal publications are his four-volume report, Explorations in Eastern Palestine (1934-1951); The Other Side of the Jordan (1940); Rivers in the Desert (1959); and Deities and Dolphins (1966). A festschrift in his honor was published on his seventieth birthday (Sanders, 1970). Glueck's major achievement, a demographic synthesis of the history of Transjordan, was best summarized by G. Er nest Wright in 1959: "Glueck's work is to be rated as one of the two most important individual contributions to the field of Palestinian archaeology in our generation" (Biblical Ar chaeologist 22.4 [1959], p. 98). Later, Albright wrote that "Glueck's most important contribution to general history is his work on the history of the Nabateans and on the econ omy and ecology of the most important north Arab nation of pre-Islamic times" (Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research 202 [1971], p. 5). While Glueck's theories on Bronze and Iron Age settle ment patterns in Jordan and in the Negev are currently being reevaluated, his work remains a textbook for contemporary scholars. The first project Glueck initiated at HUC's new archaeological school in 1964, the watershed excavations at Tell Gezer, also continues to have an enduring effect on archaeological research in tire Middle East. Gezer was the training ground for almost the entire current generation of senior American archaeologists worldng in the eastern Med iterranean basin. [See Gezer.] As a proponent of biblical archaeology, Glueck believed that the biblical tradition reflects historical memory. He also held, however, that no one could "prove the Bible, for it is primarily a theological document" (Biblical Archaeologist 22.4 [1959], p. 106). Glueck, the indefatigable scholar, the man of rare imagination, vision and insight, was one of the most renowned and productive archaeologists of his time. [See also Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. 4 vols. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 14, 15, 18/19, 25/28. New Haven, 1934-1951. Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan. New Haven, 1940. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Glueck, Nelson. Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev. New York, 1959.
Glueck, Nelson. Deities and Dolphins: The Stoiy of the Nabataeans. Lon don, 1966. Sanders, James A., ed. Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Cen tury: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck. Garden City, N.Y., 1970. SEYMOUR GITIN
G O A T S . See Sheep and Goats.
G O D I N T E P E , site located in the Kangavar Valley of central western Iran (34°3i' N , 48°04' E). Found on survey in 1961, a test sounding was made in 1965, and large-scale excavations directed by T. Cuyler Young, Jr., were con ducted in the summers of 1967,1969,1971, and 1973, spon sored by the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada. Eleven dis tinct cultural phases were identified. Periods VI-XI were excavated in only a small test trench; except for period XI, they are much more widely exposed at the neighboring site of Seh Gabi. Period I is recent Islamic. Excavations at Godin concentrated on periods II-V. Period V (c. 3500-3200 BCE) was exposed over an area of about 500 sq m, in an oval enclosure containing a central courtyard, three major structures, a gatehouse, and storage rooms (see figure 1). Pottery and small finds have close par allels in Uruk IV and Susa Acropole 17 (Late Uruk period). T h e oval is at the summit of the mound, the remainder of which was contemporaneously occupied by a local Chal colithic Zagros culture, Godin VI. It is assumed that tire Oval Enclosure was occupied by Sumerian or Elamite trad ers. [See Sumerians; Elamites.] Period IV (c. 3100-2650 BCE) was also exposed over an area of about 500 sq m. It reflects a major incursion from tire north into the central western Zagros Mountains of the Transcaucasian Early Bronze I culture. At Godin this phase yielded village houses, elaborate ceremonial open air-struc tures on the summit of the mound, and an industrial area (metalworking?). The "invasion" of this culture from the north is probably responsible for the abandonment of the period-V Oval Enclosure. Period III (c. 2600-1500/1400 BCE) was exposed over an average area of 700 sq m; it is an uninterrupted sequence for some 11 m of Bronze Age occupation. Six subperiods were identified stratigraphically and by distinct changes in both painted and plain ceramics. The period's strong initial connections with Susa D and Late Banesh Malayan and its continuing connections with most of Luristan suggest that Godin was, throughout period HI, within the Elamite con federacy (perhaps Shimashki). At this time Godin was the largest site in tire valley. It can be called a town in this period because its pottery was manufactured in centralized work shops and meat was sold from butcher shops. Godin was abandoned between 1400 and about 750 BCE, at which time
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GODIN TEPE. Figure I . Oval enclosure, period V. (Courtesy T. C. Young)
the norm side of the mound was considerably eroded by dre Khorramrud River. Period II is a single structure: a fortified palace of a Me dian khan (about 133 X 55 m). T h e structure containsdrree major columned halls, magazines (with a second story for living quarters), and a ldtchen. It has ceramic and architecteial parallels with Hasanlu III, Ziweye, the Zendan-i Sulei man, Nush-i Jan, Baba Jan, and Pasargadae. [See Hasanlu; Pasagardae; Medes.] T h e building was abandoned at an un known date and subsequentiy occupied by squatters. Founded in the Iron Age III period (c. 750/700 BCE), it may well have been occupied into Achaemenid times (c. 500 BCE). Period I is represented by an Islamic shrine (c. fif teenth century CE) and by an associated modern cemetery. BIBLIOGRAPHY Henrickson, Robert C. "Godin III and Chronology of Central Western Iran circa 2600-1400 B.C." In The Archaeology of Western Iran, edited by Frank Hole, pp. 205-227. Washington, D.C., 1987. Good sum mary of period III. Weiss, Harvey, and T. Cuyler Young, Jr. "The Merchants of Susa: Godin V and Plateau-Lowland Relations in the Late Fourth Millen nium B.C." Iran 13 (1975): 1-17. Presentation and discussion of the Late Uruk period trading post of Godin V.
Young, T. Cuyler, Jr., and Louis D. Levine. Excavations at the Godin Project: Second Progress Report. Toronto, 1974. Summary of the ex cavations as they stood at the end of die fourth season. T. CUYLER YOUNG, JR.
GOLAN. The region east and northeast of the Sea of Galilee, the Golan (Heb., Ramat Ha-Golan; Ar., el-Jaulan) extends from the Yarmuk River in the south to the slopes of Mt. Hermon in the north and from the Jordan Rift Valley and tire Sea of Galilee on tire west to tire Raqqad River on the east (1200 sq km, or 744 sq. mi.). This volcanic plateau rises from 250 m above sea level in the south to 900 m above sea level in the northeast; because of geological faults, it breaks sharply on the west, toward die Rift Valley. T h e streams that flow on the plateau are shallow, but nearing the Jordan Rift they rapidly descend through waterfalls into deep canyons or wide basins. T h e basalt rock covering most of the surface of the Golan Heights originated in a series of volcanic eruptions dating from 3.7 to 0.14 million years BP (Mor, 1986). Four main routes cross the region from east to west connecting Damascus and the Bashan to the Med iterranean: Banias—Damascus, Gesher Benot Ya'aqob
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("daughters of Jacob bridge")-Quneitra (Via Maris), Befhsaida-Khushniye, and Zemah-Rafid. The Golan is divided into three subunits, the south, the center, and the north: 1. South. A level, fertile plain ranges from die yarmuk gorge to Wadi Samakh in the north. It is tire region's main agricultural zone and was densely occupied throughout all archaeological periods. 2. Center. A rough area suitable mainly for grazing and limited agriculture, especially olive groves, the center of the Golan extends from Nahal Samakh to the Nahal Shelef-Tell Khari'a line (8 km, or 5 mi., south of Quneitra). The area was inhabited in most archaeological periods, although with many gaps in the sequence. It was densely settled in the Byzantine period. 3. North. The northern Golan, from Nahal Shelef to Nahal Sa'ar is mostly covered with thick oak forests; it has limited arable land and a few springs. Sparsely settled in the Early Bronze and Iron I periods, it was, however, densely occupied in die Hellenistic period by a settlement of Iturean Arabs. Paleolithic-Neolithic Periods. The earliest human re mains unearthed in tire Golan date to the Upper Paleolithic period. At Berekat Ram (east of Mas'ada), a paleosol layer containing flints and basalt implements from the Acheulean culture indicates habitation over a quarter of a million years ago (Goren-Inbar, 1985; Davies et. al., 1988). The Mousterian culture is represented by an open-air site at Biq'at Quneitra (Goren-Inbar, 1989) and by a few industrial sites (approximately 50,000 BP). The large site of Mjhiyye in the southern Golan belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (Gopher, 1990). Chalcolithic Period. Some thirty Chalcolithic sites have so far been found in the central Golan, fifteen of which have been excavated or probed (Epstein, 1986). Extensive pasturelands and moist tracts were exploited for sheep and goat rearing and the seasonal cultivation of wheat, barley, and legumes. [See Sheep and Goats; Cereals.] The sites are unwalled and spread over a large area. There are villages of between fifteen and forty houses, as well as smaller hamlets and individual farms. The houses are built in parallel rows in chain formation, witir neighboring houses sharing a joint side wall. They have a broadhouse plan with basalt walls constructed in dry masonry and an average size of 15 X 6 m. They were entered from die south, are characterized by a bench at the base of the walls, and, in a few cases, have grain silos. [See Granaries and Silos.] The internal partition walls form either a long narrow back room or smaller side rooms. At all the sites a wide range of ceramic, basalt, and flint vessels was found. They show affinities to assemblages in other regions but with many features unique to the Golan. Many vessels are decorated with bands of impressed rope ornament, while others are ornamented with incised and
punctured designs. Particularly noteworthy is the large number of pithoi for storing grain. Other vessels include jugs, bowls, holemouth jars, spouted jars, bowls with a fen estrated foot ("incense burners"), and spindle whorls. Few vessels for everyday use, such as cups and cooking pots, have come to light. The repertoire of basalt vessels includes bowls, basins, querns, and grinding and pounding stones, and such tools as hammers, hoes, and digging sticks. T h e flint implements include axes, adzes, scrapers, awls, fan scrapers, and a large number of siclde blades. In addition, there are circular or ovoid perforated tools made of tabular flint, some with peripheral denticulations. They are found mostly in tire northern Golan (Epstein and Noy, 1988). A unique feature of the Golan culture are cylindrical ba salt pillar figures: they display a shallow offering bowl above, with a protruding nose and, in some cases, horns and a goatee (Epstein, 1982, 1988). T h e horned and bearded fig ures were associated with fertility for the flocks and the hornless ones with the general concept of life, fertility, and abundance for humans and their crops. The Chalcolithic culture of the Golan represents a single phase that lasted from between two hundred to three hun dred years. Calibrated carbon-14 dates of charred wood fragments provide a date of 4140 ± 150 BCE; burned wheat grains provide a calibrated date of 3800 ± 1 0 0 BCE. Early B r o n z e Age. T h e EB I is found so far only at tiiree sites adjacent to dre Yarmuk River and Nahal Meizar, in the southern Golan (Epstein 1985c). In the rest of the region there seems to be a gap in occupation in this period. In con trast, surveys located forty-two sites inhabited in EB II throughout the Golan (Epstein and Gutman, 1972; Hartal, 1989): seven in the south, twelve in the center, seventeen in tire north, and six more at the foot of Mt. Flermon. [See Hermon, Mount.] The sites include settlements and large fortified enclosures. At Za'arta, Zalabeh, and Gamla, sec tions of fortification walls have been identified togetirer with building remains. [See Gamla.] T h e enclosure sites are sur rounded by massive fortifications that sometimes incorpo rate natural elements such as rocks, cliffs, and abysses over hanging wadis (Mitham Yitzhaki, Mitham Leviah, Mitham Bardawil). Other enclosures, erected in areas without nat ural fortifications, are surrounded on all four sides by huge stone-heaped walls (Sha'abniah, Es-Sur.) Excavations at Mitham Leviah (Kochavi, 1989) revealed tirree parallel walls (up to 4 m thick) crossing the narrow spur that are otherwise protected by steep precipices on the north, south, and west. On the west of the site EB III rectangular stone-built houses were discovered together with Khirbet Kerak ware in situ. EB IA, EB IB, EB II and EB IV/MB I pottery, also found in this area, indicate habitational continuity at the site. It/is clear that the enclosures sometimes incorporated buildings, such as at Mitham Leviah and es-Sur, but the function of the enclosures has yet to be clarified. They may either be fortified areas, occupied by an unsettled local pastoralist
GOLAN population and their flocks in times of danger, or walled cities. An unusual and unique site, perhaps dating to EB II is Rujm el-Hiri (Zohar, 1989; Kochavi, 1989). It contains a huge central mmulus (20-25 ni in diameter, 7 m high) sur rounded by four concentric walls; the outer walls, in which there are two entryways, is 155 m in diameter. T h e central tumulus, recently excavated by Yonathan Mizrachi and Moshe Kochavi for Tel Aviv University, housed an oval burial chamber entered through a dromos. It was robbed in antiquity, but the few remaining earnings, arrowheads, and sherds date the burial to the Late Bronze Age. Stone-paved courts surrounded the tumulus, on top of which a few Iron I and Byzantine sherds were found. The site's original func tion and date have not yet been established, but it may have been a ceremonial center with symbolic significance for the contemporary population. [See Rujm el-Hiri.] Early Bronze Age IV/Middle Bronze Age I (2350-1950 BCE). At the end of the third millennium a significant change occurred in the pattern of settlement in the Golan. No occupation sites have been located in the north and cen tral Golan. In the south eight sites have been identified, of which three are burial sites. T h e indications are that during this period pastoralists, whose origins have not yet been fully established, moved through the nortii and central Golan but did not construct any permanent settlements. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] On the other hand, they erected hundreds of dolmens in standing groups and sometimes concentrated in dolmen "fields" (Epstein, 1985a. [See Dolmen.] T h e type of dolmen most frequently found is a rectangular, or some times trapezoidal (about 3.5 X 1.5 m ) , construction with an entrance on one of its short sides. Built of monolithic basalt blocks, upright slabs served as walls and the floors were paved. In one type of dolmen the roof is constructed of large stone slabs that rise toward die center in a steplike forma tion. A huge capstone creates a corbeled ceiling within the chamber. T h e Golan dolmens are frequentiy covered by a surrounding oval stone heap, or tumulus, supported at the bottom by a circular wall; in many cases only the top roof stone is visible. T h e earliest finds from the dolmens date to EB IV/MB I and include jars, "teapots," a bottle, pedestal lamps, and round, handleless cooldng pots. T h e metal finds are of cop per and include a long pin with a bent head, pins with points at each end, a bracelet and ring, and weapons, including a dagger, a socketed spearhead, and leaf-shaped blades. [See Jewelry; Weapons.] These ceramic and metal types have clear parallels in assemblages from burials from this period in northern Israel and Syria (e.g., Megiddo, Ugarit). [See Burial Sites; Grave Goods; Megiddo; Ugarit.] Middle Bronze Age II-Late Bronze Age (2950-1200 BCE). Following the EB IV/MB I period there was probably an occupation gap in the Golan of about 150 years as no sites that can be dated to the M B ILA have been found. The
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only finds are a few pottery vessels from a dolmen in sec ondary use. T h e vessels are characteristic of the transition between MB IIA and MB IIB, with parallels in graves at Ginossar, Hazor, Dan, and other northern sites (Epstein 1985a). [See Hazor; Dan.] T h e beginning of M B IIB saw the resettlement of the Go lan. About forty sites, including cemeteries, have been iden tified in surveys (Epstein and Gutrnan, 1972; Hartal, 1989): eleven in the north, only four in the center, and twenty-five concentrated in the southern Golan. Many settlements, of ten fortified, were established in MB IIB at strategic loca tions for defense and for control of roads and territories, with a particularly strong concentration on the slopes ov erlying Nahal Samakh and its tributaries. T h e main tells in clude Ai/et-Tell in the Bethsaida valley, Masharfawi in Nahal Kanaf (surrounded by a cyclopean wall), Fakhuri, elMudowarah, Hutiyye in the Samakh basin, and Tell ed-Dahab (wall remains). [See Ai.] Only fourteen of tiiese sites continued to be occupied in the LB period. In addition to the tell sites there are small forts, such as site 151 in Nahal Samakh: a rectangular fort (20 X 24 m) whose fortification wall incorporates small rooms and two square towers. Other sites are burial caves rich in funerary goods. Noteworthy in the ceramic repertoire from surveys are large storage jars of coarse clay, decorated with applied bands of incised her ringbone or zigzag patterns, with parallels at Hazor and other sites in the northern part of the country. Late Bronze Age. T h e number of sites in the Golan de creased by more than a half in the Late Bronze Age. Most overlie M B II sites and continued into the Israelite period (tenth-ninth centuries BCE). N o LB sherds were found on the surface at Tell el-Mudowarah indicating a gap in the settlement there. However, a burial cave with complete LB vessels was found at the foot of the site, indicating, perhaps, the existence of pastoralists in the area. Another burial cave has been found at the foot of Tel Soreg, a small tell in Nahal Ein-Gev (Kochavi, 1989, p. 7). Tel Soreg itself indicates settlement continuity from EB IV/MB I through MB IIB and LB II to the Israelite period. Characteristic of LB pottery in the Golan are storage jars of coarse, light-colored clay decorated with red-painted geo metric motifs. Noteworthy is a bichrome fragment deco rated with a bird eating a fish. In some dolmens imported Cypriot ware was found; and the figurine of a woman wear ing a Hatlior wig was also recovered. Egyptian records from Amarna relate directly to the area of the Golan. [See Amarna Tablets.] In EA364 a dispute over three cities between the kingdoms of Ashtartu and Hazor is reported, and it is likely that the area of controversy was the central Golan. Another letter (EA256) describes a conflict between Pihilu (Pella) and 'Ashtartu on the one hand, and the land of Ga-ri on the other (Pritchard, 1955, p. 486). It appears that the two cities of URU Ha-iu-ni and URU Iabi-li-ma were captured from the prince of Pihilu by the cities c
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(a league?) of the land of Ga-ri. [See Pella.] William F. Al bright (1943) identified the former city witir Khirbet elAyun, in the southern Golan, and the latter with Tell Abil in the Yarmuk riverbed. Other cities in tire letter have also been identified in the southern Golan. Subsequently, Ben jamin Mazar argued that tire reading Ga-ri in EA256:23 should be emended to Ga-(su)-ri—that is, biblical Geshur (Mazar, 1986a). It may thus be deduced that tire land of Geshur existed as a political unit in the southern Golan at least as early the fourteenth century BCE. Ma'acha, the entity bordering Geshur (Jos. 12:5, 13:11), is alluded to even earlier, in the Egyptian Execration texts, as a tribal name (E62) and a place name (E37; Ahituv, 1984, p. 132). It is presumed to lie north of Geshur, in tire northern Golan, extending to the Hula Valley and southern Biqa' Val ley. Iron Age (1200-732 B C E ) . Following tire decline in set tlements in tire Late Bronze Age, a renewed spread of sedentarization took place in die Iron Age, in which many MB II settlements were reoccupied. Surveys reveal more than fifty-two sites (twenty-two in the north, ten in the center, and twenty in the south). They include small settlements, forts, and dolmens in secondary use for burials (see above). Among the sites established for the first time in this period are fortresses and fortified settlements, erected at strategic locations: Tel Dover at the western entrance to the Yarmuk valley; Khirbet Dajajiyye at the western entrance to Nahal Samakh; 'Ein-Gev and Tel Hadar (Sheikh Khadr), both on the east bank of the Sea of Galilee; and Tell Abu Zeitun and "Mezad Yehonatan" (Tannuriyye) on the Golan plateau. [See Hadar, Tel.] Strata of this period have been exposed at the following excavated sites: 'Ein-Gev, Tel Soreg, Tel Hadar, Mezad Yehonatan, Tell Abu Zeitun, Bab el-Hawa, Horvat Kanaf, and Qasrin. [See Qasrin.] At 'Ein-Gev, five Iron Age strata were exposed (Mazar et a l , 1964). Limited probes at the southern and northern edges of tire mound (about 250 X 120 m) revealed a sequence of fortifications, the earliest (stratum V) of which was a solid wall (1.85 m wide) followed by a casemate wall (stratum IV). These for tifications are similar to tirose unearthed at Hazor and Me giddo. The probes also detected a citadel (about 60 X 60 m) erected at the northern end of the site. The construction of stratum IV is attributed to King Solomon..In stratum III (ninth century BCE), which was destroyed in a conflagration, an offset/inset wall (5 m thick) was erected, beyond which was an alley and a courtyard building. Sttatum II (838-790 BCE) continued the same building plan. Stratum I (790-732 BCE) was unfortified, but a public building (perhaps a fort) was located in the north. The ceramic repertoire includes red-slipped burnished bowls similar to the Samaria type, cooking pots with triangular rims, jugs, storage jars, holemouth jars, and lamps. The stone objects include basalt pes tles, a tripod bowl, an "incense bowl," and a votive axe out of nephrite. Especially important is an ostracon inscribed in
Aramaic: Isqy' (c. 850 BCE), probably a dignitary title such as "cupbearer" for an official at the site. [See Ostracon.] At Tel Hadar a substantial round fort, surrounded by two fortification walls some 70 m across and a gate, was exposed that dates to Iron I (and perhaps before M B II) (Kochavi, 1989, pp. 9-11). Inside the fort were granary rooms con taining quantities of charred grain and four-room houses. [See Four-room House.] This stratum was destroyed in a fire at the end of the eleventh century BCE. After a gap, tire site was reoccupied in the ninth-eighth centuries BCE. T h e floors of tire houses overlie the old walls. A similar round or ovoid fort (some 70 m in diameter) was partially exposed at Tell Abu Zeitun, on the upper pla teau of the southern Golan. Part of the outer face of a wellpreserved fortification wall came to light there, witir pottery dated to Iron I. At Tel Soreg, a fortified settlement from the ninth to eighth centuries BCE was exposed, including a for tification wall, a large building, and a series of dwellings (Kochavi, 1989, pp. 6-9). At Mezad Yehonatan, on the upper tributary of Wadi Tannuriyye in east-central Golan another fort (26 sq m) dating to Iron I was probed (Epstein, 1984, p. 77). Its walls, preserved to a height of about 3 m in three-seven courses, were built with an inner vertical wall (1.7 m thick) abutted on the outside by a sloping stone glacis. T h e gate (2.45 m wide, 1.65 m deep), set in the east, was narrowed on the inside by a pair of pilasters. According to the Bible, the area to the east of the Golan— the southern Bashan—was occupied by the Israelite tribe of half-Manasseh, while the Golan itself remained in the do main of the nibes of Geshur and Ma'acah (Jos. 12:5). According to 2 Samuel 8:3-6, David smote Hadadezer, the king of Zobah, and his ally Aram-Damascus and set up garrisons in Damascus. [See Damascus.] The area under the control of Solomon (1 Kgs. 9:18) reached Tadmor and Flamath and would have included Geshur and Ma'acah prob ably as vassal states. Geshur became David's political ally, as is indicated by the marriage pact between David and the daughter of Talmai, king of Geshur. Ma'acah, on the other hand, took part in a coalition led by Hadadezer of Damascus against David (2 Sm. 10:6-19). Ben-Hadad (Bir-Hadad I), campaigned against Baasha, the king of Israel in about 886 BCE (Mazar, 1986b; Pitard, 1987, pp. 107-114), "and smote Ijon, and Dan, and Abel-Beth-Ma'acah and all of Kinnerotlr, over all the land of Naphtali" (1 Kgs. 16:20). This cam paign led, according to Mazar, to tire destruction of several cities, including the Israelite stratum IV at 'Ein-Gev and the establishment of an Aramean fort at tire site (Mazar et a l , 1964, pp. 29, 32; Mazar, 1986b). [See Arameans.] Another series of clashes between Israel and Aram Damascus, with a decisive battle at Aphek in the southern Golan, is recorded in 1 Kings 20:1-43. [See Aphek.] Though the name of the king of Israel mentioned in this cycle of stories (Kgs. 20, 22) is Ahab, it has been suggested that the event took place later,
GOLAN in the days of Joash of the dynasty of Jehu (Pitard, 1987, pp. 114-125). 2 Kings 10:32-33 records: "In those days, Yahweh began to cut off parts of Israel, and Hazael smote them in all the territory of Israel from the Jordan eastward, all the land of Gilead, the Gadites, the Reubenites, the Manassites, from 'Aro'er, which is in the Arnon Valley, Gilead, and Bashan." Revival seems to have come only in the reign of Joash, after the death of Hazael, at the beginning of the eighdr century BCE (Pitard, 1987, pp. 161-170). In a series of battles lasting some five years, Hazael's son, Ben-Hadad (Bir-Hadad III), was first repulsed in battle close to Samaria (2 Kgs. 6:24-27) and then defeated near Succoth in Trans jordan (/ Kgs. 20:1-21). [See Samaria.] T h e third, and final, battle was fought near Aphek (7 Kgs. 20:24-43). This site has been identified recently with Tel Soreg, in the southern Golan (see above). In the ensuing period, the territory of tire Golan probably remained in Israel's hands (2 Kgs. 14:25) and was only finally annexed to the Assyrian Empire, to gether with the rest of northern Israel, by Tiglath-Pileserlll, following his conquest in 732 BCE (r Kgs. 15:29; Pitard, 1987, pp. 186-189). [See Assyrians.] The Golan Heights was probably not settled during the Babylonian, Persian, and Early Hellenistic periods (sixththird century BCE) . From the time Palestine was conquered by the Seleucids in 200 BCE until the Byzantine period, there is an impressive growth in tire number of sites in the Golan (more than 173 sites in the sixth century CE). T h e number of sites and settlements in tire Byzantine period amounts to six times the figure for the Middle Bronze Age. Settlements are particularly prominent in the central and northern Go lan, which had almost no permanent agricultural settlements during tire earlier periods. Hellenistic Period (200-64 BCE). T h e earliest settle ments in the Hellenistic period were established at the be ginning of the second century BCE, mainly in the southern Golan, where they were situated at the edges of the fertile plains, above the rich springs, and in the nearby river valleys. In addition to tire agricultural villages, a system of fortresses and towers were built to defend and control the region and its roads, chief among them Hippos/Susita. Toward the end of the second century BCE their number was reinforced by the addition of Gamala/Gamla. These fortresses are typical products of Hellenistic military doctrines—strongholds built on high hills, isolated from their surroundings, and out of range of artillery fire—controlling the main highways, while ascents and secondary roads were defended by towers. T h e Itureans, a tribe probably of Aramean stock, estab lished settlements in the northeastern Golan in the middle of the second century BCE. Their distinctive pottery, "Golan ware," has been found at sixty-seven sites from this period. Fifty of these Iturean sites remained populated through the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. Excavations have been conducted at three Iturean sites in Golan: Horvat Zemel, where there were remains of five houses, and a large quantity
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of pottery, some with Greek inscriptions; Horvat Namra, which had one building and courtyard, with a great deal of pottery; and Bab el-Hawa, where there were a street and a building with two or three apartments. Early R o m a n P e r i o d (64 BCE-67 C E ) . Excavations at Gamla and Horvat Kanaf, together with remains from about 141 surveyed sites throughout the Golan, indicate the mag nitude of the settlement in the Early Roman period. At Gamla—an example of a planned city—the construction is of an exceptionally fine quality with a magnificent syna gogue, private houses, streets, and an oil extraction instal lation. Fragments of stone vessels made of chalk, attest to socioeconomic contacts with the metropolis of Jerusalem. T h e town was destroyed by the Roman army in 67 CE and abandoned. [See Gamla.] Excavations at Gamla and Horvat Kanaf and surveys of other sites testify to an archaeological gap from the late first to the early fourth centuries CE. Moreover, as there is almost no mention of places in the Golan in tire Mishnah or the Talmud, it would seem that the Jewish population was oblit erated in the First Revolt, following which there was a drastic decline of Jewish settlement in tire region. [See First Jewish Revolt.] Middle a n d Late R o m a n P e r i o d s (67-365 C E ) . Exca vations have exposed occupation levels from the Middle Ro man period, with tire most impressive finds coming from the cities of Hippos, where a cardo maximus, an imposing east gate, sections of a stonepipe siphon, a nymphaeum of basalt stone, a subterranean stone-vaulted reservoir, mon umental basalt buildings, and ornate Corinthian capitals at test to the wealth and magnificence of this city in the Middle Roman period; and Banias, which had a sanctuary to the god Pan above the spring, including an Augusteum, a Cult Court to Pan and tire Nymphs with niches hewn in the rock escarpment, a Temple of Zeus, a Court of Nemesis, a Tomb-Temple of the Sacred Goats, and a Temple for Pan and the Goats. In the city center there were monumental public buildings and a gigantic late third-century CE palace with horrea, circular halls, and vaulted passages. [See Ba nias.] In some Golan villages, private houses built of basalt ash lars with stone ceilings have been preserved. In some sites in the southern and eastern Golan, finds associated with cults from the Roman period have also been discovered, like statues of Tyche, altars, and architectural fragments from temples. Remains of pavements, milestones, and watchtowers characteristic of Roman roads attest to the existence of sev eral roads: A Roman road from Banias toward Damascus; possible remains of the Scythopolis-Hippos road; remains of a branch of a road linking the road to Hippos with the road coming from Betirsaida; and impressive remains of a paved road from the Lawiyye spur eastward to Nawa in Syria.
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Byzantine Period (365-636 CE). The Byzantine period was a time of great prosperity in the Golan, as in other parts of the country, proved by the increase in the number of sites and in the extent of the built-up area. The southern Golan, including the city of Plippos and a chain of small towns, was the most densely populated area, while central Golan only had one town, Dabura. To the north, the city of Banias en joyed great prosperity at this time, in part because of its abundant water sources and its location on the road from Tyre and Sidon to Damascus. Village and house plans. The village plan followed one of three basic patterns: (1) orthogonal, where narrow stteets and parallel lanes run between tire buildings, crossing one another at right angles, with buildings of different sizes; (2) streets like tire spokes of a wheel, with the streets converging toward the center of the village; and (3) no regular plan, with houses dispersed according to the topography. Village streets were unpaved and houses were built of local basalt, with stone ceilings. The pottery repertoire of this period in the southern and central Golan is basically similar to that common in the country as a whole, the most common household vessels being storage jars, cooking pots, kraters and bowls, as well as jugs, juglets and a variety of lamps. Most of this pottery was produced in Golan itself with only a small amount imported from the Galilee. Ethnic makeup. Excavations of public buildings such as synagogues and churches provide clear guidelines to tire ethno-religious map of the Golan in this period. Remains of synagogues have been found at twenty-five sites. Numerous remains of churches and Christian symbols have been found in the eastern and southern Golan, but only in a few villages in the Iturean territory of the northern Golan. Churches. Two main architectural types of churches have been found. The first was most common in the coastal and valley regions of Palestine, and consisted of basilicas with walls built of stones and mortar, two rows of arcades on columns tirat divide the building into a nave and two aisles, a semicircular apse, mosaic floors, and tiled roofs (Hippos, Kursi, and Khisfin). The second type was com mon at the time in the Hauran, with the apse sometimes being square, the ceilings of basalt slabs resting on large arches supported by square pillars, and the floors generally paved with stone slabs and, rarely, mosaics (er-Ramthaniyye, Deir Qeruh, Duer el-Loz, and Deir Sras). [See Churches; Basilicas; Kursi.] Synagogues. Remains of seventeen synagogues were found in the western part of the central Golan, at eight other sites architectural fragments were found from synagogues whose exact locations are unknown, The synagogue was generally the only public building in the typical Jewish village in the Golan. They were built on the best location available, often on the highest point on a slope or near a spring. These synagogues constitute a regional architectural group, shar ing certain common features: basalt ashlar masonry, thick
dry-stone walls, a single entrance in an ornamented facade, columns and stone architraves, an internal division by two rows of columns, galleries, and gabled roofs made of tiles. At the same time different "schools" of masons each had its own distinctive plan, elevation and carved decorations: 1. Chorazin-Ein-Nashut "School." Features of this school, assigned to tire mid-fifth century, include richly dec orated facades, columns on pedestals, and an abundance of sculptures in relief. Among the finds are decorations witir lions, eagles, vine branches, the Ark of the Law, a sevenbranched menorah, Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric capitals, and Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions. Examples of this school are: Chorazin, on the west bank of the Jordan River; 'Ein-Nashut, on the banks of Nahal Meshushim; and edDikkeh, situated on tire east bank of the Jordan River. [See Chorazin.] Some of the synagogues of this school have been surveyed, but not yet excavated: Khirbet er-Rafid, over looking the east bank of tire Jordan River; Khirbet Khawkha, on the southern bank of Nahal Daliyyot; Horvat Beth-Lavi (Wakhshara), northeast of tire peak of Qubbat Qar'a; Khir bet Zumeimira, north of Nahal Zavitan; and Jarabeh, west of Nahal Meshushim. 2. Kanaf "School." Assigned to the beginning of the sixth century, the Kanaf school is notable for its meager decora tion in a simple style concentrated on the outer facade and columns without pedestals. Among the finds are reliefs of lions, Hercules knots, vine branches, Doric capitals, and an Aramaic inscription. T h e group includes Horvat Kanaf, in south Golan, between Nahal Kanaf and Nahal Sfamnun; Deir 'Aziz, on the southern bank of Nahal Kanaf; and prob ably Taibeh, on the banks of Nahal Yahudiyye. 3. Qasrin "School." Also dated to the beginning of the sixth century, the Qasrin school features decoration concen trated on tire entrance of the synagogues, all of them with the same type of portal frame; in the hall two rows of col umns stand on Attic bases with Ionic capitals; there is an elevated clerestory rather than galleries. Among tire finds are decorations with seven-, nine-, and eleven-branched menorahs, tire Ark of the Law, shofars, incense shovels, eagles, vines and grapes, and an Aramaic inscription. Some of these synagogues are: Qasrin, in central Golan; Assaliyye, a large ruin west of Qasrin; Yahudiyye, a village north of Nahal Yahudiyye; Khirbet Qusbiyye, a small abandoned village on a hill west of the Yahudiyye-Khusniyye road. [See Qasrin.] In some Golan synagogues the main entrance in tire fa cade of the building was displaced from the center. This was done in order to make place for the Torah shrine on the inside. The orientation of these synagogues and the direc tion of prayer are still open questions. Some are built along an east-west axis, with tire facade oriented west. However, other Golan synagogues were aligned north-south, with their facades facing south; the facade of tire Qasrin syna gogue is in the north, but the Ark of the Law was installed in the southern wall, so that there too, the congregation
GOLAN faced south. A common Jewish symbol in synagogue art in the Golan is the menorah with varying numbers of branches, generally carved on the lintels of side entrances or windows, on capitals, and on arch stones. Another Jewish symbol is the Ark of the Law, featured on lintels. [See Synagogues.] T h e literary sources do not attest to a Jewish population in the Golan Heights during the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. Only archaeological data enable a reconstruction of its size, history, material culture, and artistic achievements. It seems that after the destruction of most of the settlements during the First Revolt and their subsequent abandonment,
Epstein, Claire. ration Journal Epstein, Claire. chaeologist 40 Epstein, Claire.
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"Basalt Pillar Figures from the Golan." Israel Explo 25 (1975): 193-201. "The Chalcolithic Culture of the Golan." Biblical Ar (1977): 57-62. "Aspects of Symbolism in Chalcolithic Palestine." In
Archaeology in the Levant: Essays for Kathleen Kenyon, edited by
P. R. S. Moorey and Peter J. Parr, pp. 22-35. Warminster, 1978a. Epstein, Claire. "A New Aspect of Chalcolithic Culture." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 229 (1978^:27-45.
Epstein, Claire. "More on the Chalcolithic Culture of the Golan" (in Hebrew). Eretz-Israel 15 (1981): 15-20. Epstein, Claire. "Cult Symbols in Chalcolithic Palestine." Bollettino del Centra Camuno di Studi Preistorici 1 9 (1982): 63-82.
the Talmud. Jews returned to the Golan in the fourth cen
Epstein, Claire. "Mesad Tannuriye." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 3 (1984): 77Epstein, Claire. "Dolmens Excavated in the Golan." 'Atiqot 17 (1985a): 20-58. Epstein, Claire. "Laden Animal Figurines from the Chalcolithic Period
tury CE, migrating from the Galilee. T h e economy of the
in Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no.
region based on agriculture, particularly the production of
258 (1985b): 53-62. Epstein, Claire. "Notes and News: Golan." Israel Exploration Journal 35 (1985c): 53-56. Epstein, Claire. "Chalcolithic Setdement Patterns and House Plans in the Golan" (in Hebrew). Michmanim 3 (1986): 34-35. Epstein, Claire. "Basalt Pillar Figurines from the Golan and the Huleh Region." Israel Exploration Journal 38 (1988): 205-223. Epstein, Claire, and Tamar Noy. "Observations Concerning Perfo rated Flint Tools from Chalcolithic Palestine." Paleorient 14.1 (1988): 133-141. Gopher, Avi. "An Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Site in the Golan
Jewish settlement in the Lower Golan was interrupted until the end of the third century CE. It was only in Dabura tiiat a Jewish village survived up to the time of the Mishnah and
olive oil. Villages were generally small, not more than twenty to fifty buildings, owing to the scarcity of water. It appears that the first synagogues were built in the second half of the fifth century CE, and a few buildings were added in the sixth century. Some of these synagogues were damaged by earth quakes in the sixth century and repaired in the sixth and seventh century. T h e architectural and artistic level of the Golan synagogues is high, revealing influences from the Galilee, as well as the culture of the eastern Mediterranean coastal region. T h e Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions point to the congregants' familiarity with the Torah. Excavations reveal that many of the villages were abandoned as early as the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century CE, probably because of the continuing state of war between the Persians and the Byzantines, a possibly frequent Bed ouin raids. In Qasrin, however, the Jewish community per
Heights." TelAviv
17 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 115-143.
Goren-Inbar, Na'ama. "The Lithic Assemblage of the Berekhat Ram Acheulian Site, Golan Heights." Paliorient 11.1 (1985): 7-28. Goren-Inbar, Na'ama. "Typological Characteristics of the Mousterian Assemblage from Biquat Quneitra." In Investigations in South Lev antine Prehistory, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch, pp. 125-146. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 497. Oxford, 1989. Goren-Inbar, Na'ama. Quneitra: A Mousterian Site on the Golan Heights.
Qedem, vol. 31. Jerusalem, 1990.
sisted until the Early Arab period, probably coming to an
Hartal, Mosheh. Northern Golan Heights: The Archaeological Survey as
end only with the earthquake of 749 CE, at the end of the
a Source of Local History (in Hebrew). Qazrin, Israel, 1989. Kochavi, Moshe. "The Land of Geshur Project: Regional Archaeology of the Southern Golan, 1987-1988 Seasons." Israel Exploration Jour nal 39 (1989): 1-17. Kochavi, Moshe. "The Land of Geshur Project, 1989-1990." Israel Exploration Journal 41 (1991): 180-184. Loewenstam, Shmuel. "Geshur" (in Hebrew). In EncyclopaediaBiblica, vol. 2, col. 568. Jerusalem, 1954. Ma'oz, Zvi, and Ann Killebrew. "Qasrin, 1983-1984." Israel Explora tion Journal 35 (1985): 289-293.
Umayyad period. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahituv, Shmuel. Canaanite Toponyms in Ancient Egyptian
Documents.
Jerusalem, 1984. Albright, William Foxwell. "The Land of Damascus between 1850 and 1750 B.C." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no.
83 (1941): 3°-36Albright, William Foxwell. "Two Little Understood Amarna Letters from the Middle Jordan Valley." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 89 (1943): 7-17.
Albright, William Foxwell. "The List of Levitic Cities." In Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, edited by Alexander Marx et al., pp. 49-73. New York, 1945. Bar-Kochva, Bezalel. "Gamala in Gaulanitis." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 92 (1976): 54-71. Davies, Simon J. M., et al. "The Animal Remains from Biq'at Quneitra." Paleorient 14.1 (1988); 95-105. Epstein, Claire, and Shmaryahu Gutman. "The Golan." Injudea, Sa
Ma'oz, Zvi. The Golan Heights in the Ancient Period:
Historical-Geo
graphical Research (in Hebrew). Qazrin, Israel, 1986. Mazar, Benjamin, et al. '"Ein-Gev Excavations in 1961." Israel Explo ration Journal 14 (1964): 1-49.
maria, and the Golan: Archaeological Survey, 1967-1968 (in Hebrew),
Mazar, Benjamin. "Geshur and Maachah." In Mazar's The Early Bib lical Period. Edited by Shmuel Ahituv and Baruch Levine. Jerusalem, 1986a. Mazar, Benjamin. "The Aramaean Empire and Its Relations with Is rael." In Mazar's The Early Biblical Period. Edited by Shmuel Ahituv and Baruch Levine. Jerusalem, 1986b. Mor, Doron. The Volcanism of the Golan Heights (in Hebrew). Geolog ical Survey of Israel, Report no. GSI/5/86. Jerusalem, 1986.
edited by Moshe Kochavi, pp. 243-298. Jerusalem, 1972.
Oded, Bustanay. The Political Status of Israelite Transjordan during the
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GOLD
Period of die Monarchy to die Fall of Samaria (in Hebrew). Jerusalem,
1968. Pitard, Wayne T. Ancient. Damascus. Winona Lake, Ind., 1987. Pritchard, James B„ ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Princeton, 1955. Schumacher, Gottlieb. Thejaulan. London, 1888. Urman, Dan. The Golan; A Profile of a Region during the Roman and Byzantine Periods. British Archaeological Reports, International Se
ries, no. 269. Oxford, 1985. Zohar, Mattanyah. "Rogem Hiri: A Megalithic Monument in the Go lan." Israel Exploration Journal 39 (1989): 18-31. Zvi URI MA'OZ
dating of Anatolian and North Syrian sites, particularly for the Bronze and Iron Ages. BIBLIOGRAPHY Goldman, Hetty, and John Garstang. "A Conspectus of Early Cilician Pottery." American Journal of Archaeology 51 (1947): 370-388. Goldman, Hetty, ed. Excavations at Gozlii Kule, 'Tarsus, vol. 1, The Hellenistic and Roman Periods; vol. 2, From the Neolithic Period through the Bronze Age; vol. 3, The Iron Age. Princeton, 1950-1963. Mellink, Machteld J. "Goldman, Hetty." In Notable American Woman,
edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, pp. 280-282, Cambridge, 1980. BONNIE MAGNESS-GARDINER
G O L D . See Coins; Jewelry; Metals.
G O L D M A N , H E T T Y (1881-1972). member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and excavator of Tarsus, in southern Turkey. Born in New York City, Goldman received a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1903 and a master's degree in classical lan guage and archaeology from Radcliffe in 1910. From 1910 to 1912 she attended the American School of Classical Stud ies in Athens, which sponsored her excavations at Halae, a small classical and prehistoric village in central Greece. Dur ing the excavation her interests shifted to prehistory and she made the necropolis at Halae the subject of her Ph.D. dis sertation, also from Radcliffe (1916). In 1922 Goldman be gan excavating Colophon in Ionia, western Greece, spon sored by the Fogg Museum of Harvard University; and from 1924 to 1927 she excavated at Eutresis in Boeotia, also in central Greece. She was appointed a professor at tire Insti tute for Advanced Study in 1936. Goldman's most important conttibution to Near Eastern archaeology was the result of her last excavation, Gozlii Kule, in Tarsus, carried out under the auspices of Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, and tire Archaeological Institute of America. She directed tire excavations between 1934 and 1939 and resumed them after World War II from 1947 to 1948. Having selected Tarsus for its potential as a link between east and west, Goldman identified intercon nections with Troy and the Aegean region in pottery as early as Early Bronze Age III (c. 2500 BCE). She also identified evidence for interaction with Mycenaeans or "Sea Peoples" in the pottery of the end of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1200 BCE). The recovery of tablets, inscribed seal impressions, and seals dating to tire Hittite period revealed tire historical importance of Tarsus and its interaction with the Hittite Empire. The meticulous care she gave to excavation, re cording, analysis, and publication of finds and architecture allowed Goldman and later scholars to produce the only re liable stratigraphic sequence for Cilicia from the Neolithic to the Roman period (Goldman, 1956-1963). The Tarsus volumes are still used as a standard reference in comparative
G O L T E P E , site located 2 km from the Kestel mine on top of a large natural hill 4 km (2 mi.) from Camardi, a town in the Taurus Mountains of south-central Turkey (37°5o' N , 34°58' E). T h e natural hill measures close to 60 ha (148 acres) and is fortified at the summit, with cultural deposition covering its surface. Goltepe is located 1,767 m above sea level. In 1988, intensive surface surveys revealed multifaceted molds, tin-rich slagged crucibles, ores, and an estimated fifty thousand ground-stone tools for ore dressing on the site's surface. A total of 698 sq m was excavated at Goltepe in 1990 and 1991 (see below); 2,500 sq m were tested through magnetic resistivity, which indicated anomalies where un derground structures may exist. A total of 858 sq m was excavated at Goltepe in 1993. The excavations aimed at hor izontally exposing as much of an area as possible to obtain settlement layout and densities and differential quarters with special functions and to understand the use of space and the distribution of artifacts. T h e extent of the settlement has now been estimated to be 8-10 ha (148 acres) between the mine and processing and habitation areas. C 1 4 uncalibrated dates from tire 1990 season at the Goltepe site range from 3290 to 1840 BCE. A dendrochronological date of 1978 ± 3 7 years was obtained for a piece of charcoal from a pit fill context. [See Resistivity; Dating Techniques.] The excavations at Goltepe, which began in 1990 and were continued in 1991 and 1993 under the direction of K. Aslihan Yener under the auspices of the Nigde Archaeolog ical Museum (1990-1991) and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (1993), were designed to illuminate tire origins, formation, and organization of a tin-production/ habitation site and its contemporary tin mine. Parallel ex cavations proceeded at the Kestel mine in 1987,1988,1990, and 1992. These sites were discovered during ten years of archaeological and mineralogical surveying in Turkey's metal-rich zones. A result of these surveys was the solution of an enigma that had puzzled scholars for decades: a source of the elusive tin of antiquity. It is tin, when alloyed up to 5-10 percent with copper, that produces bronze. Its eco nomic role in metal technology, prior to the introduction of
GOLTEPE iron, is perhaps akin to that of oil in industry today—that is, it was the most important additive to the then high-tech metal of its age, bronze. T h e alternative form of alloy, made with arsenic (1-5 percent), was widespread in Anatolia in the fourth millennium but diminished witir the use of tin alloys. The project focused on a search for the sources of these vital raw materials in Turkey, die birthplace of some of the earliest pyrotechnological innovations. T h e primary intent was to track down the direction and magnitude of tire traffic in metals and the impact of this trade on the producers of metals. T h e second goal was to understand tire technological processes involved in the manufacture of tools, weapons, and ornaments in the Taurus area, a major source zone ac cessible to neighboring Syria, Mesopotamia, and the coastal Mediterranean. The objectives were multidimensional: where tire sources of metals were, how they were made, and the socioeconomic and political systems that impacted on and in turn were changed by this industry. Goltepe is architecturally unlike any site in Turkey. T h e workshop/habitation units are semisubterranean and fully subterranean pit houses. Apart from its location and time span, the site's relatively unique morphology was created by carving tire clays for habitation. Subterranean structural units were cut into the underlying basal clays using tire outcroppings as walls—that is, the cultural deposition consisted of the accumulation of strata all cut into underlying geologic sediments, a highly unusual architectural feature in Anatolia during this period. Goltepe yielded several neighborhoods of subterranean and semisubterranean pit houses that may have functioned as combined workshop/habitation units. The pit-house structures are cut into tire graywacke bedrock and associated with smaller subsidiary pits. T h e smaller houses measure 4-6 m in diameter. Larger units are 9 X 7 m and are terraced off the slope, much like tire present-day neighboring mountain village, Celaller. The superstructure of these units is wattle and daub, great numbers of branch impressions on mud, structural daub, as well as postholes have been found that may enable a reconsttuction of the architecture of the site. In some instances a dry-laid stone wall served to buttress tire crumbling bedrock. Although very few postholes were identified, a superstructure of wattle and daub is inferred by the branch impressions on vitrified mud lumps in tire collapse levels. T h e units were repeatedly plastered, and up to twenty-five layers of plaster could be identified. Additional smaller pits cut into the bedrock prob ably served storage functions. T h e pits ranged in size from under one meter in diameter and less than 0.5 m in depth to several meters. All of the pits were filled with a similar debris: small to medium stones, ground-stone tools, reliefdecorated slabs, crucible fragments, powdered ore and ore fragments, and ceramic sherds. Some storage pits were identified by pot rests on the bottom for large pithos vessels. Unique also are what appear to be structural features: geo
425
metrically designed clay panels may have decorated the in terior of the pit houses, providing decorative borders for doors, bins, and altars. T h e earliest phase at tire site is phase V, basal pits. Phases III and IV are characterized by subterranean pit structures and storage/refuse pits. Tentatively, tirey correspond to the Early Bronze II period on the basis of pottery parallels with Tarsus. Phase II, which overlies them, represents a stratigraphic break and an architectural reorientation. The phase is characterized by the construction of above-surface struc tures and represents a period of expansion. The walls of the phase II buildings were often built over the underlying pit houses, which were filled in with industrial and domestic debris. Although pit houses continued to be built, large walled structures were erected on top of massive terraces constructed of colluvial stones. In area E, only the terrace is preserved; dre architectural plans of the structure are lost to erosion. T h e circuit wall dates to this phase and corresponds roughly to EB III at Tarsus. At Tarsus there is an architec tural break between EB II and EB III as well, when megaronrelated structures appear. T h e uppermost levels are dated to phase I. These are topsoil and transitional levels and rep resent collapse and site abandonment at the end of the third millennium. In one restricted sector on the eastern slope, an Iron Age reuse of EB pit houses was also identified. Some of the most important finds relating to the process ing of tin have been the hundreds of vitrified earthenware crucibles with a glassy slag accretion rich in tin. Constructed with a coarse straw-and-grit-tempered ware, tirey have slagged surfaces measuring between 30-90 percent tin con tent; they range from a rim size of 6 cm in diameter to one of 50 cm. In some instances, tin particles were entrapped in the slag and identified by microprobe, scanning electron mi croscopy, and X-ray diffraction as the product of tire smelt. [See Spectroscopy; Microscopy; X-ray Diffraction Analy sis.] The activities demonstrated by analysis at the Conser vation Analytical Laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., include a labor-intensive, multistep, low-temperature process carried out between 800° and 950° C. Processing involved intentionally producing tin metal by reduction firing tin oxide in crucibles—with repeated grind ing, washing, panning, and resmelting. The raw materials being processed in the crucibles consisted of tin oxide (cassiterite) witir no copper ores present, along witir calcium carbonate, iron oxide with minor amounts of magnesia and titania, an alumino-silicate containing more titan 12 percent potassia, and soda and charcoal as the reduction agent. This recent evidence put to rest initial skepticism over the con centrations of tin in the Taurus and reveals it to be an im portant tin processing center (Yener et al., 1993a; Yener and Vandiver, 1993b). Large numbers of crucibles came from multicelled struc tures at Goltepe. Along with the crucibles, the pithouse structures contained pyrotechnological installations, many
426
GORDION
ore-processing ground stones, and tin-ore nodules. One pithouse structure revealed an unusual crucible, possibly in situ. Pulverized ore of the consistency of fine powder, con taining from 0 . 3 - 1 . 8 percent tin was discovered in cups in sealed deposits on tire floors of these pit houses. Other in dicators of ore processing and metal production came from the more interesting ore-dressing equipment—large mortars and pesties (weighing 2 6 . 3 kg and 6.5 kg)—used for crush ing the ore. Querns, grinding stones with multiple flat facets, polishing stoires, and large ground-stone axes weighing 2.9 kg, as well as bucking stones with multiple hollows, also in dicate an important commitment to industry. A number of sandstone and clay molds with beds carved on several sur faces with bar-shaped forms suggest that tin metal was being produced and poured into ingot forms before transshipment to locations for bronze alloying. Tin-bronze pins, awls, rings and other fragments containing 4 . 7 5 - 1 2 . 3 percent tin were also found in several of the pit houses. The EB ceramic assemblage at Goltepe is similar to the finds from Kestel mine. Important parallels with Tarsus, Mersin, and Kultepe give comparable chronological spans for both sites. Cups with a single handle and miniature vases, both plain and painted, are dated to roughly the end of the third millennium. Also called Anatolian metallic ware, this pottery was surveyed in the same regions; Machteld Mellink ( 1 9 8 9 ) describes it as an import to Tarsus from the Taurus Mountains and adjoining plateau and suggests con nections with the metal sources. T o prevent confusing it with Syrian metallic wares, this pottery is called Anatolian metallic ware at Goltepe and at Kestel mine. The dark-bur nished wares come in red and black, as well as in a related unburnished variant. Tempered with fine grit and with some chaff, the pottery is handmade and is often slipped. Simple bowls and single-handled cups are some of the more pre dominant shapes. The closest parallels for this pottery come from EB I and II at Tarsus for the plain black-burnished and red-burnished types. The work done at Goltepe has gone a long way toward couching intelligent questions regarding the context and or ganization of tin production in the region: were specialist laborers operating out of a larger site, was it part of a more complex system, was it a cottage industry? The possibilities are interesting and quite varied. Clearly, tin processing oc curred at Goltepe and, to judge from the quantities, on a large scale. [See also Kestel; Taurus Mountains.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Mellink, Machteld. "Anatolian and Foreign Relations of Tarsus." In Anatolia and the Ancient Near East: Studies in Honor of Tahsin Ozgiic, edited by K. Emre et al, pp. 319-331. Ankara, 1989. Vandiver, Pamela B. et al., "Third Millennium B.C. Tin Processing Debris from Goltepe (Anatolia)." In Materials Issues in Art and Ar chaeology, vol. 3, edited by Pamela B. Vandiver et al., pp. 545-569. Pittsburgh, 1992,
Vandiver, Pamela B. et al., "Thermoluminescence Dating of a Crucible Fragment from an Early Tin Processing Site in Turkey." Archaeo metry 35 (1993): 295-298. Yener, K. Aslihan et al., "Reply to J. D. Muhly, 'Early Bronze Age Tin and the Taurus.'" American Journal of Archaeology 97 (1993a): 255264. Yener, K. Aslihan, and Pamela B. Vandiver. "Tin Processing at Gol tepe, an Early Bronze Age Site in Anatolia." American Journal of Archaeology 97 (1993b): 207-238. Yener, K. Aslihan. "Managing Metals: An Early Bronze Age Tin Pro duction Site at Goltepe, Turkey." Oriental Institute News and Notes 140 (1994): 1-4K . ASLIHAN YENER
GORDION. Near the juncture of the Porsuk and Sakarya rivers in central Turkey lies a large, flat-topped mound called Yassihoyuk ( 3 9 ° 3 9 ' N , 32°oo' E ) . T h e form of the site, typical of large, long-term settlements in this region, plus tire presence of small, conical burial mounds on nearby slopes, suggest a place of some importance. In 1 9 0 0 two German scholars, Gustav and August Korte, began to in vestigate the site convinced that their trenches would reveal Gordion, capital of the Phrygian kingdom of the first mil lennium BCE (Korte and Korte, 1 9 0 4 ) . They selected Yassihoyuk because it alone conformed to an ancient his torian's descriptions, which placed Gordion on the Sangarios (Sakarya) River, at a point "equally distant from tire Pontic and Cilician Seas" (Quintus Curtius, Historiae Alexandri Magni Macedonis 3 . 1 . n ) . Today this identification is supported by excavated remains of appropriate scale and date and by associated inscriptions in the Phrygian language; the site has not, however, yielded inscribed material attesting either the place name Gordion or tire name of its most fa mous king, Midas. In fact, with the exception of a few ref erences to well-known historical figures and pivotal events, most of our information about Gordion and the Phrygians comes from archaeology rather than texts. The ancient settlement is actually composed of three dis tinct topographic units (see figure 1 ) . Yassihoyuk itself rises 1 6 m ( 5 2 . 5 ft.) above plain level, and measures 5 0 0 X 3 5 0 m ( 1 , 6 4 0 X 1 1 4 8 f t ) . At least 4 m ( 1 3 ft.) more of archae ological deposit lie beneath the modern land surface; thus, the mound consists of more than 2 0 m ( 6 5 . 6 ft.) of occu pation debris dating from the Early Bronze Age to medieval times. Heavily fortified during much of its history, this area is referred to here as "the Citadel M o u n d " (formerly the "City Mound"). A fortified lower town lies adjacent to the Citadel to tire south and west, and to the north and north west a large, unwalled outer town extends over an area of nearly 1 sq km. Surface survey and excavation conducted between 1 9 8 7 and 1 9 9 4 have provided some information on fluctuations in the size and topography of ancient Gordion. We now know that the lower and outer towns were settled by the seventh century BCE if not earlier; by the third cenmry the lower town had been abandoned, but parts of the outer
GORDION
427
Settlement Areas Old Sakarya River Course Modern Dredged River Course A 0
Tumuli 250
GORDION.
Figure i. Map of the Gordion area. (Courtesy of the Gordion Project)
town were occupied into the Roman period. It is worth not ing that estimates of site size are more likely to be too small than too large because the land surface of ancient times lies buried beneath about 4 m (13 ft.) of alluvium; parts of the site have also been eroded by the meandering Sakarya River, which flowed to the south and east of the site until relatively recently. Scattered along the slopes and ridge tops surrounding Gordion are about one hundred burial mounds or tumuli, of which nearly forty have been investigated by archaeolo gists. T h e greatest number lie to the east, where a linear distribution suggests that they may have lined an ancient road or ceremonial way. T h e mounds vary considerably in size. The largest (Tumulus M M ) is about 50 m (164 ft.) in height with a diameter of nearly 300 m (984 ft.) and some
of the smaller mounds have been so reduced by erosion and plowing (not to mention robber trenches) that they are barely visible. T h e excavated tombs range in date from the eighth to first century. Previous Excavations a t Gordion. Alfred and Gustav Korte placed three trenches on the Citadel Mound and ex cavated five tumuli, two of which produced burials dated to the Early Phrygian period. Far more extensive in scope and duration was the research carried out by the University of Pennsylvania Museum's Gordion Project, directed by Rod ney S. Young. Working with Machteld Mellink and G. Ro ger Edwards, Young excavated for sixteen seasons between 1950 and 1973. On the Citadel, much of a burned settlement destroyed by fire was cleared, providing a rich and unique picture of the Early Phrygian capital. Young's team also ex-
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plored the lower-town fortifications and excavated thirtyone burial mounds. To document earlier periods Young and Mellink dug below the desttuction level until they were stopped by ground water rising in their trenches. This phase of field work ended with Young's accidental deatir in 1974. In 1988 a new cycle of excavation and regional surface survey began, directed by Mary M. Voigt in cooperation with G. Kenneth Sams. The initial goals of Voigt's research were to record a detailed stratigraphic sequence for all pe riods of occupation on the Citadel Mound and to recover information on the economy of the settlement including the subsistence system, land use, and manufacturing. Attention was also focused on tire documentation of domestic archi tecture and on variation in material culture between areas within the city. Archaeological Sequence. The earliest-known occupa tion at Gordion dates to the mid-third millennium, when the settlement consisted of small mud-walled houses sur rounded by an embankment and fortification wall. Material dating to the first half of the second millennium consists primarily of ceramics obtained from die citadel soundings, supplemented by more complete vessels from extramural cemeteries. Better known are the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age settlements. The final Late Bronze Age level (c. 1200) in cludes a house with nearby storage pits, which eventually filled with domestic trash. The house was constructed by cutting a rectangular cellar more than a meter deep and lin ing the walls with large stones; this preparation served as the foundation for a wooden superstructure, with a porch on one end. The settlement is linked to the Hittite Empire by similarities in architecture, ceramics, metal artifacts, and glyptic material. Mass production of ceramics points to an economy based on specialization and exchange. We cannot estimate the size of Gordion at this time, but it appears to be part of a small polity in contact with the Hittites and affiliated with them to some degree. Built directiy above and partially into the ruins of tire Late Hittite building was an Early Iron Age architectural com plex. Small houses, sometimes consisting of a single room, were set in shallow rectilinear pits that were lined with mud plaster or stone slabs. Around tire edge of the house pit were built walls of reeds or other lightweight material covered with mud; characteristic domestic features include ovens and bins built of stone slabs plastered with mud. Found on the floors of these houses were handmade pots fired at low temperatures; tirese vessels are extremely variable in form and decoration, attributes of a household ceramic industry. Architecture, artifacts, and a preliminary assessment of household economy suggest a relatively small and isolated community. This archaeological sequence can be used to address a question raised by historians: What was the relationship be tween the migration of Phrygian speakers from Thrace into
Anatolia, and the fall of tire Hittite Empire? Gordion pro vides no evidence for a significant hiatus in settlement be tween the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age occupations; nevertheless, there are changes in virtually every aspect of material culture between tirese periods. Thus the archaeo logical remains suggest that the Late Bronze Age/Hittite af filiated population moved out of the area or at least away from Gordion and that a new group settled there at near the beginning of the first millennium. Based on admittedly vague similarities between the Early Iron Age pottery at Gordion and roughly contemporary pottery from Thrace, it is reasonable to identify the archaeological remains of this period with the immigration of Phrygian speakers into cen tral Anatolia. T h e Phrygians' growing political power was soon re flected by new construction on the Citadel Mound. A visitor to the heart of Gordion around 800 would have passed through massive fortifications into a small gate building con structed of red, white, and gray stone. Inside, red and white stone paving led to a large court with a packed earth floor; bordering the court were at least two rectangular buildings constructed of soft white stone and wood. One or more of the structures was decorated with stone sculptures in a style related to Syro-Hittite reliefs of the ninth century. With the exception of the fortification system, all of these structures were demolished as part of a rebuilding of the elite quarter during the eighth century, and it is die latter architectural phase that was preserved by fire and explored by Rodney Young. In 700 the kingdom of Phrygia was ruled by a king known as Midas to tire Greeks, and Mita of Muski to the Assyrians. By this time Gordion had grown and may have covered much of the area now lying beneath Yassihoyuk. There were now two distinct zones within tire city: the walled elite quar ter to the east, and an area to the west, which was presum ably occupied by ordinary people. Although only 2 sq m (2.4 sq. ft.) of tire western zone has been excavated, the elite quarter has been exposed over an area of more than 2 ha (5 acres). Inside its walls were three functionally differentiated zones that were physically separated by walls and changes in level: a palace complex divided into two courts; two long service buildings; and a large building composed of small cell-like rooms (see figure 2). The stone-paved outer court of the palace complex was bordered to both east and west by large megarons (halls) built of stone or mud brick with timber elements, and possibly gabled roofs made of reeds covered with clay. Because the outer-court buildings were empty when discovered, there is little direct evidence of their precise function, but from their location we may surmise that they housed reception and storage areas, and one build ing may have been a temple. The most elaborate structure (Megaron 2) had a multicolored pebble mosaic floor set in geometric motifs; incised on the soft-stone walls of this building were many graffiti, showing gable-roofed buildings,
GORDION birds, animals, and (occasionally) people. Although these "doodles" may simply be the work of people waiting to see officials or members of the royal household, some scholars see hawk and lion graffiti as evidence tiiat Megaron 2 was a cult building dedicated to Matar or Cybele—the primary Phrygian goddess, who is often depicted with raptors and lions. A thick wall separated die outer court from an inner court, which was again bordered by megarons. T h e largest of these (Megaron 3) contained large quantities of smashed and charred artifacts including metal and ceramic storage and serving vessels, foodstuffs, carved wooden furniture, ivory inlays, and textiles. Either this building or the adjacent M e garon 4 (which was disturbed after the fire and so presumed to have contained things worth salvaging) probably served as the royal residence. Another partition wall separated the inner court from a structure made up of small rectangular rooms; this structure was used for many years after the fire. Artifacts provide no clue to its function during the Early Phrygian period.
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T o the west of the palace complex was a high terrace with two long service buildings facing each other across a broad street. Each building is divided into a series of megaron units consisting of a large inner room with central hearth and a smaller anteroom. The rooms often contained ovens, and most had rows of grinding stones set on mud platforms. Their function as cooking and storage areas is also indicated by charred grain and other seeds and masses of pottery. Other evidence for domestic production includes spindle whorls, loomweights, and partially woven textile fragments. T w o rooms stored more valuable items such as imported ivory horse trappings, bronze vessels, and animal figurines, and gold and electrum jewelry. T h e wealth and craftsmanship of the Phrygians suggested by charred and broken fragments within the Citadel are clearly documented by tombs, especially Tumulus M M and P. Huge conical mounds of clay and stone were laid over wooden chambers containing elaborately inlaid wooden fur niture, local and imported pottery of high quality, bronze and brass vessels, and jewelry such as belts and fibulae
GORDION. Figure 2. Plan of the Early Phrygian period. (Courtesy of the Gordion Project)
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(brooches). The largest tumulus (MM) is interpreted by many as the tomb of Midas, who supposedly committed suicide when his kingdom was desttoyed by the Cimmerians shortly after 700. Other scholars prefer a late eighth-century date for the log tomb chamber and/or its contents and sug gest that an earlier ruler was interred there—perhaps Midas's father. Lying above the ruins of the destruction level on the Cit adel is a 3-5-meter-thick layer of clay supporting new stone buildings that had rubble foundations set deeply into the clay. In plan, the elite quarter of the rebuilt or Middle Phryg ian settlement replicates key elements of the Early Phrygian settlement lying directly below. There are differences, how ever, in construction methods and in the plan of individual structures, especially the gate building. With its increased height and massive polychrome walls, the settlement dom inated the surrounding countryside. Its topography was rel atively complex. The walled elite quarter and the western residential zone (also built on a 5-6-meter-thick layer of clay) were distinct mounds, separated by a broad, paved avenue, which led south, presumably into the lower town. It is not clear whether the western mound was fortified, but protected by its own height it contained well-built houses, which probably belonged to merchants or minor officials. In the lower town, stone and mud buildings were protected by 3.5-meter-fhick fortification walls with square towers set at regular intervals; the walls were anchored by a mud-brick fortress (the Kticuk Hoytik). On the slopes to the north and west of the twin mounds lay the unfortified outer town where houses may have been interspersed with gardens or small fields. The absolute date of the Middle Phrygian rebuilding, and therefore its historical significance, has been the subject of considerable discussion, debate, and revision. Although Rodney Young had long thought that Gordion was rebuilt during the second half of the sixth century, after the Persians gained power in central Anatolia, during the last years of his life he placed the rebuilding in the first half of the sixth cen tury. This dating has been accepted by other scholars, some of whom credit the Lydians with support for this project if not direct sponsorship (see, e.g., DeVries, 1990, pp. 391392). New evidence challenges this view, suggesting that the rebuilding process began almost immediately after the fire and was completed by the middle of the seventh century, if not earlier (Voight, 1994; see also Henrickson, 1994). If this dating is correct, the Phrygian political system was not de stroyed in 700, and the ruling elite was able to mobilize a substantial labor force to recreate and enhance a citadel that was both product and symbol of their right to collect tribute or taxes. By the early sixth century, Phrygian Gordion was cer tainly under strong Lydian influence, incorporated into the kingdom of Alyattes and Croesus. This situation ended when Cyrus the Great took the city in 547, an event docu
mented in the archaeological record by the destruction of the Ktictik Hoytik fortress. Under the Persians, Gordion was reduced in importance as a political center, but its role as an economic center continued or was perhaps enhanced by the unification of Anatolia within the Persian Empire. One source of prosperity seems to be manufacturing, with evi dence for the production of stone, bone, ivory, and metal artifacts. The items received in exchange for such goods included Attic and Lydian fine wares and Greek wines. Gor dion under the Achaemenids was in fact a fascinating place: juxtaposed with elements of indigenous Phrygian material culture were new Iranian ceramic forms and horse harness, a building decorated with painted tiles in Lydian style, and a room decorated with polychrome murals painted in Greek style. No archaeological remains testify to the visit of Alexander the Great in 334/33, but its effect is clear. Gordion became thoroughly hellenized, as evidenced by Greek inscriptions and graffiti, Greek style house plans and grain mills, and the importation of masses of black-glazed pottery. The settle ment appears to have been reduced in size, but ashlar (dressed masonry) walls indicate the presence of one or more monumental structures, this time in the northwest quadrant of the citadel. The low street between the two mounds was filled, and houses were built above the former palace quarter and its walls. The best known phase of the Hellenistic occupation is also the latest. Early in the second century, houses on the Citadel caught fire and were aban doned with tiieir contents left in situ. T h e Roman historian Livy provides an explanation for this catastrophe (History of Rome 38.12.1-27.9). At the end of the third century Gor dion was an oppidum or hill fort occupied by immigrant Galatian mercenaries. In 189 the Roman consul and general Manlius Vulso campaigned against the Galatians in Ana tolia. When he came to Gordion, its inhabitants had fled, and he found an empty settlement, which he presumably looted of its more valuable items before setting it afire. Nearly two centuries later, Roman settlers reestablished Gordion, which was known in Latin as Gordium. Although the settlement was small (Strabo refers to it as a "village" in Geog. 12.5.3, 568), it may have been important as a market and source of agricultural products. This function is sug gested by the location of Gordion along the road between Pessinus and Ancyra, cities founded by the Romans after the annexation of Galatia into the empire in 27. Gordion's prosperity is indicated by imported red-glazed ceramics from the settlement and by grave goods deposited in cem eteries located in the lower town and on the east slopes of the valley. Cremations and inhumations were sometimes ac companied by glass or pottery vessels as well as jewelry in corporating carved stone signets. When Roman prosperity declined in Asia Minor during the initial phase of warfare with the Sasanian Empire in the second half of the third century CE, Gordion was again abandoned. It was briefly
GRANARIES AND SILOS occupied during medieval times, but excavated material from graves and houses has not been analyzed or precisely dated. BIBLIOGRAPHY DeVries, Keith. "The Gordion Excavation Seasons of 1969-1973 and Subsequent Research." American Journal of Archaeology 94 (1990): 371-406. The most recent summary of chronology and architecture from Young's excavations, especially important for its well-illus trated discussion of a construction project underway when the Early Phrygian citadel was destroyed. DeVries's definition of the Middle and Late Phrygian periods still stands, but chronology and details have been revised as a result of more recent excavation. Gunter, Ann C. The Gordion Excavations, 1950-1973:
FinalReports, vol.
3, The Bronze Age. Philadelphia, 1991. Catalogue of the Bronze Age pottery and a discussion of the place of Gordion within Bronze Age Anatolia. Henrickson, Robert C. "Continuity and Discontinuity in the Ceramic Tradition at Gordion during the Iron Age." In Anatolian Iron Ages 3: The Proceedings of the Third International Anatolian Iron Ages Sym
posium Held at Van, 6-12 August 1990, edited by David H. French and Altan Cilingiroglu, pp. 95-129. London, 1994. Presents the first comprehensive ceramic typology for Gordion, as well as evidence critical for an understanding of the Early Iron Age and the arrival of the Phrygians. Krjrte, Gustav, and Alfred Korte. Gordion: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabung im Jahre 1900. Berlin, 1904. While difficult to obtain, this volume contains a full discussion of the historical sources related to Gordion, and the argument for the identification of Yassihoyuk as Gordion. Mellink, Machteld J. "The Native Kingdoms of Anatolia." In The Cam bridge Ancient History, vol. 3, pp. 619-665. New York, 1991. Excel lent summary of the archaeology and history of Phrygians and Lydians, providing additional information on the Early Phrygian period and a context for events at Gordion. Mitchell, Stephen. Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. I , The Celts in Anatolia and the Impact of Roman Ride. New York,
1993. Comprehensive and lucid account of historical and archaeo logical evidence for the emigration of the Celts, their roles as mer cenaries and setders, and their incorporation in the Roman empire. Muscarella, Oscar White. Bronze and Iron: Ancient Near Eastern Arti facts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1988. Excellent
introduction to the material culture of the Near East, including the Phrygians and their contemporaries, witii summary sections provid ing overviews as well as a guide to key sources. Sams, G. Kenneth. The Gordion Excavations, 1950-1973: FinalReports, vol. 4, The Early Phrygian Pottery. Philadelphia, 1994. Contains a
detailed description of Early Phrygian ceramics and their distribution of types within architectural units on the Citadel Mound and in con temporary tumuli. Source: Notes in the Flistory of Art. 7.3-4 (1988). Collection of essays on Phrygian art and archaeology written in 1987, with useful discussions on Phrygian religion (Buluc and Roller) and Early Phrygian furni ture (Simpson), as well as the only published summary on Hellenistic Gordion (Winter). G. Kenneth Sams presents his view of the de velopment of Phrygian material culture as a merging of European and Anatolian elements. Voigt, Mary M. "Excavations at Gordion, 1988-89: The Yassihoyuk Stratigraphic Sequence." In Anatolian Iron Ages 3: The Proceedings of the Third International Anatolian Iron Ages Symposium Held at Van,
6-12 August 1990, edited by David H. French and Altan Cilingiroglu, pp. 265-291. London, 1994. Summary of tire stratigraphy and chro nology of Gordion from the Late Bronze Age through the Late Phrygian period as understood from excavations in 1988-1989.
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Young, Rodney S., et al. The Gordion Excavations, 1950-1973: Final Reports, vol. 1, Three Great Early Tumuli. Philadelphia, 1981. Com
pleted by Young's colleagues after his death, this volume provides a complete description of tomb architecture and the spectacular wooden and metal finds within them. The introduction contains a list of major preliminary reports on the Young excavations, including dissertations, MARY M . VOIGT
GRAINS. See Cereals. GRANARIES AND SILOS. T h e beginning of grain storage can be attributed to surplus production associated with tire domestication of cereals and otirer crops at tire be ginning of tire Neolitiric period. As social structures devel oped, so did different types of grain-storage facilities that were either publicly or privately owned. Such facilities were subterranean or above ground; tire grain was deposited in bulk or in containers. Most above-ground facilities seem to have been publicly owned. Some of the earliest have been found in the Ubaid 4 level at Tell el-'Oueili in Iraq (Huot, 1992, p. 192); how ever, dre shape of the superstructure is unknown. T h e de velopment of beehive-shaped granaries for storage in bulk probably originated in Egypt in the Early Bronze Age (Bo rowski, 1987, p . 76) and spread to Palestine. Remains of similar structures dating to the EB II and EB III were dis covered at Arad (Currid, 1986) and Beth-Yerah (Mazar, 1990), respectively. T h e latter, which could hold 2,250 cubic meters of grain, was made of nine circular structures con nected to what appears to be a temple (Mazar, 1990, pp. 129-130). Similar buildings were discovered in Anatolia and on Crete. Artistic representations show that this type of gra nary also continued in use during the New Kingdom (Gressmann, 1927, pi. 177). These structures were filled through windows at the top by ladder-climbing, grain-car rying workers and emptied through doors at the bottom. Remains of Late Bronze Age beehive granaries were found at Bir el-'Abd in northern Sinai, where a fort from the time of Seti I was maintained (Oren, 1973). Similar structures dating to the Hellenistic period were discovered at Tell Jemmeh by Sir William Flinders Petrie (1928, pp. 8-9, pi. 14) and more recentiy by Gus Van Beek (1986). T h e absence of remains of beehive granaries during the Iron Age gives credence to Petrie's suggestion that the structures at Tell Jemmeh were constructed under foreign influence, possibly from Mesopotamia. During the Iron Age, the main publicly owned storage facilities were the tripartite, pillared buildings uncovered at Tell el-Hesi, Tell Qasile, Tell Abu Hawam, Megiddo, Ha zor, and Beersheba. At Tel Fladar (Kochavi et a l , 1992, pp. 36-41) the only above-ground, rectangular grain-storage complex known from tire Iron Age Levant was recentiy dis-
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covered, attached to a tripartite building. T h e function of tire tripartite buildings is controversial; some consider them stables. Another common type oflron Age storehouse, with long rooms and thick walls, has been discovered at Jericho, Lachish, Megiddo, Beth-Shemesh, Tell Jemmeh, Tell enNasbeh, and Tell Beit Mirsim (Borowski, 1987; pp. 78-79), in which jars and other vessels such as jugs and bowls held commodities. In tire Bible, storehouses are called miskendt, from the Akkadian maskanati. During the Roman Empire, granary construction was standardized. Whether for civilian or military use, granary buildings were long and narrow with thick walls, raised floors, and proper ventilation. Examples can be found throughout the former Roman Empire in cities, at harbors, and at military installations (Rickman, 1980). Subterranean facilities were publicly and privately owned. This type of storage facility dates back to the time of the Neolithic revolution. Some of the earliest grain-storage pits have been discovered at Maghzaliyeh (Iraq) dating to tire seventh millennium BCE (Huot, 1992, p. 189). Plastered sub terranean granaries have been found at Gezer in Iron Age I and Middle Bronze IIA levels. T h e stone-lined, sometimes plastered, storage pit was a very common feature in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, in both large and small communities. Privately owned storage pits have been discovered near
GRANARIES A N D SILOS. Stone-lined
Archives)
dwellings and in courtyards at Tell Beit Mirsim, Tzbet Sartah, Beersheba, Tell Halif, and many other sites. One of the best examples of publicly owned storage pits, or silos, was found at Megiddo. There, a round pit has two sets of stairs along the wall to facilitate tire heavy traffic of workers bringing in or taking away grain. Storage pits at Beersheba had mortars and grinding stones set next to their rim to en able more efficient grinding of grain. Tell Beit Mirsim and Beersheba may be the only sites where an Iron Age cellar was used for storage in jars. The biblical term for a privately owned storage pit is 'asam*. Publicly owned grain-storage facilities were mostiy used for the collection and disbursement of revenues to function aries, such as the civic and religious bureaucracy and tire military. Private facilities were located close to or in dwell ings, to facilitate tire use of grain in daily food preparation and to store seeds. [See also Agriculture; Cereals; and Food Storage. In ad dition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY Borowski, Oded. Agriculture in Iron Age Israel, Winona Lake, Ind., 1987. The most recent work combining biblical and archaeological infor mation about Israelite agriculture.
(storage?) bin from stratum
VII at Tel Halif, (Courtesy ASOR
GRAVE GOODS Currid, John D. "The Beehive Building of Ancient Palestine." Biblical Archaeologist 49 (1986): 20-24. Recent treatment of this and other types of granaries. Gressmann, Hugo. Akorientalische
Texts und Bilder zum Alten Testa
ment, Berlin, 1927. A very good collection of artistic representations related to biblical topics from the ancient Near East. Huot, Jean-Louis. "The First Farmers at Oueili." Biblical Archaeologist 55 ( 992): 188-195. Coverage of early Mesopotamian settlements, in an issue devoted to the region. Kochavi, Moshe et al., "The Land of Geshur." Biblical Archaeology Review 18 (July-August 1992): 30-44, 84-85. First English-language report of this excavation. Mazar, Amihai. "On the Significance of the Early Bronze III 'Circles Building' at Beth-Yerah" (in Hebrew). Shenaton le-Mikra ule-heker ha-mizrah ha-Kadum (Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies) 10 (1990): 123-135, The most recent treatment of this structure and its possible function. Oren, Eliezer D. "Notes and News: Bir el-'Abd (Northern Sinai)." Israel Exploration Journal 23 (1973): 112-113. Report of this discov ery. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Gerar. London, 1928. Final report on the ex cavations and discoveries. T
Rickman, Geoffrey. Roman Granaries and Store Building. Cambridge,
1980. Important work on the design and construction of civil and military granaries and storehouses throughout the Roman Empire. Van Beek, Gus W. "Are There Beehive Granaries at Tell Jemmeh? A Rejoinder." Biblical Archaeologist 49 (1986): 245-247. Important treatment of the beehive granary. ODED BOROWSKI
G R A P E S . See Viticulture.
G R A V E G O O D S . T h e objects that accompany the dead in mortuary contexts are widely interpreted as part of the sustenance required in a postmortem existence (the netherworld or afterlife). T h e repertoire of grave goods is usually similar but not identical to that of domestic contexts; particular shapes or types of decoration are sometimes re served for burial alone. Tombs also tend to contain richer assemblages per square meter than living contexts. While in some cases tiiis wealth may actually reflect the elite status of the dead or the cultic nature of mortuary rites, it more often seems to mirror the perceived importance of wealth in the hereafter, using a fairly standardized format and inventory. Food and drink were ubiquitous provisions, preserved in the form of animal bones (cuts of meat), open vessels (for per ishable produce), and closed vessels (liquids: wine, oil, water and perhaps milk for infants). Other containers, fashioned of exotic materials—alabaster, faience, and glass—may have contained cosmetics, ointments, or processed, scented oils. A grave good inventory can reflect social status. Warrior status is inferred by the presence of weapons in certain bur ials, generally of adult males. Equid (usually donkey) burials in Middle Bronze Age tombs at Jericho, Tell el-'Ajjul, and Tell ed-Dab'a, for example, probably imply status distinc tion as well—perhaps that of a merchant. [See Jericho; 'Ajjul,
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Tell el-; Dab'a, Tell ed-.] Some Mesopotamian necropoli show a disparity in grave good affluence that may betoken social stratification (e.g., Tepe Gawra, Ur, and Assur). [See Tepe Gawra; Ur; Assur.] T h e same was true for Egypt, al beit to a lesser extent, because it is probable that only the upper classes are represented in the archaeological record. Certain tombs or burial sites whose contents are several de grees more profligate than other contemporary burials may be interpreted as elite tombs (e.g., the Royal Cemetery of Ur, the royal necropoli on the west bank of the Nile in Egypt, and, probably, the Chalcolithic Nahal Mishmar "hoard" in Israel). [See Judean Desert Caves; Cave Tombs.] Subsidi ary, "servant" burials appended to larger, more extravagant ones have been discerned at the Royal Cemetery of Ur in southern Mesopotamia and at Tell ed-Dab'a in the Egyptian Delta. Graves of the southern Levant show less class divi sion based on wealth, though the sample may not be com pletely representative if, in certain periods, only the elite adopted enduring tomb types. In the soutiiern Levant, the Middle Bronze Age cemeter ies show the greatest variety of offerings and status catego ries. Infants are found buried without offerings or with just a few—a juglet near the mouth and a talismanic scarab are the most common. Tombs of children tend to contain an equally modest array, though they rarely lack offerings com pletely. Adult interments are generally the most affluent, each corpse typically being accompanied by a number of objects of the kind described above. T h e Middle Bronze and Roman period tombs at Jericho have been especially instrumental in permitting an under standing of the nature of grave goods because of the re markable preservation of their organic contents. T h e many wooden objects—beds, stools, headrests, bowls, boxes, and combs—and the remains of foodstuffs—cuts of meat, pomegranates, and grapes—reveal that such organic mate rials were used more frequently than the remains of other tomb assemblages suggest. Subtle changes occurred during that time: in the southern Levant, cooking pots, for example, only became statistically significant as a grave good in the Iron Age and truly com mon in the Hellenistic-Roman period. In the grave good assemblages of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine pe riods glass vessels, lamps, unguentaria, and various personal possessions are commonly found. In coffin burials tiiese of ferings were placed inside the coffin. In ossuary burials, the presents were most often found next to, but not inside, the box. [See Ossuary.] A new custom of the period, introduced by Flellenistic culture, was the placing of coins on the eyes or in the mouth of the deceased for paying ferry charges to Charon to cross the river Styx. This was a common practice among Gentiles but is rarely found in Jewish tombs. The placement of grave goods was a normal, if not uni versal, practice until the Islamic period. Theological devel opments in the classical periods were paralleled first by
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changes in the way burial offerings were perceived and later by dre gradual cessation of the practice. T h e frequent oc currence of defective goods and Mishnaic writings decrying the wasteful disposal of wealth in Jewish burials suggest that burial offerings came to be considered nonessential or purely symbolic, and eventually as superfluous and down right sinful. [See also Burial Sites; and Burial Techniques.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the
Dead, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 123. Sheffield, 1992. Comprehensive study of Iron Age burial practices in Judah from both an archaeological and biblical point of view. Chapter 2 deals with burial contents. Campbell, Stuart, and Anthony Green, eds. The Archaeology of Death in the Ancient Near East. Oxford, 1995. Collection of articles dealing with mortuary practices from prehistory to the modern era, including a trove of new data. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel.
Leiden, 1988. See chapter 4, "Funerary Customs and Art," for a good synopsis of Late Second Temple period burial practices; weak on Jewish mortuary behavior of the later Roman and Byzantine pe riod. Kenyon, Kathleen M. Digging Up Jericho. London, 1957. Lively ac count of the Jericho excavations containing detailed descriptions of tombs and their contents from the Natufian period through the Iron Age. Still the site with the longest, best-excavated, and best-reported burial sequence available for the southern Levant. Palumbo, Gaetano. "'Egalitarian' or 'Stratified' Society? Some Notes on Moruiary Practices and Social Structure at Jericho in EB IV." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 267 (1987):
43-59. Good example of the criteria and statistical techniques that can be used (and abused) to infer social structure. Rahmani, L. Y. "Ancient Jerusalem's Funerary Customs and Tombs." Biblical Archaeologist 45 (1982): 43-53, 109-119. Deals with, among other things, the religious beliefs and the social and psychological motivations behind burial offerings or the lack thereof. Woolley, C. Leonard, et al. Ur Excavations. Vols. 2-9. Publications of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia. London, 19341962. Excavation reports containing a wealth of mortuary data en compassing approximately 3,500 years, with a range of social strata represented for some periods. DAVID ILAN
G R E E K . A highly inflected language, Greek encodes the syntactical structure of the sentence by accentuation of words rather than by word order. Verbs are typically marked to express tense, mood, voice, person, and number, and ad jectives, articles, pronouns and nouns can be marked to re flect gender, number, and case. Greek, like Latin, Sanskrit, and German, has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. In addition to singular and plural, classical Greek (like Sanskrit) has a dual. T h e eight Indo-European cases were reduced to five in Greek: nominative, vocative, accu sative, genitive, and dative. Greek (again like Sanskrit), has three voice distinctions: active, passive, and middle (which
has a generally reflexive meaning). In classical Attic prose, accent was based on differences in pitch (i.e., the high tone is the accent of a word), and duration. Poetry, however, had duration only. Unlike Latin, the rules of accent involve pri marily the vowel elements. During the fifth and fourth cen turies BCE, Attic developed two phonemic subsystems re vealed through orthographical variations in inscriptional evidence, a conservative subsystem with six vocalic pho nemes /z, e, a, 0, it, y\, and sixteen consonantal phonemes /p, t, k, b, d, g, ph, th, kh, s, z, h, I, r, m, «/, and an innovative subsystem consisting of eight vocalic phonemes /i, e, e, a, 0, 0, w, y/, though retaining the same sixteen consonantal pho nemes (Teodorsson 1978, pp. 94-98). History of Greek. Included under the generic linguistic term Greek are several related dialects that can be traced back to a reconstructed Proto-Greek language, which in turn derives from the Indo-European family of languages. T h e Greeks called themselves Hellenes, recognizing mutual ties of history, language, and culture. They labeled everyone else as barbaroi (i.e., non-Greeks). It is uncertain just how tire Romans came to call the Hellenes Graeci (a latinized form of the Greek term Graikoi, of uncertain etymology) and their language as Graecum (Apollodorus, 1.7.3; Aristotle, Meteorologica 1.352a), perhaps because the first Hellenes whom the Romans encountered were the settlers in Cyme north of the Bay of Naples called Graii after their place of origin, Graia in Euboea (Homer, Iliad 2.498). During the late re public and early empire many Romans used a diminutive to refer disparagingly to Greeks as Graeculi (Cicero, De oratore 1.47; Pliny, Epistula 10.40.2). Some Romans even described the philhellene emperor Hadrian disparagingly as agraeculus (Historia Augusta Hadrian 1.5). T h e Indo-European family of languages includes most European languages as well as Sanskrit. Basque, the Finno-Ugric languages, and ancient Etruscan are major exceptions. T h e two major divisions of Indo-European are the eastern satem languages (Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, Albanian, Tocharian) and the western centum languages (Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Greek, Hittite), though this division is not without difficulties. T h e comparison of numerals from one through ten in a selection of these languages in table 1 reveals a genetic relationship still recognizable despite various vocalic and consonantal shifts and transformations. Linear B syllabary. Speakers of Proto-Greek very prob ably arrived in the Greek peninsula about the beginning of the second millennium BCE. T h e earliest written Greek is found in the syllabic inscriptions on clay tablets of Linear B, now called Mycenaean Greek. It is found on Crete at Knossos and on mainland Greece at Pylos, Mycenae, and Thebes, This syllabary originated in the Mycenaean and Minoan periods (1450-1200) and served tire needs of the royal administration, particularly the scribes. T h e syllabary consisted of eighty-seven signs representing a consonantvowel combination (e.g., da, do, de, du) and did not distin-
GREEK TABLE I . Numerals
in Selected Indo-European
435
Languages
English
Sanskrit
Greek
Latin
Gothic
Indo-European
one
ekas
heis
unus
ains
*sem
two
duva, dve
duo
duo
twai
*duwo
three
trayas
treis
tres
trija
*trejes
four
catvaras
tettares
quattuor
fidwor
*q e-twores
five
paftca
pente
quinque
fimf
*penq e
six
sas-
hex
sex
saihs
*s(w)eks
seven
sapta
hepta
septem
sibun
*septm
eight
asta
okt5
octo
ahtau
*okto
nine
nava
ermea
novem
niun
*newn
ten
dasa
deka
decern
taihun
*dekm(t)
1
w
w
'All items in this column (marked with an asterisk) are reconstructed, nonattested forms in Proto-Indo-European.
guish between r and /. T h e decipherment of the syllabic script of Linear B shows a close relationship witir later Greek dialects, particularly Arcado-Cypriot, which was located in the central Peloponnesus and Cyprus. T h e comparison in table 2 of some common Greek words with transliterated Mycenaean syllabic symbols suggests that Linear B is in fact an earlier form of Greek. Adoption of the Alphabet. Mycenaean civilization dis integrated about 1200 BCE approximately the same time as the fall of Troy. The collapse of Mycenaean civilization was closely followed by the Dorian migrations into Greece, but there are no distinctive material features tirat allow archae ologists to identify this invasion. Survivors of the various conflicts at this time, tire so-called Sea Peoples (i.e., Philis tines, Sicilians, Tyrrhenians, Etruscans, and Sardinians), moved along the Mediterranean coast and settled in differ ent places. This cultural collapse was followed by the Dark Age (c. 1100-950), an era of illiteracy in which earlier writ ing was only a dim memory. A written form of the Greek language appears again toward the end of the eighth century in an alphabetic script borrowed from North Semitic (see figure 1). The earliest evidence for Greek alphabetic writing is found on the Dipylon Jug (c. 724), a few decades after Greek trade with the eastern Mediterranean had resumed. T h e Greeks called their alphabet grammata phoinikeia, "Phoenician letters" (Herodotus, 5.58; Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, ed. W. Dittenberger, Hildesheim, i960 38.37; Diodorus, 5.74.1) and believed that the alphabet was intro-
TABLE 2.
Comparison
of Equivalent
Greek and Mycenaean
Words
English
Greek
Mycenaean Greek
king
basileus
pa-si-re-u
priest
hiereus
i-je-re-u
fuller
knapheus
ka-na-pe-u
duced by the Phoenicians accompanying Cadmus, king of Tyre, who settled in Thebes (Herodotus, 5.58; Diodorus, 3.67.1; see Tacitus, Annals n . 1 4 ) . Rhys Carpenter has ar gued persuasively that the Greek alphabet was taken over and modified only shortly before the first extant written in scriptions, that is, in the latter half of the eighth century BCE (Carpenter, 1933). This alphabet existed in a large number of local variations (seejeffery, 1967), though the Ionic form eventually predominated over the many epichoric alphabets. Major dialects. By tire fifth century, two major groups of Greek dialects appeared. West Greek included "strict" Doric dialects (Laconian, Messenian, Cretan, Cyrenaean), "middle" Doric dialects (West Argolic, East Aegean Doric), and "mild" Doric dialects (Megarian, Corinthian, East Ar golic, Nordrwest dialects). East Greek (or non-West Greek) included Attic-Ionic (Attica, Euboea, the Cycladic islands and the coast of Asia Minor), Aeolic (island of Lesbos, Thessalia, Boeotia), and Arcado-Cypriot or Achaean (spo ken in central Peloponnesus and Cyprus). The Greeks themselves distinguished four dialects—Attic, Ionic, Doric, and Aeolic (Strabo, 8.1.2; 14.5.26): Following tire Dark Age, a period of Greek colonial ex pansion began during the mid-eighth century, motivated both by merchants seeking profit and by hunger for land. Various groups of Greeks from the mainland, the Pelopon nesus, and the coast of Asia Minor founded colonies and established trade throughout much of die Mediterranean world. Two of the earliest trading centers were founded by u-aders from Chalcis and Eretria in Euboea, Al Mina at the mouth of tire Orontes River in northern Syria in tire east, and tire island of Ischia (Pithecusae) north of the Bay of Naples in tire west. Among the earliest Greek inscriptions extant is the longest eighth-century inscription, a graffito on a Geometric-period cup from Ischia in Euboean Greek (Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, vol. 14, edited by A. G. Woodhead, 1957, p. 604). Later colonies were founded on the coast of the Black Sea, tire Propontis (the narrow
436
GREEK
independence and isolation of die Greek city-states had en couraged the preservation of local dialects, but the formation 800-600 Attic (400) Name Name c. 900 BCE of political leagues tended to foster linguistic homogenizaalpha AAA A alef tion. The key role Atliens had played in resisting and de feating the Persians in the early fifth century ( 4 9 0 - 4 7 9 ) was beta bet E H B 29 parlayed into political power through the formation of die gamma gimel A*\ r r-c r First Maritime League. T h e linguistic corollary of the en delta >AD A dalet A4A suing sociopolitical developments was that Attic replaced E epsilon he fcEE 33 Ionic as the most prestigious Greek dialect; mercenaries in (digamma) waw y ym PFC the Athenian army and fleet had to learn Attic, the language zeta zayin I a:I 1=1 I of command. After unifying Macedonia, Philip II of M a eta het BHH H cedon ( 3 7 2 - 3 3 6 ) defeated the Athenians and the Thebans theta tet ®@ @©o 0 at the battle of Chaeronea, tiiereby forming an extensive iota yod I Greco-Macedonian empire. Philip adopted Greek culture to kappa kaf K provide cohesion to his empire, and made Attic Greek, the dialect of Atiiens, the official language of his court and his lamda lamed U Is A A diplomatic correspondence, transforming what was primar mu mem M ily a local dialect in the fifth century into Imperial Attic, a nu nun N new common dialect. This policy was continued by Alex ksi samek ander III ( 3 5 6 - 3 2 3 ) , better known as Alexander the Great, omikron ayin O O 0 who succeeded Philip in 3 3 6 and immediately planned and pe P >i pi rr expedited the invasion and conquest of the Persian Empire, sade (san) M whose official lingua franca was Aramaic. As he marched (qoppa) qof through Asia Minor, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt, and then 99 proceeded east by means of the Fertile Crescent through rho res' 44 P PD* Mesopotamia to India, Alexander established numerous sin/Sin sigma W city-states and military garrisons that were populated with tau taw T T + X Greek-speaking Macedonian soldiers, veterans, and upsilon Y KYV thousands of Greek settlers including artisans and mer phi •
GREEK
s
*
e
mon dialect was based on fourth-century Attic Greek and was in use from the late fourth century BCE to the mid-sixth century CE, when it developed into Byzantine Greek. T h e
Written Koine was a uniform language tiiat had no local dialects but exhibited only stylistic, lexical, and phonological variation. Hellenistic Koine became the standard language
GREEK of Greece and was realized in many regional phonological substandards, that is, Attic-Ionic, Aegean-Doric, AchaeanDoric, Northwest-Doric, South-East Aegean, Egyptian, Syro-Palestinian, and Asia Minor (Bubenik, 1989, pp. 175255). The uniform character of tire written language appears to have contributed to tire standardization of the spoken lan guage. The transformation from Attic to Koine was char acterized by a variety of linguistic developments that oc curred throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods: (1) T h e Attic preference for the double consonant -tt- (as in thalatta, "sea") was bypassed by the Koine preference for ss- (as in thalassa); -ss- was actually an earlier preference of the Athenian tragedians and Thucydides; (2) in Koine there was an increasing tendency to ignore the Attic distinction between long and short vowels; (3) the athematic aorist dis appeared; (4) the optative became obsolete; (5) the dative was gradually phased out; (6) prepositions were increasingly used to indicate case relations; (7) the Greek vowels or diph thongs i, ei, e, oi, and u were pronounced so similarly that they were frequently interchanged in orthography during the Roman period; (8) the sounds of 0 and d, e and ai, ei and z, ou, and u were confused orthographically. Greek in t h e N e a r East. During tire Mycenaean and Minoan periods, mainland Greece and Crete had extensive commercial contacts with the Near East. T h e Mycenaeans apparently brought their language to Cyprus. T h e ArcadoCypriot dialect is known exclusively from inscriptions in the Cypriot syllabary (related to Linear A), used from the sev enth to the third century) Pottery from Mycenaean Greece and Cyprus were discovered at Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) in northern Syria as well as tablets in tire still-undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script. Although interrupted by the dissolution of Mycenaean-Minoan civilization, com mercial contacts were renewed and extended when Greek city-states began extensive colonization in the eighth cen tury. Throughout the Hellenistic cities of Egypt and Syria-Palestine, tire middle- and upper-class Greeks lived in relative isolation from the natives; consequently, the influ ence of indigenous languages (e.g., ancient Egyptian, Ara maic, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic) was not strong. Greek was still spoken in the Hellenistic cities in the former Persian Empire, such as Seleucia on the Tigris and Susa. In the sixteen Roman provinces of the Greek East, the use of tire Greek language was dominant and was the language of local Roman administration. Many Greeks, however, dis regarding the existence of the Roman Empire, continued to divide humanity into two categories, Greeks and barbarians (Strabo, 6.1.2; Dio Chrysostom, Orations 1.14; Josephus, Antiquities 18.20; Philo, Legatio 8, 83, 145, 292), and Apollonius of Tyana supposedly divided the Roman world up into Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking provinces (Philostratus, Vita Apollonii 5.36), and Aelius Aristides even wanted to modernize the Greek-barbarian division into a Roman vs. non-Roman one (Orations 26.63). Others wanted to expand
437
tire categories to Greeks, Romans and barbarians (Cicero, De finibus 2.49; Plutarch, On the Fortune of the Romans 324B). In the Greek-speaking provinces, even official Roman de crees, letters and edicts, and honorary inscriptions to Roman magistrates, emperors, and members of the imperial family were routinely promulgated in Greek. Most inscriptions on public works, however, are in Latin, and about 30 percent are bilingual. Milestones are often bilingual, but in Syria and Arabia they are almost always in Latin. In Asia Minor and Thrace there are many written only in Greek. Latin and Greek were used in the administration of eastern Roman provinces. Latin was the language of administration used for communication between tire central government and Ro man magistrates, between Roman magistrates and Roman colonies (as well as within Roman colonies), and sometimes between Roman citizens. T h e language of the native pop ulation was nearly always Greek. Egypt. Although Minoans had visited Egypt sporadically since the seventeenth century, the first significant Greek presence in Egypt did not occur until the seventh century when a trading colony was established in the northwest Delta. Greek domination of Egypt was established in 332 and lasted until 30. In Ptolemaic Egypt, Greco-Macedonian immigrants settled in two new urban centers of Hellenism, Alexandria in tire north and Ptolemais in the south. T h e preservation of non-literary Greek papyri in Egypt from the third century BCE through the third century CE pro vides an important avenue into tire written Koine of this period, but the absence of comparable documentary mate rial from other Mediterranean lands makes it impossible to detect the presence of a distinctive dialect. Papyrus letters in Greek begin to appear in the third century BCE. Evidence for Egyptian Koine is found in documents written by bilin gual Egyptians (primarily those in tire inferior local administtation). These documents exhibit linguistic interference. An example consists of the Egyptian-Greek contracts from Soknopaiou Nesos in the northern Faiyum (Papyrus Rylands i 6 o - i 6 o D ) , which reveal the interchange of voiced stops (b, d, g) with voiceless stops (p, t, k), and the inter change of the liquids (1, r). Some letters written by Greeks also exhibit a high degree of interference. Such orthographic confusion, however, reflects differences in phonology or ac cent rather than differences in dialect. The evidence from inscriptions indicates little dialectal difference between the Koine of Egypt, Asia Minor, Italy, and Syria-Palestine. Low-status Egyptian natives continued to speak Egyptian until the third century CE. In the second century CE, the Egyptian language, at this stage known as Coptic, was increasingly written using Greek characters and was heavily dependent on other aspects of Greek. As much as 20 percent of the Coptic lexicon, for example, consists of Greek loanwords, and some Greek verbs were adapted to Coptic morphology. Upper-class administrators and aris-
438
GREEK
tocrats as well as the lower social classes (especially in Upper Egypt), were generally monolingual. Syria-Palestine. The earliest Greek loanword in Hebrew is the name Yawan (Gn. 10:2; 1 Chr. 1:5). It was borrowed before the seventh century BCE because Yawan reflects the reconstructed archaic form *lawones with the phoneme [w], which became generally obsolete by the sixth century. Else where in the Hebrew Bible, Yawan is used as a generic term for the Greeks (Jl. 4:6; Zee. 9:13; Dn. 8:21; 10:20; 11:2), and in some Qumran texts it refers to Seleucid Greeks (4Q Pesher Nahum frags. 3-4 i 2, 3; Damascus Document [CD] 8.11). This occurrence suggests that the first Greeks whom the Hebrews contacted were the Ionians. Similarly, Akka dian records from the reign of Sargon II (eighth century) designated western Asia Minor as Jawan or Jaman, again with the archaic phoneme [w], and the Persians of the sixth century referred to their satrapy of Ionia as Yauna, a form already missing the phoneme [w] (Aeschylus, Persians 178, 563). Ten of the Arad ostraca (605-595) mention the Ktyym (from Kition, a Phoenician city on Cyprus), referring to Greek or Cypriot mercenaries in the Judean army. Ktyym in the Hebrew Bible refers to Greeks (Is. 23:1; Jer. 2:10; Ez. 27:6; see also 1 Mc. 1:1; 8:5), but later to the Romans ( i Q Pesher Habakkuk 2.12-13; 4.5-6; 6.1-4; 4Q Pesher Nahum frags. 3-4. i. 3). After the deatir of Alexander in 323, Coele-Syria, Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine were controlled by Ptolemaic Egypt until these lands were conquered by the Seleucids in 201. From the third century, most of the inscriptions found in Syria-Palestine are in Greek. Among the earliest Greek documents from Palestine are two of a cache of six ostraca, four in Aramaic, one in Greek, and one an Aramaic-Greek bilingual, found at Khirbet el-Qom (12 km [7 min] west of Hebron). They are dated to 12 Tammuz, year 6, probably the sixth year of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (277). From 259 to 257 dre Zenon papyri reflect the relationship between the Jew Tobias and Egyptian authorities. T h e Phoenician coastal cities of Aradus, Byblos, Berytus (Beirut), Sidon, Tyre, and Akko, were most affected by Hel lenistic culture and were in effect Greek cities. Many Greek setders had arrived during the third century BCE. The tra ditional bilingualism of these cities was replaced by a Hel lenistic Koine monolingualism, but inscriptions in Phoeni cian occur as late as the first century CE. Palmyra, an oasis in tire Syrian desert midway between the Phoenician coast and the Euphrates, was multilingual in the Greco-Roman period. The educated class was bilingual, speaking both Pal myrene Aramaic and Hellenistic Koine. The role of Greek in Palestine during tire Roman period has been intensely investigated because of the problem of the language (s) of Jesus and the more general problem of the degree to which Palestinian Judaism was hellenized. It now seems clear that Hebrew was a spoken language in Pal estine until the Mishnaic period, but it is not clear how
widely it was spoken. In reference to Palestine, instead of the terms bilingual or trilingual, it is more useful to use the sociolinguistic designations diglossic and triglossic, that is, the use of two or three languages for different kinds of social communication in a variety of social contexts. From this perspective, it is probable that both Hebrew and Greek were both regarded as prestige languages in different social contexts. During the second and first centuries BCE, Hebrew was used at least as a literary language. Compositions such as Daniel, Ben Sira, and much of tire Qumran literature were written in Hebrew. Hellenistic and Roman Palestine was a bilingual speech community. Hellenistic Koine was used by all social classes, not just the educated elite. Oddly, public and private Hellenistic Koine inscriptions do not display any Semitisms. Among the Dead Sea scrolls are a number of Greek man uscripts dating from tire mid-second century BCE to as late as the mid-first century CE, including fragments of four Sep tuagint scrolls from Cave 4 (two of Leviticus and one each of Numbers and Deuteronomy) and two other fragmentary Greek scrolls closely related to the Bible. A scroll of tire mi nor prophets in Greek was discovered at Nahal Hever (per haps late first century BCE) . Two of the fifteen Bar Kochba letters (written 132-35 CE) from Nahal Hever are written in Greek, and the other thir teen together with nine Bar Kochba letters from Wadi M u rabba'at are in Hebrew and Aramaic. In addition there is the Babatha archive from Nahal Hever, consisting of thirty-six or thirty-seven documents written around 93 to 132 CE in Nabatean, Aramaic, and Greek. T h e 221 Greek inscriptions from tire third and fourth centuries CE discovered in the ne cropolis of Besara or Betir-She'arim in Galilee far outnum ber those in Hebrew and Aramaic and reveal tire extent to which the Greek language had penetrated Palestinian Jewish culture. In the case of epitaphs, however, there are sociolin guistic differences between the language (s) of the deceased (as formulated by family and friends), usually Hebrew or Aramaic, and inscriptions formulated by family and friends for the consumption of visitors and pilgrims, frequently Greek. More than 60 percent of all Jewish funerary inscrip tions in Palestine are written in Greek, and even in Jerusalem the ratio of epitaphs in Greek is approximately 40 percent. The fact tirat there are approximately 1500 Greek loanwords in Talmudic literature underlines the widespread use of Greek in the first centuries CE. Writing Systems. T h e twenty-two-character Semitic syllabic alphabet was borrowed and modified by Greeks into a twenty-six-character alphabet toward tire end of tire eighth century BCE. The Greeks required fewer consonants than the Phoenicians. An important innovation was the transforma tion of some Semitic consonantal symbols to represent vow els (i.e., the Semitic consonantal glottal stops aleph and ayin were used to represent the vowels a and 0, and the conso nants he and yod were used for the vowels e and i. Although Greek required fewer sibilants than the Phoenicians (sin,
GREEK shin, sade, samekh), they introduced five additional charac ters to the Semitic alphabet: upsilon, representing the vowel u, the digamma (both from the Phoenician letter waw), and the double consonants phi, chi, and psi (combinations of two phonemes). T h e sources for these letters remain unknown. The consonant s was represented in some Greek alphabets by the letter san, which was eventually dropped, modeled on the Semitic sade or the sigma, which was adapted from the shin, but never both (Herodotus, i. 139). Later the omega was added to represent long o. T h e omicron was restricted to the short 0. Earlier inscriptions, following the Semitic pat tern, were written right-to-left (retrograde), or left-to-right, the style that came to predominate. Some texts were even written in the previously mentioned boustrophedon style (Pausanias, 5.17.6), which lasted into the fifth century. An other inscriptional style called stoichedon aligned letters both horizontally and vertically. G e n r e a n d Text. Modern knowledge of ancient Greek is derived from three kinds of sources: (1) Byzantine-period copies of earlier Greek texts (2) literary and nonliterary pa pyri preserved primarily in Egypt and dating from 300 BCE to 300 CE and even later; and (3) public and private inscrip tions from all over the Greek world. Literature. Greek literature consists of an enormous number of texts beginning with the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer through to late antiquity (survey in Easterling and Knox, 1985). T h e language of the Iliad and Odyssey is an artificial amalgam (including archaisms and new coinages), constructions, and dialect-forms from the Late Bronze Age (i.e., the Late Minoan and Late Helladic periods, c. 1600c. 700 BCE), which based on a spoken form of Ionic. The language of Homer was formed and transmitted in a nonliterate environment (Kirk, 1976). It was the invention of writing that froze the ordinarily varied oral performances of the Homeric poems into their final, authoritative form in the late seventh century. T h e dissemination of epic poetry throughout the Greek world resulted in the literary imitation of Homeric language by Hesiod of Boeotia for his didactic, moralizing poems in cluding the Theogony and Works and Days. Elegaic, iambic, and solo lyric poetry developed in the seventh century by Ionian poets writing in Ionic in a modified form of epic hex ameter and spread from there to the mainland. Important elegaic poets, who are known from references by later writ ers, include Callinus of Smyrna, Tyrtaeus of Sparta, Mimnermus of Colophon, Solon of Athena, and Theognis of Megara (the only author whose work has survived). Elegaic epitaphs became popular in the sixth century and were writ ten until the fourth century. Archilocus of Paros was a sev enth-century iambic poet, and Sappho of Lesbos was a solo lyric poet who wrote in Aeolic. Choral lyric poetry, which was written in the Doric dialect, arose in the Peloponnesus, Sicily, and Boeotia, where Pindar, its most famous expo nent, lived. Fifth-century Athenian tragedy, which was writ
439
ten in Attic, developed during the zenith of the Athenian Empire, was an extremely popular form of entertainment. The important tragedians include Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Old Comedy, which emphasized satire and fantasy, consists primarily of works by Aristophanes, who wrote in an educated form of Attic. T h e development of Middle Comedy (c. 404-321 BCE), represented by Aristoph anes' Ecclesiazusae and Plulus, served as a transition to the development of the realism of New Comedy (after 321 BCE), represented by Menander. Greek prose literature first appeared during the fifth cen tury in Ionia with the work of the Ionian philosophers (Pleracleitus, Democritus, Hippocrates). T h e greatest philosoph ical and scientific writers, Plato and Aristotle, were Athenians. The first significant historian was Herodotus (c. 485-425), who was born in Asia Minor but wrote in the Ionic dialect for a largely Athenian audience. He narrated the wars between Greeks and the Persians and is considered the father of history, Thucydides, the author of an incom plete account of the Peloponnesian War, was the first gen uinely Athenian historian. Historiography became one of most important literary genres in the following centuries and spawned many subgenres including local history, geogra phy, and antiquarian history. Some of the more important later historians include Xenophon (fourth century), Polybius (second century), Diodorus Siculus (late first century BCE-early first century CE), his contemporary Dionysius of Halikarnassos, and his imitator Flavius Josephus (late firstearly second century CE). After the conquests of Alexander the Great and the divi sion of his empire into the various Hellenistic kingdoms, the earlier literary hegemony that Athens had in the Greek world ended. T h e new Hellenistic capitals, particularly Alexandria, were not Greek city-states but centers of great imperial gov ernments. Hellenistic poetry flourished particularly in Al exandria under the patronage of the Ptolemies. Callimachus and later Apollonius of Rhodes were poets who were also librarians at the royal Ptolemaic library at Alexandria. One of the influential literary monuments of Hellenistic Koine was the translation of the Jewish Bible into the Greek trans lation known as the Septuagint beginning in the early Ptol emaic period (c. 300 BCE). Papyri. T h e Greek term byblos or biblos, meaning "pa pyrus" (Strabo, 17.1.15) and connoting "papyrus roll, book," may have been derived from Byblos, the hellenized name of the Phoenician port Gubal, an important ttading center from which Greeks obtained Egyptian papyrus, though by the mid-seventh century they must certainly have imported it directly from Egypt. With few exceptions most of the extant literary and nonliterary papyrus documents come from Egypt and parts of Palestine and Mesopotamia, primarily because of the dry climate. Major exceptions are the founh-century BCE Derveni papyrus, preserved through carbonization and the approximately eight hundred papyrus
440
GREENFIELD, JONAS CARL
rolls discovered at Herculaneum (destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE). [See Papyrus.] Inscriptions. Two categories cover the vast range of in scriptions. "Public" inscriptions are determined by a mag istrate or official body and consist of such texts as decrees, dedications, honorary inscriptions, epitaphs, manumissions, and milestones. "Private" inscriptions are formulated by an individual. Among the many types of private texts are fu nerary inscriptions, private dedications, manumissions, and curses. Our knowledge of "vulgar" Attic is based primarily on curses epitaphs. The survival of local inscriptions and the use of dialect in comedies provides the primary basis for our knowledge of dialects other than Attic and Ionic. T h e earliest Ionic inscription known is a graffito on a kylix (shal low drinking cup) from the seventh century BCE found at Smyrna (SEG 12.480).
the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, Aramaic and Nabatean
Signatures
and Subscriptions. Jerusalem, 1989. Lieberman, Saul. Greek in Jewish Palestine. 2d ed. New York, 1965. Deals with the second through fourth centuries CE. Luddeckens, Erich. "Agypten." In Die Sprachen im rbmischen Reich der Kaiserzeit, edited by Giinter Neumann and Jiirgen Untermann, pp. 241-265. Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbiicher, 40. Cologne, 1980. Meiggs, Russell, and David Lewis. A Selection of Greek Historical In scriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. Oxford, 1969. Critical
texts and discussions of important early inscriptions. Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD
337. Cambridge,
Mass., 1993. Mussies, Gerard. "Greek in Palestine and tile Diaspora." In The Jewish People in the First Century, vol. 2, edited by D. Flusser and W. C.
van Unnik, pp. 1040-1064. Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad No vum Testamentum, section 1. Amsterdam, 1976. Palmer, Leonard R. The Greek Language. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1980. The most important discussion in English of the history and structure oftineGreek language. Prentice, William K. Greek and Latin Inscriptions: Northern Syria. 2 vols.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leiden, 1908-1922. Rey-Coquais, Jean-Paul. Inscriptions grecques el latines de la Syrie, vol.
Aharoni, Yohanan, with contributions by Joseph Naveh. Arad Inscrip tions. Translated by Judith Ben-Or. Jerusalem, 1981. Allen, W. Sidney. Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical
Greek. 2d ed. London, 1974. Altheim, Franz, and Ruth Stiehl. Die aramaische Sprache unter den Achaimeniden. Frankfurt am Main, 1963. Barr, James. "Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in the Hellenistic Age." In The Cambridge History of Jerusalem, vol. 2, edited by W. D. Davies
and Louis Finkelstein, pp. 79-114. Cambridge, 1989. Bubenik, Vit. Hellenistic and Roman Greece as a Sociolinguistic Area. Am
sterdam, 1989. Important discussion oftiresocial factors influencing linguistic development and usage. Carpenter, Rhys. "The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet." American Journal of Archaeology 37 (1933): 8-29. In this article, Carpenter ar gues convincingly that the Greek alphabet was not invented until the late eighth century BCE. Easterling, P. E., and B. M. W. Knox. The Cambridge History of Clas sical Literature, vol. I , Greek Literature. Cambridge, 1985. Standard
English-language survey of the history of Greek literature. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. "The Languages of Palestine in the First Century A.D." In Fitzmyer's A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays,
pp. 29-56. Missoula, 1979. Slightly updated version of the important article originally published in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 32 (1970): 501-531. Gignac, Francis T. A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, vol. 1, Phonology; vol. 2, Morphology. Milan, 1976-
1981. Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. 2 vols. Translated by John
Bowden. Philadelphia, 1974. Indispensable study of the influence of Hellenism on Palestinian Judaism during the second century BCE. Horbury, William, and David Noy. Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Cambridge, 1992. Horsley, G. H. R. "The Fiction of 'Jewish Greek.'" In New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity,
6, Baalbek et Beqa. Institute Francais d'Archeologie de Beyrouth, Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, 78. Paris, 1967. Rosen, Haiim B. "Die Sprachsituation im rSmischen Palastina." In Die Sprachen im rbmischen Reich der Kaiserzeit,
edited by Giinter Neu
mann and Jiirgen Untermann, pp. 215-239. Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbiicher, 40. Cologne, 1980. Schwabe, Moshe, and Baruch Lifshitz. Beth She'arim, vol. 2, The Greek Inscriptions. New Brunswick, N.J., 1974. Sevenster, Jan N. Do You Know Greek? How Much Greek Could the First Jewish Christians Have Known? Supplement to Novum Testamen
tum, 19. Leiden, 1968. Important discussion of the use of Greek in first-century Palestine. Sherk, Robert K. Roman Documents from the Greek East. Baltimore,
1969. Collection of epigraphical texts of Roman legal documents, senatus consulta (senatorial decrees), and epistulae (official Roman correspondence) written primarily in Greek. Spolsky, Bernard. "Triglossia and Literacy in Jewish Palestine of the First Century." International Journal of the Sociology of Language 42
(1983): 95-109. Teodorsson, Sven-Tage. The Phonology of Ptolemaic Koine. Goteborg, 1977. Teodorsson, Sven-Tage. The Phonology of Attic in the Hellenistic Period.
Goteborg, 1978. Turner, Eric G. Greek Papyri; An Introduction. Oxford, 1968. Wachsmann, Shelley. Aegeans in the Theban Tombs. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, vol. 20. Louvain, 1987. Welles, Charles Bradford. Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic Period.
New Haven, 1934. Collection of Greek epigraphical texts issued by the chanceries of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Woodhead, Arthur G. The Study of Greek Inscriptions. 2d ed. Cam bridge, 1981. The basic textbook on Greek inscriptions. DAVID E . AUNE
vol. 5, pp. 5-40. New South Wales,
1989. Jeffery, Lilian H. The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. Oxford, 1961. De
tailed discussion of the various early Greek alphabets. Kaimio, Jorma. The Romans and the Greek Language. Helsinki, 1979. Kirk, G. S. Homer and the Oral Tradition. Cambridge, 1976. Lewis, Naphtali, et al., The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in
GREENFIELD, JONAS CARL (1926-1995), American scholar of ancient Semitic languages. Born in New York City, Greenfield, like many of his generation, re ceived a parochial education that included a traditional American as well as a traditional Jewish curriculum. By the
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time he was thirteen, he was fluent in both Hebrew and Ar amaic, which he had studied in texts at school; at the age of fourteen he studied Aramaic grammar from a copy of Cas per Levias's grammar of Babylonian Aramaic and taught himself Arabic, as well. While majoring in English at the City College of New York, he was simultaneously studying Arabic and compar ative Semitics at the New School for Social Research. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1949, he went to Yale Uni versity, where he planned to do advanced work in English; however, under tire influence of the cuneiform scholar Albrecht Goetze, he switched to ancient Near Eastern studies. He received his Ph.D. in 1956, with his dissertation " T h e Lexical Status of Mishnaic Hebrew." T h e legacy of his work in English to his Semitic scholarship was a finely honed in stinct for semantic nuances and stylistic subtleties. He began his teaching career at Brandeis University in 1954 and went on from there, in 1956, to teach at U C L A and, in 1965, at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1971 he joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became the Casper Levias Professor of Ancient Semitic Languages, a position he held until his death.
Greenfield was an honorary member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and a member of tire Royal Asiatic Society, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the American Academy of Arts and Sci ences. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls.]
Greenfield was interested in almost everything that had to do with the ancient Near East. A voluminous reader who could recall with ease much of what he had read, he was conversant with most of tire scholarly literature. A convivial person, notorious punster, and excellent raconteur who en joyed attending scholarly meetings, he was familiar both with most living scholars and with the history of scholarship. Because of his knowledge, diligence as a scholar, and gen erally easy bearing, he was in constant demand as a referee, adviser, mentor, and colleague. Students commented that after introducing them to scholarly articles in his seminars, he introduced them to tire scholars in his living room. He edited the Israel Exploration Journal (1976-1995) and was on the editorial staff of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1969-1971; 1991-1995)- In ad dition, he coedited nine books; wrote 150 scholarly articles; was part of dre New Jewish Publication Society's (NJPS) translation committee for the Writings; was a trustee of tire Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem; was a member of the Dead Sea Scrolls Supervisory Com mittee; and advised on countiess dissertations in Israel, the United States, and Europe. His own publications focused primarily on Hebrew and Aramaic lexicographic matters, but by the 1970s his interests expanded to include Qumranica and other documents dis covered in tire region. His studies were characterized by the juxtaposition of diverse elements from the ancient Near East to the issue at hand—be they legal, historical, religious, lit erary, etymological, or lexicographic—by a wealth of ancil lary details and by the latest literature on each subject from even the most obscure sources.
off. A. Emerton, edited by John Day et al., pp. 43-52. Cambridge, 1995-
BIBLIOGRAPHY For a complete bibliography of Greenfield's work, see Ziony Zevit et al., eds., Solving Riddles and Untying Knots: Biblical, Epigraphic, and Semitic Studies in Honor of Jonas C. Greenfield, pp. xiii-xxvii (Winona
Lake, Ind., 1995). The following are some of Greenfield's more notable publications. "Lexicographical Notes." Hebrew Union College Annual 29 (1958): 203-
228; 30 (1959): 141-151. "The Zakir Inscription and the Danklied." In Proceedings of the Fifth World Congress of Jewish Studies, i960, vol. 1, pp. 174-191. Jerusa
lem, 1971. "Aramaic and Its Dialects." In Jewish Languages: Theme and Variations,
edited by Herbert H. Paper, pp. 29-43. Cambridge, 1978. "Notes on die Early Aramaic Lexicon." Orientalia Suecana 33-35 (1984-1986): 149-156. "The 'Cluster' in Biblical Poetry." Maarav 5-6 (1990): 159-168. "The Wisdom of Ahiqar." In Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honor
ZIONY ZEVIT
G R I D P L A N . A common way for excavators to make easy reference to a specific location on an archaeological site is by using a grid. T h e meaning of any archaeological in formation, such as an excavated object or architectural re main, is derived largely from its context, and a grid helps to identify that location and context. T o form a grid, an arbi trary system of intersecting perpendicular lines is imposed on a site. T h e lines are usually established according to mag netic directions, running north-south and east-west. A mid point for the grid is often set at the center of die excavation area. However, at complex urban sites or at sites with visible surface remains or important topographic features, it may make more sense to center the grid on those elements. The size of the resulting square areas and the means used to refer to them may be determined by an excavator's goals and the kind of site being investigated. On large urban tells in tire Near East, areas of 50 X 50 m or 100 X 100 m are given designations, and smaller grids are established for excava tion purposes within them. A surveyor or an expedition's architect usually determines the boundaries of the areas, where permanent markers are established at a corner. Se lected portions of the grid are conventionally excavated within squares of 5 X 5 or 10 X 10 m. The use of tire same site grid over the entirety of a com plex tell allows for tire easy correlation of the locations of recovered features, such as wall lines or roadways, from
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widely spaced portions of the site. In recording archaeolog ical data, some form of grid or area designation accompanies all aspects of the excavation of specific structures and arti facts. [See also Architectural Drafting and Drawing; Recording Techniques; and Site Survey.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY The list below includes some of Guerin's most important contribu tions to the field. De ora Palaestinae a promontorio Carrnelo usque ad urbem Joppen perti-
nente. Paris, 1856. Description geographique, historique et archeologique de la Palestine, pre miere partie: Judee. 3 vols. Paris, 1868. Description geographique, historique et archeologique de la Palestine, seconde
partie: Samarie. 2 vols. Paris, 1874-1875. Blakely, Jeffrey A., and Lawrence E. Toombs. The Tell el-Hesi Field Manual. Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi, vol. i. Wi nona Lake, Ind., 1980. Basic conceptual and terminological intro duction to the spatial concepts in excavation (see pp. 6-13). Dever, William G., and H. Darrell Lance, eds. A Manual of Field Ex cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. Brief
but very comprehensive description of the goals and processes used in laying out a site grid and establishing excavation areas within die grid (see pp. 141-149).
Description geographique, historique et archeologique de la Palestine, troisieme partie: Galilee. 2 vols. Paris, 1880. La Terre Sainte: Son histoire, ses souvenirs, ses sites, ses monuments, Paris,
1882. La Terre Sainte, deuxiime partie: Liban, Phenicie, Palestine occidentale et meridionale, Petra, Sinai, Egypte. Paris, 1884. Jerusalem: Son histoire, sa description, ses etablissements religieux. Paris,
1889. PIERRE DE MIROSCHEDJI
KENNETH G. HOGLUND
GUERIN, VICTOR H O N O R E (1821-1890), French Palestinologist. Born in Paris, Guerin studied clas sical philology at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and then taught in several lycees. He joined the Ecole Francaise d'Athenes in 1852 and spent two years traveling and doing research in Greece, the Aegean, Turkey, Syria, and Pales tine. He thus inaugurated a lifetime of scientific travel that also took him to Malta, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Nubia. Most of Guerin's time and energy from 1863 onward were devoted to the study of ancient Palestine, He carried out three major surveys: a detailed exploration of Judea Qudah) in 1863, of Samaria and the Jordan Valley in 1870, and of Galilee and Phoenicia in 1875. His subsequent travels to Pal estine and Lebanon (in 1882, 1884, and 1888) were to pre pare his last major publications, La Terre Sainte and Jeru salem, which were geared to the general public. Guerin's major contribution to archaeology and Near Eastern studies is the seven volumes of his Description geographique, historique et archeologique de la Palestine, an ad mirable achievement for one person and comparable to the scope and teamwork of the publications of the Palestine Ex ploration Fund. Nobody before him had conducted such a systematic exploration of the country. Traveling on horse back, he visited and recorded in detail and with scrupulous exactitude every ruin and village in Judea, Samaria, and Gal ilee, discovering numerous sites in the process. His method was to identify biblical sites from the landscape, analyze their mutual relationship, and combine his observations with the biblical evidence. His work greatly advanced what was known about the historical geography of Palestine. Guerin's surveys belong to the prearchaeological phase of exploration in Palestine, when it was not yet recognized that the coun try's many tells covered the sites of ancient cities and "prog ress" had not yet destroyed so many ancient remains.
G U S H H A L A V (Ar., el-Jish; Gk„ Gischala/Giscala), site located on the western flank of a deep wadi (Wadi Gush Halav) several miles northwest of Safed in Upper Galilee (map reference 191 X 270). T h e Greek name is probably a corruption of the Hebrew gush halav, (lit., "block of white"), perhaps in reference to the towering white cliffs on the east side of the wadi. Another possibility is that the name means "fat ground," a derivation reflecting the area's flourishing olive oil trade in antiquity. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, presents the activities of an individual named John of Giscala, whose eco nomic dealings are viewed harshly in both Life (70-76) and War (2.590-592; 4.92-120). The site is also mentioned in Ecclesiates Rabba (2.8), in a document from Wadi Murabba'at, on a sixth-century marble plaque from Beersheba, and in the Mishnah (Arakh. 9.6). T h e church father Jerome (in Lives of Illustrious Men and in his commentary on the Epistle to Philemon) reports, enigmatically, that the apostle Paul came from "Giscalis in Judea." The full extent of the ancient settlement, which was an important trading center in the Roman and Byzantine pe riods, cannot be determined. It surely included the top of the prominent hill now occupied by the Arab village of elJish; an ancient synagogue may have existed at the top of the hill, where a Maronite church now stands, A number of chamber tombs in the vicinity, which were the focus of me dieval Jewish pilgrims, were excavated in 1937 (Makhouly, 1938); and a monumental tomb on the western side of the modern village was discovered and excavated in 1973 (Vitto and Edelstein, 1974). A hoard of 237 coins was discovered some time prior to 1948 (Hamburger, 1954). T h e tombs and coins date to the Roman and Byzantine periods. Sustained excavations at Gush Halav have concentrated on a monumental building on the eastern slope of the Jish hill. Early in the twentieth century, the German team of
GUY, PHILIP LANGSTAFFE ORDE Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger (1916) spent several days clearing and recording this building, identified as a syna gogue, as part of their investigation (1905-1907) of Galilean synagogues. [See Synagogues.] T w o seasons of excavation at this lower synagogue site were carried out by a Duke Uni versity team, as a project of the American Schools of Ori ental Research in 1977 and 1978 (Meyers, Strange, and Meyers, 1979; Meyers, Meyers, and Strange, 1990). Addi tional support for both seasons came from Garrett Evan gelical Seminary at Northwestern University; the University of the Orange Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, supported the 1977 season. Eric M. Meyers served as pro ject director; James F. Strange and Carol L. Meyers were associate directors. T o the surprise of the excavation team, the synagogue was found to be built on a considerable depth of debris, attesting to a long history of occupation at the site. In addition to a scattering of Late Bronze II/Iron I sherds, the ceramic h o rizon includes some Iron II, Persian, Hellenistic, and Early Roman material; however, no structural remains from those periods could be discerned in the very limited area in which the excavation team was permitted to dig. T h e synagogue itself had stood for some three centuries; its history spans tire Middle to Late Roman (250-306 CE), Late Roman (306363), Byzantine I (363-460), and Byzantine IIA (460-551) periods. After the collapse and abandonment of tire syna gogue in the mid-sixth century, some sporadic occupation continued in tire Byzantine LIB and the Early and Late Arab periods. Although the synagogue appeared almost square to its earliest investigators, the work of tire 1978-1979 expedition established that it is a small basilical building with two rows of four columns. [See Basilicas.] T h e interior dimensions of its main room, which is bounded on three sides by corridors or rooms, are 13.75 X 10.6-11.0 m. Only its southern, Je rusalem-oriented wall borders directly on exterior space. T h a t facade wall is also the only one constructed with welldressed ashlar masonry. T h e single major entry is in the center of that wall, and the building's bema is situated against tire inside of the southern wall to the west of the entrance. Benches were recovered on tire west and north. Remnants of heart-shaped columns and other architectural fragments, as well as a hoard of 1,953 coins dating mainly to the fourth-sixth centuries, were found in the debris in or adjacent to tire building. Perhaps the most notable architec tural fragment is a lintel with an eagle and a garland finely carved on its underside. Anyone entering the building would have to look directly overhead to see this decorative element. An Aramaic dedicatory inscription on one of the columns, first published in tire nineteenth century, reads "Jose bar Nahum/made this (column?)/may it be for him/a blessing." T h e paucity of decorative elements suggests religious conservatism; yet, the adaptive use of space, the high quality of the prominent masonry, and the idiosyncratic placement
443
of the essential features of a synagogue building reflect au thentic independence and technological expertise. T h e flourishing of Gush Halav in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods is reflected in the sophisticated simplicity of its lower synagogue. BIBLIOGRAPHY Hamburger, H. "A Hoard of Syrian Tetradrachms and Tyrian Bronze Coins from Gush Halav." Israel Exploration Journal 4 (1954): 201226. Kohl, Heinrich, and Carl Watzinger. Antike Synagogen in Galilaea. Leipzig, 1916. Makhouly, Na'im. "Rock-Cut Tombs at el-JTsh." Quarterly of the De partment of Antiquities in Palestine 8 (1938): 45-50.
Meyers, Eric M.James F. Strange, and Carol L. Meyers, "Preliminary Report on the 1977 and 1978 Seasons at Gush Halav (el-Jish)." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 233 (1979): 3 3 -
58. Meyers, Eric M., and Carol L. Meyers, with James F. Strange. Exca vations at the Ancient Synagogue of Gush Halav. Meiron Excavation
Project, vol. 5. Winona Lake, Ind., 1990. Vitro, Fanny, and Gershon Edelstein. "The Mausoleum at Gush Halav" (in Hebrew). Qadtnoniotj (1974): 49-55. CAROL L. MEYERS
GUY, PHILIP LANGSTAFFE ORDE (18851952), British archaeologist and adminisuator, instrumental in the establishment of both the Palestine and Israel depart ments of antiquities. Born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, Guy was educated at tire universities of Glasgow and Oxford. After active service in World War I, he joined Leonard Woolley's expeditions to Carchemish and Amarna, where he served as ceramic specialist. In 1922, he was appointed chief inspector of the newly established Palestine Depart ment of Antiquities and in that position was called upon to undertake salvage excavations and surveys throughout the country. In 1927 Guy succeeded Clarence Fisher as director of the Megiddo excavations of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. There, in addition to supervising the excavation of the Megiddo tombs, Guy introduced the ex tensive use of aerial photography from helium balloons to aid in mapping and analyzing the excavated architecture. As a result of professional disagreements with the authorities of the Oriental Institute, however, Guy ended his association with the Megiddo expedition in 1935. As director of the British School of Archaeology in Jeru salem in 193 8-193 9, Guy planned a comprehensive archae ological survey of Palestine. H e personally undertook initial explorations for this survey in tire Negev desert and on tire coastal plain. During World War II, Guy served in the Brit ish army as military governor of Benghazi and Asmara and as a member of the Allied Supply Mission to Syria. After the war, he returned to the civil service in Palestine, as di rector of the Government Stud Farm in Akko for tire De partment of Agriculture (1945-1947). He subsequently
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renewed his professional connection to the Palestine De partment of Antiquities (1947-1948). As one of the few British administrators to remain in the newly created State of Israel, Guy was appointed chief of the Division of Surveys and Excavation of the Israel De partment of Antiquities in 1948. In that position, he carried out important salvage excavations at Jaffa, Beth-Yerah, and Ayyelet ha-Shahar. He also established the department's system of regional inspectors and revived his earlier plans for a comprehensive national archaeological survey. [See also Beth-Yerah; British School of Archaeology in Je
rusalem; Jaffa; Megiddo; and the biographies of Fisher and Woolley.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael. "P. L. O. Guy, 1885-1922: InMemoriam." Israel Exploration Journal 3 (1953): 1-3. Includes a bibliography of Guy's work. Guy, P. L. O. "Balloon Photography and Archaeological Excavation." Antiquity 6 (1932): 148-155, plus 4 pis. Guy, P. L. O. Megiddo Tombs. Chicago, 1938. NEIL ASHER SILBERMAN
H H A B A K K U K C O M M E N T A R Y . T h e scroll known as the Habakkuk Commentary, or Pesher Habakkuk, was dis covered in 1947 at Qumran in Cave 1. In the corpus of Dead Sea Scrolls it is designated i Q p H a b . W. H. Brownlee pre pared the editio princeps (Burrows, ed., 1950). The scroll contains drirteen columns (originally the first twelve col umns with seventeen lines each, and the last column with four lines). It is preserved almost intact, except that in the first column only the ends of the lines remain, and, because the bottom of the scroll deteriorated, that the last two or three lines of every column are lost. T h e scroll was written by two scribes, A and B: scribe A wrote col. i-col. xii, 1. 13a, and scribe B col. xii, 1. 13D-C0I. xiii, 1. 4. T h e script of both hands is Herodian, characteristic of the second part of the first century BCE. This scroll, like otirer scrolls of its type from Qumran, incorporates a commentary of the prophetic words (Heb., pesher), which is placed between the lemmas, or verses, in the scroll. In i Q p H a b column ii, lines 6-10, and in column vii, lines 4-5, the pesher interprets mysterious presages con tained in tire words of the prophets concerning their actual fulfillment in historical events leading to the eschatological era. T h e man inspired by God to unravel the prophetic mys teries is the Teacher of Righteousness (see below). T h e relationship between the prophetic words and the pesher is formally carried out in a lemmatic pattern—namely, citations of the biblical text of the first two chapters of Ha bakkuk, verse by verse—followed by pesher sections. T h e sections of the pesher follow the biblical lemmas by means of an introductory formula such as psrw f ("its interpreta tion concerns . . .") and psr hdbr 7 ("the interpretation of the quoted text concerns . . . " ) , applied to persons, and psrw 'sr ("its interpretation is that. . .") andpsrhdbr 'sr ("the interpretation of the quoted text is that . . . " ) , applied to events. T h e phraseology of tire pesher sections is related to the biblical text principally by paronomasia (a punning of its words and letters in variegated forms). T h e adaptation of the biblical content into new historical circumstances is achieved by means of exegetical techniques such as analogy, allegory, and double meanings. Through such techniques, the content of the Book of Habakkuk became typological and was adapted to specific historical situations in the Second 445
Temple period. For example, the Chaldeans of Habakkuk became the Kittim, in all probability the Romans, the im perialistic power since the second century BCE. Other figures in the Book of Habakkuk became typological for figures who took part in the internecine struggles in Judea (Judah) in that period. Pesher Habakkuk hints at the halakhic contro versy between the Teacher of Righteousness, tire first leader of tire Qumran community (see Cairo Damascus [CD], col. i, 1. 1 1 ; Pesher Psalms, manuscript a [4QpPs ], col. iii, 11. 1 4 17), and the Man of Lie ( i Q p H a b col. v, 11. 8 - 1 1 ; col. x, 11. 9 - 1 3 ) , a leader of an opposing community, probably the Pharisees, who was supported by those who had left the Qumran community (col. i, 1. 16-col. ii, 1. 6; col. v, 11. 8 - 1 1 ) . It also depicts tire political and cultic struggle between the Wicked Priest, probably tire Hasmonean ldng who was also the high priest, and die Teacher of Righteousness, who crit icized his politics (col. viii, 1. 3-col. ix, 1. 3; col. xi, 11. 2-10). As these figures are not called by their names but are re ferred to cryptically, scholars disagree on their identifica tion—particularly about whether tire Wicked Priest was Jon athan, the first Hasmonean high priest ( 1 6 1 - 1 4 2 BCE), during whose rule the Teacher of Righteousness would have established the Qumran community, or Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE), who ruled when the internal political and re ligious struggle in Judea was most critical. (These are the two principal interpretations; others exist.) However, the symbolic presentation of figures and events is typological within the apocalyptic concept held by the Qumran com munity. It places their destiny in tire universal struggle be tween righteousness and wickedness at the end of days, when wickedness is to be destroyed forever (col. vii, 1. 1 col. viii, 1. 3; col. xii, 1. 10-col. xiii, 1. 4). [See also Dead Sea Scrolls.] a
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brownlee, William H. The Midrash Pesher of Habakkuk. Society of Bib lical Literature, Monograph Series, no. 24. Missoula, 1979. Burrows, Millar, ed., with John C, Trevor and William H. Brownlee. The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark's Monastery, vol. 1, The Isaiah Manuscript and the Habakkuk Commentary. New Haven, 1950.
Dimant, Devorah. "Pesharim, Qumran." In The Anchor Bible Dictio nary, vol. 5, pp. 244-251. New York, 1992.
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Elliger, Karl. Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meet: Beitrage zur historischen Theologie, 15. Tubingen, 1953. Horgan, Maurya P. Pesharim, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Monograph Series 8. Washington, D.C., 1979. Nitzan, Bilhah. Pesher Habakkuk: A Scroll from the Wilderness of Judaea (iQpHab) (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1986. BILHAH NITZAN
HABUBA KABIRA, site of two ancient settlements, located on the western edge of the Euphrates River's Tabqa dam reservoir in Syria (36°to' N , 38V E). One of the set dements was a mound of medium size, Tell Habuba Kabira; the other was a large settiement, abottt 900 m long, Habuba Kabira South, whose size could only be ascertained from the extent to which sherds were scattered and within which lay a smaller mound (Tell Qannas). The site was noted in surveys carried out by American and Syrian teams directed by Abdel Kader Rihaoui and
Maurits N . van Loon in 1963 and 1964. Tell Habuba Kabira and Habuba Kabira (South) were investigated from 1969 to 975 by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, under the direc tion of Ernst Heinrich and Eva Snommenger; Tell Qannas was excavated by a Belgian mission headed by Andre Finet. [See Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft.] Habuba Kabira (South) is the only large-scale example of Late Uruk residential architecture. [See Uruk-Warka.] T h e administrative-religious center of the city was hidden in the lower layers of Tell Qannas. T h e regional administrative center was not in this town, but on a slope of the Jebel 'Aruda Mountain to the north. There were other contemporary set dements in the vicinity, at Tell Hajj, Tell Hadidi, and Tell Sheikh Hassan, the latter on the east bank of the Euphrates and certainly dating back to the Middle Uruk period. [See Hadidi, Tell.] Habuba Kabira (South) existed only for a short time, as is indicated by a maximum of three building levels. Tablets, clay balls with tokens inside, and clay bullae, J
HABUBA KABIRA. Plan of the southern gate and houses. (Courtesy Habuba Kabira Expedition, Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft)
HABUBA KABIRA
all with numerical signs, as well as the pottery, point to a date tiiat corresponds to Uruk-Eanna, archaic levels VI-V. The later level of Habuba Kabira (South) has been carbon dated to 3290-2920 BCE and 3030-2910 BCE (cali brated; all dates according to Gunter Kohl and Jochen Gorsdorf). T h e settlement was a station along the routes from Ana tolia and northern Syria to Mesopotamia. It was involved mainly in a long-distance trade. Its role in the local exchange system is not yet clear. The town was obviously deserted peacefully, presumably as tire result of a blockade of the trade routes to the south. T h e main roads in Habuba Kabira (South) followed tire contour lines of the bank terrace or were at right angles to them and were equipped witir drains. T h e development of peripheral areas and the subdivision of courtyards indicate tiiat some of the site's residential quar ters became densely built up. T h e buildings vary in type. Most common are houses witii a large hall flanked by small rooms along both long walls (tripartite houses) or along one of them. Rooms sometimes were added to tire short wall. Tirese houses were used for all daily activities and domestic duties, except for preparing meals. T h e main room was lived in or sometimes also used for storage, along witir small chambers. Less common are large halls that open onto inner courtyards through two or three doors in one long wall (one-hall buildings). This long wall was usually remarkably tirick. Rooms with one entrance
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on the long wall near the corner were probably used as work shops or food preparation or storage areas. They are mon ocellular or surround a courtyard. Multicellular buildings without a main room are scarce. Sometimes several build ings formed a domestic unit. The most important estates consisted of one tripartite house and two one-hall buildings. Sometimes the oudine of buildings has the 3:4:5 proportion of the Pythagorean triangle. T h e settlement was at first un fortified but later was surrounded by a city wall. Parts of this 3-meter-thick wall were uncovered to tire north and to the west. Eight towers or bastions protect the northern front, twenty-nine are still preserved on the western front, as well as two gates. The central buildings at Tell Qannas were, next to the large storage areas, two tripartite houses and a one-hall building whose dimensions (approximately 13.617.2 X 9.6-15.7 m) are greater than comparable buildings in the settlement. Handicrafts in Habuba Kabira (South) included a recy cling workshop for stone objects and a metal workshop. There was, in particular, evidence of lead processing—along with copper—pieces of oxide, which are residuals of cupellation for separating silver from lead ores. Kilns for pottery were outside the settlement. Apart from ceramics, the small finds include a wide spectrum of stone, terra-cotta, and cop per objects. Worthy of mention are large stone vessels, am ulets and cylinder seals, copper axes, pins and fishhooks, tokens and sealed clay tablets, bullae, and door locks.
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HACILAR
The principle source of meat was domesticated animals and, to a lesser extent, wild animals and fish. It is difficult to prove tlris on the basis of the fish bones because they may be poorly preserved. Much more beef was consumed than smaller ruminants (according to Angela von den Driesch et al.). Tell Habuba Kabira is an irregular, oval mound approx imately 230 m in diameter and with 9 m of settlement debris. Its stratigraphy is numbered according to tire largest exca vation area, which is in the east. T h e lowest level, East 1, yielded only Late Uruk sherds. T h e corresponding building structures must have been placed in tire unexcavated center of the mound. Level East 2, which belongs to an earlier phase of the Early Bronze Age, revealed a small settlement with living areas and workshops near each other and a uni fied outer boundary. Four radiocarbon dates for tire burnt level in level East 3 range from 2900-2690 BCE to 2860-2520 BCE (calibrated). T h e settlement's exterior, with a gate in tire east, was continuously reinforced so as to serve as a protec tive wall. In level East 8, a protective forecourt with a well was built in front of this gate. T h e courtyard was enclosed in level East 9 with a building, in all probability a temple, consisting of two broad rooms with gates in the central axes. A road paved with stones led to the entrance from the river. Fire and flood brought about the end of the East 9 level. One radiocarbon dating indicates the period from 2870 to 2510 BCE (calibrated). In level East 10, a long temple with an open porch was erected in the northeast. In the following level, tire temple was reinforced and an entrance was installed in one of the antae. Carbonized beams from the temple (level East 12) were dated to 2290-2040 BCE (calibrated). In level East 1 3 , the settlement was extended east with a wall 2,8 m thick. The wall had been rebuilt several times in East 15 and reached a thickness of 3 m and a minimum height of 6 m. The buildings within, apart from the temple, were residen tial in character. The temple can be followed as far as level East 17, in which small houses covered the summit of the mound. This level and the following ones, up to the most recent Middle Bronze Age level, East 20, were badly dis turbed by Islamic period graves. From the small finds, it seems as if the economy of Tell Habuba Kabira was based on stone and metal processing. Molds and a hoard of bronze objects including fragments of plano-convex ingots are worthy of mention. In addition jew elry and ceramics were produced. The inhabitants kept cat tle, sheep, and goats. Over time, the percentage of cattle diminished; in the Middle Bronze Age, sheep and goats predominated, which can be taken as evidence of the im poverishment of the grazing land. Game included onagers and gazelles. Donkeys have been shown to have existed at tire site in the Early Bronze Age and horses in the Middle Bronze Age (according to Reirrhard Ziegler).
BIBLIOGRAPHY Finet, Andre, ed. "Lorsque la royaute descendit du del..." Les fouilles beiges du Tell Kannds sur I'Euphraie en Syrie. Morlanwelz, 1982. Ex
cavations at Tell Qannas. Strommenger, Eva. "Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesells chaft in Habuba Kabira." In Archeological Reports from the Tabqa
Dam Project—Euphrates Valley, Syria, edited by David Noel Freedman, pp. 63-78. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, 44, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1979. Preliminary report; some results need revision. Strommenger, Eva. "The Chronological Division of the Archaic Levels of Uruk-Eanna VI to III/II: Past and Present." American Journal of Archaeology 84 (1980): 479-487. Habuba Kabira (South) and chron ological problems. Strommenger, Eva. Habuba Kabira, eine Stadt vor jooo Jahren: Ausgra bungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft am Euphrat in Habuba Ka
bira, Syrien. Sendschrift der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 12 Mainz, 1980. Preliminary report, in need of revision. Strommenger, Eva, and Kay Kohlmeyer, eds. Ausgrabungen in Habuba Kabira, vol. I, Habuba-Tall, Architektur (Kohlmeyer); vol. 2, Habuba-Tall, Kleinfunde (Strommenger et al.); vol. 3, Habuba-Siid, Ar
chitektur (Kohlmeyer and Wido Ludwig); vol. 4, Habuba-Siid, Klein funde (Strommenger et al.). Final reports, including the quoted results of researches on radiocarbon dates by Giinter Kohl and Jochen Gorsdorf, animals at Habuba Kabira (South) by Angela von den Driesch et al., and animals at Tell Habuba Kabira by Reinhard Ziegler. van Loon, Maurits N. The Tabqa Reservoir Survey, 1964. Damas, 1967. KAY KOHLMEYER
HACILAR, prehistoric mound (37°i7' N , 30°32' E) sit uated 1.5 km west of the village of Hacilar, about 26 km (16 mi.) southwest of Burdur on the southwest Anatolian pla teau, on the main road from Burdur to Yesilova and Denizli. This small and rather inconspicuous mound is about 150 m in diameter and fewer than 5 m high. It lies in an intermontane valley at an elevation of approximately 940 m above sea level and 100 m above the level of Lake Burdur. Steep rocks overlook the village from a height of 560 m. At the foot of this great limestone crag is a perennial spring, known as Koca Cay. In this region of the plateau (Pisidia), also known as tire Lake District, the proximity of tire coast provides for a rather mild Aegean climate. Rainfall is abundant, with a current average of 30-50 cm; an occasional snowfall be tween December and February is not unusual. The prehistoric mound of Flacilar was excavated by James Mellaart from 1957-1960, on behalf of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. Mellaart had first visited the site, already known to the villagers of Hacilar, in 1956. H e had been informed that painted wares similar to the sherds he found in the provinces of Burdur, Afyon, and Antalya in his southwestern Anatolia survey in 1951 and 1952 were being illegally excavated at Hacilar. Mellaart considered the dis covery of a prehistoric mound with no overlying late de posits to be a unique opportunity to investigate the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods in this part of the plateau. T h e stratigraphic sequence he published suggests that the site was first inhabited during the Aceramic Neolithic period. He
HADAR briefly investigated seven phases of occupation from the pe riod in an area of 150 sq m with a cultural deposit 1.5 m deep. It was impossible to determine the size of the village, but he did establish that its occupants had been farmers liv ing in permanent mud-brick houses. T h e houses had plas tered floors and walls and were comprised of small rectan gular rooms, possibly including a courtyard. Some of the floors and lower inner walls were painted with red ocher. This village was abandoned for unknown reasons, and the site remained uninhabited for an unspecified period of time. Following a considerable gap in occupation, architectural levels IX-VI revealed evidence of renewed occupation in the sixth millennium BCE. Of these four levels representing a Late Neolithic village, the earliest three were poorly pre served. T h e last level, VI, produced important data con cerning socioeconomic aspects of the Late Neolithic com munity. T h e villagers lived in mud-brick houses built on stone foundations. These domestic units, with plastered floors, had a central courtyard and perhaps a second story constructed of wood. T h e units were no doubt occupied by fully sedentarized farmers. Unlike the mostly single-room houses at the Early Neolithic village of Catal Hoytik (with entrances through the roof), the dwellings at Hacilar were large, about 60 sq. m. They contained built-in features such as ovens, hearths, benches, and small storage bins; access was through a doorway along one of the long walls. T h e handmade and well-burnished monochrome pottery of the period has its roots in the Early Neolithic pottery of the southern Anatolian plateau. Light and cream wares from Hacilar levels IX-VIII were gradually replaced by the brown- and red-slipped and burnished wares of levels V I I VI. T h e pottery repertoire of this period consisted of cups, bowls, and jars. In level VI, carved and polished white-mar ble vessels were produced in small numbers. They disappear in level I. T h e chipped-stone industry consisted of flint and obsidian flakes, scrapers, angular knives, blades (including sickle blades), and micropoints. The Late Neolithic village produced a large quantity of terra-cotta female statuettes in standing, resting, and seated positions that vary in height from 7 to 24 cm. Some of these figures wear some sort of a skirt and are sometimes depicted holding an infant, a young child, or a leopard cub in their arms. The community's economy was based on agriculture, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and cattle, sheep, and goat herding. Farmers grew einkorn and emmerwheat, bar ley, lentil, purple pea, and bitter vetch. Red and roe deer, aurochs, wild sheep, goat, and probably leopard were hunted. After the destruction of Hacilar VI, by the mid-sixth mil lennium, the village was rebuilt (level V) and the Late N e olithic culture developed into the Early Chalcolithic. T h e most characteristic feature of this period (levels V-I) is the popularity of red-on-cream painted wares. T h e decorative patterns show a preference for geometric, and curvilinear
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motifs. T h e pottery repertoire includes—in addition to sim ple cups, bowls, and jars—new shapes, such as collar-neck jars and oval cups. Building remains from levels V-III are not well preserved at Hacilar. T h e level II remains suggest that the small walled village was composed of a few mud-brick units built on stone foundations. These units, which included a number of domestic facilities and pottery workshops, were grouped around several courtyards within the village. Hacilar II was destroyed in a conflagration in the last quar ter of the sixth millennium and rebuilt shortly afterward with fortresslike characteristics. T h e new village, Hacilar I, was much larger and roughly circular. It had a generous central courtyard surrounded by large blocks of rooms built in mud brick and forming the inner part of the casematelike forti fication wall. During this period of occupation, Hacilar pot ters produced wares that differed from those of level II: in addition to red-and-cream monochrome wares, they pro duced large quantities of linear-style red-on-white painted ceramics. T h e repertoire of this period includes cups, shal low bowls, deep bowls, and collar-neck jars with square, oval, ovoid, and basket shapes. T h e female statuettes of this period are rather crude, compared to those from the Late Neolithic levels. Evidence for the economic activities of the villagers is not abundant, but it can be postulated that farming still consti tuted the main subsistence economy of the village. This Early Chalcolithic village was abandoned at the end of the sixth or early fifth millennium. BIBLIOGRAPHY Mellaart, James. Catal Huyilk: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. London,
1967. Mellaart, James. Excavations at Hacilar. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1970. Mellaart, James. The Neolithic of the Near East. London, 1975. Singh, Purushottam. The Neolithic Cultures of Western Asia. London,
1974Yakar, Jak. Prehistoric Anatolia: The Neolithic Transformation and the Early Chalcolithic Period. Tel Aviv, 1991. JAK YAKAR
HADAR, one of the most productive hominid fossilbearing sites in Africa. Roughly 300 km (186 mi.) northeast of Addis Ababa and situated in the west-central Afar D e pression of Ethiopia (IX°IO' N , 40°35' E), the mid-Pliocene site of Hadar takes its name from a large wadi known by the local Afar tribesmen as the Kada Hadar. Paleontological field investigations at Hadar during 1973-1977,1980,1990, and 1992-1994 have produced more than 300 hominid fossil specimens. Most noteworthy is nearly 40 percent of a single skeleton (nicknamed Lucy) and the partial remains of at least thirteen individuals (the so-called First Family) from a single geological stratum at. T h e fossiliferous deposits, extending over roughly 100 sq
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HADAR, TEL
km (39 sq. mi.) and known as die Hadar Formation, consist of 160 to 270 m (525-886 ft.) of lacustrine, lake-margin, and fluvial sediments. Widespread and distinctive volcanicmarker beds permit the subdivision of die formation into four stratigraphic members (from bottom to top): Basal, Sidi Hakoma, Denen Dora, and Kada Hadar. In 1968 Maurice Taieb first visited Hadar and recognized its great potential for paleoanthropological research. Follow ing a regional survey of sites in the Afar Depression in 1972, Taieb established the International Afar Research Expedi tion with his coworkers Donald C. Johanson, Yves Coppens, and John E. Kalb. Based on geological considerations as well as the superb preservation of faunal remains, tire team ini tiated intensive study of Hadar in 1973. It was then that the first fossil hominid, a knee joint, confirmed the presence of human ancestors witirin the Hadar Formation. The sparsely vegetated and heavily eroded outcrops at Fladar permitted the recovery of close to seven thousand fossil specimens of a wide variety of carnivora, poboscidea, perissodactyla, artiodactiya, rodents, birds, reptiles, fish, nonhominid primates, and other mammalian taxa. T h e fau nal picture is characteristically African (Ethiopian faunal re gion) and indicates a mosaic of habitats, ranging from closed and open woodland bush and grassland conditions. Fossil pollen and microfauna indicate that the elevation of site was considerably higher than the present day altitude of 500 m (1,640 ft.). Age calibration of the Hadar Formation is now firmly es tablished on the basis of vertebrate biostratigraphy (corre lation to otirer sites of known absolute age), paleomagnetism, and fission track dating as well as K-Ar and A r / A r dating of the volcanic horizons. T h e hominid fossil-bearing strata at Hadar span a time range from at least 3.4 million years to approximately 3.0 million years ago. T h e best age estimate for the Lucy skeleton is 3.2 million years old. Detailed anatomical study of the Hadar hominid collec tion led to the recognition that they were morphologically identical with those from the 3.5-million-year-old site in northern Tanzania known as Laetoli. In 1978, because of die recognition of a number of primitive cranial, mandibu lar, and dental characteristics these hominid fossils were dis tinguished from other known hominids, and placed in a new species, Australopithecus afarensis Qohanson et al., 1978). Al though individual anatomical features are seen in other spe cies of Australopithecus it is the constellation of features in A. afarensis tiiat makes this species distinct. A. afarensis is sexually quite dimorphic, and males are considerably larger than females. The locomotor skeleton, represented in the Hadar collection including the lower limb, the pelvis, and the foot, as well as the remarkably well pre served hominid footprints from Laetoli indicate that/I. afar ensis was fully bipedal. Some investigators have pointed out that primitive features in the pelvis, ankle, and foot suggest 40
39
a more arboreal lifestyle for this species. However, it is more likely that these features are merely "evolutionary baggage" from an arboreal ancestry. Now widely recognized as a distinct hominid species, Aus tralopithecus afarensis with its amalgam of primitive and ad vanced features is currentiy the best link between an ancient ape ancestor and more recent hominids. Although the pre cise geometry of the human family ttee is widely debated, this primitive species of Australopithecus is considered to be an ancestor to all later hominids, including the lineage which ultimately led to modern Homo sapiens. No archaeological traces have been found in association with tire Hadar fossil hominids. However, during survey and limited excavation in the Gona area, west of the hominid bearing deposits at Hadar, lithic artifacts were found. T h e flakes and cores are broadly assigned to the Oldowan in dustry. They are stratigraphically above the hominid bearing deposits and have been estimated to be approximately 2.5 million years old, making them among the oldest stone tools in Africa. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aronson, James L., and Maurice Taieb. "Geology and Paleogeography of the Hadar Hominid Site, Ethiopia." In Hominid Sites: Their Geo logic Settings, edited by George Rapp and Carl Vondra, pp, 165-195. Washington, D.C., 1981. Johanson, Donald C , et al. "A New Species of the Genus Australopi thecus (Primates: Hominidae) from the Pliocene of Eastern Africa." Kirtlandia 28 (1978): 1-14. Johanson, Donald C , and T. D. White. "A Systematic Assessment of Early African Hominids." Science 203 (1979): 321-330. Johanson, Donald C , and Maitland A. Edey. Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. New York, 1981. Walter, Robert C. "Age of Lucy and the First Family: Single-Crystal Ar/ Ar Dating of the Denen Dora and Lower Kada Hadar Mem bers of the Hadar Formation, Ethiopia." Geology 22 (1994): 6-10. 40
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DONALD C. JOHANSON
HADAR, TEL (Ar., Sheikh Khadhr), site situated on the eastern bank of the Sea of Galilee, 1.6 Ion (about 1 mi.) north of the estuary of Nahal Samakh, which was, and still is, the main ascent to the Golan Heights (32°53' N , 35°24' E; map reference 2112 X 2507). Two of the site's concentric defense walls can be seen aboveground, enclosing an area of about 2 ha (5 acres). Tel Hadar was discovered by the Golan Survey Team of 1967-1968 (site 140) and was ex cavated from 1987 to 1995 by the Land of Geshur Project of Tel Aviv University, under tire direction of Pirhiya Beck and Moshe Kochavi; Esther Yadin was field director. The site's final stratigraphy was established only after vir gin soil was reached in 1992. T h e site was founded in the Late Bronze Age I (stratum VI). The inner city wall, about 2.5 m wide, was built of large basalt boulders in this stratum; the outer wall was not yet built. A round tower with a di-
HADAR, TEL ameter of 19 m adjoining the inner wall crowned the site. The excavation of one of its rooms revealed a floor of leveled bedrock. Of the two doors that gave access to a room, one was found with its lintel in situ. T h e site was destroyed and deserted during the LB I. N o later Bronze Age occupation was attested. T h e site was resettled in the Iron Age I (stratum V), when some stone-lined silos were constructed adjacent to the inner wall amid die debris of the tower. T h e site's most important stratum (stratum IV), is dated to the eleventh century BCE. During that period, the southern part of the area within the inner wall was leveled, and two large public buildings were constructed on two terraces. T h e first, a storehouse com prised of tiiree long, narrow halls, was built parallel to the inner city wall on the upper terrace; the second, a tripartite pillared building with a unique granary, was built perpen dicular to the wall, on the lower terrace. T h e storehouse had solid stone walls and beaten-earth floors. Portions of its halls were used for grinding flour and similar activities. A door led to tlie two wings of the second building. Some of the pillars in the building on the lower terrace were monoliths; others were built of several stones (see figure 1). Its outer halls were paved, but the central one was not. There were no troughs or holes in the pillars. T h e granary had six rooms (3 x 3 m) connected by doors raised 0.80 m from the floor. It was completely plastered and found full of carbonized wheat grains. More than one hundred complete vessels were found in the destruction level of this building, most of them
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in the tripartite wing. Besides the usual eleventh-century BCE assemblage, there were three-handled storage jars, jars with handles drawn from tiieir lip, "Phoenician" decorated flasks and jugs, bowls previously found only at Gilead, a unique model of a shrine, a juglet full of astragali, a cup-and-lamp vessel, and a Greek Proto-Geomenic bowl. Following the total destruction of stratum IV, there was a long gap in occupation at the site. When it was resettled, in strata III-I, its plan and function were entirely different. Only private buildings, dated to the ninth-eighth centuries BCE, were attested in these strata. T h e 4-meter-wide outer wall was the settlement's only defensive wall. T h e broad room plans of most of the private buildings were uncommon for the Iron Age, and the use of pillars was restricted to stratum III. Among the finds are the Gileadite bowls, small basalt anchors, and an incised enigmatic Aramaic inscrip tion on the shoulder of a jar: L S D ' L . The site was aban doned forever at the end of stratum I. In summary, Tel Hadar's raison d'etre stemmed from its location near the Sea of Galilee and the main highway lead ing from Bashan to the Galilee and beyond. The site's hey day was in the eleventh century BCE, when it probably played a major role in the Kingdom of Geshur. In the ninth century BCE, after Geshur was integrated into the Kingdom of AramDamascus and 'Ein-Gev was built as the main Aramean stronghold in the area, Tel Hadar became a small village inhabited by fishermen and peasants. [See Ein-Gev; Ara means.] T h e destruction of both Aram-Damascus and Israel
HADAR, TEL. Figure 1. General view of the site. Note the various stone pillars along two of the walls. (Courtesy M. Kochavi)
c
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HADHRAMAUT
by Tiglath-Pileser III in 732 BCE brought an end to settle ment at Tel Hadar. BIBLIOGRAPHY Epstein, Claire, and Shmaryahu Gutman. "The Golan." lajudea, maria, and the Golan: Archaeological Survey, 1067-1968
Sa
(in Hebrew),
edited by Moshe Kochavi, p. 282. Jerusalem, 1972. Thefirstsurvey of the site. Kochavi, Moshe. "The Land of Geshur Project: Regional Archaeology of the Southern Golan, 1987—1988 Seasons." Israel Exploration Jour nal 39 (1989): 1-17. Preliminary report of the first two seasons of excavation. Kochavi, Moshe, et al. "Rediscovered! The Land of Geshur." Biblical Archaeology Review 18.4 (1992): 30-44, 84-85. Popular updated re port of the first four seasons of excavation. Kochavi, Moshe. "The Land of Geshur Regional Project: Attempting a New Approach in Biblical Archaeology." In Biblical Archaeology Today, 1900: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Bib lical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by Avraham
Biran and Joseph Aviram, pp. 725-737. Jerusalem, 1993. Lecture based on diefirstthree excavation seasons. Shoval, S., et al. "Rehydroxylation of Clay Minerals and Hydration in Ancient Pottery from the 'Land of Geshur.'" Journal of Thermal Analysis 37 (1991): 1579-1592. Fixes the temperature of the fire that destroyed Tel Hadar stratum IV to t200°C. MOSHE KOCHAVI
HADHRAMAUT (Heb., Hazermawet, probably "the court of death,"), one of the largest wadis on the Arabian Peninsula, stretches about 465 km (288 mi.) parallel to the south coast and descends from west to southeast to the In dian Ocean. The wadi bed, about 308 m deep, cuts through the Eocene limestone tableland (thejol), and varies in width from 15 km (9 mi.) on the west to about 92 m in Wadi Maseila. Its bed has an elevation of about 920 m above sea level. The Hadhramaut receives less than 200 mm of rainfall annually and is dry except during April-May when flash flooding, fed by numerous tributaries on both its north and south sides, inundates groves of date palms and fields for cereals. During the remainder of the year, wells, ranging from 15 to 20 deep, provide water for garden plots. The major section of the Hadhramaut boasts of three cities, built entirely of mud brick and featuring some of the world's most exotic architecture: Slribam, Seiyun, and Tarim. Although neither environment nor known historical events justifies or explains the name Hadhramaut, it is used for both a wadi and a pre-Islamic ldngdom. The kingdom of Hadhramaut was centered in the main wadi and extended eastward and southward to the ocean. Its capital, Shabwa, was located in the westernmost part of tire valley. It is one of six pre-Islamic kingdoms; the others are Sheba, Ma'in, Qataban, Himyar, and Ausan. [See Sheba; Qataban; Himyar.] Hadhramaut is the easternmost state. Names of Hadhrami kings are known as early as tire fifth century BCE, and they, with later rulers, can be correlated in
a chronological framework with kings of the other South Arabian states. In the Table of Nations (Gn. 10:26; 1 Chr. 1:20), Hadhramaut belongs to the fifth generation descended from Shem via Eber and is one of the thirteen sons of Joktan. Among classical authors, Strabo (16.4.4) mentions Chatramotitis (Hadhramaut) as tire beginning of an incense route crossing Arabia to Gerrha on the Arabian Gulf. Pliny the Elder (12.35.64) refers to Astramitica (Hadhramautic) as a variety of myrrh. He also notes (12.32.63-64) that Shabwa marks tire beginning of tire major incense route along the western fringe of the Arabian desert to the Mediterranean port of Gaza. Theodore Bent and his wife were the first Western visitors to the Hadhramaut in 1893-1894, but the begimring of ma jor exploration began in the 1930s. Daniel Van der Meulen and Hermann von Wissmann conducted research in histor ical geography in 1931 and 1939. A number of British p o litical officers, notably Harold and Doreen Ingrams, pub lished information gleaned during their extensive, travels throughout the region. Freya Stark conducted explorations in 1935 and in 1937. T h e first excavation occurred in 19371938 at Hureidha, undertaken by Gertrude Caton-Thomp son, Elinor Gardner, and Stark. [See Hureidha.] The follow ing year, R. A. B. Hamilton (Master of Belhaven) undertook exploratory excavations at Shabwa. [See the biography of Ca ton-Thompson.] Following World War II, G. Lankester Harding visited sites in the Hadhramaut and elsewhere in the Aden Protec torates (1959-1960). [See the biography of Harding.] During 1961-1962, Gus Van Beek, Glen Cole, and Albert Jamme, under tire auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, con ducted an intensive archaeological survey between Tarim and Qarn Qaimah, along tributaries, and thejol. The French Archaeological Mission, directed by Jean-Francois Breton, excavated Shabwa from 1975-1987. During this period, Russian scholar Mikhail Piotrovski and his colleagues con ducted excavations and historical research at Raybun. The earliest prehistoric evidence stems from the Middle Paleolithic, characterized by a Levallois technique of flake preparation. This phase continued without obvious devel opment until tools produced by a preagriculture, desert N e olithic technology appeared. T o this or the succeeding pe riod belong numerous megalithic structures, large stone circles, and a unique complex of four dolmenlike structures whose inner surfaces are decorated with repeated rows of a pecked meander or crenellated design. T h e excavation of pre-Islamic town sites shows that Hadhramaut culture developed with mainstream South Ara bian culture, as at Qataban, Sheba, Ma'in, and Himyar, with only a few minor differences. It shared tire same language, with characteristics like those at Qataban and Ma'in. Iden tical methods of flash-flood and well irrigation were used. A similar religious pantheon featuring the moon god, known
HADIDI, TELL there as Sin, and cult paraphernalia prevailed. T h e archi tectural forms and designs are identical, except for the dis covery at Shabwa of "skyscrapers," or tall buildings. One of diese, reaching six stories, preserves a post-and-beam skel eton, not unlike structural steel frameworks used today, fea turing massive 'ilb (jujube) wooden beams, rigidly assem bled with tongue-and-groove, pegs, and with brick curtain walls. This building, a palace, probably dates to the second century CE and was destroyed by fire in the fifth century. [See also Shabwa.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "The Chronology of Ancient South Arabia in the Light of the First Campaign of Excavation in Qataban." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 119 (1950): 5-
15. Useful correlation of the royal chronologies of Qataban, Ma'in, Sheba, and Hadhramaut with historical events. Harding, G. Lankester. Archaeology in the Aden Protectorates. London, 1964. Outdated but useful book, primarily for its photographs of sites and objects as well as pottery drawings. Van Beek, Gus W. "South Arabian History and Archaeology." In The Bible and the Ancient Near East, edited by G. Ernest Wright, pp. 229-
248. New York, 1961. Succinct summary of sources, exploration, and excavation from the eighteentii century to 1958. Van Beek, Gus W. et al., "An Archeological Reconnaissance in Ha dhramaut, South Arabia: A Preliminary Report." In Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution: General Appendix,
pp. 521-545. Washington, D.C., 1963. Account of sites, artifacts, and pre-Islamic inscriptions discovered during a walking survey, with tentative general interpretations of die cultural history of the wadi from the prehistoric to the recent Islamic period. Western Arabia and the Red Sea. Geographical Handbook Series, Great Britain Naval Intelligence Division. London, 1946. The best avail able description of the geography, environment, agriculture, and tribal history of souuiern Arabia as of 1946. Gus W. VAN BEEK
HADIDI, TELL, site located near the now-submerged village at Hadidi, situated on the west bank of the Euphrates River in Syria, about n o km (68 mi.) east of Aleppo (36°i5'54" N , 38°8'56" E). T h e site was excavated between 1972 and 1978 by die Milwaukee Public Museum, in co operation with the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and the University of Michigan, under the direction of Rudolph H. Dornemann, and from 1972 to 1974 by a Dutch expe dition from the University of Leiden under the direction of Henk Franken. Tell Hadidi was one of many sites affected by the construction of the hydroelectric dam at Tabqa and the creation of Lake Assad. It was noted in the 1964 survey of the region conducted by Maurits van Loon of the Uni versity of Chicago. T h e occupation sequence is primarily Bronze Age (3050-1400 BCE), with areas of Early Roman and Early Islamic remains. At its greatest extent, the site occupied 135 acres along tire terrace overlooking the Eu phrates. Its basic outiine is semicircular, with a diameter of
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500 m. A smaller, higher portion of the tell, 55 acres in ex tent, is situated on tire western side of the site. Despite the large number of areas excavated—several with sizable exposures—only a small portion of the site has been exposed. T h e sequences of occupation are clear, and at least a basic assemblage of artifacts is represented for each. An excellent pottery sequence, a good representation of small finds, and a some of tablets have been excavated. T h e earliest occupational remains date to the beginning of the Bronze Age. A series of buildings excavated in area RII and sherds found in the earliest fills in many areas in dicate settlement over the entire 135 acres. T h e most abun dant remains date to the Early Bronze III and IV periods, with buildings in most areas cutting through earlier occu pation to virgin gravel. A large number of EB tombs were encountered, many of which were examined. The tomb as semblages, for the most part, had to be reconstructed from sherds because most of the tombs had been disturbed. A large quantity of reconstructed vessels from the tombs com plemented tire stratified materials, however. T h e tombs il lustrate a variety of construction methods, including both stone-built chambers and simple shaft tombs excavated into the virgin gravel. Scanty remains of a mud-brick fortification wall were preserved. Occupation seems to have been continuous from the Early to tire Middle Bronze Ages, but the size of tire settle ment was reduced significantly and shifted to the western part of the tell. Excavation exposed a good sample of MB domestic occupation and sections of the fortification system. One excavated tomb showed evidence of reuse in the Mid dle Bronze Age, and a number of infant burials were recov ered from under floors inside buildings. Occupation was again continuous through the transition from the Middle to die Late Bronze Ages. The major ex posure in area B showed a Middle Bronze fortification wall that was rebuilt at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age in an extension of the city. T h e pattern of fortification wall with moat was repeated. The lower eastern portion of the tell was apparently reoccupied when the city was rebuilt. In area H , two adjacent houses were excavated that had been con structed when the city was expanded in the Late Bronze Age. These two adjacent but successive houses had similar plans, organized around large, rectangular central rooms. T h e southernmost house, excavated by the American ex pedition in area H, was well preserved, to heights of more than 2 nr and with its inventory basically intact. A small but important collection of tablets from private archives was discovered in this building and provided dating evidence as well as a name for the site: two tablets attest that in antiquity it was the city of Azu. A number of houses with similar plans and inventory have been excavated at Tell Mumbaqat/Ekalte, not too far across the Euphrates. T h e remains of two LB tombs were excavated at Tell Hadidi; several others showed signs of reuse at this time. The Bronze
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HAFT TEPE Euphrates River Valley." Biblical Archaeologist 48 (1985): 49-59. Up dated general summary of excavation results at Tell Hadidi. Dornemann, Rudolph H. "The Syrian Euphrates Valley as a Bronze Age Cultural Unit Seen from the Point of View of Mari and Tell Hadidi." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 34 (1987): 63ff.
Dornemann, Rudolph H. "Tell Hadidi: One Bronze Age Site among Many in the Tabqa Dam Salvage Area." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 270 (1988): 13-42. Primary update of materials from Tell Hadidi. Dornemann, Rudolph H. "Comments on Small Finds and Items of Artistic Significance from Tell Hadidi and Nearby Sites in the Eu phrates Valley, Syria." In Essays in Ancient Civilization
Presented to
Helene J. Kantor, edited by Albert Leonard, Jr., and Bruce B. Wil liams, pp. 59-75. Chicago, 1989. Preliminary review of small finds from Tell Hadidi and their comparative setting. Dornemann, Rudolph H. "The Beginning of the Bronze Age in Syria in Light of Recent Excavations." In Resurrecting the Past: A Joint Tribute to Adnan Bounni, edited by Paolo Matthiae, et al., pp. 8 5 100. Istanbul, 1990. Primary preliminary study of the EB ceramics from Tell Hadidi. van Loon, Maurits N. "The Tabqa Reservoir Survey, 1964." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 17 (1967): 1-27. Primary reconnais sance of the Euphrates Valley prior to the commencement of salvage excavations. RUDOLPH H . DORNEMANN
HAFT T E P E (Pers., seven mounds), site located in HADIDI, TELL.
Clay tablet depicting a beer-drinking ceremony. Mid
dle Bronze II period. (Courtesy R. Dornemann)
Khuzistan province, on Iran's southwestern alluvial plain, about 10 km (6 mi.) southeast of Susa and 50 km (31 mi.) south of Andimeshk (at approx. 3 2 N , 48 E ) . This large Elamite site, composed of many individual mounds, forms an imposing and prominent mass rising above the surround ing plain. As early as the late nineteenth century, Jean Jacques de Morgan of the French Archaeological Mission in Iran described its ancient remains, referring to them as Haft Shogal (lit., "seven jackals"), apparently a misunderstand ing of the name in the local dialect in which it is called Haft Chogha, with chogha being the local word for an artificial mound, or tell. In Persian, seven is a term often used to indicate any large number, a reference to the multiple mounds of the complex, [see Susa; Elamites.] The site's ancient name remains in question. Some schol ars have suggested that it may have been Tikni, which is described in early documents as a religious center located between Susa and Chogha Zanbil. While no evidence has yet appeared at Haft Tepe itself to support this theory, sev eral seal impressions and clay tablets found there contain the name Ka-ap-nak, which may have been the site's original name (Herrero, 1976). In the 1950s and 1960s, Haft Tepe became the center of a large sugar cane plantation. In leveling land for planting, some archaeological remains were destroyed and others ex posed. During construction of the main road to the plan tation, a baked-brick wall was uncovered that the project's managers reported to the Iranian Archaeological Service. In 1965 an expedition was organized to excavate the site, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Art. From the 0
Age occupation came to an end with the decline of the king dom of Mitanni at the end of the fifteenth century BCE. Later occupation was preserved on the southern, river side of the tell. A large shallow area of Roman occupation was excavated on the lower, eastern side of the tell and on the southeastern side of the high tell. The Umayyad through 'Abbasid occupation was confined primarily to the river side of the high tell, and an extensive 'Abbasid cemetery stretched from, the southwest corner of the tell toward its center. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dornemann, Rudolph H. "MPM Euphrates Valley Expedition, 1974: Excavations at Tell Hadidi." Lore 25 (1975): 2-23. "Initial general report on the Tell Hadidi excavations. Dornemann, Rudolph H. "Tell Hadidi: A Bronze Age City on the Eu phrates." Archaeology 31 (1978): 20-26. Summary of the results of the excavation for a general audience. Dornemann, Rudolph H. "Tell Hadidi: A Millennium of Bronze Age City Occupation." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research
44 (1979): 113-151. First substantive preliminary report on the Tell Hadidi excavations. Dornemann, Rudolph H. "The Late Bronze Age Pottery Tradition at Tell Hadidi, Syria." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re
search, no. 241 (1981): 29-47. Basic representation of the LB mate rials, particularly the "tablet building." Dornemann, Rudolph H. "Salvage Excavations at Tell Hadidi in the
0
HAFT TEPE fourth season onward, a program of field training in exca vation techniques was instituted for graduate students of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Tehran. Even tually, a site museum was built, along with permanent head quarters for the excavation team. Although the expedition worked for fourteen seasons, until political conditions in Iran made it impossible to carry on, only a small fraction of this large site has yet been uncovered. T h e archaeological complex contains fourteen major vis ible mounds, the largest of which rises about 17 m above the surrounding plain, with extensions covering an area about 1,500 m long and 800 m wide. This is a single-level site with almost no evidence of occupation before its major period of construction and very minimal evidence afterward. T h e massive sun-dried and baked-brick buildings of Haft Tepe, which seem to be of a religious or other public nature, were constructed during a single period that lasted for one or at the most two centuries in the mid-second millennium BCE, at which time Haft Tepe was a major Elamite city. Most of the construction is of sun-dried brick, with baked brick used only for very important buildings and in areas particularly exposed to weather. Between sun-dried bricks is simple clay mortar; and between the baked brick is an extremely strong gypsum mortar. Gypsum was also used as a covering for the baked-brick pavements and for plastering walls and the inner surfaces of vaulted roofs. Natural bitu men was used to seal basins and water channels and as a mortar and surface covering. T h e architectural remains thus far uncovered include a royal tomb of baked brick with a barrel-vaulted roof (see figure 1) and another subsidiary baked-brick tomb, also with a vaulted roof, now collapsed. Both were attached to a large temple of sun-dried brick with two parallel halls opening onto a long portico that in turn opened onto a large court yard paved with several layers of baked brick. T h e courtyard contained two broken stone stelae inscribed with the name of the Elamite king Tepti-ahar. It is believed that he built the Haft Tepe complex in the mid-second millennium BCE. A massive wall of sun-dried brick surrounds the temple complex. Large architectural remains, with a massive wall at least 60 m long, extend in an easterly direction from the outside wall of the courtyard. About 100 m southeast of the temple complex, connected by this massive wall, is a large, solid, sun-dried brick construction that forms a many-sided terrace (Terrace Complex 1), built in sections. It may have served as tire foundation of a much taller structure, a zig gurat palace or temple, whose plan can no longer be distin guished. [See Ziggurat.] Around this massive terrace are nu merous halls, many of whose walls had been covered with polychrome paintings on gypsum surfaces. T h e halls had had flat roofs supported by large slats of palm tree fiber covered with reed and matting. On the eastern side of tire massive terrace, a particularly interesting large hall, apparently an artist's workshop, was
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•t-H—1—1—1—I—1—I—I—1—1—h 0 -i * 3 1 sn weft
HAFT TEPE. Figure i.
Tomb-temple
complex of Tepti-ahar.
(Cour
tesy E. O. Negahban)
partitioned into several sections, in which various crafts had been produced. Bowls with dried paint, a sawn elephant skeleton, a solidified cluster of several hundred oxidized bronze arrowheads and small bronze tools, fragments of col ored-stone mosaic framed in bronze, and a butterfly pin of gold and carnelian were found there. The most unusual ob jects recovered are two life-sized painted portrait heads of an Elamite king and queen (see figure 2), together with a clay mask. Directly in front of this workshop was a very large lain, composed of two long, partitioned wings with a fire chamber in the center, in which apparently pottery was fired and bronze was smelted. South of Terrace Complex 1 an other massive solid brick terrace was only partially exca vated. Altogether, during tire fourteen seasons of work, one
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HAFT TEPE
Hi
in a wide variety of costumes and headdresses (see figure 3); male figurines, including musicians holding stringed in struments; animal figurines in different materials, and, among tire bronze objects, arrowheads, axes, daggers, and tools, including a wide variety of chisels. Evidence indicates that the complex had been sacked and burned at some time. In the courtyard of the T o m b Temple Complex, a solidly built platform formed of nine layers of baked brick with gypsum mortar had been completely cut into. Scattered over this platform were pieces of stone in scribed in cuneiform writing. They apparently belonged to stone stelae originally installed on tire platform but were found lying elsewhere in the courtyard. It seems that after the stelae were dismantled, they proved to be too heavy to carry away and so were abandoned. In many of the halls of Terrace Complex 1, traces of roofing slats were found on tire floor, indicating that the rooms had been set on fire. Nothing was found to show when this destruction took place, but the material uncovered in the T o m b Temple
HAFT TEPE. Figure 2. Portrait head of an Elamite queen. (Courtesy E. O. Negahban)
hundred and fifty trenches (10 X 10 m), concentrated for the most part and covering an area of 15,000 sq m, were opened. Among the most important remains are the written rec ords, which include several stone stelae and many hundreds of inscribed clay tablets. The tablets were almost all Elamite tablets written in Babylonian; they include letters, accounts, scholarly treatises, and works of divination. T h e name Kadashman Enlil is inscribed on one, with an impression of the seal of Tepti-ahar. It seems that Tepti-ahar, king of Elam, was a contemporary of Kadashman Enlil I, the Kassite king of Mesopotamia. The Kassite king reigned before BurnaBuriash III, whose rule began in about 1375 BCE (Negahban, 1991). Many cylinder seals and seal impressions belonging to the middle of the second millennium BCE were also found, some with specific design details unique to Haft Tepe. [See Kassites; Seals.] The bulk of the Haft Tepe pottery is comparable to that of tire Late Kassite period. Most of the vessels, including jars and bowls, are of plain, unpainted pottery in various shades of buff; a very limited amount is plain gray pottery. Some stone vessels and mace heads were also found. Other objects from the site include many broken figurines of Ishtar,
HAFT TEPE. Figure 3. Figurine of Ishtar. (Courtesy E. O. Negahban)
HAJAR BIN HUMEID Complex and Terrace Complex i points to a major occu pation of the site for, at most, two to three centuries during the second half of the second millennium BCE. Because Haft Tepe itself is a single-level site, during the first season of excavation a step trench was dug into the large mound of Abu Fandowa, about i km northwest of Haft Tepe, in order to obtain background material on the area's prehistory. This step trench revealed twelve archaeological levels, from the sixth millennium through tire protoliterate and Elamite periods. During the last two seasons of the Haft Tepe excavation, work was reopened at Abu Fandowa. On its northwestern and northeastern slopes, kilns from the pro toliterate period were uncovered and remains of the early first millennium BCE, including some inscribed cuneiform tablets of the Neo-Elamite period, were found in the mound's topmost levels. [See also Chogha Zanbil; Elamites; and Susa.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckman, Gary. "A Stray Tablet from Haft Tepe." Iranica Antiqua 26 (1991): 81-S3. Glassner, J.-J. "Les textes de Haft Tepe: La Susiane et l'Elam en deuxieme millenaire." In Mesopotamia et Elam: Actes de la XXXVIeme rencontre assyriologique Internationale, Gand, 10-14 jidllet 1989. 1991.
Herrero, Pablo. "Tablettes administratives de Haft Tepe." Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francoise en Iran 6 (1976): 93-116.
Herrero, Pablo, and J.-J. Glassner. "Haft Tepe: Choix de textes." Ir anica Antiqua 25 (1990): 1-45; 26 (1991): 39-80. Negahban, Ezat O. "Excavation of Marlik." In Actes du Vile congres international des sciences prehistoriques et protohistoriques, pp. 220-222.
Prague, 1971. Negahban, Ezat O. "Brief General Report of Third Season of Exca vation of Haft Tepe." In Memorial Volume of the Fifth International Congress for Iranian Art and Archaeology, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz,
nth-i8th April 1968, vol. 1, pp. 153-163. Tehran, 1972. Negahban, Ezat O. "Brief Report of the Haft Tepe Excavation, 1974." In Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium on Archaeological Re
search in Iran, pp. 171-178. Tehran, 1975. Negahban, Ezat O. "Haft Tepe." Iran 13 (1975). Negahban, Ezat O. "Die elamische Siealung Haft Tepe." Antike Welt 2 (1977): 42-48. Negahban, Ezat O. A Guide to the Haft Tepe Excavation and Museum.
Tehran, 1977. Negahban, Ezat O. "Architecture of Haft Tepe." Archdologische
Mit
teilungen aus Iran 6 (1979): 9-29.
Negahban, Ezat O. "Haft Tepe Roundels: An Example of Middle Elamite An." American Journal of Archaeology 88 (January 1984): 3 10. Negahban, Ezat O. "The Haft Tepe Bronze Plaque." In Contributions a I'histoire de Than: Melanges Jean Perrot, pp. 137-142. Paris, 1990. Negahban, Ezat O. Excavations at Haft Tepe, Iran. Philadelphia, 1991.
Negahban, Ezat O. "Seal Impressions on a Jar Stopper from Haft Tepe." In South Asian Archaeology Studies, edited by Gregory L.
Possehl, pp. 87-99. New Delhi, 1992. EZAT O . NEGAHBAN
HAJAR BIN HUMEID, site located about 255 km (158 mi.) north-northeast of Aden and about 82 km (51 mi)
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south-southeast of Marib (i4°54'o" N , 45°45'45" E). It oc cupies the east bank of Wadi Beihan opposite tire strategic Mablaqah Pass. This major caravan route led to Wadi Harib, Marib, and norflrward to Gaza, the primary Medi terranean incense port. T h e site probably served as a control point under the aegis of Timna', the capital of the kingdom of Qataban. Hajar Bin Humeid is an oval-shaped mound with almost 15 m of debris. In area, the site measures 9.79 acres at the 10-m contour; 5.05 acres at the 14-m contour; and 2.67 acres at the 20-m contour. Flash floods have partially destroyed tire site's long west side, and a modern irrigation canal was dug through the talus on this side. The site was discovered by Nigel Groom, a British polit ical officer, in 1948. Two years later, the American Foun dation for the Study of Man, with Wendell Phillips, who was its president, and William Foxwill Albright, its archaeolog ical director, excavated an area of 392 sq m on the west side, along tire escarpment, through the upper four strata. In 1951, under Albright's direction, D o n Dragoo and Gus Van Beek were in charge of excavation. T o reach virgin soil dur ing the field season and to protect excavators from sloughing debris, the digging area was reduced by a series of broad steps, making the area of stratum S one-tenth that of stratum A, or 39.2 sq m. The excavations disclosed eighteen strata, spanning from about the eleventh century BCE to the second-fourth cen turies CE. T w o strata—D and F—had two phases each. From strata S through D , buildings were built entirely of sun-dried mud brick, with or without coursed rubble foun dations; strata C-A featured fine ashlar buildings; this change in architecture corresponds to a change in pottery type frequencies, indicating a break with traditions in tire late second-early first centuries BCE, when Qataban reached the zenitir of its prosperity and power. The site was a small town with a population of from six hundred to twelve hundred. It was an agricultural commu nity utilizing both flash-flood irrigation and well irrigation. U-shaped, fired clay spouts were efficiently used to break the dikes surrounding garden plots to admit water during well irrigation. Among the crops cultivated were barley, tef grass, millet, cumin, sesame, flax, sorrel, grapes, possibly oats, and probably other crops for which evidence is lacking. Bovines, sheep, goats, and game, probably including fowl, provided protein; sheep, goats, and camels yielded wool; camels and asses were used for transport; bovines, camels, asses, and people served in draft work. T h e economy of Hajar Bin Humeid must have been gready enhanced by the customs collected from caravan traffic through tire Mablaqah Pass. Imported artifacts indi cate wide-ranging international trade: a small brass chalice witir delicately tapped designs was probably imported from Egypt; a lead glazed crater, made with a molded exterior and turned interior, may have come from Asia Minor, per-
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HAJJI FIRUZ With subsequent technological development, the technique become standard procedure. [See also Qataban; and the biographies of Albright and Phil lips.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bowen, Richard Le Baron. "Irrigation in Ancient Qataban (Beihan)." In Archaeological Discoveries in South Arabia, edited by Richard Le
Baron Bowen and Frank P. Albright, pp. 43-131. Publications of die American Foundation for the Study of Man, vol. 2. Baltimore, 1958. The most comprehensive treatise on ancient and contemporary flash-flood and well irrigation methods in southern Arabia. Ford, James A. A Quantitative Method for Deriving Cultural
Chronology.
Washington, D.C., 1962. An excellent method of classifying pot sherds at sites where diere are not enough whole or restored pots or painted designs to construct a conventional, Near Eastern ceramic typology. Soderstrom, T. R. "Appendix III: Impressions of Cereals and Other Plants in the Pottery of Hajar Bin Humeid." In Hajar Bin Humeid: HAJAR BIN HUMEID. Bowl. Note molded ibex head and recumbent bulls on rim, eighth century BCE. (Courtesy G. W. Van Beek)
haps Tarsus; and an unusual green-and-white glass base probably came from Mesopotamia. Cultural influences were wide ranging as well: a calcite (alabaster) stela showing a man holding a staff imitates a Syro-Hittite prototype, and pottery-finishing techniques were borrowed from southern Palestine and some shapes from Ethiopia. Local craftsmen plied their trades: metallurgy; ceramics; and stone-working, including carving inscriptions, sculpture, and vessels; and mud and stone consmiction. There is no evidence of forti fications or of destruction by warfare, suggesting a peaceful life isolated from potential predators. The most significant of the results of the Hajar Bin Humeid excavations was Van Beek's development of the first pottery chronology for pre-Islamic Soutii Arabia, cov ering the period from about n o o BCE to 200 CE. Owing to the paucity of pottery and restorable pots in ancient Arabia, it relies on a typological method developed by James Ford (1962) that quantitatively measures the frequencies of all possible pottery traits (e.g., tempers, forming techniques, and types of decoration). These categories serve as the prin cipal typological criteria, with shape relegated to secondary status. The ubiquitous remains in every wadi of diversion dams and sluices, together with silt deposition and rectangular erosion patterns, led Richard Bowen (1958) to the first com prehensive reconstruction of techniques for pre-Islamic flash-flood and well irrigation. For environmental recon struction, a technique borrowed from paleontology enabled Thomas R. Soderstrom (1969), Elizabeth F. Wiseman, and Van Beek to identify both wild and domestic plants from seed impressions in plant-tempered pottery. Hajar Bin Humeid was the site of the first successful use of X-rays to identify joints in pots assembled from multiple sections.
Investigations at a Pre-Islamic Site in South Arabia, by Gus W. Van
Beek, pp. 399-407. Publications of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, vol. 5. Baltimore, 1969. Discusses a technique for recovering environmental information on plants in antiquity from pottery tampered with grasses and plant seed. Van Beek, Gus W. Hajar Bin Humeid: Investigations at a Pre-Islamic
Site in South Arabia. Publications of tile American Foundation for the Study of Man, vol. 5. Baltimore, 1969. Scholarly study of a preIslamic archaeological site in southern Arabia spanning more than a thousand years, with the only lengthy pottery chronology to date and several innovative research techniques. Gus W. VAN BEEK
HAJJI FIRUZ, a small, mounded site in the Solduz val ley of northwestern Iran (37°oi'o6" N , 45°28' E ) . T h e site was first recorded in 1936 by Aurel Stein and named after a nearby village (Stein, 1940). In 1956, Robert H. Dyson, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania Museum began a longterm program of archaeological research in Solduz, focused on the large site of Hasanlu with its well-preserved Iron Age citadel. [See Hasanlu.] One of Dyson's goals was to docu ment the history of settlement in the region; to achieve this goal, soundings were made at several sites with limited pe riods of occupation. Located only 2 Ion from Hasanlu, Hajji Firuz was tested in 1958 by Charles Burney and in 1961 by T . Cuyler Young, Jr. More extensive excavations were car ried out by Mary M . Voigt in 1968. T h e site can be divided into two topographic areas: a high, relatively steeply sloping central mound and a low, gently sloping outer flat. Burney's small sounding near the center of the mound defined three distinctive ceramic assemblages dated to early prehistoric times. All absolute dates for these assemblages are based on calibrated radiocarbon determi nations. Resting on virgin soil are deposits assigned to the Hajji Firuz period (Hasanlu X, c. 6500-5500 BCE); stratified above were occupations designated as the Dalma (Hasanlu IX, c. 5100-4800 BCE) and Pisdeli (Hasanlu VIII, c. 4800-
HAJJIFIRUZ 3800 BCE) assemblages. Subsequent excavation was focused on the Hajji Firuz, or Neolithic, period and was carried out on the lower slope of the mound, where the sixth-millen nium settiement lay near the site's modern surface. Young defined a sequence of building levels spanning about five hundred years (6000-5500 BCE), but did not reach virgin soil, which lay under the water table near the edge of the mound. Voigt's principal goal was to understand better the architecture and settlement plan of the village. She therefore cleared a broad area of the latest well-preserved Hajji Firuz occupation. Additional information was obtained from a re gional surface survey that showed that Hajji Firuz Tepe was one of (at least) six Neolithic villages clustered in a wellwatered zone in the Solduz valley. One additional site was located on the Gadar River in the Ushnu valley to the west. T h e Ushnu-Solduz valley was initially occupied in about 6500 BCE by farmers who migrated across the Zagros Moun tains from northern Mesopotamia, carrying witii them a ma terial culture similar in many ways to that of such Hassuna sites as Umm Dabaghiyeh and Tell Flassuna. [SeeHassuna.] Floral and faunal evidence from Hajji Firuz indicates that these people cultivated wheat, barley, and lentils and herded sheep, goats, and pigs. Although domesticates provided the bulk of tiieir food supply, they also gathered wild plants and hunted both large and small game (aurochs, red deer, wild boar, hare, and a variety of birds). T h e restriction of settle ments to areas with relatively rich pasture suggests that herding played a significant and perhaps crucial role in the subsistence system of these frontier farmers; it provided a buffer against serious crop shortages caused by drought, as well as a means of avoiding minor (seasonal) shortages. T h e village at Hajji Firuz was made up of small rectan gular houses built of mud bricks covered with mud plaster and roofed witii a layer of reed and m u d resting on short wooden beams (figure 1). Each house was oriented along
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the cardinal points of the compass and was divided into two rooms. T h e rooms differed in details of construction and contents: a cleaner and more elaborately finished "living room" and a "utility room" with uneven floors covered with trash and evidence of food storage (pottery storage jars, bins) as well as cooking (hearths, ovens). The small size of the Hajji Firuz houses (about 30 sq m of roofed space) suggests that each served as the domicile of a single nuclear family. T h e archaeological distribution of artifacts and manufacturing debris indicates that each family controlled its own food supply and manufactured such com monly used items as flint, obsidian, and bone tools. T h e pottery was handmade; the variation in form, finish, and painted decoration suggests a large number of potters and probably manufacture within each domestic unit. Thus, at Hajji Firuz the household was the unit of consumption and the basic (if not sole) unit of production. That village households were homogeneous with regard to wealth and status can be inferred from the houses (similar in both size and contents) and from burial patterns. Clay bins used as ossuaries were built inside most of the exca vated houses, usually in the living room. [See Ossuary.] T h e bones of males, females, and children apparently remained exposed for some time, but eventually the bins were sealed with clean clay to form platforms. In some cases human bone was scattered in a layer between house floors, and chil dren were sometimes placed in jars or pits beneath the low est floor. T h e bones were almost always disarticulated be fore interment, so that there must have been an area outside the village where bodies were exposed until scavengers had picked the bones clean. In one case a bone was intensely burned, an early example of cremation. Items commonly deposited as grave goods included small pots, clay spindle whorls, and grindstones. Hajji Firuz (c. 6000 BCE) can be described as an egalitarian society, similar to the model of the "early farming com munity" proposed by anthropologist and archaeologist Rob ert Braidwood in the 1950s, and typical of the earliest foodproducing villages in the Near East. [See Jarmo.] Ironically, recent evidence suggests that most seventh-millennium vil lages had more complex social and economic systems, and tiiat Hajji Firuz may represent a conservative group that chose to move into a new area rather than participate in the changes taking place on the plains of northern Mesopota mia, BIBLIOGRAPHY Braidwood, Linda S., Robert J. Braidwood, Bruce Howe, Charles A. Reed, and Patty Jo Watson. Prehistoric Archeology along the Zagros
HAJJI FIRUZ. Figure 1. Reconstruction of a mud-brick house. C. 5500 BCE. (Courtesy M. M. Voigt)
Flanks. Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 105. Chicago, 1983. De scription of the work of the Iraq-Jarmo prehistoric project, which sought to document Robert Braidwood's model for the development of agriculture and social systems in the prehistoric Near East. Dyson, Robert H., Jr. "The Genesis of the Hasanhi Project." Intro duction to Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran: The Neolithic Settlement, by Mary
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M . Voigt. Hasanlu Excavation Reports, vol. i. University Museum Monograph, no. 50. Philadelphia, 1983. History of work in the Ushnu-Solduz valley, including a summary of the archaeological se quence with key references. Stein, Aurel. Old Routes of Western Iran. New York, 1940. Account of Stein's survey of major sites in the Zagros mountains, including the initial description of Hajji Firuz Tepe. Voigt, Mary M . Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran: The Neolithic Settlement. Hasanlu
Excavation Reports, vol. 1. University Museum Monograph, no. 50. Philadelphia, 1983. Presents all material excavated by Burney, Young, and Voigt; suggests a reconstruction of village economic and social organization, and places the site within the culture history of the Zagros and adjacent regions. Includes a general discussion of clay figurines and their interpretation. Voigt, Mary M. "Relative and Absolute Chronologies for Iran between 6500 and 3500 cal BC." In Chronologies in the Near East, edited by Olivier Aurenche et al., pp. 615-646. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 379. Oxford, 1987. Summarizes information on stratigraphy and chronology of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods in the Solduz valley; lists radiocarbon dates for Neolithic and Chalcolithic Iran. Voigt, Mary M. "Reconstructing Neolithic Societies and Economies in the Middle East." Arcliaeomaterials 4 (1990): 1-14. Discussion of the social and economic organization of early agricultural communities of the Near East (c. 7500-5500 BCE); suggests relatively rapid change in social forms and significant economic specialization by 6000 BCE. MARY M . VOIGT
HALAF, TELL, site located at Ras al-'Ain, at the head waters of the Khabur River, at tire Syrian/Turkish border, about 60 km (38 mi.) south of the foothills of the Taurus Mountains (36°48' N , 40°02' E). It is about 70 km (43 mi.) northwest of Hasseke and about 130 Ion (81 mi.) southwest of the Qamishli/Nisibin area. It is 330 km (205 mi.) northeast of Aleppo, Syria. The fertile North Syrian plain there sup ports excellent rainfall agricultural production. T h e closest major ancient archaeological site is Tell Fakhariyah, about 3 km (2 mi.) to the east, on the other side of dre Khabur. The archaeological sequences at Halaf and Fakhariyah com plement each other and sometimes seem to overlap. Tell Halaf is associated with the name Guzana in both tire Bronze and Iron Ages, while the name for Fakhariyah is uncertain in the Bronze Age and is documented as Sikanu in the Iron Age (Abou Assaf et al., 1982). Guzana was tire capital city of the Aramean state of Bit-Bahiani. [See Fakhariyah, Tell] Tell Halaf was first explored by the German diplomat Max Frieherr von Oppenheim witir soundings in 1899 and excavations between 1911 and 1913 and again in 1927 and 1929 (von Oppenheim, 1931). Two major periods of oc cupation were encountered. The first was a sixth-millen nium BCE occupation with a distinctive ceramic assemblage that has given the site name to this period for North Syria and northern Iraq. The stratum was excavated at a depth of 22 m, primarily under the acropolis area and near tire spring that issues from the ground at tire foot of tire mound on the north side and feeds into the Khabur. The present-day con tours of the site reflect its Iron Age plan. A large, basically
rectangular area about 600 X 360 m was framed by a for tification system of straight stretches of walls with regularly spaced rectangular towers. This lower town surrounded the rectangular acropolis (about 150 X 200 m) in the northcentral area, backing up to the banks of the Klrabur. Halaf a n d Earlier Material. T h e earliest ceramic ma terial from the lowest levels at the bottom of deep test pits is coarse, unpainted pottery, apparently dating to the earliest phases of the Pottery Neolithic (early in the sixth millen nium BCE). Red, gray, and plain burnished wares occur at this time and then continue side by side with more elaborate painted wares followed by tire deposits of the Halaf period itself (mid-sixth-fifth millennium). T h e Halaf-period as semblage is characterized by beautifully decorated poly chrome vessels. A large repertoire of decorative motifs is executed in a fine, lustrous paint that appears to be almost a glaze. It was applied primarily on jars and bowls in a num ber of quite distinctive forms. Copper objects, flint tools, handmade figurines, and stone vessels are among the cate gories of objects tirat comprise this rich assemblage, but tirey are summarily represented because of the limited soundings (von Oppenheim, 1943). T h e Halaf culture has now been investigated or recovered from a range of sites tiiat covers a wide band across northern Mesopotamia, from the Khabur area west to die Euphrates River and east to the Zagros Mountains. A r a m e a n a n d Assyrian Occupations. T h e excavators do not mention any occupation between the earliest levels of tire Pottery Neolithic through the Chalcolithic and the earliest occupation in the Iron Age. Several levels of Iron Age settlement were blocked out from at least tire tenth through the seventh centuries BCE. T h e altbau (early build ing) period was encountered in soundings that provided ear lier phases of fortification, a gateway, and major building construction underlying the extensive remains of the Kapara period (von Oppenheim, 1950; see below). The name of the Iron Age city at Tell Halaf is known as Guzana from Assyrian sources and materials found at tire site. The literary references date from the time of AdadNirari II (911-891 BCE). He is said to have received tribute from Abisalamu of Bit-Bahiani, where Guzana is the capital city, to tire time of Sargon II (721-705 BCE), when the latest of many governors is mentioned. T h e Assyrian rulers Tukulti-Ninurta II and Ashurbanipal II mention the site in their inscriptions. Among a long list of governors mentioned in the Assyrian eponym lists, down through 706 BCE, are Mannukiassur (793 BCE) and Pursagale (763 BCE). T h e seventhcentury BCE site is considered to have been fully assyrianized on die basis of letters and legal documents recovered there. At what point in dre eighth century BCE the Assyrian gov ernors replaced the local Aramean rulers is not clear. Many inscriptions were found from the ruler Kapara; his father Handianu is also mentioned, but it has not been possible to fix precisely the years in which they lived, though a tenth-
HALAF, TELL
HALAF, TELL. Figure I. Basalt orthostat. Aleppo Museum. (Cour tesy J. S. Jorgensen)
ninth-century date is probable. At nearby Tell Fakhariyah, ancient Sikanu, a statue with a bilingual inscription in Ara maic and Akkadian, possibly dating to the end of the ninth century BCE, was dedicated to the god Hadad by Hadadyis'a, son of Shamash-Nuri. [See Fakariyah Aramaic Inscription.] In the Assyrian version he is referred to as the governor of Guzana, and in tire Aramaic version he is king of Guzana. Tukultisharru, tire son of Hadadyis'a, may have been one of the last of tire Aramaic rulers of Guzana. Assigned to the ninth century BCE, though possibly earlier
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in date, is the later palace structure, die northwestern palace, with its many sculptural embellishments and inscriptions of the ruler Kapara. A two-chambered gateway on the western side of the south wall gives access to the acropolis. A large mass of brickwork was encountered west of die gateway, covering an area of about 3600 sq m, whose function is un clear. A street runs direcdy north of this citadel gateway, through a gateway on die eastern side of the northwest pal ace, that connects to tire courtyard north of the palace. Alternating small basalt and limestone orthostats (see fig ure 1 ) , each with a separate carved scene, decorate the southern facade of tire building from its western corner, around its eastern corner, and continuing up to the palace gateway. T h e orthostats were carved in a variety of styles that include representations of soldiers standing with their weapons, engaged in combat, or hunting. T h e animals rep resented include horses, bulls, lions, a panther, reindeer, ga zelles, an ostrich, birds, fish, and snakes; mixed creatures include a scorpion man, a fish man, bull men, sphinxes, grif fins, and a human figure widr two lion heads; and even a camel rider and a boat are included. There is also a variety of ritual scenes. Evidence of rebuilding indicates that tin's row of sculptures belonged to an early phase of the palace, but it contains inscriptions of Kapara, to whom other in scriptions attribute tire palace. Two inscriptions appear over erasures of earlier inscriptions. They refer to the building both as a temple and as a palace. The early phase of occu pation in the citadel area is best represented in the gateway. It was a complex structure with an indirect-access plan. [See Palace; Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples.] At the palace gateway, the entrance to the first chamber
HALAF, TELL. Figure 2. Orthostat of a lion. Aleppo Museum. (Courtesy J. S. Jorgensen)
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HALA SULTAN TEKKE 178-181, and 233-474.) A freestanding griffin is notable, as is a group of human figures that was associated with a rich royal tomb. At the front of the palace, green and yellow glazed bricks were used in the elaborate geometric decoration of a struc ture that may have been a freestanding altar. A number of decorated gold items and silver and bronze vessels were part of the inventory of the royal tomb, but they represent only a small part of the site's rich inventory: carved stone stands; decorated ivory fragments, primarily for inlays; cylinder and stamp seals; scaraboids; small relief plaques; and beads. Only a very basic and general inventory of the pottery ves sels is published (Hrouda, 1962, tafeln 56-85). The northern palace was not nearly as well preserved as Kapara's palace, but a basic plan of a portion of tire building identified as the governor's residence was cleared. It and a number of smaller, probably private, buildings were exca vated close to the surface of the site and attributed to the Assyrian phase of occupation, primarily to the late ninthseventh centuries BCE. Hellenistic, Roman, and Islamic remains were encoun tered in tire upper 1.5 m of deposit. Very little of this material is published besides fragments of Hellenistic and Roman mold-made figurines. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abou Assaf, Ali, et al. IJX statue de Tell Eekheryi et son inscription bilingue
assyro-arameenne. Paris, 1982. Primary publication of the Tell Fak hariyah statue with a bilingual inscription. Hrouda, Barthel. TellHalaf IV: Die Kleinfunde aus historischer Zeit. Ber
HALAF, TELL. Figure 3. Entrance support from the Palace of Kapara. Aleppo Museum. (Courtesy J. S. Jorgensen)
is flanked by large, elaborate orthostats carved in the form of human-headed birds with scorpion stingers. The palace's main entrance is located on tire north. Raised on a terrace reached by a flight of stairs from the northern courtyard, its decoration is innovative and unique. The doorway is flanked by sphinxes and the base of tire front wall is decorated with a basically symmetrical arrangement of carved orthostats of lions, (see figure 2), bull and lion hunts, and other scenes. Most of the action in these scenes is directed toward the entrance. The portico's wide entrance is supported by three elaborately decorated columns representing two men stand ing on lion and bull figures in tire round (see figure 3) and a woman standing on a lion, similarly sculpted in the round. The style of the figures and the orthostats combines ele ments from different artistic traditions into the distinctive style of these locally produced works. T h e interior door leading from the portico is flanked by griffins. Other sculp ture in the round is scattered at a number of locations. (The sculpture is published in von Oppenheinr et a l , 1955; sty listic analysis is included in Orthmann, 1971, pp. 119-129,
lin, 1962. Final publication of the report series, covering the small finds. Orthmann, Winfried. Untersuchungen zur spdlhelhilischen Kunst. Saarbriicker Beitrage zur Altertumskunde, vol. 8. Bonn, 1971. Detailed discussion of Tell Halaf sculpture and similar contemporary sculp ture. von Oppenheim, Max Freiherr. Der Tell Halaf: Eine neue Kulture im
dllesten Mesopotamia!. Leipzig, 1931. First general book about the finds of the Tell Halaf expedition. von Oppenheim, Max Freiherr. Der Tell Halaf I: Die prahistorischen
Funde. Berlin, 1943. Publication of the early materials from Halaf, primarily the painted wares. von Oppenheim, Max Freiherr. Der Tell hlalaf II: Die Bauwerke. Berlin, 1950. Detailed publication of the architecture excavated at Tell Halaf, witii many reconstructions of buildings and building tech niques. von Oppenheim, Max Freiherr, et al. Tell Halaf III: Die Bildwerke. Ber lin, 1955. Primary publication of the sculptures. RUDOLPH H . DORNEMANN
H A L A S U L T A N T E K K E , Cypriot Bronze Age town situated in a field west of the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke and the Larnaca Salt Lake, south of Laxia tou Riou and Kition, and east of Klavdhia. The site's ancient name is un known. Hala Sultan Tekke has been excavated by two missions
HALIIO\RNASSOS sponsored by the British Museum (1897 and 1898) and by the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus (1948, 1968, 1983). Since 1971 a Swedish expedition there has been di rected by Paul Astrom of Goteborg University. The British excavators emptied many tombs containing a wealth of pre cious objects of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and faience and imported pottery, all dating to the Late Bronze Age before 1200 BCE. In 1948 the Department of Antiquities recovered a huge pithos and two so-called chimney tombs in 1968 dat ing to about 1200 BCE. Although the British Museum exca vations produced material earlier than 1200 BCE, the Swedish excavations, conducted in various parts of the site, have re vealed a later town, mainly from the Late Cypriot IIIA pe riod. T h e site was founded in the Middle Cypriot III (c. 1600 BCE) and flourished until the end of the Late Cypriot IIC (c. 1190 BCE). Like the town of Sinda in eastern Cyprus, it was probably destroyed twice, in 1190 and 1175 BCE; it experi enced a scant reoccupation until about 1100 BCE and was partially resettled in the Hellenistic period. In the central part of the town, a street 4-5 m wide stretches in an approximately north-south direction. Three domestic complexes there consist of a courtyard surrounded by rooms similar in plan to houses at Pyla near Dhekelia in eastern Cyprus. Another large rectangular building with two interior stone bases for pillars and an inner room may be a sanctuary. Some of the walls in two well-cut, luxurious bath rooms were built of ashlars. T h e houses were, as a rule, built on a foundation of fieldstones, sometimes of ashlar blocks, witii a superstructure of terre pisee and walls plastered with crushed lime. T h e finds reveal various activities: copper working (cop per slag, a mold for malting arrowheads, and bronze tools such as a pruning hook, trident, shepherd's crook, and a charcoal shovel); jewelry making (gold- and silverwork); fishing (fish bones and net weights of lead and beach stones); and ivory worldng (carved pieces of elephant tusk). They testify to widespread connections with eastern Medi terranean countries. Mycenaean and Minoan pottery were imported from Greece and Crete, gray Minyan vases from Asia Minor, and so-called Canaanite jars and a silver bowl with a West Semitic cuneiform inscription from Syria-Pal estine. Fragments of bones of Nile perch throw light on the Story of Wenamun, who received baskets of fish from Egypt during his stay at Byblos. Wine jars and cartouches of Horemheb, Seti I, and Rameses II are among the witnesses to contact with Egypt. BIBLIOGRAPHY Astrom, Paul, et al., Hala Sultan Tekke. 9 vols. Studies in Mediterra nean Archaeology, vol. 45:1-9. Goteborg, 1975-1989. AstrBm, Paul. "Hala Sultan Tekke and Its Foreign Relations." In Acts of the International Archaeological Symposium,
"Cyprus between the
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Orient and the Occident," 8-14 September 198$, edited by Vassos Kar ageorghis et al., pp. 63-68, pis. 4-5. Nicosia, 1986. Astrom, Paul. "Hala Sultan Tekke: An International Harbour Town of the Late Cypriote Bronze Age." Opuscula Atheniensia 16 (1986): 717PAUL ASTROM
HALIKARNAS SOS (Lat., Halicarnassus; mod. Bodrum), city founded by Greek colonists from the northeastern Peloponnesos on the western coast of what is now Turkey around 1000 BCE, but always populated by a large number of Carians (37°03' N , 27°28' E). Little is known of the city prior to the classical period and Halikarnassos seems to have experienced its first flourishing during the early and middle part of the fifth century. At that time it was politically dom inated by a dynasty whose most famous representative, Ar temisia the Elder, fought at Salamis in 480 on the side of the Persian ldng Xerxes (Herodotus, 7.99). The dynasty was removed from power toward the middle of the century after civil strife in which both the historian Herodotus and his uncle (or cousin) the epic poet Panyasis were involved (Suidas, S. V. Panyasis and Herodotus). In the fourth century the Hecatomnid dynast Mausolus and his sisters and brothers ruled Halikarnassos in turn as Persian satraps (provincial governors) from 377 to 334, when the city was conquered by Alexander the Great. These decades constitute the most important epoch in the history of Halikarnassos. T h e Hecatomnids initiated rich building activity both in Halikarnassos and on other sites of the Carian satrapy, thereby giving an impetus to the fourth-century "Ionian renaissance," which can also be studied in Labraunda, Priene, and in the new temple of Artemis at Ephesus. After Alexander (r. 332-323), the city entered the epoch of the great Hellenistic monarchies. During the suc ceeding centuries Halikarnassos received the buildings and monuments characteristic of a provincial Hellenistic-Roman city, but generally it seems to have played a less important role. A certain flourishing in late antiquity is indicated by important archaeological discoveries. In 1404 CE the knights of the Order of St. John started building the impressive castle of St. Peter, and these constructions, which utilized ancient material from the Mausoleum (tomb of Mausolus) and other monuments, were carried on until the castle was ceded to the Turkish sultan in 1522. An extant eyewitness report of the demolishing of the Mausoleum by the Crusaders forms the beginning of mod ern investigation of ancient Halikarnassos. Travelers of die eighteenth and nineteenth century have reported on its to pography and monuments, but the first comprehensive in vestigations were carried out by an English expedition di rected by Charles T . Newton in 1856-1858. In 1921-1922 Amadeo Maiuri published studies in Halikarnassos, and an important report was given by George E. Bean and John M.
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HALIKARNASSOS
Cook in 1950. New excavations on the Mausoleum site were carried out by a Danish expedition directed by Kristian Jeppesen in 1966-1977 and in tire 1970s a Turkish team di rected by Umit Serdaroglu excavated the theater. Since then, excavations have been carried out by the Museum of Bodrum (Oguz Alpozen, Akyut Ozet) occasionally in co operation with the Danish Halikarnassos Expedition (Poul Pedersen, Birte Poulsen). Although Late Mycenaean and Protogeometric tombs have been found in the surroundings of Halikarnassos, only very few finds from before the classical period are known from the city itself. In tire fifth century the central area of the city had a cemetery with large rock-cut tombs, possibly of the local nobility. This probably indicates that tire city was divided into a western part, Salmakis, and an eastern part on the mainland opposite the Zephyrion Peninsula, where the Greek colonists probably first settled down. Some ornamented column drums of exquisite workmanship could perhaps originate from an early classical temple of Apollo on the Zephyrion Peninsula. When Mausolus made Halikarnassos capital of the Carian satrapy around 370, the city was refounded on a large scale, obliterating most traces of the earlier city. T h e inhabitants of six neighboring towns were transferred to Halikarnassos to populate the new city. The Roman writer Vitruvius gives an important descrip tion of the topography of the new city, tire configuration of which he compares to that of a theater (2.8.10-15). T h e city was surrounded by a city wall, almost 7 km long, which ended in tire Salmakis fortress on the west side of the wellsheltered harbor and tire Zephyrion fortress on tire east. The latter probably still contained the old temple of Apollo and in addition the palace of Mausolus, of which a large terrace wall as well as other remains have been discovered (see Ped ersen, 1994b, 1995, 1996). T h e city received an orthogonal street-plan with a 15-meter-wide main avenue running west-east from the Myndos city gate past the north side of the Mausoleum terrace and probably continuing all the way to the Mylasa gate on the east. Outside these two gates were tire cemeteries, of which the eastern was partly investigated by the English in tire nineteenth century. In 1989 a rich tomb of the late fourth century, possibly belonging to a woman of the satrapal family was excavated in the eastern necropolis (see articles by Ozet, Prag and Neave, and Alpozen in Isager, 1994, pp. 88-114). On the site of the earlier cemetery in tire center of the city Mausolus built his monumental tomb on a very large terrace. The Mausoleum is described by Pliny (Natural History 36.30-31), and although it was demolished by the Crusaders, it has now been reconstructed (see figure 1) in most details by Jeppesen (1992). The foun dations are 32.5 nr (106.6 ft.) wide and 38.25 m (125.5 ft.) long. T h e lower part consisted of a podium, perhaps 25.2 m (82.6 ft.) high surrounded by two high bases carrying large groups of sculpture. On top of the podium was a per-
HALIKARNASSOS. Figure I. Reconstruction of the mausoleum. (Courtesy Kristian Jeppesen)
istyle (colonnade) of 9 X 11 Ionic columns and then fol lowed a pyramidal roof of twenty-four steps of marble. T h e height of the monument has been calculated to approxi mately 49.6 m (162.7 ft) including the quadriga (statue of chariot drawn by four horses), on tire top. T h e monument was unusually rich in sculptures, which no doubt added much to its reputation as one of tire Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The actual tomb chamber was placed off axis in the rock below the building and may already have been robbed long before the arrival of tire Crusaders. T h e loca tion of the Mausoleum in the center of the city, fronting the marketplace probably indicates Mausolus's wish to be re garded as new founder hero of Halikarnassos. Prominent among the other fourth-century buildings of Halikarnassos are the temple of Ares situated on a large ter race in the northern part of the city and a fine, but smaller Ionic temple, from which several architectural members have been found a few hundred meters further to the south east in the Ttirkkuyusu district. The "Doric stoa," which is illustrated on eighteenth-cen tury engravings may be part of the gymnasium and is prob ably of early Roman date. In 1987 well-preserved parts of the ancient stadium were temporarily unearthed during modern construction works in the eastern part of the city.
HALUSA The theater is about n o m (361 ft.) in diameter and has fifty-three tiers of stone seats. It is of the Hellenistic type and was originally constructed in the fourth century (Omit Serdaroglu, "Bautatigkeit in Anatolien unter der Persischen Herrschaft," Palast undHutte, 1982, p. 347ft.). Mosaics and other remains of the Late Roman period have turned up in different parts of die city. Most important among these are the remains of a large villa of the fifth cen tury CE, which was partly excavated by the English in the nineteenth century. Additional parts of this villa have been investigated by Bodrum Museum and the Danish Halikar nassos Expedition in 1990-1993, but the total extent of this large building and its mosaic decorations is unknown (Poulsen, fortiicoming). BIBLIOGRAPHY Bean, George E., and J. M. Cook. "The Halicarnassus Peninsula." An nual of the British School at Athens 50 (1955): 85-108.
Biirchner, Ludwig. "Halikarnassos." In Paulys Realencyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. I , cols. 2253-2264. Stuttgart, 1896. H0Jlund, Flemming, and Kim Aaris-S0rensen. The Sacrificial Deposit. The Maussolleion at Halikarnassos, vol. 1. Copenhagen, 1981. Hornblower, Simon. Mausolus. Oxford, 1982. Isager, Jacob, ed. Plekatomnid Caria and the Ionian Renaissance. Hali-
carnassian Studies, vol. 1. Odense, 1994. Further volumes in this series are in preparation. Jeppesen, Kristian. "Zur Griindung und Baugeschichte des Maussolleions von Halikarnassos." Islanbuler Mitteilungen 27-28 (19771978): 169-211. Jeppesen, Kristian, and Anthony Luttrell. The Written Sources and Their Archaeological Background. The Maussolleion at Halikarnassos, vol. 2. Aarhus, 1986. Jeppesen, Kristian. "Tot operum opus: Ergebnisse der danischen Forschungen zum Maussolleion von Halikarnass seit 1966." Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts 107 (1992): 59-102. Detailed survey of recent work at the site. Maiuri, Amadeo. ASAtene IV-V. Rome, 1921-1922. See in particular "Una nuova scultura del Mausoleo di Alicarnasso" (pp. 271-274), "II Castello di S. Pietro al Alicarnasso." (pp. 290-343), and "Viaggio di Esplorazione in Caria, parte III—Inscrizioni" (p. 461ft.). Newton, Charles Thomas. A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae. 2 vols, in 3. London, 1862-1863. Pedersen, Poul. The Maussolleion Terrace and Accessory Structures. The
Maussolleion at Halikarnassos, vol. 3.1-2. Aarhus, 1991. Pedersen, Poul. "The Fortifications of Halikarnassos. "Revue des Etudes Anciennes 96 (1994a): 215-235. Part of a special issue entitled "For tifications de defense du territoire en Asie Mineure occidentale et meridionale." Pedersen, Poul. "Excavations in Halikarnassos 1992." XV Kazi Sonu clari Toplantisill, pp. 135-147. Ankara, 1994b. Pedersen, Poul. "Excavations and Research in Halikarnassos 1993." XVIKaziSonuclari Toplantisill, pp. 327-334. Ankara, 1995. Pedersen, Poul. "Excavations and Research in Halikarnassos 1994." XVII Kazi Sonuclari Toplantisi. Ankara, 1996.
Poulsen, Birte. "The Late 'Roman Villa' in Halikarnassos."
Halicar-
nassian Studies 3 (fortiicoming). Waywell, Geoffrey B. The Free-Standing Sculptures of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in the British Museum. London, 1978. POUL PEDERSEN
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HALUSA (Ar., el-Khalus), a Negev settiement founded by the Nabateans as a trade route site, located about 20 km (12 mi.) southwest of Beersheba (map reference 117 X 056). Translators of the Bible into Aramaic (the targum) joined the site's Hebrew name, Halusa, to the name Shur in the Jerusalem Targum of Genesis 16:7. In the mid-second cen tury CE, Ptolemy included Halusa (Gk., Elousa) in his Ge ography (5.16.10) locating it in Idumea (Gk., Edom), west of the Jordan River, T h e site's ancient Arabic name, as re corded in Greek-Arabic papyri, is retained in the modern Arabic designation el-Khalasa. Hellenistic pottery dates the earliest settlement to the third century BCE, when Halusa developed as a trade station for Nabatean caravans venturing from Petra to Gaza. An Aramaic-Nabatean inscription dedicating a shrine to the "king of N B T W , " a reference to Aretas I (c. 168 BCE), and pottery uncovered at the site indicate that the Nabatean settiement continued into the reign of Aretas IV (9 BCE-40 CE). Ac cording to an account by the church father Jerome, a temple to Venus was in use at Halusa in the fifth century CE, at the time a small Christian community resided there. That bish ops from Halusa attended the early church councils at Eph esus (421 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE) further demonstrates tiiat pagans and Christians coexisted at the site. Two sixthcentury Byzantine sources, the mosaic Madaba map and the Nessana papyri, describe Halusa as a large city; the papyri refer to it as a district capital, a status it apparently retained into the Arab period. [See Madaba; Nessana.] Edward Robinson first identified the site in 1838. His dis covery was followed, in 1897, by the first of several visits to the site by Alois Musil, who later concluded, based on the ruins of one large public building, that the entire site had been destroyed. T h e exploratory excavation conducted in 1938 by the Anglo-American Colt expedition centered on several dumps at the site. These large mounds, made up almost entirely of sand and dust, were probably created by the sweeping of public areas in the Late Roman period. A full-scale survey of the site was undertaken by Avraham Ne gev in 1973 on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The purpose of the survey was to test Musil's thesis regard ing the total destruction of Halusa—an extrapolation that proved to be false. Negev investigated the site further in 1979 and 1980, both seasons on behalf of the Hebrew Uni versity and in collaboration, respectively, with Ben Gurion University and Mississippi State University. Among the finds from tiiese excavations were two burial grounds, both uncovered east of the town site. One dates to the Nabatean period; the other, to the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. Halusa was most prosperous in the Late Nabatean and Late Roman periods but continued as a major city of the Negev into the Byzantine period. Findings from the 1973 survey, including various suburbs, showed that Middle and Late Nabatean settlements were concentrated on the eastern third of the site, and the Late Roman and Byzantine settle-
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ments covered the rest of it. The site was bounded by two wadis, Nahal Besor, running southeast-northwest, and its uibutary, Nahal Atadim. The main streets of the Late Ro man city were laid out parallel to tirese wadis, and a series of towers—die site's only line of defense—faced diem. The remains of a large fortified palace, believed to have been tirat of the district governor of Palaestina Tertia, were found at tire western edge of town. A sophisticated reservoir system, a Nabatean innovation, supplied water to residences as well as to the public bathhouse. In addition, a three-level wine press was discovered about i km north of the site. [See Res ervoirs; Baths.] The remains of a small theater, located in the eastern third of the site, were partially excavated in 1979 and 1980. T h e theater is an Early Roman design with local modifications. For example, the outside corridor surrounding the semicir cular cavea (auditorium) did not contain the customary principal entrances (vomitoria) but instead was filled with earth and served as a support for the tiered seating. Access was through two vaulted corridors (parodoi) located at ei ther side of the auditorium. T h e lower midsection of die cavea held a special box seat, apparently for nobles or priests—one of several indications that the theater was as sociated with cult activity. A dedicatory inscription on a lin tel found in the remains of one of three portals leading from the scaena frons to the orchestra dates the laying of a new floor to die mid-fifth century; however, much earlier Na batean capitals were found among the remains of another portal in the same area. [See Theaters.] Also uncovered in die eastern third of the site, immedi ately northeast of the theater, were the remains of a church that may have been consttucted on the ruins of a Nabatean temple. Much larger than most churches in the Negev (29.60 X 77.40 m), it had an expansive, roughly square atrium (28 X 32 m) enclosed by colonnades. T h e basilica (17.70 X 39.45 m) featured two long rows of columns, ten columns per row, with Corinthian capitals and Attic bases made of imported Proconessian marble. [See Basilicas.] T h e nave comprised two aisles of slightly unequal widths; the depth of the bema in the sanctuary was two and a half col umn spaces. T h e central apse was dominated by a structure with seven steps that at one time had a marble facade with a bronze balustrade. If this structure was in fact tire base of the bishop's throne, then the church also served as a cathe dral. Originally, the central apse was flanked by two rectan gular rooms, but in a later period those rooms were turned into separate apses, situated north and south of the central apse. Excavators estimate tire date of the two building phases at 350 and 450 CE, respectively—botii toward the end of the church's history. Reliquaries were found in the south ern apse. [See also Churches; Nabatean Inscriptions; Nabateans; and Petta.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Mazor, G. "The Wine-Presses of the Negev" (in Hebrew). Qadmoniol 14.1-2 (1981): 51-60. Negev, Avraham. "L'histoire de l'antique cite d'Elusa." Bible et Terre Saime 164 (1974): 8-10. Negev, Avraham. "Nabatean Capitals in the Towns of the Negev." Israel Exploration Journal 24 (1974): 153-159.
Negev, Avraham. "Vingt jours de fouilles a Elusa." Bible et Terre Sainte 164 (1974): 11—18. Negev, Avraham. "Elusa (Halutza)." Revue Biblique 82 (1975): 109113. Negev, Avraham. "Permanence et disparition d'anciens toponymes du Negev central." Revue Biblique 83 (1976): 545-557. Negev, Avraham. "Survey and Trial Excavations at Haluza (Elusa), 1973." Israel Exploration Journal 26 (1976): 89-95. Negev, Avraham. "Elusa, 1980." Revue Biblique 88 (1981): 587-591. Negev, Avraham. The Greek Inscriptions from the Negev. Jerusalem,
1981. See pages 73-76. Negev, Avraham. "Les Nabateens au Negev." Le Monde de la Bible 19 (1981): 4-46. Negev, Avraham. "Christen und Christentum in der Wiiste Negev." Antike Well 13 (1982): 2-33.
Negev, Avraham. Tempel, Kirchen und Zistemen. Stuttgart, 1983. Negev, Avraham. Nabatean Archaeology Today. New York, 1986. Negev, Avraham. "The Cadiedral of Elusa and the New Typology and Chronology of the Byzantine Churches in the Negev." Studium Bib licum Franciscanuml Liber Annum 39 (1989): 129-142.
Wenning, Robert. Die Nabataer: Denkmaler und Geschichte. GSttingen, 1987. Contains a full bibliography (pp. 141-144). AVRAHAM NEGEV
HAMA, city on the Orontes River, between the barren Syrian steppe to the east and the well-watered western Med iterranean highland zone to the west (35°o8' N , 36°44' E). T h e highlands include the Jebel Ansariye, which separates the Orontes Valley from the Mediterranean littoral. Hama is located 146 km (91 mi.) south of Aleppo, about 140 km (87 mi.) to the east of Banias on the Mediterranean coast, about 47 km (29 mi.) north of Horns and 209 km (130 mi.) north of Damascus. T h e course of the Orontes River moves through Hama in a northwesterly direction from the desert toward the Ghab, an area of exceptionally rich, dark soil from Asharneh to Qarqur tiiat until recentiy was a marshy area. Hama has a long history, documented for thousands of years by written, cultural, and archaeological remains. T h e extended modern city, whose emblem is the nouria, or "water wheel," traces its history back to the Early Islamic city. Islamic buildings and building remains are still visible throughout the modern urban configuration, which sup ports almost 200,000 people and includes the classical city (Epiphaneia Syriae or Epiphaneia ad Orontem) and still ear lier ones. Medieval and classical remains were encountered in tire highest levels of the ancient tell excavated by a Danish ex pedition supported by the Carlsberg Foundation between 1930 and 1938. An Iron Age acropolis, in phases E and F of
HAMA the site's sequence, contains monumental buildings most likely associated widi die capital city of the biblical land of Hamath (2 Sm. 8:9). In the Bronze Age, the site is identified with an Ematu mentioned in the Ebla texts and possibly with the Imat or Amata mentioned in Egyptian texts. After tire Islamic conquest, the name reverted from its classical name to the earlier form. Earliest R e m a i n s . Scatters of Paleolithic artifacts in the vicinity of Hama attest to a long human history in the area. A long sequence of cultural remains in focused on the an cient tell (45 m high and approximately 400 X 300 m). T h e earliest documented remains on the tell date to the sixth millennium: an assemblage of Neolithic flint, plaster-vessel fragments, and pottery. These materials, in tire earliest levels of phase M, provide the beginning of the long sequence of thirteen phases encompassing forty-two levels, one of tire most complete sequences yet excavated on a single site in northwestern Syria. T h e Hama citadel continues to be one of tire main reference points for archaeological sequences excavated in Syria, Palestine, and elsewhere in tire Near East. T h e earliest phases on tire tell were exposed in limited areas at least 27 m below the surface of tire mound. Follow ing the Neolithic remains in phase M, Halaf and Ubaid ma terials are represented in phase L; phase K represents an increasingly developed society at the end of the fourth mil lennium and the beginning of the third. T h e potter's wheel is first in evidence at the beginning of the phase in K i o and, like the possible remains of a city fortification wall, dem onstrates an important feature of the local culture. Subfloor burials, common since tire Neolithic layers, gradually dis appear after phase K. Levels K9-2 contained beveled-rim bowls and Mesopotamian-type seals, as well as primitive lo cal sculpture and handmade clay figurines. In levels K 7 - 1 , examples of Red and Black-Burnished, or Khirbet Kerak, Ware represent a remarkable tradition of handmade pottery found over an extended area from southeastern Anatolia to the Jordan Valley. B r o n z e Age. T h e remaining Bronze Age sequences in phases J, H, and G on tire citadel are much better docu mented. There is evidence primarily for domestic architec ture in densely occupied areas with narrow streets. The oc cupation remains are rich in artifacts. In addition to the distinctive ceramic inventories, characteristic utilitarian and decorative metal items, pottery figurines, stone tools, deco rated stamp and cylinder seals, and ivory and bone inlays were recovered. Phase J primarily covers the second half of tire third mil lennium with a sequence that is now complimented by ex cavated remains from tire 'Arnuq to the north on the Orontes; Tell Mardikh (Ebla) to the northwest; and tire Euphrates Valley salvage sites to the east. [See 'Amuq; Ebla.] In addi tion to the artifactual assemblages, botanical and zoological
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remains document tire ecology of the area then. Barley, wheat, horsebean, lentil, a plant resembling peas, grapes, cherries, and olives are represented in the botanical sample, and donkeys, oxen, sheep, goats, and pigs are represented in the zoological sample. [See Paleobotany; Paleozoology; Cereals; Olives; Viticulture; Cattle and Oxen; Sheep and Goats; Pigs.] In phase H, a shift in the ceramic sequence takes place with many new forms for simple, primarily light-brown wares, best represented by vessels with comb-incised dec oration and a variety of carinated bowls. Architecturally, the large cylindrical grain silos excavated in tire center of the town are the most significant features. [See Granaries and Silos.] Phase G provides a sketchy representation of the final in ternational phase of the Bronze Age, with representations of imported Cypriot and Mycenaean pieces from tire four teenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, as well as earlier Nuzi painted ware. Buildings in this phase were more spacious than earlier. I r o n Age. The Iron Age remains in phases E and F on the citadel and in the cemeteries south and west of it provide important but incomplete documentation of tire period. Cremation burials are an important feature of the cemetery remains, and a valuable typological sequence was recon structed from the pottery and other grave goods. [See Tombs; Burial Sites; Grave Goods.] T h e contemporary stratified remains on the tell do not, however, provide a con vincing framework with which to structure these sequences. Some pottery forms and decoration reflect Greek traditions of the twelfth century BCE. Iron tools and weapons became part of the material inventory, as did, in particular, tire fib ula, which replaced the straight garment pin. [See Jewelry.] Phase E provides a portion of an administrative center of an Aramean state capital and Assyrian administrative center. [See Arameans; Assyrians.] It is contemporary with the his torical records in Assyrian and biblical texts, but the artifac tual and stratigraphic record is not securely tied to tire sources. Several monumental buildings ring a courtyard en tered through a gateway on tire south. A few cuneiform tab lets and fragments, including a letter to king Uratamis, were found, as well as some fine ivory carvings, cylinder and stamp seals, and a gold-plated statuette of a seated god. The entrances to several buildings were flanked by lion sculp tures, and a decorated stela was reused as a threshold for a building tentatively identified as a temple. A large building (no. II) is considered a palace by the excavators. It has a buttressed facade and on the ground floor its most noteworthy features are an entrance court and a large number of storage rooms. T h e royal residence is considered to have been located on tire second floor. The storerooms contained jars for grain, wine, and oil; among tire many other items excavated were tools, weapons, and horse trap-
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pings. Bricks with incised Aramaic inscriptions were found in die pavement at dre front of die building. [See Cuneiform; Weapons; Aramaic] Iron Age Textual References. Assyrian texts mention King Urahilina of Hamath as one of the leading figures in a coalition of states that confronted tire Assyrian army of Shalmaneser III at Karkara, within the territory of Hamath, when the Assyrians tried to dominate northwestern Syria between 853 and 845 BCE. Urahilina is also mentioned in a Luwian inscription in hieroglyphic script found on the citadel many years before the excavations began. [See Luwians.] It also mentions his son Uratamis and his father Paritas, as well as a temple of the goddess Baalat. A later inscription dated to the beginning of the eighth century BCE is written in Ara maic. It is a victory stela of Zakkur, ldng of Hamath and Lu'ath, and was found at Tell Afis, about n o Ion (68 mi.) north of Hama. [See Zakkur Inscription.] T h e last-known Iron Age ruler of Hamath is mentioned both in Assyrian texts and in a local inscription. He is designated as a usurper in the texts of Sargon II dated to 720 BCE. This Iaubi'di was defeated and killed, and his kingdom was incorporated into die Assyrian Empire as a province. Some citizens of Hamath were deported and a contingent of its military forces was incorporated into the Assyrian army. Little evidence is avail able for the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though literary sources continue to mention Hamath.
Papanicolaou Christensen, Aristea, and Charlotte Friis Johansen.
Classical and Medieval Periods. A new settlement was constructed over the Iron Age remains in a rectangular plan across the tell. Its streets were oriented north-south and east-west. Coins from the third and second centuries BCE found under the buildings of diis settlement date tire new construction securely to the Seleucid era. They connect it with Antiochus II Epiphanes, whose name is undoubtedly reflected in the city's designation as Epiphaneia. In the subsequent Roman period, the city gradually ex panded into tire valley. Building remains from this period are limited, but portions of a tiiird-century CE temple are preserved in the present Great Mosque. The temple was transformed into a church in the fourth and fifth centuries and was rebuilt in the sixth century. Remains of other churches from tiiis period have been documented in the city. A reference to a local bishop is known from 325. Occupation was continuous on the ancient tell until the thirteenth cen tury, when it apparently came to an end witir the Mongol invasion of Syria in 1260.
HAMMATH-GADER (Ar., El-Hammeh), Transjor-
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buhl, Marie-Louise. "Hamath." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, PP- 33-3S- New York, 1992. Excellent summary. Fugmann, Ejnar. Hama, fouilles et recherches, 1931-1938, vol. 2.1, L'architecture des periodes pre-hellenistiques. Copenhagen, 1958. Stan
dard reference work for the pre-Hellenistic remains. Modderman, P. J. R. "On a Survey of Palaeolithic Sites near Hama." Annales Archeologiques de Syrie 14 (1964): 51-66.
Hama, fouilles et recherches, 1931-1938, vol. 3.2, Les poteries hellenisliques el les terres sigillees orientales. Copenhagen, 1971.
Papanicolaou Christensen, Aristea, et al. Hama, fouilles el recherches, 1931-1938,
vol. 3, The Graeco-Roman
Objects of Clay, the Coins, and
the Necropolis, Copenhagen, 1986. Ploug, Gunhild, et al. Hama, fouilles el recherches, 1931-1938, vol. 4.3, Les perils objels medievaux sauf les veneries el poteries. Copenhagen,
1969. Ploug, Gunhild. Hama, fouilles et recherches, 1931-1938, vol. 3.1, The Graeco-Roman Town. Copenhagen, 1985. Riis, P. J. Hama, fouilles et recherches, 1931-1938, vol. 2.3, Ixs cimelieres
a cremation. Copenhagen, 1948. Riis, P. J., et al. Hama, fouilles el recherches, 1931-1938, verreries et poteries medievales. Copenhagen, 1957.
vol. 4.2, IJCS
Riis, P. J., and Marie-Louise Buhl. Hama, fouilles et recherches, 1 9 3 1 1938,
vol, 2.2, Les objets de la piriode dite syro-hiltite
(Age du Per).
Copenhagen, 1987. The Iron Age objects from die citadel at Hama. Thuesen, Ingolf. Hama, fouilles et recherches, 1931-1938,
vol. 1, ThePre-
and Protohistoric Periods. Copenhagen, 1988. Detailed presentation of the earliest remains from the tell at Hama. Zaqzouq, A. "Fouilles preliminaires a Hama" (in Arabic). Annales Ar cheologiques Arabes Syriennes 33.2 (1983): 141-178. The most recent excavations on the tell at Hama. RUDOLPH H. DORNEMANN
HAMADAN. See Ecbatana.
danian site noted in antiquity for its hot medicinal baths, located on the Yarmuk River, in a valley 7 km (4.5 mi.) east of the Sea of Galilee (map reference 212 X 232). T h e site is 1,450 m long and 500 m wide (180 acres). T h e site's an cient name is preserved not only in the modern Arabic place name but also in tire name of the mound, Tell Bani ("mound of the batir"). Historical References. The earliest recorded mention of I-Iammath-Gader was made late in the first century BCE by tire Greek geographer Strabo in his description of the hot springs located near Gadara (Geography 16.45). Some two and a half centuries later, tire early church father Origen mentioned the baths in his commentary on John's gospel. T h e Greek biographer Eunapius asserted in his Life ofjamblichus (late fourtir century CE) that only the baths at Baia in the Bay of Naples were more beautiful than those at Hammath-Gader, which apparently attracted a wide variety of visitors (Epiplranius, Haereses 30.7). According to Anto ninus of Placentia, a pilgrim who visited Hammath-Gader in the second half of the sixth century CE, the baths, called Thermae Heliae, had been named for the prophet Elijah and were believed to heal leprosy (Itineraria Antoninum 7). Excavation of the Baths. Much of the Roman bath complex was cleared during seven seasons of excavations, beginning in 1979 (see figure 1). This work, conducted by the Hebrew University, the Israel Exploration Society, and
HAMMATH-GADER
469
HAMMATH-GADER. Figure I. General view of the Roman baths, looking south. (Photograph by Zeev Radovan; courtesy Y. Hirschfeld)
the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, was led by Yizhar Hirschfeld and Giora Solar. An area of about 5,200 sq m was cleared, including seven bathing pools housed in individual halls of various shapes and sizes. These pools, constructed around the site's hot spring (52 C), were filled via an elevation pool built at the edge of the spring. T h e water in the pools became increasingly hot, gradually acclimating bathers to the high temperature of the pool clos est to the spring. T h e bath complex was constructed of coarsely dressed basalt stones. The walls of the long Hall of Fountains and the ceilings of many halls were of finely worked limestone. T h e floors of the complex were paved with slabs of a buffed clayey limestone. T h e most impressive construction was carried out between the fifth and seventh centuries CE. T h e complex was destroyed in the eighth century, probably by the earthquake of 7 4 9 . It was subsequently abandoned, al though people seeking cures continued to visit the site until the modern period. 0
O t h e r Excavation Work. T h e earliest excavation work at the site was undertaken in 1932 by Nelson Glueck, in whose soundings at Tell Bani sherds were recovered from the Early Bronze Age. T h e absence of any Middle Bronze sherds indicated that the site, like others in Transjordan, was abandoned by that time. Hammath-Gader was not resettled until the Roman period. Also in 1932, Eleazar L. Sukenik, leading a team spon sored by the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem, made soundings along the artificial mound (11 m high) on which a Roman theater had been built. Excavators determined that the cavea had fifteen rows of seats and held between one thousand five hundred and two thousand spectators. T h e row farthest from the stage was situated 6.6 m above the orchestra, whose diameter was 13 m. T h e stage (5.8 m deep and 29.6 m long) was 1.5 m higher than the orchestra. T h e Sukenik expedition also uncovered a synagogue hall on the summit of Tell Bani, whose excavation was resumed
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by the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums in 1982. Three phases of construction were discerned, with the building Sukenik discovered representing the latest phase. Based on names in the dedicatory inscriptions in the mosaic floors, the excavators dated the synagogue to the first half of the fifth century CE. However, the mixture of architectural elements characteristic of both early and late synagogue types (the transverse row of columns and the square hall are representative of the former; the apse and mosaic pavement, of the latter) suggests an earlier date, in the transitional pe riod between die two synagogue types. [See also Batiis; Synagogues; and the biography of Sukenik] BIBLIOGRAPHY Di Segni, Leah, and Yizhar Hirschfeld. "Four Greek Inscriptions from Hammet Geder from the Reign of Anastasius." Israel Exploration Journal 36 (1986): 251-268. Foerster, Gideon. "Flammat Gader." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 2 (1983): 41. Glueck, Nelson. "The Archaeological Exploration of El-Hammeh on the Yarmuk." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research,
no. 49 (1933): 22-23, Glueck, Nelson. "Tell El-Hammeh." American Journal of Archaeology 39 (1935): 321-330. Glueck, Nelson. "Tell El-Hammeh." In Glueck's Explorations in East ern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. New Haven, 1951. See pages 137-140. Green, Judith, and Yoram Tsafrir. "Greek Inscriptions from Hammet Gader: A Poem by the Empress Eudocia and Two Building Inscrip tions." Israel Exploration Journal 32 (1982): 77-96. Hirschfeld, Yizhar, and Giora Solar. "The Roman Thermae at Hammat Gader: Preliminary Reports of Three Seasons of Excavations." Israel Exploration Journal 31 (1981): 197-219.
Hirschfeld, Yizhar, and Giora Solar. "Sumptuous Roman Baths Un covered Near Sea of Galilee," Biblical Archaeology Review 10.6 (1984): 22-40. Hirschfeld, Yizhar. "The History and Town Plan of Ancient Flammat Gader." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 103 (1987): 101-
116. Sukenik, Eleazar L. "The Ancient Synagogue of El-Hammeh." Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 15 (1935): 101-180.
Sukenik, Eleazar L. The Ancient Synagogue of El-Hammeh. Jerusalem, 1935. YIZHAR HIRSCHFELD
H A M M A T H T I B E R I A S , site located on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, extending from the hots springs (Ar., el-Hammam) south of ancient Tiberias (32°47' N , 35°32' E). The Talmudic identification (J.T., Meg. 1, 70a) with biblical Hammath (Jos. 19:35) is questionable, given a survey of the area and excavations that revealed no remains prior to the Hellenistic period. Originally separate, walled cities Q.T., Meg. 2:1-2), die Mishnah records that sometime in the first century CE Tiberias and Hammadi were united (Tosefta, 'Eruv. 7:2). In the third century CE, Hammath ben efited from Tiberias's distinction as Judaism's spiritual cen ter. Hammadi fell into decline in about 429 but capitalized
on its noted hot springs and continued as a city until about 750. In 1921 N. Slouschz excavated at the site on behalf of the Palestine Department of Antiquities, about 500 m nortii of the southern part of the city wall. He uncovered a square, basilica-style synagogue with a double row of columns sep arating a nave and two aisles. [See Basilicas.] There were three entrances on the north. On the east, a doorway opened to an outer courtyard. At the southern end of the nave four small columns partitioned an enclosed area, perhaps for the Ark of the Law. Multiple levels of pavements, mosaics, and alterations in the building confirm at least two phases of construction, with the first placing the entrance on the south. Slouschz identified the building as the synagogue of Ham math in the Early Roman period, disagreeing with LouisHugues Vincent. Comparing the building's small size to other ancient synagogues, Vincent in 1921 had assigned the later phase to the fourth or fifth century CE. Subsequent re search identifies the building as a fourtii-century synagogue. [See the biography of Vincent.] Moshe Dotiian directed excavations for the Israel D e partment of Antiquities from 1961 to 1963 near the hot springs, about 150 m west of the Sea of Galilee. He exca vated three major construction levels dating from the first century BCE to the eightii century CE. Dothan assigned the primary building in level III to die first century or first half of the second century CE. Consisting of a central court with halls or rooms on three sides, the plan resembled a public building—a gymnasium or possibly a synagogue. Meager finds included a cantharus-shaped glass goblet. Level III was apparently destroyed in the mid-second century. In level II, the synagogue of phase IIA is a broadhouse building based on the earlier phase IIB. Building IIB is a separate structure with three rows of columns, each with three columns each, creating four halls, the widest being die nave. A mosaic-paved corridor is attached to die building on the soutii with an entrance on the east. A small room in the nordieast corner may have been a stairwell. In building IIA, the corridor was divided into cells and the entrance on the east was closed. According to Dotiian (1983) there were three entrances on the north. T h e north east stairwell went out of use and a staircase was placed in one of the cells in the former soutii corridor. At the nave's south end a step led to a raised niche in the corridor for holding the Ark of the Law. Excavated debris contained re mains of brightiy painted interior walls. [See Wall Paintings.] Magnificent mosaics using thirty hues, superbly pre served, paved the nave and aisles. Most significant are three panels in the nave mosaic. T h e southern panel depicts the Ark of the Law, flanked by a seven-branched menorah with flames, a lulab, ethrog, shofar, and incense shovel. T h e cen ter panel depicts the zodiac surrounding the figure of the sun god Helios riding in his chariot. A halo is above his head, his right hand is raised in benediction, and he holds a globe
HAMRIN DAM SALVAGE PROJECT of the universe in his left hand. In each corner of the panel a female bust with a Hebrew name beside it symbolizes each of the four seasons of the year. In the north panel a dedi catory inscription in Greek is flanked by two lions. [See M o saics.] T h e high artistic level, in design and execution, of the mosaics, as well as the various finds, confirm a date of 300350 CE for level IIA. This unique broadhouse plan remained in use until tire fifth century, when it was replaced by a new synagogue in phase IB, built in the basilica style common to the period. T h e buildings of level IB-A, also oriented southwestnortheast, were divided by two rows of columns into a nave and two aisles. An entrance hall was formed with a trans verse division of the nave by a third row of columns. A sec ond-story gallery running along three sides of the building was supported by all three of the columns' rows. From the nave, three steps led to the apse. In a room east of the apse, a staircase gave access to tire second floor; in a room to the west, tire synagogue's "treasury" had been hidden in tire floor. The three main entrances were on tire north. On the west, three doorways opened to a paved courtyard. Tiny colored tesserae formed the hall's mosaic in faunal, floral, and geometric designs. Level IB was destroyed in about 600-650 CE, perhaps by the reconquering Byzantines, and replaced by a very similar structure in level IA. Rich finds in level IA included pottery of a type found at Klrirbat al-Mafjar, Arabic inscriptions on some of the many clay lamps, and a jug inscribed in Aramaic concerning a gift of oil from Sepphoris. [See Mafjar, Klrirbat al-; Sepphoris.] Numismatic evidence indicates that level IA was destroyed at the beginning of the 'Abbasid period (c. 750), never to be rebuilt. Squatters occupied tire site from about 1100 to 1400, using the ruins for habitation and storage. [See also Synagogues; Tiberias.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dothan, Moshe. Hammath Tiberias: Early Synagogues and die Hellenistic and Roman Remains. Final Excavation Report, I . Jerusalem, 1983. DOUGLAS L . GORDON
HAMRIN DAM SALVAGE PROJECT. In 1977 tire Iraqi State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage in vited foreign archaeological teams to join Iraqi teams exca vating sites threatened by flooding from a dam built on tire Diyala River where it flowed through Jebel Hamrin, about 100 Ion (60 mi.) northeast of Baghdad (34°07' N , 44°59' E). Earlier travelers had noted archaeological sites in tire valley and Robert McC. Adams included twelve sites in his survey (Land behind Baghdad, Chicago, 1965, pp. 135-136, map section iB). During the Hamrin Dam Salvage Project about one hundred archaeological sites were identified in the ap proximately 425 sq km (265 sq. mi.) area to be flooded (be low 108 m above mean sea level) and some sixty-five were
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excavated as part of the project. Some of the excavations were extensive and others were small soundings. T h e Iraqi State Organization excavated twenty-three sites and the Universities of Baghdad and Mosul worked at two. In ad dition, American, Austrian, Belgian, British/Canadian, Dan ish/American, French, East German, three West German, Italian, Japanese, Lebanese (called Palestinian by the Iraqis), and Polish expeditions each worked on one or more sites. T h e foreign expeditions paid their own expenses but equip ment, accommodations, and labor were paid for by the State Organization. Most of the excavations were completed by March 1980 when tire lake first began to fill, but excavations at the sites of Tell Haddad and Tell Suleimeh continued until 1984. The Diyala River flowed across the plain, and near the site of the dam it was joined by two smaller streams, the Narin, flowing down from the northwest, and the Kurdere, from tire southeast, both running along tire edge of Jebel Hamrin. Geomorphological investigations showed that in tire past a major branch of the Diyala River had flowed far ther north, entering the Hamrin basin from the north; it seems probable, however, that both courses remained in use. T h e valley lies near the limits of the dry-farming zone, with an average of 250-300 m m of annual rainfall; the sur rounding hillsides provide grazing for flocks. The most im portant route from Iran to Mesopotamia, the Khorasan road, part of the so-called Silk Route, crossed the valley. At right angles to this an important route, perhaps on the course of the so-called Achaemenid Royal Road from Susa to Sardis, ran along tire northeast side of the valley. In the Ottoman period, and probably also in certain earlier periods, tire main route from soutirern Iraq went via tire Hamrin ba sin, crossing Jebel Hamrin west of tire Diyala, and contin uing via Qara Tepe to Kifri and on to Kirkuk, Arbil (Erbil), and Mosul. The excavations in the Hamrin basin give an outline of tire history of settlement in the region, although the picture has gaps that cannot be filled, and the pattern of settlement does not exactly match that derived from a study of histor ical texts. In addition it does not mirror the settlement pat tern adumbrated by Adams for the lowland plains of Iraq (Heartland of Cities, Chicago, 1981). T h e reason for this seems to be that the prosperity of the Hamrin region was extremely sensitive to considerations of political stability: dry farming and irrigation agriculture, as well as the trade routes through the region, were dependent on outside in vestment which was not normally forthcoming when tire re gion lay on the border between different political powers. It is also likely that for most periods sites have not been recorded either because they are covered by alluvium (ex cavations at Tell Madhhur in the northern part of the basin showed that there had been as many as 4 m of silt deposited in the last six thousand years) or have been eroded. Fur thermore, settlements that were not marked by substantial
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mud-brick buildings were probably missed. Thus nomadic settlements, settlements of tents or insubstantial wood or reed sttuctures, and scattered buildings have probably not been observed. The earliest site recorded was an aceramic settlement at Tell Rihan. Two Samarran sites were investigated, including that at Tell Songor A, where eight buildings witir regular grid plans, like tirose at Chogha Mami, and a possible sur rounding wall belong to the late Samarran period. T h e Hamrin basin lies at the southeastern end of the maximum extent of the Halaf culture and four sites were excavated with late Halaf pottery. On two sites occupation levels con taining both Halaf and Ubaid 3 pottery were stratified above Halaf pottery. Perhaps the greatest surprise of the Hamrin Salvage Pro ject was the number of sites from the Ubaid period. Four teen sites with Ubaid occupation levels were excavated. Most of these belonged to the later Ubaid (Ubaid 3 and 4) period, but in level III at Tell Abada Samarran, Chogha Mami Transitional, Eridu (Ubaid 1), and Hajji Muhammad (Ubaid 2-3) sherds were found together. [See Eridu.] This unusual combination suggests that either the level was mixed or that the earlier sherds were residual. A complete village consisting of eleven building units was excavated in level II (Ubaid 2-3) at Abada, and some were rebuilt in level I (Ubaid 3). The buildings are mostly tripartite with cruci form central rooms. Some have an intricate arrangement of three interlocking cruciform rooms. A similar plan was found at Kheit Qasim III (Ubaid 3), and a house witir a similar but simpler plan was excavated at Tell Madhhur.
The house at Madhhur had been burned and the walls were still standing up to 2 m high and much of its contents was found in the house. [See Ubaid.] There were no definite Early or Middle Uruk settlements, but four Late Uruk sites were recorded. The following Jemdet Nasr period, or late Protoliterate, was represented at three sites: Tell Suleimeh, Tell Gubba, and Tell Abu Qasim. The architectural remains at Tell Gubba were spectacular, including intact corbeled vaulting. T h e building (about 70 m in diameter), consisted of a central circular core with seven concentric walls and a surrounding moat. [See UrukWarka; Jemdet Nasr.] In contrast to the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, the Early Dynastic I period, characterized by scarlet ware pottery was a time of prosperity in the valley, with numerous settlements and a variety of substantial architecture and rich cemeteries. The Tell Gubba building remained in use. A second round building (27 m in diameter) of different design was exca vated at Tell Razuk: this had a circular courtyard sur rounded by curving corbel-vaulted rooms (see figure 1). This appears to have been the citadel of a small settlement. Two further round buildings were excavated at Tell Sulei meh and Tell Madhhur. Extramural cemeteries were exca vated at Kheit Qasim and Ahmed al-Hattu. T h e settlement associated with Kheit Qasim I, Abu Qasim, a small rectan gular walled settlement, was also excavated. The archaeological sequence revealed by tire excavations in the Hamrin was very similar to that established by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago excavations in the Diyala in the 1930s, but the Early Dynastic II period
HAMRIN DAM SALVAGE PROJECT. Figure I . Round fortress at Tell Razuk. ED I-II period. (Courtesy I. Thuesen)
HAMRIN DAM SALVAGE PROJECT was not as easily recognized in the Hamrin basin. [See Di yala.] There were a number of important sites in the late Early Dynastic and Akkadian periods. At Tell Suleimeh (probably to be identified with ancient Awal or Batir), a tem ple with a thick oval wall rebuilt many times was in use from the Early Dynastic to the Akkadian period. Cuneiform tab lets of the Akkadian period were also found there. At three sites, Tell Madlrhur, Tell Gubba, and Tell Razuk, the aban doned mounds were used as burial places and produced large, rich tombs. Among the grave goods were equids (bringing to mind, albeit on a smaller scale, the Royal Tombs of Ur and Kish, except that there was no evidence for chariots in these Hamrin graves). [See Ur; Kish.] T h e Ur III period was not well-recognized in the valley, but it is likely that some of the sites with Akkadian and IsinLarsa material were also occupied in the Ur III period. [See Isin; Larsa.] T h e Isin-Larsa period was one of prosperity, during which the Hamrin was under the control of the rulers of Eshnunna. [See Eshnunna.] There were a number of im portant towns in the region with public buildings, such as the palatial building excavated at Tell Suleimeh. At the neighboring mounds of Tell Haddad and Tulul al-Sib, which formed part of the city of Me-Turan, the city wall, various temples, and private houses were investigated. More than eight hundred cuneiform tablets were recovered, some of which came from a temple library and include letters, contracts, omens, and mathematical, literary, and school texts. Another palatial building was excavated at Tell Yelldri, where some seventy tablets were recovered. At Tell Khallawa an extensive area of an Isin-Larsa period settlement with houses and a small temple was exposed and cuneiform tablets were recovered. T h e destruction of Eshnunna by Hammurabi might have been expected to have reduced the region's prosperity and, although in many reports a distinction between Old Baby lonian and Isin-Larsa was not made, this does appear to have been tire case. Cuneiform tablets from this period were found at Tell Yelklri, but in general the middle centuries of the second millennium BCE are not well represented in the valley. Several Kassite sites were investigated. [See Kassites.] A small palace was uncovered at Tell Yelldri and thirteenthcentury BCE cuneiform tablets were recovered from Tell Imleihiyeh and Tell Zubaydi. Surprisingly, there was very little evidence for occupation in the valley in the Neo-Assyrian period. Shalmaneser III and Shamshi-Adad V both captured Me-Turnat (Tell Had dad) and campaigned against Gannanate, which may have been close to Sa'adiyeh. Archaeological evidence for tire pe riod is sparse. The most substantial remains are those of a well-preserved temple of Nergal at Tell Haddad which was restored by Ashurbanipal and may be tire temple mentioned in the Cyrus Cylinder. Next to the temple traces of other large buildings were discovered. Elsewhere in the valley the
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only Neo-Assyrian remains are unstratified sherds and a few graves discovered near Tell Yelldri. With the fall of the Assyrian Empire, the Hamrin valley lay on the border between the Median and Neo-Babylonian Empires. The small square fortress at Tell Gubba, with par allels at Nush-i Jan and Persepolis, may belong to the early sixth century or perhaps to later in the Achaemenid period. [See Persepolis.] Other Achaemenid remains have been noted in the valley, but there is some doubt about the dating. It is possible that they really belong to the following period. T h e Seleucid and Parthian periods were not distinguished by most of the excavators, and thus their chronological de velopment is not well known. It is clear, however, that the Parthian period was one of tire most important in the valley, with the largest occupation area. A two story fortress with some forty-eight rooms on the ground floor was excavated at Tell Baradan. Other fortified sites of this period were Tell Ababra, Tell Abqa, and Tell Abu Su'ud. T h e most outstanding Sasanian site excavated in the val ley was the small manor of Abu Shi'afeh. T h e building was square, with sides 30 m long with attached semicircular tow ers. It had a central courtyard and iwans (ayvans) on the northeast and southwest sides. In a small room on the north west some eight hundred bullae, each with between one and twenty-five stamp seal impressions, were discovered. There may have been a similar building at Tell Ibn Alwan, but only a small area was excavated there. A large number of sites had superficial eroded remains from the Sasanian period, but the major settlements may have been outside the area to be flooded. T h e city of Jalawla, near which the decisive battie between tire Islamic Arabs and the Sasanian Persians was fought in 637 CE, is to be sought near Sa'adiyeh, rather than in the modern city of Jalawla, which was previously called Qaraghan. Although Islamic remains were found at many sites, it is clear that the Hamrin basin had lost its importance by this period. T h e investigations carried out in the Hamrin Dam Sal vage Project make the Hamrin basin, "the Land behind die Land behind Baghdad" (T. C. Young and R. Killick in Killick, ed., 1988, p. 5), one of the most intensely investigated areas in tire Near East. T h e slopes of Jebel Hamrin and Jebel Nasaz form natural borders on the southwest and northeast, but tire flat alluvium extended with no natural obstacles to the southeast and north, and detailed survey of the sites out side the area of the project might alter our perception of the settlement disttibution pattern. Furthermore, because tire expeditions operated more or less independently and the standards of excavation and publication varied greatly, it is difficult to give a definitive and comprehensive evalua tion of tire results. BIBLIOGRAPHY Preliminary reports on the sites excavated in the Hamrin Dam Sal vage Project from 1977 to 1984 are published in Iraq 41 (1979): 4 I
I _
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181; 43 (1981): 167-198; 45 (1983): 210-211, 220-221; and 47 (1985): 220, 225. Papers from an international symposium on Babylon, Assur, and Hamrin, held in 1978, are published in Sumer 35 (1979), which also devoted a special issue to research on Hamrin presented in two international symposia from 1979 and 1981: Sumer 40 (1984). Reports on excavations in the Hamrin project are to be found in odier academic journals; final reports are available for several sites. It is likely, however, that many sites, particularly those excavated by the Iraqi teams will not receive the publication they deserve. The reader may also consult the following: Gibson, McGuire, ed. Uch Tepe I: Tell Razuk, Tell Ahmed
al-Mughir,
Tell Ajamat. Chicago and Copenhagen, 1981. Final report on drree sites excavated by the Chicago-Copenhagen Expedition, including an overview of the region's history. Huot, Jean-Louis, ed. Prehistoire de la Mesopolamie: La Mesopotamia prehistoire el ['exploration recente du djebel Hamrin, Paris 17-19 decem-
bre 1984. Paris, 1987. Proceedings of a conference particularly con cerned with the Ubaid and Early Dynastic I periods in the Hamrin. Killick, R. G., ed. Excavations al Tell Rubeidheh. Warminster, 1988.
Final report on the excavations at the Uruk site of Tell Rubeidheh, including a discussion of the settlement pattern up to the Sasanian period. Kim, Gwon-Gu. "Diachronic Analysis of Changes in Settlement Pat terns of the Hamrin Region." M. Phil, diss,, Cambridge University, 1989. MICHAEL ROAF
HARDING, GERALD LANKESTER
(1901i979)j archaeologist who might well be called the father of Jordanian archaeology. Harding served for twenty years (1936-1956) as the director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. In 1951 he founded the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan (ADAJ), which continues to be one of dre most important scholarly publications dealing with current archaeological work in Jordan. Born in China, Har ding spent his childhood in Singapore and England. His in troduction to archaeological fieldwork came in r926, when he joined the Tell Jemnreh excavation directed by Sir Flin ders Petrie. Petrie also served as his mentor on the Tell elFar'ah North (1927-1928) and Tell el-'Ajjul (1929-1932) excavations. From 1932 through 1936 he worked with James L. Starkey and Olga Tufnell at Tell ed-Duweir (Lachish). [See Jemmeh, Tell; Far'ah, Tell el- (North); 'Ajjul, Tell el-; Lachich; and the biographies of Petrie, Starkey, and Tufnell] Harding is best known for his work at Qumran and his documentation of Safaitic inscriptions from the Jordanian desert. Following dre discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he worked with Pere Roland de Vaux for several seasons at the excavation at Khirbet Qumran. He was instrumental in as sembling an international team of scholars to reconstruct, study, and publish the scrolls. [See Qumran; Dead Sea Scrolls; and the biography of Vaux.] In the latter years of his career, Harding focused his at tention on pre-Islamic inscriptions. In a series of expeditions to Jordan's northeastern (H5, oil pipeline pumping station) desert region, he collected nearly six thousand Safaitic in scriptions. He published them in numerous books and ar
ticles, including An Index and Concordance of Pre-Islamic Arabian Names and Inscriptions (1971), which is still consid ered an authoritative text. Harding concluded his work as a field archaeologist with surveys of the Aden Protectorates (1959-1960) and northwestern Saudi Arabia (1970; 1972). In addition to his extensive scholarly publications, Har ding promoted greater public awareness of Jordan's archae ological heritage through such popular publications as The Antiquities of Jordan (1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY "A Bibliography of Gerald Lankester Harding." Annual of the Depart ment of Antiquities of Jordan 24 (1980): 8-12.
Harding, G. Lankester. The Antiquities of Jordan. New York, 1959. Harding, G. Lankester. Archaeology in the Aden Protectorates. London, 1964. Harding, G. Lankester, with Peter J. Parr and J. E. Dayton. "Prelimi nary Survey in N.W. Arabia, 1968, Part I: Archaeology." Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology (University of London) 8-9 (1970): 193242, pis. 1-42. Harding, G. Lankester. An Index and Concordance of Pre-Islamic Arabian Names and Inscriptions. Toronto, 1971.
Harding, G. Lankester, and J. E. Dayton. "Preliminary Survey in N.W. Arabia, 1968, Part I: Archaeology (Continued)." Bulletin of the In stitute of Archaeology (University of London) to (1972): 23-35, pis. 1-18. Harding, G. Lankester, Peter J. Parr, and J. E. Dayton. "The Thamudic and Lihyanite Texts." In "Preliminary Survey in N.W. Arabia, 1968, Part II: Epigraphy." Bulletin of the Institute ofArchaeology (University of London) 10 (1972): 36-52, 60; pis. 19-25. DAVID W . MCCREERY
HAROR, TEL (Ar., Tell Abu Hureyra), site located in tire western Negev desert, on the north bank of Nahal Gerar (31°23' N , 34°37' E). T h e site has been identified with BethMerkabot (William F. Albright, 1925, p. 6), Gerar (Yo hanan Aharoni, 1954, pp. i i o - i n ) , Gath (Lawrence Stager, 1995, pp. 342-343), and Sharuhen (Anson F. Rainey, 1993, p. 185*). This 40-acre trapezoidal mound is crowned by an upper tell some 3 acres in size and 10 m high. Excavations conducted between 1982 and 1992 by an ex pedition from Ben Gurion University, directed by Eliezer D. Oren, indicated that the site had been inhabited only spo radically during the Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age I, but continuously between the Middle Bronze and Persian pe riods. The MB II—III town is represented by a 40-acre com pound surrounded by a formidable defense system of earthen ramparts (20 m wide X 8 m high) and a deep fosse (5-7 m deep X 15 m across). Area K, in the southwest cor ner of the compound, was occupied by the architectural re mains of a spacious cult precinct. T h e two-phased (K4-5) temple complex comprised a massive Syrian-style migdal, or "tower," sanctuary; a chamber with benches and niches for offerings; and a mud-brick (offering ?) altar. [See Altars.] T h e favissae, or "pits," in the courtyard yielded many bones
HAROR, TEL
mmm
Jm HAROR, TEL. Figure i. Cult stand from the MB temple courtyard. (Courtesy E. D. Oren)
of ritually slaughtered animals, including complete skeletons of puppies and birds. Nearby, another pit was uncovered, that contained skeletons of donkeys. T h e rich store of cult vessels and ex-votos—animal and human figurines, incense stands, vessels applied with figures of horned animals and snakes—supplies details of Canaanite cult and religion dur ing die Middle Bronze Age (see figure i ) . [See Canaanites; Cult.] In area L, on the upper slope of the rampart, the remains of a large M B III public building were found, ap parently a courtyard-style palace, with stone-lined but tressed foundations ( L 4 ) . [See Palace.] In area B, under Iron Age I strata, a stone-lined M B grave with the burials of in fants and an adult was recovered. [See Burial Techniques.] Although the extent of the succeeding LB I—III settlements at Tel Haror remains undetermined, it was probably con siderably smaller than, and restricted to certain areas of, the MB town. A large and well-organized public structure ( L 2 3), perhaps a patrician house, was explored in area L, di rectly above the walls of the M B palace. Excavations in area K unearthed various installations from the LB III, notably a well-preserved potter's kiln and associated refuse pits. T h e main Iron I settiement is recorded in area B and on the upper slope of the rampart. Excavations yielded a se quence of building phases (B7-1) that span the LB III and the end of the Iron I period. T h e remains of phases B6-5 of Iron I belong to a spacious structure with a stone-paved courtyard. It is noteworthy that these deposits produced lo cally manufactured monochrome pottery of Aegean types.
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Phases B4-2 are represented by a series of carefully con structed buildings on stone foundations and by stone-lined grain silos that yielded rich assemblages of both mono chrome and bichrome painted ceramics as well as nicely cut stone seals. [See Granaries and Silos.] To the last phase of Iron I (Bi) in the late eleventh century BCE belongs a massive citadel and a building with a cobbled courtyard. Certain ac tivities, industrial and domestic, in tiiis period were also re corded in other areas of the tell (D, K, L). Excavations in 1982-1986 in areas D , E, and G on the upper tell uncovered exceptionally well-preserved remains of a highly organized Iron II—III fortified citadel at the north eastern corner of the M B rampart (see figure 2). T h e overall shape of the upper tell was determined by the defense com plex, which included a rampart, massive defense wall, glacis, and probably also a corner bastion. T h e 4-meter-wide en closure wall is preserved to a height of 4 m; its base is sup ported by a massive embankment and glacis constructions. A formidable mud-brick tower (about 9 x 7 m ) prottudes from the wall; nearby, a mud-brick platform had supported the corner tower. A cluster of well-planned and exceptionally well-pre served storehouses was explored in area G, including longhailed magazines constructed against the enclosure wall. T h e magazines were elevated on mud-brick platforms that
T E L
H A R O R
M I I M SRT auba
G
now
HAROR, TEL. Figure 2. Isometric view of the citadel wall and mag azine. (Courtesy E. D. Oren)
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consisted of massive foundation walls with stones and frag ments of bricks packed tightly in between diem. Stratigraphic and artifactual considerations imply a mid- or late eighth-century BCE date for the consttuction of the citadel and tire buildings inside it (G6-5). For some reason (earth quake?), soon after their construction, both the fortification system and the buildings inside underwent a major reno vation (G4) that involved the raising of the glacis and floors for some 2 m. The citadel (G3) came to an end in a violent conflagration sometime in the mid- to late seventh century BCE, likely caused by an Egyptian military expedition of the Saite kings. Excavations yielded a rich store of finds, such as Phoenician-style transport amphorae, as well as jars with incised inscriptions, including one inscribed with the word Ibgd alongside an Egyptian ankh and the hieratic numeral 8 inscribed four times. T h e results of the excavations on the upper tell suggest that the building of the citadel at Tel Haror may have been part of Assyria's overall military and economic organization in southern Philistia and on the bor der of Egypt. [See Assyrians.] The reoccupation in the Per sian period (G, D i ) of the upper tell involved a large-scale leveling of the preceeding Iron Age site. The remains in area G consisted of a spacious building with cobbled floors and grain pits; another building, in area D, had a large courtyard paved with stone slabs. T h e finds included Greek and Cyp riot imports, clay figurines, and Aramaic ostraca. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William F. "The Fall Trip of the School in Jerusalem: From Jerusalem to Gaza and Back." Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 17 (1925): 4-9.
Aharoni, Yohanan. "The Land of Gerar." Eretz-Israel $ (1954): 108I I I (inHebrew). Oren, Eliezer D., et al. "Tel Haror." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 2 (1983): 33-35. Oren, Eliezer D., and M. A. Morrison. "Land of Gerar Expedition: Preliminary Report for the Seasons of 1982 and 1983." In Prelimi nary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored
Excavations, 1980-84,
edited by
Walter E. Rast, pp. 57-87. Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, Supplement no. 24. Winona Lake, Ind., 1986. Oren, Eliezer D. "Haror, Tel." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeolog ical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 580-584. Jerusalem and
New York, 1993. Rainey, Anson F. "Sharhan/Sharuhen—The Problem of Identifica tion." Eretz-Israel 24 (1993): i78*-i87*. Stager, Lawrence E. "The Impact of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (11851050 BCE)." In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Ixind, edited
by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 332-348. Leicester, 1993. ELIEZER D . OREN
1985 and 1988 under the direction of Pierre de Miroschedji and Amihai Mazar, on behalf of the French Research Center in Jerusalem and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The site is approximately 7.5 acres in area; two strata dated to the EB I were observed, apparently founded on virgin soil. Only a few remains from later periods were found. A hillock at the center of the site (area A) marks the re mains of a public architectural complex, a rare feature in an EB I settlement. T h e complex, only partially excavated, in cludes a central courtyard surrounded by rooms on at least three sides. The main room on the south was probably a sanctuary (5.8 X 15 m), with a line of pillar bases along its long axis and an entrance in one of tire long walls. The wall opposite the entrance was lined with standing stones, fronted by a narrow bench. Some of the stones were smooth and shaped into rectangles. The excavators identified them as a line of rnassebot ("standing stones"), used in tire cult as memorials to tribal ancestors or as symbols of deities. It is possible that in an earlier stage the stones stood in an open cult place and only later were incorporated into tire building. Another broad hall in this complex had a monumental entrance with two monolithic doorjambs made of well-cut stone blocks up to 1.9 m high. These architectural features are unknown from other EB I sites. T w o narrow subsidiary chambers formed another part of the complex. The com plex may have served as the community's joint religious and secular center. The pottery assemblage found at the site is homogeneous and can be identified as a southern version of the EB I cul ture in Palestine. It is characterized by an abundance of in cised and painted designs but lacks red slip and burnish. Similar assemblages are known from several sites in south ern Palestine. Some of the sherds belong to a group of pot tery inspired by Egyptian techniques and forms, though they were produced in southern Palestine. These connect Flartuv witir the Egyptian colony at Tel 'Erani to the south, dated to the time of the first dynasty. Hartuv has important implications for several aspects of EB I culture, such as architectural forms and monumental building techniques; regionality in die material culture; and perhaps also cult practices and die role of religious institu tions in the society. The site was abandoned before the end of the EB I, perhaps when nearby Yarmut developed as an urban center. [See also Yarmut, Tel.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
HARTUV (Ar., er-Rujum; map reference 149 X 129), Early Bronze I site located near Nahal Sorek, north of BethShemesh, in Israel's northern Shephelah. Hartuv is the site's modern Hebrew name. T h e site was discovered during field surveys; small-scale excavations were conducted between
For brief reports on the excavations at Hartuv, see Amihai Mazar and Pierre de Miroschedji, "Hartuv (Er-Rujum)," Excavations and Sur veys in Israel 4 (1985): 45, and "Hartuv: Notes and News," Israel Ex ploration Journal 36 (1986): 109; 38 (1988): 84; and 39 (1989): 110112. AMIHAI MAZAR and PIERRE DE MIROSCHEDJI
HASA, WADI E L HASA, WADI EL-, one of the main east-west wadis in Jordan; it begins in dre eastern Jordan desert and flows in a northwesterly direction to the Southern Ghors at es-Safi at tire southeast end of the Dead Sea. Elevations range from about 800 m near its eastern end at Qafat el-Hasa (2392.5 X 0278) to about - 3 7 0 m atits western end, just west (194.9 X 49.9) of es-Safi. Elevations to tire north and south of the wadi range in excess of 1,200 m, however. Wadi el-Hasa is situated on the west side of a physio graphic province geologists describe as the mountain ridge and northern highlands east of tire Great Rift Valley. Im mediately west of the wadi is a sharp change in geologic style. T h e north-south boundary fault of the Dead Sea Rift is located just east of es-Safi. This is marked by a sharp change in elevation with values being in excess of 1,000 m east of the fault and fewer than —200 m to its west. A number of explorers visited the area south of Wadi elHasa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them, Nelson Glueck extensively explored the area (19349 3 9 ) 3 excavating the Nabatean temple at Klrirbet et-Tannur (2173 X 0420), immediately south of Wadi el-Hasa, in 1937 and 1938 (Glueck, 1966). Manfred Weippert (1979) surveyed several sites immediately south of Wadi el-Hasa in 1974. Between 1979 and 1983, Burton MacDonald directed the Wadi el-Hasa Archaeological Survey (WHS), examining 1
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1,074 sites both within and south of the wadi. T h e survey published a final report in 1988 (MacDonald, 1988). T h e occupational history north of the wadi is reported on in Miller (1991). Wadi el-Hasa was the WHS's northern boundary. On the east, the survey territory extended to Qal'at el-Hasa, immediately west of the Desert Highway; on the west, it went just beyond the edge of the plateau where the terrain drops off appreciably toward the southeast plain of the Dead Sea. T h e WHS's southern boundary went from 15 1cm (9 mi.) in the west to less than 1 km in tire east, south of Wadi el-Hasa. T h e survey territory is cut by a number of impressive and deep wadis flowing south to north. T h e WHS found lithic evidence of human occupation in the area beginning as early as tire Lower Paleolithic period. This evidence spans all time-strategic units from the Lower Paleolithic through the Pre-Pottery Neolithic periods (PPN). There is little evidence of a Pottery Neolithic pres ence except in the western segment of the survey territory. The number of Chalcolithic sites seems to indicate an in crease in population south of Wadi el-Hasa then. This ttend continues into the Early Bronze I period but not into the Early Bronze II-IV. T h e Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Ages are poorly represented in the WHS territory. There is evidence, however, for the renewal of sedentary occupation in the area at the end of LB II. There are further indications of population increase during the Iron I period, with twelfth-
HASA, WADI EL-. Map of Wadi el-Hasa Archaeological Survey territory. (Courtesy B. MacDonald)
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eleventh-century BCE settlements in the western section. This population increase seems to accelerate during Iron II and possibly is sustained until it begins to wane at tire be ginning of tire Hellenistic period. Nabatean sites are found, especially in the wadis, throughout the WHS territory. Ro man period sites are also found throughout the territory and a segment of the Via Nova Traiana is well preserved in the central segment. The Byzantine period seems to be, on the basis of the number of sites, one of significant population. The Early Islamic evidence is sparse, but there are several major sites among those from the Ayyubid/Mamluk period. A number of the Ottoman period sites are probably villages associated witir the pilgrimage route to Mecca. Since the completion of the WHS fieldwork in 1983, a number of archaeologists have worked on sites the WHS surveyed, illuminating human occupation in the area in tire Paleolitiiic period: Gary O. Rollefson and Zeidan A. Kafafi (1985) studied WHS site 149, Khirbet Hammam/Abu Ghrab (2136 X 0437), a PPNB village site; Brian F. Byrd and Rollefson (1984) revisited WHS site 895, Tabaqa (2322.5 X 0342), an Epipaleolitiric site; Zeidoun Muheisen and Francois Villeneuve began excavating the NabateanRoman village, temple, and cemetery at Khirbet ed-Darih, WHS sites 253-254 (2172 X 0352), in Wadi La'ban in 1984 (Villeneuve, 1988); and Philippe Bossut, Zeidan Kafafi, and Genevieve Dollfus investigated WHS site 524 (2173 X 0362), a Pottery Neolithic site, more extensively in 1987 (Bossut e t a l , 1988). In particular, in 1984 Geoffrey A. Clark began excavating a number of WHS sites at the eastern end of Wadi el-Hasa and in Wadi el-'Ali: WHS site 618 (2387.5 X 0278), a series of Upper Paleolithic Ahmarian and Lev antine Aurignacian as well as Epipaleolithic Kebaran sites located on the northwest shore of Pleistocene Lake el-Hasa, with a C-14 date of 20,000 years BP from its Kebaran com ponent, and a probable age for the sites at about 25,00015,000 years BP; WHS site 621 (2380.5 X 0286.5), a slightly later Middle Paleolithic (tabun B-C-type Mousterian) open site located on the northwest shore of Lake el-Hasa, drat is probably about 60,000 years old; WHS site 623X (2380.5 X 0288), a small (4 sq m) Upper Paleolithic Ahmarian openair knapping station on the shore of Lake el-Hasa with many reconsttuctible cores that is undated but whose probable age is about 25,000 years BP; WHS 634, 'Ain Difla, (2274.5 0349.1), located in Wadi el-'Ali (one of tire main southnorth wadis emptying into Wadi el-Hasa), an early Middle Paleolithic (rata«-D-type Mousterian) rock-shelter associ ated with the middle terrace of Wadi el-'Ali, witir 7-meterhigh stratified deposits (tire Oxford thermoluminescence date for burnt flint from the uppermost five levels, of the twenty excavated so far, is 105,000 ± 15,000 years B P ) ; WHS 784X, Yutil el-Hasa (2375 X 0 3 n ) , a terminal Ah marian collapsed rock-shelter site with excellent faunal pres ervation, hearths, features, and a pollen sequence C-14 dated to 19,000 years BP; and WHS 1065, 'Ain el-Buheira x
(2385.5 X 0276.5), an Epipaleolithic Kebaran and Natufian open-air site associated with Lake el-Hasa and found adja cent to a rock-shelter and a fossil spring (five of its C-14 dates range from 16,900 to 15,600 years BP). BIBLIOGRAPHY Bossut, Philippe et al., "Khirbet ed-Dharih (Survey Site 49/WHS 524): Un nouveau gisement neolithique avec ceramique du Sud-jordanien." Paleorient 14.1 (1988): 127-131. Byrd, Brian F., and Gary O. Rollefson. "Natufian Occupation in the Wadi el Hasa, Southern Jordan." Annual of the Department of Antiq uities of Jordan 28 (1984): 143-150. Clark, Geoffrey, et al., "Paleolithic Archaeology in the Southern Le vant: A Preliminary Report of Excavations at Middle, Upper, and Epipaleolithic Sites in Wadi el-Hasa, West-Central ]ordan." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 31 (1987): 19-78.
Clark, Geoffrey, et al., "Excavations at Middle, Upper, and Epipaleo lithic Sites in the Wadi Hasa, West-Central Jordan." In The Prehis tory of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by Andrew N. Garrard and Hans G. Gebel, pp. 209-285. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 396. Oxford, 1988. Clark, Geoffrey, et al„ "Wadi Hasa Paleolithic Project, 1992: A Prelim inary Report." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 36
(1992): 13-23. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vols. 1-3. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 14, 15, 18/19. New Ha ven, 1934-1939. Important for early exploration in the area. Glueck, Nelson. Deities and Dolphins: The Stoiy of the Nabataeans. Lon
don, 1966. Important for Glueck's work at Khirbet et-Tannur. Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Lindly, John, and Geoffrey Clark. "A Preliminary Lithic Analysis of the Mousterian Site of 'Ain Difla (WHS Site 634) in the Wadi Ali, West-Central Jordan." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53 (1987): 279-292. MacDonald, Burton. The Wadi el Hasa Archaeological Survey,
1979-
1983, West-Central Jordan. Waterloo, Ontario, 1988. Main publica tion on the archaeological history of the south bank of Wadi el-Hasa. Miller, J. Maxwell, ed. Archaeological Suwey of the Kerak Plateau. Amer
ican Schools of Oriental Research, Archaeological Reports, I. Adanta, 1991. Rollefson, Gary O., and Zeidan A. Kafafi. "Khirbet Hammam: A PPNB Village in the Wadi el Hasa, Southern Jordan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 258 (1985): 63-69.
Villeneuve, Francois. "Fouilles a Khirbet edh-Dharih (Jordanie), 19841987: Un village, son sanctuarie et sa necropole aux epoques nabateenne et romaine (Ier-IVe siecles ap. J.C.)." Comptes-Rendus des Seances de TAcademie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1988): 458-479.
Weippert, Manfred. "The Israelite 'Conquest' and the Evidence from Transjordan." In Symposia Celebrating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1900-
197S, edited by Frank Moore Cross, pp. 15-34. Cambridge, Mass., 1979. BURTON MACDONALD
HASANLU, site located in tire northern half of the Solduz valley, just south of the southwestern corner of Lake Urmia in western Azerbaijan province, Iran (37 °oo' N , 45°i3' E). The site rises 25 m above tire surrounding plain and consists of a central high mound (the Citadel mound),
HASANLU
HASANLU. Figure I. Plan of the site. The period IV B structures in black were destroyed c. 800 BCE. The fortification wall in gray belongs to the Urartian occupation (period III B), c. 750-600 BCE. (Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia)
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about 200 m in diameter (see figure i ) , flanked by a low terraced mound about 8 m high and about 6oo m in maxi mum diameter as presently preserved (the Outer Town). The site clearly extended farther in antiquity because ar chaeological deposits occur in nearby fields and have been found beneath the modern village of Hasanlu. Soundings on the central mound indicate drat the total depth of deposit is more than 27.5 m, extending beneath the present water table. Solduz lies at the eastern end of tire Qadar River valley, which runs from the Zagros Mountains on the Iraq frontier on tire west to tire edge of the grassy plains of Miandoab on the east. The kingdom of Assyria to the west and Urartu to the north vied for control of this region during the early first millennium BCE. In the ninth century BCE, the Qadar valley and Solduz appear to have been under the influence of the Assyrians, to judge from the material culture dating to that period at Hasanlu. Between 800 and 780 BCE the Urartians, who had established settlements and fortresses to the north and west, appear to have pushed south and occupied the Qadar valley. Joint inscriptions of Ishpuini and his son Menua are found at Kel-i Shin near the sources of the Qadar, at Qalatgah (down the Qadar about 27 km [17 mi.] to the west of Hasanlu) and at Tash Tepe to the east, at the edge of the Miandoab plain. In the eighth century BCE tire Urartian settlement of Musasir was located to the west of Hasanlu, somewhere near the Kel-i Shin pass. East of Ha sanlu, an Urartian inscription at Tash Tepe mentions the name of the Mannean town of Meshta. By general consen sus, the ldngdom of Mannai (biblical Minni) lay to the southeast of Tash Tepe, in the region of modern Mahabad and Saqqiz—although the details of the historical geography of this area are much disputed as a result of the lack of written records (Levine and Young, 1977; Reade, 1979). In the late eighth century BCE, the well-known eighth campaign of Sargon II passed through some part of this region (Levine and Young, 1977). Archaeological remains show an Urar tian occupation of Hasanlu in tire late eighth to seventh cen tury BCE. Archaeologically, the best-known period of occupation at Hasanlu is the Iron Age (periods V-III), but earlier periods have also been documented, extending back to the Late Ne olithic (Hasanlu X, or the Hajji Firuz period; see Dyson, 1983). Hasanlu V begins in tire second half of the second millennium BCE; period IV, dating from tire end of tire sec ond millennium to tire end of the ninth century BCE is richly documented because it was destroyed by fire sometime around 800 BCE. A short hiatus was followed by an Urartian occupation (IIIB) that in turn was followed by an occu pation of the Achaemenid period (IIIA). Period II is poorly known but appears to belong to the end of the fourth or beginning of tire third century BCE. After a long abandonment, tire site was reoccupied in later Islamic times (period I).
The archaeological remains of Hasanlu Tepe first became known in 1934-1935 as a result of commercial digging in a cemetery along the northeastern edge of the Outer Town. The contents of one of these graves was published by Ro man Ghirshman (1939, pp. 78-79,253-254, pi. C). In 19351936, Erich F. Schmidt photographed the site from the air for the first time, although the picture was not included in his volume Flights over Ancient Cities of Iran (Chicago, 1940). In 1936 the British excavator Marc Aurel Stein spent six days at tire site putting trenches in at the northern Outer Town and at the foot of the northern slope of the Citadel Mound (Stein, 1940, pp. 389-404). These excavations also encountered Early Iron Age burials; some artifacts from these contexts are now housed in tire British Museum. In 1947 and again in 1949, the Archaeology Service of Iran undertook further excavation in both the northern and east ern Outer Town cemetery areas (Hakenri and Rad, 1950). They recovered Early Iron Age graves (later designated as Hasanlu V and IV; c. 1500-800 BCE). The Hasanlu Project of tire University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania was directed by Robert H. Dy son, Jr., from 1956 through 1977, when the Iranian Revo lution ended fieldwork. After 1958 this research was con ducted jointly with tire Mettopolitan Museum of Art (New York City); the project enjoyed the cooperation of tire Ar chaeological Service of Iran during its early years, and, after 1971, the collaboration of tire Iran Center for Archaeological Research (directed by Firouz Bagherzadeh). Excavation in cluded stratigraphic soundings, horizontal clearance of the well-preserved Iron Age levels, and test excavations at smaller, adjacent sites (Hajji Firuz, Dalma, Pisdeli, Dinkha, and Agrab Tepes); general survey of the valley was also car ried out. (See Dyson, 1983; for a bibliography of tire project through 1976, see Levine and Young, 1977). Excavation at Hasanlu Tepe focused on the ninth-century BCE level (period IVB), which was uniquely preserved be cause the site was burned during a military attack, probably by Urartians. Within the surrounding walls of this settlement four major buildings were set around two open courtyards. Each building was characterized by a portico and a large central columned hall surrounded by first- and second-story storerooms. These are the oldest such buildings so far ex cavated in later Iran and form an architectural link between Bronze Age Anatolia and Iron Age Iran. These large build ings and the smaller structures surrounding them collapsed, burying their contents in piles of debris. As a result, thousands of objects were recovered made of copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold, glass, ceramic, amber, ivory, bone, shell, wood, antler, and other materials. A wide variety of objects was found, including a large quantity of horse trap pings (bits, bridles, breastplates), containers, weapons, per sonal ornaments, and tools (de Schauensee, Muscarella, 1988; Winter, 1980), Cylinder seals and sealings (Marcus, 1988) relate to Assyria and to local traditions, as do carved
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HASANLU. Figure 2. Gold bowl Photographed in the Tehran Museum, Iran. (Courtesy Univer sity of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia)
ivories (Muscarella, 1980,1988). N o tablets were found, but several fragments of stone artifacts carry names that indicate both Assyrian and Elamite contacts. A unique object, found in 1958, was a large gold bowl (see figure 2) covered with repousse figures representing religious mythology involving three gods riding in chariots (storm god, sun god, and moon or local god), offerings, heroes in combat, and other ele ments (Porada, 1967; for detailed color illustrations see Life magazine 12 January 1959). These episodes draw on older Mesopotamian and/or Anatolian (Hurrian?) myths and symbols but are executed in a technique of metalwork com mon to late second and early first millennium BCE Iran (Ex pedition, 1989; Muscarella, 1980, 1988; Winter, 1989). BIBLIOGRAPHY de Schauensee, Maude. "Northwest Iran as a Bronze-Working Centre: The View from Hasanlu." In Bronze Working Centres of Western Asia,
ca. 1000-539 B.C., edited by John E. Curtis, pp. 45-62. London, 1988. de Schauensee, Maude. "Horse Gear from Hasanlu." Expedition 31.23 (1989): 37-52. Dyson, Robert H., Jr. "The Genesis of the Hasanlu Project." Intro
Hakemi, Ali, and Mahoud Rad. "The Description and Results of the Scientific Excavations [of Hasanlu, Solduz]" (in Persian). In Gazarishha-yi Bastan Shinasi,wo\. 1 , pp. 87-103. Tehran, 1950.
Levine, Louis D., and T. Cuyler Young, Jr., eds. Mountains and Low lands. Malibu, 1977. See especially Louis D. Levine, "Sargon's Eighth Campaign" (pp. 135-151). Marcus, Michelle I. "The Seals and Sealings from Hasanlu IVB." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1988. Muscarella, Oscar White. The Catalogue of Ivories from Hasanlu, Iran.
University Museum Monograph, no. 40. Philadelphia, 1980. Muscarella, Oscar White. Bronze and Iron: Ancient Near Eastern Arti facts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1988.
Porada, Edith. "Notes on the Gold Bowl and Silver Beaker from Has anlu." In A Survey of Persian Art, vol. 4, edited by Arthur Upham Pope, pp. 2971-2978. London and New York, 1967. Reade, Julian. "Hasanlu, Gilzanu, and Related Considerations." Archiiologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 12 (1979): 175-182.
Stein, M. Aurel. Old Routes of Western Iran. London, 1940. Winter, Irene J. A Decorated Breastplate from Hasanlu, Iran: Type, Style,
and Context of an Equestrian Ornament. University Museum Mono graph, no. 39. Philadelphia, 1980. Winter, Irene J. "The 'Hasanlu Gold Bowl': Thirty Years Later." Ex pedition 31.2-3 (1989): 87-106. ROBERT H. DYSON, JR.
duction to Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran: The Neolithic Settlement, by Mary
M. Voigt. Hasanlu Excavation Reports, vol. 1. University Museum Monograph, no. 50, Philadelphia, 1983. Expedition 31.2-3 (1989). Special issue entitled "East of Assyria: The Highland Settlement of Hasanlu," edited by Robert H. Dyson and Mary M. Voigt. Ghirshman, Roman. Fouilles de Sialk pres de Kashan 1933, 1934, *937-
Vol. 2. Paris, 1939.
H A S M O N E A N S . T h e Hasmonean state was created in the second century BCE, following a long struggle with the Seleucids and with some of the peoples settled in Palestine. T h e house of Mattahias the Maccabee, a priesdy family from Modi'in, began a military struggle against the Seleucid
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Empire (168 BCE). A struggle was also launched against the hellenizers connected to the Seleucid court, led by the most prominent priestly houses. The struggle started with the lim ited goal of achieving religious autonomy, which had been taken from the Jews by the restrictions of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. After Mattathias's death in 168, his son Judah (Ju das), called tire Maccabee, took over the command. After many battles with the Seleucid army and the hellenizers, he managed to take hold of the Temple Mount and purify the Temple (164 BCE). He fell bravely in battle in 161/60 BCE, and his brother Jonathan took over the command. [See Se leucids.] As soon as the Hasmoneans became more powerful, tireir goal shifted to the more political one of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Thus, from the 150s BCE onward, the Has monean brothers became preoccupied with fighting the Se leucid princes and strengthening their foothold in Palestine. After 161 BCE they were supported by Rome, which con cluded a treaty with them; by Sparta; and by the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt. After Judah's successor, Jonatiran died, their brother Simeon took over. In r43 BCE Simeon officially laid the foundation of an independent Hasmonean state, which became an important political factor in the ancient Near East. The state fell to the Romans in 63 BCE, when the Roman commander Pompeius conquered Palestine. Si meon's successors, John Hyrcanus I (135-104 BCE) and his sons Aristobulus I (104/03 BCE) and Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE), wanted to enlarge the area of the land of Israel and to make it their sovereign territory. Whereas Hyrcanus I mainly subjected tire Samaritans and conquered and judaized the Idumeans, Aristobulus I (who ruled for less than one year, dying prematurely in 104/03 BCE) conquered the Galilee and judaized the Itureans (Arab tribes). His succes sor, Alexander Jannaeus, conquered even more land, and under his rule the territorial dimensions of Palestine were comparable to the Davidic kingdom at its peak. His wife, Salome Alexandra, who ruled the country after his death (76-67 BCE), did not extend the territory further. [See Sa maritans; Idumeans.] The conquering Jewish dynasty based its claims on tire historical legitimacies of the biblical period, asserting that the land was theirs because it belonged to their ancestors. However, both during and after their conquest, tirey had to live alongside the Gentiles in Palestine—tire Idumeans, the Arabs, the Greeks in the cities on the coastal plain, as well as tire Phoenicians who lived throughout the land. Their most problematic relationships were with tire Samaritans, who claimed themselves to be the true Jews, and who were settled in the center of Palestine, in the region around Shechem in the Samarian hills. [See Shechem.] Whereas at tire beginning of the Hasmonean era the Jews lived mainly in the hill country of Judea (Judah), toward tire period of the Roman conquest Jews were setding in many other regions
of the country—in Gezer, Jaffa, the Galilee, and Transjor dan. From the reign of Jonatiran in 152 BCE onward, the Has moneans, as well as being secular rulers, took upon them selves the high priesthood. The position was vacant between 159 and 152 BCE because Onias III (or IV) had gone to Egypt, where he had founded a new Yahweh temple at Tell el-Yahudiyeh. [See Yahudiyeh, Tell el-.] The high priest hood enhanced the stature of the Hasmoneans in the eyes of their own people and the outside world. Although the Hasmoneans were primarily secular rulers, they did not take the throne until Aristobulus I, who, in 104/03 BCE became the first Hasmonean king. Thus, tire last three Hasmoneans to rule before tire Roman conquest of Palestine were monarchs of a new Jewish dynasty. T h e Flasmoneans had some of the attributes of a Hellenistic kingdom—for example, they had a strong army that, since the reign of John Hyrcanus I, employed foreign mercenaries—although the exact propor tion of Jews as opposed to foreigners in this army cannot be ascertained. It is, however, thought that the number of mer cenaries increased throughout the reigns of Alexander Jan naeus and Salome Alexandra. During that period the army began to adopt techniques of warfare from tire armies of tire Hellenistic princes in the region (Shatzman, 1991). The Hasmoneans, like other Hellenistic monarchs, ruled a vast territory that, at the time of Alexander Jannaeus, in cluded almost the whole of Palestine on both sides of die Jordan River. Hyrcanus I was die first ruler to mint Has monean coins, and under the later monarchs these coins had a Greek inscription on them, "the king" (basileus), together with a Hebrew inscription. The inscriptions in Greek were probably meant both for foreigners who had settled in Pal estine and for use outside tire kingdom. N o coin of the Has monean kings bears any human figure, however, which, in this matter at least, indicate that they were Jewish rulers and resisted Hellenistic influence. (Meshorer, 1982). Although the last monarchs of the Hasmonean dynasty wanted to appear to be like tire Hellenistic monarchs elsewhere in the region, tire extent of tireir hellenization remains an enigma. The hellenization of Jews and of Judaism in Palestine dur ing the Hasmonean era is a subject that has attracted many scholars. They point to tire use of Greek as opposed to Ar amaic and Hebrew, to archaeological remains showing Greek influence, to Greek motifs in the art and literature of the period, and to the Greek influence on Jewish thought. However, the existing literature that can be dated with any certainty to the Hasmonean era shows very little Greek in fluence (see below). Even less is known about the Hasmo nean institution of kingship at the time, and the archaeolog ical remains are too scant to lead to any definite conclusions as to the degree that Hellenism penetrated Jewish Palestine. Also, although there are sites at which it can be shown that
HASSUNA Jews lived in houses whose architectural motifs were Greek, that is not evidence that those Jews were hellenized (Kuhnen, 1990). There are signs, however, of the hellenization of the pagan population—in, for example, the exis tence of some syncretistic dieties in the cities on the coastal plain (Ashkelon, Tyre). On the whole, the Jews who were settled in the cities and villages may have been more influ enced by Greek architecture and culture than those living in rural areas. Some scholars point to another area of possible influence that infiltrated both Jewish and pagan Palestine long before the Hasmonean period, namely tire eastern cul tures—Iranian, Aramaic, and Phoenician. During the Hasmonean era tire Temple in Jerusalem was not only a religious center for the Jews throughout Palestine and the Diaspora (Jews in the Diaspora sent contributions to the Holy City), it also had considerable political signifi cance because tire Hasmonean kings were also its high priests. Indeed, just because of this, there was some Jewish opposition to tire Hasmoneans that even became actively militant during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus. The Phar isees, Josephus relates (Antiq. 13. 288-292), told John Hyrcanus I to be content with secular rulership and to abandon the priestly office altogether (there is an echo of these dis putes inJannaeus'stime^MZzg. 13. 372). Salome Alexandra had to nominate her son Hyrcanus II to become high priest because as a woman she could not hold tire office. T h e cultural heritage of the Hasmonean ldngdom is un even, inasmuch as a large part of the surviving literature is from the Essenes (see below), most of which was found in the caves surrounding the site of Qumran, near the Dead Sea. [See Essenes; Qumran; Dead Sea Scrolls; JudeanDesert Caves; Temple Scroll; War Scroll] For almost half a cen tury many scholars have claimed that this literature has nu merous ideas in common with tire other Jewish schools of the day, the Pharisees and the Zaddoldtes. Some writings exist that may have come from these latter circles, although their exact identity is still problematic and their transmission indirect—such as the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic lit erature excluded by tire Jewish Sages (parts of r Enoch, Ju bilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and perhaps parts of Judith). T h e sources for the period are archaeological, numis matic, and literary. T h e latter contain the two books of Mac cabees, andJosephus's^wftgzzzVz'e.? (books 12-14) and Iris Jew ish War (Book 1), which briefly describe the period. There is very little left of pagan Greek and Latin literature that adds to the picture. The two books of Maccabees differ consid erably from each other: 1 Maccabees was probably written in Hebrew during the reign of John Hyrcanus I, whereas 2 Maccabees was written in Greek outside Palestine by a Di aspora Jew called Jason of Cyrene (probably second century BCE). It was a five-volume book covering tire period 175160 BCE (ending with the death of Judas Maccabee). T h e book was condensed, and only this version, is available. In
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contrast with 1 Maccabees, which gives a more or less linear history of the period up to the rule of Simeon, 2 Maccabees is full of Jewish theology and constantly emphasizes the in tervention of God in favor of tire people of Israel. Josephus remains the only historiographic source for tire period from John Hyrcanus I through the fall of the Hasmonean inde pendent state in 63 BCE. His account is too concise to form a very comprehensive picture, however. Numismatic ma terial abounds but adds little to what is known of the nature of the Hasmonean kingdom. BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, Nahman. Discovering Jerusalem. Nashville, 1983. Bickerman, Elias J. The God of the Maccabees: Studies in the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt. Leiden, 1979. Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. 2 vols.Translated by John
Bowden. Philadelphia, 1974. Kuhnen, Hans-Peter. Palastina in griechisch-rbmischer Zeit. Munich,
1990. Mendels, Doron. The ljxnd of Israel as a Political Concept in Hasmonean Literature. Tubingen, 1987. Mendels, Doron. The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism. New York,
1992. Meshorer, Ya'acov. Ancient Jewish Coinage. 2 vols. Dix Hills, N.Y.,
1982. Momigliano, Arnaldo. Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization. Cam
bridge, 1975. Schiirer, Emil. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ,
ITS B.C.-A.D. i3S- 4 vols. Revised and edited by Geza Vermes et al. Edinburgh, 1973-1987. Shatzman, Israel. The Armies of the Hasmonaeans and Herod: From Hel lenistic 10 Roman Frameworks. Tubingen, 1991. Stern, Menachem, ed. and trans. Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and
Judaism. 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1976-1984. Stem, Menachem. Studies in Jewish History: The Second Temple Period
(in Hebrew). Edited by M. Amit et al. Jerusalem, 1991. Tcherikover, Avigdor. Hellenistic Civilization
and the Jews. Philadel
phia, 1966. DORON MENDELS
H A S S U N A , site located in northern Mesopotamia, about 35 km (22 mi.) south of Mosul, between the Tigris River and the western Jezireh (36°io' N , 43°o6' E). It is a type-site for tire Hassuna culture, which represents one of the early farming village cultures of the Near East, dating to tire late seventh and early sixth millennia. Hassuna sites are located in the north-central Jezireh, where rainfall agricul ture can be practiced. Hassuna covers a maximum area of 2.5 ha (6 acres). The site was discovered by Fuad Safar in 1942, and excavations, under the direction of Safar and Seton Lloyd, were carried out by the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities in 19431944. T h e ceramic sequence at Tell Hassuna is important in reconstructing the relative chronology of the Late Neo lithic/Early Chalcolithic painted ceramic traditions of north ern Mesopotamia. [See the biographies of Safar and Lloyd]
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Fifteen stratigraphic levels were distinguished in two soundings. The main area, sounding i, was located 20 m southeast of the summit of the mound and comprised an area of about 2,500 sq m. Sounding 2 was located on the summit. T h e two excavation units were linked by a 2-meterwide trench. The earlier occupation phases were uncovered in sounding 1, die later in sounding 2. The excavators con sidered the material from levels XIII-XV unreliable because of die proximity of the surface. The Hassuna period was divided into two phases on the basis of ceramic developments. The Hassuna Archaic of lev els Ia-c, II, and III is characterized by large storage vessels made of coarse, straw-tempered material and by small bur nished bowls. A painted variety of the Hassuna Archaic pot tery emerged in level lb. The Hassuna Standard spanned levels lb-VI and was divided into three general types based on design: incised, painted, and painted and incised. Samarran pottery first appeared in levels III-IV and continued until level IX (level V had the most). The Samarran pottery included the neck of a tall jar. The neck was ornamented with a human face, partly in relief. Many of the Samarran vessels had been repaired with bitumen and riveting, which suggests that the ware was a valued import. Halaf material was found in levels VI-XII and Ubaid material in levels X I XII. [See Halaf, Tell; Ubaid.] The earliest level at Hassuna, level la, rested on virgin soil. No architectural remains were recovered from it, leading the excavators to interpret it as die site of a series of tent en campments. Level la is now generally considered to date to the proto-Hassuna, a developmental phase of die Hassuna period recognizable primarily by its ceramics. As observed, for example, at Yarim Tepe (mound) I, the ceramics are stratigraphically earlier than the Hassuna Archaic and Stan dard ceramic traditions. In addition to Yarim Tepe I, protoHassuna remains have been found in Iraq at U m m Dabaghiyeh, Tell Sotto, Ktiltepe and Tellul eth-Thalathat, and at Tell Kashkashuk II, 20 km (12 mi.) north of Hasseke, in northeastern Syria. BIBLIOGRAPHY Lloyd, Seton, and Fuad Safar. "Tell Hassuna: Excavations by the Iraq Government Directorate General of Antiquities in 1943 and 1944." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 4 (1945): 255-289. MICHAEL D . DANTI
H A T R A (mod. al-Hadhr), site located about 90 Ion (55 mi.) south-southwest of Mosul in Iraq (35°35' N , 42°44' E). Hatra was situated just a little to the west of ancient Assur, along the route from the Euphrates River corridor at Seleucia/Ctesiphon tiiat connected to the northern route from Bactria to the west (running from Arbela to Singara, Nisibis, Carrhae [Harran], Apamea, and Zeugma). The city was first settled in the Late Hellenistic period (second-first centuries
BCE) by Aramaic tribes with ties to Adiabene. By the first century CE these semi-independent dynasts developed into a buffer state of the Parthian kingdom (240 BCE-226 CE), against the Romans. [See Parthians.] Hatra was the capital of tiieir kingdom and apparently had close ties to the Par thian capital at Ctesiphon. Both Trajan ( 1 1 6 - 1 1 8 ) and Septimius Severus (197-198) were unsuccessful in attempts to conquer Hatra (see Dio Cassius 68.31). In about 220-226, with the collapse of the Parthians and the advance of the Sasanians, it allied witii Rome and was reinforced as a le gionary garrison. [See Sasanians.] It was taken by Ardashir and his son Shapur I in 239-241. The site was deserted by the mid-fourtii century, as it was seen by retreating Roman troops in 363, after the death of Julian (Ammianus Marcellinus 25.8.5). Excavations at Hatra revealed the city of die first-second centuries CE that had developed chiefly under the Parthian sphere, but with (as with other Parthian centers) significant Hellenistic influences. T h e early inscriptions are predomi nantly in Aramaic. In the last phase, however, numerous Greek and Latin inscriptions attest to the influence of the Roman garrison. T h e architecture and art similarly reflect the mixture of Hellenistic, Parthian (Neo-Iranian), and Ro man elements. T h e city was laid out in a large circular plan (c. 320 ha, or 790 acres) with a towered circuit wall and defense ditch, very similar to the plan at Ctesiphon. There is no regular street plan, and houses are grouped around the center of the city. Both the domestic and public architecture are of Late Parthian types. The city center was dominated by a rectangular walled enclosure subdivided by a partition wall into a large outer court to the east (c. 300 sq m) and a small enclosure to the west (c. 150 X 300 m). T h e western enclosure served as the precinct of the Temple of Shamash (the Assyrian sun god), but also contained other smaller sanctuaries and likely the administrative center. T h e temple precinct was entered by two gates flanking the central axis of the inner precinct. Be fore the temple proper was a series of lateral vaulted cham bers (iwans) facing onto the open court. T w o large iwans (21 m wide) stood in the center, directiy opposite the two gates; each one was flanked by a row of smaller iwans. In contrast to die pitched-brick vaulting used in the grand iwan of Taq Kisra at Ctesiphon (third-sixth centuries CE), the vault construction at Hatra used stone voussoirs. T h e walls were made of rubble-and-mortar cores with a dressed-stone facing. This type of construction (Romano-Syrian) is highly unusual in the region, especially in connection with archi tectural forms. One inscription indicates that the Temple of Shamash was under construction in 77 CE, which is likely the period during which the entire complex was built in its present form. Adjacent to the iwan of Shamash is a square platform with vaulted galleries on all sides, usually called a fire temple. Other temples were arranged in the outer court yard or against the partition wall; a large temple in the nortii-
HATRA INSCRIPTIONS em part of tire court was in an Early Hellenistic style, with a double colonnade. Both Ionic and Corinthian orders were found. T h e moldings may reflect influences from Baalbek, while some artistic elements suggest Achaemenid traditions. T h e predominant language used at Hatra was Aramaic, as attested by more than three hundred inscriptions dating to the second century CE. Among other things, tirese texts indicate that the semi-independent dynasts took such tides as "king of Arab" (MLIC DY 'RB) and "lung of the Arabs" (MLK' D'RBY'). If these titles were not used to connote rule over the neighboring region (called Arabia), as appears from similar texts at both Dura-Europos and Edessa, this may be the earliest preserved instance of Arab as a self-des ignation of a group, even though Hatra is quite a distance from the regions usually associated with tire term. The Latin inscriptions all date to the 230s and 240s CE, during which time the city served as the easternmost garrison in Upper Mesopotamia. Whether tire Roman presence is best under stood as an alliance or an occupation is not entirely clear. T h e tribune of the I Parthica Legion was stationed there and made a dedication to Hercules. T h e tribune of the IX Maurorum Gordiana Cohort (238-244), also made a dedication to the Deus Sol Invictus ("The God, Unconquered Sun") of Hatra, a blend between tire local tradition of Shamash and the romanized cult of Sol Invictus, found prominently in the third century and often in military contexts. T h e date of the fall of Hatra is given by a reference from the Cologne Mani Codex, which preserves in a miniature fourth-century Greek codex a life of the Christian "heretic" Mani, the founder of Manichaeism. This document osten sibly preserves Mani's own account of his call to preach at tire age of twenty-four, which he dates to the year in which Ardashir defeated Hatra and Shapur assumed die throne: "in the year in which Dariardaxar, the king of Persia, sub dued tire city of Atra, also in which his son Sapores, the king, crowned himself with the grand diadem" (P. Colon. 4780, col. 18.3-7). This yields a date based on the Persian regnal calendar of either 239/40 or 240/41 for the fall of Hatra, the death of Ardashir, and the accession of Shapur. This was also tire beginning of the Sasanian encroachment on the eastern limes (border) of the Roman Empire, which would succede eventually in wresting tire area from Roman control by the 260s. T h e Sasanian Empire lasted until 642. [See also Hatra Inscriptions; and Persia, article on Ancient Persia. In addition, many of the other sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrae, Walter, Hatra. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1908-1912. Drijvers, H, J, W. "Hatra, Palmyra und Edessa: Die Stadte der syrischmesopotamischen Wiiste in politischer, kulturgeschichtiicher und religionsgeschichtlicher Bedeutung." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt, vol. II.8, edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolf gang Haase, pp. 799-830. Berlin and New York, 1977.
485
Homes-Fredericq, Denyse. Hatra el ses sculptures Parities. Istanbul, 1963. Ingholt, Harald. Parthian Sculptures from Hatra. New Haven, 1954.
Kennedy, David L., and Derrick N. Riley. Rome's Desert Frontier from the Air. Austin, 1990. See pages 106-107. Maricq, Andre. "Les dernieres annees d'Hatra: L'alliance romaine." Syria 34 (1957): 288-296. Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD
337. Cambridge,
Mass., 1993. Seepages 102, 129, and 451-452. Vattioni, Francesco. Le iscrizioni di Hatra. Naples, 1981. L. MICHAEL WHITE
HATRA INSCRIPTIONS. Hatra lies some 55 Ion (34 mi.) northwest of ancient Assur and approximately 80 km (50 mi.) southwest of Mosul in modern Iraq. T h e site was probably a camping ground used for seasonal occupa tion by seminomads from the Jezireh in northern Mesopo tamia before it became a permanent settiement in tire first century BCE. On the periphery of the Parthian Empire, Hatra remained, until the end of the third century CE, an important caravan town on the trade route connecting Seleucia-Ctesiphon witir Singara and Nisibis. In wartime, Hatra would have been a crucial halting place for any army marching from Singara to Ctesiphon. T h e Romans, however, failed to conquer it during the Parthian wars, and only a Roman co hort occupied the town for a short period in the third century CE. T h e site's religious prestige, always prominent, accounts for the existence of a monumental temple complex and of large number of smaller shrines there. What is known of Hatra is derived from classical sources, Arab legends, and some four hundred inscriptions of little consequence for the historian and of very uneven value for the linguist. The Hatraean texts are written in an Aramaic dialect of northern Mesopotamia that differs from Syriac especially in the use of performative /- for the third-person imperfect. This is tire major characteristic feature; other phonological, morphological, or syntactical features cannot be confidently described because a serious study of the epigraphic material has yet to be done. T h e presence of many local dialects in die whole area, replacing the Imperial Ara maic that had, a few centuries earlier, been its official lan guage, can be explained by die incursion of Greek at the end of die fourth century BCE. T h e script is, in many respects, close to that of the inscriptions from Assur, Sari, and Has san-Kef in the Tur 'Abdin, and from other sites in the Upper Tigris River area. The similarities between some letters of the Hattaean script and those of the inscriptions found at Garni in Armenia and at Armazi in Georgia are not negli gible. In the Hatra inscriptions, however, the neat, distinc tive handwriting of tire aleph, the long nun, tire shape of the shin, and the absence of diacritics on d/r are noticeable. All of these features distinguish tire script of Hatra from tirat of Palmyra and from Syriac. T h e Hatrean script, along witir some of its orthographic conventions, was taken over from
486
HATTUSA
Arsacids. This borrowing cannot be ignored in an area that was always exposed to cultural influences from die East, if not its direct control. The studies produced so far are of uneven quality and have not succeeded in placing Hatra in its proper historical context. Thus, in spite of much excavation and reconstruc tion, the ancient city falls short of being as well known as Palmyra. For example, little is known about the tribes who first settled Hatra. Compared to the dozens of tribal names attested by the Palmyrene inscriptions, the paucity of the Hatraean data is disturbing. Only three tribal names are known: bny bl'qb, bny rpsms, and bny tymw, raising the ques tion of why its habitants left their ethnic background unmentioned when writing their names. T h e forms of the names themselves help to answer that question: they portray a population mostiy of Arab origin in which Assyrian and Parthian families merged to create a society the inscriptions reveal as both homogeneous and very religious. Theophorous names of Shamash are frequent at Hatra because the cult of the sun deity was particularly important. Equally so was a trinity of deities whose cult was especially remarkable for its clear definition of tire relationships among the three deities: one is "our lord," another "our lady," and the third is "their son." No other community in the West Semitic area worshiped such a group of deities. [See also Hatra.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbadi, Sabri. Die Personennamcn der Inscriften aus Hatra. Hildesheim, 1983. Aggoula, Basile. Inventaire des inscriptions hatreennes. Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche-Orient, vol. 139. Paris, 1991. Contains in formation necessary to pursue independent study of the texts and their archaeological context. Beyer, Klaus. The Aramaic Language: Its Distribution and Subdivisions.
Translated by J. F. Healey. Gottingen, 1986. See pages 30-34. JAVIER TEIXIDOR
HATTUSA. See Bogazkoy.
HAYONIM, cave and terrace located in Nahal Meged in western Galilee. From 1965 to 1979 tire cave was exca vated by Ofer Bar-Yosef, Eitan Tchernov, and Baruch Arensburg, under tire auspices of the Institute of Archaeology of tire Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1992 Bar-Yosef, Bernard Vandermeersch, and Arensburg, under the auspi ces of Harvard, Bordeaux I, and Tel Aviv universities, re newed excavations in the cave to clarify the sttatigraphy and chronology of the Early Mousterian phase (see below). In 1974-1975 Donald Henry excavated Natufian remains on the terrace in front of the cave. Francois Valla of the French
Archaeological Mission in Jerusalem has been excavating on the terrace since 1980. A Paleolithic sequence (layers A-E) is represented in the cave. Layer A consists of ashy accumulations from the use made of the site by shepherds beginning in the third century CE. This occupation had been preceded by the construction of a glass furnace in tire second century CE that leveled the first stratum of Natufian remains. The Natufian layer (layer B; Epipaleolithic) consists of three major habitation phases: tire partial remains of a build ing with a burial from the early phase and a series of burials from the late phase. T h e main finds from the middle phase are a series of nine or ten unroofed, well-built, rounded rooms, each with a fireplace. During the time they were oc cupied, several of the rooms were modified for a new use; in one case, a lime kiln was installed. The skeletons in the Natufian burials were positioned in various ways: extended, semiflexed, and flexed. Secondary burials were also present in a few graves. On rare occasions, the skulls of an adult had been detached from the body with the mandible left intact, a practice that became widespread in die Early Neolithic period. Bodies were decorated with necklaces and bracelets of dentalium shells and belts and pendants out of bone and teeth. [See Skeletal Analysis; Bur ial Techniques.] The Natufian lithic assemblage is characterized by burins, Helwan lunates, and elongated picks. Stone implements for grinding consist of basalt and limestone pestles and mortars in various sizes, including a rare, large, gobletiike basalt mor tar. Bone objects include gorgets, awls, bone points, spatulae (some decorated with a net pattern), hide burnishers, bro ken sickle hafts, and rounded objects shaped from bovid bones. T h e pendants were shaped, polished, and subse quently perforated, as the unfinished or broken pieces found reveal. Three caches were uncovered near the cave wall: one contained a group of basalt pestles, the second burned ga zelle horn cores, and the third bovid ribs cut in two, as well as an unfinished sickle haft that lacks a groove. Gazelle was tire main game represented, along with nu merous birds and some fish. Radiocarbon-dated legume seeds and a few wild barley grains reflect, although poorly, plant gathering in the Natufian period; better evidence is provided by the rich collection of processing tools such as mortars and pestles. T h e high frequency of commensals— tire house mouse, house sparrow, and rats—indicates that the terrace was occupied almost year-round. Two circular Natufian houses, a well-built silo of stone slabs, and an abundance of flints and bone tools were un covered on tire terrace by Valla. T h e graves from the terrace usually contained a single skeleton in a flexed position. It is the joint burials of humans and dogs that are of special in terest, however. Again gazelle appears to have been the pri mary game hunted, one-third of which were juveniles, re-
HAYYAT, TELL ELfleeting year-round hunting. Analysis of the cementum increments of gazelle teeth, which demonstrates that the an imals were culled in both summer and winter, supports this conclusion. A Geometric Kebaran lithic assemblage with character istic elongated trapeze-rectangle microliths was uncovered under the Natufian layer on the terrace. In the cave, the Kebaran layer (C) contained mainly lithics and rare bone tools. Dominant among the microliths in the upper levels were obliquely truncated backed bladelets (Kebara points); on the lower levels arched micropoints and retouched bladelets dominated. T h e scarcity of faunal remains indi cates that tite site was occupied seasonally, probably during late summer and fall. T h e Aurignacian layer (D) in the cave was seriously dam aged by the Natufian burials. Radiocarbon dates place it between 29,000 and 27,000 BP. T h e lithics consist mostly of carinated and nosed scrapers, a few blades, and burins; the numerous horn tools include awls, points, double points, a broken split-base point, spatulae, and pendants made of deer teeth with perforated roots. Among the stone objects recovered are slabs colored with red ocher, a shaft straightener, and two stone slabs with intentional engravings—one apparently depicting an animal reminiscent of a horse. The abundant faunal assemblage provided remains of more than 120 gazelles, but only a few fallow deer, red deer, and boar. Three deep hearths in the cave's lowest level were dug into the Mousterian layer, as well as one rounded hearth with many stones. Another hearth, at a higher level, was con structed of two stone slabs. T h e partially probed Mousterian layers yielded only mea ger flint assemblages dominated by Levallois flakes, elon gated Levallois points, and some side scrapers. Only a few isolated human bones were found. T h e study of the rodent bones showed similarities with sites such as Tabun (layer C) and Qafzeh cave, while the deeper levels contained ar chaic species, as at Tabun D. [See Tabun.] Bedrock was not reached. [See also Carmel Caves.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and N. Goren. "Natufian Remains in Hayonim Cave." Paleorient I (1973): 49-68. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "The Archaeology of the Natufian Layer at Hayonim Cave." In The Natufian Culture in the Levant, edited by Ofer BarYosef and Francois R. Valla, pp. 81-92. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991. Belfer-Cohen, Anna, and Ofer Bar-Yosef. "The Aurignacian at Ha yonim Cave." Paleorient 7.2 (1981): 19-42. Belfer-Cohen, Anna. "The Natufian Graveyard in Hayonim Cave." Paleorient 14.2 (1988): 297-308. Henry, Donald O. et al., "The Excavation at Hayonim Terrace: An Examination of Terminal Pleistocene Climatic and Adaptive Changes." Journal of Archaeological Science 8 (1981): 33-58. Valla, Francois R. et al., "Les fouilles en cours sur la Terrasse d'Ha-
487
yonim." In The Natufian Culture in the Levant, edited by Ofer BarYosef and Francois R. Valla, pp. 93-110. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991. OFER BAR-YOSEF
HAYYAT, TELL EL-, small (approximately 5,000 sq m) Bronze Age village site, located 2 km (1 mi.) east of the Jordan River, 240 m below sea level, on the first terrace above the existing floodplain (map reference 205 X 203). Nelson Glueck's report of his explorations in eastern Pal estine between 1939 and 1947 suggests that Tell Abu Hayet (his site no. 154) was occupied during the Middle Bronze, Late Bronze, and Iron Ages (Glueck, 1951, p. 259). James Mellaart's 1953 Jordan Valley survey (1962) preserves this site name (his site no. 24) and notes the EB period, the E B M B transition, and the Iron Age as possible periods of oc cupation. T h e East Jordan Valley Survey (Ibrahim et al., 1976) reports surface pottery from Tell el-Hayyat (their site no. 56) dating to the EB-MB transition, Middle Bronze A, B, and C periods, and the Persian era. These authors include Hayyat among a large number of sites threatened by agri cultural development. Excavations in 1982, 1983, and 1985 directed by Steven Falconer and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner (1983; 1984; 1989a; 1989b) exposed 400 sq m through 4.5 of cultural deposition. Hayyat's stratification, material culture, and four radiocarbon dates show that habitation began late in the E B MB transition and continued through six stratigraphic/architectural phases to late M B IIC. Phase 6 (late EB-MB) and phase 1 (late M B IIC) deposits, which are limited to the center of the site, contain modest amounts of unmixed pot tery and scanty floral and faunal remains. Phase 1 architec ture consists of isolated stone wall foundations, whereas phase 6 lacks architecture altogether. During MB IIA-C (phases 5-2), Tell el-Hayyat was a sedentary Canaanite farming hamlet, as demonstrated by abundant fragments of annual cereals and legumes (e.g., wheat, barley, peas, lentils) and perennial fruit-bearing trees and vines (e.g., figs, grapes, olives). Ninety-five percent of the animal bones are from domesticated farm animals (sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle). This hamlet grew around a stratified series of four mudbrick temples at the tell's center, each of which is charac terized by anterior "buttresses" and a surrounding enclosure wall. The temple forecourts in phases 5 (early MB IIA), 4 (MB IIA), and 3 (MB IIB) include small, undecorated standing stones, many with an adjacent stone lying flat at tiieir base. T h e phase 2 temple (MB IIC) features plastered floors and walls; fragments of the exterior walls bear red paint. Phase 5 apparently lacks domestic architecture, but outside the enclosures of phases 4, 3, and 2 lie mud-brick houses, courtyards, and alleyways. Copper and bronze artifacts include javelin points and
488
HAYYAT, TELL EL-
zoomorphic figurines. Carved limestone molds, a ceramic crucible, and slag indicate that tools and anthropomorphic figurines were cast here. Pottery manufacture is reflected by ceramic wasters and slag and an intact kiln (phase 4). T h e fill debris within this kiln included the severed head and hands of a young adult male. The excavation areas at Tell el-Hayyat were backfilled after the 1985 season. BIBLIOGRAPHY Falconer, Steven E., and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner. "The 1982 Ex cavations at Tell el-Hayyat Project." Annual of the Department of An tiquities of Jordan 27 (1983): 87-104. Falconer, Steven E., and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner. "Preliminary Re port of the First Season of the Tell el-Hayyat Project." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 255 (1984): 49-74.
Falconer, Steven E., and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner. "Bronze Age Vil
lage Life in the Jordan Valley: Archaeological Investigations at Tell el-FIayyat and Tell Abu en-Ni'aj." National Geographic Research 5.3 (1989a): 335-347Falconer, Steven E., and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner. "Tell el-Hayyat." In Archaeology of Jordan,
vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denys
Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 254-261, Louvain, 1989b. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of die American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. New Haven, 1951. Ibrahim, Mo'awiyah, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1975." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 222 (1976):
41-66. Mellaart, James. "Preliminary Report on the Archaeological Survey in the Yarmuk and Jordan Valley for the Point Four Irrigation Scheme." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 6-7
(1962): 126-157. STEVEN E . FALCONER and BONNIE MAGNESS-GARDINER
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ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS
ACOR AD AH
American Center of Oriental Research
BSAJ
anno Domini, in the year of the (our) Lord
B.T.
anno Hegirae, in the year of the
CAARI
c.
Hijrah AIA AIAR
Archaeological Institute of America (W. F.) Albright Institute of Archaeological Research
AJA
American Journal of Archaeology
Akk.
Akkadian
Am. ANEP ANET
CAD CAORC CE cf.
Amos
chap., chaps.
J . B . Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near East in Pictures J . B . Pritchard, ed.. Ancient
APES
American Oriental Society
Ar. 'Arakh.
Arabic
circa, about, approximately Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute computer-aided design/drafting Council of American Overseas Research Centers of the common era confer, compare chapter, chapters
Egyptian
Elam.
Elamite
En.
English
enl.
enlarged
esp.
especially
et al. etc. Eth. et seq. Ex. exp.
American Schools of Oriental
Assyr. A.Z. b.
Ezra
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum
fascicle
fem.
feminine
CIG CIS cm
Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum centimeters Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Col.
column, columns Colossians
i Cor.
i
Assyrian
2 Cor.
2 Corinthians
OVA
Corinthians
A. Herdner, Corpus des tableltes en cimeiformes alphabetiques
born
B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
cu
cubic
Bab.
Babylonian
d.
died
BASOR B.B. BC BCE
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bava'
Batra'
before Christ before the common era
Behh.
Bekhorot
Ber.
Berakhot
Bik.
Bikkurim
BP
ff. fig.
ft.
feet
gal., gals. Gcog.
diss.
dissertation
British School of Archaeology in Egypt
BSAI
British School of Archaeology in Iraq
fragment,
fragments
gallon, gallons Ptolemy, Geographica
Ger.
German
GIS
Geographic Information Systems
Gk.
Greek
ha
Deutsches Archaologiscb.es Institut
figure floruit, nourished
Gn.
DAI
and following
fl.
Heb. Hg.
Genesis hectares Hebrew Haggai
Daniel
Hist.
Herodotus, History
DOG
Deutche Orient-Gesellschaft
Hitt.
Hittite
D.Sc.
Doctor of Science
Has.
Hosea
Hur.
Hurrian
Dn.
Dt.
Deuteronomy
EB
Early Bronze
Eccl.
Ecclesiastes
IAA
Israel Antiquities Authority
ibid.
ibidem, in die same place (as
before the present
BSAE
Esekiel
fasc.
col., cols.
Zarah
Exodus expanded
Ez.
Research
'Avodah
et sequens, and the following
Ezr.
frag., frags. ASOR
et cetera, and so forth Ethiopic
i Chronicles
CNRS
Aramaic
et alii, and others
2 Chronicles
'Arakhin
Aram.
Enoch
Eng.
2 Chr.
American Palestine Exploration Society
Babylonian Talmud
Egyp.
i Chr.
Near Eastern Texts AOS
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem
ed., eds. ED
the one immediately preceding)
editor, editors; edition Early Dynastic
EEF
Egyptian Exploration Fund
e.g.
exempli gratia, for example V
IDA(M) i.e.
Israel Department of Antiquities (and Museums) id est, that is
ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS IEJ
Israel Exploration Journal
IES
Israel Exploration Society Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche-Orient
IFAPO Is.
Isaiah Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente
IsMEO
Meg.
miles
Mk.
Mark
mm mod.
SEG
Megillah
mi.
Supplementum Graecum
ser.
millimeter
singular
modern
Sg.
Song of Songs
Mt.
Mount
Mt.
Matthew
Shabbath
S.J.
Societas Jesu, Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
Sm.
/ Samuel
2 Sm.
2 Samuel
Job
Jb.
n.
Jeremiah
Jer.
Judges
NAA Nat. Hist.
> Jon.
John Jonah
Jos.
Joshua Journal of the Palestine Oriental
JPOS
n.b. n.d. Nm.
note Neutron Activation Analysis
I
Pliny, Naluralis Historia (Natural History) nota bene, note well
sq St., Sts.
Journal of Roman Archaeology
Sumerian supplement
J.T.
Jerusalem Talmud
KA1
H. Donncr and W. Rollig, Kanaanaische undaram'dische Inschriften
Syr. no., nos.
number, numbers
n.p.
no place
n.s.
new series
O.P.
Ordo Praedicatorum, Order of Preachers (Dominicans)
p., pp.
Kelim Kelubbol
para.
kilogram
PEF
Palestine Exploration Fund
i Kgs.
i Kings
Pers.
Persian
2 Kgs.
2 Kings
Ph.D.
kg
km
kilometers M . Dietrich and 0 . Lorentz, Die keilalphabetischen Texte cms Ugarit
KTU
1 liter l.,U.
line, lines
Lat.
Latin
lb.
pounds
LB
Late Bronze
lit.
literally
Lk.
Luke
LM bo. m
Master of Arts
masc.
masculine Malachi
MB
Middle Bronze
Mc.
Maccabees
M.Div.
pi. PN ppm
Master of Divinity
Theologicae Doctor, Doctor of Theology
Ti.
Philosophiae Doctor, Doctor of Philosophy Philippians plate; plural Pottery Neolithic parts per million
PPN Prv. Ps.
Turkish
Tm.
i
pt., pts.
Psalms
2 Timothy
trans.
translated by
Ugar.
Ugaritic
v. viz. vol., vols. vs. Yad.
Pt.
/ Peter 2 Peter
Zee.
RCEA
volume, volumes versus Yadayim
Zechariah hypothetical; in bibliographic citations, English language pages in Hebrew journals
}
uncertain; possibly; perhaps
reigned, ruled Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie arabe
videlicet, namely
*
o t.
verse
Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina- Vereins
part, parts
2 Pi.
I
Timothy
2 Tm.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic Proverbs
Titus
Tk.
ZDPV
meters
M.A.
Mai.
Phil.
Late Minoan Leviticus
Ta'anit
Th.D.
i
paragraph
Syriac
Ta'an.
page, pages
Kel. Kel.
Saint, Saints
supp.
no date Numbers
square
Sum.
Society JRA
series
sg-
Shab.
Epigraphicum
degrees minutes; feet
"
seconds; inches
Revelations
+
plus
rev.
revised
minus
Ru.
Ruth
=
equals; is equivalent to
X
by
Rev.
SBF
Studium Biblicum Franciscanum
SBL
Society of Biblical Literature
-»
plus or minus
yields
H CONTINUED
HAZOR,
site located in the Upper Galilee, 15 Ion (9 mi.) north of the Sea of Galilee (map reference 2032 X 2 6 9 1 ) . T h e site is comprised of two distinct parts: the tell (or upper city), approximately 18 acres in area, and a vast rectangular plateau (the lower city), to its north, measuring some 200 acres. It was first identified by J. L. Porter in 1875 as Tell el-Qedah (also Tell Waqqas), based on geographic refer ences to Hazor in the Bible and in the works of Josephus. T h e name Hazor is mentioned in a clay tablet from the Old Babylonian period found at the site in the 1970s. Excavations. Trial soundings were first made at Hazor by John Garstang in 1 9 2 8 . Large-scale excavations were conducted by the James A. de Rothschild Expedition be tween 1955 and 1958 and again in 1968, under the direction of Yigael Yadin, on behalf of the Hebrew University of Je rusalem, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA), and the Anglo Israel Exploration Society. A smallscale trial excavation took place at the southeastern foot of the mound in 1987, under the direction of Amnon Ben-Tor. Large-scale excavations directed by Ben-Tor, the Hazor Ex cavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin, were resumed in the upper city in 1990. This current project is a joint venture of the Hebrew University; Complutense University, Madrid; and the Israel Exploration Society, in cooperation with Am bassador University, Texas. History. The earliest reference to Hazor, as hdwizi, ap pears in the Egyptian Execration texts of the late twelfthearly thirteenth dynasties (nineteenth-eighteenth centuries BCE) . It is in the Mari archives of the eighteenth century BCE that Hazor emerges as a major city. At least fourteen Mari documents refer to the city (as Ha-su-ra, Ha-sura-yu, or Ha-su-ra-a), the only one in Israel to be mentioned in that archive. Hazor's role as one of the major commercial centers in the Fertile Crescent, together with such citystates as Yamhad and Qatna, is evident. T h e name of the king of Hazor, Ibni-Adad, appears several times in the documents. Another group of documents mentioning Hazor (as Hasu-ri) and its ldng, Abdi-Tirshi, is the Amarna letters of the mid-fourteenth century BCE, It also is included, as Mr, in the lists of conquered towns in Canaan compiled by the pharaohs of tire New Kingdom, such as those of Thutmosis III,
Amenophis II, and Seti I. T h e latest Egyptian reference to Hazor is in Papyrus Anastasi I, ascribed to Rameses II. Hazor is mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible in connection with the conquest and settlement accounts, first in Joshua 1 1 : 1 0 - 1 3 and then in Judges 4 - 5 . The apparent! contradiction between these two sources with regard to the process of conquest of Canaan by the Israelites in general, and to the history of Hazor during that time in particular, has been one of the most controversial subjects in the study of the history of ancient Israel as well as in the understanding of the books of Joshua and Judges. In r Kings 9:15, Hazor is mentioned, along with Megiddo and Gezer, as one of three cities Solomon rebuilt. T h e last reference to Hazor in the Bible. 2 Kings 15:29, describes the conquest of Hazor and most of the northern kingdom of Israel by Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria. The latest reference to Hazor in connection with historical event—die battle between die Hasmonean Jonathan and die Syrian Demetrius in 1 4 7 BCE, on the Plain of Hazor—is made in 1 Maccabees 1 1 : 6 7 . It is last mentioned in Josephus (Antiq. 5 . 1 9 9 ) .
Excavation Results. Excavation has revealed that there is a difference in the history of occupation for the lower and upper cities. For this reason, the strata encountered in the upper city, where six areas were opened (A, AB, B, G, L, and M) were designated by Roman numerals, while those in the lower city, where seven areas were opened (C, D , E, F, H, K, and 2 1 0 ) , were designated by Arabic numbers. Hazor was first settled in the Early Bronze Age, but only in the upper city. The lower city was not occupied until the second millennium BCE. For most of the second millennium the upper and lower cities existed side by side as one city. Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, both the upper and lower cities were violendy destroyed. Following that destruc tion, occupation was confined once again to the upper city, until Hazor was finally deserted in the second century BCE.
Early Bronze Age (strata XXI-XIX). Remains datable to the Early Bronze period have been encountered only in deep soundings in areas A and L. Because of this limited exposure, the extent of the EB settlement is not yet known, and the date of its establishment is yet to be determined.
1
2
HAZOR
HAZOR. Plan of the ancient city and excavation areas. (Courtesy A. Ben-Tor)
The earliest sherds clearly connected with architectural re mains date to EB II, and it is to that phase that Yadin as cribes Hazor's earliest occupation. A fine assemblage of Khirbet Kerak ware indicates a settlement in EB III. In gen eral, the ceramic repertoire of these early strata shows a close affinity with Syria. Noteworthy are several cylinder seal im pressions on storage jars, of types well known from other EB sites in the north of tire country. Middle Bronze I (stratum XVIII). T h e transitional phase between the Early and Middle Bronze Ages is rep resented at Hazor by a handful of sherds found exclusively in the upper city. Most of these belong to the black-slipped and reserve-slipped wares of die Orontes valley, demon strating again die site's close relationship with Syria. Middle
Bronze Age II (upper city: strata
pre-XVII,
XVII, XVI, andpost-XVI; lower city: 4, 3). T h e question of the date of the first settlement and diat of die construction of the first fortifications in the lower city are of the center of
a wide scholarly debate. Hazor's floruit as the most impor tant city in southern Canaan is assigned by Yadin to the M B II—III, when the lower city was first settled (strata 4 and XVII), and when botii die upper and lower cities were first encircled by impressive defensive systems. According to Ya din this "greater Hazor," founded sometime in the mideighteentii century BCE is the city mentioned repeatedly in tlie Mari archive. In the preceding phase, the MB I (stratum pre-XVII), Hazor was a ratiier insignificant site, confined only to the upper tell, consisting of a few buildings and sev eral tombs. A tomb containing a large assemblage of com plete clay vessels, discovered in area L in 1 9 7 1 , seemed to Yadin to confirm this view. T h e entrance to the burial cave must have been located under die (as yet undiscovered) line of the city's fortifications, so it must have preceded tiieir construction. Because the vessels were attributed typologically to the transitional MB IIA-B phase and dated by Yadin to the mid-eighteenth century, die construction of the for-
HAZOR tifications must have occurred later—early in die M B IIB, in the second half of the eighteenth century. Other scholars differ with regard to such points as the date of the first oc cupation in the lower city, die date of construction of the fortifications, and the absolute dates to be assigned to die different phases of the Middle Bronze Age. T h e most important monuments dating to that period are the huge earthen rampart and moat defending the western and, to a lesser extent, die northern flanks of the lower city; the city gates (one in area K and one in area P); the first in a series of temples (in area H ) ; and the corner of a huge building, probably a palace (in area A). T h e earthen rampart is some 90 m wide and 1 5 m high. Similar examples known from such sites as Carchemish, Qatna, and Ebla, in Syria; from Dan, in Israel; and from otiier sites. T h e gates are of the "Syrian" direct-axis type, witii three pairs of pilasters flanking the entrance. Similar gates are known again from such sites as Carchemish, Qatna, Ebla, and Alalakh in Syria, and Tel Dan, Beth-Shemesh, Yavneh-Yam, and elsewhere in Palestine. T h e area H temple, built in stratum 3 , consists of an entrance hall flanked by two small rooms and a main room with a rectangular niche in die wall opposite the enttance. It is similar in plan to the temple in stratum VII at Alalakh. T h e same is true of the corner of the palace in area A: both stratum VII and the stratum IV palaces at Alalakh have a staircase located in the corner of the building, just as at Hazor. T h e use of finely cut orthostats, such as those incorporated into the walls of the area H temple and in die area A temple and palace, is another indication of the strong influences tiiat reached Hazor from the north. T h e close connections between Hazor and the Syro-Mesopotamian cultural sphere, evidenced in the Mari documents, are also clearly reflected in a few cuneiform documents discovered at Hazor. These include a clay liver model for divination and a fragment of a bilingual Sumero-Akkadian text discov ered by the Yadin expedition; the legal document discovered on die surface in the 1970s (see above); and an economic text and fragment of a royal letter discovered by the present excavation team. Transitional
Middle
Bronze
II-Late
Bronze
I (stra
tum post-XVI). T h e end of the prosperous M B city was catasttophic: a thick layer of ash separates its remains from tiiose of the first Late Bronze Age city. A transitional phase was encountered only in areas A and B of die upper city, termed post-XVI by die Yadin expedition. It consists of sev eral graves unrelated to any architectural remains. Late Bronze Age (upper city: strata XV-XIII;
lower
city: strata 2-1A). N o major change in population accom panied die destruction separating the Middle from the Late Bronze Age setdements at Hazor. T h e material culture, in cluding the major architectural monuments (the earthen rampart, die city gates, die area H temple), shows a marked degree of continuity. A more profound change occurred at
3
the end of die first LB stratum (XV; 2 ) , dated to LB IB. In the next stratum, LB IIA (Yadin's LB II; stratum XIV of the upper city and iB of the lower city), an open cultic area succeeded die stratum XV longroom temple in area A; a temple was founded in area C; an open High Place was founded in area F; and a major change took place in the plan of die area H temple. T h e city's defenses underwent minor changes, but the layout of the domestic buildings differs completely from that of the previous stratum. Stratam XIV (and IB) was violendy destroyed, perhaps by the end of the fourteenth century BCE, by Seti I, while, according to Yadin, Mycenaean IIIA was still in use. T h e last LB stratum at Hazor (XIII; iA), dated to LB IIB (Yadin's LB III), shows a marked decline. Imported pottery, such as Mycenaean and Cypriot wares, is found in much smaller quantities tiian in the previous strata, and there is even some doubt about whetiier the city's fortifications were still in use. Among the most significant finds attributable to LB Hazor are the various temples and the cultic and artistic objects connected with them. Noteworthy from the Stelae Temple in area C are several small stelae; a stela decorated in relief bearing the emblem of the moon god, Sin; a small orthostat of a crouching lion; a small basalt statue of a decapitated deity (or king) whose head was found nearby: a silver-plated bronze cult standard; and a pottery mask. Another impor tant building is the Orthostat Temple in area H. Its plan in stratum 2 more or less follows tiiat in stratum 3. In strata iB and iA, however, its plan is tripartite—including an en trance hall, a middle hall, and a rear hall (the temple's Holy of Holies)—an arrangement similar in concept to that in the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem. T h e temple's walls are lined with smootiily cut basalt orthostats, which, together with its plan, are clearly reminiscent of the stratum IV tem ple at Alalakh. Important finds from this temple are a lion orthostat, a basalt statue of a decapitated king (or deity?), and offering and libation tables. T h e palace at LB Hazor is probably located in area A, on the acropolis. The Yadin expedition uncovered a corner of tiiis impressive building in the mid-1950s. T h e current expedition is continuing the in vestigation of this building. Several orthostat-lined walls, two enormous column bases, and two steps uncovered so far probably belong to its entrance. T h e last LB city at Hazor was violently destroyed. A level consisting of fallen mud brick, debris, ash, and burnt wood (in some places more than 1 m thick) was encountered al most everywhere in both the upper and lower city. It is the best indication of Hazor's catastrophic end. In areas C and H there is evidence of the deliberate mutilation and dese cration of cult objects. Yadin fixed die date of that desttuction in the last quarter of the thirteenth century BCE and tended to attribute it to the conquering Israelites, as de scribed in Joshua 11:10. T h e current excavation encoun tered tiiat same destruction layer in area A. T h e date of the
4
HAZOR Iron Age II-III (strata X-IV). Stratigraphically, the fol lowing phases were established in the Iron II-III: X (Solo monic), with minor changes in IX, ending in a destruction attributed to the Aramean king Ben-Hadad I; VIII, with mi nor changes in VII (Omride dynasty), ending in a destruc tion attributed to the Aramean lung Hazael; VI, destroyed by an earthquake in the mid-eighth century BCE; V, resto ration and dien final destruction by the Assyrians in 7 3 2 BCE; and IV, a minor phase of later Israelite squatters in the ru ined city. The most important monuments belonging to strata X - I X are the six-chambered city gate and casemate walls. Built in the tenth century BCE, Yadin ascribed them to Solomon, be lieving that, as at Megiddo and Gezer, they represent die defenses Solomon undertook (1 Kgs. 9 : 1 5 ) . During that time only the western half of the acropolis was settled. T h e most prosperous period in the history of Israelite Hazor was the ninth century BCE. Under King Ahab the city expanded east ward, and die entire acropolis was encircled by a solid 3-meter-thick defensive wall. A water system, to ensure the water supply to the city in times of siege, was cut to ground water level (area M ) . It is one of the most impressive engi neering works so far found in Israel. A citadel was built on the western tip of the city (area B), and huge storage facil ities were constructed (area A). In die second half of the eightii century BCE (stratum V), in the face of the growing
HAZOR. Cultic stela. F r o m the Canaanite temple, area C . (Courtesy A. Ben-Tor)
destruction Yadin proposed, as well as its cause, should, for the time being, be left open. Iron Age I (strata XII-XI). Meager remains of a settle ment clearly postdating the destruction of LB Hazor have been discovered in various places on die acropolis. The re mains consist mainly of stone-lined storage pits, close to tiiirty of which were encountered in areas A and B; cooking installations; and what appear to be foundations of huts and tents. The pottery associated with these remains is charac teristic of Iron IA. In area B, a second level containing that same pottery was discerned. The most important feature of this sttatum, XI, is the so called high place, consisting of several walls, remnants of pavements, stone pillars (some of which may have had cultic significance), two broken incense stands, and what is most probably a foundation deposit, a jar containing metal votive objects, the most important of which is a bronze figurine of a seated male deity. Yadin be lieved that the remnants of strata XII-XI belonged to an Israelite settlement in die twelfth-eleventii centuries BCE.
HAZOR. Reconstructed entranceway
to the citadel. Ninth century BCE.
(Courtesy Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE threat posed by the Assyrian Empire, Hazor's fortifications were strengthened and a watchtower was constructed in area B. Even these improved defensive works could not with stand the might of Assyria, which conquered and destroyed Hazor in 7 3 2 BCE. Later periods (strata III-I). T h e stratum III settlement is confined to the western edge of the upper city. The As syrians constructed a citadel in area B, and remnants of an Assyrian palace, contemporary with the stratum III citadel, were encountered within the bounds of nearby Kibbutz Ayyelet ha-Shahar. Stratum II dates to the Persian period. Meager building remains and pits were encountered throughout the upper city. The most important remains are the restored and par tially altered citadel in area B and a cemetery in area A. Imported Attic ware and a silver coin fix the date of stratum II to die fourth century BCE. Stratum I is mainly the final phase of restoration of the area B citadel, which dates to die third-second centuries BCE. [See also Alalakh; Mari Texts; and the biography of Yadin] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ben-Tor, Amnon, ed. Hazor III-IV: An Account of the Third and Fourth Seasons of Excavation, 1957-1958. Jerusalem, 1989. Ben-Tor, Amnon. " T h e Hazor Tablet: Foreword." Israel Exploration Journal42 (1992): 18-20, 254-260. Ben-Tor, Amnon, and M . T . Rubiato. " T e l Hatsor. El gran monticulo magico de la Alta Galilea." Arquaologia 148 (1993): 2 2 - 3 3 . Cole, Dan P. "How Water Tunnels Worked." Biblical Archaeology Re view 6.2 (1980): 8-29. Geva, Shulamit. Hazor, Israel: An Urban Community of the Eighth Cen tury B.C.E. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 543. Oxford, 1989. Hallo, William W., and Hayim Tadmor. " A Lawsuit from Hazor." Israel Exploration Journal 27 (1977): 1 - 1 1 . Malamat, Abraham. "Silver, Gold, and Precious Stones from Hazor in a New Mari Document." Biblical Archaeologist 46 (1983): 1 6 9 - 1 7 4 . Malamat, Abraham. Mari and the Early Israelite Experience. Oxford, 1989. See pages 55-69. Reich, Ronny. " T h e Persian Building Ayyelet ha-Shahar: T h e Assyrian Palace at Hazor?" Israel Exploration Journal 25 (1975): 2 3 3 - 2 3 7 . Shaffer, Aaron, and Wayne Horowitz. " A n Administrative Tablet from Hazor: A Preliminary Edition." Israel Exploration Journal 42 (1992): 21-33, 165-167. Tufnell, Olga. "Hazor, Samaria, and Lachish." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 91 (1959): 9 0 - 1 0 5 . Yadin, Yigael et al„ Hazor: An Account of the Excavations, 1955-1958. 4 vols, in 3. Jerusalem, 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 6 1 . Yadin, Yigael. Hazor: The Head of All Those Kingdoms. London, 1972. Yadin, Yigael. Hazor: The Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible. New York, 1975. Yadin, Yigael. " T h e Transition from a Semi-Nomadic to a Sedentary Society in the Twelfth Century B . C . E . " In Symposia Celebrating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1900-1975, edited by Frank Moore Cross, pp. 5 7 68. Cambridge, Mass., 1979. AMNON BEN-TOR
5
HEALTH. See Medicine.
HEBREW BIBLE.
See Biblical Literature, article on
Hebrew Scriptures.
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Hebrew language, or more accurately Biblical Hebrew, in die main the language of the Hebrew Bible is also called Early Hebrew, in contradistinction to the language's later stages (Rabbinic, Medieval, and Modern). It belongs, with, for example, Moabite and Phoenician, to the Canaanite family of Northwest Semitic languages (to which Ugaritic and Aramaic also belong). [See Phoenician-Punic; Ugaritic; Aramaic] Biblical Hebrew. As a Semitic language, consonants in Biblical Hebrew almost exclusively constitute its roots, while its vowels modify them, through die formation of verbal and nominal themes. As a West Semitic language, its suffix con jugation (e.g., katabti, "I wrote") has become a veritable verbal form denoting die past, rather than a state (as in East Semitic). By not expanding the use of broken plurals and of the conative verbal tiieme fcTala, as have the Southwest Se mitic tongues (e.g., Arabic, Ethiopic); and by shifting w in initial position to y, Hebrew pertains to the Northwest Se mitic languages. [See Arabic; Ethiopic] By exhibiting for example, the consonantal shifts a > 0, d > z, t > s, d/s > s and showing the vowels i-i, rather than a-a, in die active derived verbal themes; and by forming many participles from the stem of the suffix conjugation {qam, zaqen, nismar) and themes like romem, "he exalted," rather than *riyyem, in die hollow and geminate verbs, it belongs to the Canaanite family (although the last two features occur in Ugaritic as well). Sources. Biblical Hebrew is mainly known from the predominantiy Hebrew parts of the Bible (only DM. 2:4-7:28, Ezr. 4:8-6:18, further Jer. I O ; I I , and two words in Gn. 3 1 : 4 7 are in Aramaic). It is transmitted in a consonantal script of which the characters are historically Aramaic, adopted for the (also consonantal) Old Hebrew alphabet following die destruction of die First Temple. Inscriptions written during the period of the First Temple were in the Old Hebrew script and, during the Second Temple period, in Old He brew and Aramaic characters alternatively. Because tiiey are written in a consonantal script, little precise information re garding the vocalization of die language can be elicited from inscriptions. Ancient transcriptions are also of uncertain value for determining vocalisms because of the pitfalls con nected widi transcription from one language to another. Neverdieless, they serve as an important corrective for the biblical material, transcriptions because they include vowel markings, and inscriptions because they provide new pho-
6
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Latin (English)
Original name
Graphic Picture
Earliest known forms
South Semitic (Sabaean)
Modern Ethiopic
A
'alf
ox-head
B
bet
house
C,G
gaml
D
dag
fish
E
he
man calling
u, v,w z
u
mace
#
Y
waw
—0
CD
zen
?
XT
A
o H
H
het
fence
U,Y K
yad
hand w/closed fist
kapp
palm
L
lamd
ox-goad (whip)
M
maym
water (waves)
N
nahag
snake
0
'ayin
eye
F,P
peh
mouth/corner
Q R
qu(p-) ra'g
head
S, X
tann
composite bow
T
taw
cross-marker
•
dirow-stick
?
n
n
i
i
Northwest Semitic (Early Hebrew)
Phoenician
>
* r
r ?
^
Yi
/ W W
<s> &
i
A
a s 0
s? +
a
t\
0
o
7 T
;
?
<\
w
LU -f-
#
T
+
w X
/
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Semitic background of the Roman alphabet.
j> *
n
r
D h D
J f
>
\ 0 L 4» 6.
0
H T
X
N
?
o
n
?
Arabic
7
r
rb
ft
? p
is
1 <3
TTT
Aramaic (Modern Hebrew)
a
iJ
t
V
o
1
0 1# n a
The letters
let and sack are excluded since diey have no counterparts in the Roman alphabet.
netic and morphological material. Moreover, inscriptions provide additions to the limited vocabulary of Biblical He brew. The transcriptions are, to a great extent, limited to the transliteration of proper nouns—for example, into Akkadian and Greek (as in die Septuagint [third century BCE onward]) or Latin (as by St. Jerome [342-420 CE]). Yet, Greek tran scriptions are not restricted to proper nouns because Origen ( 1 8 5 - 2 5 4 CE) transliterated the Hebrew Bible into Greek let ters and a few fragments of the transliteration of Psalms are preserved. [See Akkadian; Greek; Latin.] The most important Old Hebrew inscriptions from the biblical period are the Gezer Calendar (c. tentii century BCE); the Kuntilet 'Ajrud votive inscriptions (from the site on the Sinai border; late ninth century BCE); ostraca from Samaria (from the eightit [?] century BCE); the Murabba'at palimpsest (Mur. 1 7 ) , the oldest Hebrew papyrus (eighthseventh centuries BCE); the Siloam tunnel inscription (c. 700 BCE); the Mesad Hashavyahu ostraca; two small silver am ulets found in Jerusalem in the Hinnom Valley, one of which contains the Priestly blessing also known from Numbers 6:24-26 (seventh century BCE); the Arad and Lachish letters (sixth century BCE); as well as a large number of inscribed seals. [See Gezer Calendar; Kuntillet 'Ajrud; Samaria Os
traca; Murabba'at; Siloam Tunnel Inscription; Jerusalem; Mesad Hashavyahu Texts; Arad Inscriptions; Lachish In scriptions; Seals.] The biblical text itself is not easy to evaluate. It is made up of three distinct historical strata. In order of their antiq uity and their importance, drey are the consonantal text, the use of consonants as reading indicators (matres lectionis, "mothers of reading"; Heb., 'immot qeri'cl), and the system of diacritical marks for vowels and cantillation. T h e twentytwo letters of the Hebrew alphabet were originally purely consonantal. Some were polyphonic—sin/sin—and distin guished even in modern traditional pronunciation as s/s, ex cept according to the Samaritan tradition, and also presum ably ayn/gayn and het/het, respectively. This implies that the Hebrew speakers took over the alphabet from a dialect in which these consonants coincided, preferring to use these letters polyphonically, rather than invent new letters for the consonants not represented. A more original form of the alphabet, as reflected in Ugaritic, contained twenty-seven letters. (The Ugaritic alphabet also included three additional letters, added secondarily at the end of the alphabet.) T h e existence of twenty-nine consonantal phonemes is usually posited for Proto-Semitic, It stands to reason (and is also proved by deviating translations of the Septuagint) that the c
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE earliest stage of the biblical text was written in a purely con sonantal script and that the use of matres lectiones came about tiirough changes in pronunciation and subsequendy through analogical usages and intentional reform. These matres lectionis—namely waw/yod marking o and u/e and i (originally o and u/e and T), respectively, and heh in word final only and 'alef only in words in which it had been used as a consonant—were increasingly utilized by the scribes of the Bible, yet they were a ratiier restricted aid for enabling the exact reading of the holy text. [See Writing and Writing Systems; Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] It was for that reason that vowel and cantillation marks were introduced. This occurred at a rather late period (be tween 600 CE, the date of the final redaction of the Talmud, in which they are not yet mentioned, and the beginning of the tentii century, from which time dated manuscripts are known). T h e marks are, however, based on a much older tradition. T h e only vocalization and cantillation system used today by the Jewish community is the so-called Tiberian system. It is tire most elaborate system and the only one completely preserved. Accordingly, it serves as the main ba sis for linguistic investigation. In principle, however, the other vocalization (and cantillation) systems are equally im portant: die Babylonian one (in which a and ce are not dis tinguished) and the so-called Palestinian system (a sub system of which corresponds to modern Sephardi pronunciation used in academic teaching and in modern Is raeli speech). T h e Tiberian vocalization differs from both the Babylonian and Palestinian by the shift of u to a, thus coinciding with a < a. T h e Samaritan tradition is quite dif ferent. Layers. Despite the multilayered character of the linguis tic tradition, Biblical Hebrew though stretching over many hundred of years and stemming from different parts of an cient Palestine, reflects a surprisingly uniform language. This is the result of its being a standardized literary lan guage, presumably emerging from Judea (Judah) in general and Jerusalem in particular, on the one hand, and to the later changes the that text (especially its vocalization) underwent, on die otiier. Nevertheless, a distinction must be made be tween poetry and prose, and then between early and classical poetry and between classical and late prose, without going into details and differentiating between various types of prose (e.g., historical, legal). Thus, poeuy in general uses the longer (original) forms of the prepositions &, "to"; ' le, "on"; and de, "until"; it restricts die use of die definite article, the relative pronoun, and the definite direct object marker; it sometimes adds the endings -i/o to nouns in con struct (-2 in other cases as well); it utilizes die pronoun -mo, "their/them"; and it uses construct forms preceding prepositional phrases. Early poetry has preserved the short prefix conjugation to mark the past (even when not follow ing die "conversive" waw). For Late Biblical Hebrew, see below. Jar
Ca
a
7
Phonetics. The Hebrew alphabet's twenty-two letters originally marked only consonants—'b g dhw zhty klm n s'ps q rs/s t. T h e adduced order of the letters is very old, reflected not only by internal evidence (i.e., by biblical acrostic), but also by the Ugaritic alphabet. T h e penultimate letter remained polyphonic, yet the lateral s disappeared in pronunciation. It was replaced by s, identical with the fif teenth letter, so that the alphabet reflects the pronunciation of twenty-two letters only. Historically, however, it exhibits twenty-tiiree phonemes (though in biblical orthography s and s sometimes are interchanged). On the other hand, the letters b, g, d k, p , I have allophones, for after vowels they are pronounced as spirants—b, g, d, k, p , t. Yet, die auto matic shift of these plosives (which are regularly marked in the Tiberian system by an internal point, the so-called dages lene) to spirants (which are, in accurate manuscripts, marked by a superposed line, die so-called raphe) has been preserved in word-initial position only; elsewhere the spirant allophones are on the point of becoming phonemes (cf. laqahat, "you took" [fern, sg.], as against laqahat, "to take"; cf. also the very same word with alternating plosive and spi rant pronunciation: qorban, "offering," as a rule with b; but see Ez. 40:43, qorban, with V), 3
The realization of the phonemic status of noninitial b, g, d, k, p , t is of utmost importance also for understanding the biblical vowel system: because the plosive/spirant pronun ciation does not necessarily depend on being preceded by zero vowel or by 3 respectively, 3 must not be analyzed as a phoneme (see below). Between short vowels, h tends to dis appear, as does aleph in certain positions, especially in syl lable final; n preceding a consonant is almost invariably to tally assimilated to it. T h e doubling of final consonants is given up (*gabb > gab; only final tt tends to be preserved, as 'att, "you" [fem. sg.]). This may also occur in a medial position preceding a consonant [tasobna, "they will turn" [fem.]), even when die originally following a has only later become zero (as *zvayyahT > voayhi, "and it was"). Final consonant clusters tend to be opened by an auxiliary vowel, usually ce, which, however, as a rule, does not acquire pho nemic status. At a later phase, laryngeals/pharyngeals—', h, h, '—became weakened. Therefore, not only did they (and r) lose their ability to be doubled, they also often trigger the insertion of ultrashort vowels (°, * **) when they are in wordmedial position immediately followed by a consonant. These vowels also regularly replace 3 after laryngeals/ pharyngeals, which also tend to change i\u to a (i also to ce). As to vowels, the Tiberian vowel system, with the excep tion of ultrashort vowels ( " , ' " ' ) , denotes only quality, rather than quantity. That is proven, inter alia, by the use of the same vowel sign to mark a both when it developed from long a and short u. It also tends to mark allophones, not only, as mentioned above, b, g, d, k, p , t, whedier plosive or spirant, in word-initial position, and auxiliary vowels opening a final
8
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
consonantal cluster, but also when it is inserted automati cally as a vocalic glide before final h, h, after vowels otiier than a/a (die so-called furtive patah). It marks both the ab sence of a vowel and d (according to Tiberian tradition, of ten pronounced ") by the same sign (swa). Because the spirantization of b, g, d, k, p , t does not necessarily depend on a preceding vowel, including a, and because 3 often shifts to zero and vice versa, no phonemic status should be accorded to die opposition a:zero. Historically, the Hebrew vowels derive from die Semitic triads—short a:i:u, long a:T:u. Whereas the number of the Semitic consonantal phonemes has been reduced in He brew, that of the vowels has increased. The original short vowels are preserved in closed, unstressed syllables. How ever, a is often "attenuated" to i (a rather late feature, in which the various vocalization systems differ), and u tends to shift to d, except when followed by a doubled consonant; a is also preserved in stressed closed syllables of verbs, as well as in nouns originally terminating in a doubled conso nant, and in construct. Otherwise, a shifts to a, i to e, it to c
0. In stressed closed syllables, i tends to shift to a (sometimes also to ce)—the so-called Philippi's law, which occurred much later than generally assumed. In pretonic open sylla bles, a (and sometimes also z) shifts to a (and e, respectively; 1, however in this position is often elided). Sometimes the consonant following the pretonic syllable is doubled, espe cially after u, and quite often tiiis doubling spreads to the whole paradigm. Short open syllables two or four syllables before the stress are reduced. Long F and it are preserved (without length), whereas a was originally kept in unstressed syllables, shifting to o in stressed ones (this distribution has, however, largely been altered by analogy). When unstressed, the diphthongs aw/ay were monophthongized to o/e, respec tively—yet preserved, for example, preceding double w/y. In closed syllables bearing the main stress, they were split into two syllables, as *mawt > md:wcet, "death"; *bayt > ba:yit, "house." Stress. Because the cantillation marks in the Tiberian sys tem are, as a rule, on die stressed syllable, the Tiberian stress system is known with certainty. Synchronically, stress, as a rule, falls on die ultima, not rarely on the penult. A stage of general penult stress can be reconstructed historically be cause words stressed in pause on their ultima are generally forms that have elided final vowels; those stressed on their penult in pause, however, have preserved their final sylla bles. Adding die vowels elided to the words stressed on their ultima even in pause results in the great majority of Hebrew vocabulary stressed on die penult. In pause, the penult stress of words that did not elide their final vowel, was as a rule, preserved because die penult, even when originally short, was lengthened in pause. Long vowels, as a rule, preserved their penult stress (e.g., ^kata-.bu, "they wrote," with penult lengthening of the first syllable, according to the Tiberian system, in which no long vowels existed, kataibu). In con
text, however, the penult was often short, which caused the stress to move to the ultima. Because pretonic lengthening preceded the shift from penult to ultima, the first syllable of the context form *kata:bu, "tiiey wrote," was preserved, be ing long. Pretonic lengthening had already ceased operating, however, and therefore die open short unstressed penult, now losing the stress, was reduced to 3: *katdbu: and, ac cording to the Tiberian system, katdbu: This theory of general stress is of special importance for die proper understanding of Biblical morphology. Without this theory, chaos obtains; it enables discovering regularity almost everywhere, although it was often blurred by anal ogy. Thus, for example, the "conversive" and preceding the (generally short) prefix conjugation has the form wa, and the following consonant is doubled. Because, according to the dieory of general penult stress, many forms of the short prefix conjugation, which consisted of two syllables only, were sttessed on their first syllable, the a of wa was preserved by pretonic doubling. Pronouns. In Hebrew in particular and in Semitic tongues in general, triradical consonantal structure prevails, and the main meaning is carried by the radicals. Vowels only add shades to it. Interjection and pronouns, because of their emotional character (which, to be sure, is to a large extent blurred in pronouns), deviate from this structure. Moreover, pronouns allow word composition, a feature alien to Semitic linguistic structure (with die exception of negations): for ex ample, see halldzce, "tiiis," compounded of the demonstra tive ha (which serves as the definite article as well) 4- the emphatic element Id + the demonstrative zee. Altiiough a substantive to which an attributive demon strative is attached is automatically definite, it nevertheless is always also formally defined. When this is done by the definite article, it is attached to the demonstrative as well: ballay.id hahu, "in tiiat night"; yet, the more archaic form ballay.ia hu, in which the definite article is attached to the substantive only, is also attested. The personal pronouns have basically two forms: die "nominatival" ones, serving as subject and predicate, are separate words. T h e "genitival" (denoting possession and governed by substantives and prepositions) and accusatival forms (denoting direct object and governed by [transitive] verbs) are enclitic and suffixed to the preceding governing word. The genitival and accusatival suffixes are identical, except for the first-person singular, "mine," being stressed -i, " m e " unstressed -ni. Most of tiiese suffixes are preceded by "connecting" vowels, stemming from die short final vow els in which the preceding words are terminated; the absence of tiiese vowels is the result of secondary development. It is only after the third-person feminine singular of the suffix conjugation, which originally terminated in a consonant (the suffix -at), that the pronominal suffixes join the governing word directly, without a connecting vowel. Tense system. T h e Hebrew tense system, beside the im-
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE perative (in the second person only, in a form closely related to die short prefix conjugation), consists of four finite forms: die simple suffix and the conversive suffix conjugation, the simple prefix and the conversive (as a rule short) prefix con jugation. T h e prefix conversive forms are preceded by wa, "and." It is a moot question whether the verbal forms orig inally denoted aspects or time. In classical biblical prose, at any rate, these forms seem to mark time: the difference be tween the simple suffix and the conversive (as a rule short) prefix conjugation, both referring to the past, and between the simple prefix and the conversive suffix conjugation, botii referring to the future/present, respectively, depends on the syntactical environment only. As a rule, whenever the use of w, "and," is possible, the "converted" forms are applied, in accordance witii the demanded time; otherwise, the sim ple forms are used, This tense system, exhibiting two pairs of forms identical in meaning and differing in the syntactical environment only in which they occur, is quite unlookedfor. It was, to a great extent, tiierefore that Hans Bauer con sidered Biblical Hebrew to be a Mischsprache, a "mixed lan guage." It is, however, witii Gotthelt Bergstrasser ( 1 9 1 S - 1 9 2 9 , vol. 2, p. 3 , n. 1 ) , very difficult to imagine that two systems should be absorbed in their entirety into one language. Ac cordingly, it stands to reason that originally the simple suffix conjugation denoted state, as it does in Akkadian, whereas the past was marked by the short prefix conjugation (which in Akkadian and Arabic, as in Hebrew, combines the mean ings of past and jussive). As a designation of the past, the short prefix conjugation was then superseded by the suffix conjugation. It was only preserved (except in archaic po etry) in this usage in the closed syntagma preceded by wa. Accordingly, from die historical point of view, this wa is not conversive but ratiier preservative. T h e "converted" suffix conjugation is, it seems, secondary. It is formed by the anal ogy of wa + prefix conjugation, perhaps also because wishes could be denoted by die past tense verbal form as well. In poetry, however, the use of tenses is quite free, presumably because of an intentional archaism as well as a pseudoarchaism. Besides the indicative, the prefix conjugation also denotes mood—some sort of volitive action: in the first person, the "cohortative," a lengthened form (by the suffix -a), is uti lized, whereas in the second and third persons, a short form, the "jussive," is used. This jussive is basically identical with the short converted prefix conjugation after wa. It later dif fers from it in that the converted form often preserves the original penult stress. Verbal themes. It is in verbs that consonantal triliterality has evolved most completely. Although historical traces of biliteral roots can be discovered, synchronically die Hebrew verb has to be analyzed as triradical—no doubt a late de velopment, the result of analogy. T h e impact of far-reaching analogy can also be felt in the very restricted number of
9
verbal themes, as against a plethora of nominal themes. There are seven main verbal themes, all but one of which are named after the form of the third-person masculine sin gular of the suffix conjugation: the basic theme, without any affixation or doubling, called qal, "light"—that is, "light" as regards addition, without any addition; nifal, formed with prefixed n, originally only reflexive, later, after the original passive of the qal had fallen into desuetude, also passive. From the passive of the qal, die piCal, only some vestiges have been preserved. Even fewer have been preserved from its (reflexive-reciprocal) r-form (hitpaal) and die J-form of hifil, the hitafal. Both the causative hifil and the doubled middle radical (intensive-factitive) pi 'Whave (internal) pas sive forms, hofal (hufal)lpu"al, respectively. The latter also has a (reflexive-reciprocal) £-form, the hitpa"el. Accord ingly, with the exclusion of nifal, the well-balanced system shown in table 1 can be reconstructed. Among the nonfinite forms, the Hebrew verbal system possesses a participle (in the basic theme also a passive par ticiple) tiiat has both nominal and verbal rection. There are two "infinitives": The so-called infinitive construct has the usual infinitive functions (but also that of a gerund); it is, as a rule, preceded, even when not used in a final sense, by the preposition Id, " t o , " which may, however, when the infini tive clause does not have a final sense, be missing. The socalled infinitive absolute (so-called because it does not stand in construct and is not governed by prepositions) is a pe culiar blend between verbal noun and verbal interjection. It is often used, in addition to its rare infinitive functions, for example, to emphasize die verbal action, as a rule preceding the main verb. It also serves as a modal adverb, presumably an archaic feature, because in Akkadian and Ugaritic it ter minates in die adverbial ending -u. Finally, it may substitute for any finite verbal form, though the replacement of the imperative is particularly well attested. In the suffix conjugation of the basic theme fientive fd'al tends to supersede stative/cfe/ and fa'ol. The original pat terns of the prefix conjugation of die basic theme were fien tive yafil (which has been absorbed by hifil), yaful, and stative .yi/'aZ. Yet, only vestiges of diese patterns have been preserved, as yalflos, "he weakens," as against ymhflai, "he is weak"; yaqurn, "he rises," as against yebos, "he is ashamed"; yasob, "he turns," as against yeqal, "he is
TABLE I .
Verbal Themes. Obsolete forms are marked by an asterisk. Basic Theme
t-form (refiexivereciprocal)
Causative Theme
pi'el
hifil
*pu al
pu"al
h o / u f al
*hitpa'al
hitpa"al
*hitaf'el
qal Internal passive
Double Theme
c
10
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
light." In pi"el the e of the suffix conjugation is mainly pre served in tire tiiird-person singular masculine in pause. In context, as well as in tire other persons (except in die thirdperson singular feminine), the e, through Philippi's law, shifts to a. Nouns. Both triliteralism and the development of themes are less conspicuous in nouns titan in verbs. There exists a set of biradical substantives with a fixed vowel. By their meanings they demonstrate that they belong to the oldest stratum of the language and are, even synchronically, best analyzed as biradical. Substantives are used in different states: in the absolute state (when standing alone), in con struct (when closely attached to afollowing noun, the nomen rectum, historically a genitive, denoting relation of posses sion, etc.) and in the pronominal state (when attached to a genitival pronominal suffix). Two genders exist, the mas culine, as a rule with zero ending, and the feminine, with -a (spelled -h in construct and pronominal state -at) and -/ ending. Numerals. The cardinal numbers 3 - 1 0 reflect the very surprising common Semitic feature that, in opposition to the other noun classes, those with a zero ending modify femi nine nouns; those with an -a ending (in construct -fa]t) modify masculine ones. They precede or follow the counted noun in the absolute state, but they may precede it in con struct—historically an archaic feature. This is the rule with definite nouns, as well as with nouns often counted, as yom, "day." The "ten" in numbers 1 1 - 1 9 is dsdr for masculine, cesre for feminine, spelled 'srh. The ordinal numbers have special forms only for the digits and ten built, as a rule, ac cording to the theme pa'ili. The exceptions are sissi, "sixth," built secondarily off of seH, "six," and perhaps seni, "sec ond," "first" is rison, derived from ros, "head," a relatively late form, as is customary in Semitic languages. T h e older usage of the cardinal number 1 appears in Genesis 1 : 5 , yom'cehad, "one day" = the first day." c
c
Clause formation. It is in the domain of clause forma tion that Biblical Hebrew has best preserved die ancient Se mitic character. In contradistinction to Arabic, it has not relinquished free sentence structure in favor of systemization. Yet, although it has lost, like Aramaic, case and mood endings, it has not been affected by a similar syntactic form lessness. The boundary lines between main and subordinate clauses, however, as well as between the coordination of sen tences and subordination, is sometimes blurred. Thus, die main clause, when it follows the subordinate clauses, may be introduced by wa, "and." In classical prose, main clauses, as a rule, open with a verb preceded by the conversive wa. Sentences describing background tend to open with fire sub ject and may even be nominal. Yet, because the sentence following tire background sentence may open again with wa + verb, either when it continues the background sentence or resumes the main action, it is often difficult to understand die exact sentence structure. Moreover, if the verbal clause
does not open witii the finite verb or with the subject (i.e., it begins with an object or an adverbial), the finite verb has to precede the subject (i.e., the obligatory word order is ob ject/adverbial + finite verb + subject). An example in Gen esis 1 : 1 - 3 , baresit bard' ""lohim 'ethassdma:yim
wa'etha'airces
wdha'dirces hayta to:hu wdboihu . . ., wayyomcer ^lohim: "in the beginning God created the heaven and the eartii [main action, opening with an adverbial], the eartii being without form and void . . . [nominal clause serving as background], and God said [again main action; yet theoretically, it could have continued the background clause as well]. Quite frequentiy wa introduces the main clause in phrases like wayhi ki. . ., wa, "and it happened when . . . , tiien . . . ." After a jussive or an imperative, for example, the prefix conjugation following wa, by attraction to the preceding volitive, is trans ferred into the volitive mood (i.e., the long prefix conjuga tion in the first, the short one in the second and third per sons—the so-called indirect volitive). This expresses consecutive or final action (e.g., Gn. 27:4, hdbi:'dliwa'okedd, "bring me in order that I eat"; Dt. 3 2 : 7 , sa'al 'abikd wayaggedkd, "ask your father that he may tell you"). Circumstantial clauses resemble main clauses even more. Usually, they follow the main clause, connected by wa or asyndetically (e.g., Gn. 1 8 : 1 , wayyerd 'celdw . . . wahu yoseb, "and He appeared unto him . . . while he was sitting"). When circumstantial clauses precede the main clause, it is the main clause that is connected by wa, and it is only the internal structure of the circumstantial clause (the subject preceding the verb, nominal clause, etc.) that differentiates it from die main clause; Genesis 38:25-26, reflects a quite intricate sentence structure: hi musel wahi sdlhd . . . wattoimcer . . . wayakker, "and while she was being brought forth [preceding circumstantial clause], and she had already sent [background clause, the subject preceding the finite verb] . . . and had said [continuation of the background clause, yet theoretically it could denote the main action as well],. . . and he acknowledged [main action]"). T h e num ber of subordinating conjunctions is relatively small. T h e main relative pronoun is "seer. In Hebrew, relative clauses differ in their structure from, for example, English ones, be ing much more independent. In their full form, pronominal suffixes, governed by a preposition/verb, refer back to the antecedent. In English it is die relative pronoun tiiat is gov erned by the preposition/verb (e.g., '"seer . . . bo = "in which"), '"saer is also used to introduce substantive clauses. The main conjunction for introducing substantive clauses is ki, which has a variety of functions, including emphasizing particle and causal and temporal conjunction. Important particles are the conditional 'im, hypothetical hi, and presentative hinne, "behold"; the latter is often followed by a participle marking the future, whereas wahinne, literally "and behold," is often dependent on verbs of "seeing." It marks what has been seen, as in Genesis 30:6: wayyar(') 'otam wahinndm zo'"pim "and he saw that they were vexed." }
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Vocabulary. T h e vocabulary of the Bible (and even moreso of Hebrew inscriptions), is restricted; its language is also somewhat one-sided: it deals with religion, morals, and emotion, being die tongue of prophets, legislators, and po ets. Small wonder that many semantic fields are poorly rep resented and tiiat the number of hapax legomena is relatively high. Biblical vocabulary is especially influenced by Ara maic, whose impact increases in the book's later portions. Aramaic has also served as die intermediary for several Ak kadian loanwords. Second T e m p l e P e r i o d . T h e destruction of the First Temple (587 BCE and the Babylonian Exile marked a new stage in die development of Hebrew culture and language. The returning exiles brought with them the Aramaic lan guage and culture. The books of the Bible had been written during the First Temple period by people whose spoken language, for all their differences, did not differ from die literary tongue more than any other spoken language differs from its literary layer. With the return of the exiles a very much different dialect prevailed in everyday speech that was more and more influenced by Aramaic. This dialect had existed in the First Temple period (reflecting an only mar ginal Aramaic influence), but people speaking it were, as a rule, cut off from die literary tongue. In the Second Temple period, however, people spealdng this dialect were among the authors of literary works written in Late Biblical Hebrew, which, accordingly, reflected genuine diglossia. It was only later that the rabbis adopted this spoken dialect as a literary language and utilized so-called Rabbinic Hebrew, which be came the second classical Hebrew tongue, after Biblical He brew. The biblical books composed during this period—such as Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Dan iel—are, for all their differences, written in Late Biblical He brew. Besides utilizing matres lectionis more frequendy, die language prefers, inter alia, ni, " I , " to 'dnoki and tends to mark the direct object by b, presumably through the impact of Aramaic. The latter might also have caused die reduction of the use of converted forms, and the increased use of noun patterns like malkut, "kingdom," instead of die classical mamlaka. The apocryphal books are also written in Late Biblical Hebrew. Fragments of them have been discovered in He brew in. Jubilees, die Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and Ben Sira. The Hebrew parts of the latter, a book belonging to die Wisdom literature and composed in about 1 8 0 BCE, were first discovered in the Cairo Genizah (the storeroom of the Ben-Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in which worn Hebrew books and documents were kept) and later in the excava tions on Masada. T h e Dead Sea Scrolls, the manuscripts found at Qumran, near the northern edge of the Dead Sea), and in its vicinity, were, except for biblical texts, composed by Jewish sectarians. Their historical importance lies in die light they shed on the two centuries following the Hasmo,a
11
nean uprising, a period decisive for the history of monothe istic religions. [See Dead Sea Scrolls; Qumran; Masada; Hasmoneans.] These scrolls are written in another variety of Late Biblical Hebrew, dubbed Qumran Hebrew. It uti lizes, inter alia, pronoun doublets (forms with and without final hen), bdlo(')lbld(') with finite verbs, and predicatively used infinitives. Yet, although the language of the scroll Miqsat ma'ase ha-Torah from Qumran Cave 4 grammati cally resembles Biblical Hebrew more than Rabbinic He brew, it is closer to the latter in its use of se, "that," and in its vocabulary, perhaps because of its halakhic character. Nothing certain can be said so far about the Copper Scroll, which reflects affinities with Rabbinic Hebrew as well. [See Copper Scroll.] Rabbinic Hebrew is to be divided into two main periods: tannaitic and Amoraitic. In the Tannaitic era (in the first two centuries CE.), Hebrew was still a spoken language, though rivaled by Aramaic and even by Greek. The tannaim composed all their works in Rabbinic Hebrew: the large col lections dealing with law (halakha)—the Mishnah, the T o sefta, and the Baraitot (halakhic traditions not accepted into the Mishnah and Tosefta)—and the early Midrashim, which comprise both halakhic and homiletic (haggadic) exegesis. N o early manuscripts written in Rabbinic Hebrew survive. The earliest specimen in a somewhat different species of Rabbinic Hebrew are the Bar Kokhba letters, some of which were written in Aramaic and even in Greek (c. 1 3 5 CE), found mainly in Nahal Hever and Wadi Murabba'at in the Judean Desert. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt; Judean Desert Caves.] Later manuscripts were decisively influenced by Biblical Hebrew, so that the reconstruction of genuine Rabbinic He brew is somewhat precarious. T h e latter clearly differs from die former not only in vocabulary (partly the result of the Aramaic influence), but in grammatical structure as well. Converted verbal forms disappeared, as did the infinitive absolute. The infinitive construct coalesced with h preced ing it and in the basic verbal theme was restructured ac cording to the prefix tense. In final position, the opposition of m:n was neutralized. T h e past is marked by the suffix tense, while the present and, as a rule, the future, are marked by the participle. T h e prefix tense is, to a great extent, used as a sort of subjunctive. T h e lengthened, and as a rule also shortened, forms of the prefix tense are no longer extant. The attributive use of the demonstrative pronoun is archaic when compared with Biblical Hebrew because it is not pleonastically determined by the definite article (Rabbinic He brew's bayit ze, "this house," as against Biblical Hebrew's hab-bayit haz-ze). T h e number of subordinate clauses is much higher than in Biblical Flebrew, and most are built with the conjunction se. It was in die wake of the collapse of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 1 3 5 CE that Hebrew ceased to be a living language and was used for cultural (religious) purposes only—though it
12
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
often nourished as a literary tongue. It was not spoken again until die end of die nineteenth century in Israel (Palestine). Because Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew, despite the differ ences between them, continued to serve as cultural unifi ers—Bible and Mishnah being the two main pillars of Ju daism—once Hebrew ceased being spoken, various mixtures of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew were utilized in every historical period. Each of these dialects was influenced by the spoken non-Hebrew vernacular wherever Jews lived. In the Hebrew of later periods, significant archaizing ten dencies can also be detected. Amoraitic Rabbinic Hebrew (c. 200-500 CE), attested in the later Midrashim, as well as in die primary source of Jewish law, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds (compiled in the first half of the fourth and the second half of the fifth centuries, respec tively), already reflects the mixture of the two, although Rabbinic Hebrew is its main component. It is decis ively influenced by the vernacular—Aramaic—in which a great part of the Talmuds and the late Midrashim are written. Similar mixtures of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew and the vernacular are reflected in the medieval varieties of literary Hebrew. Thus, Spanish Hebrew poetry, in the main, imi tates Biblical Hebrew, yet it is not entirely devoid of elements belonging to Rabbinic Hebrew; moreover it is also influ enced by the vernacular—Arabic. M o d e r n Hebrew. T h e revival of Hebrew as a living lan guage in Modern (Israeli) Hebrew is the only case in the history of languages in which a dead language (i.e., one used only for literary purposes) again became a spoken tongue. The coincidence of three factors at the beginning of the twentieth century in Palestine (later the State of Israel) made the revival possible. Many of the Jews in Palestine had emerged from traditional Jewish society, which taught its members the Hebrew language as a part of Jewish culture, thus imparting to them a working knowledge of the lan guage. Because these Jews used various vernaculars, He brew was their only common language. Many of the Jews in Palestine additionally were influenced by the Zeitgeist of na tionalism, which pleaded for the use of the national language in every domain. This provided the members of the Zionist movement witii the motivation to revive Hebrew. It was through the Hebrew Language Committee (later the Acad emy of the Hebrew Language) that missing words, espe cially technical terms, were created. The morphology of Modern Hebrew is in the main identical with tiiat of Biblical Hebrew. Yet, from doublets forms were chosen that occur in Rabbinic Hebrew as well. Its sentence formation is much closer to Rabbinic Hebrew, but it is also influenced by Stan dard Average European, in which the number of subordi nate clauses is also much higher than in Biblical Hebrew. Standard Average European has also considerably influ enced Modern Hebrew phraseology. [See also Biblical Literature, article on Hebrew Scriptures.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauer, Hans. "Die Tempora im Semitischen." Beitrage zur Assyrologie 8.1 ( 1 9 1 2 ) : iff. Bauer, Hans, and Pontus Leander. Historische Grammatik der hebrdischen Sprache des Allen Testaments (1922). Hildesheim, 1962. Lin guistically sound approach, but sometimes impaired by an excessive desire for innovation; includes phonetics and morphology only. Ben-Hayyim, Zeev. The Literary and Oral Tradition of Hebrew and Ar amaic amongst the Samaritans, vol. 5, Grammar of the Pentateuch (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1977. Authoritative grammar of Hebrew ac cording to the Samaritan tradition, including phonetics and mor phology. Bergstrasser, Gotthelf. Hebrdische Grammatik. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1 9 1 8 1929. Although a torso, containing only phonetics and die mor phology of die verb, and somewhat dated, it is still the best Hebrew grammar. Bergstrasser, Gorrhelf. Introduction to the Semitic Languages (1928). Translated by Peter T . Daniels. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Masterly, though somewhat antiquated, introduction to Semitic linguistics that also contains a superb description of Biblical Hebrew. Blau, Joshua. A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew. 2d ed. Wiesbaden, 1993. Short grammar expatiating on problems referred to in this entry. Brown, Francis, et al. A Hebrew and English Lexikon of the Old Testa ment. Corr. ed. Oxford, 1952. Superb, though somewhat obsolete, dictionary of the Bible that can only be compared with Buhl's dic tionary (see below). Buhl, Frants. W. Gesenius' hcbraisches und aramdisches Handworterbuch tiber das Alte Testament. 17th ed. Leipzig, 1 9 2 1 . Superb, though somewhat outdated, dictionary of the Bible, comparable to Brown's (above). Cohen, Harold R . Biblical Hapax Legomena in the Light of Akkadian and Ugaritic. Missoula, 1978. The most reliable treatise on hapax lego mena. Davidson, A. B . Hebrew Syntax. 3d ed. Edinburgh, 1924. Clear, sound work. Driver, Samuel R . An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament ( 1 8 9 1 ) . New York, 1963. Still one of the best introductions to the Bible, with superb linguistic analysis. Driver, Samuel R. A 'Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew and Some Other Syntactical Questions. 3d ed. Oxford, 1892. Even if one disa grees with the author's conception of the Hebrew tenses, it is possible to profit greatly from tiiis masterful collection of material and clear exposition. Elliger, Karl, and Wilhelm Rudolph. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Stuttgart, 1968-. T h e best-known Western edition of the Bible; its apparatus criticus should be used cautiously. Joiion, Paul, and Takamitsu Muraoka. A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew. Rome, 1991. The most up-to-date, comprehensive grammar. Kautzsch, Emil. Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar. Translated by Arthur E . Cowley. 2d ed. Oxford, 1 9 1 0 . Though obsolete and often linguisti cally unsound, the collection of material is of great importance. Kohler, Ludwig. Hebrdisches und Aramdisches Lexikon zum Alten Tes tament. 3d ed., revised by Walter Baumgartner et al. Leiden, 1 9 6 7 - . T h e most up-to-date dictionary of the Bible, although not up to the standard of Brown's and Buhl's dictionaries (see above). Kutscher, Eduard Y . A History of the Hebrew Language. Jerusalem, 1982. Unfinished original account by one of the foremost Hebrew linguists. Saenz-Badillos, Angel. A hlistory of the Hebrew Language. Cambridge, 1993. Well-balanced history of the Hebrew language. Waltke, Bruce K . , and Michael O'Connor. An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake, Ind., 1990. Up-to-date treatment, with a good bibliography; the conclusions should be used cautiously. JOSHUA BLAU
HEBRON HEBREW UNION COLLEGE (Jerusalem). See Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology.
HEBRON (Ar., El-Khalil), site situated some
30 km (i8 mi.) south of Jerusalem ( 3 i ° 3 o ' N , 3 5 E). Twenty-five springs in the area, along with two ancient pools, provided an adequate water supply in antiquity for die inhabitants, their flocks, and tiieir fields. T h e ancient city is mentioned more than sixty times in the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Nehemiah, as well as in die Pseudepigraphy. Traditionally built "seven years before Zoan in Egypt," the city was un doubtedly a Canaanite cultic place, made important by the "Oak of Mamre," under which Abraham is said to have pitched his tent, "built an altar to the Lord," entertained divine messengers, and pleaded for the innocents of Sodom. Much later, the spies of Moses beheld the richness of He bron's vineyards. After the Hebrew tribes occupied the land, Hebron was "given" as an inheritance to Caleb and became a city of Judah, a place of refuge, and a Levitical sinecure 0
(Jgs. 1:20; 1 Chr. 6:57).
In die days of King David, the city achieved its greatest renown. At the death of Saul, David settled there and was subsequendy anointed king of Judah. Joab's murder of Abner precipitated the fall of the unstable house of Saul in the north, and the elders of Israel came to Hebron to proclaim David king over all the land (2 Sm. 5:3). Jerusalem became the new capital of the United Monarchy (2 Sm. 5:7), but it was to Hebron that Absalom, David's son, went to attempt the usurpation of his father's throne (2 Sm. 1 5 : 1 0 - 1 1 ) . Jo sephus (Anliq. 8.2.1) assigns Solomon's vision to Hebron, but in the Hebrew Bible it is mentioned again only in the lists of Rehoboam's fortified cities (2 Chr. 1 1 : 1 0 ) . Extrabiblical evidence may indicate that Hebron was an early Canaanite royal, as well as cultic, city, and some schol ars have seen it as a possible Hyksos city during the Middle Bronze Age. [See Hyksos.] T h e Amarna letters include a possible reference to a local prince named Shuwardata, who may have ruled there; die Medinet Habu list of Rameses III may also contain a possible reference to the site. [See Amarna Tablets.] Stamped jar handles from the eighth cen tury BCE suggest that the city functioned then as a royal pot tery works of some sort. Wares bearing the name of the city are found throughout the borders of ancient Palestine. No Assyrian or Neo-Babylonian records note the exis tence of the site, but its lush fields could hardly have escaped the notice of either set of conquerors. After the fall of Je rusalem, Edomites (Idumeans) occupied the area but were dislodged later by Judas Maccabaeus, who took the city and pulled down its fortifications in about 1 6 4 BCE. Herod the Great refurbished the city as part of his extensive building operations and enclosed the Cave of Machpelah, as his char acteristic masonry there still proclaims. During the First
13
Jewish Revolt, Shim'on bar Giora captured the city (in 68 CE), but the Roman general Cerealis recaptured and de stroyed it. The emperor Hadrian later had a road built and established a market of some prominence nearby. [See First Jewish Revolt] In the seventh century, the prophet Muham mad gave Hebron to the Tamin ed-Dari tribe and its fam ilies. During the Latin Kingdom the site was known as the Castie of St. Abraham and was a major link in die fortress cities guarding the ldngdom. In 1 1 0 0 the city became the fief of Gerhard of Avennes, but it was under Baldwin I that the city achieved its military strength. It was also in this later period that the city's glass factories were revived, which continue to the present time. In 1 1 6 7 Rainald became the Latin bishop of Flebron, further elevating the city's position. With the fall of the Latin Kingdom, the city reverted to Islamic control and soon became an important Muslim religious site. The modern Arabic name, El-Khalil ("the friend"), harkens back to the Abrahamic saga ("the friend" = Abra ham—2 Chr. 20:7, in which Abraham is called the "friend" of God; the site is also called variously Hebron and KiriathArba in the biblical text). The designation Kiriath-Arba, af ter Arba, father of the giantlike Anakim (Jos. 1 4 : 1 3 , 1 5 : 1 3 , 34, 20:7, 2 1 : 1 1 ; Gn. 2 3 : 2 , 35:27; Jgs. 1:10) led Jewish writers, followed by Jerome, to curious etymological gymnastics. The Hebrew word 'arba' ("four") was taken to mean the "four"—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Adam. During the Middle Ages, Flebron was also known as Castellum Aframia, Karicarba, and Arbothe. Charles Clermont-Ganneau also identified the site with the Roman Diocletianopolis. [See the biography of Clermont-Ganneau.] Modern archaeological investigation of the site began in 1964, after a preliminary survey of the area in 1963 by the American Expedition to Hebron, led by Philip C. Ham mond. Two further seasons were conducted by the same expedition, in 1965 and 1966. The American expedition concentrated on the observed ancient ruins located on Jebel er-Rumeide, across die valley from the modern city. Exca vation produced material remains from the Chalcolithic, Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, Late Bronze, Iron, Hellenis tic, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. Most significant was the identification of die city's original MB wall, which dates to die first half of the eighteenth century BCE and the mapping of its perimeters. Chalcolithic, EB, M B ("Hyksos"), and Byzantine burials were recovered, as well as ceramic and otiier cultural materials from those periods and extending into the Early Islamic period. Excavations were renewed at the site from 1983 to 1986 by Avi Ofer and Tel Aviv Uni versity. Major finds from those excavations included a frag ment of cuneiform tablet written in sixteenth-seventeendicentury BCE East Akkadian and jar handles bearing die royal Imlk stamp.
14
HEINRICH, ERNST BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anbar, Moshc, and Nadav Na'aman. "An Account Tablet of Sheep from Ancient Hebron." Tel Aviv 1 3 - 1 4 (1987): 3 - 1 2 . Hammond, Philip C. "David's First City: The Excavation of Biblical Hebron, 1964." Princeton Seminary Bulletin 58.2 (1965): 19-28. Hammond, Philip C. "Ancient Hebron, die City of David." Natural History 75.5 (1966): 42-49. Hammond, Philip C . "Hebron." Revue Biblique 73 (1966): 566-569. Hammond, Philip C. "Hebron, cite de Juda et premiere capitale de David." Bible et Tern Saint 80 (1966): 6-8. Hammond, Philip C. "The American Expedition to Hebron." Explorers Journal45.4 (1967): 232-244. PHILIP C . HAMMOND
HEINRICH, ERNST (i 899-1984), scholar of ancient Near Eastern architecture and professor of architectural his tory and Bauaufnahme (the recording of buildings) at the Technical University of Berlin ( 1 9 5 1 - 1 9 6 5 ) . Heinrich's scholarship embraces die prehistoric periods in the Near East through classical antiquity to nineteenth-century urban development in Berlin and its reconstruction after World War II. T h e son of an elementary school principal, Heinrich pur sued a degree in architecture, became an assistant professor of architectural history, and later oversaw the preservation of historic monuments in Potsdam and Trier. As a govern ment architect, he met Ernst Walter Andrae, who entrusted him with the final publication of the 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 0 3 German excavations at Fara ( 1 9 3 1 ) . [See Fara.] Heinrich gained practical experience as architect on the German excavations at Uruk-Warka ( 1 9 3 0 - 1 9 3 8 ) , which generated numerous publications (1932, 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 3 9 ) . [See Uruk-Warka.] He is noted best for his then exemplary excavation and publica tion of several temples and cult precincts at Eanna and area or square (plan quadrant) K XVII, which includes the first high temple (White Temple) on the Anu ziggurat. Together witii Adam Falkenstein, he conducted the first survey of the region surrounding Warka (1938, p. 3iff.). The results of his deep sounding at Eanna (1932, p. 6ff.) are still central to the chronology of the prehistoric and early historical pe riods in Mesopotamia. His later fieldwork included Tell Fakhariyah, Munbaqa, and Habuba Kabira in Nortii Syria. [See Fakhariyah, Tell; Habuba Kabira.] Heinrich's lifetime research on ancient Near Eastern ar chitecture was crowned by a series of articles and mono graphs that concentrate on Mesopotamia. A general over view (1975) and an article on domestic architecture ( 1 9 7 2 9 7 5 ) were followed by three volumes devoted to the de velopment of temples and temple precincts (1982) and pal ace architecture (1984). Heinrich was a consultant at the German Archaeological Institute beginning in 1942. He later served as a board mem ber of the Koldewey Society and the German Oriental So ciety (Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft), where he succeeded J
Andrae as president. Heinrich received the Order of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1974. [See also Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft; and the biographies of Andrae and Koldewey.] BIBLIOGRAPHY For appreciations of Heinrich's life and work, see Barthel Hrouda in Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 1 1 6 (1984): 7-9, and Ur sula Seidl in Archivfur Orientforschung 31 (1984): 2 3 4 - 2 3 5 . For a com plete list of Heinrich's publications up to 1974, see Gisela Siegenthaler, "Bibliographic von Ernst Heinrich," Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 7 (1974): 9 - 1 4 . A list of selected publications by Heinrich follows. Para: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen der Deutschen OrientgesellschaftinFara und Abu Hatab. Edited by Walter Andrae. Berlin, 1 9 3 1 . Final report of the German excavations conducted in 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 0 3 , providing de tailed information on the architecture and traceable small finds (Jemdet Nasr to Isin-Larsa period). Information on their context is in cluded in Harriet P. Martin, Fara: A Reconstruction of the Ancient Mesopolamian City of Shuruppak (Birmingham, 1988), where cor rections are made to Heinrich's original publication (Appendix I), which is reproduced on microfiche. Vierter Vorlaufiger Bericht ilber die von der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in Uruk unternommenen Ausgrabungen. Berlin, 1932. See "Die Schichten und ihre Bauten" (pp. 6-24). Schilf und Lehm: Ein Beitrag zur Baugeschichtc der Sumerer. Studien zur Bauforschung, no. 6. Berlin, 1934a. Fiinfter Vorlaufiger Bericht ilber die von der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in Uruk unternommenen Ausgrabungen. Berlin, 1934b. See "Arbeiten in Eanna, im Stadtgebiet und im Siidbau" (pp. 5-38). Sechster Vorlaufiger Bericht iiber die von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft in Uruk-Warka unternommenen Ausgrabungen. Berlin, 1 9 3 5 . Kleinfunde aus den archaischen Tempelschichten in Uruk-Warka. Berlin, 1936. Achter Vorlaufiger Bericht fiber die von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft in Uruk-Warka unternommenen Ausgrabungen. Berlin, 1937. See "Die Grabungen im Planquadrat K X V I I " (pp. 2 7 - 5 5 ) . Neunter Vorlaufiger Bericht iiber die von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft in Uruk-Warka unternommenen Ausgrabungen. Berlin, 1938. See "Grabungen im Gebiet des Anu-Antum-Tempels" (pp. 1 9 - 3 0 ) , and "Forschungen in der Umgebung von Warka" (with A. Falkenstein, PP- 31—38). For the dating, see Heinrich 1982 (pp. 3 5 - 3 9 ) . Zehnter Vorlaufiger Bericht iiber die von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschafl in Uruk-Warka unternommenen Ausgrabungen. Berlin, 1939. See "Grabungen im Gebiet des Anu-Antum-Tempels" (pp. 2 1 - 3 3 ) . For the dating, see Heinrich 1982 (pp. 3 5 - 3 9 ) . "Haus." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und VorderasiatichenArchdologie, vol. 4, pp. 176-220. Berlin, 1 9 7 2 . Reference article on house forms from the Mesolithic to Neo-Babylonian periods in Palestine, Syria, Anatolia, Iran, and Soviet Armenia. "Sumerisch-akkadische Architektur" and "Architektur von der alt- bis zur spatbabylonischen Zeit." In DerAlte Orient, edited by Winfried Orthmann, pp. 1 3 1 - 1 5 8 , 2 4 1 - 2 8 7 . Propylaen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 14. Berlin, 1975. Die Tempel und Heiligtilmer im alien Mesopotamien. Denkmaler Antiker Architektur, 14. Berlin, 1982. Typological and morphological inves tigation of temples and temple precincts from the Late Uruk to the Seleucid periods, with a useful update on dating. Die Paldste im alien Mesopotamien. Denkmaler Antiker Architektur, 1 5 . Berlin, 1984. Survey of palace architecture from the Uruk to N e o Babylonian periods. DIANA L . STEIN
HERMON, MOUNT HELIOPOLIS, ancient Egyptian center of astronomy and theology, located northeast of modern Cairo (30°05' N , 3 i ° 2 o ' E). T h e site is largely covered by the modern settle ments of Mataria and Tell Hisn. Unlike most ancient Egyp tian sites, it is situated not on the Nile but inland some 20 km ( 1 2 . 5 mi.) east of the river, to which it was connected by an ancient canal beginning at the southern edge of mod ern Cairo. T h e ancient Egyptian name of the city was jwnw ("pil lar")- A cuneiform transcription gives the pronunciation a-na, which is also preserved in the biblical Hebrew 'on (Gen. 4 1 : 4 5 ) . The name Heliopolis ("city of the sun") oc curs in classical sources from Herodotus (c. 450 BCE) on ward, reflecting fire city's association with solar theology. Most of what is known about Heliopolis comes from tex tual sources rather than from archaeology. By the time of the Old Kingdom (beginning c. 2650 BCE) it was already established as a center of astronomy, aptly characterized by the title of its high priest, "chief of observers." The city also had a reputation for learning and theological speculation, which it retained until classical times (Strabo reports visiting schools of Plato and Eudoxos there). Much of this activity was centered on the role of the sun in the creation and main tenance of the world in the persons of the gods Atum and Re-Harakhti. Heliopolitan theology was summarized in the concept of the Ennead, a group of nine gods embodying botii die creative source and the chief operational forces of the universe. By the beginning of the Old Kingdom this sys tem had already been largely formulated into a coherent phi losophy, and it continued to dominate Egyptian thought for the next three thousand years. Despite the intellectual prominence of Heliopolis, very lit tle is known about the city itself. Its chief feature was a tem ple devoted to Atum and Re-Harakhti, the precise location and shape of which is uncertain. T h e only standing monu ment visible today is a large obelisk, which is still in situ, dedicated by Senwosret (Sesostris) I (twelfth dynasty, c. 1970 BCE). Earlier structures include a fragmentary shrine of King Djoser (third dynasty, c. 2650) and part of an ob elisk of the sixth-dynasty pharaoh Teti (c. 2300), as well as several tombs of high priests from the Old Kingdom. A stela of Thutmosis III (eighteenth dynasty, c. 1 4 3 3 ) commemo rates his erection of an enclosure wall around the solar tem ple. Excavations have also revealed extensive Ramesside construction (nineteenth-twentieth dynasties, c. 1 2 9 0 1 1 0 0 ) , comprising several temples and a cemetery for the Mnevis bulls (incarnations of the sun god). Donation lists from the time of Rameses III (twentieth dynasty, c. 1 1 9 0 ) indicate tiiat the temples of Heliopolis were second only to tiiose of Amun at Thebes. After the Ramesside period, however, the fortunes of Heliopolis be gan to decline. Later building activity is represented pri marily by a few Saite tombs (twenty-sixth dynasty, c. 650). T h e city was largely destroyed during the Persian invasion
15
of 525, though enough of its structures and reputation re mained to attract tourists such as Herodotus and Strabo. In the first century CE most of its statuary and obelisks were removed to Alexandria and Rome, and its remaining struc tures served as a quarry for die building of medieval Cairo. Apart from the standing obelisk of Senwosret I, the ancient site is commemorated today only in the name "Heliopolis," designating northeast Cairo. BIBLIOGRAPHY Helck, Wolfgang. " Z u r Topographie von Heliopolis." Zeitschrift fur Agyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 82 (1957): 1 0 9 - 1 1 6 . Discus sion of the site's geography based on textual sources and earlier ex cavations, Kakosy, Laszlo. "Heliopolis." In Lexikon der Agyptologie, vol. 2, pp. i m - 1 1 1 3 . Wiesbaden, 1977. Recent summary, intended as a basic reference for Egyptologists. Kees, Hermann. Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography. Translated by Ian F. D . Morrow. London, 1 9 6 1 . Includes the most accessible sum mary of the history, archaeology, and significance of die site (see pp. 147-179)Petrie, W. M . Flinders. Heliopolis, Kafr Aimnar, and Shurafa. Publica tions of the Egyptian Research Account and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt, vol. 24. London, 1 9 1 5 . Report of the only archaeological excavation of the site so far published in detail. Porter, Bertha, and Rosalind Moss. Topographical Bibliography of An cient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts: Reliefs and Paintings, vol. 4, Lower and Middle Egypt. Oxford, 1934. Includes a list of all monuments from the site known at the time of publication, with summary bib liography (see pp. 59-65). JAMES P . ALLEN
HERMON, MOUNT (Heb„ Har-Hermon), one of the highest peaks in the southern Anti-Lebanon range, rising some 5,146 m (8,300 ft.) above sea level. T o the west and southwest is a magnificent panorama across southern Leb anon and northern Israel; to the northwest, a view to well beyond Damascus; and to the south a view of die whole of the Upper Jordan Valley. T h e upper peaks are covered with snow much of the year, making Mt. Hermon a notable land mark. The lower slopes are thick with oak, pine, and fruit trees of various kinds. T h e prominence, natural beauty, and fertility of Mt. Hermon are often praised in the Hebrew Bi ble, as well as by classical autiiors. T h e name, not known from ancient Near Eastern sources outside the Bible, derives from the common Semitic hrm, which in Hebrew and Arabic denotes something that is "ta boo," tiiat is, set apart or consecrated, as for instance a sa cred place. In the Hebrew Bible, in addition to references to its beauty and sanctity, Mt. Hermon is often referred to as a prominent natural boundary or as marking the northern borders of the territory claimed by Israel east of the Jordan River. The Bi ble alludes to other names, such as Senir, which occurs in Assyrian texts; or Sirion, which is attested in the Egyptian Execration texts and at Ugarit. Both names occur in Tal-
16
HERODIAN JERICHO
mudic texts, and Josephus (Antiq. 5 . 3 . 1 ) uses the name Mt. Lebanon. Later Arabic names are Jebel esh-Sheikh, "moun tain of the sheikh"; and Jebel eth-Thalj, "mountain of snow." The cultic associations of Mt. Hermon are easily under stood in light of its majesty and the frequent association of ancient Near Eastern deities with mountains. The Hebrew Bible alludes to shrines there to Baal-Gad and Baal-Hermon, as well perhaps as to the Israelite deity (cf. Jos. 1 1 : 1 7 ; 1 Chr. 5:2.3; Ps. 89:12). More than twenty temples and sanc tuaries have been located around Mt. Hermon, including a large Roman temple on the highest peak, known as Qasr esh-Shabib, with a large enclosure wall and a Greek inscrip tion to die "Greatest and Holiest God." BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Phil adelphia, 1967. Arav, Rami. "Hermon, Mount." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, pp. 1 5 8 - 1 6 0 . New York, 1992. Dar, Shim'on. "The Temples of Mount Hermon and Its Environs." In Abstracts of a Conference on Greece and Rome in Erelz Israel (in He brew). Haifa, 1985. WILLIAM G . DEVER
HERODIAN JERICHO, site located in the Jordan Valley (3i°8o' N , 35°3o' E; map reference 192 X 1 4 2 ) , northwest of the Dead Sea, about 2 Ion (1 mi.) northwest of the modern oasis of Jericho (Ar., er-Riha) and to the east of the mountains of Judah. The Jericho valley was probably first developed in the days of Alexander Jannaeus ( 1 0 3 - 7 6 BCE). Jericho itself flourished during the first century BCE as a garden city and royal estate. The Hasmoneans were tire first to build aqueducts in the western Jordan Valley, where the availability of water and land, as well as the mild climate, enabled the development of agriculture. Date palm and bal sam cultivation, spurred the city's economic growth. It was for these reasons that first the Hasmoneans and later King Herod built winter palaces here. History of Excavation. The site was discovered by Ed ward Robinson in 1838. Charles Warren excavated in 1868 at two of the mounds; A. Noldeke, Carl Watzinger, and Ernst Sellin conducted excavations in 1909 and 1 9 1 1 . In 1950, a joint expedition of the American Schools of Oriental research and tire Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary, directed by James L. Kelso and D . C. Baramki, conducted an extensive excavation at the two mounds, and on the other side of Wadi Qelt. In 1 9 5 1 , James Pritchard directed the excavation on behalf of the American Schools. He discov ered buildings on tire southern mound and the structure he identified as the "Gymnasium." During the years 1 9 7 3 1983 excavations were carried out by the Hebrew Univer sity, Jerusalem, under the direction of Ehud Netzer.
Hasmonean Palace Complex. Built at the outiet of Wadi Qelt, on a hill overlooking the Jericho valley, the Has monean palace complex included a 50- X 50-m building surrounded by a moat, recently excavated, on three sides. This building was later covered by an artificial mound consttucted by Herod. T h e palace probably had a central open court. In its southeast part, a hall decorated with stucco and frescoes was found in the excavations. Its walls are preserved to a height of 7 m, indicating that the palace was two stories high. Two small swimming pools were probably surrounded by a peristyle-shaped building also decorated with frescoes and mosaic floors. T h e drowning of Aristobolos III, as de scribed by Josephus in Antiquities 1 5 . 5 3 , a y have occurred in one of these pools. The Hasmoneans also erected a splen did building, a pavilion similar to a Doric temple. It may have been destroyed by an earthquake, as only its founda tions, columns, and architrave survive. This leisure complex had a magnificent view of the valley and Wadi Qelt. At a later period, it was extended to the south. Two "twin" pal ace complexes were found by Ehud Netzer, dating to the reign of Queen Alexandra (Shlomzion, 76-67 BCE) . Each has a central open court surrounded by rooms, a hall, a batiihouse, and a miqveh ("ritual bath"). The palaces were dec orated with frescoes. Each had an adjacent court with a small swimming pool. Other buildings, houses, installations, and miqveh complexes were built around the palaces, perhaps used by priests for purification rites. T h e Hasmonean palace complex was likely still standing at the outset of Herod's reign. [See Ritual Baths.] m
Herodian Winter Palace I ("Gymnasium"). Winter Palace I, identified by Pritchard as die Gymnasium, was used for residential and ceremonial purposes. It is dated to the early years of Herod's reign, following his defeat of Mattathias Antigonus (c. 3 5 - 3 0 BCE). T h e Herodian palace, a splendid villa, was built south of Wadi Qelt. It was rectan gular in plan, with a central peristyle court, a triclinium, a peristyle hall, a bathhouse, and a pair of pools that may have been ritual baths. Winter Palace II. In 3 1 BCE an earthquake destroyed the Hasmonean palace complex. Herod rebuilt and extended it to include several wings. T h e soutii wing, a small building, was erected on an artificial platform above the buried Has monean palace. It was probably Herod's private villa. T h e two pools from the Hasmonean complex were retained and combined into one large swimming pool; another smaller pool was surrounded by gardens, as evidenced by archae ological finds such as flower pots and water installations. Gardens were also planted over die remains of the destroyed Hasmonean twin palaces. T h e eastern wing of tiiis palace was constructed on two levels. On the upper level a peristyle court was surrounded by rooms on three sides and had a hall decorated with frescoes. The lower level consisted of two swimming pools from the Hasmonean palace inside a
HERODIAN JERICHO peristyle court. Attached to these was a bathhouse. This wing seems to have been devoted to recreation. Winter Palace III. Herod built his enlarged palace on both sides of Wadi Qelt. It consisted of a northern wing on die nortii bank of the wadi, a sunken garden, a large pool, and an artificial mound with a building on die south bank. T h e north wing contained two triclinia and one large hall with three rows of columns open to the south to Wadi Qelt. Included in the north wing was a five-room bathhouse. This wing also possessed two peristyle courts, die western one of which had a wide semicircular apse. Several other rooms and an entrance were included in the north wing, which probably was used for leisure activities. T h e sunken garden had an impressive facade with a semicircular sttucture at its center. On both sides of this structure were twenty-four rows of niches. T w o colonnades were located at either end. T h e orientation of the large pool west of the sunken garden differed from that of all the other structures, probably be cause it is parallel to the natural slope. It was used for swim ming and water games. T h e south mound had a rectangular interior and round exterior. A bridge connected the mound with the garden. Hippodrome Complex. T h e hippodrome and theater complex near Jericho was unique in die Greco-Roman world. It was uncovered at Tel el-Samarat, 600 m south of ancient Jericho. T h e hippodrome's rectangular course is ev ident, but no ttace remains of its spina. T h e spectators pre sumably sat in the theaterlike structure at the northern end of the course. This structure has survived nearly intact, lack ing only its benches, steps, and passages. It is built on an artificial platform. Its excavator, Ehud Netzer (1980), as serts that this hippodrome complex was used for Olympic games that could be viewed from the theaterlike structure. A building is attached to the rear of the theater, interpreted by Netzer (1992) as a guesthouse or a gymnasium. Cemetery. T h e cemetery at Jericho in the Second T e m ple period was located outside the town, on the hills flanking the Jordan Valley. A large necropolis, with approximately fifty tombs, containing both primary burials in wooden cof fins and secondary collected bone burials in ossuaries, was excavated by Rachel Hachlili on behalf of the Israel De partment of Antiquities; approximately seventy-five robbed tombs were surveyed. T h e Jericho cemetery consists of loculi tombs only, which are hewn into the hillsides, each loculus serving as a family tomb but with provision for individ ual burials. Burial Types. Two distinctly different types of loculi tomb burials, primary and secondary, were discovered dur ing the excavations in the Jericho cemetery. They can be classified typologically, chronologically, and stratigraphically into primary burials in wooden coffins (type 1 ) and secondary burials of collected bones that were either placed in individual ossuaries (type 2a) or piled in heaps (type 2b).
17
Type 1 . Primary burial in wooden coffins is the earliest type of burial in the Jericho cemetery. T h e coffins were placed in the rock-cut loculi tombs, each loculus usually holding one wooden coffin. T h e deceased were evidently brought to the cemetery inside their coffins. The coffin, once inside the tomb, its lid securely in place, was deposited in the loculus; only when all the loculi were filled would addi tional coffins be placed on the benches or in the pit. Coffins took die form of a wood chest (several kinds of wood were used) with a post at each corner and a gabled roof. They were constructed by means of mortising. One well-preserved example has a hinged lid. Iron nails and knobs found with die coffins were probably used for deco ration or structural support. T h e coffins were decorated with painted red and black geometric patterns and designs. Manner of burial. All the bodies were extended, face u p ward, in die coffin, usually with the head to one side and the hands close to the side of the body. Most of the coffins contained one individual. There are, however, several in stances in which one or two bodies were added to a coffin that already contained an individual. The orientation of the bodies in die kokh and tomb does not seem to be significant, as the heads are pointed in various directions. The discovery of several coins inside skulls may indicate tiiat coins were traditionally placed on the mouth of die deceased. It should be noted that the wooden coffins in Jericho were used for primary burials only and never as containers for secondary burials. Grave goods. In most of the coffin tombs, grave goods consisting of both personal possessions and objects of daily use were found with the deceased. T h e articles were usually placed near the head or the feet and were found mostly with women and children. Type 2. Secondary burial in ossuaries was initially prac ticed only in Jerusalem but later spread to odier parts of Palestine. It is clear from the finds and stratigraphy of the ossuary burials at Jericho that tiiey postdate coffin burials. Ossuaries were hewn from one large block of limestone, usu ally in the shape of a small rectangular box resting on four low legs. A stone lid—flat, slightly curved, or gabled—was placed on top. T h e ossuaries were often decorated and many had inscriptions recording names and family relations (Hachlili, 1978, 1979b). [See Ossuary.] Manner of burial. T h e ossuaries were placed in the loculi or on the benches. Often, two ossuaries would be stacked one above the other or placed next to each otiier. T h e bones were placed inside the ossuary in a traditional order. Usually, the bones of a single individual were placed in the ossuary, but there are several examples of more than one individual interred. Grave goods. No personal objects were found inside the ossuaries. However, objects identical to those used in daily life were found in the Jericho ossuary burials: unguentaria
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HEROD IUM
and other glass vessels, bowls, and "Herodian" lamps and cooldng pots dated to the first century CE. They were usually placed close to the ossuaries or in die pit. [See Grave Goods.] Burial Dating. The dates for the appearance of tiiese burial customs are still the subject of debate. Nevertheless, the Jericho cemetery can provide a chronology for the two types of burials: primary burials in coffins can be dated from the mid-first century BCE to about 1 0 CE; secondary burials in ossuaries followed immediately, and are dated to about 10-68 CE. These dates are based on the coins found in the tombs, the ossuary inscriptions of Agrippina and others, the comparative stratigraphy of the tombs, as well as the pottery. L. Y. Rahmani (1986) dates the practice of secondary bur ials in ossuaries in Jerusalem to 30/20 BCE-70 CE, a practice that continued sporadically until about 135 CE or until the third century.
Netzer, Ehud. " T h e Hippodrome That Herod Built at Jericho" (in Hebrew). Qadmoniot 1 3 (1980): 1 0 4 - 1 0 7 . Netzer, Ehud. " T h e Winter Palaces and the King's Estate in Jericho" (in Hebrew). Jericho (Kardom Series) 28-30 (1983): 9 5 - 1 1 2 . Netzer, Ehud. "Jericho, Tulul Abu el-'Alaiq." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 682-692. Jemsalem and New York, 1993. Pritchard, James B . The Excavation at Herodian Jericho, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 3 2 - 3 3 . New Haven, 1958. Rahmani, L . Y . "Ancient Jerusalem's Funerary Customs and T o m b s . " Biblical Archaeologist 44 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 7 1 - 1 7 7 , 2 2 9 - 2 3 5 ; 45 ( 1 9 8 2 5 : 4 3 - 5 3 , 109-119. Rahmani, L . Y . "Some Remarks on R. Hachlili and A. Killibrew's 'Jew ish Funerary Customs.'" Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 8 (1986): 96-100.
[See also Baths; Burial Techniques; and Hasmoneans. For the site in earlier periods, see Jericho.]
HERODIUM
BIBLIOGRAPHY Hachlili, Rachel. " A Jerusalem Family in Jericho." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 230 (1978): 45-56. Hachlili, Rachel, "cient Burial Customs Preserved in Jericho Hills." Biblical Archaeology Review 5 (1979a): 28-35. Hachlili, Rachel. " T h e Goliath Family in Jericho: Funerary Inscriptions from a First Century A . D . Jewish Monumental T o m b . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 235 (1979b): 3 1 - 6 6 , Hachlili, Rachel, and Patricia Smith. " T h e Genealogy of the Goliath Family." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 235 (1979c): 67-70. Hachlili, Rachel. " A Second Temple Period Jewish Necropolis in Jer icho." Biblical Archaeologist 42 (1980): 235-240. Hachlili, Rachel. "The Nefes: The Jericho Column-Pyramid." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 3 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 33-38. Hachlili, Rachel, and Ann Killebrew. "Jewish Funerary Customs during the Second Temple Period, in the Light of the Excavations at the Jericho Necropolis." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 5 (1983): 1 0 9 132. Hachlili, Rachel, and Ann Killibrew. " T h e Saga of the Goliath Family as Revealed in Their Newly Discovered 2,000-Year-Old T o m b . " Biblical Archaeology Review 9 (1983): 44-53. Hachlili, Rachel, and Ann Killibrew. "Was the Coin-on-Eye Custom a Jewish Burial Practice in the Second Temple Period?" Biblical Ar chaeologist 46 (1983): 1 4 7 - 1 5 3 . Hachlili, Rachel. "Jewish Funerary Wall-Painting of the First Century A . D . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 7 (1985): 1 1 2 - 1 2 7 . Hachlili, Rachel. "Jericho: T h e Second Temple Period Jewish Ceme tery at Jericho." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excava tions in the Holy Innd, vol. 2, pp. 693-695. Jerusalem and New York, 1993, Kelso, James L . , and D . C. Baramki. Excavations at New Testament Jericho andKhirbet en-Nitla. Annual of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, 29-30. New Haven, 1955. Netzer, Ehud. "The Hasmonean and Herodian Winter Palaces at Jer icho," Israel Exploration Journal 25 (1975): 89-100. Netzer, Ehud. "The Winter Palaces of the Judean Kings at Jericho at the End of the Second Temple Period." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 228 (1977): 1—13.
RACHEL HACHLILI
( G k , Herodion; Ar., Jebel Fureidis), a se curely identified site (map reference 1729 X 1 1 9 3 ) 5 km (3 mi.) soutiieast of Bethlehem and 1 2 km (7,2 mi.) south of Jerusalem. T h e site's Arabic name evidentiy derived from Herodis (i.e., "Herod's mountain"), the site's designation during the period of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (see below). Herod die Great constructed Herodium at some time between 24 and 1 5 BCE on a conical mountain whose shape Josephus compared to a woman's breast (Antiq. 1 5 . 3 2 4 ) . According to Josephus, Herodium was intended to serve as a fortress, as the capital of a toparchy, and as a memorial to Herod (Antiq. 15.324; War 1 . 4 1 9 , 3.55). Jose phus also describes the procession of Herod's funeral and his burial at Herodium (War 1.670-673; Antiq. 1 7 . 1 9 6 - 1 9 9 ) . During die First Jewish Revolt against Rome (67-70 CE), Herodium was occupied by Jewish rebels, one of the last three strongholds to fall to the Romans after the destruction of Jerusalem (War 4 . 5 1 8 - 5 2 0 , 7 . 1 6 3 ) . [See First Jewish Re volt.] Texts found in Wadi Murabba'at that were written during the revolt led in 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 by Shirn'on (Simeon) Bar Kokhba indicate that he used Herodium as a headquarters. [See Murabba'at; Bar Kokhba Revolt.] Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries CE, Herodium was visited by a number of explorers, including Richard Pococke ( 1 7 4 3 ) , Edward Robinson ( 1 8 3 8 ) , Felicien de Saulcy ( 1 8 6 3 ) , Conrad Schick ( 1 8 7 9 ) , and Claude R. Conder and Horatio H. Kitchener ( 1 8 8 1 ) . From 1 9 6 2 to 1967 Virgilio C. Corbo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum excavated on the top of the mountain. In 1967 and 1970 Gideon Foerster conducted conservation and resto ration work on behalf of the Israel National Parks Authority. Between 1970 and 1987 Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem excavated the lower part of Herodium. [See the biographies of Robinson, Saulcy, Schick, Conder, Kitchener, and Corbo.] The site of Herodium consists of a palace-fortress on the
HESBAN top of the mountain and a Lower City. T h e palace-fortress is located inside the summit of an artificial mountain created by pouring vast quantities of earth and stone fill around the outside of a double circular wall (die diameter of tire outer wall is 62 m). A round tower (18 m in diameter) was set into the double wall on the east. Three semicircular towers pro jected from the wall at die three other cardinal points. T h e double wall and towers, constructed on a series of vaults, rose several stories in height, with their tops originally pro truding above the earth and stone fill. Herod's palacefortress was built inside the double circular wall, as if set into the mouth of a volcano. A stepped, vaulted passage was cut through die fill from the base of the mountain to an entrance on the northeast side at the summit. T h e circular area at the top of the mountain is divided into two symmetrical halves. T h e eastern half was occupied by a peristyle garden flanked by exedrae. The palatial rooms, including dwellings, service rooms, a triclinium, and a bathhouse, occupied the western half. During the period of the First Revolt, the triclinium was converted into a syn agogue. In the Byzantine period (fifth-seventh centuries CE) a small monastic community occupied the summit (Foerster, 1993, pp. 6 1 9 - 6 2 1 ) .
The buildings in the Lower City, or Lower Herodium, have die same axial orientation as tiiose of the mountain and apparently were constructed as part of the same overall plan (Netzer, 1 9 9 3 , p. 622). A large (46 X 70 X 3 m deep) pool with a circular pavilion in the center dominated the Lower City. T h e pool was surrounded by a garden with porticoes along the sides. T o the soutiieast of the pool complex was a long, narrow racecourse or track (350 X 30 m), with a large palace just above it to the north. T h e racecourse is too nar row to have served as a hippodrome. An elaborate structure described by Ehud Netzer, its excavator, as a "monumental building" faces directly onto the western edge of the race course (Netzer, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 3 5 - 4 5 ) . It consisted of a single rectangular hall of ashlar masonry, whose bottom part was cut into the bedrock. The interior of the hall is surrounded by niches with half-columns set on pedestals between them. T h e thickness of the side walls indicates tiiat there was a vaulted ceiling and perhaps also a monumental roof. Netzer considered, but rejected, die possibility that the monumental building was Herod's mausoleum; however, he believes that the latter may have been located in the vicinity and that the racecourse may have been used for Herod's funeral proces sion. Netzer has also noted the similarity between the inte rior of the monumental building and the triclinium of the Roman Soldier T o m b at Petra (Netzer, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 4 3 - 4 5 ; p. 1 3 5 , n. 70). Post-Herodian remains at Lower Herodium include a network of tunnels (mostly at the northeastern edge of the mountain) tiiat served as hiding places during the Bar Kokhba Revolt and three churches from the Byz antine period.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Corbo, Virgilio. Herodian, vol. 1 , Gli edifici della reggia-forlezza. Jeru salem, 1989. T h e Italian expedition's excavations on top of the mountain. Foerster, Gideon. "Herodium." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeo logical Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 6 1 8 - 6 2 1 . Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Excellent, up-to-date account of the archae ological excavations and remains on top of the mountain. Netzer, Ehud. Herodium: An Archaeological Guide. Jerusalem, 1978. Slender paperback guidebook to the site. Netzer, Ehud. Greater Herodium. Qedem, vol. 1 3 . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . The author's excavations at L o w e r Herodium, 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 8 . Netzer, Ehud. "Lower Herodium." In The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Ijind, vol. 2, pp. 621-626. Jeru salem and N e w York, 1993. Excellent, up-to-date account of the archaeological excavations and remains of Lower Herodium. JODI MAGNESS
HESBAN (biblical Heshbon), Transjordanian mound rising 895 m above sea level tiiat guards the northern edge of the rolling Madaba plains, where a southern tributary of Wadi Hesban begins to descend sharply toward the Jordan River, about 4 km ( 1 5 mi.) to the west (map reference 1344 X 2267). T h e tell is about 56 km (35 mi.) east of Jerusalem, 19 km ( 1 2 mi.) southwest of Amman, 6 km (4 mi.) northeast of Mt. Nebo, and 180 m higher than 'Ain Hesban, the pe rennial spring with which it is associated. Werner Vyhmeister (1968) has traced Hesban in the work of Early Arab historians, followed by its mention in travel accounts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western ex plorers such as Ulrich Seetzen (1806), John S. Buckingham ( 1 8 1 6 ) , Charles L. Irby and James Mangles ( 1 8 1 6 - 1 8 1 7 ) , and Edward Robinson ( 1 8 3 8 ) . T h e first archaeologists to explore die site include John Garstang ( 1 9 3 1 ) , Nelson Glueck ( 1 9 3 3 ) , and Bernhard Anderson ( 1 9 6 3 ) ; all assumed it to be biblical Heshbon. From 1 9 7 3 to 1976, a regional survey of most of the ter ritory within a 10-km (6 mi.) radius of Tell Hesban was conducted by Andrews University (Berrien Springs, Mich igan). It heightened interest in the hinterland correlates of changes observed on the tell. T h e ruins and pottery discov ered by the survey as it crisscrossed the tell's hinterland pro vided opportunities for comparisons between what was hap pening both on the tell and nearby (LaBianca, 1986, 1990). There are altogether thirty-eight biblical references to Heshbon; its earliest history appears in Numbers 2 1 : 2 1 - 2 5 (cf. Dt. 2 : 1 6 - 3 7 ; Jdt- 5 : 1 5 ) , where it is referred to as the city of the Sihon long of the Amorites. Numbers 2 1 : 2 6 - 3 1 claims that at least the southern half of Sihon's ldngdom, the geo graphic tableland known in the Hebrew Bible as the Mishor (Nm. 2 1 : 3 0 ; cf. Dt. 2:36), had been Moabite, but that Sihon had earlier wrested it from Moabite control. Israel's claim that though Moabite territory was forbidden to them, the Mishor was an exception because it had been Amorite dur-
20
HESBAN
ing the conquest is again made in Judges 1 1 : 1 2 - 2 8 . The tribes of Reuben and Gad requested the territory of Sihon's kingdom for their tribal allotment ( M M . 3 2 : 1 - 5 ) , but it was actually Reuben that built Heshbon and other nearby towns (Nm. 32:37), whose names were changed, according to die difficult and cryptic verse 38. Joshua 1 3 : 1 5 - 2 3 confirms the allotment of Heshbon to Reuben, diough verses 24-28 in dicate that it was contiguous to Gad's allotment. When Heshbon became a Levitical city it was considered a city of Gad (Jos. 21:34-40). Song of Songs 7:4 (Masoretic Text 5) says, "Your eyes are like [with the versions] pools in Hesh bon, by the gate [pi. in Septuagint and Vulgate] of Batlirabbim." Heshbon figures in botii extant recensions of a prophetic oracle against Moab (Isa. 15:4, i6:8f; Jer. 48:2, 34f). By that time it may have been a steep tell, for fugitives stop in its shadow (Jer. 48:45). In Jeremiah 49:3, Heshbon appears again in an oracle against the Ammonites (it may have changed hands again). Heshbon's final biblical men tion is in Nehemiah 9:22, where it is included in a historical allusion to the Israelite conquest. In die postbiblical literary sources (collected by Vyhmeister, 1968), Heshbon is commonly called Esbus (though there are many variant spellings). Josephus says that in the second century BCE Tyre of the Tobiads was located "be tween Arabia and Judea, beyond Jordan, not far from the country of Heshbon" (Anliq. 1 2 . 4 . 1 1 . 2 3 3 ) . Further on he lists Heshbon among the cities (perhaps the capital) of Moabitis (Antiq. 1 3 . 1 5 . 4 . 3 9 7 ) and among the Jewish possessions in Moab during die reign of Alexander Jannaeus ( 1 0 3 - 7 6 / 75 BCE) (Antiq. 1 3 . 1 5 . 4 . 3 9 7 ) . Esbus is next mentioned in the late first century BCE, when Josephus includes Esbonitis among several fortresses and fortified cities that King Herod built to strengthen his kingdom (Antiq. 15.8.5.294). During the rule of Herod's son, Antipas (4 BCE-39 CE), his territory of Peraea was on the south "bounded by die land of Moab, on the east by Arabia, Heshbonitis, Philadelphia, and Gerasa" (War 3.3.3.47). Then, at the beginning of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66 CE) the Jews sacked Esbon itis (War 2 . 1 8 . 1 . 4 5 8 ) . [See First Jewish Revolt.] When the Roman province of Arabia Petrea was created in 106 CE, Esbus was certainly part of it—at least it appears there in Ptolemy's Geography ( 5 . 1 7 ) , which reflects political condi tions in about 1 3 0 - 1 6 0 . Though Late Bronze Age sherds have been identified, six seasons of archaeological excavation at Tell Hesban be tween 1968 and 1978 failed to uncover any architectural or soil remains antedating about 1200 BCE. This poses a prob lem for locating biblical Sihon's Amorite capital (see above). [See Amorites.] Amorite Fleshbon may not have been found either because it is elsewhere on the site (unlikely) or be cause its (seminomadic) impermanent nature left no trace to be discovered (more likely). More extreme options are to consider the biblical account unhistorical or at least anach ronistic (now favored by such Hebrew Bible scholars as
J. M. Miller and John Van Seters) or to seek the Amorite capital at another location—Jalul (S. H. Horn). Most at least identify Tell Hesban with Greco-Roman Esbus, based on coin and milestone evidence coupled with Ptolemy's geo graphic specifications (see above) and those in Eusebius's Onomasticon (84:1-6). Acceptance of Frank M. Cross's reading of (Ammonite) ostracon A.3 found at the site in 1978 would support such an identification for Iron Age Heshbon as well (Cross, 1986). The preferred transliteration of the Arabic name for the tell is now Hisban, identified with biblical Heshbon (Heb., hesbon; Septuagint, Esebon). The expedition from Andrews University is responsible for the first five of die six seasons of excavation at the site ( 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 7 6 ) . Baptist Bible College in Clark Summit, Penn sylvania, continued the excavation of a Byzantine church in 1978. The university team has reconstructed nineteen su perimposed strata from the excavated remains, which cover a period from about 1200 BCE to 1500 CE. The Iron Age remains (c. 1200-500 BCE) are very frag mentary as a result of periodic removals of earlier strata on top of the hill by later builders; nevertheless, evidence for at least four strata remains. Stratum 19 (twelfth-eleventh cen turies BCE) probably represents a small, unfortified village with an agrarian-pastoral economy. In its earliest phase, its most notable installation was a trench ( 1 5 m long and 3.6 m deep) crudely carved out of bedrock on die tell's southern shelf. There is no real clue as to its purpose, but suggestions include a moat for defense, storage, cultic activity, subter ranean habitation, and a water channel (if not a narrow res ervoir itself). In its later phase, tiiis installation was filled in with soil and botii the cobbled floor of a room and a "filler" wall 2.5 m wide were built into it. An egg-shaped cistern may also be associated with this phase, which produced so many loom weights they may represent a cottage industry. [See Cisterns.] Stratum 1 8 (tentii century) left no in situ remains; however, its typologically later pottery was found in deep dump layers outside the contemporary settlement on the western slope (it may have been a continuation of the sttatum 19 village). Stratum 1 7 (ninth-eighth centuries) is also represented by sloping debris layers dumped to the west, but it is better known for what may be the initial construction on the tell's southern shelf of a reservoir of almost 2 million 1 , 1 5 m to a side (its thrice-plastered eastern wall supplemented bed rock cut by a header-stretcher retaining wall) and 6 m deep. Though several channels carved out of the adjoining bed rock tunneled rainwater to the reservoir, its capacity appears to exceed die normal amount of winter rain that would fall in the catchment area; it may be that the extra water was transported up to the reservoir from below the mound. If so, this stratum may be what is left of King Mesha's attempt to fortify his northern border with Israel. (Might this be the pool referred to in Sg. 7:4?) Stratum 16 (seventh-sixth cen turies) was the best-preserved Iron Age stratum; its remains
HESBAN indicate a general prosperity and continued growth, proba bly clustered around a fort. A few scattered domestic units came to light on the western slope, and the reservoir contin ued in use—perhaps as part of a way station or supply depot on the King's Highway. It was probably controlled by tire Ammonites, to judge from the pottery and several ostraca found in the reservoir fill. T h e ostraca have added to what is presently known of the Ammonite dialect and script. Sura min 1 6 may have come to a violent end, considering the great quantity of ash in the debris scraped from the aban doned town into die reservoir by rebuilders (Maccabeans?) in the second century BCE. After about a tiiree-hundred-year absence of settled re mains at die site, Tell Hesban was again occupied in the Late Hellenistic period. T h e remains from die Hellenistic and Roman periods (c. 200 BCE-365 CE) comprise at least five strata. Stratum 1 5 (c. 200-63 BCE) consisted primarily of a rectangular military fort at the site's summit, probably surrounded by the dwellings of dependents tiiat were often associated with bell-shaped subterranean silos. [See Grana ries and Silos.] In Stratum 1 4 (c. 63 BCE-130 CE) Esbus came under die control of Herod the Great, probably as a border fort against the Nabateans. [See Nabateans.] There is abun dant evidence for extensive underground dwellings on the mound and characteristic Herodian-period family tombs in the cemetery (two such tombs were sealed with rolling stones). [See Tombs; Burial Techniques.] T h e stratum 1 4 town was destroyed by an earthquake, so that stratum 1 3 (13c—c. 1 9 3 CE) contained much new building. A new inn with an enclosed courtyard south of the fort testifies to the increased traffic past the road junction (Via Nova Trajana and Esbus/Livias) at which Roman Esbus was located. In stratum 1 2 (c. 1 9 3 - 2 8 4 CE), the inn was partially rebuilt and saw considerable use. On the acropolis, earlier masonry was incorporated into what has been interpreted as a small tem ple—perhaps the one depicted on die Elagabalus coin minted for Esbus, a very fine example of which was found at die site in 1973. Access to the temple from the south was via a ramp. Stratum 1 1 (c. 284-365 CE) continued to dem onstrate a modest level of prosperity. A porch was added to the temple and a double colonnade was built to the east of it. T h e inn soutii of the acropolis platform was demolished, and a wide monumental stairway replaced the earlier earthen ramp. T h e stratum came to an abrupt end with the severe earthquake of 365. Apart from the earthquake, the transition from the Roman to the Byzantine period was a gradual one. The Roman cemetery continued to be used. At least six strata encompass the Byzantine and Early Arab remains (365-c. 1000). Two basilica-style churches were built during this period, though at the end of the period the site was apparently abandoned. [See Basilicas.] Although it was a village of no particular significance during the early periods of Islamic rule, after a gap in its sedentary occupa tion Hesban flourished again immediately after the Cru
21
sades. It even replaced Amman as the capital of the Belqa region of central Transjordan. [See Amman.] Its remains comprise at least three strata (c. 120c—1456) that were rel atively well preserved compared to earlier remains. The tell was apparently deserted in the fifteenth century, but in the late nineteenth century there was a gradual return to limited occupation in the Ottoman and modern periods. [See also Amnion; and the biographies of Garstang, Glueek, and Robinson.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Boraas, Roger S., and S. H. Horn. Heshbon 1968: The First Campaign at Tell Hesban, a Preliminary Report. Andrews University Mono graphs, vol. 2. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1969. Boraas, Roger S., and S. H . Horn. Heshbon 1971: The Second Campaign at Tell Hesban, a Preliminary Report. Andrews University Mono graphs, vol. 6. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 7 3 . Boraas, Roger S., and S. H. Horn. Heshbon 1973: The Third Campaign at Tell Hesban, a Preliminary Report. Andrews University Mono graphs, vol. 8. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1975. Boraas, Roger S., and Lawrence T . Geraty. Heshbon 1974: The Fourth Campaign at Tell Hesban, a Preliminary Report. Andrews University Monographs, vol. 9. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1976. Boraas, Roger S., and Lawrence T . Geraty. Heshbon 1976: The Fifth Campaign at Tell Hesban, a Preliminary Report. Andrews University Monographs, vol. 10. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1978. Boraas, Roger S., and Lawrence T . Geraty. " T h e Long Life of Tell Hesban, Jordan." Archaeology 32 (1979): 1 0 - 2 0 . Bullard, Reuben G. "Geological Study of the Heshbon Area." Andrews University Seminary Studies 1 0 (1972): 1 2 9 - 1 4 1 . Cross, Frank Moore. " A n Unpublished Ammonite Ostracon from Hesban." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T . Geraty and Larry G . Herr, pp. 475-489. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. Geraty, Lawrence T . , and Leona Glidden Running, eds. Hesban, vol. 3, Historical Foundations: Studies of Literary References to Heshbon and Vicinity. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1989. Geraty, Lawrence T . , and David Merling. Hesban after Twenty-Five Years. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1994. Reviews the results of the ex cavations of the Heshbon expedition a quarter-century after its first field season; full bibliography. Horn, S. H. " T h e 1968 Heshbon Expedition." Biblical Archaeologist 32 (1969): 2 6 - 4 1 . Horn, S. H. "Heshbon," In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 5 1 0 - 5 1 4 . Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1 9 7 5 - . Ibach, Robert D . , Jr. Hesban, vol. 5, Archaeological Survey of the Hesban Region. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1987. LaBianca, Oystein S., and Larry Lacelle, eds. Hesban, vol. 2, Environ mental Foundations: Studies of Climatical, Geological, Hydrolvgical, and PSiytological Conditions in Hesban and Vicinity. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. LaBianca, 0ystein S. Hesban, vol. 1, Sedenlarization andNomadization: Food System Cycles at Hesban and Vicinity in Transjordan. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1990. Lugenbeal, Edward N . , and James A. Sauer. "Seventh-Sixth Century B . C . Pottery from Area B at Heshbon." An dretos University Seminary Studies 10 (1972); 2 1 - 6 9 . Mitchel, Larry A. Hesban, vol. 7, Hellenistic and Roman Strata. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1992. Sauer, James A. Heshbon Pottery 1971: A Preliminary Report on the Pot tery from the 1971 Excavations at Tell Hesban. Andrews University Monographs, vol. 7. Berrien Springs, Mich,, 1973.
22
HESI, TELL EL-
Sauer, James A. "Area B . " Andrews
University Seminary
Studies 12
(1974): 3 5 - 7 L Terian, Abraham, "Coins from the 1968 Excavations at Heshbon." Andrews University Seminary Studies 9 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 4 7 - 1 6 0 . Vyhmeister, Werner. " T h e History of Heshbon from Literary Sources. "Andrews University Seminary Studies 6 (1968): 1 5 8 - 1 7 7 . LAWRENCE T. GERATY
HESI, TELL EL-, site located on Israel's southeastern coastal plain ( 3 i ° 3 2 ' N, 34°43' E; map reference 124 X 106) 23 Ion (14 mi.) from the Mediterranean coast, near the bor ders of the Shephelah and die Negev. Situated on a cluster of sand dunes on the south bank of Nahal Shiqmah (Wadi Hesi), the site consists of a 25-acre terrace with a 4-acre mound at its northeast corner. Hesi was occupied almost continuously from die Chalcolithic through the Hellenistic period (c. 4300-200 BCE), with a gap in occupation during the Middle Bronze Age. The ancient identity of Hesi is unknown. In 1878, Claude Conder identified Hesi with ancient Lachish. This seemed to be supported by the discovery there in 1891 of an Amarna tablet mentioning Lachish. In 1924, William Foxwell Al bright suggested that Hesi was not Lachish but Eglon, a Canaanite city-state conquered by the Israelites. Excava tions in the 1930s at Tell ed-Duweir, however, revealed that site to be Lachish. Biblical Eglon was located in the foothills of the Shephelah, so Hesi, situated several kilometers west of the Shephelah, is not likely to be Eglon. Two major excavations have taken place at Hesi, the first by the British Palestine Exploration Fund from 1890 to 1892. The first season's work was directed by Sir Flinders Petrie. It was at Hesi that Petrie first applied the principles of stratigraphic excavation and ceramic chronology that have become the essentials of modern archaeological method. Because the site's summit was under cultivation, Petrie probed into the sides of the mound and into the ter race. He was able to identify three major periods of occu pation: Amorite (c. 1700 BCE), Phoenician ( 1 3 5 0 - 8 5 0 BCE), and Jewish (to 450 BCE). His Amorite period can now be equated with the Early Bronze Age, the Phoenician with the Late Bronze and Iron ages, and the Jewish with the Persian and Hellenistic periods. [See the biography of Petrie.] The 1891 and 1892 excavations were directed by an American, Frederick Jones Bliss. He removed the entire northeast quadrant of the mound in search of the horizontal exposure of architecture. Bliss enumerated eleven layers of architectural features and grouped them into eight "cities" that he correlated with Petrie's chronology. [See the biogra phy of Bliss.] The second excavation, the Joint Archaeological Expedi tion, was affiliated with the American Schools of Oriental Research and carried out eight seasons of fieldwork between 1970 and 1983. Both the mound and the terrace were found
to be covered by a modern bedouin cemetery. A trench along the south slope of the mound revealed occupation from the Chalcolithic through the Hellenistic period, with a gap in the Middle Bronze Age. Excavation along die south ern perimeter of the terrace revealed an Early Bronze Age occupation. Surface survey also revealed unstratified Ro man period sherds and, on the east bank of the Wadi Hesi, remains of the Paleolithic period. Major finds date to the Early Bronze, Iron II, and Persian periods. The Early Bronze Age city, occupying the full 25 acres of die terrace, was surrounded by a mud-brick city wall about 7 m wide, supported at the southeast corner by a crushed limestone glacis. Inside the city wall were remains of domestic and industrial activities. During the ninth cen tury BCE, the site was confined to the mound, which was surrounded by a casemate, or double wall, system. A plat form 7 m high elevated die summit to provide better de fense, and a large courtyard building filled the area. These structures parallel contemporary constructions at Lachish, and at tiiis time Hesi probably served as a military outpost to protect the southwestern border of Judah. A military function continued into the Persian period, when once again a large platform prepared the summit for the construction of a small citadel, which probably served as a depot and storehouse for the Persian military. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bennett, William J . , Jr., and Jeffrey A. Blakely. The Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi, vol. 3, The Persian Period (Stratum V). Wi nona Lake, Ind., 1989. Final publication of finds from the Persian period and their interpretation. Bliss, Frederick Jones. A Mound of Many Cities, or, Tell el Hesy Exca vated. London, 1894. First publication of a Palestinian excavation to show large-scale architectural remains in stratigraphic context. Dahlberg, Bruce T., and Kevin G . O'Connell, eds. The Joint Archae ological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi, vol. 4, The Site and the Expedition. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Essays on the site, its environment, and the methdology of the Joint Expedition, and a summary of results of the first four seasons. Petrie, W. M . Flinders. TellelHesy (Lachish). L o n d o n , ' i 8 9 i . First pub lication of a Palestinian excavation to present architecture and pot tery in a sequential manner and to correlate pottery and artifacts with stratigraphy. Toombs, Lawrence E . The Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi, vol. 2, Modern Military Trenching and Muslim Cemetery in Field I, Strata I-II. Cambridge, Mass., 1985. Thorough treatment of the most recent strata at the site, in particular, several hundred burials from a bedouin cemetery of the seventeenth century CE. Toombs, Lawrence E . " T h e Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi and the Results of the Earlier Excavations." Palestine Explo ration Quarterly 1 2 2 (July-December 1990): 1 0 1 - 1 1 3 . Correlation of the results of the Joint Expedition with those of Petrie and Bliss. VALERIE M . FARGO
HIEROGLYPHS. Used since the Ptolemaic period 2
(3 3-30
B C
E ) the term hieroglyphs is the Greek counterpart
HIEROGLYPHS (hieroglyphika grammata "sacred incised letters") of the Egyptian expression mdw.w-ntr "god's words" to indicate the basic writing system of die ancient Egyptian language. Because of the formal similarities with Egyptian hieroglyphs, the term has also been applied less appropriately since the nineteenth century to the writing system of Luwian, an An atolian language related to, but not identical with, cuneiform Hittite (hence the misleading definition "Hittite hiero glyphs"). Luwian was spoken and written during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages (c. 1 5 0 0 - 7 0 0 BCE) in southern and southwestern Anatolia and northern Syria. Egyptian Hieroglyphs. A variable set of graphemes, Egyptian hieroglyphs range from about 1,000 in the Old Kingdom (third millennium) to approximately 750 in die classical language (early second millennium) to many thousands during the Ptolemaic and Roman rule in Egypt (third century BCE-second century CE). Hieroglyphic signs are pictograms (picture signs) that represent living beings and objects, such as gods or categories of people, animals, parts of die human or animal body, plants, astronomical entities, buildings, furniture, and vessels. This pictographic system represents a combination of phonological and ideographic principles. A written word usually consists of a sequence of uniconsonantal, biconsonantal, or triconsonantal signs called phonograms, which con vey a substantial portion of its phonological structure: nor mally all the consonants, occasionally also the semivocalic phonemes (sound units), vowels remaining for die most part unexpressed. This sequence of phonograms is usually fol lowed by a semagram, called determinative by Egyptologists, which specifies iconically the semantic sphere of the word. For example, a sitting man $ expresses the lexical sphere of man, mankind; a sitting man touching his mouth U denotes the realms of eating, feeling, dunking, sensing; a scribe's equipment fit indicates tire semantic realm of writing; the stylized map of a settlement @ identifies the word as a toponym. Although some words of common use (such as pro nouns, prepositions, a few lexical items such as rn " n a m e " or dd "to say") are written only phonologically, that is, with the combination of consonantal signs indicating < r > + < n > or < d > + < d > respectively, many items of the basic vocabulary of Egyptian are expressed only by semagrams, which directly represent, evoke through rebuses, or metonymically symbolize their own semantic reference. These are called logograms (often improperly termed ideograms by Egyptologists): for example, the hieroglyph representing the enclosure of a house 07) means "house" (phonologically *p<3r), or the sign representing a human head (f) means "head" (phonologically *tap). In order to distinguish the logographic ("HOUSE" = /par/ = "house") from the purely phonological use of the same sign ("HOUSE" = /p (+ op tional vowel) + r/, independent of the lexical sphere of tire word in which it appears), logographic uses are often marked by a vertical stroke following the sign.
TABLE I. Egyptian Monoconsonantal
Sign
Transliteration $
1
J
(1) 11, (2) v
y
J
W b
c
•
ra i e
b h
««,
(2) 1 1
(1)
P f m n r h
s
1=3
s
A
1 k
SJ
a
g t t 'd
4
23
Signs
Object Depicted Egyptian vulture flowering reed f(i) two reed-flowers 1 (2) oblique strokes forearm quail chick foot stool horned viper owl water mouth reed shelter in fields wick of twisted flax placenta(?) animal's belly with teats [ ( 1 ) bolt 1(2) folded cloth pool hill-slope basket with handle stand for jar loaf tethering rope hand snake
Egyptian writing also displays a set of twenty-four "al phabetic," that is, uniconsonantal signs. Although these cov ered almost completely the inventory of consonantal and semiconsonantal phonemes of the Egyptian language (the only exception being the phoneme ///, for which an auton omous sign appears only in Demotic), this set of signs never developed into a genuine alphabet, but always remained em bedded in the original complex system of word signs and sound signs. This situation shows that the development of the alphabetic writing is not, as often assumed, the result of a predictable evolution from a nonalphabetic system, but rather that there is a very different "philosophy of writing" underlying the two graphic models. With the final break through of the Hellenistic cultural Koine and eventually the emergence of Christianity in Egypt (second-third century CE), when a changed cultural and religious setting suggested tire adoption of an alphabetic system, the hieroglyphic sys tem was completely superseded by the Coptic writing, an alphabet written from left to right and derived from that of Greek, with the addition of six or seven Demotic signs for the indication of phonemes absent from Greek: *& = /s/, 1 = /f/, t> (in some dialects 2) = 2 = /h/, x = /c/, 6 = /k /, t = /ti/. Table 1 shows the set of Egyptian "alphabetic" signs (from Gardiner, 1957, p . 2 7 ) . 1
24
HIEROGLYPHS "to enter" (witii the/-snake "entering" the M-sign) and pry "to exit" (with the snake "coming out" of the sign):
Some examples of biliteral and triliteral signs are as fol lows: t ©
bi
jr wr nfr
w'
'q "to enter"
hi h<
man, peison
s3
woman
$1?
people
*
star
pr house
& fire, heat, cook 3
?
rfr
pry "to exit"
On the one hand, this evolution threatened the accessi bility of the system and eventually favored its purely aes thetic, rather than linguistic use; on the other hand, it ex panded the meaning of the individual hieroglyphs and made die system more perfect as a pictorial-linguistic form. It is exactly this radical change in die nature of the writing system in the Greco-Roman periods that is at the origin of the view held in the Western world since Late Antiquity until the emergence of modern Egyptology (and still surviving to the present day in some aspects of popular culture) of the "sym bolic," rather than functional character of the hieroglyphic writing. One needs only to think of the decorative use of Egyptian hieroglyphs during the Renaissance and the Ne oclassical period in Europe. The hieroglyphic system was used mainly for monumen tal purposes, more rarely (in a cursive form) for religious texts in the Middle and the New Kingdoms (c. 2 0 0 0 - 1 0 7 0 ) . During their history, however, hieroglyphs developed two cursive varieties: Hieratic (2600-third century CE), which represents a direct rendering in the scribes handwriting (with ligatures and diacritic signs) of a sequence of hiero glyphic signs; and Demotic (seventh century BCE-fifth cen tury CE), which radically modifies the writing conventions by introducing a shorthandlike simplification of hieratic sign-groups. (For samples of Hieratic and Demotic writing followed by their hieroglyphic transcription, see Gardiner, 1 9 5 7 , pi. 2.) The basic orientation of the Egyptian writing system— and the only one used in the cursive varieties—is from right to left, with signs facing the right; in epigraphic, that is, mon umental texts, this order may be inverted for reasons of sym metry or artistic composition. In the monumental text of the Middle Kingdom (King Sesostris I, c. 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 2 8 ) shown in
T
The signs below illustrate semagrams, used either as deter minatives (i.e., following a sequence of phonograms) or as logograms (i.e., indicating botii the phonological structure and the semantic value of the word they represent or evoke). $
a
jrt eye
air, wind, sail
Alan H. Gardiner ( 1 9 5 7 , p. 25) provides a very accessible specimen of how the Egyptian hieroglyphic system worked (figure 1 ) . Numbers indicate the sequence of the individual signs. Phonograms are indicated in italic, logograms in SMALL CAPITALS, and semagrams also in SMALL CAPITALS and
"quotation marks"; Supplements necessary to complete the grammatical structure of the corresponding words are added in parentheses. Unlike most other systems of pictographic origin, such as Mesopotamian cuneiform or Chinese ideograms, Egyptian hieroglyphs kept their original iconic structure throughout their entire history without progressively developing stylized forms. Quite on the contrary, the increasing consciousness of tiie symbolic potential inherent in the relation between the signs used to write words and the semantic meaning of the words themselves led to the development of new, pre viously unknown phonological associations and also of socalled cryptographic solutions in Ptolemaic Egyptian. For example, the two signs = and «—were used in the classical system only to indicate the phonemes /m/ (or the sequence /g [+vowel] + s/) and/f/ respectively; in Ptolemaic Egyptian, they are creatively combined to represent die two verbs 'q
B J
9
U3
ifjtijisj
7.
Hieroglyphs: Transliteration:
l
2
4
5
7
8
9
4 MDW *j - n gb - % - "GOD" /i - n -
1 0c
Transcription:
d(d)
mdw(.w)
jn
Obb
hn
Translation:
"To say
the words
by
Geb
with
c
12
13
15
1 6
"PSD - r - -'"- "GODS" - / Psd.tsf his Ennead."
HIEROGLYPHS. Figure 1 . Example of hieroglyphic writing. T h e same sentence is shown in four different arrangements, the arrows showing the direction in which the sentence is to be read. N o t e that the human and animal figures face toward the beginning of the text. (Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
HIEROGLYPHS
HIEROGLYPHS. Figure 2. Monumental
text from King Sesostris I.
Middle K i n g d o m . (After B . J . K e m p . Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, London-New York, 1989., p. 28)
figure 2, the hieroglyphic sign in the middle, pictographically representing a lung with windpipe, phonologically a triconsonantal sequence /z + m + 3/, semantically a verb with the meaning "to unite," is being tied together with papyrus and lotus, the heraldic plants of Upper and Lower Egypt, by die two gods Horus and Setii. T h e cartouche in the center en circles the king's name z(j)-n(j) wsrt. The inscription on die left side is read from right to left and refers to the god Horus nfr '3 nb mm dj.f'nh dd W3s nb "the great god, lord of Mesen, may he give every life, stability, and power," whereas the one on the right side is read from left to right and refers to the god Seth nbwt(j) dj.f'nh dd 103s nb "the Ombite, may he give every life, stability and power" (from B. J. Kemp, An cient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, London and New York, 1989, p. 28). Beginning witii the Middle Kingdom Egyptian developed a particular use of hieroglyphic signgroups to express words of foreign languages, mostly of northwest Semitic origin. This procedure, commonly known as "syllabic orthography," allowed the rendering of sequences of Semitic syllables (consonants and vowels) by combining Egyptian signs in a conventional groups. More specifically, Egyptian weak consonants (such as 'aleph) semiconsonantal signs (such as yod and waw) were used to express vowels, in a procedure similar to the matres lectionis in Northwest Semitic. Although the general trends of Egyp tian syllabic orthography are well understood, disagree ments remain as concerns the exact vocalic values to be at tributed to specific sign-groups.
25
T h e most decisive contribution to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs was achieved around 1 8 2 2 - 1 8 2 4 by the French Orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion. On the basis of die writing of Greek royal names in the so-called Rosetta Stone, a trilingual (hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek) document from the Ptolemaic period discovered in 1799 in the Egyp tian town of Rosetta (in Arabic, al-Rashid) during Napo leon's expedition to Egypt, Champollion was able to estab lish the nature of the system. He thereby broke away from the traditional symbolic approach that had prevailed in the West since die knowledge of tiiis writing was lost during the first centuries CE. [See the biography of Champollion.} Hittite Hieroglyphs. Between 1 5 0 0 and 700 BCE, Lu wian, an Indo-European language of the Anatolian group related to Hittite, was written in a logographic script, tradi tionally called hieroglyphic because of its formal resemblance to the Egyptian writing system. During the first part of this timespan, that is, between 1500 and 1200, hieroglyphic Lu wian was sporadically used in the Hittite Empire, especially on seals. From 1200 to 700, it was the language of monu mental inscriptions in all the Neo-Hittite kingdoms in south east Anatolia and northern Syria. The structure of Luwian hieroglyphs is completely dif ferent from the Egyptian counterpart, to which it probably bears no historical connections. Rather, its ancestors have to be sought within the Aegean world and the Cretan Linear A writing. The Luwian hieroglyphic system is a syllabary consisting of pictorial signs, which, unlike Egyptian hiero glyphs, from their earlier to their later stages show a pro gressive loss of their original iconic content (see figure 3) to become stylized signs mostly indicating a syllable consisting of a sequence "consonant 4- vowel" or, in very rare cases, a sequence of phonemes derived through rebus writing from the original pictorial value of the sign. The direction of writ-
a
b
HIEROGLYPHS. F i g u r e 3 . Specimens Luwian
of (a) earlier
and
hieroglyphic writing. (After Gelb, 19631 PP. 82-64)
(b) later
26
HILPRECHT, HERMANN VOLLRAT
ing changes from line to line. Although monuments with Hittite hieroglyphs were known since 1870, their decipher ment was significandy favored by the discovery in 1947 of the Phoenician-Luwian bilingual inscription from Karatepe in Cilicia, dating from the eighth century. [See Karatepe Phoenician Inscriptions.] [See also Egyptian; awdLuwians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Gardiner, Alan H. Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs. 3d ed. Oxford, 1957. Still the basic handbook for the study of the Egyptian language and writing system. Gelb, Ignace J . A Study of Writing. 2d ed. Chicago and London, 1963. The most authoritative, though idiosyncratic, work on the origin and development of writing systems throughout the world. Hawkins, J. D., et al. Hittite Hieroglyphs and Luwian: New Evidence for the Connection. Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen, Philologische-Historische Klasse, no. 6. Gotdngen, 1974. The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo. Translated and introduced by George Boas. Bollingen Series, 23. New York, 1950. An ancient compen dium of bogus hieroglyphs with fantastic explanations that led to the symbolic interpretation. The introduction is a superb and succinct summary. Hoch, James E . Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period. Princeton, 1994. Monumental analysis of the evidence for the writing of foreign words in Egyptian, with particular attention devoted to syllabic orthography. Iverson, Erik. The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tra dition. Copenhagen, 1 9 6 1 . Study of the symbolic interpretation of hieroglyphs from late antiquity through the nineteenth century and their impact on European civilization. Lacau, Pierre. Stir le systeme hieroglyphique. Cairo, 1954. Typological study of the nature and structure of tine Egyptian writing system. Laroche, Emmanuel. Les hieroglyphes hittites, part 1, L'ecriture. Paris, i960. The first complete study of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions. Meriggi, Piero. Manuale di eteogeroglifico. 3 vols. Incunabula Graeca, vols. 1 3 - 1 5 . Rome, 1966—1975. Thorough handbook for the study of Luwian hieroglyphs. Valeurs phonetiques des signes hieroglyphiques d'epoquc greco-romaine. 3 vols. Montpellier, i988-i990.The product of many years ofresearch by an international team, this work is the necessary companion for the reading of the complex hieroglyphic signs of the Greco-Roman period. ANTONIO LOPRIENO
HILPRECHT, HERMANN VOLLRAT
(1859-
1925), Assyriologist. Born in Hohenerxleben in Anhalt, Ger many, Hilprecht was professor of Assyrian ( 1 8 8 6 - 1 9 0 2 ) and later Clark Research Professor of Assyriology ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 1 1 ) at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a member of the first expedition to Nippur (1888-1889) and scientific direc tor of tire fourth expedition ( 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 0 0 ) , there. Hilprecht is perhaps best known as a major figure in American Assyri ology in the nineteenth century, having set high standards for the publication of cuneiform texts. He apparently laid out plans for the publication of the results of the Babylonian expedition in four series—a total of twenty volumes. Hil precht was general editor of series A (cuneiform texts),
which he inaugurated by publishing Old Babylonian Inscrip tions Chiefly from Nippur in 1893. In 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 0 8 , Hilprecht was embroiled in a bitter dispute with John P. Peters that eventually involved not only every one connected with the Nippur excavations, but a good number of scholars in the discipline. Peters sparked tire dis pute when he alleged that Hilprecht had exaggerated his claims to having found a temple library during the fourth campaign of excavations in 1900 and had misrepresented purchased tablets as excavated artifacts and falsified the findspots of others. There was also the question of who owned certain artifacts tire Ottoman sultan had given to Hil precht. In 1893, while in Constantinople worldng on the Nippur finds, Hilprecht was asked to reorganize the Imperial Otto man Museum. In recognition of his efforts, over a period of many years, the sultan presented him with a large number of tablets and other artifacts excavated at Nippur or pur chased while the expedition was in Mesopotamia. Hilprecht maintained that the artifacts were his personal property but gave the bulk to the museum. He did, however, keep some very important pieces. His critics argued that the sultan's "gift" was a legal fiction and suggested that the finds really belonged to the University of Pennsylvania Museum (the excavations' sponsoring institution). The university's trustees appointed a committee to act as a court of inquiry in the so-called Peters-Hilprecht contro versy. In its report, the committee found the charges un sustainable and untrue, but the controversy did not end. A subsequent controversy arising over Hilprecht's publication of a Sumerian cuneiform tablet fragment that he claimed confirmed the biblical Flood story eventually led to his res ignation in 1 9 1 1 . Hilprecht maintained a residence in Jena, from 1899 to 1905. His first wife, Ida Haufe, died there in 1902. In 1903 he married Sallie Crozer Robinson, a Philadelphia socialite. Following his resignation from the University of Pennsyl vania, Hilprecht went to Germany, where he remained dur ing World War I. He returned to the United States after the war. He died in Philadelphia, leaving most of the antiquities and small finds from the Nippur excavations to the Univer sity of Jena. H e ceded a nearly complete kudurru and two copper goats' heads, acquired at Abu Habbah (Fara), to the University of Pennsylvania Museum as the Sallie Crozer Hilprecht Collection. [See also Babylon; Nippur; and the biography of Peters.] BIBLIOGRAPHY For biographical details, see George A. Barton's article in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 9, pp. 58-59 (New York, 1 9 3 2 ) , as well as the obituaries published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Times, 20 March 1925; Journal of Biblical Literature 45 (192.6): iii— iv; and Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie 36 (1925): 3 0 9 - 3 1 0 . For Hilprecht's bibliography, see Rykle Borger, Handbuch der Keilschriftliteratur, vol. I, pp. 1 9 0 - 1 9 4 (Berlin, 1967), and Ferdinand Hestermann, "Die Biblio-
HIMYAR graphie Hilprechts iiber Nippur," Wissenschaflliche Zeitschrifl derFriedrich-Schiller-Universitdt Jena 4 ( 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 5): 3 5-47. For further reading, see the following: Hilprecht, Hermann V. Die Ausgrabungen der Universitdt von Pennsyl vania im Bel-Tempel zu Nippur. Leipzig, 1903. Hilprecht, Hermann V. Explorations in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia, 1903. See pages 289-568. Hilprecht, Hermann V. The So-Called Pelers-Hilprecht Controversy. Philadelphia, 1908. Hilprecht, Hermann V. The Earliest Version of the Babylonian Deluge Story and the Temple Library of Nippur. Philadelphia, 1910. For the reaction covered even in the public press, see, for example, the Phil adelphia Press, 6 June 1 9 1 0 . Oelsner, Joachim. "Zur Geschichte der Frau Professor HilprechtSammlung Vorderasiatischer Altertiimer im Eigentum der Friedrich-Schiller-Universitatjena." In Zur Geschichte der klassischen Archdologie Jena-Krakow, edited by Ernst Kluwe and Joachim Slivva, pp. 46-53. Jena, 1985. See, for example, the newspaper account of Hilprecht's will in the Philadelphia Record, 6 April 1 9 2 5 . Ritterband, Paul, and Harold Wechsler. " A Message to Lushtamar: T h e Hilprecht Controversy and Semitic Scholarship in America." History of Higher Education Annual 1 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 5 - 4 1 . RICHARD L . ZETTLER
HIMYAR, region located in the southern highlands of modern Yemen. In antiquity Himyar was the land of the Homeritae (Homerites), or Hameroi, of classical authors. T h e last and largest of the indigenous South Arabian king doms, it may have been founded h i 1 1 5 BCE, the approxi mate starting point for the Himyarite dating system. Oth erwise, the earliest firmly datable references to Himyar are found in classical sources. Aelius Gallus observed in 24 BCE, via Pliny (Nat. Hist. 6 . 3 2 . 1 6 1 ) , tiiat the Homeritae were die area's most numerous tribe. During the mid-first century CE, die author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (23) men tioned Charibael, king of the Homerites and Sabaites, reign ing at Zafar, who was in diplomatic contact with Rome. The ldngdom lasted until shortly before the arrival of Islam. T h e language of the Himyarites is known primarily from highly formalized monumental and dedicatory inscriptions that employed standard South Arabic based on the Sabaean di alect and used the consonantal South Arabic alphabet of twenty-nine characters. By the beginning of the common era the older South Ara bian kingdoms (Ma'in, Saba'/Sheba, Qataban, and Hadhramaut) were in decline, and population and political power were shifting to the highlands. T h e highlands re quired new agricultural techniques that emphasized terrac ing and using local rainfall runoff. New kingdoms arose, among the earliest and foremost of which was Himyar, with its capital at Zafar. [See Sheba; Qataban; Hadhramaut; Zafar.] T h e next two and a half centuries were marked by a com plex rivalry between the kings of Himyar and other highland dynasties, a process only sketchily documented by surviving inscriptions. T h e Himyarites at times managed to take and
27
hold the ancient Sabaean capital of Marib, a principal prize in these contests, while on other occasions Zafar itself was overrun and occupied. By the early fourth century CE, the Himyarites had largely defeated their highland rivals, die older eastern kingdoms were extinct, and Himyarite control extended from Hadhramaut to Najran and included be douin tribes from the adjacent deserts. [See Marib; Najran.] Inscriptions and other historical sources for Himyar are sparse for the fourth and fifth centuries, consisting primarily of a few dedicatory inscriptions mentioning building proj ects and occasional military campaigns. The reign of AbuKarib Asad, a particularly long-lived king of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, may have marked the apogee of Himyar. Later Arab traditions credit him with conquests as far afield as India and China. Late Himyar is usually char acterized as increasingly feudal, though there is little evi dence for its social and governmental organization. Behind-the-scenes serious sectarian rivalries must have been developing. South Arabia's indigenous religion had primarily been astral, with "Athtar, a male god associated with the planet Venus, worshipped under various epithets in the Himyarite heartland. By the mid-fourth century, how ever, paganism was in decline. When the missionary am bassador Theophilus Indus, sent by the emperor Constantius II, arrived in about 350, he found Jews already present at the Himyarite court. He reportedly converted the king to Christianity and built churches at Zafar and Aden. Dedi catory inscriptions referring to pagan deities disappeared shortiy thereafter, to be replaced with monotheistic formulae that might be Christian, Jewish, or of an indigenous mono theism. T h e royal house ultimately converted to Judaism. [See Aden.] Systematic excavation is needed to detail cultural devel opments in South Arabia during the Himyarite period. Ma terial from Zafar, Marib, al-Huqqa, San a, and objects in the National Museum in San'a demonstrate tiiat the region was in close contact with the cosmopolitan world of die Mediterranean basin and the Near East in the early centuries of the common era. T h e museum's collection displays a rich variety of fluted columns, acanthus capitals, and reliefs with vine scrolls, winged Victories, griffins, sphinxes, and various other motifs of the orientalized Hellenism of Late Antiquity. [See San'a.] By the early sixth century, Christian and Jewish rivalries had led to open conflict, marked by occasional Ethiopian intervention on behalf of Himyarite Christians, perhaps at Byzantine instigation. T h e details are lurid though sketchy. T h e ldng, Yusuf Asar Yathar, the dhu nuwas ("lord of curls") of later ttaditions, determined to purge his ldngdom of Christians, massacring Christian communities at Zafar and Najran. These events brought on a massive Ethiopian invasion that resulted in the defeat and deatii of Yusuf and the installation of an Ethiopian viceroy named Abraha. [See Ethiopia.] The Ethiopians were later expelled with the aid c
28
HIPPOS
of Sasanian Persia. When emissaries of the Prophet Mu hammad came to South Arabia in 628, tiiey found a Persian governor in San'a. He adopted the new faith. Yemen, as the region would thereafter be known, was the first area outside the Hijaz to submit to Islam. [See also Yemen.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Beeston, A. F. L . " T h e Religions of Pre-Islamic Yemen." In L'Arabie du Sud: Histoire et civilisation, vol. 1 , Ije peuple yemenite el ses ratines, by Joseph Chelhod et al., pp. 259-269. Islam d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui, vol. 2 1 . Paris, 1984. Casson, Lionel, ed. and trans. The "Periplus Maris Erythraei": Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton, 1989. Corpus des inscriptions el antiquites sud-arabes, vol. 2, Bibliographic ge nerate systematique. Louvain, 1977. Excellent bibliography for preIslamic South Arabia through 1975. Miiller, W. W. "Survey of the History of the Arabian Peninsula from the First Century A . D . to the Rise of Islam." In Studies in the History of Arabia, vol. 2, Pre-Islamic Arabia, pp. 1 2 5 - 1 3 1 . Riyadh, 1984. Shahld, Irfan. The Martyrs of Najr&n: New Documents. Subsidia Hagiographica, no. 49. Brussels, 1 9 7 1 . Wissmann, Hermann von. "Himyar, Ancient History." Le Museon 77 (1964): 429-497. RAYMOND D . TINDEL
HIPPOS. See Decapolis.
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY. In contrast to prehistoric archaeology, which deals witii periods when there were no written records, historical archaeology is both the archaeology of historical periods and a methodology in which archaeological materials are discussed in the context of a theoretical framework determined by the study of writ ten documents. In the latter sense, historical archaeology is to be contrasted not with prehistoric archaeology but with, for example, anthropological archaeology. In anthropologi cal archaeology, anthropological theory rather than histori cal studies provides the matrix within which both excavated archaeological materials and historical documents are un derstood. Much Near Eastern archaeology was traditionally "his torical," in the second of the two ways described above. This was the result of a keen and persistent interest in exploring archaeology's potential to shed new light on the study of the Bible and otiier ancient texts. Even where there were no explicit points of contact between materials recovered from an excavation and written records, the excavated materials were frequently interpreted within categories denned by the study of historical documents. Elsewhere, however, other methods of interpretation are the norm. For instance, ar chaeology in the Americas (New World archaeology) is no table for its study of cultures that achieved a high level of
complexity but for the most part without leaving written records. The invention of alphabetic writing in the Near East, and the creation of the Bible and the many other pieces of lit erature that are central to Western civilization, account for the fact that archaeologists working in the Near East have very often been critical students of the ancient literature as well as archaeologists. This has made for a lively and critical intersection of textual and archaeological studies. However, some attempts to use archaeological informa tion to shed new light on historical or textual problems have met with a surprising lack of success. For example, when brought to bear on the historical problem of settlement nar ratives in Joshua and Judges, the archaeological data appar ently conflict irreconcilably with the textual evidence at ma jor points. T h e relationship between textual evidence on the one hand and artifactual data on the other turned out to be more problematic than many had hoped. Written Records and Excavated Material. In the early 1960s many archaeologists, especially those specializing in American, or New World, archaeology but also including European scholars, began to advocate a split between ar chaeology and historical studies. T h e conceptual framework of historical studies, they felt, simply did not fit the materials they were trying to interpret. One of their concerns was the very different nature of excavated materials and of written documents. For one thing, most written documents handed down from ancient times were produced, transmitted, and preserved by a relatively narrow spectrum of society, a lit erary elite, reflecting its biases and interests. Archaeological evidence, being essentially refuse, is more democratic in its origins. Another concern was dating. Historical documents con tain a mixture of evidence: some of this evidence no doubt dates to the time of the subject matter, but some dates to die time of writing, which could be much later, especially where tiiere is an oral tradition behind the written texts. In formation can also be inferred from a corpus of historical documents because only a tiny minority of documents has been passed down. Much has been lost, but what has been preserved also bears the stamp of selective community in terests that chose to preserve some documents and not others. A deeper concern shared by those scholars was the ab sence of a meaningful theoretical context within which to interpret their excavated finds. Their data, if properly ap proached, could be used to articulate models of ancient cul tures that addressed political and economic dimensions of human activity. However, the conceptual vocabulary avail able to them from historical studies was geared to the written word and historical epochs, not to material artifacts and stratigraphic phases. Generations of historians had created and refined theories about various aspects of human history,
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY but those theories were based on evidence fundamentally different from the land of data archaeologists study. Many archaeologists began to believe drat they had to replace his torical models with theoretical models based on archaeolog ical data and the conceptual associations native to those data. Related to this theoretical concern was a practical concern about the destruction of evidence. Once excavated, the ar chaeological site in its original form is lost. The materials chosen for preservation and the observations recorded are limited by the excavator's interests and training and by the field and laboratory technology available. Subsequent ar chaeologists, with other interests or training, or better tools, can never go back to an excavated site to study it in its pris tine state. It is tire essentially destructive character of the discipline that exacerbated the need for a theoretical frame work to guide excavation activity. Text-Assisted Archaeology. If modern archaeology is understood as a discipline in its own right, then historical archaeology is to be thought of as archaeology in which tex tual data are available for furtiier study and analysis. T h e primary source of data for archaeologists, whether they deal witii historic or prehistoric periods, is excavated artifacts, their spatial relationship both locally and regionally, and the physical environment in which they are found. Artifacts in clude both manufactured items and naturally occurring ones, such as shells or other remains of human foods, that have been used or acted on by humans. These data form the basis of a theoretical framework within which questions can be posed. T o die extent that information contained in written documents can be determined to derive from a hu man group tiiat also produced excavatable artifacts, the doc umentary information may be thought of as an "intellectual artifact" of that group. As such, it contributes along with the other data, to an understanding of die group. Other features of this kind of archaeology follow here. Material-cultural framework. One virtue of historical archaeology as formerly understood was that, superficially at least, it provided a chronological framework within which it was easy to orient a discussion of excavated materials. However, this historical framework has already largely been displaced in scholarly archaeological discussions by the ce ramic chronology of the region in which the excavations take place. Decades of careful stratigraphic excavation have es tablished sequences of pottery types from the initial ap pearance of ceramic technology in the Neolithic period through medieval times. T h e ubiquitousness of potsherds makes it possible to establish relationships among the finds associated with them—not only within sites but also between sites. Using strict sttatigraphic controls on the materials they excavate, modern archaeologists are in the process of estab lishing a material-cultural-analytical framework that is in dependent of historical documents.
29
Systems approach. Establishing a chronological frame work largely independent of historical documents allows the development of a series of archaeological "pictures" of an cient times that complement the "story" told by historical documents. In general, the archaeological pictures will show more about the everyday life of people of all ranks dian say anything particular about the great events or individuals usually featured in the historical record. These pictures de rive from analysis of the people and of their physical envi ronment. Archaeologists see humans, their cultural institu tions, and their physical environment as interacting parts of a systemic whole. This "ecological" focus helps balance the urban and elite emphases of written records with an under standing of the rural environment that was the economic backbone of preindustrial societies. Explanations for cultural change. In general, expla nations for cultural change that were based on interpreta tions of historical documents saw change as driven by events. In contrast, consonant with an approach to under standing human experience in terms of systems, archaeo logical explanations for change focus on adaptation. Human institutions and behavioral patterns adapt in response to ecological factors (gradual desalinization of soils or varia tions in die extremity of topography in a region), internal systemic factors (evolution of social institutions and tech nologies), and interactions with other human groups across regions and over time. Furthermore, tiiese factors interact with one another in unexpected ways to produce further change: when systems change, gradually or very suddenly, the explanation is sought in the complex interactions of a range of factors, some internal, some environmental. Looking to the Future. Archaeology is well along the way toward becoming a scientific discipline witii an agenda independent of, though still in communication with, histor ical studies per se. It will contribute to what is understood of the human experience in its ecological context in ways that, in many respects, have little to do with insights gained from the traditional ldnds of smdy of historical documents. Archaeologists are developing increasingly sophisticated models of human society that include political, economic, and religious dimensions. In doing so, the value of artifactbased models will increase as objective and independent sources of information that can be more meaningfully in tegrated with text-based models of human societies. [See also Biblical Archaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert M c C . Heartland of Cities. Chicago, 19S1. Pioneering work in regional surveying, analysis of human societies as adapting systems in an environmental context, and intersection of textual studies with archaeological findings (for the historical periods). Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Impact of Archaeology on Biblical Research." In Nerv Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David
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HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY
Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, pp. 1 - 1 6 . Garden City, N . Y . , 1969. Binford, Lewis R. "Archaeological Systematica and the Study of Cul ture Process." American Antiquity 29 (1965): 2 0 3 - 2 1 0 . Binford was the leading American advocate of archaeology as a scientific disci pline based on theory formulation, hypothesis generation, and hy pothesis testing. Clarke, David L . Analytical Archaeology. 2d ed. New York, 1978. The first chapter contains one of the strongest arguments for archaeology as a discipline distinct from traditional historical studies. Flannery, Kent V. "Culture History v. Cultural Process: A Debate in American Anthropology." Scientific American 2 1 7 . 2 (1967): 1 1 9 - 1 2 2 . Concise review of the debate on why human societies as studied by archaeologists change as they do. Flannery, Kent V. " T h e Cultural Evolution of Civilizations." Annual Review of Ecology and Systematic; 3 (1972): 399-426. Landmark de piction of human societies as adapting systems. Gottwald, Norman K . The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. Maryknoll, N . Y . , 1979. Pro vocative and pioneering use of sociological theory as a consistent framework within which to interpret both textual and artifactual data. Kohl, Philip L . "Materialist Approaches in Prehistory." Annual Review of Anthropology 1 0 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 8 9 - 1 1 8 . Concise review of the theoretical underpinnings of studies of artifactual data. Peebles, Christopher S „ and Susan M . Kus. "Some Archaeological Correlates of Ranked Societies." American Antiquity 42 (1977): 4 2 1 448. Frequently cited example of using theory (the "Fried-Service" model of ranked societies) to generate hypotheses testable through excavation. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. New York, 1 9 9 1 . Thorough and very readable overview of modern archaeology worldwide. DAVID W . JAMIESON-DRAKE
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY. Multidisciplinary in nature, historical geography is a comprehensive exami nation of a region's ecosystems, cultures, and artifacmal re mains. It depends on teams of scholars and bodies of data compiled and analyzed to determine the factors in settle ment patterns, the environmental impact of human activity, and the cultural developments that grow out of natural re sources, trade routes, and diffusion patterns. For example, the manner in which the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt developed was based in large part on the activities, both beneficial and devastating, of their river systems and on the presence or absence of natural bar riers to invaders. Thus, cyclic invasions by new peoples characterize Mesopotamia throughout its history because it lacked the desert and sea barriers that effectively protected Egypt. The divergence in the cultures of these two cradles of civilization can also be traced to the regularity of the Nile River's flow and flooding and to the intermittent, cata strophic flooding of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley. More specifically, historical geography has been an im portant approach in the analysis of the cities of the Mesopotamian alluvial plain. Examination of that region's basic topography suggests that the growth, and often the physical
survival, of cities was based on their ability to channel wa tercourses into irrigation systems, to keep those canals free of the heavy load of river sediment, and to respond to the increasing salinization of farm land. [See Irrigation.] Trade and warfare also followed river systems, conttibuting to shifts in political control. For instance, cuneiform texts from the Old Babylonian period ( 1 8 0 0 - 1 7 0 0 BCE) describe reve nues derived from river tolls and cities captured by troops traveling down the river. History of t h e Field. The historical geography of the an cient Near East has been a topic of interest since Christian pilgrims visited the region and noted its sites, rivers, and major landmarks in their diaries. The Byzantine (sixth cen tury CE) Madaba map provides clues to the routes these pil grims followed and the sites of major religious centers. [See Madaba.] With the advent of the nineteenth century, per haps heralded by Napoleon's scientific expedition to Egypt ( 1 7 9 8 - 1 7 9 9 ) , travel and the need for accurate maps and site reports once again became of great importance. Among the most helpful of the travel accounts produced during this period are those of the American explorer Edward Robinson (1838, 1 8 5 3 ) . [See the biography of Robinson.] His maps and compilation of geographic data laid the foundation for mod ern historical and scientific geography, the practical aspects of map malting and information gathering, and later, more systematic surveys, such as that produced for the Palestine Exploration Fund/Society ( 1 8 7 0 - 1 8 7 6 ) , the efforts of Nel son Glueck (Explorations in Eastern Palestine) from 1935 to 1949, and a recent survey of Jordanian sites (J. M. Miller et a l , Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau, 1 9 9 1 . ) [See Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biography of Glueck.] The enterprises of historical geography in the Near East from the nineteenth century to the present have included the identification of biblical sites through survey, excavation, and the examination of modern Arab place names. Among the pioneers in this effort was George Adam Smith, whose Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894) is still a valu able primary source for modern scholars. [See the biography of Smith.] W. F. Albright and G. Ernest Wright also con tributed to the discipline through their philological studies of Arab place-name traditions, their development of modern field-school techniques for analyzing artifactual remains, and their regional approach to ceramic chronology. [See the biographies of Albright and Wright] Among the first truly scientific treatments of the geogra phy of the regions of the Near East was that of Denis Baly (Geography of the Bible, 1 9 5 7 ) , which served as a model of data collection for climate, topography, and geology. Also of importance were the efforts of Yohanan Aharoni (The Land of the Bible, 1979) and Michael Avi-Yonah (The Holy Land, 1966). They not only gathered a wealth of data, but also trained a generation of scholars in the tools of historical geography and created a model for scientific atiases of the Near East: The Macmillan Bible Atlas (3d ed., 1992).
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY T h e legacy of these and many other scholars has been the expansion of what is understood of the geographic features of the lands of the Near East. This, in turn, has markedly increased interest in the relationship between the environ ment and human activity drat shaped the cultural develop ment of the peoples in the region. Approaches to Historical Geography. It is tempting to take a deterministic attitude regarding historical geography. Environmental conditions can too easily be cited as the pri mary or even sole factor in cultural development. Certainly the basic character of any geographic location will affect the nature of culture and the directions it takes. However, it is short-sighted to assume that humans will not place their own peculiar mark on an area. Factors other than environment influence cultural forms. The study of historical geography in the Near East is com plex because of the region's numerous ecosystems: deserts, savannahs, steppes, wetlands, marshes, and swamps. T h e topography includes floodplains, plateau regions, hill coun try, and mountainous areas. T h e availability of water and arable farmland have been tire prime elements in the estab lishment of permanent human settlements. This does not discount die pastoral nomadic groups that have ranged over it, but their cultural mark is less visible than tiiat made by village and urban dwellers. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] Because of the wide range of topographic features, it seems best to take, as die ancients did, a regional approach to the problems of Near Eastern historical geography. They understood that the interaction between an area and its ad jacent regions was responsible for the initiation of all types of economic activity (agriculture, pastoralism, industry). [See Agriculture.] T h e ancients thought beyond their im mediate, local concerns, establishing communication and economic links. [See Roads; Seafaring; Transportation.] Just as pastoralists had to know the physical characteristics of die areas in which they grazed their herds, the leaders of ancient city states needed to obtain information that would allow them to target effectively particular locales to be ex ploited tiirough trade and military conquest. In this way, and at the speed allowed by the terrain and the determination of the exploiters, cultural diffusion occurred and new ways of dealing with environmental conditions were introduced. T h e many Mesopotamian royal annals that describe a king's "march to the sea" and the Gilgamesh epic, in which the hero conquers the monster Humbaba and captures the re sources of the cedar forest, demonstrate how widespread this determination was. A multidisciplinary approach in volving many subdisciplines is necessary to study this pro cess and these phenomena. Topographic analysis. Fieldwork, mapping, and aerial photography are necessary in analyzing the natural re sources of any geographic area. [See Photography.] A topo graphic analysis can point to the origin of settlements, the opportunities for economic exploitation, and the likelihood
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of contact with other regions. Analysis also utilizes records of important natural resources—minerals, timber, arable land, and water. The availability of water, in terms of av erage annual rainfall, water-table levels and accessibility, as well as streams, lakes, and rivers, must be traced. Fossil sources, such as the dry riverbeds in the Sinai and Negev deserts and on the southern Arabian Peninsula, enable re searchers to speculate on the possible demographics in pre history and in antiquity in regions often no longer inhabited. Contiguous regional analysis. N o locale in the Near East is so isolated that it has been without outside influences. Thus, the historical geographer must treat each area both specifically and as part of a region. In so doing, ancient routes of travel (on land and sea) must be traced with an eye to locating commercial centers and areas of intense ag ricultural and industrial activity. Additionally, the move ments of empires as they absorb wide areas must be taken into account, especially in regard to cultural diffusion—such as the introduction of new architectural styles and technol ogies (e.g., the use of iron). Disparate regional analysis. Comparative studies can be made between settlement patterns in the Near East and in other parts of the world. For instance, it is informative to compare Near Eastern architectural styles, strategies for dealing with dry farming, and the harnessing of water for power and irrigation purposes with those in Greece or Italy. These noncontiguous regions had an impact on the material culture of the Near East in the Hellenistic period, but studies comparing setdement strategies can be useful even when areas have not directly or historically, influenced one an other. One example is the comparison that can be made between the transhumant pastorals of Spain (as described by F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, New York, 1972) and those of the ancient Near East. Cartographic analysis. With the introduction of satel lite imagery, Geographic Information System (GIS) data bases, and computer programming and modeling, a truly regional approach to historical geography is possible. These tools allow for a finer analysis of the interrelationship of nat ural resources and human setdement patterns than was pre viously possible. Using mathematical models and infrared photography, the extent of topographic change that has oc curred over time can be determined, thereby facilitating die identification of ancient sites. [See Computer Mapping; Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpretation.] Settlement and demographic analysis. Once a setde ment area has been identified, the researcher can use the region's basic geographic features (terrain, natural defenses, water sources) to estimate the size of die population and the extent of the land used for cultivation, mining, or grazing in antiquity. [ieePaleoenvironmental Reconstruction.] T h e r e mains of architectural forms can also be examined, keeping in mind that building styles might have been influenced by
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HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY
aesthetic or functional concerns. For instance, specific forms of Roman architecture (baths and theaters) are identifiable in vastly different geographic settings (from Damascus to sites in England and France) but generally exhibit regional variation. [See Baths; Theaters.] Climatic or topographic factors are often the basis for design and construction, but the use of structures for religious or political purposes may also dictate size and the inclusion of forms with a symbolic rather than practical origin. Sociocultural analysis. Ingenuity and resourcefulness were often the key to die success of a settlement, especially in an environmentally marginal area. Irrigation techniques and the terracing of hillsides to provide additional farmland are reflections of local inventions based on geographic fea tures. In addition, the degree of borrowed cultural ideas (clothing styles, religious practices, architectural styles) and the appearance and variety of trade goods may also testify to the economic ties with other regions and/or the political control extended over wide areas by ancient empires. The creation of social mechanisms to help shape behavior and cultural expression (hospitality customs, taboos, marriage customs) can often be found in written or artifactual evi dence. Diachronic and synchronic analysis. Effective geo graphic research is not possible unless it is a dual approach that attempts to determine the interaction of human activi ties within defined periods of time and between periods. Multigenerational projects, such as the temple complexes at Karnak in Egypt, as well as the revival of cultural ideas in later eras make for useful comparisons. Onomastic analysis. Beginning with the early fourthcentury Christian historian and theologian Eusebius, onomostics, as a subdiscipline of historical geography, has in volved the attempt to establish a link between site names and the archaeological evidence uncovered in excavations. In Israel, for example, many ancient Hebrew names, such as Beth-Shemesh, were preserved in their Arabic and/or mod ern names—in this case, as 'Ain Shems. Sometimes a text excavated at a site helps with identification, as has been die case at Gezer, Lachish, and Dan. [See Gezer; Lachish; Dan.] However, because many city names, such as Migdal (Heb., "tower") or Hazor (Fleb., "enclosure"), can apply to several sites, the name cannot always be utilized as a sole identifying factor. The danger of a site identification becoming pre maturely "canonized" through scholarly consensus can dis tort subsequent research. Archival research. In addition to relics and artifacts, an cient economic and administrative (government) records may contain crop-yield figures, tax rolls, census data, mili tary conscriptment figures, construction projects, and cli mactic and geological information (see the mention of the earthquake in Am. 1 : 1 ) , which are invaluable in helping to date or describe particular cultural periods.
Archaeological fleldwork. No geographic analysis is complete without the excavation and analysis of material culture: architecture (domestic and monumental), sacred sites (e.g., temples, sacred groves, high places), agricultural and pastoral installations (e.g., sheepfolds and camp sites), and industrial sites (mines, factories, refineries). These re mains of former activity can be used to provide a broad picture of regional and local cultural expression. While spe cialization is necessary, given the huge amount of informa tion in any one field, it is necessary for the geographer either to work with archaeologists or conduct his or her own sur veys and excavations. [See Survey, Archaeological.] Using a variety of disciplines to examine and analyze the historical geography of any area or time period, the re searcher must then become familiar with the region to be studied and establish a plan of action. The broad perspective of a multidisciplinary, regional approach helps avoid distor tions tiiat can arise if an area is regarded as unique. It also makes tracing cultural and economic development through time much more reliable. Spatial as well as physical ap proaches to the diverse aspects of setdement locales and types will also give a fuller picture of ecological and cultural interrelationships. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Translated and edited by Anson F . Rainey. 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1979. Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine. Harmondsworth, 1949. Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Holy Land from the Persian to the Arab Con quests, $36 B.C.-A.D. 640: A Historical Geography. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966. Avi-Yonah, Michael. Gazetteer of Roman Palestine. Qedem, vol. 5. J e rusalem, 1976. Baly, Denis. Geographical Companion to the Bible. N e w York, 1963. Baly, Denis. The Geography of the Bible. Rev. ed. N e w York, 1974. Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua. The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century. Jerusalem, 1979. Carter, Charles E . " T h e Province of Yehud in the Post-Exilic Period: Soundings in Site Distribution and Demography." In Second Temple Studies 2: Temple and Community in the Persian Period, edited by Tarnara C. Eskenazi and Kent H . Richards, pp. 1 0 6 - 1 4 5 . Sheffield, 1994. Eusebius. Das Onomastikon der biblischen Ortsnamen. Edited by Erich Klostermann. Leipzig, 1904. Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Period of Settlement and Judges (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv, 1986. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. 4 vols. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 4 , 1 5 , 1 8 / 1 9 , 25/28. New Haven, 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 5 1 . Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan (1940). Rev. ed. Cam bridge, Mass., 1970. Har-El, Menashe. The Sinai Journeys. Rev. ed. L o s Angeles, 1983. Kallai, Zecharia. Historical Geography of the Bible. Leiden, 1986. Rowton, M . B . " T h e Role of the Watercourses in the Growth of M e sopotamian Civilization." In Lis~an mithurti: Festschrift Wolfram
HISTORIOGRAPHY: Hellenistic and Roman Periods Freiherr von Soden, edited by Wolfgang Rollig, pp. 3 0 7 - 3 1 6 . Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 1. Berlin, 1969. Rubin, Rehav. "Historical Geography of Eretz-Israel: Survey of the Ancient Period." In The Land That Became Israel: Studies in Historical Geography, edited by Ruth Kark, pp. 2 3 - 3 6 . New Haven, 1990. Smith, George Adam. Historical Geography of the Holy Land. London, 1896. VICTOR H . MATTHEWS
HISTORIOGRAPHY.
[This entry provides a consid
eration of major historiographers and chronographers, including such factors as how they wrote history and what data was avail able to them. It is chronologically divided into two articles: His toriography of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods and His toriography of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods.] Historiography of the Hellenistic and R o m a n Periods Starting with Ephorus of Cyme ( 4 0 5 - 3 3 0 BCE), and Theopompus (b. 378 BCE), Greek historians emancipated them selves from the kind of monographic writing done by T h u cydides, Androtion, and Philochorus. T h e greatest historian of the third century BCE in the Greek West was Timaeus of Tauromenium (355-260 BCE), who wrote tiiirty-eight books on the history of Greece and Italy down to 264 BCE (the beginning of the First Punic War), of which we have only fragments preserved through later historians. In the second century BCE, Polybius wrote a universal his tory of die inhabited world. Flis main theme was the phe nomenon of Roman expansion in the Mediterranean. Po lybius wrote a pragmatic history—a history from which, he believed, people would learn lessons in the future. His is a rationalistic writing of history that stresses cause and effect in the historical process. Polybius believed that only univer sal histories should be written, and that there is a certain force (Gk., tyche) directing the destinies of peoples. Polybius had an enormous influence on later historiography (from 2 Mace, through Josephus to Zosimus), and his twelfth book, in which he analyzes die methods of writing history, is re quired reading for every historian. His history in forty books covers the period 2 2 2 - 1 4 6 BCE. His successor in Greece was Posidonius of Apamea (first century BCE), who wrote a history in Greek that continues from where Polybius ends (146 BCE), through the first cen tury BCE. Unfortunately, only fragments are preserved. However, because many later historians used Posidonius ex tensively, we know what his work was like. Alongside tiiese great historians who wrote world histo ries, tiiere were, in the Greek West (including Magna Graecia), historians who composed local histories, some of which may be considered "tragic" histories. For instance, at the beginning of the third century BCE, Duris of Samos wrote a
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Samian chronicle (probably two volumes) alongside his His tories (in twenty-three volumes), and a history of Agathocles; in that same century, Phylarcus wrote a history of the world, parts of which dealt with Sparta. We also know of local his tories that can be considered more as mythography, such as the Aetoliaca, Thessaliaca, and Messeniaca. In the final three centuries of the last millennium BCE, we find, in the Hellenistic East, historians of Alexander the Great and his successors. Among those writing were Nearchus of Crete, Aristobulus, Ptolemy I, Hieronymus of Cardia, and, later, those, who created die "vulgate" of Alex ander's history—people like Callisthenes. There were also many historians who in Greek wrote local histories of certain peoples (ethne), such as Dius, Menander of Ephesus, and Laetus (all Phoenician histories); Manetho and Hecataeus of Abdera (Egyptian histories); Megasthenes (history of In dia); Apollodorus (Parthian history); and Eupolemus the son of John (Israelite history). Most of tiiese histories are concerned with the nations' mythological and remote past. In the second century BCE, a Jew wrote a history (in Hebrew) of die Maccabean revolt and its aftermath (/ Mace), and somewhat later a Jew in the Diaspora, Jason of Cyrene, wrote a history of the Maccabees in five volumes. This his tory was epitomized and is the form in which we have it now (2 Mace). Even a world history was written in the first cen tury BCE by Nicolaus of Damascus, a pagan who was friend and adviser to Herod die Great. This history is only partially preserved through later historians, however. There is no his tory of the ancient Near East available that includes a gen eral, comprehensive report of the region in the Hellenistic period. During that period (third-first century BCE) Italy also pro duced important historians, some of whose writings are only known through citations in the annalistic tradition and through fragments in works composed in the Greek West. These historians include Philinus of Acragas (a pro-Cartha ginian who wrote about the First Punic War) and, in the third century BCE, Fabius Pictor, who composed in Greek a history of Rome from its foundation through the Second Punic War, In the Greek language there were also die his tories of Cincius Alimentus, Postumius Albinus, and Gaius Acilius. In 1 2 3 BCE, the annales maximi were published in Rome, and they marked an important stage in die formation of the annalistic historiogaphic tradition in that city. Gnaeus Gellius, Valerius Antias, and Claudius Quadrigarius fol lowed this line, which Livy and Tacitus pursued later. In about 100 BCE, Rome became an important center for vari ous forms and styles of historiography. Rutilius Rufus and Aemilius Scaurus wrote autobiographies, and Sulla left his hypomnemata ("memoirs"), all of which are now lost. At about the same time, Nepos ( 1 0 0 - 2 5 BCE) wrote biographies in Latin, while Caesar wrote the De Bella Gallico and the De Bello Civili. Sallustius (86-35 ) composed several works B C E
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HISTORIOGRAPHY: Hellenistic and Roman Periods
of importance in Latin. His War oj'Juqurtha is considered a fine specimen of the historiography of this age. It was at drat time that Cicero was defining what Roman historiography should be. At the end of the first century BCE, during the principate of Augustus, a number of great historians were active, only a few of whom can be mentioned here: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose Roman Antiquities began appearing in 7 BCE, wrote, in Greek, a history of Rome from its beginnings to the First Punic War. Only the first ten books survive; they are very important for those interested in the recycling of history during the early principate. Livy (59 BCE-17 CE) wrote his vast book Ab Urbe Condita Libri in 142 books, of which only parts survive. Livy wrote in Latin, in line with the annalistic tradition (proceeding according to years). He is one of our most important sources for the Hellenistic Near East because he mainly used Polybius's work for Eastern matters. Thus, in books 2 1 - 4 5 we are given considerable information about the third and second centuries in the East, information tiiat would otherwise have been lost with much of Polybius's work. Somewhat earlier (60-30 BCE), under Caesar and Augustus, Diodorus Siculus wrote the Bibliotheke, a universal history from the creation through his own time (54 BCE), in forty books. This history attempted to combine the mythologies and histories of the whole universe in a single book. Diodorus's work (in Greek) is important inasmuch as he used a great many sources, most of which are no longer available to us (such as Ctesias, Hecataeus of Abdera, Dionysius Scytobrachion, Matris of Thebes, Posi donius, and Hieronymus of Cardia). Yet, like most histori ans of antiquity, he does not always say when he uses which source. During the Augustan era, Pompeius Trogus wrote the Historiae Philippicae, an important and comprehensive his tory in forty-four books that is now lost. L. Cornelius, Vibius Maximus, and others followed suit, but their works are no longer available. We know about the nature of Trogus's work from Justinus, who used it extensively in the third cen tury CE while writing his epitome. In the Augustan era, one of the greatest geographers of antiquity composed a Geog raphy; this was Strabo of Amaseia, who wrote in Greek, de scribing the various regions of the empire and beyond. His geography is an indispensible source for historians,because of the rich historical information he included. Strabo had access to many sources, most of which are not available to us today (such as Erathosthenes and Posidonius). In the first century CE, Curtius Rufus wrote a history of Alexander the Great in Latin, and Valerius Maximus wrote a history (preserved only in two later epitomes). Velleius Paterculus wrote his Historiae Romanae during tiiis time, an important source, particularly for the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. In the middle of the century, Pliny the Elder wrote some important, now lost, works of history (Bella Germaniae and A fine Aufidi Bassi, for example). The end of the first
century CE and the beginning of the second witnessed two great Latin historians, Suetonius and Tacitus. Suetonius wrote biographies of die emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian, and Tacitus wrote some of the most significant works dealing with the history of die first century CE, the Annals and the Histories, At the same time, there was impressive historiographic activity in the ancient Near East concerning the events in Palestine. We know tiiat Justus of Tiberias probably wrote a history of the Jews from Moses to Agrippa II. Of the extant works, the most important are the histories of Josephus. He wrote his Jewish War (seven books) in the seventies of the first century CE; later, in the nineties, while in Rome, he com pleted his Antiquities (twenty books), the Contra Apionem (two books), and the Vita (his autobiography). Josephus was a prolific historian whose books, because they are preserved, are a unique phenomenon in ancient historiography. Al though he deals mainly with Jewish history, he preserves much information about the surrounding world. At the time, the evangelists were writing the histories of Jesus and his followers in Greek. Their compositions appear in the his toriographic part of the New Testament (Matthew through John, and die Book of Acts, written by Luke). Between 50 and 120 CE, in Greece, there lived one of the greatest intellectuals of the period, Plutarch. In addition to his philosophical works, he wrote biographies of past heroes, Greek and Roman. He is one of our main sources for the Zeitgeist in Greece in the first century CE. Plutarch wrote moralizing biographies in Greek, such as those of Solon, Tiberius Gracchus, and T . Q. Flamininus. In the second and third centuries CE, Appian and Cassius Dio composed their important histories. The beginnings of Christian "historiography" are to be found in the writings of Clement of Alexandria. In the second century CE, while Lucian of Samosata was writing a book called How to Write History (on the historians of the Partiiian War), Arrian was a student of the philoso pher Epictetus, which influenced his various books. His fa mous work, the Anabasis, a history of Alexander the Great, was based in particular on the histories of Alexander by Ptol emy I (king of Egypt), Aristobulus, and the Vulgate. He also wrote a Parthica (now lost), as well as a history of Alexander the Great's successors, based on Hieronymus of Cardia. Only fragments are preserved of the latter work. Arrian also wrote an Indica, taken mainly from Megasthenes and Nearchus. Appian of Alexandria wrote his Romaika under An toninus Pius; it describes Roman conquests arranged ac cording to the regions of the Roman Empire. T h e work, written in Greek, is dependent on some imperial annalistic tradition but also relies extensively on older historians, such as Polybius, Sallust, Livy, and Nicolaus of Damascus. Early in the third century CE, Herodian wrote biographies of the emperors Marcus Aurelius through Gordian III ( 1 8 0 238 CE). Dio Cassius, another great historian, wrote some
HISTORIOGRAPHY: Byzantine and Islamic Periods important works in the first quarter of the third century, including his Roman history from the beginning to 229 CE. Only parts of this history (written in Greek) are preserved; other parts were epitomized in the Byzantine era by Xiphilinus and Zonaras. Dio Cassius's history is based on the republican annalistic tradition (Livy or his sources) and the imperial annalistic tradition, as well as on his own experi ences as a politician—he was governor of Cilicia and Dalmatia as well as a praetor and consul suffectus). In the third century, Sextus Julius Africanus wrote his Chronographies in five books, attempting a synchronization of Jewish, Chris tian, and pagan histories from the creation to 2 2 1 CE. This work was an important source for Eusebius's Chronicle. Eusebius wrote his Ecclesiastical History at the end of the third century and the beginning of die fourth century. It is the first church history combining biblical and pagan history alongside much else. Eusebius's history (in ten volumes) fo cuses on the history of the church, its apostolic succession, and its victory over heresies, Judaism, and paganism up to Eusebius's own time. Somewhat later in tiiat cenmry, Ammianus Marcelinus, in Latin, wrote his thirty-one books on the history of the years 96-378 CE (the extant narrative be gins with the year 3 5 3 ) . In that cenuiry we also find the epitomators, who made summaries of history, historians such as Eutropius, Justin, and Aurelius Victor. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aune, David E . The New Testament in Its Literary Environment. Phila delphia, 1987. Fornara, Charles W. The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome. Berkeley, 1983. Meister, Klaus. Die griechische Geschichtsschreihung. Stuttgart, 1990. Momigliano, Arnaldo. Studies in Historiography. London, 1966. Villalba i Varneda, Pere. The Historical Method of Flavins Josephus. L e i den, 1986. DORON MENDELS
Historiography of the B y z a n t i n e a n d Islamic P e r i o d s Byzantine and Islamic historiography describe overlapping but not identical parts of the world, chronological spans, and dating systems. Several forms of Byzantine histories exist, whereas early Islamic historiography tended to be religious and legal in inspiration. T h e structures and stylistic rules for Byzantine secular history (Lat., historia) imitate preByzantine—that is, classical Greek—historical models for history and rhetoric. This borrowing included style and vo cabulary, or tiiose of Greek historical writing within the Ro man Empire—not those from Latin classical or medieval historiography or Islamic historiography. Altiiough Byzan tine historiography exhibited versatility and adaptability, it had no great innovators. Audiences tended to be well-edu cated elites, probably from the imperial and ecclesiastical administration, who were able to read and appreciate his
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tories as literature in a venerable tradition. Some historians were mere compilers. Byzantine secular historians often sttove to produce new narratives of approximately contemporary events or reigns. Although their objective was the U'uth, many failed to give attention to sophisticated or profound historical explana tion; to be precise in their use of numbers and geography; to consider chronology, rather than concentrate on individ uals, moral issues, and teaching truths; and to identify or engage in source criticism or exercise critical judgment, as had the best earlier Greek historians. The critical acumen of a Procopius or a Niketas Choniates was exceptional. Polit ical and military subjects prevail, togetiier with an emphasis on rulers and elites, not on economic and social subjects. Encomiastic historiography existed because honest criticism and self-criticism were difficult to include in an unveiled fashion if it involved criticism or embarrassment of a reign ing dynasty or dominant groups. Gradually, traditional con servative forms of history adjusted, by the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, to include Chris tian subject matter, frameworks of interpretation and expla nation, and terminology, even though this process of ad justment took place long after the conversion of the vast majority to Christianity. Waning interest in topographic and geographic details contributed to a shrinking of horizons, which often became Constantinopleocentric. Many tended to relate foreign peoples to the schema and typing of earlier historical models and topoi (literary commonplaces). Among the best historians are Procopius, Michael Psellos, Michael Attaleiates, and Niketas Choniates. One distin guished, although admittedly biased (in favor of her fatiier, Emperor Alexius I), woman historian is Anna Comnena (Komnenos). Ecclesiastical historians restricted their subject matter in a broad sense to die history of the church and its doctrinal conttoversies, from the perspective of the established (i.e., usually Nicene and Chalcedonian) orthodoxies, churches, and related imperial and local topics of a political and dy nastic land. They normally selected and interpreted events to demonstrate their conjunction with established religious creeds and hierarchies and seldom investigated ethnic, so cial, or economic dimensions. Their audience was primarily, but not exclusively, ecclesiastical. Another historical form is the universal or world chronicle (Gk.j chronikon, chronographia), an annalistic narration commencing with the creation of the world and terminating with the chronicler's lifetime. Chroniclers were not neces sarily monks. Chronicles often are more precise about dates and local events than secular histories and may provide in sight into ordinary language and concerns. Some later nar rative histories are entitled chronicles. Saints' lives preserved another highly selective part of the past, especially for the edification of monastic audiences. Controversy surrounds the fate of Byzantine historiogra-
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HISTORIOGRAPHY: Byzantine and Islamic Periods
phy in tine course of the seventh century. This break in clas sicizing historical writing after the 630s may be the result of a contraction in the numbers of tire literary elite who could serve as a sophisticated audience: education and funding had collapsed and tihere was a lack of great victories to cel ebrate. A difficult subject for the Byzantine historians was the explanation of the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land, Egypt, Syria, and North Africa; hence, they usually tended to avoid it. Local provincial schools of historiography did not survive the end of antiquity. Historical writing reap peared in the late eighth century and persisted, in a more or less continuous sequence of narrative histories, to the fif teenth. Islamic historiography developed from pre-Islamic oral history traditions, both of akhbar (plural, or khabar, singu lar), that is, a piece of information or reports or accounts about events) and early Islamic ones (of hadith, "conver sation or narrative," especially of the prophetic tradition, on religious doctrine and juridical subjects). Ta'rikh originally meant assigning a date; hence, it first designated chronolog ical narratives, but it came to mean any account of the past—that is, a history. Criticism of the isnad, or "tradition of transmission of authorities," developed into an elaborate form; however, the authenticity of apparently impressive isnad can neither be assumed nor easily ascertained. Materials ascribed to particular collectors of traditions do not display ideological uniformity or any homogeneous historical view. Islamic historians had their own criteria for ascertaining the creditworthiness of traditions, according to the reliability of the transmitter; tiiis was not in itself wholly dissimilar from early criticism within Hellenic historiography, but it was not explicitly used by Byzantine historians. The form, structure, and norms of Islamic historiography, which also started and reached its culmination later, differed from the Byzantine, as did their genesis. Arabic historical writing sifted and transmitted oral traditions concerning the genealogies and the prophet Muhammad. Early scholarlyreligious histories often reflected a schema of the Islamic religious community. They were usually composed by those trained in Islamic jurisprudence who sought to make doctrinally correct statements reflecting the outlook of the mosque and religious school (madrasah). Another form of later Islamic historiography, the court history, sought to glorify a ruler, or his dynasty, or to make and prove general statements about wisdom in statecraft. T o an extent this genre drew on earlier Persian and even oc casionally on Byzantine and Christian Oriental (especially Syriac) historical traditions, but in a limited fashion, and especially for models of writing court histories of reigns and dynasties. Collections of biographies (including scholarly, religious, tribal, and local ones), organized by classes (tabaqat), are other important historiographic form. Yet, for some subjects, such as tire Islamic conquests, Byzantine and Islamic traditions are not completely diver
gent. At some early date, and to an extent that still cannot be fully determined, Oriental Christian chroniclers and his torians preserved and transmitted information about the Is lamic conquest that reappears in different forms in both Byzantine and Islamic historiography. T h e Islamic con quest's exposition may be confused by contamination with later issues such as land taxation and legal titles. Probably exaggerated was the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critique of Islamic historians as divided into schools with competing self-serving interpretations and traditions (e.g., Syrian and Iraqi), with its excessive dependence on traditions of biblical scholarship and criticism. Islamic his torians' critical sense also differed from that of the Byzantine historians, for unlike that of the Byzantines, it involved, as in the case of tradition about their religion, the criticism of the chain of transmission of traditions. The process of recording, compiling, and editing Muslim historiography; collecting narratives; and selecting the most creditworthy flowered in the eighth and ninth centuries and matured by the late ninth and tenth centuries. Investigation of this process has not yet achieved a modern scholarly con sensus. Presumably, independent traditions often possess common elements. Modern scholars disagree whether the entire corpus of early traditions should be rejected as hope lessly corrupt and fabricated, or whether there is an under lying truth behind some of the traditions—and if so, the proper methodology for achieving a sound critical evalua tion. A majority probably agree tiiat something of value sur vives but disagree concerning techniques for determining that genuine core. Islamic historiography's best specimens include al-Baladhuff (d. 892), al-Tabarl (from Tabaristan, d. 1058), al-Ya'qfibT (d. 897), and other historians after the beginning of the tenth century. However, such later histo rians as the Egyptian al-Maqrlz! (d. 1447) and the Maghrebi Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) are of high quality. Local historians such as the Damascene Ibn 'Asakir (d. 1 1 7 6 ) , Ibn al-'Adim (b. Aleppo, d. Cairo, 1 2 6 2 ) , and al-AzdT (fl. early ninth cen tury in Cairo and Jerusalem) composed another important form of Muslim historiography; the form started in the ninth century but developed more intensively after the eleventh century. Islamic historiography's second major burst of pro ductivity and qualitative creativity in the later medieval era (thirteenth-early fifteenth centuries) culminated in the his torical analyses and reflections of Ibn Khaldun in his intro duction to his history. Archaeological objects and sites are seldom subjects of interest for Byzantine and Islamic historians, and archaeo logical proofs are not normally used to support Byzantine or Islamic historical reasoning. Archaeology can serve as an important (but not exclusive) control on both Islamic and Byzantine historiography, however. Actual measurements can enable modern researchers to check the veracity of his torical reports about architecture, distances, and topography (subject to adjustment for alteration by erosion, and sedi-
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: An Overview mentation during the passage of time). Study of toponym ies, terminology, and materials consistent with archaeology and epigraphy can add or diminish the credibility of specific historians' accounts, be they Byzantine or Islamic, for some of tiiese may simply be using topoi or literary/rhetorical em bellishment. T h e methodologies and limitations in such in vestigations are still being developed and require sensitivity. BIBLIOGRAPHY Cameron, Averil, and Lawrence I. Conrad, eds. The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, vol. i , Problems in the Literary Source Ma terial. Princeton, 1992. Important collection of essays on aspects of Byzantine and Islamic historiography. Corpus fontium historiae byzantinae. Berlin, 1967-. New critical editions and translations of Byzantine historical texts by an international group of scholars. Donner, Fred M c G r a w . The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton, 1 9 8 1 . Fundamental discussion of difficulties in interpreting Early Islamic historiography. Duri, 'Abd al-'Aziz. The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs. Translated by Lawrence I. Conrad. Princeton, 1983. Important essay by a leading Arab historian. Humphreys, R. Stephen. Islamic Histoiy: A Framework for Inquiry, Princeton, 1 9 9 1 . The standard introduction to problems of Islamic history and historiography. Hunger, Herbert. Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, vol. 1, Philosophie, Rhetorik, Epistolographie, Geschichtsschreibung, Geographic, pp. 243-504. Munich, 1978. T h e basic study of Byzan tine high-style literature, including histories. Kaegi, Walter E . Byzantium and the Decline of Rome. Princeton, 1968. Study of fifth-century Byzantine historiography. Kaegi, Walter E . Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests. Cam bridge, 1992. Interpretation of Byzantine and Islamic historiography on the early conquests. Karayannopoulos, Ioannes, and Gunter Weiss. Quellenkunde zur Ges chichte von Byzanz, 324-14532 vols. Wiesbaden, 1982. Reference work on Byzantine historical texts and authors. Notli, Albrecht, with Lawrence I. Conrad. The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study. Translated by Michael Bonner. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, 3. Princeton, 1994. A basic reinterpretation and critique of Early Islamic historiography. RosenUial, Franz. A Histoiy of Muslim Historiography. 2d ed. Leiden, 1968. Classic study of Islamic history writing. Sezgin, Fuat. Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 1, Qur'anwissenschaflen, pp. 50-389. Leiden, 1967. Description of Arabic historical writing to 1000 CE. WALTER E . KAEGI
HISTORY OF THE FIELD. [This entry surveys the history of archaeology in the Near East, including a discussion of major figures, discoveries, and excavations, seminal method ological and theoretical developments, and problems of defini tion, chronology, and comparative chronology. It comprises eleven articles: An Overview Archaeology in Syria Archaeology in Israel Archaeology in Jordan Archaeology in Mesopotamia
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Archaeology in Persia Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau Archaeology in Egypt Archaeology in Cyprus Archaeology in the Aegean Islands Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula The first article provides the background of archaeological work in the entire Near East; the subsequent articles focus on a specific country or region. For related discussion, see the entries on each region, (e.g., Palestine; Transjordan; Mesopotamia; Anatolia).] An Overview Heightened interest in classical antiquity and the ancient Near East was one of the most important by-products of the Renaissance and its successor movement, the Enlighten ment. Indeed, so great was the interest in ancient civilization in the sixteenth century that scholars and travelers regularly visited Greece and Italy and the countries that make up the Near East. Collectors of antiques were so numerous they were called dilettanti—those who delighted in the arts. In 1 7 3 2 die Society of Dilettanti was founded in England. Until that time most scholars believed the world was only six thou sand or so years old, calculating its origins based on the Hebrew Masoretic Bible (3740 BCE), the Catholic Vulgate Bible (5199 BCE), or simply accepting the Anglican Arch bishop Usher's calculation of 4004 BCE. At the dawn of the modern period, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all of the ancient world was believed to have fit into this chronological scheme. T h e belief that the world was older than six thousand years was one of the major advances of nineteenth-century scholarship, which came about with the development of prehistoric, scientific archaeology (Trigger, 1989, pp. 7 3 - 1 0 9 ) . Late Eighteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century. It is not surprising that in the late eighteenth century interest in Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations sparked a renewal of exploration and antiquarianism in both. With the christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, Egyptian monuments and writing had either been dese crated or banned, though travelers began visiting the coun try again in the sixteenth century. Their focus, however, was primarily the pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza, familiar already in ancient classical sources. [See Pyramids; Giza.] All of this changed dramatically in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte undertook his expedition to conquer Egypt. Be cause France was at war with Britain at the time, Napoleon no doubt hoped to use Egypt as a land base from which to disrupt British trade with India and die East. In addition to an army of thirty-five thousand, Napoleon took with him 1 7 5 savants, also known as donkeys, who constituted a Commission of Arts and Science; the commission included scientists, geographers, cartographers, architects, Oriental-
38
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: An Overview
ists, artists, and historians (Stiebing, 1993, pp. 56—57; Dan iel, 1 9 8 1 , p. 64). It was in 1799, in the Corps of Engineers, while preparing for a British attack, that the Rosetta Stone was discovered 64 Ion (40 mi.) east of Alexandria. [See Al exandria.] T h e surrender of the French forces in 1 8 0 1 re sulted in the Rosetta Stone's transfer to the British Museum. The commission's scientific results, however, were pub lished by the French in twenty-one volumes. The two-vol ume English summary was published by D. V. Denon as Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt during the Campaigns of General Bonaparte (London, 1802). It is a watershed in Near Eastern scholarship. [See the biography of Denon] Those volumes and tire subsequent decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in 1 8 2 2 by Jean Francois Champollion dem onstrated vividly to Europeans that Near Eastern culture and monuments were as impressive, or even more so, than the remains of classical Greece and Rome. [See the biography of Champollion.] In part as a result of the work of the ad venturer and Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni (who suc ceeded in bringing to the British Museum the colossal gran ite head of Rameses II from Thebes and who began the excavations at Abu Simbel), Europe soon became enamored of ancient Egyptian art and archaeology. [See Abu Simbel] Despite the development later of a more refined method ology for excavation in Egypt by William Flinders Petrie, who spent virtually his entire career excavating there, the plundering and pillaging of sites continued unabated until 1882 and the establishment of the Egyptian Exploration Fund. [See the biography of Petrie] Napoleon's invasion of Egypt also extended to Palestine, which had the effect of bringing even more closely into Western consciousness areas that were familiar because they are mentioned in the Bible. In 1 8 0 1 the English explorer and geographer Edward Daniel Clarke set out to identify the major sites in the Bible. His skeptical views regarding some of the holy sites proved a helpful corrective to most other visitors, who accepted late pilgrim traditions as completely reliable. One of Clarke's students at Cambridge was the Swiss Jean Louis Burckhardt; after learning medicine, Ara bic, and other Oriental subjects, Burckhardt moved to Aleppo for three years, during which time he explored Pal myra and copied inscriptions at many Syrian sites. [See Aleppo; Palmyra.] Subsequently, in disguise as a Muslim sheikh, he explored Transjordan and Palestine, identifying and describing many of the sites not visited by his mentor, including Petra. [See Petra.] Burckhardt went on to Egypt to work at Abu Simbel. He died in Cairo in 1 8 1 7 , and his journals were published posthumously. The Americans who came after Clarke and Burckhardt followed a much more literal line with respect to the accu racy of the Bible. Chief among them was Edward Robinson, professor of Old Testament at Andover Theological Semi nary in Massachusetts, and later at Union Theological Sem inary in New York. [See the biography of Robinson] With a
young missionary from Beirut, Eli Smith, he set out in 1838 to follow tire route of the Exodus from Egypt, following die names and places in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Together they identified hundreds of places from the Bible as they made their way through Sinai, Transjordan, Judea (Judah), Samaria, and Galilee, and then back to Beirut. While they literally created the discipline of historical ge ography, which became the basis for all later fieldwork, they were unable to prove the accuracy of the Bible through their explorations. [See Historical Geography.] What they did, however, was to set the tone for later work, much of which was to be done in the twentieth century and was also to focus primarily on biblical sites. T h e publication of their journey in Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea, (London, 1 8 4 1 ) brought their pioneering work to the attention of the Christian world and transformed what had once been a field dominated by missionaries into the newly constituted field of biblical archaeology (Silberman, 1982, pp. 4 2 - 4 7 ) .
Just as Napoleon's scientific expedition to Egypt had had an imperialist thrust and character to it, so too did British and subsequent French interest in Mesopotamia. It was in 1808 that Claudius James Rich, a linguist and a British res ident of Turkish Arabia, was hired by the British East India Company in Baghdad. All of his free time was spent visiting Mesopotamian ruins and collecting artifacts. His publica tions on Babylon, Nineveh, and Persepolis, among other places, caught the attention of Western readers. [See Bagh dad; Babylon; Nineveh; Persepolis.] They were made even more famous by Lord Byron when he recalled them in Don Juan: Claudius Rich, Esquire, some bricks has got A n d written lately two memoirs upon't.
Rich's personal antiquities collection was subsequently pur chased by the British Museum and constituted die first ma jor exhibition of Mesopotamian antiquities in a European museum. So great was the public interest in Rich's memoirs, which appeared posthumously in 1836, that French interest in the region greatly accelerated. As a result, a prominent scholar and antiquarian, Emile Botta, was appointed French consul in Mosul in 1842. [See the biography of Botta] He immediately began excavations at Nineveh in 1 8 4 2 , across the Tigris River from Mosul, and in Khorsabad in 1843. [See Tigris; Khorsabad.] These were the first excavations ever in Mesopotamia (Daniel, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 7 2 - 7 5 ) . Botta's work at Khorsabad revealed it to be the city of Sargon II ( 7 2 1 - 7 0 5 BCE), Dur Sharrukin. Botta and his artist, M. E. Flandin, published the results of their work at Nineveh in 1 8 4 9 - 1 8 5 0 in five volumes; in 1846 many of Khorsabad's finest sculp tures arrived at the Louvre museum in Paris, where they are still displayed. [See Museums and Museology.] Prior to Rich's explorations and Botta's excavations, a small number of individuals had been involved in the deci-
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: An Overview pherment of cuneiform, paralleling developments that had surrounded the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. [See Cuneiform; Hieroglyphs; Inscriptions.] In 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend, using copies of two short cuneiform inscriptions from Persia, announced his ttanslation results to the Gottingen Academy of Sciences—which refused to publish them. Thirty-three years later, in 1 8 3 5 , Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, unmindful of Grotefend's research, du plicated those results when he was stationed some 35 km (22 mi.) from Bisitun in Persia as a cadet in the British East India Company. [See Bisitun; and the biography of Rawlinson.] By 1837 he had copied and translated half of the Bisitun in scriptions ordered in 5 1 6 BCE by Darius I Hystapes ( 5 2 1 485 BCE) and written in Old Persian and Elamite. [See Per sian; Elamites.] In 1 8 3 7 and in 1 8 3 9 , he presented his results to the Royal Asiatic Society. All four hundred lines of the inscriptions appeared in translation in the society's journal in 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 4 7 (Stiebing, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 94-95). At about this time, a lasting friendship between the Frenchman, Botta, and an Englishman by tire name of Aus ten Henry Layard had already been made. [See the biography ofLayard.] T h e two had met in 1 8 4 2 and maintained a close relationship throughout their lives, despite the fact that their respective nations saw their work as competitive. In 1 8 4 5 Layard began his own excavations at Nimrud, where he dis covered the palaces of the Assyrian ldngs Ashurnasirpal, Esarhaddon, and Shalmaneser III; the most famous of the artifacts Layard shipped to the British Museum included the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II and the sculptures of Ashurnasirpal. Layard's work was covered by a reporter for the Morning Post in 1847 and made him an instant celebrity. His popular account of his work, Nineveh and its Remains (New York, 1849), became Near Eastern archaeology's first bestseller (Daniel, 1 9 8 1 , p. 7 5 ) . Though Botta and Layard disagreed as to which site was Nineveh—Botta thought Khorsabad was, Layard thought Nimrud was—their com bined archaeological work, their extensive publications and popular readership, and the spectacular exhibits at the Lou vre and British Museum presented Near Eastern archae ology in new ways to the public and to die scholarly com munity. What began as a friendly competition between the British and French archaeological missions, however, soon deteriorated into a "frantic scramble" between them, ending temporarily with the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1 8 5 5 (Stiebing, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 1 0 6 - 1 0 9 ) . Defining Period. Witii the cessation of excavations at mid-century, the emphasis in Near Eastern scholarship shifted to linguistic study of die enormous array of cunei form that had reached libraries in the West. One of the im mediate results was die discovery of Sumerian. [See Sumerian.] Even more dramatic, perhaps, was die discovery by George Adam Smith in 1872 of the story of the Flood among the tablets found at Nineveh. [See the biography of Smith.] A missing section of the account led to the reexamination of
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the debris at Kuyunjik in 1 8 7 3 , where, on the fifth day, Smith discovered the missing seventeen lines of the Meso potamian story. The expedition was funded and covered by the London Daily Telegraph. Given the remarkable similar ity to the biblical story of the Flood in Genesis, public interest in Near Eastern archaeology was once again drawn to the Bible and the land of the Bible, even as further work in Mes opotamia and Egypt continued to prosper. Interest in the Sumerians inspired the work of the University of Pennsyl vania at Nippur in 1888, begun rather unsuccessfully by John Prunnett Peters but culminated more successfully un der the direction of Hermann Hilprecht in 1899-1900. [See Sumerians; Nippur; and the biographies of Peters and Hil precht.] A similar interest was focused on the Hittites, in part because they were mentioned in the Bible as a great power (2 Kgs. 7:6), and in part because Assyrian and Egyptian doc uments confirmed it. [See Hittites; Assyrians.] The culmi nation of these efforts came in 1906, when the German Assyriologist Hugo Winkler began excavations at Bogazkoy and discovered a cache of Hittite cuneiform tablets. [See Bo gazkoy.] This excavation and the decipherment of the tab lets and identification of Hittite as an Indo-European lan guage led to the certain knowledge that Bogazkoy had been the capital of die Hittite Empire (Stiebing, 1993, pp. 1 1 3 1 1 4 ) . [See Hittite; Indo-European Languages.] From 1899 to 1 9 1 7 the German Oriental Society exca vated the ruins of Babylon, under the directorship of Robert Koldewey. [See Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft; Babylon; and the biography of Koldewey.] Though others had explored and dug at the site, there had been no significant finds of basreliefs. Koldewey, who had excavated in Italy, Sicily, Syria, and in the Aegean, was an experienced field person who trained a core of workmen to excavate carefully and slowly. The results were astounding, as he soon uncovered the great city wall of Nebuchadrezzar II (605-562 BCE) and deter mined that Babylon's circumference was some 18 km ( 1 1 mi.), malting it the largest city of its time. He also discovered the ziggurat, or stepped tower, on which a Temple of Marduk had once stood approximately 100 m high. [See Zig gurat.] Most spectacular, however, was the discovery of the Processional Way leading to the temple, a roadway lined with walls decorated with colorfully glazed bricks and fea turing reliefs of bulls, lions, and sacred dragons. Where the Processional Way passed through a monumental gate dec orated in glazed blue bricks he located and identified the Ishtar Gate, subsequendy completely reconstructed and ex hibited at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin—a feat equaling Koldewey's fieldwork. During the time that such significant progress was being made in Near Eastern archaeology in the broadest sense, more and more interest was being directed to the heardand of that vast region, Syria-Palestine. Contributing to this were the colonial interests of the great powers and their specific interest in the lands of the Bible, which had only recently
40
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: An Overview
been explored by the Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith. It is significant tiiat Americans first focused on Pal estine, and Europeans on Egypt and Mesopotamia. In due course, die scales would balance: in die second half of" the nineteenth century, all nationalities would be firmly estab lished in the region, and, by the end of the century, with major societies and institutes to guide them. [See National ism and Archaeology.] American colonial interest combined with an awareness of the area's biblical heritage inspired the first U.S. naval expedition to investigate the possibility of establishing a ttade route in die Holy Land. In particular, the Americans chose to circumnavigate the Dead Sea, ex plore the biblical cities around it, and sail the Jordan River. William Francis Lynch conducted this mission in 1 8 4 7 1848, setting sail from the Sea of Galilee in two metal ships, the Fanny Mason and Fanny Skinner. During the trip down the Jordan River, the expedition mapped its course and de scribed its environment. Thirteen months after they had left the United States they completed tiieir explorations. T h e results of the work were published in 1849 and 1 8 5 2 (Silberman, 1982, pp. 5 1 - 6 2 ; King, 1983, p. 6). The proposal to open a trade route through the Holy Land was never accepted by the U.S. government, while the attendant pub licity surrounding the Lynch expedition had the effect of arousing even greater interest in the Holy Land among Americans. Missionaries described their visits to the Holy Land, and even P. T. Barnurn sent the director of his Amer ican Museum to Palestine to collect antiquities for display (Silberman, 1982, p. 62). In 1842, just prior to the Lynch expedition, the American Oriental Society had been established to promote the study of Asian and African languages and interest in ancient Mes opotamia in particular. Edward Robinson, the explorer of Palestine and a Semitist, became president in 1846. In 1865 the British established die Palestine Exploration Fund to promote scientific exploration of the Holy Land, sending Charles W. Wilson to oversee the mapping of Jerusalem in 1867. [See Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biography of Wilson.] In 1 8 7 2 - 1 8 7 8 the British conducted the geograph ical survey of western Palestine, in which ten thousand sites were mapped; a limited survey of eastern Palestine followed in 1 8 8 1 . It was during this remarkable period of intense in terest in the Holy Land that the ill-fated American Palestine Exploration Society was established ( 1 8 7 0 - 1 8 8 4 ) . [See American Palestine Exploration Society.] A forerunner of the American School(s) of Oriental Research (ASOR), the purpose of the society was "the illustration and defense of the Bible" (King, 1983, p. 8). Because the British had con centrated tiieir efforts on explorations west of the Jordan, the Americans focused their efforts on Transjordan. Those early explorations were led by Selah Merrill and published as East of the Jordan (London, 1 8 8 1 ) . [See the biography of Merrill.] As a result of lack of funds, internal bickering, and its limited purview, the society was dissolved in 1884. T h e
Germans established their society for the exploration of Pal estine (Deutscher Palastina-Verein) in 1 8 7 7 . [See Deutscher Palastina-Verein.] It too was modeled after the British so ciety and, like its American predecessor, had a distinctively Lutheran and biblical orientation. In 1890 the French D o minicans established the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem, which resembled the British, Ger man, and defunct American societies. [See Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise.] It was in such a context that ASOR was established in 1900, its existence called forth by a series of pressures that had been building in America since the beginning of the nineteenth century. T h e three parent societies that were in strumental in its founding represented the diverse strands of American scholarship affecting Near Eastern scholarship at the time: T h e American Oriental Society, preoccupied with the linguistic and literary heritage of Mesopotamia; the Ar chaeological Institute of America, focused on the West and most closely allied to the schools in Rome and Athens; and the Society of Biblical Literature, preeminent in promoting biblical scholarship. [See Archaeological Institute of Amer ica; Society of Biblical Literature.] Given all that had pre ceded, the founding of ASOR was inevitable. Given its sponsors, it was clear from the outset that its home in the Near East would be in Jerusalem and that its ties to Trans jordan, Mesopotamia, and Egypt would remain in place permanentiy. America's unique attachment to the Bible and its allied civilizations, therefore, has been the central motivating factor in ASOR's history since its founding (King, 1983, pp. 2 5 - 2 8 ) . [See American Schools of Oriental Research.] T h e centrality of biblical archaeology as a major stream in Near Eastern archaeology is thus very much a result of the Western preference for the languages, literatures, and cultures that illuminate aspects of its own tradition and cul ture. T o some cultural critics this is the stuff of Orientalism at its worst: " T o reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient" (Said, 1978, p. 1 2 3 ) . T o be sure, Western interests in re covering the archaeological heritage of the Near East were tied to imperial, colonial, and Judaeo-Christian goals. Be that as it may, the emergence of a more detached scientific archaeology and advanced philology in more recent gener ations has only increased what is understood and appreci ated of those cultures. What motivated the spiritual fore bears of Near Eastern archaeology may no longer exist. However, it is important also to recognize that the founding fathers of a scientific archaeology in the twentieth century had other shortcomings and prejudices beside their com mitment to bolster the Bible, just as their nineteenth-century counterparts had. Twentieth Century. T h e founding of ASOR in 1900, just ten years after the French school and ten years after Petrie's excavations at Tell el-Hesi in Palestine, signaled the beginning of a new era in Near Eastern archaeology, one
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: An Overview that witnessed the growth of the overseas national institutes for Near Eastern research and related studies. [See Hesi, Tell el-.] Petrie's work in Egypt in behalf of the Egypt Explora tion Fund prior to his excavations in Palestine had laid the groundwork for ceramic typology, seriation analysis, and comparative dating. Petrie even visited Mycenae to test his dating of his finds at Gurob and Kahun, establishing a syn chronism between "proto-Greek" ware and Egypt's twelfth dynasty and identifying some of the foreign pottery from Egypt as Aegean and proto-Greek ware. He published the methods of digging and ceramic typology he developed as Methods and Aims in Archaeology (New York, 1904). The principles enunciated in tiiat work resonate well even with today's exacting standards: conservation of monuments, meticulous recording and collecting of data, accurate re cording and planning of all monuments and areas of exca vation, and timely publication of all results. [See Conserva tion Archaeology; Recording Techniques; Excavation Strategy.] His criteria for analyzing ceramics are still used. Flis American counterpart in the early part of the twentieth century was George A. Reisner, whose excavations at Sa maria were to become a showcase for American methods. [See Samaria; and the biography of Reisner.] What has only emerged in recent scholarship, however, is that Petrie's interpretative scheme, by means of which he distinguished between periods of racial domination by groups of abler peoples, was based on contemporary theo ries of racial superiority. [See Eugenics Movement.] In eval uating the reasons for the rise and fall of civilizations, Petrie embraced such views. Building also upon historical ideas of the rise and fall of civilizations, he attributed the decline of certain populations to inbreeding among their subjects. In adopting such a scheme, Petrie was not alone. R. A. S. Macalister, the famed Irish archaeologist who excavated Tel Gezer, also adhered to such an interpretative scheme, claim ing that tile ancient Semites, Hebrews, Arabs, and other civ ilizations had absorbed all their most important elements of civilization from neighboring cultures (Bunimovitz, 1 9 9 5 , pp. 6 0 - 6 1 ) . [See Gezer; and the biography of Macalister.] Looking back again at these old pioneers in field archae ology, it is difficult to dispute the accuracy of cultural critics like Edward Said (1978) who have questioned the motives of many of the first Orientalists committed to imposing Western rubrics of thought, values, and standards of supe riority on the region's "primitive cultures." It is not difficult to see how much improved the situation became when scholars such as William Foxwell Albright, George Ernest Wright, and Nelson Glueck dominated the field of Palestinian/biblical archaeology from about 1920 to 1970, especially in terms of recording and field methods. [See Biblical Archaeology; and the biographies of Albright, Wright, and Glueck.] Each of these scholars and others— Roland de Vaux, Kathleen M . Kenyon, and Yigael Yadin— introduced numerous refinements of method to the disci
41
pline, as well as new insights into long-standing problems and issues. [See the biographies of Vaux, Kenyon, and Yadin.} The fact remains, however, that all of them worked within the interpretative framework of biblical history and theology. T o be sure, each no doubt gave greater credence to the ar chaeological data when there was a clash with biblical tra dition or history. However, the Bible stood very much at the core of their work, just as it undergirded the quest of their nineteenth-century forbears for synchronicity between the Bible and contemporary scientific explanations of its history and culture. If anything, such a bibliocentrisim contributed to the growing perception that Westerners were more inter ested in tracing their roots than in exploring the full range of the region's cultures. In so doing it could be argued that the Americans, tike the British, French, and Germans before them and alongside them, imposed something of themselves upon the Near East and were also very much in the Orien talist tradition. It must also be said, however, tiiat as much as tiiis might have been a shortcoming, especially in view of the Near East today being overwhelmingly Islamic, it also provided the money, enthusiasm, and determination to ad vance a complex subject and discipline (Cooper, 1992). T h e 1970s inaugurated an era that saw the decline of bib lical archaeology and the emergence of a multidisciplinary approach frequently called the New Archaeology. [See New Archaeology.] Many individual aspects of this new ap proach had been anticipated in die earlier research of Amer ican and other scholars. Regional studies had been con ducted by Glueck in Transjordan, and Robert J. Braidwood had studied the origins of agriculture in Kurdistan in the 1940s. Surface surveys had been conducted by all die na tional schools in virtually all regions of the Near East. The introduction of new technologies in the 1970s and after, es pecially, for example, the computer, resistivitors, high-res olution photography, D N A analysis, and neutron activation analysis and all the other items tiiat made digging more ef ficient, also moved die discipline toward maturation. [See Computer Mapping; Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpretation; Photography; Neutton Activation Analysis; Ethics and Archaeology.] Similarly, the emergence of new subdisciplines, such as gender studies and cultural studies, makes the contemporary archaeologist more sensitive to no menclature, to the categories assigned to artifacts, and to interpretative strategies for understanding diverse and com plex groups of evidence. [See Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnobotany; Ethnozoology.] T h e archaeology of the ancient Near East is at last at home in the richness of the diversity of its cultures and traditions, having advanced beyond the nar rower confines of its past. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bunimovitz, Shlomo. "How Mute Stones Speak: Interpreting What We Dig U p . " Biblical Archaeology Review 2 1 . 2 (1995): 58-67. Thoughtful
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Syria
review exposing the interpretive strategies that influenced some of this century's greatest archaeologists. Cooper, Jerrold S. "From Mosul to Manila: Early Approaches to Fund ing Ancient Near Eastern Studies Research in the United States." In Culture and History II, edited by Ann Gunter, pp. 1 3 3 - 1 6 3 . Copen hagen, 1992. Insightful review of the circumstances and context in fluencing the funding of Near Eastern research. Daniel, Glyn E . A Short History ofArchaeology. London, 1981. Excellent overview of the place of archaeology in the broader context of the study of the human past. King, Philip J . American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Valuable study of A S O R ' s history, with important historical infor mation regarding the emergence of European interest in Near East ern and biblical archaeology. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York, 1978. Programmatic essay about Western attitudes toward the "Orient," an area embracing the Islamic Near East. Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Ar chaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917. New York, 1982. Engaging and authoritative account of early American and European interests in excavating ancient Palestine. Stiebing, William H. Uncovering the Past: A History ofArchaeology. New York, 1993. Concise and reliable guide to the history of the discipline, widi an especially strong section on the Near East. Trigger, Bruce G . A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge, 1989. Definitive treatment of the place of archaeological thought and theory in the history of ideas, from medieval times to the present. ERIC M . MEYERS
Archaeology in Syria In the middle of die nineteenth century, when Europeans were beginning to take an active interest in excavating Near Eastern sites, especially ancient ruins dating to the Assyrian period, Henry Austen Layard made brief soundings at a site on the Khabur River in northeastern Syria, Tell Hajajah (Assyrian Shadikanni, called Araban in tenth-century Ara bic sources). The imposing ruins of Tell Halaf (ancient Guzana) led Max von Oppenheim to excavate there in 1899, 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 1 4 , and 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 2 9 . Carchemish, which had been identified by die geographer George Adam Smith in 1876, was excavated by David G. Hogarth and C. Leonard Woolley in 1 9 0 8 - 1 9 1 1 and 1920. In 1902 German excavations were begun at Palmyra (continued in 1 9 1 7 under Theodor Wiegand); although previous studies had been made there, this was the beginning of research on the city as a whole. In i860 Ernest Renan made soundings at the coastal sites of Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon and on the island of Arwad for the French Mission to Phoenicia. The impetus for these excavations was the discovery of original sources related to the Bible and biblical peoples. However, they were also driven by die recovery of the mon umental architecture and large-scale reliefs decorating As syrian and Neo-Hittite palaces. Cuneiform inscriptions writ ten on these reliefs were deciphered by European scholars in the late nineteenth century. A lively interest in Europe for cuneiform texts had begun as early as 1625, when an Italian
traveler, Pietro della Valle, brought back the first cuneiform inscriptions. In 1897 the French Assyriologist Francois T h u reau-Dangin published a tablet from the area of Terqa on die Euphrates River; this was the first cuneiform tablet to be published from Syria, although it was not recognized as such at the time. Between the two wars, large first-millennium BCE sites in northern and eastern Syria continued to interest excavators. In 1928 Thureau-Dangin, Maurice Dunand, and Georges Dossin began excavations at Arslan Tash (Hadatu). Previ ously, a group of Neo-Assyrian sculptures dating to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III had been recovered there. Part of the provincial palace and ivories dating to the eighth cen tury were discovered. Tell Ahmar (ancient Til Barsip, also called Kar Shalmaneser) was excavated in three campaigns ( 1 9 2 9 - 1 9 3 1 ) by the same team from the Louvre museum. They established that it had been an important city in the state of Bit Adini and that its palace had been decorated with Neo-Hittite sculpture (similar to those previously recorded at Carchemish). Rarely preserved Assyrian wall paintings dated near to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III were also re covered, as well as a hypogeum dating to the third millen nium. [See Wall Paintings.] In 1988 Guy Bunnens renewed those excavations. He has excavated two large Assyrian houses containing objects (including ivories) acquired through the city's international contacts. Before the advent of satellite photos, Antoine Poidebard in 1 9 2 7 utilized air photos of sites in eastern Syria in his research (Poidebard, 1934). This early use of air photos was followed at the Mari excavations by a photo of the palace when excavation was completed. Kite photos were taken by Robert Anderson at Dipsi Faraj and later at Terqa. Kite or balloon photos are by now standard on many excavations in Syria. Prehistoric Sites. The surge of excavations at prehistoric Syrian sites has revolutionized what is known of die period's social and economic development. Multidisciplinary ap proaches to excavation have revealed more about die Pale olithic lithic technology and social interaction from sites with evidence of Homo erectus and evenmally of Homo sapiens sapiens. Prehistoric sites are rich in the area of el-Kowm near Palmyra, particularly at U m m el-Tlel (Jacques Cauvin) and Nadawiyah I (Sultan Muhesen and Jean Marie Le Tensorer). Discoveries that profoundly altered what was known of later prehistory came from excavations on the Middle Euphrates River, where the evidence demonstrated that the establishment of permanent settlements and the ttansition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and animal do mestication were separate stages. Settlement in permanent villages with a high economic and cultural standard devel oped without similar advances in agriculture and animal do mestication. The Late Natufian village at Abu Hureyra 1 (Andrew Moore) engaged in specialized hunting practices (mostly gazelles) and gathered a wide variety of plants
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Syria (more than 1 5 0 species); this specialization presupposed permanancy. At Abu Hureyra 2 , settled in about 9000 BCE, agriculture was practiced but wild-plant gatiiering contin ued; meat mostiy came from wild gazelles. In about 8000 BCE this changed, and most of the population was engaged in cereal production and raising domesticated sheep and goats. [See Cereals; Sheep and Goats.] In die second half of the seventh millennium, new ecological zones were ex ploited, as in the village of Bouqras, in an arid zone along the Middle Euphrates. From there, substantial domestic ar chitecture, in some cases decorated with painted plaster or painted reliefs, and small, but exceptionally fine, human fig ures and stone vessels were found. Starting in the 1960s, interest was renewed in excavating Flalaf sites, especially in the heartland of the Halaf culture along the Upper Khabur, the Balikh, and the Middle Eu phrates Rivers. At Tell Sabi Abyad, in the Balikh, excava tions directed by Peter M. M. G. Akkermans have shown that the earliest phases of the Halaf culture developed grad ually out of the preceding local Neolithic culture (and not, as previously thought, imported from northern Iraq). Dur ing the Ubaid period the intensification of international con tacts included North Syria, but thus far few sites from this period have been excavated. An exception is Tell 'Abr (Hamid Hammade); at Tell Bisnada, east of Latalda, Ubaid ma terial has been found in limited soundings. [See Syria, article on Prehistoric Syria.] Coastal and Central Syria. In 1928 a local farmer dis covered a tomb in the area of Minet el-Beida that attracted the attention of the French archaeologist Claude F.-A. Schaeffer. In tire following year he began excavations at this ancient port and at the nearby site of Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit. Almost immediately the excavations at Ugarit pro duced a number of texts, tire most startling of which are alphabetic cuneiform texts from the fourteenth-thirteenth centuries BCE. Other texts written in Akkadian, Hittite, and Hurrian attest to tire international contacts of this coastal city. The Ugaritic texts are also important because of their relevance to studies in Hebrew Bible. [See Ugarit Inscrip tions.] A large royal palace with its offices and workshops was excavated in addition to the temples of Baal and Dagan. Work continued at die site, with an interruption during the World War II, under Schaeffer's direction until the mid1970s; the present French director is Marguerite Yon. Of major importance for the history of Ugarit and coastal Syria are the recent Syrian-French excavations carried out under Adnan Bounni, Elizabeth Lagarce, and Jacques Lagarce at the site of Ras Ibn Hani, located a short distance from Ugarit, and situated directiy on the coast. There, two thirteenth-century BCE residential palaces served as admin istrative centers; as a result of their ongoing research, a va riety of Ugaritic texts—including letters and ritual and ad ministrative texts—have been found. Tell Sukas, the ancient city called Shuksu in the Ugarit texts, had previously been
43
excavated along the coast by P. J. Riis. Excavations at Tell al-Kazel (probably ancient Simira), initiated by Bounni and continuing under Leila Badre, have shed light on one of the most important Late Bronze sites on the coast (probably a New Kingdom Egyptian administrative center and then a major city of the kingdom of Ammuru). [See Amorites.] Im portant late third-millennium remains, also exhibiting Egyp tian connections, are now being uncovered at Tell Sianu, in centtal Syria, by Bounni and Michel al-Maqdissi. Bounni, the director of excavations in the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, is noted as an exca vator for his historic work at Palmyra (begun in 1957) in the Valley of the Tombs, the Temple of Nabu, the main street, the agora, die theater, the nymphaea A and B, and the Street of Ba'al Shamin (Bounni, 1982). In addition he has exca vated a large number of sites from the third millennium BCE to the Roman period. His colleague, Nassib Saliby, an au thority on Pafmyrene architecture and prominent Islamic architectural monuments, is excavating at the Damascus cit adel and carrying out a number of salvage projects in the city. Inner Syria has had a long history of archaeological work, starting with the activities of Maurice Pezard at Tell Nebi Mend in 1 9 2 1 . Recent excavations (Peter Parr) have found a Middle Bronze Age city wall and monumental Late Bronze Age buildings. Four seasons of excavations were conducted by Robert du Mesnil du Buisson at Mishrifeh/Qatna from 1926 to 1929. Qatna's M B and LB texts of temple inven tories give a king list for the city during a portion of the fifteenth century BCE, before its destruction. He also worked at several sites north of Hama, including Tell Suran, Tell As, and Khan Sheikhun, which gave the first indication of the importance of this area for the third millennium. Exca vations at Tell Qarqur are being conducted by the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) under the direction of Rudolph H. Dornemann. T h e Hama excavations ( 1 9 3 2 I939).i directed by Harald Ingholt and Riis, established a stratified sequence of pottery that is linked to the sequence in the 'Amuq region, thus giving a firm ceramic chronology for this area. The site that has most revolutionized what is known of the importance of northern Syria from the middle of the third to die middle of the second millennium (2400-1600 BCE) is the ancient city of Ebla, modern Tell Mardikh. Ex cavations began there under Paolo Matthiae in 1964; he spe cifically set out to test the hypothesis that third-millennium Syria had been a major urban civilization, parallel to con temporary civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was only after ten years of excavation that the Ebla archive was discovered, confirming the city's ancient name. [See Ebla Texts.] Matthiae is almost single-handedly responsible for third-millennium urban Syria taking its place in the scholarly literature. The archive came from a palace complex that in addition yielded the remains of wood inlays, parts of ala-
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Syria
baster and diorite vessels from pharaonic Egypt, gold and lapis objects, and a large amount of unworked lapis. T h e military campaigns of Sargon and his grandson Naram-Sin destroyed the city. It revived at the beginning of the second millennium BCE, when a large palace and several temples were constructed. The excavation of the royal tombs of the period from 1800 to 1 6 5 0 BCE exhibit the city's immense wealth and the international contacts of its rulers in botii Anatolia and Egypt. The excavations at Ebla transformed what was known of the importance of cities in Syria during die third millennium, highlighting their central role in the era's internationalism, which previously had been under stood to have only begun in the Late Bronze Age (Matthiae, 1980).
Matthiae began excavating near Ebla, at the first-millen nium site BCE of Tell Afis (ancient Apesh?); that work is now being directed by a member of the Ebla excavation team, Stefanie Mazzoni, who has published ceramics and jar sealings from Ebla (Mazzoni, 1985, 1992). Excavation at Tell Afis has uncovered an uninterrupted sequence of strata bridging die crucial period between the end of the Late Bronze and the beginning of the Iron Age. Recently, sub stantial Chalcolithic remains were also uncovered. North of Aleppo, excavations at the site of 'Ain Dara , directed most recently by Ali Abou Assaf and Wahid Khayyata, have identified the city potentially as ancient Kinalua, often mentioned in Neo-Assyrian annals; the excavations have found a hilani-type palace and a large temple decorated with Neo-Hittite-style orthostats; two stone thresholds were decorated witii three large footprints pointing toward die temple interior. Salvage Projects. With Syrian independence in 1946 and the establishment of the Syrian Directorate General of An tiquities and Museums, the new administration of the cul tural inheritance of the country concentrated on decentral izing Syria's museums by building a major museum in Aleppo to supplement the collections in Damascus. Smaller museums were established in Palmyra, Hama, Tartus, Horns, Latakia, ar-Raqqa, and Idlib; most recently a major new museum was constructed in Deir ez-Zor. The depart ment's policy from the beginning has been to encourage for eign excavation—by European, American, and Japanese teams. A phenomenon that has characterized Syrian archaeology of the last few decades is the prevalence of salvage opera tions. Starting in the 1960s the construction of large dams on the Euphrates and Khabur Rivers necessitated the rescue of ancient sites. The most important of tiiese is the Tabqa dam, which formed a lake covering an area of 80 X 8 km (50 X 5 mi.) Answering a call issued by the Syrian govern ment through U N E S C O , an international team of archae ologists worked between 1967 and 1974 to excavate sites ranging in date from die ninth millennium BCE to the fif teenth century CE (Freedman, 1979). A sense of the opening c
up of a new archaeological frontier resulted from the ex panded information about this region. Revolutionary dis coveries were made for the fourth millennium, especially at Tell Kannas (Andre Finet) and Habuba Kabira (Ernst Heinrich and Eva Strommenger), where a large, important setdement, including niched temples whose architectural plan resembles contemporary Uruk period temples in south ern Mesopotamia, were excavated; in addition, the ceramic and glyptic material is very close to the south. At Jebel 'Aruda (H. J. Franken and Sander E. van der Leeuw), sim ilar Uruk IV remains were found. The significance of salt sources near these sites and die connection of the salt-re finement process with beveled-rim bowls was shown in part from the American excavations farther downstream at Qraya. New French excavations at Tell Mashnaqa and Ramadi, near Mari, are extending what is known of the Uruk connection. The revelation of a strong Uruk presence ("col onies") in the Euphrates bend region of Syria has entirely changed the view of fourth-millennium Uruk culture. In ad dition, it has confirmed die strength of the regional Syrian material culture that reasserted itself immediately after the cessation of the Uruk incursion. Sites with later occupation included Tell Hadidi, with a very well-documented ceramic sequence from the beginning of the third to the middle of the second millennia BCE. Tell Selenkahiyeh, a large thirdmillennium site, yielded twelve important private houses in the heart of the city that give a picture of its economic or ganization. At Tell Halawa, Winfried Orthmann uncovered important third-millennium strata, including a temple. Ma jor second-millennium BCE levels were discovered at Meskene where an archive of approximately fifteen hundred cu neiform texts has identified the city as Emar. T h e excavator, Jean-Claude Margueron, uncovered a number of sttuctures from the fourteenth- and thirteenth-centuries BCE, when this region was under Hittite domination. T h e structures in cluded two long-room type temples and a governor's palace of the hilani type, characteristic of the first millennium BCE. Similar temples were also excavated at Tell Mumbaqat and Tell Fray. Appeals by the Syrian government through U N E S C O were also connected with the construction of a dam along the Euphrates near the Syro-Turkish border (the Tishrin dam) and two near Hassekeh, one south of the city and one to the west. South of Hassekeh, excavations concentrated on small sites along the course of the Khabur River. T h e excavation of one of them, Tell 'Atij, by Michel Fortin (1986-1988, 1 9 9 2 - 1 9 9 3 ) , has illuminated the specialized economic importance of this area in the early third millen nium. He was the first to uncover a series of granaries that could store large amounts for later shipment to otiier areas (e.g., to Tell Brak or areas to the south). Subsequent exca vations at nearby Ziyada and Tell Raqa'i revealed similar facilities. [See Food Storage.] The excavations at Tell T u neinir under Michael Fuller found an early church and an
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Syria Ayyubid bath. [See Baths.] A deep sounding confirmed the site's third-millennium occupation. Northwest of Hassekeh, Tell Kashkashuk III (Antoine Soleiman) had important re mains from the mid-third millennium, including what prob ably is a temple and a tomb with the skeleton of a young woman with more than six thousand beads of various ma terials, including gold, lapis, and rock crystal. He is also ex cavating a Neo-As Syrian site (Tell Boueid) with a large ad ministrative building and a number of jar burials. In the Tishrin dam area, die Late Bronze strata of el-Qitar (Thomas L. McClellan) reveal a city organized around u p per and lower sections. T h e city was probably destroyed by a campaign of Thutmosis III. This area was important in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period as is being shown by the excavations at Tell Halula (M. Molist) and Ja'det al-Maghara (Danielle Stordeur). E a s t e r n Syria. The landscape of eastern Syria is domi nated by numerous mounds along the Middle Euphrates River, witii its main tributaries the Khabur and the Balikh. In the period between die two world wars, partly as a con sequence of the discoveries at Ugarit, European archaeolo gists took a greater interest in excavations in Syria. In 1 9 3 3 Andre Parrot began excavating at Tell Hariri, which William Foxwell Albright had proposed identifying with the ancient city of Mari, attested in the Sumerian long lists. T h e early years of excavation at Mari uncovered the Zimrilim palace, excellently preserved with a vast number of cuneiform texts relating to palace activities, including a diplomatic archive. T h e archaeological remains both for the third and early part of the second millennium BCE, until the destruction of the city in about 1760 BCE by Hammurabi of Babylon, attest to the importance of this urban center and to Mari's border position between the cities of southern Mesopotamia and the urban centers and fertile countryside of northern and western Syria. There too a large palace dating to the third millennium has been partiy excavated along with a major temple dedicated to Ishtar. The new program of research at Mari, under Margueron's direction, has concentrated on enlarging the area where excavations and soundings have been conducted, in order to study the urban plan. In addition, he has initiated a regional study to understand better the reasons for the placement of the city on this part of the river, as well as its geographic and ecological relationship with the surrounding countryside. This research has concluded that when the city was founded in the early part of the third millennium, a series of canals and an artificial lake were constructed in order to utilize the Euphrates River basin for agriculture. The most important of these canals ( 1 2 0 km long) con nected Mari directly with the Khabur River. The width of this canal ( 1 1 m) allowed river craft to shorten the trip south and avoid the turbulent intersection of the Khabur with the Euphrates. T h e city therefore controlled both river traffic and probably also die overland caravan route. This new pro
45
gram of archaeological research, combined with new in itiatives connected with the publication of the Mari texts (Jean-Marie Durand), is of profound importance for understanding all of Syria in the Mari period. The narrowness of the Euphrates River valley in south eastern Syria permits the existence of only one major city at any given time. After the destruction of Mari, Terqa (about 60 Ion, or 37 mi., north of Mari, near the juncture of the Khabur and the Euphrates) became the major urban center. Excavations at Terqa, conducted by Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati between 1976 and 1984, uncovered an administrative building from the Khana period ( 1 7 6 0 1600 BCE), a complex of artifacts identified as the "office" of a scribe. From this same period a temple of Ninkarrak contained a hoard of 6,637 beads, including seven contem porary scarabs. In the burnt house of Puzurum, the exca vators found a storage room witii a number of sealed con tracts; in tiiis same house a pantry contained a jar with cloves inside. Before Roman times, cloves had to come from the Melakas (Moluccas, Spice Islands) in Indonesia. In the ex cavations of Olivier Rouault and Maria Grazia MasettiRouault, tablets dating to the Late Khana period and down into the Mitanni period have been discovered. [SeeMitanni.] Along the Khabur River south of Hassekeh, the site of Sheikh Hamad (ancient Dur Katlimmu) has been excavated since 1978 by Hartmut Kuhne, in collaboration with the Assyriologist Wolfgang Rollig. A Middle Assyrian palace on the highest part of the mound contained five hundred and fifty tablets dating to the reigns of Shalmaneser I and Tukulti-Ninurta I. In the Lower City, a building with a hilanitype reception area contained an archive of thirty-five tablets written in three languages: Assyrian, Babylonian, and Ara maic. Also in the Lower City (building G ) , cuneiform tab lets dating to the reign of Nebuchadrezzar yielded the first evidence of a Neo-Babylonian presence in Syria. Kuhne's extensive excavations have provided the most complete un derstanding of the importance of the Assyrian period in east ern Syria. At the site of Tell Hajajah (ancient Shadikanni), excavations were begun by As'ad Mahmoud in 1982, who rediscovered Layard's excavation trenches and uncovered part of the ninth-century BCE governor's palace decorated with relief orthostats and glazed bricks. T o the north, in the Khabur triangle, pioneering excava tions were carried out by M. E. L. Mallowan. T h e site of Chaghar Bazar ( 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 3 7 ) was significant in the Halaf pe riod, as was all of the Wadi Dar'a region. The excavations discovered an archive of cuneiform documents from the early second millennium BCE onward. The stratified se quence of pottery from die third and the second millennia BCE, especially the sequence of painted Khabur ware, be came the basis on which many of the other sites in the area were later dated. During this same period, Mallowan began excavations at one of the largest sites in eastern Syria, Tell Brak (Mallowan, 1947). Brak was an extensive city as early
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Syria
as the Uruk period; its Eye Temple was built on a southern model with a high terrace and a tripartite plan with an elab orately decorated podium. The "palace" of Naram-Sin can more likely be identified as a royal storehouse tiiat sustained his subsequent military activities in western Syria. Mallowan's example of the rapid publication of his primary ex cavation data (in Iraq) was followed by the present exca vators of Brak, David and Joan Oates, who resumed excavations there in 1976. From the Akkadian period they have excavated a large ceremonial complex containing a temple (area SS); in this complex a beautiful statue of a reclining human-headed bull in one of the ritual objects found. Impressive architectural remains from the Mitanni period include a palace and a temple. The Brak excavations are one of the primary benchmarks of archaeology in Syria, witii comprehensive stratigraphic and architectural interpre tations and an equally secure analysis of the ceramic se quences. The excavations at Tell Barri (ancient Kakhat), begun in 1980 under the direction of Paolo Emilio Pecorella, have uncovered thirteen periods dating from the Halaf to the thir teenth century CE, with few gaps (Pecorella and Anastasio, 1996). During the Mari and Mitanni eras, Kakhat was the major center for the worship of the storm god, Tessup. As syrian inscriptions indicate that Tukulti-Ninurta II (890-884 BCE) constructed a palace at Kakhat. The long and very carefully documented Tell Barri ceramic sequence is now a basic tool for ceramic chronology in the Upper Khabur re gion. Just to the north of Tell Barri, at Tell Hamidiya, Markus Waefier began excavations in 1984 and has explored a palace built on three levels of such massive dimensions that it appears to occupy the whole of the acropolis, making it one of the most imposing buildings of the ancient Near East. This trilevel palace had supporting walls preserved up to 1 6 m high and 1 2 m wide and contained a large number of ivories dating to the reign of Shalmaneser III. [See Palace.] The excavations of Shamshi-Adad's city of Shubat-Enlil at Tell Leilan were begun by Harvey Weiss in 1978; on the acropolis they have uncovered a long-room temple whose north and south facades were decorated with elaborate mudbrick relief columns. Soundings in the Lower City found many public buildings dating to the period of Shamshi-Adad and his successors that attest to the vastness of his admin istrative complex there. Two large buildings, identified as palaces, contained important tablets of the royal archive. During the third-millennium occupation (2600-2200 BCE) the city was called Shekhna; it had a city wall built in two phases around both the acropolis and the Lower City (Akkermans and Weiss, 1987; Akkermans et al., 1 9 9 1 ; Parayre and Weiss, 1 9 9 1 ) . T h e excavations at Mohammad Diyab (ancient Azamhul), begun in 1987 (by Durand and Domi nique Charpin) have recovered second-millennium BCE houses and tombs. Urkes/Tell Mozan, a large third-millennium site in the
Wadi Dara region has been excavated since 1984 by Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati (1984). They have uncovered a mid-third millennium temple (BA). T h e store house (AK) is characterized by a symmetrical plan that in cludes two small vaults; on a floor in front of one of these vaults more than six hundred Early Akkadian seal impres sions were excavated along with cuneiform tablets contain ing some Flurrian names and words. T h e inscribed seal im pressions have led to the identification of the site with the Hurrian city of Urkes. In the Khabur area 1 4 4 Early Dy nastic III tablets have been excavated at Tell Beydar, under the direction of Marc Lebeau ( 1 9 9 1 ) . The Tell Chuera excavations of Anton Moortgat and Ur sula Moortgat-Correns that began in 1958 are being contin ued by Orthmann. These excavations have revealed a large third-millennium urban center located between the Balikh and the Upper Khabur Rivers. A number of temples have been found, including what must have been a large temple placed on top of a significant stone platform (steinbau III) opposite a monumental entrance to the city. Two statues sculpted in the Early Dynastic II style are the northernmost examples of this type of sculpture. A late third-millennium palace (F) and a large Middle Assyrian building have also been excavated. T h e site is identified as Harbe in the Middle Assyrian period. In the north Balikh area, the site of Tell Hammam etTurkman (ancient Zalpa?) was an important regional center with evidence of palaces from both the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. T h e excavators, Maurits N . van Loon and Diederik J. W. Meijer, have recovered a number of cunei form tablets and cylinder seals; the seal impressions attest to a high level of administrative organization, including a scribal school. Van Loon has made substantial contributions to Syrian archaeology through his work at Tell Mureybet, Selenldiiye, and Hammam et-Turkman, in addition to train ing a whole generation of American and European archae ologists. Tell Bi'a (ancient Tuttul), near the confluence of the Ba likh and the Euphrates, has been excavated by Strommenger since 1980; she has uncovered a burnt palace from 2500 BCE containing many wood features, including pilasters. In a pal ace dated just prior to the reign of Shamshi-Adad I, one level contained a common grave witii the remains of eighty skel etons showing evidence of violent death, probably during a battle. Conclusions. In the early decades of the twentieth cen tury, some exploration of major sites, such as Mari and Uga rit, came about through accidental discoveries. Many tells, however, were selected for excavation as a result of a wellplanned research strategy: Ebla, where the research strategy posited a major third-millennium urban area in this part of inner Syria; Tell Hamidiya, where research revolves around the hypothesis that this site is the Mitanni capital of Taidu; the Khabur region, based on the reasoning that major third-
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Israel and second-millennium cities should exist there; and the elKowm region, east of Palmyra, in the Syrian steppe, where large-scale regional research deriving from specific research interests and research strategy has been undertaken. Salvage operations initiated by dam construction have given impetus to excavations in geographic areas that might otherwise have been overlooked. Research on tiiese sites, especially for the sites connected with the Tabqa dam, often was connected at a second stage with a specific research strategy. In Syria more than seventy Syrian and foreign excavations are being conducted, researching the prehistoric through the Islamic period, from coastal Syria through the Khabur region; nine large survey projects are also being conducted (al-Maqdissi, 1993)- F ° much of this intensive period of the excavation of archaeological sites in Syria during the last thirty years, Najah al-Attar has been the minister of culture. She has been responsible and directiy involved in all phases of promoting the cause of archaeology within Syria itself and in bringing the results of this endeavor to the wider international audi ence. International exhibits of objects excavated in Syria have been bringing Syrian history and culture to a much wider public. Syria has been an area where the recovery of ancient culture through excavations by an international col laboration have resulted in a significantly changed historical picture. r
[See also the biographies of Albright, Dunand, Layard, Mal lowan, Moortgat, Parrot, Poidebard, Renan, Schaeffer, Smith, Thureau-Dangin, and Woolley. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Excavation reports and textual studies for important sites can be found in the journals Iraq (for Chagar Bazar and Brak), Mari: Annates de Recherches Inlerdisciplinaires (for Mari), and Studi Eblaiti (for Ebla). The reader may also consult die following: Akkermans, P. A., and Harvey Weiss. "Tell Leilan, 1987, Operation 3: Preliminary Report on the L o w e r T o w n Palace." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 38 (1989): 1 - 1 9 . Akkermans, P. A., et al. "An Administrative Building of the King of Andarig at Shubat Enlil." Nabu 4 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 68-70. Anastasio, Stefano. The Archaeology of Upper Mesopotamia: An Analyt ical Bibliography for the Pre-Classical
Periods. Subartu, 1. Brussels,
1995. Bounni, Adnan. Le sanctuaire de Nabu. Damascus, 1982. Buccellati, Giorgio, and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. Mozan, vol. 1 , The Soundings of the First Two Seasons. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 20. Malibu, 1988. Freedman, David Noel, ed. Archaeological Reports from the Tabqa Dam Project—Euphrates Valley, Syria. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 44. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1979. Mallowan, M . E . L . "Excavations at Brak and Chagar Bazar, Syria," Iraq 9 (1947): 1-266. Maqdissi, Michel al-. "Chroniques des activites archeologiques en Syrie." Syria 70 (1993): 443~576. Matthiae, Paolo. Ebla: An Empire Rediscovered. Translated by Chris topher Holme. Garden City, N . Y . , 1980. Mazzoni, Stefania. "Frontieres ceramiques e.t le Haut Buphrate au
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Bronze Ancien I V . " Mari: Annates de Recherches Inlerdisciplinaires 4 (1985): 5 6 1 - 5 7 7 Mazzoni, Stefania. Ije Impronte su Giara Eblaite e Siriane nel Bronzo Antico. Materiali e Studi Archeologica di Ebla, I . Rome, 1992. Parayre, D . , and Harvey Weiss. "Cinq campagnes de fouilles a Tell Leilan: Bilan et perspectives," Journal des Savants ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3-26. Pecorella, Paolo E . , and Stefano Anastasio. The Second Millennium at Tell Barri-Kakhat. 1996. Poidebard, Antoine. La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie. Paris, 1934. MARILYN KELLY-BUCCELLATI
Archaeology in Israel Interest in local antiquities was first aroused among the Jew ish settlers in the land of Israel, even among members of the Orthodox community, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A. M. Lunz, a prominent scholar in the nineteenth century, studied the country's historical geography. In 1 9 1 4 , the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society (later known as the Israel Exploration Society) was founded in Jerusalem. [See Israel Exploration Society.] It concerned itself with Jewish antiquities, first excavating at Hammath Tiberias (Nahum Slouschz, 1 9 2 1 - 1 9 2 2 ) . T h e society has, ever since, been central to all archaeological activity in Israel and its journal the focal publication of the status of research on the coun try's antiquities. One of the pioneers in archaeological research by Pales tinian Jews was Eleazar L. Sukenik, the first professor of archaeology at the fledgling Hebrew University of Jerusa lem, where in 1926 he founded the Department of Archae ology and the Museum for Jewish Antiquities. [See the bi ography of Sukenik.} His first important excavation was the synagogue at Beth Alpha (1929). His subsequent excava tions included the Jewish burial caves in the vicinity of Je rusalem and, beginning in 1 9 2 7 , several seasons at Tel Gerisa, a multistrata mound of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Sukenik also participated in the expedition to Samaria led by John W. Crowfoot, where he and his assistant, Nahman Avigad, were exposed to British excavation methods. [See the biographies of Crowfoot and Avigad.} Another inspiring scholar in that period was Benjamin Mazar (Maisler). Trained as a historian and an Assyriologist, he was influ enced by William Foxwell Albright to practice interdisci plinary research that would include history, philology, Bible, historical geography, and archaeology. [See the biographies of Mazar and Albright] Following his excavation of the Jewish necropolis at Betii-She'arim, Mazar joined the faculty of the Hebrew University, where he trained a group of Israeli scholars who were to become prominent in the disciplines of ancient history and archaeology. Other Jewish archaeologists worked for the Department of Antiquities organized by the British during tiieir mandate in Palestine ( 1 9 1 7 - 1 9 4 8 ) or in the Jewish Palestine Explo ration Society. Moshe Stekelis laid the foundations for re search at die country's prehistoric sites; Emmanuel Ben-Dor
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Israel
and Ruth Amiran conducted ceramics studies; Naphtali Hertz Torzcyner (Tur-Sinai) and outers studied paleogra phy and Semitic languages; Shmuel Yeivin and J. Leibovitch studied Egyptology; Mazar studied the ancient Near East; Michael Avi-Yonah, Avigad, and others studied classical art and archaeology; and Leo A. Mayer specialized in Islamic art and archaeology. [See the biographies of Stekelis, Yeivin, and Avi-Yonah.] These Israeli historians and archaeologists combined two traditions: the broad knowledge and pedagogy involving classical and ancient Near East studies brought from Eu ropean universities and the methodologies of archaeological fieldwork, particularly as applied to the large-scale expedi tions, carried out in the country prior to 1948. 1948 to 1967. Following the foundation of die State of Israel, several factors determined the progress of archae ology in Israel: Israeli scholars were excluded from direct contact with their colleagues in other parts of the Near East; the state was encouraging the archaeological investigation of its heritage; and the country was developing rapidly. The newly established and rather small Department of Antiqui ties, directed by Yeivin, was conducting salvage excavations at many sites. Management of the country's antiquities fol lowed the ttaditions of the British Mandatory Department of Antiquities. In 1 9 4 9 - 1 9 5 0 , Mazar conducted die first sys tematic excavation at a biblical site, at Tell Qasile near Tel Aviv, under the auspices of the country's then only aca demic institution, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ma zar uncovered remains of a Philistine and Israelite town. An other consequential factor during the first years following independence was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of which Sukenik purchased for the Hebrew Univer sity. His son and student, Yigael Yadin, would later pur chase additional scrolls. [See Dead Sea Scrolls.] The discov ery of the scrolls opened new research vistas for philologists, historians, and Bible scholars. A number of Israeli archae ologists, including Sukenik, Avigad, and particularly Yadin, devoted years of study to ft-anslating them. Yadin, a brilliant scholar and an engaging lecturer, gave a major impetus to Israeli archaeology. Following his service as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, he joined the Hebrew University in 1954. [See the biography of Yadin.] From 1954 to 1958, and again in 1968, he conducted a largescale excavation at Tel Hazor, which served as a field school for a generation of Israeli archaeologists and as a crucible for the discipline of biblical archaeology. Most of Israel's preeminent archaeologists in this field were senior members of the Hazor team: Aharoni, Amiran, Trade Dothan and Moshe Dothan, Claire Epstein, and others. An inspiring fig ure at the time was architect Immanuel Dunayevsky. [See the biographies of Aharoni and Dunayevsky] The search for the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jordan and the illegal looting of caves in the Israeli part of the Judean Desert
prompted Israeli archaeologists to survey caves and conduct salvage excavations in that region. Following Aharoni's pi oneering surveys, teams of archaeologists excavated in the desert's deep ravines and cliffs in 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 2 . Documents and human remains from the time of die Bar Kokhba revolt in 1 3 5 CE discovered in this operation by the team led by Yadin have elucidated this period of Jewish history. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt.] Exploration in the Judean Desert reached its peak in 1 9 6 3 - 1 9 6 4 , witii Yadin's large-scale excavations at Masada, which various teams of Israeli archaeologists had previously explored and surveyed. T o many in Israel and abroad, Masada had deep historical and emotional signifi cance. Hundreds of volunteers from all over the world par ticipated in its excavation, initiating a practice now common on both Israeli and foreign expeditions working in Israel. For the general public the extensive, well-publicized excavations at Masada became a virtual symbol of Israeli archaeology, as well as a tourist attraction. During those same years, Aharoni initiated field surveys in the Galilee that demonstrated the significance of this method for studying settlement patterns. T h e result was a critical new methodology for interpreting historical data and writing history. In 1964, the Association for the Survey of Israel was founded, whose goal was a comprehensive ar chaeological survey of the country, an endeavor still under way, utilizing a methodology the association developed. [See Survey of Israel] In the late 1950s and early 1960s a generation of new Is raeli archaeologists, most of whom had participated at Ha zor, engaged in independent projects of their own. Impor tant achievements were made in the study of the earliest agricultural communities of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (Nahal Oren cave of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, the exploration of the Chalcolithic period in the Beersheba region, and the discoveries in the Judean Desert of the 'Ein-Gedi temple and Nahal Mishmar treasure-cave, both revolutionary finds relating to the Chalcolithic period). T h e Bronze and Iron Ages were studied by Aharoni at Ramat Rahel and Arad, by Amiran at Early Bronze Age Arad, by Moshe Dothan at Tel Mor and Ashdod, and by Benjamin Mazar at 'Ein-Gedi, Archaeologists interested in the Roman-Byzantine periods directed tiieir efforts to excavat ing Nabatean and Byzantine cities in the Negev (Avdat, Mamshit [Mampsis], primarily by Avaham Negev), as well as Caesarea (Avi-Yonah and Negev), the synagogue at Hammath Tiberias (Dothan), the town and necropolis of Beth-She'arim (Mazar and Avigad), the Roman theater at Beth-Shean, the Roman limes (Mordechai Gichon), and more. The sole academic research and teaching institute at the time was the Department of Archaeology of the Hebrew University, later to become the Institute of Archaeology. In 1962, the newly founded Tel Aviv University established an
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Israel Institute of Archaeology and Ancient Near East Studies, headed first by Yeivin and subsequentiy by Aharoni, that soon became a viable center of research and teaching. 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 9 4 . In the late 1960s, unprecedented economic opportunities and a new order of international cooperation made possible a flourishing of Israeli archaeological re search, during which exploring Jerusalem became the major endeavor of Hebrew University archaeologists. Three main expeditions were conducted: south of the Temple Mount (Mazar, 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 7 8 ) , the Jewish Quarter (Avigad, 1 9 6 9 1983), and the City of David (Yigal Shiloh, 1 9 7 8 - 1 9 8 4 ) . Additional archaeological projects in Jerusalem included the Valley of Hinnom (Gabriel Barkai); the Jaffa Gate area and the Mamilla area (Magen Broshi, Ronny Reich). The Da mascus Gate area; the Third Wall; and the aqueducts. Also explored were the vast necropoli of both the First and Sec ond Temple periods surrounding the city and its agricultural periphery, where numerous farmsteads and agricultural set tlements belonging to various periods were studied, mostly in salvage excavations. This comprehensive undertaking in the archaeology of Jerusalem greatly expanded what is known of the city over millennia. Excavations and surveys were conducted for all periods and subjects. In prehistory, excavations at Tell el-TJbeidiya (Stekelis, Ofer Bar-Yosef, and others) revealed tire earliest human culture in tire ancient Near East. Various phases of the Stone Age were explored at such sites as Hayonim cave in the western Galilee, at Paleolithic sites in the Golan Heights, and at Neolithic sites in the Jordan Valley and in the Sinai Desert. Caves on the Carmel ridge that had been explored during the 1930s were reexcavated, utilizing more sophisticated methods (Kebara cave, el-Wad cave, and oth ers). Prehistoric research in the Negev and Sinai deserts en abled the study of climatic changes and the history of indig enous Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic communities. The field of biblical archaeology was enriched by widescale excavation projects and surveys that generated an ever growing body of data and new interpretations. The major multistrata tells yielding important remains of the Bronze and Iron Ages, excavated by Israeli expeditions or by joint endeavors of Israeli and foreign archaeologists, are (from north to south): Dan (Avraham Biran), Hazor (Amnon Ben-Tor), Tel Hadar (Moshe Kochavi and Pirhiya Beck), Kabri (Aharon Kempinski and Hans G. Niemeyer); Akko (Dothan), Yoqne'am, Tel Qiri, and Tel Qashish (Ben-Tor), Jezreel (David Ussishkin and John Woodhead), Beth-Shean (Amihai Mazar), Tel Nami (Michal Artzy), Dor (Ephraim Stern), Tel Michal (Ze'ev Herzog and others), Tell Qasile (Amihai Mazar), Aphek (Kochavi and Beck), Jaffa (Jacob and Haya Kaplan), Tel Gerisa (Herzog and others), Shiloh (Israel Finkelstein), Beth-Shemesh (Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman), Tel Batash (Amihai Mazar and George L. Kelm), Tel Miqne/Ekron (Trude Dothan and Seymour
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Gitin), Lachish (Ussishkin), Tel Sera' and Tel Haror (Eliezer Oren), Deir el-Balah (Trude Dothan), Tel Sheva (Aharoni), Tel 'Ira, (Itzhag Beit-Arieh and Biran), 'Aro'er (Biran), Tel Masos (Kempinski and Volkman Fritz), and Tel Malhata (Kochavi, Beit-Arieh, and Bruce Cresson). In addition, significant data have been collected from ex cavations at single-period sites, either salvage excavations or as part of regional or subject-oriented projects. Only a few can be mentioned here: the Chalcolithic sites in the Golan Heights (Epstein) and tire megalithic monument of Rujm el-Hiri (Kochavi and Yonathan Mizrahi); the Early Bronze I villages at Yiftahel, Horvat Ilin, and Palmahim (Eliot Braun) and Hartuv (Amihai Mazar and Pierre de Miroschedji); the Middle Bronze II Age sites in the vicinity of Jerusalem (Emmanuel Eisenberg, Gershon Edelstein); the Iron Age I sites on Mt. Ebal (Adam Zertal), at 'Izbet Sartah (Kochavi and Finkelstein), and at Giloh (Amihai Mazar); the exceptional Iron Age II site of Kuntillet 'Ajrud with its Hebrew inscriptions (Zeev Meshel), the Iron Age II sites along the shores of the Dead Sea (Pessah Bar-Adon), tire Iron Age II citadels at Qadesh-Barnea (Rudolph Cohen) and Horvat TJza (Beit-Arieh and Cresson), the Edomite temple at Horvat Qitmit (Beit-Arieh) and the Negev high land sites (Cohen). This vast activity was supplemented by a multitude of salvage excavations at cemeteries and small sites carried out by archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority. Survey work also reached sites located throughout the country. The emergency survey conducted, in 1968 in Ju dah, Samaria, and the Golan Heights underscored die po tential of this methodology. Subsequently, younger scholars, of the "third generation" of Israeli archaeologists (Yehudah Dagan, Finkelstein, Zvi Gal, Mordechai Heimann, Avi Ofer, Zertal), extensively surveyed geographic regions, em ploying modern methods to analyze their data. These re gional studies opened new vistas in terms of the patterns and processes of settlement in various periods, enabling de mographic studies and illuminating such central historical issues as the Israelite settlement of the hill country. Numerous Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, and medieval sites were explored during this period. Currently, the largest archaeological enterprise in Israel is the excavations at Beth-Shean, where Yoram Tsafrir, Gideon Foerster, Gabi Mazor and Rachel Bar Nathan have exposed the entire civic center of the Roman and Byzantine city. Large-scale research at Caesarea, both on land and under water, has uncovered the harbor built by King Herod and large parts of the surrounding city (Avner Raban, Joseph Patrich, Josef Porath, and Ehud Netzer in collaboration with American scholars); at Sepphoris, American and Israeli ex peditions have revealed a well-planned city with a plethora of ornate mosaic floors in elaborate dwellings (Eric Meyers, James Strange, Netzer, Zeev Weiss); in the Golan Heights
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Israel
synagogues have been explored (Dan Urman and Zvi Uri Ma'oz), the Jewish town at Gamla that fell to the Romans in 67 CE has been excavated (Shmaryahu Gutman), the Ro man city of Banias has been partially excavated (Maoz, Vassilios Tzaferis); at Shechem, Yitzhak Magen excavated the public buildings of Roman Neapolis, while on Mt. Gerizim, he uncovered the enclosure of the Samaritan temple and parts of the Hellenistic Samaritan city; at Jericho and Her odium, Netzer uncovered elaborately constructed Hasmo nean and Herodian palaces; at Mareshah and Beth-Guvrin (Eleutheroplis) Amos Kloner revealed complex under ground installations and cisterns, Hellenistic dwellings, and a Roman amphitheater; and work continues in the cities of the Negev (Mareshah, Avdat, Halusah, Rehovot, Shivtah and Nessana). In general, the forts, roads, and aqueducts of all tiiese periods have been investigated, and numerous Byz antine churches, as well as Jewish and Samaritan syna gogues, have been excavated throughout the country. This list is partial and by necessity omits the hundreds of salvage excavations and small-scale projects carried out at agricul tural farmsteads and installations and in small villages. De sert and underwater archaeologies have defined themselves as distinct disciplines in the course of archaeological activity in Israel. This vast activity has turned Israel into one of the most intensively explored countries in the world. Institutions. At the time of writing, five universities in Israel have institutes or departments of archaeology for teaching and research. Each has it own organization, ap proach, and emphasis, yet together they create the academic framework for archaeological exploration in the country. In 1989, the governmental Department of Antiquities, a rela tively small division in die Ministry of Education, was trans formed into the independent Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Headed by Amir Drori (from 1989), the IAA's bud get supports an enlarged support network of inspectors, sal vage excavation teams, archaeological surveys, conservation and preservation teams for sites and objects, and research and publication systems. Today, the IAA's more than two hundred archaeologists and hundreds of other workers make it an effective government agency. [See Israel Antiquities Authority.] Other archaeological activity is carried out by museums (the Israel Museum and local museums), which sponsor ar chaeological exhibits and research. The Israel Exploration Society, directed since its inception by Joseph Aviram, is a voluntary body that aids in arranging and financing archae ological research, publishes it, and disseminates it by orga nizing local and international congresses. The Archaeolog ical Council of Israel, which is elected according to the Antiquities Law of Israel by the Minister of Education is another voluntary public body. The council and its com mittees advise the director of the IAA on matters of archae ological policy.
Methodology. Archaeological research in Israel emerged from European pedagogic traditions and the fieldwork car ried out in the Near East in the 1930s. In the universities, archaeology is taught in the framework of the faculty of hu manities, and is closely allied to the fields of history, Bible, ancient Near East studies, classics, and art history. Fieldexcavation methods are rooted in the sweeping architectural approach of traditional Near Eastern archaeology, in which large architectural complexes are exposed and tiieir stratig raphy is analyzed on the basis of the relationship between building remains and floor levels. T h e British method of analyzing debris layers in vertical sections developed by Mortimer Wheeler and Kathleen M. Kenyon has guided most Israeli excavators since the early 1960s, although the method was applied as a supplement to refine the architec tural approach. [See the biographies of Wheeler and Kenyon] The synthesis between these two approaches has character ized many excavations in Israel in the last decades. Israeli archaeology has concentrated largely on fieldwork, its interpretation, and publication, complemented by the comparative study of classes of finds. The theoretical as pects of archaeological research never played an important role in local research (except in the field of prehistory) until recently. Israeli archaeologists were, for the most part, de tached from the anthropological and social-studies approach that figured in the interpretation of data in western Europe and the United States. Today, new paths for research are being explored in the theoretical realm by some younger scholars who emphasize reconsttucting ancient social struc tures and take an environmental approach to archaeological studies. Subjects such as nomadism and sedentarization, family structure, family and tribal structures, processes of urbanism and rural settlement distributions are being ex amined, settlement distribution and demography are studied alongside the more ttaditional emphasis on comparative ar chitecture and art, glyptics, iconography, paleography, nu mismatics, and the interraction between finds and ancient texts. These subjects have transformed the discipline's scope to one that is panoramic in its research possibilities. Another important development is the concentration by certain research centers in special subjects. Thus, Haifa University developed its Center for Maritime Studies and underwater archaeology, while Ben Gurion University is a center for desertic studies in the arid zones of the Negev and Sinai. Publications. Archaeological subjects are published in both Hebrew and English in Israel. T h e Israel Exploration Society publishes the periodicals Qadmoniot (in Flebrew), Eretz Israel (in Flebrew with a section in European lan guages), and die Israel Exploration Journal (primarily in En glish), as well as final excavation reports and occasional col lections of essays, congress volumes, and monographs (again, primarily in English). The Israel Antiquities Au-
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Jordan thority publishes the periodicals 'Aliqot and Excavations and Surveys in Israel (the English translation of Hadashot Arkheologiot, which includes short reports on all fieldwork car ried in Israel). T h e Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University publishes the series Oedem (monographs and fi nal reports), and the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University publishes the periodical Tel Aviv, as well as oc casional monographs and final reports. Museum publica tions contribute to this list, as do the papers and books pub lished outside Israel. I m p a c t on Society. T h e breadth and intensity of ar chaeological activity in Israel has kept the public's attention, in particular when it is engaged at sites and in subjects cen tral to Jewish history, such as Jerusalem, Masada, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Gamla, and ancient synagogues. Archaeological sites are well preserved, with upkeep the re sponsibility generally of the National Parks Authority and the IAA, and attract both local and foreign tourists. Archae ological museums exist in almost every city, providing ed ucational activities for schoolchildren and adults. Archae ology is even taught in some Israeli high schools. T h e eminent role archaeology plays in Israeli society means that the issues that concern the discipline—limiting the antiqui ties trade, the difficulties created by rapid development and construction in those parts of the country in which there are antiquities, illicit digs, and the frequent demand by Ortho dox Jews that ancient tombs and burials not be excavated, a conflict of interest that has often led to ideological clashes—also arouse the public debate. By meeting chal lenge and controversy, Israeli archaeology has matured and greatly extended the scope of its activities. It is today a rich and varied field of research that is also an integral compo nent of modern life in Israel. [See also Nationalism and Archaeology; Tourism and Ar chaeology. In addition., most of the sites mentioned are the sub ject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Amitai, Janet, ed. Biblical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the Inter national Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984. J e rusalem, 1985. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Amihai Mazar. "Israeli Archaeology." World Ar chaeology 1 3 (1982): 3 1 0 - 3 2 5 . Ben-Tor, Amnon, ed. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. New Haven, 1992. Ben-Tor, Amnon. " T h e Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem." Biblical Archaeologist 56 (1993): 1 2 1 - 1 5 1 . Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Aviram, eds. Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Ar chaeology, Jerusalem, June-Jidy 1990. Jerusalem, 1993. Broshi, Magen. "Religion, Ideology, and Politics and Their Impact on Palestinian Archaeology." Israel Museum Journal 6 (1987): 1 7 - 3 2 . Dever, William G . " T w o Approaches to Archaeological Method: T h e Architectural and the Stratigraphic." Eretz-Israel 1 1 (1973): i*-8*.
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Kempinski, Aharon, and Ronny Reich, eds. The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. Jerusalem, 1992, Levine, Lee I., ed. Ancient Synagogues Revealed. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . Mazar, Amihai. "Israeli Archaeologists." In Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An Introduction to Palestinian Archaeology Dedicated to Joseph A. Callaway, edited by Joel F. Drinkard et al., pp. 1 0 9 - 1 2 8 . Adanta, 1988. Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.B. New York, 1990. Silberman, Neil Asher. A Prophet from Amongst You: The Life of Yigael Yadin—Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker of Modem Israel. New York, 1993Stern, Ephraim, et al., eds. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Ijxnd. 4 vols. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Tsafrir, Yoram, ed. Ancient Churches Revealed. Jerusalem, 1993. AMIHAI MAZAR
Archaeology in Jordan T h e archaeological exploration of Jordan (Transjordan) is closely connected historically and physically with that of Cisjordan (western Palestine). Jerusalem, being the focal point of Judaism as well as one for Christianity and Islam, is surrounded by concentric circles of historical and religious interest that involve the entire region. Archaeological inves tigation of the land east of the Jordan River and of its past has emerged slowly but is revealing its distinct identity. Only a few of the many pilgrims who visited the region in antiquity (e.g., the Bordeaux pilgrim in 333, and the monk Bernard in the late ninth century) extended their journeys beyond the Jordan. Usually, they were content to contem plate the holy sites of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. Two exceptions from this early period were Paula of Rome (382 CE) and Silvia of Aquitaine (379-388 CE). Between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, Arab and Persian geogra phers (e.g., Muqaddasi in 985, Yaqut in 1 2 2 5 , and Nasir-iKhusrau in 1047) traveled widely in die region, making care ful observations. Unfortunately, like the early pilgrims, they were not especially concerned widi archaeological ruins. When die Crusaders gained control of Jerusalem ( 1 0 9 9 1 1 8 7 ) and portions of Transjordan, it acted as a new impetus for Western travelers to explore the land—a trend that con tinued even after the Crusaders were routed. In the period after the Crusades, travelers to the Holy Land included Magister Thietmar ( 1 2 1 7 ) , who visited Petra without rec ognizing it as such; Burchard of Mt. Zion ( 1 2 8 3 ) , who thought that the site of Kerak (mod. Al Karak) was also the site of Petra and Montreal; and Rabbi Esthori Ben Mose Ha-Parchi, who spent seven years exploring eastern and western Palestine. There are many others, from the me thodical Felix Fabri ( 1 4 8 0 - 1 4 8 3 ) to the more archaeologically motivated Cotovicus (Kootwyk, 1 5 9 8 - 1 5 9 9 ) , De la Rocque (1688), and Richard Pococke ( 1 7 3 8 ) . Even in the reports of these scholars Transjordan was still of only minor interest.
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Jordan
J o r d a n Rediscovered: 1 8 0 5 - 1 9 1 8 . During the period from 1805 to 1 9 1 8 5 more and more Westerners traveled through Transjordan, recording relics and turning increas ingly to intensive exploration and mapping. Among die most adventurous were the German explorer Ulrich Jasper Seetzen, who visited between 1805 and 1807, and the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who visited between 1 8 1 0 and 1 8 1 2 . During his extensive travels, Seetzen dis covered Jerash/Gerasa and Amman/Philadelphia, while Burckhardt rediscovered Petra, whose location had been forgotten for six centuries (Seetzen had been there but could not identify the site.) [See Jerash; Amman; Petra.] What was known of Transjordan was increased by the recorded observations of the British traveler James Silk Buckingham (in 1 8 1 6 , 1 8 2 1 ) and navy officers Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles (in 1 8 1 7 - 1 8 1 8 ) . Irby and Mangles traveled with explorers William John Bankes and Thomas Legh from south of the Dead Sea to northern Transjordan, eventually discovering the temple and other ruins at 'Iraq el-Amir. [See 'Iraq el-Amir.] The travels of Leon de Laborde and Linant (in 1828) included Petra, where they made excellent drawings. The emphasis on identifying place names and on map ping increased in the mid- and late nineteenth century. An especially extensive survey, with attempts to identify biblical sites from their modern Arabic names, was made by die Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith (1838, 1 8 5 2 ) . Their travels east of die Jordan included brief visits to Petra and Pella. [See Pella.] Holy Land (historical) geography, which is intimately connected to archaeological research, progressed from the broad principles laid down by Robinson to their precise ap plication by the German Titus Tobler, who visited the Holy Land in 1 8 4 5 - 1 8 4 6 , 1 8 5 7 , and 1865, and the Frenchman Victor Honore Gueriii, who visited five times between 1852 and 1875. [See Historical Geography.] However, it was the Englishmen Claude Regnier Conder and Horatio Herbert Kitchener who carried out a detailed survey of western Pal estine ( 1 8 7 1 - 1 8 7 8 ) for the PEF to produce maps using a scale of one inch to one mile. Conder attempted the same for eastern Palestine in 1 8 8 1 , but difficulties interposed and the work was left to be completed by Gottlieb Schumacher (see below) during the next twenty years. Work in the north ern regions was supplemented by the American Archaeo logical Expedition to Syria led by Howard Crosby Butler (1899-1900). In 1904 Butler returned, leading a Princeton University team that made detailed observations at the sites of 'Iraq el-Amir and Rabbath-Ammon/Ammon. Special interest in the Dead Sea area had already been awakened in 1848 by William F. Lynch, whose U.S. expe dition traveled from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea by means of two metal boats (Bliss, 1906). He spent three weeks in the Dead Sea region, including a side trip to Kerak. [See Kerak.] In 1863 and 1864, Henry Baker Tristram led a
British expedition that investigated the regions of the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. Due de Luynes investigated the Dead Sea in 1864, along with Ammon, Moab, and the 'Arabah, down to the Gulf of 'Aqaba; and geologist Edward Hull, in 1 8 8 3 - 1 8 8 4 , further explored the Dead Sea region and the 'Arabah for the PEF. [See Ammon; Moab; 'Aqaba.] T h e discovery of the Moabite stone (Mesha stela) by An glican minister F. A. Klein in 1868 and the world's focus on the attempts to recover it, led to expectations of more rich discoveries there. [See Moabite Stone.] This victory monu ment was made by Mesha, a ninth-century BCE Moabite king. The stela was broken up by local bedouin who were confused and suspicious over Franco-German rivalry to ob tain it, and in fear of intervention by the hated Turkish gov ernor (see Horn, 1986). About two-thirds of the fragments were recovered by French diplomat and amateur archaeol ogist Charles S. Clermont-Ganneau and Charles Warren of die PEF and these were taken to the Louvre in Paris. There a reconstruction was made with the assistance of a rough paper squeeze. This discovery remains the longest (34 lines) ancient monumental inscription found anywhere in Pales tine. The American Selah Merrill collected considerable data on his expeditions to Jordan from 1870 to 1 8 7 7 , building a notable collection of Palestinian pottery. George L. Robin son (representing McCormack Theological Seminary and the American Schools of Oriental Research) spent consid erable time investigating Petra between 1900 and 1928, hav ing rediscovered the Great High Place in 1900 and realized its function. (The first to have recognized the site was an American editor, Edward L. Wilson, in 1882.) Several Eu ropean scholars explored the Petra tombs and other struc tures, including Rudolf-Ernst Briinnow and Alfred von D o maszewski, between 1897 and 1898, and Gustaf Dalman several years later. Cooperation from the Turkish governor of Kerak made it possible for Frederick Jones Bliss in 1895 and Domaszewski in 1895, 1897, and 1898 to clarify many details of the Moab plateau, its ancient roads, and its forti fications. A number of organizations were involved as sponsor or director of programs involving many of the foregoing con tributions. Most had their headquarters in Jerusalem and worked primarily in western Palestine: the American Ori ental Society, the forerunner of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR); the British Palestine Explora tion Fund (PEF), which supported the surveys of Conder and Kitchener (see above); die American Palestine Explo ration Society (APES), an even more direct forerunner of ASOR; the Deutscher Palastina-Verein, which sponsored, with the PEF, Schumacher's mapping work; and the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, which sponsored the work of Briinnow and Domaszewski at Petra, in cooperation with Dalman of the Deutsches Evangelisch.es Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes.
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Jordan Excavations: 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 4 8 . Political changes in the region at the close of World War I included the establishment of a British Mandate in Palestine. A Department of Antiquities was formed in 1920 under die leadership of John Garstang that made unauthorized digging illegal and adopted a liberal antiquities ordinance that remains in place today in Jordan with only some modifications. T h e special needs of the Transjordan region were soon recognized, and a Depart ment of Antiquities was opened in Amman in 1923. At the same time, travel to and work at isolated sites became safer as a result of the establishment of the Arab Legion. Perhaps of greatest significance for this period was the scientific use made of regional surveys alongside ceramic and other indicators of habitational patterns. The first ex pedition to use surface sherding was led by William Foxwell Albright in 1 9 2 4 under the auspices of ASOR and Xenia Theological Seminary. His associates were Melvin Grove Kyle of Xenia, Alexis Mallon of the Pontifical Biblical In stitute (PBI) in Jerusalem, and Eliezer Sukenik from ASOR in Jerusalem (King, 1 9 8 3 ) . T h e survey involved essentially the southern Ghor (Jordan Rift Valley), Kerak, and a por tion of the plateau north of Kerak; it was also the first to discover the Early Bronze Age site of Bab edh-Dhra' (Mal lon acmally made the discovery). [See Bab edh-Dhra'.] Be tween 1932 and 1934, German Fritz Frank from Jerusalem surveyed areas south of the Dead Sea. The most important and influential survey of this period was that by Nelson Glueck ( 1 9 4 0 , 1 9 4 6 ) . Between 1933 and 1947, he attempted to survey all of Jordan, with an emphasis on Ammon, Moab, and Edom. [See Edom.] This involved mapping, photographing, surveying (with sherding), and some aerial reconnaissance. T h e scope of tiiis project was so vast that it is today thought to have been superficial in some areas. One of Glueck's conclusions was tiiat the region from the modern capital of Amman to the Gulf of 'Aqaba had essentially been devoid of sedentary habitation during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. This conclusion has re quired considerable correction and qualification as a result of subsequent surveys and excavations. Some of the most important excavations carried out from 1 9 1 8 to 1948 follow: Amman. Initial excavations were commenced in 1927 in Amman/Philadelphia by an Italian Archaeological Mission team led by Giacomo Guidi and concluded in die 1930s by Renato Bartoccini. Their discoveries included several tombs and structures on top of the acropolis. Gerald Lankester Harding, director of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan from 1936 to 1956, was responsible for salvage operations in Amman at a time when rapid expansion of the city was leading to many accidental discoveries. In 1944, Harding cleared seven Iron Age tombs that yielded a wide range of pottery vessels and an inscribed ivory seal. [See Tombs; Seals.] Gerasafferash. Between 1 9 2 5 and 1940 there were almost
53
continuous projects underway to excavate and restore the ruins at Gerasa. Directors included George Horsfield, P. A. Ritchie, and A. G. Buchanan for the Transjordan Depart ment of Antiquities (TDA); John W. Crowfoot for the Brit ish School of Archaeology and Yale University; Clarence S. Fisher and Glueck for ASOR; and Harding (TDA). The dramatic nature of the site's Roman and Byzantine sttuctures as they emerged and were progressively reconstructed has made this one of the most impressive archaeological sites in the Near East. [See Restoration and Conservation.] Petra. Some general excavations at Petra were begun by Agnes Conway and George Horsfield in 1929. They uncov ered mainly Nabatean artifacts in some tombs and rubbish dumps. [See Nabateans.] Albright followed by clearing the Conway high place (an installation with a large sacred rock and surrounding processionway named after its discoverer Agnes Conway) in 1934; followed by Margaret Mur ray, who excavated two tombs in the central valley in 1937 under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt. These various discoveries indicated habitation in the valley between about the fourth century BCE and the fourth century CE. Teleilat el-Ghassul. Alexis Mallon and Robert Koeppel of the PBI in Jerusalem directed excavations at Teleilat elGhassul, a distinctive Chalcolithic site north of the Dead Sea, between 1929 and 1938. [See Teleilat el-Ghassul.] Fol lowing the discovery of the Balu' stela by R. G. Head (of the T D A ) in 1930, Crowfoot (TDA and PEF) dug briefly at Balu' in 1932. [See Balu .] Ader. Albright and Head made exploratory excavations at the site of an ancient temple at Ader in 1 9 3 3 . Habitational clues indicated rather consistent use of the site from the Early Bronze to the Byzantine period. Mt. Nebo/Khirbet el-Mukhayyat. The dual site of Mt. Nebo and nearby Khirbet el-Mukhayyat were dug by Syl vester J. Sailer and Bellarmino Bagatti (for the Smdium Biblicum Franciscanum) in an on-going program between 1933 and 1 9 3 7 , with the latter site extended to 1939 and 1948. Among the discoveries were Early Christian churches and a monastery/church complex. [See Nebo, Mount; Churches; Monasteries.] Khirbet et-TannurjTell el-KheleiJeh. Glueck excavated two sites in quick succession: a Nabatean temple at Khirbet etTannur ( 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 3 8 ) and the fortified port/industrial site of Tell el-Kheleifeh (Ezion-Geber?) at the head of the Gulf of 'Aqaba (193 8-1940). [See Kheleifeh, Tell el-, Tannur, Khir bet et-.] Stratigraphic Excavations: 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 6 7 . Jordan gained its national independence in 1946. Harding remained direc tor of the Department of Antiquities until 1956, when he was succeeded by a series of Jordanian directors, including Awni Dajani, Yacub Quweis, Adnan Hadidi, Ghazi Bisheh, and Safwan Tell. During tiiis period the Jordanian Department of Antiqn
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Jordan
uities (JDA) was involved in excavations at Qumran, to gether with die Palestine Archaeological Museum (now the Rockefeller Museum) and the French Ecole Biblique (Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise). Continuing excava tions in the vicinity of Qumran (and with the additional sup port of ASOR) led to further Dead Sea Scroll discoveries during the 1950s. [See Dead Sea Scrolls; Qumran; Copper Scroll.] A mosaic map of the Holy Land had been discovered on the floor of a sixth century church in Madaba in 1884 and publicized in 1897 by Deacon Cleopas Kikilidis (Koikylides). This map was restored by a German Mission in 1965 under the direction of H. Donner. In 1966 and 1967 Ute Lux of the German Evangelical Institute excavated two ad ditional churches in Madaba. [See Madaba.] A regional survey conducted for the Department of An tiquities from 1 9 5 2 to 1953 investigated the Jordan Valley and included minor excavations. [See Jordan Valley.] The survey was led by James Mellaart and Henri de Contenson. Kathleen Kenyon excavated at Jericho from 1 9 5 2 to 1 9 5 8 , using stratigraphic techniques that would influence future field methodology on both banks of the Jordan. T h e follow ing sampling of the excavations conducted on the east bank between 1948 and 1967 illustrates the progress of die disci pline in the field. DhibanjDibon. Fred V. Winnett, William L. Reed, A. Douglas Tushingharn, and William M. Morton (under ASOR auscpices) uncovered mainly Moabite and Nabatean structures at Dhiban from 1950 to 1956. [See Dibon.] Jordan Valley. In 1 9 5 3 Henri de Contenson and James Mellaart surveyed various sites in the Jordan Valley for the Department of Antiquities, and made some soundings at places like Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, which James B. Pritchard ex cavated from 1964 to 1967 for the University of Pennsyl vania. [See Sa'idiyeh, Tel] es-.] GhrubbajGharuba. In 1953 James Mellaart surveyed and did some limited digging at Ghrubba. The site included an ash pit measuring 1 5 0 X 5 X 3 m that was drought to have been rapidly filled by successive occupation during a Pottery Neolithic period. It is considered to be one of the earliest indicators of a substantial population in Jordan for this pe riod (see Geraty and Willis, 1986). Pella. Robert W. Funk and H. Neil Richardson dug two exploratory trenches at Pella in 1958, finding evidence of considerable Iron Age use (in addition to other periods). In 1964 Sami Rashid of the Department of Antiquities cleared eleven tombs there. Irbid. At Irbid/Arbela, Rafik W. Dajani excavated four LB-Iron Age tombs in 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 5 9 . Most of the remains of Arbela lie beneath the modern city of Irbid. [See Irbid.] Deir 'Alia. H. J. Franken led a Dutch expedition from the University of Leiden to Tell Deir 'Alia (1960-1964, 1967), where an Aramaic inscription on the plaster walls of a temple
gave details of the biblical prophet Balaam (Nm. 2 2 - 2 4 ) . [See Deir 'Alia, Tell; Deir 'Alia Inscriptions.] Umm Qeis/Gadara. In 1966, Ute Lux (German Evangel ical Institute) excavated in the Greco-Roman city of U m m Qeis/Gadara, uncovering a late classical bath with an intri cate mosaic floor design. [See U m m Qeis; Baths; Mosaics.] Khirbet Jskander. Peter J. Parr carried out some initial ex cavations (British School and Ashmolean Museum) at Khir bet Iskander, a Late Chalcolithic-Middle Bronze Age site, in 1 9 5 5 . Petra. Between 1954 and 1968 teams led by Philip Ham mond and Peter J. Parr and G. R. H. Wright worked on many of the main buildings and sites at Petra. This program was carried out by the British School with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. Teleilat el-Ghassul. Robert North (Pontifical Biblical In stitute) in i960 and J. Basil Hennessy (British School in Je rusalem) in 1967 continued the excavation work at Teleilat el-Ghassul. The latter attempted to establish a sequence of habitational levels. 'Iraq el-Amir. In 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 2 Paul W. Lapp (ASOR) ex cavated various features at 'Iraq el-Amir, including the qasr ("temple")- The impressive ruins and cliff-face caves—the latter with the name Tobiah carved in two places—appear to be the family heritage of the successors of "Tobiah the Ammonite" mentioned as an enemy in Nehemiah 2 : 1 0 , 1 9 , and elsewhere. 'Aro'er. From 1964 to 1966, Emilio Olavarri (for the Span ish Center in Jerusalem) excavated die fortress site of 'Aro 'er on the north bank of Wadi Mujib (Arnon River). This strategic building guarded the King's Highway from the north bank of Wadi Mujib. It is mentioned eight times in the Hebrew scriptures (e.g., Jos. 1 2 : 2 ; 2 Kgs. 1 0 : 3 3 ) . Bab edh-Dhrd. One of the most dramatic sites excavated was Bab edh-Dhra', by Lapp ( 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 6 7 ) . He worked for two seasons in the huge cemetery and one in the town itself. Interdisciplinary Excavations: 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 9 6 . After die Six-Day War in 1967, die eastern sector of Jerusalem was no longer a part of Jordan; as a result, new research insti tutions were established in Amman. This benefited Jordan, which earlier had been only a part of a broader research context headquartered in Jerusalem. In addition to the De partment of Antiquities of Jordan and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Jordan, die American Cen ter of Oriental Research in Amman (ACOR) was founded in 1968. T h e British Institute in Amman soon followed, and, together, these institutions undertook surveys and excava tions in various parts of the country, along with the De partment of Antiquities, whose directors encouraged and cooperated with international projects. T h e archaeology of Jordan is seen today as a unique continuum running from prehistoric to modern times. Projects tend to be interdisci plinary in character, often with large teams and broad goals.
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Jordan "Interdisciplinary" in this context means that a team does not consist only of archaeologists, and is not simply inter ested in reconstructing buildings or collecting artifacts. The entire team works toward reconstruction of the ancient hu man environment, life style, and food systems. Such an ap proach calls for a variety of support teams of specialists. These may include experts in geology who study tire site, but who also determine which stone artifacts have been made from imported material. It may include specialists in ecology, botany, and zoology, who gather bones, seeds, and carbon specimens, but are also equipped to collect and ex amine microscopic paleobotany samples (ancient pollen grains, etc.). Since about 1967 there has been much more awareness of the need for this broader approach to archae ology and most excavations in Jordan have been involved, though in varying degrees. The Madaba Plains Project. An example of interdisciplin ary archaeology, the Madaba Plains Project grew out of the excavations at Tell Hesban/Heshbon, which began in 1968. [See Madaba; Hesban.] T h e expansion included surveys of the Madaba plain. Leadership passed from Siegfried Horn to Lawrence Thomas Geraty, and by tire 1990s, the project incorporated three teams excavating and surveying simul taneously at Tell el-'Umeiri (Larry G. Herr), Tell Jalul (Randall Younker), and Tell Jawa (Michele Daviau). [See 'Umeiri, Tell el-.] Khirbet. Iskander. Since 1 9 8 1 , a series of excavations has been sponsored by AS OR, with affiliates Drew University, Upsala College, and Seton Hall University. Directed by Suzanne Richard and Roger Boraas, work focused on clar ifying the end of the Early Bronze period at Khirbet Iskan der. Excavations have supported the view that agrarian set tlement was an alternative to subsistence pastoralism in the closing phase of the Early Bronze age (c. 2350-2000 BCE) in this region. 'Iraq el-Amir. At 'Iraq el-Amir, the French Institute of Ar chaeology in the Near East has been working on the recon struction of die Hellenistic temple in collaboration with JDA. Work commenced in 1976 under the direction of Ernest Will. Gadara. Work at U m m Qeis/Gadara was continued by Ute Lux directing an Amman branch of die German Evan gelical Institute in Jerusalem. The emerging ruins of churches, theater, and city on this spur overlooking the Jor dan and Yarmuk valleys and the Sea of Galiliee may even tually be as impressive as any of the other ancient sites in Jordan. Deir 'Alia. Franken ( 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 7 8 ) and Gerit van der Kooij (since 1979) continued work at Tell Deir 'Alia, with Moawiyah M. Ibrahim as codirector, representing Yarmouk University and the Department of Antiquities. Pella. Impressive work has been done at Pella, especially by Hennessey and Anthony Walter McNicholl (Univerity of
55
Sydney, 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 9 1 ) and Robert Houston Smith (College of Wooster, 1967, 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 5 ) in uncovering churches, a cem etery, and a civic complex. Edom. Crystal-M. Bennett of the British School of Ar chaeology in Jerusalem excavated at Tawilan ( 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 7 0 ) and at Iron Age II Buseirah ( 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 4 ) . In 1979 the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History was founded, with Bennett as its first director. As a result, in 1980 another season was carried out at Buseirah and in 1982 another at Tawilan. [See Tawilan; Buseirah.] Petra. Ongoing excavations at Petra throughout this pe riod included Hammond's excavation of the Temple of the Winged Lions, which he discovered in 1974, and a marbleworkers' establishment found in 1 9 8 1 ; andFawzi Zayadine's excavation of a potters' establishment there in 1982. Man fred Lindner of the Nuremberg Prehistoric Society also worked on various projects beginning in 1 9 7 3 . In the 1990s considerable activity and excitement surrounded work on the Winged Lion Temple (Phillip Hammond) and the Southern Temple (Martha Joukowsky of Brown University working with ACOR). A Byzantine church discovered by Kenneth Russell in 1990 has been excavated by Pierre Bikai of ACOR, with funding from USAID and support from JDA and the Ministry of Tourism. A quantity of burnt pa pyri found within the church needed special treatment to enable preservation and copying. Our knowledge of Petra in the Byzantine period has been considerably enhanced by these latter discoveries. Bab edh-Dhra\ Numeira. Walter Rast and Thomas Schaub (ASOR)., who had worked with Lapp at Bab edh-Dhra', continued work at Bab edh-Dhra and commenced work at Numeira, excavating there through the 1970s and 1980s. Umm el-Jimal. Out on the desert fringe of Jordan, Bert De Vries (of Calvin College under ASOR auspices) surveyed and then excavated at U m m el-Jimal, beginning in 1973, in an ongoing project among the site's basalt ruins. [See Umm el-Jimal.] International Outreach and Publications. As a result of the direct interest of Crown Prince Hassan, Jordan or ganized a series of international archaeological conferences, the first of which was held in Oxford, England, in 1980. Subsequent conferences were held in Amman, Jordan ( 1 9 8 3 ) ; Tubingen, Germany (1986); Lyons, France (1989); Irbid, Jordan (1992); and Turin, Italy (1995). The results of the conferences have been published by volume in the series Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan. An organi zation known as the Friends of Archaeology sponsors lec tures and trips to sites in Jordan and publishes a newsletter, now called Ancient Jordan. In addition to ACOR, which is probably the largest ar chaeological entity in Jordan, the following international ar chaeological centers are now located in Jordan: the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History (BIAAH); c
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Mesopotamia
the Deutsches Evanglisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes; the Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche-Orient (IFAPO); the Franciscan Institute on Mount Nebo; and the Italian-Jordanian Institute of Ar chaeological Sciences. By 1986, Yarmuk University in Irbid had established an Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. The institute has sponsored many projects, trained a good number of promising archaeological students, and published a news letter. Mutah University near Kerak also has established an archaeology program. Notable archaeological museums have been established in Jordan that are constantly being expanded. The largest is on the citadel in Amman, adjacent to the reconstructions being pursued in the Roman temple; the others are at the University of Jordan in Amman, at Yarmouk University in Irbid, and in Madaba. F u t u r e P r o g r a m s . T h e number of archaeological proj ects in Jordan expanded in die 1990s, and the peace and normalized relations between Israel and Jordan promise an increase in substantial international research. At the same time, concerns created by utilization from increased tourism at archaeological sites are being balanced with restoration and conservation. [See Tourism and Archaeology.] Exca vation and restoration programs are likely to continue into the twenty-first century at the country's three most dramatic sites—Amman, Petra, and Jerash—while other sites are be ing further developed. T h e potential number of sites for ex cavation continues to rise: the Jordanian Antiquities Data base and Information System (JADIS), a computerized list of archaeological sites in Jordan, lists 8,680 sites (it is avail able in book form from the Department of Antiquities and ACOR). In addition, an ongoing project sponsored by the University of Western Australia has begun utilizing aerial photographs taken in 1953 with ground-verification fieldwork to build a more comprehensive list of Jordan's archae ological sites. [See also American Center of Oriental Research; Ameri can Palestine Exploration Society; American Schools of Ori ental Research; British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History; British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; Deutscher Palastina-Verein; Deutsches Evangelisches Insti tut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes; Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise; Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biographies of Albright, Bagatti, Bennett; Bliss, Clermont-Ganneau, Conder, Crowfoot, Dalman, Fisher, Garstang, Glueck, Guerin, Harding, Horsfield, Kenyon, Kitchener, Lapp, Mallon, Robinson, and Sailer.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine. Rev. ed. Gloucester, Mass., 1 9 7 1 . Bikai, Pierre, ed. ACOR, the First Twenty-Five Years: The American Center of Oriental Research, 1968-1993, Amman, 1993. Bliss, Frederick Jones. Tlte Development of Palestine Exploration. New
York, 1906. Comprehensive history for all of Palestine to 1900 by one personally involved. Dever, William G . "Syro-Palestinian Archaeology 'Comes of Age': T h e Inaugural Volume of the Hesban Series, A Review Article." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, nos. 290-291 ( M a y August 1993): 1 2 7 - 1 3 0 . Dornemann, Rudolph H. The Archaeology of the Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Milwaukee, 1983. Detailed review for these periods. Geraty, Lawrence T . , and Larry G . Herr, eds. The Archaeology of Jor dan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. Geraty, Lawrence T . , and Lloyd A. Willis. "Archaeological Research in Transjordan." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Pre sented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T . Geraty and Larry G . Herr, pp. 3 - 7 2 , 6 9 5 - 6 9 7 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. Historical survey and site-by-site descriptions. Geraty, Lawrence T . , and David Merling. Hesban after Twenty-Five Years. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1994. Comprehensive view of one site; accessible for nonprofessionals. Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan (1940). Rev. ed. C a m bridge, Mass., 1970. Glueck, Nelson. The River Jordan. Philadelphia, 1946. Hadidi, Adnan. " T h e Archaeology of Jordan: Achievements and Ob jectives." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1 , edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 1 5 - 2 1 . Amman, 1982. Helpful over view. Harding, G . Lankester. The Antiquities of Jordan. New York, 1959. Pop ular survey. Homes-Fredericq, Denyse, and J . Basil Hennessy, eds. Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1 , Bibliography; vol. 2 . 1 - 2 , Field Reports. Louvain, 1 9 8 6 1989. Horn, Siegfried H.. "Why the Moabite Stone Was Blown to Pieces." Biblical Archaeology Review 1 2 (1986): 5 0 - 6 1 . King, Philip J . American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. E x cellent overview of American contributions. Miller, J. Maxwell. "Recent Archaeological Developments Relevant to Ancient Moab." In Studies in the Histoiy and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 1 6 9 - 1 7 3 . Amman, 1982. Sauer, James A. "Prospects for Archaeology in Jordan and Syria." Bib lical Archaeologist 45 (1982): 73-84. Useful historical, archaeological, and site survey. Stern, Ephraim, et al., eds. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Jerusalem and N e w York, 1993. Comprehensive and well illustrated. Vogel, Eleanor K . , et al. "Bibliography of Holy Land Sites." Hebrew Union College Annual 42 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1-96; 52 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 - 9 2 ; 58 (1987): 1-63. JAMES A . SAUER and LLOYD A . WILLIS
Archaeology in M e s o p o t a m i a T h e archaeology of Mesopotamia has followed an eventful path since its origins in the early nineteenth century CE. From an amateur pursuit, enjoyed by adventurers and in tellectuals of the age, the study of ancient Mesopotamia has evolved over the decades into a rigorous scientific discipline employing a full range of modern analytical techniques. While these developments have led to a remarkable under standing of many aspects of ancient communities in Mes opotamia, there is still a great deal to learn, and future tech-
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Mesopotamia nical and analytical advances are likely substantially to expand the state of that knowledge. T h e birth of Mesopotamian archaeology can be ascribed to the year 1807, when the young Claudius Rich arrived in Baghdad to assume die post of resident of the East India Company. During his nine years in Iraq, at that time the Ottoman Pashalik of Baghdad, Rich carried out a study of the ruins of Babylon, which he described in some detail, and produced accurate accounts of die ruins of Nineveh and Nimrud in northern Mesopotamia. After Rich's death in 1 8 2 1 , his collection of Mesopotamian artifacts was pur chased by the British Museum. [See Babylon; Nineveh; Nimrud.] These objects, including many clay tablets in cu neiform script and inscribed bricks, formed the first sub stantial group of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts to arrive in Europe and aroused considerable interest. At about the same time, die first steps in deciphering some elements of the distinctive cuneiform script were being made by Euro pean scholars, particularly Georg Grotefend and Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, through their studies of the trilingual Bisitun inscription in Iran. [See Cuneiform; Bisitun; and the biography of Rawlinson.] After Rich's death, more than twenty years passed before the first archaeological excavations were begun in Meso potamia. It was a Frenchman, Paul-Emile Botta, who sank the first trenches into die mound of Kuyunjik, part of an cient Nineveh, in December 1842. Botta's appointment as French consul in Mosul, the modern town adjacent to Nin eveh, had been stimulated by the publication of Rich's ac counts of Babylon and Nineveh. N o t enjoying great success at Kuyunjik, Botta transferred his operations in March 1843 to die site of Khorsabad, 23 km ( 1 4 mi.) to the northeast. There Botta immediately made the spectacular discovery of stone sculptures in bas-relief and monolithic human-headed winged bulls and lions belonging to die palace of the Assyr ian king Sargon II of the late eighth century BCE. The stones of Assyria had begun to speak for the first time in more than twenty-five hundred years. [See Khorsabad; and the biogra phy of Botta.] Botta's discoveries at Khorsabad aroused the interest of an Englishman employed at the British Embassy in Con stantinople, Austen Henry Layard. Layard was encouraged by the British ambassador, Stratford Canning, to open ex cavations on the mound of Nimrud, southeast of Nineveh, in late 1845. Within a short time, Layard had uncovered large stone slabs with cuneiform inscriptions and scenes in bas-relief from two Assyrian palaces of kings resident at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu. Kalhu had been the second great Assyrian capital after Assur, but prior to Nineveh and Khor sabad. [See Assur.] Layard continued work at Nimrud until 1847, during which time he excavated remains of several Assyrian palaces. Large quantities of sculptures and uniquely important artifacts, such as the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, were transported to the British Museum,
57
creating considerable public interest. Following the publi cation in 1849 of Layard's immensely popular book Nineveh and Its Remains, funds were provided for him to return to Mesopotamia for further excavation. While working at Nimrud, Layard conducted excavations at Nineveh, expos ing the tremendous stone relief sculptures of die palace of Sennacherib, including scenes showing the siege of Lachish. The site's substantial depths of overlying deposits meant that Layard excavated by the dangerous method of tunnel ing along buried wall faces. By this means he uncovered a total of almost 3 km (2 mi.) of wall faces with sculpted re liefs. Apart from the sculptures, another major class of finds was cuneiform texts. In Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh, Layard found a massive collection of inscribed tablets (some twenty-four thousand), belonging to the royal library of Ashurbanipal. Decipherment of these documents was to bring a rich reward to historians of ancient Assyria. At the time, major developments, principally by the English schol ars Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and Edward Hincks, were being made in the decipherment of cuneiform script. In 1857 four scholars—Rawlinson, Hincks, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Jules Oppert—independendy produced trans lations of a cuneiform document found at Assur, thus con vincing sceptics of their new-found understanding of the Assyrian script and language. After Layard's departure from Mesopotamia in 1 8 5 1 , there was an increase in the pace and intensity of excavation throughout Mesopotamia. Standards, however, were low, and fieldwork took the form of small soundings at a large number of sites in die hope of recovering important artifacts to adorn museum collections with a minimum investment of money and labor. In particular, lack of familiarity with the excavation of mud-brick architecture meant that whole buildings were removed without being recorded or even no ticed, especially in southern Mesopotamia, or Babylonia, where attention had then shifted. During die 1850s, British excavations were conducted by Rawlinson at Borsippa; by William Kennett Loftus at Warka; and by J. E. Taylor at Ur and Eridu. Loftus, the first to conduct excavations in south ern Mesopotamia, also initiated soundings at Senkereh, now known as ancient Larsa, and at Tell Sifr. French archaeol ogists working at Kish and Babylon were disappointed, like Loftus, in not finding any of the spectacular stone sculptures which had so amply rewarded the first excavators in nortiiern Mesopotamia. For the time being, the lack of immediate returns from Babylonia encouraged a return to the north, to die great cities of Assyria, where the first discoveries had caused such excitement. [See Assyrians; Uruk-Warka; Ur; Eridu; and the biography of Layard.] Excavations at Nineveh had been continued by Hormuzd Rassam, once Layard's assistant, and work at Khorsabad, and also at Nineveh, was conducted by Botta's successor, Victor Place, who had traced the plans of all the Assyrian
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Mesopotamia
royal buildings on the summit of Khorsabad. At Nineveh, beginning in 1852, Rassam recovered more spectacular wall reliefs, including the famous lion-hunt scenes, and infor mative tablets from the newly revealed palace of Ashurbanipal. He also explored the mounds at Nimrud and Assur, among many others in the region. Tragically, many of the objects so hastily removed from the Assyrian cities of Nin eveh and Khorsabad were permanendy lost in a disaster on the Shatt al-Arab at Qurna in 1855, when three hundred packing cases full of priceless sculptures and other antiqui ties were sent to the bottom of the river by marauders. The commencement of tire Crimean War in the same year put an end to European investigations in Mesopotamia for al most two decades. In 1873 George Smith led a British Museum expedition back to Nineveh in search of a missing portion of a cunei form tablet that clearly provided an account of the Flood, now known as part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Smith's early death in 1876 led the British Museum to reassign Rassam to the task of excavating Nineveh. With Layard's help, Ras sam in fact obtained a capacious permit to excavate in all areas of the Ottoman Pashaliks of Baghdad, Aleppo, and Van, which he proceeded to do between 1878 and 1882. In a thoroughly unsatisfactory arrangement, Rassam left gangs of workmen in the charge of local supervisors at widely sep arated points all over Assyria and Babylonia. As well as re opening excavations at Nineveh and Nimrud, Rassam dug at Balawat to the east of Mosul, where he recovered the great bronze gates of Shalmaneser II, now in the British Museum. In Babylonia, Rassam sank trenches into many mounds, in cluding Babylon, Borsippa, Cutha, and Telloh, yielding re sults commensurate widi his archaeological skills. T o the southwest of Baghdad, at Abu Habbah (ancient Sippar and biblical Sepharvaim), Rassam recovered a vast number of tablets from a large Neo-Babylonian religious precinct ad jacent to the ziggurat. [See Balawat; Sippar; and the biogra phy of Smith.] In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, archaeology in Mesopotamia began to take on something of its modern shape, with long-term excavations at sites and the emer gence of scientific interest in Babylonia and Assyria. Ernest de Sarzec, the French vice-consul at Basra in southern Iraq, conducted excavations at Telloh (ancient Girsu- of Lagash state) from 1877 to 1881 and 1888 to 1900. [See Girsu and Lagash.] These were the first-ever substantial excavations at a Sumerian site, and the objects recovered, especially the diorite statues of rulers of Lagash and the Stela of die Vul tures, aroused immense excitement in France, ensuring a long-term commitment to Telloh that lasted until 1 9 3 3 . Study of the thousands of Sumerian tablets from Telloh still provides the basis of much of what is understood of Su merian society. Nevertheless, de Sarzec's methods were still primitive, particularly in regard to the tracing of the mudbrick walls used in almost all buildings in southern Meso
potamia. Telloh also suffered greatly from illicit excavations during de Sarzec's absences. At the same time as de Sarzec was beginning his excavations at Telloh, the appointment of Hamdi Bey as first director of the Imperial Ottoman M u seum in Istanbul saw both an increase in the control exer cised by the Ottoman authorities over foreign expeditions in Mesopotamia and the creation of an extremely important museum in Istanbul. The first American involvement in fieldwork in Meso potamia came with an expedition in 1884; it was followed by the start, in 1887, of a long-term program of excavations at the southern site of Nippur, a connection that lasted until modern times. T h e early work was directed by Hermann V. Hilprecht, John P. Peters, and J. H. Haynes, who, after a difficult start, recovered thousands of clay tablets, mainly Sumerian, which, to this day, provide the bulk of what is known concerning Sumerian literary compositions. [See American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad; Sume rian; and the biographies of Hilprecht and Peters.] In the dying years of the nineteenth century CE, archae ology in Mesopotamia at last took on its modern form with the first appearance of German scholars in the field. T h e foundation of the German Oriental Society in 1898 and its excavations at Babylon in March 1899 under the direction of Robert Koldewey mark a genuine development in die discipline. T h e work was characterized by a concern to in vestigate the architectural and social context of die Mesopotamian artifacts which had attracted so much attention in Europe. During an intensive program of excavations up to 1 9 1 3 , Koldewey uncovered and recorded in commendable detail a remarkable series of temples, palaces, houses, and other structures of the Neo-Babylonian town of the time of Nebuchadrezzar, including the Ishtar Gate and the Proces sional Way. During this work, his staff acquired and exer cised new skills in tracing and recording mud-brick walls— precious skills soon put to use elsewhere in Mesopotamia. [See Deutsche Orient-Gesellshaft; and the biography of Kol dewey] From 1901 to 1903 Koldewey excavated at Borsippa and at the Sumerian city of Fara, ancient Shuruppak. [See Fara.] More significantly, from 1903 to 1 9 1 4 a superb program of excavations at the early Assyrian capital of Assur was carried out by Walter Andrae, an assistant of Koldewey's at Baby lon. As at Babylon, the Germans meticulously recovered a plan of the city and many of its important buildings and residential areas. Of major new importance, however, was their excavation of a deep stratigraphic trench down through the Ishtar temple at Assur. For the first time in Mesopotamian archaeology, a sequence of buildings was revealed that was securely related through careful stratigraphic observa tion. Thus, at Babylon and Assur, German archaeologists set standards in architectural and stratigraphic investigation and observation which formed the basis of Mesopotamian archaeology. [See the biography of Andrae.]
HISTORY OF T H E FIELD: Archaeology in Mesopotamia During these early years of the twentieth century, archae ologists other titan Germans were conducting excavations very much in die old mold. The Sumerian city of Bismaya, (ancient Adab) was rudely tteated by the American Edgar James Banks, while French excavations at Kish and British excavations at Nineveh produced little in the way of scien tific results. T h e first surveys of Islamic remains in Meso potamia were also being conducted by L. Massignon, Con rad Preusser, Ernst Herzfeld, and others. With the outbreak of World War I in 1 9 1 4 , all archaeological work in Meso potamia came to a halt. [See Kish.] The modern state of Iraq, created after World War I, in cluded virtually all of ancient Mesopotamia within its boundaries. It was fortunate that the antiquities of Iraq found a talented and considerate protector in Gertrude Bell, an official of the British administration who became director of antiquities. Under her guidance, foreign excavations in Iraq were carefully monitored and new laws ensured that much of Iraq's heritage remained in Iraq, largely housed in the uniquely important Iraq Museum, of which she was founder. Not surprisingly, much fieldwork was subsequently conducted by British expeditions, culminating in the foun dation in 1 9 3 2 of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Initial soundings at Ur and Eridu were made by R. Campbell Thompson in 1 9 1 8 , while H. R. Hall excavated again at Ur and at nearby Tell al-Ubaid in 1 9 1 9 . [See British School of Archaeology in Iraq; Ubaid.] Those tentative postwar steps set the scene for the arrival of C. Leonard Woolley, whose excavations at Ur from 1 9 2 2 to 1934 recovered a wealth of material which receives sci entific study to this day. Woolley's excavations in all quarters of the city provided a broadly informative picture of life, and death, at Ur during several phases of its occupation. In particular, his excavation of the Sumerian royal cemetery, which yielded the most spectacular objects of gold and other materials, captured the public's imagination to an extent that had been unknown since Layard's day. A deep sounding probed levels of prehistoric occupation, similar to those en countered by Woolley in new work at Tell al-Ubaid in 1 9 2 3 1924. This work provided the first detailed information con cerning the prehistory of southern Mesopotamia. [See Ur; and the biography of Woolley.] Elsewhere during the 1920s, a wide range of foreign teams could be found exploring sites in southern Mesopotamia. The French had returned to Telloh, a British-American team worked at Kish and Jemdet Nasr, and an American team at Fara. [See Jemdet Nasr.] At the huge site of Warka (biblical Erech), the Germans, from 1928 onward recovered detailed plans of late-fourth-millennium temples, as well as thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the protocuneiform signs now known to represent the earliest form of writing anywhere in the world. A major new development was the arrival in Mesopotamia of teams from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in the late 1920s, initially con
59
tinuing the work of Botta and Place at Khorsabad and then, in the 1930s, excavating four sites in the Diyala region east of Baghdad. [See Diyala.] From these Sumerian sites came a fine series of sculptures. More significantiy, however, the excavations at Khafajeh, Tell Asmar, and Tell Agrab pro vided the basis upon which the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia is still understood. [See Khafajeh.] In northern Mesopotamia, American work at Tepe Gawra and British work, under Max Mallowan, at Nineveh, Tell Brak, and Arpachiyah, gave remarkable new information on the prehis tory and early history of tiiis region. The first traces of Pa leolithic occupation in Mesopotamia were recovered in die 1920s by Dorothy Garrod in the Kurdish mountains. [See Tepe Gawra; Brak, Tell; and the biographies ofMallowan and Garrod.] Conferences in Baghdad in 1929 and Leiden in 1 9 3 1 at tempted to make some sense of die ever-increasing amount of archaeological information being recovered from the soil of Mesopotamia. The naming of periods in southern Me sopotamian prehistory and early history was agreed upon, giving the sequence Ubaid, Uruk, Jemdet Nasr, and Early Dynastic I—III. Subsequent work in northern and central Mesopotamia established the existence of the Hassuna, Samarra, and Halaf cultures, existing prior to the Ubaid. [See Hassuna; Samarra, article on Chalcolithic Period; Halaf, Tell.] Of particular significance was Iraqi work with Seton Lloyd during World War II at Tell Uqair and Hassuna, and at Eridu from 1947 to 1949. [See the biography of Lloyd.] Iraqi investigations at Aqar Quf and Hatra shed new light on die later historic periods. [See Aqar Quf; Hatra.] T h e chrono logical framework established in 1929 and 1 9 3 1 remains in place, although with many minor modifications. T h e 1950s and 1960s saw a resurgence of fieldwork in Iraq, led by a return of die British, under Mallowan and David Oates, to Nimrud and the Americans to Nippur. A new concern with the ancient economy and environment underlay the large-scale American project, led by Robert J. Braidwood, to investigate sites in the Fertile Crescent con nected with the origins of agriculture. [See Agriculture.] Ex cavations at Jarmo, in northeastern Iraq, were especially suc cessful in this regard. [See Jarmo.] At the same time, excavations by Ralph and Rose Solecki at Shanidar cave demonstrated the existence of Neanderthal communities in northern Mesopotamia. [See Shanidar Cave.] A new development in the late 1970s was the start of res cue archaeology in Iraq, stimulated by programs of dam building and irrigation undertaken by the Iraqi government. Multinational programs of survey, excavation, and research have been conducted in the Hamrin, Haditha, and Esld Mo sul regions, yielding exttemely detailed results still being studied. [See Hamrin Dam Salvage Project; Esld Mosul Dam Salvage Project.] In the late 1980s, a return to research excavation at major Mesopotamian sites, such as Nimrud, Nineveh, Kish, Jemdet Nasr, Hatra, and Seleucia amongst c
c
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Persia
many others, reinforced ideas of the uniquely important ar chaeological heritage of the modern state of Iraq. [See Seleucia on the Tigris.] Spectacular discoveries of Assyrian royal tombs containing magnificent goldwork and other items were made by Iraqi archaeologists working at Nimrud. These modem excavations in Iraq have generally employed the full range of techniques available to archaeology, many borrowed from otiier disciplines—such as the earth sci ences—to enable the recovery of information about many aspects of ancient life. In addition, the renewed study of material excavated earlier in the century has enabled some refinements in the chronology and distribution of die various cultures of Mesopotamia. Foreign excavation in Iraq came to a halt in 1990, although the study of Mesopotamian ma terial continues to be undertaken in universities and muse ums across the world and publication of previously exca vated sites is proceeding. The many unexcavated, or only partially excavated, sites remaining in Iraq ensure that a fu ture return to fieldwork in Mesopotamia would be richly rewarded. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrae, Ernst Walter, and Rainer Michael Boehmer. Sketches by an Excavator: Walter Andrae im Orient, 1898-1919.
Berlin, 1989. Beau
tifully produced volume containing many color reproductions of paintings made in Mesopotamia by Andrae, as well as accounts of his archaeological work. Curtis, John E., ed. Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery: The Work of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1932-1982. London, 1982.
Amply illustrated account, largely written by the excavators, of work at a wide range of sites. Lloyd, Seton. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Ex ploration (1947). Rev. and enl. ed. London, 1980. Brilliant survey of
early exploration in Mesopotamia; articulate, amusing, and vastly informative. Lloyd, Seton. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest. London, 1978. Masterly summary of a large
subject in one well-illustrated volume. Oates, David, and Joan Oates. The Rise of Civilization. Oxford, 1976. Very readable and well-illustrated volume covering all major devel opments in the prehistory of Mesopotamia. Oates, Joan. Babylon. Rev. ed. London, 1986. Excellent account of the history of one of the most important archaeological sites in Meso potamia. Postgate, J. N. The First Empires. Oxford, 1977. First-rate account of
the early history of Mesopotamia and its discovery; were illustrated. R . J . MATTHEWS
Archaeology in Persia From 1800 onward, with the arrival of foreign missions in Persia, an interest in die identification of places mentioned in the Bible and by classical authors (e.g., Shushan and Ecbatana, Pasargadae, and Persepolis, respectively) grew. [See Ecbatana; Pasargadae; Persepolis.] In die first half of the nineteenth century, an effort was made to provide written descriptions and hand-drawn illustrations of visible monu
ments. Systematic excavations were begun later in the cen tury. At the same time, general surveys aimed at the history of ancient Persian art and architecture were prepared (Flandin and Coste, 1 8 4 3 - ; Dieulafoy, 1 8 8 4 - 1 8 8 9 ; Perrot and Chipiez, 1892). This work was followed in 1 9 3 8 - 1 9 3 9 by the six-volume A Survey of Persian Art (Pope, 1967). These volumes, and the organization of the International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology, did much to promote an interest in Persian art and archaeology in the West. Achaemenid Archaeology. Work on Persian inscrip tions began in 1 8 0 2 with George F. Grotefend's identifica tion of the inscriptions at Persepolis as belonging to the Achaemenid kings (Floeck, 1 8 1 8 ) . Real progress, however, awaited Henry C. Rawlinson's study of the trilingual cune iform texts of Darius the Great (522-486 BCE) at the site of Bisitun, east of Kermanshah (Rawlinson, 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 4 9 ) . [See Bisitun.] This publication initiated the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform and set the stage for later studies of Bis itun (Cameron, 1 9 5 1 , pp. 47-54) and Persepolis (Kent, 1 9 5 3 ) . Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid kings ( 5 2 1 330 BCE), was first illustrated in watercolor by Robert Kerr Porter in 1 8 2 1 . Such workmanship was superseded in 1 8 7 2 by Franz Stolze's pioneering photographic records of Per sian sites (Stolze, 1882). The new technique furtiier revo lutionized field recording witii the aerial photographs taken in 1936 by Erich F. Schmidt (1940). Systematic excavations were begun at Persepolis in 1 9 3 1 by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which remained in the field until 1939. T h e excavations were orig inally directed by Ernst Herzfeld ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 4 ) and then by Schmidt ( 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 3 9 ) . After 1 9 3 9 , die work was continued by the Archaeological Service of Iran under Andre Godard, Mohammad T . Mustafavi, and Ali Sami. From 1968 to 1974, a program of exploration and restoration was under taken by Giuseppe and Ann B. Tilia from the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estrerno Oriente (IsMEO), Rome. [See Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estrerno Oriente.] The nearby site of Pasargadae, capital of Cyrus the Great ( 5 5 9 5 3 ° BCE), also attracted the attention of early travelers such as Robert Ker Porter and Marcel Dieulafoy. Herzfeld visited the site in 1905 and undertook the first excavations there in 1928. Further studies were made in 1 9 5 5 by Sami. A definitive excavation was carried out between 1 9 6 1 and 1963 by David Stronach, director of the newly established (i960) British Institute of Persian Studies (Stronach, 1978). [See British Institute of Persian Studies.] A third major Achaemenid site, Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), began to be formally excavated in 1 9 7 4 by Masoud Azarnoush (Iranian Archaeological Services) aldiough many clandestine finds have been made there previously (Muscarella, 1980, pp. 3 1 - 3 5 ) . [See Ecbatana.] Susa, the Achaemenid capital of southwestern Iran, also contains ex tensive Achaemenid remains. [See Susa.] Between 1884 and 1886, Dieulafoy exposed parts of Darius's palace ( 5 2 1 - 4 8 5 _
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Persia BCE) there. The French Mission Archeologique en Iran (MAI) originally called the Delegation Archeologique en Perse, worked at Susa from 1897 to 1978. [SeePalace.] From 1900 to 1939 die main plan was exposed by Jacques de Mor gan and Roland de Mecquenem. In the 1970s, Apadana was resurveyed by Jean Perrot (MAI) using a magnetometer. Perrot revised and completed the city plan. [Perrot, 1977, 1978.] A new palace belonging to Darius across the Chaour River joined a "Persian village" Roman Ghirshman found in the 1950s in the quarter known as the Ville des Artisans (dated to the seventh-fifth centuries BCE) as two important new aspects of Achaemenid Susa. In the 1960s another im portant Achaemenid site was cleared by Umberto Scerrato for IsMEO (1966) in Sistan at Dahan-i Ghulaiman. E l a m i t e a n d P r e - E l a m i t e Archaeology. Between 1850 and 1 8 5 2 , William K. Loftus's excavations at Susa, while serving on a British boundary commission, uncovered the first evidence for the Elamites under extensive Achaemenid remains. [See Elamites.] In 1897 de Morgan was made di rector of France's newly established Delegation en Perse. Subsequent directors were de Mecquenem ( 1 9 0 8 - 1 9 4 6 ) , Ghirshman ( 1 9 4 6 - 1 9 6 7 ) , and Perrot ( 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 9 0 ) , the first prehistorian at the site. From 1900 to 1930 the directors en joyed a French monopoly on archaeology in Iran. T h e excavations at Susa and of the ziggurat in the nearby Elamite city of Chogha Zanbil by Ghirshman from 1 9 5 1 to 1962 established the outlines of Elamite civilization in south western Iran from about 2500 BCE to its destruction by the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE. [See Chogha Zanbil; Ziggurat; Assyrians.] By 1908 the prehistoric sequence, established on the acropolis at Susa by the French mission, and which began in 4000 BCE, was unique in the Near East. It provided the reference point for prehistoric remains in southern Meso potamia until 1930. During the 1930s this sequence was re vised by de Mecquenem's additional cuts into the acropolis and at smaller nearby sites. Under Perrot, a new and detailed stratigraphic excavation was undertaken by Alain Le Brun, augmented by the reexcavation of nearby small sites by Genevieve Dollfus (MAI). This revised sequence (Perrot, 1978) put in developmental order die numerical and textual Proto-Elamite tablets from about 3000 BCE, products of one of the earliest writing systems. [See Writing and Writing Sys tems.] Prehistory on t h e I r a n i a n P l a t e a u . Excavations at pre historic sites were initiated on the Iranian plateau for the first time in the 1930s at Tepe Giyan by Ghirshman and George Contineau ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 2 , for die Louvre Museum); Tepe Hissar ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 2 ) and Rayy ( 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 3 6 ) by Schmidt; and Tureng Tepe by Frederick R. Wulsin ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 2 ) , all three for the University of Pennsylvania Museum; and Tepe Sialk by Ghirshman ( 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 4 and 1937 for the Louvre). Sialk became the reference point for the prehistoric plateau until the period of excavation that followed World War II. Hissar 3
61
and Sialk were the models at die time for the stratigraphic recovery of regional prehistoric sequences. After die interregnum of World War II, excavations re sumed with a new university-trained generation of prehistorians who introduced interdisciplinary specialists and new methods. Computers became available for laboratory anal ysis (although portable models appeared only after 1980). This influx of new people, methods, and interests greatly enhanced the study of prehistory. Carleton S. Coon (Uni versity Museum; 1949, 1 9 5 1 ) initiated the first excavations in Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic archaeology. By 1986 it was possible to outline the Stone Age in Iran (Smith, 1986). Interest in the transition from the Paleolithic to the farm ing cultures of the following Neolithic period led in i960 to the Oriental Institute of Chicago's Iranian Prehistoric Pro ject, led by Robert J. Braidwood. Survey work for this pro ject in turn led to the exploration of the Deli Luran Plain beginning in 1961 by Frank Hole and Kent Flannery for the University of Michigan (1969). Subsequent excavations and surveys, espeically by Michigan's Henry Wright, produced a sequence from about 7500 BCE to about 3000 BCE with the help of the first computer analyses (Hole, 1987). These re sults were further augmented in Susiana by extensive settle ment surveys by Robert Adams, Henry Wright, and others interested in problems surrounding the rise of the state in antiquity (Hole, ed., 1987). Following this approach, the use of surveys thereafter became standard in the field. An interest in stratigraphically based chronology and cul tural history led to the University of Pennsylvania Museum's Hasanlu Project, directed by Robert H. Dyson, Jr., from 1959 to 1977. T h e project was modeled along the lines of Hissar and Sialk but with refined methods of excavation, recording, and analysis that led to a six-thousand-year se quence of material culture. T h e unexpected discovery of a rich burned ninth-century BCE level focused the work on the Iron Age (Dyson and Voight, eds., 1989). In 1969, to the north of Hasanlu, the German Archaeo logical Institute of Tehran (established in 1968) brought its architectural expertise to bear on the study of the kingdom of ancient Urartu. [See Hasanlu; Urartu.] Excavations at the site of Bastam by Wolfram Kleiss and extensive surveys car ried out for the institute combined, in the 1970s, to provide a detailed outiine of die ninth-fifth centuries BCE there. An other important Iron Age excavation was carried out by Stronach (British Institute of Persian Studies) at Nush-iJan from 1967 to 1975; it was the first site to yield monumental Median architecture (Stronach, 1985). [SeeMedes.] T h e Hasanlu Project preceded a number of similar re gional projects initiated in the 1960s and 1970s: the Godin Project of the Royal Ontario Museum under T. C. Young, Jr., from 1965 to 1974; the Tepe Yahya Project of Harvard University's Peabody Museum under C. C. LambergKarlovsky from 1967 to 1 9 7 5 ) ; the Italian IsMEO Shahr-i Sokhta Expedition under Maurizio Tosi from 1967 to 1978;
62
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Persia
the Baba Jan Expedition of the Institute of Archaeology, London, under Claire Goff from 1967 to 1972; the Univer sity of Manchester's Haftavan Project under Charles Burney from 1968 to 1978; the Qazvin Project of the University of Tehran under Ezat O. Negahban since 1970; and the Uni versity of Pennsylvania's Malyan Project under William M. Sumner from 1971 to 1978. [See Godin Tepe; Tepe Yahya; MalyanJ Each of these projects produced a regional se quence several thousand years long, associated with ceram ics, artifacts, architecture, animal bones, and plant remains. Godin Tepe produced an important fortified residence from the Median period and an "enclave" containing tablets and ceramics from the lowland from about 3200 BCE; Tepe Ya hya produced a similar concentration of lowland ceramics and blank tablets. The two sites suggest political or eco nomic contacts among die plateau, Mesopotamia, and Elam in about 3000 BCE. The Qazvin Project's excavations at Saqzabad, Gabristan, and Zaghe produced an important se quence of early painted pottery linked to Sialk and Hissar. Baba Jan, in addition to its earlier levels, yielded important Median structures (sixth century BCE), and Shahr-i Sokhta in Sistan provided links to both western Iran and Central Asia in the late fourth and third millennia BCE. Malyan pro vided Proto-Elamite pictographic tablets (c. 3000 BCE) and Middle Elamite inscribed brick fragments identifying it as ancient Anshan, the upland capital of Elam. Haftavan pro vided pottery connecting northern Iran to the Caucasus. Later Historical Periods. The excavation of sites from tire Seleucid (330-250 BCE), Parthian (249 BCE-224 CE), and Sasanian (224-650 CE) periods also dates largely to the pe riod after World War II. [See Seleucids; Parthians; Sasanians.] Royal cities and temples were the focus of attention for excavations that were carried out generally using tradi tional methods. Work on the Seleucid period was begun by Ghirshman at Susa in 1947-1948 in the Ville des Artisans and was followed in 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 3 by Stronach's discoveries at Pasargadae. Akbar Tadjvidi (Iranian Archaeological Ser vice) worked at Persepolis from 1969 to 1972, and John Hansman and Stronach worked at Shahr-i Qumis from 1968 to 1978. Only about a dozen sites from the Parthian period have been systematically explored. These have included ceme teries at Kangavar by Seyfollah Kambaksh-Fard - (Iranian Archaeological Service) since 1968 and at Ecbatana/Hamadan by Masoud Azamoush (Iranian Center for Archaeo logical Research) since 1975; several sites in the Dailaman area of Gilan by Namio Egami and Shinji Fukai (Tokyo University) from i960 to 1964; ruined temples at Bard-iNishandeh and Masjid-i Suleiman by Ghirshman from 1964 to 1966 and 1 9 6 1 to 1 9 7 1 ; setdement remains at Susa by Ghirshman from 1946 to 1950; Bisitun by Heinz Luschey (German Archaeological Institute) from 1965 to 1967; Qal'eh Yazdigird by Edward Keall (Royal Ontario Museum)
from 1967 to 1978; Nush-i Jan by Stronach from 1967 to 1974; Shahr-i Qumis by Hansman and Stronach from 1968 to 1978; Yahya by Lamberg-Karlovsky from 1967 to 1 9 7 5 ; and Kuh-i Khwaja by Giorgio Guillini (Italian Archaeolog ical Mission) in 1964. T h e minor Parthian remains found at Takht-i Suleiman by H. H. von der Osten and Rudolf Naumann (German Institute) from 1959 to 1978 have made the identification of that site as Parthian Phraaspa now unten able. Excavations of substantial Sasanian remains began in the 1930s at the sites of Hissar by Schmidt (for the University Museum) from 1 9 3 1 to 1 9 3 2 ; Qasr-i Abu Nasr by Walter Hauser and J. M . Upton (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) from 1932 to 1935; Istakhr by Schmidt (for die Oriental Institute, Chicago) from 1 9 3 4 to 1939; and Bishapur by Ghirshman from 1935 to 1 9 4 1 . A new cycle of systematic work on the Sasanian period began in 1959 at Takht-i Suleiman by von der Osten and Naumann. In 1968, excavations were undertaken by the Iranian Archaeological Service at Kangavar, directed by Kambaksh-Fard, that proved to be die remains of a Sasanian palace rather than a Parthian temple. In the 1970s, excavations were carried out at Sasanian settlements at Tureng Tepe by Jean Deshayes (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) from 1 9 7 1 to 1978; Shahr-i Qumis by Hansman and Stronach from 1968 to 1978; Tepe Yahya by Lamberg-Karlovsky from 1967 to 1975; Siraf by David Whitehouse (British Institute of Persian Studies) from 1966 to 1972; Firuzabad/Qal'eh-i Dukhtar by Darrell Huff and Kleiss from 1975 to 1978; and Qal'eh-i Yazdegird by Keall from 1975 to 1978. Smaller ex cavations were also carried out at such sites as Ivan-i Karkha by Ghirshman in 1950 and at Jundi Shapur by Adams and Hansen in 1963 in the Susa area; Malyan by Sumner in 1974 in Fars; and on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf by Ghirsh man in 1959. T h e revolution of 1 9 7 8 - 1 9 7 9 ended all on going foreign projects in Iran. [See also Persia; and the biographies of Ghirshman and Raw linson.} BIBLIOGRAPHY
All publications of the excavators mentioned in the text will be found listed and indexed by site and period in Louis Vanden Berghe, Bibliographie analytique de I'archeologie de XTran ancien (Leiden, 1979), and Louis Vanden Berghe and E. Haerinck, Bibliographie analytique de I'archeologie de I'Iran ancien: Supplement J, 1978-1980 and Supplement 2, 1981-1985 (Leiden, 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 8 7 ) . Reports of excavations and other
summaries appear in the following annual publications: Deutschen ArchSologischen Institut, Arclidologische Mitteilungen aus Iran (Tehran, 1 9 6 8 - ) ; Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran (Paris,
1 9 7 1 - ) ; Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estrerno Oriente (IsMEO), East and West (Rome, 1 9 7 4 - ) ; University of Pennsylvania Museum, Expe dition (Philadelphia, 1 9 5 9 - ) ; British Institute of Persian Studies, Iran (London, 1 9 6 3 - ) ; Iranica Antigua (Leiden, 1 9 6 1 - ) ; Oriental Institute, Journal of Near Eastern Studies and Annual Report (Chicago, 1 9 4 2 - ) ; and Paliorient (Paris, 1 9 7 3 - ) .
HISTORY OF T H E FIELD: Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau Primary Sources
Amiet, Pierre. Elam. Auvers-sur-Oise, 1966. Major survey of artifacts from the excavations at Susa now in the Louvre museum. Amiet, Pierre. L'dge des echanges inter-iraniens, 3500-1700
avantJ.-C.
Paris, 1986. The best current synthesis of recently found materials on the Iranian plateau and their relationship to Mesopotamia and Central Asia. Basaglia, Piero, et al. La citta bruciata del deserto Salato/The Burnt City
and the Salt Desert. Venice, 1977. Beautifully illustrated bilingual pre sentation of the results of work at Shahr-i Sokhta by the Italian ex pedition to Sistan. Burney, Charles, and David Marshall. The Peoples of the Hills: Ancient
Ararat and Caucasus. New York, 1972. The only extant survey of the archaeology of all periods of Azerbaijan. The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1.2, Early History of the Middle East.
Edited by I. E. S. Edwards et al. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1971. Authori tative articles on different periods and aspects of Iranian archaeology and history.
63
Schmidt, Erich F. Persepolis. 3 vols. Oriental Institute Publications, 6870. Chicago, 1953-1970. Definitive volumes on the excavations at Persepolis. Specialized Sources Cameron, George G. "The Old Persian Text of the Behistun Inscrip tion." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 5 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 47-54. Dieulafoy, Marcel. L'art antique de la Perse: Achemenides, Parthes, Sas-
sanides. 5 vols. Paris, 1884-1889.
Dyson, Robert H„ Jr, and Mary M. Voight, eds. "East of Assyria: The Highland Settlement of Hasanlu." Expedition 31 (1989). Expedition 3 1 . 2 - 3 (1989). Special issue entitled "East of Assyria," ed ited by Robert H. Dyson and Mary M. Voigt. Flandin, Eugene, and Pascal Coste. Voyage en Perse, vol. 5, Perse ancienne. Paris, 1 8 4 3 - .
Hoeck, Karl. Veleris Mediae et Persiae monumenla. Gottingen, 1818. International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology. London, 1 9 3 6 - .
Ongoing series of conference proceedings.
The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2, The Median and Achaemenian
Kent, Roland G. Old Persian: Grammar,
Periods. Edited by Ilya Gershevitch. Cambridge, 1985. Definitive survey of early historic Iran. Curtis, John E. Ancient Persia. London, 1989. Short survey of recent work, with color illustrations.
Haven, 1953. Muscarella, Oscar White. "Excavated and Unexcavated Achaemenian
Texts, Lexicon, 2d ed. New
Art." In Ancient Persia: The Art of an Empire, edited by Denise
Curtis, John E., ed. Early Mesopotamia and Iran: Contact and Conflict,
Schmandt-Besserat, pp. 3 1 - 3 5 . Malibu, 1980. Perrot, Georges, and Charles Chipiez. Histoiy of Art in Persia. London,
3500-1600 B.C. London, 1993. Seminar by specialists on cultural relationships across the Iranian plateau.
Pope, Arthur Upham, ed. A Survey of Persian Art (1938-1939). 13 vols.
Ehrich, Robert W., ed. Chronologies in Old World Archaeology. 2 vols.
3d ed. Chicago, 1992. The chapter on Iran by Mary M. Voigt and Robert H. Dyson, Jr. (vol. 1, pp. 1 2 2 - 1 2 5 ; vol. 2, pp. 1 2 5 - 1 5 3 ) gives
a systematic summary of regional sequences and an extensive bib liography to 1986, when the text was completed. Ghirshman, Roman. The Arts of Ancient Iran. New York, 1962. Well-
illustrated overview of Persian art to the Parthian period.
1892.
New York, 1967. Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke. The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Be histun Decyphered and Translated. 2 vols. Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, vols. io-n. London, 1846-1849. Schmidt, Erich F. Flights over the Ancient Cities of Iran. Chicago, 1940. Smith, Philip E. L. Palaeolithic Archaeology in Iran. Philadelphia, 1986.
Stolze, Franz. Persepolis. 2 vols. Berlin, 1882.
249 B.C.-A.D. 651. New York, 1962. Well-illustrated overview of Persian art in later periods.
Stronach, David B. Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963. Oxford, 1978.
Herzfeld, Ernst. Iran in the Ancient East. London, 1941. Observations
Stronach, David B. "Tepe Nush-i Jan: The Median Settlement." In
Ghirshman, Roman. Persian Art: The Parthian and Sassanian Dynasties,
and descriptions of problems and artifacts through the Sasanian pe riod, in a dated but still valuable survey. Hicks, Jim. The Persians. New York, 1975. Competent, up-to-date sur vey by Time-Life Books. Hole, Frank, et al., eds. Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran. University of
Michigan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, no. 1. Ann Arbor, 1969. Integrated summary of research by the Deh Luran pro ject. Hole, Frank, ed. The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and Society from Prehistoiy to the Islamic Conquest. Washington, D.C., 1987.
Matheson, Sylvia A. Persia: An Archaeological Gtnde. 2d ed. London,
1976. Authoritative survey done with the aid of archaeologists and on-site visits, full of useful information. Perrot, Jean, et al. "Actes de la rencontre internationale de Suse (Iran) du 23 au 28 octobre 1977: La sequence archeologique de Suse et du Sud-Ouest de l'lran anterieurement a la periode Achemenide." Paleorient 4 (1978); 1 3 1 - 2 4 4 . Definitive presentation of the results of
the work at Susa done since 1967. Pittman, Holly. Art of the Bronze Age: Southeastern Iran, Western Central
Asia, and the Indus Valley. New York, 1984. Brief but useful intro
duction to new materials contributing to a realignment of thinking about the foreign relations of the Iranian plateau in the Bronze Age. Porada, Edith. The Art of Ancient Iran: Pre-Islamic Cultures. New York,
1965. Excellent survey of Iranian art, with color illustrations, by one of the outstanding scholars of both art and archaeology.
The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2, The Median and Achaemenian
Periods, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, pp. 832-837. Cambridge, 1985. ROBERT I-I. DYSON, JR.
Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau As early as 1764, the Greco-Roman and Byzantine ruins in Mysia, Ionia, and Caria attracted the attention of the Lon don-based Dilettante Society. In the early nineteenth cen tury, some government-sponsored European institutions began to divert resources for research in eastern Anatolia. In 1827 tire French government, interested in the inscribed rock-monuments in Van, commissioned Friedrich E. Schulz, a young German scholar, to investigate the nature and content of those cuneiform inscriptions. He was killed by local bandits two years after starting the project, but not before he copied the inscriptions. Although his work drew the attention of fellow Orientalists in Europe, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that it was finally realized that the inscriptions were Urartian, not Assyrian, texts. [See Cuneiform; Urartu.] During the nineteenth century, numerous archaeological
64
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau
discoveries were made on the Anatolian plateau by foreign scholars, among whom the most prominent was the French archaeologist and architect Charles Texier. In 1834 he dis covered Bogazkoy/Hattusa and Yazihkaya although he was not aware of their Hittite origins. [See Bogazkoy; Hittites.] In 1936 "William J. Hamilton, a British geologist and re searcher, discovered Alaca Hoyiik and a year later Efiatun Pinar. He, too, failed to grasp the true identity and date of these sites. Nevertheless, his book Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus and Armenia (London, 1842), three years after the publication of Texier's book Description de VAsie Mineure, inspired other scholars and major European museums. The latter, spurred by the publicity given to dramatic archaeo logical discoveries, started to organize and finance large ex peditions . However, those expeditions were not immediately sent to the central Anatolian plateau, but rather to areas on the periphery of Syro-Mesopotamia where the potential of finding historical monuments seemed greater. Long after having completed three seasons of excavation at Carchemish ( 1 8 7 8 - 1 8 8 1 ) 3 the British Museum finally initiated ar chaeological excavations in eastern Anatolia. [See Carchemish.] These were undertaken for them by Hormuzd Rassam at Toprakkale in Van in 1897. Despite his contro versial personal motives and unprofessional approach, Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Troy, begun in 1870, were the first attempt to investigate the previously unknown preclassical civilization of Anatolia. [See the biography of Schliemann] In the closing years of the nineteenth century, exploration of the Anatolian plateau was undertaken on a large scale by Ernest Chantre, David G. Hogarth, K. H u m a n e J. G. An derson, and William M. Ramsay, who published the results of their investigations at short intervals. Discoveries in cluded sites with monumental art and architecture, rockcarved monuments, and the first cuneiform texts from Ktiltepe and Bogazkoy. [See Kiiltepe Texts.] In 1882, Humann, a German archaeologist, inspected tire ruins of Bogazkoy and Yazihkaya on behalf of the Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, making copies of some of the re liefs at the latter site. Later, in 1890, Humann and his col league Otto Puchstein published their findings and obser vations in Reisen in Kleinasien und Nordsyrien (Berlin). In 1893-1984, Chantre, a French anthropologist and prehistorian, carried out probes at Bogazkoy and discovered the first Hittite tablets. He also made several soundings at Alaca Hoyiik in areas were Hittite sculptures were visible. His book Mission en Cappadoce (Paris, 1898) provided additional en couragement to continue with archaeological research on the Anatolian plateau. At about that time, it was already suspected that the roots of the North Syrian Late Hittite civilization might well lie on the central Anatolian plateau. Gordion, in the Sakarya valley, was the first scientific excavation project undertaken by Gustav and Alfred Koerte in 1889 on behalf of tire Kais-
erlich Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts in Berlin. Its purpose, however, was solely to investigate Phrygian re mains. [See Gordion.] Chantre's discovery of tablets at Bo gazkoy changed the attitude of European scholars toward the archaeology of the Anatolian plateau. The German Ori ental Institute took the initiative and sponsored archaeolog ical excavations at Bogazkoy in 1906, under the direction of Hugo Winckler. [See Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft.] After briefly investigating the large temple complex (temple I), Winckler correctiy shifted his attention to the palace com plex at Biiyukkale, where he recovered ten thousand tablets. In the same year he tried to locate the source of the Kiiltepe tablets, but without success. Winckler collaborated with the Turkish archaeologist Makridi Bey in subsequent cam paigns, until 1 9 1 2 . Although World War I put a temporary stop to archaeological fieldwork, the evaluation and inter pretation of the linguistic data led to considerable advances in Hittitology. For instance, as early as 1 9 1 5 , the first edition of a Hittite grammar was published by Bedrich Hrozny, and by 1 9 1 8 a tentative list of Hittite kings had been assembled by emerging Hittitologists. In 1925 a Czechoslovakian expedition led by Hrozny went to Kiiltepe, suspected of being the source of Cappadocian tablets being sold by local farmers. He eventually succeeded in collecting more titan one thousand tablets from the ter race mound (the karum Kanes). It was at about this time that the Oriental Institute, founded by John D. Rockefeller at the University of Chicago, began to take an active part in field archaeology. James H. Breasted, its director, organized large-scale excavations in several Near Eastern countries, including Anatolia, in 1926. [See the biography of Breasted.] This was in fact the beginning of pioneering work in system atic and stratigraphic excavations on the Anatolian plateau by Hans H. von der Osten and his colleagues. [See the bi ography of Osten.] In his extensive surveys he concentrated mainly on recording mounds, hilltop forts, and ancient roads, with a particular emphasis on preclassical sites. In 1927, after a preliminary survey of archaeological sites in and near the bend in the Halys River (see below), and a tentative sounding at Gavur Kalesi, the Oriental Institute selected Alisar Hoyiik, 80 km (50 mi.) southeast of Bogaz koy, for excavation as the key regional site. T h e excavators hoped that this site too would reveal rich remains of Hittite settlement and in particular Hittite tablets like those being found at Bogazkoy. T o their great disappointment, this was not the case. Instead, tire site revealed a long and previously unknown pre-Hittite cultural sequence described as Neo lithic, Chalcolithic, Copper Age, and Early Bronze Age. This stratified sequence produced one of the cornerstones of a relative pre-Hittite Anatolian chronology and cultural terminology. Furthermore, the excavation and recording methods used by the excavators set the basic standards for archaeological digs in Anatolia. In the 1930s, numerous foreign and Turkish expeditions
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau became involved in archaeological research on the Anatolian plateau and its periphery, including the Cilician and 'Amuq plains. [See Cilicia; 'Amuq.] During die decade between 1 9 3 1 and 1 9 4 1 , Turkish research institutions became orga nized, taking a more active part in archaeological research. The establishment of the Turkish Historical Society in 1 9 3 1 by Kemal Atatiirk was the main guiding force behind Turk ish archaeological enterprises. Hamit Kosay was die most prominent archaeologist working on the Anatolian plateau, at Ahlatiibel ( 1 9 3 1 ) ; Alaca Hoyiik, initiated by Remzi O. Arik ( 1 9 3 5 ) ; Pazarh ( 1 9 3 7 ) ; Etiyokusu, with Seuket A. Kansu ( 1 9 3 7 ) ; and Karaoglan, with Arik ( 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 4 1 ) . T h e main purpose of these excavations was to investigate the pre-Hittite material culture record on the Anatolian plateau. While probing the pre-Hittite levels at Alaca Hoyiik in 1936, Kosay discovered die much publicized EB "royal tombs", a turning point in Anatolian archaeological research. The typology of the tombs and die technology of the metal finds led to questions of the possible origins of the Hittites and their civilization. [See the biography ofKo;ay.] There also were small-scale excavations in the outiying parts of the Anatolian plateau, in an attempt to estimate the extent and possible origins of EB culture. T h e investigations by Tahsin Ozgiic and Kosay at Dtindartepe, Tekekoy, and Kavak south of Samsun and by Seton Lloyd and Nuri Gokce at Polatli produced not only a clearly stratified pot tery typology covering most of the Early to Middle Bronze periods, but also regional ceramic repertoires for the Ana tolian plateau. [See the biography of Lloyd.] T h e nature and duration of EB II on the Anatolian pla teau, defined at the time as the Copper Age, was initially recorded only at Alisar Hoyuk. T h e sophisticated metal ob jects from die royal tombs at Alaca Hoyiik made scholars aware that the so-called Copper Age and the following EB III on the Anatolian plateau were more complex and re gionally varied tiian previously thought. The early 1930s saw not only die beginning of numerous new archaeological projects, but also the reactivation of earlier major excava tions. In 1 9 3 1 Kurt Bittel reopened die excavation at Bogazkoy. During the eight years prior to the outbreak of World War II, he exposed the remains of many Hittite build ings both in the city itself and at Yazilikaya. In 1 9 3 2 the University of Cincinnati developed a long-term plan to reexcavate Troy under the direction of Carl Blegen. Since the conclusion of the architect Wilhelm Dorpfeld's collabora tion with Schliemann in 1892, knowledge of preclassical civ ilization in the eastern Mediterranean had greatiy advanced. New discoveries on Crete, Cyprus, and the Greek mainland and in Macedonia and the Cyclades had yielded enough archaeological data to make die establishment of a compar ative chronology for the various Aegean cultures possible. [See Crete; Cyprus.] For this purpose Trojan analogies were important, but the stratigraphic confusion caused by the ear lier excavations made reexamination through controlled ex
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cavations mandatory. In reopening the excavation, Carl Blegen's policy was to approach Troy's stratigraphic problems unprejudiced by his predecessors' complicated and often conflicting inferences. While Blegen's excavation was in progress, new information on cultural interaction between the Aegean world and the Anatolian plateau surfaced in Winifred Lamb's excavations at Kusura, near Afyon Karahisar, and at Demircihoyuk, west of Eskisehir, excavated by Bittel and Heinz Otto. Among the major field projects car ried out between the two world wars, the excavations of L. Delaporte at Arslantepe, near Malatya, in 1932 is the most outstanding. [See Arslantepe.] This site, already visited by von der Osten in 1926, revealed a rich collection of NeoHittite sculptures unmatched on the Anatolian plateau. By die outbreak of World War II, Anatolian archaeology had become the subject of systematic study relying on rec ords from stratigraphic excavations. The earlier study pat tern, based on chance finds on which die preclassical history of Anatolia had rested, was abandoned. Improvements in excavation techniques made archaeological records more re liable sources of information. During World War II, only Turkish archaeologists were able to advance archaeological research on the Anatolian plateau, largely because Turkey was not involved in the war. The war prevented die Ger man, Italian, French, and British archaeologists from con tinuing dieir work since Turkey's neutrality prevented diem access. While work was in progress at Alaca Hoyiik, addi tional projects were carried out: on the mound of Bitik, ex cavated by Arik ( 1 9 4 1 ) ; at Karaz Hoyuk in Erzurum, ex cavated by Kosay (1942, 1 9 4 5 ) ; and at Has Hoyiik, dug by Halet Qambel (1943). In 1 9 4 1 the provinces of Ankara, Konya, and Eskisehir were pardy surveyed by Arik. His sur vey records, which included descriptions of a number of settlements, were published by Ozgiic in 1956. However, despite new excavations, not all problems concerning chro nology, ethnicity, continuity, or origins were entirely solved in the early 1940s. For instance, die meaning and origin of Hittite hieroglyphs, which had previously defied all attempts at decipherment, was partially solved at Karatepe beginning in 1945 by a team of archaeologists led by Helmuth Th. Bossert and Cambel and joined later by U. Bahadir Alkim. [See Hittite.] Another important Turkish enterprise in the postwar period was organized by the Turkish Historical So ciety in 1948: to resume excavations at Kultepe under die direction of Tahsin and Nimet Ozgiic. This major decision led, in fact, toward exposing one of the most interesting his torical chapters in early Anatolian civilization. At about this time, the Kosay and Mahmut Akok's team excavated an other pre-Hittite site, at Btiyuk Gullucek. Other enterprises included the excavation of Old Smyrna by a joint team headed by Ekrem Akurgal and John Cook ( 1 9 4 9 - 1 9 5 2 ) ; the excavations by the French Institute in Is tanbul at the Midas city site (Yazilikaya) in 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 3 9 ; and die resumption of excavations at the Phrygian city of Gor-
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau
dion by the University Museum of die University of Penn sylvania (1949). The 1950s and 1960s opened a new era of intense pre classical archaeological investigation in Anatolia, including extensive field surveys aimed at recording the geographic and chronological distribution of preclassical settlements in different regions. In the 1950s, excavations at Horoztepe by Ozgiic and Akok, Mahmatlar by Kosay and Akok, and Kayapinar by Raci Temizer added new dimensions to the re gional EB archaeology and relative chronology on the north ern half of the Anatolian plateau. One of the major field projects of the 1950s was the survey carried out by Charles Burney (1954—1955) in the northern provinces. While the Bogazkoy excavations were reactivated in 1952 by Bittel, Sedat Alp started excavating the large EB-MB mound of Karahoyuk near Konya in 1 9 5 3 . Following his extensive field surveys on the southern An atolian plateau and in southwestern Anatolia, in 1954 James Mellaart formed a team with Lloyd to excavate Beycesultan, the key Bronze Age site on die southwestern plateau. While this project was in progress, Mellaart initiated the Hacilar excavation project ( 1 9 5 7 - 1 9 6 0 ) . [See Hacilar.] At the time, this was the most important prehistoric project being carried out in Anatolia. In fact, interest in the central Anatolian Ne olithic and Chalcolithic period grew particularly strong fol lowing the Hacilar excavations. In 1 9 6 1 , while Mellaart ini tiated a new project at Neolithic Catal Hoyiik, David French initiated the excavation of the prehistoric setdement of Can Hasan in Karaman. In 1963, Cayonii Tepesi, with its wellrecorded aceramic remains, provided the first clues con cerning the question of an incipient farming stage in Ana tolia. [See Agriculture; Cayonii.] Not only prehistoric sites, but also major second-millen nium BCE sites were investigated in the 1960s. Nimat Ozgiic undertook the excavation of Acemhoyiik in 1963, trying, among other things, to shed some light on the identity of that MB city. In 1965 Burhan Tezcan investigated Kocumbeli and R. Temizer concentrated on the Hittite settlements at Inandik in 1966 and later at Eskiyapar. Excavation in the eastern provinces intensified in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Burney's field survey in eastern An atolia was followed by a growing interest in east Anatolian archaeology. Pulur and Giizelova, key sites of EB east An atolia were excavated by Ko§ay and Hermann Vary (1960, 1 9 6 1 ) . Major Uraitian sites were also targeted for explora tion: Altin Tepe by Tahsin Ozgiic and Cavustepe (which was begun by A. Erzen in 1959); Patnos by Temizer and Kemal Balkan ( 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 6 3 ) ; Adilcevaz by Emin Bilgic (1964); and Malatya, resumed by the Italians under Salvatore M. Pugilisi and Piero Meriggi ( 1 9 6 1 ) . In die 1960s, the preclassical sites of western Anatolia, including the area of Iznik in the Marmara region, were in vestigated by French, who proposed regional pottery se
quences for the hinterland east of the Aegean coast (see his articles in Anatolian Studies 1 7 [1967]: 1 6 5 - 1 7 8 ; 1 9 [1969]: 41-98).
From the late 1960s and early 1970s onward, Anatolian archaeology advanced considerably. Most expeditions adopted the Western multidisciplinary approach to field in vestigation, using palynological, environmental, ethno graphic, and nonartifactual data studies to reconstruct the interaction between environment, subsistence economies, and social organization in ancient communities. T h e rescue excavations in the Keban in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in the Lower Euphrates River basin in die late 1970s and 1980s gave Anatolian archaeology an unprecedented boost—not only in terms of a dramatic increase in the num ber of excavations and the volume of finds, but also in the use of newly developed excavation and recording tech niques. Beginning in die early 1970s, intensive field surveys in northern Turkey by Jak Yakar and Ali Dincol and the subsequent excavations at Ikiztepe under die direction of Alkim in Bafra emphasized the cultural links of die Black Sea zone both with the Balkans and inner Anatolia. In the 1970s two major excavations further enriched the archaeo logical record of Bronze Age Anatolia: Masat Hoyiik, ex cavated by Tahsin Ozgiic, proved to be an important source for Hittite archaeology and history, and the environmental studies carried out at Demircihoyiik, reexcavated by Man fred Korfmann, illustrated the importance of estimating the carrying capacity of the land surrounding ancient settle ments in reconstructing socioeconomic structures. In recent years, Japanese archaeologists have also taken an interest in Anatolian archaeology. T h e excavations of Tsugio Mikami and Sachihiro Omura at the multiperiod site of Kaman-Kalehoyiik and their systematic field surveys at die bend of die Halys River are producing results bearing on the character and distribution of preclassical sites on the Anatolian pla teau. Renewed excavation of such major sites as Troy, Gor dion, Alisar, Mersin, and Tarsus/Gozlti Kule reflects the new problem-oriented archaeological approach of the pres ent generation of scholars. [See also American Research Institute in Turkey; Anatolia; British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara; Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul; awdlnstitutFrancais d'Etudes Anatoliennes d'Istanbul.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Akurgal, Ekrem. Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey. 4th ed. Is
tanbul, 1978. Alkim, U. Bahadir. Anatolia I. Geneva, 1968. Bittel, Kurt. Les Hittites. Paris, 1976. Gurney, O. R. The Hittites. Rev. ed. London, 1990. Lloyd, Seton. Early Anatolia. Baltimore, 1956. Mellaart, James. "Pre-Classical Remains in Southern Turkey." Ana tolian Studies 4. (1954): 175-240.
Yakar, Jak. The Later Prehistory of Anatolia: The Late Chalcolithic and
HISTORY OF TFIE FIELD: Archaeology in Egypt the Early Bronze Age. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, vol. 268. Oxford, 1985. JAK YAKAR
Archaeology in Egypt The history of archaeological work in Egypt may conven iently be divided into five rather arbitrary periods of unequal length, each of very different character. T h e first phase con sists of ancient interest in Egypt's past. T h e second stage did not transpire until die seventeenth century CE. The third era took place in the nineteenth century. Both die fourth and fifth periods unfolded in the twentieth century. Phase One: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Cen tury. More than four thousand years ago, ancient Egyptians themselves excavated parts of tiieir archaeological pattimony. Most of the work was motivated by practical concerns: a pharaoh could show his love of the gods and respect for tiieir priests by restoring temples. He could demonstrate his own legitimacy by preserving the monuments of his ancestors. In the twelfth dynasty, for example, Senwosret (Sesostris) in removed two sarcophagi from beneath the third-dynasty Step Pyramid and placed them in the foundation deposits of his own pyramid complex as a means of demonstrating a histor ical affinity with Egypt's more ancient kings. In the nineteenth dynasty, Khaemwese, a son of Rameses II, carefully explored necropoleis from Saqqara north to Giza, cleaning and restor ing many ancient monuments. He considered his actions to be both pious and historically important. Greeks and Ro mans, too (Egypt was under their control from 3 3 2 BCE to 337 CE), took an antiquarian interest in Egyptian monuments and restored or rebuilt those that played significant roles in their own religious ritual. These early ventures into Egypt's past were harmless; some even protected the monuments. By the end of the Ro man period, however, the treatment of Egyptian antiquities had become much more brutal. Perhaps it was because they no longer had meaning or cultural relevance: by die fifth century CE, the last Egyptian temples had closed, the last priests had died, and knowledge of the Egyptian language had died out. It was also because of two new and jealous religions, Christianity and Islam, which dominated Egypt in turn from the third century CE onward. Egyptian monu ments were now seen as threats to man's relationship witii the True God, best used only as convenient sources of building material. Local villagers plowed artifacts into the mud, burned papyri as fuel for bread ovens, hacked out pa gan images on temple walls, and tore out stone blocks for new construction. The ancient Egyptians had sometimes abandoned or dismantied monuments; the Romans had carted several obelisks back to Rome, but there had not been destruction of this magnitude before. Such destruction has continued into recent times. Euro
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pean travelers, who had begun visiting Egypt in numbers in the sixteenth century, were not concerned with archaeolog ical preservation. Early pilgrims carried off Christian ob jects, anxious to acquire relics that would confirm their re ligious beliefs and offer proof of biblical history. They too destroyed figures that they could no longer understand or that seemed threatening. Medieval travelers picked over an cient sites, collecting mementos of their visit and carving their names on temple walls. Renaissance entrepreneurs dug for mummies that could be shipped to Europe and ground into what many believed were efficacious medicines. In all these instances, the digging was primitive and random, the record-keeping nonexistent, and the destruction of what we today would consider essential information nearly total. Until the nineteenth century Europeans derived most of their knowledge about ancient Egypt from classical sources (especially Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Horapollo, and Pliny the Elder), biblical texts and exegesis, and the often fraudulent writings of travel writers such as John Mandeville (who, in fact, had never visited Egypt). Rarely accurate, these descriptions of Egypt and its monuments conspired to convince European scholars that Egypt was a truly excep tional country whose culture and history followed none of the rules that had governed the rest of human development. For example, botii Pliny and Mandeville claimed that Egypt was a country inhabited by one-legged human beings who hopped about cultivated fields so fertile tiiat frogs sponta neously generated in the mud, whose people drank from a Nile so potent it instantly made women pregnant, a people who built temples and pyramids with the direct assistance of God and the angels. Egypt was said to be the site of the garden of Eden, the earthly model of paradise. Surely, Eur opeans argued, the usual rules could not be applied here. Egypt was a unique country that had appeared suddenly, fully developed, with no predecessors, survived for three thousand years, and disappeared, leaving no obvious de scendants. Gradually, this view was expanded as tales about Egypt assumed an ever greater role in European myth and art. That the ancient Egyptians possessed knowledge far greater than modern humans was a popular opinion. This belief was regularly confirmed by the misinformation published in Eu rope about the magical powers of Egyptian objects, the po tency of Egyptian symbols, and the special relationship be tween Egypt and the supernatural. For example, Europeans had long believed tiiat the bodies of Christian saints, unlike those of ordinary mortals, were incorruptible. If their corpses were exhumed, it was claimed, they would be as perfectly whole and sweet-smelling as a living person's. How saintly, then, must the ancient Egyptians have been because thousands of perfectly preserved bodies (mummies) were found there every year! T h e whole population must have sat at the right hand of God!
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Egypt
Phase Two: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Collecting. By the late seventeenth century, Egyptian arti facts were to be seen throughout Europe. At this time mu seums were first established, and cabinets des curiosites could be found in the homes of the well-to-do. These Egyptian collections exerted a profound influence on Europe's views and on its own decorative arts and architecture. People wanted to possess Egyptian "things," die older, die more mysterious, the better. From the late 1600s onward, Euro pean collectors enthusiastically sought after Egyptian objets, and agents happily ran an antiquities trade to satisfy them. In a short time, not only were small amulets, statuettes and mummies being shipped abroad, but even monumental sculptures, obelisks, whole tombs and temple walls. The pe culiar features of Egyptian art that these collections dis played—human figures wiui animal heads, elaborate pieces of golden jewelry, and fascinating but unreadable texts— only confirmed the Egyptians' special status. Phase Three: Nineteenth-Century Exploration. The distorted European picture of ancient Egypt did not begin to change until early in the nineteenth century. The first step toward a more accurate representation resulted from tire Napoleonic expedition of 1 7 9 8 - 1 8 0 2 . Bonaparte had brought 1 7 5 savants with his army, a committee of artists and scholars, whose task was to prepare as complete a record of the country as possible. The result was the Description de I'Egypte ( 1 8 0 9 - 1 8 2 8 ) , a stunning record of Egypt's archae ological monuments, natural history, and local cultures, published in twenty-one volumes of text, maps, and plates. The Description's elaborate illustrations gave Europeans their first accurate view of the country and its monuments. For almost the first time, Europeans could see the real Egypt, not the fanciful country that earlier sources had de scribed. In 1799 Napoleon's men found what was later to be called the Rosetta Stone while digging coastal defenses near the Rosetta branch of die Nile. It was immediately recognized as a possible source for the decipherment of Egyptian hi eroglyphic script. Although the Rosetta Stone was confis cated by die British (it is now in the British Museum), copies had been made, and, working from diem, Jean-Francois Champollion declared in 1822 tiiat the key to ancient Egyp tian had been found. With that announcement, it became possible for the first time in fourteen hundred years to read ancient texts and to learn about Egypt from the ancients themselves. Almost overnight, a vast new source of infor mation was available, and there was a scramble to acquire inscribed materials to study. [See French Archaeological Missions; and the biography of Champollion.] This desire for texts, either the originals or copies, led to numerous expeditions to the Nile Valley. Champollion him self visited Egypt in 1828 to copy texts, and a dozen other scholars from throughout Europe came as well. The most
important was Richard Lepsius ( 1 8 1 0 - 1 8 8 4 ) , whose thirteen-volume Denkmaler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien ( 1 8 4 9 1859) included hundreds of folio plates of ancient texts, re lief scenes, and temple plans. Today, Lepsius's work is still a rich source of information for Egyptologists; then, it and the Description were the most reliable and comprehensive sources available. So too were the superb watercolors of Da vid Roberts ( 1 7 9 6 - 1 8 6 4 ) , and the works of Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, whose brilliant tiiree-volume Manners and Cus toms of the Ancient Egyptians (1837) provided descriptions and explanations of nearly every aspect of the ancient culture. As positive as die contributions made by these descriptive publications may have been, they had unintended negative impact too. Although in die nineteenth century, in other parts of the world, archaeology was rapidly developing new techniques of excavation, dating, and interpretation, in Egypt it was being pushed into the background of scholar ship. Egyptologists, most of them philologists by training, considered archaeological data merely footnotes to the story told by the written word. Archaeology's goal, it was argued, should simply be to find more texts. Archaeological context was ignored, and objects were saved only if tiiey were de serving of display in museums. Excavators felt perfectiy jus tified in plowing through sites (not habitation sites, but cem eteries or temples for they were the ones known to contain the treasures), saving only inscribed objects and pieces of aestiietic appeal and tossing the rest into the Nile. Not only would the texts reveal all that one needed to know, scholars claimed, but also there would be more to dig. Egypt was an archaeological cornucopia that could never be exhausted. By the late nineteenth century, dozens of expeditions were at work on sites from the Mediterranean to Aswan. It was an exciting time: excavators plundered tombs, dynamited tem ples, committed piracy, and shot their competitors in order to assemble great collections. Enactment of antiquities laws (the first in 1 8 3 5 ) , the founding of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and die establishment of a national museum (1863) did little to reduce the scale of pillaging. Phase Four: Early Twentieth-Century Excavation. Indeed, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth cen tury that properly controlled excavations could be seen in Egypt, These rare early projects, in which careful digging was accompanied by proper recording procedures and con textual analyses, were the work of William Matthew Flinders Petrie ( 1 8 5 3 - 1 9 4 2 ) and George Andrew Reisner ( 1 8 6 7 1942). Petrie's work on artifact typologies, seriation, and se quence dating demonstrated that even without associated texts, archaeological material could provide important in formation and not just pretty objects. His numerous publi cations, particularly of predynastic materials, helped set a new standard for the analysis of archaeological data. Simi larly, Reisner's meticulous excavations of cemeteries at Giza
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in Egypt and at Naga ed-Deir established new chronological guide lines for Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom artifacts. [See also Giza; and the biographies ofPetrie and Reisner.] Unfortunately, Petrie's and Reisner's emphases and methods were slow to influence other excavators' tech niques. What we today would consider "proper" excava tions remained the exception. T h e first half of this century was a time of spectacular archaeological discoveries in Egypt, including the tomb of Tutankhamun (excavated by Howard Carter), the treasures of Illahun and Thebes (the Metropolitan Museum of Art); the Early Dynastic cemeter ies at Saqqara (Walter B. Emery); the Giza cemeteries (Reisner and Hermann Junker). Yet, important and wellexecuted as these projects were, they indicate that Egyptol ogists still preferred clearing tombs and stone temples to sifting through habitation debris or working with mud brick, still preferred well-preserved sites along the desert edge to the complex remains in the Nile Valley and Delta. The ex cavations of the necropolis at Tanis (a Delta site dug by Pierre Montet) and the long-term projects at Tell el-Amarna and Deir el-Medineh (both townsites) were among the few exceptions. Thus, there were few attempts in the early twen tieth century to work at sites being threatened by new irri gation schemes, growing towns, new roads, or expanding agriculture, and many of these sites simply disappeared. This bias in favor of desert and stone continues to be an increasingly serious problem even today. [See Saqqara; Amarna, Tell el-; and the biographies of Carter and Montet.] P h a s e Five: M o d e r n Analysis. One of tire most signif icant changes in the character of Egyptian archaeology oc curred during the Nubian Salvage Campaign in the 1960s. Deeply concerned about the hundreds of sites that would be destroyed by rising Nile waters when die new Aswan High Dam was completed, Egypt and U N E S C O issued a joint appeal to archaeologists from around the world to conduct salvage archaeological projects in the area south of Aswan. Aldiough in ancient times this area, which was part of N u bia, did not belong to Egypt politically or culturally, exca vations there had traditionally been conducted by Egyptol ogists (among them, Reisner, Junker, and Emery). Now, dozens of archaeologists, many of them trained in fields very different from Egyptology, came to work. With back grounds in European prehistory and North American ar chaeology, they brought with them more rigorous ap proaches to excavation and analysis than Egyptian archaeology had ever developed. Lithics and ceramics were subjected to detailed study; typologies were created; chron ological schemes were expanded and refined; and such dis ciplines as palynology, botany, zoology, chemistry, and sta tistics were used to reveal changing patterns of climate, describe minute details of lifestyle, and track changes in culture. When the Nubian campaign ended, many of these ar
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chaeologists turned their attention farther north to Egyptian sites, bringing a whole new approach to Egyptian materials. They took an interest in urban sites. These archaeologists gave emphasis to finds that earlier generations of Egypto logical excavators had considered worthless: for example, animal bones, vegetation, stone tools, potsherds, soils, and mud-brick architecture. They were eager to work in areas formerly though to be impossible, in die Delta, the Nile al luvium, and the oases. They gave to archaeological data an interpretive emphasis formerly reserved only for textual ev idence. They also asked new questions about subjects as diverse as health and disease, social stratification, the influ ence of climatic change on agriculture and trade, the devel opment of ceramic technology, and the origins of complex society. Today, archaeological work in Egypt is increasingly more anthropological rather than object or text oriented. Not sur prisingly, many of its practitioners have as much social sci ence in their backgrounds as traditional Egyptology. Karl Butzer, for example, is a geographer and anthropologist who has examined the impact of die environment on Egyptian culture and on die development of irrigation in the Nile Val ley. [See Environmental Archaeology.] Bruce Trigger is an anthropologist interested in the origins of civilization and its dynamics. Fekri Hassan is a prehistorian with a long-stand ing interest in the origins of Egyptian society and the theo retical framework for its study. William Y. Adams is a pre historian by training whose Nubian ceramic studies are benchmarks that have put Nubian chronology on a solid footing. Barry Kemp is an Egyptologist and archaeologist who has studied the dynamics of Egyptian society as re vealed by the archaeological record. His work at Tell elAmarna and his processual approach to dynastic culture have had major impact. T h e activities of these and other scholars provide examples of archaeological analysis and in terpretation as good as any in the world today. Furthermore, excavations—the long-term work at Hierakonpolis; Mark Lehner's studies of the Giza plateau; Robert Wenke's sur veys and excavations in the Faiyum and the Delta; Manfred Bietak's superb studies of the site of Tell ed-Dab'a (ancient Avaris); and those of the Germans and Swiss at Elephantine, to name a few examples—are truly state-of-the-art projects. [See Faiyum; Dab'a, Tell ed-; Elephantine.] No longer is the emphasis on pretty objects or simple description. There is a deep committment to problem-oriented excavations and to the utilization of new techniques and cross-cultural com parisons to extract die maximum amount of information from Egyptian sites. It has taken several centuries, but Egyptologists today rec ognize that ancient Egyptian culture is not a unique phe nomenon that can only be explained by suspending the rules and invoking the gods. Egyptian culture is very special and very impressive. By acknowledging that it is the work of hu-
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mans, however, mat it can best be understood by being stud ied like other civilizations, we have finally come to give an cient Egypt relevance to our own history and to an understanding of human development. This newfound relevance has come at a critical time. Without carefully planned archaeological work coupled witii meticulous conservation and recording, Egypt's cultural patrimony will not survive. Egypt's archaeological sites are being seriously threatened today, from pollution, agricul ture, growing population, theft, and other insidious forces. These threats make it even more crucial that we treat Egypt's archaeological remains not as inexhaustible curios ities we once thought they were, but as fragile and finite resources. It would be mankind's loss if they were to vanish. It certainly will be mankind's gain if we can insure tiiat an cient Egyptian monuments will survive for future genera tions. The modern approaches to Egyptian archaeological sites significantly contribute to this goal. [See also American Research Center in Egypt; British School of Archaeology in Egypt; and Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Assmann, Jan, et al., eds. Problems and Priorities in Egyptian Archaeology.
London, 1987. Series of reports on some of the current archaeolog ical work being conducted in Egypt, especially in the Nile Delta. Bietak, Manfred. "Avaris and Piramesse: Archaeological Exploration in the Eastern Nile Delta." Proceedings of the British Academy 65
(1979): 225-290. Accessible introduction to Bietak's excellent work at an important Delta site. Also published as a separate volume (Ox ford, 1981). More recent information on his work there, and on other Egyptian projects, may be found listed and abstracted in the Annual Egyptological Bibliography (Leiden, 1 9 4 7 - ) . Butzer, Karl W. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cul tural Ecology. Chicago, 1976.
Description de I'Egypte. 21 vols. Paris, 1809-1828.
Greener, Leslie. The Discoveiy of Egypt. London, 1966. The most read able account of Egyptology's early history to 1855. Kemp, Barry J. "In the Shadow of Texts: Archaeology in Egypt." Ar chaeological Review from Cambridge 3 (1984): 19-28.
Lepsius, Richard. Denkmaler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. 13 vols. Ber lin, 1849-. Reeves, C. Nicholas. After Tut'ankhamun: Research and Excavation in
the Royal Necropoleis at Thebes. London, 1992. Examples of the kind
of archaeological work currently being done in the Valley of the Kings. Trigger, Bruce G. A Histoiy of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge,
1989. General work with occasional discussion of Egyptian data. Trigger, Bruce G. Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context. Cairo,
1993. Good example of how current anthropological theory is mak ing use of Egyptian archaeological data. Weeks, Kent R., ed. Egyptology and the Social Sciences: Five
Studies.
Cairo, 1979. Egyptologists discuss the future needs of Egyptian his torical, anthropological, and archaeological studies. Weeks, Kent R. An Historical Bibliography of Egyptian Prehistory. Amer
ican Research Center in Egypt, Catalog no. 6. Winona Lake, Ind., 1985. Useful source for work done on Paleolithic through Early Dy nastic Egyptian sites.
Wilkinson, John Gardner. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyp
tians. 3 vols. London, 1837. KENT R . WEEKS
Archaeology in Cyprus T o the extent that all Near Eastern archaeology has been a reflection of Western preoccupations and interests, the his tory of archaeology in Cyprus may best be understood in terms of its involvement witii Western scholarship. Because for most of this history Western ethnocentric concerns fo cused on Greece as the birthplace of democracy, Palestine as the home of the Bible, and Egypt and Mesopotamia as die centers of die oldest civilizations, Cyprus remained somewhat of a Cinderella in the wider picmre of Near East ern archaeology. A more significant attitude that shaped this history was the view that Cyprus was neither Oriental nor Greek, but a hybrid unworthy of study by scholars of the "great traditions." This status had and continues to have serious funding implications for archaeological research. Ambivalent western perceptions are manifested in many ways: the only foreign archaeological institute in Cyprus is established under the aegis of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, the annual report of all discoveries appears in die Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique. T h e list of par adoxes is endless. Because of the island's particular history, its archaeological development was closely synchronized with its political fortunes. This development may, therefore, be divided into three stages: precolonial, British colonial, and independence. Precolonial Period, to 1878. In Cyprus, as elsewhere in the Near East, tiiis period is characterized mainly by anti quarians who collected objects from cemeteries. Already in 1576, Poracchi mentions ancient tombs "in which have been found many wonderful things" at Kouklia, Paphos, and Salamis ( C D . Cobham, Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a His tory of Cyprus, Cambridge, 1908, p. 164). By the middle of the nineteenth century, foreign officials on the island vied with each other in amassing collections to enhance their prestige, for general edification and personal profit: the mo tives were not considered incompatible. Chief amongst tiiese entrepreneurs were Sir Robert Hamilton Lang and the infamous General Luigi Palma di Cesnola. Cesnola's ex ports of innumerable antiquities helped to found the Met ropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He became its first director. Of Cesnola, D. G. Hogarth wrote in 1888: "It is much to be regretted that his want of all archaeological qualifications, coupled with his desire that that want should not be apparent to the world, has introduced such confusion into his results" (E. Gardner, D . Hogarth, M . James, R. Elsey Smith, "Excavations in Cyprus, 1 8 8 7 - 8 , " Journal of Hellenic Studies 9 [1888]: 1 5 0 ) . So many sites were rifled and so much exported during this and the start of the next
HISTORY OF T H E FIELD: Archaeology in Cyprus period that it is hard to underestimate its significance for later fieldwork developments. [See the biographies of di Cesnola and Hogarth.] British Colonial Period, 1 8 7 8 - 1 9 6 0 . Although the Brit ish administration enacted new antiquities laws, engaged an tiquarians to excavate, established the Government Collec tions Museum ( 1 8 8 3 ) , and encouraged the foundation of the Cyprus Exploration Fund (1887) which worked on a large scale at major sites, tire pervasive collecting mentality was not modified until the 1920s. Only John L. Myres fearlessly criticized the government and attempted to bring order into chaos. [See the biography of Myres.] However, Cyprus lacked a Flinders Petrie to apply systematic typological and strati graphic methods; therefore, fieldwork lagged behind stan dards of some excavations in Egypt and Palestine. The sit uation improved when a young Swedish scholar, Einar Gjerstad, came to the island in 1 9 2 3 , published his seminal Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus (Uppsala, 1926), and gained funding for an ambulatory excavation program ( 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 1 ) that was breathtaking in scope. Its aim was no less than the elucidation of the entire cultural history of Cyprus from tire Stone Age to the Roman period. T o understand this turn of events, it should be remembered that in 1927 the old antiq uities law was modified to permit the export of antiquities, thus enabling Gjerstad to obtain funding more easily. His research sttategy emphasized two other aspects: the role of Cyprus as intermediary between the Orient and the Occi dent and its own indigenous civilization. These perceptions formed the leitmotif of archaeological activity on the island for much of this century. [See the biography of Gjerstad.] Results of Gjerstad's and his colleagues' excavations have been published in the Swedish Cyprus Expedition I-IV (Stockholm, 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 7 2 ) , an indispensable research tool. They demonstrate conscientious achievement. Their dis coveries and sites are among the most important in Cyprus. T o name but a few of their successes, Gjerstad and his as sociates revealed the Bronze and Iron Age cemeteries at Lapithos; the spectacular Late Bronze Age tombs at En komi; the hilltop palace at Vouni with its elegant kore and Persian treasure; the rural shrine at Ayia Irini with two thou sand statuettes (some life-size, found undisturbed round its altar), the Archaic sanctuary at Idalion, capital of an Iron Age kingdom, where they found an entire coat of mail; the temple of Heracles-Melqart at Kition, so evocative of the syncretic beliefs of Iron Age Cyprus; and the Roman theatre at Soli. Because Cyprus lacks tells (mounds), greater emphasis was placed on art history and artifact-based analysis than stratigraphy as tire basis for the sequential reconstruction of Cypriot antiquity. Gjerstad, E. Sjoqvist, and others provided meticulous artifact studies in which artistic connoisseurship often passed for theory. Ceramic types established by Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and Myres were refined and put into a
71
chronological sequence. Although modified since then, the Swedes' Bronze and Iron Ages typologies and dates are still commonly used. Their formulations are influential beyond Cyprus since distinctive Cypriot pottery was widely ex ported, and by crossdates, it provided undue precision for chronological schemes in Palestine and elsewhere. As in Near Eastern archaeology generally, the Swedes and other archaeologists neglected Gordon Childe's culture con cept (V. G. Childe, The Dawn of European Civilization, Lon don, 1925) in favor of the traditional Three-Age technoevolutionary model. In keeping with their views about the arrival of the Greeks on Cyprus by the beginning of the Iron Age, Gjerstad and his colleagues divided the period accord ing to the Greek mainland chronological framework: CyproGeometriCj Cypro-Archaic, and Cypro-Classical. During the 1930s three archaeologists rose to prominence and helped to define the archaeology of the island for many years to come. The first was Porphyrios Dikaios, pioneer of Cypriot prehistory, who excavated the key sites of Khiroldtia, Sotira, and Erimi, and documented the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods for the first time. The second was C. F. A. Schaeffer, who in 1 9 3 4 discovered the city of Enkomi. Because previous excavators were so intent on recov ering "Mycenaean" tombs there, they failed to recognize that the tombs were inside the houses of the city. Schaeffer's objective was to obtain Late Bronze Age comparanda for material from his established excavations at Ras Shamra/ Ugarit. T h e third was A. H. S. Megaw, who became director of the newly founded Department of Antiquities in 1 9 3 6 , developed a model organization during his tenure of office until i960, and investigated classical and later remains such as Kourion and die Forty Columns castie at Paphos. During the 1930s, a long and productive project at Kourion was also initiated by George McFadden. For many years, classical archaeology in Cyprus was synonymous with discoveries by his University Museum, Philadelphia, team. [See the biog raphies of Dikaios, Schaeffer, and McFadden.] Such was the perceived importance of Enkomi that in 1948 Dikaios was sidetracked from his prehistoric research ers to direct Cypriot excavations there. His painstaking, monumental report of ten-years' work demonstrates the in fluence of the Swedes, and it can be contrasted widi Schaef fer's volumes in which only choice historical problems are treated or the most spectacular finds studied with panache. The subjective retrieval policies and incomplete publication of Schaeffer's Enkomi excavations are a continued source of regret. While Dikaios was engaged at Enkomi in 1957 he also rescued an extraordinary, half-looted tomb in a neigh boring Iron Age cemetery, and so discovered the Royal Cemetery of Salamis. Two quite different events mark the archaeological his tory of the island during the last decade of British admin istration. One was the excavation by J. Iliffe and T. Mitford
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of tire Persian siege mound at Palaipaphos, which unex pectedly yielded destroyed statuary, including what is ar guably the finest Archaic sculpture from the island, and re markable details of counter-siegeworks. The other was the creation in 1955 of a Survey Branch under H. W. Catling. This led to the first systematic surveys, the production of invaluable studies by Catiing and an accessible reference collection for scholars. The colonial power, intentionally or otherwise, had sought to deflect die Hellenization of Cypriot archaeology by em phasizing the island's cultural diversity. However, it was not possible to divorce archaeology from the struggles for in dependence and Enosis. With the founding of the new state in i960, the issue of the earliest Greek presence on the is land, never low on the agenda of earlier, classically trained archaeologists, came to the fore. Independence, Since i960. In the first flush of their in dependence, emerging modern states often produce out standing figures. Independent Cyprus was fortunate in hav ing first Dikaios (until 1963), tiien Vassos Karageorghis (until 1989), as directors of the Department of Antiquities. Karageorghis's astute policy of promoting international in terest in the role of ancient Cyprus, while pursuing his own very active program of excavations, ensured a balanced yet lively development of the subject. Another stimulating pol icy, that of withholding licences to excavate until applicants' previous fieldwork was published, a policy now widely em ulated, thrust Cypriot discoveries more forcefully into the mainstream of Near Eastern and Mediterranean archae ology. During the 1960s major excavations were carried out by the French at the city of Salamis; by Karageorghis at its necropolis and at Kition; and by Kyriakos Nicolaou at NeaPaphos, the Roman capital of Cyprus and a treasure house of mosaics. [See the biography of Nicolaou,] The immensely rich royal tombs of Salamis raised issues concerning die late expression of Homeric funerary rites. The role of the early Greeks on die island was being continually redefined, not only by excavations but also by publications such as H. W. Catling's provocatively titled Cypriot Bronzework in the My cenaean World (Oxford, 1964) and conferences like the sem inal The Mycenaeans in the Eastern Mediterranean (Nicosia, 1972). Although this topic also embraced the larger themes of the Sea Peoples and Philistines, debates paradoxically grew ever narrower as scholars vied to identify the foreign perpetrators of Late Bronze Age destructions. It is only recentiy that this empirical positivism was questioned and the whole basis of old theories of interpretation was reappraised. One of the benefits of 1960s New Archaeology was the application of explicit models and a closer association be tween archaeology, science, and social science. Prehistorians were the first to respond. Dikaios already made use of ra diocarbon dates in 1962 to radically revise upward the date of the Khirokitia culture, then regarded as the first evidence
for humans on the island. Radiometric evidence from Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi contradicted the prevailing sequence of "Neolithic I—II" and introduced compelling evidence for strong regional variation on the island. During the 1970s, self-critical concerns began to be voiced about theoretical concepts, research designs, and epistemological goals. Meanwhile, fieldwork projects multiplied. Some of the more important included the Americans at Idalion, Toumba tou Skourou, Phlamoudhi, and Kourion; die French at Sa lamis and Cape Andreas; the British at Philia and Ayios Epikititios; the Poles at Paphos; the Germans at Tamassos; the Swiss at Palaipaphos; and, not least, the Cypriots at Kition. T h e last, in particular, yielded exciting results with the dis covery of a Late Bronze Age holy precinct and the largestknown Phoenician temple, both associated with copperworking, anchors, and depictions of ships. Armed conflict between Greeks and Turks in 1974 led to the cessation of excavations in the archaeologically rich northern part of the island. Major projects nonetheless en sued in the soutii and continue in the mid-1990s. T h e French worked at Amathus, at Kition where classical slip ways were recently uncovered, and at Khirokitia where Dikaios's famed roadway was reinterpreted as a town wall. T h e Americans excavated in the Vasilikos Valley, where an ur ban center associated with the Kalavassos mines provides new impetus to thriving studies on the rise of complex so ciety in Cyprus and its relationship with copper exploitation, and at Aetokremnos, where there is evidence for preKhirokitia pygmy-hippopotamus hunters. T h e British con tinue to work at Lemba and Kissmenga, where the lengthy Chalcolithic period is finally being investigated, and at die Bronze Age manor at Maroni. Rescue excavations at Kouklia-Skales revolutionized understanding of the elev enth-tenth century BCE "Dark Age." Other projects, like that of the Swedes at Hala Sultan Tekke, the Canadian survey in the west, and those of the Cypriots themselves at a variety of sites, emphasize die intensity of current fieldwork. Equally important was the introduction of influential theo ries for explanations in archaeology. These anthropological theories came about as a result of western dissatisfaction with neo-evolutionary approaches. Labeled as processual, structural, postprocessual and otiier lands of archaeology, they exhibit the influence of neoMarxism and emphasize the social context of past changes. This new intellectual climate is fostering innovatory pro posals such as the replacement of the traditional period la bels and the application of explicit models, like secondary state formation to explain the relationship between the emergence of the Salamis royal tombs and the Phoenicians. The archaeological policies of independent Cyprus averted the excesses of nationalist archaeology characteristic of new states. As the impact of new directions indicates, however, this decision was at the price of continuing to ac cept western goals and methodologies for the interpretation
HISTORY OF T H E FIELD: Archaeology in the Aegean Islands of a polyethnic past. Thus, the current geopolitical context of Cyprus remains inseparable from interpretations of its past. [See also Cyprus. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Catling, H. W. Cypriol Bronzework in the Mycenaean
World. Oxford,
1964. Seminal, well-illustrated analysis of Bronze Age metalworkin Cypms. Underestimates Levantine influences, and now in need of updating. Gjerstad, Einar. Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus. Uppsala, 1926. Gjerstad, Einar, et al. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus, 1927-1931. 4 vols. Stockholm, 1 9 3 4 - .
Indispensible research tool for all pre-Byzantine periods. Gjerstad, Einar. Ages and Days in Cyprus. Studies in Mediterranean
Archaeology, Pocket-book 12. Goteborg, 1980. Candid,firsthandac count of the Swedes' mold-breaking investigations in Cyprus. Al though no substitute for the Swedish Cypms Expedition volumes,
many fieldwork policies and practices are articulated more clearly here. Goring, Elizabeth. A Mischievous Pastime: Digging in Cyprus in the Nine
teenth Century. Edinburgh, 1988. Although this survey of nineteenthcenturyfieldworkappears as an introductory essay to an exhibition catalogue, it is the most valuable and readable account of that period. Karageorghis, Vassos, ed. Acts of the International Archaeological Sym posium, "The Myceneans in the Eastern Mediterranean." Nicosia,
1972. Now rather dated, but still highly influential studies. Karageorghis, Vassos, ed. Archaeology in Cypms, 1960-1985.
Nicosia,
1985. Major discoveries and developments from 1935 to 1985, sum marized in introductory studies by the outstanding practitioners of the day: Karageorghis, Merrillees, Muhly, Coldstream, and TattonBrown. In the absence of a definitive history of archaeology in Cy prus, this provides the best alternative. Karageorghis, Vassos, ed. Acts of the International Archaeological Sym posium, "Cypms between the Orient and the Occident." Nicosia, 1986.
Comprehensive, international treatment of a perennial theme in Cypriot archaeology. F. G. Maier's contribution, "Kinyras and Agapenor," is an instructive example of the new movement to reassess traditional frameworks. Merrillees, R. S. Introduction to the Bronze Age Archaeology of Cyprus.
Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, Pocket-book 9. Goteborg, 1978. Thoughtful, outspoken primer for the period that has received a great deal of attention in recent studies in Cypriot archaeology. Stanley Price, N. "On Terminology and Models in Cypriote Prehis tory." In Studies Presented in Memory of Porphyrios Dikaios, edited
by Vassos Karageorghis et al., pp. 1 - 1 1 . Nicosia, 1979. Early attempt to show that the Three-Age system conventionally used to order archaeological data might hinder rather than help understand past developments. EDGAR PELTENBURG
Archaeology in the Aegean Islands The history of archaeology in the Aegean islands begins in the late nineteenth century. Very little archaeological or scholarly research was carried out in Greece during die cen turies of Turldsh rule, and work on the islands only began some fifty years after independence was won. T h e main pe riod of Turkish rule, usually given as 1 4 6 0 - 1 8 2 1 , is far more complicated for the islands: Thasos came under Turkish
73
rule in 1 4 5 5 , Lesbos in 1462, Naxos in 1566, and Melos in 1580, but Rhodes was not conquered by the Turks until 1 5 2 2 , Crete did not become part of the Ottoman empire until 1669 and Aigina not until 1 7 1 8 . T h e end of Turkish rule on the islands presents an equally complex picture. T h e islands of die Cyclades became part of Greece in 1 8 3 2 . T h e Ionian islands, governed as a British protectorate since 1 8 1 5 , were ceded to Greece in 1864. The islands of Ionia, such as Chios and Samos, and those of the North Aegean, including Thasos, Samothrace, Lemnos, and Lesbos, along with the northernmost part of the country including the Chalkidiki, all became part of Greece in 1 9 1 3 (the latter as a consequence of the successful Balkan wars that Greece and her Ballon allies fought against die Otto mans in 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 1 3 ) . In 1 9 1 2 , however, the islands of the Dodecanese—principally Rhodes, Kalymnos, Karpathos, and Kos—were given to Italy. Italian rule in the Dodecanese lasted until 1947. This variegated pattern in the recent his tory of the Aegean islands is reflected in the nature of the archaeological work carried out in the islands. European knowledge of the Aegean islands was minimal prior to the late nineteenth century. T h e piles of rubble that had once been the Colossos of Rhodes, toppled by the earth quake of 226 BCE, were finally hauled away by the Arabs, in 653 CE and sold to a Jew from Edessa who needed nine hun dred camels to transport all the bronze. In 1 1 0 3 the AngloSaxon merchant Saewulf, on his return from pilgrimage to the recently liberated Holy Land, refers to the islands of Scio (Chios), Meteline (for Mytilene, the chief city of Lesbos), and Tenit (Tenedos) before going on to "the very ancient and famous city of Troy . . ." (Easton, 1 9 9 1 ) . In 1 4 4 5 , Cyriacus of Ancona visited Mykonos and Delos, giving his impression of the colossal statue of Apollo of the Naxians. Not content simply to describe ancient sculpture, Kenelm Digby, in the seventeenth century, carried off pieces of marble sculpture from Delos for the royal collec tion of Charles I. Travelers to Crete in the seventeenth century were given a tour of the labyrinth of Daedalos, actually the remains of die stone quarry of Roman Gortyn/Gortyna. A more serious exploration of die Idaean Cave, die legendary birthplace of the god Zeus, had been carried out by Joseph Goedenhuize in 1590 or 1 5 9 1 , who remarked on the large quantity of bro ken lamps (of Roman date) in the cave. [See Lamps.] In the late 1830s, the German traveler Ludwig Ross toured the is lands of the Aegean. His observations, published in three volumes ( 1 8 5 0 - 1 8 5 2 ) provide an account of the islands in the premodern era that is matched in English only by the work of James Theodore Bent, published in 1885. Bent also excavated some forty Early Cycladic graves on the island of Antiparos in 1884, but this does not represent the beginning of archaeological work in the Cyclades. In 1869 the French geologist F . Fouque discovered remains of a prehistoric town on the southern coast of the island of Thera (actually
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Aegean Islands
that part of the island known as Therasia). The vases found at that time are still in the collection of the French School at Athens. What Fouque had discovered was the Minoan setdement at Akrofiri, buried by the eruption that took place in about 1600 BCE. It was excavated by Spyridon Marinatos from 1967 until his death in 1974. In 1 8 1 1 the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aigina was "explored," and seventeen pieces of sculpture from it were subsequently sold to Ludwig I, king of Bavaria. The Venus di Milo (a first-century BCE copy of a fourth-century origi nal), now in the Louvre museum, was found in fragments on Melos in 1820 and bought by the French ambassador to Constantinople as a gift for Louis XVIII. In 1 8 5 4 - 1 8 5 5 the Englishman Charles Thomas Newton, looking for more treasure to add to the collections of tire British Museum, "excavated" the Temple of Apollo on Kalymnos. In 1863 the French consul Champoiseau discovered tire Winged Victory of Samothrace. The statue, actually a Rhodian work of 187 BCE, is one of the treasures of tire Louvre. In 1 8 7 3 and 1875 an Austrian expedition under Alexander Conze worked at the Ptolemaion on Samothrace. In 1 8 7 3 the French School began work on the island of Delos and these excavations, which are still in progress, can be said to mark the real beginning of official archaeological work on the Ae gean islands (although large-scale excavation on Delos only took place between 1902 and 1 9 1 4 ) . In 1878 the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion was founded and in that same year Minos Kalokairinos began work at what he called Kephala, a site now known as Knossos. In 1880 the newly established (1879) Archaeological In stitute of America sent William J . Stillman to investigate the possibilities of archaeological work at Knossos and Gortyn, an enterprise strengthened by the establishment of the American School of Classical Studies in Aniens in 1 8 8 1 . Al though troubles between Greeks and Turks on Crete made work impossible, the American School maintained its inter est in Crete into the 1890s, employing the Italian scholars Federico Halbherr and Antonio Taramelli in survey work and in the exploration of the Kamares cave, the latter soon to be made famous by Arthur Evans. After an ill-fated at tempt to gain permission to excavate at Delphi, the Amer ican School finally setded upon the site of Corinth in 1896, which remains the official school excavation to this day. Halbherr, on the other hand, remained on Crete. In 1884 he discovered the monumental stone inscription known as the Gortyn Law Code (mid-fifth century BCE). This re markable discovery encouraged the Italians to remain in the vicinity of Gortyn and the plain of the Mesara. In 1885 they began work at the Temple of Pythian Apollo at Gortyn and, intermittentiy, continued to work in different areas of Gor tyn into the 1960s. Halbherr also spent August 1885 exca vating rich votive deposits from the Idaean cave (eighth and sevendi centuries BCE), especially a series of important but
poorly preserved bronze "shields," for which influence (and even provenience) has been sought in lands as far distant as Urartu. [See Grave Goods; Urartu.] In 1894 Halbherr began work at Prinias, a site covering a period from about 1 3 0 0 to 300 BCE, The excavation of Prinias was continued by Luigi Pernier (1906-1908) and, more recentiy, by Giovanni Rizza (1969-1978). Work at die Idaean cave was reopened by Yiannis Sakellarakis in 1982. In 1898 Turkish rule over Crete came to an end. An in dependent Crete was governed as a European protectorate under the leadership of Prince George of Denmark (until 1 9 1 3 , when Crete became part of Greece). In that same year Halbherr founded the Italian Mission to Crete, which, after 1937, became die Italian Archaeological School of Athens. In 1900 the main excavation of the Italian Mission was the Minoan palace at Phaistos. Work at Phaistos, directed by Pernier continued from 1900 to 1909 and then from 1928 to 1932 (Pernier and Banti, 1947). In 1 9 5 0 the Italians re opened excavations at Phaistos, under the direction of Doro Levi. Levi dug there for seventeen seasons ( 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 6 6 ) , publishing his results in a series of final excavation reports. Work at Ayia Triadha, an adjacent site in some way related to Phaistos, began in 1902. T h e major excavations at Ayia Triadha ( 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 0 5 , 1 9 1 0 - 1 9 1 4 ) , directed by Halbherr and E. Stephani, were finally edited for publication by Luisa Banti in 1977. The famous well-known sarcopha gus of Ayia Triadha, now securely dated to the fourteenth century BCE (LM IIIA), was discovered by R. Paribeni in 1903. [See Sarcophagus.] T h e current excavations at Ayia Triadha, under the direction of Vincenza La Rosa, began in 1977. A Pre-Palatial quarter at Ayia Triadha was discovered by chance in 1970 and excavated in 1 9 7 3 and 1 9 7 7 . A Mi noan pottery kiln (at first identified as a copper-smelting furnace) was excavated in 1976 and 1 9 7 7 . In 1959 Doro Levi excavated a remarkable Middle Minoan tholos tomb outside the village of Kamilari, near Phaistos. T h e Italians also worked on Crete during their period. (Di Vita and La Regina 1984). [See Tombs.] In 1900, the year the Italians began work at Phaistos, Ar thur Evans began his excavation of die palace of Minos at Knossos. He dug for six seasons ( 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 0 5 ) and published the results of his work in a series of five volumes (four vol umes of text plus an index), The Palace of Minos ( 1 9 2 1 1936), surely the best-known publication in the history of Minoan archaeology. By the time the last volume appeared, written with his half-sister Joan Evans (who also wrote a very informative biography of her brother), Evans was eightyfive years old. In 1905, during the last season of excavation at Knossos, Evans presented a paper at an international con gress in Athens outlining the basic chronological framework of Minoan civilization. His basic sequence of Early, Middle, and Late Minoan, with each period having three subdivi sions, is still used (MacEnroe, 1 9 9 5 ) . Carl Blegen, in 1 9 2 1 ,
HISTORY OF T H E FIELD: Archaeology in the Aegean Islands used this basic tripartite structure to work out a similar se quence for the Greek mainland, designating the basic peri ods as Helladic, in place of Minoan. This, too, is still the sequence used. Evans was really a gifted amateur, with no experience in field archaeology, much like Heinrich Schliemann. As Schliemann had made use of the expertise of Wilhelm Dorpfeld, so Evans employed Duncan Mackenzie. Macken zie was a skilled field archaeologist who had just spent four years (i 896-1899) excavating the site of Phylakopi on the island of Melos (Momigliano, 1995). This was the first ma jor excavation sponsored by the British School of Archae ology at Athens and the first long-range excavation in the Aegean islands. T h e results of this work were published in 1904. After only a brief season there in 1 9 1 1 , the British returned to Phylakopi in 1974, under tire direction of Colin Renfrew. This time fieldwork ( 1 9 7 4 - 1 9 7 7 ) was combined with an extensive regional and ecological survey of the is land. After World War II and the German occupation of Crete (during which the Germans conducted some excavations, notably those of Frederich Matz at the site of Monastiraki), the excavation of Knossos was resumed by die British School, under the direction of Sinclair Hood ( 1 9 5 1 - 1 9 6 1 ) . Hood is best known for his extensive excavations in the vi cinity of the Royal Road, which remain unpublished. Since then the British School has excavated in many different ar eas at the site, under the direction of Peter Warren, Mervyn Popham, J. N . Coldstream, and Colin Macdonald. Joseph Hazzidakis, director of the Syllogos of the Friends of the Herakleion Museum, and an important figure in the early years of Cretan archaeology, excavated at a complex of three Minoan villas at the site of Tylissos ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 1 3 ) , finding, among otiier things, three huge bronze cauldrons. [See Villa.] These excavations were published by the French School (in their series Etudes Cretoises) in 1934. In 1 9 1 5 Flazzidakis discovered the Minoan palace at Mallia. He con ducted some exploratory work, in 1 9 1 5 and 1 9 1 9 , and then turned the site over to the French School. The French opened excavations at Mallia in 1 9 2 1 and are still there. Work before World War II was directed by Fernand Chapouthier (among others) and, after the war, by Micheline and Henri van Effenterre. Mallia, or Malia as it is known to its present excavators, remains die Minoan palace most ap preciated by the modern visitor to Crete (for French work on Crete see Tire and van Effenterre, 1978). In 1901 the American scholar Harriet Boyd (later Hawes) began work at Kavousi, in lire Bay of Mirabello. She soon shifted to the Minoan town of Gournia, where she remained through 1904. Gournia, excavated on behalf of the Ameri can Exploration Society of Philadelphia, an organization af filiated with the University of Pennsylvania, remains the only Minoan town ever excavated. Her final excavation report,
75
published in 1908, was a model for its day and remains an indispensable publication for die study of Minoan archae ology. T h e new Gournia Project, currentiy conducting a re gional survey, is directed by L. Vance Watrous (1994). At Gournia, Boyd Hawes was assisted by Richard Berry Seager, who went on to conduct excavations at Vasiliki ( 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 0 6 ) , Pseira ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 0 7 ) , and Mochlos (1908). On the tiny island of Pseira, Seager excavated more than forty houses and thirty-three graves, but litde of this material was ever published. From 1985 to 1 9 9 1 , Pseira was reexcavated, under the direction of Philip Betancourt and Costis Davaras. T h e first volume on die new Pseira Project appeared in 1995. At Mochlos, Seager found a spectacular series of Early Minoan tombs, with stone bowls and much gold jew elry, but publication was again quite sketchy. In 1989, Jeffrey Soles reopened excavations at Mochlos, working primarily in levels dating to Late Minoan times (Shaw, 1990). The Greek Archaeological Service has also worked exten sively on the island of Crete, especially under the direction of Marinatos (see above), Nikolaos Platon, and Stylianos Alexiou. At the beginning of this century die Greek archae ologist Stephanos Xanthoudides excavated a series of Early and Middle Minoan vaulted tombs on the plain of the M e sara, beginning with Koumasa, in 1904. His final report, published in 1924, raised many problems of chronology and interpretation that may be solved when the related tombs excavated by Alexiou at Lebena ( 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 6 0 ) , the ancient port of Gortyn, are published. Xanthoudides also excavated a Late Minoan villa at Nirou Khani in 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 1 9 . In 1 9 1 2 , Xanthoudides called attention to the importance of die site of Arkhanes. Some work was done at the site by Evans ( 1 9 2 2 ) , Marinatos ( 1 9 3 5 , 1956), and Platon (1948, 1 9 5 7 ) , but it was only in 1964 that Sakellarakis began large-scale work tiiere. From 1965 to 1972 he excavated five very rich tiiolos tombs at Phourni and in 1979 discovered a structure identified as a Minoan shrine at Anemospilia, with evidence for human sacrifice. In 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 0 0 , the British School, under the direction of David Hogarth, excavated at the Cave of Psychro, usually identified with the Diktaean cave. Most of the finds from this excavation ended up in die Ashmolean Museum, Ox ford, and were eventually published by John Boardman in 1962. In 1 9 0 1 , Hogarth moved to the site of Zakros, on the east coast of Crete, where he excavated a series of Late Mi noan houses. It is now known that he came very close to finding the remains of the Late Minoan palace at Zakros tiiat Platon only discovered in 1961 (altiiough it had been known for some time to looters in the district). In 1 9 6 2 , Platon opened excavations at Zakros on behalf of the Greek Archaeological Society. Zakros is thus the fourtii great Mi noan palace to be excavated, and the results of Platen's work at the site ( 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 8 0 ) have been spectacular. Although he did publish a popular book on his excavations (Platon,
76
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Aegean Islands
1 9 7 1 ) , the final excavation report will be published by his son, Eleftherios Platon, who, since 1 9 8 1 , has been excavat ing at die site, including the surrounding caves, houses and tombs. In recent years large, possibly palatial complexes have been excavated at Khania, in western Crete (by a joint Greek-Swedish team directed by Yannis Tzedakis and Eric Hallager), at Kommos (by an American School team di rected by Joseph Shaw), and at Palaikastro (by a British School team directed by J. A. MacGillivray, returning to a site the British School excavated from 1902 to 1906). George Rethemiotakis is also excavating a new Minoan palace site at Galatas, near Herakleion, on behalf of the Greek Archae ological Service. In addition to its Minoan remains Kommos has produced a series of Iron Age Greek temples (tenth cen tury BCE) and even a structure identified as a Phoenician tripartite shrine. [See Phoenicians.] From Palaikastro a re markable ivory and stone figurine has been identified by die excavators as a representation of the young Zeus. On Naxos the physical anthropologist Klon Stefanos ex cavated some four hundred Early Cycladic graves in eigh teen cemeteries ( 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 0 5 ) , on behalf of the Greek Ar chaeological Society. This material was finally published by George Papathanasopoulos in 1963. Serious archaeological work on Naxos began in 1949 witii the excavations by Nikolaos Kontoleon at the settlement of Grotta (in the town of Naxos) and the cemetery of Aplomata. In 1985 Kostas Zachos began work at die Zas cave, uncovering evidence for continuous occupation from Neolithic times to an early phase of Early Cycladic. On Syros, the Greek archaeologist Christos Tsountas ex cavated, in the 1890s, some six hundred Early Cycladic graves at the cemetery of Chalandriani as well as a fortified Early Cycladic settlement at the site on Kastri. Tsountas published some of this material in two lengthy articles, in 1898 and 1899. The Kastri site was reexcavated by EvaMarie Bossert in 1962. Another site named Kastri, a Middle and Late Minoan setdement on the island of Kythera, was excavated by the British School, under the direction of George Huxley, from 1963 to 1965. On Kea (also known as Keos), important excavations were conducted by the Amer ican School, under the direction of Jack Caskey, who dug, from i960 to 1974, at the small Final Neolithic site of Kephala and at the large Bronze Age site of Ayia Irini. John Coleman published Kephala in 1977; Ayia Irini is being pub lished in many volumes by multiple authors. On Delos the prehistoric (Early Cycladic II and IIIA) set tlement on Mt. Kythnos was explored in 1 9 1 6 . Beside the prehistoric circular, hut-shaped shelters of the third millen nium BCE, the excavators found remains of an Archaic tem ple dedicated to Zeus Kythnios and Athena Kythnia. Pre historic Paros (especially die Early Cycladic period) was explored by the German Institute under the direction of Otto Rubensohn, whose report appeared in 1 9 1 7 . Important
evidence for understanding the end of the Bronze Age on Paros has come from recent excavations at the site of Koukounaries, conducted by Demetrius Schilardi on behalf of the Greek Archaeological Society. At the site of Skarkos, on the Island of Ios, Marisa Marthari is excavating a very wellpreserved Early Cycladic setdement, on behalf of the Greek Archaeological Service. On the island of Saliagos, between Paros and Antiparos, the British School ( 1 9 6 4 - 1 9 6 5 ) exca vated an important Middle Neolithic settlement, under the direction of John Evans and Renfrew, the first evidence for human occupation in the Cyclades in the Neolithic period. From 1896 to 1 9 0 3 , the German Institute excavated the ancient Greek city of Thera, under the direction of Hiller von Gartringen, finding many important Early Greek in scriptions. [See Greek; Inscription Sites.] The cemeteries of ancient Thera (Geometric, Archaic, and Classical) were ex cavated by Nikos Zapheiropoulos who, while ephor of the Cyclades in the 1 9 5 0 S - 1 9 7 O S , built local museums on many of the islands, including die one on Mykonos. Following the death of Marinatos in 1 9 7 4 , Christos Doumas continued work in the Minoan town of Akrotiri, where a great contro versy developed over the date of the volcanic eruption that blew apart the island and buried Akrotiri under meters of ash and pumice. Various dates have been proposed, ranging from 1648 to about 1450 BCE; no resolution is in sight. On Chios, an island noted for its production of mastic (a resin of the lentisk tree used in malting a liqueur and in chewing gum) and as the traditional birthplace of Homer, "the blind man of Chios," the most important archaeolog ical work has been that carried out by the British School at Emporio ( 1 9 5 1 - 1 9 5 5 ) , a site covering the Late Neolithic and the entire Bronze Age, under the direction of Sinclair Hood and John Boardman. In the North Aegean, the most impor tant prehistoric excavations have been those of the Italian School at Poliochni ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 6 ) , on the island of Lemnos, directed by Alessandro della Seta, and of the British School at Thermi ( 1 9 2 9 - 1 9 3 3 ) on the island of Lesbos, directed by Winifred Lamb. Both are Early Bronze Age sites, covering roughly the period of Troy I—II. The exploration of prehis toric Samothrace began in 1984 with the excavations of Dimitris Matsas at the site of Mikro Vouni. T h e discovery there of clay sealings of Minoan type added a new chapter to the history of an island known mainly for its Hellenistic Sanctuary of the Great Gods, under investigation by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, since 1 9 3 8 . [See Seals.] The current excavations at this site are being directed by James McCredie. In the islands of the Dodecanese the important work in prehistoric or Bronze Age archaeology has been done on Rhodes and Kos, mainly during the period when the islands belonged to Italy. Rhodes, in particular, was published in the periodical Clara Rhodos (published from 1928 to 1 9 4 1 ) . At Trianda on Rhodes, a habitation site under strong Mi noan influence, if not an actual Minoan colony, was exca-
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula vated by G. Monaco from 1 9 3 5 to 1936. T h e Mycenaean cemeteries on Rhodes, located at Moschou Vounara and Makria Vounara, near Trianda, were excavated by G. Jacopi from 1924 to 1928. T h e Italian interpretation of Late Bronze Age Rhodes was revised by Arne Furumark, in a classic ar ticle published in 1950. On Kos two large Mycenaean cem eteries, at Langadha and Eleona, were excavated by Luigi Morricone, in 1 9 3 5 and 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 4 1 . On both islands a great deal of recent work has been carried out by members of the Greek Archaeological Service, especially by T. Marketou at Trianda. Descriptions of the antiquities of Samos go back almost 150 years. T h e tunneled aqueduct built by Eupalinos for die tyrant Polycrates (Herodotus 3.60) was described by Victor Honore Guerin in 1856. [See Aqueducts.] T h e earliest map of the island was made by Tournefort in 1 7 7 7 and the first plan of the city walls was drawn by Bishop Pococke in 1 7 9 2 . For those interested in the Near East, especially the Near East of the first half of die first millennium BCE, tire most important excavations are unquestionably those conducted by the German Institute at the Sanctuary of Hera, the Heraion, on the island of Samos. T h e excavations there ( 1 9 1 0 1 9 1 4 , 1 9 2 5 - 1 9 3 9 , 1 9 5 2 to the present), under a number of field directors, but especially Ernst Buschor and then Hans Walter, have uncovered a spectacular array of imported bronze votives. These bronzes, dedicated to the goddess Hera, came from Egypt, Cyprus, Phrygia, North Syria, As syria, Babylonia, Luristan (or Iran), Urartu, and the Cau casus (Jantzen, 1 9 7 2 ) . N o other Greek sanctuary and no other Greek site has such a quantity of imported Oriental objects. Only Olympia, Delphi, and now the Idaean cave have produced anything remotely comparable. [See also Aegean Islands; Crete; and the biographies of Ev ans, Guerin, Hogarth, Mackenzie, and Schliemann.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barber, R. L. N. The Cyclades in the Bronze Age. London, 1987. The
only recent survey, but a very traditional work. Barber, Robin, ed. Blue Guide to Greece. 6th ed. London, 1995. Basic
information on numerous archaeological sites written principally by people associated with the British School.
77
Furumark, Arne. "The Settlement at Ialysos and Aegean History, c. 1 5 5 0 - 1 4 0 0 B.C." Opuscula Archaeologica 6 (1950): 1 5 0 - 2 7 1 . Basic
revision of the Italian work on LB Rhodes. Jantzen, Ulf. "Samos VIII." Agyptische und Orientatische Bronzen aus
dem Heraion von Samos. Bonn, 1972, The Samos bronzes excavated prior to 1965. Leekley, Dorothy, and Robert Noyes. Archaeological Excavations in the Greek Islands. Park Ridge, N.J., 1975. Now dated, but valuable for work done by the Greek Archaeological Service. MacEnroe, John. "Sir Arthur Evans and Edwardian Archaeology." Classical Bulletin 71 (1995): 3 - 1 8 . Interesting discussion of the ide
ological background of British archaeology at time Evans worked at Knossos. Matsas, Dimitris. "Minoan Long-Distance Trade: A View from the Northern Aegean." In Politeia: Society and State in the Aegean Bronze
Age, edited by Robert Laffineur and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, pp. 235-247. Liege, 1995. Discussion of important recent work on Sam othrace and in the northern Aegean. Marangou, Lila, ed. Cycladic Culture: Naxos in the 3rd Millennium. Ath
ens, 1990. Catalog of an important exhibition at the Goulandris Mu seum in Athens, based on excavated material. Momigliano, Nicoletta. "Duncan Mackenzie: A Cautious Canny High lander." In Klados: Essays in Honour of J. N. Coldstream, edited by
Christine Morris, pp. 1 6 3 - 1 7 0 . London, 1995. Morricone, Luigi. "Coo: Scavi e Scoperte nel 'Serraglio' e in locala minori ( 1 9 3 5 - 4 3 ) . " Annuario della Scuola Archeologica diAtene e delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente 5 0 - 5 1 (1973): 139-396. The most im
portant publication for LB Kos. Overbeck, John C. The Bronze Age Pottery from the Kastro at Paros.
Jonsered, 1989. Publication of the pottery from Rubensohn's exca vations. Pernier, Luigi, and Banti, Luisa, eds. Guida degli scavi italiani in Creta.
Rome, 1947. Basic account of the early Italian work on Crete. Platon, Nikolaos. Zakros, the Discoveiy of a Lost Palace of Ancient Crete.
New York, 1971. Ross, Ludwig. Reisen auf dem griechischen Inseln des agdischen Meeres. 3
vols. Stuttgart and Tubingen, 1840-1852. Shaw, Joseph W. "North American Archaeological Work in Crete, 1880-1990." Expedition 32 (1990): 6 - 1 4 . Historical article, in a spe
cial issue of Expedition devoted to Crete. Tire, Claude, and Henri van Effenterre. Guide des fouilles francaises en
Crete. 2d ed. Paris, 1978. Basic account of French archaeological work on Crete. Watrous, L. Vance. "Review of Aegean Prehistory III: Crete from Ear liest Prehistory through the Protopalatian Period." American Journal of Archaeology 98 (1994): 695-753. Excellent account of recent ar
chaeological work on Crete (to about 1700 BCE); full bibliography. J. D . MUHLY
Bent, James Theodore. The Cyclades or Life among the Insular Greeks.
London, 1885. Boardman, John. The Cretan Collection in Oxford. Oxford, 1962.
Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula
Boardman, John, and C. E. Vaphopoulou-Richardson, cds. Chios. A Conference at the Homereion in Chios, 1984. Oxford, 1986.
Davis, Jack L. "Review of Aegean Prehistory I: The Islands of the Ae gean." American Journal of Archaeology 96 (1992): 699-756. Superb
discussion of recent archaeological work; full bibliography. Di Vita, Antonio, and Adriano La Regina, eds. Ancient Crete: A Hundred Years of Italian Archaeology (1884-1984).
Rome, 1984. Published on
the occasion of the centennial of Italian work on Crete. The place to begin for all Italian excavations on Crete. Easton, Donald F. "Troy Before Schliemann." Studia Troica 1 (1991): 111-129.
Evans, John D., and Colin Renfrew. Excavations at Saliagos near Antiparos. London, 1968.
No history of archaeological research in the Arabian Pen insula can proceed as a smooth, uninterrupted narrative for tire reason that explorations and excavations in northwestern Arabia, southwestern Arabia, inner Arabia, and the Gulf re gion (including Oman) followed separate, if not always un related, trajectories. Arabian scholars working in one area may have been aware of developments in other regions, but the scholarly traditions to which they belonged were quite distinct. Thus, because of its proximity to the Holy Land, the Hijaz (northwestern Arabia) always attracted the vast
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HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula
majority of its students from the ranks of Palestinian ar chaeology. South Arabian scholars, overwhelmingly philol ogists until the 1950s, had wider interests in Semitic philol ogy but tended to be a highly specialized band until quite recently. (Today, archaeologists with backgrounds in Syr ian, Mesopotamian, and Iranian archaeology are on the scene.) Finally, tire Gulf region attracted a mixture of schol ars whose interests originally lay, for the most part, in the prehistory of Iran, the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, and, in the case of die Danish expedition (see below), Scandinavia. Political conditions have directed archaeological devel opments in many parts of the. world, and the Arabian Pen insula is no exception. Many commentators on die history of archaeological research on the Arabian Peninsula have noted that political instability, the xenophobic tenets of Wahhabism, and the belligerence of bedouin tribes ham pered the growtii and development of archaeology in this region during the nineteenth century to an extent unknown in neighboring areas of western Asia. In this state of affairs, therefore, and given the very life-tiireatening situations en countered by early explorers, it is striking just how many archaeological observations were made prior to the incep tion of excavation in 1879. Much of this achievement must be ascribed to a heroic desire to explore a hostile corner of the globe generally regarded as inaccessible to those who valued their life; to record inscriptions in as yet undeciphered tongues; and to join what was, until quite recently, a very exclusive club of inttepid explorers. T h e history of Arabian exploration has been reviewed on several occasions by scholars such as David G. Hogarth, Fritz Hommel, Detlef Nielsen, and Adolph Grohmann. Only those discoveries of relevance to the archaeology of the peninsula will be dis cussed here. For the sake of continuity, each major subarea of the Arabian Peninsula will be dealt with in turn. South Arabia. The German teacher Ulrich Jasper Seetzen became the first Western scholar to copy a South Arabian inscription as a result of his visit to the Himyarite capital Zafar in 1 8 1 0 - 1 8 1 1 . [See Zafar.] Other significant texts were copied in 1 8 3 4 - 1 8 3 5 and in 1838 by the British military adventurers James R. Wellsted and Charles J. Cruttenden. In 1843 Thomas Joseph Arnaud, a French phar macist attached to an Egyptian regiment, became die first European to visit the Sabaean capital Marib and to describe its famous dam, as well as to collect more inscriptions. [See Marib.] The French Orientalist Joseph Halevy traveled to Yemen in 1869 on behalf of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, copying almost seven hundred inscriptions and thereby laying die foundations of the systematic study of epigraphic South Arabian. [See South Arabian.] It was the great Austrian scholar Eduard Glaser, however, whose four expeditions to Yemen (1882-1884, 1 8 8 5 - 1 8 8 6 , 1 8 8 7 - 1 8 8 8 , 1 8 9 2 - 1 8 9 4 ) were to have the most profound im pact on the early course of South Arabian studies. The initial results of Glaser's work were published in the Corpus In-
scriptionum Semiticarum, but the inscriptions he copied con tinue to be edited in the Austrian Academy of Science's se ries Sammlung Eduard Glaser. T h e last great South Arabian expedition of the nineteenth century was the Vienna Aca demy's unsuccessful attempt, in 1898, to reach Shabwa, capital of the Hadhramaut, under the direction of Carlo Landberg and the Orientalist David Heinrich Miiller [See Hadhramaut; Shabwa.] In 1928 the German scholars Carl Rathjens and Hermann von Wissmann, working at the site of al-Huqqa, became the first scholars to undertake archaeological excavations in Ye men. A decade later, in 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 3 8, Gertrude CatonThompson worked at Hureidha, and R. A. B. Hamilton ex cavated at Shabwa. [See Hureidha.] Archaeological activity in Yemen was interrupted by World War II, but in 1 9 5 0 Wendell Phillips, with the help of such renowned scholars as William Foxwell Albright, led the first of his American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM) expeditions to South Arabia, working at a series of important sites includ ing Tirana , the capital of Qataban; Hajar Bin Humeid, a stratified mound in the Wadi Beihan; die Sabaean capital Marib, where the Awwam temple was excavated; and Khor Rori, a Hadhrami foundation on tire coast of Dhofar. In 1968 the American scholar Gus W. Van Beek, a veteran of the Hajar Bin Humeid excavation, surveyed Najran, the northernmost of die great South Arabian cities. [See Hajar Bin Humeid; Najran; Qataban; Timna' (Arabia); and the biographies of Caton-Thompson, Phillips, and Albright] 1
Excavations at Shabwa, capital of die Hadhramaut, were begun in 1974 by a French mission led by the late Jacqueline Pirenne and Jean-Francois Breton; such other scholars as Walter W. Miiller of Marburg, Jacques Ryckmans of Louvain, and Christian Robin of Aix-en-Provence universities continued carrying out epigraphic surveys in Yemen during the 1970s and 1980s. T h e establishment of a station of the German Archaeological Institute at San'a in the 1970s re sulted in much new work at Marib and other sites, under the direction of Jtirgen Schmidt. In the early 1980s, an im portant Italian expedition led by Alessandro de Maigret be gan, for the first time, locating and excavating Bronze Age sites in Yemen; in 1982 the AFSM initiated new work in Wadi al-Jubah, under the direction of James Sauer. [See Jubah, Wadi al-.] Meanwhile, a Soviet-Yemeni expedition, working both at Raybun in the Hadhramaut and at Qana' on the coast, in the mid- and late 1980s, added considerably to what is known of Soutii Yemen. More recently, a French expedition directed by Serge Cleuziou began investigating the later prehistory of Yemen. [See Yemen.] E a s t e r n Arabia and the Gulf Region. Foreign political advisers and military officers were the first active pursuants of the archaeological record of eastern Arabia and the Gulf. Lewis Pelly, Her Majesty's political resident in die Persian Gulf, described the ruins at Thaj in northeastern Arabia in the diary of his 1865 journey to Riyadh. In 1879 Edward L.
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula Durand conducted die first archaeological excavations ever undertaken on the Arabian Peninsula at the site of Aali, on the island of Bahrain. In 1899 an unidentified Ottoman of ficial wrote an account of archaeological sites in the Hofuf oasis area of northeastern Arabia, that was published post humously in 1 9 1 7 . William Henry Irvine Shakespear, the British political officer at Kuwait, visited Thaj in 1 9 1 1 , at which time he copied several Hasaitic inscriptions. Exca vations were resumed on Bahrain in 1889 by Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Bent; in 1903 by the Belgian scholar Arnold Jouannin; in 1906 by Francis B. Prideaux; from 1 9 2 1 to 1926 by Clive Kirkpatrick Daly; and in 1 9 2 5 by Ernest J. H. Mackay. [See Bahrain; Thaj.] The renowned British Arabist Harry St. John B. Philby collected stone tools in eastern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Qatar, in 1 9 3 1 , just as the British political agent at Ku wait, Harold Richard Patrick Dickson did in the Wadi alBatin of western Kuwait in 1 9 3 5 . [See Kuwait; Qatar.] In 1933 an agreement was signed by Standard Oil of Cal ifornia and the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Finance that ini tiated die search for oil in Saudi Arabia. With this act, thousands of Americans gained access to what had formerly been the province of but a few intrepid explorers, and in formation on archaeological finds began to accumulate. In 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 4 1 , in collaboration with Standard Oil, Peter Bruce Cornwall, then a graduate student in history at Harvard Uni versity, conducted test excavations at several sites in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. In 1947 Richard LeBaron Bowen, Jr., an engineer worldng for ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company), collected pottery and described 'Ain Jawan, the site of a limestone quarry worked during World War II. This led to an important publication that was long the main point of reference for the late pre-Islamic past of eastern Saudi Arabia. It was also oil that brought T . Geoffrey Bibby, on behalf of the Iraq Petroleum Corporation, to Bahrain and led to die inception, in 1 9 5 3 , of the Danish expedition to the Ara bian Gulf (University of Aarhus), led by the eminent Danish prehistorian Peter Vilhelm Glob. Soon after establishing themselves on Bahrain, the Danish Gulf expedition began working in Qatar ( 1 9 5 7 ) , Kuwait (1958), and the Trucial States (1958), all of which had been, archaeologically speak ing, terra incognita. In 1968 the Danes conducted a season of survey and excavation in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. In 1972 Abdullah H. Masry, a Saudi Arabian edu cated at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Chicago, began excavations at a number of important Ubaid-related sites in eastern Saudi Arabia. He was followed shortly thereafter by Constance Maria Piesinger at the third-millennium BCE sites of U m m ar-Ramad and U m m an-Nussi. Surveys of the region between Hofuf and the Kuwaiti border were conducted in 1 9 7 6 and 1977 by American scholars from the University of Chicago and Har vard working for the Saudi Arabian Department of Antiq
79
uities. Between 1982 and 1985 excavations were carried out at Thaj and in the Dhahran tomb field. New excavations on Bahrain were undertaken by several Arab missions in the late 1970s, when it became clear that the construction of die causeway that now links Saudi Arabi and Bahrain was going to destroy thousands of burial mounds. An Australian team led by Anthony McNicoll worked briefly on Bahrain in die early 1980s. T h e French scholar Monique Kervran resumed excavations at Qafat alBahrain during the late 1970s since continued by Pierre Lombard. [See Qal'at al-Bahrain.] A British expedition has been excavating the early second millennium BCE settlement of Saar since 1990. Between 1983 and 1990 a French mission to Failaka (in Kuwait), under the direction of Jean-Francois Salles, carried out extensive excavations at both Bronze Age and Hellenistic sites. [See Failaka.] Northwestern Arabia. Apart from surreptitious visits to Mecca and Medina by the likes of Richard Burton and oth ers, northwestern Arabia was not explored until 1 8 7 6 - 1 8 7 8 , when the great English Orientalist Charles M. Doughty vis ited die southerly Nabatean site of Meda'in Saleh and the earlier Iron Age mettopolis of Tayma', where the sixth cen tury BCE Babylonian monarch Nabonidus spent a decade of his reign. [See Meda'in Saleh; Tayma'.] The visit yielded an important harvest of Nabatean, Lihyanite, Thamudic, Ar amaic, and Minean inscriptions. [See Nabatean Inscriptions; Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] The year 1884 witnessed the important expedition by the Alsatian scholars Julius Euting and Charles Huber to Tayma' and al-'Ula (Dedan). [See Dedan.] From 1907 to 1 9 1 0 two French Dominican fathers, Antonin J. Jaussen and Raphael Savignac, conducted extensive surface investigations at Meda'in Saleh, al-'Ula, Tabuk, and briefly at Tayma'. Between 1908 and 1 9 1 5 the Austrian Orientalist Alois Musil made a series of journeys through northern Arabia, reaching Hail, al-'Ula, al-Jawf, and Wadi es-Sirhan which, although not intended to serve an archae ological purpose, gathered an enormous amount of topo graphic data scholars working on the archaeology and early history of this area continue to mine. Thereafter, it was not until 1962 that two Canadian schol ars, Fred V. Winnett and William L. Reed, returned to northern Arabia, where they visited most of the important, known sites (e.g., Tayma', al-TJla, and Mada'in Saleh), re cording dozens of Thamudic, Taymanite, Minean, Dedanite, Lihyanite, Nabatean, Palmyrene, and Hebrew inscrip tions. [See the biography of Winnett.] In 1968 the English archaeologist Peter J. Parr led a team that returned to Me da'in Saleh, al-'Ula, Tayma', and other North Arabian sites of importance but was still not entitled to conduct sondages. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, archaeologists work ing on behalf of die Saudi Arabian Department of Antiq uities conducted surveys and sondages tiiroughout north western Arabia, but particularly at Khuraybah and Tayma'.
80
HISTORY OF THE FIELD: Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula
O m a n Peninsula. In the early nineteenth century, the interior of Oman was almost as inaccessible as Yemen. T h e coasts, however, were visited frequently by the navies and merchant vessels of many European countries, as well as of America. On one such visit in 1844, Henry John Carter, an assistant surgeon aboard the British East India Company's brig Palinurus, noted the presence of early traces of copper metallurgy on the island of Masira off the southern coast of Oman. Copper metallurgy was to remain an important area of research in Omani archaeology. T h e year 1924 saw the establishment of a committee "to report on probable sources of the copper used by the Sumerians" by the British Asso ciation for the Advancement of Science. This research pro ject, which lasted until 1936, involved the analysis by the English metallurgist Charles H. Desch of, among other things, copper ore samples from Oman acquired in 1925 by the British geologist G. M. Lees. Actual excavations in Oman, however, were not initiated until 1958, when Ray Cleveland, a junior colleague on Phil lips's AFSM team, conducted brief soundings at Sohar, on the Batinah coast of Oman. [See Sohar.] Meanwhile, in the same year, Glob and Bibby were shown a group of burial mounds on the island of Umm an-Nar, in Abu Dhabi, and shordy thereafter in the Buraimi/al-'Ain area oasis (divided between Abu Dhabi and Oman). It was there that the Danes were to uncover the first traces of the third-millennium Umm an-Nar culture that dominated most of the Oman peninsula. In 1968 die British archaeologist Beatrice de Cardi, ac companied by Brian Doe, conducted her first survey in the emirate of Ras al-Khaimah, and the Danish archaeologist Karen Frifelt began work at sites such as Hili, Qam Bint Saud, and Rumeilah. It was the accession of Sultan Qaboos in Oman in 1970 and the formation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1 9 7 1 , however, that paved the way for the subsequent systematic archaeological exploration of the Oman peninsula. Beginning with the appointment in 1973 of the British scholar Andrew Williamson (d. 1975) as ar chaeological adviser in Oman, foreign expeditions from Britain, the United States, Italy, France, and Germany have carried out a great deal of work in Oman, investigating a wide range of sites of all periods. For the first time such neglected problem areas as copper metallurgy, oasis agri culture, irrigation, paleopathology, and ceramic technology were addressed, rather than concentrating exclusively on site sequences and chronological questions. In this tiiey were greatiy aided for many years by Williamson's successor, Ital ian archaeologist Paolo M . Costa. [See Oman.] The surveys and sondages carried out by an Iraqi expe dition to the UAE in 1 9 7 3 led to the discovery of many im portant sites, a number of which were subsequently inves tigated. Teams from France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Japan, and Australia have worked at a wide range of sites, including Hili 8, Rumeilah,
Shimal, ed-Dur, Bithna, Rafaq, Julfar, and Tell Abraq; the departments of antiquities and museums in al- Ain (Abu Dhabi), Ras al-Khaimah, and Sharjah have been particu larly active. Inner Arabia. Apart from several crossings made by Philby, the "Heart of Arabia" remained largely unknown to Western scholars until 1 9 5 1 when, at the invitation of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the Belgian scholars Gonzague Ryckmans and Jacques Ryckmans, together with Philippe Lippens and Philby, surveyed the territory between Jiddah, Najran, and Riyadh, recording more than ten thousand rock-cut inscriptions. In 1972 Abdul Rahman al-Ansary of Riyadh (now King Saud) University initiated excavations at the important cen tral Arabian metropolis of Qaryat al-Fau, which the PhilbyRyckmans-Lippens expedition had visited. [See Qaryat alFau.] This project, in which a generation of Saudi Arabian archaeologists was trained, continues under al-Ansary's di rection. In 1976 Masry, as newly appointed director of an tiquities, launched the long-term Comprehensive Survey of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. T h e project ran into the mid1980s and recorded thousands of archaeological sites scat tered throughout the interior of Saudi Arabia. Excavations at al-Rabadah, a caravan stop on the Darb Zubaydah, or Pilgrim Road, between Baghdad and Mecca, began in 1979 under the direction of Sa'ad al-Rashid of King Saud Uni versity. [See Darb Zubaydah.] The establishment of Arabian archaeology as a recognized subfield within Near Eastern archaeology is attested to not only by the large number of excavations in the region during the last few decades, but by the number of journals now devoted to it: Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy (Copenha gen), Atlal (Riyadh), Dilmun (Bahrain), and the Journal of Oman Studies (Muscat). In addition, the first academic post in the West devoted exclusively to Arabian archaeology was established at the Institute of Archaeology, University Col lege London, in the late 1980s. [See also Arabian Peninsula.] c
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibby, Geoffrey. Looking for Dilmun. New York, 1969. Popular account of the Danish Gulf expedition, with primary reference to the work carried out on Bahrain and the search for Dilmun. Hogarth, David G. The Penetration ofArabia. London, 1904. Exhaustive history of Arabian exploration from earliest times to the beginning of the twentieth century. Hommel, Fritz. "Explorations in Arabia." In Explorations in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth Century, edited by Hermann V. Hilprecht, pp.
693-752. Philadelphia, 1903. Comprehensive survey of exploration in the Arabian Peninsula from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century. Phillips, Wendell. Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia. New York, 1 9 5 5 .
Kingdoms
Potts, Daniel T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1990.
General survey of the archaeology of the Gulf region, with a full
HITTITE discussion of the history of archaeological research in Kuwait, east ern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman. Winnett, Fred V., and William L. Reed. Ancient Records from North Arabia. Toronto, 1970. D . T . POTTS
HITTITE. The language called Hittite belongs to a fam ily of languages spoken in Asia Minor during the second preChristian millennium. These languages, which constituted the old Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, in cluded Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic. Hittite is by far the best attested of all these languages, represented by thousands of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform writing stemming from the capital of the great Hittite Empire the city Hattusa, whose ruins lie adjacent to the modern Turldsh town of Bogazkale. [See Bogazkoy.] Excavations there have been con ducted on behalf of the German Oriental Society and die German Archaeological Institute, almost continuously since 1906, under the direction of Hugo Winckler, Kurt Bittel, and Peter Neve. Well over ten thousand tablets were found in several locations: on the acropolis, in the large temple in the Lower City, in the House-on-the-Slope, and, in recent years, in the smaller temples in the Upper City. Tablets from Hattusa include a small number of Old Hittite (c. 1 6 5 0 1500) and many more from the succeeding Middle Hittite (c. 1 5 0 0 - 1 3 8 0 ) and New Hittite periods (c. 1 3 8 0 - 1 1 8 0 ) . [See Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft; Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul] Writing System. The Hittites adopted a form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform writing system. T h e sign forms resemble those in contemporary inscriptions from Syria and Egypt (Alalakh, Ugarit, Amarna). T h e phonetic values of the signs are also largely tire same as in these other areas of western peripheral cuneiform, with the exception of a few values coined on the acrophonic principle: for example, the value wi for the GE&TIN ("wine") sign, whose Hittite equivalent was wiyanas. Hittite cuneiform writing consisted of signs for syllables (e.g., ba, ug, par) together with others which represent entire words, represented in transcription by their Sumerian value (e.g., L U G A L "king"). [See Cu neiform; Sumerian.] Phonology. Because Hittite is a dead language, its pho nology can be judged today only on the basis of variations in writing. Although the cuneiform writing system was ca pable of representing the distinction between voiced and voiceless stops, Hittite scribes did not employ this method. T h e same words were written with t- and i-containing signs, g and k, and b and p. Instead of employing separate signs for voiced and voiceless consonants, wherever the stop in question occurred intervocalically, the voiceless variant was written doubled: a-ap-pa for pronounced /apa/, and a-pa-aas for /abas/. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing and Writing Systems.]
81
Hittite seems to have distinguished at least the following consonants: b, d, g, g , h, k, k , I, m, w, p, r, s, t, and z. Although the graph z may occasionally represent a sibilant distinct from s, it usually represents the cluster t and s (e.g., aniyaz for aniyat- + nominative case ending s). The vowels are a, e, i, and u, which can be long or short in quantity. A minimal contrasting triad illusttates three dis tinct vowels: harkan, "destruction"; harkin, "white"; and harkun, " I held." Next to nothing is known today of the quality of tiiese vowels. Vowel length was often indicated by plene spellings (e.g., a-pa-a-as for /abas/; a-pu-u-us for /abus/). But because such spellings were sometimes neces sary to disambiguate vowel quality in cuneiform writing (e.g., p \i-e-da-an, "place," to indicate /pedan/ versus */pidan/), tire presence of vowel quantity cannot always be con cluded through their presence. Two glides, y and w, existed. Nouns, Adjectives, Pronouns, and N u m b e r s . Nouns show two genders, animate (or common) and inanimate (or neuter). There is no formal distinction between masculine and feminine gender. In number, nouns and adjectives dis tinguish singular and plural, but no dual. Animate and in animate nouns and adjectives have identical endings in the genitive (sg., -as; p i , -as), dative-locative (sg., -i; pi., -as), allative (-a), instrumental (-it), ablative (-az), and vocative (-e, -z, or zero). In die nominative and accusative cases, an imate and neuter nouns and adjectives employ different case endings (see table 1 ) . Pronouns can be independent words or clitics. Examples of the former are uk, " I " ; ammuk, "me"; ammel, "my"; zik, "tiiou"; tuk, "thee"; and tuel, "thy." Sample clitics are -mu, "me," and -nas, "us"; -ta, "diou," and -smas "you (pi.)"; -se, "to him/her/it," and the third-person nominative and accusative forms {-as, "he"; -an, "him"; -at, "it"). Demon stratives are ka-, "this," and apa-, "that." Relative and in terrogative pronouns share the stem k i- "who, which." Hittite numbers are almost always written with number signs (i-as, 3-ef) and share some of die distinctive endings of the pronouns: z-el, "of two." The full forms of only a few are known, such as teriyas, "three," and meyawas, "four." Numerical expressions employing derivational suffixes are 2-anki, "twice" (-anki) and the ordinal z-anna "second." Verbs. Verbs show root and thematic stems. Two con jugations exist in the active voice, whose endings differ only in the singular (see table 2 ) . T h e present plural is formed w
w
l
w
TABLE I. Animate and Inanimate Nouns and
sg. sg. pi. pi.
nom. acc. nom. acc.
Adjectives
Animate
Inanimate
-s
zero or -n zero or -n zero, -i, -a zero, - i , -a
-n -es, -us -us, -es
(NH) (NH), -as" (NH)
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HITTITE
TABLE 2.
Verb
Conjugations
-mi conjugation Pres. 1
-hi conjugation -hi
-mi
-ti
2
-si
3
-zi
(<*-ti)
-i
-un,
-nun
-hun
Pret. 1 2
-s
-s
3
-t
-s
with -weni, -teni, -ami (from *-anti); and the preterite plural is formed with -wen, -ten, -er. There is no difference in meaning between die -mi and -hi conjugations. Verbs can be in either the active or middle voice. A participle (ending in -ant-) serves intransitive verbs and as a passive of transitives. Verbal substantives end either in -war (gen. -was), or -alar (gen. -annas). Infinitives end either in -wanzi or -anna. Two tenses exist: a present-future and a preterite. T h e perfect is expressed analytically, by means of the neuter form of the participle with a form of the verbs har(k)~, "to have," or es-, "to be." Negation a n d Questions. Four words are specialized for negating different modes: natta, "not," and nawi, "not yet," negate statements; /e negates commands; and numan negates wishes or statements about others' wishes. Questions were undoubtedly marked in speech with an intonation pattern and stress. Many interrogative sentences contain question words: kids, "who?"; kuwat, "why?"; kuwabi, "where?"; and mahhan, "how?/when?." Vocabulary. Hittite vocabulary consists of a core of in herited Indo-European words (wadar, "water"; nebes, "sky"; padas, "foot"; genu, "knee"; ed-, "to eat") enlarged by a significant number of words borrowed from neighboring cultures (tuppi, "tabletcharacter."; sankunnis, "priest"; nitri, "natron"). [See Indo-European Languages.] Literary Genres. T h e archives of ancient Hattusa con tained texts in a variety of literary genres: historiographic, administrative, legal, and literary. In addition, tablets on which scribes wrote their training exercises have been re covered. Historiographic texts. Texts relating events either of the reign of a particular king (royal annals) or of a period of time (prologues to state treaties) or relating the (mis)behavior of a particular civil servant (anecdotal texts from the Old Kingdom) are known as historiographic. No claim is made that they follow the same standards of objec tivity and accuracy that might be claimed for modern his toriography. Procedure handbooks. The largest single category of tablets represented in the archives which describe the course of religious ceremonies. More than two hundred composi
tions describe festivals in the cultic calendar. T h e archives contained, in addition, many tablets representing around twenty distinct hymns or prayers to be employed in the cult. Outside the cult proper procedures were often prescribed to invoke deities through magical means. More than one hundred such texts describe private rituals performed to free a client (sometimes specifically the king or queen) from var ious problems, ranging from a physical illness, sexual im potence, or insomnia to being haunted by the ghost of a deceased relative. In many cases the underlying cause of the ailment is said to be "impurity," which can be removed by manipulating symbolic materials and reciting incantations. A small group of texts is called medical, but its procedures are less physical therapy than ritual manipulation. A special category of procedural handbook is represented by hippological tteatises. The best-known one is authored by a certain Kikkuli, who has a Hurrian background. T h e Kikkuli manual shows clear traces of having arisen in a so ciety of chariot-drawn warrior-aristocrats with a linguistic and cultural background in the lands to the east of Meso potamia. These texts describe a daily training regime that extends for more than a year and includes instructions for the feeding, exercise, and stabling of horses. T h e procedures seem to be aimed at producing horses capable of sustained exertion rather than short bursts of speed, and for chariot drawing rather than horseback riding. Legal literature. Although the king was the supreme judge and administrator of the law, he was himself subject to its strictures and could, in rare cases, be removed for its violation. Law was defined by the collection of precedent cases known to scholars as the Hittite laws, the earliest man uscripts of which date from the Old Kingdom. Later copies from the New Kingdom show a modernization both of lan guage and of the law itself. In addition to these late copies of the Old Hittite law collection, a New Hittite collection is also attested, whose changes in die law are more substantial. The individual cases are described, using the formulation that had become standard in Mesopotamia centuries earlier: "If a person does such-and-such, he shall pay such-andsuch a fine." The penalty clauses are almost all payments of various kinds, with a very small number requiring bodily injury or death. T h e cases covered involve homicide, bodily injury, damage to or theft of property, prices for livestock, agricultural and artisan products, and obligations to the crown by persons holding land. T h e laws deal with marriage, divorce, and sexual crimes; inheritance, contracts, loans, debts, and business are largely untouched. Laws concerned with royal succession were oc casionally promulgated by royal edict rather than in the col lection of laws. Such edicts include the so-called Political Testament of Hattusili I (c. 1650), regarding his choice of Mursili I as his successor; the Telipinu Proclamation (c. 1 5 5 0 ) , to stabilize royal succession after a period of regicide
HITTITE and anarchy; and the Apology of Hattusili III (c. 1 2 5 0 ) , in tended to legitimize his seizure of the throne from his nephew Mursili III. Unlike the cuneiform tablet archives at other major polit ical centers in the Near East, the archives of ancient Hattusa contain no substantial collection of deeds, contracts, wills, and other legal records. There is, however, a small collection of records that could be either minutes of court proceedings or depositions of testimony taken elsewhere but intended to be presented in court. T h e texts contain testimony offered by various civil servants regarding charges of misconduct against a particular member of their group. T h e defendant himself also gives testimony. There is no mention of re sponses made by any judge hearing the case. These docu ments all date from the second half of the New Hittite pe riod—the last two centuries of the Hittite capital's existence. Archival or administrative texts. Texts intended to keep records for bureaucratic purposes include censuses, in ventories of materials in the palace or temple storerooms, catalogs (or possibly shelf lists) of tablets in the palace li brary, and records of land grants. Also belonging to this general category are records of questions put to various kinds of oracles regarding formations on the liver of sacri ficed animals, observation of the flight of birds, the behavior of sacrificial animals just prior to slaughter, or the move ments of snakes observed in a controlled environment. Scribal training. Some tablets were part of the curric ulum for training scribes. T h e principal genre in this cate gory is tire Sumero-Akkadian lexical text. Texts devised in Mesopotamia for training Akkadian-speaking scribes in the use of Sumerian were further annotated in the Hittite capital by the addition of Hittite translations. In some cases there were only two columns: an Akkadian one and a Hittite trans lation. Most texts, however, included at least Sumerian, Ak kadian, and Hittite, and some added a column indicating syllabically the pronunciation of the Sumerian word-signs. Seven of the principal lexical series known from Mesopo tamia are well attested: Syllabary A, Diri, Erim-hus, HARra = hubullu, Izi, and Proto-LU. Scribes also practiced by copying Mesopotamian literary compositions, such as the great hymns to the sun god Shamash and the storm god Adad. In fact, Hittite translations of some of these hymns are known. Other Mesopotamian literary works, both copied in their Akkadian form and translated into Hittite, include the Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis epics. A Canaanite mytho logical text translated into Hittite concerns the storm god Baal, the elderly god El, and his consort the goddess Asherah. Native literature. Anatolian narrative literary works in cluded myths about the deities of the old Hattian stratum, and others about die newer wave of Hurrian deities. Among die former are the stories about the battles of the storm god with a great serpent and the stories of retrieving runaway
83
gods whose disappearance brought on famines, droughts, and infertility. Among the latter is the cycle of tales con cerning the Hurrian gods Kumarbi and Tessub. [See also Hittites.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carruba, Onofrio, ed. Per una grammatica ittita: Towards a Hittite
Grammar. Studia Mediterranea, 7. Pavia, 1992. Collection of good articles on the current status of Hittite grammatical studies. Friedrich, Johannes, Hethitisches Worlerbuch; Kurzgefasste kritische Sammlung der Deulungen heihitischer Worter. Heidelberg, 1952. Ac
curate and judicious. Although no longer complete, still the best Hit tite glossary. Friedrich, Johannes. Hethitisches Elementarbuch,
vol. 1 , Kurzgefasste
Grammatik. 2d ed. Heidelberg, i960. Although only an outline and somewhat dated, still the best grammar of Hittite; the first edition appeared in 1940. Friedrich, Johannes, and Annelies Karamenhuber. Hethitisches Wiirterbuch. 3 vols. Rev. ed. Heidelberg, 1975-1991. Revision and enlarge ment of Friedrich's 1952 volume, which diverges from the views of many Hittitologists, principally in matters of text dating. Garrett, A. "Hittite Enclitic Subjects and Transitive Verbs." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 42 (1990): 227-242. Relates transitivity to ergativ-
ity in Hittite and observes the nonoccurrence of enclitic pronominal subjects in transitive clauses. Giiterbock, Hans G., and Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Chicago, 1989.
The first complete Hittite dictionary written in English, with nu merous completely edited and translated illustrative examples. Vol ume L-N wasfinishedin 1989; subsequent volumes will cover P-Z, then A - K . Held, Warren H., et al. Beginning Hittite. Columbus, Ohio, 1987. This first elementary grammar of Hittite written in English is marred by careless philology. See the careful critical review by Gary Beckman in Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 1 1 (1991): 658-659.
Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "An English-Hittite Glossary." Revue Hittite et Asianique 25 (1967): 7-99. Based upon Friedrich's 1952 volume and therefore incomplete, but no more recent English-Hittite index ex ists. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "On the Use of Hittite -za in Nominal Sen tences." Journal
of Near Eastern Studies 28 (1969): 225-230. Dis
cusses the use of die reflexive particle to mark first- and secondperson subjects in New Hittite sentences with the verb to be expressed or understood. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "Hittite man and numan." In Investigations philologicae et comparativae: Gedenkschrift fur Heinz Kronasser, edited by
Erich Neu, pp. 38-45. Wiesbaden, 1982. Important consideration of the expression of wish, which makes an interesting distinction be tween "speaker wish" and "subject wish"; illustrated with examples. The ideas presented here are now developed in the man and numan articles of the Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute (Giiterbock
and Hoffner above). Kammenhuber, Annelies. "Hethitisch, Palaisch, Luwisch und Hieroglyphenluwisch." In Altkleinasiatische Sprachen, edited by Bertold Spuler, pp. 1 1 9 - 3 5 7 . Leiden, 1969. Thorough coverage of the sec ondary literature and quite up to date for its day, although heavy on theory, light on data, and somewhat rigid. Now needs to be supple mented and qualified. Definitely not a pedagogical tool for the lan guage. Kimball, Sara E. "Hittite Plene Writing." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983. Melchert, H. Craig. Studies in Hittite Historical Phonology. Erganzung-
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shefte zur Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Sprachforschung, no. 32. Gottingen, 1984. Perceptive and clear analysis of the development of the Hittite phonological system. Melchert, H . Craig. "Hittite Vocalism." In Per una grammalica ittita: Towards a Hiuite Grammar, edited by Onofrio Carruba, pp. 1 8 1 -
196. Studia Mediterranean 7. Pavia, 1992. Melchert, H. Craig. "Historical Phonology of Anatolian." Journal of Indo-European Studies 21 (1993): 237-257.
Oetinger, N. "Die hethitischen Verbalstamme." In Per una grammalica ittita: Towards a Hiuite Grammar, edited by Onofrio Carruba, pp.
213-252. Studia Mediterranea, 7. Pavia, 1992. Puhvel, Jaan. Hittite Etymological Dictionary. 3 vols. Berlin, 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 9 1 . HARRY A . HOFFNER, JR.
HITTITES. Long before the Hittites, about whom we know so much today from excavations in central Turkey, were known, every serious reader of the Bible knew the name. According to the Book of Genesis Hittites sold a field and a burial cave to Abraham (Gn. 24), the ancestor of the people of Israel. Abraham's grandson Esau displeased his parents by taking Hittite wives from the neighboring peoples of Canaan (Gn. 26:34). Hittites are mentioned with other ethnic groups inhabiting the land of Canaan on the eve of the invasion under Joshua (Jos. 1:4, 3:10). These people had been at home in southern Palestine for centuries before the time of the Israelite monarchy and show no traces of foreign origin. Their names are linguistically Canaanite. Their cus toms and way of life were no different from those of other Semitic groups in Palestine at that time. If they originated in the north among the stock of the Late Bronze Age Anatolian Hittites, they have lost all trace of their origin. In fact, the genealogical "Table of Nations" in Genesis 10 includes their eponymous ancestor, Heth, among the sons of Canaan. All this suggests that the "Hittites" of the earlier parts of the Hebrew Bible were Canaanite aborigines, with no Anatolian roots. On the other hand, the historical records of the Davidic and post-Davidic period in Israel clearly attest contacts with the "Hittite" ldngdoms of northern Syria. The Hittites spo ken of here are clearly foreigners. Their Syrian states rep resent the continuation of the Syrian vassal states of the great Hittite Empire of the Late Bronze Age. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, large stone blocks inscribed in a previously unknown hieroglyphic script were found built into mosques in Syria. Scholars correctly suspected that these inscriptions were the work of the an cient Hittite kingdoms of Syria. As tire search for more of these inscriptions widened into Anatolia, attention was drawn to the remarkable hieroglyphic inscriptions on living rock in the vicinity of the small village of Bogazkoy, about 160 1cm (100 mi.) east of Ankara, in central Turkey. Bogazkoy. Excavations were begun on the large mound in 1906, under the joint directorship of Hugo Winckler and Theodore Makridi, What was found forever changed our concept of the Hittites [see Bogazkoy]. More than ten thou
sand clay tablets were concentrated in two places on the large city mound: the first area was the palace administration complex on the acropolis; the second was the large temple library in the Lower City. Excavators found that several of the rooms in which the tablets from the acropolis were found had been libraries. Wooden shelving around the walls al lowed the tablets to be systematically arranged. Small clay shelf labels identified the locations of important tablet col lections. Several tablets contained what we would today call shelf lists, or catalogs, of the collection. Most of the tablets were in fragments, having fallen from their shelves in the conflagration that destroyed the city in about 1 1 8 0 BCE. Some were so badly overheated through direct, sustained contact with burning roof beams, that die clay blistered and became badly disfigured. But many tablets whose fragments were fairly large could be reconstituted by the epigraphers. The city itself, as revealed by tire archaeologists, was large by the standards of its day. The acropolis, on which the king's residential quarters and the palace administration were located, was entered by a gateway at its southwestern corner. At that point, it was connected by a large bridge or viaduct to the Upper City, to the south. This large area ac commodated more than thirty temples and temple precincts for the "Thousand Gods" of the Hittite pantheon. Some of the city's most impressive reliefs were found in this area: depictions of the kingdom's major deities and several of its last kings. Three impressive gateways punctuate the city's southern wall. The easternmost gateway is called the King's Gate be cause on its inner side stood a large relief depicting a heroic male figure, originally assumed to be a king, but possibly a god. A great festival procession exited the city through this gate and wound its way south and west to tire Sphinx Gate at the central point in the southern wall. Farther west is the Lion Gate, so named from the relief of a large lion on the outside, easily observed by processions reentering the city at this point. The centrally located Sphinx Gate is equidis tant from the Lion Gate and King's Gate. To the northwest of tire Upper City and directiy west of the Acropolis area lies the Lower City. Its most conspicuous monument is the largest temple of ancient Hattusa. This temple has a twin cella, indicating that the primary deities worshipped here were the storm god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna. The temple proper was built around a central courtyard. This complex in turn was surrounded, like the smaller temples in the Upper City, by a temenos wall. Southward, across a street from the main temple com plex, a large building housed workshops for the temple per sonnel: priests, musicians, weavers, potters, smiths, carpen ters, stonecutters, and otiiers serving the needs of the temple. Huge pottery storage vessels containing grain and other commodities stood in the western rooms of the temple. A road leading from the city gate in the extreme north-
HITTITES western corner of the city wound to the northeast for 1.5 lcm, where it reached the impressive sanctuary of Yazilikaya, which means "inscribed rock" in Turkish. Here the Hittites had constructed temple buildings to guard access to a pair of natural rock galleries. Carved into die faces of these gal leries in low relief are the figures of most of the gods and goddesses. T h e main chamber shows two processions of de ities converging from die left and the right on a central point, where the chief male and female deities face each other. T h e left-hand procession shows male deities, the right-hand one, female. Across from the central panel on which the proces sions met stands a rock on which is carved the figure of King Tudhaliya IV, under whom this sanctuary was finished. T h e second, smaller chamber contains reliefs depicting this same king in the protective embrace of his patron deity, the god Sharruma, and other reliefs that suggest this second cham ber was mortuary in character. History. T h e earliest sure evidence for the presence in Anatolia of the Indo-European groups associated with the Hittites is the occurrence of Hittite or Luwian names in the commercial documents from the Old Assyrian Colony Pe riod (c. 1 8 5 0 - 1 7 0 0 ) . It has been surmised that these groups entered Anatolia in about 2300, and that after approximately five hundred years of setded life there, at least three large groups were speaking three distinct languages developed from a common Proto-Anatolian branch of the earlier Proto-Indo-European language family. These distinct lan guages are today known as Hittite (or Nesite), Luwian, and Palaic. Other ethno-linguistic groups had been in central Anatolia before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The best known of these are die Hattians, whose language we call Hattic. During the Old Assyrian Colony period, there were Hit tite groups. T h e king of one of these, whose name is Anitta, left behind a royal inscription, an Old Hittite copy of which was found at Hattusa. T h e inscription commemorates the stages of his military expansion from control of a small area around the city of Kanes to control of most of central An atolia, stretching from Hattusa, in the north, to Purusanda, in the south. Hittite history begins in the Old Kingdom period (c. 1 6 8 0 - 1 4 2 0 ) , with the establishment of a Hittite-speaking group on die site of the city of Hattusa. T h e dynasty founder bears the name Labarna, which later becomes a Caesarlike title for Hittite kings. His immediate successor, Hattusili I, was the first Hittite ldng to expand militarily into northern Syria, into an area that included Aleppo and Alalakh. Hattusili's successor, Mursili I, led a spectacular, but short-lived, raid far to die east, where his army sacked the city of Babylon in about 1 5 9 0 and brought to an end the city's first dynasty. After Mursili's death, a period of internal strife, regicides, and usurpations weakened the state. T h e area of its effective military control shrank drastically. Around 1420 a new line of kings, bearing traditional Hit
85
tite throne names, but also identified on their seals by Hurrian names, came to power in Hattusa. T h e first of this line bore the name Tudhaliya. Because a list of Hittite kings identifies a Tudhaliya in the Old Kingdom, we traditionally call this new ldng Tudhaliya II. T h e new line of kings with a Hurrian background cultivated political connections to the southeast, in Syria. The fortunes of the new line rose dramatically around 1 3 4 5 , under the rule of a new king, Suppiluliuma I, who led his armies into Syria and reduced the previously highly suc cessful dynasty of Mitannian kings to the status of vassal ldngs. Suppiluliuma I was a contemporary of the Egyptian pharaohs of the Amarna period. In fact, he just missed an opportunity to establish one of his sons on the throne of Egypt. But if Suppiluliuma failed to gain a foothold in Egypt itself, he did not fail to secure Syria as a Hittite province. Kings of Aleppo, Carchemish, Ugarit, Nuhasse, and Amurru entered into treaties with the Hittite Empire, making Suppiluliuma's successors "great kings"—big players in the game of international politics of the ancient Near East. The Kingdom of Hatti became a super power. Armed compe tition, if not open conflict, with Egypt continued from Sup piluliuma I to Hattusili III, when a treaty with Egypt formally ended the period of struggle and conflict. Hattusili III visited Egypt, where his daughter was married to the pharaoh Rameses II. The final century after Hattusili III saw the flowering of the capital city with the building of the Upper City area, which shows Egyptian architectural influence so strikingly in the Sphinx Gate. Militarily, a new force was building in the east, Assyria. Hattusili's successor, Tudhaliya IV, the finisher of Yazihkaya and the Upper City, was much occu pied militarily with staving off Assyrian advances. At one point, the central government was so weak that a prince named Kurunta from a parallel line, who was ldng of die small state of Tarhuntas§a, was able to dethrone Tudhaliya IV and to leave his own royal seal on documents found in the Upper City. During the reigns of Tudhaliya IV and his two successors, die Hittites extended their control to a part of the island of Cyprus. Local Cypriot representatives con tracted by treaty to render vassal's tribute to the Hittite king. During die Last Days of Hattusa (c. 1 2 0 5 - 1 1 8 0 ) , a com plex alignment of enemies, which may have included groups of "Sea Peoples" from the Aegean, finally reduced the cap ital city to flames. Not all urban centers of the Hittite Empire fell when the capital city Hattusa did. Carchemish in the east and Tarhuntassa in the south survived to carry the tradition of descent from the line of kings from Hattusa into the first millennium. Hittite Royalty. Like other nation states of the ancient Near East, the Hittites were ruled by kings. A once-popular theory, according to which the Old Kingdom kings were chosen by members of a primitive senate, has been aban doned. Hittite ldngship from the first was hereditary and
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dynastic. Royal succession passed from father to son, al though the reigning Idng could designate any son he wished. He was not bound by law to choose the oldest. The Hittite king controlled all areas of life. As the chief priest, he presided at the principal religious festivals and made offerings to the gods on behalf of his people. As the chief judge and lawgiver, he was responsible for tire collec tion and distribution of the laws in the official corpus and served as the judge in the highest court in the land. Cases of particular gravity or difficulty were referred to this court. In addition, the king was head of tire armed forces and as such usually accompanied the troops into the field. Only an aged ldng would be exempt from traveling on a military campaign. The king conducted all foreign policy, writing letters to the kings and high officials of foreign lands, con tracting alliances, arranging marriages that tied his own royal line with the ruling families of other states, and occasionally even visiting other courts in person. The king's dress conformed to the occasion. He is shown on rock reliefs in two forms of attire. In both he wears ear rings and shoes with toes that turn up in a point. His priestly garb consisted of a long robe with sleeves, open in front, a skull cap, and a crook with its curved end pointing down ward and to the rear. His military attire was a short, belted tunic, with a short sword or dagger hanging from the belt. He carried a bow over his shoulder and a spear in his hand. His headgear was conical, perhaps a kind of helmet. The king's person was sacred. It was important to guard him from sources of impurity that might damage his sacred powers. Contact with the general public was therefore re stricted. His food and clothing were prepared under strict conditions of purity control. If the king was ever threatened by an evil omen, a procedure known from Assyria was fol lowed: a man was chosen as a royal stand-in until the death predicted by the omen occurred, at which time the true king returned to his post. All that we know about the Hittite ritual of enthronement, such as the anointing of the ldng with oil, we learned from the Hittite texts describing this substitute king procedure. Hittite queens were more than sexual partners to their royal husbands. They had real powers of their own. Queens had their own personal royal seals and shared a royal seal with their husbands. Queens seem to have had the right to conduct official correspondence with foreign courts. When the king died, his primary wife remained queen as long as she lived, serving as her son's consort, although she did not become his sexual partner. If her son was young and inex perienced, she often assumed some duties normally reserved for the king, such as malting legal decisions or issuing de crees. Queens in tire Empire period seem to have had control over many aspects of the religious cult and over vast amounts of resources and temple property. As a result, queens who fell from favor were occasionally accused of misappropriation of temple funds.
Hittite laws distinguish two social classes: free and slave. Slaves were not without independent means, for the laws indicate that a slave could pay a free husband to marry his daughter. However, in addition to these two classes there were foreigners taken captive in battle and used to work crown lands. According to the law code, their rights differed from those of freemen or slaves: they could not sell their fields or their children. While texts mention kings emanci pating slaves of the crown, we have no knowledge of the practice at the level of the common citizen. Because census lists of small estates do not indicate the presence of slaves, it is possible that only the very rich owned them. Economy. The Hittite heartland was tire central high pla teau of Turkey, where broad valleys and rivers encouraged agriculture. Rainfall is seasonal but ample. Winters are hard with heavy snowfall, and summers are hot and very dry. T h e rains come in the spring, which is a short but lush season. According to the Hittite texts, the principal domestic an imals were oxen, sheep, goats, horses, mules, asses, pigs, and dogs. Of tirese, the first three were also used as sacrificial animals. Plowing was done with oxen, never with horses. Horses were used to draw chariots. Mules were used for carrying loads over long distances and were the most ex pensive of the equids, both because of their sure-footedness and the fact that they do not reproduce. Sheep were ex ploited for their wool, milk, and meat. T h e milk of the sheep and goat were also made into cheese. Some wild animals were hunted, principally deer and boars. The many bird names in the texts attest the richness of the variety of tire aviary, although most named birds are unidentified as to type. They include predatory birds, such as the eagle and the buzzard, and water birds, such as ducks. Although there is a generic term for fish, no species names are used. Specific tree and bush names exist, both coniferous and deciduous. The dense forests of central Anatolia in Hittite times were harvested for timber, which was used for consuuction and fuel. Aromatic trees were highly prized for the sweet fragrance of their leaves and wood shavings. Several grain types are known both from textual and ar chaeological evidence: Triticum aestivum (common bread wheat), emmer wheat, and several types of barley. It is not clear if the Hittites knew oats, although the use of a partic ular type of grain in the feeding of horses suggests that they did. The grains were used to make a large number of dif ferent types of named breads, cakes, and pulpy dishes like porridge. A wide variety of fruits is attested, among them apples, pears, plums, and figs. T h e grapevine was cultivated for its fruit, which was dried into raisins, and for wine. Nuts are also mentioned, although the type has not been determined. Vegetables are also known from the texts. T h e appearance of one particularly popular bulbous plant of the onion family was celebrated with an annual religious festival.
HITTITES Among the crafts and tradesmen were potters, leather workers, weavers, blacksmiths, bakers, beekeepers, carpen ters, and physicians. Some crafts would only have been of interest to the wealthy: sculptors, gold- and silversmiths, glassmakers, divination specialists, and scribes. Physicians were not highly skilled; they used folk remedies and charms. Hittite royalty who were seriously ill secured highly trained physicians from Egypt and Mesopotamia. The widespread notion that Hittite military supremacy was the result of a monopoly of iron production for weap onry is a myth. Although the Hittites could produce limited quantities of iron, but it was not used for weapons. People who sold or traded their own products in small local markets are not referred to in texts. The "merchants" that are mentioned were grand entrepreneurs operating un der royal patronage and engaging in international trade. For this reason, the penalty for killing a merchant was much higher than that for killing an ordinary free man. Law. The Hittites already possessed a written collection of two hundred laws in die Old Kingdom. Their laws resem bled, in form and phraseology, the better-known collections of Mesopotamia and of the Hebrew Bible. All relevant topics of ancient law are covered: homicide, theft, assault and bat tery, marriage, sexual conduct, land tenure, and taxation. Like some Mesopotamian law collections, a tariff of ideal prices is included. Hittite treaties with foreign countries show die outiines of what may be called the international law of the era. Treaties with states of equal power and prestige express obligations as reciprocal and those witii inferior states as unequal. Con cerns of the former are mutual guarantees of dynastic sta bility against overtiirow by insiders or outsiders, mutual de fense against foreign attacks, mutual extradition of fugitives, and the stabilization of international boundaries. Concerns of the latter include tiiese as well as the vassal's obligations to pay annual tribute. Religion. Hittite religion reflects the diversity of ethnic groups comprising die population. Hattians, H u m a n s , Luwians, and Hittites—as well as smaller numbers of immi grant Syrians, Palestinians, or Assyrians—worshiped their own deities according to their traditional rites. The totality of the pantheon was called the Thousand Gods. Indeed, tire number of attested divine names in the texts approximates one thousand. All but the smallest towns had many temples. Each town had local traditions about the cultic calendar that Hittite regional governors were instructed to honor and pre serve. The official archives in the capital, which are our almost exclusive source of information, are understandably limited in their concerns. Local cults and the domestic cult are al most totally ignored. The official state cult included seasonal festivals, celebrated in die spring and fall, and a monthly festival. T h e king, queen, or a royal prince represented the
HITTITES. Stone relief from
Yazihkaya
depicting
the sword
87
god.
(Courtesy J. S.Jorgensen)
royal family at such festivals. There were two types of male priest and one female type. In addition, the religious texts reveal that musicians playing various stringed and percus sion instruments accompanied cultic liturgy. The center of the cult was the serving of the statue of die deity. T h e image was given food and drink, a change of clothing, and entertainment in the form of music, acrobatics (including sword swallowing), and atiiletic contests. Prayers were offered for the removal of drought or plague, for the defeat of enemy armies, and for the welfare of the com munity and its king. Divination was energetically pursued both at home and on trips. Omens were sought to determine the likely success of all sorts of ventures, from marriages to business to mili tary campaigns. Oracles were questioned to determine die causes for divine anger manifested by catastrophes such as disease, drought, or military defeat. The most popular form of divination was the inspection of the internal organs of a sacrificed sheep, but several other kinds were practiced, in cluding bird omens.
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HOGARTH, DAVID GEORGE
Language and Literature. The Hittite language shows its Indo-European character primarily by its grammatical structure, but also by a minimal stock of primary vocabulary (padas, "foot"; watar, "water"; ed- "to eat"). It represents the earliest attested form of an Indo-European language. Hittite texts include historical narratives (military annals), legal texts (law code, treaties, land grants, edicts), letters, myths and epics, hymns and prayers to deities, descriptions of religious festivals, prescriptions for the performance of magical rituals, and records of divination. [See also Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia; Hittite; and Luwians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bittel, Kurt. Hattusha: The Capital of the Hittites. New York, 1970. En
glish-language survey, less current than Peter Neve's book, by the director of excavations at Hattusa. Gurney, 0 . R. Some Aspects of Hittite Religion. Schweich Lectures, 1976.
Oxford, 1977. Thorough coverage of Hittite religion. Gurney, O. R. The Hittites. Rev. ed. London, 1990. The best general English-language introduction. Giiterbock, Hans G. "Some Aspects of Hittite Festivals." In Compte rendu de la rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, vol. 1 7 , pp. 1 7 5 -
180. Brussels, 1969. Giiterbock, Hans G. "The Hiuite Palace." In Le palais et la royauti: Archeologie et civilisation; cotnpte rendu de la 19& rencontre Assyriolo
gique intemationak, edited by Paul Garelli, pp. 305-314. Paris, 1974.
Giiterbock, Hans G. "The Hittite Temple according to Written Sources." In Le temple et le cult: Compte rendu de la 2oe rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale, edited by E. J. van Donzel, pp. 1 2 5 - 1 3 2 .
Leiden, 1975. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "Some Contributions of Hittitology to Old Tes tament Study." Tyndale Bulletin 20 (1969): 27-55.
Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. Alimenta Hethaeorum. American Oriental Series, vol. 55. New Haven, 1974. Complete study of Hittite flora, fauna, and food production. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "Histories and Historians of the Ancient Near East: The Hittites." Orientalia 49 (1980): 283-332.
Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "Ancient Views of Prophecy and Fulfillment: Mesopotamia and Asia Minor." Journal of the Evangelical Theological
Society 30 (1987): 257-265. Short summary of Hittite divination pro cedures. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "Hittite Religion." In Religions ofAntiquity, edited by Robert M. Seltzer, pp. 69-79. New York, 1989. Current and ac curate general picture. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr., trans. Hittite Myths. Writings from the Ancient World, no. 2. Atlanta, 1990. Collection in English translation. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "The Last Days of Khattusha." In The Crisis Years: The Twelfth Century B. C, from beyond the Danube to the Tigris,
edited by William A. Ward and Martha Sharp Joukowsky, pp. 4652. Dubuque, 1992. Contribution to a symposium held at Brown University, May 1990, providing current data on the final phase of Hittite history. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "Ancient Anatolia: Legal and Social Institu tions." In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, edited by Jack M.
Sasson et al. New York, 1993. Current and comprehensive discus sion of Hittite law. Klengel, Horst. "The Economy of the Hittite Household (E)." Oikoumene 5 (1986): 2 3 - 3 1 . Macqueen, James G. The Hittites and Their Contemporaries in Asia Mi
nor. Boulder, 1986. Particularly useful for its large number of excel lent illustrations. Neve, Peter. Hattusa: Stadt der Gotter und Tempel; Neue Ausgrabungen
in der Hauptstadt der Hethiter. Mainz am Rhein, 1993. Up-to-date summary of the archaeology of the Hittite capital. HARRY A . HOFFNER, JR.
HOGARTH, DAVID GEORGE
( 1 8 6 2 - 1 9 2 7 ) , em inent British archaeologist of the Aegean and the ancient Near East. Hogarth's greatest contributions were made in investigations of Anatolia and ancient Hittite civilization and in illuminating relationships between Anatolia and its neigh bors. His early career in Greece and the Greek islands in cluded excavations in Cyprus, Melos, and Crete. Hogarth also worked briefly at Asyut in Egypt for the British M u seum before turning to Anatolia, the region that was to hold his interest throughout his life. Hogarth proposed that An atolia was the source of inspiration for early Greek art and religion. As an archaeologist, he is best known as the exca vator of the Artemision at Ephesus and as the first excavator of the ancient city at Carchemish. Hogarth belonged to a generation for which Arabic-lan guage skills qualified a small number of scholars to serve Britain as diplomatic and military intelligence officers. Dur ing World War I, he headed die Arab Bureau in Cairo, where he found T . E. Lawrence (the so-called Lawrence of Arabia), his former Oxford protege, a position in intelli gence. Hogarth had also brought Lawrence to Carchemish. [See the biography of Lawrence.] After the war, Hogarth re turned to Oxford to direct die Ashmolean Museum and to hold numerous public positions. His scholarly interests refocused on Anatolia, and in 1 9 2 0 he published a seminal work on Hittite seals. Hogarth published over tirirty books and numerous arti cles. He wrote on Anatolia and the Hittites for the first edi tion of the Cambridge Ancient History. He also wrote travel books, which are captivating and are considered among the best of their genre. [See also Carchemish; and Ephesus.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hogarth, David G., ed. Authority and Archaeology, Sacred and Profane: Essays on the Relation of Monuments to Biblical and Classical Litera
ture. New York and London, 1899. Includes an introductory essay by Hogarth on the enterprise of archaeology. Hogarth, David G. Excavations at Ephesus: The Archaic Artemesia. Lon
don, 1908. Hogarth, David G. Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis, vol. I, Introductoiy. London, 1914.
Hogarth, David G. Hittite Seals. Oxford, 1920. Hogarth, David G. The Wandering Scholar. London and New York, 1925, Combines two earlier travel books. Hogarth's vivid and lively descriptions of life on the road and in die field are important re sources for the history of Near Eastern archaeology. Hogarth, David G. Kings of the Hittites. Oxford, 1926. Kaplan, Robert D. The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite. New
York, 1993. Traces the history of American and British diplomacy in the Near East, including the roles played by scholars serving as military officers.
HOMS Sayce, A. H. "David George Hogarth, 1862-1927." Proceedings of the British Academy 13 (1928): 379-383. A colleague's brief tribute to
the life and work of Hogarth. KATHRYN E . SLANSKI
HOMS, site located in central Syria, on the road between Damascus, 1 6 2 km ( 1 0 0 mi.) to the south, and Hama, 47 Ion (29 mi.) to die north (34°42' N , 36°48' E). It is situated between two of the oldest archaeological sites in the area: Qadesh (Tell Nebi Mend), about 1 5 km (9 mi.) to the south west, and Qatna (Mishrifeh), about 18 Ion ( 1 1 mi.) to the northeast. T h e plain around Horns is quite fiat and fertile and is partially irrigated by water from the al-'Asi (Orontes) River, which flows from the south to the northwest of Horns. The identification of Horns with Emesa does not require discussion as the name did not disappear. T h e historian Pliny the Elder was the first to mention Emesa. Other R o man historians spelled the name Emessa. T h e Arabic scholar Mahmud Al-Dimashqi (d. AH 259) wrote (Tabaqat Ahil Horns ["The Categories of the Inhabitants of Horns"], p . 202) that the old name of Horns was Souriya. The Crusaders did not settle in the city, but they named it La Chamelle. There is insufficient evidence that the city existed before the Roman period. Scholars believe that it was erected by Seleucus Nicator, who gave it the Greek name Emesa. Dur ing the Seleucid period Arabic tribes were settled in the area all along the Orontes, from Horns to Hama. [See Hama.] In 96 BCE an Arab dynasty known as Samsigram rose against the Seleucids and established an independent small kingdom in the city of Horns. T h e names of ten kings of this dynasty are known who reigned from 96 BCE to 79 CE. When the dynasty disappeared, in 79 CE, Horns was annexed to the Provincia Arabia. T h e city flourished again, but the turning point in its history occurred with the visit of the Roman general Septimius Severus ( 1 9 3 - 2 1 1 ) , who married Julia Domena, the daughter of the priest of the Temple of the Sun God. After his inauguration in Rome as emperor, Sep timius was very friendly to Syria. Caracalla and Elagabalus reigned after him as Syrian emperors when Horns was the capital of Syrian Phoenicia. [See Phoenicia.] T h e city again flourished in the Byzantine period, when the archbishop converted its Roman temples into churches. In the Islamic period, Horns was a capital of the Agnad prov ince, along with Palestine, Jordan, and Damascus. In the Hamadanite period ( 9 4 4 - 1 0 1 9 ) Horns became the center of the state of Wilayah (Tell el-Wilayah), a position it subse quently retained. T h e city became the center of a province in modern Syria. During the wars between die Arabs and die Byzantines and between the Umayyads and 'Abbasids, as well as between the small Arab ldngdoms in Syria and Egypt in the ninth-fifteenth centuries, the city suffered the destruction of many historical monuments.
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Seleucid Period. There is no archaeological evidence for the Hellenistic period. Several scholars believe that its plan was similar to the contemporary cities of Damascus, Antioch, and Laodicea. Its two main streets, the decumanus and cardo, may have crossed where the modern city hall is lo cated. R o m a n Period. Nothing is preserved of the monuments of the Roman period or the epoch of the Samsigram dy nasty. A Greek inscription indicates that King Samsigram erected a mausoleum to the west of the city in 78 BCE. This single monument of the Roman period was destroyed in 1 9 1 1 . A cemetery discovered by peasants in 1936 belongs to this period. It was situated near the mausoleum in Djurt Abu Sabun. T h e objects the peasants found are now in the Na tional Museum of Damascus. T h e most important pieces were two helmets. One of them consists of the helmet itself and a mask: the helmet is hollow cast iron with silver dec oration; the mask, which represents a human face, is also made of iron and is covered with a layer of silver. The other mask is made of gold. Both date to the first century CE. According to many written sources there was a Sun T e m ple at Horns within which a black stone stood that was taken to Rome in 2 1 7 , during the reign of Emperor Elagabalus. The temple was situated at the site of the present Nuri mosque. It is believed that the city was enclosed by a forti fication wall in this period. Byzantine Period. When Christianity replaced polythe ism, a number of churches were built in Horns, such as the Church of St. Helena (326) and the great church in which the head of John was buried. This church was the largest in Syria during the Byzantine period. In addition to these churches there was the Monastery of Mar Maron (451) and the Monastery of Mar Tommy. [See Churches; Monaster ies.] These monuments were destroyed either by earthquake or enemy attack. Many of them were rebuilt, such as the Orthodox Church of Mar Lian in Bab Dreb and the Syrian Church of al-Arabi an (the forty). All of these churches were in the hay ("quarter") of Jamal ed-Din. In 1 9 2 3 , 1 9 4 0 , and 1 9 5 7 , several below-ground Byzantine tombs were discovered by chance—no superstructure marked the site. One of the tombs is a huge cave with a number of small chambers for burials. Its inner walls were plastered and partially decorated with figural and geometric designs; die roof was supported in places by a series of arches and pillars. Among the many objects found were glass, jewelry, and bronze bracelets and earrings. Islamic Period. Between 636 and 1 9 1 9 (the Umayyad, 'Abbasid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods) Horns suffered numerous changes of rulers and continuing depredatations, No monuments from the Umayyad and the 'Ab basid periods are preserved: the existing historical monu ments in Homs were restored and indeed rebuilt under several Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman monarchs. Many old mosques in Homs have been renovated several times. c
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The most famous is the Khaled ibn al-Walid mosque, which was built at die beginning of twentieth century on the site of a Mamluk mosque with the same name. The fortification wall and towers were pulled down during the Ottoman period (their remains are visible in the eastern and northern parts of the city). They belonged to the Ayyubid period and were constructed of basalt stones. T h e city had seven gates, but the remains of only two are preserved: Bab al-Masdud in the west and Bab Tadmur in the north east. In order to strengthen Homs's defenses, the Ayyubid sultans built a citadel opposite the southwest corner of the city wall on a high (32 m) mound. This citadel resembles many others in Syria, such as the citadels at Aleppo, Hama, and Shazar, which belong to the twelfth-thirteenth centu ries. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abdul-Hak, Selim. "The Archaeology of the City Homs" (in Arabic). Annates Archeologiqucs Arabes Syriennes 1 0 (i960): 5-36.
As'ad, Pater 'Aesa. The History of Homs (Part I). New ed. Damascus, 1983.
As'ad, Muner 'Aesa. The History of Homs (Part II). Damascus, 1984. Bounni, Adnan. "Les catacombes d'Emese (Homs) en Syrie." Archeologian (1970)142-49. Dussaud, Rene. Topographic historique de la Syrie antique et medievale.
Paris, 1927. See pages 1 0 3 - 1 1 5 . Elisseeff, Nikita. "Hims," In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 3, pp.
Horsfield's work are available, but his notes survive at the Department of Antiquities in Jordan. Horsfield's notebooks, later elaborated by G. Lankester Harding, form the basis of the sites and monuments archive of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. Horsfield re corded entries for most of the major sites in Transjordan and tiieir condition and the periods represented; his text is accompanied by clear photographs. In 1929 Horsfield undertook the first archaeological ex cavations at Petra, which he later published in some detail. It was there that he met and worked with Agnes Conway, whom he married in 1 9 3 2 and who gave her name to that site's Conway Tower. Their publications, which are well illustrated, offer details regarding provenance; those works also include photographs of painted houses that no longer exist and provide a comprehensive account of the topogra phy of Petra and of the finds from their excavations on the city walls and at the high place (Jabal Madbah). They also cleared the Palace Tomb, al-Khazneh, the Urn T o m b , and the Tomb of the Roman Soldier. Horsfield's work is significant as the first concentrated in vestigation of two of the major sites in Jordan, Jerash, and Petra. He left careful records, still in use, not only of those sites but also of others he explored. [See also British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; Jer ash; Petra; and the biographies of Garstang and Harding.]
397-402. Leiden, i960-.
Seyrig, Henri. Antiquhes syriennes. 6 vols. Paris, 1934-. See volume 6, page 53. Seyrig, Henri. "Antiquites de la necropole d'Emese." Syria 29 (1952): 204-250; 30 (1953): 1 2 - 2 4 . ALI ABOU ASSAF
BIBLIOGRAPHY Horsfield, George, and Agnes C. Horsfield. "Sela-Petra, the Rock, of Edom and Nabatene: I. The Topography of Petra. II. Houses." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine 7 (1938): 1 - 4 2 .
Horsfield, George, and Agnes C. Horsfield. "Sela-Petra, die Rock, of Edom and Nabatene: III. Excavations." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine 8 (1938): 8 7 - 1 1 5 .
HORSES. See Equids.
Horsfield, George, and Agnes C. Horsfield. "Sela-Petra, the Rock, of Edom and Nabatene: IV. The Finds." Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of'Palestine 9 (1942): 105-204.
Kraeling, Carl H., ed. Gerasa, City of the Decapolis. New Haven, 1938.
HORSFIELD, GEORGE
( 1 8 8 2 - ? ) , British excavator of Petra and the first chief British officer of the Department of Antiquities of Transjordan (1928). Born in the north of England, Horsfield trained as an architect, working first in New York City and then, following World War I, with the British Army in India. In the early 1920s he was one of John Garstang's students at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. In 1 9 2 4 Garstang gave Horsfield responsibility for the Antiquities of Mandate Transjordan. Much of the work he performed in this role was directed to clearing and restoring the antiquities of Jerash. Pie began repair and con servation work on the Soutii and North Theaters, Nymphaeum, and the propylaeum of die Temple of Artemis and cleared one of the vaults under the temple's temenos to house the inscriptions he was finding. By 1930 Horsfield's pioneering enterprise was being supplemented by American and British excavations at Jerash. Few published reports of
ALISON MCQUITTY
HOUSE. [To provide a general typology and morphology of houses, this entry comprises three articles: Mesopotamian Houses Syro-Palestinian Houses Egyptian Houses Each article surveys the historical development, forms, and func tions of houses in the region specified]
Mesopotamian Houses Plans of domestic architecture are sensitive indicators of so cial organization and household composition because houses form the framework within which people live out their social lives. It is houses that provide the spaces needed
HOUSE: Mesopotamian Houses for privacy and task differentiation. However, intervening millennia interfere with the ability to read Mesopotamian social structure from architectural remains. T w o a p proaches can be used to bridge this gap. First, where cu neiform documents drat pertain to household composition are found within domestic architecture, they can be used to infer the relationship between houses and households. Where such textual sources are absent, ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological studies of modern Near Eastern settiements can sometimes be used as models; however, because most such studies are village studies, they are probably more relevant to the study of the small sites characteristic of the Neolithic period than of the large urban sites that are almost all tiiat has been excavated for the later periods. [See Ethnoarchaeology.] T h e earliest Mesopotamian houses date to the eighth mil lennium, and there is a long, complex development of do mestic architecture from that time until the rise of the first cities in the fourth millennium. With the establishment of urban centers in Mesopotamia, house forms seem to have stabilized around a limited number of different types, all adhering to the same principle. This does not mean, how ever, that more variety might not have existed in the nonnucleated village sites, virtually none of which have been excavated. Neolithic H o u s e s . T h e earliest Mesopotamian houses are found only in northern Mesopotamia (see Aurenche, 1 9 8 1 ) . Two sites, Qermez Dere and Nemrik, date to the
eighth millennium, when the inhabitants seem to have prac ticed intensive hunting and plant-food collection but not ag riculture; the architecture at the two sites seems quite simi lar: the houses were round, single-room, subterranean or semisubterranean structures, 4 - 6 m in diameter, with a bowl-shaped floor thickly coated with plaster, as were the walls, and with access only through the roof. The Qermez Dere houses are characterized by two-four nonfunctional pillars (see figure 1 ) , but the Nemrik houses used four posts to support the roof. In general, the houses at Nemrik and Qermez Dere are reminiscent of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) A houses from the Levant (e.g., Jericho), and the material culture and special treatment of skulls at burial also suggest such associations. Two other sites, dated nearly as early, present a somewhat different picture: Jarmo, located in the western Zagros Mountains and traditionally dated to 6750 BCE, and the more or less contemporary Tell Maghzaliyeh, located very close to Qermez Dere; botii demonstrate evidence for a mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economy. [See Jarmo.] In spite of the closeness in date and location between Qermez Dere and Maghzaliyeh, both their material culture and ar chitecture are quite different. The architecture at Jarmo and Maghzaliyeh is character ized by multiroomed houses built at ground level, sometimes using quite substantial stone foundations. As such, they de part distinctly from Qermez Dere and Nemrik and seem to represent a break with the more Levantine traditions those
HOUSE: Mesopotamian Houses. Figure 1. Reconstructed drawing of house interior at Qermez Dere.
(Courtesy Andromeda Oxford, Ltd.)
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sites represent, perhaps presaging the development of truly Mesopotamian domestic architecture. At Jarmo, where the house remains are more plentiful, a typical house had an entrance into a main living/sleeping room drat in turn led into both a passageway to a rear courtyard and to more liv ing quarters and some small storage areas. Grinding equip ment was found in the rear courtyard, where an oven was often built into one of the walls. The probable roofed area of the Jarmo houses was within the upper size limit of the Nernrik and Qermez Dere examples, except that at Jarmo the space was divided into four or more different spaces. Some of the Maghzaliyeh houses may have been larger, with one reported to be 85 sq m in area. By and large, the somewhat later Hassunan houses are similar to those from Jarmo and Maghzaliyeh in their multiroomed rectilinear construction and lime plastered floors and walls. [See Hassuna.] The major difference is that the stone foundations are replaced by large potsherds or mat ting. Built-in features are typical of these houses: sunken storage vessels, hearths, large ovens, and benches. Major changes in architecture are seen in the Samarran and Halaf periods that followed: the Halaf is found toward the north and northwest of Mesopotamia and the Samarran farther south. [See Halaf, Tell; Samarra, article on Chalcolithic Period.] Halaf architecture is typified by the so-called tholos, a round house, usually some 3-4 m in diameter— although structures as large as 7-9 m in diameter have been excavated at Tell Arpachiyah. These houses generally had stone foundations and were, like the earlier Hassunan houses, built of tauf or pressed mud. Most, especially at Yarim II, had only one room, which rose to a domed roof; some, however, especially at Tell Arpachiyah, had a rectan gular room added to one side. In some cases internal but tresses, or even partitions, subdivided the large rooms, but round houses are usually single-roomed structures, quite different from the multiroomed houses typical of tire pre ceding Hassunan period. This is not to say that rectangular architecture did not exist in the Halaf period, it did—not only in the form of the rectangular annexes, but also as stand-alone, multiroomed structures. Rectangular architecture was not, however, dominant at the Halaf sites, although it is typical of the Sa marran sites located farther south. The most important Samarran sites are Chogha Mami and Tell es-Sawwan, both of which exhibit much more nu cleated architecture—and buildings whose use of very long mud bricks allowed much more regular construction. At the minimum (more typical of Chogha Mami), the houses were tripartite in organization, with three parallel ranges of rooms. At the maximum (especially at Tell es-Sawwan), they could be much larger and more complex. Although many of these houses were T-shaped, their plans were markedly asymmetrical. The tripartite plan of Samarran houses and their use of buttresses not only continued into
tire Ubaid period in southern Mesopotamia, but also became key features of later Mesopotamian temples. [See Ubaid.] The discovery of Ubaid 0 remains at Tell el-'Oueili in southern Mesopotamia has made clear the degree of conti nuity between the Samarran and the earliest Ubaid remains. [See 'Oueili, Tell el-.] Thus, now the development of the complex Samarran into the more symmetrical Ubaid houses with their central halls seems unremarkable. T h e best-pre served Ubaid houses were excavated in the Hamrin area, at Tell Abada and Madhhur (Henrickson and Thuesen, 1989), but similar structures have been found both earlier (at Tell el-'Oueili) and later and farther north (at Tepe Gawra, where many were originally interpreted as temples). [See Hamrin Dam Salvage Project; Tepe Gawra.] These houses have a large T-shaped, or cruciform, central room with ad ditional ranges of rooms on each side. On occasion, as in the case of building A at Tell Abada, more than one of these units is combined into a single large building. T h e large cen tral room with its hearth was at the heart of these houses; the smaller of the side rooms must have served the important role of food storage, while tire larger were loci for food prep aration, toolmaking, and other such activities. Two trends can be identified, then, in the evolution of house forms during the Neolithic. One, beginning with the Aceramic Neolithic sites of Jarmo and Maghzaliyeh, sees tire development of increasingly complex, multiroomed rectan gular architecture—perhaps designed to house extended families—that eventually developed into the tripartite Ubaid house. The second trend is less easy to follow. T h e circular houses of Qermez Dere and Nemrik can be associated with similar structures found much farther west, and the same may be argued for the later Halaf round houses as well. Cer tainly both the PPNA and Halaf manifestations suggest cul tural continuity between northern Iraq and Syria in ways that do not exist for the Hassunan, Samarran, and Ubaid cultures. Mesopotamian Urban Housing. There are several basic functional distinctions between the houses built in Neolithic villages and those associated with later Mesopotamian cities. The former generally included considerable amounts of un roofed communal space. In the later urban centers, areas set aside for outdoor activities (because for much of the year it is cooler and pleasanter to be outside, so long as there is shade) had to be incorporated within die houses them selves—either in the form of courtyards or flat roofs. Thus, most, but not all, archaeologists interpret the central spaces within Mesopotamian houses as courtyards, and do not nec essarily assume that all stairways lead to a second story be cause they could also have been designed to provide access to the roof (Veenhof, forthcoming). Private-house areas are not distributed evenly over time and space. Protoliterate houses have not been excavated in Mesopotamia proper; the only extensive remains are at Habuba Kabira, an Uruk site on the Upper Euphrates River.
HOUSE: Mesopotamian Houses [See Habuba Kabira.] There, many of the houses resemble their Ubaid predecessors, although the addition of partitions within the large central hall may indicate the development of the courtyard house. By the third millennium, tiiere are good examples of domestic areas that have been recorded in the south at Abu Salabikh, at the various Diyala and Ham rin sites (including the only truly rural settlements), and in the north, at Tell Taya. [See Abu Salabikh; Diyala; Taya, Tell.] T h e largest areas of domestic housing date to the early second millennium BCE at Ur, Nippur, Sippar, and at die small sites of Haradum and Tell Harmal (Woolley and Mal lowan, 1976; Stone, 1987). [See Ur; Nippur; Sippar.] As sociated private documents found in these houses provide additional information about their inhabitants. Farther north, and a little later, is the extensive domestic area at Nuzi, which includes some rural villas. [See Nuzi.] For the first millennium BCE, Ur and Babylon have some domestic areas, and there are Neo-Assyrian domestic structures at Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Assur (Preusser, 1954). [See Bab ylon; Nimrud; Khorsabad; Assur.] All of the houses in Mesopotamia's urban centers were built in solid blocks, with neighboring houses sharing party walls. All Mesopotamian houses were built around an en closed courtyard, which provided light, air, and a shady place to be during the long hot summers. This is not to say that the arrangement of rooms was the same. Houses could have rooms on one, two, three, or four sides of the court yard, and in some cases had extra banks of rooms added onto one or more sides. T h e largest houses had more than one court and appear to have been composite structures. It is possible that some of the very smallest structures were commercial establishments; there is also evidence for work shops located in parts of some of the houses. Houses varied greatiy in size at each site, and every house area excavated has included botii large and small houses, houses using more relatively expensive materials (baked brick in the south, stone in the north), and houses using the bare minimum— an indication that there was little segregation of the popu lation according to wealth or status. N o t all of these differ ences reflected wealth distinctions, however. Where textual data can be brought to bear, it appears that the houses with rooms on all sides may have served extended families, whereas those with rooms on three or fewer sides were oc cupied only by nuclear families (Stone, 1 9 8 1 ) . Most Mesopotamian houses included entrance chambers with the doorways offset, so that the courtyard was not vis ible from the street. It seems likely that nonfamily members did not generally penetrate beyond the entrance chamber. Where the entrance was directly into the courtyard, the space that was most probably used for living does not con nect directly with the courtyard; instead, it is preceded by a subsidiary room that may have served the same function as the entrance chamber. T h e smallest houses have only one or two rooms at the
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back of the courtyard. Where there are two rooms, it seems probable that one was for living space and the other—gen erally accessible only through the first—for storage. Small houses do not generally have any special-purpose rooms like kitchens or bathrooms, which are most often found only in composite houses or in those with rooms on all sides of the courtyard. In most instances kitchens are marked by the presence of bread ovens, but on occasion larger stoves with built-in grills have been found. Bread baking might take place either in a room or in a courtyard, but true kitchens with stoves are generally in one corner of the house. Bathrooms present a more difficult problem. While some bathrooms have been found—especially in the Old Baby lonian houses at Ur—they are not common; it is a moot question whether they were merely used for washing or if they represent toilets. One indubitable toilet, virtually iden tical to those in use today in the Arab world, was found at Ur (Woolley and Mallowan, 1976); in general, however, cess pits, which are archaeologically unmistakable, are rare, and in most instances the ceramic drains beneath these rooms are designed for seepage rather than the disposal of solid waste. At Ur, bathrooms were generally located beneath the stairway; at other sites, while they were always small and tucked away, this association cannot be demonstrated. Baked-brick paving and drains were not only found in these apparently special-purpose rooms, but were encountered frequently in courtyards, and sometimes in other rooms, es pecially kitchens. Staircases are far from ubiquitous and are generally quite small, either built into courtyards or tucked into tiny square rooms or into long narrow ones. In the south, where walls tended to be thin and available wood for construction rare, most scholars, but not all, interpret staircases as giving ac cess to the roof. Fartiier nortii there is more evidence sug gesting the presence of second stories, including textual ref erences from Sippar referring to the lease of second-story property. In addition to the normal domestic offices, some of the larger houses have evidence of rooms set aside for religious purposes. These were especially common in the second-mil lennium BCE houses at Ur, where they are found at the back of the house. They can be identified by the presence of altars and niches and may have the tombs of family members be neath them. [See Tombs.] In summary, Mesopotamian cities were characterized by dense blocks of houses that focused on a central court. T h e larger the house, the more likely it was to have special-pur pose rooms like bathrooms, kitchens, and chapels. In all probability the same functions were carried out in the smaller houses, but without the characteristic built-in fea tures. Although most house remains from the historical period in Mesopotamia come from urban centers, there are some
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data from smaller sites. For the Early Dynastic period, sev eral small sites, generally not much more tiian i hectare (2.5 acres) in size, were excavated as part of the Hamrin rescue project. At Tells Razuk, Gubba, and Madhhur, the sites were dominated by circular buildings where a series of rooms surround a round, central courtyard; the entire ar rangement is generally about 30 m in diameter. Although these sites also include die remains of more rectilinear ar chitecture, they seem to have been dominated by a single round structure. Farther south, on the west mound at Abu Salabikh, an initial rural occupation had rectilinear architec ture surrounded by curvilinear compound walls incorporat ing significant amounts of open space. For the second millennium BCE, two single-hectare sites have been excavated, Haradum and Tell Harmal (Kempinski-Lecomte, 1992); both seem to be miniature versions of the large cities: densely packed courtyard houses. At the slightly later and more northern city of Nuzi, large rural vil las housed some of its most prominent citizens (while those structures were somewhat larger than those in the center of town, they did not differ in plan in any significant ways; see Starr, 1939). What is not clear from diese data is whether they indicate that by the second millennium BCE there was no longer any difference either in organization or in sophistication between large and small settlements (i.e., Tell Harmal and Haradum were as rich in cuneiform tablets as any other Old Babylo nian cities); or if only those for which this is the case have been sampled. Certainly there is a suggestion that at least in the Diyala basin in the third millennium there were signifi cant differences between rural settlements and urban cen ters. Conclusion. After a lengthy period of experimentation in house forms during the Neolithic, the urban dwellers of Mesopotamia took the Late Neolithic house form as the ba sis for uieir religious structures; they developed the court yard house, which was more suited to the crowded condi tions inherent in urban life. Once invented, the courtyard house remained in use in all parts of Mesopotamia for as long as the civilization continued; indeed, it is found in many parts of die Near East to this day. There is some evidence for experimentation in rural architecture in the third millen nium, but the limited evidence from the second millennium BCE suggests that by that time die courtyard house domi nated the form of both rural and urban dwellings. [See also Mesopotamia; Syria, article on Prehistoric Syria; and Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aurenche, Olivier. La maison orientals: L'architecture du Proche Orient ancien des origines au milieu du quatrieme millenaire. 3 vols. Paris, 1981. Delougaz, Pinhas, et al. Private Houses and Graves in the Diyala Region.
Oriental Institute Publications, 88. Chicago, 1967. Gibson, McGuire, ed. Uch Tepe I. Chicago and Copenhagen, 1981.
Henrickson, Elizabeth F., and Ingolf Thuesen, eds. Upon This Foun dation: The' Ubaid Reconsidered. Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient
Near East Studies, 10. Copenhagen, 1989. Kempinski-Lecomte, Christine, ed. Haradum I: Une ville nouvelle stir le
Moyen-Euphrate. Paris, 1992.
Preusser, Conrad. Die Wohnhduser in Assur. Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in Assur, 4. Berlin, 1954. Starr, Richard F. S. Nuzi. Cambridge, Mass., 1939. Stone, Elizabeth C. "Texts, Architecture, and Ethnographic Analogy: Patterns of Residence in Old Babylonian Nippur." Iraq 43 (1981): 19-33.
Stone, Elizabeth C. Nippur Neighborhoods. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, 44. Chicago, 1987. Veenhof, Klaas R., ed. Houses and Households in Ancient
Mesopotamia.
Istanbul, forthcoming. Woolley, C. Leonard, and M.E.L. Mallowan. Ur Excavations, vol. 7, The Old Babylonian Period. London, 1976. ELIZABETH C . STONE
Syro-Palestinian Houses This treatment of a large and difficult topic begins with the Early Bronze age, c. 3300 BCE, and ends with the end of Iron II, c. 580 BCE. Earlier materials have been addressed by Ed ward B. Banning (1996); later materials remain to be ana lyzed. [For some discussion of the later periods, see Syria, articles on Syria in die Persian through Roman Periods and Syria in the Byzantine Period; and Palestine, articles on Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods and Palestine in the Byzantine Period.] Following an introduction to the difficulties of interpreting three dimensional, and probably mostly multi-storied, re mains from their (often incomplete) ground plans, we turn to a brief overview of key architectural aspects of archaeoethnographically documented peasant households in the modern Middle East. [See Etiinoarchaeology.] From tiiis perspective, we develop a working model of a functional peasant's house, as this might be witnessed in Syria-Pales tine. Following tiiis, we briefly visit the social anthropology of "round" versus "rectangular" houses, and the possible socio-economic implications of "exotic" or atypical archi tecture in a Levantine setting, before working our way— hopefully in an empirical, transparent fashion—tiirough key aspects of what can be seen of the history of domestic ar chitecture in Syria-Palestine. Because archaeologists typically deal with fractional re mains, sound models for reconstruction and interpretation are paramount to their work. Houses are the most common architectural form encountered and one of die most ne glected, whether in terms of fieldwork, reporting, or inter pretation. Despite frequent indications of a second story (e.g., stairways, two distinct levels of cultural deposits within a particular room or building, evidence for second-floor sur facing, lack of suitable living quarters on die ground floor), archaeologists seldom recover more than die ground-floor plan of any building. It thus becomes important to explore
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses other avenues of knowledge to determine, for model build ing, the spatial and functional requirements or potentials of a "typical house." These will vary depending upon a house hold's economic pursuits. Traders, weavers, and members of the ruling elite would have different spatial needs, and their needs would differ from those of a farmer or herder. During the Syro-Palestinian Bronze and Iron Ages (c. 3 3 0 0 580 BCE) , most people were farmers. Therefore, most houses should have belonged to farmers, with atypical houses pos sibly belonging to people with other livelihoods (how this applies to urban settings might be problematic). During these periods, the dominant modes of production were in tensive plow-assisted dry farming, horticulture (principally vines and fruit ttees), and pastoralism, with each household typically practicing two or three modes of agriculture as a way of managing the risks inherent in the subsistence agri culture of marginal areas (Hopkins, 1985, pp. 245-250; Holladay, 1992a, p. 3 1 5 ; 1995, pp. 3 8 6 - 3 9 3 ) . Similar constraints and risks still determine life in traditional farming commu nities in the region. Near Eastern ethnoarchaeological re search has proven to be of great value for modeling "con stants" (see, e.g., Watson, 1979; Kramer, 1979, 1982; Hall et a l , 1 9 7 3 ) .
Settled Agriculturalists: Basic House Model. Typi cally, the architectural requirements of Near Eastern peas ants are living space; kitchen space; storage space for house hold goods and foods; quarters for their donkey(s), cow/ox/ bullock(s), and sheep/goat herd; seasonally adjustable storage space for fuel (dung, dung cakes, brush), straw (chaff), fodder, grain and legume reserves (including seed reserves); agricultural implements; young animals; spare beams or posts; and, in olive-oil producing, non-Islamic communities, large wine and oil jars. Courtyards are con sidered essential, although in tightly packed, fortified villages many of their functions can be taken over by the roof (Ja cobs, 1979, p. 1 7 9 ) . In such settings, strongly built flat roofs are used for a wide variety of outdoor activities, especially by women and children. Holes through the roof allow for communication between living rooms and rooftop activities. Windows often are extremely primitive, with mere holes (blocked in winter) sometimes sufficing. Each nuclear family requires its own living room, in which it lives, works, eats, entertains, and sleeps. Larger houses may have more than one living room, the second used for entertaining or for rental, if not required for the extended family. Living rooms are characterized by a central hearth (necessary for winter heating, though supplemental portable braziers are also used). Where there are kitchens, the hearths may be leveled with mud plaster for the summer. Living rooms are often whitewashed and have better flooring than the mud plaster or packed earth tiiat characterizes utility and storerooms. Even in nonurban settings, second-floor living rooms are considered more desirable, as they catch the sum mer breezes. Where there is a second story, it is invariably
95
used as living room (Kramer, 1982, p. 1 0 2 ) . In the restticted space of the fortified Iranian village of Tel-i Num, fortyeight of the fifty-nine compounds (81 percent) were two storied: the lower used for animals, and the upper for hu mans (Jacobs, 1979, p. 1 7 9 ) . In addition to the living room, there is often a second-story utility room for storing light goods (foods and household goods) and, in some areas, a kitchen (Hall et al., 1 9 7 3 , fig. 7 ) . Stables and storerooms for heavy or bulky storage are in variably found on the ground floor. Grains and legumes may be stored in bins or in above-ground silos, grain pits, sacks, or jars. Storerooms are typically mud plastered, including the floors. High thresholds may serve as (inadequate) bar riers to rodents and animals. Wealthy families tend to have relatively more storage space, and absentee landlords may have their own storehouse (and a well set-up agent) in the village for collecting in-kind land rent. From the archaeo logist's perspective, such a storehouse—and the prosperous agent's house—should be archaeologically visible (Watson, 919> PP- 40, 48, 2 4 1 , fig. 5.29). Stables should be identifi able by their built-in mangers. As opposed to the typically paved Israelite stables, traditional village stable floors are un finished and covered with decaying fodder and animal waste. Subterranean stables for housing sheep and goats at night and during winter storms, typical in western Iran (e.g., Watson, 1979, pp. 1 6 0 - 1 6 1 , 2 0 4 - 2 0 5 , 2 0 8 ) , are not found in Syria-Palestine in the periods considered here (unless the cave under the northwest tower at Tell Beit Mirsim is such a stable), and some roofed folding space should be reckoned into any defensible space equation. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell] Two underground stables illustrated for Patty Jo Watson's "Hasanabad," were, respectively, about 64 and 80 sq meters in site (1979, pp. 1 5 4 , 160). Exterior surfaces (including courtyards) are uneven, lit tered, develop damp spots, and may have piles of dirt, rocks, or other materials in corners or elsewhere. Archaeologically, streets and alleyways are generally hardened against the win ter rains by potsherds and small stones. "Public areas" and major streets near important strucmres are generally much better hardened (suggesting governmental behest) than culde-sacs, alleyways, and peripheral streets. Because it is eroded by winter rains and summer sun and wind, the mudand-chaff plaster of roofs and exterior walls is renewed an nually. A portion of this annual increment, plus litter and garbage, forms a significant part of street and alleyway buildup, which seems to average between .5 and 1.0 m per century. Some streets, such as those running tiirough gate ways or near important buildings, may be cleared out peri odically and reestablished at lower levels, particularly during renovations or rebuilding programs. Kitchens at "Aliabad" had 1-meter-deep ovens, which re stricted them to die ground floor (Kramer, 1982, pp. 9 9 100). Originally whitewashed, they then became progres sively sooty. Vertical looms at Aliabad were generally set up l
96
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
in the kitchen. Kitchens are not necessarily synonymous with oven locations, however, because ovens are frequently located outside the house, in a spot sheltered from the wind. Inside the house they may be sited in some sheltered corner of die ground floor, with no ttace of hearth. Communities without kitchens, such as Watson's "Hasanabad" (1979), cook (and bake bread on flat metal pans) on the living room hearth. In some communities, a kitchen may be shared with other members of the extended family. Sometimes depen dent family (e.g., a widow) will live and entertain in a kitchen, which then will be kept ash free, with suitable floor coverings (Kramer, 1979, p. 104). Archaeologically, such a room might be distinguished by its relative cleanliness. Liv ing rooms and kitchens used for living are not entered through other rooms, aside from entry halls, although rooms used by children may be entered from the main living room.
deviation (SD) of 3.5 sq m (Kramer, 1982, figs. 4 . 1 8 , 4.6, 4.7, 4 . 1 2 ) . A fairly minimal folding space (20-25 sq m) may be arbitrarily assigned for the sheep/goat herd. These and other dimensions, such as room width (averages for three modern villages were 2.8, 2.9, and 3 m) and ceiling height, are fundamental to the suitability of the house and must be considered carefully in interpreting remains. These distri butions are positively skewed (there are no stables or store rooms that are 2 sq m or living rooms that are 5 sq m), and most have relatively large standard deviations. In general, it is assumed that free spans of about 4 m or less could have been achieved with generally available timbers (see below). Finally, with respect to tire applicability of the full model to every situation, it should suffice to note that, for example, plans specifically developed for warm, dry climates such as the lower Jordan Valley or the Negev desert might differ with respect to roofed nighttime facilities for animals (e.g., in most of the Early Bronze and Middle Bronze I plans illus trated below; see figures 1, 2.c). However, tliis caveat might not apply when the normative house style was carried over from areas with severe weather conditions such as the Gal ilee, the central hill country, and most of Syria and Lebanon.
Ethnographically documented Iranian living rooms aver aged from 1 5 to 1 8 sq m, possibly depending on whedier there is a kitchen. The archaeological data from one-story structures (see table 1 ) suggest "needs averaging" at 1 9 - 2 2 sq m. In addition, the typical family will have one or two stables (averaging about 1 2 sq m each), one or two store rooms (about 1 2 sq m each), an entrance hall, and a kitchen. Carol Kramer's average size for kitchens (18 sq m) includes wall thickness, which makes the data unusable for this dis cussion. (Kramer, 1982, table 4.2, p. 1 2 2 ) . The average size of five illustrated kitchens was 1 1 . 5 (sq) m with a standard
The relevance of the preceding model for interpreting im perfectly preserved, complex domestic structures may be seen in figure i.a, which shows the foundation plan of a hypothetical one-story house, based on a slightly enlarged version of the Iron II house 1727 at Shechem (Wright, 1965,
TABLE I . Comparative sizes of "large" and "small" rooms in representative domestic structures ofEB and MB I towns and campsites. Breaks occurred in the large room sizes at Tel Yarmut and Nabi Salah, Chuera B, Gebel Gunna, and Be'er Resisim. The most economical explanations seem to be first, that living rooms were no longer located on the ground floor in the rectilinear Chuera B structures. That probably holds true for many of the complex Palestinian EB III houses as well (e.g., Tell el-Far'ah [North] and Tel Yarmut), which, characteristically, no longer exhibited features or floor surfaces characteristic of EB II one-story houses (exceptions help prove the rule: e.g., the benches in Tell el-Far'ah [North] room 609, [de Vaux 1 9 6 1 , pi. 34]). Second, that, in contrast to Yiftahel and Jawa, the curvilinear Nabi Salah, Gebel Gunna, and Be'er Resisim, structures were no longer designed to "accommodate families" (cf. Flannery, 1972, p. 39). Period: Site (Figure) Chakolithic;
Large Rooms (sq m)
Small Rooms (sq m)
35
10
34-1
x = 5-75 (n = 2 ) x = 5 1 . 1 (n = 5)
Mesar (3.a solid)
EB I: Yiftahel (2.a) £BJ:Jawa (z.b)
x = 2 2 . 2 (n = 5 )
EB II: Mesar (3 .a open)
E B II: Arad (j.c)
22.4
19.6
x = 16.5
3.78 (Yarmut, n= 1 )
x = 1 4 . 1 (n = 5 ) x = 1 0 (n = 1 1 )
x = 7 . 1 (n = 1 4 ) x = 1.4 (n = 3 ) x = 6.7 (n = 1 1 )
Syrian EB: Chuera A (3.b)
E B III: Tell el-Far'ah (North) and Tel Yarmut (3,e) E B II: Nabi Salah ( ,c) 2
EB II-III: Gunna 25 100 (2.d)
—
Syrian EB: Chuera B (3.d)
MB I: Be'er Resisim (2.e)
13
x = 6.2 (n = 8) x = 4.2 (n = 4)
x = 1 9 (n = 8)
9.4
to 1 2 . 6
—
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses One Story
Two
a
Story
b 0 i—
—
5 -•'
10m I
SYRO-PALESTINIAN. Figure I . Hypothetical House Plans. (a) Ground plan when built as a one-story structure; (b) Ground plan of the same house, built as a two-story structure. (Courtesy J. S. Holladay) HOUSE:
pp. 1 5 8 - 1 6 3 , figs. 7 6 - 7 7 ; Campbell, 1994). [See Shechem.] It is comprised of one stable area (14.6 sq m), a roofed fold ing area (28.5 s q m ) , one heavy- and two light-storage rooms (16 sq m, 1 6 sq m, and 4.5 sq m, respectively), one living room (25.5 sq m) with an entry hall (4.5 sq m ) , and a kitchen (8.1 sq m). T h e left hand portion of figure i.b shows what would be seen in a typical excavation report for exactiy the same house built with two stories. Nothing of the family's domestic space is seen, although all of tiieir economic do main is clearly visible. If all of the family's activities were interpreted solely on the evidence of the ground plan (per haps still the reigning mode), half of the picture would be missed (i.e., righthand portion of figure i.b). Round Houses and Rectilinear Houses. Our under standing of the relationships obtaining between house shapes and sizes and setdement patterns and dominant modes of production have been vastly advanced by recent anthropological research (Hunter-Anderson, 1977, building on earlier work by Robbins, 1966; Whiting and Ayres, 1968; Flannery, 1 9 7 2 ) . Kent V. Flannery summarizes: "rectan gular houses . . . are associated . . . with full-time sedentism, large community size, and intensive agriculture . . . [and] round houses [in compounds], . . . [while they may be] as sociated witii permanent setdement, . . . [regularly] are 'de signed to house only one, or at most two, persons' . . . [while] die rectangular houses of the village are 'designed to accommodate families.' . . . [Various facilities] are attached to or within rectangular houses [cf. the Arad kitchens, be low] . In contrast, the few facilities found in the compounds are separate, round structures located in the open between the huts [cf. die subsidiary structures of die Sinai encamp ments, below]" ( 1 9 7 2 , as cited by Hunter-Anderson, 1977, P- 3 1 4 ) Design Stability and Foreign Traits. Both cuneiform records and ethnographic parallels indicate that house build ing in Near Eastern societies was a craft profession (Stone, 1 9 8 1 , p . 2 7 , for "municipal housing"; Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 1 7 , s.v. Sitimgallu; Watson, 1979, pp. 1 2 1 1 2 2 , cf. Kramer, 1982, p . 94), although people often did
97
tiieir own construction work (Watson, 1979, p. 1 2 1 ; cf. Kra mer, 1982, p . 94). It seems equally clear tiiat various ethnic groups preferred certain architectural configurations. These twin observations go a long way toward explaining similar ities, differences, and eccentricities in house form across large cultural areas and through long stretches of time that are punctuated in a variety of instances: 1. Population relocation, cultural innovation, or stress. T h e evolution—or local introduction—of new (or new to the re gion) house forms, presumably reflects either new arrivals or altered social organization and changing modes of pro duction. Examples include Babylonian insula-style houses at Megiddo strata III-U (see below), Israelite three- and four-room houses in the centtal hill country in the latter part of the Late Bronze II, and round EB IV/MB I shelters in the central Negev. [See Megiddo.] 2. Cultural dominance or acculturation. The four-room house spread to the Shephelah, coastal plain, Esdraelon, Ne gev (and perhaps into Transjordan) the Early Iron II period. 3. Resident aliens or mercenaries. Phoenicianlike (?) benches and the rear cult room in the atypical Hazor house 1 4 (see figure 7.e). [See Phoenicians; Hazor.] 4. (Some) trade diasporas. T h e Hittite diaspora (see below; see figures 6.c-f), and Egyptian agents abroad, who also may have functioned as part of a trade diaspora (?). T h e latter were responsible, possibly under royal patronage, for buildings or such groups of buildings as the Egyptian villas at Tananir, at the Amman Airport, and possibly at Tell Selenkahiye in Syria, (see figure 10.b; Herr, 1983; see figure 10.c). [See Hittites; Amman.] In contrast, members of the Old Assyrian Karum Kanes lived in local Hittite-style houses (see figure 6.a). [See Assyrians; Kanes.] 5. Symbols of imperial power and legitimacy. Egyptian of ficers' houses and egyptianized temples appear at BethShean; an Egyptian temple appears at Lachish Qames, 1966, pp. 8 - 1 3 ; James and McGovern, 1993, vol. 1 , pp. 4 - 5 , 2 7 56; Rowe, 1940; Ussishkin, 1978, pp. 1 0 - 2 5 ) ; Egyptian res idencies appear throughout southern Palestine (Oren, 1984); and Assyrian palace-forts (see, e.g., figure 9.C) appear at Megiddo, Hazor (Yadin et al., 1958, pi. 1 7 7 ) , and Beidha(?) (Bennett, 1 9 7 7 , pp. 1 - 3 , figs. i-A, 2 ) . [See BethShean; Lachish; Palace; Beidha.] Early B r o n z e Age. For northeastern Jordan, Syria, Pal estine, and the Sinai at least five distinct types of houses are found. T h e first two types and the last are curvilinear struc tures seemingly associated with particular ethnic groups. T h e first type is associated with the invasive EB I Esdraelon culture (gray-burnished ware) and was formerly taken, based on inadequate data, to be apsidal. In the light of better analysis and new finds, this type (see table 1 ) is now seen to have an elongated oval plan (see figure 2a). This example has a c e n t a l enclosed area of about 35.5 sq m and walledoff end spaces (for storage?) of 4.5 and 7 sq m (total = 1 1 . 5 sq m, mean [x] = 5.75 sq m) (Braun, 1989). At the transi-
98
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses Palestine
G_2>
H O U S E : SYRO-PAI.ESTINIAN. Figure 2. Curvilinear Houses, EB to MB I, (a) Oval EB I building from Yiftahel (after Ben-Tor, 1992); (b) houses and store facilities at EB I Jawa (after Helms, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 1 2 3 - 1 2 5 ) ; (c) EB II houses and store facilities at Nabi Salah in the southern Sinai (after Beit-Arieh, 1 9 8 1 ) ; (d) EB II or EB III sleeping chambers and enclosure at Gebel Gunna, in the Sinai (Gunna 100), presumably of a local non-sedentary group (after Bar-Yosef et al., 1986); (e) MB I shelters at Be'er Resisim (after Cohen and Dever, 1 9 8 1 ) . (CourtesyJ. S. Holladay)
tional site of Mesar (see figure 3.a), oval houses appear stratigraphically sandwiched between a rectilinear Chalcolithic house (large room = 34.1 sq m, small room = 1 0 sq m ) — perhaps housing an extended family group and a typical EB II broad-room house (with a kitchen?) similar to those at Arad (see figure 3.C; Dothan, 1959). [See Arad, article on Early Bronze Age Period.] The larger unit is 22.4 sq m and the smaller about 1 3 sq m (see table 1 ) . The second type of curvilinear house, at EB I Jawa (Helms, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 1 2 3 - 1 2 5 , figs. 5 7 - 5 8 ) , is cell-like (see figure 2.b). It was partially dug into the ground, and—according to the excavator—new houses were successively added on to existing semiround houses and smaller facilities in an agglutinative manner. [See Jawa.] Spaces between the adjacent expanding clusters— which presumably housed different extended family groups—eventually became streets. Each living room had access, through a small doorway, to a smaller rounded space, perhaps a beehive-shaped silo. [See Granaries and Silos.] An average of five large cells yielded a mean living room size of 22.2 sq m (SD = 8.3 sq m), while an average of five small (storage?) cells yielded a mean of 5.1 sq m (SD = 1.7 sq m) (see table 1 ) . The third example, from EB II Arad, in the Negev, is a
strongly typed rectilinear sunken broad-room house (Amiran et al., 1978, pp. 1 4 - 1 7 ; see figure 3 . C ) . T h e type is rea sonably similar to an EB house near the small anten temple at Tell Chuera (Chuera A, see figure 3.b; table 1 ) , in northeastern Syria (Moortgat and Moortgat-Correns, 1978, plans 2 - 5 ) . [See Chuera, Tell] Room 53, with alcove 5 1 , totals 20 sq m, which compares well with die mean of 1 9 sq m from eight houses at Arad (see below). T h e Arad houses are, however, not like other EB complexes at Tell Chuera (Chuera B, phase 3; cf. figures 3.c-d; table 1 ) . Given the size of the individual cells (about 3 . 7 - 1 1 sq m, x = 6.6 sq m, SD = 2.2 sq m, number [n] = 1 1 ) ; see table 1 ) , the plan appears to represent the ground floors of three (?) two-sto ried buildings—presumably around a family courtyard— with living quarters to be reconstructed upon their second floors (fully realized, in the 1 5 - 4 0 sq m range, with a mean of about 25 sq m). In their respective settings, these fully rectilinear structures, with their incorporated kitchens/oven rooms (see above), may be taken as typical early and quite sophisticated—particularly at Tell Chuera—regional re sponses to the demands of intensive plow-assisted agricul ture within a common larger culture area. [See Agriculture.] As at Chuera, the Arad houses are grouped in what would
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses Palestine
Syria
f SYRO-PALESTINIAN. Figure 3. Early Bronze Age rectilinear houses, (a) Mesar, oval EB I structures sandwiched between a rec tilinear Chalcolithic house and a typical EB II broadroom house (with attached kitchen?) (after Dothan, 19S9); (b) an EB house near the "Small Anten-Temple" at Tell Chuera, in northeastern Syria (after Moortgat and Moortgat-Correns, 1978, plans 2-5); (c) EB II complex at Arad, in the Negev, including four living rooms, three kitchens, one storeroom, compound walls, a fortification wall, and two rectangular stone platforms (for silos?) (after Amiran et al., 1978, pi. 1 7 8 ) ; (d) more common type of EB complex at Tell Chuera (after Moortgat and Moortgat-Correns, 1978; plans 2-5); (e) EB III development at Tel Yarmut of the EB II broadroom house, with forecourt(?), pillared room (with living room over?), subsidiary room, and an additional rear wall (see text) (after Miroschedji, 1988, pi. 9 ) ; (f) Late EB houses at Halawa with a longroom with rear chamber on tire left, and seemingly part of a court yard house more typical of die MB II on the right (after Meyer and Orthmann, 1989). (Courtesy J. S. Holladay) HOUSE:
99
appear to be family compounds, or "farm compounds" (Edward B. Banning, personal communication). At Arad, the individual house is a single living room opening off of an irregularly walled courtyard. The house and wall are built of blocks of soft Eocene chalk, laid without attention to bed ding planes; the easily available chert is reserved for use in pyrotechnical installations, such as cooking hearths. Party walls are common. Typically, the living room is furnished with benches around its periphery (see figure 3.C). Some houses also have a platform, silo, clay or mud-brick bins (some holding carbonized grain), a stone mortar embedded in the floor, a plastered floor pit (for accumulating flour?). Some small hearths were planned, but not in every house. Depending on the size of the house, one or more stone col umn bases may appear along the long axis, deeper houses being more likely to have column bases. There may be more than one step down from the threshold to die floor. The inner walls, benches, and often the floors were surfaced with a "limey clay plaster" (Amiran et al., 1978, p. 1 6 ) . Smaller rooms (usually at surface level), most of which served as ldtchens or kitchen-storerooms, lack these features (at least one, room 1077a, which opened directly into the house, served another function: a storeroom?). Some of these rooms also have mortars embedded in the floors, built-up silos or stone-lined pits, slab-built ash bins, flagstone plat forms, or raised stone [chert] hearths (see Arad rooms 1 5 0 2 , 1 5 0 3 ) . They are usually attached to the house, often directly outside the doorway, but may also be variously arranged around die courtyard. Larger houses may have larger ldtchen-storerooms (e.g., room 1 5 0 3 ) . There are many raised round (sometimes half- or quarter-circles) and rec tangular stone platforms (e.g., platform 1008), but not near every house. These are best interpreted as foundations for the collective (mud brick) granaries of extended families. Of the eight houses in area H, stratum II (Amiran et al., 1978, pp. 26-29, pi. 1 7 8 ) , die mean width was 5.4 m with an SD of r.i m. T h e mean depth (front to back) was 3.5 m (SD = 0.5 m). Because only house 1039a lacked probable pillar bases (depth = 2.8 m), the mean depth (plus bearing lengths at each end) cannot be taken as a function of the lengths of locally available beams. Living rooms ranged from 12.8 to 30.4 sq m, (x = 19 sq m, SD = 6.2 sq m) (see table 1 ) . From the same excavation area, the mean dimensions of the three ldtchen-storerooms and one other small room were width x = 2.9 m (SD = 1.3 m), depth x = 2 m (SD = 3 m); interior areas ranged from 0.3 to 1 3 . 1 sq m (x = 6.2 sq m, SD = 4.6 sq m) (see table 1 ) . The enclosed open area (areaH, loci i o 8 o - i 0 3 i b ) of one walled-in two-house com pound is about 90 sq m. A house model confirms initial assumptions that the houses were one story, flat-roofed, and apparently plastered and painted on the outside (Amiran, I 9 7 ) P- 5 2 , pi. 66, 1 1 5 ) . T h e roofs were of reeds overlaid with clay (Amiran, 1978, p. 26). 8
T h e fourth type but closely related to the foregoing type) was excavated by Itzhak Beit-Arieh ( 1 9 8 1 ) in a number of
100
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
small EB II settlements in southern Sinai and the Negev highlands drat appear, for a variety of reasons, to be en campments of peoples closely affiliated with the Arad cul ture (see below). In these camps, subcircular to subrectangular stone foundations characterize both houses (living rooms)—mostiy pillared, many with benches, and sometimes even with a door socket—and smaller subsidiary structures. The houses are cut into the earth in a fashion similar to the Arad houses, but, as at Arad, most of the sub sidiary structures seem to be at surface level (Beit-Arieh, 1 9 8 1 , p. 38, fig. 7 ) . Where structures are not contiguous, short stretches of connector wall fill the gap. The units are strung like beads in a necklace: houses are regularly con nected to other houses, with the subsidiary structures (Flannery's "facilities," see above) being "located elsewhere around the courtyard" (Beit-Arieh, 1 9 8 1 , p. 3 7 ) . The whole forms a roughly circular corral-like encampment, often with a smaller—perhaps one of Beit-Arieh's "pens" ( 1 9 8 1 , p. 42)—and a larger "enclosure" area. The enclosure has only one (less often two) entrance(s). As published (the drawing is cut off to the left), Nabi Salah, one of the settlements BeitArieh excavated, lacks its southernmost subsidiary struc tures, but is otherwise well preserved and may be taken as typical (see figure 2.c: Beit-Arieh, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 3 7 - 3 8 , fig. 8). The interior areas of the five houses (living rooms) range from 9.7 to 18.75 sq m, with a mean of 1 4 . 1 sq m (SD = 3.7 sq m), on average 4.9 sq m smaller than the Arad living rooms, but larger than the MB I shelters, and much larger than the sleeping chambers near Gebel Gunna (see table 1 ) . The fourteen subsidiary structures range from 2 to 1 1 . 7 sq m, with x being 7.1 sq m (SD = 2.6 sq m), on average a probably insignificant 1 . 1 sq m larger than the Arad kitchenstorerooms. A larger corral area is about 1 5 0 s q m (area B), and a smaller one (area A) is about 27 sq m. On a per living room basis, this equates well with the free compound area in area H at Arad (44.25 sq m vs. 45 sq m), suggesting that one of the primary determining factors for each enclosed space might be die overnight folding area required for the group's donkeys, sheep, and goats. [See Sheep and Goats.] The entrance typically has a certain depth, which makes for easy blockage with brush and camel thorn. While it is not impossible that this setting belonged to some family groups, there is a stronger possibility, compatible with the reduced living-room size, relatively low head space, and small door ways, which are (55-60 cm wide X 70 cm high (Beit-Arieh, 1 9 8 1 , p. 3 4 ) , that fiiese were seasonal encampments. The outer walls are preserved maximally to 1.6 m, and two monolithic central pillars are 1.85 and 2.2 m high, respec tively (Beit-Arieh 1 9 8 1 , p. 47). The encampments likely be long to specialized pastoralist resource-gathering groups proceeding from and domiciled at permanent settlements such as Arad (see below). [See Pastoral Nomadism.] The resources gathered or traded included copper; semiprecious stones; mother of pearl, other shells, and other Red Sea
commodities; and even temper for the stratum III—I cooking pots found, and presumably manufactured, at Arad (Amiran, 1978, p. 50). Six (75 percent) of the eight published EB II pendants from Arad were of mother of pearl, as were 3 4 1 (64 percent) of the 531 published beads (Amiran e t a l , 1 9 7 8 , pis. 68-69) •
T h e fifth type of structure is represented by oval struc tures near Gebel Gunna (sites 2 5 , 50, and 100), investigated by Ofer Bar-Yosef and others in Sinai (see figure 2.d), which also appear to be EB II (or III?) in date and which the in vestigators propose may derive from die indigenous popu lation of Sinai (Bar-Yosef et al., 1986, pp. 1 6 4 - 1 6 5 ) . In gen eral, these structures take the pattern of subrectangular to oval to subrounded courtyards—distinguished by ashes and quantities of animal dung (?)—with one or two small at tached oval sleeping chambers (?). Usually, there were other unattached small, rounded to subrounded sleeping cham bers in the vicinity. Even smaller circular installations (x = 1.4 sq m, SD = 0.6 sq m, n. = 3) were considered storage facilities (see table 1 ) , sometimes clustered within a larger oval structure (Bar-Yosef et al., 1986, figs. 4 - 6 ) . T h e enclo sures ranged from about 35 sq m to about 1 2 9 sq m (x = 62 sq m, SD = 40 sq m), while the sleeping chambers ranged from 5.6 sq m to 16.6 sq m (x = 1 0 sq m, SD = 3.4 sq m, n = 11). In the later EB II and die ensuing EB III periods, it ap pears that an additional room or rooms were frequently added to the plan, often secondarily. Houses are not sunken at sites like Tell el-Far'ah (North) and Tel Yarmut and are typically much more closely packed and forced into irregular spaces. [See Far'ah, Tell el- (North); Yarmut, Tel.] Often they make up sprawling insulae, altiiough, where details are clearer, the individual houses seem to remain discrete, al lowing die inference that the nuclear family was still the ba sic unit of society. Internal courtyards are recognizable, off of which living rooms may open (e.g., Loud, 1948, fig. 302; Miroschedji, 1988). One variant (EB II, rooms 6 2 2 - 6 1 2 , 629-623-624, de Vaux, 1 9 6 1 , pi. 34; EB III, rooms 206, 208, 2 1 3 , Miroschedji, 1988, pi. 9) has a centrally columned room or rooms (rooms 6 1 2 , 623, and 208 are 24.5 sq m, 1 7 . 1 sq m, and 8.4 sq m, respectively; x = 16.7 sq m, SD = 8.1 sq m, n = 3; see table 1 ) directly behind a front broad room or courtyard (see figure 3.e). Room 206 could easily have been roofed over, although it is very shallow and has too many entrances to be considered a living room. While it is possible that these were living rooms, it is more probable that the living room was then on die second story, much as in the later Syrian house models (e.g., figure 5.1), which feature a second story on the rear half to tiiird of the house length— the best dated examples are all Late Bronze (Margueron, 1976, pp. 2 1 3 - 2 2 7 ) . At 8.4 sq m, the posited Tel Yarmut second floor seems too small to serve its expected livingroom function, unless the rearmost wall, 284, is taken as the expanded house's back wall (making the room about 1 5 sq
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses m). Presumably, the invasive and ill-published Khirbet Kerak culture brought its own exotic architecmral traditions with it, as is evidenced in the great granary at Khirbet Kerak/ Beth-Yerah (Hestrin, 1 9 7 5 , p. 2 5 8 ) , but these remain ob scure. [See Beth-Yerah.] M B I/EB IV. With the collapse of nucleated occupation in Palestine and much of Syria, caves and, presumably, tents or other impermanent structures became the norm. Begin ning early in EB IV and lasting throughout the later EB IV/ M B I (henceforth M B I), in winter encampments scattered across the Negev, small, round stone huts, plastered on the interior and almost certainly on the exterior, with stone-andplaster roofs, were the norm (see figure 2.e). T h e roofing was ingenious and suited to the windswept nature of the locale: locally abundant, flat chalk slabs were held together with marly clay plaster and set on a low-pitched frame of locally available tamarisk roofing beams radiating out from one or more central pillars. T h e pillars were often con structed of more than one stone; composite pillars were held in place by compression from the weight of the roofing stones and plaster (Cohen andDever, 1 9 8 1 , fig. 7). It seems likely that these utilitarian sttuctures were smaller and rounder simplifications of the curvilinear EB II hut. There was earlier EB II occupation at Be'er Resisim and at nearby site 126 (Cohen andDever, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 64, 7 2 - 7 3 ) . [SeeBe'er Resisim.] M B I structures at Be'er Resisim were not ar ranged around large open spaces, but in short ragged rows and clumps. T h e rows mostly face northeast, east, and southeast (fifteen out of 20 appear in Cohen and Dever, 1979, fig. 6; they are partly illusuated in figure 2.e), and south (four examples), away from the prevailing westerly winds (one example does face west). With diameters be tween 3 and 4 m (9.4-12.6 sq m ) , a maximum interior height of about 1.8 m (Cohen and Dever 1 9 8 1 , p. 6 1 , figs. 4 - 5 , 7 - 8 ) , sloping downward to 1.5 m or less at the exterior walls, and with the only intact doorway being .4 m wide and .55 m high, they were too small and cramped to be more than shepherds' camps or sleeping chambers (Cohen and Dever, 979)P- 5 1 ; D e v e r 1 9 8 5 , p. 1 9 ) . Presumably, the inhabitants were, as in some contemporary pastoralist societies, young boys and older men, rather than family groups (Dever, 1985, p. 2 1 ; n. 1 4 interprets the evidence to reflect polygynous family groupings). T h e dimorphic forms of EB II houses, both round and rectilinear, versus the totally opposite characteristics of EB II—III town sites (all rectilinear) and MB I campsites (all curvilinear), may help to understand the early EB IV and M B I. Against the vast majority of round-chambered shaft tombs characteristics of the developed Palestinian MB I, the earliest northern culture's shaft tombs at Megiddo (Dever, 1980, fig. 1 ) were strictiy rectilinear, an architectural state ment somewhat more weakly echoed by the same cultural group in the Northern Cemetery at Beth-Shean (Oren, 1973a, n. 1 3 ; 1 9 7 3 b , p. 1 6 [tomb 2 2 7 ] , fig. 7; p. 24). A t H a r Z
3
101
Yeroham, in the central Negev highlands, a densely built settlement bounded by a relatively inconsequential rectilin ear stone fence contained "various workshops—square structures built up against the stone fence . . . and a [lightly built, rectilinear] public building with large rooms. . . . The numerous grindstones and querns, flint scrapers, and sickles found on the site indicate that seasonal agriculture was prac ticed nearby, probably in die adjacent Yeroham basin, which has a high water table. Two animal figurines, unique for this period, one of clay and one of stone, were found near a pottery kiln which still had a Middle Bronze Age I vessel inside it" (Kochavi, 1978, p. 1 2 1 9 ) . This settlement was succeeded by one with round structures and animal pens. Little can be said for the affinities of the plans, but the sequence should be noted: from early multiroom rectilinear structures with workshops, animal figurines, and agricul tural implements, to later round structures with large animal pens. Also, while animal figurines may be rare in MB I con texts, they abound in Chalcolithic, EB, and Iron Age con texts, all periods dominated by sedentarized horticulture and/or intensive agriculture—in each case significantly buffered from risk by the individual ownership of small household flocks. Late in MB I, a reverse movement can be seen: straggling rectilinear mud-brick buildings with small, irregular rooms and walls only one brick tiiick reappeared at Jericho (Kenyon, 1970, pp. 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 , fig. 29), after an extended period in which the site was occupied by people using typical late M B I pottery but who left no visible structures. [See Jericho.] Such an oscillation from substantial rectilinear houses (with family and work-group values reflected in the multiple burial tombs of the EB I—III) to easily built round and imperma nent habitation (with family and work-group values re flected in the single and, rarely, double-burial MB I shaft tombs) and back to permanent rectilinear architecture (with renewed family vaults in M B II) may reasonably be corre lated with an oscillation from sedentary family-based agri culture (EB I—III) to pastoralism (MB I) and back again (MB IIA) to a renewed emphasis upon sedentism, intensive agriculture, and the family (LaBianca, 1990, pp. 3 3 - 4 9 ) . At Jericho, die new movement may involve late "Jerichoan M B I " elements returning to sedentary agriculturalism under the influence of incoming MB IIA agriculturalists. On the basis of data normally consulted, MB I would seem to represent die last gasp of a long period of curvilinear houses stretching back through the early Beersheba culmre to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. However, fardier afield other data are discovered, such as the one-room round, "tempo rary" structures and the one- to several-room rectilinear "farmhouses" found in the Negev from the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods (Haiman, 1995). There are averages of room sizes for the excavator's two farm groups: the mean for group 1 being 2 1 sq m (n = 19) and for group 2 , 22 sq m (n = 2 5 ) ; the standard deviation cannot be calculated
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HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
from the data (Haiman, 1995, tables 1, 2). While the notion of independent invention may be posited for each new man ifestation of the circular form, following intervals character ized by rectangular houses, it seems better to hypothesize tiiat groups of people using round structures, perhaps often in less durable materials, persisted throughout the prehis toric and historic periods at the margins of "civilized" sed entary societies and served as a reservoir for the various technologies required for survival during periods of societal collapse (Tainter, 1988). Middle Bronze II: Palestine. Despite restored plans from Tell Beit Mirsim (see figures 4.0, d, g, h) and elite houses at Megiddo (see figures 4.e, f), relatively little was known about housing in the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Ages prior to Michele Daviau's pioneering study of domes tic activity areas (Davian, 1993). Most Palestinian specialists seem to agree that the standard MB-LB house form is based on a courtyard with single-story rooms on one or two sides. This is not true for two of die three Tell Beit Mirsim ex amples, however. Largely on the basis of debris analysis, William Foxwell Albright maintained from the start that the palatial mud-brick stratum D house (MB IIC), witii its 6meter-wide courtyard (see figure 4.g), was two storied (Al bright, 1938, pp. 3 5 - 3 9 ) . If the second story was confined to just the nearly square western block, in the pattern of the (mostly—or all?—LB) Syrian model houses, that floor would have had an enclosed area of some 42.5 sq m, without its internal walls—enough for a living room, a small kitchen, and an upper storeroom. It seems more plausible tiiat the entire building, without the courtyard, was two-storied (Daviau, 1993, p. 1 5 7 ) . T h e M B IIA stratum G house (see figure 4-b) had a columned room (room 1, probably without a porticoed courtyard) about 37 sq m in area. However, the lack of an entry hall, and the twin facts tiiat the side rooms are all under 1 2 sq m and all face into room 1, speak against the ground floor being the family's living space. The line of column bases reduces the overall free span of room 1 from 4.5 m to free spans of less titan 2.5 m—well under the freespan widths of the three small rooms (2.9, 3 . 1 , and 3.2 m, respectively). The peculiar broken wall line near the north ern end of room 1—if not a digging or planning mistake— may be construed as part of the foundation for the staircase. Given the ethnographic data, die small rooms most reason ably can be seen as storerooms (and as an excellent basis for a second story), with the large room serving for daytime work space and overnight and storm shelter for the sheep and goat herd. Having proposed this, it is significant tiiat in the entire body of MB II-LB II housing Daviau reviewed, no formal facilities for housing large animals (horses, don keys, cows) could be identified (Daviau, 1993, pp. 4 5 5 456—except for the LB Tablet Building at Tell Hadidi (see below). [See Hadidi, Tell] A second story, erected only over the smaller rooms, could have had an overall area of some 40 sq m, without the internal walls—more than enough for
a living room and kitchen, or even for a living room, small kitchen, and small storeroom, with a means of exiting to the expansive roof over the pillared hall. This is, however, not the only possible reconstruction and is probably less desir able than a full second story. The pillared stratum E buildings ( S E 2 - 1 2 , S E 3 - 1 3 ) at Tell Beit Mirsim (see figure 4.d; Albright, 1938, paragraphs 39, 46-47, pis. 5 0 - 5 1 ) appear to be entirely two-storied (for staircases, see below). Albright, however, cites persuasive evidence for a radical change in plan from stratum E (MB IIB) to stratum D (MB IIC): from a previously wholly roofed structure (figure 4.d) to one only partially roofed— a courtyard building (see figure 4.I1). Accepting this inter pretation for Tell Beit Mirsim (at Megiddo, this change seems to have happened early in MB IIB; see below), in stratum D a relatively large courtyard bounded by two small rooms to the west and one large room (about 7 . 1 4 X 3.33 = 23.8 sq m) to the south are seen for the first time. Given the density of building in this area and the thickness of the walls, it is probable that at least the north end of the eastern house, and perhaps the south end as well, was two-storied. Stairways in both periods seem to be concentrated at the northwest corner of die eastern building: there is a descend ing staircase in the western house shown on the stratum E plan (see figure 4.d) in S.iD (Albright, 1938, pi. 50). This is a strong argument for the roofed character of this space. The overly thick ascending western "wall" exterior to the building shown in figure 4.I1 is also probably a staircase (lo cus 2, on the stratum D plan (Albright, 1938, pi. 5 1 ) . At urbanized Jericho, the density and small room size of the M B II ( = M B IIB-C) houses (Kenyon, i960, pp. 1 8 7 188, fig. 45) supports Kathleen M. Kenyon's early judgment that the ground floor was given over to die economic do main—whether storage or shops—with the "upper storey rooms . . . as today, providing] the living accommodation" (i960, p. 1 8 7 ) . As given, the plans do allow for buildings with 4-X -4-5-meter corner rooms, which may or may not be courtyards, witii a double range of rooms on one or two sides (see Daviau's extended analysis in favor of roofed space: 1993, pp. 2 1 3 - 2 1 8 , and LB II Ugarit, below). Me giddo, area BB, stratum XII (Loud, 1948, fig. 398, N 1 4 O 1 4 ; see figure 4.1) appears similar to the less-complete Jer icho plans. Two houses, each witii four rooms on two sides of a larger space, seem fairly secure. Anything else on the plan is problematic, although the pattern seems to repeat itself with variations. The eight small rooms average 1.9 m of free span across their narrow dimension (SD = 0.4 m), and the two larger rooms/courtyards average just a little un der 4 m in their narrow dimensions (see LB II Ugaritic be low). The largest small rooms in each house are about 5.1 sq m and 7.6 sq m, and the two large rooms/courtyards are about 1 5 sq m and 20 sq m, respectively. As at Jericho, ad equate living rooms and a kitchen could be fitted in, utilizing the space above just the small rooms, without roofing the
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
HOUSE: SYRO-PALESTINIAN, Figure 4. Middle Bronze Age II houses, (a) Tell Bi'a, courtyard house with rooms on three sides of the courtyard (after Herbordt et al., 1982); (b) Tell Beit Mirsim stratum G, MB IIA house with rooms to one (?) side of a large hall (after Albright, 1 9 3 8 , pi. 56); (c) Halawa, a MB II insula of two and diree-room houses of Hittite style (cf. figure 6) (after Meyer and Orthmann, 1989); (d) Tell Beit Mirsim stratum E, MB TIB houses with pillared halls (after Albright, 1938 pi, 50); (e) Megiddo statum XII, MB IIB buildings in area AA (after Loud, 1948, fig. 378b); (f) Megiddo area BB, su-atum XII, MB IIB houses with rooms on two adjacent sides of a courtyard (after Loud, 1948, fig. 398); (g) Tell Beit Mirsim stratum D, MB IIC multistoried building with courtyard to one side (after Albright, 1938, pi 55); (h) Tell Beit Mirsim stratum D, MB IIC version of one of the houses in (c) above, with rooms on three sides of a courtyard (after Albright, 1938, pi. 5 1 ) ; (i) Hazor MB IIC house 6205, from Hazor area C, stratum 3 (after Yadin et al., i960, pi. 207). (Courtesy J. S. Holladay)
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larger spaces. A more satisfactory plan would have involved a complete second story. Aside from the fact that the buildings are a complex insula in style, it is difficult to make much out of the Tell Nagila plans (Amiran and Eitan, 1965, fig. 3; cf. Amiran and Eitan, 1977, p. 895). Because "in some cases a flight of several steps leads down to the house from the street" (Amiran and Eitan, 1977, p. 895) without a mention of drains, fully roofed construction (and a raised threshold) must be argued. The broadest free spans shown are consistentiy under 4 m. Using the excavators' evaluation, the typical house consisted of "one or two small rooms (averaging 2 by 3 meters), opening onto a courtyard (averaging 3 by 5 meters)" Amiran and Eitan, 1977, p. 895). Pillar bases are mentioned, as are paved floors. One large silo, in its own space, is shown. Because the "rooms" are said to average 6 sq m—small even for storerooms or stables—only the "courtyard" (or the space above it) would have been sufficiently large for anything even approaching the average ethnographically documented living room. Given the compact insula plan, and the evi dence for pillars, the buildings were probably two-storied, with the usual low first story, despite tire relative thinness of tire walls. (See Netzer, 1992, pp. 2 0 - 2 1 . ) Similar consider ations govern any ethnographically aware interpretation of the three large, ill-preserved buildings in area AA, stratum XII (MB IIB) at Megiddo (cf. Ben-Dov, 1992, p. 1 0 1 , and Loud, 1948, p. 1 3 , fig. 23; see figure 4.e; and see Loud, 1948, fig. 378b), and a same-period building at Beth-Shemesh (Grant and Wright, 1939, p. 28, fig. 2 ) . [See Beth-Shemesh.] What does seem common to all these units is that the ground floor, and presumably the second story, was regularly fronted by a large room, with one to three or more smaller rooms arrayed behind it. MB IIC house 6205 from Hazor, area C, stratum 3 (see figure 4,i) illustrates a variant well attested in LB Syria— although, on this evidence, originating in the Middle Bronze Age (Yadin et a l , i960, pi. 207). The house has rooms on either side of a "courtyard," and the parallelism is complete even to die detail of entering through a small entry room (cf. figure S.d). The small rooms range from just over 4 to about 9.3 sq m (x = 6.5 sq m, SD = 2.4 sq m); the "court yard" is 28 sq m. Suitable space for a living room can only be attained by positing a two-story plan. If the "courtyard" space were left open (about 4 m of free span), the two re sulting spaces would be about 1 5 . 5 sq m and 22 sq m, with out the internal walls. Considering the problems inherent in having two separate second stories in one house, it seems better to posit a complete second story, with a wooden stair case probably ascending along the northeastern side of the southwest room. Middle Bronze II: Syria. The many two- and threeroomed houses in M B II stratum 2 at Tell Halawa (see figure 4.C; Meyer and Orthmann, 1989, pp. 2 0 - 3 3 ) , treated a r e
below (see section "Hittite houses"). Other M B II houses are poorly attested in Syria, but the next to the latest M B II building phase on mound E at Tel Bi'a (Herbordt et al. 1982) yielded one example of a strongly built house all of whose walls are more than 1 m wide (see figure 4.a). This is already in the mode of later Syrian houses, albeit of a variant posited for, but not yet attested in LB Syria: the courtyard house with "rooms on three. . . sides" (see below; Herbordt et a l , 1982, fig. 8). Entry appears to be through a relatively large room with the usual bent axis and staircase near at hand in what most surely is an open courtyard (free span = 5.5-5.75 m). The shortest free spans for the various rooms are 3.5, 2.6, and 2.6 m. Room 6 would be wider but probably utilizes a wide, slightly off-center pilaster for a compound bearing beam (of costly cedar), which would re duce the resultant north-south free spans to less than 2 m. The respective room sizes are 1 7 . 2 , 18.4, 2 1 . 4 , and 1 5 . 2 sq m (x = 1 8 . 1 sq m, SD = 2.6 sq m, on average larger than any other house in the present study). Late Bronze Age. Despite data from Megiddo, Hazor, and Tell el- Ajjul (Daviau, 1993, 2 1 9 - 2 9 9 ) and an appar ently unique, for Palestine, LB IIA house at Tel Batash/ Timnah (Kelm and Mazar, 1982, figs. 8 - 1 0 ; see figure 5 m ) , firm conclusions about house form are hard to reach. [See 'Ajjul, Tell el-; Batash, Tel.] It will help, therefore, first to examine tire extensive data from Syria, which show a broad diversity of forms. Figure 5.a illustrates just one portion of a complex insula from Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit: three closely intertwined, but functionally separate houses (A-C) (Yon et al, 1987). [See Ugarit.] Marguerite Yon comments on the processes that yielded this particular configuration: " T h e city blocks [insulae] . . . are divided into living units (houses) closely linked witii one another and imbricated, so that not one of them alone constitutes an autonomous ar chitectural unit. That is why the interior partitions have changed over the course of the history of each block [insula], according to inheritances and sales: it was sufficientto pierce a hole or board up a doorway to modify the size or the ori entation of a house" (Yon, 1992, p. 704). Yon summarizes the organization of the typical house: "In the ground plan, access to the street is from a vestibule whence the interior traffic patterns branch out, horizontally by the doorways and vertically by a staircase, the first flight of which is of stone. One area is reserved for domestic activities, recognizable from culinary utensils (stone, ceramic, bone), another per haps for the treatment of textiles, and another area for stor age, with jars and sunken silos. T h e living quarters on the next floor up must be reconstructed. Fairly frequently, a separate area, with its own entrance but linked to the rest of the house, housed a family tomb. These private homes abut ted industrial establishments [e.g., oil presses, jewelry, or figurine workshops]" (Yon, 1992, p. 7 0 5 ) . Their eighteen rooms range from 1.6 to 23.7 sq m, with a mean of 1 1 . 2 sq c
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses m (SD = 6.3 sq m). T h e free spans on the narrowest axes range from 1 to 3.6 m (x = 2.7 m, SD = .9 m), with nine of them grouped between 3 and 3.6 m. Only die widest free span—a space of 4 X 4.2 m—seems to belong to an open court (piece 1 2 6 5 , see Yon, 1 9 9 2 , pi. I). Given that these are relatively rich households in a region where cedar should have been easily obtained, it is notable that the covered free spans seem to peak in the range of 3.5-3.6 m (four out of the top eight widths). This seems to constitute relatively strong—though not absolute—grounds for ruling out free spans approaching or exceeding 4 m in areas such as ancient Palestine. On the other hand, many large spaces in MB and LB Palestinian houses seem to be governed by a 4-meter standard, suggesting that spans of this length were possible, but not ones of, say, 4.25 m or more. Two points need emphasizing: in die densely packed, long-lived urban environment, most houses have a func tional plan, but not necessarily a fixed architectural form; and LB (and presumably earlier) urban houses are typically multistoried, with no living quarters on their ground floors. T h e differential deposition of fine objects in the debris of collapse strongly indicates that domestic quarters were on the second (or higher) floors. These insights help to under stand not only ill-defined plans from, say, Alalakh, but also from such urban Palestinian sites as Hazor, Megiddo, and Tell el-'Ajjul. [See Alalakh.] Standard MB-LB house type. In the less urbanized set ting of the Middle Euphrates River, a variety of house forms can be distinguished (see esp. Meijer, 1989). [See Euphra tes,] As already noted, versions of what can be termed stan dard already appear in die Middle Bronze Age in both Syria and Palestine and will also appear in the Palestinian Iron I and II. Its fullest expression can be seen in the more broadly excavated LB strata of the Middle Euphrates, particularly at the long-standing excavations at Tell Munbaqat (Machule et a l , 1992, fig. 14; 1 9 9 3 , fig. 1 2 ) . T h e most common variants of this type are characterized by rooms on one side of a large hall (see figure 5.b,c; cf. figure 4.b,g) or rooms on two opposing sides of such a hall (see figure 5.d; cf. figures 4.i, 7.C) A third alternative has rooms along one long side and an adjacent short side (see figure 5.e; cf. figure 4.1). A fourtii variety has rooms on three or even four sides (cf. figures 4.a; 7.a, b, d; 8.a, b). In LB, Syrian, the partition walls defining these rooms are simple: they are either straight segments, L-shaped, or T-shaped. Short doorjams, proba bly associated with bars to lock the exterior door appear at the house entrance, occasionally at the entrance to the cen tral court, and only rarely elsewhere (Watson, 1979, pi. 5.4). As in the Israelite three- and four-room houses, these large areas/courts/halls are almost surely roofed, as the stairs make clear. In smaller, simpler houses, the entrance leads directiy into the large hall; in larger, more complex houses, the en trance characteristically lets into a small entry hall that, in
105
turn, leads into die large hall. In enough examples to estab lish the general pattern, stairways are directly at hand upon entering the larger hall (figures 5:a-c, e, h-j). Examples without stone stairways undoubtedly had wooden stairways (Margueron, 1980, p. 2 9 3 ) . It is historically, socially, and economically significant that these buildings have unmistak able descendants in Iron II Philistia and Israel (Holladay, 1995, PP- 3 8 2 - 3 8 5 ) .
Palestinian houses. If die Tell Beit Mirsim LB house selected for publication (Albright, 1938, pi. 56, cf. pi. 52) is correctly reconstructed, house forms current in Megiddo stratum XII (MB IIB, cf. figure 4.f) persisted into late LB II Palestine, as they did in Syria (see figure 5.e). This as sessment would be in keeping with contemporary scholarly views of die relationship of the Late Bronze to the Middle Bronze Age (cultural continuity, not discontinuity). Some curious materials from Hazor, area C, stratum i B , reflect a foreign presence and are treated below (see section "Hittite houses"). The plan of area F, stratum i B , at Hazor resem bles a rabbit warren, with entrances at both the northern and southern ends and multiple branching entrances from the south (see figure 5.k; Yadin et al. i960, pi. 2 1 0 ) . In part, different construction may have been conflated into a singlephase plan. At least one, and perhaps two staircases may be posited, but no discrete house emerges without violence to the plans as published. Viewed as a whole, these remains may represent a version of complex multigenerational in heritance and sale parcels on die order of Yon's interpre tation of the Ugaritic insula shown in figure 5.a—the whole being ultimately based upon tiiree or four instances of the standard house variant having rooms on three sides. An incomplete LB II insula house from Ashdod, area B (figure 5 . 1 ) , not yet fully published (Dothan, 1975, p. 108), bears a surprising resemblance to what was published as a late Iron II house from area D at Ashdod (cf. figures s.m and 5 . 1 ) (Dothan, 1 9 7 1 , plan 8, building 1 ) . [See Ashdod.] Given that intrusive (!) Late Iron II materials (mostiy burials from locus 1 1 1 4 ) form the bulk of the local stratum 3b pub lication from the building, it seems more tiian possible that building 1 (and probably buildings 2 and 3 as well) should also be dated to LB II. In area B, building 1 covers an area of about 1 6 7 m and may have had two courtyards. Even those were probably covered, the greatest free span being on the order of 3.8 m. Overall, the narrowest dimension ranged from 1.6-3.8 m, averaging 2 m (SD = 0.6 m). Not including the paved entry hall(?), which is 2.5 m wide, or die largest space, the other measurable rooms (n = 7) ranged from 4.8 to 14.9 sq m, averaging 8.2 sq m (SD = 4.5 sq m ) . The large courtyard(?) 1 1 0 7 and 1 1 0 8 , without the reconstructed entry hall and stairs, has only 27.2 sq m of free space, while the next largest room (or smaller court yard), 1 1 5 6 , is only 14.9 sq m (Dothan, 1 9 7 1 , p. 89a). In other words, for a house of this size, the assumed two living
106
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses rooms will have to be looked for above the ground floor— at least for one, and most probably for both. Ancestors of the Israelite four-room house? A second major style, derivative of the LB house series, is clearly an cestral to the typical Israelite four-room house. Typologically, spatially, and temporally removed from any known Israelite houses, it seems to have gone largely unrecognized to date. It is a variant on the standard Palestinian/Syrian M B II-LB II type with a center hall and opposing sets of smaller rooms. In the new type, an extra room may be added at the end opposite the entryway and stairs, but, more signifi cantly, one of the long side rooms is converted to a stable through tire use of pillars, the flagging or cobbling of floors, and the addition of bench-style mangers (see figures 5.g-i). T h e hypothetical reconstruction of figure 5.J shows a stan dard house similar to figure s.d similarly modified, with a central exterior doorway (as in figure 5.g) and an added shallow broad room at the far end. T h e latter illustrates the one small step required for full conformity with the later standard Israelite house form. This stabled dwelling is un common at Tell Munbaqat, and it probably was equally un-
HOUSE: SYRO-PALESTINIAN. Figures. Late Bronze Age houses,
(a)
Part of a complex insula from Ras Shamra-Ugarit, with three dis tinct "houses," A-C (after Yon et al., 1987, pi. 1 ) ; (b-c) Tell Mun baqat, houses with small rooms on one side of a large roofed hall, cf. the location of the staircase in (c) (after Machule et al., 1993, figs. 1 2 and 1 8 , houses L, O, and T); (d) Tell Munbaqat, house with rooms on opposite sides of a large hall (after Machule et al., 1993; fig. 1 8 , house D); (e) Tell Munbaqat, house with rooms on two adjacent sides of a large hall (after Machule et al., 1993), fig. 1 8 , house E); (f) Tell 'Atchana-Alalakh, model house (after Woolley, 195S, pi. 9b; cf. Margueron, 1976, pp. 2 1 3 - 2 2 7 ) ; (g-h) Syrian houses incorporating pillared stables witii hardened standings (= "Proto-Israelite"?) (after Machule et al, 1992, fig. 14, house S, and 1 9 9 3 , % . 1 2 , house Z); (i) as (g-h) above, Tell Hadidi, "Tablet Building" and its northern counterpart (after Dornemann, 1 9 8 1 , fig. 2); (j) hypothetical alteration of a LB II house plan from Tell Munbaqat (after Machule et al. 1992, fig. 1 4 , house B ) , incorpo rating a pillared, hardened stable area and a transverse "rear room" (top), to illustrate the very slight distance between some LB II houses at Tell Munbaqat and the typical Israelite four-room house; (k) Hazor, LB II, an ill-defined, multi-accessed building complex of area F, stratum iB (after Yadin et al., i960, pi. 2 1 0 ) , possibly witnessing to long-term multiple hereditary/sale ownership result ing in a "common" first story with various living rooms on the second story (see text); ( 1 ) Ashdod insula-type house (after Do than, 1 9 7 5 , p. 108); (m) Ashdod insula-type house attributed to the late Iron II period, but probably to be dated to the Late Bronze II period (see text; after Dothan, 1 9 7 1 , plan 8, building 1 ) ; (11) Tell Batash-Timnah, LB IIA pillared house 3 4 1 , with hardened stand ings and probable mangers (cf. (g) above; after Kelm and Mazar, 1982, figs. 8 - 1 0 ) . (Courtesy J. S. Holladay)
107
common at Tell Hadidi. However, its double presence at two separate sites points to its integrity as a distinct type, probably economically, ethnically, or socially determined. Because, conttary to those in the typical Israelite house, all the stables so far discovered are deep enough for horses (i.e., they range from 3.4 to 3.2 m at Tell Hadidi [figure 5.1] to 3.7-4.0 m [figure 5,g] and 3.3-3.6 m [figure 5.I1] at Mun baqat). T h e average depth for thirteen ancient horse stables is 3.18 m [± 0 . 3 1 ] . T h e houses may be those of maryanii (Akk., "charioteers"). [See Chariots.] The plan may, how ever, also suit a trader (housing pack donkeys—altiiough the stalls are much deeper than would be necessary). Generic agriculturalists (housing traction animals) seem ruled out on the grounds that most of the residents of Munbaqat and similar sites probably were agriculturalists and managed widiout stables in their houses. [See Stables.] Building 3 1 4 at Tel Batash/Timnah belongs to the late fourteenth century BCE (see figure 5-n), based on finds tiiat include Mycenaean and Base-Ring II wares (Kelm and Ma zar, 1982, pp. 9 - 1 3 , figs. 8 - 1 0 , 1 2 ) . It appears to be roughly contemporary with the Syrian buildings listed above and is characterized by standings hardened with flagstones and mangers, partly made of wood, toward the northern end of the eastern aisle at about 2.75 m deep. The depth of the standings is below ancient means for horse stables but is equal to Edwin Gunn's minimal specifications (Gunn, !935) • T h e pillars were of wood, set on flagstone bases. The upper part of the stairs were also made of wood. The ex cavators describe center and western aisles as floored with thick lime plaster (Kelm and Mazar, 1982, pp. 9, 1 1 ) . The semicircular floor-level manger presumably provided for the sheep and goats confined at night. T h e staircase, immedi ately before the outer doorway, and the debris from the sec ond-floor collapse mark the second floor as the residence of a wealthy important individual with widespread connec tions, as evidenced by five cylinder seals of widely diverse origins, including Mitanni and Cyprus, and two Egyptian scarabs. Inclusive of interior walls and the stairway, the lower floor covered 98 sq m, and, with thinner walls, the upper floor would have added up to more than 100 sq m— again inclusive of interior walls and the stairway area. Only two small storerooms were located on the lower floor— seemingly not enough to support an agriculturalist interpre tation of the owner's livelihood. In itself, this building, which may well have belonged to a trader or to a maryanu warrior (a curated arrowhead and javelin head[s?] as well as bronze mace heads and spearheads were recovered), goes far to ward establishing close connections between inland Syria and southern Palestine during the period of Egyptian im perialism in Palestine (Kelm and Mazar, 1982, fig. 1, p. 1 2 ) . [See Weapons and Warfare.] T h e Tell Munbaqat and Tell Hadidi exemplars (figures 5 .g—i), though considerably dif ferent, lessen the singularity of tiiis Palestinian example.
108
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
Hittite houses. As Jean-Claude Margueron (1980) has shown, the typical LB house form (see figures 6.c, f) at an cient Emar/Meskene, a site on the Middle Euphrates near Munbaqat and Tell Hadidi, is similar to the (local style) houses of die Old Assyrian colony at Kiiltepe/Kanes (see figure 6.a) and virtually identical to tiiose (see figure 6.b) from contemporary (fourteenth-thirteenth centuries BCE) Bogazkoy (Margueron, 1980, figs. 4 and 5). [See Emar; Kanes; Bogazkoy.] It is also, with a two-room variant, the prin cipal house form found at MB II Tell Halawa (Meyer and Orthmann, 1989, pp. 2 0 - 3 3 , fig. 6; see figure 4.C). Although it appears at many sites, the highly standardized plan is not that of Emar's immediate neighbors (Meijer, 1989, pp. 2 2 7 229). Margueron (1980) concludes that Emar was a Hittite colony but it is probably better understood as an enttepot of a widespread and well-connected Hittite trade diaspora (Curtin, 1984, esp. pp. 1 - 1 4 ) . This is not altogether unex pected, considering the role of the Hittites in the Levant in the late fourteentli-thirteenth centuries BCE (Roaf, 1990, pp. 3 7 3 9 ) and the perduring role of the Middle Euphrates in interarea trade (e.g., Dion, 1995, pp. 7 0 - 7 1 ) . More signifi cantly, it opens up vistas with respect to other Hittite karwwdike settlements (Akk., "community of merchants") in I
_ I
the suburbs of some major Hittite cities (Larsen, 1 9 7 6 ; Veenhof, 1972; Eidem, 1 9 9 1 ) . Significant with respect to this trade and its international significance are three clay Raucherbecken from Tell Halawa (Meyer and Orthmann, 1989, pp. 3 2 - 3 3 , fig. 1 4 ) and the fifteen caskets and three troughs from Emar (Margueron, 1982), that resemble Late Iron II and Persian-period lime stone and pottery cuboidal incense altars from North and South Arabia, Babylonia, Palestine, and Tell el-Maskhuta in the eastern Nile Delta (Stern, 1 9 7 3 ) . [See Altars; Delta; Maskhuta, Tell el-.] Because these altars virtually define the course of the incense trade during the Iron II through Hel lenistic periods, it seems highly probable that their MB and LB ceramic parallels stand in the same relationship to the Middle Euphrates trade in South Arabian aromatics during die second millennium BCE. Following the lead of Margueron (1980, figs. 6a-b, 7, 8), these Hittite settlements would include a large predecessor colony in stratum 2 at M B II Tell Halawa, isolated LB houses at Alalakh (stratum IV) and Hama (sttatum G I), an LB II quarter at Hazor (area C, stratum i A - B ; see below), and probably the port of Tell Abu Hawam stratum IV (see figure 6.d, e). [See Hama; Abu Hawam, Tell.] T o these may
0 S [ u
(ff'rawwn iJll|i3
b HOUSE: SYRO-PALESTINIAN. Figure 6. Hittite MB II and LB II houses, with similar Syrian and
Pal
estinian LB II exemplars (see also figure 4.0). (a) Typically Hittite MB IIA houses from the Old Assyrian
karum Kanes at Kiiltepe (after Margueron, 1980, fig. 5); (b) "deconstructed" LB II Hittite houses from Bogazkoy (after Margueron, 1980, fig. 5); (c) LB II houses from Meskene-Emar (after Mar gueron, 1980, fig. 1 ) ; (d) Tell Abu Hawam stramm IV houses (after Margueron, 1980, fig. 8); (e) LB II houses from area C, stratum iA-B at Hazor (after Yadin et al., i960 pi. 208, cf. (f) below); (f) a "deconstructed" block of houses from Meskene-Emar (after Margueron, 1980, fig. 2b). (Cour tesy J. S. Holladay)
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
109
be added a possible example from LB Tell Keisan (Niveau 9, squares J I I - K I i : Briend and Humbert, 1980, pi. 3 ) . It would not be surprising to find a few at Tell ed-Dab'a/ancient Avaris (cf. Holladay, n.d.; Holladay et a l , fortiicoming). [See Dab'a, Tell ed-.] A close study of Margueron's lone Hazor exemplar in its surroundings (1980; see figure 6.e) reveals other links widi the architecture of Emar (figure 6.f), suggesting tiiat this entire quarter, with its outlandish stele shrine, may be a substantive Hittite karum, complete with Hittite architecture and its own shrine. Egyptian houses. Recognition of Egyptian Amarnalike villas—which can be traced back to the twelfth dynasty—in the Levant must begin witii houses 1 5 0 0 (see figure 10.a) and 1700 at Beth-Shean (James, 1966, pp. 8 - 1 3 ) , together with their center-hall predecessors (James and McGovern, 1993, vol. i , pp. 4 - 5 , 2 7 - 5 6 ) . [See Amarna, Tell el-; Villa.] Unquestionably "domestic," they provide die lens through which the Tananir villas (Boling, 1 9 7 5 ; see figure io.b), the Amman Airport Temple (Herr, 1 9 8 3 ) , and the LB Egyptian governors' residencies (see Daviau, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 403-434) can be reassessed. [See Amman Airport Temple.] None betrays any significant body of cult trappings (charred human bones are not proof of cult performances). It seems likely tiiat die anomalous "mansion" (figure 10.c) at Tell Selenkahiye, on die Middle Euphrates, also fits tiiis pattern, rather dian that of the nascent bit-hilani. T h e mansion is dated to the twentysecond and twenty-first centuries BCE (Meijer, 1989, pp. 2 2 6 - 2 2 7 ) , but dates assigned to materials in northern Syria do not necessarily correlate with those in either Egypt, Pal estine, or Transjordan. I r o n Age: " C a n a a n i t e " a n d P h o e n i c i a n P l a n s . Aside from the early four- and three-room houses known from the central hill country and Galilee, very little is known about Iron I houses. At Tel Qiri, later walls left in place and digging into the spaces between them leaves too much responsibility to the restorer (Ben-Tor et al., 1987, pp. 9 8 99, photo 44). [See Qiri, Tel.] During die Early Iron II pe riod, in addition to large, somewhat unusual versions of typ ically Israelite houses, at Tel Masos a clearly trade-related version of the standard Syrian LB house (stratum II, area H, house 3 1 4 ) was found (Fritz and Kempinsld, 1983; Fritz and Wittstock, in Fritz and Kempinski, 1983, pp. 3 9 - 4 3 , plan 1 4 ) . In this case there are rooms on all four sides (cf. figures 5.e and 7.a). Entrance was tiirough a hall, as in the larger houses at Munbaqat (see above). A similar house (house 96)—probably belonging to a coppersmitii—was found in area A, stratum II (Kempinski et al., in Fritz and Kempinski, 1 9 8 3 , pp. 20—21, plans 3, 6). In both cases, the ground floor was given over to storerooms and work areas, probably in addition to providing overnight shelter to do mestic animals. T h e plan of the Phoenician fort at Horvat Rosh Zayit (Gal, 1992; see figure 7.b), more plausibly a fortified Phoe nician trader's residence, is essentially the same as the fore-
HOUSE: SYRO-PALESTINIAN. Figure 7.
"Canaanite"
or
"Phoeni
cian" houses with Late Bronze Age antecedents in Iron Age II Israeli
Judah. (a) Tell Masos area H, su-atum II house 3 1 4 (after Fritz and Wittstock, 1983, pp. 3 9 - 4 3 , plan 1 4 ) ; (b) "Phoenician Fort" or fortified trader's residence at Horvat Rosh Zayit (after Gal, 1992); (c) elite residence at Hazor (after Yadin et al„ i960, pi. 204); (d) "Northwest Tower" or governmental residence at Tell Beit Mirsim, from a late component of stratum A (after Albright, 1943, pi. 6); (e) Flazor stratum V, house 14, distinguished by a phoenicianizing cultic assemblage (after Yadin et al., i960, pi. 203). (Cour tesy J. S. Holladay)
going example, and, in view of the Phoenician contents of Tel Masos house 3 1 4 , probably affords a view of a typical tenth-century BCE Phoenician house plan. Somewhat later, three examples of a large version of the standard Syrian LB house with storerooms on two opposing sides of a hall are found in the elite quarter at Hazor, stratum VIII, area B. Two of the houses also included a stable area. The stables' pillars served to support the spanning timbers (cf. figures 4.b, d and 6.c). The respective free spans without the pillars are 4.5 m (house 3 1 0 0 ) and 5 m (house 3067/3235); with the pillars, the longest free spans are 2 m and 2.9 m. In the
110
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
absence of clear evidence, it is best to assume that die build ings were always pillared. While pillars and mangers are not shown in die featureless strata VIII-VI "courtyard" plans, some of the pillars and manger elements in each house are in fact founded below the claimed earlier—and unnaturally constant—floor levels, while others are higher. Over die 1 3 0 year-plus life of these buildings, some rebuilding must have occurred. House 3208 lacked the stables and had a free span of about 3.3 m. The much later northwest tower at Tell Beit Mirsim has a similar plan (see figure 7.d), although witii a rear room, an added side hall (both features modeled after late four-room houses), and the stable relocated to the hou se's forecourt. Free spans in the northwest tower's central hall ranged from 4 . 7 - 5 m, but a centered line of three large stones probably indicates a row of wooden pillars, reducing the required free spans to less than 2.5 m. A Phoenician probably lived in house 14 at Hazor in stra tum V (figure 7.e)—inferred by the anomalous benches and cult materials found in its innermost room (Yadin et a l , i960, pis. 57:22, 60:10). [See Cult.] The plan differs in sev eral respects from that of the preceding wineshops (build ings 14a and 1 1 1 ) , so it may contain "Phoenician" elements. In the absence of better information about Phoenician houses of tlie late eighth century BCE, it is difficult to be certain. Philistine houses. Two large stratum 5 C - A houses (Iron I, c. 1 1 2 5 - 1 0 5 0 BCE) at Gezer may be Philistine (see figures 8.a-b), but they share the common Syro-Palestinian plan of the standard M B - L B house with rooms on three sides (Dever et al., 1986). [See Gezer.] During the Late Iron II period, Tel Batash/Timnah presents a plan somewhat like an Israelite three-room house (see figure 8.c). However, the proportions—in particular the depth of the rear rooms—fall outside the ranges seen in Israelite and Judean houses. T h e plans of two late seventh-century BCE houses from Tel Miqne/Ekron further help to define this uniquely Philistine plan (figure 8.d). [See Miqne, Tel.] Babylonian (?) houses. Following the incorporation of Megiddo into the Assyrian provincial system, a new style of insula housing (figure 9.a), apparently opaque to the sorts of nuclear-family analyses afforded by die local Canaanite, Israelite (Stager 1985; Holladay, 1995, pp. 386-389), Syrian, Hittite, Phoenician, and (some) Philistine house forms, was introduced in strata III—II (Lamon and Shipton, 1939, pp. 62-74). A logical inference might be that these are some form of dwelling place based on social norms involving coresidence, presumably of the extended family—but, by vir tue of multiple lines of inheritance and sales or through, perhaps, temple housing projects (in the case of Megiddo, governmental housing projects) or an approximation of modern apartments or "cooperative" residences and con dominiums (Yon, 1992, p. 704; Stone, 1987, p. 76). Biblical materials (2 Kgs. 1 7 : 2 4 ) , the presence of Babylonian-styled grater bowls (Zertal, 1989), and a direct comparison of plans
with Babylonian house plans (figure g.b) all produce con verging lines of evidence pointing to a wholesale replace ment of native "Israelite" populations and forms of archi tecture witii Babylonian and Assyrian (figure g.c) forms. One of the smaller and best-preserved insulae is shown in figure 9.a. Locus 1490 and the large area north of locus 1466 were much larger than any otiier spaces and must be con sidered courtyards (roughly 61 and 44 sq m, respectively). Also, ignoring the three smallest areas, the average room size was 1 7 . 7 sq m (SD = 6.5 sq m, n = 1 1 ) , and the average length of the beams required (free span, not including bear ing lengths) was 2.53 m (SD = 0.27 m). Given virtually no information about the small finds or features other than bins (mangers), drains, ovens, and paved areas, it is difficult to arrive at useful conclusions about room usage or the need for a second story. There are some plan indications of pos sible staircases, however, and wall widths throughout appear adequate to the demands of a second story. Given die prev alence of required second stories in other periods and areas, it is reasonable to reconstruct these buildings as largely twostoried as well. Conclusions. There was considerable uniformity in do mestic architecture in antiquity across both Syria and Pal-
c
d
HOUSE: SYRO-PALESTINIAN. Figure 8. Philistine houses, Iron Age I
to II. (a-b) Two large stratum 5 C - A houses (Iron I, c. 1 1 2 5 - 1 0 5 0 BCE) at Gezer (after Dever et al., 1986) adapted from the typical Syro-Palestinian plan of the "standard" MB-LB house with rooms on three sides; (c) Tel Batash/Timnah, late Iron II, strata III—II, house 743, note location of stairway (after Kelm and Mazar, 1982, fig. 27); (d) Miqne-Ekron, two late seventh century BCE buildings, presumably houses with living quarters above and olive presses on the ground floor (after Gitin, 1989, fig. 2.3). (Courtesy J. S. Holladay)
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
111
Figure 9. Assyrian and Babylonian buildings in Israel/Judah, Iron Age II. (a) Megiddo sttatum III, small insula house, probably Babylonian, with two courtyards (after Lamon and Shipton, 1 9 3 9 , pp. 62-74, fig. 72); (b) part of a Neo-Babylonian insula from Ur (after Castel, 1992, pi. 4 ) ; (c) Megiddo stratum III, Neo-Assyrian palace-fort 1369 (after Lamon and Shipton, I939J fig. 89). The average free span is 4.2 m (SD = 0.3), that of the throne-room (bottom) is 5.4 m, perhaps nearing the practical limit of unsupported Cedar of Lebanon beams. (Courtesy J. S. Holladay) HOUSE: SYRO-PALESTINIAN.
estine, where a reasonably large body of data exists, as well as some diversity. T h e uniformity is particularly evident in the second millennium BCE, which has a great deal to say about shared perceptions and common cultural conven tions. Differences exhibited by foreign styles are equally ev ident. For die first time a network is seen along which a Hittite trade diaspora operated and, later, traces of Phoe
nicians operative within Israel and Judah. We also are given tantalizing glimpses into the ancestory of Israel's distinctive houses. Given the nature of sites uniformly selected for ar chaeological investigation (city mounds), it is not surprising that to find the space required for a suitable living room, probably averaging nearer 25 sq m than 20 sq m for most of the second and first millennia BCE, attention must system-
Figure 1 0 . Egyptian or egyptianizing villas, EB to Iron Age I. (a) BethShean, Iron I, stratum VI house 1500 (after James, 1966 p. 9); (b) Tananir, MB IIC building A (after Boling, 1 9 7 5 , fig. 2 ) ; (c) Tell Selenkahiya, late EB "Mansion" (after Meijer, 1977, p. 1 2 1 ) (Courtesy of J. S. Holladay) HOUSE: SYRO-PALESTINIAN.
112
HOUSE: Syro-Palestinian Houses
atically turn to the now-vanished second story. This points up one of the chief benefits of working out the present model. In effect, we have created a series of hypotheses for testing in future fieldwork. T o date we have almost com pletely ignored the evidence for mud-brick buildings' su perstructures. In particular, the practice of systematically shattering collapsed brickwork (originally pieces of floors, walls, ceilings, and roofs, all, one way or another, different in composition and conformation, and all with distinctive faces to their fragments) to powder in the process of "clear ing" stone foundations has resulted in the loss of informa tion we can obtain in no other way. Perhaps soon, surely later, all practicing archaeologists will recognize tiiat a clump of mud-bricky material is potentially as informative as a carved stone architectural fragment, and then we will begin patiently to piece together what has been regarded as lost beyond recall. While sufficient information is still lacking with which to reconstruct the domestic structures of Iron Age Syria and Lebanon, within the small territory of Israel, Judah, and the Philistine coast there is considerable diver sity, seemingly following ethnic (Philistines, Israelites) and socioeconomic lines (elite housing at Hazor, the northwest tower at Tell Beit Mirsim; the probable Canaanite/Phoenician houses at Tel Masos, Horvat Rosh Zayit, Hazor house 1 4 ) . This may be a reflection of political boundaries and ethnic/nationalist differentiation on the one hand, and trade, professional expertise, and international commerce on the other. Finally, when we begin to see and understand where people—families—of the distant past ate, slept, and stored their treasures and the work of their hands, we will also be gin, however imperfectiy, to recognize the bonds of com mon humanity that link their generations with ours. [See also Four-room House.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell, ed. The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim, vol.
2, The Bronze Age. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, 17. New Haven, 1938. Albright, William Foxwell, ed. The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim, vol.
3, The Iron Age. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, 2 1 - 2 2 . New Haven, 1943. Amiran, Ruth, and Avraham Eitan. "A Canaanite-Hyksos City at Tell el-Nagile." Archaeology 18 (1965): 1 1 3 - 1 2 3 .
Amiran, Ruth, and Avraham Eitan. "Nagila, Tel." In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 894-898. Je
rusalem, 1977. Amiran, Ruth, et al. Early Arad, vol. 1, The Chalcolithic Settlement and Early Bronze Age City, First-Fifth Seasons of Excavations, 1962-1966.
Jerusalem, 1978. Banning, E. B. "Houses, Compounds, and Mansions in the Prehistoric Near East." In People Who Lived in Big Houses: Archaeological Per
spectives on Large Domestic Structures, edited by Gary Coupland and
E. B. Banning, pp. 165-185. Madison, Wis., 1996. Bar-Yosef, Ofer et al. "Nawamis and Flabitation Sites near Gebel Gunna, Southern Sinai." Israel Exploration Journal 27 (1986): 1 2 1 167.
Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq. "A Pattern of Settlement in Southern Sinai and
Southern Canaan in the Third Millennium B.C." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 243 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 3 1 - 5 5 .
Ben-Dov, Meir. "Middle and Late Bronze Age Dwellings." In The Architecture ofAncient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods,
edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 99-104. Jeru salem, 1992. Bennett, Crystal-M. "Excavations at Buseirah, Southern Jordan, 1974: Fourth Preliminary Report." Levant 9 (1977): 1 - 1 0 . Ben-Tor, Amnon, et al. Tell Qiri, a Village in thejezreel
of the Archaeological Excavations, 1975-1978.
Valley: Report
Qedem, vol. 24. Jeru
salem, 1987. Ben-Tor, Amnon. "Early Bronze Age Dwellings and Installations." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian
Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 51-67. Jerusalem, 1992. Boling, Robert G. "Excavations at Tananir, 1968." In Report on Ar chaeological Work at Suwwaa.net, eth-Thamya,
Tananir, and Khirbet
Minha (Munhhata), edited by George M. Landes, pp. 25-85. Mis
soula, 1975. Braun, Eliot. "The Problem of the Apsidal House: New Aspects of Early Bronze I Domestic Architecture in Israel, Jordan, and Leba non." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 2 1 (1989): 1 - 4 3 .
Briend, Jacques, and Jean-Baptiste Humbert. Tell Keisan, Une cite phenicienne en Galilee, Fribourg and Paris, 1980.
1971-1976:
Campbell, Edward F. "Archaeological Reflections on Amos's Target." In Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology
in Honor of Philip J . King, edited by Michael David Coogan et al., pp. 32-52. Louisville, Ky., 1994. Castel, Corrine. Habitat Urbain Neo-Assyrien et Neo-Babylonien pace Bati. . . a Vespace vecu. Tomb 2. Paris, 1992.
de I'es-
Cohen, Rudolph, and William G. Dever. "Preliminary Report of the Second Season of the 'Central Negev Highlands Project.'" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 236 (1979): 4 1 - 6 0 ,
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Egyptian Houses Conforming to Near Eastern custom, the Egyptian house was traditionally oriented inward, excluding tire outer world and thus creating a climatic and social microcosm. The ap pearance of the exterior of the house was consequently of less concern to the Egyptian than the design of the interior. The furnishing of inner spaces had a greater representa tional value than the facade of the house, which was nor mally left undecorated. A minimum of openings (for ex ample, doors and windows) guaranteed the privacy of the inhabitants and protected the microclimate of the house from outside influences. Usually the house was completely enclosed by walls; only a single door or gate provided access to the interior. Enttance areas and corridors with frequent changes of direction often served to isolate farther sections
of the house. Rooms were generally organized around cen tral elements, either halls or interior courtyards. Such nuclei may—in the widest sense—be regarded as places of gath ering and the setting for communal activities. T h e numbet of central elements and their relationship to each other in dicate the social status and behavior of the inhabitants. Most rooms of the house were multifunctional; few spaces were exclusively dedicated to a specific defined purpose. T h e larger and the more architecturally organized a house was, however, die more functionally defined the spaces became. Apart from the various social, functional, and historical fac tors to be discussed below, the design of houses was influ enced by two environmental factors: building materials and climate. Building Materials. In ancient Egypt, domestic build ings were traditionally made of sun-dried mud brick. More than the conceptual significance of the perishable material, mud bricks were valued for thermodynamic properties that make them well suited to die Egyptian climate. M u d bricks were an economical choice because of the abundance of the raw material and the simple production methods. Stone was employed only for special architectural elements such as door frames and column bases; roofing beams, window frames, and grills, door wings, and column shafts were usu ally made of wood. Climate. The orientation and design of Egyptian houses generally incorporated two climatic factors—the sun and the cool north wind. T h e main rooms of the house were shielded from the direct rays of the sun by means of thick outer walls and the arrangement of the surrounding rooms. Windows and doorways were generally placed in positions that facil itated tire circulation of air into the house and between die rooms. The entrance to the private apartments, for example, was usually located to the nortii in order to allow the cool north wind to enter the house. On the roof above the bed room, a funnel-shaped wind trap directed the fresh air di rectly into the bed niche. A portico frequently shaded the doorway from the rays of the sun. House types varied according to era, social class, and lo cation. T h e principal distinction was the number of halls in the house. More complex designs were reserved for the pal aces of tire New Kingdom and the multistory town houses. Houses without Halls. The simplest houses did not have developed halls; small multifunctional chambers were more or less randomly clustered around open spaces or courts that primarily functioned as service areas. T h e basic design of these houses reflects simple, undifferentiated living arrange ments. Houses of this type have been found at several pre historic settlement sites including Merimde, Maadi, and Hierakonpolis. T h e typical farmhouse of the fourth millen nium BCE appears to have contained several isolated single room structures—either semisubterranean, oval mud con structions or rectangular wattle-and-daub huts—loosely ar-
HOUSE: Egyptian Houses ranged around yards enclosed by reed fences. In dynastic times, only members of the lowest social groups, such as unskilled laborers who were completely dependent on state institutions for their basic necessities, were sheltered in houses without developed halls. Consequentiy houses lack ing halls may be observed most frequently in orthogonally planned settlements. In Kahun, the pyramid city of Senusert II (twelfth dynasty), for example, more than half of the pop ulation was accommodated in standardized houses occu pying less than 75 sq m (807 sq. ft.). These houses were composed of small courts surrounded by several chambers. Small oven rooms next to the enttance appear to have been statutory at Kahun. Similar houses with an area of only 30 sq m are also found in tire orthogonally planned settlement of tire early Middle Kingdom at Tell ed-Dab'a. A special type of house lacking a developed hall is found in the mili tary fortresses of the Middle Kingdom, mainly in Nubia. A broad courtyard, used primarily as a service area, gives ac cess to several adjoining, individual, long chambers. Ex amples have been found witii two (Shalfak, Semna, Uron-
arti), four (Mirgissa) and five (Qasr el-Sagha) chambers. In the New Kingdom, the appearance of increasing luxuri ous houses leads to the general decline of dwellings without halls. Single-hall Houses. A hall, the meeting place of the do mestic community and a reception area for guests, was a fundamental requirement for economically and socially semi-independent households—that is, families headed by lower-ranking officials, priests, artisans, and other skilled workers employed by state institutions, as well as indepen dent farmers. The hall was the nucleus of tire private life of the household and as such served as a status symbol. Access to all other private rooms of the house, usually small, mul tifunctional chambers was provided by the hall. Large houses inhabited by extended households had several pri vate apartments, each with their own hall as the nucleus of a distinct unit. Apart from the private apartments, houses sometimes contained one or more entrance rooms or cor ridors, service areas, and various other additional chambers. T h e design of the house proper, comprising the hall and the
Private
Egyptian Houses. Figure 1. Single-hall houses at Lisht A 1.3; Right: New Kingdom house B 4.2. (Courtesy F. Arnold) HOUSE:
115
North.
Left: Middle Kingdom house
116
HOUSE: Egyptian Houses
surrounding private chambers, underwent a gradual devel opment during Egypt's long history. Single-hall houses of the Old Kingdom. Because the evidence for domestic buildings is particularly scarce in the Old Kingdom, it is not possible to define the characteristics of the single-hall house during this period. In the funerary complex of Queen Khentkaues at Giza, houses have been found witii halls distinguished by a niche at one end, an area possibly occupied by the chair of the master of the house. The private chambers surrounded the hall on all sides. Single-hall
houses
of the Middle
Kingdom.
In the
Middle Kingdom, the house proper had a characteristic bi partite layout that has become" known as the "snail house" (see figure ia). Typically, the hall was a long or nearly square chamber, sometimes with one or more columns. T h e walls were frequently painted, the upper portion in yellow, die lower in black, and the area between them in stripes of various colors. A door at one end of the side wall provided access to a single long chamber, a multifunctional private room. Additional smaller private chambers were sometimes accessible from the hall. The "snail house" was usually en tered from a courtyard, often partially roofed over, which was almost certainly considered part of the private apart ment and was the setting for various private and public ac tivities. In most Middle Kingdom houses, a small oven room was placed next to the entrance of the house. Although this room has been interpreted by some scholars as a household shrine, no confirmation exists. Single-hall houses of the New Kingdom. In houses of tire New Kingdom, well preserved at Amarna and Deir elMedineh, the hall was generally broad or nearly square (see figure ib). The walls, if painted, were usually white; a dec oration of garlands is sometimes found near the roof. A dais for tire chair of tire master of the house is frequently built against the back wall of the hall. Emplacements for the evap oration of water during the summer and fireplaces for warmth during the winter were common. The main private chambers were located behind the back wall; other rooms could be situated along the sides of the hall. Additional chambers were frequently located on a second story, acces sible by means of a staircase located next to the hall. Small shrines for household gods were sometimes found in the front portion of the house near the entrance. Multiple-hall Houses. Higher officials of the state in cluding die king not only had larger spatial needs, but also required rooms with more differentiated functions. Halls and private chambers with more specifically defined func tions have been distinguished, reflecting the higher social stauts of the occupants. In Kahun, for example, about 2.5 percent of the population—economically independent offi cials—inhabited houses with two or more multifunctional halls. Houses of the Middle Kingdom
with two halls.
The
hall of the bipartite "snail house" was divided into two sep-
i
I House Proper
Secondary Private Apartments of Dependents
HOUSE: Egyptian Houses. Figure 2. House of an official at Kahun.
(Courtesy F. Arnold) state, interconnected rooms, thus creating a tripartite pri vate apartment (see figure 2 ) . T h e central hall (H), usually die largest element of the tripartite unit, appears to have served as a private hall, the nucleus of the private apartment. The second hall ( H 2 ) , accessible both from the central (pri vate) hall and through a separate outside entrance, seems to have had a more public function. A dais for die chair of the master of the house and table stands have been found in such halls, indicating that guests were received and banquets held there. In houses of this size, the tiiird element of the tripartite unit, the private chamber, was frequently furnished with a niche in the back wall for the bed of the master, de fining the chamber as a bedroom ( C i ) . Additional chambers were usually accessible from the central private hall, some serving primarily as storerooms for private possessions, oth ers designated as bathrooms by their installations ( G 2 ) . Houses of the Middle
Kingdom
with three halls
(of
ficial residences). Some of the largest domestic buildings found in Egypt (the mansions at Kahun [see figure 2] and the official military residences in die fortresses of Buhen and Mirgissa in Nubia) have a third hall ( H 3 ) , sometimes con-
HOUSE: Egyptian Houses structed as a courtyard surrounded by various chambers. The dvird hall is usually accessible both from the private apartments—either through the second hall or from the front of the court—and direcdy from the outside of die house, from die street or from service areas. Evidence sug gests that die third hall served as an office for the master of
the house, where business was transacted and official audi ences were held. Houses
of the New
Kingdom
with
two halls
Granary
0
0
0
0
0
L_L J_L J_L M J_L
0
H 0
0
0 m
Cl C2
:
"CI C2
o H2
_ jL__ Garden
D
L-JL_i m
T
l
U
1.1 House Proper
Secondary Private Apartments of Dependents
HOUSE: Egyptian Houses. Figure 3, House of the general Ramose at Amarna (P
Arnold)
(the
"Amarna villa"). T h e functional requirements of the u p per class appear to have been different in the New Kingdom (see figure 3 ) . T h e central hall (H) with its high ceiling car-
n
0
117
(CourtesyF.
L
118
HOUSE CHURCHES
ried by tall wooden columns rose above the rest of the build ing. The step created by the different ceiling levels was used for die accommodation of windows. A second smaller hall (H2) was added to the private chambers surrounding the main hall (H). Like die central hall, the second hall was usually nearly square in shape, supplied witii a column, and often surrounded by small multifunctional chambers. A dais for the chair of the master of the house is found both in the central hall and in the second hall. Although the central hall was used for public functions, the second hall was a more intimate private hall for the household. The second hall was accessible both from the central hall and from the major chambers, but not from the outside. A separate connection between the second hall and die outside has been found only in die king's house at Amarna, the so-called window of ap pearances. As in the Middle Kingdom, houses with two halls usually have private chambers with specifically defined functions, including a bedroom with a narrow bed niche, a bathroom and storerooms. Bathrooms, separated from die toilet by a screen wall, were equipped widi two basins, one for washing and another for drainage. T h e villa was sur rounded by a large court filled with trees and plants; a water shaft was accessible by means of a spiral staircase. T h e com plex included groups of huge, beehive-shaped granaries, sta bles, workshops, and smaller buildings for family members and servants. A common feature at Amarna was a private open air shrine in a corner of the enclosure. Representational
palaces
of the New Kingdom.
The
representational royal palace forms a distinct category of do mestic buildings that were designed to meet special func tional requirements; these are known from the mortuary complexes of western Thebes and Memphis as well as from Amarna and Malkata. T h e palaces were characterized by their axial organization. A large outer hall, corresponding to the central hall of the private house, is distinguished from die more intimate interior hall by a dais for the royal tiirone. Private chambers, including the royal bedroom and bath room, were accessible only from the interior hall, not from the central outer hall. None of the palaces of this type served the ldng in his role as secular ruler of the country; the interior hall was therefore not an office, but a representational au dience hall. Multistory town houses. Clay models of the Middle Kingdom, wall paintings in Theban tombs of the New King dom, and stone models of the Ptolemaic period represent houses with three, perhaps even four stories. These struc tures were apparentiy town houses that expanded upwards because of the limited building space in crowded cities. As in modern Eastern buildings, the ground floor was used for artisans' installations and the high-roofed upper floors for residential purposes; the servants' quarters faced the street. The roof was surrounded by a parapet wall and served as another cooking and storage area. Higher floors were reached by steep staircases. Few traces of actual buildings
have survived from pharaonic times (for example a threestory house at Lisht). However, numerous town houses are exceptionally well preserved in Ptolemaic to Late Roman towns such as Karanis (Kom Aushim), Bacchias (Kom elQatl), and Soknopaiou Nesos (Dime), located in the Fai yum, and in Alexandria. Evidence from these settlements establish that four-story houses (including the vaulted cellar rooms) were quite common in cities of Egypt. Such huge, fortresslike buildings required extra thick walls, reinforced by cross beams and corners strengthened by stone masonry. The ten-twelve-meter-high houses occasionally resembled dwelling towers and were equipped with kitchens, toilets, and the necessary drainage systems; the rooms often con tained numerous, sometimes decorated wall cabinets. Doors and windows were framed with sophisticated woodwork. The cellars, staircases, and sometimes more important rooms of die main floor were vaulted. Dovecotes and animal pens are also preserved, as well as multiroomed military bar racks and huge public granaries. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Felix. "A Study of Egyptian Domestic Buildings." Varia Aegyptiaca 5 (1989); 75~93-
Badawy, Alexander. A History of Egyptian Architecture. 3 vols. Giza and Berkeley, 1954-1968.
Borchardt, Ludwig, and Herbert Ricke. Die Wohnhauser in Tell elAmarna. Berlin, 1980.
Ricke, Herbert. Der Grundriss des Amarna-Wohnhauses. Ausgrabungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in Tell el-Amarna, vol. 4. Leipzig, 1932.
Rodziewicz, Mieczyslaw. Les habitations romaines tardives d'Alexandrie.
Alexandria, 3. Warsaw, 1984. Roik, Elke. Das altagyptische Wohnhaus und seine Darstellang im Flachbild. Frankfurt, 1988. FELIX ARNOLD
HOUSE CHURCHES.
As a movement within Juda ism of the Second Temple period, the Christian sect origi nated with no distinct institutions, including church build ings. Following the death of Jesus, the disciples reportedly continued in Jewish temple piety and table fellowship "from house to house" {Acts 2:46, 5:42). There are also references in Acts to household conversions {Acts 1 6 : 1 5 , 34; 18:8) in which the earliest preaching was conducted in the homes of individuals, who offered hospitality to Paul (or others). This basic picture is substantiated by the letters of Paul, the ear liest writings of die New Testament (50-60 CE). Paul refers to entire households forming churches ( 1 Cor. 1 : 1 6 , 1 6 : 1 5 ) , and he regularly addresses greetings in the letters to churches in the house of so-and-so ( 1 Cor. 1 6 : 1 9 ; Rom. 1 6 : 5 ; Phlm. 2; Col. 4 : 1 5 ) . These references suggest that existing households served as a nucleus of organization witii cellular communities formed around them. In some of Paul's com munities—in large urban centers—it appears that there were several such house-church cells, often identified by the
HOUSE CHURCHES home of the patron. For example, in Corinth there were as many as five or six known groups during the 50s, and Paul seems to address eight distinct cells in Rome in his final salutations of the Roman letter (Rom, 1 6 : 3 - 1 6 ) . The exis tence of several such cells organized around individual household social ties contributed to diversity in the worship, organization, and social life of early Christian groups. T h e extended-household structure typical of the Helle nistic-Roman world included not only immediate family members, but also other relatives, domestic slaves, and a larger coterie of freedmen, hired workers, business associ ates, and other clients or dependents. T h e head of the household ( L a t , paterfamilias) served as patron and host to the group that met in the home, reflecting similar patterns of patron-client social relations to that of the household structure. Paul regularly stayed in the homes of the housechurch patron on his visits, who provided him witii financial support (Rom. 1 6 : 2 3 ; Phlm. 1 8 - 2 2 ; Phil. 4 : 1 0 - 2 0 ) . Increas ingly in the Roman period, women were able to retain func tional control of personal estates and manage their own households (mater familias). A number of Paul's housechurch communities were under such patronesses (Nympha, Col. 4 : 1 5 ; Chloe, 1 Cor. 1 : 1 1 ; Lydia, Acts 1 6 : 1 4 - 1 6 ; Euodia and/or Syntyche, Phil. 4:2). T h e best example is Phoebe (Rom. 1 6 : 2 ) , who is clearly called the patroness (Gk., prostatis) of a house church at Kenchreai (a port of Corinth) and was Paul's host and supporter. Her wealth and social standing are attested by the fact that she was the one who actually carried Paul's letter to the Christians of Rome; she was sent, at least in part, to pave the way for Paul's arrival among Rome's diverse house churches and to raise financial support for his planned mission to Spain. In other cases, tiie wife seems to be the predominant member of a couple who hosted the church in tiieir house (cf. Prisca, Rom. 1 6 : 3 ) . The case of Prisca and Aquila indicates further that some of these individuals had substantial means: they were able to travel and set up house churches in Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome (Acts 1 8 : 2 - 4 ; 1 Cor. 1 6 : 1 9 ; Rom. 16:3-5).
The most common reference for the place of Christian meetings in the New Testament is simply to houses, but with little or no description of the actual type of edifice or partic ular area of activity. Other references in Paul's letters sug gest that the communal worship met in the dining room of die house and around a common table, where the meal proper served as a focal point for the activities of worship. Other places used for meetings included a domestic "upper room" (Acts 20:7) and a commercial hall (Gk., schole) of indeterminate plan (Acts 19:9). The apocryphal Acts of Paul (late second century) further suggests that Christians in Rome met in large warehouses (Lat., horrea; cf. Passio Pauli 1 ) . That such private or semiprivate architecture was used by Christian groups is not in itself unique. Many other small or newly arrived religious groups and collegial associations
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in the fluid and mobile social environment of the Roman Empire regularly adapted houses or other private edifices as places of assembly or cultic activity. All six of the synagogue buildings of the Diaspora (second century BCE-fourth cen tury CE) known from archaeological remains were adapted from existing edifices, and five of die six were originally houses or apartment buildings (Lat., insulae). Often, the ad aptation of tiiese structures progressed gradually through multiple stages of renovation and remodeling to accom modate specific religious or social functions. The cult of Mithras is similarly predominantiy found to have adapted existing edifices for its purposes. Of more than sixty exca vated Mithraic sanctuaries (Lat., mithraea) from across the Roman Empire, only ten were consttucted de novo for the cult; the remainder were found in renovated houses, apart ments, shops, warehouses, basement cryptoportici, and the like. This includes all the excavated mithraea in Ostia and Rome, as well as the one at Caesarea Maritima (Israel). [See Caesarea.] At Dura-Europos (Roman Syria/Mesopotamia), there are three such adapted houses on the same street: a synagogue, a mithraeum, and a Christian building (see fig ure 1 ) . [See Dura-Europos; Synagogues.] In archaeological terms, a distinction needs to be made between a house or other edifice that might be used for re ligious purposes on a casual basis and an edifice actually renovated architecturally to meet specific spatial or iconographic needs. While it is clear that in Paul's day (and through much of the second century) Christians met in the homes of members, it does not appear that significant ren ovations occurred. These cases are properly termed house churches, and they continued in primarily domestic or other nonreligious functions. Yet, it is not likely that any archae ological evidence can be discerned for them because they lack distinguishing architectural, spatial, or artistic features. Archaeological evidence arises only with physical adaptation of the edifice. While the terminology has been inconsistent, it is preferable to use the term domus ecclesiae ("house of the church'') to denote renovated Christian edifices on their way to becoming more formal church buildings. This terminol ogy is reflected in some third-century Christian writers, where further expansion and remodeling are indicated. Such edifices are referred to by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. 7.30.19, 8.1.5) if Greek as oikos ekklesias (= Lat., domus ecclesiae) or oikos kyriakou ("house of the Lord"). T h e earliest and most clearly attested archaeological evi dence of a house renovated architecturally into a place of Christian assembly and worship is from Dura-Europos. It was buried substantially intact in 256 CE, when the city was destroyed. It was a typical domestic edifice by local stan dards, witii rooms grouped around a central court. While Christians might have been in Dura earlier, no other direct archaeological evidence exists of their activity or assembly. There is no direct evidence that the Dura building was used as a house church prior to its renovation (in c. 2 4 1 CE),
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HOUSE CHURCHES
a. Before renovation
b. After renovation sm HOUSE CHURCHES. Figure I. Reconstruction of the Christian ing at Dura-Europos,
before and after it was renovated
Build
into a house
church. (After White, 1990, p. 108)
though it is possible. When it was renovated all domestic functions ceased, and the building was given over com pletely to the spatial needs of religious (or cultic) activities. Even though the building retained its exterior domestic form and plan, it had become a "church building." Such features can be detected archaeologically from the nature of the ren ovation and other surviving epigraphic and artistic decora tion. On the south side of the court, a partition wall was
removed in order to open up two rooms to form a rectan gular hall for assembly. A small dais was then installed at tire east end of the room. A small adjoining room seems to have been used for storage. A single fragmentary inscription preserved from the room likely refers to ecclesiastical per sonnel. In the northwest corner of the house another room had a small font pool with an arched canopy installed to serve as a baptistery. [See Baptisteries.] This room also shows clear Christian usage in its artistic program, which depicts scenes from the life of Jesus on tire walls. Other me morial inscriptions from the walls of this room clearly reflect a Christian identity. Several other sites from across the Roman world provide further archaeological evidence for the adaptation and ren ovation of existing buildings prior to the implementation of formal basilical church architecture under Constantine (c. 3 1 4 - 3 1 9 ) . [See Basilicas; Churches.] T h e evidence suggests that partial adaptation occurred as an intermediate stage, and that subsequent enlargements or rebuilding overlaid earlier phases of the renovation of domestic or private ar chitecture. One site, at the Lullingstone Villa, near Eynsford, England, has only part of tire house given over for renova tion as a kind of "chapel wing"; die site is important also for its relatively late date (c. 3 5 0 - 4 1 0 ) , which shows that the process of gradual adaptation continued well after the em pire had become officially Christian and public Christian architecUtre had begun. T h e continued renovation and re use of sites over centuries has often made the archaeological evidence difficult to read. For example, in Rome, a large apartment building with shops on the ground floor and do mestic quarters above seems to have been partially reno vated for use as a Christian hall in the third century. This basic plan may have continued until the beginning of tire fifth century before being fully rebuilt in basilical form; how ever, some of the earlier structure was preserved in the foun dation levels below the basilica, now called the Church of Saints John and Paul (Ss. Giovanni e Paolo). Similarly, the Church of St. Clement (San Clemente) near the Colosseum was originally built in basilical form in about 400, over a large third century hall that may have been used by Chris tians. In turn, this hall stood over a large warehouse complex dating to the first century that Christian tradition associates with the name of Clement of Rome (d. about 96) and a church ostensibly located on his property. N o direct ar chaeological evidence indicates such usage in the lower lay ers, even though the adjacent house clearly had a mithraeum installed in a lower level cortile. Similarly, there is no evi dence that the so-called House of St. Peter at Capernaum was actually used as a house church, or domus ecclesiae, prior to the construction of a quadrilateral enclosure in the fourth century, later rebuilt on an octagonal plan in the fifth and sixth centuries. [See Capernaum.] In this case it is better to view the building in the context of the beginning of me morial architecture stimulated by Constantine to commem-
HUMEIMA orate Christian holy sites, rather than its being in direct con tinuity with die older pattern of house church and domus ecclesiae. Odier archaeological evidence suggests that by the midthird century Christians were beginning to enlarge spaces on a rectangular hall plan, but well before the beginning of formal basilical church architecture. Such buildings may be called aula ecclesiae, or "hall churches." At least one case, from Parentium (Roman Istria, modern Parenzo or Porec), shows a private house first renovated as a domus ecclesiae (third century) and subsequently renovated to form a large hall (fourth century), before it was converted to the basilical plan (fifth-sixth centuries; now known as the Basilica Eufrasiana). A hall was also installed in a block of private houses in the early fourth century at U m m el-Jimal (in Ro man Arabia, modern Jordan). [See U m m el-Jimal.] Other examples can be found in die first levels below the Church of San Chrysogono in Rome (c. 3 1 0 ) , the double halls below the church at Aquileia (c. 3 1 7 - 3 1 9 ) , a small plane hall from Qirk Bize in Syria (c. 320—333), and tire first hall below die Octagonal Church of St. Paul at Philippi, Greece (c. 3 4 3 ) . Each of these cases was transformed, by subsequent phases of renovation and construction, into more formal or recog nizable church architecture (either basilical or octagonal in plan). BIBLIOGRAPHY
Finney, Paul Corby. "Early Christian Architecture: The Beginnings." Harvard Theological Review 81 (1988): 3 1 9 - 3 3 9 . Judge, E, A. The Social Organization of Christian Groups in the First Century. London, i960. Klauck, Hans-Josef. Hausgerneinde und Hauskirche im friihen Christen-
tum. Stuttgart, 1981. Kraeling, Carl H. The Christian Building. The Excavations at DuraEuropos, Final Report 8, part 2. New Haven, 1967. Krautheimer, Richard. Corpus basilicarum christianamm romae. 5 vols.
Vatican City, 1939-1956. Krautheimer, Richard Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. 3d
ed. Harmondsworth, 1981. Malherbe, Abraham J. Social Aspects of Early Christianity. 2d ed. Phil
adelphia, 1983. Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven, 1983.
Petersen, Joan M. "House Churches in Rome." Vigiliae Christianae 23 (1969): 264-272. White, L. Michael. Building God's House in the Roman World: Architec tural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Baltimore, 1990. White, L. Michael. The Social Origins of Christian Architecture, vol. 1 , Architectural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians (reprint of above); vol. 2 , Texts and Monuments of the Christian Domus Eccle siae in Its Environment. Minneapolis, 1995. L . MICHAEL WHITE
HUMEIMA (Ar., Humaima, Homeima, Humayma), ancient Auara (Gk.; L a t , Hauara, Hauarra), major Nabatean, Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic center in the
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Hisma, Jordan's southern desert (29°57'oo"N, 35°2o'38"E). T h e ruins of the settlement, approximately 1 0 ha (25 acres) in area, are at an elevation of 955 m above sea level, in sand stone hills between the Jebel Qalkha and Jebel Humeima, 3 km (2 mi.) east of Wadi 'Arabah. Precipitation averages only 80 mm per year. The plain east of the site is watered by runoff from a roughly triangular catchment area of 240 sq km (149 sq. mi.). Petra is 44 km (27 mi.) to die nordi, the modern settlement of Ma'an 50 lun (31 mi.) to the northeast, "Aqaba (ancient Aila) 55 Ion (34 mi.) to the south, and Meda'in Saleh (ancient Hegra) 250 km ( 1 5 5 mi.) to the south east. Although Alois Musil identified the ruins of Humeima as ancient Ammatha, the Peutinger Table establishes that the site is Auara: it places Havarra 23 Roman miles (36 km, or 22 mi.) north of Praesidio (Khirbet el-Khalde) and 20 Ro man miles (30 km, or 1 9 mi.) south of Zadagatta (Sadaqa), which is Humeima's exact location. According to Ouranios's Arabika (F. Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, Leiden, 1 9 2 3 - , 675 frag. A.i.b), Auara was founded by die Nabatean king Aretas III (87-62 BCE), in response to an oracle. Nothing is known of die settlement's early histoiy, but an extensive water-supply system was built in the first century BCE to attract settlers, caravans, and a market. A Nabatean nordi-south road, rebuilt as Trajan's Via Nova, passed through, or very close to, the settlement. T h e ar chaeological and literary evidence reveals that Auara flour ished in the Late Roman, Byzantine, and Umayyad periods. Ptolemy includes Auara in his list of towns in Arabia Petraea (Geography 5.16.4), and Stephanus Byzantinus provides the alternate name Auatha. T h e Notitia Dignitatum (Oriens 34.25) records die presence of a unit of equites sagittarii indigenae at Hauare (Havarra). At the same time, the Beersheba Edict records that the governor of Palaestina Tertia assessed Auara the second highest sum of any of the settle ments in Transjordan. A military camp was built at the north edge of the site in the Late Roman or Early Byzantine pe riod. Auara continued to flourish in the Early Islamic period, and soon after 687/88, Ali ibn 'Abd Allah ibn al-'Abbas pur chased the town, which became a center for the 'Abbasid family's revolt against the Umayyad dynasty. Ceramic evi dence shows a marked decline in habitation after the mideightii century. c
T h e Department of Antiquities of Jordan cleared part of die lower church and one Early Islamic house in the settle ment in 1965, but the results were not published. David Graf initiated a survey of the site in 1979 and was later joined by John W. Eadie ( 1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 3 ) and John P. Oleson ( 1 9 8 1 1983). In 1 9 8 6 - 1 9 8 7 Oleson surveyed die region around Humeima for structures related to Auara's water-supply system and in 1989 began the excavation of die settlement center. Soon after Auara was founded, an aqueduct of traditional Nabatean design (a ground-level, roofed conduit of stone
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gutter blocks) was built to carry water for 26.51cm (16 mi.)— from Ain Ghana, 'Ain Jamam, and 'Ain Shara—to an open reservoir at the north end of die site. The habitation center was also served by a pair of large, rectangular, roofed res ervoirs fed by runoff water from a catchment to the north of the settlement area. More than fifty ancient rock-cut and built cisterns, several wadi barriers, a dam, and carefully modified runoff fields have been identified in die catchment area north, east, and south of Auara. Rock-cut tombs of Nabatean through Byzantine date occupy the ridges west of the site. The habitation area of Auara is occupied by heaps of tum bled building blocks from approximately thirty structures, probably domestic, whose plans are clearly visible in aerial photographs. They consist for the most part of square or rectangular complexes of small rooms arranged on two or three sides of a courtyard. Ceramic scatter and the excava tion of one of the houses (Oleson Field F 1 0 2 , Oleson et al., 1 9 9 2 , 1 9 9 3 a - b , 1994) indicate that the structures on the sur face are Umayyad/'Abbasid in date, but that at least some of them are built on earlier walls of the Nabatean and Roman periods. There is a typical Roman castrum at the northeast edge of the site, witii its own reservoir and located close to the Nabatean reservoir fed by the aqueduct. There is a door in each of the four walls, and twenty-four projecting corner and curtain wall towers. Excavation indicates the fort was built in die later second century and probably abandoned in the fourth century (Oleson et al., 1994).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
c
Four structures had been excavated by 1993: a late Roman bath building probably associated with the fort (Oleson no. 77; Oleson, 1990), a three-apsed Byzantine Church with in tramural burials (Oleson Field C 1 0 1 ; Oleson et al„ 1992, I993a-b, 1994), a one-apsed Byzantine church with traces of painted plaster and marble architectural elements (Oleson Field C i 19; Oleson et al., 1994), anUmayyad/early "Abbasid house or market complex built on top of a Byzantine church (Oleson Field B 1 0 0 ; Olesonetal., 1 9 9 2 , 1 9 9 3 a - b , 1994),and an Umayyad house built on top of a Nabatean or Roman structure adjacent to a Nabatean-type cistern (Oleson Field F 1 0 2 ; Oleson et a l , 1992, I993a-b, 1994). A large structure (Oleson Field F 1 0 3 ; Oleson et al., 1994) earlier assumed to be a Roman castellum (rectangular fortress) or Nabatean caravanserai was identified after excavation in 1993 as the qasr (fortified house), garden, and mosque reported in his torical sources to have been built by the 'Abbasid family after tiiey purchased the site. One room contained the remains of carved ivory furniture and colourful frescoes with floral motifs, all dating to the mid-eighth century. A substantial Nabatean structure lies beneath the Roman bath, and it seems likely that other early structures are now covered by Byzantine and early Islamic rebuilding or by the deep layer of water-deposited silt in the settlement center. [See also Nabateans.]
Oleson, John P. "The Humeima Hydraulic Survey: Preliminary Report of the 1989 Season." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan
34 (1990): 2 8 5 - 3 1 1 . Report on results of excavation of bath building. Oleson, John P. "Aqueducts, Cisterns, and die Strategy of Water Sup ply at Nabatacan and Roman Auara (Jordan)." In Future Currents in Aqueduct Studies, edited by A. Trevor Hodge, pp. 45-62. Leeds,
1991. Discussion of the planning of the water-supply system. Oleson, John P. "The Water-Supply System of Ancient Auara: Prelim inary Results of the Humeima Hydraulic Survey." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh,
pp. 269-275. Amman, 1992. Results of the survey of die water-sup ply system around Humeima. Oleson, John P. "The Humeima Excavation Project: Preliminary Re port of the 1991 Season." Echos du Monde Classique/Classical
Views
11 (1992): 137-169. Preliminary report of excavation in the church and several early Islamic houses. Oleson, John P., and J. Eadie. "The Water-Supply Systems of Nabataean and Roman Humayma." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 262 (1986): 49-76. An early report on the wa
ter-supply system and history of the settlement. 01eson,JohnP.,David Graf, and J. Eadie. "Humayma." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denyse Homes-Fredericq
and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 270-274. Louvain, 1989. Brief summary of the site and its history. Oleson, John P., K. 'Amr, R. Schick, R. Foote, and J. Somogyi-Csizmazi. "The Humeima Excavation Project, Jordan: Preliminary Re port of the 1992 Season." Echos du Monde Classique/Classical
Views
12 (1993a): 1 2 3 - 1 5 8 .
Oleson, John P., K. 'Amr, R. Schick, R. Foote, and J. Somogyi-Csizmazi. "The Humeima Excavation Project: Preliminary Report of the 1 9 9 1 - 1 9 9 2 Seasons." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 37 (1993b): 4 6 1 - 5 0 2 .
Oleson, John P., K. 'Amr, R. Schick, R. Foote, and J. Somogyi-Csizmazi. "Preliminary Report of die Humeima Excavation Project, 1993." Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views 13 (1994): 1 4 1 - 1 7 9 . JOHN PETER OLESON
HUNTING. Little is known about die prehistoric huntergatherer of the Near East who created the Natufian and sim ilar cultures. With the development of civilization, people who lived by hunting (Esau) were sometimes represented in a less favorable light than builders of cities (Gilgamesh) or pastoralists (Jacob). T h e story of David, however, who "slew both the lion and the bear," foreshadows his future greatness (r Sm. 1 7 : 3 6 ) . The introduction of the horse-drawn chariot into Egypt before the middle of the second millennium enabled kings to display themselves spectacularly in the hunt, Tutankha men (c. 1 3 4 8 - 1 3 3 9 BCE) is represented on a painted box shooting with bow and arrow as his chariot team gallops in pursuit of game; and the pylons at Medinet Habu show Rameses III (c. 1 1 9 0 - 1 1 5 8 BCE) stepping onto the pole of his chariot in order to transfix a wild bull with a gigantic lance. These representations are not realistic, for in real life a charioteer would have accompanied the king; and the Ramesside reliefs combine the originally separate motifs of the royal chariot and of die Pharaoh striding forward to smite
HUNTING his enemies. Most probably tire game—which included li ons, antelopes, and osttiches—was shot with die bow from a stationary chariot, which was driven up to it by spearmen and archers. These are shown at Medinet Habu below the ldng and on a smaller scale. Military training was thus com bined with sport. The royal hunt appears frequendy in the palace reliefs of the Assyrian New Kingdom (see figure r). Ashurnasirpal (885-860 BCE) hunts lions and bulls from a four-horse char iot in which he is accompanied by a driver and weapon bear ers. Ashurbanipal (669-627 BCE) hunts with a spear and bow botii in a chariot and on horseback. His skill as a mounted archer may reflect the influence of the Scythians, to whose kings the Assyrian royal house had allied itself by marriage. Ashurbanipal also killed lions on foot, and inscriptions ac companying his monuments refer contemptuously to the terror of subject kings compelled to share this royal sport. Lions are sometimes released from traveling cages to be de stroyed by the lung; and the monuments also show largescale drives leading to the wholesale slaughter of lions, wild asses, and gazelles, which may be driven into long nets or toward a pit in which the ldng, holding a bow and arrow, is concealed. Sometimes tiiese hunts are represented as taking place in parks to which the populace, including women, is admitted to witness the royal prowess.
T h e theme of Assyrian official art is the brutal crushing of the Icing's enemies; but the major monuments of Achaemenid Persia (c. 5 5 0 - 3 3 0 BCE) represent "all the Idngdoms of the earth" (Ezr. 1:2) as the peaceful subjects of the Great King, who is portrayed on reliefs in Persepolis destroying imaginary monsters, allegories of evil, rather than hunting real animals. Herodotus shows that to hunt on horseback with bow or spear was for the Persian nobility the epitome of manly virtue—and excellent training for leaders of armies whose strength lay in tiieir cavalry. Game parks, or "para dises," are frequendy mentioned as a feature of courtly life. Xenophon, in his romance Cyropaedia, tells how, as a boy, Cyrus the Great (c. 5 5 0 - 5 2 7 BCE) rode after boar, first in his grandfather's park and then in open country. More histor ical is the account in Xenophon's Anabasis of how Cyrus the Younger (fl. 401 BCE) killed a bear that had clawed him down from his horse. In the provincial art of the Achaemenid Empire, hunting is often represented—notably on the marble sarcophagi cre ated by Greek sculptors for the kings of Sidon and now in the Archaeological Museum at Istanbul. The Satrap sar cophagus portrays the perils of hunting big game on horse back; a less realistic hunt, 011 the Lycian sarcophagus, alle gorises the virtue of a dead prince; and the Alexander sarcophagus may show, from the point of view of an Asiatic
Figure 1. Relief from the Palace of'Ashurnasirpal IIin Nimrud, Mesopotamia. King Ashur nasirpal hunting lions, a lion leaping at the king's chariot. British Museum, London. (Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY) HUNTING.
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HUREIDHA
ruler, an incident of a historical lion-hunt in which Alex ander the Great ( 3 3 6 - 3 2 3 BCE) took part with his generals. Engraved gems often show hunting on horseback or on foot, whh bow or spear. The hunters are generally Persian nobles, but Darius I (522-486 BCE) is himself conventionally por trayed on an official seal, in the Assyrian manner, hunting lions from a chariot. The hunt is the symbol of the ruler's personal qualities and of the protection he affords his peo ple. In Asia Alexander the Great and his generals practiced, on an unprecedented scale, sports that the Macedonian kings had traditionally enjoyed in Europe. Under the suc cessor kings, notably Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt ( 2 8 3 247 BCE) and Antiochus IV of Syria ( 1 7 5 - 1 6 4 BCE), biggame hunts and displays of exotic beasts were staged as pop ular spectacles, comparable to the later venationes (hunting shows) in the Roman amphitheater. The Roman conquerors of the Mediterranean basin at first availed themselves of the captured apparatus of the royal hunt, but in general, even under the emperors, Roman hunting (as distinct from col lecting beasts for the amphitheater) seems to have been on a scale suitable to tire fiction that the emperor was first cit izen (princeps). Thus, Hadrian ( 1 1 7 - 1 3 8 CE) hunted a bear in Mysia and lions in Egypt on horseback, in tire company of intimate friends. Marble sarcophagi decorated with hunting scenes, many of them carved in Asia Minor, were used throughout the Roman Empire from the second century CE onward. The hunt as an allegory of virtue is splendidly represented in mosaics of the fifth-sixth centuries CE, notably at Apamea in North Syria and Antioch on the Orontes, where Magnanim ity (Megalopsychia) appears personified. From Sasanian Persia (224-651 CE) come silver-gilt plates, on which kings are shown hunting, usually on horse back, with bow or sword. Rock-cut reliefs at Taq-i Bostan (ascribed to Khusrau II, 591-628 CE) show royal hunts on a gigantic scale. Elephant riders drive wild boar into a swamp where die ldng, seated in a barge, shoots them with his bow; and herds of driven gazelles are pursued on horseback. Fe male musicians are in attendance, recalling the story of Bah rain Gur (420-438 CE) and the Greek singing girl Azada, which is portrayed on some of the hunting plates. After the Islamic conquest in the seventh century,hunting retained its interest as a sport and its value in military train ing. [See also Lions; Mosaics; Pigs; and Wall Paintings.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, J. K. Hunting in the Ancient World. Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1985. Brief general survey, emphasizing Greece and Rome but in cluding Assyrian and Achaemenid material. Barnett, Richard D. Sculptures from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, 668-627 B.C. London, 1976. Definitive publication of the
most important Assyrian hunting reliefs, wiuh full commentaries. B oardman, John. Greek Gems and Finger Rings: Early Bronze Age to Late
Classical. London, 1970. Includes an authoritative chapter on "Greco-Persian" gems of the Achaemenid period and excellent il lustrations. Hamdy, Osman Bey, and Theodore Reinach. Une nicropole royale a
Sidon. Paris, 1892. Original publication of the Sidon sarcophagi, with magnificent illustrations recording details of color now lost. Harper, Prudence Oliver. The Royal Hunter: Art of the Sasanian
Empire.
New York, 1978. Splendidly illustrated catalog of an exhibition of Sasanian art, with a useful historical introduction and valuable notes on the separate items. Levi, Doro. Antioch Mosaic Pavements. Princeton, 1947. Full publica
tion of important material, including the "Megalopsychia" mosaic. Porada, Edith. The Art of Ancient Iran: Pre-Islamic Cultures. New York,
1965. Accessible general survey by one of the chief authorities on Near Eastern art. Smith, William Stevenson. The Art and Architecture of Ancient
Egypt.
Harmondsworfh, 1958. Well-illustrated general survey, including pictures of the Egyptian objects mentioned in the text. J. K . ANDERSON
HUREIDHA, site located in Wadi 'Amd, about
39 Ion (24 mi.) south-southwest of its junction with the Hadhramaut in southern Yemen ( i 5 ° 3 6 ' N , 48°!. 1 ' E). Sit uated in the bed of the wadi, the site has been badly eroded by flash floods that cut through the 4-meter-high tell, sttatigraphically isolating the buildings and leaving mounds of debris spread over an area of about 1 7 acres. Three inscrip tions recovered indicate that the name of the ancient town was Madabum. The site was discovered and excavated by the archaeol ogist Gertrude Caton-Thompson; Elinor Gardner, a geol ogist; and Freya Stark, a writer, from December 1 9 3 7 to March 1938. T h e focus of the excavation was a small, rec tangular temple dedicated to the moon god Sin. Although it had been destroyed to floor level, three phases of construc tion were distinguished: the first consisted of the original temple, and the second and third were limited to repairs and additions to die former. These phases spanned the period from the sixth to the second century BCE. Outside the tem ple, several shrines with altars were constructed during the third phase, with material reused from the temple. A farm house built of mud brick, located near the temple, was also excavated. Two circular cave tombs, which had been dug in the scree slope of die cliff along the west side of the wadi, were also cleared; these yielded the first skeletons of ancient South Arabs. The small corpus of pottery recovered from these exca vations proved that the temple, farmhouse, and tombs be longed to the same period. Dated by other artifacts, espe cially beads and Achaemenid seals, the pottery provided the beginnings of a chronology for these four centuries. It also served as an independent source for dating inscriptions, which previously could only be assigned dates on the basis of paleography and filiation. Gardner, at Hureidha, was the first to investigate a flashflood irrigation system in southern Arabia. With a deflection
HURRIAN dam to channel run-off water into the primary canal, 16 km (c. 10 mi.) upstream, and a distribution network of second ary canals and tertiary earthen ditches, water was moved quicldy and efficiently to already plowed fields downstream and surrounding die town. Gardner also studied the geology of the region as oppor tunities occurred, commenting on the geologic history dur ing the Quaternary era. Paleolithic flakes and Levallois-type cores appear everywhere, on die plateau above Wadi 'Amd and on its terraces, providing the earliest evidence of human occupation of die region. Hureidha is of considerable importance in the archae ology of pre-Islamic southern Arabia because it was the first site excavated by a professional archaeologist. CatonThompson's work set a high standard for archaeological methodology by its scope: geological investigations and pre history, superior research on artifacts, reasoned interpreta tion, and comprehensive publication. [See also the biography of Caton-Thompson.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Caton-Thompson, Gertrude. The 'Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha
(Hadhramaut). Society of Antiquaries of London Research Commit tee Report, no. 1 3 . Oxford, 1944. Readable, model excavation report. Gus W . VAN BEEK
HURRIAN. T h e Hurrian language is associated with an ethnic group that first appears in areas in the northern and eastern parts of Mesopotamia (i.e., Assyria) in the Ur III period (the last centuries of the second millennium BCE). From Assyria through northern Syria to Ugarit to Hattusa (Bogazkoy), and in the Amarna archives, the group leaves textual and onomastic evidence of its presence for about one thousand years and then vanishes abruptly. The language is a close relative of, but not a direct ancestor of, Urartian, attested somewhat farther north and east in the first half of the first millennium BCE. It has been suggested, although it is not widely accepted, that Hurrian may be related to the Dagestanian languages spoken today in die northeastern Caucasus. Except for the Dagestanian reference, Hurrian and Urartian constitute a linguistic isolate among the lan guages of the world. The corpus of Hurrian texts begins with a single, short "Old Hurrian" monumental inscription of uncertain prov enance, probably the upper Khabur or Tigris, in northern Syria or Mesopotamia, at about the end of the Ur III dy nasty. T h e Old Babylonian period yields only a small num ber of poorly understood fragments from Mari and else where, some of which seem to be incantatory in nature. T h e bulk of Hurrian texts come from four mid- and late secondmillennium sites: Ugarit—bi- and quadrilingual vocabular ies (Akkadian, Sumerian, Hurrian, and Ugaritic), literary and religious fragments, and a unique small corpus of mu
125
sical texts; Bogazkoy—a large, and still poorly understood, corpus of ritual texts and religious literature, usually with a Hittite version; Emar (Syria)—a small, still unpublished cor pus of lexical, medical, and omen texts; and Amarna (Egypt)—a long, carefully written and perfectly preserved Hurrian letter from the Mitanni ruler Tusratta to Amenhotep III. The latter is the best-understood Hurrian text and the basis for almost all that is known of Hurrian grammar. With the exception of a few texts (perhaps offering lists) written in the Ugaritic alphabetic script, Flurrian is written in cuneiform. It is possible that the Hurrians formed part of the chain of transmission by which the cuneiform writing system reached the Hittites. By the time of the Tusratta let ter, it is clear that the Mitanni chancellery had developed a set of very consistent and systematic orthographic conven tions for representing Hurrian in cuneiform. These conven tions include systematic use of single and double writing to convey consonantal distinctions that did not exist in the lan guages—very different from Hurrian—of the Sumerian originators or Akkadian adaptors of the system. Morphologically, the Hurrian noun and, especially, its verb are typically constructed out of complex chains of suf fixes and enclitics. T h e noun, for example, distinguishes eight possible suffix/enclitic positions after the root, accord ing to the pattern: cr.ROOT 4\Plural
+ 1:Derivational suffix + 2-.Possessive + yArticle + s:Case + 6:Enclitic Obj + ^Agreement
+
+ %:Enclitic
Conj/Adv
An example, from the Mitanni letter (4, 1. 39), is sen+iff+da+lla+an: "o:brother + 2:my + 5:10 (directive case) + 6:them + 8:and"—that is, "and them to my brother." The verbal pattern, which distinguishes thirteen positions, is o:Root + f.Derivational + 4:Plural
^-.Relative + io:Plural 13:Enclitic
suffix + z:Tense + 3:Derivational suffix
+ 5: Transitivity
+ 6:Neg-i
+ iv.Enclitic
+ T.Subject + %:Neg-2 +
Obj + \2Agreement
+
Conj/Adv
An example, again from the Mitanni letter (4, 1. 3 1 ) , is kad+oz+a+sse+na: "o:ask 4- 2:past + 7:third-singular-ergative + 9:relative + io:plural"—that is, "which (pi.) he has asked." In syntax, Hurrian belongs to the ergative language type (that is, like Sumerian, it has a special case for subjects of transitive verbs, whereas subjects of intransitive verbs have the same case as objects of transitive verbs). As can be seen from the above formulae, Hurrian makes extensive use of enclitics for pronominal, conjunctival, and adverbial ele ments. [See also Bogazkoy; Emar Texts; Hurrians; Mitanni; Uga rit; and Ugaritic]
126
HURRIANS BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bush, F. W. "A Grammar of the Hurrian Language." Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1964. Most detailed analysis of the language since Speiser (1941). Available from University Microfilms. Diakonoff, Igor M., and S. A. Starostin. Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian Language. Munich, 1986. Best attempt yet to discover a
wider affiliation for Hurrian, but it has not found many adherents. Haas, Volkert, et al., eds. Corpus der Hurritischen
Sprachdenkmdler.
Rome, 1984-. This series will eventually contain editions of the entire corpus of Hurrian texts. Laroche, Emmanuel. Glossaire de la langue hourrile. Revue Hittite et
Asianique, vols. 34-35. Paris, 1980. First and only dictionary of Hur rian. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. Introduction to Hurrian. Annual of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, 20. New Haven, 1941. First and still fundamental Hurrian grammar. Wilhelm, Gemot. The Humans. Translated by Jennifer Barnes, with a chapter by Diana L. Stein. Warminster, 1989. Reliable, concise sur vey of Hurrian history, culture, and literature. GENE GRAGG
HURRIANS. T h e term Hurrian may be derived from hur, a stem denoting war. Although the name appears to be related to the biblical hori(m), it is not. The Hurrians were a people identified by their non-Semitic, non-Indo-European language, Hurrian. Their origin northeast of Mesopotamia, in Caucasia or beyond, is inferred from an indirect link be tween Hurrian and Urartian, botii descendents of a common "root language" (Proto-Hurrian-Urartian) and connected to northeast Caucasian languages. Textual attestations of Hurrian proper names indicate a gradual migration from east of the Tigris River in the late third millennium across northern Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast in die late second millennium BCE, although isolated linguistic as sociations suggest a Hurrian presence in northern Syria and Anatolia as early as 2000 BCE. Based on records mainly from Mari, Ugarit, Alalakh, Emar, Nuzi, and Kurruhanni, the Hurrians are divided his torically and geographically into two cultural spheres. [See Mari Texts; Ugarit; Alalakh Texts; Emar Texts; Nuzi.] The older eastern sphere encompasses tire Hurrian heartiand, stretching from the region of Lake Van and Lake Urmia in the norui to Kirkuk in the south. The later western sphere centers on southeastern Anatolia and North Syria. They each absorbed Sumero-Akkadian traditions and were briefly united under the Mitannian hegemony in the mid-second millennium BCE. Records of their religious and literary her itage were presumably compiled in Wassukanni, the stillundiscovered capital of Mitanni in northern Syria. Records were thence passed on via Kizzuwatna to the Hittite capital, Hattusa/Bogazkoy where they were found much altered and adapted, mostly in Hittite translation. Based largely on the archives from Hattusa, what is known of Hurrian religion, culture, and literature is biased toward die western traditions. [See Mitanni; Bogazkoy.]
History of Research. The focus of early Hurrian schol arship was on language. Philological research began in the late nineteentii century with studies on the "Mitanni letter" found in the diplomatic archives at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, in 1887. [See Amarna Tablets.] T h e unknown language of the letter from Tusratta, ldng of Mitanni, to Amenophis III was first called Mitanni after the sender's country of origin. Its decipherment was aided by contemporary letters in Ak kadian containing die same subject matter and style. [See Akkadian.] Similarities between words in die Mitanni letter and words marked with the gloss suf-birj") in Old Akkadian texts led to the designation Subarian, after the vague regional name of Subartu found in Akkadian and Babylonian records. This term was ultimately replaced by Hurrian, following the self-descriptive term used by the Hittites to characterize a related language on tablets from Hattusa. Initial attempts to trace the origin of Hurrian and its speakers were influenced by die Indo-Aryan throne names of second-millennium Mitannian kings and certain gods in voked in their treaties found in Hattusa. While tiiis associ ation has long been discredited, the presence of Indo-Aryan proper names, loanwords, and technical terms in Hurrian texts indicates some interaction between the two language groups either before or after they entered die Mesopotamian scene (see below). The proposed equation between Hurri ans and Subarians was dismissed on the grounds that textual evidence for die latter antedates references to the former (Gelb, 1944; and for the theory that Subartu represents an imaginary "literary" land, see Michalowski, 1986). Interest in the Hurrians was rekindled during the 1930s by new discoveries of texts at Nuzi, Ugarit, Alalakh, and Mari. With die publication of texts from Hattusa, the basis for philological and historical research was broadened. Pre war analyses of the Hurrian language and grammar, sum marized by Ephraim Speiser ( 1 9 4 1 ) , have been emended and updated by several scholars. Its characteristics include an ergative sentence structure and the use of suffixes. The east Hurrian sphere is represented by the fifteentiiand fourteenth-century BCE texts from sites in and around Kirkuk, particularly Nuzi, whose Hurro-Akkadian archives provide key information on the sociolegal institutions, cus toms, and practices of its predominantiy Hurrian popula tion. The publication of tiiese texts, begun in the 1930s and now nearing completion, has given rise to a wide range of studies on tiiese subjects. This material is balanced for the west by the archives from Alalakh and Ugarit. Research into the Hurrian tradition from Hattusa is well underway, with die aid of Hittite-Hurrian bilinguals discovered in 1983 and the systematic publication of Hurrian texts. Material evidence of the Hurrians has long been sought by archaeologists. In keeping with theories of cultural change current in the 1930s and 1940s, the Hurrians were linked with the appearance of novel ceramic types and glyp tic styles. Khirbet Kerak ware, Khabur ware, Bichrome
HURRIANS ware, Nuzi ware, and Nuzi/Kirkuk/Mitannian glyptic are among many supposed hallmarks of the Hurrians. These have since been discarded on the grounds of their different origin, chronology, or distribution (Barrelet, 1977). Indeed, recent studies have left little hope of ever identifying a dis tinctive culture of the Hurrians, whose main contribution, after more than a millennium of assimilation, lies in the transmission of traditions they encountered before and dur ing their migration across northern Mesopotamia to Syria and Asia Minor. History. The earliest (Akkadian period) evidence of the Hurrians is in the form of personal names on a tablet dated to Naram-Sin, tablets from Gasur (later Nuzi), and a marble inscription from Nippur concerning a gift of garments. [See Nippur.] According to these, the Hurrians controlled minor states to the north and northeast of Akkade, and they formed a minority of the population at Gasur east of the Tigris, near Kirkuk. [See Akkade.] T h e oldest known Hurrian ruler from this area is Talpus-atili of Nagar, whose Late Akkadian seal was found at Tell Brak (perhaps ancient Nagar/Nawar or Taide). Atal-sen, king of Urkes (possibly Tell Mozan) and Nawar, is known from an inscribed bronze foundation tablet that, though dated to the Late Gutian (2090-2048 BCE) or Early Ur III (2047-1940 BCE) period, adopts older Akkadian period curse formulas. [See Brak, Tell; Mozan, Tell.] Repeated campaigns conducted against Hurrian popula tions during the Ur III period brought large numbers of Hurrian prisoners to Sumer from regions north, northeast, and east of the Tigris, above tire Diyala. Toward the end of this period (c. 1970), the northern Tigris region appears to be ruled by the Hurrian Tis-atal, "man of Ninua" (Nine veh), probably also known as Tis-atal, endan ("ruler" or "god") of Urkes, who left a foundation inscription—the old est known Hurrian text adopting tire widespread cuneiform syllabary. [See Nineveh.] His tide suggests that he was dei fied in die tradition of the Ur III kings, like his namesake, Tis-atal, ldng of Karahar (Harhar), and other contemporary Hurrian rulers east of die Tigris. A letter to the king of Kanes from Anumhirbi, prince of Mama, may indicate diat the region around Mara? was pop ulated by Hurrians in the early eighteenth century BCE. [See Kanes.] Their expansion from the Zagros foothills to die Middle Euphrates River and northern Syria is documented in the late eighteenth-mid-sixteentii century BCE archives of Mari and Alalakh VII; by die seventeentii century BCE they had filtered into Palestine. In the wake of Shamshi-Adad I's death and the disintegration of his empire, numerous Hur rian dynasties sprang up between the Zagros and the Eu phrates, and rulers with possible Hurrian names are attested west of the Euphrates at Urshum and Hashshum. While the proposed identification between the Hurrians and the sev enteenth-century BCE Hyksos dynasty in the Nile Delta has been refuted, it is possible that the Hyksos infiltration re sulted from die expansion of die Hurrians and the gradual
127
collapse of the urban system of Palestine at this time. [See Delta; Hyksos.] This latest Hurrian incursion into northern Mesopotamia following the collapse of the Old Assyrian kingdom was ac companied by the arrival of Indo-Aryan immigrants. Little of those immigrants survives other than a few loanwords— the names of deities and personal names that distinguish the ruling dynasty of Mitanni, a Hurrian ldngdom probably al ready founded in the sixteenth century BCE, although it is first mentioned in an inscription dated to Thutmosel ( 1 4 9 4 1482 BCE). At this time, in about 1560 BCE (short chronol ogy), the Hurrians posed a threat and eventually contributed to the downfall of the Old Hittite ldngdom, whose frontier had reached the Euphrates. In about 1470 BCE, Parrattarna, ldng of die Hurrians, extended the borders of Mitanni to the Mediterranean. The archives of Alalakh IV show a dramatic increase in the Hurrian population, which is tiiought to have also penetrated central and southern Syria. The kingdom of Mitanni (Hurri, Naharina, Hanigalbat) reached its zenith under Saustatar, whose realm embraced the entire Hurrianspeaking area from die Zagros to the Mediterranean and Cilicia. [See Cilicia.] Thereafter, during die fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, as the ldngdom was reduced to the Upper Khabur ba sin, the Hurrians of Cilicia and northern Syria fell under Hittite supremacy, while those in northern Mesopotamia were subjugated by the Assyrians, who vied against Kassite Babylonia for control of Arrapha east of the Tigris. [See Khabur; Kassites.] The Mitannian decline, which began in about 1400 BCE with the defection of Kizzuwatna to the Hit tites under Saustatar's successor, Artatama I, was hastened by internal power struggles during the reign of Tusratta, which led to the formation of a rival regime under Aratatama II, an ally of the Hittites and die Assyrians. Following Tusratta's death, sometime between 1340 and 1330 BCE, Mitanni survived as a vassal state first of die Hittite Empire and dien of the Assyrian Empire. By the end of Shalmaneser Fs reign ( 1 2 6 3 - 1 2 3 4 BCE), the Assyrians had established direct rule over the former territory of Hanigalbat (an Akkadian term for Mitanni first attested in an Old Babylonian text). There after, the tide "king of Hanigalbat," is connected with two high-ranking Assyrian dignitaries but may have survived as a formality. Sporadic references to Hurrian rulers in the Up per Tigris region continued into the twelfth century BCE, and Hurrian proper names were still attested in the mid-first mil lennium BCE in die region south of Lake Van. However, die survival of the Flurrian language, which in the fourteentii century BCE had spread at least as far as central Syria, is uncertain. Religion and Mythology. T h e impact of the Hurrians and their traditions extended far beyond the shrinking boundaries of Mitanni. This is evident in the Hurrian throne names adopted by Hittite viceroys at Carchemish and by the Hittite veneration of Hurrian deities, notably the weather
128
HURRIANS
god, Tessup, whose cult was imported to Kizzuwatna from Halab (Aleppo), probably by Tudhaliya I, in the late fif teenth century BCE. [See Carchemish.] The introduction of west Hurrian cults to Hattusa may date back to the Old Hittite period, when Mursili I presumably removed tire local deities from the Hurrian towns he besieged following his conquest of Halab. T h e major influx of Hurrian-Kizzuwatnean rituals and incantations began in the reign of Arnuwanda I and climaxed during the empire period, when the state religion reflects strong Hurrian influence. Pantheon. Foremost among the oldest Hurrian deities is the weather god, Tessup, whose rise to the head of the pan theon, in tire early second millennium BCE, coincided with his identification with Syro-Mesopotamian counterparts of similar standing. His consort/sister in most areas is Sawuska, the goddess of war and sex, who was identified with the Mesopotamian Ishtar and the Syrian Isara. Supreme god dess of Mitanni, she also headed the local pantheons of many eastern towns, where she was worshipped under nu merous guises. The most famous of these was Ishtar of Nin eveh, whose healing powers were famed as far as Egypt and whose cult survived at least to the reign of Sargon II ( 7 2 1 705 BCE). The grain god Kumarbi—counterpart of Enlil, Dagan, and El—features at the center of several Hurrian myths on divine succession. Among these, the "Song of the Kingship and Heaven," itself influenced by Babylonian pro totypes, foreshadows the theogony of Hesiod (700 BCE) . The related tiieme of the Hedammu myth and the "Song of Ullikummi," in which Kumarbi challenges his succession by the weather god, is also paralleled in Greek mythology. The dethroned Kumarbi becomes one of the "ancient gods"—a group of underworld deities attested only in Hittite myths, rituals, state treaties, and art—derived from Hurrian theol ogy but who may be pre-Hurrian and pre-Semitic. Their depiction at Yazilikaya is connected with the cult of the dead king Tudhaliya IV. The adoption of Sumero-Akkadian deities goes back to Akkadian times, when Nergal, and probably also Ea, was incorporated into the Hurrian pantheon. Others, such as the moon goddess Ningal, were absorbed later in die second millennium BCE via Syria, where the native cults of Astabi, Adamma, Ishara, Allani, and Hepat also influenced the west Hurrian tradition. Information on this tradition comes from Hittite-Hurrian bilinguals from Kizzuwatna and from the rock sanctuary at Yazilikaya, where Hepat, identified with the Hittite sun goddess of Arinna, replaces Sawuska as Tessup's consort in the representation of the Hurrian pantheon based on Kizzuwatnean lines. Rituals and cult. What little is known of Hurrian ritual and cult comes almost entirely from texts. Their anthropo morphic deities were anointed, clothed, and provided with food and drink. The abundance of composite creatures in the earliest seal impressions from Nuzi suggests that east
Hurrian rituals included a demonic component, also appar ent in early Middle Assyrian glyptic. [See Seals.] The temple was the main place of worship. T h e hamri, a place of worship associated with the worship of Tessup, is widely attested also in Babylonia. [See Babylon.] Nuzi texts mention a sacred grove, and part of the Hittite-Hurrian rock sanctuary at Yazilikaya may have been used for cathartic rites. Cathartic rites are central to Hurrian magical practice, based as it is on monistic thought. Rites of homeopathic and contagious magic were accompanied by incantations. T h e oldest Hurrian incantations from Mari and southern Baby lonia date to the Old Babylonian period, but may derive from Ur III period penetrations into Hurrian territories in the north. The practice of extispicy (the examination of en tire entrails to receive divine messages) and omen inquiries was adopted entirely from Babylonian traditions. Settlement Pattern and Social Structure. Apart from slaves exported to southern Mesopotamia, the Hurrians settied the northern Fertile Crescent above the 200-mm isohyet, where animal husbandry and dry farming were pos sible without irrigation. This situation favored the formation of self-sufficient villages founded partly on kin relationships, implying the inalienability of land. In time, these villages fell under the jurisdiction of numerous Hurrian dynasties, which exacted taxes and military services. T h e military was headed by an elite known as rdkib narkabti ("chariot drivers") in the east and marianni-na in Syria and Palestine, who were skilled in the use of horse-drawn light war chariots. [See Chariots.] The primary source for Hurrian socioeconomic and legal practices are the mid-second millennium BCE archives at Nuzi. Recent studies have shown, however, that many of these practices, once considered the antecedents of biblical conventions and narratives, are Mesopotamian in origin. Material Culture and Technology. N o trend in mon umental or minor art, style, or iconography has the life span and distribution of the Hurrians. Their penchant for assim ilation is evident in their art and architecture, which reflect long-established local traditions that vary from one end of the Hurrian-speaking realm to the other. T h e temple, pal ace, painted pottery, and cylinder seals of Alalakh IV are marked by Syrian and Aegean influences, while at Nuzi, in the east, Mesopotamian and Elamite traditions predomi nate. The stylized frontality of certain mid-second-millen nium BCE sculptures from Assur, Alalakh, and Tell Brak was perceived as Hurrian until the recent discovery of precursors in Mesopotamia and Syria. The synthesis of Hurrian and foreign concepts and style is apparent in later reliefs and statues of the Late Hittite Empire period and from minor Neo-Hittite states in southern Anatolia and northern Syria of the first millennium BCE. Foremost among these is the monumental rock relief at Yazilikaya, which represents the west Hurrian pantheon in local Hittite attire and composi-
HURRIANS tion. Both an older rock relief near Imamkulu and a later libation scene from Malatya also focus on the Hittite/Hurrian storm god, Te§sup, whose stance and attendants recall scenes on seals of Mitannian date. Certain seals of this pe riod may portray the death of Humbaba, as described in the Sumero-Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, of which Hurrian copies have been found. Scenes related to myths introduced by the east Hurrians occur on seal impressions from Nuzi (Hedammu myth) and on tire ninth-century BCE gold bowl from Hasanlu IV in Iran (Kumarbi epic). [See Hasanlu.] The Hurrians have been linked to a number of trades and technological innovations. T h e oldest of these is the trade of the copper worker, ta/ibira, based on an Old Sumerian term of Hurrian derivation (Wilhelm, 1988). Less compelling is the evidence linldng Hurrians witii the introduction of the light horse-drawn war chariot, the composite bow, the "Hurrian ram," and scale armor for men and horses, most of which existed well before they were adapted to military use by a military elite. T h e supposed Hurrian origin of tech nical terms relating to glass- and glazed-ware production is doubtful. Glassmaking reaches back to tire third millennium. [See Glass.] T h e sudden surge in the scale and range of glass objects produced from the fourteenth century BCE onward reflects the economic and political climate during die Amarna period, when palace patronage of specialists crafts is widespread. [See also Hurrian.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Language Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. Introduction to Hurrian. Annual of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, 20. New Haven, 1941. Summary of all prewar research on the Hurrian language and grammar; still a basic reference for all subsequent studies. History Chiera, Edward, and Ephraim Avigdor Speiser. "A New Factor in die History of the Ancient Near East." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 6 (1926): 75-92. Introduction to the Nuzi material,
which the authors correcdy link widi the Hurrian records from Hattusa and the "Mitanni letter" from Tell el-Amarna, leading to one of the first discussions on the Hurrians. Eiehler, B. L. "Nuzi and the Bible: A Retrospective." In DUMU-E — 2
DUB-BA-A:
Studies in Honor of Ake W. Sjoberg, edited by Hermann
Behrens et al., pp. 1 0 7 - 1 1 9 . Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 1 1 . Philadelphia, 1989. A critical review of the impact of Nuzi scholarship on biblical studies from the early com parisons between sociolegal customs at Nuzi and those in the Bible to more recent scepticism regarding the Hurrian background of the customs at Nuzi and their relevance for dating and interpreting spe cific biblical narratives and institutions, Gelb, IgnaceJ. Hurrians and Subarians. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 22. Chicago, 1944. Classic monograph in which Gelb counters the then-prevalent identification between the Hurrians and Subarians with the diesis that they represent two distinct ethnic groups, the Subarians being
129
older dian the Hurrians. Reviewed by Speiser in Journal of the Amer ican Oriental Society 68 (1948): 1—13, in which he argues that the
truth lies somewhere in between. Matdiews, Donald M, and Jesper Eidem. "Tell Brakand Nagar." Iraq 55 (t993): 201-207. Recent contribution of textual and glyptic evi dence for the oldest known Hurrian king, with suggestions on the locations of Nawar and Nagar. Michalowski, Piotr. "Mental Maps and Ideology: Reflections on Subartu." In The Origins of Cities in Dry-Farming
Syria and Mesopo-
tamiainthe Third Millennium B.C., edited by Harvey Weiss, pp. 1 2 9 -
156. Guilford, Conn., 1986. A new look at the study of ancient Near Eastern geography that challenges many existing reconstructions of history. Taking the example of "Subartu," a word whose meaning fluctuates from period to period, the author demonstrates that geo graphical terminology is dependent on contextual usage. Geograph ical naming and description isfigurative,and references in both lit erary and so-called history texts cannot be taken at face value. Na'aman, Nadav. "The Hurrians and die End of the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine." Levanr.26 (1994): 1 7 5 - 1 8 7 . The most recent eval
uation of Hurrian infiltration into Palestine and its effect on the de cline of the Middle Bronze Age urban culture of Canaan and its subsequent conquest by the Egyptians. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. "Ethnic Movements in the Near East in the Second Millennium B.C." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental
Research 1 3 (1933): 1 3 - 5 4 , Key> but now superseded, article delim
iting the proper designation for the Hurrians and determining their relation to the habiru and Hyksos. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. "The Hurrian Participation in the Civili zations of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine." Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale 1 (1953-1954): 3 1 1 - 3 2 7 . Still relevant objective analysis of
the origin, appearance, and contribution of the Hurrians, with an emphasis on die cultural synthesis among the Hurrian, Sumero-Ak kadian, and West Semitic traditions in Mesopotamia and in SyriaPalestine. Wilhelm, Gemot. "Gedanken zur Friihgeschichte der Hurriter und zum hurritisch-urartaischen Sprachvergleich." In Hurriter und Hurritisch, edited by Volkert Haas, pp. 43-67. Konstanzer Altorientalische Symposien, vol. 2. Constance, Germany, 1988. The author opts for a later Gutian/Ur III date over the Akkadian date proposed by some scholars for the earliest known Hurrian royal inscription of Atal-sen, based on ordiographic discrepancies in its pseudo-Akka dian curse formula. A case is made for the Hurrian derivation of the Sumerian designation for copper worker, which introduces a new link between Old Hurrian and Urartian. Wilhelm, Gemot. The Hurrians. Translated by Jennifer Barnes. War minster, 1989. Introduction to the history and culture of the Hurri ans; provides a masterful synthesis of the research to date. Reviewed by M. C. Astour in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 53.3 (1994): 2 2 5 230.
Material Culture Barrelet, M.-T. Methodologie et critiques, vol. I , Problemes concernant les
Hurrites. Paris, 1977. Collection of essays concerned with the prob lems inherent in defining a Hurrian material culture on the basis of available archaeological and linguistic evidence. The conclusions show that it is impossible to relate one category of archaeological material to an ethnic sector of a composite community. Moorey, P. R. S. "The Hurrians: The Mittani and Technological In novation." In Archaeologia Iranica et Orientalis: Miscellanea in hono-
rem Louis Vanden Berghe, edited by Leon De Meyer and E. Haerinck,
pp. 273-286. Ghent, 1989. Critically reviews a supposed innovation accredited to the Hurrians: the introduction of the light horse-drawn war chariot with its associated armory; it concludes that both precede
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HYDRAULICS
tiieir documented adoption and adaption by the Hurrian military aristocracy. Stein, Diana L. "Mythologische Inhalte der Nuzi-Glyptik." In Hurriter und Hurritisch, edited by Volkert Haas, pp. 173-209. Konstanzer
Altorientalische Symposien, vol. 2. Constance, Germany, 1988. In terpretation of mythological imagery in the Nuzi iconography relat ing, in particular, to Tessup and Ishtar-Sawuska. DIANA L. STEIN
HYDRAULICS. T h e absence of artificial waterworks at Stone Age sites discovered so far leads to the assumption that human activity then centered around natural water sources, such as rivers and springs. In some instances per manent dwellings were established near a natural water source, while in others nomads wandered in its environs. The earliest evidence of a built water installation in Israel is from the end of the Stone Age, in the Pottery Neolithic (PN) period. At the site of 'Atiit, a well, dated to the sixth millen nium, was dug to the water table. The earliest concept of a well probably developed when a river ran dry and people began digging to reach the point in the riverbed where access to the retreating water level would be reached. In this man ner, the world's first water installation, the well, was in vented. The well at 'Atlit is lined with stone; because the Mediterranean's water level has risen, tire well-head is today situated about 1 0 m below where it was in the sixth millen nium (Galili and Nir, 1993). The second earliest well in Israel was discovered in the Beersheba region and dates to die fourth millennium, to the Chalcolithic period. Irrigation channels from this period ex ist on the Beersheba plain, which testifies to the use of water for irrigation farming. There are also early signs of water storage at Beersheba and Mesar. [See Beersheba; Irrigation; Cisterns; Reservoirs.] A concomitant of the appearance of the earliest planned walled cities, from the Early Bronze period on, was a new type of waterwork: a tunnel quarried to reach underground water (Khirbet ez-Zeraqun, Jordan) and a central water in stallation for collecting runoff water (Arad and Ai in Israel and Jawa in Jordan). [See Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-; Arad, article on Iron Age Period; Ai; Jawa.] These waterworks formed part of tire urban plan. City planners incorporated water works within the city wall, to serve them in times of siege. At small, unfortified sites, cisterns were cut into soft, im permeable, chalky rock to store water. In mountainous regions, such as the Samaria hill country, where the inhab itants were familiar with the composition of the rock, natural springs were adapted for use as water sources for the nearby settlements. The earliest use of partially plastered water cisterns is at tested at Hazor from the Middle Bronze Age onward. [See Hazor.] In that same period, a brilliant innovation was im plemented at several planned, fortified cities: a spring with
an abundant yield of water was encompassed within the city walls. The method was employed at Tel Dan, where one of the Dan springs was enclosed within the walls; at Tel Kabri, where die city ramparts encircle Ein-Shepa', and at Jericho, where the Elisha Spring is included within the perimeter of the walls. [See Dan; Kabri, Tel.] At Qatna, in Syria, too, the city wall encompasses a natural water source. This method signals a return to the Neolithic exploitation of a natural water source, but in a more technically sophisticated man ner. At Tel Gerisa, near Tel Aviv, the uppermost section of the waterworks, situated within the city walls, reaches as far down as die water table. [See Gerisa, Tel.] It is a round pit, hewn into the half hard limestone (kurkar), witii a diameter of 5.5 m. A flight of steps leading to the water is cut into the wall of the pit. Wells that descend vertically to the water table have also been found at Lachish, Tel Nami, and Tel Haror. [See Lachish; Nami, Tel; Haror, Tel.] T h e various types of MB water installations reveal a high level of engi neering and technological expertise. c
In the Late Bronze Age, the use of similar installations continued while new ones were developed: a well at BethShean; a huge, well-plastered cistern, 1 5 0 cu m in volume, at Hazor, beneath the Canaanite palace; and many cisterns at Beth-Shemesh. [See Beth-Shean; Beth-Shemesh.] T h e waterworks at Gezer may also date to this period. [See Gezer.] Mycenaean waterworks, designed in this period to provide a regular water supply, are found in the large for tified Mycenaean cities of Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens. From the Early Iron Age onward, only a few cisterns and wells are known: at Beersheba, Dor, and Gerisa. [See Dor.] It would seem that during this period water was obtained for the most part from natural springs, so tiiat no water in stallations have been found within the perimeters of settle ments. The absence of such installations accords witii what is known of the simple way of life of this period, which over laps witii die period of the Israelite settlement. T h e only known cities in Israel at the time were inhabited by the Sea Peoples, and, indeed, at Dor a well built of hewn stones dating from the eleventh century BCE was discovered. During the Iron II period, large water installations were constructed at Hazor, Gezer, Megiddo, Gibeon, Jerusalem, Yoqne'am, Yableam, and elsewhere. [See Megiddo; Gibeon; Jerusalem; Yoqne'am.] Characteristic of these projects is the quarrying of huge pits out of the bedrock on which the city was founded, in order to reach the water table and secure a constant supply of water, even in times of siege. These wa terworks are monumental in scope and size: the depth of die shafts at Hazor and Megiddo is 36 m, and the length of the excavated tunnel at Megiddo is about 50 m. [See Water Tunnels.] T h e volume of the tunnel space is that great in order to allow better ventilation (oil lamps were used for lighting, which diminished the air supply). These water works fell into disuse at the end of the Iron Age and were buried beneath millions of cubic meters of dirt and rubble.
HYDRAULICS They were only discovered through archaeological explo ration. In light of these finds, it is reasonable to conclude drat every fortified city of this era included a water installation for times of siege. The magnitude of these projects and tiieir appearance at the most important sites in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel testify to a high level of engineering and geological expertise, as well as to the economic and admin istrative capability of the state bureaucracy. In Jerusalem, at the end of this period, Hezekiah's tunnel was dug, the long est of all Iron Age tunnels, to convey the water of the Gihon Spring into the city. In that period, King Sennacherib of Assyria built the world's longest aqueduct to bring water from a distance of 55 km (34 mi.) to Nineveh, his capital. [See Aqueducts; Nineveh.] T h e use of cisterns also increased then. They have been discovered at many sites, but espe cially noteworthy are those unearthed at Tell en-Nasbeh. [See Nasbeh, Tell en-.] At several locations in Phrygia, sub terranean water systems have been found that in structure closely resemble those in Israel: a vertical shaft cut into the rock to reach the water table. From the Persian period, only two wells have been dis covered, cut into die limestone on the coastal plain. T h e first, unearthed in die Tell Qasile excavations, is quadran gular, and the second, excavated at Tel Mikhmoret, is round. [See Qasile, Tell.] Some of the cisterns found at Tell en-Nasbeh also date to this period, which witnessed a de cline in the technology of waterworks. In the Hellenistic period, cisterns continued to be used and the first aqueducts appear at desert sites in Israel that are closely connected to the activities of the Hasmonean kings. Some of those aqueducts were designed to ttap and collect water from flash floods; others conveyed water from natural springs. At Jericho, a ceramic pipe was discovered that operated as an inverted siphon (see below) to bring water up to one of the Hasmonean palaces. [See Jericho.] T h e first urban aqueduct was engineered at Akko; it con ducted water underground to the city from a distance of about 1 4 km (9 mi.). [See Akko.] In this period there is a marked influence of Greek culture on the development of water installations, especially aqueducts, which increased continually into the Roman period. The Roman period signals the apex of aqueduct construc tion. Most cities in the Roman Empire at large, and in the Near East in particular, including desert cities such as Petra and Palmyra, had a system of aqueducts tiiat brought water from afar. [See Petra; Palmyra.] Only the southern coastal cities, such as Ashkelon and Lod, lacked aqueducts because there were no natural springs in their vicinity. T h e city of Antipatris (Aphek), which lies near a water source, had no need of waterworks. In Jerusalem and at Caesarea, the chief cities of Israel in that period, a high level of engineering overcame various topological obstacles (e.g., use of an in verted siphon in Jerusalem, arched aqueduct in Caesarea).
131
[See Ashkelon; Aphek; Caesarea.] In many places pools and reservoirs were hewn and constructed. [See Pools.] Settle ments each had many water cisterns and various irrigation installations. At three locations, inverted siphons were built of stone: Jerusalem, Hippos/Susita (see figure 1 ) , andBethYerah. [See Beth-Yerah.] In the Byzantine period, the existing aqueducts continued to be used and additional ones were built. Elaborate water systems were consmtcted as a basic element of the foun dation of monasteries in the Judean Desert. Every village and settlement had numerous cisterns, as many as one per household. Some aqueduct water was directed into the bath houses originally built in the Roman period. [See Baths.] During the Early Arab period, the main centers of the Umayyad caliphate were Jericho and Ramla, to which aq ueducts were built. [See Ramla.] In desert areas, water sys tems in the form of chains of wells (Ar., qanat, fugarot) were developed to irrigate agricultural estates. These can be seen along the Syro-African Rift Valley from Fasael in the north to 'Ein-'Evrona in the south. T h e end of the Umayyad pe riod witnessed severe crises, both politically with changes
Figure 1. Holes for cleaning in the stone pipe of the inverted syphon. Under the pavement of the main steed (cardo) at Susita. (Courtesy Tsvika Tsuk) HYDRAULICS.
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under die 'Abbasids and physically with a large earthquake, and water systems fell into disuse, except for the Ramla aq ueduct, which continued to be used into the reign of die 'Abbasid Caliphs. In the Crusader period considerable use was made of wa ter systems designed to gather runoff into the large cisterns of fortresses. Most noteworthy are those at Belvoir (Kokhav ha-Yarden) and Qal'at Nimrod. The use of the lower aqueduct to Jerusalem was renewed in the Mamluk period to convey drinking water to the in habitants of die city. Several sabih ("drinking troughs"/ "fountains") were erected alongside it. In the Ottoman pe riod the same aqueduct was used, but a clay pipe was in serted in it. An impressive aqueduct was built leading to the city of Akko in the days of Gizar Pasha that was later de stroyed. A new aqueduct was built by Suleiman in its stead. This aqueduct, borne on arches, operated from 1 8 1 4 to 1948. As it approached the city it entered an inverted siphon made of interlocking stone rings, which were incorporated into towers (suterazi), to release the water pressure. At the time of the British Mandate ( 1 9 1 7 - 1 9 4 8 ) , the Akko aqueduct and a Roman-built aqueduct outside Jerusalem, the Biyyar aqueduct, operated. The latter led water to So lomon's Pools, from which the water was then pumped and conveyed in pipes to Jerusalem. Although this aqueduct has been abandoned, water still flows in it. BIBLIOGRAPHY 'Amit, David, et al., eds. The Aqueducts ofAncient Palestine (in Hebrew).
Jerusalem, 1989. Galili, Ehud, and Yaacov Nir. "The Submerged Pre-Pottery Neolithic Water Well of Adilit-Yam, Northern Israel, with Its Paleoenvironmental Implications." The Holocene 3 (1993): 268-270.
Garbrecht, GUndier. "Hydrologic and Hydraulic Concepts in Antiq uity." In Hydraulics and Hydraulic Research: A Historical Review, ed
ited by Giinther Garbrecht, pp. 1-22. Rotterdam, 1987. Shiloh, Yigal. "Underground Water Systems in Eretz-Israel in the Iron Age." In Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Memory of D, Glenn Rose, edited by Leo G. Perdue et al., pp. 203-244. Adanta, 1987. TSVIKA TSUK
Translated from Hebrew by liana Goldberg
HYDROLOGY. Water economy in the Syria-Palestine region is subject to the influence of the Mediterranean cli mate on the one hand, and die desert climate on the other. The rainy season extends from October to May, with most of that rain falling between December and February. During the rest of the year (June-September), the amount of rainfall is negligible. Annual rainfall on the coastal strip is 500-600 mm; in the central hill country 600-800 mm; in the semiarid regions approximately 100-200 mm; and in the desert only 2 5 - 1 0 0 mm.
Because the region does not have any large rivers whose
sources lie outside of it (such as Egypt's Nile River), its primary source of water is precipitation. Rainfall replenishes the water table and sometimes creates powerful streams of runoff water. T h e region has a great number of natural springs, mosdy in the hill country and on the periphery of the coastal region. Most of the springs have a small flow, ranging from 10,000 to 350,000 cu m per year, with a con siderable decrease in summer and fall. T h e few large springs, with flows ranging between several million cubic meters to 250 million cu m, depend on long-term rainfall patterns. Consequentiy, they yield a consistently strong flow of water through the summer and fall and until the following rainy season. In northern Israel and in the western Levant, such springs are large enough to create rivers. T h e largest sources, at the foot of Mt. Hermon, feed the tributaries of the Jordan River. The Yarkon River springs are the most important water source for the coastal region (220 million cu m per year). Throughout history, humans have exploited these water sources in various ways. In the coastal region, most com monly, wells were dug or hewn to reach the water table. In the hill country, inhabitants enjoyed natural springs. In ad dition, cisterns were hewn to collect runoff. In desert areas, some water was obtained from springs at oases, but mostly from collection in cisterns. Streams and springs served as the prime water source. Running streams attracted human settlement, especially in the Stone Age period. Material remains of human activity in die biblical period have been discovered along stream and riverbanks. Water that is both clean and of high quality is found in springs, which led humans to establish dwellings as close to their source as possible. In the classical period, aqueducts were built to bring water to cities, invariably from natural springs. Even the city of Tiberias, on Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), obtained water from a source 1 5 km (9 mi.) away via an aqueduct, rather than from the lake. [See Ti berias.] Wells were a second best water source, providing clean water from an aquifer. In contrast to a natural spring, an artificial well could be located in accordance with a settle ment's needs. Its major drawbacks were its great depth; die labor required to dig, hew, and construct it; and die possi bility that water would not be found. Wells were used as early as die sixth millennium BCE, as was found in the un derwater excavation near 'Atiit. Water cisterns were tertiary sources, although in many areas they were the only solution for collecting and storing water. Cisterns first appear in the third or second millen nium BCE. T O ensure the quality of cistern water, cisterns were cleaned annually, the channels leading water to them were maintained, and the top of the cistern was covered to prevent the growth of algae and to keep out dirt as well as to enable the cistern to be sealed and to prevent people from falling into it. In this way, it was often possible to preserve
HYKSOS good drinking water in a cistern from the end of spring until fall. Domestic animals such as dogs and cats were kept away from die house to prevent them from soiling the courtyard or roof where rainwater was collected. In Pcrgamon, Tur key, city statutes were discovered that warn of strict mea sures against citizens who do not keep their cisterns clean. [See Pergamon.] In addition to cisterns, water was stored in reservoirs of various types: huge underground cisterns and open-air reservoirs such as dams and pools. These were all designed to store runoff or spring water conducted via an aqueduct to an open or closed reservoir. Drinking water did not generally come from open reservoirs because of the pos sibility of pollution. It was kept in the closed reservoirs and retrieved with pails or conducted into the city either by aq ueduct or on beasts of burden. In the course of time, the region has experienced both wet and dry climatic periods, which have dictated settlement patterns. Because the Chalcolithic period is known to have been wet, settiement proliferated in tire Beersheba valley, which had many more water sources then than at present. [See Beersheba.] In die hill country, however, the climate was much colder than today, which explains the scarcity of settlement in that region. [See Judah.] There seems not to have been considerable climatic change between the Chal colithic period and the present. As a result, today's hydrological data can serve as a basis for investigating the limita tions of water use and seasonal differences with a margin of error of only about 20 percent. Climatic change is not to be confused with years of meager rainfall, when drought pre sented a direat to die inhabitants of the land, as is mentioned occasionally in the Hebrew Bible (Jer. 1 4 ) . Nevertheless, some researchers have sought to attribute the proliferation of setdement in the Negev both in the Early Bronze Age and in the Roman period to wet periods. [See also Aqueducts; Cisterns; Dams; Hydraulics; Irriga tion; Pools; and Reservoirs.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Garbrecht, Gunther. "Hydrologic and Hydraulic Concepts in Antiq uity." In Hydraulics and Hydraidic Research: A Historical Review, ed
ited by Gunther Garbrecht, pp. 1-22. Rotterdam, 1987. Karmon, Y. Eretz Israel, Geography of the Ijand and Its Regions (in He
brew). Tel Aviv, 1973. See pages 36-38. TsviKA TSUK
Translated from Hebrew by liana Goldberg
HYKSOS. In the reign of Ptolemy II
( 2 8 2 - 2 4 6 BCE), the Egyptian priest-historian Manetho used the Greek name Hyksos to identify his fifteenth dynasty, an Asiatic line of kings who ruled northern Egypt. T h e word itself is derived from an Egyptian term, Hk3(w) h3swt, meaning "ruler (s) of foreign countries." On linguistic grounds, a West Semitic background can be inferred for these Asiatics; the archae
133
ological data point to a more southern, Palestinian origin, although a few scholars prefer a Syrian background. Rise of the Hyksos. Asiatics migrated down into north ern Egypt in increasing numbers during the twelfdi ( 1 9 6 3 1786 BCE) and early thirteenth (c. 1 7 8 6 - 1 7 0 0 BCE) dynasties. Their principal focus of settiement activity appears to have been the eastern Delta. Initially, they lived peacefully along side the Egyptians; some were even in their employ (e.g., at the town of Kahun in the Faiyum region). T h e Asiatic population in the eastern Delta expanded si multaneously with the deterioration of Egypt's central au thority in the late Middle Kingdom (mid- to late thirteenth dynasty [c. 1 7 0 0 - 1 6 3 3 BCE]). This development is reflected in an increase in the number of Delta sites containing Lev antine materials whose Middle Bronze II character is espe cially evident in the area east of the ancient Pelusiac branch of the Nile River, in the region of Khatana-Qantir. Com mercial relations between Egypt and Palestine were expand ing at the same time. Eventually, the Asiatics may well have taken control of parts of the eastern Delta. In 1648 BCE, the Asiatics captured the old administrative capital at Memphis, the event that inaugurates Manetho's fifteemh dynasty. Whether the takeover of Memphis and northern Egypt was quick and violent, as described in the epitomes of Manetho and in some pharaonic documents, or the control the Asi atics assumed was more gradual—taking advantage of Egypt's weakness to fill a power vacuum—remains under discussion. The former explanation seems more likely, how ever, Hyksos Period i n Egypt. The Turin king list reports a total of six Hyksos ldngs who ruled for 108 years (c. 1 6 4 8 1540 BCE). The name of only the last of those rulers, Khamudy, is preserved on the Turin papyrus. There is consid erable debate regarding the identification and order of reign of Khamudy's five predecessors. Donald B. Redford (Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, Princeton, 1992) sug gests a dynastic sequence starting with Maaibre Sheshi, fol lowed by Merwoerre Yaqobher, Seweserenre Khyan, Yannass, Apophis, and Khamudy. Many other Asiatic royal names are attested on scarabs from the time of the fifteenth dynasty; some may belong to minor Asiatic princes who held a vassal status to the great Hyksos rulers. Attempts to reconstruct the internal history and govern mental organization of the Hyksos remain largely specula tive. T h e adoption of the Egyptian royal titulary by the Hyk sos kings, their dating of events to regnal years in die same manner as the Egyptians (e.g., the dating of the Rliind Madiematical Papyrus to regnal year 33 of Apophis), and the frequent use of die Egyptian administrative tide treasurer by their officials suggest that die Hyksos government at least partially imitated that of the Egyptians. At the same time, however, die apparent Hyksos practice of ruling through local vassals (both Asiatic and Egyptian) reflects a more Near Eastern tradition.
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HYKSOS
Archaeology of the Hyksos Period. As an archaeolog ical term, Hyksos is often employed to refer to the material remains associated with the Asiatics living in Egypt during the Second Intermediate period, especially at their eastern Delta capital. Avaris (a Greek name derived from the Egyp tian term Hwt-w'rt, "mansion of the desert plateau") was the site of the Hyksos capital; it later became the royal res idence of the nineteenth-twentieth-dynasty pharaohs ( 1 2 9 5 - 1 0 6 9 BCE), at which time it was known as Piramesse. The largest surviving portion of Avaris is at Tell ed-Dab'a, which the Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak has been excavating since 1966. This is the only site in Egypt where uninterrupted Asiatic occupation during the Second Inter mediate period can be traced—and the only Hyksos urban center discovered so far in Egypt. Archaeological evidence of Asiatic activity in Egypt in the Second Intermediate period appears at several other sites east of the former Pelusiac branch of die Nile. These include Ghita, Inshas, Tell Basta, Tell Farasha, Tell el-Maskhuta (situated along the Wadi Tumilat), Tell es-Sahaba, and Tell el-Yahudiyeh. Tell el-Maskhuta has produced a small, sea sonal Asiatic village and burials, while a cemetery and per haps a large defensive enclosure were found at Tell el-Ya hudiyeh. Only cemetery materials are attested at the other sites. The material goods, cultic architecture, and religious practices of the Asiatics in the Delta during the Hyksos pe riod reflect an amalgam of Syro-Palestinian and Egyptian features. This is evident in the burials at Tell ed-Dab a and Tell el-Maskhuta. The principal grave type at Tell ed-Dab'a during most of the Second Intermediate period was the vaulted mud-brick chamber tomb. Donkey sacrifices were found outside some of these tombs. Similar tombs with don key sacrifices are attested at Tell el-Maskhuta and at Inshas, while tombs with brick vaulting but without donkey burials have been found at Tell el-Yahudiyeh. Vaulted Middle Bronze II—III tombs have also been reported from Tell Basta, Ghita, and Tell es-Sahaba, while the equine burials are paralleled at several sites in southern Palestine. Funerary offerings in these Delta tombs and in the Wadi Tumilat include scarabs, jewelry, pottery (of both Egyptian and Levantine types), and alabaster vessels. Tombs in the later phases at Tell ed-Dab'a sometimes contain Cypriot pottery and follow Egyptian rather than Asiatic funerary practices (the Asiatics having become highly Egyptianized in late Hyksos times). No royal burials have been excavated at Tell ed-Dab'a. A rich collection of funerary offerings, possibly from a Hyksos royal tomb, is said to come from esSalhiya, located about 1 0 km (7 mi.) southeast of Tell edDab'a (though this hoard may in fact come from Tell edDab'a). An important, though controversial, source of informa tion for the history and chronology of the fifteenth dynasty consists of scarabs inscribed with royal names and private c
names and titles. Because so few texts survive from that era, our knowledge of most Hyksos rulers and officials derives from the appearance of their names on scarabs and such related items as cylinder seals and seal impressions. The Hyksos adopted the Egyptian hieroglyphic script for writing their documents and transcribing their personal names. Through typological analysis of Hyksos royal-name scarabs, Egyptologists have been able to arrange many of the Hyksos rulers in a relative sequence and to link a few of the royal names to the bleak historical record. A concenttation of royal-name scarabs in southern Palestine suggests a con nection between this region and the eastern Delta, although the exact nature of this relationship is in dispute. Finally, numerous scarabs inscribed with the names and/or titles of officials who may have been Hyksos officials (e.g., the trea surer, Har) have been found, but the common practice among the Asiatics of using Egyptian names makes it diffi cult to distinguish scarabs of Hyksos officials who adopted Egyptian names from scarabs belonging to contemporary Egyptian bureaucrats. Data on Hyksos fortifications in Egypt are limited. The high water table and the activities of local peasants searching for mud brick and lime to use as fertilizer have combined to remove any traces of a defensive system surrounding most of the mound at Tell ed-Dab'a; however, a fortification wall has been uncovered at the village of Ezbet Helmi, situated at the western end of the site. (In the debris above a garden adjacent to the wall hundreds of fragments were found of Aegean-style frescoes from the seventeenth-sixteenth cen turies BCE.) Large square earthwork enclosures with brick facing and rounded corners have been found at Tell el-Ya hudiyeh and Heliopolis. The similarity between these two structures and those constructed in the Levant in the Middle Bronze Age has led many archaeologists to identify the Delta embankments as Hyksos defense systems. Other archaeol ogists, however, believe tiiat these embankments are retain ing walls for Egyptian temple foundations. Monuments associated with the Hyksos are rare in the Nile valley, and there is no evidence for Asiatic settlements in that area. The southernmost occurrence of inscriptions, mentioning Hyksos rulers is at Gebelein, located just upriver from Thebes, where a granite block naming Khyan and a lintel containing the name of Apophis were found. It is un clear whether the Hyksos ever controlled Egypt that far south, however. Near the end of the seventeenth dynasty, the border between Theban and Hyksos territory was at Cusae (on the west bank of the Nile, just south of el-Amarna), but it is doubtful that the Hyksos continuously occupied the Nile valley that far south. Instead, they probably maintained authority in Middle and Upper Egypt through local vassals such as Teti, son of Pepi (a local Egyptian ruler at Nefrusy, who is mentioned on the Carnarvon Tablet of the late seventeenth dynasty), and through garrisons positioned at strategic points in the valley. In any event, the history
HYKSOS of Hyksos expansion and rule in Egypt cannot be traced in any detail. The Asiatics in tire eastern Delta maintained an active commercial relationship with Cyprus, the Levant, and N u bia. International trade was an important factor in the de velopment of their wealth and power. T h e seventeenth-dy nasty Theban ruler Kamose reports on a historical stela erected at Karnak that he seized several hundred ships in the harbor at Avaris. T h e goods aboard these ships included numerous Asiatic materials and substances: gold, silver, bronze, lapis lazuli, turquoise, oil, incense, fat, honey, and precious woods. Stone and faience vessels, jewelry, amulets, scarabs, and other Egyptian merchandise were exported to the southern Levant in exchange for such raw materials and finished products. Egyptian objects from this period have been found in considerable numbers at Tell el-'Ajjul, Gezer, Tell el-Far'ah (South), Jericho, Megiddo, and elsewhere in Palestine. T h e distinctive Tell el-Yahudiyeh ware, produced both in Egypt and the Levant and widely distributed from Nubia in the south to Syria and Cyprus in the north, dem onstrates the far-reaching nature of tiiis ttade network. T h e presence of Middle Kingdom statuary in Middle Bronze I I III contexts in Palestine, as well as in a few contemporane ous deposits in the Aegean and Nubia, suggests tiiat some trade in the Hyksos period consisted of items plundered from Egyptian cemeteries belonging to the early second mil lennium BCE. As for the small number of monuments con taining Hyksos royal names found at Knossos, Baghdad, and the Hittite capital of Hattusa (modern Bogazkoy), ef forts to see in these items evidence for a Hyksos "empire" have long since been abandoned by all but a small minority of academics. T h e absence of archaeological materials of the Second Intermediate period in die northern Sinai indicates that Egyptian-Levantine ttade went by sea rather than over land.
End of the Hyksos Period. T h e first effort to dislodge the Hyksos from the Nile valley appears to have taken place in the reign of the seventeenth-dynasty Theban king Seqenenre Tao, a contemporary of Apophis; wounds consistent with those made by an Asiatic battle axe were found in die skull of his mummy, suggesting that he met his death in battle. Seqenenre's successor, Kamose, was perhaps initially a vassal of the Hyksos, but he continued the war of libera tion. According to a pair of stelae he erected at Karnak (the text of the first of which is partially preserved on two stela fragments and a writing board known as the Carnarvon Tablet), Kamose recaptured much of the Nile valley and besieged, though did not take, Avaris itself. He was followed by his younger brother, Ahmose, the first king of the eigh teenth dynasty, who captured Memphis, thereby completing the reconquest of the Nile valley. The autobiographical inscription of one of Ahmose's na val officers reports that the king subsequently besieged and plundered Avaris. Occupation in the latest Hyksos-period
135
stratum at Tell ed-Dab'a appears to have ended abruptly, and the tombs of this phase were looted. After taking Avaris, Ahmose besieged and plundered Sharuhen. That town probably should be identified with Tell el-'Ajjul in Gaza (al though Tell Abu Hureirah [Tel Harar] has also been pro posed as the site of Sharuhen), which has produced a large number of Hyksos royal-name scarabs and considerable gold jewelry. It may have served as a Hyksos stronghold and commercial emporium. Numerous other towns in ancient Palestine were destroyed and/or abandoned in the second half of the sixteenth century BCE. Whether most of tiiis dev astation should be attributed to the Egyptian army has yet to be resolved. [See also 'Ajjul, Tell el-; Dab'a, Tell ed-; Far'ah, Tell el(South); Maskhuta, Tell el-; and Yahudiyeh, Tell el-.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckerath, Jiirgen von. Untersuchungen zur politischen Geschichte der zweiten Zwischenzeit in Agypten. Agyptologische Forschungen, vol.
23. Gliickstadt, 1964. Fundamental reference work for the history and archaeology of the Second Intermediate period. Bietak, Manfred. "Avaris and Piramesse: Archaeological Exploration in die Eastern Nile Delta." Proceedings of the British Academy 65
(1979): 225-290. First major English-language summary of the Aus trian excavations at Tell ed-Dab'a. Bietak, Manfred. "Canaan and Egypt during the Middle Bronze Age." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 281 ( 1 9 9 1 ) :
27-72. Discussion of Egyptian-Levantine relations during the Mid dle Bronze Age, focusing on the stratigraphy and chronology of Tell ed-Dab'a. Utilizes the author's low chronology for the Levantine materials. Bietak, Manfred. "Minoan Wail-Paintings Unearthed at Ancient Avaris." Egyptian Archaeology: The Bulletin of the Egypt
Exploration
Society 2 (1992): 26-28. Preliminary report, with color photographs, of an important series of Aegean-style frescoes recently discovered at Avaris. Dever, William G. "Relations between Syria-Palestine and Egypt in the 'Hyksos' Period." In Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages: Papers in
Honour of Olga Tufnell, edited by Jonadian N. Tubb, pp. 69-87.
University of London, Institute of Archaeology, Occasional Publi cation, no. 1 1 . London, 1985. Disputes Bietak's low chronology for the Middle Bronze Age materials found at Tell cd-Dab'a, proposing instead a middle chronology. Habachi, Labib. The Second Stela of Kamose and His Struggle against the
Hyksos Ruler and His Capital, Abhandlungen des Deutschen Ar-
chaologischen Instituts Kairo, Agyptologische Reihe, vol. 8. Gliick stadt, 1972. Translation of Kamose's important historical stela found at Karnak, with textual notes and historical interpretation. Hoffmeier, J. K. "Reconsidering Egypt's Part in the Termination of the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine." Levant 2 1 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 8 1 - 1 9 3 . Argues
against the idea that the Egyptians were responsible for die demise of the Middle Bronze II cities in ancient Palestine, based on an anal ysis of early eighteenth-dynasty Egyptian texts. Kaplan, Maureen F. The Origin and Distribution of Tell el Yahudiyeh
Ware. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 62. Goteborg, 1980. Detailed study of the manufacture, geographic distribution, and chronology of Tell el-Yehudiyeh ware. Redford, Donald B. "[Hyksos] History." In The Anchor Bible Dictio
nary, vol. 3, pp. 341-344. New York, 1992. Brief, up-to-date survey of Hyksos history.
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Tufnell, Olga. Studies on Scarab Seals, vol. 2, Scarab Seals and Their Contribution to History in the Early Second Millennium B.C. War
minster, 1984. Detailed analysis of Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate period scarabs (including those inscribed with Hyksos royal names), employing a very high chronology. Van Seters, John. The Hyksos: A New Investigation. New Haven, 1966. Comprehensive study of Hyksos history and archaelogy, based on data available through die early 1960s; must be supplemented by more recent publications. Ward, William A. "Some Personal Names of the Hyksos Period Rulers and Notes on the Epigraphy of Their Scarabs." Ugarit Forschungen 8 (1976): 353-365. Study of Hyksos royal names written in Egyptian
hieroglyphs. Most names are identified as Semitic, although a few Hurrian names may also be present. Weinstein, James M. "The Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassess ment." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 241
(1981): 1-28. Includes a historical analysis of Hyksos royal-name scarabs found in ancient Palestine and assigns the destructions and abandonments of Middle Bronze sites in southern and inland Pal estine to the Egyptians. Weinstein, James M. "[Hyksos] Archaeology." In The Anchor Bible Diclionaty, vol. 3, pp. 344-348. New York, 1992. Short overview of Hyksos archaeology. JAMES M. WEINSTEIN
I IDALION, ancient city-lcingdom on Cyprus, located at the modern village of Dhali, twelve miles south of Nicosia, (35°7' N , 33°2s' E). In 1850 the French antiquarian Honore d'Albert, the Due de Luynes, purchased a bronze tablet found on the western acropolis of Idalion, and inscribed in Phoenician and Cypro-syllabic scripts. From 1867 through 1875 Luigi Palma di Cesnola dug at tire site, claiming to empty fifteen thousand tombs. He uncovered the remains of an edifice on the summit of the east acropolis, the hill known as "Mouti tou Arvili," said to be a temple to the mother goddess, which had already been cleared by previous treasure hunters. The British banker and consul to die Ot toman Empire in Cyprus, R. Hamilton Lang, in 1868 ex cavated a "temple" to a god (Apollo Amyklos in Greek; Resheph Mikal in Phoenician). In 1883 and 1885 German newspaper correspondent turned antiquarian Max Ohnefalsch-Richter became superintendent of works for replating under the British Mandate. As such, he excavated there and investigated antiquities in Dhali for several years thereafter. From 1927 to 1931 the Swedish Cyprus Expedition es tablished the modern chronology for die site. On the western acropolis of Idalion, the hill known as "Ambelliri," Einar Gjerstad and his team excavated all of the structures visible on die highest peak. They dated the fortified "settlement and cult place" they believed they found there to the Late Cypriot III period (1200-1050 BCE). The Swedish publica tion of the supposed Bronze Age levels shows photographs of whole vessels on "floors" (SCE, vol. 2, p. 593, figs. 240241). Because the area is dotted with tombs, the floor from which the bull rhyton and other Bronze Age artifacts were recovered was perhaps a tomb underlying the Iron Age oc cupation strata. They believed there was pottery, but no ar chitecture, from die subsequent Cypro-Geometric I—II pe riods (1050-850), but the area was refortified, they felt, in Cypro-Geometric III (850-700). At that time, they reported construction of a new temenos and altar, court, and sanc tuary dedicated to the Phoenician goddess Anat (Greek Athena), the complex continuing to around 475 (SCE, vol. 2, pp. 516-532). Gjerstad's team also uncovered tombs of the Late Iron Age and Hellenistic period outside the ram parts of the Lower City. From 1971 to 1980 the Joint American Expedition to Ida
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lion (Lawrence E. Stager and Anita M. Walker, directors) dug and conducted site-catchment analysis, examining the surrounding agricultural, mining, and settlement areas by surface survey and periodic sounding. They found Helle nistic structures on the east acropolis dating from the fourth through the third centuries BCE. In die lower-city domestic precinct below the west acropolis, they found a street with houses dating to the Cypro-Classical period (sixth-fourth century) overlying Archaic pits (c. 700-475). On die west acropolis tiiey found monumental structures including a for tification wall 1 1 m (36 ft.) thick founded around 500 BCE. Structures in this area, including metalworking, continued into the Hellenistic period. A small Roman bath installation was found at the foot of the east acropolis, and a Neolithic refuse deposit was dug on the banks of the Yialias River to the north. In the 1990s the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus (Maria Hadjicosti, director) continued excavation of the monumental buildings on the west acropolis. It has dem onstrated that the fortified area was destroyed twice, around 450 and abandoned about 300. In the Hellenistic period the only elite structures are on the east acropolis. During their 1995 excavating season the Department of Antiquities lo cated apparent workshop installations dating to the elev enth-eighth cenmries BCE in a field below the west acropolis. American excavations (Pamela Gaber, director) continue in the lower-city domestic areas, extending their dates down through the Hellenistic and early Roman periods. Lang's "temple" was rediscovered on the east acropolis in 1992 (the latest strata are Hellenistic and Roman). It appears to have been an outdoor temenos approximately six acres in extent with structures of various sizes and functions. The city per se had ceased to exist by the time Pliny wrote his Historia Naturalis in the first century CE. He lists Idaliuni among the "former cities" ( 5 . 1 2 9 - 1 3 9 ) . There is evidence of medieval domestic occupation to the north of the Roman houses in the lower city. The cult of the Magna Mater (Aphrodite to the Greeks; Venus to the Romans) was the basis of the city's fame. Po ets, from Theocritos (Idylls 1 5 . 1 0 0 - 1 0 3 ) through Vergil (Aeneid 1.681, 694; 5.760; 10.48-53) to Catullus ( 3 6 . 1 1 — 1 7 ; 6 1 . 1 6 - 1 9 ; 64.94-96) and others extol the beauties of Idal-
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ium, site of the worship of the goddess.' The Venus and Adonis myth is sited at Idalion (e.g., Propertius, Elegies 2 . 1 3 . 5 1 ) . (For a full list of ancient citations see Oberhummer, 1 9 1 4 . )
[See also the biographies of di Cesnala, Gjerstad, and Ohnefalsch-Richter.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Di Cesnola, Luigi P. Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples.
London, 1877. Gaber, Pamela, and M. Morden. "University of Arizona Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus, 1992." Colliers du Centre d'Etudes Chyprioles 18,2 (1992): 20-26.
Gjerstad, Einar, et al. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition (SCE). Vols. 2 and 4.2. Stockholm, 1935-1948. Hill, George F. A History of Cyprus, vol. 1, To the Conquest by Richard Lion Heart. London, 1940.
Lang, R. H. "Narrative of Excavations in a Temple at Dali (Idalium) in Cyprus." Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature 1 1 (1878): 30-71.
Oberhummer. "Idalion," In Paulys Real-Encyclopddieder
classischenAl-
tertumswissenscha.fi, vol. 1 1 , cols. 867-872. Stuttgart, 1914. Includes a complete list of ancient references. Ohnefalsch-Richter, Max. Kypros, the Bible, and Homer. London, 1893.
See pages 5 - 1 8 . Prkchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts. Princeton, 1950.
See page 291 for the prism inscription of Esarhaddon. Stager, Lawrence E., et al. American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus: First Preliminary Report, Seasons of1971 and 1972. Bulletin of die Amer
ican Schools of Oriental Research, Supplement no. 18. Cambridge, Mass., 1974. Stager, Lawrence E., and Anita M. Walker, eds. American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus, 1973-1980.
Chicago, 1989. PAMELA GABER
IDEOLOGY AiND ARCHAEOLOGY. There is a profound connection between archaeological research and die nonmaterial belief systems of botii the ancient cultures and the modem societies in which archaeology is itself sup ported and pursued. Any discussion of die complex inter play of ideology and archaeological interpretation must take into account the essentially dual nature of the issue: the study of the belief systems of ancient cultures through the "reading" of material artifacts for their symbolic, ritual, or ideological meaning; and the conscious or subconscious im position of elements of modern belief systems (e.g., percep tions of gender, ethnicity, economics) onto the interpreta tion of ancient cultures in both scholarly and popular literature. In most cases, the penetration of modern ideologies into archaeological interpretation is subtle and unwitting. In a few cases, particularly where political or cultural institutions exploit readings of the past as the basis of their legitimacy or power, some scholars may enthusiastically cooperate in the dissemination of ideologically inspired interpretation in public forums. They may also feel constrained in their
choice of acceptable research subjects, when funding or pro fessional status is at stake. Such was certainly the case re garding racial theories in ancient Near Eastern history by German scholars during the Nazi era ( 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 4 5 ) , and by the scholars of many nations who have found themselves entangled in the religious and territorial conflicts of the mod ern Near East. Yet, whetiier their ideological basis is subtie or overt, archaeological interpretations, like other scholarly understandings of society and culture, are necessarily for mulated in contemporary contexts. As such, they can be seen as modern social behavior and cannot help but embody contemporary ideologies and social ideals. The seemingly logical assumptions by which an archae ologist connects an excavated destruction level with a his torically attested event; how he or she attributes a particular distribution of seeds or ratio of animal bones to the con sumption patterns of certain ancient etimic groups; or how an excavator identifies the function of a certain room or building are all derived from the scholar's most basic per ceptions of how the world works. Such perceptions are, however, subject to dramatic transformation. Recent studies of the origin of modern concepts of race, progress, nation alism, labor specialization, gender roles, and even the idea of the autonomous "individual" have shown them to be closely linked to the social dislocations and reorganizations of the industrial age. Ideologies, as systems of cultural logic—not merely ex plicit religious or political doctrines—are a natural part of human thought. Thus, it could be argued that archaeolo gists' interpretations can reveal as much about the societies in which they are members and political actors as about the ancient societies whose cultures they attempt to explain. Ar tifacts, architecture, and settiement patterns, however well documented and dated, possess meaning only within a culture. They cannot be interpreted without fitting them into a larger conceptual framework. As a result, die problem of reconstructing ancient ideologies is compounded by coming to terms with the outlines of modern ideologies as well. Because excavated artifacts and preserved archaeological sites can be seen as part of the material world of the society that discovers and studies them, as well as of the society that produced diem, they possess—as museum pieces and tour ist attractions—a social significance quite distinct from die function for which they were originally designed. A cunei form tablet, fertility figurine, or offering vessel, for example, would each have quite a different place in the world view of an ancient Near Eastern priest and a late twentieth-century archaeologist. T h e relationship between material culture and ideology in the Near East should therefore be seen as a complex process of reinterpretation. Any serious study of this process must come to recognize that the intellectual challenge is not to attempt to strip archaeology of its modern ideological perspectives, but to document and analyze the
IDEOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY function—and interplay—of both ancient and modern ide ologies. Ideology: A Changing Concept. T h e definition of ide ology itself underwent a radical reformulation after it first appeared in the late eighteenth century. First used by the French social philosopher Destutt de Tracy ( 1 7 5 4 - 1 8 3 6 ) to designate the scientific study of human thought and ide ational systems, tire earliest conception of "ideology" con tained within it the Enlightenment belief that human ideas were closely linked to bodily sensations and were thus ulti mately part of the material world. The assumption that hu man belief systems are finite, structured, and closely con nected material conditions has always been central to the concept of ideology. As such, it has been opposed by reli gious conservatives who believe that (at least some) human belief systems cannot be so easily analyzed and dissected, that they are unconnected to social conditions and are es sentially expressions of a transcendent spiritual truth. In the course of time, the term ideology has taken on additional meanings, contributed by both supporters and detractors of its validity. Thus, some use the term in archaeological con texts to refer to an active study of a material-based belief system, while others use it essentially as a synonym for re ligion or philosophy, generally denying explicit functional connections to social or economic reality. T h e study of antiquity was connected with the concept of ideology from the very beginning. "With the eighteenth-cen tury European discovery of the monumental ancient re mains and language systems of India and China, the French Encyclopedists attempted to distinguish structural similari ties in those ancient societies' grammar and symbolism— similarities that transcended the specifics of regional culture and might reveal the essential character of human thought. T h e civilizations of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt were eventually included in this comparison. T h e guiding prin ciple was that all human ideas and beliefs could be neatly categorized according to types and arranged in ascending orders of complexity. Like plants and animals, there was a logical structure that could be apprehended by human rea son, and drat like botany and zoology, ideology should be considered a respectable academic discipline. Ideology, however, did not long remain a passive intellec tual exercise. In the decades following the American and French Revolutions, visionary schemes for social change through the application of Reason arose on botii sides of the Atlantic Ocean. T h e confidence that scholars could identify and delineate human belief systems, and demonstrate tiieir direct connection to material conditions, led some French social philosophers (later derisively called ideologues) to see die study of ideology as a springboard for action. Like phys iology, biology, and psychology, ideology might serve as an instrument for improving the material world. If human thought could be understood, it might be manipulated to
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end hatred, greed, jealousy, and aggression among social groups. This visionary social project proved to be a failure. As a result, the term acquired the negative connotation it still possesses. Bitter conservative criticism of the ideologues and their lib eral social programs, spearheaded by the outspoken attacks against ideology by the emperor Napoleon, transformed the common meaning of die term to refer to a mistaken, shallow, or deceptive body of beliefs. This more general usage was further refined by Karl Marx in the 1850s. Marx came to see ideology as the ruling ideas and symbolic systems of every society, in which the domination of the ruling class is made to seem natural, inevitable, and uncontestable to ev eryone. This conception of ideology, in which the social logic of a society is linked in a functional way to the pres ervation of the power of a small group within that society, went beyond earlier sttuctural understandings to provide a dynamic motive for the creation and overthrow of ideolo gies. In tile early twentieth century, the group of German phi losophers known as the Frankfurt school further developed Marx's conception of ideology in what has come to be called critical theory. The theory asserts that all ideologies are es sentially coercive and suggests that the study of belief sys tems is inherently emancipatory. In trying to uncover what they defined as the conscious and subconscious control sys tems established by both ancient and modern elites, the Frankfurt school and later critical theorists, such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, established a socially en gaged and politically activist dimension to the study of ide ology. Although based on historical analysis, its effects were directed to die present and future. In attempting to expose the hidden self-interest that directed every belief system, the critical theorists specifically sought to analyze and decon struct contemporary capitalist ideology. Ideology in Near Eastern Archaeology. Through most of the history of Near Eastern archaeology, the concept of ideology has been restticted to that of ancient religion and other nonmaterial belief systems. Although certainly not valid as transcendent truths (they could be described as rather primitive superstitions), they were nonetheless en tirely spiritual. Thus, during the early archaeological explo ration of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the discovery of temples, tombs, remains of sacrifices, and ritual implements were studied in an attempt to understand the "religions" of an cient Egypt and Mesopotamia as if there were a coherent body of religious beliefs and practices that could be studied in isolation from those societies' technological, economic, military, or governmental practices. In time, progressivist and social evolutionary theories suggested that the religions of the ancient Near East were in a process of transformation, moving ever onward toward a biblical ideal. In this respect, William Foxwell Albright in Palestine,
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James Breasted in Egypt, and Henri Frankfort in Mesopo tamia can be seen as originators of an archaeological ap proach to the nonmaterial belief systems of the ancient Near East. In it the elements of greatest prominence in modern religions—monotheism, standardized rituals and religious architecture, and religious texts and law codes—were inter preted as the primary bearers of ancient ideologies. For Al bright, in particular, details of religious practices and cult places recorded in the Bible became the base line for distin guishing their counterparts in the material record. The lit eralism of tiris correspondence between material artifact and text, however, prevented many scholars from ever going be yond mere illustration of conventional modern conceptions of the role of prayer, sacred spaces, and ritual sacrifice. [See the biographies of Albright, Breasted, and Frankfort.] Similarly, the early archaeological study of tombs and tomb architecture in Egypt, Syro-Palestine, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia was concerned with the presumed, direct re lationship between material forms of tombs and burial with the society's beliefs about the afterlife as recorded in reli gious texts. [See Tombs; Grave Goods.] This was also true of the excavation and study of later forms of religious ex pression such as the temples, synagogues, and churches of the Roman and Byzantine period. [See Synagogues; Churches.] Details of material culture (orientation, specialuse chambers, decoration) were also linked to changes in specific religious practices. Few attempts were made by scholars of the late classical periods to go beyond conven tional historical definitions of Hellenistic paganism, Judaism, and Christianity, to formulate a cross-cultural functional theory of ideology. Only in the realm of Near Eastern prehistory, far beyond the chronological limits of direct connection with the his torically attested religions of Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopo tamia, did archaeologists attempt to link nonmaterial belief systems with stages of social development. Thus, in the dis covery of apparent funerary offerings connected with Natufian burials and the excavation of anthropomorphic figu rines and plastered skulls beneath the dwelling floors in the Neolithic levels at Catal Hoyuk, Jericho, Ain Ghazal, Tel Ramad, and Tell Abu Hureyra, archaeologists connected a certain form of religious ideology (i.e., ancestor worship) to the beginnings of sedentary settlement. [See Catal Hoyiik, Jericho, Ain Ghazal.] With the expansion of material forms of religious expres sion in tire Chalcolithic period at sites like Teleilat el-Ghas sul, 'Ein-Gedi, and Tell Halaf; at predynastic sites in Egypt; and at Ubaid and Early Uruk sites in Mesopotamia, the geographic dispersion of decorative motifs and burial cus toms prompted some scholars to link the spread of religious ideology with population movements or less precisely de fined "cultural influence." [See Teleilat el-Ghassul; 'EinGedi; Halaf, Tell; Ubaid; Uruk-Warka.] More recently, the differentiation in the size and elaborateness of Chalcolithic c
c
burials in the Beersheba valley, when added to the evidence of settlement patterns, has prompted Thomas Levy to char acterize the nonmaterial belief system of the period as rep resenting the "chiefdom" stage of social organization (Levy, 1995)' Similarly, Early Bronze Age religious specialization has been linked by some scholars to the rise of urbanism. At least in the earliest archaeologically attested periods, reli gious ideologies have been typologically analyzed, even though their function is seen as basically reflective, not transformative, of the material reality. While some attempts have been made to utilize structural anthropology to "read" the cultural grammar of ancient Near Eastern societies through symbolic inside/outside, left/ right, male/female oppositions expressed in material culture, other recent approaches have smdied ideology not as a neu tral cultural grammar, but as the calculated misrepresenta tions of powerful elites. The political significance of exag geration and even chauvinistic fantasy has long been recognized in studies of the ancient reliefs of Egypt and in tite material culture of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. A few studies have attempted to distinguish nonverbal, nongraphic expressions of ideology. In recent examinations of the sig nificance of the impressive encircling ramparts of many Syro-Palestinian cities of the Middle Bronze Age, Shlomo Bunimovitz and Israel Finkelstein have suggested that the defensive significance of these massive structures was less important than the psychological impact they would have had on both local inhabitants and potential foes (Bunimov itz, 1992; Finkelstein, 1992). Ancient and Modern Ideologies: A n Interplay. In all archaeological attempts to reconstruct ancient ideologies— be they of specific cult, ttanscendent beliefs, systems of cul tural logic, or calculated political misrepresentations— scholars run the risk of unwittingly imposing their own ide ological or religious values on material remains. T o a certain extent, the scholar's understanding of the nature of ideology itself will determine how much danger from this direction he or she perceives. For those scholars who see ideology as explicit, yet highly circumscribed sets of beliefs about reli gious or political systems, there has long been a reluctance to believe that a fair-minded scholar's modern religious or political beliefs (also tightly circumscribed and therefore presumably separable) would necessarily prevent an "ob jective" study and assessment of archaeological remains. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that role of modern ideologies in the conduct and direction of Near Eastern archaeology is far more fluid and pervasive than traditionally believed. In the nineteenth century, basic theo logical disputes between Protestant and Catholic scholars in Europe gave rise to the first systematic explorations of Pal estine; competing European national interests and imperial expansion into the region served as the background of much of the later nineteenth-century exploration and excavations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Palestine, and
IDUMEANS Syria. T h e close connection between archaeology and the post-World War II nationalisms of the region has also been observed in the governmental utilization of archaeological sites as national monuments and, in some cases, shrines. Debates over the ethnicity of ancient groups and their pos sible genetic relationship to modern Near Eastern peoples have also been motivated in large measure by modern ter ritorial, religious, or political conflicts. [See Biblical Archae ology.] Beyond die influence of explicit belief systems, however, there may be a more pervasive modern belief system that makes the separation of modern ideology from archaeolog ical interpretation virtually impossible. Mark Leone (1982) and Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1987) have ar gued for the widest possible definition of ideology. They see it as a society's takens-for-granted—that is, not so much an expressed set of governing ideals, but an unexpressed, yet artificial and often self-serving construction of reality. In line with die assertions of critical theory, they see ideology as a system through which the power of elites is maintained: not so much by memorized catechisms or pledges of allegiance, but through the incessant training of all of the society's members about the "natural order of things." In the field of historical archaeology in North America and Europe, a number of scholars have attempted to delineate die rise of the modern industrial consciousness and its ma terial manifestations through changes in uniformity and reg imentation (city planning, landscape alteration, house forms, and interior room arrangement); changes in the role of the individual in society (through the increasing numbers of artifacts linked to the individual for personal hygiene, grooming, and status differentiation); and through conspic uous public use of symbols of order (neoclassical facades, formal gardens, radiating stteet plans) to counteract the elites' fear of disorder—imagined or real. These elements of modern cultural logic about work, self, reason, and effi ciency, they argue, are still potent and affect deeply how modern archaeologists see die cultures of antiquity. Thus, despite the calls to introduce processual and an thropological approaches in Near Eastern archaeology as a means of making the discipline more objective or "scien tific," some critics suggest that tiiis merely represents the imposition of a modern ideology. Indeed, as Thomas Pat terson (1995) has noted, the prominence of systems theory, resource exploitation, and measures of labor efficiency in some processualist interpretations of ancient societies merely retrojects the modern ideology of transnational in dustrial development on the past. [See New Archaeology.] Is an ideology-free archaeology possible? T h e material world is always mediated through ideological symbols. T o a certain extent, the visual and intellectual impact of archae ological finds often provides raw material for the crafting or apparent substantiation of modem ideologies, as well— whether of the conscious, overt types (church history, na
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tionalism, racialism) or more pervasive relations (gender, work, the individual). It might therefore be said that it is impossible to strip archaeological interpretation of its mod ern ideological components. It is, after all, the cultural logic of modern society—its ideology in the broadest sense—tiiat is precisely the conceptual framework with which scholars make sense of the ancient world. In this respect, Near Eastern archaeology is, and always has been, a powerful social, religious, and political activity. It is fully involved with the illustration, or, alternatively, die challenge, to modern social, religious, and political ideolo gies. It is therefore to be hoped, in light of the growing awareness of the role of ideology in both ancient and modern societies, that archaeologists in the Near East will come to recognize the wider ideological implications of their inter pretations and recognize the constructive role they can play in the ongoing debates and discussions about the region's present and future, as well as its past. BIBLIOGRAPHY Broshi, Magen. "Religion, Ideology, and Politics in Palestinian Ar chaeology." Israel Museum Journal 6 (1987): 1 7 - 3 2 .
Bunimovitz, Shlomo. "The Middle Bronze Age Fortifications in Pal estine as a Social Phenomenon." Tel Aviv 19 (1992): 221-234.
Finkelstein, Israel. "The Middle Bronze Age 'Fortifications': A Reflec tion of Social Organization and Political Formation." Tel Aviv 19 (1992): 2 0 1 - 2 2 0 .
Glock, Albert E. "Tradition and Change in Two Archaeologies." Amer ican Antiquity 50 (1985): 464-477.
Handsman, Russell G. "Historical Archaeology and Capitalism." North American Archaeologist 4 (1983): 63-79.
Hodder, Ian, ed. Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge, 1982.
Larsen, Mogens T. "Orientalism and the Ancient Near East." Culture and Histoiy 2 (1987): 9 6 - 1 1 5 .
Leone, Mark P. "Some Opinions about Recovering Mind." American Antiquity 47 (1982): 742-760.
Leone, Mark P., et al. "Toward a Critical Archaeology." Current An thropology 28 (1987): 283-302.
Levy, Thomas E. "Cult, Metallurgy, and Rank Societies." In The Ar chaeology of Society in the Holy Land, edited by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 226-244. London, 1995. Miller, Daniel, and Christopher Tilly, eds. Ideology, Power, and Prehis tory. Cambridge, 1984. Patterson, Thomas C. Toward a Social History of Archaeology in the
United States. Fort Worth, Tex., 1995. Pinsky, Valerie, and Alison Wylie, eds, Critical Traditions in Contem porary Archaeology. Cambridge, 1989.
Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilly. Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge, 1987,
Trigger, Bruce G. "Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist." Man 1 9 (1984): 355-370. NEIL ASHER SILBERMAN
IDUMEANS. T h e origin of the name Iduinean (also Idumaean; Aram., *'dwmy) is derived from Edom (Heb., 'dzvm, 'edom, "red"; cf. Heb., 'dmh, "earth" or "field"). Edom re fers to the ldngdom in southern Transjordan during die Iron Age, but substantial emigration of Edomites westward
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across the Wadi 'Arabah into the southern Judean hill coun try began in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE (as suggested in 2 Kgs 24.2 and Ez. 35.6 and in Arad in scription no. 24). Finds of Edomite pottery, inscriptions, os traca, and seals of this period have appeared in the eastern Negev at 'Aro'er, Horvat 'Uza, Tel Malhata, and Horvat Qitmit. By the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE, an Edomite presence is attested in the western part of this southern She phelah region, extending toward the Mediterranean coast, by finds that include a cuboid incense altar from Lachish inscribed in Aramaic. In die fourth century BCE, Aramaic ostraca bearing Edomite and Arab names appear at Arad, Beersheba, and Tell el-Far ah, presumably the location of Persian garrisons of mercenary troops. The Idumean region constituted the southern frontier for Persia after Egypt be came independent (404-343 BCE), explaining why a fortress system was created in die region. Idumea is still called both an eparchy and a satrapy by Diodorus (19.95.2 and 98.1) in the Hellenistic era, suggesting tiiat it was a former admin istrative district of the Persian Achaemenid Empire.
Revolt, Marisa was a base of operations for the Seleucid regime and the center of the conflict in southern Judea. Id umeans probably constituted auxiliary military forces in the Seleucid army at the time. In 138 BCE, the general Diodotus Trypho, a contestant for the Seleucid throne, marched dirough Adora toward Jerusalem before his defeat and death. Afterward, Antiochus VII Sidetes regained control of the "numerous cities" of Idumea, including Mareshah and Adora. After Antiochus's death in a Parthian campaign in 129 BCE, John Hyrcanus captured the Idumean cities of Ado ra and Mareshah and forced the Idumeans to accept cir cumcision and the Jewish law or be expelled from die land. U. Rappaport connects this action with the influx of Idu means into Egypt, but there are indications the emigration began earlier. Subsequently, the "judaizing" Idumeans were incorporated into the Hasmonean state but never fully in tegrated into the Jewish population. As an Idumean, Herod die Great was regarded as a "half-Jew" and inferior to the Jewish aristocracy. His mother was a notable Arab named Cypros, perhaps a Nabatean.
Hellenistic Period. Under the Ptolemaic kingdom (third century BCE), the area comprised a toparchy, one of the ex ternal administrative districts of the Egyptian kingdom. The most important recent discovery from this period is the Ar amaic ostraca from Khirbet el-Qom (north of Hebron), the remains of the archive of an Idumean moneylender or "shopkeeper" (Gk., kapelos) that include a Greek-Edomite bilingual osttacon dated to 277 BCE. The Zenon papyri also attest official Ptolemaic journeys in 259 BCE from Gaza on die coast to the Idumean settlements of Mareshah (Marisa, modern Tell Sandahanna) and Adora (modern Dur, 8 km, or 5 mi., southwest of Hebron) in the Negev (PCZ 1.59006, 11. 64-66), where slaves were purchased (PCZ 5 9 0 1 5 , verso 16, 29; cf. 4. 59537/4). Within Egypt, third-century BCE pa pyri mention Idumean mercenary soldiers stationed along die Nile (P. Tebt. 8 1 5 ft. 5/29; P- Bat. 20.18/3 = SB 8 9797). The latter text includes an Idumean with the patronym Apollodotos, an early occurrence of a theophoric name composed with Apollo. The name is common afterward among the Idumeans, who evidentiy identified the Greek god with Qos, the chief god of their pantheon. It appears that the Greek god was especially honored at Adora (Josephus, Apion 2.9 [ 1 1 2 - 1 1 6 ] ) , and at the Sidonian military colony at Marisa/ Mareshah founded under Ptolemy II Philadelphus in about 257 BCE. By the second century BCE, with the decline of Greek emigration into Ptolemaic Egypt, Idumeans formed sizable military colonies at Memphis and Hermopolis Magna in the Upper Nile region. The politeuma of Idumeans at Memphis included both soldiers and nonmilitary settlers who shared a quarter of the city.
Roman Period. Under Pompey's reorganization of the East, Marisa and Adora were detached from Judea and as signed to the Roman governor of Syria as an annex. After ward, the Roman proconsul Gabinius partitioned Judea and its Hasmonean-Palestine conquests into five "districts" (Gk., synodoi) with separate aristocratic "councils." As a result, Idumea was apparently divided, with Mareshah forming die administrative center for the west and Adora for the east. Both of the capitals were rebuilt by Gabinius. T h e known native governors of Idumea were all from or related to the Herodian family. Both Herod's grandfather, Antipas I, and father, Antipas II, served as "governors" (Gk., strategoi) under die Flasmoneans, followed by Herod in the same capacity for Rome. After Herod became the Roman overseer (Gk., epitropos) of Judea, both his brother Joseph and son-in-law Kostobar governed Idumea, which Herod still used as his retreat and refuge. After the Parthians de stroyed Marisa in 40 BCE, Herod transfered the administra tive center for western Idumea several miles north to BethGuvrih and moved the center of eastern Idumea from Adora to Ein-Gedi. After Herod's deatii, Augustus charged his son Archelaus with the job of ethnarch for Idumea; from 6 to 4 1 CE, it was administered by the governors of Syria. Agrippa I briefly inherited the region from 4 1 to 44 CE, before it re verted again to the Syrian procurators. Josephus's list of the toparchies of Judea includes "Idumea and Engeddi" (War 3-3-5 [55])J but Pliny omits them (Nat. Hist. 5 . 1 4 [70]), probably because they constituted an annex rather than an integral part of the Jewish state. Other designations for the same toparchies appear to be "upper Idumaea" (War 4.9.9 [552]) and perhaps "eastern Idumaea."
c
Idumean relations with the Seleucids were also intimate. In 1 6 3 BCE, Idumea was administered by the experienced Seleucid general (Gk., strategos) Gorgias, a member of the "King's Friends," who reorganized the territory and en larged it, perhaps to include Ashdod. During die Maccabean
c
Military and Social Organization. T h e Idumeans formed the basic core of Herod's army and were exttemely loyal to die dynasty. As a militia, they were well equipped and organized and could be speedily mobilized. Herod once
IKTANU, TELL settled more than three thousand Idumeans in Trachonitis to quell the brigandage in the region, which signified their commitment and sturdiness in difficult situations. A sizable number of foreigners were also employed in the Herodian army, including Thracians, Germans, and Gauls. Mordechai Gichon has characterized the rural militia of the Idu means as a frontier force comparable to the limitanei, the soldiers in frontier areas in the Late Roman Empire. This emphasis on a Herodian limes, a fortified frontier, and the military nature of the region remains disputed. Marisa ap pears to have been an important agricultural center. Kostobar, Herod's "governor of all Idumea and Gaza," a de scendant of priests of Qos, owned estates in Idumea, as probably did the Herodians and other aristocratic families. T h e Idumeans last appear in the Jewish Revolt against Rome (66-70) as confederates of the Zealots and in defiance of Rome. During the conflict, Vespasian devastated tire region and decimated the population; Jewish partisans later further ravaged the region. Idumea later became part of the prov ince of Judea and was administered by Beth-Guvrin, which incorporated most of the region as part of its extensive chora. T h e city continued to prosper and was honored in 200 CE by Septimius Severus with the name of Eleutheropolis and issued its own coinage. Mosaic floors from a villa and a Byz antine chapel are now in the Israel Museum, but by this time Idumea as a toponymn and ethnic term had faded from ex istence. Language and M a t e r i a l Culture. Edomite texts from Transjordan are mainly concentrated in the capital city at Buseireh and at Tell el-Kheleifeh at 'Aqaba. Within Idumea, they are distributed over a wide area but are still few and laconic. This limited attestation provides only a few distinc tive paleographic and grammatical aspects of the language. T h e script shows a similarity to Moabite, with distinctive forms for dalet (probably to avoid confusion with resh), he, and mem (e.g., the Horvat 'Uza ostraca). Specific linguistic features are more difficult to isolate because the corpus mainly shares affinities with Hebrew, Phoenician, Ammon ite, and Moabite. T h e basic means of determining Edomite remains the theophoric names formed with the " Q o s " ele ment that appear throughout the Near East from Egypt to Persia (see Maurice Sartte, Inscriptions Grecque et Latines de la Syrie 1 3 [1982]: no. 9003, with a discussion). Identifica tion of Idumean material culture also remains vexed because tire architecture and other material remains reflect few, if any, distinctive characteristics. Partially, this is the result of tire culture's mixed population, consisting of Sidonians, Ar abs, Edomites, and Greeks. T h e late Iron Age Edomite shrine at Horvat Qitmit and the ruins of tire Hellenistic city at Marisa afford rare insights into Idumean culture. [See also Mareshah] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, F.-M. "Marisa dans le Papyrus 76 de Zenon et la traite des esclaves en Idumee," Revue Biblique 33 (1924): 566-574.
143
Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq. "The Edomite Shrine at Horvat Qitmit in the Judean Negev: Preliminary Excavation Report." Tel Aviv 18.1 (1991): 93-116.
Crawford, Dorothy J. T. "The Idumeans of Memphis and the Ptole maic Politeumata." In Alii del XVII Congresso inlernazionale di papirologia, Napoli, 1983, pp. 1 0 6 9 - 1 0 7 5 . Naples, 1984.
De Geus, C. H. J. "Idumea." Jaarberichi
"Ex Orient Lux" 26 ( 1 9 7 9 -
1980): 53-74. Excellent basic survey, to be used with more recent studies. Gichon, Mordechai. "Idumea and the Herodian Limes." Israel Explo ration Journal 1 7 . 1 (1967): 27-42.
Israel, Felice. "Miscellanea Idumea." Rivista Biblica 27 (1979): 1 7 1 -
203. Comprehensive study, with the supplement cited below, of the epigraphic and linguistic aspects of Edomite; includes a complete bibliography. Israel, Felice. "Supplementum Idumeum I." Rivista Biblica 35 (1987): 337-356.
Kanael, B. "The Partition of Judea by Gabinius." Israel Exploration Journal7.2
(1957): 98-106.
Kasher, Aryeh. Jews, Idumeans, and Ancient Arabs. Texte und Studien
zum Antiken Judentum, 18. Tubingen, 1988. The most recent sub stantial account of the history and relations of Idumea; should be used with caution. Launcy, Marcel. Recherches sur les armies hellenistiques (1949-1950). 2
vols. Reprint, Paris, 1987. Basic discussion of the Idumean military colonies in Egypt (vol. 1, pp. 556-559) and the onomasticon (vol. 2, pp. 1 2 3 5 - 1 2 4 1 ) , with a postface by Y. Garlan, P. Gauthier, and C. Orrieux. Rappaport, U. "Les Idumeens en Egypte." Revue Philologique 43 (1969): 73-82. DAVID F . GRAF
IKTANU, TELL, site located at the edge of the foothills in the southeast Jordan Valley, 1 2 Ion (7 mi.) northeast of the Dead Sea, at approximately the —150 m contour below Mediterranean Sea level ( 3 i ° 4 9 ' N , 35°4o' E; map reference 2 1 5 X 1 3 6 ) . T h e occupation covers the tops of two natural spurs south of tire perennial Wadi Hesban. T h e area re ceives a low annual rainfall (modern average 164 mm), but the site overlooks alluvial soils responsive to irrigation cul tivation as well as to dry farming. It has a strategic position in relation to routes, water, and arable and grazing land. The history of discovery of die site reflects changing per spectives in archaeology. In the nineteenth cenUiry the prin cipal interest in the site was biblical. The first recorded vis itor to the site was Selah Merrill, in 1876, for die American Palestine Exploration Society. He described tire ruins on the north tell and proposed an identification with one of the Cities of the Plain, specifically Zoar. Claude R. Conder vis ited the site in 1881 for the Palestine Exploration Fund and rejected die identification. In 1926, William Foxwell Al bright, then at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, proposed an identification with the Gadite settle ment at Bedt-Haram. Alexis Mallon, of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jeru salem, made the first modern assessment of the site between 1929 and 1934. He published a sketched plan of the ruin of "Beth-Haram" on the north tell and identified the pottery found there. H e was the first to describe the remains of a
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IMPERIAL ARAMAIC
large settlement which lacked defensive walls on the south tell and correctiy dated the associated material (Mallon, 1929, pp. 2 3 0 - 2 3 2 ; Mallon et al., 1934, p. 1 5 1 ) . Nelson Glueck appears not to have known of Marion's work when he paid a brief visit to the site in 1943. A survey and a small excavation concentrated mainly on the south hill were carried out in 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 6 6 by Kay Wright (Prag), for the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. The site was included in the East Jordan Valley Survey of Moawiyah Ibrahim, James Sauer, and Khair Yassine of Jor dan University, ACOR, and the Jordan Department of An tiquities, respectively, in 1976. Prag returned to tire site in 1987, 1989, and 1990 under the auspices of the British In stitute at Amman for Archaeology and History. In 1987 and 1990 the project was extended to Tell Hammam, 3 km (2 mi.) nortii on the south side of the Wadi Kafrain. The pro ject, to develop a regional archaeology, includes environ mental studies, with analysis of the ancient and modern flora and fauna, investigation of the local vernacular architecture, and ethnographic work. The current analysis of occupation at Iktanu resulting from the work of tiiis project indicates that it was first oc cupied in the Early Bronze Age I. The evidence suggests a small settlement supported by a mixed farming regime, in which the principal cereal crop was wheat. The site was then abandoned. The most extensive occupation of the site was during EB IV. On die soudi hill a well-planned village of rectangular structures, with courtyards separated by unpaved lanes, was built over an area of 22 hectares (54 acres). A minimum population estimate suggests that 2,000-2,500 people oc cupied the settiement. They practiced mixed farming, with goat and barley as the dominant food resources, but with cattle, sheep, wheat, legumes, pulses, and tree crops. T h e food production, storage, and processing systems are very well documented. Though relatively short-lived, the settle ment is one of the largest and most important known for the period. Its stratigraphy provides the basis for the current division of EB IV into two or more phases. At least two other large settlements and several small sites also existed in the region. T h e excavation adds considerably to the evidence recovered from the work of Kathleen M. Kenyon at Jericho, only 20 km ( 1 2 mi.) to the west. The village was abandoned as suddenly as it was established. There is no evidence of Middle Bronze Age sherds or settlement on the site. Some sherds dating to the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age I were found in survey. The ex cavations on the north tell indicate with certainty that a sub stantial fort was constructed in Iron II, and possibly earlier. It commanded a strategic view in all directions, was built in brick on a platform supported by stone foundations which extended the hill's natural narrow rocky crest, and had a defended lower enclosure. Its use continued into the Persian period. Scattered sherds of later dates, but no occupation, are attested. The final use of the site, in the late Ottoman to
the modern period, was strategic and for burials, a pattern observed on most prominent tells in the region. [See also the biographies of Mallon and Merrill.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Mallon, Alexis. "Notes sur quelques sites du Ghflr oriental." Biblica 10 (1929): 230-232.
Mallon, Alexis, R. Koeppel, and Rene Neuville. Teleilat Ghassul I. Compte rendu des Fouilles d' ITnslitut Biblique Pontifical
1929-1932.
Rome, 1934. Prag, Kay. "Preliminary Report on the Excavations at Tell Iktanu and Tell al-Hammam, Jordan, 1990." Levant?.?, ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 55-66.The most
recent report, containing references to earlier publications, including the works listed above. KAY PRAG
IMPERIAL ARAMAIC.
T h e English counterpart of the German term Reichsaramdisch, the term Imperial Ara maic was originally applied in 1 9 2 7 (by its coiner, Joseph Markwart), to the administrative language of the Achae menid empire and to the Aramaic of the books of Ezra and Daniel. Although Biblical Aramaic has strong affinities with the standard administrative language of the Persian period, the Aramaic of Ezra is not identical with that administrative language. The Aramaic of Daniel is even further removed. Thus, the inclusion of Biblical Aramaic immediately atten uates the term. T h e ambiguity of the term is deepened by its extension in the other direction to include even earlier Aramaic inscrip tions. It is often inferred from the incident (c. 7 0 1 BCE) in 2 Kings 18:26-28 (cf. Is. 3 6 : 1 1 - 1 3 ) that Aramaic was normally the language used in the Neo-Assyrian empire for diplo macy and administration—at least in its western sphere of influence. This supposition is confirmed by both iconographic and epigraphic evidence (KAI233; Fales, 1986). As syrian palace reliefs show an Aramaic scribe witii pen and ink exercising official functions alongside an Akkadian scribe with reed stylus and clay tablet (e.g., ANEP 367; Driver, 1976, pis. 2 3 , 24). [See Palace; Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing Materials; Writing and Writing Sys tems; Akkadians; Tablet.] However, the presumption that the Aramaic sponsored by the Neo-Assyrian empire in the west was in essential continuity with the standard Aramaic sponsored by the Neo-Babylonian and Persian empires sev eral centuries later is too facile. If, thus, the label Imperial Aramaic is to be applied to a genuinely linguistic entity, which empire and which texts must be specified. Of course, Imperial, or Official, Aramaic can be defined in purely chron ological terms (e.g., of die period c. 700-200 BCE), following die influential division proposed by Joseph A. Fitzmyer ( 979> PP- 60, 6 1 ) . T h e problem is that the term together with its historical usage connotes more than mere chronol ogy and is therefore misleading. J
It is best to define Imperial, or Official, Aramaic first in its narrow sense as the ideal standard language in which
IMPERIAL ARAMAIC scribes in the Persian period (probably from Darius I to Darius III [ 5 2 2 - 3 3 0 BCE]) would draft official documents. Then the relationship of other texts and periods can be de fined in relation to that standard. Official Aramaic in this more restricted sense is strikingly homogeneous in orthog raphy and grammar, which can be reconstructed fairly com prehensively on the basis of three corpora: the Elephantine legal papyri (fifth century BCE) from Egypt; the Arsames correspondence (fifth century BCE) from Egypt; and the Sa maria papyri from Wadi ed-Daliyeh (fourth century BCE) in ancient Palestine. [See Elephantine; Samaria; Papyrus; Daliyeh, Wadi ed-.] It is this level of homogeneity that had a real functional existence for scribes in the Persian period; it is missed, however, when the term is used in a quasi-chron ological sense. A fuller appreciation of this homogeneity al lows finer judgments to be formed about the language of texts from a wider period. Witiiin the Persian period, genre correlates more closely with language titan either geographic, temporal, or ethnic provenience. Thus, Official Aramaic applies to legal docu ments, administrative correspondence, literary (e.g., the Ahiqar narrative, Hor bar Pawenesh) and monumental texts (e.g., the Bisitun inscription). [See Bisitun.] On the other hand, the language of private letters, including the Hermopolis papyri, deviates from the standard and represents a complex compromise between the conventions of Official Aramaic and the vernacular of the writers. T h e relatively few Aramaic texts that fall after the period of Old Aramaic (inscriptions of die ninth and eighth centuries BCE) but be fore the Persian period—whether in the Neo-Assyrian or Neo-Babylonian sphere—tend to show a transition in gram matical forms toward the Official Aramaic of the Persian period. T h e coming of Alexander and the collapse of the Persian empire (330 BCE) form a watershed for the history of Ara maic. The homogeneous standard language was broken up, but then quickly reconsolidated locally into forms of stan dard literary Aramaic: Nabatean, Palmyrene, Hatran, Old Syriac (in inscriptions from Edessa), and texts in the tradi tion of Jewish literary Aramaic. [See Nabatean Inscriptions; Palmyrene Inscriptions; Hatra Inscriptions; Syriac] These forms show strong continuity with Official Aramaic but are colored to varying degrees by local vernaculars. The Ara maic of Ezra is especially close to Official Aramaic but shows significant modernization of grammar as well as of spelling. The Aramaic of Daniel is typologically more ad vanced and approaches the literary forms of Aramaic ex emplified by various texts from Qumran. [See Qumran.] T h e Aramaic of Targums Onkelos and Jonathan, as well as the Bar Kokhba letters and Megillat Ta'anit represents the end point of this literary tradition before the emergence of a new literary tradition based on die Jewish Palestinian ver nacular. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt.] Unlike the Old Aramaic of the group of inscriptions from the eighth century BCE described by Rainer Degen (1969),
145
Official Aramaic seems to be based on a dialect stock whose origins must be located fartiier to the east. Whereas the Old Aramaic inscriptions from Syria anticipate (in a few re spects) features of the later Aramaic dialects of Jewish Pal estinian, Christian Palestinian, and Samaritan Aramaic, a number of features of Official Aramaic are already antici pated by the ninth-century BCE Tell Fakhariyah inscriptions from Sikan on the Khabur River in Syria. [See Fakhariyah Aramaic Inscription.] At the other end, the fact that there is no radical break in die literary tradition at Edessa from the literary successor to Official Aramaic throughout the whole period of Classical Syriac may be construed as an argument that the original home of Official Aramaic lies not too far from Edessa. Official Aramaic (in the restricted sense) has several distinctive features in phonology and orthography, morphology, syntax, and its lexicon. Phonology and O r t h o g r a p h y . Official Aramaic exhibits a number of phonological mergers for which there is no ev idence in Old Aramaic. T h e consistent spelling of etymo logical /d/, /t/j and /z/ with dalet, taw, and let—with tire reg ular exception of a more conservative spelling for the demonstatives and relative with zayin (znh, z\ zk(y), and zy)—shows that these consonants had merged with /d/, /t/, and /t/. The mergers are to be correlated with the develop ment of the fricative variants of the nonemphatic stops /b, d, g, k, p, t/ (a process that eventually found its way into the reading traditions of Hebrew). Occasional spellings of ety mological /d/ (perhaps originally an emphatic fricative lat eral) with 'ayin shows that it had merged with /'/• Still, the preferred spelling of tiiis consonant is with qop, as in Old Aramaic (perhaps for [ 7 ] ) . Etymological /s/ may have merged with /s/), even though the spelling with sin is re tained fairly consistently. Also in contradistinction to Old Aramaic, syllable-closing /'/ quiesced, although the scribes consistently maintained the distinction between the deter mined state [-a] spelled with a final 'alep and the phonetically identical absolutive feminine-singular ending on adjectives and participles spelled with he. The negative /la/ is spelled with a final 'alep and written as a separated word (in contrast to /- in Old Aramaic). As in Old Aramaic the diphthongs / ay/ and /aw/ are retained, but they were already contracted in the Hermopolis letters (see above). At the same time, /n/ is not assimilated before a following consonant (regarded as secondary nasalization by many); similarly, /l/ is unassimilated in prefixal and infinitive forms of the root \/lqh. As similation is consistent in these forms in Old Aramaic (out side of the Tell Fakhariyah bilingual), the Hermopolis letters, and most later Aramaic dialects. The formative ele ment h- is consistently retained in word-initial position in particles and in the causative stem; however, it already is changing to '- in the Hermopolis letters and then in many later dialects of Aramaic, Official Aramaic increases the use of medial matres lectionis (for stem syllables), while prefer ring the defective spelling of the absolutive masculine plural ending in [-Tn], Final unaccented syllables ending in [-a]
146
IMPERIAL ARAMAIC
tend to be spelled without a final mater (e.g., the first-person plural inflectional and pronominal suffix -net, and the sec ond-person masculine-singular independent pronoun 'anla, spelled 'raz). On die otirer hand, a final unaccented -F(as in the third-person masculine-singular suffix -why on a plural base (cf. also the second-person feminine-singular forms 'nty, ktbty, -ky) is now spelled with a final mater, in contrast to Old Aramaic (which has -wh for the corresponding thirdperson masculine-singular suffixal form). Morphology. T h e internal passive is progressively lost in competition with - it- forms. It is first lost in prefixal verb forms but is retained for a while in the perfect and participle; eventually, it is retained only in tire participle of the basic and factitive stems in the later dialects. The formative ele ment serves to mediate object suffixes on the imperfect. Sev eral l-yod verbs are treated like l-nun in the imperfect and infinitive (as in the later dialects). The infinitive of the basic stem is formed with ;«ew-preformative (as at Tell Fakhariyah but not in other Old Aramaic inscriptions), in contrast to derived stems without OTem-preformative. The mem-preformative had already spread to die derived stems in the Hermopolis letters and in the Proverbs of Ahiqar (as in later Syriac and Western Aramaic). The determined masculineplural ending on masculine-plural nouns is still -ayya (in contrast to later eastern dialects, whose -e, nevertheless, first makes its appearance in the Persian period). The consonan tal contrast between masculine and feminine plural prenominal suffixes (~hm, -km :: -hn, -kn) is maintained in Official Aramaic, whereas the emergence of the later mas culine-plural forms (masculine-plural -non, -kon) is attested in private letters from the same period. Syntax. /- serves as a facultative direct-object marker for definite direct objects (especially personal), corresponding to 'yt in Old Aramaic and yat in tire later western dialects. The use of zy in genitive constructions is increased greatly over the few instances found in Old Aramaic. T h e new con struction of noun + proleptic suffix before zy 4- noun for close genitive relation also begins to appear. The paradig matic distinction between imperfect and jussive, well estab lished in Old Aramaic and maintained in private letters and to some extent in later dialects, tends to be lost in Official Aramaic (where an occasionally unambiguous jussive form will be used as a jussive but more commonly is replaced in this usage by an imperfect form). In contrast to Old Ara maic, where the participle is used only as a substantive, the participle increasingly becomes part of the verbal system alongside the perfect and imperfect (as already in the Nerab inscriptions). [See Nerab Inscriptions.] In addition, the per iphrastic use of the participle with a form of the verb hdwa ("to be") begins in this period and continues in tire later dialects. In the Old Aramaic of the ninth and eighth centu ries BCE (with the notable exception of tire Tell Fakhariyah bilingual), the finite verb seems to be restricted to tire first and second position in its clause, with VSO (verb-subjectobject), being the most unmarked word order. In Official
Aramaic, apparently under the influence of Late Babylonian and Persian, the position of the verb is not so restricted. [See Persian.] Especially under Persian influence there is a sffong tendency to place the object before the verb. Lexicon. Among the distinctive elements in the lexicon of Official Aramaic are tire new formation brt- for "daugh ter" (only rarely attested before the Persian period) replac ing the earlier *bint-; the preposition '/encroaching on 7; the quasi-pronoun mnd 'm ("something, anything"); the proform tnh ("here"; in opposition to tmh, "there"); an increas ing number of Akkadian loanwords; and tire presence of Persian loanwords and caiques. [See also Aramaic Language and Literature.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Degen, Rainer. Aharamdische Grammalik der Inschriften des 10.-8 Jh. v.
dir. Wiesbaden, 1969. A positivistic, but useful description of the language of Old Aramaic inscriptions from Syria. Driver, Godfrey R. Semitic
Writing: From Pictograph
to Alphabet.
Schweich Lectures of the British Academy (1944), pis. 23,24. 3d ed. London, 1976. Fales, Frederick Mario. Aramaic Epigraphs on Clay Tablets of the NeoAssyrian Period. Rome, 1986.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. "The Phases of the Aramaic Language." In A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays, pp. 57-84. Chico, Ca
lif., 1979. Greenfield, Jonas C. "Standard Literary Aramaic." In Actes du premier congres international de Unguislique semitique et chamito-semitique, Paris
16-19 juillet 1969, edited by Andre Caquot and David Cohen, pp. 280-289. The Hague, 1974. Seminal discussion of the place of Im perial Aramaic among the Aramaic dialects and its literary successor in Jewish tradition. Greenfield, Jonas. "Aramaic in the Achaemenian Empire." In Cam bridge History of Iran, vol. 2 , The Median and Achaemenian
Periods,
edited by Ilya Gershevitch, pp. 698-713. Cambridge, 1985. A more detailed survey of Imperial Aramaic, including historical background and texts and their linguistic affinities; copious references. Gropp, Douglas M. "The Language of the Samaria Papyri: A Prelim inary Study." Maarav 5-6 (1990): 169-187. Analysis of the linguistic
features of the Samaria papyri in relation to other Aramaic corpora within the Persian period. Kaufman, Stephen A. The Akkadian Influences on Aramaic. Assyriol-
ogical Studies 19. Chicago, 1974. Much more than a treatment of loanwords. Kutscher, Eduard Y. "Aramaic." In Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 6, Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa, edited by Thomas
A. Sebeok, pp. 3 4 7 - 4 1 2 . The Hague and Paris, 1970. A valuable critical survey of literature on the earliest phases of Aramaic (in cluding Imperial Aramaic and Biblical Aramaic). Porten, Bezalel, and Ada Yardeni. Textbook of Aramaic Documents from
Ancient Egypt, newly copied, edited, and translated into Hebrew and English. 3 vols, to date Jerusalem, 1986-1993. A preliminary publi cation of a complete Corpus of Aramaic Texts of the Persian
Period
projected as four volumes: 1. Letters (1986), 2. Contracts (1989), 3. Literature, Accounts, and Lists (1993), and 4. Ostraca. Pritchard, James B., ed. The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the
Old Testament, pi. 367. 2d ed. Princeton, 1969.
Whitehead, J. David. "Some Distinctive Features of the Language of the Aramaic Arsames Correspondence." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 37 (1978): 1 1 9 - 1 4 0 . DOUGLAS M . GROPP
INCENSE INCENSE. Odoriferous plants of various origins and species growing in various parts of the ancient Near East became important elements in the religious, political, and economic life of the region beginning in the third and second millennia BCE and increased in importance in the first mil lennium BCE. T h e sap, wood, bark, roots, and fruit of the plants were used both as incense and as ingredients in per fume and medicine. Trees and shrubs growing in East Af rica and South Arabia, such as Boswellia papyri/era and Boswellia sacra, yielded frankincense; Commiphora myrra yielded myrrh. Both of these incense substances were al ready important trade commodities from the region called Punt in southern Egypt and from South Arabia to cultures in the Fertile Crescent in the second millennium BCE (cf. the reliefs at Deir el-Bahari in Egypt representing Queen Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt, and Tell el-Amarna letter 269, 1. 1 6 ) . Other incense-producing trees grew in what are today Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. They include Astragalus gurnmifera, which yields gum tragacanth; Cistus laurifolius, which yields ladanum; Commiphora balsamodendron and gileadensis, which yield the balm used in various medicinal ointments; Liquidambar orientalis, which yields storax; Pistacia lentiscus, which yields mastic; and, finally, Pinus brutia, which yields an oleoresin, used by the Sumerians for medical purposes. Although the use of incense is considered a symbolic ex pression of a mythic reality in the ancient Near East, there are hardly any traces of etiological myths explaining the or igin or beginning of the use of specific incense materials. This is surprising in a world permeated by mythology be cause myth legitimizes the use of specific materials for spe cific purposes. T h e only complete myth of origin of a spe cific incense material is found in Ovid's Metamorphoses ( 1 0 : 2 9 8 - 5 1 8 ) . It deals with the origin of myrrh and legitimizes its use in connection with death and funerals. T h e Hebrew Bible testifies to various uses of incense, but has no myth of origin; it only informs us that God likes die smell of offerings, including or excluding incense (cf. Gn. 8:21; Lv. 1:9, 2:2). T h e gods of ancient Assyria-Babylonia also appreciated the fragrance of incense offerings (cf. the Gilgamesh epic, 1 1 : 1 5 8 ) . Even in Egypt, where so much incense was burned, there is no myth of origin, although there is the Egyptian word for incense, sntr, "that which makes divine." In the linguistic metaphors and images con nected with incense there are hybrid expressions of exalted feelings that allow for the use of mythological images in con nection with incense. For instance, incense is called the Eye of Horus, although it does not play any major role in the myths connected with Horus and Osiris. T h e term is, there fore, a symbolic expression at best. In the pyramid texts, which describe the funeral and the worship of the dead ruler, it is said of tire dead king about to become a god that his "sweat is the sweat of Horus," his "odor is the odor of H o rus," referring to the incense fumigation in the cult of the dead king. Incense makes divinity.
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Incense a n d t h e Human Body. Although there is no myth of origin for the use of incense in the ancient Near East, it can still be maintained that its use is legitimized by myth—by tire gods—simply because its use is supposed to be appreciated by the gods. This appreciation has far-reach ing consequences for the way it is used. It seems that the earliest use of incense is connected with death, funerals, and the worship of the dead. In Egypt the pyramid texts relate tire funeral of the dead king. The mythic idea of die cere monies associated with the funeral and the cult of the dead ldng is to make him a god who lives forever. It is for that purpose the incense is being burned. Incense enables die king to obtain the stated purpose because it possesses divine qualities: it purifies from putrefaction and evil odor, it pro tects against evil, and it bestows upon the ldng the odor of the divine world, from where incense mythically derives. In cense furthermore facilitates the physical transference of the king to heaven: the smoke forms a staircase from earth to heaven. Incense is able to make the dead live again because deatii in the ancient Near East was never considered a nat ural necessity but, rather, a mythic accident. Incense material was also used in embalming die dead body. It was thought to preserve it and keep it alive. Incense has tire same function in tire cult of the dead. In the tombs statues representing die dead were erected in inaccessible rooms that the Arabs call serdab, "basement." These rooms have one or two small openings in one of the walls tiirough which the cult of the dead person could take place. The serdab statues were fumigated with incense to assure that the dead stay alive. T h e same belief can be found behind the Phoenician sarcophagus inscription from Byblos that tells its reader that the dead person lies in myrrh and bdel lium. In the Bible there is only slight evidence of the use of incense at funerals: for example, Joseph's body may have been prepared according to Egyptian standards (Gn. 50:26). 2 Chronicles 1 6 : 1 4 describes the funeral of King Asa. His bier is said to be filled with all kinds of spices prepared by the perfumer's art. Incense may have been among those spices, but Israel did not share the same profound belief in the divinity of afterlife as the Egyptians. Thus, the Israelites used less incense at funerals and in the cult of the dead. The same is true for Assyria-Babylonia; like Israel, it had a more somber view of life after deatii. The belief tiiat incense ultimately derives from the gods is also responsible for its use as medicine. Medicinal use is amply testified in Egyptian and Assyro-Babylonian medical texts and in the Bible. Jeremiah 8:22 seems to indicate that sort ("storax"?) could be used to cure diseases and wounds. It is also a mythic idea that incense used as a perfume is able to make an individual divinely beautiful. Perfume is thought to transfer a person to another, more elevated sphere of life (cf. the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, who perfumes herself in myrrh oil or stacte, a sweet spice used in preparing in cense; cf. Sg. 5:5).
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INCENSE eighth-fifth-century BCE contexts. Incense shovels have been found at Tel Dan in Israel (eighth century BCE) and may be the same type of utensil as the tool described in Levitcus 1 6 as used by the high priest on Yom Kippur in the Temple in Jerusalem. The incense shovel is later depicted in synagogue art. It appears, for example, in the mosaic floor of the syn agogue of Severus at Hammath Tiberias (250-300 CE), where it seems to depict a symbol of Jewish worship in die Jerusalem Temple. Numerous ceramic incense shovels of this kind have also been found in the excavations at Sepphoris in Israel. [See Dan; Hammath Tiberias; Sepphoris.]
INCENSE. Chalcolithic incense burner, c. 3500 BCE. (Courtesy Pictorial
Archive) Incense in Divine Worship a n d in T r a d e . The use of incense in divine worship was widespread throughout the ancient Near East in pre-Christian times. At Medinet Habu, the temple of Rameses III, the priest fumigated the statue of Amun to pave the way for the god who, in die morning, would enter his image. Fumigation witii incense meant pu rification and offering in a single act, an offering intended to attract and soothe the deity at one and the same time. Ashurbanipal gave an excellent reason for using incense in divine worship: he maintained in a prayer that the "gods inhale incense." The Hebrew Bible relates that there were daily incense offerings in the Temple in Jerusalem in front of the Holy of Holies. This so-called tamid ritual was enacted to purify the room, to attract and please die deity, and to protect the priests in the Temple area. The ritual use of incense required altars and such incense tools as censers, shovels, and containers, which, in variant forms, have been unearthed at various locations and iden tified in reliefs and paintings. Among them is the incense burner in the shape of an arm and hand, which is especially characteristic in die reliefs and paintings of Egyptian culture. The horned incense altar belongs to the Canaanites and He brews (cf. Ex. 30:2), as examples excavated at Megiddo from the tenth-ninth centuries BCE testify. The small South Arabian cubic burner inscribed with the names of incense materials is well known from many sites in South Arabia. One was recently found at Baraqish, in Yemen, in a fourthcentury BCE context. The same type of burner has also ap peared at Beersheba, Lachish, and elsewhere in Israel in
The use of incense created vivid trade relations between South Arabia and the Fertile Crescent (cf. the potsherds with South Arabian inscriptions found in Jerusalem from die seventh to sixtii centuries BCE), between Egypt and SyriaLebanon (cf. Gn. 37:25 and many Egyptian literary sources), and between Egypt and Punt. That trade, which included many oilier commodities, created vast riches and therefore had political consequences: as early as the begin ning of the first millennium BCE, the Neo-Assyrians and Babylonians expanded toward the south and west to capture the incense trade. This same trade, in a later period, with the Ptolemies in Egypt and their dominions (cf. the Zenon papyri), became one of the foundations of the kingdoms of Petra and Palmyra. [See Petra; Palmyra.] The New Testament relates that Jesus was buried with myrrh and aloe used as ointments (cf. Jn. 1 9 : 3 8 - 4 2 ) . In an cient Greece and Rome, fumigations at funerals and in di vine worship were common. It seems that the non-Jewish Christians continued die habit of fumigating at funerals but, wanting to distance tiieir liturgy from pagan cults, were re luctant to use incense in divine worship in the first three centuries of the common era. During die fourth century, however, the literary and archaeological evidence suggests that a change took place. In the Syrian church, the Testa ment of St. Ephraim recommends the use of incense in wor-
INCENSE. Iron Age II stone incense spoon, c. 800 BCE. (Courtesy Pic
torial Archive)
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES ship. T h e Western church also begins to use incense in the fourth century, and Christian censers begin to appear in strata from that time. T h e idea behind the use of incense in the Christian church is to honor God, to exorcise evil, and to symbolize prayer (cf. Ps. 1 4 1 : 2 ) . The Jews abandoned the use of incense with the destruc tion of the Jerusalem Temple. Only in the Havdalah cere mony, which marks the end of the holy Sabbath and the beginning of the profane week, do the Jews continue the use of fragrant spices. A benediction was and still is uttered over the box containing the spices, a symbolic act that utilizes the fragrance of the aromatic plants as a device to comfort the Jewish soul saddened by die end of the Sabbatii. [See also Burial Techniques; Grave Goods; Medicine.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Antonini, Sabina. "Nuovi incensieri iscritti Yemeniti." OriensAntiquus 27 (1988): I 3 3 - I 4 I . Atchley, Edward G. C. F. A History of the Use of Incense in Divine Wor ship. London, 1909.
I-Iepper, F. Nigel. "Trees and Shrubs Yielding Gums and Resins in the Ancient Near East." Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 3 (1987): 107— 114. Martimort, A.-G., ed. Handhuch der Liturgiewissenschaft, vol. 1 , pp. 1 7 9 - 1 8 0 . Freiburg, 1963. Miiller, W. W. "Weihrauch." In Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, supp. vol. 1 5 . , cols. 699-777. Munich, 1978. Nielsen, Kjeld. Incense in Ancient Israel. Supplements to Vetus Testa-
mentum, vol. 38. Leiden, 1986. Zwickel, Wolfgang. Rducherkult
und Rduchergerdte. Orbis Biblicus et
Orientalis, 97. Gottingen, 1990. KJELD NIELSEN
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. An extensive linguistic family, the Indo-European (IE) languages are spo ken in the western half of Eurasia, stretching from Europe through Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent, across the northern Near East from Anatolia to Iran and Afghanistan, and at one time as far east as western China and Siberia. They are now also the dominant languages in the Americas, Australia, and southern Africa. The close linguistic relationship of the IE languages is most immediately evident by comparing lexical cognates. The word for daughter may serve as an example: among the modern languages, one finds Tochter in German, dukte in Lithuanian, doS' in Russian, thugatera in Greek, dustr in Ar menian, and dokhtar in Persian. [See Greek; Persian.] T h e word was tkdcer in Tocharian, written between thefifthand sixth centuries CE in western China. It is first documented as duatra in thirteentii-century BCE Anatolia. Recognition of the genetic relationship among IE lan guages began with occasional observations, mainly of lexical similarities between two or three member languages throughout recorded history, but became especially vivid and more comprehensive in the seventeenth and eighteenth
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centuries. A decisive event was an observation in a speech made by William Jones in 1796, then chief justice in British India, as well as a Persianist and Sanskritist. He postulated that not only Persian and Sanskrit, but also Greek, Latin, Germanic, and Celtic must go back to a common root and must therefore be members of the same family. [See Latin.] The first major breakthroughs in the systematic establish ment of the relationships among Indo-European languages were made in the early nineteentii century. This led to the development of linguistic science—that is, the study of lan guage in its comparative, historical, and synchronic aspects, conjoined with the study of cultural history. The method ologies developed by Indo-Europeanists soon began to be applied also to the research of other language families and provided the foundations of general linguistics. Overall, there are eleven well-attested dialect groups, or dialects, that can be distinguished. T h e Anatolian languages were first recognized as IndoEuropean in 1902, and their discovery resulted in a funda mental reassessment of the diachrony and structure of IE. These languages were spoken in large parts of Anatolia and the northern Levant during the second and first millennia BCE. They include Hittite, Palaic, Luwian, Lydian, and Lycian and a few other less well-attested dialects. [See Hittite; Luwian.] Best documented in Cuneiform Hittite. [See Cu neiform.] Beside personal names and a few Hittite loan words in Assyrian tablets found in Kanes/Kiiltepe in Cappadocia (eastern Turkey), dated to the nineteenth century BCE, it is most abundantly documented on some twenty-five thousand tablets found in tire archives of the Hittite capital, Hattusa/Bogazkoy, now Bogazkale, in central Turkey. [See Assyrians; Tablet; Kanes; Kiiltepe Texts; Libraries and Ar chives; Bogazkoy.] Its three stages are Old Hittite (c. 1 7 0 0 1500 BCE), Middle Hittite (c. 1 5 0 0 - 1 3 5 0 BCE), andNeo-Hittite ( 1 3 5 0 - 1 2 0 0 BCE). Palaic, spoken to the north of the Old Hittite empire, is found in a small number of texts from die same archives. Luwian was spoken throughout tire southern parts of An atolia. It is documented from about 1400 to 200 BCE in three periods, which also reflect dialect variants: Cuneiform Lu wian is found in die archives of the Hittite New Empire (c. 1 4 0 0 - 1 2 0 0 ) . [See Hittites.] Eastern Luwian is represented by Hieroglyphic Luwian (formerly called Hieroglyphic Hittite) from the period of the Neo-Hittite states (c. 1200-700 BCE) in northern Syria. Western Luwian is represented by Lycian, documented by some 1 5 0 inscriptions (c. 400-200 BCE), and Lydian, with some seventy inscriptions, mosdy from the capital city of Sardis in nortiiwestern Turkey, dated to die sixth-fourth centuries BCE. [See Sardis.] These were written in eastern and western types of the Greek alphabet, respectively. T h e Indo-Iranian, or Aryan, languages consist of three groups: Iranian, Indie (also called Indo-Aryan), and Nuristani. T h e earliest attestation of these languages is an early
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form of Indo-Aryan. It is reflected in royal and divine names and technical terms related to horse training and racing in Hurrian texts of the Mitanni period (fifteenth century BCE onward) and found in the Hittite archives. [See Hurrian; Mi tanni.] Thereafter, Indo-Aryan emerges first in the north west of the Indian subcontinent. T h e vast literature begins with the religious texts, the Vedas, whose earliest parts may date to the middle of the second millennium BCE. T h e clas sical language, Sanskrit, was codified in a quasi-algebraic code in about 400 BCE by the grammarian Panini in the Panjab and has remained the standard learned language. Middle Indie begins in about the third century BCE, notably Bud dhist Pali and the vernaculars, die Prakrits. T h e modern In die languages have been attested since the end of the first millennium CE and are spoken in the northern half of the subcontinent, but also in Sri Lanka and the island groups; they include such languages as Kashmiri, Panjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali, Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, and Hindi/Urdu (in Devanagari/Arabic script, respectively), which is lexi cally replete with Persian (with the latter's Arabic and Turk ish components), and finally Romany, the language of the Gypsies. [See Arabic] T h e Iranian languages were once spoken from the south ern Ukraine across Central Asia into western China and western Siberia. They are divided, geographically, into a northern (traditionally called eastern) and a southern group and, historically, into old, middle (c. third century BCEeightli cenUiry CE), and modern stages. Speakers of the southern group, notably the Medes and Persians, entered the plateau of Iran during the first centuries of the first mil lennium BCE. [See Medes.] Iranian is first documented in the Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenids ( 5 5 9 - 3 3 ° BCE). Little is known about the language of the Medes, who preceded the Achaemenids. Linguistically older are the texts in Avestan, probably spoken in northeastern Iran, which include Gathic Avestan, the language of Zarathushtra (c. 1000 BCE), and so-called Younger Avestan texts, some of which may date in part to the middle of the second millennium BCE. Middle Persian is well attested, and to a lesser degree (Middle) Parthian, spoken in northeastern Iran. The old and middle nortiiern Iranian languages include Scythian, once found from die Black Sea to Siberia and best documented in extensive texts in the Saka dialect from Chi nese Turkistan (late first millennium CE); Sogdian, in Centtal Asia, documented in extensive texts (first millennium BCE); Khwarazmian, documented south of the Aral Sea and known mainly from glosses in early medieval Arabic texts; and Bactrian (first millennium CE), known from inscriptions. Today, the southern Iranian languages include such widely spread languages as Persian, spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan; Kurdish, spoken in eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran; and Baluchi, spoken in south eastern Iran, southern Afghanistan, and southwest Pakistan. The modern northern languages are confined to the east and
include Yaghnobi in Tajikistan; the so-called Pamir dialects; and, foremost, Pashto in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ossetic is spoken in the central Caucasus as their sole representative in the west, continuing the language of the Alans. The Nuristani languages are attested only from modern times and are spoken in a few villages in the mountainous Hindukush area on the borders of Afghanistan, Paldstan, and India; they may have branched off from Early IndoAryan, rather than constitute an independent branch of Indo-Iranian. Greek, also called Hellenic as a language group, is first attested in its most archaic form, called Mycenaean, in the thirteenth century BCE. It was written on more than thirty thousand tablets, in the so-called Minoan B syllabary script, that were found at Knossos on Crete and at Mycenae and Pylos on the Greek mainland and deciphered in 1 9 5 2 . [See Crete.] This culture collapsed by the twelfth cenUiry BCE. Later epigraphic records of Greek appear from the seventh century BCE. Four main dialect groups are distinguished: Arcadic, Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic, with a complex distribution pattern; they were spoken on the mainland and on the is lands and in western Anatolia and in Greek colonies around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. T h e dialect of the H o meric epics, dated to about 800 BCE, combines both Aeolic and Ionic features. Beginning in the fifth century BCE Attic Greek increasingly overlaid the dialectal diversity in Greece, Anatolia, and elsewhere, and as die koine "common" dia lect, gradually replaced it. This happened most significantly after Alexander's conquests in the late third century BCE, which led to the Greco-Bactrian culture in northern Af ghanistan, the Gandhara culture in northwest Pakistan (until the seventh century CE), Ptolemaic culture in Egypt, and the hellenization of Anatolia and the Levant (where the New Testament was composed in Hellenistic Greek). [See Pto lemies; Biblical Literature, article on New Testament.] M e dieval Greek was the language of the Byzantine empire (since 330 CE). Modern Greek (since c. 1200 CE) developed out of this koine, which led, by the end of the nineteenth century, to the contest between atticizing kathareitousa ("purist") and demotike ("popular") literary styles, the latter becoming dominant. Italic languages comprise Latin, spoken originally in the small region of Latium and Rome; Faliscan, in a tiny area north of Latium; Oscan and Umbrian, found over the entire area of central to southern Italy; and Venetian, between the Po River, the Carnic Alps, and Istria. T h e earliest docu ments in Latin come from Latium and are dated to the sixth century BCE. Oscan-Umbrian and Venetian documents, mainly tablets and inscriptions, date to the last centuries BCE. By 100 CE at the latest, Latin had erased the other languages and dialects from Sicily to the Alps, with the exception of the southern Greek colonies. Similarly, the expansion of the Roman empire brought about the emergence of the Ro mance languages, including (beside Italian), Sardinian,
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES Spanish, Portuguese, French, Rhaeto-Romanian, and Ru manian. [See Sardinia.] T h e Celtic languages had their widest distribution, across Europe, between the fifth century BCE and the third or fourth century CE. Known from inscriptions beginning in the sec ond century BCE and from glosses, Continental Celtic in cludes Ibero-Celtic in central Spain, Gaulish in France up to the Low Countries (Belgae), and Italo-Celtic in northern Italy, all of which were erased by the evolving Romance lan guages by the fourth century CE, while the Celtic of Ger many succumbed to Germanic. Celts, called Galatians, moved into Anatolia in the third cenmry BCE and appear to have retained tiieir language amid Phrygians in centtal An atolia until the fifth century CE (according to St. Jerome). Celts appear to have reached the British Isles in the fifth century BCE. Insular Celtic is found in two branches. Goidelic, or Gaelic, the old name for Irish, has three branches, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and the Gaelic of the island of Manx (extinct since the late nineteenth century). The earliest IrishGaelic texts were written in the stroke-and-notch ogham al phabet between the fourth and eighth centuries CE, followed in the late seventh century by Old Irish texts in Roman char acters. Brittonic, or Brythonic, includes Welsh, which is first known from texts dating to about 800 CE, as well as Cornish (extinct since the late eighteenth century) and Breton, im ported to Brittany before 800 CE, both first known from glosses between 800 and 1 1 0 0 CE. T h e Germanic languages originated in southern Scandi navia and initially spread to the coastal areas of the North Sea and die Baltic Ocean from the Netherlands to die Vis tula River. They are first mentioned in Roman records in the late second century BCE and are first documented in third-century CE runic script from southern Scandinavia. There is much debate about the early groupings. They in clude North Germanic in southern Scandinavia; North Sea Germanic, along the North Sea; Rhine-Weser Germanic, along the middle Rhine and Weser Rivers; Elbe Germanic, along the Middle Elbe River; and East Germanic, between the middle Oder and Vistula Rivers. By 250 CE, Elbe Ger manic is found in the south at the Danube River and East Germanic in the area of the Carparthian Mountains. Many of these groups began their great tribal migrations toward the end of the fourth century CE, to the west (the Low Coun tries, England), south into Celtic-speaking areas, and east. T h e East Germanic Goths appear to have moved to the Vistula area as early as the second century CE. Farther south, they subjected the Iranian-speaking Sarmatians in the south ern Ukraine in about the middle of the fourth century. The Gothic Bible translation by Bishop Ulfilas at about that time represents the earliest and most extensive documentation of early Germanic. While the tribal federations of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths migrated farther west to Gaul, Spain, and Italy, Gothic appears to have lasted in the Crimea into the sixteenth century CE. T h e other Germanic languages (texts
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in the various dialects are found from about 750 CE onward) are roughly grouped into two divisions: Old Low German (including Saxon and Lower Franconian) and Old High German (represented by the remainder, including Upper Franconian, Alemannic, Bavarian, and Langobardic in northern Italy). The middle period leads to the modern pe riod by about 1400 CE, including such languages as Modern German; English; the languages of the Lower Countries, Scandinavia, Iceland; and Afrikaans in South Africa. The Slavic, or Slavonic, languages probably originated in die northern Balkans. They are first alluded to in the first two centuries of the common era. Their vast and rapid ex pansion in all directions began in the fifth century, especially after the disintegration of Hunnic power in the east, and lasted until the tenth century. They expanded into Baltic and Finnic areas (Novgorod, c. ninth century CE) and, farther east, toward the Ural Mountains, reached the Dnjepr River and established the Ukraine "borderland" (Kiev was founded in c. 600 CE). In the west, they expanded into for merly Germanic-speaking territory to the Elbe and Saale Rivers, south into Moravia and Bohemia up to die Austrian Danube valley, farther east to the Great Central European plains into Hungary, to Slovenia, and, from there, together with the Turkish-Iranian Avars, into the Balkans, Serbia, and Croatia. They reached Greece and even the Aegean islands and Crete, and good numbers of Slavic-speaking people settled and were absorbed in northwestern Anatolia. This coherent Slavic-speaking area was split by the reassertion of German in the Austrian Danube valley and of Ru manian and by the incursion of the Finne-Ugric Magyars, or Flungarians, in 896 CE. Written Slavic began with Old Church Slavonic, or Old Bulgarian. It is based on the Mac edonian-Bulgarian Slavic dialect of the city and hinterland of Salonika, which the Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius employed for translating Christian texts from Greek, begin ning in 863 CE. This church language considerably affected the subsequent developing literary languages, including Russian. The Baltic languages probably originated in the present Polish-Russian border area and, as suggested by place and river names, once reached as far east as Moscow. Except for the Baltic coastal areas, they were superseded by die expanding Slavic languages beginning in the middle of the first millennium CE. Both Lithuanian and Latvian, or Let tish, are first documented by texts dated to the sixteenth century, while Prussian, spoken in the coastal areas from the Vistula to the Nemen, or Memel, River, is first recorded in the fourteenth century but was absorbed by German by 1700. Baltic is often joined with Slavic into a single dialect group of IE called Balto-Slavic. However, they are so dif ferent they must be considered to have originally been sep arate groups that converged considerably. It is probable that the origins of Slavic are to be partially sought in the Iranian languages of the Ukraine and southern Russia.
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INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
In addition to these IE dialects, there are a number of poorly attested examples in the Balkans. These include Dacio-Thracian in Romania and Bulgaria (some twenty-five words are from the fourth or fifth century BCE), which may have survived sporadically into the sixdr century CE. Phryg ian, spoken in northwest Anatolia, where the capital was Gordion, is documented in two stages: Old Phrygian is found in some twenty-five inscriptions from the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, and New Phrygian is found in some one hundred inscriptions from the first three centuries CE, writ ten in an archaic and common Greek alphabet, respectively. [See Gordion; Writing and Writing Systems.] Armenian, spoken in the southwestern Caucasus moun tains, is an original member of the East Balkan group of IE dialects and may have originated in Moesia, the province just south of the lower Danube River separating Dacia from Thracia. [See Armenian.] T h e name is also found as Mysia in northwestern Anatolia and may be reflected in the Muski, who, in cuneiform records, are located on the Upper Eu phrates River early in die twelfth century BCE. [See Euphra tes.] Their self-designation Hay (pi., Hayk') may continue the term Haiti/Hittite. Armenians would thus be the east ernmost reflex of the expansion of the East Balkan group of IE that swept into and through Anatolia in the twelfth cen tury BCE and destroyed the Hittite empire. Linguistically, Armenian appears to have emerged out of the convergence of the immigrant language with the local Urartean, Hurrian, and Caucasian languages. [See Urartu.] It was under heavy Iranian influence from the eighth centtiry BCE through the first half of the first millennium CE, under the Medes, Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sasanians, during which time Armenian lost much of its inherited lexicon. [See Parthians; Sasanians.] Old, or Classical, Armenian began to be written in the early fifth century CE in a Greek-based alphabet, with similarities to early Middle-Persian Aramaicbased alphabets invented by Bishop St. Mesrob. [See Ara maic Language and Literature.] Western Armenian devel oped with the Armenian colonization of Cilicia and the establishment of the kingdom of Cilicia ( 1 1 9 8 - 1 3 7 5 CE) . [See Cilicia.] The modern period began in the fifteenth century. During the nineteenth century, two main literary variants evolved, a western one in the Armenian colony of Constan tinople/Istanbul and an eastern one in Armenia, based on the dialect of Yerevan and the Ararat (cf. ancient Urartu) valley. Albanian is an isolated IE language on the eastern Adriatic coast, with two main dialects, Gheg in the north and Tosk in the south, the official language since 1950. Albanians are first mentioned by Ptolomy about 1 5 0 CE, and have with stood early celtization, then romanization and slavization. The first written records begin only in the late fifteenth cen tury CE with a brief religious text. Linguistically, Albanian appears to have closest affinities with Thracian, about which
little is known, rather than with Illyrian, which was once spoken in the western half of the Balkans. Tocharian is only known since 1908. It is an isolated IE language once spoken in the Tarim Basin in western China. There are two distinct languages, labelled Tocharian A and Tocharian B, or Eastern and Western Tocharian, respec tively. Linguistically, Tocharian is strikingly different from the neighboring Iranian languages, and closer to the Euro pean dialects of IE, so that it has been suggested that the Tocharians may have migrated east as early as the end of the third millennium BCE prior to the Iranian expansions. The discovery of Tocharian in the far east forced the re thinking of the traditional groupings of the IE dialects, in particular, it proved to be a centum-language with plain ve lar stops like the European languages where die eastern satem-languages Indo-Iranian and Slavic have developed sib ilants (see discussion of velars below). Finally, it is only recently (1987) that Bangani, a language in the Garhwal district of the Indian Himalayas, has become known. It has proven to have an archaic centum-layer over laid by Indie; a similar layer was found in Baltic and Slavic areas. G r a m m a t i c a l F e a t u r e s . The grammar reconstructed for common IE is an abstraction—the result of systemic comparison. The evidence of the attested dialects was re traced to common denominators, from which, in turn, all features can be derived. Before tire Anatolian languages be came known early in the twentieth century, the reconstruct was essentially the common denominator of Indo-Iranian and Greek, the two best-known and most highly developed systems, so that the other dialects appeared as reductive. This system of the so-called Neogrammarians continues to be held by a few scholars, albeit with substantial adjustments (e.g., Szemerenyi, 1990). With the discovery of Anatolian, the question of common IE became a major issue—in par ticular whether Anatolian and the rest of the IE languages derive from a yet earlier Hittite-IE ancestor called Indo-Hittite, or Anatolian split off from common IE, as is now gen erally held. "Common" is generally understood to be die last stage before dispersal and major dialectal differentiation. At the other end is the notion of the earliest stage that can be re constructed. In effect, staging is essentially based on the de gree of complexity in inflection. Accordingly, the earliest stage of IE is assumed to have had no inflection—leading to the stage shared by Anatolian and the remainder of the di alects and to a stage where major groupings have already occurred. Given the known geographic areas of the dialects relative to each other, the diachronic scheme is correlated with approximate location. A prominent model is the socalled space-time model (Meid, 1 9 7 5 ) . For example, Fran cisco Adrados (1992) proposes the following diagram:
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES IE I (preinfiectional) IE II (monothematic)
Anatolian (monothematic)
IE III (polythematic)
IE III A (Indo-Greek)
IE III B (Western)
For a summary of the features thought to have character ized die stage common to Anatolian and the otiier dialects, see Mayrhofer (in Indogermanische Grammatik 1 . 2 , 1 9 8 6 ) on phonology and Szemerenyi (1990) on morphology. T h e focus on phonology and inflection has resulted in die relative neglect of larger syntactic issues, and the syntactic studies that have been done have not attracted general at tention. A notable early example is the monumental study by Berthold Delbriick ( 1 8 7 1 - - 1 8 8 8 ) , who established IE as a S O V (subject-object-verb) language. With die renewed attention to linguistic universals and typology, syntactic is sues are increasingly the focus in comparative historical re construction. T h e basic systems of nominal and verbal in flections are described below. Nouns. T h e nominal inflection in IE is based on stems, which are either the plain root or derived by suffixes. They are grouped morphologically into stem classes: consonantal, diphthongal, resonantal-vocalic i-, u- stems, and vocalic "tiiematic" o-stems, which are relatively more recent than the others. For example, *ped-, "foot"; *gwow-, "cow"; *pot-i-, "master"; *suAn-u-, "son"; *kwekwl-o-, "wheel, wagon." T h e basic gender distinction is that between animate and nonanimate, which is morphologically marked by the formal identity of the nominative and accusative in neuters. This basic gender distinction corresponds to the distinction be tween genus commune and genus neuter in Anatolian. In the other dialects is found die furdier distinction between masculine and feminine gender, the latter marked by the long stem endings *-a, *-i, *-u (*-&4, *-iA, *-uA), and the
TABLE I.
153
feminine *-o. The origin of this triple distinction remains unclear. It may have originated partially in the pronominal system (but cf. the female ldnship terms below). The three diachronic layers are still reflected in such languages as Latin: no distinction in m./f./n. felix, "frugal, happy" (con sonantal stems); binary distinction in m./f. facilis, n. facile, "easily done"; and triple distinction in m. bonus, f. bona, n. bonum, "good." T h e nominal endings distinguish the three numbers—sin gular, plural, and dual—and inflectional cases, which are grouped as follows: three "grammatical" cases—nomina tive, accusative, and genitive; four "adverbial" cases—ab lative, dative, locative, and instrumental; and the vocative. Morphologically, the cases are most differentiated in the sin gular and least in die dual. In the singular, genitive = abla tive; in the plural, dative = ablative; in the dual, dative = ablative = instrumental and nominative = accusative. In these two numbers, vocative = nominative. Table 1 shows the pattern in the singular of consonantal stems (vocative omitted). T h e case endings of the thematic o-declension differ to some degree. Thus in the singular the endings are: nom. *-os, acc. *-om, gen. *-os-yo, abl. *-od, dat. *-oi, loc. *-ei/oi, instr. *-e/o; voc. *-e; the neuter has *-om in both nominative and accusative. This system overlayed an archaic inflectional pattern, the so-called heteroclisis. T h e latter is marked by the opposition of continuants (*s, *H, resonants) in the nominative-accu sative vs *-n in the genitive. Hittite has preserved some of this inflection, e.g., Hittite nom.-acc./pahur/, gen./pahwenas/ < *peAwr, *pAwen-. In die other dialects, either stem was generalized and fitted into the new inflectional patterns. For example, *-r is generalized in English fire, but *n in Gothic fon, "fire." A particularly archaic example may be animate *mar-l*man-u, "human." T h e r-stem is found in Anatolian-Aryan mar-ya-nnu, "charioteer, young noble man"; Indie mdr-ya, "young man"; Greek metrax, "girl"; Lith. mar-ti, "bride, virgin." T h e w-stem is found in Indie mdnu-s, "man, human"; Russian mu-z "man"; German Mann, Men-sch. While in nouns the basic pattern is nominative-accusative
IE case endings
SING.
Indie
Greek
Latin
Hittite
IE
Nom Acc. Gen.
s am as
s a OS
s em is
s an as
*s *m *es/os/s
Abl. Dat. Loc, Instr.
as (at) e i a
i i e
(od) i e e
az i a it
= Gen. or*-d *ei *i/*0 *eH/oH, bhi/mi
154
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES TABLE 2. Basic case forms
is nom. acc. 2s nom. acc. ip nom. acc. 2p nom. acc.
Indie
Greek
Slavic
Hittite
IE
aham mam tvam tvam vayam nas yflyam vas
ego erne su se hemeis hemeas humeTs humeas
azu mene
ug/amug amug tsig tug wcs nas sumes smas
*eg' (h)*me*tu *t(w)e*wei/*nsmes *nes/*nos *yus/*usmes *wes/*wos
tu tebe mu nasu vy vasu
vs. genitive, die personal pronouns have the basic binary opposition nominative versus accusative-genitive. T h e ad verbial case endings, which are more archaic than the nom inal ones, are added to die latter. Table 2 shows the two basic case forms in the singular and plural of the first and second persons. Common IE therefore distinguished between three types of declension. If these are considered as a system, they reveal a scale of animacy and an intersecting pattern of morpho logical, syntactic, and semantic case distinctions that are shown as in Table 3. Verb system. The typical finite verb form of IE distin guishes the following categories: aspect-mood-person-num ber-voice-tense, in that order. Within these categories, the following basic distinctions are made: aspect—imperfective versus perfective (i.e., incomplete versus complete action), mood—indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative; person and number—first, second, and third person in sin gular, plural, and dual; voice (also called verbal gender, or diathesis)—active versus mediopassive, or middle (i.e., per son as agent versus person affected by action or situation); and tense—present versus past (also called preterit). Ana tolian lacks the subjunctive and optative, as well as the dual. Morphologically, aspect is distinguished in the stem (root, or root + suffix, with ablaut). The other categories are indicated by suffixes and endings. For example, Avestan bar-a-t-i ("bears, carries") has the imperfective stem bar-a-
("present" stem *bher- + thematic *-e-); the mood is indic ative (absence of the subjunctive *-e- or optative *-yeE-/*iE-); the person is third singular *-f, the voice is active (absence of die mediopassive suffix *-o-); and the tense is present, which is indicated by *-i. Finite verbs do not show gender distinctions that correspond to masculine, feminine, and neuter in the nominal inflection. There is no original verbal prefixation. There are various other differentiations, attested as early as Plittite: suffixes and infixes that originally specified incomplete action as to the kind of action (called aktionsart), such as intensive, iterative *-s-k'-, and *-»- (re flected in pairs such as the Latin jug-are, "yoke," &rtdju-ng-ere, "join"). Comparative reconstruction suggests that, underlying tiiis developed system, is the yet more fundamental distinction between activum and perfectum. These can be described as the marking of agency and action as opposed to a situation, state, and result. This distinction differs from that between the active and mediopassive voice). T h e perfectum is ex emplified by the root *weid- ("see"), whose perfect has de veloped into a so-called perfectopresent, "have seen" > "come to know." This is reflected, for example, in Indie ved-a, vet-tha, vid-a; Greek (u)oid-a, (u)ois-tha, (u)oid-e; Gothic wait, waist, wait—all meaning "I know, you know, he/she/it knows." This is comparable to the English put on ("activum") versus wear ("perfectum"). I n d o - E u r o p e a n H o m e l a n d . The IE homeland has been
TABLE 3. Basic semantic case distinctions SEMANTIC SYNTACTIC MORPHOL.
Agent Subject Nominative
Patient Object Accusative
Other Other Genitive
Pronoun
*eg'(h)-
*me-
*me-
"I"
Animate
mater *wlkwo-s
*mater-m *wikwo-m
*matt-6s
*wjkwo-s-yo
"mother" "wolf'
*peAwr *yugo-m
*peAwr *yugo-m
*pAwen-s *yugo-s-yo
"fire" "yoke"
Inanimate (neuter)
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES located anywhere between western Europe and northern Central Asia, in Anatolia, and in tire southern Caucasus re gion. A consensus is emerging that the formative area was the northern Pontic (Black Sea), from the Dniepr River to tire Caspian Sea. T h e period suggested for the formative phase is the Late Neolithic/Eneolitiric (4500-3500 BCE). T h e common phase may have ended by 2500 BCE. T h e main lines of the arguments here largely follow James Mallory (1989). T h e earliest attestation of IE is Hittite, in approximately 2000 BCE. Also found in Anatolia, by about 1500 BCE, is IndoAryan, which is already clearly differentiated from Iranian. Accordingly, even though there are no yardsticks for tire rate of linguistic change, the latest date for the breakup of the IE unity could be set by 2500 BCE. (The earliest known IE term may date to about 3000 BCE, if the Sumerian gigir and Se mitic *gagal derive from IE *kwe-kwl-o-, "wagon wheel".) T h e lexicon shared by all IE dialects reflects the first rev olution and the secondary-products revolution in economy and technology—including the domestication of animals, agriculture, and vehicular technology—and, finally, the in novative coinage of vocabulary (nouns and verbs) to reflect the technology of the equine revolution, which is dated to the early fourth millennium or earlier. One approach to locating the homeland of IE is to identify its so-called center of gravity. By taking tire distribution of the dialects in use by about 100 BCE, when most of the known IE dialects had emerged (the Iberian Peninsula to western China and India) and considering the area of highest variety (Central-Eastern Europe), tire center of die belt can be lo cated at between 20 and 30° East—the Pontic region. T h e region is compatible with the common IE lexical material relating to the physical environment, fauna, and flora. This is supported by observations concerning naming. For ex ample, the referential meanings of IE tree names are best preserved in the Baltic-Slavic regions but are shifted consid erably in Greek (Friedrich, 1970). Similarly, the domesti cation of the horse, which is recognized as a determining factor in the IE expansion, appears to have occurred be tween the northeastern Pontic-Caspian region and the southern Ural Mountains. T h e next line of arguments considers linguistic contacts. There are no known transitional languages between recon structed IE and other language families. However, contact is clearly evident with the Uralic language family, in partic ular Finno-Ugric. There are two distinct layers. T h e younger layer are loans from Indo-Iranian, and specifically Iranian; for example, *pork'-c~ ("pig"), Iranian *parsa, Finnish porsas, ("pork"), and Votyak, pars; Iranian satam ("one hundred"), Finnish sata. None of the other language families has the same degree of similarities with IE as Uralic, although Semitic continues to be seriously discussed. A large number of Semitic-IE lex ical pairs have been suggested, but the systematic sound cor
155
respondences are difficult to ascertain. The Semitic laryn g e a l have been compared with tire IE laryngeals, but again there are few convincing correspondences, and the phono logical features of the IE laryngeals are quite uncertain. There may nevertheless be a truly archaic connection be tween these families. It has been argued that the six language families—Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic), Kartvelian, IndoEuropean, Uralic, Altaic, and Dravidian—belong to a single phylum, for which Holger Pedersen (in 1903) coined the term Noslratic (from Lat., nostras, "one of ours"). Nostratic studies were propelled in the 1960s by Illic-Svityc but have found strong opposition, largely because of the difficulties in indentifying sound rules as exacting as those that are cus tomary in IE studies. Part of tire difficulty in evaluating these efforts may be that it is not always realized that Nostratic cognates are established via common Nostratic, not between two families—for example, IE and Kartvelian, directly—and that not all items identified as Nostratic can be expected to be found in IE (see Manaster-Ramer, 1993). The next step toward identifying the area of common IE combines linguistics with archaeology and correlates the lay ers of the dialectological configurations of IE with major ar chaeologically identified cultural layers and patterns of dif fusion. Two such major patterns are known. The first is the spread of agriculture from eastern Anatolia into Europe; the second is the much later spread of numerous distinct cul tural features from tire Pontic-Caspian regions into Europe and into Asia. [See Agriculture.] The spread of agriculture from Anatolia into Europe, called the wave of advance, begins in die Early Neolithic period, about 7000 BCE (Renfrew, 1987). It first reaches Greece and the Balkans and from there spreads into the remainder of western and nortiiern Europe. This wave swings around tire northwestern corner of the Pontic region and, from there, farther east, where steppe pastoralism be comes the main feature. This wave is followed by tire prog ress of the secondary-products revolution. Moving east, the wave reached Iran and the Indian subcontinent, as well as Central Asia. Colin Renfrew (1987) advocates the correlation of this wave with tire spread of IE, which would make Anatolia the IE homeland. However, it has become obvious that die pat tern of its progress does not agree at all with the internal dialectal structuring of the IE dialects: it would require the move of the original speakers of IE out of Anatolia and the return of such groups as the speakers of the Anatolian lan guages back into it. T h e original group would also have to become entirely extinct because the Anatolian languages as well as Armenian are entirely superimposed on non-IE, such as Hattic and Hurrian-Caucasian. Moreover, those lan guages are typological, and lexically they are completely dif ferent from IE—tiiey lack any discernible trace of earlier contact with IE. It has also been noted that an early spread
156
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
across Europe would have resulted in much greater differ entiation of IE than is found in tire attested dialects. Equally crucial is that the source area of IE must have known not only vehicular technology, but also the technology of the equine revolution, which excludes seventh-millennium An atolia. The source of the second differentiation is tire PonticCaspian region. It fits well both geographically and tempo rally with the technoeconomy and witii the internally reconstructed dialectology and its phases of IE. This con clusion was forcefully drawn in the 1960s by Marija Gimbutas (1965) and has been argued convincingly by Mallory (1989).
Indo-European Kinship Terminology and Social Structure. The kinship terminology of IE is the only cog nitive system, beside the decimal system of numbers, that has remained so remarkably intact it can by and large be linguistically reconstructed, at least phonologically (e.g., Szemerenyi, 1977; Mayrhofer, in Indogermanische Gram matik, 1986); however, its etymology has remained obscure. Delbrtick (1889) pioneered the first major survey and study of the topic but rejected much of the speculation of his time, both in terms of etymology and of the societal systems de rived from it. The most recent study focuses on etymology, much of which has been subjected to strong criticism (Szemerenyi, 1977). There appears to be little agreement, except that the system overall seems to have been patriar chal, patrilineal, and patrilocal. A large number of kinship terms can be reconstructed for common IE. The dialects vary gready—from Anatolian, witii very few, to Slavic, whose inherited linguistic network is virtually intact in a modern setting and should serve as the guideline for recon structions. Reconstruction and Reality. In the late twentieth cen tury a renewed and vigorous debate occurred about the emergence of languages, die principles of reconstruction and their underlying assumptions, and the reality of the re construct. Most, if not all, of the issues and points appear to be commonsensical and to have already been made dur ing the two hundred years of Indo-European study. How ever, a new degree of consensus appears to have been reached. First, it is commonly agreed that IE is not the Ursprache of humankind, and that it did not evolve out of naught, but that its nucleus emerged out of non-IE. There is agreement that the development of diversified forms is the result of multiple mergers. Three main models have been isolated. For the initial emergence of IE the model is the Creole, which typically develops out of the pidgin, inflectionless amalgam of the languages of a colluvies gentium (in cluding cossack-type mercenaries returning from the Near East), into a functioning natural language within one of two generations. However, pidgins and Creoles always reflect one major donor language (note Pidgin English), which is still unidentified for earliest IE. Another model is the Sprachbund, in which genetically unrelated languages develop not
only lexical, but also phonological and grammatical, simi larities (according to the wave theory of language diffusion). T h e third model is that of the koine, in which a dominant dialect erases most others. These three models are not mu tually exclusive, nor do they exclude the participation of al ready diversified dialects anywhere at any stage with others and with non-IE dialects. In each case, one of the dominant speech groups continued IE in the form into which it had changed, which may be incompletely learned IE. As to the real time it might have taken for the initial con solidation and the subsequent diversifications, there are only guesses. Both Romance and Slavic developments are doc umented, but they cannot be generalized and projected backward into entirely different conditions. No method yet exists for measuring the rate of linguistic change similar to DNA sequencing. Glottochronology, by calculating the rate of loss of a set of assumed basic lexical items, has not proven convincing. Recent attempts by archaeologists to correlate archaeo logical trajectories with the expansion of IE are part of the reason for the epistemological debate in IE studies. There is either common ground or agreement in many respects, in cluding the recognition that genetic-linguistic relationships are not the same as ethnic or as biological relationships. However, linguistic expansion involves the initial move of people, and more people have to find it advantageous to adopt a language—there must be motivation, such as the new technology of rapid transit (the horse, e.g., would have made it cost efficient to move). Beside economic motivation, social mobility is made easier in hierarchically structured so cieties. The IE social structure must have made it easier for others to adopt that language. What is known of early re corded IE is based on the dialects of dominant elites, whose mobility must have played a major role in the spread of IE. Important information on expansive warrior elites, alliances, peoples, localities, and gods is found in the profuse, but con fusing, references in epic and mythology. It is also agreed, however, that linguistics and archaeology operate with different data within different epistemologies: "Picture and text each require separate specialists in their reconstruction" (Yoffee, 1990). Neither ceramic patterns nor reconstructed rituals or cultures, or tiieir particular as sembly, allow for the reconstruction of the language, or lan guages, that was part of them. Language disappears and can only be reconstructed; artifacts are remains. Language change is not synchronized with cultural change. Locating the emergence of IE in the Pontic-Caspian area assumes that the relative location in time and space of the attested dialects and their immediately preceding stages is sufficiently close to project by triangulation their source backward into die empty linguistic slot. It is here, however, that archaeological data appear to confound linguistic projections, as there does not seem to be a direct link between the Pontic-Caspian cultures to northern central Europe.
IND 0-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES Finally, a topic widely debated, but unrelated to the in terdisciplinary one, is the ontological status of the linguistic reconstruct, whether identified as common IE, as a preced ing stage with less inflection, or as a stage without any in flection. Opinions range from near reality to mere algebraic abstract. A case cited for the former is the verification of the algebraically postulated laryngeals in Hittite. Such discov eries, however, are not seen by many as sufficient for the recognition that any reconstruct by itself is unanchored in time and space. Reconstruction is reductive, ending with a single common source of sound, structure, or lexical item. It cannot recover those that left no traces. T h e majority opinion seems to hold that while it is possible to identify relative chronologies and tentative areas, it is impossible to reconstruct IE as a natural, synchronically functioning lan guage—which always is an unpredictably mixed one. BIBLIOGRAPHY The History of a Revolution." Indogermanische Forschungen 94 Roots, rev. and edited by
Calvert Watkins. Boston, 1985. Anthony, David W. "The Archaeology of Indo-European Origins." Journal of Indo-European
Studies 1 9 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 9 3 - 2 2 2 . Succinct re-
evaluation, with maps. Baldi, Philip. An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages, Carbon-
dale, 111., 1993. Handy overview, widi minigrammars and sample texts. Benveniste, Emile. 1 9 3 5 . Origines de la formations des noms en indo-
europeen. Paris, 1935. Fundamental study of the origins and structure of the Indo-European root. Benveniste, Emile. Indo-European Language and Society. London, 1969. (A translation of Les structures elementaires de laparenti, Paris, 1967.)
Brilliant, most comprehensive analytical-comparative study of IndoEuropean society; partially controversial, Brugmann, Karl. Karl. Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammalik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 7 vols. 2d ed. Strassburg, 1 8 9 7 - 1 9 1 6 . Still
the standard documentation of Indo-European phonology and mor phology. Buck, Carl Darling. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principle Indo-European
Languages; A Contribution to the History of Ideas. Chi
cago, 1949. Unsurpassed and topical. D'iakonov, Igor M. "On the Original Home of the Speakers of IndoEuropean." Journal of Indo-European
Friedrich, Paul. "Proto-Indo-European Kinship." Ethnology (Pitts burgh) 5 (1966): 1-36. Friedrich, Paul. Proto-Indo-European
Trees: The Arboreal System of a
Prehistoric People. Chicago, 1970. Thorough documentation and analysis of terminology; shows the least shift in eastern Europe re garding flora's evidence for the IE homeland. Friedrich, Paul. Proto-Indo-European
Syntax: The Order of Meaningful
Elements. Butte, Mont., 1974. Pioneering factual reassessment. Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., and Vjaceslav V. Ivanov. "Sprachtypology und die Rekonstruktion dergemeinindogermanischenVerschKissc." Phonetica 27 (1973): 1 5 0 - 1 5 6 . Proposing the "glottalic theory" that
the system of IE stops developed from a South Caucasian type whose central series were glottalized ejectives. Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., and Vjaceslav V. Ivanov. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Prow-
Language and a Proto-Culture, edited by Werner Winter. Berlin, 1995. Updated from Indoevropejskij jazyk i Indoevropcjcij (2 vols.;
Tbilisi, 1984). The most comprehensive and insightful recent reevaluation; includes proposal that IE was an "active" language, with separate active and stative classes of verbs and nouns. Gimbutas, Marija. Bronze Age Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe.
Adrados, Francisco Rodriguez. "The New Image of Indoeuropean: (1992): 2 1 - 4 4 . American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European
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Studies 1 3 (1985): 9 2 - 1 7 4 . Bril
liant but sharp criticism of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's theories of IESouth Caucasian and IE-Semitic relationships. Delbriick, Berthold. Syntahtische Forschungen, 5 vols. Halle, 1 8 7 1 - 1 8 8 8 .
Pioneering; still the best documentation of the mosdy neglected as pects of grammar. Delbriick, Berthold. Die indogermanischen Verwandtschaftsnamen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Alterlhumskunde. Leipzig, 1889. Pioneering
The Hague, 1965. Pioneering work by an archaeologist to correlate cultural trajectories from the Pontic-Caspian area into Europe. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization
of the Goddess. The World of Old
Europe. San Francisco, 1991. Focus on pre-IE matriarchal, artistic Old Europe. Indogermanische Grammalik, edited by Jerzy Kurylowicz, (later by) Manfred Mayrhofer, Heidelberg. Cowgill, Warren, Einlchung, vol. 1.1 (1986): 1 1 - 7 1 ; Mayrhofer, Manfred, Lautlehre, vol. 1.2 (1986):
7 5 - 1 8 5 ; Kurylowicz, Jerzy, Akzent. Ablaut, vol. 2 (1968); Watkins, Calvert, Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalflexion, vol. 3 (1983).
The up-to-date standard of Indo-European linguistics. Lehmann, Winfred P. The Theoretical Bases of Indo-European
Linguis
tics. London, 1993. Insightful, up-to-date discussion of theory and methodology. Lehmann, Winfred P. Residues of Pre-Indo-European Active Structure and their Implications for the Relationships among Dialects. Innsbruck, 1995. Levin, Saul. Semitic and Indo-European: The Principle Etymologies with
Observations on Afro-Asiatic. Amsterdam, 1995. A renewed, cautious, and thorough attempt to establish the linguistic relationship, consid ering the Nostratic macrophylum of language families. Lockwood, William B. A Panorama of Indo-European Languages. Lon
don, T 9 7 2 . A most readable overview. Mallory, James. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London, 1989. Factual reassessment of the controversial correlation between archaeology and comparative-historical linguistics for IE. Manaster-Ramer, Alexis. "On Illic-Svityc's Nostratic Theory." Studies in Linguistics 17 (1993): 205-250. Fairest and most insightful critique
of establishing the macrophylum of language families called Nos tratic. Mayrhofer, Manfred. Die Indo-Arier im alien Vorderasien, Wiesbaden,
1966. Still the best on die subject of the Indo-Iranian linguistic loan component in Anatolian, Meid, Wolfgang. Probleme der raumlichen und zeitlichen Gliedenmg des Indogermanischen. In Helmut Rix, ed. Flexion und Wortbildung, pp.
and sober evaluation of anthropological and linguistic epistemologies and theories; still the most detailed and best-documented analysis of IE kinship, Friedrich, Paul. "An Evolutionary Sketch of Russian Kinship." In Viola
Pokorny, Julius. Indogermanisches etymologisches Worterbuch. 2 vols.
E. Garfield et al., eds. Symposium on Language and Culture: Proceed ings of the 1962 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological
Renfrew, Colin. Archaeology and Language. The Puzzle of Indo-European
Society, edited by Viola E. Garfield et al, pp. 1-36. Seattle, 1963. This and the influential article below are informed by anthropolog ical theory.
204-219. Wiesbaden, 1975. Programmatic and influential; suggests a three-dimensional space-time model. Bern, 1 9 5 1 , 1969. The unsurpassed standard dictionary. Origins. London, 1987. Controversial proposal for the origins of IE in Anatolia. Schmidt, Johannes, Die Verwandtschafisverhdlmisse
der indogerman-
158
INK
ischen Sprachen. Weimar, 1872. Introduced the model of the wave theory to account for the spread of innovations and linguistic filia tion. Schrader, Otto, and A. Nehring. Reallexikan der indogermanischen Allertumskunde. 2 vols. Berlin-Leipzig, 1917-1929, Still an indispensible compendium. Schwink, Frederick W. Linguistic Typology, Universality and the Realism
of Reconstruction. Washington, 1994. The best-documented assess ment of recent theories on IE linguistics and the relative value of linguistic typology. Skomal, Susan N., and Edgar C. Polome, eds. Proto-Indo-European: The Archaeology of a Linguistic Problem. Washington, 1987. One of
the many volumes edited and coedited by Polome, the editor of the Journal of Indo-European
Studies.
Szemerenyi, Oswald. "Studies in the Kinship Terminology of the IndoEuropean Languages." Acta Iranica 16 (1977): 1-240. A book in
article form, this is the most comprehensive, but often idiosyncratic, etymological study of IE kinship terminology and reconstructable social structures. Szemerenyi, Oswald. Einfilhrungin die
vergleichendeSprachwissenschaft.
4th ed. Darmstadt, 1990. The unsurpassed statement of IE histori cal-comparative phonology and morphology, with an ample, up dated bibliography on linguistic matters (only). Yoffee, Norman, "Before Babel. A Review Article." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 56 (1990): 2 9 9 - 3 1 3 . Insightful and to-the-point
assessment of the viability of conjoining linguistics with archaeology; reviews Renfrew, 1987 and Mallory, 1989. Yoffee, Norman. "Too Many Chiefs? or, Safe Texts for the '90s." In Archaeological Theory: Wlxo sets the Agenda?, edited by Norman Yof
fee and Andrew Sherratt, pp. 60-78. Cambridge, 1993. Zimmer, Stefan. Ursprache, Urvolk imd Indogermanisierung. Innsbruck,
1990. An admonition against the facile correlation of artifact with an abstract linguistic reconstruction. GERNOT WINDFUHR
INK. See Writing Materials.
INSCRIPTIONS.
[To provide a broad survey of the inscriptional material that has been recovered from the Near East, this entry comprises four articles: Ancient Inscriptions Inscriptions of the Classical Period Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Inscriptions of the Islamic Period Each article treats the material supports on which inscriptions are found; the languages, literary genres, and chronological and geographical distribution of the inscriptions; and the role of inscriptional materials in reconstructing ancient Near Eastern his tory.}
Ancient Inscriptions An overview of Near Eastern inscriptions down to the Per sian period is, in effect, an account of the origins of modern literate society. It must take into account virtually all extant written documents from the dawn of writing to the rise of Classical Greek civilization. These documents stand along side noninscriptional artifacts as the two principal types of
archaeological data available for reconstructing the history of these periods. T h e two types of data must be correlated in a history intended to include the political, economic, so cial, and intellectual aspects of ancient civilization. The history of decipherment of the various inscriptions discovered constitutes an important part of die history of modern archaeology. During the heroic period of Egyptian and Mesopotamian archaeology (late eighteenth and early nineteentii centuries CE), for example, the decipherment of inscriptions contributed greatly to understanding the place in history both of artifacts and of those who had produced diem. The texts from these early periods are more exclusively archaeological artifacts than are those from later periods. The cultures they represent have not provided a chain of tradition down to the modern era, such as has been pre served in, for example, the Hebrew Bible, the Qur'an, the Syriac Christian corpus, or the principal literary texts from Classical Greece. There is evidence for an ancient chain of tradition for some literary texts (e.g., the Gilgamesh story), and some genres show evolution and accretion over centu ries (e.g., Mesopotamian divinatory and lexical texts). T h e majority of ancient inscriptional material, however, repre sents primary documents—the documents as they came from the first writer's hand, often intended for one-time use, as in the case of letters and accounts. For such primary documents to have been preserved, they need to have been written on materials capable of preser vation across millennia. This means that, witii the exception of Egypt, where the dry climate has preserved papyri back to the earliest stages of writing, most extant documents are inscribed either on stone or on clay tablets. [See Papyrus; Tablet.] Origins of Writing. T h e prehistory of writing—the steps that led up to the well-attested writing systems of Mesopo tamia and Egypt—is a subject of debate, but actual texts are attested by the last quarter of the fourth millennium. T h e scripts of both civilizations originally had a strong pictographic character, but die Mesopotamian version rapidly developed into a syllabary. Egyptian hieroglyphics retained, at least in formal inscriptions, their pictographic form, even though they became representations of consonantal pho nemes (the system was not proto-alphabetic, however, for each sign could represent one, two, or three consonants). [See Writing and Writing Systems; Hieroglyphs.] Both sys tems used certain signs as semantic determinatives (e.g., GlS, "wood," in Sumerian, is written before names of ob jects made of wood). Another pictographic-syllabic system came into use in Anatolia in die late second millennium BCE—the so-called Hittite hieroglyphic system, used to write the Luwian language. [See Hittite; Luwians.] T h e invention of the consonantal alphabet ("abjad") probably did not oc cur until about the middle of the second millennium BCE, somewhere in the Levantine area; its earliest tokens are the Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite inscriptions. [SeeProto-
INSCRIPTIONS: Ancient Inscriptions Sinaitic; Proto-Canaanite; Alphabet] T h e true alphabet, wherein both consonants and vowels are noted, was the con tribution of the Greeks after tiiey had borrowed the conso nantal alphabet from the West Semites in the early first mil lennium BCE. [See Greek.] Writing Materials. There were, in the ancient world, three primary systems for recording a text: producing signs by transferring a colored substance onto a relatively flat sur face (e.g., ink on papyrus or on an ostracon) by means of a penlike instrument; gouging signs into a soft material (e.g., clay or wax) by means of an instrument with an angular tip; and carving signs into a hard surface (e.g., wood or stone) by means of a chisel-like instrument. [See Writing Materials; Ostracon.] As is still the case, the last system was used for texts with permanent value (e.g., funerary inscriptions), and they were often placed where they would be generally visible (e.g., royal proclamations in Assyrian palaces or on Egyptian ob elisks). Few inscriptions in wood are preserved—both be cause wood was probably used less frequently for this pur pose than was stone and because wood is more perishable than stone. Inscriptions on stone are attested from all parts of the Near East, in many of its languages. They range in size from tiny (e.g., seal inscriptions) to gigantic (e.g., Egyp tian obelisks). [See Seals.] They appear on all types of stone (e.g., semiprecious stones for seal inscriptions, carved lime stone or basalt for royal inscriptions) and in various contexts (e.g., in tombs, on architectural elements, and even on cliff faces). [See Inscription Sites.] Though using ink and gouging signs into soft material are also attested everywhere, there was certainly a predilection in Mesopotamia for stone. In Egypt the ready availability of papyrus made it a common surface for writing (texts on papyrus are attested from die Old Kingdom onward). In Mesopotamia the invention of writing is attested as impres sions on clay. T h e system was the primary one used there until die end of classical Mesopotamian civilization. How ever, witii the increased use of Aramaic in the Late Assyrian and Babylonian periods, writing on wax-covered wooden tablets and on parchment became more common. [See Ar amaic Language and Literature; Parchment.] It is possible that the relative dearth of documents from the Levant in general (Palestine, Transjordan, Phoenicia, southern Syria) is owing to the extensive use there of pa pyrus and other soft materials for writing the local lan guages. In any case, the Ugaritic novelty (a West Semitic language written in cuneiform on clay tablets) has provided a corpus of texts, ranging from the great myths to mundane lists, unparalleled at any other Levantine site. [See Ugarit; Cuneiform.] Languages/Areas. Witii few exceptions (e.g., Amorite), if the existence of an ancient Near Eastern language is known, inscriptions exist in that language. [See Amorites.] T h e numbers of texts in a given language range from only a few (Flurrian, mainland Phoenician) to thousands or even
159
hundreds of thousands (Akkadian, Egyptian). [See Hurrian; Phoenician-Punic; Akkadian; Egyptian.] Because the area is the homeland of the Semites, most inscriptions are in vari ous Semitic languages or, in the case of Egyptian, in a lan guage closer to the origins of Semitic: the Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic) group. T h e Semitic languages attested during these periods are classified geographically as Eastern (Akkadian) and Western (specifically Northwestern: Uga ritic, Phoenician/Hebrew, and Aramaic). [See Ugaritic; He brew Language and Literature.] The principal Indo-European languages attested are die various languages of Anatolia (principally Hittite and Lu wian) from early in the second millennium BCE—and almost to the end of the period covered here in the case of Luwian. [See Indo-European Languages.] The first Indo-Aryan in scriptions are those in Old Persian; tiiere are no native-lan guage inscriptions from the Mitannians orKassites. [See Mi tanni; Kassites.] Mesopotamian writing was invented for a language that was neither Semitic nor Indo-European—that is, Sume rian—and this writing system, as well as Sumerian thought and literature, exercised a major influence on Akkadian throughout its existence. [See Sumerian.] Other important non-Semitic languages, attested primarily to the east and to the north of Mesopotamia proper, are Hurrian, Urartian, and Elamite. [See Hurrians; Elamites; Urartu.] The latter two languages are written witii Mesopotamian cuneiform. Hurrian is poorly attested, but texts have been discovered written in both Mesopotamian cuneiform and Ugaritic al phabetic cuneiform. Important aspects of die correlation of languages and ar eas are the related phenomena of bilingualism or multilingualism, of prestige languages, and of linguae francae. Be cause writing was invented in Mesopotamia to express the Sumerian language, that language remained the principal means of written expression for hundreds of years, even for Semitic speakers. By the Old Akkadian period (c. 2400 BCE), this was, however, principally a graphic phenomenon: the use of Semitic words and phonetic indicators shows that the use of Sumerian could be logographic—that is, that a text written principally or even entirely in Sumerian could be read in the local Semitic language (e.g., Akkadian in Akkad or Eblite at Ebla). [See Akkade; Ebla; Ebla Texts.] Learning Sumerian remained an important part of die curriculum of Mesopotamian scribes long after the language had disap peared from daily use. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] In any case, the use of Sumerian logograms became a per manent part of Akkadian; in certain genres (e.g., divinatory texts) logograms constituted a major form of the expression. Sumerian logograms were also important in Hittite, so much so that the Hittite form of many words is still unknown, for die word was always written logographically. From about 2000 BCE until the rise of Aramaic in the Per sian Empire, Akkadian (with its usual Sumerian underpin nings) was both the prestige language of Mesopotamia, An-
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INSCRIPTIONS: Ancient Inscriptions
atolia, and Syria/Palestine and die international lingua franca, much like Latin in medieval Europe. As is clear from die Amarna letters, Akkadian was used for the correspon dence between the New Kingdom pharaohs and their Lev antine client rulers. [See Amarna Tablets.] This required, of course, an Egyptian scribal class that was bilingual. When a lingua franca is used, the command of the lan guage may vary considerably from one area to another— whence the modern Romance languages, to cite the Euro pean model. This is clear from the use of Akkadian in the Syro-Palestinian area in the second millennium BCE, where, depending on whedier a text was from Mari, Alalakh, Uga rit, or the Phoenician and Palestinian city states, the purity of the language varied considerably. [See Mari; Alalakh.] That Akkadian was not only a practical lingua franca, but also the prestige language representing the prestige culture during this time, is clear from the relatively large numbers of texts representing Mesopotamian culture discovered in the West. This is clearest from Ugarit, where hundreds of lexical texts and a significant number of literary texts have been discovered. T h e numbers go beyond those expected of simple schools for learning the language; they represent an attempt at mastering Mesopotamian literary culture. Ugaritic scribes also seem to have prided themselves on their ability to manipulate the Akkadian language (Arnaud, 1982). In other instances, genres that seem likely to have originated in Mesopotamia have been thoroughly assimi lated into die local language: this is true of "scientific" texts at Ugarit (hippiatric texts, various ominological texts), writ ten in pure Ugaritic with few Akkadianisms. The extent of bilingualism in a given culture depended on the degree of isolation and self-sufficiency: Egypt consti tuted one extreme, its geographic isolation often translating into cultural isolation; the Levantine states, which dealt reg ularly with people from all over the Near East, were at the other extteme. This is best illustrated by Ras Shamra (Uga rit), die Levantine site that has produced the largest number of texts, in eight different languages/scripts. [See Ugarit In scriptions.] Types of Texts. The mundane will usually hold pride of place in a collection of primary documents for, to varying degrees, such texts reflect everyday activities. In most ar chaeological text discoveries, literary and explicitly historical texts will be in a very small minority or entirely absent. Dur ing the first century of the study of ancient Near Eastern texts, such texts were nevertheless considered the most im portant, and they received the lion's share of attention. In the last few decades, a reaction has set in to this preponder ance of energy expended on a minority production of the elite: more attention is now being paid to documents that permit a broader reconstruction of socioeconomic history. The content of a group of texts discovered in an archae ological excavation can vary considerably, depending on various factors:
1. The social status of whoever (in antiquity) assembled the collection (i.e., whether the individual(s) was private or royal) 2. Whether the texts constitute an archive, a random assem blage, or even discards 3. If the texts come from an adminisft-ative archive, the place in the administration occupied by whomever col lected the archive (e.g., many of the texts from Mari rep resent royal correspondence, whereas almost all the Ebla texts are account tablets) 4 . The time period covered (from a few decades in the case of the Ebla archives to centuries in the case of the library of Ashurbanipal) 5. The interests and aptitudes of the collector or collectors (e.g., a high percentage of Ugaritic mythological texts were the work of a single scribe) 6. Whether the texts represent a working archive or scribal training (e.g., "the classics" were part of the scribal cur riculum, and in Egypt extracts from these were found written in ink on ostraca) 7. The origin of the archaeological deposit (with an instan taneous desttuction more likely to contain a cohesive ar chive than a stratum, which reflects either continuous habitation or the gradual abandonment of a site) In addition to these and other definable factors, there is also the simple fortune of discovery: only a fraction of a site is usually excavated and because only a fraction of the avail able sites have been touched, only a fraction of the poten tially available texts, themselves only a fraction of the texts actually produced in antiquity, are known. T o some degree, the material selected for inscription will reflect the genre of the text: precious materials or unwieldy objects (such as large stones) will be used for texts upon which a certain value is placed. On die other hand, every thing from account texts to the highest literature will be writ ten with the primary media of the culture (clay tablets in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, papyrus in Egypt). Priorities were different from one culture to another: Egypt is well known for monumental inscriptions, particularly in tombs and temples, whereas these are relatively rare in the rest of the ancient Near East. In this case the iconic value of the hieroglyphic script and the accompanying artistic represen tations were important: only a very small percentage of the population would have been capable of actually reading the texts in any ancient culture. In Mesopotamia, the cuneiform script lacked the iconic value of hieroglyphs. T h e linking of text and pictorial representations achieved major impor tance only relatively late, at the time of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. [See Assyrians.] It is possible to classify ancient Near Eastern texts into a representative list of a number of categories, depending on the criteria chosen: Administrative texts—accounts of all sorts; legal texts, in cluding treaties
INSCRIPTIONS: Ancient Inscriptions Epistolary texts—letters between individuals Ritual texts—prescriptions or descriptions of liturgy Scientific texts—astronomy, mathematics, medicine, lexi cography, ominology Historical texts—royal inscriptions and preambles to legal documents; some annals and, toward the end of the pe riod covered here, chronicles Belletristic works—myths, legends, and stories, often char acterized by poetic composition; however, "poetry" may have been expressed in ancient languages As with any such categorization, there are overlapping subgenres (e.g., a business letter or one recounting an ob servation of the stars). This list is meant consciously to ex clude the very transitory writing (few graffiti are known from the early periods; school texts can reflect any genre) and historiography (the relatively few historical documents tend to be strongly apologetic; the dates of the nascent his toriographic documents in the Hebrew Bible are debated). Religious texts belong to several literary types, for religion so infused ancient society that it is reflected in several genres (e.g., temple accounts, celestial omens, temple histories, myths). Prose ritual texts, however, constitute a formal type concentrated in the sphere of religion, for no other aspect of life generated sets of prescribed acts couched in writing to die same extent as religious rites. Furthermore, poetry was used almost exclusively in these early periods when top ics were treated that touched on the divine. Administrative texts and letters constitute the backbone of many archives, for tiiey represent the day-to-day and summary aspects of accounting, the legal basis for the own ership or use of various sorts of property, and the commu nication across space of all sorts of matters relating to house holds or larger social entities. [See Libraries and Archives.] Such texts provide die principal basis for reconstructing an cient societies and economies; having been produced by a literate elite, they do tend to represent the concerns of the upper levels of society, malting it difficult to reconstruct a true cross section of society. Science was, of course, the science of the day, but much of modern science has nonetheless developed from it, par ticularly mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Divinatory texts are classified as scientific because they are formally similar to medical texts and were plausibly considered by the ancients to be equivalent in nature: botii are character ized by the protasis-apodosis structure ("if such-and-such an omen is observed, such-and-such an event will occur," "if such-and-such a symptom is observed, give such-andsuch a remedy"). Most of the explicitly scientific texts are from Mesopotamia, though certain types are attested in An atolia and in Syria-Palestine. T h e Egyptians are known to have developed mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, but they left few writings dealing with the topics. T h e classifi cation of the world, natural and human.- was an important part of Mesopotamian science, expressed in lexical terms:
161
long lists of words organized into broad semantic categories, usually based on the Sumerian term and with or without the corresponding Akkadian term. The concept developed into virtual polyglot dictionaries in the West (tablets are attested at Ugarit with columns for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Ugaritic). It is the belletristic works that have most potently captured the imagination of modern readers, for their combination of elevated expression and metaphysical topics seems to reveal aesthetic and religious aspirations similar to modern sensi bilities. Indeed, these texts were first seen as important in comparison with die Flebrew Bible, a document at least par tially from this early period and that has endured. The Ugaritic mythological texts have provided a particularly meaningful background to the Bible, while those from Mes opotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt have done so less directly. These texts are now being studied as witnesses to tiieir own cultures and have thus, to some extent, been liberated from a Bible-centered perspective. Inscriptions and History. T h e virtual absence of histo riographic texts from this early period means that the an cient sources provide only die narrowest of viewpoints on ancient Near Eastern history—and then it often is the per sonal account of a monarch or a courtier. The modern his torian must, therefore, work extensively from the ephemera of the time. Modern historians of the ancient Near East can be characterized broadly as belonging to two categories: ar chaeologists with few, if any, documents who reconsttuct the history of a site on the basis of its material remains, and specialists in texts, who, perforce, work only on areas and periods for which texts are extant. The two types work in cooperation. Anyone worldng on the long-term history of a region or of a site works of course with both artifactual and textual evidence according to availability. Certain types of data—for example, names and the specifics of many events—are only available from textual sources, whereas many realia are best known from archaeological sources; die correlation between the two types of data is improving as cooperation between archaeologists and text specialists builds a databank. Because of the importance of ephemera, epistolary doc uments constitute one of the most important types of text for reconstructing political history, while other administra tive documents provide the main basis of economic history. T h e texts from Old Babylonian Mari illustrate this well: thousands of letters from that site permit the reconstruction of a quite-detailed history of Upper Mesopotamia and of Babylonian interests there; many administrative texts have provided a great number of data on the contemporary econ omy—at least from the perspective of the royal administra tion. T h e Amarna letters, on the other hand, witii their dis parate origins and without the contribution of administtative texts, contain primarily political data. Only Ugarit has pro vided texts of both types, both in Akkadian and in the local language, allowing a unique perspective on the organization
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INSCRIPTIONS: Inscriptions of the Classical Period
and international dealings of a royal city-state at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Intellectual history and the history of religious beliefs and practices are most plausibly pursued where a wealth of doc uments gives several perspectives on these topics—princi pally, therefore, in Egypt and Mesopotamia and to a lesser extent in Anatolia and Syria. Considerably more is thus known about the beliefs and practices of New Kingdom Egypt or of Mesopotamia in the eighteenth century BCE than is known about those of tire pre-Exilic "Hebrews," simply because most information about Israelite religion comes from a single source, the Hebrew Bible, the precise origins of which are still debated. Indeed, most of tire light cast on tire Hebrew Bible has been eitiher from nontextual archae ological discoveries or from non-Hebrew texts. (In the Northwest Semitic languages alone, inscriptions in Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Aramaic far outnumber those in Hebrew.) There is nothing ungrateful in this description of the current status of affairs, for great progress has been made since the beginning of modern archaeology. It is nonetheless true that additional written sources from South Canaan must be dis covered—preferably in the local languages, though any ar chive would be welcome—in order for a more precise de scription of the intellectual and religious history of the peoples of the area to be possible. [See Literacy.]
ings. 3 vols. Berkeley, 1973-19S0. Authoritative translations of the most important Egyptian literary texts. Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Autobiographies Chiefly of the Mid
dle Kingdom: A Study and an Anthology. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis,
84. Freiburg, 1988. Lilteratures anciennes du Proche-Orient. Paris, 1967-. Ongoing series of
volumes (fifteen to date), each devoted to a single group of texts, defined generically and/or linguistically. Matthews, Victor H., and D. C. Benjamin. Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East. New York, 1 9 9 1 . Very
free English translations of major ancient Near Eastern texts ar ranged as pertinent to the books of the Hebrew Bible. Oppenheim, A. Leo. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead
Civiliza
tion. Chicago, 1964. Classic portrait of Mesopotamian civilization by someone who knew the texts as well as anyone in his day. Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old
Testament. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. English translations with brief notes; still a standard but becoming out dated. Texte aus der Umwell des Allen Testaments. Giitersloh, 1982. Recent
translations of ancient Near Eastern texts by multiple autiiors, ar ranged in separate fascicles and volumes according to genre and origin. Nearly complete. Van Seters, John. "The Israelites." Orientalia 50 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 3 7 - 1 8 5 .
Overview with historical and historiographic textual data. Wevers, John W. "Preface." Orientalia 49 (1980): 1 3 7 - 1 3 9 . Introduc tion to Histories and Historians of the Ancient Near East, a series of
essays including Grayson, Hoffner, and Van Seters (see above). Writings from the Ancient World. Adanta, 1990-. Recerrdy launched se
ries of volumes, each devoted to a single group of texts, defined generically and/or linguistically. DENNIS PARDEE
BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnaud, Daniel. "Une lettre du roi de Tyr au roi d'Ougarit: Milieux d'affaires et de culture en Syrie a la fin de 1'age du Bronze Recent." Syria 59 (1982): 1 0 1 - 1 0 7 . Scribal professionalism and internation
alism from the perspective of Ugarit. The Cambridge Ancient History. Vols. 1 - 3 . 2d and 3d eds. Cambridge,
1970-1991. Written by major specialists, but the first two volumes are already out of date. Ebeling, Erich, et al„ eds. Reallexikon der Assyriologie. 7 vols, to date. Berlin, 1932-. Includes articles on important texts and archives. Foster, Benjamin R. Be/ore the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian
Liter
ature. 2 vols. Bethesda, Md., 1993. Up-to-date translation, including texts difficult to find in English or previously untranslated. Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. New
York, 1992. Covers all aspects of biblical studies; includes articles on other ancient Near Eastern cultures. Godart, Louis. Le pouvoir de I'ecrit: Aux pays des premieres ecritures.
Paris, 1990. Comprehensive and well-illustrated introduction to early writing systems in the Near East and the Mediterranean basin. Grayson, A. Kirk. "Assyria and Babylonia." Orientalia 49 (1980): 1 4 0 194. Overview with historical and historiographic textual data. Gurney, O. R. The Hittites. Rev. ed. London, 1990. General introduc tion to the Indo-European cultures in Anatolia. Helck, H. Wolfgang, and Eberhard Otto, eds. Lexikon der Agyptologie. 7 vols. Wiesbaden, 1975-19S6. Articles on important texts and ar chives. Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. "The Hittites." Orientalia 49 (1980): 283-332.
Overview with historical and historiographic textual data. Hooker, J. T., ed. Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to
the Alphabet. London, 1990. Six articles by eminent specialists cov ering early writing systems in the Near East and the Mediterranean basin. Lichtheim, Miriam, comp. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Read
Inscriptions of the Classical Period For the classical period inscriptions are found in Old Per sian, Elamite, Akkadian, Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, the Anatolian languages, Greek, and Egyptian. They were in scribed on almost all materials that are inscribable—ceram ics, stone, marble, or bronze—and on a range of objects— ostraca, seals, jar handles. Old Persian. Inscriptions are the primary source for the language of Old Persian and for accounts of tire Persian Empire from the point of view of the Persians. (The histo rian Herodotus had excellent sources for the history of Per sia, but he was Greek and he viewed the East from a Greek perspective.) The premier inscription in Old Persian from the classical period is the Bisitun monument. [See Bisitun.] The declaration of Darius (521-486 BCE) was cut into tire native rock of a cliff face and inscribed in three languages (Persian, Elamite, Akkadian) in cuneiform. Darius gives his lineage, the organization of his empire, his dedication to Ahuramazda, his justification for the seizure of tire throne (that Bardiya, die supposed brother of Cambyses, his pred ecessor, was an imposter), his quelling of rebellion, and ad vice to his successors. The inscription was composed on clay tablets and parchment first, then inscribed, read to Darius, and finally sent in translation to the satrapies. An Aramaic version survives that was discovered in Egypt. A Babylonian text known as the Cyrus cylinder, the officially approved
INSCRIPTIONS: Inscriptions of the Classical Period declaration of the accomplishments and lineage of Cyrus, has survived only in a very fragmentary Old Persian version. A comparison of the Cyrus cylinder and the Bisitun mon ument suggests that Darius may have invented a common ancestor, "Achaemenes," to link his ancestry to Cyrus's. An equally well-known inscription of Darius's son and succes sor, Xerxes, records his pious (as an adherent of Ahuramazda) destruction of "the demons." Other Persian inscrip tions record the building programs of the kings. Languages of Syria-Palestine. Syria and Palestine pro vide few epigraphic remains that allow a prosopographical study to determine the area's ethnic composition in antiq uity. Hebrew. Inscriptions provide information about the de velopment of the Hebrew language, alphabet, and mor phology; about tire background of tire Hebrew Bible; and about local history and social organization. By and large, however, few Hebrew inscriptions exist from the period fol lowing Nebuchadrezzar's destruction of the Temple in Je rusalem ( 5 8 6 BCE). The few earlier inscriptions give an idea of the measures of defense taken against Nebuchadrezzar, present some religious opposition to the rule, and mention Greek mercenaries. Phoenician. Inscriptions in this period are found in Old Phoenician at Byblos and Sidon, in the form of tomb curses and dedications. One of the best-known is the tomb inscrip tion of King Eshmunazar, which gives some historical in formation. [See Byblos; Sidon; Eshmunazar Inscription.] Other inscriptions in the Phoenician language are found on Cyprus (sometimes bilingual, in Phoenician and Greek) and also are predominantly dedications or grave markers. In scriptions in Phoenician are found on Rhodes, and in other places where Phoenicians traded. Althojugh the inscriptions themselves contribute little historical information, their provenance attests to the activity of the Phoenicians. Aramaic. Beginning in the second millenium BCE the Arameans, whose original language was Aramaic, began to in filtrate and in some places dominate Mesopotamia and Syria. Because die Arameans were merchants, their trading expeditions spread their language throughout the Near East. Aramaic alphabetic script appears to have been used along with cuneiform by tire Assyrians. [See Cuneiform.] Monu ments depict Aramaic scribes alongside cuneiform scribes, and some cuneiform tablets have filing notations in Aramaic. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] During the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians in 7 0 1 BCE, negotiations were carried on in Aramaic. By the classical period, Aramaic was the international language of diplomacy, displacing Hebrew (it is the principal language also of the books of Daniel and Ezra). T h e first recorded reference to the house of David outside die Bible is in an Aramaic inscription discovered in 1993 at Dan, in Israel (Biran and Naveh, 1993). [See Dan.] Some scholars have argued that the Greek alphabet derived partly or largely from Aramaic and not from Phoenician.
163
Persian officials used it among themselves throughout the Persian Empire. (Correspondence was dispatched in leather bags sealed with the name of the official in Aramaic.) As the common official language, inscriptions in Aramaic are found throughout the Persian Empire, although they are rel atively rare. Dedicatory inscriptions are found in Cilicia, Lydia, and Lycia, though in Anatolia Aramaic was sup planted by Greek. Anatolian Languages. Inscriptions establish the lan guages used in Anatolia in the classical period. They show relationships between languages and the spread of Greek. Phrygian. The inscriptions in Phyrgian (the principle source for knowledge of the language) date from 750 BCE (rare) to the fifth century BCE and beyond and establish Phrygian as Indo-European. If the suggestion that Phrygian is somehow related to Latin could be established, scholars would have to reassess the ancient legends of the settiement of Italy from central Anatolia. Lydian. Inscriptions in Lydian are all on stone and date from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE. Bilingual inscrip tions exist in Lydian-Aramaic and Lydian-Greek. They sug gest that Lydian belongs to the Hittite-Luwian branch of Indo-European. Seal inscriptions show tire spread of Persian influence in Sardis and throughout Lydia. [See Hittite; Luwians; Sardis.] Lycian. A trilingual Lycian-Greek-Aramaic stela from Xanthos in year 1 of Artaxerxes (either 358 or 337 BCE) and a few funerary inscriptions survive. These inscriptions give enough information to identify die Lycian language as IndoEuropean, but not to assign it within tire family of IndoEuropean languages. [See Lycia.] Carian. Inscriptions of tire seventh-sixth centuries BCE, including a few fragmentary bilingual texts using a Grecianstyle alphabet, do not provide enough information to identify even the family to which Carian belongs. T h e names (from graffiti) of a group of mercenaries in Egypt in 591 BCE can be recognized as Carian. Carian gave way to Greek. Greek. Hundreds of inscriptions from the Greek settle ments in Asia Minor and tire islands off its coast survive. They were public inscriptions, meant to inform citizens of tiieir rights or obligations; they thus reveal the internal affairs of die separate cities, their relations with each other, and tiieir relations with Persia and, finally, with Alexander. For instance, one of the earliest constitutions known, from Chios, from about 600 BCE, recognizes the rights of die peo ple while allowing for some aristocratic privileges; another (early fourth century BCE) fixes the exchange rate between Mytilene and Phocea for die purpose of easing commerce. A letter from Darius ( 5 2 1 - 4 8 6 BCE) to his satrap on a marble stela in Magnesia on the Meander stressed his commitment to protect local religion and to the "greening" of the empire. An inscription on limestone from Xanthos (late fifth century BCE) shows a Lycian dynast to have been a member of the
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INSCRIPTIONS: Inscriptions of the Classical Period
Athenian Empire. In 3 9 1 - 3 8 8 BCE the cities of Miletus and Myus referred a boundary dispute to the arbitration of the Persian king. In the mid-fourth century BCE, Strato, the king of Sidon, vassal of the Persian Empire, developed a rela tionship with Athens. Inscriptions show how local, nonGreek rulers adopted Greek names, made Greek cities their capital, and employed Greek mercenaries, often against the Persian king. They also reveal die difficulties the Persian king had in controlling his far-flung subject (and satraps). Inscriptions also delineate Alexander's policy toward the Greek cities, restoring exiles, settling property disputes, and giving grants of freedom and land. [See Miletus.] Egyptian. The classical period in Egypt is best known tiirough the accounts of Herodotus (and other lesser writ ers), as Greeks began to visit Egypt not only as mercenaries and merchants, but also as tourists and students. Psammetichus IPs campaign against Nubia in 593 BCE (or 591) is recorded in Egyptian and Greek inscriptions. The Greek inscription furnishes details of the organization of the Egyp tian army (there were separate commands for Egyptians and foreigners) and together with the Egyptian inscriptions de fines the extent of die expedition. Greeks were employed as mercenaries until the Persian conquest, and Greek mer chants were settled at Naukratis. [See Naukratis.] An in scription of Nectanebo I (378-360 BCE) describes the finan cial arrangements: a 1 0 percent tax on silver, gold, and manufactured items. Inscriptions support the suggestion that the Egyptians learned about the specialized Greek war-
ship, the trireme, from Greeks and employed these triremes with Greek and Carian crews. A reconstruction of the chronology of the Sake pharoahs, the line of pharoahs from the mid-seventh century to the Persian conquest in 525 BCE, is based on epigraphy. Inscrip tions allow the account of Herodotus of the Persian conquest of Egypt (in which an "insane" king Cambyses slew the sacred bull Apis; 3 . 2 7 - 3 0 . 1 ) to be corrected. According to inscriptions, the sacred bull lived through the turmoil and conquest unharmed by the Persians; and Cambyses did re duce the income and expenditures of the temples, which turned the priestly caste against him. Darius I allowed the Egyptians to undertake building projects. The assimilation of the ruling classes can be traced through a Persian noble with the name Tachos, an Egyptian noble who was a general in the Persian army. Midway through the Persian occupa tion historical inscriptions largely end; tiiey reappear, in sig nificant numbers, only after Alexander's conquest. Besides inscriptions in Egyptian, several corpora of in scriptions in Aramaic have been discovered in Egypt. These have provided information on Semites and Persians in Egypt, particularly on aspects of everyday life (marriage contracts, real-estate transactions, the workings of the Per sian bureaucracy in Egypt). [See Egyptian Aramaic Texts.] Without the inscriptions of the classical period, nothing would be known of die Old Persian language, of the kings' official records, or of the organization of the Persian empire. Inscriptions are the only sources for some ancient languages, and they allow origins and movements (e.g, of the Anatolian peoples) to be traced. Inscriptions are a means of tracing the increasing influence of Greeks in the Near East before Alexander and the chronology, organization, and society of the Egyptians before and during the Persian domination. [See also Akkadian; Aramaic Language and Literature; Egyptian; Greek; Hebrew Language and Literature; Per sian; and Phoenician-Punic] BIBLIOGRAPHY Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Naveh. "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan." Israel Exploration Journal (1993): 8 1 - 9 8 .
The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 3. Edited by John Boardman et al.
2d ed. Cambridge, 1982. Discusses the languages, materials, and sources of the classical period in historical context. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic
Essays.
Missoula, 1979. Good introduction to the Aramaic language and available texts. Gibson, John C, L. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions. 3 vols. Ox INSCRIPTIONS: Classical Period. Limestone grave stela from Abu
Sir. The subjects here appear Greek from the protliesis (laying out) depicted, but the style and the winged disk above are Egyptian. The assumption may be that this is a scene of Greeks in Egypt, except that the inscription (which we cannot read) is in Carian. Dated to 500 BCE. Height 27 cm. Berlin Staatliche Museum # 1 9 5 5 3 . (Courtesy Pamela Lenck Bradford)
ford, 1971-1982. Complete collection of the significant Semitic doc uments of this period, with translations. Harden, Donald B. The Phoenicians. 3d ed. Harmondsworth, 1980. Brief references to and descriptions of Phoenician inscriptions. Jones, Clifford M. Old Testament Illustrations. Cambridge, 1971. Pro vides photographs of the major sources. Kent, Roland G. Old Persian: Grammar,
Texts, Lexicon. 2d ed. New
Haven, 1953. A transliteration and translation of Persian texts. Meiggs, Russell, and David Lewis. A Selection of Greek Historical In-
INSCRIPTIONS: Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods scriptions to the End of the Fifth Century BC. Oxford, 1969. Greek
texts, some related to this period and area, principally the letter of Darius. Pritchard, James B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Tes
tament. Princeton, 1969. Translations of the principle documents. The Sculptures and Inscriptions of Darius the Great of the Rock of Behistun
in Persia. London, 1907. British Museum publication that provides texts in cuneiform, transliterations, and translations, as well as pho tographs and drawings of die monument. ALFRED S . BRADFORD
Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Inscriptions for the period that begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE and ends with the Muslim conquest of the Near East and northeast Africa after Mu hammad's death in 632 CE have been found in large quan tities. They occur on official buildings and houses, on tem ples and altars, synagogues and churches, on and in tombs, on ex-votos and potsherds, on rocks and mountains, on tem ple and church utensils—in short, on any surface suitable for writing. With this diversity, it is not surprising that epi graphic techniques vary according to the material used: marble, limestone, metal, wood, or pottery. Inscriptions are engraved on, marble, whereas they are usually written with ink on wood or pottery. Inscriptions supply firsthand, direct sources of information, for they comment on all religious and secular aspects of tribes, nations, and empires, as well as on tiieir different social levels. When Alexander and his successors, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties, ruled the Near East, koine Greek be came the official administrative language. [See Seleucids; Ptolemies; Greek.] However, Official Aramaic, the language of the Achaemenid chancelleries, also remained in use, es pecially in Mesopotamia and farther east. [See Aramaic Lan guage and Literature.] Yet, even before Alexander's arrival, Greek was circulating—as the trilingual inscription in Ara maic, Lycian, and Greek from Xanthos in Lycia (337/36 BCE) attests. [See Lycia.] Many copies of royal edicts in Greek have been found inscribed on marble stelae or on die walls of temples (Welles, 1 9 7 4 ) . T h e Near East, including Anatolia and Egypt, has yielded an enormous number of Greek inscriptions continuing far into the Islamic period. The most famous example from Egypt is die Rosetta stone, a decree of the Egyptian priesthood passed in 196 BCE and written in Greek, hieroglyphic Egyptian, and Demotic—a combination that enabled the decipherment of hieroglyphic Egyptian by Champollion in 1 8 2 0 . [See Egyptian; Hiero glyphs; and the biography of Champollion.] The use of Greek also spread eastward to present-day Afghanistan, where two Greek inscriptions of the Indian ldng Asoka were found in Kandahar. These are the only two Buddhist documents in Greek, and while die first has a parallel Aramaic text, they testify to the cultural prestige of Greek in those distant
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regions. Alongside Greek, the indigenous languages re mained in use particularly for private purposes during the period of the Hellenistic dynasties until the arrival of the Romans in the person of Pompey in 63 BCE. Few of these inscriptions have survived from the period because of the relative scarcity of contemporary evidence (Millar, 1987). The use of Greek alongside various indigenous, mainly Semitic, languages typified the basic bilingualism that char acterized Near Eastern cultures in die Hellenistic and Ro man periods and later. Many inscriptions are bilingual, mostly Greek and Aramaic, with the Greek often repre senting the official version and the Aramaic providing a translation of the text. Hence, Aramaic became, to a certain extent, hellenized tiirough the adoption of Greek words and idiom, a phenomenon that particularly manifests itself in of ficial public inscriptions (e.g., at Palmyra). [See Palmyra.] The beginning of the Roman period saw a resurgence of inscriptions and papyri written in the various local lan guages. [See Papyrus.] Jewish inscriptions in Palestine were written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. [See Hebrew Lan guage and Literature.] T h e Jews in Edessa used Hebrew and Greek for tiieir tomb inscriptions. By contrast the inscrip tions from the synagogue at Aphrodisias are only in Greek. [Synagogue Inscriptions; Aphrodisias.] Other synagogues in Asia Minor also yielded mainly Greek inscriptions and very few in Hebrew. The use of a certain language cannot be interpreted as indicative of a particular culture or religion. Language in these periods and in tiiese areas does not function as an impermeable cultural barrier. Coastal areas have yielded Phoenician and Punic inscriptions alongside Greek ones. [See Phoenician-Punic] Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions also come from North Africa and Tripolitania. The Nabateans living in Petta, tiieir capital (in modern Jordan), wrote tiieir inscriptions in Nabatean, a form of Aramaic, but also used Greek. [See Nabateans; Nabatean Inscriptions.] A host of Nabatean graffiti has also been found along caravan routes in the Sinai and Negev deserts and on the Arabian Peninsula. The desert areas in modem Jordan, in Syria and in northern Arabia have also yielded Safaitic, Thamudic, Taymanite, Lihyanite, Dedanite, and Minaean inscriptions, as well as graffiti mainly consisting of Arab proper names of die various tribes and clans. [See Safaitic-Thamudic In scriptions; Tayma'; Dedan.] Northern Mesopotamia is the area of Old Syriac inscrip tions, but Greek and Hebrew examples are also attested that date mainly from the second and third centuries CE. [See Syriac] From that period, Aramaic inscriptions from Assur and Hatra are known. [See Assur; Hatra.] Palmyra, the car avan city in the middle of the Syrian desert, has supplied by far the largest number of Aramaic inscriptions, including many bilingual ones (Greek, Palmyrene) and even trilingual ones (Greek, Palmyrene, Latin). Dura-Europos, the fortress
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INSCRIPTIONS: Hellenistic and Roman Periods. The Pontius Pilate
inscription. (Courtesy ASOR Archives) on the Euphrates River, has yielded texts in Greek, Latin, Palmyrene, and in Iranian languages, attesting the various cultures and powers drat manifested themselves in that bor der area. [Sec Dura-Europos; Latin.] Despite tire fact that the Romans ruled large parts of the Near East until the Mus lim conquests, there are relatively few Latin inscriptions. Greek remained the official language of administration, while Latin inscriptions are mainly found on milestones along Roman roads or pertaining to the Roman army and odrer Roman officials. When the Romans over the centuries terminated the independence or quasi-independence of many cities and nations and incorporated them into the provinces into which die Near East was divided, inscriptions were basically no longer written in indigenous languages and local scripts. Greek remained dominant and Latin texts are very rare after Constantine the Great founded Constanti nople in 330 CE, which became the seat of Roman govern ment. Apart from Greek, only Syriac inscriptions are at tested, but they are mainly concentrated in the eastern regions, where Syriac essentially became the language of Near Eastern Christianity. Greek was also used in tire Ira nian empires of the Parthians and Sasanians. [See Parthians; Sasanians.] The res gestae of the Sasanian ldng Shapur I ( 2 4 1 - 2 7 2 CE) are carved on a stone wall at Naqsh-i Rustam
near ancient Persepolis in three languages: Middle Persian, Parthian, and Greek. [See Naqsh-i Rustam; Persian.] Other Aramaic languages—Mandaic and Talmudic Aramaic— alongside Syriac were used for incantation texts written on unglazed pottery bowls and lead strips that have been found in large quantities in modern Iraq, particularly at the site of ancient Nippur. [See Mandaic; Nippur.] T h e thousands of inscriptions covering a wide range of languages and periods deal with all aspects of history and culture and consequently present a variety of literary genres. There are official documents and edicts issued by tire Hel lenistic rulers and city councils and also Greek versions of official Roman documents (Sherk, 1969). Legal texts are attested in a great variety, ranging from the so-called sacred laws that regulate behavior in temple areas to tax laws. An example of the last category is the bilingual tax law of Pal myra, written in Greek and Aramaic on four large stelae, that was passed in 1 3 7 CE. T h e entire inscription is preserved in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, Russia, to which it was transported after its discovery in 1 8 8 1 . Building inscriptions commemorating founders, dates, and the functions of public and private buildings are essential to the archaeology of towns and villages, supplying the main sttuctural elements of the historical chronology of urban development. Honor ific inscriptions for meritorious citizens and public officials, as well as for emperors and priests, usually accompanied statues erected in the main colonnades of towns or within the sacred areas of temples. These give insight into tire or ganization of tire body social and into tire public deeds of its important members. A special category of inscriptions is tire caravan texts hon oring caravan leaders, the great entrepreneurs of Near East ern antiquity, which often refer to their brave activities bringing tire caravans home through the desert, where they were threatened by robbers and other dangers. T h e large majority of these inscriptions belong to the mercantile net work of Palmyra and have been instrumental in reconstruct ing ancient trade routes and economies. Another significant group is tomb inscriptions commemorating the dead and cursing grave robbers. Such inscriptions provide the means for reconstructing families and clans, especially the wealthy, for whom die monumental tombs were built. [See Tombs.] The most impressive examples are again found at Palmyra, where wealthy citizens had hypogea and tower-tombs con structed that sometimes contained several hundred dead. Most tomb inscriptions are rather stereotyped, but the Edessene area in northern Mesopotamia offers a wide range of interesting texts on walls and inlaid in mosaics that covered tire floor of the cave tombs. [See Mosaics.] Because literary texts regarding the various cults of the Near East in Hellenistic and Roman times are rare (presum ably Egyptian and Mesopotamian religious practices based on the ancient myths continued, but proper religious texts do not exist for Syria and Phoenicia), inscriptions on altars
INSCRIPTIONS: Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
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description of a Syrian cult that has been preserved. T h e religious practices of seminomadic desert dwellers can only be reconstructed from their inscriptions, graffiti, and petroglyphs. Inscriptions differ in many aspects from literary texts in grammar as well as in idiom and lexicology. While the lan guage of the public inscriptions is usually highly stylized and sometimes pompous, the private ones reveal the language of everyday life, local dialects, and variants of official lan guages. Inscriptions, therefore, are invaluable for studying the grammar, orthography, vocalization, pronunciation, and lexicology of Greek and the various Near Eastern languages. Some, like Palmyrene Aramaic and the languages of the Na bateans and Phoenicians, are only known through inscriptional evidence. Inscriptions are also the main source for studying the onomastics and prosopography of the Near East. Proper names often occur in Semitic texts as well as in Greek transcription; in this way, inscriptions provide in sight into the pronunciation of the names, which are unvocalized in Semitic script. Many individuals in Mesopotamia and elsewhere also took a Greek name, which often contains a clue to the meaning of their Semitic name. Related to this practice is the so-called Greco-Babyloniaca, a group of clay tablets dating to the second century BCE or later. [See T a b let.] They transcribe cuneiform and Aramaic texts in Greek script. [See Cuneiform.] In this way they provide insight into the contemporary pronunciation of the languages nanscribed.
INSCRIPTIONS: Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Columnal
monu
ment. Commemorating honors given Tiberius by the people of Sardis. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
and ex-votos and dedications in temples, often combined widi sculptures and reliefs, are die only sources of infor mation about Near Eastern cults in this period. This dearth applies to the religion of the Nabateans, to the cities of Pal myra and Hatra and of the rest of the Levant, and to the important religious centers of Heliopolis/Baalbek, and Emesa/Homs. [See Baalbek; Horns.] On die other hand, die important religious center of Hierapolis/Mabbug has yielded Greek inscriptions and Aramaic texts on coins. T h e often enigmatic De Dea Syria of Lucian of Samosata, describing the history of the temple and its cult, is the only literary
The Greco-Roman world, including the Near East, pro duced copious amounts of inscriptions during die Hellenis tic and Roman periods. Writing, often in public form, was a distinctive characteristic of Greco-Roman civilization in the west and east, and therefore was an almost incomparable cultural phenomenon. Consequently, inscriptions refer to vast provinces of life, social structures, and the thought and values of the ancient world; they contain vast amounts of information, but there is much they do not divulge. Their perspective is limited to what was deemed fit for the con temporary reader, and they present certain stylized conven tions and practices. The primary challenge in using inscrip tions as a source of history and culture is constructing an intelligible context within which the inscriptions can be in terpreted. The problem is exacerbated when inscriptions are badly damaged or only partially preserved; it becomes chronic when the original context is lost. Without support ing archaeological evidence, inscriptions run the high risk of becoming stray texts whose meaning is elusive or enigmatic. Moreover, even when inscriptions can be read and inter preted easily, they often contradict other sources of infor mation, such as histories or archaeological finds, although sometimes the information is complementary. Despite these difficulties, the publication of a single inscription can bring a new dimension to and totally change an established schol arly opinion. As such, inscriptions remain the main and
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most direct source of historical information on life and so ciety in the Greco-Roman Near East. Indeed, as a result of the paucity of literary sources, inscriptions (and papyri) are the main instrument for writing the history of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Their value is recognized increas ingly by scholars, who are combining inscriptions with ar chaeological and scanty literary evidence (Sherwin-White and Kuhrt, 1993; Millar, 1993). The rapid spread of Christianity (one of the major changes in the Roman Empire) asserted by ecclesiastical au thors is also challenged by inscriptional evidence, which sug gests that it was, rather, a protracted and prolonged process. [See Church Inscriptions.] While the center of early East Roman Christianity can be traced to Antioch in northern Syria, the countryside remained for the greater part pagan until far into the fifth century (Liebeschuetz, 1977). A com parable situation prevailed at Edessa, capital of Osrhoene in northern Mesopotamia, and allegedly the center of Early Syriac Christianity, which became die first Christian king dom in the world. All Syriac inscriptions from the first four centuries are pagan and provide conclusive proof that the process of christianization developed in the opposite way to what Christian writers have asserted. Inscriptions can there fore be a vital corrective to traditional views of the history of the Greco-Roman Near East—which are, moreover, sometimes steeped in scholarly prejudices. Inscriptional finds add new information to the scholarly file and are im perative for augmenting and embellishing the history of the Near East. Moreover, only finds of Greek and bilingual in scriptions can alleviate the problem—or at least supply a better understanding of Hellenism, the expression of Greek civilization that emerged in the Hellenistic and Roman pe riod and about which there is still much vigorous debate. [See also Writing and Writing Systems; and Writing Ma terials.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Berard, Francois, et al. Guide de Tepigraphiste: Bibliographie choisie des
epigraphies antiques et medievales. Paris, 1986. Fairly comprehensive
survey of tools and studies of epigraphy, with extensive and very useful bibliographies. Dijkstra, Klaas. Life and Loyally: A Study in the Socio-Religious Culture of Syria and Mesopotamia in the Greco-Roman Period Based on Epi graphic Evidence. Leiden, 1995.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. "The Languages of Palestine in the First Century A.D." In Fitzmyer's A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays,
pp. 29-56. Missoula, 1979. Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie. 10 vols, to date. Paris, 1929-.
The most complete survey of Greek and Latin inscriptions found in Syria. Inscriptions Reveal: Documents from the Time of the Bible, the Mishna, and
the Talmud. Israel Museum Catalogue, no. 100. Jerusalem, 1972. Well-illustrated catalog with a wide range of inscriptions and clear commentary. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. "Epigraphic Evidence on the Christianisation of Syria." In Limes: Akten des XI Internationalen Limeskongresses, ed
ited by Jeno Fitz, pp. 485-508. Budapest, 1977.
Millar, Fergus. "Epigraphy." In Sources for Ancient History, edited by
Michael Crawford, pp. 80-136. Cambridge, 1983. Basic study of the use and function of inscriptions for historical research of the ancient world. Millar, Fergus. "The Problem of Hellenistic Syria." In Hellenism in the East, edited by Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White, pp. 1 1 0 133. Berkeley, 1987. Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD
337. Cambridge,
Mass., 1993. Neumann, Giinter, and Jtlrgen Untermann, eds. Die Sprachen im romischen Reich der Kaiserziet. Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbticher, 40. Co
logne, 1980. Excellent survey of all languages of the Roman Empire; good bibliography. Robert, Louis. Hellenica: Recueil d'epigraphie, de numismatique e d'anti-
quites grecques. 13 vols. Paris, 1940-1965. Excellent studies dealing mainly with Asia Minor. Robert, Louis. Opera minora selecla: Epigraphic et antiquites grecques. 4
vols. Amsterdam, 1969-1974. Schmitt, Riidiger. "Die Sprachverhaitnisse in den ostiichen Provinzen des romischen Reiches." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen
Well, vol. II.29.2, edited by Wolfgang Haase, pp. 554-586. Berlin and New York, 1983. The best survey of the languages used in the eastern Roman Empire; excellent bibliography. Seyrig, Henri. Antiquites syriennes. 6 vols. Paris, 1934-1966. Collection of articles on archaeology and die use of inscriptions, originally pub lished in the journal Syria. Seyrig, Henri. Scripta varia: Melanges d'archeologie et d'histoire. Bibliot-
heque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 2 5 . Paris, 1985. Sherk, Robert K. Roman Documents from the Greek East: Senatus Consulta and Epistulae to the Age of Augustus. Baltimore, 1969.
Sherwin-White, Susan, and Amelie Kuhrt. From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire. Berkeley, 1993.
Teixidor, Javier. Bidletin d'epigraphie semitique. Paris, 1986. Surveys of Semitic
inscriptions with useful commentaries, originally published
in the journal Syria (1964-1980). Welles, C. B. Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic Period. A Study in
Greek Epigraphy. London, 1934; rpt, Chicago, 1974. Classic mono graph of royal edicts in Greek. H. J. W. DRIJVERS
Inscriptions of the Islamic Period Thousands of inscriptions of the Islamic period are found in Arabia and in neighboring Arab and Islamic countries. Archaeological research has shown that the Arabic script used by Arabs and Muslims developed from Nabatean script, which was closely linked to Aramaic script. [See Ar amaic] The evolution of Arabic script from Aramaic is ev ident in the extensive texts and inscriptions found in Syria and dated to the early seventh century CE. In this period in Jerusalem and Mecca, those who were literate seem to have had knowledge of Aramaic. The alphabet of the Kufic Ar abic of the Islamic period has similarities to alphabets found in some inscriptions of the pre-Islamic period, such as those at Umm el-Jimal I (250 CE), U m m el-Jimal II (sixth century CE), Harran (568 CE), Osays (423 CE), and in the an-Namarah ( 5 1 2 CE) and Zabad texts (328 CE). [See U m m elJimal.] The basic sources of the Arabic inscriptions are the rev elations about the emergence of Islam made to the prophet
INSCRIPTIONS: Inscriptions of the Islamic Period Muhammad and die Qur'an, which were written in Arabic script. Other sources were the Prophet's correspondence and peace treaties. T h e revelations were memorized and then inscribed on different materials—on palm leaves and tree stumps, camel bones, hides, thin stone slabs, silk and other cloth, and woven bast. T h e inscriptions were primarily incised or engraved; some were embossed. After the Islamic conquest of Egypt, linen and papyrus were adopted for writ ing inscriptions. Islamic inscriptions from the first century AH onward are found on tombstones, coins, mosques, palaces, and forts and are religious and civil in nature. Inscriptions generally have Qur'anic verses and supplications and furnish histori cal, biographical, or administrative details, depending on the place and purpose for which they were intended. They also furnish funerary details—for example, the name of the de ceased, his or her ancestry, and date of death. These details contribute to the development of a demographic profile of a particular place. Some inscriptions are decorative. T o m b stone inscriptions in particular are an important source for studying the evolution of Arabic script. Genealogical details on tombstones—for example, titles and positions held—are sources for studying regional history. T h e tombstones were engraved by Arab calligraphers, the most renown of whom was Mubarak al-Makki. His inscriptions, dated to AH 243/ 857 CE, are characterized by unusually long texts. Inscriptions of paramount importance are those found in the Prophet's mosque at Medina, the al-Haram mosque in Mecca, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque in Je rusalem, die mosque of Ibn Tulun (Cairo); and the mosques at Qayrawan (Tunisia), and Cordoba and Gharnatah (Spain). [See Medina; Mecca; Jerusalem.] T h e largest group of tombstones (more than four thousand) and the earliest (dated to 3 1 / 6 5 1 ) come from Aswan and Cairo (Egypt). Registered and studied by Gaston Wiet ( 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 4 2 ; 1 9 7 1 ) in 1 9 3 2 , they are preserved in the Islamic Art Museum, Cairo. [See Cairo.] Other studies have been carried out by Abdur Rahman Abd at-Tawwab and Solange Ory. Bernard Roy Paule Poinsset conducted the first studies of Islamic inscriptions from Qarawan in 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 8 . A large collection of inscriptions was found at the Gorjani cemetery in Tunisia. T h e collection of inscriptions on tomb stones found in the Dhalak Islands in the Red Sea (Eritrea) is another important source for studying Arabic script. These have been published by Giovanni Oman (1976) and Madeleine Schneider ( 1 9 8 3 ) . Scores of tombstone inscrip tions have been found at other locations, such as in Yemen, Oman, Syria, and Spain. Adolf Grohmann ( 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 5 5 ) listed forty-five inscriptions, dated to between 22/643 d 129/746. They include inscriptions not only from tomb stones, but also from buildings, as well as supplications writ ten on rocks, cloth, and papyrus. In addition to these early inscriptions, Grohmann cites examples of inscribed Early Islamic coins. [See Yemen; Oman; Syria, article on Syria in a n
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the Islamic Period.] Most of the inscriptions found are on religious and civic buildings in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. In Arabia a very important inscription was found at the Saysad dam in Ta'if, built by Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufiyan in 58/677. It was published by George C. Miles in 1948. Archaeological survey and research conducted in Saudi Arabia have brought to light scores of Islamic inscriptions. Inscriptions on rocks have been found in the Hijaz, Asir, Tihama, Ta'if, Mecca, and Medina. T h e inscription on Jabal Sal in the heart of al-Medina al-Munawarrah is consid ered to be the earliest in the Muslim world. Among the rich est areas of early Islamic inscriptions (first-third century AH) in Arabia are Hanakiya, Suwaydra, Khybar, Ruwawa (near Medina; see figure 1 ) , Jabal Hisma (west Tabuk), and Dawmat al-Jandal. A larger number of inscriptions have been found along the different pilgrim routes in Saudi Arabia. A prominent corpus of inscribed tombstones was found in tire region of Ashm and as-Sirrayn, along die coast of Tihama, south of Mecca. They are dated to between the third and seventh centuries AH/ninth-thirteenfh centuries CE, and constitute an important source of regional history. Their inscriptions also reflect the development of Arabic script and its decorative aspects. Examples of the earliest dated rock inscriptions in Saudi Arabia and their provenance follow. (The figures named are either those who wrote the inscriptions or those on whose behalf [or in whose name] the inscriptions were written.) Khalid Ibn al-'As, AH 40/660 CE (Darb Zubaydah) Abdullah ibn Diram, AH 46/666 CE (Wadi Sabeel, Najran) Jahm ibn 'Ali ibn Hubayrah, AH 56/676 CE (Darb Zubay dah) Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufiyan, AH 58/677 CE (Saysad, dam, Ta'if) Rabah ibn Hafs ibn Asim ibn 'Urnar ibn al-Khattab, AH 76/694 CE (Ruwawa, Medina) Two inscriptions referring to Uthman ibn Wahran, AH 80/ 700 CE (Wadi Al Usaylah, Mecca) Maymun Mawla abi Mariam Mawla Rabah, AH 80/700 CE (Syrian pilgrim route) Ufayr ibn Al Mudarib, AH 83/703 CE (Syrian pilgrim route) Abdullah ibn Amarah, AH 84/704 CE (Arafat area, Mecca) Mukhlid ibn Abi Mukhlid Mawla Ali ibn Abi Talib, AH 9 1 / 7 1 0 CE (Syrian pilgrim route) Abu JaTar ibn Hasan al-Hashimi, AH 98/716 CE (Arafat Region, Mecca) Abu Salmah ibn Abdullah ibn Abdullah ibn 'Umar ibn Uthman ibn Hafs, AH 100/718 CE (Ruwawa, Medina) Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn al Tufayl, AH 1 1 2 / 7 3 1 CE (western Tabuk) Al Hakam ibn Umar ibn Farwah, AH 1 1 3 / 7 3 2 CE (south ern Hijaz) Uthman ibn Hafs, AH 120/738 CE (Ruwawa, Medina) c
s
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INSCRIPTIONS: Inscriptions of the Islamic Period
INSCRIPTIONS:
Islamic Period. Figure i.
Two inscriptions from Ruwawa,
near Medina.
The top
three lines are dated AH 140/750 CE. The bottom text is undated. (Courtesy S. Al-Rashid)
C E
Abdullah ibn TJmar ibn Hafs, AH 1 2 1 / 7 3 9 (Ruwawa, Medina) Asim ibn 'TJmar ibn Hals, AH 124/740 CE (Ruwawa, Me dina) Harith ibn Saghir, AH 1 2 1 / 7 3 9 CE (al-Jawf region) There are several unpublished inscriptions dated to the Umayyad period in die region oi'Hijaz and Asir. Their even tual publication will add to the corpus of Early Islamic in scriptions and writings found outside the Arabian Peninsula and will be a fertile field for the study of the development of Arabic script. Numerous 'Abbasid inscriptions and writings are dated. The most important locations follow: Restored San'a mosque (Yemen), AH 136/754 CE Masjid al-Bay'ah, AH 144/761 CE (Mina, Mecca) Al-Haram mosque (Mecca), from the time of Caliph alMahdi (one inscription is dated to AH 167/783 CE) Carved milestone with the names Khalifa al-Mahdi and Yaqteen ibn Mosa, a minister (Darb Zubaydah) Restored pilgrim road inscribed with the names Khalifa al-Muqtadir Billah al-Abbasi and Ali ibn Isa, a minis ter, AH 304/916 CE (from Iraq to Mecca) c
c
Several other dated 'Abbasid inscriptions on rocks, build ings, and tombstones from different periods in the 'Abbasid era have also been found. Ottoman foundation inscriptions are found in the fortresses scattered along pilgrim roads in Syria and Egypt and on some irrigation works.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Arabic References Fa'r, Muhammad Fahd Abdullah al-. Tatawur al-Kitabat wa al-Nuqush fi-al-Hijaz
mundhu fajr at-Islam Hatta muntasaf al-Qarn al-Sabi al-
Hijri. Jiddah, 1984. Ghabban, 'AIT Ibrahim ibn 'AIT Hamid, Islamic Archaeology of North western Saudi Arabia (in Arabic). Riyadh, 1993. Ghabban, 'AIT IbrahTm ibn 'AIT Hamid. Northwestern Saudi Arabia. Part 1, Studies in the History and Archaeology (in Arabic). Riyadh, 1993. Grohmann, Adolf. Awraq al-Bardi
bi Dar al-Kutub al-Masriyyah.
1
vols. Translated by Hasan Ibrahim Hasan. Cairo, 1934-1955. Munajjid, Salah al-DTn al-. Dirasat ft Tarikh al-Khatt al-Arabi mundhu Bidayatih ila Nihayat al-Asr al-Umawi. Beirut, 1979.
Naqshabandi, Nasir. "Mansha al-Khat al-Arabi wa Tatawurah Lighayat Ahd al-Khulafa al-Rashidin." Sumer 3 (1947): 1 2 9 - 1 4 2 .
Rashid, Sa'ad al-. "Al-Athar al-Islamiyyahfial-Jazirah al-Arabiyyah fi Asr al-Rasul wa al-Khulafa al-Rashidin." In Studies in the History of Arabia, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 1 4 5 - 1 9 9 . Riyadh, 1989.
Rashid, Sa'ad al-. "Naqsh mu'arrakh min al-'Asr al-Umawi majhul almawqifimantiqat Janub al-Hijaz." In Dirasat fi al-Athar, pp. 2 6 5 270. Riyadh, 1992. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. Darb Zubaydah: Tariq al-Hajj min al-Kufa ila Makkah al-Mukarramah, dirasah larikkiyyah hadariyyah athariyyah. Riyadh, 1993-
Sayoti, Jalal ad-Din Abd al-Rahman (b. Abi Bakr). Tarikh al-Khulafa. Edited by Muhammad Muhyi ad-Din Abdal-Hamid. 3d ed. Cairo, 1964.
Ush, Muhammad Abu al-Faraj al-. "Kitabat Arabiyyah Ghayr Manshurah WujidatfiJabal Usays." Les Annates archeologique de Syrie 3 (1963): 2 8 1 - 2 9 3 .
English and Other Sources 'Abd al-Tawab, Abd al-Rahman. Steles islamiques de la Necropole
d'Assouan. 3 vols. Cairo, 1977.
INS CRIPTION SITES Grohmann, Adolf. Arabic Inscriptions. Bibliotheque de Museon, vol. 50. Louvain, 1962. Grohmann, Adolf. Arabischc paldographie, vol. 2, Das Schriftwesen, die Lapidarschrifl. Vienna, 1 9 7 1 .
Hamidullah, Muhammad. "Some Arabic Inscriptions of Medinah of the Early Years of Hijrah." Islamic Culture 13.4 (1939): 427-439, pis. 1-10.
Hawary, Hassan, and Rached Hussein. Catalogue general du Musee Arabe du Caire. Vol. 3. Cairo, 1932.
Miles, George Carpenter. "Early Islamic Inscriptions near Ta'if in the Hijaz." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 7 (1948).
Miles, George Carpenter. '"Ali B. 'Isa's Pilgrim Road: An Inscription of the Year 304 H ( 9 1 6 - 9 1 7 A.D.)." Bulletin de I'Inslitut d'Egypte 36 ( 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 5 4 ) : 477-487-
Oman, Giovanni. La necropoli islamica di Dahlak Kebir. 2 vols. Naples, 1976.
Roy, Bernard, et al. Inscriptions arabes de Kairouan. 2 vols. Paris, 1 9 5 0 1958. Schneider, Madeleine. Steles funeraires musulmanes des lies Dahlak. 2
vols. Cairo, 1983. Wiet, Gaston. Catalogue general du Musee Arabe du Caire. Vols. 2 - 1 0 . Cairo, 1936-1942. Wiet, Gaston. Catalogue general du Musee de I'Art Islamique du Caire.
Cairo, 1971. Zaylai, Ahmad Omar al-. "The Southern Area of the Amirate of Makkah (3rd-7th/9th-t3di Centuries): Its History, Archaeology, and Epigraphy." Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1983. SA'AD ABDUL AZIZ AL-RASHID
INSCRIPTION SITES. Sites that yield inscriptions but do not have a history of permanent settlements are known throughout the ancient Near East from nearly every chronological period. T h e inscriptions they display can be classified into two distinct types: private inscriptions or graf fiti on rough, unmodified rock surfaces and official procla mations often inscribed on a smoothed or otherwise modi fied surface, specifically for the purpose of public viewing. Inscription sites are best attested in Egypt and Syria-Pales tine and on the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus. T h e paucity of examples from Mesopotamia is no doubt related to the character of its physical geography: Mesopotamia is a lowprofile, alluvial plain with few outcroppings; the remainder of the Near East is generally more rugged and mountainous with ample rock surfaces suitable for inscriptions. The first category of inscription sites is comprised mostly of graffiti. Thousands of private inscriptions have been cat aloged throughout the Syro-Arabian desert and the Sinai Peninsula. As its name attests, Wadi Mukatteb ("wadi of the inscriptions") in the Sinai is particularly rich in inscrip tions, among them, Nabatean, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, Ar menian, and occasionally Latin texts. [See Nabatean Inscrip tions; Arabic; Aramaic Language and Literature; Greek; Armenian; Latin.] Sometimes the inscription is merely a name with a patronymic, but often a prayer or memorial is included. Earlier hieroglyphic Egyptian inscriptions are also attested in the Sinai, in the vicinity of ancient mines. [See Hieroglyphs.] Throughout the Syro-Arabian desert fringe
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hundreds of private inscriptions in Thamudic and Safaitic script have been found dating from the first through fourth centuries CE. [See Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] Most of these, consisting of names and prayers, are also in the form of graffiti. The second category of inscription sites, official procla mations, is better attested outside Palestine, in Egypt and Lebanon and on the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus. These inscriptions are also commemorative in nature. Numerous Egyptian inscriptions recording mining expeditions and mil itary exploits are known from Wadi el-Mughara, in the an cient mining region of western Sinai, and from Wadi Hanimamat and Wadi el-Hudi in the eastern desert. All date to as early as the Old Kingdom. T h e inscription of Henu, stew ard of Mentuhotep I, for example, describes an expedition to the Red Sea and to Punt, as well as quarrying activity carried out in the wadi. A rock stela of Mentuhotep III de scribes miraculous events that accompanied the quarrying of a sarcophagus. In Lebanon, at Nahr el-Kalb, three hieroglyphic inscrip tions of Rameses II and adjacent cuneiform inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser I, Shalmaneser III, and Esarhaddon overlook the sea on the road leading north from Beirut. They com memorate successful military campaigns into this area. [See Beirut.] Each inscription is accompanied by a figural relief of the victorious ruler. Other Greek, Latin, and Arabic in scriptions are attested as well at this strategically important site. In the central and southern portions of the Anatolian pla teau, late second- and early first-millennium hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions dot the landscape. [SeeLuwians.] Many of them are associated with a particular population center, while others seem to function as boundary markers or, less frequently, as proclamation inscriptions. One of the most striking from die Hittite imperial period is the rock relief and hieroglyphic inscription of Hattusili found at Firaktin (per haps beside what was a road in antiquity) depicting the Hit tite king pouring a libation. [See Hittite; Hittites,] A more dramatic inscription site is that of Akpinar near Manisa in western Anatolia. T h e relief with accompanying inscriptions is cut into a niche high on an outcrop. These and others from the imperial period are perhaps primarily art sites and only secondarily inscriptions sites. T h e inscriptions are mostly names—labels accompanying the figural relief. Sim ilar inscription sites are known from the postimperial period. Many inscriptions ostensibly removed from settlements are concentrated in the Halys River basin, along what may have been transportation routes near, for instance, Asarjik, Sausa (near ancient Karaburna), and Bulgarmaden. One of the best-known inscriptions sites from antiquity is that of Bisitun in western Iran. [See Bisitun.] Its inscriptions and accompanying relief, cut high above the main east-west road connecting the Iranian plateau and the Mesopotamian
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INSTITUTE OF HOLY LAND STUDIES
alluvium near ancient Kermanshah, commemorate the ac cession and reign of Darius I. Like other inscription sites in this category, Bisium can also be considered an art site. Sites with graffiti are often found along roads or pilgrim routes (e.g., Darb el-Hajj, Darb Zubaydah) and memorial ize an individual's participation in a holy journey. [See Darb Zubaydah.] The inscriptions are generally short and only occasionally have a figural representation (perhaps a cross or menorah). Proclamation inscriptions, while often iso lated, are also generally found along traveled routes—be they major highways or a road to a mine. Their often dra matic location (at times high on a cliff or rock outcrop that required scaffolding) bespeaks a greater expenditure of re sources than was possible for the average individual. They acknowledge the presence of a ruler and boast of his exploits or military prowess. The two types of inscription sites, while exhibiting marked differences in quality and content, bear much the same intent and message: they attest to human kind's desire for immortality and memorial.
in biblical history, Hebrew language, and Middle Eastern studies; students enrolled in other undergraduate or gradu ate programs may spend a semester or a year at the institute. Through the long-term program, students may also take courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Nondegree study on the graduate level may lead to certificates in Mid dle-Eastern studies or biblical exegesis. Prominent Israeli scholars and expatriate American schol ars comprise tire institute's faculty. Together, the faculty provide coursework in archaeology, historical geography, modern Hebrew, history of Judaism, Middle Eastern his tory, biblical and ancient Near Eastern languages, and bib lical studies. The institute is loosely associated with more than one hundred graduate and undergraduate institutions in the United States and Canada. More than nine thousand stu dents from twenty-five countries have attended the institute since 1959, most in the short-term program. CHARLES E . CARTER
[See also Art Sites; and Inscriptions.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
LNSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE
Cerny, Jaroslav. The Inscriptions of Sinai, part 2, Translations and Com mentary. London, 1 9 5 1 .
DU PRO CHE ORIENT. The French Institute of Ar
Gelb, Ignace J. Hittite Hieroglyphic Monuments. Oriental Institute Pub lications, 45. Chicago, 1939. Giveon, Raphael. "Nahr el-Kelb." In Ijexikon der Agyptologie, vol. 4, p. 319. Wiesbaden, 1982. Porter, Bertha, and Rosalind Moss. Topographical Bibliography of An cient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings, vol. 7, Nubia, the Deserts, and Outside Egypt. Oxford, 1 9 5 1 .
Stone, Michael E., ed. Rock Inscriptions and Graffiti Project. 3 vols. SBL
Resources for Biblical Study, 28, 29, 31. Adanta, 1992-1994. JOHN S. JORGENSEN
INSTITUTE OF HOLY LAND STUDIES. Founded in 1957 by G. Douglas Young, the Institute of Holy Land Studies had as its initial purpose providing grad uate-level training in Israel in the archaeological, historical, geographic, linguistic, and cultural background of the Bible from a conservative Christian perspective. The institute first offered classes in 1959; in 1967 it moved to its present lo cation on Mt. Zion, overlooking the Hinnom Valley. Sidney DeWaal was appointed as die institute's seventh president in 1 9 9 3 . Currently, the institute offers both short- and long-term programs of study on undergraduate and graduate levels. The short-term program operates primarily in January and throughout the summer. The sessions are two to three weeks long and involve extensive field trips to major archaeological sites and the study of biblical background, modern Israel, or field archaeology. The long-term program has two major facets. The institute offers two-year Master of Arts degrees
chaeology in Beirut was founded in 1946 by Henri Seyrig, the former director of antiquities of Syria and Lebanon un der the French Mandate. Seyrig envisaged a center in which resident scholars and students from the East and West could openly interact. He chose an impressive nineteenth-century mansion that had belonged to the Beyhum family to house the institute. For it, he established one of tire most complete libraries of Near Eastern archaeology and related subjects in the region. Following Syria's independence from France, Seyrig con tinued his close cooperation with tire Syrian Department of Antiquities and was granted a concession to continue ar chaeological work begun in 1936. T h e Mission de Haute Syrie, one of the institute's major archaeological projects, set out to map, study, document, and publish the seven hun dred Roman-period and paleo-Christian villages and mon uments in northern Syria, between Antioch and Aleppo. From the beginning, and until 1975, under the direction of the Russian architect Georges Tchalenko, the mission com piled a unique and comprehensive architectural and histor ical record and produced two major publications: a classic and fundamental reference work on the area (Tchalenko, I9S3-I958) and another on the village churches (Tchalenko and Baccache, 1979-1990). Among the institute's other main projects were excavations at Palmyra, Baalbek, and the Crac des Chevaliers. From 1967 to 1972, the institute was directed by Daniel Schlumberger. He was followed by Er nest Will (1973-1980), who began the excavations at Tell 'Arqa in northern Lebanon and published the institute's contribution to the study of the desert city of Palmyra in
INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE ORIENTATE Syria (Seyrig, Amy, and Will, 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 7 5 ) . The institute ed its two periodicals: Syria (1920ft.), an annual journal of ori ental art and archaeology; and Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique (BAH), a monograph series that covers subjects from prehistory to the nineteenth century. The institute was renamed Institut Franpais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient (IFAPO) in 1 9 7 7 , two years after the out break of hostilities in Lebanon. T w o new centers were opened, in Amman, Jordan, and in Damascus, Syria, pro viding a base for the institute's archaeological projects in those countries. Between 1 9 8 1 and 1992, die war in Lebanon precluded serious fieldwork there. IFAPO's current program comprises survey, excavation, and restoration work in Syria and Jordan for die prehistoric through the Islamic period. T h e institute's 1989 exhibition in Damascus, " T h e French Contribution to Syrian Archae ology, 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 8 9 , " presented an overview of its work. T h e institute's last director, Georges Tate (1980-1990), and the present one, Francois Villeneuve, are involved in the rural archaeology of die periods preceding Islam in northern Syria (Tate, 1992), southern Syria (Dentzer, 1985), and Jordan. Two international colloquia held in Damascus under the in stitute's auspices discussed traditional water management in irrigated lands (Geyer, 1990) and houses in ancient Syria from the tirird millennium BCE to the beginnings of Islam (held in 1992). IFAPO continues to record and preserve local architec ture, such as the Hellenistic residence of a local potentate at 'Iraq el-Amir in Jordan (Will et a l , 1 9 9 1 ) . The institute's historic contribution, particularly to architectural studies, continues to be exemplified in the work of Jacques Seigne atjerash (Gerasa), in Jordan, and Palmyra. Interdisciplinary teamwork and close cooperation with the regional depart ments of antiquities and between Western and Middle East ern professionals and institutions characterize the IFAPO's work as a foreign research center. [See also the biographies of Seyrig and Schlumberger.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dentzer, Jean-Marie, ed. Hawaii I: Recherches archeologiques sur la Syrie du Sud d I'epoque hellenistique et romaine. Bibliotheque Archeologique
et Historique, vol. 124 Paris, 1985. Geyer, Bernard, ed. Techniques et pratiques hydro-agricoles traditionelles en domaine irrigue: Approche pluridisciplinaire des modes de culture avant la motorisation en Syrie; Actes du Colloque de Damas, 27 juin-
ierjuillet 1987. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 136. Paris, 1990. Seyrig, Henri, Robert Amy, and Ernest Will.'Xfi temple de Bit a Palmyre. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 83. Paris, 1968-1975. Fundamental study and presentation of Palmyra's prin cipal sanctuary, major deity, and cult. Tate, Georges. Les campagnes de la Syrie du Nord du He au Vile siecle.
Vol. 1. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 133. Paris, 1992. Recent coverage of village communities in northern Syria; see in conjunction with Tchalenko (1953-1958).
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Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: Le massif du Belus d I'epoque romaine. 3 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et His
torique, vol. 50. Paris, 1953-1958. Comprehensive presentation and interpretation of the growth, development, decline, and abandon ment of the area's village communities. Tchalenko, Georges, and E. Baccache. Eglises de village de la Syrie du
Nord. 3 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 105. Paris, 1979-1990. Detailed study and reconstruction of the North Syrian village churches characterized by a stone-built and sculpted, horseshoe-shaped arrangement of seats (=bema) in their main nave. The first two volumes of architectural drawings and photographs illustrate the third text volume, Eglises syriennes a bcma. Will, Ernest, et al. 'Iraq al Amir: Le chateau tu tobiade Hyrcan. 2 vols.
Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 3 2 . Paris, 1991. HELGA SEEDEN
INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE ORIENTALE. The oldest foreign archaeological orga nization in Egypt, the Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire (LFAO) was founded in December, 1880, as the Ecole Francaise du Caire. Its mission was to study Egyptian antiquities, history, and philology, as well as "oriental" antiq uities (those of other Near Eastern cultures). Gaston Maspero, its first director, drafted a plan of organization and di vided the staff between pensionnaires, newly graduated scholars with specific research projects, and charges de mission, who work for various excavations and research projects. Dur ing the early years, members focused their attention on the copying of ancient Egyptian texts and monuments, and began publication of their research in 1883. In 1898, under the directorship of Emile Chassinat, the name was changed to tire Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire. Chassinat inaugurated a vast program of excavations all over Egypt and founded the institute press which to date has published more than seven hundred vol umes in twenty-five series. T h e IFAO is one of the largest foreign archaeological in stitutes in Cairo. Its established position in Egypt has en abled it to carry out large long-term excavations and resto ration projects at major sites ranging in date from prehistoric to Islamic times, supported by a permanent staff and a net work of expedition headquarters throughout Egypt. IFAO excavations and documentation projects have included the complete temples of Edfu and Dendera, the tombs and workmen's village at Deir el-Medineh, the early Christian site at Kellia, the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, the tomb of T i at Saqqara, the treasury of Thutmose I at Karnak North, and sites in the oases of the Western Desert. During tire 1960s, the IFAO participated in the UNESCO campaign for the salvage of the Nubian monuments, exca vating at the temple of Rameses II at Wadi es-Sebua. It has also collaborated witii the Egyptian Department of Antiq uities and with other French and foreign institutions. [See also the biography of Maspero.]
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INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ETUDES ANATOLIENNES D'ISTANBUL Kassab, Dominique, and Tahsin Sezer. Catalogue des lampes en terre
BIBLIOGRAPHY
cuile du Musee Archeologique d'Istanbul, vol. 1, Epoques prehistoriques,
Dawson, Warren R., and Eric P. Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. 2d rev. ed. London, 1972. See entries for Maspero and Chassinat.
archaiques, classiques et hellenistiques. Collection Varia Anatolica, 6.
IFAO. Un siicle de fouilles francaises en Egypte, 1S80-1080, a Voccasion du Centenaire de I'Ecole du Caire (IPAOj. Cairo, 1 9 8 1 . Catalog of
Remy, Bernard, ed. Anatolia Antiqua/Eski Anadolu. 2 vols. Collection
exhibition honoring the centennial of the IFAO. Descriptive essays and good photographs for all the sites excavated by the IFAO.
Remy, Bernard. Les carrieres senatoriales dans les provinces romaines d'Analolie au Haut-Empire (31 av.J.-C.-284 ap. J.-C): Pont-Bithynie, Galatie, Cappadoce, Lycie-Pamphylie et Cilicie. Collection Varia An
Vercoutter, Jean. Introduction to Le livre du centenaire de ITnstitut Fran cois d'Archeologie Orientate du Caire, 1880-1980.
Institut Francais
d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire, Memoires, vol. 104. Cairo, 1980, History of the institute written for its centennial.
Paris, 1995. Varia Anatolica, 1. Paris, 1987-1988.
atolica, 2. Istanbul, 1989. Remy, Bernard, ed. Pontica I: Recherches sur I'histoire du Pont dans
I'anliquile. Collection Varia Anatolica, 5. St. Etienne, 1991.
SUSAN J. ALLEN
CATHERINE ABADIE-REYNAL
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ETUDES ANATO LIENNES D'ISTANBUL. Founded in 1930, and called die Institut Francais d'Archeologie, die Institut Fran?ais d'Etudes Anatoliennes was created to promote studies in Islamic and Anatolian antiquities. The institute took its current name in 1 9 7 5 , in order to reflect its interest in An atolia's civilizations through the modern period. The institute's staff consists of a director, a scientific as sistant, a student, and five researchers on stipends. Several of diem are archaeologists who specialize in a wide range of periods, from the Prehistoric to the Byzantine. The institute facilitates work and provides a logistical base for the various French expeditions working in Turkey, in which the institute's researchers frequentiy participate. The institute handles administrative matters, provides storage space for excavation equipment, and makes its vehicles available to expeditions. The institute also develops its own field projects, often in collaboration with Turldsh archaeol ogists and other institutions such as the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and universities. For ex ample, a major project in the Black Sea area is being carried out in partnership with the Groupement de Recherche 1056 of the CNRS. The Institut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes is an active partner in a wide range of other scientific activities being undertaken in Turkey, around which it organizes museum exhibits, colloquia, and discussions on such study topics as defensive systems in Anatolia and amphoras from the Black Sea. Its research appears in die journal Anatolia Antiqua and in volumes of the collection Varia Anatolica. BIBLIOGRAPHY Amandry, Michel, and Alain Davesne, eds. Anatolic antique: Fouilles
francaises en Turquie. Collection Varia Anatolica, 4.1. Paris, 1989. Balkan-Atli, Nur. La neoliihisation de I'Anatolie. Collection Varia Ana tolica, 7. Paris, 1994. De Anatolia Antiqua. 3 vols. Bibliotheque de l'lnstitut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes, 32, 38, 40. Paris, 1991-1994. Grands ateliers d'architecture dans le monde egeen du Vie siecle av. J.-C:
Acles du colloque dTstanbul, 23-2$ mai 1991. Collection Varia Ana
tolica, 3. Paris, 1993.
INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ETUDES ARABES. Founded in 1922, the Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes de Damas (LFEAD) has as its focus Muslim archaeology and art as well as Arab and Islamic studies in the Bilad ash-Sham (Syria). Its works are published in the Bulletin des Etudes Orientales (BEO), created in 1 9 3 1 and now published an nually (vol. 46 in 1994), and in nonperiodical publications, currently 1 5 0 in number. From its creation, the institute, under the direction of es tablished directors and researchers, has maintained an in terest in Syrian territory through urban studies, research in volving the steppe and its inhabitants, and archaeological surveys conducted by Eustache de Lorey, Henri Seyrig, Jean Sauvaget, Jean Lassus, Robert Montagne, Michel Ecochard, Albert de Boucheman, and Jacques Weulersse. Since the 1950s, historical research has been carried out on a wide variety of subjects, all with the same goal: to understand the country and its inhabitants in different periods. The town has remained a recurring topic of research with, among others, the establishment of the Vieux Damas Extramuros (extramural Old Damascus) program. Work on the waqfs, Ottoman fiscal registers, and economic and dynastic texts has enhanced the approach to studying Islamic society (carried out by Sauvaget, Janine Sourdel-Thomine, Domi nique Sourdel, Sami Dalian, Nikita Elisseeff, Andre Miquel, Khaled Moaz and Solange Ory, Jean-Claude David, J.-P. Pascual, Sarab Attassi, Robert Mantran, Andre Raymond, Henri Laoust, and Thierry Bianquis). Research on the con temporary period also constitutes a part of this study. Be tween 1970 and 19S0, the institute devoted its attention to the archaeological areas in those towns that had served as rest stops for travelers along the right bank of the Euphrates River. Under die direction of Jean-Claude Golvin and Ray mond, five salvage excavations were undertaken before the construction of the Assad dam at the site of Balis. D e Lorey, G. Salles, and L. Cavro had conducted, but not completed, an excavation there in 1 9 2 9 - 1 9 3 1 . Gilles Hennequin and Abd al-Faraj al- Ush published the coins from the excava tion (IFEAD, 1978). A Franco-Syrian team at Rahba-Mac
'IRA, TEL yadin, on a site 3 5 0 km ( 2 1 7 mi.) from Balis, excavated a town from the 'Abbasid and Mamluk periods in six seasons, under the direction of Bianquis. Arlette Negre published the coins from this site (BEO 3 2 - 3 3 [ 1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 1 ] ) . Marie-Odile Rousset has published an inventory of Islamic archaeologi cal sites in Iraq with the institute (1992). A catalog of the pottery from Mayadin is in preparation. Since 1983, the institute has devoted equal attention to ar chaeological research in rural Syria. Sophie Berthier has stud ied the Middle Euphrates in close collaboration with the an thropologist Olivier D'Hont, gathering information on the different types of human settlement along tire banks of the river. The anthropological results appear in Vie quotidienne des 'Agedat (IFEAD, 1994). Alexandrine Guerin excavated the village site of Msayke in the Leja, in southern Syria, in 1993 that followed numerous regional explorations conducted since 1991 (BEO 45 [1993]). This multidisciplinary study, involving archaeology, architecture, historical geography, and anthropology, followed tire work of a team headed by JeanMarie Dentzer (CNRS, Equipe de recherche associee 20) studying the Hauran in tire pre-Islamic periods. T h e institute's library is open to all researchers. With 950 periodicals, 400 of which are current subscriptions, and 50,000 volumes, it is one of the best French libraries for Arabic studies. T h e institute cooperates with Syrian re searchers and local institutions such as the Academie de Langue Arabe, tire University of Damascus, the Direction des Antiquites, and the al-Assad Library (national library). It also cooperates with the Syrian Antiquities Authority in joint ventures. [See also the biographies of Sauvaget and Seyrig.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Renaud Avez, L'Jnstitui francais de Damas au Palais Azem
(1922-1946)
a trovers les archives. Damascus, 1993. Includes information on the origins of the institute. ALEXANDRINE GUERIN and JACQUES LANGHADE
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
TRA, TEL (Ar., Khirbet Ghara) a Negev desert site lo cated in tire Beersheba valley, 18 Ion ( 1 1 mi.) east of the city ofBeersheba ( 3 i ° i 4 ' o o " N , 3 4 ° 5 9 ' 2 0 " E , map reference 1487 X 0 7 1 3 ) . T h e tell, slightly more than 6 acres in area, covers the entire plateau of an isolated hill ( 5 1 4 m above sea level) surrounded by precipitous slopes. T h e possibility that the site is referred to in the Bible re mains debated. Yohanan Aharoni (1957) suggested identi fying it with Qabse'el, which heads the list of Judahite cities in the Negev (Jos. 1 5 : 2 1 ) and is equivalent to Yeqqabse'el (Neh. 1 1 : 2 5 ) . Eighteen years later, following Criisemann ( 973= P' ff-)j he suggested identifying Tel 'Ira with Zephatli in Judges 1 : 1 7 (Aharoni, 1 9 7 5 , p. 1 1 9 ) . F.-M. Abel 1
2
1
2
175
(1938, p. 3 5 3 ) , suggested Jagur in Joshua 1 5 : 2 1 , and Yigael Yadin ( 1 9 6 1 , p. n o ) Mmst of Imlk seal impressions. Ben jamin Mazar suggested that the site is Elto'lad (Jos. 15:30; see Avigad, 1990, p. 2 6 3 ) . In consideration of Tel 'Ira's al titude, at 5 1 4 m above sea level, Andre Lemaire ( 1 9 7 3 , p. 361 ff.), Nadav Na'aman (1980, p. 1 4 6 ) , and Anson F. Rainey suggested Ramat Negev (Heb., "height" of the Negev; Jos. 19:8). Remains from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine periods have so far shed no light on the site's ancient name. David Alon surveyed tire site under auspices of the Israel Department of Antiquities in the early 1950s. Aharoni's ex tensive 1956 survey on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem led him to conclude that Tel 'Ira had been the capital of the Negev in the Iron II period (Aharoni, 1 9 5 7 ) . T h e Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University con ducted excavations there between 1979 and 1987, most of them directed by Itzhaq Beit-Arieh. Avraham Biran and Ru dolf Cohen directed an expedition from the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology of the Hebrew Union Col lege of Jerusalem, participating for one season in 1979. The earliest settlement at Tel 'Ira dates from die Early Bronze III (stratum IX). From this period excavations ex posed several floors, with clay vessels found in situ, and iso lated segments of walls. T h e most common finds were pot tery sherds scattered over the bedrock. Although the exact nature and extent of this earliest settlement could not be clarified, it appears that it was unwalled and fairly extensive, the southernmost settlement in Palestine during the period. After a prolonged hiatus in occupation, an Israelite pop ulation settled at some undetermined time between the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. During that period a small, tem porary settlement was established at the site, of which no architectural remains are preserved (stratum VIII). Stratum VII is dated to tire first half of the seventh century BCE. The Israelite city, whose remains are plainly visible to day, covered the area. Most of this city was surrounded by a solid wall about 1.60 m thick and about 600 m long. A four-entry way gate structure and two towers ( 1 7 X 18 m) were erected at its eastern end. T h e gate belongs to the socalled Solomonic gate type known from Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer. Some public buildings were also exposed in this area, including one with five rooms and a storehouse. T o the north and east this area was surrounded by a casemate wall, which demonstrates that tire two types of city wall ex isted side by side in sttatum VII. The steep approach to the gate was protected by a large tower (6 x 9 m) diat projected outward from the wall. The storage building, evidently an official (royal) store house, contained a large quantity of pottery vessels, includ ing some twenty-five large pythoi capable of holding large amounts of food. A conflagration desttoyed stratum VII, shortly after which, in the second half of tire seventh century BCE, the city was rebuilt and reinhabited (stratum VI). The
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IRA, TEL
'IRA, TEL. Plan of the site. (Courtesy I. Beit-Arieh)
final destruction of the Iron Age city took place at die be ginning of the sixdi century BCE. The cemetery of the Israelite city was discovered on the eastern slope. It comprises some twenty-five rock-cut bench tombs, dien common in Judea (Judah). [See Burial Tech niques.] The settlement's water supply relied on large cis terns also cut in the rock. Beyond the site, the groundwater was exploited by digging wells, a method still practiced by bedouin. [See Cisterns.] According to the archaeological data, the city's economy was based on agriculture and sheep and goat herding. How ever, it can be assumed that in this semiarid region the cen tral government, which was vitally interested in the city's continued existence, took the primary responsibility for its economic well-being. In the strata of the Israelite settlement, large and varied amounts of typical Judean small finds were recovered—fig urines, shekel weights, and jewelry. The written finds were scant—short inscriptions on jars; the opening phrase of a letter written in cursive Hebrew, 'bdk '[mr] ("your servant sa[id]" or "sa[ys]"); and an ostracon inscribed mpqdbrkyhio gbh mwqr slmyhw—a list of personal names. As was the case elsewhere in the Negev, this site was re settled by the exiles returning from Babylon (Persian period,
stratum V). The resettlement, however, was smaller than that of stratum VI. T h e site is represented in the Hellenistic period (stratum IV) by a large fortified city using the Iron Age city wall, whose remains extend to most of the exca vated areas. The residences generally followed the plan of the Iron Age houses over which they were built, with some abutting of the Iron Age city wall. A smaller, but still fortified settlement appeared in the Early Roman Period (stratum III) that may have served as part of die Herodian limes. The population of Tel 'Ira again grew in the Byzantine period (stratum II), inhabiting an area as larger—or larger— than the Iron Age city. A fairly well-preserved large mon astery with a church was discovered on its east side. An eight-line inscription, still intact, indicates tiiat the church complex was dedicated to St. Peter. The last occupation of Tel 'Ira took place in the Early Arab period (stratum I). BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Felix-Marie. Geographic de la Palestine, vol. 2. Paris, 1938. Aharoni, Yohanan. "The Negev (South) of Judah." Judah and Jeru salem: The Twelfth Archaeological Convention (in Hebrew), pp. 4 6 -
58. Jerusalem, 1957. Aharoni, Yohanan. "The Negev of Judah." Israel Exploration (1958): 26-38.
Journals
'IRAQ EL-AMIR Aharoni, Yohanan, Volkmar Fritz, and Aaron Kempinski. "Excavation at Tel Masos (Khirbet el-Meshash)." Tel Aviv 2 (1958): 97-124.
Alon, David. "The Tribal Territory of Simeon." Mibifnirn 17 (1953): 1 0 0 - 1 1 6 (in Hebrew).
Avigad, Nahman. "Two Hebrew 'Fiscal' Bullae." Israel Exploration Journal40
(1990): 262-266.
Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq. "Tel 'Ira, a Fortified City of the Kingdom ofJudah." Qadmoniot 18 (1985): 1 7 - 2 5 .
carved along its inner straight side, suggest the presence of a stable for cavalry. T h e name Tobyah, which means "Yahweh is my wellbeing," left as a signature on the two caves, may date to the period of the First Temple in Jerusalem (first millennium BCE). Under the Persian Achaemenids (sixth century BCE), "Tobyah the Ammonite servant," ( abdm West Semitic lan guages), is mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah 2:1 as one of the governors of "beyond the river." Fie, with Sanballat the Floronite, governor of Samaria, and Geshem, king of the Arabs in Idumea, yielded his authority to prevent the re building of Solomon's Temple and the walls of Jerusalem (Neh. 2 : 1 9 ; 3:35). Nevertheless, Nehemiah, a cupbearer of King Artaxerxes I, who returned from exile in about 445 BCE, was appointed governor of Judea (Judah) and was able, with die lung's support, to rebuild the walls of the city. He expelled Tobyah, a dignitary, from a spacious chamber in the Temple he had acquired through the complicity of tire high priest Eliashib. Ezra, a scribe and priest who arrived after Nehemiah, in about 398 BCE, was commissioned by the king to restore the law of Moses and officially promulgated it in the Temple (Neh. 8 : 1 - 1 2 ) . He excluded the Tobiads from the high priesthood because they were unable to trace their genealogy to a pure Israelite origin (Es. 2:60). c
Crusemann, Frank. "Uberlegungen 245 Identification der Hirbet elMsas." Zeitschrift des Deulschen Paldstina-Vereins 89 (1973): 2 1 1 224. Danin, A. Desert Vegetation of Israel and Sinai. Jerusalem, 1983.
Lemaire, Andre. "Les Ostraca hebreux de l'epoque royale israelite." Ph.D. diss., Paris, 1973. Na'aman, Nadav. "The Inheritance of the Sons of Simeon." Zeitschrift des Deulschen Paldstina-Vereins
177
96 (1980): 1 3 6 - 1 5 2 .
Yadin, Yigal. "The Fourfold Division of Judah." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 163 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 6 - 1 1 . ITZHAQ BEIT-ARIEH
IRAN. See Persia. IRAQ. See Mesopotamia.
'IRAQ EL-AMIR (ancient Tyros), site located in the luxurious valley of Wadi es-Sir, 24 km ( 1 5 mi.) west of Am man, Jordan. T o the northwest rise towering, rocky cliffs, in which two tiers of caves are hewn. T o the east, in the mod ern village, the settlement that dates to the Early Bronze period (3,200-3,000 BCE) was excavated. T o the southwest, on the old track to Jerusalem, are die ruins of die palace, the Qasr el-'Abd. The site was first brought to the attention of scholars by the two British commanders, C. L. Irby and J. Mangles, in 1823 and by the French explorers Melchior de Vogue and Felicien de Saulcy in 1864 and 1865, respectively. Charles H. Butler published the first reconstruction of Qasr el-'Abd in 1 9 1 9 , but it was not until 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 2 that tire first exca vations were conducted there by Paul W. Lapp, on behalf of tire American Schools of Oriental Research. From 1976 to 1986, the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the French Institute of Archaeology for the Near East (IFAPO) have sponsored a program of excavation and restoration of the qasr, made soundings at its main gate, and surveyed the irrigation system and environs of 'Iraq el-Amir (Villeneuve, 1988). [See the biographies of Vogue, Saulcy, Butler, and Lapp.] Historical Background. O n two of the carved facades in the lower tier of caves, the name Tobyah is deeply en graved in Aramaic characters of the late fourth or early third century BCE. These are dwelling caves, originally a troglodite village, and would have been reused as shelters in times of danger. In the upper tier, silos and cisterns and a large cave (28 m deep X 6 m in width) with about eighty horse troughs
Litde material culture has been discovered at 'Iraq elAmir from the Persian period. In his report Lapp mentions a few objects shown to him from the village and dated to the period (Lapp, 1963, p. 30), and a lion protome was dis covered in 1978 in a modern fence, in the northern part of the village. Its open mouth and menacing fangs are typical of the Babylonian and Achaemenid style. In the Early Hellenistic period, under die reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 BCE), according to the Zenon pa pyri discovered at Gerza in the Faiyum of Upper Egypt, Tobias appears as a leading authority in Transjordan and one who commands a garrison of cavalry. He entertained friendly relations with Ptolemy II and his minister of finance, Apollonios. In papyrus 59005, Sourabitt, listed among the localities of Palestine and Transjordan, is usually identified with Sur of the 'abd, "servant" (Neh. 2 : 1 ) or Sur of theBirtha (manor)—that is, Rabbath Ammon (Mittmann, 1970). Flavius Josephus recounts in Antiquities 1 2 . 1 5 4 - 2 3 6 the tales of the Tobiads in the Hellenistic period with legendary episodes and several anachronisms. Yet, his is the only avail able account and its historicity cannot be denied completely (Wellhausen, 1897, pp. 245ff.). According to this report, Jo seph the Tobiad, whose mother was a sister of the high priest of Solomon's Temple Onias II, leased the collection of taxes of Coele-Syria (Transjordan?), Samaria, Judea, and Phoe nicia. He held this lucrative office for twenty-two years, probably from the end of Ptolemy's III reign (246-221 BCE) to the time of Ptolemy VI Philometor (c.177/76 BCE). During one of several official journeys to Alexandria, Jo-
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IRAQ EL-AMIR
seph the Tobiad fell in love with an Egyptian dancer whom he wished to marry. But his brother, who had accompanied Joseph, gave his daughter over to him one night while he was drunk. He fathered a son with her, Hyrcanus, who dis tinguished himself from childhood with precocious intelli gence, whom he favored. As a young man, Hyrcanus, prob ably through bribery, had the king of Egypt appoint him to the office of his aging father (Antiq. 12.220), His half-broth ers, colluding with their father, resolved to kill Hyrcanus on his return from Egypt. Hyrcanus escaped their ambush, killed two of his brothers, and sought refuge east of the Jor dan River, at the family's ancestral estate of Tyros/Iraq elAmir, in Wadi es-Sir (see below). He made his home there, levying tribute on the local inhabitants and malting war on them. Widi die support of the high priest, he probably had deposited his fortune in the Temple of Jerusalem, as is at tested by the episode of Heliodorus in 2 Maccabees 3 : 1 - 4 0 . Hyrcanus is described in 3 : 1 1 as "a man of great dignity," a reflection of just how influential he was at that time. In fact, it was political conflicts that forced Hyrcanus to withdraw to Transjordan: in 200 BCE, Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch of Syria, conquered Palestine, Phoenicia, and Transjordan from the Ptolemies. [See Seleucids.] The pro-Seleucid party in Jerusalem, headed by the high priest Simon and supported by Hyrcanus's older brotiiers, perse cuted Hyrcanus, a partisan of the Ptolemies. It was then that he was obliged to withdraw to Tyros. He and his father con tinued to collect taxes for the Ptolemies, in accordance witii the dowry agreement made with the king of Egypt: Antio chus III gave his daughter Cleopatra I Syra in marriage to Ptolemy V (193 BCE) and presented the royal couple with the tribute of the countries he conquered. This was certainly the occasion for a new auction of the taxes and Joseph the Tobiad won the bid for the second time by doubling the sum of 800 talents proposed by the other Syrian tax-farmers (Antiq. 1 2 . 1 4 5 - 1 5 5 ) . After the death of Joseph die Tobiad, factional strife arose in Jerusalem and the pro-Seleucid party, supported by Hyr canus's older brothers and the high priest Simon, declared war on Hyrcanus, who was banished and swore never to return to Jerusalem. His final retreat can be estimated toward the end of Seleucus IV's reign, in about 177 BCE. Archaeological R e m a i n s . In describing Hyrcanus's es tate, Josephus was topographically accurate: "The place is between Arabia [the Nabatean kingdom] andjudea [Peraea] not far from Esbonistis" (Antiq. 1 2 . 2 3 3 - 3 4 ) . The name Ty ros given to the estate by Hyrcanus is the Aramaic transcrip tion of Sor, meaning "rock" and preserved in modern Wadi es-Sir; 'Iraq, in the local dialect is "rock," "cliff," or "cave." El-Amir ("the prince") is significant evidence of the persis tence of local traditions attached to an ancient site in the East. Josephus describes the main monument built by Hyr canus as a baris uschura, a "mighty manor." The term bans is borrowed from the Greek used in fourth-century BCE Asia
Minor, in which it meant "domain," "fortified residence," or "manor" (Will et a l , 1 9 9 1 , pp. 3 1 - 3 5 ) . T h e description of the domain in Antiquities 1 2 . 2 3 3 - 3 4 is complex and in complete for it omits the village that was the main settiement of the Tobiads, several important buildings, such as the Plaster Building (Lapp, 1963, pp. 8-39), the monumental gateway, and the defensive walls (Villeneuve, 1986, pp. 1 5 7 165). The other buildings mentioned by Josephus are aulai, probably "small villas," and paradeisoi, meaning "parks," rather than "hunting reserves." However, the outstanding structure was the baris, the actual Qasr el- Abd, or "palace of the steward." c
This two-storied rectangular monument (37 m northsouth X 18.5 m east-west) was erected on an artificial ter race southwest of the village (see figure 1 ) . Its lower level contained four storage rooms, pierced with seven windows, that opened on a long corridor on the east and west sides. A monumental entrance distyle in antis on the northern and southern facades gave access to die building. T w o water basins at the northeastern and northwestern corners released the overflow of water through feline fountains. The upper story, which was originally designed as the owner's resi dence, was never completed. It included four corner towers, accessible through the northeastern stairway, two galleries with twenty-one fluted Corinthian columns on the east and west sides, and a central festival hall. There was, in addition, a balcony on each of the corner towers tiiat was supported by a frieze of lions being followed by a lioness with her cubs. The frieze on the southern balcony (see figure 2) was un finished and the water basins were unplastered—evidence that Qasr el-'Abd had been abruptiy abandoned. There are pre-Hellenistic antecedents for the Qasr el'Abd: the two-storied Ammonite towers at Rujm el-Malfulf, North and South; the U m m Sweiwineh towers south of Am man; the Khilda towers to the west; and several other megalithic towers near Rabbat Ammon that date to the sev enth century BCE but that were reoccupied from the Early Hellenistic to the Roman-Byzantine periods. Good parallels of fortified residences can be found in Iran at Shar-i Qumis near Hamadan and in northern Iraq at Jaddala, both dated to the Late Hellenistic period (Will et al., 1 9 9 1 , pp. 2 7 6 - 7 7 ) . [See Hamadan.] An Aramaic inscription at Jaddala recounts that the residence was designed as a birtha or manor. T h e antecedent of these residences is the Neo-Hittite bit-hilani, which is characterized by a columned entrance usually flanked by two towers. Nevertheless, the architectural dec oration of the qasr, with its Corinthian floral capitals, applied half columns, acroteria, and row of acanthus leaves on the base of the shafts are Alexandrian in origin. Later develop ments of tiiis architecture are the Khazneh ed-Deir and es pecially the Palace T o m b at Petra, in southern Jordan. [See Petra.] The date of the Qasr el-'Abd has been the subject of spec ulation. De Saulcy (1865) related the monument to the Am-
'IRAQ EL-AMIR
'IRAQ EL-AMIR. Figure r. Reconstruction of Qasr el-'Abd.
monite period. N o significant evidence was discovered in excavating the monument because it was never finished and therefore was not occupied in the Hellenistic period. How ever, the excavation of tire main gateway revealed pottery sherds and coins of chronological importance: six bronze coins, dated to the end of Antiochus Ill's reign (c. 208-200 BCE), were associated witii floor 1, which is not related to the
(After F. Larche)
architectural level of the gateway but to a later entrance sys tem "prepared in haste" (Dentzer et al., 1982, p. 320; 1983, p. 1 4 1 ) . Jean-Marie Dentzer and his colleagues conclude that consfruction of the qasr was begun "at the end of the reign of Seleucus IV ( 1 8 7 - 1 7 5 BCE) but was interrupted in 175 BCE. Their interpretation is not fully convincing, how ever: on the one hand, the assumption that Hyrcanus ended
'IRAQ EL-AMIR. Figure 2. Unfinished lion relief in the sourth-westem balcony of Qasr el-Abd.
F. Zayadine)
179
(Courtesy
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'IRAQ EL-AMIR
his life in 175 BCE does not rest on historical ground. Several authors date his suicide to die first campaign of Antiochus IV (169 BCE) and Antiochus's looting of the Jerusalem Tem ple treasure (Will et al., 1 9 9 1 , p. 2 1 ) . On the other hand, if floor 1 of the gateway was a reuse, a reasonable conclusion would be that the gateway itself, and especially the qasr, are earlier than 200 BCE. With this evidence it is not possible to accept Momigliano's hypothesis that the qasr was standing in 259 BCE (Momigliano, 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 2 ; Gera, 1990, p. 25), but it is likely that Hyrcanus began building his fortified resi dence when he first fled east in about 209 BCE. T h e later occupation of the qasr belongs to two phases: die first dates to the Late Roman period (third-fourth cen turies CE), ending with the 363 earthquake, and the second from the fifth to the mid-seventh centuries. T h e latter is attested by both coins and pottery lamps. Byzantine and Umayyad iconoclasm was probably responsible for the desttuction of the animal reliefs still standing in the eighth cen tury. There is no reason to accept Josephus's chronology and date Hyrcanus's end to the accession year of Antiochus IV in 1 7 5 BCE. T h e new ldng of Syria had to busy himself at first with consolidating his power, for he was opposed by his nephew Demetrius. He began to meddle directly in Jewish affairs in 174 BCE, when Joshua (Jason) offered a high price to buy the priesthood and with the arrival of Menelaus in the position 1 7 2 BCE. At the end of his first campaign in Egypt in 169 BCE, Antiochus was directly confronted with the factions fighting in Jerusalem. By pillaging the Temple treasure, and collecting Hyrcanus's fortune, he realized the role of tiiat independent "princelet," but east of the Jordan. Hyrcanus had been fighting the Nabatean Arabs, who joined the Seleucid party after Antiochus Ill's campaign in 218 BCE. The dramatic end of Hyrcanus's adventure is recounted in Antiquities 12.236: "seeing how great the power which An tiochus had, and fearing that he might be captured by him and punished for what he had done to the Arabs, he ended his life by his own hand." This may refer to the capture of Jerusalem by die Seleucid king in 169 BCE and the execution of the enemies of the high priest Menelaus. Hyrcanus was most probably directly threatened by Antiochus IV and his army before his suicide. T h e revolt of the Maccabees in 167 BCE brought an end to Tobiad hegemony east and west of the Jordan. BIBLIOGRAPHY Butler, Howard Crosby, et al. Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to Syria in 1904-1905
and 1909. Division
II, Section B: Northern Syria. Leiden, 1920. See pages 1-25.
Dentzer, Jean-Marie, et al. "The Monumental Gateway and Princely Estate of Araq el-Amir." Annual of the American. Schools of Oriental Research 47 (1983): 1 3 3 - 1 4 8 .
Edgar, Campbell Cowan. Zenon Papyri. Catalogue General des Antiquites Egyptiennes du Musee de Caire, 1. Cairo, 1925. Gera, Dov. "On the Credibility of History of die Tobiads, Josephus Antiquities 1 2 , 1 5 6 - 2 2 2 . " In Greece and Rome in Erelz Israel, edited by Aryeh Kasher et al., pp. 2 1 - 3 8 . Jerusalem, 1990. Goldstein, Jonathan A. "The Tales of the Tobiads." Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 12.3 (1973): 8 5 - 1 2 3 .
Irby, Charles Leonard, and James Mangles. Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria, and Asia Minor during the Years 1817 and 1818. London, 1823.
See page 146. Josephus, Flavius. Jewish Antiquities. Translated by Ralph Marcus. Loeb Classical Library. London, 1958. Lapp, Nancy L., et al. "The Excavations at Araq el-Emir." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 47 (1983): I—154 plans 1 5-
Lapp, Paul W. "Soundings at 'Araq el-Emir Jordan)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 165 (1962): 16-34.
Lapp, Paul W. "The Second and Third Campaigns at 'Araq el-Emir." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 171 (1963): 8-39.
Lapp, Paul W. "The 1962 Excavation at 'Araq el-Emir." Annualof the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 10 (1965): 3 7 - 4 2 .
Marcus, Ralph. Preface to Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities. Loeb Classical Library. London, 1958. Mazar, Benjamin. "The Tobiads." Israel Exploration Journal 7 (1957): T
3 7 - i 4 5 i 229-238.
Mittmann, Siegfried. "Zenon in Ostjordanland." InArchaologie
undAl-
tes Testament: Festschrift fur Kurt Galling, edited by Arnulf Kuschke
and Ernst Kutsch, pp. 199-210. Tubingen, 1970. Momigliano, Arnaldo. "I Tobiadi nella prehistoria del moto maccabaico." Atli delta Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, ser. 2, vol. 67 ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 2 ) : 165-200.
Orrieux, Claude, and Edouard Will. Ioudaismos-Hellenismos:
Essai
sur lejudaisme judeen a I'epoque hellenistique. Nancy, 1986. See pages 77«f.
Saulcy, Felicien de. Voyage en Terre Sainte. Paris, 1865. See pages 2 1 1 235.
Saulcy, Felicien de. Memoire sur les monuments d'Aaraq-el-Emyr.
Me-
moires de l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 26. Paris, 1867.
Villeneuve, Francois.. "Recherches en cours sur les systemes defensifs d'un petit site d'epoque hellenistique en Transjordanie: Iraq alAmir." In La fortification dans I'histoire du monde grec: Actes du colloque international la fortification et sa place dans I'histoire politique, culturelle et sociate du monde grec, Valbonne, decembre 1982, edited by Pierre Leriche and Henri Treziny, pp. 1 5 7 - 1 6 5 . Paris, 1986.
Villeneuve, Francois. "Prospection archeologique et geographique historique: la region d'Iraq al-Amir (Jordanie)." In Geographichistorique au Proche-Orient, edited by P.-L. Gatier, B. Helly, and J.-P. ReyCoquais, pp. 257-288. Notes et monographies techniques no. 23. Paris, 1988. Villeneuve, Francois. "L'histoire des Tobiades chez Flavius Josephe." In Le monde du roman grec, edited by Marie-Francoise Baslez et
al., pp.
249-257.
Etudes de Litterature Ancienne, vol. 4 Paris,
1992.
Conder, Claude R. The Survey of Eastern Palestine: Memoirs of the To pography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archaeology. London, 1S89.
Vogue, Melchior de. Le Temple de Jerusalem. Paris, 1864. See pages 3 4 -
See volume 1, page 78. Dentzer, Jean-Marie, et al. "Fouille de la porte monumentale a Iraq alAmir: La campagne de 1978." Annualof the Department of Antiquities
Wellhausen, Julius. Israelilische undjudische Geschichte. Berlin, 1897. See
of"Jordan 26 (1982): 3 0 1 - 3 2 1 ,
38.
page 254. Will, Edouard. Histoire politique du monde hellenistique. Vol. 1, Nancy, 1966.
IRRIGATION Will, Ernest, F . Larche, and Fawzi Zayadine, et al. Iraq al Amir, le chateau du Tobiade Hyrcan. Paris, 1 9 9 1 . FAWZI ZAYADINE
IRBID, site located in northwestern Transjordan (map reference 674 X 062) and identified with biblical Beth Arbel (Hos. 1 0 : 1 4 ) , classical Arbela, and Islamic Arbad. The site's name prior to the eighth century BCE remains unknown. In 1890, Gottlieb Schumacher recorded the site's classical re mains, and in 1929, William Foxwell Albright noted its im portance between tire fourteenth and the tenth centuries BCE. Although considerable obfuscation of the remains has oc curred in tire last century, systematic excavations, survey, and the integration of textual ethnohistorical, and recently taken oral historical data have begun to clarify the occupa tional history of tire tell and the surrounding area. The site consists of an eliptically shaped tell (about 500 m X 400 m) and surroundings that encompass modern Irbid and Barha. Following an intensive survey of the tell and its vicinity in 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 8 4 , systematic excavations were begun in 1984 that are still underway. Stratified occupational data are most secure for the period from about 3500 to about 700 BCE; however, there is also some stratified evidence for the first-ninth centuries CE, which are attested to textually as well. Excavations of the surrounding area, conducted by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, and analysis of die survey data have helped to confirm tire sequence of occu pation attested to on the tell. Evidence for the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze pe riods has been found on the southwest and western sides of the tell. Cisterns were cut into the bedrock near small-scale, probably domestic, structures. N o city wall was found. In the Middle Bronze Age (c. eighteenth-nineteenth cen turies BCE), the tell was encircled by a boulder wall of basalt, which is indigenous to the region. T o the east, part of a glacis was excavated. Structures relating to this period were badly disturbed by later occupation. However, the domestic na ture of the pottery implies private dwellings, rather titan public. The Late Bronze and Early Iron Age occupation (c. 1 3 0 0 1000 BCE) is the clearest to date. Domestic structures on the west reused or partially destroyed the Middle Bronze struc tures. On the northwest side of the tell and farther to the east was part of the necropolis, as shown by R. Dajani. T h e city wall was extended in the south by the addition of a chert and limestone hewn block wall. On the southwest, a public complex dating to the end of the Late Bronze Age, sup ported by carbon-14 dates, has been excavated. The struc tures were multistoried and enclosed by a perimeter wall. Cultic objects—an incense burner, goblets, cups and sau cers, lamps, and a basalt libation stand—were found on stor age shelves at the rear of die complex. One room contained large storage vessels that held lentils, olives, grains, and
181
probably oil. A fire destroyed the complex, during which the wooden beam supports burned, causing the mud-brick su perstructure to collapse into the randomly sized stone sub structure. The destruction debris extended for about 100 m and was 4 m deep. The fire and destruction were caused by natural means. Following the destruction, the debris was leveled but not removed. The stones were reused to build minor industrial and domestic structures and new construction techniques altered the area. Although other areas on the tell attest to the change in constructional techniques from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age, only the complex in the southwest was de stroyed. T h e pottery corpus indicates a gradual change in typology, rather than a distinctive and fundamental change based on historical periodization. As at other sites, the tell was incorporated into tire plan of the Roman city. T h e site's function as the center for mu nicipal structures continues to the present. Although its size surpassed that of Beit Ras/Capitolias, located 5 km (3 mi.) to the north, Irbid/Arbela's status was lower. That tire sites were interconnected seems clear; accommodations must have been made regarding the surrounding arable land. Irbid's fame in early Islamic history emanates from Caliph Yazid II, who lived at Beit Ras and died at Irbid, probably at Barha, to the west, which then was probably a district of Irbid, as it is today. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " N e w Israelite and Pre-Israelite Sites: T h e Spring Trip of 1929." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 35 (1929): 1 - 1 4 . Lenzen, C . J . , et al. "Excavations at Tell Irbid and Beit Ras, 1985." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 29 (1985): 151—159. Lenzen, C . J . "Tall Irbid and Bait R a s . " Archivfiir Orientforschung 33 (1986): 1 6 4 - 1 6 6 . Lenzen, C . J . , and E . Axel Knauf. "Tell Irbid and Beit Ras, 1 9 8 3 1986," Liber AnnuuslStudiiBibliciFranciscani36 (1986): 3 6 1 - 3 6 3 . Lenzen, C . J . , and E . Axel Knauf. "Irbid." Revue Biblique 95 (1988): 239-247. Lenzen, C . J . , and Alison M . McQuitty. " T h e 1984 Survey of the Irbid/ Beit Ras Region." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 32 (1988): 265-274. Lenzen, C . J. "Tell Irbid and Its Context: A Problem in Archaeological Interpretation." Biblische Notizen 42 (1988): 2 7 - 3 5 . Lenzen, C . J . , and Alison M . McQuitty. " A n Architectural Study of the Irbid Region with Particular Reference to a Building in Irbid." Levant 2 1 (1989): 1 1 9 - 1 2 8 . Lenzen, C . J . "Irbid and Beit Ras: Interconnected Settlements between c. A . D . 100-900." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, pp. 299-307. Amman, 1992. Schumacher, Gottiieb, Northern 'Ajlun, "Within the Decapolis." L o n don, 1890. C. J. LENZEN
IRRIGATION. T h e history and extent of irrigation in the ancient Near East are difficult to trace because the phys-
182
IRRIGATION
ical evidence in many instances is located away from settled sites in the open countryside. It is only recentiy that regional surveys have been initiated to determine the extent of oc cupation beyond well-defined sites and the use made of nat ural resources. T o help in this endeavor, space-age tech nology, using information gained through the LANDSAT system, is now being utilized to trace ancient waterworks (Adams, 1 9 8 1 , p. 3 3 ) . Because many known waterworks were in use for more titan just one period, however, deter mining their original date is complicated. These limitations in studying the history of irrigation, render the results in complete. Very soon after the domestication of plants in the Neo lithic period, people realized that in certain regions cultiva tion required supplementing rainfall with water from other sources. Thus, in the Ubaid-Early Dynastic I periods in the valleys of the great rivers of Mesopotamia (Adams, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 5 2 - 1 2 9 ) and in predynastic Egypt (Hodges, 1970, p. 6 1 ) , dense settlement was undertaken and flourished to the point of developing unique cultures. The nature of the floods in the Nile River valley and in Mesopotamia differed and re quired different responses. The Nile inundation occurs in early spring and recedes, after only a few days, after depos iting a new, rejuvenating layer of soil in which sowing can take place immediately; the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers flood in the early summer, when it is too late for sowing. Thus, sowing in Mesopotamia took place before die flood ing, and the fields had to be protected with dikes against the crops being washed away. In Egypt, canals were dug to ir rigate the fields after the floodwaters had receded (Hodges, 1970, p. 60); this undertaking, which required a strong cen tral authority because it involved more than just one com munity, probably led to the unification of Egypt. In other regions, different existing water sources, such as springs and brooks, had to be tapped and wells and cisterns had to be built. Jericho, founded in the Neolithic period, is considered to be the earliest urban site; its settlement was made possible by a perennial spring nearby. Its earliest set tlement was surrounded by a defense wall with a tower pro tecting the approach to the spring (Kenyon, 1979, p. 2 5 ) , whose water was used for drinking, watering animals, and irrigating land. Some of the earliest preserved waterworks are those at Jawa, die short-lived Early Bronze Age (late fourdi millen nium BCE) site in Jordan's Black Desert. While irrigation in the river valleys of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates relied on flooding, at Jawa water for irrigation became avail able from catchment basins created to collect runoff water that was in turn diverted into dams and gravity canals (Helms, 1 9 8 1 , pp. 1 3 5 - 1 9 8 ) . The remains of these water works and those of the town and its fortifications suggest that they were designed and constructed by a highly orga nized population. [See Jawa.] Irrigation with runoff water
was also practiced in other arid zones, such as the Negev desert, but in later periods. Remains of water-collection and distribution facilities dated to the Iron II period have been found at Ramat Matred and Mishor ha-Ruah (tenth-ninth centuries BCE) in the central Negev, and in the Buqefa (sev enth century BCE), west of the northern tip of the Dead Sea (for bibliography, see Borowsld, 1987 pp. 1 - 2 0 ) . It seems that settlements throughout tiiis period were initiated, or at least supported, by the central Judean government for eco nomic as well as political and military reasons. During the Roman-Byzantine and Early Arab periods, agriculture in the Negev continued to rely on the same method of diverting water to terraced fields, cisterns, and pools. [See Cisterns.] Throughout history, Mesopotamian agriculture relied on irrigation by canals that took their water from its great rivers. The great canal networks and their use and maintenance dictated strong, central political units first centering on citystates and later on territorial empires. T h e use and care of canal irrigation was state controlled and demanded a highly organized social system that relied on detailed recordkeep ing (Adams, 1 9 8 1 , p. 1 6 5 ) . In Girsu, Eanatum (c. 2 5 0 0 B C E ) and Entemenak (c. 2400 BCE) constructed weirs of baked bricks laid in bitumen (Jacobsen, 1982, p. 62); similar activ ities were carried out at Lagash (Hruska, 1988). UrNammu, ldng of Ur, devoted his energies to many projects, among them a substantial program of irrigation works that assured the city's prosperity (Hallo and Simpson, 1 9 7 1 , p. 78). Gungunum of Larsa, as well as other kings of the M e sopotamian city-states of the first half of the second millen nium BCE (Renger, 1990), was also occupied with the build ing and maintenance of canals for bringing fresh water to the south (Hallo and Simpson, 1 9 7 1 , p. 92). Mathematical texts from the Old Babylonian period (c. 2 0 0 0 - 1 6 0 0 B C E ) suggest tiiat the ancients were preoccupied with the volumes of water from different sources that were necessary to irri gate fields to a certain depth (Powell, 1988). [See Girsu and Lagash; Ur; Larsa.] T h e subject of irrigation plays a prominent role in the earliest agricultural manual, known as the Sumerian "Georgica," composed in about 2 1 0 0 BCE and still in vogue in about 1700 BCE (Jacobsen, 1982, p. 5 7 ) . According to this manual, fields were irrigated in die summer (June-July) in preparation for weeding (July-August). After the ground was prepared (August-October) and sown (September-Oc tober), four irrigations were recommended during particular stages of crop development—the final one when the crop (barley) was ripening, to ensure an extra good yield J a c o b sen, 1982, pp. 59, 6 1 ) . The Mari (Syria) archives are another source of infor mation about irrigation in this region of the Euphrates (Kupper, 1988). Included in the correspondence of die gov ernors of the districts of Mari, Terqa, and Sagaratum are reports pertaining to new canals built under their supervi-
IRRIGATION sion; information related to water control; irrigation termi nology; and the enumeration of personnel involved in irri gation and canal maintenance. T h e amount of inlbrmation available demonstrates the importance of irrigation to the kingdom's economy. Archaeological surveys and excava tions show that the Mari region was already being cultivated and irrigated in the Early Bronze Age, at the beginning of the third millennium BCE (Margueron, 1988). [See Mari; Terqa.] Unfortunately, the intensive irrigation of certain soils leads to salinization. In southern Mesopotamia, tire soil is alluvial in origin, of fine-textured clays with a high salt con tent. In addition, irrigation with river water and capillary action from a shallow and saline water table add salt to the soil. High salt content affects germination and makes tire soil impermeable Qacobsen, 1982, pp. 5 - 7 ) . Soil salinization in Mesopotamia led to die abandonment of wheat cultivation in favor of tire more resistant barley. [See Cereals.] Gradual salinity tirrough irrigation in Mesopotamia's Di yala region slowly rendered the area unusable for normal cultivation and forced the abandonment of the region (Jacobsen, 1982, p. 7 1 ) . T h e earliest occupation of die region occurred in about 4200 BCE, and it was very fertile and pros perous until much of it was abandoned during die Islamic period. Throughout its history, however, the Diyala region suffered several abandonments, the result primarily of the collapse of the political system in charge of the irrigation network. With the collapse of central authority, waterworks could not be maintained and the entire agricultural system collapsed, forcing the population to abandon it. [See Diyala.] Since prehistoric times in the Iranian plateau, a watertransport system known as qanat, was developed (Olmstead, 1948, pp. 1 6 - 6 8 ) . It consisted of a horizontal tunnel with vertical shafts that allowed entrance for maintenance and tire release of air pressure (Landels, 1978, pp. 3 8-40). T h e water carried by these systems originated in the mountains as melted snow (Olmstead, 1948, p . 1 6 5 ) . Early traditions con cerning this system found dieir way into tire Avesta (Olm stead, 19483 pp. 1 6 , 20). Tides to plots watered by qanats were owned in fee simple (Olmstead, 1948, p. 68). During the time of Darius, the Persians introduced (c. 490 BCE) the qanat system into Egypt, where it was used at the Oasis of the South (Olmstead, 1948, p. 2 2 4 ) . T h e first pharaoh, the legendary Menes, is credited not only with uniting Upper and Lower Egypt, but also witii being die first to try to control the Nile by building dikes and apportioning the water used for agricultural purposes (Hodges, 1970, p. 9 1 ) . T h e centrality of government control of water continued throughout Egyptian history into the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods (Bonneau, 1986). During certain periods, installations known as Nilometers were used to measure the level of fioodwaters in or der to compute the tax rate for die year; the higher the water
183
level, die more abundant the crop, and thus the higher the tax rate. Nilometers were built along the river, mostly near temples. In addition to the archaeological recovery of re mains of these installations, Nilometers are depicted on mo saics, such as those uncovered in Israel at Sepphoris and Beth-Shean and atTabgha (Netzer and Weiss, 1992, p. 38). [See Sepphoris; Beth-Shean; Tabgha.] T h e annual flooding of the Nile required repeated land surveying, which taught the Egyptians how to lay out a right-angle triangle and solve other mathematical and geometric problems (Hodges, 1970, P- 1 3 2 ) . Gardening is a branch of agriculture that also requires controlled irrigation. In ancient Palestine it was practiced on a limited scope because of irrigation difficulties (including die terrain and minimal water sources). In Jerusalem in the First Temple period (c. 950-586), there were gardens in the Kidron Valley that were watered by an open canal, the Siloam channel, which originated at the Gihon Spring. [See Jerusalem.] It is known from Egyptian textual and artistic evidence, and from the Bible (Dr. 1 2 : 1 0 - 1 1 ) that gardening was well developed in Egypt. T o be able to water gardens year-round, water had to be brought from the river to the fields (Endesfelder, 1982, p. 1 4 2 ) . Initially, this was accom plished by hand, but later witii an implement called shaduf in Arabic (see figure 1 ) . A shaduf is a long horizontal beam on an upright pole; it has a vessel attached at one end and a weight at the other. When the vessel is immersed, water is drawn into a canal leading to the agricultural plot or into a large receptacle from where it can be carried by hand to other destinations. The shaduf is known from a Mesopota mian cylinder seal (c. 2000 BCE) and from Egyptian tomb painting (c. 1500 BCE; (Hodges, 1970, pp. 1 1 8 — 1 1 9 ) . This method, although still in use, was later partially replaced, probably in die Roman period, by the screw pump invented by Archimedes. Another technical improvement for irriga tion, which probably reached the region in the Early Roman period, is die waterwheel (or bucket) powered by draft an imals (or humans). T h e waterwheel raises water from a low source, such as a river, to higher ground, where it can be distributed through canals. However, the height to which water could be raised was limited by the size of the wheel, a problem that was resolved with the invention of the bucket chain. This installation was made of an endless chain with buckets attached at set intervals. The chain was draped over the axle of a wheel that was operated in a manner similar to that of die waterwheel. T h e difference in elevations between the water source and the higher destination depended on the length of the chain (Landels, 1978, pp. 7 1 - 7 4 ) . Roman technological influence was strong in ancient Pal estine beginning in the time of Herod the Great, who intro duced new ways of transporting water from distant sources. In and around Jerusalem, for example, water was brought from "Solomon's Pools" at Artas, south of Bethlehem. Wa-
184
ISFAHAN 1 9 8 1 . Excellent source for the study of ancient Mesopotamian irri gation and urban society. Bonneau, Danielle. " L e souverain d'Egypte, juge de l'usage de l'eau." In L'homme et l'eau en Mediterranee et au Proche Orient, vol. 2, edited by Francoise Metral and Jean Metral, pp. 69-80. L y o n , 1986. Brief study of the legal role of the Egyptian king in matters of water con trol. Borowski, Oded. Agriculture in Iron Age Israel. Winona Lake, Ind., 1987, Good bibliographical source for runoff irrigation in the Negev. Endesfelder, Erika. " Z u r Entwicklung der Bewasserungstechnik in Agypten." In Produktivkrafte und Gesellschaftsformationen in Vorkapitalistischer Zeit, edited by Joachim Herrmann and Irmgard Sellnow, pp. 1 4 1 - 1 4 7 . Berlin, 1982. Brief study of irrigation techniques in Egypt. Hallo, William W „ and William Kelly Simpson. The Ancient Near East: A Histoiy. N e w York, 1 9 7 1 . Concise history of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Helms, S. W. Jawa: Lost City of the Black Desert. London, 1 9 8 1 . E x cellent report on this site, including its ancient waterworks. Hodges, Henry. Technology in the Ancient World. N e w York, 1970. E x cellent study of ancient technology, including water pumps. Hruska, Blahoslav. " D i e Bewasserungsanlagen in den altsumerischen KSnigsinschriften von L a g a s . " Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 4 (1988): 6 1 - 7 2 . Brief study of texts related to irrigation from the S u merian period.
IRRIGATION. Figure I . A shaduf, a type of primitive irrigation pump on the river bank of the Nile. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N Y )
ter for urban and agricultural uses was brought by aqueducts utilizing arch-supported canals, bridges, tunnels, and si phons. [See Aqueducts.] Large irrigation projects were car ried out around Jericho, Samaria, and Caesarea. T h e Ro mans utilized similar water systems in the second century CE in North Africa to bring vast areas under cultivation to grow high-quality wheat. Where cereals could not be culti vated, olive trees were planted. In Roman Palestine, water rights for agricultural use were included in property deeds, as is seen in the documents be longing to Babatha's archive found in a cave near Ein-Gedi. These rights were enumerated according to days of the week, number of hours, and water sources for irrigation (Yadin, 1971, pp. 235-237). Irrigation has always been a labor-intensive branch of ag riculture that cannot survive without tight control by a cen tral authority. When a political system was weakened, water management often disintegrated, the economy collapsed, and periods of disorder and scarcity took over. [See also Agriculture; Hydraulics; and Hydrology.] c
Jacobsen, Thorkild. Salinity and Irrigation: Agriculture in Antiquity. B i b liotheca Mesopotamica, 1 4 . Malibu, 1982. Extensive study of the causes and effects of salinity in Mesopotamia. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Archaeology in the Holy Land. 4th ed. N e w York, 1979. Kupper, J . - R . "L'irrigation a Mari." Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 4 (1988): 9 3 - 1 0 4 . Study of irrigation-related texts from the archives at Mari. Landels, J . G . Engineering in the Ancient World. Berkeley, 1978. Excel lent study of ancient technology, including water pumps, aqueducts, and qanat. Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Espace agricole et amenagement regional a Mari au debut du Hie millenaire." Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 4 (1988): 49-60. Brief study of agriculture and irrigation in and around Mari in the Early Bronze Age. Netzer, Ehud, and Zeev Weiss. "New Mosaic Art from Sepphoris." Biblical Archaeology Review 18.6 (1992): 3 6 - 4 3 , 78. Some of the mo saics from Sepphoris, including the one depicting a Nilometer. Olmstead, Albert T . Histoiy of the Persian Empire: Achaemenid Period. Chicago and London, 1948. Extensive history of the Persian Empire, including the history of qanat. Powell, M . A. "Evidence for Agriculture and Waterworks in Babylo nian Mathematical T e x t s . " Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 4 (1988): 1 6 1 - 1 7 1 . Brief study of mathematical texts related to irrigation. Renger, Johannes. "Rivers, Water Courses, and Irrigation Ditches and Other Matters Concerning Irrigation Based on Old Babylonian Sources, 2000-1600 B . C . " Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 5 (1990): 31-46. Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt against Imperial Rome. London, 1 9 7 1 . Popular de scription of the archaeological work around 'Ein-Gedi, with a chap ter on the archive of Bahama. ODED BOROWSKI
BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert M c C . Heartland of Cities: Suweys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago,
ISFAHAN, site located in modern Iraq, on the banks of the Zayandeh-Rud, some 17,160 m (5,200 ft.) above sea
ISFAHAN level, midway between Damascus and Aleppo in the west and Bukhara and Samarkand in the east (32°4o' N , 5 i ° 3 8 ' E). Isfahan is an oasis surrounded by desert and semidesert. It boasts the most abundant water supply on the land-locked Iranian plateau, a condition that led to the early develop ment of agriculture and urban growth there. Isfahan was a center for the exchange of goods and ideas perhaps as early as Achaemenid times. Identified as ancient Gabae, Isfahan was cited by Strabo ( 1 5 . 3 . 3 ) as one of tire Achaemenid royal residences. As an administrative center, it appears as the Parthian G'b and Middle Persian GdyjGay in the third-century CE inscription of the Sasanian king Shapur I at Naqsh-i Rustam (inscrip tion on the Ka'bah of Zoroaster, KZ11. 27, 3 3 ) . [See Naqshi Rustam.] These names, in turn, have been equated with AspahanlAsfaha.nlIsfahan in late classical and later Arab sources; the abbreviation ASP, for Aspahan, occurs on Sasanian coins from the fourth century onward, while Spahan is found on Sasanian administrative seals as a province of tire Sasanian Empire. Spahan was the site of one of the many sacred fires estab lished throughout the Sasanian Empire by the chief priest of the Zoroastrian state church, Kirder, in the third century. In Nestorian Christian accounts from die Sasanian period, Asfahan/Isfahan is mentioned as an episcopal seat. T h e foundation of the present city appears to date to early in die Sasanian period, when it was centered on the town of Jayy (Gay), now Shahristan, a suburb 8 km (5 mi.) to the
ISFAHAN. F i g u r e 1.
185
east. Jayy served as a citadel and place of refuge for the surrounding villages in times of war, as well as an archival and administrative center. According to later Arab and Per sian sources, it was protected by a wall with one hundred towers and four gates aligned according to the seasonal po sitions of the sun. Outside one of the gates, a special open space, or maidan, served as a marketplace. Three kilometers (2 mi.) to tire west was Yahudiyya, where, according to one u-adition, Jews had been settled in the sixth century BCE by the Babylonian king Nebuchadrez zar or, according to another, by the Sasanian ruler Yazdigird I ( 3 9 9 - 4 CE), at the request of his Jewish wife. With the Arab conquest of Iran in the middle of the seventh century, Jayy became the seat of an Arab governor and site of the first Friday Mosque in the region. Jayy declined after 767 (AH 1 5 0 ) , when the 'Abbasid governor shifted his adminis tration and die mosque to Khusinan, a village closer to Ya hudiyya. Shortly thereafter, Khusinan was absorbed by Yahudiyya, which is now the center of modern Isfahan and, since 773 (AH 1 5 6 ) , the location of the third and present-day Friday Mosque. The city continued to develop under the Buyids in the tenth cenUiry; it was walled and ovoid in shape, with twelve gates and a citadel. Within it, die Friday Mosque was fronted on the maidan and associated bazaar area—the re ligious, administrative, commercial, and intellectual center of the city. Another major period of construction was under the Seljuks in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. T h e me20
The Sasanian bridge at Shahristan.
(Courtesy J . Lerner)
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ISIN
dieval history of Isfahan ended with the elevation of die city as the capital of Persia in 1598 (AH 1006) under the Safavid Shah 'Abbas, who was responsible for a grand architectural program. No archaeological work has been done in Isfahan to doc ument its pre-Islamic past. A ten-arched bridge spans the Zayandeh-Rud at Shahristan (see figure 1 ) , the former Jayy; its stone piers are probably a Sasanian construction. Two Sasanian capitals, both bearing royal and divine busts in re lief, have been known since at least the nineteenth century, when they were observed at the entrance to die Safavid pa vilion on the Maidan-i Shah. By analogy witii similar capitals from other sites in Iran, these date to the time of Khusrau II (591-628 CE) and attest to some unknown palatial struc ture. The capitals are unexcavated and were most likely moved from their original findspot. On a hill to the west of the city are the mud-brick ruins of what may be an ateshgah, or Zoroastrian fire temple. Shah Diz, a mountaintop strong hold south of die city, may or may not date to die Sasanian period. Other than the Friday Mosque, the minarets of Isfahan and the twelftii-century Sha'ya Mosque, none of Isfahan's pre-Safavid Islamic monuments have been published from an archaeological point of view. While restoration work in die Friday Mosque yielded no definitive pre-Islamic levels, the history of this major building is now better understood. [See also Mosque; Persia, articles on Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam and Persia in the Islamic Period; and Sasanians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Galdieri, Eugenic Isfahan: Masgid-i Gum'a. 3 vols. Rome, 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 8 2 . Documents die research and restoration activities in the Friday Mosque by the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Orient of Rome; good photographs. Gaube, Heinz. Iranian Cities. New York, 1979. Examination of tiiree typical Iranian cities—Isfahan, Herat, and Bam—using literary and physical evidence to describe their form and function in the different stages of their growth. Godard, Andre. "Isfahan." Athar-e Iran 2 (1937): 7 - 1 7 6 . Earliest pub lication of the ateshgah and Shahristan bridge. Golombek, Lisa. "Urban Patterns in Pre-Safavid Isfahan." In Studies on Isfahan: Proceedings of the Isfahan Colloquium, Part 1 , edited by Renata Holod, pp. 18-44. Iranian Studies, 7. Chestnut Hill, Mass., 1974. Lucid reconstruction from literary sources and firsthand ob servation of the pre-Safavid city; useful bibliography, L e Strange, Guy. Lands of the Eastern Caliphate. 2d ed. Cambridge, 1930. See Chapter 14 for a complete account of Arab and Persian medieval authors. Luschey, Heinz. " Z u r Datierung der sasanidischen Kapitelle aus B i sutun und des Monuments von Taq-i-Bostan." Archdologische Mitleilungen aus Iran 1 (1968): 1 2 9 - 1 4 2 , pi. 52. Useful for photographs of the two Sasanian capitals said to come from Isfahan and similar capitals from other Sasanian sites. Minasian, Caro O. Shah Diz of Isma'ili Fame: Its Siege and Destruction. London, 1 9 7 1 . Controversial interpretation of what has been iden tified as the remains of a citadel outside modern Isfahan. JUDITH LERNER
ISIN,
ancient capital of the first dynasty of Isin, situated about 200 km ( 1 2 4 mi.) south-southeast of Baghdad, Iraq, about 20 km ( 1 2 mi.) south of Nippur ( 3 1 5 1 ' N , 4 5 1 7 ' E). The ruins of Isin cover about 1.5 sq km and are 8 m high. The site's modern name is Isan al-Bahriyat. (J. N . Postgate [1930] has proposed that during the third millen nium the site was known as IN .) T h e identification with the ancient city was made by K. Stevenson in 1 9 2 3 . The first brief excavation was carried out in 1 9 2 4 by the exca vators of Kish, A. T . Clay and Stephen Langdon (see P. R. S. Moorey, Kish Excavations, 1923-1933, Oxford, 1 9 7 8 ) . Their trench north of the highest point was rediscovered by a German expedition in 1986, working on behalf of the Uni versity of Munich and die Bavarian Academy of Science and supported financially by the German Research Council. From 1973 to 1989, before the Gulf War, eleven seasons of excavation had taken place. 0
0
ta
The first king of die first dynasty of Isin, Ishbi-Erra ( 2 0 1 7 1 9 8 5 / 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 2 1 BCE; middle, or short, chronology) may also have been the founder of the city of Isin. During the first season of excavations by the German team, however, traces of an older occupation were found, especially from the Ak kadian period, and quality objects recovered, the oldest of which belong to die Ubaid period (fourth millennium). Ishbi-Erra was a general during the reign of the last ruler of the Ur III dynasty, Ibbi-Sin, prior to becoming ldng of Isin, According to the Bible, he belonged to the tribe of the socalled Amorites. [See Amorites.] These people spoke a West-Semitic dialect as did die later Arameans, Hebrews, and Arabs. Nomads, they invaded southern Mesopotamia from Northern Syria at the end of the third millennium, King Shu-Sin of Ur III built a wall against the Amorites between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers north of Baghdad, where the distance between the rivers is narrowest. [See Ur.] T h e ruins of this wall, constructed of earth and clay, can still be seen. One of the best-known subtribes of the Amo rites (which means "west" in West-Semitic languages), or MAR.TU. (Sum., "west"), were the Benjaminites ("the sons of the south"), mentioned in the Bible with Abraham from Ur in Chaldea. [See Chaldeans.] From the Bible, and now also from cuneiform inscriptions, it is known that the home of the Benjaminites was both in the south near Ur and in the north near Harran (Gn. 3 5 : 1 8 , 24; 42:4, 36; 4 3 : 1 4 - 1 6 , 29; 34; 4 4 : 1 2 ; 4 5 : 1 2 , 1 4 , 22; 46:27; Dt. 3 3 : 1 2 ; Jos.ii-.20,
28;
Jgs. 2 : 2 1 ) . West-Semitic tribes may have migrated from there into Canaan at the same time the Amorites invaded Mesopotamia. As a result of the biblical name Canaan, West-Semitic people in this area were called Canaanites. [See Canaanites.] The best-known of the Amorite ldngs in Mesopotamia was Hammurabi of the first dynasty of Babylon ( 1 7 9 2 - 1 7 5 0 / 1 7 2 8 - 1 6 8 6 BCE). Unfortunately, that level in the city of Bab ylon has not yet been excavated because the level of ground-
ISIN water is still too high. [See Babylon.] In the sixteenth century BCE, Babylon was conquered by the Hittites under King Mursili I. [See Hittites.] T h e real winners, however, were the Kassites, who may have come from the east (the names of some of their gods resemble those in India in tire second millennium BCE), although in Mesopotamia cuneiform let ters were used for the Babylonian/Akkadian as well as the Sumerian languages. [See Kassites; Cuneiform; Akkadian; Sumerian.] Just before iooo BCE another West-Semitic peo ple came to Mesopotamia, the so-called Arameans, who es tablished the second dynasty of Isin and whose principal capital was Babylon, rather than Isin. [See Arameans.] T h e Arameans ruled over Babylonia for a long period, until the invasion of the Achaemenids under King Cyrus the Great in 538 BCE. The primary god of Isin was tire goddess Gula, the main goddess of medicine in the Near East and specially favored by the Kassites in die second millennium BCE. [See Medi cine.] Her temple (60 X 90 m) was discovered at the highest point on the tell. T h e temple contained two chapels, one of Gula and the other of her husband, Ninurta. The main pe riod of use was during the Kassite period. One of the tem ple's courtyards was covered with burned clay slabs and had stamp inscriptions of a Kurigalzu of the fourteenth century BCE. The walls were built mainly of sun-dried bricks. This temple was probably founded in the Early Dynastic period (c. 2700 BCE) because at some places below die walls of the Kassite and the Old Babylonian levels burnt and sun-dried bricks, whose shape is plano-convex, were discovered. Clay and St. Langdon had found them in their trench in 1924, as well. T h e building's most important feature, however, was a large (4 x 3 m) staircase in front of the temple leading to the main entrance. Excavated in the last two seasons (1986, 1989), the staircase is composed of nineteen steps of sundried bricks paved with clay. Curiously, tire steps showed no ttaces of use. In front of the staircase an altar or pedestal was built up with reused bricks inscribed with the names of Icings of die first dynasty of Isin, such as Bur-Sin ( 1 8 9 5 1 8 7 4 / 1 8 3 1 - 1 8 1 0 BCE). This staircase was in place from the beginning of the second millennium BCE until the sixth cen tury BCE, when Nebuchadrezzar II (604-562 BCE) restored tire Temple of Gula for the last time. The staircase suggested the existence of a temple tower, the so-called ziggurat, but according to cuneiform texts there was no ziggurat at Isin. [See Ziggurat.] The sacred building was also surrounded by a great wall, a temenos, founded by Ishme-Dagan of Isin ( 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 3 5 / 1 8 8 9 - 1 8 7 1 BCE) and rebuilt in the Kassite period. T h e 1986 expedition searched for the second-millennium BCE palace at several locations in the ruins. In the southeast an official building was found from that period with very well made and plas tered walls. The buildings ground plan could be compared to that of one of tire southern buildings at Tell Asmar, also a structure with official features and significance. At Isin an
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archive of about eighty tablets was found, mentioning some deliveries to King Enlil-bani ( 1 8 6 0 - 1 8 3 7 / 1 7 9 6 - 1 7 7 3 BCE). [See Libraries and Archives; Tablet.] West of the Temple of Gula two larger buildings were excavated during the last two seasons, also with some hints of being a palace. Two inscriptions on seal-impressions mention the king's scribe and brewer. South of the temple, occupation levels from the beginning of the third millen nium BCE were discovered just below the surface, with cir cular offering tables like those at Uruk and Ur from the same period. [See Uruk-Warka.] Outside tire city of Isin were several Early Islamic build ings that were in use until the Mongol invasion in the thir teenth century. One of tire buildings seems to have been a caravanserai. The site's small finds were numerous, and some are of very fine quality, especially the cylinder seal from the Ak kadian period. [See Seals.] In the Temple of Gula a mace head of the Akkadian ldng Sar-kali-sarri (2223-2198 BCE) was found, dedicated to Gula, the Lady of Isin, an indication of the importance of Isin/IN then. The terra-cotta reliefs of die Old Babylonian period found at Isin show new motifs (e.g., representations of ostriches). A curious find from the temple area is a figurine of a kneeling man with his left hand on his back, perhaps either pointing to where he has pain or to where he was healed. T h e excavation's anthropologist discovered some traces of arteriosclerosis in examining skel etons at Isin. Other corpses showed a blow to the head or stroke injuries. One skull had small artificial openings in the area of the right parietal bone, indicating that a Babylonian doctor had performed a trepanation, but probably only in a postmortem, for cult purposes. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the ruins at Isin were surrounded by water, like a marsh (hor), as the modern name shows: Isan al-Bahriyat "monument (isan), which was nearly covered by the sea (bahriyat)." The bones of deer and razorback hogs found at Isin suggest that the region was also a swamp in the past, with brushwood and trees, as those animals could only have existed in such a biotope. Among the animal bones was also a whale bone, an intimation of the legend of the prophet Jonah, who was spewn out of the mouth of such an animal, although farther nordi, near the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. [See Nineveh.] A mosque bearing his name, Nebi Yunus, is a reminder of the event. kl
BIBLIOGRAPHY Cassin, Elena, et al., eds. Die Altorientalischen Reiche. 3 vols. Fischer Weltgeschichte, vols. 2-4. Frankfurt, 1965-1967. Edzard, Dietz O. Die "zweite Zwiscfiemeit" Babylonians. Wiesbaden, 1957. Hrouda, Barthel, ed. Isin-Uan Bahnyal 1992. Postgate, J . N . Sumer 30 (1974): 207ff.
I-IV.
4 vols. Munich, 1 9 7 7 -
BARTHEL HROUDA
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ISKANDER, KHIRBET
ISKANDER, KHIRBET, 7.5-acre site on the north ern bank of Wadi el-Wala, in modern Jordan, strategically located on the ancient King's Highway, approximately 24 km ( 1 5 mi.) south of Madaba, in what was once northern Moab. In surveys (Glueck, 1939) and excavations (Parr, i960) important remains from the Early Bronze IV period (c. 2350-2000 BCE) had been noted at the site. In 1 9 8 1 , 1982, 1984, and 1987, the American Schools of Oriental Research sponsored an excavation at Khirbet Iskander directed by Suzanne Richard, with Drew University, Upsala College, and Seton Hall University as affiliates. Roger Boraas served as associate director in 1982 and 1984. The project's primary research objective was to test the hypothesis that sedentism was an alternative subsistence choice to pastoralism in tire Early Bronze Age. Excavation affirmed the hypothesis, even expanding the parameters of sedentism in this alleged "no madic interlude" to include small fortified towns. The stratigraphic profile that emerged is tentative and awaits additional excavation and final publication. The best stratigraphic sequence (seven phases thus far) comes from area B at the northwest corner of the site. The earliest, phase G, represented by fragmentary house walls, dates to EB I. Phase F house walls represent the basal EB IV settlement. Phases E-B constitute the EB IV settlement within fortifi cations. Phase A, therefore, is the final, postfortification EB IV settlement, after which the site was abandoned. Four distinct phases of the site's fortifications are cur rently discernible: an inner wall (E), outer wall (D), and two domestic use phases (C-B). The inner wall, of stone and mud brick, was found in a collapsed state. The phase D rebuilding included the inner wall, a new outer wall, a rubble fill, and a square tower witii steps, creating a 2.5-meter de fense system. Excavation has revealed two interior-use phases thus far, a building complex in phase B and a limited sounding into an earlier domestic level (C). Two contiguous broadrooms formed part of a larger building complex in phase B. In one of the rooms benches line the walls and in the other a stone-lined bin (possibly afavissa, or repository for discarded cultic objects) is associated with a fire pit, hearth, decorated offering plate (with the foot of a bovine incised inside), and miniature vessels. These remains as well as the quality and quantity of vessels uncovered in situ sug gest a public, possibly cultic function. Also discovered was a range of vessels, including large storejars containing grain, a vat, amphoriskoi, teapots, cups, and jugs. Destruction debris encased the vessels in phase B, but the reuse of walls in phase A suggests an immediate recovery for the site. The settlement pattern changes from a fortified public complex to a domestic complex of interconnected long- and broadroom houses. Several houses had blocked pillar walls that were once freestanding. Such pillar construction ties Khirbet Iskander
to Negev desert sites such as Har Yeroham and Be'er Resisim. [See Be'er Resisim.] The style revives in the Iron Age I period. A study of three tabuns, querns, grinders, a mortar, and stone tables/benches within these buildings should pro vide insight into the still enigmatic domestic activities in EB IV. In Area C, three phases (A-C) of the Gateway were in vestigated at the southeastern crest. After the destruction of the fortifications, settlement patterning changed here as well, but the transformation was from domestic to public. The excavation exposed twelve squares in die latest phase (C), which comprised monumental, well-constructed guardrooms on either side of a 2.25-meter-wide bench-lined entryway. There were two rows of steps at each end of the plaster-coated passage. This passage was the only access point into the interior of the town, which was discovered when die wall lines were traced tiiat connect tiiis area with the domestic quarter uncovered in area A to the west. The northern steps led to a courtyard and partially paved storage bin. Connected to the guardrooms on both sides is a series of rooms, one of which contained three stone platforms and extensive flint debitage, indicative of a specialized work area. Broadroom houses below, in phases B and A, testify to the area's previous domestic nature. All of the EB IV tombs excavated were of the typical sin gle-shaft, round or square chamber variety, and all con tained secondary burials. T h e surprise discovery was a twochambered EB I tomb containing tiiirteen skulls and a variety of pottery (e.g., false-spouted jars, dipper juglets, and duck-handled vessels). When combined with the om phalos base and band-slipped fragments found in phase G in area B, this new and tantalizing tell and tomb data serve to underscore the gap in occupation at Khirbet Iskander during the urban EB II-III periods. BIBLIOGRAPHY Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 3. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 8 / 1 9 . New Haven, 1939. Parr, Peter J . "Excavations at Khirbet Iskander." Annual of the Depart ment of Antiquities of Jordan 4-5 (i960): 1 2 8 - 1 3 3 . Richard, Suzanne. "Toward a Consensus of Opinion on the End of the Early Bronze Age in Palestine-Transjordan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 237 (1980): 5-34. Richard, Suzanne, and Roger S. Boraas. "Preliminary Report of the 1 9 8 1 - 8 2 Seasons of the Expedition to Khirbet Iskander and Its V i cinity." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 254 (1984): 63-87. Richard, Suzanne. "Excavations at Khirbet Iskander, Jordan: A Glimpse at Settled Life during the 'Dark A g e ' in Palestinian A r chaeology." Expedition 28.1 (1986): 3 - 1 2 . Richard, Suzanne. " T h e Early Bronze Age: T h e Rise and Collapse of Urbanism." Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987): 2 2 - 4 3 . Richard, Suzanne, and Roger S. Boraas. "The Early Bronze IV Forti fied Site of Khirbet Iskander, Jordan: Third Preliminary Report, 1984 Season." In Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excava tions, 1982-8$, edited by Walter E . Rast, pp. 1 0 7 - 1 3 0 . Bulletin of the
ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY American Schools of Oriental Research, Supplement no. 25. Balti more, 1988. Richard, Suzanne. " T h e 1987 Expedition to Khirbet Iskander and Its Vicinity: Fourth Preliminary Report." In Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1983-87, edited by Walter E . Rast, pp. 3 3 - 5 8 . Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Sup plement no. 26. Baltimore, 1990. SUZANNE RICHARD
ISRAEL. See Palestine.
ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY. Since the Antiquities Authority Law was passed in 1989, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has been empowered by the government of Israel to administer the nation's Antiquities Law (1978). The IAA assumed the duties of the fotmer Is rael Department of Antiquities (IDA) and bears responsi bility for all archaeological matters. T h e IDA was founded in 1948, shortly after the establishment of the State of Israel, and initially was attached to the Ministry of Labor and Con struction. It was subsequentiy transferred to the Ministry of Education and Culture. Under the British Mandate ( 1 9 1 7 1948) all archaeological documentation (files, collections, maps, photographs, plans) belonging to the Department of Antiquities had been located in the Jordanian sector of Je rusalem, as was the Palestine Archaeological Museum and its research library. Starting from scratch, tire IDA set up six departments responsible for inspection, conservation ex cavations and surveys, museums, archives and library, and research and publications. It enlisted the assistance of ar chaeology enthusiasts throughout the country in reporting discoveries of remains, increasing the department's ability to record sites and antiquities and enhance awareness of tire need for antiquities protection. In its formative years, IDA staff included Shmuel Yeivin, director; Immanuel Ben-Dor, deputy director; P.L.O. Guy, director of excavations and surveys; Jacob Pinkerfeld, con servator of monuments and acting chief inspector of antiq uities; Michael Avi-Yonah, scientific secretary and acting inspector of antiquities in Jerusalem; Penuel Kahane, in spector of regional museums; Ya'aqov Ory, inspector of an tiquities in the southern district; Ruth Amiran, inspector of antiquities in the northern district; and Milka Cassuto, head library clerk. Through 1989, the IDA directors were Avraham Biran ( 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 7 4 ) , Avraham Eitan ( 1 9 7 4 - 1 9 8 8 ) , and Amir Drori ( 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 8 9 ) . Technical support staff in the form of surveyors, photographers, illustrators, and restorers was brought into the department, as were physical anthro pologists and lab personnel. In the 1980s a special team was assembled to prevent the robbery of antiquities from known and previously unknown sites. Among the largest excavations in which the department
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was involved were those at Tel Dan, Tel Ashdod, Tin-Gedi, Hammath-Gader, Beth-Shean, and Beth-Guvrin. A large survey project, the Negev Rescue Survey, was in operation from 1978 to 1988, overseeing rescue excavations and sur veys conducted as a result of the peace treaty with Egypt and the subsequent redeployment of the Israel Defense Forces in the Negev desert. Large rescue excavation projects were undertaken at Biq'at 'Uvdah, Ramat Matred, and in die Tel Malhata area during the survey. The IDA had been involved in hundreds of rescue exca vations, as well as in joint excavations with the Hebrew Uni versity and the Israel Exploration Society in Jerusalem and in other parts of the country. T h e Archaeological Survey of Israel began its work in 1964, and, since 1967, the office of the staff officer for archaeology for Judea and Samaria has also conducted numerous rescue excavations and surveys. The Antiquities Authority Law enumerates die functions of the IAA as follows: 8
8
Custodianship of archaeological sites. Some fifteen thou sand sites are currently known as the result of large-scale archaeological surveys. T h e country is divided into four regional districts, each overseen by a district archaeologist and a team of archaeological assistants. Excavations. Land excavations, salvage excavations, un derwater excavations, surveys, and the issuing of exca vation permits for local and foreign expeditions are die jurisdiction of the IAA. In the eighteen months preceeding July 1993, the IAA was involved in more than two hundred salvage excavations, employing a staff of more than two hundred and fifty archaeologists. Large rescue excavations were conducted where housing was being prepared for Russian and other immigrants in Jerusalem, Beersheba, Ashkelon, and Beth-Shemesh. Long-term ar chaeological excavations directed by the IAA were con ducted for purposes of tourism at Banias, Beth-Shean, Caesarea, Beth-Guvrin, Mareshah (Marisa), and 'EinHaseva. Many important archaeological excavations have also recently been conducted by the archaeological insti tutes at Israeli universities (The Hebrew University of Je rusalem at Tel Dor and Tel Hazor; Tel Aviv University at sites in die Golan; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev at Tel Haror; and the University of Haifa at Hatula, Cae sarea, and Tabun) as well as by academic institutions from the United States (the Harvard University expedi tion at Ashkelon), France (at Tel Yarmut), Japan (at 'EinGev), and other countries. IAA staff includes experts in die fields of prehistory, physical antiiropology, paleobot any, paleozoology, petrography, and carbon-14 dating.
• Theft. Preventing the theft of antiquities and monitoring antiquities dealers is the responsibility of a special IAA unit. There are regular patrols and inspection of all sites and regions as well as periodic visits to dealers.
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ISRAEL EXPLORATION SOCIETY
• Laboratories. T h e IAA operates scientific laboratories for preservation and restoration. Metal, glass, and ceramic artifacts are preserved and restored as well as photo graphed and drawn for purposes of documentation. • Curatorship. T h e curating, documentation, and storage of more than one million artifacts produced by excavations or by chance have been carried out by the IAA and tens of thousands have been lent to museums for permanent or temporary display. T h e Dead Sea Scrolls are part of this patrimony. • Documentation and recording. Archaeological information is recorded and documented by site, including data from the period of the British Mandate. All archaeological ma terial from IAA endeavors is organized, consolidated, and classified in a national database. • Public education. T h e IAA is responsible for the initiation and management of projects designed to promote public awareness and care for antiquities both in the society at large and throughout the educational system. • Publications. Major archaeological reports, articles, and notices are regularly published. Excavation reports were first published in 'Atiqot in 1955; in the original format there were separate English and Hebrew volumes—nine teen English and ten Hebrew volumes were published through 1990. Seven volumes have appeared in tire new combined English/Hebrew format. Hadashot Arkheologiyot has appeared in Hebrew since 1961 and the equivalent Excavations and Surveys in Israel (English translations) has appeared since 1982. Maps from the Archaeological Survey of Israel and the Negev Emergency Survey (six maps from areas in northern Israel, including 'Atlit, Haifa, and Ma'anit; four maps from Judea (Judah) and the cen tral part of the countty, including Herodium and tire hill country of Benjamin; and eight Negev maps that include the Sede Boqer and Mispe Ramon areas) have also been published. Guidebooks to sites such as Tiberias, Chorazin, and Ma'ale Adumin and a book called Highlights of Recent Excavations have also been published. • Library. A scientific library for the discipline of archae ology and related subjects is presently housed at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Preservation, restoration, and site development. Several teams of restorers, architects, and engineers form tire de partment responsible for preservation and restoration. Site development involves preparing tire site for visitors and includes reconstruction activities as well as the prep aration of explanatory signs and promotional material on the history of the site, and so forth. 0
The IAA's annual budget includes a S9-million base granted by Israel's Treasury Department through the Min istry of Education. A similar sum is generated by various excavations and projects through the Ministry of Tourism and by regional authorities for local development projects.
The conservation and restoration of Israel's archaeological heritage has assumed primary importance among the IAA's tasks and has thus enjoyed a considerable portion of its re sources. Some fifty sites throughout the country are cur rently under the care of IAA preservation teams, among them Tel Dan; Banias; Mt. Berenice in Tiberias; Caesarea; Beth-Guvrin, Mareshah (Marisa); an aqueduct on the He bron Road, Malha (the new site of the Biblical Zoo), and Mamilla near the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem; the synagogue at Ein-Gedi; Yeroham; 'Ein-'Evrona; and Timna'. In man aging and developing archaeological sites that will attract the general public and show visitors tangible evidence of Israel's past, the IAA attempts to minimize reconstruction and pre serve site integrity. A new IAA project is the 'Ein-Ya'el Liv ing Museum in the Jerusalem hills. T h e museum uses an archaeological site as the setting for educational seminars and workshops in ancient crafts. T h e IAA is involved in incorporating the many archaeological sites uncovered as a result of the rapid growth of new Jerusalem suburban neigh borhoods into area parks. [Most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries. See also Israel Exploration Society; Survey of Israel; and the biographies of Avi-Yonah, Guy, and Yeivin.] c
BIBLIOGRAPHY See Sefer HaChukkim 885 ( 1 0 February 1978): 76-83, forme Antiq uities L a w , 5 7 3 8 - 1 9 7 8 ; and Sefer HaChukkim 1 2 8 3 (3 August 1989): 88-94, f ° the Antiquities Authority L a w , 5749-1989, both passed by the Israeli parliament. r
RUDOLPH COHEN
ISRAEL EXPLORATION SOCIETY. On 7 No vember 1 9 1 3 , the first general meeting of die Jewish Pales tine Exploration Society (which became the Israel Explo ration Society in 1948) was convened by a group of Jewish intellectuals living in Ottoman Palestine. Until that time in vestigation of the ancient land of Israel had been the mo nopoly of foreign scholars and expeditions. In addition to a lecture that evening by Isaiah Press on " T h e History of Re search in the Land of Israel," tire program included an ad dress by tire society's chairman, the educator David Yellin, who stressed to the audience that the responsibility of a re born people in the land of the Patriarchs was to recover its material past and to leave behind "for the generations to come" evidence of the "holy books," which are "the inher itance of the whole world." Although the outbreak of World War I brought a halt to the society's activities, it was reestablished in 1920 under the direction of Nahum Slouschz, an archaeologist, historian, and scholar of Hebrew literature. T h e society's statutes pro claimed that it would hold lectures and seminars (many geared to the general public), establish a library and a mu seum in Jerusalem that would be the basis of an institute for
ISRAEL EXPLORATION SOCIETY the exploration of Palestine, organize tours, carry out sci entific excavations, and publish a scientific periodical, books, and pamphlets. T o meet the society's most urgent need, the raising of funds, committees of philanthropic Jews were formed in the United States, London, Paris, T h e Hague, and Egypt. By 1 9 2 3 , the society could report to the American committee that three excavations were underway and that the ruins of the ancient synagogue at Hammath Tiberias had been cleared. T h e first ancient menorah discovered in Palestine was found at Hammath Tiberias (the Israel Exploration So ciety subsequently chose it for its logo). A museum with a specialized library that had been built in 1 9 2 2 housed the finds from these first excavations, including the menorah and a fine collection of ancient Palestinian coins. This col lection eventually formed the nucleus of the archaeology section of the country's national museum in Jerusalem, T h e Israel Museum. In 1926, the library was moved to the newly formed Department of Archaeology at the Hebrew Univer sity of Jerusalem. In a story published on 6 March 1924, The London Times Weekly Edition gave international recognition to Slouschz's work in Absalom's T o m b and adjacent sepulchral monu ments in Jerusalem's Kidron Valley. In 1 9 2 5 , also under the society's auspices, Eleazar Lipa Sukenik and L. A. Mayer began an excavation of the Third Wall in Jerusalem, a pro ject critical to determining Jerusalem's boundaries in the first centuries BCE and CE. Arab insurrections between 1929 and 1 9 3 1 resulted in a temporary suspension of activity, but it was renewed in full force in the 1930s with excavations by Benjamin Maisler (Mazar) and Moshe Stekelis at Ramat Rahel, and by Maisler at Beth-She'arim, in addition to other, smaller projects. In 1934 the society opened the Institute for the Exploration of tire Land of Israel in Tel Aviv, but renewed hostilities in 1936 made convening its classes unfeasible. Within a decade of its foundation and despite shortages of funds, die society had issued five important publications, including two volumes of its Qobetz series and E. Branden burg's comprehensive study on 1 6 0 caves in the Jerusalem area. What began with the Qobetz series was continued in !933 by Yediot: Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, the society's first attempt to publish a quarterly de voted entirely to studies of the Land of Israel. In 1968 it was replaced by a new quarterly, Qadmoniot: Quarterly for the Antiquities of Eretz-Israel and Bible Lands. In the 1940s, lectures, conferences, and excavations were held without interruption, in spite of the world war and the hostilities that surrounded the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948. Scholars and the general public attended the society's first annual conference in Jerusalem in 1943; its fifth annual conference was held in war-scarred Jerusalem in 1948. With independence, the society became the Israel Exploration Society (IES), under the direction of Maisler
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(Mazar). For the IES, Maisler carried out the first excava tion under the new state at Tell Qasile, near Tel Aviv. T o communicate to foreign scholars tire results of Israeli sci entific investigations in the field, in 1 9 5 1 the first volume of the English-language quarterly, the Israel Exploration Jour nal (IEJ), was published. In that same year, the IES initiated a Hebrew (with English summaries) festschrift series, EretzIsrael: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies. T h e names of many of the society's founding members, whose work was fundamental to research into the land of Israel, appear as editors and contributors on the covers of the issues. In 1955 the IES mounted tire first large-scale archaeolog ical expedition earned out by local archaeologists at Hazor, under the direction of Yigael Yadin of the Hebrew Univer sity of Jerusalem. It was Israeli archaeology's first "field school" and its staff members now rank among the coumry's leading archaeologists. In i960 the IES organized another large-scale expedition, tiiis time to the Judean Desert Caves. Staffed by Yadin, Yohanan Aharoni, Pessah Bar-Adon, and Nahman Avigad; coordinated by the IES director, Joseph Aviram; and assisted by the Israeli army, the expedition was an organizational feat. Its purpose was to probe caves plun dered by bedouins searching for ancient manuscripts. The IES subsequently played a central role in the excavation of the Israelite citadel and Early Bronze Age city of Arad, the Herodian palace-fortress at Masada, the Temple Mount and Upper City in Jerusalem, Beth-Shean, Aphek, Herodium, Lachish, Dor, Elusa, and other sites. Forty-seven years after it was issued a license to excavate the City of David, the ancient kernal of Jerusalem, on its southeastern hill, the IES sponsored Yigal Shiloh's archaeological expedition there. [See Jerusalem.] In a country where numerous institutions deal with the study of the land, the publications of the IES represent au thoritatively the fields of Palestinian archaeology and related studies. In addition to its periodicals (see above), the IES publishes excavation reports (Hazor, Masada, and the Ju dean Desert expeditions) and special studies both in Hebrew and English. The IES's annual conferences are intended for the general public, and another annual meeting, during which die latest discoveries are reported, caters to the country's archaeolo gists. T h e IES has sponsored two international congresses on biblical archaeology (1984, 1990) in which the state of the art was reviewed and debated by the international schol arly community. In 1989, seventy-six years after it was established and forty-one years after die creation of the State of Israel, the IES and its director, Joseph Aviram, received the prestigious Israel Prize. It acknowledged the IES as the country's prin cipal and most effective institution for furthering knowledge of its archaeology and history both at home and abroad. [See also History of die Field, article on Archaeology in
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Israel; and the biographies ofAharoni, Avigad, Mazar, Shiloh, Stekelis, Sukenik, and Yadin. In addition, most of the sites men tioned are the subject of independent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Amiran, Ruth. Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land (1963). New Brunswick, N.J., 1970. Amiran, Ruth. Early Arad, vol. I, The Chalcolithic Settlement and Early Bronze Age City, First-Fifth Seasons of Excavations, 1962-1966. J e rusalem, 1978. Amitai, Janet, ed. Biblical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the Inter national Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984. J e rusalem, 1985. Avigad, Nahman. Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah: Remnants of a Burnt Archive. Jerusalem, 1986. Aviram, Joseph, et al., eds. Masada: The Yigael Yadin Excavations, 1963-1965, Final Reports. 4 vols. Jerusalem, 1989-1994. Ben-Tor, Amnon, ed. Hazor III-IV: An Account of the Third and Fourth Seasons of Excavation, 1957-1958. Jerusalem, 1989. Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Aviram, eds. Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Ar chaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990. Jerusalem, 1993. Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, 1988. Judean Desert Caves, Survey and Excavations: The Expedition to the Ju dean Desert, 1960-1961. 2 vols. Jerusalem, 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 6 1 . Kempinski, Aharon, and Ronny Reich, eds. The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. Jerusalem, 1992. Mazar, Benjamin. The Early Biblical Period: Historical Studies. Edited by Shmuel Ahituv and Baruch Levine. Jerusalem, 1986. Stern, Ephraim, et al., eds. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Yadin, Yigael, et al. Hazor: An Account of the Excavations, 1955-1958. 4 vols, in 3. Jerusalem, 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 6 1 . Yadin, Yigael. The Finds from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters. Jerusalem, 1963. Yadin, Yigael. The Temple Scroll. 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1983. JANET AMITAI
ISRAELITES. The name Israelis used to designate the entirety of the people as well as the political entity formed by this people. In every instance what the term embraces is subject to historically determined variations. Nomenclature. "The people" is understood as die amal gamation of twelve tribes, each of which is traced back to a tribal father. Their common father is Jacob, who, as a logical consequence, is renamed Israel (Gn. 3 2 : 2 3 - 3 3 ) . The Isra elite people are thus fictitiously traced back to an ancestor of the same name. This construction presupposes the polit ical union of the tribes under the kingdom; consequently, the use of the name as a designation for the people first dates from the period of the monarchy. At the same time, the name Israelis most often used for the ten northern tribes, in contrast to Judah (2 Sm. 3:10, 5:5, etc.). After the division of the kingdom in 927 BCE, the name Israel is used to des ignate the northern ldngdom. With the demise of the north ern kingdom in 722 BCE, the name is also used to refer to Judah (2 Chr. 1 1 : 3 , 2 1 : 2 ) . After the end of Judah in 587 BCE,
Israel becomes a religious definition in order to differentiate die people who worship Yahweh from the surrounding peo ples. [See Judah.] In contrast to the more than twenty-five hundred refer ences to Israel in the Bible, there are only a few exfrabiblical ones. The oldest mention is found on the Israel stela of Phar aoh Merneptah ( 1 2 1 3 - 1 2 0 3 BCE), where the name was rep resented in die so-called group writing as ysr'r (ANET 378). According to Helmut Engel (arguing against Gosta Ahlstrom, 1986), the determinative points to the fact that, in con trast to the previously mentioned cities of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yeno'am, the reference is to a population group in the region of the land of Canaan. T h e spelling ysr'l in the M o abite Mesha inscription from the ninth century BCE (ANET 32off.) and the Aramaic stela fragment from Dan (Biran and Naveh, 1993) corresponds to the biblical spelling and is ev idence for the general use of the Assyrian form sir-'i-la-a-a, from the time of Shalmaneser III (shortly after 853 BCE) (ANET 2 7 8 f f ) . [See Moabite Stone; Dan.] T h e name is constructed with the theophoric element El; the verbal ele ment is formed using the root JOT, whose meaning is unclear because of a lack of evidence. In the folk-etymological ex planation in Genesis 32:29, the name is linked witii srh, "to fight." For the time being the etymology must remain open. Origins. The name is not attested in die Bible for die prestate period; Israel as a nation-state is not historically un derstandable before 1000 BCE. However, the Egyptian ref erence shows that there must have been a population ele ment with this name, although no closer determination is possible either ethnically or witii respect to geographic set tlement. T h e Song of Deborah (Jgs. 5 : 1 3 - 1 8 ) names a total of ten ttibes, which to be sure did not form a political unity but were nevertheless pledged to common action in case of war 011 behalf of Yahweh. With two exceptions, the names are identical with those in the later system of twelve tribes: Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulon, Issachar, Reuben, Gilead, Dan, Asher, and Naphtali. These tribes did not form a political unit and did not have control over a self-contained settlement area; however, they were later merged into the totality of the Israelite people. The origin of the Israelite tribes is unknown. T h e biblical story of a long stay in Egypt is fiction. Locating the emer gence of Israel as a people in Egypt in a time period lacking precise description shows that no unified ttadition existed concerning die origin of the people. A reconstruction of Is rael as an ethnic unit in the prestate period is purely hypo thetical. Because the report in Joshua 1 - 1 2 of the conquering of the land is similarly not historical, two different models, with various modifications—the "revolution" model and the "immigration" model—have been developed recently to ex plain the occupation of the land; each also explains the origin of tiiese new population groups, replacing older "conquest" models. T h e revolution model (Mendenhall, 1 9 6 2 , 1 9 7 0 ; Got-
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twald, 1979; Lemche, 1985) postulated a social revolution within the Canaanite city-states at die end of the Late Bronze Age. This radical change resulted in the ruling class losing power and die lower class becoming independent. T h e latter group then left the urban centers and founded new settlements outside die previously settled areas. This thesis explains the downfall of the city-states as a revolu tionary event and identifies the population of the new set tlements as Canaanites, who certainly modified their life
style and social structure but nevertheless retained their economic form and material culture. T h e immigration model (Alt, 1989; Finkelstein, 1988; Fritz, 1987) postulates a nomadic population outside of the Canaanite city-states, with which they engaged in economic and cultural ex changes. Witii the collapse of the urban centers, this sym biotic relationship of the nomadic groups and the cities nec essarily came to an end. Therefore, the groups outside the cities were forced to form fixed settlements in order to feed
194
ISRAELITES
themselves by practicing agriculture and stock breeding. Thus, a modification of the economic system was connected with a modification of lifestyle. The inhabitants of the new settlements were from elements formerly in the areas sur rounding the cities, but it is impossible to determine their ethnic identity any more closely than that. Possibilities in clude the underprivileged groups called 'Apiru (Hapiru) in sources, or the nomads also named in the texts, of which the Shasu (s3sw) were tire most important group. The historical processes for the Israelite tribes developing from the Canaanite population or from groups outside the city-states are, however, largely obscure, making it impos sible to choose between the hypotheses. The archaeological remains also give no certain data regarding the origin of the inhabitants in the new settlements. The variety in settlement patterns and construction forms supports the idea of a mixed population. Thus, it seems entirely possible to com bine the two hypotheses. Both forms of development are conceivable and could have taken place in a parallel fashion. Following tire collapse of the Canaanite city-states, portions of the Canaanite population could very well have sought other habitation sites. At the same time, tire nomadic pop ulations in the vicinity of the cities could have been forced to occupy new settlement areas. In any case, the various elements of the population were not cut off from each other but were, rather, involved in many forms of exchange, which were continually altered in form and content. The final de struction of most of the cities, which took place no later than the first half of the twelfth century BCE, altered the previous ways of life so radically that all the groups living in the land were forced to give up their familiar way of life to found and occupy new settlement sites. Because the two hypotheses complement each other in explaining the development of tire new settlements, they can also be used to reconstruct the historical processes. Settlements. In comparison with the Late Bronze Age cities, the disttibution of the Iron Age I settlements presents a completely different picture. Not only has the number of settlements greatly increased, but they are also generally lo cated outside the spheres of influence of the former citystates, in areas that were only sporadically settled or com pletely unsettled during the second millennium BCE. The preferred regions for the settlements, which generally had a size of only 0 . 5 - 1 ha ( 1 - 2 . 5 acres), are Galilee, the central hill country, the Negev desert, and the cultivated strip along the middle of the east bank of the Jordan River. However, even in layout and size, the Early Iron Age settlements are fundamentally different from the Canaanite cities because of their lack of large-scale palaces and temples. [See Palace; Temples, article on Syro-Palestinian Temples.] In addition, the settlements are as a rule unfortified, even in those cases where the houses located on the perimeter are laid out in the form of a fortification ring, The settlements are character ized by an ad hoc plan, as well as by the presence of nu
merous silos and cisterns. [See Cisterns.] Three types of set tlement can be differentiated on the basis of their layout. 1. Ring-form settlements. Houses organized in a circle or an oval, which created a central open area, are known as ring-form settlements. Examples were found at Tel Esdar stratum III, Izbet Sartah stratum III, and Beersheba stratum VII. 2. Nucleated villages. Settlements characterized as having been built up randomly, either with individual houses or with complexes consisting of several buildings, are known as nucleated villages. There may be su-eets of varying width or irregularly shaped open areas between the various units. The arrangement of the houses is completely unplanned, and the settlement is open on the perimeter. T h e settlements of Ai, Khirbet Raddanah, 'Izbet Sartah stratum II, Tel Masos stratum II, and Beersheba stratum VI are examples of this type. 3. Farmsteads. Individual buildings or a group of build ings surrounded by a wall and that may have had a certain protective function are known as farmsteads. T h e remains at Beit Jala and on Mt. Ebal are freestanding farmsteads. Architecture. With the exception of the architecture, the material culture of the Early Iron Age shows a strong con tinuity with that of the preceding Late Bronze Age period. Only the house construction—the so-called "four-room" house—shows a certain originality. Even if the construction types are supposed not to have been deeply rooted in the Late Bronze Age, the almost complete lack of courtyard houses and the development of new forms of construction give the Iron Age I a distinctive cultural stamp. Irrespective of the differences in the type of settlement, it is possible to determine die development of a few house types that be came common in Iron II as well. 1. Broadroom houses. While it is true that broadroom houses occur only occasionally, they are by no means re stricted to ring-form settlements. Their distinguishing char acteristic is the position of the entrance on tire long side of the building. Originally, this type was a single-roomed house; however, it could also be divided by stone pillars along its length and was provided with small rooms sepa rated by diagonal walls. 2. Pillar houses. As rare as the broadroom house, the pil lar house is a rectangular building with the entrance on the narrow side. It is divided along its length by two rows of stone pillars. Of the three long rooms formed in this fashion, the middle room is wider than the two side rooms. This part was presumably not roofed and was therefore an open courtyard. 3. Three- and four-room houses. Residential architecture is primarily characterized by three- and four-room houses that often are arranged in a row next to each other. [See Four-room House.] The "four-room house" indicates a building that, like tire pillar house, is divided by two rows of stone pillars along its lengtii, but that has an additional room
ISRAELITES situated on die side opposite the entrance. The room ex tends across the entire width of the house. The designation "four-room house" is misleading, insofar as the central area was an open courtyard providing air and light for the other rooms. The basic conception could be varied by interior and exterior structures, as well as by changes in construction; however, the ubiquitousness of the plan shows that it was a firmly established type. T h e three-room house is simply a variant of this construction form, in which there is only one side room next to the courtyard. These three forms of residential house are closely related typologically, but no clear derivation has yet been estab lished. In spite of tiieir courtyards, the Iron Age houses are fundamentally different from the courtyard house in their use of stone pillars and in the arrangement of the rooms. Although the LB courtyard house cannot possibly be the model for the form of the residential house in the Iron Age, in LB cities there are occasional instances of buildings di vided by rows of stone pillars. Even if tiiis form of room construction represents an exception, it is still possible in the last analysis to trace the division of rectangular rooms by stone pillars back to the Canaanite culture. However, the predominance of tiiis construction type and its almost ex clusive use in the Early Iron Age is new. T h e broadroom house, the pillar house, and the four-room house are all characteristic of the Early Iron Age settlements. It is striking that up to the present time there is still no evidence of cult buildings for the period. There may have been sacred struc tures outside the settlements, but so far there is no clear proof of any. C e r a m i c s . The ceramic repertoire of the Late Bronze Age was taken over and developed in die Iron Age. In the process, decoration with geometric patterns and mytholog ical motifs disappeared almost completely. Slip and burnish became new techniques for surface treatment. Apart from changes in its design, the cooking pot was provided with two handles, and a pot with a narrow opening was developed from the jug. Some forms, such as the jug with a spout and the collar-rim jar were not used after the end of Iron I. [See Ceramics, article on Syro-Palestinian Ceramics of the Neo lithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.] Metallurgy. In metalworking as well the Canaanite tra dition was carried on in the beginning; this is demonsteated especially by the Early Iron Age hoards found in the old urban centers of Megiddo, Beth-Shean, and Tell esSa'idiyeh. [See Megiddo; Beth-Shean; Sa'idiyeh, Tell-es.] However, even in the new settlements weapons and tools were manufactured from bronze using older metiiods and designs. As a new form, the bowed fibula was adopted from the Aegean area during Iron II. After the collapse of foreign trade at the end of the Late Bronze Age, the raw material presumably came from the only known deposits in the coun try, at Feinan, on the east edge of the 'Arabah. [See Feinan.] In the case of many tools and weapons, however, bronze
195
was gradually replaced by iron. Above all knives, sickles, daggers, and swords were made exclusively from iron from the tenth century BCE onward because the blades could be sharpened better and were stronger. The prerequisite for this changeover was the development of a new technology for tempering iron. The early manufacture of steel resulted from forging in conjunction with heating in a charcoal fire, so that the iron was carburized. T h e carbon gave a greater strength to the iron, making it superior to bronze. [See Met als, article on Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.] Language. In the Early Iron Age villages the population most probably spoke an early form of Hebrew. It is true that long inscriptions are lacking, but the core portion of the Song of Deborah (Jgs. 5:i2ff.) permits the conclusion. In any case, this song remains the only text from the prestate period. From the tenth century BCE onward, die Hebrew language is attested by botii biblical and extrabiblical sources. Like Canaanite, Phoenician, and Aramaic, Hebrew is one of the noruiwest group of Semitic languages. As nu merous other Northwest Semitic idioms, Hebrew was writ ten with an alphabetic script that consisted only of conso nants. This had been developed in the southern Levant during the course of the second millennium BCE. In contrast to the syllabic script of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the alpha betic script represented an innovation and a simplification. Based on an acrophonic principle (every symbol reproduces the sound of the first letter of the word after which it is named), it reduces the written characters to the number of sounds present in a language. The oldest documentation for this form of writing in Hebrew is the ostracon from 'Izbet Sartah. This abecedary, or handwriting exercise, consists of five lines scratched onto a fragment of pottery (ostracon); the bottom line reproduces the letters of the Hebrew alpha bet—with the exception of mem—in die sequence still used today, although 'ayin and pe have traded places. [See Ostra con.] T h e letters are written by an unpracticed hand from left to right and are in die tradition of the Proto-Canaanite script, as it is attested by short inscriptions from the Ca naanite cities. [See Hebrew Language and Literature.] Urbanization. After the foundation of the kingdom, there was a wave of urbanization under David and Solomon that led to die dissolution of the village form of settlement in Iron II. This reurbanization continued during the course of die United Monarchy. Building the new cities corre sponded to die requirements for the new state to consolidate its power internally and externally. Because different re quirements governed the location of the city, there was con tinued development only in exceptional cases. T o found a city it was necessary to have a nearby source of living water, arable land in the vicinity; and a strategic location in terms of defense and commercial and other traffic. These had been the prerequisites for die Canaanite cities, so it is not sur prising that a number of Iron Age cities were founded on Bronze Age tells. Furthermore, the Canaanite settlements
196
ISRAELITES
that had survived the collapse of the culture were included in the newly formed kingdom of David and Solomon. Based on tiieir layout, the cities can be divided into four groups: (i) residential cities; (2) cities with limited admin istrative or military function; ( 3 ) administrative or military centers; and (4) royal cities. [For details, see Cities, article on Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages.] In spite of their differ ences, these various types of cities reveal a series of common characteristics. In plan they are round or oval, which is de termined by the character of the topography (they were erected either on a mountaintop or on an older tell—sloping sites and or sites on spurs are rare. The city was surrounded by a strong ring of walls, where various fortification ele ments, such as massive walls, casemate walls, and projecting towers, could be utilized. As a rule, the city's single gate took on civil functions in tire absence of other large buildings. In residential construction, the three- and four-room houses predominated, but public buildings were laid out as pillar houses; in addition there were palace structures. Numerous cities were equipped with their own water-supply systems, a significant technical achievement. Urban foundations at the outset of the kingdom were planned. A state with the desire to expand must factor in the need for defense and take appropriate measures. T h e new phase of urbanization in Israel that coincided with the formation of the state reflects the strong desire to structure the country politically. The settlements were fitted inside a ring of walls in order to offer the inhabitants a certain mea sure of security in case of attack. The technical execution of those fortifications was adopted from the country's con struction tradition and topography. Economy. In the prestate period, as during the mon archy, the economy was based on farming and stock breed ing. Agriculture was not restricted to growing grain, but in cluded vineyards and olive groves. Sheep and goats were the primary livestock, although cattle accounted for about a fourth of the livestock raised. In any case, planting based on rainfall and a mixed economy must be assumed. T h e food stuffs produced were mainly for direct consumption; any excess would have been exchanged for finished goods from craftspeople: primarily ceramics, weapons, bronze and iron tools, and jewelry. Society. In the Early Iron Age settlements social differ ences seem not to have been very marked, inasmuch as the overall construction is very homogeneous. In spite of this uniformity, a certain social stratification must be postulated. Ownership is ownership of land, and this could vary in size. For example, the story of Nabal (r Sin. 25) shows that there were already large landholders in Israel in the prestate pe riod. The amount of land under cultivation determined eco nomic strength, and this in turn determined social standing. With the advent of the kingdom, the social structure was modified to tire extent that the king and his entourage oc cupied the highest position. Responsibilities connected to
administration and military obligations demanded, on the one hand, the possession of land as crown estate and, on tire other, a contribution from the people in the form of taxes in goods and services. This could lead to the appropriation of the property of the individual and in the long run to an overall restructuring of all relationships relating to property. In any case, changes in ownership, in the final analysis, nec essarily resulted in a change in the social order. The ldng had not only political, but also economic power; possession of land, contributions, and services secured his supremacy, in which the members of his entourage shared. Farmers could make up for the necessary contributions only by cutting back on their own needs or through increased cultivation. Because only large landholders were able to in crease the amount of land in production and the size of their work force, the kingdom necessarily led to a two-class so ciety: an economically powerful, but small, upper class and the mass of small farmers whom debt could reduce to the status of slaves. Monarchy t o Exile. Under pressure from the Philistines, the Israelite tribes formed a state by raising Saul to tire king ship. In the beginning this consisted only of cooperation in common military endeavors. David was the first leader to provide the kingdom with the necessary stability by elimi nating the Philistine threat and by subduing the neighboring states of Ammon, Moab, and Edom, as well as the small Aramaic principalities. [See Ammon; Moab; Edom; Ara means.] Through personal union David united not only the dominion over Judah, but also the kingdom of Israel over the northern tribes and tire royal status of the city of Jeru salem that he had conquered (2 Sm. 2 : 1 - 4 , 5 o ) . Under his son and successor, Solomon, there followed the conse quent elaboration of the state in the realm of internal politics. With Solomon's death, the kingdom David had built fell apart because the vassals defected; its division into the two ldngdoms of Israel and Judah followed (1 Kgs. n , 1 2 ) , Of the two kingdoms, Israel was at first the stronger economi cally, and all of Judah's attempts to reestablish the unity of the ldngdom failed because of Israel's military superiority. A peace arrangement was not established until the ninth century BCE, when it was sealed by the marriage of Jehoram, heir to the throne of Judah, to the Israelite princess Athaliah, one of the daughters of Ahab (2 Kgs. 8:18). In the course of the western campaigns of the Assyrians in the eighdr century BCE, Israel was conquered by Tiglath-Pileser III; a large por tion of the territory of the state was incorporated into the Assyrian kingdom as the provinces of Dor, Megiddo, and Gilead. [See Assyrians; Dor; Gilead.] In 7 2 2 BCE, the con quest of tire capital city of Samaria meant the end of the northern kingdom of Israel. T h e remaining area was set up under direct Assyrian administration as the province of Sa maria. In Judah, the ldngdom continued to exist under As syrian rule until the Assyrians were replaced by the Baby lonians. With the seizure of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar : I _ I
ISTITUTO ITALIANO PER IL MEDIO ED ESTREMO ORIENTE in 586 BCE, however, the king was exiled to Babylon. With the Exile, the kingdom ruled by the dynasty David founded came to an end. After their loss of sovereignty, the popula tions of the states of Israel and Judah and their neighbors lived in exile both inside and outside the country under the changing rule of the great powers that succeeded each other in turn. Until its destruction in 70 CE, the Temple in Jeru salem that Solomon had founded and that was newly reerected after the Exile became the focal point of the people. [See Biblical Temple.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahlstrom, Gosta W. Who Were the Israelites? Winona Lake, Ind., 1986. Ahlstrom, Gosta W. The History ofAncient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander's Conquest. Journal for the Study of the Old T e s tament, Supplement 146. Sheffield, 1993. Alt, Albrecht. Essays on Old Testament History and Religion. Sheffield, 1989. Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Naveh. " A n Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel D a n . " Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993): 8 1 - 9 8 . Borowski, Oded. Agriculture in Iron Age Israel. Winona Lake, Ind., 1987. Coote, Robert B . " T h e Meaning of the N a m e Israel." Harvard Theo logical Review 65 (1972): 1 3 7 - 1 4 2 . Coote, Robert B . , and Keith W. Whitelam. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield, 1987. Davies, Philip R. The Origins of Israel in the Biblical Period. Sheffield, 1992. De Geus, C . H. J . The Tribes of Israel. Assen, 1976. Donner, Herbert. Geschichte des Volkes Israel und seiner Nachbarn in Grundziigen. 2 vols. Gottingen, 1984-1986. Engel, Helmut. "Die Siegesstele des Merenptah." Biblica 60 (1970): 373-399Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, 1988. Flanagan, James W. David's Social. Drama: A Hologram of Israel's Early Iron Age. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 73. Sheffield, 1988. Frick, Frank S. The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel. Sheffield, 1985. Fritz, Volkmar. "Conquest or Settlement? T h e Early Iron Age in Pal estine." Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987): 8 4 - 1 0 0 . Fritz, Volkmar. Die Stadl im alien Israel. Munich, 1990. Gottwald, Norman K . The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. Maryknoll, N . Y . , 1979. Halpern, Baruch. The Emergence of Israel in Canaan. Chico, Calif., 1983. Hayes, John H., and J . Maxwell Miller, eds. Israeliie andjudaean His tory. Philadelphia, 1977. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Settlement and Fortification Planning in the Iron A g e . " In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 2 3 1 - 2 7 4 . Jerusalem, 1992. Hopkins, David C . The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age. Sheffield, 1985. Kochavi, Moshe. " A n Ostracon of the Period of the Judges from 'Izbet Sartah." Tel Aviv 4 (1977): 1 - 1 3 . Lemaire, Andre. "Asriel, sr'l, Israel et l'origine de la confederation israelite." Velus Testamenlum 23 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 239-243. Lemche, Niels Peter. Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society before the Monarchy. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, 37. Leiden, 1985. Margalith, Othniel. "On the Origin and Antiquity of the Name 'Israel.'" Zeitschrift fiir die alllestamcntliche Wissenschaft 1 0 2 (1990): 2 2 5 - 2 3 7 .
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Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B. CE. N e w York, 1990. Mendenhall, George E. " T h e Hebrew Conquest of Palestine." Biblical Archaeologist 25 (1962): 66-87. Miller, J . Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. Philadelphia, 1986. Naveh, Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet. Jerusalem, 1982. Shiloh, Yigal. "Elements in the Development of Town Planning in tire Israelite City." Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978): 3 6 - 5 1 . Soggin, J . Alberto. A Histoiy of Israel: From the Beginnings to the Bar Kochba Revolt, A.D. 135. London, 1984. Stager, Lawrence E . " T h e Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Is rael." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 260 (November 1985): 1 - 3 5 . Weippert, Helga. Paldstina in vorhellenislischer Zeit. Handbuch der Archiiologie, vol. 2. Munich, 1988. Wilson, Robert R. Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel. Philadelphia, 1980. VOLKMAR FRITZ Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
ISTANBUL. See Constantinople. ISTITUTO ITALIANO PER IL MEDIO ED ESTREMO ORIENTE. The Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East, known as IsMEO, was founded in 1933 by Giovanni Gentile, who was its first president. Giu seppe Tucci, who had been close to Gentile, became pres ident in 1947. He was succeeded by Sabatino Moscati in 1978 and by Gherardo Gnoli in 1979. T h e institute was founded in response botii to the foreign policy needs of the Italian government at the time and to the lagging development of oriental studies, particularly con cerning areas beyond the Near East, as compared to that of other European countries. T h e stated aims of the institute, which operates under die supervision of the Ministry of For eign Affairs, are concerned witii cultural relations between Italy and Asian countries, as well as with the study of Asian civilizations. It originally also had the task of fostering eco nomic relations, but that never came within the main focus of its efforts. Currently boasting more than 100 general members (who alone have voting rights in every decision taken), more than 150 associate members, and about 70 cor responding members in countries in Asia and Europe and in the United States, the institute's members are orientalist scholars and archaeologists from numerous universities and cultural institutions, as well as Italian diplomats. IsMEO is currently engaged in archaeological work in Ne pal, Oman, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Hungary, and Ye men. New projects will involve China, Jordan, India, and Mongolia. Its research is organized through agreements with Italian institutions (mainly the National Research Council and the Oriental Institute of Naples), as well as with foreign institutions in Europe (in Austria, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Hungary), the United States,
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and Asia (in China, Japan, Jordan, India, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, and Yemen). GHERARDO GNOLI
IVORY. See Bone, Ivory, and Shell.
'IZBET SARTAH, hill country site located northeast of Rosh ha-'Ayin, southwest of Kafr Qasim, and about 1 6 km ( 1 0 mi.) east of Tel Aviv (map reference 14675 X 16795). In the western margins of the western hill country, the site is situated on a hill that borders on and overlooks the coastal plain. Tel Aphek, site of a Canaanite city-state on the coastal plain, is about 31cm (2 mi.) to die west, across the Aphek Pass. With access to the Yarkon River controlled by Aphek, occupants of Izbet Sartah had to store water in cisterns cut into die hillside. [See Aphek; Cisterns.] An archaeological survey team from Tel Aviv University discovered die site in 1 9 7 3 . Excavations, directed by Moshe Kochavi, continued for four seasons (1976-1978) under the auspices of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv Uni versity and the Department for the Land of Israel Studies at Bar-Ilan University, with Israel Finkelstein serving as field director. The excavators distinguished three Iron Age strata: the two earliest date to Iron I; the latest, to the beginning of Iron II. Six other Iron I sites were identified nearby. Settie ment patterns in the region and architectural features in every stratum of die site indicate that the occupants of'Izbet Sartah belonged to the population that settled hundreds of hill country sites in the early Iron Age. An oval-shaped settlement established at the end of die thirteenth or at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE was uncovered at the earliest level, stratum III. The site was roughly half an acre in size, with a continuous outer wall. Access was from the northeast; where a narrow opening flanked by monolithic doorjambs led to stone-paved open space. At the center of the settlement was a courtyard in which several stone-faced silos were found. The courtyard was surrounded by a wall, to which a belt of contiguous broad rooms of various widths was attached. T h e rooms lacked internal doorways and had to be entered from the courtyard. Their walls, made out of large stones, were pre served to one course and most of the floors were bedrock. Sherds from the entire settlement history of stratum III were uncovered, and the variety of pottery types indicates that the inhabitants interacted witii the people of the nearby coastal plain. Because the site was situated on the border between the hill country and the coastal plain, 'Izbet Sartah was affected by regional rivalries. At the beginning of die eleventh century BCE, the stratum III settiement was aban doned as a result of growing tensions between the people of the hill country and the Philistines on the coastal plain. [See Philistines, article on Early Philistines.]
Abandonment was apparently planned, as only a few complete pottery vessels, including three collar-rim storejars, were found. Among die earliest pieces were fragments of a Mycenaean stirrup jar, a krater of the "ibex-and-palm" type, and a krater with a "palm" ornamentation applied in relief; bases of "Canaanite" jars; cooldng pots with an everted rim; and various bowls in pottery styles of the Late Bronze Age. T h e latest pottery pieces were rims of redslipped bowls and fragments of jars with plain, unshaped rims. 'Izbet Sartah was resettled at the end of the eleventh cen tury BCE, after the destruction of Aphek and probably as part of the Israelite westward expansion from the hill country to the coastal plain—perhaps under King Saul. There are in dications that aspects of this stratum II settiement were planned. Its layout varies significantly from that of stratum III in size—it was roughly an acre—and in its internal con figuration. At the center of the settiement a large, four-room house (16 X 1 2 m) was preserved up to three courses of stone with outer walls as much as 1.4 m thick. Three long, connecting rooms were separated by two rows of stone pillars. An en closed room was situated perpendicular to them along the south wall. The floors of the side rooms were made out of stone slabs; the rest were of bedrock or beaten earth. T h e only entrance was at the northern end of the long western wall, and a small room was attached to the house at its north west corner (see figure 1 ) . Clustered around three sides of the house were forty-three silos that had been dug into a light-colored, mud-brick ma terial, as well as the rooms of the earlier stratum. This brick substance, ubiquitous in stratum III, was reused as foun dation material for the stratum II houses, which were built in a series along the edge of the site. Like the large central house, two of tiiese smaller structures had four rooms. Al though they were positioned near the slope of the hill, these structures did not function as a line of defense because they were not built contiguously. The silos, which were lined with small and medium-sized stones, held an estimated volume of 1.3 cu m. Found inside of one of diem (no. 605) was an ostracon in two fragments bearing eighty-six letters of Proto-Canaanite script, the longest Proto-Canaanite inscription uncovered in the coun try to date. Only one line of the five-line inscription, a ProtoCanaanite abecedary, is legible. [See Proto-Canaanite.] The stratum II settlement was abandoned after only a few decades, perhaps in the wake of the Philistine consolidation of power in the region. 'Izbet Sartah was reoccupied shortly thereafter, however, at the beginning of the tenth century BCE, perhaps when Israelite expansion westward was re sumed under King David. T h e stratum I site was smaller than that of stratum II, but their plans were similar. T h e four-room house was rebuilt with partitions between the col-
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'IZBET SARTAH. Figure I .
Four-room house after restoration.
umns, and two rooms, with installations, were added at the north of tire building. A few new silos also were added. In the process of rebuilding, the stratum II houses at the edge of the site were damaged. T h e same pottery types as those found in stratum II were uncovered in stratum I; only a statistical analysis can differentiate sherds from tire two lev els. [See also Four-room House; Granaries and Silos.] Like stratum II, the stratum I site was abandoned after a brief occupation, this time because the fertile Yarkon basin had opened to Israelite settlement. Tzbet Sartah was never resettled, but during the later Byzantine period it was used as an agricultural site. Stones taken from stratum II struc tures were reused to build several walls, one of them around the top of the hill. [See also Canaanites.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cross, Frank Moore. "Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 238 (1980): 1 - 2 0 . Demsky, Aaron. " A Proto-Canaanite Abecedary Dating from die Pe riod of the Judges and Its Implications for the History of the Alpha bet." Tel Aviv A, (1977): 1 4 - 2 7 . Dotan, Aron. " N e w Light on the 'Izbet Sartah Ostracon." Tel Aviv 8 (1981): 160-172. Finkelstein, Israel. 'Izbet Sartah: An Early Iron Age Site near Rosh Ha'ayin, Israel. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 299. Oxford, 1986. Kochavi, Moshe. " A n Ostracon of the Period of die Judges from 'Izbet Sartah." Tel Aviv 4 (1977): 1 - 1 3 .
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(Courtesy A S O R Archives)
Naveh, Joseph. "Some Considerations on the Ostracon from 'Izbet Sartah." Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978): 3 1 - 3 5 . LESLIE WATKINS Based on material submitted by Israel Finkelstein
IZEH,
a plain and a town located in the western Bakhtiari Mountains of Iran and known as Malamir in the later Islamic period until 1 9 3 5 . The plain, approximately 22 km (14 mi.) long and 1 0 km (6 mi.) wide, is mainly used for agriculture. An archaeological survey uncovered numerous ancient sites from as early as the third millennium, but no full-scale ex cavation has yet been carried out there (Wright, 1979). Re liefs carved on the surrounding rocks and boulders testify to tlie site's importance from the early second millennium BCE until the Parthian period. The rock carvings are presented here in a proposed chronological order. The numbering of tlie individual reliefs follows Louis Vanden Berghe (1963). E l a m i t e Period. In default of excavated finds, rock carv ings are almost the only evidence for Elamite culture in the Izeh valley. They show people in cultic ceremonies. The earliest reliefs were manufactured in die Old Elamite period; the most important carvings range from the twelfth century BCE up to the Neo-Elamite period. Shah Savar. At the southeastern end of the plain, a smootiied panel is cut in a vertical cliff. Only the upper part of tlie panel was used for a frieze in low relief. Four standing orants are introduced by a fifth to a seated deity. The sttucmre (tlie pictoral frieze over a blank area) and the topic
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(orants with an enthroned god) can be compared with the Elamite rock reliefs at Kurangun and Naqsh-i Rustam, dated to the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE, re spectively. [See Naqsh-i Rustam.] Hung-i Nowruzi (mod. Hung-Azhdar). At the north ern end of the plain, two oblong panels are cut into a boul der. The relief is carved only in the lower space. Faint re mains of at least seven standing figures can be discerned. The little that is preserved seems to resemble tire Shah Savar panel and may date to the same period. Shikaft-i Salman I—IV. At the southwestern border, there is a wide cave with a spring. Two reliefs (Shikaft-i Salman I and II) are carved on the outside, on the cliff at the right side of the cave, and two (III and IV) on the inside. Carved in relief I are two men, a child, and a woman who are standing and facing left, behind a thymiaterion (or cen ser); in II a man, a child, and a woman face left (see figure i); in III a man faces right; and in IV a man wearing a long skirt faces right. All the figures face tire place where water springs from the rock and where a huge water (?) channel comes from above. Their hands are posed in two different Elamite prayer gestures: one or both hands raised before the face or clasped at the waist (figure 1). The figures have sty listic parallels in a relief from Susa that was assembled by
IZEH. Figure 1. Shikaft-i gisches Institut, Tehran)
Pierre Amiet (Arts Asialiques 32 [1976]; 1 3 - 2 8 ) from scat tered glazed bricks; the Susa relief is dated to the time of Shilhak-Inshushinak (twelfth century BCE) by a contempo rary inscription. T h e rock reliefs at Shikaft-i Salman are accompanied by cuneiform inscriptions that name Hanni son of Tahhi, chief of Ajapir, as having commissioned them. He is the same ruler who commissioned the inscription and relief Kul-i Farah I (see below); he may have lived anywhere between the late eighth and early sixth centuries BCE. Thus, the dates of manufacture of the reliefs and of the inscriptions are separated by several centuries, which can be explained only by means of a usurpation of older pictures by Hanni. Nevertheless, the late inscriptions may hint at the signifi cance of the place. The large text to the left of relief III relates the dedication (?) of images of Hanni and his family to the goddess Mashti at a place called Tarrisha. As neither the deity's nor die place's name are mentioned in the Kul-i Farah inscription, both may be connected to Shikaft-i Sal man, probably since deepest antiquity. This means that nameless men, women, and children from tire end of the second millennium BCE may be represented at this cave with a spring venerating the goddess Mashti, mistress of Tar risha. Kul-i Farah
I-IV.
Opposite Shikaft-i Salman, at the
Salman II relief. (Photograph by Barbara Grunewald, Deutsches Archaolo-
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IZEH. Figure 2 . Kul-i Farah III relief, south side. (Photograph by Barbara Grunewald, Deutsches A r chaologisches Institut, Tehran)
northeastern border, a ravine called Kul-i Farah with reliefs on its slopes and on boulders shows processions (III and IV), animal sacrifices (I—III, V) and a banquet scene (IV). Together with other scattered rocks (either roughly worked as platforms or with cavities on the top, or with smoothed panels on one side), tlie whole arrangement points to a cultic use. Based on their style, it appears that the reliefs were manufactured at different dates. Relief IV. The banquet scene, with about 1 5 0 figures, cov ers several rock faces that jut out at various angles along the south side of tlie ravine. T h e central figure is seated in front of a stand that holds three goblets; he faces a table and is surrounded by his servants. His arms bearer is positioned in the register below. From both sides, figures arranged in reg isters face the center. Most of these hold their right hand to their mouth in a gesture of eating or of veneration, and some are playing musical instruments. T h e banquet scene has
parallels on Middle Elamite seals. The shape of the throne is known from a bead of Shilhak Inshushinak (twelfth cen tury BCE); the goblets represented were in use no later than about 1000-900 BCE. Relief III. T h e northern, southern, and the southwestern sides of a boulder are covered with processions moving east (see figure 2). The procession on the north is divided into three registers and headed by a man whose height fills all three registers. Encountering him are smaller individuals, similar to the participants in tlie procession, three of whom are playing harps. T h e southwestern and southern proces sions follow in four registers, a large figure supported by four laieeling men. He is preceded by three naked men and encountered by some ordinary people, as on the northern side. The destination of the processions seems to be the rounded east side, where diree bulls and eighteen smaller animals are represented.
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Relief VI. The same large figure supported by kneeling men is shown in relief VI. He is followed only by a few smaller individuals, among them the arms bearer (cf. Kul-i FarahIV,I). Style and iconography place reliefs III, IV, and VI in one group. They therefore may originate in roughly the same period, at about the end of the second or the beginning of die first millennium BCE. Relief I. A rectangular panel on die north wall of the ra vine, relief I is the only inscribed monument at Kul-i Farah. On its upper part, a text of twenty-four lines covers the space unoccupied by the figures; short captions, or labels, are carved on or beside die human figures. The main figure is, according to the text on his skirt, Hanni son of Tahhi, chief of Ajapir, who dedicated his image to the god Tirutur. Behind him stand, in smaller scale, his arms bearer and an other official in a long skirt. In front of Hanni in the upper part of die relief, are tiiree musicians; in the lower part are four men engaged in sacrificial acts. The "one who delivers the sacrificial victim" leads a goat; the "priest" is occupied with a thymiaterion and die otiiers with a bull; and three beheaded carcasses and loose heads of rams lie in between. The text contains invocations of Elamite deities, deeds of Hanni, and the dedication of the relief to the god Tirutur. For the text, Matthew Stolper suggests "a date within the seventh century" (Calmeyer and Stolper, 1988, p. 279). Al though comparable Neo-Elamite art is scarce, there is no reason to doubt here—in contrast to Shikaft-i Salman—that the text and pictures are contemporaneous. In particular, the large figure of Flanni differs from the reliefs at Shikaft-i Sal man and at Kul-i Farah III, IV, and VI in style and iconog raphy. The headdress and die garment with its rosette bor der and fringes find their parallels in the clothing of the Elamite king Tepti-Humban-Inshushinak (Assyr, Te'umman), killed during a battle with Ashurbanipal in 653 BCE, that is pictured in Assyrian reliefs at Nineveh. Reliefs II and V. Similar in subject to most of the Kul-i Farah reliefs, in reliefs II and V a large man, followed by four smaller figures, is directed to a slaughtering scene where a naked man is occupied with a bull lying on its back. With die bull are six smaller animals in the same position (i.e., in tlie same numerical relationship as on relief III). On relief V, the large man is praying over a thymiaterion. Too few details are given or preserved to allow a positive dating. In all probability they were carved after IV, III, and VI, but their temporal relation to relief I cannot be fixed. Certainly, they were made before Achaemenid times. Kul-i Farah, seen through its reliefs, seems to be a place of ceremonies with animal sacrifices, processions with mu sic, and symposia. P a r t h i a n Period. The latest rock reliefs are Parthian. They are located on the northern side of the valley. The subject of these carvings is different from the Elamite ones. They show people of rank facing the sovereign.
Hung-i Nowruzi (Hung-i Azhdar). The boulder with the faint Elamite relief bears a Parthian relief on its back side, facing the cliff; in front of it, an isolated stone relief is lying on the ground. T h e rock relief shows a horseman with his attendant moving to die right and four standing men in front of him, in frontal view. T h e two parts of the relief differ in style and iconography. T h e rider is Greek in inspiration. Comparable heads can be found on Arsacid coins of the second half of the second century BCE. T h e four standing men have their closest parallels in Parthian reliefs from the beginning of the third century CE. Various proposals, the following among them, have been made to explain this dis crepancy. The entire relief has been dated based on the elements of the left side, the rider. Louis Vanden Berghe (1963) com pares the head witii tiiat of Mitiiridates I ( 1 7 1 - 1 3 8 BCE) on a coin, interpreting the relief as the representation of Mitii ridates I as he is received by Elymaean nobles after die Par thian conquest of Elymais in 140/39 BCE. This would make the four men the oldest examples of frontal representation. T o support this view, other scholars argue with sculptors from different schools or with the ecclecticism of GrecoIranian art. The entire relief has also been dated, based on die ele ments of the right side, the four standing men. Trudy S. Kawami (1987) argues that the artistic style and details of dress and hairstyle of the four nobles indicate a date in the Late Parthian period, at the end of second or third centuries CE. She suggests that a local ruler and his entourage are rep resented as they pay homage to their ancestor, sculptured in the fashion of the Hellenistic period. Other scholars have harmonized the dating discrepancy by proposing a date between the two extremes (first century BCE and first century CE) for die entire relief. However, Hans E. Mathiesen proposes that an unfinished relief of the vic torious Mitiiridates I (second century BCE) was "completed" by a Parthian or Elymaean king in about 200 CE, which means that the carvings on the left and right sides belong to different times. (The relief lying on the ground shows a man in frontal view, who may have been part of a larger nearby composition.) Hung-i Yar-i Alivand. T h e weathered rock relief at Flung-i Yar-i Alivand shows two standing figures in frontal view. A shallow circular element between them suggests the interpretation that this is an investiture scene. T h e dating for the carving ranges from the first century BCE to the late second century CE. Hung-i Kamalvand. The rock relief at Hung-i Kamalvand shows a horseman and a standing figure pouring a libation before him. An inscription names "Phraajtes the priest, son of Kabniskir." The date of the carving is usually given as second century CE. [See also Elamites; and Susa.]
IZEH BIBLIOGRAPHY Calymeyer, Peter, and Matthew W. Stolper. "MalamTr." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 7, pp. 275-287. Berlin and New York, 1988. Discussion of the Elamite reliefs and their inscriptions, with an extensive bibliography. De Waele, E . "Travaux archeologiques a Sekaf-e Salman et Kul-e Farah pres d'Izeh (MalamTr)." Iranica Antiqua 16 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 4 5 - 6 1 , pis. 1 - 4 . Geographical evaluation, being one of several preliminary re ports based on an unpublished doctoral thesis. Kawami, Trudy S. Monumental An of the Parthian Period in Iran. Acta Iranica, vol. 26. Leiden, 1987.
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Mathiesen, Hans E . Sculpture in the Parthian Empire. 2 vols. Aarhus, 1992. Vanden Berghe, Louis. " L e s reliefs Elarnites de MalamTr." Iranica An tiqua 3 (1963): 2 2 - 3 9 , P' - 9-28. Treatise of the Elamite reliefs (ex clusive of Khul-i Farah VI) with good illustrations. Vanden Berghe, Louis, and Klaus Schippmann. Les reliefs rupestres d'Elymaide (Iran) de I'epoque Parthe. Iranica Antiqua, supp. 3. Ghent, 1985Wright, Henry T . , ed. Archaeological Investigations in Northeastern Xuzestan. Ann Arbor, 1979. s
URSULA SEIDL
J
JACOBSEN, THORKILD
( 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 9 3 ) , philologist, cuneiformist, and archaeologist; one of die great interpreters of Mesopotamian culture. Born in Denmark, Jacobsen stud ied Assyriology first at die university of his native Copen hagen and then, in the late 1920s, at the University of Chi cago. Throughout his life, he was passionately and deeply committed to the study of ancient Mesopotamia, its land, cultures, and languages. Jacobsen was a field assyriologist with the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute ( 1 9 2 9 - 1 9 3 7 ) , worldng closely with Henri Frankfort, its director, as well as with Pinhas Delougaz, Seton Lloyd, and Gordon Loud. He was the epigrapher at Khorsabad and in the Diyala region and led the excava tion at Ishchali. Together with Lloyd, Jacobsen excavated Sennacherib's aqueduct at Jerwan. He was instrumental in introducing to Iraq the method of systematic surface ce ramic survey. Returning to Chicago in 1 9 3 7 , Jacobsen began a twentyfive-year affiliation with the university. From 1946 to 1 9 5 1 , he was director of the Oriental Institute and then dean of the Division of Humanities. As director, he gave new shape to the Assyriology faculty of the Oriental Institute and to American Assyriology, in general. Moreover, he set the agenda for American archaeology in Iraq by reestablishing American excavations at Nippur jointly with the University of Pennsylvania and setting in motion the surface surveys that would lead to his and Robert M c C . Adams's important discoveries regarding waterways, salinization, and settie ment patterns (Jacobsen and Adams, 1958). Disagreements over the policies, direction, and execution of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary led to Jacobsen leaving Chicago in 1962 for Harvard University, where he taught until his retirement in 1974. Jacobsen's unique blend of textual scholarship, knowledge of art and archaeology, quest for conceptual patterns, ap preciation of the environment and way of life of ancient Mesopotamia, and his own deep human sympathy allowed him to fathom the meaning and recreate the image of a past civilization. He approached the task in an existential spirit and saw that alien and distant human life was something that not only existed in its own terms, but also mattered very deeply for the enduring human spirit.
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[See also Assyrians; Diyala; Khorsabad; Nippur; Sume rian; Sumerians; Ur; and the biographies of Frankfort and Lloyd.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Sumerian King List. Oriental Institute, Assyriological Studies, n . Chicago, 1939. Exemplary edition and analy sis. Jacobsen, Thorkild. "Mesopotamia." In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East, by Henri Frankfort et al. New York, 1946. Ground breaking and breathtaking interpretation of Mesopotamian religious thought. Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Robert M c C . Adams. "Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture." Science 128 (1958): 1 2 5 1 - 1 2 5 8 . Pio neering study of Mesopotamian irrigation and settlement patterns. Jacobsen, Thorkild. Toward the Image of Tammuz and Other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture. Edited by William L . Moran. Harvard Semitic Series, vol. 2 1 . Cambridge, Mass., 1970. A number of Jacobsen's seminal essays originally published between 1930 and 1965. T h e collection includes some of Jacobsen's most important writings on Mesopotamian religion and mythology, political and cul tural history, and Sumerian and Akkadian grammar. See as well the bibliography of Jacobsen's writings to 1969 (pp. 471-474) and the assessment of his work by Moran (pp. v-vi), Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness. New Haven, 1976. De velops die idea of divine intransitivity and transitivity; reconstructs the major stages in Mesopotamian religion over four thousand years; and analyzes significant segments of the religious literature. Jacobsen, Thorkild. Salinity and Irrigation: Agriculture inAruiqidty. Bibliodieca Mesopotamica, 1 4 . Malibu, 1982. Jacobsen, Thorkild, ed. and trans. The Harps That Once . . .: Sumerian Poetry in Translation. N e w Haven, 1987. Meticulous but profound and beautiful translations of religious poetry—myths, prayers, and laments. Jacobsen, Thorkild. " T h e Sumerian Verbal Core." Zeitschrift fiir Assyriologie 78 (1988): 1 6 1 - 2 2 0 . This study continues his earlier "Aboutthe Sumerian V e r b " (included in Jacobsen, 1970),which was the first systematic and comprehensive utilization of the principle of fixed-rank order in studying die Sumerian verb and an explication of some of its intricacies. Kramer, Samuel Noah. "Thorkild Jacobsen: Philologist, Archeologist, Historian." In Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on His Seventieth Birthday, June 7 , 1 9 7 4 , edited by Steven J . Lieberman, pp. 1 - 7 . Chicago, 1976. Assessment of Jacobsen's career by a con temporary who represented a different approach to Sumerian my thology and religion. Tzvi ABUSCH
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JAFFA
JAFFA, site located along the southern edge of modern Tel Aviv-Jaffa, on a promontory jutting into the Mediter ranean Sea that forms one of the few ancient harbors along the coast of Israel (32°oi' N, 34°45' E; map reference 1 6 2 X 127). Jaffa is referred to in Egyptian texts and the Hebrew Bible as Jaffa, and the name is preserved in Arabic as Yafa el-'Atiqa ("ancient Jaffa"). The Harris papyrus and reliefs on the Karnak temple refer to the conquest of Jaffa by Thutmosis III in the fifteenth century BCE. Jaffa is one of the Egyptian administrative cen ters through which the Egyptians controlled Syria-Palestine in the Late Bronze Age. The Amarna letters and Papyrus Anastasi I, dated to die fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, respectively, mention Jaffa as an Egyptian stronghold. [See Amarna Tablets.] Additionally, an Akkadian letter sent from Ugarit and found at Aphek mentions Jaffa as the seat of an Egyptian official. [See Aphek.] In 701 BCE Sennacherib recorded the conquest of Jaffa on the Prism stela. The He brew Bible includes Jaffa within the tribal boundary of Dan (Jos. 19:46). The site is connected witii the shipping of ce dars from Lebanon in the construction of the First and Sec ond Temples (2 Chr. 2 : 1 5 ; Ezr. 3:7). Jonah attempts to flee from God via Jaffa (Jon. 1 : 3 ) . Jaffa was excavated from 1945 to 1950 by P. L. O. Guy for the Department of Antiquities of Israel. John Bowman and B. S. J. Isserlin excavated in 1952 for the University of Leeds. The most extensive excavation was undertaken by Jacob Kaplan, between 1 9 5 5 and 1974, f°r d^e Museum of Antiquities of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. During six seasons of exca vation, Kaplan opened four areas (A, B, C, and Y). Eight archaeological strata have been discerned, from the Middle Bronze Age II through the Roman Period. [See the biography of Guy] Stratum VII dates to M B IIB/C. In area A, along with mud-brick walls, a small section of a typical MB IIB glacis was found. In area C, die eighth-century glacis may rest on the remains of an MB IIA glacis. In area Y, an infant jar burial and an MB IIB/C tomb were excavated. T h e Late Bronze Age is well represented in area A. Ar chitectural remains from stratum VI (LB I) are dated by Bichrome, Gray-Burnished, and Cypriot Base-Ring and Monochrome wares. In area Y, stratum VI is limited to pits dug into loam. Stratum V (LB IIA) is dated to the fourteenth century BCE by pottery found in a silo. Strata IVA and B both date to the Late Bronze IIB (cf. Kaplan, 1993). T h e earliest LB gate was founded in stratum IVB. This gate sys tem includes mud-brick walls and sandstone doorjambs. Four doorjamb fragments were inscribed with titles of Rameses II, along with part of his name. Rivka Gonen (1992) has suggested that this gate may be freestanding and purely ceremonial. In stratum IVA a better-preserved gate on the same orientation was uncovered. At tiiis point the city was fortified with a wall system tiiat included a fortified structure
or citadel. Bronze hinges from this stratum IVA gate were found in situ on the bottom left doorjamb. There is evidence of burning and destruction ending both strata IVA and B within die thirteenth century BCE. Kaplan (1993) suggests that a small (4.4 X 5.8 m) rectan gular structure next to the citadel is a temple. This poorly preserved building includes a white plaster floor and two column bases; almost no small finds or pottery, except for a lion's skull with a half scarab near its teeth, were recovered. The excavator dates this structure to the late thirteenth/early twelfth centuries BCE and compares it to the northern temple at Beth-Shean. Mariusz Burdajewicz (1990) suggests that it is only a small shrine and rejects the comparison to the BethShean temple because of its small size. Initially Amihai Ma zar suggested architectural parallels at Tell Qasile and in the Aegean. More recently however, Mazar (1992) has cast doubt on whether this structure is a temple at all. The scant Iron Age (stratum IIIB) remains from area A include Philistine sherds found in pits and depressions that date the stratum to the eleventh century BCE. A rough stone wall and floor and two cattle burials with stone markers be long to stratum ILIA (eighth century BCE) . In area C there is some indication of a glacis. Jaffa is now under the political conttol of Ashkelon. Persian period (stratum II) remains include an ashlar wall dating to the fifth century BCE. Stone walls of large sttuctures with mud-brick and stone paving were found throughout area A. In this stratum a consttuction technique using ashlar piers interspersed with fieldstone fills—a technique associ ated with the Phoenicians—was revealed. Stern (1992) sug gests that Jaffa may mark the southernmost extent of Phoe nician culture from the eighth century BCE to the Hellenistic period. Jaffa may have belonged to the Sidonians, as it was recorded in the Eshmunazar Inscription (fifth century B C E ? ) that the ldng of Persia presented Eshmunazar of Sidon with Dor and Jaffa. Fragments of Attic ware were found in area Y. [See Phoenicians; Sidon.] Stratum I dates to the Hellenistic period. An ashlar corner of a fortress was found in stratum IB (third century BCE), along with the remains of an ashlar casemate wall. A possible cult hall with a fieldstone altar was also uncovered in this stratum. A third-century BCE catacomb was found in area C, and in area Y there was evidence of a monumental ashlar building with square rooms that may be part of a Hellenistic agora. The Zenon papyri mention the visit of an Egyptian treasury official during the reign of Ptolemy II, in 259/58 BCE. Under the Hasmoneans (stratum IA) the city was cap tured from the Seleucids and became a Jewish port. Guy found a hoard of more than eight hundred coins in his ex cavations dating to the reign of Alexander Jannaeus. T h e only stratified remains from the Roman period were found in area C (levels VI-I). Fragments of a mosaic date to the sixth-seventh centuries CE (level I). Architectural frag-
JAR BURIALS merits were excavated in levels II (fifth century CE), III (fourth century CE), and IV (third century CE). In level V (second century CE) better-preserved architecture was found, along with a hoard of bronze and silver coins dating no later than Trajan's reign ( 9 8 - 1 1 7 CE). A small glass fac tory and a well-constructed catacomb were also excavated. Two important Greek inscriptions found in level VI (first century CE) include a limestone inscription mentioning Judah, an agoranomos of Jaffa during the reigns of Nerva (9698 CE) and Trajan. The second inscription is a third-century BCE votive that mentions Ptolemy IV Philopator. Additional inscriptions include jar handles with Greek and Latin in scriptions, a tile with a Tenth Legion stamp, and a pyram idal seal with the name Ariston. A marble door leaf (midsecond-mid-third centuries CE) was also found. Jacob Pinkerfeld (1955) suggests drat tiiis fragment is similar to mausoleum doors from the necropolis at Palmyra. [See Pal myra.] T h e city was destroyed by Cestius Gallus and Ves pasian in 67 CE, it was later rebuilt and referred to as Flavia loppa. A Jewish cemetery from nearby Abu Kabir, east of Jaffa, dates from the first through the fifth centuries. BIBLIOGRAPHY Applebaum, Shimon. " T h e Status of Jaffa in the First Century of the Current Era." Scripta Classical Israelica 8-9 (1988): 1 3 8 - 1 4 4 . Im portant historical overview of Jaffa in the Roman period. Bowman, John, et al. " T h e University of Leeds, Department of S e mitics Archaeological Expedition to Jaffa, 1 9 5 2 . " Proceedings of die Leeds Philosophical Society 7.4 ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 2 3 1 - 2 5 0 . Burdajewicz, Mariusz. The Aegean Sea Peoples and Religious Architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean at the Close of the Late Bronze Age. Ox ford, 1990. Gonen, Rivka. " T h e Late Bronze A g e . " In The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, edited by Amnon B e n - T o r , pp. 2 1 1 - 2 5 7 . Jerusalem, 1992. Kaplan, Jacob. " T h e Archaeology and History of Tel Aviv-Jaffa." Bib lical Archaeologist. 35.3 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 66-95. Thorough overview of the au thor's important research at Jaffa and its environs. His chronological conclusions and some of his interpretations are problematic and re main so in his updated article (below). Kaplan, Jacob. "Jaffa." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 655-659. Jerusalem and N e w York, 1993. Kindler, Arie. " T h e Jaffa Floard and Alexander Jannaeus." Israel Ex ploration Journal 4 (1954): 1 7 0 - 1 8 5 . Formal numismatic analysis with an emphasis on minting techniques. Landau, Y . H. " A Stamped Jar Handle from Jaffa." 'Atiqat 2 (1959): 1 8 6 - 1 8 7 . Useful article about Jaffa in the classical period. Mazar, Amihai. Excavations at Tell Qasile, part 1 , The Philistine Sanc tuary: Architecture and Cult Objects. Qedem, vol. 1 2 . Jerusalem, 1980. Essential for understanding the validity of Kaplan's claims regarding the so-called Lion Temple. M u s t be used in conjunction with M a zar's article below. Mazar, Amihai. "Temples of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages and the Iron A g e . " In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehis toric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 1 6 1 - 1 8 7 . Jerusalem, 1992. Pinkerfeld, Jacob. " T w o Fragments of a Marble Door from Jaffa." 'Atiqot 1 (1955): 89-94.
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Stern, Ephraim. " T h e Phoenician Architectural Elements in Palestine during the Late Iron Age and Persian Period." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 302-309. Jerusalem, 1992. J . P . DESSEL
JAR BURIALS. One of the many forms of human in terment places the body of the deceased in a jar for burial. Infants and children were inserted into a single jar, while adults were positioned in one large jar or two facing jars. T h e neck of die jar frequently was removed to facilitate the insertion of an adult body. Jar burial is similar to the Late Bronze-Iron Age practice of anthropoid coffin burial: both employed ceramic vessels to contain (predominantly) pri mary interments with accompanying mortuary offerings. In contrast to these forms of primary interment, Iron Age Phoenician urn burials have yielded predominantly cre mated remains (Tell er-Rugeish, Achziv, Khaldeh), and Chalcolithic and Hellenistic-Byzantine ossuaries encased secondary bone collections (Azor, Haderah). From the Natufian period through the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1 0 , 5 0 0 - 1 5 5 0 BCE), infants and children were buried in jars or in large jars called pifhoi, under house floors or court yards (Aphek, Ashkelon, Yoqne am). During this same pe riod, adolescents and adults were buried in caves or shaft tombs and pit or cist graves (Adeimeh, Bab edh-Dhra', Jer icho, Shiqmim). Infant jar burials beneath occupation sur faces have been reported from the fifth-millennium Pottery Neolithic site of Sha'ar ha-Golan. Stillborns, infants, and children up to approximately the age of nine were buried in pithoi at the more southerly sites of Nahal Besor and Teleilat el-Ghassul during the Chalcolithic period (4300-3300 BCE). c
Jar burial was reintroduced beginning in the MB IIA (2000-1500 BCE), when the northern coast and valleys were resettled. As in the earlier periods, children, now with a small number of provisions, including ointment juglets and jew elry, were interred in jars under occupation surfaces (Ash kelon, Yoqne am). The inu-oduction of jar burial for adults, which first appeared in the Late Bronze II ( 1 4 0 0 - 1 2 0 0 BCE), is also attributed to northern influence. Extramural inter ments of exclusively mature individuals, inserted at the time of deatii into one or two large jars positioned to form a burial receptacle, have been reported from the four northern sites of Azor, Kefar Yehoshu'a, Tell el-Far'ah (North), and Tel Zeror. T h e forty-year-old man buried at Kefar Yehoshu'a was provided with flasks, other pottery vessels, a bronze blade, and cuts of sheep, ox, and pig for nourishment. c
Jar burial continued through the Iron Age (1200-586 BCE), although with diminishing frequency. Eleven sites yielded jar burials in northern and coastal Cisjordan and on the Transjordanian plateau in Iron I ( 1 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 BCE), for ex ample, at Afula, Amman, and Azor, whereas only six or
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JARMO
JAR BURIALS. Double-pitkos burial from Tell es-Saidiyeh.
seven sites provided Iron II examples (1000-586 BCE) . Small numbers of children continued to be interred in jars, which were usually buried in cave or chamber tombs along with adolescents and adults. [See also Burial Techniques. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael, and Ephraim Stern, eds. Encyclopedia of Archae ological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N . J . , 1975-1978- Summary of excavations including results of all earlier expeditions to the sites. Ben-Tor, Amnon, ed. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. Translated by R. Greenberg. New Haven, 1992. Collection of essays with differing emphases on the Neolithic through die Iron Age II-III periods. Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 1 2 3 . Sheffield, 1992. Summary and comprehensive catalog of die Iron Age burials. Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. New York, 1990. Comprehensive, detailed, well-illustrated survey of biblical archaeology, limited only by the traditionalist biblical inter pretation. Stern, Ephraim, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Ijind. 4 vols. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Supple ments Avi-Yonah and Stern (above), with results of more recent excavations and revised interpretations. ELIZABETH BLOCH-SMITH
(Courtesy A S O R Archives)
JARMO
(or Qafat Jarmo), prehistoric site located in northern Iraq (35°33' N , 44°57' E), approximately 1 1 km (7 mi.) east of the town of Chemchamal, at an altitude of 8,250 m. Jarmo occupies a hilltop above a wadi locally known as Cham-Gawra, one of several that drain the higher slopes of the ridges enclosing an intermontane plain in the Iraqi foot hills of the Zagros Mountains. This plain is bounded by the Kani Domlan-Jabal Tasak and the Kani Shaitan Hasan-Sarirma Dagh ridges, and is 161cm (10 mi.) wide by 56 km (35 mi.) long (Braidwood and Howe, i960, pp. 2 6 - 2 7 ) . Jarmo, dated to the seventh millennium BCE (see below), was for many years the oldest known agricultural and pas toral community in the world. It was first located in die 1940s by the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities, which rec ommended it to Robert J. Braidwood of the Oriental Insti tute at the University of Chicago when he inquired about ancient village sites in northern Iraq (Braidwood, 1 9 7 4 ) . Un der the auspices of the Oriental Institute, Braidwood exca vated at Jarmo from March to June 1948; September 1 9 5 0 to spring 1 9 5 1 ; and March to June 1 9 5 5 . Excavation was undertaken to recover empirical evidence for the beginnings of agriculture and pastoralism. T h e site was the first in the Near East in which interdisciplinary field archaeology was applied to elucidating the origins of food production. In the second and third seasons of excavation, Braidwood's staff included natural scientists as well as ar-
JAWA chaeologists. T h e structure and functioning of these inter disciplinary teams investigating an important cultural and economic transition influenced subsequent archaeological projects in many parts of the Old and New World long after the Iraq-Jarmo Project's fieldwork was terminated. As the first archaeologically known example of a very early agricultural and pastoral village, Jarmo's architectural and other cultural remains were for many years the only docu mentation available for the way of life of the world's first farmers and herders. Braidwood's work at Jarmo was emulated by subsequent generations of archaeologists (several of whom were his stu dents) in addressing the same problem in many other areas of western Asia. Braidwood himself has fielded a series of m o r e recent projects in Iran and Turkey. Our understanding of tire transformation from hunting-gathering-foraging Economies to food-producing ones is now much different from that of the late 1950s when the Jarmo data were new and unique (for recent summaries see Bar-Yosef and Mea dow, in press; Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, 1989; and Moore, 1 9 8 5 ; see also Braidwood, 1974). Nevertheless, Jarmo continues to have significance in the history of world archaeology. The archaeological work at Jarmo was interrupted after a nationalist revolution took place in Iraq in the summer of 1958. N o excavation has been carried out since then. Infor mation gained from analyses on the material recovered be tween 1948 and 1 9 5 5 are detailed in two volumes (Braid wood and Howe, i960; Braidwood et al., 1983). Braidwood dates the site to early in the seventh millennium BCE but freely admits that tlie various radiocarbon dates are not very helpful. Apparendy, contamination by bitumen (locally available and used throughout the occupation) and complex site-formation processes affected the radiocarbon samples. The village of Jarmo is thought to have been occupied by approximately 100 to 1 5 0 people at any one time (there is a maximum of some 7 m of deposit). Its population lived in rectilinear household complexes constructed of puddled adobe (Ar., tauf). The Jarmoan economy was based on do mestic emmer and einkorn wheat, two-row barley, lentils, and vetchling. Available wild plants included field pea, pis tachio nuts, acorns, and wild wheat and barley. T h e villagers kept dogs, domestic goats and sheep, and—in the later pe riod of the site's occupation—domestic pigs. There was con siderable hunting of wild animals. Cattle, onager, and small mammals were apparently taken for food. Bones of lion, leopard, a small wildcat, fox, and lynx have been identified among the Jarmo fauna. These camiverous species may have been killed for their pelts, or to protect tlie villagers and their flocks. T h e Jarmo people were skilled flint and obsidian knappers, producing both normal-sized and microlithic tools, primarily from blade cores. T h e obsidian was imported from Anatolia, but not in large quantities. Other imports
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included marine shells and, perhaps, turquoise. Milling stones are well represented in the ground-stone categories, as are small celts and chisel-like implements, beads, pen dants, and bracelets. Nicely made stone bowls were pro duced in some quantity from a wide variety of fine-grained local limestone; and a plethora of small clay figurines (human, animal, and geometric) are also characteristic of the Jarmo artifact assemblage. Bone tools, especially perfo rators, or awls, are abundant, and the bone industry also includes carefully made spoons and beads. The villagers made small quantities of pottery, an innovation that seems to have originated elsewhere and is only patchily found in the Jarmo deposit. The Jarmo assemblage, once virtually the only one of its kind, can now be seen as an example of many such farming and herding communities scattered throughout the Zagros region in both Iraq and Iran in tlie Early and Mid-Holocene periods. As Braidwood pointed out forty years ago, diese humble but vigorous settlements created the economic and social foundations for the rise of Mesopotamian civilization in the fourth millennium BCE. [See also Paleobotany; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruc tion; and Paleozoology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Anna Belfer-Cohen. " T h e Origins of Sedentism and Farming Communities in the Levant." Journal of World Prehis tory 3 (1989): 447-498. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Richard H . Meadow. " T h e Origins of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in the Near and Middle East." In Last Hun ters-First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Ag riculture, edited by T . D . Price and A. B . Gebauer. Santa Fe, N . M . , in press. Braidwood, Linda S., et al. Prehistoric Archeology Along the Zagros flanks. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Publications, vol.105. Chicago, 1983. Braidwood, Robert J . " T h e Iraq Jarmo Project." In Archaeological Re searches in Retrospect, edited by Gordon R. Willey, pp. 6 1 - 8 3 . Cam bridge, Mass., 1974. Braidwood, Robert J . , and Bruce Howe, eds. Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Saidies in Ancient Civilization, no. 3 1 . Chicago, i960. Moore, Andrew M . T . " T h e Development of Neolithic Societies in the Near East." Advances in World Archaeology 4 (1985): 1-70. PATTY J o WATSON
JAWA, large fortified site located in northeastern Jordan, at the eastern margins of the Fertile Crescent, on the border between steppe and arable land (32°2o' N , 3 7 V E). T h e site was founded in the Early Bronze Age IA as a walled settlement sustained by an elaborate water-harvesting sys tem of dams, canals, and pools. The system drew winter runoff from Wadi Rajil, one of the largest of the wadis drain ing southward from the volcanic peak of Jebel al-Druze in southern Syria. This first occupation was short lived, and the site was abandoned after a few decades. Jawa was oc-
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JEBEL QA AQIR
cupied again at die beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (EB-MB/MB IIA) when a "citadel" and outbuildings were constructed on its summit, within the EB walls. Because of its remote location, Jawa was not known to pioneer archaeologists in Syria and Palestine. The site was first recorded in an aerial photograph taken by Antoine Po idebard in the 1930s. Poidebard believed Jawa to be Roman because of the regular nature of the fortification walls. It was also visited by Aurel Stein at about this time. The first to recognize its true date was G. Lankester Harding, when he and Fred Winnett explored the area in the 1950s, looldng for inscriptions. In the 1970s, Svend Helms began excava tions at Jawa under tire auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. His work provided a detailed rec ord of the occupations and water systems associated with the site. [See the biographies of Poidebard, Harding, and Win nett.] Jawa is located on a rocky island between the main gorge of Wadi Rajil and a tributary valley entering the main gorge from the west. The EB town consisted of an upper settle ment, defended by massive fortifications that followed the edge of the rock scarp, and a lower part of the town, spread around the slopes of the hill and enclosed by an outer wall. T h e upper setdement was entered through a large cham bered gateway on the west. Entrances to the lower town were found at the southern end of the site, while posterns around the walls allowed limited access at other places. The Jawa houses were rounded and built of stone and mud brick with packed-clay floors. The roofs were of mud and straw laid on timber beams. The MB settlement was laid out within the upper fortifi cation walls of the earlier town. In the center was a citadel, a complex comprising a rectangular unit divided into a series of interconnected cells. The cells were roofed witii basalt slabs laid on stone piers. A ring of rectangular courtyard houses built of stone and also roofed with basalt slabs sur rounded the citadel. The site was supported by a complex water-harvesting system constructed in the Early Bronze Age. More than 8 km (5 mi.) of sttuctural remains of stone gravity canals, di versions, earth-and-stone-lined dams, and reservoirs can still be seen along Wadi Rajil, and at Jawa itself. T h e water system was simple in principle. The annual winter discharge of Wadi Rajil was deflected into canals at three points, and these canals led the water to the main reservoirs in the valley, west of the site. Overflow and secondary diversion systems led water into other pools farther downstream. Jawa had a limited cultural assemblage, probably reflect ing its location on the edge of the steppe. Items at the site, most of them basic and functional, had to be made locally or transported from a long way off. The EB pottery assem blage can be divided into two repertoires, one reflecting Pal estinian, and the other Syrian, influence. Holemouth jars are one of the most common forms. Most have a line of punc
tuate decoration (dots) below the rim and some have ves tigial lug handles. Large Syrian-type jars with lug handles and punctuate decoration and smaller jars with stamp seal impressions on both the body of the vessel and on lug han dles are also part of die assemblage. Bowls and platters are less common. Painting and plastic decoration appear on some of the jar forms. T h e MB pottery assemblage similarly reflects contact with both Palestine and Syria. Other items found at the site include basalt saddle querns, rubbing stones and stone vessels, flint tools, stone and shell beads, and small clay animal figurines. BIBLIOGRAPHY Betts, Alison V. G., ed. Excavations at Jawa, 1972-1986. Edinburgh, 1991. Technical report on the stratigraphy, pottery, and other finds. Gregory, Shelagh, and David Kennedy, eds. Sir Aurel Stein's Limes Report. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 2 7 2 . 1 - 2 . Oxford, 1985. Briefly mentions Aurel Stein's visit to Jawa. Helms, S. W. Jawa: Lost City of the Black Desert. London, 1 9 8 1 . Semipopular account of excavations at Jawa and the site's significance; slighdy outdated, but a good summary for the lay reader. Poidebard Antoine. La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie. Paris, 1934. Aerial photographs, including a view of Jawa. ALISON V. G. BETTS
JEBEL QA'AQIR, site located
1 2 km (7.5 mi.) west of Hebron at the juncture of the Central Hills and the Shephe lah (map reference 1457 X 1 0 3 4 ) . It was discovered by Wil liam G. Dever and excavated by him on behalf of the He brew Union College in Jerusalem in 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 1 . The site is occupied almost exclusively in Early Bronze IV (c. 2200-2000 BCE). It consists mostly of typical shafttomb cemeteries with hundreds of tombs. Many had been robbed in 1967, but thirty-eight of these were excavated in Cemetery B (see figure 1 ) , and some forty were cleared and planned elsewhere in Cemeteries A, B, C, D , and E. The tombs were all laid out systematically along steplike terraces on the lower slopes of the horseshoe-shaped ridge. They had round or oval shafts 1 . 0 0 - 1 . 7 5 m in diameter and as much as 2.00 m deep, and round dome-shaped chambers up to 2.00 m in diameter. Most were single-chamber tombs, but a few were bilobate. The doorways into die lateral chambers were blocked by large stones, often plastered into place. Shallow body-recesses and lamp-niches were often present, but the bones were never in the recesses or the lamps in the niches. These and other considerations, such as die fact tiiat the lack of weathering of the rock in the shafts indicates only summer burials between the rains, leads to the conclusion that some groups living at the site prepared the tombs in large numbers in advance of their use by other groups.
Most tombs contained the bones of a single individual, but some had up to four. Frequendy a headless sheep or goat carcass was included. Other offerings consisted of a few pieces of pottery, or a copper dagger, javelin, or awl. All the
JEMDET NASR
bones, both human and animal, were disarticulated, indi cating that these were secondary burials. Analysis of the hu man bones by Patricia Smith revealed that 17 percent were children, 1 7 percent adolescents, and the remainder adults of both sexes. T h e skeletal type was gracile Mediterranean, identical to local population groups of the third millennium BCE, but different from die more robust second-millennium BCE groups. T h e disarticulated burials no doubt indicate a seminomadic population, probably pastoralists who mi grated seasonally and transported their dead for burial at ancestral cemeteries. Such customs may seem strange, but they are well documented ethnographically. T h e only dwellings at the site were natural caves, some times enlarged and furnished with storage areas, hearths, and mortars cut into die bedrock. One cave, G 26, produced an assemblage of more than two dozen pots and stone tools. Another, Cave G 2 3 , perhaps a dump, yielded sherds of more than 1800 vessels. These caves probably represent summer shelters of pastoralists camping briefly at the site. On the ridge above the cemetery there were found a well preserved potter's kiln; a large dolmenlike structure; an en igmatic "high place" with standing stones; a dozen large cairns that were not, however, used as expected for burials; and a rambling boundary wall. T h e significance of Jebel Qa'aqir is that it is one of the few Early Bronze IV "domestic" sites of Dever's "Southern Family" thus far excavated, although' it has extensive ce
211
ramic links with pastoral nomadic encampments in the Ne gev, like Be'er Resisim. It is best understood as a very small year-round settlement with a large influx of summertime pastoralists from the Negev who used tire area as a burying ground. [See also Burial Sites; Tombs.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dever, William G . "Jebel Qa'aqir." Israel Exploration Journal 2 1 , 4 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 229-230. Dever, William G . " A Middle Bronze I Site on the West Bank of the Jordan." Archaeology 25 (1972): 2 3 1 - 2 3 3 . Dever, William G. "New Vistas on the E B IV ('MB F) Horizon in Syria-Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 237 (19S0): 35-64Dever, William G. " C a v e G 26 at Jebel Qa'aqir: A Stratified M B I Domestic Assemblage." Eretz-Israel 1 5 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 22*~32*. Gitin, Seymour. " A Ceramic Inventory of Cave G 23 at Jebel Qa'aqir." Eretz-Israel 1 2 (1975): 46*-62*. Horwitz, Liora K . "Animal Offerings from T w o Middle Bronze Age T o m b s . " Israel Exploration Journal 37 (1987): 2 5 1 - 2 5 5 . Smith, Patricia, " T h e Physical Characteristics and Biological Affinities of die M B I Skeletal Remains from Jebel Qa'aqir." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 245 (1982): 65-73. WILLIAM G , DEVER
JEMDET NASR, site located
100 km (62 mi.) south of Baghdad, approximately halfway between the Euphrates
212
JEMDET NASR
and Tigris Rivers at the northern end of the south Meso potamian plain (32°42' N, 44°47' E). The Proto-cuneiform symbols NI + RU or UB are possible representations of the site's ancient name. T h e UB sign, a five-pointed star, occurs on clay tablets, spindle whorls, a cylinder seal, and painted and incised pottery from the site. The modern name derives from jemdet, an Iraqi word for "small mound" and "Nasr," the name of a modern local sheikh. Of the two mounds at Jemdet Nasr, mound A covers i.5ha (3.7 acres) and mound B totals 7.5 ha (18.5 acres). Almost all excavation so far has taken place on mound B, which rises to a height of 3.5 m. Occupation commences in the Ubaid period (c. 4000 BCE) and flourishes from 3,400 to 2,800 BCE, during the Late Uruk, Jemdet Nasr, and Early Dynastic I periods. On the summit of mound A tire foundations of a baked-brick build ing of Neo-Babylonian or Parthian date have been exca vated. Jemdet Nasr first came to notice in 1925, when artifacts from the site were brought to tlie nearby camp of the Oxford University-Field Museum (Chicago) Expedition to Meso potamia excavating the Sumerian city of Kish under Ste phen Langdon. Langdon conducted a season of excavations at Jemdet Nasr in 1926; Louis Watelin, field director at Kish, directed a brief second season in 1928. Material from these two seasons was hastily excavated and inadequately pub lished. More recent excavations, in 1988 and 1989, were car-
JEMDET NASR.
Spindle whorl
Note the incised five-pointed star,
the U B sign, a possible ancient representation of the name of J e m det Nasr. F r o m the 1 9 2 6 excavation. (Courtesy R. J . Matthews)
ried out by R. J. Matthews for the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq. The principal architectural feature at Jemdet Nasr is a large building (92 X 48 m) constructed of both sun-dried and baked mud bricks, with clay roofing and ceramic gutters or drains. The building consists of ranges of long, narrow rooms on three sides of a more open area, all resting on a brick platform. T h e contents of this large building, as well as its unusual size and plan, suggest that it functioned as an administrative organization of some significance, probably a temple. Artifacts from this building were considered dis tinctive enough to define a previously unknown period, called Jemdet Nasr (3200-3000 BCE) . When this period was first identified, there was some uncertainty as to its nature and extent. It is now clear, however, that Jemdet Nasr, as a cultural definition, is a term which can only be applied to southern Mesopotamian communities of the late fourth mil lennium. In contrast to the preceding Late Uruk period, when a largely homogeneous material culture spread from southern Mesopotamia across great areas of die ancient Near East—from southwestern Iran to southern Anatolia and even reaching Egypt—the Jemdet Nasr period was a time of retrenchment and relative cultural isolation in south ern Mesopotamia. An extremely important group of more than two hundred inscribed clay tablets was found within the large building. Other tablets, now in museums in Europe, are thought to have been illicitly removed from the site. The Jemdet Nasr tablets are written in a Proto-cuneiform script comparable to that employed on tablets from the Eanna Archaic III levels at the site of Uruk-Warka, immediately postdating the Eanna Archaic IV tablets which are tlie earliest inscribed clay tablets from Mesopotamia. [.See Uruk-Warka.] T h e lan guage of these tablets is likely to bear some relation to the Sumerian language of later, Early Dynastic texts, although the lack of grammatical elements makes any language iden tification hazardous. T h e Jemdet Nasr tablets deal with tlie administration of an unidentified important institution, probably a temple, and concern the management of labor, measurement of land, herding of animals, and distribution of rations; they employ a range of numerical counting sys tems including sexagesimal and bisexagesimal. T h e tablets thus appear to deal exclusively with economic and admin istrative matters; many bear impressions made by cylinder seals which depict naturalistic scenes of humans, animals, architecture, and decorative motifs. One group of thirteen tablets bears a seal impression which lists the names of sev eral early Mesopotamian cities, including Ur, Larsa, Nip pur, Uruk, Kesh, Zabala, and Urum. [See Seals.] Similar lists of early Mesopotamian cities are known from contemporary contexts at Uruk-Warka, as well as from Early Dynastic and Old Babylonian tablets from Abu Salabikh and Ur. This evidence is the earliest indication of some form of intercity cooperation in ancient Mesopotamia, although its precise
JEMMEH, TELL
213
developments were to underpin the spectacular achieve ments of Sumerian civilization in the succeeding Early Dy nastic period. BIBLIOGRAPHY
JEMDET NASR.
Burial of the Late Uruk period.
N e x t to the con
tracted b o d y are grave goods, including pots, a stone bowl, and many shells. F r o m the 1989 excavation. (Courtesy R. J . Matthews)
nature remains unclear. T h e need for cities to act in concert in the Jemdet Nasr period may be an indication of military threats to southern Mesopotamia attendant upon the col lapse of the Late Uruk cultural sphere. Other artifacts include distinctive stone cylinder seals with abstract designs of ladders, spiders, and pig-tailed humans, very different from the seal impressions on the tablets. In a large rubbish dump of Early Dynastic I date, a group of 180 clay sealings was recovered. These sealings, which had orig inally sealed door locks and containers, were impressed with naturalistic scenes similar in many respects to those on the Proto-cuneiform tablets, thus demoiisteating continuity from Jemdet Nasr into Early Dynastic times. T h e Jemdet Nasr pottery assemblage includes polychrome painted ves sels which display distinctive plum, dark red, and black col ors, and a range of plain pottery types subsequentiy found at other sites in southern Mesopotamia as far north as the Diyala valley and Hamrin mountains. Based on the ceram ics, the main Jemdet Nasr period sites in southern Meso potamia are Uruk-Warka, Ur, Fara, Nippur, and Tell Uqair. In sum, the material culture of Jemdet Nasr reflects the con solidation of administrative and social developments in the centuries following the invention of Proto-cuneiform writing in the Late Uruk period in southern Mesopotamia. These
Englund, Robert K . , and J . P. Gregoire. The Proto-Cuneifonn Texts from Jemdet Nasr. Materialien zu den friihen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients, vol. i. Berlin, 1 9 9 1 . T h e first volume in a series which aims to provide full coverage of all known Proto-cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia. Finkbeiner, Uwe, and Wolfgang Rollig, eds. Gamdat Nasr: Period or Regional Style? Beihefte zum Tiibinger Adas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B , vol. 62. Wiesbaden, 1986. Publication of a conference held to discuss the definition and significance of the site and period of Jemdet Nasr, containing many relevant and authoritative articles on Mesopotamia and surrounding areas; subsequent excavation has re fined many of the details. Matthews, R . J . "Excavations at Jemdet Nasr, 1988." Iraq 51 (1989): 225-248. Account of recent work. Matthews, R. J . "Defining the Style of die Period: Jemdet Nasr, 1 9 2 6 28." Iraq 54 (1992): 1 - 3 4 . Analysis of material from the 1920s sea sons, with special reference to the pottery. Matthews, R. J . "Jemdet Nasr: T h e Site and the Period." Biblical Ar chaeologist 55 (1992): 196-203. Fully illustrated general survey of the 1920s and 1980s excavations within a wider Mesopotamian context. Matthews, R . J . Cities, Seals, and Writing: Archaic Seal Impressions from Jemdet Nasr and Ur. Materialien zu den friihen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients, vol. 2. Berlin, 1993. Full publication of the seal impressions on the clay tablets from Jemdet Nasr, with an anal ysis of their role within the administration and a discussion of "city name" seal impressions from Jemdet Nasr, Uruk, and Ur. R . J . MATTHEWS
JEMMEH, TELL, site located in Nahal Besor, about 1 0 km (6 mi.) due south of Gaza (map reference 097 X 088). W. J. Phythian-Adams and Sir William Flinders Petrie iden tified it as biblical Gerar. However, Benjamin Mazar has demonstrated that it is Yurza, a border town mentioned in New Kingdom topographical lists and in die Amarna texts. Yurza is also "Arsa on the Brook of Egypt" of the Esarhaddon inscriptions. Yardha, Yurza, and Arsa are not men tioned in the Bible. Phythian-Adams first sampled the site for one day in 1922, followed by Petrie for six montiis in 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 2 7 . Gus Van Beek conducted major excavations in 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 8 , and small, problem-solving digs in 1982, 1984, 1987, and 1990. At virgin soil, the area of the site was approximately 1 2 . 1 5 acres; 15 m of occupational debris covered about 1,500 years of continuous occupation from the Middle Bronze III through the Early Hellenistic periods. Although the entire site was settled in most periods from the tenth to the eighth centuries BCE, and again in the Persian period, only the west ern half was occupied. A small Chalcolithic settlement was found on the east side. Occasional Crusader and twentieth century CE artifacts were found at the surface. T h e site was resettled in the M B II-III, ending a 1,500year hiatus. T h e climate had by then changed sufficiently to
214
JEMMEH, TELL
support rainfall agriculture in this marginal environment. The site was protected by an earthen revetment, and ass sacrifices were found buried beneath buildings. Imports show a brisk trade widi Cyprus, and a Tell el-Yahudiyeh bull vessel relates Jemmeh to coastal and Jordan Valley Ca naan. The Late Bronze II was an extraordinarily active period at the site, indicated by debris accumulated to a depth of 6 m. The elite lived on the west side, where an enormous house of die thirteenth century featured a public area—with cobblestone floor, mud benches along the walls, a bread oven in one corner, and a plastered bathroom in another— and a domestic section complete with courtyard, ovens, and a private entrance. Camel bones first appear in tiiis period, and African fauna are represented by vertebrae of an Afri can ostrich and a horn core of a hartebeest. A Philistine settlement followed and may have lasted to the end of the occupation. The most noteworthy find of the twelfth-tenth centuries is a very large, technologically so phisticated pottery kiln, so far unparalleled in Israel. The tenth-century settiement exhibited a method of minimizing damage to mud-brick buildings from earthquake by sur rounding the mud-brick foundations with compressible sand. In the seventh century BCE the Assryian king Esarhaddon conquered Arsa and converted the town into a military base, protected by a casemate-wall system, for his assault on Egypt. Pie built new buildings following a common Assyrian
JEMMEH, TELL.
plan, vaulted rooms with the pitched-brick method long known in Assyria, and outfitted one building with fine ce ramic Assyrian Palace ware. Two ostraca were found, writ ten in a script with Philistine characteristics, one of which contains an unusual series of names, in which six probable family names end in sin. Petrie's largest building was probably a massive Persian fort guarding a small town. Petrie found ten and Van Beek two circular storage buildings with no house remains. This suggests that the site was a central storage facility during Ptolemaic rule in the late fourth-third centuries BCE. T h e ostraca indicate that produce, representing taxes paid to die state, was deposited in the structures according to kind— grain in some, wine in others. Jemmeh is the first Palestinian excavation in which every thing—bones, seeds, plaster, slag—was saved and attempts were made to restore all artifacts. This methodology elimi nated collecting biases, yielded new forms and artifacts not heretofore seen, and made it easier to determine the func tions of structures and areas. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. " T h e L a n d of Gerar." Israel Exploration Journal 6.1 (1956): 2 6 - 3 2 . Maisler (Mazar), Benjamin. "Yurza: T h e Identification of Tell Jem meh." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 84 ( 1 9 5 2 ) : 4 8 - 5 1 . Naveh, Joseph. "Writing and Scripts in Seventh-Century B . C . E . Philistia: The New Evidence from Tell Jemmeh." Israel Exploration Journal^ (1985): 8 - 2 1 .
Granary, from the northeast. T h e two piers are the springers of a radially arched
crosswall supporting roofing beams. Superimposed mud-brick floors indicate use in two periods. (Courtesy G . W. Van Beek)
JERASH Oppenheim, A. L . "Babylonian and Assyrian Historical Texts, Esarhaddon." In Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, edited by James B . Pritchard, pp. 289-294. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. Petrie, W. M . Flinders. Gerar. British School of Archaeology in Egypt, Publications of the Egyptian Research Account, no. 43. London, 1928. Phythian-Adams, W. J . "Report on Soundings at Tell Jemmeh." Pal estine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1923): 1 4 0 - 1 4 6 . Schaefer, Jerome. " T h e Ecology of Empires: An Archeological A p proach to the Byzantine Communities of the Negev Desert." Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1979. Van Beek, Gus W. "Archeological Investigations at Tell Jemmeh, Is rael." National Geographic Society Research Reports: 7975 Projects, pp. 675-696. Washington, D . C . , 1984. Wilson, J . A. "Egyptian Historical Texts: T h e Asiatic Campaigns of Thut-mose III." In Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, edited by James B . Pritchard, p. 2 3 5 . 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. G u s W. VAN BEEK
JERASH, site located in the region of Gilead, 34 km (21 mi.) nordi of Amman, Jordan, and 22 km ( 1 4 mi.) east of 'Ajlun ( 3 2 ° i 7 ' N , 35°54' E). T h e ruins atjerash (Gk., Gerasa) attest to the city's prominence in die Hellenistic and Ro man eras. Identification of tlie site is based on Roman-era public inscriptions that describe the city's inhabitants as Gerasenes. Coins and other inscriptions offer a more com plete title for the city: "the city of the Antiochenes on the River Chrysorhoas, formerly [of] the people of Gerasa, holy and sacrosanct" (C. B. Welles, "Indices to the Inscriptions," in Gerasa: City of the Decapolis, New Haven, 1938 [hereafter Welles, 1 9 3 8 ] , no. 2 3 2 ) . T h e Hellenistic title Antioch may have been bestowed in honor of Antiochus III ( 2 2 3 - 1 8 7 BCE) or IV ( 1 7 5 BCE) once Transjordan passed to the Seleucid dynasty (200 BCE) . One account (Etymologicon Magnicum, col. 207) offers an etymology of the pre-Hellenistic name for Gerasa based on the tradition that when Alexander die Great captured the city, the younger men were killed and only the elderly (geron) survived. Another account (Stephanus Byzantius, de Urbibus 3.543) attributes the title to a company of gerontes ("veterans") that Alexander settled at the site. It is more likely that tlie name Gerasa was the hellenized version of an unknown Semitic name for the preHellenistic settlement. Although the German scholar Ulrich Seetzen first recog nized die site in 1806, major excavation did not begin until 1 9 2 5 , when George Horsfield led an Anglo-American team sponsored by the British Mandatory Government. Their work continued until 1 9 3 1 and was supplemented in 1928 by a joint expedition from the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and Yale University, led by John Winter Crow foot, The American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) replaced tlie British school in 1930 under the direction of Clarence S. Fisher, and then Nelson Glueck in 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 4 . Between 1925 and 1934, excavators uncovered the sanctu
215
aries of Zeus and Artemis and the southern theater and cleared tlie cardo and many church foundations. The area of the city east of the bisecting Chryorhoas River has not been excavated because it runs under the modern town of Jerash. [See the biographies of Horsfield, Crowfoot, Fisher, and Glueck.] Restoration continued in the 1940s and 1950s. The lower terrace of die Temple of Zeus and tlie oval plaza were par tially restored in the 1940s, and restoration of the southern theater lasted until the 1960s. Otherwise, work during the 1960s was limited to removing debris from either side of the cardo and partially restoring the gates of the Temple of Ar temis (see figure 1 ) . An Italian expedition from the Univer sity of Turin resumed excavations atjerash in 1 9 7 5 ; it was subsumed in 1982 by T h e Jerash Archaeological Project, composed at various times of teams from Jordan, Great Brit ain, tlie United States, Austtalia, France, Poland, Spain, and Italy. T h e project has excavated many structures in tlie western half of the city, principally the Temples of Artemis and Zeus, as well as the hippodrome and tombs outside the city. Pre-Roman sites outside the walls of Jerash have yielded Acheulean hand axes, numerous Neolithic flint implements, and hearths, as well as Chalcolithic flint implements and burial mounds. These finds, along with Bronze Age, Middle Bronze Age, and Iron Age pottery from inside and outside the city walls, suggest that the site and its environs had been intermittently inhabited since the earliest Stone Age settle ment. It is likely that a small Hellenistic or pre-Hellenistic settle ment existed at Gerasa and became a polis after Antiochus III or IV won Transjordan. A Roman inscription states that a group of Macedonians, perhaps Greek veterans, were early inhabitants (Welles, 1938, no. 78). Various legends as sign die founding of die city to a particular political figure (Antiochus FV, Alexander the Great, or one of Alexander's successors: Perdiccas or Antigonus). A Roman-era inscrip tion (Welles, 1938, no. 1 3 7 ) states that a statue of Perdiccas, Alexander's general, was erected at Gerasa; it suggests that during the Roman era Perdiccas was regarded as the founder of the Hellenistic city. By tlie mid-second century BCE both the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires were weakening. [See Ptolemies; Seleucids.] Hostility toward Hellenism led to the Hasmonean re volt against the Seleucids in 1 7 3 - 1 6 4 BCE. Under Alexander Jannaeus, in 103 BCE, the Hasmoneans took control of the Decapolis cities. [See Decapolis.] Gerasa and Philadelphia, however, remained in die hands of Zeno and Theodoras, the "tyrants" of Philadelphia, who brought some of their treasure for safekeeping to the Temple of Zeus at Gerasa (Josephus, War 1.104; Antiq. 1 3 . 3 9 3 ) . Indeed, excavation of the foundation walls of die temenos of the Temple of Zeus uncovered Rhodian stamped jar handles (c. 2 1 0 - 1 8 0 BCE),
216
JERASH
JERASH. Figure I .
View of the propylaea and staircase leading to the Sanctuary of Artemis. (Courtesy
E . C. Lapp)
confirming the existence of the sanctuary at that time. Alex ander Jannaeus reportedly captured Gerasa at the end of his reign ( 1 0 2 - 7 6 BCE), however, and died while besieging Ragaba, in Gerasene territory (Josephus, Antiq. 13.398). The Decapolis region, contested among local powers such as the Nabateans, Itureans, and Hasmoneans in the wake of Seleucid disintegration, succumbed to Rome with the arrival of Pompey in 63 BCE. T h e Decapolis cities, including Ger asa, were given back their autonomy by Pompey, but they remained under the hegemony of the Province of Syria to the north. The city came to flourish with the broad security and prosperity that characterized the Pax Romana, possibly in terrupted by Jewish uprisings. During the First Jewish Re volt against Rome (66-70 CE), the rebels reportedly attacked Gerasa, despite reports of peace between the Romans and Jews (War 2.458; 4.480). [See First Jewish Revolt.] Indeed, the continuity of the building program during the revolt sug gests to most scholars that the Gerasa captured by the Ro mans (War 4.487-848) was not tire Decapolis city. Archi tectural fragments attributed to a synagogue and found in the fill of Hadrian's arch suggest that the city's Jewish com munity was destroyed prior to 1 3 0 , although not necessarily as a result of die Jewish uprising in the 60s (cf. Welles, 1938, nos. 56-57)-
The renewed prosperity at the advent of the Roman era led to die renovation of the Temple of Zeus (22-24 CE). A terraced courtyard surrounding tire temple was built on a hill in the southwest quarter of the city in 27/28 CE. Its vault ing required substantial retaining walls, so a major building
project, perhaps during the reign of Augustus, preceded the courtyard. The second renovation ( 1 6 1 - 1 6 3 CE) added three successive terraces joined by stairs that ascend the hill to ward the temple. T h e upper terrace, a flat, colonnaded plat form ( n o X 50 m), surrounds the temple proper. T h e tem ple rests on subterranean vaults, with eight columns along its facade and twelve along its sides. T w o altar inscriptions dated to the 40s CE (Welles, 1 9 3 8 , nos. 2, 4) reveal that the temple was a local enterprise subsidized by Gerasenes and suggest a substantial degree of private wealth. The basis for later urban development was also laid during the Early Roman era. Gerasa's orthogonal plan, with its bi secting cardo maximus, two decumani, and a city wall of uni form construction ( 1 0 1 towers spaced at 1 7 - 2 2 m intervals), was formulated by 75/76 (Welles, 1938, no. 65). Excavations against the inner face of the southern city wall indicate that the first Roman wall was built in 70 CE, although the present, thicker walls date to the fourth century. Six gates interrupt the wall; die most elaborate pair mark tire north and south entrances, with two on the west and two water gates to ac commodate the Chrysorhoas River. T h e 12-meter-wide, Ionic-colonnaded cardo maximus (see figure 2) extends for more titan 800 m to the city's northern and southern ex tremes and intersects two 8-9-meter-wide decumani. T h e cardo also conceals the main artery of the underground sew age system and parallels the course of the Chrysorhoas, which is traversed by three bridges. A Corinthian triple archway joins the cardo maximus to the oval plaza (first century), a unique precinct set in a nat ural depression northeast of the Temple of Zeus. Surround-
JERASH ing the elliptical (90 X 80 m) area's stone-slab pavement are 160 Ionic columns. Underneath the plaza lies the confluence of a network of water and drainage channels for die west and soudiwest of the city, and a small street joins die plaza with the city's south gate. T h e south theater, just west of the Temple of Zeus, was dedicated in 90/91. The lower auditorium (ima caved) was built into a natural slope and contained four divisions (cunei), while the upper auditorium (summa caved) stood above and contained eight. T h e theater held, in its eight sections of fifteen rows each, about three thousand spectators and dis played an elaborately decorated scaenae. T h e next phase in Gerasa's growth followed Trajan's re organization of the Roman east in 106, when the expansion ist emperor annexed the Nabatean kingdom and founded die Roman Province of Arabia. [See Nabateans.] Gerasa be came a central part of the new province, whose political and military capital was at Bosra. Gerasa continued to prosper in its role as a caravan city, then more profitably placed
JERASH. Figure 2.
View of the central colonnade next to the cardo.
(Courtesy E . C . L a p p )
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along a tributary of the major international route linking east-west trade, the Via Nova Trajana. By the end of the Hadrian's reign ( 1 1 7 - 1 3 8 ) , the Roman road network in Syria-Palestine was complete. [See Roads; Transportation.] Jerash became a key junction along the route that connected Philadelphia with the Mediterranean cities. This boost in trade led to increased contact with the Nabateans, evidenced by Nabatean coins and jewelry styles and a Nabatean public inscription. A building spree followed Trajan's reorganiza tion of die east and continued during the reign of Hadrian, who visited the city, heralded by a triumphal arch. Also at this time (until the reign of Alexander Severus), Gerasa be gan to strike its own coins bearing the image of Artemis or Tyche with the emperor. In addition to considerable renovation of the Temple of Zeus ( 1 6 2 - 1 6 6 ) and nionumentalization of the cardo with the northern and southern tetrapyla, expensive consttuction began during the second century on the Temple of Artemis. The new sanctuary to the city's patron goddess became the focal point of the city during die Middle Roman era and required thirty years of construction ( 1 5 0 - 1 8 0 ) . Its size, complex architecture, and well-planned approach up its processional way rendered the Artemesion one of the most impressive sanctuaries in the Syro-Palestinian world. Begin ning in the eastern half of the city, the processional way ( 1 1 m wide X 500 m long) bridges the river, approaches the cardo at an ornamental exedra, and ascends the retaining wall toward the eastern end of the colonnaded propylaeum. A staircase then leads to the outer court ( 1 6 1 X 1 2 1 m) of the temenos through a triple gate and finally to a colonnade ( u r n wide X 1 0 0 m long) that leads to die temple court (124 X 88 m). T h e Temple of Artemis stands in this col onnaded court; two sets of stairs ascend the podium (40 X 22.6 X 4 m) to die temple. Of peripteral hexastylos design, the temple displays six Corinthian columns along its facade, with eleven along each of its sides. Another extravagant structure, the triumphal arch, lies 400 m south of the city and is dated to 1 3 0 CE, just prior to Hadrian's visit. Its main passageway is flanked by subsidiary passages, and both facades contain four engaged Corinthian columns that bear an ornamented architrave and pediment. A passage running from side to side under the main arch indicates that the arch was intended to be a part of the city's southern wall, but the extension of the wall to meet the arch never took place. Also outside the city walls, northwest of the triumphal arch, lies Gerasa's hippodrome (mid-second century CE). Despite an interior length of 244 m and a capacity for fifteen thousand spectators, it is the smallest circus in the east. At its southern end are ten well-preserved compartments from which the chariots started. Recent excavation redated (based on lamp fragments and inscriptions) the structure to this era from its formerly posited tliird-century date (Kehrberg, 1988; Seigne, 1988).
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Telling evidence for the wealth of the city also appears in the duplication of structures. The northern theater, situated northeast of the Temple of Artemis and south of tire north ern decumanus, is smaller than its earlier, southern counter part and dates to 1 6 2 - 1 6 6 CE. Features include vaulted entrances, at least four vomitoria, and two double passage ways, or paradoi. Recent excavation suggests that the orig inal building may have been a roofed odeum and estimate its capacity to some sixteen hundred spectators (Khouri, 1986). [See Theaters; Odeum.] The theater was expanded in a later phase (222-235) and rededicated then. Inscribed on some of the seats of the fourteen-row auditorium are eight legible names of Greek gods and one reference to Ha drian that may have represented the voting tribes (phylai) in the city's boule. Temple C ( 1 1 0 - 1 5 0 CE) is the smallest temple in the city (24 X 27 m). The suucture faces southeast, and the en trance to the T-shaped cella rests within a rectangular per istyle court ( 1 5 . 3 X 9.4 m). The vaulted chamber that lies underneath the podium suggests to some that the suucture may have functioned as a heroon ("hero's shrine"; see Kraeling, 1938).
The western baths (150-200 CE), situated at the corner of the cardo and northern decumanus, comprise one of tire larg est sttuctures in the city (50 X 75 m). Although unexcavated, surface finds suggest a plan similar to those at Timgad and Cyrene. [See Cyrene.] Entered from the east, the struc ture centered around a domed frigidarium flanked by apodyteria to the east and a caidarium to the west. The nymphaeum ( 1 9 1 CE), a small (22 m wide) but finely decorated monument, also indicates the second-century ex penditure on ornamental buildings at Gerasa. Placed south of the Artemision along the cardo maximus, tlie structure displays a two-level facade and central apse, with niches and a Corinthian colonnade spanning its length. The first, mar ble-covered level bears an elaborately carved entabulature; the second level, plastered and richly painted, bears pedi ments and a once-gilded or painted half dome. Water flowed from the statues of the lower story to a basin, through lion heads, to lower circular basins decorated with dolphin motifs and into an underground channel. The decline of Jerash began early in the third century. Political instability and economic vulnerabilities loosened the cohesion of tlie empire so that Caracalla's promotion of the status of Gerasa, dubbing it Colonia Aurelai Antoniniana, was only an ostensible improvement in the city's for tunes. Trade diminished as the Nabateans began to relin quish their political and economic power to the aspiring Palmyrenes. [See Palmyra.] When Roman political instabil ity succeeded in hampering international trade, Gerasa's fortunes faded rapidly. The widespread, lavish construction of previous eras gave way to the dismantling of standing structures for consttuction materials, although new con struction projects did include the (as yet unexcavated) east
baths, die festival theater at Birketein (1,200 m north of the city walls), and tlie expansion of the north theater. The im perial reforms of Diocletian offered a temporary reprieve from Gerasa's decline late in the third century. It was during that time that the city's walls were refortified and a small marketplace just west of the city's south gate was estab lished. In the absence of epigraphic evidence from the city be tween 307 and 440, little can be added to the city's history. The reign of Justinian (527-565), however, marks a renais sance in the life of the city. Reforms in civil and military administration, the protection of the frontiers, and the return of government spending on public buildings improved Ger asa's economic simation and the Gerasenes' standard of liv ing. The Christian character of the sixth-century city is exhib ited in the variety and sophistication of its ecclesiastical structures: chapels, baths for parishioners, and churches. [See Churches.] Church interiors were decorated with mo saics and silver; a glass chalice and several Late Roman glass lamps have been recovered. [See Mosaics.] A series of churches was built in the late fifth and early sixth cenmries, beginning in 464/465 (Welles, 1 9 3 8 , no. 298) with the Apostles, Prophets, and Martyrs Church, situated in the northeast part of the city. The church exhibits a cru ciform plan: each of its arms contains a nave and aisles, with the central area of the cross supported by Corinthian col umns. Building continued with St. Theodore's (496), distin guished by a narthex-flanked nave that led to a rhomboidshaped atrium to tlie west and a fountain court to the east. The Procopius Church (526) was tlie first sixth-century ec clesiastical structure, and the only church on the city's east bank. Its sparse remains suggest that it was basilical, with Corinthian-colonnaded side aisles; its mosaic floors depict floral and geometric motifs. T h e complex of St. George, St. John the Baptist, and Sts. Cosmas and Damian dates to 5 2 9 - 5 3 3 . T h e three churches actually comprise one structure (a central church witii lateral churches). The Church of St. John was built in 5 3 1 (Welles, 1938, no. 306). It is circular, with an exedra facing each of the cardinal points. T h e apse is on the east, with the chancel in front of it, and the dome was supported by four columns. The two flanking churches are identical basilicas with apses in their eastern walls. The Synagogue Church, built in 5 3 0 - 5 3 1 , is so-named because the remains of a synagogue were found beneath tlie church. [See Synagogues.] Beneath the church's apse was the synagogue's narthex, whose floor had a mosaic depicting animals entering Noah's ark. From the narthex, three doors opened to the synagogue's hall, which was divided into a nave and aisles by two rows of columns. An inscription (Welles, 1938, no. 3 4 1 ) records the names of its three do nors. Sts. Peter and Paul (540) and the Mortuary Church (565),
JERBA found in die soudiwest quarter of die city, were excavated under Horsfield's direction in 1929. T h e former was a ba silica with three apses and a colonnaded atrium at its western end, dated to 540 on the basis of mosaic parallels with other dated churches. T h e nearby Mortuary Church, a burial chapel, was a simple hall, terminating in an apse that opened on the south into a burial cave dating from the latter half of the sixth century. T h e Church of St. Genesius, a basilica with an exterior apse and a chapel on the southwest, is dated by an inscription (Welles, 1 9 3 8 , no. 3 3 1 ) to 6 1 1 . Shortiy after the construction of the church, the city was occupied by the Persians ( 6 1 4 ) , and in 635 it fell to the Muslims. Jerash was occupied until a series of eardiquakes struck in the mid- to late eight century. T h e ruined site may have hosted settlement periodically until its final destruction in 1 1 2 2 by Baldwin III. BIBLIOGRAPHY Borkowski, Zbigniew. "Inscriptions on Altars from the Hippodrome of Gerasa." Syria 66 (1989): 79-83. Browning, Iain. Jerash and the Decapolis. London, 1982. Broad and very readable account of early exploration at Jerash and excavations prior to the Jerash Archaeological Project, with a useful introduction to other Decapolis cities. Gerasa 1 : Report of the Italian Archaeological Expedition at Jerash, Cam paigns 1977-1981. 2 vols. Mesopotamia, 1 8 / 1 9 . Florence, 1983—1984. Harding, G . Lankester. "Recent Work on the Jerash Forum." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 81 (1949): 1 2 - 2 0 . Harding, G . Lankester. The Antiquities of Jordan. London, 1959. Kalayan, Haroutine. "Restoration in Jerash (widi Observations about Related Monuments)." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities of Jor dan 22 ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 6 3 - 1 7 1 . Kalayan, Haroutine. " T h e Symmetry and Harmonic Proportions of the Temples of Artemis and Zeus at Jerash, and the Origins of Numerals as Used in die Enlargement of die South Theater in Jerash." In Stud ies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 243-254. Amman, 1982. Kehrberg, Ina. "Selected Lamps and Pottery for the Hippodrome at Jerash." Syria 66 (1988): 85-97. Khouri, Rami G . Jerash, a City of the Decapolis. London, 1984. Khouri, Rami G . Jerash: A Frontier City of the Roman East. London, 1986. Highly useful guide for touring the site, with introductions to exploration, history, and culture at Jerash from the Hellenistic to Islamic eras. Kraeling, Carl H., ed. Gerasa, City of the Decapolis. New Haven, 1938. Standard reference, includes meticulous measurements and plans for all structures within and outside the city walls and Welles's (1938) compilation of inscriptions. M c C o w n , Chester C . " A N e w Deity in a Jerash Inscription." Journal of the American Oriental Society 54 (1934): 1 7 8 - 1 8 5 . Meshorer, Ya'acov. City-Coins of Eretz-Israel and the Decapolis in the Roman Period. Jerusalem, 1985. Olavarri, Emilio. Excavaciones en el Agora de Gerasa en 1983. Madrid, 1986. Parapetti, Roberto. " T h e Architectural Significance of the Sanctuary of Artemis at Gerasa." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1 , edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 255-260. Amman, 1982. Uses archaeological evidence of the Artemion to demonstrate the importance of symmetry to die aesthetic of sanctuary architecture. Pouilloux, Jean. " D e u x inscriptions au tirefitre sud de Gerasa." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 27 (1977): 246-254.
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Seigne, Jacques. " L e sanctuaire de Zeus a Jerash: Elements de chronologie." Syria 66 (1988): 287-295. Spijkerman, Augusto. " A List of the Coins of Gerasa Decapoleos." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 25 (1975): 73-84. Spijkerman, Augusto. The Coins of the Decapolis and Provincia Arabia. Jerusalem, 1978. Thompson, Henry O. Archaeology in Jordan. N e w York, 1989. Zayadine, Fawzi, ed. Jerash Archaeological Project, vol. 2, Fouilles de Jerash, 1984-1988. Paris, 1989. Compilation of essays reporting the results of the Jerash Archaeological Project; essential companion to Kraeling (above). MELISSA M . AUBIN
JERBA, island off the coast of southern Tunisia, occu pying a central position in the Mediterranean seaways (33°53' N , i o ° 5 2 ' E). Jerba (Djerba) is one of the first ports north and west of the Gulf of Syrte. It provides essential water and supplies for boats traveling from Tripolitania to the Maghrib. T h e island is relatively flat, with long beaches on the sea-front punctuated by small coves. The best harbor is now found at Houmt Soul?; however, all of the coast to the southeast provides protected anchorages, and the major ports in antiquity seem to have been located there. In Hellenistic and Roman times the island was known as Meninx, after its principal port. Pliny (5.41) reports that Eratosthenes, a Greek astronomer, identified the island with the land of the Lotus eaters visited by Odysseus. Meninx remained the largest town tiirough the third century CE and in 2 5 1 Vibius Gallus and Volusius were proclaimed emper ors there (Aurelius Victor, Epit. 3 1 ) . However, by that time the name of the island was shifting to that of another city, Girba (Aurelius Victor, Epit. 3 1 ; Cuntz, 1929). This has been identified with modern Houmt Souk on the basis of an inscription found there that mentions the Respublica Girbitana {Annie Epigraphique, 1 9 8 7 , 1 0 3 2 ) ; however, some doubt may persist as to whether the ancient site was not farther inland. T h e Arab traveler al-Tijani, writing in the fourteenth century, speaks of the ruined city of Gerba with a splendid mosque and baths, some distance from die for tress at Houmt Souk (Gragueb, 1976, pp. 25-44). Jerba has been settled since prehistoric times. The island formed part of the Numidian kingdom of Masinissa; a large city site at Henchir Borgou, marked by the ruins of a towertomb, appears to date from die early second century BCE. Jerba's economic potential was reinforced under the Antonines by the construction of a causeway linldng it to the coast; the rapid development of Meninx during the Roman period seems to be related to this event. There is a strong possibility that the island was a center for the slave trade, dealing in slaves from south of the Sahara desert who were brought up to the coast through the valley of the Fazzan in southern Libya. Byzantine remains, such as the small fort on the main road between the causeway and Houmt Souk, as well as the rec-
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ords of bishops of the island, qualified in Latin as Girbitani, suggest that occupation and some prosperity continued up to the Arab conquest. In the eighth century most of the orig inal population appears to have converted to the Ibadi Mus lim sect, which was, until recently, in the majority. Jewish communities are found at Hara Sghrir and Hara Kebira, just inland from Houmt Souk. Tradition dates the Jewish settlement of the island to the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE; it is said that a door of the temple and stones from a sanctuary were brought to Jerba by a group of kohdnim (Heb., "priests") and built into the synagogue at Hara Sghrir, known as the Ghriba. This is the reason commonly given for the importance of the Ghriba as a pilgrimage site. Although there is no archaeological or doc umentary proof of this early origin, numerous Jewish com munities in Roman North Africa are known. Furthermore, certain local customs, such as the recitation of a long kiddush (Heb., "sanctification") before Passover, find parallels in Morocco and Yemen and may predate the unification of Jewish ritual.[See Flebrew Language and Literature.] Thus, tire origin of the community may well lie in the second, if not the first, diaspora. The existence of the Jewish com munity on Jerba is first demonstrated by documents from the Cairo Geniza dating to about 1030 CE. These merchants' records show that, by the eleventh century, Jerba was par ticipating in a wide commercial network, trading agricultural products as well as slaves with Cairo, Sicily, Amalfi, Genoa, and Venice. The Norman conquest of the island probably did not damage this trade, although the effects of a massacre in 1 1 5 4 will have to be evaluated by historians. Subse quently, die island was taken by the Aragonese, and from then on was the subject of a dispute between Christians and Muslims. Two Aragonese forts are known from the medieval pe riod. One, the Borj Ghazi Mustafa in Houmt Souk, has been excavated by the Tunisian Department of Antiquities. The earliest fortress, constructed between 1284 and 1289 by Ro ger de Loria, admiral of Aragon and Sicily, is defended by circular, square, and octagonal towers (the latter mentioned by al-Tijani in the fourteenth century). The second Ara gonese fort is found at Borj Kastil, on the tip of a long sandspit on the southeast side of the island. BIBLIOGRAPHY Cuntz, Otto, ed. Itineraria romana. Vol. 1. Leipzig, 1929. See page 83 for Girba in the hinerarium maritimum, Ennabli, Abdelmajid. "Meninx." In Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. Princeton, 1976. Gragueb, Anton. "Note sur le voyage de Tijani dans le Sud Tunisien." Cahiers de Tunisiez^ (1976) 25-44. Valensi, Lucette, and Avram L . Udovitch. Juifs en lene d'hlame: Les conimimautes de Djerba. Paris, 1984. Study of the communities of Hara Sghrir and Hara Kebira, with an introduction to tite history of the sites. ELIZABETH FENTRESS
JERICHO
( 3 i ° 8 o ' N , 35°3o' E; map reference 1 9 2 X 1 4 2 ) , site located in the Jordan Valley, northwest of the Dead Sea, about 2 km (1 mi.) northwest of the modern oasis of Jericho (Ar., er-Riha) and to the east of the mountains of Judea Qudah). Geographically, the first settlement occurred on the fertile plain of the Great African Rift Valley, some 250 m (825 ft.) below sea level, through which the Jordan River descends into the Dead Sea. The first references to Jericho in die Hebrew Bible are in die books of Numbers ( 2 2 : 1 , 26:3), where the encampment of Israel is described across the river from the town; of Deu teronomy (34:1, 3 ) , where the site is named; and of Joshua ( 2 : 1 - 3 , 5 : 1 3 - 6 : 2 6 ) , where it is recorded that spies were sent to examine the city and that the town was surrounded and conquered. The modern name of the mound, Tell es-Sultan, is die medieval name given to the site because it is lo cated at the spring of 'Am es-Sultan ("Elisha's fountain"). During the period of the Judges, when the site was pur portedly occupied by Eglon of Moab, the town was also known as the "city of palm trees" (Jgs. 3 : 1 3 ) .
Archaeological History. Because of its biblical connec tions, the site of Jericho inspired considerable attention for nearly fifteen hundred years before the advent of modern archaeological research. Many pilgrims and travelers visited the area during the first millennium CE, the first written ac count, in 333 CE, being that of the Pilgrim of Bordeau (de scribed in Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099-1185, by John Wilkin son, with Joyce Hill and W. F. Ryan, London, 1988, p. 4 ) . It was not until 1868, however, that the first archaeological investigation of the mound was undertaken by Charles War ren, on behalf of the British Palestine Exploration Fund. Warren excavated east-west trenches on die mound and sank 2.4 sq. m shafts 6.1 m into the earth (Warren, 1869, pp. 1 4 - 1 6 ) . Although Warren dug through the EB town wall and found artifacts, he did not consider that the excavated material remains (pottery and stone mortars) were very im portant occupational finds for dating successive historical periods. Warren's conclusion regarding Jericho and other similar sites was: "The fact that in the Jordan valley these mounds generally stand at the mouths of the great wadies, is rather in favour of tiieir having been the sites of ancient guard-houses or watch-towers" (Warren, 1869, p. 2 1 0 ) . The site was more seriously investigated when Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener made a topographical survey of Jericho and its surroundings, published in The Survey of Western Palestine, vol. 3 (London, 1 8 8 3 ) . T h e second ar chaeological expedition to the site was conducted by an Austro-German team directed by Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger between 1 9 0 7 and 1909 and in 1 9 1 1 , under the sponsorship of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Ori ent-Gesellschaft); the results appeared in Jericho: DieErgebnisse der Ausgrabungen (Leipzig, 1 9 1 3 ) . T h e large portion of the mound excavated revealed much of the Middle Bronze Age glacis, which originally surrounded the town, as well as
JERICHO portions of the EB town walls. Houses belonging to the Is raelite occupation of the town (eleventh-early sixth centu ries BCE) were discovered on the southeast side of die mound. Controversy over the dating and capture of Jericho by Joshua has centered around two main schools of thought. T h e first theory conforms essentially to the biblical view that the Israelite occupation occurred with military attacks on Canaanite cities (a view primarily maintained by William Foxwell Albright, G. Ernest Wright, and John Bright). The second theory is that the conquest was a gradual and peace ful assimilation process that occurred in about 1200 BCE, at the beginning of the Iron Age (a view held by Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth and more recently discussed by Manfred Weippert [1971], and Israel Finkelstein [1988]). In an effort to obtain further archaeological evidence con cerning this question, excavations were conducted at Jericho from 1930 to 1936 by John Garstang. He led tlie MarstonMelchett Expedition on behalf of the University of Liver pool and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Garstang excavated many areas on the mound and also lo cated a number of M B and LB tombs in the necropolis as sociated with the site (Garstang, 1932, pp. 18-22, 41-54; 1933a PP- 4-42; Bienkowski, 1986, pp. 32-102). Garstang originally claimed that the Israelites had indeed destroyed Jericho on the evidence of fallen walls he dated to the end of the Late Bronze Age, but he later revised their destruction to a much earlier period. Although the Joshua controversy was not solved, Garstang did reveal the very early Mesolithic and Neolithic stages of occupation on tlie site. In an effort to resolve the Joshua problem and to clarify the results of Garstang's excavations, Kathleen M. Kenyon directed the most recent archaeological work at Jericho (1952-1958), sponsored by the British School of Archae ology in Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the British Academy in collaboration with the American School of Oriental Research (now Albright Institute) in Jerusalem and tlie Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (Kenyon, 1957, i960, 1965, 1981; Kenyon and Holland, 1982, 1983). T h e Kenyon expedition excavated a large number of tombs in the necropolis dating from the Proto-Urban period (c. 34003100 BCE) to the Roman period. Although much of the an cient mound had already been dug by tlie previous two ex peditions, Kenyon was able to plot three main trenches on the north (trench II), west (trench I), and south (trench III) slopes of die tell in order to obtain comparative stratigraphical cross-sections of the main fortification systems of dif ferent historical periods. She also excavated a number of large squares inside tlie walls of the town in order to cross check the results of the former excavations as well as to ex pose larger areas of the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods of occupation; these squares are lettered and numbered A I—II (grid E4-5, on tire highest part of the tell, 24 m high), D I, D II (grid H4-5, east end of trench I), E I - V (grid E-F6-7, northeast side of the tell), F I (grid G4-5, northeast end of
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trench I), H I-VI (grid H 6 - 7 , east side of the mound above the spring), L I (grid G 5 - 6 , center of the mound), and M I (grid F - G 5 , overlapping die EB town wall on the north western side of the mound). Major R e m a i n s . Archaeological investigations of the site have shown that it is one of the earliest settled communities in the world. During the Mesolithic period (or Epipaleolithic, beginning c. 12,000 BCE), local hunters camped around the natural spring and constructed an oblong plat form of clay directly on bedrock in square E I (Kenyon, 1 9 8 1 , pi. 144b). Kenyon indentified a group of three stone sockets associated with the platform as probable supports for "totem poles" used in a shrine or sanctuary, but Peter Dorrell (Kenyon and Holland, 1 9 8 3 , p. 489) later reclassi fied these stones as limestone mortars. Many Natufian flint and bone tools, including a small bone harpoon, were found in this area. The next stage of growth at Jericho occurred during the Epipaleolitliic/Neolithic 1 period (c. 8700-8500 BCE). Ru dimentary clay "humplike" (or "hog-backed") bricks be longing to the bases of walls of shelters, with probable branch and skin superstructures, were found in squares D F and M I (Kenyon, 1 9 8 1 , pis. 1 2 9 , 295). T h e most impor tant aspect of the flint industry was the occurrence of palegray obsidian tools. T h e obsidian for malting the tools came from Ciftlik in eastern Turkey, thereby confirming that the inhabitants of Jericho had already evolved extensive trade relations, making it a major center of evolving civilization. Although there was a gap in occupation between the Epipaleolithic/Neolithic 1 period and the next stage of devel opment, the Neolithic 1 occupation (c. 8500 BCE), great ad vances had been made in architecture and town planning. T h e development of one-room, domed, round houses con structed with plano-convex mud bricks implies a permanent settlement and the beginning of a true town. For reasons not yet ascertained, tlie inhabitants built a major stone wall around the town, as well as a stone tower (diameter, 8.5 m; height, 7.75 m) against the inner side of the town wall in trench I (Kenyon, 1 9 8 1 , pis. 4 , 6 ) . The excavator suggested that these constructions were either for defense or protection from wild animals, but Ofer Bar-Yosef (1986, pp. 1 5 9 - 1 6 1 ) has hypothesized that the wall may have been necessary to keep the rising accumulation of ground debris out of the town. The tower may also have been used for some religious purpose. T h e presence of bone tools such as pins, awls, and a shuttle attest to both a skin-working industry and weaving (see figure 1 ) . T h e succeeding Neolithic 2 period (c. 7000 BCE) is archi tecturally notable in that there was a complete change in house construction from simple round rooms to rectangular rooms. Seventeen building levels were found that revealed that the houses were built around a central courtyard con taining fireplaces. Impressions left in the clay floors gave evidence of different patterns of rush-made mats (Crowfoot
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in Kenyon and Holland, 1982, pp. 546-550, pis. 4 - 5 ) . One very large room (about 6 m X 6 m) stands out because it contained a plaster-lined basin and a series of pits, as well as adjoining semicircular domed enclosures on its east and west sides (Kenyon, 1 9 8 1 , pis. 46b, 2 2 1 ) . Because of its unique plan, Kenyon suggested that it probably served as a cult center or temple. However, the presence of bone tools could imply that it was a skin-working "factory," witii the domed enclosures used as drying kilns. Other finds certainly suggest some form of cult practice or ancestor worship. A group of human skulls was plastered and painted to repre sent human faces, possibly to resemble the actual features of the deceased (Kenyon, 1 9 8 1 , pis. 50-59). Dated to the end of this period were two clay figures stylized to represent human figures; one had shells inlaid as eyes and painted features (Garstang, 1 9 3 5 , pi. 53) (see figure 2 ) . It is known that Jericho was abandoned at the end of Ne olithic 2 because there were considerable layers of eroded material over the occupation remains of that period. T h e next sequence of settlements is known as the Pottery Neo lithic A and B period, or Neolithic 3 - 4 , because the new comers to die site brought the art of pottery making with them. Two distinct styles of pottery indicate that there were two separate groups of settlers (Kenyon and Holland, 1982, figs. 1 - 1 9 , 2 1 - 3 3 for the A and B period pottery types). While the Pottery Neolithic A people lived only in pit dwell ings cut into die debris of the previous occupation, the ar rival of the B people introduced the construction of hut
JERICHO. Figure 1 .
dwellings and, later, of freestanding houses with stone foun dations and handmade mud-brick superstructures. Crow foot Payne has identified the new types of flint tools used as Yarmukian (Kenyon and Holland, 1 9 8 3 , pp. 7 0 6 - 7 1 6 , figs. 3 3 2 - 3 4 1 ) . An analysis of die plant remains from this period led Maria Hopf (Kenyon and Holland, 1983, p. 578) to con clude that the Pottery Neolithic, or Neolithic 3 - 4 , people were primarily herdsmen and hunters. Jericho was again abandoned for a considerable period of time at the end of the Pottery Neolithic period. T h e next occupation of the site, in Kenyon's terminology, is known as the Proto-Urban period (c. 3 4 0 0 - 3 1 0 0 BCE = EB I else where), which she subdivided into periods A and B on the basis of different pottery styles found in the tombs of the necropolis belonging to this stage of occupation. Garstang's excavations in area E revealed the best information con cerning the religious customs and architecture of tiiis period; he found a broadroom building, with an entrance facing east, that he labeled shrine 420 (Garstang, 1 9 3 6 , pp. 7 3 - 7 4 , pi. 4 1 a ) . Stone objects associated with the shrine included a small libation altar and an oval-shaped smoothed stone Gar stang thought could have been a prototype of the masseba. The next occupation at Jericho is the Early Bronze Age (Kenyon's EB I—III, c. 3050-2300 BCE = EB II—III else where), which gradually evolved out of the preceding ProtoUrban period. Defense of the town seems to have been u p permost in the thoughts of its EB occupants, as Kenyon found remains of two parallel town walls constructed of
Neolithic moat, tower, and fortification wall,
(Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N Y )
JERICHO
JERICHO.
Figure 2. Pre-Pottery
Neolithic B head with inlaid
seashell
eyes, (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
mold-made, unbaked rectangular mud bricks. During the later stages of die walls, the town was also protected by an external ditch. Architecturally, the earliest houses are either oblong witii a curved end, or circular; later, rectangular de signs were employed, as well as mud-brick built silos for storing grain. This was die first period at Jericho in which artificial irrigation was employed to produce food for selfsufficiency: large quantities of carbonized naked hexaploid bread-wheat remains were found (Hopf in Kenyon and Hol land, 1 9 8 3 , p. 579). Multiple burials in the rock-cut tombs in the necropolis contained pottery vessels and personal or namentation, attesting to some belief in an afterlife. Inter national trade was thriving, as both pottery and objects were imported from eastern Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. T h e pros perity of this period ceased when die town was violently destroyed, probably as a result of a general collapse of the economy caused by deforestation of the region—which in turn made the town vulnerable to invasion as well as disease. T h e archaeological evidence shows that the town was then unoccupied for about two hundred years. T h e town was partially reoccupied during Kenyon's In termediate Early Bronze-Middle Bronze Age (c. 2 1 0 0 - 1 9 5 0
223
BCE) by a group of seminomadic newcomers who may be identified with the "Amorites" (other scholars identify this period at other sites as EB IIIB or EB IV, c. 2 3 0 0 - 1 9 5 0 BCE). T h e new pottery is related to types also found in north Syria (Kenyon, 1 9 8 1 , fig. 1 2 ) . A new type of tomb plan was in troduced that had a vertical shaft leading into rock-cut chambers below. Kenyon postulated tiiat the newcomers were organized into tribal groups because seven different burial customs could be observed in the tombs. The tomb types are dagger, pottery, dagger/pottery, outsize, bead, composite, and multiple burial (Kenyon, i960, 1965). Kenyon divided the following MB period at Jericho into two major stages: MB I ( 1 9 5 0 - 1 8 5 0 BCE) and MB II ( 1 8 0 0 1550 BCE). The town was very heavily fortified by three suc cessive plastered ramparts placed against the steeply sloping sides of the mound, which had been created by previous occupation debris. Originally, the rampart was most likely crowned with a freestanding mud-brick defensive wall, but erosion has removed all traces of this. T h e houses Garstang and Kenyon excavated in grids H - K 6 show good town plan ning in tiiat the dwellings are well aligned with two streets and drains (Garstang, 1 9 3 4 , pp. 1 1 8 - 1 3 0 , pis. xiii-xvi; Ken yon, 1 9 8 1 , pi. 336a). The objects of everyday use, as well as the burial customs, of the MB inhabitants are extremely well preserved because of the excellent state of preservation of the tombs in the necropolis (Garstang, 1 9 3 2 , pp. 4 1 - 5 4 ; I 9 3 3 > PP- 3-37; Kenyon, i960, pp. 2 6 3 - 5 1 5 ; 1965, pp. 1 6 7 478). This period in the history of Jericho was brought to a violent end by a major conflagration that may have been caused by an earthquake or by the Egyptians. T h e Late Bronze Age period at Jericho (c. 1 4 0 0 - 1 3 25 BCE) is perhaps the most controversial with regard to its fortifi cation system and its historical connections with the biblical Joshua story (the entry and settlement of the Israelites into Canaan). Many scholars (cf. Finkelstein, 1988) believe that the settlement was a peaceful and gradual infiltration of an already-established local population. Kenyon concluded, with reference to the military conquest theory and the LB walls, that tiiere was no archaeological data to support the thesis that the town had been surrounded by a wall at the end of LB I (c, 1400 BCE; for recent arguments against tiiis view, see Bryant G. Wood, 1990, and the rebuttal by Piotr Bienkowski, 1990). Also, Kenyon found very few remains on the mound that can be dated to tiiis period in the site's history (see Kenyon, 1 9 8 1 , p. 3 7 1 , fig. 14:6, pi. 199a, b; cf. Garstang, 1934, pp. 1 0 5 - 1 0 8 , pi. xii). However, evidence from the necropolis, tombs 4 and 5, does indicate burials during this period (Bienkowski, 1986, pp. 7 1 , 90, 1 0 2 ) . T h e reoccupation of Jericho does not occur until the Iron Age (c. 1200-587 BCE), in about the eleventh century. Pot tery evidence from a tenth-century tomb, A 85 (Tushingham in Kenyon, 1 9 6 5 , p. 487, fig. 2 5 3 ) , accords well with the biblical account in 1 Kings 16:34 that Jericho was reoc cupied and fortified by Hiel the Bethelite during the time of
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Ahab. The town's main Iron Age occupation did not occur until tire seventh century BCE, however. Extensive occupa tional remains were found by all three expeditions (see es pecially Franken, 1974, and Weippertand Weippert, 1976). The presence of a royal stamped jar handle impressed with a two-winged royal stamp implies that Jericho was admin istered by Judah at this time (Bartiett in Kenyon and Hol land, 1982, p. 537, fig. 2 2 0 : 1 , pi. 3a). The pottery evidence also suggests that the town remained occupied until the Bab ylonian Exile in 587 BCE. As a result of erosion there is no evidence of any building remains on the ancient mound after the end of the Iron Age, if any such occupation occurred. Occupation from the Per sian through the Byzantine periods was centered on two nearby mounds known as Tulul Abu el-'Alayiq. T h e town's position on the eastern flank of Judea probably continued to make it strategically important militarily. As a natural oasis it was also of great economic value to a succession of conquerers by providing them with food and medicinal plants. A bronze barbed arrowhead attests to at least the presence of Persian warriors or tireir subjugates (Kenyon and Hol land, 1982, p. 569, fig. 229:18); a Rhodian stamped handle implies active trade during the Hellenistic period (Bartiett in Kenyon and Holland, 1982, p. 542, fig. 220:6); and Ro man tombs and graves indicate the presence of Roman le gionnaires either encamped on or near the ancient town. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; Herodian Jericho; and the biographies of Conder, Garstang, Kenyon, Kitchener, Sellin, Warren, and Watzinger.]
most up-to-date general discussion of the archaeological finds from tlie Kenyon expedition, with fuller bibliography. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Digging Up Jericho. London, 1 9 5 7 . T h e most comprehensive general discussion of the archaeology and history of Jericho relating primarily to the author's excavations; well illustrated. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations at Jericho, vol. 1, The Tombs Exca vated in 1952-54. London, i960. Final excavation report. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations at Jericho, vol. 2, The Tombs Exca vated in 1955-58. London, 1965. Final excavation report. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations at Jericho, vol. 3, The Architecture and Stratigraphy of the Tell. 2 vols. Edited by Thomas A, Holland. London, 1981. Final excavation report with detailed plans, sections, and photographs of the occupation phases, as well as specialist re ports on radiocarbon dates and the human skeletal remains. Kenyon, Kathleen M . , and Thomas A. Holland. Excavations at. Jericho, vol. 4, The Pottery Type Series and Other Finds. London, 1982. Final excavation report, which includes drawings of the key pottery forms from each period and specialist reports on various objects. Kenyon, Kathleen M . , and Thomas A. Holland. Excavations at Jericho, vol. 5, The Pottery Phases of the Tell and Other Finds. London, 1983. Final excavation report, which includes drawings of pottery forms from each phase of occupation and specialist reports on various ob jects, studies of plant, charcoal, and animal remains, and additional radiocarbon dates for Jericho. Warren, Charles. "Note on the Mounds at Jericho." Palestine Explo ration Fund Quarterly Statement 1 (1869): 2 0 9 - 2 1 0 . Weippert, Helga, and Manfred Weippert. "Jericho in der Eisenzeit." Zeitschrift des Deulschen Paldstina-Vereins 92 (1976): 1 0 5 - 1 4 8 . Weippert, Manfred. The Settlement, of the Israelite Tribes in Palestine: A Critical Survey of the Recent Scholarly Debate. London, 1 9 7 1 . Stan dard reference work for assessing the Israelite "peaceful invasion" theory of Canaan. Wood, Bryant G. "Dating Jericho's Destruction: Bienkowski Is Wrong on All Counts." Biblical Archaeology Review 16.5 (1990): 45, 47-49, 68-69. Must be used cautiously with regard to Bienkowski's 1990 rebuttal. THOMAS A . HOLLAND
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "The Walls of Jericho: An Alternative Interpretation." Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 1 5 7 - 1 6 2 . Bienkowski, Piotr. Jericho in the Late Bronze Age. Warminster, 19S6. The most comprehensive treatment to date of die Late Bronze Age at Jericho, based on the excavated material of both Garstang and Kenyon. Bienkowski, Piotr. "Jericho Was Destroyed in the Middle Bronze Age, Not the Late Bronze A g e . " Biblical Archaeology Review 16.5 (1990): 45-46, 69. Recent archaeological treatments of Jericho and tlie "Joshua problem." Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, 1988. Recent treatment of different theories concerning the evidence for the Israelite setdement in Canaan, Franken, Hendrichs J . In Search of the Jericho Potters: Ceramics from the Iron Age and from the Neolithicum. Amsterdam, 1974. The best tech nical study of the manufacture of Iron Age Israelite pottery. Garstang, John. "Jericho: City and Necropolis." Liverpool Annals of Ar chaeology and Anthropology 1 9 (1932): 3 - 2 2 , 35-54; 20 (1933): 3-42; 21 (1934): 9 9 - 1 3 6 ; 22 (1935): 1 4 3 - 1 6 8 ; 23 (1936): 67-76. Final sci entific reports on the Garstang expedition to Jericho. Garstang, John, and J . B , E . Garstang. The Story of Jericho. 2d ed. Lon don, 1948. The best general discussion of Garstang's excavations; well illustrated. Holland, Thomas A. "Jericho." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, pp. 723-737, 739-740. New York, 1992. T h e author's previous and
JERUSALEM, site located at an average height of
740
m above sea level, on the spine of the Judean range, 40 km (25 mi.) east of the Mediterranean coast ( U T M map ref erence 7 1 1 5 X 5 1 8 3 ) , The name of the city is derived from Canaanite, in which it means "the god Salem is its founder." This god is well known from Ugaritic texts (fourteenth cen tury BCE), in which he is one of the two "agreeable and hand some gods" Sahar and Salem—the gods of day and night, respectively. Because the oldest occurrences of Jerusalem are as Umshalimun in the Egyptian execration texts (nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE) and Urusalim (Amarna tab lets, Egypt, fourteenth century BCE), some scholars dispute the derivation and meaning of the name. Archaeologically, the site of ancient Jerusalem can be divided into three sec tors: the biblical City of David (the hill of Ophel), its his torical nucleus, located south of the Old City and the T e m ple Mount ( U T M map reference 7 1 1 7 X 5 1 8 4 ) ; the Old City itself, encircled by the sixteenth-century Ottoman walls; and the areas outside the walls, which include the an cient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, the Kidron
JERUSALEM Valley below the City of David, and many Christian holy places. T h e ancient city is well defined by the Kidron and Hinnom valleys, which form die framework in which die city is engulfed from east, south, and west, leaving the northern side entirely exposed to attacks with no natural defense. T h e vulnerability of Jerusalem from the north is an important factor in its history. Another valley, named Tyropoean by Flavius, crosses the city from north to south, creating the western confine of the City of David as well as the Temple Mount. History of Excavations. T h e first archeological exca vations in Jerusalem were those of Felicien de Saulcy, who in i860 cleared the so-called royal tombs north of the Old City. These excavations mark the beginning of a long list of nineteenth-century explorations of the city and its topog raphy by individuals working without religious bias or su perstition, investigations that yielded information of endur ing relevance. More methodical exploration of the city began with the survey directed by Charles Wilson in 1864 and the excavations directed by Charles Warren in 1 8 6 7 1870, that followed, on behalf of die Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Warren explored sections of the hill south of the Temple Mount (the Ophel), not realizing that he was digging the biblical city. It was only in 1 8 8 1 , after Hermann Guthe's excavations on the hill, on behalf of the Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Paliistinas, that it was identified as the core of the ancient city. In 1 8 9 4 - 1 8 9 7 Frederick Jones Bliss and Archibald Campbell Dickie, also for the PEF, ex cavated sections of the Ophel, uncovering not only the city's "First Wall" (see below), but also the remains of one of its early churches. In 1 9 1 1 a group of engineers headed by Montague Parker cleared the immediate vicinity of the only perennial spring, the Gihon, located on the eastern slope of the City of David. There they discovered a group of three Early Bronze I tombs, since dubbed the Ophel tombs, as well as an elaborate tunnel system fed by the spring. [See Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biographies of Saulcy, Wilson, Warren, and Bliss.] Louis-Hugues Vincent thoroughly studied Parker's explo rations, correcdy identifying the results of the work and giv ing them scholarly significance. More advanced and archeologically reliable excavations on the Ophel began with the work of Raymond Weill in 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 1 4 and again in 1 9 2 3 1924. His excavations provided a more thorough view be cause he revealed strata from various periods, thus placing the hill and its water installations in historical context. Weill was followed by R. A. S. Macalister and J. Garrow Duncan (in 1 9 2 3 - 1 9 2 5 ) , who discovered partial remains of the city's defenses and residential quarters. They were succeeded by John W. Crowfoot and Gerald M. FitzGerald (in 1 9 2 7 1929) who, under the auspices of the British School of Ar chaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ) and die PEF, uncovered, among other remains, the Valley Gate, thus denning the
225
western boundary of die City of David. Their original plan was to dig a trench that would extend across the hill, the deep valley that borders it on the west (the Tyropoean), and the city's western hill (known today as Mt. Zion). Technical problems created by the accumulation of enormous fills over the centuries prevented them from achieving their goal. [See British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; and the biogra phies of Vincent, Weill, Macalister, and Crowfoot.] From 1 9 6 1 to 1968, Kathleen M. Kenyon, under the aus pices of the PEF and institutions in France, Canada, En gland, and Australia, reexcavated the City of David. In 1978, another team, headed by Yigal Shiloh on behalf of the He brew University of Jerusalem and the City of David Society, initiated a new series of excavations on the hill. This project was concluded in 1985 and, togetiier with Kenyon's exca vation results, succeeded in giving the scholarly world a comprehensive view of ancient Jerusalem's history and ar cheology. [See the biographies of Kenyon and Shiloh.] B r o n z e Age. The earliest remains on the hill were found in Shiloh's excavation areas B, E l , and E 3 . The remains of the Chalcolithic period (late fourth millenium) consist mainly of pits dug into the natural bedrock and filled with debris and Early Bronze Age I (third millenium) pottery, which contributes important additional data for the period of the Ophel tombs (see above). In area Ei remains of a typical broadroom house were found; it had been built on bedrock, with its interior walls surrounded by stone benches. T h e later phases of the urban Early Bronze Age are not represented in Jerusalem. T h e Middle Bronze Age I (also designated EB IV), although not found in the City of David, is nevertheless represented by tombs dated to the period found by the Kenyon team, as well as by the nineteenthcentury scholars who worked on the Mount of Olives and in die village of Silwan across the Kidron Valley from the City of David. (It is now also suggested that the grotto under the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount is also a burial cave that dates to this period [see Rivka Gonen, "On An cient Tombs and Holy Places," Cathedra 34 (1985): 3 - 1 4 ] . ) T h e transformation of Jerusalem into a fortified city took place in the Middle Bronze Age II period (eighteenth cen tury BCE), when the site was surrounded by a city wall some 3 m thick (found by both Kenyon in her section A and Shi loh in his area E). In die following MB phases, bastions were added to the wall; it is highly probable that a tower flanking a gate, found in Kenyon's section A also belongs to the MB fortifications. Because the tower was found at a point where the wall is above the spring, and because die buildings there had been in use when die Babylonian army destroyed Je rusalem in 586 BCE, many scholars believe that die gate is the biblical Spring Gate (Neh. 2 : 1 4 , 3 : 1 5 , 8 : 3 , 1 6 ) . The east ern slope of the hill above die spring is very steep, demand ing a resourceful solution to make construction possible there: a system of terraces proved to be the answer. It is
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probable, as Kenyon suggested, that these terraces are die structures referred to in the Bible as the millo' (Heb., "fill") built by David and repaired by Solomon and Hezekiah (Kenyon, 1974). In the Late Bronze Age, Jerusalem is mentioned in the Amarna tablets (see above), which give the impression that the city was then quite prosperous and attempting to expand into the territories of the neighboring city-states. Excava tions in the vicinity of the City of David seem to confirm this: in 1954, Sylvester J. Sailer discovered a wealthy tomb on the Mount of Olives (Sailer, The Jebusite Burial Place, Jerusalem, 1964, pp. 7 - 1 0 ) . In 1 9 3 5 , on the Hill of Evil Counsel (south of die Hinnom Valley), D. C. Baramki dis covered a cistern with a rich assemblage of LB finds (Bar amki, "An Ancient Cistern in the Grounds of Government House, Jerusalem," Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Jerusalem 4 [1935]: 1 6 5 - 1 6 7 ) and in 1 9 3 3 , a tomb rich with grave goods was found in the Nahlat Ahim neighbor hood northwest of the Old City (published by Ruth Amiran in Eretz-Israel 6 [i960]: 2 8 - 3 7 [Heb.], 2 7 * [Eng.]). [See the biographies of Sailer and Baramki.] At the summit of the southeastern hill in the City of David itself, a monumental LB sttucture was found that constitutes a series of terraces built of small stones on various levels to create a huge arti ficial mound. No doubt the work of the Canaanite kings of Jerusalem, the structure created a podium on which a citadel or a royal palace might suitably have been built. Later, in David's time, the podium was covered with an enormous stepped stone structure, the best-preserved structure dated to the time of that king (c. 1000-940 BCE). Iron Age. The remains of the period immediately pro ceeding the Davidic conquest of Jerusalem, found in Shiloh's areas D i and E i , were too poor to cast any light on die "Jebusites" who then dwelled in the city (Jos. 15:63; Jgs. 1 : 2 1 , etc.). Except for the podium (see above), remains in the city from the tenth century are quite scant. Area G, where the stepped structure was found (Kenyon's section A) is located at the northeast corner of the City of David. The structure served as the city's citadel then. Kenyon found, as its western extention, a city wall of the casemate type, which is typical of tenth-century BCE fortifications (her area H). Slightly east of the stepped structure Kenyon also found a palmette ("Proto Aeolic" type) capital, which is an indicator of "royal" architecture at other cities in the country as well (e.g., Hazor). All the indications therefore are that the stepped structure belonged to the citadel of David, as his palace and fort are referred to in the Bible (2 Sm. 5:7; 1 Kgs. 8:1). It was only in die time of his son Solomon that the city's civic and administrative center moved farther north to the Temple Mount. Because of its location, no archeological evidence of that center has yet been found. The condition of the stepped structure may be an indication of the process of erosion by millennia of winter rains. In the eighth-seventh centuries BCE, when the city reached its ze
nith, the stepped structure was utilized as an artificial hill on which some of the city's best-preserved private houses were built. Cult objects such as figurines representing various de ities were found there—examples of the syncretistic religious inclinations of the city's inhabitants (Shiloh, 1984, p. 1 7 ) . An important feature of biblical Jerusalem is its water in stallations. The earliest are simple canals directing water from the Gihon Spring to pools—the Kings Pool and the Siloam Pool—farther down the Kidron and Tyropoean Val leys. The first installation, discovered by Warren in 1 8 6 7 , is known today as Warren's Shaft. The date of its construction is not clear because Warren destroyed its immediate archeological context. The shaft consists of tiiree main parts: a tunnel tiiat brings water from the spring toward the inside of the hill (22 m long); a vertical shaft ( 1 2 . 3 m long) to the tunnel that served as a well from which water could be drawn; and a long tunnel that begins at the lower part at the top of the shaft and ascends at first moderately (28 m long) and then steeply, necessitating steps (8 m high) to the sur face (Shiloh, 1984, pp. 2 1 - 2 2 , 24). Warren's shaft enlarged natural karstic cavities in the bedrock. It was designed for use when the city was under siege as an undisturbed and unseen source of water. Some scholars identify it as the sinnbr (Heb., "pipe") the Bible says was the passage through which David's men entered Jerusalem in order to conquer it (2 Sm. 5:18; 1 Chr. 1 1 : 6 ) . If, however, the water system should be dated to the time of Solomon, this identification is untenable. The second water installation is Hezekiah's tunnel. Dur ing that king's reign, the city expanded westward, covering the hill west of the City of David. Hezekiah surrounded the newly settled environs of the city with a wall (see below) that included the Tyropoean Valley and the Siloam Pool within the city wall. These new topographic realities enabled Hez ekiah to bore a water tunnel over half a kilometer long (be cause of later construction and quarrying on the hill it is impossible to be more precise, but 533 m is frequendy con jectured). T h e tunnel slopes about 30 cm from the spring to the pool. At a certain point in Hezekiah's tunnel, an in scription (discovered by local children in 1880) was in stalled. It describes the moment when the two parties, hew ing the tunnel from two ends, met. It is not a royal inscription, however, and the king is not even mentioned. The ascription of the tunnel to Hezekiah rests on the epigraphic dating of the inscription to the late eighth-century BCE and the biblical description of the deeds of that king. [See Water Tunnels; and Siloam Tunnel Inscription.] The western limits of the City of David are still a matter of dispute because no substantial remains have been discov ered. A section of a city wall about 8 m wide, in which a gate was incorporated was discovered by Crowfoot and Duncan in 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 2 8 (see above). They ascribed it to the biblical city, it is now dated to the second or first century BCE. North of the City of David, toward the Temple Mount, Benjamin
JERUSALEM Mazar and Elat Mazar excavated a large public building (some parts of it were first excavated by Warren and other parts by Kenyon) and a second structure. Benjamin Mazar has identified the first one as bet millo' (2 Kgs. 1 2 : 2 1 ) ; Elat Mazar believes the second structure to be a city gate (Mazar and Mazar, 1989, pp. 58-60; many scholars prefer to inter pret it as a royal storehouse, however). Although these re mains are later than the Solomonic period, they nevertheless indicate the great works carried out by the kings of Judea (Judah) in the immediate vicinity of tire Temple Mount. Of the Temple itself, there are no remains from the biblical period. T h e present Temple Mount and its retaining walls date to tire first century BCE, the Second Temple period, and they have obliterated or conceal all earlier remains. [See the biography of Mazar] The cemeteries of the Iron II period (most of the eightiiseventh centuries BCE), have recently become subject to thorough study. David Ussishkin surveyed the cemetery in the village of Silwan across the valley from the City of David in 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 7 1 . His survey revealed more tombs similar to the ones known from Charles Clermont-Ganneau's 1874 survey and subsequent surveys (altogether, some fifty burial caves). [See the biography of Clermont-Ganneau.] Gabriel Barkay has identified rock-cut tombs on the grounds of the Ecole Bib lique et Archeologique Francaise as being part of the large cemetery north of the present Old City. Amos Kloner and Amihai Mazar produced more information about the latter, describing an additional fifteen caves, including the Garden T o m b . In 1990 Ronny Reich found another section of that cemetery west of the Old City. This and another cemetery discovered by Barkay farther south, in his excavations on the grounds of the Scottish church from 1979 to 1988, reveal the extent of the burial grounds around tire ancient city. (See Barkay, Kloner, and Mazar, " T h e Northern Necropolis of Jerusalem during the First Temple Period, in Geva, ed., I994> PP- H 9 7 J Barkay and Kloner, "Jerusalem Tombs from the Days of tire First Temple," Biblical Archaeology Review 1 2 [1986]: 2 2 - 3 0 ; and Barkay, "Excavations atKetef Hinnom in Jerusalem," in Geva, ed., 1994, pp. 8 5 - 1 0 6 . ) Re search into these cemeteries concentrates on two problems: does the diffusion of die tombs reflect tlie size of Jerusalem at the end of the First Temple Period, and can the size of tlie cemetery help to deduce the number of inhabitants then living in tlie city? _ I 2
Many remains of the First Temple period have been dis covered on Jerusalem's western hill (see figure 1 ) . T h e Jew ish Quarter, in the Old City, was excavated during the quar ter's reconstruction and rehabilitation. Directed by Nahman Avigad from 1968 to 1 9 7 8 , tlie excavations recovered a 65meter-segment of tlie "Broad Wall," or Nehemiah's wall (Avigad, 1 9 8 3 ) . It forms a section of a 7-meter-deep city wall probably constructed by Hezeldah in tlie late eighthearly seventh centuries BCE. [See the biography of Avigad.} Many Judean refugees moved to Jerusalem at about that
227
time, following the expansion of the independent pagan coastal cities; otiiers were fleeing the Assyrian destruction of northern Israel. The expansion of the city, as well as the need to fortify tlie newly founded neighborhoods to its west, compelled Hezeldah to build tlie wall, which withstood die Assyrian siege of 701 BCE. T h e wall and adjacent remains of fortifications were surrounded by houses, some of which were demolished by the construction of the wall (cf. Is. 2 2 : 1 0 ) . At the western edge of the hill more contemporary remains were uncovered at the Citadel, near the Jaffa Gate (by Hillel Geva, 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 8 0 ; and Renee Sivan and Giora Solar, 1980-1988; see Geva, "Excavations at the Citadel of Jerusalem, 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 8 0 , " and Sivan and Solar, "Excavations in the Jerusalem Citadel, 1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 8 , " in Geva, ed., 1994) and on the southern slope of Mount Zion (by Bargil Pixner, Doron Chen, and Shlomo Margalit, 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 8 8 ; see Chen, Margalit, and Pixner, "Discovery of Iron Age Fortifications below the Gate of the Essenes," in Geva, ed., 1994, pp. 7 6 8 1 ) . All these remains indicate the city's expansion toward the end of tlie First Temple period, although many ques tions remain unanswered. P e r s i a n Period. During tlie fifth century BCE, when re patriates from Babylon came to Jerusalem, some reconstruc tion work was undertaken. This activity continued until the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (Neh. 3 : 1 - 3 2 ) . The latter even reconstructed the city walls, although there is no archaeo logical proof of that activity. On tlie southeastern hill of tlie City of David, a few poorly constructed walls were found by Shiloh in his area G that had been used as terraces to support the debris of collapse from the 586 BCE Babylonian destruction (stratum 1 0 ) . In his area D 1 - 2 , more contem porary remains were found, constituting, among other things, a quarry, possibly an indication of the works carried out in the city as a part of its rebuilding by Nehemiah. Hellenistic P e r i o d . T h e period between Nehemiah (c. 445 BCE) and die second century BCE is one of the most obscure in the history of Jerusalem, although some literary sources that describe die city are available (e.g., tlie Letter of Aristeas). It seems that only after the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids, when Jerusalem became independent again ( 1 6 4 BCE), does its expansion toward tlie western hill become its most prominent urban feature. From what can be deduced from die archaeological record, the city shrank during the Persian period to its earlier dimensions—when it was limited to the southeastern hill, the City of David. T h e remains of the biblical city were still prominent above ground on the western hill, however, and when the western hill was surrounded by a wall those remains were incorpo rated. Avigad's excavations (see above) defined tire limits of the settlement of the western hill. It became, in the second century BCE, the center of the city, and remained so until the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. T h e southeastern hill, the City of David, was surrounded by walls that partially reused the Bronze Age-Iron Age walls.
228
JERUSALEM
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JERUSALEM. Figure i .
Plan of the city, First Temple period.
(After Bahat, 1990)
JERUSALEM but were modified by Nehemiah. His changes included re moving the wall's eastern alignment from halfway up the slope to its summit, giving the city its smallest dimensions ever. Macalister and Duncan (see above) had excavated that city wall but misinterpreted it; Kenyon and Shiloh corrected the dating to the second-first centuries BCE. T h e remains include two towers and a section of a wall, along with other elements Macalister and Duncan had discovered on the eastern slope and by Bliss and Dickie (see above) along the southern slope of the same hill and on die southern slope of the western hill (Mt. Zion). From 1 9 7 7 to 1988, Pixner, Chen, and Margalit reexcavated a small section in the wall examined by Macalister and Duncan, confirming their dat ing. In 1 9 7 3 - 1 9 7 6 , farther north on the western slope of that hill, Magen Broshi excavated the entire length of the wall. He distinguished two phases: of die Maccabean period and of the Herodian period. T h e latter was a reinforcement of the earlier wall and was probably connected with the con struction of the Herodian palace inside the wall at that point (Broshi, "Excavations along the Western and Southern Wall of the Old City of Jerusalem," in Geva, ed., 1994, pp. 1 4 7 1 5 5 ) . Between 1934 and 1947, C. N. Johns had found an other section of the wall in the Citadel, along witii three
JERUSALEM. Figure 2.
229
towers incorporated into it. Later excavators (Ruth Amiran and Avrahani Eitan in 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 6 9 ; Hillel Geva from 1976 to 1980; Sivan from 1980 to 1988) confirmed Johns's results and refined his discovery of the two phases of construction, Maccabean and Herodian (Amiran and Eitan, "Excavations in the Jerusalem Citadel," in Yadin, ed., 1975, pp. 5 2 - 5 4 ) . It was in the latter phase that the Tower of David was con structed, still one of the city's dominant features (see figure 2). Avigad excavated the eastern extension of the wall above, and discovered a gate in it that, although irregular in form, still must be interpreted as a city gate—it is unarguably an opening in die wall. The entire length of the wall is, thus, now well understood. T h e first-century CE historian Jose phus Flavius named it the "First Wall" (War 5 . 1 4 2 - 1 4 5 ) . T h e city confined within the First Wall yielded a great many archaeological finds: from the City of David, an in scribed stone that probably was originally installed above the lintel of a synagogue served by at least of three generations of the same family. Although from Josephus's descriptions some of die city's most sumptuous structures were located in die city of David, excavation has not revealed any struc tures of importance (Shiloh, 1984, pp. 29-30). The lack of monumental remains on the southeastern hill can be as-
The citadel/tower of David. (Courtesy
Pictorial Archive)
230
JERUSALEM
cribed to the fact that in successive periods it served as a quarry. The remains of the Maccabean period on the west ern hill are better known from Avigad's excavations (see above). Although built over in the Herodian period, tiiese survived—the lower parts of die houses revealed the lower parts of walls, cisterns, and baths, both for secular and re ligious purposes. In addition, many of the small finds indi cate the character and size of the city in the Late Hellenistic period. R o m a n Period. The Herodian period marks die apex in the development of the western hill (also called the Upper City and Zion by Josephus, War 5-137). Avigad's excava tions revealed whole neighborhoods, including villas of great elegance—the Burnt House and the Western House—in the residential quarter, known as the Herodian Quarter, that oc cupied the entire western hill (see figure 3 ) . Amiran and Eitan's excavation in the Citadel (see above) confirmed these findings. Two distictive strata were discovered in the Citadel representing the Maccabean and Herodian periods. From the small area excavated, the urban plan featured grids of crisscrossed streets flanked by houses, as was common in contemporary cities in the Greco-Roman world. This plan was also found in Broshi's 1972 excavations on Mt. Zion (see above), as well as in minor excavations on die lower parts of the eastern slope of the western hill (Bliss and Dickie in 1894-1897; Yitzhak Margovsky in 1969, Meir Ben-Dov in 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 7 7 ; See Margovsky in Revue Biblique 78 [ 1 9 7 1 ] , p. 597; Ben-Dov, "Excavations and Architectural Survey of the Archaeological Remains along the Southern Wall of the Jerusalem Old City," in Geva, ed., 1994, pp. 3 1 1 - 3 2 0 ) . T h e houses on the western hill, which were built on a slope, all followed a similar plan: installations in their lower part—for storage, cisterns, and baths—supported the main floor. T h e main floor incorporated a central paved courtyard sur rounded by rooms of various sizes. The houses were deco rated with mosaic floors and frescoes. These adhered to the Jewish law forbidding human representation and display flo ral and geometric designs. Only one house was found in which the courtyard was surrounded by a colonnade (the Column House). Of special importance is the fact that fur niture was found in some of the rooms, of which the most common type are stone tables in more than one design. The abundance of small finds includes terra sigillata ware, painted bowls, cups, trays, and beautiful glass and stone ware. The entire quarter was destroyed by the conflagration of 70 CE, whose traces were dramatic and ubiquitous (Avigad, 1983).
According to Josephus (War 5 . 1 7 6 - 1 8 3 ) , Herod built a sumptuous palace on the western hill. In excavations carried out on its supposed site (by A. D. Tushingham from 1962 to 1967 and Dan Bahat and Broshi in 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 2 ) its foun dations were exposed. The palace was large (130 X 330 m) and raised on an artificial platform constructed on a criss cross pattern of retaining walls that created compartments
filled with earth to a height of more than 8 m. Some frag ments of painted plaster found in secondary use in the Cit adel may have belonged to the upper part of the palace. Another city wall, which Josephus called the Second Wall (War 5.146), surrounded the northern quarter of the city. Dated to Herod's reign, some scholars believe that it may be earlier. Because the alignment of this wall underlies die present Old City, there is very little chance that archaeology will reveal traces of it. Its course has been a matter of dispute since the beginning of scholarship on Jerusalem. Avigad dis covered a city gate in his excavations in the Jewish quarter (see above) that may be the Gate of Genneth Josephus men tions as tile starting point of the Second Wall; Josephus maintains that its final point was at the fortress named Antonia (see below). T h e only clear ttace of the wall is a small fragment of a thick wall, built of typical Herodian ashlars discovered by R. W. Hamilton (1949) while excavating the Damascus Gate in 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 3 8 . Warren uncovered other re mains in 1 8 6 7 - 1 8 7 0 in the so-called Muristan Quarter of the Old City he ascribed to the Second Wall. They were found to belong to the Late Roman period (see below). They were excavated under die nearby Church of the Redeemer by Ute Lux and K. Vriezen in 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 2 . The same is true of the ancient remains exposed by N . Khitrowo in 1874 in the Rus sian Hospice east of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Moreover, Kenyon's excavations in the Muristan (her area C) found that the entire area had been used as a quarry, probably also in the Herodian period, as well as a burial ground. (In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at least six burial caves were found, including the traditional tomb of Jesus.) No vestiges of the city's domestic quarters sur rounded by the Second Wall have ever been found. The city's northernmost extension was defended by an other wall, the Third Wall (Josephus, War 5 . 1 4 7 - 1 4 8 ) . Many sections of this wall were found forming a long (about one kilometer) east-west curtain. T h e remains of the wall were still visible in the nineteenth century and were de scribed by Edward Robinson (in 1838; see his Biblical Re searches in Palestine, 2 vols., Boston, 1 8 4 1 ; for this wall, see vol. 1, pp. 465-467) and then by Wilson (in 1864). In 1 9 2 5 1927 and again in 1940, Eleazar L. Sukenik and L. A. Mayer (1930) excavated a long section of the wall and some towers bonded to it. Because most of the stones were robbed in antiquity, only a few details are known of its construction. It was about 4.5 m wide and built with stones dressed witii typically Herodian margins and bosses. The towers pro truded northward for more than 7 m from the wall's north ern face. The wall's foundations were a packed earthwork— whose remains are in many cases the only indication of the wall's existence. [See the biographies of Robinson and Su kenik.] Another excavation, by Emmett W. Hamrick in 1 9 6 5 , yielded coins dating from the 50s CE found in the wall's foun dation layer, suggesting that the wall was built near the time
JERUSALEM,. Figure 3. Plan of the city, Herodian period. (After Bahat, 1990)
232
JERUSALEM
of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (67-70 CE), exactly as described by Josephus (War 5.148). In 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 4 , Ehud Netzer and Sarah Ben-Arieh uncovered a house adjacent to die wall, finding evidence of the wall's destruction during the revolt ("Excavations along the 'Third Wall' of Jerusa lem, 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 4 , " IEJ24 [1974]: 9 7 - 1 0 7 ) . Excavations along the line of the wall were resumed between 1990 and 1992 by four teams, who found signs of quarrying activity as well as a hoard of tools at the site and in some sections of the wall (see V. Tzaferis, N . Feig, A. Onn, and E. Shukron, "Ex cavations at the Third Wall, North of the Jerusalem Old City," in Geva, ed., 1994, pp. 287-292). In the area de fended by the wall, a few contemporary remains were un covered by Conrad Schick in 1879 and 1893 and by Netzer and Ben-Arieh in 1977: some partial remains of houses, one of which was excavated by Netzer and Ben-Arieh (see above) and a round structure, built in the opus reticulatum technique. The function of the round structure is unclear, although it is most likely a decorated tomb, possibly the one Josephus (War 5.10%, 507) describes as Herod's Monument. [See the biography of Schick.] Since the beginning of archaeological exploration in Israel the Temple Mount has been a focus of scholarly attention, both in survey and excavation (see figure 4). Of the Temple itself, however, practically no remains have survived. T h e present Temple Mount is essentially the one built by Herod the Great during the last two decades of the first century BCE. The first excavations along the outer face of the Temple Mount's retaining walls were carried out by Warren (in 1 8 6 7 - 1 8 7 0 ) , who was following the lines of Wilson's 1864 survey. The next major studies were by Kenyon and Roland de Vaux in 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 8 (they reached the Ummayyad layer only in their area J) and then by Benjamin Mazar (see above), who excavated the western part of the southern re taining wall of the Temple Mount and the southernmost section of the western wall. [See the biography of Vaux] In addition, Mazar's expedition investigated tire tunnel that the Ministry of Religious Affairs had bored along the length of the Western Wall (the Kotel). Work in that tunnel was re sumed in 1985 under Bahat's supervision. These excava tions and surveys have, in combination, provided clear de tails of the Temple Mount: it is a large, irregular rectangle (488 X 320 X 280 X 470 m), 740 above sea level. The Her odian consttuction destroyed that of Solomon and of the temples built by tire repatriates from Babylon and the Maccabeans. The Herodian foundations, which reach bedrock, thus conceal any earlier remains. T h e Herodian walls are built with bossed ashlars incised with double margins. T h e Herodian additions to tire Temple Mount were installed along its north, west, and south sides. T o construct the new areas level with the existing Maccabean platform, enormous fills became extensions on tire south and north. The hill that held the Antonia fortress was partially cut away, and the valleys between it and the existing hilltop were also filled in.
JERUSALEM.
Figure 4.
The
Temple
Mount.
(Courtesy Pictorial
Archive)
Some stones in the wall weigh as much as several hundred metric tons, making tire Herodian walls one of the marvels of the ancient world. Geoelectric analysis has revealed the thickness of the wall to be 4.60 m. Streets paved with large stones abutted the western and southern sections of tlie ar tificial hill. The street at the northernmost point of tlie T e m ple Mount was flanked by columns, although they were found in too limited an exposure to permit conclusions as to their purpose. T h e platform's two southern gates, today called the Dou ble and Triple Gates (erroneously named the Hulda Gates) and the four western gates (named after their discoverers— Robinson, James T . Barclay, Wilson, and Warren) were ini tially studied in tire nineteenth century. T h e Double Gate still retains its Herodian decorated domes over the ancient passageway. Warren's expedition (see above) discovered subterranean passages under the Triple Gate, whose func tion is not yet clear. Two broad staircases, opposite the west ern gate (65 m wide) and eastern gate (about 1 5 m wide), explored by Mazar (see above), suggest the monumentality
JERUSALEM and beauty of die Herodian structures. T h e enure area just south of the southern wall was dotted witii ritual baths, in dicating an ardent need to preserve the laws of purity for the Temple. On the southern street many fragments of dec orated stones were found that probably came from the mag nificent royal stoa Herod built along the southern retaining wall of the Mount. Mazar's expedition cleared the majestic staircase that descends from the southern gate in the western wall and the pier supporting the large arch over which the stairs were installed (Robinson's Arch). Farther north, Barklay (in 1854) described another passage (5.60 m wide and about 8 m high) to the Temple Mount platform that still carries his name. Another gate even farther north was named as homage to Warren by Charles Wilson, who ex amined it from inside the passageway. During work in the tunnel along the western wall in 1985, Bahat studied its outer side (Bahat, " T h e Western Wall Tunnels," in Geva, ed., 1994.1 P P - 1 8 1 - 1 8 2 ) . Between tiiese two gates, a bridge was discovered by Titus Tobler in 1 8 5 3 and investigated by Wil son in 1864. The existing easternmost vault (Wilson's Arch) is dated to the Umayyad period (eight century CE); it re placed a Herodian vault. Warren investigated the entire sys tem of the bridge, which he called the Great Causeway (Conder and Warren, 1884, pp. 1 9 3 - 2 0 9 ) . It consisted of a series of small vaults, all dating to the same period. The arch (or rather the bridge of which it formed a part) was rebuilt over an older one that had not only facilitated the walk from the western hill across the central valley (the Tyropoean) but supported the aqueduct conveying water from "Solo mon's Pools" south of Bethlehem to the Temple. [See Aq ueducts.] Under die bridge, a large room—which Warren called the Masonic Hall—is one of the country's best-pre served examples of Herodian architecture, although its function is not yet clear. At the northern end of the tunnel that was bored along the western wall, excavation revealed that Herod did not finish constructing the western wall: it ends in the partially cut away Antonia hill. Because the hill itself was left intact, some earlier pre-Herodian remains are preserved, including another aqueduct. (Warren had origi nally discovered that aqueduct in 1868, but it was subse quently forgotten.) Cisterns and the remains of foundation trenches for walls were also preserved—the last remains of the fortress built by the Maccabean rulers as a palace called Baris (see Bahat, in Geva, ed., 1994, p . 1 8 7 ) . No traces of the Antonia fortress have hitherto been found in the tunnel. Many scholars have studied the rocky pinnacle on which the Antonia fortress was built. Vincent and, later, Marie Aline de Sion (in 1955) attempted to reconstruct the fortress from remains of die natural rock, which had been carved by Her od's workmen from four sides to create defensive scarps (de Sion, La Fortress Antonia a Jerusalem et la question du Pretoire, Jerusalem, 1 9 5 5 ) . On the northern side a deep moat was excavated in which Herod installed a large pool, still visible in the monastery of the Sisters of Zion. Farther east,
233
another contemporary pool was found, the one known as the Sheep Pool or, in the Christian tradition, the Bethesda Pool. Originating in the First Temple period, it is really two pools, separated by a thick wall (50-60 X 95 m). The pools were partially excavated most recently (in 1 9 8 1 ) by MarieJoseph Pierre and Jourdain-Marie Roussee ("Saint Marie de la Probatique: Etats et orientations de recherche," Proche Orient Chretien^i [ 1 9 8 1 ] : 2 3 - 4 2 ) . Another pool of the same date, adjacent to the northern wall of the Temple Mount, was filled in in the 1930s. It is known today as the Pool of Israel. Its ancient name is unknown, but it was the largest of the city's pools ( n o X 38 m). T h e aqueducts that provided water to the city from Solomon's Pools were still in use in the twentieth century. [See Pools.] Considerable scholarship has been focused on the city's many surrounding cemeteries, as well as its water systems. It is possible that almost a thousand burial caves have been found in those cemeteries from the Herodian period and described by scholars since the nineteenth century. The hills surrounding the city were once pockmarked with caves for a distance of about 3 km (2 mi.) from the city limits in all directions. Some won fame because of the great beauty of tiieir facade decoration (Avigad, 1954; L. Y. Rahmani, " O s suaries and Ossilegium (Bone-Gathering) in the Late Sec ond Temple Period," in Geva, ed., 1994, pp. 1 9 1 - 2 0 5 ) . Most of the tombs date to die first centuries BCE and CE. [See Burial Sites; Tombs.] Following the period of Roman oppression and the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 63-70 CE, the city was almost entirely destroyed. Only a few remains, such as the western section of die city wall and die Temple Mount, were pre served. It was only after the emperor Hadrian's visit in 1 2 9 CE that the decision was made to reconstruct the city. [See First Jewish Revolt; Bar Kokhba Revolt.] Most of the im portant remains of the Roman city date, therefore, to the second century CE. Under Hadrian (r. 1 1 7 - 1 3 8 ) a typical Roman city was planned—a plan that is retained in the Old City to the present. T h e camp of the Tenth Roman Legion stationed in Je rusalem was installed in what is today the Old City's Ar menian Quarter. Excavations in die Citadel (by Johns in 1934) and in the Armenian Garden (by Kenyon and Tushingham from 1962 to 1967) produced some evidence of the camp, namely many roof tiles bearing seals of the legion (which were also found in the Jewish Quarter, although not in situ). In the Citadel some fragments of walls were also found, but none that permit the reconstruction of any in stallation. In 1949, a workshop that had produced similar tiles was discovered by Michael Avi-Yonah about 3 1cm (2 mi.) northwest of the Old City that was recentiy (1992) ex cavated entirely. A considerable amount of information about this period has been gleaned from the inscriptions found in the city, all of them in secondary use in later in stallations, mostly epitaphs of legionnaires.
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The city's fortifications in the Roman period pose a prob lem because there is no concrete evidence for precise ar chaeological dating; all hypotheses for dating the walls must therefore rest on historical evidence. Hamilton's excavations at the Damascus Gate in 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 3 8 revealed the city gate and its later abutting walls (Hamilton, "Excavations against the Northern Wall of Jerusalem," Quarterly of the Depart ment of Antiquities in Palestine ro [1994]: 1-54)- On die east, the gate has the typical configuration of a large central gate witii two smaller flanking gates. A fragment of an inscription mentions the name of the city then, Aelia Capitolina. No precise date could be obtained for this gate's construction, but it seems that it should be assigned to Hadrian's reign. Recent excavations (M. Magen, "Excavations at the Da mascus Gate, 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 4 , " in Geva, ed., 1994, pp. 2 8 1 - 2 8 6 ) along the northern city walls suggest two possibilities for dating: either the walls were built toward the end of die third century, when the Tenth Legion left and the city was de fenseless, or they were built in the first third of the fourth century, when, with the triumph of Christianity, Jerusalem became a central city within the framework of the Byzantine Empire. Archaeologically, the finds associated with the walls are conclusive. The Roman Damascus Gate may simply have been a triumphal arch if no wall was attached to it for at least 150 years. There were three more such arches in the city: two at the entrance to either of the fora that existed in Jerusalem (see below), and one about 400 m north of the Damascus Gate. Some contemporary streets have also been located. The city's main street, the cardo, was found, in cluding a piazza, adjacent the Damascus Gate, by Menahem Magen in 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 4 . Farther south, a small segment of pavement and a column belonging to the flanking portico were found by Margalit in 1978. Still farther south, Avigad, in the framework of the excavations in the Jewish Quarter (see above), located die extension of the cardo, constructed in die sixth century. Another, eastern cardo was found dur ing development work in 1978 by Magen and Emanuel Eisenberg. Another street, today the main street in the Chris tian Quarter, was excavated for its entire length by Margalit in 1977. No remains of the decumanus, the east-west main street, that probably once existed, have been found, how ever, in spite of the deep trenches excavated in 1986 along its supposed line. Altogether it seems that the Roman city had two distinc tive features: a northern civil administration sector and a southern military sector occupied by the army. The present Jewish Quarter is still problematic regarding its function during the Roman period. Avigad (see above) discovered many fragments of tiles and other contemporary finds, but none in situ. It is thus assumed that the legion's camp was installed farther west, in the present Armenian Quarter. N o definite line for the camp's western limits has ever been found. As already pointed out, a stteet grid was found for the northern half of the city, along with its two fora. T h e
eastern forum was located north of the Temple Mount dur ing construction of the monastery of the Sisters of Zion in 1 8 6 8 - 1 8 7 4 . Although Vincent and Marie Aline (see above) misinterpreted die remains (believing them to belong to the Herodian Antonia fortress), in 1 9 7 1 , Pierre Benoit proved tiiat they were a forum with a beautifully paved piazza, sur rounded by various installations (columns, incisions on the floors, etc.) and a rocky scarp, all artificially hewn. A tri umphal arch was erected on the west, toward the city. It was identified in the late medieval period as the Ecce Homo arch, where Jesus was taken from the Antonia fortress by Roman soldiers to be crucified. The entire complex had been er roneously identified as the Praetorium, where Jesus was tried by Pilate (Mt. 2 7 : 1 1 - 1 4 ; Mk. 1 5 : 2 - 5 ; Lk. 2 3 : 3 - 1 2 ) . Part of the western forum has been excavated. In 1874 Khitrowo excavated the triumphal arch and a section of its pavement. Kenyon uncovered other sections of the pavement (her area C), and Lux and Vriezen (see above) excavated more under the Church of the Redeemer. North of this forum, the T e m ple of Aphrodite was built in Hadrian's time; during the Byz antine Empire, it became the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The two superimposed edifices were excavated and studied between i960 and 1969 by Charles Cotiasnon (The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, London, 1974) d later by Virgilio C. Corbo (77 Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme, Je rusalem, 1982), revealing tiiat very few remains of the Ro man temple are preserved. What is preserved are the retain ing walls of the temple precinct, a large wall under the present facade of the church (the southern retaining wall), and wall remains in the nearby Russian Hospice, which in clude the enclosure's eastern facade. Broshi and Barkay dis covered some of the temple's foundation under the church in 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 7 6 (Broshi and Barkay, "Excavations in the Chapel of St. Vartan in the Holy Sepulchre," IEJ35 [1985]: 1 0 8 - 1 2 8 ) . These scant remains do not permit a clear picture of the temple to be drawn. [See the biography of Corbo.] a n
In Mazar's excavations along the southern and western walls of the Temple Mount (see above), remains of at least three large public buildings, tiles of the Tenth Legion, and some inscriptions were also found that are attributed to the activity of the legion in this part of the city. Because the Roman city was built north of the City of David, it appears that the city's ancient core was used as a quarry where many of the stones needed to construct the new city were cut. At the southern end of this hill, the Romans rebuilt the Siloam Pool, ttansforming it into a square pool surrounded by col onnades (Bliss and Dickie, 1898, esp. pp. 1 3 2 - 1 7 7 ) ; a con temporary adjacent street was also found there, descending the valley from the city lying farther to the north. Tombs of the period were found surrounding the city, but no single burial ground has so far been discovered. On Salah edh-Din Street Hamilton and S. A. S. Husseini excavated some con temporary tombs in 1934. Netzer and Ben-Arieh also found tombs along the Third Wall (see above). At Nahal Raqafot,
JERUSALEM about 3 Ion (2 mi.) west of the city, L. Y. Rahmani found some of the best-preserved tombs in 1972 (Rahmani, "Ro man Tombs in Nahal Raqafot, Jerusalem," 'Atiqotn [1976]: 7 7 - 8 8 ) . Some Roman tombs were found among the Iron Age tombs discovered between 1975 and 1994 at the Scot tish Church. The only other temple discovered in Jerusalem was that of Aesclepius, excavated by the White Fathers on their property at the Church of St. Anne inside St. Stephen's Gate (the Lion's Gate) within the walls of the Old City. Byzantine Period. T h e ascendancy of Christianity made Jerusalem a central city in the Byzantine Empire. Many cler gymen, pilgrims, and others flocked to tire city, which grew immensely in the fourth and fifth centuries and reached its apex in the sixth (see figure 5 ) . Church building was the city's main area of development and the churches are the prominent features in the archaeology of the period. Fore most is die Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Emperor Constantine in the 320s. Built above the pagan Temple of Aphrodite, it has the same dimensions (see above). T h e church is divided into four parts: a central round structure regarded as the tomb of Jesus; tlie Holy Garden, an open courtyard with porticoes on three sides that incorporates tlie hill of Golgotha in tlie southwest corner; the basilica, which was actually the temple in which tlie Christian cult was prac ticed; and the atrium, or forecourt, which gave access to the church from the east—from tlie cardo, where the church's three gates were located. Another church (fifth century), excavated by Bliss and Dickie (see above), was built at the Siloam Pool, incorpo rating the pool itself. In the excavations in the Jewish Quar ter, Avigad partially exposed tlie " N e a " Church, revealing its immense size. T h e identification of the remains with the church, which is mentioned in contemporary literary sources, was further confirmed by the discovery of a build ing inscription in subterranean vaults. T h e vaults served to level the site for construction and as cisterns for tlie church and its numerous dependencies (e.g., hospices). T h e in scription mentions the founder, Emperor Justinian, and a date of about 549 CE (Nahman Avigad, "A Building Inscrip tion of the Emperor Justinian and the Nea in Jerusalem," IEJ 27 [1977]: 1 4 5 - 1 5 1 ) . T h e Church of Holy Zion, a fourth-century structure, was first discovered in 1898-1899 by H. Renard and then investigated by Eisenberg in 1983. T h e building had a basilical plan with five naves. T h e tra ditional tomb of King David is incorporated in it. A church was discovered at a site where tradition locates a miracle—that of the healing of tlie paralytic (Jn. 5:2-9). T h e church, a typical basilica in plan was built on tlie large wall that divides the two Bethesda pools (see above), on 13meter-high pillars that reach from the bottom of the pool to tlie surface. (C. Mauss in 1854, the White Fathers in 1 9 1 4 , and Rousee and Pierre in 1 9 5 6 ) . The church of St. Stephen was built by the empress Eudocia in tlie fifth century. It was excavated by Marie-Joseph
235
Legrange from 1885 to 1893 and entirely reconstructed for use by the Dominican fathers. On tlie Mt. of Olives, the emperor Constantine built a church named Eleona (Gk., "of the olives") that was discovered in 1 9 1 0 - 1 9 1 1 by Vincent and partially cleared and restored. Other churches on the slopes of the mountain have also been excavated, including the Dominus Flevit (probably the Late Byzantine Church of Gethsemane) by J. T. Milik and Billarmino Bagatti in 1955; the Church of Gethsemane built by Theodosius I in 385 and excavated by Gaudence Orfali from I 9 i o t o 1 9 1 9 ; two chapels on the site of the present Russian Church of the Ascension, investigated from 1870 to 1893 that include the tomb of the Virgin, even though the remains are mostly from the Crusader period; and two unidentified churches on top of the mountain, investigated by Bliss and Diclde in 1894. Many contemporary tombs have also been discovered on the mountain's slopes. Barkay found a church on the hill of the Scottish Church during his 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 8 9 excavations. T o this repertoire belong burial chapels: one decorated with birds in a mosaic pavement found by Dickie in 1894 north of tlie Damascus Gate; the "Orpheus mosaic" found in the same area studied by Vincent in 1 9 0 1 ; and the chapel re cently discovered by Reich in his 1992 excavation in tlie Mamilla area west of the Old City (Reich, "The Ancient Burial Ground in the Mamilla Neighborhood, Jerusalem," in Geva, ed„ 1994, pp. 1 1 7 - 1 1 8 ) . [See Churches; Mosaics.] T h e Byzantine period's primary contribution to Jerusa lem's fortifications was the empress Eudocia's addition, in 446 CE, of a new southern city wall—actually a reconstruc tion of the First Wall (first century BCE). T h e empress, a resident of tlie city, rebuilt the wall to enclose the newly built churches of Siloam, Zion, and Peter in Galicantu, as well as the nearby residential neighborhoods. Bliss and Dickie ex cavated most of this new city wall in 1 8 9 4 - 1 8 9 7 ; Kenyon, Warren, Broshi, Macalister and Duncan, and others exca vated more of it. Some evidence of the network of streets in that part of tlie city was revealed in every excavation that took place there (see Broshi, "Standards of Street Widths in the Roman-Byzantine Period," IEJ27 [1977]: 2 3 2 - 2 3 5 ) . A fragment of the city wall was also discovered in Sivan's ex cavations in the Citadel (see above). Evidence of the density of tlie residential quarter that wall encircled can be deduced from the excavations on the southeastern hill of tlie city of David by Macalister and Duncan in 1 9 2 3 - 1 9 2 5 and Crow foot and FitzGerald in 1 9 2 7 and from Mazar's 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 8 excavations along the southern wall of the Temple Mount. A well-planned residential quarter was revealed in which the streets were flanked by well-built houses in which a central open courtyard was the main feature. Only in Mazar's ex cavations did the location of the houses seem to be unplan ned, although their embellishments reveal that the inhabi tants were well-to-do. In the Jewish Quarter tlie extensions of the Roman cardo was found to belong to the Byzantine period. It was apparently built by the emperor Justinian to
JERUSALEM. Figure 5.
Plan of the city, Byzantine period.
(After Bahat, 1990)
JERUSALEM connect the Church of the Holy Spulcher to the newly built Nea church, probably for religious processions. Fragments of the eastern cardo may well belong to this period (see above). Excavations that began in 1990 north of the Old City have revealed monasteries and chapels along the Third Wall (first century CE.) Similar structures were found in previous ex cavations along this wall—by Sukenik and Mayer (1930) in 1929 and by Netzer and Ben-Arieh in 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 4 (see above). The last of the Byzantine construction projects was the Golden Gate. It was built in 629 by the emperor Heraclius as a triumphal arch when he brought True Cross back to the city after its captivity among the Persians, who had conquered Jerusalem in 6 1 4 . Islamic Period. T h e Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 638 did not alter the city appreciably, but there were some al terations in its landscape as the Nea church had been de stroyed. T h e period is characterized by considerable build ing activity on and around the Temple Mount. It was under the Umayyad dynasty ( 6 6 1 - 7 5 0 ) that tire focus of the sanc tity of die Holy City moved from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher back to the Temple Mount. T h e Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque were built in 691 and 7 1 1 7 1 3 , respectively, along with other, minor structures on the Mount (see figure 6). An administrative compound was built south of the Temple Mount. It is unique of its kind because, although literary documents from the period reveal that similar compounds were constructed in all the main cities of Islam, the one in Jerusalem is so far the only one to survive. Excavated by Mazar between 1967 and 1978, it comprised six large palaces organized along the west and die south walls of the Temple Mount. Wall paintings, stucco, and vast dimensions are their main aesthetic fea tures. During the period earthquakes struck the country, creat ing decisive destruction in the city. T h e 747 or 749 quake left the Umayyad structures in ruin. Only the Dome of the Rock survived it. There are almost no architectural remains from the 'Abbasid period that followed. T h e earthquake of 1033 also created major devastation in the city. It was during the reconstruction that followed it that the present southern alignment of the city wall was created. In his excavations in the Jewish Quarter, Avigad recovered a small section of this eleventh-century wall with a postern. T h e present northern city wall was repaired tiien and some fragments of that re construction have been found in excavation (by De Groot in 1979). J. Basil Hennessy's excavations at the Damascus Gate revealed two cisterns flanking the gate's entry that he ascribes to the Umayyad period (see G. J. Wightman, The Damascus Gate, Jerusalem, Oxford, 1989). As a result of the repairs after the 1 0 3 3 earthquake, the southern part of the city was left outside the walls, and the inhabitants of that part of the city moved into the port city, which was included by the new walls. Other contemporary building projects in-
JERUSALEM. Figure
6. Dome of the Rock.
237
(Courtesy Pictorial
Archive)
elude the repair work of the Temple Mount retaining walls and die installation of the so-called Solomon's Stables under the Temple Mount esplanade. The Byzantine neighborhood on the soudieastern hill (the City of David) existed into the Arab period, but the architectural renovations they under went were of inferior quality. Medieval Period. T h e Crusaders conquered Jerusalem on 1 5 July 1099, The alignment of the city walls then re mained through subsequent repairs in the 'Ayyubid ( 1 1 8 7 1250) and Ottoman ( 1 5 1 7 - 1 9 1 7 ) periods. It was during those periods that Jerusalem acquired its Oriental character, still apparent to the visitor. T h e Muslims made conscious efforts to change the city's Crusader/Christian features. [See Crusader Period.] In the last few decades, many excavations have been car ried out in the city to obtain a better understanding of the Late and post-Medieval periods: for example, the Citadel (by Geva in 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 8 0 and Sivan in 1980-1988); tire Churches of St. Julian (by Bahat in 1972) and St. Peter in Vinculi and the Crusader southern market (by Avigad from
238
JEWELRY
1969 to 1982); the Churches of St. Thomas of the Germans (by Bahat and Reich in 1976) and St. Mary of the Germans (by Asher Ovadiah and Netzer in 1968); the Holy Sepulcher (by Corbo, Cotiasnon, Christos Katsimbinis from i960 to 1969); the foundations of the chapel of St. Egidius (by Bahat in 1985); the cloister of St. Mary Magdalene (by Bahat in 1978); the Crusader royal palace (by Bahat and Broshi in 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 1 ; see their "Excavations in the Armenian Gar den," in Yadin, ed., 1975, p. 56); the Templar wall, south of the Temple Mount (by B. Mazar from 1967 to 1978); and the Damascus Gate (by Hennessy in 1972). Some 'Ayyubid remains have been uncovered as well. Many vestiges of this period are preserved in the city and are responsible for its special character. In 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 7 , in the Armenian Garden, Tushingham found a large building in his area L that he interpreted as a caravanserai, although its plan may be better explained as an administrative structure. The building's centrality was underscored by the discovery of strong towers in the contemporary western and southern city wall built by the nephew of Salah edh-Din (Saladin) between 1202 and 1 2 1 2 . These towers (excavated by Broshi in 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 2 , Avigad from 1969 to 1982, Margowsky from 1969 to 1972, and Ben-Dov from 1973 to 1977) were incor porated in a city wall of which only small sections are pre served. However, Bliss and Dickie (from 1894 to 1897) dis covered a city wall crowning Mt. Zion that can be identified with a wall the literary sources report was built by Salah edhDin, who also excavated a moat in front of it. The north western corner of the Old City preserves the remains of a tower and a section of the medieval city wall (explored by Bahat and Menashe Ben-Ari in 1972). Between 1968 and 1983 Michael H. Burgoyne did a survey of Mamluk build ings in the city for the BSAJ. The greatest change in the character of the city took place in the sixteenth century un der the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The city walls of Jerusalem (demolished by Saladin's nephew in the thirteenth century) were reconstructed, as were six foun tains built by him in addition to the reconstruction of the aqueducts from Solomon's Pools south of Bethlehem. Pub lic buildings were also added to die city and its present Mus lim character was thus secured. [See also Bibilical Temple.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Amirarij David H. K . , and Arie Shachar. Atlas of Jerusalem. Berlin and New York, 1973. Avigad, Nahman. Ancient Monuments in the Kidron Valley. Jerusalem, 1954. Avigad, Nahman. Discovering Jerusalem. Nashville, 1983. Avi-Yonah, Michael, Sefer Yerushalayim (in Hebrew). Vol. 1. Jerusa lem, 1956. Bahat, Dan. The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem. New York, 1990. Ben-Dov, Meir. In the Shadow of the Temple: The Discovery of Ancient Jerusalem. Translated by Ina Friedman. New York, 1985.
Benvenisti, Meron. Jerusalem, the Torn City. Minneapolis, 1976. Bliss, Frederick Jones, and Archibald Campbell Dickie. Excavations at Jerusalem, 1894-1897. London, 1898, Burgoyne, Michael Hamilton, and D . S. Richards. Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study. London, 1987. Conder, Claude R., and Charles Warren. The Survey of Western Pal estine, vol. 5, Jerusalem. London, 1884. Crowfoot, John W., and Gerald M . FitzGerald. Excavations in the Ty ropoean Valley, Jerusalem, 1927. London, 1929. Geva, Hillel, ed. Ancient Jerusalem Revealed. Jerusalem, 1994. Hamilton, Robert William. The Structural History of the Aqsa Mosque: A Record of Archaeological Gleanings from the Repairs of 1938-1942. London, 1949. Hollis, F . J . The Archeology of Herod's Temple. London, 1934. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Jerusalem: Excavating 3000 Years ofEIistory. N e w York, 1967. Kenyon, Kathleen M , Digging Up Jerusalem. London, 1974. Lutfi, Huda. Al Quds al-Mamlukiyya, Berlin, 1985. Macalister, R. A. S., and Duncan J . Garrow. Excavations on the Hill of Ophel, Jentsalem, 1923-192$. London, 1926. Mazar, Benjamin, and Eliat Mazar. Excavations in the South of the Tem ple Mount. Qedem, vol. 29. Jerusalem, 1989. Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam. The Early Islamic Monuments of al-Haram alSharif. Qedem, vol. 28. Jerusalem, 1989. Shiloh, Yigal, et al. Excavations al the City of David, 1978-8$. 3 vols, to date. Qedem, vols. 1 9 , 30, 33. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 9 2 . Simons, Jan Jozef. Jerusalem in the Old. Testament. Leiden, 1 9 5 2 . Sukenik, Eleazar L . , and Leo Mayer, The Third Wall of Jerusalem: An Account of Excavations. Jerusalem, 1930. Tushingham, A . D., et al. Excavations in Jerusalem, 1961-1967. Vol. 1. Toronto, 1985. Vincent, L . - H . , and Felix-Marie Abel. Jerusalem: Recherches de topogra phic, d'archeologie et d'histoire, vol. 2, Jerusalem nouvelle. Paris, 1926. Wilson, Charles W. Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem. London, 1865. Yadin, Yigael, ed. Jerusalem Revealed: Archaeology in the Holy City, 1968-1974. Jerusalem, 1975. DAN BAHAT
J E W E L R Y . Adornment and satisfying the wearer's van ity are only two of the contributions jewelry makes to an individual's well-being. Some pieces of jewelry, many of them shaped like deities, their attribute animals, or symbols, are at the same time meant to protect the individual and to demonstrate one's piety. Jewelry shaped like flowers or fruit reflects the time-honored use of plants as personal orna ment, as well as the symbolic significance of their shape or divine associations (e.g., McGovern, 1985). T h e materials (gold = sun, silver = moon) usually are also weighted with symbolic significance. When worn, jewelry also serves to ex press human difference/inequality (see below). Lastly, jew elry is an investment, and in precoinage times (and later) could be used as money: many types have a standard weight and gold/silver content, their value being enhanced by fine work, whether viewed as personal effects or as money. In the ancient Near East and elsewhere, the craving to bedeck oneself with jewels transcended gender. Excavated finds on skeletal remains of known gender, as well as artistic representations, reveal that by tiieir appearance alone it is
JEWELRY seldom possible to distinguish women's jewels from those of men (Marcus, 1993, p. 170). This may, at least in part, be an archaeological optical illusion: common sense suggests, and ample ethnological studies illustrate, that jewelry— along with other personal ornaments and accessories, cloth ing, and tattooing—did express differences, of wealth, gen der, family and social status, official function, and ethnos (cf. Marcus, 1993), and that some of it was intended for special occasions such as weddings and festivals. Possessed of emotions and desires on a majestic scale, many gods dis play a knack for jewelry no less than that of mortals. Jewelry is found least in habitational contexts—that is, on tlie floors; exceptions to this rule occur chiefly in cases of violent destruction not followed by plundering (Marcus, !993i P- t59)- Most jewelry is found in tombs, foundation deposits, temple favissae, or hoards. While in the former three its function is plain enough, there are several possibilities for the preburial role of jewelry from hoards. It is often impossible to decide whether the pieces in a hoard belong to a jeweler/trader or are the prop erty of a customer. Intact jewelry pieces may be identified as finished products/stock-in-trade of the former, and as personal ornaments or money of the latter. Broken jewelry pieces may be identified as spare parts/recyclables of the former, and as money of the latter. Unfortunately, the archaeological context does not always permit one to distinguish a foundation deposit from a hoard, which might have been hidden in die face of danger. When it can be distinguished, a hoard will not only afford chron ological, technological, and typological insight; it might offer an opportunity for economic interpretation (Balmuth, 1976; Curtis, 1984). In Mesopotamia, archaeologists have unearthed the splendid jewelry of the third-millennium royal tombs of Ur; Egypt, in addition to tlie grave goods of Tutankhamun, has yielded a sizable sample of second-millennium and early first-millennium BCE royal jewelry. Students of ancient Pal estinian jewelry have to content themselves with a far more modest corpus. In another contrast with Egypt there is hardly any piece that can be regarded as funerary in origin. Representational art (e.g. Neo-Assyrian reliefs) and textual mentions (like in Ex. 39 and Is. 3:18-24) complement tlie picture and lend it perspective. Materials, Techniques, a n d Tools. T h e first known gold, usually considered to be of Egyptian origin (for a mod est local source exploited much later, Wadi Tawahin near Eilat, see Wolff, 1993, pp. 160-162), appears in Palestine in the Chalcolithic period. Copper, thought to have been mined locally at Feinan and Timna', makes its appearance in Palestine in the same period. Silver, probably coming from Anatolia, is first found in jewelry of the Early Bronze I period (seePrag, 1978). Bronze makes its debut in jewelry, as well as in tools and weapons, in tlie Middle Bronze I
239
period (see Eisenberg, 1985). Iron was not a popular metal in jewelry making; personal ornaments in this metal belong chiefly to the early Iron II. Stones were valued chiefly for their colors, not because they refracted light (precious stones, such as diamonds and rubies, were not yet used). Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and turquoise from Sinai, so popular in Egypt—the former also in Mesopotamia—were rare in Palestine. Carnelian (quartz with iron minerals, from the surrounding sandstone deserts) was used abundantly in Palestine in beads from the late Neolithic onward. Other quartzes, such as amethyst (quartz with manganese minerals, from near Aswan, Egypt), are found less frequentiy from the EB I onward. Animal and plant products were always available locally and were in use as jewelry long before tlie Chalcolithic period—such as wood, Mediterranean and Red Sea shells, ostrich-egg shell, and bone (e.g., in the P P N B Nahal Hemar cave, Bar-Yosef and Alon, 1988, pp. 19-20). Elephant ivory, coming from Egypt and possibly Syria, and hippopotamus ivory, available also locally, was used in Palestine since tlie Chalcolithic, and amber since tlie Late Bronze. The source of the latter seems to be the Baltic region, probably attesting to indirect trade, with Greece the last leg of the relay before Syria-Palestine; the local amber product was of low quality (Todd, 1985; Bass, 1986, p. 286; Harding, 1987; Pulak, 1988, pp. 24-25; Sherratt, 1995). Manufactured materials used in jewelry production in cluded the alkaline glaze on "soapstone" beads, known since the Chalcolithic period; glazed faience (since EB I); and glass (since MB IIA; cf. McGovern et al., 1991, and the section on M B IIA below). Glass, like stones, was valued for its colors. A twelfth-century BCE sizable glass ingot dis covered at Ashdod may attest to the local manufacture. Innovative methods and technological breakthroughs in metallurgy are detectable in jewelry. In the Chalcolithic pe riod, soldering and lost wax casting were introduced; since EB II—III (and possibly earlier) chasing and repousse are employed to enhance pieces; in the M B JIB granulation, which depended on fine soldering, and cloisonne techniques appear in Palestine for the first time (on granulation see Hoffmann and Davidson, 1 9 6 5 ^ . 4 6 ; Carroll, 1974); filigree is found rarely since the LB period, like gilding in Iron II (tlie exact technique for the latter is still unclear). Jewelers used drills, anvils (Potts, 1985, p. 186), chasing hammers, doming blocks, and drawplates; tlie latter two are still missing from the archaeological record of Palestine, but hardstone beads are a possible alternative for drawplates. Also employed were stone dies for impressing a pattern into sheet metal, and stone molds (distinguishable by their pour ing channels from dies) were probably used only for casting wax in the lost-wax technique. The finest soldering was done employing a brazier and blowpipe (documented in Egyptian tomb paintings of jewelers).
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JEWELRY
Chalcolithic Period. Until the fifth millennium (preGhassulian cultures) jewelry finds consist mostly of beads and pendants, such as die carnelian, garnet and other stone beads from Kabri in Israel. From the Ghassulian Chalcol ithic heavy gold rings (ingots?) were found in the Nahal Qana cave (Gopher et al., 1990), which is roughly contem porary with the elite cemetery at Varna (Bulgaria), and its gold jewelry. Although no jewelry was recovered in the Nahal Mishmar "Cave of the Treasure," there was ample evidence among the metal objects discovered for sophisti cated soldering and the lost-wax technique (Shalev et al., 1 9 9 2 , 1 9 9 3 ; Tadmor et a l , 1995). A double-spiral wire pen dant was discovered within a small copper hoard at Neve Noy near Beersheba, closely related to the Nahal Mishmar finds (Baumgarten and Eldar, 1985; Negbi, 1976, pi. 47, shows how it was worn). A pendant with the same doublespiral motif in relief was found at Biq'at 'Uvda in the south ern Negev desert (Avner, 1984, pi. 16:2). This motif was widespread in tire ancient Near East and in Old Europe and was probably related to fertility (Keel, 1987). An ivory hair pin surmounted by a bird was found among other ivories of Egyptian inspiration at Beersheba (Perrot, 1 9 5 5 , pp. 1 7 1 1 7 2 , pi. 2 2 B ) , and there is a similar example from Shiqmim. Unique among the finds from Palestine is a beadwork purse (?) from a cave in Nahal Se'elim in the Judean Desert, made of white- and blue-glazed stone beads (Aharoni, 1 9 6 1 , p. 1 5 , pi. 7A). Bracelets, of a type found also around much of the Indian Ocean rim, cut from Red Sea shells like Lambis truncata sabae, continue from the Chalcolithic (Levy and Alon, 1985, pp. 1 2 9 - 1 3 0 ) into the EB (Schaub and Rast, 1989, pp. 3 1 0 - 3 1 2 ) .
Early Bronze Age. Among the rare gold finds from the EB I are wire spiral hair(?) rings (also found in electrum and silver) from tombs at Azor (Ben-Tor, 1975, p. 24; and ex cavation by A. Druks, exhibited in the Israel Museum, Je rusalem, unpublished), and a wire ring (earring?) and seam less, seemingly soldered tube from Tell en-Nasbeh. Some of the earliest silver finds from the Levant are a pin (hair pin?), unearthed in an EB I tomb at Bab edh-Dhra' in Jordan (Schaub and Rast, 1989, pp. 3 1 2 - 3 1 3 ) , and the items from Azor just mentioned. From a tomb at Azor two oblate am ethyst beads (finished Egyptian imports) were among the twelve hundred beads found (Ben-Tor, 1 9 7 5 , p. 23), From an EB I tomb at Tell el-Assawir and from a contemporary domestic context at 'Ein-Besor come Egyptian or egyptianizing Ram's(?)-head pendant beads (Gophna, 1980, p. 1 5 , pi. ni:4). Faience beads were recovered in quantity from EB I tombs, e.g. at Jericho, that may have been produced locally. Splendid isolated EB II-III finds hint at die richness and diversity of tire jeweler's craft. In an unexpected find-spot, a modest habitational site at out-of-the-way Ein ha-Me'ara in the western Negev, were discovered three drop-shaped, hollow, gold pendant-beads (exact date within the EB un certain; Haiman, 1989, p. 180), with comparable finds but
not exact parallels in Egypt. In a late EB II or early EB III tomb excavated in 1941 at Kinneret, a locality on the Sea of Galilee, the finds include a repousse gold disk, of uncertain use, and beads attesting to the advanced technology of the day: hollow cylinders with closed ends, thick ones whose soldering is visible and thin ones that may have covered now-decayed faience beads; tubular carnelian beads with gold caps and a band (with comparisons in contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia); and a barrel-shaped electrum(?) bead with what may be hammered-on gold caps (Mazar et alo 1 9 7 3 ; Amiran, 1993; see figure 1 ) . Similar material— cylindrical gold beads and two repousse gold plaques—was recovered from an EB III charnel house at Bab edh-Dhra (Rast and Schaub, 1987, p. 48; Schaub and Rast, 1989, pp. 468-469). The jewelry from Kinneret was believed to show Anatolian inspiration, but when considered together with the Bab edh-Dhra' finds local origins are suggested. Three star-shaped spacer beads were found at Jericho in T o m b A (Garstang, 1 9 3 2 , pi. XXII); it is not clear whether they are local or imported. An ivory hairpin surmounted by an ani mal shape was found at Megiddo, stratum XVIII (Loud, 1948, pi. 2 0 1 ) . Although granulation and cloisonne are known in third-millennium Mesopotamia, and cloisonne is known in contemporary Egypt, these two techniques are un known in the EB II-III Levant. Nor are finger rings found in the region before the M B I. c
Middle Bronze I. In this period bronze is introduced and is employed inter alia in jewelry and personal accessories, such as toggle pins. In fact the latter, used to fasten gar ments, made their debut in this period—in Mesopotamia toggle pins are found already in the Early Dynastic III pe riod. M B I toggle pins made of bronze come, for instance, from 'Einan. At the same site copper bracelets were found in situ on a woman's arm, as were finger rings, two of them in situ on tire middle finger of a woman's right hand, and
c
JEWELRY. Figure 1.
Gold, silver, and carnelian beads.
F r o m an E B
tomb at Kinneret, near the Sea of Galilee. (IAA 41.488, 41.498, 41.500, 4 1 . 5 0 1 , 4 1 . 5 0 3 , 4 1 . 5 1 6 ; courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
JEWELRY
JEWELRY.
F i g u r e 2.
Three views of a gold and glass earring.
241
F r o m a mid-second-millennium BCE
tomb at M e g i d d o . (IAA 36.196; courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
spiral hair rings (Eisenberg, 1 9 8 5 , pp. 7 1 - 7 2 ) . An MB I cop per diadem was found on the skull in a tomb at Jericho (Ken yon, 1965, fig. 4 1 : 8 ) , and an amethyst bead, a rare Egyptian import, at Ma'abarot (Dar, 1 9 7 7 , pp. 3 5 - 3 7 ) . A silver brace let was unearthed in a tomb of the same period at Hazorea' (Meyerhof, 1989, p . 1 0 6 , pi. 3 7 ) , a very rare find in this metal besides the celebrated Ain es-Samiyeh goblet (Tadc
mor, 1986, 1 0 0 - 1 0 2 ) .
Middle Bronze IIA. T h e M B IIA royal tombs at Byblos revealed die first Syro-Palestinian gold granulation, some of it made into elaborate figural motifs never since repeated (Maxwell-Hyslop, 1 9 7 1 , p . 1 0 3 ) . Little jewelry datable to tiiis period was recovered in Palestine. (Aphek in tire Sharon, the type-site for the stratigraphy and pottery chro nology of the Palestinian M B IIA, yielded hardly any jewelry at all.) T h e earliest glass find from Palestine belongs to this period: a bead from Tel Dan (Ilan et al., 1993); it is roughly contemporary with the substantial find from Assur (Wartke, in Harper et a l , 1 9 9 5 , pp. 54, 1 0 6 ) . Middle Bronze IIB to Late Bronze I. Throughout the second millennium gold finds outnumber silver in Syria-Pal estine, T h e richest find in Palestine in the late MB/early LB period and die one that comes nearest to royal jewelry, or, rather, princely jewelry was made at Tell el- Ajjul (Negbi, 1970, using outdated chronology, Ziffer, 1990, pp. 5 4 ^ - 6 3 * [English], 63-78 [Hebrew]). Egyptian influence, expressed for instance in scarabs mounted in gold and silver and in the use of amethyst (Ziffer, 1990, p. 74), is present amongst the mostly local work of the 'Ajjul assemblages, much of it ex hibiting great skill in execution, such as in the fine granu lation. There are partial parallels to the Ajjul material in the princely tombs at Ebla, with a few further comparisons from c
c
the Uluburun shipwreck, and at Tell ed-Dab'a in the eastern Nile Delta. In this period (late MB/early LB) toggle pins became elaborate in design (Ziffer, 1990, p. 7 1 ) . Crescent pendants, which began as an open form, gradually closed in die course of the Late Bronze Age (Ziffer, 1990, p. 58*; Tadmor and Misch-Brandl, 1980, p . 78). Solid crescentic (or "boat") earrings began to appear then and continued as a popular form for more than a millennium. Legume-shaped sheet-gold earrings from Tell el-'Ajjul have symbolic signif icance because of their crescentic shape (Negbi, 1 9 7 1 ) . One pair was provided with a unique sliding lock (Ziffer, 1990, p. 5 5 * ) . By adding a head and tail, and decorating the cres centic base-form in a semblance of feathers, the same shape was transformed into a bird with outspread, raised wings (Ziffer, 1990, pp. 65 vs. 64), tentatively identified by Tufnell (1983) as a wryneck. Most of these legume-shaped and birdshaped earrings are decorated with granulation and wire (Lilyquist, 1993). Fly and fly-larva pendant beads (Tadmor, 1986, p. 1 2 3 bottom left), and flamboyant glass-inlayed mul tiple-eye (blue and yellow concentric circles) earrings with rams' heads soldered at the bottom have also been found at Tell el-'Ajjul (Ziffer, 1990, pp. 56*, 66), and a similar pair turned up at Megiddo (see figure 2 ) . Also from 'Ajjul are neck ornaments or belts made of multiple, hinged parts (Zif fer, 1990, p. 69) and a diadem or choker in the shape of a gold strap witii evenly spaced tubes that may have held nowvanished gold flowers (Ziffer, 1990, p. 68, comparable to an intact item from Egypt, ibid., p. 67). In Megiddo was found a complex hinged silver bracelet of the late MB or early LB (Guy and Engberg, 1 9 3 8 , pi. 145:22). Sheet-metal repousse pendants are rather common in Syria-Palestine, continuing from the MB II well into the LB period: circular examples
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JEWELRY
with a "Cappadocian symbol" or double thunderbolt, the symbol of the storm god (e.g., from late MB Shiloh, Fin kelstein and Brandl, 1 9 8 5 , pp. 2 3 - 2 4 ) , or with an eightpointed star, the symbol of the goddess Ishtar, and dropshaped pendants with the schematic image of a naked goddess (examples of latter two from Tell el-'Ajjul, Tadmor, 1986, pp. 1 2 3 , 1 2 5 ) . Late Bronze II to Early Iron I. Just as MB UB and LB I jewelry are inseparable, so the jewelry items of die four teenth-twelfth centuries form a fairly coherent group. Jewelry lists were found for instance in Syria in die Ningal Temple at Qatna, and in the Amarna letters. Gold ingots were recov ered at Beth-Shean, and bivalve stone molds (see above) for casting several items each—earcings, beads, pin—were found at Hazor stratum XTV (Yadin et al„ 1 9 6 1 , pi. 1 5 8 : 3 1 ) ; Tell Abu Hawam stratum V (Hamilton, 1935, p. 58, no. 359); and Beth-Shemesh (Grant, 1 9 3 1 , pi. 1 3 ) . Jewelry in the Late Bronze Age II reflects a mixture of local types—traditional plus innovative designs—and Egyptian types. Circular and goddess-shaped pendants begin to appear in glass (Megiddo, Lachish, Dan, Tel Mevorakh). Pomegranate-bud pendant earrings with the hoop separate are new, and have as their provenience Deir el-Balah (Dothan, 1979, pp. 74, 76), a hoard from Beth-Shemesh (Tadmor and Misch-Brandl, 1980, p. 77; see figure 3 ) , Tell el-Far'ah (Soutii), Tel Nami
JEWELRY. Figure 3.
Part of a jewelry hoard.
(unpublished), Megiddo, and Ugarit. Beads and pendantbeads in palmette, drop, lotus-seed, and Egyptian nefer (hi eroglyph denoting "good[ly]") shapes, made of gold, carnelian, and faience, and belonging to Egyptian-type necklaces or broad collars, were found at Deir el-Balah (where red-tinted gold was also used; Dothan, 1979, pp. 78-80; Tadmor, 1986, p. 1 3 3 ) , Dhahrat el-Humraya, Beth-Shean (Tadmor, 1986, p. 1 3 5 ) and Lachish. Inscribed massive Egyptian-type finger rings in metal, stone, and faience are known from several sites: from 'Ajjul comes a gold ring with the name of T u tanlchamun; in Judur, Aphek, and Azor were discovered fin ger rings inscribed with good wishes in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Granulation in the LB LI is less widespread than in the pre ceding period; whether this reflects a real decline of the tech nique or only the chances of discoveiy cannot be said. One example in silver or electrum, a pair of bracelet centerpieces, comes from Kamid el-Loz (Hachmann, 1983, p. 1 5 7 ) ; a pair of gold bracelets from the tomb of Tutankhamun constitutes a close parallel (Andrews, 1990, p. 157 right). T h e earliest known appearance of cloisonne is certainly inspired by Egypt (where this technique is at home), but tire jewelry pieces thus made have a possibly local origin: isolated examples have been found at Lachish (Tufnell, 1958, pi. 25:9); Megiddo (Loud, 1948, pi. 224:27); and Kamid el-Loz (Miron, 1990, pp. 45, 168, 1 7 1 , pi. I). An LB LI filigree bead in gold from
Beth-Shemesh; thirteenth century BCE. Also shown is
the ceramic vessel in which the hoard was found. (Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
JEWELRY
JEWELRY.
Figure 4.
243
Two views of a pair of gold eatings. T e l l J e m m e h , early first millennium
B C E . ( I A A J . 1 0 0 6 ; courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
the Beth-Shemesh hoard is the only local example of this rare technique (Tadmor and Misch-Brandl, 1980, p. 75). The bead has exact parallels in die Valley of the Kings in Thebes, Egypt, in a tomb of a daughter of Queen Tawosert ( 1 1 8 8 1186 BCE) (Andrews, 1990, p. 127), and from Tell el-'Ajjul comes an imitation in faience (Petrie 1933, no. 10 on p. 5, pis. 8 , 10). Tapering metal-band finger rings in die Hittite style appear at Tell el-Far'ah (South) (Petrie, 1930, pi. 36; Macdonald et al., 1932, pi. 51) and Tel Nami (Singer, 1993). The earliest-known amber beads in Palestine, of Baltic origin, were found at Tell Abu Hawani and a few other sites in LB LI contexts (Sherratt, 1995, p. 202; more references in "ma terials" section above). In early Iron I, LB traditions initially were continued, as is evidenced, for instance, at Tell el-Far'ah (South), where Flinders Petrie found a late twelfth- or elev enth-century gold crescent pendant and carnelian lotus-seed beads (Petrie, 1930, pis. 36, 3 7 , 39). Late I r o n I to Early I r o n II. As far as jewelry is con cerned this period, the eleventh-ninth centuries, is to be re garded as a continuum. New local jewelry types introduced, perhaps by die Sea Peoples, are known chiefly from the Tell el-Far'ah (South) cemeteries. Tassel earrings in gold, electrum, silver, and bronze, whose prototype probably was flo ral (Maxwell-Hyslop, 1971, p. 22s, photographs 198, 200), are also known, in addition to Tell el-Far'ah, from Madaba (Harding, 1953, p. 32, nos. 197-198), Timna' (Rothenberg, 1988, pi. 55:15), die Judean Desert (unpublished), a n d T a wilan, the latter in a sixth-fifth-century context (Bienkowsld, 1991, p. 102). Early examples of "basket" earring(?) pen dants were unearthed in eleventh-ninth-centuries contexts, an example in gold at Tell el-Far'ah (South) (Petrie, 1930, pis. 36, 39) and in silver at Beth-Shean; these finds herald the much later Phoenician type (see below). T h e earliest examples of massive bracelets, armlets and anklets, the latter two distinguished by their size, also appear in late Iron I: iron examples were found at Tell el-Far'ah (South) and Tell Qasile (Mazar, 1985, p. 8 - 9 ) .
Iron I types continued into the Early Iron II, pre-Assyrian period, as noted, and new developments are discernible. At Eshtemoa' a silver hoard was recovered (Yeivin, 1990) and at Tell Jemmeh there were silver and gold finds (Pettie, 1928), both apparently from the ninth century. Elongated gold crescent earrings with a herringbone wire decoration and a loop to hold a pendant, die latter now lost, were dis covered at Tell Jemmeh (see figure 4), and silver specimens come from Arad and Eshtemoa'. Other earrings from Tell Jemmeh and elsewhere display a flattened crescentic hoop decorated with a row of granules (Yeivin, 1990, fig. 1 6 : 1 1 ) , and use is made of granulation on items from the Eshtemoa' hoard (Yeivin, 1990, fig. 17:7). Iron and bronze bangles were found at Lachish and at other sites, but while die use of the bronze specimens continues, the interest in iron ban gles appears eventually to diminish. Subsequently, at Tell el-Mazar, a burial was found with both bracelets and anklets in situ on the skeleton (Yassine, 1984, p. 93). Fibulas, in vented in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, began to replace toggle pins in Syria-Palestine in the Early Iron II or perhaps as early as Iron I. Fibulas were also used for securing a seal with a chain, and there is a type of fibula which is cast in one piece with a seal (Curtis, 1994; Curtis, in Curtis and Reade, 1995, p. 174). Late I r o n II. From tiiis period mostly silver jewelry is found; gold is rare. There appears to be little cloisonne work, though cloisonne decoration of ivory and wood carving is popular. New shapes in jewelry proliferated, displaying Syro-Assyrian and Phoenician as well as local styles. The former is probably the result of Assyrian deportations, cer tainly of Assyria's imperial rule, and one may be entitled to speak of a Syro-Assyrian koine, encompassing most of the Near East: parallels to jewelry finds from Palestine exist as far afield as Karmir Blur in Urartu. Late Iron II jewelry finds in the southern Levant are mainly from inland sites, e.g., Ketef Hinnom, Kamid el-Loz (Hachmann and Kuschke, 1966), Meqabelein, and Tel 'Ira. Some types continue into
244
JEWELRY
the sixth—fifth centuries, or else are difficult to differentiate; there are, for example, mixed seventh-fifth-centuries tombs in Jerusalem (Ketef Hinnom) and Amman (Adoninur). Abundant use is made of hollow shapes embellished with granulation and wire decoration, mainly in earrings. Cloi sonne is found in Amman (the tomb of Adoninur) and Meqabelein in ring bezels. In Palestine, at Tel Miqne/Ekron, a sheet-silver pendant, incised witii the images of Ishtar and a worshiper (Gitin, 1995, fig. 4 . 1 4 ) , is a provincial rendering of North Syrian work paralleled at Zincirli. Triangular eye beads made of glass, of Assyrian type, were found at Gezer and other sites (Reich and Brand.l, 1985, p. 49). Though artifacts coming from or inspired by Phoenicia are common in Iron II Palestine, Phoenician influence in jewelry (some of it egyptianizing) has been first observed only in work done in die early 1990s on late Iron II finds from the coastal sites of Achziv and Tel Miqne/Ekron (for mer unpublished, latter in Gitin, 1995, fig. 4 . 1 2 ) ; inland jew elry shows Syro-Assyrian influence (see above). Parallels to the Miqne and Achziv jewelry come mainly from the Phoe nician West. Among the finds are elaborate earrings, includ ing some witii multiple pendants (basket and lotus flower), and a rare example of gilding was observed on silver Horus eyes from Miqne. A silver finger ring from the same site, with a hieroglyphic inscription, should be noted. Few Phoenician/egyptianizing finds are also known from inland sites, such as a gold finger ring from Samaria, that has a parallel in a bracelet of Sheshonq found at Tanis. At Achziv a lionshaped pin-head made of Baltic amber was found (Sherratt, 1995, p. 202; more references in "materials" section above). Multiple hollow-ball earrings are probably of local inspi ration, an offshoot of the MB-LB granule-cluster earrings, unless the Iron Age version was made by Iranian deportees to Palestine—somewhat similar earrings of the early first millennium B C E are known from Marlik and Hasanlu in Iran (Maxwell-Hyslop, 1971, photographs 1 3 5 , 144). Examples of die local type found in a seventh-century B C E tomb at Tel I r a (Beit-Arieh, 1985, p. 23) testify to the date of their in troduction; when they appear elsewhere it is often in postIron II or mixed contexts, e.g., at Ketef Hinnom and Kamid el-Loz (Hachmann and Kuschke, 1966, p. 64, fig. 20:6-7). Also found only locally are hoops of several earring types decorated with wound wire and tiny hollow balls. An abundance of inexpensive Egyptian faience amulets in the shapes of deities and their symbols, such as Horus eyes (Herrmann, 1994), and local carved bone "club" and "ham mer" pendants (Piatt, 1978; Herrmann, 1994, P- 8 1 4 ) been found, for example, at Lachish. [See also Bone, Ivory, and Shell; and Metals. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent en tries.] n
a
v
e
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JEWISH PALESTINE EXPLORATION SOCIETY
T o d d , Joan M . "Baltic Amber in the Ancient Near East: A Preliminary Investigation." Journal of Baltic Studies 16.3 (1985): 2 9 2 - 3 0 1 . Special issue of tlie journal, "Studies in Baltic Amber," edited by T o d d . Tufnell, Olga. Lachish IV: The Bronze Age. London, 1958. Tufnell, Olga. "Some Gold Bird Ornaments: Falcon or Wryneck?" Anatolian Studies 33 (1983): 57-66. Tylecote, R. F. A History of Metallurgy. 2d ed. Brookfield, Vt., 1992. Wolff, Samuel R . "Archaeology in Israel." American Journal of Archae ology 97 (1993): 1 3 5 - 1 6 3 . Yadin, Yigael, et al. Hazor III-IV: An Account of the Third and Fourth Seasons of Excavations, J957-795S. Jerusalem, 1961 (plates). Yassine, Khair. Tell el-Mazar, vol. 1 , Cemetery A. Amman, 1984. Yeivin, Ze'ev. " T h e Silver Hoard from Eshtemoa'." 'Atiqot to (1990): 43-56 (Hebrew). Ziffer, Irit. At That Time the Canaanites Were in the Land. Daily Life in Canaan in the Middle Bronze Age 2, 2000-7550 B.C.E. Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, exhibition catalog. Tel Aviv, 1990. BENIAMIN SASS
JEWISH PALESTINE EXPLORATION SO CIETY. See Israel Exploration Society. JEZREEL, TEL, a 15-acre mound situated in die east ern part of the Jezreel Valley on a ridge extending along its southern side. The site's a commanding position offers a breathtaking view of the valley. Although there is a large spring, 'Ein Jezreel, in the valley to the northeast, it seems that the numerous rock-cut cisterns that collected rainwater at the site and in its immediate surroundings served as the settlement's main water source. Development works carried out nearby in 1987 revealed Iron Age monumental remains. Following limited salvage excavations by tlie Israel Antiquities Autliority, systematic excavations were started by David Ussishkin and John Woodhead, on behalf of Tel Aviv University and tlie British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, respectively. Six largescale seasons of excavation took place between 1990 and 1995-
A few Late Neolithic flint implements of the Wadi Rabbah culture are tlie earliest finds collected at the site. A consid erable number of Early Bronze Age I and III pottery frag ments were also recovered on the surface and a few Middle Bronze Age II sherds were found. A considerable amount of Late Bronze Age pottery concentrated in the construc tional fills of the Iron Age gate indicates the existence of a settlement in the central part of the mound during that pe riod. The existence of a Canaanite settlement at Jezreel has a bearing on the origins of the name of the site and the valley, which first appears in late biblical accounts. Jezreel was lo cated in the tribal inheritance of Issachar (Jos. 1 9 : 1 8 ) . It is mentioned in tlie list of Solomon's district officers (1 Kgs. 4 : 1 2 ) . Iron I pottery found in the constructional fills of the later Iron Age indicates that Jezreel was probably settled during the period of the United Monarchy.
During the reign of tlie Omride dynasty (882-842 B C E ) , Jezreel became a royal center of considerable importance in the ldngdom of Israel, and a large enclosure was built there. The site's importance during this period is attested in two biblical stories: 1 Kings 21 describes the story of Naboth the Jezreelite who had an orchard near King Ahab's "palace," and 2 Kings 9 - 1 0 relates in detail the story of Jehu's revolt in 842 B C E . It was there that he received the decapitated heads of the members of Ahab's family sent to him from Samaria. Hosea (1:4) mentions "the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu"—a possible indication that Jehu de stroyed Jezreel at that time. T h e royal enclosure, built on a grand scale and according to a uniform plan, is rectangular and surrounded by a case mate wall with projecting towers at the corners. Its outer maximal measurements are about 3 3 2 X 184 m, and the area inside die enclosure is about 45 dunams ( n acres). One of the long sides follows the slope and faces the valley. T h e gate, of tlie six-chambered type, is located in the opposite long side. T h e casemate wall is supported by a massive earthen rampart. On three sides—but not on tlie long side facing the valley—a rock-cut moat forms the outer ring of the fortifications. T h e moat is about 8 - 1 2 m wide and, at one point at which its bottom was reached in excavation, it is about 6 m deep. It was estimated on the basis of presently available data that about 26,800 cu m of rock were quarried in the moat and that at least 23,300 cu m of material were dumped in the ramparts. T h e area of die enclosure is largely destroyed or covered with later remains, and relatively little is known about tlie buildings inside. Remains of a domestic character were found in the casemates and adjoining sttuctures. Iron Age domestic remains probably dating to the eighth century B C E were found superimposed on the enclosure's ruined walls, an indication that it had only been used for a brief period. T o tiiis later settlement should be assigned a handle of a royal Judean storage jar; it bears a stamp with a two-winged emblem and the city name m[mst], which dates to die time of Sennacherib's campaign in Judah in 701 B C E . T h e distribution of royal storage jars was limited to Judah, which makes this particular handle significant. [See Seals; Judah.] A number of suggestions have been raised regarding the role of Jezreel in the period of the Omride dynasty. Accord ing to one, Israel had two capitals then—Samaria and Jez reel, one Samaria may have served as a "summer" capital and Jezreel in the winter. [See Samaria.] It has also been suggested that the ldngdom had two religious centers—one Israelite and the other, Phoenician, tlie latter having been promoted by Jezebel, Ahab's wife. The present excavators have raised the possibility that Jezreel was built as a central military base for the royal Israelite army at the time of the Omride Idngs. This view is supported by the nature of the enclosure, the unusually massive fortifications, tlie poor
JILAT, WADI ELquality of construction, and the poor domestic remains within its perimeter. Following the destruction of the Iron Age enclosure, set tlement at Jezreel apparently continued uninterruptedly un til the twentieth century C E . Remains of the Persian, Helle nistic, and Roman periods have been found. During the Byzantine period, a densely populated settlement (Esdraela ofEusebius's Onomaslicori) existed here. Structural remains were found all over the site and its outskirts, as well as inside the disused Iron Age moat. During the period of the Crusades, a settlement belonging to the Templars, Le Petit Gerin, existed here. It is men tioned several times in association with battles of the period. Its center was apparently at the western side of the site, where an Ottoman tower is located, founded on Crusader walls—probably the remains of the crusader settlement's main building or fort. A church was built nearby. In later periods, the Arab village of Zer'in developed on this part of tlie site. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ussishkin, David, and John Woodhead. "Excavations at Tel Jezreel, 1 9 9 0 - 1 9 9 1 : Preliminary Report." Tel Aviv 19 (1992): 3-56. Ussishkin, David, and John Woodhead, "Excavations at Tel Jezreel, 1 9 9 2 - 1 9 9 3 : Second Preliminary Report." levant 26 (1994): 1-48. Williamson, H . G . M . "Jezreel in tile Biblical Texts." Tel Aviv 18 (1991): 72-92. DAVID USSISHKIN
JILAT, WADI EL-,
tributary of Wadi ed-Dabi (Wadi Dhobai), which drains tlie southwestern sector of tlie Azraq basin, an internal drainage basin in north-central Jordan ( 3 i ° 3 o ' N , 36°25' E). T h e wadi runs through low hills of Late Cretaceous and Early Tertiary limestones, marls, and cherts, at elevations of between 950 and 750 m. These are located in die present-day transition zone between steppe and desert, receiving about 100 mm of rainfall per year. The western drainage is covered by loessic soils held in place by perennial grasses and other vegetation; the eastern sector is actively deflating into a desert environment. A series of Pleistocene and Flolocene fluvial, colluvial, and eolian de posits has been identified on die valley floor (Garrard et al., 1988). A gorge cuts through these deposits, in which water may be found after winter rains. This attracts bedouin who graze camel, sheep, and goats in this region between late autumn and spring. In 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 3 8 , John d'A. Waechter et al. (1938) conducted an archaeological survey in tlie valley, recording a number of Epipaleolithic and Neolithic sites, as well as a well-con structed dam of historic date. Waechter excavated sound ings at two of the prehistoric sites (Dhobai B and K ) , which have recently been the subject of more intensive research. Between 1982 and 1989 six seasons of paleoenvironmental
247
and archaeological survey and excavations were conducted in the valley focusing on the Paleolithic and Neolithic oc cupation (Garrard et al., 1994). More than thirty Stone Age sites were found in a 5-kilometer (3 mi.) stretch of the valley floor; soundings were excavated at eight of them and broader area excavations were undertaken at another five. The most spectacular of the Epipaleolithic sites is Jilat 6 (Garrard and Byrd, 1 9 9 2 ) . T h e site forms a low mound and is covered by a dense canopy of flint artifacts for an area of 20,000 sq m (2 ha, or 5 acres). With the exception of Kharaneh 4, which is located 25 km ( 1 6 mi.) to the north, Jilat 6 is tlie largest site of its period known in the Near East. Although the scale may partly be the result of erosion, it is thought to represent a seasonal aggregation site used by hunter-gatherers in the period around 14,000 B C E . Animal and plant remains demonstrate that the groups subsisted on gazelle, wild ass, hare, and tlie seeds and tubers of the local steppic plants. A series of Neolithic sites was excavated dating to between 7500 and 5500 B C E (Garrard et al., 1994). These are much smaller than contemporary sites in tlie better-watered areas to the west and were probably occupied seasonally. Exca vations revealed semisubterranean circular or oval dwellings with external walls built from upright slabs of the local lime stone. Roofs were probably constructed from perishable or ganic materials. The site of Jilat 26 (c. 6700 B C E ) contained a semicircle of twenty such structures, with evidence of an outdoor activity area on tlie side sheltered from the wind. Plant remains from the Jilat Neolithic sites indicate that do mestic wheat and barley were in use from tlie earliest levels onward; it is unclear, however, whether these were culti vated locally or imported from areas to the west. [See Ce reals.] Presently the local climate is too arid for regular cul tivation. The animal remains indicate that hunting of gazelle and hare remained important down to 6000 B C E . Later Ne olithic sites contain substantial numbers of sheep and goat bones thought to derive from imported livestock. Their ap pearance provides a terminus ante quern for the process of caprine domestication in the southern Levant. [See Sheep and Goats.] With the exception of a minor excavation at tlie Early Bronze Age site of Jilat 27 (Garrard, unpublished), no work has been done on later prehistoric sites and burial cairns in die region. However, the dam, which has been described as one "of the most impressive hydraulic architectural struc tures in Jordan," is the subject of an article by Konstantinos D. Politis (1993, quotation from p. 4 3 ) . It was built across the main gorge and is 58 m long, 5 m wide, and 6 m in maximum height. Its downstream face is built from stepped ashlar masonry, supported by three buttresses. Politis found Nabatean sherds in the cement, but the presence of Byz antine and Umayyad sherds in the vicinity suggests that tlie present dam may have been built in this later period. The reservoir area has completely filled in with silt, which may
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have happened quite rapidly after its construction. It has been suggested that the dam may have been built as a show piece or as a gift to local tribes in exchange for support (King et al., 1983). BIBLIOGRAPHY Garrard, Andrew N „ et al, "Environment and Subsistence during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene in the Azraq basin." Paleorient 14.2 (1988): 40-49. Summary of environmental work in Wadi elJilat. Garrard, Andrew N . , and Brian F. Byrd. "New Dimensions to the Epipalaeolithic of the Wadi el-Jilat in Central Jordan." Paliorient 18.1 (1992): 47-62. Describes the main Epipaleolithic sites. Garrard, Andrew N . , et al. " T h e Chronological Basis and Significance of the Late Palaeolithic and Neolithic Sequence in the Azraq basin, Jordan." In Late Quaternary Chronology and Paleoclimates of the Eastem Mediterranean, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Renee S. K r a , pp. 1 7 7 - 1 9 9 . Radiocarbon, Tucson, 1994. Summary of recent prehis toric investigations. Garrard, Andrew N . , et al. "Prehistoric Environment and Settlement in the Azraq basin: A n Interim Report on die 1987 and 1988 Exca vation Seasons." Levant 26 (1994): 7 3 - 1 0 9 . Description of the N e olithic sites. King, Geoffrey R. D . , et al. "Survey of Byzantine and Islamic Sites in Jordan: Second Season Report, 1 9 8 1 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 27 (1983): 385-436. A brief discussion of the dam. Politis, Konstantinos D . " T h e Stepped D a m at Wadi el-Jilat." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 2 5 (1993): 43-49. Detailed discussion of the dam. Waechter, John d'A., et al. " T h e Excavations at Wadi Dhobai, 1 9 3 7 1938, and the Dhobaian Industry." Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 18 (1938): 1 7 2 - 1 8 6 , 292-298. Initial fieldwork in Wadi elJilat. ANDREW N . GARRARD
JORDAN. See Transjordan.
JORDAN VALLEY. The Jordan Rift Valley lies be tween the Sea of Galilee and die Dead Sea. It is situated below sea level and encompasses the lowest spot on earth. The Jordan Valley is part of a much larger rift extending from Iskanderun in North Syria into Africa, beyond the Red Sea. It is bordered by two ranges of mountains with steep slopes on its west and east sides that rise to about 5 0 0 - 1 2 0 0 m above sea level. Its eastern highland is interrupted by sev eral side wadis running east-west and emptying into the Jor dan River or the Dead Sea: Wadi el-Yarmuk, Wadi el-'Arab, Wadi Ziqlab, Wadi el-Jirm, Wadi el-Yabis, Wadi Kafranja, Wadi Rajib, Wadi ez-Zerqa, Wadi Shu'eib, Wadi el-Kafrain, Wadi er-Ramah, and Wadi Azeimah. [See Ziqlab, Wadi; Yabis, Wadi el-; Shu'eib, Wadi.] These wadis, to gether with other water sources, account for the valley's continuous occupation. T h e valley varies in width. It is about 2 km across near Tell es-Sa'idiyeh and the modem village of Kraymeh, but it becomes much wider (about 18
lcm, or 1 1 mi.) to the south, around die plains of Sweimeh and Jericho. [See Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-.] T h e west side of the valley is narrower than the east side and has a smaller num ber of side wadis with perennial streams. There are also fewer modern villages and archaeological sites than on the east. T h e main wadis on the west are Nahr el-Jalud, Wadi el-Malih, Wadi el-Far'ah, Wadi el-Auja, and Wadi el-Qelt. The Marj ibn Amir (Esdraelon Valley) cuts through the western highland to become the main connecting corridor between the Ghor and the Mediterranean Sea. T h e Ghor, the major part of the valley, is flat and has been cultivated throughout history. All the major wadis on both sides of the valley have carved courses for themselves through the floor of the Ghor, preparing suitable locations for many major and small settlements, including the northern Jordan Val ley's important archaeological sites of Beisan (Beth-Shean) and Tabaqat Fahl (Pella). [See Beth-Shean; Pella.] T h e area between Wadi Shu'eib and Wadi ez-Zerqa (a distance of about 1 5 km, or 9 mi.) was not irrigated until the Umayyad period, around Ghor Kibid, and then in connection with the modern extension of the East Ghor Canal. Irrigation meant bringing water from distant streams. [See Irrigation; Agri culture.] The Jordan Valley consists of three main geographic zones: ez-Zor is the small valley cut by the Jordan River until it empties into the Dead Sea. T h e Zor is up to a kilometer wide, but it lacks major settlements because of flooding and the changing bed of the Jordan River in this zone. T h e sec ond zone is called al-Katar, a region of barren, desiccated hills that separates the Ghor from the Zor. These hills date from the Pleistocene Age, and some were settled in the N e olithic Chalcolithic, Early Bronze, and Iron Ages. T h e major part of the valley is al-Ghor (see above). Archaeological and ethnoarchaeological studies have shown strong connections between the Jordan Valley and the highlands in all periods. T h e inhabitants of the Jordan Valley have had to locate their settlements carefully, taking into consideration the availability of water, security, and roads. They have also had to avoid areas subject to floods and earthquakes, or adapt themselves to tiieir occurrence. In most cases the Ghor's good soil was protected and set tlements were placed on barren land or in the foothills. Those settlements were constructed mainly of mud bricks and reeds, in contrast to stone, the main building material in the highlands. Agriculture has always been the main occupation of Ghor settlers, whose abundance was distributed beyond the boundaries of the Jordan Valley. Its tomatoes, cucumbers, and other products are still exported. During the Islamic period, it was the main source of cane sugar for the area of greater Syria (see below). Deforestation on the foothills and salinization are critical environmental problems in the valley. In certain areas, the soil was washed down from the highlands and the slopes to
JORDAN VALLEY form new soil layers. Evidence of highland tena rosa has been found as far away as the Katar hills along the Jordan River. Strong soil erosion and frost occasionally destroy the area's agricultural products. In addition to agriculture, the inhabitants of the valley have also produced pottery, metals, and textiles. Evidence of these industries has been found in excavations in the area. T h e valley is comfortably warm to intolerably hot and hu mid. It receives rain mainly between tire months of Novem ber and March, ranging between 38 and 41 cm (15-16 in.) annually. T h e valley's tropical character has been made green through water and irrigation systems, and malignant malaria and other epidemics were eradicated a few decades ago. Two main, parallel roads were used in antiquity, running north-south on both sides of the valley, connecting its major settlements. T h e roads are dated by numerous Roman mile stones, but they appear to have played a similar role as early as tire first and second millennia B C E . They were open to the north, but ended in the south at the Dead Sea and tire sur rounding steep cliffs, disconnected from die Wadi 'Arabah and the Red Sea. Both roads were interconnected with a number of subsidiary roads. Many archaeological surveys and excavations have been carried out in the valley, including those of William Foxwell Albright (1926) in the 1920s; Nelson Glueck (1951) in the 1 9 3 0 S - 1 9 4 0 S ; Henri de Contenson (1964) and James Mel laart in the early 1950s; and Moawiyah Ibrahim, James Sauer, and Khair Yassine in the 1970s (Ibrahim et a l , 1976). Until tire mid-1970s, large-scale excavations were restricted to a few sites: Teleilat el-Ghassul, Qumran, Tell es-Sultan (Jericho), Tulul Abu el- Alayiq, Khirbat al-Mafjar, Tell Iktanu, Tell Deir 'Alia, Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, Mallaha, Sha'ar ha-Golan (al-'Uqhuwanah), and Khirbet Kerak (BethYerah). [See Teleilat el-Ghassul; Qumran; Jericho; Mafjar, Kliirbat al-; Iktanu, Tell; Deir Alla, Tell; Sha'ar ha-Golan; Beth-Yerah.] In addition, small excavations were conducted at Shuna (North), Pella, Tell Abu Habil, Ghrubba, and Azeimah. [See Ghrubba.] Work has been resumed at old excavation sites in the east Jordan Valley, at Ghassul, Iktanu, Deir 'Alia, Sa'idiyeh, Pella, and Shunah (North), while new excavations have begun at Tell Nimrin, U m m Hammad esh-Sharqi (et-Twal), Kataret es-Samra, Abu Sarbut, Tell el-Mazar, Abu Hamid, Abu en-Ni'aj, Tell el-Hayyat, Abu el-Kharaz, el-Maqbarah, and Dhra' el-Khan. [See Nimrin, Tell; Mazar, Tell el-; Hayyat, Tell el-.] c
c
Paleolithic to Chalcolithic Periods. T h e earliest evi dence of habitation in tlie Jordan Valley was found at the Paleolithic sites of Tell Abu Habil, south of Wadi el-Yabis, and Wadi el-Hammeh, about 2 km (1 mi.) north of Tabaqat Fahl (Pella). In the lower Wadi el-Hammeh basin, a se quence of Pleistocene deposits dating from about 8 0 , 0 0 0 11,000 years BP have been attested. Among these deposits were Upper Paleolithic, Kebaran, and Natufian sites. T h e
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Natufian occupation includes two isolated large oval enclo sures and smaller structures (Edwards, 1989, pp. 409-412). Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) evidence has also been found at Abu 'Urabi, Mhitli, and Dhra' el-Khan, sites situated at the mouth of wadis close to foothills. The most impressive Natufian and P P N remains in the valley were excavated at Jericho and 'Ain Mallaha. T h e Natufian evidence at Mallaha included three levels with a large num ber of huts and plastered storage pits, in addition to pits with collective burials. At Jericho a clay platform with microliths and a bone harpoon-head were the main finds from the Na tufian I period. Jericho is a unique P P N settlement, with its successive layers and distinctive defensive structures, which include a wall enclosing an area of 4 ha (10 acres) and a massive stone tower (Kenyon, i960, 1965, 1981; Kenyon and Holland, 1982, 1983). Except for its defensive struc tures, Jericho's repertoire has close parallels at Wadi Himar, 'Ain Ghazal, and Wadi Shu'eib. [See Jericho; 'Ain Ghazal.] Jericho and Sha'ar ha-Golan, represent two groups in an early phase of the Pottery Neolithic (PN) in Palestine. Jer icho's pottery includes distinctive coarse ware and decorated red-burnished ware; Sha'ar ha-Golan and other sites display tlie painted and incised pottery with simple geometric de signs of tlie Yarmukian culture, in addition to distinctive examples of engraved and incised pebbles and human fig ures. Other sites include P N material: Ghassul, Ghruba, Ghannam, Dhra' el-Hesseini, Katar Zakari, Qa'dan, Pella, Baqurah, and Abu Hamid. Most show no distinction be tween P N and Chalcolithic material. Both periods seem to represent early village farming communities that were re lated to many other sites on the highland. The Chalcolithic period that followed has been attested at many large, open settlements in the valley with coarse and painted handmade pottery, chisel axes, and fan scrapers. Large-scale excavations, such as at Ghassul and Abu Hamid, exposed large rectangular houses and storage facil ities. B r o n z e Age. Early phases of the Early Bronze Age (be fore the beginning of the third millennium) appear at open settlements such as Rweihah, Umm Hammad esh-Sharqi, and Kataret es-Samra. Other EB II—III sites were located in the footiiills and have a defensive character. Khirbet Kerak (Beth-Yerah) and Jericho are the main fortified towns in the valley. More recent excavations at Iktanu, Sa'idiyeh, Abu elKharaz, Pella, and Shunah (North) show scanty evidence of EB fortifications. In the following transitional period (EB IV-Middle Bronze I), there are numerous low sites with new locations in the Katar hills, foothills, and side wadis. Most lack architectural remains; the primary evidence is from shaft tombs, such as at Wadi el-Hammeh, Umm Hammad (et-Twal), and Jericho. [See Shaft Tombs.] The MB period is well represented at many sites in tlie valley where excavation has revealed architectural com plexes: Pella, Tell el-Hayyat, and Deir 'Alia. Most striking
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are a series of four roughly square MB IIA-C temples at Tell el-Hayyat and defensive walls at Jericho, Deir 'Alia, and Pella. Significant MB material has come from tombs at Jer icho and Pella (Kenyon, i960, 1965). The prosperity of the Jordan Valley continued throughout the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 B C E ) and has been widely attested in settlements at Jericho, Deir 'Alia, Pella, Abu elKharaz, Sa'idiyeh, and Kataret es-Samra. At some of tiiese sites, LB tombs were also excavated. Egyptian, Cypriot, and Mycenaean materials demonstrate strong international con tacts with other Mediterranean regions. An LB sanctuary on a high platform was excavated at Deir 'Alia. Iron Age. There seems to have been a smooth transition from the Late Bronze into the Iron Age. Most major LB sites were reoccupied in the main periods of the Iron Age. This cultural continuity can be demonstrated at Jericho, Nimrin, Deir 'Alia, Mazar, Sa'idiyeh, Pella, and Abu elKharaz, although some recession in international contacts can be observed during Iron I. Significant material from Iron II comes from excavations at Deir 'Alia, phase IX (Franken, 1969, phase M ) . This phase includes a large architectural complex that may have served as a religious center and related workshops. A lengthy Ammonite/Aramaic plaster text attributed to Balaam Bar Beor, the Balaam mentioned in the Hebrew Bible appears to represent a tradition of religious practice in the Jordan Valley that may extend beyond the immediate region. [See Deir 'Alia Inscriptions, Aramaic Language and Literature.] A strong earthquake toward the end of the ninth century B C E destroyed this settiement and perhaps others in the area. Persian through Islamic Periods. At the end of the Iron Age, in about the mid-sixth century B C E , there is a decline in the material culture of the Jordan Valley, even though some sites reflect continuous occupation between the sixth and first centuries B C E . The best-known sites during this pe riod are Nimrin, Deir 'Alia, Mazar, Sa'idiyeh, and Pella; however, there is relatively little architectural evidence from them for the Persian and Early Hellenistic periods. Toward the end of the Flellenistic period (second and first centuries B C E ) , prosperity is demonstrated through building activities and the quantity of imported amphora handles witii inscrip tions. The Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran, at the north west corner of the Dead Sea, and in the surrounding caves are the most dramatic discovery in the Jordan Valley. [See Dead Sea Scrolls.] The Roman period is well represented throughout the Jor dan Valley. More than fifty Roman sites are distributed in and near foothills, on the Ghor, and near the Katar hills. Many were situated along the Roman road, which is indi cated by a number of milestones, some bearing Latin in scriptions. Sites located on the peaks of hills served defen sive and military purposes, while other, open sites were supported by agriculture. Most of the Roman sites have been identified in surveys. A few were excavated: Tulul Abu
el-'Alayiq, Abu el-Kharaz, and Pella. These investigations showed that the Roman occupation in the valley was strongly connected to urban sites in the highlands. Cultural, religious, and commercial activities are best represented at Pella, which Josephus Flavius (first century CE) referred to as a city of importance. Excavations at the site revealed a large civic complex and some tombs from the Roman pe riod. During the Byzantine era, population density was high, reflecting, to a large extent the preceding Roman period. Byzantine sites are found everywhere in the valley and in dicate that agriculture was practiced on a large scale. Byz antine remains have been excavated mainly at Pella, the larg est city in die area then. Excavation has uncovered three churches and large residential quarters. [See Churches.] T h e Byzantine city must have served as an administrative center for at least the northern Jordan Valley and parts of the east ern highland. Islamic sites are represented in all parts of the valley, es pecially (but not exclusively) from the eleventh to the fif teenth centuries. Archaeological surveys have shown Otto man sites to be underrepresented, although historical sources mention a significant number of settlements during the period. Interest in Islamic sites is increasing, and a num ber of them have been excavated. Hisham's palace at Kliirbat al-Mafjar near Jericho for example, was built in the first years of the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn 'Abd al-Malik (724-743). It comprises a large central courtyard and a bath complex with painted mosaic floors, in addition to a mosque and a gatehouse (Hamilton, 1959). The most impressive ar chaeological evidence of a large Islamic settlement comes from Pella, however, where, as with many other sites in the area, the inhabitants' Christian and civic rights seem to have been maintained as a result of a peace covenant witii the Muslim army led by Abu 'Ubaidah 'Amir bin el-Jarrah. In Arab sources, Fahl (Pella) is mentioned as a center for the district of Transjordan (Jund el-'Urdun). The archaeologi cal and the historical evidence reveals continuity from the Byzantine into the Umayyad and 'Abbasid periods. T h e area experienced a severe earthquake in 747, whose effects could be traced in a number of locations at Pella. A sizable 'Abbasid settlement, north of the mound, was established in the ninth and continued into the tenth century (Walmsley, 1989, pp. 436-438). [SeeUmayyad Caliphate; 'Abbasid Ca liphate.] Most of the Islamic sites in the Jordan valley are agricul tural and were sometimes connected to aqueducts and otiier elements in irrigation systems. There is clear evidence that sugar was produced on a large scale in the valley, based on the number of sugar mills associated with quantities of "sugar pots." Mosques, mausolea, and cemeteries are found all over the valley. [See Mosque; Mausoleum.] Monuments carry the names Nebi Musa, Abu 'Ubayad, Dirar, Sharhabil, Ma'adh, and Waqqas. They are difficult to date but were
JOTAPATA dedicated to prophets and to leaders of early Islam. Most are located at Early Islamic sites or in their immediate vicin ity. [See also Palestine; and Transjordan. For further discussion of the western side of the valley., see Judah and Judean Desert Caves.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Jordan Valley in the Bronze A g e . " Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 6 (1926): 13—74. Contenson, Henri de. " T h e 1953 Survey in the Yarmouk and Jordan Valleys." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities of Jordan 8-9 (1964): 30-46. Dollfus, Genevieve, and Zeidan A . Kafafi. "Preliminary Results of the First Season of the Joint Jordano-French Project at Abu Hamid." Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 30 (1986): 3 5 3 - 3 7 9 . Edwards, Philip C . "History of Pella." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denyse Homes-Fredericq and J . Basil Hennessy, pp. 4 0 9 - 4 1 2 . Louvain, 1989. Franken, H. J . , with contributions by J . Kalsbeek, Excavations at Tell Deir Alia, vol. 1, A Stratigraphical and Analytical Study of the Early Iron Age Pottery. Leiden, 1969. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. New Haven, 1 9 5 1 . Hamilton, Robert William. Khirbat al-Mafjar: An Arabian Mansion in the Jordan Valley. Oxford, 1959. Helms, S. W. "Jawa, Tell U m m Hammad, and the E B I/Late Chalco lithic Landscape." Levant 1 9 (1987): 4 9 - 8 1 . Hennessy, J . Basil. "Teleilat Ghassul: Its Place in the Archaeology of Jordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. I, edited by Adnan I-Iadidi, pp. 5 5 - 5 8 . Amman, 1982. Ibrahim, Moawiyah, James A . Sauer, and Khair Yassine. " T h e East Jordan Valley Survey, 1 9 7 5 . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 222 (1976): 4 1 - 6 6 . Kafafi, Zeidan A. " T h e Neolithic of Jordan (East B a n k ) . " P h . D . diss., Freie Universitat, 1982. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations at Jericho, vol. 1 , The Tombs Exca vated in 1952-54, London, i960. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations al Jericho, vol. 2, The Tombs Exca vated in 1955-58. London, 1 9 6 5 . Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations at Jericho, vol. 3, The Architecture and Stratigraphy of the Tell. 2 vols. Edited by Thomas A, Holland. London, 1 9 8 1 . Kenyon, Kathleen M . , and Thomas A . Holland. Excavations at Jericho, vol. 4, The Pottery Type Series and Other Finds. London, 1982. Kenyon, Kathleen M . , and Thomas A . Holland. Excavations at. Jericho, vol. 5, The Pottery Phases of the Tell and Other Finds. London, 1983. Leonard, Albert, Jr., ed. The Jordan Valley Smvey: Some Unpublished Soundings Conducted by James Mellaart. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 50. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Mittmann, Siegfried. Beitrage zur Siedlungs- und Territorialgeschichte des nordlichen Ostjordanlandes. Wiesbaden, 1970. Pritchard, James B . The Excavation at. Herodian Jericho, 1951. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 32/33. New Haven, 1958. Sauer, James A . "Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages: A Critique of Glueck's Synthesis." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 263 (1986): 1 - 2 6 . Smith, Robert Houston. The 1967 Season of the College of Wooster Ex pedition to Pella. Pella of the Decapolis, vol. r. Wooster, Ohio, 1 9 7 3 . T u b b , Jonathan N . Excavations at the Early Bronze Age Cemetery of Tiwal esh-Sharqi. London, 1990. Walmsley, Alan. " T h e Early Islamic and 'Abbasid Pella/Fahl, 635-c.
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900." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denyse Homes-Fredericq and J . Basil Hennessy, pp. 436-440. Louvain, 1989. Yassine, Khair, ed. Archaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports. Amman, 1988. MOAWIYAH IBRAHIM
JOTAPATA (Gk., Iotapata; Heb., Yodefat; Ar., Khirbet Shifat), site located in the Galilee, directiy south of modern Moshav Yodefat and described by Josephus (War 3.158160) as surrounded on tiiree sides by steep ravines and ac cessible from the north, hidden by surrounding mountains, and having no natural water source (map reference 176 X 248). Jotapata was the site of the first major battle between Roman Jewish forces in the Jewish War that began in 66 CE. Josephus, the commander of the Jewish forces, describes in great detail the battle and his subsequent capture by Ves pasian (War 3.145-288, 316-408). Archaeological remains provide a glimpse of the battle as well as a rare look at a first-century CE Galilean site undisturbed by building activ ities from later periods. In 1847, E. G. Schultz (1849) first properly identified Jo tapata; Edward Robinson associated the site with Jiphthahel (Jos. 19:14,27), but the apparent absence of Late Bronze or Iron I pottery makes his identification unlikely. Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener (1881) suggested that the site might also be the Gopatata of the Talmud (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 108a), Yodpat in the Mishnah ('Arakh. 9.6), and Jotabe, an episcopal town in 536 CE. William Foxwell Albright as sociated it with biblical Yotva. A place called Yodefat existed in the time of Joshua, according to the Mishnah ('Arakh. 9.6), but excavations in 1992 directed by Douglas Edwards, Mordechai Aviam, and David Adan-Bayewitz indicate that the first major occupation of the site occurred in the Helle nistic period. T h e site consists of upper Yodefat, or Jotapata, and is approximately 480 acres in area when combined with lower Khirbet Shifat immediately to the north. Jotapata had a large outer fortification wall that experienced at least three build ing phases: in its earliest phase (probably belonging to the Seleucid period), an outer wall (2.5-3.5 m thick) extended around the north, east, and west sides. [See Seleucids.] T h e inner part of the fortification wall was built over an earlier building that produced large storage jars and a Ptolemaic coin on its floor, suggesting a founding date for the town in die Ptolemaic period. An inner wall at the northern part of the site increased die wall's thickness to more titan 5 m. Its construction style resembles that of the Hellenistic city wall found at the coastal city of Dor. [See Dor.] On die north, the city wall consists of large ashlars founded on bedrock; the ashlars were covered on their north face by chipped pieces of limestone, in some spots to a depth of almost 4 m. A series of narrow walls held the limestone
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chips in place, creating an artificial hill to the northwest that increased protection where the town was most vulnerable. A portion of a ramp composed of mortar and crushed pottery, probably built by the Romans during their attack on Jotapata in 67 CE, was also found on the northwest. [See First Jewish Revolt.] Ballista, iron bow and catapult arrow heads, possible sandal nails, and Early Roman pottery em bedded in or under the mortar that stabilized the ground in front of the wall are clear evidence of the first-century battle between the Roman army and the town's Jewish defenders. Another rubble wall 5 m inside the ashlar wall on the north east created a casemate wall 5-6 thick. The casemate struc ture was built on top of the quarried limestone chips asso ciated with the earlier wall (see above). This construction appears to date to the Early Roman period and may be as sociated with preparations for war against the Romans. Sim ilar rubble walls extend south: one follows the contour of the hill and die other follows the upper hill. T h e upper wall appears to have been built during the Hellenistic period; the lower wall enclosed tire lower plateau in the Roman period. The language of at least some of the first-century CE in habitants was Aramaic or Hebrew, as shown by an ostracon found in a first-century context. An unfinished olive press and an olive-press complex in a cave on the site's steep east side suggest die industry's importance in the town. Several stepped pools, possibly miqvaot, or ritual baths, have been located near the oil-press operations. However, the pools may have simply served as settling pools. An Early Roman pottery kiln at the southern edge of the town indicates that Jotapata had a degree of self-sufficiency in ceramic manu facturing, although pottery from kilns at Kefar Hananyah show that Jotapata was part of a regional economic network that linked pagan cities (such as the coastal city of Akko) with Galilean cities, towns, and villages. [See Kefar Hananyah.] Upper Yodefat, or Jotapata, was apparently not occupied after the Romans destroyed it in die first century. T h e lower part of the town, Khirbet Shifat, was apparently reestab lished to tire north in the late first or early second century CE. Pottery found down to floor surfaces indicates that this lower town continued at least into the medieval period. [See also Galilee; and the biographies of Albright, Conder, Kitchener, and Robinson.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adan-Bayewitz, David. Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade. Ramat Gan, 1993. Aviam, Mordechai. Article in Hebrew in Cathedra 28 (1983): 33-46. Conder, Claude R., and H. H. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. 1, Galilee. London, 1881. See pages 289, 3 1 1 - 3 1 3 . Edwards, Douglas R . , Mordechai Aviam, and David Adan-Bayewitz. "Yodefat, 1992." Israel Exploration Journal 45.2-3 (1995): 1 9 1 - 1 9 7 . Josephus. The Life. Translated by Henry St. John Thackeray. Loeb
Classical Library, Josephus, vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass., 1966. See 188, 234. 322, 350, 353, 357, 4 1 2 , and 4 1 4 . Josephus. The Jewish War. Loeb Classical Library, Josephus, vols. 2 - 3 . Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 6 8 . See 2.573, 3 . 1 1 1 - 1 1 4 , 3 . 1 4 1 - 3 3 9 , 3.405-406, 3.432, 3.438, 4 . 1 , 4.4, 4.624, and 5.544. Meyers, Eric M . , et al. " T h e Meiron Excavation Project: Archaeolog ical Survey in Galilee and Golan, 1976." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 230 (1978): 1 - 2 4 . Schultz, E . G . "Mitteilungen iiber eine Reise durch Samarien und Galilaea." Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morganlandischen Gesellschafl 3 (1849): 46-62. Tsafrir, Yoram, et al. Tabula imperii romani: Iudaea-Palaestina. Jeru salem, 1994. Wolff, Samuel R., et al. "Archaeology in Israel." American Journal of Archaeology 98 (1994): 4 8 1 - 5 1 9 . See pages 5 0 9 - 5 1 0 . DOUGLAS R . EDWARDS
JUBAH, WADI AL-, isolated, yet protected, valley lo cated at a mountain/sand desert interface in the modern Re public of Yemen, with tire central highlands to the west and the Ramlat as-Sab'atayn to the east. T h e upstream south western tail of the crescent-shaped wadi is at i4°57' N , 45 15' E; the eastern edge of the wadi is at i5°oi' N , 45°2i' E; and the northwestern reach, where the wadi vanishes into the sands of the desert, is at I 5 ° i 2 ' N , 45°i7' E, 25 km (15 mi.) south of Marib. Precambrian metamorphic rocks intruded by plutons of Late Proterozoic diorite and granite underlie tire area. Near the center of the structurally controlled erosional course of Wadi al-Jubah through these rocks, die roof of the diorite pluton was breached, forming a basin rimmed on all sides by mountainous barriers. Pleistocene and Holocene alluvial deposits within the basin created a fertile plain that became a rich savannah during more moist periods. With the advent in about 5000 B C E of the current more arid cycle, a grassy, arid savannah developed tiiat persisted until early agricul turalists overgrazed and irrigated the region. Except for squeezes taken from Sabaean and Qatabanian inscriptions by local inhabitants employed by Eduard Glaser during the late nineteenth century and a short epigraphic survey conducted by Albert Jamme of the Catholic Univer sity, Washington, D.C., in the area in 1975-1976, this wadi was unknown to archaeologists until 1982. In that year, the American Foundation for the Study of M a n (AFSM) initi ated an archaeological project in Wadi al-Jubah to continue the pioneering work done between 1950 and 1952 in nearby Wadi Beihan and at Marib, under the direction of Wendell Phillips and William Foxwell Albright. Between 1982 and 1987 the new AFSM team conducted six campaigns in Wadi al-Jubah, consisting of archaeological, geological, pedological, botanical, and epigraphic surveys, with test excavations at six sites. T h e project's initial goal was reconnaissance: to identify the types, extent, and dates of archaeological re mains preserved in this region. T h e project was coordinated 0
JUDAH by James A. Sauer (chief archaeologist), Jamme (epigrapher), and Jeffrey A. Blakely (field director since 1983). It is not known when hominids first reached the southern part of die Arabian Peninsula, but the presence of core and flake tools with Acheulean characteristics, found in second ary alluvial contexts within Wadi al-Jubah, indicates that hominids were in the wadi, at least periodically, by the Lower Paleolithic period. A few Upper Paleolithic and pos sibly Neolithic tools were also discerned only in secondary alluvial contexts. Plearths, cairns, and small structures at tributed to die fifth, fourth, and early diird millennia are present. Because the project was largely survey, tiiese re mains were not investigated in any detail. T h e AFSM lo cated a large South Arabian Bronze Age site (late third-midsecond millennium) just to the north of Wadi al-Jubah but did not investigate it in detail. The vast majority of the visible archaeological remains within Wadi al-Jubah date to the Sabaean and Qatabanian periods (approximately the fifteenth century BCE-first cen tury C E ) . For much of this period Wadi al-Jubah was dom inated by its one major site, Hajar ar-Rayhani, more com monly called al-Hajar (i5°05' N , 45°i8' E); the remainder of the wadi appears to have supported small farming com munities set across an intensively irrigated landscape. Start ing in the mid-second millennium, a series of dams and ca nals fed water to a growing field system. Sediment in the irrigation water replenished soil nutrients but also raised the level of the fields and canals several meters until, apparently, the fields grew too high to receive adequate water and the system failed, in about the mid-first millennium B C E . Hajar ar-Rayhani appears to have been the central place within the wadi and to have served as a stop on the ancient South Arabian trade route, situated near where it crossed the border separating Qataban from Saba' (Sheba). Its ruins are located on top of a Bronze Age site and may represent continuous occupation from that period. It received a mas sive fortification wall in about the eighth century B C E and experienced a major destruction a few hundred years later. The site supported local ceramic, metallurgical, and lapidary industries, possibly until its abandonment early in the first or second century C E . Following this site's abandonment, Wadi al-Jubah was not occupied by a sedentary population living in permanent strucmres until the nineteenth century, when the wadi was repopulated and a new irrigation system was established on top of the older, eroded system. [See also Marib.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary and Technical Reports Blakely, Jeffrey A . , et al. The Wadi al-Jubah Archaeological Project, vol. 2, Site Reconnaissance in North Yemen, 1983. Washington, D . C . , 1985. Glanzman, William D . , and Abdu O. Ghaleb. The Wadi al-Jubah Ar chaeological Project, vol. 3 , Site Reconnaissance in the Yemen Arab Re
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public, 1984: The Stratigraphic Probe at Hajar ar-Rayhani. Washing ton, D . C . , 1987. Overstreet, William C , et al. The Wadi al-Jubah Archaeological Project, vol. 4, Geological and Archaeological Reconnaissance in the Yemen Arab Republic, 198;. Washington, D . C . , 1988. Toplyn, Michael R . The Wadi al-Jubah Archaeological Project, vol. 1, Site Reconnaissance in North Yemen, 1982. Washington, D . C . , 1984. Secondary and Popular Reports Blakely, Jeffrey. A., and James A . Sauer. " T h e Road to Wadi al-Jubah: Archaeology on the Ancient Spice Route in Yemen." Expedition 27.1 (1985): 2-9. Initial popular statement describing work in Wadi alJubah, only partially superseded by Sauer and Blakely (1988). Gwinnett, A. John, and Leonard Gorelick. "Bead Manufacture at Hajar ar-Rayhani, Y e m e n . " Biblical Archaeologist 54 (1991): 1 8 6 - 1 9 6 . Nar rowly focused but engaging account of beads and the technology of ancient bead manufacture based on stone and mineral beads found in Wadi al-Jubah, Sauer, James A . , and Jeffrey A . Blakely. "Archaeology along die Spice Route of Yemen." In Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archaeology, edited by Daniel T . Potts, pp. 9 0 - 1 1 5 . Copenhagen, 1988. T h e most up-to-date, popular statement describing work in Wadi al-Jubah; does not include die results of the 1987 season. JEFFREY A . BLAKELY
JUDAH. Covering the southern third of Israel, Judah (Lat., Judea) designates, in certain late periods, an entire country. Both poor and remote, this small region was the cradle of the Hebrew Bible. Geography. Judah extends over some 4,400 sq 1cm (2,728 sq. mi.): 2,150 sq km (1,333 <3- i 0 & essentially desert; 1,500 sq 1cm (930 sq. mi.) are partiy cultivatable highlands; and 750 sq km (465 sq. mi.) tend to have good soil. The adjacent regions are, from the north, counterclockwise, the highland of Ephraim; Philistia (the coastal plain and die western Negev desert); the Negev highlands; and the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. T h e core of the region is the Jerusalem area (about 150 sq km or 93 sq. mi.) and the highlands of Judah (about 1,000 sq 1cm or 625 sq. mi., including the Arqub in the northwest, and the central and southern parts, also known as the high lands of Hebron). T h e Land of Benjamin (the Benjamin highlands, about 350 sq 1cm, or 217 sq. mi.), is north of these. All of tiiese areas (the Judean highlands) comprise the south ern part of modern Israel's central highlands. T h e altitude ranges from 600 m above sea level in the south to 1,020 m near Hebron. Mean annual rainfall ranges from 300 to 400 m m in the south, to about 700 m m (including snow) in die highest parts of the region, but it may fall to below 300-200 m m in the frequent drought years. Mean temperature is about io-7°C January) to 22-26°C (August). The Judean highlands, especially south of Jerusalem, are the highest, steepest, and poorest part of the central highlands. S
m
re
c
East of the highlands, the Judean Desert slopes down to the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea shore (about 400 m below sea level). T h e desert is large (about 1,150 sq 1cm, or
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713 sq. mi., not including Jericho) but very marginal: it has a mean annual rainfall of only 50-100 mm (200-400 mm on the higher desert plateau) and, in August, a mean temper ature of only 26-34°C. T o the soutir lies the Beersheba-Arad valley: the biblical Negev of Judah (only part of the modern Negev). This also is a fringe area, but it is not so marginal. An important natural route to the south and east, it extends for more than about 1,000 sq km (620 sq. mi.). Its mean annual rainfall is about 300-150 mm and its mean temper ature is about 28-26°C (August) to i4-io°C (January). Below, to the west, lies the Shephelah of Judah (about 750 sq Ion, or 465 sq. mi., excluding the western parts, which are connected to Philistia), the richest part of Judah, com posed of moderately undulating hills. Its altitude is about 150-300 m in the lower (western) Shephelah and 300-600 m in tire upper (eastern) Shephelah. This is the real biblical hill country of Judah, although some translations give that name to the highlands. Its mean annual rainfall is about 350550 mm; its mean temperature is the same as the Negev's. History and Methods of Research. Judah's ancient re mains were first recorded by such nineteenth-century ex plorers as Edward Robinson, Victor Guerin, and above all Claude R. Conder and Horatio Herbert Kitchener, but they were unable to date most of the ruins. [See the biographies of Robinson, Guerin, Conder, and Kitchener,} Modern excava tions have been conducted at several sites since the 1920s. The main stratigraphic excavations (mostly of more than one period) are in the Judean highlands: Jerusalem, Khirbet et-Tell (Ai), Tell el-Jib, Tell en-Nasbeh, Tell el-Ful, Ramat Rahel, Giloh, Herodium, Beth-Zur, Hebron, Susiya, and Khirbet Rabud (Debir); in the Shephelah: Beth-Shemesh, Tel Yarmut, 'Azekah, Mareshah (Marisa)/Beth-Guvrin, Lachish, Tell Beit Mirsim, and Tel Halif; in the Negev of Judah: Tel Beersheba, Tel Esdar, Tel Masos, Tel 'Ira, Arad, 'Aro'er, Tel Malhata, and Horvat 'Uza; and in the Judean Desert: Masada, Ein-Gedi, Qumran, several caves and monasteries, and sites in the Buqei'a valley and along the Dead Sea shore. Major stratigraphic-ceramic sequences for the early periods have been published for Tell Beit Mirsim and Lachish. c
The first modern archaeological survey, systematic but very selective, was conducted in the Judean Desert and high lands in 1967-1968 (Kochavi, 1972). More detailed surveys have been conducted since the early 1980s in the highlands and the Shephelah. The available data (Finkelstein and M a gen, 1993) from the various subregions still differ signifi cantly. T h e highlands of Judah have been surveyed by Avi Ofer since 1982 (800 sq km, or 496 sq. mi., not including the 'Arqub). A sample of about a third of the area has been completed, enabling an estimation of the possible lacunae in the selective survey (completed for the entire region, in cluding all ruins marked on maps). T o fill in the gaps, 15 percent must be added to the settled area in the surveyed
region, based on results from the wide sample areas. An additional 35 percent must be added for tire 'Arqub. T h e size of each site in different periods is estimated following a standard technique: sherd scatters and maximum size of site. Diagnostic pottery rims from each period are counted, while tire rims that can be dated to more than one period are assigned to them according to percentages. This count ing is weighted according to the length of each period, which is indispensable for valid analysis. The weighted relative per centage of each period, compared with the maximum per centage, yields the relation of its size to tlie maximum size, or a calculated size estimate. For early periods, this estimate may be too low, as sherds could be covered by later debris. T o minimize error, an average is made between the maxi mum and the calculated size, using a factor proportional to the extent of later debris. This averaged estimate may re duce possible errors and is the basis for further evaluations. In special cases, tlie estimate is changed according to other relevant data (e.g., sherd distribution over tlie site, which, however, generally is not useful). Several averages were cal culated for each period and subregion, such as relative height above sea level as a security factor, distance from water sources and roads, and land use. T h e averages were calculated not only per site, but also per settled area, which is more significant. A rank-size analysis of all periods indi cates possible changes in social integration. T h e intensity of pottery at every site and in every period was also analyzed, representing the intensity of human activity—population size relative to carrying capacity (an estimate based on settied area is, however, problematic because the coefficients of inhabitants per acre vary too much). By all these means, a purely archaeological history of the region was obtained, which will be compared to its documented history. Many surveyors have explored the small Land of Benja min (Finkelstein and Magen, 1993). In most cases die in dispensable data are published (although unweighted), but most periods lack subdivisions, such as Iron I I — I I I , and the data, evaluated separately for each arbitrary survey unit, have not been synthesized. Most of tlie Jerusalem area has been surveyed but not yet published. Yehudah Dagan (1992) has surveyed the Shephelah, covering about 75 per cent of the area and almost all of its principal sites. Most of his data has not yet been evaluated or published, but the Iron Age sites are reasonably well known. In the desert there has not been much progress since Pessah Bar-Adon's work (1967 onward). Many scholars have explored the Negev of Judah, especially Yohanan Aharoni and his successors, but their work was not part of a systematic research program or publication, and most of their surveys were incomplete. History of S e t t l e m e n t . A detailed archaeological analy sis is so far available only for the highlands of Judah. Prehistory. There have been almost no surveys of pre historic Judah. However, Rene Neuville's work in the desert yielded some caves and rock shelters, important type-sites
JUDAH for the prehistoric cultures in Israel: Umm Qatafa (Early Paleolithic), 'Erq el-Ahmar (Middle to Epipaleolithic), and el-Khiam (Middle Paleolithic to Neolithic). Other Neolithic sites are Nahal Hemar, Abu Ghosh, and (nearby) Khirbet Rabud. Protohistory (c. 4000-2000 BCE). During the Chalco lithic period, die Beersheba-Ghassul culture in the Shephelah and Negev flourished, including the type-sites in the Beersheba basin. The highest level of solid organization seems to have been small chiefdoms. T h e extensive human activity in the desert in the period includes a regional temple found above the oasis of 'Ein-Gedi; a magnificent hoard of bronzes was found in the nearby Cave of the Treasure. Signs of human activity are scant in the Judean highlands, however—perhaps the result of the environment. [See EinGedi.] c
The Early Bronze Age witnessed the first urban civiliza tion. In the first stage (EB I) many sites were inhabited in all of the nondesert parts of Judah, significantly penetrating the highlands. Twenty-eight sites are known in the highlands of Judah, with a total size of about 42/17 acres (42 averaged, 17 calculated). T o the north, ten more sites are recorded (about 37 acres in total) that are dominated by the site of Ai. T h e area south of Jerusalem may have been dominated by the great city at Tel 'Erani, on the southwestern edge of the Shephelah. During EB II, a large city existed at Arad, connected with copper mining and trade in the southern deserts (Sinai and the Arabah). In the southern highlands, between Arad and Ai, there seems to have been a decline in sites; the situation in the Shephelah is not yet clear. T h e transition to EB III witnessed a grave crisis in the south, perhaps connected to the strengthening of Egypt under the third dynasty and competition over copper sources. Arad and other centers were weakened or abandoned. In contrast, settlements in the highlands flourished. Ai (27 acres) was still the center of a unit extending north of the region. In the highlands of Judah, twenty-two sites (32/20 acres), most of them fortified, were headed by a large city (15 acres) at Ras Tawra, on tire highest mountain in the region (1,010 m high). EB III culture comes to an end in the last third of the diird millennium B C E . During the succeeding EB IV, pas toral society is found everywhere in the central highlands (it was not entirely nomadic, as was thought), represented by a few poor sites, with many cemeteries of typical shaft tombs, frequently unconnected to any particular site. [See Arad; Ai.] e
Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1500 BCE). In the Middle Bronze Age a new urban culture flourishes. For the first time, documents are available, evidence of a dimorphic Amorite-Canaanite (West Semitic) society—that is, it combines urban and pastoral elements. T h e main city-states are found at Lachish in the Shephelah and Jerusalem in the Judean highlands. In the latter, twenty-three sites (a total of 34 acres) are centered in the fortified site of Hebron ( 6 acres).
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A cuneiform tablet from Hebron, unique in Judah, reveals the existence of an Amorite-Canaanite society, with a Hur rian element. It seems that Hebron was a third city-state, smaller than the other two and maneuvering between them. In the Negev, only two fortified sites were found (Tel Masos and Tel Malhata), which may belong to a unit centered west of the region. [See Lachish; Hebron.] Late Bronze Age (c. 1550-1150 BCE). Under the domi nation of the Egyptian Empire, the Late Bronze Age is a period of great decline, especially in the highlands and fron tier zones. The main centers are still Lachish and Jerusalem, bordered on the west by Gezer and Gath (Tel es-Safi). T h e Amarna letters testify to this reality and to the existence of smaller centers (e.g., Qe ilah in the Shephelah) maneuvering between the greater city-states. In the highlands of Judah there is only one significant site, Khirbet Rabud (Debir), which is small. An element of refugees (the hapiru) appears, mainly in the highlands. [See Gezer; Rabud, Khirbet.] Iron Age IA-B (c. 1200-1050 BCE). Although the Iron I is generally defined as the twelftii-eleventii centuries, it seems that the late eleventh century belongs to the next phase. In Iron I, a mass of new settlements is evident all over the highlands: it appears to be a new society, just beginning to crystalize, without dominant centers. In the highlands of Judah some eighteen settlements appear (45/27 acres) in which the main site is Hebron. These sites are not very small, but tiieir economic preferences tend toward horticul ture. Northward, die same appears to be true for western Benjamin; it is uncertain, however, whether the eastern sites here antedate the tenth century B C E . In Iron I/IIA, the name Judah first appears, designating only the highlands of Judah. Looldng westward, die settlers saw the hill country, which they referred to as "the lowland" (Heb., shephelah). That region was then completely abandoned, and the Philistine culture was emerging to the west. A few large villages ap peared in the Negev: Tel Masos, Nahal Yattir, and probably Beersheba, whose material culture was connected to the coast. [See Masos, Tel; Beersheba.] c
T h e population in the central highlands seems to have been composed of northern groups emigrating from the crumbling Hittite Empire; local elements, such as the hapriu; and other settling pastoralists, called Proto-Israelites. Local centers were reestablished in Jerusalem by the Jebusites, in Hebron, and perhaps at other sites, such as Gibeon. [See Gibeon.] Iron Age IC-IIA (c. 1050-800 BCE). T h e process of set tlement accelerated in new directions in the Iron IC-IIA. The desert fringe became densely inhabited for the first time. Probably most of the tribal-pastoral elements that were to become the core of the Judahites only now began to settle. The Judean highlands were settled through a continuous process, changing once and for all from a fringe area to an integral part of the inhabited land. In the highlands of Judah, there are tiiirty-three known Iron IIA sites (85/50 acres al-
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together) and eighty-six Iron IIB sites (137/95 acres). The estimated total inhabited area toward 800 BCE was 237 acres; in Benjamin and die area surrounding Jerusalem, 187 acres; Jerusalem, 75 acres; the Shephelah, about 237 acres; and the Negev, 12 acres. The continuous settlement increased integration among the settled groups, and foreign occupation by the Philistines accelerated the process. An Israelite national kingdom was established in all of the central highlands under King Saul, whose expansion may have stimulated the rise of other eth nic entities in the region. The most important event in the history of Judah, however, was the rise of King David, first in Hebron and then in Jerusalem, where he established tlie capital of his dynasty. David and his son Solomon built Je rusalem as their kingdom's impressive center. Judah first ap peared as a unified entity extending over all of Judah in the schism following Solomon's death. The entity was then in transition from a city-state to a national kingdom, a process completed two centuries later. Iron Age IIB (c. 800-701 BCE). The climax of Judah's settlement, in Iron IIB, is matched only in die later Byzan tine period. In the highlands of Judah, 122 sites were sur veyed (232/215 acres); in Benjamin, about 100 sites (225 acres); in the Shephelah about 340 sites (about 500 acres). The estimated total inhabited area in die highlands of Judah is 388 acres; in Benjamin, 300 acres; in the Shephelah, 625 acres; in the Negev, 20 acres; in tlie desert, 10 acres; and in Jerusalem about 150 acres. The total is about 1,500 acres, or 120,000-150,000 inhabitants (using traditional estimates). The Ceramic Intensity Index is much higher than for other periods (40 percent higher than in the Byzantine period), so figures should perhaps be higher. It seems that Judah be came a fully integrated nation only toward this stage, which ended in catastrophe. In 701 BCE, tlie Assyrians, under Sen nacherib, marched on Judah to suppress the revolt of King Hezeldah. They desttoyed die country and killed or exiled most of the inhabitants of the Shephelah and about 50-70 percent of those inland. Only Jerusalem resisted. Iron Age HC-Iron III (c. 701-538 BCE). Following the Assyrian desttuction Judah's recovery began in the high lands and then spread partially to the Shephelah. T h e Negev and the desert flourished. Toward the end of the seventh century BCE, tlie inhabited area is estimated as follows: the highlands of Judah, 300 acres (mostly in the north); Benja min, 225 acres; the Shephelah, 225 acres (±75); the Negev, 37 acres; and the desert, 25 acres. Jerusalem (still 150 acres) was more central, materially and spiritually. The Deuteronomic ideology flourished, heralding the coming transition to Judaism. The recovery was disrupted by the events that led to the destruction of the First Temple and the termination of the kingdom by the Babylonians under Nebuchadrezzar. The destruction in the countryside was less severe than pre viously, but long-term processes led the Shephelah, Negev, and highlands of Hebron into continuous impoverishment.
They were separated from Judah and incorporated in Edom (laterldumea). [SeeEdom.] Persian Period (c. 538-332 BCE). With the return of the exiles, following the edict of King Cyrus, Judaism defini tively replaced the old Judahite/Israelite national identity. It centered in the Yehud district (Heb., medinah), including Benjamin and part of the highlands of Judah. Half of the highlands sites (eighty-seven sites; 120/90 acres) are in that northern one-quarter of the district. T h e Second Temple was built and was regarded by the Jewish community as the only legitimate sanctuary. The western part of Idumea was inhabited by urban, Hellenized Phoenicians and the inland part by a rural society with autochthonous roots. With tlie tide of history turning, the old polis regime reappeared. Hellenistic Period (c. 332-37 BCE). Both Jewish and Hellenistic culture flourished between 332 and 37 BCE throughout the highlands of Judah (ninety-eight sites; 132/ 75 acres), first under Ptolemaic and then under Seleucid kings. The Maccabean Revolt, beginning in 167 BCE, ended with the consolidation of the Hasmonean kingdom of Judah. At its zenith, under Alexander Jannaeus, it covered the whole land of Israel, including most of Transjordan and the Golan. When Pompey established Roman hegemony in 63 BCE, Judah was reduced to the mostly Jewish-populated ar eas in the highlands, parts of Transjordan, and die Galilee. [See Ptolemies; Seleucids; Hasmoneans.] Roman I Period (c. 37-135 BCE). T h e ldngdom of Judah reached its maximum expansion and wealth in the time of Herod the Great (40/37-4 BCE). Jerusalem, "most famous among [Near] Eastern cities" (Pliny), again became the cen ter of a great kingdom. T h e Second Temple, rebuilt by Herod, was the period's outstanding monument, and Judah prospered (the highlands of Judah included ninety known sites, extending to 245/115 acres). The kingdom did not sur vive Herod, however, and Judah became the Roman prov ince of Judea. Later, tlie great revolt of the Jews (66-70 CE) led to the country's destruction by the Romans under Ves pasian and Titus, Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed in 70 CE, as well as many other Judean sites (the last strong hold, Masada, is the most famous and most excavated). Fol lowing the destruction, Judea became the garrison of the Roman Tenth Legion. [See Masada.] T h e period (Roman I) was one of great unrest. T h e main archaeological evidence comes from tlie Judean Desert sites, including Qumran. T h e canonization of the Hebrew Bible was completed; the Pharisees achieved hegemony in Juda ism; the Saducees and Essenes disappeared; and Christian ity emerged. Messianic yearnings led to the Bar Kokhba Re volt against the Roman emperor Hadrian, ending with the massive destruction of Judea in 135 CE and the end of its Jewish identity until the modern era. [See Judean Desert Caves; Qumran; Essenes; and Ban Kokhba Revolt.] Roman II Period (c. 135-324 BCE). Following the de struction by Hadrian, the name Judea was changed to SyriaPalaestina (Philistia) and then to Palaestina Prima, in order
JUDAH to erase the memory of Judah (hence the name Palestine, which lasted until modern times). T h e Land of Judah never had a specific name after that. Jerusalem was rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina. In about 200 CE, Emperor Septimius Severus established Eleutheropolis (Beth-Guvrin), which dominated most of Judah, except for Aelia and its surroundings. In the highlands of Judah, ninety-five sites are known (150/90 acres). Its southern part remained predominantly Jewish (Heb., dromah, "southern") and die rest was mostly pagan. Byzantine Period (c, 324-638 BCE). The Byzantine pe riod is generally assumed to be the most heavily populated of the ancient periods in Israel. In the highlands of Judah 273 sites (425/350 acres) are known. However, the Ceramic Intensity Index is only about 70 percent Iron IIB, which is consistent with the settlements' uncrowded character. Christianity became die official religion in the Byzantine pe riod and the society was composed mainly of religious com munities: Christians, Jews, Samaritans, and pagans. "Medieval Period" (c. 638-1516 BCE). In archaeological and especially in ceramic terms, the period between 638 and 1516 is not well known. It will only be discussed briefly here. Early Arab period (c. 638-1099 CE). Following tire Arab conquest in 638 CE, the Jund Philastin inherited Palaestina Prima. Judah was included within three subdistricts (Ar., achwar): Aelia (Jerusalem), Beit Jibrin, and the Dead Sea. Under the Umayyad, 'Abbasid, and Fatimid dynasties, part of tire population became Muslim, and some Arab bedouin tribes settled in the Land of Judah, mainly on the desert fringes. Ramla became the capital of Philastin. T h e al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock were built in Jerusalem, which became Islam's third important pilgrimage site. [See Umayyad Dynasty; 'Abbasid Dynasty; Fatimid Dynasty; and Ramla.] Crusader and Ayyubid period (c. 1099-1291 CE). Most of the Crusader remains known in Judah are in Jerusalem, al though forts and fortified properties were built in the coun tryside as well. Between 1099 and 1291, die Frankish ele ment of the society played an important role within the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Judah was the first royal domain, and then Hebron and Beth-Guvrin became independent principalities. Following the kingdom's end (in 1191 CE), Ju dah became predominantly Muslim. Late Arab period (c. 1291-15,16 CE). Under die Mamluks, the coastal plain was intentionally depopulated, turning it into a fringe area, while the population of the highlands in creased. Judah was divided first between the districts of Je rusalem and Hebron (as a province of Damascus) and then the province of Gaza. T h e deterioration of the land reached its peak during this period. In 1376, Jerusalem became the seat of a minor governor. Ottoman Period (1516-1917 CE). Following the Ottoman conquest in 1516, most of Judah was unified within the dis trict of Jerusalem, including the city's subdistricts and He bron. Parts of the Shephelah fell within the Ramla subdistrict. T h e land flourished in the sixteenth century, and
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Jerusalem was refortified with the wall that still encircles it. Ottoman administrative documents (Tk., defteri) give the best information on the economics of the land's traditional society. In the following centuries Judah sank into decline, while Jerusalem's position was strengthened, heralding the political and cultural importance it would know in the twen tieth century. [See also Jerusalem; Negev; Northern Samaria, Survey of; Shephelah; and Southern Samaria, Survey of. In addition, the following sites not previously cross-referenced above are the subject of independent entries: 'Aro'er; Beit Mirsim, Tell; Beth-Shemesh; Beth-Zur; Esdar, Tel; Ful, Tell el-; Giloh; Herodium; 'Ira, Tel; Mareshah; Nasbeh, Tell en-; Ramat Rahel; Susiya; and Yarmut, Tel.] BIBLIOGRAPHY The Atlas of Israel, 3d ed. (Tel Aviv, 1985) contains geographic data relevant to the region. Detailed maps of Judah from ancient to B y z antine periods can be found in the second edition of The Macmillan Bible Atlas by Yohanan Aharoni and Michael Avi-Yonah (New York, !993)' T h e earliest (and still best) modern systematic description of ancient ruins in Judah is provided in Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener, The Survey of Western Palestine, vol. 3, Judaea (London, 1883); see sheets 1 7 - 2 6 . T h e dating is unreliable, however. Geographic histories include Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible, 2d ed. (Phil adelphia, 1979), for biblical Israel and Judah, and Michael Avi-Yonah,
The Holy Land: From the Persian to the Arab Conquest, $36 B.C. to A.D. 640, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1977), for the classical periods. Aharoni's text is somewhat out of date and differs from tiiis entry on many points. For archaeological scholarship and excavation reports, the reader should consult the following: Bar-Adon, Pessah. Excavations in the Judean Desert. 'Atiqot, Hebrew Series, vol. 9. Jerusalem, 1989. Reports on the author's excavations; English summaries. Dagan, Yehudah. " T h e Shephelah during die Period of the Monarchy in Light of Archaeological Excavations and Survey." M . A . thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1992. Until recently, the only publication of die author's comprehensive survey. Presents a list of 276 Iron Age sites, although the data and conclusions may be disputable. In Flebrew with English summary; may be obtained from Tel Aviv University. Finkelstein, Israel, and Yizhak Magen. Archaeological Survey of the Hill Country of Benjamin. Jerusalem, 1993. Survey results. Kochavi, Moshe, ed. Judea, Samaria, and the Golan: Archaeological Sur vey, 1967-1968 (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1972. Report of selective surveys, including of Judah (but only of the highlands and the mar gins of the Shephelah), the Judean Desert, and the Land of Benja min. Ofer, Avi. " T h e Highland of Judah during the Biblical Period." Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1993. Complete report of the survey in the area, with a detailed analysis of evaluation methods and historical data about biblical Judah. In Hebrew with English summary. Ofer, Avi. " T h e Highland of Judah: A Fringe Area Becoming a Pros perous Kingdom," In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel, edited by Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na'aman (in press). Archaeological and historical discussion of the Iron Age I in Judah, including survey methods and some in formation about other periods (especially the Bronze Age and Iron Age II). Based on the author's dissertation (see above). A v i OFER
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JUDEA. See Judah.
JUDEAN DESERT CAVES. Since the fourth cen tury CE there have been reports of discoveries of scrolls and other artifacts in caves in the Judean desert (cf. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.16.1). Modern interest in these caves stems from the discovery of the Qumran scrolls in 1947. After bedouins had ransacked many of the caves in the area of Qumran, it was decided that a comprehensive and sys tematic search of the Judean Desert caves should be under taken by archaeologists. This was done in 1952 under die direction of Roland de Vaux and G. Lankester Harding while they were digging at Qumran. There were also several follow-up excavations at the caves and sites in the immediate vicinity of Qumran, on the Jordanian side of the border with Israel, during die 1950s. Nonetheless, bedouin discoveries continued to preempt those of the archaeologists. The eastern Judean desert is dissected by several eastwest canyons that drain toward the Dead Sea. Expeditions on the Israeli side of the border in 1961-1962 focused on the area between Masada and 'Ein-Gedi and divided the region into four sectors with a team assigned to each sector. T h e four teams were directed by Yohaman Aharoni, Pessah BarAdon, Nahman Avigad, and Yigael Yadin; their task was to explore every cave and crevice in their sector (Avigad et al., 1960-1961). Exploration and excavation of these dark cav erns was made difficult by the large rocks that cluttered tlie cave floors and by the occasional thick layers of animal drop pings that covered the floors. Equally daunting was the fact that many caves were located in sheer cliffs far above the valley floor and could be entered only after a perilous climb (Yadin, 1963). The discovery of materials from the Chalcolithic, Middle Bronze, Iron, and Roman periods made it clear that the caves had served as places of refuge throughout history for people forced to flee their homes. T h e artifactual and inscriptional remains from the Middle Bronze and Iron Ages are meager, indicating that the caves were only used inter mittently and for short periods of time. The materials from the Chalcolithic and Roman periods, however, are consid erable and impressive. While nearly all of die caves evi denced occupation during the Chalcolithic period, the most significant finds came from the Cave of the Treasure in Nahal Mishmar (Bar-Adon, 1980). The vast amount of household vessels, tools, textiles, and foodstuffs found in this cave indicates that during the Chalcolithic period it was inhabited for regular and prolonged periods. T h e most spec tacular discovery was a cache of more than four hundred copper items: tools, mace heads, baskets, crowns, and uten sils. Many of these items are ornately decorated and can be seen in tlie Israel Museum in Jerusalem. T h e objects suggest that the owners were wealthy individuals who brought their treasures with them in the hope of returning home once the
danger that forced them into the cave had passed. Unfor tunately, they never again used their valuables in the luxu rious surroundings for which they were obviously intended. Equally noteworthy are the discoveries dating to the time of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome led by Bar Kokhba (132-135 CE).[See Bar Kokhba Revolt.] While the leader of this revolt is traditionally identified as Bar Kokhba ("son of a star"), a title with messianic overtones, some Jew ish traditions label him Bar Koziba ("son of a lie"). T h e Bar Kokhba letters, from the Cave of Letters in Nahal Hever, identify the leader's actual name and tide as "Simon ben Kosiba, prince of Israel." Both forms of his name, Bar Kokhba and Bar Koziba, are, therefore, tendentious corrup tions of his real name and reflect two attitudes toward his revolt. Many Jewish rebels followed Bar Kokhba and fled into tlie desert to prosecute their war against the Romans. T h e caves in the Judean desert have yielded a ttemendous amount of information about these Jewish rebels and their way of life. T h e discovery of pottery, glass, and otiier luxury items from this period indicate that tlie inhabitants prepared the caves in advance for prolonged stays and entered them only when necessary. Once refugees were safely inside the caves, it would have been nearly impossible to attack or ex pel them forcibly. T h e Romans watched the rebels from camps they established above the caves and on the opposite sides of the canyons. This strategy enabled the soldiers sta tioned across a canyon to watch the rebels in the caves and relay the information to otiier soldiers stationed in the camp above the caves. T h e rebels waited in the caves and used tlie rations they had brought with them. Their plan, how ever, failed terribly. One cave, the Cave of Horror in Nahal Hever, yielded more than forty skeletons of men, women, and children who perished there. In the end, the Romans outlasted the rebels by cutting off their supply lines and starving them. T h e Cave of Letters in Nahal Hever yielded two large collections of documents (Lewis et a l , 1989; Yadin, 1963). The Bar Kokhba letters comprise more than a dozen dis patches in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek sent by Bar Kokhba to his commanders in other places (principally 'Ein-Gedi). [See 'Ein-Gedi.] This correspondence provides details about the rebels' chain of command, their observation of Jewish festivals, and Bar Kokhba's stern leadership style. T h e Ar chive of Babatha, the daughter of Simon, is a collection of thirty-five legal documents (marriage contract, loans, deeds, wills) in Nabatean, Aramaic, and Greek, dating from 93 to 132 CE. [See Nabatean Inscriptions.] Babatha, once awealthy and prominent resident of Nabatea, moved to 'Ein-Gedi and eventually fled to the caves in advance of the Roman assault on Bar Kokhba's forces. Although traditions about this re volt were preserved in a variety of sources, the discoveries from die Judean Desert caves provided the first direct evi dence of the rebels and their way of life. Other caves in the region have yielded additional evidence
JUDEIDEH, TELL ELof occasional occupation from prehistoric times through the Middle Ages. Excavation and exploration of the caves con tinues under the direction of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Society for the Preservation of Nature. A compre hensive survey of the region was conducted during the 1980s, and reports of artifactual and inscriptional finds con tinue to surface. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls; Judah; Qumran; and the biog raphies of Aharoni, Avigad, Harding, Vaux, and Yadin.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, Nahman, et al. Judean Desert Caves, Survey and Excavations: The Expedition to the Judean Desert, 1960-1961. 2 vols. Jerusalem, 1960-1961. Bar-Adon, Pessah. The Cave of the Treasure: The Finds from the Caves in Nahal Mishmar. Jerusalem, 1980. Benoit, Pierre, et al. Les grottes de Murabba'at. 2 vols. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 2. Oxford, 1 9 6 1 . Lewis, Naphtali, et al. The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, Aramaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions. Jerusalem, 1989. Yadin, Yigael. The Finds from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters. Jerusalem, 1963. Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt against Imperial Rome. London, 1971. J. EDWARD WRIGHT
JUDEIDEH, TELL EL- (Heb., Tel Goded), site lo cated in the Shephelah (3i°38' N , 34°54' E; map reference 141 X 115) on a natural hill about 398 m above sea level, and about 25.4 km (15 mi.) south of Gezer, 43.5 Ion (27 mi.) north-northeast of Beersheba, 34.5 km (21.5 mi.) east of Ashkelon, and 22 km (13.7 mi.) northwest of Hebron. T h e site has generally been identified with tire MoreshetGath of Micah 1:14, the home of the prophet Micah (Mi. 1:1; Jer. 26:18). Micah 1:13-15 implies that Moreshet-Gath was near Lachish (9.6 km [6 mi.] southwest of Tell el-Judeideh) and Mareshah (Marisa; about 4.5 Ion [2.8 mi.] south-southwest of the site). T h e Madaba map places M o reshet-Gath north of Beth-Guvrin (2 Ion [1 mi.] south of Judeideh). Both F.-M. Abel (Geographic de la Palestine, vol. 2, Paris, 1938, p. 392) and Yohanan Aharoni (The Land of the Bible, rev. ed., translated and edited by Anson F. Rainey, Philadelphia, 1979, p. 330) subscribe to this identification; Zecharia Kallai (1962), however, identifies Tell el-Judeideh witii Libnah (cf. Negev 1990). Apart from the proposed identifications with cities mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and what can be reconstructed through excavation, the his tory of die site is unknown. Tell el-Judeideh was excavated as part of a regional pro ject in 1899-1900, under the direction of F. J. Bliss and R. A. S. Macalister, funded by the Palestine Exploration Fund. Because archaeology was then in its infancy and ce ramic typology was yet to be understood, the results of that excavation are confusing and disappointing. Of the approx
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imately 2.5-hectare (7-acre) site, Bliss and Macalister ex cavated about 87 sq m, finding few remains from the "preIsraelite" period (the Bronze Age); the "Jewish" period (the Iron Age); and the "Hellenistic-Roman" period. Many of the fragmentary wall remains from the Iron Age showed extensive evidence of fire. However, because of the excavation's limited exposure and the state of the art, it is impossible to assign a precise date to them. The excavation did not reveal a fortification system for the Iron Age, but it did uncover thirty-seven stamped Imlk jar handles. Among them were representations of both the two-wing and fourwing variety, as well as references to die four cities regularly attested: Ziph, Hebron, Socoh, and mmst. These handles imply an occupation of the site in the late eighth century BCE.
The bulk of the remains date from the Roman period and consist of an oval enclosure encompassed by a wall approx imately 228 m long and about 91.5 m wide. The wall is, on die average, about 3.35 m thick and is built of roughly dressed stones, dry laid in horizontal courses. Sixteen une venly spaced internal buttresses strengthen it. Only some of the buttresses are bonded to the wall; they extend 1-1.5 m into the enclosure. Four gates, each directed to a cardinal point, provide ac cess to the enclosure. Internal square towers flank the gates. Some of the towers have interior chambers, and Bliss pos tulated that those that appear to have been solid were prob ably destroyed into their foundations below the chambers. Some of die gates retain their pillars, sockets, and thresholds, which indicate that they had double-wing doors. That a fifth gate, leading to the southeast, may have existed was inferred from Bliss's discovery of two large slabs of stone in the line of the city wall (1900, p. 93). The two streets extending from the gates—the north-south cardo, and the east-west decumanus—intersected at right angles just south of a large twopart building in the middle of die enclosure. The western part of the building is square (13.6 m) with exterior walls that are 1 meter thick. Eight rooms that ap parently had earthen floors and no exterior windows sur rounded a courtyard. T h e eastern building was separated from it by a hallway. It had four rooms on its eastern side and one room or a columned porch on its south, all of which opened into a courtyard with a large pool. Eight columns originally surrounded the pool in an asymmetrical arrange ment; six column bases were found in situ. Broshi suggests (1977, p. 696) that the western building was a women's house (a gynaeconitis), and the eastern one was for men (an andron). On the basis of die architectural styles, he proposes a Herodian date for the structure. [See also the biographies of Bliss and Macalister.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bliss, Frederick Jones. "First Report on the Excavations at Tell ej-Judeideh." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (April 1900):
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8 7 - 1 0 1 . This source, and the following entries by Bliss, constitute the formal excavation reports available for Tell el-Judeideh. Their usefulness is hampered by the inadequate excavation techniques of the time. Bliss, Frederick Jones. "Second Report on the Excavations at Tell ejJudeideh." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (July 1900): 199-222. Bliss, Frederick Jones, and R. A . S. Macalister. Excavations in Palestine during the Years 1898-1900. London, 1902.
Broshi, Magen. "Judeideh, T e l l . " In The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 694-696. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975Kallai, Zecharia. "Libnah" (in Hebrew). In Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. 4, pp. 4 2 1 - 4 2 3 . Jerusalem, 1962. Negev, Avraham, ed. " G o d e d ( T e l ) . " In The Archaeological Encyclo pedia of the Holy Land, p. 1 6 1 . Rev. ed. Nashville, 1986 (3d ed. N e w York, 1990). DALE W . MANOR
K
KABRI, TEL, a large mound of about 80 acres located in the foothills of the western Lower Galilee bordering die Jezreel Valley, 5 km (3 mi.) inland from Nahariya (map ref erence 1632 X 2681). T h e site may be ancient Rehob, men tioned in the Egyptian Execration texts and in Jos. 19:28. Moshe Prausnitz carried out surveys and soundings for the Israel Department of Antiquities in 1957-1958; and Aharon Kempinski carried out major excavations in 1986-1993 for tire Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, assisted by W.-D. Niemeier of Heidelberg University. The site, well watered and in a very fertile area, was oc cupied extensively in the Neolithic period and into the Early Chalcolithic phases. Belonging to this horizon are DarkFaced Burnished wares of die so-called Wadi Rabah culture. T h e third millennium is represented by an Early Bronze IA-B phase (c. 3400-3100 BCE) characterized by large oval houses with central pillars; quantities of typical pottery, in cluding Grain Washed; several rich tombs, one with a ra diocarbon date of about 3494 BCE; and a sealing that is M e sopotamian in style and usually found only in EB II—III contexts. T h e EB II phase exhibits substantial broadroom houses and "metallic" wares drat are northern in type. T h e Middle Bronze Age saw the maximum expansion of Kabri, exhibiting two phases of fortifications. T h e first, with a shallow earthen rampart and an inner wall, belongs to M B I. A later phase, of M B II—III date, witnessed the addition of a massive city wall. T h e MB pottery includes vessels that are Anatolian in type, "North Syrian Painted Ware," and Cypriot imports. Several burials produced scarabs, includ ing one with tire name of a Hyksos king, ykbm. T h e most spectacular remains of this phase belong to a large, multiroom palace (no. 607) with a plastered "ceremonial hall" decorated with multicolored floral frescoes on both the floors and walls (more than 2,300 fragments). T h e closest parallels are from Middle Minoan II Crete (Phaistos); Late Minoan IA Knossos and Thera; and now Tell ed-Dab a in the Egyptian Delta. [See Dab'a, Tell ed-.] T h e destruction of tlie MB levels may have occurred as early as 1600 BCE. Later remains belong to the Iron Age, with Cypro-Phoenician and Phoenician pottery. T h e Iron Age was brought to an end by Assyrian and Babylonian destructions. Persian and Hellenistic occupations are also attested. c
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Kempinski, Aharon, ed. Excavations at Kabri: Preliminary Reports. 6 vols. Tel Aviv, 1 9 8 7 - 1 9 9 2 . Covers the 1 9 8 6 - 1 9 9 1 seasons. Prausnitz, M . W . " K a b r i . " Israel Exploration Journal 9 (1959): 2 6 8 269. WILLIAM G . DEVER
KAFRANJA, WADI, region of Jordan, located be tween Wadi el-Yabis and Wadi Rajib, that drains the west ern face of Jebel 'Ajlun (biblical Gilead), entering die Jordan River at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh. T h e region is well watered, re ceiving 300-600 m m (12-23.5 in.) rainfall annually and pos sessing numerous springs. Cereals, olives, and vines are cul tivated on slopes and terraces near the wadi head, and its drier southwestern tail is suitable for grazing. Pine, pista chio, and oak forests cover die ridges dominating the valley. In medieval times iron was mined in the surrounding lime stone hills and smelted locally. T h e sharply dissected topog raphy with elevations u p to n o o m (3,610 ft.) isolate the region from the plains north, east, and south and the Jordan valley to the west. There have been no systematic excavations in Wadi Kafranja. Qal'at er-Rabad (map reference 2185 X 1922), built in 1284-1285 at Saladin's behest, is the principal monument. The castle was cleared and repaired during die British Man date of 1921-1948 (Tohns, 1932), but never excavated. In 'Ajlun village (map reference 2213 X 1940) the Department of Antiquities has carried out salvage excavations and the Department of Religious Affairs has restored a Mamluk mosque. Nineteenth-century travelers visited Qal'at er-Rabad and extolled the verdure of Wadi Kafranja (Merrill, 1881; Le Strange, 1886; Conder, 1892). Gottlieb Schumacher con ducted die first concerted survey around 1900 (Schumacher and Steuernagel, 1924-1926). Nelson Glueckreconnoitered tlie wadi in 1942, butreported only four sites ( i 9 5 i ; p p . 231235). Augosti.no Augustinovic and Bellarmino Bagatti (1951-1952) explored 'Ajlun village and the highlands east, north, and west, but did not descend into the wadi. Ernst Kutsch (1965) found evidence of ancient occupation at modern Anjara and Kafranja and at sites along the wadi
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bottom. Siegfried Mittmann (1970) incorporated this earlier work into a comprehensive study of ancient settlement in northern Transjordan. Wolf Dieter Hutteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah (1977) examined early Ottoman tax records for Wadi Kafranja in a study of the historical geography of the sixteenth-century CE southern Levant. T h e most recent ar chaeological survey of the Wadi Kafranja was completed in 1986 (Greene, 1996). This superbly habitable but rather remote region was set tled perhaps as early as die Chalcolithic, if the seven dolmen fields at the wadi's southern end date to that period, and not, as previously believed, to die Early Bronze. Early Bronze occupadon in the wadi is well attested (eight sites), but the Middle Bronze is not (three sites). Late Bronze settlement is more widespread dian initially supposed (five sites). T h e Iron Age saw a clear increase in settlement (Iron I, fourteen sites; Iron II/Persian; twenty-nine). There was a sharp de cline in the Hellenistic (ten sites) but settlement grew again in die Roman period (twenty-two sites). The Byzantine col lapse in the early seventh century was not accompanied by a serious retraction of settlement in Wadi Kafranja. Byz antine (sixteen sites) and Late Byzantine/Umayyad settle ment (eleven sites) shows strong continuity and significant ceramic connections with contemporary Jerash nearby. There is a significant and surprising increase in 'Abbasid setdement (twenty sites). Later, the construction of Qal'at er-Rabad, intended to prevent Crusader incursions across the Jordan, enhanced security in the region. T h e castle was rebuilt in the ensuing Ayyubid-Mamluk period coinciding with the densest occupation (thirty sites). There was a si multaneous expansion of water-powered grist mills in the wadi. Remains of nineteen mills probably dating in this pe riod line the wadi between 'Ajlun and Kafranja villages. Ot toman tax records indicate that at least sixteen mills were functioning in 1596 CE. Only one remained in use after World War II (Greene, 1995). Wadi Kafranja and sites in it are not mentioned in biblical or oilier ancient Near Eastern texts, though such mentions are common in medieval Arabic literature (see the article '"Adjlun," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., Leiden, i960-, vol. 1, p. 208). Ottoman tax accounts name settle ments in the wadi corresponding to sites of Ottoman date recorded by archaeological survey. [See also 'Ajlun.]
American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. N e w Haven, 1 9 5 1 . Part of Glueck's archaeological surveys east of the Jordan. See pages 2 3 - 2 5 for his work in Wadi Kafranja (four sites only). Greene, Joseph A. "Water Mills in the Wadi Kafranja: T h e Relation ship of Technology, Society, and Setdement in North Jordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 5, edited by Safwan Tell, pp. 7 5 7 - 7 6 5 . Amman, 1995. Greene, Joseph A. "Ajlun-Kafranja Survey, 1986: Final Report." An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 42 (1996). Hutteroth, Wolf Dieter, and Kamal Abdulfattah. Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan, and Southern Syria in the Late Sixteenth Cen tury. Erlanger Geographische Arbeiten, 5. Erlangen, 1977. Recon structs the wadi's medieval agricultural economy through study of the Ottoman tax records (defters); see pages 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 for Wadi Kaf ranja. Some villages mentioned in the documents have been located by archaeological survey. Johns, C . N . "Medieval 'Ajlun I: T h e Castle (Qal'at er-Rabad)." Quar terly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine 1 (1932): 2 1 - 3 3 . T h e fullest and still standard analysis of the history and architecture of this important Crusading-period fortification (only the first part was published). Kutsch, Ernst. "Beitrage zur Seidlungsgeschichte des wadi kufringi." Zeilschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 81 (1965): 1 1 3 - 1 3 1 . T h e first detailed archaeological survey of Wadi Kafranja, with a discus sion of settlement history. Summarized in English in Arnulf K u s chke, " N e w Contributions to the Historical Topography of Jordan," Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 6-7 (1962): 90-95, esp. 92-93. Le Strange, Guy. " A Ride through 'Ajlun and the Belka during Autumn of 1884." In Gottlieb Schumacher's Across the Jordan: Being an Ex ploration and Survey of Part ofHauran andjaulan, pp. 268-323. N e w York, 1886. Enriched by the author's wide knowledge and frequent citation of medieval Arabic texts that mention 'Ajlun. Merrill, Selah. East of Jordan: A Record of Travel and Observation in the Countries of Moab, Gilead, and Bashan. London, 1 8 8 1 . See chapters 27 and 28 for Wadi Kafranja. Mittmann, Siegfried. Beitrage zur Siedlungs-und Territorialgeschichte des nbrdlichen Ostjordanlandes. Wiesbaden, 1970. Extensive survey of north Jordan. See pages 78-89 for a report of Mittmann's work in Wadi Kafranja, based on Kutsch (above). Sapin, Jean. "Prospection geo-archeologique de l'Ajlun, 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 8 2 . " In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 2 1 7 - 2 2 7 . Amman, 1985. Programmatic effort to integrate archaeological survey and paleolandscape studies in the 'Ajlun region, including Wadi Kafranja. Schumacher, Gottlieb, and D . C . Steuernagel. " D e r 'Adschlun." Zeil schrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 47 (1924): 1 9 1 - 2 4 0 5 4 8 ( 1 9 2 5 ) : 1 - 1 4 4 , 1 9 1 - 3 9 2 ; 49 (1926): 1 - 1 6 7 , 2 7 3 - 3 0 3 . Originally prepared to accompany the Kane des Ostjordanlandes ( 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 2 1 ) . Primarily a work of physical and historical topography with ethnography excurses, this is the earliest and most comprehensive exploration of the 'Ajlun region. See 1924: 2 3 4 - 2 3 7 and 1925: 300-327. JOSEPH A. GREENE
BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustinovic, Augostino, and Bellarmino Bagatti. "Escursioni nei dintorni di 'Aglun (Nord di Transgiordiana)." Studium Biblicum Pranciscanum/Liber Annuus 2 (1952): 2 2 7 - 3 1 4 . Archaeological, historical, and topographic survey of the highlands above Wadi Kafranja, east, north, and west of modern 'Ajlun village. Conder, Claude R. Heth and Moab: Explorations in Syria in 1881 and r882. 3d ed. London and New York, 1892. See chapter 6, "Mount Gilead," for the 'Ajlun region. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of die
KALAVASOS, village (34°46' N , 33°i8' E) situated close to the southern coast of Cyprus, halfway between Limassol and Larnaca. T h e village area has been occupied since die Neolithic period (c. 4500 BCE), but its ancientname is unknown. Brief excavations at Tenta, south of Kalavasos, by Porphyrios Dikaios in 1947 under the auspices of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities revealed the presence of
KALAVASOS an Aceramic Neolithic settlement, then dated to 5800 BCE. Since 1976 the Vasilikos valley, centered on Kalavasos, has been the scene of multidisciplinary fieldwork designed to elucidate the sequence of occupation and nature of life in the valley from the earliest Neolithic until medieval times, some nine thousand years. Excavations have been under taken at four sites, in conjunction with a field survey de signed to recover information on tlie pattern of ancient set tlement. T h e Aceramic Neolithic village of Tenta, now dated to die seventh millennium, represents the earliest excavated settlement in the valley. Located on a small hill 2.3 km (1.4 mi.) south-southeast of Kalavasos, it consists of a cluster of curvilinear stone and mud-brick domestic buildings (see fig ure 1), surrounded by an outer settlement wall with a ditch cut in the limestone outside it. T h e reason for these defen sive features and the origin and circumstances of the initial settlers are unknown. T h e population was small, perhaps fifty people. T h e dead were buried under house floors and in open areas outside. Stone was used for die manufacture of sophisticated vessels, domestic equipment, and items of personal adornment. Domesticated plants (emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, and lentils) and animals (sheep, goat, and pig) were known to the inhabitants, and fallow deer were hunted. Following the end of the Aceramic Neolithic, the site was reoccupied (c. 4500 BCE) after a considerable gap, but the remains are insubstantial. T h e succeeding Early Chalcolithic period (c. 3500 BCE) is represented by the excavated site of Ayious, on the east side of the valley, opposite Tenta. N o standing architectural re mains were identified, only pits of various types, including
KALAVASOS. F i g u r e i .
Kalavasos-Tenta.
southeast. (Courtesy I. A. T o d d )
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several large ones connected by subterranean tunnels. Di kaios located similar pits at nearby Pamboules (site B) in 1947, which he interpreted as pit dwellings. It seems likely that tlie pits are the extant remains of a settlement that con sisted mainly of lightly built structures. Finely painted pot tery, ceramic figurine fragments, and domestic stone tools were found within the pits. The later Chalcolithic period in tlie valley is known only from scattered surface finds of pottery at several sites. T h e nature of the succeeding Early Bronze Age remains to be established, but the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1950-1650 BCE) is well represented by numerous excavated subterranean chamber tombs within the confines of the village, especially in the area of the church and mosque. Large numbers of fine pottery vessels, bronze tools and weapons, and stone and faience beads were deposited with the dead. Excavation of a contemporary settlement has not yet been undertaken in the valley, but tlie field survey attested dense occupation of the Kalavasos region in tlie early second millennium BCE. While there may have been a reduction in the density of settlement in the early Late Bronze Age, the large, townsized settlement of Ayios Dhimitrios south of Tenta is in dicative of the urban character of life in the thirteenth cen tury BCE. T h e site occupies 11.5 ha (28.4 acres) of gently sloping ground overlooking an easy crossing of the Vasilikos River from its western side. The location is strategic because it also lies at the junction of two major routes—east-west along the southern coastal region of the island, and northsouth from the copper mines north of Kalavasos down to the coast. In view of tlie known importance of copper in the LB economy of Cyprus, it can scarcely be doubted that the
Architecture on the upper part of tlie site, from tlie south-
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Kalavasos mining region was of considerable significance for its copper deposits at the time Ayios Dhimitrios was oc cupied. The field survey did not prove beyond doubt the LB utilization of the Kalavasos mining area, but Bronze Age remains have been found within 500 m of the mining zone. Initial excavations were undertaken at Ayios Dhimitrios within the line of the Nicosia-Limassol highway that has obliterated die settlement's central sector. Rectilinear struc tures (100-600 sq m in area) were found, fronting onto long, straight streets. Subsequent excavations at the north end of the site revealed a palatial complex, called building X. T h e plan of this square structure (30.5 m across) is ttipartite around a central courtyard (see figure 2). Extensive use of finely cut, large stone blocks was made in the outer walls, and the building probably had an upper story. T h e most
KALAVASOS. Figure 2. (Courtesy I. A. Todd)
impressive architectural feature is a rectangular hall, with a central row of stone pillars to support the roof, used for storing olive oil (and perhaps other commodities) in rows of very large storage jars (pithoi). T h e fifty pithoi in the main hall had an estimated capacity of 33,500 liters (see below). The building's character is clearly public rather than private; an administrative purpose may be supported by the discov ery within and adjacent to it of a number of small clay cyl inders with signs inscribed in the Cypro-Minoan script, indicating a literate clientele. Immediately west of building X, excavation revealed parts of anotiier building (XI) in which olive oil was probably manufactured. A very large stone tank was set into die floor of one room, and gas chromatography analyses of its interior face suggested that it had contained olive oil, as was the case
Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios.
General plan of building X and adjacent areas.
KAMID EL-LOZ with some of the pithoi. Crushing and pressing equipment has not yet been found. A series of rock-cut chamber tombs was also found within the settlement area; in the most significant of these, tomb 11 (c. 1375 BCE), three young women, a young child, and three infants were buried togedier with quantities of fine imported and local pottery, gold jewelry, and other exotic grave goods; the latest skeleton was found completely intact, with its as sociated grave gifts in situ. T h e apparent wealth of the in habitants of Ayios Dhimitrios seems to have been derived from copper trading and olive-oil manufacture. [See also Olives.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dikaios, Porphyrios. " T h e Stone A g e . " In The Swedish Cyprus Expe dition. Vol. 4. Stockholm, 1 9 6 2 . Invaluable summary of Dikaios's work in the Kalavasos area and elsewhere (see part 1, pp. 1-204), written after die initial formulation of the prehistoric Cypriot se quence. N o w dated and must be used in conjunction with current literature. South, Alison K . "From Copper to Kingship: Aspects of Bronze Age Society Viewed from the Vasilikos Valley." In Early Society in Cy prus, edited by Edgar Peltenburg, pp. 3 1 5 - 3 2 4 . Edinburgh, 1989. See South (1992) for a more up-to-date, tiiough less accessible, study. South, Alison K . , Pamela Russell, and Priscilla Schuster Keswani. Vas ilikos Valley Project, part 3, Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios II: Ceramics, Objects, Tombs, Special Studies. Studies in Mediterranean Archae ology, vol. 7 1 . Gbteborg, 1989. T h e first volume of the final exca vation report covering material from the 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 3 excavations in the more central and southern sectors of the site, excluding the northern building X area and tomb 1 1 . Soudi, Alison K . "Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios 1 9 9 1 . " Report of the De partment of Antiquities, Cyprus (1992): 1 3 3 - 1 4 6 . T h e latest results of excavations at this site, including notes on gas chromatography anal yses by Priscilla S. Keswani. T o d d , Ian A . , ed. Vasilikos Valley Project, part 1, The Bronze Age Cem etery in Kalavasos Village. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 7 1 . Goteborg, 1986. Final report on the excavation of a series of thirteen M B tombs in Kalavasos village in 1978. T o d d , Ian A. Vasilikos Valley Project, part 6, Excavations at KalavasosTenta. Vol. 1. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 7 1 . G o teborg, 1987. The first of a two-volume final report on die Tenta excavations (the second volume is forthcoming). IAN A . T O D D and ALISON K . SOUTH
KAMID EL-LOZ, tell located at the southeastern edge of the Lebanese Biqa' (Bekaa) Valley, north of the modern road that branches off die north-south road from Qabb Ilyas to Mashgara, leading eastward via Jubb Jannin and joining the southbound road from Masna to Rashaya. Kamid elLoz is strategically located at the place where two ancient main roads cross: the old road going from the Upper Jordan Valley through Wadi-at Taym, crossing the Biqa' into Syria, and another one from the Phoenician coast. Tell Kamid elLoz is one of the largest (300 X 240 m) and highest (26 m) settlement hills in the Biqa'. T w o springs are in close prox
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imity to the tell: one to the north, the other at its western edge. As early as 1897, A. Guthe suggested that the modern name of Kamid el-Loz implied that of ancient Kumidi. Egyptian sources of the second half of the second millen nium BCE mention a location K M T (Ku'-m'-t), or Kumidi, several times, most probably an administrative center, that of a rabu (ruler) of an Egyptian province in Asia. This iden tification was confirmed in 1969 by the discovery of four clay tablets (followed by more between 1972 and 1978, let ters written by the Egyptian pharaoh to the rabu, in which it is clear that Kumidi is a city in the southern Biqa' and that it is located at a cultural crossroad. This applies perfectly to Kamid el-Loz, the only tell in the southern Biqa' that meets all the requirements established for Kumidi. In 1954, Arnulf Kuschke identified the site of Kamid elLoz and began excavating it in 1963. Fieldwork between 1963 and 1965 was carried out by joint expeditions from the Universities of Johana Gutenberg of Mainz and the Univer sity of Saarbrucken, directed by Kuschke and Rolf Hachmann, respectively. Between 1964 and 1981, the University of Saarbrucken alone assumed the work. T h e excavation continued for six years into the Lebanese civil war (with the exception of the years 1975 and 1976) and closed prema turely in 1981. Since then, treasure hunters with bulldozers have destroyed the fragile architectural evidence and strat ification of the second- and third-millennium town. Prior to 1981, excavation had cleared an area of 5,700 sq m. T h e earliest archaeological remains cover the bedrock at the northern edge of the tell. They revealed an Early Neo lithic settlement yielding plain Neolithic pottery, a few clay idols, and numerous lithic tools. T h e Chalcolithic level has not yet been found. All that is known about the existence of an Early Bronze Age town are some pottery sherds found out of context in later strata. T h e Middle Bronze Age was excavated over an area of 2,400 sq m. A number of urban settlements were uncovered whose size, building materials, and building techniques were superior to those of later pe riods. This probably indicates a politically more important settlement than any of die later Late Bronze Age towns. A fortified city wall was cleared on the tell's northern and east ern slopes. T h e location of the MB palace and temples is known; they lie, unexcavated, underneath the LB palace and temple. T h e excavations concentrated mainly on the Late Bronze Age city, which was cleared for 3,800 sq m. A city wall sur rounded the LB city. T h e temple was located in the north western part of the tell, separated from die palace by an esplanade that opened onto a street leading outside the city. T h e temple was destroyed and rebuilt four times. T h e dis tinctiveness of this temple is its double court. T h e western court was paved with mud-brick blocks and had three rec tangular basins lined with plaster, probably used for sacri fices. Four temple models were found in the court. An annex
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to the temple consisted of two rooms where large number of clay vases and bronze figurines were found. The LB pal ace was located south of die temple. Like the temple, die palace was destroyed and rebuilt five times. The mud-brick walls of the entrance hall were preserved to a height of more than 3 m. Only one building was excavated to the east of die oldest palace. Tombs of three people with rich funerary material, were found beneadi it; it was probably the site's royal cem etery. [See Grave Goods.] To tiiis same period belong beautiful ivory objects and six Amarna tablets. [See Amarna Tablets.] Following tiiis pe riod, the city remained uninhabited for a time. An area of 4,400 sq m was excavated from the Iron Age I period. It yielded eight superposed levels of nonfortified villages con sisting of small, irregular houses of one to two rooms, built out of wood. Poor residential materials were found inside. No Phoenician remains from the Iron II period were found. The excavator indicates that period could be present in the southern, unexcavated part of the tell. In the Persian period the deserted northwest sector of the tell was used as a cemetary. Modern occupation of the site covers part of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman cemeteries. [See also Phoenicians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Hachmann, Rolf, ed. Kamidel-Loz, T977-1981. Bonn, 1986. See pages 2 0 5 - 2 1 1 for a complete bibliography. Hachmann, Rolf, ed. Kamid el-Laz, 1963-1981: German Excavations in Lebanon (Part I), Berytus, vol. 37. Beirut, 1989. LEILA BADRE
KANES (or Nesa; mod. Tk., Kultepe [ashmound] and Karahoytik, the latter the name of a small village near the mound), site situated 21 Ion (13 mi.) to the northeast of Caesarea (modern Kayseri), the capital of the Cappadocian kingdom. The site is at the junction of several natural roads: an east-west road coming from Sebasteia (modern Sivas), a southeast-west road via Malatya, and a south-north road from Cilicia. This strategic location increased the impor tance of Kanes in the commerce of the ancient world and is one of die main reasons it became one of the ffading centers of ancient Syro-Mesopotamia. Kanes consisted of two parts; a city mound (tepe) and a lower city (karum or trade center in Assyrian terminology). The city mound includes an inner citadel and the areas in which the palaces and temples of the kings were built. T h e mound rises 20 m above the Kayseri plain and contains a series of occupation levels. With a diameter of 550 m, it is among the largest mounds in central Anatolia. Surrounding the mound and rising 2-2.5 above die plain, and witii a diameter of up to 3 km (2 mi.), is the lower city of Karum m
Kanes, the center of the system of Old Assyrian trading col onies in Anatolia. Kanes is 124 Ion (77 mi.) from the Hittite capital Hattusa (Bogazkoy) and 73 Ion (45 mi.) to the south of Alisar (an cient Ankuwa). T h e city mound of Kanes had a long exis tence, while the Karum Kanes only lasted for about three hundred years—it was founded much later than the site on the mound and was abandoned much sooner. Kanes-Ktiltepe became known in the archaeological lit erature when the first cuneiform tablets were found there in 1871. Ernest Chantre undertook the first excavations on the mound in 1893-1894. In 1906, Hugo Winckler and also Hugo Grotiie carried out brief excavations on the mound only. In 1925, Bedrich Hrozny conducted excavations both on the mound and in the lower city for one season. He suc ceeded in discovering about one thousand tablets. T h e finds identified the center as Karum Kanes, which had been sug gested by Benno Landsberger as early as 1924. Systematic excavations by a team under the direction of Tahsin Ozgtic began in 1948 on behalf of the Turkish His torical Foundation and the General Directorate of Monu ments and Museums; they are still underway regularly. Both the mound and the karum were excavated in parallel projects and yielded important monuments, now in the process of being restored. K a r u m . T h e karum of Kanes consists of four levels ( I IV): the upper level contains two phases, la and lb. Levels IV (built on virgin soil) and III belong to the very beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1920 BCE). They did not yield written documents, but the entire area of the karum was built up in both levels. The pottery used in these levels was monochrome wheelmade ware found side by side with handmade polychrome ware. The most spectacular era at Kanes is represented by ka rum level II (1920-1850 BCE), established in the period of the Assyrian king Erishum I, and the following phase of ka rum lb (1800-1750 BCE). Level II was destroyed by a heavy conflagration in about 1850 BCE, in the time of the Assyrian king Puzur-Ashur. After an interval of at most two genera tions, the town of level lb was established on the ruins. From historical and archaeological perspectives, the discoveries from tiiese levels reveal two facts of major importance: cu neiform tablets record the beginning of Anatolian history, and die very lively commercial and cultural relations that existed among Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Nordi Syria, stimulated the development of native Anatolian art. Karum level II presents a town with stone-paved streets, below which run functional drainage channels, and open spaces that mark divisions into various districts. T h e karum of Kanes in levels II and lb was surrounded by a fortification wall whose diameter is the largest in the Near East. In die period of the Assyrian trading colonies (levels II and lb), Kanes was a very strong city protected by two con-
KANES
w
267
terra-cotta figurines of gods and goddesses and stone molds for their manufacture were discovered in houses and in tombs. These are the first examples of native Anatolian style. They became the source of the Hittite style that de veloped later in central Anatolia. In level la, Kanes declined in importance, written records disappeared, and evidently ttade relations were cut. T h e kanun of Kanes was not sub sequently occupied. In every level at Kanes the dead were buried below the floors of the houses in pits, jars, or stone cists. The funeral gifts were rich and varied. Figurines imported from northern Syria and Mesopotamia, in metal and terra cotta, expand tire evidence provided by tablets and cylinder seals to refine the dating for this period. One of the richest groups of finds from the Assyrian trad ing colony period represented at Kanes level II (i 920-1840 B C E ) is the glyptic group—cylinder seal impressions on baked clay envelopes containing tablets and on bullae. These seal impressions, clearly reflecting the cosmopolitan character of tire trade with foreign peoples, are in Ur III Neo-Sumerian, Old Babylonian, Old Assyrian, and Old Syrian styles. Among the styles represented, Kanes's native Anatolian group takes a very important and very informative place. Executed in a highly individual style, they consist of representational scenes executed in fine detail: processions of deities standing on sacred animals and hunting or war
KANES. Beak-spouted pitcher. F r o m level II; red slipped and highly polished. N o t e the pair of horses set on the wide b a n d handle, which tend to be light brown in color. Height, including horses, is 26 cm. M u s e u m of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. (Courtesy T . Ozgiic)
centtic fortification systems, the center of the kingdom of Kanes. In houses of two, four, or six rooms, most of them twostoried, tablets in Assyrian were found, in archives mostly belonging to Assyrian and, in fewer instances, to native mer chants, on top of regularly aligned jars, boxes, rush matting, and bags and on wooden shelves. Fourteen thousand tablets and envelopes were discovered between 1948 and 1992. Be cause tlie fire that destroyed the city started very suddenly, the people of the town could just save their lives; all their belongings that were fireproof remained in place until they were excavated. Pottery in the Hittite style and cult objects in tlie shape of animals sacred to die gods—bulls, lions, ea gles, antelopes, rabbits, and boars—reached a high level of development in this period. [See Hittites.] In layout, karum level lb follows that of level II, in which building techniques and plans are native Anatolian. In level lb, in contrast to level II, commercial relations with Assur weakened, while trade within Anatolia gained momentum. As in level II, ivory, bronze, faience, silyer, lead, stone, and
KANES.
Clay drinking vessel in the shape of a lion.
F r o m level II.
Filled through the spout located on its back, tlie outlet for tlie liquid was through an opening in the mouth. L e n g t h 2 1 cm, widdi 1 7 . 8 cm. M u s e u m of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. (Courtesy T . Oz giic)
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KARATEPE PHOENICIAN INSCRIPTIONS
scenes. The surface of tiiese seals is filled with multiple mo tifs and symbols. Stamp seals, which are typical of Anatolia, and appear in every level at Kanes, reached their true de velopment in levels II and lb. With tire end of the Assyrian trading period at Kanes, cylinder seals went out of use. [See Seals.] Mound. Excavations on the mound went down to the final phase of Early Bronze Age I, distinguishing a total of eighteen building levels. The final phases on die mound are two Roman building levels (1-2) and one Hellenistic level (3). At that time Kiiltepe was a small town overshadowed by Kayseri. A major part of the karum of Kanes had become the site of the cemetery. Levels 4-5 represent the Late Hittite period. Kiiltepe then was the center of one of the kingdoms allied to the land of Great Tabal. In the tenth-eighth cen turies BCE, Kiiltepe maintained a strong position, but toward the end of the eighth century BCE it was conquered and de stroyed by the Assyrians, who shattered its hieroglyphic ste lae, statues, and sculpted orthostats. The concordance of the Middle Bronze Age levels on the mound and in the karum follow: mound 6 7 8 9 10
karum la lb II HI IV
In levels 7 and 8 a series of five royal rulers (one of them a queen) are known by name; they had palaces and temples that were built both on the inner citadel and in the surround ing area. Tablets from the palace archives reveal that one of those palaces belonged to Warsama son of Inar, ldng of Kanes. It is evident that palaces in that period were built like Old Babylonian palaces, but temples were built in die native Anatolian style. [See Palace, Temples, article on Mesopota mian Temples.] A spearhead with an Akkadian inscription by King Anitta, who ruled over Nesa, found in the official storage building of the Anitta palace, was the first authentic historical document found in situ at Kanes. Levels 1 1 - 1 3 represent the Early Bronze III period, an important prelude to the Assyrian trading colony era. Kanes, equipped with monumental buildings, had developed exten sive economic and cultural connections with Mesopotamia and North Syria, to which imported cylinder seals, pottery, and metal objects testify. Alabaster figurines of goddesses and gods, characteristic of this period, were discovered in the inner sanctum of temples and in tombs. Levels 1 4 - 1 7 represent Early Bronze Age II. Level 18 is the final phase of Early Bronze I. [See also Kiiltepe Texts.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Balkan, Kemal. Letter of King Anum-Hirbi of Mama to King Warshama of Kamish. Ankara, 1957.
Garelli, Paul. Les Assyriens en Cappadoce. Paris, 1963. Landsberger, Benno. "Assyrische Handelskolonien in Kleinasien aus dem dritten Jahrtausend." Der alte Orient 24.4 (1925): 1-34. Larsen, Mogens T . Old Assyrian Caravan Procedures. Istanbul, 1967. Orlin, Louis L . Assyrian Colonies in Cappadocia. T h e Hague, 1970. Ozgiic, Nimet. The Anatolian Group of Cylinder Seal Impressions from Kiiltepe. Ankara, 1965. Ozgiic, Nimet. Seals and Seal Impressions of Level lb from Karum Kanish. Ankara, 1968. Ozgiic, Tahsin. Ausgrabungen in Kiiltepe, 1948. Ankara, 1950. Ozgiic, Tahsin, and Nimet Ozgiic. Ausgrabungen in Kiiltepe, 1949. A n kara, 1953. Ozgiic, Tahsin. Kiiltepe-Kanis: New Researches at the Center of the As syrian Trade Colonies. Ankara, 1959. Ozgiic, Tahsin. Kiiltepe audits Vicinity in the Iron Age. Ankara, 1 9 7 1 . Ozgiic, Tahsin. Kiiltepe-Kanis II: New Researches at the Trading Center of the Ancient Near East. Ankara, 1986. Ozgiic, Tahsin. "New Observations on the Relationship of Kiiltepe with Southeast Anatolia and North Syria during the Third Millen nium B . C . " In Ancient Anatolia: Aspects of Change and Cultural De velopment; Essays in Honor of MachteldJ. Mellink, edited by Jeanny V. Canby et al., pp. 3 1 - 4 7 . Wisconsin, 1986. Veenhof, Klaas R. Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and Its Terminology. Leiden, 1972. TAHSIN OZGUC
KARATEPE PHOENICIAN INSCRIPTIONS. Karatepe, a Neo-Hittite walled town overlooking the Ceyhan River, is situated approximately 100 km (62 mi.) north east of Adana in Cilicia, Turkey. It was discovered in 1946 by the German archaeologist Helmuth T . Bossert, and a Turkish team began a series of excavations there in the fol lowing year. Those excavations and a meticulous restoration project culminated in the creation of an open-air museum at the site. Karatepe basically consists of a walled enclosure approx imately 1 km in circumference with two monumental gates. The lower part of the two gates is comprised of orthostats covered with bas-reliefs and inscriptions in Phoenician and hieroglyphic Hittite (Luwian). The Phoenician text appears in three places: there are two identical texts on each of the gate structures and a third, which is slightly different, on the statue of a divinity. Each gate also has a hieroglyphic ver sion. Upon discovering the Phoenician inscriptions, Bossert sent copies to a dozen Semitic scholars, each of whom pub lished a translation. Bossert himself began translating the more difficult hieroglyphic text, a task eventually completed in 1974 by Franz Steinherr, one of his students. The author of the inscriptions, a certain Azatiwada fztzvd), identifies himself as a vassal of Urildd, king of the Danunians ('wrk mlk Dnnym). He refers to the blessings he has brought to the Danunians, inhabitants of the Adana plain, while keeping Urikki's descendants on the throne. Thus, he appears to have played the role of a kind of palace prefect. Fie boasts of the part he has played in maintaining peace in the region, particularly by constructing a citadel, which he named after himself (Azatiwada), on the orders of the gods Baal and Rasap (Resheph), in whose honor he has
KAR-TUKULTI-NLNURTA established sacrifices. T h e inscription ends with a prayer to the gods to bless him, the city, and its inhabitants and witii curses on anyone attempting to desttoy his work. These inscriptions are not without problems, one of the most crucial of which is their date. Indeed, the only indi cation of a specific time period is the mention of Urikki, the vassal of the Assyrian ldng, in the annals of Tiglath-Pileser III (738, 732 BCE) and in a letter found at Nimrud dating to 709. Because the inscriptions had to have been written after Urikki's death, they are probably from the very end of die eighth century, which would correspond to the paleographic analysis of the Phoenician text. Because the archaeological data appear to indicate an earlier date for the fortress (ninth century BCE), a great deal of debate has centered around this apparent discrepancy. T h e later date is now generally ac cepted for the inscriptions and the earlier one for the for tress. It is hypothesized tiiat Azitawada constructed his cit adel on the remains of previous construction. Nevertheless, the historical context remains unclear: the absence of any mention of Assyria is particularly surprising; it apparently implies a period of Assyrian retreat after the death of Sargon II (705). These inscriptions are significant because they constitute the longest known Phoenician text to date. With the Kilamuwa inscription at Zincirli and the Cebel Ires Dagi inscrip tion, they reveal the status of Phoenician as an international language in Anatolia from the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE. T h e fact that the inscriptions are in two languages proved to be instrumental in deciphering the Hittite hiero glyph. Finally, they provide information about the Luwian pantheon in this period and the functional parallels in the Phoenician version. [See also Hittite; Luwians; Neo-Hittites; and PhoenicianPunic] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bossert, Helmuth T . , and Halet Cambel. Karatepe: A Preliminary Report on a New Hittite Site. Institute for Research in Ancient Oriental Civ ilizations, Publications, no. i . Istanbul, 1946. Bossert, Helmuth T , Karatepe kazilari. Ankara, 1950. Bron, Francois. Recherches sur les inscriptions pheniciennes de Karatepe. Geneva, 1979. Deshayes, Jean, et al. "Remarques sur les monuments de Karatepe." Revue d'Assyriologie 75 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 3 1 - 6 0 . Donner, Herbert, and Wolfgang Rollig. Kanaanaische und aramdische Inschriften. no. 26. Wiesbaden, 1963. Gibson, John C . L . Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 3, Phoe nician Inscriptions, no. 1 5 . Oxford, 1982. Winter, Irene J . "On the Problems of Karatepe: T h e Reliefs and Their Context." Anatolian Studies 29 (1979): 1 1 5 - 1 5 1 . FRANQOIS BRON Translated from French by Monique Fecteau
KAR-TUKULTI-NINURTA. Site located about 3 Ion (2 mi.) north of Assur in northern Iraq, on the east bank of the Tigris River. Since i960, two villages have appeared
269
within the old ruin: Tulul al-'Aqir (its official modern name) and Na'ifeh. Serious archaeological work at the site was car ried out in winter 1913-1914 by the architect Walter Bachmann, a member of Walter Andrae's team at Assur. The identification of Tulul al- Aqir with ancient Kar-TukultiNinurta, a residential city founded by the Middle Assyrian ruler Tukulti-Ninurta I (1233-1197 BCE), already suggested by Friedrich Sarre and Ernst Herzfeld (1911), was proved by the several foundation tablets Bachmann excavated. Un fortunately, Bachmann did not write a final report and the original field notes were considered lost. Based on the ex isting original plans and maps, it was at least possible for Tilman Eickhoff (1985) to publish a summary of Bachmann's work. Fieldwork under the direction of Reinhard Dittmann sponsored by the German Research Foundation was reopened at the site in 1986 and continued in 1989. The original data belonging to the early campaign were recov ered in 1992, in Dresden, Germany. [See Assur; and the bi ography of Andrae] c
T h e site is about 500 ha (1,235 acres) in area (only 250 ha, or 617 acres, have been surveyed and mapped thus far). T h e site's western limit is defined by the Tigris; its eastern one must be next to a large Middle Assyrian channel run ning parallel to the river that enters the plain about 25 km (16 mi.) to the north. T h e ruin's northern limit cannot be defined today because of recent leveling activities; the south ern city wall was not traced until 1989. T h e city was sub divided into several quarters: an official royal-administrative one, separated from the others by a fortification wall and further subdivided by a smaller wall into western and eastern sections. This complex could be entered through at least four gates (figure 1: D , F, G, N ) . T h e western quarter, on the bank of the Tigris, includes the palace and temples. The eastern part is as yet functionally unidentified and partly overlaid by the two recent villages. Of the original palace complex (minimum measurements 320 X 150 m), only two parts have been excavated so far. The so-called North Palace (figure 1: M) was accessed from a courtyard or an open space to the north through a mon umental entrance that led to the representative rooms; this plan foreshadows the later Neo-Assyrian reception suite lay out, in which access is given to a large unexcavated area, perhaps to a courtyard (or more than one) ending in a huge terrace originally about 18 m high (see the South Palace, figure 1: A). Fragments of elaborate wall paintings on the flanks of the eroded terrace indicate the former importance of the rooms on the top; assuming two stories, they were almost the same height as the top of the neighboring ziggurrat of the Assur Temple (see figure 1: B, i.e., about 30 m high). South of the terrace are industrial-like installations. Recent surveys, south of the terrace, makes likely the ex istence of a large (165 X 120 m) unexcavated structure. About 60 m north of the North Palace, recent excavations unearthed parts of another large complex with a room or courtyard paved with unique rhomboid bricks. The walls
270
KAR-TUKULTI-NINURTA
Gatt:
KAR-TUKULTI-NINURTA.
Figure
I.
n 51) loo
2(>i>
3ik>iti
Temple at Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta has no staircase, and die possibility that there was no real access to the Middle As syrian ziggurat needs to be considered. This would also be in harmony with tlie Assur-Enlil Ziggurat at Assur. [See Zig gurat.] About 250 m north-northeast of the North Palace, a new small temple was excavated in 1989 at an elevation called Tell O. T h e deity worshiped is as yet unidentified; it is also unclear whether this sttucture belonged to the administra tive sector of the city, to a residential area, or the suburbs. Midway between this temple and the palace is an area (about 150 X 150 m) with a dense concentration of pottery and a lot of grinding-stone fragments. T h e finds may indi cate a grain-manufacture and storage unit, such as men tioned in the texts. Traces of large smictures are found in tlie vast southern parts of the city along tlie channel, surely the place where die king settled the different peoples exiled there following his campaigns in neighboring countries. It has been assumed that after the violent death of TukultiNinurta I tlie ruin was either completely deserted or was no more than a hamlet. Survey evidence, as well as a critical
The official section of the town.
(Courtesy R. Dittmann)
had been decorated with glazed tiles in green and yellow, with frit panels with palmette motifs. The only large frag ment found has a direct, contemporaneous parallel in tire area of the Ishtar Temple at Assur; in light of the three votive altars found in the immediate vicinity, this structure might be another temple and not part of the palace, as the stamps, marked E. GAL, on the bricks suggest. In the northeast cor ner of tlie western official part, a small (18.5 X 20 m), tow erlike structure of unknown function has been excavated (figure 1: K). The Assur Temple with its ziggurat (figure 1: B, figure 2; measuring 30 X 30 m) at the base) is located immediately to the southeast of the terrace of die South Palace.The niche of its cella, whose layout is somewhat Babylonian, offers some enigmatic installations that could belong to a woodpanel construction once perhaps decorated with paintings. Because in the 1913-1914 excavations no otiier temple was found or ttaced on the ruin, the structures found in 1989 have now altered the assumption that the large oblong room next to die cella is the place where the gods mentioned in the texts (see Freydank, 1976-) as worshiped at Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta (in addition to Assur: Adad, Shamash, Ninurta, Nusku, Nergal, Sebittu, and Ishtar), were assembled in the form of votive altars. Access to the ziggurat is unclear. Andrae and Bachmann identified a small suucture west of the ziggurat as a staircase building from which, via a bridge like construction, the first level of the ziggurat could be reached. Another hypothesis, based on the evidence of Tell er-Rimah (possibly ancient Karana), envisions access via the roof of the temple. [See Rimah, Tell er-.] The Assur
lis M
B _ _______
flM
P"*
c. 30 m
KAR-TUKULTI-NINURTA.
Figure 2.
ziggurat. (Sketch by W. Bachmann)
Plan of the Ashir temple with
KASSITES examination of the historical sources, shows that there was a brief interruption in tire use of most of the public buildings (with the exception of the new temple in Tell O, which con tinued to be in use for a short time) and that in the one-year reign of Ninurta-Tukulti-Assur (1133 BCE) parts of struc tures had been pulled down. So-called Ishtar hands, found in some quantities especially in the South Palace, attest to a partial reuse of the ruin in the ninth century BCE. Important traces of a Neo-Assyrian occupation have mostly been found in the official sector of the town (figure 1: J? and newly excavated areas). Historical records mention at least two of ficial administrators of tire town at the end of the ninth and the second half of the eighth centuries BCE. N O traces of a post-Assyrian occupation have yet been found, with the ex ception of a few Parthian sherds and some medieval pottery. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bastert, Katrin, and Reinhard Dittmann. "Anmerkungen zu einigen Schmuckelementen eines mittelassyrischen Temples in K a r TukultTNinurta (Iraq)." Allorientalische Forschungen 22 (1995): 8-29. Pre liminary report on the excavation of the temple in Tell O in 1989. Dittmann, Reinhard, et al. " K a r TukultT-Ninurta/Al-'Aqar 1986." Sumer (1989-1990): 86-97. Preliminary report on the campaign of 1986. Dittmann, Reinhard, et al. "Untersuchungen in Kar-TukultT-Ninurta (TulQl al-'Aqar), 1986." Mitteilungen der Deulschen Orient-Gesellschaft 1 2 0 (1988): 9 7 - 1 3 8 . Preliminary report of the work at the site in 1986 and a critical review of the old data. Dittmann, Reinhard. "Ausgrabungen der Freien Universitat Berlin in Assur and Kar-TukultT-Ninurta in den Jahren 1988-89." Mitteilun gen der Deulschen Orient-Gesellschaft 1 2 2 (1990): 1 5 7 - 1 7 1 . Second preliminary report on the new excavations. Dittmann, Reinhard. "Assur und K a r Tukulti-Ninurta." American Journal of Archaeology 96 (1992): 3 0 7 - 3 1 2 . Treats the campaigns of 1986 and 1989. Eickhoff, Tilman. Kar Tukulti Ninurta: Eine miltelassyrische Kult- und Residenzstadl, Abhandlungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 2 1 . Berlin, 1985. T h e first comprehensive compilation of the data from die old excavation. Frame, Grant. "Assyrian Clay Hands." Baghdader Mitteilungen 22 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3 3 5 - 3 8 1 . Compilation of data on the so-called Ishtar Hands. Freydank, H. "Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta. A . Philologisch." In Reallcxikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasialischen Archdologie, vol. 5, pp. 455-456. Berlin, 1 9 7 6 - . Overview of the textual finds and historical informa tion on tlie ruins. Sarre, Friedrich P. T . , and Ernst Herzfeld. " D e r Djabal Makhul." In Archdologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigris-Bcgiet, vol. 1 , pp. 2 1 2 2 1 4 . Berlin, 1 9 1 1 . T h e earliest correct identification of the site and some pottery sherds, already indicating a Neo-Assyrian occupation. REINHARD DITTMANN
KASSITES, A tribal people of unknown origin, the Kas sites (Kassu) are attested mainly in Babylonia and western Iran in the second and first millennia BCE. Apart from Kassite-Akkadian bilinguals and Kassite onomastica (Balkan, !954J PP. 2-4), a Kassite presence in Babylonia is deduced from textual references to a "land of tire Kassites" (Kessler, 1982, p. 57, no. 1), a "king of the Kassites" (Brinkman, 1976, p . 405), a "Kassite" dynasty (Babylonian king list A),
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and certain individuals designated as Kassite in administra tive records. The Kassite dynasty (fifteentlr-twelfth centuries BCE) is bracketed by two "dark ages" which obscure what is known of its rise and tlie aftermath of its fall. Though often dis missed as a reign lacking in cultural identity, Kassite rule brought an extended period of relative political stability and economic prosperity to a unified Sumer-Babylonia, which attained international prestige, ranking with Assyria, Hatti, and Egypt in the Amarna correspondence of the fifteenththirteenth centuries BCE. [See Amarna Tablets.] T h e culture and literature of Babylonia, promoted by the Kassites in an effort to legitimize their rule at home, spread throughout the Near East, along with the widespread adoption of Babylo nian as the language of diplomacy. History. Texts of die eighteenth century BCE provide tlie first references to individuals and groups of Kassites linked primarily with Sippar and its tribal environs. As agricultural laborers and militiamen, these early Kassites appear in col laboration, but also in confrontation, with tlie Babylonians. By the end of the Old Babylonian period, a Kassite is at tested as far west as Alalakh in die Orontes valley; their main concentration lay on the Middle Euphrates and Khabur river valleys, near Khana and Terqa. This area was ruled by a king with the Kassite name of Kashtiliashu, who may have been a Babylonian vassal (Podany, 1991-1993, p. 60, n. 60). From the region of Khana, the Kassites gained control of northern Babylonia following the decline of the first dynasty of Babylon in the early sixteenth century BCE. With tlie de parture of the Sealand lungs and the conquest of their ter ritories, the Kassites then ruled over a united Sumer-Bab ylonia between about 1475 and 1155 BCE. Most of what is known about the Kassites of this period relates to the ruling dynasty. According to tire Babylonian ldng list A, the Kassite dy nasty consisted of thirty-six lungs who, with minor interrup tions, reigned an unprecedented 576 years. Little is known of the earlier ldngs until the reign of Agum II. In an inscrip tion known from a later copy, which may be a scribal for gery, Agum II is said to have returned the statues of Marduk and his wife from Khani to Babylon twenty-four years after dieir removal by the Hittites in about 1595 BCE (middle chro nology). T h e first Kassite monarch to rule the north as ldng of Babylonia was Burna-Buriash I (c. 1510 BCE), but it is not until tlie late fifteenth century BCE that there are contem porary sources for tlie Kassite kings. Royal inscriptions and the Amarna letters, dating largely between 1402 and 1347 BCE, document the intensification of international relations between Egypt and Babylonia—from tlie initial exchange of ambassadors and gifts under Kara-indash (c. 1415 BCE) to diplomatic marriages and large-scale trade during the reign of Burna-Buriash II (1359-1333 BCE). T h e early years of Sumero-Babylonian unification and the establishment of tlie Kassite dynasty were marked by exten sive building programs, associated in particular with Kara-
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indash and Kurigalzu I (c. 1390 BCE). With proceeds ob tained largely from international trade, major restoration and reconstruction were undertaken in several old Sumerian cities, notably at Ur, Eridu and Uruk. A fortified capital or royal residence was erected at Dur Kurigalzu/'Aqar Quf on the outsldrts of modern Baghdad, presumably to defend the capital at Babylon against Assyria or Elam. With the decline of Mitannian hegemony in the mid-fourteenth century BCE, Babylon extended its boundaries northward to Kirkuk, where Kassites made up approximately 2 percent of the population in and around Nuzi (1440-1340 BCE), whose rec ords provide the oldest archival corpus of Kassite onomastica. [See Mitanni.] During the reign of Burna-Buriash II, the Kassite dynasty ranked among the major powers of the Near East, its mon arch hailed internationally as a "Great King" and his family linked by diplomatic marriages to the courts of Hatti, Egypt, and Assyria, where the influence of Babylonian language, religion, and customs is apparent. After 1335 BCE, the equilibrium was upset by occasional conflicts on the northern and eastern frontiers, with Baby lonian incursions into Assyria and Iran and vice versa. A short-lived Assyrian interregnum under Ashur-Uballit I was followed by Tukulti-Ninurta I ' s more major conquest of Babylonia (c, 1225-1217 BCE), which recovered its indepen dence before the Elamite invasion by Shutruk-Nahhunte brought about the end of the Kassite dynasty in about 1155 BCE. The deportation of prisoners and booty accounts for the presence of Kassites in northern Mesopotamia from the late thirteenth century BCE. They are still attested serving in various capacities in Neo-Assyrian records of the first mil lennium BCE. At tiiis time, monarchs with Kassite names reigned in the northerly regions of Allabria and Na'iri. Large concentrations of Kassites had been settled to the east in the Namri (Namar)-Habban area, which fell under Assyrian in fluence in the ninth century BCE. After the fall of the Kassite dynasty in the mid-twelfth century BCE, Kassites continued to reside in Babylonia, where they appear to have been fully assimilated. They bear Babylonian names and hold high governmental posts, until at least the ninth century BCE. Monarchs of Kassite descent occupied the throne under the second Sealand and Bazu dynasties in the late eleventh and early tenth centuries BCE. At that time, when trade relations to the west and north of Babylonia were being disrupted by the Arameans, there were close artistic and economic connections between Bab ylonia and the people living in the area of the Zagros Moun tains, on either side of the Baghdad-Kermanshah road. It is there, in the piedmont hills of eastern Iraq and western Iran, tiiat the majority of Kassites settled in the first millennium BCE. A warlike tribal people, they retained their indepen dence from the Neo-Assyrian period through to Achae menid and Hellenistic times, when the main textual sources are in Greek or Latin (Brinkman, 1968, 1972,1976).
Language and Literature. Knowledge of the Kassite language and its syntax is limited, based as it is on bilingual lists and scattered references to Kassite deities, names, terms, and words. From what is known, it bears no relation to any other language or language family. Archives and texts dating to the Kassite dynasty have been found at numerous sites on the Middle Euphrates (Terqa); in the Hamrin (Tell Mohammed, Tell Imlihiye, Tell Zubaydi); in Sumer-Babylonia (Ur, Larsa, Uruk, Isin, Nippur, Babylon, D u r Kuri galzu, Sippar); at Susa; and on both Failaka (Kuwait) and Bahrain (Qala'at al-Balrrain). T h e bulk, largely unpubli shed, are written in Middle Babylonian and concern eco nomic life. Dedicatory building inscriptions were, by con trast, written in Sumerian. [See Sumerian.] These, the letters, and the royal inscriptions (notably from Dur Kuri galzu) shed light on international affairs, the conventional titulary of the Kassite monarchs, and their public display of power and piety through major building projects. Boundary stones (kudurru) from the final quarter of the dynasty inform on the tax structure and provincial administration under Kassite rule. In addition to restoring and maintaining national shrines, the Kassite ldngs also promoted the collection, composition, and recording of literary works, which were stored in temple libraries, such as those largely preserved at Ur, Uruk, Nip pur, Babylon, and Sippar. Some of these were looted by Tukulti-Ninurta I, following his sack of Babylon in the thir teenth century BCE. It appears that many of the standard literary works found in the later Neo-Assyrian libraries of the seventh century BCE are copies of Kassite originals and compilations. Scribal families of the first millennium BCE claimed descent from famous Kassite forebears, one of whom, Sin-leqe-unnini, is credited with the authorship of the eleven-tablet Epic of Gilgamesh found in Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh. Sociopolitical Structure and Settlement Patterns. As ruler of a unified Sumer-Babylonia, die Kassite monarch replaced the old political structure of city-states with a na tional state and surpassed his predecessors in international prestige. In what appears to have been an attempt to appease the ancient Sumerian centers, the Kassite monarchs (who bore Kassite names until the reign of Kudur-Enlil [12541246 BCE], when some assumed Babylonian names) adopted Babylonian titulary, customs, religion, and language. For much of its rule, the Kassite monarchy was dominated by a single family; the normal succession being father-son, but fraternal succession may also have occurred. T h e Amarna correspondence demonstrates that the palace en gaged in foreign trade—though the extent of its involvement is uncertain—and royal participation in military maneu vers—which then incorporated the horse and chariot—is also attested. Information on die government bureaucracy, provincial administration, and taxation derives mainly from kudurrus
KASSITES (boundary stones) of the last quarter of the dynasty. T h e individual provinces were governed by a Saknu/saknu man (governor/governor of the land) or, in the case of Nippur, the sandabakku (a unique tide for the governor of Nippur), but little is known of their duties or the extent of their juris diction. Private ownership of land was recognized by the crown. Exemption from taxes in kind, corvee, and military service was normally obtained only by royal decree, which may have been granted to certain religious cities (e.g., Bab ylon) at this time. Apart from the ruling dynasty, little is known of the Kassite aristocracy or die Kassite component within the popu lation of Babylonia. Kassite social structure was tribal, based on a unit called House of So-and-So, after an eponymous ancestor. Each house or clan, comprising persons related in the male line, involved up to several villages with consider able agricultural land and was headed by a bel biti ("lord of the house"). The Kassite tribal organization is best attested between 1200 and 850 BCE. There are, however, references to Kassite "houses" in the eighteenth century BCE, suggest ing the existence of similar social units on the outskirts of Old Babylonian cities. These units seem to have retained tiieir social structure throughout the period of the Kassite dynasty. T h e prominence of relatively small clan and tribal units in Kassite society may account for the steady rise in the percentage of small nonurban settlements (e.g., Tell Zubaydi) and the decline in urban complexes in Babylonia dur ing the Late Bronze Age. E c o n o m y . T h e extensive building and restoration pro grams undertaken by the Kassite monarchs in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE were largely financed by trade, in particular with Egypt. In its age-old role as middleman, Babylonia prospered at the center of a complex network of commercial contacts tiiat spread throughout the Near East and beyond to the Aegean, as well as to present-day Af ghanistan. Babylonian textiles, horses (steeds), and chariots were sent west to Egypt with transhipped luxury items such as lapis lazuli in exchange for gold and precious stones. The textual evidence for far-flung trade during the Amarna pe riod is borne out in the archaeological record by the discov ery of a Babylonian cylinder at Failaka and another in the Uluburun shipwreck, which was bound westward, where Kassite seals made of lapis lazuli were found in a hoard at Thebes in Boeotia (Porada, 1981). Evidence for foreign shipments within Babylonia include a Mycenaean-style in got from Tell al-Abyad, as well as Egyptian jewelry found at Babylon, Tell ed-Der, and Nippur. As a result of this trade, the country's economy went on the gold standard, which lasted at least until the reign of Ada-shuma-iddina (c. 1222-1217 BCE). Under the last lungs of the dynasty, trade had dwindled to such an extent that Babylonia briefly went on a copper standard. Religion a n d Burial C u s t o m s . T h e official embrace of Mesopotamian religion and liturgy left little trace of the ven
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eration of Kassite deities, and much of the evidence is tex tual. T h e investiture of the Kassite kings took place at Bab ylon in the shrine of tiieir patron deities, Suqamuna and his consort Simalija, both mountain deities of foreign origin, whose names occur in Ugaritic literature and whose statues were still preserved in the seventh century BCE. There is an indication of a possible cult of a Kassite goddess ( Kassitu) in about die mid-first millennium BCE at Uruk and perhaps also at Babylon. Other prominent Kassite deities include: Burias, the weather god; Harbe, the lord of the pantheon—a god also venerated in Hurrian areas; Maruttas (often equated with the Sumero-Akkadian Ninurta); Mirizir, a goddess identi fied with the generic Beltu; Sah, a sun god; Sipak, the moon god; and Surias, the more common solar deity. The names of some of the Kassite gods have been compared with IndoEuropean deities, but contact, if any, would have occurred prior to the arrival of the Kassites in Mesopotamia (Brinkman, 1976). M a t e r i a l C u l t u r e . As with the religious and literary cul ture of the Kassites, there is little remaining in the way of architecture, industry, or art that is quintessentially Kassite. At the capital, Babylon, most of the Kassite occupation lies under the water table, but contemporary levels have been exposed at several ancient Sumerian cities (Nippur, Isin, Larsa, and Ur) and, most recently, in the Hamrin and Haditha regions. [See Flamrin D a m Salvage Project.] These provide evidence for Kassite town planning, as well as sec ular and religious architecture and burials—which, on the whole, adhere to Mesopotamian conventions. Much the same applies to the extant artwork of the Kassite period, which is characterized by the selective adaptation of estab lished forms and iconography. Architecture and architectural decoration. The ear liest-known Kassite building is the Inanna temple built by Kara-indash at Uruk (late fifteenth century BCE). Its rectan gular plan follows the Assyrian langraum scheme, with the entrance in the center of the short wall, directly opposite the altar. Its exterior decoration of baked, molded bricks is de rived from unbaked variations at Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian temples. T h e alternating mountain and water de ities, which decorate the facade, each have older prototypes, but tiieir combination is unique. Fragments of molded-brick ornament have also been found at Ur, Nippur, Larsa, and Dur Kurigalzu. The technique was adopted and developed by the Elamites, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. Dur Kurigalzu was most probably founded by Kurigalzu I in the early fourteenth century BCE. The eroded remains of its ziggurat, which still rises about 57 m above the plain, was often mistaken by early travelers for the biblical Tower of Babel. [See Ziggurat.] Its mud-brick core was leveled and bonded with layers of reed matting and plaited ropes at reg ular intervals. Aside from this construction method, the zig gurat conforms to southern decoration and plan with an exd
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terior facade of buttresses and recesses and a triple staircase giving access to die temple on top. Also reminiscent of Ur III and Isin/Larsa-period religious precincts is the adjoining complex of partially excavated courtyards and corridors— identified as temples diough they lack a recognizable shrine. The palace at Tell Abyad, 700 m northwest of the ziggurat, covered an area of about 300 sq m. It consisted of several courtyard blocks with four building levels, of which level II is associated with tablets of Kudur-Enlil (1254-1246 BCE) and Kashtiliashu IV (1232-1225 BCE); level I contained those of Marduk-apla-iddina (1171-1159 BCE). Wall paint ing, found in all four building levels, is especially well pre served in level IG, where individuals and groups are shown in procession. The procession motif prefigures the common theme of Assyrian palace decoration, and the fez, which is later adopted as the royal headdress in Assyria, appears here in connection with one group of Babylonian nobility or As syrian subjects. [See Wall Paintings.] Sculpture. T h e Kassites are credited with the introduc tion of the kudurru, an elaborately carved boundary stone which served to commemorate royal land grants (see figure 1). Most popular in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries BCE, the oldest extant kudurru dates to the fourteenth century BCE; they continued to be made into the first millennium BCE. The text is generally accompanied by a relief decoration il lustrating the symbols of the deities who witnessed the trans action. While most deities and symbols are Mesopotamian in origin, three symbols (a bird with its head reversed, a bird on a pole, and the cross) represent Kassite gods. Glyptic. Kassite glyptic is conventionally divided into four main styles, whose regional and chronological distri bution is difficult to determine on the basis of the evidence available to date. First Kassite has been traced to origins in the eighteenth century BCE although a number of seals from the Khana ldngdom have now been redated to the sixteenth century BCE (Podany, 1991-1993). It is seen as an outgrowth of the late Old Babylonian style, continuing to at least the mid-thirteenth century BCE. Characterized by its hard-stone material and full-length inscriptions, this group includes most of the seals inscribed with royal names. [See Seals.] Comparisons between this group and the later paintings at 'Aqar Quf, on the one hand, and Kassite kudurru on the other, are considered unconvincing. Caps of granulated gold, once regarded as typically Kassite, are now known to have been used during the reign of Shamshi-Adad I of As syria. Second Kassite includes a variety of mainly symmetrical designs of which the most important is the "cthonic god" series. The scenes depicting a god rising from either water or mountains resemble tire figural decoration on the Temple of Kara-indash at Uruk and find parallels at Assur. Other typical designs are centered on an upright man, demon, or tree that is flanked by diagonal fish men, animals, or mon sters. This group ranges from the fourteenth to late thir-
KASSITES. Figure 1 . A kudurru representing the mastiff of Gula. (Courtesy J . C . Margueron)
teenth centuries BCE. The related Third Kassite/Isin II group is posited in the twelfth century BCE, on account of its ap parent derivation from Assyrian prototypes of the thirteenth century BCE. The scenes concentrate on the themes of ani mals, monsters, and trees and are identified above all by tire volute tree and garland motif. Pseudo-Kassite is typified by its soft-stone or composite material, its truncated inscriptions, horizontal and vertical borders, and the twisted tree. A tentative origin in the midfourteenth century BCE is argued on the basis of impressions on dated tablets from Nippur. A hybrid group, pseudo-Kassite designs show influence form Babylonian, Mitannian, and Elamite traditions. (Matthews, 1992; Kiihne, 1995). Luxury products. T h e Kassite-period industry in luxury goods is characterized by the production of faience, sintered quartz, and glass wares, which, in common with other pro duction centers of the Amarna Age, was largely restricted to local needs. A foreign, Egyptian influence is manifest in the jewelry of this period, as well as in the painted terra-cotta head from the palace at 'Aqar Quf. [See also Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia. In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of inde pendent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Language and Texts Balkan, Kemal. Kassitenstudien I; Die Sprache der Kassiten. Translated from Turkish by F . R . Kraus. American Oriental Series, 3 7 . N e w Haven, 1954.
KAZEL, TELL ALDosch, Gudrun, and Kariheinz Deller. "Die Familie Kizzuk. Sieben Kassitengenerationen in Temfena und Suriniwe." In Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians, edited by M . A . Morrison and D . I. Owen, vol. i, pp. 9 1 - 1 1 3 . Bloomington, Ind., 1981. Kessler, Kariheinz. "Kassitische Tontafeln von Tell Imlihiye." Baghdader Milleilungen 1 3 (1982): 5 1 - 1 1 6 . Lambert, W. G . "Ancestors, Audiors, and Canonicity." Journalof Cu neiform Studies 1 1 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 1 - 1 4 . Prichard, James, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Tes tament. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. History Brinkman, John A . A Political History of Post-Kassile Babylonia, 1158722 B.C. Analecta Orientalia, 43. R o m e , 1968. Sec pages 246-259. Brinkman, John A . "Foreign Relations of Babylonia from 1600 to 625 B . C . : T h e Documentary Evidence." American Journal of Archaeology 76 (1972): 2 7 1 - 2 8 1 . Brinkman, John A . " T h e Monarchy in the T i m e of die Kassite D y nasty." In Le palais et la royaute: Archeologie et civilisation; compte rendu de la 19c rencontre Assyriologique inlernalionale, edited by Paul Garelli, pp. 395-408. Paris, 1974. Brinkman, John A . Materials and Studies for Kassite History, vol. 1, A Catalogue of Cuneiform Sources Pertaining to Specific Monarchs of the Kassite Dynasty. Chicago, 1976. Edzard, Dietz O. "Die Beziehungen Babyloniens und Agyptens in der mittelbabylonischen Zeit und das G o l d . " Journal of the Economic and Social Histoiy of the Orient 3 (i960): 3 8 - 5 5 . Podony, Amanda. " A Middle Babylonian Date for the Hana K i n g dom." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 43-45 ( 1 9 9 1 - 1 9 9 3 ) : 5 3 - 6 2 . Art and Archaeology Baqir, Taha. Iraq Government Excavations at 'Aqar Quf, 1942-1943. London, 1944. Baqir, Taha. Iraq Government Excavations at 'Aqar Quf: Second Interim Report, 1943-1944. London, 1 9 4 5 . Beran, Thomas. "Die babylonische Glyptik der Kassitenzeit." Archiv fur Orientforschung 18 (1957): 2 5 5 - 2 7 8 . Boehmer, Rainer Michael, and Heinz-Werner Dammer. Tell Imlihiye, Tell Zubeidi, 'Tell Abbas. Baghdader Forschungen, 7 Mainz am Rhein, 1985. Invernizzi, Antonio. "Excavations in the Yelkhi Area (Hamrin Project, Iraq)." Mesopotamia 1 5 (1980): 1 9 - 4 9 . Kuhne, Hartmut. " D e r mittclassyriche 'Cut Style.' " Zeitschrifl fiir Assyriologie 85.2 (1995): 2 7 7 - 3 0 1 . Matthews, Donald M . Principles of Composition in Near Eastern Glyptic of tlie Later Second Millennium B. C. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, S e ries Archaeologica, 8. Freiburg, 1990. Matthews, Donald M . The Kassite Glyptic of Nippur. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 1 1 6 . Freiburg, 1992. Porada, Edith. " T h e Cylinder Seals Found at Thebes in Boeotia." Ar chiv fiir Orientforschung 28 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 - 7 0 . Seidl, Ursula. Die babylonischen Kudurru-Reliefs. Orbis Biblicus et Or ientalis, 87. Freiburg, 1989. Spycket, Agnes. "Kassite and Middle Elamite Sculpture." In Later Mesopotamia and Iran: Tribes and Empires 1600-539 BC, edited by John Curtis, pp. 2 5 - 3 2 . London, 1 9 9 5 . Tomabechi, Yoko. "Wall Paintings from D u r Kurigalzu." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 42 (1983): 1 2 3 - 1 3 1 . DIANA L . STEIN
KAZEL, TELL AL-, one of the largest five tells on the Syrian coast, situated on the 'Akkar plain in the western part
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of die topographic depression of Homs, the easiest pass from Syria's interior to die sea. It dominates the al-Abrash River at a distance of about 3.5 Ion (22 mi.) from the sea, 8 Ion (5 mi.) nortii of Nahr al-Kabir al-Junubi (the Eleutheros) and about 25 km ( 1 6 mi.) southeast of Tortose and Arwad. T h e tell is shaped like an oval platform ( 3 1 0 X 280 m). Its summit is about 25 m above the surrounding plain and 50 m above sea level. Three ancient roads climb to the tell's upper terraces, which were used in antiquity. T h e modern village, which until recently occupied the center of the tell, was transferred to the plain. The word hazel in tiiis toponym is not Arabic or any other Semitic language. However, casal, which means "castle" in the toponymy of the Crusader period in Syria, may explain the name ("tell of the castle"). In fact there was a casal crowning the tell as early as the Roman period, whose tower was uncovered in 1956 during the excavations of Maurice Dunand and Nassib Saliby (see below). Ptolemy (5.15.4) mentions the Simyra castellum, as does Pomponius Mela ( 1 . 1 2 ) . It is probable that Simyra was the name of the site in the Greco-Roman period, a likely variation of Sumur, the name of the city in the Amarna letters and Sumri in die Middle Assyrian records. [See Amarna Tablets.] Sumur, the capital of Amurru, is mentioned more than fifty times in the Amarna texts. It would correspond well to the privileged position of Tell al-Kazel in the historically important pass from the coast to inner Syria and at the center of a very fertile plain of about 500 sq km ( 3 1 0 sq. mi.) From Genesis ( 1 0 : 1 8 ) , Pliny (Nat. Hist. 5.20.17) and Strabo (Geog. 1 6 . 2 . 1 2 ) followed by W. M . Thomson (Bibliotheca Sacra, 1848, vol. 5, pp. 1 5 - 1 7 ) and Ernest Renan (Mission en Phenicie, Paris, 1864, p. 1 1 5 ) it is possible to conclude that the city of Simyra should exist on the plain between the Amrit (Marathus) River and die Nahr al-Kabir al-Junubi (the Eleutheros). These resources confirm the an nals of Thutmosis III (Breasted, 1 9 0 6 , 1 1 . 1 0 8 . 4 6 5 ) andTiglatii-Pileser I (Luckenbill, 1926, p . 98, no. 302). The latter arrived from Arwad to "Sumri" in six hours (tiiree double hours), which corresponds exactly to the distance between the two sites. Finally, the land to the nordi of Tell al-Kazel is still named Ard Simyrian ("land of Simyrian"), after the later name of the site (Simyra). From the archaeological point of view, Tell al-Kazel is die largest and the richest of the tells, and its stratigraphy is in accord with the known period of Sumur/Simyra. [See the biography of Renan.} The primary argument against the identification of Su mur/Simyra witii Tell al-Kazel considers that the Amarna letters mention "the ships of Sumur," and Tell al-Kazel is 3.5 km (2 mi.) from the sea. However, the Mediterranean sea has undergone frequent fluctuations throughout history, so that the coastline then may have been closer to the site. If tiiis were true for the Amarna period, the river could have been used to bring the ship into a harbor in front of the city. In any case, many harbors, like Minet el-Beida and al-Mina, were far from the cities they served.
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E. O. Forrer in 1939 and Robert Braidwood in 1940 (see "A Note on die Identification of Simyra," Syria 2 1 [1940]: 2 1 8 - 2 2 1 ) were the first to refer to Tell al-Kazel. In 1956 the tell was surveyed under the auspices of the Syrian Direc torate General of Antiquities and Museums by Maurice Dunand and Nassib Saliby. In 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 6 1 and 1962, D u nand, Adnan Bounni, and Saliby undertook large-scale ex cavations there. In 1985, jointly with tire museum of the American University of Beirut, the Syrian Directorate Gen eral resumed a season of excavations headed by Bounni and Leila Badre. Since 1986, Bounni granted the entire permit to the AUB team directed by Badre with the strict collabo ration of Michel Al-Maqdissi from the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums. T h e riverbank at die foot of Tell al-Kazel is rich in stone artifacts from the Lower and Middle Paleolithic periods. The tell itself is on a natural promontory on which the first settlement was located in the Neolithic period. Neolithic stone implements for agriculture and hunting have been found on the surface, with scattered material from other pe riods before the end of the third millennium. The debris from these periods is 10 m thick. Urban installations presumably began with the arrival of the Cananite-Amorite population. [See Amorites.] The city was then protected by a rampart. T h e extraction and reuse of stones from die tell both recently and in antiquity have greatly disturbed the archaeological sequences. Neverthe less, from the pottery and some undisturbed locations in the three excavated areas to the west, southeast, and northeast the history of the site since the Middle Bronze Age can be reconstructed: 1. MB period. T h e city wall in area III to die northeast was built of stone rubble and buttressed by a glacis made of hard yellow clay. T h e corresponding ceramics are mainly carinated black bowls and burnished flat-based jars. 2. Amarna period. T h e palace to the northwest and an other LB III architectural remains produced local plain jars and utensils, white-slipped bowls, base-ring juglets, Myce naean-type vessels with Canaanite garments, and weapons. 3 . Iron Age I. The lower parts of large rooms were exca vated, and local bichrome and sub-Mycenaean III C pottery were found (necklace beads and an Astarte plaque). 4. Iron Age II. A great quantity of red-slipped pottery was found in level A. Cypro-Geometric vessels were also well represented along with some Neo-Assyrian pottery sherds. 5 . Achaernenid period. A rich level was excavated from the Achaemenid period with a monumental building and prob ably a Cananite temple (a Persian-style column base and one offering table). T h e principal corresponding types of pottery were Cananite jars and imported Attic ceramics (sixth-fourth centuries BCE). Noteworthy also was a large collection of terra-cotta heads of typical Cananite (Phoeni cian) priests. [See Phoenicians.] 6. Hellenistic period. T h e principal area excavated from
the Hellenistic period was a large cemetery on the northeast terrace. It was very rich in local and imported pottery: Late Cananite small jars, imported Rhodian amphorae, local fish plates, Megarian bowls and bowls from Pergamon. 7 . Roman period. On the southern side of the tell the lower part of a Roman tower was excavated, but there were few other traces of tiiis period, except for quantities of Early and Late Roman pottery. 8. Byzantine and Islamic periods. Byzantine pottery and a variety of glazed Islamic vessels were found on the surface without a clear connection to any buildings, which had mostly been removed during agricultural activities. BIBLIOGRAPHY Badre, Leila. "Tell Kazel, 1 9 8 7 . " Archiv fur Orienlforschung 3 6 - 3 7 (1989-1990): 258-260. Badre, Leila, et al. "Tell Kazel-Syria Excavations of the A U B Museum, 1985-87: Preliminary Reports." Berytus 38 (1990): 9 - 1 2 4 , Badre, Leila. "Recent Phoenician Discoveries at Tell Kazel." In Atti del II congresso internazionale di studi fenici e punici, vol. 2, edited by Enrico Acquaro et al. Rome, 1 9 9 1 . Badre, Leila, et al. "Tell Kazel (Syrie), Rapport preliminaire sur les 4e-8e campagne de fouilles ( 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 9 2 ) . " Syria71 (1994): 259-346. Breasted, James H. Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. Vol. 2. Chicago, 1906. Dunand, Maurice, and Nassib Saliby. "A la recherche de Simyra." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 7 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 3 - 1 6 . Dunand, Maurice, Adnan Bounni, and Nassib Saliby. "Fouilles de Tell Kazel: Rapport preliminaire." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syrien nes 14 (1964): 3 - 1 4 . Elayi, Josette. " L e s importations grecques a Tell Kazel (Simyra) a I'epoque perse." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 3 6 - 3 7 (1986-1987): 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 . Gubel, Eric. "Tell Kazel (Sumur/Simyra) a I'epoque perse." Transeuphratene 2 (1990): 37-49. Klengel, Horst. "Sumur/Simyra und die Eleutheros-Ebene in der G e schichte Syriens." Klio 66.1 (1984): 5 - 1 8 . Luckenbill, Daniel D . Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. Vol. 1 . Chicago, 1926. Maqdissi, Michel al-. Courriers de I'archeologie syrienne. 2 vols. Damas, T989.
Weiss, Harvey. "Archaeology in Syria." American Journal of Archae ology 95-4 ( i 9 9 i ) : 7 3 4 - 7 3 5 . ADNAN BOUNNI
KEFAR HANANYAH, Jewish village located on the lower slope of a hill east of the Hananyah Valley, in northern Lower Galilee, about 9 km (5.5 mi.) southwest of Safed (map reference 189 X 2 5 8 ) . T h e identification of ancient Kefar Hananyah with modern Kafr 'Inan (Kufr 'Anan) is based on geographic references in tannaitic literature, in cluding mention of Kefar Hananyah as a boundary point between Upper and Lower Galilee (Mishnah Shev. 9.2); on archaeological and archaeometric evidence showing that the site was a pottery-manufacturing center during the Roman and Early Byzantine periods (see below); on the mention in a twelfth-century CE text of a rock-cut synagogue at Kefar
KEFAR HANANYAH Hananyah (see below); and on the phonetic similarity of Kafr 'Inan (Kufr 'Anan) to Kefar Hananyah. Rabbinic sources dating to the first/second-fourth cen turies CE refer to Kefar Hananyah as a well-known potterymanufacturing center, mentioning several of its products and attesting to their durability under conditions of thermal stress. Rabbi Halafta of Kefar Hananyah (second century CE) is quoted several times in tannaitic sources. T h e descrip tion by Jacob ben Nathanel, a twelftli-century (prior to 1187) traveler, of a synagogue at Kefar Hananyah "quarried from the hill with only one built wall" (Reiner, fordrcoming, no. i ) , seems to refer to more substantial remains then vis ible of the rock-cut sttucutre at the site (see below). Menachem ha-Hevroni (c. 1215) mentions a synagogue in use by the residents of Kefar Hananyah (Reiner, forthcoming, no. 5). In two unpublished manuscripts (c. sixteenth cen tury), and apparendy also in a fragmentary third text (prob ably late fifteenth century), two synagogues are mentioned (in two cases tire authors state that one of the synagogues is in use by the Jews of the settlement; Reiner, forthcoming, no. 10). Joseph Braslavsky (Braslavi; 1933) identified remains of a rectangular rock-cut public structure (similar to that at Meiron) located east of tire village of Kufr 'Anan as an ancient synagogue. [See Synagogues.] In the early 1980s, Zvi Han (1981-1982) published a plan of that building, found re mains of another public building he suggested was a second synagogue, and traced remains of an aqueduct to the site, suggesting an early date for its construction (it is apparently medieval, however; see below). [See Aqueducts.] Parts of several installations for olive-oil production have been stud ied by Rafael Frankel (1984). [See Olives.] A bronze polycandelon, bearing an Aramaic dedicatory inscription men tioning the "holy place of Kefar Hananyah" and inscribed with two seven-branched menorahs, each flanked by a lulav and shofar, was found at el-Makr in the western Galilee and published by Jean-Baptiste Frey (1952) and, subsequemly, by Joseph Naveh (1978, 1988). T h e pottery center at Kefar Hananyah was studied as part of an interdisciplinary regional project investigating the manufacture and local ttade of common pottery in the Gal ilee and Golan in the Late Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byzantine periods. T h e ongoing project, directed by David Adan-Bayewitz, was begun in 1981 by him and the late Isadore Perlman at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has continued at Bar-Han University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with the collaboration of Frank Asaro, Robert D. Giauque, and Helen V. Michel of the latter institution, and Moshe Wieder, of the former. Archaeometric work conducted between 1981 and 1985 showed that Kefar Hananyah supplied most of the kitchen pottery of tlie Galilee, and a significant minority of tlie cook ing vessels of the Golan, from the Early Roman through tlie Early Byzantine periods (c. mid-first century BCE-early fifth
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century CE). T h e vessel forms made at Kefar Hananyah have been identified and dated, and their geographic and quantitative distribution described (Adan-Bayewitz, 1993). In the wake of this analytical study, Adan-Bayewitz di rected tiiree seasons of excavation at Kefar Hananyah (1986, 1987, 1989), under tlie auspices of Bar-Ilan University. Un earthed were remains of a Late Roman pottery kiln with a stone-paved approach, a rock-cut pit containing a large quantity of ash along one side of the access pavement, and an outer structure (possibly a fuel store) supported by ashlar pillars. All four components were built in a trench (3-3.5 m wide) cut into the slope. T w o successive plaster-lined struc tures, which may have served as clay-soaldng pools, were found about 10.5 m west of the kiln. The kiln is a common Roman type, circular in plan (about 2.9 m in diameter) with a round central pillar (1 m in di ameter). At the north (rear) and east of the furnace chamber one or two courses of cut stones line the bedrock. The en trance to the furnace chamber is about 0.9 m wide, and its jambs are built of ashlars. Following the destruction in the Early Byzantine period of the apparently disused kiln and outer structure, the recessed area served as a dump for dis carded vessels—including an estimated equivalent of 9,50013,000 whole vessels, about 98 percent of which were of two Kefar Hananyah vessel forms. Recovered in the excavations were pottery wasters of Kefar Hananyah vessels dating to the Early, Middle, and Late Roman-Early Byzantine peri ods. The ttench cut into the bedrock slope, in which the kiln and associated structures were built, also cut through an ear lier roof-tile layer, above an Early Roman accumulation. A number of the tiles bore the impression of the Legio VI Ferrata (LEGVTF). No architectural remains associated with the roof-tile layer have been found. Probes excavated in the final in situ section of the Kefar Hananyah aqueduct (see above) showed that that part of the aqueduct had not been constructed prior to the medieval period. [See also Galilee, article on Galilee in the Plellenistic through Byzantine Periods; and Golan.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Rabbinic Sources, the Polycandelon Inscription, and die Me dieval Texts Frey, Jean-Baptiste. Corpus inscriptionum iudaicamm, vol. 2, Asie-Afrique. Rome, 1952. Presentation and discussion of die polycandelon inscription (see pp. 1 6 4 - 1 6 5 , no. 980). Klein, Samuel, ed. Sefer ha-Yishuv. Volume 1. Jerusalem, 1939. Col lection of rabbinic texts on Kefar Hananyah (see p. 92). Naveh, Joseph. On Stone and Mosaic: The Aramaic and Hebrew Inscrip tions from Ancient Synagogues (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv, 1978. Presen tation and discussion of the polycandelon inscription (see pp. 3 4 36, no. 1 6 ) . Naveh, Joseph. " L a m p Inscriptions and Inverted "Writing." Israel Ex ploration Journal 38 (1988): 36-43. Magical elements of the polycan delon inscription.
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Reiner, Elchanan, ed. Sefer ha-Yishuv. Vol. 3, Division: Sacred Places. Fordicoming. See "Kefar Hananya." Definitive publication and study of the texts on Kefar Hananyah dating to 1 0 9 9 - 1 5 1 7 . Safrai, Shmuel. "Notes on Palestine Studies" (in Hebrew). In Benjamin de Vries Memorial Volume, edited by Ezra Zion Melamed, pp. 3 2 8 333. Jerusalem, 1968. Reprinted in Shmuel Safrai, 'Eretz Yisra'elvaHakhameha bi-Tekufat ha-Mishna ve-ha-Talmud, pp. 1 0 5 - 1 1 2 . J e rusalem, 1983. Collection of rabbinic texts on Kefar Hananyah (see p. 109). Surveys and Studies Braslavski, Joseph. "Kefar Hananya" (in Hebrew). Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society 1 (1933): 1 8 - 2 3 . Important early study of the rock-cut public building, medieval Jewish settlement, and ven erated tombs. Frankel, Rafael. "The History of the Processing of Wine and Oil in Galilee in the Period of the Bible, the Mishna, and the T a l m u d " (in Hebrew). 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1984. Studies of parts of several installations for olive-oil production at Kefar Hananyah. Han, Zvi. "Kfar Hananya: History and Remains of a Jewish Village in Galilee." Israel Land and Nature (Winter 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 8 2 ) : 6 1 - 6 9 . Useful popular survey of literary sources and surface remains at the site. Ilan, Zvi. "H. Kefar Hananya, Survey." Israel Exploration Journal 33 (1983): 255. Brief scientific report on the author's survey at Kefar Hananyah, including a plan of the rock-cut public building. Ilan, Zvi. " A Survey of Ancient Synagogues in Galilee" (in Flebrew). Erelz-Israel 1 9 (1987): 1 7 0 - 1 9 8 . Report on presentation of the survey of the two public buildings at Kefar Hananyah, including a plan of both structures (see pp. 1 8 4 - 1 8 6 ) . Ilan, Zvi. "The Aqueduct to Kefar Hanania" (in Hebrew). In The Aq ueducts of Ancient Palestine, edited by David 'Amit et al., pp. 9 7 - 1 0 0 . Jerusalem, 1989. The Archaeometric Study and the Archaeological Excavations Adan-Bayewitz, David, and Isadore Perlman. "Local Pottery Provenience Studies: A Role for Clay Analysis." Archaeometry 27 (1985): 2 0 3 - 2 1 7 . Initial analytical study of the Kefar Hananyah pot tery. Adan-Bayewitz, David. "Studies in Talmudic Archaeology 1: T h e Kavkav" (in Hebrew). Sinai (1986): 1 6 4 - 1 7 7 . Adan-Bayewitz, David. "Studies in Talmudic Archaeology: Krozin" (in Hebrew). Sidra 5 (1989): 5 - 1 6 . This and the study above identify specific products of Kefar Hananyah with vessels mentioned in rab binic literature. Adan-Bayewitz, David. "Kefar Hananya, 1989." Israel Exploration Journal^! ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 8 6 - 1 8 8 . Report on die third season of excavation at Kefar Hananyah. Adan-Bayewitz, David. Common Pottety in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade. Ramat Gan, 1993. Comprehensive work on tlie man ufacture and distribution of Kefar Hananyah pottery, including dis cussions of the socioeconomic, ecological, and historical implications of the analytical data and detailed treatment of the rabbinic sources. DAVID ADAN-BAYEWITZ
KEISAN, TELL, a high, prominent mound of about 15 acres, situated on the Akko plain between Haifa and Akko. Although the site is today about 8 km (5 mi.) inland, it orig inally connected the Mediterranean coast with the hills of Lower Galilee. It has been identified tentatively with biblical Achshaph (Jos. 11:1, 12:20, 19:25).
Tell Keisan was excavated by John Garstang and Alan Rowe in 1935 and 1936 and again from 1 9 7 1 to 1980 by Roland de Vaux, Jacques Prignaud, Jacques Briend, and Jean Baptiste Humbert for the Ecole Biblique et Archeolo gique Francaise in Jerusalem. [See Ecole Biblique et Ar cheologique Francaise.] There are scattered Neolithic remains, but the tell was first settled in the Early Bronze I—III period (stratum XVI, fol lowing the system of tire 1935 excavation), with a city wall 5 m wide. Even more massive walls, embankments, and a glacis characterize the Middle Bronze Age strata (XV-XIV) city. A Late Bronze Age occupation, while attested, is not well documented (sttata XIII-XI). T h e later excavations, however, delineated an important LB II/Iron I ttansitional horizon (Garstang and Rowe's stratum 13) characterized by both Egyptian imports and Late Mycenaean IIIC pottery. It came to a violent end in a destruction in the early twelfth century BCE plausibly attributed to the "Sea Peoples." T h e Iron I levels at Tell Keisan (strata 1 2 - 9 ) , some 3 m thick, are especially significant. Stratum 12 may represent a mid-twelfth-century BCE rebuilding by a northern group of the Sea Peoples (tire Sherden?), with some Philistine Bichrome ware. Stratum 11 represents a more substantial ur ban establishment, in the late twelfth century BCE, that ended either in destruction or abandonment. Sttatum 10 reflects tire mixed cultural influences of Lower Galilee and the northern coast in the eleventh century BCE, with Philistine ware continuing alongside locally made pottery of Myce naean and Cypriot derivation. T h e recent excavators refer to it as Levanto-Mycenaean, but it could be a forerunner of the slightly later Phoenician coastal ceramic repertoire. Some of the vessels were used in tire manufacture of purple dye, for which the Phoenicians were well-known. Strata 9 C A, which cover much of die eleventh century BCE, revealed substantial well-planned, multiroomed structures laid out on a rectangular grid, although no city wall was in evidence. Philistine Bichrome ware disappeared by the end of stratum 9A, overlapping with distinctive Phoenician Bichrome jugs that begin in stratum 9B. Stratum 9 ends in about 1000 BCE in a conflagration that is also in evidence at other northern sites (Tel Abu Hawam IV; Flazor XI; Megiddo VIA); how ever, the destruction is more likely to be tlie result of local events than to any northern campaigns of King David (2 Sm. 8:3-12). Stratum 9 is perhaps best understood as mark ing die Phoenician ascendency in the area. [See Abu Ha wam, Tell; Hazor; Megiddo; Phoenicians.] Strata 8-6 (Iron II period) witnessed major changes. T h e settlement of stratum 8, which was relatively impoverished, initially reused some earlier walls and did not expand; this settlement continued from about 1000 BCE into about die mid-eighth century BCE with no notable feature but remark able continuity. By the beginning of stratum 7, the old LB traditions were finally exhausted, and the subsequent pot tery was typical Iron Age domestic ware, noteworthy only
KENYON, KATHLEEN MARY for scattered Cypro-Phoenician and Samaria wares. When stratum 5 ended, it was widiout any clear indication of the Assyrian destructions of the late eighth century BCE. Strata 5-4 belong to the period of Assyrian conquest and domination (referred to by the later excavators as Iron III), when Tell Keisan underwent a sort of renascence. An As syrian influence is then apparent and is reflected in "Palace" and other wares, as well as in Assyrian-style seals. [See Seals.] Stratum 4, with two phases, is characterized in its plan by a new rectangular grid. T h e later excavators see, especially in the pottery, a Phoenician culture combined with Neo-Assyrian elements. Numerous Phoenician am phorae found throughout the eighth-sixth centuries BCE point to maritime trade: links with Cyprus are especially close, but by late in stratum 4 (4A) large quantities of Ae gean, Rhodian, and Ionian wares were also imported. Stra tum 4A ended in destruction in the mid-seventh century BCE, perhaps die work of a punitive expedition to Akko in 643 BCE mentioned in die annals of Ashurbanipal. Strata 3-1 are Persian and Hellenistic, respectively, and are characterized by Greek imports. T h e strata ended by the late second century BCE. In the Byzantine period a small Christian community occupied the site until the seventh century CE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Briend, Jacques, and Jean-Baptiste Humbert. Tell Keisan, 1971-1976: line cite phenicienne en Galilee. Fribourg and Paris, 1980. WILLIAM G . DEVER
KENYON, KATHLEEN MARY (1906-1978), ar chaeologist born in London, the elder daughter of Frederic Kenyon the papyrologist and director and principal librarian of the British Museum (1909-1930). Kathleen M. Kenyon was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School in London and at Somerville College, Oxford, where she specialized in his tory. She became a member of the Oxford Archaeological Society and was its first woman president. She was a good student and a fine athlete, witii the energy and drive to make her a natural leader. On graduation in 1929 she accompanied Gertrude CatonThompson (who had been a student and colleague of Wil liam Flinders Petrie) as general assistant, photographer, and driver, to excavate the stone ruins of Zimbabwe, in what was then Southern Rhodesia. Upon her return to England, she was recruited by R. E. Mortimer Wheeler and his wife Tessa to participate in a major excavation (1930-1936) of the Romano-British city of Verulamium (St. Albans). From the Wheelers Kenyon learned the principles and techniques of the new stratigraphic method they had been developing since before World War I. It involves excavation by trenches, or squares, and very careful observation, inter pretation, and recording (as excavation proceeds) of the soil
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strata encountered (distinguished by color, texture, and composition). When the vertical faces of the trenches and of balks running up to them are recorded and drawn to scale, it is possible to plot, in three dimensions, the stratigraphic positions and relationships of all structures and finds, and to assign relative dates to them. Absolute dates could be assigned on the basis of the pottery or coins contained in the pertinent strata. When the carbon-14 method of dating be came available, the remanent radioactivity in preserved or ganic materials such as bone or wood could provide absolute dates. Although the method requires meticulous technique, the evidence for the conclusions educed is preserved for all to see and, if necessary, to reassess. Kenyon, who describes this method in Beginning in Archaeology (1952), introduced it to the Near East during her work with John W. Crowfoot at Samaria (1931-1933). Back in England she was closely associated with Wheeler in the founding of die University of London Institute of Ar chaeology (1934). Before and after World War II (during which she served with the Red Cross) she worked at British sites. From 1948 to 1951, she joined John Ward-Perkins, director of the British School in Rome, in excavations at Sabratha in Tripolitania. Soundings into the essentially Ro mano-Byzantine city reached important Phoenician levels. In 1951, Miss Kenyon became honorary director of the British School in Jerusalem. John Garstang had made im portant discoveries at Jericho (1931—1936) but raised prob lems requiring further investigation. Kenyon's excavations there (1952-1958) made Jericho die type-site in Palestine for die application of the Wheeler-Kenyon stratigraphic method. In 1961 Kenyon began what would be seven years of ex cavation in Jerusalem. T h e site was an exceedingly difficult one because of its topography (its steeply sloped terrain), its history (the accumulated debris of centuries), and its being a living city (with its houses and roads in daily use). She was able to establish for the first time a historic framework for the city over its 3,800 years of existence. In 1962 Kenyon became principal of St. Flugh's College, Oxford. When she retired in 1973, after a tenure of great practical and creative advantage to die college, she was able to concentrate on publication. Her detailed annual reports in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly during her excavations of Jericho and Jerusalem were supplemented by popular (but by no means superficial) general works. Of the defini tive publications on Jericho, only two volumes of her Exca vations at Jericho (i960, 1965) were released before her un timely death. However, she left much virtually completed work, which was subsequently edited and, where incom plete, augmented as volumes 3-5 (1981-1983). Since her death, tiiree volumes on the Jerusalem expedition have been published (vols. 1, 2, and 4; 1985,1990, and 1995). Kenyon made important contributions to the new (third) edition of
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die Cambridge Ancient History. While archaeological data were the chief sources for these works, in them and in her Amorites and Canaanites (1966), she attempted to relate the cultural, social, and political conditions reflected in written as well as archaeological documentation. The fourth and much-revised edition of her Archaeology in the Holy Land (i960) appeared, posthumously, in 1979Kathleen M. Kenyon is not only remembered for her dy namic and imaginative leadership in the field and the sig nificance of her discoveries, but for the encouragement and training she devoted to scores of young students who, in turn, have made their reputations in archaeology all over the world. Her accomplishments led to many academic and in ternational honors but the appreciation of her own country was marked most vividly by the DBE (Dame of the Order of the British Empire) conferred on her by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973. [See also British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; Jer icho; Jerusalem; Samaria; and the biographies of CatonThompson, Crowfoot, Garstang, and Wheeler.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Crowfoot, John W., Kathleen M . Kenyon, and Eleazar L . Sukenik. The Buildings at Samaria. Samaria-Sebaste: Report of the Work of the Joint Expedition in 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 3 and of the Work of the British E x pedition in 1935, ' t - London, 1942. n o
Crowfoot, John W., Grace M . Crowfoot, and Kathleen M . Kenyon. The Objects from Samaria. Samaria-Sebaste: Report of the Work of the Joint Expedition in 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 3 and of the Work of the British Expedition in 1935, no. 3. London, 1957. Franken, H. J . , and Margaret L . Steiner. Excavations in Jerusalem, 1961-1967, vol. 2, The Iron Age Extramural Quarter on the South-East Hill. Oxford, 1990. Kenrick, Philip M . Excavations at Sabratha, 1948-1951: Report on the Excavations Conducted by Dame Kathleen Kenyon and John WardPerkins. London, 1986. Kenyon, Kathleen M . "Notes on the History of Jericho in the 2nd Mil lennium B . C . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 1 0 1 - 1 3 8 . Kenyon, Kathleen M . "Excavations at Jericho." Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1952): 4-6, 62-82; (1954): 45-63; (1955): 1 0 8 - 1 1 7 ; and (i960): 88-108. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Beginning in Archaeology. London, 1953. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Digging Up Jericho. London, 1957. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Archaeology in the Holy Land (i960). 4th ed. New York, 1979. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations at Jericho, vol. 1, The Tombs Exca vated in 1952-54. London, i960. Kenyon, Kathleen M . "Excavations in Jerusalem." Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1962): 72-89; (1963): 7 - 2 1 ; (1965): 9-20; (1966): 73-88; (1967): 65-73; and (1968): 9 7 - 1 1 1 . Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations at Jericho, vol. 2, The Tombs Exca vated in 1955-58. London, 1965. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Amorites and Canaanites. London, 1966. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Jerusalem: Excavating 3000 Years of History. New York, 1967. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Digging Up Jerusalem. London, 1974. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Excavations al Jericho, vol. 3, The Architecture and Stratigraphy of the Tell. 2 vols. Edited by Thomas A. Holland. London, 1 9 8 1 .
Kenyon, Kathleen M . , and Thomas A. Holland. Excavations at Jericho, vol. 4, The Pottery Type Series and Other Finds. London, 1982. Kenyon, Kathleen M . , and Thomas A. Holland. Excavations at Jericho, vol. 5, The Pottery Phases of the Tell and Other Finds. London, 1983. Kenyon, Kathleen M . The Bible and Recent Archaeology. Revised by P. R. S. Moorey. London, 1987. Moorey, P. R. S. A Century of Biblical Archaeology. Cambridge, 1 9 9 1 . See pages 63, 94-99, 1 2 2 - 1 2 6 . Moorey, P. R . S. "British Women in Near Eastern Archaeology: Kath leen Kenyon and the Pioneers." Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1992): 9 1 - 1 0 0 . Prag, Kay. "Kathleen Kenyon and Archaeology in the Holy Land." Pal estine Exploration Quarterly (1992): 1 0 9 - 1 2 3 . Tushingham, A. D . , et al. Excavations in Jerusalem, 1961-1967. Vol. 1 . Toronto, 1985. Tushingham, A. D . "Kathleen Kenyon." Proceedings ofthe British Acad emy 71 (1985): 555-582. Wilkes, John. "Kathleen Kenyon in Roman Britain." Palestine Explo ration Quarterly (1992): 1 0 1 - 1 0 8 . A . D . TUSHINGHAM
KERAK (al-Karak; often Karak), site commanding the intersection of the main north-south route along the Transjordanian plateau with an important east-west route from the desert to the Dead Sea and the west bank of the Jordan River ( 3 i ° n ' N , 35°42' E). The town occupies an irregular plateau (850 m northsouth X 750 m east-west), at the north end of a ridge, nat urally protected by steep escarpments. T o the south, the ridge narrows into an isthmus (200 m long X 110-140 m wide) isolated from the rest of the ridge by deep ditches cut to the north and south: a castle (see below) occupies the resulting island. Early History. Kerak was an important Moabite center. A Moabite inscription names Mesha, or his father Chemosh-yat, mid-ninth-century BCE ldngs of Moab, and sug gests that Kerak had a temple to the god Chemosh. T h e place names Qir-M6'ab (Is. 15:1), Qir-Heres (Jer. 48:31, 48:36; Is. 16:11), and Qir-Hareset (Is. 16:7; 2 Kgs. 3:25) are thought to refer to Kerak, perhaps because the Isaiah T a r gum renders Qir-M6'ab by the Aramaic Karka' de-M6'ab. If correct, then Kerak was an important fortress in the revolt of Mesha against Israel and the site of the dramatic siege in 2 Kings 3:25-27. Kerak cannot be the Qarhoh on Mesha's stela, which was evidently a quarter of Dibon. Kerak was the administrative center of Moab during the Persian period (539/520-332 BCE) . Nabatean pottery is com monly found there and Nabatean-Roman spolia (architec tural and decorative fragments) are reused in the castle (see below). In about 130 Hadrian granted polis status to Kerak, which later had its own mint. T h e Madaba map (mid sixthcentury CE) shows [Khara]khmoba as a walled, hilltop city. [See Madaba.] Crusader Kerak and the Lordship of Oultrejourdain. Early in the twelfth century CE, the ldngs of Jerusalem built a line of fortifications to protect their revenue from Trans-
KERAK Jordan and to dominate the trade routes: al-HabTs (Cru sader, Cava de Suet, Cave de Sueth; Ar., 'Ayn HabTs, alHabls, HabTs Jaldak), pre-iioQ(?); Montreal (Crusader, Mons regalis, Mont royal, Montreal; Ar., al-Shawbak), 1 1 1 5 ; Ayla (Crusader, Helim) and He de Graye (Ar., JazTra Fara'un, al-Qurayyah), I I I 6 - I 7 ( ? ) ; Li Vaux Moys (Cru sader, Li Vaux Moys, Castellum Vallis Moysis; Ar., al-Wu ayra); and two other castles in the Petra region, Celle (Ar., al-Sar"a[?]) and Hormoz (Ar., al-HabTs [?]), 1 1 2 7 ( ? ) . Casdes were also built at Amman (Crusader, Ahamant) and Tafila (Crusader, Taphila). [See Qurayyah; Amman.] Oultrejourdain was kept mostly in the royal domain until about 1 1 2 6 when it was granted to Pagan the Butler (Romain de Puy was not tire first lord of Oultrejourdain but held lands in the Balqa"). The crown retained some castles and lands until 1 1 6 1 , when Baldwin III invested Philip de Milly with all royal property from Wadi Zarqa to the Red Sea. The lordship was crucial to die defense of the kingdom and was economically important: it exported bitumen, dates, grain, oil, salt, sugar, and wine. Kerak had its own Dead Sea port. Tolls were levied on caravans and bedouin passing through the region. In 1 1 4 2 , Pagan built Kerak castie (Crusader, Chrac, Crac [not to be confused with Crac des Chevaliers in Syria], Crac de Montreal/Mont royal, Cracum Montis regalis, Petra Deserti, Pierre dou Desert, Civitas Petracensis; Ar., al-Karak, Karak al-Shawbak) to replace Montreal as the center of Oul trejourdain (see figure 1 ) . His successors, Maurice and Philip de Milly, strengthened it. Philip entered die Templars in about 1 1 6 5 and was succeeded by his daughter's hus bands, first Miles de Plancy ( 1 1 7 2 - 1 1 7 4 ) and then Reynald
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de Chatillon ( 1 1 7 7 - 1 1 8 7 ) . N u r al-Din and Salah ad-Din at tempted to take Kerak in 1 1 7 0 and 1 1 7 3 . When Reynald used Kerak as a base for raids on caravans protected by treaty and on al-Hijaz, Salah ad-Din launched systematic assaults ( 1 1 8 3 , 1 1 8 4 , 1 1 8 7 ) . Reynald was killed after the Bat tle of Hattin in July 1 1 8 7 . In November 1 1 8 8 , after a siege of eight months, Kerak capitulated. Middle Islamic Kerak. Under the Ayyubids ( 1 1 9 3 1 2 6 3 ) , Kerak usually belonged to the independent Syrian principality of Damascus, although al-Nasir Dawud ( 1 2 2 7 1249) and al-Mughidr Umar ( 1 2 5 0 - 1 2 6 3 ) ruled Kerak as a semiautonomous principality. Al- Adil ( 1 1 9 3 - 1 1 9 8 ) refortified the castle, converted the cathedral into a mosque, and founded a mosque in Wadi Kerak. Al-Mu'azzam ( 1 1 9 8 1227) repaired the castle after tire earthquake of 1 2 1 1 , con structed the western entrance tunnel, and ordered the im provement of the Hajj road from Damascus to al-Hijaz (work at Mu'ta and Ma'an was completed). Further refortification was carried out under al-Nasir Dawud, who built a palace within the castle. Al-Mugith Umar repaired dam age caused by the 1261 earthquake. c
c
c
Under the Mamluk sultans ( 1 2 6 3 - 1 5 1 7 ) , Kerak became the chief town of an administrative province stretching from Ziza to 'Aqaba and from the Dead Sea to the desert. Kerak's prosperity was largely dependent on the patronage of the sultans, although the region continued to export agricultural products, especially sugar. Baybars I ( 1 2 6 0 - 1 2 7 7 ) visited Kerak frequently and undertook its major refortification (see below). In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Kerak was used as a school where the sons of die dynasty could be educated in Arab ways and as a place of exile for
KERAK. Figure 1. Plan of Kerak Castle. (Courtesy J . Johns)
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troublesome members of the ruling family. Al-Nasir Muhammad spent two periods of exile in Kerak (12941298, 1308-1310) and in 1311 had a palace, badi, school, khan, hospital, and mosque built there. For a few months in 1342, under al-Nasir Ahmad, Kerak became die capital of the Mamluk state. During the fifteenth century, Mamluk interest in Kerak waned, and local tribes increasingly came to dominate the town. In 1517, an Ottoman governor was installed at Kerak. The Ottomans attempted to retain control of the town tirroughout the sixteendi century, but soon after 1600 it was in Arab hands. Successive Ottoman expeditions (1655-1656,16781679, 1710-1711) failed to regain control. Remains. The town's walls and towers are well pre served. Burj al-Zahir is a massive salient, very similar to the castie's south front, and defends the northern extremity of the plateau. A foundation inscription of Baybars I appears on its interior face (RCEA 4733). Burj al-Banawi, a round tower on the south wall, also carries a foundation inscription of Baybars flanked by two heraldic "lions of Baybars" (RCEA 4734). Burj al-Sdub is an elaborate tower with a machicolated parapet and a talus defending a postern at the easternmost point of the circuit. Enttance to die town was originally through two subterranean passages: northeast of the Burj al-Sa'ub and west of the Burj al-Zahir, the latter dated to 1227 (RCEA 3965). The Crusader cathedral was converted into the jami (congregational mosque) under al-Malik al-'Adil. The early twentieth-century mosque on the same site preserves two Arabic inscriptions in the prayer hall: one records the foun dation of thtjdmf in 1198 (RCEA 3800A); the otlierrecords repairs carried out in about 1380 (Albert de Luynes, Voyages d'exploration a la Mer Morte, 3 vols. Paris, 1871-1876, vol. 2, pp. 200-201, no. 18). A third inscription, on the minaret, records Sultan Barquq's perpetual exemption of the Keralds from all property taxes (ibid., pp. 201-202, no. 19). The Greek church (of St. George?) is a mid-nineteenthcentury reconstruction of a Byzantine structure. The smaller Greek church of St. George is apparently medieval in date. In the cemetery below Burj al-Zahir is a nineteenth-century (?) qubba (domed tomb) identified as the tomb of Noah, a claimed shared by Kerak Nun in Lebanon. At nearby Ma zar, die mausoleum of Ja'far ibn Abu Talib, a companion of die prophet who fell at the Battle of Mut'a, is incorporated into the modern mosque: two Arabic inscriptions record work on the mausoleum in 1327 and 1351 (ibid., pp. 206208, nos. 23-24). The constructional history of the castle has yet to be thor oughly investigated. No standing remains are indisputably pre-Crusader. Two distinct phases of Crusader construc tion may be distinguished, however, and die south and west defenses were extensively rebuilt under Baybars I. There is considerable amount of posttnedieval alteration of the inte rior apartments.
The castle consists of a large upper court occupying the crest of the ridge and a lower court built on a terrace to the west. The north front, built of huge limestone blocks, was originally flanked by two massive salients: of tiiese only the eastern survives; the modern entrance is through the ruined west corner. T h e much-damaged Crusader chapel and ad joining sacristy lie in the middle of the upper court. South and west of the chapel, below the court, are the apartments of the Mamluk palace. Of particular note are a small en trance court decorated by a plaque with an intricate inlaid geometric design (originally one of a pair); a reception hall; and what may be a small mosque. T h e south end of the castle is dominated by the massive south front overlooking the castle reservoir and the south ditch: the foundation in scription of Baybars I is on the exterior face. T h e lower court is separated from the upper court by a curtain wall. In Mam luk times, the principal entrance was through a monumental gate in the west wall, into a long gallery beneath the lower court. There are also small posterns in the north and south fronts. The central salient in the west wall of the lower court bears a much-damaged foundation inscription of Baybars I. [See also Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties; Crusader Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Robin M . "Excavations in the Fourteenth Century A . D . M a m luk Palace at Kerak." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 ( 989): 287-304. Brief excavation report. Canova, Reginetta. Iscrizioni e monumenti protocristiani del paese di Moab. Sussidi alio Studio delle Antichita Cristiane, 4. T h e Vatican, 1954. Fundamental guide to the Christian inscriptions and monu ments of Kerak. r
Deschamps, Paul. Les Chateaux des Croises en Terre-Sainle, vol. 2, La defense du royaume de Jerusalem. Bibliotheque Archeologique et His torique, vol. 34. Paris, 1939. Still the only attempt at a thorough survey of the castle and town fortifications. Ghawanmah, Yusuf D . Imdrat al-Karak al-Ayyubiyyah. Kerak, 1980. The only existing study of Ayyubid Kerak; includes an English sum mary. Alternatively, see Humphreys below. Ghawanmah, Yusuf D . Tar'Tkh sharqi al-Urdunn ft 'asr dawlat al-Mamalik. 2 vols. Amman, 1979. The only existing study of Mamluk Kerak; includes an English summary. Alternatively, see Irwin and Thorau below. Gibson, John C. L . Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. I, Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions. Oxford, 1 9 7 1 . See pages 7 1 - 8 3 for the Mesha stela and the Moabite inscription from Kerak. Humphreys, R. Stephen. From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260. Albany, N . Y . , 1977. Useful synthesis based on the primary sources, containing much information about Ayyubid Kerak. Irwin, Robert. The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate, 1250-1382. Carbondale, III, 1986. Short, lively account of the early Mamluk sultanate, with useful material on Kerak. Mayer, Hans Eberhard. Die Kreuzfahrerhenschaft Montreal (Sobak) Jordanien im 1 2 . Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden, 1990. Thorough account of the history of Crusader Oultrejourdain; see also Tibbie below. Pringle, Denys. The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus. Vol. 1. Cambridge, 1993. The first of three volumes. See especially the entries '"Ain al-HabTs" (p. 26), "JazTrat Fara'un" (pp.
KESTEL 2 7 4 - 2 7 5 ) , and " K a r a k " (pp. 286-295), which include useful and copious bibliographies. Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie ara.be ( R C E A ) . 18 vols. to date. E d ited by Etienne Combe, Jean Sauvaget, and Gaston Wiet. Cairo, 1 9 3 1 - . Standard collection of Arabic epigraphy. Thorau, Peter. The Lion of Egypt: Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century. London, 1992. Biography of the first Mamluk sultan, containing many useful references to Late Ayyubid and Early Mamluk Kerak. Tibbie, Steven. Monarchy and Lordships in the Latin Kingdom of Jeru salem, 1099-1291. Oxford, 1989. Useful supplement to Mayer (above). Tibbie's reinterpretation of the early years of Oultrejourdain (c. 1 1 1 5 - c . 1 1 2 6 CE) is preferable to Mayer's. JEREMY JOHNS
KESTEL, an Early Bronze Age tin mine and its associ ated specialized mining areas, located 4 Ion (2.5 mi.) from the town of Camardi and situated upslope from several riv ers coursing through the Nigde Massif, a large volcanic dome formation in south-central Turkey (37°5o' N , 34°58' E). T h e Kurucay stream, witir tile highest analyzed cassiterite (tin oxide) sediments, carrys with it sediments rich in pyrite, hematite, garnet, tourmaline, magnetite, scheelite, cinnabar, titanite, rutile, apatite, monazite, and gold. T h e tin appears as sand-sized brilliant red, orange, yellow, and (rarely) black cassiterite grains that can be easily separated by manual means such as a pan or a vanning shovel and very little water. Because of their high specific gravity, tin particles sediment out from the less dense magnetite, he matite, and quartz. This simple process was replicated a number of times at Celaller village in 1992 by Bryan Earl from Cornwall, England. T h e Kestel mine is characterized by intense tectonic movement and is in a major subduction zone, where mineralization is common. T h e mine was cut into a slope composed of granite, marble, gneiss, and quartz ite. T h e site of the Early Bronze Age miner's village, Goltepe, lies 2 km due south of the Kestel tin mine, across the valley on a prominent hilltop that overlooks the Kurucay stream. Cassiterite was found at the Kestel mine by the Turkish Geological Research and Survey (MTA) after sifting through 80 tons of alluvial stream sediments in tire course of a major five-year research project investigating the sources of heavy minerals. K. Aslihan Yener investigated and excavated the tin mine from 1987 to 1989 and in col laboration with Lynn Willies from 1990 to 1992. Only subeconomic material remains unmined today. T h e most con vincing evidence of former tin production is the one ton of metallurgical debris, such as crucible fragments with tin-rich slag accretion, found in excavation at the neighboring site of Goltepe and at the entrance to the Kestel mine. Recent analyses by atomic absorption spectroscopy from veins re maining unmined inside tire Kestel mine indicated that even after extensive mining in antiquity, the veins still contained more than 1.5 percent tin. [See Specttoscppy.] There have
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been two primary mineralizing episodes: an early tin-bearing one and a later one of hematite with weak tin. Willies notes that evidence of ore extraction continues below the marble into the underlying quartzitic schist and granitic pegmatites. As of the 1992 excavation season, tire depth of tlie Kestel mine measured 1.5 km in its greatest known extent. As presently understood, the Kestel mine was originally in operation in about 3000 BCE, probably as an open-pitmining operation. During the early EB I—II, the mine ex panded into shaft and gallery systems, workshops were set up outside the mine entrance, and Goltepe was settled. Gol tepe grew into what may have been a substantial walled town and tin-processing workshop toward die middle of the third millennium (EB II), at the same time that bronze was being widely used in Anatolia and was increasing in use in Syria and Mesopotamia. T h e settlement and the mine attained their largest extent during this and the early part of the EB III period. At that time, they comprised one of a number of centers lining tire sttategic passes through the Taurus Mountains. T h e sites may have controlled resources, pro duction, and intermontane traffic during tire pre-Akkadian period. Aside from the original four soundings done in 19871988, the soundings made in 1991 and 1992 in the Kestel mine were to obtain a chronological sequence for tlie mine and to determine tlie extent and nature of the tin mineral ization. Mined by fire setting in antiquity, five samples of charcoal from excavated contexts inside the Kestel mine gave radiocarbon determinations of 2070-1880 BCE, cali brated to 2870-2200 BCE, dating its use firmly in die Early Bronze Age. Another six dates recently obtained suggest an even earlier beginning for die mine (2740 BCE ±100 cali brated 3240-3100 BCE). In order to test die assumption that cassiterite was the targeted mineral in the Bronze Age, four small-scale sound ings 1 X 2 m in size were initiated inside the galleries in 1988 and 1989. T h e assumption was that the detritus of mining activity would yield important information about dating the mine and about the original ore body composition. Sound ing S.2 (1.5 X 1 m) was placed in chamber VI at the con fluence of five upsloping galleries, some of which measured a scant 60 cm in diameter. These galleries had circular cross sections and differed morphologically from chambers I and II, which have larger entrances. Careful study of the sttatified assemblage indicated that the mining debris dates to the Bronze Age. Also supporting this view were tlie massive lay ers of rubble with tliird-millennium ceramics that were over laid by thin horizons dating to the Byzantine period, but without any associated mining debris. Thus, die fact that there are Byzantine-period suata in the mine, dated by ce ramics and radiocarbon (charcoal samples from sounding S2, at —30 cm = 380 ± 6 0 CE, calibrated 347-609 CE), does not indicate that mining took place during these later peri ods.
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The discovery of a large diabase mortar or anvil with two circular hollows on one surface provided information about die specific tools of extraction and beneficiadon in this chamber. The EB sherds are mostiy dark-burnished and unburnished varieties, with a red-burnished and micaceous finish. Some cruder examples, such as a holemouth jar and several straw-tempered types, also emerged in the lowest strata, suggesting the existence of a Late Chalcolithic phase in this mine as well. Sounding S2 has established several discernible features about this chamber. First of all, cassiterite was being mined in the third millennium. T h e technique entailed fire setting and tiien battering the ore with heavy hammerstones. Mor tars, pestles, and bucking stones indicate that some ore beneficiation was also taking place inside the mine. It is ap parent from the stone tool types found inside that hammerstones for battering and pulverizing the ore were being utilized. Surprisingly, however, bucking stones, a stone with one flat surface and a hollow in the middle, in dicate that grinding also took place. T h e debris may have been used as backfill in the mine. The presence of beneficiation suggests that some fine-scale processing was essen tial for extraction and may indicate that veins were small or that testing of the particular area of die deposit by empirical means was necessary and was more efficiently carried out within the mine. It may also be that some tools were stored or discarded in the mine. Therefore, the ore was battered, pecked, and enriched there. Second, the presence of pottery with open forms, the domestic fauna, and a hearth suggest that a certain minimal amount of domestic activity also took place inside the mine. Larger ceramic forms, presumably to contain water for beneficiation and drinking or cooking, may have been used for such short-term storage. The soundings in the mine have provided important in formation about tlie tools employed in the technology of Bronze Age mining and ore pulverization; they also indicate that the mine probably provided some amount of habitation or shelter. The Kestel excavations have helped define an interactive system between the mine and Goltepe, with its specialized sectors devoted to smelting tin. Tin smelting en tailed an initial ore enrichment at Kestel, followed by grind ing and washing phases at Goltepe. Fired in crucibles of various sizes, the resulting tin metal was fabricated into in gots by pouring the molten metal into molds. The data from this project have led to the irrefutable conclusion that tin was mined at Kestel and processed at Goltepe in the third millennium. Reconstruction can now proceed to question where the products went and what the impact of this stra tegic industry was on the bronze producers, In die process of mapping and excavating test trenches inside the galleries, a mortuary/burial chamber was discov ered in several abandoned mine shafts. Mortuary traditions as well as data on status, diet, and population can be derived
from the excavation of this new evidence. One extensive mortuary chamber contained a number of different burial traditions—pithos burials, stone-built tombs, simple intern ment, and rock-cut chamber tombs—spanning a date from the Late Chalcolithic/EB I to the end of the third millen nium. [See Burial Practices.] Broken fragments of human skeletal material occurred throughout the chambers. A pre liminary assessment has identified a minimum of eight in dividuals interred in the chamber, based on counts and ag ing information from femurs, mandibles, and a few pelvises. So far, tiiis small demographic sample contains children, men, and at least one woman, mirroring a true population composition. One is an infant fewer than two years old. Three are subadults younger than eighteen years of age: one twelve-fifteen-year-old, one from five-ten years old, and die other approximately eight. Four adults are represented, in cluding one female and one probable male. [See Demogra phy; Paleopathology.] Pottery in association within the burial chamber has chronological and stylistic parallels with the Goltepe and Kestel assemblages. Red- and black-burnished wares, lightclay minature lug ware, painted Anatolian metallic wares, and imported ceramics such as Syrian bottles and Syrian metallic wares link the mine not only with the processing site, Goltepe, but with neighboring regions as well. A copper spiral akin to examples dating to the end of the third millen nium, as well as Syrian bottles, plain simple ware, and Syrian metallic wares, indicate interregional connections witii Syria and Mesopotamia, as well as the Mediterranean coast. In addition to Kestel representing the earliest and largest shaft-and-gallery systems related to tin mining, the 1992 re search indicated that an earlier phase of occupation existed on the slope of the mine, most likely dating to the Late Chal colithic/EB I. Data on initial settiement in this area and the earliest extraction phase for the mine can be derived from this area. It is clear that the mortuary chamber will be an important source of data and will be critical to understand ing each of the settlements and the interaction among them. So far no comparable examples of burials in mine chambers are known from other regions. [See also Goltepe; Metals, article on Artifacts of the Neo lithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages; and Taurus Mountains.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Sayre, E . V., et al. "Statistical Evaluation of the Presently Accumulated Lead Isotope Data from Anatolia and Surrounding Regions." Ar chaeometry 34.1 (1992): 7 3 - 1 0 5 . Willies, Lynn. " A n Early Bronze Age T i n Mine in Anatolia." Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society 1 1 (1990): 9 1 - 9 6 . Willies, Lynn. "Report on the 1991 Archaeological Survey of Kestel Tin Mine, Turkey." Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical So ciety 1 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 2 4 1 - 2 4 7 . Willies, Lynn. "Reply to Hall and Steadman." Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 5.1 (1992): 9 9 - 1 0 3 .
KETEF HINNOM Yener, K . Ashhan, et al. "Kestel: An Early Bronze Age Source of Tin Ore in the Taurus Mountains, T u r k e y . " Science 244 (1989): 2 0 0 203. Yener, K . Ashhan. "Stable Lead Isotope Sudies of Central Taurus Ore Sources and Related Artifacts from Eastern Mediterranean Chal colithic and Bronze A g e Sites." Journal of Archaeological Science 18 (1991): 541-577K . ASLIHAN YENER
KETEF HINNOM, Iron Age cemetery located along a high scarp on the southwestern bank of the Hinnom Valley, south and southwest of Jerusalem (3i°4o' N, 35°is' E; map reference 173 X 131). This necropolis is located on the grounds of St. Andrew's Scottish Church and Hospice. T h e site is known by its Hebrew name, which means "shoulder of Hinnom." Three major necropoli served Iron Age Jerusalem: the eastern necropolis in the village of Silwan, the northern ne cropolis north of tlie Damascus Gate, and the western ne cropolis along tlie slopes of the Hinnom Valley. T h e south ern and southwestern extents of the Hinnom Valley were utilized in response to the growth of the city in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Thirty-seven tombs have been located along the length of the valley. This area of ancient Jerusalem and its environs were partially surveyed by R. A. S. Macalister in 1900. [See the biography of Macalister.] More recently, bench tombs at Ketef Hinnom were excavated by Gabriel Barkay (1979-1988), under the auspices of Tel Aviv University. These tombs date to the end of Iron II (late eighth-sixth centuries BCE). Some of tlie cave tombs may have been used in die Second Temple period as well, how ever. A variety of burial types were found at Ketef Hinnom, including plain pit graves and bench tombs. [See Tombs; Burial Sites; Burial Techniques.] These bench tombs are typical of Judah in the Iron II and include features such as sarcophagi carved into the bedrock, burial benches carved along die walls, projecting cornices, carved headrests, and the use of two Egyptian cubit standards. [See Sarcophagus.] Typically, bench tombs consist of a single or multichambered tomb in which a series of benches is cut along tlie chamber walls. A small entrance opens to a forecourt that leads into a central hall. Burial chambers are arranged around this central hall. T h e body was laid out on a bench, into which headrests were often carved. When a new body was interred, tlie earlier bones and grave goods were gath ered and placed in repositories under the burial benches. It is believed that in this way extended families were buried for generations in the same chamber tomb. [See Grave Goods.] Barkay excavated nine bench tombs at Ketef Hinnom, all of which were cut into the bedrock. None of the roughly square tombs was intact, as their ceilings had collapsed. Ad
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ditionally, tlie area had been used as a quarry in antiquity. Five of the tombs were single chambered, with benches along three sides. Carved stone headrests were found in sev eral tombs. In cave 13 the headrests were so arranged as to hold two parallel sets of bodies ordered head to foot. Cave 20 is distinctive in its plan, dimensions, and decorative de tails. It is a multichambered tomb with parallels in Jerusa lem's northern necropolis and at Beth-Shemesh tombs 5-8. [See Beth-Shemesh.] This tomb also used the short Egyptian measurement system (the amah), as opposed to the long, or royal, one used in the other tombs. Many of tlie tombs throughout Jerusalem utilized such a standardized system of measurement, suggesting the use of a set of plans or blue prints. T h e Israelite system of measurement, tlie cubit, was based on the Egyptian system. T h e most spectacular find from Ketef Hinnom was the undisturbed repository in room 25, located in burial cave 24. Cave 24 is a complex, multichambered tomb with five chambers off the central hall. A variety of features were used in interring the dead, including benches, headrests, and deep grooves. In room 25 the six headrests could accommodate six bodies arranged side by side. This chamber is roughly 3 X 1.8 m and 2 m high. A cache of mortuary goods was found in the repository that the excavator dates from the seventh century BCE to some time after the Babylonian destruction in 586 BCE (Barkay, 1984). T h e remains of more than ninetyfive individuals were found along with more than one thou sand objects. The burial goods included 263 whole ceramic vessels, a bathtub coffin, Scythian iron arrowheads, bronze axheads, bone objects, alabaster vessels, beads, a glass bot tle, more than one hundred pieces of silver jewelry, silver seals, and gold objects. A sixth-century BCE coin from the Aegean island of Kos found in this tomb is one of the earliest coins found in Israel. Most significant was the recovery of two small silver amulets inscribed witii priestly blessings. The silver amulets were delicately incised, and the largest is only 97 mm long and 27 m m wide. They date to tlie midseventh or early sixth centuries BCE. One amulet records tire name Yahweh. T h e wording of both scrolls is almost iden tical to the priestly benediction in Numbers 6:24-26 (Barkay, 1983). This represents tlie earliest surviving biblical passage, antedating the Dead Sea Scrolls copies by some four hun dred years. [See Dead Sea Scrolls.] The importance of this tomb is immeasurable. Its material greatly expands what is known of the nature of the Jewish community in Jerusalem after the Babylonian destruction. Hillel Geva (New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by Ephraim Stern, vol. 2, p. 715, Jerusalem and New York, 1993) suggests that tlie western necropolis was used for the lower classes and the eastern necropolis of Silwan for nobility and high officials. While tlie proximity and architectoral elaboration found in the Sil wan necropolis indeed supports this suggestion, the notion
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of a lower-class necropolis at Ketef Hinnom must be reas sessed in light of die finds in room 25 of cave 24. [See also Jerusalem.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Barkay, Gabriel. " T h e Divine Name Found in Jerusalem." Biblical Ar chaeology Review 9.2 (1983): 1 4 - 1 9 . Papular account of the excava tion, conservation, and interpretation of the silver amulets. Barkay, Gabriel. "Excavations on the Hinnom Slope in Jerusalem" (in Hebrew). Qadmoniot 1 7 (1984): 94-108. One of the only detailed scholarly articles regarding the Tel Aviv excavations at Ketef Hin nom. Not, however, a final report; a more complete report of the material culture from cave 24 is still needed. Barkay, Gabriel, and Amos Kloner. "Jerusalem Tombs from the Days of the First Temple." Biblical Archaeology Review 1 2 . 2 (1986): 2 3 39. Popular account and review of Iron Age tombs from the northern necropolis. Barkay, Gabriel. Ketef Hinnom: A Treasure Facing Jerusalem's Walls. Israel Museum Catalogue, no. 274. Jerusalem, 1986. See pages 3 4 35 for a brief review of the finds. Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 1 2 3 . Sheffield, 1992. Excellent scholarly work providing a detailed anal ysis of Iron Age Judean burials; recommended for any serious re search on this subject. King, Philip J . Jeremiah: An Archaeological Companion. Louisville, K y . , 1993. Semipopular book that intertwines the archaeological data from die seventh and sixth centuries BCE with the biblical narrative from the same period. A very useful background volume for Iron II. Mazar, Amihai, and Gabriel Barkay. " T h e Iron A g e . " In The Archae ology ofAncient Israel, edited by Amnon Ben-Tor, pp. 258-373. N e w Haven, 1992. Contains an overview of the significance of Ketef Hin nom in Iron II-III (see esp. pp. 3 6 9 - 3 7 1 ) . Ussishkin, David. The Village of Silwan. Jerusalem, 1993. Excellent de tailed architectural analysis of Jerusalems" eastern necropolis at Sil wan, with historical background for the study of Iron Age mortuary practices and the archaeology of Iron Age Jerusalem. J . P. DESSEL
KHABUR. T h e Khabur River catchment of northern Syro-Mesopotamia can be divided into the Khabur Trian gle, or Upper IChabur, and the Lower Khabur. T h e former, where precipitation ranges annually from 500 mm northeast of modern Qamishli at the Syro-Turkish border to 250 mm just south of Hassekeh, is a broad agricultural region formed by a number of tributaries, the most important of which is Wadi Jaghjagh. T h e narrow alluvial valley of Lower Khabur cuts through very dry areas (from 250 mm to less than 150 mm annual precipitation) on its course to the Euphrates River. Modern exploration of the Upper Khabur began in 1850 with Austin Henry Layard, who uncovered a Neo-Assyrian lammasu ("winged bull") at Tell Araban, today known as Tell Agaga, ancient Shadikanni. In campaigns in 1899, 1911-1913, and 1927-1929, M. von Oppenheim explored the western Khabur and excavated Tell Halaf. Between the world wars, Antoine Poidebard pioneered aerial reconnais
sance in his study of the Roman limes system along the Lower Khabur and Wadi Jaghjagh to Nisibin. In 1934-1935 Max Mallowan surveyed portions of the Khabur Triangle and began excavations at Tell Brak and Chaghar Bazar. Re cent surveys have been conducted by Frank Hole and by D . J. W. Meijer in the northeast part of the Khabur Triangle and by B. Lyonnet in its central area. Hartmut Ktihne has surveyed the lower Khabur and, in anticipation of a new dam, J. Monchambert has surveyed the Middle Khabur. [See the biographies of Layard, Poidebard, and Mallowan] These surveys, and excavations at approximately thirty sites, document occupation from the Neolithic period to the present; it reached a peak in the late third and early second millennia BCE, both in number of sites and population, es timated from total hectares occupied. Some Bronze Age sites are quite large, ranging from 30 to more than 100 ha (74-247 acres): Mozan, Hamoukar, Barri, Leilan, Chuera, Mabtuh (East), Hamidi, Brak, Beydar, Chaghar Bazar. [See Mozan, Tell; Leilan, Tell; Chuera, Tell; Brak, Tell] In the western part of the Upper Khabur about a dozen Bronze Age tells are surrounded by large earthworks; von Oppen heim first noted this unusual feature and coined the term kranzhugel, "wreath-shaped tell," for them. Settlement was relatively sparse from the end of the Middle Bronze Age until the twentieth century. The earliest excavated remains from the Khabur date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) at Tell Feyda, followed by Hassuna material from Kashkashuk II. Von Oppenheim first encountered painted Halafian ceramics of the Chalcol ithic period in deep soundings at the ware's namesake, Tell Halaf. [See Halaf, Tell.] Important Uruk (late fourth millen nium) remains, including the beveled-rim bowl, related to styles from southern Mesopotamia, have been found throughout the Khabur catchment. At Tell Brak, Mallowan excavated the Eye temple from the Uruk period; it contained scores of small stone amulets with exaggerated eyes. It has been posited that there was a break in occupation in the early third millennium and that the first complex pol ities—that is, secondary-state formation—in the Khabur, rather than being an outgrowth of Uruk influence, occurred in the mid-titird millennium at dry-farming sites such as Tell Leilan. At issue is ceramic chronology: a style of painted and incised pottery called Ninevite 5, which dates to die first half of the third millennium, is found in die eastern part of the Upper Khabur to beyond the Tigris River. Chronolog ically problematic Metallic/Stone ware is distributed throughout the western Khabur and beyond. It is moot whether the significant increase in number and size of sites during the second half of the third millennium marks the transition to complex society. Nevertheless, this sudden in crease in sites and the location of many of them, such as Tell Chuera and other kranzhugel tells such as. Tell Beydar, where "Ebla" style tablets have been found, in agriculturally
KHABUR marginal areas, remains to be explained, as does their sub stantial decline beginning in the second quarter of the sec ond millennium BCE. Several research teams have sought to reconstruct climatic and environmental conditions in the Khabur. A group led by Harvey Weiss of Yale University now suggests that there were climatic fluctuations during the third millennium, climaxed by a severe drought at the end of the Akkadian period, that lasted for several hundred years during the last quarter of the millennium. On the banks of the lower Khabur River several sites served as storage centers for grain; they were found during salvage excavations in anticipation of a dam to be con structed south of Hassekeh. At Tell Raqai (excavated by Glenn Schwartz and Hans Curvers for Johns Hopkins Uni versity and die University of Amsterdam) a circular mudbrick building was identified as a granary complex, and at Tell 'Atij (excavated by Michel Fortin of Laval University) there are storage facilities but little evidence for domestic habitation. Similar configurations are known at Ziyada (ex cavated by Giorgio Buccellati, Daniela Buia, and Steven Reimer for the University of California, Los Angeles) and at Kerma (excavated by Muntaha Saghie of the Lebanese University in Beirut). It has been proposed that these sites were collection points for grain to be shipped downstream to Mari, or for pastoralists during the summer months when fodder was scarce. [See Mari.] At Tell Brak, tire palace of the Sargonic ldng Naram-Sin, discovered by Mallowan (1947), has been augmented by large mud-brick public buildings in area SS (excavated more recently by David and Joan Oates. Weiss's soundings at Tell Leilan provide a ceramic sequence for much of the third millennium and show that the site greatly increased in size in about 2600 BCE. During the early second millennium BCE, in the Middle Bronze Age (Old Assyrian, Old Babylonian periods), his torical evidence for the Khabur is greatly expanded from archives of the period that tell of the Old Assyrian trade network that passed through the Khabur between Assur and Anatolia: from the Mari archives of the Old Babylonian pe riod, and recently from post-Mari archives at Tell Leilan (ancient Shubat-Enlil, once tire seat of power for ShamsiAdad, who briefly controlled much of Northern Mesopo tamia). [See Assyrians; Assur; Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia.] With his demise and the destruction of Mari by Hammurabi of Babylon, the Khabur Triangle came under the influence of Yamhad, ancient Aleppo, for a time. [See Aleppo.] Habur ware dates to this period, a painted pottery Mallowan first identified at Chaghar Bazar. T h e presence of Hurrians increased during this period, one early center of which was Urkish (possibly Tell Mozan, being excavated by Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati). [See Hurrians.] By the middle of the second millennium BCE, die Hurriandominated kingdom of Mitanni had emerged as the main
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power of northern Syro-Mesopotamia; its capital Wassukanni, located in the Khabur Triangle, has not been posi tively identified, although Tell Fakhariyah is one candidate. [See Mitanni; Fakhariyah, Tell.] During this period settle ment was relatively sparse, and neither at Brak nor Chuera are Mitanni occupation remains extensive. At Tell Brak there was a palace (that can be reconstructed as a hilani) and an accompanying temple. During the fourteenth cen tury BCE, Mitannian power collapsed in die face of Hittite pressure, but the main beneficiary in the Khabur region was Assur, center of the Assyrians, who, after displacing the Mi tanni, fought campaigns against pastoralists there. Their struggle led to die establishment of a number of Middle As syrian setdements, including the fortress of Dur Katlimmu at Tell Sheikh Hamad on the Lower Khabur. Kiihne recov ered a small archive from his excavation at Tell Sheikh Hamad, and dates the first irrigation canals on tire Khabur to that period. Two painted wares of the Late Bronze Age are Late Habur (Khabur) ware and Nuzi (Mitanni) ware, but the majority of the pottery is plain. [See Sheikh Hamad, Tell; Nuzi.] Early in the Iron Age (1200-333 BCE) a major center of the Aramean ldngdom of Bit-Bahiani was the city of Guzana (modern Tell Halaf), which has provided a significant col lection of early Aramean art and architecture. [See Arameans.] Von Oppenheim excavated two palaces on the acrop olis. T h e so-called temple-palace has the plan of a hilani. Roman occupation obscures another major Aramean center at Tell Fakhariyah, where McEwan excavated a palace. Recentiy, a statue of Hdys'y, with a bilingual (Aramaic and Akkadian) inscription was discovered there by chance. In the eighth-seventh centuries BCE, the Khabur region was incorporated into tire Assyrian Empire. Neo-Assyrian palace ware was found at Tell Halaf, and major settlements were located at Tell Beydar in the Khabur Triangle and on the Lower Khabur at Tell Agaga and Tell Sheikh Hamad. Tell Agaga, where Layard began his explorations in the Khabur, has recently been reexcavated by Assad Mahmoud. A major Neo-Assyrian fortress and administrative center was built at Tell Sheildi Hamad, ancient Dur Katlimmu. In the lower city, building F has a hilani plan, and rooms in building G were decorated with painted lotus friezes. Settlement in the Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and Flellenistic periods is not well documented archaeologically in the Khabur. During the Roman period, the Khabur Triangle was a frontier between Roman and Parthian/Sasanian (Per sian) control. Poidebard's reconstruction of the limes system is currently undergoing reevaluation. In the Byzantine and Islamic periods, settlement was modest in the southern parts of the Khabur catchment, but important settlements existed at Dara, Nisibin, and Diyarbaldr. The limited settiement af ter the mid-second millennium BCE may have been related to the following conditions: its position as a march between
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1990: Further Investigations at a Small Rural Site of Early Urban Northern Mesopotamia." American Journal ofArchaeology 96 (1992): 3 9 7 - 4 1 9 . Discusses the final seasons of excavations and their impli cations. See bibliography for earlier reports. Stein, Diana L . "Khabur Ware and Nuzi Ware: Their Origin, Rela tionship, and Significance." Assur 4.1 (1984): 1 - 6 5 . Warburton, David A . "Previous Archaeological Work in the Habur BIBLIOGRAPHY Region." In Tall al-Hamtdiyd 1 : Vorbericht 1984, edited by Seyyare Eichler et al., pp. 1 3 - 3 0 . Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, Series ArchaeoAnon. "Mille et une capitales de Haute-Mesopotamie: Recents d6coulogica, 4. Gottingen, 1985. One of the few reviews in English. vertes en Syrie du Nord." l~£s Dossiers d'Archeologie, no. 1 5 5 (De Weiss, Harvey, ed. The Origins of Cities in Dry-Farming Syria and Mes cember 1990). Short reports in a popular format. opotamia in the Third Millennium B.C. Guilford, Conn., 1986. Anon. "Lost Civilizations of the Desert: Recent Archaeological R e Weiss, Harvey, et al. " T h e Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium search in Third Millennium North Syria." Bulletin of the Canadian North Mesopotamian Civilization." Science 261 (1993): 995-1004. Society for Mesopotamian Studies 21 (May 1 9 9 1 ) . Middle Khabur THOMAS L . MCCLELLAN storage facilities and their significance. Eichler, Seyyare, et al., eds. Tall al-Hamidiyd 2: Recent Excavations in the Upper Khabur Region, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, Series A r chaeologica, 6. Gottingen, 1990. T h e first section contains prelimi KHAFAJEH, one of the important sites to the east of nary reports in English from a 1986 symposium in Bern on other modern Baghdad and slightly north of the confluence of the Khabur excavations. Tigris and Diyala rivers (33°38' N , 44°4o' E). Archaeolog Fortin, Michel. "Resultats de la 4eme campagne de fouilles a Tell Atij ically this section of modern Iraq is known as the Lower et de la 3eme a Tell Gudeda, Syrie." Echos du Monde Classique/ Diyala region. Because of die areas' proximity to Baghdad, Classical Views 37 n.s./i2 (1993): 9 7 - 1 2 1 . Kiihne, Hartmut. Die Keramik vom Tell Chuera und ihre Beziehungen the sites of the Lower Diyala have been known to scholars zu Funden aus Syrien-Paldslina, der Turkei und dem Iraq. Vorderaand travelers since Western interest in early Mesopotamia siatische Forschungen der M a x Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung, began in the nineteenth century. Henry Rawlinson men 1. Berlin, 1976. T h e first detailed study of third-millennium ceram tioned Khafajeh and equated it with the ancient city of Opis. ics, now dated. [See the biography of Rawlinson.] Modern interest in Khafa Ktihne, Hartmut, ed. Die Rezente Umwelt von Tall Seh Hamad und Daten zur Umweltrekonstruktion der assyrischen Stadt Dur-kallimmu. jeh came about because of a number of illicitly dug antiq Berichte der Ausgrabung Tall Seh Hamad/Dur-katlimmu uities that had appeared on the market in Baghdad that ( B A T S H ) , vol. 1 . Berlin, 1 9 9 1 . Scientific studies on the past and could be traced to the Lower Diyala region. Khafajeh was present environment of the Middle and Lower Khabur, and evidence excavated by the Oriental Institute of T h e University of Chi for a Middle Assyrian canal system (English summaries). cago, The University Museum of tlie University of Penn Lebeau, Marc. "Esquisse d'une histoire de la Haute Mesopotamie au debut de l'Age du Bronze." Zeitschrift filr Assyriologie und Vorderasylvania, and the American Schools of Oriental Research sialische Archdologie 80 (1990): 2 4 1 - 2 9 6 . from 1930 to 1938, followed by some minor work in 1950 Mallowan, M . E . L . "Excavations at Brak and Chagar Bazar." Iraq 9 by the Directorate General of Antiquities of Iraq. T h e di (1947): 1-266. Site and survey report; see as well Mallowan's reports rectors of these excavations were Conrad Preusser, Pinhas in Iraq 3 and 4 and recent volumes of the journal for preliminary Delougaz, and Ephraim A. Speiser. [See the biography of reports on Tell Brak by David and Joan Oates. Moortgat-Correns, Ursula. Die Bildwerke vom Djebelet el-Beda in ihrer Speiser.] T h e excavation and recording techniques evolved Raumlichen und Zeillischen Umwelt. Berlin, 1972. Reviews Oppenby die excavators of Khafajeh and tlie otiier sites of the heim's discussion of kranzhugels. Lower Diyala became standards for American archaeolog Oates, David and Joan Oates. "Tell Brak: A Stratigraphic Summary, ical excavation in Mesopotamia for many years. 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 9 3 . " Iraq 56 (1994): 1 6 7 - 1 9 3 . See also earlier preliminary reports in Iraq, Covering some 216 ha (533.5 acres), Khafajeh is com Orthmann, Winfried. Tell Chuera: Ausgrabungen der Max Freiherr von posed of a number of mounds; the four major mounds were Oppenheim-Stiftung in Nordost-Syrien. Damascus, 1990. Short syn labeled A through D by the excavators. These mounds rise thesis of excavation results, in German and Arabic. from approximately 4 to 6 m (13-19.6 ft.) above the present Poidebard, Antoine. Iui trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie: Le limes de plain level. Mound A, the largest, is situated in die northern Trajan a la conquete Arabe: Recherches aeiienes (1925-1932). Paris, 1934. Brilliant early use of aerial photography, but his interpretation part of the site and is the mound closest to die modern of the Roman limes is now undergoing revision. course of tlie Diyala river. Occupation began in the Uruk Rouault, Olivier, and Maria-Grazia Masetti-Rouault, eds. L'Eufrate e il and Jemdet Nasr periods and lasted into die Akkadian pe tempo: Le civiltd del medio Eufrate e delta Gezira sirana, Milan, 1993. riod when A was abandoned. Mounds B and C are joined Catalog of an archaeological exhibition for the Khabur and Middle and are parts of a single settlement in the southwest. T h e Euphrates, with synthetic articles and brief site reports. Schmidt, Hubert, et al. Tell Halaf. 4 vols. Berlin, 1 9 4 3 - 1 9 6 2 . M o n o excavated materials from these mounds are dated to the Old graphs by individual authors containing primary source material, alBabylonian period and perhaps to the early Kassite era. diough the discussions are now dated, Mound D , located in the southeast, is the smallest mound Schwartz, Glenn M . A Ceramic Chronology from Tell Leilan, Operation and is dated to the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods. 1 . Yale Tell Leilan Research, 1. N e w Haven, 1988. Schwartz, Glenn M . , and Hans H . Curvers. "Tell al-Raqa'i 1989 and Information derived from a hoard of tablets from a temple
kingdoms and empires where combat was endemic and con ditions did not favor sedentary life, or its position as an agriculturally marginal zone where slight fluctuations in cli mate or human-induced environmental degradation inhib ited setdement.
KHAFAJEH of Sin in mound D of the Old Babylonian period allows for the identification of the mound with ancient Tutub, which was a town known in die Akkadian period (Harris, 1955). The name occurs in an Old Akkadian tablet from Eshnunna; therefore, it is likely that mound A, the earliest mound, was also known as Tutub during at least part of its history. An inscribed clay cylinder from Mound B found in the foun dations of a room in a massive fortification indicates that in the Old Babylonian period mound B, and probably mound C as well, became known as D u r Samsuiluna. Samsuiluna of Babylon, the ruler after Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE), constructed a fortress there in the twenty-third year of his reign. It is not known how long tiiese ancient names sur vived, but it seems probable that in tire early part of the first millennium during the Neo-Assyrian period, Khafajeh was located in a region known at one time as Tupliash. Of the four mounds of Khafajeh, mound A was the most extensively excavated. The building sequences include the so-called Sin temple, the private houses, the small temple in square O 4 3 , tire Nintu temple, and the Temple Oval. It is most unlikely that the "Sin temple" was really sacred to die god Sin, but tire name is so entrenched in the early literature describing the building that it would be confusing to rename
KHAFAJEH.
Reconstruction of the Temple Oval.
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the structure. A sounding beneath the Sin temple probably reached virgin soil and indicated that occupation in the area of the sounding began with the late Uruk period. The ex cavations of the actual temple are extremely important as they provide an unbroken series of levels of one building dating from the Jemdet Nasr period through the Early Dy nastic period. It was one of the archaeological sequences in the excavations of the Lower Diyala region that provided a definition of the Early Dynastic period. Levels I through V of Sin are dated to "Protoliterate c and d," a terminology used by the excavators. This occupation is the equivalent of the Jemdet Nasr period. T h e chronological situation is somewhat more complicated in that it is now known that Protoliterate d of tire Diyala region is actually contemporary with Early Dynastic I of southern Mesopotamia. Sin VI and VII are also Early Dynastic I, Sin VIII and IX are Early Dynastic II, and Sin X dates to Early Dynastic III. The plan of the earliest temple is based on the classic tripartite Su merian temple type of southern Mesopotamia. By Sin IV the temple is built upon a terrace and is reached by a flight of steps. T h e plan also incorporates a large court to the east. In the Early Dynastic period plano-convex bricks are used and the building becomes increasingly monumental.
E D II period. (Courtesy Oriental Institute, Chicago)
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KHALDEH
T o the west and south of the Sin temple and stratigraphically related to it were die remains of a long sequence of twelve levels of Early Dynastic private houses as well as the smaller Nintu temple and a temple located in square O 43 on the survey map of Khafajeh. These sequences greatly enriched our knowledge of the Early Dynastic period in the Diyala region and underlined the fact that there was an exttaordinary diversity of architectural approaches to temple construction at Khafajeh during the third millennium. An additional new type of temple architecture was provided by the excavation of the very large Temple Oval further to the west of the private houses and in close proximity to the town wall. Three different levels of this Early Dynastic temple were excavated. Because the building must have dominated the southern part of mound, it is unfortunate that the deity to whom this temple complex was dedicated is not known. It was originally built on top of a foundation pit filled with some 7 m (23 ft.) of clean sand. T h e cella (inner part of the temple), which was not preserved, stood on top of a raised platform and was reached by a flight of steps rising from a courtyard surrounded by rooms and a large irregular oval wall. This wall in turn was surrounded by another curved wall. Its length was over 100 m (328 ft.), and in the south a residential type building called house D (no houses A, B, or C exist) was built in the space between the inner and outer curved walls. House D must have served in the administra tion of die temple. Most of the material found in mound A belongs to the Early Dynastic period, although some Ak kadian finds were made in a private house area in the north ern part of the mound. Mention has already been made of the clay-foundation cylinder, which identified the excavated remains of mound
B as Dur Samsuiluna, a fortress built by Samsuiluna around 1726. A portion of a 4.7-meter-thick buttressed wall of this fortification was exposed as well as parts of two different buildings. T h e plan of the larger of the two buildings has two parts that imply a dual function for the building's use, and the excavator suggests that it may have been the resi dence of a governor or ruler of the fort (Hill, 1990, p. 210). Perhaps to be included in Dur Samsuiluna is mound C. A few soundings on this mound were undertaken but nothing of importance was recorded. Large-scale excavations were carried out on mound D , which may be dated to the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods. Part of a massive fortification wall 7 to approxi mately 12 m (23-39 ft-) thick surrounded what has been termed "the citadel." The shape of the space defined by this wall was very irregular. A street led from an outer gate ex cavated in the northeastern part of the enclosure to a large temple building surrounded by private houses in the center of the citadel. T h e excavators defined an earlier and later phase of construction. An Old Babylonian tablet hoard found in a room of the later phase identified this building as a temple of the god Sin and provided for the identification of Khafajeh with ancient Tutub. [See also Diyala.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Delougaz, Pinhas. The Temple Oval At. Khafajah. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications (OIP), 53. Chicago, 1940. Delougaz, Pinhas, and Seton Lloyd. Pre-Sargonid Temples in the Diyala Region. OIP, 58. Chicago, 1942. Delougaz, Pinhas. Pottery from the Diyala Region. OIP, 63. Chicago, 1952. Delougaz, Pinhas, et al. Private Houses and Graves in the Diyala Region. OIP, 88. Chicago, 1967. Ellis, Richard S. A Bibliography of Mesopotamian Archaeological Sites. Wiesbaden, 1972. See pages 43-44 for citations of preliminary re ports. Frankfort, Henri. Sculpture of the Third Millennium B.C. from TellAsmar and Khafajah. OIP, 44. Chicago, 1939. Frankfort, Henri. More Sculpture from the Diyala Region. OIP, 60. Chi cago, 1943. Frankfort, Henri. Stratified Cylinder Seals from the Diyala Region. OIP, 72. Chicago, 1 9 5 5 . Harris, Rivkah. " T h e Archive of the Sin Temple in Khafajah (Tutub)." Journalof Cuneiform Studies 9 (1955): 3 1 - 8 8 ; 9 1 - 1 2 0 . Identifies K h a fajeh as Tutub. Hill, Harold D . , et al. Old Babylonian Public Buildings in the Diyala Region. OIP, 98. Chicago, 1990. DONALD P. HANSEN
KHALDEH (Kobbet Choueifat), site located about 12 km (7 mi.) south of Beirut, Lebanon, along the highway connecting Beirut to Sidon. The site is formed by two prom ontories, about 10-15 above sea level, that slope toward the sea for a length of 500 m. A milestone discovered at the site gives its distance as 239 Roman miles from Antioch and m
KHAFAJEH,
Scarlet Ware jar, E D I period. (Courtesy I. Thcusen)
KHAWLAN AT-TIYAL about 12 from Berytus (Beirut). Khaldeh is identified with ancient Hi-il-du-ya (in Akkadian), a city of the kingdom of Sidon annexed by Esarhaddon in 677/76 BCE (see Archiv fur Orient Forschung, Berlin, 1926-, vol. 9, p. 48, col. 3.2). It is known as Mutado Heldua in the itinerary of the Bordeaux pilgrim of the Roman period; Khaldeh is its modern Arabic name. T h e site has been known since 1847, when Henn Guys mentioned it in Beyrouth et le Mont Liban. In i960, during construction of the highway near the airport, tlie Lebanese Department of Antiquities uncovered some Phoenician tombs. Subsequently, archaeological excavations were car ried out at the site under the direction of Roger Saidah (1961-1962) under the auspices of tlie Lebanese Depart ment of Antiquities. T h e excavations unearthed stratigraphic levels from tlie Byzantine-Roman, Early Roman, Greco-Persian, Late Bronze, and Late Chalcolithic periods. A complex of urban houses (villas with mosaic floors and baths) as well as in dustrial and agricultural quarters (olive presses and cisterns) dating to the Byzantine-Roman period (fourth-sixth cen turies CE) were found covering the surface of the mound. The main discoveries from the Early Roman period are terra-cotta sarcophagi, characteristic terra sigillata and M e garian ware, and a number of coins of the imperial period. [See Sarcophagus.] T h e finds indicate a time span from the Late Hellenistic to the Early Roman period. T h e GrecoPersian period is represented by a few wall foundations con structed of limestone blocks. About 422 tombs were discovered in the Iron Age (tentheight centuries BCE) Phoenician necropolis that shed light on the funerary practices. They were of two types: the majority were inhumations, in which the body was placed directly on the ground between two rows of stones and surrounded by grave goods—mainly Iron Age pottery. A lesser number of burials were in funerary urns found containing some calcin ated bones, indicating the practice of incineration. [See Phoenicians; Burial Techniques; Grave Goods.] this exten sive cemetery points to a large settlement, as yet unfound— possibly the first one in tlie Phoenician homeland to bear witness to that golden era in Phoenician history. T h e Late Bronze Age (thirteenth-eleventh century cen turies BCE) is attested by sherds discovered in the area of the cemetery. T h e Phoenician tombs apparently disturbed ear lier LB settlements probably abandoned toward the end of the thirteenth century BCE. A S the excavations neared their end, a few oval structures and funerary jars were discovered that are dated to the Late Chalcolithic period (beginning of the third millennium). BIBLIOGRAPHY Callot, Oliver. "Remarques sur les huileries de K h a n Khalde (Liban)." In Archeologie au Levant: Recueil a la memoirs de Roger Saidah, pp. 4 1 9 - 4 2 8 . L y o n , 1982. See, as well, die contributions by Pierre B o r -
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dreuil (pp. 1 9 0 - 1 9 1 ) , N . Duval a n d J . - P . Calliet (pp. 3 1 1 - 3 9 4 ) , and J.-P. Rey-Coquais (pp. 402-408). Gebara, Cherine, "Remarques sur la sigillee orientale d'apres les fouilles de Khan Khalde (Heldua)." In Archeologie du Levant: Recueil a la memoire de Roger Saidah, pp. 4 0 9 - 4 1 7 . Lyon, 1982 Guys, Henri. Relation d'un sijour de plusieurs annees a Beyrough el dans. le Liban. Paris, 1847. Saidah, Roger. "Fouilles de Khaldeh." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 19 (1966): 5 1 - 9 0 ; 20 (1967): 1 5 5 - 1 8 0 . Saidah, Roger. "Archaeology in the Lebanon 1968-69." Berytus 18 (1969): 1 3 0 - 1 3 4 . Saidah, Roger. "Objects grecs d'epoque geometrique decouvert recemment sur le littoral libanais (a Khalde pres de Beyrouth)." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syrienne 2 1 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 9 5 - 1 9 8 . LEILA BADRE
KHAWLAN AT-TIYAL, region situated on the inter nal slope of the Yemenite mountains, southeast of Yemen's capital, San'a. It occupies approximately tlie northwest sec tor of the basin of Wadi Dhanah (i5°oo'-i5°i5' N, 44°3o'45°oo' E). This great watershed area, which the ancient Sabeans once closed with a dike near their capital, Marib (see below), drains into the desert to the east. T h e name Khawlan is very ancient and comes from the name of a Himyarite tribe that occupied the region in the pre-Islamic era (first-second centuries CE). The appellation is derived from the high mountain (Jabal Tiyal, about 3,500 m high) dominating the chain that delimits tlie region on the north; the name distinguishes it from Khawlan bin 'Amir, located farther north, near the city of Sa'dah. The region is sparsely populated today, and the few villages (al-Kibs, Jihanah, 'Asal, Ban! Sulayh, ad-Dayq, al-Watadah) are dis tributed along the alluvial valleys (Wadi Miswar, Wadi Hababid, Wadi 'Atfah, Wadi Shirwab), cutting into the bare hills of Precambrian granite that slopes toward die desert. Except for the brief exploratory voyage made by Eduard Glaser at the end of the 1800s, no archaeological research had been done in the area prior to the beginning of the re connaissance surveys carried out by the Italian Archaeolog ical Mission in 1981. In addition to a series of extensive Mousterian (Middle Paleolithic) workshops in Wadi Hababid that produced flint tools, numerous Neolithic settlements characterized by iso lated oval houses and by a sophisticated stone-working in dustry have been discovered. Several excavations conducted at site 3 in Wadi ath-Thayyilah (1984-1986) have given proof of tlie beginning of domestication. They have allowed tlie hypothetical reconstruction of die methods of exploiting resources that were used by the first sedentary Yemenites from about 5000 to 3500 BCE, in an environment more hu mid than the present one. T h e reconnaissance surveys also led to tlie discovery—for the first time on the southern Arabian Peninsula—of a Bronze Age, datable to the third-second millennium. More than fifty sites from this period were discovered between
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1981 and 1985 in the regions of A'rush and Suhman (west ern Khawlan) and Jabal Afnas (al-Hada). The data from the explorations and from the excavations conducted in four of the principal settlements (Wadi Yana'im, Wadi Najid elAbyad, al-Masannah, ar-Raqlah) offer a quite clear picture of the culture that preceded the Sabaeans. This picture shows agricultural villages with oval houses centered around areas of common activity (see figure 1). Raised mud walls were perched on foundations of unworked blocks, and central pilasters supported the ceilings. Exca vation led to the discovery of stone utensils, objects of bronze and semiprecious stones, grinding stones, pestles, and an abundance of animal bones on ceramic tile floors. The examination of seeds found in the clay of tire tiles and of the bones show that tire inhabitants cultivated millet, wheat, and barley and raised cattle, sheep, and pigs. The ceramic ware, which shows evident parallels witii Early Bronze Age Syrian-Palestinian wares, is clearly differ ent from that of the following Sabaean period. It rhay sug gest that the origins of the kingdoms of the southern Arabian Peninsula are to be found outside Yemen. Paleoenvironmental studies have demonstrated that Bronze Age culture came to an end (at least in this area) toward the middle of the second millennium: the geohydrologic equilibrium upon which the economic success of tiiese agricultural communities was based entered into a pe riod of crisis. A drier, more irregular climate ensued, and the Khawlan, now traversed by more ephemeral and violent streams of water, was abandoned. Human occupation shifted toward the desert border to the east and began to be
integrated into die emerging Sabaean culture. At that time, imposing hydraulic works were developed that were able to manage the irregular quantities of water coming from the mountains, and large stretches of the desert were cultivated with very intricate systems of irrigation. T h e dike at Marib is only the largest example of such new technology. [See Hydraulics.] Thus, in the Sabaean period, only the most eastern part of the Khawlan was occupied. This was demonstrated by the Italian mission's discovery in 1985 of a large archaic Sabaean city (ancient Hafary) in Wadi Yala, about 30 Ion (19 mi.) southwest of Marib. A brief excavation conducted there in 1987 made it possible to ascertain that the city was first founded in the tiiirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE. Such a date should probably be assumed to mark the beginning of Sabaean culture in Yemen and the point of transition be tween prehistory and history in Khawlan and on the south ern Arabian Peninsula. [See also Marib.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Maigret, Alessandro de. " A Bronze Age for Soudiern Arabia." East and West 34 (1984): 7 5 - 1 0 6 . Maigret, Alessandro de, ed. The Sabaean Archaeological Complex in the WddT Yala (Eastern Hawlan at-Tiyal-Yemen Arab Republic): A Pre liminary Report. Istiruto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, Centra Studi e Scavi Archeologici in Asia, Reports and Memoirs, 2 1 . Rome, 1988. Maigret, Alessandro de. The Bronze Age Culture ofHawldn at-Tiyaland al-Hada (Republic of Yemen). Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, Centro Studi e Scavi Archeologici in Asia, Reports and Memoirs, 24. Rome, 1990.
KHELEIFEH, TELL ELMiiller, David H., and Nicolaus Rhodokanakis, eds. Eduard Clascrs Reise nach Marib. Sammlung Eduard Glaser, I Vienna, 1 9 1 3 . ALESSANDRO DE MAIGRET Translated from Italian by Susan I. Schiedel
KHELEIFEH, TELL EL-, site located approximately 500 m from the nordiern shore of the Gulf of 'Aqaba, roughly equidistant between the modern cities of Eilat and Aqaba. Tell el-Kheleifeh was first surveyed in 1933 by the German explorer Fritz Frank, who identified the site with the biblical city of Ezion-Geber (Nm. 33: 35-36; Dt. 2: 8; 1 Kgs. 9: 26-28; 22: 47-48; 2 Chr. 8: 17-18). In 1937, Nelson Glueck conducted a surface survey of this low, mud-brick mound and concluded that the site had been occupied be tween the tenth and eighth centuries BCE. Glueck directed three seasons of excavation at Tell el-Kheleifeh for the Smithsonian Institution and the American Schools of Ori ental Research (ASOR) between 1938 and 1940. He dis cerned six major periods of occupation, which he dated be tween die Iron I and Persian periods. Glueck wrote a number of articles about Tell el-Kheleifeh (see Vogel, 1970) but never published a final excavation report. He accepted Franks' Tell el-Kheleifeh/Ezion-Geber identification. (For a recent reappraisal of Glueck's excavations, see Pratico, 1985, I9930 C a s e m a t e Fortress. T w o major architectural phases could be discerned in the mud-brick ruins at Tell el-Khe leifeh: the first, and earliest, was a casemate fortress; the later one was a fortified settlement. T h e former was composed of a square (45 m on each side) of casemate rooms. A large building, constructed on die so-called four-room house plan (Shiloh, 1970) was located in the center of this casemate square. This structure, identified by the excavator as a cit adel or granary, measured 12.30 X 13.20 m. It was com posed of three contiguous units at the northern end of the fortress. Each of these units, or small rooms, was roughly square. Extending to the south were three larger rectangular rooms (approximately 7.40 m long and 2-3 m wide) whose walls were preserved to a height of 2.70 m. An open space between the casemate fortification and this monumental building was, devoid of architecture and used as a courtyard until the later fortified settlement was built (see below). In light of die excavated data, tire chronology of die case mate fortress cannot be established. T h e only pottery that can be assigned to tiiis level with certainty is Negevite ware, a handmade Iron Age tradition for which a refined typology has yet to be established. T h e chronology of Negevite pot tery can only be determined on the basis of its association witii datable wheelmade forms. T h e fortress's plan is intriguingly similar to an architec tural tradition well attested in the central Negev southward to the site of Tell el-Qudeirat (Qadesh-Barnea). Recent sur veys and excavations have documented an extensive net
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work of early Iron Age fortresses (eleventh and/or tenth cen turies BCE) witii notable similarities to the Tell el-Kheleifeh fortress, including the casemate construction and nearby buildings exhibiting the four-room plan (Cohen, 1979). Given the fact that Tell el-Kheleifeh's pottery and inscriptional materials do not predate die eighth century BCE (see below), this observation of the striking similarities between the Tell el-Kheleifeh fortress and those of the central Negev must be, for the present, one of comparative architecmre and not chronology. Fortified Settlement. When the casemate fortress was destroyed, a fortified setdement of considerable size (56 m [north] by 59 m [east] by 59 m [south] by 63 m [west] re placed it. This new, larger settlement was surrounded by a solid offset/inset wall witii a different alignment that gave access through a four-chambered gate on the south. Unlike the casemate fortress with its open courtyards between the casemate wall and the central structure, the spaces inside the new offsets/insets wall were now occupied with build ings. In part, the earlier casemate foruess was incorporated into the new plan. T h e edifice that once stood in the center of the casemate square was now located in the northwest cor ner of die fortified settlement. Some of the old casemate rooms, primarily those on the southern and eastern sides of the old fortress, continued in use. T h e casemate rooms of the western and northern sides, however, were now outside the new fortification perimeter. T h e chronology of the fortified (offsets/insets) settlement can be established with reasonable certainty on the basis of the wheelmade pottery recovered (c. eighth-early sixth cen tury BCE). T h e same chronology is also suggested by a small but important collection of stamp impressions tiiat appear on the handles of storage jars. T h e inscriptions read "be longing to Qaws'anal, servant of the lung" (Iqws'nl 'bd hrnlk). T h e script dates to the seventii or early sixth century BCE. T h e offsets/insets settlement represents the last major ar chitectural level at the site. There is fragmentary evidence for later occupation, after the sixth century BCE (a few Phoe nician and Aramaic ostraca of the fifth and fourth centuries, a small collection of Greek body sherds and some pottery of the fifth century BCE). T h e building remains of die later occupation are poorly preserved. Identification. Reappraising Glueck's work at Tell elKheleifeh has verified a number of his conclusions, but has also indicated the need for some significant revisions and refinements, particularly for the site's chronology and iden tification. Reappraisal has suggested later chronological ho rizons for the site than originally proposed by Glueck. As noted above, Tell el-Kheleifeh's wheelmade pottery is dated to between the eighth and early sixth centuries BCE, creating a problem in terms of the biblical references to Ezion-Geber (see above): the question is whether the ruins of Tell elKlieleifeh do indeed preserve the story of biblical Ezion-
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Geber and/or Eilat. T h e revised chronology provides no clear archaeological evidence for die period of Israel's wil derness traditions (Nm. 33: 35-36) or even for the time of Solomon's reign in the tenth century (r Kgs. 9 : 26-28). Ad ditionally, the site provides only questionable evidence for the ninth century BCE ( J Kgs. 22: 47-48). Assuming the cor rectness of the revised chronology, the identification of Tell el-Kheleifeh is both an archaeological and a historical prob lem. BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohen, Rudolph. " T h e Iron Age Fortresses in the Central Negev." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 236 (1979): 61-79. Glueck, Nelson. " T h e First Campaign at Tell el-Kheleifeh." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 71 (1938): 3 - 1 7 . Glueck, Nelson. " T h e Topography and History of Ezion-Geber and Elath." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 72 (1938): 2 - 1 3 . Glueck, Nelson. " T h e Second Campaign at Tell el-Kheleifeh (EzionGeber: Elath)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 75 (1939): 8-22. Glueck, Nelson. " T h e Third Season of Excavation at Tell el-Khelei feh." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 79 (1940): 2 - 1 8 . Glueck, Nelson. "Ezion-Geber." Biblical Archaeologist 28 (1965): 7 0 87. Glueck, Nelson. "Some Edomite Pottery from Tell el-Kheleifeh, Parts I and I I . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 188 {1967): 8-38. Glueck, Nelson. "Tell el-Kheleifeh Inscriptions." In Near Eastern Stud ies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, edited by Hans Goedicke, pp. 225-242. Baltimore, 1 9 7 1 . Meshel, Zeev, "On the Problem of Tell el-Kheleifeh, Elath, and EzionGeber" (in Hebrew). Eretz-Israel 1 2 (1975): 49-56. Pradco, Gary D . "Nelson Glueck's 1938-1940 Excavations at Tell elKheleifeh: A Reappraisal." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 259 (1985): 1 - 3 2 . Pratico, Gary D . "Where Is Ezion-Geber? A Reappraisal of the Site Archaeologist Nelson Glueck Identified as King Solomon's Red Sea Port." Biblical Archaeology Review 12.5 (1986): 24-35. Pratico, Gary D . Nelson Glueck's 1938-1940 Excavations at Tell el-Khe leifeh: A Reappraisal. Atlanta, 1993. Shiloh, Yigal. " T h e Four-Room House: Its Situation and Function in the Israelite City." Israel Exploration Journal 20 (1970): 1 8 0 - 1 9 0 . Vogel, Eleanor K . "Bibliography of Nelson Glueck." In Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck, edited by James A. Sanders, pp. 382-394. Garden C i t y , N . Y . , 1970. GARY D . PRATICO
KHIRBEH (Ar., khirbet, joined with a noun, meaning "ruin"). The term khirbeh indicates that at least some por tion of a ruined structure or city is visible: for example, a wall line, cistern, or architectural fragment(s). Eighteenthand nineteenth-century Western travelers to the Near East observed that a Palestinian khirbeh was a ruined city of an cient Palestine. Many such sites had names descriptive of their location: for example, Khirbet Qumran ("ruin of the
grayish spot") and Khirbet el-Busl ("ruin of the onion"). [See Qumran.] Other descriptors referred to a current or previous owner: Khirbet el-Huseinat ("ruin of the Husein clan"). T h e names of still others represented their specific archaeological features: Khirbeh ed-Deir ("ruin of die mon astery") and Khirbet es-Sukriyeh ("ruin of the sugar fac tories"). The khirbeh sites that attracted the most interest in the nineteenth century were those with Arabic place names that appeared to preserve "corrupted" versions of their ancient Hebrew, Greek, or Latin names: for example, Khirbet Seilun (biblical Shiloh) and Khirbet 'Ajlan (biblical Eglon). [See Shiloh.] Recognizing linguistic transformations between languages led to the identification of many biblical sites and to the creation of the first more-or-less comprehensive his torical geography of biblical Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century. [See Historical Geography.] Subsequent archaeological research, beginning in 1890 with the work of Flinders Petrie, showed that most of die ruined sites did not date to die period of the Hebrew Bible at all; they were, rather, ruined Roman-, Byzantine-, Cru sader- or Islamic-period sites that in turn might preserve an earlier biblical place name from the immediate region but not necessarily of the site itself: the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic site of Khirbet 'Abdeh was Oboda/Avdat and Khir bet Kaisariyeh was Caesarea, but Khirbet el-Jezery was only adjacent to biblical Gezer. [See Avdat; Caesarea; Gezer.] Overzealous attempts to see biblical place names in Arabic place names produced erroneous results. T h e aforemen tioned Khirbet 'Ajlan, for example, probably had nothing to do with biblical Eglon, but rather was named in the seventh century CE by 'Arnr ibn al-'As. Once scholars realized that the Palestinian khirbeh sites were post biblical (and often Islamic in date), interest in them as worthy of study on their own merit vanished. Historical documentation identifies many Khirbeh sites as active villages through the sixteenth century and suggests that they were abandoned and ruined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Others were only seasonal habitation spots founded in the early nineteenth century. These also attracted the name khirbeh, in these instances meaning "temporary site." Finally, some of the Arab villages aban doned in 1948 and now located within modern Israel have also come to be referred to as khirbeh. Most khirbeh sites in modern Israel were given Hebrew names prefaced by the word horvat ("ruin") and thus have two "modern" names. Many of the new Hebrew names do not preserve a tradition: some are modern identifications of the site's ancient name, when one can be suggested, and may not be accurate; and others may be named after a modern kibbutz and have no antiquity, such as Horvat Uza, the modern name of Khirbet Aiyadiyah. [See also History of the Field, overview article; Site Survey; Tell; and the biographies of Petrie, Robinson, and Smith.] c
KHORSABAD BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Translated and edited by Anson F . Rainey. 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1979. Classic account describing the geography of biblical lands but widi interesting methodological discussions of how the sites were identified. Hutteroth, Wolf Dieter, and Kamal Abdulfattah. Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan, and Southern Syria in the Late Sixteenth Cen tury. Erlanger Geographische Arbeiten, 5. Erlangen, 1977. T h e best study of sixteendi-century Palestine. M a n y of the nineteenth-century khirbeh sites are seen at this time as active villages and towns. Palmer, Edward H. Arabic and English Name Lists. Survey of Western Palestine, vol. 7. London, 1 8 8 1 . T h e name list from the Survey of Western Palestine identifying and translating Palestine's nineteenthcentury Arabic place names. Robinson, Edward. Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea. 3 vols. Boston, 1 8 4 1 . Robinson's classic travel journal of Palestine in 1 8 3 8 , containing descriptions of many khirbeh sites. JEFFREY A . BLAKELY
KHIRBET For toponyms beginning with this el ement (also spelledYlivcbzX), see under latter part of name. For a general definition of the term, see Khirbeh.
KHORSABAD, modern village on the site of the an cient city of Dur Sharrukin ("fortress of Sargon"), is located in nordrern Iraq about 20 km (12 mi.) nordieast of Nineveh (36°3i' N , 43°i4' E). T h e ancient city was founded by Sar gon II, ldng of Assyria (721-705 BCE), who purchased die site from the inhabitants of a local village, Magganubba, and built a city there to be his new capital. T h e reasons for Sargon's decision to build a new capital are not clear. If he usurped the throne, as has often been drought, he may have wished to create a new administrative center away from hos tile elements in the older Assyrian cities. H e may, however, have simply wished to display his power and wealth by cre ating a splendid new capital for die expanding Assyrian Em pire. With prisoners of war as laborers, work on the new city began in 717, and celebrations in honor of tlie king and the gods taking up residence were held in 707. Consttuction of the city remained unfinished at the time of Sargon's death in 705. Sennacherib, his son and successor, moved the cap ital to Nineveh, but D u r Sharrukin appears to have re mained a provincial capital until its final abandonment when the empire fell in about 612 BCE. [See Nineveh.] T h e identity of the site did not disappear from memory, however; the medieval Arab geographer Yaqut referred to "a city called ruins of Sar'on" located beside tlie contemporary village of Khorsabad. Khorsabad was the first site in Mesopotamia to be exten sively excavated, and it has produced a wealth of archaeo logical material. Excavation at the site began in the early 1840s, with tlie work of Paul Emile Botta, tlie French consul at Mosul. Disappointed at not finding anything of particular
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interest during earlier digging at Kuyunjik (the citadel of ancient Nineveh), Botta turned his attention to Khorsabad, where inscribed bricks were reported to have been found by the local inhabitants. His excavations were immediately suc cessful. Between 1843 and 1844, numerous large stone slabs with pictorial reliefs were unearthed that had lined die walls of an immense palace. [See Palace.] Botta thought that he had uncovered the biblical city of Nineveh. Eugene Flandin, an artist sent by the French government to assist Botta, made drawings of the wall reliefs that were later published. When some of the discoveries were exhibited in Paris, they caused a sensation and spurred a European hunt for Me sopotamian antiquities. Excavation at Khorsabad was resumed from 1852 to 1854 by Victor Place, Botta's successor as French consul at Mo sul. Place cleared about two hundred rooms in the palace and he, too, found numerous stone wall reliefs and statues, most of which were lost in 18 5 5: the boat and rafts conveying them down tlie Tigris River on the start of their journey to Paris sank near Qurna, after being attacked by rebellious ttibesmen. Fortunately, drawings of many of the reliefs and architectural plans had been made by Felix Thomas, Place's draftsman, and these were later published. In addition, pho tographs (calotypes) of some of the archaeological work at Khorsabad, as well as of other places in Mesopotamia, were taken by Gabriel Tranchard, an engineer and friend of Place. Among the photographs, the most impressive are those showing tlie various stages in the excavation of a city gate: its arched entrance displays a border of glazed bricks along its upper facade and a flanking pair of stone colossi in the form of human-headed winged bulls. Systematic excavations at Khorsabad were not resumed until 1929, when tlie Oriental Instimte of die University of Chicago sent an expedition under Edward Chiera. The in stitute carried out excavations at tlie site until 1935, with the most important seasons (1932-1935) under the direction of Gordon Loud. Their work centered on the main citadel area, a second smaller citadel (palace F), and one of the city gates (gate 7). In 1957, the Iraqi Directorate General of An tiquities carried out excavations at the temple of the Sebitlu (a group of seven beneficent deities) under the direction of Behnam Abu al-Soof. T h e city wall surrounding D u r Sharruldn was constructed of mud brick on top of a stone base; it was about 14 m thick and 12 m high and enclosed an area roughly square in plan (approximately 1,800 X 1,700 m—about 300 ha, or 740 acres). Seven monumental gates (gates 1-7) provided entry into the city, and each gate was given a name honoring a Mesopotamian deity (e.g., " T h e Goddess Ishtar Is The One Who Makes Its People Flourish"). Two gates were located on each side of the city, except on the northwest, where there was only one (gate 7). At tlie time of excavation, this last gateway was blocked, suggesting that tlie doors had never been brought into position.
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The area serving as the city's main citadel was located against the northwest city wall. T h e citadel was on the same level as the remainder of the city but was walled off from it and made accessible by two gates (A and B). Within the citadel, the palace complex and the temple to die god Nabu were placed on platforms, raising them above die level of the other structures uncovered there (buildings J, K, L, and M). The form and placement of several of the units within die citadel seem to be somewhat haphazard and irregular. This is surprising because the city was planned and built within a brief period of time. The royal palace (e-gal-gaba-ri-nu-tuku-a, "palace with out rival"), with its residential, administrative, ceremonial, and religious sections, was made up of approximately 240 rooms, courtyards, and corridors, and covered about 10 ha (25 acres). The palace complex was placed on a raised ter race about 12 m high that partly jutted beyond the main line of the city wall; its inhabitants thus received the prevailing wind and also obtained a view of the nearby mountains. Access to the terrace was by means of a broad ramp that led from an open square or plaza up to the main entrance of the palace. The palace of Sargon II is perhaps the best known of all the Neo-Assyrian palaces. It was planned around three large courtyards, with the throne-room suite located between the second and third courtyards. T h e main entrance, on the southeast, had three monumental gateways, each of which was guarded by pairs of colossal winged bulls (see figure 1 ) . This entrance led into the first and largest courtyard, XV (103 X 91 m). Administrative offices were probably located around this courtyard; to its northeast was the palace service area, with kitchens, storerooms, and pos sibly workshops. T h e walls of die second major courtyard (VIII), reached by passing through two chambers, were lined with stone reliefs. The ceremonial and official sections of the palace were probably located around this courtyard. On the southwest side of this courtyard, tiiree monumental entrances led into a typical Neo-Assyrian throne-room suite. The large rectangular throne room (about 10 X 47 m) had a stone throne dais against its narrow southeastern end and was embellished with stone wall reliefs and painted deco ration. Beyond the suite of rooms adjacent to the throne room was the third and innermost courtyard, around which the palace's residential quarters were probably located. A somewhat isolated complex of rooms was discovered in the southwest corner of the palace. It was first uncovered by Place, who thought it was the palace harem (Place, 18671870). Subsequent work by the Oriental Institute, however, showed tiiat this area contains six sanctuaries, and tiieir sub sidiary rooms, grouped around three courtyards (Loud, 1936). The three largest sanctuaries were dedicated to the deities Sin, Shamash, and Ningal, and the three smaller ones to Ea, Adad, and Ninurta. Nearby was a ziggurat that, ac cording to Place, was about 43 X 43 m and could be as cended by means of a stairway that spiraled around it. [See
KHORSABAD. Figure 1 . Winged bull with a human head, guardian figure from the gate of the palace of Sargon II. Dated to the second half of the eighth century BCE. M u s e e du L o u v r e , Paris. (Alinari/Art Resource, N Y )
Ziggurat.] Place also reported that each level of the ziggurat was about 6 m high and painted a different color; the four preserved levels are white, black, reddish, and bluish (Place, 1867-1870). Sargon claimed (e.g. Fuchs, 1994, p . 294, 1. 64) tiiat he built a structure for his palace in the image of a Syrian bithilani, which is generally thought to have included a pillared portico. Although various locations have been suggested for tiiis structure, including an unusual building at the north west corner of the palace terrace, no firm identification can be made at present. Great care was taken witii the construc tion and decoration of the palace, and Sargon boasted (Fuchs, 1994, p. 294,1. 63) that various woods and precious materials had been employed for those purposes. Important doorways were guarded by colossal statues of winged bulls with human heads and figures of protective deities. T h e walls of numerous public rooms were faced with stone slabs carved with scenes depicting the king's military accomplish ments, ceremonial activities, and religious scenes (see figure 2)-
The only independent temple in the citadel at Khorsabad was dedicated to Nabu, the god of writing and wisdom, as was the most important temple discovered on the citadel at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu). [See Nimrud.] South of the palace terrace, and connected to it by a corbeled stone bridge, was
KHORSABAD a lower, separate platform on which a large and imposing temple of Nabu (building H) was found. T h e temple con tained about forty-five rooms and corridors arranged around five courtyards. T h e two major cellae were placed next to one another, the larger one dedicated to Nabu and the slighdy smaller one probably dedicated to his spouse, Tashmetu. Two important facades inside tire temple were embellished with glazed-brick decoration in bright colors, depicting lions, eagles, bulls, fig trees, and ploughs. Similar decoration was also found on the courtyard facades leading into the palace's Sin, Shamash, and Ningal sanctuaries. In addition to the palace complex and the Temple of Nabu, at least four large residences were situated in die cit adel (buildings J, K, L, and M ) . These resembled the palace in general layout but were less complex. An inscription found on three stone threshold slabs in die largest residence (building L) indicates that it belonged to Sargon's brother, the vizier Sin-aha-usur. Although not completely excavated, tlie structure may have had about two hundred rooms,
KHOESABAD. Figure 2 .
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courtyards, and corridors. N o stone wall reliefs were found in these residences, but remains of impressive painted wall decoration were found in the main reception room of build ing K. [See Wall Paintings.] A second, smaller citadel (palace F) was discovered against the southwest city wall, near one of the city gates. Similar to the palace complex, it was raised above the level of the city and extended beyond the normal line of the city wall. This area has been only partially excavated and was originally thought to be the palace of the crown prince. However, a comparison with Fort Shalmaneser at Nimrud makes it likely that it served as the city's arsenal and military barrack. Limited excavation has been carried out in the city itself (as distinct from the two citadels), but one large residence located near gate B (building Z; Loud and Airman, 1938), a structure near the center of the city (building G; Place, 1867-1870), and a temple situated between gate 7 and gate A (Safar, 1957) have been uncovered. T h e temple was ded-
Relief of an offering scene.
(Alinari/Art Resource, N Y )
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icated to the Sebittu (see above), and in it were found ap proximately fifteen stone altars of offering tables, each with the same shape: a round top and uipod base, with the bot tom corners of the base carved in the form of a lion's paw. Inscriptions of Sargon II describing his military cam paigns and building activities were discovered throughout the royal palace, placed on the front and back of stone wall reliefs, on stone thresholds, on winged-bull colossi, on nu merous clay barrel cylinders, and on small metal tablets, among other items. Among the other important inscriptions found at the site was the Khorsabad ldng list: it lists the rulers of Assyria from earliest times, down to 748 BCE and was dis covered in die Nabu temple by the Oriental Institute exca vations. The American excavators found few small objects in pro portion to the scale of the site, a lack they attributed to tire short life of the city and its orderly abandonment following Sargon's death, when most of the inhabitants moved to the new capital of Nineveh (Loud and Airman, 1938). Never theless, the site has produced a variety of miscellaneous ob jects, including carved ivories (similar to ones found at Nim rud, Arslan Tash, and Samaria), fragments of embossed bronze door bands (comparable to the ones found at Bala wat), small bronze bells, and weights in the shape of ducks. [See also Assyrians; Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mes opotamia; Nineveh; and the biography ofBotta.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albenda, Pauline. The Palace of Sargon, King of Assyria, Paris, 1986. Brief history of the excavations at Khorsabad, followed by a detailed presentation and study of the wall reliefs found by Botta. Amiet, Pierre. Art of the Ancient Near East. Translated by John Shepley and Claude Choquet. N e w York, 1980. Botta, P. E . , and Eugene Flandin. Monument de Ninive. 5 vols. Paris, 1846-1850. Description of Botta's work and discoveries (vol. 5) and copies of the reliefs and inscriptions found (vols. 1 - 4 ) . Fontan, Elisabedi, ed. De Khorsabad d Paris: La decouverte desAssyriens. Notes et Documents des Musees de France, vol. 26. Paris, 1994. Series of popular essays treating various aspects of the French and American discoveries, published in connection with the reopening of the Assyrian galleries in the Louvre. Frankfort, Henri. The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. 4th ed. Harmondsworth, 1970. Dated but still useful synthesis of informa tion on Mesopotamian art and architecaire (see esp. pp. 1 4 3 - 1 5 2 ) . Fuchs, Andreas. Die Inschriften Sargons II. aus Khorsabad. Gottingen, 1994Loud, Gordon. Khorsabad, part 1, Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate. Oriental Institute Publications, 38. Chicago, 1936. In cludes chapters by Henri Frankfort and Thorkild Jacobsen. Loud, Gordon, and Charles B . Altman. Khorsabad, part 2, The Citadel and the Town. Oriental Institute Publications, 40. Chicago, 1938. Place, Victor. Ninive et TAssyrie. 3 vols, Paris, 1 8 6 7 - 1 8 7 0 . Description of Place's work, with drawings of the major finds; lavishly produced but almost impossible to find except in the best libraries. Safar, Fuad. " T h e Temple of the Sibitti at Khorsabad." Sumer 1 3 (1957): 2 1 9 - 2 2 1 , figs. 1 - 4 . GRANT FRAME
K I S H , site located in Iraq northeast of modern Hilla and approximately 15 Ion (9 mi.) to the east of Babylon (32°33' N , 44°39' E). Kish is a region that comprises many mounds of different sizes covering an area some 8 X 2.5 km (50 X 15.5 mi.). Particularly important for archaeology were the mounds called Tell Uhaimir in die eastern part of this wide expanse and Tell Ingharra in the west. From early in the second millennium BCE part of the site (Tell Ingharra) seems to have been referred to as Hursagkalama; however, the geo graphical extent of Hursagkalama and its exact relationship to Kish (Tell Uhaimir) is by no means clear. Kish was one of the most important cities of ancient Mesopotamia and was considered to be the first seat of kingship after the Flood. T h e title "ldng of Kish" was of major importance in the early historic periods, and it was from Kish that Sargon set out to create the kingdom of Akkad. Diverse parts of die site were occupied from tire Ubaid period into the time of the modern Ottomans. Since the nineteenth century, scholars and travelers have been interested in Kish, and as early as 1852, minor exca vations were undertaken by Fulgence Fresnel and Jules Oppert of die Expedition scientifique et artistique de Mesopotamie et Medie that was followed much later in 1912 by a fairly large-scale French expedition under the direction of Flenri de Genouillac. Only one season of excavation was completed before the onset of the World War I. After the war a new major long-term joint expedition of the Field Mu seum of Natural History of Chicago and the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University began work in 1923. Between 1923 and 1933 eleven campaigns were completed under the direction of Stephen Langdon. Ernest Mackay was die first field director and was succeeded in 1926 by Louis Watelin. In 1989 a Japanese expedition of Kokushikan University (Tokyo) under the leadership of Hideo Fuji started work again at Kish. Only one season of excavation was completed before the commencement of tire Gulf War. The evidence for occupation at Kish prior to the Early Dynastic period (c. 2900-2335) is scarce, but it is evident from the so-called Y-sounding in the major mound Tell In gharra that the earliest strata excavated contained painted pottery of Jemdet Nasr type. This suggests that there was occupation in Tell Ingharra during the Jemdet Nasr period. On top of these early strata there was a domestic settlement probably of considerable size built with plano-convex bricks in Early Dynastic I. Above and partially sunk into tiiese plano-convex brick levels was a cemetery also dating to Early Dynastic I. T h e grave materials were particularly rich, and some of the objects from the graves indicated that an advanced state of metal technology was employed. Also found in the Y-sounding were a group of graves containing chariots or carts perhaps drawn by both bovids and equids. Because of the quantity and quality of the objects found in the graves at Kish, these important burials are less famed than the graves from tire Royal Cemetery of Ur; however,
KISH at least four burials in Kish indicate that the Ur burials were not unique. They may even predate the Ur cemetery, but it has proved difficult to determine the exact date of the Kish burials because of a series of very complex problems. Dates have ranged from Early Dynastic I to Early Dynastic IIIA. Probably dating to Early Dynastic III are the remains of two solid structures at Tell Ingharra that have been called ziggurats. One is larger than the other, but both are con structed of plano-convex bricks with some of the successive courses of bricks forming a herringbone pattern, a charac teristic building technique of the Early Dynastic period. The plans of these ziggurats are not known completely, and it is not clear whether they were built as a single platform or whether they had more titan one stage. They were probably stepped and are of considerable interest for the history of the development of the temple platform and tower. They may well be worthy of further investigation. More extensive remains of the Early Dynastic period were recovered from Mound A located to the south of the main part of Ingharra but considered to belong to it. Significant is a large building of plano-convex bricks that has been called a palace, clearly tire most impressive of the monu mental buildings of Early Dynastic Sumer. The entire com plex is not known, but the excavated remains include a main north wing, an added south wing, and an eastern primary gateway constructed between the north wing and an eastern wing (?) no longer preserved. Apparently the original stair case was covered by a ramp when the southern wing or an nex was built. T h e drawn plans of the palace complex have been regularized, and certain parts are not easy to interpret as some of the walls and rooms seem to have been improp erly dug. A curious feature of the main northern wing is the use of long corridors forming a double enclosure around tire rooms and courts of the building. Such corridors are known from other monumental building complexes in Sumer such as the so-called palaces at Eridu. [See Eridu.] T h e southern addition also has a special feature. Columns are used within a large room near tire west end of the building and also in a porch on the eastern end. A residential area of the building is not clearly evident from the plan, and it has not been fully ascertained how such a complex as the Kish palace or other monumental buildings functioned as an expression of Su merian kingship. Like many of the early remains of Kish, die date of the palace has been much debated. Some have sought to date the building to Early Dynastic II on the basis of the per ceived style of a group of inlay pieces. Even if it were pos sible to limit the style chronologically, such dating is fraught with difficulties. More cogent is the find of a tablet beneath a mud brick bench built in one of the rooms. The tablet is of the "Fara" type, representing a stage in the development of writing attributable to the early part of Early Dynastic IIIA and indicates that the building was in use during that period. Before the end of Early Dynastic. IIIA the palace
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complex had already been abandoned and had at least par tially disintegrated. Another cemetery known as Cemetery A was sunk into the palace area, and some 150 graves rich in pottery and seals were excavated. T h e A cemetery was short lived but is important for our understanding of the archaeology of Early Dynastic III. T h e change from palace area to cemetery area would imply some type of population shift. Another monumental building probably also dating to the same time as the palace is the so-called Piano-Convex Build ing excavated in Area P to the north of Tell Ingharra. The building has very thick buttressed exterior walls and was probably heavily fortified. It has many storage rooms as well as long surrounding corridors in part of the complex. Un fortunately the plan of tire entire building is not known. Graves, pottery, tablets, some objects, a few architectural remains, and textual references from other sources all attest to the continued occupation and importance of Kish from the Akkad through the Old Babylonian and Kassite periods. At Tell Uhaimir was located the ziggurat and temple to the important god of Kish, Zababa. Apparently begun in the Old Babylonian period, tire ziggurat underwent several rebuildings, and lasted into the Neo-Babylonian period when the exterior surface was enlivened with a complicated series of brick niches and buttresses. T h e actual temple seems to have been located on the northeast side of the ziggurat where bricks were found that were part of the reconstruction of the temple undertaken by Hammurabi of Babylon (1792-1750). Significant to the history of Neo-Babylonian architecture is the uncompleted double temple excavated on Tell In gharra near the early ziggurats. The main, large part of tire temple measures some 92 X 83 m (57 X 51.5 ft.). There is a direct axis approach to the cella (the inner part of the temple housing tire image of deity) leading from the main entrance in the northern wall through a large courtyard and then through two antecellas. T h e broad room cella is flanked on both sides by smaller dependent rooms. Bricks from a foundation box and fragments of a barrel cylinder suggest that the temple was originally built by Nebuchadrezzar II (604-562). In the Achaemenid period this temple no longer was used even tirough Kish continued to be occupied and many economic texts of tire period were found. Fragmen tary remains of the settlements in the later Parthian and Sas anian periods have also been preserved. [See also Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples; and Ziggurat.] BIBLIOGRAPHY The final publications of the Kish excavations include: Genouillac, Henri de. Fouilles francaises d'El-Akhymer: Premieres recherches archeologiques a Kish, 2 vols. Paris, 1924-1925. Langdon, Stephen H. Excavations al Kish I, 1923-1924. Paris, 1924. Mackay, Ernest. Report, on the Excavation of the "A" Cemeteiy at Kish, Mesopotamia. Chicago, 1925.
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Mackay, Ernest. A Sumerian Palace and the "A" Cemetery at Kish, Mes opotamia, Chicago, 1929. Watelin, Louis Charles, and Stephen H. Langdon. Excavations at Kish III, 1925-1927. Paris, 1930. Watelin, Louis Charles, and Stephen H. Langdon. Excavations al Risk IV, 1925-1930. Paris, 1934. Important syntheses with extensive bibliographies of the Kish ex cavations include: Gibson, McGuire. The City and Area of Kish. Miami, 1972. Gibson, McGuire. " K i s . B . Archaologisch." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie and vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 5, pp. 6 1 3 - 6 2 0 . Berlin and New York, 1980. Moorey, P. R. S. Kish Excavations, 1923-1933. Oxford, 1978. DONALD P . HANSEN
KITAN, TEL, two-acre site located on a hillock on die west bank of the Jordan River, approximately 12 km (7.5 mi.) north of Beth-Shean (map reference 2043 X 2270). The site's occupational history was first explored by N e hamiah Tzori in the Beth-Shean Regional Survey. In 1970 Adam Druks cut a stratigraphic section through the tell, on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Muse ums. Between 1975 and 1978 Emmanuel Eisenberg con ducted five seasons of excavation at the site, also on behalf of the department. In the course of those explorations, ten occupational levels were investigated. The first settlement at Tel Kitan was in the Chalcolithic period (strata X-VIII). It consisted of several houses, oc cupied for an extended period of time, and underground silos. One house also contained an enormous buried storejar, one of the largest of its kind found in Israel. Over time, new buildings were constructed over die original houses. T h e ceramic assemblage at this Chalcolithic site is considered a northern variant of the Ghassulian culture. The excavator suggested that this long-lived village was an extension of the contemporary 60-acre settlement at nearby Neveh Ur. The late Early Bronze Age I (stratum VII) unwalled vil lage at Tel Kitan included a number of densely packed dwellings. Floors were often below ground level, and plas tered benches ran along many interior walls. The rich rep ertoire of EB I materials found at Tel Kitan is attributed to the sudden destruction and abandonment of the site. Tel Kitan was reoccupied in Middle Bronze I (stratum VI). While the first sanctuary was constructed in M B II (stratum V), it is likely that sacred activities took place in stratum VI as well. T h e exterior of the mud-brick sanctuary measured 5.5 X 6.9 m. Piers extended from two walls to form a shallow entryway, and two pillars flanked the en trance. Five meters in front of the sanctuary facade stood a row of stone stelae; large holes between them may have once contained the socles of other standing stones. T h e central stela depicts a nude goddess cupping her breasts; her facial features are distinct. Two larger stelae stood elevated behind
the front row of stones. Residential buildings, many con taining infant jar burials, were located nearby. Care was taken to preserve the stratum V sanctuary when a new sanctuary was constructed over it later in M B II. T h e exterior of the stratum IV building measured n . 5 X 14.3 m. In the courtyard, piles of ash filled with animal bones were heaped around a semicircular bench, and four crudely carved stone figurines lay near two basalt bases and a basalt slab. T h e settlement, which also included several houses, was surrounded by a fortification wall. T h e site was desttoyed at the end of MB II. In Late Bronze I (stratum III), a new sacred complex was constructed over the earlier one. Many precious and ritual objects were found in die sanctuary, which then consisted of a main hall and two small service rooms. Piles of broken pottery and a small pebble structure were found in the court yard. As before, houses were located nearby. This occupa tion came to a sudden end, and Tel Kitan remained unoc cupied for nearly two millennia. T h e thin-walled houses of the Early Arab period (stratum II), situated along a street, were badly eroded. During the Ottoman period (stratum I), a Muslim cemetery was located on the top of the mound. BIBLIOGRAPHY Eisenberg, Emmanuel. " T h e Temples at Tell Kittan." Biblical Archae ologist 40 (1977): 7 7 - 8 1 . Eisenberg, Emmanuel. " T h e Middle and Late Bronze Age Temples at Tel Kittan." In Temples and High Places in Biblical Times, edited by Avraham Biran, p. 159. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . Eisenberg, Emmanuel. " T e l Kittan." In The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 878-881. Jeru salem and New York, 1993. BETH ALPERT NAKHAI
KITCHENER, HORATIO HERBERT, first Earl Kitchener of Khartoum and Broome (1850-1916), surveyor for the Survey of Western Palestine (1871-1877). As a young lieutenant in the British Royal Engineers, Herbert Horatio Kitchener was seconded in 1874 to die Survey of Western Palestine being conducted under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). A devout Christian, Kitchener brought to the survey a detailed knowledge of the Bible, which, combined with a military eye for topography, led him, like Claude R. Conder, to attempt numerous iden tifications of biblical sites. Many of his judgments were er roneous, as for example, in placing Ai at Khirbet Haiyan (The Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archaeology, vol. 3, London, 1883, p . 33). Kitchener's main contribution to the archae ology of Palestine was twofold. First, he surveyed about onethird of the country himself, recording in careful plans many structures which no longer exist. Second, as a keen amateur photographer, he took many photographs (preserved in the PEF archives). Twelve of his photographs were published
KITION in London in 1876 under the tide Guinea Book of Biblical Photographs (also known as Photographs of Biblical Sites). Much of Kitchener's work was published in the volumes of Memoirs which accompanied the maps of the Survey of Western Palestine; his reports and letters were published in the PEF's Quarterly Statement between 1874 and 1878. Kitchener went on to survey Cyprus and, in 1883, his fluent knowledge of Arabic led to his being recommended by Charles Wilson to carry out the trigonometrical survey of the Wadi 'Arabah during Edward Hull's geological recon naissance of the Sinai Peninsula, also under the auspices of the PEF. Kitchener made his professional name in the administra tion of Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, and India. He was dis tinguished as a Knight of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, and Knight Grand Cross of St. Michael and St. George and earned the order of merit. At the time of his death, he held the post of secretary of state for war. [See also Palestine Exploration Fund; Sinai; and the biog raphies of Conder and Wilson.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Information on Kitchener's life and work is available in the Archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund, London. F o r a full-length biogra phy, see Magnus (below). Conder, Claude R., and H. H. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the 'Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology. 8 vols, and set of maps. London, 1 8 8 1 - 1 8 8 5 , Crace, J . D . " L o r d Kitchener." Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Ex ploration Fund (July 1 9 1 6 ) : 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 . Kitchener, H. H. Photographs of Biblical Sites. London, c. 1876. Magnus, Philip. Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist. London, 1958. Still the most authoritative study of Kitchener, although only a few pages are devoted to his work in Palestine. YOLANDE HODSON
KITION, name of a kingdom and a site, today below the city of Larnaka, on the southeast coast of Cyprus (34°54' N, 33°39' E), north of die Salt Lake (Aliki). T h e historical territory of the Cypro-Phoenician kingdom of Kition was bounded by the sea on the south and southeast and was adjacent to the territories of Salamis on the northeast and Amathus on die west. T o the north, the rich agricultural region of Idalion was annexed after 450 BCE. Tamassos, to the northwest, with its copper mines, belonged to Kition for several years in the fourth century BCE. [See Salamis; Ama thus; Idalion.] T h e name is attested in Hebrew (from the eighth century BCE) in the ethnic plural kit.tf.rn (cf. Nm. 24:24; Is. 23:1; Ez. 27:6). T h e identification with Qartihadasht ("new city"), mentioned in Assyrian on the prism of Esarhaddon from Nineveh and in Phoenician (Cyprus, CIS 1.5) has been questioned but is defensible. [See Nineveh; Phoenician-Pu nic] T h e name of the city in Phoenician is Kt(y); in alpha
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betic Greek Kit(t)ion; in syllabic Greek Ke-ti-o-ne (geni tive); and in Latin, Citium. After the Middle Ages, the names Scala, Larnaka, and Salines occur. Kition's location and ancient remains were noted by nu merous early travelers in descriptions and schematic plans, among them Richard Pococke (1745), Giorgio Mariti (1769), and Carsten Niebuhr (1837). Pococke copied thirtythree Phoenician inscriptions that are now lost. In the nine teenth century, ttavelers, merchants, and such scholars as Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and Melchior de Vogue discov ered or occasionally purchased exceptional objects from the area and sent them to museums in Europe and the United States: from Bamboula, the stela of Sargon II from 707 BCE (Vorderasiatische Museum, Berlin) and large Hathoric cap itals (Berlin; the Louvre Museum); from the Salt Lake, in scriptions to Eshmun-Melqart of Batsalos (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City); figurines from the sanc tuary of Artemis Paralia (Louvre; British Museum); and fig urines and sarcophagi from various areas of Larnaka, in cluding [See Sarcophagus.] Kamelarga and Ayios Giorghos. T h e work of the British administration in 1879, carried out to do away with the unhealthy environment by filling the marshes witii the material from the archaeological mound of Bamboula, irrevocably destroyed important historical re mains (cf. Ohnefalsch-Richter, 1879; Sinclair, 1969-1970). Several documents were saved, such as the inscription in Phoenician of the accounts of die Temple of Astarte, now in the British Museum. In CIS 1 (1881), the majority of the Phoenician inscriptions from Cyprus are from Kition. T h e first precise plan of the site appears in the CIS (p. 35). Scientific excavation at Kition began in 1929 with Einar Gjerstad's brief sounding for the Swedish Cyprus Expedi tion at Bamboula. He located a sanctuary of Heraldes Melqart with a bothros filled with figurines. Excavations by die Cypriot Department of Antiquities directed by Vassos Kar ageorghis began in 1959 at Kathari, north of Larnaka. They uncovered an area with exceptional Late Bronze Age sanc tuaries (temples 1-5), evidence of bronze metallurgy, and fortifications (see below). T h e newly arrived Phoenicians reoccupied and rebuilt the area in the ninth century BCE (temples 1 and 4). The expedition recovered evidence of metallurgy and inscriptions (see below). In 1976, a resumption of work at Bamboula by a French expedition from the University of Lyon 2 directed by Mar guerite Yon uncovered the sanctuaries of Melqart and As tarte (ninth-end eighth centuries) and a naval port with sheds (see figure 1) and boat slips (fiftii-fourth centuries). In 1990, a Phoenician inscription was found by chance north of the town of Larnaka describing a monument tiiat had been set up in the port after a naval victory by King Milkyaton in 392 BCE. T h e earliest occupation of die area is attested by Early Bronze Age tombs at several places in Larnaka, but no set-
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tlement earlier than the thirteenth century BCE has been lo cated. In this period, because silting had closed off the Salt Lake, rendering die port of Hala Sultan Tekke useless, a new settlement was established i Ion to the north on die seacoast at Kition, to find better access to the sea and continue the maritime activities. [See Hala Sultan Tekke.] A group of sanctuaries next to the fortification at Kathari and several tombs date to this period (see below). Several traces of habitation remain from the Geometric I period, including a domestic establishment on the edge of the fortification to the north of Bamboula that was aban doned in the tenth century BCE. I n the ninth century tlie Phoenicians established an important colony in Kition (cf. Justin, 18.5-6) that preserved its Phoenician character until the third century CE (Cypro-Geomettic III, Archaic, and classical periods). T h e period is attested archaeologically at die sites of Kathari, Bamboula, Ayios Giorghios (on the edge of tlie Salt Lake), and various other locations in Larnaka. It is attested textually (literary texts and inscriptions), especially in tlie fifth-fourth centuries. Inscriptions and coin legends in Phoenician give the names of several kings, in cluding Baalmilk I, Azibaal, and Baalmilk II (fifth century BCE); and Milkyaton and Pumayyaton (fourth century BCE). Because of their navy, these kings played a role in tlie mar itime rivalries between the Greeks and the Persians in the eastern Mediterranean basin. T h e wealth of the kingdom depended on that maritime commercial activity, which was supported by the resources of the countryside (corn, olive oil, timber, copper, etc.). T h e most celebrated Kitian is tlie philosopher Zenon, founder of Stoicism, who was born
KITION. Figure 1.
there in the fourth century BCE. Ancient authors, such as Cicero (De finibus 4.20.56), recognized the Kition's Phoe nician character. At the end of the fourth century BCE, Ptolemy I Soter seized control of the city (Diodorus 19.79.4), and a new "era of Kition" began (in 311). Kition then followed the fortunes of the Lagid possessions and, after 50 BCE, of the Roman province to which Cyprus belonged. Monuments are visible at different locations in the town: at Kathari, there are remains of temple 1 (Karageorghis, Excavations at Kition, vol. 5, 1987) consttucted of cut stone blocks (thirteenth century BCE) and transformed into a Phoenician temple in tlie ninth century BCE; the remains of other temples and workshops that constituted the sacred area were found next to tlie fortification. At Bamboula, various sanctuaries from the ninth century BCE to the classical period survive. T h e civic works from the beginning of the fourth century include a drainage system with a main sewer. T h e sanctuary is bounded on tlie north by die naval port, with sheds and slips for the ships (see Calvet, 1993). There are tombs in various parts of Larnaka: Early Bronze Age tombs at Ayios Prodromos; LB tombs at Chrysopolitissa with grave goods of rich furnishings and local and im ported luxury products; Archaic period tombs at Phaneromeni; beautifully built tombs from the Classical/Hellenistic period from Tourabi and Metropolis and from Ayios Ioannis and Ayios Giorghios, where the tombs continue to yield sarcophagi and funerary furnishings. [See also Cyprus; and Phoenicians.]
Ship sheds in the naval port,
(Courtesy Mission Francaise de Kition)
KOSAY, HAMIT ZUBEYR BIBLIOGRAPHY Calvet, Yves. "Kition: Travaux de la mission fran?aise." In Kinyras: L'archeologie francaise a Chypre, pp. 1 0 7 - 1 3 8 . L y o n , 1993. Includes bibliography of the French mission. Cobham, Claude Delaval. Exceipta Cypria: Materials jar a History of Cyprus. Cambridge, 1908. Gjerstad, Einar, et al. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus 1927-1931. Vol. 3. Stockholm, 1937. See "Kition" (pp. 1-79). Hill, George F . Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Cyprus. London, 1904. Hill, George F . A History of Cyprus, vol. 1 , To the Conquest by Richard Lion Heart. London, 1940. Karageorghis, Vassos, ed. "Chronique des fouilles et decouvertes ar cheologiques a Chypre." Bulletin de Conespondance Hellenique 83 (1959): 3 3 6 - 3 6 1 , and subsequent volumes. Karageorghis, Vassos, ed. Fouilles de Kition. 5 vols. Nicosia, 1 9 7 4 - 1 9 8 7 . Karageorghis, Vassos. Kition: Mycenaean and Phoenician Discoveries in Cyprus. London, 1976. Mariti, Giorgio. Viaggi per I'Isola de Cipro. Vol. 1. Florence, 1769. Masson, Olivier, and Maurice Sznycer. Recherches sur les Pheniciens a Chypre. Paris and Geneva, 1 9 7 2 . Nicolaou, Kyriakos. The Historical Topography of Kition. Goteborg, 1976. Niebuhr, Carsten. Reisen durch Syrien und Palaestina, nach Cypern. Vol. 3. Hamburg, 1 8 3 7 . Ohnefalsch-Richter, M a x . " N e u e Funde aus Cypern." Ausland 52 (1879): 970-974Pococke, Richard. A Description of the East and Some Other Countries. Vol. 2 . 1 . London, :74s. Reyes, A . T . Archaic Cypms: A Study of the Textual and Archaeological Evidence. Oxford, 1994. Sinclair, L . "Report on Excavations at the Bamboola-Larnaca." In D . Bailey, " T h e 'Village Priest's T o m b ' at Aradippou in Cyprus." Brit ish Museum Quarterly 34 ( 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 7 0 ) : 37-40. Y o n , Marguerite, ed. Kition-Bamboula. 4 vols. Paris, 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 9 3 . Y o n , Marguerite. " L e royaume de Kition: Epoque archai'que." In Phoe nicia and the East Mediterranean in the First Millennium B. C , edited by Eduard Lipmski, pp. 3 5 7 - 3 7 4 . Studia Phoenicia, 5. Louvain, 1987. Y o n , Marguerite. " L e royaume de Kition: Epoque classique." In Numismalique et histoire economique pheniciennes et puniques, edited by T o n y Hackens and Ghislaine Moucharte, pp. 243-260. Studia Phoe nicia, 9. Louvain, 1992. MARGUERITE Y O N Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
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tions in the soil, an unheard-of technique at the time. For years, this talented archaeologist worked as an architectural instructor at the university in Gorlitz, Germany, while ex cavating at classical sites in Italy, Sicily, and Syria. Fie started large-scale excavations in Babylon in 1899. He re mained there for the next eighteen years, only leaving during World War I, when tire British advance up tire Tigris River threatened to cut off his last route to safety. Koldewey de veloped sophisticated techniques for tracing that city's myr iad mud-brick structures, training teams of diggers to dis tinguish the texture of room fill and mud brick after careful scraping and picking. Starting witii a general knowledge of the city gleaned from cuneiform tablets, Koldewey identified King Hammurabi's city (1790 BCE) and then cleared a large part of Nebuchadrezzar's (604-562 BCE) capital, tracing die course of the paved Procession Street, reconstructing the Ishtar Gate, and untangling the long history of the city's citadel and ziggurat. Koldewey's excavation techniques re covered the general layout of die royal city and enabled him to reconstruct the magnificent enameled friezes that adorned the Ishtar Gate and Procession Street. His methods influenced the techniques of later excavators like Leonard Woolley at Ur. Koldewey did tend to overlook the potential of pottery and small artifacts for dating stratified layers, an oversight his successors regretted. [See also Babylon.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Koldewey, Robert. The Excavations at Babylon. London, 1 9 1 4 . Kol dewey's account of tire Babylon excavations, aimed at die general reader. Koldewey, Robert. Das Wieder erstehende Babylon ( 1 9 1 3 ) . Leipzig, 1925. Another description of the royal city. Lloyd, Seton. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Ex ploration. Rev. and enl. ed. London, 1980. General history of M e sopotamian archaeology that offers an assessment of Koldewey's work. Oates, Joan. Babylon. London, 1979. Definitive popular account of Babylon, drawing on bodi historical and archaeological sources, with numerous plans and illustrations. BRIAN FAGAN
KOLDEWEY, ROBERT (1855-1925), archaeologist whose work revolutionized Mesopotamian archaeology. Koldewey studied architecture, archaeology, and ancient history in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. His first archaeolog ical experience came on the acropolis at Assos. T h e German Archaeological Institute subsequently commissioned him to excavate on Lesbos. In 1887, Koldewey worked with Robert Moritz at Surgul and al-Hiba, near Sumerian Telloh, in southern Mesopotamia. There Koldewey refined excavation techniques for following mud-brick walls, finding many small houses separated by twisting, narrow streets. He also followed foundation trenches by observing dark discolora-
KOSAY, HAMIT ZUBEYR (1897-1984). Turkish archaeologist, ethnologist, and museologist Kosay was born in the village of Tilenkci Tamak attached to the Ufa district in Russia's Idil-Ural province. After graduating from high school in 1916, Kosay became interested in ethnographic studies and, planning to study in Budapest, began to learn Hungarian. In Budapest he studied history and languages (1917-1921). He subsequently received a Ph.D. in Turkology and philology from the Eotros College in Budapest. In 1923-1924 he took courses in ethnography at Berlin Uni versity.
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Upon his return to Turkey in 1924, K o s a y became in volved in various government-sponsored projects related to ethnography, archaeology, and museology. Between 1 9 2 7 and 1931 he created the Ethnography M u s e u m in Ankara and served as its director. He was eventually in 1 9 3 1 ap pointed general director of all museums and in 1945 director general of the Department of Antiquities and Museums. Ko§ay's involvement in archaeological field projects be gan in the early 1930s. Atatiirk, the leader of the then young Turkish republic, favored government-sponsored archaeo logical projects directed by Turkish archaeologists. He asked Kosay to excavate in the vicinity of Ankara, the capital of the republic. Thus, in 1 9 3 3 , Ahladibel, southwest of the cap ital, became K o s a y ' s first archaeological project. A year later he excavated Kumtepe, near T r o y . His excavations at Alaca Hoyiik ( 1 9 3 5 - 1 9 4 8 , 1 9 6 3 - 1 9 6 7 ) revealed important aspects of Hittite and pre-Hittite civilizations in Anatolia. T h e site's spectacular finds earned him a reputation as one of Turkey's most experienced and knowledgable field archaeologists. During his long career, Kosay carried out numerous other excavations and field surveys: in the 1930s he excavated the Phrygian site of Pazarli in C o r a m ; in the 1940s, at K a r a z Hoyiik in Erzurum and the Late Chalcolithic site of B u y u k Gullucek in Corum; in the 1960s, at the Early Bronze A g e settlements at Giizelova and Pulur in Erzurum, and Pulur (Sakyol) in the K e b a n region; and, in 1972, at Yenikoy, also in the Keban. Kosay published more than 35 books and 1 5 0 articles on Anatolian civilization. His work represents an important data bank on Early Bronze A g e , Hittite, and Phrygian cul tures in Anatolia.
KOURION.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr. Les fouilles de Pazarli. Ankara, 1 9 4 1 . Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr. Ausgrabungen von Alaca Hoyiik. Ankara, 1944. The first archaeological report on the excavations at Alaca Hoyiik. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr, and Mahmut Akok. Ausgrabungen von Biiyiik Gullucek. Ankara, 1944. Archaeological report on the 1942 and 1944 campaigns at Biiyiik Gullucek. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr. Les fouilles d'Alaca Hoyiik. Ankara, 1 9 5 1 . Prelim inary report on the 1937-1939 excavations at Alaca Hoyiik. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr, and Hermann Vary. Die Ausgrabungen von Pulur. Ankara, 1964. Report on the i960 season of excavations at Pulur. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr. Guide d'Alaca Hoyiik. Ankara, 1965. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr, and Mahmut Akok. Ausgrabungen von Alaca floyiik. Ankara, 1966. Preliminary report of the 1940-1948 excavations at Alaca Hoyiik. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr, and Hermann Vary. Ausgrabungen von Giizelova. Ankara, 1967. Archaeological report on the Giizeolova excavations. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr, and Mahmut Akok. Alaca Hoyiik Excavations. Ankara, 1973. Preliminary report on research and discoveries, 1 9 6 3 1967. Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr. Keban Project Pulur Excavations, 1068-1970. An kara, 1976. Final report of the Pulur excavations in the Keban area. JAK YAKAR
KOURION
(Roman C u r i u m ) , southern Cypriot city ly ing on a 70-meter bluff overlooking the B a y of Episkopi (34°4o' N , 3 2 ° 5 i ' E ) . A sanctuary of Apollo Hylates (i.e., Apollo of the Woodlands) 2.5 km (1.5 mi.) west of the city that attracted worshipers, and a R o m a n stadium, perhaps of the second century CE, lay north of the city. Various sites have been found at die foot of the bluff adjacent to die sta dium, but only a fraction of Kourion has been excavated.
General view of the site. (Photograph by Noelle Soren)
KOURION Settlements of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age periods are within 7 km (4.3 mi.) to die north and east, but the earliest site at Kourion is Episkopi-Kaloriziki 2 km (1.2 mi.) east of die city. A cemetery spanning the Late Bronze Age and the Cypro-Classical period has revealed evidence of Greek settlers (Arcadians?), a new type of square-chamber tomb and Greek artifacts, including the fa mous falcon-headed, gold, and enamel scepter of Kourion (see Swing, 1982, p . 53, fig. 44; see also George McFadden, "A Late Cypriot III T o m b from Kourion," American Jour nal of Archaeology 58 [1954]: 1 3 1 - 1 4 2 ) . Although no settle ment was found at Kaloriziki, it seems tiiat the nearby Late Bronze Age site Episkopi-Bamboula diminished in impor tance as inhabitants moved to Kourion. Kourion is cited in the Prism of Esarhaddon (673-672 BCE), an important octagonal and cylindrical text, as a city under Assyrian control. Under Persian hegemony, which began around 550, Kourion took part in the Ionian Revolt of 499, when King Stasanor aided the Greeks, but tiien de serted to the Persian side (Herodotus, 5 . 1 1 3 ) , allowing Kou rion to stay independent after the revolt was crushed. In 3 5 1 Kourion was one of nine kingdoms of Cyprus (Diodorus, 16.42.4). In 332 Pasicrates, last king of Kourion, aided Alex ander tiie Great against the Persians at the battle of Tyre (Arrian, Anabasis 22.2). Little is known about Ptolemaic Kourion, but it revived considerably under the Romans, particularly in the JulioClaudian and Trajanic periods. Kourion probably did not exceed twenty thousand inhabitants in the high empire and was supposedly visited by St. Paul and Barnabas (Acts of Barnabas 44) during their first missionary journey (45-48 CE). Kourion was destroyed by earthquakes; the most no table of them appears to have occurred on 2 1 July 365 CE, forcing the abandonment of the area for at least eighteen years. At the beginning of the fifth century, a small com munity had developed with two impressive early Christian basilica complexes and a palatial dwelling (the Eustolius complex) that featured private baths and fine mosaics with detailed inscriptions. T h e site was abandoned following Is lamic raids of the mid-seventh century. Excavations at the sanctuary of Apollo were conducted by George McFadden, aided by Bert Hodge Hill, for the Uni versity of Pennsylvania Museum ( 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 5 3 ) . The results were summarized by Robert Scranton in 1967. New exca vations began in 1978 by the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, under Diana Buitron and the University of Missouri under David Soren. The sanctuary functioned continuously from at least the seventh century BCE to the fourth century CE. Early features included a circular rubble altar in the archaic precinct, which was surrounded by votive terra-cotta figu rines. Gold and silver statuettes of bulls found in the altar are now in the Cyprus Museum. Several major caches of votive terra cottas have been found in votive pits at the pe riphery of the precinct; one group of more than ten thousand
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horses and riders, chariots, and charioteers was recovered in 1981.
A large circular monument, initially constructed in the seventh or sixth century BCE and rebuilt in the Roman pe riod, was found west of the altar and principal street of the sanctuary. It was placed on a flat, elevated terrace originally surrounded by plantings in rock-cut channels but later en tirely walled in during the Julio-Claudian period. Unique in Mediterranean archaeology, it may have been used for sa cred dancing. It was hypaethral (i.e., unroofed) and featured seven pits carved in the bedrock in its central area, possibly for date palms (sacred trees?). A wall blocked uninitiates from the proceedings. T h e precinct surrounding the mon ument may have been the alsos (holy grove) with sacred deer described by Aelian (De Natura Animalium 1 1 . 7 ) . The site also featured a temple dedicated by the Roman emperor Nero (54-68 CE) and erected over a simpler rec tangular structure of the seventh or sixth century BCE. Thus, in the sixth century BCE it was possible to enter the sanctuary from the south, walk north on the main street, and go from the cemral court area straight to the rectangular proto-temple, and right to the archaic precinct or left to the circular monument. First uncovered by McFadden in 1934, the tem ple was restudied by Scranton in 1967. Detailed studies by the Soren team in 1979 led to a proposed reconstruction but Stefanos Sinos partially rebuilt it in situ in 1981 in a manner that differs slightly in the arrangement of front and anta cap itals from the reconstruction proposed by Soren. As part of the Roman revisions, the sanctuary received a palaestra (low building witii central court for exercising and athletics, esp. wrestling), baths, and an apparent visitor center (the South Building). At the city site of Kourion, McFadden, J. F. Daniel, and Roger Edwards conducted excavations, which began in 1934. The ruins are scattered over a full kilometer and in clude a well-preserved theater remodeled under Nero but originally built in the late second century BCE. Since 1975 Demos Christou of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities has conducted important excavations in the northern area of the city revealing buildings of the forum including a pos sible stoa and a monumental building of the first century CE identified as a nymphaeum (monumental public forum). The opulence and size of these structures suggests that Kourion must have been of considerable importance in the Roman imperial period. A. H. S. Megaw of the British School at Athens has un earthed the remains of a large Christian basilica of the early fifth century intended as the key structure for the post-earth quake revitalization of Kourion. Some materials were bor rowed from the abandoned Apollo sanctuary. A baptistery, auxiliary chapels, and courtyards have also been unearthed. Beginning in 1984, David Soren, excavating for the Uni versity of Arizona, restudied work by J. F. Daniel in 1 9 3 4 and revealed a large house and possible market complex in
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which the skeletons of nine humans and one mule were found in the debris of the earthquake of 365 CE. This area of the site was never rebuilt. A small museum located in Kourion House in nearby Episkopi village features objects from Kourion and nearby areas. BIBLIOGRAPHY Benson, Jack L. The Necropolis of Kaloriziki. Smdies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 36. Goteborg, 1973. Buitron, Diana. "Terracotta Figurine Deposit Unearthed." American Schools of Oriental Research Newsletter 35.4 (1984): 1 - 3 . Christou, Demos. "Excavations at Kourion: First Preliminary Report, 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 8 2 . " Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus (1983): 266-280. Megaw, A. H. S. "Excavations at the Episcopal Basilica of Kourion in Cyprus in 1974 and 1975: A Preliminary Report." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30 (1976): 3 4 5 - 3 7 1 . Mitford, Terence B. The Inscriptions of Kourion. Philadelphia, 1 9 7 1 . Scranton, Robert L. "The Architecture of the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 57 (1967): 3-85. Sinos, Stefanos. The Temple of Apollo Hylates at Kourion and the Res toration of Its South-west Corner. Athens, 1990. Soren, David. The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion, Cyprus. Tuc son, 1987. Soren, David. "The Day the World Ended at Kourion: Reconstructing an Ancient Earthquake." National Geographic 174 (July 1988): 3 0 53Swiny, Helena W., ed. An Archaeological Guide to the Kourion Area and the Akrotiri Peninsula. Nicosia, 1982. Young, John H., and Suzanne I-I. Young. Terracotta Figurines from Kou rion in Cyprus. Philadelphia, 1955. DAVID SOREN
KRAELING, CARL HERMANN (i897-i966),historian of religion, prominent educator, archaeologist, and authority on the Near East. Kraeling began his career at die Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he taught for nine years (1920-1929) and produced his first piece of scholarly research, Anthropos and Son of Man: A Study in the Religious Syncretism of the Hellenistic Orient (1927). After completing a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1927), Kraeling joined the faculty of the Yale Divinity School (1929). He earned a Th.D. from the University of Heidelberg (1935). At Yale he served as editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature (1931-1933) and was Buckingham Pro fessor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation (i94i)In the 1930s, Kraeling's interests shifted to archaeology and history. He participated in tlie British and American excavations at the site of Gerasa (Jerash) in Jordan and ed ited their findings in Gerasa, City of the Decapolis (1938). In 1947, Kraeling founded the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature at Yale University and served as its first chair for three years. He then moved to the Univer sity of Chicago as professor of Oriental archaeology. An in dication of his efforts to promote interest in Near Eastern
archaeology was his service as president of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1948-1955) and then as pres ident of tlie American Oriental Society (1958-1959). Kraeling served as the director of the Oriental Institute in Chicago from 1950 to i960. He was responsible for the in stitute's excavations in Egypt and other parts of the Near East, and he directed the excavations at the Roman site of Ptolemais in Cyrenaica, publishing Ptolemais, City of the Lib yan Pentapolis (1962). In addition to his administrative du ties, he published a volume on John the Baptist (1951) and a study on the Dura synagogue (1956). In 1958 he assem bled scholars from all over tlie world for a week-long sem inar on the topic of urbanization in the ancient Near East. The proceedings were published as City Invincible (i960). From 1946 until 1965, he was a member of the board of directors of tlie Byzantine Research Institute of Harvard University at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., where he also lectured. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; DuraEuropos; Gerasa; and Ptolemais.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Kraeling, Carl H. Anthropos and Son of Man: A Study in the Religious Syncretism of the Hellenistic Orient. New York, 1927. Kraeling, Carl H., ed. Gerasa, City of the Decapolis. New Haven, 1938. Kraeling, Carl H. John the Baptist. New York, 1 9 5 1 . Kraeling, Carl H. The Synagogue. The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report 8, part 1. New Haven, 1956. Discussion of the houses at Dura-Europos. Kraeling, Carl H., and Robert M. Adams, eds. City Invincible: A Sym posium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near Bast. Chicago, i960. Kraeling, Carl H. Ptolemais, City of the Libyan Pentapolis. Chicago, 1962. Kraeling, Carl H. The Christian Building. The Excavations at DuraEuropos, Final Report 8, part 2. New Haven, 1967. VICTOR FI. MATTHEWS
KSAR 'AKIL, rockshelter situated 10 km (6 mi.) eastnortheast of Beirut in Wadi An telias, and2km (1 mi.) inland from Lebanon's present Mediterranean coastline (33°54'4o" N , 35°36'2o" E). Wadi Amelias has two branches that de scend steeply through rugged limestone hills to the sea. Ksar 'AMI is on the northern branch, slightly above its junction with the southern fork. T h e copious Amelias spring lies half a kilometer downstream and, after heavy rain, a stream fills the wadi below the site. The site was inhabited from the Middle through the Upper Paleolithic into the Epipaleolithic period. Its unusually long, and apparently complete, se quence of occupation has made it the site of reference for tlie later Paleolithic in the Levant. T h e site of Ksar 'Akil has been known since tlie early years of the twentieth century. Two major excavations have taken place there, one from 1937 to 1938 that was resumed in 1947 and 1948, and another from 1969 to 1975 that came to a
KSAR 'AKIL premature end because of the outbreak of civil war. T h e first series of excavations was undertaken by Joseph G. Doherty, with the assistance of J. Franldin Ewing, under the auspices of Boston College and Fordham University. They dug a deep trench against the back wall of the rockshelter, through the entire sequence of occupation, down to the natural sur face 23 m below (Ewing, 1949). T h e site was never fully published. T h e second series of excavations was conducted by Jacques Tixier for the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in France, to obtain detailed information about human activity at Ksar 'Akil and to construct a well-dated sequence of environmental change for the successive peri ods of occupation there. T h e site had come under threat from large-scale limestone quarrying in Wadi Antelias, which provided an additional impetus for the work. Tixier's excavation was limited in scale: two sections were cut through die Epipaleolithic and the later Upper Paleolithic levels, to a depth of 7 m, before the excavation was con cluded (Tixier and Inizan, 1 9 8 1 ) . T h e sequence revealed in the original excavations was es pecially important for the development of the Upper Pale olithic, usually designated as the Levantine Aurignacian cul ture. It has inspired a series of studies on die chipped-stone assemblages from Ksar 'Akil and their geomorphological context. T h e cultural sequence at Ksar 'Akil began with a Middle Paleolithic of Levalloiso-Mousterian affinities that, after a lengthy intermediate episode, was succeeded by the Levantine Aurignacian. Ewing (1949) had called the inter mediate phase a mixed or transitional zone, but it has been renamed Ksar 'Akil, phases A and B, by recent commen tators. Ksar 'Akil was inhabited for the entire Upper Pale olithic—that is, Levantine Aurignacian, phases A and B — and through another transitional stage, Levantine Aurigna cian C, or the Athlitian, into the Kebaran culture of the ear lier Epipaleolithic. Recent studies of the material from the earlier excavations and inferences derived from Tixier's work suggest that, while the basic sequence still holds, its interpretation should be modified. Anthony E. Marks and P. Volkman (1986) have suggested that the basal deposits may date to tire early and middle Levalloiso-Mousterian, and that there may have been a hiatus in occupation between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic at Ksar 'Akil. Christopher Bergman (1987) has concluded that, although the Ksar 'Akil Upper Paleolithic sequence is still the longest known in the Levant, it should be regarded as discontinuous, with periods of human use separated by episodes of abandonment. Tixier had found preserved living surfaces containing hearths, food remains (animal bones), and flint artifacts. T h e last phase excavated by Tixier, attributed to the "proto-Kebaran," ended in about 22,000 B P , in radiocarbon years. The lowest levels reached by him, corresponding to the upper part of the Levantine Aurignacian B in the older sequence, dated to about 32,000 B P . It is estimated that the
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Levantine Aurignacian at Ksar 'Akil began at least 40,000 years ago, whereas the Levalloiso-Mousterian levels proba bly date to well before 50,000 B P . This suggests that the Upper Paleolithic may have begun earlier in the Levant than in Europe. Ksar 'Akil was used as a shelter by humans for much of the last cold episode of the Pleistocene. It is known from independent sources, principally deep-sea caves, ice cores, and pollen sequences (for example, Dansgaard and Oeschger, 1989; Shackleton and Opdyke, 1976; and Wijmstrar, 1969), that, although the climate was generally cooler throughout than today, temperature and humidity fluctu ated considerably. Those fluctuations are reflected in the long sedimentary sequence in the rockshelter, though they are scarcely apparent in the collections of animal bones from the site. T h e faunal remains, studied by D. A. Hooijer ( 1 9 6 1 ) , are dominated by fallow deer. This suggests tiiat die foothills of the mountains of Lebanon, which formed the environs of Ksar 'Akil, remained wooded, despite the nu merous fluctuations in climate that occurred. BIBLIOGRAPHY Azoury, Ingrid. Ksar Akil Lebanon, vol. I, Levels XXV-XII. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 289. 1 - 2 . Oxford, 1986. Analysis of the chipped-stone assemblages from Ksar 'Akil A and B and the Levantine Aurignacian A levels, with much back ground information on the history of research at the site. Bergman, Christopher A. Ksar Akil Lebanon, vol. 2, Levels XIII-VI. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 329. Ox ford, 1987. Analysis of the chipped-stone assemblages from the Lev antine Aurignacian levels, with illustrations of the first series of ex cavations. Dansgaard, W., and Oeschger, H. "Past environmental long-term rec ords from the Arctic." In The Environmental Record in Glaciers and Ice Sheets, edited by H. Oeschger and C. C. Langway, Jr., pp. 2 8 7 3 1 7 . . Chichester, 1989. Ewing, J. Franklin. "The Treasures of Ksar 'Akil." Thought: Fordham University Quarterly 24 (1949): 255-288. Popular account of the first series of excavations. Hooijer, D. A. "The Fossil Vertebrates of Ksar 'Akil, a Palaeolithic Rock Shelter in the Lebanon." Zoologische Vcrhandelingen, Uitgegeven door het Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historic le Leiden 49 (1961): 1 68. Definitive study of the faunal remains. Marks, Anthony E., and P. Volkman. "The Mousterian of Ksar Akil: Levels XXVIA through XXVIIIB." Paleorient 1 2 . 1 (1986): 5-20. Study of the chipped-stone assemblages from the Middle Paleolithic levels and a discussion of their significance. Mellars, Paul, and Jacques Tixier. "Radiocarbon-Accelerator Dating of Ksar 'Aqil (Lebanon) and die Chronology of the Upper Palaeolithic Sequence in the Middle East." Antiquity 63 (1989): 761-768. Series of radiocarbon dates that provides data for a revision of the site's chronology. Ohnuma, Katsuhiko. Ksar Akil Lebanon, vol. 3, Levels XXV-XIV. Brit ish Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 426. Oxford, 1988. Restudy of technological change in the chipped-stone assem blages from Ksar 'Akil, phases A and B. Shackleton, N. J., and Opdyke, N. D. "Oxygen-isotope and paleomagnetic stratigraphy of Pacific core V28-239. Late Pliocene to latest Pleistocene." In Investigations of Late Quaternary Paleoceanography
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and Pakoclimatology, edited by R. M. Cline and J. D. Hays, pp. 449464. Washington, D.C., 1976. Tixier, Jacques, and Marie-Louise Inizan. "Ksar 'Aqil, stradgraphie et ensembles lithiques dans le paleolithique superieur: Fouilles 1 9 7 1 1975." In Pr&hiaoire du Levant, edited by Jacques Cauvin and Paul Sanlaville, pp. 353-367. Paris, 1981. Summary of the results of Tixier's excavations with a preliminary interpretation. Wijmstra, T. A. "Palynology of the first 30 metres of a 1 2 0 m deep section in northern Greece." Acta Botanica Neertandica 18.4 (1969): 511-527. A. M . T. MOORE
KULTEPE TEXTS. The body of some twenty-thou sand cuneiform tablets written in Old Assyrian script and language discovered in die fields at Kultepe ("ash mound"), the modern name for the ruins of the ancient city of Kanes (also called Nesa), in ancient Anatolia, is currently known as the Kultepe texts. The site is located about 19 1cm (12 mi.) northeast of modern Kayseri. [See Kanes.] Nearly all the tablets, which are dated to tire twentieth-eighteenth cen turies BCE, were discovered in the walled lower city, called karum ("commercial quarter"), an area of more than one square kilometer northeast of the mound. T h e tablets were found in the houses of traders, usually in so-called sealed rooms or safes, stored on wooden shelves or kept in jars and sealed tablet coffers. A limited number of tablets have been discovered on the city mound, mainly in tire ruins of the local palace. Discovery and Publication. T h e first tablets appeared in about 1880 via the antiquities market. Until 1948, an es timated four thousand tablets were acquired in this way for collections. Most have been published, at least in cuneiform copies (Veenhof and Klengel-Brandt, 1992). In 1925 their presumed provenance was established during excavations by tire Czech scholar Bedfich Hrozny and another one thou sand discovered (now in the Archaeological Museum at Is tanbul). Since 1948 systematic excavations at Kultepe by Tahsin Ozgiic for the Turkish Historical Society, presently directed by Kudu Emre, yielded about fifteen thousand tab lets; they and many other artifacts, are now in the Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara. Publication of these ex cavated texts begin in 1990 with the appearance of the first volume of the series Ankara Kultepe Tabletleri, under the auspices of a "Kultepe Tablets Publication Committee" (Bilgic, 1990). History of Trade. Mesopotamian traders in Anatolia are mentioned in epics about Old Akkadian kings (twentyfourtii-twenty-third centuries BCE). Both texts and excava tions distinguish two periods. T h e first is identical to level 2 at Karum Kanes, based on the total number of year eponyms known today, and may have lasted eighty years, perhaps until 1840/35 BCE, covering three generations of ttaders and Assyrian Idngs. Most of the Kultepe texts are from this pe riod (to its last fifty years). It ended with the destruction of
Kanes. After a relatively short interval (perhaps less than one generation), the karum was again inhabited and ttade flourished. This second period may have lasted from about 1810 until 1740 BCE {karum level i b ) , but although Assyrian traders were still present and the system still functioned more or less, a lot had changed: the role of native Anatolian ttaders surpasses that of the Assyrians, different articles of trade appear (no tin was imported), and commercial activ ity, as reflected in the fewer than three hundred texts from this period, reveal that trade took place primarily within tire borders of Anatolia. Old Assyrian Trade in Anatolia. T h e tablets reveal in tensive and sophisticated overland trade between Assur and central Anatolia, where Assyrian traders had settled in tire last quarter of the twentieth century BCE. [See Assur.] T h e more important settlements were called karum ("commer cial quarter"), the designation of important trading stations under the walls of usually bigger Anatolian cities; alongside about fifteen karttms there existed about a dozen smaller fac tories, called wabartum ("settlement"). Karum Kanes ad ministered the network and was equipped with a building ("house," with office and storage facilities and a shrine of Assur), a secretary, and an assembly (which also acted as a court of law), led by a limited number of important traders. The colonies functioned somewhat as a province of Assur, subject to its assembly and ruler, maintaining contact via both official letters and "envoys of the city" (who transmit ted orders and verdicts and supervised diplomatic contacts with the Anatolian rulers). Assyrian donkey caravans brought large quantities of ex pensive woolen textiles and tin into Anatolia. These com modities, acquired rather cheaply in Assur, could be con verted into Anatolian silver with great profit. (The gross profit on tin was at least 100 percent and on textiles at least 300 percent.) Family firms, whose members also used cap ital invested by rich Assyrians, temples, and commercial moneylenders (interest at 30 percent per year), conducted the trade. Partnerships, service contracts, mutual represen tation, commission, and credit were vital instruments of trade. Secure and regular communications and a permanent presence in Anatolia guaranteed reliable information on tlie local markets, which made it possible to grant long-term credit and to direct the flow of merchandise or keep it tem porarily in stock. Written documents played a vital role in tlie trade, main taining communication with Assur and with people in other commercial settlements. Thousands of contracts were vali dated by the seal impressions of parties and witnesses ap plied to the clay envelopes in which the tablets were encased: debt notes (originating from credit sales and consignment), service contracts with personnel, transport contracts with caravan leaders, and numerous quit claims. Most are dated by the week, month, and eponym year (in all some 120).
KULTEPE TEXTS
KULTEPE TEXTS. Tablet with its envelope. Top: The tablet on the right (British Museum, BM 1 1 3 5 7 2 ) is a business letter of the As syrian trader Ennum-Assur son of Salmah. The envelope on the left is impressed on the top and bottom with the seal of the sender. Bottom: Detail drawing of the seal impression on the envelope (BM 1 1 3 5 7 2 a ) . (Courtesy K. R. Veenhof)
Contracts served evidentiary purposes and were used in the numerous lawsuits among traders. Hundreds of witnessed records of private summonses show that an attempt was first made to solve problems privately or by arbitration before formally appealing to local Assyrian courts (usually a ka rum). T h e latter resulted in records of interrogations, ne gotiations, sworn oaths, and finally formal verdicts, ulti mately by the city and die ruler of Assur, the highest judicial authorities, which could also issue binding procedurial or ders and assign attorneys to plaintiffs. Finally, the archives contain numerous notes, lists, and memoranda: accounts of caravan expenses, lists of mer chandise in stock or given in consignment, and individual transactions. They were needed to keep track of die many, often simultaneous and complicated transactions and of payments not in cash but by book transfer (via the karum office), which required periodic general settlements of ac counts under the auspices of the karum. Contacts with native Anatolians, living inside or outside the karum, resulted in the oldest written historical data on Anatolia some two centuries before the Old Hittite Empire emerged. T h e country consisted of a fair number of citystates, each witii its ruler and a varying number of officials,
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most of whom were designated as "the one in charge of. . ." (lit., "great one of. . .")• T h e most important were the rabi sirnmiltim ("great one of the stairway"), the second man af ter the king, frequentiy the crown prince, and the rabi sikkitim, presumably a military official. In addition, the texts introduce priests of various local gods, some that also occur in the names of the festivals mentioned as dates of payments in loans or credits granted to locals. Some rulers of impor tant and powerful cities, such as Kanes and Purushanda, appear as overlords of smaller ones. The still-limited number of purely native Anatolian con tracts (in the Assyrian script and language mastered by some local scribes) deal with the sale and purchase of houses and slaves, marriage and divorce, adoption and inheritance, debt, slavery, and security. T h e society was, to all appear ances, primarily agricultural, but also characterized by trade and metallurgy. Assyrian traders were allowed to work and settle in Karum Kanes on the basis of sworn agreements ("oaths") between the authorities and local rulers. Such agreements granted the right to trade, Assyrian jurisdiction, and protection of the caravans in exchange for the payment of import and transit taxes ( 5 percent on textiles, four pounds of tin per donkey load), and a right of preemption of ten percent of the textiles. Anatolian rulers promised to make good losses from brigands and occasionally (?) to pre vent other (Babylonian) traders from entering their territory. Assyrians who tried to dodge the taxes by smuggling could be fined and jailed, and local rulers and officials harming Assyrians or refusing to pay their debts could be boycotted. On the whole, losses and conflicts were exceptional because both parties, profiting from the trade, stuck to the agree ments. T h e linguistic analysis of die large body of Anatolian personal names occurring in the texts reveals that the bulk of the population spoke a language closely related, though not identical, to Old Hittite or (as the Hittites themselves said) "Nesite," probably in a more archaic form. In addition there were proto-Hattian and Hurrian population groups. Seal Impressions. Several thousand Kiiltepe tablets, particularly contracts and judicial records, have been found in sealed envelopes and validated as legal documents by seal impressions (see above). In addition, many fragments of en velopes belonging to letters have been discovered (opened to be read) that had been sealed by their senders. Excava tions have yielded hundreds of bullae originally attached to a variety of containers and packets in order to protect, iden tify, or validate them (e.g., by the official seal of the "city office" in Assur, applied as proof of clearance after payment of the export tax). Some served as labels for transport, oth ers for storage, and still others to close and seal the doors of storerooms. T h e perhaps two thousand different seal im pressions known today exhibit a great mixture of elements of styles and techniques from various traditions and work shops. While most Anatolians used stamp seals, some of
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them, and all Assyrians, used cylinder seals. Old Assyrian, Babylonian, Syrian, Anatolian, and Syro-Anatolian styles can be distinguished; some older seals were recut and re used. Seals and sealings, which are subjects for iconographic studies, had legal significance on certain types of records. Once the owner of a seal is identified (only some 15 percent are inscribed), it becomes possible to discover links between the seal and its owner's ethnicity, status, or wealth. [See also Kanes.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bilgic, Emin, ed. Ankara Killtepe Tablelleri, vol. 1. Turk Tarih Kurumu Yaymlan 6/33. Ankara, 1990. The first volume with texts officially excavated and preserved in the museum at Ankara. Eisser, Georg, and Julius Lewy. Die attassyrischen Rechtsurkunden votn Killtepe. 2 vols. Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-Aegyptischen Gesellschaft, vols. 33 and 35.3. Leipzig, 1 9 3 0 - 1 9 3 5 . First systematic and still reliable edition of 340 legal documents including commentary. Garelli, Paul. Les Assyriens en Cappadoce. Paris, 1963. The first com prehensive study of all aspects of the Kiiltepe texts and the Old As syrian trade, widi extensive analysis of the Anatolian population, chronology, the political relations between Assyrians and Anatolian rulers, and a full bibliography. Larsen, Mogens T. Old Assyrian Caravan Procedures. Istanbul, 1967. Reconstruction of the system based on standard texts: transport con tracts, caravan accounts, and notifying messages. Larsen, Mogens T. The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies. Co penhagen, 1976. Analyzes die political structure of Assur and the government of the colonies, with a long historical introduction. Michel, Cecile. Innaya dans les tablettes paleo-assyricnnes. 2 vols. Paris, 1991. Studies the family and business of two traders and includes a full edition of 280 texts used as sources. Orlin, Louis L. Assyrian Colonies in Cappadocia. The Hague, 1970. General survey and interpretation, outdated by Garelli's book (above). Ozgiic, Nimet. Seals and Seal Impressions of Level lb from Karum Kanish. Ankara, 1968. Ozgiic, Tahsin. Ausgrabungen in Killtepe: Bericht iiber die im Auftrage der Tiirkischen Historischen Gesellschaft, 1948 durchgefiihrten Ausgra bungen. Ankara, 1950. Ozgiic, Tahsin. Kiiltcpe-Kanis: New Researchers at the Center of the As syrian Trade Colonies, Ankara, 1959. Ozgiic, Tahsin. Kiiltepe-Kanis II: New Researchers at the Trading Center of the Ancient Near East. Ankara, 1986. Report on the excavations between 1959 and 1983. Teissier, Beatrice, Sealing and Seals on Texts from Killtepe Karum Level 2. Leiden, 1994. Study of sealing practices and seals on the basis of a sample of nearly seven hundred seal impressions, presented in ta bles and drawings. Veenhof, Klaas R. Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and Its Terminology. Leiden, 1972, Investigates the material aspects of caravan transport, taxes, smuggling, trade in wool and textiles, and forms of sale and purchase, including the markets, Veenhof, Klaas R., and Evelyn Klengel-Brandt. Altassyrische Tontafeln aus Killtepe: Texte und Siegelabrollungen. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, vol. 26. Berlin, 1992. The latest publication of cuneiform texts and seals in photos and drawings, with general and detailed descriptions of types of texts and the iconography of the seals. KLAAS R. VEENHOF
KUNTILLET 'AJRUD (Heb., Horvat Teman), site located in the northeast Sinai Desert ( 3 0 ° n ' N , 34°25' E; map reference 0940 X 9560), approximately 50 km (30 mi.) south of Qadesh-Barnea and a few kilometers west of Darb Ghazza, an ancient route and modern track leading to Eilat and southern Sinai. T h e mound rises prominently from the broad valley of Wadi Qurayyah, which forms a natural eastwest route. T h e top of this isolated hill is a narrow plateau, witii ruins at its western end. Shallow wells at the foot of the hill still make the site an important one. Kuntillet 'Ajrud has been explored by Edward H. Palmer (1869), Alois Musil (1902), Beno Rothenberg (1967), and Ze'ev Meshel (1970); Meshel directed three seasons of ex cavation between October 1975 and April 1976 under the auspices of Tel Aviv University, the Israel Department of Antiquities, and die Exploring the Land Division of die Kib butz Movement. There are two structures on the site: a main building at the western end of the plateau, and a secondary one 10 m to its east. T h e state of preservation of the second one is very poor, as were its finds. The main building, a rectangle with four corner rooms, covers an area of approximately 15 X 25 m. T h e entrance was through a small exterior court area ringed with stone benches and then through a small gate room leading to a narrow chamber divided into two wings. In each wing plas tered stone benches surrounded the walls. Except for a nar row passage between the wings, the benches fill the spaces. The bench room extends north-south across the entire width of the building and apparentiy was the most important part of the site. Certainly its function was associated with the benches. Plaster fragments tiiat had detached from die walls were found in the bench room. Some of the fragments are in scribed with black ink: two Hebrew inscriptions in Phoeni cian script (see below) and a partial third inscription. The third inscription was found in situ, about 1.5 m above floor level, on the northern doorpost of the entrance leading to the main courtyard. T h e bench room, the corner rooms abutting its two wings, and the adjoining parts of the main building produced most of the other significant finds. Two pithoi adorned with inscriptions and pictures and stone bowls of various sizes, four of which had the names of do nors incised on tiieir rims. Bases of pithoi and large storage jars were found, still in situ, in the two long rooms located to the south and west of the main courtyard. These areas served as storerooms for food supplies. The Hebrew inscriptions and the cosmopolitan style and motifs of the drawings found at the site attest to its unique significance. Some of the inscriptions are written in ancient Hebrew script and some in Phoenician script, on plaster, stone, and pottery. 1. Plaster fragments. Three partial inscriptions, written in ink in Phoenician script but in the Hebrew language, were
KUNTILLET 'AJRUD
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KUNTILLET ' AJRUD. Aerial view of the site. (Photograph by Avraham Hay; courtesy Z. Meshel)
found on plaster fragments in die bench room; portions of two others, written in ancient Hebrew script, were found in the debris at the entrance to the western storeroom. One of the Phoenician inscriptions reads: "your days may be pro longed, and you shall be satisfied . . . give YHWH of Teman and his Asherah . . . Y H W H of Teman and his Asherah favored. . . ." Another inscription is a piece of an ancient theophany describing the revelation of God in language echoing the Hebrew Bible: "and when El rose up . . . and hills melted . . . and peaks were pounded . . . bless Baal in (the) day of war . . . the name of El in (the) day of war. . . ." It is note worthy that Baal and God (Heb., 'el) are mentioned here in poetic parallelism, in connection with a possible reference to a "day of war" (ydm milhama). 2. Stone bowls. Among the four inscriptions incised on the rims of stone bowls, the most complete one reads: "(do nated) by Ovadyo son of 'Adnah; may he be blessed by Y H W ( H ) . " These stone bowls were apparently dedicated to the god of Israel by donors who sought his blessing. 3 . Pottery. One or two letters are incised on the shoulders of most of the pitlioi. T h e letter 'aleph is found most fre
quently, while the letter yod is found least often; the com bination qoph-resh appears in two instances. It is assumed that these letters are abbreviations indicating types of offer ings and tithes, a practice described a millennium later in tire Mishnah and Tosefta. These letters were incised on tire pithoi prior to firing. Neutron activation analysis of their clay established drat they were made in the vicinity of Je rusalem, perhaps reinforcing tire suggestion that priests lived at the site and received supplies in the forms of sacri fices and tithes. Among the seven inscriptions incised on the shoulders of storejars after firing are four reading Isr 'r, to be read lesar 'ir, "(belonging) to a city official." The jars may either have held commodities consigned to an official at the site or registered by him. Among the inscriptions written in red ink on two large pithoi that are also decorated witii pictures are four repeti tions of the alphabet, a list of personal names, and two bless ings that resemble the priestly benediction. One of these was written above two figures of the Egyptian god Bes and may be reconstructed as follows: "A[shy]o m[lk] (the king) said: tell [x, y, and z], may you be blessed by YHWH of Shomron (Samaria) and his Asherah." If this reconstruction is sound,
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it is possible that '(sy)w (hm)lk ("Ashyo tlie king") is a trans position of the name yio's, "Joash," referring to the ldng (hmlk) of Israel who reigned from Samaria (c. 801-786 BCE); tiiis may provide an important synchronism for dating the site. The second inscription is reconstructed as "Amaryo said: tell my lord, may you be well and be blessed by Y H W H of Teman and his Asherah. May he bless and keep you and be with you." The two inscriptions not only shed light on the religious character of the site, but also provide revealing glimpses into the history of Israelite religion. Various divine, human, and animal figures are drawn on the two storejars. On one of them, alongside two represen tations of Bes, a seated figure, perhaps Asherah, plays a lyre. The familiar motif of the ttee of life, flanked by two ibex, also appears on this vessel, along with drawings of a lion, a procession of animals, and a cow licking the tail of a suckling calf. On the other vessel five figures are depicted raising their hands in a gesture of supplication, and an archer raises his bow. Most of these motifs, are well-represented elsewhere in Syria/Phoenicia, The subject matter of the inscriptions, the references to various deities, and the presence of dedicated vessels all sug gest that Kuntillet 'Ajrud was not a temple but a kind of religious center. Given its location (it may have been asso ciated with journeys of the Israelites to Eilat and to EzionGeber and perhaps with those of pilgrims to southern Sinai), the absence of ritual appurtenances usually associated with cult or sacrifices (e.g., altars), as well as its architectural plan, it may have been a wayside shrine. A journey south along the Darb Ghazza from Qadesh-Barnea might have included stopping at this well-side station to make dedications to Is rael's god in the bench room of the main building. Kuntillet 'Ajrud was only occupied for a few years. The interpretation of the evidence points to an occupation by a small group of priests from Israel, with an officer (sr 'r) at their head. The reference to "Yahweh of Samaria" on one of the large decorated pithoi, the Phoenician-style writing, the decorative and pictorial artwork, the pottery types, and the onomastic conventions (names ending in -yau, and not -yahu), suggest that the site was in sustained contact with the northern ldngdom of Israel. In return for provisions, pri marily from Judah, priests would have rendered various blessings and other services to travelers. The date of the site, determined by typological and paleographic analysis, and by the need to identify a historical period in which Israelite influence over Judah was especially strong, points in the excavator's opinion, not to the time of the reigns of Jehoram, Ahaziah, and Athaliah (850-837 BCE), but to tlie period of Joash, lung of Israel (c. 801-786 BCE), who captured King Amaziah of Judah, broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and seized the treasures of the Jerusalem Tem ple and palace (2 Kgs. 1 4 : 1 - 1 6 ; 2 Chr. 2 5 : 1 - 2 4 ) . Itis possible that Joash intended to gain direct access to the Red Sea, and that this was the reason for the war between the two kings.
The victory of Joash may be reflected in the construction of the buildings at Kuntillet 'Ajrud. BIBLIOGRAPHY Chase, Debra A. "A Note on an Inscription from Kuntillet 'Ajrud." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 246 (1982): 63-67. Dever, William G. "Asherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from Kuntillet 'Ajrud." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 255 (1984): 2 1 - 3 7 . Emerton, J. A. "New Light on Israelite Religion: The Implications of the Inscription from Kuntillet 'Ajrud." Zeitschrift filr die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 94 (1982): 2-20. Lemaire, Andre. Les ecoles et la formation de la Bible dans I'ancien Israel. Fribourg, 1981. See pages 26-28. Lemaire, Andre. "Date et origine des inscriptions hebrai'ques et pheniciennes de Kuntillet 'Ajrud." Studi Epigrafici e Linguislici 1 (1984): 131-143. McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr. "Aspects of the Religion of the Israelite Mon archy: Biblical and Epigraphic Data." In Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, edited by Patrick D. Miller, Jr., et al. Philadelphia, 1987. Meshel, Ze'ev. Kuntillet 'Ajrud: A Religious Centre from the Time of the Judaean Monarchy on the Border of Sinai. Jerusalem, 1978. Meshel, Ze'ev. "Did Yahweh Have a Consort? The New Religious Inscriptions from Sinai." Biblical Archaeology Review 5.2 (1979): 2 4 34. Tigay, Jeffrey H. You Shall Have No Other Gods: Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions. Atianta, 1986. See pages 26-29. Tigay, Jeffrey H. "A Second Temple Parallel to die Blessings from Kuntillet 'Ajrud." Israel Exploration Journal 40 (1990): 218. Weinfeld, Moshe. "Kuntillet Ajrud Inscriptions and Their Signifi cance." Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici 1 (1984): 1 2 1 - 1 3 0 . ZE'EV MESHEL
KURNUB, a fortified settlement in the central Negev de sert, also known as Mampsis, located 40 km (25 mi.) south east of Beersheba, at the junction of the roads from Aila (Ei lat) to Jerusalem and Gaza (map reference 1 5 6 X 046). Kurnub is the site's Arabic name. At the end of the first cen tury BCE, the site was settled by the Nabateans as a secondary stop on the trade route from Petra to the Mediterranean Sea. The settlement prospered into the second century CE, when it and the rest of the Nabatean kingdom became part of the Roman Provincia Arabia and horse breeding replaced trade as the primary economic activity. (In contrast to other Na batean sites in the Negev, agriculture at Kurnub was never an important part of the economy, primarily because of the dearth of arable land.) In the Late Roman period Kurnub became a garrison in defense of the Jerusalem—Aila road. Its strategic importance continued into die Byzantine period, pri marily because of its proximity to Transjordan. T h e mosaic Madaba map portrays it (under the Greek name Mampsis) as a fortified city—an arched gateway flanked by towers. [See Madaba.] It is also mentioned as Mamphis in the military papryi of Nessana, another sixth-century source. [See Nessana.] Because the latest coins found at the site date to
KURNUB the mid-sixtii century CE, it is believed that the town was de stroyed by Arab invaders sometime before tire Muslim con quest of Palestine in 636 CE. Following numerous late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury surveys and preliminary explorations, Kurnub was extensively excavated between 1 9 6 5 and 1 9 6 7 , in 1 9 7 1 1 9 7 2 , and again in 1990 by a team led by Avraham Negev on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Architec tural remains at Kurnub are more extensive than at any other site in the Negev, and the quality of that construction is striking. More than two-dozen public buildings have been excavated, among them, two Byzantine churches with mo saic pavements. A Late Roman city wall surrounded the town, which also had an extensive water-collection system and three distinct cemeteries with burials dating from the Nabatean through the Byzantine periods. Kurnub was not one of the early Nabatean settlements in the Negev. Remains from the Middle Nabatean period (c. 30 BCE-70 CE) are die earliest found there. Studying tiiis pe riod is further hampered because the town was completely rebuilt, following a new plan in the second century CE. T h e largest of the Middle Nabatean buildings, all of which were built of hammer-dressed stones, was a fortress situated at the site's highest elevation, in the northeast. T h e Late Nabatean/Late Roman period (70 CE-midfourth century CE) begins with tire reign of Rabel II ( 7 0 - 1 0 6 CE) and continues into what is known historically as the Late Roman period. (It can, however, be classified as Late Na batean because the same structures continued in use from the second through the mid-fourth centuries—and in most cases beyond, into the Byzantine period.) The Late Roman finds consist primarily of pottery and coins and tire remains of the city wall. Built at the end of the third century or at the beginning of the fourth, the wall was about 900 m long and enclosed an area of about 1 5 acres. It had two gates and was defended by two towers. T h e main gate was on the north; the western gate gave access to Nahal Mamshit. Many Late Nabatean buildings were constructed on or incorporated into the foundations of earlier buildings. A large Middle Nabatean structure, for example, was uncov ered beneath the city wall. Use of the Late Nabatean public pool at the northeastern edge of the city extended into sub sequent periods. T h e pool ( 1 8 X 1 0 X 3m) apparently had a wooden roof supported by pillars. Next to it was the public bathhouse, which consisted of a courtyard that may have been used as a dressing room, two cold baths, a tepid bath, and a three-room hot bath. [See Baths.] Water for the pool, bathhouse, and city cisterns was sup plied by a network of water-collection systems constructed at various points for which die Nabateans are known. [See Cisterns.] Water was collected primarily by damming Nahal Mamshit but also by conducting rainwater from a nearby mountain slope. Three dams in Nahal Mamshit were kept under observation from a high (5 m), square tower ( 1 0 X
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10 m) situated at the western edge of tire town. This struc ture had a paved courtyard with a roofed water reservoir as well as storerooms, a guest suite (a separate, self-contained dwelling unit), and a square, characteristically Nabatean staircase tower. [See Reservoirs.] A very large building (35 X 20 m), believed to have been the governor's palace, was uncovered northeast of the tower, at the center of the western edge of town. The building's internal courtyard ( 1 9 X 6 m) housed a guardroom, recep tion hall, and library, as well as servant quarters, a ldtchen, storerooms, and storage cellars. T h e colonnade running along the western and northern walls of the courtyard sup ported arches that in turn supported a balcony onto which tire upper rooms opened. This "P'-shaped arrangement has not been found elsewhere in the Negev. A separate residen tial area—its rooms distinguished by stone floors—was ac cessed via an arched vestibule. Also unique to the Negev is the stable found in a large rectangular building (27 X 35 m) in the town's southwestern corner. Three rooms were partitioned such that a wide cen tral area was flanked by two elongated aisles. Animals housed in these aisles were fed from troughs dug into the sills of four arched openings cut out of both the western and eastern walls of the central hall. A stable of the same type— though much larger and more elaborate—was found in a building complex in the eastern section of the city. A square structure (40 X 40 m), it had only one entrance, which led through a vestibule into a large irregularly shaped courtyard. T h e building comprised numerous units, including work shops, a lavatory, a residential wing and visitors' suite, a stylobate bearing columns witii Nabatean capitals, and a treasure room. Both of tiiese buildings contained cisterns. Traders found respite at die large khan, or caravanserai (23 X 42 m), located to the northwest, just beyond the later Roman city wall. This rest house, which included large courts, halls, and rows of rooms along its northern and east ern sides, resembles the one found at Avdat. [See Avdat] About 50 m from die caravanserai, the excavators uncov ered two buildings thought to have been schools in which Nabatean architecture and construction were taught. The earlier building, which was square (30.30 X 30.25 m), con tained pottery dating from the Middle Nabatean through the Byzantine periods. Various imported wares indicate that some of its occupants were wealthy. Adjoined to this struc ture's western wall was a larger, rectangular building (35.80 X 45.25 m) dated to the early second century CE. Destroyed by the mid-fourth century, its remaining pillars and arches were later ruined in an earthquake, perhaps that of 363. Later in its history, tiiis building may have been a barrack for a locally recruited militia. During the Byzantine period (mid-fourth-early sixth cen turies CE) many Late Nabatean buildings continued in use; the primary Byzantine remains, however, are two churches, designated the east church and the west church. Both date
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to the second half of die fourth or the beginning of die fifth century. The east church complex (55 X 35 m) contained a chapel, baptistery, annexes (housing a bath and perhaps a monastery), and a square bell tower. [See Baptisteries; Baths; Monasteries.] Access to the complex was through a large atrium (15 X 18 m) abutting the basilica on the west. The church (27.5 X 15 m) was entered through one of three openings in the atrium's eastern wall. Botii of its aisles were paved in stone. A mosaic floor in the nave was decorated with geometric designs; two large crosses were executed in front of the bema. [See Mosaics.] The church had a single, central apse flanked by rectangular rooms; neither room contained an apse, but relics were found inside of botii. Ex tending around the interior of the semicircular apse was a bench with three steps that supported the base of the bish op's throne. Numerous Arabic invocations were engraved on the apse, an indication that Arab tribesmen occupied the site temporarily after it was conquered early in the seventh century. The west church, situated in the southwestern corner of the city, was built over part of a large Late Nabatean build ing. Like the east church, it had a colonnaded atrium with a central cistern and three openings that led into the basilica. The interior (17.5 X 10 m) was smaller than that of the east church, but its plan was identical and its aisles were also paved in stone. Bird, fruit, and geometric motifs were exe cuted in tlie nave's colored-mosaic pavement, which also featured six undated Greek inscriptions. Most of the city's marketplace, comprising three rows of shops situated along two streets, is dated to the Byzantine period. Its southern portion was constructed on the foun dations of a large Middle Nabatean building; and at some point in its history, the structure apparently served as a mon astery. The marketplace is one of the few buildings that sur vived the Muslim conquest of Kurnub. [See also Churches; and Nabateans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Negev, Avraham. "The Nebateans and the Provineia Arabia." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der rbmischen Welt, vol. II.8, edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, pp. 6 3 1 - 6 3 3 , 647-658. Berlin, 1977. Negev, Avraham. "Housing and City-planning in the Ancient Negev and the Provineia Arabia." In Housing in Arid Lands: Design and Planning, edited by Gideon Golany, pp. 3-32. London, 1980. Negev, Avraham. The Greek Inscriptions from the Negev. Jerusalem, 1981. See pages 69-72. Negev, Avraham. Tempel, Kirchen und Zislernen. Stuttgart, 1983. Negev, Avraham. Nabatean Archaeology Today. New York, 1986. Negev, Avraham. The Architecture of Mampsis Final Report. 2 vols. Je rusalem, 1988. Negev, Avraham. "Mampsis: The End of a Nabatean Town." Aram 2 . 1 - 2 (1990): 337-365. Negev, Avraham. "The Mampsis Gymnasia and Their Latter History: Preliminary Report and Interpretation." In Early Christianity in Con text: Monuments and Documents, edited by Frederick Manns and Eu-
genio Alliata, pp. 241-264. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Collectio Maior, 38. Jerusalem, 1993. Wenning, Robert. Die Nabalaer: Denkmaler und Geschichte. Gottingen, 1987. Contains a full bibliography (pp. 1 5 9 - 1 7 2 . ) . AVRAHAM NEGEV
KURSI (Ar., Khirbet el-Kursi), site located at the mouth of Nahal Samakh on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee (map reference 2481 X 2102). It and the fertile valley that surrounds it were identified long ago by surveyors and re searchers as the land of the Gergesenes of the Gospels, re lated to the story of the stampeded Gadarene swine (Mt. 8:28-34; Mk. 5:1-20; Lk. 8:26-39). The identification was based mainly on the site's topographical setting, as well as on the modern name Kursi, which may be a distortion of the original name, Gergesa. Archaeological surveys and ex cavations conducted in the area after 1967 by Dan Urman and S. Bar-Lev proved die identification beyond doubt (see below). The early Christians identified the site with the place where the miracle took place, according to the Synoptic Gospels. From a topographical point of view, it corresponds to the biblical description of the land of die Gergesenes. From 1970 to 1974, Vassilios Tzaferis, under the auspices of the Israel Department of Antiquities, excavated a site lo cated some 300 m east of die shore of the Sea of Galilee, partly on the valley side and pardy on the slopes overlooking the sea. After three seasons of excavation (1969-1972) a re ligious settlement consisting of a church and the remains of a walled monastery was revealed. The monastery (140 X 120 m in area) was enclosed by walls on all four sides. At the center of the enclosed area was a magnificent early Christian basilica (25 X 45 m), one of the largest discovered in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee. At a distance of several meters to the east of the monas tery, halfway up the slope of Nahal Samakh, another build ing was discovered tiiat included a small chapel paved with colorful mosaics and a rectangular room with a natural con glomerate stone boulder standing in the center. It was prob ably this room, with its natural rock, tiiat the early Christians saw as the place of the miracle, at least in the writings of the church fathers from the fourth century onward. Based on the archaeological evidence, three phases (lev els) can be distinguished in the settlement, basilica, and chapel: the earliest dates from the second half of the fifth century to the middle of the sixth century CE; the second lasted from the second half of the sixth century to the be ginning of the seventh; and the third began in the seventh century and continued until the middle of die eighth. In the earliest stage of occupation (level 1) the settlement was a compact and well-organized community with streets, dwellings, and drainage channels. It no doubt functioned as a purely religious community, as evidenced by the magnif icent church in its center, its most important element. At
KUWAIT approximately the same time, the chapel dedicated to the "miracle" was erected. In the second stage (level 2) many changes took place within the church and the monastery, probably as the result of an increase in die Christian population in the region and of changes in liturgical customs. Prosperity ended abruptly with the Persian invasion in 6 1 4 CE; the monumental char acter of the church was altered and its area greatly reduced. Some of the chapels on its two long sides were converted to industrial use: one was used as a storeroom and another held an oil press. Within the residential quarter, new buildings of less refined construction were built on the earlier remains. T h e third stage (level 3) was the last occupation before die entire complex was destroyed, probably by an earth quake, and abandoned. New settlers came who were not sensitive to the site's religious significance or to the archi tectural importance of the church. This final settlement was short-lived, lasting only until the second half of die eighth century. T h e monastery and die church, as well as the chapel dedicated to die miracle, were destroyed, abandoned, and subsequently laid in ruins. [See also Churches; Monasteries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY The Excavations at Kursi-Gergesa. 'Atiqot (English Series), vol. 16. Je rusalem, 1983. Urman, Dan. "The Site of the Miracle of the Man with the Unclean Spirit." Christian News from Israel 22 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 72-76. VASSILIOS TZAFERIS
KUWAIT. Located at the head of the Arab-Iranian Gulf, the State of Kuwait bounds with Saudi Arabia to the south, Iraq to the west and north, and the Gulf to the east. Kuwait consists of 17,000 sq 1cm (10,540 sq. mi.) of the Arabian desert, the Gulf littoral, and several uninhabited off-coast islands, of which Bubiyan and Warba are the largest and lie near the Shatt al-Arab. Other islands to the south—Kubbar, Qaruh, Auha, Unun al-Marindin, and U m m an-Nammal in Kuwait Bay—are bare and small. T h e principal archaeolog ical remains are found on Failaka Island at the entrance to Kuwait Bay, which has been inhabited since 2000 BCE. T h e mainland is characterized by a mostly flat, stony de sert plain broken by escarpments and hills. Particularly in the north, the wadi systems drain internally, except along the east coast, where they drain into the Gulf. Wadi alBatin, the relic of an ancient watercourse, rising in Arabia to the south, is a prominent feature defining the state's west ern boundary. Shallow, depressed basins (playas) in die cen tral, north, and west of Kuwait are important collection sta tions for winter rains. Typical coastal sand dunes occur in the southern part of the region. T h e earliest inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf must have derived from populations enacting a developed
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Olduwan culture in Tanzania and Kenya more than one million years B P . Arabian-bound emigrants probably crossed from Africa near Bab al-Mandeb (Ethiopia) to Ye men at the mouth of the Red Sea. Acheulean sites are known in North Arabia at Shuway Hittiyah 644 km (400 mi.) due west of Kuwait) and at more than two hundred lakes sites in central, west, and southwest Arabia dating between 700,000 and 100,000 BP. Wadis running north from central Arabia were natural corridors for the peoples who were to inhabit the Gulf and the whole of the Near East. Wadi alBatin, framing Kuwait on the west, and still archaeologically unknown, is an obvious route. By 50,000 BP, Mousterian culture had developed on the Arabian Peninsula. The Gulf was a fertile valley, well-watered by an extension of the Shatt al-Arab emptying into the Gulf of Oman (Indian Ocean) at Hormuz. In 15,000 BCE, the Gulf began to fill from the south, forcing the resident populations of the Shatt valley to seek higher ground north and west. Between 8000 and 5000 BCE, a Mesolithic hunting culture was established in the Burgan Basin, where characteristic microliths have been found in association with bitumen pools. Drawings of animals (horned quadrupeds widi elon gated bodies, giraffelike creatures) and a palm tree, executed in a reddish-yellow pigment, decorate die underface of a prominent flat rock near Mudaira (on the north side of Ku wait Bay) that may date to this period. Neolithic (5000-3500 BCE) sites are distributed along all of the Gulfs western littoral. One site identified in Kuwait at Sabiyah (on the north side of Kuwait Bay) exhibits pot tery, fishing gear, celts, and small blades, a rather deprived version of the contemporaneous Ubaid culture nourishing in Sumer. [See Ubaid.] T h e Neolithic may have continued for some time in Kuwait, although no artifacts have been discovered on the mainland or islands to suggest any con tinuity of habitation. There is no evidence of an Early Bronze culture. Never theless, somewhere along the mainland littoral a society based on a fishing culture must have existed because the economic surplus provided by fishing would have created the initial stimulus for trade. Two of the types of boats that would have been utilized still survive: the warjia (a reed craft) and the houri (a dugout); the bones of large sea mam mals from the second-millennium BCE excavations on Fai laka Island indicate the use of a frame or plank boat essential for deep-water fishing. Otiier recognized archaeological remains in the State of Kuwait are to be found on the tiny island of Umm an-Nam mal, located very close to the tip of Cape Asharij, which juts into the rear position of Kuwait Bay. The island is accessible to the mainland at low tide, and they were no doubt joined in antiquity. The staff of the Kuwait National Museum have completed a thorough survey of the island and conducted test excavations at several of the more substantial locations.
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Four sites containing meager Bronze Age remains are clus tered near the center of the island. One of the sites is iden tified as a kiln, and sherds of ceramic wares are comparable to material from excavations at Qal'at al-Bahrain that has been dated to the end of the third millennium and the first half of the second millennium BCE. Other small sites on the island contained Late Kassite, Late Hellenistic, and Late Is lamic period material. The Sabiyah peninsula has been briefly surveyed along the Khor Sabiyah, the channel separating the mainland from Bubiyan Island. Four sites were located, devoid of architec ture but identified by pottery dating mainly from the Middle and Late Islamic periods. [See also Failaka.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Dickson, H. R. P. Kuwait, and Her Neighbors. London, 1956. Howard-Carter, Theresa. "Kuwait." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol, 6, PP- 3 9-397- Berlin, 1983. Howard-Carter, Theresa. "The Johns Hopkins University Reconnais sance Expedition to the Arab-Iranian Gulf." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 207 (1972): 6-40. Howard-Carter, Theresa. "The Tangible Evidence for the Earliest Dilmun." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 33 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 2 1 0 - 2 2 3 . Kassler, P. "The Structural and Geomorphic Evolution of the Persian Gulf." In The Persian Gulf: Holocene Carbonate Sedimentation and Diagenisis in a Shallow Epicontinental Sea, edited by B. H. Purser, pp. 1 1 - 3 3 . Berlin and New York, 1973. McClure, Harold A. The Arabian Peninsula and Prehistoric Populations. Coconut Grove, Fla., 1 9 7 1 . 8
THERESA HOWARD-CARTER
LACHISH (Ar., Tell ed-Duweir), a prominent mound
Dagan, who also surveyed the surrounding region (Dagan, 1992). [See Restoration and Conservation.] Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze Ages. An assemblage of flint implements and a single pottery sherd found on the mound probably indicate the existence of a Pottery Neolithic site in one of the surrounding valleys. Chalcolithic Ghassulian pottery was found on the mound, suggesting a settiement. Remains from the end of the Chal colithic period and the beginning of the Early Bronze Age were uncovered on the northeast corner of the mound and on a ridge northwest of the site, where settlers lived in caves. A dolmen on the northwest ridge is probably related to this settlement. EB remains were found on the northeast corner, in Area D (in the center of the mound) and in tombs, in dicating that the site was extensively settled during this pe riod. I n t e r m e d i a t e Bronze Age. Except for a small settlement and its cemetery (cemetery 2000) on the ridge to the north west there is no sign of habitation in the Intermediate Bronze Age (EB IV); 1 2 0 rock-cut single-chambered tombs were excavated. [See Tombs.] T h e period's pottery assemblage belongs to Ruth Amiran's soutiiern Family A (Amiran, i960) and to William G. Dever's Families J and S (Dever,
of about 3 1 acres located near a major road leading from Israel's coastal plain to the Hebron hills. T h e site's location, the fertile land in the area, and an ample water supply from numerous wells contributed to its development as an im portant settlement. In 1929 William Foxwell Albright identified ancient La chish with Tell ed-Duweir. With die absence of inscriptions, this identification, which is generally accepted, is based on circumstantial evidence and archaeological data. Tel La chish was first excavated ( 1 9 3 2 - 1 9 3 8 ) by a British expedi tion directed by James L. Starkey, assisted by G. Lankester Harding and Olga Tufnell. T h e excavations were termi nated when Starkey was murdered by Arab bandits. Starkey published only brief excavation reports, and Tufnell com pleted the publication work (Tufnell, 1 9 5 3 ; Tufnell et a l , 1940; Tufnell et al., 1958). Starkey carried out large-scale excavations on the summit of the mound and in the surrounding area. Most of the re mains uncovered on the summit date to the Iron Age and later. Earlier remains were uncovered in a section cut near the northeast corner of the site and on the nearby slope. T h e Canaanite Fosse Temple was discovered near the northwest corner of the mound, and numerous graveyards and a Bronze Age settiement were uncovered in the area sur rounding the mound. Few of Starkey's stratigraphic conclu sions (with the exception of the Assyrian siege ramp) were challenged by later excavators. For purposes of interpreta tion and publication, the most recent excavation (see below) has kept Starkey's stratigraphic divisions and terminology, except for the Middle and Late Bronze Age phases in levels VIII and VII in which his divisions are not sufficiently flex ible. In 1966 and 1968 Yohanan Aharoni ( 1 9 7 5 ) , under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, undertook limited excavations in the solar shrine area. In 1 9 7 3 , Tel Aviv University initiated full-scale excavations under the di rection of David Ussishkin, assisted by Gabriel Barkay, Christa Clamer, Yehudah Dagan, John Woodhead, and Orna Zimhoni (Ussishldn, 1 9 7 8 , 1983). A reconstruction program for the Iron Age city gates is being carried out by
1980).
Middle Bronze Age. T o date no evidence has been re covered for the MB I Canaanite city, but there was new settlement on the mound and Lachish was an important city-state by MB II—III. A glacis with a lime-plastered slop ing surface constructed around the site in die Middle Bronze Age is responsible for die existing mound's configuration, but no remains of a freestanding city wall on top of the glacis have been found. Along the bottom of the glacis, on the west, a fosse was cut into the bedrock. In the center of the mound die northwest wing of a large palace with massive brick walls and perhaps a second story was excavated in area P. The palace probably belonged to the city's ruler. Huge stone slabs in secondary use from an earlier, similar struc ture were also used in its consttuction. Destroyed by fire, tiiis palace was subsequently repaired and reused for do mestic and industrial purposes. [See Palace.] Remains of a cult place were found in area D , but the structure is badly
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preserved and its character and plan are unknown. Many votive vessels and animal bones indicate its ritual function. Starkey's level VIII in the northeast corner of the site dates to this period. Many rock-cut tombs were found outside the site, richly furnished with pottery, weapons, and scarabs. [See Grave Goods; Weapons and Warfare.] Late Bronze Age. The settlement decreased in size and declined in importance following the MB destruction. It did not regain prominence until the later part of the Late Bronze Age, then becoming one of the most significant city-states in Canaan. Papyrus Hermitage 1 1 1 6 A , dated to the reign of Amenhotep II ( 1 4 5 3 - 1 4 1 9 BCE), is the earliest written source referring to Lachish. It records food presentations to envoys from Lachish and other Canaanite cities. Several cuneiform tablets containing letters from kings of Lachish to their over lords, Pharaohs Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV, in the fourteenth century BCE were found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt. [See Cuneiform; Amarna Tablets.] Another letter, discovered at Tell el-Hesi, was apparently sent by an Egyp tian official stationed at Lachish. [See Hesi, Tell el-.] LB Lachish apparently was unfortified, and a temple was erected in the abandoned fosse near the northwest corner of the mound (Tufhell et a l , 1940). It was rebuilt twice (phases I—III) and the finds were rich in each successive temple and in die surrounding pits, into which offerings had been thrown. T h e original fosse temple was modest; fosse temple
LACHISH. Figure 1 . Main
II was larger. Fosse temple III, the largest, was destroyed by fire; it was apparentiy contemporaneous with the level VII domestic sttuctures on the mound in area S. All were de stroyed at the same time, probably toward the end of the thirteenth century BCE (Ussishkin, 1985). Buildings belong ing to levels VII and VI (thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE) were uncovered near the upper periphery of the mound, indicating that there was no city wall there then. However, the buildings along the upper edge of tire site may have been adjoining, forming a line of fortifications around the city. In any case, by the fourteenth century BCE, the entire area ex cavated in area S up to the edge of the mound was open ground. Information about the settlement between the end of tire Middle Bronze Age and level VII is scarce. Some remains were uncovered in the northeast (Starkey's level VII) as well as in area P and in area S beneath level VII. In addition, many tombs contained pottery vessels, including Cypriot imports, and scarabs. Level VI. T h e last prosperous Canaanite city is repre sented in level VI. It demonstrates a cultural continuity from level VII, but the city was rebuilt along different lines: in area S die level VII domestic structures were replaced by a public building; the fosse temple was not rebuilt, and a new sanctuary was built on the acropolis (see figure 1 ) , possibly as part of the royal palace. T h e main complex of the acrop-
hall of the Late Bronze Age acropolis temple, from the north. (Courtesy
Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University)
LACHISH olis temple consists of an antechamber, a main hall, and a cella, climbing the slope in that order. T h e entrances to the three units are on a straight axis drat passes through die center of the complex. T h e main hall is rectangular; its ceil ing was supported by cedar of Lebanon beams resting on two huge columns. T h e plan of the temple shows affinities to shrines at Tell el-Amarna and Deir el-Medineh in Egypt. [See Amarna, Tell el-.] Various architectural elements, such as painted plaster, the stone staircase leading to the cella, and octagonal columns, indicate a strong Egyptian influ ence. Nevertheless, a gold plaque portraying a naked Ca naanite goddess (Clamer, 1980) and a graffito of a Canaan ite deity indicate that a Canaanite cult was performed there. T h e level VI finds attest to strong ties with Egypt, in par ticular during the reign of Rameses III ( 1 1 8 2 - 1 1 5 1 BCE, low chronology of Wente and Van Siclen, 1976). Several bowl fragments inscribed in hieratic script document (as do sim ilar inscribed bowls from Tel Sera') a harvest tax paid to an Egyptian religious institution, probably associated with a lo cal temple (Goldwasser, 1984). [See Sera , Tel.] The re cording of tlie harvest tax on votive bowls reflects the eco nomic exploitation of southern Canaan by Egyptian authorities and their religious establishment, suggesting that Lachish was under direct Egyptian control. T h e level VI city was completely desttoyed by fire, its inhabitants were liq uidated or driven out, and the site was abandoned until the tenth century BCE. With the absence of inscriptions, tlie identity of the conquerors cannot be established. One pos sibility is that Lachish was destroyed by tlie Sea Peoples, who settled at about that time on the coastal plain. [See Phil istines, article on Early Philistines.] (Significantly, Philistine painted pottery—monochrome as well as bichrome—has not been found at Lachish, except for some sherds in a cave on the slope.) T h e alternative possibility is that level VI was destroyed by the Israelites, as described in Joshua 1 0 : 3 1 - 3 2 . The biblical record, which describes a large Canaanite city destroyed in a swift attack, fits the archaeological evidence. On the other hand, tlie motive for the destruction remains obscure: the Israelites did not settle at the site or in the sur rounding region (Dagan, 1992) until much later. c
A cache of bronze objects, one of which contains a car touche of Rameses III, was found in area G beneath tlie level VI destruction debris. Thus, level VI could not have been destroyed before the later part of his reign—in about n 60 BCE. The desttuction of Lachish may have coincided with Egyptian loss of control over southern Canaan (c. 1 1 3 0 BCE), as without Egyptian protection unfortified Lachish could not defend itself. Seven or eight brief inscriptions written in Canaanite al phabetic script have been recovered (Puech, 1 9 8 6 - 1 9 8 7 ) , malting Lachish the cardinal site in Canaan proper for studying this script. The earliest inscription includes four letters incised on an M B bronze dagger. [See Proto-Canaanite.]
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Level V. The settlement was renewed, but unfortified, after a long period of abandonment in level V. It is usually assigned to the period of the United Monarchy and its de struction to Pharaoh Shishak (Sheshonq)'s campaign in about 925 BCE. Small domestic buildings were uncovered in different parts of the site. Aharoni (1975) discovered a cult room in the solar shrine area; its cultic equipment included a stone altar and pottery incense burners and chalices. The cult room was destroyed by fire; remains of destruction may also have been detected in area S. Level V cannot be dated with certainty because the date of the pottery characterizing it remains problematic. Level IV. A large fortified city was constructed in level IV, probably because of Judah's new strategic needs (Solo mon's divided kingdom). [See Judah.] Lachish is cited in 2 Chronicles 1 1 : 5 - 1 2 , 2 3 as one of the cities fortified by Rehoboam, but the list may refer to construction works by a later Judean king. Level IV appears to have been consttucted by one of the early kings of Judah—Rehoboam ( 9 2 8 - 9 1 1 BCE), Asa (908-867 BCE), or Jehoshaphat (870-846 BCE). The city was surrounded by massive fortifications. The city gate on the southwest included a roadway ascending into the city, an outer gate built as a projecting bastion, a six-chambered inner gate, and an open courtyard between the Uvo gates (see figure 2 ) . An outer revetment surrounded the site halfway down die slope; it supported a glacis that reached the bottom of the main city wall extending along the mound's upper periphery. Whether the outer revetment functioned merely as an obstacle preventing attackers from reaching tlie main wall or was a city wall that could have been manned in time of siege cannot be determined. A huge palace-fort (palace B), apparently tlie residence of the Judean governor, crowned the center of the city. The edifice was built on a raised foundation podium whose su perstructure is missing. T h e foundation podium has two dif ferently constructed parts, A and B. It is generally believed that podium A belonged to an earlier edifice (palace A of level V) that was incorporated in level IV into the newly erected palace B. It seems more probable, however, that po dium A was originally an integral part of palace B, and that it was constructed as a separate unit and, for technical rea sons, in a different style. Palace B had two annexes. The northern building was probably a storehouse, while the southern one (labeled tlie "government storehouse" by Starkey) was either a stable or a storehouse (see below). A mas sive wall (the enclosure wall) connected tlie corner of the palace-fort and the main city wall. A great shaft, a rock-cut installation (about 22.50 m deep) on tire eastern side of the site, was partially cleared by Starkey. It may be an unfinished water system, but it is more likely the quarry that supplied tlie stones for tlie level IV monumental structures. A deep well uncovered at tlie site's northeast corner was probably the city's main water source, at least in the Iron Age. T h e beginning of level IV lacks
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domestic structures. In a later phase, however, a house was built in area S; some domestic remains were also found near die city gate, indicating the beginning of settlement in open areas of the fort. 2 Kings 14:19 and 2 Chronicles 25:27 record that King Amaziah (798-769 BCE) fled to Lachish when a revolt broke out in Jerusalem. T h e rebels followed him to Lachish and killed him. The king's choice of Lachish as a refuge indicates the city's importance in the kingdom of Judah. It is not known whether tiiis event took place in level IV or III. Palace B, the city gate, the "enclosure wall," and the res idence in area S (but apparently not the city walls) were rebuilt in level III, indicating their desttuction at the end of level IV. As no remains of willful destruction were discerned, these structures may have been destroyed by an earthquake, such as tlie one that occurred in about 760 BCE, during the reign of Uzziah (Am. 1 : 1 ; Zee. 14:5). Level III. The rebuilding of the city gate, the palace-fort compound, and the enclosure wall mark level III. The num ber of settlers at Lachish must have increased, as many buildings of domestic character were found in the areas south of the palace-fort and along the road from the city gate into tlie city. Of note is the enlarged palace-fort com pound. Podiums A and B of former palace B, as well as an extension (podium C), formed an enlarged raised founda tion for tlie new palace C. Its superstructure has not sur
vived, except for some floor segments. The palace-fort and its two annexes opened into a large courtyard. The southern annex was enlarged in level III. Its ground plan (and that of the smaller level IV building) resembles the controversial stable compounds at Megiddo and the storehouse at Tel Beersheba and probably served similar functions. [See Megiddo; Beersheba.] If these buildings were stables, the large courtyard might have been a training and parade ground for chariots from the Judean garrison. T h e lamentation of Micah ( 1 : 1 3 ) associates Lachish with chari ots, and the Lachish reliefs (see below) portray burning ve hicles, probably chariots, being thrown on the Assyrian at tackers. Assyrian conquest. The level III city was destroyed in 701 BCE by Sennacherib, king of Assyria. Campaigning in Judah, Sennacherib established his camp at Lachish (2 Kgs. 1 8 : 1 4 , 1 7 ; Is. 36:2, 37:8; 2 Chr. 32:9) and from there sent a task force to challenge King Hezeldah in Jerusalem. [See Je rusalem.] When the destruction of Lachish was complete, its inhabitants were deported. The region of Lachish was probably included in the Judean territory Sennacherib turned over to the Philistine kings. T h e well-dated, large assemblages of pottery vessels sealed beneath the destruc tion debris of the level III structures form the basis for dating the pottery of Judah in that period (Tufnell, 1953; Zimhoni, 1990).
Figure 2. Excavation of the Iron Age city gate, from the south. (Courtesy Institute of Ar chaeology, Tel Aviv University)
LACHISH.
LACHISH The main Assyrian attack was carried out in the southwest corner of the city. T h e archaeological data make possible die reconstruction of the battle that took place here (Ussishkin, 1990). T h e Assyrian army laid here a huge siege ramp (the oldest siege ramp, and die sole Assyrian one known). [See Assyrians.] Starkey unknowingly removed a substantial part of it. Made of boulders heaped against the slope of the mound, its top reached the bottom of the outer revetment. It is estimated that 13,000-19,000 tons of stone were dumped "there. The stones of die upper layer were joined with mortar to create a compact surface. An earthen plat form on top of the siege ramp provided level ground for die siege machines. As a countermeasure, the defenders laid a counterramp against the inner side of the city wall, opposite the siege ramp. It was composed of mound debris topped by a layer of limestone chips. At its apex it is about 3 m higher than the top of the city wall, forming a basis for a new defense line apparently erected there. When the defense positions on top of the city walls collapsed, the Assyrians had to ex tend the siege ramp in order to attack the new, higher de fense line. T h e second stage of the siege ramp is also com posed of boulders. Remains of weapons, ammunition, and equipment have been recovered, mostly at the point of attack at the south west corner: a bronze helmet crest, scales of armor, slingstones, iron arrowheads, a few carved bone arrowheads; a fragment of an iron chain, and twelve large, perforated stones apparently used by the defenders to unbalance the siege machines. Starkey uncovered a mass burial—die scattered, disartic ulated skeletons of about fifteen hundred individuals—in a few adjoining caves that may be associated with the Assyrian attack. D . L. Risdon (1939) has studied 695 skulls belonging to men, women, and children; three had been trepanned. Curiously, the crania bear a close racial resemblance to the contemporary population of Egypt. Lachish reliefs. A series of stone reliefs commemorating the conquest of Lachish existed in Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh (Kuyunjik), decorating the walls of a large room (Ussishldn, 1982). [See Nineveh.] T h e palace was excavated in 1 8 4 7 - 1 8 5 1 by Austen Henry Layard, who sent most of the reliefs to the British Museum in London. The original length of the relief series was 26.85 m; 18.85 were sent to London and thus preserved. From left to right, the series depicted Assyrian horses and charioteers, Assyrian infantry attacking the city, the besieged city itself, Assyrian soldiers carrying booty, deported families leaving the city, Judean captives, Sennacherib seated on his throne, the royal tent and chariots, and the Assyrian camp. T h e city is portrayed in detail: die city gate and city walls under attack (see figure 3), the huge siege ramp on which five siege machines are deployed, and a large structure in the center of the city, pos m
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sibly the palace-fort. The perspective, in schematic Assyrian style, appears to be from a point on the slope of the hill southwest of the mound. It may be the point, probably in front of the Assyrian camp, from, which Sennacherib watched the battle from his throne, as depicted in the relief. Royal Judean storage jars. Tel Lachish is a key site for studying royal Judean storage jars and their stamps. By 1994, 403 royal stamps and 63 personal stamps from Lachish had been amassed: 85.60 percent of the royal stamps are of the four-winged type, and 73.96 percent of the identifiable royal stamps include the city name Hebron. All the stamped han dles belong to storage jars of type 484, following TufnelPs classification (Tufnell, 1 9 5 3 ) , but many jars of this type were not stamped. Neutron activation analysis has shown that these jars were produced of similar clay, originating in the region of Lachish, indicating tiiat tiiey were manufactured at a single regional center. Ten jars with stamped handles and many unstamped jars were restored. It appears that jars of all the types found were used concurrently. The restorable jars were uncovered be neath the destruction debris of level III and thus date to shortly before 701 BCE. This date fits the view that the royal storage jars were produced by Hezeldah's government as part of the preparations to meet the Assyrian invasion. T h e capacity of the stamped jars varies, so that the stamps would not have been a royal guarantee of capacity. T h e personal stamps were also impressed on jars with royal stamps (Ussishkin, 1976), suggesting that the owners of the personal stamps were either potters or officials otherwise associated with the production of the jars. There is no consistent pat tern to where on a handle the stamps were applied; many stamps were applied carelessly and were not ment to be read. Level II. Following a period of abandonment, Lachish was rebuilt and refortified, probably during the reign of Josiah (639-609 BCE). T h e level II city was poorer and less densely inhabited, and its fortifications weaker than those of levels IV-III. T h e palace-fort was not rebuilt, and its ruins loomed over the center of the city. Numerous small houses were uncovered in different parts of the site. A smaller city gate was built on the ruins of the earlier one. It contained an outer and an inner gate, with a rectan gular courtyard surrounded by small rooms between them. The Lachish letters uncovered in one of these rooms hint that the city's headquarters were located in the city-gate complex. [See Lachish Inscriptions.] T h e outer revetment was repaired, and a new main stone city wall was erected on the remains of the previous wall. Numerous Hebrew ostraca, inscriptions on pottery ves sels, bullae, seals, and inscribed weights were found in level II. Most important are the Lachish letters, a group of ostraca interpreted as correspondence mostly sent to "my lord Yaush," an army commander at Lachish, by a subordinate
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Figure 3. Detail of the Nineveh reliefs of the siege of Lachish. An Assyrian battering-ram attacking the city wall. (Courtesy Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University)
LACHISH.
stationed at some point not far from the city, shordy before the Babylonian conquest (Torczyner et al., 1938). Yigael Yadin (1984) believed that the letters are copies or drafts of letters sent from Lachish to the commander in Jerusalem. Several inscriptions on vessels were found in a storeroom near the city gate, two of which define types of wine kept in the vessels. Two jar inscriptions mention dates—probably the regnal years of Zedekiah (596-586 BCE). Seventeen bul lae stamped with Hebrew seals were found in the solar shrine area; another, stamped with the seal of "Gedaliah who is over the house"—possibly Gedaliah son of Ahikam (2 Kgs. 25:22)—was found on the surface of the mound. Level II was destroyed in 588/86 BCE by Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon. Shortly before, Jeremiah (34:7) had named Lachish as one of the remaining Judean strongholds. A con siderable amount of pottery—including storage jars stamped with a rosette emblem—was sealed beneath die debris of the houses, providing an indicative pottery assemblage for tire period (Zimhoni, 1990).
Level I. After a period of abandonment following the de struction of level II, Lachish was rebuilt as a Persian gov ernment center. Level I covers the Babylonian, Persian, and tite beginning of the Hellenistic periods. T h e fortifications were restored, and a small palace (die Residency), a temple (solar shrine), and a few large buildings were constructed. Judeans returning from the Babylonian Exile settled there (Neh. 11:30). T h e Residency was constructed on the foun dation podium of die Judean palace-fort, which was cleared of tire debris from the level III palace-fort. T h e Residency was smaller than the earlier edifice. Its plan combined that of an Assyrian open-court house and that of a North Syrian bit-hilani; the square column bases in the porticos were carved in Achaemenid style. At a later phase of level I, the Residency was settled by squatters. T h e solar shrine, whose entrance faced east, was built in a style similar to it, and they are probably contemporaneous. The finds indicate that the shrine was in use until the Hellenistic period. T h e Persianperiod finds include about two hundred small limestone al-
LACHISH INSCRIPTIONS tars found outside the mound near the southwest corner. [See Altars.] One altar bears an inscription mentioning in cense. [See Incense.] It is not clear whether these altars were associated with die cult practiced in the solar shrine. L a t e r R e m a i n s . T h e settlement was abandoned during the Hellenistic period. For unknown reasons, Marisa/Mareshah and then Eleutheropolis/Beth-Guvrin replaced La chish as the region s central settlement. [See Mareshah.] A segment of the Roman road from Eleutheropolis to Gaza, which passed near the site, was uncovered by Starkey. N u merous coins from different periods were found on the sur face, indicating that the summit was continuously cultivated. The western part of the summit contained burials, devoid of any burial offerings, which probably belonged to be douins. The latest remains include trenches, cartridges, and coins from Israel's War of Independence in 1948. [See also the biographies ofAharoni, Harding, Layard, Starkey, and TufnelL] !
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. Investigations at Lachish: The Sanctuary and the Res idency (Lachish V). Tel Aviv, 1 9 7 5 . Amiran, Ruth. "The Pottery of the Middle Bronze Age I in Palestine." Israel Exploration Journal 10 (i960): 204-225. Clamer, Christa. "A Gold Plaque from Tel Lachish." Tel Aviv 7 (1980): 1 5 2 - 1 6 2 . Dagan, Yehudah. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Lakhish (98). Jerusalem, 1992. Dever, William G. "New Vistas on the EB IV ("MBI") Horizon in Syria-Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 237 (1980): 35-64. Goldwasser, Orly. "Hieratic Inscriptions from Tel Sera' in Southern Canaan." Tel Aviv 1 1 (1984): 77-93. Puech, Emile. "The Canaanite Inscriptions of Lachish and Their Re ligious Background." Tel Aviv 1 3 - 1 4 (1986-1987): 1 3 - 2 5 . Risdon, D. L. "A Study of the Cranial and Other Human Remains from Palestine Excavated at Tell Duweir (Lachish) by the Wellcome-Marston Archaeological Research Expedition." Biometrika 35 (1939): 99-165. Torczyner, Harry. Lachish I: The Lachish Letters. London, 1938. Tufnell, Olga, et al. lachish II: The Fosse Temple. London, 1940, Tufnell, Olga. Lachish III: The Iron Age. London, 1953. Tufnell, Olga, et al. Lachish IV: The Bronze Age. London, 1958. Ussishkin, David. "Royal Judean Storage Jars and Private Seal Im pressions." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 223 (1976): 1 - 1 3 . Ussishkin, David. "Excavations at Tel Lachish, 1 9 7 3 - 1 9 7 7 : Prelimi nary Report." Tel Aviv 5 (1978): 1-97. Ussishkin, David. The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib. Tel Aviv, 1982, Ussishkin, David. "Excavations at Tel Lachish, 1978-1983: Second Preliminary Report." Tel Aviv 1 0 (1983): 9 7 - 1 7 5 . Ussishldn, David. "Levels VII and VI at Tel Lachish and the End of the Bronze Age in Canaan." In Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages: Papers in Honour of Olga Tufnell, edited by Jonadian N. Tubb, pp. 2 1 3 - 2 3 0 . London, 1985. Ussishkin, David. "The Assyrian Attack on Lachish: The Archaeolog ical Evidence from the Southwest Corner of the Site." Tel Aviv 1 7 (1990): 53-86. Wente, E. F., and C. C. Van Siclen. "A Chronology of the New King
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dom." In Studies in Honor of George R. Hughes, edited by J. H.John son and E. F. Wente, pp. 2 1 7 - 2 6 1 . Studies in Ancient Oriental Civ ilization, 39. Chicago, 1976. Yadin, Yigael. "The Lachish Letters: Originals or Copies and Drafts?" In Recent Archaeology in the Land of Israel, edited by Hershel Shanks, pp. 1 7 9 - 1 8 6 . Washington, D.C., 1984. Zimhoni, Orna. "Two Ceramic Assemblages from Lachish Levels III and II." Tel Aviv 17 (1990): 3 - 5 2 . DAVID USSISHKIN
LACHISH INSCRIPTIONS. The site of Tell edDuweir or Tel Lachish has provided one of the most im portant corpora of Hebrew inscriptions: thirty-six are pres ently known and the ongoing excavations may well discover others. In addition, important Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, Imlk sealings and other seals and sealings (Diringer, 1 9 5 3 , pp. 340-348; Aharoni, 1968: 1 6 5 - 1 6 7 ) , inscribed weights (Diringer 1 9 5 3 , pp. 3 4 8 - 3 5 6 ; Aharoni, 1968, p. 1 6 5 ) , several Egyptian inscriptions (Goldwasser, 1 9 9 1 ) , and a three-line Aramaic inscription on a Persian-period altar (Diringer, !953J PP- 3 5 8 - 3 5 9 ) have been recovered at the site. The first group of Hebrew texts, numbering twenty-one, was discovered in 1 9 3 5 and 1 9 3 8 and published almost im mediately by Harry Torczyner (Torczyner, 1938, texts 1 18; Torczyner, 1940, texts 1 9 - 2 1 ) . During a trial excavation carried out at the Solar Shrine at Lachish in 1966, a single ostracon was found (Aharoni, 1968, text 2 2 ) . In the exca vations that have been ongoing since 1973 under David Us sishldn, another ten inscriptions have come to light (Lemaire, 1 9 7 6 , text 2 3 ; Ussishkin, 1978, texts 2 4 - 3 0 , pp. 8 1 88; and Ussishldn, 1 9 8 3 , texts 3 1 - 3 2 , pp. 1 5 7 - 1 6 0 ) . For reasons that are unclear, this sequential numbering of the Hebrew inscriptions omitted four brief texts, not written on ostraca, that Diringer reeditcd ( 1 9 5 3 , pp. 3 5 6 - 3 5 8 ) . It is the first group of texts, the so-called Lachish letters, tiiat have made the collection famous, for several of tiiese documents are relatively long and well preserved. There can be no doubt that this group is at least partially homogeneous, for five of the ostraca are sherds from the same vessel (G. Lankester Harding in Torczyner, 1938, p. 1 8 4 ) . Whether tiiis means that the documents are drafts of letters written on the site and sent elsewhere (Yadin, 1984) is open to de bate (Rainey, 1987). The most important documents in this group are letters from an inferior to his superior in an ad ministrative and/or military context (e.g., text 3 , 11. 1 - 2 : "Your servant Hoshayahu hereby reports to my lord Yaush"). T h e letters are generally dated to the period before the fall of Judah, in 586 BCE, perhaps in 589. The concerns of tiiat time appear to be reflected in the mention in text 3 of a high-level embassy to Egypt (the envoy is Konyahu, general of the army [sr hsbl) and of an unnamed prophet (hnb'). Although attempts to identify this prophet as Jere miah are pure speculation, the extrabiblical attestation of the term nb' itself is important; the circumstances of tiiese letters
324
LAGASH
also are not unlike die situation in the time of Jeremiah, as described in the Hebrew Bible (Dussaud, 1938: 2 5 6 - 2 7 1 ; Lemaire, 1977, p. 1 0 9 ) . Several of this first group of texts are of less historical interest than the letters; they are either simple lists of names (texts 1 , 1 1 , and 19) or are too poorly preserved to allow meaningful analysis (texts 1 0 , 1 2 , and 1 7 ) . Text 20, a brief jar inscription, is important because it may include an ele ment of dating: if blfyt means "in the ninth (year)," it may refer to the ninth year of Zedeldah, king of Judah, which would correspond to 589-588 BCE, the date indicated in the Hebrew Bible for the beginning of the siege of Lachish (Jer. 3 9 : 1 ; cf. Lemaire, 1977, pp. 1 3 4 - 1 3 5 ) The documents found since 1966 are more heterogeneous and include an ostracon with a list of names (text 2 2 ) , other fragmentary inscriptions on ostraca (texts 23 and 3 1 ) , and several inscriptions originally written with ink or incised on whole jars (texts 2 4 - 3 0 and 3 2 ) . T h e four inscriptions from the earlier excavations not included in the sequential num bering fall into the heterogeneous category, but two are im portant: a royal bat jar inscription, useful in attempting to ascertain the quantity designated by the term bat, and a par tial alphabet (Diringer, 1 9 5 3 , pp. 3 5 6 - 3 5 8 ) . These inscriptions provided the first reasonably extensive body of texts in Judean Hebrew written in cursive script. They provided, therefore, an important contribution to early descriptions of extrabiblical cursive paleography (Dussaud, 1938, pp. 2 7 0 - 2 7 1 ) , orthographic practice (Cross and Freedman, 1 9 5 2 , pp. 5 1 - 5 6 ) , and grammar. Some of the texts discovered since, at Tel Arad, have shown that ortho graphic conventions could vary (e.g., they reveal a more ex tensive use of matres lectionis), but that the basic language of these two primary corpora was identical and for all intents and purposes was also identical with standard biblical H e brew. One of the primary contributions of the Lachish let ters to the study of Hebrew syntax has been to show how frequently nonverbal elements were fronted in the spoken language (e.g., text 4,11. 6-7: wsmkyhw Iqhh sm'yhw wy'lhw h'yrh, "Now as for Semakyahu, Shemayahu has seized him and taken him up to the city"). The Lachish letters also provided die first body of extrabiblical data regarding epistolary usages in preexilic Flebrew (Pardee et a l , 1982, pp. 6 7 - 1 1 4 , 1 4 5 - 1 6 4 ) . These data have more recently been expanded by the letters from Tel Arad (ibid., pp. 2 4 - 6 7 ) . Because the total number of letters known from the period is still small, however, many details of epis tolary usage remain unknown. [See also Arad Inscriptions; Hebrew Language and Lit erature; and Lachish.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. "Trial Excavation in the 'Solar Shrine' at Lachish: Preliminary Report." Israel Exploration Journal 18 (1968): 1 5 7 - 1 6 9 . Editio princeps of text 2 1 , with a hand copy.
Cross, Frank Moore, and David Noel Freedman. Early Hebrew Or thography. New Haven, 1952. Diringer, David. "Early Hebrew Inscriptions." In Lachish, vol. 3, The Iron Age, by Olga Tufnell et al, pp. 3 3 1 - 3 5 9 . London, 1 9 5 3 . Dussaud, Rene. "Le prophete Jeremie et les lettres de Lakish." Syria 19 (1938): 2 5 6 - 2 7 1 . Goldwasser, Orly. "An Egyptian Scribe from Lachish and the Hieratic Tradition of the Hebrew Kingdoms." Tel Aviv 18.1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 248-253. Lemaire, Andre. "A Schoolboy's Exercise on an Ostracon at Lachish." Tel Aviv 3 (1976): 1 0 9 - 1 1 0 . Editio princeps of text 2 3 , widi a pho tograph (pi. 5/2). Lemaire, Andre. Inscriptions hebraiques, vol. I , Les ostraca, Litteratures Anciennes du Proche-Orient, 9. Paris, 1977. Excellent philological and historical treatment of texts 1 - 2 2 . Pardee, Dennis, S. David Sperling, J. David Whitehead, and Paul E. Dion. Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Letters. Society of Biblical Liter ature, Sources for Biblical Study, vol. 1 5 . Chico, Calif., 1982. Com prehensive bibliography on epistolary documents (up to 1978). Rainey, Anson F. "Watching Out for the Signal Fires of Lachish." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 9 (1987): 1 4 9 - 1 5 1 . Torczyner, Harry. Lachish, vol. t, The Lachish Letters. London, 1938. Editio princeps of texts 1 - 1 8 , with a photograph, hand copy, and commentary. Torczyner, Harry. Twdwt Ikys: Mktbym mymy yrmyhw hnby'. Jeru salem, 1940. Hebrew edition of previous entry, with the addition of texts 1 9 - 2 1 , discovered in 1938. Ussishkin, David. "Excavations at Tel Lachish—1973-1977: Prelimi nary Report." Tel Aviv 5 (1978): 1-97. Includes editio princeps of texts 24-30, with hand copies and photographs (pis. 2 6 - 3 2 ) . Ussishkin, David. "Excavations at Tel Lachish, 1 9 7 8 - 1 9 8 3 : Second Preliminary Report." Tel Aviv 1 0 (1983): 9 7 - 1 7 5 . Includes editio princeps of texts 3 1 - 3 2 , witii hand copies and photographs (pis. 4 1 ) . Yadin, Yigael. "The Lachish Letters—Originals or Copies and Drafts?" In Recent Archaeology in the land of Israel, edited by Hershel Shanks, pp. 1 7 9 - 1 8 6 . Washington, D.C., 1984. DENNIS PARDEE
LAGASH. See Girsu and Lagash.
LAGRANGE,
MARIE-JOSEPH
(1855-1938),
founder of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem. Lagrange took a doctorate in law at the Univer sity of Paris before entering the Toulouse province of the Dominican Order in 1879. After seminary studies at the University of Salamanca in Spain ( 1 8 8 0 - 1 8 8 4 ) , he taught there and in Toulouse ( 1 8 8 4 - 1 8 8 8 ) before undertaking graduate studies at the University of Vienna ( 1 8 8 8 - 1 8 9 0 ) . He opened the Ecole Biblique on 1 5 November 1890, and within a decade he had recruited and trained scholars of the caliber of M. A, Jaussen ( 1 8 7 1 - 1 9 6 2 ) , L.-H. Vincent ( 1 8 7 2 1960), A. M. Savignac ( 1 8 7 4 - 1 9 5 1 ) , F.-M. Abel ( 1 8 7 8 x
9 5 3 ) , and P- E. Dhorme ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 6 6 ) , whose original re search quicldy demanded an outiet. In 1892 he founded the Revue Biblique and in 1900 the monograph series Etudes Bibliques, botii of which still flourish. Lagrange carried out pioneering topographical research in Palestine, Sinai, and Petra but is best known as a historian, a biblical commentator, and the author of twenty-nine
LAHAV books. In addition to full-scale commentaries on Judges ( 1 9 0 3 ) 3 Mark ( 1 9 1 1 ) , Romans ( 1 9 1 6 ) , Galatians ( 1 9 1 8 ) , Luke ( 1 9 2 1 ) , Matthew ( 1 9 2 3 ) , and John ( 1 9 2 5 ) , his research produced major works on tire canon and textual criticism of the New Testament, messianism, and intertestamental Ju daism. Many of his 248 articles made highly original con tributions in areas as diverse as the theology of inspiration, patrology, and Palestinian topography. His 1,500 book re views reveal a fruitful and sustained dialogue with authors specializing in all facets of biblical sUtdies. Lagrange's programmatic book La methode historique (1903) won him enemies among Roman Catholic tradition alists during the Modernist crisis, but his loyalty and per severance eventually established the critical method as fun damental to Catholic biblical studies. Before poor health obliged him to leave Jerusalem in 1 9 3 5 , he had initiated a second generation of brilliant scholars, notably, Pierre Benoit ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 8 7 ) , Bermara Couroyer ( 1 9 0 0 - ) , and Roland de Vaux ( 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 7 1 ) . [See also Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Braun, Francois-Marie. L'oeuvre du Pere Lagrange: Etude et bibliogra
phic. Fribourg, 1943. Indispensable for its exhaustive bibliography. Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome, with a contribution by Justin Taylor. The Ecole Biblique and the New Testament: A Century of Scholarship,
1890-
1990, Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus, vol. 1 3 . Fribourg, 1990. See chapter 2 for a critical evaluation of Lagrange's contri bution to New Testament scholarship. Lagrange, Marie-Joseph. Pere Ijxgrange: Personal Reflections and Mem
oirs. Translated by Henry Wansbrough. Foreword by Pierre Benoit. New York, 1985. An approach to an autobiography for the years 1 8 5 5 - 1 9 1 3 , edited by Pierre Benoit as Le Pere Lagrange, au service de la Bible: Souvenirs personnels (Paris, 1967). JEROME MURPHY-O'CONNOR, O.P.
LAHAV (Tel Halif; Ar., Tell Kliuweilifeh), 3-acre mound at Kibbutz Lahav in southern Israel, on tlie southwestern flank of the Judean hills, 8 km (5 mi.) south of Tell Beit Mirsim, 1 5 km (9 mi.) north of Tel Beersheba, and 25 km (15 mi.) west of Tel Arad ( 3 i ° 2 3 ' N , 34°52' E; map refer ence 1 3 7 3 X 0879). T h e site's prominent geomorphological location, at the juncutre between the coastal plain, Judean mountains, and Negev desert, commands the route from the seacoast north of die Beersheba drainage east into the Ju dean hills. Identification. Based on the proximity of Tel Halif to its satellite site, Horvat Rimmon (Ar., Khirbet U m m er-Rammamin), less than 11cm south of it, Felix-Marie Abel, in his 1938 geographical survey, identified Tel Halif with biblical Ziklag, the city that the Philistine overlord Achish ceded to King David (/ Sm. 27:6 ff.). In tlie nineteenth century, Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener identified Horvat Rimmon as the Iron Age Rimmon mentioned in tlie terri torial lists of Judah in Joshua 1 5 : 3 2 and 19:7. Accepting this
325
hypothesis, Abel also identified Halif with Tilla, a Byzan tine-period settlement that Eusebius, in his Onomasticon (99.26), had located near Rimmon, 26 km (16 mi.) south of Beit Jibrin. More recently, noting the absence of Iron Age remains at Horvat Rimmon, Amos Kloner (1980) argued that Halif itself was biblical Rimmon, suggesting that its Byzantine-period satellite later co-opted its name. Nadav Na'aman (1980) has also suggested that Tel Halif is biblical Hormah. [See the biographies ofAbel, Conder, and Kitchener.] Exploration. Archaeological exploration at Tel Halif be gan in the 1950s, following the establishment of Kibbutz Lahav on its eastern slopes. T h e first formal investigations were intermittent salvage operations conducted by the Israel Department of Antiquities. These included investigations of tombs of the Roman/Byzantine settlement at site 66 below the tell on die northwest in 1 9 6 2 (Gophna and Sussman, 1974) and of the Iron Age at site 72 on the slopes facing the tell to die south in 1964 and 1 9 7 2 (Biran and Gophna, 1964; Seger, 1972.) The Lahav Research Project launched an integrated study of Tel Halif and its environs in 1976 that included excava tion, regional survey, and ethnographic study. The project was carried out by a consortium of American scholars and institutions under the direction of Joe D. Seger. Field re search seasons were conducted in 1 9 7 6 , 1977, 1979, and 1980 (phase I); 1983, 1986, 1987, and 1989 (phase II); and in 1 9 9 2 - 1 9 9 3 (phase III.) These explorations recovered ev idence of ancient settlement on the tell itself, on its lower eastern terrace, and at a number of satellite sites. Traces of occupation from the Chalcolithic period (c. 3500 BCE) through die late Byzantine and Islamic periods were found, along with remains of nineteentii- and early twentieth-cen tury CE Arab dwellers. S e t t l e m e n t History. T h e first settlers at the site utilized the lower terrace area just above the valley to the east. Ex cavations at terrace sites 1 0 1 and 301 produced evidence of Chalcolithic (stratum XVII) and Early Bronze I (stratum XVI) occupation; they revealed that Halif steadily developed as a significant village site between 3500 and 2900 BCE. Halif s architecture and small finds from the end of the EB I indicate that it was a regional center in commercial contact with early dynastic Egypt. Halif was not occupied until the end of EB II. Nearby Arad flourished in tlie EB II, but when it declined at the end of the period, die main tell at Halif underwent vigorous new settlement. In field I, on the eastern slopes, the EB III set tlement is marked by four substantial architectural phases (strata XV-XII). The stratum XV city was defended by large fortification walls. Its defenses included a 7.5-meterwide tower fronted by a well-prepared crushed limestone glacis. The final stratum XII EB settlement was destroyed in the twenty-fourth century BCE, possibly in tlie course of late fifth-and sixth-dynasty Egyptian forays in the area. After the eclipse of the stratum XTI city, Halif lay unoc cupied until just before 1 5 0 0 BCE. T h e sttatum XI resettle-
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LAMPS
ment, in tlie late Bronze IA period follows closely on the mid-sixteenth-century destruction of city D at nearby Tell Beit Mirsim. In field I at Halif, four LB phases were iden tified (strata XI-VIII). In strata X and IX, during LB IB and IIA, the presence of a large Egyptian style "residency" building and its associated remains indicates that the settle ment was a trading station along the route into the southern Judean hills. With stratum VIII (LB IIB) all of the field I architecture was converted into a storage complex with numerous stonelined bins. Elements of an adjacent domestic building in area Bio, with three subphases of room resurfacing, testify to the intensity of this thirteenth-century occupation. Sttatum VIII ends in destruction in about 1200 BCE. Modest occupation continues into the Iron I period (stra tum VII), as indicated by several later surfacing phases in the area B i o structure in field I, along with evidence from probes in fields II and III. However, significant rebuilding begins again only during sttatum VI in the Iron II period. This was a period of extensive growth and expansion at Halif, presumably under the aegis of the Judean monarchy. Traces of tire Iron II settlement were found virtually every where at and around the site. These included the extensive site 72 cemetery on the slopes of the hill southwest of die tell. On tlie summit of the tell, large-scale architectural expo sures from tlie Iron II period were made in fields II, III, and IV. The first major Iron II redevelopment (sttatum VTB) took place in the early ninth century BCE. Investigation in fields III and IV indicated that they included casematelike fortification walls associated with intramural domestic build ings and an oudying flagstone paved glacis. T h e stratum VIB city experienced massive destruction at the end of the eighth century BCE, probably by Sennacherib in his cam paign in 7 0 1 . A subsequent squatter phase of reoccupation (stratum VIA) represents a brief resettlement during the first quarter of the seventh century BCE. After this, occupation ceases until tlie Persian era. In stratum V, reoccupation by a regional Persian admin istration is indicated by pits and surface deposits all across the tell. Significant architecture was encountered only in field II, where elements of a large building (the foundations of its walls are a meter wide) and related artifacts' suggest that it was a barrack or otiier military structure. Above tlie Persian remains two subphases of another large building were found. These date to die Hellenistic period (sttatum IV). Initial construction is dated to the mid-fourth century BCE. A second-century Ptolemaic coin sealed in a grave beneath final-phase floors shows continuity of settle ment until at least about 200 BCE. An occupational hiatus in the Early Roman period followed. With the flight of Jews and Christians from Jerusalem dur ing tlie first- and second-century CE wars with Rome, the site recovered dramatically, however. A substantial Roman/
Byzantine village (Tilla) was established on the tell and on the terrace below its northeast slopes (stratum III.) This in cluded the cemetery at site 66 below the tell to the northwest. Tilla is part of an intensive regional pattern of Roman/Byz antine resettlement that includes significant satellite villages at Horvat Rimmon to the south, Khirbet Za'aq to tlie north, and Khirbet Abu Hof to the southwest. Traces of later occupation representing the early Islamic (stratum II) and modern Arabic periods (stratum I) are found mainly on the lower terrace areas. Excavated remains in cave complex A, just below field I, indicate an early Is lamic presence from Mamluk times (c. 700 CE) until well into the period of the Crusades. The more prominent re mains, however, belong to the late nineteenth- and twenti eth-century settlement of Khirbet Khuweilifeh. Excavations and ethnographic research indicate that until about 1940, cave complexes and other structures in tlie Khuweilifeh vil lage were used seasonally by Arab fellahin—sharecroppers, shepherds, craftsmen, and traders—working as clients of be douin who claimed ownership of the region. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Felix-Marie. Geographic de la Palestine. Vol. 2. Paris, 1938. Biran, Avraham, and Ram Gophna. "An Iron Age Burial Cave at Tel Halif." Israel Exploration Journal 20 (1970): 151—169. Borowski, Oded. "The Biblical Identity of Tel Halif." Biblical Archae ologist 5 1 . 1 (1988): 2 1 - 2 7 . Gophna, Ram, and Varda Sussman. "A Jewish Burial Cave of the Ro man Period at die Foot of Tel Halif (in Hebrew). Atiqot 7 (1974): 11-12. Jacobs, P. "Tell Halif: Prosperity in a Late Bronze Age City on the Edge of the Negev." In Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Memory of D. Glenn Rose, edited by Leo G. Perdue et al., 67-86. Atlanta, 1987. Kloner, Amos. "Hurvat Rimmon, 1979." Israel Exploration Journal 30 (1980): 226-228. Na'aman, Nadav. "The Inheritance of tlie Sons of Simeon." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 96 (1980): 1 3 6 - 1 5 2 . Seger, Joe D. "Tell Halif (Lahav)." Israel Exploration Journal 22 (1972): 161. Seger, Joe D„ and Oded Borowski. "The First Two Seasons at Tell Halif." Biblical Archaeologist 40 (1977): 1 5 6 - 1 6 6 . Seger, Joe D.. "Investigations at Tell Halif, Israel, 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 8 0 . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 252 (1983): 1 - 2 3 . Seger, Joe D. "The Location of Biblical Ziklag." Biblical Archaeologist 47.1 (1984): 47-53Seger, Joe D., et al. "The Bronze Age Settlements at Tell Halif: Phase II Excavations, 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 8 7 . " In Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1983-87, edited by Walter E. Rast, 1 - 3 2 . Bulletin of die American Schools of Oriental Research, Supplement no. 26. Baltimore, 1990. JOE D . SEGER
LAMPS. T h e oil lamp was the most common means of lighting in the ancient Near East. It basically consisted of a reservoir, a wick, and fuel; any other features were but var iants or embellishments. The wick was an absorbent cord
LAMPS that could be made from a variety of fibrous plants, of which flax was particularly suitable and widely available. Animal fat was an early fuel, but vegetable oils—particularly those derived from olives, castor beans, and sesame seeds—be came the most widely used fuel, providing a steady flame that was relatively free from smoke and odor. T h e laborintensive agricultural practices of the ancient world dictated frugality with lamp oil in most periods and regions, even though lamps could burn satisfactorily on a grade of oil that was unsuitable for human consumption. As early as the Epipaleolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Near East, concave shells and stone bowls were utilized as lamps. By the fifth and fourth millennia BCE small, hand made ceramic bowls began to serve the same purpose, though as yet there was little attempt to create distinctive lamp forms. T h e wick was usually draped over the rim of the bowl or floated on the fuel. Because oil would, in time, seep wastefully and messily tirrough the ceramic ware, a lamp was sometimes placed in a saucer of water before or during use. In Egypt throughout the dynastic period, cylindrical ves sels of stone or pottery were used as lamps. They had no wick spouts, the flame rising near the center. Herodotus's description of Egyptian lamps, written in about 400 BCE, would have been appropriate to describe traditional Egyp tian lamps at almost any time during the previous two mil lennia or more: they were "small vases filled with salt and olive oil, on which the wick floated" (Hist. 2.62). Even the
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magnificently carved alabaster lamps in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun were essentially only large cups. In Mesopotamia the Sumerians made vessels of metal or carved stone in the form of a conch shell, but it is not certain that these always served as lamps. In the Levant during the Early Bronze Age, ordinary small bowls continued to serve as lamps, as traces of carbon black on their rims indicate, but a potter would sometimes pull out the rim slightly to form a small triangular wick channel. Toward the end of the third millennium the partially no madic people of the southern Levant used a distinctive flatbottomed saucer lamp, handmade or turned on a slow wheel, that had four prominent wick channels spaced at equal intervals around die sides. T h e Middle Bronze Age in the Levant (c. 1 8 0 0 - 1 5 50 BCE), which was closely linked with the Canaanite culture, saw the introduction of a wheelmade saucer lamp that gen erally had a round bottom but in some regions was given a slightly flattened base. Although there were some typological developments over die. successive centuries, this type of lamp continued to be the customary form of Canaanite lamp during the Late Bronze Age ( 1 5 5 0 - 1 2 0 0 BCE). In addition to tiieir primary function in everyday life, lamps were some times placed in the ceremonial foundation deposits of build ings. They also were placed in rock-cut family tombs along with food and objects of daily life, as provisions for the af terlife, and sometimes were left outside the entrances to tombs in memorial rites. Even at this early date—if, indeed.
LAMPS. Lamps of the Bronze-Iron Ages and the Hellenistic period. Top row, 1 to r: MB oil lamp, c. 2000 BCE; two LB oil lamps, c. 1400 BCE; Iron Age I oil lamp, c. 1000 BCE. Bottom row: typical Iron Age II oil lamps, c. 800 BCE;-Hellenistic pinched oil lamps, c. 100 BCE. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
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not before—lamps were recognized not simply as devices for producing light, but as symbols of life. Saucer lamps continued to be used, in modified form, in the Levant throughout the Iron Age (c. 1200-600 BCE) and Persian period (c. 600-300 BCE). The Phoenicians—seafar ing descendants of the Canaanites—carried the saucer lamp, sometimes in a dual-spout form, to Cyprus, North Africa, and elsewhere. Among the varieties of saucer lamp used in central Palestine were a stump-base type in the Iron II pe riod (c. 900-300 BCE) and an extremely shallow version with a large, everted rim that was popular in the Persian period. Occasionally, and perhaps for special purposes, saucer lamps were molded of bronze. Lamps continued to be placed in tombs, sometimes in considerable quantities. Some lamps, having seven wick channels equidistant around the rim and occasionally provided with pedestal bases, may have been used in religious rites. The forms of the lamps in the Temple in Jerusalem were different from those of house hold specimens and may have changed with passing time; the description of Solomon's Temple (1 Kgs. 7:49) alludes to ten gold lampstands, and the priestly account of Israel's ideal cult paraphernalia includes a distinctive seven-branch lampstand (Heb., menorah) of gold (Ex. 2 5 : 3 1 - 4 0 ) . In Mesopotamia diere were, along with varieties of saucer lamps, ceramic specimens harking back to tire archaic shape of the conch shell, and some specimens were made of bronze or iron. By the twelfth century BCE, however, the Assyrians were using a new form of wheelmade lamp that had a glob ular oil reservoir with a flat base and a filling hole at the top, as well as a tubular wick channel that curved upward from the lower part of the reservoir. This lamp form served as the glyphic representation of Nusku, the Assyrian god of fire. Assyrian tombs customarily were provided with a niche in which a lamp was placed. This distinctive lamp continued to be used in Mesopotamia during the Babylonian and Per sian periods, and its form appears to have influenced a Pal estinian closed lamp during the time of Persian domination. As early as the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, Greek traders began to bring black-glazed wheelmade lamps into the Near East. The earliest imports had shallow, open bod ies, but before long a new style of Greek lamp appeared with a globular oil reservoir, a filling hole at the top, and a short wick channel that extended horizontally from the upper part of the body. Although found most often at commercial set tlements on the coast of Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, these sturdily made, handsome lamps sometimes found their way to places farther inland. T h e revolution in material culture that swept through the Near East following the conquests of Alexander die Great in the late fourth century BCE brought the rapid alteration of previous lamp traditions. During the third century most lamps were in the new international Hellenistic style, which still relied on the potter's wheel. In the second century BCE, however, molded lamps consisting of joined upper and
lower halves largely supplanted the wheelmade tradition throughout the Hellenistic world. A much-favored color for these lamps and other molded vessels was gray, with a glossy gray-black finish, but wares and finishes in other colors sometimes were used. Molding made possible a vast variety of shapes and decorative designs that had been impossible to fabricate on a potter's wheel; factories at Ephesus and at other localities that exported to distant regions sometimes restricted tiieir production largely to a single distinctive form for which they became well known. Decorative designs on molded lamps were largely confined to the area around die filling hole and on the top of the nozzle and tended to be floral or geometric. Loop handles were attached to some specimens. Lamps with multiple nozzles were not uncom mon, and elegant bronze lamps were manufactured for spe cial purposes. Typological differences among Hellenistic lamps often provide archaeologists with a useful chronolog ical sequence that contributes to the dating of contempo raneous artifacts. Despite the immense popularity of molded lamps, wheelmade types continued to be made in some regions of the Near East during the Late Hellenistic period. Small saucer lamps in the Iron Age tradition were manufactured in Egypt in the late dynastic period. In Palestine some potters made a distinctive lamp by pinching together two places on the rim of a small, flat-bottomed bowl so as to form a wick hole. In a different but similarly conservative vein, potters at the Jewish sectarian community of Qumran in the Jordan Valley fashioned distinctive closed lamps on a wheel. When the Roman period succeeded the Hellenistic era in die mid-first century BCE, the vast majority of lamps contin ued to be molded; however, a new type of common lamp associated with imperial Rome soon supplanted die Helle nistic forms. The oil reservoir became flattened, with a con cave discus on the top, the filling hole was reduced to a small puncture, the wick channel was shortened, and a design in low relief was added to the circular top surface. N o longer restricted largely to linear patterns, artisans created a variety of striking designs for the discus, among which were scenes of gladiatorial combat, mythological and animal represen tations, and abstract patterns. Such lamps often were pro duced in factories located around the Mediterranean basin tiiat were devoted solely to the manufacture of molded ce ramics; die name of die factory sometimes was embossed on the flat base. In spite of the dominance of the imperial and related lamp types, there was a considerable variety of forms during die early years of the Roman period. Oversized specimens with elaborate decorative handles, sometimes fabricated in bronze or iron, were used in public buildings, cult centers, and the residences of the wealthy, Hellenistic artistic traditions continued to influence botii the form and the dec oration of finer lamps. Sculptural lamps in an international style also were popular, taldng such varied shapes as human
LAMPS
LAMPS.
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Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic lamps from Sepphoris. (Courtesy E. M. Meyers)
figures, animals, gods, boats, gladiator helmets, and shoes. Wheelmade lamps sometimes reappeared, though only in provincial contexts; among these was a type with a wheelmade, knife-pared body and a stubby, scimitar-shaped noz zle that was popular in Palestine and Transjordan in the Herodian era. In Mesopotamia molded lamps with short nozzles were often glazed. By this time crude oil (called naphtha) was being used in parts of Mesopotamia as an alternate fuel for lamps. During the Late Roman period (c. 135—335 CE) lamps frequently degenerated, especially as de signs were repeatedly copied, with an increasing loss of pre cision in form and decoration. Specimens tended to develop regional characteristics, some of which have proved useful to archaeologists as indicators of date and provenience. M e sopotamian lamps sometimes continued to reflect tiieir more remote ancestry in the Nusku lanip. T h e Byzantine period (c. 3 3 5 - 6 3 5 CE) brought new ty pological developments to lamps in the Near East. In many regions the body and nozzle often merged into an almond shape, with a wide filling hole; decorative elements often
were placed, much as in the Hellenistic period, on the shoul der and between the filling hole and the wick hole. The Christian tradition found expression in the frequent display of the cross and other religious motifs and Jewish tradition in the menorah. In Palestine some molded lamps displayed Christian sentiments in Greek, which became increasingly garbled with time. At Carthage, discus lamps in a distinctive red-orange ware retained die small filling hole of Roman lamps so that the discus could be boldly decorated witii re ligious symbols, figures of saints, or pagan motifs. Churches and synagogues were illuminated with large, ornate bronze lamps on tall tripod bases or suspended from chains, and cup-shaped glass lamps came into widespread use in sanc tuaries. By this time a transformation in the function of lamps interred with the dead had undergone a change. There was no longer great concern to provide physical necessities for the dead, but there was much interest in symbolic burial gifts. Epitomizing life, as they so readily did, lamps came to constitute a considerable proportion of funerary gifts. The
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variety of specimens found in some tombs suggests tiiat each mourner may have brought a lamp to be left burning in the tomb. In Egypt frog-shaped lamps may have been manu factured primarily for use in burials, inasmuch as in popular Egyptian tradition the frog was believed to represent im mortality. After the Islamic conquest of the Near East in the seventh century CE, Byzantine lamps gradually evolved into distinc tively Islamic types; however, the almond shape was long retained, and even the simple saucer shape reappeared in the tenth and eleventh centuries in Egypt and the Levant. During the caliphates of Cairo and Baghdad, new forms emerged; among the many diverse medieval types were green-glazed pedestal lamps and slipper-shaped lamps dec orated with blue underglaze. It is only in recent centuries that oil lamps have been superseded by artificial illumina tion. BIBLIOGRAPHY An exhaustive bibliography of studies of lamps in tire ancient Near East would include several hundred titles, but no comprehensive over view of the technology and typological history of lamps yet exists for the entire region. Academic interest has chiefly been on lamps of the Greco-Roman and Byzantine periods and their great variety. Geo graphically, die most extensive research has dealt with the lamps of Palestine, which have been treated in numerous excavation reports, catalogs of museum collections, and scholarly articles. Among the latter are the author's series of articles on "The Household Lamps of Pales tine" (BA27 [1964]: 1 - 3 1 , 1 0 1 - 1 2 4 ; 29 [1966]: 2-27); unlike most lamp studies, which are limited to discussions of lamp typology, chronology, and motifs, tiiese articles discuss the archaeological evidence in light of historical texts, technology, and cultural practices. The lamps of other regions of the ancient Near East have been much less adequately pub lished and studied; for some regions, such as Arabia, there is scarcely any literature. An unusually diverse range of Near Eastern lamp types will be found in Renate Rosenthal and Renee Sivan's Ancient Lamps in the Schloessinger Collection, Qedem, vol. 8 (Jerusalem, 1978). Some use ful information about the technology of ancient lamps, as well as brief comments about some major lamp types from Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia, will be found in A History of Technology, vol. 1 , From Earliest Times to the Fall of Ancient Empires, edited by Charles Singer et al., pp. 235-237 (London, 1954). An extensive bibliography pertaining to lamps in the ancient Near East can be found in Les lampes de lerre cuke en Mediterranee des origines a Justinien, edited by Therese Oziol and Rene Rebuffat, Travaux de la Maison de l'Orient, no. 1 3 (Lyon, 1987). ROBERT HOUSTON SMITH
LAPITHOS, important village on the north coast of Cy prus approximately 1 4 km (8.5 mi.) west of the town of Kyrenia and 70 km (43.5 mi.) from die south coast of Tur key (35°22' N , 33°oo' E). Lapithos falls within the Kyrenia district of the Republic of Cyprus, but came under Turkish occupation during the summer of 1974 and is currently (1995) part of die self-proclaimed and internationally un recognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Its his torically predominant ethnic-Greek population has now
been replaced by Turkish Cypriot and mainland Turkish settlers. The village is built on terraces on the lower northern slopes of the Kyrenia mountain range, above the fertile coastal plain, in an area well watered by perennial springs and abundant rainfall. Lapithos has long been noted for its citrus groves and other thriving agriculture. It has also been a traditional center for such crafts as woodcarving, pottery, and embroidery. Although Lapithos lacks a large natural harbor, its shoreline is protected from the prevailing north easterly winds and would have been adequate for ancient shipping. The modern village was founded in 654 CE by settlers from the nearby coastal town of Lambousa, who sought protec tion from Arab raids. However, according to tradition, Lapithos was founded by Laconians in die aftermath of the Trojan War. Archaeology suggests that the vicinity was the center of extensive occupation at least since the Chalcolithic period (c. 3800 BCE). The area has been the focus of considerable archaeolog ical investigation, beginning with the explorations of John L. Myres in 1 9 1 3 and Menelaos Markides in 1 9 1 7 on behalf of the Cyprus Museum. In 1927 the Swedish Cyprus Expe dition, under the direction of Einar Gjerstad, conducted ex tensive excavations in the area, which were fully published in volume 1 of The Swedish Cyprus Expedition (1934) and formed the basis for a substantial portion of the syntheses in volume 4 of the same work ( 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 7 2 ) . This activity was followed in 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 2 by an expedition from the Uni versity Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, which was directed by B. H. Hill. T h e results are still largely un published, except for the study of one tomb. Little evidence for settlements has been recovered as excavations to date have concentrated on cemeteries. Lapithos demonstrates the characteristic Cypriot settle ment pattern in which successive sites move from place to place within a limited region, presumably all utilizing com mon resources, such as a water source. The earliest-known habitation is the Chalcolitiiic settlement at the locality Alonia ton Plakon, excavated by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. This occupation is followed after an apparent hiatus by the extensive Early-Middle Bronze Age (c. 2 1 0 0 - 1 6 0 0 BCE) ne cropolis near the coast at Vrysi tou Barba, explored by Myres, Markides, the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, and the University Museum. Here chamber tombs contained rich offerings of pottery and metal, including the earliest import to Cyprus from the Aegean, a Middle Minoan I jar. Following another apparent hiatus, Late Cypriot (c. 1 3 0 0 - 1 0 5 0 ) tombs of two different types were constructed higher up the slopes, at Ayia Anastasia and Kylistra. These cemeteries were followed by new ones at Kastros, Kato Kastros, Plakes, and near the sea, dating from the early Cypro-Geometric to the beginning of Cypro-Archaic (c. 1 0 5 0 - 7 0 0 ) , another exceptionally rich phase. Class-
LARS A ical (fifth-fourth century) and Roman-period remains have also been found in the area. [See also the biographies of Gjerstad and Myres.]
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c
[See also Bab edh-Dhra ; Daliyeh, Wadi ed-; Ful, Tell el-; 'Iraq el-Amir; Rumeith, Tell er-; and Ta'anach.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY Adelman, Charles M. Cypro-Geometric Pottery: Refinements in Classi fication. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 47. Goteborg, 1976. See chapter 2, "Lapithos." Gjerstad, Einar Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus. Uppsala, 1926. See pages 8, 58-87. Gjerstad, Einar, et al. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus, 1927-1931. 4 vols. Stockholm, 1 9 3 4 1972. Grace, Virginia R. "A Cypriote Tomb and Minoan Evidence for Its Date." American Journal of Archaeology 44 (1940): 1 0 - 5 2 . Herscher, Ellen. "New Light from Lapithos." In The Archaeology of Cyprus: Recent Developments, edited by Noel Robertson, pp. 39-60. Park Ridge, N.J., 1975. ELLEN HERSCHER
LAPP, PAUL WILBERT
( 1 9 3 0 - 1 9 7 0 ) , archaeologist and a director and professor of archaeology at the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Jerusalem ( 1 9 6 0 1968). Lapp died in an accident on Cyprus, so that his ar chaeological career spanned fewer dian thirteen years. His major publication, Palestinian Ceramic Chronology, 200 B.C.-A.D. 70 ( 1 9 6 1 ) , grew out of his early field experience at Shechem/Balatah ( 1 9 5 7 , i960) and Betii-Zur ( 1 9 5 7 ) and
his Harvard T h . D . dissertation. It was the first systematic study of Late Hellenistic and Early Roman pottery and is still die basic work for that period. Developing the field methodology and pottery analysis he studied under William Foxwell Albright at Johns Hopkins University and G. E. Wright at Harvard University, and in close consultation with Kathleen M . Kenyon of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and Roland de Vaux of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, Lapp at tempted to combine tire best approaches to field archaeology at that time. At ASOR he concentrated on small excavations to give short-term residents at tire institute a variety of field experienes: at 'Iraq el-Amir ( 1 9 6 1 , 1962), Wadi ed-Daliyeh (1963, 1964), Dhahr Mirzbaneh ( 1 9 6 3 ) , Tell el~Ful (1964), Tell er-Rumeith (1962, 1967), and Bab edh-Dhra' (1965, 1967). He directed more extensive excavations at Ta'anach (1963, 1966, 1968), in association with the Concordia schools of the Missouri-Synod Lutherans. Lapp's prompt publication of preliminary reports from his 'Iraq el-Amir, Bab edh-Dhra', and Ta'anach excavations set a standard. T h e final publication of Dhahr Mirzbaneh appeared in 1966; publication of Wadi ed-Daliyeh, and Tell el-Ful, portions of the 'Iraq el-Amir excavations, and his Bab edh-Dhra' excavations were completed by Nancy L. Lapp and other of his colleagues. In addition to excavation re ports, Lapp published several synthetic studies.
Harvard Theological Review 64.2-3 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : Studies in Memory of Paid Lapp. Articles by an international group of biblical scholars and ar chaeologists, vvidr a Memorial Minute and a bibliography of Lapp's works. Lapp, Nancy L., ed. The Third Campaign at Tell el-Ful: The Excavations of 1964. Cambridge, Mass., 1981. Lapp, Nancy L., et al. The Excavations at Araq el-Amir. Winona Lake, Ind,, 1983. Lapp, Nancy L. "Rumeith," In Archaeology ofJordan, vol. 2, Field Re ports, edited by Denys Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 494-497. Louvain, 1989. Lapp, Paul W. Palestinian Ceramic Chronology, 200 B.C.-A.D. 70. New Haven, 1961. Lapp, Paul W. "Tell er-Rumeith." Revue Biblique 70 (1963): 4 0 6 - 4 1 1 ; 75 (1968): 98-105. Lapp, Paul W. Biblical Archaeology and History. New York, 1969. Oberlin College Haskell Lectures, 1966. Lapp, Paul W. The Dhahr Mirzbaneh Tombs: Three Intermediate Bronze Age Cemeteries in Jordan. New Haven, 1966. Lapp, Paul W„ and Nancy L. Lapp, eds. Discoveries in the Wadi" edDaliyeh. Cambridge, Mass., 1974. Lapp, Paul W. The Tale of the Tell, Edited by Nancy W. Lapp. Pitts burgh, 1975. Introductory chapters on archaeological method and on each of the excavations Lapp directed, reprinted from semipopular sources. Contains a complete bibliography of his works. Perspective (Pittsburgh) 1 2 . 1 - 2 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : Essays in Memory of Paul W. Lapp. Includes a bibliography. Rast, Walter E. Taanach I: Studies in the Iron Age Pottery. Cambridge, Mass., 1978. Schaub, R. Thomas, and Walter E. Rast. Bab edh-Dhra': Excavations in the Cemetery Directed by Paul W. I-app, 1965-67. Winona Lake, Ind., 1989. NANCY L. LAPP
LARSA (modern Tell Senkereh), the royal capital of an important realm in southern Mesopotamia at die beginning of tlie second millennium BCE, located about 20 km ( 1 2 mi.) from ancient Uruk and 100 km (62 mi.) from the modern city of Nasiriyyah. T h e site was noticed in the mid-nineteenth century by travelers exploring this desert region, specifically by William K. Loftus, who carried out several soundings for the Assyr ian Excavation Fund in 1 8 5 3 - 1 8 5 4 that confirmed its iden tity with Larsa. In 1903 Walter Andrae, the excavator of Assur, located tlie outlines of walls that demonstrated the existence of a great monument at the heart of the city. [See the biography of Andrae.] T h e arrival on the antiquities mar ket of numerous beautiful objects, sometimes inscribed, and cuneiform tablets drew the attention of specialists to Senk ereh, which had been systematically plundered. Andre Par rot, under auspices of the National Museums of France, conducted the first campaign to Senkereh in 1933. [See the biography of Parrot.] Iraq's denunciation of the partition re gime (under which half the objects found at a site stayed in
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Iraq and the other half went to the institution that financed the mission) and the discovery of Mari that served to detain Parrot in Syria delayed further excavation until 1967, during which Parrot conducted two campaigns aimed at complet ing a large sounding at tire center of the tell. In 1969 and 1970, under the direction of Jean-Claude Margueron, the excavations reached the palace of Nur-Adad and the temple E.babbar, dedicated to the sun god Shamash (Utu in Su merian). In 1976, Jean-Louis Huot assumed responsibility for the excavations and, until the Gulf War of 1 9 9 1 , con ducted eight campaigns at the site, attending in particular to the religious complex formed by the E.babbar and the zig gurat that occupied the center of the city. [See Ziggurat.] The area of the ruins extends for 2 km north-south and 1.8 km west-east; it reaches an elevation of 22 m. An oval, its perimeter is generally higher titan its center, which is oc cupied by a relatively level plateau; the accumulation of the ruins of the various levels of the E.babbar (see below) forms its highest point. The city's history is as yet imperfectly known. A number of indices (e.g., the high frequency of fragments of terra cotta sickles) suggest that the foundation reaches back to the Ubaid period, although as yet no phase earlier than the third millennium has been found in situ. [See Ubaid.] A large building from the Early Dynastic period was located, but its excavation is as yet incomplete; it attests simply to a certain importance of the city in that period. The documentation becomes much richer by the beginning of the second mil lennium BCE. The texts of that period, sometimes found in excavation, more often coming from the antiquities trade, reveal the city in the period of die Amorite dynasties, when Larsa contended with other Sumero-Babylonian cities, such as Isin, to assume the heritage of the third dynasty of Ur and rebuild the empire. [See Isin; Ur.] Larsa played an im portant role in the nineteenth century BCE and at the begin ning of the eighteenth, but it was finally Hammurabi who unified Mesopotamia to the advantage of Babylon. [See Bab ylon.] Larsa survived its imperial dream and remained a place dominated by its sanctuary. Its economic activity was periodically more or less important until the Parthian period, tire last represented at the site. As yet, little is known of the city, but aerial photographs nevertheless permit some understanding of its plan. Exca vations have concentrated on its religious core, dominated by tlie E.babbar and the ziggurat. After conquering the city, Hammurabi endowed it with a monumental complex more than 300 m long that consisted of a linear succession of buildings and great courts. The architecture was orna mented witii a series of semiengaged spiral columns that connects witii the axis of the ziggurat (see figure 1 ) , itself provided with a court oriented to the northeast. Chapels and workshops lined the courts. The entire grandiose complex was constructed symmetrically on a southwest-northeast axis. The sanctuary (see figure 2) was restored several times
Figure 1. Decorative semi-engaged spiral columns. North wall, grand court of the E.babbar. (Courtesy J.-C. Margueron) LARSA.
and survived until the eleventh century BCE. In the NeoBabylonian period, a more restrained structure stood on die site of the earlier cella. Occupation is attested again in the Seleuco-Parthian period. T h e palace of Nur-Adad ( 1 8 6 5 - 1 8 5 0 BCE) presents die peculiarity of never having been occupied; it is probable that it remained incomplete as a result of the difficulties that king encountered at the end of his reign. Even incomplete, the building embodies the administrative organization of the pe riod, when the system of the palatial economy prevailed in a pure state: the architectural thought of die Amorite period,
LARSA. Figure 2. Stairway descending into the sanctuary of the tem ple of the E.babbar. (Courtesy J.-C. Margueron)
LATIN in the form of the palace. [See Palace.] The complex com posed of the administrative quarters and die throne room is the best expression of what was customary in this sphere. Several fine houses from the Old Babylonian period were also uncovered. BIBLIOGRAPHY Huot, Jean-Louis, ed. Larsa (8eine et geme campagnes, 19-18 el 1981) et Oueili (2eme et 3eme campagnes, 19/8 et 1981): Rapport preliminaire. Paris, 1983. Huot, Jean-Louis, ed. Larsa (toe campagne, 1983) et Oueili (4c campagne, 1983): Rapport preliminaire. Paris, 1987. Huot, Jean-Louis, ed. Larsa, travaux de 1985. Paris, 1989. Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Larsa, rapport preliminaire sur la quatrieme campagne." Syria 47 (1970): 2 6 1 - 2 7 7 . Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Larsa, rapport preliminaire sur la cinquieme campagne." Syria 48 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 2 7 1 - 2 8 7 . Margueron, Jean-Claude, with Jean-Louis Huot. "Larsa." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archdologie, vol. 6, pp. 5 0 0 506. Berlin and New York, 1984. JEAN-CLAUDE MARGUERON Translated from French by Nancy W. Leinwand
LATAMNE, open-air Paleolithic site located on a slope above die middle reaches of the Orontes River, 23 km ( 1 4 mi.) northwest of die town of Hama, in Syria ( 3 5 ° i 4 ' N , 36°36'32" E). Latamne is a rare example of an undisturbed camp of the Middle Acheulean culture, one of a very few known anywhere in the world. It has yielded important ev idence concerning human activities during the Middle Pleis tocene epoch. Willem J. van Liere, a Dutch geomorphologist, found handaxes and associated bones of Middle Pleistocene ani mals in deposits exposed by quarrying at Latamne in i960. A Dutch archaeologist, Pieter J. Modderman, of the Uni versity of Groningen, conducted additional investigations of the locality in 1961 and 1962; some of the artifacts he re covered were in such good condition they could only have come from an intact site. Accordingly, the Paleolithic ar chaeologist J. Desmond Clark of the University of California at Berkeley was invited to excavate the site in 1964 and 1965. Excavation revealed that the Acheulean campsite had once been situated on a sandy bank beside a steeam (Clark, 1968). Soon after it was abandoned, however, it was covered by silt, which preserved its cultural remains in situ. At the time of excavation the site consisted of a single layer of debris 1 2 X 19 m in extent covered by a thin deposit of sand. The most distinctive remains were numerous lime stone blocks grouped in clusters and rows and concentrated mainly in the southwestern part of the site. Other blocks were scattered over the rest of the habitation area. In the center of the camp and toward the northeast were concen trations of flint artifacts and debris. The stone blocks and artifacts had all been brought to the site by its inhabitants from sources nearby. Clark believes that- the blocks were
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used as weights to anchor a shelter made of perishable ma terials (1967). T h e artifacts were unusually varied for a site of such an tiquity. They comprised large flint cutting tools, notably handaxes, a number of heavy-duty tools, particularly chop pers and scrapers, and some smaller scrapers. Some of them were manufactured at the site while others were brought there in a finished state. Several of the limestone blocks were used as anvils to make flint tools. The evidence suggests that the site was used as a camp by a group of Acheulean people for one or two seasons about 500,000 years ago. A few bones and animal teeth were found on the site, but considerably more were found in contemporary geologic de posits in the vicinity. T h e main species were large and me dium-sized animals: elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, large deer, gazelle, bison, antelopes, camels, and horses. Some of these animals would have been hunted by the in habitants of the Latamne campsite. Among the predators were hyenas and jackals. T h e environment in which tiiese creatures lived would have consisted of open woodland and grasslands, with gallery forest, that is, a narrow band of trees, fringing the Orontes River and its tributary streams. BIBLIOGRAPHY Clark, J. D. "The Middle Acheulian Occupation Site at Latamne, Northern Syria (First Paper)." Quaternaria 9 (1967): 1-68. Com prehensive account of the preliminary investigations of the Latamne locality, of the first season of excavations at the campsite, and a sum mary of its place in world prehistory. Clark, J. D. "The Middle Acheulian Occupation Site at Latamne, Northern Syria (Second Paper), Further Excavations, 1965: General Results, Definition, and Interpretation." Quaternaria 10 (1968): 1 60. Full description of the second season of excavations with an in terpretation of the site's function. A. M. T. MOORE
LATIN. An inflectional language, Latin averages three morphemes per word. As in Spanish and Russian, the Latin vowel system has a two-dimensional structure involving three heights with the added contrast of front-back or un rounded bottom: high (i, it), mid (e, 0 ) , low (12), front un rounded (i, e), back rounded (u, 0). Latin has fifteen to eighteen consonantal phonemes in na tive words, a phoneme being a significantly different and distinct sound. Latin orthography did not distinguish be tween short and long vowels (which are phonemically dis tinct) nor between consonantal and vocalic i and u. The Latin phonemic system underwent a number of changes. Early Latin had from twenty-seven to thirty-one phonemes (depending on the distinction between long and short vow els), and by the mid-first century BCE, the phonemic inven tory was from thirty-one to thirty-six phonemes. Verbs have two voices, active and passive. A verbal form is a "sentence/word," that is, a word that contains the nu-
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clear construction of the favorite sentence-type of the lan guage, in this case a predicate constitute. Nouns and adjec tives share the inflectional category of number and case; nouns have a gender, and adjectives are inflected for gender. The eight cases of Indo-European were reduced to seven in Latin: nominative, accusative, vocative, genitive, dative, ab lative, locative. Although archaic Latin had a stress accent falling on the first syllable of a word, classical Latin developed a system of accentuation based in part on Greek models. Words of two syllables are accented on the first syllable. Words of more than two syllables are governed by the "penultimate rule." They are accented on tire penult (next to the last syl lable) if long (e.g., a-mT'-cus, "friend"; con-fi'-ci-o, "inven tion") or on the antepenult (syllable before the penultimate) if the penult is short (e.g., do '-mi-nus, "lord"; a '-lac-ris, "eager"). History of Latin. T h e term Latin was derived from a group of related tribes called Latini, who settled in the region of Latium, where Rome eventually came to occupy a sig nificant position. The Latini originated in central Europe and settled in Latium by the tenth century BCE. Latin be longs to the Italic group of the Indo-European family of languages, and is divided into two groups, Oscan-Umbrian and Latin-Faliscan. Oscan was the standardized common language of central Italy until the area was subjugated by the Romans. Originally tire language of Latium and the city of Rome, Latin eventually displaced the other Italic languages as a result of tire increasing political and military power which Rome exerted first in central Italy, then throughout tire Italian peninsula, then in the western Mediterranean and finally throughout the ancient world. By tire end of the Republic ( 3 1 BCE), Greeks dominated Roman education (grammar, rhetoric, philosophy); Greek literature, mythology, and history were basic to Roman ed ucation; and Greek was the first language of Roman edu cation. By the first century BCE, young male Roman aristo crats were regularly educated in Greece. Nonetheless, educated Romans were privately bilingual but never boasted publicly of their appreciation of Greek culture or fluency in Greek. By the first century CE, only a small percentage of the population of the residents of Rome were of Roman or Italian ancestry, perhaps 10 percent. Within Rome itself var ious national groups often maintained linguistic and cultural traditions; tlie extensive Jewish community, for example, which numbered from thirty thousand to fifty thousand, was a Greek-speaking community, doubtless because of the hellenization of Palestine. Of the 534 Jewish catacomb inscrip tions, 76 percent are in Greek, 23 percent are in Latin, and one is in Aramaic. Roman emperors were generally bilin gual. Marcus Aurelius, for example, chose to write his Med itations in Greek. By the fourth century CE, however, most educated Romans in tire west were monolingual and under stood little or no Greek. T h e formal end of classical Latin
may be dated to 8 1 3 , when Charlemagne officially recog nized the colloquial forms of Latin as independent Romance languages. Writing Systems. The Latin alphabet of twenty-one let ters was ultimately derived from the Greek alphabet of twenty-six letters. T h e Greeks in Italy did not use a single, uniform alphabet, but five different alphabets. Of these, the Ionic alphabet of Tarentum was used in some south Oscan inscriptions, and an alphabet from central Greece was the basis for the primitive Etruscan, Oscian, and Umbrian al phabets, as well as those of Rome and Latium. T h e Latin system, derived from the early twenty-six-letter Etruscan al phabet, originally consisted of twenty letters; T h e capital letters C and G were both represented by the C. C as an initial capital letter served for both letters in abbreviations for the praenomina (forenames) Gaius (C.) and Gnaeus (Cn.), and z and y were added as phonemes in transliterated Greek words. Later the Latin alphabet was increased to twenty-one letters with the distinction between c and g. T h e Roman alphabet lacked j (the consonantal version of i), u (the vocal version of v), and w. During the first century CE, emperor Claudius attempted to add three new letters to the Latin alphabet, but for the most part these innovations did not long survive his decease (Quintilian, 1.7.26; Suetonius, Claudius, 4 1 . 3 ; Tacitus, Annals, 2 . 1 3 - 1 4 ) . Latin in the West. Although Rome does not appear to have had a formal language policy, Latin was the primary language of Rome (a polyglot city with a substantial Greek population), of all colonies founded by Rome (the first Ro man colony outside Italy was Narbo in Gaul, founded in 1 1 8 BCE), and of the Roman army and Roman provincial civilian administrations. Italy had previously been multilin gual, but Latin increasingly predominated until by the first century BCE it was tlie dominant language of the peninsula. In the western empire outside Italy and the Roman colonies, the army was one of the main vehicles for the spread of Latin, both through contact with the local population and die learning of Latin by non-Latin speaking auxiliaries. In Italy there were two different kinds of Latin, tlie formal, polished, correct Latin spoken by the educated and surviv ing in public speeches and most of extant Latin literature, and common colloquial Latin. Plautus is a major exception. There were striking phonological differences between re gional varieties of Latin. (Cicero, Brutus, 1 7 1 - 1 7 2 ; Jerome, Epistles, 107.9; see Omeltchenko, 1977; Whatmough, 1970), that is, there were a number of vulgar types of Latins. Though some of these vulgar forms developed into the Ro mance languages, it is hardly appropriate to speak of Latin dialects during the earlier period. In many of the provinces in which Latin was tlie language of the army, administration, and culture, there were also na tive tongues which inevitably exerted influence on Latin phonology (Historia Augusta Septimus Severus, 19.9). In North Africa, the indigenous language was Libyan (Berber,
LATIN from the Greek term barbaroi, "foreign"). From the eighth century it was the language St. Augustine called the lingua Punica, that is, a Semitic language based on Phoenician. Lib yan was the first language of both tire emperor Septimus Severus ( 1 4 5 - 2 1 1 CE) and Augustine (354-430 CE). Al though there are some inscriptions in Libyan, many in Pu nic, and some bilinguals in Punic-Latin and Libyan-Latin, the more than thirty thousand Latin inscriptions from North Africa are most numerous. T h e relationship between Rome and the many Greek col onies in the western Mediterranean was complex. Many Greek settlements in Magna Grecia lost their Greek popu lation and language through tire conquests of the Samnites. After its capitulation to Rome in the Pyrrhic War in 272 BCE, Tarentum and many other cities were either destroyed or depopulated during the remainder of die Republican period until the inauguration (in 27 BCE and following) of Augus tus's policy of the romanization of Italy obliterated the re maining pockets of Greek culture and language. Neapolis was die last city in the western Mediterranean to abandon Greek as an official language, and public and private in scriptions were written in Greek until the late first century CE, perhaps because Roman aristocrats found it convenient to have a Greek city near Rome. During the Second Punic War ( 2 1 8 - 2 0 1 ) , Sicily was captured and plundered by the Romans and later ( 1 3 2 BCE) became the first Roman prov ince. Subsequently, Augustus founded six colonies in Sicily in which Latin was die first language. This development was accompanied by a conscious program of Romanization which resulted in the gradual elimination of the Greek lan guage during the first few centuries CE. Before Augustus, most public inscriptions and legends on coins were in Greek, thereafter, Latin was used almost exclusively. The replace ment of Greek by Latin in old Greek colonies occurred pri marily in the Augustan age. Latin in t h e East. Roman immigration to the East, which was under Greek control, began during tire third century BCE and peaked during the second century. Although Mac edonia, which was established in the second century ( 1 4 8 ) was the first Roman eastern province, official Roman colo nization in the Greek East did not begin until the mid-first century. By 1 4 CE there were about thirty colonies in the Greek East: four in Greece, fifteen in Asia Minor, six in Macedo nia, one in Crete, and two in Syria. In addition by the midfirst century CE there were sixteen Roman provinces in the East: four in Greece (Achaea, Epirus, Macedonia, Thracia), six in Asia Minor (Asia, Bithnyia and Pontus, Galatia, Lycia and Pamphylia, Cilicia, Cappodocia), and four in Syria (Syria, Iudaea Qudea], Mesopotamia, Arabia), as well as Egypt and Crete and Cyrenaica (the latter two forming one province). Latin was the first language of all Roman colonies. Al though these settlements were eventually hellenized, the col
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onists formed a socially separate, privileged group, and the native populations had an inferior social status, lacking Ro man citizenship. Botir public and private inscriptions as well as legends on coins were exclusively Latin in such colonies. Syria-Palestine. Following the Roman conquest of Pal estine in 63 BCE, Latin was used in Palestine primarily by the Romans for whom it was the language of the army as well as of the civilian administration. Inscriptional evidence for Latin includes dedications on aqueducts and buildings, fu nerary texts, milestones on Roman roads, and large numbers of bricks and tiles with stamp impressions of abbreviations for the Tenth Legion, Fretensis. T h e excavation of Caesarea Maritima has uncovered many Latin inscriptions, including a dedicatory slab erected by Pontius Pilate (prefect of Judea around 2 6 - 3 6 CE) for a cult center for Tiberius and a in scription of the Tenth Legion, which repaired the high-level aqueduct during the time of Hadrian. The multilingual char acter of Jerusalem is attested by the signs posted within the Temple in Greek and Latin forbidding foreigners to enter the holy place. Two fragmentary Greek copies of this inscription have been found (Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 8.169; 20.477). The inscription on die cross of Jesus was written in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek (Jn. 19:20). Egypt. T h e Romans generally regarded Egyptians with contempt, and often made no distinction between native Egyptians and Egyptian Greeks. Egypt had three Greek cit ies, Naukratis and Alexandria in Lower Egypt and Ptolemais in Upper Egypt. Alexandria was populated primarily by Greeks and Jews who engaged in intermittent conflict. The Greek language predominated in the administration of Ro man Egypt. The papyri containing imperial constitutions, edicts, rescripts (orders) and decrees are 75 percent Greek and 25 percent Latin. Generally, imperial rescripts sent to private individuals, including Romans, as well as those for public promulgation in Egypt, are written in Greek, and communications and mandates addressed to Roman offi cials and instructions to the army are written in Latin. Edicts of the Roman prefect of Egypt and other Roman magistrates in Egypt are almost exclusively promulgated in Greek. Egyptian provincials who were not Roman citizens always used Greek in legal documents. Roman citizens necessarily used Latin for many types of legal documents (e.g., birth certificates, marriage contracts, petitions to the prefect, and wills). G e n r e a n d Text. Latin literature is customarily divided into three major periods: ( 1 ) tire formative period, that is, Livius Andonicus to Cicero (c. 240-80 BCE); (2) the classical period or Golden Age, to the death of Augustus (c. 80 B C E 1 4 CE); (3) the Silver Age, to the death of Apuleius ( 1 4 - 1 8 0 CE). (Gian Biagio Conte's Latin Literature [1994] contains a masterful survey.) Data for the formative period of Latin literature are lim ited because of the few texts that antedate the third century
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BCE. In the view of both ancient and modern scholars, Latin literature began during the late third century with Livius Andronicus, a Greek from Tarentum who became a school teacher in Rome and translated the Odyssey into Latin for a school text. Gnaeus Naevius, a Greek from Sardinia, was trilingual (Greek, Oscan, Latin), and wrote an epic on tire first Punic war between Carthage and Rome in Latin. An other Greek, Quintus Ennius of Rudiae near Tarentum, adapted Greek metrical form to the Latin language. Latin prose has its beginning with Ennius's translation of Euhemerus preserved by the Christian rhetorician Lactantius. There was hardly a single author, of Latin prose or poetry who actually came from the city of Rome. That means that no Latin literature is completely native. The earliest exten sive body of literature that has survived, however, consists of die twenty-one plays of T . Maccius Plautus (late thirdearly second centuries), from Umbria, who became Rome's greatest dramatist. Terence (c. 1 9 5 - 1 5 9 ) , a native of North Africa wrote comedies based closely on Greek originals, par ticularly Menander. Latin prose began with M. Porcius Cato (234-149 BCE), who wrote orations and essays. Only his De agricultura has survived. Prose Roman history, which had its beginnings in the Annates or yearly records compiled by the current pontifex maximus (the highest priestly office in Rome), was written in Greek beginning in the late third cen tury BCE by Q. Fabius Pictor and his successors. The classical period or Golden Age of Latin literature be gan with the admired didactic poem of Lucretius (94-55 BCE), De rerum nalura, which focused on Epicurean physics. The most innovative author of the period, however, was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), a politician and orator whose prose compositions, consisting primarily of primarily speeches, letters, and philosophical essays, became literary and rhetorical models for later writers. Other influential writers of this period include Cicero's contemporaries, M. Terentius Varro ( 1 1 6 - 2 7 ) , who wrote the now-lost Roman Antiquities and his single extant work, De re rustica (On Ag riculture); Julius Caesar (100-44), h ° wrote De bello Gal ileo (On the Gallic War), and De bello civili (On the Civil Wars) in crisp, unadorned prose; and Sallust (86-35), who also wrote historical works. During the empire period (31 BCE-476 CE), tire poet of greatest stature was Vergil ( 7 0 - 1 9 BCE) whose most important work was the epic Aeneid, a modernized Iliad and Odyssey that promulgated the ideals of the Augustan principate. Other eminent Latin poets in clude Horace (65-8 BCE), Propertius (late first century), and Ovid (43 B C E - 1 7 CE), who wrote in elegaic meter. Livy (59 B C E - 1 7 CE) wrote a history of Rome in 142 volumes, of which thirty-five have survived. During the early Imperial period the Latin literature pro duced during the classical period became models, but to be imitated and reacted against, during die following centuries. After varying degrees of intellectual and literary repression following the death of Augustus in 1 4 CE, Latin literature w
again exhibited creativity during the Silver Age, that is, from the end of die first to the middle of the second century CE. Authors of the Silver Age by turns imitated or reacted against the works of die Golden Age. Some of the more important literary figures are Seneca (c. 4 BCE-65 CE), an important writer of literary tragedies, philosophical essays, and letters, and his nephew Lucan (39-65 CE), who wrote Pharsalia; both were forced by the emperor Nero to commit suicide. Pliny the Elder (c. 2 3 - 7 9 ) J Pliny the Younger (c. 6 1 - 1 1 2 ) ; and Tacitus (born c. 56), who wrote Germania, Agricola, Histories, and Annals. T h e accomplished comic novelist Apuleius (c. 1 2 3 - 1 8 0 CE) wrote the Golden Ass. Inscriptions. T h e earliest surviving Latin inscriptions date to the sixth century BCE. They often resemble Greek letter forms and are sometimes written in the so-called boustrophedon ("turning like oxen when plowing") style in which alternate lines written from left to right then right to left. An example is perhaps the earliest Roman inscription from possibly the sixth century BCE (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. 1, pt. 2, no. 1 ) . While an early Latin inscrip tion from Praeneste from the seventh century survives (Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, no. 8 5 6 1 ) , its authenticity is now doubtful (Gordon, 1983, p. 75L). The Romans began to inscribe texts in the sixth century BCE, while most of the literary and inscriptional evidence for Latin begins to ac cumulate toward the end of the third century BCE. In addi tion to stone, bronze was commonly used, particularly for legal texts (Pliny, Nat. Hist., 16.237; 34.99). More perishable wooden boards were frequently used for public notices, such as Caesar's famous short text displayed at his triumph in 47 BCE: VENI VIDI VICI "I came, I saw, I conquered" (Sue tonius, Caesar, 37.2). Vespasian tried to replace the more than three thousand bronze tablets that were destroyed by a fire on the Capitoline in Rome in 69 CE (Suetonius, Ves pasian, 8.5). C E
More than three hundred thousand Roman inscriptions are known, mostly carved in capital letters, which reached their fullest development toward the end of the first century CE. The most extensive collection of Latin inscriptions is the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1 8 6 2 - ) , which con sists of eighteen volumes to date, primarily arranged geo graphically. Hermann Dessau edited a selection of nine thousand texts published as Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Berlin, 1 8 9 2 - 1 9 1 6 ) . In the western Mediterranean, the lan guage of these inscriptions was primarily Latin, and in prov inces east and south of the Adriatic, Greek—the lingua franca of the Levant—predominated. T h e evidence for the use of Oscan is limited to about two hundred inscriptions from the last two centuries BCE. Knowledge of Umbrian is largely restricted to the Iguvine tablets from the first century BCE. The main categories of inscriptions are ( 1 ) laws, trea ties, and other public documents (often on bronze panels); (2) commemorations of the construction of a building; (3) honorific texts for individuals (often on a statue base); ( 4 )
LAYARD, AUSTEN HENRY altars and religious dedications; (5) gravestones; and (6) curse tablets. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, W. Sidney. Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin. Cambridge, 1965. Important discussion of the reconstructed phonetics of classical Latin. Altheim, Franz. Geschichte der lateinischen Sprache von denAnfixngen bis zum Beginn der Literatur. Frankfurt am Main, 1 9 5 1 . Balsdon, John P. V. D. Romans and Aliens. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979. Conte, Gian Biagio. Latin Literature: A History. Translated by Joseph B. Solodow. Revised by Don P. Fowler and Glenn W. Most. Balti more, 1994. One of the best short English-language introductions to Latin literature. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. "The Languages of Palestine in the First Century A.D." In Fitzmyer's A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays, pp. 29-56. Missoula, 1979. Slightly updated version of the important article originally published in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 32 (1970): 501-531. Gordon, Arthur E. Ulustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy. Berkeley, 1983. Extremely informative for all aspects of the study of Latin inscriptions. Keppie, Lawrence. Understanding Roman Inscriptions. Baltimore, 1 9 9 1 . Lewis, Naphtali. Life in Egypt under Roman Rule. Oxford, 1983. Meinersmann, Bernhard. Die lateinischen Warierund Namen indengriechischen Papyri. Leipzig, 1927. Millar, Fergus. "Local Cultures in the Roman Empire: Libyan, Punic, and Latin in Roman Africa." Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968): 126-134. Omeltchenko, Stephen W. A Quantitative and Comparative Study of the Vocalism of the Latin Inscriptions of North Africa, Britain, Dalmatia, and the Balkans. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977. Pinkster, Harm. Latin Syntax and Semantics. London and New York, 1990. Schmitt, Riidiger. "Die Sprachverhaltnisse in den Ssdichen Provinzen des romischen Reiches." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der rbmischen Welt, vol. II.29.2, edited by Wolfgang Haase, pp. 554-586. Berlin and New York, 1983. Sherk, Robert K. Roman Documents from the Greek East: Senatas Consulta and Epistulae to the Age of Augustus. Baltimore, 1969. Whatmough, Joshua. The Dialects of Ancient Gaul. Cambridge, 1970. Wilson, Alan J. N. Emigration from Italy in the Republican Age of Rome. Manchester, 1966. DAVID E. AUNE
LAWRENCE,
THOMAS
EDWARD
(1888-
!935)> British archaeologist born in Tremadoc, Caernar vonshire, Wales, tire illegitimate son of Thomas Chapman and Sarah Lawrence. Educated at City of Oxford High School for Boys and Jesus College, Oxford University, Law rence, by his late teens had developed a passion for medieval history. He was heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and the work of William Morris. Lawrence cycled widely as a boy and sailed on his father's yacht when the family lived in France. In 1908, as part of his research for his thesis at Oxford, Lawrence undertook a cycling tour of France, from St. Malo to Marseille and back to Le Havre. The following year he undertook a walking tour of the Crusader castles of Syria, from Beirut into northern Palestine and then north to
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Aleppo. From 1 9 1 1 to 1 9 1 4 , Lawrence took part in tire Brit ish Museum's excavations at Carchemish, a period he re garded as one of the happiest of his life. In spring 1 9 1 4 , Lawrence and his colleague on tire Carchemish excavations, C. L. Woolley, were engaged by the Palestine Exploration Fund to carry out an archaeological survey of Palestine's Negev desert. When World War I broke out in 1 9 1 4 , Lawrence enlisted and, because of his knowledge of tlie area, was posted in military intelligence in Cairo. Sent as military adviser to the Hashemite army in Transjordan, then in revolt against tire Ottoman Turks, he came to play an important role in die war in Palestine but was badly affected by the experiences. His role in the war and in tlie peace settlement that followed, and the noteriety arising from the publications of Lowell Thomas, prevented Lawrence from returning to archae ology, as Woolley had been able to do. In 1922 Lawrence enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF), under the name John Hume Ross, in an attempt to escape from the constant pub licity and speculation about his wartime activities. His iden tity was quickly revealed, and he was discharged. In 1923 he enlisted in the tank corps under tire name T. E. Shaw and in 1927 officially changed his name to Shaw. In 1925 he was able to return to the RAF. Late in 1926 he was posted to Karachi, India, and in 1928 to Miranshah on India's north west frontier, where he remained until his presence was ex posed in 1929. He returned to England and from 1929 to 1935 worked as part of an RAF team testing designs for a speedboat to tend seaplanes. Lawrence left the RAF in Feb ruary 1 9 3 5 , retiring to his cottage at Clouds Hill, Dorset. He died in a motorcycle accident. [See also Carchemish; Negev; Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biography of Woolley.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Dann, Uriel. "T. E. Lawrence in Amman, 1 9 2 1 . " Abr-Nahrain 1 3 (1972): 3 3 - 4 1 . James, Lawrence. The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lavirenee of Arabia. London, 1990. Lawrence, Arnold W., ed. T. E. Lawrence, by His Friends, a New Selec tion of Memoirs. New York, 1937. Lawrence, Thomas Edward. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. London, 1926. Lawrence, Thomas Edward. Revolt in the Desert. London, 1927. Storrs, Ronald. "Lawrence, Thomas Edward." Dictionary of National Biography 1931-1940, pp. 5 2 8 - 5 3 1 . London, 1949. Wilson, Jeremy. Ixiwrence of Arabia: the Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence. New York, 1992. RUPERT CHAPMAN
LAYARD, AUSTEN HENRY ( 1 8 1 7 - 1 8 9 4 ) , exca vator of Nineveh and Nimrud. Layard's career as an ar chaeologist occupied less than a decade of his life but was the basis of his considerable fame and successful career in the British government. Beginning in 1840, he spent several
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years in Mesopotamia—after 1842 with the assistance of Stratford Canning, then British ambassador to Turkey. Lay ard's initial excavation was but one of a range of slightly stealthy activities performed through the ambassador. Commencing operations at the great mound of Nimrud in November 1845, Layard almost immediately came upon portions of two palaces, one being that of Ashurnasirpal II. His finds of Late Assyrian reliefs, statuary, and other arti facts marked the first major English discoveries in Meso potamia; within two years the discoveries were on display at the British Museum. By the time Layard returned to En gland, in 1847, he had discovered portions of eight Assyrian palaces. Layard's discoveries came two years after those of his col league and rival, the Frenchman Paul-Emile Botta at Khor sabad. Yet, in a second campaign ( 1 8 4 9 - 1 8 5 1 ) Layard suc ceeded, as Botta had not, at the mound of Kuyunjik (Nineveh), excavating artifactual and textual remains of the great palace of Sennacherib. [See the biography of Botta.] Ex cavations begun by Layard at Kouyunjik and Nimrud were continued and expanded by Hormuzd Rassam and William Kennett Loftus, through 1 8 5 5 , under the auspices of the British Museum and the (private) Assyrian Excavation Fund. Layard's activities as an archaeologist and also a publicist were central to the fledgling enterprise of Assyriology. T h e exhibition of his discoveries inspired a host of emulatory representations in, among other media, jewelry, panoramas, theatrical production, painting, poetry, and architecture. Layard's account of the first campaign, Nineveh and Its Re mains (1849, popular edition 1 8 5 1 ) was arguably Britain's greatest archaeological bestseller of the entire nineteenth century. Layard's work provoked extensive discussion by theolo gians, historians, and art critics. His discoveries did much to change, as well as complicate, prevailing notions of bib lical credence, historical progress, and artistic form. Layard thus contributed significantly to the intellectual growth of the antiquarian science of his time. [See also Nimrud; Nineveh.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bohrer, Frederick N. "The Printed Orient: The Production of A. H. Layard's Earliest Works." Culture and History, no. 1 1 (1992): 8 5 105. Fales, Frederick M., and Bernard J. Hickey, eds. Austen Henry Layard: Tra I'Orieme e Venezia. Rome, 1987. Essays on various aspects of Layard's life and interests, with a catalog of an exhibition. Layard, Austen Henry. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. London, 1853. Layard, Austen Henry. Autobiography and Letters. 2 vols. London, 1903. Focused disproportionately on the period in Mesopotamia. Saggs H. W. F. Introduction to Layard's Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), 1-64. New York, 1970. Independent critical assessment, based on significant archival and intertextual work.
Waterfield, Gordon. Layard of Nineveh. New York, 1963. The standard biography of Layard. FREDERICK N. BOHRER
LEAD ISOTOPE ANALYSIS. Measuring the rel ative isotopic abundances of lead to characterize its isotopic composition has become a frequently used analytical method in determining the provenance of archaeological finds. In conjunction with diagnostic evaluations of an ob ject's stylistic attributes and method of fabrication, the iso topic data can be used to address archaeological and art his torical questions of authenticity, as well as to study the production and distribution of metal. Lead isotope analysis can provide information about the sources of the materials used and their trade patterns, information with valuable so cioeconomic and political implications. T h e technique is ap plicable to a wide range of lead-containing materials such as glass, glazes, metals (copper, silver, bronzes, brasses, and pewter), paint pigments, and lead ores. The technique has traditionally been used as an analytical tool in geological studies to measure the geochronological age of the Earth or to determine the age of an ore deposit. Elemental lead is composed of four stable isotopes whose masses are 208, 207, 206, and 204. Stable isotopes differ from each other only by the number of neutrons in their atomic nucleus, referred to as their mass number. Three of the four isotopes of lead (Pb 208, Pb 207, and Pb 206) are derived in part as the stable end products from the radio genic decay of thorium 2 3 2 , uranium 2 3 5 , and uranium 238, respectively, and in part from primordial lead created at the time of the Earth's formation. T h e fourth isotope (Pb 204) exists in its original form (at the earth's beginning) and is dependent only on the amount originally present in the for mation of the deposit. Thus, the isotopic composition of lead in ores is dependent upon die geochemical constituents of the mineralization and its age and emplacement history. These variances in the isotopic composition of lead create a distinct "isotopic signature" in ore deposits containing lead. Because the differences in isotopic composition are very small, a measurement of high precision and high accuracy is required. Chemical-separation techniques under clean conditions, involving acid dissolution, ion-exchange chro matography, and anodic electrodeposition are used to ex tract and purify the lead. Thermal ionization mass spec trometry is the analytical tool generally used to measure die relative isotopic abundances in naturally occurring elements. This involves the introduction of a sample into a mass specttometer, where it is thermally ionized, accelerated by elec trostatic forces through a magnetic field, and separated ac cording to mass. T h e various masses are then electronically detected and measured. Archaeological evidence has demonstrated that the iso topic signature present in the ore is preserved in the object,
LEATHER unaffected by the object's metallurgical history or subse quent weathering. In theory, this unique isotopic composi tion can be used to identify the object's geographic source or to eliminate others. However, the method has its limita tions: mixing and overlapping are factors that pose compli cations in interpretating the data. In antiquity, lead was fre quently salvaged, remelted, and reused. During this recycling, certain materials could have been mixed, thus erasing tiieir original lead signatures. T h e overlapping factor arises from the fact that ores in different regions, sometimes widely separated geographically, can have similar isotopic compositions if formed at the same time under geologically similar conditions. Still used in conjunction with other an alytical methods, such as trace-element analysis and multi variate and probability statistical analysis, lead isotope anal ysis has proven to be an important technique in archaeology. [See also Analytical Techniques.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Faure, Gunter. Principles of Isotope Geology. New York, 1986. Gale, N. H. "Lead Isotope Studies Applied to Provenance Studies: A Brief Review." In Archaeometry: Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium, edited by Yannis Maniatis, pp. 496-502. Amsterdam, 1989. Gulson, Brian L. Ijead Isotopes in Mineral Exploration. New York, 1986. Russell, Richard D., and R. M. Farquhar. Lead Isotopes in Geology. New York, i960. A good reference for understanding die basic principles and early history of lead isotope analysis but outdated on present methodology. The reader is urged to consult scientific literature for more up-to-date measurement techniques. Sayre, E. V., et al. "Statistical Evaluation of the Presently Accumulated Lead Isotope Data from Anatolia and Surrounding Regions." Ar chaeometry 34.1 (1992): 7 3 - 1 0 5 . Covers the debate on the use of multivariate and probability statistical analysis, methodology, selec tion of data, treatment of outiiers, etc. For continuing discussion, see Archaeometry 34.2 (1992): 3 1 1 - 3 3 6 , and 35.2 (1993): 2 4 1 - 2 6 3 . EMILE C. JOEL
LEATHER. In virtually all ancient cultures of the Near East, animal hides must have been used for a variety of pur poses as early as Paleolithic times. In the art and texts of the early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt we see leather used for clothing, gloves, footwear, tents, containers or pouches, military implements and armor, fittings for ani mals, ropes, boats and sails, balls, musical instruments, cushions, furniture, and writing materials. T h e standard of Ur shows early examples of leather harnesses and kilts witii the fleece worn in or out as items of clothing (Henri Frank fort, Harmondsworth, 1954, figs. 76 and 77; C. Leonard Woolley, Ur Excavations, Philadelphia, 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 7 6 , vol. 2, The Royal Cemetery, pi. 92). The value and versatility of leather as opposed to cured raw sldn lies in its qualities of sttength, flexibility, and du rability, which is achieved only through the process of tan ning. Wall paintings in a number of Egyptian tombs illus
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trate die various aspects of leather production. Among these are a tomb at Beni Hasan, and the tomb of Rekmire at Thebes. After the corium or middle layer of skin was cleaned of hair and flesh through scraping and soaking in solutions of lime and pigeon droppings, the tanning process changed the raw skin or corium into leather resistant to water and to decay through the use of one of three substances: tannic acid commonly derived from the bark, leaves, or fruit of the pomegranate, acacia, or tamarisk; alum and salt to produce a white leather in a process called tawing; and third, fish oils in a process called chamoising. A number of ancient texts on tablets from sites in Meso potamia describe leather products, the processing of leather, and the wages and rights of tanners and shoemakers. Very few clearly identifiable tanners' workshops have been dis covered, however, in archaeological excavations of any pe riod in the Near East (at Pergamon—see Machteld J. Mellink, "Archaeology in Anatolia," American Journal of Archaeology 96 [1992]: 1 4 4 - 1 4 5 , and Wolfgang Radt, Archaologische Anzieger 1 9 9 1 , p p . 4 1 0 - 4 1 2 ; and at Horvat Sumaq—see Samuel R. Wolff, "Archaeology in Israel," Amer ican Journal of Archaeology 97 [1993]: 1 5 7 - 1 5 8 ) . Tools and objects made of leather have been recovered from Egyptian tombs (including sandals and a stool from the tomb of King Tutankhamun) and from the tombs at Ur, and in caves in Palestine. Because of the unpleasant smells associated with the pro cessing of hides, tanneries were usually located on the out skirts of town. Among the Hebrews, tanners were consid ered to be of low status, although leather products were in great demand. In Egypt and Assyria, for example, where warfare was a major activity, tanneries could be owned by the state, especially for the production of the quantities of leather goods required by the army and navy. Independent artisans who produced luxury items were also important, however, and in the Hellenistic and Roman periods tanners had their own guilds in many cities of the Near East. Among the most famous producers of fine leather in the Islamic world were die tanneries in Morocco. The work shops of Fez, established by the tenth century CE and still functioning, were among the strongest and most influential guilds in the city with one hundred workshops under the Merinide dynasty. A constant source of water, a supply of animal sldns, and inspiration and techniques derived from Persia and Moorish Spain account for the importance and success of the industry in Fez. Unlike tanners in other an cient cultures, the tanners of Fez had high status as artisans, whereas olive oil producers and metal workers were ac corded the lowest status. BIBLIOGRAPHY Forbes, R.J. Studies in Ancient Technology. Leiden, 1966. Summarizes the evidence for ancient techniques from texts and leather artifacts (see vol. 5, pp. 2-46).
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Le Tourneau, Roger, and L. Paye. "La corporation des tanneurs et l'industrie de la tannerie a Fes." Hesperis 2 0 . 1 - 3 (1935): 167-240.
Detailed account of the history, techniques, and organization of the tanneries in Fez, Morocco. Reed, R. Ancient Skins, Parchments, and Leathers. London, 1972. Early
methods and scientific basis of skin processing. Waterer, John W. Leather Craftsmanship. London, 1968. VIRGINIA R. ANDERSON-STOJANOVI6
LEBANON. See Phoenicia; Syria.
LEHUN, site located in central Jordan, in die Madaba district (biblical Moab), 80 km (50 mi.) soudi of Amman, 7 km (4 mi.) east of Dhiban (biblical Dibon) and 31cm (2 mi.) east of 'Ara'ir (biblical 'Aro'er), on the northern plateau of Wadi Mujib (the biblical Arnon River). The site is quite extensive: 1,100 m nortii-south by 600 m east-west. It ranges in altitude between 7 1 9 and 748 m above 'Aqaba sea level and is divided north-south and east-west by seasonal wadis, delimitating natural areas (excavation sectors A - D ) , alternatively chosen by settlers in antiquity. The region is fertile, largely open to the steppe and the desert, and has a semiarid Mediterranean microclimate. No literary sources mention Lehun, but some travelers and archaeologists have either visited or otherwise noted it, such as Rudolf-Ernst Briinnow (1904), Nelson Glueck ( 1 9 3 3 ) , and Raphael de Savignac (1936). Excavations at Lehun were sponsored by the Belgian Committee of Excavations in Jordan, whose directors from 1977 to 1984 was P. Naster and since 1977 is Denyse Homes-Fredericq. The site is characterized by permanent set tlements from prehistoric to modern times. The southern sectors (B3, C i , D) are its most strategic area: they are well protected by the cliffs of Wadi Mujib and overlook the whole region. Remains of the Early Bronze, Late Bronze, and Iron Ages were found there. In the northern sectors (A, B 1 - 2 , C i ) , on the northern, more fertile slopes of Wadi Lehun, in the vicinity of tire fertile fields of the Moabite plateau, some settlements appeared in more peaceful and commercial pe riods: in the Nabatean and Roman periods, as well as in Islamic, Ottoman, and modern times. [See Moab.] The area has been inhabited since tire Paleolithic period, as is attested by nearly one thousand tool samples collected over an area of 225,000 sq m. The range of tools assembled is impressive: racloirs, burins, scrapers, flakes (sometimes Levallois flakes), nuclei, and core fragments in sector C i . The Chalcolithic period is represented by some surface flints and a few sherds. The first permanent sedentarization (sector B 3 ) appears in the Early Bronze Age. Remains of a large settlement (still to be excavated) and an adjacent water reservoir, similar to the town of Jawa in northern Jordan, have been located. [See Jawa.] Separated by the Wadi Lehun, a disturbed family
tomb was excavated under an earth layer some 40-60 cm deep. It contained more than 1 3 0 specimens of often un damaged and homogeneous handmade ceramics that are comparatively dated by material from Bab edh-Dhra' I A B. [See Bab edh-Dhra'.] In the transition period of the Late Bronze-Iron Ages ( 1 3 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 BCE), a fortified village ( 1 7 0 m north-south X 3 7 - 6 0 m east-west) was built following the borders of the well-protected plateau in sector D. The settlement belongs to a period when tire Moabite kings were developing and defending their kingdom. Different residen tial complexes, sometimes of the pillared-house type (see figure 1 ) , were discovered. [See Four-room House.] Their wheel-made pottery and artifacts indicate an agricultural en vironment (storage jars, cooking pots, pilgrim flasks, grind ing stones, pestles). A beautiful faience scarab from the twentieth dynasty ( 1 1 8 6 - 1 0 7 0 BCE) represents a sphinx with a ram's head and an atef before an upraised uraeus and an open lotus flower. Its base is inscribed with a deficient hi eroglyph name of Amun-Re, which suggests that Lehun was still inhabited at the end of the second millennium BCE. T h e village seems to have been temporarily abandoned. The buildings on the southern part of the plateau were later leveled and their stones used as the foundation for an Iron Age fortress. This fortress, with its central courtyard, probably belonged to the belt of military installations along the northern Moabite plateau: it measures 3 3 - 3 7 m eastwest by 43 m north-south and is strategically located, over looking the whole region and would have controlled all traf fic on the King's Flighway, in the nearby valleys, and on die southern Moabite plateau. It was protected by the cliffs of northern Moab. Its four inner-corner watchtowers are unique in central Jordan because they were built inside the fortress. Breaks in the fortification's walls and the stone fill found in some of its casemate rooms attest to the building's having been attacked. The wheel-made pottery, some silos, and ovens suggest that this settlement was also agricultural. The fortress probably served an economic purpose as well: fortified storage buildings are known in ancient Palestine and in Assyria, possibly for supplying grain and wheat to garrisons—in this case, to Moabite 'Aro'er or Dibon. [See 'Aro'er; Dibon.] An Egyptian new year flask of the Saite period (seventh-sixth centuries BCE) reflects international relations in the Near East during the twenty-sixth dynasty. In the Nabatean period, Lehun must have been a religious center of some importance: it is a small, square temple (6.25 X 6.25 m), built of embossed local limestone blocks, that corresponds to the single-chambered Nabatean sanctuaries that are Oriental in origin. It was probably used by traders and caravaneers ttaveling one of tlie byroads of the King's Highway. Ceramic fragments found in the temple date to the first century CE and are of smooth or ribbed common pottery and distinctive Nabatean painted fine ware. T h e temple and its altar have been restored and reconstructed. An intrusive Nabatean grave was discovered in the Pillar
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LEHUN. Figure i. Pillar House I, sector D. (Courtesy D. Homes-Fredericq)
House I in sector D : it belonged to a woman and is dated by the pottery and jewelry (a bead necklace, bronze fibula, earrings, and bracelets). [See Nabateans; Grave Goods.] T h e Islamic period is represented by a small rural mosque of the late Mamluk period. A bronze coin found on its floor gives a post quern date as late as the fourteenth century. The mosque was built near a small village. A large agricultural complex widi a cave has been partially excavated north of it. Three collapsed Ottoman houses (sector C 2 ) are still used as granaries by the villagers of modern Lehun.
Homes-Fredericq, Denyse, and J. Basil Hennessy, eds. Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1 , Bibliography and Gazetteer of Sumeys and Sites; vol. 2, Field Reports: Surveys and Sites. Louvain, 1986-1989. Homes-Fredericq, Denyse. "Lehun (El/IChirbet el)." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denyse Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 349-359. Louvain, 1989. Homes-Fredericq, Denyse. "Late Bronze and Iron Age Evidence from Lehun in Moab." In Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan, edited by Piotr Bienkowski, pp. 187-202, figs. 1 6 . 1 - 1 1 . Sheffield Archaeological Monographs, 7. Sheffield, 1992.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LEILAN, TELL, a roughly 90-ha site located at the con
Homes-Fredericq, Denyse. "Un goulot de bouteille de Nouvel An, trouve a Lehun (Jordanie)." In Studia Paulo Naster Oblata, edited by Simone Scheers, pp. 79-90, pis. 8-9. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 1 2 - 1 3 . Louvain, 1982. Homes-Fredericq, Denyse. "Lehun." In Pottery and Potters, Past and Present: 7000 Years of Ceramic Art in Jordan, edited by Denyse Ho mes-Fredericq and H. J. Franken. Tubingen, 1986.
fluence of Wadi Jarrah and Wadi Siblah on the eastern half of the Khabur Plains of northeastern Syria (36°57'4i.8" N , 4 °3o'35.6"E).Leilan's location on the present-day 440-mm isohyet that sttetches across the lowland plains of northern Mesopotamia unites the site with Tell al-Hawa, Tell Taya, Tell er-Rimah, and Mosul/Nineveh to the east and Tell Aid,
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Farfara, Tartab, and Tell Mozan to the west. [See Taya, Tell; Rimah, Tell er-; Nineveh; Mozan, Tell.] This north Mesopotamian geoclimatic and cultural region was known in the third millennium as Subir, at which time Leilan's name was Shekhna, and in the early second millennium BCE as Subartu, when Leilan's name was Shubat-Enlil. Prehistoric Periods. Leilan was founded upon a small ridge alongside Wadi Jarrah, in the late Ubaid (Leilan VI) period. [See Ubaid.] At this time the Leilan region was al ready experiencing the forces of early spatiofunctional hierarchization: Leilan was about 20 ha in size and a center for the forty-nine Halaf/Ubaid small village sites located within 1 5 km (9 mi.) of it. Climatic conditions during this period were significantly more humid than at present, to judge from the Halaf/Ubaid villages in the Wadi Radd region, 20 km ( 1 2 mi.) to the south, that is now agriculturally marginal. Severe, and perhaps sudden, aridification (F. Sirocko et al., "Century-Scale Events in Monsonal Climate in the Past 24,000 Years," Nature 364 [1993]: 322-324) occurred dur ing or at tire end of the succeeding Leilan V period that may have played a role in local and southern Mesopotamian so cial stratification and the Late Uruk period expansion pro
cess and its sudden collapse. Regional settlement shrank during period V to eight sites. T o judge from its Leilan IV period ceramic assemblage, Leilan was then one of tire en igmatic Late Uruk period "colonies." T h e succeeding col lapse was followed by the Leilan Ilia (painted Ninevite 5) period, which lasted for about one hundred years. During this period and the next two hundred years (c. 2900-2600 BCE), local settlements were of fewer titan 1 0 ha and widely distributed along the perennial streams of the Khabur River. There is no evidence within individual settlements for social stratification or political organization at the state level. T h e distinctive cylinder seals used during this period unite the region with the dry-farming stretches of the Zagros pied mont and the proto-Elamite culture area of southwestern Iran. [See Seals; Agriculture; Elamites.] Very few sealings from these northern seals have been retrieved in southern Mesopotamia. Early Historic Periods. In the Leilan Hid period (c. 2600-2400 BCE), Leilan suddenly expanded more than six fold, growing from an acropolis-based settlement of fewer than 1 5 ha to the approximately 100 ha comprising most of the lower town and some settled areas outside its later walls.
Figure I . Operation 5, lower town south, residential quarter and street. Dated to 2 6 0 0 2000 BCE. (Courtesy Harvey Weiss)
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villages. The acropolis (northwest) cultic quarter wall, of mud brick, was 2.5 m wide. T h e Leilan lower town, how ever, still lacked a wall throughout tlie period. Substantial changes took place during this period in ceramic technology: the tradition of the Ninevite 5 period incising disappeared almost completely, and ceramic production moved toward simplified, less labor-intensive production techniques. This alteration suggests that containers were serving new pur poses influenced or controlled by state authority for state standards of measurement—capacities and areas for agri cultural production, distribution, collection, taxation, stor age, and reinvestment. Economic and political relationships LEILAN, TELL. Figure 2. "Subarian" style cylinder seal impression with southern Mesopotamia intensified during this period showing a seated musician playing a lyre. Dated about 2600 BCE. L87- with cuneiform archives documented at nearby Tell Beidar. 1493 (Courtesy Harvey Weiss) [See Libraries and Archives.] T h e Leilan period lib (c. 2400-2200 BCE) witnessed the Akkadian conquest and imperialization of Subir by NaramThe lower town (south) exposure shows that the Leilan set Sin. This event was conditioned by tlie availability on tlie Subarian side of a rich cereal-agricuhure region, already ur tlement in the Hid period was a planned city—that is, banized and organized regionally for efficient production, straight streets (4.5 m wide) were laid out with straight street and by die need on the Akkadian side to replace the conwalls providing only limited access to cross alleys (see figure quer-plunder-destroy syndrome of previous southern 1). monarchs with a more efficient and longer-lasting system of On the Leilan acropolis (northwest), tire small domestic accessible, adjacent-region exploitation. Naram-Sin's con structures of the earlier Leilan IIIc period were now replaced quest of the Khabur Plains was accompanied by tlie instal with a public cultic quarter that was to be maintained, ren lation of a complex Akkadian imperial administration pen ovated and rebuilt during the next four hundred years, to etrating deeply across tlie urbanized landscape of Subir. At the end of the Akkadian imperialization of the region. [See Leilan the Akkadian presence is documented epigraphically Cult; Akkadians.] T h e activity center of this quarter was a by two inscribed artifacts retrieved at the acropolis north mud-brick sacrificial altar situated in the center of a mudwest cultic quarter: one is a fragmentary Old Akkadian tab brick platform ( 1 0 X 1 5 m). [See Altars.] Around the let, the second a fragmentary Old Akkadian sealing with the platform were elaborate rooms to die east, including one Old Akkadian inscription: "Hayabu the shabra official." with more than twenty bones of human adults, juveniles, and infants in an ash-filled submural pit sealed by a late period Six features of Akkadian imperialization have been iden Ha floor; a ramp and stairway to the south; and, also to the tified archaeologically at Tell Leilan: west, storage rooms filled with cylinder-seal impressions. 1. Population redistribution. The Akkadian imperialists T h e cylinder seals in tire storage rooms are local Khabur streamlined the regional administration of production by re Plains ("Subarian style") imitations of Sumerian late Early ducing the number of Leilan-region settlements from Dynastic II/early Early Dynastic III banquet scenes that re twenty-two to thirteen. Tell Mohammed Diyab, the large placed the local "piedmont Jemdet Nasr" sealing tradition secondary center only 8 km (5 mi.) southeast of Leilan, was (see figure 2 ) . This contact with southern Mesopotamia, reduced in size from 50 to 1 0 ha, its population apparently whatever its nature, may have stimulated sudden regional nucleated within Leilan. Do Gir, the comparable satellite site secondary state formation and urbanization. Across the Lei to tlie north of Leilan, suffered a similar fate. lan lower town, as well as on tire Leilan acropolis, the ce 2. Regional population control. Regional control to prevent ramics in use during this period were those of tlie terminal insurrection and to protect imperial administration and Ninevite 5 incised tradition—that is, the radical social and stores required tlie deployment of local populations for de economic alterations of the period were not accompanied fensive/protective and legitimizing construction works. Sub by synchronous changes in traditional ceramic manufacture stantial numbers of laborers were, for the first time, de technologies. ployed to consttuct a massive city wall around Tell Leilan. At the eastern edge of the Leilan lower-town settlement die In the Leilan Ha period (c. 2400-2300 BCE), the consoli rock-hard calcitic virgin soil was first excavated to depths of dation of state power within the cities of Subir is marked by . 5 - 1 . 5 m. Two concentric walls of mud brick, each 8 m wide the first construction of a defensive wall around the Leilan (a casemate wall), were then set into these excavations. A acropolis (northwest) cultic quarter. It protected and iso middle wall, perhaps a walkway between the two, was one lated die elite, their wealth, and administrative power from meter wide. On tlie northern side of tlie city, where a natural the residents of tlie Leilan lower town and Leilan-region
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depression and rise afforded protection, an imposing earthen rampart was constructed by excavating a io-meterwide/deep ditch and then mounding the excavated virgin soil. 3. Agricultural redistribution. Botanical remains within 50-100 percent samples of each lower-town (south) house floor's debris are missing nodal stems, rachises, and nonseed plant parts. The domesticated cereals and pulses, mostly barely and lentils, had already undergone primary and sec ondary processing and were clean, ready for storage, cook ing, and consumption, suggesting that they are tire remains of rations previously processed and stored elsewhere prior to disttibution. [See Cereals.] 4. Introduction of Akkadian mensuration and Leilan sila bowls. The Leilan lib (Akkadian) lower-town ceramic as semblage includes a bowl type of distinctive appearance and standardized capacities. The bowl is dark green, with no visible temper; it is wheel made and has a flat base and sim ple rim with straight sides. Along with 557 sherds of this vessel type that have been retrieved and measured, 27 com plete or fragmentary stacked kiln wasters (SKWs) of these vessels have also been rettieved and measured (see figure 3). The SKWs have a trimodal capacity distribution: about 55 percent range between .2 and .41; 38 percent between .8 and 1.21; and 6 percent at 1.5 1. The rim sherds of the frag mented vessels in general, however, suggest that most derive from vessels of 1 -liter (Sumerian sila) capacity. These ves sels are the only vessels within the Leilan lib assemblage for which wasters have been retrieved. It seems likely that they are an administrative artifact of Akkadian imperialism: stan dardized sila bowls for ration distribution according to the Akkadian imperial standards. 5. Akkadian intensification of agroproduction. As part of the Akkadian reorganization of production, water courses were stabilized by channelization—deepening and straight ening water-course channels—to counter the effects of rapid siltation and to maintain efficient water flow. On the western side of Tell Leilan this water management is recorded within a 4-meter sequence of repeated entrenchments into calcic virgin soil, embankments of large basalt blocks, and masses of water-borne silt and pebbles cleared from tire channel. Leilan period lib potsherds were stratified on tire beds of the stabilized channels. Channelization prevented wasteful water-course meandering and may have permitted supple mental summer crop production. Akkadian canal-manage ment expertise may have been the source of this intensifier of northern agroproduction. 6. Akkadian cult practices. The white-plastered walls of the Leilan Ha acropolis (noithwesf) cultic quarter were trun cated, and surfaces of mud brick and thick mud plaster were prepared over them and over ashy room deposits. Two con structions were set upon these prepared surfaces: stone walls, up to 1.2 m wide, constructed of coarsely prepared basalt boulders (some of these walls had 3-5 courses of mud
LEILAN, TELL. Figure 3. Period IIB "sila" bowls of three standard ized volumes. Top: forty-six fused wasters, each 0.265 liters; middle: five fused wasters, each 1.052 liters; bottom: eighteen fused wasters, each 1.522 liters. (Courtesy Flarvey Weiss)
brick on them, while others were simply topped with a sur face of mud plaster and large potsherds); and a large, mudbrick building with three-brick-thick walls, most of which remains to be excavated. The exterior surfaces of these structures covered the period-IIa platform, leaving only the burnt-altar surfaces at floor level. T h e Akkadians thereby maintained the cultic locus of previous state rulers while in stituting their own cult practices. Desertification and desertion (c. 2200-1900 BCE) charac-
LEILAN, TELL terize the collapse of Akkadian imperialism. T h e extractive organization imposed by the Akkadian dynasty was inter rupted by urban collapse in the south and collapse, reorga nization, and abandonments in the north. There is no evi dence for settlement at Tell Leilan between periods lib and I—that is, between 2200 and 1900 BCE. (Similarly, there was no sedentary settlement at Tell al-Hawa, Tell Taya, Tell Khoshi, Chaghar Bazar, Tell Mohammed Diyab, or at the hundreds of other settlements within northern Mesopota mia. A reduced local power, using the title "King of Urkish and Nawar," emerged at tiiis time to control briefly the rem nant Khabur Plains populations of Mozan and Brak. [See Mozan, Tell; Brak, Tell.] A few sherd types retrieved through regional surface surveys (and unassignable with certainty to other periods) may document some village-level sedentary human activity. Soil micromorphology studies (thin sections of datable pedostratigraphic units) undertaken at Tell Leilan and sites within the surrounding countryside have revealed a rapid alteration of climatic conditions for this period: a sudden intensification of wind circulation; an increase in atmo spheric dust; and the establishment of arid conditions. The wind erosion and dust deposition are also documented in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. A relatively massive displacement of sedentary agriculturalists and sea sonally transhumant pastoralists is suggested by the Leilan and other Khabur Plains settlement abandonments. Syn chronous population expansion in southern Mesopotamia, as well as tribal Amorite incursions into the sedentary heart land of soutiiern Mesopotamia, suggest the amplitude of population transfer at this time. [See Amorites.] Only at the end of this desertification period, witii the reestablishment of favorable climatic conditions in the nine teenth century BCE, was sedentary settlement reestablished on the Khabur Plains by those previously displaced. Amorite chiefs, acculturated in soutiiern Mesopotamia after decades of sedentary life there, led the resettlement; under the paramountcy of Shamshi-Adad, they selected the abandoned urban center at Tell Leilan to be the new Khabur Plains regional administrative center, Shubat Enlil, "the dwelling place of Enlil." Inscriptions of servants of Shamshi-Adad and his successors were retrieved at Leilan witiiin the tem ples excavated on the northeastern quadrant of the acropolis in 1979, 1980, and 1982. These inscriptions were the first Leilan evidence for the historical identification of the site. Additional epigraphic data have been retrieved from the lower town palace (east) and the lower town palace (north). [See Palace.] On the Leilan acropolis three levels of temple construction were identified. T h e last, building level I, was a badly eroded, partial rebuilding of building level II. Building level II was an elaborate "long-room" temple with a central cella featuring impressive northern and southern facades deco rated with intricate columns and column decoration. The
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northern facade of building level II was decorated with semiattached, spiral mud-brick columns (see figure 4 ) ; the same building's southern facade was decorated with a variety of columns embellished with mud-plaster incising and relief (see figure 5 ) . Building level II was a foreshortened rebuild of building level III, where interior spiral columns set on each side of a central column were retrieved. An associated building level " X , " stratigraphically linked probably to building level II (but almost entirely eroded except for its deeply set wall foundations), provided a range of adminis trative tablets and sealings linked with officials' and rulers' letters and sealings retrieved in 1985 and 1987 within the lower town palace (east). The topography of the lower town suggests that the lower town palace (east) covered an area of 9 or 10 ha and there fore was one of the largest early second-millennium BCE pal aces in Mesopotamia. Twenty-five rooms already retrieved include a baked-brick court with a central throne area along the wall opposite die room's main entrance. Side exits from the throne wall lead to smaller rooms, including some with six hundred cuneiform tablets and several hundred tablet fragments, major portions of the palace's royal archives, resting both on the rooms' floors and within their roof and wall collapse. [See Cuneiform.] These documents include dated archival, royal administrative texts and royal letters and treaties, many bearing the impressions of inscribed seals of royal servants. Large fragments of a locally copied recen sion of the Sumerian King List document both the level of scribal activity within the palace complex during this period and relationships with southern Mesopotamian scribal ac tivity. [See Sumerians.] The archives chronicle the activities of the local dynasty that succeeded Shamshi-Adad at Tell Leilan, but sealings of Shamshi-Adad and his sons retrieved in one partially exca vated room at the northeast limit of the 1987 exposure sug gest that the palace was built and used initially during the reign of Shamshi-Adad himself. The lower town palace (north) was retrieved, in part, in 1 9 9 1 and provided an ar chive of 5 90 tablets devoted exclusively to die administration of receipts for royal beer-preparation supplies and beer dis bursement. The disbursement documents are sealed witii the seal of an official of the ldng of Andarig; tiiey suggest that after the death of Shamshi-Adad, the king of Andarig, a powerful neighbor of Shubat-Enlil, had direct or indirect control over the former capital city. Six soundings in the Leilan lower town and on the acrop olis have revealed impressive public architecture associated with the reign of Shamshi-Adad and his successors. The only domestic sttuctures retrieved have been small units piled against the early second-millennium BCE city wall. These data and the topography of the site suggest a relatively small agricultural population within the capital city during this period. Regional survey indicates that the resettlement of the Khabur Plains under the rule of Shamshi-Adad was
LEPTIS MAGNA focused at the village level: the reoccupied Leilan adminis tered a densely occupied empire (more than sixty villages within 1 5 km, or 9 mi.), extending from the Euphrates to die Zagros. [See Mari.] T h e city was conquered and de stroyed by Samsuiluna of Babylon in a military campaign in 1 7 2 8 BCE. T h e site was only reoccupied in the early twentieth century CE by Kurdish villagers. [See also Mesopotamia, articles on Prehistoric Mesopota mia and Ancient Mesopotamia; and Temples, article on M e sopotamian Temples.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Akkermans, P. A., and Harvey Weiss. "Tell Leilan 1987 Operation 3: Preliminary Report on the Lower Town Palace." Annates archeolo giques arabes syriennes 38 (1989): 1 - 1 9 . Akkermans, P. A., et al. "An Administrative Building of the King of Andarig at Shubat Enlil." NABU [= Nouvelles assyriologiques breves et utilitaires] 4 (1991): 68-70. Charpin, Dominique. "Subat Enlil et le pays d'Apum." Mari: Annates de Recherches Inlerdisciplinaires 5 (1987): 1 2 9 - 1 4 0 . Publication of Mari epigraphic data that confirms Leilan data for identification of Leilan as Shubat-Enlil and Shekhna. Eidem, Jesper. "Tell Leilan Tablets 1987: A Preliminary Report." An nates archeologiques arabes syriennes 38-39 (1989): 20-40. With die following items by Eidem, preliminary publication of the royal letters and treaties from the lower town (east) palace. Eidem, Jesper. "Les archives paleo-babyloniennes de Tell Leilan." Les Dossiers d'Archeologie (Paris) 1 5 5 (1990): 50-53. Eidem, Jesper. "An Old Assyrian Treaty from Tell Leilan." In Marchands, diplomates, et empereurs, edited by Dominique Charpin and Francis Joannes, pp. 185-207. Paris, 1991a. Eidem, Jesper. "Tell Leilan Archives 1 9 8 7 . " Revue d'assyriologie et d'archeologie orientate 85 (1991b): 1 0 9 - 1 3 5 . Ismail, Farouk, "Altbabylonische Wirtschaftsurkunden aus Tall Lei lan." Ph.D. diss., University of Tubingen, 1991. The administrative texts from the lower town (east) palace. Parayre, Dominique. "Les sceaux et empreintes de sceaux d6couverts a Tell Leilan en 1987." Annates archeologiques arabes syriennes 38-39 (1989): 4 1 - 5 5 . Witii the following items by Parayre, third- and sec ond-millennium Tell Leilan seal impressions and their internal and external administradve and iconographic relationships, Parayre, Dominique. "Seals and Seal Impressions from Tell Leilan, 1985." American Journal of Archaeology 94.4 (1990): 556-567. Parayre, Dominique. "Notes sur la glyptique de Tell Leilan a I'epoque paleo-babylonienne." In Marchands, diplomates, et empereurs, edited by Dominique Charpin and Francis Joannes, pp. 389-395. Paris, 1991. Parayre, Dominique. "Ninevite 5 Seal Impressions from Tell Leilan." In The Origins of North Mesopotamian Civilization: Ninevite 5 Chro nology, Economy, Society, edited by Harvey Weiss. New Haven, forthcoming. Schwartz, Glenn. A Ceramic Chronology from Tell Leilan Operation 1. Yale Tell Leilan Research, 1. New Haven, 1988. Much of the Tell Leilan ceramic sequence, with statistical analysis for chronological purposes. Senior, Louise, and Harvey Weiss. "The Akkadian Reorganization of Subarian Agro-Production." Orient-Express 2 (1992): 16-24. Leilan sila bowls explained. van de Mieroop, Marc. "Tell Leilan Tablets, 1 9 9 1 : A Preliminary Re port." Orientalia 63 (1994): 305-344. Report on the administrative archive retrieved from the lower town (north) palace in 1991. Vincente, Claudine. "The 1987 Tell Leilan Tablets Dated by the
347
Limmu of Habil-kinu." Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1991. Admin istrative texts from the lower town (east) palace. Weiss, Harvey. "Tell Leilan on the Habur Plains of Syria." Biblical Archaeologist 48.1 (March 1985): 5-34. Precis of Leilan settlement history and significance. Weiss, Harvey. "Tell Leilan and the Shubat Enlil." Mari: Annates de Recherches Interdisciplinaires 4 (1985): 269-292. The relationship be tween the site and the ancient second-millennium capital. Weiss, Harvey. "The Origins of Tell Leilan and the Conquest of Space in Third Millennium Mesopotamia." In The Origins of Cities in DryFarming Syria and Mesopotamia in the 'Third Millennium B. C, edited by Harvey Weiss, pp. 7 1 - 1 0 8 . Guilford, Conn., 1986. North Me sopotamian climate, agroproduction, and transport economics. Weiss, Harvey. "Tell Leilan 1989: New Data for Mid-Third Millen nium Urbanization and State Formation." Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin 1 2 2 (1990a): 1 9 3 - 2 1 8 . Report on the lower town (south) excavations, including the initial Hid period set dement through the lib abandonment. Weiss, Harvey. "'Civilizing' die Habur Plains: Mid-Third Millennium State Formation at Tell Leilan." In Resurrecting the Past, A Joint Tribute to Adnan Bounni, edited by Maurits van Loon, Paolo Mat thiae, and Harvey Weiss, pp. 387-407. Leiden, 1990b. Definition of the acropolis (northwest) settlement periodization and the signifi cance of the Leilan Hid seal impressions for understanding North Mesopotamian secondary state formation in 2600 BCE. Weiss, Harvey, and Maria-Agnes Courty. "Entre droite epigraphique et gauche archeologique, y-a-t-il une place pour la science?" Les Nouvelles de I'Archeologie 57 (1994): 3 3 - 4 1 . Polemic and explanation of the third-millennium climate change and collapse data. Weiss, Harvey, Gil Stein, P. A. Akkermans, Dominique Parayre, and Robert Whiting. "1985 Excavations at Tell Leilan, Syria."American Journal of Archaeology 94.4 (1990): 529-581. Excavations ontheLeilan acropolis, at the city wall, and at the lower town (east) palace, with analysis of cuneiform tablets archives and cylinder seal assem blages. Weiss, Harvey, Maria-Agnes Courty, Wilma Wetterstrom, Louise Se nior, Richard Meadow, Francois Guichard, and Anna Curnow. "The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopo tamian Civilization." Sciencez6i (1993): 995-1004. Analysis of thirdmillennium settlement, agriculture, abrupt climate change, and so cioeconomic collapse. Weiss, Harvey, Maria-Agnes Courty, and Melinda Zeder. "Tell Leilan 1993." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes, forthcoming. Report of the Leilan Hid—lib acropolis (northwest) cultic quarter. Wetterstrom, Wilma. "Diet and Cooking in a Workmen's Quarter in the Mid-Third Millennium B.C. at Tell Leilan." Paper delivered to the Society for American Archaeology, Pittsburgh, 9 April 1992. HARVEY WEISS
LEPTIS MAGNA,
important Roman harbor situated
adjacent to the eastern side of die modern town of Horns, 1 2 0 km (74.5 mi.) east of Tripoli in Tripolitania, the western province of Libya (32°48' N , I 4 ° i 7 ' E). T h e topographical development of Leptis appears to have been more complex than previously demonsft-ated. T h e early Punic levels (Car ter, 1965) may be only a part of die full picture. It appears from the Stadiasmus Maris Magni (Geographi GraeciMinores I, edited by K. Muller, Paris, 1 9 5 5 , pp. 9 3 , 94) diat a dis tinction should be made between the hormos (protected har bor) and the actual settlement of Leptis. T h e latter lay at the
348
LEPTIS MAGNA
mouth of the Wadi Lebda from at least sometime in tlie sixth century BCE. By the early second century (accepting the con ventional dating of tire Stadiasmus), however, Leptis still lacked a port and was named Neapolis, "new town." T h e Stadiasmus refers to another site called Cape Hermaios at a distance of 1 5 stades (about 2.7 km or 1.5 mi.) west of Nea polis, and this clearly points to the promontory on which modern Homs is situated. Although silting has occurred at Homs, a small harborage still exists on the east side of tlie promontory, offering protection from onshore northerly winds. A port, even a small one at this point, also avoids the problem of seasonal floods descending from the Wadi Lebda, a feature of late autumn and winter. Some part of the early history of Leptis is perhaps to be sought here, par ticularly if the name Hermaios is interpreted as cognate with the modern Homs. This hypothesis has gained greater credibility from recent discoveries to die west of die present waterfront at Homs. Excavations for a new building in 1972 revealed tlie very extensive remains of a villa belonging to die mid second century CE (Di Vita, 1974). The evident prosperity of tlie villa with its substantial bath suite is a striking reflection of the wealth at the disposal of the Leptitane upper class. More relevant in this context, however, was the discovery of a harbor mole sealed by the remains of tire villa. It was sug gested that tlie remains of tlie quay with its stone mooring rings were of Hellenistic date. The position of the quayside below the later villa clearly testified to the Homs waterfront having been extended in an eastward direction, perhaps as the result of silting. The date of the mole seems to be before the first century CE, but more precise dating within the Hel lenistic period is lacking. Discussion of the chronology in volved depends on the use of mooring stones made of Ras el-Hammam limestone, an argument that Antonino Di Vita (1969, p. 196) also deploys in his proposed late Hellenistic dating of the layout of the Forum Vetus at Leptis proper. Despite the lack of precision, the sequence of development appears to coincide with the situation implied in the Sta diasmus. Until tlie Hellenistic period Leptis lacked adequate port facilities and relied on use of the hormos available at Homs, where some early Phoenician evidence might rea sonably be expected to emerge. Whether this (material) is forthcoming remains to be seen, but the reference to Leptis as Neapolis leads to the inference that there was a change of emphasis from Homs to Lebda nearly 3 km (2 mi.) to the west at the mouth of the Wadi. The next question concerns the possible identification of the early settlement. Study of aerial photographs of Leptis shows quite clearly that north of tlie old forum important evidence survives towards the triangular promontory ulti mately adapted into part of the Severan harbor (Jones, 1989). On morphological grounds the jumbled houses and courtyards visible under a covering of sand may date at least to tlie period of the late Punic settlement. The detailed plan
of the buildings therefore suggests that a small but appar ently early quarter of Leptis survives and needs to be incor porated into our view of the evolution of tlie city. This reconstruction accords with the picture implied by the Stadiasmus for at least early second century BCE. A S Di Vita (1974, p. 229) has argued, Homs may have remained the major transshipment port until the little understood har bor development at the mouth of the Wadi Lebda epigraphically attested under Nero (Bartoccini, 1958). T h e devel opment of the core of Leptis is known primarily from the evidence of tlie Punic graves located under the stage area of the Roman theater (where the earliest evidence is a Corin thian sherd of c. 500 BCE) and from a deep sondage through the floor of the old forum (Carter, 1965). T h e results are of great interest, but the development of ceramic smdies now make it difficult to accept wholly either the attribution of the various phases to relatively strict chronological dates or the precise dating of the pottery. Although the early history of this great coastal city still contains many gaps in our knowledge, its development in the early and later Imperial period is uniquely well under stood in North Africa. There are two reasons: the manifest changes in the layout and extent of the city, and the wealth of epigraphic and architectural evidence from the early Im perial period (31 BCE-69 CE) when the Punic aristocracy was first assimilated into the Roman provincial system. T w o centuries later Septimius Severus, a son of one of Leptis Magna's greatest provincial families, became tire emperor of the Roman world and founded a brief African dynasty.
LEPTIS MAGNA.
West gate, Municipal
Art Resource, NY)
Palace. Roman period. (SEPI
LEPTIS MAGNA These two groups from the early and later empire contrib uted to the architectural growth of the city in a variety of magnificent buildings. Their excavation was undertaken by Italian archaeologists in die years when Tripolitania was un der Italian control 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 4 2 . Italian involvement has con tinued along with British survey work, and Libyan archae ologists are continuing to uncover the great amphitheater to tire west. The early core of the town appears to have centered, as one might expect, around the old forum area. Harbor facil ities on site must initially have been the foreshore at tire mouth of the Wadi Lebda which was protected in part by an offshore island. T h e three temples of the old forum lay on the north side, and opposite, across the square, lay a curia, or council chamber, and a basilica. The date of the formal paving of the area is disputed but the visible paving probably dates to the Augustan period. T h e changes of alignment in the principal spine road to the southwest reflect the development of tlie city. T h e arch of Tiberius stands at tlie end of tire first section close to three remarkable build ings built by local benefactors in the early Julio-Claudian period. T h e market with its two circular kiosks was con structed by the rich patron Annobal Rufus in 9-8 BCE. He also was responsible for tlie construction of tlie famous the ater in 1 - 2 CE. T h e suucture comprises the usual semicir cular auditorium or cavea fronting a stage through whose ornamental backdrop (scaenae frons) an arch revealed a view of an integrated temple to the northeast. This small temple to the deified Roman emperors was constructed through the patronage of AnnobaPs relative Iddibal Tapapius and ded icated in 43 CE. Between the two major buildings discussed above lay die site of the so-called Chalcidicurn, a long, col umned portico behind which lay a rectangular open space surrounded by porticos, possibly to serve as anodier market. It was dedicated by Iddibal Caphada Aemilius in 1 1 - 1 2 . T h e names of the early imperial pattons are of particular interest; they demonstrated the cultural assimilation of Roman nomenclaUire by a local aristocracy that retained latinized ver sions of their Libyo-Punic names. These three spectacular buildings sprung up early in die first century CE presumably in areas where development was still possible at the time. T h e relationship of the central core of tlie city to the pre sumably later city walls is not understood at present. The harbor area, as an inscription (Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, no. 3 4 1 ) implies, underwent some formaliza tion during the reign of tlie emperor Nero. T h e principal developments, however, occurred further west along the coast at the site of the now eroded circus and the magnificent amphitheater, which is slowly emerging from its covering of sand. By tlie turn of tlie century the layout of the Chalci dicurn and the adjacent arch of Trajan shows that the road to the southwest ran past a formalized street grid of dwelling blocks to the crossroads with the main east-west route along the North African coast. It is evident from both the original
LEPTIS MAGNA.
The scaena, ruins of a Roman theater.
349
(SEF/Art Re
source, N Y )
Italian survey and subsequent examination of air photo graphs that the northwestern coastal area beyond the city walls with an impressive east gate was extensively occupied. Although most of the evidence has been destroyed by tlie growth of modern-day Homs, beyond the Hunting Baths of second-century CE date with their famous surviving murals there lay a series of major warehouses and storerooms on either side of die road to Tripoli. These sttucttires undoubt edly represent storage areas for agricultural products, no tably massive amounts of olive oil from the Gebel hinterland awaiting shipment in Tripolitanian-style amphorae to tlie markets of southern Italy and above Rome where Tripolitanian oil may have accounted for up to 10 percent of die market. The first imperial intervention in this setting was tlie con struction across the southeastern quarter of the residential area of the magnificent baths of Hadrian, with a formal pa laestra, or colonnaded courtyard, to the nortii. Still greater remodeling was to come in the last decade of the second century when tlie emperor Septimius Severus ( 1 9 3 - 2 1 1 ) glorified his native town with extensive renovation. A fourway arch with scenes depicting his state visit to his native town formalized the junction of tlie spine road with tlie great coastal highway. From tlie eastern side of tlie Hadrianic baths a colonnaded stteet was constructed northeast toward the harbor area. Partly to disguise the Wadi Lebda at this point a magnificent nymphaeum opposite the Hadrianic baths acted as a backdrop overlooking a small piazza at a change in the angle of the colonnaded street. Along its
350
LEVANT
northern side Severus's architect cleverly inserted a huge forum and a separate basilica integrated within an irregular area of former streets. At its southeast gate die forum was focused on the Severan temple to the imperial cult, and an entrance through a series of shop facades led directiy into the great basilica completed in 213 CE by Severus's son, the emperor Caracalla (198-217). Its two-story construction and clerestory roof led to its eventual conversion into a Christian cathedral, and it can be argued that this magnifi cent building had a seminal influence on the later develop ment of the basilican church form. The interior retained not only the twin culmination (with its dedicatory inscription along the entablature) but also the original pilasters with scroll decoration containing largely Bacchic scenes. The sculptural techniques evident in the forum and the inhabited scrolls of the basilica were generally thought to reflect the school of Aphrodisias in western Anatolia, but isotopic analysis of marble types imported to Leptis Magna along with much Egyptian granite has broadened the pic ture. Although the Proconnesian origin of the inhabited scrolls in the basilica has been confirmed, the origins of the other marbles used have now been shown to include ex amples from Dokimeion, Naxos, and Thasos/Aliki around the Aegean and Carrara in Italy. Furthermore, it has been argued that the layout of the Severan buildings flanking the colonnaded street extended in the intended original form farther north toward the Flavian temple. Whether this ar rangement was an integral part of the original project is not certain but, if it was, another element needs to be recognized in the already massive urban remodeling brought about un der the brief star of the African emperor and his sons (Walda and Walker, 1984, p. 8 1 ; 1988, p. 55; Di Vita, 1982, p. 84). The single largest development in the program was un doubtedly the construction of the Severan harbor around the mouth of the Wadi Lebda. A mole was constructed link ing the area of the promontory beyond the old forum with the offshore island on the tip of which a lighthouse was built. T h e southern mole contained a second lighthouse and a temple of Portuninus together with a range of warehouses flanking the excavated quayside overlooking the now silted interior. Relatively little work has been devoted to the latest stages of Byzantine Leptis but there is a hint of possible urban continuity from the recovery of seventh-century CE coinage from recent examination of the Flavian temple area. The much-reduced Byzantine wall circuit is generally believed to have encircled the back of the old forum temples and the basilica and then to have crossed the wadi to the south mole. T h e implications of this reduction may have to be rethought in the light of the possible identification of an outer, T shaped arm on the eastern side of the Severan harbor. If this extension was in use in the Byzantine period and if the inner harbor perhaps substantially silted, then it would force a considerable adjustment of our view of the inhabited area
available within the Byzantine wall circuit. This question, like so many in the vast unexplored area of Tripolitania's greatest city, remains for future decades to unravel. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bartoccini, Renato. II Porto Romano di Ijiptis Magna. Rome, 1958. Bianchi Bandinelli, Ranuccio, et al. The Buried City: Excavations at Leptis Magna. New York, 1966. Birley, Anthony R. Seplimius Severus: The African Emperor. 2d ed. New Haven, 1988. Caputo, Giacomo. // Tealro Augusteo di Leptis Magna: Scavo e restauro, 1937-1951. Rome, 1987. Carter, Theresa H. "Western Phoenicians atLepcis Magna." American Journal of Archaeology 69 (1965): 1 2 3 - 1 3 2 . Degrassi, Nevio. "II mercato Romano di Lepcis Magna." Quademi di Archeologia della Libia 2 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 27-70. Di Vita, Antonino. "Le date di fondazione di Leptis e di Sabratha sulla base dell'indagine archaeologica e l'eparchia cartaginese d'Africa." In Hommages a Marcel Renard, vol. 3, edited by Jacqueline Bibauw, pp. 196-202. Collection Latomus, 103. Brussels, 1969. Di Vita, Antonino. "Un passo della Stadiasmos tes magales thalasses ed il porto ellenistico di Lepcis Magna." In Melanges de philosophic de litterature el d'histoire ancienne offerls a Pierre Boyance, pp. 2 2 9 249. Rome, 1974. Di Vita, Antonino. "II progetto originario del forumnovum Severianum a Leptis Magna." Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts, Abteilung Romische 89 (1982): 84-106. Di Vita-Evrard, Ginette. "Municipium Flavium Lepcis Magna." Bul letin Archeologique du Comitedes Travaux Hisloriques, n.s. 1 7 B (1984): 197-210. Floriani Squarciapino, Maria. Leptis Magna. Basel, 1966. Floriani Squarciapino, Maria. Sculture del Foro Severiano di Leptis Magna. Rome, 1974. Goodchild, Richard G., and J. B. Ward-Perkins. "The Romans and Byzantine Defences of Lepcis Magna." Papers of the British School at Rome 21 (1953): 42-73. Haynes, Denys E. L. An Archaeological and Historical Guide to the PreIslamic Antiquities of Tripolitania. Tripoli, 1959. Jones, G. D. B„ and Robert Kronenburg. "The Severan Buildings at Lepcis Magna." Libyan Studies 19 (1988): 4 3 - 5 3 . Jones, G. D. B. "The Development of Air Photography in North Af rica." In Into the Sun: Essays on Air Photography in Archaeology in Honour of Derrick Riley, edited by David L. Kennedy, pp. 25-43. Sheffield, 1989. Torelli, Mario. "Per una storia della classe dirigente di Leptis Magna." Rendiconti Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Classe di Scienze Morali 28 (1974): 3 7 7 - 4 1 0 . Walda, I-L, and S. Walker. "The Art and Architecture of Lepcis Magna: Marble Origins by Isotopic Analysis." Libyan Studies 1 5 (1984): 8 1 92. Walda, H., and S. Walker. "Isotopic Analysis of Marble from Lepcis Magna: Revised Interpretations." Libyan Studies 19 (1988): 55-59. Ward-Perkins, J. B. The Severan Buildings of Lepcis Magna. London, 1993Whittaker, C. R. "The Western Phoenicians: Colonisation and Assim ilation." Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 20 (1974): 58-79. G. D. B. JONES
LEVANT. T h e regional designation Levant is derived from the Latin levare, "to raise," the participle being levans
LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES (-antis); it is similar in derivation and use to "to orient," for "the lands to the east" (from the European perspective). T h e term is sometimes employed to designate the lands around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean—tire Near/ Middle East, as opposed to the Far East. T h e Levant would thus include modern Asiatic Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and possibly Egypt (but not necessarily Cyprus). T h e term Levant was popular in the nineteenth century in such fields as history, geography, economics, political sci ence, and ethnography, especially in French scholarship. More recently, however, "Levantine" has taken on negative connotations, like "Byzantine," to suggest the mysterious mind, bureaucratic intrigue, and unsavory business prac tices of an Oriental world inferior to the West. Accordingly, the term has been all but abandoned, except in a few very recent attempts to revive it in Anglo-Saxon Near Eastern archaeology. There the term Southern Levant is sometimes used alternatively to refer to ancient Syria-Palestine. Such usage among younger archaeologists may be encouraged by the adoption of Levant as the name for the annuals of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. [See also Syria-Palestine.] WILLIAM G. DEVER
3 51
War II he returned to Rome, where he taught the history of Islamic institutions until 1956, when he retired. He was a member of the most prominent academies in Europe and America; he received a doctorate honoris causa at the uni versities of Paris (Sorbonne), Algiers, and Jerusalem, and he received Lidzbarsld's prize for Semitic epigraphy. His name and image appear on a medal awarded by the University of California to students of Islam. BIBLIOGRAPHY Garbini, Giovanni, ed. Giorgio Levi Delia Vida nel cenlenario delta nascita, 1886-1967. Studi Semitici, n.s. 4. Rome, 1988. Includes a bib liography of works by Levi Delia Vida. Gordon, Cyrus H. The Pennsylvania Tradition of Semitics. Atlanta, 1986. See especially pages 62-64. Michclini Tocci, Franco. "La storiografia orientalistica in Italia fra otto e novecento." In La cultura slorica italiana tra otto e novecento, edited by M. Martirano and E. Massimilla, vol. 2, pp. 1 1 3 - 1 4 4 . Naples, 1991. Moscati, Sabatino. Ricordo di Giorgio Ijtvi Delia Vida. Orientis Antiqui Collectio, 7. Rome, 1968. With a bibliography of Levi Delia Vida's works. Tessitore, Fulvio. "Giorgio Levi Delia Vida nella storiografia italiana tra otto e novecento." Introduction to Giorgio Levi Delia Vida, Arabi ed Ebrei nella storia, edited by Francesco Gabrieli and Fulvio Tessi tore, pp. 1 1 - 5 6 . Biblioteca di Saggistica, 17. Naples, 1984. MARIA GIULIA AMADASI Guzzo
LEVI DELLA VIDA, GIORGIO
(i886-1967),
Semitist and Islamist, called "one of the greatest Orientalists of our times" (Moscati, 1968, p. 1 ) . Levi Delia Vida's main works include the publication of Syriac and Arabic manu scripts, the edition of important Western Semitic inscrip tions (e.g., from Karatepe in Turkey and all the Punic in scriptions from Tripolitania, North Africa) and historical syntheses of tire ancient Semitic and Islamic worlds. His an alytical works display profound erudition, subtle intuition, and an exemplary philological method; in his work as a his torian he combined positivistic methodology with die ide alistic tendencies of contemporary philosophy and histori ography. Levi Delia Vida had been a pupil of Ignazio Guidi at the University of Rome. His collaborator, as early as 1 9 1 1 , in his translation of the Arabic sources for Annali dell' Islam was Leone Caetani. In 1 9 1 3 Levi Delia Vida became pro fessor of Arabic at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in N a ples and in 1 9 1 6 was a professor of Semitic languages at the University of Turin; in 1920 he succeeded Guidi in teaching Hebrew and Semitics at Rome. In 1 9 3 1 he refused, with only eleven other Italian professors, to swear allegiance to the fascist government and was consequentiy removed from Iris office. From 1932 to 1939 he was employed in the Vatican Library, charged with studying Arabic and Syriac manu scripts, but as a result of political and religious persecution, he was forced to leave Italy. H e went to the United States, where he taught Semitics at the University of Pennsylvania until 1945 (and again in 1 9 4 6 - 1 9 4 7 ) . At the end of World
LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES. The emergence of writing in the ancient Near East, shortly before 3000 BCE, resulted in two kinds of texts, as the Mesopotamian evidence shows: groups of records drawn up for administrative pur poses and texts used in training scribes. T h e former are usu ally designated archival texts; the latter, commonly called school texts, in time formed the contents of libraries. Archival texts were drawn up by scribes/managers as an aid to memory and proof of transactions, to take stock of goods and personnel, to register transfers, and to meet the demands of accountability. Eventually, contracts, letters, and a variety of reports and notes were included, written to control economic and political processes and kept for con sultation. Such collections, unearthed during excavations, are called archives. School texts, reflecting tire complexity of cuneiform script, comprise a variety of sign and word lists together with student exercises. [See Cuneiform.] In the middle of the third millennium school texts were joined by tire earliest literary texts (e.g., hymns, incantations, prov erbs), written by and for the scribes responsible for the ar chives and usually found in the same locales. They attest the scholarly scribal activity that eventually developed libraries: collections of nonadministrative, scholarly, and traditional texts written and collected for educational purposes and professional needs. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] They keep turning up in houses (schools and dwellings of master scribes), temples, and even palaces, always con-
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nected with die literati who collected and used them and who usually lived or worked in the places the texts were found. Archives. The definition of archives as collections of rec ords accumulated during the period of a particular admin istrative task performed by a person or institution may be too broad. Some would add to it "performed ex officio and still present with those who made and used them." Others would even wish to reserve the term for "a collection or repository of records no longer in use but preserved for their historical value and stored under special conditions." In the ancient Near East, such restrictions were usually ignored. Coherent bodies of administrative and legal records from large private households are in principle no different from those created by officials of a palace or temple—both of which also functioned as a large household. [See Palace.] Many archives have been found in situ, left behind when a disaster struck the building in which they were kept and used. A convincing example is the archive in room L 2769 of palace G at Ebla (c. 2400 BCE) . [See Ebla.] Thousands of tablets had been stored on wooden shelving along walls that collapsed. The room was only accessible from adjoining room L 2875, a typical scriptorium, with low benches along the walls on which tablets could be laid out. [See Tablet.] Similar discoveries have been made elsewhere: in the houses of Assyrian traders in Kanes (Anatolia, nineteenth century BCE), in the residence of Ur-Utu at Sippar/Amnanum (Tell ed-Der, destroyed c. 1630 BCE), and in the house of Shilwatesshub at Nuzi (house A on the northeastern mound, destroyed c. 1 3 3 0 BCE). [See Kanes; Sippar; Der, Tell ed-; Nuzi.] Many complete or partial archives have been found in secondary locations: old records, having lost their value, might be discarded or put to secondary use as fill for walls and mud-brick benches or for leveling floors (not surprising in a country without building stone). Reconstruction and terracing suggest that parts of older buildings were displaced together with their contents, including archives. T h e bulk of the archival texts of the Temple of Inanna at Nippur (UrIII period, twenty-first century BCE) were discovered in distinct pockets in the fill of the foundation platform of a temple (?) erected there two thousand years later. [See Nippur.] Hun dreds of records of the same period were discovered at Ur, stacked five to six layers deep under the pavement of a build ing dated to the Kassite period (c. 1300 BCE). [See Ur; Kas sites.] Archival texts from the period of Assyrian domination of Mari were used as fill for mud-brick benches built in the palace of the next king, Zimrilim (eighteenth century BCE). [See Mari.] The so-called Persepolis fortification tablets (Achaemenid period) by tiieir very name perpetuate their secondary use as fill for walls. [See Persepolis.] Remains of archives and coherent files have even been recognized among the oldest administrative records known, those from level IV at Uruk (before 3000 BCE), where they
had been deposited as part of the general debris in trash pits or used as architectural fill. [See Uruk-Warka.] Such hoards may be tteated as archives if they exhibit enough coherence, but as random parts of larger collections, they must be used with caution for historical reconstructions. T h e best exam ple of an archive as a respository of records no longer in use was found in the archival building of the "tablet hill" at Girsu (Telloh). [See Girsu and Lagash.] The archive origi nally contained some thirty thousand tablets dating to the end of the third millennium, they were carefully filed, in chronological order, in five or six layers on benches in two adjacent galleries. Such huge archives and repositories must have been restricted to large institutions, where, it may be assumed, administrative continuity and storage facilities were accompanied by qualified scribes who respected old records. Even when violent destruction disturbed an original locale and scattered tablets, die findspot and the contents of the records can help to identify the source. Records dealing mainly with land transfer, dating to the fourteenth century BCE, were found in debris filling die area of court IV in the southern part of the palace at Ugarit (destroyed c. 1 1 8 0 BCE) . Found in the higher levels of the debris, they proved to have fallen from an upper story and had to be distinguished from records dating to the second half of the thirteenth century BCE found in the same area near the floors (particularly in archive rooms nos. 30 and 3 1 ) . Upper stories could of course also have held current archives, as was the case at Masat Hoyiik (Tapigga, with a Hittite palace), Mari, Nineveh, and Hattusa/Bogazkoy (in building E of the citadel, where they had fallen down the slope); [See Nineveh; Bogazkoy.] Another source of confusion is archives having been transferred in antiquity. Tablet labels with Babylonian dates show that the diplomatic correspondence of Zimrilim of Mari was moved to a room (no. 1 1 5 ) adjoining the palace's interior court, where it was inspected by the scribes of the conqueror Hammurabi. In die wake of building new capitals or palaces, die chancery archives of Assyrian ldngs were moved, as was deduced by Simo Parpola (1983) from the sometimes remarkable location and composition of certain archives. Such operations imply selection because the col lections exhibit gaps. All the examples mentioned thus far concern cuneiform archives. There is no reason to doubt that these observations are also valid for archives consisting of records on papyrus, leather, or wood. [See Papyrus.] Destruction (with confla gration) and climate have almost completely robbed history of such collections. They can only be inferred from the ex istence of tile clay sealings or bullae originally attached to certain records that have survived. [See Seals.] This applies also to the hundreds of wax-coated wooden writing boards (codices) used in Mesopotamian chanceries and libraries, whose existence is known from colophons and library rec ords. Hoards of bullae with royal seals have been discovered
LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES at Hattusa/Bogazkoy, in the so-called western building at Nisantepe, in building D at Biiyiikkale, and in the City of David, Jerusalem, once attached to official documents. Sealed bullae, discovered in Judah from about 600 BCE are considered to be remnants of a burned archive (Avigad, 1986), and the numerous bullae found in an archival cham ber with extensive shelving, room 6 1 , of Sennacherib's pal ace at Nineveh are the remains of an archive containing rec ords on papyrus originating in Egypt and the Levant. Only under special circumstances have parts of archives not written on clay survived. From ancient South Arabia records in the shape of inscribed wooden sticks are known that survived in the dry climate (Ryckmans et a l , 1994). T h e so-called Samaria papyri (fourth century BCE) were discov ered in a cave in Wadi ed-Daliyeh near the Jordan River, (Cross, 1969) and several hoards, including the Babatha ar chive (c. 1 0 0 CE), carefully packed in a leather bag, have been discovered in caves west of the Dead Sea (Yadin, 1 9 7 1 ) . [See Dead Sea Scrolls.] Such hoards had been carried to refuges in inhospitable and dry places. A few hoards of inscribed potsherds (ostraca) are also known that could be called archives: the Samaria ostraca (eighth century BCE), tile Lachish ostraca (c. 600 BCE), and the Arad ostraca (i.e., the archive of Elyashib, c. 600 BCE). [See Samaria Ostraca; Lachish Inscriptions; Arad Inscriptions.] T h e first consist of administrative bookings (later digested in a papyrus led ger?); the second and third comprise small groups of letters. The following observations apply almost exclusively to clay tablets because of the lack of substantial archives of noncuneiform texts found in situ. Storage and filing. A small, private archive could be stored in a jar or basket in a residence. Large institutions had special archival rooms for the systematic storage of rec ords. Large archives, with valuable and sensitive records, were kept in sealed rooms and admission was restricted (ex officio or by mandate). Special committees were appointed to enter die sealed rooms of absent or dead Assyrian traders in Kanes' (Veenhof, 1986, p. 1 2 ) . The location of archival rooms was often dictated by practical considerations: ar chives for registering regular deliveries and expenditures near die entrance of a palace (e.g., the eastern and western archives of the palace at Ugarit); the archive of "the Icing's meal" in the kitchen area of the palace (e.g., at Mari); a chancery archive near the rooms where the Icing and his counselors met; tablets with international treaties in the ar chival room of a temple, where they had been deposited before the gods who had to guarantee them (e.g., at Hattusa), [See Ugarit.] This implies that large institutions usually had several archival rooms for different spheres of domestic and international activity: agriculture, industry, husbandry, commerce, the military. At Archaic Uruk (Eanna, level IV, area of die Red Temple) "substantially coherent and discrete administrative . . . archives, that is, tablets from an individual accounting . , , unit" have been
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observed (Englund, 1994, p. I4ff.). Practical considerations may explain archival decentralization—for example, in the case of production centers (for textiles, leather, metals, and even agricultural production) outside temples and palaces, such as the Isin Craft Archive (c. 2000 BCE, with nearly a thousand records). This may account for the absence of ar chives in Early Dynastic temples (however, that may also be because such patrimonial organizations knew only a limited separation of official and private spheres, and thus admin istrative archives are to be found in the houses of its high officials). Three methods of storage are usually distinguished: a con tainer system, an open-shelf system, and a pigeonhole sys tem. Many written sources mention jars, baskets, boxes out of wood or reed, trays and leather bags. T h e first are found regularly in excavations. Some containers even have an in scription identifying the contents, as was the case with some of the ten jars holding the archive of the regular offerings of the Assur temple (c. 1 1 0 0 BCE, found in storeroom 3 ' , under the responsibility of Ezbu-leshir). Traces of baskets and boxes are more elusive, but tiieir use can be deduced from the remains of wood (Gasche, 1989, p. 30ft.; Stein, 1993, p. 24ff.) and metal (copper nails in the archival room of Shilwa-Tesshub at Nuzi). T h e use of shelves is well attested in Mesopotamia and elsewhere (at Ugarit and Hattusa; in buildings A and K at Buytikkale [Veenhof, 1986, p. 1 3 ] ) . Along three walls of the main archival room in the palace at Ebla were clear traces of where triple shelving had been fixed to the walls. Mud-brick benches for storing containers hold ing tablets may have been an alternative to shelves and were suitable for laying out tablets for inspection. Room 1 7 of UrUtu's residence (see above) was equipped with benches. The pigeonhole system was used in the library room of the Nabu temple at Khorsabad, in Sennacherib's palace at Nin eveh (room 6 1 , used for papyrus records), and in the NeoBabylonian Temple of Shamash at Sippar (room 3 5 5 , with fifty-six niches built of mud brick, wood, and reeds, in three tiers along three walls). Less sophisticated were brick boxes used as filing cabinets (in the scribal office of the northwest palace at Kalhu). Tablets in large archives could be classified by format, size, and style: there are links between the physical appear ance and the contents of records (e.g., multi- or single col umned, square, round or oblong, with or without a sealed envelope). In the U r I I I period, for example, so-called round tablets are used in Lagash for recording the assessment of fields and (their) expected yield (Veenhof, 1986, p. 1 4 ) . From the seventh century BCE onward, key words, sum maries, dates, and names were written in Aramaic on the edges for quick identification. Containers and stacks of tab lets could be identified by their labels, in use since the third millennium and particularly common during the third dy nasty of Ur. The labels were usually attached to baskets, trays, and boxes with tablets called pisan-dub-ba, "tablet"
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(dub) basket (pisan) in Sumerian (Veenhof, 1986, p. i6ff.). The texts written on them identify the subject, transaction, occasion, date (they frequently cover an accounting period of one month or one year), and place of the group of rec ords. Unfortunately, almost all of them (their number ap proaches five hundred) lack an archaeological context, so they cannot be linked to particular files. The variety of forms bears witness to systems with different, at times ad hoc cri teria of classification. Some labels, moreover, may be trans port rather than filing or storage labels. Clay bullae, with seal impressions and short inscriptions are also used. Old Assyrian traders used them also.to identify records by pro venience, format (sealed or not), type (letters, copies), and subject matter, frequently adding personal names. Contents. Archives differ widely as to scope, size, and institutional setting. Archives of great institutions may cover various areas and levels of administrative activity, such as production (agriculture, husbandry, crafts), trade, foreign relations (gifts, tribute, booty), jurisdiction, personnel man agement, the army, cult. The huge archive at Drehem (Puzrish-Dagan, Ur III period), however, only registered, pains takingly, the delivery and disbursement of livestock in the public sphere. The so-called customs archive from Mari consisted only of letters of clearance received by traders en tering Mari's territory upon payment of an import duty. T h e letters were submitted to the overseer of the traders upon tlie latter's arrival in the city. Private persons and families usually kept a single archive, covering many activities. This could result in large holdings, with at times more than a thousand records (Old Assyrian traders in Kanes [Veenhof, 1986, p. 9, n. 33], the Tehip-tilla family in Nuzi [Maidman, 1979], the Murashil firm at Nippur [Stolper, 1985]). Large archives of high officials can be a mixture of records re ceived or kept ex officio and those bearing on private affairs. That of Shamash-hazir, an official of King Hammurabi of Babylon in Larsa charged with the allotment and adminis tration of crown land, contained more than a hundred letters of tire lung's, as well as his wife's, correspondence. The busi ness reflected in tlie huge archive of the chief lamentation priest (Ur-Utu) of the goddess Annunitum at Sippar/Amnanum (see above) also reflects his responsibilities as ad ministrator of the temple. Archives of expert scribes and scholars, risen to the ranks of senior officials, may contain private archival records in combination with public records and a personal library of scholarly texts, as was tire case with that of Rap'anu at Ugarit. Administrative records of institutions, which aim at con trolling the movement of goods and persons, frequently ex hibit standardized formats, styles, and layouts. They com prise both a small tablet for registering single, daily events and monthly and yearly summaries and balanced ac counts—ledgers drawn up for the purpose of accountability. The transactions recorded are deliveries, transfers, expen ditures, distributions, and accounting. There are always lists
of personnel (receipt of rations, wages, fields), of material in stock (inventories), of special expenditures (offerings, gifts), as well as letter orders (as proof of disbursements). Such administrative archives usually cover a limited pe riod—one or two generations at most—with a clear numer ical preponderance of records of the last few years before their abandonment or destruction. Many records, especially of daily transactions, after having been consulted could be discarded, stored separately or "erased" (with red lines over tire tablets, as at Mari); legal documents (notes of debt) in due time could be "broken" or "killed" (in the language of the texts). Rules for discarding documents as such are not known and may have varied from one administration to an other. Certain records, such as a comprehensive yearly ac count, cadastral texts, and some legal documents, were kept longer, for later reference. The size of a public archive is also conditioned by the measure of bureaucratic control, which of course was never complete and showed remarkable fluctuations from deliberate measures and historical devel opments. Increased standardization and central coirtrol are already attested during tire Old Akkadian period (NaramSin) and the Ur III period (from the middle of the reign of Shulgi, c. 2050 BCE). A royal chancery archive, such as that from the Neo-As syrian period, had a wide scope: political correspondence, legal documents (treaties, grants, conveyances), records concerning the military (conscription, booty, equipment), official religion (expenditures for the cult, building of tem ples), and the court (royal family, harem, courtiers, officers, specialists, lists of disbursements of luxury items such as wine, oil, and garments). A variety of reports supplied in formation on military campaigns, conquered areas, produc tion and works, and on ominous features relevant to tlie royal house (signs on earth and in the heavens, dreams, prophecies). Such palace archives could also contain private records of palace officials, either because they kept them in their offices, or because the king wished to exercise control over powerful and potentially dangerous individuals, such as officers of the guard, royal charioteers, and those con trolling the harem (Parpola, 1983). Royal archives usually also contain selections of historical state documents, such as earlier royal correspondence. Thus, such archives could take on the character of a royal reference library. Institutional and state archives are a mine of information for tlie historian interested in recovering a past administra tion's main features, discovering how power was wielded, and the status, duties, and careers of tlie main officials. Dated records allow the reconstruction of historical events, and the statistical evaluation of large archives make quan titative approximations possible. T h e king's obligations to ward the cult and the temples make such archives a source for the study of religion and of the king's role in it. Private archives contain a variety of records reflecting the activities of their owners as traders, landowners, priests, and
LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES officials. Among these mere are nearly always letters, both those received in function (administrative duties, contrac tual links with the authorities) and those of a private nature. Letters were essential for overland traders (see above) and make up half of the records of die Old Assyrian traders. Because of their informative and virtual legal value (sealed message tablets contained orders and authorizations) archi val copies were kept. In Babylonia, recipients of such letters were advised "to preserve them as proof of my order" and the same may be true of the Sumerian letter orders of die Ur III period. [See Sumerian; Sumerians.] Private archives always contain a number of long-term legal documents, such as marriage, adoption, and inheritance contracts and especially title deeds of real property. They were carefully preserved in their sealed envelopes and may go back several generations (some even more than two hundred years). They were die core of the small archive of Silli-Ishtar from Kutalla, which he left wrapped in reed mats and covered by mud bricks when he had to flee from his house in about 1740 BCE, never to return. When Ur-Utu's house in Sippar/ Amnanum was destroyed by fire, someone tried to salvage a box of such records but lost them on the way out and they were found before the door to the court (Gasche, 1989, p . 32 with pi. 1 2 . 1 ) . Lawsuits over property rights were occasions to consult and produce tablets, and verdicts confirming die rights they embodied became part of such archives. When lost, they could be "revived" and rewritten on the basis of oral testi mony before the judges. When real property was sold, such earlier title deeds—which contained valid descriptions of the property—had to be handed over to the new owner. This explains the presence of seemingly out-of-place records found in private archives. They might also have contained contracts ceded, given as pledge, or deposited there for safe keeping by friends. Also discovered in private archives are small hoards of records belonging to junior members or em ployees of a household (who had no houses of their own). Without careful excavation and recording (many private ar chives have been dug illicitly), such data and links are lost. Excavated archives drat did not undergo conservation pro cedures (numbers lost), were poorly published (ignoringthe links between textual and archaeological data), or were di vided among various museums (e.g., archives from Assur, Nippur, Nuzi, Ur) are responsible for the loss of essential information. Well-analyzed private archives are a mine of information for social history. T h e large variety of legal contracts and judicial records are the main source of what is known of ancient law. Official archives as a rule contained few con tracts; only in certain periods and cases (notably records dealing with the transfer of real estate, especially when en cumbered with servicies and duties) were private contracts registered or abstracted by the authorities. Official courts of law occasionally kept copies of verdicts (e.g., the collection
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of tablets with final verdicts passed by city governors in the Ur III period). However, the general rule was that those verdicts and the files to which they belonged would be given to the winning party to store. T h e enormous variety of let ters sheds light on many aspects of daily life, without which what is known of family life, trade, and personal religion would have been rather scant. Such letters, moreover, are a prime source for studying ancient languages, especially id ioms. Libraries. Collections of scholarly and traditional texts written and used by scribes during and after their training developed into libraries. T h e texts were also used in training pupils, which explains why such collections, especially in early periods, are frequently found in or near the archival rooms where the scribes worked (e.g., at Shuruppak/Fara, Abu Salabikh, Ebla). [See Fara; Abu Salabikh.] Expert scribes, witii specific duties and interests and perhaps more free time, eventually began writing down or composing ad ditional texts to serve their personal needs, such as ritual, divinatory, liturgical, medical, and astrological texts and in cantations not part of the school's standard curriculum. Some worked as master scribes in a palace (chancery) or temple, others earned tiieir living by running a school in their house, where a mixture of school and professional texts and private archival records is usually discovered. Schools in a capital city may have had links with the chancery (where official inscriptions and royal hymns must have been com posed). This may explain why some royal texts (hymns, letters, inscriptions—especially of the kings of Ur III and Isin) found their way into the curriculum. When Sumerian disappeared as a spoken and soon after as a written language (after 2000 BCE), it remained indispensable for scholars as the basis of the writing system. [See Writing and Writing Systems.] Schools and scholars devoted a great deal of at tention to copying traditional Sumerian texts, which led to the growth of a kind of standard corpus, eventually arranged in a normative sequence. This corpus, registered by the first lines of compositions in various catalogs, and to a varying degree actually discovered in schools (especially in Nippur), can be considered a ldnd of standard library. Texts outside this corpus, written and kept for specific professional needs (e.g., collections of incantations or omens) could be added. Akkadian compositions (epic and mythical texts, prayers, wisdom texts, historiographic compositions) were com posed, written down, and copied in these schools, but what is known of this Akkadian corpus as part of school and scholarly libraries is more limited. [See Akkadian.] In the following centuries many such libraries are known, usually in the houses or work places of master scribes. Convincing examples have also come to light at Ugarit, discovered in private houses, such as those of Rap'anu (see above), of "the high priest" (Mesopotamian lexical texts, Hurrian texts, mythical and epic texts in the alphabetic cuneiform script of Ugarit, written by the scribe Ili-malku), and of "the
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Hurrian priest" (Hurrian and Ugaritic texts in alphabetic script). [See Hurrian; Ugaritic] Such libraries are also found in temples, where the scholars who wrote and used them worked (e.g., Temple M , at Emar/Meskene on the Middle Euphrates, c. 1200 BCE). [See Emar.] The many divinatory and incantation texts it contained reveal the specialization of its owner, who also had a small sample of literary texts (wisdom. Epic of Gilgamesh, a ballad). The same pattern is observable in Babylonia after the end of the second millen nium BCE. The traditional corpus was by then more or less fixed (the term canonized has been used in this context). Many collections discovered in houses and rooms of temples contain a sampling of this standard corpus, together with more specialized texts (e.g., incantations, divinatory and medical texts). Good examples are the library of the incan tation priest in Assur, the one found in a house in the As syrian town of Huzirina (Sultantepe, four hundred different texts), and that of Anu-belshunu, a scholar attached to the Bit-Resh Temple of Seleucid Uruk. [See Assur.] The closest approximation of a temple library (without an admixture of archival texts) was discovered in 1986 in room 355 of the Shamash temple in Sippar (c. 500 BCE), stored in more than fifty niches in the walls; however, its full size remains un known (Al-Jadir, 1987). The evidence for palace libraries is very limited. The pos tulated library of Tiglath-Pileser I in Assur (c. 1 1 0 0 BCE) has been shown to be the collection of an Assyrian scribal family from the first decades of tire twelfth cenuiry BCE. T h e palace chancery may have incorporated in part some important older state documents (palace edicts, perhaps also the Mid dle Assyrian laws), but that does not make it a library. That important documents were carefully preserved, perhaps as separate collections, is not surprising. A collection of treaty tablets was stored in the great temple at Hattusa, probably because they had been deposited there before the gods who had to watch over tirem. In the same city, in building A of the citadel house, an important collection of older judicial decisions and royal edicts was found registered in a catalog, perhaps in the royal reference library. The only real palace library, and perhaps the only library that fully deserves the name, was created by King Ashurbanipal in about die middle of the seventh century BCE in Nineveh. It was discovered and excavated by Austen Henry Layard and his successors between 1850 and 1 9 3 2 . [See the biography of Layard.] From royal letters and colophons on tablets it is known that the king wished to collect all scholarly and religious texts considered important. Fie may have built on an already existing royal collection, but his own contri butions were very substantial. Scribes were sent out to col lect and copy tablets and, after his victory over Babylonia, hundreds of texts (both on clay tablets and on wax-coated writing boards, including polyptychs) were confiscated from houses and temples. Tablets copied for the library were in scribed with special colophons (some in ink, on existing tab
lets) that state tire king's intentions and identify tirem as royal property. All of these texts are now in tire British M u seum, as the K(uyunjik) Collection. T h e total number of different tablets (many compositions are represented by sev eral—at times up to five or six—copies) has been estimated at around fifteen hundred, with perhaps two hundred thou sand lines of text. T h e collection comprises the whole of the canonical corpus, the stream of tradition. Catalogs (also those listing all the individual tablets in a lengthy series, with tablet numbers and catch lines) and la bels made the library accessible. T h e majority of tablets con sist of magical, medical, divinatory, and ritual texts, indi cating that it focused on what was "good for the kingship," especially texts that would protect tire king and his family against evil. There is also a substantial group of literary texts, however. Notwithstanding all this information supplied by the lung's scribes, it is still not easy to reconstruct the library: in the nineteenth century the rich harvest of texts from at least two palaces and a temple seems to have been mixed up: the southwest palace (rooms 40, 4 1 ) , built by Sennach erib in about 700 BCE, Ashurbanipal's own northwest palace (the successor to the older Succession Palace), and the Temple of Nabu. In addition, there was a certain amount of mixing of archival records with library texts. It seems that the king considered certain royal archival documents worth preserving alongside scholarly and literary texts. This means that, although there is no doubt that Nineveh contained a large, specifically royal library, the border between royal ar chive and royal library must have been somewhat fluid— how fluid can only be established if the originally separate royal text collections can be distinguished. A thorough anal ysis of the libraries of Nineveh remains a task for the future. BIBLIOGRAPHY Al-Jadir, Walid. "Une bibliotheque et ses tablettes." Archeologia 224 (1987): 18-27. Arnaud, Daniel. Recherches au pays d'Astala. Emar VII4: Textes de la bibliotheque. Paris, 1987. Full edition of all texts found in temple M as a sample of a library of a priest-specialist. Avigad, Nahman. Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah: Remnants of a Burnt Archive. Jerusalem, 1986. Charpin, Dominique. Archives familiales et propriite privee en Babylonie ancienne: Etude des documents de "Tell Sifr." Geneva, 1980. Paradig matic analysis of a small private archive of the Old Babylonian period discovered in ancient Kutalla. Courtois, Jacques-Claude. "Ras Shamra (Ugarit). I. Archeologie." In Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible, fasc. 5 2 - 5 3 , cols. 1 2 2 2 - 1 2 8 0 . Paris, 1979. Illustrated overview of the various archives and libraries discovered at Ugarit. Cross, Frank M. "Papyri of the fourth Century B.C. from Daliyeh." In Nezu Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, pp. 4 1 - 6 2 . New York, 1969. Englund, Robert K. Archaic Administrative Texts from Uruk. The Early Campaigns. Archaische Texte aus Uruk, Bd. 5. Berlin, 1944. Edition and analysis of the earliest cuneiform records, from c. 3200 bce. Foster, Benjamin R. "Archives and Record Keeping in Sargonic Mesh
LIBYA opotamia." Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie 72 (1982): 1 - 2 7 . Basic analysis of early archival practice, with good evidence on filing systems. Gasche, Hermann. IM Babylonie au 17c siecle avant noire ere: Approche archeologique, problemes el. perspectives. Ghent, 1989. Chapter 2 de scribes and analyzes the large and carefully excavated archive of UrUtu at Tell ed-Der. Gibson, McGuire, and Robert D. Biggs, eds. The Organisation of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilizations, no. 46. Chicago, 1987. Pays ample attention to administrative archives as instruments of bureacracy, especially during die Ur III period in Mesopotamia. Hunger, Hermann. Babylonische und assyrische Kolophone. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, 2. Kevelaer, 1968. Presents and analyzes the information on the tradition and copying of literary cuneiform tablets incorporated in libraries. Jones, Tom B. "Sumerian Administrative Documents: An Essay." In Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on His Seventieth Birthday, June 7, 1974, edited by Steven J. Lieberman, pp. 4 1 - 6 2 . Chicago, 1976. Krecher, Joachim. "Kataloge, literarische." In Reallexikon der Assyriol ogie und vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 5, pp. 478-485. Berlin, 1976-. Lieberman, Steven J. "Canonical and Official Cuneiform Texts: To wards an Understanding of Assurbanipal's Personal Tablet Collec tion." In Lingering over Words: Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Lit erature in Honor of William L. Moran, edited by Tzvi Abusch et al., pp. 305-336. Atianta, 1990. Maidman, M. P. "A Nuzi Private Archive: Morphological Consider ations." Assur I (1979): 1 7 9 - 1 8 6 . Nissen, Hans J., et al. Archaic Bookkeeping: Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East. Chicago, 1993. Highly informative presentation, in word and image, of the earliest records for describing and interpreting the earliest administrative systems (third millennium BCE) . Oppenheim, A. Leo. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civiliza tion. Chicago, 1964. The introduction and chapter 5 deal with the scribes, tiieir creative efforts, libraries, and recording. Parpola, Simo. "Assyrian Library Records." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 42 (1983): 1 - 3 0 . Presents the records of acquisitions from.'] Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh from confiscations in Babylonia. Posner, Ernst. Archives in the Ancient World. Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 7 2 . Describes and analyzes the data from die ancient Near East in the wider framework of what is known from antiquity. Ryckmans, Jacques, W. W. Miiller, and Y. 'Abdallah. Textcs du Yemen Antique inscrits sur bois. Louvain-la-Neuve, 1994. Shawe, J. "Der alte Vorderorient." In Handbuch der Bibliothekwissenschaft, edited by F. Milkau and G. Leyh, vol. 3, pp. 1-50. Weisbaden, 1955Sigrist, Marcel. Drehem. Bethesda, 1992. Overview and analysis of the largest administrative archive (dealing with livestock) of the Ur III period. Soldt, W. H. van. Studies in the Akkadian of Ugarit: Dating and Gram mar. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, 40. Neukirchen-VMuyn, 1991. A meticulous reconstruction and analysis of die archives and libraries discovered at Ugarit (see pp. 4 7 - 2 3 1 ) . State Archives of Assyria. 10 vols, to date. Helsinki, 1987-. Full edition of die Assyrian state archives discovered at Nineveh, witii introduc tions and translations, including royal correspondence, astrological reports, oracular queries, treaties and loyalty oaths, prophecies, legal transactions, administrative records, and court poetry. Stein, Diana L. Das Archiv des Silva-Tessub, vol. 8, The Seal Impressions. Wiesbaden, 1993. Overview of the various archives discovered at Nuzi as introduction to a detailed analysis of one archive, with the use of texts and seal impressions.
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Stolper, Matthew W. Entrepreneurs and Empire: The Murasu Archive, the Murasu Firm, and Persian Rule in Babylonia. Istanbul, 1985. Veenhof, Klaas R., ed. Cuneiform Archives and Libraries: Papers Read at the soe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden, 4-8 July 1983. Leiden, 1986. Papers devoted to many archives in the ancient Near East by some of the best specialists in the field, with a general intro duction and much bibliographic data. Weitemeyer, Mogens. "Archive and Library Technique in Ancient Mesopotamia." Libri 6 (1956): 2 1 7 - 2 3 8 . Careful study by a profes sional Assyriologist and librarian. Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt against Imperial Rome. London, 1971. The discov ery and contents of the remains of papyrus archives in caves west of the Dead Sea. Zettler, Richard L. The Ur III Temple of Inanna at Nippur. Berliner Beitrage zum Vorderen Orient, 1 1 . Berlin, 1992. Comprehensive analysis of an early temple on the basis of its archives. KLAAS R. VEENHOF
LIBYA.
Situated at die northeast corner of Africa, Libya
consists of three regions: Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan (ancient Phazania). Cyrenaica and Tripolitania are semiarid Mediterranean coastal zones on opposite sides of the Gulf of Syrte. Arid Fezzan, dotted with oases, separates them at the Sahara's nortiiern edge. For the ancient Greeks, Libya was all of northern Africa between the Nile River and Gibraltar; to them, its lightskinned inhabitants were all "Libyans," though diey distin guished subgroups such as Garamentes, Maures, and N u midians. Phoenicians traded with Libyans beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Herodotus 4 . 1 9 6 ) . [See Phoenicians.] T h e Periplus of the Erythraean Sea of Hanno the Carthaginian, a partly fanciful, partly factual account of a sea voyage to "Libyan lands beyond the Pillars of Hercules" (presumably tire Adantic coast of Morocco), mentions Libyphoenicians, punicized native peoples.
[See Phoenician-Punic]
The
name also bears tenuous connection with biblical Lehabim (Table of Nations, Gn. 1 0 : 1 3 )
a n
d Lubim (2 Chr. 1 2 : 3 ) .
T h e Greeks may have learned the name from the Egyp tians, for whom, from the Old Kingdom onward, Libya formed a hostile western desert frontier, In his mortuary complex at Abu Sir, Sahure (fifth dynasty) boasted a victory over Libyans. T h e Story of Sinuhue (twelfth dynasty) men tions Tehune-Libyans vanquished by Egypt. Rameses II (nineteenth dynasty) built a chain of forts in die western desert against Libyan incursions. On reliefs at Medinet Habu, Rameses' son Merneptah recorded his defeat of a coalition of Sea Peoples and Libyans (written RBW or LBW, vocalized Lebu or Libit). During the twenty-secondtwenty-third dynasties (c. 9 4 5 - 7 2 5 BCE), pharaohs with Lib yan names like Sheshonq and Osorkon controlled Lower Egypt. Cyrenaica took its name from Cyrene, the earliest Greek foundation in Africa (631 BCE, following Herodotus 4 - I 5 Q
-
1 5 1 ) . Cyrenaica was also known as Pentapolis for its five
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major cities: Apollonia (Sosuza), Cyrene (Shahat), Ptolemais (Tolmeta/Barce), Tauchira (Arsinoe/Tocra), and Euesperides (Berenice/Benghazi) (Stillwell, 1976). T h e Per sians under Cambyses possessed die region, and Ptolemy I annexed it after Alexander's death. In 96 BCE Ptolemy Apion bequeathed Cyrenaica to Rome, after which it was united with nearby Crete as a Roman province. [See Cyrene; Ptolemais.] Tripolitania ("three cities"), colonized by Phoenicians in the seventh century BCE, had three principle cities: Leptis Magna (Labdah), Oea (Tripoli/Trablus), and Sabratha (Stillwell, 1976). [See Leptis Magna.] Until 146 BCE, Trip olitania formed the eastern province of a west Phoenician realm dominated by Carthage. [See Carthage.] After Car thage's destruction, Rome ceded Tripolitania to its Numidian allies. Tripolitania later became a Roman province fa mous for olive oil production. The monumental urban ruins at Cyrenaica and Tripoli tania have attracted archaeologists, as have traces of Paleo lithic and Neolithic peoples that once inhabited a less des iccated Fezzan. The archaeology of later native North Africans, the Berbers, is still poorly understood, though their language and inscriptions are known (Camps, 1986). One remedy for this neglect has been the UNESCO Libyan Val leys Survey, devoted to the archaeology of rural Tripolita nia. The survey has discovered extensive Roman-period (though not necessarily Roman-designed) fioodwater irri gation systems. [See Irrigation.] These supported a signifi cant inland occupation based on mixed agriculture (grape, olive, cereals) integrated with mobile sheep/goat pastoralism, the prevailing mode of subsistence before and after the Romans (Journal of Libyan Studies, 1989). [See also North Africa.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Camps, Gabriel. "Libyco-Berber Inscriptions." In Encyclopaedia of Is lam, new ed., vol. 5, pp. 754-757. Leiden, 1986. Journal of Libyan Studies 20 (1989). Special issue entitled "Libya: Stud ies in Archaeology, Environment, History, and Society, 1969-1989," edited by D. J. Mattingly and J. A. Lloyd. Stillwell, Richard, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. Prince ton, 1976. JOSEPH A . GREENE
LIMES ARABICUS. The Latin term limes Arabicus means "Arabian frontier" and appears in literary sources in the fourth century CE. By tiiis period the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire was divided into frontier districts (Lat., limites), each under the command of a dux. South of the Euphrates River these districts extended along the edge of the North Arabian desert and formed the empire's south eastern frontier. T h e limes Arabicus extended from the re gion just south of Damascus to Wadi el-Hasa, near the southern end of the Dead Sea. By the fourth century the
frontier zone south of Wadi el-Hasa was the limes Palaestinae, which in turn extended to the Red Sea at Aila ('Aqaba). The limes was defended by Roman garrisons based in forts and towns along the frontier. Their primary mission was to protect the sedentary provincial population and the lucrative caravan ttaffic that passed through the region against the raids of nomadic Arab tribes (Saraceni, or Saracens) from die adjacent desert. [See Hasa, Wadi el-; 'Aqaba.] Only two literary sources explicitly refer to the limes Ar abicus. The church historian Rufinus (Hist. Eccl. 2.6), de scribing the assault on the frontier by the Saracen queen Mavia during the reign of Valens (364-378 CE), refers to the "towns and cities of the limes Arabicus." T h e historian Ammianus Marcellinus ( 3 1 . 3 . 5 ) , describing events leading up the battle of Adrianople in 378 CE, refers to a certain M u n derichus, who was later dux limitis perArabiam, "duke of the limes through Arabia." The Roman frontier in this region was created by Trajan, who annexed the Nabatean kingdom in 106 CE as the new province of Arabia. [See Nabateans.] Trajan then built a ma jor road (Via Nova Trajana) that extended from southern Syria to the Red Sea. Most forts of the later limes Arabicus were built along or a short distance east of this road, which was completed between 1 1 1 and 1 1 4 . T h e original Roman provincial garrison consisted of Legio III Cyrenaica, based at the provincial capital of Bosra in the north, and perhaps ten auxiliary units based in towns and forts along the fron tier. [See Bosra.] Some strengthening of the Arabian frontier occured under the Severan dynasty ( 1 9 3 - 2 3 5 ) . Inscriptions document the construction of several forts around the north west outlet of Wadi Sirhan, a natural migration route be tween southern Syria and the interior of the Arabian Pen insula, and by many milestones reflecting road repairs. T h e frontier appears to have faced an increased Saracen threat by the late third century, when the frontier defenses were significantly strengthened by Diocletian (284-305). He re built die road system, constructed or rebuilt many new for tifications, and reinforced the provincial army with new units. He also redrew the provincial boundaries, transferring southern Transjordan, die Negev, and Sinai (formerly part of Arabia) to the province of Palestine. [See Negev; Sinai.] The military frontier advanced to die desert fringe and Ro man forces campaigned deep in the desert, apparently as far as Jawf (Duma) at the southeastern end of Wadi Sirhan. T h e Notitia Dignitatum (Oriens 3 7 ) , dated to about 400 CE, re veals that the dux Arabiae commanded two legions, eight elite cavalry vexillations, six cavalry units or alae, and five infantty cohorts. These forces were styled limitanei—that is, troops that manned the limes. The limes Arabicus appears to have remained well fortified until the late fifth century, when there is evidence for the abandonment of some forts and a decline in the quality of its garrisons. In about 530, Justinian effectively demobilized most of the remaining units by stopping their pay and turned over primary responsibility
LIMES ARABICUS for the defense of the southeastern frontier to the Ghassanids, Christian Arab clients. By this date the limes Arabicus, in the sense of a military frontier, effectively ceased to exist. Although descriptions of some individual sites were made by several nineteenth-century travelers to the region, the first systematic survey of most of the Arabian frontier was conducted by Rudolf-Ernst Briinnow and Alfred von D o maszewski in the 1890s. Their focus was largely architec tural and epigraphic. As a result of the subsequent destruc tion of many sites, their work remains fundamental. Subsequent surveys identified many other smaller sites, such as watchtowers, that formed part of tire frontier system. As late as the mid-1970s, however, no fort of the limes had been excavated and no comprehensive survey had been con ducted. T h e Limes Arabicus Survey, directed by S. Thomas Parker in 1976 under the auspices of the American Schools of Oriental Research, collected pottery from most major sites along the entire length of tlie frontier in Transjordan. This evidence, combined with excavation results from sev eral key sites (e.g., el-Lejjun/Betthorus and U m m el-Jimal),
359
led to the first historical synthesis of the Roman frontier (Parker, 1986). [See U m m el-Jimal.] Since the late 1970s several scholars have focused on more limited sectors or in dividual sites on the frontier, producing important new ev idence. A lively debate has begun about the nature of the frontier, with some questioning the level of the Saracen threat while others defend the ttaditional notion about tlie purpose of the frontier system. The fortifications of the limes include watchtowers, castella (forts), fortresses, and fortified cities. The last category is beyond the scope of this discussion, but various sources suggest that Roman army units were based within some towns and cities. Hundreds of sttuctures identified as towers exist along the frontier; they seem to date to many periods, but they were not all military structures. The Romans often reused existing Iron Age and Nabatean sttuctures but also built some new towers at key locations. Few have been ex cavated, further complicating their dating. Analysis of sur face pottery and architecture has, however, permitted some understanding of these structures: many were erected on elevations witii extensive views, usually intervisible with
LIMES ARABICUS. Figure 1 . Plan of Da'janiya. Roman fort built around 300 CE along the Arabian frontier. (Courtesy S. T. Parker)
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LIMES ARABICUS
other towers, and thus presumably served as the "eyes and ears" of the frontier system. A number of castella have now been excavated, including forts at Umm el-Jimal, Qasr al-Hallabat, Khirbet es-Samra, Umm er-Rasas/Kastron Mefaa, Qasr Bshir, Khirbet el-Fityan, Da'janiya (see figure i ) , and Humeima. [See Qasr alHallabat; Umm er-Rasas; Humeima.] The most common type of castellum is the so-called quadnburgium, or rectan gular fort with towers projecting from the four corners. This type may date as early as the early third century, as evi denced by Qasr al-FIallabat, dated epigraphically to 2 1 3 CE. Perhaps the best-preserved and most securely dated castel lum is Qasr Bshir (see figure 2 ) , on the Kerak plateau east of the Dead Sea. [See Kerak.] This quadnburgium is dated to 293-305 CE by an in situ Latin inscription. The interior plan consists of ranges of two-storied rooms surrounding a central courtyard; the ground-floor rooms served as stables and tlie second-story rooms housed a garrison of about 150 men. Most other excavated castella also date to the tetrarchy, including those at Umm el-Jimal, Khirbet es-Samra, Khirbet el-Fityan, and Da'janiya. Recent excavation by John Oleson of the large (approximately 3 ha, or 7 acres) fort at Humeima, on the Via Nova Trajana between Petra and Aila, suggests a second-century date and is thus the earliestknown Roman fort along tire frontier. By the fourth century at least three and possibly four le gions were based along the Arabian frontier. The castra of
the Legio III Cyrenaica has been identified as an annex at tached to the city wall of Bosra but is as yet unexcavated. Arabia's second legion, IV Martia, was based in a fortress at el-Lejjun, east of the Dead Sea on the Kerak plateau. At 4 . 6 ha ( 1 1 acres), el-Lejjun is typical of Late Roman legion ary fortresses with its massive projecting U-shaped interval towers and semicircular corner towers. Erected in about 300 CE, the fortress seems to have been designed for a garrison of about two thousand men, but this was later reduced to about one thousand, following a reconstruction in the late fourth century. T h e fortress is the most extensively exca vated Roman military site along tire frontier, with portions of the fortifications, headquarters, barracks, bath, church, and other structures exposed. The legion remained in gar rison until the Justinianic demobilization of the early sixth century. The fortress itself was destroyed in an earthquake in 5 5 1 CE. Farther south, on the limes Palaestinae, the Legio X Fretensis was transferred from Jerusalem to Aila ('Aqaba) by the end of the third century. Its fortress at Aila has not been identified. Just east of Petra is the great fortress at Udruh, which is virtually a twin of el-Lejjun in terms of its size ( 4 . 7 ha, or 1 2 acres) and the number and plan of its gates, interval towers, and angle towers. The original internal plan of Udruh was obscured by later Islamic occupation. Although the excavator, Alistair Killick, has proposed a Trajanic date for its construction, no specific evidence has been advanced
it**
LIMES ARABICUS. Figure 2. Qasr Bshir. Roman fort built between 293 and 305 CE east of the Dead Sea. (Courtesy S. T. Parker)
LIONS to support this early date. Rather, the close architectural par allels with el-Lejjun and other late third-early fourth-century fortifications strongly suggest that the extant fortifications at Udruh were erected in the Diocletianic era. It has plausibly been suggested that this fortress was originally erected for Palestine's other legion, VI Ferrata, which may have been transferred from northern Palestine to Udruh in about 300 CE but was disbanded or destroyed during the fourth cen tury. Neither the legion nor the site appear in the relevant chapter in the Notitia (Oriens 3 4 ) . [See also Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Hel lenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods; Roman Empire; and Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Banning, E. B. "Peasants, Pastoralists, and Pax Rotnana: Mutualism in the Southern Highlands of Jordan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 261 (1986): 25-50. Briinnow, Rudolf-Ernst, and Alfred von Domaszewski. Die Provineia Arabia. 3 vols. Strassburg, 1904-1909. Still indispensable survey of die architectural evidence for the limes Arabicus. Graf, David F. "Rome and the Saracens: Reassessing the Nomadic Menace." In L'Arabie preislamique el son environnement historique et culturel: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, edited by Toufic Fahd, pp. 341-400. Leiden, 1989. Isaac, Benjamin. The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1992. Revisionist study that downplays the level of external nomadic threat, emphasizing instead the problem of internal security. Kennedy, David L. Archaeological Explorations on the Roman Frontier in North-East Jordan. British Archaeological Reports, International Se ries, no. 134. Oxford, 1982. Kennedy, David L., and Derrick N. Riley. Rome's Desert Frontier from the Air. Austin, 1990. Lavishly illustrated with aerial photos and plans of many key sites along the Arabian frontier. Mayerson, Philip. "The Saracens and die Limes." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 262 (1986): 35-47. Parker, S. Thomas. "Peasants, Pastoralists, and Pax Romana: A Dif ferent View." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 265 (1986): 3 5 - 5 1 . Reply to Banning's article. Parker, S. Thomas. Romans and Saracens: A History of the Arabian Fron tier. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Series, 6. Winona Lake, Ind., 1986. Historical and archaeological survey of the limes Arabicus. Parker, S. Thomas, ed. The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Interim Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980-198$. 2 vols. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 340. Oxford, 1987. Report on excavations at el-Lejjun, Khirbet el-Fityan, Rujm Beni Yasser, and Qasr Bshir and survey of the Roman frontier east of the Dead Sea. Parker, S. Thomas, ed. The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Final Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980-1989. 2 vols. Washington, D.C., forthcoming. Results on excavations at el-Lejjun and Da'janiya, survey of the frontier east of the Dead Sea, and a historical syndiesis of tiiis sector. Parker, S. Thomas. "The Nature of Rome's Arabian Frontier." In Ro man Frontier Studies 1989: Proceedings of the XVth International Con gress of Roman Frontier Studies, edited by Valerie Maxfield and Mi chael Dobson, pp. 498-504. Exeter, 1991. Review of recent scholarly debate on the subject.
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Sartre, Maurice. Trois etudes sur I'Arabie romaine et byzantine. Collection Latomus, vol. 178. Brussels, 1982. The first essay deals with the borders of the province; the second with the region's Arab tribes. Speidel, Michael P. "The Roman Army in Arabia." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt, vol. 2.8, edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, pp. 687-730. Berlin, 1977. Definitive study of the Roman army in this province. Speidel, Michael P. "The Roman Road to Dumata (Jawf in Saudi Ara bia) and the Frontier Strategy of Praetensione Colligare." Historia 36 (1987): 2 1 3 - 2 2 1 . Important epigraphic evidence about the peneuation of Roman forces deep into the Arabian desert during Diocle tian's reign. S. THOMAS PARKER
LIONS. Not found in the fossil record of the Levant until the Late Pleistocene, lions (Panthera leo) arrived as tropical elements entering an already diverse fauna. If artistic and literary evidence are any guide, lions were known all over the ancient Near East. Witii more than 150 citations in the Hebrew Bible, they apparently were familiar in biblical times. Lions were finally hunted to extinction in Palestine in the nineteenth century CE. Elsewhere in the region they were not exterminated until after World War I. Several subspecies of lion ranged throughout the greater Near East until mod ern times, but it is impossible to determine which were clos est to ancient Levantine populations, Lion imagery was ubiquitous in the cultures of the ancient Near East. In religious and royal symbolism the lion appears as aggressor, victim, and protector of gods and kings. Given its prominence in literature and iconography, it is surprising that the bones of lions are such very rare finds at archaeo logical sites. The most spectacular discovery has been the skull and mandibles of a lioness found on die floor of a twelfth-century BCE Pre-Philistine temple in Jaffa, Israel. Half a scarab seal found in close proximity led the excava tors to suggest that a lion cult was practiced in the temple. The right mandible has two sets of deep cut marks that are consistent with opening the oral cavity from the basal sur face of the jaws while leaving the head attached to the skin. Two lion bones associated with Iron 1 pottery in a noncultic Iron II building were recovered from Tel Miqne/Ekron. A third lion bone was of Iron II date. At Tel Dan, one lion foot bone was recovered from the mid-ninth-century BCE deposit in the altar room complex in die sanctuary; the cut marks on this bone are consistent with skinning. A fragment of a mandible was found in a metalworking area of Iron I date at the same time. These bones are in collections studied by Paula Wapnish and Brian Hesse (see Wapnish and Hesse, 1991). At the site of Hesban, in Jordan, an ankle bone of Roman date and a shoulder from a lion cub (date uncertain) were recovered. Farther afield, from the site of Habuba-Kabira in nordiern Syria, four lion bones were noted, two from the Uruk period (fourth millennium) and two from the Middle Bronze Age. From Lidar Hoyuk in southeastern Anatolia, a
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lower jaw and lower leg bone were discovered in Late Bronze deposits, and one first phalanx noted from the Hel lenistic period. Documentation of the lion in ancient Egypt comes almost exclusively from artistic representations, from the Old King dom onward. However, the remains of seven partial lion skeletons are reported from the grave complex of Hor-Aha in Umm el-Qaab. These bones date from the first dynasty (early third millennium), and are mostly of young animals, suggesting to the investigators that they might have been kept in captivity. BIBLIOGRAPHY Boessneck, Joachim. Die Tierwelt des Allen Agypten. Munich, 1988. Boessneck, Joachim, and A. von den Driesch. "Besprechung der Tierknochenfunde aus dem Grabkomplex des Horus-Aha im Umm elQaab bei Abydos." Internationale Archaologie 1 (1991): 55-62. Cornelius, Izak. "The Lion in the Art of the Ancient Near East: A Study of Selected Motifs." Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 1 5 (1989): 53-85. The latest study of a much covered topic, useful for its bibliography. Kaplan, Jacob, and Haya Ritter-Kaplan. "Jaffa." In The New Encyclo pedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by Ephraim Stern, vol. 2, pp. 655-659. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Illustrates the lion skull from the Pre-Philistine temple. No photo graphs of the mandible have been published. Wapnish, Paula, and Brian Hesse. "Faunal Remains from Tel Dan: Perspectives on Animal Production at a Village, Urban and Ritual Center." Archaeologica 4 (1991): 9-86. Reports on the lion foot bone found in the altar complex at Tel Dan. PAULA WAPNISH
LITERACY. The subject of literacy in the ancient Near East touches on all major aspects of civilization, not the least being the recording of history, for the invention of writing some five thousand years ago signaled the emergence of hu manity from the darkness of the prehistoric age. Writing radically changed all earlier forms of communication, the transmission of tradition, formal education, accounting, and man's perception of the world. This epic event then, dated to about 3 1 0 0 BCE, marks the beginning of the historical period. Writing was preceded by oral and iconographic means of communication—including the arduous process of accounting by using tokens and counters bearing agreed-upon designs that may have evolved into pictographic logograms (Schmandt-Besserat, 1984). Those other means of social intercourse coexisted and interacted with literate forms, as they continue to do. The earliest form of writing is found in ancient Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia. Probably invented by Sumerian ac countants as a mnemonic device, it was a system of picto graphic signs depicting concrete objects—that is, logograms, or word signs. [See Sumerian.] (The 8, or dollar sign, used to express die idea of "dollar" is a logogram.) Because it is
inherentiy brief, a pure logographic system lacks the flexi bility to reproduce visually the subtleties of language—the ultimate object of writing. Ancient scribes realized this lim itation and very early on introduced the phoneticization of writing by depicting syllables, which are called syllabograms. For instance, they would take a logogram such as the original pictographic star-shaped AN—meaning "star," "heaven," and "god"—and read it as the syllable an, unrelated to the word sign. This is an early application of the rebus principle whereby an object is depicted whose name has the same sound as in tire words represented (e.g. two gates and a head = "gateshead"). They could thus reproduce any word pho netically—whedier it was a concrete object, a personal name, or a verb. Actually, the conservative Mesopotamian literati chose to write in a combination logosyllabic system, including class determinatives and phonetic complements, comprising a total of about six hundred signs. (Only two hundred or so signs would have been used by any one scribe at any one time, however.) [See Writing and Writing Sys tems; Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] The external form of tire signs evolved from tire initial pictograph into a stylized linear representation. With the widespread use of soft clay as a writing surface in Meso potamia, the signs were reproduced by a prism-shaped split reed that created the wedged-shaped signs now called cu neiform. [See Writing Materials; Cuneiform.] These signs evolved over a period of three thousand years, becoming the hallmark of Mesopotamian culture and influence. The idea of writing in both its essence as a logosyllabic system and in its external form as a pictograph and then in cuneiform had a profound effect on all types of writing in the ancient Near East. It stimulated Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (literally "sacred carvings"), which dates to about 3000 BCE, and its adaptation into linear hieratic, as well as Proto-Elamite. [See Hieroglyphs; Egyptian.] T h e Sumerian system was used to write other languages, such as Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) and Hittite. [See Akkadian; Hit tite.] T h e prestige and influence of cuneiform script is ap parent in its adoption in Ugarit and Canaan between about 1 4 0 0 - 1 2 0 0 BCE for their innovative alphabetic scripts and in its use in representing the syllabic script of Old Persian, de vised in about 520 BCE in the time of Darius the Great. [See Ugaritic; Proto-Canaanite; Phoenician-Punic; Persian.] Scribes. T h e evolution of writing in ancient Mesopota mia, and the parallel development of ancient Egyptian scripts and tiieir influence in the contemporary Near East, reflects the growing stature and organization of the scribal class in antiquity. Scribes set the standard and defined lit eracy in its institutionalized form in die school and at court. By the second millennium BCE, they had created a canon of literature that exemplified the great civilizations of Meso potamia and Egypt and established a code of ethics for the professional scribe. T h e sum total of their studies, station in
LITERACY society, and literary productivity might aptly be called scribal culture (Oppenheim, 1964, chap. 5; Hallo, 1 9 9 1 ) . T h e literature (and iconography) of both Mesopotamia and Egypt describe that form of limited literacy that char acterized the specific professional class holding the monop oly on writing. While there were differences in language and scripts, the literati of these two great civilizations shared many traits, among them a position of authority and respect, an education, and a conservative and elitist ideology regard ing their literate status and privileged position in society and in the eyes of their patron deities. Already in the Ur III (c. 2 1 1 0 - 2 0 0 0 BCE) and Old Baby lonian (nineteenth-eighteenth centuries BCE) periods, scribal schools attracted the sons of the aristocracy and high administration, thus maintaining the profession's privileged status. T h e children studied in the edubba, "the tablet house." The headmaster was the adda edubba, or "father of the tablet, house," sometimes called the ummia > ummanu, or "master." In die hierarchy of the school could be found the disciplinarian (ugula), the teacher's helper or aid (sheshgal—i.e., "the big brother"), and the teachers of the various subjects the dumu edubba, "the son of the tablet house," would learn. T h e tens of thousands of documents written in cuneiform and in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in hieratic scripts are the output of the scribal class, a small percentage of their re spective societies. John Baines (1983) has estimated that in ancient Egypt the scribal class numbered between 2 and 5 percent of die total population. In addition to the light shed by iconographic and archeological data, most of what is known about these ancient civilizations is derived from and shaped by the work of the scribe. By the end of the third millennium, a considerable body of literature had come into being in Mesopotamia that was soon incorporated into the curriculum of the Sumerian schools. [See Sumerian.] These texts were studied and recopied, forming the basis of a canon. Mesopotamian scribal culture was to become bilingual. At the end of the second millennium BCE, when Sumerian ceased to be a spoken lan guage and was replaced by Akkadian, it continued, much like Latin in the Middle Ages, to be taught, spoken, and even written in scribal schools. In addition to belles lettres, the written scholarly output included lists of legal phraseology and formulae, linguistic material and encyclopedic data, and omnia compendia (col lections of unusual natural phenomena). At a later period, mathematics and astronomy texts became more common. Letters and contracts were die scribes' main fare. T h e privileged status of the scribes is one of the central themes in the school texts of Mesopotamia and Egypt. T h e theme was obviously a pedagogic device to support the stu dent through the many required years of tedious study, drill, and discipline. It inculcated the idea of elitism and pride in
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a profession that claimed immortality in addition to the ben efits of this world. One of the best-known texts is the Egyp tian composition "In Praise of Learned Scribes": As for those learned scribes from the time of those who lived after the gods . . . their names have become everlasting, (even though) they are gone . . . they made heirs for themselves in the writings and in the (books of) wisdom which they composed. They gave themselves [the papyrus roll as a lector] priest, the writing board as a son-he-loves, (books of) wisdom (as) their pyramids, the reed pen their child and the back of a stone for a wife. From great to small were made into his children . . . dieir names are pronounced because of their books which they made, since they were good and the memory of him who made them (lasts) to the limits of eternity. Be a scribe, put it in your heart, that thy name may fare similarly. More effective is a book than a decorated tombstone or an established tomb wall, . . . It is bet ter than a (well-) founded castle or a stela in a temple" (ANET, pp. 4 3 1 - 4 3 2 ) .
A Babylonian scribe of the mid-second millennium BCE would probably have felt at home in any number of scribal centers throughout Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, and even Egypt. For example, the el-Amarna archive, which contains tire diplomatic correspondence of the Egyptian court of the early fourteenth century BCE, as well as some literary and scholarly texts, was written in cuneiform, in the Middle Bab ylonian dialect, in Akkadian. Half of these letters were from the Canaanite vassal states whose local scribes struggled with the lingua franca. [See Amarna Tablets.] Judging from the cuneiform texts found at Canaanite sites, local scribes received a classical, albeit provincial, education. In ancient Egypt the scribal school, called the tnsb3 > ansebe, composed many texts that made up the curriculum (including wisdom literature and onomastica) that opened witii the key word sb3yt, "instructions," A scriptorium could be found adjoining the temple that bore the significant name pr 'nh "the house of life." There is no real proof for widespread literacy in these great civilizations. At different times, there may have been more literati or greater interest in writing and its benefits. In the Old Babylonian period, for example, an increased num ber of documents is indicated, especially personal ones, such as letters. In addition, in the Old Assyrian period, an attempt was made to reduce the number of signs to a more man ageable hundred or so. It is noteworthy tiiat in Mesopotamia's long history only three kings claimed literacy: Shulgi of Ur (2094-2047 BCE), who was praised as the ideal ldng; Lipit-Ishtar ( 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 2 4 BCE) of Isin, known also as a legislator; and Ashurbanipal (668-627 BCE), a king of Assyria. The first two were praised for their patronage of the scribal schools, and die last was renown for his extensive library, discovered at Nineveh. [See Nineveh.] Whatever tiieir real expertise in reading and writ ing cuneiform, tiieir claim is to have mastered the scribal art <
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and education. Writing never became a prerequisite for kingship or its idealization, as we find in Israel (Dt. 1 7 : 1 8 19). Ashurbanipal declared on a tablet: The profession of Adapa I learned, the hidden treasure of all die scribal art. I studied the signs of heaven and earth, I argued mat ters in the assembly of the wise. I discussed (the series) Summa Anna Matlat Same ("if the liver reflects the heavens") with the scholars. I solved difficult (problems) of division and multipli cation that had no solution. I read the artistic script of Sumer and Akkadian writing which is difficult to understand. I collated the sealed, dark, and confused antediluvian inscriptions on stone (D. D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Chi cago, 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 2 7 , vol. 2, pp. 378-379)'
On the other hand, in Egypt tire princes seem to have received scribal training. The early Prophesy of Neferti, dated to the Middle Kingdom (c. 1 9 7 0 - 1 7 5 0 ) , narrates how pharaoh "extended his hand to the scribe's case and with drew for himself a papyrus scroll and a scribal ink board. Then he wrote that which he was told by tire lector-priest Neferti" (ANET, p. 444). The ldngs take a prominent place in wisdom literature. For instance, the tenth-dynasty king Merikare in his "Instructions" to his son said, "Do not kill a man when thou knowest his good qualities, one with whom thou once didst sing the writings . . ." (ANET, p. 4 1 5 ) . T h e uses of writing in the civilizations of the ancient Near East, according to A. Leo Oppenheim (1964, pp. 23off.), fall into three categories: ( 1 ) Recording data for future use— administrative records, legal codification, sacred lore (myths, rituals, and local theology), royal annals (historic inscriptions and chronologies), and scholarly data and doc umentation; (2) communicating data on a synchronic level—letters, royal edicts, public announcements, and school texts and exercises; and (3) ceremonial purposes (documents not meant for human eyes)—Egyptian mortu ary texts, cuneiform foundation inscriptions, monumental engravings on mountainsides (e.g., the Bisitun trilingual in scription), letters to the gods, magical writs and incantations on amulets and bowls, and execration texts for sympathetic magic. [See Bisitun.] From tiiis catalog it is possible to con clude that the literary productivity of these great civilizations was turned inward—that is, it was meant for the use, edu cation, and enjoyment of the scribal class exclusively. When indeed they felt they should have a wider audience, -tire scribes created a divine readership, as some of the above ceremonial inscriptions indicate. Exacting methods of copying texts, the difficulty in ac quiring and mastering the use and preparation of the differ ent writing surfaces and implements, and the storing of texts in libraries and archives did not allow for widespread literacy in those ancient societies. Colophons are an important source for understanding scribal practice. Very often the writer added kima labirshu shatirma bari, "according to its original, it was written and checked." The Ashurbanipal li brary colophon was shatirshaniq bari, "written, collated, and
checked." Sometimes, the amanuensis would emphasize his source by noting kipi ummani, "dictated by the master," or kipi tuppi qabari shatir, "copied from an old text." On the basis of die literary output and the learned meth ods of transmission and preservation of these texts, it ap pears that literacy in these societies was limited to the pro fessional scribes. While there are other examples of limited literacy, as in second-millennium BCE Mycenaean Greece, where Linear B was used for administrative purposes, an cient Mesopotamia and Egypt produced the scribal culture that shaped the entire ancient Near East. Alphabet. The Canaanite invention of the alphabet in the first half of the second millennium BCE was the most impor tant development in the history of writing since its inception and phonetization, as well as in the spread of literacy in an tiquity (for strictures on the use of the term alphabet to de scribe tite Canaanite invention, see Gelb, 1 9 6 3 ) . For more than five hundred years, it evolved from an almost com pletely pictographic script to a standardized linear signary, conventionally written from right to left. It became the of ficial medium of writing in the emerging Northwest Semitic societies of the Early Iron Age. By the end of the seventh century BCE, the alphabet had become tire dominant script of the ancient Near East and literate Mediterranean. T h e social and cultural consequences of its spread were mani fold, ultimately leading to greater popular literacy and die democratization of higher culture. In essence, tire "alphabetic revolution" was the radical re duction of writing from a system of hundreds of logographic and syllabic signs to that of between twenty-two and thirty consonants, according to the phonetic inventory of tire lan guage being written. The conception of the alphabet was based on a sophisticated analysis of the phonemic system of Canaanite. Each phoneme received an appropriate sign that was originally a pictograph, for which it was named. In other words, as Alan H. Gardiner assumes, the letter names orig inally represented a word beginning with that particular phoneme, which he calls the acrophonic principle. For ex ample, the bucranium, or ox head, is called 'alf, " o x " in Canaanite, and represents the initial phoneme 'a. Similarly, bet, "house," represents the sound b. Gardiner demonstrates this principle in his decipherment of the Proto-Sinaitic in scriptions found in and around the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in southern Sinai. He interprets four recur rent signs as b'lt, "lady," a plausible Canaanite epithet for the Egyptian goddess Hathor, "the lady (of turquoise)," worshipped at that site. T h e acrophonic principle suggests that not only the letter forms, but their names, are intrinsic aspects of the invention of the alphabet. In fact, an abece dary found at Ugarit from the fourteenth century BCE, in terpreted by Frank M. Cross and Thomas O. Lambdin (i960) as listing Babylonian syllabic equivalents, supports the contention that the alphabetic letter names are at least that old.
LITERACY From the epigraphic evidence, it must be assumed that the alphabet was conceived in Canaanite scribal circles in die first half of die second millennium BCE. T h e earliest al phabetic texts seem to have been found at Gezer, Lachish, and Shechem (seventeenth century BCE). [See Gezer; La chish; Shechem.] Even the above-mentioned Proto-Sinaitic script (which some date to die fifteenth century BCE) was probably written by Canaanite merchants (not slaves) or their secretaries, who had set up camp at die mines. The Canaanite genius who invented the alphabet was probably familiar with several systems of writing—the Egyptian hav ing the greatest influence on his choice of the consonantal values of the signs and some of the hieroglyphic forms he adopted. T h e invention of the alphabet seems to be the result of deliberate reflective thought on how to improve upon an existing technique. As Alan R. Millard suggests, the discov ery "required thorough analysis of the phonemic stock of his language, an analysis perhaps facilitated by the common practice of listing words as part of school training" (Millard, 1986, p. 394). Very early on, a set order of the letters was established accompanied by a mnemonic song facilitating the learning process and easy dissemination of the alphabet. Actually, there were two basic orders of the alphabetic letters. T h e first is the abecedarium in all its variations. T h e earliest ex amples are the thirty-letter Ugaritic alphabet written in cu neiform; then the reduced twenty-two linear Canaanite al phabet that became the source through Greek and Latin for all the European alphabets and via Aramaic to the scripts of tile East—not the least important being the alphabet of clas sical Arabic. T h e latter, while rearranged according to ex ternal form and supplemented with diacritically differenti ated identical signs, is still taught as the abjedhawa, recalling the first six letters of the Old Canaanite abecedary. T h e second system for ordering the letters is generally called die South Semitic alphabet of twenty-eight letters: h l h m q w s r g / b t s k n k h s F ' d g d b/g t z d y t s/z. This order is known from Ge'ez and seems to have come origi nally to Ethiopia by way of South Arabia, where it was used as a means of writing local dialects. A. G. Lunden (1987) discovered tiiis order in a Canaanite cuneiform tablet dated to die thirteenth century BCE from the excavations at BethShemesh in the 1930s. [See Beth-Shemesh.] It now becomes apparent that tiiere were at least two basic patterns of or dering the letters of die alphabet in ancient Canaan. For whatever reason, the ABC order was preferred over the HLHM order that moved to the periphery of the Semitic world. These innovations in education and communication were introduced by and meant for a very conservative body of professionals, heirs to a tradition of writing fifteen hun dred years old. [See Alphabet.] Two P a t t e r n s of Literacy. T w o basic patterns of literacy existed in the ancient Near East. T h e predominant form was
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the limited literacy of the highly trained professional scribes in the main cultural and political centers of Mesopotamia and Egypt and their satellites. Redefining a term introduced by Henri I. Marrou ( 1 9 5 6 ) , this form of literacy can be called scribal culture. The second form is the one found in die emerging literate societies—Iron Age Syria, Phoenicia, an cient Israel, and classical Greece—where simple reading and writing skills were learned by laymen employing the local alphabetic scripts. No doubt tiiere was contact and influence between the bearers of both types of culture. It is the former pattern that has left most of the written evidence, indicating greater influence in areas of formal education and defining the categories of "wisdom." Belonging to the restricted "scribal culture" meant not only mastering the techniques of writing, but also learning the rudiments of such subjects as mathematics, astronomy, and engineering, as well as inbibing an esprit de corps of the literati. However, it was the second pattern that ultimately mumphed, inheriting its cul tural legacy and becoming the medium that shaped classical antiquity. Much of the discussion regarding popular literacy and its diffusion and measurement has centered around ancient Is rael. This is because of the variety and quality of the literary and epigraphic sources. T h e Bible, in particular, reflecting a period of some thousand years of Israelite history, remains a basic source for the study of alphabetic literacy. Even so, because of the objective problem of defining literacy in an tiquity, tiiere is a wide difference of scholarly opinion on die matter. For instance, is literacy the ability to read and write—or just one of them? What level of expertise consti tutes "literacy": writing or reading one's name, a simple sen tence, or a complex document? Is tiiere a means to determine a gradation in the ability to write that would dis tinguish between a professional scribal hand, a layman's script, a craftsman's markings, and graffiti in a vulgar style? How can widespread literacy as a social phenomenon be measured? The nature of the problem is that there are vari ables in the level and extent of literacy in every society. In other words, die problem is methodological because there are no direct, absolute, or objective criteria for defining and measuring broad-based literacy prior to die Industrial Rev olution, let alone for antiquity. Furthermore, regarding ancient Israel, subjective issues have been raised by different disciplines of research regard ing the historicity of the Bible and its transmission and the value of epigraphic evidence and paleography to answer so cial and cultural historical questions. For instance, Swedish scholars identified witii the Uppsala school of biblical re search claim that the Bible, for the most part, was composed orally and only later, in reaction to the national tragedy of the Exile, was put into writing: thus, in the First Common wealth period, except for a limited number of scribal ad ministrators, the population would have been illiterate (Engnell, 1969). However, some paleographers claim hard
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evidence for widespread literacy during die period of the monarchy (Millard, 1985). It has become increasingly clear that research on die topic must syntiiesize literary and epi graphic evidence. Issues of composition, transmission, and publication of ancient texts and the typology of formal and occasional inscriptions must be placed in a social context that fits the historical developments of that period of antiq uity (Demsky, 1985, 1988). An attempt in that direction is visible in studies of school and education systems in ancient Israel. There is literary and epigraphic evidence of some formal education for scribes, priests, royalty, women, artisans, and laity (Demsky, 1971). However, it is not clear whether there were actual educa tional institutions like the Mesopotamian edubba or more informal settings like the home or workshop. There is no biblical word for school. T h e term bet-hassefer/hassofer, "the house of die book or of the teacher (scribe)," is Late He brew. For that matter, terms like bet-midrash and yeshivah are found first in Ben Sira 51:23, 29, while bet migra and bet talmud for elementary and higher education are rabbinic. Following Mesopotamian models, scholars have de scribed the ancient Israelite school by reconstructing the supposed curriculum taught there on the basis of literary and epigraphic evidence. Andre Lemaire (19 81) has gone to one extreme in finding schools throughout the country, while Menahem Haran (1988) has gone to the other extreme of denying tiieir existence. There is no doubt that certain subjects made up a program of formal education—tiiat the simpler the subject the more widespread its adaption. For instance, learning the letters of the alphabet by repetition of the abecedary and accompanying exercises was basic for a general urbanite's education. It would have been of partic ular use for artisans, who introduced writing into their craft—for which there is evidence from potters, ivory join ers, and builders. It is of interest that the biblical term yode'a sefer and its opposite, 'aser Id' ydde'a sefer, within the prophetic context of Isaiah 29:11-12, are the only direct references to the abil ity to read in the Bible. T h e former has been translated "one who can read," or "a knower of a book," indicating a rea sonable ability to read. This interpretation is seemingly con firmed by Lachish letter 3:8-10, in which a garrison com mander is asked: lo'ydda'ta qero' sefer, "Don'tyou knowhow to read?" [See Lachish Inscriptions.] Actually, yode'a sefer means "to know writ" (Bib. Heb., sefer = Late Heb. and Aram., ktab), implying that with some knowledge of writing it is also possible to read. This Hebrew term for minimal literacy should be compared to the internationally wellknown terms for professional scribes: safer (Ugar./Phoe., spr; Aram., safar), soter (Aide., satam), or tifsar (Assyr., tupsarru; Sum., dup.sar). Not only a basic knowledge of writing seems to have been common in Israelite urban centers from the eighth century BCE onward, but also some understanding of elementary arithmetic and the ability to inscribe numbers (Is. 10:19).
S p r e a d of Literacy. T h e factors that influence such a complex aspect of life as written communication and the storage of data affect all levels of society to different degrees. This was true in antiquity as well. There factors probably act in concert: the technical innovation of an alphabetic script; changes in the power structure in society; and the degree of motivation in some societies to attempt to change tiieir world. An alphabet of no more than thirty signs that can be learned in a matter of days—as opposed to a writing system of hundreds of logosyllabic signs, each of which may have multiple values—would, seemingly, allow for wider literacy. However, there were periods of illiteracy or semiliteracy in societies in which the alphabet was used: in Medieval Eu rope and, as H. C. Youttie (1973) has shown, in HellenisticRoman Egypt. On the other hand, when there is high mo tivation or centralized government control, the masses can learn an even more complex system, as the modern Chinese have proven. T h e second factor is social: if there are interest groups that find it necessary, for self-preservation, to prevent or forestall innovations in the field of literacy or communica tion, there will be limited literacy. For example, from the dual system of administration at the beginning of die As syrian Empire (end of the eighth century BCE), the iconographic motif found on royal stelae and in wall paintings is of two scribes—the Assyrian sa zigni, representing the con servative establishment and writing in cuneiform, and the Aramaic eunuch, the sa resi, standing behind him writing his innovative alphabetic script on a leather scroll. This dual system is further corroborated by contemporary Aramaic notations on cuneiform tablets. Of course, the opposite can also occur. The retreat of the great empires from Syria and Canaan in the thirteenth century BCE left a void in admin istrative methods and staff. The new peoples, like the Arameans and Israelites, had no comparable scribal tradition or organization. As a result, tiieir leaders readily adopted and encouraged the rapid development of the local Canaanite alphabet. This brought about the standardization of the script, of the direction of writing, and of letter stance and order. It did not take long before they recognized the ad vantages of this medium to store and recall information (see Jgs. 8:14). The third factor in the spread of literacy is motivation— a drive to control or influence people politically, economi cally, or religiously through the written word, even within the same ethnic, religious, or national community. T h e As syrians realized that in order to succeed in asserting admin istrative control over their newly established empire (745611 BCE) and in integrating its many conquered peoples it was wise to adopt the Aramaic language and its written me dium, the utilitarian alphabet. Aramaic dialects were spoken widely throughout Syria, parts of Anatolia, and as far as south Chaldean Babylon. After the destruction of Aram Da mascus in 732 BCE, the last and strongest independent Ar-
LITERACY amean ldngdom, the Aramaic language was free of national ties and local culture. It became the Reichsprach, a most un usual example of a conquered people's language becoming an instrument of the conqueror in empire building. Besides its obvious advantages—many speakers, grammatical sim plicity, and no national and geographic ties—Imperial Ara maic had its own facile and utilitarian script that was quicldy adopted along with an unemployed professional scribal class. It was under the Neo-Babylonians (609-539 BCE) and Persians ( 5 3 9 - 3 3 3 BCE) that Aramaic became the lingua franca of the ancient Near East and its script the medium of government and civilian life. [See Aramaic Language and Literature.] An example of what may be die economic motivation in the spread of writing might be found in the history of the Phoenicians, those great entrepreneurs who traded off the products of one land for those of another (cf. Ez. 2 7 ) . Egypt, a major client, supplied them with sundry raw materials and goods, among which was papyrus. [See Papyrus.] It was probably through Byblos (Phoen., Gebak Egyp., Keben), which had the longest-standing business relationship witii Egypt, that the potential of exporting papyrus throughout the Mediterranean lands was realized (recounted in the early eleventh-century BCE "Journey of Wenamun to Phoenicia," ANET, pp. 2 5 - 2 9 ) . However, the market for papyrus as a writing surface had to be created. Perhaps it was this eco nomic need that motivated the Phoenicians to introduce and teach tiieir own Canaanite alphabet as well. It certainly was not for political or religious reasons that it was spread throughout the Mediterranean lands. Herodotus (5.58) in the fifth century BCE, defined the boundaries between the civilized world and the barbarians by who wrote on papyrus (the former) and who on animal sldn (the latter). It is worth noting that the Greek word for book, biblion, and its cognates in the European languages are derived from the place name Byblos. [See Byblos.] There is no need to prove the Greeks' indebtedness to the Phoenicians for their alpha-beta, attributed by some to Cad mus (i.e., qedem, "the easterner"), who took up residence in mainland Thebes. Opinions differ widely about when tiiis borrowing of the Canaanite alphabet occurred. Joseph Naveh (1987) has proposed an early, eleventh-century BCE date on the basis of comparative paleography. Rhys Carpenter and L. H. Jeffery ( 1 9 6 1 ) argue for an early seventir-century BCE date, with the earliest datable Greek epigraphy. Indeed, there may have been several channels of influence, spread over a long period. However, it seems that the best contact was within the historical framework of the early tenth cen tury BCE and the beginning of Phoenician colonization of the western Mediterranean. [See Phoenicians.] An established religion, especially one using an alphabetic script, can be a catalyst in die spread of literacy. This be comes more obvious with the advent of Israelite monothe ism, where, to rephrase Jack R. Goody (1986), there is an intrinsic connection between its features and the literate
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modes in which its beliefs and behavior are formulated, communicated, and transmitted. Biblical monotheism is characterized by the cardinal belief in die deity who reveals his will through an inscription on stone and in a scroll using the literary form of a vassal covenant to express his special relationship to his chosen people, Israel. This covenant is to be read publically every seven years before all men, women, and children (Dt. 3 1 : 1 0 - 3 1 ) in what seems to be the first recorded case of religious education for the masses. It is no wonder that Ezra, in the mid-fifth century BCE, used this commandment as his model for the public Torah reading that would become the centerpiece of synagogue worship (Neh. 8:iff.). T h e Torah even became the symbol of the divine and the direct object of veneration (cf. Ps. 1 1 9 , esp. verse 48). [See Hebrew Language and Literature.] By the mid-eighth century BCE, apostolic prophets were commanded to write down their message for the sake of communicating it to the masses (e.g., Is. 8 : 1 ; Jer. 2 9 : 1 , 36:2; Ez. 3 7 : 1 6 ) or as a means to safeguard it for future genera tions (e.g., Is. 30:8; Jer. 3 0 : 2 - 3 , 32:ioff.). These are the "writing prophets"—beginning with Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah—and they continue down to the mid-fifth cen tury BCE, with the last of the classical prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. These prophets use various literate means to enhance and publicize their message, a sure sign that their urban audience appreciated and understood this method of instruction. For example, in order to hold his listeners' attention, Jeremiah (25:26, 5 1 : 1 , 4 1 ) introduces the atbash exercise familiar to all beginners (in which, after hav ing learned the order of the letters, die student matches let ters from opposite ends of the alphabet, e.g., the first ['aleph] with the last [taw], the second [beth] with the next to last [shin], etc.). Nahum resorts to an alphabetic acrostic (i:2ff.) familiar from late biblical poetry, and Zechariah (6:10, 14) plays on an alphabetic mnemonic for storing information. Thus, in ancient Israel it seems that writing was an integral part of tile religious experience. This is not to say that writing was absent from pagan re ligions. The ancient scribes regarded writing like the other arts, as the invention of the gods. The Sumerian Nisaba, the Babylonian Nabu, and the Egyptian Thoth were the patron deities of the scribal profession and assigned similar roles in the divine assembly. Books of wisdom and esoteric divina tion were attributed to various deities. T h e idea of the heav enly Tablet of Destiny, the tup simati, where al! creation's fate was recorded, is a recurrent motif in Mesopotamian mydiology. In the second-millennium BCE Enuma elish, the Babylonian story of creation, Tiamat empowers her second consort, Kingu, by presenting him with the Tablet of Des tiny. For the Mesopotamian literati, this motif reflects belief in die primordial existence and the efficacy of the written word. In fact, the Sitz im Leben of the creation epic is in its being read by the high priest in the inner sanctum before the statue of Marduk on the fourth day of the Akitu new year festival. This literate aspect of cult no doubt superceded
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an oral dramatic presentation of the myth and reflects the growing influence of the scribal community even in matters of religion. A closer comparison of the differences between how M e sopotamian paganism used cuneiform writing and how Is raelite monotheism applied the alphabet demonstrates the nature of religion as a catalyst for the spread of literacy. In Babylon, the creation story is about the deeds of Marduk. Its private reading is intended to remind the deity of his duties toward the world in subduing the forces of chaos. Although there is no evidence for how widely the text was known, it certainly was not meant for mass consumption. Cuneiform writing in general is a closed and secret art turned inward upon the scribal class. Similarly, the Tablet of Destiny remains a figment of mythic imagination. In Israel, conversely, the Torah, or a portion thereof, was to be read publicly before the entire populace every seven years. The text is meant for the edification of all the people and not for initiates alone. It is turned outward. Biblical monotheism is a national religion. T h e Sinai theophany is described as a public experience and the text is meant to preserve its memory in the literary form of a covenant (Dt. 2 9 : 1 3 - 1 4 ) . Not only the public reading of the text, but also its private and communal study (Ps. 1:2, I9:8ff., 1 1 9 ; AM. 8:i3ff.) became religious values for the laity, stimulating the further desemination of the written word and the spread of literacy. Private schools (Eccl. 1 2 : 9 ! ; Ben Sim 5 1 : 2 3 ! ! . ; Avot 1 4 ) and, later, public schools established by Shim'on ben Shetah (c. 100 BCE) and by the high priest Joshua ben Gamla (B.T., B.B. 21 a) are not secular; they are, rather, institutions for religious instruction (cf. B.T. Shab. 104a). Furthermore, for comparison's sake, the description of the Tablets of the Covenant, written by tire finger of God, avoids the introduction of divine mythic writing implements (Ex. 3 2 : 1 5 ! ; 3 4 : 1 ) . Moses even shapes the stone writing sur face of the second set of tablets. While preserved beyond the view of the populace, they did have a direct obvious influence on the architecture of the desert sanctuary and tire Jerusalem Temples, and that influence is felt to this day in the layout of the traditional synagogue and the place of the holy ark. [See Synagogues.] The idea of a revealed written document is so closely .as sociated with the essence of historical monotheism and its mission that Christianity and Islam were able to compete with the authority of the Mosaic Torah only by replacing it with the belief in another superior divinely revealed work. The "holy" is found in Scripture and in the technique of writing and not in nature, as paganism would have it. Lit erate terms are central to the self-identification of the mono theistic faiths. Early Christianity (as well as tire Dead Sea covenanters) borrowed Jeremiah's prophesy of the "new covenant/testament" to be written upon the heart (Jer. 3i:30ff.) and concretized it into a corpus of naratives, mis
sives, and apocalyptic revelations recorded in the Greek ko ine. Brealdng with tradition, not only in regard to the lan guages of revelation (Hebrew and Aramaic), but also in abandoning die cumbersome scroll for the compact and portable codex, Christianity's message could now reach out to a wider audience of Greek-speaking Jews and gentiles, heirs to the Hellenistic education that set the standard for literacy in antiquity (Marrou, 1956; Innes, 1950). Islam's al-Qur'an, "the reading/recitation," revealed by the archangel Gabriel (cf. Dn. 9:2iff.), was in a language that had almost no written tradition prior to that time. Sub sequently, the Arabic of the holy writ would become the model for literate expression. Marking this turning point, the Qur'an proclaims Muhammad "the seal of the prophets" (38.40)—the capstone of all earlier written revelation. Es pecially noteworthy is the coining of the generic term for members of the monotheistic religions, in particular Juda ism, as 'Ahl al-Kitdb, "the people of the book." [See Arabic] This survey of the history of literacy in the ancient Near East from the end of the fourth millennium BCE until the advent of Islam in the first half of tire seventh century CE has touched on great cultural achievements not only in the realm of communication, education, and the storage of informa tion, but also in the areas of politics, government adminis tration, and economics—not to mention established religion. The study of literacy during the first half of this period is primarily the attempt to understand the art of writing as learned and practiced by a limited professional scribal class and how it spread throughout the ancient Near East. For the latter half of this period—beginning in the first millen nium BCE—momentous social and religious developments are documented that indicate the gradual democratization of higher literary culture and the formation of literate soci eties in which laymen and artisans could read and write. It is a period when Mosaic monotheism is integrally associated with a holy book leaving its indelible impression on the for mative stages of Christianity and Islam. One of die conse quences of these literary developments was the creation of an institutionalized religious service around the public read ing and exposition of tiiat holy text. Commentary and trans lation of the revealed book further encouraged the dissem ination of literature culture to the masses in antiquity. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baines,John. "Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society." Man 18 (1983): 572-599.
Cerny, Jaroslav. Paper and Books in Ancient Egypt. London, 1952.
Cross, Frank Moore, and Thomas O. Lambdin. "A Ugaritic Abecedary and the Origins of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 160 (i960): 2 1 - 2 6 .
Demsky, Aaron. "Education in the Biblical Period." Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 6, cols. 382-398. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 1 . Demsky, Aaron. "On the Extent of Literacy in Ancient Israel." In Bib lical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the International Congress on
LITHICS: Typology and Technology Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984, edited by Janet Amitai, PP- 349-353- Jerusalem, 1985. Demsky, Aaron, and Me'ir Bar-Ilan. "Writing in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism." In Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpre tation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by M.J. Mulder, pp. 1—38. Philadelphia, 1988. Demsky, Aaron. "The Education of Canaanite Scribes in the Meso potamian Cuneiform Tradition." Bar Ilan Assyriological Studies 1 (1990): 1 5 7 - 1 7 0 . Driver, Godfrey R. Semitic Writing: From Pictograph to Alphabet. 3d ed. London, 1976. Engnell, Ivan. A Rigid Scrutiny. Nashville, 1969. Gardiner, Alan H. "The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 3 ( 1 9 1 6 ) : 1 - 1 6 . Gelb, Ignace J. A Study of Writing. 2d ed. Chicago and London, 1963. Goody, Jack, ed. Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge, 1968. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society. Cam bridge, 1986. Hallo, William W. "Isaiah 28:9-13 and the Ugaritic Abecedaries. "Jour nal of Biblical Literature 77 (1958): 324-338. Hallo, William W. "The Concept of Canonicity in Cuneiform and Bib lical Literature: A Comparative Appraisal." In The Biblical Canon in Comparative Perspective, edited by K. L. Younger, Jr., William W. Hallo, and B. F. Batto. Scripture in Context, 4. Lewiston, 1991. Haran, Menahem. "On the Diffusion of Literacy and Schools in An cient Israel." Supplements to Vetus Testamenlum 40 (1988): 8 1 - 9 5 . Harris, William V. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Hunger, Hermann. Babylonische undAssyrische Kolophone. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, 2. Kevelaer, 1968. Innes, Harold A. Empire and Communication. Oxford, 1950. Jacobsen, Thorkild. "Mesopotamian Religious Literature and Mythol ogy." In The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 1 1 , pp. 1 0 0 7 - 1 0 1 2 . Chicago, 1974. Jeffery, L. H. The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. Oxford, 1961. Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago, 1963. Landsberger, Benno. "Scribal Concepts of Education." In City Invin cible: A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East, edited by Carl H. Kraeling and Robert McC. Adams, pp. 9 4 - 1 2 3 . Chicago, i960. Lemaire, Andre. Les ecoles et la formation de la Bible dans I'ancien Israel. Fribourg, 1981. Lunden [Loundine], A. G. "L'abecedaire de Beth Shemesh." IJC Museon 100 (1987): 243-250. Marrou, Henri Irenee. A History of Education in Antiquity. New York, 1956. Millard, A. R. "An Assessment of the Evidence for Writing in Ancient Israel." In Biblical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984, edited by Ja net Amitai, pp. 3 0 1 - 3 1 2 . Jerusalem, 1985. Millard, A. R. "The Infancy of the Alphabet." World Archaeology 1 7 (1986): 390-398. Naveh, Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet. 2d ed. Jerusalem and Leiden, 1987. Oppenheim, A. Leo. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civiliza tion. Chicago, 1964. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. "Before Numerals." Visible Language 18 (1984): 48-60. Youttie, H. C. "AGRAMMATOS: An Aspect of Greek Society in Egypt." Scriptiunculae 1 1 (1973): 6 1 1 - 6 2 7 . Youttie, I-I. C. "Bradeos graphon: Between Literacy and Illiteracy." Scriptiunculae 1 1 (1973): 629-651. AARON DEMSKY
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LITHICS. [This entry surveys the history of stone artifacts with reference to the technologies used to create them, the uses to which they were put, and their overall role in the cultures and societies in which they figured. It comprises three articles: Typology and Technology Artifacts of tire Chalcolithic Period Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages The first serves as an overview, providing a discussion of the importance of typology for identification purposes and the de velopment of specific typologies. The other articles treat the ar tifacts of specific periods and regions]
Typology and Technology Stone tool manufacture is essentially a reduction process wherein a block of raw material is chipped and/or ground, either to a desired shape or to produce flakes that are further modified to a desired shape. The simplest techniques in volve the splitting open of cobbles and the removal of a few flakes to produce a sharp cutting or chopping edge, with little attention paid to general morphology. More sophisti cated core-reduction techniques involve preparing the core (the original block of raw material) such that the shape of the flakes is predetermined—for example, to points, blades, bladelets, and special flakes. T h e removal of flakes (knapping, flaking) can be accom plished using several techniques: direct percussion—that is, a direct blow on the core using a hard (stone) or soft (antler, bone) hammer; indirect percussion—a blow applied to a punch placed in the desired point on tire core; block-onblock and anvil techniques; and pressure techniques, such as a chest punch. Further modification (retouch), usually of flakes, can also be accomplished using several methods, most notably direct percussion and pressure retouch. T h e preferred, although not exclusive, materials for stone chipping or knapping (the predominant mode of lithic man ufacture in prehistoric times) were either amorphous (e.g., obsidian) or cryptocrystalline (e.g., flints, cherts, chalcedo nies) in structure. These materials fracture conchoidally, and thus the shape and direction of the chippage can be controlled by tlie knapper. In contrast, crystalline (e.g., quartz) materials break along cleavage lines. Otiier advan tages of these materials include hardness and sharpness. Be ginning in the Late Epipaleolithic, and continuing through historic times, softer, more friable materials (e.g., limestone, dolomite, basalt, phosphorite, schist) were often exploited for various types of grinding stones and stone vessels, al though harder materials (e.g., flint, granite) could also be used. The products of lithic manufacture can be divided into two general classes, waste and tools. Tools are defined by the presence of retouch, or secondary modification, and not by assumed function. Unretouched pieces may indeed have
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7 UTI-Iics: Typology and Technology. Figure i. Idealized lithic tool types and attributes, (i) core; (2) flake; (3) primary flake, with cortex; (4) blade; (5) bladelet; (6) ridge-blade, core trimming ele ment; (7) scraper and selected flake elements and attributes. (Cour tesy S. A. Rosen)
been used. Waste products can be further divided into cores, amorphous debris, and debitage (flake products). Cores and some types of debitage, like tools, are often characteristic of specific cultural units. In general, waste provides informa tion on modes of manufacture. Specific typologies for both waste and tools have been developed for different periods. Scales of Analysis. On the most detailed level, analyses focus on microscopic edge wear and damage on stone tools in order to ascertain elements of function, such as direction of movement, intensity of utilization, or type of material worked. Experimental studies have suggested potential suc cess rates as high as 80 percent for identifying some elements of function (Keeley, 1980). However, there has been debate over the efficacy of the method, given the nonpristine state of most lithic assemblages and the possibility of multiple uses. Analyses of macroscopic attributes incorporate metric at tributes such as length, width, thickness, and various angular measurements; nominal features such as type of striking platform, planar shape, or location of retouch; and presence/ absence attributes, such as sickle gloss, edge retouch, and cortex. Attributes can be chosen to reflect specific factors so
that, for example, edge angle is often assumed to reflect function (i.e., scraping versus cutting), whereas wings on arrowheads are usually assumed to be stylistic. On the level of the artifact, virtually all scholars utilize various agreed-upon types, both waste and retouched tools, in order to expedite analysis. Types are assumed to repre sent intuitively obvious sets of covarying attributes. Debate exists over the legitimacy of specific tool types and whether they indeed represent types as recognized by early Homo. However, a more appropriate measure of their legitimacy is their analytic efficiency—whether they serve a reasonable archaeological goal. Types are usually organized in a hier archical framework, with several levels of subtypes, and sta tistical attribute analyses may be conducted to subdivide tire types further or to confirm tiieir independent existence. The assemblage (e.g., Clarke, 1978) is a higher unit of analysis consisting of the collection of artifacts from a phys ically definable location, usually from a specific stratum or substratum from an archaeological site, although conceiv ably from a specific locus within a site. In theory, assem blages should represent the final discard stage of the original lithic tool kit employed on the site (assuming little postdepositional disturbance). However, given the difficulties in defining die processes of discard, and the often disturbed nature of many assemblages, interpretation is not straight forward. The key point is that assemblages do not represent frozen or fossilized actions. In a large sense, they are the products of a multitude of actions, both cultural and noncultural, and reflect a range of factors. T h e classic debate over the interpretation of Mousterian (Middle Paleolithic) variability centered precisely over the issue of which factors dominated the formation of assemblages and the morphol ogy of tool types. Higher-level analyses involve die definition of "cultures," "industries," and "complexes," but precise definition of these terms has not been achieved. This is probably the re sult of both the inherent variability in sets of assemblages and the resulting problems in defining borders, as well as the difficulties of restricting normal English terms like culture and industry to very specific phenomena. Cultures are as sumed to represent the equivalent of ethnographically defin able tribes or groups and are reconstructed on the basis of what are assumed to be stylistically sensitive attributes, or types. Attempts to define cultures are often disputed by ad ducing functional or other explanations for the allegedly sty listic traits. Cultures are most easily definable in the later periods of prehistory, when tool standardization is such tiiat regional and chronological variability are easily defined. In essence, the first well-defined lithic cultures in the Near East occur in the Epipaleolithic—for example, the Natufian, Harifian, and Negev Kebaran. Thus, several "complexes" have also been defined for the Epipaleolithic—the Kebaran complex, the Geometric Kebaran complex, and the Mushabian complex. Each is divided into several, often unnamed,
LITHICS: Typology and Technology clusters of assemblages that essentially correspond to cul tures. In the case of the Epipaleolithic, the intermediate-level culture is definable; however, for earlier periods tiiere is usu ally a jump from the assemblage to the complex or industry. This is primarily a consequence of die great variability in herent among assemblages, difficulties in chronology, and often, a relative scarcity of sites. Of course, it may also be tiiat pve-Homo sapiens sapiens simply did not exhibit cultural behavior as it is presently recognized. Causes of Variation. Variability in stone tool morphol ogy, technology, and type frequencies in the archaeological record can be caused by any of a range of factors, either individually or in combination. These are reviewed briefly below. Raw materials. Both the properties and availability of raw materials affect patterns of exploitation. For example, flint can be of coarse or fine grain, may show many or few impurities, and may come in different-sized nodules that are distributed unevenly over the landscape. Different flint chipping technologies (e.g., flakes, blades, bladelets) may require different qualities of raw material. T h e same is true of other raw materials, such as basalt and quartzite. Thus, in general, different periods, with different lithic technolo gies, show exploitation of different types of stone. Access to and availability of raw materials play a role here. Quantitative variability in assemblage or industrial attributes may be a function of relative expense of acquisition of ap propriate raw materials (e.g., Dibble, 1987). Patterns of trade and exchange may often be reconstructed through quantitative analysis of distributions of raw material and completed artifacts. Function. The different functions of stone tools affect the nature of variation. Function may be reflected on a range of scales, from microscopic edge damage to the general con figuration of tool kits. Different types of function can also be defined, so tiiat beyond utilitarian use, stone tools may have subsidiary social and ideological functions. Obvious examples are ritual objects. Other social functions, partic ularly involving strengthening of group identity, may also obtain. Style. Stylistic attributes are those that reflect nonutilitarian elements in the design of a stone tool. These may be decorative, or they may be reflected in the choice of different but equivalent technologies for the same utilitarian function. Style is often assumed to reflect ethnic tradition, and stylistic attributes are thus used to reconsttuct various units of cul ture. There is clear overlap between style and socioideological functions. Biological abilities. Technological evolution is also af fected by developments in coordination and intellectual capabilities. Development of the precision grip in later hom inids allowed for finer coordination and execution of the knapping process. The evolution of abstract thought is rep resented in die increasing symmetry of tools, the develop
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ment of what appear to be paradigmatic types (e.g., handaxes), and in the generally increasing complexity of lithic technologies. Archaeological
biases
and
postdepositional
pro
cesses. Biased collection techniques and the deliberate se lection of special or supposedly diagnostic types can render assemblages noncomparable, as well as result in the loss of much information. Natural processes such as deflation and erosion can affect lithic analysis on several levels, from the presence of abrasion on individual artifacts to the disap pearance of smaller artifacts as a result of natural sorting processes. Chronological Overview. The following sections review briefly the general development of lithic technology from the first evidence for stone tool manufacture in the Near East up to the apparent final displacement of chipped stone im plements in the Iron Age. Notably, ground stone imple ments and vessels continue in common use more or less up through recent times. Lower Paleolithic. In the Levant, the Lower Paleolithic industries are core-tool and flake based; the core tools, es pecially bifaces, comprise the diagnostic elements. The presence of bifaces in virtually all Middle Pleistocene assem blages places the entire Levantine Lower Paleolithic in the Acheulean complex. At TJbeidiya (c. 1.4 million years ago) high proportions of chopping tools, spheroids, polyhedrons, and trihedrals among the bifaces distinguish the assemblage from the later Acheulean (Bar-Yosef, 1 9 7 5 ) . Middle and Late Acheulean assemblages, such as from Berzine, Birkat Ram, 'Erneq Rephaim, 'Evron, Kissufim, Latamne, Ma'ayan Baruch, Tabun, and U m m Qatafa show much higher proportions of handaxes. The site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqob shows a significant addition of relatively nu merous basalt cleavers to the lithic repertoire. Many of these sites are surface collections and/or were investigated early in the history of research and may reflect collection bias. In general, within the Acheulean tiiere is a trend toward shorter and more finely manufactured bifaces (Gilead, 1970). In die Late Acheulean, the Levallois technique for specialized flake manufacture makes its first appearance. Interpretation of t e n d s and variability are problematic, especially given the difficulties of chronology in these early periods, and of collections from early excavations. However, given the immense time span of the Acheulean complex, and die fact of physical evolution during this period, it is likely that changes in physical and intellectual abilities played a major role, at least in the long-term trends. The cleavers at Gesher Benot Ya'aqob have been interpreted by some, for example, Ofer Bar-Yosef, to reflect a direct connection to Africa. Middle Paleolithic. T h e rise of diagnostic flake tools, especially those manufactured using Levallois technologies, and the concomitant decline and eventual disappearance of bifaces are the primary defining characteristics of the Mid-
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die Paleolithic (Copeland, 1975; Bordes, 1 9 6 1 ) . Two preMousterian industries can be defined: the Yabrudian (in cluding the Acheulo-Yabrudian) and the Pre-Aurignacian ('Arnudian), found at Tabun, Yabrud, Zumoffen, Bezez, Zuttiyeh (Yabrudian only), and Masloukh (Yabrudian only). Many scholars place these industries in the terminal Acheulean or refer to them together as the Mugharan com plex (Jelinek, 1982). The Yabrudian is a flake industry char acterized especially by the presence of Quina-type scrapers (thick, canted, stepped retouch). Pre-Aurignacian assem blages, sometimes sandwiched between Yabrudian layers, are characterized by high proportions of blade tools and other "Upper Paleolithic" types (burins, endscrapers)—
hence die name Pre-Aurignacian. Neither shows high Lev allois indices. The heavy use of die Levallois technique for the manu facture of flakes, blades, and points is the hallmark of the Mousterian in the Levant. A basic unilineal typological framework was established by Dorothy Garrod's (Tabun, Skhulj el-Wad) and Rene Neuville's ( Erq el-Ahmar, Abu Sif, Qafzeh) excavations. More recent excavations and stud ies at numerous sites (e.g., Ksar 'Akil, Kebara, Qafzeh, T a bun, Rosh 'Ein-Mor, Quneitra, Fara, Tirat ha-Carmel) have focused more on functional and technological questions. As semblages have been viewed as tool ldts, and groups of sim ilar assemblages as functionally similar (Binford, 1986). c
9 Typology and Technology. Figure 2. Examples of lithic tools. (1) chopping tool; (2) handaxe; (3) Levallois flake; (4) Quina (Yabrudian) scraper; (5) arrowhead; (6) burin; (7) El Wad point; (8) lunate; (9) adze; (10) sickle blade. (For sources, see bibliography)
LITHICS:
LITHICS: Typology and Technology Tool morphology has been interpreted in light of reduction sequences and different patterns in the exploitation of raw materials (Dibble, 1 9 8 7 ) . A general trend toward increas ingly gracile flakes (greater width-thickness ratio) has also been demonstrated and interpreted to reflect gradual evo lution in physical coordination (Jelinek, 1982). Upper Paleolithic. T h e dominance of blade technologies in Upper Paleolithic industries replacing the Levallois tech nique, endscrapers (instead of sidescrapers), burins, and blade tools distinguishes them from those in the Middle Pa leolithic. Local transition from the Middle to the Upper Pa leolithic has been demonstrated typologically at Ksar 'Akil in the production of Upper Paleolithic scrapers and other types using Levallois blanks (Azoury, 1986). T h e techno logical transition has been demonstrated at Boqer Tahtit and Boqer using conjoinable-piece analysis. It shows the devel opment of Upper Paleolithic prismatic blade cores from Levallois blade cores (Marks, 1 9 8 3 ) . Two apparently partially contemporary complexes are defined: the Levantine Aurignacian (e.g., Amelias, el-Wad, Ksar 'Akil, Arkov, Hayonim, 'Erq el-Ahmar) and the Ahmarian (e.g., Boqer A, Gebel Lagama sites, Qadesh-Barnea sites, Erq el-Ahmar, Qafzeh, Ksar 'Akil). They differ in the dominance of fine-blade technology and tools in the Ahmarian (from 'Erq el-Ahmar), as opposed to flake and blade technologies, and the dominance of burins (for work ing wood and bone) and endscrapers in the Aurignacian (Gilead, 1 9 9 1 ) . T h e significance of the contrasts is disputed; suggestions include differing cultural traditions, ecological adaptations related either to geographical location (the Ahmarian more evident in the desert, tire Aurignacian in the Mediterranean zone) or climatic fluctuations, and chronotechnological developments. Epipaleolithic. The dominance of bladelet technology and the development of the specialized microburin tech nique for bladelet truncation in the later Epipaleolithic are the defining technological characteristics of the period. Ty pologically, complexes and cultures have been defined on a range of standardized microlithic tool types (Goring-Morris, 1987; Henry, 1989). Variation within tiiese tool types, as in length and the presence of Helwan backing retouch on Natufian microlithic lunates (e.g., Hayonim, el-Wad, 'Einan), provide the means for finer subdivision. As in the U p per Paleolithic, the functions of stone tools seem to reflect hunting (points, barbs) and processing (scrapers, burins). T h e addition of sickles to the repertoire, as evidenced by the lustrous edges of some blades and bladelets, is an important precursor to later Neolitiiic agriculture. T h e terminal Epi paleolithic Harifian culture also witnesses the introduction of small arrowheads. Of special technological significance in the Epipaleolithic is the development of a range of stone pestles, cup marks, mortars, and bowls, the results of a combination of chipping of rough-outs and the grinding of final products. Beyond c
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tiieir utilitarian significance for processing grains, the dec orative elements on the pestles and bowls probably held symbolic meaning. Breached stone mortars and bowls have been found with some burials (e.g., Neveh David, Nahal Oren). Neolithic. With respect to lithic analysis, this period is notable for the introduction of ground-stone celts, true grinding stones, and heat treatment in the manufacture of long blades. Much of this complex is direcdy related to the evolution of agriculture. Blades were utilized for arrowheads and sicldes. Chronological and geographic distinctions are based on the wide variety of types and attributes in both classes (Gopher, 1994). T h e end of die Neolithic shows a decline in the use of arrowheads, except in the desert regions, probably related to the decline of hunting in the latest Neolithic economies. Neolitiiic industries also include a range of flake tools (scrapers, notches, denticulates), burins, and otiier blade tools. Technologically, flakes dominate the waste assem blages from most sites, although the diagnostic elements (for the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and the early Pottery Neolithic) are long, prismatic blades manufactured from bipolar naviform cores. Stone vessels and art (masks, figurines) have also been discovered (e.g., Sha'ar ha-Golan, Nahal Hemar), presum ably of symbolic significance. Of additional interest is the long-distance exchange of obsidian, from sources in Ana tolia to as far south as Sinai and the central Negev. Post-Neolithic. T h e two major trends in lithic industries following the Neolithic are the increasing specialization in manufacture of all kinds, and a general decline in the im portance of chipped-stone artifacts (Rosen, 1989). Special ization is especially evident in sickle and ground-stone vessel manufacture. T h e decline in chipped-stone tools is reflected both in a decrease in types (and presumably in functions) and an absolute numerical decrease. By the Iron Age, only sickles are present in the chipped-stone tool repertoire (al though threshing-sledge teeth may also be present, they are difficult to identify). Iron sicldes replace flint toward the end of the Iron Age. Ground-stone vessels and grinding stones are of increas ing importance during the historical periods, as agricultural technologies and economies improve. The introduction of bronze and iron tools provides more efficient means of stoneworldng on a larger scale, resulting in a range of objects such as sarcophagi, olive presses, mills, and millstones. [See Sarcophagus; Olives.] Many stone vessels incorporate both utilitarian and symbolic functions, as in Chalcolithic basalt fenestrated and decorated bowls and mortars, or in lime stone cups from the Second Temple period in Israel. S u m m a r y , Lithic artifacts are the primary remains of material culture available from prehistoric periods. They are thus the primary means for reconstructing basic cultural his tory, as well as other elements of the cultural process. In the
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proto- and early historical periods, they provide a valuable addition to odier realms of material culture, especially in making it possible to define specialized modes of manufac ture and exchange based on analysis of waste. Study of these artifacts also provides insight into their various functions, usually utilitarian; often, however—but especially in the case of ground-stone vessels—they hold important symbolic meaning. [See also the biographies of Garrod and Neuville. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent en tries] BIBLIOGRAPHY The sources for tlie ten illustrations in figure 2 are as follows: (i) Ofer Bar-Yosef and N. Goren, The Lithic Assemblages of' Ubeidiya, Qedem 34, Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew Uni versity (Jerusalem, 1993), fig. 26:3; (2) R. Schild and F. Wendorf, "New Explorations in the Egyptian Sahara," in Problems in Prehistory: North Africa and the Levant, edited by F. Wendorf and A. E. Marks (Dallas, 1975), fig. 9:2; (3) P. Boutie and S. A. Rosen, "Des gisement Mousteriens dans le Neguev central / resultats preliminaires de prospections recentes," in Investigations in South Levantine Prehistory, edited by O. Bar-Yosef and B. Vandermeersch (Oxford, 1989), fig. 3 : 1 ; (4) L. Copeland, "The Middle and Upper Paleolithic of Lebanon and Syria in Light of New Research, in Wendorf and Marks, eds., 1975 (see above), fig. 3:5; (5) A. Gopher, The Flint Assemblages ofMunhata (Israel) (Paris, 1989), fig. 1 2 : 1 2 ; (6) ibid., fig. 21:3; (7) I. Gilead and O. BarYosef, "Prehistoric Sites in the Area of Qadesh Barnea," in Sinai, edited by G. Gvirtzman et al. (Tel Aviv, 1987), fig. 5:1; (8) A. E. Marks, "An Outline of Prehistoric Occurrences and Chronology in tlie Central Ne gev, Israel," in Wendorf and Marks, eds., 1975 (see above), fig. 9:d; (9) unpublished, from the author's analysis of lithic assemblages at Sataf; (10) Gopher, 1989 (see above), fig. 40:10. Azoury, Ingrid. Ksar AMI, Lebanon: A Technological and Typological Analysis of the Transitional and Early Upper Palaeolithic Levels of Ksar Akil and Abu Halka, vol. 1, levels XXV-XII. Oxford, 1986. Primary reference from one of the most important cave sites in the Levantine Paleolithic. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "Archaeological Occurrences in the Middle Pleisto cene of Israel." In After the Australopithecines, edited by Karl W. Butzerand Glynn L. Isaac, pp. 571-604. The Hague, 1975. Although somewhat dated, this is still one of the most important syndieses of the Lower Paleolithic in the Levant. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "Prehistory of the Levant," Annual Review of Anthro pology 9 (1980): 1 0 1 - 1 3 3 . Concise review of Levantine prehistory by one of its leading scholars. Binford, Sally R. "Variability and Change in the Near Eastern Mousterian of Levallois Fades." In New Perspectives in Archaeology, edited by Sally R. Binford and Lewis R. Binford, pp. 49-60. Chicago, 1986. Classic summary of the "Mousterian functional argument" on Near Eastern data. Bordes, Francois. Typologie du Paleolithique ancien el moyen. Bordeaux, 1961. The basic descriptive typology used by virtually all scholars for the Middle Paleolithic in Europe and the Near East; well illus trated. Bordes, Francois. A Tale of Two Caves. New York, 1972. Classic ex ample of standard typological analysis in tlie Paleolithic. Clarke, David L. Analytical Archaeology. 2d ed. New York, 1978. Still a primary reference for archaeological systematics. Copeland, Lorraine. "The Middle and Upper Paleolithic in Lebanon and Syria in Light of Recent Research." In Problems in Prehistory:
North Africa and the levant, edited by Fred Wendorf and A. E. Marks, pp. 3 1 7 - 3 5 0 , Dallas, 1975. Although somewhat dated, there have been few Paleolithic excavations in Lebanon and Syria since it was written and it remains an important summary. Dibble, Harold L. "The Interpretation of Middle Paleolithic Scraper Morphology." American Antiquity 52 (1987): 1 0 9 - 1 1 7 . An important technological perspective in tool technologies. Garrod, Dorothy A. E., and Dorothea M. A. Bate. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: Excavations al the Wady al-Mughara. Vol. 1. Oxford, 1937. Primary reference for Levantine prehistory and typology. Gilead, David. "Handaxe Industries in Israel and the Near East." World Archaeology 2 (1970): I—11. Gilead's work was original and exhaus tive and remains a primary reference on Acheulean industries in the Near East. Gilead, Isaac. "The Upper Paleolithic Period in the Levant." Journal of World Prehistory 5 (1991): 1 0 5 - 1 5 4 . The most up-to-date review of this period available. Gopher, Avi. Arrowheads of the Neolithic Levant: A Seriation Analysis. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Series, no. 10. Winona Lake, Ind., 1994. Perhaps the definitive study of arrowhead typology and seriation in the Neolitiiic, with discussion of otiier as pects of the lithic industries as well. Goring-Morris, A. Nigel. At the Edge: Terminal Pleistocene Hunter-Gath erers in the Negev and Sinai. 2 vols. Oxford, 1987. Model presentation of the materials, with much emphasis on lithic analysis and numerous illustrations. Henry, Donald O. From Foraging to Agriculture: The levant at the End of the Ice Age. Philadelphia, 1989. Elegant summary of die origins of agriculture, including a considerable amount of data and analysis of lithic materials. Jelinek, Arthur J. "The Tabun Cave and Paleolithic Man in the Le vant." Science 216 (1982): 1 3 6 9 - 1 3 7 5 . In the absence of a final report, this is the best summary of die recent excavations, including impor tant technological analyses. Keeley, Lawrence H. Experimental Determination of Stone Tool Uses: A Microwear Analysis. Chicago, 1980. Classic in microscopic analysis of stone tools. Marks, A. E. "The Middle and Upper Paleolithic Transition in the Levant." Advances in World Archaeology 2 (1983): 5 1 - 9 8 . Seminal analysis of technological continuity between the two periods. Neuville, Rene. Le Paleolithique el le Mesolithique du desert de Judee. Archives de l'lnstitut de Paleontologie Humaine, Memoire 24. Paris, 1 9 5 1 . Neuville's work remains a cornerstone in Levantine prehistory. Rosen, Steven A. "The Analysis of Early Bronze Age Chipped Stone Industries: A Summary Statement." In L'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Bmmaiis, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 199-224. Oxford, 1989. The only recent synthesis of lithic industries and analysis at the beginning of the Bronze Age. Valla, Francois R. Les industries de silex de Mallaha (Eynan) et du Natoufien dans le Levant. Memoires et Travaux du Centre de Recherche Prehistoriques Francais de Jerusalem, no. 3. Paris, 1984. Primary and exhaustive technological and typological study of the lithic industries of Natufian culture. STEVEN A . ROSEN
Artifacts of the Chalcolithic Period The lithic assemblages from the Chalcolithic period, like those from the preceding Neolithic and die later Early Bronze Age, can be divided into two broad technological spheres: ground stone and chipped stone. These are not ex clusive categories; some chipped-flint tools (such as celts)
LITHICS: Artifacts of the Chalcolithic Period may be finished by grinding, and many ground-stone tools were initially chipped (such as basalt vessels). Chipped-Stone Industries. Chalcolithic domestic sites usually exhibit at least live different chipped-stone technol ogies: flake tools, blade tools, tabular scrapers, celt tools, and microlithic tools. In addition to these common chippedstone technologies, rare tool types may occur at some sites, such as prismatic blades and perforated star-shaped disks, die latter known primarily from sites in the Golan region of modern Israel. [See Golan.] All of these types are typically manufactured from cryptocrystalline silicates (chert or flint) of varying quality and color, though chipped-limestone tools have been recovered from sites such as Grar and Gilat. [See Gilat] Predominant at most sites are the ad hoc tools that rep resent the domestic production of flint for a wide range of everyday needs. Within the ad hoc tool category a variety of
subtypes is commonly recognized, such as notches, denticulates, borers, scrapers, sidescrapers, and choppers, as well as retouched and/or utilized flakes and debitage. The ma jority of these exhibit a range from standardized to nonstandardized and were produced locally with the common flake technology, requiring no specialized skills or flint. Blade tools during tite Chalcolithic are primarily limited to the manufacture of sickle blades, although some blades were made into awls or other less standardized tools. Siclde blades, identified by the lustrous "sickle sheen" (a result of plant silica deposition) along die working edge, are typically rectangular to trapezoidal in outline, with one side backed (invasive longitudinal retouch). There is evidence for pris matic blade manufacture in die Chalcolithic, but it consti tutes a significant part of tire flint-tool assemblage only in the Early Bronze Age. Celt tools, a broad category encompassing axes, adzes,
b
c
5 cm
d
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e
LITHICS: Chalcolithic Period. Typical chalcolithicflintartifacts, (a) borer or perforator; (b, d) end scrapers; (c) axe; (e) "tabular" scraper; (f) micro-endscraper. All tools are from the northern Negev site of Shiqmim. (Courtesy Y. M. Rowan)
f
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and chisels, are generally made from bifacially flaked cores, although flakes are occasionally used. Axes and adzes, dif ferentiated primarily by the adze's asymmetric bit (working edge), as opposed to the axe's symmetric bit, are common at most Chalcolithic sites. Less frequently seen are chisels, often called the Ghassulian chisel after the type-site of Tel eilat el-Ghassul, which are generally narrower at the bit and body than axes and adzes. [See Teleilat el-Ghassul] Tabular scrapers, also known as Ghassulian fan scrapers, only rarely exhibit the classic fan shape. Although they are called scrapers, microwear analyses have suggested that some were used as knives. Manufactured from large cortical flakes of fine-grained flint, tiiese pieces are usually retouched along all edges, often with the intentional removal or thin ning of the bulb of percussion. T h e result is a large, thin flake tiiat sometimes exhibits grinding on the cortical surface (incisions begin only in die Early Bronze Age). Debris from the production of tabular fan scrapers is found only at a few sites, indicating possible specialized production, selectivity in flint procurement, and some form of exchange. Microlithic tools such as microendscrapers, transverse ar rowheads, and microborers are found only at some sites, particularly those on the southern coastal plain, such as Gilat, Grar, and the Wadi Gaza sites; they are less frequent at the Beersheba sites in the northern Negev desert. [See Beer sheba; Negev.] Microendscrapers (small bladelet tools with slight retouch primarily along the distal tip) are manufac tured from a very fine semitranslucent flint. Transverse ar rowheads manufactured from bladelets are primarily limited to southern Negev and Sinai sites. [See Sinai.] Microborers are not commonly recovered from most sites, but it is dif ficult to know if this is a result of geography, chronology, or recovery methodology. Obsidian, more common during the Pre-Pottery Neo lithic, is known from a few Chalcolithic sites, such as Gilat, Teleilat el-Ghassul, Tel Kabri, and Sinai site A 3 0 1 , and is indicative of some long-distance trade with Anatolia. [See Kabri, Tel; Anatolia, article on Prehistoric Anatolia.] A num ber of sites identified as specialized flint-tool production ar eas indicate trade in chipped-fiint tools. Tabular scraper procurement and production sites are known from the west ern Negev and Sinai. A number of Wadi Gaza sites spe cialized in flint-tool production; Wadi Gaza sites A, B, and D show evidence of celt-tool production and possibly ex port. Site A also produced many stages of tabular scraper production. Only a few sites have recovered large numbers of microborers, sometimes with a scarcity of other flint tools. Unfortunately, microborers, which are probably related to bead production, are extremely small (about 1 0 - 2 0 mm) and may be overlooked during excavations. Ground-Stone Artifacts. The majority of ground-stone assemblages are grinders manufactured from beach rock, limestone, or basalt, with the material selection typically a function of a site's proximity to a source. Virtually ubiqui
tous at domestic sites, grinding stones as well as an array of mortars and pesties affirm the increased reliance on an agricultural subsistence base. Hammerstones and pounding stones, varying from pecked and battered round cobbles to ground and worn stones, are found at virtually all sites. Large stone rings are frequently discovered, alternatively in terpreted as digging-stick weights or weights, or, at coastal sites, as anchors or net weights. Basaltic vessels, a few examples of which are known from the Neolithic period (Tel Dan), achieve the highest crafts manship during the Chalcolitiiic period. [See Dan.] T w o types of basaltic (sometimes actually phosphoritic) vessels are common—the large bowl and the pedestaled, fenestrated stand (or "incense burner"), both represented by similar ceramic forms. Basaltic vessels are often decorated with chevron incisions along a thin, flared rim and with an incised band around the base of a bowl. In addition to vessels, ba saltic pillar figurines witii anthropomorphic or zoomorphic features are found in the Galilee and Golan regions, pre sumably manufactured from the locally available basaltic lava flows. However, at sites in the northern Negev and coastal plain regions, basaltic origins are unknown; the Dead Sea area, the Golan, and the Galilee regions all remain p o tential source areas (geologists have eliminated the Maktesh Ramon in the Negev as a potential basalt source area). T h e lack of evidence for basaltic artifact production at all sites indicates specialized production and exchange. A wide range of other artifacts also was manufactured from ground stone, some of it from distant sources. Ground-stone mace-heads, while rare, are also found pro duced from limestone, diorite, gabro, granite, and haema tite, some resembling predynastic Egyptian forms. These artifacts are conceivably items of warfare but may also rep resent symbols of power, authority, and divinity, as is known from later textual and pictographic evidence from both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Spindle whorls, commonly lime stone or ceramic, are infrequently found made of otiier ma terials, such as basalt, sandstone, flint, or chlorite schist. These artifacts, flat and circular to elliptical, attest to the increased importance of spinning wool. Other small, per forated ground-stone artifacts are frequently found, alter natively called loom weights or stone rings, which also may relate to the spinning craft. Decorative items such as beads and pendants, typically manufactured from locally available materials such as lime stone and chalk, are sometimes also made of carnelian, mal achite, calcite, and amazonite. Palettes, rectangular to trap ezoidal in shape and biconvex to concave in cross section, are known made from granite, scoria, chlorite schist, and limestone; some were probably used to grind ocher, an iron oxide pigment used for ceramic paint, and cosmetic or m e dicinal preparations. Evidence from predynastic Egyptian contexts also supports a possible commemorative function. Even more rare are the abstract violin-shaped figurines,
LITHICS: Artifacts of the Chalcolithic Period
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LITHICS; Chalcolithic Period. Assorted ground stone artifacts from the chalcolithic site of Glial. Shown are spindle whorls, maceheads, palettes, a votive axe, a basalt fenestrated stand, and a pendant. (Courtesy Y. M. Rowan)
in the southern Levant found only in Chalcolithic contexts, which are often made of similar materials, including granite, chlorite schist, mica schist, limestone, and calcite. By far the greatest number of these enigmatic figurines were found at Gilat, where a plethora of otiier nonlocal stone materials was also recovered. These abstract, geometric figurines have been interpreted as having served a cultic and/or an eco nomic function. They were manufactured by chipping, grinding, and polishing, and the lack of manufacturing de tritus indicates that they were imported. BIBLIOGRAPHY Alon, David, and Thomas E. Levy, "The Archaeology of Cult and tlie Chalcolithic Sanctuary at Gilat." Journal of Mediterranean Archae ology 2.2 (1989): 1 6 3 - 2 2 1 . Amiran, Ruth, and Naomi Porat. "The Basalt Vessels of die Chalcol
ithic Period and Early Bronze I." Tel Aviv II (1984): 1 1 - 1 9 . The only synthesis of basalt vessels from Chalcolithic sites in the soudiern Levant. Gilead, Isaac, and Yuval Goren. "Petrographic Analyses of Fourth Mil lennium B.C. Pottery and Stone Vessels from the Northern Negev, Israel." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 275 (1989): 5 - 1 4 . Important work suggesting that stone vessels found at Chalcolithic sites in the northern Negev originated in Transjordan around die eastern areas of the Dead Sea. Macdonald, Eann, et al. Beth-Pelet, vol. 2, Prehistoric Para; Beth-Pelet Cemetery. British School of Archaeology in Egypt, Publications of the Egyptian Research Account, no. 52. London, 1932. Primary ref erence on the results of early excavations in the Wadi Ghazzeh re gion, with ample illustrations and photographs. Neuville, Rene. "Objects en silex." In Teleilat Ghassidl, by Alexis Mallon et al, pp. 55-65. Rome, 1934. Though dated, this work remains an important reference from what is still regarded one of the more important Chalcolithic sites. Rosen, Steven A. "The Potentials of Lithic Analysis in the Chalcolithic
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of the Northern Negev." In Shiqmim, vol. i, Studies Concerning Chal colithic Societies in the Northern Negev Desert, Israel, 1982-1984, edited by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 2 9 5 - 3 1 2 . British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 356. Oxford, 1987. The only methodical syndiesis of Chalcolithic chipped-stone tools from the southern Le vant published to date. Rosen, Steven A. "The Analysis of Early Bronze Age Chipped Stone Industries: A Summary Statement." In L'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emrnaiis, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, vol. 1, pp. 199-222. British Archaeological Reports, In ternational Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Primarily concerned with EB flint analysis but refers to the Chalcolithic period, including im portant changes between them. YORKE M . ROWAN
Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages Lithic assemblages of the Bronze and Iron Ages can be di vided into two classes: chipped-stone industries and groundstone industries. Chipped-stone tools are types of small cut ting, boring, and scraping utensils manufactured using various knapping methods, usually on cryptocrystalline ma terials (e.g., flints). The ground-stone industry comprises a wider range of implements, including various kinds of grind ing stones, stone vessels and mortars, weights, palettes, pol ished objects such as votive axes, and lapidary (a technology in itself, and not dealt with here). Production methods in clude knapping and chiseling; coarse and fine abrasion, or polishing; pecking; cutting; splitting; and drilling. Raw ma terials include limestones and chalks, basalt, alabaster, steatite, diorite, some cryptocrystalline materials, and sem iprecious stone. Aside from the obvious typomorphological differences between the two classes, there is a contrast between their utilitarian and social functions, technology, raw materials, and general developmental trajectory. Whereas the chippedstone industries show increasing production specialization and restriction in functions through the Bronze and Iron Ages, the ground-stone assemblages seem to reflect relative stability in production mode and, in fact, show increased diversity in function. T o a degree, both of these phenomena can be associated with die introduction of metal tools. Over the three-millennia-long course of this period, metal tools slowly replaced most chipped-stone tools. In conttast, they facilitated the manufacture of other stone implements, al lowing better implements, as well as a wider range of them, to be produced. Unlike chipped-stone tools, there is little functional overlap between ground-stone tools and vessels and metal tools in these periods. In addition to the examination of basic technologies and utilitarian functions of lithic assemblages, these artifacts can also be used to reconstruct other aspects of culture. In par ticular, the large quantities of production waste associated with both classes of artifacts and the relative scarcity of sources of some raw materials (e.g., basalt or obsidian) allow
patterns of production, specialization, and exchange to be analyzed. In some cases, stylistic motifs, reflective of differ ent aspects of cultural ttaditions, can also be traced. Chipped-Stone Industries. Although chipped-stone in dustries have been the subject of detailed reports and syn thesis (e.g., Rosen, 1989), the same is not true for other stone implements. Syntheses of other stone technologies, even on the level of the site, are rare, and collections have focused on art objects, sometimes to the near exclusion of other elements. Early Bronze Age blade industries. Long prismatic blades, usually trapezoidal in section, struck from large uniplatform cores, are characteristic of the Early Bronze Age across virtually the entire Near East. Early excavators in the Levant referred to these blades as ribbon knives, but they were later more formally described and analyzed by Rene Neuville and John W. Crowfoot, who referred to them as Canaanean blades. No good antecedents for tiiis technology have been found in the Levantine Chalcolithic, nor do they continue into the succeeding Middle Bronze Age, although they are abundant in the EB IV-MB I horizon in northern Israel. These blades were used primarily for sickle manufacture. Up to 1 5 cm or more in length, and traditionally of fine grained brown flint, they were usually snapped into shorter sections, truncated, and hafted. The recovery of relatively fresh pieces with sickle gloss suggests that pieces were re touched or sharpened only after the primary edge dulled. Segments were often reversed in the haft, as reflected in the double-edged gloss on some pieces. Bitumen preserved on the edges of some segments is indicative of a hafting mode, and although most show lateral hafting of short segments, some complete blades were apparently utilized as reaping knives and not sickles in die narrow sense. The near absence of corresponding cores and debitage at most sites, the recovery of packets of complete, unworked blades deriving from the same core, and the discovery of a few workshops (e.g., at Har-Haruvim and Lahav in Israel, Saida-Dakkerman in Lebanon, and Hassek Hoyiik in T u r key), indicate exchange and a degree of production special ization. In addition to Canaanean blades and sickles, two other blade industries are present in the Early Bronze Age. Egyp tian bitruncated and/or backed blades have been discovered at some sites in the northern Negev and the Shephelah (e.g., Tel 'Erani). These are smaller, less regular in section, and manufactured on different flint from the Canaanean blades. Utilized in part for sickle manufacture, they seem also to have been used for knives. In the Negev, especially at Biq at Uvda, small, relatively crude blades served as blanks for backed sickles and arched backed blades—perhaps functionally knives. These types are virtually absent from northern assemblages. Other blades were also manufactured, apparently as adc
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LITHICS: Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages
379
LITHICS: Bronze and Iron Ages. Figure I, Chipped stone tools, (i) Canaanean blade, broken at end; (2) Canaanean sickle segment; (3) large geometric sickle segment from Iron Age Tell el-Hesi; (4) microendscraper; (5) borer; (6) denticulate/notch; (7) scraper; (8) fanscraper (tabular scraper). (For sources, see bibliography)
juncts or ad hoc substitutes for Canaanean blades. These are smaller and less standardized than their prismatic coun terparts. They also show little evidence for production spe cialization. Early Bronze Age bladelet industries. T h e earliest stages of the Early Bronze Age seem to show a continuation of the Chalcolithic bladelet industries. This is reinforced by the presence of Egyptian twisted bladelets in the south. These tools seem to drop out of the repertoire later in the period. In the desert regions, bladelet technology is present in the form of microlithic transverse arrowheads and lunates, as in the assemblages from the nawamis tombs of 'EinHudera, Gebel Guna, and associated sites, Early Bronze Age tabular scraper industry. Tabular scrapers are large, flat, cortical flakes showing different kinds and locations of retouch. T h e classic type, the fan scraper, is a transverse scraper with distal retouch, a faceted striking platform, and in many cases, bulbar thinning. However, the classic type is relatively rare and there is much variation in shape and preparation. The primary characteristic is the re tention of the cortex and even that may have exceptions. Production techniques seem to have included block-onblock, direct, and indirect percussion. EB types may exhibit
cortical incisions in various patterns—for example, the "protoaleph." Microscopic analysis of edge wear has indi cated that at least some of tiiese tools functioned as knives. Also, tiiere appears to be some spatial association with ritual loci, suggesting some cultic functions for the class. EB tabular scrapers as a class clearly originated in the pre ceding Chalcolithic period or in the terminal Neolithic. They disappear with the end of die EB III and have not been found in reliable contexts at EB IV-MB I sites. In common with Canaanean blades, evidence for the manufacture of these pieces is absent from all but a few sites. Unlike the blades, workshop sites have been found exclusively in the southern deserts, and the quantitative distribution of tiiese pieces shows a geometric decline with distance from the as sumed source area. This suggests some kind of down-theline exchange system similar to that postulated for Anatolian obsidian during the Neolithic period. Early Bronze Age ad hoc industry. T h e bulk of most EB assemblages is comprised of a range of retouched and utilized flakes and debris. They may be further subdivided into types: scrapers, notches and denticulates, choppers and hammerstones, and retouched pieces. Within these types there is little standardization. Microwear analyses and the
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wide range in morphology and attributes of the general class indicate a wide range of functions, including hide scraping, plant processing, whittling, boneworking, piercing, cutting and shredding of soft materials, and pounding and chop ping. In contrast to other indusft-ies, there is abundant evidence for local on-site manufacture for die entire range of these artifacts. Cores and debitage from simple flake manufacture are the most abundant element on virtually all sites, and these tools constitute the most common tool class. There is no evidence for specialized manufacture or exchange of these items, and the raw materials exploited are local. A similar ad hoc industry dominates Chalcolithic assem blages, although tire crude and generalized nature of the technology precludes the assumption of cultural continuity on this basis. These tools are common in the EB IV-MB I horizon as well. Special classes. Special imported pieces, such as Egyp tian bifacial knives and scrapers ('Ein-Besor, Tel 'Erani) are also occasionally recovered. Various obsidian artifacts have been found, especially in the north, and should be treated as a special class because of their potential in defining trade relations. Post-Early Bronze Age sickles. Following the Early Bronze Age, Canaanean sickle technology was replaced by a flake industry for the production of Large Geometric sick les. This type continues through the middle of tire Iron Age, with minor typological variations, until flint sicldes are re placed by iron. The technotypological and chronostratigraphic discontinuity between tire Canaanean and Large Geometric sickles should be emphasized. Large Geometric sickles were manufactured by backing and truncating medium-sized flakes (usually 5-7 cm long). Shapes such as rectangles, trapezoids, triangles, and paral lelograms were fixed by the angles of the truncations. The bulb of percussion was often deliberately removed, appar ently to facilitate hafting. Bitumen and possibly resin-based adhesives have been discovered on tire backs of some sickles. Sickles were used first without edge retouch and were later sharpened with a serration retouch. No obvious cores from Large Geometric sickles have been recovered, but several secondary workshops or caches have been excavated. In several caches at Gezer tiiese.con sisted of a large number of unretouched flakes appropriate for sickle manufacture, numerous incomplete and unused sickles, a few used sickles, and a horn core for knapping and retouch. Such caches are clear evidence for the specialized manufacture of these sickles. The continued use of flint sickles even into the Iron Age is a reflection of their effectiveness, the ready availability of the raw material, and the efficiency of the specialized pro duction-distribution system. Post-EB ad hoc industry. A good definition of the postEB ad hoc industry is difficult to develop because of the scarcity of well-collected assemblages from unmixed M B II
contexts. By the Late Bronze and Iron Ages the industry is considerably reduced, both numerically and typologically. Typically, as at Deir el-Balah, sickles constitute some 80 percent of the assemblage—the rest are comprised for the most part of retouched flakes. The decline of this industry is probably the result of die increasing availability of bronze, and later iron, for small utensils. G r o u n d - S t o n e Industries. As mentioned above, ground stone implements in the Bronze and Iron Ages constitute a more diverse class functionally than do the chipped stone tools. The following review touches only on the primary types. Grinding stones. T h e standard grinding stones through out the Bronze and Iron Ages at virtually all sites are saddle querns and associated rubbing stones. The raw material used is usually basalt, sandstone, limestone, or flint. Shapes vary depending on the original block, but rubbing stones are often loaf shaped. Querns from EB Jericho average roughly 30 cm in length and 1 5 - 2 0 cm in width; rubbing stones have about half those dimensions (Dorrell, 1983). At Arad they are somewhat larger (Amiran, 1978). By the Iron Age, as at Tell Qasile, larger rubbing stones and grinding slabs, occa sionally with rectangular bases, appear. These allowed more efficient processing of larger quantities of grain. T h e rotary quern seems not to have been introduced until the second century BCE, and occasional finds from earlier periods are likely to be intrusions. However, large rollers, presumably complementary to rubbing stones, have been found in Iron Age contexts at Megiddo. The absence of chipping debris and rough-outs at virtually all sites, along with the common use of nonlocal raw materials, such as basalt and sandstone, is indicative of production specialization and exchange. Vessels. The EB basalt vessel industry, as at Arad, Jeri cho, and other sites, shows a qualitative decline from its Chalcolithic predecessor. Fenestrated bowls disappear (per haps replaced by ceramic copies), and die fine finish and decorative incisions common in the Chalcolithic are rare or absent in the Early Bronze Age (Braun, 1990; Amiran and Porat, 1984). The most common types show thick, flat bases and high splayed rims. A subtype shows one or, more rarely, several lug-type handles. In addition to tiiese vessels, crude mortars, often of lime stone, are also common, and small, shallow cup marks have also been found. Door sockets, morphologically similar to crude mortars have also been discovered. MB, LB, and Iron Age basalt vessels, as at Hazor and Megiddo, show a resurgence in basalt vessel craftsmanship. This is especially evident in the introduction of tripod-based bowls and variants with decorative elements. Simple bowls and mortars are also present, and at Jericho they dominate. Various platters, palettes, and shallow bowls, of both coarse (limestone, basalt) and fine (alabaster, calcite, steatite) ma terials have been found at numerous sites. As with the grinding stones, the apparent absence of pro duction debris and use of nonlocal materials are indicators
LITHICS: Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages
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13
LITHICS: Bronze and Iron Ages, Figure 2 . Stone vessels and other artifacts. (1-5) upper scale, (61 3 ) lower scale. ( 1 ) limestone macehead; (2) light brown travertine mortar; (3) white limestone perforated disc fragment; (4) limestone macehead; (5) cosmetic stone palette; (6) limestone grinding/ rubbing stone; (7) stone gameboard; (8) basalt tripod mortar; (9) basalt bowl; ( 1 0 ) basalt bowl; ( 1 1 ) limestone bowl; ( 1 2 ) limestone pestle; ( 1 3 ) basalt basal grinding stone. (For sources, see bibliography)
of trade and production specialization. Some vessels, of al abaster and calcite, are clearly luxury goods imported from Egypt. T h e functions of this class of utensils are varied. Mortars were used for processing grain, and a large mortar at Tell Qasile may be associated witii a brewery. Other vessels may also have served as mortars, although many were associated with ritual, perhaps on a domestic level. Door sockets, pre sumably for attached hinges, have already been noted. Many
of the finer palettes and platters were for the preparation and use of cosmetics. Pestles
and pounding
stones.
Manufactured out of
limestone and basalt, the most common type of grinding stone at Jericho was small and almost dome shaped. Pound ing stones, hammerstones, and hammers are also found in large numbers in all periods. Hammerstones range from simple cobbles with signs of pecking through fully rounded, fist-sized balls that show deliberate pecking all around.
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LLOYD, SETON HOWARD FREDERICK
Hammerheads, as at Megiddo, show worked waists for hafting. This class of tools probably had many uses, including food processing, hammering, the reduction of metal ores (as at Timna') and possibly as ballistas and weights or mea sures. The more finely worked basalt objects were probably connected to some type of exchange network, but most were locally manufactured. Pierced objects. Ranging in size from small beads to large stone rings, pierced objects vary considerably in form, workmanship, and function. All show a central hole, prob ably drilled out with a bow drill. Typologically they include large stone rings, finely polished mace-heads, spindle whorls, loom weights, and beads. Raw materials are varied, both between types and within them. Thus, spindle whorls at Megiddo are of limestone, basalt, steatite, and hematite, and weights are of hematite, limestone, and sandstone. Large stone rings at Arad are of basalt, limestone, and sand stone, but the mace-heads are almost exclusively of lime stone. The different types are found throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages, and it is difficult to ascertain any chronotypological change. The function of the large stone rings is unclear; sugges tions include their use as digging-stick weights, net weights, and measuring weights. Ship anchors have been recovered from sites on tire coast. [See Anchors.] The mace-heads may have been weapons, or alternatively, ritual objects. Their Chalcolithic copper antecedents were certainly not weapons and thus lend credence to a symbolic role, especially in the Early Bronze Age. Spindle whorls and looms generally should be associated with textile manufacture, although, in some cases, use as small measuring weights cannot be ruled out. [See Textiles.] As with other stone implements, the pierced objects seem to reflect varying degrees of production specialization and exchange. A fundamental problem with these objects is tire scarcity of good collection and synthetic study. Miscellaneous objects. Beyond the general groups of ground-stone tools, a wide range of other types is found at all sites: stone disks (sometimes pot lids), casting molds, gaming boards, grooved stones (whetstones), potters' wheels, polished votive axes, and figurines. [See Games.] As with other types, most of these reflect degrees of specializa tion and exchange. [See also the biographies of Crowfoot and Neuville. In addi tion, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY The sources for the eight illustrations in figure I are as follows: (i) S. A. Rosen, "Notes on the Flint Implements from Tel Yarmuth," in Yarmouth I, by P. de Miroschedji (Paris, 1988), pi. 52:6; (2) ibid., pi. 5 1 : 1 4 ; (3) unpublished, from the author's own research; (4) I. Gilead, "Grar: A Chalcolithic Site in the Northern Negev, Israel," Journal of Field Archaeology 16.4 (1989), fig. 10:2; (5) R. Cohen, Archaeological Survey of Israel Map of Sede Boqer-East (168) 13-03, Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 ) ,
fig. 2, p. 26; (6) Rosen, 1988 (see above), pi. 50:6 (7) ibid., pi. 50:7; (8) J. C. Payne, "The Flint Industries of Jericho," in Excavations at Jericho [/(London, 1983), fig. 348. The sources for the thirteen illustrations in figure 2 are as follows: (1) W. G. Dever et al, Gezer II (Jerusalem, 1974), pi. 39:8; (2) P. de Miroschedji, Yarmouth I (Paris, 1988), pi. 49:9; (3) ibid., pi. 49:2; (4) R. Amiran, Early Arad Qerusalem, 1978), pi. 76:5; (5) Y. Yadin et al., Hazor II (Jerusalem, i960), pi. CV:24; (6) Amiran, 1978 (see above), pi. 8 0 : 1 1 ; (7) Yadin, i960 (see above), pi. L X X V I I L 6 ; (8) ibid., pi. L X X V I F 4 ; (9) ibid., pi. L X X V I F 9 ; (10) ibid., pi. CIV:6; ( 1 1 ) Amiran, 1978 (see above), pi. 77:1; (12) ibid., pi. 80:12; (13) ibid., pi. 79:3. Amiran, Ruth. Early Arad, vol. I, The Chalcolithic Settlement and Early Bronze Age City, First-Fifth Seasons of Excavations, 1062-1066. Je rusalem, 1978. Includes a discussion of tlie full range of stone arti facts recovered from the site, including a note on the chipped-stone tools by Tamar Schick. Amiran, Ruth, and Naomi Porat. "The Basalt Vessels of the Chalco lithic Period and Early Bronze I." Tel Aviv 1 1 (1984): 1 1 - 1 9 . Incor porates petrographic analysis into a standard typological study, with important results on sources of stone vessels. Braun, Eliot. "Basalt Bowls of the EB I Florizon in the Southern Le vant." Paleorient 16.1 (1990): 87-96. One of the rare synthetic studies of stone vessels. Brezillon, Michel N. La denomination des objets de Pierre Taillie. Gallia Prehistoire Supplement, 4 Paris, 1 9 7 1 . Classic introduction to stonetool technology and typology; especially well illustrated. Dorrell, Peter G. "Appendix A: Stone Vessels, Tools, and Objects." In Excavations at Jericho, vol. 5, edited by Kathleen M. Kenyon and Thomas A. Holland, pp. 485-575. London, 1983. The most com plete study of nonchipped-stone artifacts available from a single site. El-Khouli, Ali. Egyptian Stone Vessels: Predynastic Period to Dynasty III. 3 vols. Mainz am Rhein, 1978. Exhaustive catalog and study of stone vessels of all types from the indicated time period in Egypt; extensive bibliography. Lamon, Robert S., and Geoffrey Shipton. Megiddo I. Chicago, 1939. A wealth of information on different types of stone implements and vessels is scattered throughout the volume. McCaslin, Dan E. Stone Anchors in Antiquity: Coastal Settlements and Maritime Trade-Routes in the Eastern Mediterranean ca. 1600-1050 B.C. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 6 1 . Gdteborg, 1980. Covers not only the technology and typology of stone anchors, but attempts social and economic reconstructions based on prove nance and distribution. Rosen, Steven A. "The Analysis of Early Bronze Age Chipped Stone Industries: A Summary Statement." In L'urbanisalion de la Palestine a Tage du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Act.es du Colloque d'Emmaus, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 199-224. Oxford, 1989. The only recent synthesis and analysis of EB lithic industries. Semenov, S. A. Prehistoric Technology. London, 1964. English transla tion of the seminal work on microscopic analysis and functional de termination. Yadin, Yigael, et al. Hazor III. Jerusalem, i960. One of a handful of site reports that record a range of stone implements, especially ves sels of different periods. STEVEN A . ROSEN
LLOYD, SETON HOWARD FREDERICK ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 9 6 ) , archaeologist who worked extensively in Iraq and Turkey. Born in Birmingham, England, Lloyd qualified as an architect in 1926. In 1929 he replaced a colleague as
LOCUS the architect on Henri Frankfort's excavations at Tell elAmarna in Egypt; he subsequently assisted Frankfort on the Oriental Institute of Chicago's excavations in Iraq: he worked at first millennium BCE sites at Khorsabad and Jerwan in Assyria; in tire Diyala region east of Baghdad, he recorded sequences of temples and palaces from about 3100-1750 BCE by tracing their mud-brick walls. In these excavations he made innovative use of kite photography. In 1937-1938 Lloyd worked with John Garstang at the prehis toric site of Mersin on Turkey's south coast and conducted a survey around Sinjar, in northern Iraq, that provided a model for archaeological surveys and the basis for subse quent excavations (e.g., Tell er-Rimah and Yarim Tepe). During World War II, as adviser to the Directorate General of Antiquities in Iraq, Lloyd worked with Iraqi archaeolo gists at sites (Hassuna, Uqair, and Eridu) selected to fill gaps in the chronologies of northern and southern Iraq from about 5800 to 2000 BCE. Lloyd also helped to reorganize the collections of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. In 1949 Lloyd went to Turkey as the first director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. His excavations at Polatii, Beycesultan, and Sultantepe provided sequences from the Chal colithic to the Iron Ages. He also conducted architectural surveys of Islamic Harran and Seljuk Alanya. In 1962 Lloyd became professor of Western Asiatic archaeology at the In stitute of Archaeology in London, where he taught until 1969. Lloyd has since added to what was already an exten sive list of publications, ranging from guidebooks for troops during World War II to excavation reports and handbooks for students. He has been the recipient of many academic honors and is a Fellow of the British Academy. [See also British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara; Di yala; Eridu; Flassuna; Rimah, Tell er-; and the biographies of Frankfort and Garstang.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Lloyd, Seton. The Interval: A Life in Near Eastern Archaeology. Faringdon, 1986. Lloyd, Seton. "Seton Lloyd." In The Postmasters: Eleven Modem Pio neers of Archaeology, edited by Glyn E. Daniel and Christopher Chippindale, pp. 61-88. London, [1989?]. Based on "Archaeological Ret rospective 4: Seton L\ayd," Antiquity 56 (November 1982): 1 8 1 - 1 8 8 . Lloyd, Seton. Ancient Turkey: A Traveller's Histoiy of Anatolia. London, 1989. Lloyd, Seton. "Back to Alanya." Anatolian Studies 40 (1990): 2 1 9 - 2 2 1 . "Seton Lloyd: A Bibliography." Iraq 44 (1982): 2 2 1 - 2 2 4 . Omissions and additions are listed in The Interval (p. 179). DOMINIQUE C O L L O N
LOCUS. T h e technical term archaeologists use to de scribe certain excavated features is locus. The word refers specifically to discrete archaeological entities created by hu man hand or tiirough postoccupational decay. The locus is the basic unit of excavation; additionally, it provides a means
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of relating associated artifacts and ceramic materials to those archaeological entities. Complicating our understanding of the locus is the fact that this basic unit may be defined differently by different archaeologists. Older works may utilize the term locus, but they often neglect to define it at all. More recently, Ameri cans and Europeans have generally used locus to refer to architectural elements, to built features, and to layers of soil, while for Israelis, the term often describes rooms in their entirety. The locus is a tool that enables an excavator to maintain a three-dimensional perspective. It challenges the excavator of each square, each area, each field, and each site to con sider stratigraphic relationships among the various features within each square, among contiguous squares, and throughout a site. Excavation with attention to loci requires the continual evaluation and reevaluation of the strati graphic relationship among architectural features, for ex ample, walls, revetments, socles, and cisterns, along with soil levels, including surfaces, fills, and postoccupational debris layers. The value of the locus is best seen in archaeological plans and sections, in which the rendering of loci enables the excavator to demonstrate visually the relationship among a site's various architectural and depositional fea tures. Typically, each discrete archaeological entity is assigned a locus number when it is first encountered in the excavation process. This locus number places the newly discovered fea ture into the record of excavated features, or loci, in the square in which it was found. T h e recording of the locus ensures that die new feature is accurately and completely described in the excavation note book. This description usu ally includes elevation, size, construction materials, color, contents, extent of preservation, a discussion of nearby fea tures to which the locus relates, and other appropriate top ics. The locus number then becomes die reference number for all pottery and artifacts associated with the excavated feature—whether at the time the locus number is originally assigned or later in the excavation process. Sometimes pot tery and artifacts that had been excavated in contexts that were ambiguous can later be assigned locus numbers that clarify tiieir contexts. In this way, there is a record for each excavated area describing the association of features and ob jects. This record, in which architectural elements, debris lay ers, artifacts, and pottery are described and related, provides a basic resource for archaeologists in their discussion of stratigraphic and chronological relationships throughout a site. It permits the reevaluation of decisions, should new ev idence warrant it. Additionally, it allows those who were not participants in an excavation to review its basic building blocks and the interpretive process that was applied to them. [See also Balk; Stratigraphy.]
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LOWER EGYPT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aharoni, Yohanan. "Remarks on the 'Israeli' Method of Excavation." Eretz-Israel u (1973): 48*—53*. Joukowsky, Martha Sharp. A Complete Manual of Field Archaeology: Tools and Techniques of Field Work for Archaeologists. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980. Lance, H. Darrell. "The Field Recording System." In A Manual of Field Excavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists, edited by William G. Dever and H. Darrell Lance, pp. 7 3 - 1 0 7 . Cincinnati, 1978. Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. New York, 1990. Wright, G. Ernest. "The 'New' Archaeology." Biblical Archaeologist 38 (1975): 1 0 4 - 1 1 5 . B E T H ALPERT NAKHAI
LOWER EGYPT, the northern part of the country, comprising the Nile Delta south to Cairo. The nome (pro vincial) divisions that characterized Upper (southern) Egypt from very early times developed later in Lower Egypt where they followed the division of the Delta into long lenticular land areas separated by the branches and drainage channels of the Nile River. Eventually, Lower Egypt was divided into twenty nomes, as indicated in the lists from the Ptolemaic and Roman temples of Edfu and Dendera. Memphis in the first nome of Lower Egypt was a major religious capital and the administrative center of Egypt throughout much of its history. The great pyramid cemeteries in the western desert, from Abu Roash in the north to Dahshur on the southern border with Upper Egypt, belong to Memphis. In one of the offices of the civil government, there was a northern vizier for Lower Egypt who lived at Memphis. Merimde Beni Salame has long been the most important Neolithic site in the Delta, located along its southwestern edge. Recent research indicates that the material from Mer imde is part of a predynastic cultural tradition, named after the sites of Maadi and Buto, that developed separately from die predynastic Naqada culture (c. 3850-3000 BCE) in the upper Nile Valley (Bruce Trigger, "The Rise of Egyptian Civilization," in Trigger et a l , 1983). The ceramic ttadition is exemplified by small shallow bowls and black and brown polished jars with incised and impressed decoration. Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic iconography and texts from Upper Egypt and Saqqara indicate that Buto was an.im portant religious center and perhaps the political capital of Lower Egypt in the Predynastic period. In early times the ancient Egyptians associated the north eastern Delta with Asiatics, particularly Canaanites from southern Palestine, just as the western Delta may have been continually infiltrated by Egypt's western neighbors, the Libyans. Throughout the three thousand-year history of an cient Egypt there was a continual interplay between south ern Palestine and Egypt, beginning with strong Palestinian influence at the Predynastic site of Maadi in the southeast ern Delta followed by Egyptian penetration of southern Pal estine in the early first dynasty (c. 2920-2770). T h e lower
corners of the flat and expansive Nile Delta were at all pe riods Egypt's soft points that allowed non-Egyptian cul tures—Canaanite, Libyan, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman—to penetrate and dominate die Egyptian Nile Valley. An influx of Syrian traders and southern Palestinian im migrants in the late Middle Kingdom (second half of the twelfth dynasty, c. 1845-1783) led to a secondary state in the northeast Delta ruled by non-Egyptians. T h e Egyptians called them heka khasut, "rulers of foreign countries," from which the Greeks derived the more familiar term Hyksos. Ruling from Avaris, the site of Tell ed-Dab a in the north east Delta, the Hyksos comprise the fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties. Over the course of nearly three decades of exca vation, Manfred Bietak of the Austrian Archaeological In stitute in Cairo has found a complete chronological range of Middle Bronze II Canaanite culture, with ceramics, warrior graves, and temples that, in size and classic MBII features, match those found anywhere in Syria or Palestine (Bietak, 1968, 1975). c
During the Hyksos domination the Egyptian state, ruled by the kings of the seventeenth dynasty (c. 1640-1550), was restricted to Upper Egypt south of Hermopolis. After the Egyptians defeated and expelled the Hyksos, the eighteenth dynasty (1550-1307) and later New Kingdom rulers (eigh teenth-twentieth dynasty) initiated an active program of set tlement in Delta sites such as Heliopolis, Sais, Athribis, and Tanis. T h e eastern Delta became the staging area for cam paigns into Syria and Palestine, the latter area coming under Egyptian control through the eighteenth and nineteenth dy nasties. T h e nineteenth dynasty rulers, particularly Rameses II (1290-1224), built new Delta cities, the most important of which was Per-Rameses, at Qantir just north of the old Hyksos capital at Tell ed-Dab'a. This new city became the new administrative center of the kingdom. With the disintegration of the New Kingdom in the Third Intermediate period, a line of ethnic Libyan rulers rose to power from Tell Basta, where Libyans may have been moved by Rameses III after he defeated them in the west. Tell Basta, the capital of the eighteenth Lower Egyptian nome, located southeast of modern Zagazig was important since the Old Kingdom as the cult center of the cat-headed goddess Bastet. During the twenty-second and twenty-third dynasties (c. 945-712), the Delta was fragmented into sep arate principalities ruled by "Great Chiefs of the M a " or Meshwesh, one of the Libyan peoples attested in the New Kingdom. Tanis, located at the site of San el-Hagar in the northeastern Delta, became a major religious center. Many royal statues and parts of royal monuments were moved to Tanis for reuse in its temple precinct, which also became the burial ground for the twenty-second dynasty rulers who retained the title "king of Upper and Lower Egypt" even during the times of greatest political fragmentation. Toward the end of the Third Intermediate period (twenty-first-first half of twenty-fifth dynasty, c. 1070-712)
LUWIANS the entire western Delta was taken by Tefnakht, tire leader of another Libyan contingent known as the Libu. His de scendants remained in some control through the period of nominal Nubian rule under the twenty-fifth dynasty. Even tually descendants of Tefnakht moved their control from west to east across the Delta and down the Nile Valley to establish tiieir own kingdom over a unified Egypt as the twenty-sixth dynasty (c. 6 6 4 - 5 2 5 ) . T h e capital was now Sais, which had been a major Delta center since late Predynastic times. In the Ptolemaic and Roman periods the Delta, which had returned to fragmented political control under the Persian domination, there were many settlements with the accoutre ments of hellenized cities, including temples for both Greek and native Egyptian divinities. A large town of die Ptolemaic and Roman periods was found at Tell er-Ruba, which was part of the city of Mendes, the capital of the nome in the east central Delta. Mendes is an example of a true tell (mound) site, with settlement extending back to the late Predynastic period. Athribis hosted a Roman spa. In the west ern Delta Naukratis had been established as a major trading center during the reign of Amasis (c. 5 7 0 - 5 2 6 ) of the twenty-sixth dynasty. Kom Abu Bellou in tire western Delta has proved one of the richest sites for burials of the Ptole maic, Roman, and early Coptic periods (c. 3 3 2 BCE-sixth century CE) . Located at die extreme northwest of the Delta, Alexandria grew from a small native Egyptian fishing village, Rakotis, to become the capital of the Ptolemies, the preeminent city in Lower Egypt, one of die major ports of the Mediterranean coast, and the transit point between old native Egypt and die hellenized world. [See also Alexandria; Dab'a, Tell ed-; Delta; Heliopolis; Hyksos; Merimde; Naukratis; Saqqara; and Upper Egypt.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Baines, John, and Jaromir Malek. Atlas of Ancient Egypt. New York, 1980. Bietak, Manfred. Studien stir chronologic der nubischen C-Gruppe. Ein Beilrag zur friihgeschichte untemubiens. Vienna, 1968. Bietak, Manfred. Der Fundort im Rahmen der archaologischen-geographischen untersuchungen iiber das dgyptische osrdelta, Tel el-Dab'a. Vi enna, 1975. Butzer, Karl W. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cul tured Ecology. Chicago, 1976. Emery, Walter B. Archaic Egypt. Baltimore, 1961. Gardiner, Alan H. Egypt of the Pharaohs. Oxford, 1961. Hayes, William C. Most Ancient Egypt, Chicago, 1965. Kees, Hermann. Ancient. Egypt: A Cultural Topography. Translated by Ian F. D. Morrow. London, 1 9 6 1 . Trigger, Bruce G., et al. Ancient Egypt: A Social History. Cambridge, 1983. Z A H I HAWASS
LUWIANS. Essentially an etlinolinguistic term, Luwian (or Luvian) is used to refer to population groups that be
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came widespread in Anatolia during the second millennium BCE and spoke a common language. Scholars are still uncer tain about both the original homeland of the Luwian-speaking peoples and the nature and period of their entry into Anatolia. There is, however, fairly general agreement that they settled in Anatolia during the third millennium BCE, ini tially occupying extensive areas in the west. In the first half of the second millennium, a large part of western Anatolia seems to have been called Luwiya. How ever, the term was probably used only in a broad geographic sense, with no strong political connotations. By the middle of that millennium, Luwiya was replaced in the Hittite texts, most explicitiy in the Hittite laws, by the term Arzawa. The latter, though varying in its geographic limits, nonetheless had distinct political connotations. During the Hittite New Kingdom, it embraced a number of Hittite vassal states known collectively as the Arzawa lands. Luwian speakers extended far beyond the boundaries of Arzawa. T h e migrations that had led to their settlement in western Anatolia continued well into the second millennium, and by the middle of that millennium, Luwian-speaking groups occupied much of the southern coast of Anatolia, from die region later known as Lycia, in the west, to Cilicia, in the east. Lycia was the homeland, or part of the home land, of the Luwian-speaking Lukka people, one of the Lycians' main Bronze Age ancestors. Luwian speakers also settied in Cilicia, particularly in the region of Bronze Age Kizzuwatna. Kizzuwatna also came under strong Hurrian influence and, presumably, Luwian and Hurrian cultural and ethnic elements mingled there. Our understanding of the spread of Luwian speakers in western and soutiiern Anatolia is based primarily on lin guistic and onomastic evidence: a range of place names (names ending in -assa, for example) and personal names, as well as the names of Luwian deities. Thus, cults of the Luwian gods Tarhunt and Santas (Sandon) are attested in Kizzuwatna, and to the north of Kizzuwatna cults of the Luwian deities Sahasara, Huwassana, and Kuniyawanni are in evidence in the region of the classical Tyanitis, part of the Hittite Lower Land. The most tangible evidence of the Luwian presence in Anatolia is provided by two types of inscriptions: cuneiform and hieroglyphic. T h e cuneiform texts are inscribed on clay tablets, dating to the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE and found in the Hittite archives at Bogazkoy/Hattusa. In these inscriptions (the bulk of which are published in Heinrich Otten, Keilschrift Urkunden aus Boghazkoi, vol. 3 5 , Ber lin, 1953) die language used is identified as lu(w)ili, literally "(written) in the manner of Lu(w)iya." From the inscrip tions, which deal mainly with ritual and cultic matters, it is clear that Luwian belongs to the Indo-European language family and has close affinities with the "Hittite" (more strictly Nesite) language. T h e hieroglyphic texts appear on a number of royal seals and rock monuments. The earliest
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known example of the script appears on a seal of Ispuhtahsu, a fifteenth-century Icing of Kizzuwatna. However, the ma jority of texts date from the thirteenth through the eighth centuries BCE. Decipherment of the hieroglyphic script was gready fa cilitated by die discovery in 1939 of a bilingual text, in Phoe nician and Luwian hieroglyphs, at Karatepe, in eastern Cilicia. More recent work on the language of the inscriptions has established its virtual identity with that of the Luwian cuneiform texts. The character of the script, which was per haps initially inspired by the monumental script of Egypt, made it a more appropriate medium than cuneiform for re cording important achievements on public monuments. In the thirteenth century, increasing use seems to have been made of the script for this purpose, as is illustrated by the discovery in 1988 of a built stone chamber, commonly re ferred to as the Siidburg structure, in the Hittite capital of Hattusa. The monument, which dates to the reign of the last Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II (c. 1205-), bears a hieroglyphic inscription listing the Icing's military conquests in southern Anatolia. Luwian elements survived the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations, reemerging in the first millennium BCE. In deed, the majority of hieroglyphic inscriptions, attributable to the atlers of Early Iron Age kingdoms in southeast Ana tolia and northern Syria, date to the first two centuries or so of this period. In Lycia and Cilicia Aspera, Luwian personal names are attested as late as the classical and Roman im perial periods. The Lycian language was a direct descendant of the Luwian language, and Luwian deities figure promi nently in the Lycian pantheon. [See also Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia; Bogazkoy; Cilicia; and Lycia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Houwink ten Cate, Philo H. J. The Luwian Population Groups of Lycia and Cilicia Aspera during the Hellenistic Period. Leiden, 1961. Study of the survival of Luwian elements in southern Anatolia during the first millennium BCE. Laroche, D. L. "Luwier, Luwisch, Lu(w)iya." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archdologie, vol. 7, pp. 1 8 1 - 1 8 4 . Ber lin, 1928-. General discussion of the chief features of the Luwian language and the spread of Luwian-speaking peoples in Anatolia during the second and first millennia BCE. Laroche, Emmanuel. Dictionnaire de la langue louvite. Paris, 1959. Lu wian word list, with meanings (where known), Hittite equivalents (where applicable), and sources of reference. Otten, Heinrich, and Christel Riister. Texte in hurritischerSprache. Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazkoi, vol. 35. Berlin, 1993. TREVOR R . BRYCE
L Y C I A . The kingdom of Sarpedon and Glaukos in Ho meric tradition, Lycia was located in the southwest corner of Asia Minor. This region was almost certainly part of the homeland of the Late Bronze Age Lukka people, remnants
of whom formed one of die main population groups in Lycia in the first millennium BCE. Another population group may have come from Crete. Lycia figures prominently in Homer's Iliad as Troy's most important ally in the Trojan War. However, the earliest ar chaeological evidence so far for settlement in the country dates only to the late eighth century BCE. A number of build ings of this period have been excavated on the acropolis at Xanthos, which was to become Lycia's largest and most im portant city. In about 540 BCE, Lycia became a subject state of the Per sian Empire. Shortly afterward, a local ruling dynasty was established at Xanthos that exercised authority over much of the country until the early decades of the fourth century BCE. In 367 BCE, Lycia took part in the abortive satrap re bellion. When the rebellion was crushed, the country was once more forced to submit to Persian overlordship and re mained subject to Persia until Alexander tire Great invaded the country in 334/33 BCE. After Alexander's death in 323, Lycia came first under the control of Antigonus of Macedon and subsequentiy under Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule. How ever, with die defeat of the Seleucid king Antiochus III by the Romans at the battle of Magnesia in 190 BCE, Lycia was brought within the Roman sphere of influence. In 43 CE, the emperor Claudius joined Lycia with the neighboring coun try of Pamphylia and made it a Roman province. T h e language spoken by the native Lycians is closely re lated to the Late Bronze Age Luwian language. T h e script used was a modified form of the Greek alphabet. Our knowl edge of this rests primarily on 170 inscriptions carved on stone, from the late fifth to the late fourth century BCE. T h e majority are sepulchral inscriptions, carved on the facades of rock-cut tombs—which often replicate features of die wooden houses in which the Lycians lived. Because in many cases these were family tombs, they often provide important information about Lycian family structure, including some support for Herodotus's claim that there were mattilineal elements in Lycian society. Although much of the content of the inscriptions is still unintelligible to us, the discovery in 1973 of a trilingual inscription—in Lycian, Greek, and Aramaic—has thrown new light on the language. The inscriptions identify a number of Lycian gods and goddesses. The most prominent of these was "the mother of the gods," a direct descendant of the Luwian mother god dess. Under Greek influence, she was equated with the god dess Leto, who became increasingly important in Lycian re ligion. By the Roman imperial period, she and her children, Apollo and Artemis, were honored as the country's national gods. National religious festivals were held at the Letoon, the center of their worship. Apollo was also closely associ ated with the famous oracle at Patara. Lycia was in general well known for its oracular centers. Early in the second century BCE, the Lycians formed a political federation of their cities. It was known as the koinon,
LYCOPOLIS or Lycian League, and met under die presidency of a lykiarch. Although under Roman rule the league lost much of its autonomy, it continued to exercise important adminis trative functions throughout the period of the Roman Em pire. Following the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity, a number of bishoprics were established in Lycia. The city of Myra, where there are remains of a sixth-century church (with later additions), was the seat of Nicholas, the most famous of the Lycian bishops. Otiier remains from tlie early Christian period can be found in the Letoon, where a large church, also from the sixth century, was excavated in the 1970s.
Under Roman rule, Lycia enjoyed a relatively peaceful and prosperous existence. Products for which it was well known included perfume, wine, and, most importantly, tim ber cut from its cypress and cedar forests. T h e Arab inva sions that began at the end of the seventh century brought
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major changes to Lycia. Yet, a number of the ancient Lycian cities, including Xanthos, survived and were still in evidence in the eleventh century, when die Seljuk Turks arrived. [See also Anatolia; and Luwians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bean, George E. Lycian Turkey. London, 1978. General survey of Ly cian history and archaeological sites. Borchhardt, Jiirgen, et al. Goiter, Heroen, Herrscher in Lykien. Munich, 1990. Contributions by a number of scholars on a wide range of aspects of Lycian history and civilization from the Archaic through the Byzantine periods. Bryce, Trevor R. The Lycians, vol. 1 , The Lycians in Literary and Epigraphic Sources. Copenhagen, 1986. Study of Lycian history and so ciety as revealed through inscriptions and literary sources, up to the time of Alexander's conquests. TREVOR R . BRYCE
LYCOPOLIS.
See Asyut.
M
MA'AGAN MIKHA'EL. In fall 1985, while diving along die shore at Kibbutz Ma'agan Mikha'el, 32 km (20 mi.) south of Haifa, Israel, Ami Eshel noticed, in water less than 2 m deep, a pile of stones not native to the Levantine coast. Pieces of wood and pottery sherds protruded from the stones. Shifting local sand and a diver's keen sense of observation resulted in the discovery of the remains of an ancient merchantman. Preliminary investigations were carried out soon after the discovery by Shelley Wachsmann, under auspices of the Is rael Antiquities Authority. Based on the examination of an oil lamp and storage jar handles, a tentative date of tlie late fifth century BCE was assigned to the finds. In the following year, during further exploration by Elisha Linder and Avner Raban, several hull planks were observed while a test trench was being cut. T h e timbers were in an excellent state of preservation because they had been buried in the sand, an anaerobic environment, and protected under a thick layer of stones that turned out to be part of the ship's ballast. Ex cavation was undertaken by the Center for Maritime Studies of tlie University of Haifa, under the direction of Elisha Lin der. Survey a n d Excavation T e c h n i q u e s . T o determine the extent of tlie remains, define the ballast area, and measure tlie depth of the sand that had accumulated over the site, a probe pipe was inserted into the sea bottom by means of a water jet, which disclosed a clay layer about 4 m below the present sea level. Test trenches aided in locating the vessel's endposts, which were nearly 8 m apart. For recording pur poses, datum poles were inserted to define tlie plan of the site; they remained in place throughout the excavation to facilitate triangulation measurements in recording artifacts. The ship lay in shallow water at a walking distance of less than 60 m from the shoreline. T h e surge made working con ditions difficult, as sand continually drifted back into the excavation areas, affecting visibility. T o prevent interfer ence, a horseshoe trench was dredged around tire site, its outside wall lined with some fifteen hundred sandbags, but that failed to eliminate the surge and sand migration; even waves less than a meter high made it impossible to work safely and to avoid movements that would endanger the del
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icate procedures. In three seasons of excavation (autumn 1988, spring and autumn 1989), out of a total of 160 days at the site, sea conditions allowed only thirty-two days of actual excavation of the hull and its contents. T h e first task was to remove the ballast stones, whose total weight was more than 1 2 tons; some of the stones weighed more than 50 kg (100 lbs.) each. They consisted of three lithological groups: metamorphic, magmatic, and sedimen tary rock. The first group, comprising 65 percent of the to tal, was mostly blue schist. T h e origin of the stones pointed first to the central Mediterranean seacoast, near Corsica and Calabria. Closer analysis determined a more likely location, however, farther east, in the Greek islands. Beginning at the offshore end of the ship, which the finds indicated was the stern, where tire galley would normally be located, the ex cavation proceeded slowly toward the bow, using a dredger operated by a powerful water pump. Because damage by storm waves was feared, only one section of the inner hull was excavated at a time. Its contents were recorded, mapped, and photographed before they were removed. Hull Structure. The vessel's original measurements were approximately 1 2 m long and 4 m wide. More than n m of its bottom were recovered, including its keel and the lower portions of its stem- and sternposts. T h e starboard side was found in a better state of preservation than the port side, rising at its highest to more than a meter above the bottom of the keel. T h e ship was constructed in the shell-first method: the hull was completely built before the internal frames were installed. T h e planks were attached to one an other by a series of pegged mortise-and-tenon joints. Sur prisingly, however, the ends of the planks were also lashed to the end posts by cords. Other sttuctural components in cluded full frames secured to the planks by copper nails, a longitudinal stringer supporting vertical stanchions, and a massive mast step, forward of the middle of the ship, that carried a single mast for a large square sail. The lower end posts were attached to tlie keel and consisted of a single timber nearly 8 m long with a false keel, or shoe. All of the hull's structural components were of pine, except the ten ons, tlie treenails, and the false keel, which was of oak. T h e wood was in an excellent state of preservation, the external
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timbers unblemished by erosion or teredo worms. The ship appeared almost new and may therefore have been on its maiden voyage when it sank. Ship's Contents. In addition to die heavy load of ballast and a great deal of dunnage (twigs and branches that buff ered die ship's hull from the ballast stones), an impressive array of artifacts was intact in the hull or scattered around it. A complete one-arm anchor, made of oak, with a leadfilled wooden stock was discovered off the ship's starboard bow. The anchor's shank and arm were carved from a single timber. Remains of rope were found around its crown and lifting loop. The find is unique and thus essential to under standing the evolution of the anchor in antiquity. Among the ceramic items were basket-handle storage jars; utensils the sailors used daily, such as jugs, plates, lamps, and a water "pitlios"; and miniature juglets and cups or painted pottery tiiat were probably the sailors' personal be longings. Also in the latter category are three beautifully carved wood artifacts: a heart- or leaf-shaped "jewel box" with a swivel top and two violin-shaped "cosmetic palettes." A collection of carpenter's tools consisting of wood handles belonging to cutting and boring tools, parts of bow drills, a carpenter's square, scores of treenails and tenons, and a whetstone, was found scattered around a woven basket that was probably the shipwright's tool kit. A few meters of rope, in widths varying from 2-40 mm and in a three-strand lefthanded twist, were found intact, in undisturbed bundles, with some knots still detectable. Grape and fig seeds and olive pits were identified, as well as barley. A preliminary study of die pollen samples indicates an eastern Mediter ranean coastal variety of plants that grow during the sum mer. The metal finds included what seemed to be a small copper incense scoop and copper and iron nails. A single lead ingot was recovered that was probably a source of raw material for use on board. Shipbuilding Technology. Only a very few hull remains have been discovered in the Mediterranean in a reasonable good state of preservation from the general same period as the Ma'agan Mikha'el ship. Two are of particular interest: the late fourth-century BCE merchantman excavated and raised from the sea at Kyrenia, Cyprus, and the early sixthcentury BCE shipwreck found near the coast of Gela, Sicily, which is still being explored. Considering the many similar ities and some of the basic differences among these ships, it now appears tiiat the Ma'agan Mikha'el ship is a missing link in hull construction between the other two vessels. One example points to the extensive use of lashing the timbers by means of cords in the Gela ship, a method that was only partially applied in the Ma'agan Mikha'el ship and disap peared altogether in the Kyrenia vessel. The conservation process of the Ma'agan Mikha'el hull timbers and perishable artifacts lasted three and a half years. Plans are underway for the ship to be reconstructed and displayed at the Uni versity of Haifa, in a newly built museum hall.
S u m m a r y . The Ma'agan Mikha'el ship plied the Medi terranean in about 400 BCE, a peak period of maritime activ ity and trade by the Phoenicians and Greeks. In its mode of construction it follows two Mediterranean traditions: mortise-and-tenon joints and cord lashing. More than half of the ship's displacement was comprised of ballast stones not na tive to the Levantine coast. Whether these were loaded at the port of departure or picked up en route, in a secondary use, is not known. T h e pottery remains one of the main clues by which the ship is dated and its sailing route traced. Pres ently, the leads point to Cyprus and Eastern Greece. Who carved the ship's unique wood anchor and where parallels for the carved wooden "boxes" are to be found are not yet known. Because it seems to have been on its maiden voyage, it is possible that the vessel itself was the merchandise. Fur ther investigation and the results of laboratory testing may be able to fill in the existing information gaps. BIBLIOGRAPHY Eiseman, Cynthia J. E„ and Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway. The Porticello Shipwreck; A Mediterranean Merchant Vessel of 41S-385 B.C. College Station, Texas, 1987. Frost, Honor. "The Punic Ship: Final Excavation Report." In Attidella Accademia Nazionaledei Linecei, supp. 30. Rome, 1976. Linder, Elisha. "The Ma'agen Michael Shipwreck Excavation: First Season." Center for Maritime Studies News (Haifa University) 16 (1989). Linder, Elisha. "Excavating an Ancient Merchantman." Biblical Ar chaeology Review 18.6 (1992): 24-35. Rosloff, Jay. "The Ma'agan Michael Shipwreck Excavation, 1989 Sea son." Center for Maritime Studies News (Haifa University) 17 (1990). Rosloff, Jay. "A One-Armed Anchor of c. 400 B.C.E. from Ma'agan Michael Vessel, Israel: A Preliminary Report." International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 20.3 (1991): 223-226. Steffy, J. Richard. "The Kyrenia Ship: An Interim Report on Its Hull Construction." American Journal of Archaeology 89.1 (1985): 7 1 - 1 0 1 . ELISHA L I N D E R
MACALISTER, ROBERT ALEXANDER STEWART ( 1 8 7 0 - 1 9 5 0 ) , archaeologist born in Dublin into an academic family, his father being a professor of anat omy at Cambridge. Some of Macalister's early training was in architecture and surveying, but his lifelong interests were broad and included not only Near Eastern archaeology but also Celtic archaeology and antiquities, ecclesiastical art and vestments, and music. In pursuit of the latter, he became an accomplished organist and choirmaster and composed hymns, a number of which were relatively well known. He never married and remained a staunch Protestant in Cath olic Dublin. After his early fieldwork in Palestine, Macalister returned to University College Dublin, where, as professor of Celtic archaeology, he occupied the first chair in Euro pean archaeology in any university ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 4 3 ) , a post he held until his retirement. In later life, he became somewhat notorious for his impatient field methods at Irish national
MACHAERUS monuments like Knowth, as well as for his cantankerous responses to any negative reviews of his books on many sub jects. Macalister carried out archaeological surveys and sound ings in the Judean Shephelah ( 1 8 9 8 - 1 9 0 0 ) with Frederick J. Bliss, at the mounds of Tell es-Zakariyeh, Tell es-Safi, Tell es-Sandahanna, and Tell el-Judeideh, published in 1902 as Excavations in Palestine during the Years 1898-1900. It was Macalister's excavations at Gezer ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 0 9 ) , however, sponsored by the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), that made his reputation. These were among tire first largescale excavations carried out in Palestine, and they were promptiy published by the PEF in 1 9 1 2 in three sumptuous, handsomely illustrated volumes as The Excavation of Gezer. Nevertheless, Macalister's insistence on working yearround, alone without proper staff, his neglect of proper stratigraphic methods, and his adoption of a highly idiosyn cratic chronology marred what appeared to many to be ad mirable and innovative work. T h e fact, revealed by the American excavations of G. Ernest Wright, William G. Dever, and Joe D . Seger in 1 9 6 4 - 1 9 7 4 , is that Macalister discerned no more than one-third of the strata present at Gezer, and that his final publication is largely useless for reconstructing the site's actual history. Macalister later worked on tire Ophel in Jerusalem with A. C. Dickey ( 1 9 2 3 1 9 2 5 ) ; there, his relative chronology of the city walls, al though challenged by Kathleen Kenyon, was confirmed by the subsequent excavations of Yigal Shiloh. Macalister's later publications on Celtic archaeology are now regarded as little more than historical curiosities. [See also Gezer; Jerusalem; Judeideh, Tell el-; Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biography of Bliss.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bliss, Frederick Jones, and R. A. S. Macalister. Excavations in Palestine during the Years 1898-1900. London, 1902. Dever, William G. "Excavations at Gezer." Biblical Archaeologist 30.2 (1967): 47-62. Macalister, R. A. S. The Excavation of Gezer, 1902-1905
and
1907-1909.
3 vols. London, 1 9 1 2 . Thomas, Page A. "The Success and Failure of Robert Alexander Stew art Macalister." Biblical Archaeologist 47 (1984): 3 3 - 3 5 . W I L L I A M G. DEVER
MACCABEES. See Hasmoneans.
MACHAERUS. T h e modern village of Mukawer in Jordan, situated 30 km (19 mi.) southwest of Madaba on the south bank of Wadi Zerqa Ma'in (map reference 2092 X 1084), preserves the name of tire Hasmonean-Herodian for tress of Machaerus built on die soutiiern border of Jewish Peraea against the Nabateans. T h e site consists of two dis tinct areas: the ruins of the fortress on the isolated spur of
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Qal'at al-Mishnaqa (see figure 1 ) , and the ruins of the Ro man-Byzantine village of Machaberous northeast of it that is connected with the high plateau. According to Josephus (War 7 ) , Alexander Jannaeus ( 1 0 3 - 7 6 BCE) built the fortress of Machaerus and Gabinius, in 57 BCE, destroyed it. After fleeing from Rome, Aristobulus and his son Alexander sought refuge in its ruins. Herod the Great rebuilt it (after 37 BCE). It was composed of an upper and a lower city. According to Josephus, John the Baptist was thrown into the prison of the fortress, where he was put to deatii by order of the tetrarch Herod Antipas (Antiq. 1 8 . 5 . 1 - 2 ) . At the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, die Roman garrison abandoned the fortress to the rebels, who held it for six years (until 72 CE) . [See First Jewish Revolt.] Lucilius Bassus built the siege works around die fortress. The besieged of the upper city surrendered and the lower city was taken by force and burned. In 1807 Ulrich Jasper Seetzen recorded the name of the village (Seetzen, 1854—1859, vol. 2 , pp. 3 3 0 - 3 3 4 ; vol. 4, pp. 378-382) and in 1864 the Duke de Luynes explored its ruins (Luynes, 1 8 7 4 ) . In 1965 the Jordanian Department of An tiquities partially excavated a Byzantine church there. Jo seph Vardaman began excavating the fortress in 1968. In 1973 August Strobel, of the German Evangelical Institute, surveyed the siege works around Qal'at al-Mishnaqa, the vallum, the camps, and the towers. In 1 9 7 8 - 1 9 8 1 , work was resumed on the fortress by an archaeological team from the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (SBF), directed by Virgilio Corbo. [See the biography of Corbo.} In 1989, a second Byzantine church was excavated in the village. A Greek in scription, with die name of the deceased, was retrieved from one of the plundered tombs of the Roman-Byzantine cem etery hewn in the rock on the east side of the village. One of the main results of the SBF excavations has been the identification of the upper city on the top of Qal'at alMishnaqa with the palace-fortress (with a total surface of about 4,000 sq m) and of the lower city on the mountain's precipitous north slope with the housing for die palace-for tress personnel (an area of 5,000 sq m; only a few of those dwellings, which were destroyed by fire, have been exca vated). In the palace-fortress, two main phases and a subphase of occupation were detected and identified with the Hasmonean fortress (three towers with part of the defensive wall), the Herodian fortress, and the fortifications of the Zealots during the First Jewish Revolt (the polygonal sur rounding wall and ovens inside the fortress). T o the Hasmonean fortress belong three towers on the crest of the mountain, part of the defensive wall on its south east side, and some rooms reused as a substructure for the thermae in the Herodian fortress. The tower at the north west corner of the lower city also belongs to this period. In the tower's small rooms a large number of Late Hellenistic jars, bowls, and lamps were collected along with Hasmonean coins. T h e tower was connected to a huge rock-cut water
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MACHAERUS
MACHAERUS. Figure i. Qal'at al-Mishnaqa-Mukawer. photograph by Michele Ficcirillo)
reservoir 8 m deep that is perfecdy preserved. The original entrance to the reservoir was carefully masked and blocked in antiquity. [See Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Flellenistic and Roman Periods; Cisterns; Reservoirs.] The central Herodian palace-fortress measures n o m east-west and 60 m north-south. A corridor stretching north-south divides die palace into two blocks: the eastern block has a paved courtyard in the center flanked by the thermae on the south; it has an additional laconicum and rectangular rooms on the north; the western block has a peristylar columination on the north erected on a water cistern and a possible double triclinium on the south. The apoditherium of the thermae and the other rooms inside the fortress show traces of mosaic floors. The fortress shows no signs of successive reuse, except for two coins from Trajan's reign ( 9 7 - 1 1 7 ) . An aqueduct ( 1 5 m high) collected the rainwater from the plateau into a series of plastered cisterns hewn on the northern slope of the mountain. A lower channel di rected the rainwater from Wadi al-Mishnaqa in the lower series of cisterns. [See Aqueducts.] Three Byzantine churches have been located in the ruins
(Archive Studium Biblicum Franciscanum;
of the village: the north church was built and its mosaics executed in 603 CE; the central church is from the time of Bishop Malichos (possibly the first half of tire seventh cen tury); but the third church has not yet been investigated. [See Churches.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Corbo, Virgilio. "La fortezza di Macheronte: Rapporto preliminare della campagna di scavo, 8.09-28.10.1978." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 28 (1978): 2 1 7 - 2 3 1 , pis. 57-70. Corbo, Virgilio. "Macheronte, la reggia-fortezza erodiana: Rapporto preliminare alia II campagna di scavo, 3.09-20.10.1979." Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annuus 29 (1979): 3 1 5 - 3 2 6 . Corbo, Virgilio. "La fortezza di Macheronte (al Mishnaqa): Rapporto preliminare alia III campagna di scavo, 8 . 0 9 - 1 1 . 1 0 . 1 9 8 0 . " Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annuus 30 (1980): 365-376. Corbo, Virgilio, and Stanislao Loffreda. "Nuove scoperte alia fortezza di Macheronte: Rapporto preliminare alia IV campagna di scavo, 7 . 0 9 - 1 0 . 1 0 . 1 9 8 1 . " Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annuus 3 1 (1981): 257-286. Loffreda, Stanislao. "Preliminary Report on the Second Season of Ex cavations at Qal'at al-Mishnaqa-Machaerus." Annual of the Depart ment of Antiquities of Jordan 25 (1981): 85-94.
MADABA Luynes, Due de. Voyages a la Mer Morte, a Pitra et sur la rive gauche du Jourdain I: Relation du Voyage. Paris, 1874, Piccirillo, Michele. "First Excavation Campaign at Qal'at al-MishnaqaMeqawer (Madaba)." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jor dan 23 (1979): 1 7 7 - 1 8 3 . Seetzen, Ulrich J. Reisen durch Syrien Palastina Phbnicien die Transjordan-Ldnder, Arabia Petraea und Unter Agypten, edited by F. Kruse. Berlin, 1 8 5 4 - 1 8 5 9 . Strobel, August. "Machaerus: Geschichte und Ende einer Festung im Lichte archaologisch-topographischer Beobachtung." In Bible und Qumran, pp. 198-225. Berlin, 1968. Strobel, August. "Observations about the Roman Installations at Mukawer." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 19 (1974): 101-127. Strobel, August. "Das romische Belagerungswerk um Macharus: Topographische Untersuchungen." Zeitschrift des Deutschen PalastinaVereins 90 (1974): 1 2 8 - 1 8 4 . Vardaman, E. J. Machaerus: Project for Excavation. Unpublished manu script, Louisville, Ky. MICHELE PICCIRILLO
MACKENZIE, DUNCAN (1861-1934), Scottish ar chaeologist, excavator, and explorer of various sites in die Aegean, Palestine, Sardinia, and the Sudan. Mackenzie re ceived his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Edin burgh University in 1889, conducted postgraduate studies in classics and archaeology at the universities of Munich and Berlin, and earned a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1895. Mackenzie is known primarily for his work at Phylakopi on the island of Melos (1896-1899) and, especially at Knos sos, Crete, as assistant to Sir Arthur Evans (1900-1910, 1920-1929). From 1910 to 1912 Mackenzie worked for the Palestine Exploration Fund, directing the excavations at Ain Shems (Beth-Shemesh). Mackenzie also traveled and recorded prehistoric monuments in Sardinia in 1906 and 1907 and worked in the Sudan for Sir Henry Wellcome on tlie excavations at Dar el-Mek and Saqadi in 1913. During World War I he assisted Evans in Oxford with the publi cation of The Palace of Minos at. Knossos and with the reor ganization of the Aegean collections in the Ashmolean Mu seum. Mackenzie published little. His most important works are a chapter in a volume on Phylakopi (1904), articles on the pottery of Knossos (1903,1906) four articles on Cretan pal aces (1905-1908), and his reports on the excavations at 'Ain Shems published by the Palestine Exploration Fund (19111913). His main contributions to archaeology are his day books of the excavations at Phylakopi, Knossos, and Ain Shems. These daybooks not only contain valuable, unpub lished information on these important sites but also, together with his surviving correspondence, show a precision in the recording of archaeological excavations and an attention to problems of methodology and interpretation that are quite outstanding for the period. c
c
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[See also Beth-Shemesh; Crete; Sardinia; and the biography of Evans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Mackenzie, Duncan. "The Pottery of Knossos." Journal of Hellenic Studies 23 (1903): 1 5 7 - 2 0 5 . Mackenzie, Duncan. "The Successive Settlements at Phylakopi in Their Aegeo-Cretan Relations." In Excavations at Phylakopi in Me los, by T. D. Atkinson et al., pp. 238-272. London, 1904. Mackenzie, Duncan. "Cretan Palaces and die Aegean Civilization." Annualof the British School at Athens, no. 1 1 (1904-1905): 1 8 1 - 2 2 3 ; no. 1 2 (1905-1906): 216-258; no. 1 3 (1906-1907): 423-445; no. 14 (1907-1908): 343-422. Mackenzie, Duncan. "The Middle Minoan Pottery of Knossos." Jour nal of Hellenic Studies 26 (1906): 243-267. Mackenzie, Duncan. The Excavations at. 'Ain Shems, 1 9 1 1 . Palestine Exploration Fund Annual, no. 1, pp. 4 1 - 9 4 . London, 1 9 1 1 . Mackenzie, Duncan. Excavations at Ain Shems (Beth-Shemesh). Pales tine Exploration Fund Annual, no. 2. London, 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 1 3 (double volume). Momigliano, Nicoletta. "Duncan Mackenzie: A Cautious Canny High lander." In Klados: Essays in Honour ofj. N. Coldstream, edited by Christine Morris, pp. 1 6 3 - 1 7 0 . London, 1994. NICOLETTA MOMIGLIANO
MADABA, city located in central Jordan, 30 km (19 mi.) south of Philadelphia/Amman (map reference 2256 X 1249). The city of Madaba was built on a natural elevation of the Transjordan high plateau with steep slopes on tlie west, south, and southeast. T h e Roman-Byzantine town spread to the north over an area that slopes more gently toward the surrounding plain. The site's ancient name is preserved in the mosaic floor inscriptions of the Church of the Virgin Mary ("the people of this city of Madaba") and in the west courtyard of the "cathedral." In tlie mosaic floor of the Hippolythus hall, the city is represented as a Tyche seated on a throne. In the Bible, Madaba is recorded among the Cities of the Plain in Moab conquered and occupied by tlie Israelite tribes (Nm. 21:30; Jos. 13:9-16). [See Moab.] In the environs of the city the battle between King David's army and the coalition of Ammonites and Arameans (1 Chr. 19:7ft.) took place. Ac cording to die Mesha inscription, tlie town was liberated by the Moabite ldng in about tlie second half of the ninth cen tury BCE (1.7-9). [See Moabite Stone.] In later biblical texts, Madaba is mentioned among the cities of Moab (Is. 15:2). During tlie Maccabean revolt (second century BCE), "the sons of Jambri" went out of the city and laid an ambush for the Jewish convoy led by John, one of the brothers of Judas Maccabeus, plundering and killing them. Johri's death was immediately avenged by Jonathan and Simon (1 Mc. 9:36ff.). Later, John Hyrcanus conquered Madaba after a long siege (Josephus, Antiq. 13.9.1); it remained in the hands of the Hasmoneans, even during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (Antiq. 15.4). Hyrcanus II, in exchange for the help he asked for in the war against his brother Aristobulus,
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promised to restore the city to the Nabatean king Aretas of Petra, together with other cities in tire region (Antiq. 1 4 . 1 . 4 ) . Madaba became a city of the Provincia Arabia after 106 CE. In 37 CE, in the time of Aretas IV, the strategos of the city, a certain Abdobodat built a funerary monument for his fa ther Itaybel and his son, also named Itaybel, of tire 'Amirat tribe (banu 'Amrat, possibly "the sons of Jambri" of Mc. Q:36ff.). A bilingual inscription in Greek and Nabatean rec ords that in the third year of the new Provincia Arabia (108/ 109 CE), another member of the same tribe, Abgar/Isyon son of Monoath, built a tomb for his son Selaman. In a Greek inscription found at el-Mushaqqar, on the road between Esbus/Hesban and Livias/Tell er-Rameh, the priest Zaidaliah Petrigenous, boleuta (of the city council) of Madaba, is men tioned, who offered the monument in honor of an unknown Roman emperor. Together with Greek and Latin inscriptions of the sec ond-third centuries mentioning centurions of the Tenia Legio Cyrenaica stationed in the province, a dedicatory in scription was recently found with the name of the governor (Flavius) Iulianus at the time of Emperor Elagabalus (219 CE; see Piccirillo, 1989). Madaba had a local mint at die time of the emperors Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta, and Alexander Severus. The main typologies used were the He lios and the Tyche (standing or seated), of the Medabenon (inhabitants of Madaba) and the baetyl in a tetrastyle tem ple. So far, the main portions of the decumanus, the primary paved east-west road of Roman Madaba, and possibly the Tychaion, the temple of the city's Tyche along that road (whose carved architectural elements were reused in the ci ty's Byzantine churches), have been identified. Ulrich J. Seetzen crossed the ruins of the then abandoned tell of Madaba in 1807. In 1 8 7 2 , coming from the south, the expedition of Canon Tristram arrived at Madaba and camped among the ruins for four days. Explorers from the Palestine Exploration Fund arrived in 1 8 8 1 . Their arrival had been preceded, in December 1880, by ninety Christian bedouin families who had established themselves among the ruins allotted to them by tire Turkish authorities. It is to this reoccupation of the site that the greater part of the following discoveries is owed. In 1887, the Latin missionary Don Biever sent to Jerusalem tire transcription of the first inscrip tions of the mosaic floor from the Church of tire- Virgin Mary. Gottlieb Schumacher, in October 1 8 9 1 , and P.-M. Sejourne, in 1892, drew the first general plan of the ruins. It was later updated by Frederick J. Bliss, in 1895; Giuseppi Manfredi, in 1899; A. Paulouskji and N. K. Kluge, in 1903; Alois Musil, in 1905; and by Melezios Metaxakis from 1905 to 1907. The Madaba mosaic map was seen in December 1896 in the new church built by the Greek Orthodox patri archate by Cleofas Kikilides and published the following year. The event focused the attention of scholars from all over the world on Madaba (see figure 1 ) . In 1897 mosaics also were discovered in the crypt of St. Elianos, in the
Church of the Prophet Elias, and elsewhere. From that year on, Madaba became "the city of mosaics." [See Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biographies of Schumacher and Bliss.] In 1965, a German mission under die direction of H. Donner restored the Madaba map mosaic. In 1966, Ute Lux of the German Evangelical Institute excavated the Church of al-Khadir and, in 1967, the Church of the Apostles (Lux, 1967, 1968). Beginning in 1968, tire Department of Antiq uities of Jordan conducted excavations in the cathedral and in the Salayta Church. In collaboration with the Department of Antiquities, Michele Piccirillo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (SBF) conducted several archaeological campaigns, as of 1979, in the area of the Church of the Vir gin Mary and of the Hippolythus hall, in the "burnt palace" along the paved Roman street, and in the cathedral church on the south side of the tell. [See Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes; Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.] The finds from two tombs discovered in the necropolis area west of the tell are the only archaeological evidence that Madaba was inhabited at least from the thirteenth century BCE (the final phase of the Late Bronze Age). A second tomb, from the Iron Age I—II, was found on the slopes of the hill in front of the tell on the south. The main edifices so far excavated are several churches and palaces of die Byzantine and Umayyad periods. It is known that Christianity spread rapidly in the Provincia Ara bia. Eusebius mentions Qurayat as "a village of only Chris tians flourishing near Madaba" (Onomasticon 1 1 2 . 1 4 ) . Monks lived on Mt. Nebo, west of Madaba, at least in the second half of the fourth century. [See Nebo, Mount.] How ever, it is only from the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, held in 4 5 1 , that the existence of a Christian community at Madaba is known, with a bishop under the authority of the metropolitan archbishop of Bosra. [See Bosra.] T h e Life of St. Euthymius, written by Cyril of Scythopolis, recounts that Gaianus, a disciple of the saint, was consecrated bishop of Maiumas in Gaza. In the fifth century Peter the Iberian, bishop of Maiumas, entered and stopped in Madaba on the road to the hot baths of Baarus (modern Hammamat Ma'in). The inscriptions in the mosaics of the churches in Mad aba and its environs are the principal and practically the only source of historical information available for the first dec ades of the sixth century through the eighth century. Phidus and Cyrus probably were the bishops of Madaba in the first decades of the sixth century. In the time of Phidus, the lower Chapel of the Priest John at Khirbet el-Mukhayyat was built and a mosaic executed. In the time of Cyrus, the photisterion ("baptistery") of the cathedral in Madaba received a mo saic, as did the Church of Kaianos in the Valley of Ain Musa north of Mt. Nebo. T h e mosaics in the diaconiconbaptistery of the Sanctuary of Moses and in the Church of c
MADABA
St. George in the village of Nebo mention that Elias was bishop in 5 3 1 and 536. [See Baptisteries.] In 562, when John was bishop of the diocese, the Chapel of St. Theodore, in the atrium of the cathedral, received a mosaic. During John's episcopate, a small chapel was built in the southeast sector of tire city, to which the Church of the Apostles was later added. In the village of Nebo, tire upper Chapel of the priest John and the Church of tlie Holy Martyrs Lot and Procopius were built and paved with mo saic floors. Just outside tire north wall of the city of Madaba in the time of the emperor Justinian, a great reservoir was dug to provide the city's water. In tlie valley southwest of the tell, another great reservoir (about 100 sq m and 1 0 m deep) was already in use. T h e mosaic in the Hippolythus hall, the best example of the city's classical renaissance, is dated to this period, the first half of tlie sixth century (see figure 2). T h e hall was part of a mansion that had been added to the west side of the Roman temple (the Tychaion) on the north side
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of the paved road (the decumanus) in the center of tlie city's northern quarter. The mosaic pavement (7.30 X 9.50 m) is lavishly decorated with Nilotic and mythological motifs in spired by Euripides's tragedy Hippolytus. The personifica tions of the Tychai of the christianized cities of Rome, Gregoria, and Madaba also appear, each one holding a cross on a long staff. In die mosaic's central panel, the characters in the Uagedy are accompanied by labels with their respective names: the handmaidens assist Phaedra, while the wet-nurse turns toward Hippolytus, who is accompanied by his min isters and by a servant who holds his mount by the bridle. In a second figurative panel, the goddess Aphrodite, seated on a throne next to Adonis, threatens with her sandal a winged Eros, who is being presented to her by a Grace. A second Eros supports Aphrodite's bare foot, while a third Eros looks on and a fourth is intent on emptying a basket full of flowers representing beans. A second Grace grasps a foot of still another Eros, who takes refuge among the branches of a tree, and a third Grace runs after the sixth
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Figure 2. The Church of the Virgin and the Hippolytus Hall. (Archive Studium Biblicum Franciscanum; photograph by Michele Piccirillo) MADABA.
Eros. A peasant girl coming from the country observes the scene and locates the scene in the countryside. From 576 to die end of the century, Sergius was bishop of Madaba. The inscriptions chart the period's building ac tivities, which were especially busy in the diocese during his episcopate. He continued the renovations begun by his predecessor John, and in 576 brought to completion the res toration of the atrium of the cathedral, with its cistern and new baptismal chapel. In 578, the mosaicist Salaman signed mosaic floor of the Church of the Apostles, which was built on the southeast corner of the acropolis. At the same time, at Umm er-Rasas/Kastron Mefaa, 30 km ( 1 9 mi.) east of Madaba, the northern church (named the Church of Bishop Sergius), the Church of the Lions, the Church of the Rivers, and the Church of the Priest Wa'il were built and lavish mosaics were laid down. [See Umm er-Rasas.] The most important building program in the diocese was die construc tion of the Basilica of Moses on Mt. Nebo, completed in 597/98- At the same time, a sacred complex that included the Church of the Virgin and the Church of the Prophet
Elias was begun in the city. Before the death of Sergius in 595/96, the crypt of the Church of the Prophet Elias was completed. In 603, Bishop Leontius, "sweetest and true friend of peace," as he was remembered in inscriptions, had already succeeded Bishop Sergius. A room with mosaics, to the north of the church in the cathedral complex, is dated to 603. In the southern territory of the diocese, the west church in the village of Mukawer was decorated witii mosaics and dedicated in 603. [See Machaerus.] In 608 the building pro gram of the two churches on the main street, begun in the time of Sergius's predecessor, was finished with the aid of funds donated by two brothers, Menas son of Panphilus, and Theodosius. A chapel dedicated to the Virgin Theotokos was added to the baptistery on the southern wall of the Basilica of Moses on Mt. Nebo. T o these dated monuments should be added, for stylistic reasons, several other churches discovered at Madaba and in the nearby villages. They were either built or restored in the second half of the sixth century-beginning of the seventh
MAFJAR, KHIRBAT ALcentury, at the time of the Bishops John, Sergius, and Leontius. It was the period during which tire most intense eccle siastical building activity took place: the northern church with the mosaic map of Palestine, the church of al-Khadir, the Hippolytus hall, and tire Burnt palace. T h e basilica near the city's north gate had been identified before the Madaba map mosaic was discovered and pub lished. In the 1880s the Greek Orthodox community had chosen tire area to build a chapel and a house for its priest. Then in 1896 a new church was built there, during which the left sections of its mosaic floor were uncovered. Within the three-naved church, the mosaic composition did not ex tend much farther than the limits of those sections, which are each 15.70 m wide and 5.60 m long. T h e nearly 1 5 0 geographic captions in the mosaic's left sections refer mainly to Syro-Palestinian territory from the region of Tyre and Sidon on the north, to the Egyptian Delta on the south, and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Syrian desert. T h e mo saic's figurative high point is the vignette of Jerusalem, which, in a way is the ideal center of the composition even if it is not in the exact physical center. T h e city, seen in a bird's-eye view, is represented with its walls, gates, streets, and principal buildings, some of them still identifiable. T h e map is oriented east, as are its cities and their buildings—so are the captions, which can be seen and read by whomever enters the church and walks toward the altar. In spite of the approximations the map's small area required in order to distribute the localities along the region's road network, the sites are quite clearly indicated, by captions and vignettes that suggest the importance of each locality. From the cap tions of the toponyms (mostly taken from the Onomasticon of Eusebius), and especially from the direct references to the Israelite tribes, it becomes clear that the map is, in the first place, a document of biblical geography. T h e addition of New Testament localities and the preeminence of Chris tian sanctuaries and churches and of the basilica of tire Holy Sepulcher in the heart of Jerusalem, make the map a Chris tian rereading of the history of salvation in its geographic framework. Seen in this perspective, the map is a document of the faith of the Christians who executed it. Artistically, the map and the mosaics of Madaba and its environs should be seen in the context of the classical renaissance of the Jus tinian period. After a period of historical silence, recent excavations have clarified that the Christian community of Madaba was still vital during the Umayyad period. On tire acropolis of Ma'in, "a large village near the hot baths of Baaru" (Ono masticon 4 4 . 2 1 ) , a church was rebuilt with a mosaic pave ment in 719/20. T h e pavement depicted a series of buildings representing the cities and villages in Palestine and Trans jordan. At U m m er-Rasas/Kastron Mefaa the church of St. Ste phen was rebuilt and paved with the same kind of architectonical representations at the time of Bishop Sergios II—
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certainly in the eighth century, although the exact year can not be fixed. In 756, under Bishop Job, the presbytery of the same church was repaved. In 762, also under Bishop Job, the mosaic of the chapel of the Virgin Theotokos in tire monastery of 'Ayn al-Kanisah on Mt. Nebo was restored. In 767, at the time of Bishop Theophane, the mosaic of the church of the Virgin in the center of Madaba was repaved. This is the last date for the Christian community and for the city. Archaeological evidence points to a scanty oc cupation in the later periods until the modern resettlement in December 1880. [See also Churches; and Mosaics.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Alliata, Eugenio. "Nota sulla ceramica." Studium Biblicum Francis canuml Liber Annuus 32 (1982): 403-408. Alliata, Eugenio. "Nota sulla ceramica dello scavo." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 36 (1986): 328-334. Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Madaba Mosaic Map. Jerusalem, 1954. Bagatti, Bellarmino. "II significato dei mosaici della scuola di Madaba (Transgiordania)," ReallexikonJiirAntike und Christentum 33 (1957): 139-160. Di Segni, Leah. "The Date of the Church of the Virgin in Madaba." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 42 (1992): 2 5 1 - 2 5 7 . Gatier, Pierre-Louis. Inscriptions de lajordanie, vol. 2, Region centrale (Amman, Hesban, Madaba, Ma'in, Dhihan). Inscriptions Grecques et Latines de la Syrie, 2 1 . Paris, 1986. Gatier, Pierre-Louis. "Une inscription latine a Madaba." Studium Bib licum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 37 (1987): 365-367. Flarding, G. Lankester. Four Tomb Groups from Jordan. Palestine Ex ploration Fund Annual, no. 6. London, 1953. Lux, Ute. "Eine altchristiiche Kirche in Madeba." Zeitschrift des Deulchen Palastina-Vereins 83 (1967): 1 6 5 - 1 8 2 . Lux, Ute. "Die Apostel-Kirche in Madeba." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins % A, (1968): 1 0 6 - 1 2 9 . Piccirillo, Michele. "Una tomba del Ferro I a Madaba (Madaba BMoab)." Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 25 (1975): 198-224. Piccirillo, Michele, with Eugenio Alliata. Chiese e mosaici di Madaba. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 34. Jerusalem, 1989Piccirillo, Michele. "Un'iscrizione imperiale e alcune stele funerarie di Madaba e di Kerak." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 39 (1989): 1 0 5 - 1 1 8 . Sailer, Sylvester J. "The Works of Bishop John of Madaba in the Light of Recent Discoveries." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber An nuus 19 (1969): 1 4 5 - 1 6 7 . Thompson, Henry O. "An Iron Age Tomb at Madaba." In The Ar chaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T. Geraty and Larry G. Herr, pp. 3 3 1 - 3 6 3 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. M I C H E L E PICCIRILLO
MADINAH. See Medina.
MAFJAR, KHIRBAT AL-, site located near Jericho in the Jordan Valley, where excavations carried out between 1934 and 1948 brought to light the richest and tire most
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original of all princely establishments associated with the early Islamic dynasty of the Umayyads (661-750 CE). After 1948 additional sections of the site were cleared and a pro cess of continuing renovation was initiated to preserve the existing ruins and to make them easier for visitors to under stand. The vast majority of the finds from the site and most of the records of the excavations are kept in Jerusalem, in the former Palestine Archaeological Museum, now known as the Rockefeller Museum, where several sculpted ensem bles have been reconstructed. Khirbat al-Mafjar is also known as Qasr Hisham, because a graffito found in its ruins carries the name of that particular caliph who ruled between 724 and 744. There is in fact no valid reason to associate Khirbat al-Mafjar with Hisham and, even though a reasonable and tempting hypothesis can be made about tlie pan-on of the complex (see below), it cannot be demonstrated. The site had been identified as a significant settlement as early as 1873 by the British surveyors of Palestine. For a while it was considered to be the biblical Gilgal and the Early Christian Galgala. In fact, its excavators first believed that they had found a Christian ecclesiastical establishment. It turned out to be an Umayyad palace that was probably never completed. Its construction seems to have been abandoned rather abruptly—either because of one of the several earth quakes that affected Palestine in the middle of the eighth century or because a patron suddenly disappeared or lost interest. There are five parts to the establishment: 1 . Two-storied square castle. Roughly 70 m to the side, the complex has a porticoed courtyard with single rooms, large
MAFJAR, KHIRBAT AL-.
halls, or apartments known in Arabic as bayts, around it (see figure 1 ) ; although their exact functions cannot be estab lished, these halls clearly were meant for a diverse set of activities, a relative rarity in palaces of the same type. T h e entrance complex is unusually large and was decorated with a striking array of stucco sculptures, ranging from ttaditional geomettic and vegetal designs to an unusual number of rep resentations of personages and animals, and mural paint ings, some representational, on the second floor. [See Palace; Furniture and Furnishings, article on Furnishings of the Islamic Period.] 2. Mosque. To the north of the castle, a small and archi tecturally sober mosque had a direct passage to the second floor of the living quarter. [See Mosque.] 3. Bath. A sequence of rooms—an enormous (30 X 30 m) common room covered by an extraordinary roof of vaults and domes, a small suite of bathing rooms, a large latrine, a heavily decorated small private room, and a mon umental entrance—corresponds to the usual system that is sued from Roman architecture. T h e respective sizes of the components and especially the decoration found in them are unique in three ways: by the techniques used (mosaics, paintings, and sculptures); by the subjects depicted (princes, half-clad women, animals in all sorts of guises, a most elaborate geometry, rich vegetation), even though many of the topics have not yet been properly identified; and by the styles of depiction (its models are found in the Mediterranean world as well as in Buddhist Cemxal Asia). A small room in die northwest corner, whose exact function is unclear, is a museum of mosaic and sculpture master pieces. [See Baths; Mosaics; Wall Paintings.]
Figure i. General view of the excavated palace. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
MAGDALA 4 . Forecourt. Unifying the bath, mosque, and casde as a single composition, even though they were built at different times, is a forecourt. Toward the center of the courtyard an octagonal domed pavilion stood over a small pool. 5 . Walled and irrigated area. A large walled and irrigated area surrounding the complex may have been used for cul tivation or for hunting. Khirbat al-Mafjar's architectural planning is awkward in many details, but the ensemble differs from other Umayyad castles through the imagination and originality of some of its construction (vaults in the bath hall, a pavilion in the forecourt), through its elaborate and luxurious decoration, and through the technical quality of most of its decoration. One of its excavators, Robert W. Hamilton (1988), has made a most persuasive argument that the licentious, poetic, and exhilarating life of the prince-poet and short-lived caliph Walid II (assassinated in 744) fits admirably with the setting and decoration of Khirbat al-Mafjar and that he should be considered the palace's patron. Like most sites in Syria and Palestine, Khirbat al-Mafjar was reoccupied in the twelfththirteenth centuries, when a caravanserai was built out of its ruins. [See also; Umayyad Caliphate.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Creswell, K. A. C. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Rev. ed. Aldershot, 1989. See pages 179-200 for Khirbat al-Mafjar, Ettinghausen, Richard. From Byzantium to Sasanian Iran and the Islamic World. Leiden, 1972. See chapter 3, "The Throne and Banquet Hall of Khirbat al-Mafjar" (pp. 1 7 - 6 5 ) . Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art. Rev. and enl. ed. New Ha ven, 1987. Hamilton, Robert William. Khirbat al-Mafjar: An Arabian Mansion in the Jordan Valley. Oxford, 1959. Hamilton, Robert William. Walid and His Friends: An Umayyad Trag edy. London, 1988. Whitcomb, Donald S. "Khirbat al-Mafjar Reconsidered: The Ceramic Evidence." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 271 (1988): 51-67OLEG GRABAR
MAGDALA (Ar., Majdal), site located on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, 3 km (2 mi.) north of Tiberias and 5 km (3 mi.) south of Capernaum (32°49' N , 3 5 ° 3 i ' E; map reference 198 X 247) and identified as ancient Migdal by its Arabic name. No remains of city walls have yet been found at die site, but its borders are known on three sides: to the east, the Sea of Galilee; to the south, a cemetery; and to the west, the mountains. It seems that it was a small town in tire early Hellenistic to Byzantine periods, also called Tarichea ("salted fish") and Migdal-Nunia ("the fish tower")— names that reflected the main occupation of its citizens— fishing. [See Fishing.] An underwater survey carried out by Ehud Galili for the Israel Antiquities Authority in 1 9 9 1
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raised the possibility that the town was named after a tower built in the water, south of the town, with natural rock as its base. Magdala was a Jewish town founded in the Late Hellenis tic (Hasmonean) period. T h e town came under siege and a heavy battle was fought there during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, when Titus attacked it from the Sea of Galilee (Josephus, War 3 . 1 0 . 3 ) . [See First Jewish Revolt.] According to Josephus, six thousand people were killed. T h e town is known later, in Christian tradition, as the birthplace of Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus (e.g., Mt. 27:56). The town survived die Roman defeat of the Jews, and its name appears a few times in Jewish sources (J.T. Ber 9.3, Meg. 3 . 1 ; B.T. Yoma' 1.2; see also Manns, 1976). T h e largest excavations at the site were carried out by Franciscans, directed by Virgilio Corbo (1976), in 1 9 7 1 1973 and 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 7 6 . Five levels were unearthed. The first features a well-designed building (9 X 7 m) called a minisynagogue by its excavators. It is a one-room structure, with a flight of steps the excavators interpreted as benches. On three sides of the rectangular building, three rows of pillars 33 cm in diameter and with Doric capitals were arranged in a U shape, witii heart-shaped pillars in the corners. The ex cavators identified two floors, one above the other, with a fill about 30 cm deep. They dated the first floor to the first century BCE and the later floor to the first century CE. Water canals around the walls support Ehud Netzer's identification of the building as a springhouse, rather than a very small and unusual synagogue. [See Synagogues.] West of the structure a group of pools and a water tower are dated to the Early-Late Roman period. The installations are connected to the spring that supplied water to the town. T o the north an "urban villa" was excavated, and to the south a large building with twenty-four rooms and a large "piazza" adorned witii pillars. [See Villas.] These elements point to a well-designed small town in the Roman period. According to the excavators, the eastern side of the town was badly damaged during the Jewish Revolt. It is possible that the shipwreck found in the Sea of Galilee close to Magdala and dated to the first century CE is also a relic of that war. [See Galilee Boat.] T h e boat was found not far from the location of the town's ancient quay; both inside and near die quay a few arrowheads and a typical first-cen tury CE cooking pot and oil lamp were recovered by Shelley Wachsmann. A small salvage excavation carried out by the Israel An tiquities Authority in 1 9 9 1 , directed by Hana Abu-Uqsa (i993)> uncovered the remains of a private building whose floors held storage jars, cooking pots, and assorted small finds. T h e earliest coins, as in the Franciscan excavations, are Hasmonean. It seems that the building was damaged during the First Revolt but was later rebuilt and remained in use until the second century. A Byzantine monastery was excavated at the site, which, as at neighboring Tiberias,
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demonstrates the social change that took place in formerly Jewish Galilee in the Byzantine period. [See Monasteries.] A few hundred meters south of the site, a number of dec orated sarcophagi were unearthed that date to the thirdfourth centuries CE. [See Sarcophagus.] A hoard of 188 bronze coins minted in different cities was found nearby as well in 1973 (Meshorer, 1976). [See also the biography of Corbo.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu-Uqsa, Hana. "Migdal." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 1 3 (1993): 28. Corbo, Virgilio. "Cirri romana di Magdala: Rapporto preliminare dopo la quarta campagna di scavo, 1975." In Studia Hierosolymitana in onore del P. Bellarmino Bagatti, vol. 1, Studi archeologici, edited by Emmanuele Testa, pp. 355-378. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 22. Jerusalem, 1976. Corbo, Virgilio. "Piazza e villa urbana a Magdala." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 28 (1978): 232-240. Corbo, Virgilio. "La mini-synagogue de Magdala." Le Monde de la Bi ble, no. 57 (1989): 15. Loffreda, Stanislao. "Alcune osservazione sulla ceramica di Magdala." In Studia Hierosolymitana in onore del P. Bellarmino Bagatti, vol. 1 , Studi archeologici, edited by Emmanuele Testa, pp. 338-354. Stu dium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 22. Jerusalem, 1976. Manns, Frederic. "Magdala dans les sources litteraires." In Studia Hi erosolymitana in onore del P. Bellarmino Bagatti, vol. 1, Studi archeo logici, edited by Emmanuele Testa, pp. 307-337. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 22. Jerusalem, 1976. Meshorer, Ya'acov, "A Hoard of Coins from Migdal." Aliqot 1 1 (1976): 5 4 - 7 1 . Schneider, A. M. The Church of the Multiplying of the Ijyaves and Fishes at Tabgha on the Sea of Gennesaret and Its Mosaics. London, 1937. Translation of the original German edition (Paderborn, 1934). Stefanski, Y. "Migdal." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 5 (1986): 7 1 . Discusses the ancient town's northern border. Wachsmann, Shelley. The Excavations of an Ancient Boat in the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret). 'Atiqot vol. 19. Jerusalem, 1990. MORDECHAI AVIAM
MAGHREB. See North Africa. MAGNETIC ARCHAEOMETRY. A nondestruc tive geophysical investigation technique that reacts to mag netic characteristics in natural and worked materials, of use at archaeohistorical sites, is known as magnetic archaeo metry, or magnetic survey analysis. Differences between ambient forces and those induced by human agencies such as heat, compaction, organic decay, and architecture are measurable if their magnetic properties are not the same. While this form of site study is faster and less expensive than excavating test trenches, nearby vehicles, trains, build ings, and power lines can interfere witii testing. Anomalies, which are measurable variations, existing between environ mental rocks and sediments and human habitats with
trenches, snuctures, paths and roads, and areas and mate rials that were fired can be located with instruments in die field. The ambient magnetic field anywhere on the planet can be observed in the behavior of a suspended magnetized nee dle. Cartographers call the angle on the earth's surface be tween the earth's north rotational axis and the magnetic vec tor, the declination. T h e inclination is the dip angle between the horizontal at the point of measurement and the magnetic force field within the earth. This magnetic field has wan dered through geologic time; it has, in fact, reversed its po larization from time to time. T h e intensity of this natural magnetic field is a function of the greatest pull (or vector) on such a "needle" or detec tor by the forces in any given area on earth. T h e unit of magnetic field strength expressed by most researchers is the gamma (7). For example, in the United States the magnetic field varies from 49,900 to 59,500 7; its inclination varies from 60 to 75° below the horizontal (Weymouth and Huggins, 1985, p. 1 9 3 ) . Strength variations occur during solar magnetic storms and over 24-hour periods. Current magnetic surveys may employ one of three in strumental techniques: the rubidium or cesium magnetom eter; the fluxgate magnetometer; or the proton free-preces sion magnetometer. In the first, atomic electrons of rubidium and cesium (vaporized) capture the magnetic re sponse. The second method detects the vector field forces along the axis of its electromagnetic coil design. Most re searchers employ the last—the least costly—mode of instru mentation. The detector of the proton magnetometer is a coil submerged in a liquid (water or kerosene) source for hydrogen. A current in the coil produces an intense mag netic field in the liquid much greater than the natural/or am bient forces. The nuclear protons (actually spinning mag netic dipoles) of the hydrogen are partially polarized. T h e coil current is cut off and the nuclear protons precess (by a change in the axis of rotation) in the magnetic flux of the earth at that location. The protons briefly precess together, inducing a measurable voltage in the coil. The results are read in gamma units upon amplification of the voltage and determination of the frequency. Instrumentation has been designed to exhibit cycle times in about one second and to have a sensitivity level of 0.1 y or less. Environmental materials such as bedrock, residual and transported soils, and iron objects can be magnetized by the effect of applied magnetism. This physical property, known as induced magnetization, disappears when the magnetic forces cease. Those magnetic characteristics displayed in the absence of any applied field are described as remnant mag netization. Heated material, such as certain rocks and most clays, that cools in a magnetic field posseses a thermoremnant magnetization. Some minerals, such as hematite and magnetite, exhibit properties of remnant magnetism. He-
MALLON, ALEXIS matite, for example, is susceptible to conversion to tire more highly magnetic magnetite by heating or in organic decay loci in die absence of oxygen. Subde variations in the magnetic field over a site probably indicate tlie presence of human activities. These data are mapped using block portions of the site area—the blocks may vary in area up to a limit controlled by the frequency of the ambient magnetic changes, usually 100 m X 1 0 0 m quadrangles. Sample positions may be set at i- or 2-meter grid-line spacings within each quadrangle, depending on the desired resolution of the data imagery when mapped. Sensor (detection) height is chosen so as to lower input ("noise") from the subtle magnetic properties of soils: 40-60 cm is regarded as optimal for a one-meter grid. Control points act as references to track the diurnal, or daily, variations in the environment under study. Careful monitoring of these con trol points (usually every 1 5 - 2 0 minutes) assures greater ac curacy of the method and its precision. T h e greatest accuracy is achieved when two proton mag netometers are employed in either of the following config urations: one instrument is maintained at a fixed point on the site while the other records values at the grid points; or both instruments are operated together with a fixed spacing between them. When setting up the measurement opera tions, every natural (geological) and human (archaeological) feature must be recorded. These conditions conttibute to tlie plans for the analytical procedures and to the final un derstanding of tlie data. T h e results of magnetic analysis are best presented as a matrix of corrected site magnetic values. Computer processing is essential in which a dot-line printer is used with characters of different shades, each recorded at representative grid-point intervals. The lightness or dark ness of each dot character is a function of the magnetic field force at each point. The maps produced are easily read and interpreted. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aitken, Martin J. Physics and Archaeology. 2d ed. Oxford, 1974. Arnold, J. B. "A Magnetometer Survey of the Nineteenth-Century Steamboat Black Cloud." Bulletin of the Texas Archaeological Society 45 (1974): 225-230. Atkinson, R. J. C. "Methodes electriques de prospection en archeolo gie." In La decouvcrte de passe, edited by Annette Laming, pp. 5 9 70. Paris, 1952. Black, Glenn A., and Richard B. Johnston. "A Test of Magnetometry as an Aid to Archaeology." American Antiquity 28 (1962): 199-205. Breiner, Sheldon. Applications Manual for Portable Magnetometers. Palo Alto, Calif., 1973. Ezell, Paul, et al. "Magnetic Prospecting in Soudiern California." American Antiquity 31 (1965): 1 1 2 - 1 1 3 . Graham, I. D. G., and Irwin Scollar. "Limitation on Magnetic Pros pection in Archaeology Imposed by Soil Properties." Archaeo-Physika 6 (1976): 1 - 1 2 4 . Lerici, C. M. "Archaeological Survey with the Proton Magnetometer in Italy." Archaeometry 4 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 76-82. Mason, R. "Large-Scale Archaeomagnetic Surveys of the Barton and
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Vinton Townsites." Paper delivered at the Fourteenth Annual Meet ing of the Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, 1 9 8 1 . Ralph, Elizabeth K., et al. "Archaeological Surveying Utilizing a HighSensitivity Difference Magnetometer." Geoexploralion 6 (1968): 109-122. Scollar, Irwin. "Magnetic Prospecting in the Rhineland."/!rc/jaeo»!«ry 4 (1961): 74-75SYMAP. Synagraphic Computer Mapping. Harvard University, Labora tory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis. Cambridge, Mass., 1975. von Frese, R. R, B. "Magnetic Exploration of Historical Archaeological Sites as Exemplified by a Survey at Ft. Quiatenon ( 1 2 T 9 ) . " Master's thesis, Purdue University, 1978. Weymouth, John W., and Robert Huggins. "Geophysical Surveying of Archaeological Sites." In Archaeological Geology, edited by George Rapp.Jr., and John A. Gifford, pp. 1 9 1 - 2 3 5 . New Haven, 1985. REUBEN G . BULLARD
MAKKAH. See Mecca.
MALLON, ALEXIS
( 1 8 7 5 - 1 9 3 4 ) , best known in tlie field of Syro-Palestinian archaeology as the excavator of the Chalcolithic type-site of Teleilat el-Ghassul Mallon was born in La Chapelle-Bertin, France. As a young priest, he was sent to Ghazir in Lebanon. Mallon earned a Ph.D. in Egyptian hieroglyphics and Coptic, and in 1904 he pub lished a grammar of Coptic and a number of articles. After studying theology in England ( 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 0 9 ) , he returned to Lebanon, where he taught and published numerous articles on Egyptology and Coptic studies in the "Melanges de la Faculte orientale de Beyrouth." Thereafter, his intellectual interests shifted to prehistory and biblical archaeology. In 1 9 1 3 , the Pontifical Biblical Institute (PBI) acquired land in Jerusalem for a study center and Mallon was selected to oversee the Vatican's building program there. During World War I he returned to Rome, where he wrote "Les Hebreux en Egypte" ( 1 9 2 1 ) and participated in the prehis toric research of Father Bovier-Lapierre. His interest in pre history lasted until the end of his life. Mallon returned to Jerusalem in 1 9 1 9 to continue the PBI consttuction project, which had ceased during the hostilities. He conducted a number of surveys in the Dead Sea region with tlie French prehistorian Rene Neuville, publishing them in a number of concise and erudite reports in the jour nal Biblica. However, his most lasting achievement is die publication of his 1 9 2 9 - 1 9 3 2 excavations at Teleilat elGhassul, which appeared shortly after his death (Mallon, Koeppel, and Neuville, 1934). Marlon's excavations at Teleilat el-Ghassul fundamentally altered Palestinian archaeology through the discovery of a new archaeological culture. William Foxwell Albright, who examined the new material with Mallon, labeled the assem blage Chalcolithic (Albright, 1 9 3 2 ) . Among the reasons
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Marlon's work stands as a lasting achievement is his having been one of the pioneers in a multidisciplinary approach to archaeological fieldwork and analysis. His book on Teleilat el-Ghassul is still the most significant publication of the site, for the scale and care that Mallon and his team achieved. [See also Teleilat el-Ghassul; and the biography
ofNeuville.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "The Chalcolithic Age in Palestine." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 48 (1932): 1 0 13Mallon, Alexis. Les hebreux en Egypte. Rome, 1921. Mallon, Alexis, Robert Koeppel, and Rene Neuville. Teleilat Ghassul. 2 vols. Rome, 1934-1940. Detailed geological studies; contextual summaries of the range of architectural features found at the site; descriptions of the flint, pottery, and small finds assemblages; chem ical analyses of the paint used in the site's now well-known murals; and a study of megalitiiic mortuary remains in the Dead Sea envi rons, THOMAS E . LEVY
tention to outlying Fort Shalmaneser, a royal residence, ar senal and treasury in which an exceptional range of early first-millennium BCE ivories came to light. As an excavator Mallowan was always dependent on fresh finds for future funding and, in response to this pressure, he persisted in digging, well into the 1950s, with a small staff and a large work force. In his own words (Memoirs, 1977) he remained "an unashamed supporter of the bygone days of digging." As the first Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London ( 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 6 0 ) , Mallowan's natural gifts as a teacher were es pecially valued. Knighted in 1968, he also continued throughout his later years to foster the activities of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and tire British Institute of Persian Studies, two institutions that owe a particular debt to his energy and initiative. [See also Brak, Tell; British Institute of Persian Studies; British School of Archaeology in Iraq; Halaf, Tell; Khabur; Nineveh; Ur; and the biography of Woolley.} BIBLIOGRAPHY
MALLOWAN, MAX EDGAR LUCIEN
(1904-
1978), one of the principal archaeologists to work in the Near East. Mallowan received his B.A. in classics at Oxford and was immediately hired as Leonard Woolley's assistant at the Ur excavations, a position he held for six successive seasons ( 1 9 2 5 - 1 9 3 0 ) , It was at Ur that Mallowan met his wife and archaeological companion of the next forty-five years, the mystery writer Agatha Christie. In 1 9 3 1 he com pleted his apprenticeship by joining R. Campbell T h o m p son's excavations at Nineveh. Mallowan's interests included all areas of the ancient Near East and the Indus Valley as well, but he excavated exclu sively in northern Mesopotamia. He first chose to dig, in 1933, at Arpachiyah where the well-preserved Halaf depos its proved to contain a series of substantial circular buildings (Mallowan's conceivably domed tholoi) and an outstanding range of finely painted Middle and Late Halaf pottery. When subsequent political developments kept British teams from working in Iraq, Mallowan chose to explore the littleknown region of the Khabur and Balikh Rivers in nearby northeastern Syria. Following an initial survey, he excavated at Chaghar Bazar in the Khabur basin where, in the course of two full seasons (1935 and 1936), he not only revealed a long Halaf sequence but also an early second millennium occupation associated with Khabur Ware and cuneiform tablets from the time of Shamshi-Adad 1 ( 0 . 1 8 1 3 - 1 7 8 1 BCE) . His second major excavation in the region was at Tell Brak where he discovered the richly appointed Eye Temple of Late Uruk date and an Akkadian palace attributable to Naram-Sin. Mallowan's final large-scale excavation took place at Nim rud (1949-1957)5 where he first concentrated on the main buildings of the Neo-Assyrian citadel before turning his at
Curtis, John E., ed., Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery: The Work of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1932-1982. London, 1982. Mallowan, M. E. L. Twenty-Five Years of Mesopotamian Discovery, 1932-1956. London, 1956. Mallowan, M. E. L, Nimrud and Its Remains. 2 vols. London, 1966. Mallowan, M. E. L. Mallowan's Memoirs. London, 1977. Reade, Julian. "Revisiting the North-West Palace, Nimrud." Orientalia 63.3 (i994): 273-278. Stronach, David. "Sir Max Mallowan." Iran 1 7 (1979): v-vii. DAVID STRONACH
MALTA. Only by some stretch of the imagination is Malta a Near Eastern land. Although Malta and its sister island Gozo are only 80 km (50 mi.) from Sicily, they are 290 (180) from Tunisia, 3 3 5 (210) from Libya, 620 (385) from Greece, 1060 (660) from Turkey, and 1,895 ( 1 , 1 7 5 ) from the Syrian coast. T h e Mediterranean Sea can join, however, as well as divide. At several points in their long history, either directly or with North Africa as intermediary, Malta and Gozo have been linked with Southwest Asia, oc casionally quite closely. Although the concept of diffusion is out of fashion in ar chaeological interpretations, the origins of farming in the ancient Near East, and its spread from there across Europe, are universally accepted. However, since it took one thou sand years to reach Malta, around 5000 BCE, by a route that took it through Greece, Italy, and Sicily, eastern influence was much diluted. Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that die wheat and barley, sheep and cattle, upon which the earliest Maltese farming was based, originated in the Near East. In the long and largely indigenous development of Mal tese prehistory, there are only two hints of eastern contact.
MALTA Associated with the spectacular megalithic temple architec ture of 3500-2500 are numerous representations in stone and clay of grossly corpulent and strangely asexual human figures, popularly known as "fat ladies." They are well il lustrated in John D. Evans's work on Malta ( 1 9 7 1 ) . Al though similarities with much earlier examples from Catal Hoyiik in Turkey have been noticed, they are in all proba bility accidental. Rather more convincing are a series of open straightwalled bowls with flat base, single handle, and lip charac teristically thickened on the inner side, discussed by David T r u m p (1966). T h e lip is also flat, insloping, and frequentiy decorated with incised triangles, which are dot-filled or di agonally hatched. A few have been found in temple-period deposits, and they become common in the succeeding Bronze Age, whose culmral affiliations lie with western Greece. Close parallels for this form and its decoration were found in Early Bronze Age Thermi on Lesbos, and occurred also on die nearby mainland at Troy. It is certainly exotic in Malta at much the same period, but the Turldsh connection will not be certain until confirmed by clay analyses. All other foreign imports before the first millennium, whether raw materials or manufactured goods, can be traced to Sicily or elsewhere in southern Europe. P h o e n i c i a n a n d P u n i c Influences. A great change came with the expansion of Levantine, or more specifically Phoe nician, trade. Although the first contacts were formerly dated to die ninth century, it is now generally felt that firm evidence goes back no further titan the later eighth, though this would not rule out occasional earlier visits. Cultural in fluence increased strongly when Carthage took over control of Phoenician enterprise in the west in the mid-sixth cen tury. The Punic period in Malta lasted to the arrival of the Romans. They sacked the islands in the First Punic War in the 250s and annexed them in the second war in 2 1 8 . Written evidence for the Punic period is remarkably scarce. Diodorus Siculus mentions tire Phoenicians' occu pation of Malta and Gozo, and Latin writers report the wresting of them from the Carthaginians. Apart from some dedications on potsherds, the earliest of which may date from the third century, epigraphic evidence is confined to the Roman period and will be described below. As a result, our only significant information is from the archaeology. Direct evidence for settlements of tire Punic period is scanty in the extreme. A thin stratum with Phoenician redslipped sherds but no structures was identified beneath the main square of Victoria, Gozo, stratified between Bronze Age and Roman levels. In limited excavations within the acropolis, known now as the Gran Castello, all earlier de posits had been destroyed by medieval and recent occupa tion. Mdina, in tire center of Malta, produced some Roman structures and a little residual Bronze Age pottery. No ex cavation has been attempted in Vittoriosa beside Grand Harbour. All these places must have hsd substantial Phoe
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nician and Punic occupation on the evidence of surrounding cemeteries. A special case is provided by a strange building of fine ashlar (dressed stone) masonry with an Egyptian-gorge cor nice at Zurrieq in the south of tire island. This architectural ornament can hardly be anything but Punic work, though excavation has produced no dating evidence in the badly disturbed deposits. It has been variously suggested that this structure could be the remains of a country house, a mon umental tomb, or a temple (Houel, 1 7 8 5 ; Mayr, 1909; Ashby, 1915; Isserlin, personal communication). Two more securely religious sites have been discovered on dramatic cliff-bound headlands on the west coasts of Malta and Gozo, at Ras ir-Raheb and Ras il-Wardija. T h e former has not been properly studied but has yielded a stone thymaterion or incense burner and a bone relief carving of a boar. T h e latter consists of an alcoved rock-cut chamber, including a symbol of the Phoenician goddess Tannit, but no deposits. Both sites had massive water cisterns cut in the rock beneath them. By far the most important building of tire Punic period in the islands is die temple at T a Silg, excavated by an Italian mission from 1963 to 1 9 7 0 and reported by Michelangelo Cagiano de Azevedo and colleagues ( 1 9 6 5 - ) . A prehistoric temple had been erected on the site in the third millennium and activity continued through the Bronze Age to approxi mately 1000. About 700 the Phoenicians incorporated the earlier structures in a rectangular temple of their own, with a courtyard and temenos. Alterations such as the enlarge ment of tire enclosure and the addition of a colonnaded por tico and further structures were made, particularly in the fourth to second century. These changes show sttong Hel lenistic influence. Later remodelings under tire Romans, and especially in the Byzantine period, further complicate the earlier phases. T h e finds from Ta Silg underline the eastern Mediterra nean connection, including architectural fragments with Egyptian and proto-Aeolic motifs, a fine ivory carved in openwork relief with palmette and lotus designs, and an other fragment of an incense burner. Numerous dedications in Phoenician to Astarte and in Greek to Hera were recov ered too. They were incised in pottery before firing and were thus clearly made to serve as votive offerings. These objects strongly support tire identification of the site with the temple of Juno, which was looted by Gains Verres (governor of Sicily 7 3 - 7 1 ) , as recorded in Cicero's speech for his prose cution. A second temple dedicated to Hercules/Melkart was mentioned by the geographer Ptolemy, but it has not been identified. Of other epigraphic material, two marble cippi (votive pil lars), one in the National Museum of Malta, one in the Lou vre, have bilingual dedicatory inscriptions in Punic and Greek. T h e Louvre specimen assisted the original translit eration of the Phoenician script in the eighteenth century.
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They also were probably found in the ruins of Ta Silg. A small and very elegant slab from Gozo, now broken, records work on public buildings and temples. Its second-century date emphasizes an important fact—that Punic culture sur vived Roman military conquest by two centuries or more. The Maltese people were barbaroi at the time of St. Paul's visit about 60 CE, which in the context must surely mean Phoenician-speaking. This cultural overlap is particularly obvious from the tomb material, which gives us our most detailed evidence concerning tlie Phoenician impact on Malta. Some tombs undoubtedly date back to the Punic or even Phoenician pe riod. A well-excavated burial from Ghajn Qajjet near Mdina was published by J. G. Baldacchino and T. J. Dunbabin ( 953) d can serve as an example. A square shaft was cut into the soft rock and a trapezoidal chamber, which mea sured 3 X 3.6 m (9.9 X 11.8 ft.), opened from its foot. A stone slab sealed its entrance. A larger horizontal slab inside the chamber served as a bed for two skeletons, one male, one female. They were accompanied by seven bracelets, two of bronze and five of silver; four silver rings; a bronze lampstand top; and four key-shaped loops of iron, probably fit tings on a bier. Thirty-three pieces of red-slipped Phoeni cian pottery included amphorae, an oinochoe (wine vessel), jugs, cups, dishes, plates, and bilychnis lamps (saucers with two pinched spouts). In addition, there were two imported Greek cups, a proto-Corinthian kotyle (deep drinking cup) of a little before 700 and a Rhodian bird-bowl of the midseventh century. Because the former was noticeably worn, the latter gives the more reliable date for the burial. There was also a plain jar of a form datable to the second century, and it contained cremated human bone. Clearly the tomb had been reopened to take this later interment. This reuse for later burials is only one of the problems in studying the several hundred tombs known from Malta and Gozo. I
a n
There are other intact tomb groups, but very few with datable imports. A fine fourth-century Megarian bowl from another tomb at Hamrun is a good example. Usually only locally made pottery was included, making close dating dif ficult. Gradually red slip was abandoned, though narrow hoops of red or purple paint were often applied to the buff ware. Larger jars and egg-shaped amphorae appear. As an example, in a tomb chamber at Tal Horr, Pawla, a young man was accompanied by two each of amphorae, jugs, bowls, and saucers, all with simple red rings, and a plain two-handled jar. He wore a silver signet ring bearing a palm tree within a cabled border. Much less informative are the great majority of tombs, which were looted long ago. On the other hand, there are quantities of material, some of it high quality, in private col lections of antiquities without provenance or secure associ ation, which must originally have been recovered from these tombs. Fragments of decorated gold foil, a terra-cotta mummiform sarcophagus, numerous amulets in faience, bronze
and gold, and silver rings with faience scarab bezels testify to close ttading links with the Levant (Gouder, 1 9 9 1 , pp. 8-14).
Later still, the tombs become larger, with one or two rec tangular chambers on the same axis as a rectangular shaft. Cremation is now the more usual burial custom, as in the secondary interment at Ghajn Qajjet near Mdina. Most of the tombs must date to the period of Roman occupation. From 100 B C E - I O O CE, the whole suite of material of Phoe nician derivation is gradually replaced by Roman provincial pottery and glass. The coin evidence, which has been reviewed by Charles Seltman (1946), should also be mentioned. Whereas trade easily explains coins from Sidon, Aradus, Cartilage, and the Greek cities of Sicily, the local issues are much more puz zling. Of these, some were inscribed with tlie names Anan and Gawl in Phoenician, others had the corresponding Melitaea and Gauliton in Greek, although the Greeks never held the islands. The conclusion from all this evidence is that, although Phoenician and Punic culture became firmly es tablished among the inhabitants of Malta and Gozo, ar chaeological information from the islands is very restricted, and can add little to that from areas where it is better pre served, in die Levant, North Africa, Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily. Arabic Influence. The next period of eastern influence comes with the Arab invasion of 870 CE under Ibn Kliafadsha, after which Malta was held as a dependency of Tunis until the Arabs were expelled by Count Roger of Sicily in 1090. Historical records are scanty and give no further de tails. Epigraphy is confined to gravestone inscriptions, a fine one pertaining to Majmuna, a twelve-year-old girl from Gozo, and a number from Rabat, outside the walls of the Arab capital in Mdina. Where datable, most of these tomb stones are later, often much later, than the Christian reconquest of 1090. T h e pattern of slow culture change follows a remarkably similar pattern to that under tlie Romans. Maltese ttaditional pottery shows strong North African influence, presumably going back to tlie ninth-eleventhcentury occupation. It includes lamps, sttainer jars for wa ter, and bipartite globular jars. Decoration consists of fine, geometric red painting on white slip or coarser white on burnished red, both again with North African parallels. Un fortunately, intact deposits earlier than tlie fifteenth century have not yet been found; therefore, such influences and their survival cannot be sUidied in detail. That influence is clearest linguistically. Maltese is basi cally a North African Arabic dialect with considerable ad ditions from Sicilian Italian. That it took such firm root in the two centuries of Arab occupation may be explained, it has been suggested, if in 870 the Maltese were already Se mitic speakers, as would have been the case if they were still using Phoenician. Because no contemporary records exist, proof of this hypothesis is not forthcoming. It does remind
C
MA LULA us, however, that, although Malta is isolated from the Near East, the sea routes of the Mediterranean allowed eastern influences to make a lasting mark on the culture of the Mal tese islands. [See also Phoenicians.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ashby, Thomas. "Roman Malta." Journal of Roman Studies 5 ( 1 9 1 5 ) : 49. Baldacchino, J. G., and T. J. Dunbabin. "Rock Tomb at Ghajn Qajjet, near Rabat, Malta." Papers of the British School at Rome 21 (1953): 32-41. Cagiano de Azevedo, Michelangelo, et al. Missione archeologia italiana a Malta. Rome, 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 7 3 . Ciasca, Antonia. "Malta." In The Phoenicians, edited by Sabatino Moscati, pp. 206-209. New York, 1988. Evans, John D. The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands, London, 1971. Gouder, T. C. Malta and the Phoenicians. Malta, 1991. Harden, Donald B. The Phoenicians. London, 1962. Contains scattered references to Malta. Houel, Jean, Voyage pitloresque des Isles de Sidle, de Make et de Lipari. Paris, 1785. See vol. 4, pp. 97-98, pi. 259. Mayr, Albert. Die Insel Malta in Alterturn. Munich, 1909. See pp. 8 9 90, fig. 30. Seltman, Charles. "The Ancient Coinage of Malta." Numismatic Chronicle 6 (1946): 81-90. Trump, D. H. Skorba: Excavations Carried Out on Behalf of the National Museum of Malta, 1961-1963. London, 1966. D.
H.
TRUMP
MAXULA, modern village located in the Qalamun Mountains, 60 km (37 mi.) north of Damascus, Syria, and n o km (68 mi.) south of Homs. T h e village is 1,650 m above sea level, at the bottom of a valley bordered on three sides by cliffs. If the evidence provided by the inscriptions found by W. H. Waddington and Heinrich Moritz (inscrip tions 2 5 6 3 - 2 5 6 5 ) in the nearby caves is reliable, the site has been occupied since the Roman period; two of the inscrip tions give dates of 107 and 167 CE. T h e existence of the site is, in any case, attested by George of Cyprus (Gelzer, 1890, p. 188, n. 993) as Magloulon. It was then a part of Lebanese Phoenicia. T h e Arab historian Yaqut mentions Iklim as one of flie many villages that are a part of Malula. The village houses are arranged on the slopes of the valley like the tiers of seating in an immense amphitheater. Behind the summit of the cliff lies the Mar Sarlds Church and, since 1988, a modern hotel, from which tiiere is a magnificent panoramic view. Three quarters of the village's inhabitants are Christians—Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic; the re maining quarter are Sunni Muslims. M a l u l a is cited as the seat of a seventeenth-century Melchite bishopric, but in 1 7 2 4 it was reunited with Said Naya. [See Said Naya.] It is perhaps its isolation (although it is not far from Damascus it is in the mountains) that has enabled Malula to maintain its predominantly Christian population, unusual in Syria.
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This isolation did not, however, completely protect it from the hazards of politics. T h e city was sacked in 1850 by Turk ish troops under Mustafa Pasha, whose men were pursuing the survivors of the revolt of the emir of Baalbek who had come to Malula seeking refuge; the village was attacked and besieged again in i860 and 1 9 2 5 . [See Baalbek.] Nevertheless, in many respects the village remains a living conservatory of the most ancient traditions of Syrian civili zation. T o begin with, the inhabitants continue to speak a Western Aramaic dialect related to Judeo- and Syro-Pales tinian Aramaic. It is therefore not injudicious to surmise that it represents the last example in Syria today of the language spoken in Syria-Palestine in the time of Jesus. [See Aramaic Language and Literature.] In comparison, the Aramaic spo ken in die villages of the Jezireh and the T u r 'Abdin is much further removed, notably in the area of morphology. Malula also retains in use many churches dating to the most ancient Christian past. In the Church of St. Elie, a mosaic from the fourth century has been uncovered. T h e best-known mon asteries in Malula are of Mar Sarkis (St. Serge, whose cult was very widespread in Syria) and St. Takla. The Church of Mar Sarkis was probably constructed on the ruins of a pagan temple; it is a small basilica with columns and a cen tral nave flanked by two aisles. Even though basilicas with cupolas do not appear before the fifth century, the monks of the monastery propose a date for the church before the Council of Nicaea (325 CE); it was then that the altar tables found in pits in the central apse and the northern side chapel were outlawed—because their origin was believed to be pa gan. [See Basilicas; Churches.] Carbon-14 analysis dates certain wooden elements from the wall supports of the cen tral nave to the fourth century. None of these arguments is entirely convincing. Carbon-14 technology, in particular, does not permit such precise dating. In the absence of an executed scientific study, it is impossible to date this church with certainty. It is, however, entirely possible tiiat its most ancient parts belong to the fourth or fifth century, as ttadition holds. Since 1 7 3 2 the monastery and church have be longed to the Basilien Salvatorien order and the Greek Cath olic community. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gelzer, Heinrich. Georgius of Cyprus: Descriplio orbis romani. Leipzig, 1890. Le Bas, Philippe, and W. H. Waddington. Inscriptionsgrecques et latincs de la Syrie. Paris, 1870. Moritz, Heinrich. Die Zunamen bei den Hislorikern und Chronisten. 2 vols. Landshut, 1897-1898. Reich, Sigismund S. "Histoire de Ma'lula: Raisons pour la conservation et la disparition de cet idiome." In Reich's Etudes sur les villages arameens de I'anti-Liban. Documents d'Etudes Orientales de l'Institut Francais de Damas, 7. Damascus, 1937. GEORGES T A T E
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
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MALYAN
MALYAN
(Anshan), site located in Fars Province, Iran, 50 km (31 mi.) north-northwest of Shiraz at an elevation of 1 , 6 1 1 m above sea level (30°oi' N , 52°25' E). Malyan is often mentioned with Susa in the royal titulary of Elamite kings. [See Susa.] Its ancient city wall, constructed in the Proto-Elamite period, enclosed 200 ha (494 acres), but the occupation mound within the wall has an area of only 1 3 0 ha (321 acres). The Archaeological Department of Fars opened soundings under the direction of Feridun Tavaloli in about 1961 and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania sponsored five field seasons there ( 1 9 7 1 1978) under the direction of William M. Sumner. Excava tions focused on the Proto-Elamite (Banesh) period, the Kaftari-Qale period, and the Qale-Middle Elamite period. Ceramic evidence indicates that die site was occupied nearly continuously from about 6000 BCE into the Islamic period. Proto-Elamite Period (3400-2800 BCE). Proto-Elamite deposits were excavated in four main operations. Large hor izontal exposures were excavated in operation ABC, located near die center of the main mound, and in operation TUV, on a small isolated mound near the northeast corner of the city wall. More limited excavations were undertaken in a narrow ttench across the city wall ( B Y 8 ) , and in the H 5 deep sounding below later Kaftari buildings in operation GHI. ABC operation. Four Proto-Elamite buildings from building levels 2 - 5 were excavated in the ABC operation (20 by 30 m, reduced to 1 0 by 1 3 m in the lowest level). Building Level 5, founded at the level of the plain, was made of unfired mud bricks, like all the buildings excavated at Malyan. Building Level 4 was constructed directly on the remains of the razed walls of Building Level 5. The earliest Proto-Elam ite tablet and glyptic art came from this level. In Building Level 3 (15 by 25 m), with seventeen rooms, had walls dec orated with painted rosette, swirl, and nested-step motifs executed in red, white, yellow, gray, and black plaster. Finds included fragments of incised and painted plaster bowls and drum-shaped ceramic vessels with floral and animal deco ration in relief. The bricky fill between this building and the floors of Building Level 2 produced a collection of tablets and sealings in the classic Proto-Elamite style that is related to administtative activities in or near Building Level 3. Building Level 2 was a fifteen-room warehouse (18 by 26 m) containing thirteen large (about 2 m high) Jemdet Nasrstyle painted storage jars. Finds included Proto-Elamite tab lets, sealings, concentrations of specular hematite, motherof-pearl geometric inlay, and unworked shells from the Persian Gulf. TUV operation. Operation T U V was occupied only in the Proto-Elamite period. Building Level 3 (247 sq m) was founded on the ruins of earlier Banesh buildings. The build ing had a number of rooms, a circular burned structure, and an alleyway; it was later modified for the construction of a
pyrotechnical installation for copper smelting. Finds include Proto-Elamite sealed and inscribed tablets (see figure 1 ) , jar and door sealings in several styles, solid clay balls witii seal impressions, tools, and raw materials and by-products as sociated with the production of personal ornaments in metal, stone, and shell. Building Level 3 was razed to make room for the construction of Building Level 2 (455 sq m), which had plaster-lined bins, storage jars, hearths, milling stones, wells, and trash pits. Level 1 , which was immediately below the mound surface and partly eroded, included the remains of two buildings separated by an alley. Finds in lev els 2 and 1 indicate a continuation of the domestic activities and craft production found in the earlier buildings. BY8 trench and H$ sounding. The Proto-Elamite wall (Operation B Y 8 , 30 X 4-8 m) was a series of rooms rein forced along its inner face with a mud-brick platform; the rooms were protected on the outer face by a mud-plaster glacis built on a stone foundation. A sounding in operation H5 produced Middle Banesh ceramics below trash deposits with Late Banesh or Early Kaftari ceramics. This is the only context at Malyan that might represent a transition between the Banesh and Kaftari ceramic styles. Kaftari P e r i o d ( 2 2 0 0 - 1 6 0 0 BCE). T h e city reached its maximum extent, some 1 3 0 ha within the reconstructed city wall, during the Kaftari period. Kaftari deposits were ex cavated in five main operations: large horizontal excavations in operations ABC and GHI, smaller excavations in two 1 0
MALYAN. Figure 1. Proto-Elamite tablet. Operation TUV, BL3. (Courtesy W. M. Sumner)
MALYAN
MAI,VAN. F i g u r e 2. Kiifturi slump seal. O p e r a t i o n H. (Courtesy VP. M . Sumner)
MALYAN. F i g u r e 3. Kaftari
figurines.
O p e r a t i o n A B C . (Courtesy W . M . S u m n e r )
407
408
MALYAN
X io m squares ( G G X 9 8 , F X 1 0 6 ) , and in the upper strata of a trench across the city wall ( B Y 8 ) . ABC operation. The upper strata in operation ABC (20 X 30 m) consisted of Kaftari trash layers resting on the eroded surface that had truncated Proto-Elamite level 2. Within this trash deposit were a number of surfaces, pits, wells, fragmentary buildings, and many finds, including seals (see figure 2 ) , tablets, figurines (see figure 3 ) , flints, metal objects, raw materials, and production by-products. GHI operation. Building Levels 3 and 4 were explored in a reduced area of excavation at the bottom of operation GHI. Building Level 2 was a courtyard building with access to the adjacent street, which was littered with a dense trash deposit. Finds included administrative texts in Sumerian, a lenticular school text, seals and sealings, figurines, and a bronze buckle in the form of hands grasping a bar. Level 1 belonged to the Qale-Middle Elamite period. FX106 and G G X 9 8 operations. Evidence of five Kaftari building levels was revealed in operation F X 1 0 6 ( 1 0 X 1 0 m). Building Level 2 was a domestic structure with signs of extensive repair and rebuilding, an exterior well, a drainage ditch, and a walkway paved with square and trapezoidal baked bricks. Finds included figurines, cylinder seal blanks, flint tools, and by-products of metallurgical production. Op eration G G X 9 8 ( 1 0 X 1 0 m in area) produced two Kaftari building levels and a large intrusive Kaftari pit that con tained a number of black-on-red canteen sherds, inscribed sealings, and a sun-dried-brick production site with rows of bricks left standing to dry in a herringbone pattern. Qale-Middle Elamite Period ( 1 6 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 BCE). The E D D operation (1,000 sq m) uncovered a large burned Middle Elamite building with a central courtyard ( 1 0 X 1 4 m), surrounded by a corridor and a series of rooms. Finds from the floors of the destruction level included administra tive tablets recording transfers of metals, finished objects, grain, flour, and animal products. The tablets and sealings were impressed with punctate designs representing diamond patterns, cuneiform signs, and naturalistic motifs. Other finds included glazed knobs and tiles, stone door bolts, crude flint flakes, and unworked calcite, hematite, and bitumen. Pottery kilns, constructed after the fire, produced Qale painted and plain ware. A small domestic complex, reusing some of the standing walls of the burned building, was also constructed after the fire. Ceramics and an Elamite tablet, similar to the finds from the burned level, suggest that there was a relatively short time lapse between the later and earlier levels. A burial above the latest building level may date to the Neo-Elamite period. Late Periods. There is no evidence of an Achaemenid occupation, in spite of the frequent mention of the name Anshan in tablets from Persepolis. [See Persepolis.] A Sas anian kiln, several late burials, and Islamic ceramics found on tlie surface represent the final use of the site. [See also Elamites.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Alden, John R. "Excavations at Tal-I Malyan. Part 1: A Sasanian Kiln." Iran 16 (1978): 79-86. Describes a Sasanian kiln and associated ce ramics. Balcer, Jack Martin. "Excavations at Tal-I Malyan. Part 2: Parthian and Sasanian Coins and Burials (1976)." Iran 1 6 (1978): 86-92. Blackman, M. James. "The Mineralogical and Chemical Analysis of Banesh Period Ceramics from Tal-e Malyan, Iran." In Scientific Studies in Ancient Ceramics, edited by M. J. Hughes, pp. 7-20. British Museum Occasional Paper, 1 9 . London, 1 9 8 1 . Blackman, M. James. "The Manufacture and Use of Burned Lime Plaster at Proto-Elamite Anshan (Iran)." In Early Pyrotechnology: The Evolution of the First Fire Using Industries, edited by Theodore A. Wertime and Steven F. Wertime, pp. 1 0 7 - 1 1 5 . Washington, D.C., 1982. Blackman, M. James. "Provenance Studies of Middle Eastern Obsidian from Sites in Highland Iran." In Archaeological Chemistry III, edited by Joseph B. Lambert, pp. 1 9 - 5 0 . American Chemical Society, Ad vances in Chemistry Series, no. 205. Washington, D.C., 1984. Carter, Elizabeth, and Matthew W. Stolper. "Middle Elamite Malyan." Expedition 18.2 (1976): 33-42. Preliminary report on the Middle Elamite building in historical context. Hansman, John. "Elamites, Achaemenians, and Anshan." Iran 10 (1972): 1 0 1 - 1 2 5 . The historical and geographic evidence concerning the identification of Malyan as Anshan. Miller, Naomi F. "The Interpretation of Some Carbonized Cereal Re mains as Remnants of Dung Cake Fuel." Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 1 (1984): 45-47. Miller, Naomi F. "Paleoethnobotanical Evidence for Deforestation in Ancient Iran: A Case Study of Urban Malyan." Journal of Ethnobiologys.l (1985): 1 - 1 9 . Nicholas, Ilene M. The Proto-Elamite Settlement at TUV. Malyan Ex cavation Reports, vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1990. Nickerson, Janet W. "Malyan Wall Paintings." Expedition 19.3 (1977): 2-6. Nickerson, John L. "Investigating Intrasite Variability at Tal-e Malyan (Anshan), Iran." Iranica Antiqua 26 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1-38. The evidence for craft specialization during the Kaftari period. Stolper, Matthew W. Texts from Tall-i Malyan, vol. 1, Elamite Admin istrative Texts (1972-1974). Occasional Publications of tlie Babylo nian Fund, 6. Philadelphia, 1984. Stolper, Matthew W. "Proto-Elamite Texts from Tall-i Malyan." Kadmos 24.1 (1985): 1 - 1 2 . Sumner, William M. "Excavations at Tall-i Malyan, 1 9 7 1 - 7 2 . " Iran 1 2 (1974): !55-r8o. Sumner, William M. "Excavations at Tall-i Malyan (Anshan), 1974." Iran 14 (1976): 1 0 3 - 1 1 5 . Sumner, William M. "The Proto-Elamite City Wall at Tal-i Malyan." Iran 23 (1985): 1 5 3 - 1 6 1 . Sumner, William M. "Proto-Elamite Civilization in Fars." In Gamdat Nasr: Period or Regional Style?, edited by Uwe Finkbeiner and Wolf gang RSUig, pp. 1 9 9 - 2 1 1 . Beihefte zum Tubinger Adas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B, vol. 62. Wiesbaden, 1986. An interpretation of die Proto-Elamite levels at Malyan in a regional and chronological con text. Sumner, William M. "Maljan, Tall-e (Ansan)." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 7, pp. 306-320. Ber lin and New York, 1988. Summary of excavations at Malyan, with an extensive bibliography. Zeder, Melinda A. "The Equid Remains from Tal-e Malyan, Southern Iran." In Equids in the Ancient World, edited by Richard H. Meadow and Hans-Peter Uerpmann, pp. 366-412. Beihefte zum Tubinger Adas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe A, vol. 1 9 . 1 . Wiesbaden, 1986.
MANDAIC Zeder, Melinda A. Feeding Cities: Specialized Animal Economy in the Ancient Near East. Washington, D.C., 1991. W I L L I A M M . SUMNER
MAMLUK DYNASTY. See Ayyubid-Mamluk Dy nasties.
MAMPSIS. SeeKurnub. MANASSEH, SURVEY OF. See Northern Samaria, Survey of.
MANBIJ, provincial town in northern Syria, located
78
km (48 mi.) northeast of Aleppo, the economic and admin istrative center of a fertile plain south of the Sajur River and near its junction with the Euphrates River. Commonly iden tified with the Assyrian settlement Nappigi/Nampigi, known as Hierapolis throughout the classical period, the traditional Arabic name, meaning "gushing water," mirrors the abun dance of the freshwater supply. Even in antiquity, the water was distributed mainly through subterranean channels (qanats) to the irrigated gardens surrounding die city. T h e area's fertility has encouraged continuous settlement since prehistory. An important urban center developed tiiere, famed for a large temple dedicated to Atargatis and Fladad, alongside a sacred pool. These, together with other monuments of the Hellenistic period—a theater, the site's circular defensive walls, and several churches, described in some detail by medieval geographers—had already disap peared by the time Gertrude Bell ( 1 9 1 1 ) visited the site in 1 9 1 0 . Buildings from the Islamic era, known from Arabic sources and occasionally from building inscriptions, have also vanished without trace, as has an oratory from AH 463/ 1 0 7 0 - 1 0 7 1 CE, two madrasas from the mid-twelfth century, and the Great Mosque, of uncertain date, to which a minaret was added in 5 8 1 / 1 1 8 5 - 1 1 8 6 . T h e minaret was still standing, adjacent to some otiier ruins, in 1879, when Eduard Sachau (1883) passed through Manbij. Soon after, in 1 3 0 4 / 1 8 8 6 1887, the monument was replaced by a modern mosque, constructed by order of the Ottoman sultan Abduihamid for a newly settled community of Circassians. Historically, Manbij was an important sttonghold at the heavily contested traditional border between Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, marked by the Upper and Middle Eu phrates. Already established as a military base in the Hel lenistic period, it formed part of the Roman limes of Chalcis. Later on, in the Early Byzantine period, it was an advance fortification against the Sasanians, who nevertheless suc ceeded in sacking the town in 540. Conquered by the M u s lims in 16/637, the fortified city was renamed Manbij ac
409
cording to the ancient name. On orders from die 'Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, it was established as the capital of the border provinces ('awdsim) in 170/786, the starting point of the yearly military campaigns into the areas of the Byz antine Empire. The site's key position on the major roads connecting the Syrian metropolis of Aleppo with Baghdad in central Mesopotamia and with Mosul in northern Mes opotamia motivated frequent raids by its Christian neigh bors, the Byzantines (in 962, 966, 974), and the Crusaders (in 1 1 6 8 - 1 0 7 1 , u n , 1 1 2 0 , 1 1 2 3 , 1 1 2 4 ) , until a semiautonomous principality was established there under the Ayyubids in the late twelfth century. Devastated by the Mongols in 657/1259, the area was soon depopulated and Manbij was consequently reduced to the status of a provincial settle ment. The nearest crossing point on the Euphrates, 29 km (18 mi.) farther northeast, called Jisr Manbij, was protected by a strongly fortified castle, the Qal'at Najm, rebuilt in the mid-twelfth century by the Zangid ruler Nur al-Din Mahmud. The castle was further enlarged by the Ayyubid ruler of Aleppo, al-Zahir Ghazi, in 605/1208-1209 and subsequently enriched with a palace, a bath, and a mosque (612/ 1 2 1 5 ) . This citadel and a ruined Ayyubid madrasa or mosque, togedier with a nearby domed mausoleum, are the only surviving architectural witnesses to the important role the region played in history. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bell, Gertrude Lowthian. Amurath to Amurath. London, 1 9 1 1 . See pages 19-26. Should be compared witii the earlier account by Sachau (below). Elisseeff, Nikita. "Manbidj." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 6, PP. 3 7 7 3 8 3 . Leiden, i960-. The best summary available on the Is lamic period. Goossens, Godefroy. Hierapolis de Syrie: Essaide monographic hiswriaue. Publication of the University of Louvain, Recueil de Travaux d'Histoire et de Philologie, 3d ser., fasc. 12. Louvain, 1943. Still the standard reference on pre-Islamic Manbij. Sachau, Eduard. Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien. Leipzig, 1883. The most complete description of lost monuments, including the only published inscriptions of Qal'at Najm (see pp. 1 4 6 - 1 5 5 ) . Sanlaville, Paul, ed. Holocene Settlement in North Syria. British Archae ological Reports, International Series, no. 238. Oxford, 1985. Report of archaeological surveys conducted in 1977 and 1979. -
MICHAEL MEINECKE
MANDAIC. The national and religious language of the Mandaeans, the only surviving Gnostics, is Mandaic. The language emerged simultaneously with this religious com munity in southern Mesopotamia in the third century CE. The Mandaeans still live in tiieir ancient communities on both sides of the Persian Gulf. As an ethnic group with an esoteric national religion, they are a foreign element in their environment. According to tiieir own mythologico-legendary traditions, contained in their holy books (Ginza Rabba,
410
MANDAIC 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
"The Great Treasure"; DrasT d-Yakya, "Sermons of John [the Baptist]"; the liturgies; and a later pseudohistorical treatise, the legend Harran Goweyta), they had to flee from their original homeland, Palestine, because of Jewish per secution. In spite of the lack of external evidence, these myths and legends appear to have a solid historical kernel. All of this religion's basic and central notions and even its technical terms are decidedly Palestinian, not Babylonian (cf. the use of the root sby, "to baptize," with the Christian Palestinian stf, as opposed to the Syriac 'md; yardfna, "Jor dan," the technical term for "river," in which the baptism is performed; nasoraya "observant (of the Law); spiritual leader." All typical technical terms of the Gospel of John (light, darkness, way, truth, life, vine), are fundamental ex pressions of the Mandaean faith and indicate that a strong Proto-Mandaean movement must have existed in the milieu of the author of the fourth Gospel. Like the Babylonian Jews, the Mandaeans also had to adopt a local Aramaic idiom in their new country. It was a South Babylonian Aramaic dialect closely related to the Ar amaic language of the Babylonian Talmud. Minor differ ences may be explained by the strictly separate life of the two communities, their traditional inimical attitude toward each other, and their diametrically opposite religious ideol ogies. It is not surprising that the language of Mandaean incantation texts (lead scrolls and magic bowls) is very close to that of Jewish phylacteries—both are written in a sort of Babylonian-Aramaic koine common to Mandaeans, Jews, and Christians (see figure i ) . Another reason for the differ ences between the Mandaic and the Talmudic languages is their literary style. All of the classical Mandaean literature is exclusively poetic, whereas the Talmudic is entirely prosaic. Once in Mesopotamia, the Mandaean Nasoraeans had to invent an alphabet and to fix the orthographic rules for the language in which they wanted to propagate their religious ideas (they could not use the Jewish-Aramaic alphabet be cause of their enmity with the Jews). There are some Elymaean inscriptions (named after Elymais, an ancient name of the soutiiern Iranian province of Khuzistan) from the sec ond half of die third century CE that already show prototypes of the Mandaean book script at a time when the Mandaeans are supposed to have immigrated to southern Mesopotamia. The problem of whether the Mandaeans brought this script into this region when they immigrated or took it over has not yet been definitively solved. There are arguments for both sides of the question (Macuch, 1 9 7 1 ) . Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the first copy of the Mandaean Liturgies should have been redacted at about that time, according to the colophons from Early Islamic times. At any rate, the use of this script for Mandaic was an effective invention of the Nasoraeans, and the speed with which it was adapted to all the practical needs of the lan guage shows that its adoption was clearly premediated. Mandaean scholars broke with many scribal practices of Im-
7.
8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
„
_,
1
ae/a/a, a/a b/b g/g d/d h w/u z -1
1 i-
J V
,»
t y/e/i/i k/x 1 m n s
We-, or gi p/f
4t«
Jl
MANDAIC.
§
q r s t/t (a)d (only (=1) Figure
I.
The Mandaic
alphabet.
perial Aramaic, introducing simple phonetic spelling with a complete scriptio plena that has no analogy among the vari ous Aramaic writing systems. Like the Greeks, they used the signs for the laryngeals, which were no longer pronounced, to express vowels: ' for a/ae, -h (original Aramaic h) for the final -f as a suffix of the third-person singular masculine, and for initial e/i or as a support for o/u. In all other posi tions the back and the front vowels o/u and e/i were ex pressed by the semivowels w and y used regularly as matres 1
lectionis.
Nevertheless, the inventors of this simple Mandaic writing system remained captives of the Imperial Aramaic orthog raphy in three respects: the masculine plural ending -ia (< *-ayya), pronounced simply -1, is still consistently written with the silent final a(lephj; the silent q ( < Proto-Semitic d) still appears in the script as in Imperial Aramaic; and simi larly, z ( < Proto-Semitic d) is still written, altiiough with frequent (later) variants betraying the actual pronunciation. Mandaic can be divided into three distinct periods: clas sical (third century CE-Early Islamic period); postclassical (medieval); and modern. Classical P e r i o d . In the golden era of the Mandaic lan guage and literature, the founders of the Mandaean com munity developed a South Babylonian Aramaic dialect as an expressive poetic tool for tiieir Gnostic mythology and lit urgy. This fundamental period, in which all basic Mandaean writings were written, is of extreme importance in both his-
MANDAIC torico-religious and linguistic respects. Mandaeans are the only Gnostic sect that completely preserved its sacred lit erature; because it has been preserved as a liturgical lan guage, its traditional recitation, partly supported also by tire living colloquial pronunciation, gives welcome means to the study of the ancient phonetic phenomena of South Baby lonian Aramaic. T h e phonetics of classical Mandaic rest on a Late Baby lonian substrate, of which the loss of tlie laryngeals (', h, ') and the dissimilation of geminates (bb > mb, dd > nd, zz > nz) are especially characteristic. T h e only laryngeal that re mained is h. Both phenomena mentioned are already at tested in the names of these people and their religion, manddyd ("Mandaean"), an adjective deriving from mandd, "knowledge par excellence, or gnosis," hence originally gnostikos—although it simply designates laymen as believers in mandd d-heyyT, gnosis tes zoes, the "redeemer of the Man daean religion." The word derives from madded (rootyd', "to know") and is attested in its dissimilated form, but still with the original laryngeal, manda', four times in the Book of Daniel (2:21; 4 : 3 1 , 3 3 ; 5 : 1 2 ) . Through tire coinage of this technical term for the central notion of the Mandaean reli gion, the infix n was quasi-sanctified. It was often written even where it was not originally pronounced (e.g., kunza for kuza, "jar"), or pronounced where it was not written. Mandaic is known for the fluid state of its phonetics, es pecially the free or combinatory variations of the liquids /, r, w; tlie disappearance of the laryngeals; tlie syncope of den tals, sibilants, and palatals; and the metathetical words and roots that created numerous homonyms and facilitated wordplays in polemics against other religious. Classical Mandaic morphology is simple. Because the Mandaeans did not write silent letters, as did tlie Syro-Arameans, the phonetically written form of the third-person plural perfect tense became homographic with the same per son in tlie singular: g°tal, "he killed" and "they killed." Al though the grammatical number was clear from the syntac tic construction, in tlie medieval and modern periods, a full plural form, g'talyon, "they lulled," developed. Otherwise, classical Mandaic morphology is easily comparable to Syriac and other Aramaic dialects. Classical Mandaic syntax is very archaic, as TheodorNoldeke (1964) rightly noted in his grammar. This may be the result in part of tlie predominantly poetic character of an cient Mandaic writings. Postclassical Period. Compared to the classical period, the postclassical period is extremely prosaic, and in it the classical language was no longer fully understood. T h e me dieval Nasoraeans wrote down their speculations about the beginning of tlie world, their historico-geographic imagin ings, casuistic commentaries, and astrological and pseudoscientific treatises (most of them published by Drower, 1937) in a new language that may have been closer to the spoken idiom of their time; however, their writings were not
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aimed at common believers and remained confined to priestly libraries. The writings lack tlie regularity of tlie lan guage of the classical period and their syntax is burdensome, obscure, and much inferior to the clear and simple poetic syntax of tlie Nasoraeans of the classical period. M o d e r n M a n d a i c . Lacking a proper literature, modern Mandaic is found in written form only in the colophons of the last few centuries in Iraq. Mandaic ceased to be spoken before the end of the nineteenth century. In the province of Khuzistan, where the Mandaeans are concentrated, it partly survived under harsh conditions in the cities of Ahwaz and Khorramshahr, to which the Mandaeans of the strongest community of Shustar immigrated because of Muslim per secutions at die beginning of the twentieth century. Accord ing to an estimate by Salem CoheylT from Ahwaz (personal communication, 1 9 9 1 ) , among the approximately thirty thousand Mandaeans in Iran there are fewer than one thou sand who are still able to speak Mandaic. BIBLIOGRAPHY For a list of editions of Mandaic texts, see Rudolf Macuch (1965b, 1976) below. The reader may also consult the following: Drower, Ethel S. The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran: Their Cults, Customs, Magic, Legends, and Folklore (1937). Leiden, 1962. Firstiiand obser vations, widi folk tales in English translation. Drower, Ethel S., and Rudolf Macuch. A Mandaic Dictionary. Oxford, 1963. The only dictionary of classical and postclassical Mandaic. Lidzbarski, Mark. Das Johannesbuch der Mandaer. 2 vols. Giessen, 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 1 5 . Reprint, Berlin, 1966. Critical edition and German trans lation of the Sermons of John [the Baptist]. Lidzbarski, Mark. Mandaische Liturgien mitgeieilt, iibersetzt und erklart (1920). Flildesheim, 1962. Includes a transliteration in Hebrew char acters and a German translation. Superseded by Ethel S. Drawer's complete edition, 77ie Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans (Lei den, 1959). Lidzbarski, Mark. Ginza: Der Schatz oder das grofie Buck der Mandaer iibersetzt und erklart. Gottingen and Leipzig, 1925. Classical trans lation of the main religious book of tlie Mandaeans based on Petermann's 1867 edition (see below). Macuch, Rudolf. "Anfange der Mandaer." In Die Araber in der alien Welt, edited by Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiehl, vol. 2, pp. 76-190. Berlin, 1965a. Reconstruction of early Mandaean history. Macuch, Rudolf. Handbook of Classical and Modern A'landaic. Berlin, 1965b. Parallel grammatical description of die literary and the spoken language, with a complete bibliography up to 1965, an English-Mandaic vocabulary of die vernacular, and an addenda and corrigenda to Drower-Macuch (1963). Macuch, Rudolf. "The Origins of the Mandaeans and Their Script." Journal of Semitic Studies 16.2 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 7 4 - 1 9 2 . Macuch, Rudolf, ed. ZurSprache und Literatur der Mandaer. Berlin and New York, 1976. Macuch, Rudolf. "Hermeneutische Akrobatik aufgrund phonetischen Lautwandels in aramaischen Dialekten." Orientalia Suecana 3 3 - 3 5 (1984-1986): 269-283. Macuch, Rudolf. Neumandaische Chrestomathie mil grammatischer Skizze, kommentierter Ubersetzung und Glossar. Wiesbaden, 1989First collection of Neo-Mandaic texts, with a detailed introduction and grammatical outline. Noldeke, Theodor. Mandaische Grammalik (1875). Darmstadt, 1964.
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MANUAL OF DISCIPLINE
Classic grammar of classical Mandate, with a detailed morphology and syntax; phonetics superseded by Macuch (1965b). Petermann, Julius Heinrich. Thesaurus S. Liber Magnus vulgo "Liber Adami" appellants, opus Mandaeorum summiponderis. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1867. The only edition of the main religious work of the Mandaeans, the Ginzd Rabba. RUDOLF MACUCH
MANUAL OF DISCIPLINE. See Rule of the Com munity.
MARDIKH, TELL. SeeEbte. MARESHAH (Ar., Tell es-Sandahanna), site located about 1.5 km (1 mi.) south of Beth-Guvrin and 39 km (24 mi.) east of Ashkelon (map reference 1405 X 1 1 1 3 ) . T h e site was identified as biblical Mareshah (Gk., Marisa) by Edward Robinson, William Flinders Petrie, Frederick Jones Bliss, and others on the basis of biblical references and the writings of Josephus and of Eusebius. The identification has been confirmed by excavation. Ancient Mareshah com prised a high mound, a lower city with ancillary cave com plexes, and a necropolis that encompassed the entire site. Mareshah is first mentioned in the Bible as a city in Judah (Jos. 15:44). After the destruction of the First Temple it became an Edomite city. In the Late Persian period, it was the capital of Idumea at which time a Sidonian community settled there. It is also mentioned in the Zenon papyri (259 BCE). During the Hasmonean wars, Mareshah was a base camp for assaults on Judah and suffered retaliation by the Maccabees. After John Hyrcanus I took and destroyed Ma reshah in 1 1 2 BCE, the region remained under Hasmonean conttol (Antiq. 13.396). The Parthians completely devas tated the "strong city" in 40 BCE, and it was never rebuilt. Mareshah was first excavated on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1900 by Bliss and R. A. S. Macalister, who uncovered a planned and fortified Hellenistic city sur rounded by a wall with towers. They also identified two Hel lenistic and one Israelite strata. From 1989 to 1993, Amos Kloner cleared the northwestern tower on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, revealing two Hellenistic building phases. Beneath those fortifications were Persian and Iron Age constructions. The earlier tower, dated to about 300 BCE, was built into debris of the Persian period, A new tower, dated to about 200 BCE, and built over the earlier Flellenistic tower, was probably destroyed toward the end of tiiat cen tury. Finds from the Israelite stratum found during the 1900 excavations include seventeen Imlk impressions. Among the numerous Hellenistic finds were 328 Rhodian amphora han dles and three inscriptions. Sixteen small lead figurines and
fifty-one limestone execration tablets attest magic practices at Flellenistic Mareshah. Lower City. Ceramic evidence dates the original con struction of the lower, partially walled city, which surrounds the mound in a belt of varying width, to the Hellenistic pe riod. The lower city consisted of private houses, baths, workshops, and stores laid out in insulae with lanes and streets. The Southern House above Macalister's cave 53 was almost entirely excavated in 1989. It was erected in the midthird century BCE and continued in use until the final de struction of the city. A staircase led to a second story and a corridor descended to a network of cisterns. [See Cisterns.] A juglet found under a floor contained twenty-five coins of 1 2 2 - 1 1 3 / 1 1 2 BCE. Similar dwelling units and caves were ex cavated in 1 9 9 2 - 1 9 9 3 in area 6 1 , in the eastern part of the lower city. More units and caves beneath them were exca vated in 1994 in areas 939-940. Caves. The lower city had been constructed above hun dreds of caves hewn into the soft chalky limestone of the hillsides. Macalister listed sixty-three cave complexes in his survey, and recent investigations have revealed ninety more. The principal uses of these caves were for the manufacture of olive oil and for pigeon breeding. Twenty-one Hellenistic oil presses have been discovered, of which two—comprising a crushing installation, three pressing beds, storage areas, a cistern, and a cultic niche—have been excavated. [See Ol ives.] More tiian seventy columbaria have been identified, the finest in caves 30 and 6 1 . Cave 2 1 was excavated by Kloner in 1972 and 1981 and dated to the third-first cen turies BCE. Each columbarium comprises halls with many small niches carved in the upper part of the walls; there are probably about fifty thousand such niches in all of Mare shah. There is no evidence for these having been used as repositories for human ashes. It is likely that the niches were intended initially as dovecotes; their subsequent functions are unclear. T h e caves were also used as stables, animal stalls, storerooms, cisterns, bathhouses, and ritual rooms. Cave 70, examined in 1980, consists of thirty-one rooms and contained various cereal grains and olive pits. Cave 7 5 , ex plored in 1988, was occupied in the Iron Age, Persian, and Hellenistic periods. Necropolis. In the eastern necropolis tiiere are fifteen tombs, of which seven were first excavated in 1902 by John P. Peters and Hermann Thiersch (1905). T o m b I is the larg est and most lavishly decorated, with a painted frieze of hunting scenes and animals adorning its walls. Greek in scriptions and graffiti date the tomb to 1 9 6 - 1 1 9 BCE. T o m b II, also painted, contains inscriptions dating it to 1 8 8 - 1 3 5 BCE. The northern necropolis contains twenty loculus tombs dated to the third-second centuries BCE. One tomb in the southwestern necropolis was excavated in 1989. Greek in scriptions and varied pottery assemblages date it to the third and second centuries BCE. Other tombs were cleared in
MARI 1 9 8 9 - 1 9 9 4 . These tombs indicate that the inhabitants of Mareshah in the Hellenistic period (Idumeans, Sidonians, and Greeks) practiced secondary burial, added loculi for primary burial, and built family tombs. [See also Necropolis; T o m b s ; and the biographies of Bliss, Macalister,
Petrie, and
Robinson.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bliss, Frederick Jones, and R. A. S. Macalister. Excavations in Palestine during the Years 1898-1900, London, 1902. Kloner, Amos, and Orna Hess. "A Columbarium in Complex 21 at Mareshah." 'Atiqot 1 7 (1985): 1 2 2 - 1 3 3 . Kloner, Amos. "Mareshah." Qadmoniol 24.3-4 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 70-85. Kloner, Amos, and Nahum Sagiv. "The Technology of Oil Production in the Hellenistic Period at Mareshah, Israel." In Oil and Wine Pro duction in the Mediterranean Area, edited by Marie-Claire Amouretti and Jean-Pierre Brun, pp. 1 1 9 - 1 3 6 . Paris, 1993. Peters, John P., and Hermann Thiersch. Painted Tombs in the Necropolis of Marissa. London, 1905. AMOS KLONER
M A R I (mod. Tell Hariri), a Mesopotamian royal city that existed from the beginning of the third millennium to the beginning of the second millennium BCE, located on the right bank of the Euphrates River, close to the present-day border between Syria and Iraq. At Mari, the Euphrates traverses a quasi-desert steppe, where rainfall agriculture is impossible because of insufficient precipitation. However, surveys con ducted since 1980 have located several canals, a number of which clearly supported agriculture—in particular, the one located on the terrace on the right bank of the river. T h e flow there seems to have been assured by a dammed lake constructed in Wadi es-Souab. T h e most important canal was on the left bank; it was connected to the Khabur River and flowed into the Euphrates just short of the lock at Baghouz. This canal (120 km, or 74 mi., long, with a channel that is 1 1 m wide for its entire length) appears to have been nav igable, designed to facilitate the fluvial link between the ac tive Mesopotamian plain and the foothills of the Taurus Mountains (Khabur and northern Syria). [See Taurus Mountains.] T h e birth of Mari—far from the other settle ments and great population zones that the plain of the Kha bur River, Mesopotamia itself, and western and northern Syria represent—can, thus, be explained in the context of the need for a city as a control point for river traffic, and perhaps also for caravan travel. T h e payment of taxes would have assured revenues, which explains Mari's wealth in cer tain periods. Thus, although the network of irrigation chan nels was designed to assure the subsistence of the popula tion, it was not the primary reason the city was settled. History of Excavation. In August 1 9 3 3 , Syrian peasants, while digging a grave, excavated a statue carved in the Su merian style. T h e find drew die attention of Mesopotamian
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specialists to Tell Hariri, the source of the object. By D e cember 1 9 3 3 , Andre Parrot, under the auspices of the Na tional Museums of France, had made the first soundings. In January 1934, in a new trench at the western edge of the tell, in a temple dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, a statuette bear ing on its shoulder the inscription "Lamgi-Mari" ("ldng of Mari") was recovered. T h e inscription securely identified the site with one of the cities mentioned in the Sumerian king lists as the seat of the tenth dynasty after the Flood and gave the name of an unknown king of Mari—a discovery of great importance. During the second campaign, in 1935, a Royal Palace from the beginning of the second millennium BCE was discovered. This exceptionally well-preserved mon ument had walls as high as 4 or 5 m and was full of material abandoned by the conquering Hammurabi of Babylon when he destroyed the city in 1760 BCE. T h e palace was unearthed in the course of five campaigns preceeding World War II. By the onset of the war, Parrot had discovered the palace, several phases of the Temple of Ishtar, and several sanctu aries in tire city's sacral quarter, in particular the Temple of the Lions (incorrectly thought to be the sanctuary of Dagan, the great god of the Euphrates). Parrot understood a new sequence of four campaigns for the Commission on Excavations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1 9 5 1 and 1954, shortly after Syrian inde pendence. He turned his attention to the area called the Red Mound, a high terrace from the third millennium, as well as to the temples of Ishtarat and Ninni-Zaza, which yielded a superb collection of statuettes. From 1961 onward, work fo cused on the structures situated north of the "ziggurat," identified at the time as annexes of the tlrird-millennium Temple of Dagan; in 1964, however, the third-millennium palace under the second-millennium palace was located, leading Parrot to concentrate his efforts there until 1974, when he stopped digging. T h e work was continued in 1979 by Jean-Claude Margueron, with modified objectives: the whole valley was to be studied, with the aim of understand ing die reasons and means by which the capital of tire Eu phrates was installed in a desert zone. T e n campaigns have been conducted since 1979. S e t t l e m e n t Periods. Based on the most recent research, the origins of the city are to be placed at the beginning of the third millennium, during the Early Dynastic I period. Written sources attest that the city was destroyed by Ham murabi of Babylon in 1760 BCE (middle chronology). It thus existed for a millennium during which it participated, ac tively it seems, in tire history of Syro-Mesopotamia, with periods of splendor and decline. It is probable that those fluctuations followed changes in the level of trade, which was international, in spite of the anachronism of the term. T h e various phases of Mesopotamian history are well rep resented at Mari: T h e Early Dynastic period (twenty-ninth or twenty-eighth-twenty-fourth centuries BCE); the Akka-
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MARI structure located on the tell's northwest promontory and chiefly by a cemetery installed in the ruins of the Royal Pal ace, which demonstrates a certain affluence for the popu lation. Another cemetery belongs to the Seleucid, or Par thian, period and it seems that Tell Hariri was then occupied by a modest village dependent on Dura-Europos. It seems that from that time onward, except for a contemporary cem etery on the northeast, the site was deserted. Early Dynastic period. The first centuries of the city are still poorly understood. Because the earliest level, that of the initial settlement, was reached only in two soundings, one on the northern border of the tell (trench B) and the second in the central space of the sacred precinct of the pre-Sargonic palace, it is not possible to describe the organization of the city at its inception. It is known, however, that its plan was circular (1,900 m in diameter) and that it was sur rounded by a dike to protect the city from the occasional floods that could ravage the valley. A canal linked to the Euphrates assured the city's water supply and also permitted boats to enter die port. N o house plan has emerged clearly, and not enough material was recovered to engage in a gen eral study concerning the first town of Mari. It is not until Early Dynastic III that a coherent whole emerges: the house
MARI . Steatite statue of Idi-ilum, governor of Mari. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
dian period (to die time of Naram-Sin; twenty-fourth/ twenty-third century); the third dynasty of Ur, designated here as the period of the shakkandkku (see below), a title meaning "governor" and denoting the holder of power at Mari (twenty-third or twenty-second century-twentieth century? BCE); and the moment at which the Amorite ldngs dominated the country (end of the nineteenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries BCE). The destt'uction of 1760 BCE, put an end to Mari as the capital of a realm playing a major role in the interchange of the cities of the ancient Near East. However, the ttaces of later structures attest that the city did not disappear over night. People continued to live in the ruins of the city Ham murabi devastated. The remains of that epoch, the Khana period (seventeenth-sixteenth centuries BCE), are generally rather poor; it is in the neighboring city of Terqa that life continued. [See Terqa.] The Middle Assyrian period (thir teenth-twelfth centuries BCE) is represented by a modest
MARI. Necklace of gold wire, lapis lazuli, and other precious stones; pendant with nude goddess. Late middle Syrian period from tomb 125. National Museum, Aleppo, Syria. (Erich Lessing/ArtResource, NY)
MARI of trench B with its tablets; the houses of the so-called preSargonic quarter, with a small market around a porticoed square; die temples of Ishtar, Ninni-Zaza, and Ishtarat, as well as the one associated with the high terrace called the Red Mound; and especially the rooms of the palace and its Sacred Precinct. A flourishing city is revealed whose char acteristics seem very original. At the end of the period, a school of sculptors at Mari made it a primary site of Near Eastern artistic production. T h e event or events that brought about the end of this phase are not known. It is probable that terrible destructions brought about tire end of Mari during the Akkadian period, perhaps at the beginning of the twenty-third century BCE. City of the shakkanakku. A new phase in the history of the city began near the end of the Akkadian period. T h e new dynasty is known by the name Shakkanakku (see be low) because it undoubtedly resulted from the governors who directed tire city for the benefit of tire kings of Akkad, when they seized Mari for a short time. Enormous construc tion projects were undertaken that obliterated, in whole or part, tire buildings of the latest levels of the Early Dynastic period. A new Royal Palace was built on top of the ruins of
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the earlier one, but following a completely new plan—except that tire Sacred Precinct was preserved. T h e plan of the of ficial apartments—a courtyard called the Court of the Palm closely associated with two successive long rooms, the sec ond one being the Throne Hall—is a characteristic formula for royal palaces from the Third Dynasty of Ur (twenty-first century BCE) to the end of tire Old Babylonian period (midsecond millennium). A second palace was built to the east of the temple area. Smaller in size, it would have sheltered the king while the new palace was being constructed. It was built over two hypogea that had clearly functioned as burial chambers for the former king and royal family. Unfortu nately, they were completely pillaged by robbers in antiq uity, perhaps when Hammurabi took Mari. At tire heart of the city's sacred area, a new high terrace (sometimes mis takenly called a ziggurat) was erected in association with the Temple of the Lions. It covered over the area that had con nected the Sacred Precinct with the temple on tlie Red Mound (see above). Amorite domination. Excavation of the Royal Palace resulted in the recovery of very precise information about how life was organized in a great Amorite palace at the be ginning of the second millennium BCE, thanks to the archives and other material abandoned by die Babylonian soldiers. [See Palace.] The palace was the political and administrative heart of all Mesopotamian cities. At Mari it was 2.5 ha (6 acres) in area, with nearly three hundred rooms at ground level—a number that could be doubled because there was a second story over most of tire building, as proved by the height of the remaining walls (5 m), the position of objects in the filling levels, and the presence of stairs. The palace included the following feattrres. House of the king, with an official area (Court of the Palm 106, Room of the Goddess with tire Flowing Vase 64, throne room 65), storerooms, a staff (servant and slave) area, kitchen, and administrative quarters Second house, for the women in the court (queens, female workers), consisting of a residential zone (the house centered on room 31), staff quarters, and storerooms Temple area at tlie site of the former Sacred Precinct Great storerooms, partially unrecoverable in the southern part of the structure.
MARL Frieze with mother ofpearl inlays, schist, and ivory. Depicted is a procession of priests and women decorating a bench with bull's legs. National Museum, Damascus, Syria. (Erich Lessing/Art Re source, NY)
The life of the realm was revealed through the recovered archives, of which there are some fifteen thousand docu ments that cover daily life at the palace (incoming and out going merchandise, food and other goods, food rations as payments, the king's meals); administrative relationships be tween the ldng and his servants in the cities that made up the realm (the ldng gave his orders and received reports and other information from his governors); and the relationships among different realms, or international activities, with other cities in Mesopotamia and Syria. [See Mari Texts.] It is not known what led Hammurabi to attack the capital
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MARI
of the Middle Euphrates because he and Zimrilim seem to have maintained a long political alliance. All that is known is that the Babylonian king gave the name of the capture of Mari to the thirty-first year of his reign and the destruction of its walls to the thirty-third year, according to their tradi tion of naming a year by a significant event of the previous year. During the several months he occupied Mari, he sys tematically pillaged die palace and all the official buildings; he transferred his booty to Babylon, abandoning several stray objects in place (to the joy of the archaeologists). He then burned all the monumental buildings as a statement that Mari no longer held its place in the concert of realms of the twenty-eighth century BCE. Because the trade routes connecting Syria with Mesopotamia no longer principally passed the Euphrates, tiiis destruction marked the end of the role Mari had played for a millennium. Conclusions. In its diversity, the epigraphic documen tation from Mari is one of the richest in the Near East. It gives an exceptionally concentrated picture of the Syro-Mesopotamian world during the brief period that preceded the fall of the city. T h e quality of Mari's preserved architecture and the richness of the surviving furnishings give an idea of what a city in the first Babylonian Empire, under the king ship of Hammurabi, may have looked like (the excavation of Babylon has not yielded finds from that period). The Royal Palace at Mari remains a unique example of a Bronze Age palace. In the amplitude and the audacity of its conception, the architecture of the third-millennium palace expresses the in ventive power of the Mesopotamian population. T h e per
fection of some of its statues reveals that workshops at Mari were of the first rank for artists, perhaps because they had contact with two close, but not identical, realms—Meso potamia and Syria. Finally, the magnitude of the regional organization—re sulting from the wealth from trade with the edge of the Tau rus Mountain range, its Anatolian hinterland, western Syria, and alluvial or deltaic Mesopotamia—over whose control Mari was created to be the key, illustrates the dynamism of the Sumerian population at the dawn of history in a unique way, revealing all of its true depth in the first of the great urban civilizations. No other site has been so rich in evi dence of a millennium of Mesopotamian civilization. [See also Akkadians; Amorites; Babylon; Khabur; Meso potamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; Sumerians; Syria, article on Syria in the Bronze Age; Temples, article on M e sopotamian Temples; and the biography of Parrot.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Durand, Jean-Marie, and Jean-Claude Margueron. "La question du harem royal dans le palais de Mari." Journal des Savants (OctoberDecember 1980): 253-280, Heintz, Jean-Georges, et al. Bibliographie de Mari: Archeologie et textes. Wiesbaden, 1990. Complete list of publications about Mari, 1 9 3 3 1988, supplemented by Heintz et al., "Bibliographie de Mari, Sup plement I [1985-1990]," Akkadica 77 (March-April 1992): 1 - 3 7 . Margueron, Jean-Claude. Recherches sur les palais mesopolamiens de I'dge du Bronze. 2 vols. Paris, 1982. Demonstrates that tile palace "of Zim rilim," to which the author devotes 170 pages of analysis, is the result of constructions and renovations that continued for more than two hundred years; twenty pages are reserved for the pre-Sargonic palace at Mari; general conclusions offered.
MARI. Reconstruction of the second-millennium palace. (Maguette Vuillet/Louvre)
MARIB Mari: Annates de Recherches Inlerdisciplinaires. Paris, 1 9 8 2 - . Reports of excavations conducted since 1979, as well as all the studies concern ing Mari, archaeological and philological; published approximately every two years. Parrot, Andre. Mission archeologique de Mari II: Le palais, vol. 1, Archi tecture; vol. 2, Peinlures murales; vol. 3, Documents et monuments. Paris, 1958-1959. Many of die excavators' interpretations are now out of date. Volume 2 is a catalog. Parrot, Andre. Mission archeologique de Mari III: I j i s temples d'Ishlarat et de Ninni-Zaza. Paris, 1967. Parrot, Andre. Mission archeologique de Mari IV: Le "Tresor" d'Ur. Paris, 1968. Parrot, Andre. Mari, capitate fabuleuse. Paris, 1974. Popular account of the excavations. Young, Gordon D., ed. Mari in Retrospect: Fifty Years ofMariandMari Studies. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. JEAN-CLAUDE MARGUERON
Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
MARIB
(Sabaean, Maryab), the pre-Islamic capital city of Saba' (biblical Sheba), located on the north bank of Wadi Dhanah, on its large silt delta, in northeastern Yemen, (15°2Q' N , 45°28' 30" E). According to tradition, this was the city where the Queen of Sheba (1 Kgs. 1 0 ) lived and from which she ruled her kingdom. T h e site is rectangular in plan, with its long axis parallel to the wadi. It measures about 580 m in length (northeast-southwest) by 400 m in width (northwest-southeast), for an approximate area of 232,000 sq m, or 23.20 hectares (57.30 acres). It is the largest known pre-Islamic site in southern Arabia and has about 1 0 m of occupation debris. Centered in the northeastern area of the site a small, circular, secondary tell stands on the lower, rec tangular tell. This piggyback tell contains tire remains of suc cessive occupations beginning in the Islamic period; it was occupied until portions were destroyed in Yemen's civil war in die 1960s and the remaining buildings in an earthquake in 1982. The piggyback tell had a surface area of 2.53 hec tares or (6.26 acres) and a prewar population of about 765 people. Using a formula tiiat assumes 1 0 percent occupation by public buildings for the large, pre-Islamic tell would yield a population of about 6,635 in pre-Islamic Marib. E x p l o r a t i o n a n d Excavation. T h e first European to visit Marib was Louis Arnaud ( 1 8 4 3 ) , who was followed by Joseph Halevy (1869). Of the early explorers, Eduard Glaser contributed the most by copying more than two thousand South Arabian inscriptions during four separate visits ( 1 8 8 2 - 1 8 8 4 , 1 8 8 5 - 1 8 8 6 , 1 8 8 7 - 1 8 8 8 , 1 8 9 2 - 1 8 9 4 ) . Ahmed
Fakhry visited Marib in 1947 and copied inscriptions, pho tographed ruins, and sketched plans. In 1964 Gus Van Beek measured the site, studied the dam, and collected sherds in the ancient irrigated zone and on the tell. T h e first excavations at Marib were directed by Frank P. Albright, on behalf of the American Foundation for the Study of Man ( 1 9 5 1 - 1 9 5 2 ) , with Albert Jamme, an epigrapher. During an abruptly terminated three-month field sea
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son, the entrance hall of the 'Awwam Temple was cleared and a mausoleum adjacent to the precinct wall was exca vated. Jamme published 2 8 3 South Arabic inscriptions from the excavations; he had been restrained by the local governor from working at the site for almost four weeks, so that the 2 8 3 was by no means all of the inscriptions found. The Ger man Archaeological Institute, under the direction of Jurgen Schmidt, has been working at the site, chiefly excavating Temple Bar'an, since the 1 9 8 0 s . ' A w w a m T e m p l e . Known as Haram Bilqis, or locally as Mahram Bilqis, the 'Awwam Temple was dedicated to the moon god, 'Ilumquh, the primary deity at Marib. It is lo cated on the valley floor, about 3 . 2 3 Ion ( 2 mi.) south-south east of tlie Marib tell, straight across Wadi Dhanah. It con sists of a large oval enclosure wall, accessed through a peristyle entrance hall on the northeast side and a narrow doorway on the west. T h e oval wall encloses an area about 1 0 0 m long by 7 5 m wide and remains unexcavated, although Glaser reported walls and bedrock inside. T h e casemate oval wall stood about 9.5 m high by about 4 . 0 m at the base, tapering to 3 . 6 m at the top. It was constructed of limestone ashlar blocks finished with marginally drafted, pecked surfaces. The inner and outer walls were linked by sixty pairs of crosswalls; the resulting compartments were filled with stones, soil, and sand. The outer surface of the wall on the west side had no fewer than seven beautifully cut South Arabian inscriptions, each dedicating a portion of the construction of the wall to the gods and naming the king who ordered die work. In letters about 2 3 cm high, the cumulative length of the lines in the seven inscriptions runs to 1 4 3 . 6 4 m. The longest single inscription (Ja 5 5 5 ) has a total length of 4 2 . 3 7 m. Such in scriptions are unparalleled in the ancient world in pre-Roman times. T h e earliest inscription belongs to the mid-seventii century BCE, although the oval wall may have an earlier phase or phases. The entrance hall was built into an opening in the oval wall, probably in the second half of the fifth century BCE by Tubba'karib. Constructed as a casemate wall with masonry similar to that of the oval wall, it measured 2 3 . 9 7 by I 9 - J 5 m inside and consisted of an open court surrounded by a peristyle hall. The court was entered from the outside through a series of outer structures: through a line of eight monolithic, square piers, 7 . 6 5 m high; then through a small court witii a peristyle on three sides; and finally through a triple doorway formed by two massive pylons witii recessed corners on their outer sides. T h e roofed area of the peristyle was supported by the outer walls of the entrance hall and a series of thirty-two rectangular piers—all monoliths, except for two consisting of two stones—and the two pylons. T h e inner surface of the walls of the entrance hall was decorated with sixty-four false windows with successive recesses intri cately carved to represent wooden lattice. Above the lattice work was a series of five raised tegular panels, superficially
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resembling dentils, with a horizontal grill at the top. Above each window, the tegular panels and grill were repeated in the wall. Similar windows appeared on the outer surface of the nordr wall, but without regard to tlie placement of the inside windows. Three steps led to the entrance to the oval wall area. Two pylons formed die doorway and apparentiy supported a large water tank, from which a stream of water fell on die steps, eroding a large hole through the first and part of the second limestone steps. This may have been a final purification or washing area through which worshipers passed before entering the sacred oval area. T h e runoff wa ter flowed through a channel to a bronze basin (230 X 69 cm) that bears an inscription on one edge indicating a fifthcentury BCE date. A flight of stairs led to a roof room and possibly to a balcony. Other additions were built in various places in tlie entrance hall, chiefly after the first century CE, and continued to be repaired and repaved as late as the fourth century. Hundreds of inscribed stones, many with lengthy inscriptions, were found on the floor of tlie peristyle and die surrounding court. Stone bases of votive statties, bronze plaques with mounting dowels on the back edges, and painted inscriptions on tlie walls illustrate the religious customs and devotion of the Sabeans. Mausoleum. Built of limestone blocks, a mausoleum touched the northwest corner of tlie oval wall. The structure (8.34 X 7.73 m) was entered through a doorway in its north wall. Four monolithic rectangular piers (3.60 m high), each finished with a capital with two rows of raised tegular panels, carried the roof, which consisted of granite joists spanning from pier to wall, rabbeted on its upper long edges to sup port limestone roof panels. A total of sixty burial compart ments was arranged in tiers; the compartments were closed by means of two limestone panels fitted into grooves on ei ther side and joined in the middle by a lap joint. T h e upper front edge was decorated with a grill, with the partitions finished with four or five parallel vertical grooves; both are common South Arabian architectural designs. In the north west and southwest corners, underground burial chambers had been built. T h e mausoleum yielded several incense burners, including one of bronze, a gold globule, human skeletal material, and potsherds. Compartment-closing panel fragments contained the names of the deceased, two of whom were kings, proving that this was a royal mauso-' leum: Sumhu'alay Yanaf and Yith"amara Bayyin, son of Yakrubmalik Watar, both of tlie second half of the fifth cen tury BCE. South T o m b s . A group of mausolea, located about too m south of the royal mausoleum, are more similar in plan and design to the mausolea at Heid Bin 'Aqil, Timna', and Qataban. The burials were badly disturbed, but especially noteworthy is a boustrophedon inscription painted on a wall and dated paleographically to the eighth century BCE. Temple B a r ' a n . T h e Temple of Bar'an is located away from the tell; it is marked by a row of six rectangular, mono lithic piers with capitals. An inscription indicates that the
name of the temple was Bar'an, and that it was dedicated to the moon god 'Ilumquh. T h e temple is immediately west of the piers. M a r i b D a m . The dam at Marib is one of the best-known monuments of the ancient Near East and the largest dam known from antiquity. It is located about 6 1cm (3.73 mi.) in a straight line west of the tell. It was built across the narrow defile of Wadi Dhanah, where die wadi emerges into a valley that increasingly widens to its borders, which are formed by black volcanic hills. Wadi Dhanah carries torrents of water during the southwest monsoon in the late winter and spring. The dam functioned as a barrage to deflect the waters into two sluices, one on tlie south and tlie other on the north side of die wadi. It was built of soil heaped to a 7-meter-high structure, triangular in section, with a facing on the west side of stones set vertically, cemented in place, and stretching 593 m across tlie wadi. T h e dam was anchored to a rock outlier on the south side, and the builders cut a channel through tlie bedrock to permit water to flow to tlie fields on tlie south side of the wadi; this took place during the reign of Sumuhu'alay Yanaf, according to an inscription on the rock in channel, in the second half of the fifth century BCE. Later, a tower wall with a long wall paralleling the axis of the wadi was constructed of ashlar; after two thousand years, it still stands to more than 6 m. On the north side of the wadi, tlie terrain was flat, so that the north sluice was built with a long wall, angled to abut on the curving dam on the north end. Two sluice openings lead to the primary canal, followed by a massive wall at right angles, to deflect water into the sluices. This sluice in its present form dates from the fourth century CE, during die reign of Shammar Yuhar'ish; it underwent repeated repairs in 449 and 450 CE, as well as by the Abyssinian viceroy, Abraha, in about 542 CE. The sluice was finally destroyed in about 575 CE. So far as is known, the installation was abandoned then. T h e primary canal on the north side is partially intact for about one kilometer. Sluices located in the fields distributed the flow as quickly as possible by means of secondary and tertiary channels. On die south side, the primary canal was probably located on the higher ground, near the base of tlie rock outliers, and is now covered with sand. The Qur'an (surah 3 4 : 1 4 , 15) refers to "gardens, the one on the right hand and tlie other on the left," which are tlie fields on the north and south sides of the wadi, irrigated by this system. In aerial photographs, these fields show heavy rectangular erosion and extend eastward well beyond the tell and the 'Awwam Temple. Together they provided a com bined area of at least 1 6 1 9 ha (4,000 acres) of cultivable land. Thus far, nothing from the time of the Queen of Sheba has been recovered at Marib; the earliest dated material be longs to the eighth century BCE, only two hundred years after her time. The great tell at Marib has not yet been excavated, however, and it is there that remains of the tenth century and perhaps of earlier centuries will surely be found. [See also Qataban; Sheba; and Timna (Arabia).] c
MARI TEXTS BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, Frank P. "Excavations at Marib in Yemen." In Archaeological Discoveries in South Arabia, edited by Richard Le Baron Bowen and Frank P. Albright, pp. 2 1 5 - 2 8 7 . Publications of the American Foun dation for die Study of Man, vol. 2. Baltimore, 1958. Definitive pub lication of the American excavations at Marib and several important ancillary studies. Bowen, Richard Le Baron. "Irrigation in Ancient Qataban (Beihan)." In Archaeological Discoveries in South Arabia, edited by Richard Le Baron Bowen and Frank P. Albright, pp. 4 3 - 1 3 1 . Publications of die American Foundation for die Study of Man, vol. 2. Baltimore, 1958. The most complete description of the ingenious flash-flood irrigation systems in soutiiern Arabia. Jamme, Albert. Sabaean Inscriptions from Mahram Bilqis (Marib). Pub lications of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, vol. 3. Baltimore, 1962. Definitive scholarly study of the South Arabic in scriptions, including transliteration, translation, commentary, and historical interpretations of the large collection recovered by the American excavations at Marib. Phillips, Wendell. Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia. New York, 1955. Delightful semipopular book describing the research expeditions of die Amer ican Foundation for the Study of Man. Schmidt, Jiirgen, et al. Antike Technologic: Die sabaische Wasserwirtschaft bon Marib. 2 vols. Archiiologische Berichte aus dem Yemen, vols. 5 6. Mainz am Rhein, 1 9 9 1 . Van Beek, Gus W. "South Arabian History and Archaeology." In The Bible and the Ancient Near East, edited by G. Ernest Wright, pp. 2 2 9 248. New York, 1961. Summary of the history of exploration and excavation in southern Arabia and a general description of what was known as of the mid-1950s. Van Beek, Gus W. "The Land of Sheba." In Solomon and Sheba, edited by James B. Pritchard, pp. 40-63. London, 1974. Fairly comprehen sive description of the culture of Sheba, derived from archaeology; explores what is known historically and how the Solomon-Sheba re lationship is viewed by Jewish, Ediiopic, Muslim, and Christian traditions. Van Beek, Gus W. "A Population Estimate for Marib: A Contemporary Tell Village in North Yemen." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 248 (1982); 6 1 - 6 7 . Population is calculated using aerial photographs to determine house density and data from a 1975 census to determine the average number of persons per house. Gus
MARIETTE,
W. V A N BEEK
AUGUSTE ( 1 8 2 1 - 1 8 8 1 ) , French founder of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and its national museum of antiquities (both firsts for the Arab world). Mariette began his career in archaeology by discovering die Serapeum at Saqqara—the vast catacomb containing the buri als of the sacred Apis bulls—uncovering as well the approach avenue lined with sphinxes and two temples with hundreds of objects. Although the initial finds from die Serapeum discovery went to the Louvre, which had sent Mariette to Egypt to procure Coptic and Syriac manuscripts, it became his aim to stop the rampant pillaging of Egypt's monuments. With the aid of Ferdinand de Lesseps, Egypt's ruler, Said Pasha, was persuaded to appoint Mariette director of an antiquities service. In this capacity Mariette then launched a massive archaeological rescue effort under his own exclusive au
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thority to excavate throughout Egypt and recover portable objects for the nation, to be housed in what became the first of a series of ever-enlarging museums. At one point, Mari ette had simultaneous expeditions in thirty-seven different locales. Certainly, without his supervision at each site, only the most obvious was found, and much of the work con sisted of clearing buildings such as the Edfu, Dendera and Deir el-Bahari temples. More than three hundred tombs were opened at Giza and Saqqara, and from there and Karnak came much of the collection of the current Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Mariette's energies were also sapped by diplomatic de mands from both France and Egypt, international exhibi tions, and the publication of some of his work, such as five volumes on the temple of Dendera ( 1 8 7 5 ) , and a catalogue of antiquities discovered at Abydos (1880). Although he could not totally stop the illegal digging and export of antiq uities, Mariette did raise international awareness of the im portance of protecting the heritage of the past. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dawson, Warren R., and Eric P. Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. 2d rev. ed. London, 1972. Fagan, Brian M. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Ar chaeologists in Egypt. New York, 1975. Vercoutter, Jean. The Search for Ancient Egypt. Translated by Ruth Sharman. New York, 1992. BARBARA SWITALSKI LESKO
MARISA. See Mareshah.
MARI TEXTS. The bedouin discovery of Mari on 3 January 1934, at Tell Hariri in Syria revealed the location of a city that had become mytiiical after its fall. It was known to Assyriologists only by its mention in the Sumerian King Lists as the seat of one the dynasties after the Flood. From 1934 to 1938, six fruitful excavations took place there under the direction of Andre Parrot. In the first year twenty-five hundred whole tablets and fragments were unearthed. In the following year, no fewer than thirteen thousand inventory numbers were assigned for texts alone. When World War II brought an end to this period of research, some twenty thou sand documents had been uncovered. Excavation was re sumed after the war (with another long interruption during the Suez expedition in 1 9 5 6 ) , and another thousand texts were recovered. Tablets are still being discovered, although in more modest numbers, under the direction, since 1979, of Jean-Claude Margueron. [See the biography of Parrot.] For the most part, Parrot excavated tablets in die royal palace and die area immediately southeast of it (the "zig gurat"); in excavations since 1979 tablets have also been found in the small palace of the Sakkanakku (a governing official) northeast of the tell (the House of Asqudum and
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the House of Queen Sibtu (where she was installed at the end of the reign of Zimrilim), as well as in areas B (from the period of Ebla), D , E, and F (reign of Yakhdunlim). [See Ebla.] In the palace of Zimrilim, the archives were divided among many small rooms, sorted according to administra tive categories, indicating the function of different parts of the palace. [See Palace.] T h e most important of these rooms are numbers 108 and 1 1 5 ; 1 1 5 , situated between the palmtree court (room 106) and the court of the Temple of Ishtar (room 130) preserved administrative and diplomatic corre spondence; 108 held the main body of administtative doc uments. A good part of the harem archives were recovered in room 72. Although the archives of the palace seem to have remained in their original arrangement, the Babylonians, who systematically sacked Mari, sorted through them to re move any that concerned them. [See Babylonians.] Thus, the records of international correspondence are limited. Many groups of documents were recovered from construc tion fill, such as the texts from the harem of Yasmakh-Addu ( I 7 9 8 P - I 7 7 6 BCE) found in 1982 in the retaining wall of an oil storeroom, and the private archives of Yakhdunlim ( i 8 i 5 ? - i 7 9 9 ? BCE).
Contrary to Parrot's hopes, no library was found at Tell Hariri. The excavated texts belong to the administration of the state or the private archives of the people living in the palace. They give evidence of tlie daily life, the movement of palace supplies, and the affairs of the kingdom—known as the Banks of the Euphrates—and contact with foreign courts. The letters (e.g., from servants of the ldng, or his allies) are more important than the administrative texts (e.g., records of the import and export of goods and food, inven tories, audits of accounts). The absence of archives con cerning the kingdom's tax system suggests that such docu ments were housed outside the palace (the palace has been completely excavated and such archives would have held no interest for pillagers). There is a limited group of legal texts, as well as texts of an ideological or religious character, such as the "nail" of Yakhdunlim from room 1 8 , or nine bricks inscribed with a single text from the Temple of Shamash that describes that king's expedition to Lebanon, and models of inscribed oracular livers. The (unpublished) epic of Zim rilim, written on a large tablet broken into three pieces, was discovered in room 1 1 5 . [See Tablet.] It is the only work found that can properly be described as belletristic. Many magico-religious texts were found (e.g., incantations—a fragment of one dated to the third millennium was discov ered in area B—and penitential and ritual psalms). The first epigraphist for the French team was Francois Thureau-Dangin. He was soon superseded by C.-F. Jean and then by Georges Dossin, who turned "mariology" into an important field of study by the number and quality of his publications. In 1979, Jean-Marie Durand and Dominique Charpin took charge of editing the Mari texts, reinvigorating the project. The series ARM (Archives Royales de Mari),
founded by Dossin and Parrot, was initially devoted to the epistolary archives and was arranged by the authors of the letters: ARM 1 , 4, and 5 concern Shamshi-Adad and his sons; ARM 3 contains die letters of the governor of Terqa, and 6 and 14 those of others, from Mari and Sagaratum; ARM 13 is based on the same principle, but the lots have less breadth. Volume 2 is the only one with any diversity, providing a better sampling of the documents. Some vol umes are arranged thematically, such as ARM 1 0 , women's correspondence, and, more recently, ARM 27, dedicated to the governors of the city of Qattunan. Administtative texts were published initially by room: ARM-/ (room 1 7 0 ) , A R M 9 (room5), ARM21 (rooms 1 3 4 , 160), and ARM 24 (rooms Z, Y). Under Durand and Charpin it was decided that all epistolary and administration doc uments would be arranged by theme—the better to extract their historical and lexical interest and to allow for the poor data regarding find spots of the documents unearthed by the earlier excavations. ARM 26 (in three volumes) marks a sig nificant evolution: the documents published (or repub lished) are grouped according to thematic or historical cri teria (divination, religion, the military affairs of Sindjar and of the Upper Jezireh) without breaking with tradition (e.g., within these categories the letters are arranged by author). Because ARM 23 is a collective work, the administrative documents have been grouped according to themes such as texts dealing with garments or texts dealing with luxury crockery. The commentaries are more abundant and more systematically treated, according to the principle that, for the sake of comprehending the text, purely philological analysis cannot be separated from the reconstruction of the context. Many texts from Mari have also been published individually or in small lots in various journals and collections, such as Syria and the Revue D'Assyriologie (RA). Since the 1980s there has also been a specialized journal, MARI (Mari: An nates de Recherche Interdisciplinaires), as well as tlie occasional series Florilegium Marianum. At first glance, the chronological range of the Mari texts seems fairly large: from the third millennium to 1 7 6 1 BCE (the latest documented date). In reality, the useful historical span is no more than die twenty-fifty years that document the Amorite dynasty; these are the last decades of Mari. [See Amorites.] Earlier, the documents are too rare or brief to reconstruct a historical thread. What characterizes Mari ar chives is thus a great density of information over a very short period of time: two generations, during the reign of Zimrilim (1775--1761 BCE) and the end of his predecessor's, YasmakhAddu. No other period in antiquity is so extensively de scribed and detailed. The Near East appears in all its picturesqueness and com plexity. The palace is revealed in all its different aspects: its gardens and courts where one day a princess exposed herself dangerously to the sun, its sanctuaries, its various adminis trative functions, its storehouses, and its workshops. T h e
MARLIK harem, which occupied its northwestern part, was inhabited by a great number of women, from die queen mother and principal royal wife, to slaves and captives, including con cubines, who were the designated musicians, scribes, cooks, water drawers, and floor sweepers. At the entrance to the palace, prophets came to proclaim die truths that a divinity had revealed to them. T h e ldng, in constant consultation with the gods, de manded that his subjects tell him everything they knew, even tiieir dreams about him. It was naturally the divination priests, the governors of the kingdom, and the servants at the palace who had the most occasion to write letters. The chancellor's office maintained diplomatic correspondence with a number of small, turbulent states (principally in the Upper Jezireh) and the great powers of the day: to the west, Aleppo; to die soutiieast, Qatna; to the east, Eshnunna, Bab ylon, and Elam (whose Sukkalmah is the avowed suzerian of the Mesopotamian princes); and to the northeast, the monarchies of Sindjar and Ekallatum. [See Aleppo; Esh nunna; Babylon.] International exchanges—political, com mercial, and cultural—as well as the movements of armies and diplomats, were intense and favored a certain awareness of the unity of the Near East on the part of the guiding classes, at least until family or racial solidarity came into question. Racism was not absent, particularly among the conquering Elamites. [See Elamites.] T h e written language of Mari was Classical Akkadian, which differs little from that used in Babylon and elsewhere in the Near East. [See Akkadian.] More precisely, the syl labic writing and language came from the scribal tradition of Eshnunna, whose practice was adopted at Mari under Zimrilim. Nevertheless, strong influences from Western Se mitic are recognizable. Akkadian lexicography and onomastics are also enriched with Hurrian words. [See Hurrian.] Peculiarities of syntax in the letters reveal as much the level of language as of any real dialect. Mari's geographic horizon extended beyond the strict boundary of local politics. Thus Zimrilim could undertake a peaceful voyage, for religious reasons, to the Mediterra nean coast. Mari maintained contacts witii the island of Bahrain/Dilmun, thanks to passing merchants; with Kanes/Kayseri in Anatolia; and with the Arab tribes. [See Bahrain; Dilmun; Kanes.] T h e Mariotes nevertheless needed interpreters when they encountered Cretans on the quays of Ugarit or the people of Marhasi/ParahSi in the Iranian mountains. T h e Mari documentation testifies to a period in the his tory of the Near East when relationships among the great powers were more or less in balance, a balance of which there was a clear awareness. However, tensions among states rarely ceased and a king often had to mount a military ex pedition or extend a strong hand to his allies. There were constant quarrels within the kingdom and at the borders over pasture rights and territory; rivalries existed between
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nomadic and sedentary groups and among the confedera tions of bedouins; and occasionally tiiere were great wars, when the armies of Eshnunna or Elam descended. The de finitive destruction of Mari marked the end of tiiis equilib rium in the Near East. [See also Mari.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Charpin, Dominique. "La Syrie a I'epoque de Mari: Des invasions amorites a la chute de Mari." In the catalog Syrie: Memoire el civilnation, pp. 1 4 4 - 1 4 9 . Flammarion, 1993. This is the best synthesis (in French) on the history of Mari. There are also other studies on Mari in this richly illustrated catalog. Charpin, Dominique and Jean-Marie Durand. Mari, Ebla et les Hourrites. A series of fundamental syntheses on the age and the docu ments of Mari. Paris, 1996. Durand, Jean-Marie. Les declarations prapheliques dans les letlrcs de Mari. Supplement to Cahier Evangile, 1988-1994, pp. 8-74. The most re cent synthesis in French on the theme of the prophets of Mari and the texts of Mari in translation. Durand, Jean-Marie. Les documents epistolaires dupalais deMari. Forth coming. A thematic collection (in French) of all the letters of Mari, translated and annotated, published before 1988 (ARM I-XVIII and uncollected). Durand, Jean-Marie. La religion en Siria durante la epoca de los reinos amoneos segitn la documentation de Mari. Mitologia y religion del Oriente Antiguo, 2 . 1 , edited by G . del Olmo. Heinz, J.-G., et al. Bibliographic de mari: Archeologie et textes ( 1 9 3 3 1988). Weisbaden, 1990. Fundamental work for any study of Mari. Should be amplified with the supplements of the Belgian journal Akkadica: Supplement 1 (1989-1990), Ahkadica 77 (1992): 1 - 3 7 ; Supplement 2 ( 1 9 9 1 - 1 9 9 2 ) , Akkadica 81 (1993): 1 - 2 2 ; Supplement 3 (1992-1993), Akkadica 86 (1994): 1 - 2 3 . Malamat, A. Mari and the Early Israelite Experience: The Schweich Lec tures. Oxford, 1989. A synthesis of very important comparative works dealing with die Bible and Mari. MICHAEL GUICHARD
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
MARLIK, late second to early first millennium BCE site, located in the region of Rahmatabad of Rudbar in Gilan province in northern Iran, about 50 km (31 mi.) from the town of Rasht on the Caspian Sea (at approx. 3 7 N , 50° E). During the 1940s and 1950s, the highlands of the north ern slopes of the Elburz Mountains south of the Caspian were subject to much clandestine and illegal digging. It pro duced beautiful spouted pottery vessels, bronze and pottery animal figurines, bronze weapons, and even some silver and gold objects, all belonging to an unknown culture. This ma terial was distributed throughout the world to collections and museums under the term Amlash, from the name of the market town to which die objects were taken to be sold to dealers. 0
In fall 1 9 6 1 , a team from the Iranian Archaeological Ser vice began a survey in the foothills of the Elburz Mountains with the aim of mapping the area's archaeological sites and eventually of conducting systematic and scientific excava-
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tions to identify the people responsible for the masterpieces of art and technology. In the course of the survey the team entered the valley of die Gohar Rud (Crystal River), a trib utary of the Send Rud (White River). There they found five apparently related mounds, Pileh Qal'a, Jazem Kul, Dure Bejar, Zeinab Bejar, and Marlik (or Cheragh-Ali Tepe, after its last owner). The mounds were surveyed one by one. The team eventually reached Marlik, a large mound that appears natural. It has a rocky crest surrounded by olive groves and wild pomegranate bushes and overlooks the rice paddies that blanket the lower slopes of the valley. Its surface was covered by brush and revealed few artifactual traces; one slope bore the scars of several ditches dug by unsuccessful antiquities hunters. When a test trench produced a range of objects, including two small bronze animal figurines, two cylinder seals, and fourteen gold buttons, the need for immediate scientific ex cavation was met by the Iranian Archaeological Service, in cooperation with the Institute of Archaeology of the Uni versity of Tehran. Their team worked without interruption for fourteen months, from October 1961 to November 1962. Although at first the team had little idea of what might lie beneath the surface, gradually it became clear that Marlik contained the Royal Cemetery of a long-forgotten kingdom. Scattered over its crest were fifty-three tombs filled with a fascinating variety of objects of gold, silver, bronze, and pot tery, testifying to the wealth and sophisticated craftsmanship of this three-thousand-year-old culture. Although the richest tombs were concentrated in the Royal Cemetery, the whole lower valley of the Gohar Rud was also essentially a contem porary burial ground for persons of lesser importance. Bur ied in simpler graves, with fewer grave goods, they had, per haps, been attracted by the presence of the royal tombs. [See Tombs; Grave Goods.] At Marlik, the tombs were formed basically of walls of broken stone and mud mortar built between the mound's large natural rocks. Some of the tombs were very roughly constructed, while others showed more care. For the most part, the natural stone of the surrounding area was used for construction. For some of the tombs, however, slabs of yel lowish stone had been brought from the headwaters of the Gohar Rud, about 1 5 km (9 mi.) away. This stone might occur only in a single wall or in the form of slabs placed at the bottom of the tomb, but some of the richest tombs were built entirely of it. In most of the tombs the skeletons had completely disin tegrated, but in those few that still contained any, an elab orate burial ritual was revealed in which the body was care fully laid out on a long stone slab and surrounded by precious and ordinary objects their owners would need in the afterlife. With or without skeletal remains, the tombs were filled with a wide range of objects, including ritual ves sels, human and animal figurines, jewelry, weapons and
tools, domestic utensils, and some models of oxen with yoke and plow and toys. T h e metal vessels found in the tombs were of gold, silver, and bronze, in many sizes and shapes—cups, bowls, pots with long spouts, beakers, and vases. They range from plain and unadorned forms to vessels with highly elaborate, some times narrative designs done in different techniques, includ ing dotted linear engraving, repousse in low and high relief (see figure 1 ) , and, on one silver vessel, gold inlay. T h e workmanship ranges from simple, crude patterns on some vessels to highly elaborate naturalistic or stylized portraits of real and mythical animals and humans on others. In addition to these metal ritual vessels are several beautifully made in glass mosaic and frit. Striking human and animal figurines were found in the tombs, made of pottery and of metal, including bronze, sil ver, and gold. T h e ceramic human figurines, most of them hollow, are highly stylized, as are several solid bronze figu rines and one of gold. Some of the animal figurines are also highly stylized, such as the humped bulls, while others are more naturalistic. In addition to the bulls are figurines of stags, mountain goats, mules, horses, rams, bears, leopards, dogs, and wild boars and models of yoked oxen, tiger heads, and birds. The large number and high quality of the Marlik bronze figurines reflect the flourishing state of the bronze
MARLIK. Figure 1. Gold bowl from Marlik. An example of re pousse technique. (Courtesy E. O. Nagahban)
MARLIK
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industry in the Elburz highlands during the late second and early first millennia BCE. An extremely rich collection of jewelry was found in the tombs, including necklaces, pendants, buttons, bracelets, earrings, rings, forehead bands, leaves, hair binders, pins, and fibulae. Much of this jewelry came from tombs that appear to have belonged to women. Some ornamental items were, however found in tombs that may have belonged to warriors since they contained large numbers of weapons and hunting items. Most of the jewelry is of gold, sometimes combined with carnelian, agate, or other materials. Small amounts of jewelry out of shell, bone, frit, glass, lime gyp sum, and bronze were also found. Some are masterpieces of great delicacy and beauty: pendants and earrings with fine granulation, pomegranate, quadruple spiral, and animalhead beads, and embossed rosette buttons, demonstrating tire well-developed technology and skill of the Marlik crafts men. [See Jewelry.] Both cylinder and stamp seals were found in the tombs. There are fourteen definite and several possible cylinder seals, made of frit, gypsum, various stones, and even gold. T h e majority are of frit, with surfaces so badly damaged that in some cases the designs have entirely disappeared. Two of the cylinder seals are inscribed, the only evidence of writ ing found at Marlik, but the writing is legible on only one of them and it is fragmentary. T h e five stamp seals found are of cast bronze and have simple geometric designs. [See Seals.] T h e pottery from the tombs seems, for tire most part, to have a specifically funerary purpose. Although it does not differ too widely from the site's domestic pottery, it tends to be more elaborate and ornamental. T h e vessels are red, brown, and gray and of very fine clay tempered with fine grit. The firing was very well controlled and the surface treatment is of high quality. Especially notable among the many stylized forms are beautiful spouted vessels finished with burnishing and sometimes with a pattern-burnished decoration. Among the vessels in die tombs were bottles, jars, pitchers, chalices, mugs, cups, pots, bowls, basins, plates, vases, sieves, and lamps. Of almost a thousand fairly complete weapons found in the tombs, fewer titan forty were made of some material other than bronze, including about twenty-five of stone and a lesser number of iron. By the beginning of the Marlik pe riod, die use of stone for weapons was already outdated. By the end of the Marlik occupation, iron was just beginning to be introduced, although it was still far from common. T h e large number of weapons in the tombs seems to reflect the role of the deceased as a formidable warrior, although some items, such as die many bronze arrowheads, could also have been used for hunting. Their inclusion with the pottery and bronze figurines of wild game suggests that the occupant of tire tomb had been a great hunter. Among the other weapons found in the tombs were mace heads,- swords, daggers,
MARLIK. Figure 2. Bronze macehead. The form is tiiat of a stylized human head. (Courtesy E. O. Nagahban)
spearheads, and arrowheads, along with such military equip ment as shields, helmets, cymbals, quivers, belts, and wrist bands, almost all of them bronze (see figure 2). [See Weap ons and Warfare.] The large collection of finds from Marlik has been as signed typologically to a date between the fourteenth and tenth centuries BCE, a date supported by a carbon-14 date of 1457 ± 55 years BCE. Marlik apparently represents the Royal Cemetery of an Indo-Iranian culture that first settled in the highlands of the northern slopes of the Elburz Moun tains in the mid-second millennium BCE and flourished there for several centuries. This highly developed culture, espe cially notable for its bronze industry, covered the southern zone of the Caspian Sea and the northern slopes of the El burz Mountains. Its influence was felt throughout the an cient world. The Marlik excavation thus provides informa tion on a dark period of the early Indo-Iranian movement into northern Iran, illustrating the daily life, industry, crafts-
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manship, and religious beliefs and traditions of tiiis previ ously unknown people. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ncgahban, Ezat O. "Marlik, a Royal Necropolis of the Second Millen nium." Archaeologia Viva I (September-November 1968): 58-79. Negahban, Ezat O. "Pottery Figurines of Marlik." In Memorial Volume of the Fifth International Congress of Iranian An and Archaeology, Teh ran, Isfahan, Shiraz, iith-iSth April 1968, vol. I, pp. 1 5 3 - 1 6 3 . Teh ran) 1972. Negahban, Ezat 0. Marlik: A Preliminary Report on Marlik Excavation, Gohar Rud Expedition, Rudbar, r961-1962. 2d ed. Tehran, 1977. See especially, "Seals of Marlik" (pp. 2-25). Negahban, Ezat O. "Pottery and Bronze Human Figurines of Marlik." Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 12 (1979): 1 5 7 - 1 7 3 , pis. 29-34. Negahban, Ezat O. "Maceheads from Marlik." American Journal ofAr chaeology 85.4 (1981): 367-378, pis. 59-64. Negahban, Ezat O. Metal Vessels from Marlik. Prahistorische Bronzefunde, 2.3. Munich, 1983. Negahban, Ezat O. "Mosaic, Glass, and Frit Vessels from Marlik." In Essays in Ancient Civilization Presented to HeleneJ. Kantor, edited by Albert Leonard, Jr., and Bruce Beyer Williams, pp. 2 2 1 - 2 2 7 , pis. 3 4 37. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute, Studies in Ancient Ori ental Civilization, no. 47. Chicago, 1989. Negahban, Ezat O. "Pendants from Marlik." Iranica Antiqua 24 (1989): 175-208. Negahban, Ezat O. "Horse and Mule Figurines from Marlik." In Ar chaeologia Iranica et Orientalis: Miscellanea in honorem Louis Vanden Berghe, vol. 1, edited by Leon De Meyer and E. Haerinck, pp. 2 8 7 309. Ghent, 1989. Negahban, Ezat O. "Silver Vessel of Marlik with Gold Spout and Im pressed Gold Designs." In Iranica Varia: Papers in Honor of Professor Ehsan Yarshaler, pp. 1 4 4 - 1 5 1 . Leiden, 1990. EZAT O . NEGAHBAN
tant remains from the Early Bronze Age IC-IIIB ( 3 0 0 0 2400 BCE): a palace (perhaps originally a temple), a temple that yielded a rich and important assortment of cult objects and Egyptian First Dynasty alabaster vessels, and fortifica tions that included an elliptical tower and postern. Her ex cavation of the cemetery recovered significant assemblages of EB pottery. Judith Marquet-Krause's death from an incurable illness ended the short career of a very promising young scholar. She had planned to excavate at Ai for a few more seasons and then to turn her attention to Hazor. She was the first native Jewish archaeologist in Palestine, the first local woman archaeologist, and the director of tlie first large-scale expedition carried out by a Jewish team in Palestine. [See also Ai; Jericho; and the biography of Garstang.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Callaway, Joseph A, "Ai." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, pp. 39-45. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Summary of the excavations at Ai, with a useful coor dination of Marquet-Krause's results and subsequent excavations at the site. Dussaud, Rene. "Mme Judith Marquet-Krause." Syria 17 (1936): 3 1 9 320. Obituary, with an incorrect birthdate. Marquet-Krause, Judith. Lesfouilles de 'Ay (Et-Tell), 1933-193$. 2 vols. Paris, 1949. D A N BARAG
MARSEILLE TARIFF. A fragmentary Punic inscrip tion of tire third century BCE, engraved on two stones, was found in 1844/45 cemetery in Marseille. Now housed in the Musee Borely, in Marseille, they are known as tlie Marseille Tariff. The stones and text reveal that die inscrip tion originated in Carthage, for fragments of the same type of text have been found in the Punic metropolis. It is not known when or under what circumstances the inscriptions were brought to France. In antiquity, tlie tariff was affixed to the gate of the Car thaginian temple of Baal Saphon, the protector of seagoers. It served to regulate fees as well as the parts of the offerings that were designated for the priests and for those who pre sented the offerings (individuals, religious associations, and clans). The amounts given to each varied according to the type of sacrifice and victim and according to the role played by the priest in tlie different ceremonies. The sacrificial material consisted primarily of bovids, ovids/caprids, and birds, but other offerings are attested as well, such as cakes, milk, oil, and various vegetal products. The sacrificial victims are divided into four categories ac cording to age and size: oxen; calves and deer; sheep; and lambs, Idds, and other small animals. A distinction seems to have been made between domestic and wild birds. The text mentions three types of sacrifices: Ml, sw't, and slm kll, but their namre and their distinguishing character istics are far from clear. In the case of the kll, which can be n e a r
MARQUET-KRAUSE,
JUDITH
(1906-1936),
Palestinian archaeologist born in Hanya (Sejera, 1 3 km, or 8 mi., west-southwest of Tiberias), the first daughter of Eliyahu Krause and Haya (nee Hankin). Marquet-Krause spent her early childhood in Sejera before the family's move in 1 9 1 4 , to the Miqweh-Israel agricultural school, east of Jaffa, where her father became director. She received her secondary education in Tel Aviv and subsequently studied in Paris, at the Sorbonne, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and the Ecole du Louvre, where she acquainted herself with Pal estinian archaeology. On her return to Palestine she worked for a season at Jericho under John Garstang. Her broad knowledge of Oriental archaeology and com mand of ancient and modern languages, as well as her en thusiasm and energy, brought her the appointment of di rector of the Baron Edmond de Rothschild Expedition to Ai (et-Tell). She conducted three seasons of excavation there ( 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 5 ) , establishing that the site had been destroyed and abandoned more than a millennium before the Israelite settlement, and that a small, unfortified village had existed there in the Early Iron Age. These discoveries demonstrated that the account in Joshua 7:2-5 and 8:1-29 was an "etio logical" legend. The excavations also revealed very impor
a
MARTYRION a burnt offering, all kinds of animals could be offered, with the exception of birds; the offerer did not receive any part of the victim and was moreover required to pay a fee, in amounts of silver that decreased according to the size of the beast, from the ox to the smaller animals. Some parts of the victim were assigned to the priest. T h e sw't sacrifices con sisted of the same animals as in the kll, but the victim was divided between the offerer(s) and the priests, nothing being due directly to the god(s). T h e slm kll admitted all kinds of victims. The priests received various amounts of silver, but neither they nor the offerer(s) was allowed to eat the flesh of the slaughtered animals (birds excluded). It is frequently assumed that the Marseille Tariff has strong affinities with tire normative texts of the Hebrew Bi ble (Leviticus), not only in matters of vocabulary but in actual practice as well. A sound analysis of the inscription, how ever, points up more differences than similarities between the Hebrew and the Punic ritual traditions. Moreover, the aim of the Punic text, with its clear administrative concerns, is not theological but practical. Because of this emphasis on tire administration of the cult, both the theologically oriented biblical texts and the tariff itself must be used with care in reconstructing the religion of ancient Carthage. [See also Phoenician-Punic] BIBLIOGRAPHY Amadasi [Guzzo], Maria Giulia. Le iscrizionifenicie epuniche delle colonie in Occidente. Rome, 1967. Text, translation, and philological com mentary; see, in particular, pages 1 6 9 - 1 8 2 . Amadasi Guzzo, Maria Giulia. "Sacrifici e banchetd: Bibbia ebraica e iscrizioni puniche." In Sacrificio e societd net mondo antico, edited by Cristiano Grottanelli and Nicola F, Farise, pp. 9 7 - 1 2 2 . Rome, 1988. Comparative evaluation of botii biblical and Punic ritual traditions. Baker, D. W. "Leviticus 1 - 7 and die Punic Tariffs: A Form-Critical Comparison." Zeitschrift filr die alttestarnentliche Wissenschaft 99.2 (1987): 1 8 8 - 1 9 7 . Reconsiders the relationship between J^eviticus and the Carthaginian rites. Delcor, M. "Le tarif dit de Marseille (CIS I, 165): Aspects du systeme sacrificiel punique." Semitica 38.1 (1990): 87-94. Terminological and historical-religious problems. Donner, Herbert, and Wolfgang Rollig. Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschrifien. 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 1962-1964. Text, translation, and philological commentary. Xella, Paolo. "Quelques aspects du rapport economic-religion d'apres les tarifs sacrificiels puniques." Bulletin Archeologique du Comite des Travaux Hisloriques et Scientifiques, n.s. 19B (1983): 39-45. Study of the ritual typology, kinds of victims, and character of the text (ad ministrative rather than theological). PAOLO X E L L A
MARTYRION. In early Christian usage, martyrion de notes a place, shrine, sanctuary, sacred monument, or build ing marking a "place of witness." T h e term is comprised of the Greek stem mart, to which the denominative suffix i-on is appended. In the narrow sense, the Early Christian writers who use the term envisage a place or building that houses the physical remains of a blood witness. T h e concept de
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veloped from the predication of the Greek term martys ("witness") to Stephen (Acts 20:22), to Antipas (Rv. 2 : 1 3 ) , and to other unnamed persons (Rv. 17:6) who, like Stephen and Antipas, testified to Jesus by giving up their lives. Jesus was the archetype of the blood witness; in Christian tradi tion, Peter, Stephen, and Paul follow close upon the arche type. In the broader sense, however, a martyrion is any place hallowed by tradition and associated with legendary heroes and heroines, both blood witnesses others. T h e term is not a Christian neologism. Herodotus, Aes chylus, and Thucydides use it to denote testimony or phys ical proof. The plural, martyria, appears in Exodus 2 5 : 1 6 , 2 1 as a synonym for the tablets of the Decalogue. It is also true, however, that, although attested in earlier contexts, die word is invoked witii much greater frequency in later antiquity (second-sixth centuries) than in any other period of ancient history. Throughout later antiquity the term commonly im plies a material place (usually a building), in contrast to ear lier usages, where it carried legislative or judicial associa tions. Beginning in the Constantinian period ( 3 0 5 - 3 3 7 ) , the term comes to acquire a broad sphere of associated mean ings. This fact makes it difficult to identify just exactly which building types should be classified under the martyrial ru bric. For example, the Palestinian buildings constructed to mark and commemorate events in the lives of Jesus, John the Baptist, and Mary the mother of Jesus are denominated martyria. Also attested as martyria are certain shrines, sanc tuaries, and sacred monuments marking either a theophany or an epiphany of a saint or an apostle or a figure from the Hebrew Bible. The best-known Palestinian example was the Constantinian construction (no longer extant) atMamre, on a site where, according to tradition (Gn. 1 8 : 1 ) , the Israelite God appeared to Abraham. In addition, the terms memoria and tropaion ("commemorative memorial," or "monu ment"; cf. Eusebius, Church History 2.25.7; 7 . 1 8 . 1 ) , though used infrequently in patristic literature, are close functional equivalents to martyrium. Yet another association die term comes to acquire, also beginning in the fourth century, is martyrium used as a syn onym for various words denoting church buildings, includ ing ekklesia, kyriakon, and hieron. This is a consequence of die real-life assimilation of two functionally different lands of structures—the one for the eucharistic worship of the liv ing community and the other for die commemoration and veneration of the dead. Christian cults of martyrs and holy sites expanded dramatically during die fourth century, and the martyrial structures associated with those cults were of ten used in multiple capacities, including the performance of liturgical functions unrelated to the cult of the dead. In short, the term martyrion was predicated of church buildings with increasing frequency from the fourth century onward. On questions concerning origins and putative models, Andre Grabar (1946) hypothesized the derivation of Early Christian martyrial structures from Hellenistic and Greco./... i t . ' . / " * : ^
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Roman funerary antecedents, notably hero shrines (herooa) and mausolea. Grabar's view of this subject is closely tied to his invention of a sevenfold architectural typology of martyrial structures. He subsumes the full range of martyrial types under this scheme. Grabar distinguishes the types of plans: square sttuctures; rectangular structures; structures witii one apse on the periphery; triconch structures (or with a cella trichora); structures with a transverse hall or transept; structures built on a circular or polygonal plan; and martyr ial buildings constructed on a cruciform grid. Of these seven plan types, the first three may be said to exhibit Hellenistic and Greco-Roman antecedents; for the remaining four, however, the evidence is at least problematic—some would say nonexistent. Thus, although Grabar's monograph is still the basic starting point for any serious study of martyrial structures in later antiquity, his seven-part typology, de signed to support a theory of derivation from pagan proto types, actually requires substantial modification and redefi nition. It is necessary to consult more recent publications, especially those listed Kleinbauer's (1992) bibliography. It has been suggested that Christian martyrial structures may have influenced later, non-Christian architectural traditions, notably Islamic saints' shrines (see "Kubba," in Encyclopae dia of Islam, new ed., vol. 5, pp, 289-296, Leiden, 1986). Early Christian martyrial structures situated in Near East ern settings are products of the fourth through sixth cen turies. Constantine endowed four martyrial buildings in the Holy Land: two in Jerusalem, one in Bethlehem, and another in Mamre); one in Constantinople (Holy Apostles); and an other in Rome (St. Peter's). In the late fourth century, what Constantine had begun was continued in Palestine (Anastasis and Imbomon, both in Jerusalem) and in other mar tyrial buildings constructed in Rome and in provincial Italy, North Africa, die Rhineland, and Syria (i.e., St. Babylas in Antioch.) [See Jerusalem; Bethlehem; Constantinople; Antioch on Orontes.] In the fifth and sixth centuries, more martyrial structures were built in virtually all the lands that had been conquered by Christianity. In addition to the places already mentioned, this includes the northern and central Aegean on the Greek side and along the Turkish coast; the interior of Anatolia, Egypt, Jordan, and especially Syria, which became the great Near Eastern center of martyrial architecture. On Syrian soil, the two most-impressive centers of martyrial cult and martyrial architecture are the shrine of the ascetic St. Sim eon (d. 24 July 459) at Qal'at Sim'an and the shrine of the Roman soldier St. Sergius (who, according to tradition, was tortured and martyred [with Bakchos] by his fellow soldiers during the Diocletianic period) at Rusafa/Sergiopolis in northeastern Syria, south of the Euphrates River. [See Qal'at Sim'an; Rusafa.] The following survey, organized alphabetically by region, provides a selected inventory of martyrial buildings in the Near East.
Anatolia/Turkey. (In addition to the items listed below, cf. Robert Edwards, "Yamkhan (Cilicia in Turkey)" in En cyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology [hereafter EECAA], forthcoming.) Antioch/Kaoussie: Martyrion of St. Babylas, late fourth century (cf. Pauline Donceel-Voute, Les pavements des eglises byzantines de Syrie et du Liban: Decor, archeologie et liturgie I, Louvain, 1988, pp. 2 1 - 3 1 ) . Der Kubbuk (southeast of Midyat in Tur 'Abdin): square funerary structure, possibly a martyrion, fifth or sixth century (cf. G. Wiessner, Gbttingen Orientforschungen. Reihell?, [1993]: 1 1 6 - 1 2 0 ) . Hah (Anith, 20 km (12.5 mi.) northeast of Midyat in Tur 'Abdin): Martyrion of el-'Adrha; two-storied rectangu lar structure, possibly sixth century (cf. R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th ed., New York, 1986, fig. 263.). Isauria, Meriamlik, south of Seleucia/Silifke: Martyrial Church of St. Thekla, c. 3 7 5 ; rectangular plan on a lon gitudinal axis, narthex, nave and two aisles, central apse projecting from the east wall flanked by pastophory and diakonikon (cf. F. Hild, H. Hellenkemper, and G. Hellenkemper-Salies, "Kommagene—Kilikien—Isaurien," in Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 8 9 ) . Arabian Peninsula. There are no surviving examples of martyrial buildings from the period of later antiquity.
Armenia. (In addition to the items listed below, cf. Rob ert Edwards, "Armenia," in EECAA.) Aghoudi: two vaulted mausolea, fifth or sixth century (cf. A. Khatchatrian, L'Architecture Armenienne du IVe au Vie siecle, Paris, 1 9 7 1 , p. 30, pi. 3, fig. 8). Aghts: hypogeum of the Arsacid kings, fourth century; vaulted, rectangular burial chamber with two arcosolium burials and an apse projecting from one of the short ends of the chamber (cf. ibid., pp. 2 9 - 3 0 , pi. 3, fig. 7). Ardvi: mausoleum, fifth or sixtii century (cf. ibid., p. 3 1 ) . Nakhtjavan: hypogeum of the Kamsarkan lords, fifth cen tury (cf. ibid., p. 3 0 ) . Vagharchapat: Church of St. Hripsime, martyrial crypt, fourth century (cf. ibid., p. 3 2 , pi. 4, fig. 1 2 ; A. B. Eremian, "La chiesa di S. Hripsime," Ricerca sull'architettura armena 6 [1972]: 1 - 1 4 0 ) . Zvart'nots: Church of St. Gregory (with the epithet Loosavorich, "the Illuminator"), mid- to late seventh cen tury; aisled tetraconch constructed at a site that com memorates the epiphany of St. Gregory to King Tiridates III (cf. W. E. Kleinbauer, "Zvart'nots and the Origins of Christian Architecture in Armenia," Art Bul letin 54 [ 1 9 7 2 ] : 245-262). Cyprus., There are numerous martyrial traditions attrib uted to early Christian Cyprus, including die apostle Bar nabas who is said to have been killed by Jews at Salamis and
MARTYRION whose body is said to have been discovered in 488 (see Ray mond Janin, "Chypre," Dictionnaire d'histoire et geographic ecclestiastique, Paris, 1 9 5 3 ) . Politiko: martyrion of St. Heraldeides, late fourth century or earlier (cf. A. Papageorghiou, E palaiochristianike kai Byzantine techne en Kupro kata to 1964, Nicosia, 1 9 6 5 , p. 6). Egypt Abu Mina: multiple phases of a martyrial structure, the earliest of them a small rectangular building dated to the late fourth century (cf. Peter Grossmann, "Abu Mina," and A. S. Atiya, "Martyrs, Coptic," both in The Coptic Encyclopedia, New York, 1 9 9 1 ) . Ethiopia. There are no surviving examples of martyrial buildings from the period of later antiquity (cf. Marilyn Heldman, "Ethiopia," in EECAA). Iran and Iraq. There are no surviving examples of mar tyrial buildings from tire period of later antiquity (see Judith Lerner, "Christianity in Pre-Islamic Persia: Material Re mains," in Encyclopedia Iranica, New York, 1992). Israel Bethlehem: Church of the Nativity, domed octagonal mar tyrion at the east end of the building commemorating the place where by ttadition Jesus was born, mid-fourth century (cf. J. E. Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places, Oxford, 1993, pp. 9 6 - 1 1 2 ) . [See Bethlehem.] Jerusalem: Church of the Holy Sepulcher, domed triconch martyrion at tlie western end of the building commem orating tlie place where by tradition Jesus was buried, mid-fourth century (cf. Joseph Patrich, " T h e Early Church of die Holy Sepulchre in the Light of Excava tions and Restoration," in Ancient Churches Revealed, edited by Yoram Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 1 0 1 1 1 7 ) . [See Jerusalem.] Jerusalem, Mount of Olives: Eleona (Imbomon) Church; rectangular structure, apse at the east end over the cave from where by tradition Jesus ascended to heaven, late fourth century (cf. Taylor, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 1 4 3 - 1 5 6 ) . MamrejTerebinthos (Ramat el-Khalil): small rectangular martyrial sanctuary where the three angels (the Trinity in Christian exegesis) appeared to Abraham (Gn. 1 8 : 1 22), fourth century (cf. Taylor, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 86-95). Mount Gerizim: Church of Mary Theotokos; octagonal martyrial structure with an apse projecting to the east, late fifth century (cf. Y. Magen, " T h e Church of Mary Theotokos on Mt. Gerizim," in Tsafrir, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 8 3 89). Jordan Madaba: the so-called Cathedral Church, Chapel of the Martyr Theodore; rectangular chapel in the southwest corner of the building, dated 562 (cf. Michele Piccirillo, The Mosaics of Jordan, Amman, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 1 0 9 - 1 1 3 1 1 7 ) . [See Madaba.] Mount Nebo, Siyagha peak: Memorial Church of Moses;
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triconch martyrial sanctuary, late fourth century (cf. Piccirillo, 1 9 9 3 , pp. 1 4 4 - 1 4 5 ) . [See Nebo, Mount.] Lebanon. For martyrial remains in Lebanon, see index V, "Martyrium," in Pauline Donceel-Voute, Les pavements des eglises byzantines de Syrie el du Liban (Louvain, 1988). Syria Bosra: Church of Sts. Sergius, Bacchus, and Leontios; ai sled tetraconch, c. 500 (cf. R. F. Campanati, "Considerazioni sulla chiese dei ss. Sergio, Bacco eLeonzio di Bosra dopo gli ultimi scavi ( 1 9 7 7 , 1 9 7 8 ) " Romisch-Germanisches Zantralmuseum Monographien 1 0 . 1 [1986]: 1 3 3 - 1 4 2 ; Campanati, "Die italienischen Ausgrabungen in Bosra (Syrien). Der spatantike Zentralbau der Kirche des Hll. Sergius, Bacchus und Leontius," BOREAS 9 [1986]: 1 7 3 - 1 8 5 ; Jean-Marie Dentzer, "Bosra," in EECAA). [See Bosra.] QaVat Sim an: Church of St. Simeon; octagonal central structure with die base of Simeon's column at the center of the octagon; four rectangular wings project from the perimeter of the octagon, creating a cruciform plan, 474-491 (cf. J.-P. Sodini, "Qal'at Sema'an," in EE CAA). [See Qal'at Sim'an.] Qanawat (Kanatha): Triconch martyrial chapel, fifth or early sixth century (cf. Donceel-Voute, 1988, pp. 2 4 4 249). Qartamin: Monastery of Mar Samuel, Mar Simeon, and Mar Gabriel; octagonal structure (possibly a martyrion) at the northwest corner of the main church, early to mid-sixth century (cf. E.J. W. Hawkins, M. C. Mundel, and Cyril Mango, " T h e Mosaics of the Monastery of Mar Samuel, Mar Simeon, and Mar Gabriel, near Kartmin," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 27 [1973]; see fig. 2, plan of the monastery). RusafalSergiopolis: Church (possibly the martyrion) of St. Sergios, located 1 5 0 m northwest of the basilica; tetra conch, before 553 (cf. Thilo Ulbert, "Rusafa," in EE CAA). [SeeRusafa.] [See also Churches; Mausoleum; Palestine, article on Pal estine in the Byzantine Period; Syria, article on Syria in tlie Byzantine Period; and Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Byzantine Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Grabar, Andre. Martyrium: Recherches sur le cuke des reliques et I'art chretien antique. 2 vols, Paris, 1946. The basic work on the architec ture of early Christian martyria. Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture: An Annotated Bibliography and Historiography. Boston, 1992. Now the indispensable lexical tool for the study of Early Christian architec ture. Immensely informative. See entries 1804-1829 for a survey of literature on martyria, including the material culture of martyr sites and the cult and ideology surrounding them, NB: Kleinbauer citations refer to entry numbers. Krautheimer, Richard, and Slobodan Curcic. Early Christian and Byz antine Architecture. 4th ed. New Haven, 1986. Concise introduction
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to Early Christian architecture, with numerous examples of martyrial structures. Ward-Perkins, • J. B. "Memoria, Martyr's Tomb, and Martyr's Church." Journal ofTheological Studies 17 (1966): 20-38. Reprinted in Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of Early Christianity, edited by
Paul Corby Finney, pp. 306-403. New York, 1993. Questions Grabar's derivation of Christian martyria solely from pagan funerary antecedents; his architectural typology, which divides martyrial structures into seven categories; and his developmental model, which he imposes on the Early Christian architectural evidence. PAUL CORBY F I N N E Y
MASADA, a mesa located at the edge of the Judean De sert on the western shore of the Dead Sea, approximately 25 km (15.5 mi.) south of 'Ein-Gedi. Rising about 440 m above die Dead Sea, Masada's summit covers 23 acres. The cliffs surrounding Masada contain evidence of human ac tivity beginning in the Chalcolithic period, but die site's main occupadon was during die late Second Temple period. The history of Masada under the Hasmoneans and through the First Jewish Revolt (66-74 CE) is documented archaeologically and by the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius. Ma sada was last inhabited during the Byzantine period, when a small church occupied the site. [See Churches.] Josephus' discussions of Masada (War 1 . 1 3 , 1 5 ; 2 . 1 7 , 2 2 ; 4-7> 9; 7-7-to; Antiq. 1 4 . 1 3 - 1 5 ) provide the basis for all his tories of this site. As early as 1838 the American explorer Edward Robinson correctly identified Masada with the site called es-Sebba, basing his identification almost exclusively on information drawn from Josephus's account. Samuel W. Wolcutt visited the mesa in 1842 and identified the Roman walls and camps tiiat encircle it. Felicien de Saulcy was the first to excavate at Masada and in 1 8 5 1 uncovered the mo saic floor of a Byzantine chapel. [See Mosaics.] Claude R. Conder published plans of buildings on the summit and of one Roman camp in 1875. The first in-depth study of the Roman camps was carried out by Alfred von Domaszewski in 1909. Major studies of the site were begun in 1932 when Adolf Schulter spent a month investigating and sketching die plans of the buildings and Roman camps. The exact location of the so-called Snake Path was established by Shmaryahu Gutman who, later, with A. Alon, surveyed the site's Her odian water system. Gutman then partially excavated and reconstructed some of the Roman camps. In 1953 the Israel Exploration Society, the Israel Depart ment of Antiquities and Museums, and the Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem identified strucnires on the northern and western sides of Masada and drafted corrected maps of the site. The major excavation of the site was carried out by Yigael Yadin in two seasons from 1963 to 1965. T h e build ings on top of the mesa were the primary focus of investi gation, but Yadin also made trial soundings in one of the Roman camps. Using Josephus's record as his primary
guide, Yadin excavated 97 percent of die area on the sum mit. Josephus ascribed the first construction project on Ma sada to "Jonathan" (War 7.285), whom archaeologist Ehud Netzer ( 1 9 9 1 ) associates with Jonathan Maccabaeus. Others associate him with Alexander Jannaeus. Josephus attributes the major building phase to Flerod the Great, who from 37 to 3 1 BCE expanded the preexisting Hasmonean fortress (War 7.300). After a nearly disastrous siege by Antigonus Mattathias, the last of the Flasmonean kings (c. 40 B C E ) , Herod refortified the site. Little information remains of the occupation of Masada after Herod's deatii; however, Josephus writes that rebels, whom he characterizes as sicarii, the "short-knived ones" captured the site from a Roman garrison (War 2.408, 4 3 3 434). This record, coupled with pottery with Latin inscrip tions found in excavation, suggests that the fortress housed a Roman garrison following Herod's death. During the First Jewish War (66-74 ) the site was occupied by the rebel group. In 73 CE the Roman Tenth Legion, led by Flavius Silva, marched against the Masada defenders led by Eleazar ben Ya'ir ben Judah (War 2.447; 7 - 2 5 2 - 2 5 3 ) . Though Josephus describes extensive Hasmonean con struction on Masada, the only clear physical evidence of a Hasmonean presence is an assemblage of coins dating to Alexander Jannaeus and plaster dated to the period from some of the cisterns on the summit. N o architecture can be attributed to the period, suggesting that Herodian construc tion destroyed earlier Flasmonean structures. A casemate wall, dated to the Herodian period, enclosed the summit except on the north, where a palace forms the outer fortifications. T h e wall, built of local dolomite stone, about 13,000 m long; the casemates are about 5 m wide. There are four gates, seventy rooms, and thirty towers in the casemate wall. T o supply fresh water, a series of aque ducts and cisterns was built. These supplied an abundance of water to the elaborate bathhouses, pools, and (during the Jewish Revolt) ritual baths. [See Aqueducts; Cisterns; Baths; Pools; Ritual Baths.] The four palace complexes contain the most spectacular of all the architecture at Masada. T h e best known of these, the Northern Palace-Villa complex on the northernmost point of the summit, was built in three tiers near the edge of the cliff (see figure 1 ) . [See Villa.] T h e upper level comprised living quarters with a semicircular porch. The middle terrace, approximately 20 m below the upper terrace, contained a circular building. That building's foun dations incorporated two concentric circular walls; the di ameter of the outer wall was 1 6 m and of the inner wall 1 0 m. Yadin (1965) and Netzer ( 1 9 9 1 ) propose that two rows of columns supported a roof. A staircase, hidden from view, connected the middle and upper terraces. The lower terrace, built on a raised area at the cliff s edge, lies 16 m beneath the middle terrace. Building foundations C E
MASADA
MASADA. Figure I. North end of the site showing the Herodian do mestic palace, bath house, and storerooms. (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
revealed a central area diat had been surrounded by porti coes and an inner columned wall. This terrace contained a small bathhouse with a simple paved mosaic floor and a structure with decorated plaster walls and columns. [See Wall Paintings.] Painted and mosaic elements on Masada use geometric patterns. They lack "graven" images., perhaps in accordance with a strict interpretation of tire Second Commandment. In this, the art of Masada parallels contem porary art in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Judah. [See Jeru salem; Judah.] T h e Western Palace, near the casemate wall, is the largest (4,340 m) residential building on Masada. Four distinct blocks of rooms constitute this palace: "royal" apartments, workshops and a service wing, storerooms, and an admin istrative section near what Yadin (1966) and Netzer (1993) call the residences of tlie palace officials. T h e opulence of the surviving architecture may have influenced Yadin's identification of this structure as royal apartments: its walls were decorated with plaster, and an indentation in the floor suggested a throne area to Yadin (1966) and Netzer ( 1 9 9 3 ) .
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T h e floor was covered with a richly colored mosaic with a central medallion of geometric and plant designs. A Romanstyle bath was located in the northeast corner of a wing of this palace. Situated southeast of this complex were three small pal aces whose central courts and two-columned halls reflect the layout of the Western Palace. Herodian ceramics and coins found within the complex provide a reliable chronological indicator. Of special interest was the discovery of a wine amphora inscribed in Latin "to Herod, ldng of Judea." Evidence of the Jewish occupation of Masada during the Jewish Revolt of 66-74 is extensive. Two blocks of long rooms (approximately 30 X 3 m) were attached to a building complex at the north end of the site. Yadin (1966) and Netzer (1993) date the remains of flour, oil, wine, dates, olives, and other foodstuffs recovered from these structures to the period of the revolt. Another group of storerooms west and south of the northern building contained caches of weapons. [See Weapons and Warfare.] Casemate rooms and palaces underwent conversion into living quarters, and cooldng ovens, new walls, and benches were added in many ofthe Herodian buildings. Ritual baths were apparently built at this time, and in the northern casemate wall a synagogue was constructed in a room that had previously served as a stable. Numerous religious documents were discovered, many of them recovered in, or in close proximity to, the synagogue. T h e texts included biblical books, tire Book of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), and " T h e Songs of tire Sabbath Sac rifice." T h e latter text was also discovered at Qumran. [See Qumran.] T h e artifacts from the period of the revolt were of special interest to Yadin: items of everyday life (textiles and textile artifacts, ceramics, and baskets), hoards of Jewish coins dat ing to the fourth year of the revolt (70 CE), and ostraca of various types. [See Ostracon.] The osttaca include personal names, designations of priestly tithes, names of foodstuffs, and records of supplies and payments. Following Josephus (War 7.395), Yadin excavated a group of ostraca he identified with the "lots" used by the defenders in carrying out their mass suicide (Yadin, 1966). These ostraca were found near the Water Gate in a group of eleven (a twelfth appears simply to be an incomplete os tracon sherd). Each carries a single name, including the name Ben-Ya'ir, who has been associated with Eleazar ben Ya'ir ben Judah. Not all scholars share diis identification. Among those who have raised serious questions is S.J. D. Cohen (1982), who doubts tire historicity of Josephus's de scription of the rebels and their mass suicide. Josephus re ports that the Sicarii set fire to the "palace" during the final stage of the siege, though evidence of a conflagration was discovered (War 7 . 3 1 5 - 3 1 9 , 397, 403-406). Josephus reports that Flavius Silva built an extensive siege wall and a series of camps encompassing Masada (War 7 . 3 0 4 - 3 1 4 ) , which archaeological exploration has verified.
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Both die wall and several of the camps are still visible. Gutman excavated camp A and the assault ramp and Yadin (1965) made soundings in camp F. After die fall of Masada a Roman garrison remained at the site, but only a few related coins have been recovered that reflect this occupation. The site appears to have been abandoned until the Byzantine period (fifth-sixth centuries). An apsidal church was built northeast of the Western Palace that may have been part of a monastic complex. [See also First Jewish Revolt; Hasmoneans; Israel Antiq uities Authority; and the biographies of Conder, Robinson, Saulcy, and Yadin.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohen, S. J, D. "Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus." Journal of Jewish Studies (Essays in Honour of Yigael Yadin) 33 (1982): 385-405. Revisionist reevaluation of the literary and archaeological evidence for the last days of Masada, bringing to bear parallels in Greco-Roman literature. Josephus. The Jewish War. Books 1-7. Translated by Henry St. John Thackeray. Loeb Classical Library. London, 1927-1928. The stan dard edition of Josephus's writings. Josephus. The Jewish Antiquities. Books 1 2 - 1 4 . Translated by Ralph Marcus. Loeb Classical Library. London, 1943. Knox, Reed, et al. "Iron Objects from Masada: Metallurgical Studies." Israel Exploration Journal 33 (1983): 97-107. Argues that specific metal objects discovered on Masada were produced by the rebels during the Jewish Revolt against Rome. Masada 1-4: The Yigael Yadin Excavations, 1963-1965, Final Reports. Jerusalem, 1989-. Definitive, readable series of site reports that re tains much of Yadin's original interpretations while reevaluating the discoveries. The series includes Yigael Yadin and Joseph Naveh, Masada 1: The Aramaic and Hebrew Ostraca and Jar Inscriptions (Je rusalem, 1989), published with The Coins of Masada by Ya'acov Meshorer; Hannah M. Cotton and Joseph Geiger, Masada. 2: The Latin and Greek Documents (Jerusalem, 1989); and Ehud Netzer, Ma sada 3: The Buildings, Stratigraphy, and Architecture (Jerusalem, 1991). Masada 4 (Jerusalem, 1994) includes Dan Barag and Malka Hershkovitz, Lamps; Avigail Sheffer and Herd Granger-Taylor, Tex tiles; Kathryn Bernick, Basketry, Cordage, and Related Artifacts; Nili Liphschitz, Wood Remains; and Andrew Holley, Ballista Balls. Netzer, Ehud. "The Last Days and Hours at Masada." Biblical Ar chaeology Review 17.6 (1991): 20-32. Further discussion and explo ration of the defenders' siege walls and Roman engines. Netzer, Ehud. "Masada." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 973-985. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Newsom, Carol, and Yigael Yadin. "The Masada Fragment of the Qumran Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice." Israel Exploration Journal 34 (1984): 77-88. Publication of the Masada fragment, comparing it to the version discovered at Qumran. Yadin, Yigael. "The Excavation of Masada, 1963/64: Preliminary Re port." Israel Exploration Journal 15 (1965): 1 - 1 2 0 . Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand. New York, 1966. Fairly detailed, popular account of the excavation and finds at Masada. GLENDA W. FRIEND and STEVEN F I N E
MASHKAN-SHAPIR, ancient city in Mesopotamia identified with the site Tell Abu Duwari, located at 32°24'7"
N and 4 5 ° i 2 ' i 7 " E. The identification of Tell Abu Duwari witii Mashkan-shapir was made firm when more than 1 5 0 fragments of baked clay cylinders bearing an inscription dedicating Mashkan-shapir's city wall were found in 1989 in association witii one of the site's city gates. In the broader scope of Mesopotamian settlement, the oc cupation of Mashkan-shapir was quite brief. Its name, which can be translated as "the encampment of the overseer," in dicates its humble beginnings. T h e first textual reference to tiiis town, dated to the Akkadian period ( 2 3 3 4 - 2 1 5 4 BCE) shows it to have been a place of refuge for a runaway slave girl. Mashkan-shapir continued for several centuries as an obscure outpost of Mesopotamian civilization, concerned more witii raising sheep than the larger issues of state. In deed, had the unification of southern Mesopotamia, which characterized most of die Akkadian and U r III periods (2334-2004 BCE) persisted, Mashkan-shapir would probably have remained no more than a small rural hamlet. The succeeding Isin-Larsa period was characterized by political fragmentation, however, with Larsa claiming dom inance over the south, Isin the center, and (somewhat later) Babylon the territories of northern Babylonia. Given the ab sence of native sources of stone, metals, and high-quality timber for construction, this political fragmentation resulted in a disruption in the trade routes so vital to die Mesopo tamian economy. Larsa, although in clear control of trade coming up from the Persian Gulf, was cut off by Isin from the usual trade route u p the Euphrates River. Larsa there fore turned its attention to the territory between it and the Tigris River—the alternate route to the nortii. It is here that Mashkan-shapir becomes significant. Mash kan-shapir was located—as can be seen on satellite images of the area—beside all or some of the path of the Tigris River in the early second millennium BCE. It was thus in a strategic position to control trade moving from areas east and north of Babylonia into the southern heartland. The interest of the Larsa Icings in Mashkan-shapir is made clear both by objects found at the site and by the more ex tensive textual record. Zabaya ( 1 9 4 1 - 1 9 3 3 BCE), one of the more obscure of the early Larsa kings, left a record of build ing activity at the site in the form of an inscribed clay nail; however, it was not until the reign of Sin-iddinam ( 1 8 4 5 1843 BCE) that Mashkan-shapir became a major city. Siniddinam built the wall around Mashkan-shapir with the ex press intent "to increase its dwellings," as he says in his dedicatory inscription (see above), Archaeological evidence indicates tiiat his city wall enclosed an area in excess of 70 hectares (173 acres)—an area larger than that walled in at Ur. From this time forth, Mashkan-shapir rose from obscu rity and began to play a key role in trade between the key eastward trade route along the Diyala River and the king dom of Larsa, and tiiis was only the beginning. Within a decade of Sin-iddinam's death, the rulership of the parent city of Larsa was taken over by a family from Mashkanshapir. Mashkan-shapir then became the second capital of
MASHKAN-SHAPIR the Larsa kingdom, playing key roles in justice and inter national diplomacy, especially following Rim-Sin's defeat of Isin in 1794 BCE. Mashkan-shapir fell when Hammurabi fi nally moved against Larsa in 1763 BCE. T h e shift in tire al legiance of its armies to Hammurabi precipitated Larsa's downfall. While Hammurabi's conquest ended Mashkan-shapir's role as a political capital, it remained an important city—as is testified by its inclusion in the prologue of Hammurabi's law code. However, conditions deteriorated in southern Babylonia under Hammurabi's successor, Samsuiluna ( 1 7 4 9 - 1 7 1 2 BCE). By 1720 BCE the cities of southern and central Babylonia lay abandoned, including Mashkanshapir—probably the result of a combination of political u p heaval and ecological degradation. While in Kassite times (between perhaps 1400 and 1 1 5 0 BCE) new canals brought water back to old centers of Sumerian culture, Mashkanshapir was either too far east or had had too brief a tradition for it to be included. It remained lost in the desert until its recent discovery by archaeologists. T h e first archaeologist to visit Mashkan-shapir was Rob ert McC. Adams, who included the site in his survey of the area around Nippur, giving it the identification number 639. Based on his description of tire site, Elizabeth C. Stone se lected it as a likely candidate for excavation. T o date, three seasons of work have been conducted there, two three-week seasons in 1987 and 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 8 9 , and a three-month season in 1990. T h e brevity of Mashkan-shapir's floruit is what gives its archaeological manifestations particular significance. Apart from an underlying Uruk occupation (3500-3000 BCE) and a very limited Parthian settiement (250 BCE-228 CE), the re mains of Mashkan-shapir provide a snapshot of an early second-millennium Mesopotamian city that is unparalleled. Only 2 m above plain level on average, the major features of this ancient city have not been obscured by erosion or later occupation, as is so often the case at longer-lived ex amples. Because the primary aim of the Mashkan-shapir project was to recover a sense of the overall city plan, tire bulk of the work conducted to date has been devoted to reconnais sance—both aerial and surface surveys. In addition, several small soundings were excavated to test the validity of con clusions drawn from surface survey work alone; one exten sive area, covering 1,000 sq m, was excavated in 1990. The survey work conducted at Mashkan-shapir has not only revealed tire site's major features—canals, temple plat forms, city walls—but also some that are more subtle— roads, manufacturing areas, and special-purpose zones identified on the basis of their surface objects. Together, tiiese provide a comprehensive view of the ancient city's organization, albeit a somewhat provisional one pending further excavation. Mashkan-shapir was divided into its component parts by four major canals. Its south, central, western, eastern, and
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northern parts have different characteristics and apparently served somewhat different functions. A fifth major canal (possibly somewhat later in date) flowed through the north ern portion of the site, but no differences in patterning have been observed on either of its banks. Minor canals were also located within the areas in the east and north that appear to have been associated with manufacturing—especially of ce ramics. Where the main central canal intersected with the eastern and western branches, the area was opened into two harbors, each covering an area of approximately one hec tare. It is not clear whether these harbors should be identified with the main Mashkan-shapir harbor (mentioned in one cuneiform text as holding 270 boats preparatory to an attack on the city of Kish) or if that center of international trade was located a kilometer or so away, on the banks of the Tigris River. The site's religious quarter was located in the south; there, a quite small area is characterized by both baked-brick and mud-brick platforms that must once have supported tem ples. Associated with these platforms are some seventy frag ments of life-sized and half-sized terra-cotta statuary in the shape of humans, lions, and horses. These statues doubtless guarded the entrance to a temple in the same way that sim ilar statues guarded the entrances to the contemporary tem ples at Khafajeh, Isin, and Tell Harmal. Tentative evidence suggests that the immediate temple precinct was walled off from the rest of the southern portion of the city, but tiiis conclusion awaits confirmation. [See Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples.] Also on the periphery of the site, but in this case in the soutiiern part of the west mound, is the area that seems to have been devoted to secular administration. Aerial photo graphs reveal a walled building complex made up of a num ber of regularly built structures characterized by large court yards. Large numbers of fragments of models of chariots have been found in this area, but their association with ad ministrative practices is unclear. Two soundings and one larger excavation yielded numerous unbaked clay sealings, an administrative tablet, and some other inscribed materials that confirm the impression that this was an administrative area. T h e tablet suggests concern with trade and shipments of goods. Numerous fragments of the bitumen (natural as phalt, used for waterproofing) covering of reed and matting wrapped bundles may also be testimony to such activity, but more excavation is needed before the full scope of the area's activities can be assessed. T h e third distinctive part of the city lies in the southern portion of the central mound. This was apparently the core of the early settlement. A sounding revealed residential structures dating to early in the Isin-Larsa period, before the city's rise to power. T h e evidence suggests that this early mound was left unoccupied for the last century or so of Mashkan-shapir's occupation and was used as a cemetery. Numerous fragments of large burial jars and typical grave goods—jewelry, cosmetic palettes, and weapons—litter die
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surface of the area (as do the traces of the work of illicit diggers at the site). Like die administrative area and perhaps also die religious quarter, this cemetery area was walled off from the rest of the central mound. Enclosed within tiiis wall is another platform that presumably also supported a tem ple. It is possible that Mashkan-shapir's dedication to Nergal, the Mesopotamian god of death, may have led to this association between a cemetery and a temple—an associa tion not seen at other Mesopotamian cities. The rest of the site seems to have been largely residential in character. In some areas aerial photographs reveal the street pattern: major roads paralleled the canals, leaving space for a single row of houses between a street and a canal. Larger areas, though, were bisected by roads that connected witii quays or bridges to allow passage across the canals. The evidence suggests that there was a fairly even distri bution of wealth over the spread of the residential districts. Artifacts associated with high status—cylinder seals, stone bowls, and even metal objects—are found all over the city. Also found everywhere are traces of baked-brick architec ture and graves—an indication that not everyone was buried in the cemetery. It is in the residential districts that evidence for manufac turing activities is found. Three such industries have been identified: copperworking, pottery production, and lapidary work. The first two are indicated by ± e presence of their residues—copper slag, kiln fragments, and wasters—while the third is marked by concentrations of unworked stones found with numerous small, mostly cuboid grinders. It ap pears that all crafts were represented in all parts of the city, but tiiat there was some specialization. Most of the copperproduction centers were located in the central part of the site; ceramic production was focused on the small canals in the north and east; and lapidary work was concentrated in the southeast, The whole was surrounded by Sin-iddinam's city wall, in which three gates have been identified: a water gate and two gates located beside the canals where their flow enters the city. In many places, the densely occupied portion of the city never reached the wall. Instead, the empty space left held a few large, but scattered, buildings. In plan, some of tiiese suggest storage facilities, so it is possible that the city's granaries were located near the city gates. Although the exploration of Mashkan-shapir is still in its infancy, its unique occupational history has allowed a quite complete picture of the organization of this Mesopotamian city. Noteworthy are the role the canals played in dividing the city and the peripheral character of its main institutions, with religious and administrative centers located toward its edges. [See also Isin; and Larsa.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Charpin, Dominique. "Les reprfesentants de Mari a Babylone (I)." In Archives epistolaires de Mari 1/2, edited by Dominique Charpin et al.,
pp. 139-205, Archives Royales de Mari, vol. 26. The latest evidence on the role played by Mashkan-shapir in the political infighting lead ing up to the conquest of Larsa by Hammurabi. Leemans, W. F. Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period as Revealed by Texts from Southern Mesopotamia. Studia et Documenta, vol. 6. Leiden, i960. Standard work on trade relations in early second mil lennium BCE Mesopotamia. See pages 1 6 6 - 1 7 2 for a discussion of Mashkan-shapir. Stone, Elizabeth C. "The Tell Abu Duwari Project, Iraq 1987." Journal of Field Archaeology 17 (1990): 1 4 1 - 1 6 2 . Preliminary report of the first season of work. Stone, Elizabeth C , and Paul E. Zimansky. "Mashkan-shapir and the Anatomy of an Old Babylonian City." Biblical Archaeologist 55.4 (1992): 2 1 2 - 2 1 8 . Discussion of the organization of Mashkan-shapir for a popular audience. Stone, Elizabeth C , and Paul E. Zimansky. "The Second and Third Seasons at Tell Abu Duwari, Iraq." Journal of Field Archaeology 2 1 (1994): 437-455. Preliminary report of the last two seasons of work at Mashkan-shapir. ELIZABETH C, STONE
MASKHUTA, TELL EL-, town in the eastern Nile Delta (see figure i ) , occupied in the late Middle Bronze II and from about 6 1 0 BCE into the Early Roman period, with gaps in the Late Persian period, and in about 1 0 0 B C E - I O O CE (30°33' N , 32°O6' E).
The name of the site in the Second Intermediate period is unknown. Inscriptional and literary evidence indicates that after 6 1 0 BCE it was known as Per-Atum Tulcw (the "estate of Atum in Tkw"); as biblical Pitom or Pithom (Ex. 1 : 1 1 ) , in the region of Tkw; or as biblical Succoth (Ex. 1 2 : 3 7 , 13:20; Nm. 3 3 : 5 - 6 ) . The biblical references are anachronis tic, probably arising from the antiquarian interests of Jeremianic refugees resident in the eastern Delta. [See Delta.] Though the older name was preserved into the Hellenistic period, it was more commonly known by its Greek name, Heroon polis (Eroopolis, Heroon; the Greek translation of Gn. 46:28, "near Heroopolis in the land of Rameses"). T h e Romans shortened it to Ero (Hero). The first to excavate die site was Edouard Naville for the Egypt Exploration Society. (1893). Jean Cledat excavated many objects on behalf of the Service des Antiquites (about 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 1 0 ) , but contributed little else. T h e Egyptian Antiq uities Organization excavated in the northern cemetery, along the Ismailia canal, a necropolis area of the Persian period south of the temple precinct, and near the present village (c. 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 8 5 ) . A major series of excavations ( 1 9 7 8 1985) was undertaken by the University of Toronto's Wadi Tumilat Project, directed by John S. Holladay, Jr., witii funding from the Smithsonian Institution and the Social Sci ence and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Second Intermediate Period (Middle Bronze IIB). T h e earliest occupation at the site, about 1 7 0 0 / 1 6 5 0 - 1 6 0 0 BCE, was a small, unfortified Asiatic ("Hyksos") village of possibly only 2 ha (5 acres). [See Hyksos.] It was of short duration, with a total depth of stratification of about 2 m divided into seven archaeological phases. In its architecture
MASKHUTA, TELL EL-
and burial practices, it resembled Tell ed-Dab'a and pre sumably functioned as a Hyksos outpost (see figure 2). [See Dab a, Tell ed-.] The pottery, some of it made on site, is a subset of that found at Tell ed-Dab'a and is a mix of M B IIB and earlier Levantine forms together with local Egyptian forms. Signif icantly, the Asiatic aspects of the corpus do not resemble typical corpora from either Syria or Palestine. Despite the site's small size, the "urban" character of its architecture and layout is comparable to that at Tell ed-Dab a, in plot de marcation by sinuous boundary walls, house styles and con struction, and a progression in area use from storage facili ties (aboveground circular silos) and burials to an increasingly dense pattern of houses and associated features (relating to agricultural, animal husbandry, cooldng, and in dustrial activities). Surprisingly, paleobotanical evidence shows that the site was seasonal, occupied only during the winter (through wheat harvest), with relocation elsewhere (to campsites?) during the summer, [See Paleobotany.] The economy was dominated by herding and plow-assisted dry farming (wheat, barley), apparently on more than a subsis tence basis. Donkeys, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, hartebeest, and gazelle were present, and a wide variety of small game and birds were hunted. [See Hunting.] Crafts include pottery making; secondary bronze smelting and tool/weapon mak ing; textile production using the warp-weighted loom; sickle production with preformed blades; and perhaps silverc
c
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smithing. One enigmatic workshop housed high-temperaUire hearths and an industrial process for which multiple stakes had been driven into the floor, and in which red and yellow ocher, cobble-sized grinders, palettes, hammer stones, and reused chert slingstones played significant roles. Large quantities of water had repeatedly been sluiced over die floors. What was involved seems to have been the inten sive manufacture of a composite product: possibly leather with metal fittings or ornaments, or elite products that in volved precious metals. Burials include "warrior's tombs," marked by burials of a single donkey and weapons, women's tombs, and small mud-brick tombs for infants and adolescents. [See Tombs; Burial Practices.] T h e tombs contained relatively rich offer ings: gold and silver headbands, armbands, and earrings; scarabs; amulets; and food offerings. [See, Grave Goods.] There were infant jar and cist burials and simple inhuma tions with few or no grave goods. T h e evidence for seasonality, the site's short life-span, ending before the final phase of Hyksos domination, the high level of technological production, the great disparity between the agriculturalist-pastoralist orientation of the do mestic economy, the rich burials of the town's residents, and the central-to-eastward trending of settlement in Wadi Tumilat all argue that the village was the primary reception, provisioning, and debarkation point for donkey caravans bearing products northwestward: presumably incense,
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MASKITUTA, TELL EL-. Figure 2. Plan of the final building phase of the MB IIB (Hyksos) occupation.
(Courtesy J. S. Holladay)
spices, ivory, gold, gemstones, precious woods, and animal pelts; commodities ttansported to the southeast were most likely copper, tin, silver, coniferous woods, linen, fine wool ens, alabaster, medicinal drugs, weapons, and tools. T h e Hyksos settlement at Tell er-Retabah probably functioned as the region's principal military and administrative center and as a way station for caravans to the port city of Tell edDab'a. Such operations had military implications and relied on the cooperation of the indigenous pastoral people of the Sinai. Presumably, this extension of Hyksos settlement to tire east occurred when tlie Nile River was closed to com munications between Nubia and the Delta during the fif teenth dynasty. Or, given the hostility between Thebes and Karnak during the late fifteenth dynasty, it is possible that the overland traders operating between the Horn of Africa and its eastward-looking trade connections either were in adequately servicing the traffic into Nubia or began making exorbitant demands, causing Avaris to seek more direct con nections with South Arabia. A third possibility is that the development, by the Late MB IIB or Early MB IIC, of over land trade connections between South Arabia and southern Palestine caused the merchant princes of Avaris to want some portion of that overland trade diverted to their own emporium.
Saite Period. With the advent of Necho II ( 6 1 0 BCE) and his sea-level canal connecting the Pelusiac branch of the Nile with the Red Sea via Wadi Tumilat, the site's exposed fron tier position, unsettled since the Late M B II period, again became an asset. Following the use of the terrace as a work camp for canal-building and the sacrifice and burial of a large number of bulls (presumably as foundation sacrifices; see figure 3 ) , houses and mid-sized aboveground granaries were built, accompanied by outdoor bread ovens, which also roasted fowl. [See Granaries and Silos.] Central planning is suggested by tlie shared design features in both die houses and silos. Following Necho's defeat and expulsion from Asia in 605 BCE, a 8-9-meter-wide defensive wall was erected. It cut through elements of the original town plan, including newly built houses enclosing an area of roughly 200 m per side. The adequacy of this 4-hectare (7-acre) space for the townsite is demonstrated by the lack of Saite occupational levels in all sectors of the enclosure. Two destruction phases followed, apparently in 601 BCE and in 568 BCE, both carried out by Nebuchadrezzer II. A minor presence of Judean pot tery associated with a house destroyed in 568 BCE may attest to the settlement of some Jeremianic refugees from the 582 BCE dispersion. Another destruction marked the Persian conquest of Egypt in 525 BCE. A large Atum temple was
MASKHUTA, TELL ELfounded at the beginning of this period, probably in asso ciation with bull sacrifices. During the Saite period, expanded trade via the canal is evidenced by massive quantities of Phoenician "crisp ware" amphorae, Greek amphorae from Thassos and Chios, and imported mortaria, probably of Anatolian origin. A Phoe nician terra-cotta statuette of a seated pregnant goddess (Asherah/Tannit?) found in a small limestone shrine is probably testimony to tire presence of expatriate Phoenician traders. [See Phoenicians.] That Phoenician ships were the primary carriers seems evident, given the Egyptian reluc tance to venmre far from the mouth of the Nile, and given the quantity of Phoenician trade amphorae. T h e Greek and other amphorae, mortaria, and other heavy cargoes formed a substantial part of die ballast under which the keelless ships of the times sailed. [See Ships and Boats.] T h e ballast could then be sold at any port at which other heavy, large bulk products were to be on-loaded. Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade was not witnessed by material finds, but must be in ferred from die wealth of evidence for widespread trade con nections at what otherwise would be nothing but a small provincial town at the midpoint of a long canal terminating near Suez. P e r s i a n Period. T h e site expanded to fill the entire en closure area in the Persian period, with an elite necropolis to the southwest. The four great quadrilingual stelae near Tell el-Maskhuta and southward (the largest Persian mon uments in Egypt), attest to Darius die Great's successful completion of the canal to the Red Sea. Outside the enclo
sure wall a stone-built well had been deliberately blocked and filled in the rebellion of 487 BCE. With evidence for a water sweep operating with a different well, and no evidence for any gateway in this area, these remains indicate wellsupported horticultural and pastoral activities. [See Agricul ture.] Belowground beehive granaries of no more than small-estate size point to some of the production being conn-oiled by minor elites during this period. Given the mas sive numbers of Persian storage pits in southern Palestine, Persian agricultural intensification and bulking of agricul tural surpluses for the eastern Nile Delta are likely. Indusnial and storehousing activities were concentrated near the enclosure wall on the eastern side of town, near the canal. What may have been priestly quarters are densely built near the temple. A bulla of Darius the Great mention ing the district of Tkw suggests that administrative quarters might have been located nearby. Fragmentary monuments from tile thirtieth Nectanebid dynasty may be later imports to the site, or may indicate continued Nectanebid administtation of the canal. During the Persian period (c. 5 2 5 - 3 3 0 ) , there was an in crease in goods imported in Phoenician trade amphorae— probably mostly wine—and in Thassian and Chian ampho rae. Dipinta (painted) inscriptions on jar fragments are mostly in Demotic, witii a few in Phoenician script. Either Egyptian-based Phoenician traders labeled the storage jars in Demotic for local trade or Egyptians controlled most of the trade. Mortaria were imported in quantity, and small cubic limestone altars, ultimately of South Arabian inspira-
Figure 3. The third bull burial discovered at the site. The burial pit was cut by the enclosure wall (top right) foundation tench, around 605 BCE. (Courtesy J. S. Holladay) MASKHUTA, TELL EL-.
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tion and probably not of local manufacture, suggests the spread of incense use to domestic cultic installations. [See Altars.] A cache of thousands of Athenian tetradrachmas points to trade gifts to the Atum temple, as do the "Tell elMaskhuta bowls," inscribed "to the lady"—presumably Hathor—from Qainu the son of Gashmu, a princely Ara bian name witnessed in the Bible (Neh. 2:19). Minute Himyaritic silver coins bearing the archaic owl of Athena probably come from this period, further attesting trade re lations with South Arabia. Zoological and botanical analysis shows a great variety in tire agricultural economy, reflecting a local intensification, the interests of the Persian rulers of Egypt, and greater avail ability of nonlocal species and varieties presumably because of traffic on the canal. Ptolemaic Period. Following a diminished Late Persian and an Early Hellenistic occupation, the site's fortunes turned upward under Ptolemy II (282-246), who rebuilt the canal; he celebrated some of his imports (including ele phants) in a stela found by Naville (1903). A new six-cham bered granary with an attached bank of bread ovens was constructed and a Late Persian storehouse was restored. Nearby, work went on in support of the renewal of the Atum temple complex: sculptors' "trial pieces," scraps of quality limestone, and evidence of secondary bronze smelting were found in excavation. It seems unlikely that the series of massive storehouses discovered by Naville (1903) began quite this early. Exca vations demonstrated the successive building and wholesale replacement of three differently oriented large storehouses. This series dates from about the second half of the third century to about 1 5 0 - 1 2 5 BCE. Other, even more massive storehouses remain to be investigated. The material stored in these structures presumably were part of the trading ac tivities between the Mediterranean basin and South Arabia and the Horn of Africa. During this period it is clear that Tel] el-Maskhuta was either a major point of shipment for some heavy, high-volume capacity (e.g., wheat), or a turn around spot for ships because only a few ships were needed for continuing on into the Red Sea (some choice Greek wines made the journey all tire way to India). Alternatively, it is possible that cargoes were deliberately lightened for the southbound leg of the trip, with the transshipment of rela-' lively low-bulk, high-value cargoes to fast triremes at the head of the Red Sea for better handling of the combined northern Red Sea problems of shallow water, adverse winds, and pirates. Transshipment to these Red Sea triremes could have taken place at Per Atum. The returning ocean-going ships could have taken on high-value, lightweight south eastern products (spices, incense, ivory, rare woods, etc.) for value and local products (grain, hides, dried meat) for partial ballast. They could then have gone tightly ballasted as far as Pelusium, where the ballast weight required for ocean travel could be made up of locally accumulated am
phorae, metal and glass ingots, and choice building stone. During this period the site outgrew the enclosure area. R o m a n Period. The Christian pilgrim Egira mentions a Roman military post at Hero in about 381 CE, but few re mains of this period exist. By this time, the military garrison may have been located to the northeast. Following a break in occupation from the first century BCE to the first century CE, the site experienced its greatest period of expansion, probably associated witii Trajan's reconstruction of the ca nal. Only two small fields in the Roman cemetery were inves tigated. However, Roman materials overlaid much of the field E storehouse, and a number of Roman limekilns were sunk in pits penetrating MB and Saite levels. Limekilns had already been intensively used for the large and heavily plas tered Hellenistic storehouses. The bricks for the latest field E storehouse contained lime flecks, which indicates that they were made of mud recycled from earlier buildings whose plaster had been stripped. Given die rarity of quality lime stone in the Delta, it is notable that many large piles of lime stone chips remained at the site. No traces of dressed or inscribed outer surfaces appeared, suggesting either that limestone chips were imported for lime making, or that new blocks for the Atum temple were made at locations well east of the temple. A lack of typically Roman figured lamps and otiier late indicators suggests a relatively early date for the end of oc cupation in the late third-early fourth centuries CE. T o the east, a Roman cemetery occupied the location of a former Hellenistic suburban village, filling it with squarish, largely subterranean, mud-brick tombs with vaulted roofs. The tombs were entered from a walled dromos centered on the eastern side, the arched tomb entrance being bricked in after each burial. The tomb burials were found stratified, owing to the constant exfoliation of mud-brick materials from the tomb vault. These tombs were looted during their active use-life, clearly by the attendants, and afterward. Traces re mained of relatively rich burial goods (gold foil and a gold earring, glass vessels, carved bone hairpins). Simple inhu mations lacldng durable grave goods were cut into the open spaces between the tombs, and a children's cemetery of am phora burials, possibly slightly later, occupied the south eastern end of the excavation area. Among the latter was one Christian burial—oriented toward Jerusalem—marked by a Coptic epitaph and two clii-rho symbols on a Gaza amphora. A few other inhumations sharing this orientation may also be Christian; most other inhumations were ori ented west. Indications of trauma and the mortality curve of adult males are consistent with a military population. [See Tombs; Burial Techniques; Grave Goods.] In die Roman period, the defense and regulation of over land traffic seem to have heightened in importance because increasingly large Roman freighters were unable to operate
MAS OS, TEL safely in the northern Red Sea. [See Seafaring.] However, Trajan's reopening of the canal (see above) argues for its continued use as a viable military transit or commercial fa cility. For the latter activity, a more complicated system of assembling cargoes at Quseir or at points farther south in the Red Sea may be posited. Islamic Period. In about 641 BCE the silted-up canal was reopened by Amr ibn al-'As, the conqueror and first gov ernor of Egypt. It was used until 767, when die second 'Ab basid caliph, Abu Jafar al-Mansur, closed it, to keep supplies from reaching die rebellious cities of Mecca and Medina. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ball, John. Egypt in the Classical Geographers. Cairo, 1942. Bennett, William J., Jr., and Jeffrey A. Blakely. Tell el-Hesi: The Persian Period (Stratum V). Winona Lake, Ind., 1989. Bietak, Manfred. "Egypt and Canaan during the Middle Bronze Age." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 281 (1991): 27-72. Cledat, Jean. "Deux monuments nouveaus de Tell El-Maskhoutah," Recueil de Travaux Relalifs a la Philologie et a I'Archeologie Egyptiennes el Assyriennes 32 ( 1 9 1 0 ) : 40-42. Cledat, Jean. "Notes sur PIsthme de Suez (monuments divers)." Recueil de Travaux Relalifs a la Philologie et a I'Archeologie Egyptiennes et As syriennes 36 ( 1 9 1 4 ) : 1 0 3 - 1 1 2 . Holladay, John S. Tell el-Maskhuta. Cities of the Delta, part 3. Reports of the American Research Center in Egypt, vol. 6. Malibu, 1982. Holladay, John S. "The Wadi Tumilat Project: Tell el-Maskhuta." Bul letin of the Canadian Mediterranean Institute 7.2 (1987): 1 - 7 . Holladay, John S. "A Biblical/Archaeological Whodunit." Bulletin of the Canadian Mediterranean Institute 8,,2 (1988): 6-8. Holladay, John S. "The Eastern Nile Delta during the Hyksos and PreHyksos Periods: Towards a Systemic/Socio-Economic Understand ing." In Proceedings of the University of Pennsylvania Hyksos Seminar, Spring 1092, edited by Eliezer D. Oren. Philadelphia, forthcoming. Holladay, John S., and Carol Ann Redmount. The Wadi Tumilat Project I: Surveys in the Wadi Tumilat, 1977 and 1983, Results and Archaeo logical Interpretation. Forthcoming. Naville, Edouard. 772a Store-City of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus. 4th ed. London, 1903. Oren, Eliezer D. "Migdol: A New Fortress on the Edge of the Eastern Nile Delta." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 256 (1984): 7-44Pake, Patricia. "A Preliminary Analysis of Some Elements of tlie Saite and Persian Period Pottery at Tell el-Maskhuta." Bulletin of the Egyp tological Seminar 8 (1987): 9 5 - 1 0 7 . Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. Redford, Donald B. "Exodus I n . " Vetus Testamentum 13 (1963): 4 0 1 418. Redford, Donald B. "Pithom." In Lexihon der Agyptologie, vol. 4, cols. 1054-1058. Wiesbaden, 1983. Redmount, Carol Ann. "On the Egyptian/Asiatic Frontier: An Archae ological History of the Wadi Tumilat." Ph.D. diss., Oriental Insti tute, University of Chicago, 1989. Stern, Ephraim. "Limestone Incense Altars." In Beer-Sheba I: Exca vations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons, edited by Yohanan Aharoni, pp. 5 2 - 5 3 . Tel Aviv, 1973. Veenhof, Klaas R. Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and Its Terminology. Leiden, 1972. J O H N S. HOLLADAY, JR.
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MASOS, TEL (Khirbet el-Meshash), site situated about 1 2 km (7 mi.) east of Beersheba in Israel's Negev desert (map reference 1 4 7 X 069). T h e name still indicates the areas rich water sources, in which groundwater is easily ac cessible by means of wells. T h e site consists of three differ ent components, located on both sides of the wadi: a small tell; and remains of a large village to the northeast; as well as the artificial hills of an enclosure on the southern bank. The tell's existence has been known since the nineteenth century, when it was mapped by Claude R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener in the Survey of Eastern Palestine (1874). The otiier two sites were discovered during intensive sur veys by Yohanan Aharoni (1964, 1967). In spite of the existence of both the long lists of cities in the Negev in Joshua 1 5 : 2 1 - 3 2 and Shishak's list, tlie ancient name of Khirbet el-Meshash has not yet been ascertained. Its identification with Hormah by Aharoni (Aharoni et a l , 9 7 5 J PP- 1 2 3 - 1 2 5 in particular) is unlikely because it seems that Hormah was a rather important city in tlie time of tlie Israelite Monarchy. During that period, except for a few decades at the end of the seventh century BCE, the archae ological record shows that Khirbet el-Meshash was deserted. T h e same applies to the suggested location of Ziklag by Frank Crusemann ( 1 9 7 3 , especially pp. 2 2 2 - 2 2 4 ) . The identification by Nadav Na'aman with Ba'alat Be'er, as in Joshua 19:8, is entirely arbitrary (Na'aman, 1980, p. 1 4 6 ) . Taking into account that the name may have been men tioned in the list in 1 Samuel 3 0 : 2 7 - 3 1 8 , dated to the end of the eleventh century BCE, Sifmot and Rachal should be con sidered possible candidates for the ancient name. The history of the site was revealed in 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 5 , during the course of extensive excavations by a joint GermanIsraeli expedition led by Volkmar Fritz and Aharon Kem pinski on behalf of the University of Mainz and Tel Aviv University. Tel Masos was settled only for short periods of time during different periods, with large gaps in occupation, which explains why the several settlements were spread out at a distance from one another. The tell owes its formation to a settlement dated to tlie end of Iron II (seventh century BCE); resetflementtook place, however, at the end of tlie Byzantine period. There is a for mer Iron I village ( 1 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 BCE) situated northeast of the tell, with some remains dating to the Chalcolithic period. T h e fortified enclosure on tlie southern bank of the wadi was constructed during tlie Middle Bronze Age II—III and was abandoned during tlie same period. Altogether, five pe riods of occupation can be distinguished: Chalcolithic earth dwellings; a fortified MB II—III enclosure; an Early Iron Age village; a settlement from the seventh century BCE; and a monastery dating from the seventh-eighth centuries CE. T h e Chalcolithic material is meager and neither tlie pot tery nor the implements exhibit any peculiarities. The funds come mainly from one subterranean dwelling dug into the i
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r
MASOS, TEL. Reconstructed plan of the village. (Courtesy V. Fritz)
loess; later, in the Iron I, a house was built on top of it. No exact date witiiin the range of the period from 3600-3200 BCE can be given. The site belongs to the so-called Beersheba culture, known throughout the Negev. Within the MB enclosure, two fortified settlements can be distinguished, the older of which was demolished when the subsequent one was built. The embankment enclosed a square with sides approximately 100 m in length, but a large part of the site had been washed away by the wadi that runs next to it. These settlements probably represent an attempt on the part of the coastal cities to control the route leading to the east; they yielded homogeneous ceramics that date to die seventeenth century BCE. The Early Iron Age village covers an area of approxi mately 200 X 1 5 0 m and is the largest known site of this period in the country. Altogether, three strata witii a total of five phases can be distinguished; tiiey indicate continuous habitation from about 1200 until the beginning of the tenth century BCE. In the earliest phase, stratum IIIB shows some signs of nomadic occupation; there are floors, pits, and hearths, but no architecture. The building of actual houses begins in stratum IIIA, in about the middle of the twelfth century BCE. During the two phases of stratum II, the site
was more densely built up, with a large variety of building types. Besides the dominant four-room house, there are three-room houses, broadroom houses, a courtyard house, and the so-called Amarna house, an Egyptian type of dwell ing (cf. Fritz, 1988). Various other buildings had some sort of public function. T h e large variety of structures indicates that the population was by no means homogeneous. Stratum I is badly eroded but seems to mark a certain decline. The site was entirely abandoned at the beginning of the tenth century BCE. The finds from Tel Masos include both local and im ported ceramic wares; an example of early Phoenician ivory art; and a remarkably large number of copper and bronze objects. T h e imported ware include bichrome-style vessels from the Phoenician coast; sherds of Philistine pottery from the coastal plain; so-called Midianite ware originating in northwest Arabia; and fragments of Egyptian "flowerpots." The diverse nature of this assemblage shows that the village had wide-ranging connections in every direction. T h e large quantity of copper and bronze implements indicates that copperworking played an important role. A scarab made of steatite bears the motif of a pharaoh defeating his foes and can be assigned to the reign of Seti II ( 1 2 0 4 - 1 1 9 4 BCE).
MASPERO, GASTON During the second half of the seventh century BCE, a small settlement was constructed southwest of the former village, which had already been deserted for more than three hun dred years. At its center stood a large building, whose size and arrangement of rooms suggest that it served as a cara vanserai—a station along the trade routes passing through the area. T h e settlement was probably fortified and existed only for a short period of time. It was destroyed during the Edomite conquest at the beginning of the sixth century BCE. T h e last occupation on the mound took place at tire end of the period of Byzantine rule in Palestine, when Nestorian monks selected the top of the tell to build a small monastery. T h e monastery itself was built on the north, while the pla teau to the south of it was used as a large courtyard with a surrounding wall. T h e entrance into the building led from this courtyard into a small hall, from which the central court yard, around which the various rooms were grouped, was accessible; A chapel was incorporated into the building and could be reached from the entrance hall by a stairway with five steps. T h e apse was rectangular, a unique occurrence among Nestorian churches that is characteristic of Syrian churches. T h e altar was discovered in a room next to the chapel, not in situ. East of the chapel a crypt with a separate entrance contained seven graves. Each grave contained ei ther two or three skeletons, all interred facing east. No ar tifacts of any kind were found, but the rubble inside the graves included pieces of plaster with fragments of inscrip tions in Syriac script, which was written by the Nestorians in the eighth century CE. Other inscriptions incised in Syriac on stone were found throughout the building. T h e monas tery was founded in the seventii century CE, but it did not last long. It suffered a sudden and violent destruction during the first half of the eighth century CE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan, et al. "Vorbericht iiber die Ausgrabungen auf der Hirbet el-Msas (Tel Masos), 2. Kampagne 1974." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 91 (1975): 1 0 9 - 1 3 0 . Ahlstrom, Gosta W. "The Early Iron Age Settlers at Hirbet el-Msas (Tel Masos)." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 100 (1984): 35-52Criiscmann, Frank. "Uberlegungen zur Identifikation der Hirbet elMsas (Tel Masos)." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 89 (1973): 2 1 1 - 2 2 4 . Fritz, Volkmar. "The Israelite 'Conquest' in the Light of Recent Ex cavations at Khirbet el-Meshash." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 241 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 6 1 - 7 3 . Fritz, Volkmar, and Aharon Kempinski. Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf der Hirbet el-Msas (Tel Masos), 1972-7$. 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 1983. Fritz, Volkmar. "Tel Masos; A Biblical Site in die Negev." Archaeology 36.5 (1983): 30-37Fritz, Volkmar. "Die Verbreitung des sog. Amarna-Wohnhauses in Kanaan." Damaszener Mitteilungen 3 (1988): 27-34. Kempinski, Aharon. "Tel Masos: Its Importance in Relation to the Setdement of the Tribes of Israel in the Northern Negev." Expedition 20.4 (1978): 29-37.
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Na'aman, Nadav. "The Inheritance of the Sons of Simeon." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 96 (1980): 1 3 6 - 1 5 2 . VOLKMAR F R I T Z
MASPERO, GASTON
( 1 8 4 6 - 1 9 1 6 ) , great French Egyptologist and most prolific author in the history of Egyp tology. Maspero studied hieroglyphs on his own as a youth and then under Professor Emmanuel de Rouge, whose suc cessor he became at the College de France in 1874 at the age of twenty-eight. In 1881 he succeeded Auguste Mariette as director of both Egypt's Bulaq Museum and the antiq uities service. At tiiis time he copied newly discovered reli gious texts inscribed inside late Old Kingdom pyramids for subsequent translation and publication. Circumstances forced Maspero to raise funds in Europe in order to undertake such work as the excavation of the Great Sphinx and the temple of Luxor. He resigned and returned to France in 1886 to produce a number of books including one on Egyptian archaeology and another on Egyptian literature. Maspero's three-volume Histoire ancienne des peuples de I'orient ciassique (Paris, 1 8 9 5 - 1 8 9 9 ) , which appeared in English as The Dawn of Civilization: Egypt and Chaldaea (London, 1894), exhibits his masterful broad command of history. Maspero returned to Egypt in 1899 to become the director of the newly established Egyptian Museum in Cairo and remained in this position until 1 9 1 5 . There he organized its already vast holdings and produced the first guide for visi tors. He supervised the conservation of such temples as Karnak, Edfu, Dendera, and Kom Ombo and the archaeological survey of Nubia to the south, threatened by the building of the first Aswan dam. Maspero's most useful archaeological project was undoubtedly his editorial direction of the catalog of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, fifty volumes of which appeared during his tenure as director. Maspero expanded and reorganized the Egyptian antiq uities service into five inspectorates. His appointments and honors from the scientific and scholarly worlds were nu merous. His English knighthood was a response to his un qualified support for the fledgling Egypt Exploration Fund in London, which went on to do so much important exca vation in Egypt under Flinders Petrie, Edouard Naville, and others, BIBLIOGRAPHY Dawson, Warren R„ and Eric P. Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. 2d rev, ed. London, 1972. Maspero, Gaston. Histoire ancienne des peuples de TOrient ciassique. 3 vols Paris, 1895-1899. Translated as History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria. 9 vols. Edited by A. H. Sayce. Translated by M. L. McClure. London, 1906. Maspero, Gaston, Egyptian Archaeology. Translated by Amelia B. Ed wards. New York, 1887.
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Maspero, Gaston. IJI Musee egypticn: Recueil de monuments et de notices sur les fouilles d'Egypte. Cairo, 1904-1924. Maspero, Gaston. Art in Egypt. New York, 1 9 1 2 . Maspero, Gaston. Guide du visiteur au Music du Caire. 4th ed. Cairo, 1915. Maspero, Gaston. Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt. New York, 1914. Naville, Edouard. "Sir Gaston Maspero." Journal of Egyptian Archae ology 3 (1916): 227-234. BARBARA SWITALSKI LESKO
MATARA, site of an Axumite urban center, located at the eastern edge of die northern Ethiopian escarpment about 3 km south of the modern town of Senafe, Eritrea (i4°43' N , 39°26' E). It sat beside the route that once led from Adulis, a port on die Red Sea, to Axum on the western side of the Ethiopian plateau. This unwalled provincial center was abandoned sometime after the early seventh century CE, al though tiiere is no evidence of fire or massive destruction to suggest a violent end to inhabitation. Excavations conducted by the Ethiopian Institute of Ar chaeology uncovered several typical Axumite mansions (similar to the great structure of Dungur at Axum) and a section of densely built popular housing, the latter datable to the sixth century CE. The site has only one dressed (finished) monolithic stela (about 5 m or 16.4 ft. high), the original position of which is uncertain. Its rounded top is decorated with the disk and crescent, the religious symbol of pre-Christian Axumite coins. (Axum's King Ezana converted to Christianity about 3 3 3 CE.) Its brief inscription in unvocalized Ge'ez script may date to the end of the third century. Although its sense is not clear, it refers to a military victory. Stelae at Axum are uninscribed. The mansion of Francis Anfray's complex A is datable to the third century. Its remains exemplify the Axumite build ing style. The square central pavilion, which is 12.6 X 1 1 . 2 m (41.4 X 36.7 ft.) sits upon a stepped podium (platform) of stone-faced, mud-mortared rubble. Walls and podium have projecting and re-entrant sections, and corners are re inforced with dressed-stone blocks. The pavilion, reached by a flight of stone stairs at the center of the west facade, sits within a courtyard. It may be compared with the con temporary complex C and the somewhat later complex B of Matara. Additions to complex A are post-Ezana in date, as indicated by the associated cross-marked pottery. The mansion complexes at Matara are aligned along the cardinal compass points. Complex C, a central pavilion raised on a stepped platform and witii surrounding annex rooms, is partially overlaid by complex D. The central pa vilion is subdivided into nine square sections, creating eight rooms and a staircase that led to upper story. Complex B, which is larger in size (59.5 X 49 m or 195 X 1 6 1 ft.) and later in date, is more regular in plan. The
rubble-stone and mud-mortared fabric of the central pavi lion's podium includes reused stone fragments from the Ethio-South Arabian period. T h e central pavilion with monumental stairs on its north, east, and west sides is di vided into nine "rooms"; stairs at two corners indicate an upper story. T h e surrounding rectangular courtyard is shaped by an exterior wall to which is attached a string of rooms opening off the courtyard. Associated finds included red pottery marked with a cross and Axumite coins of silver and bronze ranging in date from the reigns of Ezana to Gersem (seventh century). Architectutal complex D presents a new scheme. Al though its general plan—central pavilion within a courtyard shaped by an enclosure wall lined with annex rooms—re sembles the typical Axumite mansion, the central pavilion with grand western staircase has a crypt built of large, dressed-stone blocks. Above the lintel stone is a stone block carved with a cross. This chapel with subterranean tomb chamber is similar to the two subterranean tombs with su perstructure at Axum, the so-called tombs of Kaleb and Gabra Masqal, which appear to date to the mid-sixth century CE.
Matara's complex F includes a typical, probably galleried Christian basilica, which was built in Axumite style. Im mediately to the east of the church is a characteristic "keyhole"-shaped baptistery basin. Axumite structures of Matara were built upon earlier con structions. Anfray found evidence of four levels. T h e lowest of them, which was associated with objects of a marked South Arabian character and pottery, belongs to the EthioSouth Arabian period (fifth-fourth century BCE). T h e next, his period II, belongs to the intermediate period and is char acterized by schist walls and pottery similar to that found at Yeha, a major Ethiopian pre-Axumite site located east of Axum. It is unclear whether Matara was totally abandoned at the end of this intermediate period. Monuments of com plexes A and C belong to Anfray's period III, the pre-Chris tian Axumite period with which is associated red and black Axumite pottery with no Christian symbols. Monuments of complexes B and D belong to his period IV (fifth-seventh century CE). [See also Axum.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Anfray, Francis. "Premiere campagne de fouilles a Matara (Nov. 1 9 5 9 Jan. i960)." Annales d'Ethiopie 5 (1963): 87-166. Anfray, Francis, and G. Annequin. "Matara: Deuxieme, troisieme et quatrieme campagnes de fouilles." Annales d'Ethiopie 6 (1965): 4 9 142. Anfray, Francis. "Matara." Annales d'Ethiopie 7 (1967): 33-88. Anfray, Francis. "Deux villes axoumites: Adoulis et Matara." In IV Congresso Inlernazionale di Studi Etiopici—Roma 1972, pp. 745-766, pis. 1-6. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Quaderno no. 1 9 1 . Rome, 1974. 1
M A R I L Y N E . HELDMAN
MAUSOLEUM MAT ARIA BOAT. In 1987 excavations for utility con struction in Mataria (ancient Heliopolis or On), a suburb of Cairo, Egypt, exposed the remains of a boat, which dates to die fifth century BCE about 10 m (39 ft.) below ground level. Archaeologists recorded the existing 8 X 4 X 1.2 m (26 X 1 3 X 4 ft.) after about one-third of the hull was destroyed by heavy machinery. In addition, despite tire efforts of tlie Conservation Department of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, to record and preserve the fragments of the shallow, broad rivercraft, many of the planks of the surviving hull section broke apart. Most of the extant fragments today are 3 5 - 5 0 cm long. Barren sand immediately beneath the hull suggests that the craft was beached near an old river channel. Roman artifacts were found in tlie layers above the boat, but ar chaeologists discovered nothing directly related to tlie boat. Wood samples from the hull components include sycamore fig, sidder, acacia, and tamarisk, all local Egyptian woods. T h e boat from Mataria is the latest-known Egyptian hull. Its builders lived in a prosperous, yet unstable time when Egypt was ruled by die Persians (twenty-seventh dynasty, c. 525-404 BCE). A Greek colony at Naukratis in die Nile Delta dates to die sixth century, and increasing numbers of foreigners came to Egypt thereafter, providing the oppor tunity for Egyptians to observe different technologies. T h e Mataria hull reflects Egyptian nautical traditions that incor porated a feature of Mediterranean shipbuilding found in boats dating from the Late Bronze Age to the Byzantine period but never seen in the older Egyptian hulls: tlie oc casional use of pegs driven perpendicularly through tenons to lock mortise-and-tenon joints. Although this type of fas tening is known as early as the Egyptian first dynasty (c. 2920-2770) in the manufacture of furniture, coffins, and statues, the Mataria boat marks die first recorded use of pegged mortise-and-tenon joints in Egyptian shipbuilding. T h e mortises were up to 3 cm thick and 1 4 cm deep, larger than those of the seven known earlier Egyptian hulls. T h e use of treenails or pegs may reflect shipbuilding techniques adopted by the Egyptians about 1 2 5 0 BCE. A S the Mataria boat indicates, however, Egyptian shipbuilders did not im itate the practice followed elsewhere in the Mediterranean of locking every joint in place with pegs on either side of a plank seam. Not all mortise-and-tenon joints were pegged, and the current condition of the planking fragments pre vents an analysis of die relation of the pegs to the construc tion. Because the peg length was greater than plank thick ness, however, we must consider the possibility that the pegs functioned as treenails for fastening now-lost frames to the hull. As for other important technological features, the plank ing of the Mataria boat continues the Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom traditions of hull construction. In tlie Ma taria boat planks of .8-6.0 X .2 X .08 m ( 2 . 5 - 1 9 . 5 X .65 X .25 ft.) were edge-joined to create a shell. Plank ends appear to have been butted against each other to. form lines of
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planking called strakes, each side having about fifteen of them. Although tlie Mataria vessel ttaveled on tire Nile about the time that the fifth-century Greek historian Herod otus described Egyptian boat consttuction (Haldane and Shelmerdine, 1990), tlie Mataria planks are much longer than those of his account. T h e basic method of construction, however, was the same. Interestingly enough, planks of the same dimensions as those of the Mataria boat were recorded for Upper Egyptian watercraft of the 1950s. BIBLIOGRAPHY Casson, Lionel. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. Princeton, 1986. Haldane, Cheryl, and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine. "Herodotus 2.96.1-2 Again." Classical Quarterly 40 (1990): 535-539. Haldane, Cheryl. "The Lisht Timbers: A Report on Their Signifi cance." In The Pyramid Complex of Senzvosret I, by Dieter Arnold et al., pp. 1 0 2 - 1 1 2 . Metropolitan Museum of Art, Egyptian Expedition, South Cemeteries of Lisht, vol. 3. New York, 1992. Patch, Diana C , and Cheryl Haldane. The Pharaoh's Boat al the Car negie. Pittsburgh, 1990. CHERYL W . HALDANE
MAURITANIA. See North Africa.
MAUSOLEUM. T h e term mausoleum refers to a type of sepulchral monument that takes its name from the tomb of Mausolus of Halikarnassos, a Carian king who died in 353 BCE. The exact reconstruction of the mausoleum at Hal ikarnassos (modern Bodrum in Turkey) is disputed because of its poor state of preservation and the different descrip tions given by ancient sources. However, all the evidence indicates that it consisted of a rectangular building sur rounded by an Ionic colonnade on a base that may or may not have been a stepped pyramid. T h e building was capped by a stepped pyramid bearing a sculpted quadriga group. Mausolus commissioned some of the most famous artists of tlie fourth century BCE, including Scopas, Leochares, Bryaxis, and Timotheus, to sculpt the frieze that decorated tlie monument. T h e Mausoleum at Halikarnassos was ranked among the seven wonders of the ancient world. It provided the inspi ration and model for other highly decorated monumental tombs, especially in Asia Minor. One characteristic of these structures is the arrangement of a square base (or podium) that supports a building (or cella) that is surrounded by a colonnade and surmounted by a pyramidal roof. One such tomb was erected at Belevi near Smyrna, perhaps for An tiochus II of Syria, who died there in 246 HCE. The marble monument has a square podium with a Doric entablature containing the tomb chamber. T h e building on the podium was surrounded by Corinthian columns, between which stood larger-than-life-sized statues. T h e roof was probably
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pyramidal. Another tomb of this type, though smaller in size, is preserved at Mylasa in southwestern Turkey. Mausolea are also found in the Syro-Phoenician realm. The tomb of Hamrath, at Suweida in Syria's Hauran, erected in about 7 5 BCE, has a square base with engaged Doric columns capped by a stepped pyramidal roof and is constructed of stone. T h e sepulchral monuments at Hermel and Kalat Fakra in Lebanon are two-storied structures wkh smooth-sided, pyramidal roofs, also constructed of stone. Flavius Josephus (Antiquities 13.6.6) describes a mauso leum made of "polished white marble" erected in the second century BCE by Simon the Hasmonean at Modi'in (near modern Lod in Israel) for his fadier and brothers. Although this monument no longer exists, two Jewish mausolea of the first century BCE and first century CE still stand in Jerusalem's Kidron Valley. T h e so-called T o m b of Zechariah and the Tomb of Absalom are monolhhs cut out of die limestone of the rocky hillside. Each has a cubic central portion encircled by engaged columns. The T o m b of Zechariah has a smooth pyramidal roof, while the T o m b of Absalom is capped by a cylindrical "tholos." A Roman mausoleum built of rough stone dressed only on its outer face of the third or fourth century is located at the site of Mazor, also near Lod. Its lower part, which still stands virtually intact, has two burial chambers and a front porch with Corinthian columns. A mausoleum of the same date was found next to catacomb 1 1 in the Jewish necropolis at Beth-She'arim. It was con structed of ashlar masonry and decorated with a carved an imal frieze. [See also Burial Techniques; and Tombs.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, Nahman, and Benjamin Mazar. "Bedi She'arim." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, pp. 236-248. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Dinsmoor, William Bell. The Architecture of Ancient Greece. 3d ed. New York, 1950. Contains a brief discussion of the development of the mausoleum in the classical and Hellenistic worlds. Fedak, Janos. Monumental Tombs of the Hellenistic Age: A Study of Se lected Tombs from the Pre-Classical to the Early Imperial Era. Toronto, 1990. Excellent, up-to-date survey of monumental tombs throughout die Hellenistic world. Kaplan, Jacob. "Mazor." In The New Encyclopedia ofArchaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 991-992. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. JODI MAGNESS
MAZAR, BENJAMIN
( 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 9 5 ) , Israeli historian and archaeologist. Born in Cechanovitz, Poland, Mazar (originally Maisler) studied Assyriology at the University of Giessen, Germany, and received his Ph.D. in 1927. In 1928 he moved to Jerusalem. His research interests covered wideranging aspects of the history, archaeology, and historical geography of die land of Israel and of the ancient Near East.
In the years before World War II he was inspired by William Foxwell Albright, with whom he worked at Tell Beit Mirsim. From 1936 to 1939 he undertook excavations for the Israel Exploration Society at Beth-She'arim, where he uncovered a Jewish necropolis of the second-fourth centuries CE. In 1943 he became a member of the academic staff of tire He brew University of Jerusalem, where he established a de partment for the Historical Geography of the Land of Israel. He excavated at Beth-Yerah ( 1 9 4 5 ) , Tell Qasile ( 1 9 4 9 1 9 5 1 , 1956), and Ein-Gedi ( 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 6 4 ) . His largest and most important enterprise was the excavations south and west of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem ( 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 7 8 ) , where he uncovered public architecture from the Iron Age, Second Temple Period, and the Early Islamic period. His publica tions, teaching, and work over many years as editor in chief of the Hebrew Encyclopedia Biblica combined his broad knowledge and ability to synthesize data from the various fields of ancient Near Eastern studies, biblical studies, and archaeological research. This synthesis of disciplines was his main legacy to three generations of scholars in Israel, and many of his smdents became scholars in his numerous fields of interest. c
From 1 9 5 2 to 1 9 6 1 , Mazar was rector and president of the Hebrew University. Under his leadership the university overcame the crisis of the 1948 War of Independence, when the campus on Mt. Scopus was detached from the western part of Jerusalem, and entered a period of rapid academic development. H e was also involved for many years in de termining the general direction and quality of academic life in tire State of Israel. Mazar earned many prizes and hon orary degrees, among them the Israel Prize. [See also Beit Mirsim, Tell; Beth-She'arim; Beth-Yerah; 'Ein-Gedi; Israel Exploration Society; Jerusalem; Qasile, Tell; and the biography of Albright.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A survey of Mazar's most important works is provided below, along with several collections of major and minor essays. Untersuchungen zur Alten Geschichte und Ethnographie Syriens und Fa ustinas. Geissen, 1930. History of the Archaeological Research in Palestine (in Hebrew). Jerusa lem, 1936. Covers the history to 1925. History of the Land of Israel (in Hebrew). Part 1. Tel Aviv, 1938. En-Gedi: The First and Second Seasons of Excavations. 'Atiqot, 5. Jeru salem, 1966. Co-authored with Trude Dothan and Immanuel Dunayevsky. The Excavations at Beth She'arim (1945). 3 vols. New Brunswick, N.J., 1973-1976. Cities and Districts in Eretz-Israel (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1975. Col lected essays. The Mountain of the Lord. Garden City, N.Y., 1975. Canaan and Israel: Historical Essays (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1980. Excavations and Discoveries (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1986. Collected essays. The Early Biblical Period: Historical Studies. Edited by Shmuel Ahituv and Baruch Levine. Jerusalem, 1986.
MAZAR, TELL ELBiblical Israel: State and People. Edited by Shmuel Ahituv. Jerusalem,
1992. Collected essays.
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Stratum IV: seventh century BCE (Iron II) Stratum V: eighth century BCE (Early Iron II)
A M I H A I MAZAR
MAZAR, TELL EL-,
site located in modern Jordan in the middle of the Jordan Valley, approximately 3 km (2 mi.) north of Tell Deir 'Alia and 6.5 km (4 mi.) south of Tell esSa'idiyeh ( 3 2 ° i 3 ' 2 o " N , 3 5 ° 3 6 ' 2 2 " E; map reference 1 8 1 2 X 2074). T h e mound is relatively small (.75 acres) but rises an impressive 24 m above the surrounding plain (the elevation of the summit is 228.67 m below sea level). T h e site does not appear to have been founded on a natural hill but is comprised strictly of accumulated occupational debris. T h e absence of major fortifications strongly suggests that throughout its history, Tell el-Mazar was dependent on the larger villages in the region for both its security and eco nomic prosperity. Associated with Tell el-Mazar is a small mound—referred to as mound A in the excavation reports—located 220 m northwest of the main tell (map reference 1 8 1 3 X 2073). Mound A rises only 1.8 m above the plain, has a maximum elevation of 249.10 m below sea level, and covers an area of just over an acre. The name Mazar (Ar., "place of visitation or pilgrimage") may be derived from tire nearby mosque and grave of Abu Obeidah, an early Islamic general. Tell elMazar is not attested in ancient sources, including the He brew Bible. Tell el-Mazar was noted and briefly examined by Nelson Glueck ( 1 9 5 1 ) in 1 9 4 2 and by Moawiyah Ibrahim, James Sauer, and Khair Yassine (1976) in 1 9 7 5 . These surface sur veys collected pottery from the tell proper dating to tire Mid dle and Late Bronze Ages and Iron I—II, Persian, Early Ro man, Byzantine, and 'Abbasid periods. Glueck ( 1 9 5 1 ) refers to mound A as Tell el-Ghazala (his site no. 1 7 7 ) and col lected LB, Iron II, Roman, and Byzantine pottery from the surface. T h e first excavations at the tell and on mound A were initiated by Yassine for the University of Jordan in 1977. A total of four, two-month seasons were conducted on the tell ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 7 9 , 1 9 8 1 ) . Mound A was also investigated during the 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 7 9 campaigns. Stratigraphy. Although both surface surveys found M B and LB pottery, the earliest stratified material discovered thus far dates to Iron I. Five distinct strata have been iden tified on the summit of the main tell, covering an occupa tional sequence from the eighth through the late fourth cen turies BCE, as follows: Stratum I: fourth century BCE (Late Persian/Early Helle nistic) Stratum II: fifth century BCE (Persian) Stratum III: sixth-seventh centuries BCE (Late Iron II)
Because of successive episodes of destruction, rebuilding, and pitting, architectural plans for the five strata at Tell elMazar are incomplete. Nevertheless, die overall occupa tional sequence is relatively clear. Mound A yielded evi dence of an eleventh-tentir-century BCE occupation followed by a four hundred-year hiatus and then a reuse in the fifth century BCE as a cemetery. Major Finds. T h e earliest occupational layer uncovered tirus far (stratum V) consists of a large, flagstone-paved courtyard surrounded by rooms that contained loom weights, storage jars filled with grain, a beer mug, and a variety of animal bones. The excavator suggests that the fiery destruction at the end of the eighth century BCE may be attributed to Sennacherib's invasion of the region in 7 0 1 (Yassine, 1983, pp. 5 1 0 - 5 1 2 ) . In the early seventh century BCE a series of domestic struc tures (stratum IV) was built on the debris of stratum V. The modest walls and die rooms, which contained domestic utensils, suggest that the structures were private houses rather than part of a public or military installation. The stra tum IV occupation appears to have ended peacefully. A large structure, designated tire palace-fort, was built on top of the stratum W houses. Its central portion consisted of a raised platform, or podium ( 1 0 X 1 5 m), surrounded by a thick (1.70 m) mud-brick wall and was divided into three large rooms. T o the east, a stairway led to rooms at a lower level. Those rooms were used for a variety of domestic ac tivities, including cooking, meat processing, food storage, and weaving. T h e stratum IV courtyard located north of tire palace-fort is at the same elevation as the lower rooms and was reused in stratum III (Yassine, 1983, pp. 5 0 7 - 5 1 0 ) . Shortly before an intense fire destroyed the palace-fort, a series of partition walls was added in the podium rooms in an extensive remodeling. These newly formed rooms were the scene of increased domestic activity in this part of the structure. The excavator suggests tiiat the desnuction of the palace-fort in the early sixth century BCE may be attributable to Nabuchadrezzar IPs campaign in 582 (Yassine, 1983, pp. 503-507).
The beginning of the fiftii-century BCE occupation (stra tum II) is marked by massive filling and leveling over the desttuction debris of stratum III. A number of poorly con structed mud-brick rooms and adjoining courtyards appear to be modest private houses built roughly on the same ori entation as the stratum III structures. T h e stratum II inhab itants of Tell el-Mazar used mound A as their cemetery. Objects from both the tell and the cemetery display a dis tinctive Archaemenid Persian influence (Yassine, 1983, pp. 501-503).
The Tell el-Mazar settiement seems to have slowly dwin-
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died during the early fourth century BCE. By late in that cen tury, the summit of the mound was covered with numerous pits and silos measuring up to 2 m in diameter and 4 m deep. [See Granaries and Silos.] The absence of any architectural remains from this phase (stratum I) indicates that die tell was then used exclusively as a granary (Yassine, 1983, pp. 498-500).
The earliest stratum on mound A revealed rite fragmen tary remains of a large (24 X 12.60 m) tripartite structure with stone foundations, mud-brick walls 1.20 m thick, and an associated courtyard 16 m wide. Constructed in the elev enth century BCE and destroyed in the late tenth century BCE, the building contained a variety of ceramic vessels (includ ing storage jars, kraters, bowls, and chalices) and a fenes trated incense stand. Although no contemporary occupa tional layers have been found on the summit of main tell, it seems probable that they might be encountered beneath stratum V. Iron I layers and architecture have been uncov ered on the tell's south slope. Citing parallels from BethShean, Lachish, Megiddo, Ta'anach, and Deir 'Alia, the ex cavator has interpreted this structure as an open-court sanctuary with seven distinct phases of use, corresponding to phases F-K at Deir 'Alia (Yassine, 1984b). [See BethShean; Lachish; Megiddo; Ta'anach; Deir 'Alia, Tell.] In the fifth century BCE, mound A was used as a cemetery, apparently by the people who occupied the homes of stra tum II on the tell. Eighty-five graves have been excavated (Yassine, 1984a). Three main types of burials are repre sented: simple interments (pit graves); pits lined with mud bricks; and pits lined with stones on one side. In addition, there was one infant jar burial (no. 47) and one larnax (clay coffin) burial (no. 23). The graves were approximately 1 m deep, .70 m wide, and 1 - 2 m long, each containing a single burial. Most, but not all, of the burials were oriented eastwest, with tire head at the east end of the grave, facing south. Males were buried in an extended position, whereas females were placed in a flexed position. Typical female grave goods consisted of silver and copper earrings, kohl sticks, shells, and beads. Males were often buried with iron arrowheads, spearpoints, and knives/daggers as well as stamp and cyl inder seals made from limestone and such semiprecious stones as marble, agate, jasper, and lapis lazuli. Copper and ceramic vessels and copper/bronze pins, rings, and fibulae were found with both males and females. The cemetery was used throughout the fifth and possibly into the early fourth centuries BCE. [See Burial Sites; Tombs; Grave Goods; Jew elry; Weapons.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/2S. New Haven, 1 9 5 1 . See pages 302-307. Ibrahim, Moawiyah, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1 9 7 5 . " Bul
letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 222 (1976): 4 1 66. Yassine, Khair. "Ammonite Seals from Tell el-Mazar." In Studies in the Histoiy and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 189-194. Amman, 1982. Yassine, Khair. "Tell El Mazar, Field I. Preliminary Report of Area G, H, L, and M: The Summit." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 27 (1983): 4 9 5 - 5 1 3 , pis. 1 0 0 - 1 1 2 . Yassine, Khair. Tell el-Mazar, vol. 1 , Cemetery A. Amman, 1984a. Yassine, Khair. "The Open Court Sanctuary from the Iron I at Tell elMazar Mound A." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 100 (1984b): 1 0 8 - 1 1 8 . Yassine, Khair, and Javier Teixidor. "Ammonite and Aramaic Inscrip tions from Tell el-Mazar in Jordan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 264 (1986): 45-50. Yassine, Khair, ed. Archaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports. Amman, 1988. DAVID W . M C C R E E R Y and
MCFADDEN, GEORGE
K H A I R YASSINE
( 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 5 3 ) , pioneer of American archaeology in Cyprus. A graduate in architecture from Princeton University, McFadden was deeply inter ested in the broad span of classical Greek civilization from literature to archaeology. He inspired, supported, and codirected the first major field project from the New World to excavate on Cyprus. The University of Pennsylvania Museum (now the Uni versity Museum) had previously sponsored a brief excava tion on Cyprus in 1 9 3 1 directed by Bert Hodge Hill, but it lacked the means to underwrite more fieldwork. With McFadden's generous contribution the museum's Kourion Expedition was established to trace the history of human occupation in the area from earliest times through the breakup of the Roman Empire. Beginning in 1934, Mc Fadden and Hill directed extensive excavations at several localities; at the city-site of Kourion they uncovered die the ater, basilica, stadium, and temple of Apollo, now regarded as some of die island's most spectacular archaeological dis coveries. The expedition also sponsored an archaeological survey of the region and the excavation of and the publication by the Cypriot Department of Antiquities of Sotira Teppes, a Ceramic Neolithic settlement north of Kourion. McFadden would have been well pleased to know that the archaeological tradition he established was to thrive after his accidental death. His fine house in the village of Episkopi, a short distance from Kourion, was partially converted into a museum displaying local archaeological finds, and the rest of the building has accommodated, over the years, expedi tions associated with a wide range of sites. Some projects investigated the earliest human occupation of Cyprus on the Akrotiri peninsula, and others, at the far end of the chron ological spectrum, have explored the medieval origins of Episkopi, McFadden's adoptive village, overlooking the bay where he drowned. Since 1969, the American School of
MECCA Classical Studies at Athens has offered many fellowships in McFadden's memory. [See also Cyprus; Kourion.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Davis, Thomas W. "A History of American Archaeology on Cyprus." Biblical Archaeologist 5 2 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : ! 6 3 - 1 6 9 . The most detailed overview to date of American archaeological research on the island. Friend, A. M., Jr. "Necrology." American Journal of Archaeology 58 (1954): 154McFadden, George. "A Tomb of the Necropolis of Ayios Ermoyenis at Kourion." American Journal of Archaeology 50 (1946): 449-489, pis. 34-49. McFadden, George. "A Late Cypriote III Tomb from Kourion Kaloriziki No. 40." American Journal of Archaeology 58 (1954): 1 3 1 - 1 4 2 . McFadden's most important publication of material excavated by the Kourion Expedition. Swiny, Helena W., ed. An Archaeological Guide to the Ancient Kourion Area and the Akrotiri Peninsula. Nicosia, 1982. Contains many ref erences to McFadden's role in the Kourion excavations and de scribes his house and museum in Episkopi Village. STUART S W I N Y
MEC CA (more properly, Makkah), city located in an arid valley in al-Hijaz in western Saudi Arabia ( 2 i ° 2 7 ' N , 39°39' E) and about 73 km (45 mi.) from the Red Sea port of Jeddah, which serves the pilgrims to Mecca. T o the south east is the town of Ta'if, 88 1cm (55 mi.) away. Mecca must have existed since ancient times as the Ka'bah (see below) was established in the nineteenth century BCE (Salama, 1994); it has been known by different names, such as Bakka, U m m al-Qura, Makkah, al-Balad al-Amim (surah 95.3 in the Qur'an), or "the safe land." T h e climate is very hot. Around the Mecca Valley are mountains and wadis. T h e famous Mecca mountains, which have been frequendy mentioned in autobiographies and geographical sources are Jabal Abi Qobais on the east, Jabal Qunaiga' on the west and Jabal Hira'. A few of the main antiquities of Mecca and its environs are mentioned below. Both Bakka and Mecca are mentioned in the Qur'an. T h e holy mosque (al masjid al-Haram) with the Ka'bah at its cen ter is the holiest place of Islam for Muslims. It is the first house of worship that Allah appointed (3.96; 48.24). During ancient times Mecca was famous for Arabia's foremost sanctuary, the Ka'bah, which was built by Ibrahim (Abra ham), and pilgrims thronged to it from distant places. T h e building of the Ka'bah by Abraham and Ismail is mentioned in the Qur'an ( 2 . 1 2 5 - 1 2 7 , 1 1 9 - 1 2 1 ) . Local clans, such as tire Jurhom, Khuzaa , and Quraysh, controlled it from time to time. All Muslims face the Ka'bah for prayers. It was rebuilt several times. Mecca was the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, and the Qur'anic revelations were originally addressed to the people of Mecca to reform them socially and morally. It was at Jabal Hira' on which the angel Gibril (Gabriel) descended from heaven and revealed Islam c
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to the prophet Muhammad and directed him to spread it. Jabal Hira' is located some 6 km (3.7 mi.) to the northeast of Mecca. Jabal Thawr is also situated at tire same distance to the southeast. In this mountain Muhammad hid himself before his migration to Medina. When Caliph Umar made a pilgrimage to Mecca in AH 17/638 CE, a wall was built around the Ka'bah. This was enlarged by Caliph 'Uthman in 26/646 and arcades were built. Since then the holy mosque has been under constant expansion and rebuilding and has achieved the current ex tent under the government of Saudi Arabia. T h e names of the extant old quarters are Ajyad, al-Mesfala, al-Shubaika, al-Hojon, al-Ma'abida, Shi'b-'Ali, Shi'b'Amir, and Kudai. Of the several cemeteries in Mecca, alMa'lat, north of the Ka'bah, contains the burials of several venerable companions of tire Prophet as well as of other followers and Muslim scholars; it has numerous inscribed tombstones, which provide important biographical infor mation. Because of Mecca's strategic location, it developed into an important commercial center where all principal trade and pilgrim routes, both internal and external, converged, Uniting Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and the cities of Basra, and Kufah. Since antiquity quarrying and masonry have been known at Mecca. Mecca has long accommodated markets, mosques, baths, and different industries. The valleys near Mecca have been exploited for farming; the most important are Wadi Fatimah, Wadi Nu'man, and Wadi 'Oranal. During the twentieth century, Mecca has expanded con siderably, becoming a cosmopolitan city. Millions of pil grims and other visitors arrive annually. Because of the con tinuous structural expansions for al-Haram mosque, many of the cultural landmarks have disappeared from the center of the holy city. However, some of tire remains still reflect ancient architecture of mixed elements, botit local and for eign. Islamic antiquities at Mecca and its vicinity are numerous. T h e two ancient mosques associated with the Ka'bah and pilgrimage rites are Namira at Arafat and al-Khaif at Mina. During the cleaning of tire Zemzem well in 1979, which springs from the eastern part of the Ka'bah area a large number of antiquities were recovered, such as pottery ves sels, ceramics, metal objects, and Islamic coins (some of them are dated to the Ottoman era and the beginning of the modern Saudi state). Some Kufic inscriptions on columns in the al-Haram mosque dated to the reign of the 'Abbasid caliph al-Mahadi ( 1 5 8 - 1 6 9 / 7 7 5 - 7 8 5 ) survive. These texts documentthe com prehensive expansion of the al-Haram mosque during alMahadi's rule. Some inscriptions of the Mamluk and Ottoman periods are also found in the mosque, recording the expansion and amendments of al-Haram by other ca liphs and sultans. Various ancient reservoirs and dams re-
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main in and around Mecca. Near Mina three dams were erected by al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf al-Thagafi, who ruled the Mecca emirate on behalf of the caliph Abdul Malik ibn Marwan for three years (73-75/692-694), Sad Athal, the biggest dam, which is built in stone, is about 140 m (460 ft.) long, 5.6 m (18.4 ft.) high, and 6 m (19.6 ft.) wide. One of the surviving water structures to date is at 'Ain Zobaida, which was financed and erected by al-Sayida Zobaida, die wife of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. It covers an area of 40 Ion (24.8 mi.) southeast of Mecca, extending to Arafat and Mina as well. It was used until the beginning of the twentieth century. [See also Medina.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Angawi, SarniMuhsin. "Makkan Architecture." Ph.D. diss.,University of London, 1988. Arslan, Shaktb. Al-irtisamat al-litdf fi khatir al-hajj ila aqdas malaf. Cairo, c. 1 9 3 1 . Add; The Journal ofSaudi Arabian Archaeology 1-2 ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 7 8 ) . AzraqT, Abfl al-WalTd Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah. AkhbarMakkah wamdjaa Jiha min al-'aihdr. 2 vols. Mecca, 1965. Barakati, N. Abdulla al-, and Muhammed N. Sulayman Manna'. Dirasa Tarikh iya Lirnasagid al-Masha'r al-Moqadasa. Jeddah, 1988. Basalamah, Husayn 'Abd Allah. Tarikh Hmarat al-Masjid al-Haram. Cairo, 1964. BiladI, 'Atiq ibn Ghayth al-. Ma'Slim Makkah al-tarikhiyah wa-al-athariyah. Mecca, 1980. Burton, Richard F. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah. 2 vols. New York, 1964. Esin, Emel. Mecca the Blessed, Madinah the Radiant, London, 1963. Fa'ar, M. Fahad al-. Tatawor al-Kitabdt wa-al-Nuqush JTal-Hijdz. Jed dah, 1984. Fakihl, Muhammad ibn Ishaq al-. Akhbar Makkah fiqaatm al-Dahrwahadi thih. 6 vols. Edited by 'Abd al-Malik ibn 'Abd Allah ibn Duhaysh. Mecca, 1986-1988. Fast, TaqT al-DTn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-. Al-'iqdal-thamTn ji tarikh al-Balad al-Amin. 8 vols. Cairo, 1958-1969. Ibn Jubayr, Muhammad ibn Ahmad. Rihlat Ibnjubayr. Beirut, 1968. Kawshak, Y. Hamza. Zemzem ta'amun ta'im wa-sharabun sogem. Jed dah, 1983. Salama, Awatif Adib. Quraysh Khabal Islam. Dar al-Mariq, 1414/1994. Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan. Makkah in the Later Part of the Nine teenth Century. Leiden and London, 1 9 3 1 . Zaila'T, Ahmad 'Umar al-. Makkah wa-Alaqatuha al-KharijTyah. Ri yadh, 1981. SA'AD ABDUL A Z I Z AL-RASHID
MEDA'IN SALEH ("cities of Saleh"), site located in northwestern Arabia (26°5i' N , 37°58' E), directly on the caravan route between Syria and Yemen. T h e site is uni versally identified with Hegra (or Egra), the Nabatean ad ministrative and military center in the southern part of their kingdom, second in importance only to their capital, Petra. It is mentioned by Strabo (16.4.24) and also by Pliny (6.32.156) and Stephanus of Byzantium (Ethnika 260, n 1 2 ) . In Islamic tradition, as al-Hijr, it is associated with the Thamud, one of the early peoples of Arabia, whom God sought to convert from polytheism by sending the prophet
Saleh to them. When the Thamud rejected him, their town was destroyed. Meda'in Saleh lies in a spectacular setting of isolated sandstone stacks, weathered into fantastic shapes, surrounding a broad, sand-filled basin. T h e basin is fed by winter storms and flash floods which provide ample supplies of water easily tapped by wells and cisterns. T h e site was familiar to thousands of Muslim pilgrims traveling to Mecca, and it is mentioned by many of the medieval Arab geographers. It was not until 1888 tiiat it was brought to the attention of the Western world, however. Charles M. Doughty wrote about it in Travels in Arabia Deserta (Cam bridge, 1888); however, it was not until 1909 that Antonin Jaussen and Raphael Savignac's very full description of the monuments and the inscriptions was published, with many photographs, drawings, and a sketched plan (Mission ar cheologique en Arabia, 2 vols., Paris, 1909 and 1 9 1 4 ) . More recent work has added a little to their account, but it remains basic for any consideration of the history of the site. The earliest datable archaeological evidence appears to be seven monumental South Arabian inscriptions on reused building blocks, presumably the work of the Minean mer chants established at Dedan, some 20 km ( 1 2 mi.) to the south, in about the fourth-third centuries BCE. [See Dedan.] There are also some Lihyanite graffiti from about the same period. T h e kingdom of Lihyan, based at Dedan, probably fell to a Nabatean adventurer, Mas'udu, in the second or early first century BCE. It must have been at this time that Meda'in Saleh was chosen by the rulers of Petra as the site for their southern base. T h e earliest datable pottery lying on the surface of die site—the distinctive fine Nabatean painted ware—dates to this time. Nothing more is known about tiiis early period of occupation and development; Strabo's ref erence relates to about 24 BCE and alludes to the site as a village in the territory of King Obodas II. Judging from the inscriptions on the tombs (see below), the site flourishes in the first century CE, when its principal role was to collect payments from the Arabian trade caravans and protect the routes. When the Nabatean kingdom was annexed by Rome in 1 0 6 CE, it is unlikely tiiat Hegra's strategic position was forgotten. Epigraphic evidence points to both a section of the Third Legion and a number of local auxiliary troops being stationed there during the second and possibly die third centuries CE. Notiiing is known after that, and by the time of the Muslim conquest in the seventh century CE the "cities of Saleh" were the subject only of pious specu lation. Very little is visible on the surface of what was probably a prosperous and cosmopolitan town. T h e most striking re mains are the approximately eighty Nabatean tomb facades carved in the sandstone cliffs (see figure 1 ) . T h e facades are very similar to those at Petra, although the very ornate "clas sical baroque" tombs at Petra are absent at Meda'in Saleh. [See Petra.] They range in style from relatively plain, flat, vertical surfaces surmounted by one or two rows of crenel-
MEDEINEH, KHIRBET EL-
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MED A'IN SALEH. Figure I . Tomb facades. (Courtesy P. J. Parr)
lations carved in low relief, to more elaborate facades with deeply cut moldings, pilasters, capitals, architraves, and pediments. They reproduce in the living rock the appear ance of the entrance to a freestanding building. This archi tectural ornamentation is derived from a wide variety of sources, including ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the classical world; it demonstrates that eclecticism which is the hallmark of Nabatean art and which makes it unique. Unlike the tombs at Petra, almost half of those at Meda'in Saleh bear inscriptions over their doorways, in the Nabatean script. T h e inscriptions are essentially legal texts, copies of which seem also to have been deposited in a temple. T h e inscriptions give the epitaph of the owner, the date of con struction (in the form of the regnal year of the Nabatean king), and, in some cases, the occupation of the owner and tire name of the stonecutter employed (interestingly not called an architect). The importance of tiiese inscriptions is twofold: they prove that the types of Nabatean facades rep resented here were being carved contemporaneously be tween i and 76 CE (the varying degrees of embellishment primarily reflect social status, and thus the wealth of the owner). They also demonstrate a concentration of highranking military personnel in the city, presumably on ac count of its importance for guarding the southern limits of the Nabatean realm. [See also Nabatean Inscriptions; Nabateans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bowersock, Glen W. Roman Arabia. Cambridge, Mass., 1983. Standard work on the subject, including the best short account of Nabatean history, with many references to Meda'in Saleh. Bowsher, J. M. C. "The Frontier Post of Medain Saleh." In The Defence
of die Roman and Byzantine East, edited by Philip Freeman and Da vid Kennedy, pp. 19-30. Oxford, 1986. Succinct account of the mil itary organization of tire site in Nabatean and Roman times, derived from the texts. McKenzie, Juditii. The Architecture of Petra. London, 1990. Includes a chapter on the Meda'in Saleh tombs, with emphasis on the devel opment of the architectural ornament and its relevance for dating the tombs at Petra. Negev, Avraham. "The Nabataean Necropolis at Egra." RevueBiblique 83 (1976): 203-236. Very useful survey of the dated tombs, discuss ing both the architecture and the owners' social status. PETER J . PARR
MEDEINEH, KHIRBET EL-, site located on the c
eastern bank of Wadi al-Mo arradjeh, branch of the Mujib River, 7 km ( 4 mi.) east of Smakieh and about 1 6 km ( 1 0 mi.) from Qasr, a village situated on the Madaba-Kerak road in modern Jordan. T h e site was only recentiy identified with the Moabite cities attested in the Hebrew Bible and the his torical records. Excavations were undertaken by Emilio Olavarri for the Casa Santiago in Jerusalem in 1976 and 1982. The ruins cover a town surrounded by a solid wall that conforms to the oval configuration of the surface of the hill. A single wall 4 m wide defended the steep slopes to the north and south. T h e eastern slope, whose gradient is softer and more vulnerable, had a double parallel defense wall. In the town, the residential structures were attached to the inner face of the defense wall, leaving open space, perhaps a small plaza, in the center. One of these houses, which measures 10 X 6 m, was excavated in the 1976 campaign. Its four rooms are separated longitudinally by eight monolithic pil lars on which the poles that held up the roof were probably
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affixed. Regular stone benches are attached to the walls of the rooms. In fire 1982 campaign, another house was cleared with the following interior distribution: an open court at the entrance whose door is on tire north wall; two rooms sepa rated by three monolithic stone pillars that supported a ter race; an interior room with a window opening to the court; and a triangular enclosure with a staircase leading up to the terrace. This house clearly resembles tire four-room Iron Age I pillared houses found elsewhere in the area. [See Fourroom House.] On the eastern side of the hill, the outer defensive wall was reinforced with two rectangular towers, one in its north ern corner and the other in the middle of its course. A third tower at tire southern corner, detached from the town wall, defended the main entrance. Near it, the doorway consisted of two rectangular towers delimiting an interior hall ( 2 X 1 0 m) in which stone benches were attached to the towers' in terior walls. At the farthest end of the hall, a staircase with three steps served either as a place to dismount or as the presidential seat during the city's senate assembly (cf. Gn. 2 3 : 1 0 , 34, 20 ff.; Prv. 3 1 : 2 3 ) .
The pottery is a uniform repertoire assignable to a brief, single period of occupation (twelfth-eleventh centuries BCE). Predominant are the fragments of large jars with col lared rims, craters, and characteristic cooking pots. T h e do mestic housewares generally have a white slip. N o remains of painted decoration or red-slipped burnished sherds were found. Khirbet el-Medeineh, then, was small town, sttongly for tified, belonging to the old kingdom of Moab. It was founded in tlie twelfth century BCE and abandoned in about 1 0 7 5 - 1 0 5 0 BCE. Its structures and pottery indicate a clear affinity with the contemporary urban environment in Ca naan in the first phase of Iron Age I. Its strategic placement echoes tlie pressing interest with which the kings of Moab defended their eastern frontier from nomadic incursions coming from the eastern plateau. It was during this time that the Israelite tribes, bound for Canaan and sharing a vaster and increasing movement toward sedentarization, passed Khirbet el-Medeineh, on Moab's eastern frontier (Nm. 2 1 : 1 1 ; Jgs. 1 1 : 1 8 ) . BIBLIOGRAPHY Miller, J. Maxwell. "Archaeological Survey South of Wadi Mujib: Glueck's Sites Revisited." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 23 (1979): 79-92. Olavarri, Emilio. "Sondeo arqueol6gico en Khirbet Medeineh junto a Smakieh (Jordania)." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities of Jordan 22 ( I 9 7 7 - I 9 7 8 ) : 136-149= Pi- 84Olavarri, Emilio. "La campagne de fouilles 1982 a Khirbet Medeinet al-Mu'arradjeh pres de Smakieh (Kerak)." Annualof the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 27 (1983): 1 6 5 - 1 7 8 , pis. 2 8 - 3 1 . E M I L I O OLAVARRI
MEDES. T h e heartland of ancient Media is located in the central Zagros Mountains of western Iran. T h e Medes first appear in Assyrian cuneiform sources in tlie middle of tlie ninth century BCE. These early sources speak of many Median uibes and Median kings. Eventually, possibly late in the seventh century BCE, a unified Median state was formed. Allied with the Babylonians, the Medes captured Nineveh in 6 1 2 BCE, which led to the collapse of the Assyrian Empire in 6 1 0 BCE. [See Nineveh.] Median power then stretched from the Halys River in Anatolia to perhaps as far east as northeastern modern Iran. They are said to have ruled over the Persians, another Iranian tribe. They were conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 550 BCE, and throughout Achaemenid times they were the second-most important people in the empire after the Persians them selves. Median history and culture are complex. Herodotus ( 1 . 9 5 - 1 3 0 ) recounts that originally the Medes were village dwellers. They were united, at their request, under the lungship of one Deioces, who founded the capital city of Ecba tana (modern Hamadan). [See Ecbatana.] H e then reigned for fifty-three years. Deioces was followed on the throne by his son Phraoites, who conquered the Persians, ruled for twenty-two years, and died fighting the Assyrians. His suc cessor, Cyaxares, ruled for forty years and reorganized the Median army, separating spearmen, archers, and cavalry into separate units. In 6 1 2 BCE, in alliance with the Babylo nians, Cyaxares conquered Nineveh. He was succeeded by his son Astyages, who reigned for thirty-five years and was overthrown by Cyrus in 550 BCE. Herodotus ( 1 . 1 0 3 - 1 0 6 ) also recounts that Cyaxares's at tacks on Assyria were interrupted by the conquest of Media by the Scythians, who ruled "Upper Asia" for twenty-eight years until they were finally driven out by Cyaxares. [See Scythians.] Herodotus's story may be a true account of a Median national epic history. Other written and archaeo logical sources on Median history, however, confirm H e rodotus only in part. There is no record of either Deioces or Phraortes independent of Herodotus, and convoluted ef forts by imaginative scholars to prove otherwise have failed. Astyages, on die otiier hand, is clearly the Istuwigu of the cuneiform Babylonian chronicle and probably came to the throne of Media in 585 BCE. Cyaxares is the Umakistar of an earlier Babylonian chronicle that tells of the fall of Nin eveh and the collapse of Assyria. Using Herodotus's chro nology, Cyaxares came to the throne in 625 BCE. Thus, the latter half of Herodotus's story of the Median royal house is, in part, corroborated. From archaeological and Assyrian cuneiform sources it is possible, independently of Herodotus, to reconstruct some thing of the early history of Media. T h e Assyrian sources give a clear picture of the Medes as an important people widespread throughout the central western Zagros from the
MEDES mid-ninth to the mid-seventh century BCE and ruled by nu merous "kings." Not all Medes lived in what, in these early times, can be called Media. T h e geographical Media, as known to the Assyrians, seems to have been located along the so-called High Road in tire neighborhood of modern Kermanshah and eastward. Other peoples, some Iranian, some not, also lived in this area, but the sources suggest that, once as far east as the Hamadan plain, there were only Medes. Thus, the heartland of geographic Media would seem to lie east of Mt. Alvand (the mountain against whose eastern flank the city of Hamadan/Ecbatana lies). The peo ple called Medes in the Assyrian texts are clearly a very di verse people in terms of culture and social and political or ganization. T h e archaeological sources, such as they are, tend to con firm this picture. This is the Iron Age III period in Iranian archaeology (c. 850-500 BCE in central western Iran). T h e principal sites that can be considered Median are Tepe Nush-i Jan, Godin period II, and Baba Jan. Nush-i Jan was apparentiy primarily a religious establishment; Godin II the fortified palace of an important Median khan or tribal chief, such as are often mentioned in the Assyrian sources; and Baba Jan may have been the seat of a lesser tribal ruler. [See Godin Tepe.] Though broadly similar in many cultural characteristics, there are nevertheless marked differences among these sites that are in part the result of chronology and in part of functional variation, but that may also rep resent the diversity among the so-called Medes found in the Assyrian sources. Herodotus's story of tire earliest Medes living in "vil lages"—meaning, to the Greeks, that they had no cities and no central government and were, thus, uncivilized—ap pears, then, to be partially corroborated. On the other hand, there is no evidence for a unification of the Median state under Deioces or anyone else as early as the late eighth cen tury BCE, as Herodotus recounts. There is also no evidence outside of Herodotus for a Scythian interregnum in Median history, although there is abundant evidence in Assyrian sources for the presence of Scythians in western Iran in the seventh century BCE. T h e Assyrian sources fall silent on western Iran in about 640 BCE. Because Hamadan remains unexcavated, there is no available archaeological evidence of any centralization of the Median state. It is possible to conclude, however, that such a central state came into being sometime in the reign of Cyaxares, prior to the Median participation in the col lapse of Assyria. In dealing with Cyaxares and Astyages, the Babylonian chronicle speaks of only one Median king. Cyaxares was clearly a powerful figure. Under him the Medes are reported to have sacked Harran in north Syria in 6 1 0 BCE and are at war with the Lydians deep in Anatolia in 585 BCE. T h e situation clearly changed markedly from the picture received from the texts of Sargon II of Assyria ( 7 2 1 ~
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705 BCE) of a Media of many tribes and many kings. Thus, some kind of Median political unity was created late in the seventh century BCE, possibly as a case of secondary state formation under pressure from Assyria. This undoubted political unification of Media also had important cultural implications: it led to the "iranianization" of the central and northern Zagros Mountains. The Assyrian records speak of many ethnic groups and polities beside Medes in these regions in the eighth century BCE. Among other non-Iranian people were the Namrians, Ellipi, and Manneans. Yet, by the time the Babylonian chronicler is writing, all these people had disappeared from the written record and he knew the area simply as Media, occupied by Medes. T h e Manneans, as allies of the Assyrians at the seige of Nineveh, are, in fact, the last people from central western and northwestern Iran, other than Medes, mentioned in cu neiform sources. By the end of the seventh century BCE, Media had emerged as one of the four principal powers of the ancient Near East, alongside Babylonia, Lydia, and Egypt. Cyrus the Great, by conquering Astyages and the Medes, thus, in one stroke, brought tire other major Iranian group, the Per sians, to world power. As noted above, however, the Medes remained a privileged group in the Persian Empire as the second-most important people ruled by the "ldng of kings." Indeed, these two Iranian groups were so identified that the Greeks spoke sometimes of Medes and sometimes of Per sians when referring to the Achaemenid Iranians. For a Greek to become too closely associated with Iranian culture was to become medianized, not persianized. Medes played an equal role in the imperial guard with Persians and were equally responsible for the defense of the Achaemenid Em pire. It is also clear that Median culture, perhaps particularly in matters of religion, became thoroughly embedded in broader Iranian culture. T h e Median language, Old North west Iranian (as reconstructed by certain loanwords in Mod ern Persian such as sag, the word for "dog"—there are no texts in Median), is very likely the ancient form of modern Kurdish. If this is true, then part of ancient Media is still occupied by the descendents of the Medes. Median art and architecture remain subjects of some con troversy. Assuming that Godin II and Nush-i Jan were in deed Median sites, they provide in their architecture a clear link between the tradition of columned audience halls first documented in Iran at Hasanlu IV in Azerbaijan and the great columned audience halls of Achaemenid Persia at Pasargadae, Persepolis, and Susa. [See Hasanlu; Pasargadae; Persepolis; Susa.] In origin, the concept of the columned audience hall may not have been Iranian, but the concept certainly became thoroughly imbedded in Iranian architec tural traditions, probably because the Medes adopted it. (A more recent manifestation of the tradition can be seen at
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Chehel Situn, "the hall of forty columns," built in Isfahan in the seventeenth century CE.) The Median contribution to tire small arts of Iran is more problematical. Numerous objects in museums and private collections throughout the world have been ascribed to the Medes. Yet, not one comes from an archaeological exca vation. All, if genuine, are the products of antiquities looting. Thus, the very existence of Median art, as opposed to ar chitecture and ceramics, is a construct of the imagination and cannot be given scholarly credence. In sum too little is known of Median history and culture. From both textual and archaeological bits and pieces, it is clear that it is much more than just a history of the Medes: it is a history of many peoples, Iranian and non-Iranian. From this mosaic came the first Iranian state, the kingdom of the Medes. The evidence is that this state rose to world power in the late seventh century BCE. A S a young state it soon succumbed to the power of Cyrus the Great of Persia, but it nevertheless made a profound, and lasting, contribu tion to the greater world of Iranian culture. [See also Assyrians; Persians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, Stuart C. "Media in the Achaemenid Period: The Late Iron Age in Central Western Iran." In Achaemenid History IV: Centre and Periphery, edited by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Arnelie Kuhrt, pp. 63-76. Leiden, 1990. Good summary of what is known and not known about the archaeology of Media. Cameron, George G. History of Early Iran. Chicago, 1936. In large part out of date, but a pioneering study of ancient Elam and Media on which all subsequent studies have built. Culican, William. The Medes and Persians. London, 1965. Somewhat out-of-date, readable semipopular work with value for the layperson. Diakonoff, Igor M. "Media." In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, pp. 36-148. Cambridge, 1985. Somewhat idiosyncratic but thorough and scholarly review of Median history with a good bibliography. Dyson, Robert H., Jr. "The Architecture of Hasanlu: Periods I to IV." American Journal ofArchaeology 81 (1977): 548-552. Best short sum mary of Hasanlu's Iron Age architecture. Goff, Clare L. "Excavation at Baba Jan, 1968: Third Preliminary Re port." Iran 8 (1970): 1 4 1 - 1 5 6 . Final preliminary report on this im portant site. See also specialist reports on aspects of the site in Iran 15 (1977): 1 0 3 - 1 4 0 ; 16 (1978): 29-65; and 22 (1985): 1-20. Helm, Peyton R. "Herodotus' Medikos Logos and Median History." Iran 19 (1981): 85-90. Excellent analysis of what Herodotus may have been talking about in his sections on Media and the Scythians. Herodotus. The History. Translated by David Greene. Chicago, 1987. The starting point for all ancient Iranian history. Levine, Louis D. "Geographical Studies in the Neo-Assyrian Zagros." Iran 11 (1973): 1 - 2 7 ; 1 2 (1974): 99-124. The most thorough and complete attempt to reconstruct the historical geography of western Iran, including Media, in the Iron Age. Essential for understanding the cultural dynamics of the region and period. Stronach, David. "Tepe Nush-i Jan: The Median Settlement." In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, pp. 8 3 2 837. Cambridge, 1985. Excellent brief summary of the archaeology of the Median levels at Nush-i Jan. Young, T. Cuyler, Jr., and Louis D. Levine. Excavations of the Godin
Project: Second Progress Report. Toronto, 1974. The most complete report yet published on the Median structure of Godin period II. Young, T. Cuyler, Jr. "The Early History of the Medes and the Persians and the Achaemenid Empire to the Death of Cambyses." In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, edited by John Boardman, pp. 1 52. Cambridge, 1988. A longer discussion of Median history and archaeology, from which tile present article is largely drawn. T . CUYLER Y O U N G , J R .
MEDICINE. As a general reference to healing practices, medicine has a long and complex history in the ancient Near East. It is useful to think of healing practices as part of a healthcare system that includes, but is not limited to, beliefs about the causes of illness, the options available to patients, and the role of governments in healthcare. Public hygiene, which refers broadly to the organized ef forts of a community to promote health and prevent disease, is also part of any healthcare system. Brief synopses are pro vided here of the healthcare systems in the major geocultural areas of the Near East (see below) from earliest times to the Early Islamic period (c. 1 2 5 0 CE). Prehistory. Little is known about the treatment of illness during the Paleolithic, the first period of human material culture, which ended approximately between 20000 and 16000 BCE in the Near East. By the end of the period, it is speculated, humans practiced therapeutic rituals and may have recognized the medicinal value of some plants. At Shanidar I (c. 45000 BCE), a rock-shelter in Iraq, the skeleton of a "Neanderthal" adult male suggests that he had received substantial care from his community because he had lived for years witii osteoarthritis and other serious injuries. [See Shanidar Cave.] In the Neolithic (c. 8500-4300 BCE) period, the domesti cation of animals introduced some new pools of diseases into human populations. Thus, bovine tuberculosis may have become more prevalent in human beings after cattle began to be kept for milk and food. Human tuberculosis is reflected in skeletal material from Egypt and Bab edh-Dhra' (Jordan) as early as the fourth millennium. Some researchers conclude, on the basis of comparisons in dental attrition (among other features), that hunter-gath erers (e.g., Natufians at el-Wad, Jordan) in some Epipaleo lithic cultures (c. 19000-8000 BCE) were generally healthier than agriculturalists at places such as Jericho and Tell Abu Hureyra, a large settlement in northern Syria. Yet, some studies of the Levant estimate the average life-span in the Neolithic at thirty-four years, compared to thirty years in the Epipaleolithic period. At Catal Hoytik, a large Neolithic town in Anatolia, skeletal remains of some individuals were estimated to be more than sixty years old. [See Catal Hoytik.] Because many diseases need relatively high population densities in order to thrive, a number of diseases that were insignificant in hunter-gatherer bands became significant with the rise of urbanization. Other serious threats to public
MEDICINE health in most cities of the ancient Near East probably in cluded the unequal distribution of food and the contami nation of food and water supplies by die inadequate disposal of human and animal wastes. Increases in trade, military expeditions, and migration helped to spread diseases among populations. T h e frequency of enamel hypoplasia (thin enamel) and other skeletal features in tlie urban populations of the Early Bronze Age (c. 3300-2300 BCE) in the Levant may indeed indicate a decline in health status relative to the Epipaleo lithic and Neolithic. High rates of hypoplasia are also found at Azor (near Tel Aviv) and elsewhere in the Chalcolithic period (4300-3300 BCE). Throughout all prehistoric periods the family was prob ably tlie main caretaker for the ill. T h e appearance of survivable surgical procedures on the skull (trephination) is al ready evident in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic at Jericho (c. 8500-6000 BCE). T h e reasons for trephination are still unclear, but if it is a medical procedure, it may be one of the earliest representatives of the development of specialized healing crafts. The most effective treatment, however, was probably simple rest. A discussion of the major geocultural areas in the Near East follows for the periods prior to the Islamic conquest in the eighth century CE. We shall proceed alphabetically: An atolia, Cyprus and the Aegean, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine. Anatolia. By the Neolithic period various groups had already built impressive towns (e.g., C tal Hoyiik) in Ana tolia. It is the Hittites, a group of Indo-European speakers, who are perhaps the best-known residents of the region, es pecially in the Late Bronze Age. T h e Hittite healthcare sys tem is difficult to reconstruct because sources are very frag mentary. However, extant sources show that Hittite medicine included Luwian and Hurrian traditions. Many of the best-known Hittite medical texts are translations or ad aptations of Mesopotamian models, [See Hittites; Luwians.] The inadequate disposal of waste was probably a major public health problem, especially in urban areas. Concern with public health may be partiy responsible for the clay pipes and drainage channels found at Bogazkoy, Alaca Ho yiik, and otiier LB cities. Some of the wealtiiier households in Bogazkoy and otiier cities were apparently equipped with toilets. [See Bogazkoy.] Illnesses mentioned in Hittite texts include disorders of the eyes, mouth, throat, and intestines. There are reports of illnesses afflicting King Suppiluliuma (who died in about 1 3 3 5 BCE of a plague brought back by his soldiers after a campaign in Syria) and King Hattusili III (c. 1278 BCE) . T h e Plague Prayers of Mursili II (c. 1 3 3 5 - 1 3 0 8 BCE), which refer to an unidentified epidemic lasting some twenty years, rec ognize that diseases could affect the socioeconomic stability of an entire empire. For Hittites, illnesses could be caused by numerous fac a
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tors, including the sins of past generations. Evil and illness could resemble physical substances that needed to be re moved by washing and other methods. Known therapeutic rituals emphasize an analogy between ritual actions, espe cially the act of speaking itself, and the effects on an illness. Many gods and goddesses (e.g., Ishara, Sausga, Kamrusepa) could be healers. There are no known Hittite temples that were used as sanitoria, but prayers and divinatory rituals related to illness may have been performed at temples. Hittite physicians are already attested in the Old Hittite period (c. 1 7 0 0 - 1 5 0 0 BCE), and at least some probably were pupils of Assyrian healers. T h e materia medica included various plants and minerals. Hittite kings, like many sover eigns in the Near East, attempted to maintain a reliable and efficient organization of healers. Various texts also attest to the importance of female midwives and healers/diviners, some of whom had their own organizations. Hittite letters also mention the importation of professional healers from Egypt and Mesopotamia, especially in the fourteen-thir teenth centuries BCE. T h e general population, however, probably consulted a variety of folk practitioners who were not organized. Cyprus a n d t h e Aegean. Although it is difficult to de termine the earliest instances of healing activities in the Ae gean area, some scholars argue that female figurines on Cy prus indicate the possible existence of fertility therapy by the Chalcolithic period (c. 3800-2500 BCE) . Various Middle and Late Minoan period sites (e.g., Mt. Jouktas, Traostalos) on Crete have produced figurines of body parts that may have been associated with healing cults. According to Vassos Karageorghis (Cyprus, London, 1982), medical activities may be detected in at least some LB temples at Kition on Cyprus. [See Kition.] At Mycenae, skeletal remains show that in the fourteen-thirteenth cen turies BCE the elite were probably better fed and healthier than the general population. Greeks generally believed that illness could be sent by a large number of deities who also could heal. Such deities included Apollo, whose arrows could cause epidemics (a la Resheph in the Levant), and Artemis, the goddess of women. T h e most famous healing god, Asclepius, who had the dog and serpent as emblems, was regarded as tlie patron of all physicians. Unlike most other gods, Asclepius rarely sent illness. By the late first millennium BCE there is ample textual and archaeological evidence for the use of asclepieia (temples of Asclepius) as healing centers, particularly in Athens, Cos, Pergamon, and Epidauros. Patients usually were believed to be healed in a night's stay at the asclepieion. Figurines of afflicted (or healed) body parts were left in these temples. Probable scalpels and other surgical instruments have been discovered at the asclepieion in Pergamon. City-states invested in the care of the chronically ill by building asclepieia and other healing temples. Community
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investments in asclepieia in Athens and Rome may be linked to local epidemics in 429 BCE and 292 BCE, respectively. Pa tients, especially wealthy ones, also supported the temple with thanksgiving offerings and other donations. Hierarchies in healing options are attested in some Greek texts. For example, patients might first attempt to pray to a god at home. If that did not bring relief, a local physician might be consulted. If the latter was unsuccessful, the pa tient might go to the asclepieion. Comparable therapeutic hi erarchies were probably used in most areas of the ancient Near East. By the third century BCE, Hippocrates and other figures are credited with developing the first systems of "rational" medicine. For example, the Hippocratic treatise "On Airs, Waters, and Places" links climate and environment, not gods, with illness. Yet, such natural explanations can be found alongside supernatural ones in asclepieia. T h e Roman Empire helped to spread Greek concepts of healthcare throughout the Near East. Egypt. Egyptian medical texts were among the first dis covered and published by modern Near Eastern archaeol ogists. The Ebers papyrus (c. 1550 BCE), which contains a general collection of remedies, was published in 1 8 7 5 . Mummies from Egypt began to be studied medically as early as 1820. The thousands of skeletons from Egypt provide examples of various illnesses, including mandibular ab scesses, skeletal deformities, and likely cases of mberculosis. Private tombs, especially in the Old Kingdom (c. 2 5 7 5 2 1 3 4 BCE), depict people with dwarfism, scoliosis, and other physical deformities. Some scholars argue that excavated human remains reflect a life expectancy of forty-fifty years and high infant mortality, regardless of social level. Herodotus speaks of the scrupulous personal hygiene of the Egyptians, but Egypt probably suffered from poor pub lic sanitation. Latrines existed in at least some upper-class households (and even in some second dynasty tombs, c. 2700 BCE), but excavations at Tell el-Amarna and elsewhere indicate that even some of the most luxurious homes were surrounded by heaps of garbage and open sewers. Although the Ebers papyrus and other texts reflect the notion that irregularities in the system of vessels that carried air and fluids within the body could cause illness, Egyptians believed that illness could be sent and/or cured by a large number of deities, including Heket, Hathor, Imhotep, Isis, and Sekhmet ("the lady of pestilence"). Some temples spe cialized in healing, a notable example being the sanitorium established in the Ptolemaic period (304-30 BCE) at Deir elBahari on the site of the "birthing temple" (where royal women gave birth) of Queen Hatshepsut ( 1 4 7 3 - 1 4 5 8 BCE). Medical professions and skills may have developed quite early in Egypt. Probable dentists (known as "toothers") ap pear in about 3000 BCE. One of the earliest known physi cians, Hesy Re of tire third dynasty (c. 2600 BCE), is de scribed as tire "chief of the dentists and physicians" to the
pyramid builders in a wooden panel found in his tomb at Saqqara. Two bodies from tombs from the fifth dynasty (c. 2465-2323 BCE) attest to the setting of fractured limbs by means of splints and bandages. Scholars usually identify the swnw, attested in the main medical papyri and in other texts, as the principal type of healing practitioner. T h e Edwin Smith papyrus indicates that medical examinations were simple, direct, and meant to determine, among other things, whether patients would benefit from treatment. Most treatments probably used in cantations along with drugs and physical procedures. In some periods, Egyptian practitioners were valuable com modities exported to Anatolia and other lands of the Near East. In at least some periods the state seems to have invested in medical care in order to ensure the maintenance of a healthy labor force. Some records noted illness-related ab sences from state projects, and physicians (e.g., Hesy Re) were assigned to particular groups of laborers. Of course such investments probably varied with time and circum stance. For the majority of Egyptians, however, healthcare was probably provided by folic healers and administered in the home. M e s o p o t a m i a . As elsewhere in the Near East, healing practices in Mesopotamia probably predate writing. Meso potamian healers are mentioned in texts by the middle of the third millennium. As indicated by the earliest attested collection of medical prescriptions (Ur III period, c. 2050 BCE), the development of writing created new systems of collecting, storing, and distributing medical information. Diagnostic manuals, letters, and other types of texts speak of the threats to public health posed by dirty water, urban epidemics, and famine (see Martinez, 1990). Some texts speak of taboos against contacting persons with certain skin diseases. Malaria and other diseases probably posed con stant problems for people living near canals or near areas with poor water drainage. Eye ailments, impotence, and di gestive problems are among the most frequent problems mentioned in Akkadian texts. Marduk, Ea, and Ishtar were among the deities consulted for illness. Recent excavations at Isin and Nippur have re newed attention on the importance of Gula (Ninisina), a healing goddess associated with dogs (see figure 1 ) . Dogs probably had a role in Gula's therapeutic rituals, and a dog cemetery, dated to about 1000 BCE, is associated with her temple at Isin. Although no known Mesopotamian temple functions as a large sanitorium, various temples (e.g., the temple of Gula at Isin in various periods) may have stored medical information, and priests may have performed ther apeutic and diagnostic rituals in them. Many Assyriologists have followed Edith K. Ritter (1965) in positing two main healing specialists in Mesopotamia, the asipu and the asU (see figure 2 ) . In this scheme, the former uses magical means while the latter does not. An alternative
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MEDICINE. Figure i. Figurine from Isin of a patient and dog. This may depict a ritual mentioned in texts in which a dog, associated with Gula, is touched by the patient for medicinal purposes. (Cour tesy H. Avalos)
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view argues that both professions operated within a frame work that assumed magical causation. T h e distinction was rooted in the simple distribution of labor in the healthcare system—namely, the astt specialized in the direct application of herbs and bandages and the asipu in contacting and ap peasing the divine beings deemed responsible for the illness. Intensive therapeutic labor resulted, in part, from poly theism itself. For example, a single illness might require the assembly of paraphernalia, plants, and incantation texts for each of the numerous supernatural beings that might be en treated or repelled. Complex therapeutic rituals could even leave kings waiting days without the desired treatment. Di agnostic manuals may have helped to set labor priorities by identifying patients who were expected to die regardless of therapy. Patients chose consultants on the basis of availability, ec onomics, and a host of other factors. Kings could affect the distribution of physicians by monopolizing their services or sending them to other lands. Kings and town officials could also help to manage the distribution of materia medica. Some Mesopotamian laws reveal the state's efforts to set prices for medical services and malpractice (e.g., laws 2 1 5 221 of the Code of Hammurabi). Extant laws and contracts also show that the state attempted to place the responsibility for long-term healthcare on the families of tlie afflicted. In fact, care at home was prevalent throughout the history of Mesopotamia. Persia. The healthcare systems in ancient Iran, especially in the Achaemenid period ( 5 5 0 - 3 3 2 BCE), are among the most difficult to reconstruct. Excavations of Persian palaces and houses in Persepolis, Susa, Pasargadae, and elsewhere indicate that Persians probably encountered the same urban health problems found elsewhere in the Near East. Because Old Persian texts are few, the usual sources for the study of Persian medicine include Greek authors and the Videvdad, a Zoroastrian sacred text whose composition is dated by some scholars to within the Arsacid period (224 BCE-224 CE).
Zoroastrianism is a monolattous religion popularized dur ing the Achaemenid, Parthian/Arsacid, and Sasanian ( 2 2 4 652 CE) periods in Iran. In general, Zoroastrianism ascribed good and evil to two primordial principles: Angra-Mainyu, the principle of evil, is credited with creating thousands of diseases, while Ahuramazda is credited with creating healing substances, including homa ("wine"). The Videvdad outlines elaborate codes of purity that viewed physiological processes such as birth, menstruation, and death as generators of impurity that could be transmit ted by touch. This theology apparently led to the use of elaborate rituals to purify those afflicted by illness. Various diseases, including chronic skin ailments, rendered the pa MEDICINE. Figure 2 . A panel of an Assyrian bronze plaquette, prob tient an outcast in society. ably showing a healing ritual. Note tlie figure on the couch and The Videvdad mentions at least three types of healing healers, perhaps asipus dressed in fish-garb, attending to him. (Mu specialists (herbalists, surgeons, and incantation priests). see du Louvre/Antiquites Orientales)
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The same work notes procedures meant to certify physicians and outlines fees for various medical services. The medical school founded in the Sasanian period at Gundaishapur (Iran) foreshadowed Islamic hospitals and medical schools. It is difficult to judge the extent to which Zoroastrian monolatry and purity laws were applied in the Achaemenid period. An Old Persian text does indicate that Xerxes I (485-465 BCE) destroyed the temples of "false gods," a pol icy that presumably would restrict the options for patients if such gods were healing deities. Yet, Greek reports indicate that Achaemenid kings valued or preferred Greek and Egyp tian physicians. Interest in -public health reportedly prompted Darius (522-486 BCE) to subsidize the medical professions in Egypt and elsewhere. Some scholars argue that it was only in the Sasanian pe riod that Zoroastrianism became a state religion. If so, it is only speculation that the state encouraged the removal of various types of patients from society and restricted thera peutic options, insofar as not all deities were seen as legiti mate. While the persecution of Christians is attested in the Sasanian period, however, Christianity and many other re ligions survived and retained tiieir healing traditions. Syria-Palestine. The trephinated skulls found at Jericho from the Neolithic period and the implantation of a bronze wire in a tooth found at Tiin-Ziq, a small Nabatean fortress in Israel's northern Negev desert in the Hellenistic era, attest to tlie long existence of specialized medical consultants in Syria-Palestine. Liver models found at LB Hazor and Me giddo may have been used in medical consultations or in hepatoscopy. The Amarna tablets (fourteenth century BCE) mention epidemics and the traffic of physicians in Canaanite royal courts. As in most areas of the Near East, the inadequate disposal of garbage and human waste was a threat to public health in Syria-Palestine. City-states (e.g., Gibeon) in areas where rainfall was poor had to construct cisterns, which were vul nerable to contamination. By the Middle or Late Bronze Ages, parts of various cities (Jericho, Tell Beit Mirsim) ap parently had drains, some of which may have carried sew age. Recent excavations in Jerusalem have recovered toilet seats, one of which was found in a separate cubicle in a house dated to about 586 BCE. However, it is not certain how widespread such amenities were in the city at the time. Although there are many textual references to washing and related hygienic activities (Gn. 18:4; Ps. 60:8), it is likely that personal hygiene was generally poor in the absence of abundant water supplies. In the Bible, bathing was some times seen as a significant event (Ru. 3:3). As in many areas of the ancient Near East, insect infes tation was probably a significant problem in Syria-Palestine. Incense may have been useful in repelling some insects, and ivory and wooden combs found at various sites from various periods (e.g., at LB Megiddo) may have effectively removed lice. Shaving the body and covering it with oil also may have combatted lice and other ectoparasites. [See Incense.]
Archaeoparasitologists recently established die likely ex istence of certain intestinal diseases (e.g., tapeworm and whipworm infections) in ancient Israel, but the precise iden tification of most diseases in die Bible has been notoriously difficult, especially in cases of epidemics (Nm. 2 5 ; 1 Sm. 5:61 2 ) , Nonetheless, biblical stories recognize that epidemics can alter the course of history (e.g., the plagues on Egypt in Ex. 7 - 1 0 ) , and many plagues are viewed as the result of Israel's contact with outside groups (e.g., Midianites in Nm. 25)-
The condition usually translated as "leprosy" (Heb., sdrcfat) receives the most attention in the Bible (Lv. 1 3 - 1 4 ) , but it does not have a simple modern equivalent because it probably encompassed a large variety of diseases, especially those manifesting chronic discoloration of the skin. Infertil ity was viewed as an illness that diminished the social status of the afflicted woman (Gn. 3 0 : 1 - 2 0 ) . As the Kirta epic and other Ugaritic texts indicate, El, the supreme god at Ugarit, was concerned with healing, espe cially infertility. In Tyre, Sidon, and other Phoenician citystates of the early first millennium BCE, Eshmun, who was sometimes identified with the Greek Asclepius, was a heal ing god whose temples may have provided therapeutic ser vices. Many gods in the ancient Near East, including Yah weh and Resheph, were gods of disease and healing. The Hebrew Bible has at least two principal explanations for illness. Deuteronomy 28 affirms that health (Heb., salom) encompasses a physical state associated witii the fulfillment of covenantal stipulations that are fully disclosed to the members of the society. Illness stems from the violation of those stipulations, and therapy includes reviewing one's ac tions in light of the covenant. T h e Book of Job offers a con trasting, yet complementary, view arguing that illness may be rooted in divine plans that may not be disclosed to the patient at all—and not in die transgression of published rules. The patient must trust that God's undisclosed reasons are just. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Israelite health care system depicted in the canonical texts is the division of the patient's consultative options into legitimate and illegit imate. This dichotomy is pardy the result of monolatry, in sofar as illness and healing rest ultimately upon Yahweh's control (Jb. 5:18) and non-Yahwistic options are prohibited. Because it was accessible and inexpensive, prayer to Yah weh was probably a patient's most common legitimate op tion. Petitions and thanksgiving prayers uttered from the viewpoint of the patient are attested in the Bible (Ps. 38; Is. 3 8 : 1 0 - 2 0 ) . Other treatments mentioned in the Bible include "mandrakes" for infertility (Gn. 3 0 : 1 4 ) , "bandages" (Ez. 3 0 : 2 1 ) , and "balsam" from Gilead (Jer. 4 6 : 1 1 ) . T h e last text shows awareness of the importance of Gilead in the pro duction of medicinal substances consumed in Egypt. Illegitimate options, which were probably widely used by Israelites, included consultants designated as rope'im (2 Chr. 1 6 : 1 2 ) , non-Yahwistic temples (2 Kgs. 1 : 2 - 4 ) , and probably
MEDICINE a large variety of "sorcerers" (Dr. 1 8 : 1 0 - 1 2 ) . Female figu rines found diroughout monarchic Israel, especially in do mestic contexts, may have been involved in fertility rituals. The largest known dog cemetery in the ancient world, re cently uncovered at Ashkelon, may be associated with a healing cult of the Persian period. [See Ashkelon.] T h e foremost legitimate consultants in the canonical texts are commonly designated prophets, and they were often in fierce competition with "illegitimate" consultants. Stories of healing miracles (e.g., 2 Kgs. 4:8) may reflect an effort to promote prophets as the legitimate consultants. Their func tion was to provide prognoses (2 Kgs. 8:8) and intercede on behalf of the patient (2 Kgs. 5 : 1 1 ) . Unlike some of the prin cipal healing consultants in other Near Eastern societies, the efficacy of Israelite prophets resided more in their relation ship with god than in technical expertise. The demise of die prophetic office in the early Second Temple period probably led to the wide legitimation of the rope'im (cf. Sir. 38). Midwives (Ex. 1 : 1 5 - 2 1 ) may actually have been the most com mon healthcare consultants, especially for pregnant women. Another accepted option for some illnesses, particularly in the preexilic period, was the Temple. In 1 Samuel, Han nah visited the temple at Shiloh to help reverse her infertility. 2 Kings 18:4 indicates that prior to Hezekiah the bronze ser pent made by Moses as a therapeutic device (Nm. 2 1 : 6 - 9 ) was involved in acceptable therapeutic rituals in the Temple in Jerusalem. Bronze serpents have been found in temples (e.g., the asclepieion at Pergamon) and are known to have been used for therapy during the first millennium BCE. Bronze serpents, such as those found in or near shrines at LB Timna', Tel Mevorakh, and Hazor, may have been in volved in therapeutic rituals, but other functions cannot be excluded. T h e Priesdy code, which may be viewed as an extensive manual on public health that centralizes in the priesthood the power to define illness and health for an entire state, severely restricted access to the Temple for the chronically ill (e.g., lepers in Lv. 1 3 - 1 4 ; cf. 2 Sm. 5:8 on the blind and tire lame) because of fear of "impurity." T h e theology of impurity, as a system of social bounda ries, could serve to remove socioeconomically burdensome populations, and especially the chronically ill, from society. "Leprosy" alone probably encompassed a wide variety of patients. In effect, the Priesdy code minimizes state respon sibility for the chronically ill, leaving the eradication of illness for the future (Ez. 4 7 : 1 2 ; cf. Is. 3 5 : 5 - 6 ) . Thanksgiving or "well-being" offerings (Lv. 7 : 1 1 - 3 6 ) af ter an illness were probably always acceptable and econom ically advantageous for the Temple. Offerings after an ill ness also may have served as public notice of the readmission of previously ostracized patients to the society (Lv.
14:1-32).
Relative to the Priestly code, the community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls added to the list of illnesses ex cluded from the normal community and expanded the re
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strictions for "leprosy," the blind, and tire lame (iQSa II.49). Socioeconomic reasons, as well as the fear of magical contamination, may be responsible for such increased re strictions. Perhaps the most significant consequence of the Priestly code was the growth of chronically ill populations with little access to the Temple. Because Jesus and his disciples appear to target these populations (Mt. 10:8; Mk. 14:3), early Chris tianity may be seen, in part, as a critique of the priesdy healthcare system. In early Christianity illness may be caused by numerous demonic entities who are not always acting at Yahweh's command (Mt. 1 5 : 2 2 ; Lk. 1 1 : 1 4 ) , and not necessarily by the violation of covenant stipulations (Jn. 9:2). Emphasizing that the cure for illness may be found in this world, early Christianity preserved many older Hebrew ttaditions regarding miraculous healings (Acts 5:16, 9:34) and collective health (Jas. 5 : 1 6 ) , although tire influence of Hellenistic healing cults (e.g., the Asclepius cult) also may be seen. In the Roman Empire, famous therapeutic baths were constructed or enlarged. Near the Sea of Galilee, the large thermal bath complex that thrived from the second century to the end of the first millennium CE at Hammath-Gader is explicitly associated in inscriptions with therapy and may have been used by Romans, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. [See Hammath-Gader.] A mass grave near the Jordan River apparendy contains the remains of sick visitors in search of healing (c. 6 1 4 CE) in the famous waters (see 2 Kgs. 5). Ritual bath installations called miqva'ot (sg., miqveh), dating from the Second Commonwealth onward, have been uncovered in many Jewish communities (e.g., the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem, Masada), but they probably were not used for ordinary therapeutic reasons. [See Ritual Baths.] In the Byzantine period, and especially under the empress Eudocia (d. 460), various leprosaria were founded in tire Judean Desert (e.g., at the Monastery of Theodosius). These leprosaria may reflect die state's attempt to channel populations of chronically ill patients to peripheral areas of the empire rather than simply to the outskirts or to special areas of major cities. In sum, prior to the rise of Islam, SyriaPalestine and most of the Near East already had a wide array of healthcare systems and facilities deriving from Greek, Ro man, Jewish, Christian, Persian, and Arab traditions. Islamic Period. Because Islam encompassed most of the geographic areas under discussion, the Islamic period merits a unified treatment. Between the ninth and fourteenth cen turies CE, many of the most important works in medicine by Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims were written in Arabic, a language spread by Islam. Arabic medical texts are abundant, so that archaeology is not the primary source of information about healthcare in Islamic countries. Little is known of the healthcare systems of the pre-Is lamic cultures (e.g., Midianites, Nabateans) associated with the northwestern Arabian Peninsula, the homeland of Islam. It is possible to speculate that some diseases (e.g., malaria)
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ultimate supernatural level of causation (will of the supernatural beings)
secondary-
focus of labor
focus of labor
proximate level of causation (bodily symptoms)
^PRIMARY ACTORS cooperation
consultation asipu ultimate relief consultant who sought ultimate causes (e.g.j"medical signs") and performed rituals to restore balance with die supernatural world.
consultation patient selected consultants based on seriousness of condition, socio economic status, availability of consultants; prayed directiy to gods; participated in rituals recommended by consultants.
focused on immediate causes and medications meant for immediate "magical effect," but also knew that ultimate relief may require the asipu.
I SUPPORT BUREAUCRACIESl
I
city officials controlled supply and distribution of drugs by supervising gardeners and other components.
king controlled distribution of consultants within die kingdom by setting ritual priorities or by sending consultants to foreign courts. The king also could affect the supply of drugs.
temple of G/N storage and distribution of medical texts and parapharnelia; medical education; locus for shortterm therapeutic and thanksgiving rituals associated with illness.
*The bard, sa^lu, and other diviners may also be consulted, particularly for diagnosis and prognosis.
MEDICINE. Figure
3. Synopsis of the Mesopotamian health care system. (Courtesy H. Avalos)
MEDICINE were insignificant in arid regions. Analogies with healing practices elsewhere in the Near East probably existed (e.g., prayer; the use of special consultants). Jews and Christians lived in northwestern Arabia at the time of Islam's rise in the seventh century and presumably had their own healing traditions. Some scholars argue that Islamic medicine was essentially Greek medicine. Others argue that while the Greek traditions are obvious, Islam synthesized various traditions and made new contributions. T h e famed Ibn Khaldun ( 1 3 3 2 - 1 4 0 6 ) , in his Muqaddimah, acknowledges that Islam inherited a body of nonrevealed medical tradition from the bedouins, Sasanians, and other sources. Under the word salS.ni, the Qur'an speaks of the broad well-being of a person. Sickness encompassed the whole or ganism rather than just the soul or the body. Greek influ ence, however, helped to maintain tire soul/body dualism in many Islamic traditions. Thus, Ibn Sina (980-1037), whose Canon was, for hundreds of years in the West and the East, one of the most authoritative medical textbooks, thought that the mind could heal or sicken the body. As a monotheistic religion, Islam resulted in a dichotomous healthcare system insofar as patients could not use options sponsored by gods other than Allah. Although nat ural causes for illness seem to be recognized, ultimately ill ness and health are created by Allah's will and purposes. Prevention of illness was an essential component of Islamic medical practice, and a proper diet, which excluded pork, was seen as perhaps the most essential factor in maintaining good health. T h e major traditions of Islam (e.g., Sunni, Shi ah) devel oped some distinctive notions of treatment. For example, some scholars argue that Sunni tradition encourages pa tients to seek treatment at any time, whereas Shi'i tradition encourages them to seek treatment only if the illness be comes unbearable. While major traditions prohibit the use of alcohol, other traditions (e.g., the Hanafi school) prohibit only intoxication. Various Muslim states encouraged heavy investment in public health. For example, a rare, if not unprecedented, healthcare policy was promulgated in Iraq by Walid I ( 7 0 5 7 1 5 ) , who reportedly provided stipends and attendants for lepers. In the early tenth century in Iraq special teams were established to visit prisons, and mobile dispensaries brought healthcare to the countryside, where doctors were scarce. The management of lepers during the Umayyad caliphate ( 7 5 5 - 1 0 3 1 ) in Cordoba (Spain) included their segregation in "the suburb of the sick" (Ar., Rabad al-marda). Endow ments (Ar., waqf), often by wealthy individuals, for hospitals were generally encouraged. T h e most famous general hospitals emerged during the 'Abbasid caliphate ( 7 5 0 - 1 2 5 7 ) , especially in Baghdad, Mecca, and Damascus. There were also some hospitals for mental patients. T h e administrators and medical personnel c
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of the first hospitals were often Nestorian Christians, who translated medical texts from Greek into Arabic (sometimes via Syriac). T h e principal doctors, who were also teachers, reportedly made rounds witirin the hospital and visited the court daily. T h e hospital founded in the twelfth century in Damascus reportedly kept detailed patient records. It also had protocols to separate patients who would be admitted from those who would be sent home after receiving treat ment. In general, the Islamic period presents perhaps the best documented examples of how monotheistic societies integrated a variety of approaches to healthcare. Synthesis. The advance of "civilization," and of urban ization in particular, posed new challenges to human health. Challenges included managing chronically ill populations, determining the level of state investment in public health, and maintaining a supply of consultants and medications, especially for the elite. Ancient governments recognized that epidemics could hasten the demise of an entire city or em pire. The parallel and overlapping healthcare systems in the Near East provided a variety of responses to tiiese chal lenges. In fact, many of the basic problems and responses pertaining to healthcare (e.g., level of state investment, reg ulation of medical fees) were first articulated in the ancient Near East. Many aspects of a healthcare system are related to a cul ture's basic religious framework. Polytheistic systems (e.g., in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt) allowed a broader range of alternatives for patients than monolatrous ones (see figure 3). Yet, the large number of gods that could be ap peased or repelled could also lead to complex rituals that denied speedy attention even for the elite. T h e development or imposition of monolatry tended to bifurcate a healthcare system into legitimate and illegitimate options. Although monolatrous systems (e.g., in Israel and Islam) could simplify the search for a healing deity, other factors could render the therapeutic process as variegated and complex as in polytheism (see figure 4 ) . Most healthcare systems had a variety of options that were probably arranged hierarchically, depending, in part, on the patient's needs and means. Prayer was probably one of the first, and most economical, options chosen by patients in all systems. Care at home was probably the preferred and most common option, even in cultures that centralized and lo calized healthcare to some extent (e.g., asclepieia; Islamic hospitals). It is difficult to evaluate one healthcare system as better than another because precise data are lacldng with which to measure their effectiveness. Some institutions meant to cure may actually have spread diseases by concentrating sick people in small spaces (e.g., asclepieia). T h e best medical technology (e.g., scalpels, forceps, dental drills, and splints) may have helped only simple problems (e.g., extraction of lodged weapons). In general, in most cultures, trauma (from accidents, strife), malnutrition, and disease maintained life
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YAHWEH (die healer in Ex. 15:26)
prophet
midwife
direct prayer
temple (s)
*consulted Pregnancy e.g., Hezeldah *petitionary for oracles birth, and in 2 Kgs. 20. locus for fertility (Hannah in concerning; other 1 Sm. 1) prognosis related ^Petitions for Intercessory matters. other maladies? prayer. (cf. Nehustan (2 Kgs. in the temple in S:3ff). 2 Kgs. 18:4). *Priest examines "lepers," and decides wheather they can live within the "healthy" community (Lv.13).
"ILLEGITIMATE" OPTIONS
non- yahwistic temple Ahaziah in 2 Kgs. 1:2.
J
rophe im Asa in 2 Chr. 16:12.
Other
(cf., Dt. 18:1011);
midwife. patient > = option (s) patient may select consultant > Yahweh = option facilitates access to Yahweh Midwives probably could be legitimate or illegitimate
MEDICINE. Figure 4. System of consultation options reported in the biblical texts. (Courtesy H. Avalos)
expectancy to under forty years from the Paleolithic to the Early Islamic period. Much of the information preserved in archaeological and textual sources pertains to the urban and literate segments of Near Eastern cultures; however, as is the case in many modern nonwestern cultures, the majority of patients lived outside of cities and had as healing consultants midwives and other types of folk healers who were illiterate—and thus did not document their practices.
Nonetheless, archaeology still has much to contribute to what can be known of ancient and modern healthcare. More importantly, by focusing on healthcare as a system that in teracts with theology, politics, economics, and the environ ment, new questions can be posed about the textual and archaeological data already available. [See also Paleopathology; Personal Hygiene. In addition to the sites cross-referenced above, many others mentioned are also the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY Angel, J. Lawrence. "Ecology and Population in the Eastern Mediter ranean." World Archaeology 4 (1972): 8 8 - 1 0 5 . A paleopathologist discusses the general incidence of disease in tlie eastern Mediterra nean. Avalos, Hector I. Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel. Adanta, 1995. The comprehensive study of healthcare systems in die relevant areas from a medical anthropological perspective also includes a short his tory of the study of medicine in the Near East. Beckman, G. "Medizin. B. Bei den Hethitern." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 7, pp. 629-631. Berlin, 1990. Survey in English of Hittite medicine. Biggs, Robert D. "Medizin. A. In Mesopotamien." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 7, pp. 623-629. Berlin, 1990. Survey in English of Mesopotamian medicine. Bolger, Diane. "The Archaeology of Fertility and Birth: A Ritual De posit from Chalcolithic Cyprus." Journal of Anthropological Research 48.2 (1992): 1 4 5 - 1 6 4 . Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. 2d ed. London, 1986. Includes a discussion of medical practices. Chosky, Jamsheed K. Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism: A Triumph over Evil. Austin, 1989. Cohen, Mark Nathan, and George J. Armelagos, eds. Paleopathology of the Origins of Agriculture. New York, 1984. Anthology of essays dis cussing health in prehistoric cultures around the world, including various areas of the Near East. Cohen, Mark Nathan. Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven, 1989. Survey of the impact of cultural evolution on human health. Elgood, Cyril. A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate from the Earliest Times until the YearA.D. 1932. Cambridge, 1 9 5 1 . Dated but useful summary. Ghalioungui, Paul, and Zeinab El-Dawakhly. Health and Healing in Ancient Egypt. Cairo, 1965. Grmek, Mirko. Diseases in the Ancient Greek World. Baltimore, 1989. One of the most comprehensive surveys on the topic. Kleinman, Arthur. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, andPsychiatry. Berkeley, 1980. Indispensable introduction to the study of healthcare as a system. Majno, Guido. Tlie Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. Cambridge, 1975. Richly illustrated discussion of medicine in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. Martinez, R. M. "Epidemic Disease, Ecology, and Culture in tlie An cient Near East." In The Bible in Light of Cuneiform Literature, edited by William Hallo et al., pp. 4 1 3 - 4 5 7 . New York, 1990. This concise discussion of epidemics in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in tlie Near East includes extracts of Mesopotamian sources translated into En glish. McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, N.Y., 1976.
MEDINA Study of how diseases may have influenced the course of history in the ancient Near East and elsewhere. Preuss, Julius. Biblical and Talmudic Medicine ( 1 9 1 1 ) . Translated by Fred Rosner. New York, 1978. Dated but important survey of Jewish medical practices, especially in the first half of the first millennium CE.
Rahman, Fazlur. Health and Medicine in the Islamic Tradition. New York, 1987. Excellent and concise summary by one of the world's leading scholars on Islam. Ritter, Edith K. "Magical Expert (= Asipu) and Physician (= Asfi): Notes on Two Complementary Professions in Babylonian Medi cine." In Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger on His Seventh-Fifth Birthday, April 21,1965, edited by Hans G. Giiterbock and Thorkild Jacobsen, pp. 299-321. Chicago, 1965. Seybold, Klaus, and Ulrich B. Mueller. Sickness and Healing. Trans lated by Douglas W. Stott. Nashville, 1 9 8 1 . Survey on the topic in the Bible. Sigerist, Henry E. A History of Medicine. New York, 1 9 6 1 . Despite its date, still one of the most comprehensive and readable treatments of ancient medicine, especially in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Greece. Smith, Patricia M. "The Skeletal Biology and Paleopathology of Early Bronze Age Populations in the Levant." In L'urbanisation de la Pal estine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emmaiis, 20-24 octobre 1986, vol. 1, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 2 9 7 - 3 1 3 . British Archaeological Re ports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Zias, Joseph. "Death and Disease in Ancient Israel." Biblical Archae ologist 54.3 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 4 6 - 1 5 9 . Survey from the prehistoric periods uirough the Byzantine era, with numerous bibliographic references. HECTOR IGNACIO AVALOS
oil, vegetables, meat, perfume, cloth, and second-hand items. There were also auction places. Mosques (including the Prophet's Mosque), residential houses, forts, and resthouses were consttucted. This building activity continued in all directions, involving every aspect of life during the times of the caliphs. It reached its zenith during the Uma yyad and 'Abbasid periods, when palatial palaces were built in Medina. After die assassination of Caliph 'Uthman, 'Ali succeeded him, and to counter die political moves of the opposition he shifted the capital in 651 from Medina to Kufah. Subse quently, the caliph Mu'awiyah made Damascus the capital in 661. Thus Medina lost all its splendor, retaining, however, its importance as a religious and cultural center as well as commercial hub for the trade coming from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. T h e city was protected by the erection of a defensive wall, with seven entrances in 876, which was later rebuilt. Under the Ottomans the wall was raised to a height of 25 m (82 ft.). It had forty towers overlooking the outskirts of the city. However, to facilitate die free movement of traffic the wall was demolished in 1948. During the Hijrah to Medina, the Prophet built the first mosque at Qubba, south of die city. After entering the city, a suitable larger site near al-Baki' was selected and the Pro phet's mosque was built.
MEDINA (al-Madinah), city located in the Hijaz region of Saudi Arabia (24°28' N , 39°36' E), lying about 350 km ( 2 1 7 mi.) north of Mecca (Makkah) and about 425 km (263.5 ml-) fromjeddah. Before Islam, Medina was known as Yathrib and was fa mous for its oasis on die ttade routes from southern and northern Arabia and its commercial contacts with important trading centers. Around it are mountains and it is famous for its numerous wadis or water coarses across the oasis. According to Arabic sources, it was known by ninety-five names. Apart from Yatirrib, die following were the most popular: Taiba, Manzil al-Wahyi, and 'Ush al-Fuqaha'. T h e prophet Muhammad named die city Taiba and Medina. T h e settlement is spread out in four main areas—Al'Awali, Quba, al-TJsba, and ancient Yathrib. At the time of the prophet Muhammad's Hijrah (pilgrimage) in 622 CE, it was divided into nine independent quarters, which were de scribed as neighboring states like villages. After the Hijrah the quarters expanded, linked to each otiier. Thus the city of Medina evolved, acquiring political and socioeconomic importance as the capital of die first Islamic city-state. For this new city-state, Muhammad provided all ameni ties for the welfare of the people. New commercial special ized markets for different commodities were established. These centers included markets for livestock, grain, fruit,
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MEDINA.
The QaTat Quba. (Courtesy S. al-Rashid)
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MEGIDDO
Since the Prophet's time, his mosque has been expanded from time to time to meet the growing needs of the everincreasing number of visitors. Consequently the residential and commercial areas in the vicinity of the mosque were absorbed into its complex. The number of mosques in Medina multiplied; forty were built during the Prophet's lifetime. Some of the mosques that were built by 'Umar ibn 'Abdul 'Aziz, ruler of Medina during the time of Caliph al-Walid ibn 'Abdul Malik, (AH 86-96/705-715 CE) on spots in which the Prophet prayed survive to tiiis day. Despite the expansion and rebuilding of the ancient mosques, their distinctive characteristic features have been preserved. T h e Ottoman additions to the Prophet's mosque are outstanding in their architecture, porcelain arabesque decoration, and Qur'anic inscriptions. One of the most out standing features surviving is the mihrab (niche) erected by Mehrab al-Suleimany in 948/1541. One of the oldest inscrip tions on the wall of the inner mihrab of the Prophet's mosque is dated to 888/1483 in the reign of Sultan Gaitabi. It consists of five sentences written in Mamluk Thuluth script. Medina was famous for numerous splendid Umayyad and Ottoman palaces, which are located near the Wadi al- Aqiq. Literary sources mention that there were seventy palaces built of stones and bricks. They were spacious and had high walls. Some of the surviving palaces belonged to the follow ing rulers: Hisham ibn 'Abdul Malik, 'Urwa ibn Zubair, 'Asim ibn 'Umar, Sa'id ibn al-'As, and al-Marajel. Portions of these palaces are in private collections. 'Abdul Quddas al-Ansary has described the two-story palace of Sa'id ibn al'As as magnificent. Its architectural features resembled the classic Islamic style of Umayyad palaces in Syria, especially the Geran palace of Damascus. Medina is famous for its many forts. During the Prophet's time they numbered 199. Of these, 127 belonged to Medinite Ansars (helpers); 1 1 to the Mahajirs (immigrants from Mecca); and 1 5 9 to other tribes of Medina. Remains of many forts survive in good condition. One such example is the fort of Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf in the southeastern part of the city. Numerous Arabic rock inscriptions, primarily graffiti, are found in and around Medina (al-Rashid, 1993). Some of these texts reveal the urban life and settiement of the people during die early Islamic periods. The most ancient inscrip tion is found on Jabal Sal, northwest of the Prophet's mosque. Inscriptions of the early Umayyad period are lo cated in the vicinity of the palaces. At Ruwawa about 50 km (31 mi.) south of the Prophet's mosque, fifty-five inscrip tions have been discovered (al-Rashid, 1993). They are dated to first three centuries of the Hijrah and furnish family details about Caliph 'Umar and others. Five are dated to the Umayyad period and four to the 'Abbasid period. [See also Inscriptions, article on Inscriptions of the Islamic Period; and Mecca.] e
BIBLIOGRAPHY 'AbbasT, Ahmad ibn 'Abd al-HamTd al-. Kitdb 'Umdar. al-akhbarfTMadinat al-Mukhtdr. Edited by Muhammad al-Tayyib al-Ansari. N.p., 198'Alljawad. Al-mufassalfT tarikh al-Arab Qabla al-Islam. 10 vols. Beirut, 1968-1973. 'AIT, Salih Ahmad al-. Al-Hijaz ft sadr al-Islam. Beirut, 1990. Amahzoon, Muhamad. Al-MadTnah al-Munawwarah ft Rihlat al-'Aydshi, Dirdsah wa-Tahqiq, Kuwait, 1988. Ansari, 'Abd al-Quddus. 'Athdr al-Madinah al-Munawwarah. Medina, 1935. 'AyyashT, Ibrahim ibn 'Allal-. Al-MadTnah bayna al-madiwa-al-hadir. Medina, 1972. BatanunT, Muhammad LabTb al-. RThlah al-Hijaziyah. Cairo, 1 9 1 1 . Burton, Richard F. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah. 2 vols. New York, 1964. Hafiz, 'AIT. Fusiil min tarikh al-Madihah al-Munawwarah. Jeddah, 1984. Hamdan, 'Asim Hamdan 'AIT. Harat al-Aghawat. Jeddah, 1992. HarbT, IbrahTm al-. Kitdb al-manasik wa-amakin turuq al-hajj tuama'alim al-JazTrah. Edited by Hamad al-Jasir. Riyadh, 1969. Ibn Idris, 'Abd Allah ibn 'Abd al-'AzTz. Mujtamd al-Madinah ft 'ahd al-Rasiil. Riyadh, 1982. KhiyarT, Ahmad YasTn Ahmad al-. Tarikh ma'alim al-Madinah al-Mu nawwarah Qadiman wa-hadithan. Edited by 'Ubayd Allah Muhammad AmTn KurdT. N.p., 1990. Al-Manhal 54 (1992). Special issue: "Al-MadTnah al-Munawwarah." MaraghT, Abu Bakr ibn al-Husayn al-. Tahqiq al-nusrah bi-talkhTs ma'alim Dar al-hijrah. Edited by Muhammad 'Abd al-Jawad alAsma'I. Medina, 1955. Mustafa, Salih Lam'T. Al-Madihah al-Munawwarah: Tatawiiruha al'umrani' wa-lurdthuha al-mfmari. Beirut, 1981. Rashid, Sa'ad al-. Kitdbat IslamTyah Ohayr Manshurah min "Ruwawah" al-Madinah al-Munawwarah. Riyadh, 1993. Rifa't, IbrahTm. Mir at al-Haramayn. 2 vols. Cairo, 1925. Sayyid, 'Ubayd Madani al-. "Otoom al-Madmah al-Munawwarah." Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Riyadh 3 ( 1 9 7 3 - 1 9 7 4 ) : 226-213. Shami, Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-. Fadffil al-Madihah al-Muna wwarah. Edited by Muhyi al-DTn Mattu. Beirut and Damascus, 1990. Winder, R. Bayly. "Al-MadTna." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 5, pp. 994-1007. Leiden, i960-. Zaila'T, Ahmad 'Umar al-. "Naqsh ta'sisi min Harat al-Aghawat bilMadTnah al-Munawwarah Mu'rrakh sanat 706 H . / 1 3 0 6 - 1 3 0 7 A.D." Dirasdtftal-'Athar (1992): 2 7 1 - 3 0 3 . SA'AD ABDUL A Z I Z AL-RASHID
MEGIDDO (Ar., Tell el-Mutesellim; "die tell of the gov ernor"), site located on the western side of the Jezreel Valley (Plain of Esdraelon), not far from the point where the brook of Nahal Iron (Wadi Ara) crosses Mt. Carmel and enters the Jezreel Valley. In antiquity the main highway (Via Maris) from Egypt to Syria passed the narrow Nahal Iron, militarily the best point for controlling the road, giving Megiddo spe cial strategic importance. Megiddo is mentioned in the Book of Revelation (16:16) as Armageddon (probably Har M e giddo, "the Mount of Megiddo"), where the final battle be tween the people of God and the gentile armies will take place at the end of days.
MEGIDDO Excavations. T h e first excavations at Megiddo were car ried out between 1903 and 1 9 0 5 by Gottlieb Schumacher (1908), an architect from Haifa, on behalf of die Deutscher Palastina-Verein. An analysis of the finds was later pub lished by Carl Watzinger (1929). In 1925 die Oriental In stitute of the University of Chicago began large-scale ex cavations, aimed at completely excavating the mound by horizontally digging one city level after the other. T h e pro gram was too ambitious, and they subsequently excavated only parts of the site. The project ended with the onset of World War II in 1 9 3 9 . N o attempt was made to correlate the work with tire German finds or with Schumacher's cru cial architectural data. Clarence S. Fisher (1929) directed die excavations from 1 9 2 5 to 1 9 2 7 . He concentrated the work on the eastern side of the summit, further uncovering Schumacher's Tempelburg, a monumental Iron Age suuc ture. From 1927 to 1 9 3 4 , P. L. O. Guy ( 1 9 3 1 ) cleared more of the area to the east of the site, uncovering remains of early periods (Engberg and Shipton, 1934) and many tombs (Guy, 1 9 3 8 ) . He excavated the first-millennium BCE levels across the summit, including the city gate, palaces, and sta ble compounds (Lamon and Shipton, 1939) and cleared the water system (Lamon, 1 9 3 5 ) . From 1935 to 1939, Gordon Loud directed the work, concentrating on digging the lower strata in limited areas (AA-DD; Loud, 1948). A deep trench that reached bedrock was excavated in area BB at the site's eastern edge. Between i960 and 1 9 7 2 , Yigael Yadin (1970) of the He brew University of Jerusalem carried out soundings on the northeast and west to clarify the Iron Age stratigraphy and particularly tlie fortifications. In 1965 Immanuel Dunayevsky and Aharon Kempinski ( 1 9 7 3 ) , also of the Hebrew Uni versity, studied the stratigraphy of the cultic area in BB, and in 1974 Avraham Eitan (1974) studied, on behalf of tlie He brew University, the Iron Age remains on the eastern slope. A long-term project of systematic excavations initiated by Israel Finkelstein and David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv Univer sity and Baruch Halpern of Pennsylvania State University followed exploratory soundings in 1992 and 1993. They car ried out a full-scale excavation season in 1994 on tlie lower terrace, on the summit near the Assyrian palaces, and in the cultic area in BB. Early S e t t l e m e n t . Remains of settlement of the earlier periods were uncovered on the site in a limited area on the eastern slope, and it is unclear whether the settlement ex tended over the entire site or not. Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. T h e earliest settle ment, on bedrock, was uncovered in area BB. Habitation remains in one cave date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) period (stratum-XX). Remains of stone and brick walls, floors, pits, and fireplaces cut in the surface of the rock be long to the earliest proper settlement here (stratum XX). Toothed flint siclde blades and pottery fragments of the Yarmukian culture date the settlement to the PPNB. Some re
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mains dating to the Ghassulian culture of the Chalcolithic period were uncovered immediately above bedrock in the upper part of the slope in area BB: rock-cut pits, installa tions, and possibly a curving wall. The pottery contains a relatively large number of cornets and small bowls, a pos sible indication of cultic activity. Early Bronze Age I. Remains of the Early Bronze Age I discerned in a surface survey northeast of the mound and on the lower terrace were uncovered in stages VII-IV in the area east of the mound (Engberg and Shipton, 1934) and in area BB (stratum XIX). T h e remains indicate that a huge unfortified EBI settlement existed there that extended over a large area east and northeast of tlie mound. The pottery is characterized by gray-burnished Esdraelon ware and grain-washed pottery. T w o "curving" buildings—rectan gular with a rounded end—and a number of cylinder seal impressions stamped on pottery vessels were uncovered in stage IV. [See Seals.] A temple compound was excavated on the eastern slope of tlie mound in area BB. It was studied by Dunayevsky and Kempinski ( 1 9 7 3 ) and again examined in the excavations since 1992. The temple was tlie first of successive sanctu aries built in this general area (the "sacred area") before the Iron Age. The shrine faced east, and a courtyard extended in front of it on the slope. T h e recent excavations indicated that there were two superimposed temples there, the upper one possibly dating to EB II. A stone pavement along the slope belonged to tlie earlier structure; some of the stone slabs are incised with figures of men, animals, and decora tive patterns. Early Bronze Age II—III. T h e EB II—III, are covered by strata XVIII-XV in area BB. Attempts to elucidate their stratigraphy and chronology were made by a number of scholars, in particular Kathleen M. Kenyon (1958), Duna yevsky and Kempinski ( 1 9 7 3 ) , and Douglas Esse ( 1 9 9 1 , pp. 67-90). A massive stone city-wall (about 4 - 5 m wide) was built in stratum XVIII; it marks the beginning of a smaller, but fortified, setdement. T h e wall's construction date is not clear; it is preserved to about 4 m in height. It turns inward at the edge of area BB, indicating that it did not surround the site. In stratum XVII it was widened to about 8 m. Ken yon (1958) suggested that it was merely a retaining wall sup porting an edifice built higher on tlie slope. Altar 4 0 1 7 , apparently the focal point of tlie sacred area, was built on tlie summit in stratum XVII and was later re built. A circular, stone-built sttucture (8 m in diameter and 1.5 m high), it has seven steps leading to its top. An enclo sure wall surrounded it, and large amounts of bones and pottery were found within it. Three temples, uniform in plan and measurements, were built near the altar in sttatum XV. Each consisted of a rectangular cella entered through a porticoed porch and a side room. Two pillar bases were found in the center of each cella, and a raised altar stood against the rear wall. T h e temples were probably dedicated to three
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different deities; with die round alter they formed an im pressive cultic compound. Their stratigraphy and chronol ogy are unclear, but it seems they were constructed later than die altar, although they were in use contemporane ously. Loud assigned the temples to the Intermediate E B MB period. It is now generally assumed that temple 4040 is earlier than the other two and that they all date to EB III. Excavations in 1994 revealed an EB III domestic layer be neath temple 4040, which needs to be factored into the dat ing. Intermediate EB-MB period. During the EB-MB pe riod, settlement continued but declined. Temple 4040 was reused: the cella was largely filled with rubble, leaving a small cultic cell in the center. A pavement with cultic vessels was found above die earlier round altar. A number of rock-cut tombs were uncovered to die southeast (Guy, 1938), many of them characterized by their plan: a vertical shaft leads into a central chamber surrounded by three smaller cham bers. [See Tombs.] The pottery in the tombs represent wheel-made, gray vessels decorated with wavy white bands, defined by Ruth Amiran (i960) as Family C and by William G. Dever (1980) as Family N C in their classifications of tlie period's pottery. Canaanite City. The beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (twentieth century BCE) marks the development of Me giddo (in stratum XIII) as an urban settlement—the center of a Canaanite city-state that existed, without interruption, until its destruction (in stratum VIIA) at the end of the Late Bronze Age (twelfth century BCE). The entire period was affected by Egyptian interests and influence, whose domi nation of Megiddo was a strategic prerequisite for hegemony in Canaan. The custom then of constructing tombs within the city limits, the difficulty in clarifying the tombs' association with city levels, the site's continuous occupation, and the near absence of destruction by fire makes interpreting the stra tigraphy and finds difficult. Many scholars have attempted to elucidate the stratigraphy, in particular Claire Epstein (1965), Kenyon (1969), Dunayevsky and Kempinski ( 1 9 7 3 ; Kempinski, 1989), Patty Gerstenblith (1983, pp. 2 3 - 2 8 , 1 1 4 ) , and Rivka Gonen (1987). It seems that the settlement was extended during this period by tire addition of a large area to the northwest. The lower city, demarcated by steep slopes, is clearly discernible today. In 1994 excavations were begun in tlie lower city (area F); whose uppermost level dates to the Late Bronze Age, indicating that the lower city was abandoned at die end of this period. Middle Bronze Age. The MB I parallels the Middle Kingdom period in Egypt, when the twelfth dynasty re newed Egyptian interest in Syria and Canaan. T h e nature of the relationship between Egypt and Megiddo then is not clear. The Execration texts do not mention Megiddo (in terpreted as an indication of Egyptian domination). Part of a stone statuette of Thuthotep, a contemporary high Egyp tian official, was found—with two other broken statuettes—
embedded in the raised platform of the stratum VIIB temple 2048. It is assumed that the statuettes stood in an earlier temple built at the spot and were broken when tlie temple was plundered; they may also have been buried later as an act of reverence. T h e historical implications of this find are similarly unclear. Some scholars assign strata XIII-XII to M B I (e.g., Kempinski, 1989), while others (e.g., Gersten blith, 1983; Graham Davies, 1986) assign stratum XII to M B II. During M B II-III (strata XI-X), the Second Inter mediate period in Egypt, Egyptian associations with M e giddo weakened, and scarabs are the main expression of Egyptian influence. Massive fortifications characterize the MB city. At least three phases were uncovered at the north edge of the mound in area AA. In stratum XIII a city gate was uncovered with a stepped approach, narrow doorways, and an indirect pas sage (indicating that it was planned for pedestrians). T h e gatehouse and associated city wall were built of bricks on stone foundations and were supported on die outside by a glacis of limestone chips. In stratum XII die city gate must have been moved and a new wall supported by a glacis added. In sttatum XI a new massive glacis was laid against the earlier fortifications, extending the mound on the north. The glacis leaned against a wall with buttresses constructed along its inner face. On the east, this wall segment ended in a tower that apparently either formed part of the city gate or flanked a monumental road leading to the upper city. A continuation of the area AA strata XIII-XII walls was found in areas BB and CC, also of bricks on stone foun dations. The unplastered brick walls were preserved to a considerable height, indicating that they were supported by a glacis and a constructional fill and were hidden from view. Schumacher uncovered remains of one or more glacis along the slope that supported massive brick walls, probably as sociated with tlie same fortification systems, in seven narrow trenches in different parts of the mound (Schumacher, 1908, pp. 2 3 - 3 6 ) . Significantly, the lower city was apparently also fortified; the 1994 excavation revealed the existence of a massive city wall built of large stone blocks that probably dates to this period. The MB royal acropolis at Megiddo was probably located at tlie center of the site. It included the Nordburg, a large building Schumacher uncovered in his main trench (1908, p. 37-66), and a building with thick stone walls uncovered in strata XI-X in area BB. Adjoining the southern side of die Nordburg Schumacher uncovered another building, the Mittelburg, which contained three unique stone-built tombs, apparently belonging to royalty or nobility. T h e largest was empty and hence was not considered by Schumacher to be a tomb. All the chambers are vaulted by fine stone rudi mentary corbeling—an early example of this building tech nique. T h e EB sacred area in BB continued to function. Loud (1948) uncovered buildings of strata XIII-IX around the sacred area but did not identify any contemporary building
MEGIDDO in the sacred area itself. He assigned an area with standing stone stelae (above altar 4 0 1 7 ) to stratum XII and a series of superimposed rubble pavements to stratum IX. T h e new temple (no. 2048) was assigned to the Late Bronze Age. It is now generally agreed that this temple was founded in the Middle Bronze Age, in stratum X or even later. Temple 2048 has three superimposed phases. T h e earliest structure was preserved at foundation level only. It is a massive rec tangle (21.50 X 16.50 m) containing a single hall with a niche opposite the entrance; two towers flanked the en hance. T h e temple is tower temple or fortress temple type and can best be compared to the contemporary temple at Shechem. [See Shechem.] MB domestic buildings were uncovered in the various strata in areas AA and BB, indicating tiiat Megiddo was densely populated then. T h e custom of intramural burial, inside and outside the houses, in graves and in stone-built tombs, was very common. [See Burial Sites; Burial Tech niques.] Typical of the end of the period and of the begin ning of the Late Bronze Age is bichrome ware—decorated pottery either imported from Cyprus or locally made. Late Bronze Age. The expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt and the campaign of Ahmose to Canaan in about 1 5 5 0 BCE mark the beginning of the Late Bronze Age and the renewal of Egyptian influence in the country. It seems that Megiddo was not destroyed but was conquered in about 1479 BCE, during Thutmosis Ill's first Asiatic campaign. Events at Megiddo were recorded in detail in Thutmosis's monumental inscription carved on the walls of the Temple at Karnak and can be reconstructed (Davies, 1986, pp. 5 1 56). While the Egyptian army progressed northward along the coastal highway, the army of die Canaanite ldngs, led by the ldng of Qadesh on the Orontes River, concentrated near Megiddo. They prepared to challenge Thutmosis where the pass leading through the narrow Nahal Iron opens to the Jezreel Valley (see above). Thutmosis III learned of his op ponents' plan, but decided to follow the direct route and took the Canaanite armies by surprise. T h e Egyptians won the ensuing battle, and the Canaanites fled to Megiddo, which Thutmosis conquered after a seven-month siege. T h e battle established Egyptian domination over Megiddo. It probably continued until the end of Canaanite Megiddo, which is marked by the destruction of stratum VILA (twelfth century BCE) . Megiddo is not mentioned in the descriptions of the cam paigns of Amenhotep II ( 1 4 2 7 - 1 4 0 1 BCE), apparently be cause the city was already dominated by Egypt. One of the Ta'anach letters mentions the Egyptian commander at M e giddo. [See Ta'anach.] Papyrus Hermitage 1 1 1 6 A , dating to the reign of Amenhotep II, records presentations by Egyp tian officials of grain and beer to envoys of various Canaan ite cities, including Megiddo. Eight letters found in die elAmarna archive and dating to the reigns of Amenhotep III ( 1 3 9 1 - 1 3 5 3 BCE) and Amenhotep IV ( 1 3 5 3 - 1 3 3 5 BCE) were sent from Megiddo. [See Amarna Tablets.] Six letters were
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sent by Biridiya, the ruler of Megiddo, who expressed his loyalty to the Egyptian pharaoh and discussed his struggle with Labayu, the ruler of Shechem, and the cultivation of estates in Shunem by forced labor. Egyptian domination probably continued into the thirteenth century BCE, but there is no documentation other than Papyrus Anastasi I, in which Megiddo appears as a place name in Canaan. Of particular interest is a fragmentary cuneiform tablet that includes the Epic of Gilgamesh; although found on the surface beyond the site (Goetze and Levy, 1959), it may derive from a scribal school at Megiddo. A new royal palace was built in stratum IX on the north, probably replacing the earlier royal acropolis at the center of the settlement. Four successive palaces were excavated (area AA) in strata IX-VIIA. Particularly impressive is the stratum VIII palace. The stratum VILA palace was decorated with wall paintings, an indication of Egyptian influence. [See Wall Paintings.] According to Loud (1948), the strata VIIB and VILA palaces met with violent destruction; however, it seems possible that only the latest palace was desttoyed by fire. A second palatial complex was built farther east, in area D D , but the relationship between the two is unclear. The stratum VILA palace included an annex—a threechambered cellar. In its rear chamber, sealed by destruction debris, an assemblage of ivory objects and other precious items was found (Loud, 1 9 3 9 ) . T h e assemblage included 382 carved ivories of assorted types in the locally carved Canaanite style and imported Egyptian, Aegean, Assyrian, and Hittite examples. It is the richest assemblage of Bronze Age ivories found in the Near East. A wide, paved roadway supported by a retaining wall led to a city gate near the palace. Built in stratum IX (or even stratum X) and used until stratum VILA, it was a three-entry monumental gatehouse built with ashlars but without foun dations. T h e gatehouse is not connected to a city wall and was probably erected where the stratum XI roadway or ga tehouse was, incorporated in the line of the MB glacis. In 1993 the gatehouse, which the Chicago expedition had par tially blocked after its excavation, was recleared, further ex cavated, and then restored by Israel National Parks Author ity. T h e Chicago excavators believed that the gate had two floors, representing two phases, but the recent excavation has not verified this conclusion. Three large ovens where found on the floor, indicating that in its latest period of use it did not function as a gate. The absence of a Late Bronze Age city wall has puzzled scholars, particularly because Thutmosis III laid a siege to the city (Gonen, 1987, pp. 97-98). It seems that the glacis of the previous period continued to function also in the Late Bronze Age. Also, houses built along the upper periphery of the mound may have formed a defense line around the city. Temple 2048, uncovered in Area BB, which was probably founded in die Middle Bronze Age, continued to be in use. It was destroyed by fire at the end of the period. A number
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of valuable objects, including bronze figurines and two clay liver models, probably originate in the temple. An ivory object bearing a cartouche of Rameses III was found in the assemblage of ivories in the stratum VILA pal ace. It proves drat stratum VILA was not destroyed prior to the reign of that pharaoh ( 1 1 8 2 - 1 1 5 1 BCE; low chronology of Wente and Van Siclen). A statue of Rameses VI ( 1 1 4 1 1 1 3 3 BCE; low chronology), found buried in a pit in Area CC was probably placed in a temple; it indicates die continua tion of Egyptian domination of Megiddo during Rameses VPs reign. The destruction of sttatum VILA probably oc curred shortly afterwards, in about 1 1 3 0 BCE. A S it seems this destruction coincides with the end of Egyptian rule in Canaan, and the two events may well have been connected. Strata VIB-A. Following the destruction of the Canaan ite metropolis, a poor settlement was built in sttatum VIB that was subsequently replaced by a larger, richer settlement in VIA. It was unfortified, but tire excavators believed the later stratum VA/IVB (see below) city gate to have origi nated there. The buildings, mostly domestic in nature, were built of bricks on stone foundations. The sole public struc ture is building 2072, near the site's northern edge. Metal objects, mostly of bronze, reflecting a long tradition (prob ably Canaanite) of bronzework, are typical of this settle ment; of particular interest are a number of bronze stands and iron blades uncovered by Schumacher (1908, pp. 8 4 87). The settlement was destroyed by fire. Historical correlations. The Philistine bichrome pot tery uncovered in stratum VI suggests a Philistine presence or influence. Albrecht Alt ( 1 9 5 3 ) , Mazar (1976), and Yadin
MEGIDDO. Figure I.
(1970) believed stratum VIA represented the eleventh-cen tury Canaanite-Philistine city David conquered, and Trude Dothan considers the fragments of Philistine pottery re ported from that stratum to be an early indication of the Sea Peoples' presence; however, they are more likely merely stray sherds. [See Philistines, article on Early Philistines.] The king of Megiddo is mentioned in Joshua 1 2 : 2 1 in the list of kings defeated by Joshua. Joshua 1 7 : 1 1 - 1 2 and Judges 1:27 record that the Canaanites continued to live in Megiddo until their later subjugation by the ttibe of Manasseh (cf. r Chr. 7:29). Albright (1936) believed that the expression "in Ta'anach, by the waters of Megiddo" (Jgs. 5:19) in the Song of Deborah refers to a time when Megiddo was not settled, assigning the poem and the events described in it to the period immediately following the destruction of the stratum VILA city. Aharoni (1982) suggested that the Israelites de stroyed the stratum and that stratum VIB was a small Isra elite settlement. His view was supported by the presence of Collared-rim storage jars, usually associated with the Isra elite conquest of Canaan, in stratum VIA. Israelite City. Remains of domestic buildings of stratum VB were uncovered in various parts of the site. T h e stratum VB settlement was unfortified, except for one building, pos sibly a fort. It is usually considered to be Israelite, dating to the reign of David. Solomonic city. Megiddo was included with Ta'anach and Beth-Shean in the fifth administrative district of Solo mon (1 Kgs. 4 : 1 2 ) . Apparently tlie district governor, Baana son of Ahilud, resided at Megiddo. [See Beth-Shean.] M e giddo is mentioned with Jerusalem, Hazor, and Gezer in 1
Aerial view of the southern Solomonic palace at the time of its excavation. (Courtesy
The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)
MEGIDDO
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Figure 2. Suggested reconstruction of the stratum VA-TVB city gate. Dated to die ninth century BCE. (Courtesy The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) MEGIDDO.
Kings 9:15 as a central city built by Solomon and financed by levies. [See Jerusalem; Hazor; Gezer.] Monumental So lomonic remains were uncovered in all the excavations. Their interpretation is not easy and is, in many ways, con troversial. Of special importance is Yadin's work (1970), which resulted in redating city wall 325 and "Solomon's sta bles" to die ninth century BCE. Stratigraphically, the Solomonic city level includes the structures located above the stratom VB building remains and immediately beneath city wall 325 of stratum IVA and associated structures. Solomonic remains were assigned by the University of Chicago excavators to different strata: V (later VA), IVB, and IV. Albright (1943, pp. 29-30, no 1 0 ) observed that the remains of strata VA and IVB belong to a single city level (his VA/IVB), the superimposed strattim was labeled IVA. This terminology is largely used today, but some scholars label tiiese levels VA and IV, respectively. Aharoni ( 1 9 7 2 ; 1982) dated stratum VA/IVB to David's reign and IVA to Solomon's (cf. Kenyon, 1964, and Wightman, 1 9 8 5 ) .
Stratum VA/IVB includes three palaces (nos. 1 7 2 3 , 6000, 338) built along die upper periphery of the site on the south (see figure 1 ) , north, and east, respectively. Situated in large courtyards, their facades face the center of the site. A large building (no. 1 4 8 2 ) , interpreted as an administrative in func tion, was built near the compound of the southern palace (no. 1 7 2 3 ) . Large quarters of domestic buildings were un
covered along the east and north, including a sanctuary (no. 2081) along the upper periphery on the north. The buildings on the upper periphery formed a line of defense Yadin (1970) interpreted as a casemate city wall. The city gate, on the north, was a small, two-entry gate house, approached by a wide, lime-paved ramp (Loud, 1948, pp. 39-45) (see figure 2 ) ; the so-called Solomonic four-entty gatehouse is later in date and belongs to stratum IVA. In addition, a small postern (gallery 629) was built on the west, above the spring. Originally dated to the twelfth century BCE (Lamon, 1 9 3 5 ) , it was correctly assigned by Ya din (1970) to stratum VA/TVB. Ashlar masonry was used lavishly in constructing the monumental buildings, botii in their foundations and su perstructure. Proto-Ionic stone capitals, mounted on pilas ters and freestanding pillars, decorated their entrances. Un fortunately, the buildings were mostly destroyed when die ashlars were taken for reuse in stratum IVA. Construction with ashlars originated in Egypt and first appears in Canaan in the LB city gate and temple at Megiddo. It was introduced on a large scale during Solomon's reign. At Solomonic M e giddo, it fits the description of ashlar masonry in Solomon's palace in Jerusalem (r Kgs. 7 : 9 - 1 2 ) and reflects the Phoe nician influence on Solomon's building activities. Palace 6000, uncovered by Yadin (1970, pp. 7 3 - 7 7 ) , was rectangular (28 X 2 1 m ) . Most of its stones were removed following its destruction by fire. It was apparently a cere-
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MEGIDDO. Figure 3. Cult objects. The objects were found in a cache in small sanctuary no. 2081 of stratum VA-IVB; dated to the reign of Solomon. (Courtesy The Oriental Institute, Univ. of Chicago)
monial palace built as a bit-hilani (a type of a ceremonial palace typical to North Syria in this period). It contained a porticoed entrance and a large central hall. Palace 1 7 2 3 (La mon and Shipton, 1939, pp. u - 2 4 ) was built in a spacious courtyard and entered through a monumental gatehouse (no. 1567) that was largely uncovered by Schumacher (1908, pp. 9 1 - 1 0 4 ) . T h e nearly square palace (about 22 X 23 m) was mostly preserved at foundation level; hence, its aboveground plan is unknown. It seems probable that it con tained both a ceremonial section built as a bit-hilani and a residential section (Ussishkin, 1966). If so, Solomonic Me giddo contained at least two bit-hilani palaces as, for in stance, on the acropoli of Tell Ta'yinat and Zincirli (ancient Sam'al) in North Syria, which date to this general period. Other scholars restore only palace 6000 as a bit-hilani (Ya din, 1970; Kempinski, 1989). Building 338, at the highest point in the city, was con structed on an aboveground foundation podium. It was first excavated by Schumacher (1908, pp. 1 1 0 - 1 2 4 ) , who iden tified it as a sanctuary and associated it with the stratum II fortress (his Tempelburg). Fisher (1929, pp. 68-74) exca vated it further and identified it as the Temple of Astarte; Guy ( 1 9 3 1 , pp. 3 0 - 3 7 ; Lamon and Shipton, 1939, pp. 4 7 59) interpreted it as the residence of the military commander of the eastern part of the city and assigned it to stratum IV (i.e., IVA). Guy's views are generally accepted today. How ever, while part of the building probably served a secular function, it seems that Schumacher rightiy identified a shrine, characterized by two large stelae, in unit 340, in the
southern part of the building (Ussishkin, 1989). Model shrines and stone altars uncovered inside and to the south of rite building by Schumacher and Fisher (May, 1 9 3 5 ) probably belong to this shrine. A wing of the building un covered by Schumacher and later destroyed was ignored by the University of Chicago excavators; it apparently ante dates city wall 3 2 5 ; hence, building 338 dates to stratum VA/ IVB. Sanctuary 2081 contained a cache of cultic equipment (Loud, 1948, pp. 45-46) (see figure 3 ) . Several stones carved in the shape of an eight segment of a sphere found nearby (Lamon and Shipton, 1939, pp. 24) suggest that a large horned altar erected of ashlars, similar to tire Tel Beer sheba altar, stood in the sanctuary's courtyard. [See Altars; Beersheba.] It seems that stratum VA/IVB was destroyed by fire, but it is presently unclear when and by whom. Indications of destruction were uncovered in a number of places, primarily palace 6000, building 1 0 , the gatehouse to the compound of palace 1 7 2 3 , and structures on the north. Megiddo is mentioned in the list of cities conquered by Sheshonq I (biblical Shishak) during his campaign to Israel and Judah in about 925 BCE. Furthermore, Fisher (1929) found a fragment of a stone-carved stela erected by that pharaoh at Megiddo. It is estimated that die complete stela was about 3.30 m high and 1.50 m wide; it had stood not far from its findspot on the eastern side of the site. Albright (1943, p. 29, no 1 0 ) proposed that Solomonic Megiddo was destroyed by Sheshonq I, but it seems more likely that the pharaoh erected his stela in an existing city with the intention
MEGIDDO of holding it in the future (so that stratum VA/IVB must have been destroyed later). T w o decorated seals inscribed in Hebrew were uncovered by Schumacher in gatehouse 1567 in the palace 1 7 2 3 com pound: "(belonging) to Asaph" and "(belonging) to Shema, Servant of Jeroboam." They probably belonged to royal Is raelite officials. T w o more inscribed seals were found nearby, in Schumacher's dumps. T h e Shema seal is usually ascribed to the reign of Jeroboam II (784-748 BCE), but some scholars (e.g., Ussishldn, 1994) ascribe it to the period of Jeroboam I (928-907 BCE). If that is so, the compound of palace 1 7 2 3 , and probably all of the stratum VA/IVB city, would not have been destroyed prior to 928-907. [See Seals.] Stratum IVA. T h e city of stratum IVA differs radically from that of VA/IVB because the role of the city changed with the. Divided Monarchy. T h e city of stratum VA/IVB, a civilian district center characterized by palatial com pounds, became a fortified stronghold in stratum IVA. Its date of construction is not clear. In view of the identification of the "stable compounds" as stable for horses (see below), many scholars date this city level to the reign of Ahab ( 8 7 3 852 BCE), known from Assyrian records of the battle of Karkar to have had strong cavalry and chariotry. Ahaziah, king of Judah, may have died at Megiddo in stratum IVA, fleeing before Jehu's men (2 Kgs. 9:27). City wall 325 (about 3.6 m thick), stone built with insets and offsets, surrounded the city. T h e entrance was through a complex city gate—the so-called Solomonic gate (Loud, 1948, pp. 46-57). A roadway led to an outer gatehouse; the latter opened to an open court, and behind it was the inner, four-entry gatehouse that adjoined the city wall. The inner gatehouse rested on massive foundations built with ashlars in secondary use that were supported by a constructional fill. The foundations and ground plans of the gate complex are similar to the tenth-ninth century BCE gates at Hazor, Gezer, Ashdod, Lachish, and probably Tel Batash (ancient Timnah). [See Ashdod; Lachish; Batash, Tel.] The construction date of the city gate is controversial. Stratigraphically, it adjoins city wall 325 and is contempo rary with it—and thus belongs to stratum IVA. A growing number of scholars, notably Aharoni ( 1 9 7 2 ) , Ze'ev Herzog (1986), Ussishkin (1980), Kempinski (1989), and Finkel stein, concur. It follows that the gate complex dates to the period of the Divided Monarchy. Yadin ( 1 9 5 8 , 1 9 7 0 , 1 9 8 0 ) believed that the four-entry gatehouse originated in stratum VA/IVB and was built by Solomon's architects. This dating is primarily based on the similarity in plan between this gate and die four-entry gates at Hazor and Gezer. All three were built by Solomon (r Kgs. 9 : 1 5 ) . Yadin (1970; 1980) offered a new interpretation of the stratigraphy to explain how the gatehouse antedates city wall 3 2 5 (which in fact adjoins it) tiiis stratigraphy and dating are followed by most scholars. A large water system was built to protect, as well as to facilitate, the approach to the spring at. the bottom of the
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west slope (Lamon, 1 9 3 5 ) . It was originally assigned to the twelfth century BCE, but Yadin (1970) redated it. Gallery 629 (the stratum VA/IVB postern leading to the spring) and the approach to the spring from outside were then blocked. A vertical shaft was dug from the surface, its lower part hewed out of the rock, and steps were prepared along its sides. A rock-cut horizontal tunnel led from the bottom to the spring. In a later stage the horizontal tunnel was deepened, enabling the water to flow to the bottom of the shaft. [See Water T u n nels.] Two "stable compounds" were uncovered (Lamon and Shipton, 1939, pp. 3 2 - 4 7 ) and identified by Guy ( 1 9 3 1 , pp. 37-48) as stables for horses—associating them with Solo mon's "cities for chariots and cities for horses" (1 Kgs. 9:19). Several scholars (e.g., Lamon and Shipton, 1939; Yadin, 1976; Holladay, 1986; Davies, 1986) supported the identi fication of the structures as stables, while others (e.g., Prit chard, 1970; Herzog, 1 9 7 3 ; Herr, 1988) argued for their different use as barracks, public storehouses, or market places. This discussion assumes that they were stables for horses. The southern compound contains five stablingunits. Each unit (about 21 X 1 1 m) contains a centtal lime-paved passage and two side, stone-paved aisles. Each aisle is sep arated from the central passage by a row of stone pillars alternating with stone mangers made of ashlars taken from the Solomonic palaces. T h e side aisles served as stalls for the horses, each pillar and the adjoining manger marking the position of one horse. Many pillars had holes in their corners for tethering. Each aisle could accommodate 1 5 horses— hence, each unit contained 30 horses and the entire complex had 150. The stables opened into a spacious, lime-paved square courtyard (about 55 X 55 m). It has been suggested (Lamon and Shipton, 1 9 3 9 , p. 35) that a unit of chariots was stationed in this compound and the courtyard used for its training. The northern complex contained similar stabling units, but they were not built uniformly around a large courtyard. It could hold 3 0 0 - 3 3 0 horses; altogether, 450-480 horses were garrisoned at Megiddo. A large stone storage pit (no. 1 4 1 4 ) , uncovered midway between the two stable compounds, was assigned to stratum III (Lamon and Shipton, 1 9 3 9 , pp. 66-68). However, it probably belongs to stratum IVA, where it was the central silo for the horses' provisions (Ussishkin, 1994, pp. 4 2 4 426). T h e pit was at least 7 m deep; its diameter at the bot tom is 7 m (for a capacity of about 450 cu m). Remains of chaff and grains were found inside. Assuming that each horse consumed about 9.61 of food a day, the pit could have held supplies for 3 0 0 - 3 3 0 horses for about 1 3 0 - 1 5 0 days. Stratum III. In 7 3 2 BCE, Tiglath-Pileser III annexed northern Israel to Assyria, and Megiddo became the capital of the Assyrian province Magiddu (stratum III). [See As syrians.] City wall 325 continued in use, but a new city gate was constructed. Remains of one or two gatehouses super imposed above the four-entry inner gatehouse were uncov-
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ered. The upper one was a stratum III two-entry gatehouse. T o the west of the city gate, two or three public buildings (nos. 1 0 5 2 , 1369, 1853) were uncovered that display Assyr ian architectural features, in particular central, rectangular courtyards. It is clear that they were administtative or resi dential centers. Excavations resumed in this area in 1994 revealed a number of building stages. The buildings had not been destroyed by fire, but few finds were recovered. T h e absence of finds, in particular of Assyrian objects, is puz zling because the buildings were Assyrian provincial centers. Residential quarters extended over large areas of the city, with houses arranged, in blocks separated by evenly spaced and parallel streets. Strata II and I. Stratum II dates to the seventh century BCE. Its remains, uncovered across die site, include mainly domestic structures that follow the stratum III pattern. T h e stratum III Assyrian public buildings may have continued in use in stratum II. Remains of buildings uncovered near the site's upper periphery indicate that city wall 325 had fallen into disuse in stratum II or I sometime before the set tlement ended. A large structure (about 69 X 48 m), with a large central court, at the eastern edge of the site, was uncovered by Schumacher (1908, pp. 1 1 0 - 1 2 1 ) as part of the Tempelburg and by Fisher, who identified it as a stratum II fortress (La mon and Shipton, 1 9 3 9 , pp. 83-86). The stone walls are about 2.5 m thick at foundation level. According to Lamon and Shipton (1939), the fortress was built above the disused city wall 3 2 5 , the settlement's only fortification. (Both con clusions are doubtful.) In 609 BCE, Pharaoh Necho reached Megiddo on his way to Carchemish to aid Assyria against Babylon. Josiah, king of Judah, met Necho at Megiddo and was executed by him (2 Kgs. 23:29-30; 2 Chr. 35:20-24). Stratum I represents ordinary remains (many small houses, three long storerooms near the city gate, and a number of stone-built cist tombs) of the last settlement in the Babylonian and Persian periods. Tel Megiddo was abandoned in the fourth century BCE, pos sibly when Alexander the Great conquered the region in 332 BCE.
Later Periods. A Jewish village, Kefar 'Otnay, existed south of the site in about 100 CE. During Hadrian's reign ( 1 1 7 - 1 3 8 CE) the Legio II Traiana was stationed there and was later replaced by the Legio VI Ferrata. Kefar 'Otnay, renamed Legio after the occupying force, became the center of an administrative district whose name is preserved in the name of the later Arab village, Lejjun. Schumacher (1908) investigated extensive remains of the Roman and Arab pe riods, including aqueducts, a theater, tombs, and a possible site of a Roman camp to the south. He also uncovered some late remains, notably an Ottoman watchtower on the east. [See also the biographies of Aharoni, Albright, Alt, Dunayevsky, Fisher, Guy, Kenyon, Mazar, Schumacher, Watzinger, and Yadin,}
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. "The Stratification of Israelite Megiddo." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 31 (1972): 3 0 2 - 3 1 1 . Aharoni, Yohanan. The Archaeology of the Land of Israel. Philadelphia, 1982. Albright, William Foxwell. "The Song of Deborah in the Light of Ar chaeology." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 62 (1936): 2 6 - 3 1 . Albright, William Foxwell. The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim. Vol. 3, The Iron Age. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2 1 - 2 2 . New Haven, 1943. Alt, Albrecht. "Megiddo im Ubergang vom kanaanaischen zum israelitischen Zeitalter." Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel, vol. 1, pp. 256-273. Munich, 1953. Amiran, Ruth. "The Pottery of the Middle Bronze Age I in Palestine." Israel Exploration Journal 10 (i960): 204-225. Davies, Graham I. Megiddo. Cambridge, 1986. Dever, William G. "New Vistas on die EB IV ("MB I") Horizon in Syria-Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 237 (1980): 35-64. Dunayevsky, Immanuel, and Aharon Kempinski. "The Megiddo Tem ples." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 89 (1973): 1 6 1 - 1 8 7 . Eitan, Avraham. "Notes and News: Megiddo." Israel Exploration Jour nal 24 (1974): 275-276. Engberg, Robert, and Geoffrey Shipton. Notes on the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Pottery of Megiddo. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilizations, no. 1 0 . Chicago, 1934. Epstein, Claire. "An Interpretation of the Megiddo Sacred Area during Middle Bronze II." Israel .Exploration Journal 15 (1965): 2 0 4 - 2 2 1 . Esse, Douglas. Subsistence, Trade, and Social Change in Early Bronze Age Palestine. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilizations, no. 50. Chi cago, 1991. Fisher, Clarence S. The Excavation of Armageddon. Oriental Institute Communications, 4. Chicago, 1929. Gerstenblith, Patty. The Levant at the Beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. ASOR Dissertation Series, 5. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Gonen, Rivka. "Megiddo in the Late Bronze Age: Another Reassess ment." Levant 19 (1987): 83-100. Goetze, Albrecht, and Shalom Levy. "Fragment of the Gilgamesh Epic from Megiddo." 'Atiqot% (1959): 1 2 1 - 1 2 8 . Guy, P. L. O. New Light from Armageddon. Oriental Institute Com munications, 9. Chicago, 1 9 3 1 . Guy, P. L. O. Megiddo Tombs. Oriental Institute Publications, 3 3 . Chi cago, 1938. Herr, Larry G. "Tripartite Pillared Buildings and the Market Place in Iron Age Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 272 (1988): 47-67. Herzog, Ze'ev. "The Storehouses." In Beer-Sheba I, edited by Yohanan Aharoni, pp. 2 3 - 3 0 . Tel Aviv, 1 9 7 3 . Herzog, Ze'ev. Das Stadttor in Israel und in den Nachbarlandern. Mainz am Rhein, 1986. Holladay, John S., Jr. "The Stables of Ancient Israel." In The Archae ology of Jordan and Other Studies, Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, ed ited by Lawrence T. Geraty and Larry G, Herr, pp. 1 0 3 - 1 6 6 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. Kempinski, Aharon. Megiddo: A City-State and Royal Centre in North Israel. Munich, 1989. Kenyon, Kathleen M. "Some Notes on the Early and Middle Bronze Age Strata at Megiddo" (in Hebrew). Eretz-Israel 5 (1958): 5 1 - 6 0 . Kenyon, Kathleen M. "Megiddo, Hazor, Samaria, and Chronology." Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology 4 (1964): 1 4 3 - 1 5 5 . Kenyon, Kathleen M. "The Middle and Late Bronze Age Strata at Megiddo." Levant 1 (1969): 25-60.
MEIRON Lamon, Robert S. The Megiddo Water System. Oriental Institute Pub lications, 32. Chicago, 1935. Lamon, Robert S., and Geoffrey Shipton. Megiddo I: Seasons of 192$34, Strata I-V. Oriental Institute Publications, 42. Chicago, 1939. Loud, Gordon. The Megiddo Ivories. Oriental Institute Publications, 52. Chicago, 1939. Loud, Gordon. Megiddo II: Seasons of I93S-I939- Oriental Institute Publications, 62. Chicago, 1948. May, Herbert Gordon. Material Remains of the Megiddo Cull. Oriental Institute Publications, 26. Chicago, 1935. Pritchard, James B. "The Megiddo Stables: A Reassessment." In Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nel son Glueck, edited by J. A. Sanders, pp. 268-276. Garden City, N.Y., 1970. Schumacher, Gottlieb. Tell el-Mutesellim, vol. 1, Fundberichl. Leipzig, 1908. Ussishkin, David. "King Solomon's Palace and Building 1723 in Me giddo." Israel Exploration Journal 16 (1966): 1 7 4 - 1 8 6 . Ussishkin, David. "Was the 'Solomonic' City Gate at Megiddo Built by King Solomon?" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 239 (1980): 1 - 1 8 . Ussishkin, David. "Schumacher's Shrine in Building 338 at Megiddo." Israel Exploration Journals (1989): 1 4 9 - 1 7 2 . Ussishkin, David. "Gate 1567 at Megiddo and the Seal of Shema, Ser vant of Jeroboam." In Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J . King, edited by M. D . Coogan, J. C. Exum, and Lawrence E. Stager, pp. 410-428. Louisville, 1994. Watzinger, Carl. Tell el-Mutesellim, vol. 2, Die Funde. Leipzig, 1929. Wightman, Gregory J. "Megiddo VIA-III: Associated Structures and Chronology." Levant 17 (1985): 1 1 7 - 1 2 9 . Yadin, Yigael. "Solomon's City Wall and Gate at Gezer," Israel Explo ration Journal % (1958): 80-86. Yadin, Yigael. "Megiddo of die Kings of Israel." Biblical Archaeologist. 33 (1970): 66-96. Yadin, Yagael. "The Megiddo Stables." In Magnolia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory ofG. Ernest Wright, edited by F. M. Cross, W. E. Lemke, and P. D. Miller, Jr., pp. 249-252. Garden City, N.Y., 1976. Yadin, Yigael. "A Rejoinder." Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 239 (1980): 1 9 - 2 3 . DAVID USSISHKIN
MEIRON, one of four major villages in Upper Galilee (Tetracomia), located just 11cm (1.6 mi.) north of the closest village, Khirbet Shema', at 750 m above sea level (33°oo' N , 35°27' E; map reference 1 9 1 X 2 6 5 ) . T h e site lies on die eastern ridge of die Meiron range (Jarmaq) and enjoys a plentiful water supply from rainwater (about 75 cm or 30 in. per year) and from the Spring of Meiron in the wadi to its south. T h e site is not to be confused with Merot in Jo sephus (War 2.573, 3.39), which is located just north of Safed. Rather, Meiron is to be identified with the Talmudic village associated with Simeon bar Yochai. The ruins of Meiron attracted Jewish pilgrims in medieval times, atten tion being focused on the traditional grave sites of sages and the ruin of the ancient synagogue. T h e Jewish feast of Lag B'Omer has been celebrated at the site since tlie thirteenth century CE. The synagogue ruin was cleared and surveyed by Hein-
469
rich Kohl and Carl Watzinger (Antike Synagogen in Galilda, Leipzig, 1 9 1 6 , pp. 80-88) at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, because tlie synagogue's western wall and floor are cut from natural rock, not much has survived except one of the southern portals (the others were restored by the Israel Department of Antiquities in the 1950s). [See Synagogues.] Excavations were sponsored by the American Schools of Oriental Research from 1 9 7 1 to 1977, directed by Eric M. Meyers. They represent the only systematic work done at the site, which has suffered greatly from modern consttuction and pilgrimage during Lag B'Omer. The 1 9 7 1 and 1 9 7 2 seasons were conducted concurrently with the ex cavations at Khirbet Shema'. [See Shema', Khirbet.] After 1 9 7 2 , work at Meiron, Gush Halav, and Nabratein was con ducted under the framework of the Meiron Excavation Pro ject. [See Gush Halav; Nabratein.] Soundings made up against the eastern closing wall of the synagogue produced limited results. Several rooms or an nexes were uncovered with clear debris of the late third cen tury CE and may be associated with the founding of the syn agogue structure. Unfortunately, most of the synagogue's architectural elements had been robbed, so that die expe dition was only able to alter slightly Kohl and Watzinger's plan. The building is a standard basilica with a portico with two rows of columns running north-south. [See Basilicas.] The facade, with three doorways on the south wall, possibly with a Torah shrine, was certainly the wall of orientation, and a gallery for extra seating can be reconstructed from existing architectural fragments. Significant medieval re mains once covered the eastern end of the destroyed syna gogue, but their poor state of preservation makes it impos sible to identify their purpose. The main focus of die excavation was the domestic areas located considerably downslope on the east, where preser vation was better and the depth of debris considerable (2-4 m). Although pockets of Late Hellenistic and Early Roman debris were found, tlie major periods of occupation were the second-fourth centuries CE, with a clear floruit in the thirdfourth centuries. Of special interest in the lower city was the insula, or block, known as MI. In this area a courtyard served as a major open space; it adjoined an interior space used for chores and specific trades (e.g., carpentry, as evi denced by small finds such as a bronze plane). The second story was most probably used as a sleeping space. An earlier riutal bath and cistern(s) also were discovered in this area. [See Ritual Baths; Cisterns.] Important details of everyday life, while ample, are difficult to reconstruct fully because of the poor state of preservation caused by extensive rock tum ble. Several houses in the next insula, Mil, provided further details of domestic existence in Late Roman contexts. Of note is that a common space apparently connected two dis tinct units, both of which utilized tlie site's natural topog raphy to full advantage. In both dwellings in this area, as in
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MI, evidence was recovered of a fourth-century abandon ment, especially in a sealed room whose contents were apparendy purposely charred and set aside (as hekdesh, i.e., for the future Temple). T h e foodstuffs identified were wheat, barley, legumes, fid beans, and walnuts. The courtyard, with an oven in the larger unit, is particularly well preserved. Soundings to tire north of the settlement revealed cultivation areas and small field structures that would have been used to store supplies and for other agricultural activities. The excavation of a tomb farther up the slope and to the west provided numerous small finds, intact pottery, and skeletal remains from the Late Hellenistic, Early Roman, and Late Roman periods. Secondary reburial of remains from kokhim or loculi predominate, while important evi dence of endogomy was posited from the skeletal remains, suggesting family continuity over a very long period. Fairly extensive pottery remains were uncovered from the cisterns throughout the site. [See Burial Sites; Tombs; Burial Tech niques.] T h e significance of the Meiron excavations is their con centration on domestic/private rather than public buildings. T h e picture of everyday life revealed is consistent with life in rural, mountainous Upper Galilee. The large corpus of material culture published is one of the major building blocks available for reconstructing daily life in Roman Pal estine. BIBLIOGRAPHY Meyers, Carol L . , et al. "Excavations at Meiron in Upper Galilee, 1 9 7 1 , 1972: A Preliminary Report." Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 2 1 4 (1974): 2 - 2 5 . Meyers, Eric M., et al. "Excavations at Meiron in Upper Galilee, 1974, I97S: Second Preliminary Report." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 43 (1978): 73-98. Meyers, Eric M., et al. "The Meiron Excavation Project: Archaeolog ical Survey in Galilee and Golan, 1976." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 230 (1978): 1-24. Meyers, Eric M., et al. The Excavations at Ancient Meiron, Upper Galilee, hrael, 1971-1972, 1974-197$, 1977. Cambridge, Mass., 1981. Final report on the excavations; contains plans, photos, and artifacts. E R I C M . MEYERS
M E M P H I S , site located on the west bank of the Nile ( 2 g ° 5 i ' N, 3 i ° i 5 ' E) some 25 km (15 mi.) south of Cairo; one of ancient Egypt's longest-occupied settlements. Ac cording to die fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, Menes (probably best identified as King Aha, first dynasty, c. 3100 BCE), founded die initial settlement of Memphis. The city's occupation continued well after the dynastic period, although the founding first of Alexandria and then Fustat (an area in Cairo) seriously lessened its significance. Origi nally the town was called tire "white fortress" (jnb hd), but during the late Old Kingdom the city acquired its most widely used name, Mennefer (mn nfr). The Greeks called it
Menophreos, the derivation of the modern name, Memphis. Mennefer, an abbreviation for "(town of) the pyramid of Pepi Merenre," referred to the settiement housing the build ers of Pepi I's pyramid at Saqqara, one of several nearby cemeteries serving the local population. Memphis acquired other names, but they generally refer to specific quarters or structures, not to the entire community. Mit Rahina is the name of tire modern village nearby. Memphis was the capital of tire first Lower Egyptian nome (province), and during the Old Kingdom, it was the country's only capital. T h e city was a primary residence of the king and the seat of a vizier. Throughout Egyptian his tory, Memphis was a great center of political, economic, and religious prominence, even when the royal residence was located elsewhere. Today tire archaeological remains of the city are visible only over 2.5 km (1.6 mi.) of floodplain, but ancient Memphis was certainly much larger. Cemeteries as far north as Abu Roash and south to Dahshur contained occupants who had lived in Memphis. T h e city encom passed civic structures such as palaces, temples, manufac turing zones, a port, and probably markets, as well as private estates with land and clusters of houses with gardens. Several factors were responsible for Memphis's domi nance over other Egyptian settlements. Its location at the apex of the Delta allowed effective control over communi cation between Lower and Upper Egypt as well as foreign trade. Archaeological and textual remains indicate that Memphis was a prominent religious site. A temple identified with Ptah, tile creator god, is known from the first dynasty, and in later times it was the focal point of Memphis. Ptah was a deity of utmost importance, and during the reign of Shabaka (twenty-fifth dynasty, c. 770-657) a text now known as the Memphite Theology documents universal cre ation through Ptah's speech and thought. T h e priests asso ciated with the Ptah temple were particularly powerful, hav ing responsibilities that included the coronation, the Apis rites, and maintaining the country's archives, including the flood records. These duties, in conjunction with the potency of the Memphite theology, earned die Memphite priesthood a reputation for wisdom and knowledge. Ptah was part of a triad that included his consort Sekhmet and his son Nefertum. By the end of Egyptian history, the Apis bull, an animal sacred to Ptah, was highly venerated at Memphis. Other important deities with recorded temples, shrines, or monuments at the site include Hathor, Tatenen, Neitii, Amun, Sokar, Imhotep, and the foreign divinities, Baal, Reshep, Astarte, and Qudshu (Qadesh). Flinders Petrie, working for the British School of Archae ology in Egypt between 1908 and 1 9 1 3 , was the first person to undertake an organized excavation of the site's archaeo logical remains, although the site's importance had been rec ognized earlier. His work focused upon the large Ptah tem ple and the palace of Apries. Clarence S. Fisher of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania
MERIMDE worked at Memphis between 1 9 1 5 and 1 9 2 3 . He discovered a large ceremonial(?) palace widi much of the layout and wall decoration still preserved, dating to the reign of Merneptah. Fisher also seems to have excavated extensively (ap proximately 3000 sq m [32,283 sq. ft.]) among the settle ment strata, but little has been published. [See the biographies of Petrie and Fisher,] Rudolph Anthes, also of the University Museum, and John Dimick worked for two seasons at Memphis ( 1 9 5 4 1956) and mapped extensively (Anthes, 1959, 1965). The Egypt Antiquities Organization (EAO) excavated the re mains of shrines belonging to Sety I and Rameses II, the embalming house of die Apis bulls, and thirteenth dynasty tombs of die high priests of Memphis. Later, between 1982 and 1986, a team from New York University furtiier ex plored the embalming house. In 1982 to celebrate its centenary, the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) of London commenced a survey and test ex cavations at Memphis under the direction of David Jeffreys and Flarry S. Smith Geffreys et al., 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 9 3 ) . The prin cipal goals of this ongoing project are to produce a detailed map of the city, investigate the site's history, record both new and previously discovered monuments and inscrip tions, and develop an understanding of the damage caused to the archaeological remains by the local environment. These excavations have identified settlement strata from the Middle and New Kingdoms, and coring has allowed the ar chaeologists to develop a better understanding of the eastern shift of the settlement reflecting the Nile's changing course, which is now more than 3 km (2 mi.) away from tire site. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anthes, Rudolf. Mil Rahineh, 7 9 5 5 . Museum Monographs. Philadel phia, 1959. Mil Rahineh, 1956. Museum Monographs. Philadelphia, 1965. These publications discuss the work of Anthes and his col leagues at the southwest corner of the Ptah temple enclosure wall, including the small Rameses II temple there, and work on Kom elQal'a. The first volume has a large scale topographic map of this area of Memphis. Fisher, Clarence S. "The Eckley B. Coxe, Jr. Egyptian Expedition." The Museum Journal 8 ( 1 9 1 7 ) . A very brief discussion of his finds from Kom el-Qal'a at Memphis, focusing principally on material from Merenptah's palace. Kees, Hermann. Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography. Translated by Ian F. D. Morrow. London, 1 9 6 1 . Contains a somewhat out of date but very readable discussion of Memphis' role in the history and culture of ancient Egypt. Jefferys, David G., et al. "The Survey of hAem^hK." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 69-79 ( 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 9 3 ) . Preliminary reports of the annual excavation by the Egyptian Exploration Society, principally authored by Jefferys, Lisa L. Giddy, and H. S. Smith. Jeffreys, David G.. The Survey of Memphis. Part I: The Archaeological Report. Occasional Publication, 3. London, 1985. Summary of the first years of Egypt Exploration Society's new work at Memphis; provides numerous maps and plans. Jones, Michael, and Angela Milward Jones. "The Apis House project at Mit Rahinah: Preliminary Report of the Fifth Season, 1984-85." Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 24 (1987): 35-46.
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Summarizes information on the structure's architecture in conjunc tion with data from the 1941 EAO excavations. Kamil, Jill. "Ancient Memphis: Archaeologists Revive Interest in a Fa mous Egyptian Site." Archaeology 38.4 (1985): 25-32. Well-written article for popular consumption on the history and archaeology of the site. Mahmud, Abdulla el-Sayed. A New Temple for Halhor al Memphis. Egyptology Today, 1. Warminster, England, 1978. One of the few publications available about work undertaken by the Supreme Coun cil of Antiquities (Egyptian antiquities organization). Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Memphis I. British School of Archaeology in Egypt, vol. 15. London, 1909. The Palace ofApries (Memphis 11). Brit ish School of Archaeology in Egypt, vol. 17. London, 1909. Meydum and Memphis (III). British School of Archaeology in Egypt, vol. 1 8 . London, 1910. Roman Portraits and Memphis (IV). British School of Archaeology in Egypt, vol. 20. London, 1 9 1 1 . Tarkhan I and Mem phis V. British School of Archaeology in Egypt, vol. 23. London, 1 9 1 3 . Riqqeh and Memphis VI. British School of Archaeology in Egypt, vol. 25. London, 1 9 1 5 . Site reports of Petrie's work in the various areas of Memphis. Most are quite brief in their content. Redford, Donald B. "Memphis." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, pp. 689-691. New York, 1992. Solid historical overview, with a focus directed to an audience of biblical specialists. Zivie[-Coche], Christiane M. "Memphis." In Lexikon der Agyptologie, vol. 4, cols. 2 4 - 4 1 . Wiesbaden, 1982. A more detailed entry (in French) than Redford's on the history and archaeology of the site. DIANA CRAIG PATCH
M E R I M D E . In 1 9 2 8 , archaeological survey along the Nile Delta's western margin northwest of Cairo located a prehistoric site (30°i 9' N , 3 0 ° 5 1 ' E) now known as Merimde Beni Salame, or Merimde. Against a background of small hills, Merimde sits on a low sandy rise overlooking the Del ta's floodplain, adjacent to the Rosetta branch of the Nile River. T h e Viennese Academy of Science sponsored die ini tial work at Merimde under Hermann Junker ( 1 9 2 8 - 1 9 3 5 ) ; Josef Eiwanger ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 8 3 ) conducted later excavations for the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo. The site encompasses a large area, approximately 2 0 - 2 5 ha (50-62 acres) of which only about 7,500 sq m (80,700 sq. ft.) have been exposed. It is unlikely that the entire site was occupied at any one time, making population estimates difficult. A previous estimate of sixteen thousand inhabitants is unlikely, and even a more reasonable estimate of 9 0 0 - 1 3 0 0 people is still large for a Neolithic village (Hoffman, 1979; Hassan; 1988). Merimde's roughly 2-meter-deep deposit consists of five levels (I-V), covering at least four hundred years (c. 4 8 0 0 4400 BCE), and perhaps as much as one thousand years (c. 5200-4100) of occupation. T h e first two layers are discon tinuous; the last three are defined by differences between assemblages. T h e cultural assemblages found in these layers have not been identified at any other site, although some artifact types have parallels in Faiyum A sites, at el-Omari, and in the earliest levels at Buto. Merimde's inhabitants practiced a mixed economy of hunting, fishing, and agriculture. Plant remains include do-
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mesticated emmer wheat, barley, lentil, and fodder vetch. Individual houses had granaries drat were often lined with baskets or matting. Meat came from domesticated animals, especially pigs, and also cattle, sheep, goat, and wild animals including hippopotami, crocodiles, and antelopes (?). Re mains of other Nile fauna, such as fish, turtles, and fresh water mussels, have also been recovered. The earliest occupation (I) produced sparsely scattered, insubstantial structures whose outlines suggest that they may have been houses and windbreaks. In the next level (II), the oval and horseshoe-shaped houses were made from wooden poles, covered by woven materials and possibly skins. The latest levels (III-V) contained small, sturdy, semisubterranean structures of straw-tempered mud. A step, made from a hippo tibia or wooden post, allowed easy access to the interior. These houses also contained a hearth and a large water jar. Placed side by side, these dwellings enclosed the living space, and in some locations, their layout suggests that communal passageways had been included in tire settlement's design. Burials, principally of women and children, have been found scattered throughout the site, probably in abandoned sections of tlie settlement. They have few grave goods. Polished wares dominate the ceramic finds, although die upper levels produced large quantities of coarse wares. A variety of lithic tools have been recovered, including arrow heads, knives, sickle flints, and axes. Bone and ivory tools are also common, but personal objects, such as statuettes, representing humans or animals, and jewelry are rare. The earliest level (I), whose most distinctive feature is pottery decorated with an incised herringbone motif, has a blade assemblage corresponding strongly to material found in Pottery Neolithic A sites in Palestine. Pear-shaped maceheads, slings, semisubterranean houses, and flaked axes in later levels may also illustrate Palestinian contact. Other ob jects, however, suggest early ties to Saharan cultures. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baurngartel, Elise J. "What Do We Know about the Excavations at Merimda?" Journal of the American Oriental Society (1965): 5 0 2 5 1 1 . Adequate summary of Hermann Junker's excavation reports. Eiwanger, Josef. "Merimde-Beni-Salame." In Lexihon der Agyptologie, vol. 4, cols. 94-96. Wiesbaden, 1982. Abbreviated summary of the site's most important characteristics, including data from Eiwanger's work. Hassan, Fekri A. "The Predynastic of Egypt." Journal oj 'World Prehis tory 2.2 (1988): 1 3 5 - 1 8 5 . Contains an excellent summary of the Ne olithic and Predynastic periods in Egypt, with important information on dating and population estimates for Merimde Beni Salame, Hayes, William C. Most Ancient Egypt, Chicago, 1965. Chapter 3 con tains a succinct summary of die earliest excavations at this site. Hoffman, Michael A. Egypt before the Pharaohs. New York, 1979. Part 4, chapter 1 2 summarizes Junker's work. Kemp, Barry J. "Merimda and the Theory of House Burial in Prehis toric Egypt." Chronique d'Egypte 43 (1968): 22-23. Although the fo
cus of this article is not Merimde, Kemp reviews the data concerning house strucaires and burials there. D I A N A CRAIG PATCH
MEROE
(ancient Bedewe/Medewe), site near modern Begrawiya (Northern Province, Sudan), tlie earliest largescale city known in Africa outside of Egypt (i6°54' N , 33°44' E). A substantial town under the Napatan rulers of Nubia (c. 760-270 BCE), Meroe became the royal, administrative, and religious capital of the Meroitic kingdom (270 B C E - 3 5 0 CE). Mentioned by Herodotus and otiier early writers, Meroe was accurately located by James Bruce ( 1 7 2 2 ) and archaeologically identified by John Garstang's excavations ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 1 4 ) . The only subsequent excavations of signifi cance were Peter Shinnie's ( 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 8 5 ) , but from 1920 to 1923 George Reisner excavated Meroe's royal cemeteries, lying east of the city. Earlier Giuseppe Ferlini recovered spectacular examples of Meroitic royal jewelry (in gold and semiprecious stones) from one of the pyramids. T h e treas ure was hidden in the upper part of a 31-meter-high stone pyramid, which Ferlini almost completely demolished in a fruitless search for additional treasure. [See the biographies of Garstang and Reisner.] Several factors made Meroe a central place. It lay on the Nile, a major commercial and strategic route and, enjoying significant rainfall, possessed substantial agricultural and grazing lands. Significant local resources included sandstone for buildings, iron ores for the extensive smelting industry at Meroe, and clay deposits for pottery. Most importantly, Meroe was the node for far-flung ttade and military routes linking Nubia to Egypt and tlie Mediterranean; to the Gezira (between the Blue and White branches of the Nile River); and to the wealthy trading kingdom of Axum (in modern Ethiopia) and the Red Sea. [See Axum.] Founded by 1000, Meroe expanded significantly around 590; the earliest-known inscriptional reference dates to the Napatan ruler Iriki-Amanote (c. 4 3 1 - 4 0 5 ) . Meroe may have been a—or even the—royal residence in Napatan times, but no rulers were buried nearby until Arkamaniqo (Gk., Ergamenes) about 270-260. Thereafter, Meroe flourished, re maining the royal burial ground until the end of the Meroitic state (350 CE); occupation may have continued, but ulti mately the site was completely abandoned. Meroe city occupied about 2.59 s q k m (640 acres or 1 sq. mi.). On tlie west, a large stone-walled enclosure sheltered several palaces and ancillary buildings and abutted on its east a much-renovated and expanded temple to Amun, an Egyptian god long taken over by the Nubians. Exttemely large ( 1 3 7 m [450 ft.] long), the temple included a colon naded court; columned halls; and a sanctuary. A proces sional route led to a so-called Temple of the Sun outside the city; this temple was an enclosed area containing a singlechambered cult building surrounded by a colonnade. Both
MERRILL, SELAH
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MEROE. Figure I . Pyramid field at the site. (Frederic Caillaud, Voyage d Meroe, Paris, 1826)
stood on a platform. (To the city's southeast was a temple of Apedemak, a lion-headed Nubian deity). Smaller cultstructures flanked the processional route, including a temple that had been perhaps renovated to house a life-sized bronze statue of the Roman emperor Augustus. T h e Meroites had plundered the statue from Aswan in southern Egypt in 23 BCE.
Sprawling east of the royal enclosure were extensive ag glomerations of residential zones and industrial and manu facturing areas. Deposits of slag from iron smelting are con spicuous along the city's eastern edge, and a cavelike quarry produced kaolin for a distinctive, white-fabric pottery. Other typical ceramic types included handmade black wares; a sta tistically dominant wheel-made brown ware for domestic purposes; and imported fabrics. Meroe's burial grounds are rich and important sources of information. Immediately east of the city lie three discrete cemeteries; the northernmost dates to about 100 BCE-200 CE. The two others are later. Most graves were marked by a mound of sand or gravel, and were for relatively prosperous people. T h e commoners' cemeteries perhaps remain to be found. Farther east, three other cemeteries are arranged in a tri angle. T h e western cemetery (between the others and the city) included pyramid tombs of lesser royalty, and the northern and soutiiern held the pyramid tombs of virtually all Meroe's rulers after Arkamaniqo (see figure 1 ) . Other graves, marked by pyramids, mastabas (benchlike super structures) or mounds were for queens, princes, and mem bers of the elite. Pyramids, which were built of stone ma sonry, later of brick or rubble, often had an attached chapel
(those of die kings were embellished with a pylon, a doubletowered gateway in Egyptian style). Chapels were provided with scenes and texts of a funerary nature. Despite severe plundering, the surviving traces of royal and elite wealth are astounding. Hoards of golden jewelry have been found, as well as a wide range of imported objects (especially from Egypt and the Mediterranean), some of superb quality. BIBLIOGRAPHY O'Connor, David. Ancient Nubia: Egypt's Rival in Africa. Philadelphia, 1993Priese, Karl-Heinz. The Gold of Meroe. Translated by Russell Stock man. New York, 1993. Robertson, J. H. "History and Archaeology of Meroe." In An African Commitment: Papers in Honour of Peter l^ewis Shinnie, edited by Judith Sterner and Nicholas David, pp. 35-50. Calgary, 1992. Shinnie, Peter L. Meroe: A Civilization of the Sudan. London, 1967. DAVID O ' C O N N O R
MERRILL, SELAH
( 1 8 3 7 - 1 9 1 0 ) , American clergy man, archaeologist, and diplomat; active promoter of bibli cal archaeology in the United States. Born in Canton Cen ter, Connecticut, Merrill was educated at Yale and ordained at the Yale Divinity School. After service as a Union chap lain in the Civil War and as a minister in New York and California, he studied Semitic languages at the University of Berlin ( 1 8 6 8 - 1 8 7 0 ) and traveled widely in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. In 1874, he was appointed archaeologist for the second expedition of the American Palestine Exploration Society (APES); he assumed command after the resignation of the expedition's leader, James C. Lane.
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During three long excursions through Palestine and Transjordan, Merrill supervised die collection of hundreds of archaeological, ethnological, botanical, and geological specimens and directed the preparation of a rough map of ancient sites in the ancient kingdoms of Ammon and Moab. Though tiiis work fell far short of the standard established by the British Palestine Exploration Fund in its Survey of Western Palestine, Merrill's popular account of die Ameri can explorations, East of the Jordan ( 1 8 8 1 ) , was well received by the general public. After the disbanding of APES, Merrill briefly joined the faculty of the Andover Theological Seminary. Through family connections, he was appointed U.S. consul in Jeru salem in 1882 and served in that position during every Re publican administration until his transfer to British Guiana in 1907. In Jerusalem, Merrill continued his collecting activ ities and became an outspoken critic of the historical traditions connected with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. His book on the subject, Ancient Jerusalem (1908), is an early attempt to reconstruct the topography of Herodian Jerusa lem and identify the location of its walls through archaeo logical finds. Merrill sold his large collection of Palestinian antiquities and natural specimens to the Harvard University Semitic Museum in 1896. He was also an active supporter of the American School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, established in 1900 as the first major overseas enterprise of the American Schools of Oriental Research. [See also American Palestine Exploration Society; Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research.] BIBLIOGRAPHY King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A Histoiy of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. Merrill, Selah. East of the Jordan: A Record of Travel and Observation in the Countries of Moab, Gilead, and Basham. London, 1881. Merrill, Selah. Ancient Jerusalem. New York, 1908. Moulton, Warren J, "The American Palestine Exploration Society." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 8 (1928): 55-69. Vester, Berdia Spafford. Our Jerusalem: An American Family in the Holy City, 1881-1949. Garden City, N . Y . , 1950. N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN
MESAD HASHAVYAHU, fort located on the kurkar (sandstone) ridge south of Yavneh-Yam, about 100 m from Israel's Mediterranean coast (map reference 1207 X 1462). T h e site is not identified with any place known from histor ical records. It received its name in modern times after an ostracon inscribed in Hebrew with the name Hashavyahu was found in die first season of excavation at the site. Sub sequently, in 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 6 1 , Joseph Naveh conducted two sea sons of excavations there. A third season, a rescue dig fol
lowing damage to the site, was carried out in 1986 by Ronny Reich on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The fort is L-shaped in outline; its maximum measure ments are 77-95 m. It is surrounded by a wall about 3.2 m thick that is strengthened by exterior buttresses. A single gate on the west, protected by two towers, faces the sea. Except for the gate area, die fort represents a single stratum of construction, pointing to a short period of occupation. It is dated by its pottery to the last quarter of the seventh cen tury BCE. Raised floor levels in several rooms in the gate area indicate a second, partial occupation in the Early Persian period, however. T h e fort's large western area was found to be almost devoid of buildings, except near die gate and abut ting it from the inside. This part of the site is situated on a relatively steep slope, and the kurkar is exposed over almost all of it, so that it is possible that any early construction was washed into the sea by winter rains. T h e eastern area is di vided into three blocks by two parallel alleys; each block is further subdivided into seven buildings. It seems that the eastern part of the fort was carefully planned to accommo date these blocks of buildings. T h e perimeter wall and the buildings are of mud brick on a foundation of kurkar stones; the gate and towers are constructed entirely of kurkar. T w o groups of pottery vessels were found: local Judean pottery (cooking pots, storejars, and juglets) and pottery that had originated in die Aegean world. T h e latter includes ves sels containing a large amount of mica grit, used in the tem per mixed with the clay, a characteristic element in Greek pottery. This group also includes typical Greek shapes, such as skyphoi and amphorae, and objects decorated in the Wild Goat style. Chunks of hematite ore, an unusual find, were discovered in several places on the site. Sir William Flinders Petrie reported similar finds in his excavations in the Nile Delta, at Daphne and Naukratis, that clearly belonged to their Greek inhabitants (for citation, see Reich, 1989, p. 232).
T h e rather large quantity of Greek pottery, relative to the amount of Judean pottery, and the presence of foreign iron ore raise the question of the use of the site and the reasons for a Greek presence here. Although Greeks were active in establishing merchant colonies in the Mediterranean at the time, it seems more likely that the Greeks here were mer cenaries hired by the Judean king Josiah. Mesad Hashavyahu would then offer clear evidence of Josiah's successful at tempt to enlarge the kingdom of Judah to the west. Several Hebrew ostraca were found near the gate area. [See Osttacon.] As noted above, one bears the name Ha shavyahu, after which the site was named in modern times. The other names all indicate inhabitants from Judah. A doc ument of special importance is a fourteen-line ostracon, also written in Hebrew, found in the guardroom at die gate. It is a letter or petition written by or on behalf of a worker em-
MESKENE ployed in the vicinity for die harvest. T h e worker complains that as a punitive action his garment was confiscated—an action biblical law prohibits (Ex. 2 2 , 2 6 - 2 7 ) . An exhaustive bibliography on the reading and interpretation of this doc ument has accumulated since its discovery. BIBLIOGRAPHY Naveh, Joseph. "A Hebrew Letter from the Seventh Century B.C." Israel Exploration Journal 10.3 (i960): 1 2 9 - 1 3 9 . Naveh, Joseph. "More Hebrew Inscriptions from Mesad Hashavyahu." Israel Exploration Journal 1 2 . 1 (1962): 2 7 - 3 2 . Naveh, Joseph. "The Excavations at Mesad Hashavyahu: Preliminary Report." Israel Exploration Journal 12.2 (1962): 8 9 - 1 1 3 . Naveh, Joseph. "Some Notes on die Reading of the Mesad Hashavyahu Letter." Israel Exploration Journal 14.3 (1964): 1 5 8 - 1 5 9 . Reich, Ronny. "Third Season of Excavations at Mesad Hashavyahu." Erelz-Israel 20 (1989): 228-232. In Hebrew with English summary on page 203*. RONNY REICH
MESAD HASHAVYAHU TEXTS. During two campaigns in i960 at the site of Mesad Hashavyahu, located approximately one mile south of Yavneh-Yam, Israel, seven Hebrew inscriptions were discovered: one group of seven ostraca belonging to what was originally a single document, five other individual ostraca, and an inscription originally incised on the shoulder of a jar (Naveh, i 9 6 0 , 1 9 6 2 ) . Among the same finds was a stone weight inscribed only with sym bols. T h e modern name of die site was assigned on the basis of the appearance of the name hsbyhw in the incised inscrip tion. T h e most important of these documents is the first men tioned, for it is comparatively well preserved and of great historical interest. Its fifteen lines contain the plea of a har vest worker (qsr) whose garment (bgd) has been confiscated by a certain Hawsha 'yahu ben Shobay, otherwise uniden tified. T h e plea is addressed to a local official (sr), who goes unnamed, in standard inferior-to-superior phraseology ("May my lord the official hear the word of his ser vant . . . " ) . T h e worker claims that he has fulfilled his quota and that he has committed no wrong; he asks the official to have his garment returned either for these reasons or out of pity. In spite of some difficulties in interpretation, the lan guage of the inscription is essentially that of the Judean He brew inscriptions (e.g., those from Arad and Lachish) and is closely related to standard biblical Hebrew. T h e primary unresolved questions about the document are literary and sociohistorical. T h e document was first identified as a letter, but because of die absence of epistolary formulae that identification has either been qualified (Pardee et a l , 1982, p. 23) or rejected (Smelik, 1992). There is gen eral agreement on identifying it as a plea; tlie question is whether tlie form of the plea is epistolary. If the definition
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of a letter as "a written document effecting communication between two or more persons who cannot communicate orally" (Pardee et al., 1982, p. 2) be accepted, die document may qualify as a plea in epistolary form. It is in any case doubtful that a plea should constitute a literary category on the same level as a letter. Joseph Naveh, tlie editor of the inscription, hypothesized that all of these documents should be assigned to the time of Josiah and be taken as evidence for a previously unre corded Judean control of the coastal area (Naveh, i960, p. 1 3 9 ) , an opinion that became widespread in works on the history of tlie late seventh century BCE. In recent years, how ever, other origins have been proposed for the texts—for example, a Judean occupation under Jehoiakim (Wenning, 1989) or Judean mercenaries serving in an Egyptian fortress (Na'aman, 1 9 9 1 , 44-47). Tied in with die political question are issues regarding tlie precise position of the sr (local gov ernor or military or administrative official?), of tlie harvest worker (servant, slave, corvee-worker?), and of the one who seized the garment (directly under die sr or in another chain of command?). The biblical parallels for the required return of a confiscated garment (Ex. 22:25-26; Dt. 2 4 : 1 2 - 1 5 , 1 7 ) raise the question of how widespread the requirement may have been. [See also Yavneh-Yam.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Booij, Th. "The Yavneh Yam Ostracon and Hebrew Consecutive Im perfect." Bibliotheca Orientalis 43 (1986): 642-647. Discussion of several grammatical and lexical features. Na'aman, Nadav. "The Kingdom of Judah under Josiah." Tel Aviv 18 (1991): 3-71Naveh, Joseph. "A Hebrew Letter from the Seventh Century B.C." Israel Exploration Journal 10.3 (i960): 1 2 9 - 1 3 9 . Ediiio princeps ofthe inscribed sherd and letter. Navehjoseph. "More Hebrew Inscriptions fromMesad Hashavyahu." Israel Exploration Journal 1 2 . 1 (1962): 2 7 - 3 2 . Editio princeps of the other ostraca and the weight. Pardee, Dennis, et al. Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Letters. Society of Biblical Literature, Sources for Biblical Study, vol. 1 5 . Chico, Calif., 1982. Comprehensive bibliography up to 1978. Smelik, K. A. D. "The Literary Structure of die Yavneh-Yam Ostra con." Israel Exploration Journal 42.1 (1992): 5 5 - 6 1 . Wenning, Robert. "Mesad Hasavyahu," In Vom Sinai zum Horeb: Stationen altlestamentlicher Glaubensgeschichle, edited by Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, pp. 1 6 9 - 1 9 3 . Wiirzburg, 1989. Discussion of historical context. D E N N I S PARDEE
MESHA INSCRIPTION. See Moabite Stone.
MESKENE. See Emar.
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MESOPOTAMIA: Prehistoric Mesopotamia
MESOPOTAMIA. [This entry provides a broad survey of the history of Mesopotamia as known primarily from ar chaeological discoveries. It is chronologically divided into four articles: Prehistoric Mesopotamia Ancient Mesopotamia Mesopotamia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Mesopotamia in the Islamic Period In addition to the related articles on specific subregions and sites referred to in this entry, see also History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Mesopotamia.] Prehistoric M e s o p o t a m i a T h e geographical area that will be tteated in tiiis article roughly corresponds with the territory of modern Iraq, where in the middle of the fourth millennium the southern part (Babylonia) and slightly later, the northern part (As syria) became the scene of the emergence and development of Mesopotamian urban civilization. In the earlier periods, however, Mesopotamia was tied to larger developments in the Near East, in particular in Syria, Anatolia, and Iran. For the beginning of the domestication of plants and animals, of sedentary life, the evidence is better documented in other areas. The scant material recovered in Mesopotamia's northeastern mountain zones suffices only to show that peo ple did live there and took part in the general cultural changes. For the early millennia the carbon-14 dates used for all of the Near East are not always reliable. However, because the many dates available for the end of the Aceramic Neolithic seem to converge at about 6000 BCE, this may be a relatively secure anchor. It is only with the last cultural phase that will be discussed, the Late Uruk period, that through close par allels with early Egypt, dates become more stable, placing the end of the Uruk period at about 3 1 0 0 BCE. The dates used in this discussion are at present the ones most com monly accepted. Ecologically, Mesopotamia is highly diversified. The north and northeast share witii other regions of the Near East those features that made possible the domestication of plants and animals and the conttolled migration patterns that led toward sedentary life: highly adaptable, and thus domesticable, plants and animals and small-scale environ ments with sharp differences in climate and thus in different exploitable flora and fauna. The region's landscape forms (topography) range from narrow valleys in the high moun tains to small plains in the piedmont to the alluvial plain. Thus, each level of agricultural ability found its appropriate landscape: mountain valleys are surrounded by a diversified environment, permitting survival by food gathering when agriculture failed; at the other end of the spectrum, the al luvial plain was open to those agricultural specialists who accumulated profound experience over thousands of years.
The existence of an ever more demanding topography to challenge people, whenever their experience and resource fulness rose to a point where higher social and economic risks could be faced, seems largely responsible for the con tinuity of early development in Mesopotamia and through out the Near East. Life is determined by the accessibility of water. Like hunt ers and gatherers early agriculmralists also depended upon areas with sufficient rainfall. Techniques of supplying ad ditional surface water to enhance the growth of plants be came necessary once advanced experience allowed the oc cupation of areas that were larger and more fertile but had less stable rainfall patterns, or never got enough rain. [See Irrigation.] The accessibility of water divides Mesopotamia. While a large part of Assyria lies in an area of sufficient precipitation, agricultural production in Babylonia depends entirely on an artificial supply of water. The area's paleoclimate has been shown on average to have been similar to today's, but witii shorter or longer de viations. While the fifth millennium seems to have been moister than average, another change, resulting in a slightly cooler and dryer climate, seems to have begun in the midfourth millennium and probably became influential in the formation of early urban society toward the end of that mil lennium. Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic Periods. Evidence for the presence of paleolithic life in Mesopotamia is scarce but exists and, as elsewhere, is restricted to the mountainous zones. Best known is the Shanidar cave, with its burials of Mousterian Neanderthal-type humans. [See Shanidar Cave.] Stray finds dating to this period as well as to the Upper Paleolithic (the local name for the period in the Zag ros Mountains is Zarzian) attest to its presence throughout the mountain ranges. From about 16,000 BCE onward (the Epipaleolithic period), flint tools tended to become more specialized, while the diet became more diversified perhaps a result of more efficient tools being used in hunting and gathering. In the Zarzian period, at the Shanidar and Zarzi caves, eastern Anatolian obsidian appears, attesting to long distance contacts. Aceramic Neolithic (c. 9,000-7,000 BCE). Sites showing the salient features of the Neolithic: incipient domestication and sedentarization, but no pottery, are few in Mesopotamia and lack the sequence of layers that would allow a sketch of the cultural development between the Epipaleolithic and the Pottery Neolithic. There is only Jarmo, with its aceramic layers beneath early pottery ones, that testifies to the latest part of that time-span. By that time, food production was already well advanced, and there is no doubt about an allseason occupation. In every respect, aceramic Jarmo is part of the greater Zagros horizon. [See Jarmo.] Pottery Neolithic (c. 7,000-6,000 BCE). T h e best rep resentative for the Pottery Neolithic part of the greater Zag ros development is also the site of Jarmo. As elsewhere, the
MESOPOTAMIA: Prehistoric Mesopotamia introduction of pottery vessels is not accompanied by major changes in the tool kit or the diet. Pottery, with its ability to adapt to minute changes in taste or needs to differentiate, and its ubiquity, henceforth becomes an indispensable tool in comparing or contrasting temporal and spatial cultural entities through similarities in shape and decoration. Although basal Umm Dabaghiyeh, southwest of Mosul, seems to be contemporary with Pottery Neolithic Jarmo, other sites, like Hassuna or the lowest levels at Tell Soto, Matarrah, Shamshara, and Nineveh begin later. [See Has suna; Nineveh.] In contrast to the others that still lie in hilly (ecologically diversified) terrain, Nineveh is the first lowland site, settled in the area of rain-fed agriculture. [See Agricul ture.] Multiple storerooms combined with the evidence from paleobotanical and paleozoological analyses, seem to indicate that Umm Dabaghiyeh was a specialized hunting place; too little is known of the other sites to be more spe cific. Halaf (c. 5,500-5000 BCE). While the eponymous site of Halaf lies in modern Syria, the area in which this specific kind of pottery is found also includes the northwestern part of Mesopotamia. [See Halaf, Tell] In fact, tire finest speci mens come from the site of Arpachiyah, northeast of Mosul. Other sites settled in this period are Yarim Tepe and basal Tepe Gawra. [See Tepe Gawra.] Pottery production reveals an advanced technology in the Halaf period: the firing pro cess could be controlled. T h e result was a firing-induced polychromy and lustre, on complex shapes with carinations and pedestals. In architecture, besides small, multiroomed dwellings round structures are found that often have a long-rectan gular antechamber attached. N o public buildings of char acter can be singled out either by size or plan in this period. In the art of the Halaf period animal figurines seem to strive for realism whereas human figures are abstract in style. Pe culiarly shaped clay "counters" and stamps with linear in cisions are part of the Halaf cultural horizon. They indicate a kind of economic situation where it was necessary to keep records and mark items as personal property. S a m a r r a (c. 6,000-5,000 BCE). Unlike Halaf, the Samarra cultural horizon is more confined to Mesopotamia, though Baghouz on the Syrian Euphrates, close to the Iraqi border, and Chogha Mami on the Iranian piedmont zone of the Zagros mountains indicate a possibly larger distribution. T h e few instances of the overlapping of the two zones do not allow greater specificity beyond indicating that these en tities were contemporaneous, at least partially. T h e Samarra ceramic assemblage shows a matt painting on mostly simple, open shapes. The pottery is completely different from that of Halaf, as is tire architecture. Houses that are similar in size and plan prevail; they are large enough to be called dwellings of extended families, which may indicate a higher level of division of labor and social stratification than seen before or at contemporary Halaf. There are again, however,
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no indications of public buildings. Small decorated statu ettes of humans and animals in stone or clay were found both in the houses and private graves. [See Grave Goods.] It is only at Tell es-Sawwan in the area of Samarra that a wall and a moat were found surrounding the settlement. However, as yet no other settlement of the period has been explored as extensively as Samarra. [See Samarra.] E r i d u a n d Hajji M o h a m m e d (c. 6,000-5,000 BCE). So far, all cultural developments have occurred either in the mountainous zones or in those areas in which rain-fed ag riculture was possible. There is no indication that up to this point the southern plain took part in the steps toward sed entary life. T h e pottery found on a site close to Uruk (UrukWarka Survey no. 298) and matched by pre-Eridu material from basal Tell el-'Oueili, southeast of Larsa, is contem porary with Samarra, as is the material from the lower parts of the sequences at Eridu and Tell el-'Oueili. T h e corpus is enriched for the later part of the period by pottery from the short-lived Hajji Mohammed, southwest of Uruk. [See Uruk-Warka; Eridu; 'Oueili, Tell el-.] Initially using simple, mostly open shapes the phase of Hajji Mohammed pottery adds a sharp carination to deep bowls, reminiscent of Halaf shapes. Patterns of painted decoration, however, differ from both Halaf and Samarra pottery. The Eridu-Hajji Moham med sequence is seen as contemporary with Halaf/Samarra. T o date, tire occurrence of Eridu pottery is restricted to the extreme south of Mesopotamia and only the Hajji Moham med pottery from Ras al-Amiya, south of Kish, suggests a larger distribution. The areas excavated at Eridu/Hajji Mohammed were too small to reveal any architectural contexts, except in the tem ple sounding at Eridu where, in the second-lowest layer, a small freestanding square building was found. In the next phase, it received a niche opposite the entrance, which is usual for shrines in later Mesopotamian tradition. Measur ing barely 3 X 3 m, it may not be a public building; but neither is it a dwelling. T h e level of subsistence and the economy more or less equal that of the contemporary pe riods in the north. U b a i d (c. 5,000-4,000 BCE). Wares similar to those first identified in southern Babylonia at Ubaid, Ur, Eridu, and Uruk were subsequently found over large areas of the Near East. Simple open and closed forms bear a dark, mono chromatic decoration of multiple concentric bands alternat ing with geometric designs like hatching, wavy lines, and garlands. The patterns were applied to the vessel rotated on a pivotted platform. Early wares with the full range of this complex decoration (Standard Ubaid) are followed by ves sels with simplified designs, often restricted to one or two concentric bands (Late Ubaid). Because such elements are already found in tire Eridu/Hajji Mohammed assemblages, Ubaid pottery is assumed to be a sequel to those groups, and hence, a native development of Babylonia. T h e sequence of temples at Eridu is continued in tlie
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Ubaid period. Temples were set on platforms for the first rime. A central space was expanded with subsidiary rooms, indicating a specific order for the rituals conducted in it. Platforms in front of a niche in the rear wall may have served as altars (cf. the similar so-called Anu-Ziggurrat at Uruk). [See Ziggurat.] The architecture at Tell Abada in die Hamrin dam sal vage area differs markedly from that attested in earlier pe riods. The houses are of the Central Hall type (irregular smaller rooms attached to an elongated space) beginning a tradition found systematized in the large so-called temples of the Late Umk period at Uruk-Eanna. A central building with a similar configuration was found, but because of its size and artifacts, a cache of clay counters, it may have been used for economic activities. As in the earlier periods, artistic expression is confined to small figurines of animals and erect humans. To the north, at Tepe Gawra, east of Mosul, levels con taining pottery resembling tiiat of the Ubaid period were found overlying Halaf levels. Although the shapes differ from those found in the south, as do the paste and the basic color, they share the principle of rotary decoration: their Ubaidlike appearance may be the result of a transformation of the local tradition by means of the new technique for applying decoration to a rotating vessel. This development shows a similar problem awareness, as this new technique certainly was an answer to a mutual challenge by the grow ing division of labor. The architecture at Tepe Gawra uses the same type of central hall structure as the main component of what seems to have been large compounds composed of sheds and stor age facilities. No public building was immediately evident, and a large round structure situated inside the habitation area remains enigmatic. Early Uruk (c. 4,000-3,500 BCE). Though presumably of major importance, the Early Uruk phase is known only from a deep sounding at Uruk with limited exposures; hence, no broad architectural context was recovered. At first, tiiis phase seems to mark only the rather sudden fading of Ubaid-style painted pottery and the emergence and rapid increase in the use of unpainted pottery made largely on the true potter's wheel, which enabled a different set of vessel shapes. Late Uruk is the first urban civilization. It features mon umental buildings and art, a high level of economic and po litical organization and the first script. These features were not present in late Ubaid. Yet, when they appear they are fully developed, without a sign of initial hesitation, so that the basic steps must have taken place in the Early Uruk phase. Although not much has been recovered in excavations. Early Uruk pottery is an established entity identified in ar chaeological surface surveys, like Late Uruk. Based on such data, a major increase in settlement activity is noted in mid dle, and probably northern, Babylonia in the Early Uruk
phase; the southern region, notably the hinterland of Uruk, remained at the low level of settlement activity of the Late Ubaid. Unfortunately, none of these Early Uruk sites has been explored. In die northern part of Mesopotamia, the Ubaid pottery tradition passed over into local developments without ap parent ties to the south. This is demonstrated by the strati graphic sequence of Tepe Gawra, which, because it was ex cavated on a large scale, revealed some interesting architectural features. Of particular importance is a rectan gular square surrounded by four public structures, that, on the basis of contemporary structures at Eridu, proved to be temples. Most conspicuously, this square occupies a quarter of the surrounding habitation area. Its size indicates that it was more than the center of the settlement. It is thus as sumed that this central feature served a large surrounding area suggesting the existence of a structured settlement sys tem. Late Uruk (c. 3 5 0 0 - 3 1 0 0 BCE). A full array of archaeo logical evidence becomes available in the latest phase of the Late Uruk sequence at Uruk, or, in archaeological terms, in level IVa of archaic Eanna. Excavated on a large scale, Eanna features a number of monumental public buildings. Thousands of fragments of clay sealings and written tablets found there proved to be the means of control for an ex panding economy. This area is characterized as the seat of a central economic (and political?) administration. [See Seals; Tablet.] In order to provide a growing number of administrators with personalized seals, the stamp seal was replaced by the cylinder seal. Its larger surface increased the artistic range of the designs. Most written documents dealt with the trans actions of a powerful economic administration. T h e com plexity of those transactions is amply illustrated in the con tents of die tablets: large herds of animals had to be supervised; thousands of units of barley had to be booked as either entering stores or handed over to someone. Monthly and yearly accounts were computed from daily records; there was traffic between various departments, as the brewing department had to calculate how much barley or groats it needed for so many liters of beer in order to place the proper request with the barley and groats store; and thousands of employees received daily rations of barley, using the mold-made bowls, known as beveled-rim bowls, that turn up by the thousands at every site, a usage illustrated by the pictorial sign for "allotment" composed of the bowl's image with its characteristic rim and a stylized human head. Simpler media had prepared the way for cuneiform script, a versatile means of storing information which turns up by Uruk IVa or slightly earlier. [See Cuneiform.] Thus, tablets are found incised with numerical notations that record quantities only—from Chogha Mish in Khuzistan and Jebel Aruda and Habuba Kabira (South) in Syria. [See Habuba Kabira.] In addition to the information on numbers, the sealed clay balls yielded information on the individual re-
MESOPOTAMIA: Ancient Mesopotamia sponsible via the seal employed. An expanding economy needed a better means of administrative control, which made the rapid disposition of a writing system desirable. [See Writing and Writing Systems.] Lists of words and signs mark the effort to order the uni verse. They are as much precedents of later Babylonian sci ence as are die calculations of field sizes for later mathe matics. The stratification of society in the Late Uruk period is illustrated both by a list of titles and professions arranged in ranking order and in pictorial scenes like the one on the cult vase from Uruk, now in Baghdad. Fragments of major works of art, including nearly life-sized statues of individu als, probably date to the Late Uruk period although they were found in later dumps only. In the shaping of these innovations within the 2 5 0 - 3 0 0 years of the Late Uruk pe riod a considerable acceleration of a process can be seen that resulted in the expansion of Uruk to cover an area of at least 2.5 sq km ( 1 . 5 sq. mi.), making it the center of a settlement system of more titan one hundred settlements in an area that previously had only eleven. T h e shift to a dryer climate in the fourth millennium (see above), may have lessened the amount of the flooding of the rivers and the size of the marshes. T h e opening of the al luvium to large-scale settlement resulted in an unprece dented population density that accelerated the process of developing organizational means to cope with the social and economic problems that ensued. Apparently, one outcome was strict hierarchization, on the level of settlements (cen ters; settlement systems), of economic and political admin istration, or on the social level. Local traditions had prevailed in northern Mesopotamia during the Early Uruk period, until, by Late Uruk, some settlements had adopted the Babylonian Late Uruk set of traditions, its pottery (including the ration bowls) and the use of cylinder seals. Architectural contexts are laclung be cause of limited excavation and insufficient evidence; yet where there has been a larger exposure at sites as in modern Syria, the architecture exactly matches Babylonian models. This adoption is part of a larger process in which Babylonian urban features spread into neighboring regions. Even Egypt produced cylinder seals and niched facades, like those found in Buto/Tell Fara'in, demonstrating a close link between Late Uruk and predynastic Egypt. Urban civilization was the culmination of a long period of development toward higher forms of social, economic and political organization. T h e Late Uruk period also marks the beginning of the long life of Mesopotamian civilization, characterized by splendid creations in the fields of art, literature, architecture, and the sciences. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities; Surveys of Ancient Setdement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. Summary of archaeological surface surveys in Babylonia. Algaze, Guillermo. The Uruk World System. Chicago, 1993. Deals spe
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cifically with the Uruk period of the second half of the fourth mil lennium. B ernbeck, Reinhard. Die Aufldsung der hduslichen Produktionsweise. Ber lin, 1994. Discussion of the early pottery periods in Mesopotamia, with a special focus on changes in social and economic life. The Cambridge Ancient Histoiy. Vols. 1 and 3. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1 9 7 0 1976. Vols. 3 . 1 - 2 . 2d ed. Cambridge, 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 9 1 . Each chapter by a leading expert. Ehrich, Robert W., ed. Chronologies in Old World Archaeology. 2 vols. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Amply documented chronological tables with pertinent archaeological evidence, carbon-14 tables, and bibliogra phies, from the Mediterranean to East Asia, 7000-1500 bce. Gebel, Hans G., and Stefan Kozlowski, eds. Neolithic Chipped Stone Industries of the Fertile Crescent: Studies in Early Near Eastern Pro duction, Subsistence, and Environment. Berlin, 1994. Detailed discus sion of Aceramic Neolithic evidence. Henrickson, Elizabeth F., and Ingolf Thuesen, eds. Upon This Foun dation: The 'UbaidReconsidered. Copenhagen, 1989.Mostrecentand comprehensive coverage of the Ubaid phenomenon. Mellaart, James. The Neolithic of the Near East. London, 1975. Though in need of supplements, a still valuable account of the older evidence. Nissen, Hans J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. Chicago, 1988. Covers tine Neolithic period to the Third Dy nasty of Ur. Nissen, Hans J., et al. Archaic Bookkeeping. Chicago, 1993. Compre hensive discussion of die emergence of writing and the contents of early documents. Niitzel, Werner. "The Climate Changes of Mesopotamia and Border ing Areas." Sumer 32 (1976): 1 1 - 2 4 . Summary of marine geological research in the Persian Gulf. Oates, Joan. Babylon. Rev. ed. London, 1986. Well-written account of Mesopotamian history and archaeology. Postgate, J. N. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of Histoiy. London, 1994. Covers the period 3000-1500 BCE, mosdy from a philogical perspective. Redman, Charles L. 'The Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers to Urban Society in the Ancient Near East. San Francisco, 1978. Intended as a textbook for American anthropology departments, this is a splendid account of the period from an anthropologist's point of view. Roaf, Michael. Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. New York, 1990. Well-written and amply illustrated coverage from the Neolithic period to Alexander. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. Before Writing. 2 vols. Austin, 1992. Doc umentation of the means of information storage before writing. Tiibinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients. Wiesbaden, 1977-1994. Collection of 210 physical and historical maps of the Near East and Egypt, from prehistoric to modern times. Ucko, Peter, and G. W. Dimbleby, eds. Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals. London, 1969. Ucko, Peter, et al., eds. Man, Settlement, and Urbanism. Cambridge, Mass., 1972. HANS J . NISSEN
Ancient Mesopotamia Shortly before 3000 BCE, the first stage of urbanization was completed with the formulation of the innovations and in stitutions that henceforth would characterize Mesopotamian civilization. Whereas before, Babylonia and Assyria had par ticipated in tire cultural development of the larger Near East, including notably the west Iranian (Zagros) mountains, in the Uruk period, Babylonia took a markedly different turn,
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eventually followed by Assyria. For some centuries to come, the pace of development accelerated in Babylonia until, in the mid-second millennium BCE, a balance of power was reached again between tire various forces in the Near East. As a consequence, Babylonia relinquished its role as the driving agent. By the first millennium, empires were formed that reached even beyond the Near East proper. While the shift to a slightiy dryer climate in tire fourth millennium seems to have had no consequences for northern Mesopotamia, the danger of flooding was reduced in Bab ylonia, in the south. In the large-scale occupation that en sued, daily life came to be described as urban. In the begin ning, there was enough water alongside the fields to irrigate without canals; however, the continuing decrease in water for another millennium made it necessary to built canals to feed the areas then left dry. [See Irrigation.] However, be cause increasingly all water was used to irrigate, leaving no excess to wash away the natural salts of water and soil, ir rigation had the effect increasing salinization of the soil. By the end of the third millennium, both water shortage and salinization, plus the population increase, had in created an economically tense situation. Ecological conditions seem to have ameliorated in the second millennium. The center of power shifted to northern Babylonia, accompanied by ne glect of the hydraulic systems of the south. The result was a permanent loss of power in the south, except for some enclaves along the Euphrates River. Because ethnic groups in antiquity can be identified only through their language, the bearers of early cultural devel opment in Mesopotamia and the Near East remain anony mous. Early writing does not help identifying ethnic affilia tion because texts largely employ word signs that could be read in any language. Not until either grammatical elements are written pointing to a particular language, or signs are used with their phonetical value can there be certainty about the language expressed. This stage was reached in mid-third millennium BCE texts from Babylonia. They represent a lan guage whose main element was Sumerian with an admixture of words from other languages. [See Sumerian.] Texts from Ebla from the same period are the first to make full use of the potential of employing signs with their phonetic values. [See Ebla Texts.] From this time onward, die representation of bound language enabled the composition of texts other than economic records. [See Writing and Writing Systems.] Later in the third millennium speakers of Semitic languages under the various designations of Akkadian, Babylonian, Amorite, Assyrian, and Aramaic dominated the scene. Speakers of other languages, such as Kassite and Hurrian, at times played a greater role in political life, but like the Old Iranian of the Achaemenids, the languages never succeded in matching the political influence of their speakers. [See Akkadian; Aramaic; Hurrian.] J e m d e t Nasr/Early Dynastic (c. 3 1 0 0 - 2 3 5 0 B C E ) . Though additional data come from Jemdet Nasr, Nippur, and the Diyala region, Uruk remains the best source for the
turn from tire fourth to the third millennia. [See Jemdet Nasr; Nippur; Diyala.] There, a huge terrace is built to incorporate the former Anu Ziggurrat while in Eanna, instead of large buildings on ground level, a single platform, presumably surmounted by a temple, surrounded by auxiliary buildings, marks the center. [See Ziggurat.] This internal realignment did not affect other aspects of society, such as writing which in the style of the script and arrangement on the tablets, shows that it was responsive to the need for easier usage and fuller representation for more complex problems. [See T a b let.] Such tablets were also found in northern Babylonia at sites such as Jemdet Nasr and those in the Diyala region. These discoveries point, at least in this phase, to widespread economic and culmral uniformity in Babylonia. Within at most two hundred years, by Early Dynastic I, Uruk had more than doubled its size, to cover almost 6 sq km ( 4 sq. mi.) within die new city-wall and beyond. In gen eral, fewer but larger settlements housed an increased pop ulation, until by the later part of the Early Dynastic period, the number of large cities had grown at the expense of rural settlements. This population shift must have enforced pres sure to enhance the existing rules of administration and con flict management in order to ensure orderly everyday life. Thus, among the texts, which subsequently were no longer confined to economic data, legal procedures are found tteated in a way that presupposes a long consolidation phase. According to royal inscriptions the excessive growth of cities resulted in territorial conflicts between the various city-states ruled by local dynasties. For the first time, the representation of a bound language allows Sumerian to be identified as the language of the texts. Fabulous wealth, including many exotic materials, is shown by the grave gifts in the royal tombs of the cemetery at Ur. [See Ur; Grave Goods.] Prosperity, however, was not confined to the ruling class, as indicated by the find in Eshnunna and Khafajeh of hundreds of stone statues buried alongside small neighborhood shrines, where they originally had been placed in supplication by donors. [See Eshnunna; Khafajeh.] Apparently, ordinary people could afford to treat themselves to statues of imported material. Based on a number of texts, a form of government has been suggested in which the city god was the actual ruler and the king his earthly substitute. Probably, however, this was only a local form since all evidence comes from texts from a single city (Lagash), pertaining only to a limited number of years. Yet, there certainly was more variation, both contemporaneously and before. Increasingly local rul ers attempt to control larger parts of Babylonia; none of these efforts, however, survived tire reigns of their initiators. First E m p i r e s (c. 2 3 5 0 - 1 9 0 0 BCE). After gaining control over all of Babylonia, Sargon, an Akkadian from prepon derantly Semitic northern Babylonia, established a central state, that remained with his dynasty for several generations. Measures to enforce centrality, like monopolizing the sea trade with Oman and the Indus River valley, or keeping a
MESOPOTAMIA: Ancient Mesopotamia standing military force at their disposal, help. Apart from being preoccupied with permanent internal rebellions, Sargon and his grandson Naram-Sin campaigned in distant lands, such as Syria and the Iranian highlands. Their fame remained vibrant into much later periods. T h e art of the period reflects a profound change in con cept: unlike earlier archetypal renderings of the human form, Akkadian art individualizes figures by placing them in front of a background and adding anatomical details, allow ing them natural proportions. T h e outstanding monument in this style is a stela commemorating Naram-Sin's victory over tlie mountain tribe of the Lullubi (now in the Louvre, Paris). T h e Semitic Akkadian begins to appear in official inscrip tions, a political decision, not a reflection of a population shift. With the Akkadians stronger in the north and the Sumerians in the south, occasionally signs of both groups' selfawareness are found, but there is no indication of major tensions or even conflicts between them. However, both re bellious cities and attacks by mountain tribes (Guti) caused the Akkadian state to shrink in the end to the size of but one of several city-states, always threatened by the menace of a Gutian foothold. Ur~Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, capi talizing on the prestige of his father, Utuhegal, as victor over tlie Gutians, was able to reunite Babylonia by 2 1 0 0 BCE. Both he and his son Shulgi furthered the land of organization necessary for a central state, such as creating districts with local civilian and military representatives. They returned to Sumerian as the official language, bringing about the socalled Neo-Sumerian period in the history of Mesopotamian literature. An encompassing reform in Shulgi's twenty-first regnal year ordering that almost all economic transactions had to be recorded, was intended to counter growing eco nomic difficulties. Desiccation, salinization, and a growing population had combined to create serious supply problems. A remedy was sought in the tightening of controls to an extent that nothing would escape die official system of re distribution. The increased need for scribes had the side ef fect that Ur III became one of the most literate societies in the ancient world, as demonstrated not only by the emer gence of new literary genres, but by tlie fact that on seals, inscriptions partly take over the function of identifying the owner. Opposition to this omnipresent control combined with old resentments against the central state, started a rebellion in nortiiern Babylonia. T h e capital was caught at its weakest point: because of its largely salinized fields, Ur depended on shiploads of grain from the north. Decisively weakened, Ur was raided by its eastern neighbor, Elam, and Ibbi-Sin, the last king, was taken prisoner. Once again, like at the end of the Akkadian period, the local element had proven strong enough to thwart a central government (Elamites). Assyria had always been part of a larger complex with northeastern Syria and, in the first half of the third millen
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nium, had kept its traditional pace in spite of short-term affiliations with Babylonia. This eventually changed. Statues from the late Early Dynastic Ishtar temple at Assur show close ties with Babylonia, which remained valid through tlie Akkad and Ur III periods. [See Assur.] Early Second Millennium. Against measures to stop them, tlie Amorites had succeeded in invading Babylonia, to an extent that tlie spokesman of the anti-Ur III forces was the Amorite ruler of the Babylonian city of Isin. [See Amo rites.] Isin's hope to retain central rule was soon challenged by the Amorite dynasty of Larsa, which in turn gave the Amorite dynasty of Babylon the opportunity to gain power. [See Larsa.] Hammurabi, the sixth ruler of the dynasty, fi nally succeeded in controlling all of Babylonia by starving Rim-Sin of Larsa. By intensifying irrigation schemes in northern Babylonia, and by founding many new settlements, the seat of power irrevocably shifted there. The conquest of Mari on tlie Euphrates, Eshnunna, and even Assur, how ever, proved to be fateful: Hammurabi had destroyed the buffer zones facing the Kassites who were waiting to invade. [See Mari.] With the loss of these new possessions during the reigns of Hammurabi's successors in the seventeenth century BCE, Babylon became just another political entity between a dynasty of the Sealand, somewhere in southern Babylonia; Elam; the Kassite foothold-kingdom of Khana close to Mari; Assur; and, finally, the rising power of the Hittites. [See Hittites.] T h e final blow came when the Hittite ruler Mursili, prolonging his raid on Halab (Aleppo), fol lowed the Euphrates downstream until he sacked Babylon, in 1 5 9 5 BCE. Also from this period there are many documents telling us that the despotic rule of Ur III administration had given way to a decentralized form of economic administration though from many letters it is known that politically every thing was decided in Babylon; even legal cases of minor im portance were brought to the attention of Hammurabi. Though tlie older order of the gods still prevailed, there was a tendency to favor the sun god Shamash and to pro mote the city god of Babylon, Marduk, as head of the pan theon. Particular mention should be made of the many sur viving mathematics texts, which show a well-advanced mastery of that field. While a later lung-list begins with "rulers living in tents," unknown otherwise, sources only testify to the existence of a local power in Assur after tlie beginning of the twentieth century BCE. Shortly thereafter, Assyrian merchants made Assur an emporium from which merchandise from several directions was forwarded to other trading partners. This in formation comes from thousands of tablets from Anatolia, where a network of trading colonies was established. That trade was ended by events connected with the Hittite inva sion by 1700 BCE; no accounts exist from Assur. [See Ana tolia; article on Ancient Anatolia.] Better coverage is avail able only for the reigns of Shamshi-Adad I and his sot Ishme-Dagan. Of Amorite origin, they conquered the are
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of Assur and expanded their territory to include Mari and the Upper Khabur area, where they resided at Shubat Enlil, modern Tell Leilan. [See Khabur; Leilan, Tell] After their expulsion, historical information is resumed only in the fif teenth century BCE. Seen in the light of political develop ment, tiiis is a period when, witii Babylonia deposed from the first rank, new powers formed in Syria and Elam and among the Hittites. The stage was set for the next phase of rival territorial states. Late Second Millennium. The fall of Babylon opened a period of unknown length, die so-called "dark age" for which no details are available except that a later compilation lists Kassite kings supposed to have ruled then. [See Kas sites.] Only by the end of the fifteenth century BCE is infor mation provided by the so-called Amarna letters found in pharaoh Akhenaten's new capital Akhetaten/Tell elAmarna. [See Amarna Tablets.] A few, addressing the Kas site kings Karaindash, Kadashman-Enlil I, and Burnaburiash II, fix the regnal dates to die first half of the fourteenth century BCE. Best known of the Kassite kings is Kurigalzu II (13451324 BCE) for the building of his new capital, Dur Kurigalzu/ 'Aqar Quf, north of Sippar, and for his restoration of tem ples at the old Sumerian centers. [See 'Aqar Quf.] Care for tradition is also shown by the use of Sumerian in Kassite official inscriptions and by the collecting and copying of tra ditional literature, which survived in that canonized form into die first millennium BCE. Their own language was never written extensively and is hardly known. Kassite rule over Babylonia was never really challenged and was relatively peaceful, except for latent conflicts with Assur. The Elamite ruler Shutruk-Nahhunte finally put an end to Kassite rule by raiding Babylonia in 1160 BCE. It is, in addition, the first certified case of looting the cultural heritage of an enemy and adorning one's own capital with the booty. The might of Assyria reappears when the death of the Mitannian ruler Tusratta gave Ashur-Uballit (1365-1330 BCE) the chance to consolidate the independence won by his father, Eriba-Adad. Like him his successors were constandy campaigning in the regions to the east, north, and west. This certainly reflects the necessity of protecting borders, in the absence of namral boundaries, but it also shows the need to secure additional resources for an area devoid of metal or precious stones and with a limited agricultural capacity. Under Shalmaneser I (1274-1245 BCE), Assyrian imperial ideology became apparent: the city god Ashur was con verted into a god of war, who ordered the conquest of neigh boring regions and was thought to march in front of the Assyrian army; this represents warfare as a divine decree, legitimizing the atrocities of war, so vividly described in As syrian royal inscriptions and depicted in their palace reliefs. Large-scale building activities are known, especially for the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208 BCE), the first of the Assyrian rulers to build himself a new capital, Kar-Tu-
kulti-Ninurta, opposite Assur on the east bank of the Tigris River. [See Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta.] None of the various main forces of this period in the Near East—the Hittites, the Hurri-Mitanni, Assur, Babylon, or Elam—outweighed the others. A balance of power prevailed that also prevented Assyria from becoming too powerful. Neo-Assyrian E m p i r e . From the end of the tenth cen tury BCE onward, Assyria became militarily active again, fol lowing a period in which it had been barely able to defend its borders. Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) resumed cam paigning in the west using improved military strategies; he even collected tribute from the Phoenician cities. [See Phoe nicians.] At the same time, political strategy began to change: the tendency was to turn conquered areas into per manent Assyrian provinces. Assyria's main opponents were the Aramean principalities in Syria, founded there after the fall of the Hittite Empire. [See Arameans.] Yet, area after area was added in the west to Assyrian territory until under Sargon II (721-705 BCE) the Mediterranean was reached and part of Palestine turned into the province of Samaria. Egypt was added by Esarhaddon in 671 BCE, but it was lost by 655 BCE during the reign of Ashurbanipal. Assyria's northward expansion was obstructed by the state of Urartu, which, un der the impact of constant Assyrian attacks, Sardur I was able to unite in 832 BCE. [See Urartu.] Urartu even expanded westward, frustrating Assyrian ambitions. Following raids by the Cimmerians, however, Sargon was able to eliminate Urartu in 714 BCE. [See Cimmerians.] T h e process of rallying took longer in the eastern mountains, however. Though the lands of Parsua and the Medes are mentioned as early as the ninth century BCE it was not until much later that Medes and Persians entered the political arena. [See Medes; Persians.] Because the cultural superiority of the south was recog nized, and many gods worshipped in Assyria had their cultic centers there, Assyrian relations with Babylonia were always exceptional. For a long while Babylonia was taboo for As syrian military aspirations. However, after the Babylonian south fell to hostile Aramean and Chaldean tribes, Assyria's attitude changed, culminating in the sack of Babylon by Sennacherib in 688 BCE. [See Chaldeans.] The picture would, however, be incomplete without emphasizing the enormous building activities of nearly every ldng after Ashurnasirpal, each one erecting a splendidly decorated pal ace for himself. [See Palace.] Sargon even founded his own city, along with a palace, while Sennacherib enlarged the old city of Nineveh to cover 7 sq km (4 sq. mi.), watered by a canal that at one point needed an aqueduct to bridge a val ley. [See Nineveh.] Apart from superb palace reliefs, cer tainly one of the lasting Assyrian achievements was the com pilation of the library housed in the palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. Only two years after the first attacks, Assur fell, in 614 BCE, to the Medes; then Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to a com-
MESOPOTAMIA: Ancient Mesopotamia bined Median-Babylonian army. Harran was a last refuge until 609 BCE. Given the formerly unrivaled power of the Assyrian Empire, the end came quickly. T h e probable ex planation is tirat by this time Assyria was finished econom ically. As it had been an expansionist empire, its economic balance could be secured only as long as it could tap new resources. When expansion was no longer possible, the sys tem was bound to collapse. That is, when Assyrian expan sion reached the Mediterranean coast, and the attempt to circumvent it by conquering Egypt proved to be too costly. Chaldean Empire. Following the texts called tire "Bab ylonian Chronicle," Kassite rule counts fifty-one kings be fore the Chaldean Nabopolassar became ldng of Babylon in 626 BCE, taking advantage of the turmoil following Ashurbanipal's death. Allying himself with Cyaxares of Media, they accomplished the final defeat of Assyria in little time, leaving Nabopolassar with large parts of the Assyrian heri tage. His son, Nebuchadrezzar, consolidated Babylon's rule in the west using Assyrian strategies. He is best known for his deportation of the Jews following his conquest of Jeru salem in 597 BCE; his plans to conquer Egypt failed, however. [See Jerusalem.] Immense tributes and booty from conquests enabled Ne buchadrezzar to conduct large building programs in Baby lon and other centers. His works include tlie holy precinct of Babylon, comprising the ziggurat (Tower of Babel), the processional way and Ishtar Gate, and his palace, which was especially famous for its Hanging Gardens regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Nebuchadrezzar also built the exceptionally high and wide city wall of Babylon. Following brief reigns by other family members, a former official, Nabonidus, was appointed ldng in 555 BCE. Barely enough is known to characterize this enigmatic figure who, out of his sixteen-year reign, spent ten years in tlie Arabian oasis Tayma', far from Babylon. [See Tayma'.] His favoring of the moon god Sin over Babylon's Marduk is the only piece of evidence for explaining the opposition of the priests and people of Babylon to Nabonidus. When he returned to Babylon in about 540 BCE, the Persian ldng Cyrus was al ready on his way to tlie city, having defeated the Medeans and the Lydians under king Croesus. [See Medes.] On 1 2 October 539 BCE Cyrus seized Babylon without resistance. T o judge from the number and size of the settlements inhabited under Chaldean rule, it had been a thriving period for all of Babylonia, as well as the highlight of Babylonian culture—in literature, religion, and the sciences. Especially noteworthy are the astronomy texts (diaries) that, in addi tion to plotting daily observations, give information on weather and the prices of commodities. Achaemenids and Mesopotamia. Under the Achae menids, Mesopotamia was only one district in a vast empire; yet, Babylon was highly respected and chosen to be one of the empire's capitals. Under Darius, a large palace was built on top of the ruins of Nebuchadrezzar's palace. Even after
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Xerxes responded to a rebellion in 482 BCE by desttoying the city's walls and holy district, Babylon remained a main center. Cyrus's proverbial tolerance, best known for allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, left life in Babylonia largely unchanged, a policy maintained by his successors. Later years, however, witnessed the large-scale decline of Babylonia, caused by paying the enormous yearly uibute demanded by the royal administration and from the resultant neglect of the irrigation systems. Following Alex ander the Great's final victory over tlie Persian army at Gaugamela in 3 3 1 BCE, he took residence in Babylon, ordering the temple of Marduk to be rebuilt. Plans to make Babylon the capital of his empire were thwartiied as he died on 1 0 June 323 BCE in tlie palace in Babylon diat Darius had errected over tlie ruins of the one built by Nebuchadrezzar. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1 9 8 1 . Summary of the archaeological surface surveys in Babylonia. Brinkman, John A. A Political History of Post-Kassile Babylonia, n$8722 B.C. Rome, 1968. Brinkman, John A. Materials and Studies for Kassite History, vol. 1 , A Catalogue of Cuneiform Sources Pertaining to Specific Monarchs of the Kassite Dynasty. Chicago, 1976. Brinkman, John A. Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747-626 B.C. Philadelphia, 1984. Excellent presentations of material and discussions of a neglected period. The Cambridge Ancient History. Vols. 1 and 3. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1 9 7 0 1976. Vols. 3 . 1 - 2 . 2d ed. Cambridge, 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 9 1 . Each chapter by a leading expert. Cooper, Jerrold S. Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The Lagash-Umma Border Conflict. Malibu, 1983. The material for, and tine problems with, reconstructing late Early Dynastic history. Ehrich, Robert W„ ed, Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, z vols. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Amply documented chronological tables widi pertinent archaeological evidence, carbon-14 tables, and bibliogra phies, from the Mediterranean to East Asia, 7000-1500 BCE. Jaeobsen, Thorkild. Tozoard the Image of Tammuz and Other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture. Edited by William L. Moran. Harvard Semitic Series, vol. 2 1 . Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Collection of Jacobsen's writings, including his pioneering article, "Early Polit ical Development in Mesopotamia" (1957). Lamprichs, Roland. Die Westexpansion des neuassyrischen Reiches. Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1995. Excellent discussion of die Assyrian Empire as expansive system, based on written and pictorial accounts. Larsen, Mogens T. Old Assyrian Caravan Procedures. Istanbul, 1967. Full discussion of the trade network of the Old Assyrian merchants. Liverani, Mario. Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near East ca. 1600-1100 B.C. Padua, 1990. In-depth discussion of the power politics of diis period. Liverani, Mario, ed. Akkad, the First World Empire. Padua, 1993, The most up-to-date accounts of the various aspects of die first central state in Mesopotamia. Nissen, Hans J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, gooo-2000 B.C. Chicago, 1988. Covers the Neolithic period to the Third Dy nasty of Ur, Oates, Joan. Babylon. Rev. ed. London, 1986. Well-written account of Mesopotamian history and archaeology. Oppenheim, A. Leo. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civiliza-
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lion. Chicago, 1964. Ingenious essays on various aspects of Meso potamian culture. Postgate, J . N. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy al the Dawn of History. London, 1994. Covers the period 3000-1500 BCE, mosdy from a philological perspective. Redman, Charles L. The Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers 10 Urban Society in the Ancient Near East. San Francisco, 1978. Intended as a textbook for American anthropology departments, this is a spendid account of the period from an anthropologist's point of view. Roaf, Michael. Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. New York, 1990. Well-written and amply illustrated coverage from the Neolithic period to Alexander. Tiibinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients. Wiesbaden, 1977-1994. Collection of 210 physical and historical maps of the Near East and Egypt, from prehistoric to modern times. HANS J . NISSEN
M e s o p o t a m i a from Alexander to the Rise of I s l a m The death of Darius III in 330 BCE and Alexander die Great's conquest of the Achaemenid Empire mark die be ginning of the so-called late periods in Mesopotamia and die Near East. The combined Seleucid, Parthian, and Sas anian periods lasted almost a millennium, until the Arab conquest in the second quarter of die seventh century CE. These late periods are characterized by the transmission and assimilation of Hellenistic and Persian ideas, fashions, arts, and crafts into flourishing local economies and, in Meso potamia, die continuity of the long-established indigenous cuneiform recording system as late as the first century CE. [See Cuneiform.] The spoken languages included Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, and Mandaic—although Parthian and Middle Persian became the official languages during the Parthian and Sasanian periods. [See Greek; Latin; Aramaic; Syriac; Mandaic] During these two periods, there were pe riodic clashes between Rome and Persia, primarily over the control of Mesopotamia and its routes and resources. There is, accordingly, a greater variety and number of historical sources relating to Mesopotamia than, for instance, to many areas of highland Iran (Frye, 1984). Mesopotamia contin ued to exercise a crucial role in the wider Near Eastern econ omy throughout these late periods, owing to its rich agri cultural resources and strategic position controlling routes from Syria and the eastern Mediterranean to the Gulf and western Iran. Alexander and the Seleucids. Following campaigns across the Iranian plateau as far east as Central Asia and the Indus River, Alexander returned with his army to Meso potamia, where he selected Babylon as his capital. [See Bab ylon.] Alexander's earlier triumphal entry into Babylon fol lowing the battle of Gaugamela was commemorated on a cuneiform diary of astronomical and meteorological phe nomena observed from 3 3 1 to 330 BCE. He ordered the res toration of the ziggurat in the central Etemenanki precinct, although this remained unfulfilled after his premature deatii in Babylon in June 323 BCE. [See Ziggurat.] A mound of brick
rubble on part of the site known as Homera is thought to represent debris from this project, but only the brick core of the ziggurat itself survives. Nearby construction from this period includes a theater with a Greek dedicatory inscription recording "Dioscurides (built) the theater and a stage." [See Theaters.] An adjacent peristyled building may represent a gymnasium. A tiiird-century BCE ostracon also attests a local garrison officered by men witii Greek names; other Seleucid finds from the site include stamped amphorae and terra cottas (Koldewey, 1 9 1 4 ) . After Alexander's death, Seleucus Nicator ( 3 2 1 - 2 8 1 BCE) established himself as "Ruler of the East," ruling over Mes opotamia, Iran, Syria, and Anatolia. Fie ensured political le gitimacy by minting coins at important Achaemenid centers, including Persepolis, as well as at new foundations. [See Per sepolis.] Seleucus continued Alexander's policy of founding new cities, itself a well-developed ancient Near Eastern royal prerogative. T h e most important of these was Seleucia on the Tigris, situated on the eastern end of a large canal called the Nahar Malcha ("royal canal"). This canal linked the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers a short distance below the point where they enter the alluvial plains of southern Mesopota mia. [See Seleucia on the Tigris; Euphrates; Tigris.] Seleucia remained the eastern Seleucid capital until it was captured by the Parthians in the first century BCE. Thereafter, it con tinued to be occupied until the Sasanian foundation of Veh Ardashir ("New Seleucia") drew the population away. The site of Seleucia was said to have a population of 600,000 (Pliny 6.30), appears to have been fortified, and was bisected by two major canals (initially misidentified as roads). The street plan was based on a grid, first revealed by aerial photographs. A depression at the eastern end of the city may represent a harbor, whereas a prominent mound called Tell TJmar, at the northern edge of the city, probably represents later Sasanian construction. T h e mound is located immediately north of a large three- or foursided agoralike complex referred to by its Italian excavators as the Archives Building (Invernizzi, Negro Ponzi Mancini, and Valtz, 1985). This name reflects the discovery of a hoard of seal-impressed clay bullae; two additional hoards of bullae were recovered from University of Michigan excavations at Seleucia, mostly dealing with the administration of a local salt tax. Other identified public buildings include a theater and two temples. American excavations near the center of the city revealed an insula (a block of housing separated by streets) witii remains of painted stuccoes and molded brick decoration (Hopldns, ed., 1 9 7 2 ) . [See Wall Paintings.] Bur ials were interred within intramural family-sized subterra nean brick vaults, a burial method that reflects the contin uation of a two-thousand-year-old mortuary tradition in Mesopotamia. [See Burial Sites; Burial Techniques.] Local religious cults enjoyed royal patronage under the Seleucids, with large-scale construction and renovation in the Bit-Resh and Irigal temple complexes at Uruk (now
MESOPOTAMIA: Mesopotamia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam called Orchoi). [See Cult; Uruk-Warka.] Despite the pre dominant use of parchment, clay tablets written in cunei form continued to be used at major religious centers in southern Mesopotamia. [See Parchment; Tablet; Writing Materials.] T h e tablets provide die primary dated historical sources for Seleucid history and chronology, in addition to matters relating to temple administration, particularly at Uruk (McEwan, 1 9 8 1 ; Sherwin-White and Kuhrt, 1 9 9 3 ) . More unusual are a small number of Late Seleucid or Early Parthian tablets, known as the Graeco-Babyloniaca series. These were inscribed with Greek transcriptions of cunei form lexical and literary texts, including incantations and a Description of Babylon (Black and Sherwin-White, 1984). Little is known in detail about rural settiement in Meso potamia during this period. However, archaeological surface surveys in the northern Jezireh and excavations for the Sad dam Dam Salvage Project at sites such as Tell Deir Shun (Curtis, Green, and Knight, 1 9 8 7 - 1 9 8 8 ) demonsttate apeak in rural settiement densities during the third-second cen turies BCE, plus the appearance of new forms of bell-shaped underground silos and imported basalt grinding stones. [See Granaries and Silos.] T h e impact of Western styles of ce ramics and, presumably, cuisine on Mesopotamia are re flected by the appearance of distinctive "fish plates" with overhanging rims, low ring bases, and a central interior de pression that was used to contain dressing. Continuing cul tural dichotomy between northern and soutiiern Mesopo tamia is demonstrated by the different methods of preferred ceramic surface treatment: whereas southern fish plates were either glazed or left plain, northern equivalents were typically decorated with reddish-brown or black slip. Moldmade ceramic lamps, sometimes with palmette handles, and classical styles of molded terra-cotta figurines also appear throughout Mesopotamia during tiiis period, again suggest ing a relatively high degree of hellenization (Oates and Oates, 1 9 5 8 ; Hannestad, 1 9 8 3 ) . P a r t h i a n s . Seleucid control of Mesopotamia ended with the defeat and death of Antiochus VII Sidetes ( 1 3 8 - 1 2 9 BCE) and die arrival of a Parthian army commanded by Phraates II (c. 1 3 8 - 1 2 8 BCE). T h e Parthians established a garrison town and later a capital at Ctesiphon, opposite Seleucia, on die left bank of the Tigris, thus controlling a major route to western Iran via the Diyala River corridor. [See Ctesiphon.] Southern Babylonia broke away under Hyspaosines of Charax, who instigated direct commercial links with Pal myra via the Middle Euphrates corridor. [See Palmyra.] Palmyrene-style tombs on Kharg Island, in the Gulf, probably reflect these new ties. Ceramics excavated at Failaka, near die head of the Gulf, are thought to be Characenian prod ucts, although die Characenian capital of Charax Spasinu, identified with the site of Jabal Khayabir at the junction of the Karun and Tigris Rivers, remains unexcavated (Hansman, 1967). [See Failaka.] Characene was reduced to vassal status by Mitiiradates II
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(c. 1 2 3 - 8 7 BCE), who also seized Adiabene and established a more secure western Parthian frontier on the Euphrates after capturing the town of Dura by 1 1 3 BCE. [See DuraEuropos.] This site, also known in antiquity as Europos, provides an important corpus of Parthian architectural re mains, sculpture, pottery, glass, and textiles. [See Glass.] However, its poorly excavated stratigraphy has resulted in a mixture of Seleucid and Roman material (Hopldns, 1979). Seleucus V ( 1 2 5 BCE) continued to campaign in Babylonia and Media but failed to regain control of those regions. Bab ylonia was later lost to a usurper called Gotarzes I (c. 9 1 - 8 0 BCE) and the Parthian Empire fell victim to internal struggles until the accession of Vologases I (c. 5 1 - 8 0 CE). During this brief interregnum, the ldngdom of Commagene flourished in southeast Turkey before being swallowed by Rome. Rome also attempted to play an important role in Parthian politics until the Parthian general Suren crushed a Roman army commanded by Emperor Crassus at the battle of Carrhae, in southeast Turkey, in 53 BCE. T h e first century CE witnessed the emergence of a more distinctive Parthian material culture in Mesopotamia, in cluding the replacement of Aramaic for Greek and a fire altar for the figure of an archer on the coins of Vologases I. Vologases also founded a rival city to Seleucia called Vologesocerta (Vologesias). Its location has been disputed but probably corresponds to a substantial unexcavated site called Abu Halefija, situated due southeast of Seleucia on another junction of the royal canal and the Tigris. In 1 1 5 CE, the Roman emperor Trajan succeeded in sacking Ctesiphon before reaching Charax and the head of the Gulf. However, his claims to Mesopotamia were rapidly dropped by his suc cessor, Hadrian. Vologases and Osroes battled for control over soutiiern Mesopotamia. A massive fortress excavated at Nippur may belong to this phase of Parthian history. Seleucia and Ctesiphon were later captured twice by Ro man armies commanded by C. Avidius Cassius in 1 6 5 CE and Septimius Severus in 1 9 7 CE—although the American excavators of Seleucia reported few traces of desttuction that could be associated with these events. Septimius Se verus was also responsible for extending direct Roman mil itary control down die Euphrates corridor and establishing a network of forts commanding routes to and from the Ti gris, the Jabal Sinjar, and the Khabur basin. Several of these Severan forts have been partially excavated, including 'Ain Sinu-Zagurae, Sell Qubba, Bijan, and Kifrin (Oates and Oates, 1 9 5 9 ; Valtz, 1 9 8 5 ) . This military frontier remained substantially intact until Sasanian military advances during the mid-third century. Archaeological excavations are providing useful groups of Parthian pottery and other finds. As in Iran, there continues to be marked regional variation in ceramic assemblages from northern, central, and southern Mesopotamia: important groups have been recovered from Dura-Europos, 'Ain Sinu, Nineveh, Seleucia, and Tell Aswad (Oates and Oates, 1 9 5 9 ;
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MESOPOTAMIA: Mesopotamia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam
Debevoise, 1934). [See Nineveh.] Elaborate stuccoes have been recovered from Assur, Babylon, Seleucia, and Uruk. [See Assur.] Columned architecture has been excavated at Babylon (Tell Amran), Nippur, and Seleucia, but a signif icant innovation is the large barrel-vaulted iwan architecture found at Assur and Hatra. [See Nippur; Hatra.] Babylonianstyle shrines are also attested from Khiut Rabbu'a (on the outskirts of Baghdad) and Nineveh, the latter being dedi cated to Hermes. Limestone and bronze statues of Herakles and figurines of Eros have been found at several other sites, including Dura, Assur, Hatra, Seleucia and Uruk. In addi tion to pottery, glassware, terra-cottas, and other objects, a limestone statue of a seated Herakles, inscribed "Diogenes made (this). Sarapiodorus son of Artemidorus (dedicated this) in fulfilment of a vow" was excavated at Nineveh (Invernizzi, 1989). A stone lintel showing a pair of sinuousbodied griffins drinking from a vase, found near the south east corner of this mound, closely parallels contemporary Parthian temple cornices from Hatra (Curtis, 1989, p. 60). There is widespread archaeological evidence for Parthian mortuary customs in Mesopotamia. The norm appears to have been intramural burial, the deceased being interred in a ceramic or wooden coffin placed in a vault or in a simple eartii-cut shaft. Glazed ceramic "slipper coffins" were a par ticularly distinctive type tiiat were popular at Babylon, Nip pur, and Uruk during the first-second centuries CE (Curtis, 1979). However, large extramural cemeteries with a wide variety of types of burials are also known from Abu SkhairUmm Kheshm (Negro Ponzi, 1972). Parthian grave goods from these and other sites included gold face masks, eye covers, mouth covers, headbands, funerary wreaths, jewelry, local and imported Roman glassware, bone "dolls," painted alabaster and ceramic statuettes, and blue-, green-, or whiteglazed pottery (Curtis, 1979). [See Grave Goods.] T h e stat uettes usually belong to nude or partially clothed female fig ures, either reclining or standing, with one hand holding a veil, or reclining male figures holding a cup in one hand (Vanlngen, i939;Karvonen-Kannas, 1995). Finally, a rockcut set of caves at Al-Tar, on the edge of the western Iraqi desert, appears to have been used as a burial place for no mads living on the Arabian fringe of the Parthian state; a large number of textiles are unusually preserved at this site owing to the arid local conditions (Fujii, ed., 1976). Sasanians. The last Parthian king was Artabanus V. The end of his reign was marked by a nobles' revolt led by Ardashir I (224-240 CE), who came from the province of Fars on the Iranian plateau. In 241 Hatra was sacked and Jovian ceded five trans-Tigridian provinces under the terms of a peace treaty signed between die empires. Henceforth, north ern Mesopotamia as far as the Khabur headwaters fell within the Persian Empire, the actual border running from Nisibis to Singara and Bezabde. Ardashir took die throne and adopted the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon. Zoroastrianism was adopted as the state religion, although there were other
important religious communities in different parts of the empire. The Byzantine emperor Zeno's expulsion of the "Edessa school" of Christian scholars, in 489, led directly to the founding of the "Persian church" across the border, witii an archbishop at Ctesiphon, to urban bishoprics and rural monasteries, and to an influential school of philosophers at Nisibis (Fiey, 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 6 9 ) . [See Monasteries.] Between the third and fifth centuries, Jews living in central Mesopotamia compiled the Babylonian Talmud, a fundamental Jewish le gal code and a useful historical source for reconstructing details of Sasanian agriculture (Newman, 1 9 3 2 ; Oppenheimer, 1983). [See Agriculture.] Various Gnostic sects are at tested, including the Mesallyene, Manichaeans, and Man daeans. Several pagan cults are also attested from Syriac sources, who accuse them of worshiping trees and snakes (Morony, 1984). The Sasanian Empire extended from nortiiern Mesopo tamia into the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Pakistan. Fron tier zones appear to have been stiffened with Persians drawn from cities such as Isfahan and Istakhr on the Iranian pla teau. [See Isfahan.] T h e desert borders were closely guarded through a combination of "long walls," forts, and regular mounted patrols. Official traffic between the Persian and Byzantine empires was restricted to a single route from Ni sibis to Dara (Morony, 1984). Heavy investment in the Mesopotamian irrigation net works was linked to large new trunk canals constructed be tween the Tigris and Euphrates and a massive canal network linking the Tigris and Diyala known as the Nahrawan/Katuli Kisrawi system. [See Irrigation; Diyala.] Surface surveys suggest optimum exploitation of central and southern Mes opotamia during this period (Adams, 1 9 8 1 ) . Systematic set tlement programs appear to have been carried out then, for which possible archaeological evidence has been detected on the Upper Tigris. Several rural settlements have been par tially excavated in nortiiern and central Mesopotamia, in cluding Tell Abu Sarifa (Adams, 1970). At die site of Tell Abu Shi'afeh, in the Hamrin basin, a large number of sealed clay bullae were found in a storeroom inside a small admin istrative building; they had originally probably been attached to parchments, which usually do not survive. [See Hamrin Dam Salvage Project; Seals; Parchment.] Palaces and large private houses were decorated with elab orate stuccoes, wall paintings, and occasionally mosaics; vil las have been excavated at Ctesiphon and Kish (Kroger, 1982). [See Palace; Mosaics; Kish.] T h e major military and economic rival of Rome, and later of Byzantium, the Sas anian Empire had contacts with the Far East via overland trade through Central Asia. Far eastern silks and other goods were highly valued, and fine cotton cloth was produced at Merv and possibly in other Sasanian cities. Identifiable west ern imports are negligible, being limited to a handful of coins and some lamps from Nineveh and Veh Ardashir, thus giv ing the impression of a well-developed and self-sufficient
MESOPOTAMIA: Mesopotamia in the Islamic Period Sasanian economy. High-quality cut glassware was manu factured in Sasanian workshops, some of which was traded as far as China, Korea, and Japan. There is evidence from excavation and survey for large-scale industrial develop ment, including glass factories, pottery workshops, and brick industries, some of which appear to have been delib erately sited on countryside canals in order to take advantage of the improved water-borne transport network (Adams, 1981).
Decorative silver vessels, often with partial gilding, were another characteristic Sasanian product, although no ex amples have yet been excavated in Mesopotamia. Sasanian pottery was mass produced, yet the forms occasionally copy metalwares. A distinctive range of decorative stamp-im pressed jars was made and traded in central and northern Mesopotamia. The longest sequence of excavated Sasanian pottery comes from the city of Veh Ardashir/Coche, oppo site Ctesiphon (Venco Ricciardi, 1984), but important groups of Early, Middle, and Late Sasanian pottery have also been recovered from Tell Mahuz, Kish, Telul Hamediyat, and Khirbet Deir Situn (Venco Ricciardi, 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 1 ; Moorey, 1978). These suggest a strong thread of cultural continuity from Late Parthian to post-Sasanian periods, with occasional new forms stimulated by developments in contemporary Sasanian metalwork. Weakened by internal strife and additional wars with By zantium, the Sasanian Empire finally fell to repeated Muslim Arab attacks, culminating in the Islamic conquest in the mid-seventh century. However, the Sasanian administration served as a model for the new rulers, and Sasanian art and architecture continued to have a profound effect on Early Islamic developments. [See also Parthians; Sasanians; Seleucids.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert McC. "Tell Abu SarTfa: A Sasanian-Islamic Ceramic Sequence from South Central Iraq." Ars Orientalis 8 (1970): 8 7 - 1 1 9 . Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. Black, Jeremy A., and Susan Sherwin-White. "A Clay Tablet with Greek Letters in the Ashmolean Museum, and die 'Graeco-Babyloniaca' Texts." Iraq 46 (1984): 1 3 1 - 1 4 0 , pi. 9. Curtis, John E. "Loftus' Parthian Cemetery at Warka." Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 6 (1979): 3 0 9 - 3 1 7 . Curtis, John E., et al. "Preliminary Report on Excavations at Tell Deir Situn and Grai Darki." Sumer 45 (1987-1988): 49-53. Curds, John E. Ancient Persia. London, 1989. Debevoise, Neilson C. Parthian Pottery from Seleucia on the Tigris. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1934. Fiey, J. M, Assyrie chretienne. 3 vols. Beirut, 1965-1969. Frye, Richard N. The History of Ancient Iran. Munich, 1984. Fujii, Hideo, ed. Al-Tarl: Excavations in Iraq, 1971-1974. Tokyo, 1976. Hannestad, Lise. The Hellenistic Pottery from Failaha: With a Survey of Hellenistic Pottery in the Near East. Ikaros: The Hellenistic Settle ments, vol. 2. Aarhus, 1983.
487
Hansman, John. "Charax and the Karkheh." Iranica Antiqua 7 (1967): 2 1 - 5 8 , pis. 5-8. Hopkins, Clark, ed. Topography and Architecture of Seleucia on the Tigris. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972. Hopkins, Clark. The Discovery of Dura-Europos. New Haven, 1979. Invernizzi, Antonio, et al. "Seleucia on the Tigris." In The Land between Two Rivers: Twenty Years of Italian Archaeology in the Middle East. The Treasures of Mesopotamia, edited by Ezio Quarantelli, pp. 87-99. Turin, 1985. Invernizzi, Antonio. "L'Heracles Epitrapezios de Ninive." In Archaeologia Iranica et Orientalis: Miscellanea in honorem Ijouis Vanden Berghe, edited by Leon De Meyer and E. Haerinck, vol. 2, pp. 623-636. Ghent, 1989. Karvonen-Kannas, Kerttu. The Seleucid and Parthian Terracotta Figu rines from Babylon in the Iraq Museum, the British Museum, and the Louvre. Florence, 1995. Koldewey, Robert. The Excavations at Babylon. London, 1914. Kroger, Jens. Sasanidischer Sluckdekor. Mainz am Rhein, 1982. McEwan, G. J. P. Priest and Temple in Hellenistic Babylonia. Wiesbaden, 1981. Moorey, P. R. S. Kish Excavations, 1923-1933. Oxford, 1978. Morony, Michael. Iraq after the Muslim Conquest. Princeton, 1984. Negro Ponzi, M. M. "Glassware from Abu Skhair (Central Iraq)." Mesopotamia 7 (1972): 2 1 5 - 2 3 7 , figs. 1 9 - 2 2 . Newman, Julius. The Agricultural Life of the Jews in Babylonia between the Years 200 CE and 500 CE. Oxford, 1932. Oates, David, and Joan Oates. "Nimrud 1957: The Hellenistic Settle ment." Iraq 20 (1958): 1 1 4 - 1 5 7 , pis. 1 6 - 3 0 . Oates, David, and Joan Oates. "Ain Sinu: A Roman Frontier Post in Northern Iraq." Iraq 21 (1959): 207-242, pis. 52-59. Oppenheimer, Aharon. Baby Ionia Judaica in the Talmudic Period. Wies baden, 1983. Sherwin-White, Susan, and Amelie Kuhrt. From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire. Berkeley, 1993. Valtz, Elisabetta. "Kifrin, Fortress of die Limes." In The Land between Two Rivers: Twenty Years of Italian Archaeology in the Middle East. The Treasures cf Mesopotamia, edited by Ezio Quarantelli, pp. 1 1 1 1 4 1 . Turin, 1985. Van Ingen, Wilhelmina. Figurines from Seleucia on the Tigris Discovered by the Expeditions Conducted by the University of Michigan with the Cooperation of the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1927-1932. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1939. Venco Ricciardi, Roberta. "Sasanian Pottery from Tell Mahuz (North Mesopotamia)." Mesopotamia 5-6 ( 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 1 ) : 427-482, figs. 8 7 96. Venco Ricciardi, Roberta. "Sasanian Pottery from Choche (Artisans' Quarter and Tell Baruda)." In Arable orientate: Mesopotamie et Iran meridional, de I'Age du Per au debut de la periode islamique, edited by Remy Boucharlat and Jean-Francois Salles, pp. 49-57. Paris, 1984. S T . J O H N SIMPSON
Mesopotamia in the Islamic Period The Sasanian hold on Mesopotamia was broken at the battle of Qadisiyha in 637 CE, a result confirmed at Nihawand in 642. From this time onward, the Arabic term al-lraq was used to refer to Mesopotamia from the Gulf to Samarra, and al-Jezireh ('the island') designated the region from Sa marra to Mosul and Aleppo. T h e Islamic armies, mainly composed of tribesmen from eastern Arabia, were settled not at the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon, but in two new garrison cities (Ar, misr; pi., amsar), at Kufah, close to the
488
MESOPOTAMIA: Mesopotamia in the Islamic Period
pre-Islamic capital of the Lakhmids at al-Hira, on the desert bank of the lower Euphrates, and at Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf. T h e type of settlement, with a central mosque and governor's residence surrounded by quarters allocated to each tribal unit, seems to have drawn its inspi ration from Arabian multitribal settlements, such as Medina (Yathrib). T h e practice of founding new garrison cities, es tablished in Iraq, was followed in all the conquered territo ries except Syria. At Kufah, the mosque of the Umayyad period (661-750) survives in part, and the Umayyad gov ernor's residence (Dar al-Imarah) has been excavated (Mustafa, 1956). At Old Basra, much has been excavated, but nothing published. Iraq was administered from Kufah until tire middle of the Umayyad period, when, in response to the continual rebellions there, the Iraqi army was demo bilized, and a Syrian garrison installed at a third new garri son city at Wasit, south of Kut, where only the mosque has been excavated. Finally Mosul was built opposite to Nine veh on the Tigris. These Arab-Muslim garrisons were supported by the al ready-existing agricultural economy of the Sasanian period, notably the well-developed irrigation network. Only a little archaeological work has been done on the Umayyad period in Iraq (e.g., Finster, 1976); not even the ceramic typology has been clearly established. What little has been accom plished tends to confirm the picture from Syria and Jordan that new development was largely on tire desert edge. How ever, by die 'Abbasid revolution in 750 Arab and non-Arab were increasingly integrated, partly by conversion to Islam and partly by Arab ownership of land. The rate of conver sion to Islam is shown by the excavations at Ana on the Euphrates, where, in this strongly Christian town, only a small mosque was built in the Umayyad period, replaced by a large congregational mosque in the ninth century. Real integration of the Mesopotamian state tradition and Islam was achieved by the 'Abbasids, who settled in Iraq, notably by the second 'Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur ( 7 5 4 775). A new capital was established at Baghdad in 762-766, only 30 km (18.5 mi.) from Ctesiphon, in the northern part of the alluvial plain, a region with excellent access to routes to Iran, Syria, and the Gulf. The urban type was evolved from the amsar with the addition of a fortified palace and administrative quarter, the Round City, with the military cantonments divided ethnically. Robert M c C . Adams ob serves that the striking increase in the proportion of urban to cultivated area in the Diyala basin at this time may be understood as reflecting the metropolitan nature of the Baghdad area, which no longer depended solely on its hin terland (Adams, 1965, pp. 98-99). Although'AbbasidBagh dad has disappeared, the character of the architecture can be seen at the sole 'Abbasid desert castle at Ukhaidir, west of Karbala, a plan based on iwans and apartments in the form of houses around courtyards, and more particularly at
Samarra, the second 'Abbasid capital built on steppe land 125 km (77.5 mi.) north of Baghdad by al-Mu'tasim in 836 and abandoned after 892. Here the entire range of'Abbasid construction has been preserved, from palaces to small houses and industrial structures, with the exception of the markets. [See Baghdad; Samarra, article on Islamic Period,] The success of the 'Abbasid caliphate led to a cultural dominance of die Iraqi style in the Islamic world, from the spiral minaret of the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, copying Samarra, to the luster tiles on the mihrab (niche oriented toward Mecca) of the mosque of Kairouan (Qayrawan) in Tunisia. T h e islamization of the pottery typology in Syria and Jordan and possibly in Egypt, represents in fact the in troduction of Iraqi types. Although glazed pottery had al ways been more significant in Mesopotamia, early 'Abbasid Iraq produced first monochrome glaze over surface deco rations and then the first polychrome-glazed wares about 800, stimulated probably by new types imported from China. Cobalt painting on white glaze, splash-lead glaze, and lastly luster painting were produced in southern Iraq, possibly at Basra, and spread rapidly around the Islamic world and beyond. [See Ceramics, article on Ceramics of the Islamic Period.] Although the wealth of the 'Abbasid state was based on the Sasanian irrigation network, the system was developed and extended; in particular two additions were made to the Nahrawan system by Harun al-Rashid (786-809) and alMa'mun ( 8 1 3 - 8 3 3 ) , although there was retrenchment of the limits of cultivation, particularly in the south of Iraq, dem onstrated by the surveys of Adams (1965, 1 9 8 1 ) . However, with the slowly cumulating problems of the ninth century and the complete political collapse of the second quarter of the tenth century, a widespread abandonment of tire irri gation network occurred, and no new expansion occurred before modern times. Formerly the financial base of the ca liphate and its wealthiest province, Iraq became a poor re lation of surrounding territories. However, more accurate pottery dating shows that Adams placed tiiis transformation too early (Adams, 1965, p. 1 0 3 ) ; sgraffito ware, which ap pears in the terminal deposits of many sites, was not intro duced until the first half of the tenth century. Although the tenth and eleventh centuries were certainly periods of polit ical instability, the essential problem may have been that the quasi-feudal medieval states, which emerged at this time, were incapable of the organizational and financial effort to maintain or replace the Sasanian canals, which may have been damaged as much by natural as by human agency. For example, movements of the beds of die Tigris and Euphra tes could leave whole districts without water. The political collapse of the 'Abbasids installed die Iranian Shi'i Buyids in Baghdad ( 9 4 5 - 1 0 5 5 ) and Arab tribal prin cipalities on the desert edge and in the Jezireh. Although little work has been done on the archaeology of this period,
MESOPOTAMIA: Mesopotamia in the Islamic Period the regional surveys become less reliable because the areas settled are tiiose still occupied today. The archaeological record becomes more visible again after the twelfth century. Contemporary with the medieval high culture in Syria and Iran, a fine tradition of brick architecture developed at Bagh dad (al-Mustansiriyah) and Mosul. An Iraqi fine-glazed ware has been excavated at Wash, Ana, Samarra, and else where. Metalwork was made at Mosul, and miniatures painted at Baghdad and Mosul. T h e Mongol conquest of Iraq in 1258 marked the end of Iraqi political independence. [See also 'Abbasid Caliphate; Umayyad Caliphate.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert M c C . Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains. Chicago, 1965. Adams, Robert M c C . Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. Creswell, K . A. C . Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2, Umayyads, Early 'Abbasids, and Tulunids. Oxford, 1940. Directorate-General of Antiquities. Excavations at Samarra, 1936-1939. 2 vols. Baghdad, 1940. Djait, Hichem. Al-Kufa: Naissance de la vide islamique. Paris, 1986. Donner, Fred M c G r a w . "Tribal Settlement in Basra during the First Century AH." In Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East, edited by Tarif Khalidi, pp. 9 7 - 1 2 0 . Beirut, 1984. Finster, Barbara. Sasanidische und fruhislamische Ruinen im Iraq. Baghdader Mitteilungen, 8. Berlin, 1976. Keall, E . J . , and Robert B . Mason. " T h e 'Abbasid Glazed Wares of
489
Slraf and the Basra Connection: Petrographic Analysis." Iran 29 (1991): 51-66. Kennedy, Hugh. The Early 'Abbasid Caliphate: A Political History. Lon don, 1981. Kervran, Monik. "Les niveaux islamiques du secteur oriental du tepe de l A p a d a n a . " Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran 7 (1977): 7 5 - 1 6 2 . Lassner, Jacob, "The Caliph's Personal Domain: T h e City Plan of Baghdad Reexamined." In The Islamic City, edited by Albert Hourani and S. M . Stern, pp. 1 0 3 - 1 1 8 . Oxford, 1970. Lassner, Jacob. The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages: Text and Studies. Detroit, 1970. Morony, Michael. "Continuity and Change in die Administrative G e ography of Late Sasanian and Early Islamic al-'Iraq." Iran 20 (3 982): 1-49. Morony, Michael. Iraq after the Muslim Conquest. Princeton, 1984. Mustafa, M . A. "TaqrTr awwalT 'an al-tanqib ft al-Kufa lil-mawsim althalith." Sumcr 1 2 (1956): 2 - 3 2 (translated by Kessler in Sumer 19 [1963]: 36-65). Noithedge, Alastair, et al. Excavations at 'Ana, Qata Island. Warmins ter, 1988. Northedge, Alastair. "Archaeology and New Urban Settlement in Early Islamic Syria and Iraq." In Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam II: Settlement Patterns in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, edited by G . R. D . King and Averil Cameron, pp. 2 3 1 - 2 6 5 . Prince ton, 1994. Safar, Fuad. Wash, the Sixth Season's Excavations
(in Arabic). Cairo,
1945Waines, David. " T h e Third-Century Internal Crisis of the 'Abbasids." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20 (1977): 282-306. ALASTAIR NORTHEDGE
THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF
A R C H A E O L O G Y IN T H E N E A R E A S T
EDITORS
William G. Dever
Carol L. Meyers
Dennis Pardee
James D . Muhly
James A. Sauer
CONSULTING
EDITOR
Paul Corby Finney
ASSISTANT
EDITOR
John S. Jorgensen
ASOR
Pierre M . Bikai
CONSULTANTS
Seymour Gitin
Stuart Swiny
ADVISERS
David E. Aune
Ofer Bar-Yosef
Ghazi Bisheh
Annie Caubet
Trade Dothan
Oleg Grabar
William D . Kingery Ernst Pernicka
Siegfried Mittmann Donald B. Redford
Javier Teixidor
Giorgio Buccellati William W. Hallo P. R. S. Moorey
David Stronach
Richard L. Zetder
THE OXFORD E N C Y C L O P E D I A OF
ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE NEAR EAST PREPARED U N D E R T H E AUSPICES OF
THE
A M E R I C A N S C H O O L S OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH
Eric M. Meyers E D I T O R IN
CHIEF
VOLUME
4
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford encyclopedia of archaeology in the Near East / prepared under the auspices of the American Schools of Oriental Research; Eric M . Meyers, editor in chief, p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.
) and index.
1. Middle East—Antiquities—Encyclopedias. 2. Africa, North—Antiquities— Encyclopedias. I. Meyers, Eric M . II. American Schools of Oriental Research. DS56.09
1996
96-17152
939'.4—dc20
CIP
ISBN 0-19-506512-3 (set) ISBN 0-19-511218-0 (vol. 4) Many photographs and line drawings used liercin were supplied by contributors to the work. Others were drawn from the archives of the American Schools of Oriental Research, from commercial photographic archives, and from the holdings of major museums and cultural
institutions.
The publisher has made every effort to ascertain that necessary* permissions to repnnt materials have been secured. Sources of all photographs and line drawings are given in the captions to illustrations.
Printing (last digit): 9
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS
ACOR AD
AH
AIA AIAR
anno Domini, in t h e year of the (our) L o r d
B.T.
anno Hagirae, in t h e year of the Hijrah
CAARI
c.
Archaeological Institute of America (W. F.) Albright Institute of Archaeological Research
AJA
American Journal of Archaeology
Akk.
Akkadian
Am.
BSAJ
American Center of Oriental Research
Amos
CAD CAORC CE
cf. p . , chaps.
ANEP
J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near East in Pictures
ANET
J. B . Pritchard, ed., Ancient. Near Eastern Texts
CIG
American Oriental Society
CIS
AOS APES Ar.
Babylonian T a l m u d circa, about, approximately C y p r u s American Archaeological Research Institute computer-aided design/drafting Council of American Overseas Research Centers of t h e c o m m o n era confer, compare chapter, chapters
cm CNRS col., cols.
CTA
born
column, columns
A. H e r d n e r , Corpus des tablettes en cuneifcrrmcs alphabkiques
cu
cubic
Bab.
Babylonian
d.
died
Berakhot
Bik.
Bikkurim
BP
BSAE BSAI
before t h e present British School of Archaeology in Egypt British School of Archaeology in Iraq
diss. Dn. DOG D.Sc.
Deutsches Archaologisches Institut dissertation Daniel D e u t c h e Orient-Gesellschaft D o c t o r of Science
Dt.
Deuteronomy
EB
Early Bronze
Eccl. ed., eds. ED
fig.
and
following
figure
feet
Bachelor of Arts
DAI
ff.
floruit, flourished
B.A.
Ber.
Ezckiel
fl.
2 Corinthians
Bekhorot
Exodus expanded
ft.
2 Cor.
Bekh.
Ez.
et sequens, a n d the following
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Assyrian
before t h e c o m m o n era
exp.
Ethiopic
centimeters
Colossians
BCE
Ex.
et cetera, a n d so forth
feminine
C o r p u s Inscriptionum Semiticarum
I Corinthians
before Christ
Eth. et seq.
et alii, a n d others
fascicle
Col.
BC
etc.
fem.
Cor.
Bava' Batra'
especially
et al.
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum
I
B.B.
enlarged
esp.
Ezra
American Schools of Oriental Research
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
English
enl.
Ezr.
ASOR
BASOR
Eng.
fasc.
Aramaic
b.
Enoch
2 Chronicles
Aram.
'Avodah Zarah
Elamite
En.
2 Chr.
'Arakhin
A.Z.
Egyptian
Elam.
i Chronicles
'Arakh.
Assyr.
Egyp.
Chr.
i
American Palestine Exploration Society Arabic
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem
Ecclesiastes
frag., frags. gal., gals. Geog.
EEF
Egyptian Exploration F u n d
e.g.
exempli gratia, for example V
Ptolemy, Geographica
Ger.
German
GIS
Geographic Information Systems
Gk.
Greek
On.
Genesis
ha
hectares
Heb.
Hebrew
Hg.
Haggai
Hist.
Herodotus, History
Hitt.
Hittite
Bos.
Hosea
Hur.
Human
IAA
Israel Antiquities Authority
ibid.
ibidem, in the same place (as the one immediately preceding)
editor, editors; edition Early Dynastic
fragment, fragments gallon, gallons
IDA(M) i.e.
Israel D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities (and Museums) id est, that is
ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS IEJ
Israel Exploration Journal
IES
Israel Exploration Society Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche-Orient
IFAPO Is.
Isaiah Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente
IsMEO Jb-
Job
Jer.
Jeremiah
Jgs.
Judges John
Jn. Jon.
Jonah
Jos.
Joshua Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society
JPOS JRA
Journal of Roman Archaeology
J.T.
Jerusalem T a l m u d
KAI
FI. D o n n e r and W . Rollig, Kanaandische und aramaische Inschriften
Kel
Kelim
Meg.
Megillah
mi.
miles
Mk.
Mark
mm mod. Mt. Mt. n. NAA Nat. Hist. n.b.
sg-
modern
Sg.
Song of Songs
Mount
note Neutron Activation Analysis
nota bene, note well
Numbers
n.s.
new series
O.P.
O r d o Praedicatorurn, Order of Preachers (Dominicans)
kg
kilogram
PEF
Palestine Exploration F u n d Persian
iKgs.
i Kings
Pers.
2 Kgs.
2 Kings
Ph.D.
kilometers M . Dietrich a n d 0 . Lorentz, Die keilalphabelischen Tcxte aus Ugarit
1 liter 1., 11.
line, lines
Lat.
Latin
lb.
pounds
LB
Late Bronze
lit.
literally
Ik.
Luke
LM IJV.
m
Late Minoan Leviticus
Master of Arts
masc.
masculine Malachi
Mai. MB
Middle Bronze
Mc.
Maccabees
M.Div.
Phil. pi. PN ppm
Master of Divinity
Philosophiae Doctor, Doctor of Philosophy Philippians plate; plural Pottery Neolithic parts per million
PPN
Pre-Pottery Neolithic
Pw.
Proverbs
Ps. pt., pts.
Psalms
2 Samuel
sq St., Sts.
Pt.
2 Peter 2 Peter
I
r. RCEA
square Saint, Saints
Sum.
Sumerian
supp.
supplement
Syr.
Syriac
Ta'an.
Ta'anit
Th.D.
Theologicae Doctor, D o c t o r of Theology
Ti.
Titus
Tk.
Turkish
Tm.
7 Timothy
2 Tm.
2 Timothy
trans.
translated by
Ugar.
Ugaritic
v. viz. vol., vols. vs. Yad.
verse videlicet, namely volume, volumes versus Yadayim Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina- Vereins
ZDPV Zee.
Zechariah
*
hypothetical; in bibliographic citations, English language pages in H e b r e w journals
?
uncertain; possibly; perhaps
0
degrees
part, parts
2 Pi.
meters
M.A.
7 Samuel
7
paragraph
Ketubbot
KTU
/ 5m.
page, pages
Kel.
Societas Jesu, Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
2 Sm.
number, numbers no place
Shabbalh
S.J.
Pliny, Naturalis Historia (Natural History)
para.
km
Shab.
Matthew
Nm.
p., pp.
series
ser.
millimeter
no date
n.p.
Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum
singular
n.d.
no., nos.
SEG
reigned, ruled
minutes; feet
Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie arabe
"
seconds; inches
Revelations
+
plus
rev.
revised
minus
Ru.
Ruth
-
Studium Biblicum Franciscanum
=
equals; is equivalent to
X
by
Society of Biblical Literature
1
yields
Rev.
SBF SBL
plus or minus
M CONTINUED
METALS. [This entry surveys the history of metal artifacts
Another reason for the emphasis on typology in studying metal artifacts was that the vast majority of all surviving preIron Age metal artifacts (in both base and precious metals) came from hoards. Metal, even unalloyed copper, was ex pensive and metal artifacts were not disposed of. Metal has the property of being endlessly recyclable: broken or wornout objects were simply melted down and recast. The struc ture and properties of metal with a long history of reuse are exactly the same as those found in virgin metal just smelted from an ore (and these are the very qualities that have cre ated such problems in using metal analyses to study pro venience). Metal was deliberately taken out of circulation only when metal artifacts were buried with a recently deceased individ ual as grave goods or when they were buried in the ground as a hoard, a votive deposit, or a foundation deposit (with the last two categories also being designated as hoards). [See Grave Goods.] Grave goods can often be dated with some reasonable assurance, especially if a tomb was used for a single burial and also contained datable pottery, but objects from hoards are usually very difficult to date. [See Tombs.] Either the pit for the hoard was dug down into earlier strata or else it was dug into sterile soil. An outstanding example of the latter is the Kefar Monash hoard (see below), which was buried in the sand of the Sharon plain in Israel without associated materials either at the findspot or in the imme diate area. In such cases the artifacts from the hoard can only be dated typologically. It is not surprising, therefore, that ty pology has played such a major role in the study of metal artifacts. As many hoards have been found under less than ideal circumstances, the exact composition of the original hoard is often in dispute, often with serious chronological implications. Again the Kefar Monash hoard provides an instructive example. T h e consensus of scholars is that the contents of the initial find are most satisfactorily placed in EB I. However, if a crescentic ax found several years later, some 200 m from the original findspot, is considered to be part of the original hoard, it places the entire hoard in EB III (a hoard is dated on the basis of the latest object found in it). Because so much of the surviving prehistoric metalwork
with reference to the technologies used to create them, the uses to which they were put, and their overall role in the cultures and societies in which they figure. It comprises three articles: Typology and Technology Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods The first serves as a general overview, while the remaining ar ticles treat the artifacts of specific periods and regions^
Typology and Technology Typological classification, or the ordering of objects into groups and subgroups according to shape, has been the most popular method for studying metal artifacts. Group ings were based on assumed geographical and/or chrono logical grounds. There are various reasons for this emphasis on typology, not the least of which is that until recently there was hardly any other way to deal with the material. Without the use of modern techniques of scientific analysis, many of which have been applied to the study of archaeological ma terials only within the last two decades, not much could be said about the materials used or about methods of manu facture. Only the distinction between copper and bronze was emphasized—a difference of real chronological signifi cance as the addition of tin to copper was a relatively late development. Such basic elemental analyses had been carried out on the metal artifacts excavated at Troy in the late nineteenth cen tury C E as a result of the far-sighted interests of Heinrich Schliemann. [See the biography of Schliemann] Schliemann's conclusion that bronze was used as early as Troy II (EBII) has been confirmed by modern research. That research has also revealed the earlier popularity of an arsenical alloy of copper, beginning at least as early as about 3500 BCE (al though not that early at Troy). The use of arsenical copper in the manufacture of metal artifacts in the third millennium BCE had been detected as early as 1906, but it was not until the late 1960s that archaeologists came to appreciate the im portance and the extent of the use of arsenical copper. T h e Early Bronze Age was actually more of an Age of Arsenical Copper (Muhly and Pernicka, 1992).'
1
2
METALS: Typology and Technology
comes from hoard contexts, the nature of these hoards and the "psychology" of hoarding have been studied intensely by prehistorians, especially by European prehistorians. By studying the metalwork stored in dozens of museums in Eu rope, the Swedish scholar Gustav Oscar Montelius (18431921) was able to work out a comparative typology for the Bronze Age of northern Europe. He worked out a sequence of six periods based on the typological development of bronze tools, implements, weapons, vessels, and ornaments. He later extended it, in both directions, to include four pe riods of the Neolithic and six periods of the Iron Age. Mon telius explained the basis of his typological system in Die typologische Methode: Die alteren Kulturperioden im Orient und in Europa (Stockholm, 1903). In a posthumous volume {La Grece preclassique, (Stockholm, 1924), Montelius pub lished drawings of Aegean Bronze Age artifacts that were so good they are reprinted frequently (often without acknowl edgment). Montelius's system was elaborated on by the German prehistorian Paul Reinecke (1872-1958). His four-phase se quential framework for the European Bronze Age, still known as Reinecke A - D (although Reinecke himself never published his system in detail), has long served as the basis for the chronological ordering of the material culture of the European Bronze Age. The sequence was extended into the Iron Age, with Hallstatt A - D , followed by La Tene A - D , which ended with die Roman period. For objects made of base metal, Reinecke's system probably represents the single most successful application of the principles of typological analysis. One of the main drawbacks of typological analysis is that such work has often resulted in the creation of archaeolog ical cultures having little or nothing to do with historical reality. Present work with metal analyses has created a sim ilar state of affairs, with metal types replaced by metal groups established on the basis of elemental analysis or lead isotope analysis. [See Lead Isotope Analysis.] Scholars not only studied the typology of objects from hoards, they studied the typology of the hoards themselves. European prehistorians came to distinguish between per sonal hoards (containing the personal property of a single individual), craftsman's hoards (containing the tools used by a particular artisan), merchant's hoards (having freshly made artifacts ready for distribution), and founder's hoards (broken or damaged artifacts destined for the melting pot or crucible). Although these categories can be extended to the Aegean, they do not seem to work in the Near East. In the first sys tematic study of hoards from Iraq and Syria dating to before about 2000 B C E , Judith K. Bjorkman concluded that "not a single one can be safely ascribed to a particular occupation" (Bjorkman, 1994, p. 12). The only possible exception would be the Larsa goldsmith's hoard, also the subject of a detailed study by Bjorkman (1993). [See Larsa.]
Near Eastern hoards also differ from their European counterparts as regards both size and number. In the hun dreds of hoards from the European Bronze Age, many ex amples have enormous quantities of bronze. In the CincuSuseni (Romania) group of seventy hoards, the five largest contained nearly 4,000 kg of bronze. One of the largest of these hoards had 5,812 bronze objects weighing almost 1,100 kg (Sandars, 1983). Nothing like this is known from the Near East, where the largest metal hoard (and also the earliest), from Nahal Mishmar in Israel's Judean Desert, contained 416 metal artifacts. [See Judean Desert Caves.] As to number, Bjorkman, in her catalog of Mesopotamian hoards and deposits, identified only thirty-eight actual hoards from all periods down to about 2000 B C E — m o s t of which are hoards of silver, not bronze. These figures should be kept in mind in evaluating the role of metals and metallurgy in ancient Mesopotamia. There, metal was never used on anything approaching the scale known from Bronze Age Europe—which must reflect the relative availability of the raw materials, copper and tin, and the accessibility of major ore deposits. T h e sheer num ber of artifacts involved is certainly one of the reasons why typological analysis has been carried out with greater success for prehistoric Europe titan for ancient Mesopotamia. With more exemplars to work with, it is possible to establish more meaningful categories. T h e state of preservation of surviv ing metal artifacts is also a factor: in general, the poor state of preservation of bronze artifacts from the Near East hin ders typological classification. Typology is often used as a means of organizing (and publishing) large bodies of material. This was the case with Jean Deshayes's (i960) two-volume study—the first serious attempt to organize and evaluate a very large number of bronze tools and implements. These volumes were pub lished with boxes containing hundreds of punch cards, even tually either discarded or misplaced by most libraries—an early attempt at the mechanical recovery of data. The successor to Deshayes's pioneering work is the series of volumes being published under the general title Prdhistorische Bronzefunde, a monumental research project orga nized by Hermann Miiller-Karpe under the auspices of the Union Internationale des Sciences Prehistoriques et Protohistoriques. Since 1969 a steady stream of volumes has ap peared within twenty categories. Eighteen categories are based on type of object: swords, daggers, razors, bracelets, pins, horse trappings—with the nineteenth for specialized bodies of material not otherwise covered; the twentieth is being set aside for general or synthetic studies. Within each category (or abteilung), the material is pub lished geographically. Assembling a complete catalog has meant the inclusion of pieces of questionable context or au thenticity, but it does bring together large bodies of material that are otherwise virtually inaccessible. Although the pro ject's main focus has always been prehistoric Europe, there
METALS: Typology and Technology are volumes dealing with material from Greece, Turkey, Cy prus, Israel, Iraq, and Iran, with volumes by Eva A. BraunHolzinger (1984) on Mesopotamian bronze figurines and statues and by Michael Miiller-Karpe (1993) on Mesopo tamian bronze vessels. The fortunes of archaeological discovery play a defining role in any study of ancient Near Eastern metalwork. Cer tain sites have produced such enormous amounts of met alwork that virtually every category of object includes ex amples from them. Pride of place must go to the royal cemetery at Ur, including the graves from the Akkadian and Early Dynastic III periods. [See Ur; Akkadians.] Much of the Ur material remains unpublished. T h e final reports of its excavator, C. Leonard Woolley, for all their admirable qualities, often included little more than perfunctory cata logs of metal finds. [See the biography of Woolley.] There are also vast numbers of metal artifacts from Nippur, also for the most part unpublished. [See Nippur.] In the case of Nippur the problem is that most of the finds come from the first seasons of excavation, conducted before World War I, and none have any real archaeological context. There is a large body of unpublished Mesopotamian (and Near Eastern) metalwork in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum from the days of the Ottoman Empire (although this material has been studied typologically in an unpubli shed Turkish dissertation). All excavated Near Eastern sites have produced a fair number of metal finds, but very little of this material has been published in a usable fashion. Such circumstances have discouraged the serious study of ancient Near Eastern, especially Mesopotamian, metalwork. Conditions are actually somewhat better in the Levant, where a considerable amount of metalwork has been exca vated and published. T h e metal weapons from EB and M B Syria and Palestine have been the subject of a detailed ty pological study by Graham Philip (1989) that provides the opportunity to examine both the merits and defects of ty pological analysis. [See Weapons and Warfare.] Within the category of tanged spearheads, Philip gives seventeen separate types. T y p e number 7, a spearhead with a tang ending in a tightly closed hook, represents a class of objects with very close Anatolian connections. The same holds for type number 15, a spearhead with two parallel slots on either side of the midrib. In these examples the Anatolian connections are so close Philip regards all Levantine ex amples as Anatolian imports. T h e objects are also typolog ically very, similar to contemporary metalwork on Cyprus, there representing the beginning of the Cypriot Early Bronze Age, the so-called Philia culture. [See Cyprus.] This has been taken to mean that the bronze industry developed on Cyprus, in the third quarter of the third millennium B C E , under a strong Anatolian influence. Other types of Levantine spearheads appear to have dif ferent foreign connections. Type number 3, a spearhead with a leaf-shaped blade, may have strong North Syrian
3
connections, whereas number 9, with a tapering "pokerbutt" tang, is a classic Mesopotamian type whose use spread as far as Transcaucasia. T h e spearhead soon became the characteristic weapon of Mesopotamia, in contrast to Ana tolia where the dagger predominated. Spearhead production also marks the beginning of a major metal industry in Mes opotamia, where the earliest example is one excavated by Woolley from an Ubaid period III (c. 5000-4500 BCE) grave at Ur. By the Jemdet Nasr period, Mesopotamia was using the traditional spearhead with a leaf-shaped blade (Frangipane, 1985). T h e Mesopotamian connections are even stronger for all Levantine shaft-hole axes. Although Philip recognizes six different types, his total corpus amounts to only thirty-one exemplars, some of which are odd specimens. His type number 6 consists of a group of objects known only from Mari (the palace of Zimrilim). [SeeMari.] They were pub lished by their excavator, Andre Parrot, as door hinges (an identification accepted by P. R. S. Moorey, 1994). Type-2 axes, with lobate blades with the cutting edge on their un derside, constitute the classic Mesopotamian type of shafthole ax. At Ur alone there are at least ninety eight examples, seventy two from Early Dynastic III contexts and twentysix from the Akkadian period (according to the dating of the Ur burials proposed by Hans Nissen). This type of ax has a distribution along the Euphrates River, from Ur to Habuba Kabira. [See Euphrates; Habuba Kabira.] Examples are known as far south as Byblos, but none has ever been found in Israel. [See Byblos.] T h e same holds true for type-3 axes, with horizontally mounted blades. They are known from Syria (Ugarit, Alalakh), but not from ancient Palestine. [See Ugarit; Alalakh.] This evidence certainly indicates that, in the second half of the third millennium B C E , a north-south trade route ran along the Euphrates valley connecting Sumer with the Med iterranean coast of North Syria. Raw materials were con veyed along this route, including copper from Magan (Oman) and tin and lapis lazuli from distant Afghanistan. [See Oman.] Armies also marched along this route: inscrip tions of Sargon of Akkad and his grandson Naram-Sin rec ord the conquest of Mari, Armanum, and Ebla. [See Ebla.] In the study of ancient Near Eastern metalwork, the fen estrated ax has received a great deal of attention, for it is a type of object thought to have clear chronological signifi cance. Kathleen M. Kenyon even used the presence of such an ax to date temple 4040 at Megiddo to her EB-MB period (also known as EB TV or M B I), although incorrectly. [See Megiddo.] Philip recognizes five types of fenestrated axes, not in cluding the crescentic ax, which he regards as a separate category (with three different types). T h e crescentic ax has a blade that was attached to the haft by means of one or more tangs; it seems to be a very primitive, almost useless object but one that enjoyed a fair degree of popularity. Ex-
4
METALS: Typology and Technology
amples from ancient Palestine (Jericho, Bab edh-Dhra', Tell el-Hesi) all appear to date to EB III, as do the more northern examples known from Byblos and Amarna in Syria. [See Jericho; Bab edh-Dhra'; Hesi, Tell el-.] Byblos produced a mold for casting a crescentic ax, also from the EB III period. The Mesopotamian examples, on the other hand, seem to be somewhat earlier. The examples from the Shara temple at Tell Agrab (in the Diyala region) are Early Dynastic II, while those from the Y cemetery at Kish, found in associa tion with cart burials, could even be late Early Dynastic I. [See Diyala; Kish; Carts.] T h e classic fenestrated ax is. the so-called duckbill ax (Philip, 1989, type 1), which has a narrow, functional blade. An ax of this type is depicted being carried by an Asiatic in an early nineteenth-century BCE painting from Beni Hasan in Lower Egypt, although the ax was foreign to Egypt itself. The date, however, is in keeping with the MB I date sug gested for examples from Syrian coastal sites. The best-pre served example of such an ax, which even preserves its dis tinctive curved wooden handle, comes from the Syrian site of Baghouz and is dated to between 2000 and 1750 B C E (MB I, also known as MB IIA). Molds for casting duckbill axes are known from Byblos, Ugarit, and Ebla. The Ebla example, from tomb D3712, is made of andesite and is an excellent example of the twopiece, or bivalve, mold. T h e Ebla mold would have pro duced a Philip type-2 ax: it has a wider, more D-shaped blade than the narrower type-i examples. Type-2 axes are known chiefly from the so-called Depots des Offrandes at Byblos. These consist of jar deposits containing massive numbers of bronze artifacts, including hundreds of small human figures cut out of thin sheet bronze. Philip convinc ingly argues that all these hoards are votive deposits, made in association with the Obelisk Temple at Byblos. Similar, though much smaller, deposits at Ugarit are to be associated with the Temple of Baal at Ugarit (Philip, 1988). The range of metal types in use in Mesopotamia is well indicated by the composition of the Old Babylonian hoard from Tell Sifr. A similar hoard, with hooks, nails, spoons, large rings, needles, tweezers, platters, bowls, mirrors, hoes, sickles, and adzes, is said to have come from Ishchali (Iraq) but was actually purchased in Baghdad in 1930. It is now in the collection of the Museum of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago (Moorey, 1994, p. 262). Vessels were usually made of bronze, but examples in gold, silver, and electrum are also known. A chronological sequence for bronze vessels has been worked out by MiillerKarpe (1993). Statuary in copper and bronze was usually executed on a small scale, as seen in numerous human and animal figurines, usually made of copper (Braun-Holzinger, 1984). The outstanding exception comes in the use of metal for architectural decoration, especially from the Early Dy nastic III temple at Tell al-Ubaid, excavated by H. R. Hall and C. Leonard Woolley. [See Ubaid.] There, the temple
was decorated with large-scale animals—bulls, stags, lions, and leopards—out of hammered thin sheets of copper over a wooden core; the heads (and horns, where present) of the animals were made of cast bronze. This technique of ham mering sheet metal over a wooden core was also used in fabricating the lions that guarded the terrace of the Old Bab ylonian temple of Dagan at Mari. In the Neo-Assyrian period there was an apparent in crease in the use of metal in Mesopotamia, made possible by the tribute in metals paid by vassal states from all parts of the Assyrian empire. T h e Assyrian kings used some of their newly acquired metal resources to decorate the wooden doors of their temples and palaces with strips of bronze. Such bronze overlays are first mentioned by Adad-Nirari I (1305-1274 BCE) and continued to be used down to the end of the Neo-Assyrian period (late seventh century B C E ) . Examples of decorated bronze strips nailed to wooden doors are known from Assur, Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Tell Hadad (in the Hamrin basin). [See Assur; Khorsabad.] T h e best-known examples are from the site of Balawat and date to the reign of Shalmaneser III (858-824 B C E ) . [SeeBalawat.] The bronze bands from Balawat are said to be the earliest examples of true engraving on metal. T h e cuneiform in scriptions on these bands were cut with steel engraving tools, exactly as they would have been cut into stone. One of the bands shows an Assyrian sculptor cutting cuneiform text on the rock face of a commemorative inscription (Moorey, 994> PP- 34= 7 6 ) . T h e Assyrian king Sennacherib (704681 BCE) claims that he knew how to melt and cast the metal for making such bronze bands (in his account of the construction of his "Palace without Rival"; cf. Dalley, 1988). l
2
By the tenth century B C E , iron was well on the way to replacing bronze as the basic utilitarian metal. Agricultural tools and implements formerly made of bronze, as docu mented in cuneiform texts and by the contents of the Tell Sifr hoard (see above), were increasingly made of iron, as documented by the finds from such Palestinian sites as Ta'anach (Stech-Wheeler et al., 1981). [See Ta'anach.] T h e array of iron tools and implements found at Ta'anach nicely parallels the list given in r Samuel 13:19-20. There, in a passage placed in the time of King Saul's wars against the Philistines (c. 1000 B C E ) , it is stated that "There was no smith to be found in all the land of Israel, for the Philistines had said to themselves, " T h e Hebrews might make swords or spears!" So all Israel would go down to the Philistines to repair any of their plowshares, mattocks, axes, or sickles." Iron swords were difficult to make and were first found in any quantity on Early Iron Age Cyprus. Spearheads and arrowheads were socketed and, therefore, tended to be made of bronze even in Roman times. It was in the manufacture of objects such as plowshares, axes, adzes, hoes, spades, and shovels, however, that iron soon replaced more expensive bronze.
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bjorkman, Judith K. " T h e Larsa Goldsmith's H o a r d s — N e w Interpretations." Journal ojNear Eastern Studios 52 (1993): 1-23. Bjorkman, Judith K. Hoards and Deposits in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Philadelphia, 1994. Braun-Holzinger, Eva A. Figiirtiche Bronzen aus Mesopotamien. Prahistorische Bronzefunde 1.4. M u n i c h , 1984. Dalley, Stephanie. "Neo-Assyrian T e x t u a l Evidence for Bronzeworking C e n t r e s . " In Bronzeworking Centres of Western Asia c, 1000-530. BC, edited by John Curtis, p p . 97-110. L o n d o n , 1988. Deshayes, Jean. Les outils de bronze I'Indus au Danube (IVe au lie milMnaire). Paris, i960. Frangipane, Marcella. "Early D e v e l o p m e n t s of Metallurgy in the N e a r East." In Studi di Paletnologia in onore di Salvalore M. Puglisi, edited by Mario Liverani, Alba Palmieri, a n d Renato Peroni, p p . 215-228. R o m e , 1985. M o o r e y , P . R. S. Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries. The Archaeological Evidence. Oxford, 1994. Miiller-Karpe, Michael. Metallgefasse im hag. Prahistorische B r o n z e funde 2.14. Stuttgart, 1993. M u h l y , J. D . , a n d E r n s t Pernicka. "Early T r o j a n Metallurgy and Metals T r a d e . " In Heinrich Schliemann. Grundlagen undErgebnisse moderner Archaologie ioojahre nach Schliernanns Tod, edited by J. H e r r m a n n , p p . 309-318. Berlin, 1992. Philip, G r a h a m . " H o a r d s of the Early a n d M i d d l e Bronze Age in the L e v a n t . " World Archaeology 20.2 (1988): 190-208. Philip, G r a h a m . Metal Weapons of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages in Syria-Palestine. Oxford, 1989. Sandars, N a n c y . " N o r t h and South at the E n d of t h e M y c e n a e a n Age: Aspects of an Old P r o b l e m . " Oxford Journal of Archaeology z (1983): 43-68. Stech-Wheeler, T a m a r a , J. D . M u h l y , K. R. Maxwell-Hyslop, a n d Robert M a d d i n . " I r o n at T a a n a c h a n d Early I r o n Metallurgy in the Eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . " American Journal of Archaeology 85 (1981): 245-268. J. D .
MUHLY
Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages In the "Three-Age" periodization of human cultural devel opment, first proposed by die Danish scholar Christian J. Thomsen in 1819 (Daniel, 1981, pp. 58-60), the Bronze Age (beginning c. 3000 B C E ) , marked the change from stone to metal. T h e metals in question—copper and tin (the latter alloyed with copper to produce bronze)—then dominated the scene until they were replaced by iron (c. 1000 BCE) . T h e Iron Age represented the culmination of the primitive tech nology characteristic of the ancient world before the emer gence of Greco-Roman civilization. Although world prehistory has largely been rewritten dur ing the last two decades, the three age system is still a useful chronological framework, although it no longer has any technological meaning. Recent advances in what is under stood of the beginnings of metallurgy make this very clear: evidence for the first use of metal now goes back to about 8000 B C E . T h e beginning of the Bronze Age is associated with a series of developments that includes complex political and economic systems requiring stratified societies and sys tems of writing, international trade, fortified cities, and the
5
use of arsenical copper—not bronze. The alloy of copper and tin, the only copper alloy properly designated bronze, only came into common use during the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1600 B C E ) . T h e beginning of the Iron Age has al ways been put at about 1200 B C E , but only Cyprus and Pal estine made any serious use of iron before the first millen nium B C E . Neolithic Period. T h e first metal used in antiquity was copper, not only because it was a useful metal—being du rable, ductile, and easy to work—but also because it exists as a metal in geological context. Nuggets of native copper needed only to be hammered into shape to form the earliest metal artifacts. Small beads, hooks and pins, and reamers/ awls of native copper are known from the Aceramic Neo lithic site of Cayonii Tepesi in southeastern Anatolia, a site also known for its complex domestic and public architecture (c. 8000 B C E ) . From a somewhat later period (late eighth millennium) there is a series of copper beads, used in mak ing necklaces, from the site of Asfkli Hoyiik in central An atolia. In about the same time frame, small beads of copper are known from the Iranian site of Ali Kosh and the Me sopotamian site of Tell es-Sawwan. [See Ali Kosh.] T h e ear liest substantial copper object is an awl from the northern Mesopotamian site of Tell Magzaliya (see figure 1 ) , dated to the second half of the eighth millennium (Muhly, 1988). All these early copper finds represent the use of native copper. Quite unexpected is the evidence for the practice of annealing (the heating of copper at low temperatures to pre vent cracking during hammering) in the early copper arti facts from Cayonii and Asikli. The use of fire (pyrotechnology) was thus employed in working with metal long before it was used with clay, at least in the ancient Near East (in central Europe, animal and human figurines made of fired clay are known from Dolni Vestonice in Czechoslo vakia that date to about 24,000 B C E ) . T h e discovery of small pieces of copper smelting slag from level VIA at Catal Hoyiik (c. 6000 BCE) suggests the early development of a smelting technology, but there is little other evidence for the use of anything but native copper before about 5000 B C E , [See Catal Hoyiik.] The lead beads reported from Catal Hoyiik VIA are actually made of galena (the lead sulphide ore that would have been smelted to pro duce metallic lead), and the slags and crucibles from the Anatolian site of Nevah Qoti are from its Early Bronze I levels—not its Aceramic Neolithic ones—which is appar ently true for its small copper objects as well. [See Nevah CorL] The shaft-hole mace-head from level 2b at Can Hasan (c. 6000 B C E ) , made of very pure copper, with only 0.05 percent silver as an impurity, must also be made of native copper. The copper beads found in graves at the site of Mehrgarh, in Baluchistan, also date to about 6000 B C E and should also be of native copper. They demonstrate that this simple cop per metallurgy had spread to South Asia by the late seventh
6
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages some reason, not carried forth. The sixth seems to have been but a prelude to die great expansion of the following two millennia (c. 5000-3000 B C E ) — i n many respects the most creative period in prehistoric metallurgy. From the fifth-millennium Iranian sites of Tell-i-Iblis and Tepe Ghabristan comes tire first clear evidence for a coppersmelting technology and the existence of metal workshops. Tall-i-rblis produced a large number of crucible fragments, while Tepe Ghabristan had an actual workshop, with cru cibles, tuyeres, molds, and some 20 kg of copper ore. Con temporary with these finds (c. 4500-4000 B C E , or Sialk III 4-5) are a number of copper artifacts, including fifty-five copper axes from the Susa I (or A) graves representing the mass burials associated with the city's founding (Moorey, 1982). [See Susa.] T h e second half of the fifth millennium is also when cop per metallurgy expanded into the Aegean, the Balkans, and southeastern Europe. Earlier copper objects are known from all these areas, from Early Neolithic (c. 5900-5300 BCE) and Middle Neolithic (c. 5300-4700 BCE) times, but it was in the Late Neolithic (c. 4700-4300 BCE)—also known as the Eneolithic (or Aeneolithic)—that European copper usage ex ceeded anything known from the Near East. From this pe riod also, the time of the Gumelnitsa, Karanovo VI, Tiszapolgar, Cucuteni, Tripolje, and Sesklo regional cul tures, hoards consist of shaft-hole axes as well as flat axes (or celts) and chisels, all made of unalloyed smelted copper. The copper ore came from at least two mining sites that have been securely dated to the second half of the fifth mil lennium: Rudna Glava, in eastern Serbia, and Ai Bunar in Bulgaria. It was also during the Late Neolithic that gold made its first appearance. A few gold objects are known from sites in northern Greece, but massive quantities were found in the graves of the Varna cemetery on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. Nothing comparable is known from the Near East (although claims have been made for Late Neo lithic copper smeltingin Wadi 'Arabah, at Timna' in Israel (site F2) and at Feinan in Jordan (site Fidan 4). [See Timna' (Negev); Feinan.]
—
fCM
METALS: NEOLITHIC, BRONZE, AND IRON AGES. F i g u r e I .
Copper
awl from the Russian excavations at Tell Magzaliya, Iraq. (Courtesy Ralf Munchaev; supplied by J. D . Muhly)
millennium. At present, the massive lead bracelet from level XII at the northern Mesopotamian site of Yarim Tepe I (early seventh millennium), stands alone as a Neolithic ob ject made of metal that must have been smelted from an ore. Metallurgically, the sixth millennium in the ancient Near East seems to have been an uneventful period. The preco cious developments of the previous millennium were, for
F o u r t h Millennium B C E . Large-scale metallurgy was developed in the ancient Near East in the fourth millennium, replacing the "trinket metallurgy" (cf. Moorey, 1994) of the earlier periods. T h e best evidence for these developments comes from the Levant—from Israel and Jordan. A great hoard of more than four hundred copper artifacts from Nahal Mishmar (on the west bank of the Dead Sea) was greeted with incredulity when it was first discovered in 1961. [See Judean Desert Caves.] It was thought to be treasure from the Temple in Jerusalem that had been hidden to save it from destruction by the Romans in 70 CE. Now, some thirty objects in the same style are known from excavated Chalcolithic sites that have also produced evidence for copperworking and the casting of tire mace heads, standards,
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages and "crowns" still best known from the Nahal Mishmar hoard (see figure 2). It is still possible that this hoard rep resents cult paraphernalia, but from the Chalcolithic temple at 'Ein-Gedi, not the Herodian temple in Jerusalem. [See Cult; Tiin-Gedi; Jerusalem.] Evidence for the Chalcolithic mining of copper is known from Feinan in Jordan (and perhaps also from Timna' in Israel). These mines produced a copper ore consisting of chrysocolla and malachite, but the complex prestige or cult objects were made of a remarkable alloy containing more than 20 percent antimony and more than 8 percent arsenic. T h e copper for such an alloy could only have come from eastern Anatolia, where it has even been found in an ar chaeological context at the Chalcolithic site of Norsuntepe. T h e implications of this evidence are still not understood. It could be argued that the evidence for local metalworking, as known from Tell Abu Matar and Shiqmim in Israel, com prising simple bowl furnaces, crucibles, slags, and quantities
METALS: N E O L I T H I C , BRONZE, A N D I R O N AGES.
Figure
2. Copper
Standards from the Nahal Mishmar hoard. Israel M u s e u m , J e r u s a lem. (Courtesy M i r i a m T a d m o r ; p h o t o g r a p h by R o b e r t M a d d i n ; s u p plied by J, D . M u h l y )
7
of copper ore, pertained only to the manufacture of the util itarian axes and chisels made of unalloyed copper. [See Shiq mim.] T h e ore in question could certainly have come from Feinan, where evidence was also uncovered for Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age copper smelting, but what then of the cult or prestige objects? T h e problem is that these objects also seem to be of local manufacture, utilizing an iconog raphy also seen in contemporary objects in clay, stone, and ivory. Apparently, metallic copper, rich in antimony and ar senic, was produced in eastern Anatolia and then shipped to Israel's Negev desert, where it was fashioned into the elaborate objects known from the Nahal Mishmar hoard. Precious metals are also found for the first time during the Chalcolithic period, in the fourth millennium. A re markable collection of eight ring-shaped gold objects, with up to 30 percent silver, were found in a cave in Nahal Qanah, along with prestige objects of alloyed copper. These objects should be described as being made of electrum, as was a remarkable wolf s-head terminal from tomb 114, level X, at Tepe Gawra in northern Mesopotamia (mid-fourth millennium). [See Tepe Gawra.] Analysis has shown that many of the objects commonly described in the literature as being of gold are in fact made of electrum, including some of the most famous pieces from the royal cemetery at Ur (see below). [SeeUr.] A few pieces of gold jewelry are known from an earlier (level XII) tomb at Tepe Gawra, and more extensive finds, including gold pendants, gold bands, and gold spirals, were found in tombs in levels XI-X. T h e great age of gold jewelry, however, was the third millennium B C E , a period that, with full justification, could be called the Age of Gold. [See Jew elry.] Electrum normally contains about 60-70 percent gold and 30-40 percent silver. There are examples of high-silver elec trum; this so-called aurian silver seems to have been the only type used in ancient Egypt, at least prior to the Middle King dom (c. 2000 B C E ) . In the rest of the ancient Near East, however, silver was extracted from argentiferous galena by a process called cupellation, producing as a by-product a lead oxide known as litharge. T h e earliest evidence for cu pellation comes from the Syrian site of Habuba Kabira (late Uruk period, late fourtli millennium). [See Habuba Kabira.] T h e separation of natural electrum into its component parts (gold and silver), a cementation process known as parting, does not seem to have been known before the mid-sixth century B C E . Silver came into common use in the late fourth millen nium. A surprising number of silver objects are known from sites in Anatolia (Beycesultan, level XXXIV; Alisar Hoyiik, level 14; Arslantepe, level VTA; and from two contemporary rich graves at Korucutepe), the Levant (especially the rich burials from the Eneolithic cemetery at Byblos), and Egypt (the Predynastic graves at Naqada). [See Arslantepe; Grave Goods; Byblos; Naqada.] From the Jemdet Nasr period in
8
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages
Mesopotamia comes a silver vase and a limestone bull widi silver legs (both from Uruk) and, from Proto-Elamite Iran, a magnificent silver kneeling bull holding a vase, an object that, like so many works in precious metal, comes not from a conttolled excavation but from the antiquities market. [See Jemdet Nasr; Uruk-Warka.] The use of silver inlay in dec oration is usually associated with the EB II—III period and is best documented in the inlaid stags from the royal cemetery at Alaca Hoyiik: the inlaid sword hilts from Arslantepe show, however, that die technique was akeady in use in die late fourth millennium. Silver is extremely rare from contem porary sites in the Aegean; the only example known to date is a silver pendant from the Alepotrypa cave hoard in Mani, in southern Greece (Muhly, 1985a, p. 112). The lead, pro duced as a by-product of silver extraction, was also used to make objects, especially a series of vessels from the so-called Jemdet Nasr cemetery at Ur (Moorey, 1994, p. 294). The prestige objects from Nahal Mishmar are unusual in their high concemrations of antimony, in addition to the more common arsenic. Arsenical copper was the standard alloy of the fourth millennium, and its use extended into the third as well. T h e use of arsenical copper is documented in many fourth-millennium copper hoards, including those from Ilipinar, Ikiztepe, Beycesultan, Arslantepe, and Hassek Hoyiik (in Anatolia), from various sites in Palestine dating to the time of the Nahal Mishmar hoard, and from late fourth-millennium sites in Mesopotamia, notably Jemdet Nasr and Kish. [See Kish.] Arsenical copper was also the dominant alloy in the large hoard of metal objects found at Kefar Monash in Israel that included flat axes, adzes, chisels, large hooked-tang spearheads, and many small, thin copper plates (see figure 3). T h e hoard also contained some frag-
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F i g u r e 3. Copper "scale" from the Kefar Monash hoard. Israel M u s e u m , J e r u s a l e m . (Courtesy Miriam T a d m o r ; photograph by Robert M a d d i n ; supplied by J. D . Muhly) M E T A L S : N E O L I T H I C , B R O N Z E , A N D I R O N AGES.
ments of silver and some carnelian beads and must date to about 3000 BCE (Syro-Palestinian EB I). Third Millennium B C E . T h e use of metal, both precious and base, "exploded" in the entire ancient world during the third millennium B C E , from the Danube to the Indus River. T h e dominant copper alloy still seems to have been arsenical copper but, as the millennium progressed, the use of bronze steadily increased—in Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran. The situation in mid-millennium is illuminated by the hoard of metal artifacts found in a large covered and painted clay vessel on the acropolis at Susa in 1907. T h e entire hoard, consisting of forty-eight (or fifty-seven metal objects, eleven alabaster vessels, six cylinder seals, gold rings and beads, and a tiny frog of lapis lazuli, has come to be known as the vase a la cachette ("hidden vase"). It includes objects from the entire first half of the third millennium B C E . Of the forty-two metal artifacts that have been analyzed, only six have at least 2 percent tin, with four of them having more than 7 percent tin. T h e dominant alloy in use was arsenical copper: thirty-one of the forty-two analyzed objects had at least 1 percent arsenic, including a globular spouted vessel with 6.2 percent; a broad, shallow bowl with 4.7 percent; and a tanged saw with 4 percent arsenic. The parallel use of bronze and arsenical copper, with the latter predominating, is the technology found across Ana tolia, as far as the Troad and die northern Aegean, in the mid-third millennium B C E . Recent analytical work has doc umented its use at Thermi (Lesbos) and Poliochni (Lemnos). T h e latter site is of particular interest as the anal yses document a gradual but steady increase in the use of bronze, from Poliochni II to V, covering the first half of the third millennium B C E . Arsenical copper was also the pre dominant alloy in the Cyclades (especially in a hoard thought to be from Kythnos but more likely originating on Naxos) and Crete during die Early Bronze Age. A few bronzes are known from Early Minoan Crete, whose num ber should increase with the metal finds from the rich cem etery at Ayia Photia. [See Crete.] In Palestine, on Cyprus, and in Egypt, bronze was seldom used before the second millennium B C E . A number of dag gers from EB IV tombs in Palestine (Bab edh-Dhra', 'Einan, Jericho, Motza, Menahemiya) are made of bronze, but the use of this alloy seems restricted to this class of object. [See Bab edh-Dhra'; 'Einan; Jericho.] These EB IV bronze dag gers have strong Anatolian connections, best seen in the daggers from the hoard found at Soloi-Pompeiopolis. The Anatolian connections could be related to the sources of tin being exploited at the end of the third millennium B C E (see above). It requires tin to make bronze, and tin deposits are very rare in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean and the an cient Near East. Copper deposits are quite numerous, es pecially in Anatolia, on Cyprus, and in Iran, but ancient
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages sources of tin have yet to be identified. Some believe that Bronze Age tin, especially EB tin, came from the Taurus Mountains of southeastern Anatolia. [See Taurus M o u n tains.] Others, not impressed by the quantity of cassiterite (or tin oxide, the main source of ancient tin) from the T a u rus put their faith in the tin deposits of Afghanistan and Central Asia, where the geological evidence for alluvial cas siterite is far better than anything known from Anatolia. T h e hypothesis of a Mesopotamian source for tin in Afghanistan is greatly strengthened by the fact that Afghanistan is also known as a major source of lapis lazuli and alluvial gold: these three materials—tin, gold, and lapis lazuli—appear to gether in the archaeological record in the mid-third millen nium B C E . This is best documented in the finds from the royal cemetery at Ur (Early Dynastic IIIA, c. 2600-2500 BCE).
If Afghanistan were indeed a source of tin for the metal industries of EB western Asia, something of a local bronze industry would be expected in Afghanistan itself, the ancient land of Bactria. Indeed, such an industty did exist, but it is known almost entirely from objects purchased on the antiq uities market (and from excavated sites such as Mundigak, in the south). "Bactrian bronzes," looted mainly from cem eteries in northern Afghanistan, flooded the antiquities mar ket in the years following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. From the bazaar in Kabul these bronzes made their way to museums and private collections in the West. In ad dition to a great number of compartmented stamp seals, at first considered to be the work of Nestorian Christians, there were also vessels (including examples in gold, silver, and electrum) and weapons, notably axes. [See Weapons and Warfare; Seals.] The axes often are decorated in high relief, there are even examples in silver, ornamented with gold foil. Insofar as it can be determined, these Bactrian bronzes date to the late third and early second millennia BCE (Potts, 1994). From the mid-third millennium B C E , deposits of gold jew elry, either as hoards or as grave goods, have been uncov ered over a vast area, from Greece to southern Mesopota mia. Although chronological uncertainties have long clouded the issue, it now seems that all of these gold treas ures, from the Greek mainland (Thyreatis), the northern Aegean (Poliochni), Crete (Mochlos), northwest Anatolia (Troy), central Anatolia (Alaca Hoyiik, Eskiyapar), and Mesopotamia (Ur) are from roughly the same chronological horizon. Gold, with the exception of Varna (see above) and, to a lesser extent, Tepe Gawra, was rare in archaeological contexts prior to about 2500 B C E . It then appears in (rela tively) large quantities and over a vast area. In almost all cases, it appears in conjunction with tin (used in malting bronze). Gold jewelry and bronze tools and weapons seem to have something in common. That commonality must re side in the alluvial nature of gold and cassiterite and in the fact that both alluvial materials occur geologically in asso
9
ciation with granite rock (not all granites have tin, but there is no tin without granite). In Mesopotamia (Ur) and Syria (Ebla) gold and bronze appear together with lapis lazuli, and all three materials—gold, tin, and lapis lazuli—are found in Afghanistan. [See Ebla.] Moreover, lapis lazuli is known only from deposits in northeastern Afghanistan (save for minor deposits in Pakistan). This conjunction suggests that the great metallurgical ex pansion of tire mid-third millennium B C E was stimulated, in some very significant way, by the establishment of Meso potamian contact with lands to the east, contacts that tapped into new sources of raw materials, both metals (gold, tin, and perhaps even copper) and semiprecious stones (carnelian and lapis lazuli). This great influx of material wealth stimulated the growth of trade and a commercial expansion that also had a political component. Lapis lazuli was shipped up the Euphrates River and beyond, as far as northern Syria, where blocks of the raw material have been found in the storerooms of palace G at Ebla. [See Euphrates; Palace.] It may even have been shipped as far north as Troy, where a ceremonial axe of lapis lazuli was one of four axes that made up Heinrich Schliemann's Treasure L (mid-third millen nium B C E ) . [See the biography of Schliemann.} Apart from being at Troy, lapis is unknown at Anatolian Bronze Age sites. There clearly was a great increase in the amount of pre cious metal (and tin) in circulation by the middle of the third millennium B C E . T h e idea that these raw materials came into the land of Sumer from the east is supported by references in Sumerian literary texts to a trade between Sumer and the land of Aratta, described in a Sumerian literary text from Nippur as being "in the midst of the highlands, where the sun rises." [See Sumerian; Nippur.] Associated with Aratta is the land of Tukrish, described in the same text as "the mountain land of great food offerings" and as a source of gold and lapis lazuli. Sumer itself was an alluvial fioodplain, possessing virtually no natural resources save for clay, reeds, and the Sumerians themselves. All raw materials, including metals, stone, and wood, came, according to Sumerian lit erary texts, from the eastern highlands. Silver also played a major role in this trade with lands beyond southern Mesopotamia. An Archaic Sumerian lit erary text, known from copies found at Ebla and at Abu Salabikh (near Nippur), says of the god Ea that "foreign trade he gave to the traders. [See Abu Salabikh.] T h e lands yielded lapis lazuli and silver, sissoo wood, cedar, cypress, juniper. . . . " The text dates to the very beginning of the Akkadian period (c. 2400-2200 B C E ) , or just before. In the Akkadian period there was a great increase in the amount of silver in circulation. Mesopotamia went on the "silver standard" and prices for goods were quoted in terms of shekels of silver. It stayed on this standard except for a brief period during Kassite times, when it shifted to gold. [See
10
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages
Kassites.] Neo-Assyrian texts also sometimes quote prices in terms of shekels of copper. [See Assyrians.] A number of silver hoards are known from Akkadian times, including at least four hoards from Tell Brak, two from Tell Taya, and several from Tell Asmar and Khafajeh. [See Akkadians; Brak, Tell; Taya, Tell; Khafajeh] Many contained rings and coils of silver, which are now seen as a premonetary form of currency. T h e silver coils and rings from the so-called Treasure of Ur, excavated at Mari, in dicate that such objects were in use already during the time of the royal cemetery at Ur. Silver was also much in use in Anatolia during the third quarter of the third millennium B C E ; actual ingots of silver are known from Troy and Mahmatiar. Lead-isotope anal yses indicate that at least some of the silver used at Troy, and at Mesopotamian sites such as Telloh and Assur (and even in one of the silver coils from Khafajeh) came from die Taurus Mountains, an area well known as a source of silver until well into Ottoman times. [See Assur.] The great con queror Sargon of Akkad states that his military campaigns took him "as far as the Cedar Forest and the Silver Moun tains." The first is certainly a reference to the cedars of Leb anon; the second must designate the Taurus. There was also a major increase in the use of silver in the Aegean, especially on the islands of the Cyclades, during the third quarter of the third millennium B C E , documented primarily by a group of silver bracelets from Early Cycladic graves. According to lead-isotope analyses, the earlier silver (Early Cycladic I—II) came from the Ayios Sostis mines on Siphnos. Increased demand for silver led to die opening of the Laurion mines, in southern Attica, at the end of Early Cycladic II. T h e silver known from Early Minoan Crete includes a silver vase from Mochlos. Although bronze was certainly being produced during the Akkadian period, many of the most famous pieces of M e sopotamian metalwork have proved to be of unalloyed cop per. A striking head dated to the time of Sargon of Akkad, but found in a Neo-Assyrian level at Nineveh (where it had been mutilated in the sack of 612 B C E ) , is made of cast cop per, not bronze as usually stated. [See Nineveh.] T h e largescale statue of a crouching nude male, "discovered" by a bulldozer at the site of Bassetki in northeastern Iraq, is also made of cast copper. It bears an inscription of Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, and seems originally to have guarded the gate of a temple. This use of unalloyed copper for sculpture may represent something of a Mesopotamian tradition. There are many Early Dynastic figurines made of cast cop per and, from Early Dynastic ELI, a number of animal heads and relief panels showing animals, probably bulls, are all of cast copper. According to Sumerian literary and administrative texts, copper came from the land of Magan, now identified as be ing roughly equivalent to the modern Sultanate of Oman. [See Oman.] The copper mines of Oman have been known
for many years, but it has only been possible recently to show that these mines were first worked in the late third millennium BCE. T h e Sumerians sailed to Dilmun, their name for the island of Bahrain, in order to acquire the cop per of Magan and, in some periods, sailed directly to Magan. [See Dilmun; Bahrain.] In exchange they brought textiles (produced by the extensive textile industry in Sumer) and silver (perhaps from Anatolia). This seaborne trade devel oped in the second half of the third millennium B C E , replac ing the earlier overland trade route that had brought raw materials, including Iranian copper, from the eastern high lands into southern Mesopotamia. T h e development of this seaborne trade is in some way related to the rise of the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley, an area known to the Sumerians as the land of Meluhha. In one of his royal in scriptions Sargon of Akkad claims that he "moored the ships of Meluhha, Magan, and Dilmun at the quay of Akkade" (his capital city). [See Akkade.] T h e Sumerian texts refer to gold, and even to tin, from the land of Meluhha, along with stones and exotic woods (Cleuziou, 1986). As the Mesopotamians had done earlier, the merchants of Meluhha expanded into Central Asia (ancient Bactria) and seem to have been physically present in southern Mesopo tamia, where their presence required the services of a trans lator. The inhabitants of die Indus Valley established some sort of a colony in Afghanistan, at the site of Shortugai. A complex of trade networks came into existence, linking Mes opotamia, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley. T h e metal work that resulted from these cultural connections can be seen in such collections of precious materials as the so-called Quetta treasure. T h e treasure was discovered during the course of digging the foundations for a hotel in modern Quetta and is dated to about 2000 B C E . It includes gold ves sels and small objects (especially two bull pendants), as well as copper/bronze implements and alabaster vessels. There is also a hoard of five gold and seven silver vessels said to have been found in 1966 at Khosh Tapa, north of Kabul, also dated to about 2000 B C E . Khosh Tapa is on the other side of the Anjuman Pass, across from the Sar-i-Sang lapis mines. These treasures must reflect the tremendous wealth generated by die international trade of the day (see articles in Ligabue and Salvatori, 1989). One of the most distinctive objects in the repertoire of late third-millennium B C E jewelry in gold and silver is the quad ruple spiral bead. These beads have an extensive geographic distribution, from Anatolia to the Persian Gulf (with later, related examples known from mid-second-millennium sites in Greece). This very distinctive artifact actually provides an excellent object lesson on the dangers inherent in typo logical dating. While many examples do date from the sec ond half of the third millennium B C E , including specimens from Troy, Alaca Hoyiik, Tell Selenkahiyeh, Tell Brak, Ur, and Bahrain, others are from the early second millennium B C E (Old Assyrian Kultepe, Assur tomb 20) and even the
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages late second millennium (twelve examples from a tomb at Mari dated to c. 1400-1200 B C E ) . Moreover, these beads were still being produced in the Iron Age. Eighteen complete examples in silver were found as part of a hoard excavated at the seventh century B C E site of Tepe Nush-i Jan, in west ern Iran (Curtis, 1984). It has been argued that the Nush-i Jan beads represent curated heirlooms and were actually manufactured in the third millennium B C E . This seems most unlikely, given the large number of finds (including a number of fragments), but certainty on such matters will probably forever elude researchers. It certainly is significant that the hoard from Nush-i Jan also included five- double spiral pendants in sil ver, a type known in the Early Uruk period and well docu mented in graves in the royal cemetery a t U r (Early Dynastic ILIA) and from roughly contemporary examples in Iran (TepeHissarHIB). T h e Nush-i Jan hoard also contained thirteen silver bar ingots. Such ingots are known from contexts both a thou sand years earlier (Tell Asmar, Larsa) and a thousand years later (from the Late Roman period). [See Larsa.] Examples in copper are a distinctive feature of the EB IV period in Palesdne. Molds for casting such ingots are known from Tell Brak and Chaghar Bazar (and even from sites as early as Tepe Ghabristan and as late as the Early Iron Age site of Koukos in northern Greece). T h e distribution of such ingots in Palestine, together with the general lack of EB IV settle ments, has suggested the existence of a guild of itinerant metalworkers operating throughout Palestine at the end of the third millennium B C E . Second Millennium B C E . From a metallurgical perspec tive the second millennium B C E began with the Old Assyrian trade between Assur and the karum Kanes, covering the nineteenth century B C E (the time of level II in the karum). Flundreds of Old Assyrian letters document a metals trade between northern Mesopotamia and central Anatolia. The Old Assyrian merchants brought tin (and textiles) into An atolia, there to be exchanged for silver (and gold). T h e silver was used to purchase more tin, in ASsur, and the process was repeated the following year. The obvious implication of this trade pattern is that silver was available in Anatolia, whereas tin was not. T h e texts say nothing about the source (s) of this tin, only that it was brought (from somewhere in the east) to Assur, where it was purchased by Assyrian merchants, along with textiles from Babylonia. [See Babylonians.] Both tin and textiles were then brought by donkey caravan (malting use of a spe cial breed of black donkey) to Anatolia. The further impli cation is that the local Anatolian princes had no access to sources of tin themselves—or, at least, found it more desir able to purchase tin (at somewhat inflated prices) from As syrian middlemen. T h e copper used by the Anatolian met alworkers must have been of local origin, and the production and utilization of bronze was also carried out locally. A metal
11
workshop has been excavated in the lb level in the karum Kane§, the time of Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria. This pattern of an east-west metals trade, bringing tin from the east (Afghanistan?) to sites west of Mesopotamia, is also documented in the Old Babylonian letters from Mari, covering at least the first half of the eighteenth century B C E . Tin came up the Euphrates to Mari, with Susa serving as a vital link between eastern tin sources and the Euphrates val ley. Certain merchants (Aide., tamkaru) specialized in this tin trade with Elam, especially one named Isi-Dagan. T h e good graces of local Elamite officials were essential to main taining access to this tin and so they were ingratiated with gifts of wine and honey. [See Elamites.] The tin came to Mari in ingot form and was stored tiiere for reshipment. From one text, known as the Mari Tin In ventory, it is known that this dn was shipped to various sites in the west, from Carchemish in the north to Hazor in the south. [See Carchemish; Hazor.] From Ugarit the tin was further shipped to the land of Kaptaru, the Akkadian name for the island of Crete. Such long-distance trade was justi fied by the scarcity (and therefore die cost) of the metal. Metal ratios given in the Mari text reveal that tin was con sidered to be about one-tenth the price of silver, whereas the price of copper was 150 to 180 times cheaper than silver. Lead, on the other hand, was twelve hundred times cheaper than silver. [See Mari Texts.] There are other references to Kaptaru in the Mari texts, as well as to the exchange of "greeting gifts" between the rulers of the Minoan palaces on Crete and the rulers of Mari. Communication between the merchants of Crete and those of Mari required the services of a translator (Aide, targamannum, the Akkadian word eventually borrowed by all Eu ropean languages as dragoman), as had earlier contact be tween Akkadian merchants and the merchants of Meluhha (see above). T h e Mari texts also refer to copper from Alashiya, a geographic term usually associated with the island of Cyprus. The Cypriot copper industry was certainly well underway by the eighteenth century B C E . The first evidence for actual copper mining on Cyprus, at the site of Ambelikou Aletri, dates to this period. Copper from Alashiya is even mentioned in a text from Babylonia, dated to the fifth year of the reign of Samsuiluna, Icing of Babylon and the succes sor of Hammurabi. This was the international world of the Old Babylonian period, illuminated by many references to metalworking and the metals trade in texts from Mari and Ur. T h e situation at Mari, however, has been greatly confused by mistranslations in the standard editions of the Mari letters. T h e translators identified references to a process of ore beneficiation and to a copper-smelting installation. In reality, the texts describe the washing and crushing of ice (Akk., sunpum) and to the storage of that ice in an icehouse (bit surtpim). A Mari text said to describe the casting of metallic copper actually states that, after the ice freezes, the iceman will send it to Mari for
12
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages
storage in the icehouse. Equally suspect is the interpretation of rooms 216-218 in the palace of Zimrilim as metal work shops. There are, however, many actual references to metalworking in the Mari texts, especially to the manufacture of military equipment and even to the repair of chariots. [See Chariots.] From Ur a group of texts from the time of Rim-Sin, king of Larsa (1822-1763 BCE) deal with the acquisition of copper from Dilmun (the copper actually coming from Oman, an cient Magan). [See Larsa.] A trader named Ea-nasir seems to have played a special role in this trade and, according to the surviving texts, may have been a rather unscrupulous individual, trying to pass off ingots of bad copper as good copper. The nature of the objects being produced from this copper can be seen in a hoard of metal artifacts found by W. K. Loftus at the site of Tell Sifr (Iraq) in 1854 (see below). Loftus described the hoard in 1857 as "consisting of large chaldrons, vases, small dishes, and dice-boxes (?); hammers, chisels, adzes, and hatchets; a large assortment of knives and daggers of various sizes and shapes—all unfin ished; massive and smaller rings; a pair of prisoners' fetters; three links of a strong chain; a ring weight; several plates resembling horses' shoes, divided at the heel for the insertion of a handle and having two holes in each for pins; other plates of a different shape, which were probably primitive hatchets; an ingot of copper and a great weight of dross from the same smelted metal" (W. K. Loftus, Travels and Re searches in Chaldaea andSusiana, London, 1857, P- 268). Although several of the specific identifications Loftus made could be questioned today, it is clear that the Sifr hoard was basically of agricultural tools and that it demon strates a basic continuity between the agricultural practices of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and those in use in pres ent-day Iraq. [See Agriculture,] Elemental analysis of a num ber of pieces from the Sifr hoard indicates that tin was used very sparingly, even in the Old Babylonian period. Most of the tools from the Sifr hoard were made of unalloyed cop per. The extensive use of unalloyed copper is distinctive of other analyzed groups of second-millennium BCE metalwork as well, including pieces from Tell er-Rimah, Kar-TukultiNinurta, and Bahrain. [See Rimah, Tell er-; Kar-TukultiNinurta.] Old Babylonian work in precious metal is best docu mented by the contents of tire goldsmith's hoard excavated as a jar burial from the site of Larsa. [See Burial Tech niques.] This deposit included many pieces of scrap metal, both silver and gold, as well as a copper anvil, three copper design blocks, and more than sixty stone weights for use with a pan balance. Such balance weights, often found in com plete sets with one or more pan balances, are quite common in the archaeological record, especially in contexts dating to the mid-second millennium B C E (for Larsa hoard see Bjork man, 1993). The French excavators of Larsa believe that the room in
which this hoard, as well as two others was found, was ac tually a metal workshop, die atelier of a goldsmith who can even be identified by name. All of this is most unlikely be cause, while hoards are buried in very improbable places, they are almost never buried in workshops. The goldsmith's hoards from Geometric Eretria (Greece) and the silver hoard from stratum VI (eleventh century BCE) at Megiddo (Israel) certainly did not come from workshop context. [See Megiddo.] The same is true of the gold hoard from Late Bronze Age Tell el-'Ajjul and Beth-Shemesh (Israel; see Tadmor, 1980) and the silver hoards from LB Ugarit and El-Qitar (Syria). [See 'Ajjul, Tell el-; Beth-Shemesh; Qitar, El-.] The goldwork of the Middle Bronze Age, like that of the Early Bronze Age, possessed an international character. A gold pendant from Tell ed-Dab a (on Egypt's eastern Delta) is very similar to one tiiat is part of a gold hoard said to come from the island of Aegina (Greece). [See Dab'a, Tell ed-; Delta.] Both date to the seventeenth century B C E . However, such goldwork is also found out of context: a gold pendant very similar to one from the Mesopotamian site of Dilbat (seventeenth century BCE) has turned up in a tenthcentury B C E burial at the site of Lefkandi on the island of Euboea (Greece). c
Nor was metallurgical paraphernalia always stored in a workshop area. Copper/bronze workshops have been iden tified at Uruk, Ur, Khafajeh, Kish, and Tell Asmar, but none has proved to be very convincing. T h e only useful example of an Old Babylonian metal workshop is at Tell edh-Dhiba'i, located in what is now a suburb of Baghdad in Iraq (Davey, 1988). Although excavated under conditions that prevented the proper recording of the finds, this workshop contained a rich assemblage of metalworking paraphernalia, including two clay pot bellows, six crucibles, a tuyere, a clay ladle, and a series of molds. The use of the pot bellows to create a forced draft of air to be directed, via the tuyere, into the furnace, is well illustrated in Egyptian tomb paintings, es pecially those from the tomb of Rekmire. [See Tombs; Wall Paintings.] Such bellows are attested at sites in Anatolia, the Levant, the Sinai (Serabit el-Khadem), and Mesopotamia and on Cyprus from throughout the second millennium BCE. They usually are not correctiy identified in the relevant ex cavation reports. Claude F.-A. Schaeffer, for example, thought that the example from Ugarit had been used in mak ing cheese. T h e crucibles from Tell edh-Dhiba'i have a distinctive shape; they are best known from Egypt, where in profile the hieroglyphic sign for metal (not for ingot, as commonly be lieved) is formed. C.J. Davey (1988) believes that this com bination of crucibles, pot bellows, and molds forms the "southern tradition" of metalworking known from Meso potamia, inland Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Metalworking in this tradition is depicted in many scenes from Egyptian New Kingdom tombs and is described in many passages in the Amarna letters.
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages Many passages from the Amarna correspondence de scribe the greeting gifts exchanged between the pharaoh of Egypt and the rulers of the Hittites, Assyria, Babylonia, and the kingdom of Mitanni. [See Hittites; Mitanni.] Egypt was seen as a land rich in gold but, strangely enough, the gifts of gold received from Egypt were considered suspect. Ashur-uballit I, king of Assyria (1353-1318 B C E ) , says to pharaoh that "gold in your country is dirt; one simply gath ers it u p " (EA 16:6), but the paltry quantity he was sent did not even cover the travel expenses of his messenger. Even worse was the gold sent to Burna-Buriash, king of Kassite Babylonia (1349-1323 B C E ) . He claims that "the twenty minas of gold that were brought here were not all there. When they put it into the kiln, not five minas of gold appeared" (EA 10:4). T h e Egyptians seem to have held on to their gold for their own use. It is certainly not reasonable to assume that all the gold known from the ancient world in the second half of the second millennium B C E , including the fabulous treasures of the shaft graves of Mycenae and the tholos tombs of Messenia, came from Egypt. In tiris period, some of the most interesting work in copper and its alloys come from Susa. T h e headless statue of NapirAsu, wife of Untash-Napirisha, king of Anshan and Susa (c. 1250 BCE) is, at 1.29 m, one of the few near life-sized metal sculptures to survive from the second millennium B C E . What makes diis work of special interest is the way it was cast: it consists of a copper outer shell cast over a bronze core (not clay as might be expected). This represents a great waste of (expensive) material: the statue, without its head, represents the use of 1,750 kg of metal. Of equal interest, but for very different reasons, is the bronze object known as the Sit Shamshi, a twelfth-century B C E votive object from the temple of Ninursag on the acrop olis at Susa. Inscribed with the name of Shilhak-Inshushinak, son of Shutruk-Nahhunte, the two human figures and the various objects, including jars and altars, which stand on a flat base—some cast as part of the base, others added— must all be connected with a ceremony that was part of die worship of the rising sun. [See Altars.] Unfortunately, die lack of comparative material rules out any detailed under standing of tiiis remarkable object. First Millennium B C E . It has long been argued that, in the confusion created by the various invasions and migra tions at the end of the second millennium B C E , the lands of the Aegean and the Levant were cut off from their custom ary sources of copper and tin. T h e ensuing bronze shortage forced metalworkers to look for an alternative to bronze: hence, the shift to iron and the birth of the Iron Age. T h e actual state of affairs was probably much more complex: the degree of disruption at the end of the Bronze Age was not as severe as once believed; metalsmiths in the Aegean and the Levant do not seem to have experienced any bronze shortage as bronze artifacts from the so-called Dark Age (c. 1200-900 BCE) often have a high tin content. Nevertheless,
13
iron did gradually become the dominant utilitarian metal from about 1200 to 800 B C E , with bronze remaining the metal of choice for statues, figurines, and vessels, as well as for weapons and armor. T h e shift from bronze to iron probably came about for very practical economic reasons: bronze was always quite expensive, copper was relatively plentiful; but tin was very rare. After a century of speculation scholars are still very uncertain about Bronze Age sources of tin. What the limited textual evidence does make clear is that tin came into the ancient Near East and the eastern Mediterranean from dis tant lands whose exact location was probably unknown even to the metalworkers at Ur, Tell Brak, Tarsus, and Troy (as it was unknown to Flerodotus in die fifth century B C E ) . Almost every country of the world, on the other hand, had local deposits of iron ore. T o work in iron was to work with local raw materials. T h e problem was that making use of this ubiquitous resource required a technology quite differ ent from that known for copper, tin, gold, silver, and lead. Those metals could be cast, using molds, for they were all used in the molten state. However, the high melting point of iron (1,534° C) meant that, in the ancient world, iron was always worked in the solid state—except in ancient China. For special reasons, in China a cast-iron industry developed perhaps as early as the eighth century B C E . T h e Chinese always had cast bronze; they never developed any tradition of hammering sheet metal or of raising a vessel from a sheet of bronze. It seems to have been necessary for them to ap proach iron in the same way. For lands west of India, how ever, iron metallurgy was a smithing, not a casting technol ogy. Working with iron was labor intensive, but labor was cheap and the iron ore, to be converted, by smelting and forging, to metallic iron, was readily at hand. Cheap iron and the alphabet were, for V. Gordon Childe (see below) two of the main factors responsible for the de mocratization of Iron Age society. In a work first published in 1942, Childe claimed that "cheap iron democratized ag riculture and industry and warfare too. Any peasant could afford an iron axe to clear fresh land for himself and iron ploughshares wherewith to break up stony ground. . . . Cheap iron tools abolished or at least reduced the depen dence of the small producers on State monopolies and great household stores. With the new metal implements for break ing the ground, clearing it of trees, and digging drainage channels, the small farmer might earn independence by re claiming for himself a piece of waste . . . " (Childe, What Happened in History, rev. ed., New York, 1954, pp. 183, 191). Childe's observations have strongly influenced subse quent scholarship, especially in biblical studies, in which iron tools have come to be seen as an important factor in malting possible the early Israelite settlement of the central hill country. Yet, the concept of cheap iron really does not explain why iron, as a utilitarian metal, only came into gen-
14
METALS: Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages
eral use after 1200 B C E . Objects of metallic iron, often me teorite iron, were in use in the Early Bronze Age. T h e bestknown example is an iron dagger with a gold-covered hilt from one of the "royal" shaft graves at Alaca Hoyiik. N u merous iron objects (Sum., AN.BAR; Akk., parzillu) are mentioned in Old Babylonian texts from Mari, in mid-sec ond millennium B C E texts from Nuzi, and in Hittite texts from Bogazkoy. [See Hittite; Bogazkoy.] The famous treas ure of Tutankhamun contained two ornately decorated cer emonial daggers: one had a gold blade, the other an iron blade. Minoan and Mycenaean tombs have produced a number of iron rings as well as gold rings witii an iron bezel. The earliest example of worked iron in the Aegean seems to be the seventeenth-century B C E iron and silver ring from the Anemospilia sanctuary at Arkhanes (Crete). All this represents the use of iron as an exotic, precious material. T o turn iron into a practical metal, possessing properties equal to or better than those found in bronze, it was necessary to develop the techniques of carburization, quenching, and tempering. Simple wrought iron was infe rior to bronze, being softer, more subject to oxidation and corrosion, and incapable of taking and holding a decent cut ting edge. Quenched, carburized iron (or steel), on the other hand, was superior to the best 10 percent tin-bronze—being harder, more durable, and capable of taking and holding a keen cutting edge. If the steel in question was too hard, and therefore quite brittie from excessive production of martensite, this could be corrected by tempering the metal. Based on present evidence, the technology of carburiza tion, quenching, and tempering was developed in the eastern Mediterranean, on Cyprus and in Palestine, in the twelfth and eleventh centuries B C E . Various solutions have been pro posed, but it is still not clear just why this technology de veloped where and when it did. Even its localization in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean may reflect nothing more than that region's being where most of the scientific analysis of ancient iron artifacts has so far been carried out. Once perfected, in the eleventh century B C E , the technology spread quickly to other parts of the ancient world. Ideas of a secret technology and of an iron monopoly (exercised by the Hittites and then by the Philistines) are best consigned to the academic dustbin, [See Philistines.] Many studies of regional industries have been published recentiy, including those of Hittite Anatolia, Iron Age eastern Anatolia (king dom of Urartu), ancient Cyprus, Israel and Assyria. T h e emphasis on this new metal and new technology should not be allowed to obscure the fact that bronze con tinued to be produced in the centuries following 1200 B C E . Indeed, those centuries witnessed the efflorescence of one of the major bronze industries of the ancient world—that covered by the umbrella term Luristan bronzes. Although there was an earlier period of bronze production in the Lur istan province of the Zagros Mountains, documented by Belgian excavations in western Luristan, the main period covers roughly 1350-750 B C E and is known almost entirely
through material illicitly excavated and sold on the antiqui ties market. The work of the Belgian Luristan Expedition, led by L. Vanden Berghe, has, to some extent, also clarified the chronology of this later period of bronze production in Luristan, as have British excavations at Baba Jan conducted by Clare Goff. T h e assemblage of bronzes from this period consists of axes, daggers, vessels, and harness trappings for horses, often decorated with contorted animals, principally goats, cast in a fantastic animal style. It is not known how many thousands of bronzes were produced, as Luristan bronzes have found their way into almost every museum and private antiquities collection in the world. Bronzes inscribed with the names of the later Kassite kings of Babylonia indicate that this period of bronze pro duction began sometime in the fourteenth century B C E . The main period of production seems to have been the Iranian Iron II (c. 1000-800 B C E ) , contemporary with level IV at Hasanlu. [See Hasanlu.] While the nomadic smiths of Lur istan worked almost entirely in bronze, a gold bowl also from level IV at Hasanlu helps to date a rich assemblage of gold vessels from Marlik, decorated in high repousse, to the first two centuries of the first millennium B C E . [See Marlik.] Of the surviving bronzes from the Early Iron Age, the most striking is a series of large bronze cauldrons on iron tripod stands. T h e rim of each cauldron is decorated with so-called protomes in the shape of griffins, bulls, and sirens (usually four per cauldron). Normally, any one cauldron will have only one class of protome, although the cauldron from tomb 79 at Salamis (late eighth century BCE) has both griffins and sirens—eight of one, four of the other. [See Salamis.] Although it was found flattened in the tomb, the Salamis cauldron has been beautifully restored. At 1.25 m in total height, it gives a good idea of tire size of such objects that, all too often, are known only from isolated protomes pur chased on the antiquities market (Muscarella, 1992). Once tiiought to be of Urartian manufacture, such caul drons are now seen as products of one or more North Syrian workshops, although no examples have yet been found in Syria. [See Urartu.] Most surviving examples, in fact, come from sanctuary sites in Greece—from Olympia, Delphi, and Samos. The griffin protomes, of which more than 450 ex amples are now attested, were either cast or hammered (the cast examples are regarded as being of Greek manufacture). It is possible, however, that all of the cauldrons found in Greece were actually made there. Those who believe oth erwise have developed theories of gift exchange, such as is known from the Amarna letters and the world of Homer, with Oriental potentates like Midas, king of Phrygia, sending cauldrons as gifts to Greek sanctuaries (as recorded by He rodotus, 1.14). BIBLIOGRAPHY Bjorkman, J. K . " T h e Larsa Goldsmith's H o a r d s — N e w Interpreta tions." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52 (1993): 1-23. Braun-Holzinger, E v a A. Figurliche Bronzen aits Mesopotamien. M u -
METALS: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods nich, 1984. Well-illustrated, reliable discussion of M e s o p o t a m i a n bronze sculpture. Cleuziou, Serge. " D i l m u n and M a k k a n during the T h i r d and Early Second Millennis B . C . " In Bahrain through the Ages: The Archaeology, edited by Shaikha H a y a Ali Al Khalifa and Michael Rice, p p . 143155. L o n d o n , 1986. Curtis, John. Nush-i Jan III: The Small Finds. L o n d o n , 1984. Publica tion of silver hoard, with excellent discussion of comparative mate rial. Curtis, John, ed. Bronze-working Centres of Western Asia, c. 1000-539 B.C. L o n d o n , 1988. Valuable collection of articles dealing w i t h N e o Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Iranian, Phoenician, and Phrygian met allurgy. Daniel, Glyn. A Short Histoiy of Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1981. Davey, Christopher J. "Tell e d h - D h i b a ' i and t h e Southern N e a r East ern T r a d i t i o n . " In The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys, edited by Robert M a d d i n , p p . 63-68. C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1988. Places the finds from the Tell e d h - D h i b a ' i workshop in historical context. D e Jesus, Prentiss S. The Development of Prehistoric Mining and Met allurgy in Anatolia. 2 vols. British Archaeological Reports, 74. O x ford, 1980. Especially valuable for its presentation of work done by the Turkish Geological Survey (known as M T A ) . G o p h e r , Avi, Tsvika T s u k , Sariel Shalev, a n d R a m G o p h n a . "Earliest Gold Artifacts in the L e v a n t . " Current Anthropology 31 (1990): 436443. Analyses of gold and electrum artifacts from Nahal Qanah. H a u p t m a n n , Andreas, G e r d Weisgerber a n d H a n s G. B a c h m a n n . "Early C o p p e r Metallurgy in O m a n . " In The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys, edited by R o b e r t M a d d i n , p p . 34-51. Cambridge, Mass., 1988. Account by the t e a m that has investigated the c o p p e r deposits of the Sumerian land of M a g a n . Jovanovic, Borislav. "Early Metallurgy in Yugoslavia." In The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys, edited by R o b e r t M a d d i n , p p . 69-79. Cambridge, M a s s . , 1988. A c c o u n t of early copper mining in the Bal kans, by the excavator of R u d n a Glava. Ligabue, Giancarlo, and Sandro Salvatori, eds. Bactria: An Ancient Oa sis Civilisation from the Sands of Afghanistan. Venice, 1989. Excellent articles, superb illustrations and m a p s . Moorey, P . R. S. "Archaeology and Pre-Achaemenid Metalworking in Iran: A Fifteen Year Retrospective." Iran 20 (1982): 8 1 - i o r . Survey of early metallurgical developments. M o o r e y , P . R. S. " T h e Chalcolithic H o a r d from Nahal M i s h m a r , Israel, in Context." World Archaeology 20.2 (1988): 171-189. G o o d account of the significance of Nahal M i s h m a r hoard. Moorey, P . R. S. Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence. Oxford, 1994. Definitive work on M e s o p o tamian metallurgy, as well as on other materials. Miiller-Karpe, Michael. Metallgefdsse im Iraq I: Von den Anfangen bis zur Akkad-Zeit. Stuttgart, 1993. Typological analysis of all known M e s o p o t a m i a n metal vessels, d o w n to the late third millennium BCE. Muhly, J. D . "Beyond Typology: Aegean Metallurgy in Its Historical Context." In Contributions to Aegean Archaeology: Studies in Honor of William A. McDonald, edited by N a n c y C . Wilkie a n d William D . E. Coulson, p p . 109-141. Minneapolis, 1985a. Muhly, J. D . "Sources of T i n a n d the Beginnings of Bronze Metal lurgy." American Journal of Archaeology 89 (1985b): 275-291. D e velopment of copper alloys d o w n to about 2000 BCE. Muhly, J. D . " T h e Beginnings of Metallurgy in the Old W o r l d . " In The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys, edited by Robert M a d din, p p . 2-20. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1988. Early use of metal, from E u r o p e to China. Muhly, J. D . "Early Bronze Age T i n and the T a u r u s . " American Journal of Archaeology 97 (1993): 239-253. Critical evaluation of the T a u r u s M o u n t a i n s as a source of tin. Muhly, J. D . " M i n i n g and Metalwork in Ancient Western Asia." In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, edited by Jack M . Sasson, vol.
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3, p p . 1501-1521. N e w York, 1995. General survey to the end of the Iron Age, with references. Muhly, J. D . , Robert M a d d i n , and T a m a r a Stech. " T h e Metal Arti facts." In Kinneret: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf dem Tellel-'Oreme am See Gennesaret 19S2-1985, edited by Volkmar Fritz, p p . 159-175. Wiesbaden, 1990. Survey of the development of iron technology, by the team that has done m o s t of the m o d e r n analytical work. Muscarella, Oscar W . " G r e e k a n d Oriental Cauldron Attachments: A Review." In Greece between East and West: iothSth Centuries BC, edited by G u n t e r Kopcke a n d Isabelle T o k u m a r u , p p . 16-45. Mainz, 1992. Survey of scholarship regarding the provenience of caldrons. Philip, G r a h a m . " H o a r d s of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages in the L e v a n t . " World Archaeology 20.2 (1988): 190-208. Argues that metal deposits from Byblos, Ugarit, and elsewhere are hoards. Potts, T i m o t h y . 1994. Mesopotamia and the East. An Archaeological and Historical Study of Foreign Relations ca. 3400-2000 BC. Oxford, 1994. Solid survey, with excellent documentation. Prag, Kay. "Silver in the L e v a n t in the Fourth Millennium B . C . " In Archaeology in the Levant: Essays for Kathleen Kenyan, edited by P. R. S. M o o r e y and Peter J. Parr, p p . 36-45. Warminister, 1978. Ar chaeological evidence for early silver in N e a r East. T a d m o r , Miriam. " T h e Beth Shemesh H o a r d of Jewellery." The Israel Museum News 16 (1980): 71-79. W a l d b a u m , Jane C . " C o p p e r , Iron, T i n , Wood: T h e Start of the Iron Age in the Eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . " Archeomaterials 3 (1983): 1 1 1 122. Survey of the evidence for the transition from bronze to iron. W a l d b a u m , Jane C . Metalwork from Sardis: The Finds through 1974. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1983. Gives range of metal finds from a single site. J. D .
MUHLY
Artifacts of the P e r s i a n through R o m a n Periods T h e metal artifact should be viewed first as a unit of material culture, whereby artifacts themselves—whether a luxury item such as a gold necklace or a utilitarian object such as a corroded iron nail—are seen as equals, in the sense that they illuminate some aspect of daily life in antiquity. Metal ob jects of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods served a variety of functions, and the finds themselves number in the tiiousands. For this reason, this survey relies on a few select examples to suggest the vast corpus of metal artifacts, which are grouped according to cultural function. Gold, sil ver, electrum, iron, tin, bronze, brass, copper, and lead rep resent the main metal and alloy types used to manufacture metal objects in the periods under discussion. Major sources of metal ores in the ancient Near East and surrounding regions include the Arabian Peninsula, Asia Minor, Bactria, Cyprus, India, Italy, Lebanon, Nubia, the Sinai Peninsula, Spain, Syria, and Wadi Arabah. Artifacts of Daily Life. Domestic metalwares of the Per sian through Roman periods that have come to light in ex cavations include bowls, plates, cups, goblets, jars, jugs, juglets, pitchers, utensils, lamps, lampstands, pans, strainers, ladles, and trays. Terra-cotta wares were often prototypes for metal vessels. A gold-plated silver bowl with depictions of two elderly Scythian leaders, was discovered with drink ing vessels from the Gaymanova Moguila (South Russia). It dates to the second half of the fourth century B C E . (Rolle, e
16
METALS: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods
1989). A bronze ladle with a handle decorated with ram heads was recovered from Persian contexts at Gezer (Is rael). A sculptured bronze vessel of a seated Nubian boy from Zawiya (Syria) dates to the Early Roman period (Weiss, 1985), and an iron "frying pan" with a folding han dle from the Thebes/Luxor region of Egypt is Late Roman (Hayes, 1984). Chief among the metal artifacts of writing is the inkwell. Although inkwells were commonly made of terra-cotta, sev eral Roman examples in metal have been recovered by ar chaeologists. A bronze inkwell with a tall, cylindrical body that closely resembles its ceramic counterparts was un earthed at Qumran, Israel (Goranson, 1991). At the mon astery site at Deir el-Bahari (Egypt), a lead (or possibly pew ter) inkwell with an iron handle and a rounded body that was raised from a single sheet was found (Hayes, 1984). T h e artifact dates to the first or second century CE. Lead station ery was also common for the writing of curses and of mili tary diplomas in the Roman period. Examples of such lead sheets with inscribed curses were recentiy found at Caesarea Maritima (Israel). Ancient artistic representations of musical instruments and their literary mention abound. [See Musical Instru ments.] A Late Hellenistic Alexandrian terra-cotta figurine of a seated Syrian musician holding a panpipe connected to a bellow, for example, suggests an organ (Gk., hydraulis). Two curved metal trumpets (Heb. hdsdserd) are depicted on a mosaic floor in the fourth-century C E Samaritan synagogue at el-Khirbe near Sebaste/Samaria (Israel). Ironically, few actual musical instruments have survived from antiquity, chief among them having been the lyre, oboe, lute, pipe, bagpipe, flute, cross flute, panpipe, organ, trumpet, drum, cymbal, rattle, and clappers. Of the various musical insttument types, cymbals, clappers, and ratdes are probably the most commonly discovered at archaeological sites. Phoeni cian cymbals cast in bronze have been recovered at Kerkouane (Tunisia) and date to the third century B C E ( M O S cati, 1988). They resemble small shallow bowls with raised, domelike centers. A bronze finger cymbal excavated in a military context at the legionary fortress at el-Lejjun (Jor dan) is dated to 363-502 CE. Jewelery represents the most commonly found metal ar tifact of adornment discovered at ancient Near Eastern sites, primarily finger rings (including signet rings), bracelets, pendants and otiier necklaces, beads, belts, belt ends and buckles, pins, fibulae, brooches, amulets, and earrings. [See Jewelery.] Various decorative techniques—repousse, cut ting, piercing, soldering, and granulation—have been em ployed by the ancient metalworker in the manufacture of jewelery. A Persian pin with a gold pomegranate-shaped bead and a long silver shank from the Tall-i Takht in Pasargadae (Iran) demonstrates the use of granulation as a decorative technique (Stronach, 1978). A cast, silver signet ring whose oval bezel depicts a woman seated in front of an incense altar was found at Tel Michal (Israel) and dates to
the fifth-fourth centuries B C E (Muhly and Muhly, 1989). A gold bangle from Tartus (Syria) represents a superb ex ample of the smithing technique of opus interrasile, which, by means of piercing, creates a lacelike decoration. This ar tifact dates to the late fourth century BCE. A unique pendant from Meroe (Sudan), dating to the second century C E , con sists of a single gold nugget on which a cylindrical loop for a chain is attached (Ogden, 1982). T h e emphasis in this piece on the natural simplicity of the raw metal demonstrates an atypical, virtually modern approach to ancient jewelery design. Metal artifacts that served a religious, political, or magical function include amulets, altars, censers, crowns, incense shovels, candelabra, lamps, bells, and votive items. A Phoe nician faience amulet depicting a cat entwined with gold was recovered at Tharros (Sardinia) and dates to the seventhfourth centuries B C E (Moscati, 1988). A portable Roman im perial bronze altar (Lat., amid) from Lower Egypt consists of a shallow square tray with sloping sides supported by a lathe-turned round drum and a square base (Hayes, 1984). A central shaft fragment with attached branches of a castbronze menorah was recovered from a Late Roman context at Sardis (Asia Minor), whose corpus of metal objects is one of the largest and most varied for the Roman and Byzantine Near East (Waldbaum, 1983). Bronze incense shovels from the Faiyum in Egypt date to the first and second centuries CE and consist of a square-to-rectangular central pan with a handle attached to one of the short ends (Hayes, 1984). A Phoenician votive razor (third century BCE) from Carthage (Tunisia) cast in bronze depicts Heracles-Melqart and a male figure slaying an enemy (Moscati, 1985). A votive stat uette of a cast-bronze bull from Bludan (Syria), belonging to the corpus of military cult items of the Roman East, was offered to the deity Orion by a soldier, as suggested by a single-line Greek inscription engraved on the base (Weiss, 1985). A collapsible gold crown belonging to a Bactrian no madic princess was recovered at Tillya-tepe, Afghanistan (Sarianidi, 1985). T h e crown itself consists of five elaborate palmettes and a fillet-base hand-cut from thin sheet gold. In healing the sick and the injured, doctors made use of a variety of bronze and iron implements (see figure 1). Roman surgical instruments have widespread distribution across the ancient world. T h e most common types include bleeding cups, scalpels and dissectors, phlebotomes, retractors, em bryo hooks, elevators and chisels, spatulae, spoons (cyathiscomele) and ligulae, probes and needles, tubes, forceps and tweezers, specula, and cylindrical medicine cases. A cranioclast reportedly found at Ephesus (Anatolia) represents the only known example from the Greco-Roman period (Bliquez, 1988; Kiinzl, 1983). This instrument was used to crush the skull of the fetus in cases of abortion. Represen tative symbols of the healing gods Hercules (a knotted club pattern), Aesculapius (a snake or head of a snake), and Sminthian Apollo (a mouse) frequently decorate metal sur gical instruments. The end of a handle belonging to a sur-
METALS: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods
5 METALS: Persian t h r o u g h R o m a n Periods.
F i g u r e i . Near East-
em Roman surgical instruments, ( i ) E m b r y o h o o k s f r o m E p h e s u s in Anatolia; (2) s p a t u l a e f r o m N o r t h Syria; (3) late n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y illusttation of scalpels f r o m Idalion, C y p r u s ; (4) i n s m t m e n t h a n d l e fashioned a s a m o u s e s y m b o l i z i n g t h e healing g o d Apollo S m i n t h e u s from s o u t h w e s t Asia M i n o r ; (5) d e n t a l forceps f r o m a t o m b a t G a d a r a , J o r d a n . ( I t e m s 1-4 after K u n z l , 1983, figs. 20, 97, 23, a n d 14 respectively; i t e m 5 after K u n z l a n d W e b e r , 1991, fig.
4)
gical implement from soudiwestern Asia Minor is rendered in the shape of a mouse, symbolizing Sminthian Apollo (Kunzl, 1983). It was reportedly found with grave goods dating to die first half of the tiiird century CE. A collection of Roman dental instruments (i.e., an iron tooth forceps, tweezers, and shears) was recovered from a grave at the Decapolis city of Gadara/Umm Qeis, Jordan (Kiinzl and Weber, 1991). Common metal toilet articles found at sites in the Near East include kohl sticks and tubes, ear spoons, combs, pins, rods, unguent spoons, spatulae, mirrors, tweezers, and r a zors. A slender cylindrical cosmetic tube, most probably dat ing to the Roman period, was recovered at Sardis. Although similar to a surgical-probe case, the presence of a black res
17
idue inside this artifact of copper alloy suggests that it con tained either medicine or cosmetics (Waldbaum, 1983). A collection of bronze kohl tubes and sticks dating to the Per sian period was discovered in a tomb at 'Adit, Israel (Stern, 1982). T h e sticks are flat on one side and twisted on the other. A pair of Phoenician cast-bronze tweezers from Kerkouane dates to the fourth century B C E . Bronze tweezers be longing to a military toilet kit were recovered from a Late Roman context at el-Lejjun. In addition to tweezers, the mil itary toilet kit of the Roman period included an ear scoop and nail cleaner. T h e design and decoration of many cos metic articles are simple while others are crafted in precious metals with ornate patterns: a gold comb whose handle is fashioned into a dramatic battle scene involving three Scyth ian warriors was uncovered in a royal tomb of the Solokha kurgan, South Russia (Rolle, 1989). It represents one of the finest pieces of metalwork from the late Persian period (first half of the fourth century B C E ) . The range of tools used by the miner, builder, sculptor, artisan, and carpenter in antiquity was not unlike that of today. Metal tools from the archaeological record include planes, hammers, folding rules, plumb bobs, anvils, masons' chisels, compasses, calipers, masons' squares, picks, sledge hammers, punches, and chisels. A Roman iron chisel was recovered by archaeologists from the waste dump of a mine shaft in Wadi Khalid (Jordan). Chemical analyses revealed that its ends are composed of a eutectoid steel with a carbon concentration of about 0.7 percent. Drills used by artisans in antiquity possessed capabilities of the utmost precision, as revealed by microscopic impressions of spiraling grooves left by the head of a very fine iron drill in amber beads from Hajjar ar-Rayhani (Yemen) dating to the fourtii-third cen turies BCE (Gwinnett and Gorelick, 1991). Metal spikes, nails, tacks, rivets, wires, staples, and clamps were used in construction, and plows, spades, sickles, pruning hooks, adzes, augers, awls, and axes were commonly used in agri culture. A Late Roman iron pruning hook and sickle were uncovered at Jalame, Israel (Berry, 1988). T h e major metal artifacts of trade in antiquity include coins, tesserae, ingots, weights, and weighing instruments, with coins being the most widely circulated. A series of silver coins depicting a dolphin above a murex shell was minted at Phoenician Tyre (Lebanon) in the Persian period. (The Murex shell and its coveted purple dye were closely asso ciated with the international commerce of the city.) Coins also depicted architectural elements of the urban landscape unique to their city of origin. For example, the flight of steps ascending to the Temple of Zeus on Mt. Gerizim is often depicted on coins minted at Neapolis/Nablus (Palestinian Authority), as is the nymphaeum (public fountain) at Pella that appears on coins from this Decapolis city (Jordan). [See Coins.] Cast ingots of gold, silver, iron, or copper further repre sent a type of metal artifact. They were traded extensively throughout the ancient Near East and provided the metal-
18
METALS: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods
worker with the core material from which to manufacture objects. A Roman cast-gold bar with Latin stamps originates from Abukir (Egypt). Persian-period bronze, cube-shaped, as well as zoomorphic weights (e.g., ram, donkey, calf) are known from Ashkelon (Israel). Weights from the Roman East include a rec tangular example with beveled edges used witii a scalepan balance (Lat., libra) and a biconical version used with a steelyard (Lat. stratera). Examples of each include the bronze artifacts found atel-Lejjun andjbail (Syria). In 1985 a unique square lead weight was discovered by archaeolo gists at Sepphoris (Lower Galilee; Israel). Noteworthy is die mention of Simon, a Jewish agoranomos, or "market inspec tor," in the five-line inscription on the reverse side of the artifact. [See Sepphoris.] Weighing instruments, such as a late fourth-century C E bronze steelyard from Jalame or the Roman steelyard from Jbail, are based on the principle of the lever. The Jbail example (and outers like it) consists of a central rod with a weight and two hooks—one to support the instrument and the second attached to the end of a chain from which a chosen object is weighed. Not all metal artifacts served a terrestrial function. An chors, spikes, nails, staples, hull casings, rams, and sinkers are among the many metal objects associated with ancient seafaring. [See Seafaring.] Late Hellenistic hourglass-shaped lead stoves whose broad bases provided considerable sta bility on rolling seas attest to the ancients' fear of on-board fires (Bass, 1972). With respect to ship construction, copper spikes found at the late fourth-century BCE Kyrenia ship wreck off the northern coast of Cyprus had secured the wooden frames of the ship to its keel. Unlike the Kyrenia wreck, the frames of the Persian shipwreck from Ma'agan Mikha'el (near Haifa, Israel) as well as the Early Roman Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) fishing boat were secured to the hull with iron nails rather than copper spikes. [See Ma'agan Mikha'el; Galilee Boat.] Chemical analyses of the Kinneret nails revealed that tiiey are composed of 0.4 percent carbon steel, not unlike present-day steel. A sheathing of lead at tached to the Kyrenia vessel's hull by copper tacks—a method commonly used during the Roman period—pro tected the ship from marine borers. Hundreds of anchor parts made of lead or iron have been recovered in the Med iterranean. [See Anchors.] The majority of finds from the Late Persian, Hellenistic, and Early Roman periods suggest titat most anchors were made of wood with either lead or stone. After the first century CE, however, anchors were con structed exclusively of iron. One such example of a firstcentury iron anchor was found in the ancient harbor at Dor (Israel).
Artifacts of War, Oppression, and Death. Important metal weapons and associated equipment recovered from Persian- through Roman-period contexts include swords, daggers, dagger sheaves, penknives, spearheads, arrow heads, javelin heads, bolts, dart points, helmets, breastplates,
and chain mail. T h e arrowhead is perhaps the most com monly found weapon type from archaeological deposits. Specific arrowhead finds include triangular barbed exam ples from Tell el-Hesi, Tel Michal, Gezer, Hesban, 'EinBoqeq, Masada, and Horvat Eqed (Israel), Pasargadae, Dura-Europos (Syria), and el-Lejjun. A Late Hellenistic helmet made of two parts, die head piece and visor, was found at Emesa/Homs (Syria). Both components are cast in iron, but the mask itself is sheathed with solid silver. T h e thick visor, narrow eye slits, ear guards, and the heavy weight of the helmet attest to its function: protecting its owner in a tournament or battle. A Late Ro man bowl-shaped helmet constructed with two iron pieces was recently recovered from the grave of a Roman soldier at el-Haditha (Jordan). Metal artifacts of oppression include fetters, chains, cru cifixion nails, and slave collars. In 1906, a lead collar bearing a single-line Latin inscription was excavated beneath the pavement of the Temple of Apollo area at Bulla Regia (Hammam Darradji, Tunisia). T h e collar was found still attached to the skeleton (neck) of a female who apparentiy died in midlife. T h e inscription not only describes the woman as a fugitive, but as a prostitute and as adulterous. T h e artifact may date to the fourth century C E (Ben Abed Ben Khader and Soren, 1987). T h e right heel bone of a crucified male was recovered from a Jewish cemetery at Giv'at ha-Mivatar located north of Jerusalem. It was found in an ossuary engraved with the name of tite victim himself, a young man by the name of Yehohanan ben Hagkol, who apparently died sometime in the first century C E . An iron nail 11.5 cm long had penetrated the specimen medially. T h e find is important, for it is the only known archaeological evidence for crucifixion, a wide spread form of execution in the ancient Near East (Zias, 1991). Examples of metal artifacts commonly associated with death and burial include coffins, jewelery, weapons, cos metic equipment, bells, funerary masks, and metalware. [See Grave Goods.] A gold funerary mask from Phoenicia, for example, dates to the fifth-fourth centuries B C E (Moscati, 1988). Lead sarcophagai first begin to appear in the archae ological record in about the first century CE. [See Sarcoph agus; Burial Sites; Tombs; Burial Techniques.] T h e base and sides of coffins were often cast in a single mold and tlteir edges further strengthened with lead bars. T h e lead coffins tend to be long and rectangular and are often decorated with floral and vine patterns. An early Christian coffin of lead has been uncovered at Caesarea Maritima (Israel) and several are known from the Jewish catacombs at Beth-She'arim (Lower Galilee, Israel). [See Beth-She'arim.] Metal objects not only played a role in the customs sur rounding death; certain metals even caused it. Lead poison ing was especially widespread in the Roman period. Although miners and metalworkers of lead were most vul-
METALS: Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods nerable, poisoning would also have resulted from nonoc cupational exposure to objects either made of lead or con taining it. Examples include coins, cosmetics, toys, yarns, drinking vessels, paint pigments, medicines, and water pipes (Nriagu, 1983). Artifacts of W a s t e . Slags represent the molten by-prod uct of smelting practices. They are a significant group of metal artifacts because their subsequent chemical and metallographic analyses yield important information about an cient metallurgical techniques (e.g., temperature of the smelting). Depending on the chemical composition of any given slag, the archaeologist can determine the kind of metal smelted at a site. Analysis may even pinpoint the primary source of tire ore used in a smelting operation. [See D C P Spectrometry; Magnetic Archaeometry.]
19
of walls, as is evidenced at Be'er Ora in Wadi 'Arabah, where Roman stores and workshops were erected with large cop per slags (Rothenberg, 1972). In his Natural History, which contains important passages regarding the use of metals in antiquity, Pliny notes that both copper and silver slag were considered useful for their medicinal properties, the latter being particularly sawy for closing wounds and remedying sores caused by chafing (33.35.105; 34.24.107). [Most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY
F i g u r e 2. An iron
Bass, George F . A History of Seafaring Based on Underwater Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1972. Bass's work represents the most comprehensive to date with respect to the archaeology of ancient as well as historical shipwrecks. It is an important source for the types of metal artifacts found associated with ancient wrecks. Ben Abed Ben Khader, Aocha, a n d David Soren, eds. Carthage: A Mosaic of Ancient Tunisia. N e w York, 1987. T h i s well-illustrated work exposes one to die extraordinary material culture of Cartilage and other sites in ancient T u n i s i a . Berry, Walter. " T h e M i n o r Objects." In Excavations atjalame: Site of a Glass Factoiy in Late Roman Palestine, edited by Gladys Davidson Weinberg, p p . 227-255. Columbia, M o . , 1988. Important primary examples of domesitic, agricultural, a n d industrial implements and e q u i p m e n t associated with a L a t e R o m a n glass factory. Bliquez, Lawrence J. Roman Surgical Instruments and Minor Objects in the University of Mississippi. Goteborg, 1988. Publication of a major collection of ancient surgical instruments. G o r a n s o n , Stephen. " F u r t h e r Q u m r a n Archaeology Publications in Progress." Biblical Archaeologist 54.2 (1991): 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 . Reinvestigates the ceramic a n d bronze inkwells from Q u m r a n , themselves impor tant in t h a t they represent s o m e of the very few examples recovered from controlled stratigraphic excavations. Gwinnett, A.John, and L e o n a r d Gorelick. "Bead Manufacture atHajar ar-Rayhani, Y e m e n . " Biblical Archaeologist 54.4 (199:): 186-197. Hayes, John W . Greek, Roman, and Related Metalware in the Royal On tario Museum: A Catalogue. T o r o n t o , 1984. Important source of pri mary metalwares from G r e c o - R o m a n Egypt. Healy, John F . Mining and Metallurgy in the Greek and Roman World. L o n d o n , 1978. Eminently readable, comprehensive, a n d well-illus trated; draws on a wide range of archaeological evidence and ancient literary sources as they pertain to every technological and adminis trative m e c h a n i s m behind G r e c o - R o m a n metallurgy. Koucky, F r a n k L., and Arthur Steinberg. "Ancient Mining and Mineral Dressing on C y p r u s . " In American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus, 1973-1980, edited by L a w r e n c e E. Stager and Anita M . Walker, pp, 275-327. Oriental Institute C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , 24. Chicago, 1989. T h e m o s t comprehensive treatment of ancient mining, mineral dressing, and slag types found on Cyprus, whose copper industry was one of the most i m p o r t a n t in antiquity. Koucky, Frank L., and Eric C. L a p p . "Metallagraphic Evidence of Ironworking at el-Lejjun: A n Archaeometric Study of R o m a n and Byzantine Iron Slags." In The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Fi nal Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980-1989, edited by S. T h o m a s Parker. Washington, D . C . , forthcoming. Iron-slag finds at a R o m a n legionary fortress, attesting to a small-scale metalworking operation in a military context. Chemical a n d petrological thin-sec tion analyses revealed that their iron content was n o t unlike that found in slags from sites elsewhere in the R o m a n world.
slag from the legionary fortress of el-Lejjun, Jordan. (Drawing by Eric C. L a p p )
Kiinzl, Ernst. Medizinische Instmmente aus Sepulkralfunden der romischen. Kaiscrzeit. K61n, 1983. Provides a useful comparative catalog
Slag heaps often consist of pronounced layering, each stratum of which represents a period of chronologically de fined production. By examining layers, the development of technological practices can be traced. On Cyprus alone, seven slag types have been identified and classified (Koucky and Steinberg, 1989). Cypriot slags dating to the Persian through Hellenistic periods include the crucible and blocky shaped varieties. Crucible-shaped iron slags dating to the Late Roman-Early Byzantine periods (see figure 2) were recovered in a barrack at el-Lejjun and suggest a small-scale metalworking operation, substantiating the Roman military author Vegetius's claim that soldiers were skilled in various crafts (Koucky and Lapp, forthcoming). Metal slags also served a secondary use as building blocks in the consttuction
METALS: Persian t h r o u g h R o m a n Periods.
20
MICHAL, TEL
of surgical instruments found throughout the ancient world with a c companying discussion and copious illustrations. Kunzl, Ernst, and T h o m a s Weber. " D a s spatantike G r a b eines Z a h n arztes zu Gadara in der Decapolis." Damaszener Mitteilungen 5 (1991): 81—118. Discusses t h e excavation and burial goods including surgical implements found in this rare grave of an urban Decapolis dentist. Moorey, P.R.S. Materials and Manufacture in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Evidence of Archaeology and Art in Metals and Metalwork, Glased Ma terials, and Glass. British Archaeology Reports, International Series, no. 237. Oxford, 1985. Detailed discussion of various techniques employed by artisans; should be consulted in conjunction with other works discussing Early Prehistoric-Persian and middle Hellenistic period metal artifacts of the ancient N e a r East, particularly from sites in Mesopotamia. Moscati, Sabatino, ed. The Phoenicians. Translated by I. Fenici. Milan, 1988. T o date, this landmark work represents the most c o m p r e h e n sive treatment of Phoenician material culture. T h e numerous metal artifacts included in this impressive, well-illustrated volume provide one with numerous examples of Phoenician metal handicraft. M u n r o - H a y , S. C. Excavations atAksum: An Account of Research at the Ancient Ethiopian Capital Directed in 1972-4 by the Late Dr. Neville Chittick. L o n d o n , 1989. A landmark study of the Ethiopian site of Aksum, whose metalwork finds represent a fascinating mixture of Greco-Roman and African stylistic elements. Muhly, James D „ and Polymnia Muhly. "Metal Artifacts." In Exca vations at Tel Michal, Israel, edited by Ze'ev Flerzog, George R a p p , Jr., and Ora Negbi, p p . 267-295. Publications of the Institute of Ar chaeology, 8 Minneapolis, 1989. A n examination of the important assemblage of metalwork, particularly from the Persian period, r e covered by excavations at T e l Michal. Nriagu, Jerome O. Lead and Lead Poisoning in Antiquity. N e w York, 1983. A comprehensive treatment of lead and its important c o m mercial, medicinal, and often deadly role in ancient society. Ogden, Jack. Jewellery of the Ancient World. L o n d o n , 1982. Discusses various metals and types of gemstones, glass, enamel, a n d faience used by ancient smiths to manufacture jewelry; superb illustrations, including several images of metal artifacts taken with the scanning electron microscope to detail smithing techniques. Rolle, Renate. The World of the Scythians. Translated by F . G . Walls. Berkeley, 1989. Discusses metal artifacts in the broader cultural con text of the Scythians, including the finds recovered from controlled stratified excavations. Rothenberg, Benno. Titnna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines. L o n don, 1972. Well-illustrated study addressing six thousand years of metallurgy in the 'Arabah, as evidenced by excavation. T h e chapter on the R o m a n copper mines and smelting sites at Be'er Ora provides extraordinary primary archaeological evidence for furnace installa tions, mining, and smelting. Sarianidi, V. I. The Golden Hoard of Bactria. Translated by Arthur Shkarovsky-Raffe. N e w York, 1985. An important gold hoard excavated in Afghanistan. Superbly crafted turquoise-inlaid bracelets, cere monial knives, buckles, and necklaces are presented in detailed color plates. Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, $38-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. Copiously illustrated, c o m prehensive study of the material culture of Persian Palestine, includ ing chapters on architecture, burial, pottery, metalware, cult objects, seals, weights, and coins. Stronach, David. Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961101963. Oxford, 1978. T h e metal artifacts a n d particularly the jewelry recovered from P e r sian and Hellenistic contexts at the site demonstrate the sophistica tion of ancient Iranian metallurgy. Tylecote, R. F . " F u r n a c e s , Crucibles, a n d Slags." In The Coming of the Age of Iron, edited by T h e o d o r e A, Wertime and James D , M u h l y ,
p p . 183-228. N e w Haven, 1980. Important study with respect to t h e mechanics behind t h e manufacture of metal artifacts—furnace types, slags, and crucibles. W a l d b a u m , Jane C. Metalwork from Sardis: The Finds through 1974. C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1983. Typological and stylistic account of t h e artifacts a n d their archaeological context a n d a thorough c o m m e n tary on ancient textual sources pertaining to metal artifacts a n d met allurgy; includes metallographic a n d chemical analyses of select ar tifacts. Weiss, Harvey, ed. Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Syria. Washington, D . C . , 1985. T h i s exhibition volume of t h e art and archaeology of ancient Syria is the most comprehensive to date. Its thorough and well-illustrated treatment of the material culture of Syria from the prehistoric through Islamic periods includes signifi cant metal finds. Zias, Joseph. " D e a t h and Disease in Ancient Israel." Biblical Archae ologist 54.3 (1991): 146-159E R I C C.
LAPP
MICHAL, TEL, site located on the southern part of the Sharon coastal plain, on a kurkar (sandstone) cliff overlook ing the Mediterranean Sea, about 6.5 km (4 mi.) north of die Yarkon River estuary. T h e site consists of several areas: a main settlement area, a small high tell (0.3 ha or .75 acre) rising 30 m above sea level; a slighdy lower hill to the north that covers about 4 ha (10 acres) and descends toward the norui; and three isolated hillocks east of those hills. T h e si te's ancient name is unknown. T h e region's sandy soil makes it suitable for cultivating cereals and viticulture. Numerous wine presses were recov ered, but wine production alone does not justify occupation of tire site or explain tire frequent settlement gaps. Rather, the archaeological data show a clear correlation between the periods of occupation and phases of maritime activity; com bined witii its location, they corroborate the site's raison d'etre as a coastal trading post. Anchorage for small crafts was possible in a 2-meter-deep and 30-40-meter-wide chan nel recorded near the mound in an underwater survey con ducted in 1978 by Avner Raban of die Center of Maritime Studies, University of Haifa. In 1958 and i960 tire northeastern hillock was partially exposed by Nahman Avigad, revealing the remains of a cer emonial cult place known as Makmish (Avigad, 1977). T h e Hebrew name given to the main mound is Tel Michal (or Tel Mikhal). From 1977 to 1980 an expedition from Tel Aviv University, directed by Ze'ev Herzog, conducted a large-scale exploration of the site, in cooperation with the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, Brigham Young University, Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary (USA), and Macquarie University (Australia). Several graves were exposed in 1993 at the northern end of the northern hill, during a salvage excavation directed by Her zog and Yossi Levy. Bronze Age. T h e first occupation of the site was in the Middle Bronze LIB (stratum XVII, late seventeenth cen tury). T o this period, found only on the high tell, belong the
MICHAL, TEL remains of an artificial platform that raised and leveled the top of the natural kurkar hill. Most of the platform and all the structures built on it are no longer intact, as a result of the collapse of the western seaward side of die site, apparentiy caused by tectonic shocks. A large amount of Cypriot ware, many "Hyksos"-type scarabs, Egyptian alabasters, and Tell el-Yahudiyeh juglets were collected from the fills on the platform. T h e construction of this trading station is therefore determined to be connected with the maritime ac tivities of tire Hyksos ldngdom. [See Hyksos.] T h e sudden destruction of the settlement, as well as part of the natural hill, forced the planners of the next occupation phase (sttatum XVI, Late Bronze Age I) to extend the mound on the east. This was achieved by constructing a tremendous earthen rampart out of alternative layers of de bris from the previous settiernent, sand, and hamra (red sandy soil) in a strip 30 m wide. T h e scant architectural remains preserved from this period consist of several thick walls found at the northern end of the high tell. These walls were reconstructed in the form of a small rectangular fort. T o stratum XVI belongs a group of rare kraters with a single horizontal handle, some decorated in brown and red. In stra tum XV (LB IIA) additional eartiien fills, supported by solid retaining walls, were laid on the eastern side. In this period the center of the high tell was occupied by domestic struc tures, and the amount of imported ware decreased. T h e site was abandoned in the thirteenth century B C E . There was no occupation at Tel Michal in Iron I (twelftiieleventii centuries B C E ) , indicating that Philistine settlements did not cross the Yarkon River valley. After a gap of three hundred years, the site was resettled, in the tenth century B C E (strata XIV-XILI). During this phase, occupation ex
M I C H A L , TEL.
Figure
21
panded beyond the high tell: all three of the eastern hillocks were occupied for the first time, and the earliest wine presses were constructed. Large domestic units were built on the high tell, some reused in both phases. The finds on the eastern hillocks for the tenth century were related to ceremonial/cultic uses: an enclosure on the northeastern hillock; and a small chapel with an internal altar and external favissae on the eastern hillock, from which large chalices with fenestrated feet and small chalices were recov ered. Remains of houses with benches along their walls, which also suggests ceremonial/cultic use, were excavated on the southern hillock. Two winepresses were found near the eastern hillock, each consisting of two pressing surfaces flanking a storage compartment, a pair of large vats, and a pair of small ones (see figure 1). These plastered installations are a rare ex ample of Iron Age wine presses. T h e production of wine for the site's ceremonial chapels could have developed into a commercial enterprise. T h e site was settled as part of the expansion of Phoenician traders along the coast of the east ern Mediterranean, and the cultic chapels may reflect the traders' ceremonial needs. Tel Michal was not settled during the rest of the Iron Age, except for some minor use in the eighth century, indicated by scattered pottery and occupa tion of die southern hillock (stratum XII). P e r s i a n Period. The most prosperous chapter in die his tory of Tel Michal began in the late sixth century B C E . In addition to tiiose parts of the site previously occupied, die large northern hill was settled. Six architectural phases (strata XI-VI) were recorded on the high tell covering the period between 525 and 300 B C E (witii no cultural break at the beginning of the Hellenistic period). On the high tell a
1. Iron Age winepresses.
(Courtesy Z . Herzog)
22
MICROSCOPY
large fort or administrative building was constructed with a few residential units to its south. Grain pits dug in the set tlement's early phases and a round brick silo from a later stage support the assumption that Tel Michal was one of the stations along the coast that supplied the Persian army on its campaigns against Egypt. Wine production surely played an important role in the economy. A winepress dated to the Persian period was found east of die southern hillock and a smaller one was found on the northern hill. A store room with twenty-seven storage jars may have been used as a wine cellar. The jars used in producing and distributing the wine were made locally: similar jars were found in one of the three pottery kilns exposed on the northern hill, which indicates that the kilns had collapsed at die end of the firing process.
fort on the high tell and a small winepress, both dated by coins to the days of Alexander Jannaeus. Following a gap of about fifty years, Tel Michal was reoccupied by a large fortress ( 3 7 X 3 0 m) in the first half of the first cenairy BCE (stratum II). It consisted of rooms arranged around a central courtyard, in the center of which was a massive tower, undoubtedly a lighthouse. This is the only known Roman fortress along the coast of Israel. Its construc tion may be explained as a measure against Jewish piracy from Jaffa. [See Jaffa.] Indeed, the fortress was abandoned when Jaffa was conquered and a Roman camp was built there. After another gap of eight-hundred years, a small watchtower was built on the mound (stratum I), in the ninth-tenth centuries CE.
The center of die northern hill was densely filled with do mestic buildings, a few of which were exposed in excavation. An industrial area was excavated at die edges of the settle ment that produced evidence of pottery kilns, wine presses, and metalworking. The northern slope of the northern hill had been used exclusively as a cemetery. In a trench that covers about 10 percent of the area 120 burials of various types were uncovered: cist tombs, pit graves, and infant jar burials. The grave goods included jewelry, bronze bowls and fibulae, and iron tools; bronze and iron nails from wooden coffins also were found. The skeletons had deteriorated from the salty and wet conditions, but from a study of the preserved remains it was concluded that population's life span was a low average age of tiiirty years (Herzog et a l , 1989). [See Burial Techniques; Grave Goods.] On the northeastern hillock Avigad exposed a temple in which dozens of clay and stone figurines were found. Trade on an international scale was well attested there by an abun dance of luxury goods made of pottery, alabaster, glass, and bronze imported from Cyprus, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. The archaeological data corroborate the political and com mercial control of the region by the Phoenicians under Persian hegemony, as recounted in the inscription of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon. [See Phoenicians; Eshmunazar Inscription; Sidon.] Hellenistic, R o m a n , a n d Early A r a b Periods. T h e na ture of the site changed drastically at the beginning of die third century BCE. Occupation was concentrated again on the high tell, which tiien housed a large fortress. Three such fortresses were built in consecutive stages in die Hellenistic (strata V-IV) and Hasmonean (stratum III) periods. T o the earliest stratum belongs a hoard of forty-seven Ptolemaic silver coins (Kindler, 1978). A large winepress was con structed on the northern hill, cut into the remains of houses of the Persian period. The main vat of die winepress has a capacity of 7,0001, which demonstrates its role as part of a centralized production system. The northeastern hillock re tained its ceremonial function, but the cemetery was not uti lized. T o the Hasmonaean period are attributed a smaller
BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, N a h m a n . " M a k m i s h , Tell." In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, p p . 768-770. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976. Herzog, Ze'ev, et al., eds. Excavations at Tel Michal, Israel. T e l Aviv University, Publications of the Institute of Archaeology, 10. M i n neapolis, 1989. Full account of the excavations at the site. Herzog, Ze'ev. " T e l M i c h a l . " I n The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, p p . 1036-1041. Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1993. Kindler, Arie. " A Ptolemaic Coin H o a r d from T e l M i c h a l . " Tel Aviv 5 (1978): 159-169. ZE'EV HERZOG
MICROSCOPY. T h e light microscope, invented in about 1600, became a useful analytical tool in the nineteenth century. Microscopy is a "mature" technique that is invalu able for studying archaeological artifacts. It is usually the first physical technique employed in investigating material culture. A binocular microscope with a magnification of up to 20 X has a depth of focus large enough to provide threedimensional vision useful for studying surface details or se lecting certain mineral grains from a powder. Higher magnifications require a special sample prepara tion that depends on the type of material being studied. Transparent materials are usually examined as thin sections of about 0.03 m m thickness in transmitted light, which may be polarized. T o prepare a thin section for petrographic analysis, the sample is mounted on a standard-size glass slide (50 X 25 mm) so that a relatively large area can be studied. Mineral grains are identified by their shape (or cleavage pat tern), color, and pleochroism (the differential absorption of polarized light in different directions). Rocks are composed of minerals, whose morphologies, relative abundances, and intergrowth may be characteristic of a specific occurrence of a certain rock type, It is therefore possible to relate the raw material of stone artifacts or of rock fragments in coarse grained pottery to their original source, providing evidence for the transport of raw materials, be it by trade, human
MICROSCOPY migration, or natural events. A classic example is the petrographic study of die bluestones erected at Stonehenge that derive from Pembrokeshire, some 150 miles away. Major applications of this method, often in combination with chemical analyses, have been reported on the provenance of the limestones of Egyptian monuments and on millstones from the eastern Mediterranean. T h e diorite statues of Manishtushu and of Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, are said to originate in Oman. In pottery, the mineral assemblage can also provide information about firing temperature. [See X-ray Diffraction Analysis.] Organic materials are also regularly studied witii diis tech nique. Various sorts of wood differ in their microscopic structure and can therefore be identified from small samples of about 1 m m in diameter. Similarly, textile fibers can be unequivocally identified. Opaque materials, such as metals, are examined in re flected light. For sample preparation a piece is cut from a metal artifact, embedded in a resin, and polished. T h e sam ple can be small (less than 1 cu mm), but larger samples (ideally a thin slice providing a cross-section through the artifact) are easier to work with and yield more information. Often, the polished surface is etched with suitable reagents to enhance the internal structure. Because thermal and/or mechanical treatment like cold-working, annealing, or hotworking results in different microstructures, considerable information on the techniques employed in tire fabrication of nonferrous metal artifacts can thus be obtained. Identi fying the various phases in iron-carbon alloys sheds light on the processes used in the manufacture of iron and steel ar tifacts (e.g., carburization, quenching, and tempering) and the progressive evolution of iron metallurgy. Because many ore minerals are also opaque, ores and slags are also often examined using this technique. As a result of diffraction effects, the limit of resolution of light microscopy is in the order of 1 11m (i.e., 0.001 m m ) , corresponding to magnifications of about 500 times. Still higher magnifications are obtained in electron microscopes with a resolution of less than one manometer (i.e., 0.000001 mm), which approaches the size of single atoms. For ar chaeological material, the most useful and widely employed form of electron microscopy is the so-called scanning elec tron microscope (SEM). A beam of high-energy electrons (up to 100 keV) is focused by a series of magnetic lenses so that the illuminated area of the specimen is about 0.02 ixm in diameter—which is also the typical resolution obtainable witii this instrument. Additional magnetic coils allow the beam to be deflected so that it scans, in a regular manner, over the surface of the specimen. T h e primary electron beam stimulates, among other effects, the emission of sec ondary electrons from the surface of the specimen. These are collected and converted into an electric signal. Because the number of secondary electrons ejected on each spot de pends largely on the tilt angle, a grazing beam produces
23
more secondary electrons and, hence, a greater signal than a beam at right angles. T h e detector is used to modulate the brightness of a display cathode ray (television) tube tiiat has its line scan driven in synchronism with the probe beam in the microscope column. There is a one-to-one correspon dence between the brightness of each point on the display tube and the number of secondary electrons emitted from any spot on the surface of the specimen. In this way, a map of a large number of single points (between 50,000 and 100,000) of different brightness is built up that yields a pic ture of the surface topography of the specimen with a large depth of focus. T h e electron beam has to be operated in a vacuum be cause electrons cannot travel any appreciable distance in air. Therefore, the sample must not contain any substances that are not stable in a vacuum. Otherwise, the requirements for specimen preparation are minimal. Most SEMs have rela tively large sample chambers, so that even bulky samples can be accommodated. It is desirable that the specimen be rendered electrically conducting. This is usually achieved by evaporating a thin (10-20 nm) layer of metal or elementary carbon onto die specimen in the vacuum. Another important feature of the interaction of the elec tron beam with the sample is the excitation of X-rays char acteristic of the chemical composition at die illuminated spot. Hence, it is possible to obtain information on the dis tribution of certain elements on the sample surface in ad dition to the topographical picture. However, such analyses can only be considered semiquantitative because of the vari able self-absorption of the X-rays in the sample as a result of surface roughness. For quantitative analyses, the electron probe microanalyzer is used. [See Analytical Techniques.] The SEM has frequently been used to study die surface microtopography of archaeological materials, especially in investigating ceramic and metal technology and identifying pigments and lime plaster. BIBLIOGRAPHY Coghlan, Herbert H . Notes on Prehistoric and Early Iron in the Old World. Oxford, 1957. S o m e w h a t dated, b u t still valuable, account of the use of the microscope for the study of early iron. Goldstein, Joseph I., et a l , eds. Scanning Electron Microscopy and XRay Microanalysis: A Text for Biologists, Materials Scientists, and Ge ologists. N e w York and L o n d o n , 1981. Comprehensive and very readable text on all aspects of this topic, including practical aspects of sample preparation. Noll, Walter. Alte Keramiken und ihre Pigmente: Studien zu Material and Technologic Stuttgart, 1991. Comprehensive text on the scientific investigation with the S E M of archaeological pottery and pigments. Phillips, Victor A. Modern Metallographic Techniques and Their Appli cations. N e w York, 1971. S t a n d a r d textbook o n metallographic tech niques. Tite, Michael S. " T h e I m p a c t of Electron Microscopy on Ceramic Studies." I n New Developments in Archaeological Science: A Joint Syrnposium of the Royal Society and the British Academy, February 1991, edited b y A . M . Pollard, p p . 1 1 1 - 1 3 1 . Proceedings of the British
24
MIDDLE EASTERN CULTURE CENTER IN JAPAN
Academy, 77. Oxford, 1992. Useful review of scanning electron mi croscopy in studying ancient ceramic technology. ERNST PERNICKA
MIDDLE EASTERN CULTURE CENTER IN JAPAN. At the initiative of Prince Takahito Mikasa, and with the close cooperation of the late Sazo Idemitsu, the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan was established in October 1979. The first center of its kind in Japan, it pro vides both researchers and students with a place to conduct intensive studies in various spheres, such as the history and culture of the Near East, and with a forum for exhibiting the results of their work. A key aim in creating the center was to collect study ma terials and to design activities that would make the institu tion inviting to specialists and to the general public. T h e center is thus furnished with exhibition halls, a library, au ditoriums, and research facilities. Among the center's main activities are lectures delivered by foreign scholars and spe cialists and lectures that supplement special exhibitions of artifacts. The center sponsors the Biannual Colloquium for Ancient Near Eastern Studies, of which Prince Takahito Mikasa is the honorary president. The center also holds an interna tional Annual Symposium on Anatolian Archaeological Studies. The center's current overseas projects, both of which were initiated in 1986, are an excavation at Kaman-Kalehoytik in Kirsehir, Turkey, and a general survey of Anatolia. The ex cavation has unearthed new information regarding the Chal colithic and Early Bronze periods. The centers' publications include die Bulletin of the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan (seven volumes); Acta Sumerologica (thirteen volumes); and the Proceedings of the An atolian Archaeological Symposium in Japanese (two volumes). Final reports for die excavation and for the Anatolian survey are published intermittentiy. The center is a unique insti tution in Japan because of its area of specialization, the wealth of periodicals in its library, and the opportunity it affords students and researchers to gain first-hand archae ological experience. SACHIHIRO OMURA
MIDDLE EAST MEDIEVALISTS (MEM) is a professional nonprofit association of scholars interested in the study of the Islamic lands of the Middle East in the me dieval period. The organization defines "medieval Middle East" to include northern Africa and Islamic Spain in the period between 500 and 1500 CE. M E M was founded in 1989 and incorporated in die state of Illinois in 1992. Its main goals are to encourage the presentation of panels and papers on subjects relating to the medieval Middle East at scholarly
conferences; to support the academic study of die medieval Middle East; and to foster communication among individ uals and organizations interested in die medieval Middle East. Membership is open to individuals of all nationalities. In 1995, MEM's membership was about 225 and growing; about 75 percent of its members reside in the United States. The association's first president was Sam I. Gellens (19891991). He was succeeded by Fred M. Donner (1992-1994); the current president is R. Stephen Humphreys ( 1 9 9 5 I997)As part of its effort to foster communication among its members, M E M publishes Al-Usur al-Wusta (The Bulletin of Middle East Medievalists) semiannually; it contains short articles, reviews of books from the Middle East of interest to MEM's membership, and news of the organization. Ex change programs and summer workshops are planned. M E M is loosely affiliated witii the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the American Oriental Society (AOS). It holds its annual business meeting at MESA's annual meeting. FRED M . DONNER
MIDDLE EAST STUDIES ASSOCIATION. In 1966, a group of American and Canadian scholars founded the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) to promote high standards of scholarship and instruction in the field of Middle East studies, to facilitate communication among scholars through meetings and publications, and to foster cooperation among individuals and organizations concerned with scholarly study of the Middle East. T h e organization covers the geographic area from the Atiantic to, and more recendy including, Central Asia, as well as those lands in Europe once under Islamic political control. T h e chrono logical period covered by MESA begins with the rise of Is lam. However, most scholarly activities focus on contem porary developments. MESA publishes botii the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the MESA Newsletter four times a year; the MESA Bulletin appears twice a year. Topics of archaeolog ical interest, announcements of conferences, and calls for papers are listed in die Newsletter. The names of those who participate in professional meetings and the titles of the pa pers presented at those meetings appear in an electronic form. Articles and book reviews related to Islamic archae ology are sometimes included in the Bulletin. Tables of con tents, notes research and teaching resources, lists of recent conferences, and books in Middle East studies are available on the MESA Bulletin gopher site (at gopher.cua.edu) or via World Wide Web connection to URL:gopher://vmsgopher. cua.edu.:7o/ngopher_root_mesabul: [000000]. Presentations related to Islamic archaeology are often de livered at the annual MESA meeting. Many of the archae ological sessions at the meeting are sponsored by the North
MID IAN American Historians of Islamic Art (NAHIA), an organi zation affiliated with MESA. All of the papers presented at the annual MESA meeting are listed in the Newsletter's fall issue; those papers available for purchase are listed in its winter issue. MESA does not sponsor either archaeological excavations or publications. JERE L . B A C H A R A C H
MIDIAN. T h e extreme northwestern corner of the Ara bian Peninsula, immediately east of the Gulf of 'Aqaba, was associated by the classical and medieval Arab geographers with the place name Madian or Madiama. It is generally agreed that these preserve the name of Midian, die son of Abraham and Keturah and the ancestor of the Midianites of the Plebrew Bible. It was to Midian tiiat Moses fled after murdering an Egyptian overseer, and it was Zipporah, the daughter of a Midianite shepherd and (possibly) priest, var iously named Jetliro, Reuel, or Hobab, whom he subse quently married (Ex. 2 - 4 , 1 8 ; Nm. 25, 31). According to one tradition {Nm. 10:29-32), Jethro helped guide the Israelites through the desert after their exodus from Egypt. T h e good relationship initially enjoyed by the two peoples is illustrated by the fact that Moses invited the Midianites to join in the journey to the Promised Land—an offer which was, how ever, declined. Relations soon deteriorated and, following an incident at Ba'al-Peor in Moab, when an Israelite zealot killed some Midianite princes apparently involved in a fer tility rite, the two groups became implacable foes. In Judges 6-8 an account is given of an unsuccessful attack by Midi anite raiders on the Israelite tribes in northern Canaan led by Gideon, followed by further military action in Trans Jor dan. These events are conventionally dated to the eleventh century B C E . The last mention of the Midianites as a people probably refers to an episode a few decades later, when they are said to have been defeated by the king of Edom (Gn. 36:35). After this, the name occurs in die Hebrew Bible only as a geographical expression; it does not appear, either as a gentilic or a locality, in any other ancient texts prior to the classical period. The Midianites are portrayed in these traditions as no madic sheep and camel herders, caravaneers, and raiders, ranging over a wide territory to the soutii and east of Ca naan. There is no reason to suppose that this portrayal is not essentially correct, at least in part. However, recent ar chaeological survey in northwestern Arabia—the heartiand of Midian—has indicated that this is not the whole story. There also existed, during the final centuries of the second millennium B C E , sedentary communities that should, in all probability, be included among the Midianites. The evi dence lies in the discovery at a number of sites of a distinc tive type of painted pottery, stylistically related to certain types of Late Bronze Age pottery of the eastern Mediter ranean region. T h e pottery may ultimately be derived from
25
the Mycenaean pottery of die Aegean, by way of Canaan or Egypt. At the site of Qurayyah a number of kilns used in the manufacture of this pottery have been identified. [See Qurayyah.] There is also strong evidence at this site of for tification walls and an irrigated field system contemporary with the pottery. Identical pottery has been excavated at the copper mining and smelting installations at Timna', in the southern Wadi 'Arabah north of modern Eilat in Israel. That pottery is dated by inscribed Egyptian objects to the nine teenth dynasty (thirteenth-twelfdi centuries BCE)—precisely the time to which most authorities ascribe the Hebrew traditions mentioned above. [See Timna' (Negev).] There can be no doubt that the Egyptians were engaged, presum ably in a controlling capacity, in the 'Arabah mines and that tiiey employed workers from Qurayyah and perhaps from elsewhere in Arabia. There is no evidence for metallurgical activities at Qurayyah itself, however, or at Tayma', where sherds of the same pottery have also been found. [See Tayma'.] This suggests that other activities, perhaps the in cense trade with Soutivwest Arabia, played a part in Midian's economy. The field system at Qurayyah indicates that ag riculture was also economically important. It has been suggested that the development of what has been termed oasis urbanism in Midian at this time was largely the result of Egyptian involvement in the economy of the region. This interpretation is controversial, primarily because of the complete lack of evidence in Egyptian texts for such involvement, other tiian at Timna . For the Egyp tians, die inhabitants of the arid regions of Sinai, the Hijaz, and Transjordan seem to have been subsumed under the term shasu and depicted as pastoralists and raiders, much as the Midianites are depicted in the Hebrew Bible. In the pres ent state of research, all further attempts to reconstruct the history of Midian must remain speculative. 1
BIBLIOGRAPHY Mendenhall, George E. The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition. Baltimore, 1973. C h a p t e r 6, " T h e 'Sea Peoples' in Pal estine," contains a stimulating, though very controversial, discussion of the Midianites, suggesting an Anatolian origin. Parr, Peter J., et al. "Preliminary Survey in N o r t h West Arabia, 1968." Bulletin of the Institute ofArchaeology, University of London 8-9(1970): 219-241, pis. 21-42. T h e first account of the archaeological discov eries which began to challenge t h e conventional view of the history of Midian. Parr, Peter J. "Pottery of the L a t e Second Millennium B.C. f r o m N o r t h West Arabia a n d Its Historical Implications." In Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archaeology, edited b y Daniel T . Potts, p p . 72-89. C o p e n h a g e n , 1988. Succinct account and possible interpretation of the recent archaeological discoveries, with full references. Sawyer, John F. A., a n d David J. A. Clines, eds. Midian, Moab, and Edom: The His toryand Archaeology of Late Bro nzeand Iron Age Jordan and North-West Arabia. Sheffield, 1983. Conference papers; see in particular the essays by E. J. Payne ( " T h e Midianite A r c " ) , E. Axel K n a u f ("Midianites and Ishmaelites"), and Beno Rothenberg and Jonathan Glass ( " T h e Midianite P o t t e r y " ) . PETER J. PARR
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MILETUS
MILETUS, the southernmost settlement of Ionia, origi nally situated on the coast with four harbors but now, as a result of the silting of the Maeander River, in the middle of a plain 3 km (5 mi.) from die sea (37°3o' N , 27°i8' E). A prominent hill several miles to the west of the present theater was, in antiquity, the island of Lade, where the Persian fleet destroyed the Ionian navy in 494 BCE The site has a long and complex history. Surveys around Miletus conducted under the direction of Volkmar von Graeve have located more than one hundred sites that date from the Neolithic to Byzantine periods. Minoan settlement of the area may date to the sixteenth century B C E , perhaps as part of their maritime expansion throughout the Medi terranean. A city wall and some houses found near the the ater date to the Mycenaean period (c. 1400 BCE) and indicate that displacement of die Minoan settlement roughly coin cided with die establishment of Mycenaean power on the island of Crete, formerly die center of Minoan power. E. O. Forrer first suggested that Ahhijawa in Hittite texts was equated with the Mycenaean Greeks and that Millawanda, also mentioned in the texts, was Miletus. That interpretation has been disputed. James G. Macqueen, for example, argues that Millawanda lay on the shores of the Sea of Marmara in northwest Anatolia (1986, pp. 40-41). The debate contin ues. According to literary sources, Miletus (Ionic), or Milatos (Doric), was also known as Pituousa and Anactoria (Herodotos 1.17-20, 141; 6.6; Arrian, Anabasis 1.18). In the twelfth century C E , die site was called Balat (from die Greek Palatia) because the inhabitants, then residing upon the completely covered Roman theater, thought they were over a palace. Scientific excavation of the site (primarily by German ar chaeologists) began in 1899 under the direction of Theodor Wiegand but were discontinued after the start of World War I. Carl Weickert's excavations, begun in 1938, were halted during World War II. More recentiy, excavations have been conducted by Gerhard Kleiner, Wolfgang Muller-Wiener, and Volkmar von Graeve. As part of diis project, the pre historic levels are being investigated under the direction of W. D . Niemeier. Between the ninth and sixth centuries BCE, the city estab lished numerous colonies (ninety, according to literary sources) in lands around the Black Sea (notably Olbia, Sinope, Panticapeion, and Amisos) and around the Mediter ranean Sea. At the time, it was the most powerful city in the Ionian world. The Black Sea colonies in particular provided large supplies of needed wheat. Miletus also gave rise to a number of famous philosophers and scientists, including Anaximander, Thales, Anaximenes, Aspasia, and later, Isodoros, die builder of the magnificent Hagia Sophia in Istanbul/Constantinople. [See Constantinople.] In addition, according to Greek tradition, Hippodamos, who recon
structed Miletus and other cities after their destruction by the Persians, created a city plan that connected streets at right angles (the Hippodamian plan). The Milesian alphabet served as die basis for die unifi cation of die Greek states after it was adopted by Athens in the fifth century B C E . Some of the earliest coins were minted at Miletus, including an electrum coin with a lion on one side and three ornamental notches on the other. After the city was demolished by the Persians in 494 B C E , its principal leaders were removed to the mouth of die Tigris River and the rest of die populace enslaved. From that point onward, the city had little influence in the region until the Hellenistic period, when it became an important commercial center. It then had close relationships with die various Hellenistic kings who ruled after the death of Alexander. It became a part of the Roman province of Asia in 129 B C E The religious center of the town was Delphinion, where Apollo was worshipped. Originally established in die archaic period, the current temenos was enclosed on three of its sides by stoas in the Hellenistic period and furtiier expanded in the Roman period. Other buildings from the Hellenistic period include a gymnasium whose palaestra and propylon have been located. T h e propylon that leads to the gymna sium is similar to ones encountered at Pergamon and Priene and may have been built as a result of the influence of King Eumenes II of Pergamon. [See Pergamon; Priene.] A bouleuterion, also from the Hellenistic period, contains a col onnaded courtyard, an auditorium, and a propylon; it seated approximately fifteen hundred people. An inscription as sociated with the bouleuterion indicates that it was consttucted under the sponsorship of two Milesian brothers, Timarchos and Herakleides, at the behest of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. An agora in the southern part of the city has been partially excavated and is possibly the largest ever found in the Greek world (about 33,000 sq m). Founded during the Hellenistic period, the stoa on its east had thirty-nine pairs of shops back to back and the one on its south had nineteen. A large stadium was apparently erected during this period, as it is aligned witii the bouleuterion and is at right angles to both the south and north agoras. Its gateway is Hellenistic in de sign. The Roman tiieater (built over the earlier Hellenistic one) was one of the largest and most elaborate in Asia, capable of holding upward of fifteen thousand people. [See Thea ters.] A Jewish presence in the city is confirmed from a sec ond- or third-century C E inscription on a seat in the theater mentioning "the place of the Jews who are also called God fearing." The inscription sheds some light on the current debate over the make-up of die God-fearers (converted Gentiles, pious Jews, etc.) and the degree to which the cat egory is simply a literary creation as Thomas Kraabel has argued. At the least the inscription along with important in-
MILETUS scriptions from Panticapaeum and Aphrodisias confirm diat such a group existed and was possibly distinct from naturalborn Jews (Reynolds and Tannenbaum, 1987, pp. 54-55; see also Biblical Archaeology Review 12.5 [1986]: 44-69). The location of the inscription in the fifth row suggests a degree of prestige attributed to the Jews (Paul Trebilco, Jew ish Communities in Asia Minor, Cambridge, 1991, p. 162). Jews apparentiy resided in the city beginning in at least the first century C E . Josephus (Antiq. 14:244-246) mentions a decree from the Roman proconsul Publius Sevilius Galba who restored the rights of the Jews that had been revoked by the city (e.g., observance of the sabbatii, practice of rit uals, and collection of tithes). A Roman basilica with an ad jacent courtyard was identified by Von Gerkan as a syna gogue. [See Basilicas; Synagogues.] It was built in the late third or early fourtii century but had no Jewish symbols as sociated with it. T h e identification, which was based on its architectural similarity to synagogues found in Palestine, is suspect: one column had a decree from Helios Apollo com manding that an altar to Poseidon be built. A monument with a rounded base near the harbor was apparentiy set up by the Milesians in honor of an emperor, probably Augustus. Another edifice north of the monument was set up by Grattius, a Roman, and is similar in structure. A large sixteen-harbor gateway with sixteen columns was built in the first half of the first century CE. A processional way flanked by sidewalks went through it. Baths were built by Vergilius Capito, a procurator of Asia Minor under Clau dius. A stoa erected by Tiberius Claudius Sophanes lies op posite the north agora and west of the baths. [See Baths.] The very well-preserved Faustina baths from tire Roman period were sponsored by the wife of Marcus Aurelius ( 1 6 1 180 C E ) , as was the theater. Other remains of buildings in clude a temple to Serapis and a heroon. T h e northern gate way of the southern agora has also been reconstructed and is in the Berlin Museum. A provincial cult, one of three in Asia, was established at Miletus under Caligula. Such a cult indicated that the city was seen as wealthy and of impeccable heritage. It also re veals the political bond tiiat existed between the demos of die city and Rome. T h e cult lasted only a few years, how ever. An inscription mentioning it has been found at nearby Didyma, in its Apollo temple, an important cult for Miletus. [See Didyma.] T h e inscription talks about a statue of die emperor Gaius Caesar Germanicus at the time a certain Gaius Vergilius Capito "was high priest of the temple in M i letus of Gaius Caesar for the first t i m e , . . . and (when) T i berius Julius Menogenes, son of Demetrios the nomothete [legislator] was high priest the second time and neokoros [cult official] of the temple in Miletus . . . " (Steven J. Friesen, Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family, Leiden, 1993, p . 22). Capito also had a cult established in his name at Miletus, purportedly the last such
27
cult for a Roman who was not the emperor. When Gaius died, Miletus's provincial cult was discontinued. The cult had been unusual for a provincial cult in not mentioning the senate or Rome or referring to Gaius as divine. Miletus had close connections with the Temple of Apollo in Didyma, approximately 6 Ion (10 mi.) to the south. A Sacred Way connecting die two sanctuaries was paved with large limestone slabs sometime during the reign of Trajan— a pattern found in many locations throughout the eastern empire. Fountains, a large gate, and halls with colonnades are associated with the road. Miletus experienced several significant building periods: during the time of Eumenes II, ruler of Pergamon in the second century B C E ; and under die emperors Trajan (who also dedicated a monumental nymphaeum to his father) and Marcus Aurelius, primarily through the benefactions of his wife, Faustina (see above). T h e site also flourished during the reign of Diocletian, when a good deal of building took place. Shortiy afterward, however, buildings fell into disrepair and small, poorly and haphazardly built structures ignored the previous city plan. A modest revival occurred during die reign of Justinian I, in the Byzantine period, when a new cathedral and baths were built and die harbor was dredged. T h e city also had an arch bishop in 536. T h e exquisite mosque, Ilyas Bey, completed in 1404 is still standing. According to Acts 20:15-38, Paul addressed elders from Ephesus here before his return to Je rusalem (cf. 2 Tm. 4:20). BIBLIOGRAPHY Akurgal, E k r e m . Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey. 7th ed. Is tanbul, 1990. Fine s u m m a r y in English by one of Turkey's most p r o m i n e n t archaeologists. Forrer, E. O. " D i e Griechen in d e n Boghazkoi T e x t e n . " Orientalistische Literatitrzeitung (1924): 1 1 3 - 1 1 8 . Forrer, E. O . "Vorhomerische G r i e c h e n in den Keilschrifttexten von Boghazkoi." Milteilungen der deutschen Orienigesellschaft 63 (1924): 1-22. H o m m e l , Hildebrecht. "Judcn u n d Christen imKaiserzeitlichen Milet: Uberlegungen zur Theaterinschrift." Istanbukr Milteilungen 25 (1975): 167-195. Kleiner, Gerhard. Die Rumen von Milet. Berlin, 1968. Authoritative dis cussion of the site. Kleiner, Gerhard. Das rbmische Milet. Weisbaden, 1970. Important dis cussion of R o m a n Miletus by o n e of its principal excavators. Kleiner, Gerhard. "Miletos." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, p p . 578-582. Princeton, 1976. K r a u s s , Friedrich. Das Theater von Milet. Milet, vol. 4.1. Berlin, 1973. M a c q u e e n , James G. The Hittites and Their Contemporaries in Asia Mi nor. L o n d o n , 1986. Mayer, M . "Miletos." I n Paulys Real-Encyclopadie derclassischen Altertumswissenschaft,vo\. 15, cols. 1622-1655. Stuttgart, 1932. M c R a y , John. "Miletus." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, p p . 825-826. N e w York, 1992. Milet: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen und Untersuchungen seit dem Jahre i&99. Berlin, 1906-1990. Multivolume series published by the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut; the most authoritative presen tation of archaeological finds from Miletus, beginning in 1899.
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MINES AND MINING
Muller-Wiener, Wolfgang. Milet 1899-1980, Ergebnisse, Probleme unci Perspektiven einer Ausgrabung: Kolloquium Frankfurt am Main 1980, Istanbuler Mitteilungen, 31. T u b i n g e n , 1986. Reynolds, Joyce, and Robert T a n n e n b a u m . Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias: Greek Inscriptions with Commentary. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, supp. vol. 12. Cambridge, 19B7. Robert, Louis. " L e cult de Caligula a Milet et la province d'Asie." In Robert's Hellenica, vol. 7, p p . 206-238. Paris, 1949. DOUGLAS R . EDWARDS
MINES AND MINING. See Metals. MINHA, HORVAT. SeeMunhata. MLNOANS. Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941) gave the modern name Minoan to the Aegean Bronze Age (c. 30001100 BCE) inhabitants of the island of Crete. We do not know what they called themselves, or if indeed they were a single ethnic group. They may have been known to their contem poraries in Egypt as Keftiu and in Syria as Kaptarites. Systematic excavation of the principal town and palace site at Knossos began in 1900 by Evans under the auspices of the British School at Athens, who used the findings as the basis for his re-creation of Crete's early civilization. In the absence of written history, he devised a tripartite system of relative chronology based on die Egyptian kingdoms but named for the monarch and lawgiver associated with early Crete in later Greek tales, Minos; hence, we speak of the Early, Middle, and Late Minoan periods (EM, M M , and L M , respectively, with divisions of I, II, and III and further subdivisions of A, B, and C). An alternative chronology uses the broad terms Prepalatial for EM I to M M IA (c. 30001910 B C E ) , Protopalatial for M M IB to M M LIB (c. 1 9 1 0 1780 B C E ) , Neopalatial for M M III to L M IB (c. 1780-1450 B C E ) , and Postpalatial for L M II and III (c. 1450-1100 B C E ) . A radiocarbon-based chronology has yet to be widely ac cepted; the above dates are derived from synchronisms with Egypt and the Near East. Minoan society before the Postpalatial period is studied on the basis of surviving material culture and die interpre tation of complex and detailed iconography in the minor arts, such as on ceramics, seal stones and metal ring bezels, relief carvings on stone vessels, and in wall painting. The absence of obvious political propaganda—for example, there are no representations of named individuals—and an abundance of images, apparentiy representing ritual behav ior, have led to a belief the Minoans were ruled by a priestly class. The frequency of mature women.in the iconography has prompted the suggestion that one or more goddesses were the focus of the Cretans' religious beliefs, with a minor emphasis on her youthful male consort. The earliest inhabitants of Crete seem to have arrived dur
ing the Early Neolitiiic period (c. 6000 B C E ) . Continuous migration over die next tiiree tiiousand years must be re sponsible for the introduction of olives and vines as well as domesticated cattle and sheep and goats. T h e island's initial attraction may have been its temperate climate and com parative wealtii of water and forests. It became densely pop ulated by the Late Bronze Age, with an economy that con tinued to be based primarily on agriculture but that no doubt took advantage of its median position in the developing eastwest Mediterranean trade in metals that preoccupied the Aegean and Near Eastern states in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. During die palace periods, the Cretans be came the producers of luxury goods based on raw materials, both local (ceramic, stone, and textile) and imported (gold, ivory, silver, copper, and semiprecious stones), tiiereby gaining a reputation abroad as creative artisans. Settlements seem to have begun as small households in E M I-LTA, for example, at Myrtos-Fournou Korifi and Palaikastro-Roussolakkos. Evidence for substantial structures with possible public functions in E M IIB has been found at Vasiliki, Palaikastro, Knossos, and Phaistos, but later con struction has made it difficult to identify the structures clearly. The E M III and M M IA periods are poorly repre sented, but evidence from Knossos and Mallia—in the form of wall foundations used in the later palaces—may indicate that the planning, at least, for the palaces may have started in E M III or M M IA. Funerary ritual during die Prepalatial period took place in rock shelters and caves throughout the island, and circular stone-built communal monuments, called tholoi, chiefly in south-central Crete, and in rectan gular stone-built communal ossuaries, called house tombs, in north-central and eastern Crete. T h e confusion of bones and grave offerings over long periods may indicate multiple inhumations or the secondary placement of bones following excarnation. Exceptions are rock-cut single inhumations at Aghia Photia in eastern Crete that resemble those at Kouphonisi in the Cyclades. T h e palaces at Knossos, Phaistos, and Mallia were built early in die M M IB period. They were erected in prominent positions in their respective towns, which display urban planning, as evidenced by the formal road systems at all three sites; the most impressive example is the Royal Road at Knossos. T h e palaces themselves incorporated innova tions such as facades of quarried and dressed blocks with incised mason's marks, stone pillars and wooden columns, stone-built and ceramic drains and waterpipes, and patternpainted lime plaster. A formal administration is indicated by the Cretan pictographic, or hieroglyphic, script—as yet undeciphered—that came into use along witii a sealing system based on Near Eastern models. An adaptation of die pictographs into the Linear A script, also undeciphered, had taken place by the M M HA period. The rectangular complex at Chrysolakkos (Mallia) may represent a new type of civic scale funerary installation near
MINOANS the urban environment, as the tholoi and house tombs of the villages and countryside gradually go out of use during this period, perhaps due to a movement of the population into the emerging palatial centers. Secondary burials in ceramic jars, or pithoi, and ceramic boxes, or larnakes, are found at Ailias near Knossos, and Fourni near Archanes. T h e foundation of the palaces coincides with the estab lishment of remote shrines, including peak sanctuaries and sacred caves, and an elaborately built road system in the countryside, with associated sturdy rectangular structures called watchtowers. It may be that the Early Palace period was a time of emerging competitive states centered on the palaces. Evidence for elaborate protective walls along the north coast at Mallia, Myrtos-Pyrgos, Palaikastro, and in the passes entering the Kato Zakros and Karoumes Bays may confirm this view of formal protection of territorial interests. By the end of the Early Palace period, die preeminent state seems to have been Knossos. T h e urban defensive works, rural road systems, and towers seem to go out of use, as do most of the remote shrines. The change from the Old to the New Palace period is not clear. At Knossos, there seems to have been an earthquake in about 1780 B C E that forced the rebuilding of the palace with some architectural innovations—example, the "Mi noan Hall" with polytheron (multiple doorways); otherwise, the material culture shows little evidence of abrupt change. At Phaistos, the Early Palace shows traces of destruction by fire at roughly the same time, but the palace seems to have been rebuilt in stages and may not have regained its admin istrative power. A major change may be seen in the appear ance of new palaces at Kato Zakros, Archanes-Turkogitonia, Galatas, and most likely Khania, as well as what may be public architecture at numerous coastal sites such as Kommos, Aghia Triadha, Gournia, Mochlos, Palaikastro, and Petras. T h e countryside during the course of die Neopalatial period filled with rural establishments that may have been centers for localized agricultural and manufacturing concerns responsible, perhaps through taxation, to the pal ace. The pictographic script was entirely abandoned in favor of Linear A, and the clay roundel became an important ad ministrative device. T h e ossuary at Myrtos-Pyrgos and the Temple T o m b at Knossos indicate the continuity of funerary ritual in built civic structures, although these have not been found at other centers. An apparent change in burial practices is indicated by the rock-cut chamber tombs filled with Cretan L M I finds on the island of Kythera. Similar tombs at Poros, the port of Knossos, were reused into the Postpalatial period but cer tainly were first dedicated in the M M III. T h e Neopalatial period fostered the emergence of a lively artistic style that abandoned the codified symbol systems of previous stages and experimented with realism in human and natural representations. T h e favored group scenes of athletic contests and bull leaping may be related to the social
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importance of male and female rites of passage and initiation into the social and political elite. By the end of the L M IB period (c. 1450 B C E ) , artists attempted to show depth in their work by sculpting and constructing wall murals in low relief of overlapping subjects with open mouths and exaggerated veins, intended to show tire figures' vitality. The close con tact of the Mineans with their Near Eastern contemporaries can be seen in the Cretan influences in die representational arts of Syria and perhaps of Egypt during the Hyksos period. T h e L M IB ends with clear evidence for burnt destruction throughout Crete and in the Aegean towns that prospered under Cretan influence and control. T h e subsequent Post palatial period is marked by the introduction of the Myce naean Greek language used in an adaptation of Linear A into the Linear B script. Also known as the reoccupation period, many of the oldest settlements were rebuilt, often reusing material from earlier buildings; rarely is there evi dence for new quarrying or architectural innovation. Knos sos was the main political center, as suggested by the ar chives there, with secondary centers at Kydonia (modern Khania) and Phaistos, T h e economy, as understood from the archives, was securely based on the exploitation, in great quantities, of sheep for wool. Early in the period, a new form of burial, primary inhumation with weapons or the warrior grave, appears at Knossos; and large cemeteries of rock-cut chamber tombs appear at a number of locations throughout the island, for example at Armenoi, heralding a major change in funerary ritual. In the arts, a return to flat iconographic representations primarily depicting stationary rit ual scenes was witnessed. A major fire at Knossos in the L M IIIA or Early L M IIIB (c. 1300 BCE) destroyed the majority of the Linear B ar chives. Tablets found in L M IIIB contexts at Khania and the continued use of the script on transport containers (stir rup jars) may indicate a swing of power to the western town, which now had links with the western Mediterranean. Late in the L M IIIB or early in the L M IIIC there was a gradual move away from the coastal sites to mountaintop areas with access to upland plains—such as Kavousi-Kastro and Karphi-Lasithi—no doubt in response to the general collapse of audiority in die Aegean states and the rise of piracy. The material culture of these Postpalatial Cretans was less lux urious than in previous periods, but the iconography of the mature woman as goddess prevailed and continued throughout die subsequent Protogeometric periods, albeit in crude versions. [See also Crete; and the biography of Evans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY T h e most useful primary sources for Crete in the Bronze Age are Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos, 4 vols, in 6 (London, 1921-1935), and the Index by J. E. Evans ( L o n d o n , 1936). F o r general surveys the reader m a y consult Martin S. F . H o o d , The Minoans: Crete in the Bronze Age ( L o n d o n , 1971), and J. Wilson Myers et al., The Aerial Atlas of
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MIQNE, TEL
Ancient Crete (Berkeley, 1992). T h e latter contains exceptional aerial views and plans of the most important excavations, as well as recent essays by the excavators a n d a bibliography. Relative and absolute chro nologies are argued in Peter M . W a r r e n and Vronwy Hankey, Aegean Bronze Age Chronology (Bristol, 1989), a n d Philip P . Betancourt, The History of Minoan Pottery (Princeton, 1985). Both contain extensive bibliographies. Architecture is discussed in J. Walter G r a h a m , The Pal aces of Crete, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1987), and J. W . Shaw, Minoan Ar chitecture: Materials and Techniques (Rome, 1971). Both works are in need of revision to include theoretical matters. Cretan Hieroglyphic texts may be found in Arthur Evans, Scripta Minoa, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1909), and Fernand Chapouthier, Les ecritures minoenries au palais de Mallia (Paris, 1930), both long out of date and deserving of new coipus. F o r Linear A, see Louis Godart and Jean P. Olivier, Recueil des inscrip tions en Lineaire A, 5 vols. (Paris, 1976-1985). Linear B is covered in John Chadwick et al., Corpus of Mycenaean Inscriptions from Knossos, vol. 1 (Rome, 1986). Studies on ritual behavior include Geraldine G e sell, Town, Palace, and House Cult in Minoan Crete (Goteborg, 1985); N a n n o Marinatos, Minoan Religion (Columbia, S.C., 1993); and Bogd a n Rutkowski, The Cult Places of the Aegean (New H a v e n , 1986). All three are quite speculative. Martin S. F . H o o d provides the best treat ment of M i n o a n arts and crafts in The Arts in Prehistoric Greece (Harmondsworth, 1978). J. A L E X A N D E R M A C G I L L I V R A Y
MIQNE, TEL (Ar., Khirbet el-Muqanna'), site located 35 km (22 mi.) southwest of Jerusalem, on the western edge of the inner coastal plain (the frontier zone that separated Philistia and Judah), overlooking the ancient network of highways leading northeast from Ashdod to Gezer (map ref erence 1356 X 1315). One of the largest Iron Age sites in Israel, Tel Miqne is identified with biblical Ekron, one of the capital cities of the Philistine Pentapolis. The site is com posed of a 40-acre lower tell, which in Iron II expanded to 65 acres, and a 10-acre upper tell. William Foxwell Albright (1924) identified Muqanna' with biblical Eltekeh, but Joseph Naveh (1958), who subsequentiy surveyed die site, identi fied it as Ekron. T h e current excavations support the latter conclusion. Written Sources. Ekron is mentioned in the Hebrew Bi ble in Joshua 13:3 as part of "the land that yet remains"; in 15:11 in reference to the northern border of the tribe of Ju dah running through "&ete/Ekron northward"; in 15:45-46 in die list of the cities of Judah; and in 19:43 as part of the territory of Dan. la. Judges 1:18 it is a city conquered by the tribe of Judah; in 1 Samuel 5:10 the Philistines take the Ark of the Covenant to Ekron; in 17:52, in the story of David and Goliath, the Philistines are pursued to "the gates of Ek ron"; in 2 Kings 1:2 King Ahaziah of Israel (ninth century BCE) sent messengers to consult "Baal Zebub, the gods of Ekron"; in Amos 1:5 (eighth century BCE) the destruction of Ekron is prophesized, as it is in Jeremiah 25:20, Zephaniah 2:4, and Zechariah 9:5-6 (second half of the seventh century BCE).
In the Assyrian sources the 712 BCE siege of 'amqar(r)una (Ekron) is depicted on a wall relief in Sargon IPs palace in
Khorsabad. T h e 701 B C E conquest of Ekron is described in the royal annals of Sennacherib, and, in first half of the sev enth century B C E , in the annals of Esarhaddon, Ikausu, king of Ekron, supplies materials for the construction of the pal ace in Nineveh, and in 667 B C E , in his annals Ashurbanipal is quoted as ordering the vassal long Ikausu to support his military campaigns against Egypt and Cush. T h e Babylo nian chronicles describe Nebuchadrezzar's campaign against a Philistine city in 603 B C E that may be Ekron. In the Apocrypha, Ekron appears in 1 Maccabees 10:89 and in 14:34 as a toparchy torn from Ashdod. T h e Roman Jewish historian Josephus (Antiq. 13:4:4) reports that in 147 BCE Ekron was given by Alexander Balas to Jonathan the Hasmonean. In the fourth century C E , Eusebius (Onomasticon, ed. Klostermann, pp. 22, 11.9-10) mentions "a very large Jewish village called Accaron." Excavations. The Tel Miqne/Ekron excavation is a joint American-Israeli project directed by Trude Dotiian (direc tor, Berman Center for Biblical Archaeology, Hebrew Uni versity) and by Seymour Gitin (director, W. F. Albright In stitute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem). Twelve excavation seasons were conducted from 1981 to 1995, ex posing 3.5 percent of the site. The primary goal is to ex amine the process of urbanization of a Philistine city and the geopolitical, economic, cultural, and environmental ele ments that influenced its development. A continuous stratigraphic profile of the tell appears only on the acropolis in the upper city (field I), beginning with stratum XI (Middle Bronze Age LIB) and extending through the end of stratum I (Iron IIC). In the lower city (fields III, IV), following stratum XI (sixteenth century B C E ) , there was a four hundred-year occupational gap until its resettlement in stratum VII at the beginning of Iron I (c. 1200 B C E ) . Fol lowing the Iron I period (end of stratum IV, c. 1000 B C E ) , there was approximately a 250-year occupational gap in the lower city until it was again resettled at the very end of the eighth century B C E , expanding to its greatest extent in stra tum I (seventh century B C E ) . Both the Iron I and II cities were well designed, with zones of occupation primarily for fortifications, industry, and elite habitation. Middle Bronze Age. The tell apparentiy was shaped by the fortifications that encompassed both the upper and lower cities in die Middle Bronze Age. MB II ceramic and fragmentary architectural evidence was found throughout the tell; in addition, three infant burials were found in field IV. Late B r o n z e Age. T h e apparentiy unfortified LB settiement (strata X-VTfl) was confined to the upper city. It con tained Cypriot and Mycenaean imports and Anatolian grayslipped ware, attesting to international maritime trade. The Egyptian impact is evident, inter alia, in a burial containing a nineteenth-dynasty seal and scarab and a fourteenth-cen tury B C E scarab bearing the name of the Egyptian king Amenhotep III and dedicated to the "lady of the sycamore
MIQNE, TEL tree," usually associated with the foundations of Egyptian shrines. This scarab was an heirloom found in a later Iron I phase. Stratum VIII, representing the last Canaanite city, was totally destroyed by fire; the destruction was dramati cally illustrated by a severely burned storeroom complex with jars containing carbonized grains, lentils, and figs. Iron Age I. The fortified Iron I settlement (strata VIIIV) encompassed the upper and lower cities. It is charac terized by a new material culture introduced by an ethnic group of Aegean origin: the Philistines, one of the Sea Peo ples. One of its special features is a megaron-type building with a hearth as its central architectural component. While locally made Mycenaean IIIC:ib pottery (see figure i) pre dominates in the earliest phase of occupation (stratum VII), Philistine bichrome pottery with red and black decoration on white slip is predominant in the strata VT-V city. In stra tum IV, the material culture reflects the influence of Phoe nician culture, with its predominant red-slipped and bur nished ceramic vessels. Upper city (field I). Next to the stratum VII mud-brick city wall was an industrial kiln area and, at the very top of the acropolis, in strata VII-VI, a cluster of large pits. Stra tum VI had a large building complex with a cultic room that, in stratum V, became its most prominent feature. It con tained votive vessels and incised scapulae, like those from twelfth-and eleventh-century B C E shrines at Enkomi and at Kition on Cyprus. [See Enkomi; Kition.] Concentrated in an open activity area to die west were twenty-five circular peb bled hearths—thirteen in stratum VI and twelve in stratum V. Also found in strata VI-V were two infant jar burials. Stratum IV was attested at die top of die acropolis by the reuse of some stratum V architectural elements and two pebbled hearths. T h e stratum IV street, with two parallel stone walls, initiated a plan that continued into the Iron II period.
MIQNE,
TEL.
Figure
I.
Mycenaean IIIC:Ib bowl with antithetic
tongue motif. F r o m t h e initial P h i l i s t i n e (Sea P e o p l e s ) s e t t l e m e n t of t h e early twelfth c e n t u r y BCE. F o u n d i n t h e " e l i t e " z o n e of o c c u p a t i o n . (Courtesy Tel M i q n e - E k r o n Excavations) •
31
Lower city (field III). Well behind the city wall, stratum VI was represented by a building complex, over which the stratum V monumental building was constructed. Both mud-brick structures had two large units in which were found a mud-brick firebox, a bull-shaped zoomorphic ves sel, an incised ivory tube, a conical stamp seal depicting two prancing gazelles, a bronze pin and needle, and two goat skulls. Stratum VI had two examples of the circular pebbled hearths known from fields I and IV. In the stratum V build ing, a large flagstone pavement formed a monumental en trance with matched wall insets in front of a mushroom stone pillar base. This design is similar to the monumental entrance of the megaron building in field IV. The artifacts, many of which represented a continuation of Aegean traditions, included a rectangular bone plaque painted blue and incised with die back end of a horse, a Mycenaean-type female figurine, a gold spiraled hair ring, an iron knife with an ivory handle, and a pebbled hearth. Stratum IV consisted of two building complexes and an extended platform that supported a large number of plas tered installations. These were in part built over the deep backfill covering stratum V, as in field IV, and in part reused the plan of stratum V. Continuing the Aegean tradition were two pebbled hearths. Immediately behind the fortifications, a large installation of red earth (Ar., hamra) and a crucible were found, indicating metal production. Special finds in clude a gaming piece, copper pins and needles, and an in cised scapula similar to those found in field I. Lower city (field IV). Because of the special nature of its architecture and finds, field IV in the lower city is considered the elite zone. Stratum VII was represented by the earliest appearances of rectangular hearths. In Stratum VI, the west ern building complex was composed of a temple/palace in the form of a megaron whose central feature was a circular heartii. T h e origin of die hearth is well attested in megaron buildings of Mycenaean palaces in the Aegean. In stratum VI, the western building complex produced special finds, including a round ivory lid decorated with scenes of animals in battle—gryphons, lions, and bulls—in a distinctly Aegean style. Stratum V building no. 350 of the western complex, also with a megaron plan, had a main hall with superimposed pebbled hearths, three rooms with benches and batnot (al tars), one room witii twenty clay "lump" loom weights in the Aegean tradition, and a monumental entrance hall with two mushroom-shaped stone pillar bases (see figure 2). This building also produced three miniature bronze wheels from a cultic stand, known from Cyprus and reminiscent of the biblical description of the laver stands (Heb., mechonoi) in Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and a bronze Janus-faced linchpin of a chariot wheel, which can be associated with Cyprus and the Aegean. In addition, it contained an iron knife with a pierced, spool-shaped ivory handle attached by three bronze nails—one of four such handles found at Ekron
32
MIQNE, TEL
Tel Miqne-Ekron Field IV Stratum V Building 350 MIQNE, T E L . F i g u r e 2. Megaron style building 3so in field IV, stratum V. T o t h e left are adjacent b u i l d i n g s 352, 353, 354. (Courtesy T e l Miqne-Ekron Excavations)
and similar to cultic knife handles known from Tell Qasile, Cyprus, and the Aegean. [See Qasile, Tell; Cyprus.] In strata VI and V, the eastern building complex had ex tensive living quarters featuring a large stone bath, a mono lith, two stone pillar bases, and several hearths, some peb bled. In Stratum IV, the stratum V temple/palace of the western building complex was backfilled, like the stratum V building in field III. Its plan was reused and its cultic func tions continued. Its finds include a cache of ivory, faience, and stone objects—decorated earplugs, and a ring depicting the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. The destruction and aban donment of the lower city of stratum IV marked the end of die early Philistine city and die end of the Iron I period at Ekron.
Iron Age II. In the Iron IIA-B period, strata III—II (c. 1000-700 B C E ) , Ekron only occupied the 10-acre upper city. Its coastal plain traditions of architecture and pottery evi denced contimiity with stratum IV. In stratum IC, the first three-quarters of the seventh century B C E , Ekron became a vassal of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Its upper and lower cit ies, which were rebuilt, contained the largest olive oil pro duction center in antiquity. T h e stratum IB city of the last quarter of the seventh century, which was under Egyptian hegemony, was destroyed in 603 B C E by the Babylonians. Afterward, die site was resettled only sporadically. Upper city (field I). In strata III—II, Ekron was reduced in size to the area of the acropolis, which was refortified with a new mud-brick city wall and a 7-meter-wide mud-brick
MIQNE, TEL tower faced with ashlar masonry. T h e new Iron II city on the top of the acropolis was built over a series of monumen tal stone foundations that ran east-west up and across tire top of the acropolis, forming part of a huge system of ter races and platforms. Some of these walls contain large ashlar masonry similar to that of the facing of the mud-brick tower. T h e central architectural feature of stratum III was a repaved stratum IV street with flanking walls. The monumen tal architecture of stratum II continued the general plan of stratum III. T h e two main new elements are a series of rooms, probably shops or market stalls, which opened to die repaved stratum III street, and a stone-lined central drainage system. The ceramic evidence of strata III—II indicates a continuation of the red-slipped and burnished tradition of stratum IV and the introduction of several new forms with red wash and slip. T h e pottery of stratum II included Judean forms typical of the eighth century B C E , Phoenician-type forms, and local types well known in the eighth-seventhcentury B C E coastal ceramic assemblage, best defined in stra tum IB. Associated with the end of the eightii century B C E were three Imlk stamped jar handles. One, reading Imlk hbrn ("belonging to the king of Hebron"), is a four-winged type; the others are two-winged, dating from die brief period when Ekron was ruled by Hezekiah, king of Judah. [See Ju dah.] Lower city (field III). In stratum I, the city was expanded following Sennacherib's conquest in 701 B C E . The Assyrian annals cite Ekron as a vassal city-state of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The new fortifications of stratum I on the south of the reoccupied lower city included a double system of stone city walls, a line of stables or storehouses, and a three-pier gate protected by a gatehouse, similar to those at Tell Batash, Gezer, Lachish, and Ashdod. [See Batash, Tel; Gezer; Lachish; Ashdod.] On die acropolis, die strata III—II mudbrick city wall was rebuilt, and a series of citadel towers was erected. T h e most outstanding phenomenon of diis new city was the olive-oil industrial zone laid out in a belt along the in terior face of the city wall. [See Olives.] It was composed of rectangular factory buildings with a tripartite division, in cluding an oil-production room, a room for processing and storage, and an anteroom opening to the street. The oil in stallation had a large rectangular crushing basin and pressing vats, one on each side of die basin. Other equipment in cluded a stone cylindrical crushing roller and eight 77-kg (170-lb.) stone pressing weights. Each factory building room produced an average of one hundred restorable ceramic vessels. Special finds include a cache of seven well-preserved large iron agricultural tools and four-horned limestone altars. [See Altars.] In all, eigh teen altars of this type, usually considered incense altars, were discovered at Ekron. Large numbers of loom weights and installations not associated with the oil-manufacturing process were found throughout the industrial zone, sug
33
gesting the presence of a secondary textile industry. [See Textiles, article on Textiles of the Neolithic tiirough Iron Ages.] T h e 115 oil presses thus far found at Ekron have a pro duction capacity of at least 500 tons. T o date, Ekron is the largest industrial center for the production of olive oil known from antiquity. This huge industry prospered because of the commercial needs of the expanding Assyrian Empire. [See Assyrians.] In the last third of the seventh century (stratum IB), a diminution in olive-oil production is attested by the discarded parts of oil installations. This phenomenon is as sociated with the end of Assyrian rule (stratum IC) and the establishment of Egyptian hegemony in Philistia in about 630 B C E (stratum IB). Lower city (field IV). T h e elite zone had a complex of eight courtyard-type buildings, comprising twenty-one rooms that contained a large percentage of fine and deco rated wares (including Assyrian-type and imported East Greek vessels), fourteen inscriptions on storejars, including, among others: qds and I'Srt, "dedicated" and "for die god dess Asherah"; Imkm, "for the shrine"; the letter let, widi tiiree horizontal lines below it, probably indicating the allo cation of thirty units of produce for tithing; bl, designating a storejar capacity of probably 33 1; and inscriptions indi cating storejar contents, such as smn, "oil", and dbl, "cluster of figs." These building complexes also produced three caches comprising 157 pieces of silver jewelry, cut pieces of silver— bisze kesef—and silver ingots. [See Jewelry.] Another cache from the acropolis had thirty one pieces, among which was a silver medallion depicting die goddess Ishtar standing on a lion (see figure 3). A fifth cache was found in field III. Together, these caches represent the richest assemblage of its kind yet found in Israel. T h e large amount of silver re flects its use as currency, which was an important element in the Assyrian economy and in Phoenician maritime trade. North of the courtyard building complexes of the elite zone was a monumental Neo-Assyrian-type building. Its front and side entrances each had a single-stone, 4-meterlong threshold. Its special finds include a stela incised with a rosette, a royal Neo-Assyrian emblem, a curated carved elephant tusk with the image of an Egyptian goddess asso ciated witii die nineteenth dynasty, a golden cobra, a ureaus, part of the headdress of a statuette of Egyptian royalty or a deity, and a faience amulet of Ptah-patecus, the Egyptian god of craftsmen. Ekron was destroyed at the end of stratum IB, during Ne buchadrezzar's campaign to Philistia in 603 B C E . Sealed beneadi the massive meter-thick layer of destruction debris were thousands of mostiy coastal and some inland late sevendi-century B C E whole ceramic forms. In stratum IA, ap parently only die lower city was occupied. One structure was well preserved, an "Assyrian courtyard" type building tiiat produced typical seventii-/sixth-century B C E coastal ceramic
34
MIQNE, TEL to Gaza and Back." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 17 (1925): 5-6. C l e r m o n t - G a n n e a u , Charles S. Archaeological Researches in Palestine during the Years 1873-1874. Vol. 2. L o n d o n , 1899. See page 195. Conder, Claude R., and H. H . Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. 2, Samaria. L o n d o n , 1882. See sheet 16, page 425. D o t h a n , T r u d e . The Philistines and Their Material Culture. N e w H a v e n , 1982. See pages 17-18, 20, 57, 88, 296. D o t h a n , T r u d e . " T h e Arrival of die Sea Peoples: Cultural Diversity in Early Iron Age C a n a a n . " In Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited by Seymour Gitin a n d William G. Dever, p p . 1-14. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental R e search, 49. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1989.
F i g u r e 3. Silver medallion showing a figure praying to the goddess Ishtar, who is standing on a lion. F r o m a jewelry c a c h e , d a t e d to the end of t h e seventh c e n t u r y BCE. (Courtesy T e l M i q n e Ekron Excavations)
M I Q N E , TEL.
forms. Thereafter, the city was abandoned until the Roman period. Evidence of Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic settle ments was found only at the northern edge of the tell. Conclusion. The excavations have produced ceramic data indicating that die site was settled almost continuously from the fourth through the titird millennia; and stratigraphic, architectural, and artifactual evidence that indicates continuous occupation from the seventeenth through the early sixth centuries B C E . Thereafter, there was sporadic setdement from the Roman through the Islamic periods. The excavations highlight the process of growth, diminution, re newal, and partial abandonment tiiat, during the Iron Age, was die fate of Ekron, a frontier city on die border between Judah and Philistia. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "Researches of the School in Western Judea." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . t5 (1924): 2 - 1 1 , especially page 8. Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Fall T r i p of the School in Jerusalem
D o t h a n , T r u d e . " I r o n Knives in Cult Areas at E k r o n " (in H e b r e w ) . Eretz-Israel 20 (1989): 154-163. D o t h a n , T r u d e . " E k r o n of die Philistines, Part I: W h e r e T h e y C a m e F r o m , H o w T h e y Settled D o w n , and the Place T h e y W o r s h i p p e d I n . " Biblical Archaeology Review 16.1 (1990): 26-36. D o t h a n , T r u d e . " B r o n z e Wheels from Tel M i q n e - E k r o n . " Eretz-Israel 23 (1992): 148-154. D o t h a n , T r u d e , and M o s h e D o t h a n . People of the Sea: Tire Search for the Philistines. N e w York, 1992. D o t h a n , T r u d e , a n d Seymour Gitin. " E k r o n . " In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, p p . 1051-1059. Jerusalem and N e w York, 1993. D o t h a n , T r u d e , a n d Seymour Gitin. "Ekron of the Philistines" (in H e brew). Qadmoniot 105-106 (1994): 2-28. D o t h a n , T r u d e . " T e l M i q n e Ekron: T h e Aegean Affinities of the Sea Peoples' (Philistines') Settlement in C a n a a n in the Iron Age I." In Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West. Reports on Kabri, Nami, Miqne-Ekron, Dor, and Ashkelon, edited by S e y m o u r Gitin, p p . 41-59. Archaeological Institute of America Colloquia a n d C o n ference Papers, n o . 1. D u b u q u e , Iowa, 1995. Eitam, David, and A. Shomroni. "Research of the Oil-Industry during the Iron Age at T e l M i q n e . " In Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer and David Eitam, p p . 37-56. Haifa, 1987. Gitin, Seymour, a n d T r u d e Dothan. " T h e Rise and Fall of E k r o n of the Philistines: Recent Excavations at an U r b a n Border Site." Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987): 197-222. Gitin, Seymour. " T e l M i q n e - E k r o n in the Seventh C e n t u r y BCE: City Plan D e v e l o p m e n t . " In Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer and D a v i d Eitam, p p . 81-97. Haifa, 1987. Gitin, Seymour. "Incense Altars from Ekron, Israel, a n d Judah: C o n text and T y p o l o g y . " Eretz-Israel 20 (1989): 52-67. Gitin, Seymour. " T e l M i q n e : A Type-Site for the I n n e r Coastal Plain in the Iron Age II Period." In Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited by S e y m o u r Gitin and William G. Dever, p p . 23-58. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental R e search, 49. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1989. Gitin, Seymour. " E k r o n of the Philistines, P a r t II: Olive Oil Suppliers to the W o r l d . " Biblical Archaeology Review 16.2 (1990): 32-42, 59. Gitin, Seymour. " T h e Impact of Urbanization on a Philistine City: Tel M i q n e - E k r o n in the Iron Age II Period." In Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem 1989, p p . 277-284. Je rusalem, 1990. Gitin, Seymour. " L a s t D a y s of the Philistines." Archaeology 45.3 (1992): 26-31. Gitin, Seymour. " N e w Incense Altars from Ekron: Context, Typology, a n d Function." Eretz-Israel 23 (1992): 43-49. Gitin, Seymour. " S c o o p s : C o r p u s , Function, and T y p o l o g y . " In Stud ies in the Archaeology and History of Ancient Israel: In Honor of Moshe Dothan, edited by Michael Heltzer et al., p p . 99-126. Haifa, 1993. Gitin, Seymour. " Seventh Century BCE Cultic Elements at E k r o n . " In
MISHRIFEH Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second Interna tional Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by A v r a h a m Biran a n d Joseph Aviram, p p . 248-258. Jerusa lem, 1993. Gitin, Seymour. " T e l M i q n e - E k r o n in the Seventh Century BCE: T h e I m p a c t of E c o n o m i c Innovation a n d Foreign Cultural Influences o n a Neo-Assyrian Vassal City-State." In Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West. Reports on Kabri, Nami, Miqne-Ekron, Dor, and Ashkelon, edited by Seymour Gitin, p p . 61-79. Archaeological Insti tute of America Colloquia and Conference Papers, n o . 1. D u b u q u e , Iowa, 1995. Gittlen, Barry M . " T h e L a t e Bronze Age 'City' at T e l M i q n e / E k r o n . " Eretz-Israel 23 (1992): 50-53. G u n n e w e g , Jan, et al. " O n the Origin of Pottery from T e l M i q n e E k r o n . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 264 (1986): 3-16. Hesse, Brian. "Animal U s e at T e l M i q n e - E k r o n in the Bronze Age and Iron A g e . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 264 (1986): 17-27. N a v e h , Joseph. "Khirbet a l - M u q a n n a ' - E k r o n . " Israel Exploration Jour nals (1958): 87-100, 165-170. Porten, Bezalel. " T h e Identity of K i n g A d o n . " Biblical Archaeologist 44 (1981): 36-52. Taclmor, Hayim. "Philistia u n d e r Assyrian R u l e . " Biblical Archaeologist 29 (1966): 86-102. T R U D E D O T H A N and
SEYMOUR G I T I N
MIQVA'OT. See Ritual Baths.
MISHRIFEH, ruin located about 18 km (11 mi.) north east of Horns and about 35 km (22 mi.) southwest of Salamiyah, on the east side of Wadi Zora, in Syria (34°3o' N , 36°55' E). The wadi flows from south to north and runs into die al-'Asi (Orontes) River. Opposite the southwest corner of the tell is a spring. T h e houses of the village of Mishrifeh once covered the tell, but in 1980 the inhabitants were re moved to a new village along die west side of the tell. Mishrifeh, a 100-hectare (247 acres) ruin has been iden tified as Qatna. However, when Robert du Mesnil du Buisson began excavating there, die identification was not yet definite. During his second campaign (1927) many cunei form tablets were found referring to the site as alu kat-na, ki, alu kat-na, and in the Amarna tablets as alu kat-na, katna hi. In the hieroglyphic texts it was written as kdn3 by Thutmosis III; kdn by Amenhotep II; kdyn-3 by Amenhotep III; kdn3 by Seti I and Rameses III; and k3dns by Rameses II. T h e initial settlement at die site is obscure. In the Paleo lithic period it seems to have been a stopping-off place for nomads. Archaeological materials indicate tiiat Qatna played a pivotal role in the trade between Mesopotamia and the Syrian coast at the beginning of the third millennium. A Mesopotamian influence in the period of the tiiird dynasty at Ur appears, particularly in the pottery of tomb IV. [See Ur.] Qatna's copperworks demonstrate contact with the Syrian coastal cities. T h e discovery of Egyptian sculptural
35
fragments and the sphinx of Ita, the daughter of Amenemhat II (1929-1895 BCE) indicate that Qatna had good relations with Egypt in the first two centuries of the second millen nium B C E . Documents from the Mari archive reveal that an Amorite dynasty reigned in Qatna in the first half of the second mil lennium B C E . [See Mari Texts; Amorites.] It also had good relations with Shamshi-Adad of Assur and his son IsmahAdad of Mari, as well as with Alalakh, at the time of Alalakh (stratum VII). [See Assur; Alalakh.] However, Qatna's re lations witii its neighbors were not always good. At the end of the sixteenth century B C E , the Mitanni spread their control over the kingdom of Aleppo and then in all directions including Qatna in the south, where Plurrian immigrants already lived. [See Mitanni; I-Iurrians.] During die reign of Thutmosis I and Thuunosis III, Qatna was un der Egypt's control. T o all appearances there was a struggle between Egypt and the Mitanni to pull Qatna into the po litical sphere of one or the other. T h e struggle continued between Egypt and the Hatti. It is not entirely clear if the Hatti or another power destroyed Qatna. Some scholars be lieve that Suppiluliuma (1380-1340 BCE) plundered die city. There is, however, evidence that the city was settled by the Arameans in the first half of the first millennium B C E , and that in the Neo-Babylonian period it was an important trad ing center. [See Arameans.] The Temple of Nin-Egal was identified when cuneiform tablets with an inventory of the temple of the goddess, the lady of Qatna, were discovered. The goddess was worshiped in southern Mesopotamia and the name is Sumerian. [See Sumerians.] T h e plan of the temple is like the court of a palace of the period with a cella in its nortiieast corner. T h e palace itself was situated to the east of the temple, opening to the west. It contained a central court; an expanded court yard; a throne room, whose main entrance is in the south; and two small, square rooms for the toilet. T h e royal apart ment for the habitation of the king's family was situated op posite the north corner of the throne room. It was entered through a door that led to a waiting room. On the west side of the throne room is the royal residence. [See Palace.] The city plan shows Qatna girdled by imposing, approx imately square ramparts. Their average height is 15 m and they are constructed of tuff and soil, rather than mud bricks. There are four city gates, one on each side of the wall. T h e plan of the western and eastern gates, which consists of two pairs of flanking buttresses, resembles those excavated at Gezer in Israel and at Ebla and Tell 'Atchana (Alalakh) in Syria. [See Gezer; Ebla.] The so-called inventory of the Temple of Ninegal was found in 1927. It mentions objects, accounts, and adminis trative arrangements, as well as the names of kings and per sonal names. T h e majority of the names are Canaanite and Hurrian, and the syllabary is of a Hurrian type. T h e archive belongs to the fifteenth century B C E . According to the tab-
36
MITANNI
lets, Qatna was ruled by Canaanite kings and its population was Canaanite and Hurrite. Besides this inventory, five other tablets were found: a contract, two economic texts, an astrological text, and a fragmentary economic text. [See also Temples, article on Syro-Palestinian Temples; and Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bottero, Jean. " L e s inventaires de Qatna." Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientate 43 (1949): 1-41, 137-216. Bottero, Jean, "Autres textes de Qatna." Revue d'Assyriologie el d'Ar cheologie Orientale 44 (1950): 105-122. D u Mesnil d u Buisson, Robert. Le site archeologique de Michrife-Qatna. Paris, 1935. ALI ABOU
ASSAF
MITANNI. Probably first attested during the reign of Thutmosis I (1494-1482 BCE), and last mentioned during die reign of Tiglath-Pileser I (1114-1076), Mitanni is the name of a land also known as Hurri, "land of the Hurrians" in Hurrian, Hanigalbat (etymology unknown) in Assyrian and in the documents of Nuzi and Arrapha, Habigalbat in Babylonian, and Naharina or Nahrima in Egyptian (from the Semitic nhr, "river"), the Aram Naharayim of the Bible (Gn. 24:10). In about 1450 BCE, the boundaries of Mitanni stretched from the region of modern Kirkuk (Iraq) in the east, to the upper reaches of die Euphrates River in the north, and to the Orontes River and the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Its heartiand was the Khabur valley in northern Syria, where its capital, Wassukanni, was located. The exact location of Wassukanni is not known, and its identification with Sikani, modern Tell Fakhariyah is open to question. Mitanni's other important centers were Alalakh (modern Tell Atchana on the Upper Orontes), Nuzi (Gasur) and Arrapha in the region of Kirkuk, and Tell Brak in the Kha bur, where two tablets recovered in 1984 and 1986 mention the names of two kings of Mitanni. Mitanni was largely inhabited by Hurrians, an ethnic group attested in cuneiform sources since die tiiird millen nium. [See Hurrians.] They had migrated from the moun tainous areas north and northeast of Mesopotamia into Mes opotamia and Syria, where tiiey were heavily influenced by the local Sumerian and Semitic cultures. They spoke Hur rian, an agglutinative language, which is related to the Urartian language attested during the first millennium B C E . [See Hurrian.] Both of tiiese languages are thought to be con nected to Caucasian languages. In general, the Hurrians wrote in die Akkadian language, using the cuneiform script, but they also left a few documents written in Hurrian. [See Akkadian; Cuneiform.] In about die middle of the second millennium BCE, the Assyrians, a Semitic people who spoke and wrote in Akkadian, were subjects of Mitanni, as were
the West Semitic people of the Syrian city-states, such as Aleppo. A group of people speaking an Indo-European di alect also inhabited the land. They had migrated into the area from the east Anatolian mountains at an unknown date, bringing with them Indo-European names of men and gods, as well as Indo-European technical terms related to the breeding and training of horses. The names of the gods whom they worshiped were Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya, all known from the Veda. Their onomastica also sug gest that they worshiped the vayu, "wind," and svar, "heaven." Their term rnarijanni-na, "chariot driver," con tains die Old Indian element marya-, "young man"; their numbers from one to nine are Vedic. When tiiese speakers of Indo-European ruled Mitanni during the second millen nium B C E , they used Hurrian as their official language. A few royal letters written in this language have been found in el-Amarna in Egypt; a few members of die royal family had Hurrian names, such as Gilu-Hepa and Tatu-Hepa, names borne by two princesses. [See Assyrians; Indo-European Languages; Amarna, Tell el-.] T h e Indo-European speakers ruled over nortiiern Meso potamia and Syria, playing an important role on the international scene from die seventeenth to the fifteentii cen turies BCE. Because the capital and other important Mitanni centers had not yet been discovered, little is known about the beginning of their rise to power. Figure 1 is a list of kings of Mitanni attested by the sources. The first two kings of Mitanni, Kirta and his son Suttarna I, are known from a dynastic seal rolled over two documents from Alalakh. Parratarna is known from a tablet from Nuzi and die inscription of Idrimi, king of Halab/Aleppo, accordKirta
1 Suttarna I Parratarna Parsatatar
I Saustatar Artatama I
1 Suttarna II
I
I
Artasummara
Tu§ratta
Artatama II (rival ldng)
I
1
Sattiwazza
Suttarna III (rival king)
Sattuara I
I Wasasatta
I Sattuara II MITANNI. Figure 1. Kings of Mitanni. The downward arrows in dicate descent from father to son.
MITANNI ing to which, Parratarna had imposed his hegemony over the king of Halab. Saustatar and his father Parsatatar are known from a cylinder-seal impression on a letter from Nuzi. The first ruled both Alalakh and Kizzuwatna (later Cilicia), as well as Assyria and Nuzi, thus unifying the king dom of Mitanni from west to east. According to the treaty between Suppiluliuma of Hatti and Satriwazza of Mitanni, Saustatar took away a door of silver and gold from Assur and installed it in his palace in Wassukanni. Thutmosis III (1478-1424 BCE) and Thutmosis IV (1400-1390 BCE) of Egypt campaigned against Mitanni, aiming at imposing their hegemony over Syria. These campaigns were eventu ally followed by a peace treaty that was confirmed by dip lomatic marriages. Artatama I of Mitanni married his daughter to Thutmosis IV; Suttarna II married his daughter Gilu-Hepa to Amenophis III (1390-1352 B C E ) ; and Tusratta married his daughter Tatu-Hepa to die latter, as well as to the latter's successor, Amenophis IV (Akhenaten, ( 1 3 5 2 1336 B C E ) . Mitanni also faced a new threat to the nortii, from the Hittites, who later so weakened die land that it was engulfed by its former vassal Assyria. [See Hittites.] In a letter from el-Amarna, Tusratta informed his brother-in-law, Ameno phis III of Egypt, of a victory over Hatti. But after three "Syrian wars," Suppiluliuma of Hatti replaced the Mitanni federation in Syria with a Hittite federation and confined Tusratta and his son Sattiwazza to the Khabur valley in northern Syria. Moreover, he concluded a treaty with a "king of Hurri," Artatama II, while Tusratta was still on the throne of Mitanni. T h e final phase of Mitanni's political sur vival was marked by Assyrian interference. Ashur-Uballit I (1363-1328) supported Suttarna III against his enemy Sat tiwazza and the latter's Hittite allies and probably annexed Nuzi and Arrapha to Assyrian territory. Adad-nirari I (1305-1274) and Shalmaneser I (1273-1244) dealt with the last royal clan of Mitanni: Sattuara I, his son Wasasatta, and his grandson Sattuara II. After the defeat of Sattuara II by Shalmaneser I, very early in the latter's reign, Mitanni was annexed to Assyria and ceased to exist as a political entity. Mitanni's main cities have not yet been located, and diis land's material culture is evidenced only at eastern and west ern provincial sites, where architecture and sculpture are relatively rare compared with the minor arts (e.g., cylinderseals, figurines, wares). Mitanni's culture appears essentially to have been eclectic, involving mainly Mesopotamian and Old Syrian traditions. The palaces at Alalakh level IV (from the time of Parratarna and Saustatar) and at Tell Brak area IV (the time of Tusratta and Artasummara) share such unMesopotamian features as a northern location for the major reception rooms and an upper story approached by two stairways. T h e entrance hall of the palace at Alalakh had a monumental columned portico, a reminder of die bit-hilani, an architectural style adopted by the Assyrians for their pal aces and temples during the Neo-Assyrian period. This ar
37
chitecture was once thought to be of Hurro-Mitannian origin, but recent studies suggest a western, possibly Ae gean, influence. The temple at Tell Brak with its broadroom cella and shallow rabbet niche to the north, almost opposite die door, follows an Old Syrian plan known since die third millennium; die inset panels of engaged half col umns in the southern and eastern facades reflect the reli gious architectural tradition of Mesopotamia. The one and only sculpture from Mitanni, a small statue of fine-grained white or gray limestone found at Tell Brak, represents a seated male figure wearing a togalike garment and holding what may be a vase in front of him. The statue shares fea tures with the larger statue of Idrimi of Alalakh, which itself has Egyptian and Old Syrian characteristics. Syro-Mitannian glyptic uses two unequal registers of scenes that depict ritual, hunting, and ceremonial themes. Many other themes found in the glyptic, including winged disks, palmette trees, winged nude females, the storm god, and composite mon sters, derive from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Syrian, Cappadocian, and Aegean repertoires. The heavy use of the drill, a practice known since the third millennium, charac terizes Syro-Mitannian seals produced in mass quantities. Nuzi ware, a luxury ware commonly found in temples and palaces, associates Mesopotamian ceramic traditions with western elements of design. It is also attested at Alalakh and Tell Brak, although there local designs were also used. Glass and glazed wares, also luxury products, were produced in large number and widely distributed during the Mitannian period. [See also Alalakh; Brak, Tell; Khabur; Mesopotamia, ar ticle on Ancient Mesopotamia; and Nuzi.] BIBLIOGRAPHY D r o w e r , Margaret S, "Syria c. 1550-1400 B . C . " In The Cambridge An cient History, vol. 2.1, History of the Middle East and the Aegean Region c. 1800-1380 B.C., edited by I. E. S. Edwards et al., p p . 417-525. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1973. Useful historical survey that should be s u p plemented by recent studies. Finkel, Irving. "Inscriptions from Tell Brak, 1984." Iraq 47 (1985): 187— 201, pis. 340-d. Includes t h e only d o c u m e n t dated to the reign of Artasummara. Gotze, Albrecht. " T h e Struggle for the Domination of Syria, 14001300 B . C . " In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 2.2, The Middle East and the Aegean Region c. 1380-1000 B.C., edited by I. E. S. Edwards et al., p p . 1-20. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1975. Useful study, although dated by new archaeological a n d textual discoveries. Harrak, Amir. Assyria and Hanigalbat: A Historical Reconstruction of Bi lateral Relations from the Middle of the Fourteenth to the End of the 'Twelfth Centuries B.C. Hildesheim, 1987. A version of the historical events related to Mitanni's late history; uses archives recently dis covered in Syria a n d Iraq. Mingworth, N . J. J. "Inscriptions from Tell Brak, 1986." Iraq 50 (1988): 87-108. M o o r e y , P . R. S. " T h e Hurrians, the Mittani, and Technological In novation." In Archaeologia Iranica et Orientalis: Miscellanea in honorem Louis Vanden Berghe, edited by L e o n D e M e y e r and E. Haerinck, p p . 273-286. G h e n t , 1989. Discusses the role of the Mitannian king d o m in the development of glass a n d iron technology.
38
MOAB
Oates, David. "Excavations at Tell Brak, 1985-86." Iraq 49 (1987): 175-191. An exhaustive description of the Mitanni palace uncovered in area H H . Stein, Diana L. "Art and Architecture." In G e m o t Wilhelm's The Hur rians, p p . 80-90. Warminster, 1989. Up-to-date archaeological a n d artistic data related to t h e Hurrians and the Indo-Aryan kings of Mitanni. Stein has published an illustrated article on the same topic
in Reallexikon der Assyriologie 8 (1994): 296-299. Wilhelm, G e m o t . The Humans. Translated by Jennifer Barnes. W a r minster, 1989. Comprehensive and authoritative study of the H u r rians, based on available textual and archaeological sources; useful bibliography. Woolley, C. Leonard. Alalakh: An Account of the Excavations at Tell Atchana in the Hatay, 1937-1949. Oxford, 1955. Basic account; m u s t be used with new studies reinterpreting level IV; for a bibliography of the new studies, see Stein above. A M I R HARRAK
MOAB. Two inscriptions from Luxor, both dating to the reign of Rameses II (c. 1304-1237 B C E ) , provide the earliest certain epigraphic references to Moab. One of these inscrip tions, which apparentiy commemorates an Egyptian cam paign into Moab, is presented with scenes in relief depicting Egyptians attacking fortifications and mentions three towns by name: b(w)trt, yn(?)d, and tbniw. Both inscriptions render the name Moab witii the hieroglyphic determinative that in dicates a land or a region; other ancient sources verify that Moab was the region immediately east of the Dead Sea. Specifically, die Hebrew Bible refers to the people who lived in tiiat area as Moabites, and two royal inscriptions found there, the Mesha inscription and the Kerak fragment (see below) use the title "king of Moab" for local rulers. T h e tbniw of the Luxor inscription probably is to be identified with Dibon (present-day Dhiban), known otherwise from the Hebrew Bible and the Mesha inscription. The Balu stela also suggests an Egyptian presence in Moab at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The most important epigraphic source for ancient Moab is the famous Mesha inscription discovered at Dibon/Dhiban in 1868. Written in Canaanite (or Moabite) script on a basalt stela, the thirty-four lines identify Mesha as the king of Moab and report the major deeds of his reign. Those deeds include his successful struggle to "liberate" die region north of Dibon from Israelite control; numerous building projects, such as the temple to Kemosh, where the stela was erected; and the construction of a road across die Arnon River (Wadi el-Mujib). T h e Hebrew Bible also reports Mesha's successful rebellion against Israel and states that this occurred following King Ahab's death (2 Ks. 3:6-27), which would place Mesha's reign in the second half of the ninth century B C E . Parts of only four lines of the Kerak fragment survive, but it is enough to reconstruct the name of one [KJmlyt, also identified as king of Moab. It has been sug gested that this [KJmsyt was Mesha's father, whose name is partially preserved (Kms[.J) in the Mesha inscription. This c
is what speculative, however, because the theophoric ele ment Kms was typical of royal Moabite names. Of the few archaeological sites excavated in Moab, most are situated north of the Arnon/Wadi el-Mujib. T h e follow ing have produced Late Bronze and/or Iron Age remains (listing from north to south): Khirbet el-'Al, Hesban, Dhi ban (Dibon), Lehun, 'Ara'ir, Balu', and Khirbet el-Medeineh (i.e., Medeinet el-Mu'arrajeh, overlooking Wadi elLejjun). Especially for the area south of the Arnon/Mujib, therefore, the available archaeological evidence derives largely from surface surveys. It seems clear tiiat the region had a rather sparse sedentary population during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, but experienced a significant in crease in the number of settlements during the Iron Age. This trend probably began near the end of the Late Bronze Age and reached a high point in Iron II. Early in the Iron Age some small but strategically located fortifications al ready appear—Khirbet 'Akuzeh, on the southern rim of the Kerak plateau; ed-Deir on its western edge; and the two Khirbet Medeinehs on the eastern side, overlooking Wadi el-Lejjun. These suggest the beginnings of an organized de fensive strategy early in die Iron Age, although not neces sarily a unified territorial state encompassing the whole area east of the Dead Sea, as the Hebrew Bible seems to presup pose. Specifically, the Hebrew Bible speaks of a race of giants, die Emim, who occupied the land of Moab before the M o abites (Gn. 14:5; Dt. 2:10-11). It identifies the Moabites themselves as descendants of Lot's eldest daughter (Gn. 19:30-38) and presupposes a unified Moabite kingdom witii fixed boundaries already in place when the Israelites passed through Transjordan during their exodus from Egypt (e.g., Nm. 21:26; 22:4). T h e Hebrew Bible is not a firsthand source, however, and die picture it presents of ancient Moab clearly is legendary, as well as influenced by theological and ideal notions regarding early Israel. T h e various Moabite kings mentioned in the Bible (to the extent that they are in fact historical people), as well as the Shasu king (?) featured in the Balu' inscription, may have been tribal chieftains or lords over local city-states. Among the former are Balak, who is said to have engaged the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites while they were camped in the plains of Moab (Nm. 22-24); Eglon, who is reported to have oppressed Is rael during die time of the Judges (Jgs. 3:12-30); andMesha, who reportedly paid an annual tribute to Israel of a hundred thousand lambs and the wool of a hundred tiiousand rams but rebelled after Ahab's death. T h e Mesha inscription provides a firsthand look at polit ical circumstances in Moab during the ninth century B C E . T h e kingdom Mesha inherited from his father seems to have consisted essentially of the city-state of Dibon, for which Wadi el-Mujib and Wadi el-Wale would have provided nat ural boundaries. From this base he claims to have expanded his domain northward as far as Madaba, fortified 'Aro'er
MOABITE STONE ('Ara'ir), presumably to protect the road he built across the Arnon/Mujib, and conducted at least one military campaign into die region south of the Arnon (depending on the lo cation of Horonaim mentioned in line 31). However, the geographic range of his building activities as reported in the inscription implies that, except for possible military excur sions, the Moabite territory south of the Arnon was beyond the limits of his domain. Mesha credited his successes to the Moabite god Kemosh, and the inscription stood in a temple dedicated to Kemosh. Assyrian texts indicate that Moab, along with die other peoples of Transjordan, became Assyrian vassals following Tiglath-Pileser Ill's western campaigns in 734-732 B C E . This status involved payments of heavy tribute to Assyria, but also Assyrian protection, which seems to have been needed primarily against the nomadic Qederites, who roamed the desert regions east and southeast of Damascus. Also learned from these Assyrian texts are the names of four additional Moabite kings and otiier bits of information about Moab's involvement in international affairs. A fragment of a clay tablet discovered at Nimrud lists Salamanu of Moab among the Icings who paid tribute to Tiglath-Pileser shortiy after 734 B C E . A prism fragment from the reign of Sargon II suggests that Moab was implicated in an anti-Assyrian revolt led by Ashdod in 713 B C E . A Kammusunadbi of Moab is mentioned among local Palestinian kings who sent presents to assure Sennacherib of their loyalty when he marched against Philistia and Judah in 701 B C E . In addition, a King Musuri of Moab appears in a list of kings who transported building materials to Nineveh during the reign of Esarhaddon, as well as in anotiier list of local rulers who sent presents to Ashurbanipal and supported his wars against Egypt. T w o more texts from Ashurbanipal's region report Assyrian mil itary action against the Qederites. One of these texts men tions a King Kamashaltu of Moab, who seems to have played a major role in the action. (For documentation of the Assyrian references to Moab, see J. Maxwell Miller, "Moab and the Moabites" in Dearman, ed., 1989, pp. 1-40.) Josephus (Antiq. 10.9.7) states that Nebuchadrezzar made war on the Ammonites and Moabites and brought them un der Babylonian control. Presumably, the peoples of Trans jordan submitted to Persia as well, but there is no specific evidence of this. [See also 'Ara'ir; Balu'; Central Moab; Dibon; Kerak; Lehun; Medeineh, Khirbet el-; and Moabite Stone.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bienkowski, Piotr, ed, Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan. Sheffield, 1992. Essays focusing on the t r a n sition from t h e Late Bronze to t h e Iron Age in southern Transjordan and therefore attentive to issues pertaining to t h e origins of the M o abite a n d Edomite monarchies. K e n n e t h A. Kitchen's essay, " T h e Egyptian Evidence on Ancient J o r d a n " (pp. 21-30), is especially use ful. D e a r m a n , A n d r e w , ed. Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab. A t
39
lanta, 1989. N ine essays that c o m b i n e to provide a comprehensive overview of recent studies, issues, a n d views pertaining to ancient M o a b . J. Maxwell Miller's essay, " M o a b a n d the M o a b i t e s " (pp. 1 40), provides full documentation for references to M o a b in biblical and other ancient sources. Miller, J. Maxwell. " T h e Israelite Journey through (around) M o a b a n d Moabite T o p o n y m y . " Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 577595. Analysis of key biblical texts relevantfor locating Moabite places mentioned in the H e b r e w Bible a n d the M e s h a inscription. Reed, William L., and F r e d V. Winnett. " A F r a g m e n t of a n Early M o abite Inscription from K e r a k . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, n o . 172 (1963): 1-9. Initial publication of the fragment that reconstructs the king's n a m e as [K]msyt a n d identifies h i m as Mesha's father. T i m m , Stefan. Moab zwischen den Machten: Studien zu historischen Denkmalern und Texten. Wiesbaden, 1989. Comprehensive treatment of epigraphic evidence pertaining to ancient M o a b . Worschech, U d o F. C h . Die Beziehungen Moabs zu Israel und Agypten in der Eisenzeit: Siedlungsarchaologische und siedlungshistorische Untersuchungen im Kemland Moabs (Ard el-Kerak). Wiesbaden, 1990. Based on his own archaeological explorations in t h e Moabite region, Worschech argues for an early M o a b i t e territorial monarchy already in place by the beginning of Iron I. J. MAXWELL M I L L E R
MOABITE STONE. T h e inscription of Mesha, king of Moab, known both as die Moabite Stone and as the Mesha Stone/Inscription, was the first (1868) of the major epigraphic documents discovered in either Cis- or Trans jordan and couched in a language closely related to Hebrew (see figure 1 ) . More than a century later, it is still one of the most important of the Canaanite inscriptions, providing data on the religion, history, geography, language, and thought of the Moabite people. The discovery did not take place in the course of regular excavations, and attempts by Europeans to obtain the stela from local inhabitants resulted in die inscription being bro ken into pieces, Many fragments were recovered, but our knowledge of approximately one-third of the text rests on a partial and inexpert copy of the intact stela and on a squeeze hastily taken before the stone was broken. As is often the case with antiquities discovered at the dawn of modern sci entific archaeological research, there is no readily identifia ble editio princeps (on matters of discovery and early publi cations, see Clermont-Ganneau, 1887, and M. P. Graham in Dearman, 1989, pp. 41-92). T h e text deals with the deeds of Mesha, the defeat of his enemies, and the construction projects his new glory per mitted (on die questions of text structure and literary genre, see Smelik 1990, 1992). T h e greatest of these projects was designated by the term qrhh, apparentiy a quarter of die cap ital city of Dibon, wherein Mesha erected a bmt, a type of sanctuary (cf. Hebrew bama), in which the inscription itself was deposited (1.3). He (re)built the walls, the gates, and the towers of the qrhh, as well as a palace within, and in stalled waterworks (11. 21-26). For the correlation of archae-
40
MOABITE STONE (Israel, 1987; 1992, pp. 105-110). The primary isoglosses are monophthongization of -ay- and -aw- diphthongs and -n as the plural marker of masculine nouns and adjectives (for details, see Israel, 1984; and K. P. Jackson in Dearman, 1989; pp. 96-130). A fragment of another monumental in scription providing the name of Mesha's father, Kemoshyatti, was published in 1963 (Reed and Winnett, 1963; Swiggers, 1982); more recentiy, a brief text on papyrus appeared that was identified by its editors as belonging to a dialect of Moabite (Bordreuil and Pardee, 1990). [See also Dibon; and Moab.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bordreuil, Pierre, and Dennis Pardee. " L e p a p y r u s du m a r z e a h . " Semitica {Hommages a Maurice Sznycer, vol. 1) 38 (1990): 49-68. Editio princeps of a brief text in what may be a Moabite dialect. C le r mont- G anne au, Charles S. " L a stele de M e s a . " Journal Asiatique 9 (1887): 72-112. Early description of the stela and of previous at te mpts at deciphering the text. D e a r m a n , Andrew, ed. Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab. American Schools of Oriental Research, Society of Biblical Litera ture, Archaeological and Biblical Studies, 2. Atlanta, 1989. Collection of survey articles by various scholars on aspects of Moabite studies. See in particular M . Patrick G r a h a m , " T h e Discovery and R e c o n struction of the M e s h a Inscription" (pp. 41-92), and K e n t P . Jack son, " T h e L a n g u a g e of the M e s h a Inscription" (pp. 96-130). C o n tains extensive bibliographical information on previous research; however, data are indicated only in footnotes and with an inconve nient form of cross-reference in subsequent notes. Israel, Felice. "Geographic Linguistics and Canaanite Dialects." In Current Progress in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics: Papers of the Third Inter national Hamito-Semitic Congress, edited by James B y n o n , p p . 363387. Current Issues in Linguistic T h e o r y , vol. 28. A m s t e r d a m , 1984. Linguistic description of M o a b i t e in contrast with neighboring lan guages.
MOABITE
STONE.
Figure i.
The Moabite Stone. (Courtesy A S O R
Archives)
ological data from Dibon with the text of the Moabite stone, see A. D. Tushingham (1990). The (re)building activity ex tended beyond Dibon, to other towns (11. 26-28). The enemy was the Israelite Omride dynasty, which had occupied Moab "for many days" (1.5), indeed "forty years" (1.8). Both the Omride occupation and the defeat of the occupiers is described as the work of the deity Kemosh, who had first "been angry with his land" (11. 5-6) and then "re stored it" (11. 8-9). T h e interpretation of particular details is uncertain, as is any correlation with data from other sources—for example, the chronology of the Omrides or the geography of both the Israelite occupation and of the Mo abite borders with Ammon to the north and Edom to the south (on tiiese matters, see Timm, 1989; Smelik, 1992; and die bibliographies therein). This text constitutes the primary source for the Moabite language, for most otiier inscriptions identified as Moabite belong to the category of minor inscriptions, such as seals
Israel, Felice. "Studi moabiti I: Rassegna di epigrafia moabita e i sigilli moabiti." In Atti delta 4" giornata di studi Camito-Semitici e Indeuropei, edited by Giuliano Bernini a n d V e r m o n d o Brugnatelli, p p . 101-138. Quaderni della Collana di Linguistica Storica e Descrittiva, 1. Milan, 1987. Overview of Moabite inscriptions, the best attested category being seals. Israel, Felice. " N o t e di onomastica semitica 7/2: Rassegna critico-bibliografica e d epigrafica su alcune onomastiche palestinesi; L a T r a n s giordania." Studi Epigrafici e Linguistiei 9 (1992): 95-114. M o a b i t e onomastics in the Transjordanian context. Reed, William L., and Fred V. Winnett. " A F r a g m e n t of an Early M o abite Inscription from Kerak." Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 172 (1963): 1-9. Editio princeps of the Kerak in scription. Smelik, K. A. D . " T h e Literary Structure of K i n g M e s h a ' s Inscrip tion." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 46 (1990): 21-30. Smelik, K. A. D . " K i n g M e s h a ' s Inscription: Between History a n d Fic tion." Oudtestamentische Studien 28 (1992): 59-92. Study of the text as a literary d o c u m e n t in praise of M e s h a a n d of its value as a his torical document. Swiggers, Pierre. " T h e Moabite Inscription of el-Kerak." Annali: Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 42 (1982): 521-525. Careful historical and linguistic study of the Kerak inscription. T i m m , Stefan. Moab zwischen den Machten: Studien zu historischen Denkmalern und Texten. Agypten u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , vol. 17. Wiesbaden, 1989. Critical study of all Moabite epigraphic material
MONASTERIES and of references to M o a b in other sources (e.g., Egyptian a n d bib lical). T u s h i n g h a m , A. D . "DhTban Reconsidered: K i n g M e s h a a n d His W o r k s . " Annual of lite Department of Antiquities of Jordan 34 (1990): 183-192. Overview of archaeological work at Tell D h i b a n ( D i b o n ) , correlated with the M e s h a inscription. D E N N I S PARDEE
41
analogy with die coasdine at Faza, to the north, the harbor of Muza should be sought at least 5 1cm (3 mi.) south of Mocha and inland: at Faza, early medieval port sites are found stranded to the south and east of present-day lagoons. Prevailing onshore winds and tides have a tendency to create sand bars which form natural anchorages for shallowdrafght boats. In time, the lagoons silt up, and anotiier nat ural harbor forms farther north.
MOCHA (Ar., al-Mukha), city located in the harbor of a natural lagoon on the Red Sea coast of the Republic of Yemen ( i 3 ° i 9 ' N , 43°is' E). T h e name of the port is syn onymous with coffee. Legend attributes the invention of coffee drinking and, hence, the foundation of the town to a local fifteenth-century CE hermit, Shaykh 'Ali ibn 'Umar Shadhili, who died in 1418 ( A H 821). Mocha was the sole port for the shipment of coffee during the Yemeni monopoly on production of the crop (c. 1550-1725 C E ) . T h e city was linked by road with Bayt al-Faqih, to the north, which was the emporium for collecting the bales from die mountainous interior where the coffee grew. Before the arrival of European traders (i.e., before the sev enteenth century C E ) , Mocha served as a small port in the Egypt-India trade. It grew in importance after Ottoman Turkish measures against die Portuguese restricted trading activity at the port of Aden. English and Dutch factories were established first under Ottoman authority in 1618; the height of the coffee trade was reached between about 1660 and 1780. T h e French did not establish a factory until 1713, but they successfully transplanted coffee bushes to Reunion, breaking the Yemeni monopoly. There have been no excavations at Mocha. T h e city's ar chaeological history is mostiy derived from European de scriptions, including lithographs. Mocha had no city walls until shortiy after 1700. Eighteenth-century descriptions are consistent in tiieir disparaging remarks about die flimsiness of the masonry—too thin to resist canon shot and a suitable deterrent only for cavalry or those witiiout artillery. Aerial photographs taken in die 1970s show the position of the walls and the defensive bastions. T h e two most significant monuments are the tombs of Shaykh al-Shadhili and Shayldi al-Amudi. The settlement was severely damaged by offshore bombardment during Italian-Turkish engagements before World War I. Worse devastation was inflicted by a flash flood from the mountains that sent a wall of water 1 m deep as far as the sea. T h e name of Mocha is inextricably linked with that of Muza, the pre-Islamic port listed in the Periplus of the Ery thraean Sea, which describes it as a station between Berenice in Egypt and Barygaza in India. T h e archaeological quest for the location is hampered by die similarity of the names of Muza, Mukha, and Mawza'—the latter located 251cm (15 mi.) inland, which Ptolemy describes as die town associated with the port of Muza. Numerous, mostiy informal expe ditions have tried to locate Muza, but to no avail. In an
BIBLIOGRAPHY Donzel, E. J . van. " A l - M u k h a . " In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 7 , p p . 513-516. Leiden, i960-. Covers the Periplus era, as well as the coffee trade. H a t t o x , Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Bev erage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle, 1985). Provides a more crit ical analysis of the Shadhili legend than M a c r o (i960, below). Huntingford, G. W . B. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Hakluyt S o ciety, Second Series, no. 151. L o n d o n , 1980. Supercedes the m u c h quoted c o m m e n t a r y by Wilfred Schoff (New York, 1912). M a c r o , Eric. " N o t e s on M o c h a . " In Bibliography on Yemen and Notes on Mocha, edited by E r i c M a c r o , p p . 31-63. Coral Gables, Fla., i960. M a c r o , Eric. " T h e T o p o g r a p h y of M o c h a . " Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 10 (1980): 55-66. T h i s and the above report are supplemented by artist's illustrations published by Macro in Pro ceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies (1982, 1984, 1987). E . J. K E A L L
MONASTERIES. T h e foundation of a monastery was preceded everywhere in die Near East by individual ancho rites, whose fame attracted pious individuals to settle near them to benefit from their experience and counsel. It was in this way tiiat communities of monies came into being. Al though Eusebius does not mention monasticism in his Ec clesiastical History, which was written before 325 C E (sug gesting that monasticism was not yet considered a significant trend witiiin Christianity), the first monasteries in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine had already emerged by that time. By the middle of die fourth century the movement had spread, and by the last quarter of that century monasteries were common throughout the Near East. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the movement became strong and wealthy and was a dominant factor in the Christian church and in Byzantine society. In different parts of the Christian world, depending on local cultural and social and national affinities, there were diverse answers to the question "What is the proper way to conduct monastic life?" T h e variety of monastic systems gave rise to the emergence of several types of monasteries with particular architectural plans. The design and con struction of monasteries were also determined by regional building traditions. Once the movement had grown and taken shape, two main types of organized monastic life emerged. In each the monks were subordinate to an abbot or priest and dieir life was regulated by rules, either oral or written, In the ceno-
42
MONASTERIES
bium (from the Greek koinos bios, "common life"), monks lived within a walled compound; the laura (Gk., "alley") was a community of anchorites in which each monk lived alone in his cell or with one or two fellow monks or disciples. The cells were dispersed around core buildings—a church, kitchen and bakery, storerooms, and other communal build ings. A network of constructed paths communicated be tween the cells and the core. Cenobitic monks met each other daily, during common meals and prayers. In the laura these encounters occurred only on weekends and at feasts. T h e framework of the laura can therefore be considered to have been semicenobitic. Cenobia were found everywhere in die Near East, while laurae were restricted mainly to Egypt, Palestine, and Sinai (although they were known in Cappadocia, on Mt. Olympus in Bithynia, and on Mt. Latros [Latmos] in Caria). [See Cappadocia.] There were sig nificant differences in the life-styles between the Pachomian cenobia (see below) in Egypt and the Syrian ones, on the one hand, and the Basilian cenobia (see below) of Asia Mi nor and Palestine on the other hand. There also were dif ferences between the vast anchorite colonies at Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis, where several thousand monks lived in each, and the modest Palestinian laurae or the tiny, remote colo nies of Sinai. By die sixth century, a composite institution was also found throughout the Levant: a cenobium with a few anchorites or recluses living within its wall or in im mediate proximity to its walls. Almost all of the communal buildings found in a cenobium were also present in the core of a laura, except that the latter had no walls or gates. Typologically, both kinds of monasteries were constructed ei ther on a plain, a moderately hilly area, or steep cliffs. Egypt. Because, in Egypt, brick was the common building material, the state of preservation of monastery buildings is much poorer than in Syria and Palestine. In the inhabited monasteries, like those in Wadi 'n-Natrun, or like St. Antony and St. Paul, medieval and recent reconstruction work masks the original layout. Two main monastic systems were born in Egypt: one, propagated in Lower Egypt by Antony (251-356 CE) and his disciples, was semicenobitic; the second, founded by Pachomius (c. 290-346 CE) in Upper and Middle Egypt, was a true cenobitic system. The best-known Antonian colonies were those on Mt. Nitria (founded c. 315), in Kellia (estab lished in 338), and in Scetis (established between 330 and 340). The monks in tiiese colonies numbered several thou sand. Other communities of this type were die Mustafa Kasif at el-Khargah; Der al-Dik, Der Sombat, and Der Abu Henes in the region of Antinoe (Martin, 1971); and perhaps also die early phases of the excavated Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit and Apa Jeremias at Saqqara (Cledat, 19041916; Quibel, 1912; Grossmann and Severin, 1982). [SeeNi tria; Saqqara.] Pachomius founded his first monastery in about 323 in Tabennesi. His second foundation, Phbow (in 329), became
his largest and most important. At die time of his death, nine monasteries and two nunneries were united in his commu nity, the Pachomian federation (koinonia). They later in creased to twenty-four, comprising several thousand monks. A Pachomian monastery was also established in Metanoia, not far from Alexandria. Shenoute, who headed the White Monastery (Deir el-Abiad) near Sohag in the first half of the fifth century, modified the Pachomian system by not advocating extreme asceticism. He permitted a monk to withdraw to the desert after a few years of cenobitic life, without completely cutting ties with the community. Such was the life-style of the cell dwellers associated with the Monastery of Epiphanius near Thebes in Upper Egypt and of the monks who inhabited the cells west of Esna. Egyptian laurae such as these reused the burial caves from the pharaonic and Roman periods that are found along many stretches of the Nile Valley as well as in the Delta (Martin, 1967). [See Delta.] Such anchorite settlements had a nearby cenobium serving as its core. The core buildings at each of the four communities in Scetis included a church; a tower of refuge, or keep (Ar., qasr); a kitchen, bakery, and dining room; and storehouses for food. T h e monks' cells were scattered at short distances from each other in unwalled colonies. Unlike Mustafa Kasif and St. Antony, where perimeter walls were built in the fifth and sixth centuries, the core buildings at Scetis were not surrounded by a wall until the ninth century, and in the fourteenth century monies were no longer permitted to dwell outside the walls (Evelyn-White, 1932-1933; Walters, 1974)The sixth-century laura at Der el-Dik consisted of fifteen rock-cut cells, two churches similarly constructed, and pre sumably also a qasr. A large walled structure (146 X 92 m) nearby that might have served as a cenobium was con structed after the cells were abandoned. Kellia (Gk., "cells") is identified with the sites of Qusur al-Ruba iyyat, Qasr Waheida, Qusur Isa, Qusur el-'Izeila, Qusur el-'Abid, Qusur Hegeila, and Qusur 'Ereima. T h e colony extended for more than 22 km (14 mi.). T h e col lapsed cells, built of mud bricks, created more than fifteen hundred mounds, which are clearly visible on the ground. T h e mapping of Kellia was done with the aid of aerial pho tographs, and each mound (kom) was given a separate num ber (Daumas and Guillaumont, 1969; Kasser, 1967, 1972, 1980,1983, 1984; Bridel, 1986). T h e earliest hermitages in Kellia were modest in scale and lacked an encircling wall. However, those built in the late fifdi-early sixth centuries were more spacious and elaborate. A typical spacious Kelliot hermitage, dated to the sixth cen tury, is the early phase of kom 167, whose rectangular, walled area is about 15 X 27.5 m in size, T h e kom was composed of a spacious dwelling with many rooms; its water-supply installations included a well, a pool, channels, and a toilet; a courtyard area contained a garden. [See Pools.] T h e dwellc
c
MONASTERIES ing (10.30 X 9.70 m) was in two parts, each with several rooms: the larger area included a kitchen and food store rooms and was occupied by the senior monk; the smaller one, attached to it on the south, was used by a disciple or an attendant. Each section had its own chapel (oratory), a spacious room whose walls were ornamented with frescoes. [See Wall Paintings.] T h e ceilings were of brick vaulting. From the first quarter of the seventh century onward, in stead of isolated hermitages dispersed tiiroughoutthe desert, at Kellia hermitages were grouped into a compound sur rounded by a shallow wall. T h e result was a cenobiumlike construction, a ma-nshubeh (Copt., "dwelling"). A qasr was built later. However, the monks continued to maintain the daily life of hermits, not of cenobites. Such a monastery can be found in the final stage of kom 219, excavated by the French expedition (Daumas and Guillaumont, 1969). Within the wall about ten hermitages are each comprised of several rooms. T h e communal structures included a kitchen, latrines, the courtyard, and cisterns. [See Cisterns.] How ever, isolated hermitages persisted even side by side with these monasteries. There were many churches at Kellia. T h e main and most ancient church appears to have been the one discovered at Qusur Isa (South 1) and excavated by the University of Geneva (Kasser, 1983,1984). T h e second ec clesiastical center was at Qasr Waheida ( = kom 34), exca vated by the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology at Cairo (Descoeudres, 1988). c
T h e nine cells excavated to the west of Esna, dated to 550650, are spacious subterranean complexes cut to a depth of about 3.5 m below the surface. T h e walls and floors were plastered and whitewashed. T h e simpler type had a single prayer chapel, courtyard, bedroom, and storeroom. T h e kitchen was equipped with elaborate cooking devices, in cluding a stove and a baldng oven witii an improved aircirculation system. T h e second type had two chapels and two courtyards (Sauneron and Jacquet, 1972). At the Apa Jeremias monastery at Saqqara, the dwellings had three components: a small courtyard, an outer room that served as a living room, and an inner room with a niche in the eastern wall that served as an oratory. It seems that there was also a second story (Quibel, 1912). T h e structure of the cells at Bawit is similar (Cledat, 1904-1916). At both sites, and near Esna, the rooms also had air shafts. T h e Pachomian cenobium, inhabited by several hundred monks, was surrounded by a wall; its plan resembled that of a military camp, although die wall was not a fortification wall. T h e best-preserved example of a Pachomian cenobium is Deir al-Balaiza near Asyut (Grossman, 1993). It is con structed on a moderate slope that descended eastward; its walls encircle a trapezoidal area (200 X 50-250 sq m). Many of its structures are preserved to two or three stories: three or four churches, a bakery, two refectories, and several dor mitories. Its estimated population was about one thousand monks. T h e wall had a gatehouse on the east, with a guest
43
house next to it, on the outside. T h e entire layout and struc ture parallel the literary sources (Patrich, 1995, pp. 17-22), according to which a Pachomian monastery included an as sembly hall (Gk., synaxis) for prayer, a community dining hall, a kitchen, a bakery, a hospital, and storehouses for ag ricultural produce and other foodstuffs and work tools. There were various workshops and folds for pigs and ani mals used for plowing and for transport. (Camels and boats were used for transportation.) [See Pigs; Camels; Transpor tation.] T h e literary sources report that the monks in each mon astery were divided into houses (Gk., oikoi) comprised of twenty to forty men. Each tiiree or four houses constituted a tribe. T h e dwellings created a barracldike structure. Each house was to include an assembly hall for lessons, discourse, and prayer as well. Initially, one monk lived in each cell, but in a later period three monks are known to have lived in a single cell. Such cells were found in the excavations of the sixth-century Monastery of St. Simeon (Anba Hadra) near Aswan. T h e cells in die monastery's keep opened onto a central corridor (Monneret de Villard, 1927). The cells at Deir Fakhoury near Esna were similarly arranged (Walters, 1974, p. 110). However, at Deir al-Balaiza the monks lived in dormitories (Grossman, 1993). T h e refectory at the Apa Jeremias monastery at Saqqara measures about 22 X 10.5 m. Three rows of columns divide the room along its longitudinal axis. Six windows were set in the north wall; traces of stone benches along the eastern wall indicate that the dining tables were long (there are also indications of a round table). Another hall (10 X 20 m) has been identified by inscription as an infirmary (Quibel, 1912; Grossman and Severin, 1982). Niches and cupboards were built in its walls. At Anba Hadra the refectory is also a rec tangular hall divided along its axis by a row of four columns. On the stone floor are traces of eight circular brick tables; water tanks were built near the walls. Another refectory with a central row of columns was found in kom 34 (Qasr Wa heida) at Kellia. Monastic churches are rectangular, oriented to the east, and have straight, outward walls—no apse protrudes. Gen erally, tiiere were two entrances—on die north and on the south. Where there was a narthex, a tiiird enttance was set in the western wall. The numerous entrances of the White Monastery (Monneret de Villard, 1925-1926) are rare. Churches were basilical in design, with the nave much wider than the aisles. [See Basilicas.] Occasionally, galleries are seen. The sanctuary was generally single apsidal or trifoliated, widi two sacristies—one on the north and one on the south. On the west tiiere was an endo- and/or an exonarthex. T h e "soudiern narthex" in the White and Red Monasteries near Sohag is an unusual feature in its placement. The main building material for churches was brick. Stone was used only for the more important churches, at least in their lower courses. T h e White Monastery is remarkable because it was
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MONASTERIES
built of white limestone, including its floors, doorframes, and decorated architectural members. T h e main center of pilgrimage in Egypt was the shrine of St. Menas at the town of Abu Mina (Mareotis; Grossman, 1986). Sinai. The small monasteries and hermitages in the Sinai desert have been studied extensively in recent years (Finkelstein, 1985; Tsafrir, 1993; Dahari, in press), as has the St. Catherine Monastery (see below). Uzi Dahari (Tsafrir, ed.; 1993) recorded seventy monastic sites in the high moun tains of Sinai, seventeen of which appear in the literary sources. He estimates the population of monks in Sinai to have been about six hundred at the apogee of monastic life. A second monastic center, at PUiaithou, was identified by Dahari (Tsafrir, ed., 1993) at modern Sheikh Raia, near the western shore of the peninsula. T h e cells discovered in die monastic centers on Jebel Safsafa and Jebel Sirbal in Sinai are generally small, narrow alcoves built under large boulders or in overhangs, with at least one masonry wall. Complex 250 on Jebel Safsafa is unique in that it is more spacious and is composed of a courtyard, vestibule, and a living room; site 2 tiiere, which is a narrow alcove, is the prevalent type of cell (Finkelstein, 1985). The cells at Bir Abu-Sweira, a monastic site near Rhaithou, are also small. Partially rock cut, each cell is a room with several niches in its eastern wall that served as a private chapel. T h e monks in the high mountains con structed gardens and irrigation systems near their hermit ages. Each monk cultivated an average plot of 325 sq m for his livelihood. The fortified St. Catherine monastery was both a monas tic center and a pilgrimage site (Forsyth, 1973; Grossmann, 1988). Most of its structures were two to three stories high and were constructed along the circumference walls (about 75 X 85 m): dwellings, a refectory, a kitchen and a bakery, and storerooms. T h e magnificent basilical Church of Justin ian (20 X 37 m) inside the compound, was built sometime between 548 and 565, next to the "burning bush." Its eastwest orientation is askew to the wall lines. A guesthouse and fourth-century tower of refuge are alongside it. T h e "Well of Moses" is located to the north of the church. T h e rest of die area inside the walls is free of constructions. Ancient Palestine. T h e first monks known by name are Hilarion (291-371) of Tabatha (near Gaza), who started his monastic career about 308, and Chariton, a native of Iconium (Konya) in Asia Minor, the founder of monasticism in die Judean Desert. In the beginning, the laura was the most common type of monastic settlement in the Judean Desert. Chariton established his first monastery, Pharan, there in about 330. At that time anchorites also lived among the reeds of the Jordan River. Chariton later established two other monasteries: Douka, overlookingjericho, and Souka, notfar fromTekoa. [See Jericho.] Monasticism spread throughout Palestine during the fourth century, and monasteries—
mainly cenobia—were established in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and in otiier holy places connected with Jesus' life, as well as in the lowland (Shephelah) and Gaza. [See Bethlehem.] Unlike in Egypt and Syria, Palestinian monasticism was not an indigenous movement; it was mainly a Greek-speak ing one, with a cosmopolitan flavor. Influences were intro duced both from Egypt and from Asia Minor, from whence most of the Palestinian monastic leaders came. T h e outcome was something original, however, and in die mid-fifth cen tury Palestine became a monastic center on its own, attract ing monks and admirers from the entire Christian world. T h e most comprehensive archaeological and historical studies refer to monasticism in the Judean Desert (Hirschfeld, 1992; Patrich, 1995). The ruins of some sixty monas teries and monastic installations were explored in this area, some of which (Kuiirbet el-Murasas, Khirbet el-Kiliya, Khan el-Ahmar, Khirbet ed-Deir) have been excavated completely (Bottini et a l , 1990). All others were surveyed comprehensively. Five monasteries on the fringes of the de sert, adjacent to Bethlehem, were excavated by Virgilio Corbo (1955). Information from other regions of die coun try is more fragmentary. T h e sixtli-century Monastery of Martyrius (Khirbet elMurasas) is the best representative among the cenobia. T h e compound is rectangular (78 X 68 m) and surrounded by a 0.7-meter-thick stone wall preserved to a height of 1-2 m. It originally was about 4 m high. The main entrance was in the eastern wall and had stables next to it. T h e church, a typical monastery chapel (29.5 X 6.60 m ) , had a narthex on the west, an elongated diaconicon (15 X 4.6 m) on the south, and a mortuary chapel on the north. T h e northern wing included the dwelling cave of die founder monk, which later served as a burial ground. [See Burial Sites.] T h e vast refec tory (31 X 25 m) was basilical in shape, with galleries on three sides. Adjacent to it was the kitchen, with a cellar and an upper floor. T h e dwelling areas, with two other chapels, were on die southwest, on the second floor of the structures that surrounded a central courtyard. An exceptional struc ture, a small bathhouse (9 X 1 3 m ) , was located on die west. T h e monastery was equipped witii vast underground cis terns and drainage channels, as well as with storerooms. T h e floors of all the structures were decorated with colorful mo saics, large portions of which are preserved. [See Mosaics.] Open spaces and passages were paved with flagstones. On die exterior, near the nortiieast corner, was a hostel (28 X 43 m), including a stable and a chapel. Nearby, on the out skirts of die complex, three gardens had been irrigated by stone-cut channels. [See Irrigation.] Generally, monks were interred in die burial chapels and the common cemeteries according to their hierarchy in the monastery: abbots; priests and deacons; and unordained monks. T h e tomb of the founding father was sometimes marked by a special building, or he was buried in the cave in which he had spent his life. T h e tomb could become a
MONASTERIES focal point for veneration by monks and pilgrims. [See Martyrion; Tombs.] Monks usually lived alone, but two or three might share a cell or there might have been dormitories, in accordance with the regulations for monks legislated by Em peror Justinian. The Great Laura of St. Sabas (Mar Saba) is the most elaborate example of a laura (Patrich, 1995). Its remains are distributed along 2 Ion of die Kidron ravine. There was more than one type of laura hermitage. T h e simplest cells consisted of a single room and a courtyard; the complex ones consisted of several rooms, including a private chapel or a prayer niche. Most hermitages were intended for a sin gle monk, but tiiere are several dwelling complexes that might have served two, or even three monies. Private chapels were a common feature. Each hermitage had its own water supply provided by drains and cisterns to catch rainwater. Syria. From the literary sources about eighty monasteries are known to have existed in the sixth century on Syria's limestone massif (the agricultural regions between Antioch and Apamea), with the most important ones being Deir Tell Ade, Qal'at et-Touffah, Deir Tormanin, and Deir Batabo. [See Antioch on Orontes; Apamea.] More than fifty of these monasteries were identified in die surveys of Melchior de Vogue, Howard C. Butier (1929), Georges Tchalenko (1953-1958), and others. T e n monasteries have been ex plored in northern Apamene, and still others to the west of Antioch. T e n have been explored in the Hauran and more in the region of T u r 'Abdin. Most monasteries were small, with seven to fifteen monks. Of the fifty-seven cenobia ex plored by Ignace Pena, P. Castellana, and R. Fernandez (Pena et al., 1983) on Jebel Baricha (northern Syria), thirtyfour are small, fifteen medium sized, and only eight are large. In most regions of Syria monasteries were built of ashlars and, because those communities were deserted by the end of the Byzantine period, the state of preservation of many of them is excellent. Most are known only through an ar chitectural survey; only a few have been excavated. There fore, information regarding their early stages (fourth-early fifth centuries) is meager, but presumably the earliest struc tures were humble. T h e transition from anchoritism to cenobitism passed through the stage of hind (cells arranged ir regularly around the cell of die head of die community). By the first half of the fourth century tiiere were organized monasteries at Osrhoene, Euphrathesia, and Antiochene. Additional centers developed in the second half of die cen tury in die desert of Chalcis, in Cilicia, and in the districts of Apamea, Zeugma, Cyrrhus, and Phoenicia. [See Cilicia.] The first known anchorite was Juliana Saba, who lived in the early fourth century in Osrhoene. Flis disciple, Asterios, had already erected a cenobium. T h e first anchorite at An tiochene was Ammianos, and his monastery, Teleda (Deir Tell Ade), took the lead in the region. Eusebius, who headed die monastery after 360, promoted monasticism in Antioch
45
ene; it was spread from there to Apamene by Agapetus and Symeon, who founded to two monasteries at Nikertai, where the rules of Marcianus, their spiritual father, were imple mented. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the spread of cenobitism was on a large scale: monumental and elaborate communal buildings were arranged efficientiy, unlike the unorganized hirta. In the larger cenobia, the communal buildings were arranged around a central courtyard and were surrounded by a fence built of unhewn stones. Many cisterns were dug within the enclosure and plots of land were cultivated. Most monasteries were located in die country side, alongside roads, in agricultural areas, at some distance from villages. T h e Antiochene cenobia were comprised of a church; a communal tomb with a burial chapel and underground arcosolia in which the monks were buried according to their monastic rank; a tower used for surveillance or seclusion inside or outside die walls, but nearby; and a monumental communal building of two or three stories that was rectan gular, oriented north-south, and surrounded on three or four sides by porticoes of square, plain monolithic pillars supporting an undecorated architrave. There is a debate among scholars about the function of this building (Buder, 1929, Lassus, 1947; Tchalenko, 1953-1958; Pena et al., 1983; Sodini, 1989). It seems that it served as a dormitory for monks and novices, as is recommended by the Justinianic legislation for monks (see above) and by some monastic regulations. Additional use of the ground floor may have included a refectory, house of assembly, infirmary, halls for charitable activities, or workshops. Examples of this type of building, peculiar to monasteries, are preserved at Deir Tell Ade, Deir Turmanin, Deir Sim'an, and Qal'at Sim'an, as well as at the smaller monasteries of Qasr el-Brad and Kimar. The character of the accommodations of die abbot, priest, and other leaders of the community was more private. Those sttuctures may have had more than one story and they lacked porticoes, they were a separate component in the complex. Early monastic churches in Syria are basilical (e.g., Qasr el-Banat, Deir Turmanin, Deir Sim'an [Northwest]), while the late ones are small chapels (Deir Sim'an [Soutiieast]). T h e Apamene monastic chapels (e.g., at Dana [Soudi], Btirsa, Shinshara, and el-Breige) are of a transverse type, witii a rectilinear sanctuary and a narthex. Those at T u r 'Abdin are of the same type but have an apsidal or triapsidal sanctuary and are roofed with a brick barrel vault rather than with timber (Bell, 1982; Fourdrin, 1985). Monastic churches lack the horseshoe bema, or ambo, located in the central nave in parish churches. Towers of seclusion and the columns of stylite monks were very common in Antiochea (at Kafr Derian, Kimar, el-Brad), following the habits of the renowned monk Sy meon Stylites (d. 459). T h e monastery built around his col-
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MONASTERIES
umn of seclusion between 473 and 491 (Qal'at Sim'an) became a center of pilgrimage. [See Qal'at Sim'an.] A sacred road led there from Deir Sim'an, and three smaller mon asteries and several hostelries for pilgrims were found in that village. The architecture of the Monastery of Symeon Stylites the Younger on Mons Admirabilis, southwest of Anti och, with its cruciform martyrion, is quite similar (Mecerian, 1948, 1965; Lafontaine-Dosogne and Orgels, 1967; Djobadze, 1986). [See Martyrion.] Fifty towers of seclusion were explored on northern Syr ia's limestone massif (Pena etal., 1975,1978). The phenom enon of these towers was a late development in Antiochene monasticism (some are dated by inscriptions to the sixth century). The towers are generally spacious hermitages that consist of two, three, and even six stories, each with a single room. The cell on the ground floor was used by the atten dant or disciples, while the cell on die upper story served as living quarters for the recluse or as a private chapel. In a two-story hermitage known as the Cell of Gabriel, which was explored in the Abbey of Qartmin near Tur 'Abdin, at the border of the Tigris River, the lower story served as a prayer chapel and the upper one as a living room. A hermit tower of three stories with single rooms is located at a dis tance of 250 m to the west, outside of the monastery (Palmer, 1990). Each of these towers is generally sur rounded by a stone wall enclosing a courtyard and forming a mandra, "a fold." T h e Apamene monasteries, ten in number, are all located in the northern part of that region; they display a common plan that differs somewhat from those in Antiochea. They appear to have been implemented by a central authority, as a means of disseminating Christianity or Monophysitism. They were isolated from the outside world by a wall and a gate. Except at Frikya, there is no hostel in these monaster ies. The collective tomb is located under the church or in a special structure. The absence of traces of cells implies a collective dwelling. In the monasteries of southern Syria, as at ed-Deir, south of Bosra, and in northeast Syria, a sym metrical plan was followed in monasteries. In them, the communal structures were arranged around the atrium of tire church, located to its east. [See also Churches.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Egypt Bachatly, Charles. Le monastere de Phoebamon dans la Thibaide. Cairo, 1961-1981. Bridel, Philippe. Le site monastique copte des Kellia; Sources historiques et explorations archeologiques. Actes d u Colloque de Geneve, 13-15 aout 1984. Geneva, 1986. Chitty, Derwas. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyp tian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford, 1966. Includes an extensive bibliography. Cledat, Jean. Le monastere et la necropole de Baouit. 2 vols. M e m o i r s de rinstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire, vols. 12, 39. Cairo, 1904-1916.
D a u m a s , Francois, a n d Antoine Guillaumont. Kellia 1, Kom 219: Fouil les executees en 1964 et 196$. 2 vols. Fouilles de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, vol. 28. Cairo, 1969. Descoeudres, George. "L'architecture des Kellia." Le Monde Copte 14/ 15 (1958): 75-96. Doresse, Jean. "Monasteres coptes aux environs d ' A r m a n t en T h e b a i d . " Analecla Bollandiana 67 (1949): 327-349, pis. 4-5. Doresse, Jean. "Nouvelles etudes sur l'art copte: Les monasteres de Saint-Antoine et de Saint-Paul." Comptes Rendus de TAcademie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1951): 268-274. Doresse, Jean. "Recherches d'archeologie copte: Les monasteres de moyenne-Egypte." Comptes Rendus de TAcademie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres (1952): 390-395. Evelyn-White, H u g h G . The Monasteries of the Wadi 'n Natrun, part 2, The History of the Monasteries of Nitria and Scetis; part 3, The Archi tecture and Archaeology. N e w York, 1932-1933. Fakhry, Ahmed. " T h e M o n a s t e r y of K a l a m o u n . " Annales du Service des Antiquites de I'Egypte 46 (1947): 63-83. Godlewski, Wlodzimierz. Le monastere de St.. Phoibammon, translated by Szolt Kiss. Warsaw, 1986. Grossmann, Peter, a n d H a n s - G e o r g Severin. "Reinigungsarbeiten im Jeremiaskloster bei Saqqara: Vierter Vorlaufiger Bericht." Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts, Abteilung Kairo 38(1982): 155-193Grossmann, Peter. Abu Mina: A Guide to the Ancient Pilgrimage Center. Cairo, 1986. Grossmann, Peter. " R u i n e n des ldosters Dair al-Balaiza in O b e r a g y p ten: Eine Surveyaufnahme." Jahrbuch filrAntike und Christentum 36 (1993): 171-205. H u s s o n , Genevieve. " L ' h a b i t a t monastique en Egypte a la lumiere des papyrus grecs, des textes Chretiens et de l'archeologie." I n Hommages a la mimoire de Serge Sauneron, vol. 2, edited by Jean Vercoutter, p p . 191-207. Cairo, 1979. Kasser, Rodolphe. Kellia 196;: Topographic generate. Recherches Suisses d'Archeologie C o p t e , vol. 1. Geneva, 1967. Kasser, Rodolphe. Kellia; Topographic Recherches Suisses d ' A r c h e o logie Copte, vol. 2. Geneva, 1972. Kasser, Rodolphe. " A u x origines d u m o n a c h i s m e copte: Fouilles de l'Universite de Geneve aux Kellia (Basse-Egypte)." Bulletin de la Societe d'Egyptologie, Geneve 3 (1980): 33-38. Kasser, Rodolphe. Survey archeologique des Kellia (Basse-Egypte): Rap port de la campagne 1981. 2 vols. Louvain, 1983. Kasser, Rodolphe. Le site monastique des Kellia (Basse-Egypte), Re cherches des annees 1981-1983, Louvain, 1984. Martin, Maurice. " L a u r e s et ermitages d u desert d ' E g y p t e . " Melanges de l'Universite Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth 42 (1966): 181-198. Martin, Maurice. La laure de Der al Dih a Antinoe. Cairo, 1971. Meinardus, Otto F . A . Monks and Monasteries of the Egyptian Deserts. Rev. ed. Cairo, 1989. M o n n e r e t de Villard, U g o . Les convents pres de Sohdg (Deyr el-Abiad, et Deyr el-Ahmar). 2 vols. Milan, 1925-1926. M o n n e r e t de Villard, U g o . Description genirale du monastere de Snt. Sim eon a Aswan. Milan, 1927. M o n n e r e t de Villard, U g o . Deyr el-Muharraqah. Milan, 1928. Quibell, James R. The Monastery of Apa Jeremias. Cairo, 1912. Sauneron, Serge, a n d Jean Jacquet. Les ermitages Chretiens du d&sert d'Esna. 4 vols. Cairo, 1972. Walters, Colin. Monastic Archaeology in Egypt. Warminster, 1974. Winlock, Herbert E., a n d W a l t e r E . C r u m . The Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes. Vol. 1. N e w York, 1926. Palestine Bagatti, Bellarmino. The Church from the Gentiles in Palestine. T r a n s lated by Eugene H o a d e . Jerusalem, 1971. See chapter n , " T h e M o n asteries."
M O N T E T , PIERRE Bottini, Giovanni Claudio, et al., eds. Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land, New Discoveries: Essays in Honour of Virgilio C. Corbo. Jeru salem, 1990. See the essays by H a i m Goldfus ( p p . 227-244), Yizhar Hirschfeld (pp. 1-90), Yitzhak M a g e n a n d Rina T a l g a m ( p p . 9 1 152), a n d Joseph Patrich (pp. 205-226). C o r b o , Virgilio. Gli scavi di Khirbet Siyar el-Ghanam (Campo deiPastori) e i monasleri dei dintorni. Jerusalem, 1955. C o r b o , Virgilio. " L ' a m b i e n t e materiale della vita dei monaci di Palestina nel periodo bizantino." In II monachesimo orientale: Alii del convegno di studi orientali, Roma, 9-12 aprile 1958, p p . 235-257. Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 153. R o m e , 1958. Fitzgerald, Gerald M . A Sixth-Century Monastery at Beth-Shan (Scythopolis). Philadelphia, 1939. Hirschfeld, Yizhar. The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Pe riod. N e w Haven, 1992. Includes an extensive bibliography. Meimaris, Yiannis E. " T h e Hermitage of St. John the Chozebite, Deir V/ady el-Qilt." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 28 (1978): 171-192. Meinardus, Otto F . A. " N o t e s on the L a u r a e a n d Monasteries of the Wilderness of J u d a e a . " Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 15 (1964-1965): 220-250; 16 (1965-1966): 328-356; 19 (1969): 305327. Pattich, Joseph. " T h e Sabaite L a u r a of Jeremias in the Judean D e s e r t . " Studium Biblicum Franciscanuml Liber Annuus 40 (1990): 295-311, pis. 37-40. Patrich, Joseph. " T h e Sabaite M o n a s t e r y of the Cave (Spelaion) in the Judean D e s e r t . " Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 41 (1991): 429-448. Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries. D u m b a r ton Oaks Studies, 32. Washington, D . C . , 1995. Includes an extensive bibliography. Piccirillo, Michele. Mount Nebo. 2d ed. Jerusalem, 1990. Sailer, Sylvester J. The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo. 2 vols. Je rusalem, 1941. Tsafrir, Y o r a m , ed. Ancient Churches Revealed. Jerusalem, 1993. See the essays by Yizhar Hirschfeld (pp. 149-154), Yitzhak M a g e n ( p p . 170196), and Joseph Patrich (pp. 233-243). Syria Bell, Gertrude Lowthian. The Churches and Monasteries of the Tiir 'Ab din. Edited by Marlia M . M a n g o . L o n d o n , 1982. Butler, H o w a r d Crosby. Early Churches in Syria, Fourth to Seventh Cen turies. Princeton, 1929. See chapter 4, " T h e Monasteries." Canivet, Pierre. "Contributions archeologiques a Phistoire des moines de Syrie, I V e - V e siecle." Studia Patristica 13 (1975): 444-460. D e i c h m a n n , F . W . Qalb Laze und Qatat Sem'an. M u n i c h , 1982. Djobadze, W a c h t a n g . Archeological Investigations in the Region West of Antioch-on-the-Orontes. Stuttgart, 1986. Fourdrin, Jean P . " L e s eglises a nef transversal d'Apam6ne et d u T u r A b d i n . " Syria 62 (1985): 319-335. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jacqueline, a n d Bernard Orgels. Itineraires ar cheologiques dans la rigion d'Antioch: Recherches sur le monast'ere et sur I'iconographie de S. Symeon Slylite lejeune. Brussels, 1967. Lassus, Jean. Sanctuaires Chretiens de Syrie. Paris, 1947. See " L a vie monastique et la culte des ascetes." Mecerian, Jean. " M o n a s t e r e de Saint-Symeon-Stylite-le-Jeune, expose des fouilles." Camples Rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres (1948): 323-328. Mec6rian, Jean. Expedition archeologique dans I'Antiochene occidentale. Beirut, 1965. Palmer, Andrew. Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier: The Early History of Tur Abdin. C a m b r i d g e , 1990. Includes an extensive bibli ography. Pena, Ignace, et al. Les stylites Syriens. Jerusalem, 1975.
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Pena, Ignace, et al. Les rectus Syriens. Jerusalem, 1978. Pena, Ignace, et al. Les cenobites Syriens. Jerusalem, 1983. Restle, Marcell. " L e s m o n u m e n t s Chretiens de la Syrie du S u d . " In Archeologie et hisloire de la Syria, vol. 2, edited by Jean-Marie Dentzer and Winfried O r t h m a n n , p . 381. Saarbrticken, 1989. Sodini, Jean-Pierre. " L e s eglises de Syrie d u N o r d . " I n Archeologie et histoire de la Syria, vol. 2, edited by Jean-Marie Dentzer and Winfried O r t h m a n n , p p . 367-371. Saarbrticken, 1989. Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: Le massif du Belus a I'&poque romaine. 3 vols. Paris, 195 3-1958. VSobus, Arthur. Histoiy of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient. 2 vols. C o r p u s Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, vols. 184,196. Louvain, 1958-1960. Sinai Dahari, Uzi. Monasteries of Southern Sinai: Archaeological Remnants. 'Atiqot, in press. Finkelstein, Israel. "Byzantine Monastic Remains in the Southern Sinai." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 39 (1985): 39-75. Forsyth, George H., and K u r t W e i t z m a n n . The Monastery of St. Cath erine at Mount Sinai: The Church and Fortress of Justinian. A n n Arbor, Mich., 1973. G r o s s m a n n , Peter. " N e u e baugeschichtliche U n t e r s u c h u n g e n im K a tharinenkloster im Sinai." Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaologischen In sults. Archaologischer Anzeiger (1988): 543-558. Tsafrir, Yoram, ed. Ancient Churches Revealed. Jerusalem, 1993. See essays by Uzi Dahari (pp. 341-350), Israel Finkelstein (pp. 334-340), and Yoram Tsafrir ( p p . 315-333). T u r k e y (Asia M i n o r ) G o u g h , Michael. Alahan: An Early Christian Monastery in Southern Turkey. T o r o n t o , 1985. Janin, R a y m o n d . Les eglises et les monasteres: Le siege de Constantinople et le patriarcat oecumenique. 2d ed. Paris, 1969. Janin, R a y m o n d , £as eglises et les monasteres des grands centres byzantins: Bithynie, Hellespont, Lalros, Ga/esios, Trebizonde, Athenes, Thessalonique. Paris, 1975. Rodley, Lyn. Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia. Cambridge, 1985. Thiery, Nicole. "Monasteres et ermitages en C a p p a d o c e . " Le Monde de la Bible 70 (1991): 20-26. JOSEPH PATRICH
MONTET, PIERRE (1885-1966), Egyptologist and archaeologist, born at Villefranche-sur-Saone in 1885. Montet studied Egyptology under Victor Loret at Lyon Univer sity. In 1910 he was appointed pensionnaire ("fellow") at the French Archaeological Institute in Cairo, where he pub lished, with J. Couyat, Les inscriptions hieroglyphiques et hieratiques du Ouddi Hammamat. He was drafted in 1914, and earned medals for distinction during the war. In 1919 he was appointed lecturer and then professor at Strasbourg Uni versity. In 1920 Montet excavated Jbail (Phoenician Gebal; Greek Byblos; Crusader Giblet) in Lebanon. He uncovered several royal tombs contemporary with Egypt's Middle Kingdom, along with artifacts that provided evidence for repeated contacts between Byblos and pharaonic Egypt as early as die Old Kingdom. Also found at Byblos was the sarcophagus of Ahiram, which bears die earliest known Phoenician alphabetic inscription. [See Ahiram Inscription.]
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M O N T G O M E R Y , JAMES A L A N
Montet's work at Byblos between 1920 and 1924 was pub lished in Byblos et. I'Egypte (1929). He earned his doctorate in 1925 with the thesis "Les scenes de la vie privee dans les tombeaux egyptiens de l'ancien empire." From 1928 on ward, he focused on Tanis in Lower Egypt, publishing sev eral monographs. Additional observations on contacts be tween Egypt and the Levant appear in his 1937 work Les reliques de I'art syrien dans I'Egypte du nouvel empire. In 1948 Montet became professor of Egyptology at the College de France and in 1953 was appointed a member of die Academie Francaise des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. His two volumes on the Geographie de I'Egypte ancienne (1957-1961) serve to summarize his extensive scholarship on ancient Egypt. Pierre Montet bequeathed his Egyptian collection to Strasbourg University, whose Institut d'Egyptologie is named for him. [See also Byblos.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Montet, Pierre, and J. Couyat. Les inscriptions hieroglyphiques et hieratiquesdu Ouadi Hammamat. Cairo, 1912. Montet, Pierre. Byblos et I'Egypte: Quatre campagnes defouilles d Gebeil 1921-1924. Paris, 1929. Montet, Pierre. Les nouvelles fouilles de Tanis, 1929-1932. Paris, 1933. Montet, Pierre. Les reliques de I'art syrien dans I'Egypte du nouvel empire. Paris, 1937. Montet, Pierre. Le drame d'Avaris: Essai sur la penetration des Semites en Egypte. Paris, 1941. Montet, Pierre. Tanis, douze annees de fouilles dans une capitale oubliee du Delta egyptien. Paris, 1942. Montet, Pierre. IM Necropole royale de Tanis. 3 vols. Paris, 1947-1960. Montet, Pierre. Les enigmes de Tanis. Paris, 1952. Montet, Pierre. Geographie de I'Egypte ancienne. 2 vols. Paris, 1957— 1961. Vandier, Jacques. "Pierre Montet, 1885-1966." Syria 43 (1966): 335338. HAFEZ K . CHEHAB
MONTGOMERY, JAMES ALAN (1866-1949), one of die central figures in the early development of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). Mont gomery was the director of die Jerusalem school ( 1 9 1 4 1915), chairman of ASOR's board of trustees (1918-1921), and its first president (1921-1934). He was also the first ed itor of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR), a position he held from 1919 to 1930. By education and training Montgomery was a biblical scholar and an Orientalist. He held undergraduate (1887) and graduate degrees from die University of Pennsylvania (completing his Ph.D. in 1904). He received his theological training at the Philadelphia Divinity School, graduating in 1890, and subsequentiy studied at the Universities of Griefswald and Berlin (1890-1892). Montgomery taught Old Tes tament literature at the Philadelphia Divinity School (18991935) and Hebrew and Aramaic at the University of
Pennsylvania (1910-1938). During the time he was elected president of the Society of Biblical Literature (in 1918) and the American Oriental Society (1926-1927). He edited each society's journals for extended periods: the Journal of Bib lical Literature (1909-1913) and the Journal of the American Oriental Society (1916-1921, 1924). Montgomery wrote widely on Semitic philology, Israelite religion, archaeology, Jewish-Christian relations, the history of Israel, Ugaritic, Ethiopic, South Arabian inscriptions, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. He wrote nine fulllength books, more than 126 scholarly articles, twenty arti cles for religious publications, and more titan forty-five book reviews. His two contributions to the International Critical Commentary series (on Daniel and Kings) remain classics, demonstrating his command of Semitic linguistics, textual criticism, and literary genres. Montgomery advanced the study of Biblical and Classical Aramaic significantly. He ad vocated widespread use of the Aramaic Elephantine texts and various Aramaic inscriptional materials in biblical schol arship. His Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (Phila delphia, 1913) is still widely used as the introductory work on these texts. T h e Ras Shamra Mythological Texts, written with Zellig S. Harris (Philadelphia, 1935), represents an early attempt to make use of Ugaritic texts to broaden the understanding of biblical and Canaanite religion. Montgomery was, however, interested in more than lin guistics, literature, and religion. His scholarly breadth al lowed him to examine the historical, geographic, and socio economic settings of die entire ancient Near East. Two of his works explored these issues. The Samaritans: The Earliest Jewish Sect (Philadelphia, 1907) traces the history of Sa maritan culture from its origin to the early twentieth century. Arabia and the Bible (Philadelphia, 1934), despite some re visions necessitated by recent discoveries (see Van Beek, 1969) remains a sound introduction to the history, geogra phy, and religious and ethic backgrounds of the Arabian Peninsula. Montgomery became emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Divinity School in 1938. His commentary on Kings, edited by his student Henry S. Gehman, was published posthumously in 1951. [See also American Oriental Society; American Schools of Oriental Research; Society of Biblical Literature.] BIBLIOGRAPHY G o r d o n , Cyrus H . " A Scholar and Gentlemen: James Alan M o n t g o m ery." Biblical Archaeologist 46 (1983): 187-189. Brief article providing insight into the personal life of M o n t g o m e r y as r e m e m b e r e d by one of his most p r o m i n e n t students. King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. Besides being die standard book on the history of A S O R a n d its major fig ures, this work contains valuable information on other related re search organizations.
MOR, TEL M o n t g o m e r y , James A. The Samaritans: The Earliest Jewish Sect. Phil adelphia, 1907. M o n t g o m e r y , James A.. Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur. Phila delphia, 1913. M o n t g o m e r y , James A.. Arabia and the Bible. Philadelphia, 1934. M o n t g o m e r y , James A., a n d Z. S. Harris. Ras Shamra Mythological Texts. Philadelphia, 1935. Speiser, E p h r a i m Avigdor. "Bibliography of James Alan M o n t g o m e r y . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 117 (1950): 8-13. Complete list of M o n t g o m e r y ' s books, articles, a n d reviews. Van Beek, G u s W . " P r o l e g o m e n o n " to reprinted edition of James A. Montgomery, Arabia and the Bible. N e w York, 1969. Critical intro duction analyzing a n d u p d a t i n g M o n t g o m e r y ' s book.
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the Art of Mesopotamia (London, 1964), Barthel Hrouda's Vorderasien (Handbuch der Archaologie, vol. 1, Munich, 1971), Winfried Orthmann's Der alte Orient (Propylaen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 14, Berlin, 1975), Wolfram Nagel's Bauern und Stadtkulturen im vordynastischen Vorderasien (Berlin, 1964), Rainer Boehmer's Glyptik der Akkad-Zeit (Berlin, 1965), Peter Calmeyer's Bronzen aus Luristan (Ber lin, 1969), Ursula Seidl's Bablyonische Kudurru-Reliefs (Ber lin, 1968), and Jutta Borker-Klahn's Altvorderasiatische Bildstelen (Berlin, 1982). [See also the biography of Frankfort.]
CHARLES E . CARTER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MOORTGAT, ANTON (1897-1977), a founder of Near Eastern archaeology as an academic discipline, along with Ernst Herzfeld and Henri Frankfort. The field com prises the investigation of material remains in Asia Minor, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, and Iran from the Neolithic period to die time of Alexander the Great. Moortgat left his native city of Antwerp, Belgium, for Germany, where he earned his doctorate in classical ar chaeology at Berlin University in 1923. Following a period of activity at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, he worked under Walter Andrae in die Near Eastern division of the Berlin museums (1930-1945). As custodian, he held an honorary professorship at the Archaeological Institute of Berlin University in 1941. After World War II, Moortgat accepted the chair of ancient Near Eastern studies at the newly founded Free University of West Berlin (1948), a post he held until his retirement in 1965. Moortgat's chief accom plishment proved to be the working out of a chronologically reliable sequence of styles in the southern Mesopotamian corpus of artistic monuments; at tire same time, he investi gated artistic activity in this core area's peripheral provinces, with respect to their mutual dependency upon Mesopota mia. It was this schema of cultural groups and his generally reliable system of time periods in the central area that first provided the indispensable prerequisite for further mean ingful work in Near Eastern archaeology. Moortgat pub lished his foundational work primarily in Friihe Bildkunst in Sumer (Early Imagery in Sumer, 1935); Vorderasiatische Rollsiegel (Near Eastern Cylinder Seals, 1940); two articles on Assyrian glyptics (1942, 1944); and Die Entstehung der sumerischen Hochkultur (The Development of Sumerian High Culture, 1945). Because Moortgat based his work on the assumption of ethnically determined artistic regions, he neglected the de termining effects of the state on artistic production and eth nological development. Therefore, some of his numerous students rejected aspects of his work and modified and de veloped his chronological system. Handbooks of art history based on Moortgat's pioneering work are still used as basic texts; examples include Eva Stromm'enger's 5000 Years of
Bittel, K u r t , ed. Vorderasiatische Archaologie: Studien und Aufsdtze Anton Moortgat zum fiinfundsechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet. Berlin, 1964. Includes a bibliography of M o o r t g a t ' s work (pp. 12-17). Moortgat, Anton. Friihe Bildkunst in Sumer. Leipzig, 1935. Moortgat, Anton. Vorderasiatische Rollsiegel. Berlin, 1940. Moortgat, Anton. "Assyrische Glyptik des 13, Jahrhunderts." Zeitschrift fiir Assyriologie47 (1942): 50-88. Moortgat, Anton. "Assyrische Glyptik des 12. Jahrhunderts." Zeitschrift fiir Assyriologie 48 (1944): 23-44. Moortgat, Anton. Die Entstehung der sumerischen Hochkultur. Leipzig, 1945WOLFRAM NAGEL
Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
MOR, TEL (Ar., Tell Mura), a small mound about 1.5 acres in area near tire mouth of the Nahal Lachish, about 2 km (.5 mi.) from the Mediterranean coast in Israel (map reference 1175 X 1368). The site may be ancient AshdodYam, "Ashdod of the Sea." It served as the port of nearby Ashdod in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Tel Mor was exca vated in 1959-1960 by Moshe Dothan on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities. Twelve strata were distinguished, extending from the late Middle Bronze Age drrough the Hellenistic period. The M B remains were scant but included Cypriot and Egyptian im ports, as well as local cultic vessels. T h e Late Bronze Age levels (strata 1 1 - 7 ) indicated a flourishing seaport, especially during the fourteenth century B C E (stratum 9), when a large fortress/storehouse demonstrates that Tel Mor was an im portant site on the Via Maris. This settlement was desttoyed in about 1300 B C E , perhaps during the campaigns of Seti I in Canaan. T h e strata 8-7 resettlement, dating mainly to the thir teenth century B C E , saw the construction of anotiier large multiroomed fortress with a courtyard, built on an Egyptian plan. Substantial amounts of Egyptian, Mycenaean, and Cypriot pottery were found in this fortress, which may have been destroyed by fire in the time of Rameses II, or in his son Merneptah's raid in about 1207 B C E . A small tower or fort (migdalj in strata 6-5, on the ruins of the fortress, be longs to the late thirteenth-early twelfth centuries B C E . The
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MOSAICS
pottery is transitional LB/Iron I, including local imitations of Cypriot styles. Some Egyptian pottery and scarabs sug gest that here, as elsewhere in Canaan, an Egyptian governor was in residence as late as die period of Rameses III. Strata 4-3 represent the post-Egyptian era, when Philis tine material culture dominates, as at other coastal sites. Tel Mor was destroyed again at the end of stratum 3, perhaps in the wars of David against the Philistines. The small re settlement of stratum 2 belongs to the eighth century B C E , witii some remains of a casemate-walled fortress. It may have been destroyed by the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II, who, in the Assyrian annals, is said to have taken AshdodYam and turned the entire territory of Ashdod into an As syrian province. Following a long abandonment and the transfer of Ashdod's port to a site known later as Hellenistic Azotos (Minet Isdud), only a large public building and a dye-extraction facility were constructed on Tel Mor (stra tum 1). [See also Ashdod; Philistines, article on Early Philistines.] BIBLIOGRAPHY D o t h a n , M o s h e . " T e l M o r (Tell K h e i d a r ) . " Israel Exploration Journal 9 (1959): 271-272; 10 (i960): 123-125. D o t h a n , Moshe. " T h e Foundation of T e l M o r a n d A s h d o d . " Israel Exploration Journal 23 (1973): 1-17. W I L L I A M G . DEVER
MOSAICS. In antiquity polychrome mosaic pavements were a conspicuous feature of interior decoration in public and domestic buildings. They survive in great abundance where corresponding wall and ceiling decoration has largely vanished. The earliest floor mosaics were made of small, smooth pebbles, but these were soon replaced by tesserae (small, evenly cut cubes of stone). There are two types of tesserae, each used to achieve different effects: opus tessel lation consists of square, or nearly square, stones set in rows and opus vermiculatum ("worm-shaped work") are very small tesserae cut in irregular shapes and laid in patterns dictated by a pavement's design. Opus tessellatum was used to execute geometric patterns or figures, whereas opus ver miculatum was usually reserved for fine details. Tesserae (of local limestone; marble and glass for highlights) were avail able in a wide range of colors, and several shades of a single color were often used to achieve subtle modeling effects. In Roman mosaic decoration, the average number of colors in the mosaicist's palette was thirty; in Byzantine mosaics the average palette consisted of from ten to twelve colors. M o saic floors are typically laid on a tiiree-layer foundation con sisting of the nidus (a bed of packed earth or debris with large stones); the nucleus (several centimeters of mortar made of lime and ash or pottery dust and chips); and the setting bed (a layer of 2-4 cm of limestone plaster into which the tesserae are set).
Although ancient authors (e.g., Vitruvius) mention mo saic pavements, there are no extant texts that describe the malting of a mosaic. The process must have involved several specialized craftsmen to prepare the setting bed, to cut the tesserae, and to design and execute the figures. Piles of precut tesserae, sorted according to color, along with the waste stones from which they were cut, have been found at some sites, indicating a degree of industrialization. While even the most complicated geometric patterns could have been exe cuted merely with string and compass, the repetition of nearly identical figural compositions over several centuries and in widely separated geographic areas indicates that some sort of model "books" were used. Early Pebble Mosaics. The first differentiated floor de signs were pebble mosaics. Although some scholars have placed the invention of this technique in the Near East, the most recent studies suggest that pebble mosaics originated in Greece, where they existed as early as the Late Bronze Age. At Gordion, in Asia Minor, three buildings were dis covered with multicolored pebble floors tiiat are dated to the eighth century B C E . These Phrygian pavements are com posed of scattered geometric motifs with no overall order. Hellenistic Mosaics. In the Hellenistic period, pebble mosaics were elaborate and representational, often featuring mythological characters (the Scylla mosaic from Nea-Paphos on Cyprus). Floors that incorporate both pebbles and tesserae illustrate the transitional phase in the development of tessellated mosaics (from Alexandria, Egypt: a warrior surrounded by a frieze of griffins; a Flunt with erotes at tacking a stag [both now in die Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria]). As mosaic compositions became more picto rial and dependent on paintings for models, the cutting of the tesserae became more refined. These changes can be charted in the emblemata, or portable tray, compositions ex ecuted in opus vermiculatum. Two very similar mosaics from Thmuis (Tell Timai), witii female busts that represent ei ther the city of Alexandria or a Ptolemaic queen (Berenike II?) are striking examples of this technique; their superb ex ecution attests to the virtuosity of the Alexandrian work shops, which some scholars believe specialized in the pro duction of emblemata. Close parallels between Alexandrian works and those found in die House of the Faun at Pompeii suggest the influence of Alexandrian artists abroad. Mesopotamian Mosaics. The art of mosaics was never popular in Mesopotamia. Although the Standard of Ur (in the British Museum) is sometimes described as executed in the mosaic technique, it is not; it is executed with inlay of shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone. Only four sites with pavements executed in opus tessellatum are known from the region, and all date to the third century C E . A personification of die Euphrates River between personifications of Syria and Mesopotamia found at Mas'Udiye has inscriptions in Greek and Syriac that give the name of the artists and the date 539 of the era of the Seleucids (227-228 C E ) . A well-known mo-
MOSAICS saic of late Severan date, with the personified provinces, was excavated at Zeugma (Belqis). Better known than either of these are the funerary mosaics at Edessa and the mosaics in the Palace of Shapur I, erected in 260 C E , after his victory over Valerian. In the palace mosaics, geometric panels al ternate with figural scenes of dancers, courtesans, musi cians, and portraits. Roman Mosaics. The earliest tessellated mosaics from the Near East follow the compositions of the pebble mosaics of the Hellenistic period (e.g., at Delos and Alexandria)— namely, multiple bands framing a central emblema that was usually filled with a geometric design (at Arsamea in ancient Commagene in Turkey). Similar pavements with central designs were found in Israel, on Masada in the Judean Desert and in the Herodian quarter of Jerusalem. They are securely dated to before 70 C E , the year Titus destroyed Jerusalem. T h e majority of mosaics from the imperial period are from the private sphere of the Roman house. These are best represented by the extensive series of floors excavated at Antioch in Syria. T h e taste for illusionistic picture panels arranged within a single composition can be seen in the ear liest houses of the first century C E , those constructed before the earthquake of 115 (e.g., the triclinium mosaic in the Atrium House, with its Judgment of Paris, Drinking Con test, and Adonis and Aphrodite). Aside from a rich selection of mythological scenes, apotropaic symbols are introduced at the entrances to rooms and houses (the evil eye or ithyphallic dwarfs). Representations of the months and seasons (House of the Calendar) and personifications of rivers (House of the Porticoes) and provinces (House of Cilicia) also reflect the expansion of the repertoire of mosaic images beyond the narrative models of Greco-Roman painting. E p isodes drawn from literary (Greek novels in the House of the Man of Letters, now in the Princeton Museum and the Worcester Art Museum) and theatrical (House of the Red Pavement; House of Iphigenia, now in the Antakya M u seum) sources reveal the cultural milieu of Roman cities in the eastern Mediterranean. Sometimes the themes reflect the function of the particular room they decorate—for ex ample, an elaborate table setting replete with foods frames a central medallion with Ganymede serving the Eagle in the apsed triclinium of the House of the Buffet Supper. This fashion for allegorical and mythological composi tions is demonstrated throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the second and third centuries CE. Where entire houses have been excavated, as in the case of the House of Dionysos at Nea-Paphos, there is evidence for reading the selection and placement of certain themes as programmatic. Dionysiac themes (Vintage and Triumph) are typically set into re ception rooms or near them (Dionysos's Gift of Wine to Ikarios), while salutatory motifs such as the frontal peacock or Four Seasons are found at or near the house entrance. Often, several themes are incorporated into one grand de
51
sign, as is the case with the mosaic, reconstructed from nu merous fragments, originally found in Gerasajerash (Transjordan): several Dionysiac friezes are stacked verti cally and framed by a garland border accented by busts of the Seasons, Muses, and Authors (Homer and Thucydides are extant), each identified by a Greek inscription. T h e combination of themes in this mosaic, dated on stylistic grounds to the mid-second century C E , may be intentional: they evoke the processions and cult festivals associated with the theatrical guilds of Dionysiac artists. (Most of the mosaic is in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin.) An equally grand and unusual floor with Dionysiac scenes was produced in the first half of the third century C E for the triclinium of a house in the theater district at Sepphoris in the Galilee. The central composition consists of fifteen pan els, each labeled with a Greek inscription, that depict aspects of Dionysiac mythology and ritual. The whole is enclosed by a frame of lush acanthus foliage inhabited by animals and hunters; the bar of the T-shaped mosaic contains a contin uous procession of Dionysiac cult followers bearing various gifts and offerings. Throughout the Near East there was a pronounced taste for mosaic compositions steeped in classical learning. T h e didactic nature of such displays is emphasized by the pop ularity of Greek labels. Busts of the Seven Sages (accom panied by their maxims and titles in Greek) and Socrates surround Calliope in a mosaic of Severan date from Baalbek/ Suweida in Lebanon. Mythological scenes are also accom panied by inscriptions, and their selection often reflects local lore and interests (the Beauty Contest between Cassiopeia and the Nereids found at Apamea, Palmyra, and NeaPaphos). T h e display of philosophical notions of time (Chronos, "time"; and Aion, "the ages") and the represen tation of nature by personifications (Ge, "earth"; Georgia^ "agriculture"; and Tropai, "turning points of the seasons") are masterfully set out in a mosaic produced in the second half of the third century C E in the city of Shahba/Philippopolis in southern Syria. T h e discovery of many mythological and allegorical mosaics in Shahba/Philippopolis indicates that a workshop was active there from the second half of the third century through the first half of the fourth. L a t e R o m a n Mosaics. Hellenism continued as a signif icant force in the cultural life of the Near East through the Late Antique period, as evidenced by the influence of Neoplatonism, especially in Syria. Several of the mosaics found at Apamea, an important Greek city, bear eloquent testi mony to the continuation of pagan beliefs and myths. A group of pavements (most are in the Apamea Museum), dated to the reign of Julian the Apostate (360-363 CE), were found in a single building near the Cathedral of Apamea. Among them is a remarkable scene of Socrates seated among the Seven Sages (as well as the Return of Ulysses, with the "Servants" labeled, and the Judgment of the Ne reids) . T h e very ambiguity in the scholarly interpretations
52
MOSAICS
MOSAICS.
Figure i . Mosaic from Shavei-Zion.
of Socrates as a Christlike teacher or a pagan emperor-type implies the degree to which both paganism and Christianity drew inspiration from Platonism. The interpretation of the recondite myths and personifications set out in six elaborate panels in a room from the House of Aion at Nea-Paphos suggests a pagan response to the rise of Christianity. Se curely dated to the second quarter of the fourth century., these mosaics include the Childhood and Triumph of Dionysos who, it would appear, is presented as a universal savior. In the adjacent Governor's Palace (House of Theseus), ren ovations in the fifth century included a grand mosaic with the Birth, First Bath, and Education of Achilles. Scenes from the Life of Achilles are featured on a mosaic from Nablus in Israel, dated to the third/fourth century. The iconography demonstrates the widespread popularity of the myth cycles and the common repertoire of the Near East. Original com positions are rare, but there is an exceptional case from Mariamin (in the Hama Museum in Syria), where the mosaic
(Courtesy Lucille A. Roussin)
features a concert with six female musicians, seemingly a record of an actual event. In the course of the fourth century, figural compositions begin to shift away from pictures in stone to be viewed from a single vantage point to pavements composed of several scenes or single scenes broken up into multiple parts. This change is illustrated by the triclinium pavement in the Constantinian Villa at Antioch (now in the Louvre), where the entire field is divided into a series of irregular panels: sac rifice and hunt scenes fill trapezoidal panels with full-length female Seasons set in the diagonals between them. Early Christian Mosaics. Although the promulgation of the Edict of Toleration by Constantine in 312/13 C E meant that Christians were free to construct houses of worship, it is not until the third quarter of the fourth century that church building and decoration appear on a large scale in the eastern provinces. T h e most prolific center for mosaic production was Syria, where the "rainbow style" emerged
MOSAICS in the second half of the fourth century. This new style is characterized by complex geometric designs executed in multicolored bands that can be extended in all directions (e.g., the Kaoussie Church in Antioch; the church in Zahrani, Lebanon; and the basilica in Salamis/Constantia, Cy prus) . Such designs suited the need for aniconic decoration necessitated by the prohibition against images contained in the Second Commandment. T h e increase in mosaic production throughout the Near East in the fifth century is a sign of the region's general prosperity and political stability. Mosaic workshops in T u r key, Syria, and Cyprus continued to flourish, and mosaic production in Lebanon and Palestine increased, especially in the first half of the fifth century. At this time church pave ments are decorated with the cross and Christogram (in an cient Palestine at Nahariya, Shavei-Zion (see figure i ) , and Evron; on Cyprus tiiere is a mosaic representation of a jew eled cross set into the pavement in the church atTremithus). The practice continues into the late sixth century, despite c
MOSAICS.
Figure
53
the prohibition in the edict of Theodosius II in 427 CE. The crosses and Christograms in these pavements usually mark entrances, altars, and places of special veneration within the churches and may have served an apotropaic function. Spe cifically religious themes are found in a group of pavements from Cilicia (at Ayas, Karlik, and Korykos) in which the iconography of the Peaceful Kingdom (Is. 65:25) is illus trated. This theme continues in popularity in the sixth cen tury in the mosaics from the Madaba region (Baptistery of the Cathedral; Churches of Sts. Lot and Procopius; and die Memorial of Moses on Mt. Nebo). At the same time, the natural world is also brought into the sacred space through the insertion of a great variety of plant and animal motifs into tlie geometric patterns (in ancient Palestine at the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem; in Syria at Dibsi Faraj and Khirbet Mouqa; and on Cyprus at Soloi and at die Kourion Baptistery and Basilica). The most significant development of the latter half of the fifth century is the reintroduction of large-scale animal and
2. Mosaic from Betk-Shean/El-Hammam.
(Courtesy Lucille A. Roussin)
54
MOSAICS
hunt carpets. T h e camel caravan and animal chase mosaic in the portico of the Great Colonnade at Apamea (469 CE) may be the earliest of this type (also at Apamea are mosaics of Amazons hunting and of Atlante and Meleager). The most dramatic and monumental examples of hunt pavements are those discovered at Antioch (the Megalopsychia Hunt from Yakto now in the museum at Antakya, Turkey, and the Worcester Hunt in the Worcester Art Museum). T h e mosaic of Adam enthroned in Paradise surrounded by wild beasts from the nave of the North Church at Huarte, Syria, is an example of the adaptation of a popular Roman theme—Or pheus charming the beasts—to Christian iconography. A taste for the personifications of abstract ideas and the elements of nature remain popular from the Late Roman period through the sixth century; for example, Ananeosis, or "Renewal," and Ktisis, or "Foundation," occur at Antioch (Ktisis also appears in the frigidarium of the Baths of Eustolios at Kourion, Cyprus); personifications of the seasons (at Deir es-Sleib, Syria), Ge (at Beth Guvrin?), and Thalassa, or "Ocean" (at the Church of the Apostles, Madaba). Calendar mosaics expand on the seasons imagery with il lustrations of the agricultural labors of each season and month (at Beth-Shean in Israel and el-Hammam in the same locale). In the sixth century, Palestine and Arabia are the most important provincial centers of mosaic productivity. T h e most popular pattern was the medallion style of the inhab ited vine or acanthus scroll rinceaux, which was used for border and field compositions. Within the scrolls of church pavements are miniature versions of hunting themes and pastoral and vintaging scenes (Beth-Shean (see figure 2) and Madaba). Elements of the natural world—flowers (rosettes), animals, birds, baskets of fruit—fill the intervals formed by grid patterns composed of small four-petalled flowers; these petalled trellis designs are widely found—at Antioch, in the House of the Green Carpet; in Lebanon at the church of Khalde; and in Syria at the church at Dibsi Faraj. Classical myths continue to be represented at Madaba with the Dio nysiac thiasos (revelry) and with Achilles and Patroclus; in Jerusalem, with Orpheus; and at Erez, in Israel, with the Triumph of Dionysos. Topographical subjects, introduced in the fifth century in the cityscape border of the Megalopsychia Hunt from An tioch and in the Nilotic pavement of the transept of the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha, in Israel, are a particularly rich subject for sixthcentury mosaicists. T h e Madaba Map represents the prin ciple cities of Palestine and the Nile Delta, as well as prom inent pilgrimage sites. In the borders of the mosaics atMa'in (719 CE) and U m m er-Rasas (76s CE), in Jordan walled cities and churches represent the principle cities of the patriar chates of Jerusalem, Arabia, Alexandria, and Memphis. The monumental peristyle (1,900 sq. m) mosaic in the Great Palace in Constantinople provides a rare example of a sixth-century mosaic in an imperial context. Recent ex-
M O S A I C S . F i g u r e 3. Lion mosaic. F r o m B y z a n t i n e c h u r c h a t M a g e n in t h e N e g e v . (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
cavation has clarified the dating of this monument, which previously ranged from the fourth through tine seventh cen turies: pottery finds below the mosaic indicate a date in the first half of the sixth century. More titan seventy scenes are extant and illustrate heterogeneous episodes drawn from the repertoire of the hunt (outdoors and staged in an amphithe ater), rural life, and animal combats, against a neutral white ground. Synagogue Mosaics. T h e majority of synagogue mosaics are found in Israel, where they present iconographic pro grams distinctly different from those in the Diaspora. T h e mosaic pavements of the synagogues at Sardis (dated by numismatic evidence to c. 350 CE) and Apamea (dated by inscription to 391/92) are geometric carpets with framed panels of donors' inscriptions interspersed with geometric designs. In contrast, synagogue pavements in Palestine from the fourth through the sixth centuries show a richly devel oped iconography with representations of the Torah shrine and menorah and other Jewish ritual objects (shofar, lulav, ethrog, incense shovel) used in the liturgy. Signs of the zo diac and personifications of the seasons frame Helios in the mosaics at Hammath Tiberias, Sepphoris, Khirbet Susiya, Na'aran, Beth-Shean, Beth Alpha, Husifah, and Yafia. Bib lical scenes are illustrated in the floor mosaics at Gerasa (Noah's family and the animals leaving the Ark), Beth Alpha (the Sacrifice of Isaac), and in Na'aran and Khirbet Susiya (Daniel in the Lion's Den). The political unrest produced by the war between the Byzantine and Persian empires and the Arab invasion of 640 brought about a general decline. Mosaic production in T u r -
MOSQUE key, on Cyprus, and in Phoenicia came to a halt. The dis covery of the Church of St. Stephen at U m m er-Rasas, dated to between 756 and 785, indicates that church building in Palestine did not cease. At least some mosaic workshops in Palestine and Arabia flourished long after the Arab con quest. The Umayyad caliphs employed Byzantine craftsmen to decorate their buildings with mosaics in Syria and Palestine. The most spectacular early Islamic pavement is preserved in the large bath hall at Khirbat al-Mafjar, near Jericho, dated to the second quarter of the eighth century; it consists of thirty-one individual panels filled with geometric designs. A figural mosaic with lions hunting gazelles on either side of a fruit tree is found in the small private room off the hall. Whether this scene can be read as an allegory is debated. [See also Churches; Synagogues. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries {see espe cially Madaba).] BIBLIOGRAPHY Baity, Janine. Mosaiques antiques de Syria. Brussels, 1977. Campbell, Shelia. " R o m a n M o s a i c Workshops in T u r k e y . " American Journal of Archaeology 83 (1979): 287-292. Daszewski, Wiktor A., and D e m e t r i o s Michaelides. Mosaic Floors in Cyprus. R a v e n n a , 1988. Donceel-Vofite, Pauline. Les pavements des eglises byzanlines de Syrie et du Liban. Louvain-la-Neuve, 1988. Kitzinger, Ernst. "Stylistic D e v e l o p m e n t s in P a v e m e n t Mosaics in the Greek East from the Age of Constantine to the Age of Justinian." In The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval Westj edited by W . E u g e n e Kleinbauer, p p . 64-88. Bloomington, 1976. Lavin, Irving. " T h e H u n t i n g Mosaics of Antioch and T h e i r S o u r c e s . " Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 181-286. Levi, D o r o . Antioch Mosaic Pavements. Princeton, 1947. Meyers, Eric M . , Carol. L . M e y e r s , a n d E h u d Netzer. Sepphoris. W i nona Lake, Ind., 1992. Michaelides, Demetrios. Cypriot Mosaics. Nicosia, 1987. Ovadiah, Asher, a n d R u t h Ovadiah. Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byz antine Mosaic Pavements in Israel. R o m e , 1987. Piccirillo, Michele. Chiese e mosaici di Madaba. Jerusalem, 1989. Piccirillo, Michele. The Mosaics of Jordan (1986). A m m a n , 1993. Trilling, James. " T h e Soul of t h e E m p i r e : Style and M e a n i n g in the Mosaic P a v e m e n t of the Byzantine Imperial Palace in Constanti nople." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 43 (1989): 27-72. CHRISTINE K O N D O L E O N and
L U C I L L E A. R O U S S I N
MOSQUE. T o the beginning of the eleventh century
GE
in the Near East, mosque typology is dominated by the plan of the hypostyle (many-columned) courtyard, which in this context is sometimes also referred to as the "Arab" plan. Numerous models from the pre-Islamic period had mis lay out, but there is little doubt that the Prophet's house in M e dina played a key role. This building was not designed to be an exclusive place for prayer. It contained rooms for Mu hammad and his wives, and its large open courtyard was used for various social, political, and military functions of the whole Muslim community.
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T h e Prophet led the faithful in prayer on the southern side of the courtyard, facing the shrine at Mecca (that is, the qiblah). Here there were two rows of palm tree columns cov ered with a palm-thatched roof. The collective memory of the significance of this may be thought sufficient for the form's later popularity. T w o additional factors may well have contributed to its pervasiveness. T h e first was its tech nological simplicity. Trabeated structures (featuring beams or lintels) required little in the way of masonry skills, and reused columns provided a further saving of labor. The sec ond was the flexibility of the hypostyle plan, which permit ted expansion in any direction without necessarily altering the overall character of the building. The expansion of the Prophet's house to become the Great Mosque of Medina shows this process in action. It was one of three major mosques (the others being those of Damascus and Jerusalem) which were built or expanded by Caliph al-Walid (705-715). The Medina mosque was the first to incorporate a mihrab (concave niche), which was sit uated not at the center of the qiblab wall but to one side, corresponding to the axis at which Muhammad led the prayers in the original building. Its first appearance at this site, where it was richly decorated, and its ubiquity in sub sequent mosques are strong arguments that it should be seen as a commemoration of the place where the Prophet led the prayers as the first imam. The more frequent explanation, that it indicates the direction of prayer, is less likely for two reasons. First, the mihrab is usually invisible from a sub stantial portion of the interior of the mosque. Second, the qiblah is normally immediately apparent from the direction of the largest roofed area, which is the main prayer hall. T h e mosque at Medina was also the first to be provided in al-Walid's rebuilding with tall towers at its corners. These have normally been considered minarets, places from which the call to prayer was given, although recent work by Jona than Bloom {Minaret: Symbol of Islam, Oxford, 1989), has argued that this is a problematic interpretation, and that the minaret did not become a standard feature of mosque ar chitecture until the 'Abbasid period. Two other features of al-Walid's works at Medina were also widely imitated in other mosques: a finely decorated axial nave and a domed ante-mihrab bay. T h e rebuilding of the Aqsa mosque in Je rusalem by al-Walid is now thought to have included these two features, although it differs from all early congregational mosques in its lack of a courtyard. This configuration is to be explained by its location within the Haram (the former Temple Mount), where its forecourt could easily have served the same purpose. Unlike other major early mosques, the Great Mosque of Damascus is essentially basilical in plan rather than hypo style. The prayer hall has three bays parallel to the qiblah wall, interrupted by a transverse nave. It is not certain whether there was originally a dome within this nave; if so, it may have been above the bay in front of the mihrab, rather than the central bay where it is today. The gable that rises
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above the nave on the courtyard facade is possibly derived from Byzantine palaces. The courtyard is surrounded by one arcade on each side; die combination of basilica and adjacent peristyle courtyard was also common in Roman forums. The Roman temple enclosure, which bounded the mosque, prevented it from being subsequently enlarged. Its already massive size and sumptuous decoration of mosaic landscapes, however, enhanced its prestige and led to fre quent copies, die mosques in Khirbet al-Minyeh and the meclina of Qasr al-Hair ash-Sharqi being two Umayyad ex amples. Smaller U m a y y a d Mosques. Although it is clear that the prestigious congregational mosques of the Umayyads set the fashion both for later periods and for lesser mosques wititin their own period, the variety of smaller mosques that has survived has not been fully appreciated. At its simplest the place of prayer could be indicated by a niche in the wall facing Mecca. This mihrab is found, for instance, in the en trance corridor of the caravanserai at Qasr al-Hayr ashSharqi. A passageway also used by animals is an unlikely setting for prayer, but there is a tradition that a mosque is formed wherever one prays, and therefore blocking off this area to other traffic would have been sufficient to form one. The larger enclosure at Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi has a more substantial courtyard mosque; the mosque of the caravan-
serai was never designed for many people. In the contem porary caravanserai at Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi the mosque is only slighdy more formal, consisting of a wing projecting from the enttance facade. [See Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi; Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi.] The mosque at Jabal Says is of the simplest type—a single room—although a central pier awkwardly interrupts the axis between the mihrab and door opposite. Single rooms fronted by a larger courtyard are found at Qastal and Qasr Muqatil; the latter is distinguished by a triple entrance to the prayer hall. A possible prototype for these examples or an example that may have occurred concurrentiy with them is seen at Qasr Burqu , which consists now only of a low stone wall, but which may well have had a tent erected over it to provide the covered space for prayer. [See Qasr Burqu'.] Three Umayyad mosques, at Khan al-Zabib, U m m alWalid and Qasr al-Hallabat, contain the germ of the ninebay plan, which was to become widespread under tire 'Abbasids. They are square, with an interior whose roof is supported by four piers, although the irregular spacing of the piers and the roofing, either flat or barrel-vaulted and parallel to the qiblah distinguish them from the later exam ples. [See Qasr al-Hallabat.] 'Abbasid Congregational Mosques. T h e major mosques of the 'Abbasids continued to be courtyard hypostyle buildings, but several features appeared or became standard at this time. T h e first is the minaret, which usually took the form of a single tower in the middle of the wall opposite die qiblah (Siraf, Harran, Samarra). T h e examples at Samarra are helicoid (spiral shaped), most likely inspired by the then more numerous and better preserved ziggurats of Mesopotamia. The minaret of the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo was probably of the same shape. T h e second feature is the ziyada, a space that surrounded the mosque on all sides except the qiblah. Its purposes are not yet fully understood, especially when to judge from the aerial photographs of the Great and Abu Dulaf Mosques of Samarra, it more than doubled the size of what were already enormous buildings. It is difficult to imagine that these huge buildings (the Great Mosque remains the largest ever built) could ever have been filled for Friday prayers, but recent excavations at Abu Dulaf have shown that double arcades were added to most of the outer walls to accommodate the overflow. The mosque was abandoned before it had been in use for one year. Therefore, these additions must have been a response to a contemporary need. T h e ziyada of Ibn T u lun's mosque is much smaller, but there at least we have some indications of how it was used. T h e sources mention facilities for ablutions and a small clinic for those attending Friday prayers. The ziyada may also have functioned to iso late the prayer area from the noise of the urban surround ings.
Marble mosaic coating of a mihrab (niche). Z a y n a b i y y e h M o s q u e , D a m a s c u s , f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y . (Courtesy K. Toueir)
T h e third feature was the use of stucco as a decorative medium. Although this was found on Umayyad palaces, the
MOSQUE.
1
MOSQUE 'Abbasid use of brick rather than stone as the medium of construction must have encouraged its proliferation. The poor state of preservation of the Samarra mosques means that the Ibn Tulun mosque is the place where its effects can be best admired. T h e soffits (undersides) of the arches each have a different pattern based on abstract vegetal ornament within simple geometric frameworks of intersecting circles and squares, the so-called Samarra B style. T h e painting which would have adorned these and the friezes that run continuously around the arcades would have made the pat terns even more striking. T h e state of preservation of the mosque of Ibn Tulun also makes it one of the best places to assess the spatial qualities of the large hypostyle mosque. T h e repetition of the basic building unit, the arch on piers, allows endless vistas through the arcades to spring up simultaneously in multiple direc tions. The hypnotic effect that this repetition induces results in the sense of quiet contemplation which pervades the building. Smaller 'Abbasid Mosques. T h e largest corpus of smaller 'Abbasid mosques is those of the stations of the Darb Zubaydah, the pilgrimage route from Kufah to Mecca which was endowed by Zubaydah, the wife of Harun alRashid. More than twenty-five mosques have been recov ered in excavations. T h e simplest plan, as expected, is an undivided room, which occurs both as a single component of a larger building (al-'Amya') and in several instances as an isolated rectangular structure, usually with three en trances on the side opposite the qiblah (e.g., al-Makhruqa). In other cases courtyards have also been preserved, at least in part, in front of this room (al-Kharaba) and the piers of
MOSQUE.
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the wall opposite the qiblah show that the three entrances clearly correspond to a division of the interior into three bays (al-Saqiyya). T h e most common mosque plan which was added to the qasrs on the route was a nine-bay type, possibly related to those of Khan al-Zabib, U m m al-Walid, and Qasr alHallabat mentioned above. In five of the qasrs the nine-bay plan is well-preserved, although in none of them to the ex tent that the elevation can be deduced. Three of these are roughly square (e.g., U m m ad-Damiran), and two are dis tinctly basilical with engaged piers to either side of the four central ones emphasizing the division into a wider nave and two aisles (al-'Aqiq). It is worth noting the resemblance that many of the Darb Zubaydah mosques have to the basilical audience hall of the Dar al-'Imarah at Kufah, one of the towns on the Darb Zu baydah itself. Rather than necessitating a ceremonial link between these structures, however, it serves to underline the blurring of the meanings of forms which naturally arose from the reuse by Islam of earlier prototypes. T h e later 'Abbasid period sees widespread diffusion of the nine-bay plan. Three Persian examples are known at Balkh, Hazara, and Tirmiz. These were all vaulted; the Hazara ex ample resembles a quincunx (which has central and four corner domes plus four barrel-vaulted bays). That of Balkh is impressive for its stucco decoration. Like the adornment of the mosque of Ibn Tulun, the stucco at Balkh is in Sa marra B style, its most easterly diffusion. Persian Variations. T h e only well-documented example of a Sasanian four-arched building, that is, a chahartaq, be ing converted into a mosque is that of Yazd-i Khvast. A
The al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
(Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
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MOSQUE INSCRIPTIONS
similar history has been postulated for several others, raising the question whether dome chambers were later built to stand alone as mosques (i.e., "kiosk" mosques). Most of the discussion has centred around Seljuk monuments, although one 'Abbasid possibility is the mosque of 'Ali Qundi in Fahraj, a small town that also possesses an 'Abbasid hypostyle congregational mosque. Whether converted or built anew, it is likely that the presence of these dome chambers stim ulated one of the most radical developments in later mosque plans, the incorporation of very large dome chambers in the mihrab area of the hypostyle mosque. The other radical development of Persian mosques was the incorporation of another pre-Islamic form: the ayvan. The Friday Mosque at Nayriz has a large qiblah ayvan whose stucco mihrab indicates mat it replaced a tenth-cen tury predecessors. It has been suggested that this ayvan orig inally stood alone, although it may be more likely that it was inserted into a hypostyle plan. T h e real revolution came later, in the eleventh or twelfth century, when the 'Abbasid plan of the Isfahan Friday Mosque was transformed by the addition of four ayvans around its courtyard and became the model for countless others. At another mosque in Isfahan, the Hakim, the remains of an entrance portal decorated in brick and stucco were un covered in 1955. The style of its inscriptions accords with the textual evidence identifying this as the portal of the Jurjir mosque built by a Buyid vizier about 960-985. Its signifi cance lies in its role as advertising the presence of the mosque through both its elaborate decoration and the mul tiple reveals of its architecture. This is one of the earliest monumental entrance portals of any Near Eastern mosque.
Fatimid Cairo. The monumental portal soon became widespread. The late tenth-century mosque of al-Hakim in Cairo has a projecting axial portal, itself modeled on the earlier mosque in the previous capital of the Fatimids at Mahdiyya. The early Fatimid mosques in Egypt also borrow some features from other North African prototypes, such as the T-plan and the ante-mihrab dome chamber. However, those features in turn may have been inspired by our first example, the Great Mosque of Medina as restored by alWalid, where it will be recalled that a shallow dome stood in front of the mihrab and that the arcades were arranged to emphasise the aisle leading to the mihrab. BIBLIOGRAPHY Creswell, K. A. C. Early Muslim Architecture. 2 vols. Oxford, 19321940. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1969. T h e m o s t detailed treatment of the early mosque. Creswell, K. A. C , and J. W . Allan. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Aldershot, 1989. Essential revision and expansion of Kreswell's earlier study (above). Frishman, Martin, a n d H a s a n - U d d i n K h a n , eds. The Architecture of the Mosque. L o n d o n , 1994. T h e most comprehensive work on the s u b ject.
Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art. Rev. a n d enl. ed. N e w H a ven, 1987. Chapter 5 deals with the m o s q u e . Hillenbrand, Robert. "Masdjid." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 6, p p . 677-684. Leiden, i960-. T h e most thoughtful extended s u m mary of mosque architecture yet published. Hillenbrand, Robert. "Archaeology VI. Islamic I r a n . " In Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 2, p p . 317-322. L o n d o n , 1987-. Includes a t h o r o u g h bibliography of die archaeological record. O ' K a n e , Bernard. "Cahartaq, Islamic Period." I n Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 4, p p . 639-642. L o n d o n , 1987-. T h e m o s t recent discussion of the theory of the "kiosk" mosque. Pedersen, Johannes. "Masdjid." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 6, p p . 644-677. Leiden, i960-. Covers the liturgical a n d historical background. BERNARD O ' K A N E
M O S Q U E INSCRIPTIONS. Inscriptions were used in mosques from the earliest times. One of the first congre gational mosques, the Umayyad mosque at Damascus built by al-Walid I (r. 705-715 C E ) , had an extensive epigraphic program in blue and gold mosaic. Although destroyed, the text can be reconstructed from medieval descriptions. It in cluded pious phrases, Qur'anic citations, and the foundation inscription with the caliph's name. Throughout the Islamic world, mosque inscriptions were almost invariably written in Arabic. Although Persian was introduced for commem orative texts and foundation inscriptions in tombs as early as the eleventh century, Arabic remained the primary lan guage for mosque inscriptions, presumably because of the sanctity Arabic was accorded as the language in which the Qur'an was revealed. The information contained in mosque inscriptions falls into two broad categories, historical and religious. Because each text reads continuously in a single language and script, however, such a division of subject matter is basically a con vention of modern scholarship. The standard text begins with the Basmala or invocation to God, followed by Qur'anic citations mixed with the foundation inscription. T h e basic form was so-and-so ordered the construction of this mosque (Ar. amara bi-bina' hadha al-masjid) at a certain date, but the texts can provide the names of the supervisor and craftsmen and other information about specific parts built or restored. T h e mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo is a good example of the standard text in the early Islamic pe riod: in addition to several Qur'anic citations (among them 9:18, 3:106,48:29,2:256, and 24:36-38.) the inscription con tains the Basmala, the name of the patron, Ahmad ibn Tulun, and the date A H Ramadan 265 (May 879 C E ) . Like inscriptions on other types of buildings and objects, those in mosques became longer and more elaborate over time. Ahmad ibn Tulun is identified by his title (amir), his kunya or patronymic (Abu'l-'Abbas), his nasab or genealogy (Ibn Tulun), and his relationship to the 'Abbasid caliph, client of the commander of the faithful (Ar., mawla amir almu'minvn). Two centuries later when the mosque at Da-
MOSQUE INSCRIPTIONS mascus was restored, the inscription records that the work took place during the caliphate of the 'Abbasid al-Muqtadi, commander of the faithful, the empire of the Seljuq sultan Malik Shah, the governorate of his brother Tutush, and the vizierate of Nizam al-Mulk, all of whom are identified by several names, tides, and epithets. By tire fourteenth century under die Mamluks, these tides had doubled in length. Thus, tire inscriptions in mosques are useful historical doc uments to measure political allegiance, for just as the khutba or sermon in the congregational mosque was a sign of au thority, so the inscription there was a testament to official policy. T h e inscription served as a legal document of own ership until all work on the building was finished and the endowment deed (Ar., waqf) could be drawn up. The most common Qur'anic text used in mosques is su rah 9:18, which says that God's mosques should be reserved for good Muslims who believe in God, pray, pay alms, and worship God alone. One of the few Qur'anic texts to mention mosques (Ar., masajid) and the activities associated with them, the text quicldy became standard for congregational mosques. Other common Qur'anic citations on mosques in clude the so-called Throne Verse (2:255) extolling God's majesty, the Light Verse (24:36-38) in which God is elo quently described as the light of the heavens and the earth, and verses from the victory Surah (48) about God's granting a manifest victory. Some Qur'anic verses became associated with parts of mosques because of individual words referring to specific practices: verses 17:78-79 about prayer and vigil, for example, are often found on mihrabs (niches in the wall that indicates the direction of Mecca). Mosque inscriptions were composed as coherent pro grams. Those in the earliest mosques seem to illustrate uni versal or general themes. The Qur'anic inscriptions from the mosque of Damascus, for example, contained eschatological texts about tire day of judgment (surahs 79-81). Similarly, the verses carved in stucco on the arcades of the Azhar mosque in Cairo (AH 363/972 CE) described paradise (e.g., 21:101-107). Medieval sources assert that the entire Qur'an was inscribed around the interior of the mosque of Ibn Tulun. Although patently untrue, the report shows that tire text was meant to be inclusive. Similarly, the inscriptions around the interior of the mosque of al-Hakim in Cairo, founded in 989 ( A H 379), contain the opening verses of var ious surahs, probably used as synecdoches to suggest the presence of the whole. With the breakup of the Islamic community in the tenth century, the Qur'anic verses decorating mosques were se lected to illustrate specific ideological points. The Fatimids, for example, seem to have chosen verses with key phrases about the Shi'i ddwah (the call to accept members of the Prophet's family as his rightful successors). A now-lost mar ble inscription from the exterior of the mosque of al-Hakim, completed in 1010-1011 ( A H 401) contains surah 28:4 with the word a'imma (leaders), the plural of imam, the title used
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by the Fatimids. The western minaret of the mosque is in scribed with surah 11:73; it contains the coded phrase ahl al-bayt (people of the house), taken by the Fatimids as a direct reference to themselves as descendants of the Pro phet's son-in-law 'Ali. Such pointed use of Qur'anic inscrip tions only increased with the growing sectarian struggles: the foundation inscription for the mosque of al-Aqmar, dated by inscription to A H 519 ( 1 1 2 5 - 1 1 2 6 CE) mentions victory over all infidels, referring the Fatimid caliph al-Amir's strug gles against either the Crusaders or the recalcitrant Nizaris. T h e inscription also contains surah 33:33, addressed to the people of the house, a verse which became a code for the Shi'is who considered it a vindication of their legitimacy. In addition to Qur'anic citations, hadith were also in scribed on mosque furnishings and furniture from the elev enth century. Although a less reverent source of authority than the Qur'an, these prophetic traditions have the advan tage of being more diverse and adaptable and could be cited
MOSQUE INSCRIPTIONS. F i g u r e 1. Isfahan stucco mihrab. (Courtesy S. S. Blair)
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to support a particular sectarian point of view. T h e splendid stucco mihrab added to die congregational mosque at Isfa han in A H Safar 710/July 1310 (see figure 1) just after the IIKhanid Oljeitii's conversion to Shiism, for example, is in scribed with a tradition of 'Ali ibn Abi Talib that whoever frequents a mosque will receive one of eight benedictions. It was undoubtedly invoked to win over the population in this troublesome sectarian city. [See also Inscriptions, article on Inscriptions of the Islamic Period; Mosque.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Berchem, M a x van, et al. Materiaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum. Cairo, 1894-. T h e basic survey of Arabic inscriptions on Islamic architecture. T h e most important volumes are those on Cairo by van Berchem a n d Gaston Wiet, on Jerusalem by van Berchem, on Aleppo by Ernst Herzfeld, and on Mecca by Hassan el-Hawary and Wiet. Blair, Sheila S. The Monumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana. Leiden, 1992. Recent corpus. Bloom, Jonathan M . " T h e M o s q u e of al-Hakim in C a i r o . " Muqamas 1 (1983): 15-36. Discusses the sectarian use of inscriptions in the Fatimid period. Combe, Etienne, Jean Sauvaget, and Gaston Wiet, eds. Repertoire chronologiqtie d'epigraphie arabe. 18 vols, to date. Cairo, 1931-. Cor pus of historical inscriptions o n Islamic buildings a n d objects, ar ranged chronologically. T h e latest volume covers material u p to 1397 CE (AH 800). D o d d , Erica, and Shereen Kliairallah. The Image of the Word. 2 vols. Beirut, 1981. Corpus of religious inscriptions on Islamic buildings, arranged by verse n u m b e r and location. Finster, Barbara. " D i e Mosaiken der Umayyadenmoschee von D a maskus." Kunst des Orients 7 (1970-1971): 82-141. Reconstructs the program of inscriptions in one of the earliest mosques. Sourdel-Thomine, J., et al. "Khatt (Writing)." In Encyclopaedia of Is lam, new ed., vol. 4, p p . 1113-1128. Leiden, i960-. Sourdel-Thomine, J., et al. "Kitabat (Inscriptions)." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 5, p p . 210-233. Leiden, i960-. Williams, Caroline. " T h e Cult of ' A M Saints in the Fatimid M o n u ments of Cairo. Part I: T h e M o s q u e of al-Aqmar." Muqamas 1 (1983): 37-52. M o r e on the sectarian use of inscriptions in Fatimid Cairo. S H E I L A S. B L A I R
MOZAN, TELL, site, now positively identified as Ur kes, located in Syria, on the Khabur plains, near the head waters of Wadi Dar'a, one of the streams feeding the Kha bur River, just soutii of the Mardin pass leading to the Anatolian plateau (37°02' N , 4 1 V E). T h e site, with its commanding position, was the major gateway to the copper mines in the north and was a hub in the communication network to the south, along the Khabur, and on the eastwest road tiiat flanks the Taurus range. [See Taurus Moun tains.] The central High Mound measures 18 ha (45 acres) and stands 25 m above virgin soil. The Outer City extends for 400 m, for a total surface of 135 ha (334 acres). Tell Mozan
has been identified as the site of ancient Urkes, the mythical city of Hurrian mythology and one of the major third-mil lennium capitals that had so far escaped identification. It is described in later Hurrian myths as the residence of Kumarbi, the major god of the Hurrian pantheon. As such it plays a prominent role in the mythical geography of ancient Syria. The famous bronze lions of King Tish-atal of Urkes, which had been sold on die antiquities market and are now exhibited in the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum, are thus to be reinterpreted as having come from Tell Mozan. [See Hurrians.] Tell Mozan was first surveyed and briefly excavated by Max Mallowan in 1934. He dug three trenches (R0, GO, HO) and noted some surface remains, identified as NO. Mal lowan first assumed that the site was Roman, which was one reason he chose Chaghar Bazar for his excavations. (The most detailed report is to be found in his wife's autobiog raphy: Agatha Christie, Come Tell Me How You Live, New York, 1977, p. 72ff). [See the biography of Mallowan.] Regular excavations, under the direction of Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, began in 1984; by 1995 eight seasons were completed. T h e long-term research strat egies, favored by the fact that the site has almost no modern occupation, have taken three major directions: extensive surveys (topographic, geophysical, and artifactual) of the entire area; distinct operations on the High Mound, with a view toward obtaining an understanding of different func tional units (the city wall in KW; the temple, BA; the royal storehouse, AK; a private house, F i ) and different periods (the stepped trench, AS; the deep sounding, S2; die later occupations in BH and C i ) ; and, preliminary soundings in the Outer City, indicating that it was utilized botii for burials (OA4, OBi) and domestic structures ( O D 2 , O E i ) . The chronological disttibution of the occupation of Mozan began in the Halaf period, on the basis of ceramic evidence found on the surface of the Outer City and from the lowest levels of deep sounding S2, just above virgin soil. [See Halaf, Tell.] No early third-millennium strata have yet been excavated, but in deep sounding S2 three small pointed-base Ninevite V cups were found in stratum A 1 2 next to a carbon sample for which the calibrated date 2920 ± 1 7 0 BCE was obtained. The surface ceramic survey sug gested that early-third-millennium sherds were more prev alent on die northern portion of the mound. The major occupational strata at Mozan and die largest component in the buildup of the high mound can be dated to the second half of the third millennium (a calibrated C14 date of 2435 B C E ± 60 has been obtained for phase A i of temple BA). It is remarkable to find structures from this period not only at lower elevations (city wall K W , store house AK), but also at middle (private house F i ) and top most elevations (temple BA). This suggests that the city's skyline in the mid-third millennium was already similar in its general outiine to the profile of the tell today.
MOZAN, TELL From the initial ceramic survey it appeared that secondmillennium BCE occupation was centered on the highest por tion of the mound. This was verified in a small sounding (Qi) and in the upper strata of the step trench AS, where traces of a large building have been partially uncovered. The latest levels above temple BA dated to the Khabur period, but no building remains were found. On a lower portion of the high mound, area C i , a single Khabur-period grave was excavated. T h e latest occupation dates to the Nuzi period and is characterized by private houses (AS, BH) containing very few small finds. Even the ceramics are of the coarser variety, with only portions of two painted goblets found in the excavations. The earliest phase of temple BA is the best preserved (see figure i). It had a large interior space (9 X 16.5 m) with a monumental entrance accessed by a long (8 m) stone ramp. The foundations were constructed of large and roughly hewn limestone blocks with mud-brick walls resting imme diately on stone foundations. T h e plan and the exterior di mensions are similar to those of temple G at Ebla and the "Aussenbau" at Chuera (which, however, have an access in antis, as opposed to the Mozan bent-axis approach); at Ebla the walls are twice as thick, which means that the interior space is considerably smaller. [See Ebla; Chuera, Tell.] A thick, cementlike pavement covered the entire interior space; it is assumed that, in spite of its large size, this room was roofed and that the roof was pitched. At the base of a stepped trench on the western side of the tell, portions of a large storehouse have been excavated. Judging from the layout of the excavated portion, this is the southwestern corner of a building that, once excavated, may be three times as large as the present exposure. T h e plan (see figure 2) consists of an accession suite, a large hall with a closet or vault, and probably a courtyard and an interior storage area behind. T h e sectors to the east appear to have a plan that is the mirror image of the western half. T h e lower courses of the walls are stone, up to about 1 m high, with mud brick on top, but they are not plastered. T h e vault in sector B is a small closet (1.8 X 1.3 m) with thick walls and an anteroom. T h e notching, or rabbeting, in the doorways is for the most part structural, in that it must have held a door panel—the location of the door coincides in many cases with a strongly marked threshold. More than six hundred seal impressions, all dated to the early Akkadian period, came from a floor deposit associated with the vault in sector B (stratum B12). More than 150 of these were inscribed: these legends give the name of the king (endan in Hurrian) of Urkes and of the queen, plus other members of the royal court. It appears therefore that this was a royal storehouse, where goods were stored in boxes, baskets, and jars on which the seals were rolled; there were only two door sealings. Since the majority of the seals be longed to the queen, the western wing of AK must have been reserved for goods belonging to her. T h e iconography and
BBI ^
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perimetral walls ^
MOZAN, TELL.
0
1
2
3
4
5
F i g u r e I . Plan of temple BA, phase BiA. (Courtesy
G. Buccellati)
style of the seal impressions are, for the most part, in striking contrast with the more formal early Akkadian glyptic of the south. T h e seals carved in Urke§ have a unique stylistic vigor that can be traced to the production of different workshops. Distinctive aspects include: the close correlation between the scenes and the individuals mentioned in the legends; the feet that several different seals were used by the same person; various depictions of the royal family with the king, the queen, the crown prince and a smaller child seated on the lap of the queen; the realistic rendering of animal figures, which include a lion crouching under the throne of the king; the extremely fine and naturalistic definition of the figures, resulting in what appears to be portraitlike representations of the queen and the prince.
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or projected
M O Z A N , T E L L . F i g u r e 2. Plan of storehouse AK, stratum S i 2. (Courtesy G. Buccellati)
Two administrative cuneiform tablets dating to the Late Sargonic period (c. 2250-2000 BCE) were found in F i ; they are written in Old Akkadian, but with several Hurrian per sonal names. A school tablet from AK contains an excerpt of six lines from a list of professions also known from Abu Salabikh and Ebla. [See Akkadian; Abu Salabikh.] With it were found one lentoid tablet and fragments of some thirty additional administrative tablets, all from the Early Sargonic period. About eighty seal impressions from AK bore cune iform legends from the same period. [See Seals; Cuneiform.] More than forty seal impressions were found in K W — mostly door sealings dating to the Early Dynastic III period, some possibly even Early Dynastic II. While some motifs continue into the Early Akkadian period, there are no clearly recognizable Akkadian sealings in the deposit. Prominent among the designs are the nude hero motifs and animal and human combat scenes. Typical Early Dynastic III ceramics include medium jars with grooved rims, Simple-ware conical cups, and Metallicware jars with rounded or ring bases. Akkadian ceramics are characterized by a later variety of metallic ware and a con-
MOZAN, TELL.
F i g u r e 3.
(Courtesy G. Buccellati)
Small statue of a lion found in temple BA.
MUNHATA tinuation of the Simple-ware tradition. One tomb with more than fifty vessels excavated in the Outer City (OBi) exhibits the transition between the Late Ninevite 5 tradition and the use of early Metallic ware. During this transition, painted Scarlet-ware stands were utilized at Mozan; they appear to have been manufactured locally because both painted and unpainted examples were found at the site. From third-millennium contexts a large number of metal objects have been excavated and analyzed—mostiy points and pins, but also spears, daggers, and one scraper. A range of metal alloys was used—relatively pure copper, copper al loyed witii arsenic, or low-tin bronzes. Some recycling of metals is indicated. T h e majority of these objects were cast, annealed and finished by cold working. BIBLIOGRAPHY Buccellati, Giorgio, a n d Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. Mozan, vol. I , The Soundings of the First Two Seasons. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 20. Malibu, 1988. T h e first d o c u m e n t a r y report on the current excava tions, with introductory information o n the earlier explorations. Buccellati, Giorgio, a n d Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. "Tell M o z a n . " Syr ian Archaeology Bulletin 2 (1990): 4-7. Preliminary report on the fifth and sixth seasons. Buccellati, Giorgio, a n d Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. "Tell M o z a n . " Les Dossiers d'Archiologie, no. 155 (1990): 18-23. Introductory overview of the major finds. Buccellati, Giorgio, a n d Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. " M o z a n . " American Journal of Archaeology 95 (1991): 712-714; 98 (1994): 131-133. P r e liminary reports o n the sixth a n d seventh seasons of excavation. Buccellati, Giorgio, a n d Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. " M o z a n , T a l l . " In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasialischen Archaologie, Berlin, forthcoming. Preliminary report. Buccellati, Giorgio, a n d Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. " T h e Seventh Sea son of Excavations at Tell M o z a n , 1992." Annales Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes (forthcoming). Preliminary report. Buccellati, Giorgio, a n d Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. " T h e Eighth Season of Excavations at Tell M o z a n , 1993." Annales Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes (forthcoming). Kelly-Buccellati, Marilyn. " A N e w T h i r d Millennium Sculpture from M o z a n . " In Essays in Ancient Civilization Presented to HeleneJ. Kantor, edited by Albert L e o n a r d , Jr., a n d Bruce B . Williams, p p . 149154, pi. 26. Chicago, 1989. Critical analysis of the plowman a n d herd stelae from temple BA. Kelly-Buccellati, Marilyn. " T h r e e Seasons of Excavation at Tell M o z a n . " In Tall al-Hamidiya 2, b y Seyarre Eichler et al., p p . 1 1 9 132. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, Series Archaeologica, 6. Gottingen, 1990. Preliminary report. Milano, Lucio, et al. Mozan, vol. 2, The Epigraphic Finds of the Sixth Season. Syro-Mesopotamian Studies, 5.1. Malibu, 1991. D o c u m e n tary publication of the first find of stratified third-millennium c u neiform texts from M o z a n . G I O R G I O BUCCELLATI and
MARILYN
KELLY-BUCCELLATI
MUNHATA, site located in the northern Jordan Valley, near the outiet of Nahal Tabor, 215 m below sea level. Ex cavations were conducted over a surface area of 2,000 sq m by Jean Perrot (1966) in the 1960s.
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T h e earliest layers (6-3B) are dated to Pre-Pottery Neo lithic B (PPNB) period. In layer 6 remains of isolated houses were identified, with foundations built of undressed stones and bricks. In tire southern portion of the excavated area, remains of special activities were identified. Five large basalt slabs with wide grooves were uncovered, adjacent to a pave ment of large pebbles and a floor with a few fireplaces. In layer 5 tire remains of a brick building with a wall more than 20 m long were uncovered. T h e houses in layer 4 were rec tangular, with foundations built of a single course of un dressed stones and sun-dried bricks, sometimes containing lime-plaster floors. In layer 3 a large rounded building with pebble flooring was uncovered, as were several rounded, plastered installations, perhaps used for storage. T h e lithic industry of the PPNB is characterized by spear points and arrowheads, made mostiy from long blades re moved from bipolar (naviform) cores and by elongated sickle blades, burins, and retouched blades. The assemblage also includes a large collection of ground-stone tools, in cluding flat bowls, querns, and rubbing stones (Gopher, 1989). Other artifacts recovered include small clay figurines representing both males and females. Among the imports to the site were obsidian from central Anatolia and marine shells. Of the faunal remains, two thirds are of ovicaprids; the rest are pig, cattle, gazelle, and deer. From this evidence, the economic basis seems to have been a mixed strategy of agriculture, herding, and hunting. Following a short occupational gap (layer 3a), layer 2b belongs to die Pottery Neolithic (PN) period, known as the Yarmukian culture (including both the Sha ar ha-Golan and Munhata phases as originally defined by the excavator), ten tatively dated to 5500-5000/4800 BCE (uncalibrated). [See Sha'ar ha-Golan.] T h e Yarmukian habitations are in large pits with numer ous underground bell-shaped storage facilities. At least some of these dwellings contain a floor, a fireplace, and a bench like structure around the walls. The often bell-shaped stor age pits are about 1 m deep and 1-1.5 m in diameter at the base. Recently studied by Yosef Garfinkel (1992), the Yarmu kian pottery, the earliest at the site, is characterized by pithoi, holemouth jars, and decorated bowls, as well as handleless jars. Large open bowls are interpreted as food n-ays, while miniature ones are seen as cosmetic or spice containers. Considered tire hallmark of the Yarmukian culture, the in cised herringbone pattern, always enclosed by painted lines, is a common decoration. Another pattern is a combination of zigzag and undulating lines. Early assemblages contain pottery decorated with incision and paint. T h e objects that most distinguish the Yarmukian culture are the seated female figurines. They are usually represented wearing a conical mask; they have "coffee bean" eyes and their hands are folded under their breasts. T h e lithic industry of layer 2b contained denticulate siclde e
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MUNSELL CHART
blades, awls and perforators, scrapers and burins, and a few arrowheads and bifacials. The Yarmukian arrowheads are often 'Amuq and Byblos points, although the smaller type appear in low frequencies. The assemblage resembles that at Sha'ar ha-GoIan and may indicate that the sites were oc cupied by the same people. Most of layer 2a is related to the Wadi Rabbah phase (4800-4000 B G E ) , often considered Early Chalcolithic, and reflects Halafian connections. Layer 2a contains the remains of large rectangular structures with mud floors. T h e lithic industry consists of smaller versions of the same forms as the Yarmukian. Common types of Wadi Rabbah pottery were holemouth jars and pithoi. Slightly less common were bow-rim jars, chalices, and stands. The stone tools from layer 2 were made using unidirec tional cores, a feature that distinguishes them from the PPNB industry, and include sickle blades and scrapers. Layer 1, which was disturbed by agricultural activities, con tained remains from the Early Bronze Age. BIBLIOGRAPHY Garfinkel, Yosef. The Pottery Assemblages of the Sha'ar Hagolan and Rabah Stages of Munhata (Israel), Cahiers d u Centre de Recherche Francais de Jerusalem, n o . 6. Paris, 1992. Gopher, Avi. The Flint Assemblages of Munhata: Final Report. Cahiers du Centre de Recherche Francais de Jerusalem, no. 4 . Paris, 1989. Perrot, Jean. " L a troisieme campagne de fouilles a M u n h a t a (1964)." Syria 43 (1966): 49-63. OFER BAR-YOSEF
white). T h e /8 identifies the chroma (or intensity) of the color—hence indicating a fairly pure representation. T h e numeric code allows a more precise color identification than simply by name; even in the Munsell charts the name yellow describes several different color representations—the reason for combining the color name and the code. The color charts provide more precise color differentia tion for both natural and artifactual materials. With soils and sediments, color variations may not only differentiate strata and loci, but may also indicate the presence of organic ma terials that might prompt further investigation. For artifacts, the most common use of the Munsell charts is in identifying ceramic colors. Their value, however, is not just in color identification (even though the charts provide standards to identify colors beyond such often arbitrary and subjective designations as "burgundy" and "sky blue"): ceramic color, for example, results from a combination of factors, so that assessing color in ceramics can help to identify clay types and technical production procedures. Although the Munsell charts provide a relative standard of color identification, limitations in their use still exist. Col ors ideally should be measured in daylight and preferably at the same time each day, to minimize lighting variations. It is preferable (but usually impossible in the field) to have the colors read by the same person each time because color per ceptions vary from person to person. Despite these limitations, the Munsell soil-color charts are so far the best source of standardization for color identifi cation and are an essential basic tool of modern archaeology.
MUNSELL CHART. An internationally recognized
BIBLIOGRAPHY
set of charts that arrange colors on a series of standardized color chips and named for its originator, Albert H. Munsell (1858-1918), is known as the Munsell soil-color charts. In this handbook each chip is identified with a verbal descrip tion and a numeric code. The colors are arranged according to a theoretical threedimensional cylinder according to three intersecting vari ables: hue, value, and chroma (or brightness). Hue defines the position of the color in the spectrum arranged around the circumference; the circumference is divided into ten col ors that are then subdivided into another ten. Value defines the darkness or lightness of a color along a vertical axis, which is then divided from o to 10, with 0 representing black and 10 representing white. Chroma (or brightness) defines the purity or intensity of the color as it radiates from the vertical axis of value (a grayer representation) to its purest state (or brilliance) at the spectrum's outer circumference (usually to 10, but sometimes to an intensity of 16). Colors represented by these three variables are then given standardized names and numeric codes: for example, yellow 5Y 8/8. The 5 Y indicates the hue name—Y for yellow— while the 5 defines the position in the hue range. T h e 8/ identifies the value of the color on the scale of 0-10 (black-
Birren, Faber, ed. A G r a m m a r of Color: A Basic Treatise on the Color System of Albert H. Munsell. N e w York, 1969. Joukowsky, M a r t h a Sharp. A Complete Manual of Field Archaeology: Tools and Techniques of Field Work for Archaeologists. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980. Shackley, M y r a L . Archaeological Sediments: A Survey of Analytical Methods. N e w York, 1975. Shepard, Anna O . Ceramics for the Archaeologist. W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , 1956. DALE W . MANOR
MURABBA'AT, a wadi descending from the Judean Desert to the Dead Sea. T h e wadi's steep slopes contain numerous caves, in four of which were found remains dating from the Chalcolithic period and later. T h e caves are located about 18 km (11 mi.) south of Qumran and about 25 km (16 mi.) southeast of Jerusalem. Like several of the caves associated with Qumran, those at Murabba'at were located by the Ta'amra bedouin searching for written materials they could sell. Because such material began to surface in Jeru salem late in 1951, an archaeological expedition was mounted to explore the wadi and its caves between 21 Jan uary and 21 March 1952.
MUREYBET Talcing the materials discovered during formal explora tions together with what the bedouin had found and sold, the results were considerable: along with various biblical manuscripts, documentary autographs were discovered written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Arabic. These ma terials spanned the period from the first century CE to the tenth century. By far the most important texts dated to the time of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, led by Shim'on BarKokhba (132-135 C E ) . In addition to a number of letters Bar Kokhba sent to his lieutenants (in them his name is revealed to be Simeon b. Kosiba), the Murabba'at finds include contracts written during his regime or just prior to it. At about tire same time, bedouin had discovered and were offering for sale additional materials related to this revolt. A proper appraisal of the Murabba'at texts requires the use of these related documents. They come from one or more caves in the Wadi Seiyal (Nahal Se'elim), and the nearby caves of Wadi Habra (Nahal Hever). After the bedouin pil fering, Israeli archaeologists explored Nahal Se'elim be tween 24 January and 2 February i960; the documentary finds were fragmentary in the extreme. Archaeologists also investigated Nahal Hever for two weeks in i960 and a sec ond time in the spring of 1961. It was tiien that their efforts reaped rich rewards. One of the Hever caves, known as the Cave of Letters, yielded tiiree different collections of documents. The first was a packet of fifteen letters to military leaders in charge of 'Ein-Gedi, an important military supply site during the Second Revolt. Many of these letters were from Bar Kokhba himself, while others had been sent by subordinates. A sec ond group of documents, known as the Archive of the 'EinGedites, consists of six Hebrew and Aramaic contracts leas ing state lands. Apparentiy, like the Roman administration he sought to replace, Bar Kokhba claimed ownership of vast tracts of land, which he leased to tenant farmers. The tiiird collection of documents from the Cave of Letters was the archive of Babatha daughter of Simeon. This group num bered about forty and deals with property and litigation in volving Babatha and her family. T h e texts are inscribed in Aramaic, Nabatean, and Greek; the earliest Babatiia text dates to 93/94 C E and the latest to 132 C E . All of the Murabba'at texts have been published in volume 2 of the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (Benoit, Milik, and de Vaux, 1961). Texts 42-48 are Bar Kokhba letters; 49-52 may also be Bar Kokhba letters but are too fragmentary to permit certainty even about their genre. T h e Greek materials in the Babatha archive are also now avail able (Lewis, Yadin, and Greenfield, 1989). The fifteen let ters from Nahal Hever are still unpublished, as are the Se mitic portions of the Babatha archive. For tiiese texts there are prepublication descriptions that contain significant ex cerpts. Many lacunae exist in die scholarship of the Second Jew
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ish Revolt, The most basic questions—the causes of the out break, its geographic extent, and even its dates—cannot be answered with any certainty because of lack of evidence. T h e Murabba'at and related materials do not make it pos sible to write a history of die revolt, but they do shed im portant light on limited aspects of it. The materials illumine the course of the war, administration under Bar Kokhba, and the prosopography of those involved in the revolt. They contain precious information on legal and religious practice, the economics of second-century CE Palestine, Jewish liter acy, and onomastics. T h e linguistic information they supply is very considerable and has yet to be fully exploited: the form of both the Hebrew and the Aramaic languages is somewhat different from that known from the Dead Sea Scrolls and later rabbinic literature. [See also Bar Kokhba Revolt; Dead Sea Scrolls; and Masada.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Benoit, Pierre, J. T . Milik, a n d Roland de Vaux. Les grottes de Mur abba'at. 2 vols. Discoveries in the Judean Desert, vol. 2. Oxford, 1961. Editio princeps of t h e M u r a b b a ' a t texts, with photographs, tran scriptions, French translations, brief notes, a n d a full discussion of the archaeology. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. " T h e Bar C o c h b a Period." In The Bible in Current Catholic Thought: Gruenthaner Memorial Volume, edited by J. L. M c K e n z i e , p p . 133-168. N e w York, 1962. G o o d analysis of several texts, with evidence of classical a n d pattistic sources. Deals with most of the big issues b u t m a y be overtaken by publication of ad ditional primary source material in the near future. Isaac, Benjamin, a n d A h a r o n Oppenheimer. " T h e Revolt of Bar Kokhba: Ideology a n d M o d e r n Scholarship." Journal of Jewish Stud ies 36 (1985): 33-60. Balanced discussion of the major issues a n d how scholars have evaluated t h e evidence, including the M u r a b b a ' a t and related texts. Lewis, Naphtali, Yigael Yadin, a n d Jonas C. Greenfield. The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, Ar amaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions. Jerusalem, 1989. Excellent analysis of texts a n d ancillary issues, with photographs, transcriptions, and English translations. Yadin, Yigael. "Expedition D " a n d "Expedition D : T h e Cave of the Letters." Israel Exploration Journal 11 (1961): 36-52; 12 (1962): 227257. Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba. L o n d o n , 1971. Along with Yadin's articles (above), this volume provides coverage of the expedition to the Cave of Letters a n d an analysis of die significance of the texts and related materials, including those from M u r a b b a ' a t . T h e articles give tech nical details of the archaeology a n d m a n y excerpts from texts that remain unpublished; the book contains beautiful color photographs of artifacts and both published and unpublished texts, MICHAEL O .
WISE
MUREYBET, Neolithic site located on the left bank of the Euphrates River, prior to its innundation by the Thawra (Tabqa) dam (36°o4'o6" N , 38°os'26" E). Mureybet is a key site for the Epipaleolithic and Early Neolithic in Syria be cause its continuous sequence from the Natufian to the PrePottery Neofhhic B periods (PPNB) charts the transition
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M U R R A Y , M A R G A R E T ALICE
from hunting and gathering to agriculture and the passage to a sedentary lifestyle. In-depth studies of the site provide the fullest picture of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) in the northern Levant. Salvage excavations were conducted by Maurits N . van Loon in 1965 for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and by Jacques Cauvin from 1971 to 1974 for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Cauvin found four phases of occupation that incorporate and supercede van Loon's stratigraphy. The earliest is phase I (8500-8200 B C E ) , in which the semisedentary occupation of a huntinggathering community was represented in a small excavated area of 35 sq m by a semisubterranean round house, fire pits, and a microlithic tool assemblage, including geome tries. This material culture is considered to be Natufian, thus greatly extending its geographic range beyond the southern Levant. In phase II (8200-8000 B C E ) , a transitional period that corresponds to van Loon's levels I-VTIL semisedentary occupation continued with monocellular round houses, firepits, and a lithics assemblage with Khiamian arrowheads that, although common, first appeared in phase lb. Phase III (8000-7600 BCE; van Loon's levels IX-XVLT) represents the Mureybetian, or Middle Euphrates, variant of PPNA culture. At that time innovations in architecture and changes in symbolic representation and an expansion of the setdement to an estimated 2-3 hectares (5-7 acres) took place. Multicellular round houses are internally divided by half-height partition walls that formed storage compart ments. Late in phase III, van Loon found multicellular rec tilinear structures built with distinctive loaf-shaped cut lime stone blocks embedded in a matrix of red clay mortar. T h e structures were subdivided into compartments thought to be too small for human habitation, and the buildings are believed to have functioned as storehouses. Lithics are char acterized by Khiamian and Helwan (notched and tanged) arrowheads. The appearance of rectilinear architecture and Helwan points at Mureybet much earlier than in the south ern Levant may indicate their origin on the Middle Euphra tes and later diffusion to the southern Levant. Crude female figurines of clay and stone were found. Several ceramic ves sels mark an early abortive attempt at pottery manufacture. Subsistence continued to be largely based on hunting and gathering, but there is evidence of some cereal cultivation. Thus, the changes noted above indicate significant trans formations in social organization prior to the emergence of a full agricultural system. In phase IV (7600-6800 BCE) of the PPNB period, the area (28 sq m) excavated included portions of a large rectangular house. Under it were buried several detached skulls, reflect ing funerary customs well known in the southern Levant. Lithics are marked by the appearance of Byblos points. Ce reals were cultivated and steps were taken toward the prac tice of animal herding. The occupation of Mureybet from about 8500 to 6800 B C E , during which there were no major
cultural breaks, indicates that the trend to sedentism and the emergence of agriculture developed with the same basic population. [See also Euphrates; and Euphrates Dams, Survey of.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Calley, Sylvie. Technologic du debitage a Mureybet, Syrie: ge-Se millenaire, British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 3 1 2 . 1 2. Oxford, 1986. Cauvin, Jacques. " L e s fouilles de M u r e y b e t (1971-1974) et leur sig nification p o u r les origins d e la sedentarisation au P r o c h e - O r i e n t . " Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 44 (1979): 19-48. Primary publication of Cauvin's excavation. Cauvin, Marie-Claire, a n d Danielle Stordeur. " L e s outillages lithiques et osseux d e Mureybet, Syrie (fouilles van L o o n 1965)." Cahiers de I'Euphrate 1 (1978): 1-103. See volumes 2-5 for other reports. Nierle, M . C. " M u r e y b e t et Cheikh Hassan (Syrie): Outillage de m o u ture et de broyage (9eme et 8eme millenaires)." Cahiers de I'Euphrate 3 (1982): 177-216. van L o o n , Maurits N . " T h e Oriental Institute Excavations at Mureybit, Syria: Preliminary Report o n the 1965 C a m p a i g n . P a r t 1: Architec ture a n d General F i n d s . " Journal of Near Eastern Studies 27 (1968): 265-290. Primary report of van L o o n ' s excavation. THOMAS L . MCCLELLAN
MURRAY, MARGARET ALICE
(1863-1963), first professional woman Egyptologist. Born in Calcutta to English parents who held liberal views concerning female education and non-Christian religions, Margaret Murray earned her doctorate at University College, London, under Flinders Petrie, James H. Walker and Francis Llewellyn Griffith. She was hired 1899 as a junior lecturer and taught elementary Egyptian hieroglyphs, which resulted in a gram mar (1905). Murray's first field experience was with Flinders Petrie at Abydos (1902-1903), when they excavated the mysterious Osireion (thought to be a simulation of the tomb of Osiris or a cenotaph of Seti I). From 1903 to 1904, Murray worked at Saqqara as part of a three-woman team, copying relief scenes in the mastabas. This work resulted in the first and only volume of Saqqara Mastabas (1905). Returning to teaching at University College, Murray or ganized a comprehensive program in archaeology and con tinued the language courses. She produced an elementary Coptic grammar in 1911. After Walker's death, she and Flinders Petrie constituted the Department of Egyptology. As he dug in Egypt every winter, starting in November, Murray carried the full burden of teaching but was not ap pointed an assistant professor until age sixty-one in 1924. Only summer vacations allowed Murray time for exca vations, which she carried out in Europe because of the heat and inundation in Egypt. She spent five seasons investigat ing megalithic sites on Malta and Minorca. Coincidentally she began studying European folklore and witch cults, pub lishing The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921)
MUSEUMS AND MUSEOLOGY which won her acclaim among folklorists and the presidency of the Folk Lore Society from 1953 to 1955. Her last field expeditions were at Petra (1937) and at Tell el-'Ajjul near Gaza with Flinders Petrie and E. J. H. MacKay in 1938. Murray's bibliography includes more than eighty books and articles. Her best-selling popular book The Splendour that was Egypt appeared in 1949. Her last and hundredth year saw the publication of two books, The Genesis ofReligion and her memoirs, My First Hundred Years. Murray's great est contribution to Egyptology may well have been her ded ication to teaching, which resulted in the first integrated pro gram of studies in Egyptology in England, and in training subsequent generations of British archaeologists. [See also Abydos; 'Ajjul, Tell el-; Petra; Saqqara; and the biography of Petrie.] BIBLIOGRAPHY D a w s o n , W a r r e n R., and Eric P. Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. ad rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1972. Murray, Margaret. Elementary Egyptian Grammar. L o n d o n , 1905. M u r r a y , Margaret. Saqqara Mastabas. P a r t 1. Publications of the E g y p tian Research Account, 10. L o n d o n , 1905. M u r r a y , Margaret. Elementary Coptic (Sahidic) Grammar. L o n d o n , 1911. M u r r a y , Margaret. The Splendour That Was Egypt. L o n d o n , 1949. M u r r a y , Margaret. The Genesis of Religion. L o n d o n , 1963. M u r r a y , Margaret. My First Flundred Years. L o n d o n , 1963. BARBARA SWITALSKI L E S K O
MUSEUMS AND MUSEOLOGY. It is often as sumed that a fascination with the past is a preoccupation of the modern era, born of a time when the luxury of leisure could permit the retrospective perusal of earlier peoples and cultures. In point of fact many earlier civilizations demon strated the same curiosity in their ancient antecedents; "mu seums," in the sense of collections of curios and relics illus trating the past, have existed, in some form, since well before classical times. Nabonidus, the sixth-century DCE ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, is thought to have had a museum, containing ancient inscriptions and other artifacts, at Ur, and possibly another at Babylon. T h e Greeks also frequently adorned their temples and shrines with statues, paintings, and, in addition to aesthetically interesting artifacts, unusual geological and natural history specimens. Indeed, it was the Greeks who first devised the word museum, although the building first named as such, erected by Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria in the third century B C E , was, in reality, more akin to a modern university research institute. Museums in the currently accepted sense of the term trace their origins to the Renaissance, when an interest in the an cient world was rekindled, and wealthy individuals began to assemble extraordinarily rich and varied collections of art treasures. Nowhere was collecting artifacts and works of art more vigorously pursued than in Italy: in the fifteenth cen
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tury the Medicis were particularly active in Florence, and in 1471 Pope Sixtus IV established a museum of antiquities on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. More museums were built in the following century. The Belvedere Gardens in Rome be came the setting for a fine collection of classical statuary, and the Uffrzi Gallery was founded in Florence. These early museums were essentially private collections, accessible only to their owners; in the seventeenth century, however, it became customary to grant access to learned travelers and educated members of the public, sometimes on receipt of an admission fee. It was out of the tradition of those private collections that the concept of the public mu seum was born—the creation often inspired by the bequest of the collection to the nation following the death of the owner. Thus it was that the physician Hans Sloane's exten sive and diverse collections of antiquities, natural history, and geological specimens, drawings, books, and manu scripts came to form, after his death in 1753, the basis of the first real public museum, the British Museum in London, which first opened its doors to the general public in 1759. The two hundred years or so following the foundation of this great institution saw the rapid development and prolif eration of museums throughout the world; not only muse ums to serve antiquities and works of art, but museums to document almost every aspect of human experience as well as the natural sciences. As museums have both diversified in terms of their subject matter and specialized with regard to their various points of focus, there has arisen the need for an all-embracing discipline to cope with the numerous as pects and demands of collection curation. T h e name given to this multifaceted discipline is museology, which may be defined as the study of aspects relating to museum collec tions (in this respect, therefore, the term museum studies is to be much preferred because museology might otherwise be taken to indicate a study of museums or even a study of the muses). Clearly, the parameters of this study are vari able, depending upon the nature of the collections: the prob lems facing a museum of philately will not be the same as those confronting a museum of marine transport. In general terms, however, the broad categories of collection care and management are applicable to almost any museum. Re stricting the discussion to archaeological museums, the prin cipal subject areas subsumed under the heading of imiseology or museum studies are display and presentation, conservation and storage, documentation and cataloging, public relations and education, management and policy, and, in the case of some of the larger museums, research. T h e issue of display and presentation is perhaps one of the most complex areas of museology, involving, as it often does, a balance between aesthetic values and technical re strictions. T h e overall design of a particular room or gallery, the arrangement and style of showcases, and the positioning of freestanding exhibits have to be weighed against such fac tors as access, anticipated number of visitors, and security.
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Aesthetically pleasing light levels, both external and in-case, may have to be tempered by consideration of the nature of the objects displayed. Organic materials, textiles, manu scripts, and paintings are light-sensitive, and the level of il lumination must consequently be kept low in their display cases. The choice of gallery display materials, again, is a matter to be determined by more than mere physical ap pearance. In particular, fabrics for case interiors need to be tested rigorously for acidity and sulphide levels, an excess of either being potentially detrimental to the condition of objects placed in close proximity. Conttol of relative hu midity is essential for metal and organic objects, and because the optimum value varies for different materials, it may not be possible to display certain items in the same case. For example, a composite object, such as a bronze daggers with an ivory hilt, would require especially sensitive treatment because the range of relative humidity, acceptable for both materials, may be very narrow indeed. The in-case relative humidity level is normally adjusted by die simple method of inserting a concealed tray of water (to raise the level) or a desiccant such as silica gel (to lower die value). The level is monitored by means of an instrument known as a hygrom eter, placed as unobtrusively as possible inside the showcase. Changes in temperature are generally less critical tiian those in relative humidity. Nevertheless, extremes and large shortterm fluctuations must be guarded against if problems such as the stress fracturing of glass and metal artifacts or the softening of materials used in conservation and restoration are to be avoided. It is important, therefore, that the overall design of a gallery incorporate some provision for temper ature regulation. Special attention must also be paid to mounting objects within cases. Mounts to support objects or hold them at particular angles must both protect the item in question, free from stress, and be as unobtrusive as possible. Steel pins, used to mount metal objects on vertical display panels, must be fitted with plastic sleeves to prevent corrosion from the electrochemical reaction contact between the two metals causes. T h e layout of a gallery is of prime concern. Archaeologists are notoriously chronologically oriented, an obsession not necessarily shared by the visiting public. While it may seem logical to present archaeological materials chronologically— Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age, Middle Bronze Age, and so on—thematic presentations may be equally meaningful to the visitor. A gallery could, for example, be organized geo graphically, or be divided into sections entitled daily life, religion, or weapons and warfare. The arrangement of objects within cases is largely a matter of taste. Fashions change, and there has been a general ten dency in recent years to make displays sparser and more intimate, although there are always instances where greater impact can be gained by presenting objects en masse. At tention should be paid to correct representation: a museum
may have a fine collection of, say, unusual Early Bronze Age Syrian terra cottas and jewelry, but to show great numbers of them at the expense of more mundane items would ob viously misrepresent the culture. A balance needs to be found between exhibiting objects which are unusual or spe cial and those which are more truly representative. The provision of labels and information panels constitutes another area of museology for which there are no hard-andfast rules. Many museums adopt a "house style" to provide a uniformity of in-case labels and information panels throughout their various galleries. Some larger museums, which have their own design department, will be able to pro duce professional standard panels and labels themselves. Otiierwise, this work has to be contracted out, an expensive procedure, especially where graphics or photographs need to be incorporated. Information panels should be exactiy that: they should be informative, concise (250 words is die maximum attention limit for most people), and should help to put the exhibited artifacts into context. In-case object la bels, similarly, should be clearly and simply worded. Small, unobtrusive numbers, placed next to each item, provide the easiest means of keying the labels to the objects. Labels should, in any event, always include the museum's registra tion number to assist possible further requests for infor mation. Technical terms should be avoided as much as pos sible (both on labels and information panels): there is simply no point in specifying the date of an object as "Middle Bronze IIA" (or worse, abbreviated MB HA) when die vast majority of visitors will barely have grasped the "three ages" system, let alone its idiosyncratic subdivisions. If such terms cannot be avoided, it is essential that a chronological chart with explanatory text be incorporated into the gallery infor mation. Similarly, a map should appear somewhere in the gallery to show the geographic parameters of the exhibits and location of sites. While display and presentation are arguably the most ob vious side of museology (the side seen by the public), there are behind-the-scenes aspects of museum work that are equally important. Storage is often a major problem for mu seums, especially for those long-established institutions whose space is finite but whose collections continue to grow. Museums that are involved in active fieldwork projects fre quently have to resort to outstations in order to cope with processing finds. Their reserve collections, in other words, the items not on permanent exhibition, must be stored fol lowing a well-organized system, to keep them accessible to the museum's curators and visiting scholars. D a m p , subter ranean basements, often the popular image of museum storerooms, are unacceptable. T h e environmental and cli matic control of storage areas is every bit as important as that of the galleries and showcases. This often requires the installation of sophisticated and expensive equipment to handle dust extraction, temperature control, and dehumidification.
MUSEUMS AND MUSEOLOGY Conservation, the preservation of cultural heritage, is an immense subject in itself, covering a wide range of skills and disciplines. At its most basic, "passive conservation" may be seen as the manipulation or control of the environment in order to inhibit the deterioration of an object's condition. A heavily corroded iron dagger placed in appropriately de humidified storage may not look very attractive, but it will not corrode further. "Active conservation," on the other hand, seeks to arrest and reverse the processes of deterio ration by the application of mechanical, chemical, or, in some cases, electrolytic treatments. A bronze bowl, for ex ample, which is found to be deteriorating through the con dition known as bronze disease (caused by the presence in the corrosion layer of cuprous chloride) can be mechanically treated using a scalpel. Sites of active bronze disease will be removed, and the overall surface of the bowl will be "cleaned" down to a level within the corrosion layer which is judged to represent the object's original surface. T h e bowl can then be stabilized using a corrosion inhibitor such as benzotriazole and will then be lacquered to add further pro tection. Restoration is the stage beyond conservation, by means of which missing elements of an object are replaced using synthetic materials. A pottery storejar which has been con served by cleaning and desalinating the individual sherds, and then assembled using an appropriate adhesive, may be found to be missing part of its rim, or to have a broken handle or gaps or holes in the body. Through the process of restoration, these deficiencies can be made good, using a material such as fine dental plaster, which is subsequently painted to provide a near-perfect match. All three aspects of conservation are relevant to museum collections. T h e importance of climatic and environmental regulation has already been stressed. In a situation in which this type of control is perfect, the need for active conser vation would be minimal beyond the appropriate treatment of new acquisitions. In reality, of course, conditions are never perfect: accidents occur in handling, and many of the materials used in conservation have a finite life-span and may need to be periodically renewed. Small museums may incorporate a laboratory employing one or two conservators who are trained to cope with the full range of materials, or may instead subscribe to a service which provides conser vation cover for a number of similar museums in the same region. For large national and international museums, such as the British Museum in London or the Louvre in Paris, both of which have vast and diverse permanent collections, as well as a constant input of archaeological materials from their various field projects, the scale of the operation is much greater. Conservation, in such cases as these, constitutes an established department within the museum, with many lab oratories providing facilities for a large number of specialist conservators responsible for individual materials (ceramics, stone, metals, textiles).
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A controversial aspect of museology, which draws to gether display and conservation, lies in the degree to which objects are restored for exhibition. Techniques are so highly refined that it is certainly possible to take, for example, twenty sherds which make up half of the profile of a bowl and produce a complete vessel without even a crack show ing. Such a procedure would be seen by most museums as unethical, as would the practice of "completing" an object solely by reference to external evidence. It would not be acceptable, for example, to restore, using a synthetic mate rial, the missing head of a bronze statuette, based on an illustration of a generally similar piece. It would, on the other hand, be perfectly in order to fill in an unsightly gap in the rim of a Greek black-figure vase, or to manufacture the missing second wheel of a terra-cotta chariot model by mak ing a cast of the existing one. While the limits of acceptability vary from museum to museum, most archaeological muse ums accept a responsibility not to restore beyond what is known or can be established beyond doubt. It is also gen erally held that the restored elements of an object should be unobtrusive at a distance, but obvious on close examination, leaving no question as to what is original. If an overall trend can be observed in this area, it seems to be one of moving away from restoration. With the viewing public's greater awareness of the processes of archaeology, there is a much greater tolerance and acceptance of artifacts "as found"— pots with gaps and all the breaks showing or animal figurines with missing legs—a recognition of tire essential integrity of the objects themselves. Documentation and cataloging lie at the very heart of any museum's collections. Systems vary, of course, from mu seum to museum, but whatever method of cataloging is adopted, whether it be on computer, on index file cards, or in bound ledgers, the objective is always the same: to provide for each object in the collection a discrete and specific iden tification which can be physically applied to the object itself. Catalog entries, whether for Assyrian reliefs or humble pot sherds, must be as full and exhaustively documented as pos sible. This is especially important for archaeological mate rials where original excavation numbers may have to be removed in favor of the museum's registration number. Clearly, such objects would become utterly meaningless if the catalog entry failed to preserve all details of the context. For any object, the museum's registration entry becomes the primary and fundamental source of information and, as such, should contain the total "profile" of that object. Be yond a physical description (type, material, dimensions, and cultural attributes), each entry should record context details for excavated items and acquisition details for purchased or presented pieces (donor or vendor, source, and price paid). Other relevant information includes publication references, references to any scientific analyses undertaken, details of conservation treatments, references to photographs taken (including appropriate negative numbers), and most im-
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portantly of all, an indication of the current location of the object (whether on display or in storage). Most major museums have adopted computer registration as their normal procedure, opening the way for an interna tional exchange of collections data. Some controls are nec essary, however: although it may be extremely convenient and valuable for a curator at the Louvre, for example, to be able to know, at the touch of a button, exactly which bronze items from Beth-Shean stratum VI are held in the collections of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylva nia, it may not be appropriate or desirable for, say, the Met ropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to know how much the Vienna State Museum paid for a particular Egyp tian statuette. Some fields of information may, therefore, need to be restricted, bringing into question ethical issues concerned with freedom of information and access to doc umentation. More serious ethical problems have to be addressed with regard to museums' acquisitions policies. Most museums follow ethical codes of practice to ensure that objects illegally exported from their country of origin are not acquired. Re grettably, the guidelines are not followed universally or con sistently, and many objects of questionable title find their way into museum collections. It is an unfortunate reality that the trafficking in cultural property involves as much deviousness, misrepresentation, and criminality as the trafficking in drugs. In the case of antiquities, however, the resource is finite; despite claims to the contrary by the so-called legal trade in antiquities, it is undeniably true that any move to purchase items from what is now an international market has a direct, almost proportionate consequence in the loot ing and destruction of archaeological sites. In this respect, museums of integrity must adopt the moral high ground. It is becoming increasingly unacceptable for museums to be involved, on any level, with the antiquities trade, either directly through the purchase of objects, or in directly by offering gallery space to temporary exhibitions of private and often dubiously acquired collections. Such a viewpoint is not incompatible with the desire of museums to add to their collections. National archaeological museums can obviously exploit their own heritage resources through the initiation of home-based field projects. The international collections of the large multicultural museums, such as the Louvre or the British Museum, need not be static in this respect either. Many countries, in return for the research input, allow a division, or "partage," of ex cavated finds. Quite apart from the benefits of international cooperation gained through undertaking scientifically con trolled research abroad, the objects added to a museum's collections through the process of a legal division will be of immeasurably greater value than the overpriced trinkets of the antiquities market. T h e modern archaeological museum has moved a long way from the nineteenth century "cabinet of curiosities."
Many of the larger institutions function very much as uni versity faculties, with an overall director or directorate over seeing a number of geographically or chronologically differ entiated departments. Each department is staffed by a number of curators responsible for specific and specialized areas; it is their brief not only to superintend the objects within their remit, but more generally to represent their area to the public and to the scholarly community. Public accountability is of serious concern in state-funded museums, and curators involved in research or field projects must acknowledge an obligation to present the results of their work in exhibitions, public lectures, and publications. These activities may be coordinated through an education department, which not only serves to disseminate the work of the curatorial departments to a wider audience, but also provides guidelines and instructions for teachers and edu cators. T h e modern archaeological museum is, above all, a re search institution, often at the very forefront of archaeolog ical and scientific investigation. Many of the larger museums include extensive facilities for scientific analyses, including C-14.J neutron-activation, metalography, and petrography— indeed, the full range of analytical techniques designed to complement the work of museum-based excavators and re searches and to assist archaeologists from external, often overseas, institutions. [See also Analytical Techniques; Artifact Conservation; Ethics and Archaeology; and Restoration and Conserva tion.] JONATHAN N .
TUBB
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. T h e understanding, sociohistorical interpretation, and research of musical in struments (sound tools) as part of human culture is a con ditio sine que non of modern scholarship. Modern musicol ogists define music as a pattern of human behavior in a relevant cultural context, in which sound-producing tools undergo changes based on changes in culture. Musical in struments and their iconographic representations are the only available material evidence from preliterate societies and are the primary source of investigation for societies that have an oral musical tradition. An interdisciplinary ap proach, combining archaeological, sociohistorical, musicological, and ethnographic-comparative analysis, has turned archaeomusicology (a field established as an independent branch of scholarship only in the late I970s-early 1980s) into a most effective tool of study of music in ancient cul tures. While archaeological finds of musical instruments may make it possible actually to hear "historical sound," and pro vide information on the audial ecology of the past, archae ological iconography is more helpful in studying sociocultural matters, performance practices, the social performance
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS environs, and die body language of performers. T h e central tool of organological research (typological analysis) raises the question of classification (Kartomi, 1990, pp. 1 2 - 1 3 ) . It is assumed that each culture has both its own "cultureemerging," or "natural," musical instrument classification (which scholarship does not necessarily always discover— e.g., Phoenician instruments) and an "observer-imposed," or "artificial," one created for a particular research scheme. Certain Near Eastern cultures (e.g., Sumerian) appear to tend to a natural model guided by the construction material of the musical instrument itself (e.g., determinatives are gis, "wood"; gi, "cane"; si, "horn"; compare Sachs, 1940, p. 164); some (e.g., Hittite) combine this with the method of sound production (hazzik, "strike"; paripardi, "blow"; Turnbull, 1980, p. 391); others (Israelite/Judean), divide in struments into sacred (horn, trumpet), levitic (lyre), and secular (reed pipes) (Braun, 1994, col. 1512). On the other hand, since the early days of organology, artificial classifi cation systems have been used, although natural systems sometimes contribute more to understanding a certain cul ture. At present, Erich M. von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs's artificial classification (Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, 46 [1914]: 553 59o) appears to be the most functional system for an cient cultures. It is based on the source of sound, or the nature of die vibrating body: idiophones, membraphones, aerophones, and chordophones (see below). _
T h e names of the musical instruments are in most cases highly uncertain. Contrary to the conditions in Egypt, where iconographic sources frequentiy are accompanied by texts bearing the name of die depicted instrument, other Near Eastern archaeological finds lack written comments, and the preserved texts with names of musical instruments include hardly any information on the type of instrument. Only as late as the third century BCE-third century C E do the first known parallels of iconographic and written sources appear (lilissu, Akkadian, "kettle drum": Rashid, 1984, p. 140; zmr, clarinet-type double pipe with one long pipe and one short one: Braun, 1993, p. 176). Most names of musical instru ments have to remain in the realm of suggestions (e.g., GIS gu-di/de, "lute": Anne Kilmer and Dominique Collon, 19801983, vol. 6, p. 512), but there are several exceptions (Old Sumerian balag, "harp"; Bib. Heb. hasosem, "trumpet"). In certain cases one name is used for different instruments of one type (e.g., tp, different drums, most Semitic languages). T h e primary importance of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman music cultures has been acknowledged since the beginnings of modern (eighteenth century) music historiography. Carl Engel's study of the music of ancient cultures was the first to focus on archaeological sources (Engel, 1864). T h e first clear statement on the decisive signifi cance of Near Eastern musical instruments for world music culture was made by the founder of contemporary organ ology, Curt Sachs (1940). T h e linguistic approach, which dominated studies of ancient Near Eastern musical instru
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ments, and proved to be insufficient, dominated the period following World War II but was more and more replaced by a combined interdisciplinary approach. Since World War II, die study of ancient musical instru ments has focused on three areas: 1. Musical instrument types. Based on a typological ap proach to musical instruments, the study of instrument types mostiy strives for an organological-ergological and his torical classification. Its aim is to produce a "history" of the type (see the classical examples of lasting value in Hickmann, 1949-). 2. Musical instrumentarium of certain cultures or geographic areas. Socioanthropologically oriented, studies of instru mentarium strive to incorporate archaeomusicological re search results into the general framework of historiography. (For Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece, Central Asia, and Islam, see the series Musikgeschichte in Bildern; for An atolia see the encyclopedia entries in Max Wegner (1949-) and Harvey Turnbull (1980); for the Sasanian period see Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, 1993; and for Israel/Pales tine see Joachim Braun (1996). 3 . Artifacts. Nearly the broadest, in terms of quantity, and developed along with musicologists by archaeologists, his torians, and art historians, the study of individual artifacts recovered in excavations stresses the organological-ergolog ical, or socioandiropological, approach. The few studies designed with a comprehensive Near Eastern approach, continue the approach of Engel and Sachs. However, the discussions of the different Near East ern areas and cultures are individual and not synthetic. Weg ner defends the position that "the ancient Oriental world does not present a unity also in its musical culture" (Weg ner, 1950, p. 50), which is especially true, according to the author, of the opposed nature of Near Eastern and Helle nistic musical instruments: the former are changeable and irregular and the latter are stable and invariable. This dis putable theory was developed based on Sachs's thesis on the "classical" and quite solemn character of Egyptian Old Middle Kingdom musical instruments, as opposed to the orgiastic, noisy, and savage character of the New Kingdom/ Near Eastern sound tools (Sachs, 1940, p. 98). This popular tiieory was proved wrong by Hickmann (1961b) on the basis of later archaeological discoveries. The only attempt to discuss Near Eastern musical instru ments comprehensively was made by Hickmann (1957, 1961b). Flis central conclusions are still unchallenged: in certain cases the Egyptian music instrumentarium (e.g., rat tles, sistrum, concussion sticks, flute, trumpet) influenced Babylonian cultures; in others primacy belonged to the Su merians (e.g., lyre, angular harp, cymbals, frame drums); and in still others the development was parallel but inde pendent (e.g., the harp; Hickmann, 1961b, pp. 23, 35). As regards the provenance of the Western instrumentarium, "certain is the Oriental provenance . . . of a number of mu-
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sical instruments, which are adequate to the common sound-ideal of the Mediterranean countries" (Hickmann, !957> P - 35)- The central Phoenician and Israel/Palestine area of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the Sinai de sert to Anatolia was considered to be a transit channel only; its significance as a center with an indigenous culture was ignored, even though a number of musical instruments, and especially new instrumental performance traditions, origi nated there (see Caubet and Braun in Homo-Lechner, 1994, pp. 129-147). Idiophones. Self-sounders, or sound produced by vibra tions of the substance of the instrument itself (e.g., rattles, cymbals), are known as idiophones. Natufian strung rattles. Rattles from modern Israel's Carmel range (11,000-9,000 BCE) are the earliest attested sound tools in the Near East (see figure 1). This type of syncretic jewelry/sound cult object, often disregarded by re searchers, exists in various forms and has probably always been an artifact of culture. Concussion sticks. Pictograms from Uruk (Uruk IV pe riod, 3000-2900 BCE) and a carved shell from a burial (no. PG789) at Ur show concussion sticks. A bronze sound tool also was found at Kish from the Jemdet Nasr period (29002800 BCE) (Rashid, 1984, ill. 8). Egyptian ivory concussion
sticks appear somewhat earlier (first dynasty, 3300-3000 BCE).
Sistrum. In the middle of the third millennium, the sistrum (a type of rattle) appears in both Sumer and Egypt; the Sumerian examples are U-shaped and are open at the top (Rashid, 1984, ills. 8, 42), and the Egyptian examples are rectangular, in the shape of a temple naos, a Hathor image, or a horseshoe (Hickmann, 1961a, p. 160, ills. 2 6 27). Only two or three centuries later, rectangular metal sistra, ornamented with animal figurines, appeared at the An atolian sites of Horoztepe, and Alaca Hoytik (Turnbull, 1980, p. 388). In all cultures, sistra were cult instruments. Clay rattles. T h e most popular Near Eastern idiophones are clay rattles. Among those preserved are egg-shaped ex amples from the fifth-millennium Lower Egyptian Merimde culture (Hickmann, 1949, p. 70, pi. XLIII); these are the oldest examples and were in use at least until the eighteenth dynasty. Zoomorphic and piecrust shaped clay rattles from the Old Babylonian period (1950-1530 BCE) have been found at nearly every Mesopotamian site (Rimmer, 1969, pi. Ill), and from the Middle Bronze Age IA-II in ancient Israel/Palestine, some one hundred items in zoomorphic, an thropomorphic, and geometric forms are preserved—the spool shape being tire most popular. On Cyprus, the Late
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. F i g u r e 1. Female thigh bone with a fox tooth rattle. F r o m H a y o n i m C a v e (Mr. Carmel, Israel); early Natufian period. Rockefeller M u s e u m , IAA 7 9 . 5 3 6 . (Courtesy Israel M u s e u m , Jerusalem)
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS Bronze zoomorphic forms, especially of birds, are found fre quently (Cyprus Museum, no. A-990). T h e quantity, dis persion, and archaeological context of the Near Eastern clay rattles, which preserve an indigenous artistic form in every local culture, confirm their plural function as a cult imple ment, amulet, sound tool, and game—rather than solely as a child's toy, and substantiates it as a mass produced music, cult, and culture commodity. Bells. From the early first millennium B C E , bronze bells appear—mostly the sound tool itself (from Nimrud alone there are some one hundred bells that are the property of the British Museum)—that are rarely represented iconographically: the first representations are horse bells on As syrian bas-reliefs (Rimmer, 1969, pis. XVII, XVIII). Bells are first attested in the tenth century B C E in northern Persia, at Amlash (Rimmer, pi. XLXc-d) and a century later in As syria, at Nimrud (Rimmer pi. XlXa), and in Israel/Phoeni cia, at Megiddo (Oriental Institute, no. M936); two centuries later they are found on Cyprus and in twentythird-dynasty Egypt at Tell Basta (Hickmann, 1949, pi. XXIIIA). A dispersion from east to west and a Caucasian or Asian provenience are thus plausible. Bells in various sizes (2.5-12 cm) and forms were designed for animals and humans, mostly probably with an apotropaic function (a supposition based on Ex. 28:35 and questioned for its uni form interpretation by Peter Calmeyer, (1966, vol. 3, p. 431). Bell-shaped clay rattles and clay bells (Rashid, 1984, ill. 1 3 1 , Hebrew University, no. 9245; also on Cyprus: Limassol District Museum, no. T 4 7 4 ) may indicate a continuity of the social and acoustic function of the two idiophones. Scrapers. Notched implements, such as scapulae, were scraped with a rigid object to produce sound. Scrapers are known throughout the world from prehistoric times. While they do not appear with any frequency in the Near East, there are examples from Ugarit, thirteenth century B C E (Caubet, 1987, figs. 1, 2) and eleventh century B C E Ekron (Trude Dothan and Seymour Gitin, "Tel Miqne (Ekron) 1982," Israel Exploration Journal 33 [1983]: 127-129). A concentration of some ten items was discovered at Kiton, from the twelfth-fifth centuries B C E (Vassos Karageorghis, Excavations at Kiton, vol. 5.2, 1985, p. 317); however, the identification of these artifacts as sound tools, based on the presence of trails of erased patina, is doubtful (Kara georghis, 1985 pp. 327-328). Bronze cymbals. Among the best-attested musical in struments for the entire Near East are bronze cymbals. T h e earliest representations are on bas-reliefs from southern Babylonia at the end of the third millennium (Rashid, 1984, pp. 70-73). These rather large (some are 20 cm in diameter) cymbals, however, disappeared in Neo-Assyrian times; at Nimrud (ninth century BCE) true cymbals (some 10 cm in diameter) were discovered (Rashid, 1984, p. 110). More than twenty pairs of cymbals (12-8 and 6-4 cm in diameter)
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dated at least four hundred years earlier have been found at Late Bronze Canaanite/Phoenician sites (Tell Abu Hawam, Hazor, Megiddo). Already mentioned in fourteenth-century BCE sources from Ugarit (Caubet, 1987, p. 734), and fre quently encountered in the Hebrew Bible (mesiltayim), cym bals disappear from the archaeological finds of Israel/ Palestine between the Early Iron Age and the Hellenistic period. Figurines of cymbal players were popular in the Neo-Babylonian kingdom (Rashid, 1964, p. 134), and on Cyprus (Hickmann, 1949, fig. 29; Israel Antiquities Au thority, no. Pi823); cymbals appear in Anatolia (Bittel, 1968) and Egypt (Marcuse, 1975, p. 10) from the seventh century B C E onward. Cymbals and forked crotala (see be low) were widely used at Cybele and Dionysian cult events in Palestine, Anatolia, and Syria, as well as in the Sasanian kingdom. Forked crotala. Small cymbals attached to a forked han dle (forked crotala) and larger cymbals were among the most popular instruments in the Hellenistic-Roman Near East (Farmer, 1966, pp. 18, 23, 27). A frequent combination of instruments seems to be the crotala and the organ (Braun, 1994, p. 142). M e m b r a n o p h o n e s . Instruments that produce vibrations from a tightly sttetched membrane, such as the drum, are known as membranophones. Drums belong to the most an cient and popular category of musical instruments attested in the Near East, where they are the main membranophone. They were made with one or two membranes and in various sizes (20-150 cm) and forms (round and square frame, cy lindrical, hourglass, kettle, goblet, and bowl shaped). They were held in several positions (in front of the chest, above the head, under the arm) or placed on the ground. Wall paintings of a hunting shrine at Catal Hoytik in Anatolia (level A.III. 1, seventh millennium) shows men dancing and beating small round-frame drums with a stick (see Doris Stockmann in Lund, 1986, pp. 12-14). This drum (with one or two skins?) appears again at the beginning of the second millennium B C E in a scene of dancing etched on a rock in Israel's Negev desert (Anati, 1963, p. 211) and remains the main membranophone of the Near East. It seems that be ginning in the Chalcolithic/EB terra-cotta goblet-, cornet-, chalice- (Ghassulian culture: e.g. IAA, no. 36.66,36.97) and hour-glass-forms (Gilat, in the Negev: IAA, no. 76.54) were used. In the late third millennium the Mesopotamian giant drum, probably in bronze, or with a bronze frame (SchmidtColinet, 1981, ills. 7 1 - 7 5 ) , and in the early second millen nium B C E the bronze goblet form, lilissu (Schmidt-Colinet, 1981, ills. 76, 77), appeared. A barrel-shaped drum with two skins and a rectangular drum are attested in Middle King dom Egypt (Hickmann, 1961a, pp. 28, 106). With rare ex ceptions, the entire corpus of pre-Iron Age drum iconog raphy shows the instrument in a cultic context. In the first half of the second millennium B C E in Old Bab ylonia and later, but especially in the Iron Age, in other Near
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Eastern areas, two forms of the female drum player, the most notable indigenous type, appear on deep-relief terra cotta plaques. The figures are naked but adorned with a wig or headcover and a disk (drum) is pressed against the chest with both hands (Rashid, 1984, ills. 91-95); and as bellshaped figures dressed in a long gown, beating the drum, which is in a position perpendicular to the body (Meyers, 1987). Preserved only in Israel/Palestine, there are more than forty items of the first type and some fifteen of the second extant. Mixed types appear on Cyprus and in Syria: pillar figurines with a disk pressed against the chest and fig urines on votive stands. It is probably at this time that the drum (toph in the Hebrew Bible) acquired a function in both the cultic and everyday life of the lower strata of the popu lation. The function of this type—homogeneous in its Near Eastern unity and autochthonous—is not yet clear: the range of use is from dea nutrix and amulet to apotropaic object and toy; even the identification of the disk type is questioned (drum, solar disk, bread?). The hourglass drum (darabbuka, also a popular drum among modern Arabs and Druze), characteristically held under the arm, appears once in the Negev and more frequently in finds from Old Babylonia between the Iron Age and Hellenistic periods. Excavations from the Hellenistic-Roman period confirm the appearance of the Greco-Roman frame drum (mostly on mosaics—e.g., at Sepphoris in Israel; see Meyers, Netzer, and Meyers, 1992, p. 49). In the earliest drum iconography, the membranophone-chordophone in duet is considered to be a typ ical Near Eastern ensemble (cf. Anati, 1963, p. 211, for N e gev rock-etchings; Rashid, 1984, p. 76). Aerophones. Vibrations of air enclosed in an instrument, produced by wind or breath across its edge (flute), via a reed (clarinet), a double reed (oboe), or the performer's lips (trumpet) distinguish the category of instruments known as aerophones. Bullroarer. A slab of wood 10-20 cm long, rhomboid in form and frequently carved and ornamented, with a small hole at die end for a cord, is a bullroarer. It is a noisemaker used at ritual and magic events that produces a roaring sound through circular movement. Probably one of the ear liest aerophones, it is attested by the finds from the Natufian Kebara cave in Israel's Carmel hills (IAA, no. 13.85) and the Neolithic Nahal Hemar cave (Treasures of the Holy Land, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986, fig. 17). In Egypt, the bullroarer appears in predynastic times (Hick mann, 1961a, p. 157). Flute. The first archaeological evidence for flutes is not earlier than the late fourth millennium in Egypt, (Hickmann, 1961a, ills. 1, 4); this flute type, the nay (60-90 cm long) is still in use and is usually held at an oblique angle. The flute is also attested in third millennium-Mesopotamia (Rashid, 1984, p. 50). The single flute, however, either was not pop ular in the ancient Near East, or was not frequently depicted in the Bronze and Iron Ages because of its low status. A
corpus of some ten short ( 7 - 1 2 cm) whistles with a single side opening has appeared in areas of Canaan/modern Is rael, the earliest dated to the third millennium (Megiddo: IAA, no. 39.680) and the latest to the seventh century B C E . In the first-dynasty royal cemetery at Ur, fragments of silver tubes were discovered that have been interpreted as flutes or other reed instruments. Double pipe. T h e most typical aerophone in the ancient Near East was the double pipe (two tubes) with a single or double reed (i.e., a clarinet or an oboe type, not a flute), which produces a rich, harsh, penetrating, and sensual tim bre. While the single flute was still in use during the Old Babylonian period (Rashid, 1984, ills. 85, 86), the divergent double pipe with cylindrical tubes, of Cycladian prove nience (Aign, 1963, ill. I/5), permeated musical life. T h e double pipe has been discovered in excavations in contexts from the middle of the second millennium B C E u p to Byz antine times; mostly, however, it appears in iconographic material both as a single instrument and in ensembles. T h e differences in representations are mainly in the degree of divergence of the pipes: length of the longer pipe (possibly a drone), how it is held (horizontally or vertically, together or apart), performance style (position of the hands), and type of reed. Finds from the ninth-seventh centuries B C E (e.g., from Achziv: IAA, no. 44.56; Karatepe: Schmidt-Colinet, 1981, no. 89) show that the double-pipe performer— mostly female—had become a popular Near Eastern terra cotta figurine type, along with die drum player (see above.) T h e instrument acquired all the signs of the classic aulos; in Greece itself, however, the instrument does not appear prior to 700 BCE. After the seventh century B C E , the phorbeia (a leather band passed over the lips and cheeks to secure stability while blowing) appears on Cypriot and Anatolian (see figure 2) figurines (e.g., Schmidt-Colinet, 1981, no. 90; Hermary et al., 1989, no. 578.579), but is absent from NeoAssyrian examples and in material from Israel/Palestine. T h e double pipe is frequently part of the Neo-Assyrian or chestra (e.g., the Elamite orchestra, Niniveh, seventh cen tury B C E ; see Rashid, 1984, ill. 151), or die membraphoneaerophone-chordophone "Phoenician orchestra" (ninthseventh centuries B C E : Aign, 1963, figs. 89, 90, 91) that can be traced back to Philistia/Israel ensembles from the elev enth to the tenth centuries B C E (Braun, 1994, p. 143; Ashdod: IAA, no. 68.1182). In Hellenistic-Roman contexts, finds of actual aulos instruments are frequent and seem to indicate microtone scales (e.g., Gezer: IAA, no. 81.1839). In that period, also for the first time, the double pipe with a short melody pipe and long drone (arghul type) can be at tested with certainty (Safaitic basalt etching: Jordan, J. 1886). Mosaics and other artifacts from the Hellenistic-Ro man period show the double pipe both as a musical instru ment of lament (e.g., in a wall painting in the Idumean ne cropolis at Marisa/Mareshah, (in situ) and of orgiastic joy (in a Dionysian context: Braun, 1995).
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.
F i g u r e 2. Bell-form figurine
with
double
pipe. F r o m A c h z i v , Israel. D a t e d t o t h e n i n t h - e i g h t h c e n t u r y BCE. Rockefeller M u s e u m , I A A 4 4 . 5 6 . (Courtesy Israel M u s e u m , Jerusa lem)
Zamr. A new period in the history of the double pipes, and especially single pipes, began with the use of conoid reed pipes. The zamr type of double flute from the seventh century B C E is still dominant in die Near East. Among the first examples to attest this aerophone type is one from Tel Malhata, in southern Israel: a terra-cotta figurine of a man blowing a divergent conical double pipe (IAA, no. 94.3393); bronze figurines from Anatolia should be associated with this type of aerophone rather than with trumpets (cf. T u r n bull, 1980, fig. 8). Single zamr instruments appear on nu merous artifacts, mostiy in pastoral surroundings (BethShean, sixth century, Lady Mary Monastery mosaic, in situ: Farmer, 1966, ill. 5). Panpipe. The earliest evidence of panpipes (syrinxes) in the region is probably from Anatolia (seventh century BCE: Turnbull, 1980, fig. 7). It has been one of the most popular instruments in the Near East since Seleucid times (Rashid, 1984, p. 142) and has kept its autochthonous peculiarities in every area. In the second century C E the panpipe was ac cepted as a symbol on the city coins- of Paneas/Banias in
75
northern Palestine (in the second-third centuries called Caesarea Philippi; see Israel Museum no. 2883). Represen tations of zamr instruments appear on other coins from Paneas, the oldest of which in the Near East is the depiction of a cross flute (Meshorer, 1984-1985, figs. 6a, 27). Organ. In the third century BCE the organ, based on the panpipe (liydraulus), was invented in Alexandria, Egypt. T h e first iconographic evidence of this instrument are terra cottas from Alexandria (second-first centuries BCE: Perrot, 1971, pi. V), Tarsus (pre-Christian: Perrot, 1971, pi. XVT/i), and Carthage (second century: Perrot, 1971, pi. XII). T h e most significant example has come to light in a Hamath (Syria) mosaic that depicts a third-century ensemble performance (organ, crotals, lyre, double aulos, bells, sounding bowls). Attention has been drawn to the Samaritan terra-cotta oil lamps, that depict an organ (again with crotala; see Braun in Homo-Lechner, 1994, p. 142); it seems that this instru ment was used in both liturgical and secular life. Animal horns. Comparatively scarcely attested, animal horns may have been used in Anatolian Neolithic cultures (Lund, 1986, p. 20), but they undoubtedly appear in only two finds: in an early second-millennium BCE drawing from Mari (Perrot, 1961, ill. 389) and in a ninth-eighth century BCE stone relief from Carchemish (Schrnidt-Colinet, 1981, ill. 75). There is evidence as well of the use of oxhorns in fifteenth-centLiry B C E Egypt during the reign of Amenhotep IV (Marcuse, 1975, p. 747). Skofar. The ram's horn, or shofar, is the most frequentiy mentioned music instrument (seventy-two times) in the He brew Bible. However, it does not appear in archaeological contexts until the third century (among the earliest appear ance is in the Hammath Tiberias synagogue mosaic, in situ): die shofar is always part of a group of synagogue symbols (menorah, shofar, lulav, etrog). Shell horn. A different type of horn, the shell horn, was used in Israel/Palestine beginning at least in die late second millenium B C E (Tell Qasile: Hebrew University no. 2968:227). Trumpet. The elite music instrument the trumpet de scends from the animal horn and is similar to it. It appears rarely, however. Besides the two famous Tutankhamun trumpets (one silver, 58.2 cm, and the other bronze, 49.4 cm), tiiere are only some fifteen representations of the trum pet from Egypt. Among them, die first certain depiction (sixteentii-fifteenth centuries B C E ) , shows a clear cultic and military affiliation (Manniche, 1975, p p . 33-35; Hickmann, 1961a, p. 74). Mesopotamian cultures show extremely little evidence for this instrument: there are only two between the Mesalim and Neo-Babylonian periods (Rashid, 1984, ills. 37= 143)- T h e situation is similar in Israel/Palestine, where, contrary to its significance in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Nu. 10:2-10), and in the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran ( i Q M II. 15 and VII.9), the only iconographic evidence for the trumpet is on the wall paintings in the Idumean necropolis
76
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
near Beth-Guvrin (in situ, third-second centuries B C E ) . There, for the first time in trumpet iconography, the instru ment—an early example of the Roman tuba—is part of a hunting scene. The aerophones depicted on the coins minted by Bar Kokhba in 132-135, frequently defined as trumpets, can hardly be considered as such (Sachs, 1940, p. 120), and the two trumpets depicted among the booty from the Jerusalem Temple on the Arch of Titus in Rome may not necessarily be the Temple instruments but, rather, cop ies of the Roman tuba. There are only isolated instances of trumpet representations from later periods, such as the pair of trumpets on the rock carving at Tak-i-Bostan from the Sasanian period (Behn, 1954, p. 77). In spite of the early appearance and significance of the trumpet in Egypt, and the importance attached to it in Near Eastern written sources, this instrument may actually have been used very little in the Levant. Chordophones. An instrument in which a stretched string vibrates is known as a chordophone. Its subgroups are the zither, lyre, harp, and lute. The phenomenon of the ap pearance of sophisticated string instruments at very early stages in the history of music without evidence of earlier rudimentary forms is clearly manifested in the Near East. Harp. The oldest archaeological document of a chordo phone is a stone from Megiddo, strata XIX (figure 3) etched with a female figure with a triangular, fully developed harp. T h e instrument appears again in Cycladic culture (Aign, 1963, figs. 1-3) but was not witnessed again in the Near East. While other forms of the harp have been attested since the early third millennium in Mesopotamia and the fourth dynasty in Egypt, the harp itself is absent from the central areas along the eastern Mediterranean coast from the Sinai to Anatolia (Caubet and Braun in Homo-Lechner 1994, pp. 132, 141; Tumbull, 1980, p. 388). This strongly questions the popular interpretation of nebel in the Hebrew Bible as the "harp" of ancient Israel. T h e early Sumerian harp (Uruk IV and Mesalim periods), a small (50-70 cm), arched instrument, is depicted mainly on seals in a cultic context, frequently being played by ani mals (Rashid, 1984, pp. 52-59). At the beginning of the sec ond millennium B C E , the arched harp was replaced by the angular harp, which was held vertically or horizontally (Rashid, 1984, figs. 42-49); while the horizontal harp was known only in Mesopotamia, the vertical one was used to the west, especially on Cyprus (Rashid, 1984, fig. 5 1 ) . T o ward the first millennium BCE, the size of the instrument and the number of strings increased. The horizontal harp (eighttwelve strings) was plucked with a plectrum and the vertical harp (eighteen-twenty-two strings) with the hand, which suggests a basso function for the first and a melodic function for the second. The placement of the hands on the strings allows some conclusions about the style of the music being played (Sachs, 1940, p. 82). A new small rectangular vertical
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. F i g u r e
Stone etching from Megiddo,
3.
showing afigurewith a harp. D a t e d
t o t h e late f o u r t h m i l l e n n i u m .
Israel M u s e u m , I A A 3 8 . 9 5 4 . (Courtesy Israel M u s e u m , Jerusalem)
harp with upright resonator on the side of the frame ap peared during the Seleucid period (Rashid, 1984, p. 150; Behn, 1954, pi. 55; Dor, Exp. no. 61378); in Roman times this type (sambyke?) became popular throughout the Near East, Greece, and Rome. The first Egyptian harps, also arched, are dated somewhat later (fourth dynasty; Hick mann, 1961a, pp. 20-27) Sumerian but are much larger (150-180 cm); they appear in sophisticated forms, some richly ornamented, with a developed tuning system (up to thirty-six pegs), and others nearly angular (e.g., an example from the tomb of Rameses III: Hickmann, 1961a, 'pp. 44, 64, 128). There are representations since the eigh teenth dynasty of the vertical angular harp, which is consid ered an import from elsewhere in the Near East (Hickmann, 1961a, pp. 30,130); smaller harps are depicted as well—the portable "shoulder harp" (Hickmann, 1961a, ill. 95) and the "ladle harp" (Hickmann, 1961a, ills. 93, 94). All of these instruments, mostly built from expensive wood from Leb anon and designed as works of art, seem to have been used only in the highest circles of society. In terms of chronology, the Egyptian harps followed in the footsteps of the Mesopotamian harps but developed greater sophistication in conm
a
n
m
e
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS struction. In Hellenistic-Roman times, in both the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires, the smaller, simply worked, angular harp (Hickmann, 1961a, ill. 109) was played. Lyre. T h e primary musical instrument in the Near East was the lyre. From its first appearance on Sumerian seals in the first half of the third millennium, where it is depicted as a perfect chordophone (Rashid, 1984, p. 50), the lyre dom inates the musical scene of the region until the Early Byz antine period. T h e elaborate Sumerian asymmetrical lyres have a resonator in the form of a bull (upright it is some 150 cm high) or are ornamented with a bull's head (portable, 100-120 cm), and have eight-twelve strings. T h e instru ments recovered in excavation and supplemented by iconographic material (Hickmann, 1961a, ills. 1 1 , 28-39) show a royal context for lyre music. T h e smaller, vertically held, asymmetrical lyre with two unequal side-arms appeared in Akkad and was played also in Carchemish and Babylon (Hickmann, 1961, ill. 43; Aign, 1963, figs. 78, 79). In the late third-early second millennium B C E , when large standing lyres were still in use (in Babylon: Rashid, 1984, ills. 79, 80; in Anatolia: Turnbull, 1980, p . 388), and the first modified forms appeared in the hands of naked dancing women (Negev rock etching, nineteenth century B C E : Anati, 1963, p. 210), dramatic changes took place nearly simultaneously in several places in the Near East. T h e Sumerian grand royal lyre was replaced by a simply built, small (some 40-50 cm), portable, symmetrical, and sometimes asymmetrical, instru ment. For the first time it was held horizontally, in front of the musician; it was played mostly by musicians of low social status, Semitic traveling merchants, and women—the latter often depicted naked (Rashid, 1984, ills. 47, 59, 76, 80; Behn, 1954, pi. 85; Porada, 1956, figs. g-j). T h e new lyre type entered Egypt from Syria and Canaan. It took root there in its horizontal asymmetrical form and was played only by women. In Late Bronze Age Canaan, a new way to hold the asymmetrical lyre, with the sound box under die arm, can be seen from Megiddo (IAA, no. 38.780). This change significantly increased performance possibilities, and in its new capacity the lyre became the main instrument of priests and musicians in holy places, courts, and elite mili tary orchestras (Rashid, 1984, ills. 120, 142, 145, 148,150). This new playing technique migrated to Assyria, partly with musicians-prisoners from Judah (Rashid, 1984, ill. 142). The first half of the first millennium B C E is marked by a multitude of lyre forms, demonstrating both the autochtho nous creativity of different groups and certain common Near Eastern tendencies. T h e most common forms follow: Ufonn. Examples of a U-shaped form with parallel strings can be seen from the eleventh century B C E on Cyprus at Palaipaphos-Xerolimni; in Israel/Palestine at Ashdod; and in Anatolia atKaratepe (Porada, 1956). Symmetrical square form. Examples of a symmetrical square form with a parallel, or fanlike, arrangement of its
77
strings appeared mainly in Assyria and Israel/Palestine (Rashid, 1984, ill. 150; Braun, 1990-1991, figs. 1, 3; Behn, 1954, fig. 19; Kamid el-Loz excavations, no. 78:504). Asymmetrical square form. Examples of an asymmetrical square form appear with differently arranged strings throughout the Near East, including Egypt (Hickmann, 1961a, p. 138; Rashid, 1984, pp. 126, 134; Braun, 1990I 9 9 i , f i g s . 4-6).
In Israel/Palestine and Assyria, the preference seems to have been for a parallel string arrangement. In the Hellenis tic-Roman period the lyre tended to be the symmetrical Ro man type with a rounded or square sound box, animal-horn side arms, and mostly parallel strings; this instrument is often represented in a stylized form (Hickmann, 1961a, ills. 110, n i ; B r a u n , 1994,cols. 1509-10;Rashid, 1984,pp. 1 5 2 153; Behn, 1954, pi. 48) and appears in nearly every social context. Lute. Instruments of the lute type are the most mobile, dynamic, and subject to change among all chordophones. By permitting the performance of a nearly unrestricted number of sounds from one string, they can be adjusted to any kind of tonal system and music style. Their inexpensive and simple construction, as compared to harps and lyres, and their rustic, entertaining, and erotic performance con text made them popular among the common people, which may also may explain the comparatively rare depictions of the instrument. The question of the origin of the lute re mains unanswered—theories range from the Caucasus and Central Asia (Marcuse, 1975, p. 406), to Syria and Babylon (Turnbull, 1972; Rashid, 1984, p. 92). The first iconographic evidence for the long-necked lute appears on seals from Akkad, probably in a cultic context (Rashid, 1984, ills. 38, 39)In the Old Babylonian period, the musicians are often na ked men and women (Rashid, 1984, pp. 75-76, 81-84); the lute rarely appears then in connection with a cult or temple service, although later it does, in Anatolia (Schmidt-Colinet, 1981, figs. 60, 62). In the middle of the second millennium B C E , probably via Canaan (male terra-cotta figurine, six teenth century B C E : IAA, no. 33.1567) the lute reached Egypt. While attested in Canaan in two more finds (naked female bronze statuette: IAA, no. M969; dancing minstrel on a terra-cotta plaque: Hebrew Union College, no. 23.095), the lute does not appear in Israel/Palestine again until the Hellenistic period. In Egypt the instrument became very popular and was played by naked females (Hickmann, 1961a, p. 98) and on some occasions by men, possibly in a cultic context (Hickmann, 1961a, ill. xoi). In the earliest depictions, lutes are generally shown with two-three strings marked with decorative tassels at the tun ing box. A long, frequently fretted neck emerges from a small, resonator out of wood or tortoise shell and covered with animal hide. Mostly plucked with a plectrum, fastened
78
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
by a cord to the body of the instrument, the form of the lute has not changed significantly over the centuries. How it was held, however, has changed constantly, and there have been attempts to create a lute chronology according to the playing position: Old-Babylonian period, horizontal; Kassite-NeoAssyrian period, lute neck at an oblique angle, pointing up ward; Seleucid period, lute neck at an oblique angle, point ing downward (Rashid, 1984, p. 146). The short-necked lute with a broad, pear-shaped body, perhaps of Central Asian origins, appeared only rarely in the ancient Near East (it appeared for the first time in the Egyptian nineteenth dy nasty: Hickmann, 1961a, ill. 104). In Hellenistic times the instrument is represented on terra cottas from Egypt and Palestine (Hickmann, 1961a, ill. 105; Marisa/Mareshah ex cavation, no. 1386), and it acquired great popularity in the Sasanian period (Farmer, 1966, ill. 4; Duchesne-Guillemin, 1993), when it developed into one of the most popular tra ditional instruments of Islamic countries, the 'ud, predeces sor of the European lute. Zither. The zither type is actually nonexistent in the Near East, and information on this chordophone type, often also called psaltery (psalteria, from Gk., psalmos, "finger," be cause in antiquity their strings were plucked with bare fin gers) is scarce and confused. The only known example, also interpreted by some scholars as a xylophone (Wegner, 1950, p. 36), is a beautiful carving on an ivory pyxis (BM, no. 118179, ninth-eighth century B C E ) , where as part of a small Phoenician orchestra two persons are plucking(?) square stringed frames (nine and ten strings) or boxes (Aign, 1963, pp. 158-159) [Most of the sites, peoples, and cultures mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aign, Bernhard P . Die Geschichte der Musikinstmmente des Agaischen Raums bis mm 700 v. Chr. Frankfurt am Main, 1963. T h e best dis cussion of archaeological material from preclassical times, including rich Near Eastern comparative material. Anati, Emmanuel. Palestine Before the Hebrews. N e w York, 1 9 6 3 ^ . 2 1 1 . Bayer, Bathja. The Material Relics of Music in Ancient Palestine and Its Environs: An Archaeological Inventory. T e l Aviv, 1963. Useful catalog of finds based on a bibliography; does not indicate the artifacts' place of preservation. Becker, Heinz. Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der antiken und mittelalterlichen Rohrblattinstmmente. H a m b u r g , 1966. Basic study of ancient reed instruments. Behn, Friedrich. Musikleben im Altertum und friihen Mittelalter. Stutt gart, 1954. Separate chapters on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Phoeni cian, Hebrew, Sasanian, a n d other N e a r Eastern music cultures, with special stress on organological rather t h a n cultural matters. Includes more than two h u n d r e d illustrations. Bittel, Kurt. " C y m b e l n ftir Kybele." In Gilnther Wasmuth zum 80. Oeburtstag gewidmet von seinen Preunden, Kollegen und Autoren, p p . 7 9 82. Tubingen, 1968. Braun, Joachim. "Iron Age Seals from Ancient Israel Pertinent t o M u
sic." Orbis Musicae: Essays in Honor of Hanoch Avenary 10 (19901991): 11-26. Braun, Joachim. '". . . die Schone spielt die Pfiefe': Z u r nabataischsafaitischenMusikpflege." In. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstagvon Wolf gang Suppan, edited by Bernhard Habla, p p . 167-184. T u t z i n g , 1993. First attempt to analyze a narrow local musical culture from the Hel lenistic period. Braun, Joachim. "Biblische M u s i k i n s t r u m e n t e . " I n Die Musik in Ges chichte und Gegenwart, vol. 1, p p . 1503-1537. 2d ed. Kassel, 1994. Braun, Joachim. " D i e Musikikonographie des Dionysoskultes im R o m ischen Palastina." I n Imago musicae, 8, 109-133. L u c c a , 1995. Braun, Joachim. Musik in Alt-Israel/Paldstina: Studien zu den archdologischen, schriftlichen und vergleichenden Quellen. Freiburg, 1996. Calmeyer, Peter. " G l o c k e . " In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archdologie, vol. 3, p p . 427-431. Berlin a n d N e w York, 1966. Caubet, Annie. " L a musique a Ougarit." Compt.es Rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1987): 731-754. T h e only discussion of Ugaritic musical i n s t a l m e n t s , stressing the autochthonal character of the musical culture of the eastern Mediterranean coast. Duchesne-Guillemin, Marcelle. Les instruments de musique dans Van Sassanide. Ghent, 1993. Ellermeier, Friedrich. "Beitrage zur Friihgeschichte altorientalischer Saiteninstrumenten." In Archdologie und Altes Testament: Festschrift fur Kurt Galling zum 8 January 1980, edited by Arnulf K u s c h k e a n d Ernst Kutsch, p p . 75-90. T u b i n g e n , 1970. Clarifies t h e interpreta tion of the H e b r e w t e r m kinor. Engel, Carl. The Music of the Most Ancient Nations. L o n d o n , 1864. T h e first study t o emphasize archaeological material, with chapters o n the musical cultures of the Assyrians, Egyptians, a n d H e b r e w s . Includes more than a h u n d r e d illustrations. Farmer, H e n r y George. Musikgeschichte in Bildern, vol. 3.2, Islam. E d ited by Heinrich Besseler a n d M a x Schneider. Leipzig, 1966. Along with the other volumes in this series, considered the best study of iconography, both as regards musical instruments a n d general cul tural background. Includes detailed presentations of each artifact, comparative tables, and general musicological discussions. Fleischhauer, Giinter. Musikgeschichte in Bildern, vol. 2.5, Etrurien und Rom. Edited by Heinrich Besseler a n d M a x Schneider. Leipzig, 1964. See F a r m e r (1966). Hass, Gerlinde. Die Syrinx in dergriechischen Bildkunst. Boelaus, 1985. H e r m a r y , Antoine, Annie Caubet, a n d Olivier Masson. Catalogue des anliquites de Chypre. Paris, 1989. Hickmann, Ellen, a n d David W . H u g h e s , eds. The Archaeology of Early Music Culture: Third International Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology. Orpheus-Schriftenreihe, vol. 51. Bonn, 1988. Includes an article on harps by O. R. G u r n e y a n d B . Lawergren, and Greek and R o m a n pipes by Annie Belis. Hickmann, H a n s . Catalogue general des anliquites egyptiens du Musee du Caire: Instruments de musique. Cairo, 1949. Classical model of a p r o fessional musicological catalog a n d a m o n u m e n t a l i n d e p e n d e n t study of Egyptian musical instruments. Hickmann, H a n s . "Floteninstrumente," " G l o c k e n , " " H a r f e , " " H o r n instrumente," " K l a p p e r n , " "Klarinette," " L a u t e , " " L e i e r , " " R a s sel," a n d " T r o m p e t e n i n s t r u m e n t e I . " In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Basel, 1949-. Although in need of u p d a t i n g , still valuable entries on the typology of musical instruments, Hickmann, H a n s . " D i e Rolle des Vorderen Orients in der Abendlandischen Musikgeschichte." Cahiers d'Histoire Egyptienne 9.1-2 (1957): 19-37. T h i s and H i c k m a n n (1961b) are the only valuable overall discussions of organological developments in the N e a r East. M u s t be read in light of m o r e recent archaeological finds. Hickmann, H a n s . Musikgeschichte in Bildern, vol. 2.1, Agypten. Edited
MYRES, JOHN L. by Heinrich Besseler and M a x Schneider. Leipzig, 1961a. See F a r m e r (1966). Additional material may be found in M a n n i c h e (1975). H i c k m a n n , H a n s . "Vorderasien u n d Agypten im musikalischen A u s tausch." Zeitschrift der Deulschen Morganldndischen Gesellschaft 111.1 (1961b): 23-41. H o m o - L e c h n e r , Catherine, ed. La pluridisciplinarite en archeologie musicale: IVe rencontres intemationales d'archeologie musicale d'ICTM, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, octobre 1990. 2 vols. Paris, 1994. Includes papers on Ugaritic musical instruments by Annie Caubet, t h e state of archaeomusicological research in Israel by Joachim Braun, N e a r Eastern string instruments by Bo Lawergren, a n d the Greek lyre by Annie Belis. Karamatov, Fajsulla M . , et al., Musikgeschichte in Bildern, vol. 2.9, Mittelasien. Edited by W e r n e r B a c h m a n n . Leipzig, 1987. See F a r m e r (1966). Kartomi, Margaret J. On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instru ments. Chicago, 1990. T h e best c o n t e m p o r a r y historical, theoretical, and methodological discussion on the classification and research of musical instruments. Kilmer, A n n e , and D o m i n i q u e Collon. " L a u t e " a n d " L e i e r . " In Reatlexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 6, p p . 512-517 a n d 571-582. Berlin a n d N e w York, 1980-1983. Kilmer, A n n e , Richard L. Crocker, a n d R o b e r t R. Brown. Sounds from the Silence: Recent Discoveries on Ancient Near Eastern Music. Berke ley, 1976. L u n d , Cajsa S., ed. Second Conference of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology, Stockholm, November 19-23, 1984. Vol. 1. Stock holm, 1986. Includes p a p e r s by Doris S t o c k m a n n on early M e d i t e r ranean d r u m s , Bo Lawergren o n the ancient harp of Altai, a n d Albrecht Schneider on the typology of the ancient reed pipe. M a n n i c h e , Lise. Ancient Egyptian Musical Instruments. M u n i c h , 1975. Inefficiently organized catalog; updates H i c k m a n n (1961a). M a r c u s e , Sibyl. A Survey of Musical Instruments. N e w York, 1975. Comprehensive contemporary survey organized by instrument type; no references are given for archaeological-iconographic material. Meshorer, Yaakov. " T h e Coins of Caesarea P a n e a s . " IsraelNumismatic Journal 8 (1984-1985): 37-58. Meyers, Carol L. " A Terracotta in the H a r v a r d Semitic M u s e u m and Disc-Holding Female Figures Reconsidered." Israel Exploration Journal 37.2-3 (1987): 116-122. Exemplary discussion of the type. Meyers, Eric, E h u d Netzer, a n d Carol L. Meyers. Sepphoris. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1992. Nixdorff, Heide. Zur Typologie und Geschichte der Rahmenlrommeln. Berlin, 1971. T h e only typological discussion of the ancient d r u m . Perrot, Jean. The Organ from lis Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the End of the Thirteenth Century. L o n d o n , 1971. Standard study. Polin, Claire C. J. Music in the Ancient Near East. N e w York, 1954. Porada, Edith. " A Lyre Player from T a r s u s and His Relations." In The Aegean and the Near East: Studies Presented to H. Goldmann, edited by S. Weinberger et al., p p . 185-211. N e w York, 1956. Rashid, Subhi Anwar. " C o m p a r a t i v e Archaeological Research on the Musical Instruments in Ancient Iraq a n d E g y p t " (in Arabic). Sumer 33 (!977) 9 7 - Rashid considers M e s o p o t a m i a t h e birthplace of nearly all musical instruments (p. 16). See also Rashid (1984), page 21. Rashid, Subhi Anwar. Musikgeschichte in Bildern, vol. 2, Mesopotamien. Edited by W e r n e r B a c h m a n n . Leipzig, 1984. See F a r m e r (1966). R i m m e r , Joan. Ancient Musical Instruments of Western Asia in the British Museum. L o n d o n , 1969. Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments. L o n d o n , 1940. Al though somewhat out of date, this volume has not lost its significance as a major classic. ;
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Schmidt-Colinet, Constanze. Die Musikinstrumente in der Kunst des Al len Orients: Archdologisch-philologische Studien. Bonn, 1981. Survey of archaeological finds from t h e N e a r East, mainly from M e s o p o tamia, with only casual examples from other areas. Includes some ninety illustrations. Stauder, Wilhelm. Die Harfen und Leiem Vorderasiens in babylonischer und assyrischer Zeit. Frankfurt a m Main, 1961. T u r n b u l l , Harvey. " T h e Origin of the Long-necked L u t e . " Galpin So ciety Journal 25 (1972): 58-66. T u r n b u l l , Harvey. "Anatolia." In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. I , p p . 388-393. L o n d o n , 1980. T h e only u p - t o date and very rich survey of Anatolian musical instruments. Wegner, M a x . "Hethitische M u s i k . " In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 6, p p . 330-334. Basel, 1949-. Wegner, M a x . Die Musikinstrumente des Alien Orients. M u n s t e r , 1950. Includes sections on Egyptian, M e s o p o t a m i a n , Hitdte, Syrian, Is raeli, a n d Greek music. W e g n e r , M a x . Musikgeschichte in Bildern, vol. 2.4, Griechenland. Edited by Heinrich Besseler and M a x Schneider. Leipzig, 1963. See F a r m e r (1966). Wellesz, Egon, ed. The New Oxford History of Music, vol. I . L o n d o n , 957> PP- 239-246, 266-274, 94-295. Sections rich with archaeo logical material are devoted to musical instruments in Mesopotamia and Egypt as opposed to the chapter on music in the Bible, which ignores archaeological sources. Ziegler, Christiane. Les instruments de musique egyptiens au Musk du Louvre. Paris, 1979. 1
2
JOACHIM
BRAUN
MYRES, JOHN L. (1869-1954), British archaeologist and historian. Myres was a pioneer in applying anthropo logical techniques to archaeology. His approach was to link history, geography, archaeology, and classical studies. He first visited Greece in 1891 and thereafter traveled widely in Mediterranean lands. In 1893 Myres went to Crete where he recognized the importance of tire prehistoric site of Knos sos later excavated by Arthur Evans. He established a cor relation between the so-called Kamares ware pottery that he had sketched in the Heraklion Museum and the comparable vase fragments found by Flinders Petrie at Kahun in Egypt, dated to the twelfth dynasty. Myres traveled with Evans in Crete and later excavated at Palaikastro and the nearby mountaintop sanctuary at Petsofas. His most profound in fluence was on Cypriot archaeology. In Cyprus, which he first visited in 1894, he was the first to excavate, particularly at those sites associated with ancient Kition, in a scientific manner in order to reconstruct the island's history. With Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, with whom he conducted an un easy relationship, he published A Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum (1899), which made possible a framework of absolute chronology. In 1914, Myres extended his ideas in the Handbook of the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities from Cyprus. Myres's interest and influence on Cypriot archaeology continued long after he ceased excavating. Instrumental in establishing the Cypriot Department of Antiquities in 1935,
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he insisted on the proper training of Cypriot archaeologists, most notably Porphyrios Dikaios. In 1910 Myres was elected Wykeham Professor of Ancient History and a fellow of New College, Oxford, a post he held until he retired in 1935. He was knighted in 1943. Although his writings had been mainly in the field of ancient history, Myres again turned his atten tion to the archaeology of Crete shortly before his death and edited Evans's notes and drawings for Scripta Minoa II (i952)[See also Crete; Cyprus; Kition; and the biographies of Di kaios, Evans, and Ohnefalsch-Richter.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Myres, John L., and M a x Ohnefalsch-Richter. A Catalogue of the Cy prus Museum, with a Chronicle of Excavations Undertaken since the British Occupation and Introductory Notes on Cypriote Archaeology. Oxford, 1899. Myres, John L . "Excavations at Palaikastro. II. T h e Sanctuary-Site at Petsofa." Annual of the British School at Athens, no. 9 (1902-1903): 356-387. Myres, John L . Excavations in Cyprus, 1913. L o n d o n , 1913. Myres, John L . Handbook of the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities from Cyprus. N e w York, 1914. ANN C. BROWN
N
NABATEAN INSCRIPTIONS. The Nabateans are
inscriptions were copies of documents deposited in an office or temple; copies were also distributed among members of the family who had the right of burial. The epitaphs (and the documents) contain the name or names of those who had the monument made, the names of those with the right of burial; a date by regnal years (most monuments were made in the reigns of Aretas IV, Malichus II, and the first five years of Rabel II); a curse on anyone who desecretes the monument; and the amount of the fine to be paid by violators—either to the treasury of a temple or temples or to the treasury of a secular authority (the king or regional gov ernor), and the name or names of the sculptors who made the monument. The shorter inscriptions were engraved either on the rocks surrounding Petra, where funerary feasts took place, or in the vicinity of Egra, at a place called the Tombs of the Sol diers. Numerous inscriptions were written by soldiers— mostly cavalrymen—in Greek and Latin. The Aramaic-Nabatean inscriptions mention generals in the cavalry and in fantry and other military officials. The inscriptions found in the Hauran were probably en graved by members of the tribe of Obaishat (Gk., Obaisenoi). They consist of dedicatory inscriptions from the temple of Ba'al Shamin at Seeia (built between 33/32 and 2/1 BCE) mat mention the building's architectural features, shrines, statues, and other cult objects. One epitaph (c. 270 CE) is for Fero, the teacher of Gadimat, king of Tanuh. A small group of inscriptions comes from the central Ne gev, mainly from the religious center at Oboda (Avdat). Some were dedications of the temple and one mentions de scendants of Aretas IV. Of special interest is a group of ma son's marks engraved by die temple's builders. The rock inscriptions of southern Sinai (some three thou sand graffiti), constitute a discrete group. Most are short invocations containing the word slm, "peace," or a short blessing; the name of the engraver; sometimes also the name of the deceased's brother or brothers, father, and, more rarely, grandfather and ending with another blessing. Only a few are dated (the dates range from 150/51 to 267/68 CE. In a group of inscriptions found at Jebel Moneija, near the oasis of Feiran, the officials of a temple are mentioned (two
of Arab descent, as their personal names, certain Arabic words incorporated in their vocabulary, and a recently dis covered inscription found in the vicinity of Oboda (Avdat) reveal. T h e Oboda inscription is written partly in Aramaic and pardy in Arabic but rendered entirely in Aramaic letters. The earliest inscriptions written with certainty by Nabateans are in Aramaic, the official language of the Persian Empire. Almost all of the Nabatean-Aramaic inscriptions deal with matters of religion. The earliest inscription, in archaic Ara maic script, dates to 168 B C E and comes from Elusa (Halusa) in Israel's central Negev desert. It refers to a shrine in honor of Aretas, king of the Nabateans. T h e Aslah inscription (c. 90 BCE) found at Petra, in Jordan is also in archaic script and mentions a shrine dedicated to Obodas I, son of Aretas II. It dates to about 67 B C E and was engraved on the base of a statue of King Rabel I. T h e bulk of the Nabatean inscriptions come from the vi cinity of Petra, the capital of the Nabatean kingdom; Egra (Meda'in Saleh) in northern Arabia; and the Hauran, in southern Syria. Most belong to the reigns of Aretas IV (9 B C E - 4 0 C E ) , Malichus II (40-70 C E ) , and Rabel II (70-106 CE). Very few of the texts found at Petra are of any length. T h e longest is an undated epitaph referring in detail to com ponents of a large funerary monument. Another fairly long and detailed inscription is engraved on what was apparently the base of a statue dedicated to Rabel II. It provides a de tailed genealogy of the Nabatean royal house. Most of the inscriptions found in the region of Petra are, however, brief invocations by pilgrims that are engraved along paths lead ing to open-air high places. In one of these the names Garshu and Raqmu—the Semitic names of Gerasa (Jerash) and Petra—are mentioned. T h e northern Arabian group of Nabatean inscriptions comprises some thirty lengthy epitaphs and hundreds of rock inscriptions engraved by pilgrims and soldiers (Cooke, 9 ° 3 j Jaussen and Savignac, 1909). T h e detailed funerary inscriptions, written in an elegant cursive script, were en graved on the facades of monuments (there is a direct re lationship between the architectural quality of the monu ment and the length of the inscription). The funerary I
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classes of priests, supervisors of animal victims sacrificed in Nabatean temples, and a scribe). A few Nabatean inscriptions were found in Wadi Tumilat, in eastern Egypt; a few others were found at various sites within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. [See also Aramaic Language and Literature; Avdat; Halusa; Jerash; Nabateans; and Petra.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cantineau, Jean. Le Nabateen, vol. 2. Paris, 1932. See pages 11-25. Cooke, G . A, A Textbook of North-Semitic Inscriptions. Oxford, 1903. Jaussen, Antonin, and Raphael Savignac. Mission archeologique en Ara bia, vol. 1. Paris, 1909. Negev, Avraham. The Inscriptions of Wadi Haqqaq, Sinai. Q e d e m , vol. 6. Jerusalem, 1977. Negev, Avraham. " A Nabatean Sanctuary at Jebel Moneijah, Southern Sinai." Israel Exploration Journal 27 (1977): 219-234. Negev, Avraham. Personal Names in the Nabatean Realm. Q e d e m , vol. 32. Jerusalem, 1991. Contains an extensive bibliography. AVRAHAM NEGEV
NABATEANS. During the late Hellenistic and Early Roman imperial era, an Arab kingdom centered at Petra in Edomite Transjordan established itself as one of the prom inent native independent political powers in the region of the Levant. The territory under its control extended from southern Syria through most of Transjordan, the Negev of Palestine, the Sinai, and the northwestern part of the Hijaz. Strabo, the Roman geographer, and the Jewish historian Josepbus offer the fullest discussions of Nabatean history and culture, in the absence of any indigenous Nabatean literary sources. More than four thousand Nabatean Aramaic in scriptions do offer valuable direct testimony from the native population, but the majority are laconic graffiti containing mere stereotyped formulae at best; the few lengthier texts are mostly funerary. Archaeological remains of the material culture suggest that the Nabateans possessed accomplished technical skills. Especially of note is their distinctive hellenized architecture, reflected in rock-cut tombs and temples; peculiar eggshell-thin ceramics of exceptionally high quality; and the hydrological techniques they employed in devel oping agriculture in the extensive desert landscape they oc cupied. Origins. The view that the Nabateans of the classical era are related to the Iron Age people known as the Nabaioth in the Hebrew Bible or the Nabatu of Assyrian texts remains controversial, but linguistic and historical evidence suggest the identification is not without some basis. These indica tions suggest their homeland was in the region of north eastern Arabia, adjacent to the Persian Gulf. They appear to have migrated westward in the Achaemenid Persian pe riod to settle finally in Petra. [See Petra.] The movement was along the North Arabian trade route that connected Baby lonia and Egypt and proved to be a vital commercial link
even in the Roman era. Of more entrepreneurial importance was their control of the valuable commerce of the frankin cense and myrrh of South Arabia transported to the Levant by Minaean and Gerrhean merchants. By 312/11 B C E , the fortune and reputation of the Nabateans were already well established, attracting the interests of Antigonus the OneEyed, one of the successors of Alexander the Great, who sent his army to Petra in hope of confiscating its wealth. T h e enterprise failed. According to the Zenon papyri of 259 B C E , the Nabateans also resided in the neighborhood of the Hauran in Syria and were merchants of aromatics with Ptol emaic agents in Moabite Transjordan. By the second cen tury BCE and afterward, they had spread into the Hijaz, the Negev, and Sinai to the borders of Egypt. Their expansion is best perceived as an extensive political alliance of various peoples united under the rule of the Petraean dynasts. [See Negev; Sinai.] Royal Dynasty. During the Hellenistic era, a series of kings is known from literary and epigraphic sources begin ning with Aretas I (c. 170 B C E ) , Rabel I (?), Aretas II (c. 100 B C E ) , and Obodas I (93-85). Under Aretas III (85-62), Nabatea became a Roman client-state and Malichus I (62-30) was involved with such notable figures as Caesar and Mark Antony. His successor, Obodas II (30-9), was the ally of Augustus, and these relations were continued by the later kings until the reign of the emperor Trajan. Under Aretas IV (9 B C E - 4 0 C E ) , the Nabatean kingdom flourished and reached its zenith; his reign remains the best known of all the Nabatean dynasts. The reigns of his successors, Mali chus II (40-70 CE) and Rabel II (70-106 C E ) , are more ob scure, but the common depiction of this period as one of political and economic decline remains at issue. Because the period between Pompey and Augustus is the best known, the formative character of the monarchy has been seen as a result of Roman rule. However, the Nabatean dynasty re flects all of the aspects of a typical Hellenistic Macedonian monarchy of the Egyptian Ptolemaic type. T h e kings adopted the traditional titulary slogans of their Hellenistic counterparts on coins and inscriptions: Aretas III was known as philhellenos; Aretas IV as "friend of his people," or the equivalent in Greek of philodemus, but perhaps better understood as philopatris; and Rabel II as "the one who has given life and deliverance to his people," or the soter, "sav ior," of his people. T h e monarchs also adopted royal con sanguineous marriages, typical of the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt; intermarriage with the Herodian dynasty is. also known. Evidence for a royal dynastic cult is clear from the known apotheosis of Obodas and Malichus; that of the other kings can be inferred from the pseudotheophoric "servant" names combined with the names of the kings and queens and used by many court officials, military personnel, and artisans. After the Roman annexation in 106 C E , the royal family faded from existence and the Nabatean realm was integrated into the new province of Arabia. T h e Babatha
NABATEANS family archive from the Dead Sea documents the transition from the reign of Rabel II to Roman rule. [See Dead Sea Scrolls.] Settlement Pattern. From the royal capital at Petra and the Edomite heartland, Nabatean settlements radiated in all directions. T o the south, the port at Leuke Kome on the Red Sea in Midian and inland settlement at Hegra (Meda'in Saleh) in the Hijaz provided bases for transporting South Arabian aromatics on to Petra and elsewhere. [See Meda'in Saleh.] From Aila ( Aqaba), routes led northwest to Gaza and north to the Petra. [See Aqaba.] For the latter, Naba tean road stations and settiements at Khirbet al-Kithara, Khirbet al-Khaldeh, Quweira, Humeima, and Sadaqa sus tained traffic to the royal capital. [See Khaldeh; Humeima.] T h e Nabatean temple at Wadi Ram in the Hisma was also the center for Nabatean settlers in die desert region. From Petra, another route led west through the Negev via tire cities of Oboda/Avdat, Mampsis/Kurnub, Nessana, Sobata/Subeita, and Elusa/Halusa; it formed the basis for trade at the ports of Gaza and Rhinocorura on the Mediterranean coast. [See Avdat; K u m u b ; Subeita; Halusa.] Numerous Nabatean inscriptions in the Sinai and the eastern desert of Egypt at test to a substantial Nabatean presence in the area. T o the East, a route tirrough the Arabian desert, via the oasis at Dumah al-Jandal (modern Jawf), led to the Persian Gulf and the emporium at Charax Spasinou. T o the north through Transjordan, the Nabateans also had a string of settlements in Edom and Moab that extended to Bosra and Damascus, where goods could be transported to the ports along the Phoenician coast. [See Edom; Moab; Bosra; Damascus; Phoenicia.] While the Nabatean presence in die hellenized Decapolis region was not substantial, they neither excluded nor avoided the region. [See Decapolis.] Both Philadelphia (Amman) and Gerasa/Jerash were the locations of Nabatean communities, and the Hauran of southern Syria has yielded numerous inscriptions and sporadic finds of Nabatean pot tery. [See Amman; Jerash.] Safaitic inscriptions also attest to Nabatean influence in the region, suggesting that the indig enous population was under the sway of the Nabatean king dom. [See Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] c
c
Political and Military Organization. T h e titles of civil and military officials are borrowed from Greek (strategos, chiliarch, and hipparch) and Latin (centurion) and reflect the development of the military system along the lines of a standard professional army of the Hellenistic type. The strategoi were regional district governors and military com- / manders. Such officials are attested at Sidon in Phoenicia, Dmer and Canatiia in southern Syria, Madaba and U m m er-Rasas in Moabite Transjordan, and Hegra (Meda'in Sa leh); the Nabatean communities in Edomite Transjordan, the Negev, and perhaps the Sinai, must have been organized in similar fashion, but the evidence is lacking. [See Sidon; Madaba; U m m er-Rasas.] There are suggestions that the position was hereditary. For example, the sons of Damasip-
83
pos at Hegra, Rabib'el and Ganimu, and his grandson Maliku, were all strategoi at Hegra; another grandson, Damasi, led a revolt later against the ruling dynasty in Petra in the early years of Rabel IPs reign. T h e chiliarchs must have been in charge of infantry units of approximately a thousand men. T h e hipparchs were commanders of cavalry units of ap proximately five hundred horsemen. Almost all of the offi cials with this title are concentrated near Bosra in the far north and Hegra in tire far south of the kingdom, but an individual designated the chief of the cavalry (rb prsy') is known from Petra. T h e title may represent die Semitic equivalent of the hipparch or an official of inferior rank in the cavalry unit. Two individuals are designated by the Latin title of centurion, one at Hegra and the other at Leuke Kome, evidendy in charge of protecting officials charged with collecting tariffs on ttade. In addition, several individ uals are designated the chief of the camp (rb msryt') at Petra, Dumah al-Jandal, Luhita, and Abarta', officials perhaps comparable to the stratopedarch or praefectus castrorum of the Roman army. [See Meda'in Saleh.] In conflicts with Hellenistic armies and the Hasmonean and Herodian dynastic forces, the Nabatean royal army per formed fairly efficientiy, despite the castigating remarks of Strabo and Josephus about their effectiveness. After the Ro man annexation of the ldngdom in 106, most of the Naba tean army was transformed into regular Roman military units, comprising at least six regiments of cohortes Ulpiae Petraeorum and perhaps several alae regiments of cavalry men and dromedarii, sometime between 1 1 4 - 1 1 6 , in con nection with Trajan's Parthian campaign. Afterward, these units served in Cappadocia, Syria, and Palestine, and prob ably their homeland of Arabia as well. [See Cappadocia.] L a n g u a g e a n d Script. Of the more than four thousand published Nabatean Aramaic inscriptions, the oldest are from the Late Hellenistic era, from Petra (96/5,70/69), Bostra (51-47) in the Hauran, and Tell el-Shuqafiya (77) in Wadi Tumilat between the modern Suez Canal and Nile River in Egypt, where a recent text is dated to 35/4 B C E , to die reigns of both tire Ptolemaic ruler Cleopatra VII Philopater and Malichus I. [See Aramaic Language and Litera ture; Nabatean Inscriptions.] T h e largest concentration of dated texts is from the tombs at Hegra, which provide im portant insights as well for the architectural analysis of the tombs at Petra, which have only a single dedicatory inscrip tion. Ironically, the largest concentration of inscriptions is in the forlorn and desolate area of Wadi Mukatteb in the Sinai, where thousands have been recorded. No Nabatean text ex ists at Petra after its annexation by Rome in 106, although a number of texts dated to the Roman provincial era of Ara bia are known from the periphery of the old Nabatean king dom. T h e latest dates to 356, from the Hijaz. Although the language of these texts is Aramaic, there are a number of Arabic loanwords utilized for political and religious institu tions; the vast majority of personal names in the Nabatean
84
NABATEANS
onomasticon are also Arabic, spelled according to the pe culiar orthographic practices of Imperial Aramaic of the ear lier Persian era. The paleography of the script, with its pe culiar ligatures and style, eventually develops into that of the Classical Arabic script. [See Arabic] It is also apparent that some Nabateans used the North Arabian scripts and dialects known as Safaitic and Thamudic (see above). Recent bilin gual texts in these pre-Islamic Arabic dialects and Aramaic indicate the Nabatean community was complex, diverse, and basically polylingual, providing a substantial basis for understanding Aramaic as only the formally adopted lan guage of a largely Arabic population. E c o n o m y a n d Society. Of primary importance for the Nabatean economy was the commerce in aromatics from South Arabia and spices from the Far East. Their activities and fame as traders and merchants extended across the Mediterranean and as far east as Han dynasty China, which knew Petra as Rekem (Chinese, Li-kan). In the fourth cen tury B C E , the Nabateans were already profiting greatly from this exotic commerce, and their activities as merchants in these goods was still recognized by Roman writers in the second century C E . Finds of their typical painted eggshell fineware have been found along the eastern coasts near Bah rain, the ports of Oman and Yemen, and at sites such as Qaryat al-Fau in Saudi Arabia, along the incense route lead ing north to Petra. [See Bahrain; Oman; Yemen; Qaryat alFau.] Their Aramaic inscriptions have been found scattered across the Mediterranean at such places as Tenos, Rhodes, Cos, Delos, and Miletus in the Aegean, and Puteoli and Rome in Italy. [See Miletus.] The development of agricul ture in the Nabatean realm has been viewed as a late devel opment resulting from a decline in commerce when Rome absorbed much of the Red Sea traffic. It is also a product of the social evolutionary anthropological model that charac terizes the transition from nomadic pastoralism to sedentary life as a gradual and late development. [See Pastoral No madism.] In contrast to this cultural scheme, the earliest de scriptions of the Nabateans indicate that they possessed ad vanced technical ability and ingenuity. Their engineering skill is revealed in their developing hydrological systems to support settlements on the desert fringe. [See Hydrology.] Such achievements at Humeima in the Hisma desert of southern Jordan are particularly impressive and date to the first century B C E , rivaling the later developments in the Ne gev. In similar fashion, horse breeding must have been a necessity for maintaining the cavalry of the Nabatean army as early as Aretas III—both Petra and Amman seem to have been prime regions for these activities in the Hellenistic era. Furthermore, the art and architecture of the Nabatean realm also reveals creative adaptations of classical styles. Religion. The principal national god of the Nabateans was Dushares ("belonging to Shara," Edom's mountain range). Other divinities in the pantheon included the god dess M a t , al-Uzza, al-Kutba, Shai al-Qaum, and Ba'al
Shamin. Their representations normally were in the betylic form of a rectangular stela (albeit with stylized eyes, nose, and mouth), rather than anthropomorphic form, suggesting to some that there was a cultural inhibition or even prohi bition against depicting divinities in human fashion (Patrich, 1990). Other sculptural representations in Hellenic iconographic form suggest the practice was not uniform. Some of the best-preserved sanctuaries are at Petra, Khirbet etTannur, and Wadi Ram in Edom; Qasr Rabba and Dhat Ras in Moab; and Si in the Hauran. Shrines and cultic cen ters are abundant throughout the realm, indicating that the Nabateans absorbed the indigenous cults of the Edomites, Moabites, and Syrians into their pantheon. Even the Egyp tian cult of Isis nourished at Petra from at least the Augustan era into the later Roman imperial period. Although there is evidence that Petra came increasingly under the sway of Christianity by the fourth century, there are no traces of the new religion in the Nabatean Aramaic inscriptions. [See also Arabian Peninsula, article on T h e Arabian Pen insula before the Time of Islam; Palestine, article on Pales tine in the Persian through Roman Periods; Syria, article on Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods; and Transjor dan, article on Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bowersock, Glen W . Roman Arabia. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1983. S u p e r b overview of political developments in the region. Dentzer, Jean-Marie, ed. Hauran I: Recherches archeologiques sur la Syrie du Sud a I'epoque hellenistique et romaine. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 124. Paris, 1985-1986. Basic archae ological investigation of N a b a t e a n southern Syria. Gatier, Pierre-Louis, and Jean-Francois Salles. " A u x frontieres meridionales du domaine nabateen." In L'Arabie et ses mers bordieres, ed ited by Jean-Francois Salles, p p . 173-190. Paris, 1988. Graf, David F . " T h e Nabataeans a n d the Hisma: In die Steps of Glueck and Beyond." I n The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman, edited by Carol L . M e y e r s a n d Michael O ' C o n n o r , p p . 647-664. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1983. Graf, David F . " T h e Origin of the N a b a t a e a n s . " ARAM 2 (1990): 4 5 75. Synthesis of t h e recent research on the question of the beginnings of Nabatea. Graf, David F . " T h e N a b a t a e a n Army a n d the Cohortes Ulpiae Petraeorum." In The Roman and Byzantine Army in the East, edited by E d ward D a br ow a, p p . 265-311. Cracow, 1994. Graf, David F . " T h e R o m a n East from die Chinese Perspective." In Palmyra and the Silk Road. D a m a s c u s , 1995. Discusses the relevant Chinese texts related to Petra a n d die N e a r East. Gruendler, Beatrice. Development of the Arabic Scripts. H a r v a r d Semitic Series, 43. Adanta, 1993. Basic study of the evolution of t h e N a b a tean script into Arabic script. H a m m o n d , Philip C . The Nabataeans: Their History, Culture, and Ar chaeology. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, 37. G o t h e n b u r g , 1973Healey, John F . The Nabataean Tomb Inscriptions ofMeda'in Salih. Jour nal of Semitic Studies, S u p p l e m e n t 1. Oxford, 1993. N e w edition of older texts, integrating recent linguistic evidence. Meshorer, Ya'acov. Nabataean Coins. Q e d e m , vol. 3. Jerusalem, 1975. Basic study now u p d a t e d by Schmitt-Korte (below).
NABRATEIN Negev, Avraham. Personal Names in the Nabatean Realm. Q e d e m , vol. 32. Jerusalem, 1991. Patrich, Joseph. The Formation of Nabatean Art. L e i d e n , 1990. Provoc ative study of die iconoclastic tradition in N a b a t e a . Schmitt-Korte, Karl, a n d M i k e Cowell. " N a b a t a e a n Coinage, Part I: T h e Silver C o n t e n t M e a s u r e d b y X - R a y Fluorescence Analysis." Numismatic Chronicle 149 (1989): 33-58. Schmitt-Korte, Karl, a n d Mike Cowell. " N a b a t a e a n Coinage, Part II: N e w Coin T y p e s a n d Variants." Numismatic Chronicle 150 (1990): 105-133Schmitt-Korte, Karl, a n d M a r t i n Price. " N a b a t a e a n Coinage, Part I I I . " Numismatic Chronicle 154 (1994): 67-131. W e n n i n g , Robert. Die Nabataer: Denkmaler und Geschichte. N o v u m T e s t a m e n t u m et Orbis A n t i q u u s , 3. Gottingen, 1987. Basic biblio graphic index of N a b a t e a n archaeology. W e n n i n g , Robert. "Erne neuerstelle Liste der nabataischen D y n a s t i c " Boreas 16 (1993): 25-38. W e n n i n g , Robert. " D i e Dekapolis u n d die N a b a t a e r . " Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins n o (1994): 2-35. Zayadine, Fawzi, ed. Petra and the Caravan Cities. A m m a n , 1990. Splendid collection of articles o n N a b a t e a n religion and culture. DAVID F.
GRAF
NABLUS. See Shechem. NABRATEIN (Ar., "two hills; also known as Kefar N e buraya), site located 4 km (2.5 mi.) nortii-northeast of Safed in Upper Galilee ( 3 3 V N , 35°3o' E; map reference 197 X 267). Situated at 650 m above sea level on the summit of a small hill opposite Moshav Dalton, Nabratein lies along a deep ravine on its north side (Nahal Dalton, or Wadi 'Ammuqa) that empties eastward into the Hulah Valley at 0.5
85
lcm south of Hazor. A perennial spring flows some 250 m southeast of the ruin. Another small site, Khirbet en-Nabrah, which has not been excavated, lies close to the spring and no doubt accounts for the dual form of the name Na bratein (Frowald Hiittenmeister and Reeg Gottfried, Die antiken Synagogen in Israel; Tubinger Adas des vorderen Ori ent, B e i h e f t B n , vol. 1, Wiesbaden, 1977, pp. 343-347). Nabratein's ruins were first discovered by the British ex plorers Claude R. Conder and FI. H. Kitchener, who noted the inscription on the synagogue's lintel, which is decorated with a menorah in a wreath. T h e inscription was deciphered and published by Nahman Avigad in 1960 (see Naveh, 1978, p. 31). It is unique in Hebrew epigraphy because its date, 564 C E , is reckoned from die destruction of the Second Tem ple in 70 CE: "(According) to the number four hundred and ninety-four years after the destruction, the house was (re)built during the office of Hanina son of Lezer and Luliana son of Yudan." T h e inscription is incised on a Romanperiod architectural fragment. Its decipherment led to a great deal of confusion until recent excavation could dem onstrate that a resettlement and rebuilding occurred at the site in the late Byzantine-Early Arab period. Excavations conducted in 1980 and 1981 were sponsored by the American Schools of Oriental Research and directed by Eric M. Meyers. They focused on the synagogue and its building context, on areas to the northwest presumed to be domestic or agricultural/industrial, and on a smaller area to the southwest in front of the synagogue entryway that did not appear to be a "public" space. Very little debris had accumulated on the site, which is located in a very isolated spot in a reforested area of the Safed mountains, Avigad had
NABRATEIN. F i g u r e 1. General view of the synagogue.
(Courtesy E. M . Meyers)
86
NABRATEIN
removed tire incised lintel to the Israel Museum, but its findspot was known; the central portal of the synagogue on the south side was visible. Results of the excavation of the synagogue area were sur prising and significant. A series of increasingly larger build ings had been built there, which stratigraphic excavation re vealed. The oldest and smallest building, synagogue I, dated to the second century CE (c. 135-250), is the oldest post-70 C E , securely dated synagogue in Israel. [See Synagogues.] Its dimensions are 11.2 X 9.35 m; its entrance is in the southern wall; and it is a broadhouse building. Benches along its east ern and western walls utilized elements of the older struc tures below it. It probably had four internal columns, but there is no solid evidence for them in this period. The roof span, however, is sufficiently long to suggest columns. Two stone bemas, or platforms, adorned the southern wall, and the possible imprint of a reader's platform was detected in the plastered floor. Synagogue II (c. 250-363) was converted to a basilica with six columns (11.2 X 13.85 m), increasing the internal space of the building by 48 percent (see figure 1). The twin bemas were extensively decorated in this phase. The bema at the southwest is adorned with a beautiful Torah shrine whose gabled roof was supported by two rampant lions with a niche for the eternal light carved as a half dome or shell in the key of the pediment. This unique discovery resolved the long standing question about where in ancient Sacred Jewish ar chitecture the Ark of the Law had been placed (see figure 2). The second bema, in the southeast corner, may have held a menorah or served as the reader's platform.
It is clear that the site was abandoned in about 350-363 as a result of economic hardship and the earthquake of 363. The synagogue was rebuilt in the final phase of occupation, as is demonstrated by the inscription on the lintel (i.e., 564), which lasted into the eighth century, or about 700, when synagogue III was enlarged to an eight-column basilica (11.2 X 16.8 m), 21 percent larger than in the previous phase. A portable wooden Ark of the Law was used in this final phase of the synagogue. This surprising rebuilding, after an aban donment of almost two hundred years, suggests that there was some sort of communal remembrance of the synagogue ruin, which is in keeping with Jewish custom. The best-preserved Early Roman remains from the site came from the large structure attached to the perimeter wall on the northwest of the synagogue and some 15 m beyond the western areas adjacent to the synagogue. T h e bedrock installations suggest that the rooms there were basements remodeled and reused in the late second-third centuries. It is not clear whether the area was industrial or domestic. The site's relatively small size (less than a hectare) suggests that the village was not much more than a way station connecting inland Upper Galilee with the nearby Jordan Valley via Wadi Dalton. The area southwest of the synagogue produced a unique Late Byzantine ceramic piece that depicts the Ark of the Law with the eternal light. The room in which it was found may have served some liturgical function in connection with the synagogue: it may have been where the washing of the feet of the priests took place. T h e area immediately to the west of the synagogue produced several architectural frag-
NABRATEIN. F i g u r e 2. Fragment of the Torah Shrine ("Ark"). (Courtesy E. M . Meyers)
NAG HAMMADI merits of interest: part of a lion's body, a lamb's head, and a bird's head, suggesting a loosening of the conservative Jew ish attitude toward representational art in the Byzantine pe riod. Numerous impressed sigillata bowls with animals were found in a Late Roman or Byzantine context. The results of the Nabratein excavations modestly revised views regarding conservatism in Upper Galilee in the Ro man through the Byzantine periods, with respect both to art and trade. Because of its location so close to the Jordan Val ley, it would not have been oriented to trade with the Phoe nician coast. T h e material culture of the site reflects all of the changes above. Surface sherds, which may have been washed in from the hills above, indicate the presence of an earlier occupation in the area in the Early Bronze Age I I III, Iron II, Persian, and Plellenistic periods. Medieval sherds, from after 700, were found at the second site, some 250 m to the southeast, and dated to the early and late Arab periods. BIBLIOGRAPHY Meyers, Carol L . , a n d Eric M . M e y e r s . " T h e Ark in Art: A Ceramic Rendering of d i e T o r a h Shrine from N a b r a t e i n . " Eretz-Israel 16 (1982): 176-185. Meyers, Eric M . , et al. " T h e Ark of Nabratein: A First G l a n c e . " Biblical Archaeologist 44.4 (1981): 237-243. Meyers, Eric M . , et al. "Preliminary R e p o r t o n the 1980 Excavations at en-Nabratein, Israel." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 244 (1981): 1-25. Meyers, Eric M . , et al. " S e c o n d Preliminary R e p o r t on the 1981 E x cavations at en-Nabratein, Israel." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 246 (1982): 35-54. N a v e h , Joseph. On Stone and Mosaic: The Aramaic and Hebrew Inscrip tions from Ancient Synagogues. T e l Aviv, 1978. See p p , 31-33. ERIC M.
MEYERS
NAG HAMMADI, city in southern Egypt near discov ery site of important Coptic Gnostic texts (26°03' N , 32°i5' E). The name Nag Hammadi has become popular in New Testament studies through its association with the Nag Hammadi Papyri, a collection of Gnostic documents found some miles from Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. Being the major urban center in the area, however, Nag Hammadi has been identified as the site of discovery. This small city is located on the west bank of the Nile River, 51 km (32 mi.) northwest of Luxor by a direct route. T h e discovery was made at the base of Jebel et-Tarif, the high desert cliff face on the north side of the Nile River. Villages in this area between the Nile and the cliff are (from west to east) elKasr, el-Busa, Hamra D o m , Sheikh Ali, and Abu Manaa. In 1945, while digging near Hamra D o m for sebakh, a soil mixture used as fertilizer in the Nile Valley, a farmer found a grave containing a skeleton and a jar containing thirteen codices with 1,153 surviving pages, which are now known as the Nag Hammadi papyri (also called the Gnostic pa
87
pyri). El-Kasr is the ancient site of Chenoboskion, hence the earlier association of the find with this name. Chenoboskion was the site where St. Palamon established one of the first monasteries in Upper Egypt. In the early fourth century C E Pachomius, after a brief association with Palamon, founded his own monastery at Tabennese and later his larger mon astery at Pabau (modern Faw Qibli), located about 17.6 km (11 mi.) east of Nag Hammadi on the north side of the Nile. A major phase of the Nag Hammadi excavations focused on this Pachomian monastic complex at Pabau. Four major seasons of work were conducted from 1975 to 1980. T h e excavations were organized by James M. Rob inson; Torgny Save-Soderbergh and Bastiaan Van Elderen were the field directors in 1975, and in succeeding seasons Van Elderen served as head. Peter Grossmann of the Ger man Archaeological Institute in Cairo joined the staff in 1976 as chief architect. The work of the first season was located in the area of Jebel et-Tarif where local people indicated the discovery was made. A major part of this season involved the clearance of six of the more than 150 caves at the middle or top of the cliff face of Jebel et-Tarif. One (T73), a previously pub lished sixth dynasty (c. 2300 BCE) tomb of the provincial governor Tjauti, proved to have lower chambers, previously unknown, with extensive reliefs and hieroglyphs. Some smaller tombs also high up on the cliff face belong to the first centuries CE. A burial cloth found in T 1 1 7 was dated to the fifth century CE by Carbon-14 testing. Some caves were occupied, presumably by anchorites, during the early Chris tian centuries. One cave ( T 8 ) , with the opening lines of the Book of Psalms in Coptic inscribed on its walls, was dated to the late sixth or early seventh century by the evidence of coins, epigraphy, and ceramics. In none of these excava tions, however, was there clear evidence for the findspot of the codices. In the second season (1976) the major activity was the excavation of the large monastery-basilica complex of Pa chomius in Faw Qibli. T h e proximity of this complex to the area where the papyri were found suggests that it could throw some possible light on the early Christian movements in this area. Over a wide area on the edge of the village lie the architectural remains, chiefly pillars, of a large building. Seven trenches or squares were sunk in various parts of die site to ascertain the stratigraphy of the area and the dimen sions of the major structure. These probes revealed that the structure was a very large five-aisle basilica. Below these fifth-century ruins two earlier occupation levels were identified: one was a smaller building dated to the fourth century and the other a large late thirdcentury storage room. In addition, in a stratum below this building traces of another building complex, possibly dating from the third century, were found in various parts of the site. T h e destruction of the basilica, as attributed in literary
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NAG HAMMADI
sources to Khalif el-Hakim in the eleventh century, was con firmed by a destruction level with an ash layer on which architectural members had toppled and building debris had accumulated. This layer was dated by its pottery to the elev enth century. In the tiiird season (1977-1978) ten new trenches or squares were opened at the site of the basilica of Pachomius. The uncovering of the foundations and lower courses of the north wall, the south wall, and the east wall including die northeast corner provided the dimensions of the basilica— 75 m (246 ft.) long and 37 m (121 ft.) wide—which proved to be die largest ancient church in Egypt identified to date. In the fourth season (1979-1980) eleven new trenches or squares provided additional and new information about the fifth-century basilica and fourth century-building below. Ceramic evidence dated the latter to the fourth century. Correlated with the literary evidence, this building would be the structure built by Pachomius, and the fifth-century ba silica would be the structure built by his followers. In 1980 a team under the direction of H. Keith Beebe as field director conducted a survey of the village of el-Kasr (ancient Chenoboskion) and environs to assess the archae ological remains and the feasibility of further archaeological work. The team identified extensive remains dating from die Roman and Byzantine times. In addition to a survey of die nearby monastery of St. Palamon, die team also investigated the Wadi Sheikh Ali. In this wadi was located a site with numerous graffiti-like in scriptions. Dozens of Coptic inscriptions were found and additional pharaonic drawings and inscriptions even yielded a cartouch of Menkaure, pharaoh of the fourth dynasty. The Bodmer papyri were found about the same time as the Nag Hammadi papyri. This collection, named after Martin Bodmer of Geneva, Switzerland, who acquired most of the codices, contains biblical texts, classical texts, early Christian literary texts, and some non-literary texts. Among the biblical texts are some of the earliest sizable copies of New Testament books—Luke and John ( P ) , John ( P ) — dating from about 200 CE. T h e precise provenance of this collection is not known, but local tradition places it near the Pachomian monastic complex, possibly in the Wadi Sheikh Ali. The findspot of the Nag Hammadi papyri was not verified by the excavations and surveys discussed above. In fact, subsequently in 1988 and 1990 Mohammed Ali suggested anotiier site as the findspot, located approximately one mile northeast from the previous suggestions. This latest sug gested site has not been excavated, although its environs are intriguing. Neverdieless, the excavations have set some pa rameters regarding the findspot and the local Gnostic move ment. There is no evidence of a community, settlement, or cemetery in this area. It appears that the grave found in 1945 was a single burial in the low desert. Any suggestion of the size of the Gnostic movement in this area is speculation. 75
65
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The opening page of the Coptic
Gospel of Thomas.
(Courtesy A S O R Archives)
Furthermore to claim that the Pachomian monastic com pound was Gnostic ignores the close relationship between Pachomius and die Egyptian archbishop Athanasius, who at one time was hiding at the Pachomian complex. Further more, die suggestion that the Bodmer papyri were found in this area (possibly in the nearby Wadi Sheikh Ali) implies that tiiere was a strong anti-Gnostic spirit in this vicinity because there are works such as The Apocryphal. Correspon dence between the Corinthians and Paul of this sentiment in the collection of the Bodmer Library. T h e convergence of the Bodmer Papyri (as early as late second century), the Pachomian monastic complex (fourth century), and the Gnostic papyri in close proximity provides some challenging and interesting problems of integration and historical se quence. Judgment about die Gnostic movement in Upper Egypt must take into account the above data. T h e large size of the Pachomian monastic complex con firms the allusions in literary sources to die extent of the monastic movement in Upper Egypt. Along with the con temporaneous extensive rise of monasticism in Lower Egypt (as developed by St. Antony and in the settlements in Wadi
NAHAL OREN 'n-Natrun), this further confirms the major role that monasticism played in Egyptian Christianity. In view of Athanasius' contacts with the Pachomian mo nastic movement, the issuance of his canonical list in the Easter letter of 367 may have occasioned the removal of the extracanonical Gnostic papyri and their owners from the Pachomian community. This library may then have been buried with its exiled owners who had settled in the cliff area of Jebel et-Tarif. This hypothesis must await ad ditional surveys and excavation of sites in the vicinity of Nag Hammadi for further confirmation. This area has not been systematically and scientifically surveyed nor additional sites stratigraphically excavated. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Emmel, Stephen. " N a g H a m m a d i Library." In The Coptic Encyclope dia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya, vol. 6, p p . 1 7 7 1 - 1 7 7 3 . N e w York, 1991. Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 12 vols. Leiden, 19721984. G r o s s m a n n , Peter. " T h e Basilica of St. P a c h o m i u s . " Biblical Archae ologist 42 (1979): 232-236. Habachi, Labib. "Sixth-Dynasty Discoveries in thejabal al-Tarif." Bib lical Archaeologist 42 (1979): 237-238. Kasser, Rodolphe. " B o d m e r P a p y r i . " In The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed ited by Aziz S. Atiya, vol. 8, p p . 48-53. N e w York, 1991. Lease, Gary. " T h e F o u r t h Season of the N a g H a m m a d i Excavation, 21 D e c e m b e r 1979-15 January 1980." GottingerMiszellen41 (1980): 75-85. Meyer, Marvin. "Archaeological Survey of t h e W a d i Sheik Ali, D e c e m ber 1980." Gottinger Miszellen 41 (1980): 77-82. Meyer, Marvin, and H . Keith Beebe. "Literally an Archaeological Sur vey of al-Qasr." ARCENewsletter 121 (1983): 25-31. Robinson, James M . " T h e First Season of the N a g H a m m a d i Exca vation, 27 N o v e m b e r - 1 9 D e c e m b e r 1975." Gottinger Miszellen 22 (1976): 71-79. Robinson, James M . , ed. The Nag Hammadi Library. San Francisco, 1990. Robinson, James M . , a n d Bastiaan V a n Elderen, " T h e N a g H a m m a d i Excavations." In Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Report 19721980, edited by Marvin Meyer, p p . 37-44. Claremont, 1981. Van Elderen, Bastiaan, and James M . Robinson. " T h e S e c o n d Season of die N a g H a m m a d i Excavation, 22 N o v e m b e r - 2 9 D e c e m b e r 1976." Gottinger Miszellen 24 (1977): 57-73. Van Elderen, Bastiaan. " T h e N a g H a m m a d i Excavation." Biblical Ar chaeologist 42 (1979): 225-231. BASTIAAN V A N ELDEREN
NAHAL OREN, prehistoric site located south of the Carmel ridge, close to the outlet of the Oren valley onto the coastal plain. Excavations at the site were begun by Moshe Stekelis in 1942 and were continued from 1954 to i960 by him and Tamar Yizraeli-Noy, and in 1969-1970 by Noy, Eric Higgs, and Anthony Legge. Because the cave floor is buried under large limestone boulders, the main archaeo logical operations were conducted on the terrace, over an area of about 400 sq m. Nine layers were uncovered: I X -
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VII, Kebaran; VI-V, Late Natufian; and IV-I, Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). T h e Kebaran layer has been radiocarbon dated to 18,250 ±350 to 15,800 ±300 BP. Although a small stone wall was exposed in this layer, most of the remains were animal bones and lithic industries. T h e Kebaran industry is dominated by microliths, the most common types of which in the lower levels are the obliquely truncated backed bladelets and micropoints. In the uppermost levels, triangles and backed lunates predominate. Among the animal species represented are fallow deer, which indicates that the immediate environ ment of Mt. Carmel was still covered by oak forest; and gazelle, which were probably hunted in the parkland of the coastal plain. As a result of the lowering of the sea level during the glacial age, the coastal plain was at least 10 km (6 mi.) wide. Nahal Oren was unoccupied during the Early Natufian period. The Middle and Late Natufian are represented at the site by flimsy house foundations, well-built terrace walls, small installations, postholes, and a large cemetery. Most of the occupational deposits abut three terrace walls, which were erected in a west-east direction. Deep mortars, also known as "stone pipes," were imbedded in secondary po sitions in these walls. Small mortars, stone bowls, and nu merous pestles, as well as decorated basalt shaft straighteners, were found. T h e cemetery contained numerous flexed burials with the remains of forty-five humans, ten of which were children. In a central area a large hearth, more than a meter in diameter, was uncovered, surrounded by flat limestone slabs. Three postholes were uncovered nearby around the fireplace. T h e Natufian lithic industry is dominated by backed lunates, many of which were made by the microburin tech nique. Sickle blades, burins, endscrapers, and perforators comprise the rest of the assemblage. T h e few art objects recovered include a long bone de picting an ungulate on one end and a human head on the other; a limestone piece interpreted as depicting the heads of a dog and an owl; a gazelle head carved in bone; and a stone figure smeared with red ocher, representing an un identified animal head but resembling a baboon. Among the objects used as body decorations were bone pendants and numerous dentalium shells. Layers IV and III contained assemblages associated with the PPNA. The nature of layer IV is unclear but may be related to the Khiamian, the earliest phase within the Neo lithic sequence. Layer III contained the remains of twenty domestic structures, often attached, arranged on four ter races. T h e houses/rooms are 2.5-4.0 m in diameter, with entrances facing south. On the well-preserved floors, rounded hearths surrounded by small stones were uncov ered, and next to each was a limestone slab with two to four cup holes. Large, fiat, and round grinding stones, as well as rubbing stones, were found, as were two schematic figurines
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interpreted as representing humans. PPNA burials were rare at Nahal Oren. Of those burials found, in only one was the skull removed. In this way, the PPNA here differs from con temporary farming communities in the Jordan Valley. [See Jericho.] The layer III lithic industry is comprised of a few arrow heads, ax/adzes, sickle blades, perforators, retouched blades, and a considerable amount of debitage. T h e Tahunian axes are characterized by a working edge shaped by transverse removals. Among the sickle blades, Beit Ta'amir knives should be noted, as well as el-Khiam arrowheads. Small ob sidian blades originated in central Anatolia. It is, however, extremely difficult to determine what part of the microlithic tool assemblage belongs to the PPNA because the leveling of the terraces caused the mixing of Natufian and PPNA artifacts. Layers II and I contain the remains of small rectangular houses. The remains of six rectangular buildings were ex posed, with very few finds. Among the most important ob jects were querns and rubbing stones. The lithic assemblage includes arrowheads of the Helwan types, Jericho points shaped by pressure flaking, elongated sickle blades with short tangs, and Tahunian axheads, as well as some polished bifacials. The burials are mostly of adults, from which the skulls have been removed. Among the animal remains are ovicaprids, probably domesticated goats, wild boar, gazelle, and some deer. It seems that Nahal Oren represents the spreading in the process of acculturation of cultural traits that had originated in the "corridor" of Jericho to the Damascus basin. The small village or hamlet in Nahal Oren kept its traditional Natufian structure during the PPNA and only modified its architectural forms later, during the PPNB. BIBLIOGRAPHY N o y , T a m a r , et al. " R e c e n t Excavations at Nahal Oren, Israel." Pro ceedings of the Prehistoric Society 39 (1973): 75-99. Stekelis, Moshe, a n d T a m a r Yizraeli. "Excavations at Nahal Oren: Pre liminary Report." Israel Exploration Journal 13.1 (1963): 1-12. OFER BAR-YOSEF
NAJRAN
(ancient South Arabian, N G R N ; also identified in pre-Islamic literature as Ra'ma), also known as al-Ukhdud ("pit," or "trench") in reference to the Qur'anic surah and the Christian martyrdom (see below), a modern oasis located on the fringes of the Arabian shield and on the drain age network of Wadi Najran, which permits large-scale ag riculture to the west and south (i7°32' N , 44°i2' E). The wadi disappears eastward into the Rub al-Khali sands. Cur rently in Saudi Arabia, its ancient historical ties and ecolog ical orientation lie within the framework of ancient South Arabian civilization. Writers from Strabo, Pliny, and Ptol emy (who called it Nagrana) to al-Hamdani, al-Istakhri, and
Carsten Niebuhr (1792) have remarked on the area's agri cultural and commercial wealth. Arab travelers referring to the site in 1070 (al-Bakri) and 1230 (Ibn al-Mujawir) suggest the ancient site was aban doned by the early second millennium CE. Niebuhr was the first Westerner to mention the site (1792, p. 61), but it was not visited by a western explorer until Joseph Halevy (1872) in 1870. The next formal investigation of the site was in 1936: St. John Philby described the central walled area, the palatial buildings, the surrounding moats, the cemetery on the south side of the walled area, and the numerous inscrip tions in Epigraphic South Arabian (1952, pp. 265-266). His comments on a possible earlier domed structure being a Christian church tied into earlier accounts of the presence of "Omar's mosque" and even the famous Ka'ba of Najran (Shahid, 1979, pp. 70ff; Zarins et al, 1981, pi. 9). In 1951, Philby revisited the site with the Philby-Ryckmans-Lippens expedition and a more detailed plan of the site was made (Ryckmans, 1981, p. 63). The site was briefly examined in 1967 by Gus Van Beek. In 1980, the Comprehensive Archaeological Survey of Sa udi Arabia, led by Juris Zarins, visited the site to determine the cultural sequence and site layout. A composite section suggested more than 8 m of deposit. In one small sounding, more than 3 m of stratified materials was excavated. Carbon-14 dates from the sounding indicate a range of occu pation from 535 B C E to 250 C E for the central citadel area (Zarins et a l , 1981, pp. 23-24, pi. 7). Fragmentary Neolithic material was found, but no clear evidence of the Bronze Age (Zarins et al., 1983, p. 36 n. 1). The team revisited the site in 1982 to examine the area in more detail. Based on the comments and plans of earlier researchers (Philby, 1952; Ryckmans, 1981; Van Beek, n.d.; Zarins et al., 1981; Doe, 1983, pp. 150-152), the site can be divided into several subareas. T h e citadel area (240-250 m on a side, covering 12.8 acres) is defined by walls of fitted and cut masonry. Its uneven bastions and recesses are typical of South Arabic building (e.g., at Shibam). T h e straight-axis gate is on the west. T h e house layout is also typical of South Arabian types (Zarins et al., 1983, pis. 20-21), and their hammered, marginally drafted masonry with inscriptional materials is also well attested (Zarins et al., 1983, pis. 17-20, 34). The moat on at least two sides of the area may be as sociated with the modern arabic name (al-Ukhdud). The cemetery area noted by others and mapped in 1982 (Zarins et al., 1983, pi. 22) may be the internment area for the Ukhdud settlement (ShahTd, 1979, p. 42), based on the presence of Byzantine period ceramics. Ukhdud (South), a defined area of South Arabic houses, also contained the remains of a seil dam (i.e., for control of flash-flood waters) with ac companying Epigraphic South Arabian inscriptions. The bulk of the site is on the northeast, as the town expanded in the South Arabic, Byzantine, and Islamic periods (Zarins et al., 1983, pp. 22-27, pi. 16).
NAMES AND NAMING The excavation area was expanded in 1982 (Zarins et al., 1981, pi. 7; 1983, pi. 23) and a total area surface-collection project begun. T h e project revealed that die area's South Arabic wares could be divided into at least three subperiods between 500 B C E and 300 C E (Zarins et a l , 1981, pp. 28-32), followed by a recognizable Byzantine corpus from between 300 and 700, an Early Islamic (Umayyad/'Abbasid) corpus, and, finally, a post-'Abbasid corpus of minor importance (Zarins et al., 1981, pp. 32-35; for drawings, cf. Zarins et a l , 1981, pis. 22-25; 1983, pis. 24-28). Industrial activities were carried out at the site: copper and iron metallurgy and casting, flint hoe production, steatite working, ceramic pro duction (kilns), and production of huge grinding stones for use in presses and mining (Zarins et a l , 1983, 35-36). Najran was an important commercial center and the northernmost major South Arabian center for transporting incense north along the western Arabian road (Mecca, Yathrib Medina, al-'Ula/Dedan, Hegra, Tayma', Gaza) and northeast along Jebel Tuwayq (Qaryat al-Fau, Ayun/Layla, al-Yamama, Thaj/Iiina). [See Mecca; Medina; Dedan, Tayma'; Qaryat al-Fau; Thaj.] Incense burners and inscrip tions, particularly the use of the WD'B formula praising the deity Wadd at Najran, confirm that Najran was a major han dling post for incense, particularly in association with Minaean activities (Doe, 1979; Zarins et al., 1983, pi. 29; Pirenne, 1977). Obsidian was also traded there. The site became associated with the growth of strong M o nophysite Christian belief and their martyrdom, under the Jewish Yemenite ldng D h u Nuwas, in 523 C E , is reported in Martyrium Arethae (ShahTd, 1 9 7 1 , 1 9 7 9 , i994;Trimingham, !9793 PP- 287-307; De Blois, 1990). T h e Qur'anic verse (su rah 85.4-7) referring to al-Ukhdud, is taken to refer to these events: the bodies of the victims were thrown into a large trench or pit. Examination of the moats, tumuli, and asso ciated possible Christian-period buildings in the area (Zar ins et al., 1983, p. 27), coupled with the strong Byzantineperiod ceramic corpus (see above), suggests that future archaeological work may confirm the historical accounts. BIBLIOGRAPHY Blois, Francois de. " T h e D a t e of t h e 'Martyrs of N a g r a n . ' " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 1 (1990): n o - 1 2 8 . D o e , Brian. " T h e W D ' B F o r m u l a a n d the Incense T r a d e . " Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 9 (1979): 40-44. D o e , Brian. Monuments of South Arabia. N e w York, 1983. Halevy, Joseph. " R a p p o r t sur u n e mission archeologique dans le Y e m e n . " JournalAsiatique 19 (1872): 5-98, 129-266, 489-547. N i e b u h r , Carsten. Travels through Arabia and Other Countries in the East. 2 vols. Translated by R o b e r t H e r o n . E d i n b u r g h , 1792. Philby, H . St. John. Arabian Highlands. W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , 1952. Pirenne, Jacqueline, Corpus des inscriptions et anliquites sud-arabes. L o u vain, 1977. Ryckmans, Jacques. " A l - U k h d u d : T h e Philby-Ryckmans-Lippens E x pedition of 1951." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 11 (1981): 55-63-
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ShahTd, Irfan. The Martyrs of Najran: New Documents. Subsidia Hagiographica, n o . 49. Brussels, 1971. ShahTd, Irfan. "Byzantium in South Arabia." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 33 (1979): 25-94ShahTd, Irfan. " O n the Chronology of the South Arabian Martyr d o m s . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994): 66-69. T r i m i n g h a m , J. Spencer. Christianity among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times. L o n d o n , 1979. Van Beek, G u s W . "Preliminary R e p o r t on the Nejran Survey, 1967." U n p u b . m s . , D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities, Riyadh, n.d, Zarins, Juris, et al. " T h e Second Preliminary R e p o r t on the South western Province." Atlal 5 (1981): 9-42. Zarins, Juris, et al. "Preliminary R e p o r t on the Najran/Ukhdud Survey and Excavations 1982/1402 A H . " Atlal 7 (1983): 22-40. JURIS ZARINS
NAMES AND NAMING. Names are personal (anthroponyms), geographic (toponyms), or divine (DN). They are recorded in various scripts and languages. Most ancient Near Eastern names are Semitic. T h e remainder are Hamitic (notably Egyptian) and Indo-European (Anatolian and Indo-Iranian) or belong to unclassifiable languages (e.g., Sumerian, Elamite, Hurro-Urartian.). In antiquity a personal name is not merely a means of identification, but is also considered to be an expression of its bearer's character. Generally, a male is known by his name and patronym. Only rarely is he known by his moth er's name. A wife is mentioned in texts together with her husband's name and a slave with his master. Few individuals in Ugarit and early monarchic Israel are known only by their patronyms. Several Israelite personalities, whose names are known, are addressed only by their patronyms—a deroga tory usage on the part of their adversaries. In a few cases in the Hebrew Bible, a person is introduced by his full name at the beginning of the narrative and by a short form of his name (a hypocoristicon) in the rest of the story. Many in dividuals are listed without their genealogy. Extant Mesopotamian and Levantine genealogies generally consist of two generations. T h e exceptions are Chaldean and Achaemenid Babylonia, where most urbanites are listed with their pa tronyms and their ancestors' names. Elsewhere, long gene alogies are reserved mostly for important personalities. Ge nealogies are rare in the Old and New Egyptian kingdoms but are common from the Saitic period onward (the longer ones are probably unreliable). Generally, the newborn is given his name shortly after birth by his mother (Israel and Egypt) or father (Sumer). During his lifetime an individual may acquire an additional name, usually motivated by his extraction, occupation, per sonality, or physionomy; throne names were current in cer tain ancient kingdoms. A personal name can be theophoric or "basilophoric" (containing a numen or a royal name, re spectively) or profane. From a structural point of view it can be either compound, noncompound (including hypocoristica), or abbreviated. All but atypical names belong to cer-
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tain languages with various degrees of probability. Almost all the ancient textual corpora contain a small percentage of "atypical" names of various patterns (monosyllabic and re duplicated, anthroponyms including names with identical two final syllables). Naming (name giving) may be motivated by the circum stances of birth (exclamation names on the one hand, and certain theophoric names invoking a deity with regard to the birth and the newborn on the other), as well as by the unity and succession of the lineage. Naming a child after a grand father (papponymy) appears in the ancient Near East as early as the first half of the second millennium BCE. The practice became more frequent in the ancient Near East af ter the second half of the first millennium BCE. It is not doc umented among preexilic Israelites and, strictly, not among postexilic ones, either, if the highly elaborate genealogies (in all probability invented by the Chronicler or his circle) are ignored. At most, few postexilic Israelites are named after their grandfathers. Most Mesopotamian individuals are recorded in juridical, administrative, and epistolary documents, whereas the prosopographical Levantine documentation is mainly from seal impressions, bullae, graffiti, ostraca, and votive inscriptions (in Egypt it is mainly from papyri). In order to ascertain ethnolinguistic distributions, not of the number of individual names of a given dialect, but of the number of persons bear ing names in that dialect should be calculated. If the name of an individual is indicative of his or her ethnolinguistic affiliation, these statistics are the closest approximations achievable regarding the relative percentage of the ethnolin guistic groups in a given region. However, in most cases it is impossible to draw conclusions on the level of the indi vidual, as relatively few people are listed with their gentilic or place of origin. A prosopographic sampler from a given site does not refer exclusively to residents, but also to visitors and foreigners (especially in capitals and centers of inter national trade). Except for a very few special cases (such as Puzrish-Dagan—that is, modern Drehem), most individuals were residents of the site in question or its region. The over whelming majority of the individuals mentioned in a given corpus belonged to the local group, unless there is clear ev idence to the contrary. For instance, no more than 10 per cent of the more than ten thousand individuals recorded in Babylonia between 580 and 480 B C E were strictly non-Bab ylonians (actually it was much less than 10 percent, as the Arameans were local). Most individuals in the Hebrew Bible were Israelites. Like anthroponyms, toponyms (including microtoponyms), or place names, are a rich and enduring source of ethnolinguistic, historical, and folkloristic information. Place names, especially those referring to geomorphologic fea tures like hydronyms and oronyms (e.g., Jordan and Tabor, respectively)—but hardly microtoponyms—are generally more archaic than personal names. They often preserve oth
erwise unretrievable information concerning early—and of ten extinct—linguistic strata. The structure of place names resembles that of personal names, but the distribution of their various patterns is dif ferent. Because they have a special function, their topics also generally differ. The following short description is based mainly on the toponymic inventory of Syria-Palestine where the relevant ancient documentation (about one thousand pre-Hellenistic toponyms) is especially abundant and shows a high degree of diversity. Moreover, the later and even modem toponymy of the Syro-Palestinian limestone massif has a sizable hard core of ancient survivals. This is in sharp distinction to the Mesopotamian alluvium, where ecological (the ever-changing arable terrain) and historical factors re sulted in much toponymic discontinuity. Some sentence names are anthroponyms used as unmod ified toponyms: 'm'd and Yqm'm in the Hebrew Bible. Rel atively few sentence toponyms describe configurations of the terrain. Most composite toponyms are genitive com pounds in which the nomen regens, or essential name, is a "ground word" functioning as a geographic definer and fol lowed by a nomen rectum. The latter can be an appellative, anthroponym, or divine name. T h e most frequent ground word is the common Semitic term byt: "house;" "temple," "domain." The other ground words (e.g., 'yn, "source" and bny, "sons of—originally a ttibal name) are much less com mon. Noncompound toponyms are, like the corresponding anthroponyms, of various nominal formations. Many noncompound toponyms end in the plural suffixes -d/ot (even of D N : ntwt, 'strwt, B'lwt), and -Tm/n, as well as in the loc ative suffix -aym/n and -d . These suffixes are very rare in genuine anthroponyms. All the toponyms can belong to the following semantic-topical categories: h
1. Topographic feature (e.g., gb'(h), "hill") or position (e.g., msph "watchtower," "lookout point"; byt Kmq, "house/ domain of the valley"), nature of the soil (e.g., twb, spyr, "good"), watercourses and sources (e.g., 'bl, 'pq, hmt) 2. Buildings and installations (e.g., gdr, hsr'dr/'sm), "forti fications" (e.g., for, frym), and worship sites (open or built up, e.g., bmwt, glgl, qds, ms'l, 'st'l [cf. Punic for beg and beseech]) 3. Flora (e.g., btnym) 4. Fauna (e.g., hsr swsym) 5. Anthroponyms (many second components of ground words). Moreover, numbers 3-4 may not be primary in many cases but simply an anthroponym deriving from a plant or an an imal—as in (byt) hglh and hsr (svfl). A comparison of the percentage of each category in later toponymic documentation groups—namely, those of Hel lenistic-Roman (more than 140 new toponyms) and Late Ottoman Palestine—reveals only relatively small differ-
NAMES AND NAMING ences. These differences are mostly in the realm of human activity as well as in theology. Many fewer place names con tain divine names after the Hellenistic period, as a result of the diffusion of monotheism; this is partly remedied by the abundance of saints' toponyms in Byzantine and Islamic Palestine. T h e toponymy of Palestine the late Ottoman pe riod shows a higher percentage of anthroponyms—an ac cumulation of ancient layers and a great number of tribal names—as a result of a continuous and massive penetration of seminomads. T h u s , the abundant documentation (of about six thousand toponyms) of Palestine in the 1870s can be used as a legitimate comparable corpus for clarifying the functions of ancient Palestinian toponymy. Theophoric, or divine, elements in names can identify specific deities (Marduk, Sin, Shamash); can be general, us ing the appellative Hum, "god" (pi. ilu; or Hi, Hsu as a pro tective deity); can express terms of kinship; or can include other numina (toponyms including temples and sacred ob jects, for example). In several names the theophoric element is replaced by a personal pronoun (you, he, she, him). Most intelligible personal names in the ancient Near East are theo phoric, expressing religiosity and the popularity of the cult of certain deities. It is plausible that bearers of theophoric names were under the protection of the respective deity, but the issue is complicated. Individual onomastica (corpuses of names) can be de scribed in terms of linguistic affiliation. T h e discussion that follows is arranged accordingly. Semitic O n o m a s t i c o n . T h e most important Semitic lan guage from the onomastic point of view is Akkadian. T h e only assured representative of the East Semitic subgroup, its onomasticon has the longest duration—from about 2500 BCE down to the beginning of the Christian era (with later survivals). T h e most important type of names in Akkadian are verbal sentence names. T h e order in early Akkadian (Old Akkadian through Old Babylonian [OB]) is normally verb (imperfect ["preterit"]) as predicate followed by D N as subject. T h e inverted order occurs only if the verbal form is a ventive. This position (predicate-subject) accords with West Semitic onomastica of the same period (see below). The position changes in post-OB times when there are more Akkadian names with the order subject-predicate (imperfect verb). Again, this tendency is shared by most of the later West Semitic onomastica. Abbreviated names are shortened from compounds. Contrary to male names, most female names in Akkadian and other ancient Semitic onomastica are pro fane (some based on jewels and related items as a land of endearment), with a fair percentage of "substitute" names. Several female anthroponyms are genitive compounds, like AmatlMaral-~D!$ ("maid/daughter of [Divine Name]"). Many compound names borne by Semitic females are grammatically masculine; instances of gender congruency are rare. (Note the Septuagent's Elizabeth for 'lysV in the
93
Hebrew Bible.) Compound names with two predicates are common in Akkadian but extremely rare in West Semitic. Eblaite, the second oldest Semitic language, has a consid erable number of names, but its classification within Semitic is not yet established. All the texts are from Ebla (Tell Mardikh). Their geographic horizon is roughly between Byblos in the south, Harran in the north, and the Trans-Tigridian regions in the east. Eblaite in this context is necessarily a rather vague designation: the names may belong to several different early and as yet ill-defined Semitic dialects. Names witii a verbal form of the prefix conjugation + subject (DN or, conceivably, a divine epithet) are much more common titan the inverted order, resembling the situation in early Akkadian and West Semitic. Other Semitic languages be long to the West Semitic subgroup. Amorite is the earliest West Semitic dialect. It is recorded from about 2100 to about 1180 BCE. Most names are con tained in Old and Middle Babylonian texts from Babylonia, the Jezireh, and northeastern Syria. There is not a single Amorite text. The huge Amorite onomasticon (about ten thousand names) is recorded in cuneiform, a writing system that inadequately transmits the inventory of early West Se mitic consonantal phonemes. In most cases, cuneiform does not indicate either vowel length or consonant gemination. This is only partly remedied by Egyptian transcriptions (be ginning in c. 1800 BCE) of names and words from Canaan. Early Canaanite can barely be separated from Amorite before the Amarna age because the only criterion—the Ca naanite shift of a to o—was not completed much before 1400 B C E . It is therefore used here only for the sake of con venience. T h e handful of Late Old Babylonian texts from Palestine contains West Semitic names that cannot be distinguished from Amorite names. The very restricted onomasticon of the Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite in scriptions is of the same type. However, tire early Canaanite alphabet—and to a great extent Egyptian script—cannot ex press vowels. Canaanite names in the Amarna correspon dence are recorded in Peripheral Middle Akkadian. Ugaritic was recorded in the fourteenth-thirteenth cen turies B C E in the small kingdom of Ugarit on the northwest ern coast of Syria. It is written in an invented cuneiform alphabet that transmits the consonantal phonemes ade quately, but the vowels only very partially. As far as the abundantly documented local onomasticon is concerned, the alphabetic limitations are in part palliated by the pres ence of a large corpus of Akkadian texts there. Ugaritic is not a straightforward Canaanite dialect but can be regarded as belonging to the northwestern end of the Amorite dialec tal continuum. A small percentage of the names refer to people from Canaan and other Syrian regions. Many of the texts unearthed in the course of controlled excavations be long to archives, which facilitates prosopographic research. Following a gap in documentation for Syria-Palestine, a negligible number of names are recorded in early Phoenician
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alphabetic script from the turn of the first millennium B C E . This alphabet was later adopted by both the Arameans in the Jezireh and Syria and by speakers of Canaanite-Hebrew dialects in Palestine and southern Transjordan. Individual scripts do not begin to differentiate until die mid-ninth cen tury BCE. Presumably, script originally expressed the con sonantal phonemes of a certain Phoenician dialect, whereas other Northwest Semitic dialects probably had additional consonantal phonemes. These additional phonemes re mained unexpressed in script but occasionally occur in tran scriptions. All the Canaanite-Hebrew dialects have more or less distinctive onomastica.
Achaemenid northern Negev and Hellenistic Idumea ("Idumean"). Early Aramaic texts contain a restricted number of an throponyms. Aramaic texts after 720 B C E and imperial Ar amaic documents contain many non-Aramaic names be cause Aramaic became the language of communication in the vast territories of the Late Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid empires. T h e main sources of the Aramaic onomasticon are the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Late Babylo nian documents and, after the Macedonian conquest, the Greek and then the Latin transcriptions. Altogether there are several thousand names.
Phoenician names are recorded in Phoenician, Akkadian, Greek, and Cypriot transcriptions from about iooo B C E to the beginning of the Christian era (with some isolated oc currences as late as c. 200 CE). The language later died in the mother country, but Punic, which was spoken by de scendants of Phoenician colonists in the western Mediter ranean, was still alive as late as the Byzantine period (as Neo-Punic; Phoenician names also appear in Latin transcription). The Phoenician-Punic onomasticon contains hundreds of names referring to thousands of individuals. The poorly documented onomasticon of Philistia is proba bly very close to Phoenician. (North-)Israelite and Judahite Hebrew have the largest Canaanite corpus and the richest and most diverse source of data for the Northwest Semitic onomasticon. T h e first occurrence of the name Israel itself is from 1207 B C E . How ever, the ensuing documentation is very sparse until the be ginning of the eighth century B C E (mostly in the Samaria ostraca). [See Samaria Ostraca.] The documentation in Is raelite Hebrew ceases after 720 B C E . (The later material from Samaria cannot, strictly speaking, be regarded as an unin terrupted continuation of the North Israelite tradition.) T h e documentation from Judah is very poor before 720 B C E , but it becomes abundant after the destruction of Samaria. It reaches its peak just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. At least 2,500 individuals, bearing hundreds of dif ferent names, are recorded, most of them in late preexilic Judah. The sizable Jewish onomasticon from Achaemenid Egypt and Babylonia is in the same onomastic tradition. The maximum number of Israelite individuals mentioned in the Hebrew Bible is 1,947. Most of them may have lived be tween 1000 and 300 BCE, and they bore hundreds of different names.
Several thousand names are recorded in various ancient Arabian dialects—roughly, from north to south, Safaitic, Thamudic, Taymanite, Lihyanite, Dedanite, Hasean, Minean, Sabean, Qatabanian, Ausanian, and Hadhrami, as well as in pre-Islamic classical Arabic. Most of the pre-Islamic Arabian texts consist of graffiti (mainly from the Achae menid period down to the diffusion of Islam). Earlier Ara bian names (no more than one hundred) are recorded in "Proto-Arabian," Assyro-Babylonian, Aramaic, and, later on, Greek and Latin sources. T h e Ethiopian onomasticon is late (from the Byzantine period onward) and is therefore beyond the scope of this discussion.
Ammonite, Moabite, and Edomite refer to restricted tex tual corpora of Canaanite-Hebrew ("fringe Canaanite") from southern Transjordan. Ammonite is written in a vari ant of Aramaic script, whereas Moabite and Edomite had their own variants of the Phoenician script. There are nearly one hundred Ammonite names (mostly on seals); Moabite has fewer than fifty and Edomite even fewer. The chrono logical range of these dialects is between about 800 and 500 BCE. Only Edomite survived any later, but merely in the
West Semitic names are usually transparent as to mean ing, for they consist either of a full sentence (e.g., ntn'l, "God has given [this child]") or of single-element names, many of which can be identified as abbreviations of sentence names (e.g., ntn, "has given"). These single-element names may or may not show a syllable in place of the omitted el ement, the so-called hypocoristic ending. T h e sentence names express explicitly various relationships between the deity and the name bearer, while in the single-element names the relationship is not expressed, as in the name ntn, historically a verbal form of which any divine name could be the subject. Because any verbal form may in theory be used for the verbal element (though in practice the perfect and the imperfect of the Qal stem are the most common), because any of a great number of nominal patterns may appear, because the order of the elements in sentence names may be reversed or one element may be omitted, and be cause sentence names may be either declarative or interrog ative, the attested number of individual structures is im mense (see Zadok, 1988, for an exhaustive listing of the structures attested in Israelite personal names). Finally, though it may be granted that most names were meaningful, one wonders how well names of which the structure is clear but which consist of an archaic element were understood (e.g., Zimri, "my protection [is (in) X-deity]," from an old root DMR, meaning "to protect," that was no longer cur rent in biblical Hebrew). The semantic-topical and theological-ideological evalua tion of the ancient Semitic onomastica is necessarily based mainly on the huge, diverse, and fairly well-established Ak-
NAMES AND NAMING kadian documentation and much less on the West Semitic (notably Israelite) one. The chronological-historical and so cial backgrounds of the Akkadian onomasticon are also well known. For many Akkadian names, even the situations and scenarios (concerning mostly the childbirth naming and re lationship to deities and relatives) can be reconstructed. The main theological-ideological categories of Akkadian names follow: Forms of greeting are included in either profane sentence names spoken at the time of birth by a parent (Bailu-kasid, "A healthy one has arrived") or by an older sibling (Ahamarsi "I have acquired a brother") or theophoric names ex pressing joy (for the newborn). They are directed to a deity: example, Sin-kasid, " O Sin; he (the newborn) is (here)." In thanksgiving names, such as the latter (generally in the thirdperson singular), the deity is thought of as having given the child. A name expressing a request (imperative/precative, and generally second-person singular) is Marduk-iqisanni, "Give me (a son), O Marduk." T h e request was uttered by the father before the birth and was eventually fulfilled. A wish (on behalf of tire child; imperative) is expressed in IIIusursu, "O my god, protect him." A complaint and a trust are expressed by Atanah-Istar ("I have become tired, O Ishtar") and Ana-Sin-taklaku ("I trust in Sin"), respectively. The former is motivated by an illness; the latter is placed in the child's mouth. Attribute names refer to characteristics of deities. Praise and endearment names are Mannum-kimaD N ("Who is like D N ? " ) and Si-tabni, "She is our (spoken by parents/siblings) joy." "Substitute" names, in which the child is named after a deceased or living relative, are AliummT, "Where is my mother?," Enb-Sin, "Sin has compen sated," and Ahu-waqar, "My brother is precious." Slaves and maids were probably named (in certain cases renamed) by their masters and mistresses, respectively. Many slaves' names contain praises, wishes, and requests for their masters or mistresses, as well as expressions of trust in them. In the same manner, many names of public officials contain praises, wishes, and requests for the king, as well as expressions of trust in him. Priestesses bore more theophoric names than other females. A wide range of occupational terms is attested in anthroponyms, mostly as surnames in Babylonia (especially during the first millennium B C E ) . An throponyms denoting mental characteristics, physical traits, plants, animals, and other realia, as well as gentilics, are well represented in all the Semitic onomastica. H a m i t i c O n o m a s t i c o n . Egyptian, which is written in hi eroglyphs and later in derived scripts, has a huge onomastic documentation from about 3000 B C E to the Byzantine pe riod. Very few Libyan and Nubian names are recorded in Egyptian sources. T h e main Egyptian name types are sen tences with finite verbs (in certain tense categories). T h e second person (singular and plural) is reserved for the im perative. Certain names contain more than one predicate. Nominal sentences contain a substantival, adjectival, or ad
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verbial predicate. There are compound abbreviated names. Short names may or may not bear a hypocoristic suffix. I n d o - E u r o p e a n O n o m a s t i c o n . Hittite, during most of the second millennium B C E , and Luwian for the same period, but continuing into the first half of the first millennium B C E , are written both in cuneiform and hieroglyphs and contain a sizable number of names. Clear compounds are, for ex ample, piya-, "give" (preceded or followed by a D N , as in Arma-piya-), the Hittite asi-, and the Luwian wasu-, "good," "dear" (preceded by D N as in Laknasu < Lak(a)nasu-). Both name-types (sequence: subject-predicate) have Indo-European semantic-structural parallels (Greek Theodoros/Dorotheos and Theophilos, respectively). On the other hand, no such parallels are known for the many names with -ziti-, " m a n " (Luwian; follows theophoric elements, topo nyms, or appellatives); -muwa- (signifying "descendance," race; possibly borrowed in Hittite from Luwian), and -nani, "brother" (preceded by a D N or an appellative). The fact that Hittite and Luwian stay outside the mainstream of the Indo-European onomastic tradition may be the result of the great antiquity of the Anatolian group and its relative struc tural isolation within Indo-European. Noncompound names end in various suffixes (either found only in anthroponymy or denoting participles) or are originally appellatives without any modification. Not a few names are originally gentilics in Hittite, Luwian, or Hattic (a non-Indo-European Anatolian language). Other members of the Indo-European family are IndoAryan and Old Iranian. Indo-Aryan has left only remnants in foreign languages—primarily written in cuneiform during most of the second millennium BCE—from Mesopotamia, the Levant, and southeastern Anatolia. The Old Iranian on omasticon (c. 880-330 B C E , and 330 B C E - 7 0 0 C E , Middle Ira nian) is recorded on the Iranian and Armenian plateaus and, during the Achaemenid periods, in other parts of western Asia and Egypt. Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian are an impor tant segment of the rich and well-explored Indo-European onomastic tradition. Two-stem compounds are common in both. T h e most common type is bahuvrihi: for example, Midra-banu-, "with Mithra's brilliancy of light." A deter minative compound is Baga-data-, "Created/Given by God," and related names. Compounds with a verbal form are Daraya-vahu-, "He who holds firm the good." Unclassifiable O n o m a s t i c a . Sumerian has a very rich onomastic documentation from about 2500 (if not earlier) to the first half of the second millennium BCE. Many genitive compounds start with the initial component ur, which looks like the Sumerian appellative for "dog" but is of unknown denotation (perhaps meaning something like "belonging to [DN]"). Other initial components (all like ar followed by a theophoric element; the genitive postposition is generally not marked) are, for example, ir/ir "servant," geme, "fe male servant," and lu, "man." Genitive constructions with out "dependence terms" are En-lil-la '("the child belongn
d
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NAMI, TEL
ing") to EnhT and Inim-'Utu, "the word of Utu (is true)." Sentences with a predicate can contain an attribute: Lugalad-da, "the king is a father" (with a nominal predicate), Lugal-dingir-mu, "the king is my god" (with a possessive suffix), Nanna-lu-duia "Nanna is a good man" (with an ad jective as epithet). The predicate can be verbal. Sentence names can express wishes and questions. Hypocoristica are abbreviated from sentence names with omission of the sub ject, as in Ma-an-si < Dingir-mu-ma-an-si, or by retention of the participle only (Du -gd). Several hypocoristica end in -mu: A-kal-la-mu, "my dear Akalla." More than two hun dred elements (mostly predicative) are contained in NeoSumerian names or serve as such. Flora and fauna are vir tually absent in the Neo-Sumerian onomasticon.
well-documented elements are ak (akai,akap), "to bring," "to guide"; ar- "to give"; tan-, "to do"; tad-, "to like," "to love"; hubiti, "calf; keldi, "peace" (kill-, "be in good state," or "peace"); kiase, "sea"; papa(n), "mountain"; pur(u)li, "house" or "temple"; senni, "brother;" and wanti, "just." They form both compounds and single-element names. Hypocoristic suffixes are -ya and -uya. There are various suffixal forrnatives. [See also entries on specific languages and language families.]
w
Elamite has a sizable number of names from about 2400 BCE to the second century CE. Most compound names con sist of two elements and can contain more than one theophoric element. Names with three elements are much less common than those with two. Classification is necessarily tentative. Nominal sentences may consist of substantives, substantive + adjective or vice versa fRi-sa-ap- la), sub stantive + passive participle ( Sa-ti-sil-ha-ak) or vice versa (Silhak-Insusinak), substantive + personal pronoun first per son singular (At-ta-u-n), and personal pronoun + passive participle (Um-mu-ur-da-ik). A present passive participle follows a substantive (theophoric element as subject) in Atta-me-te-en. Hit- ba-nu-du-uk may consist of a theophoric element plus personal pronoun (-«-) plus passive participle (-k) of tu-, "receive," "take." Verbal sentence names consist of substantive (theophoric element as subject) and verb (mostly ending in -s, which marks the personal pronoun third singular: Hu-pan-mi-ri-is). Many names start with kuk, "protection," which is followed by a theophoric element. The names look like genitive compounds (if not nominal sentences). Elamite has a sizable number of suffixed hypo coristica, short and atypical names in various patterns. d
d
Kassite and other dialects were spoken in the Iranian pla teau and its piedmont before the diffusion of the Old Iranian dialects. Because of the paucity of the material and the lack of any texts in these dialects, no coherent classification of their onomasticon is possible. Hurrian and Urartian are related to one another. There is a relatively rich Hurrian onomasticon from the Fertile Cres cent, the Armenian plateau, parts of Anatolia and the Zagros (predominantly from the second millennium BCE). The Ur artian onomasticon has a rather meager documentation and is restricted to the Armenian plateau and adjacent regions during the first half of the first millennium B C E . Most Hur rian names are theophoric compounds. The most common pattern is predicate + theophoric element: Ehli-, Eni-, Ewri (Ibri), Hismi-, Taki-, Talmi-, Vrhi-Telsup ("Tesup [is] salute/ god/lord/brilliant/sure/great/true; Una-p-Tessup [with "asservative" -p-], "Tessup [is] surely coming," Urha-l-enni [with "superlative" -1-], "the god [is] very steadfast"). Other
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bcnz, Frank L . Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions. R o m e , 1972. Gelb, Ignace J., et al. Nuzi Personal Names. Chicago, 1943. Gelb, Ignace J. Computer-Aided Analysis of Amorite. Chicago, 1980. Grondahl, Frauke. Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit. R o m e , 1967. Herr, Larry G . The Scripts of Ancient Northwest Semitic Seals. H a r v a r d Semitic M o n o g r a p h Series, n o . 18. Missoula, 1978. Israel, Felice. " N o t e di onomastica semitica 7/1-2: Rassegna criticobibliograflca ed epigrafica su alcune onomastiche palestinesi." Studi Epigrafici e Linguislici 8 (1991): 119-147; 9 (1992): 95-114. Jongeling, Karel. " N a m e s in N e o - P u n i c Inscriptions." P h . D . diss., Rijksuniversiteit te G r o n i n g e n , 1984. Krebernik, Manfred. Die Personennamen der Ebla-Texle: Eine Zwischenbilanz. Berlin, 1988. Laroche, Emmanuel. Les noms des Hittit.es. Paris, 1966. Limet, Henri. L'anthroponymie sumerienne dans les documents de la j e dynastie d'Ur. Paris, 1968. M a r a q t e n , M o h a m m e d . Die semitischen Personnenamen in den alt- und reichsaramaischen Inschriften aus Vorderasien. Hildesheim, 1988. Mayrhofer, Manfred. Onomastica Persepolitana. Vienna, 1973. Rainey, Anson F . " S m , smwt m q w m w t (Place N a m e s ) . " In Encyclo paedia Biblica Inslituti Bialik, vol. 8, cols. 11-29. 1982. Includes an exhaustive bibliography. Ranke, H e r m a n n . Die agyptischen Personennamen. 2 vols. Gltlckstadt, 1935-1952. Rasmussen, Carl G. " A Study of Akkadian Personal N a m e s from M a r i . " P h . D . diss., Dropsie University, 1981. S t a m m , J . J. Die Akkadische Namengebung. Leipzig, 1939. Wufhnow, Heinz. Die semitischen Menschennamen in griechischen In schriften und Papyri des Vorderen Orients. Leipzig, 1930. Zadok, R a n . The Elamite Onomasticon. Naples, 1984. Zadok, Ran. " Z u r Struktur der nachbiblischen jtidischen P e r s o n e n n a m e n semitischen U r s p m n g s . " Trumah: Jahrbuch derHochschulefur Judische Studien Heidelberg 1 (1987): 243-343. Analyzes n o t only the postbiblical Jewish n a m e s , b u t also most of the names from Helle nistic-Roman Syria-Palestine a n d U p p e r M e s o p o t a m i a , including those in Greek and Latin transcription. Zadok, Ran. The Pre-Hellenistic Israelite Anthroponymy and Prosopography. Louvain, 1988. RAN ZADOK
NAMI, TEL, peninsula situated 15 km (9 mi.) south of Haifa, Israel, and 4 Ian (2.4 mi.) west of the Carmel ridge (32°39' N , 34°55' E). The coastal strip west of the Carmel mountain range is characterized by wavelike parallel series of low sandstone ridges separated by basins filled with clayey alluvium. Tel Nami is part of the westernmost ridge, which
NAQADA is partially submerged. On another ridge, i km to tire east, a Middle Bronze IIA settlement (c. 2000-1700 BCE) was noted (sites 104-106). Another habitation site, Nami East, was found under the sand dunes 75 m east of the peninsula. Like Tel Nami, it has remains of MB IIA and Late Bronze IIB habitations. The area's important feature—archaeologically, hydrologically, and geomorphologically—is the course and oudet of Nahal Me'arot, which originates in the Carmel ridge, crosses an eastern kurkar ("sandstone") ridge, and dis charges into the sea in the vicinity of Tel Nami. Ship rep resentations dating to the end of LB II have been observed there. The location of its estuary in antiquity is crucial to understanding the site. Of equal interest is a marshy basin lying between Nami East and another of the kurkar ridges. This basin must have been a natural swamp, a shallow or brackish lake, or a lagoon that could have been used in an tiquity as a natural anchorage before artificial harbor con struction was developed. T h e site was noted by the Israel Survey in tire 1960s and explored in 197s; since 1985 a Land and Sea Project has been carried out by the University of Haifa under the direction of Michal Artzy. T h e broadest latitudinal M B IIA exposure thus far was in area D on the tell. There are signs at both Nami East and on the tell that the area was abandoned at the end of MB IIA or the first part of M B IIB. At least two clear architec tural phases are apparent, each of which is dictated by the topography, as was a retaining wall that follows the contours of the kurkar. At Nami East a possible granary and an un identified industrial area were excavated. A stone-lined well, already in disuse in MB IIA, has contributed data on sea level for die period. The international character of the an chorage site is demonstrated by imported legumes from the Aegean world, White-Painted ceramics from Cyprus, 'Amuq/Cilician and Levantine Painted Wares, and a scarab seal weight dated to the milieu of the Egyptian twelfth dy nasty. [See 'Amuq; Seals.] A layer of sand accumulated between M B IIA and die LB II layers. A rampart was constructed at the end of the thir teenth century B C E , probably to combat rising sea levels. On the summit (area G ) , a cultic precinct was excavated. T h e finds include kernoi, a seven-spouted lamp, conical cups, pumice, and numerous pieces of metal, including bronze, silver, and gold, which had been prepared for recycling, as well as metalworking tools such as chisels. Part of the floor was paved with sherds of incense burners. Nami East be came a necropolis with diverse forms of burials: box and pit, as well as built graves and jar burials. [See Tombs; Burial Techniques.] Cypriot, Mycenaean IIIB, and other imported ceramics were noted. T h e bronze objects recovered include weapons, knives, armor scales, lamps, bowls, strainers, a wine set, incense burners, and scepters. Gold, silver, faience, and ivory objects were also found. For a short time, until its destruction and final abandonment sometime in tire first
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years of the twelfth century B C E , Nami served as an etrepot for a larger trade network (for incense, among other com modities) that combined maritime and desert routes via the valleys to Transjordan and beyond. BIBLIOGRAPHY Artzy, Michal. "Fortress a n d Settlement: Anchorage System during the Second Millennium T e l N a m i ? " In Cities on the Sea, Past and Present, edited by Avner Raban and Elisha U n d e r , p p . 14-17. Haifa, 1986. Artzy, Michal. " T e l N a m i , 1985/1988." Pladashol Arkeologiyat 9 (1989): 22-24, Artzy, Michal. " N a m i L a n d a n d Sea Project, 1985-1988." Israel Ex ploration Journal 40 (1990): 73-76. Artzy, Michal. " P o m e g r a n a t e Sceptors and Incense Stand with P o m e granates F o u n d in Priest's G r a v e . " Biblical Archaeology Review 16 (1990): 48-51. Artzy, Michal. "Conical C u p s a n d Pumice: Aegean Cult at T e l N a m i , Israel." In Thalassa, the Prehistoric Aegean, and the Sea: Aegaeum VII, edited by Robert Laffineur, p p . 203-206. Liege, 1991. Artzy, Michal, and E. M a r c u s . " T h e M B I I A Coastal Settlement at T e l N a m i . " Michmanim 5 (1991): 5*-i6*. Artzy, Michal, and E. M a r c u s . "Stratified Cypriote Pottery in M B I I A Context at T e l N a m i . " I n Studies in Honour 0/ Vassos Karageorghis, edited by G . C. loannides, p p . 103-110. Nicosia, 1992. Artzy, Michal. "Incense, Camels and Collar Rim Jars: Desert T r a d e Routes a n d Maritime Outiets in the 2nd Millennium," Oxford Jour nal of Archaeology 13 (1994): 121-147. Artzy, Michal. " N a m i : A Second Millennium International Maritime T r a d i n g Center in the M e d i t e r r a n e a n , " In Recent Discoveries in Israel: A View to the West, edited by Seymour Gitin, p p . 17-39. American Institute of Archaeology Series, Colloquia a n d Conference Papers, 1. 1995. Artzy, Michal. "Anchorage Systems of the Second Millennium B C at T e l N a m i . " In Tropis III: Third International Symposium on Ship Con struction in Antiquity, edited by HaiTy E. Tzalas, p p . 23-30. Athens, 1995Kislev, Mordechai E., et al. " I m p o r t of an Aegean Food Plant to a Middle Bronze IIA Coastal Site in Israel." Levant 25 (1993): 145154. M I C H A L ARTZY
NAQADA, important predynastic site in Upper Egypt. T h e archaeological remains from the Naqada region (Nakada, Negadah; 25°58' N , 32°44' E) extend for approxi mately 8 km (5 mi.) along the desert edge on the western side of the Nile near the modern towns of Naqada and Zawayda and from the Paleolithic to Roman periods. They include scatters of stone tools representing ancient living or working areas, numerous cemeteries, several habitation sites, die ruins of a temple dedicated to the god Seth, and a structure identified by die excavator as a pyramid. Objects from tire area began appearing in museums and private collections in the mid-nineteenth century. The first systematic archaeological investigations were conducted by Flinders Petrie and James E. Quibell in 1894-1895 in the area between Naga Kom Bilal and Zawayda: the archaeo logical sites of Naqada and Ballas. Two years later, Jacques de Morgan, working on behalf of the Egyptian Antiquities
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Service, excavated two cemeteries closer to the village of Naqada. Since that time several surveys and minor exca vations have been conducted in the region by various re searchers. The oldest significant remains from tire region date to the Predynastic period (c. 3900-3100 BCE). Petrie reported three Predynastic cemeteries near Naqada. He excavated about two thousand graves from the "Great Cemetery." Ceme teries T(umuli) and B(ilal) were significantiy smaller. One habitation site of the same period, which Petrie named South Town, and several small predynastic settlements were located nearby. Many pit graves and a number of mastabas of the Early Dynastic period (c. 3100-2700) were also found. The earliest levels of the ancient town of Nubt (clas sical Ombos), which name probably derives from the an cient Egyptian word for "gold," and the temple of Seth were found to date to the Old Kingdom (2700-2250). Middle and New Kingdom (2050-1050) remains were also recovered from the town and nearby graves. T h e greatest building phase of the Seth temple dated to the New Kingdom. T o the south of Petrie's excavations, de Morgan found other habitation remains, lithic scatters, and two cemeteries containing predynastic and early dynastic graves. In his southern cemetery, de Morgan uncovered die graves of what he called "indigenous tribes." T h e northern cemetery contained Early Dynastic burials. The so-called royal mastaba of Naqada is 100 m (328 ft.) north of the northern cemetery. Inscribed objects from this tomb bore the name of the first dynasty ruler Aha and queen Neithhotep. De Morgan thought tins was the actual burial place of the ruler, but the current interpretation is that it belonged to an im portant official. The predynastic evidence from die Naqada region has been critical to our understanding of developments in Upper Egypt in die fourth millennium. Petrie himself did not ini tially recognize tiieir significance but thought that the strange objects and burial positions he encountered be longed to invaders, whom he called the New Race and dated to the First Intermediate Period (2250-2050). It was only after die publication of Petrie and QuibelPs Naqada andBallas (London, 1896) that de Morgan recognized the true sig nificance of tiiese remains and assigned them to their proper place in history—prior to the beginning of dynastic civili zation. Petrie and QuibelPs excavations were the first to bring to light the full complexity of predynastic material culture from mortuary contexts. This inventory included ceramics, stone cosmetic palettes in geometric and animal forms, stone ves sels, jewelry of local and imported stones (such as lapis laz uli), and weapons and tools of stone, metal, ivory, and wood. Their work also revealed the increasing sophistication of predynastic tomb architecture, which began with small round or oval holes dug into the ground and developed into large, rectangular pits, some with more than one chamber,
lined with wood or mud brick. T o deal with the ceramics that he found, Petrie developed a still-used typology of pre dynastic pottery. He divided the predynastic ceramic corpus into nine classes: B (black topped red), P (polished red), F (fancy), C (white cross-line), N (black incised), W (wavyhandled), D (decorated), R (rough-faced), and L (late). Petrie and Quibell were the first to note the variation in wealth among the graves at Naqada. Recent anthropological interpretation has posited the development of a stratified so cial hierarchy, die local elite being buried in Cemetery T . Petrie's theories of ritual cannibalism of the dead and the invasion of a dynastic race have been abandoned by most scholars. It has also been proposed that South Town, with its nearby cemeteries, may have been the qenter or capital of one of three late predynastic kingdoms or- chiefdoms in Upper Egypt. [See also the biography of Petrie] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bard, Kathryn A. From Farmers to Pharaohs: Mortuary Evidence for the Rise of Complex Society in Egypt. Oxford, 1994. Recent anthropolog ical study of the funerary remains from N a q a d a a n d what diey can tell us about predynastic Egyptian society. Baumgartel, Elise J. Petrie's Naqada Excavation: A Supplement. L o n d o n , 1970. Presents a tabular listing of all known objects recovered by Petrie and Quibell from the cemeteries of N a q a d a a n d the southern cemetery at Ballas. de Morgan, Jacques. Recherches sur les origines de I'Egypte, vol. 2, Eth nographic prehistorique et tombeau royal de Negadah. Paris, 1897. T h e primary source for information on these excavations. Hoffman, Michael A. Egypt before the Pharaohs. Rev. a n d u p d a t e d ed. Austin, 1991. Excellent review of the state of knowledge on Egyptian prehistory u p to 1979, with an a d d e n d u m u p d a t i n g t h e work. Petrie, W. M . Flinders, a n d James E. Quibell. Naqada and Ballas (1896). L o n d o n , 1974. T h e best source for information on t h e sites. Weeks, Kent R. An Historical Bibliography of Egyptian Prehistory. A m e r ican Research Center in Egypt, Catalog n o . 6. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1985. Comprehensive bibliography including references t o N a q a d a publications. PATRICIA V . PODZORSKI
NAQSH-I RUSTAM, a precipitous cliff at the south side of the Husain Kuh, located nortii of Persepolis, Iran, with rock reliefs ranging from Elamite (second millennium ' BCE) to Sasanian times (fifth century CE) . Surrounding it are other rock installations and some Achaemenid and Sasanian architecture, most of which lies under several meters of de bris and has not yet been excavated. E l a m i t e Periods. T h e only surviving monument from the pre-Achaemenid period is a relief that was mostiy oblit erated when the court scene of Bahram II (designated N R m 2) was carved over it. T h e surface of the original relief curves toward the left and slants back at the right end. T h e remnants of the scene show an attendant standing behind two seated deities, faced presumably by a standing wor shiper, and a head with a mural crown. Only the attendant
NAQSH-IRUSTAM at the right is preserved in its major features. T h e bearded face is turned in the direction of the deities, and the hair, projecting in front, is covered with a cloth fastened by rib bons. T h e view of the body is frontal with the hands clasped at the waist. Only the lower portions of the seated deities are barely discernible. They wear flounced garments and sit on layered thrones representing coiled snakes. T o the left of the later carving of Bahram the partially visible feet of a standing figure point toward the deities. T h e crowned head preserved on the left belongs to a shorter figure whose preserved feet are correspondingly smaller. Another figure stood between this person and the worshipper next to Bahram, as evi denced by the remnants of some curls and a heel. The orig inal height of this figure cannot be reconstructed. The main part of the relief resembles the central part of the rock sculptures at Kurangun, which can be dated to the late Old Elamite period (c. seventeenth century B C E ) ; how ever, differences in the shape of the thrones and the slenderness of the figures point to a somewhat later date. T h e figure with the mural crown at the left may have been added in the early first millennium B C E . A c h a e m e n i d P e r i o d . Four tombs of Achaemenid monarchs are cut into the rock of the cliff (Schmidt, 1970). A square tower erected in stone blocks (Kabah-i Zardusht) stands in front of the cliff, and some minor walls of built structures were detected in trenches dug there. The sepulchral compartments tunneled into the rock dif fer in plan and in the number of burial cists, but their facades are essentially alike. The oldest (no. I) is dated to Darius I (521-486 BCE) by his inscriptions; the other tombs (nos. I I IV) can be assigned to his successors only through iconog raphy and style (see figure 1 ) .
T h e facade of tomb I, which faces southeast, lies about 1 5 m above the surface (see figure 2). Its total height is 22.93 m, but a vertical enlargement toward the bottom may have been intentional as the quarrying slots at the base suggest. T h e facade is divided into three registers: the bottom register is blank, the middle is sculptured to imitate the front of a palace, and the top shows the monarch at worship on the top of a piece of furniture that is supported by representa tives of the nations in his realm. T h e middle register, which gives access to the burial chamber, is adorned with a relief representing a building facade. Erich F. Schmidt (1970, p. 81) has shown that the model for it was the facade of the residential palace of Darius at Persepolis (tacara: a portico with two rows of four col umns in antis). In addition to the architectural similarities, Schmidt notes that the principal dimensions are identical (length, height, distances between the centers of the col umns, width of the doorway), except for the height of the columns (the lost palace columns are computed from the steps in the antae). This difference arises from a common misunderstanding resulting from the transposition of threedimensional architecture into two-dimensional relief, how ever: the capitals, in the shape of addorsed bulls carrying the stepped architrave between their heads, are turned 90 de grees, to be seen in profile; the architrave is consequently shown in cross section and looks instead like small roof beams. If the palace columns are reconstructed with the ar chitrave placed between the bulls' heads of the capitals, they have the same height as the relief columns carved at the tomb. T h e panels between the columns bear a trilingual cu neiform inscription of Darius I (designated D N b); an Ar amaic inscription was added later,
50 NAQSH-i RUSTAM.
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100m
F i g u r e 1. Plan of the site. A c h a e m e n i d t o m b facades a r e n u m b e r e d in R o m a n
n u m e r a l s . S a s a n i a n reliefs a r e n u m b e r e d 1-8. (Courtesy U . Seidl)
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N A Q S H - I R U S T A M . F i g u r e 2.
View ofNaqsh-i
Rustam cliffs. T h e e n t t a n c e t o t h e t o m b of D a r i u s I is
s h o w n a b o v e t w o S a s a n i a n reliefs. T h e relief of S h a p u r I ( N R m 6 ) is at t h e lower left, a n d a relief of t w o j o u s t i n g scenes ( N R m 7 ) is directly b e l o w t h e t o m b e n t r a n c e . (Courtesy D A I )
The top register is adorned with a framed relief panel showing an imposing estrade (or dais) supported by thirty representatives of the nations of the empire, identified by cuneiform captions. They are arranged in two tiers of four teen people with raised arms between the legs, and two peo ple on the outside support the feet of the estrade. Unlike the sculptured supporting figures on Assyrian or Urartian fur niture, the figures here are acaially lifting the dais, and, as they are all facing right, they appear to move it in this di rection. On the top, the king, standing on a three-stepped pedestal, faces a fire altar. A figure in a winged disk hovers above, between king and altar, and there is a moon symbol farther to the right. Since the last century, the man in the winged disk has usually been called Ahuramazda, but Shapur Shahbazi (1974) has shown that this interpretation is mainly based on a circular argument. On the tombs and
in the Persepolitan palaces, the figure is not only related to the king by his position, he also wears the royal garment and crown; this, along with some written sources, and the As syrian prototype, points to his being a royal daimon or daimon of kingship. Behind the king is a second inscription of Darius I (DN a). T h e frame of the relief panel and the pro jecting side walls are adorned with reliefs. Behind the king stand his spear bearer, the bearer of his battle-ax and bow, and several anonymous spear-bearing Persians. On the op posite strip of frame and wall, several Persians, with their left hands raised to their mouths, face the king. Three copies of Darius's tomb facade (tombs II-IV) were cut into the same cliff by his successors, but definitive attri butions to individual Achaemenid kings have not yet been reached. T h e Kabah-i Zardusht is a square tower (12.50 m high
NASBEH, TELL ENand 7.32 m wide) widi reinforced corners diat stands on a three-stepped base. It is built of light-colored stone with false windows in dark stone. Most of the tower is solid, but in the upper half a small room with a door facing the cliff can be reached through a stone staircase. An identical monument was built at Pasargadae (Zendan-i Sulaiman). The purpose of these towers is not known, but it has been proposed that it was either a royal tomb, a depository for objects of dy nastic or religious importance, or a fire sanctuary. T h e third can be ruled out because there is no ventilation or outlet for smoke or gases. In the Sasanian period inscriptions of Shapur I and Kerdir tire high priest were cut into the tower (see below). S a s a n i a n P e r i o d . Apart from the Aramaic inscription on the tomb of Darius I, presumably cut in the Seleucid period, noticing is known tiiat can be dated to the time between the Achaemenid and the beginning of the Sasanian periods. Eight rock reliefs were carved on the cliff by Sasanian ldngs (numbered from west to east N R m 1-8). Although most of die reliefs are difficult to date, they are discussed here in their assumed chronological order. The oldest relief (NRm 1) was carved at the west end, near the Elamite relief (see above). It shows die investiture of Ardashir I (224-241 CE) by die god Ahuramazda. Both the king and the god are mounted. On the ground under or beside their horses lie their slain enemies, respectively the last Parthian king, Artabanus V, in his royal dress, and Aliriman, the evil genius in the shape of a naked man whose legs end in snakes and whose head is encircled by snakes. The nearby Elamite relief, with its snake throne and perhaps with snake attributes of the gods, was still clearly visible at the time of Ardashir's carving and could have inspired the fashioning of Ahriman. Ardashir's son and successor, Shapur I (241-272 CE), was the next to carve a relief (NRm 6). He placed his "Victory over the Romans" relief near Darius's tomb (see figure 2), It shows Shapur I on horseback grasping tile wrist of a standing Roman (Valerian ?) with his extended right arm. Another Roman emperor (Philip the Arab ?) is kneeling be fore the Sasamian King. Later, during the reign of Bahram II, die High Priest Kerdir added his picture and a lengtiiy inscription. T h e third relief (NRm 2) shows Bahram II (276-293 C E ) with members of his family and court. In carving over an Old Elamite relief (see above) Bahram II made apparent his program to persecute all religions other than Mazdaism, Kerdir, the high priest of Bahram II, writes in his inscrip tions, of which two copies are carved on Naqsh-i Rustam monuments (NRm 6 and Kabah-i Zardusht) section 1 1 . "and idols were destroyed and the abode of the demons dis rupted. . . ." Was it only die negligence of the sculptor that tire portion with the snake thrones remained visible, or was it the intention of a dissident sculptor? Narseh's (253-302 CE) investiture relief (NRm 8) was
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never finished. In the main part that is shown, the king re ceives the ring from the hands of a goddess (Anahita?). In the fourth century and perhaps also at the beginning of the fifth century reliefs with jousting scenes were carved below the Achaemenid tombs: Hormizd II (302-309) van quishing his adversary (NRm 5), placed below tomb III; two jousts in two registers below the tomb of Darius I (NRm; see Figure 2), attributed to Bahram IV (388-399) by Hubertus von Gall (1990); the latest joust (NRm 3), dated by von Gall (ibid.) to the fifth century placed below tomb IV; and a relief of a seated king (NRm 4) that is too eroded to be dated. The area of the carvings, excluding the reliefs of Ardashir and Bahram II (NRm 1 and 2), was enclosed by a wall sometime in the Sasanian period. Outside diis wall are Sasanian installations that, according to Dietrich Huff (forthcoming), are related to burials: the column on the Husain Kuh, and the so-called fire altars are interpreted as astodans (burial urns for the bones of the dead). [See also Elamites; Parthians; Persians; and Sasanians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Calmeyer, Peter. " T h e Subject of the Achaemenid T o m b Reliefs." In Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium on Archaeological Research in Iran, p p . 233-242. T e h r a n , 1975. Gall, H u b e r t u s von. Das Reiterkampfbild in der iranischen und iranisch beeinflufiten Kunst parthischer und sasanidischer Zeil, T e h e r a n e r F o r schungen, 6 Berlin, 1990. Covers Sasanian reliefs n u m b e r s 3, 5, a n d 7 (PP- 30-36). H e r r m a n n , Georgina. Naqsh-i Rustam 5 and 8: Sasanian Reliefs Attrib uted to Hormuzd II and Narseh, Iranische Denkmaler, II 8. Berlin, 1977. H e r r m a n n , Georgina. The Sasanian Rock Reliefs at Naqsh-i Rustam: Naqsh-i Rustam 6, The Triumph of Shapur I. Iranische Denkmaler, II 13. Berlin, 1989. M a c K e n z i e , D . N . "Kerdir's Inscription." In Iranische Denkmaler, II 13, PP. 35-72. Berlin, 1989. Huff, Dietrich. "Fire Altars a n d A s t o d a n s . " In Proceedings of the Inter national Conference on Parthian and Sasanian Themes in Iranian Art. L o n d o n , forthcoming. Schmidt, Erich F . Persepolis, vol. 3, The Royal Tombs and Other Mon uments. University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications, 70. Chicago, 1970. T h e basic publication for N a q s h - i Rustam. Seidl, Ursula. Die elamischen Felsreliefs von Kurangun und Naqsh-i Rus tam. Iranische Denkmaler, II 12. Berlin, 1986. See pages 14-23, pis. 11—15. Shahbazi, Shapur. " A n Achaemenid Symbol I. A Farewell to 'Frahahr' and ' A h u r a m a z d a . ' " Archaologische Milteilungen aus Iran N . F . 7 (1974): 135-144. V a n d e n Berghe, Louis. Reliefs mpestres de Than ancien. Brussels, 1983. URSULA SEIDL
NASBEH, TELL EN-, site located 12 km (8 mi.) north of Jerusalem (3i°53' N , 35°i2' E, map reference 1706 X 1436). T h e mound is approximately 260 m long by 130 m wide and about 7.7 acres in size. It is usually identified with biblical Mizpah of Benjamin (Jos. 18:21-27). The American scholar Edward Robinson traveled past die site but did not
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connect it with Mizpah, which he located at Nebi Samwil, an identification some still maintain. It was A. Raboisson, in 1897, who first proposed equating Mizpah with Tell enNasbeh. Before the excavation of Tell en-Nasbeh, those who supported this identification were Gustaf Dalman, Albrecht Alt, Eberhard Baumann, Paul Lohmann, W. Y. Pyth ian-Adams, and L.-H. Vincent. William Foxwell Albright opposed this view, however, holding to Nebi Samwil in stead, and proposing to place Be'erot at Tell en-Nasbeh; later he contended that Tell en-Nasbeh was 'Ataroth (Adar) because the Arab village of 'Attara was located just south of the tell. Alt twice changed his views; he first proposed to locate Gibeon at Tell en-Nasbeh, with el-Bireh for Mizpah; subsequently, he suggested that Tell en-Nasbeh was at first called 'Ataroth and after its fortification by Asa was renamed Mizpah. From the time of the excavations to the present, the major supporters of the Tell en-Nasbeh-Mizpah equa tion have been F.-M. Abel, William F. Bade, and James M u ilenburg. Tell en-Nasbeh was excavated in five campaigns between 1926 and 1935 by William F. Bade of the Pacific School of Religion. He uncovered approximately two-thirds of the site, even though the central part was severely eroded, and few occupational deposits, except for rock-cut installations, were recorded. The site's significance today is in the infor mation it provides on town planning in the Iron Age, espe cially during the little-known Babylonian period. [See the bi ography of Bade.] The remains uncovered at Tell en-Nasbeh correlate with what is known of Mizpah. T h e Mizpah traditions that have the earliest setting revolve around the prophet Samuel, bat tles with the Philistines, and the election of Saul as king— although not all scholars accept these as early traditions. Mizpah next appears in the reign of Asa of Judah, who for tified the site during his conflict with Baasha of Israel. Its next, and most important, role is as the capital of the NeoBabylonian province of Judah during the period of the Exile. Inhabitants of Mizpah helped in the restoration of Jerusalem after the Exile. Finally, Judah Maccabee assembled his troops at Mizpah to face the Seleucids. The earliest remains are from the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze I periods: three tombs and two caves on the tell contained ceramics and other material. Early pottery is also found in cavities in the bedrock and scattered in later debris, mainly in the northwest corner of the tell. Other caves used as dwellings and/or tombs were found in the low ridge northwest of the tell. Tell en-Nasbeh was uninhabited from the end of EB I to the beginning of the Iron Age. Philistine bichrome pottery and local forms such as collar-rim jars attest to the site's occupation in this latter period. Architectural remains are harder to identify, but many of the rock-cut cisterns and silos were dug then, and many of the houses that were used in Iron II may have been built then as well. Large parts of the Iron II town were uncovered. Because
Tell en-Nasbeh was not destroyed during that period, many buildings continued in use, with modifications, for more than four hundred years. T h e Iron II town was protected by a casematelike wall. Later, a wall (4-6 m wide) reinforced by towers and a glacis were built and in places a fosse was erected around the casemate wall, but downslope from the original town. Entrance to the town was through an inner and outer gate complex. (These fortifications are probably the work of Asa.) There were storage bins in tire intramural space on the south, and channels to drain off water crossed the northern and western sections. The dwellings usually contain two or three parallel long rooms, with a broad room across the back. T h e back rooms of the outermost belt of buildings are arranged to form the casemate-like wall and follow the natural oval shape of the mound. These buildings opened onto a ring-road that, with interruptions, circles the site. Facing them across a narrow street is another group. Occasional streets branch off toward the center of the town. Six olive oil presses also belong to this phase. Fragments of contemporary dwellings and agricultural installations were uncovered outside the town wall, in the suburbs of the walled settlement. The Iron Age cemetery was located on the ridge north and west of the tell. In tire Babylonian period, the inner gate and many of the earlier houses went out of use. They were replaced by more spacious houses of the same four-room type, as well as by other, even larger structures whose plans are fragmentary. One may be a palatial building with a large paved central court. The orientation of all of these buildings is completely different from that of the buildings of the previous stratum. It reflects a change in the settlement's purpose from that of a border fortress to a minor provincial capital. Fragments of walls built over the town wall, isolated walls and rooms scattered across the tell, and two kilns built in front of the outer gate, along with finds of Attic pottery and seal impressions from the Persian period, indicate continued settlement in the Second Temple period. Coins, fragments of Roman pottery, and a possible watchtower attest to at least a minimal late occupation on the tell. T h e cemetery remained in use until the Byzantine period, and settlement continued in the vicinity, as affected by remains of a church near the western cemetery. Tell en-Nasbeh was rich in epigraphic finds. These in clude private seal impressions and seals; noteworthy is the seal of Jaazaniah, whose title is "the servant of the king." This seal bears one of the earliest representations of a rooster found in Israel. A full range of government seals was un covered, including hnlk, rosette, msh, and yhd. Seven in scribed ostraca were found, as well as an unusual bronze circlet bearing a dedicatory cuneiform inscription. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "Review of M c C o w n and W a m p l e r , Tell en-Nasbeh I and II." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 7 (1948): 202205. Best critical review of t h e final excavation report.
NATIONALISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY Avigad, N a h m a n . " N e w Light o n the M S H Impressions." Israel Ex ploration Journal 8 (1958): 1 1 3 - 1 1 9 . Full treatment of this class of seals, most of which c o m e from Tell e n - N a s b e h , including a discus sion of their date and function. Broshi, M a g e n . " N a s b e h , Tel E n - . " In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, p p . 912-918. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975-. Useful s u m m a r y of the standard interpretations of t h e Tell e n - N a s b e h material, in the main, accepting the conclusions of the final report. McClellan, T h o m a s L . " T o w n P l a n n i n g at Tell e n - N a s b e h . " Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 100 (1984): 53-69. Best general treat m e n t of the Tell e n - N a s b e h material to appear after the final report and a m u s t for those interested in ancient t o w n planning. M c C o w n , Chester C. Tell en-Nasbeh, vol. 1, Archaeological and Histor ical Results. Berkeley, 1947. V o l u m e 1 of the final report. Includes a concise history of t h e excavation, a review of Muilenburg's discus sion of the site's identification, and a report on the architecture a n d nonceramic small finds. N o t well organized, a n d a n u m b e r of c o n clusions are no longer valid. Muilenburg, James. " M i z p a h of Benjamin." Studia Theological (1954): 25-42. S u p p l e m e n t to the author's chapters in the first volume of the final report; reviews Alt's latest identification of Tell en-Nasbeh. Wampler, Joseph C. " T h r e e Cistern G r o u p s from Tell e n - N a s b e h . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 82 (1941): 25-43. Detailed treatment of the finds, especially the pottery, from three cisterns. T h i s material is only s u m m a r i z e d , n o t analyzed, in the final report. W a m p l e r , Joseph C. Tell en-Nasbeh, vol. 2, The Pottery. Berkeley, 1947. Volume 2 of the final report. Includes a general discussion of the types, a list of c o m p a r a n d a as of a b o u t 1940, and a catalog of 1,800 types. Z o r n , Jeffrey R. "Tell en N a s b e h : A Re-evaluation of the Architecture and Stratigraphy of t h e Early B r o n z e Age, Iron Age and Later P e riods." P h . D . diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1993. A c o m plete detailed restudy of the architectural remains of Tell e n - N a s b e h based on research from the original records.
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East—as elsewhere in the world—archaeological finds, in terpretations, and hypotheses are often woven into over arching narratives of progress and transformation, used to explain how the particular modern nation's peoples, lifeways, technologies, religions, and even forms of government have roots in a distant past. Despite bureaucratic apparatus and governmental re sources, however, control of archaeology by nation-states has never been either uniform or uncontested. In the Near East, archaeological exploration was long the exclusive province of foreign archaeological expeditions, whose mem bers' direct involvement with particular nationalist ideolo gies in die region varied from outspoken commitment and political activism to neutrality to open hostility. Because the expansion of archaeological activity in the Near East has long been connected with general religious attachments, re source exploration, and economic development, ratiier tiian with specific nationalism, some of the major themes of ar chaeological interpretation have always highlighted such universal themes as religious evolution, ecological adapta tion, and technological innovation, rather than particularist histories. Also working against the power of archaeological nationalism are internal political factors. In recent years, dis sident minority and political opposition groups within Near Eastern nations have inspired alternative archaeological in terpretations that directly expose or challenge the validity of "official" nationalistic archaeology. Thus, die importance of an examination of the interplay of nationalism and archae ology is not simply one of direct correspondence between a particular political ideology and archaeological interpreta tion, but rather the illumination of archaeology's relevance to ongoing and often acrimonious philosophical and political discussions about the legitimacy of the modern state and its relationship to the wider world.
sciously or subconsciously, archaeological interpretation and the public presentation of archaeological monuments are used to support the prestige or power of modern nationstates. Although nationalism is only one of several modern ideologies that have sometimes subtly influenced archaeo logical interpretation, it is often the most visible, well sup ported, and socially pervasive. This is the result of the dom inating role played by national governmental bodies, such as departments of antiquities, universities, and ministries of tourism and education, in the funding, legal oversight, and logistical support of archaeology. Indeed, national institu tions often determine which of a nation's archaeological monuments will be preserved and presented to die public (through special legal decree or inclusion in national park systems) and often approve the contents of widely distrib uted interpretive information about them (in the form of school textbooks, on-site signage, and promotional tourist brochures). Although scholarly literature is, in most coun tries, less subject to direct government control, the political context of archaeological work is often unmistakable to ac ademics and to members of the general public. In the Near
In terms of a general definition, nationalism may be de scribed as the philosophical belief in the historical and po litical legitimacy of territorially circumscribed, often cultur ally or ethnically homogeneous polities. The conception of the nation-state as the most coherent form of large-scale po litical organization emerged in Europe in the eighteenth cen tury, when earlier empires based on religious authority or dynastic connections (such as those of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Ottomans) had begun to disintegrate. Economic change was also an important factor in the emer gence of the modern nation-state in Europe: in place of he reditary aristocracies whose power was largely based on the agricultural surplus of feudal landholdings, there arose ur ban elites whose power was based on commerce and largescale production. The new elites became the spokesmen for, and leaders of, territorially and ethnically defined polities of a fairly uniform type. Yet, nationalism cannot be described merely as support of an abstract political formation. Na tionalism's potency lies in die concrete manifestations of the patriotism—or chauvinism—of particular nation-states. When taken to extremes in the elevation of the glory of the
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nation above every other cultural value, nationalism can mo bilize citizens to violent action in the pursuit of internal order or external war. Even in its most innocuous manifestations, however, modern nationalism is based on the presumptive antiquity and historical coherence of the boundaries, traditions, customs, and culture of the modern nation. In this respect, archaeology and the other historical disciplines are instrumental in bolstering and legitimizing what might otherwise be considered a thoroughly modern ideology. Modern nation-states often construct historical narratives that are vividly illustrated by archaeological monuments and bolstered by archaeological interpretations that celebrate the very elements—centralized administration, organized reli gion, military power—most prized in the modern society (see below). Because these achievements are selectively identified in the archaeological record, the national "spirit" or "character" of the particular modern nation are made to seem timeless, inevitable, or, in some unfortunate and ex treme cases, the result of unchanging racial attributes. Al though some archaeologists and other scholars have occa sionally utilized archaeological data to challenge the basis of modern nationalistic assertions, most scholars have chosen to restrict their interest to narrowly circumscribed research questions, rarely occupying themselves with the possible po litical implications of their findings. This generally leaves the business of public interpretation and presentation to oth ers—often to officials of the interpretive branches of the na tional government itself. This sociopolitical phenomenon is strikingly uniform (both in the Near East and throughout the world), despite the antagonism that often arises between competing nations over the interpretation of the same types of artifacts or concerning the same set of historical events. Archaeological projects, finds, and interpretations serve to legitimate the political power of nation-states in several stan dard ways. By helping to construct a narrative of the human settlement in the territory of the nation from prehistory to the present, distinguished primarily by the transformation of material culture, archaeology often reinforces the timelessness of modern geographic perceptions and highlights the importance of economic development and technological change. While the sites and archaeological periods of a given nation may be superficially linked to unique historical events or personalities, an equation or correspondence can be made with the historical development of neighboring nation-states or regions using anthropological concepts, Stone/Bronze/ Iron Age terminology, or carbon-14 dates. Thus, in provid ing both a particularistic biography for the nation and in demonstrating that the nation has undergone a development as complex and as lengthy as that of any other nation-state, archaeology provides both a pedigree and a curriculum vitae for the nation's full-fledged participation in the fraternity of modern sovereign states. While many of the more virulent forms of archaeological nationalism and conflict were abandoned or diluted after the
end of the Cold War and its surrogate regional conflicts, the continuing struggle for self-determination by minority eth nic communities throughout the Near East still sometimes finds its symbolic expression in a connection between ar chaeology and militant nationalism. In this period also, new, more subtle forms of political image making emerged. In a world of transnational economies and worldwide tourism, national identity could sometimes be achieved through the excavation and presentation of archaeological monuments selected for their presumed attraction to foreign visitors rather than for their importance in elaborating a particular istic nationalist ideology. European Nationalism and Near Eastern Archae ology. T h e religious and emotional attachment of the vari ous peoples and polities of Western Europe to the antiquities of the Near East can be traced to the early centuries of the Christian era. T h e discovery and "translation" of relics of saints and biblical figures from the lands of the Bible to Eu ropean cities established specific geographic and commer cial connections. While the Muslim conquests of the early seventh century changed the region's political conditions, the continued European practice of pilgrimage and relic col lection served to further the commercial interests of rival European centers under the guise of antiquarian interest or popular piety. T h e political dimension of the European at tachment to Near Eastern relics and ruins was intensified with the establishment of the Crusader kingdoms in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the subsequent struggle for power within them by representatives both of church and various European principalities. Even after the destruction of the Crusader kingdoms, Eu ropean financial support and religious patronage of Chris tian shrines and holy places throughout the Near East were sources of political and diplomatic prestige. Yet, the Ref ormation in Europe in the sixteenth century brought about a significant split in the character of European attachments to Near Eastern antiquities. While the pope and the Catholic powers continued to encourage pilgrimage to the traditional holy sites, the early European Protestant explorers of the region—freed from, and often antagonistic to, the pilgrim age traditions of the Catholic church (and, for that matter, of the Eastern Orthodox churches)—sought to locate what they believed were the "true" locations of the biblical events. Although this antiquarian movement was a manifestation of European theological conflict, it can also be seen as part of an intensifying effort by representatives of trading nations such as England, France, Denmark, and Holland to widen their presence in the region and to contest the long-standing commercial hegemony of Venice and other Italian cities in the Levant. The political dimension of antiquarian conflict intensified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the Ottoman Empire became a tempting target for commercial and ulti mately territorial penetration by European powers—notably
NATIONALISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY England, France, and Prussia, and to a more limited extent Austria, Holland, and Russia. Scholarly pursuits and geo graphic exploration could not be easily separated from dip lomatic, commercial, and religious initiatives at a time when the various nations were attempting to increase their influ ence in the region. In the field of antiquities and antiquities collection, the acquisition of movable relics began to be seen as an index of national prestige—particularly in Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Aegean—as resident European consuls com peted to purchase and remove the most impressive or un usual antiquities. The first truly national endeavor, however, occurred dur ing the ill-fated Egyptian expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte (1797-1799)5 when the specially recruited Scientific and Ar tistic Commission undertook, under French auspices, a comprehensive cartographic and archaeological survey of the Nile River valley and, later, of Palestine. T h e surrender of one of the commission's prize finds—the Rosetta Stone— to the victorious British forces who supervised the French evacuation from Egypt in 1801 made the political and na tionalistic value of the possession of Near Eastern antiquities unmistakable. The Rosetta Stone soon took its place in the British Museum with the Parthenon marbles brought back by Lord Elgin from Greece. In the following decades of the nineteenth century, the competition for antiquities was to become increasingly the activity of national bodies, both sci entific and diplomatic, rather than of private individuals. In Egypt, the race for movable inscriptions and statuary inten sified between the British and French consuls, and in Syria and Palestine, wide-ranging geographic explorations were undertaken by Ulrich J. Seetzen, on behalf of the Russian government, and Johann Burckhardt, on behalf of the Brit ish African Association. In Mesopotamia, in the 1840s, the conflict to excavate and export impressive remains of the Neo-Assyrian palace complexes, waged between the French consul in Mosul, Emile Botta, at Kuyunjik and Khorsabad, and the British consul, Austen Henry Layard, at Nimrud, brought the political competition to a fever pitch. [See Nim rud; and the biographies of Botta and Layard.] In fact, the prominent display at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London of the monumental sculpture recov ered by Layard at Nimrud and the conspicuous placement of an Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in Paris marked the beginning of an era in which Near Eastern an tiquities came to be seen as national trophies, symbols of modern European nations' pretensions to inherit the impe rial mantles of the great nations of antiquity. Eventually, per manent national institutions and academic organizations were founded in nearly every European nation to direct and oversee its ongoing exploration of the Near East. Though European scholars of various nations periodically met, de bated, and exchanged information, it is significant that the funding and directorship of the early archaeological under takings in the region were restricted almost entirely to schol
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ars of the same nationality. T h u s , for British scholars, the Assyrian Excavation Fund (founded in 1850), the Palestine Exploration Fund (founded in 1865), and the Egyptian Ex ploration Fund (founded in 1883) became their main prac tical conduits for Near Eastern archaeological research. For the French, research was done primarily through the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and, in the Holy Land, by the Dominican Ecole Biblique et Archeologique francaise (founded in 1891); for the Germans, it was through the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (founded in 1898) and, in the Holy Land, by the Deutscher Palastina Verein (founded in 1877); and for the Americans, through the American Palestine Exploration Society (1870-1884) and the American Schools of Oriental Research (founded in 1900). [See Palestine Exploration Fund; Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise; Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft; Deutscher Palastina Verein; American Palestine Exploration Society; American Schools of Oriental Research.] European archaeological nationalism was also manifest in the manner in which the monuments were administered and excavation sites were selected. From the 1850s onward in Egypt, French economic and political influence resulted in the customary appointment of a French scholar as directorgeneral of the antiquities service. Regulations enacted at the time of the 1882 British occupation of the country decreed that henceforth a British scholar would serve as deputy di rector, with extensive powers of his own. While fierce com petition for museum-quality antiquities continued (in such cases as the bitter fight between British, French, and Prus sian scholars for the famous Moabite Stone in Transjordan in 1868-1870), the claim to rich excavation sites—rather than individual relics—became paramount. [See Moabite Stone.] Indeed, with the various European powers preparing to partition the Ottoman Empire toward the end of the nine teenth century, territorial spheres of archaeological influence were established in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt. Certain antiquities sites, and indeed entire regions, were regarded as the exclusive provinces of Euro pean scholars of particular nationalities. Thus, British pre dominance in southern Palestine, Sinai, and Lower Egypt; German predominance in central Asia Minor; and French predominance in Lebanon and Syria came to reflect those countries' larger territorial ambitions. Aside from foreshadowing the direction of future Euro pean imperial expansion, nineteenth-century archaeology in the Near East institutionalized a distinctively European ap proach to the region's past. In former Ottoman provinces, such as Cyprus and Egypt, that came under direct admin istration by the British, archaeological interpretation began to absorb modern social concepts that far transcended the earlier classicism and historicism of biblical and classical ar chaeology. Although religious and literary interest contin ued, the conceptual framework for archaeologically based interpretations of both Near Eastern prehistory and of the.
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later historical periods came increasingly to center on such secular concepts as ethnogenesis, ethnic migrations, state formation, religious evolution, technological development, and military tactics. [See Eugenics Movement.] Indeed, the archaeological interest in and elaboration of these concepts occasioned a subtle, yet far-reaching transformation in the modern social implications of the Near Eastern antiquarian enterprise. From passive veneration of religious scriptures, relics, and monuments, European scholars had, by the late nineteenth century, begun to weave a new, material narra tive of the rise of the economic, political, and technological institutions of the Western world. Naturally, the narratives were expressed in terms that were the most congenial to the specific storyteller: the British and American archaeologists in tire region, exemplified by William M. Flinders Petrie and George A. Reisner, working under the influence of the generally progressivist model of material culture pioneered by Augustus L.-F. Pitt-Rivers, tended to see the sweep of history as one of increasing tech nological refinement, characterized by the adoption of ever more efficient and complex military and administrative sys tems, roughly dated by a regionwide Stone/Bronze/Iron Age scheme. [See the biographies of Petrie and Reisner.] In con trast, German and Austrian scholars, such as Friedrich Delitzsch and Hugo Winkler, often preferred to seek origins of cultural and racial characteristics, rather than their out comes. They attempted to chart the interactions of the world's great cultures: to describe the dynamics of history as the encounter over the millennia of the world's passive peoples with more creative and active ones. This approach became particularly evident in the historical reconstructions of the followers of Delitzsch's Babel und Bibel school of the turn of the century, when racial and linguistic theories pos iting the primacy of the Indo-Aryans finally overcame the apparent Semitocentrism of the Noahide biblical genealo gies. Archaeology and indeed Near Eastern historiography as a whole were now resolutely pointed westward. Although Western scholars of varying nationalities might now debate specific chronological and stratigraphic issues, few disputed the mostly unspoken assertion that they—not the local peas ants who served them as domestics and excavation labor ers—were the true cultural and spiritual heirs of the great empires of the ancient Near East. A decisive turning point in the political and archaeological history of the region—and in the impact of European-style nationalistic concepts on its peoples—came in the years im mediately following World War I. With the final partition of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious allies, the establish ment of the Turkish Republic, the granting of at least nom inal autonomy to Egypt, and the creation of League of Nations mandates in Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, the future political landscape of the region was envisioned as one of independent nation-states. Under the tutelage of British,
French, and Italian administrators, local populations were taught the techniques of self-determination; along with modern finance, education, public works, and public safety departments, archaeological administration in each of the mandated territories was organized as an embryonic na tional department of antiquities. T h e Cypriot and Egyptian antiquities services, under direct colonial control, had long been run in this manner, but new archaeological bureaucra cies were established in Syria, Palestine, Trans Jordan, and Iraq. Local participation was, for the most part, restricted to the lower bureaucratic levels of clerks and subregional inspectors. However, for the representatives of the various European powers who served at the higher levels, the period between the two world wars in the Near East was recognized as an archaeological golden age. Rarely facing effective local political opposition to the ex propriation of antiquities sites from the inhabitants of nearby villages, and with the forces of the mandatory re gimes cooperating to ensure security and logistical support, massive excavation programs were begun by the various Western institutions in the region. Activities ranged from those of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in Upper Egypt and at Megiddo in Palestine, to the British Museum excavations at Carchemish in Syria, to the French excavations at Ras Shamra/Ugarit, to the continuing Ger man activity in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. T h e earlier na tional competition of rival Western archaeological powers continued on an even larger scale. Although some early ech oes of local nationalist opposition to foreign expeditions be gan to be heard in this period, especially in Egypt, the main political context for archaeological activity in the region con tinued to be primarily that of the scholarly pride and terri torial interests of competing European states. Indeed, it was not until after World War II and the end of the colonial era that the peoples of the modern Near East themselves made powerful connections between Near Eastern archaeology and their own emerging national identities. Archaeological Nationalism and the Rise of Near Eastern Nation-States. Until well into the twentieth cen tury, the empirical archaeological study of Near Eastern an tiquities was pursued almost exclusively by visiting or resi dent European scholars and the few local scholars they had directly educated and trained. For the vast majority of the local population, older traditions of reverence remained po tent; remnants of the past such as tombs, ruins, and natural formations ascribed to the activities of legendary or biblical figures were an integral part of a living landscape. They were sites of prayer, pilgrimage, and ritual in which modern peo ples drew continuous blessings and inspiration. They were certainly not conceived as discrete research locales. Even the impressive ruins of Egypt and Mesopotamia were woven into Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions as the scenes of stereotypical biblical events. Their present ruinous states
NATIONALISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY had clear significance to the larger narrative. T h e idea of digging up the ruins and removing any interesting artifacts found there clashed directiy with time-honored local traditions. In fact, when European explorers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began excavating in the re gion they were often greeted with horror and outrage by local religious authorities. Excavation was considered to be, at best, a destructive and greedy search for buried treasure, or, at worst, the desecration of sacred sites. For centuries, the interpretation of the past had been the exclusive prov ince of duly ordained religious authorities, guided by traditions and Scripture, be it the Hebrew Bible, New Tes tament, or Qur'an. T h e idea that anything meaningful (or previously unknown) could be divined through an exami nation of fallen stones, broken pottery, or the exhumed bones of the ancients seemed both foolish and heretical. Yet, with the gradual assimilation of the peoples and economies of the Near East into the European world system—and with the concomitant acceptance of European concepts of time, space, and empirical observation—the region's antiquities began to take on a new meaning and a new political signif icance,
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T h e gradual spread through the region of the modern Eu ropean-style concepts of nation and national destiny (par ticularly among Western-educated, urbanized, commercial, or intellectual elites in every region of the former Ottoman Empire) provided the basis for a continuing political strug gle for independence. As had already occurred in Europe, images of the past, when loosed from traditional religious moorings, proved to be powerful vessels in the service of modern nationalism. Through the nineteenth century, par ticularly in Egypt, an entirely new school of nationalist his toriography grew up that was not content to dismiss the country's impressive ancient remains as mere biblical relics or ruins of the "time of darkness," the Jahiliyah, the era before the rise of Islam. Instead, they attempted to draw a lesson from the entire narrative of Egypt's history, stretching from the time of the pharaohs to the present. It was almost inevitably concluded that the new awareness of Egypt's great past precluded its continued subjugation by foreign powers. Egypt's ancient past and its modem destiny as an independent culture and an independent polity were there fore seen as essentially parallel.
ceptance of the political program was eventually to be bol stered by assertions about the centrality of Jewish political independence, as suggested by archaeological monuments and finds from the time of Israelite and Judean kings. The process was similar, if not completely simultaneous, among many of the nationalities and ethnic and religious communities of the region. In Syria, Arab Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey, and Iraq, ancient monuments, landmarks, and dec orative motifs began to take on new meanings as symbols of the past greatness of the particular people and sure signs that the greatness could be achieved again. While local Ot toman administrators (or, in the case of Egypt, the only nominally autonomous khedives) had been content to allow Western scholars to excavate and remove antiquities from the country in return for bribes or political favors or in re sponse to diplomatic pressure, the possession and local study of archaeological remains became a matter of national honor in some circles, especially when political indepen dence loomed. Until the post-World War I era, the notion of archaeo logical nationalism within the Near East was restticted al most entirely to small circles of intellectuals and often mixed inextricably witii uncompromising, often radical, political ideologies. That peripheral status, and the hostility of the authorities, is illusttated by the fact that the members of one of the earliest of die nationalist organizations primarily de voted to archaeology, die Jewish Palestine Exploration So ciety (founded in 1912), felt it necessary to destroy all of its organization's records at the outbreak of the war. Yet, with tire defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the war, and with the declaration of the allies at the San Remo Conference in 1920 that the destiny of all Near Eastern peoples should be one of self-determi nation, both nationalism and nationalistic archaeology ac quired a certain political legitimacy. In Egypt the publicity surrounding die discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 by an English expedition sparked parliamentary pro tests by tire Wafd party. It also led to the enactment of a ban on die export of Egyptian antiquities, a measure designed to end the officially sanctioned plunder of the modern Egyp tian people's material patrimony. Although diis regulation did not end European hegemony in Egyptological matters, it occasioned a profound shift in the local political context in which it was done.
T h e rise of political Zionism in the late nineteentii century similarly encouraged a growing number of Jews educated in European universities or otherwise exposed to European po litical ideologies to see Jewish history as finding fulfillment in the modern world only in the form of a culturally h o mogeneous, territorially based, modern nation-state. T h e novelty and potential power of this political conception can be gauged by the initial hostility of both orthodox religious officials and the Ottoman authorities. Yet, the general ac
An even more dramatic change came in Turkey in the 1920s, when the Kemalists began to construct a new, secular history for the republic. They downplayed Turkey's Islamic heritage, stressing instead its historical and ethnic links to the Indo-European Hittites of the second millennium B C E . In Palestine also the continued interest in archaeological re mains by the Jewish community began to focus on concrete embodiments of earlier periods of independence and cul tural creativity—primarily die tombs, fortifications, and for-
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tresses of the Second Commonwealth and the synagogues of the Byzantine period. Such perceptions would only grad ually spread throughout the region. As long as the adminisa-ation of antiquities remained in the hands of the occu pying or colonial powers, ultimately subject to their approval and academic standards, the pursuit of tire nationalistic sig nificance of archaeological remains could not always be ac tively pursued. With the gradual granting of independence to the various countries of the region during World War II, however (in the case of Syria and Lebanon), or in the years that immediately followed (as in tire case of Egypt, Israel, and Jordan), the bureaucratic structures of antiquities ad ministration were turned over to newly established govern ments. Although Western expeditions continued to work in the region, national priorities and nationalist ideologies played increasing roles in determining the pace and progress of Near Eastern archaeology. [See Ideology and Archae ology.] The rise of modern nation-states in the Middle East (as elsewhere) brought about a dramatic shift in the social sig nificance of archaeological work. The region was no longer seen exclusively as the "Fertile Crescent" or the "Cradle of Western Civilization," but was divided into the homelands and autonomous domains of independent peoples. The con nection for those people to the land and its archaeological monuments was immediate, not abstract. In each nation, the elaboration of "national" histories was being used as a tool in maintaining the new nation-states' social solidarity. It in terpreted archaeological finds as evidence of timeless na tional character, precocious technological advancement, or as validation of the historicity of prized national myths. In Israel, for example, the emotional connection between the modem Jewish population and the ancient Israelites and Judeans was made explicit through the excavation of biblical sites and their incorporation into a national park system. The much-publicized excavation of the desert palace-for tress of Masada in the 1960s provided the modern nation with a powerful symbol and political metaphor. [See Ma sada.] At the same time, the Ffashemite Kingdom of Jordan celebrated images and protected the archaeological remains of the trading Nabateans, the urban populations of the coun try's Late Roman cities, and the Umayyad caliphs. In Anwar Sadat's Egypt of the 1970s, the power and grandeur of the pharaohs was stressed, while in Iraq in the 1980s, the res toration of Neo-Babylonian monuments was conspicuously associated with the imperial pretensions of Saddam Hus sein. Indeed, the establishment of modern nations through out the region occasioned the adoption of symbolic ances tors and their archaeological monuments. In the Yemen Arab Republic they were the Sabaeans; for the Lebanese Maronites, the Phoenicians; for the Syrians, the Umayyads and, after discoveries in the 1970s, the Early Bronze Age Eblaites. The list of archaeologically "chosen peoples" and "golden
ages" was eventually extended to every country in the Mid dle East and the eastern Mediterranean basin as traditional religious veneration of the past began to give way to Euro pean-style historiography. Despite the distinct images and sites celebrated by each of the nations of the region, the phenomenon was strikingly uniform. It reflected, ironically, the abandonment of time-honored national ttaditions in preference for the universal celebration of the power of modern archaeology. Thus, throughout the region, national parades and celebrations, postage stamp and banknote sym bols, even the rhetoric of newspaper articles and political slogans memorialized and romanticized the symbolic signif icance of archaeological remains. Archaeological national ism in the postcolonial period was not, however, restricted only to ideological exploitation of preexisting archaeological images. Ancient ruins, once mute elements of the landscape, became potentially transformable into national shrines and popular tourist attractions. Furthermore, they became the focus of intensifying excavation, following the lead of the earlier European scholars, in the thoroughly empirical study of the material remains of the past. Departments of antiquities, university archaeology de partments, and national museums became the established institutions of historical investigation and instruction, re placing the traditional religious authorities, whose authority became fairly narrowly circumscribed to matters of ritual. The secular institutions were, moreover, entrusted with pro tecting the nation's sovereignty over its own archaeological heritage. International legal claims began to be expressed for the "repatriation" of antiquities removed during the colonial era: Greek claims for the restoration of the Elgin marbles from England; Egyptian claims for the restoration of the Nefertiti bust from Germany; and Turkish claims for the restoration of the "Treasure of Priam" from the former So viet Union were merely the most highly publicized. Here, too, the specific claims should not be permitted to obscure the shared character of a regional phenomenon. Foreign expeditions continued to come to excavate ancient tombs, temples, and cities, but they did so with the express permission and often active cooperation of the local archae ological authorities. Criteria for supervision and control were broadly the same in every country. T h e conceptual, methodological, and often theoretical frameworks estab lished for archaeology by scholars in the West were closely followed. From a politicosociological perspective, the only elements that differed from nation to nation were the spe cific sites and cultures selected as the main subjects of re search. In this respect, and despite the military and diplo matic enmity between various nations of the region, the symbolic prominence of such archaeological monuments as Masada, the Ishtar Gate, and the Temple of Karnak rep resented the transformation of Near Eastern regional polities into European-style nation-states. At its core, then, archae ological nationalism in the Near East, as elsewhere, is some-
NATIONALISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY tiling of a contradiction in terms. It was only in abandoning traditional national approaches to the past and adopting a more universal conceptual apparatus that the historical in evitability and legitimacy of modern, technologically based nation-states could be historically maintained. Archaeological N a t i o n a l i s m a n d " C o u n t e r h i s t o r i e s . " The establishment of modern nation-states in the Near East and the consequent authority bestowed on national depart ments of antiquities throughout the region gradually focused scholarly and popular attention on ever-more-tightly bounded areas. Terms such as "the archaeology of Israel" (or of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, or Bahrain) became common, often existing alongside and sometimes even sup planting the archaeological use of such terms as "the Fertile Crescent" and "the Levant." Indeed many important ar chaeological sites excavated and/or preserved under national auspices became symbolically identified with the modern nation and its ideological interests—by both its most fervent supporters and its external enemies. In this regard, the as sociation of certain Iron Age sites in Israel such as Hazor, Megiddo, and Beersheba with the Early Israelites was both a source of considerable official pride within the country and a source of political criticism by its opponents, who chal lenged the specific "Israelite" character of the remains (Baramki, 1969). Similarly, the celebration of the grandeur of Persepolis by the shah of Iran (Lewis, 1975) and the atten tion lavished on pharaonic remains by Sadat in the 1970s (Reid, 1985) were both supported by government resources and condemned and eventually muted by internal Islamic opposition movements. In a more symbolic—if no less di rect—manner, archaeological sites in northern Cyprus that had been of considerable ideological importance to the Greek-dominated government of the Republic of Cyprus were subject to plunder and neglect during the years im mediately following the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974Acts of intellectual, rhetorical, and sometimes physical opposition to "official" national archaeological monuments and narratives are, however, usually underpinned by counternarratives that are no less coherent or politically self-jus tifying. In none of the cases mentioned above was the cri tique of a particular nationalist reading put forward in the interest only—or even primarily—of a more scientific or "objective" reading of the past. The critiques are themselves part of an ongoing political struggle for ideological legiti mation and political power that frequently cloaks itself in archaeological and historical terms. The source of these counterhistories can be rival governments, opposition polit ical parties, international bodies (whose interests are global rather titan national), and—often most powerful and persis tent of all—the emerging political elites of ethnic groups or communities struggling for their own statehood or auton omy. These fragmented, subnationalisms have, by their very existence, posed a threat to the coherence of the modern
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nation and have usually been ignored or moved to the mar gins of the state's official archaeological history. In this connection, it is important to note that one of the most pervasive legacies of early European archaeology in the Near East was its chronological imbalance. Because the scholarly representatives of the Western nations saw themselves as the true inheritors of ancient Near Eastern civilization, their interest in the region's material remains extended only to tire point where the economic, political, or religious developments they represented were directly rele vant to them. Therefore, the eras after the "end of antiq uity"—that is, after the seventh-century Muslim conquests, were of relatively less concern that those that preceded them. However, this was ethnocentrism rather than pure nation alism. T h e nationalistic aspect was emphasized after the end of the colonial period, when new chronological boundaries were determined by every nation-state. As mentioned above, each nation-state saw itself not as a modern political innovation, but as the political resurrection of a long-op pressed people and the fulfillment of that people's history. In that sense, the rise of the modern state was seen to mark the end of the period of cultural subjugation that had fol lowed antiquity, or the people's cherished golden age. Although the dates and cultural associations for the period of desolation varied with each nation (Islamic, Crusader, Ottoman, or European colonial), the negative associations evoked by the historical period led to a general neglect of its archaeological remains. Except for the interest of art histo rians and occasional epigraphers, the vast majority of nonmonumental, archaeological remains of the medieval and postmedieval periods in the region were consigned to ig norance and oblivion. In practical terms, the otherwise fairly strict archaeological laws of most countries of the region mandated that the material remains of the later periods (with the exception of human remains and impressive standing architecture) were not protected and therefore considered to be removable debris, even by archaeologists undertaking the excavation of important sites. As a result, a vast discrepancy arose between the scholarly knowledge of the material culture of those periods consid ered to be truly ancient (Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages) and those considered to be fairly recent. That differential had a great impact on the nationalistic understanding of history. Because practically no archaeological evidence of material culture change and economic adaptation had been collected from the remains of the periods immediately preceding statehood, the reasons for that political change and resulting modern struggles had to be explained through traditional textual sources. In other instances, those modern develop ments could be romantically retrojected onto a distant past and be ascribed to inherited traditions or national "charac ter." Whether the neglected archaeological remains came from the time of Ottoman domination (the Turkokratia in Greek-speaking countries), the time of Muslim domination
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in Israel, or the colonial domination of a given region by any and all outsiders, certain material remains were seen as being outside die purview of legitimate archaeology—and thus of little relevance for reconstructing the nation's "real" history. In other parts of the world, however, such chronological and ideological barriers began to break down during the 1970s and 1980s with the spread of anthropologically ori ented historical archaeology. This development would pose an eventual challenge to traditional archaeology in the Near East. Beginning with the theoretical work of James Deetz and Stanley South in the archaeology of colonial North America, it began to be clear that analysis of the material remains of recent or superficially familiar historical periods could provide some striking correctives to conventional un derstandings. Though the theoretical orientation of histori cal archaeologists varied from processualist, through struc turalist, through neo-Marxist, implicit in the work of all of them was a desire to deepen accepted historical understand ings. They wished also to discover some of the underlying causes and contexts for the European commercial and, ul timately, industrial expansion all over die world. In the rec ognition that material remains permitted analysis of the re ality that underlay imperial expansion and the formation of modern nation-states, the historical archaeology of planta tions, factories, ghettoes, and workers' housing proved con genial to the antiautiioritarian political reflections of femi nism, labor history, social history, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, and North American AfricanAmerican history. Thus, in the early 1980s, when the techniques and theo retical approaches of historical archaeology began to be ap plied—albeit on a tiny scale—in the Mediterranean basin and the Near East, archaeologists began to recover a mate rial reality that had long been subsumed under the patron izing ethnological rubric of "traditional" everyday life (Ziadeh, 1987; Kardulias, 1994). In the excavations and material culture studies that began to be undertaken at Ottomanperiod sites in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, the very act of filling out the archaeological record and demonstrating that every part of the nation's history possessed dynamism, vitality, and complexity helped to un dermine the basis of romantic, chronologically imbalanced, nationalistic archaeology. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the in creasing internationalization of archaeological research in the prehistoric and early historic periods—both in field methodologies and theoretical interpretations—also served to counteract the classical nationalistic archaeology. T h e adoption of such scientific innovations as radiocarbon dat ing; chemical provenance studies; geological, botanical, and faunal analysis; and increasingly complex data processing had, by the 1960s, made the ongoing excavations in the Near East among the most technologically sophisticated in die world. The earlier tendency of Near Eastern archaeologists
to identify migration and diffusion as the main mechanisms of culture change in the region gradually gave way to a vari ation of the American "New Archaeology," in which em phasis was placed on the larger systemic concepts of eco logical adaptation, resource exploitation, and technological efficiency. [See New Archaeology.] This intellectual development had an unmistakable polit ical context in the post-World War II period, as the Near East underwent unprecedented economic development. In an era when transnational corporations and international de velopment agencies began to devote substantial resources to the study of the environmental, geological, and demographic potential of the various nations of the region, the objectives of Near Eastern archaeology began to reflect a more instru mental, functionalist view of ancient cultures. Particularistic historical questions were being supplemented—and to a cer tain extent supplanted—by new research questions about agricultural efficiency, economic profits, specialized pro duction, and regional population growth. It was no longer enough merely to describe archaeological remains and link them to historically attested peoples and events. Process and systemic interaction became central. This change in em phasis so neatly parallels the imperatives of modern eco nomic development in the region that it is difficult to ascribe the correspondence to mere coincidence (Miller, 1980; Pat terson, 1995). Far more persuasive in its explanatory power is the recognition that the universalist, processualist archae ology was, like the nationalist archaeology it often replaced, a style of historical investigation that had its own implicit ideological subtext: retrojecting into the distant past latetwentieth-century concepts of efficiency, resource extrac tion, environmental balance, and of the inevitability—or at least imperative—of economic development in all human societies. In this light, it may be legitimately asked whether archae ological nationalism is a discrete and identifiable—yet ulti mately curable—intellectual malady, or whether it is merely one of a limited number of general political assertions that archaeology, throughout its history, has routinely been used to express. T h e development of new pictures of the past and new technological means of obtaining them have always been tied to economic and cultural change and the emer gence of new intellectual and political elites. In the Near East as elsewhere, die acceptance of archaeology has required the abandonment of traditional means of history making—be they legendary, scriptural, or ritual—with all the social and cultural consequences that such an intellectual transforma tion entails. Whatever the specific nation of the region or the specific subject of archaeological research, politically powerful narratives can make the present seem natural and inevitable. They can also be used to support the power and authority of organized religions, transnational corporations, national liberation movements, and international develop ment agencies—as well as established nation-states.
NATIONALISM AND ARCHAEOLO GY However, any review of the long history of the intercon nections of archaeology and nationalism will demonstrate the particular power and pervasiveness of the nation-state. Although the international legal and scholarly communities have in recent years cooperated to protect and preserve en dangered archaeological resources, and to internationalize both the theory and practice of archaeology (Trigger, 1986), conflicts between rival nations in the Near East over control of archaeological remains in disputed territory are seemingly beyond the power of international agencies or individual scholars to discourage or control. As long as control over the practice of archaeology in the Near East remains within the legal purview of national governments, with national de partments of antiquities empowered to permit or prevent excavation at certain sites and to provide or withhold fund ing for public presentation, there is little that international bodies can do to adjudicate conflicting historical claims. Through the force of archaeological tradition and prac tice, and through the very structure of modern nation-states in the region, it has become each nation's accepted right to determine the pace and location of excavations within its borders. It has become their right, through national park systems and tourist facilities, to highlight their own chosen peoples and golden ages. Moreover, to interfere with the archaeological agenda of a modern nation—so long as it is conducted along internationally accepted academic stan dards—is to risk a bitter protest against a violation of sov ereignty. Thus, no international scholarly organization has so far been able to formulate and gain acceptance for an enforceable statement of global archaeological rights and obligations that can, when necessary, contest or overrule the narrow pursuit of particularistic national interests. Such an ethical hope may appear quixotic in a world composed of, and ultimately controlled by, nation-states. However, the ethics of the preservation and study of the archaeological remains of the widest possible range of human communities is an essential political and intellectual challenge. It needs to be met if archaeology is ever to be precluded from use pri marily as an instrument of nationalism, or ever to serve meaningfully in the resolution—rather than in the promul gation and perpetuation—of national conflicts. [See also Biblical Archaeology; Ethics and Archaeology; Museums and Museology; and Tourism and Archaeology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. N e w York, 1983. Baramki, Dimitri C. The Art and Architecture of Ancient Palestine: A Survey of the Archaeology of Palestine from the Earliest Times to the Ottoman Conquest. Beirut, 1969. Part of a series issued by t h e Pal estine Liberation Organization Research Center; its underlying na tionalist orientation is clear. Broshi, M a g e n . "Religion, Ideology, and Politics in Palestinian Ar chaeology." Israel Museum Journal 6 (1987): 17-32.
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Fagan, Brian M . The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Ar chaeologists in Egypt. N e w York, 1975. Fagan, Brian M . Return to Babylo7i: Travelers, Archaeologists and Mon uments in Mesopotamia. Boston, 1979. Fowler, D o n D . " T h e Uses of t h e Past: Archaeology in the Service of the State. "American Antiquity 52 (1987): 229-248. Friedman, Jonathan. " T h e Past in the Futur e: History and die Politics of Identity." American Anthropologist 94 (1992): 837-859. Enlight ening essay on the political context for changing national histories. Gathercole, Peter, and David Lowenthal, eds. The Politics of the Past. L o n d o n , 1990. Geary, PatrickJ. Furla Sacra: Thefts ofRelicsin the Central Middle Ages. Rev. ed. Princeton, 1990. T r a c e s the early religious attachment of certain cities a n d nations to biblical relics. H o b s b a w m , Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge, 1990. H u n t , E. D . Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Ixtter Roman Empire, AD 312460. Oxford, 1982. Excellent account of the early political signifi cance of relic hunting in the lands of the Bible. Kardulias, P. Nick. " T o w a r d s an Anthropological Historical Archae ology in Greece." Historical Archaeology 28.3 (1994): 39-55- Survey of recent developments in constructing histories of neglected ar chaeological periods. Kohl, Philip L., and Clare Fawcett, eds. Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge, 1995. Wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject from archaeologists working all over the world. Larsen, Mogens T . "Orientalism and the Ancient N e a r East." Culture and History 2 (1987): 96-115. Lewis, Bernard. Hisloiy Remembered, Recovered, Invented. Princeton, 1975. Brief survey of manifestations of historical and archaeological nationalism in the N e a r East. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, 1985. Eclectic survey of the m o d e r n uses of the past. Miller, Daniel. "Archaeology a n d Development." Current Anthropology 21 (1980): 709-726. Patterson, T h o m a s C . Toward a Social History of Archaeology in the United States. Fort W o r t h , T e x . , 1995. Incisive analysis of political power a n d its effects on the c o n d u c t of archaeology. Reid, D o n a l d M . "Indigenous Egyptology: T h e Decolonization of a Profession?" Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985): 233-246. Survey of the intellectual and political contexts of E g y p tology. Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Counlty: Exploration, Ar chaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917. N e w York, ^982. History of nineteenth-century national and religious conflict over tile antiquities of Palestine. Silberman, Neil Asher. Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East. N e w York, 1990. Series of essays highlighting die m o d e r n social and political context of ar chaeology in the region. Silberman, Neil Asher. " T h e Politics of the Past: Archaeology and N a tionalism in the Eastern M e d i t e r r a n e a n . " Mediterranean Quarterly 1 (1990): 99-110. Silberman, Neil Asher. "Desolation and Restoration: T h e Impact of a Biblical Concept on N e a r Eastern Archaeology." Biblical Archaeol ogist 54 (1991): 76-87. Smith, Anthony D . The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford, 1986. Trigger, Bruce G. "Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist," Man 19 (1984); 355-370. Trigger, Bruce G. "Prospects for a World Archaeology." World Ar chaeology 18 (1986): 1-20. Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge, 1989. Ziadeh, G h a d a . " T h e Present Is O u r Key to The Past." Bir Zeit Research
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NAUKRATIS
Review 4 (1987): 40-65. Theoretical and methodological essay on a new, critical archaeology of Palestine. N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN
NAUKRATIS (modern Kom Ge'if), site located in the Behera province of the western Nile Delta, about 80 km (50 mi.) southeast of Alexandria, to die west of the Canopic branch of the Nile River. Although Herodotus claimed that it was Pharaoh Amasis (Ahmose, 570-526 BCE) who first allowed Greek merchants to settle and trade at the site, ear lier Greek pottery indicates a Hellenic presence in the sec ond half of the seventh century B C E , possibly during the reign of Psamtik (Psammetichus) I (664-610 BCE). Amasis may have simply codified a de facto situation when he made Naukratis the only legal outlet for Greek wares in Egypt. During his reign the city nourished, and nine eastern Greek cities combined their efforts to build the famous Hellenion, described by Herodotus as the "best known . . . most used . . . a n d . . . largest" of all of the temene, or "sacred precints" at Naukratis. Naukratis continued to be the foremost commercial city in the Delta for the next few centuries, and when Nectanebo (Nekhtnebef) came to power in 380 B C E , one of his first official acts was to build a temple there. He decreed that 10 percent of the existing levies on "gold, silver, timber, worked wood, and everything coming from the Sea of the Greeks" would be used to provide for its upkeep. Although the early period of commercial exclusivity ended when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt (332/31 BCE) and founded the Mediterranean port city of Alexan dria, the town continued to function as an important trans shipment point for goods coming from the Mediterranean to the capital at Memphis, or eastward to Pelusium and be yond. Under the Ptolemies, Naukratis continued (with Al exandria and Ptolemais) to be one of the three major Greek cities in Egypt. The situation becomes less clear during the later Ptolemaic period, as Egypt fell steadily under Roman control. The events that surrounded the final incorporation of Egypt into the Roman Empire by Octavian (30 BCE) do not seem to have left their mark on Naukratis, but we do know that the old Greek trading center continued to govern itself through the elected members of its own council (boule). Sub sequent documentation for Naukratis, however, is slight, and the date and cause of the city's final demise are un known. Coptic records sporadically mention bishops from Naukratis through the fourteenth century C E , but by that time the name Naukratis may have been transferred to the neighboring village of Neqrash, where some late artifacts have been recovered. In 1884, William Flinders Petrie identified the ancient city of Naukratis with the extensive mounds near the village of Qom Ge'if. His excavations (1884-1885) were continued by
E. A. Gardner in 1886 and by D. G. Hogarth in 1899 and 1903. Their work uncovered the remains of four Greek sanctuaries (to Apollo, Aphrodite, Hera, and the Dioscuri) that had been founded during the seventh and sixth centu ries BCE. In addition, Petrie identified the Hellenion with a large structure (about 260 X 300 m) that he called the Great Temenos, in the southern part of the town. Hogarth, how ever, found no trace of such a monumental building, he ex cavated a building in the northern part of the site that he claimed was the Hellenion. Unfortunately, these early excavators paid little attention to the ancient city's domestic and mercantile character and almost totally ignored the later Ptolemaic and Roman peri ods. In an attempt to rectify this situation, renewed inves tigation was conducted from 1978 to 1983 by Albert Leon ard, Jr., and W. D . E. Coulson that combined the vertical control of the excavation at Naukratis/Kom Ge'if with a pro gram of regional survey and sounding in an area of 25 sq km around the ancient city. A small mound in the area of Petrie's Great Temenos still survived, and Leonard's exca vation produced 6 m of vertical stratigraphy, indicating ten phases of (apparently domestic) occupation, all of which dated to the Ptolemaic period. This argues in favor of Ho garth's identification of the Hellenion. Excavation was also conducted at Qom Hadid, originally part of the Naukratis mounds, where Petrie had recorded Roman sffuctures with painted frescoes. In the reexcavation, however, contiguous architecture was rare, and the artifacttial material (almost all of it from secondary deposits) ranged from Ptolemaic times into the Roman period. Coulson's survey of the area recorded an artifact scatter extending 2 km. to the north and south of the early exca vations. The distribution of this material suggests that be tween the fourth and first centuries C E the city expanded to the north and east, whereas during the Roman period, ex pansion and growth were to the west. This, too, supports Hogarth's placement of the Hellenion in the northern part of the city. At present, little survives of the ancient site of Naukratis, and the Delta's high water table persists as a severe obstacle to reaching the early strata of this unique Greco-Egyptian trading center. [See also Delta; and Egypt, article on Postdynastic Egypt.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Coulson, William D . E., a n d Albert L e o n a r d , Jr., eds. Cities of the Delta, vol. 1, Naukratis, Malibu, 1981. First volume of the renewed exca vation, setting out the project's goals and methodology a n d providing a good historical s u m m a r y (by Richard Sullivan). Coulson, William D . E., and Albert L e o n a r d , Jr. "Investigations at Naukratis and Environs." American Journal of Archaeology 86 (1982); 361-380. G o o d overview and bibliography of past scholarship con cerning Naukratis, as well as an exposition of t h e types of problems a n d confusion that led to renewed study of the site. Coulson, William D . E., Albert L e o n a r d , Jr., and N a n c y C . Wilkie.
NAZARETH " T h r e e Seasons of Excavations a n d Survey at Naukratis and E n v i r o n s . " Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 19 (1982): 73-109. G o o d synthesis of t h e excavations o n the south m o u n d at Naukratis a n d of soundings at c o n t e m p o r a r y sites in the survey area. Venit, Marjorie S. Greek Painted Pottery from Naukratis in Egyptian Museums. American Research C e n t e r in Egypt Catalogs, vol. 7. W i nona Lake, Ind., 1988. T h e only compilation of this important m a terial in existence. Each sherd is restudied and, when necessary, r e dated. ALBERT LEONARD, JR., and
W I L L I A M D . E.
COULSON
NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY. See Underwater
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BIBLIOGRAPHY D a w s o n , Warren R., a n d Eric P . Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. 2d rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1972. Hall, H e n r y R. "fidouard Naville." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 13 (1927): 1 - 6 . Naville, E d o u a r d . The Temple of Deir el Bahari. 7 vols. L o n d o n , 18941908. Naville, E d o u a r d . Tlie Store-City of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus. L o n d o n , 1885. Naville, E d o u a r d . The Shrine of Saft el-Henneh and the Land of Goshen. L o n d o n , 1887. Naville, Edouard. The Xlth Dynasty Temple at Deir el-Bahari, 3 vols. L o n d o n , 1907-1913. BARBARA S W I T A L S K I L E S K O
Archaeology.
NAVILLE, EDOUARD
(i844-1926), Swiss Egyptol ogist; specialist in archaeology and philology. Professor of Egyptology at the University of Geneva, his birthplace, Naville was first interested in philology and religious texts. His great four-volume edition of the Book of the Dead appeared in 1886, but by then he had begun a long career of exca vating on behalf of London's Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society). Hoping to find evidence for the Exodus, Naville first worked in the eastern Delta site of Tell el-Maskhuta. His excavation resulted in The Store-City of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus (1885). Further exploration in the Wadi Tumilat, a region in the eastern Delta that includes Tell elMaskhuta, appeared as The Shrine of Saft el-Henneh and the Land of Goshen (1887). Expeditions to Herakleopolis, Mendes, and Tell Muqdam followed, but then Naville turned south to finish the excavation (begun by Auguste Mariette) of Iiatshepsut's mortuary temple of Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank at Thebes. Clearance (1893-1896) was followed by careful epigraphic work, which was published in large folio volumes. In 1903 Naville attacked the mounds to the south of Hatshepsut's temple, discovering tombs and the temple of King Mentuhotep II of the eleventh dynasty.
Unlike Flinders Petrie, Naville found no interest in small antiquities and left this site after the 1907-1908 season, con sidering it completed, although it would yield still more to the later expedition of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1920s. In 1909, Naville was at Abydos, where he cleared the Osireion (presumed to be a cenotaph of Seti I) discovered by Petrie and Murray in 1902. Although N a ville had an impressive publication record, his archaeological methodology belongs to the "old school" of Heinrich Schliemann and Mariette, in contrast to Petrie's careful sifting and study of small finds. Undoubtedly much significant material was lost, and Naville's strongly held opinions also tended to color his conclusions. [See also Abydos; Egypt Exploration Society; Maskhuta, Tell el-; and the biographies of Mariette and Petrie.]
NAZARETH, the town of Jesus' youth, located just west of Mt. Tabor, immediately north of the Jezreel Valley, and 25 km (15 mi.) west of the Sea of Galilee (32°42' N , 35°i8' E). Nazareth exhibits archaeological remains from the Mid dle Bronze II, Iron II, and late Hellenistic periods, but its heyday was in the Early Roman period. Judging from the locations of its Early Roman (Herodian) tombs (which must have been located outside the village according to Jewish law), its size then must have been about 900 m from the southwest to the northeast and 200 m southeast-northwest. T h e total area comes to fewer than 24 ha (60 acres) and reflects a population of some five hundred. It stood in a natural bowl within what is today called the Nazareth Fault, which divides the Jezreel plain from Lower Galilee. Based on its size and locations, Nazareth was surely a dependency of ancient Sepphoris, the capital of Lower Galilee in the Roman period; in the Byzantine period it was the seat of a bishop and an independent city. Benedict Vlaminck, under auspices of the Custodia Terra Sancta, excavated Nazareth from 1890 to 1910 within the grounds of the Latin churches of St. Joseph and of the An nunciation. In 1889 and then from 1907 to 1910, Prosper Viaud excavated within the same area and published a vol ume on the two churches. In 1955, Bellarmino Bagatti ex cavated beneath the Church of the Annunciation, which had been built in 1730, enlarged in 1877, and then demolished to make way for a new church. Beneath die Church of the Annunciation Bagatti found extensive remains from the Roman-Byzantine village. Cis terns, rooms, chambers, work and storage spaces, tunnels, and other rock-cut areas and installations are evidence that the inhabitants of ancient Nazareth, as of many other Gal ilean localities, utilized the soft limestone bedrock to increase their living and work spaces. In two caves beneath the church several layers of plaster were found. Beneath a coat of undecorated white plaster, painted plaster featured a cross in a wreath, some floral de signs, and prayers to Jesus in Greek. The prayers are most conservatively dated to the early fourth century CE. These
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NEBI MEND, TELL
two small caves had been incorporated into the north end of a building whose facade evidendy pointed south. The building had a mosaic floor whh a large chi-rho cross that pointed north, into the two caves. The excavator interpreted this building as having originally been a Jewish-Christian synagogue because it was oriented south, toward Jerusalem, and because he recovered about seventy architectural frag ments nearby that resemble elements of third- or fourthcentury Galilean synagogues (e.g., two simple capitals, five column bases, voussoirs of arches). The fragments were found beneath the mosaic floor of a Byzantine (fifth cen tury) monastery. A Jewish ritual bath, or miqveh, from the Roman period was found beneath the mosaic floor with the chi-rho cross. Many plaster fragments had been dumped into die bath when it went out of use and the mosaic floor with its chirho cross was installed. Several of the fragments were scratched witii graffiti in Greek and Syriac and are Christian in character. They may be remains of a church built over the caves that were seen by the Christian Pilgrim Egeria in the late fourth century CE. The sequence of occupations at Nazareth follows: (i) Middle Bronze tombs; (2) scattered Iron II remains; (3) Late Hellenistic to Early Roman caves with domestic in stallations, some used as late as the Byzantine period; (4) a third-century C E , or later, ritual bath; (5) a large public struc ture, interpreted by the excavator as a Jewish-Christian syn agogue; and (6) a fifth-century church with a monastery attached, perhaps the structures seen by the Piacenza Pil grim in 570 CE. Nazareth is mentioned in the poem Mishmaroth (1. 18; see Michael Avi-Yonah, "A List of Priestiy Courses from Caesarea," Israel Exploration Journal 12 [1962]: 137-139, pi-13) as the settlement place of the priestly course of Hapizez, following the destruction of Jerusalem and die Temple in 70 CE. This is repeated in a Byzantine inscription found at Caesarea that contains the priestly courses. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bagatti, Bellarmino. Excavations in Nazareth, vol. 1, From the Beginning till the XII Century. Jerusalem, 1969. Report on the 1955 excavations. Viaud, Prosper. Nazareth et ses deux eglises de I'Annonciation el de SaintJoseph. Paris, 1910. Complete report on the two churches, as of 1910. JAMES F. S T R A N G E
NEBI MEND, TELL,
site located on the Orontes River in Syria, about 25 lcm (16 mi.) soutiiwest of the city of Horns (34°33' N, 36°32' E). Its identification with Qadesh, the location of the battle between Egyptians and Hit tites (early tiiirteenth century BCE) depicted by Rameses II on the walls of his temples at Karnak and Luxor, was first suggested in 1848 and is universally accepted. The Hittites knew the town as Kinza, and this name appears on an in
scribed tablet found in recent excavations at the site. In the late fourth or early third century B C E , the town was refounded, under the Seleucid rulers of Syria, are called Laodiceia-ad-Libanum. Qadesh is, mentioned initially in the textual sources on the occasion of Thutmosis Ill's battle at Megiddo, when its ruler led the coalition of Canaanite princes attempting to block die Egyptian advance into Syria. It figures in other Egyptian and Hittite texts, including the Amarna letters and the cam paign reliefs of Seti I, who captured the city in about 1300 BCE. Its location in the fertile Orontes valley, on one of the few major routes which cross the Levantine coastal moun tains to link inland Syria with the Mediterranean, explains its strategic importance. Its siting on the fork of the Orontes and one of its tributaries provides it witii natural defensive strength on three sides. Aldiough at about 10 hectares (25 acres) it is not one of die largest of Syria's ancient mounds, it is one of the highest, its summit being 30 m above the surrounding plain. T o the south of this mound is an area of comparable extent—with fragmentary remains of walls and column drums—the site of Greco-Roman Laodiceia. The mound was excavated in 1921-1922 by a French Mandatory government expedition under Maurice Pezard. Large areas on the northeast summit and flanks were inves tigated and monumental remains uncovered, but die work was entirely devoid of stratigraphic control and was pub lished only in a preliminary manner. Enough was recovered, however, to show that important levels from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, the Iron Age, and the Greco-Roman pe riod existed. Perhaps the most striking find was part of an Egyptian stela recording Seti I's seizure of the town. Renewed excavations by an expedition from the Univer sity of London, under the direction of Peter J. Parr, com menced in 1975 and is still underway. As a result of the work completed so far, the site's occupational history is postulated as follows. The earliest settlement took place in the sixth millennium, in the Pottery Neolithic period. T h e settlers were farmers and lived in houses built of poor mudbrick or terrepisee, but with good white plaster floors. After an unknown period of time, and for unknown reasons, diis settlement was aban doned (there is no evidence of occupation in the fifth and fourth millennia). The site was reoccupied in the third millennium, the Early Bronze Age. T h e substantial and spacious houses uncovered suggest that this settlement was something more than a vil lage, although there is no evidence for urban fortifications. A decline in architectural standards is apparent toward the end of the millennium, however, and the site may have been abandoned again, apart from squatters. A period of vigorous urban growth began in about 2000 B C E , with a new style of architecture and, soon after, massive casemate defensive walls with, in one place at least, a massive, artificial sloping rampart. The site seems to have flourished during this, the
NEBO, M O U N T Middle Bronze Age. T h e settlement came to an end in about 1600 B C E , with the destruction of the fortifications and as sociated buildings, and there may have been another short period of desertion. T h e Late Bronze Age (the period of Qadesh's recorded history) is represented archaeologically by remains of large public buildings, none yet sufficiently exposed to provide evidence of their function. Sherds of Cypriot, Mycenaean, and Egyptian pottery show the extent of the city's contacts, as do the few tablets found (letters addressed to its ruler by the prince of Halab [Aleppo]). There is no archaeological record in the areas excavated ei ther of Seti's capture of the city or the battle waged by Rameses II. Whether, and how, Qadesh was affected by the distur bances which brought the Bronze Age to a close in the Le vant is not yet determined. There is significant occupation in the Late Iron Age (eighth-seventh centuries B C E ) , when an Assyrian garrison was probably stationed at the site. There is nothing to indicate settlement during the Persian period, and the mound may well have been deserted when Laodiceia was founded there. This seems to have been a town of middling importance, judging from surface indica tions and its virtual absence from the written sources. Dur ing the Byzantine period it was the seat of a suffragan bishop, however. T h e few archaeological finds indicate that the site did not survive beyond the fifth century C E , and that it remained abandoned until the modern village was founded in the early nineteenth century. BIBLIOGRAPHY Breasted, James H . The Battle ofKadesh: A Study in the Earliest Known Military Strategy. Chicago, 1903. T h e most diorough English-lan guage account of the battle, with sketches of m a p s , reproductions of the Egyptian reliefs, a n d lengthy extracts from texts. Gardiner, Alan H . The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II. Oxford, i960. T h e most scholarly publication of t h e battle texts in English, cor recting some of Breasted's readings. Parr, Peter J. " T h e Tell N e b i M e n d Project." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 31 (1983): 99-117. Brief s u m m a r y of t h e aims a n d m e t h o d s of t h e current excavations, t h o u g h n o w somewhat out of date regarding results. Contains t h e only accurate published plan of the site. Parr, Peter J. " T h e Tell N e b i M e n d Project: A Progress R e p o r t . " Jour nal of the Ancient Chronology Forum 4 (1990-1991): 28-85. Popular account of t h e most recent excavations. Pezard, Maurice. Qadesh: Mission archeologique a Tell Nebi Mend, 19211922. Paris, 1931. A c c o u n t of the F r e n c h excavations, useful mainly for the illustrations of the m a n y objects recovered. P E T E R J. P A R R
NEBO, MOUNT, site rising from the Transjordanian plateau 7 km (4 mi.) west of Madaba, bounded on the east by Wadi 'Afrit (which extends into Wadi al-Jadidah, Wadi al-Kanisah, and Wadi al-Hary farther south) and on the north by Wadi Abu al-Naml, which extends into Wadi 'Am
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Musa. Mt. Nebo's highest crest reaches an altitude of 800 m above sea level. Its other peaks are only slightly lower; of them, the two most important historically are the western peak of Siyagha and the southeastern peak of al-Mukhayyat (map reference 2218 X 1315). In the Hebrew Bible Mt. Nebo, part of the Abarim Moun tain, was located east of the Jordan River, opposite Jericho. It was also known as Pisgah (Dt. 34:1; Nm. 21:20, 33, 47). As a Christian sanctuary dedicated to Moses, Mt. Nebo was known by scholars and visited by Byzantine pilgrims. Eusebius (Onomasticon 136.6) wrote: "Nabau, which in He brew is called Nebo, is a mountain beyond the Jordan, in front of Jericho in the land of Moab, where Moses died. Until this day it is indicated at the sixth milestone of the city of Esbus [which lies] to the east." The Roman pilgrim Egeria (381-384) and the bishop of Maiumas of Gaza, Peter the Iberian (fifth century), relate in great detail their visits to the Memorial Church of Moses on Mt. Nebo in Arabia. Egeria, after having crossed the Jordan on her way from Jerusalem, stayed at Livias and then took the road to Esbus. At the sixth Roman mile she took a detour to the Springs of Moses and from there climbed to the summit of Mt. Nebo (Itinerarium 10-12). T h e pilgrim Theodosius (first half of the sixth cen tury) relates that not far from the city of Livias, east of the Jordan River, pilgrims could visit "the water made to flow from the rock, the place of Moses' death and the hot springs of Moses where lepers come to be cured" (Theodosius 19). The pilgrim from Piacenza (second half of the sixth cen tury), adds: "From the Jordan to the place where Moses died, it is eight miles" (Itinerarium 10.5). Moreover, in die Bible, as on the inscription of Mesha, king of Moab, Nebo is a city listed among the Cities of the high plateau of Moab, in the territory of Madaba (Nm. 32:3, 38, 33:47; 1 Chr. 5:8; Is. 15:2; Jer. 48:1, 22; z Mc. 9:37). T h e Mesha inscription records that King Mesha conquered the town, killed the inhabitants, and "took from thence the ves sels of Yahweh and dragged them before Chemosh" (1. 1 4 18). [See Moabite Stone.] Eusebius (Onomasticon 136.91!.) knew the locality of Nebo as a desert 13 km (8 mi.) from Esbus. T h e biographer of Peter the Iberian, in the second half of the fifth century, knew Nebo as a village on the mountain inhabited by Christians (Life 85). The survival of the name Nebo in the region was discovered in 1838 by Ed ward Robinson and Eli Smith (Robinson and Smith, 1941, vol. 2, p . 307). T h e local bedouin also know the mountain as Jabal Nabo or Jabal Musa in homonymy to Wadi 'Am Musa located on the northern slope of the mountain (Sailer, i 9 4 i , v o l . 1, p. 72). The discovery in Arezzo, Italy, of Egeria's memoirs (ed ited by Francesco Gamurrini in 1886), and the subsequent discovery of the biography, in Syriac, of Peter the Iberian in 1895 (see above), were decisive in identifying the Memorial of Moses with the ruins at Siyagha on the northwest spur of Mt. Nebo. T h e ruins were first visited and describedin 1864
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by the French explorer the Duke de Luynes (1874, vol. 1, pp. I48ff.). In 1933, archaeologists from the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (SBF) in Jerusalem began exploring Siyagha. Sylvester Sailer directed three lengthy excavations, in 1933, 1935, and 1937 that resulted in the discovery of the basilica and of a large monastery that, in the Byzantine pe riod, had grown up around the sanctuary. In 1963, Virgilio Corbo began the restoration of the basilica. Michele Picci rillo has directed the project since 1976. [See the biographies of Sailer and Corbo.} The ridge of Mt. Nebo has been inhabited since remote antiquity, as the dolmens, menhirs, flints, tombs, and for tresses from different epochs testify. However, its real fame is derived from the death of Moses described in Deuteron omy 34. In the fourth century, the Christians in the region constructed a memorial church in honor of Moses on the Siyagha peak, an obvious effort to perpetuate the memory of the biblical episode. It was a triapsidal church (a cella trichord) with a vestibule in front of it, tombs covered by its mosaic floor, and two funeral chapels on each side. An open court in front of the sanctuary's facade was bordered on the north by a covered passageway leading to the diaconicon chapel, including a cruciform baptistery basin (see figure 1 ) . The chapel was lavishly decorated with offerings from the officials of the Byzantine government by a team of three mosaicists: Soelos, Kaiomos, and Elias. The work was com pleted in August 531, in the time of Bishop Elias of Madaba and of the Roman consuls Lampadius and Orestes. In the second half of the sixth century the three-nave ba silica was built, in the time of Bishop Sergius of Madaba and of Abbott Martyrius. The primitive church Egeria and Peter the Iberian visited became the presbytery of the new sanc tuary. The basilica had a long diaconicon on its north side, on a higher level, and a new baptistery chapel (afotisterion) on the south side, with a narthex at the facade. T h e first stage of the work was completed in 597, as stated in the mosaic inscriptions in the baptistery chapel. The sanctuary was decorated with wall and floor mosaics. At the beginning of the seventh century, in the time of Bishop Leontios and Abbott Theodore, the Chapel of the Theotokos (of the Mother of God) was added on the southern wall, covering two rooms of the monastery. In front of the altar, in the area of the presbytery, a rectangular panel can still be seen of mosaic flowers, gazelles, and two bulls standing before an alter with a ciborium on it. The mosaicist intended to depict the altar in the Temple in Jerusalem. While the sanctuary was undergoing its various stages of architectural development, the adjacent monastery gradu ally expanded. Dayr Siyagha reached its maximum size dur ing the sixth century. The monastery, dominated by the Me morial Church of Moses, presents itself as a complex of different, yet interrelated, sectors, composed of several rooms that open into a central courtyard. The sectors seem functionally specialized: community rooms in the atrium of the basilica and living quarters or cells in the southern sector.
NEBO, MOUNT.
F i g u r e 1.
The old Diakonikon-Baptistery
at
Si
yagha with mosaic floor. D a t e d t o 530 CE. (Archive S t u d i u m Biblicum Franciscanum; p h o t o g r a p h by Michele Piccirillo)
From the archaeological research underway, it appears that the monastery developed from monastic units more or less isolated and situated on the top of or on the slopes of the mountain as the so-called hermitage of Procopius on the west slope (Piccirillo and Alliata, 1990). When the threenaved basilica was completed in 597, the size of the mon astery was probably reduced, for unknown reasons, to the area of the atrium in front of the church facade and to the southern sector; the other sectors were abandoned. Archae ological research into the ecclesiastical edifices in the valleys around Mt. Nebo support Sailer's conclusion that the su perior of the main monastery also had jurisdiction over the monks living in the valleys near the water supply, where the monastery may have had its orchards and vegetable gardens (Sailer, 1941). T h e monastery was completely abandoned in the ninth century. Khirbet el-Mukhayyat. T h e fortified place of Khirbet elMukhayyat, on the southeast spur of the mountain, with an attested continuity of settlement from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman-Byzantine period, according to its Franciscan
NEBO, M O U N T excavators, fits well with the locality of Nebo mentioned by ancient sources (Sailer and Bagatti, 1949, pp. 207-217). In 1863 the French explorer Felicien de Saulcy listed the name of the tell, but the ruins were not visited until 1881, by Claude R. Conder of the Survey of Eastern Palestine. [See the biographies of Saulcy and Conder.] In 1901 Alois Musil visited the site, described it, and was die first to propose its identity. In 1935, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land acquired the acropolis. T h e following year Jerome Mihaic improved the road leading to the ruins and began a program of archaeological research. Sailer and Bellarmino Bagatti (1949) published the results. In 1962 Julius Ripamonti of the University of Caracas, Venezuela, undertook a systematic study of the necropolis and at the same time excavated a small monastery and an Iron Age tower (see below). Sailer subsequentiy studied the pottery found in the tombs, which furnished excellent points of reference for establishing a chronological sequence of human habitation at el-Mukhayyat. Bedouin excavated an Early Bronze III tomb on the southwestern slope of the acropolis; Ripamonti excavated several Iron II tombs (Sailer, 1966) on die north side of the tell; and Sailer (1967) published the tombs of the Hellenis tic-Roman period. T h e Iron Age tower Ripamonti exca vated is unpublished. Three churches and a monastery have been excavated at Khirbet el-Mukhayyat: the Church of Saint George built on top of the acropolis in 536, in the time of Bishop Elias of Madaba and decorated with mosaics by a team of three mosaicists—Nahum, Kiriakos, and Thomas; the Church of Sts. Lot and Procopius built in the time of Bishop John of Mad aba (sixth century) on the lower terrace of the acropolis; the Church of Amos and Casiseos on the west slope of Wadi 'Afrit; and the small monastery on tire opposite side of the same valley. [See Madaba.] Recent excavations have proven that tire Church of Amos and Casiseos is the oldest in the village (Piccirillo, 1984). It takes its present name from its benefactors, whose names were carved on the chancel posts. T h e church, poorly paved with stone blocks, may have been built in die second half of the fifth century; it was flanked on the north by a room near a water cistern hewn in the rock of the mountain. In the time of Bishop Phidus of Madaba, under the direction of the priest John and die deacon Silvanus, the area was trans formed into a chapel witii a mosaic pavement and a square presbytery, preceded by a vestibule also decorated with a mosaic under the deacon Kaiomos. In the time of Bishop John, the chapel was enlarged and rebuilt on higher ground. Based on the style the same team of mosaicists responsible for the mosaic floor in die Church of the Sts. Lot and Pro copius executed the mosaic in the new apsed chapel. The small monastery of al-Kanisah, built following the contours of die terraces of the mountain on the eastern slopes of Wadi 'Afrit, is composed of a chapel, with a mo saic, on the highest point with respect to the rooms to die south; several rooms are constructed along the slope of the
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mountain going north. A cave runs underneath die mon astery that was used for storage. T o the south of the chapel, at a higher point, a wine press was found hewn in the rock, which is typical of agricultural monasteries. 'Ain M u s a Valley. Archaeological exploration of the val ley of' Ain Musa, the toponomic point of reference for the identification of the nearby ruins of Siyagha with the M e morial of Moses, following Egeria's journey, began in 1984. During her visit to Mt. Nebo, the pilgrim Egeria met many monks in the valley near the "springs of Moses" and saw their cells and a tiny church. "Between the church and the cells was a plentiful spring which flowed from the rock, beautifully clear and with an excellent taste," she wrote (Itinerarium 11.2). Before the discovery of Egeria's manuscript, the first ac count by a modern visitor to the 'Ain Musa was written in 1864 by the Duke de Luynes, who noted the nearby Chris tian hermitage hewn in the rock (see above). In 1934, Nelson Glueck surveyed the fortress of al-Mashhad near the spring, collecting Iron Age and Nabatean sherds and a number of contemporary clay figurines (see Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 14 [1933-1934]: 24-27, 15 [1935]: n o ) . Sailer and Bagatti (1949) identified several Byzantine ruins along the padi leading to the Roman road on the Mushaqqar ridge, a road with its milestones already known from the survey carried out by J. Jermer-Durand in 1884 ("Voie de Hesban aujourdain," Revue Biblique [1895]: 398-400, [1896]: 613-615). Sailer and Bagatti (1949) pro vided a general sketch of the region with its dolmens, circles, tombs, fortresses, and Byzantine buildings. A more detailed map of the Roman road from Esbus to Livias taken by pil grims to reach the Memorial of Moses was drawn in 1973 by the members of the Hesban (Esbus) expedition, who sur veyed and mapped die Roman-Byzantine fortress of al-Mahatta near the sixth Roman milestone. A rescue excavation by the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (SBF) under Michele Piccirillo in 1984-1985 in a farmhouse among die vineyards revealed the church of a small monastery, named the Church of Kaianos, with two superimposed mosaic floors: die "upper church," like the "lower" one, had a slightly raised, square presbytery. Iconographically, a unique motif in the mosaic of the upper church is an anonymous Arab camel driver depicted with a loinclodi and a mantie over his shoulders. The lower church was built in the time of Bishop Cyrus of Madaba, at the beginning of the sixth century, on top of two tombs. In the area of the presbytery, a bilingual inscription, funerary in character, in Greek and in Christo-Palestinian Aramaic, the language spoken by ordinary people in the region, was re covered (Puech, 1984). A second church is located along the path connecting the spring with the Roman road. It was part of a small monas tery built on the slope of the mountain. It was excavated by the SBF in 1986-1987. It is square and includes a room on the south with a mosaic and a paved courtyard. The
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church's mosaic floor is nearly intact and is one of the bestpreserved works of the local workshops of mosaicists. In 1994 the SBF excavated a small monastery east of the spring in the Wadi 'Am al-Kanisah south of the mountain. The chapel was dedicated to the Theotokos as stated in the mosaic inscriptions. It was repaired in 762 at the time of Bishop Job of Madaba (Piccirillo, 1994). [See also Churches; and Mosaics.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Alliata, Eugenio. " L a ceramica dello scavo." Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (SBF)ILiber Annuus 34 (1984): 316-317. Alliata, Eugenio. " L a ceramica dello scavo della cappella del Prete Gio vanni a Khirbet el-Mukhayyat." SBFi'Liber Annuus 38 (1988): 3 1 7 360. Alliata, Eugenio. " N u o v o settore del monastero al M o n t e N e b o - S i yagha." In Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land, New Discoveries: Essays in Honour of Virgilio C. Corbo, edited by Giovanni Claudio Bottini et al., pp. 427-466. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum ( S B F ) , Collectio Maior, 36, Jerusalem, 1990. Bagatti, Bellarmino. " N u o v a ceramica del M o n t e N e b o (Siyagha)." SBFILiber Annuus 35 (1985): 249-278. C o r b o , Virgilio. " N u o v i scavi archeologici nella cappella del battistero della basilica del N e b o (Siyagha)." SBFILiber Annuus 17 (1967): 241-258. C o r b o , Virgilio. "Scavi archeologici sotto i mosaici della basilica del M o n t e N e b o (Siyagha)." SBFI Liber Annuus 20 (1970): 273-298. Knauf, E. Axel. "Bemerkungen zur friihen Geschichte der arabischen Ortographie." Orientalia 53 (1984): 456-458. Luynes, D u e de. Voyage d'exploration a la Mer Morte, a Petra et sur la rive gauche dujourdain, vol. I. Paris, 1874, p . 148ft'. Milani, C. Itinerarium Antonini Placentini. Milan, 1977Milik, J. T . "Nouvelles inscriptions semitiques et grecques du pays de M o a b . " SBFI Liber Annuus 9 (1959): 330-358. Piccirillo, Michele. " C a m p a g n a archeologica a Khirbet el Mukhayyet (Citti dei N e b o ) , agosto-settembre 1973." SBF/Liber Annuus 23 (1973): 322-358. Piccirillo, Michele. " C a m p a g n a archeologica nella basilica di M o s e Profeta sul M o n t e N e b o - S i y a g h a . " SBF/Liber Annuus 26 (1976): 281-318. Piccirillo, Michele. "Forty Years of Archaeological W o r k at M o u n t Nebo-Siyagha in L a t e Roman-Byzantine Jordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 291-300. A m m a n , 1982. Piccirillo, Michele. " U n a chiesa nell'wadi 'Ayoun M o u s a ai piedi del M o n t e N e b o . " SBF/Liber Annuus 34 (1984): 307-318. Piccirillo, Michele. " T h e Jerusalem-Esbus Road and Its Sanctuaries in Transjordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 165-172. A m m a n , 1987. Piccirillo, Michele. " L a cappella del Prete Giovanni di Khirbet el-Mu khayyat (Villaggio di N e b o ) . " SBF/Liber Annuus 38 (1988): 297-315. Piccirillo, Michele, and Eugenio Alliata. " L a chiesa del monastero di Kaianos alle 'Ayoun M o u s a sul M o n t e N e b o . " In Quaeritur inventus colitur: Miscellanea in onore di padre Umberto Maria Fasola, vol. 40, p p . 561-586. Studi di Antichita Cristiana, 40. T h e Vatican, 1989. Piccirillo, Michele. Chiese e mosaici di Madaba. SBF, Collectio Maior, 34. Jerusalem, 1989. See pages 147-225. Piccirillo, Michele, and Eugenio Alliata. "L'eremitaggio di Procapis e l'ambiente funerario di Robebos al M o n t e N e b o - S i y a g h a . " In Chris tian Archaeology in the Holy Land, New Discoveries: Essays in Honour of Virgilio C. Corbo, edited by Giovanni Claudio Bottini et al., p p . 391-426. SBF, Collectio Maior, 36. Jerusalem, 1990.
Piccirillo, Michele. Mount Nebo. S B F Guides, 2. 2d ed. Jerusalem, 1990. Piccirillo, Michele. " L e due inscrizioni della cappella della T h e o t o k o s nel Wadi 'Ayn a l - K a n i s a h - M o n t e N e b o . " Studium Biblicum Fran ciscanum)Liber Annuus 44 (1994): 521-538. Puech, fimile. "L'inscription christo-palestinienne d " A y o u n M o u s a ( M o u n t N e b o ) . " SBF/Liber Annuus 34 (1984): 319-328. Robinson, Edward, and Eli Smidi. Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea. Boston, 1941, vol. 2, p . 307. Sailer, Sylvester J. The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo. 2 vols. S B F , Collectio Maior, 1, Jerusalem, 1941. Sailer, Sylvester J., a n d Bellarmino Bagatti. The Town of Nebo (Khirbet el-Mekhayyat) with a Brief Survey of Other Ancient Christian Monu ments in Transjordan. SBF, Collectio Maior, 7. Jerusalem, 1949. Sailer, Sylvester J. " I r o n Age T o m b s at N e b o , J o r d a n . " SBF/Liber An nuus 16 (1966): 165-298. Sailer, Sylvester J. "Hellenistic to Arabic Remains at N e b o , J o r d a n . " SBF/Liber Annuus 17 (1967): 5-64. Schneider, Hilary. The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo, vol. 3, The Pottery. S B F , Collectio Maior, 1. Jerusalem, 1950. Stockman, Eugene. " S t o n e Age Culture in the N e b o Region, J o r d a n . " SBF/Liber Annuus 17 (1967): 122-128. Yonick, Stephen. " T h e Samaritan Inscription from Siyagha: A R e c o n struction and R e s t u d y . " SBF/Liber Annuus 17 (1967): 162-221. MICHELE
PICCIRILLO
NECROPOLIS. Literally meaning "city of the dead" in Greek, a necropolis is a cemetery of some size exhibiting uniform modes of interment, and usually, though not al ways, associated with a contemporary settlement. Necrop oleis were also used by nonsedentary peoples to bury their dead, as attested, for example, by the Early Bronze Age (EB) IV subterranean charnel houses at Bab edh-Dhra in Jordan. In necropoleis interments took various forms: simple cist graves dug into earth, natural caves or rock-cut chambers, decorative facades hewn into cliff faces, and structures (ranging from simple to grandiose) above or below ground. Necropoleis were normally separated from settlements in order to maintain an acceptable degree of physical and psy chical distance between the living and the dead. Intramural interments, as practiced in the Neolithic period, were not, strictly speaking, necropoleis. Necropoleis first appear in fourth-millennium B C E Egypt (Predynastic Naqada) and Mesopotamia (Ubaid Eridu) during the earliest period of urbanization and state forma tion. Dolmen fields around tire northern Jordan Valley, pos sibly funerary in character and Chalcolithic in date, may likewise constitute early necropoleis. By the third millen nium, the practice of burial in necropoleis was well estab lished, with royal tombs at Ur in Iraq, pyramids and asso ciated elite cemeteries at Giza in Egypt, and typical urban necropoleis as at EB Bab edh-Dhra'. With few exceptions (e.g., MB Ebla, LB Ugarit) extramural interment continued throughout the Bronze Age (e.g., MB Jericho, MB/LB Megiddo, LB/Iron Tell es-Sa'idiyeh) and into Iron Age (Tell el-Far'ah [South], Megiddo, Beth-Shean [northern ceme tery]). c
NEDERLANDS HISTORISCH-ARCHEOLOGISCHINSTITUUT Necropoleis yield various archaeological data. Undis turbed, they contain quantities of intact objects, mostly pot tery vessels, which can be dated using other artifacts such as scarabs found with them or by statistical techniques like sedation, which W. M. F. Penie applied to Predynastic Egyptian necropoleis. Even necropoleis with no contents, as in Nabatean Petra, can be dated by the styles of decoration on elaborately built or carved burial monuments whose forms offer clues to chronology and cultural associations (McKenzie, 1990). So-called burial customs, the distinctive character of interments within necropoleis, have long been regarded as ethnic indicators. Differences in factors such as tomb size and shape, variety and quality of contents, and disposition of human remains were thought to betoken eth nically distinct peoples, as Kathleen Kenyon assumed for Middle Bronze Jericho (Kenyon, 1979). Alternatively, dif ferences in tomb size, shape, location, and in quantity and quality of contents may reflect the stratification in the society of the living. Old Kingdom Egyptian necropoleis are bla tantly stratified: pyramids were the prerogative of pharaohs, nonroyal elites built mastabas, and commoners dug cist graves (Lehner, forthcoming). Burial customs may also re flect kinship structures. Multiple interments accumulated in a single large chamber over a long time span may indicate an extended family resorting generation after generation to an ancestral tomb (Bentley, 1991; Bloch-Smith, 1992). N e cropoleis also often contain large numbers of human skele tons that can be analyzed forensically, yielding information about ancient diet, diseases, causes of death, and overall de mographic trends. [See also Burial Sites; Catacombs; Pyramids; Skeletal Analysis; and Tombs. In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY T h e r e is n o general survey of necropoleis for the entire N e a r East. Published reports on specific necropoleis can be found under entries for the sites of which they are part. T h e brief list below concerns syn theses of archaeological materials from necropoleis. Bentley, G. " A Bioarchaeological Reconstruction of the Social a n d K i n ship Systems at Early Bronze Age Bab e d h - D h r a ' , J o r d a n . " In Be tween Bands and States, edited by Susan A. Gregg, p p . 5-34. Southern Illinois University, Center for Archaeological Investiga tions, Occasional P a p e r , n o . 9. C a r b o n d a l e , 1991. Reconstruction of Early Bronze society based on results of forensic analyses of h u m a n skeletons from a large necropolis in the J o r d a n valley. Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for t h e Study of t h e Old T e s t a m e n t , S u p p l e m e n t 123. Sheffield, 1992. Anthropologically informed investigation of m o r tuary practice that integrates archaeological data a n d biblical sources. Includes an annotated catalog of m o r e than 850 Iron Age burials (c. 1200-600 BCE) discovered in m o d e r n Israel a n d Jordan. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Archaeology in the Holy Land. 4th ed. L o n d o n , 1979. Lehner, Mark. The Complete Pyramids. L o n d o n , forthcoming. A r c h a e ological a n d historical survey of the best-known mortuary complex
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in the N e a r East, based o n recent excavations and surveys of L e h ner's Giza Plateau M a p p i n g Project. M c K e n z i e , Judith. The Architecture of Petra. British Academy M o n o graphs in Archaeology, 1. L o n d o n , 1990. Richly detailed architec tural and historical analysis of the funerary facades of Petra, proving that even e m p t y t o m b s still hold meaning. Morris, Ian. Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity. C a m b r i d g e , 1992. M o d e l t r e a t m e n t of the relationship between the living and the dead in classical society, with broad methodological applicability. J O S E P H A.
GREENE
NEDERLANDS HISTORISCH-ARCHEOLO GISCH INSTITUUT TE ISTANBUL. The Neth erlands Historical-Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, T u r key, is an affiliate of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East in Leiden, the Netherlands. Founded in 1953, the Is tanbul branch became more fully operational with the open ing, in 1958, of an actual institute in the building that had formerly been occupied by the Dutch embassy (Palais de Hollande). While the institutes' financial resources are pro vided by the Dutch government through Leiden University, individual researchers are often funded independently by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. T h e purpose of the institute is to promote research on the archaeology, history, and languages of the countries and cul tures of the Near East and to provide logistical support for scholars specializing in Near Eastern studies. In addition, it seeks to foster cultural relations between the Netherlands and various countries in the Near East. T h e Institute spon sors the publication of the annual Anatolica (since 1967), which serves as an international forum for examining the history and archaeology of the Near East in general and of Turkey in particular. Since 1956, the institute has also pub lished a series of monographs in English, German, and French, Publications de I'Institut Historique-Archeologique Neerlandais de Stamboul. By 1992, sixty-nine volumes had appeared. In them, individual scholars present the results of their research on various aspects of Near Eastern history and archaeology, from prehistoric to modern times. Since 1979, the institute has participated in the archaeological rescue ex cavations at Hayaz Hoytik and at Kumartepe, both in south ern Turkey. In 1985, the institute initiated a major, longterm archaeological project at Ilipinar, in northwestern Anatolia, south of Istanbul. BIBLIOGRAPHY Nijland, C. "In M e m o r i a m Arie A b r a h a m K a m p m a n . " Anatolica 5 (1973-1976): 1-6. Brief account of factors leading to the founding of the institute in Istanbul. Roodenberg, J., L . Thissen, a n d H . Buitenhuis. "Preliminary R e p o r t on the Archaeological Investigations at Ilipinar in N W Anatolia." Anatolica 16 (1989-1990): 61-144. Preliminary b u t detailed report of
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die results of the D u t c h excavations at Ilipinar, with special emphasis on the prehistoric period. LEONARD VICTOR RUTGERS
NEGEV. The Negev comprises several different geo graphic regions, each with climatic, geologic, and topo graphic peculiarities that influenced the type of settlement it attracted and the course of its history. The regions are the northern Negev, whose most prominent area is the Beersheba basin, which prospered in tire Chalcolithic period; the Negev highlands, an area in which settlement flourished in the Early Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Nabatean, Ro man, and Byzantine periods; and the 'Arabah, the eastern Negev, which flourished principally in the Iron Age and tire Nabatean, Roman, and Early Arab periods. The first periods in die history of the Negev can be char acterized as alternating between prosperity and scarcity and abandonment. The region's varied topography, semiarid cli mate, proximity to Egypt and Sinai as well as the Levant, and its geographic placement at die crossroads between East and West all contributed to the movement of people in and out of die area. It is only since the mid-twentieth century, as a result of numerous archaeological surveys and excava tions of the region's major sites—conducted by Nelson Glueck, Yohanan Aharoni, Beno Rothenberg, and Rudolph Cohen—that some of the Negev's ancient history has been recovered. The broadest of the surveys, the Negev Emer gency Survey, was carried out by the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums between 1978 and 1988. [See the biographies of Glueck and Aharoni.} Prehistoric Periods. Surveys in the western Negev sand dunes, the Negev highlands, and the southern Negev have mapped 320 sites, with remains representing all of the pre historic periods. A connection can be drawn between envi ronmental changes and ongoing geomorphological pro cesses, population growth, and settlement patterns in these periods. The region was extensively populated during the Epipaleolithic (18000-8000 BCE) and, to a certain degree, in the Pre-pottery Neolithic B (Neolithic 2). Avdat, Nahal Hemar, Har-Harif, Nahal Nessana, Nahal Issaron, and the 'Uvda Valley are among the important prehistoric sites. In the Chalcolithic period, a continuous chain of settle ment existed from the Beersheba and Arad basins and Nahal Besor to the interior of the Negev highlands. In the east, sedentarization reached die fringes of the 'Arabah and, in the south, the Timna' region. The focus of settlement, how ever, was the Beersheba basin. [See Timna' (Negev).] During the course of the Chalcolithic period, groups of pastoralists and possibly hunters, originating in the Beer sheba basin and Nahal Besor, penetrated die Negev high lands. There and in the 'Arabah they established small, unwalled villages and utilized the region's natural caves as
dwelling places. In addition, temporary campsites and tent encampments were set up by nomadic or seminomadic tribes who traversed this district, apparentiy engaged in sea sonal animal husbandry and die transport of copper. Major Chalcolithic sites include Beersheba, Gilat, Shiqmim, Nahal Yattir, Arad, 'Ein-Gedi, and the caves at Nahal Mishmar. Of special note are the buildings that are probably temples or cultic places, such as those at 'Ein-Gedi and Gilat. [See Gilat; Shiqmim; 'Ein-Gedi.] Early Bronze Age I—III, Widespread sedentarization characterizes the Early Bronze Age in the Negev. T h e most important Negev site to enjoy significant expansion in this period was die large walled city of Arad. Included among its several public buildings are a sacred area (EB II) with at least one structure its excavator, Ruth Amiran, identified as a temple. Contemporary settlements flourishing in the high lands were unwalled and can be classified as central (upward of 5 acres in area); large (2-4 acres); small (including 2-8 buildings); or temporary. The central and large settlements were located near permanent water sources. Characteristic EB II dwellings are structures witii several rooms arrayed around a central courtyard, one-room structures, and round buildings. [See Arad, article on Early Bronze Age Period.] T h e EB II—III population of the Negev highlands included groups of immigrants from the urban culture that had de veloped to the north. These settlers preserved the pastoral way of life that had flourished in the Chalcolithic period. T h e Beersheba basin, the previous period's settlement and cultural center, was almost totally abandoned in favor of more southern locations—reaching the southernmost boundaries of the Negev highlands—where the economy was based on agriculture, husbandry, and hunting, as at sites in the Sede Boqer, Ramat Matred, and Mispe Ramon areas, the 'Uvda Valley, Har-Horsha, and Nahal Mitnan. Early Bronze IV. Hundreds of EB IV settlements have been recorded, primarily in the Negev highlands and 'Uvda Valley. None were found in the Beersheba and Arad basins. Excavations at Be'er Resisim, an important EB IV site, were conducted during three seasons by a joint American-Israeli expedition headed by William G. Dever and Cohen. New archaeological techniques focusing on a holistic approach to examining the site were employed. These techniques in cluded climatic, geological, paleozoological, and paleobotanical studies. [See Be'er Resisim.] Arad, which had flourished during EB IT, was destroyed and abandoned sometime after the mid-third millennium B C E , as were other larger centers in the Shephelah and south ern Transjordan. Most of die population of the Negev high lands and bordering areas, however, was not displaced. In addition, a new ethnic group penetrated the Negev in EB IV, This population established large, dense villages near permanent water sources and lived alongside the settlements of the earlier inhabitants. The social and organizational
NEGEV makeup of the new population differed from that of the ear lier Bronze Age people, and its material culture was some what more complex. EB IV settlements fall into three categories: central settle ments of 1-5 acres (e.g., Ein-Ziq, Mash'abbe Sadeh, Be'er Resisim, 'Atar Har-Yeruham); medium-sized settlements of up to half an acre (Horvat Be'er Hayyal, Ramat Boqer, Nahal Sirpad, Horvat 'Avnon); and small settlements (Nahal Revivim, Horvat 'Ahdir, 'Atar Har-Ramon). Central settlements can be further divided into those characterized by round residences of one to five rooms tiiat share small courtyard; by a coterminous series of rectangular or circular houses whose continuous outer walls served as a parapet for the site; and by residences made up of irregularly shaped rooms built around a large open courtyard. Far fewer large settlements have been uncovered than small, temporary settlements, perhaps because of die no madic and seminomadic lifestyle of the region's inhabitants. Most of the small, more distant settlements were occupied periodically, primarily during grazing season, when resi dents of the larger, more permanent settlements would mi grate there with their flocks but return home to the central centers at the end of the season. I r o n Age. T h e Iron Age was a period of settlement ex pansion in every area of the Negev. T h e fortified city of Beersheba was an important site, as was the settlement at Tel Masos and the fortress at Arad. In addition to numerous Hebrew ostraca found in the Arad fortress, the remains of a Judean shrine were uncovered by Aharoni in his excava tions tiiere. [See Arad Inscriptions.] In the tenth century B C E , following a period of abandonment that lasted almost a mil lennium, a series of fortified cities came to characterize the Negev highlands, the result of the building programs of Da vid and Solomon. These military installations, surrounded by agricultural settlements, dominated the Negev. T h e "four-room house," the most prominent dwelling type in the Sede Boqer and Ramat Matred areas, became a distinc tive feature of the settlements. [See Four-room House.] Many Iron Age sites have been excavated, most of them fortresses of three main types: oval (die most common, built on axes 15-70 m long), such as those at 'Atar ha-Ro'a and Horvat Haluqim; rectangular (ranging from 78 X 32 to 17 X 15 m), as at Har-Reviv and Nahal Zena'; and fortresses (from 17 X 11 to 7 X 5 m ) , such as those at Horvat Ramat Boqer and Be'erotayim. Their common plan was casement rooms around a central courtyard. After these fortresses were destroyed or abandoned—probably in 918 B C E , during Pharaoh Sheshonq's (biblical Shishak) campaign into Ju dah—the Negev highlands were uninhabited for about four centuries, until the Persian period. [See Masos, Tel.] During the eighth-sixth centuries B C E , the Beersheba ba sin reached die zenith of its Iron Age Occupation, with die establishment and efflorescence of tiiree additional walled c
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cities, at Tel 'Aro'er, Tel Malhata, and Tel 'Ira, and the important site of 'Ein-Haseva in the 'Arabah. Additionally, many fortresses and forts (e.g., at Arad, Horvat Tov, and Qadesh-Barnea) sprang up along the highways of the north eastern Negev. [See 'Aro'er; 'Ira, Tel; Qadesh-Barnea.] P e r s i a n Period. Square fortresses from the Persian period were recendy excavated at Mesudat ha-Ro'a, Horvat Ritma, and Horvat Mesora. Numerous Aramaic ostraca at test to the status of Beersheba as an administrative center and Arad as an important way station. Other centers of note during this period included Tell Jemmeh, Tell el-Far'ah (Soutii), and Gaza. Persian period remains have also been uncovered at Ashkelon by the Leon Levy Expedition headed by Lawrence E. Stager. [See Jemmeh, Tell; Far'ah, Tell el(South); Ashkelon.] N a b a t e a n , R o m a n , a n d Byzantine Periods. Important Nabatean remains lie along the main route traversing the Negev, die "frankincense and myrrh road" leading from Pe tra to Gaza. These include way stations, forts, towers, and agricultural settlements: Mo'a, Horvat Qasra, Mesad Neqarot, and 'Ein-Saharonim. Significant Nabatean remains were also uncovered during Avraham Negev's excavations at Avdat, Mampsis (Kurnub), and Elusa (Halusa). [See Avdat; Kurnub; Halusa.] The Roman period is characterized by square fortresses with four projecting corner towers and single square towers erected along roads. 'Ein-Haseva, Mesad Tamar, 'Ein-Boqeq, Yotvata, Mesad Zohar 'Illit, and the towers along the Scorpion's Pass are among this period's sites. [See 'Ein-Boqeq.] The Byzantine period represents the Negev's settlement efflorescence. Scores of agricultural settlements have been uncovered, including die cities at Avdat, Mamshit, Rehovot, Shivtah, and Nessana. Among the most impressive of the remains excavated are several Byzantine churches. These sites apparentiy constituted the agricultural hinterland of die region's large urban centers and facilitated their economic prosperity. [See Rehovot; Nessana.] Early A r a b Period. While several Byzantine settlements continued to exist after the Arab conquest in the seventh century (at Nessana and Shivtah, to name two), sedentari zation in the region declined ending eventually, in the mid dle of die eighth century C E . A few of die surviving villages and mosques, as well as new settlements, have been exca vated (including Sede Boqer, Kefar Shahaq, Kibbutz 'Eilot, 'Ein-Yahav, 'Evrona, and Har-Nafha). In the Negev high lands, tiiese new sites follow the distribution of Byzantineperiod settlements. This is not the case in the central and southern 'Arabah, however, which witnessed unprecedented setdement in Byzantine times. Both regions experienced an interruption in sedentarization in the fifth-sixth centuries CE. T h e sedentary Negev population in this period resided in small villages and on farms, practicing agriculture in the wa-
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dis, where seasonal rainwater was collected and utilized for irrigation. The period's numerous rock inscriptions are mostly graf fiti of the type found in abundance in the deserts of northern Arabia, Transjordan, and Sinai and are usually accompa nied by engravings of animals. The inscriptions are primar ily in Nabatean and Arabic and provide valuable informa tion on the customs and beliefs of the period. From the inscriptions, as well as from the abundant ar chaeological remains of settlements, farms, and agricultural installations, it is clear that the semiarid Negev supported a considerable population—pardy nomadic and partly sed entary—between the first and seventit-eighth centuries CE. [See also Beersheba.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. " T h e N e g e b . " In Archaeology and Old Testament Study, edited by D . Winton T h o m a s , p p . 385-403. Oxford, 1967. Aharoni, Yohanan. " T h e Negeb and the Southern Borders." In The Age of the Monarchies: Political History, edited by Abraham Malamat, p p . 290-307. World History of the Jewish People, vol. 4.1. Jerusalem, 1979. Alon, David, and T h o m a s E . Levy. "Preliminary N o t e on the Distri bution of Chalcolithic Sites on die W a d i Beer-Sheba-Lower Wadi Besor Drainage System." Israel Exploration Journal 30 (1980): 14c— 147. Cohen, Rudolph, and William G. Dever. "Preliminary Report of the Pilot Season of the 'Central Negev Highlands Project.'" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 232 (1978): 29-45. Cohen, Rudolph. " T h e Iron Age Fortresses in the Central N e g e v . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 236 (1979): 61-79. Cohen, Rudolph, and William G. Dever. "Preliminary Report of the Second Season of the 'Central Negev Flighlands Project.'" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 236 (1980): 41-60. Cohen, Rudolph, and William G. Dever. "Preliminary Report of the T h i r d and Final Season of the 'Central Negev Highlands Project.'" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 243 (1981): 57-77. Cohen, Rudolph. " N e w Light on the D a t e of the Petra-Gaza R o a d . " Biblical Archaeologist n$ (1982): 240-247. Cohen, Rudolph. " T h e Mysterious M B I People." Biblical Archaeology Review 9.4 (1983): 16-29. Cohen, Rudolph. " T h e Fortresses King Solomon Built to Protect His Southern Border." Biblical Archaeology Review 1 1 . 3 (1985): 56-70. Cohen, Rudolph. "Solomon's Negev Defense Line Contained T h r e e Fewer Fortresses." Biblical Archaeology Review 12.4 (1986): 40-45. Dever, William G. "Village Planning at Be'er Resisim and Socioeco nomic Structure in Early Bronze Age IV Palestine." Erelz-lsrael 18 (1984): l8*-28*. Glueck, Nelson. Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev. N e w York, 1959. Goring-Morris, A. Nigel. At the Edge: Terminal Pleistocene Hunter-Gath erers in the Negev and Sinai. 2 vols. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 361. Oxford, 1987. H a i m a n , Mordechai. "Preliminary Report of the Western Negev High lands Emergency Survey." Israel Exploration Journal 39 (1989): 1 7 3 191. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Enclosed Settlements in the Negeb and the Wilderness of Beer-Sheba." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 250 (1983): 41-49.
Lender, Yeshayahu. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Har Nafha (196) 12-01, Jerusalem, 1990. Levy, T h o m a s E., ed. Shiqmim, vol. I , Studies Concerning Chalcolithic Societies in the Northern Negev Desert, Israel, 1982-19S4. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 356. Oxford, 1987. Negev, Avraham. " T h e Nabataeans and Provincia Arabia." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der rbmischen Welt, vol. II.8, edited by Hildegard T e m p o r i n i and Wolfgang Haase, p p . 520-686. Berlin and N e w York, 1977. Sharon, M . "Arabic Rock Inscriptions from the N e g e v . " In Archaeo logical Survey of Israel: Ancient Rock Inscriptions. Supplement to Map of Har Naflia (196) 12-01, edited by Y. Kuris and L o r i L e n d e r , p p . 9*—35*. Jerusalem, 1990. Shiloh, Yigal. "Elements in the Development of T o w n Planning in the Israelite City." Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978): 36-51. Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. RUDOLPH
COHEN
NELSON GLUECK SCHOOL OF BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY. Located in the Skirball Center for Biblical and Archaeological Research on the campus of He brew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUCJIR) in Jerusalem, the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Ar chaeology is an academic institution with an active field research program focusing on the archaeology of die land of Israel and the world of the Bible. T h e campus, initially called Hebrew Union College Biblical and Archaeological School, was opened in 1963 by Nelson Glueck, then presi dent of HUC-JIR. The intention of its founders was to pro vide, among other community services, a base for American scholars and researchers engaged in Near Eastern studies. At the time, some were unable to visit East Jerusalem, where the American School of Oriental Research (now the Al bright Institute) is located, then under Jordanian control. At the outset an American scholar was appointed director an nually, but in 1968 William G. Dever became its first per manent director; he was followed by Joe D. Seger. The school began a long-term archaeological project at Gezer in 1964 under the direction of G. Ernest Wright. T h e enterprise contributed to the school's rapid development into a major archaeological center. In addition to introduc ing new excavation methods, the Gezer project inaugurated the use of student volunteers in the field. T h e school also undertook excavations at Jebel Qa'aqir and Khirbet el-Qom. Final reports of the Gezer excavations appear in the school's Annuals; a Manual of Field Excavation was published in 1978. Following Glueck's death in 1971 and the election of Al fred Gottschalk as president of HUC-JIR, the name of the school was changed to the Nelson Gleuck School of Biblical Archaeology. In 1974 Avraham Biran was appointed direc tor, at which time the school took over the excavation at Tel Dan, which became its major project and is the longest on going excavation in Israel. Other excavations were carried
NEMRUD DAGI out at 'Aro'er, Yesud ha-Ma'alah, Ras el-Kharrubeh, Deir es-Sid, Tel'Ira, Shiqmim, Gilat, and Nahal Tillah. An integral part of the school is its Skirball Museum, which exhibits material from the school's archaeological projects. T h e exhibits are based on specific subjects with an emphasis on archaeological objects as works of art and as expressions of the cultural and historical processes that af fected the biblical world. An International Colloqium on Temples and High Places in Biblical Times was held in 1977 and its proceedings pub lished (1981). Congresses, seminars, and lectures comple ment the school's research activities. [See also the biography of Glueck. In addition most sites men tioned are the subject of independent entries; see especially Dan; and Gezer.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Biran, Avraham. Dan: 25 shenot hafirot be-Tel Dan ( D a n : 25 Years of Excavations at T e l D a n ) . T e l Aviv, 1992. Biran, Avraham. Biblical Dan. Jerusalem, 1994. Biran, Avraham, ed. Temples and High Places in Biblical Times: Proceed ings of the Colloquium in Honor of the Centennial of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem, 14-16 March 1977. Je rusalem, 1981. Dever, William G . , and H . Darrell L a n c e , eds. A Manual of Field Ex cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. AVRAHAM BIRAN
NEMRUD DAGI, Late Hellenistic site on the summit of the mountain of the same name, located in southeastern Turkey (36°38' N , 38°4o' E), in the new (as of 1954) prov ince of Adiyaman, formerly the province of Malatya. N e m rud Dagi is one of the highest mountains of the Anti-Taurus range within the region known in Turkish as the Ankar Daglari. Although some of die neighboring mountains are higher, Nemrud Dagi is unique in that its summit is clearly visible from all directions and tire sanctuary on its peak must have been a prominent landmark in antiquity, as it is today. T h e Turkish Aerial Geodetic Survey in 1954 reported an official height of 2,150 m above sea level for Nemrud Dagi. T h e elevation was verified in 1986 by the Ministry of Cul ture and Tourism. More precise data for the coordinates of the peak and the number of the geodetic benchmark on top of the site are not available because Nemrud Dagi lies within a military zone. T h e name Nemrud Dagi seems to have been first brought to the attention of the West by Charles Sester, a German road engineer and surveyor, when he reported his discovery of the monument to German and Ottoman authorities in 1881. Subsequently, the site was explored briefly and then published by two separate teams. In 1882 and 1883, German teams recorded die major sculptural, epigraphic, and archi tectural remains, which were published amid descriptions of the team's travels throughout Asia Minor and North Syria
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(Humann and Puchstein, 1890, pp. 97-406). Also in 1883, O. Hamdy Bey, director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum of Constantinople, and Osgan Effendi, an Armenian tech nician, made the difficult ascent to Nemrud Dagi and spent five days studying the remains (Hamdy Bey and Osgan Ef fendi, 1883). Complete investigation of the site's abundant sculptures and inscriptions did not occur until the midtwentieth century, when an international team, directed by Theresa Goell between 1953 and 1973, carried out thorough excavations, pioneering geophysical explorations, and par tial restorations. Other sporadic investigations and recon structions continued during the late 1980s. Although Nemrud Dagi is the name used today for the site and the mountain peak, it is uncertain whether diis is merely one name among others. For example, William Ainsworth, an English traveler who journeyed through the region in 1839, described the scenery and mentioned an outstand ing high conical peak tiiat he called Assur. Later, Humann and Puchstein identified the mountain of Assur as Nemrud Dagi. However, Ainswordi referred also to a more remark able cone called Ura Baba, which could equally well be the mountain now called Nemrud Dagi. On top of the mountain peak of Nemrud Dagi is the hierothesion, or temple-tomb and common dwelling place of all the gods, of the Late Hellenistic king Antiochus I of Commagene (c. 69-34 B C E ) . T h e term hierothesion seems to ap pear only on monuments erected by Antiochus I and at die burial places of his immediate family, at the sites of Nemrud Dagi, Gerger, Karakys, and Arsameia on the Nymphaios. T h e numerous inscriptions at Nemrud Dagi do not furnish any precise historical or chronological data regarding the date of the site or the life of its creator. T h e ldng's alleged genealogies, carved on the backs of stelae throughout the site, provide a chronological position relative only to two dynastic lines. The site does, however, provide die earliest known extant Greek calendrical horoscope, in the form of a monumental stela depicting a striding lion and a scattering of stars. Representing the constellation Leo and other celes tial elements, the particular configuration of astronomical symbols presents a date equivalent to 7 July 62 B C E (for an alternative interpretation of the stela and its date, see T u man, 1984). The complete excavation and site clearance led by T h e resa Goell finally revealed the true nature of Antiochus's tomb-sanctuary, which his workers had hewed directly from die living rock of Nemrud Dagi. T h e monuments are made from and rest directiy on the peak's limestone; tiiere are no remains of previous occupation. Nevertheless, certain icon ographic and architectural similarities between the layout and design of the hierothesion and some Plittite and late Hit tite monuments in the region hint at the prospect that this prominent summit may once have been a sacred high place. Any remains of such an ancient ritual location are currently buried deep beneath a roughly 50-meter-high conical tu-
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mulus mat is the focal point and dominant feature of the hierothesion. The whole complex is constructed on a cyclopean scale. Three rock-cut terraces flank the tumulus on its northeast, southwest, and north; each is a terminus for separate sign posted Processional Ways leading up to Nemrud Dagi from the valleys and towns below. On the East Terrace, the largest and most spacious of the three, the central court is lined on all four sides by a vast array of ritual accessories. Along the west side of the terrace, colossal enthroned statues (origi nally about 8-9 m high) of Antiochus and his syncretized Greco-Persian tutelary deities rise high above the court on a two-tiered podium cut from the mountain limestone, with the massive tumulus as a backdrop. The seated gods, mostly preserved intact except for their heads, which have fallen to the ground, include a centrally positioned Zeus-Oromasdes, flanked on the north by Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes and Artagnes-Heracles-Ares and on the south by the goddess Gommagene and Antiochus himself (see figure 1). The de ities are bounded at each end by a pair of guardian figures,
NEMRUD DA5I.
F i g u r e 1. Antiochus's
pantheon.
an eagle and a lion. Carved on the back of the colossal thrones are monumental Greek inscriptions {nomas, or "sa cred laws") prescribing the rituals pertaining to the cult of Antiochus and the eternal maintenance of his sanctuary. Parallel to the colossal statues, but located below, on a lower tier set closer to court level, was a row of four colossal stelae, each depicting Antiochus being greeted by one of his tutelary gods in an act of deification. T h e lion horoscope stela stood as the northernmost stela in this row; the set was also bounded by guardian animals. These stelae survive only in fragments. A row of contiguous orthostats set into sockets on low plinths define the north and south limits of the East Terrace. T h e northern stelae depict, on the side facing the court, full-length, overlifesize portraits of the Persian and Commagenian ancestors of Antiochus, beginning with Da rius the Great and ending with Antiochus's father. T h e southern row of stelae portray Antiochus's Macedonian an cestors, from Alexander the Great through Antiochus's mother. On the backs of the ancestor stelae, genealogical inscriptions identify each royal relative on the obverse. Be-
V i e w across t h e E a s t T e r r a c e t o w a r d t h e D o u b l e
P o d i u m , as of the 1954 excavation s e a s o n . T h e r u b b l e t u m u l u s rises i n t h e b a c k g r o u n d . (Used widi permission of the N e m r u d D a g Publication Project)
NEMRUD DAGI hind and parallel to each line of ancestors is a shorter, second row of orthostats depicting miscellaneous lesser figures, in cluding Antiochus's children. Only a few stelae survive in large, recognizable pieces. On the east side of the terrace stands a low, square, stepped platform, now fully restored. T h e remains lying around the platform suggest that it supported a Persian fire altar and sets of guardian eagles and lions. Other, smaller altars are scattered throughout the terrace: in front of each ancestor stela, by the deification sequence, and at the south west corner, near a subsidiary collection of carved stelae de picting the investiture of Antiochus. The West Terrace contains the same set of sculpted fea tures, but they are arranged a bit differently because of the shallow and cramped available floor space. Thus, the West Terrace lacks the stepped platform and high double podium prominent in the East Terrace's grandiose layout. The co lossal gods are less well preserved than those on the East Terrace, but the ancestor stelae survive somewhat more completely. T h e magnificent monumental deification stelae and lion horoscope, which are preserved nearly intact, were recently restored to their original positions. The North Ter race contains only a guardian eagle and a long wall of uncarved orthostats forming one side of the court. A rubble walkway rings the base of the tumulus, connecting all three terraces. If Antiochus's tomb chamber exists within the tu mulus, no entrance to it has been detected, despite numer ous test trenches and geophysical probes into the mound. The site's design, use of guardian animals, profuse stat uary, and ritual symbols set within a cultic context perpet uate long-established local traits dating from the period of the Hittite Empire. Late Hellenistic architectural vocabulary and contemporary Persian religious iconography were in tegrated with indigenous features into an elegant and co herent statement of power and piety. The site is important because (i) it is the most striking and informative monument of the Hellenistic ruler cult; (2) it presents an excellent reflection of the fusion of Ana tolian, Persian, and Hellenistic cultural and artistic conven tions; ( 3 ) it provides telling testimony to the manner in which Mithraism, a new agrarian religion sweeping across borders from east to west, permeated long-established Hel lenistic beliefs (the sculpture and inscriptions illustrate re markably the regional tendency toward religious syncretism in the crucial decades just preceding the Christian era); and ( 4 ) the exact date provided by the astronomical data on An tiochus's horoscope stelae furnish a monument firmly placed in the mid-first century B C E , from which to study other Hellenistic monuments that lack fixed dates. At Antiochus's hierothesion the separate elements of ar chitecture, sculpture, inscriptions, and the natural landscape are intertwined in a complex and delicate balance that recalls and reflects the king's immersion in a Greek, Roman, and
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Parthian military and cultural environment. The total effect of the sanctuary at Nemrud Dagi is unique, as a result not only of Antiochus's syncretistic proclivities, but ultimately of an underlying tenacity of indigenous Anatolian traditions. [See also Hittites.] BIBLIOGRAPHY T h e r e is currently no c o m p l e t e or fully accurate m o n o g r a p h on N e m r u d Dagi, however, a comprehensive excavation report is forth c o m i n g (see Sanders below). T h e publications by T h e r e s a Goell, di rector of the site's excavations, are all preliminary, and therefore partial, studies. All otiier publications a b o u t the site are based primarily on the incorrect, fragmentary, a n d largely inaccessible books by H u m a n n and Puchstein (i 890) a n d H a m d y Bey a n d Osgan Effendi (1883), or on the early reports by Goell. D o r n e r , Friedrich Karl. Der Thron der Goiter auf dem Nemrud Dag: Kommagene, das grosse archaalogische Abenteuer in der ostlichen Tilrkei. 2d ed., rev. Lilbbe, 1987. Exhaustive review of Commagenian sites, including N e m r u d D a g i , comprising the final c o m p e n d i u m of work by a G e r m a n epigrapher w h o specialized in Commagenian history. D o r n e r discovered a n d excavated Arsameia on die N y m p h a i o s , the hierothesion a n d m o u n t a i n t o p retreat of Mitiiradates Callinicus, fa ther of Antiochus. Goell, T h e r e s a . " T h e Excavation of the 'Hierothesion' of Antiochus I of C o m m a g e n e on N e m r u d D a g h , 1953-1956." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 147 (October 1957): 4-22. R e view of the author's first excavation seasons, including a survey of previous scholarship, t h e site's regional context, the importance of the site for late Hellenistic scholarship, and problems still to be re solved. Goell, T h e r e s a . " T h r o n e above the E u p h r a t e s . " National Geographic Magazine 119.3 (1961): 390-405. General essay on the site and brief s u m m a r y of the basic remains, as well as a colorful description of the region, the author's exploits in the territory, and the conditions u n d e r which excavations were carried out. Generously illustrated. Goell, T h e r e s a . "Geophysical Survey of die Hierodiesion and T o m b of Antiochus I of C o m m a g e n e , T u r k e y . " National Geographic Society Research Reports: 1963 Projects, p p . 83-102. Washington, D . C . , 1968. Presents the findings of the pioneering geophysical explorations of the m o u n d a n d terraces, of which the primary objective was to locate the t o m b chamber of Antiochus. T h e seismic refraction and electri cal resistivity surveys, e q u i p m e n t a n d methods used, and the results are presented in s o m e w h a t technical language. Goell, T h e r e s a . " T h e N e m r u d Dagh (Turkey) Geophysical Surveys of 1964." National Geographic Society Research Reports: 1964 Projects, p p . 61-81. W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , 1969. S u m m a r y of die second and last geophysical probing of the m o u n d , using seismic refraction, magnetic, and gravity techniques, with a review of die equipment, methods, and results, a n d suggestions for further tests. H a m d y Bey, O s m a n , a n d O s g a n Effendi. Le tumulus de Nemroud-Dagh: Voyage, description, inscriptions (1883). Istanbul, 1987. Remarkable work—given the authors' brief stay at the site and the 4m of snow covering some of the monuments—attributing the site to Antiochus I V , mid-first century CE. T h e publication was rushed to press to counter preliminary analyses offered in 1882 by Otto Puchstein. Contains n u m e r o u s illustrations, particularly of the inscriptions. H u m a n n , Karl, a n d Otto Puchstein. Reisen in Kleinasien undNordsyrien, 2 vols. Berlin, 1890. T h e fundamental publication of the site and region, u p o n which all subsequent interpretations have been based until Goell's excavations dramatically altered our understanding of N e m r u d Dagi's design, date, heritage, a n d art historical significance
126
NEO-HITTITES
(see Goell, Sanders). Contains numerous errors in analysis a n d tran scription of the inscriptions, primarily the result of limited excavation time, lack of knowledge regarding the yet to b e discovered indige nous Anatolian cultures, a n d an overwhelming tendency to judge remains against an ideal Greek model. T h e authors present a date of 17 July 98 BCE for the Lion Horoscope. Sanders, Donald H., ed. Nemrud Dagi: The Hierothesion of Antiochus I of Commagene; Results of the American Excavations Directed by Theresa B. Goell. 2 vols. Winona Lake, Ind., 1995. Final a n d comprehensive excavation report, including all the work of Goell and her collabo rators (most data heretofore unavailable) on t h e geography of the region, its architecture, sculpture, inscriptions, and small finds, with a synthesis of the geophysical probes. Important as a corrective to the numerous errors a n d misstatements in previous publications about the site. Lavishly illustrated. T u m a n , V. S. " T h e T o m b of Antiochus Revisited: Planetary Align ments and t h e Deification of the K i n g . " Archaeoastronomy 7.1-4 (1984): 56-69. Suggests an alternative interpretation of the Lion Horoscope stelae, giving a date of 4-5 February 55 BCE on which occurred a significant alignment of planets. T h e author posits a di rect relationship between this event a n d the selection of Antiochus's pantheon. Although weak on art historical analysis, the reassessment of the site's iconography merits consideration in all future studies. D O N A L D H . SANDERS
NEO-HITTITES. T h e term used to designate the Iron Age states that succeeded the Hittite Empire in southeast Anatolia and North Syria is Neo-Hittite. [See Hittites.] It re flects the use of the term Hatti for these peoples by their neighbors, principally the Assyrians. These states no longer used the Hittite language written in cuneiform on clay tab lets (like those in the Hattusa archives); instead they contin ued the practice of the Hittite kings in writing monumental inscriptions in the hieroglyphic script and Luwian language. [See Luwians.] Evidence suggests tiiat they also wrote their everyday texts on perishable materials tiiat have not sur vived. The bulk of die population as well as the rulers appear to have been Luwian speaking, which implies a migration of this people from the Anatolian plateau into Syria at the fall of the Hittite Empire. The Neo-Hittite states seem partiy to correspond to old centers and provinces of the Hittite Empire and partiy to be new foundations. At the center lay Carchemish, where con tinuity of occupation from the Hittite Empire is likely. [See Carchemish.] Limited excavation of the site by a British ex pedition (1911-1914) exposed parts of the citadel and fortifications and especially an area of the lower town and recovered a considerable amount of sculpture and inscrip tions. On the east bank of the Euphrates River 20 km (12 mi.) south of Carchemish, Tell Ahmar, ancient Til Barsip, was excavated by a French expedition (1929-1931), revealing a provincial Assyrian palace, under which lay the palace of the earlier rulers (see Thureau-Dangin and Dunand, 1936). [See Til Barsip.] Hieroglyphic inscriptions give the history of a Neo-Hittite dynasty of at least four generations. T h e
site, now threatened witii flooding by a barrage, is again (1993) under investigation by an expedition from Mel bourne University (Bunnens, 1990). On the west bank of the Upper Euphrates the site of Ar slantepe (ancient Melid) was excavated by a French expe dition (1932-1933, 1938) that recovered its main N e o Hittite monument, the Lion Gate, with its sculpture and inscriptions (Delaporte, 1940). [See Arslantepe.] A series of royal inscriptions from the valley of the Tohma Su marks the expansion of Melid westward, and a stela from Elbistan records die colonization of that plain by a Melidian ldng. In 1947, Turkish excavations at the neighboring site of Karahoyuk discovered another large stela in situ (Ozgtic, 1949). An Italian expedition resttmed excavations at Arslantepe in 1961 that are still underway to investigate the mound's levels (for full bibliography, see Frangipane, 1993). On the Euphrates between Melid and Carchemish lay Kummuh, the Iron Age predecessor of classical Commagene, with its capital at Samsat Ployiik on the river. Rescue excavations at sites along the river preceded their flooding by a barrage in 1989, but no very notable Neo-Hittite re mains were recovered (see Moore, 1993; Summers et al., I993). Hieroglyphic inscriptions, the work of a Hittite dy nasty, are known from other sites. West of Kummuh, Marqas (modern Maras, the capital of the small state of Gurgum), in spite of a complete absence of archaeological investigation, has yielded a series of sculp tures and inscriptions. T h e latter attest the existence of a seven-generation dynasty in the period from 1000-800 B C E ; the former are funerary in character, suggesting as provenance the unlocated cemetery. T h e Syrian-Hittite Expedition of the University of Chi cago (1933-1938) investigated die modern 'Aniuq, die king dom of Unqi, on die plain of Antioch (Braidwood, 1937; Haines, 1971). [See 'Arnuq.] T h e Iron Age capital at Tell Ta'yinat yielded a typical Neo-Hittite palace-citadel and fortification complex, though the excavated sculpture and inscriptions were badly destroyed, probably in antiquity by die Assyrian conquerors. T h e Syrian Department of Antiq uities has uncovered a massive, early Neo-Hittite temple at 'Ain Dara', another Unqi site (Abou Assaf, 1990). [See Ain Dara\] A Danish expedition from the University of Copenhagen (1931-1938) excavated the most southern state witii NeoHittite remains, Hama, ancient Flamath, which revealed an other typical Neo-Hittite citadel of die ninth century B C E , die work of a Hittite dynasty, as its hieroglyphic inscriptions show (Fugmann et al., 1948-1990). [See Hama.] By the eighth century B C E , political power had passed to an Aramean dynasty. In Plain Cilicia another Neo-Hittite kingdom is known, but of its capitals, the site of ancient Adana has not been located, while Tarsus, excavated by an American expedition (1934-1938,1947-1949) has not yielded substantial remains c
NERAB INSCRIPTIONS of the period (Goldmann, 1956-1963). [See Cilicia.] Its civ ilization is thus represented by the small provincial site of Karatepe in the hills north and east of the plain. There, a hilltop fort, excavated by a Turkish expedition since 1947, has two monumental gateways decorated by sculptured or thostats and a large bilingual inscription in hieroglyphic L u wian and alphabetic Phoenician (for bibliography, see Orthmann, 1980). [See Karatepe Phoenician Inscriptions.] This bilingual, which has been of great significance in the deci pherment of hieroglyphic Hittite, provides the longest in scription of the hieroglyphic corpus and probably also the latest (c. 700 B C E ) . The southeast Anatolian plateau is not well known archaeologically in this period, but it is quite rich in monu ments. A western group centering on the mountains Karadag and Kizildag probably date to the twelfth century B C E and provide evidence of continuity from the Hittite Empire. The other two groups, a northern one covering the modern provinces of Kayseri and Nevsehir and a southern one cov ering Nigde, are both late (late eighth century BCE) and attest the works of Anatolian dynasties of the period. In addition to the evidence of their own hieroglyphic in scriptions, sources for the history of the Neo-Hittite states can be drawn from the inscriptions of the Assyrians, who attacked, harried, and ultimately destroyed them. In the late eighth century B C E , the Assyrians broke up these states one by one, removing their native populations and constituting the resettled territories as Assyrian provinces. This process proved terminal for Hittite civilization, which finally disap peared from history at this date. [See Assyrians.]
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Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 3.1, edited by John B o a r d m a n et al., p p . 372-441. 2d ed. C a m b r i d g e , 1982. General historical overview, including evidence drawn from detailed interpretations of the hier oglyphic inscriptions. Hawkins, J. D . " T h e Syro-Hittite States." I n The Cambridge Ancient History, plates to vol. 3, p p . 65-92. Cambridge, 1984. Illustrations to citation above, with detailed explanatory text for each picture. Hawkins, J. D . In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Ar chaologie, vols. 4-8. Berlin a n d N e w York, 1972-1990. S e e t h e entries for Halab, Plamath, Hatti, Hattin ( U n q i ) , Hilakku (Cilicia), Irhuleni ( H a m a t h ) , Jau-bi'di ( H a m a t h ) , Karatepe, Karkamis, Kinalua (Unqi), K u m m u h , L u h u t i ( H a m a t h ) , M a n s u a t e ( H a m a t h ) , M a r a s , Marqas, and Melid. General encyclopedia entries with detailed ref erences covering history, excavation, a n d indigenous sources; in cludes m o s t of the Neo-Hittite states u n d e r one heading or another except Q u e (Cilicia), T a b a l (Anatolian plateau), a n d Til Barsip (Tell Ahmar). Hogarth, David G., et al. Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis, vol. 1, Introductory (Hogarth); vol. 2, The Town Defences ( C . L e o n a r d Woolley); vol. 3, The Excavations in the Inner Town; The Hittite Inscriptions (Woolley a n d R. D . Barnett). L o n d o n , 1914-1952. M o o r e , John. Tille Hoyiik 1: The Medieval Period. British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, M o n o g r a p h n o . 14. L o n d o n , 1993. O r t h m a n n , Winfried. " K a r a t e p e . B. Archaologisch." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 5.5-6, p p . 41 iff. Berlin, 1980. Ozgtic, T a h s i n , and N i m e t Ozgtic. Ausgrabungen in Karahoyiik. A n kara, 1949. S u m m e r s , G. D . , et al. Tille Hoyiik 4: The Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age Transition. British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, M o n g r a p h no. 15. L o n d o n , 1993. T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Francois, a n d M a u r i c e D u n a n d . Tille Barsib. Paris, 1936. Wa'fler, M a r k u s . " Z u Status u n d Lage von T a b a l . " Orientalia 52 (1983): 181-193. J. D .
HAWKINS
BIBLIOGRAPHY K
A b o u Assaf, Ali. Der Tempelvon Ain Dam. Mainz a m Rhein, 1990. Braidwood, Robert J. Mounds in the Plain of Antioch. Oriental Institute Publications, 46. Chicago, 1937. B u n n e n s , G u y , ed. TellAhmar, 1988 Season. Publications of the M e l b o u r n e University Expedition to T e l Ahmar, vol. 1. Louvain, 1990. First report on the new series of excavations, with an overview of previous work. Delaporte, Louis. Malatya, Arslantepe, vol. 1, La Porte des Lions. Paris, 194°. Desideri, Paolo, and A n n a M . Jasink. Cilicia: Dall'eta di Kizzuwatna alia conquista macedone. T u r i n , 1990. T h e m o s t up-to-date survey of the sources for Cilicia. Frangipane, Marcella. "Melid. B . Archaologisch." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archaologie, vol. 8.1-2, p p . 50-52. Berlin, 1993. F u g m a n n , Ejnar, et al. Llama II: Les premiers habitants et la ville prehellenistique de Hamath, vol. 1, L'architecture ( F u g m a n n ) ; vol. 2, Les objets de la periode dit Syro-Hittite ( P . J. Riis a n d Marie-Louise Buhl); vol. 3, Les cimetieres a cremation (Riis). C o p e n h a g e n , 1948-1990. G o l d m a n , Hetty, ed. Excavations at Gozlii Kule, Tarsus, vol. 2, Prom the Neolithic Period through the Bronze Age; vol. 3, The Iron Age. Princeton, 1956-1963. Haines, Richard C. Excavations in the Plain ofAntioch, vol. 2, The Struc tural Remains of the Later Phases. Oriental Institute Publications, 95. Chicago, 1971. Hawkins, J. D . " T h e Neo-Hittite States in Syria, a n d Anatolia." In The
NERAB INSCRIPTIONS. Two basalt funerary ste lae, inscribed in Aramaic and belonging to two priests of the moon god Sahr, were found in 1891 by fellahin digging clay for the walls of their houses on a tell abutting the small village of Nerab (about 7 Ion, or 4 mi., southeast of Aleppo, Syria). T h e stelae were associated with an uninscribed sarcophagus hewn from the same material, containing two skeletons. The sarcophagus had been uncovered two years previously in similar circumstances (Clermont-Ganneau, 1897, PP> 183— 184). Charles Clermont-Ganneau obtained the stelae for France and had them brought to the Louvre museum, where they remain. He published them in 1897. Each priest is carved in bas-relief on a stela with a rounded top. In Nerab I (93 X 35 cm), Sin-zer-ibni stands with his right arm raised in a gesture of prayer or adoration. His fringed robe, wrapped around his right shoulder, leaving his left shoulder bare, reaches to his bare feet. He is wearing a round cap and in his left hand he grasps some folded fabric, possibly fringed. T h e text surrounds his head and then con tinues across the bottom of his robe from the knee down: S i n - z e r - i b n i , priest of
Sahr in
N e r a b , deceased. A n d
this is his
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NERAB INSCRIPTIONS
image a n d his s a r c o p h a g u s ( ? ) . W h o e v e r y o u are, s h o u l d y o u carry off (?) this i m a g e a n d t h e s a r c o p h a g u s (?) from its p l a c e , m a y S a h r a n d S h a m a s h a n d Nikkal a n d N u s k tear o u t y o u r n a m e a n d y o u r place from life, a n d m a y they kill you with a n a s t y d e a t h a n d destroy y o u r offspring. B u t if y o u g u a r d tine i m a g e a n d this s a r c o p h a g u s (?), afterward, m a y w h a t b e l o n g s to y o u b e g u a r d e d .
Nerab II (95 X 45 cm) depicts She'gabbar wearing the same cap and robe worn by Sin-zer-ibni on stela I. He sits before a well-stocked offering table, feet resting on a foot stool. His left hand holds a drinking cup close to his lips. Facing him from across the table stands an attendant, carved on a smaller scale, either whisking flies from the table or fanning the priest. T h e text is inscribed on the flat raised surface above this scene: S h e ' g a b b a r , priest o f S a h r i n N e r a b . T h i s is his i m a g e . B e c a u s e of m y righteous c o n d u c t before h i m h e gave m e a g o o d n a m e a n d p r o l o n g e d m y days. O n t h e d a y I died, m y m o u t h w a s n o t s t o p p e d from speaking; a n d w i t h m y eyes, w h a t w a s I seeing? C h i l d r e n of the fourth g e n e r a t i o n w e p t over m e [or: " a n d w i t h m y o w n eyes I w a s witnessing t h e children of t h e f o u r t h g e n e r ation. T h e y w e p t over m e . . . " ] a n d b e c a m e c r a z e d w i t h grief. T h e y d i d n o t set a n y silver o r b r o n z e vessel beside m e . T h e y set m e (here) with m y clothes (only) so t h a t , in the future, y o u w o u l d n o t carry off m y s a r c o p h a g u s (?). W h o e v e r y o u a r e — s h o u l d y o u c o m m i t w r o n g a n d carry m e off, m a y S a h r a n d Nikkal a n d N u s k m a k e his d e a t h o d i o u s , a n d m a y his posterity perish.
The script of the stelae is fairly conservative (Naveh, 1970, pp. 17-18; Gibson, 1975, p. 94). Virtually every form has a precedent in eighth-century B C E Aramaic inscriptions. A number of these forms, however, are at the innovating pole of the comparable forms (zayin, het, kaph, samekh, sade). Assuming that the lapidary style was conservative in its own time, the script fits tire early seventh century B C E . Fortunately for dating purposes, She'gabbar of Nerab II has turned up as "Se'gabbari, priest (sangu) of Nerab," in a Neo-Assyrian letter addressed to Sargon II (c. 710 BCE) pub lished by Simo Parpola (1985). T h e same name is attested in two other cuneiform sources from roughly the same tem poral and geographic horizon (c. 721-680 B C E ; Parpola, 1985, p. 273, n. 2), allowing a date in the first decades of the seventh century B C E for She'gabbar's funerary stela. The method of writing is scriptio continua throughout, without word dividers or spaces between words. T h e or thography is conservative and conforms to the practice of the Old Aramaic inscriptions of the ninth and eighth cen turies BCE. The language is transitional between the Old Ar amaic of the ninth and eighth centuries and the Official Ar amaic of the Persian period. Certain consonants later lost through merger in the Persian period are still represented as they are in Old Aramaic (cf., e.g., I't'hz IL4; 'srh, 'srk 1:8, 10; tnsr, ynsr 1:12,13). T h e form of the negative in the Nerab stelae (11:4, 6, 8) is simply as in Old Aramaic generally (and in the Assur ostracon), in contrast to /' in the texts of
the Persian period. [See Assur.] On the other hand, the vac illation between assimilated (yshw l:g) and nonassimilated forms (tnsr, ynsr L 1 2 , 13) falls between the Old Aramaic inscriptions, which generally (outside of the Tell Fakhariyah inscription) assimilate, and the official and literary docu ments of the Persian period, which do not assimilate these forms. [See Fakhariyah Aramaic Inscription.] T h e form yktlwk (1:11) presupposes the *qtl form of the root for "to kill," widely attested from the Persian period, in contrast to the original *qtl reflected in the Old Aramaic inscriptions (and in cognate languages). Moreover, the language behind the Nerab inscriptions has already developed the quasi-ver bal use of the participle (mhzh 'nh IL5) entirely absent in the Old Aramaic inscriptions of the ninth and eighth cen turies B C E , but widely attested in the Persian period. As funerary texts, the Nerab stelae are unique among early epigraphic Aramaic texts. They share a number of structural features with several Phoenician funerary inscrip tions, including autobiographical elements and curses pro nounced on the would-be violator of the funerary installa tions. [See Phoenician-Punic] In both inscriptions, but especially in Nerab II, the deceased speaks from beyond the grave. T h e curses are comparable to similar curses found in other Northwest Semitic funerary, commemorative, and vo tive inscriptions (Gevirtz, 1961). Hayim Tawil (1974, p p . 57-65) has demonstrated the traditional character of several motifs in Nerab II by adducing parallels in other Northwest Semitic and cuneiform texts. Most impressive, however, is the sequence of motifs (most in the same order) shared with Nerab II by the Harran funerary inscription of Nabonidus's mother Adda-guppi' (Gadd, 1958, p p . 46-51) cited by Tawil (i974> p. 65). The Nerab stelae exhibit an Assyrian influence in the names of the priests (Kaufman, 1970), in the formulae of the inscription (Tawil, 1974, pp. 57-65), and in the iconog raphy of the bas-reliefs (Gibson, 1975, p . 94). T h e gods mentioned—Shamash, Nikkal, Nusk, and Sin (in the Ara maic form of Sahr)—are Babylonian. Nikkal is the consort of the moon god Sin/Sahr, while Nusk (if not also Shamash) is their son. From the letter published by Parpola (1985) it is clear that Nerab (cuneiform evidence points to a vocali zation, Nereb) was administratively dependent on Harran, where the same holy family was worshiped. Theophoric names from cuneiform tablets from Nerab of more recent date (c. 560-520 B C E ; Dhorme, 1928; Oelsner, 1989, pp. 6 8 69, 76) indicate the longevity of tire cult of this holy family in Nerab. [See also Aramaic Language and Literature; Imperial Ar amaic; and the biography of Clermont-Ganneau.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
C ler mont- G a nnea u, Charles S. " L e steles arameennes d e N e i r a b . " Etudes d'Archeologie Orientate 2 (1895): 182-223. See with C l e r m o n t Ganneau (1897).
NESSANA C l e r m o n t - G a n n e a u , Charles S. Album d'anliquith orientates: Recaeilde monuments inedits ou pen connus. Paris, 1897. With C l e r m o n t - G a n neau (1895), the editio princeps of the N e r a b stelae. Serious study should begin with the photographic plates, which are still the best published, especially for N e r a b I. T h e s e are more readily available, although reduced a n d somewhat poorly reproduced, in Driver (1976, pi. 59.1-2) below. D h o r m e , Paul. " L e s tablettes babyloniennes de N e i r a b . " Revue d'As syriologie 25.2 (1928): 53-82. Driver, Godfrey R. Semitic Writing: From Pictograph to Alphabet. 3d ed. L o n d o n , 1976. Fitzmyer, Joseph A., a n d Stephen A. K a u f m a n . An Aramaic Bibliogra phy, part 1, Old, Official, and Biblical Aramaic. Baltimore and L o n don, 1992. T h e fullest bibliography o n the N e r a b inscriptions. G a d d , C.J. " T h e H a r r a n Inscriptions of Nnbonidus." Anatolian Studies 8 (1958): 35-92. pis. 1-16. Gevirtz, Stanley. "West-Semitic Curses a n d t h e P r o b l e m of the Origins of Hebrew L a w . " Vetus Testamentum 11 (1961): 137-158. Gibson, John C. L . Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 2, Ara maic Inscriptions, Including Inscriptions in the Dialect of Zenjirli. O x ford, 1975. T h e m o s t up-to-date treatment in English, with useful philological notes, in spite of their brevity (see p p . 93-98). Should be read critically. Kaufman, Stephen A. "Si'gabbar, Priest of Sahr in N e r a b . " Journal of the American Oriental Society 90 (1970): 270-271. N a v e h , Joseph. " T h e D e v e l o p m e n t of tire Aramaic Script." Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 5 (1970): 21-43. Oelsner, Joachim. "Weitere B e m e r k u n g e n zu d e n N e i r a b - U r k u n d e n . " AltorientalischeForschungen 16 (1989): 68-77. Parpola, Simo. "Si'gabbar of N e r a b R e s u r r e c t e d . " Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 16 (1985): 272-275. Pritchard, James B., ed. The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament. 2d ed. Princeton, 1969. See plates 280 a n d 635. Rel atively good photographic plates, especially for N e r a b II (no. 635); more accessible t h a n C l e r m o n t - G a n n e a u . Tawil, Hayim. " S o m e Literary Elements in the Opening Sections of the H a d a , Zakir, a n d the N e r a b II Inscriptions in the Light of East and West Semitic Royal Inscriptions." Orientalia 43 (1974): 40-65. DOUGLAS M . G R O P P
NESSANA, site located in the western Negev desert, 52 km (32 mi.) soutiiwest of Beersheba (30°53' N , 34°26' E). Founded by Nabateans in tire Hellenistic period, Nessana was occupied until the Early Arab period. T h e modern vil lage of Auja al-Hafir is located on the site of the ancient town. It is west of Wadi Hafir, below the acropolis where the remains described below are located. T h e H. D u n scombe Colt expedition excavated die site for two seasons in die 1930s under tire auspices of the British School of Ar chaeology in Jerusalem. Dan Urman (1990-1991) resumed excavations in 1987, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Au thority. When Nessana was first inhabited is unclear. T h e earliest remains date to die third century B C E , when Nabateans settied this region of the Negev. Finds from this period include coins from Egypt and Judea (Judah) and imported Helle nistic pottery. T h e date and function of the earliest building (27 X 25 m) are difficult to determine because in the Byz antine period the North Church was built in die same lo
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cation. Colt thought the earliest building was a Flellenistic fortress because it had thick walls and towers. Avraham Ne gev (1993) believes that the walls and towers were Byzantine renovations and suggests tiiat it may have been a Nabatean temple, built between 30 B C E and 60 CE. In die same period, a large staircase was built up to the acropolis. There is no evidence of new building activity and only a few small finds between 60 and 200 CE. It is possible tiiat the site was abandoned for part of this period. It was occupied after the late third century: a fortress (85 X 35 m) was built adjacent to die south side of the Nabatean temple. It had rooms along the western wall, and, later, rooms were added along the eastern wall. It was probably one of several forts built by Diocletian and Constantine to form a regional de fense system in the fourth century. Local troops manned the fort until their unit was disbanded; the building subsequently became part of a monastery. Not long after the fort was built, a Christian church com plex was erected on the foundations of the Nabatean temple. T h e complex consisted of the church, a courtyard, rooms south of tile church, and an atrium to the east of the church. T h e church is a narrow, three-aisled basilica (19 X 10.7 m). It had a marble floor with opus sectile inlays. West of the nave was a baptistery, and north of it was a chapel. T h e nave was entered through its south wall, which led into a narrow courtyard. On the south side of die courtyard are several rooms, two of which functioned as a martyrion (a burial chamber witii inscriptions to different saints). East of the courtyard and the basilica was an atrium tiiat was con nected to the old monumental staircase, the entrance to the complex. Numerous papyri were found in die martyrion, including literary and nonliterary texts. The literary papyri include fragments from classical authors and religious texts. T h e nonliterary texts are legal documents, such as contracts and receipts or church and military documents. They are written in Greek and Arabic and are dated to between 512 and 689. In about 601, a second church was built on a hill soLtthwest of the Roman fortress. It, too, was a three-aisled basilica (20.8 X 14.1 m). On the south side of the nave was a smaller chapel (6.22 X 13.2 m), and west of die nave was an atrium. T h e entire complex was built of well-dressed stone and paved. Nessana flourished after the Islamic conquest until the eighth century. T h e reasons for its decline are uncertain. [See also Judah; Nabateans; and Negev.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Casson, Lionel, a n d Ernest L . Hettich, eds. Excavations at Nessana, vol. 2, Literary Papyri. Princeton, 1950. Colt, H . D u n s c o m b e , ed. Excavations at Nessana. Vol. 1. Princeton, 1962. Kraemer, C. J., ed. Excavations at Nessana, vol. 3, Non-Literary Papyri. Princeton, 1958. T h i s a n d t h e volumes above comprise the final re port for the 1935-1937 Colt excavations. Volume 1 describes the site's architecture a n d history a n d catalogs various finds (glass, coins,
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NEUTRON ACTIVATION ANALYSIS
lithics, pottery, etc.). T h e second a n d third volumes describe the papyri found at Nessana. Mayerson, Philip. "P. Ness. 58 and T w o Vaticinia ex Eventu in H e brew." Zeitschrift fiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 77 (1989): 283-286. Discusses Nessana after the Islamic conquest and how the U m a y y a d government's policies affected the town. Negev, Avraham. " N e s s a n a . " In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, p p . 1145-1149. Jerusalem and N e w York, 1993. Excellent summary of excavations at Nessana; overturns some of Colt's theories by using more recent archaeolog ical data and comparing Nessana to other Nabatean sites. U r m a n , Dan. " T e l Nessana: A Meeting Place of Cultures during the Byzantine Period." Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 10 (1990-1991): 103-104. Brief summary of a lecture describing ex cavations at Nessana (1987-1991); mentions areas excavated by Colt and some new excavations in the lower city. ADAM LYND-PORTER
NEUTRON ACTIVATION ANALYSIS. T h e chemical composition, or "fingerprint," of an object can be determined by trace- and major-element analysis. T h e method, neutron activation analysis (NAA), measures the quantities of a large number of constituent elements from only a small sample of an object (typically 50-100 mg). NAA's widest application in archaeology has been in deter mining the chemical composition of ceramics in order to establish place of origin. NAA has also been applied with great success to obsidian, flint, glass, jade, marble, and ba salt. By applying statistical tests to the composition of a col lection of samples, it is possible to determine if the samples come from the same or a different source. It is also possible to determine where an artifact originated by matching its chemical composition to that characterizing a particular site. However, because the methods employed in ceramic pro duction can change the composition of the clay (e.g., if tem per is added or clays are mixed) and because the chemical reference compositions characterizing differentpottery-production sites may not be available, tracking the sources of ancient pottery is a complicated task. Reference composi tions are usually not based on clay analysis but on the chem ical analysis of ceramics that can be unequivocally assigned to a specific site or region. The composition of the ceramic reflects the composition of the clay plus whatever else the potter added to the clay. Wasters are ideal for establishing local compositions. Kiln and tabun ceramic linings, mud bricks, footbaths, and loom weights can serve as reference materials to establish a local chemical profile. Ceramic chemical compositions that persist over long time periods at a given site and that represent different types of pottery can also serve as reference groups. T h e use of ceramic rather than clay compositions in NAA is also preferred because the composition of a given clay bed may not be uniform over a wide area and because it usually is not known where ancient potters got their clay. The availability of chemical reference compositions is a technical problem that is gradually being
overcome by judicially selected analysis and interlaboratory calibrations. One of the advantages of NAA over other an alytical techniques is that NAA laboratories can be intercalibrated very precisely. A fairly simple way to uncover similarity between chem ical compositions, and hence commonality of origin, is to do a regression analysis, in which a constant relationship between two chemical compositions is sought. If a constant factor is found that connects every element of one compo sition to every element of the other, the two represent the same clay source, diluted to different degrees. Considering dilution is a common but critical factor in chemical analyses of pottery. In order to determine the place of manufacture of a col lection of ceramic objects sampled, the chemical fingerprint of the clay sources or ceramic compositions at various sites across a wide area is needed. Without such reference groups, NAA, coupled with statistical analysis, can only tell whether the objects measured came from one or more sources—al though this information is valuable in itself. NAA provides precision and accuracy for a large number of elements, the method uses instruments (no chemical preparation of the sample is required; hence, I Instrumental] NAA is often used in tests in place of NAA); many element abundances are measured simultaneously; measurements can be automated; errors of measurement can be precisely determined; and large numbers of samples can be measured in relatively short time round the clock with little human attendance. [See also Analytical Techniques.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Perlman, I., a n d F . Asaro. "Pottery Analysis by N e u t r o n Activation Analysis." Archaeometry 11 (1969): 21-52. Yellin, Joseph, I. Perlman, F . Asaro, H . V. Michel, a n d D . F . Mosier. " C o m p a r i s o n of N e u t r o n Activation Analysis from t h e L a w r e n c e Berkeley Laboratory and t h e Hebrew University." Archaeometry 20 (1978): 95-ioo. Yellin, Joseph, and A. M . Maier. "Origin of t h e Picotrial K r a t e r from the ' M y c e n a e a n ' T o m b at T e l D a n . " Archaeometry 34 (1992): 3136. Zorn, Jeffrey, Joseph Yellin, a n d J. Hays. " T h e M ( W ) S H S t a m p I m pressions and die Neo-Babylonian Period." Journal of the Israel Ex ploration Society 44 (1994): 161—183. JOSEPH YELLIN
NEUVILLE, RENE (i899-i952),prehistorian consid ered, together with Dorothy Garrod and Alfred Rust, to be one of the founders of modern Near Eastern prehistory. Born in Gibraltar, where his father was a diplomat, Neuville was sent to Jerusalem in 1926 as a chancellor of the French general consulate. While in that post (1926-1937), his in terest in prehistory emerged under the influence of Father Alexis Mallon when he became involved in Marion's Chal-
NEVALICORI colithic excavations for the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Je rusalem at U m m Qatafa in the Judean Desert and at Teleilat el-Ghassul. His own research concentrated on the Paleolithic sites of the Judean Desert and on the Qafzeh cave, near Nazareth. Among the Judean sites at which he worked are U m m Qatafa, where Acheulean industries were uncovered; Abu Sif, with a then new kind of Middle Paleolithic assemblage; and 'Erq el-Ahmar and el-Khiam, with unique stratifications of Upper Paleolithic, Epipaleolithic, and Neolithic layers. Qafzeh cave is well known for the association of modern humans with Middle Paleolithic industries and is of interest because of the presence of the early Upper Paleolithic at the top of the sequence. As early as 1934, Neuville proposed a first synthesis of the prehistory of Palestine. Using both his results and those from the Carmel caves, he was able to draw a sketch of human occupation in Palestine. [See Carmel Caves.] Draw ing from the knowledge he had acquired in Europe as a guide, but identifying some of the main specifics of the local tradition, he subdivided the Upper Paleolithic into six phases, avoiding European nomenclature. This work of the 1930s still underlies scholarly interpretations sixty years later. Neuville left Jerusalem in 1937 and spent several years in Spain and North Africa. Returning to Palestine in 1946, he prepared a monograph (1951) on his work in the Judean Desert. Through their work Neuville, Garrod, and Rust de veloped the teaching of Jacques de Morgan, according to whom the biblical record was of no value in understanding the prehistory of the Near East. Neuville was a pioneer in considering Near Eastern prehistory in the context of the worldwide study of the oldest developments of human life and in incorporating Near Eastern materials into the general framework of Quaternary research. [See also Judean Desert Caves; Teleilat el-Ghassul; and the biographies of Garrod and Mallon.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Neuville, Rene. " L e prehistorique d e Palestine." Revue Biblique 43 (1934): 237-259. Neuville, Rene. Le Paleolithique et le Mesolithique du desert de Judee. Archives de l'lnstitut de Paleontologie H u m a i n e , M e m o i r e 24. Paris, 1951. F R A N Q O I S R. V A L L A
NEVALI CORI, prehistoric settlement site below the village of Kantara Koy (now Gtilusagi), in the Hilvan district of the province of Sanli Urfa, Turkey (37°6C N , 38°7o' E ) . Since 1992 it has been covered by the Atatiirk Reservoir. Settlement was on a 90-meter-long and 40-meter-wide ter race below the Yangmtepe foothills, 490 m above sea level on the right side of the Kantara Cayi, 3 km (2 mi.) from the
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southeast bank of the Euphrates River in the foothills south of the Taurus. Nevali Cori was discovered in 1980 during a systematic survey carried out by Hans Georg Gebel as part of exca vations at Lidar Hoytik, 9 km (7 mi.) away. It was excavated in 1983, 1985-1987, and 1989-1991 by the University of Heidelberg, under the direction of Harald Hauptmann, in cooperation with the Archaeological Museum of Sanli Urfa. The aim of the excavations was to investigate the earliest occupation of the settlement, which is dated to the Pre-Pot tery Neolithic B (PPNB; 8800-7600 B C E ) , the beginning of agriculture and the domestication of animals. [See Agricul ture.] Stone cist graves in a small cemetery date from the Roman period. T h e Early Bronze Age IB level (c. 3000-2700 B C E ) contained a terraced limestone building. Pits with copper slag and crucibles were evidence of metallurgic activities. Twenty-three stone cist and pithos graves belong to this pe riod as well. [See Burial Techniques.] On the basis of the plain simple ware and reserved-slip ware typically found in such burials in North Syria, this settlement is contemporary with Hassek Hoytik 0-2, Kurban Hoytik VB and VA-B, Norsuntepe XXVI-XXV, a n d ' Amuq G. [See Grave Goods; Amuq.] A limestone wall surrounding an open area below the limestone hilltop is to be dated to the Middle Chalcolithic Halaf culture of the second half of the sixth millennium. Along its southern length, it consists of a 13-meter-long dou ble wall with a towerlike round building at each end. A small round structure just northeast of the enclosure contained the skeleton of a seated burial. Good parallels for the mono chrome and painted ceramics can be found in the Middle Euphrates area at Kurban Hoytik VIII, Cavi Tarlasi, and Tell Damisliya on the Middle Euphrates, and in 'Amuq D . The site's special significance, however, is in its Early-Mid dle P P N B settlement, which in the Taurus and its piedmont are represented by Cafer Hoytik near Malatya and Cayonii, north of Diyarbakir. [See Cayonii.] T h e core settlement (Nevah Cori I) contains five building phases, 2 m thick that, for the most part, was investigated (see below). T h e oppo site, west side of the valley was also settled (Nevah Con II); however, it consisted of only two building phases. The basic construction type for the twenty-three lime stone and mud-mortar buildings is a freestanding, long rec tangle with regular inner divisions and subfloor channels. This building type, characteristic of levels I-V, has a direct correspondence at Cayonii in the Intermediate level. Level I. In the lowest level (I) at Nevah Cori, two chan nels under a house (no. 21 A) floor ran along its long axis. Outside of the house were cooldng areas and roasting pits lined with gravel, as at Cafer Hoytik and Cayonii. Only wall fragments remain of a "cult building." [See Cult.] Existing carbon-14 dates give a calibrated age of between 8400 and 8100 B C E for this level, making it contemporary c
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witii Abu Hureyra 2A, Mureybet IV A, and the older levels at Cayonii in the Early PPNB. [See Mureybet.] T h e stoneimplement industry (consisting of flint), in which the bipolar striking technique dominates, supports this dating. The two largest groups of implements found are projectile points, in cluding tanged points of the Byblos type (also known from Bouqras, Jericho, and Ugarit), and harvest implements (i.e., blades with silicate luster). [See Bouqras; Jericho; Ugarit.] These indicate an economy based on hunting and the al ready developed agriculture (see above). Gazelle were es pecially prized as game animals—along with red deer, fallow deer, and wild boar—while sheep and goats were kept as domestic animals. [See Sheep and Goats.] There were plant ings of einkorn and emmer (Trilicum boeoticum and monococcum as well as Triticum dicoccoides and dicoccwri); barley (Hordeum spontaneum [distichon]); legumes such as lentils (Lens culinaris); peas (Pisum sativum); and other pulses. T h e food supply was supplemented by gathering pistachios, al monds, grapes, and wild grasses and bearded wheats (Aegilops squarosa or speltoide). [See Cereals.] Level II. In level II three buildings were situated next to each otiier (nos. 1 2 , 2 1 B , 26). The remaining buildings (nos. 16, 22, 25) and a sacred building in the west were set off by a ditch leading from the slope. Along the slope a wall formed the settlement boundary with Yangmtepe. T h e largest house (no. 26) was 19 m long and 6.5 m wide. The building's 16.10-meter-long main portion (toward the northeast) was a long rectangle with eight rooms arranged in two regular rows. The adjoining main building had its entrance on the
side facing the Kantara valley. T h e outer walls were .50 m thick and the inner walls .40 m tiiick. T h e construction, which encompassed five building stages, corresponds to the typical schema at Nevah Cori: the foundation platform, composed of large stone blocks, consisted of six rectangular strips with spaces (0.25-0.30 m) between them. T h e spaces were covered with stone slabs to produce subfloor channels. The outer walls and then the rooms were set above this con tinuous foundation platform, which was made even with stone ballast. T h e floor was covered witii a layer of gravel, and it and the stone walls were plastered with mud. T h e channels, which run through the platform, are left open on the outside, and so provided ventilation or cooling. T h e ex terior of the house was surrounded by a "bench" consisting of one layer of stone. Posts were set along the long sides to support the roof. The successor to die oldest cult building was well pre served. Its rectangular outline (13.9-13.5 m to a side) cov ered a surface of 188 sq m. The surrounding walls, still par tially preserved to a height of up to 2.8 m, consisted of layers of undressed stone covered witii plaster. Inside, a stone bench was positioned in front of the walls on three sides; eleven monolithic pillars with T-shaped capitals were set into the bench. T h e entrance, flanked by two pillars, lay in die southwest; in die southeast wall tiiere was a niche for a cult statue. The floor was made from terrazzo. Stone sculp tures representing birds and human/animal hybrids belong to this building. Level III. T h e settlement showed its most lavish con-
N E V A L I CORI. Building 3 , view from the northeast. (Archaologisches M u s e u m Sanliurfa)
NEVALICORI struction in level III. In the southeast, four houses (nos. 3, 2, 6, 7) were in parallel alignment. House 2 (16 X 6.8 m) and house 7 (14 X 6.10 m) show the same construction: a foundation platform of rectangular strips (eight and nine of them, respectively) with subfloor channels running through them (seven and eight of them, respectively). An open area separated these houses from those with a different orienta tion in the west and the latest sacred building erected on the spot of previous ones. T h e settlement was again closed off with a boundary wall toward the slope. Most of the houses contain up to nine small rooms arranged in three rows and seem to have been storehouses; house 6, however, based on its division into large rooms and its furnishings, can be in terpreted as a residence and workshop for the manufacture of stone implements and sculpture. T h e cult building was set direcdy into its underlying pred ecessor from level II, so mat its area was reduced to 155 sq m. On the inside a stone bench covered with monolithic stone slabs was set in front of the walls, except on the en trance side. Ten pillars were inserted between the slabs and an additional two pillars were placed at the entrance. T h e inside of the room, with two 3-meter-high sculptured pillars, was again outfitted with a terrazzo floor, as in the terrazzo building at Cayonii. A small niche for a cult statue was cut in the rear wall opposite tire entrance. Levels IV-V. Several buildings arranged in parallel rows belong to level IV, among them house 4 ( 1 2 X 8 m). A break in the continuity of settlement becomes apparent with the most recent level (V). Only one io-X-6-meter house (no. 1) survives from level V, and it lacks the previously char acteristic channels. T h e division of space—four equally large rooms with a diagonal area in front of them—corre sponds to buildings from the cell building phase at Cayonii. In addition to skeletons from "contracted-position" bur ials, deposits of skulls and partial burials were also found in
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the houses, generally below the floors. They provide evi dence for the skull cult, or ancestor worship, practiced in this period. Monumental stone buildings outfitted with lifesized limestone figures provide, for the first time, an idea of Early Neolithic worship. A clean-shaven head with a snake coiling itself like a braid, as well as a human torso, must have belonged to a male figure. In addition, there is a sculpture of a bird in flight and one of a hybrid creature with the body of a standing bird with a stylized human head. A composite figure shows two female figures crouching back to back sur mounted by a bird. It and another monumental female head were part of a carved column reminiscent of a totem pole. In the world of ideas, these symbol-laden images anticipate the later wall art at Catal Hoyiik; however, in their unique ness they go far beyond the usual ideas of Neolithic com munities in the Near East. [See Wall Paintings.] In addition to the large statues, a stone bowl with a relief on its exterior of two human figures framing a turtle (rep resenting fertility) and a limestone plate with an engraved hunting scene are especially fine. T h e small limestone sculp tures include naturalistic and stylized human heads and rep resentations of panthers, lions, wild boars, wild horses, bears, and vultures. There are female and male figures in sun-dried and fired clay, as well as polished-stone objects: axes, clubs, arm rings, and beads with single and multiple holes of the older bar form and the later butterfly form. T h e advanced technical level at the site is documented by a cop per bead—evidence of a preliminary stage of early metal lurgy (as at Cayonii, Tell Maghzaliyeh, Tell Ramad, and Asikh Hoyiik). S e t t l e m e n t Differentiation. Nevali Cori and neighbor ing settlements provide a differentiated picture of Early Ne olithic forms of organization in the southern Taurus pied mont. T h e settlements had different subsistence economies, which were already highly specialized because of specific environmental conditions. O n the Euphrates plain there was agriculture and fishing, and in the fertile alluvial land of the Harran plain (e.g., Giirciitepe) there was gazelle hunting as well. [See Fishing; Hunting.] On the limestone hilltops of the steppe, an additional settlement type appeared, as atGobekli Ziyaret Tepe, in which flint outcroppings were used to pro duce implements, and the easily worked limestone promoted the manufacture of small figures and large sculptures. In this settlement system, Nevali Cori may have functioned as a central site, where a central cult was located, tools and ob jects of religious significance were produced, and provisions stored. Its organization and coherence as a larger settlement strongly suggest such a role. BIBLIOGRAPHY H a u p t m a n n , Harald. "Nevali C o r i . " Anatolian Studies 3 4 (1984): 228; I
NEVALI CORI. Sanliurfa)
Limestone
bird sculpture.
(Archaologisches M u s e u m
8
3 7 ( 9 7): 206-207. H a u p t m a n n , Harald. "Nevali Cori: Architektur." Anatolica 15 (1988): 99-11 o.
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H a u p t m a n n , Harald. "Nevali Cori: Eine Siedlung des akeramischen Neolithikums am mittleren E u p h r a t , " Niirnherger BlatterzurArchaologieS ( I 9 9 I - I 9 9 2 ) : 15-33H a u p t m a n n , Harafd. "Ein Kultgebaude in Nevah Cori." In Between the Rivers and over the Mountains: Archaeologica Anatolica et Mesopotam ia, Alba Palmieri Dedicata, edited by Marcella Frangipane et al., p p . 37-69. R o m e , 1993. H a u p t m a n n , Harald. "Friihneolithische Steingebaude in Sudwestasien." In The Megalithic Phenomenon: Recent Research and EthnoArchaeologicalApproaches, edited by Karl W. Beinhauer et al. M a n n heim, 1996. Mellink, Machteld J. " N e v a h Cori." American Journal ofArchaeology 88 (1984): 449; 91 (1987): 10; 92 (1988): 104; 93 (1989): 107; 94 (1990): 127; 95 (i99i): 126-128; 96 (1992): 123-124; 97 (1993): 108-109. Schmidt, Klaus. "Nevali Cori: Z u m T y p e n s p e k t r u m der Silexindustrie u n d der iibrigen Kleinfunde." Anatolica 15 (1988): 161-201. Schmidt, Klaus. " T h e Nevah Cori Industry: Status of Research." In Neolithic Chipped Stone Industries of the Fertile Crescent, edited by Hans G. Gebel and Stefan Kozlowski, p p . 239-252. Studies in Early Near Eastern Production, Subsistence, and Environment, 1. Berlin, 1994. Schmidt, Klaus. "Nevah Cori: Chronology and Instrasite Distribution of Lithic T o o l Classes. Preliminary Results." In Neolithic Chipped Stone Industries of the Fertile Crescent, and Contemporary Taxa in Ad jacent Regions, edited by Stefan K. Kozlowski and Hans G. Gebel. Studies in Early N e a r Eastern Production, Subsistence, a n d Envi ronment, 3. Berlin, in press. HARALD HAUPTMANN
Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
NEW ARCHAEOLOGY. Originally used by Joseph Caldwell in 1959 to describe the increasing archaeological interest in North America in ecology, settlement patterns, and cultural process (Caldwell, 1959), "New Archaeology" entered the archaeological vernacular in 1962 with the pub lication of Lewis Binford's "Archaeology as Anthropology" (Binford, 1962). In that landmark article Binford argued that archaeology should be understood as having the same goals as anthropology: the recovery and explanation of patterns of similarity and difference in human cultural behavior. In the 1970s and 1980s, the term became largely synonymous with Processual Archaeology. The interests of the New Ar chaeology were generally paralleled in England in tire work of David Clarke (1968). Many of the same criticisms of the cultural-historical paradigm, and suggestions for a new ap proach, had been voiced by Walter W. Taylor in his pre scient, but neglected 1948 book A Study of Archaeology (1948; see generally Trigger, 1989). The New Archaeology sought to escape historical partic ularism and address issues of broad comparative and an thropological interest, including subsistence, land use, set tlement patterns, demography, and technology. It thus incorporated many of the interests of the cultural ecology approach that had emerged in the 1950s, particularly under the influence of Julian Steward (see especially Steward, 1955). T h e New Archaeology also incorporated the mate rialist approach of Leslie White, which saw culture as tech
nological, economic, social, and ideological subsystems de termined by the levels of technology and energy capture (White, 1949). These two positions were partially reconciled by the neo-evolutionary cultural anthropologists, such as Elman Service and Morton Fried (Service, 1962; Fried, 1967), whose evolutionary schemes (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states) and egalitarian, rank, and stratified societies gave ar chaeologists fixed typologies with which to theorize and cat egorize their data. While ahistorical or even antihistorical in practice (Patterson, 1990), New Archaeology therefore had significant interest in social organization and change—which proved especially influential in the emergence of debates over the origins of the state. Discussions over the causes and nature of social evolution, including the origins of the state, had been almost completely ignored by Syro-Palestinian ar chaeology. Among the concerns of the New Archaeology were a more rigorous scientific approach to archaeological method, including explicit research design and the use of statistics and computers, sampling strategies, and floral and faunal data. Among the techniques that came into use were flota tion of soil samples to recover botanical remains, analysis of animal bones to understand stock raising and utilization pat terns, and computers to execute multivariate statistical anal yses, especially cluster and regression analyses and tests of significance. An emphasis on explicit research design, which set out the goals and methods of a particular project, was one achievement of the period, though the concept was fre quently influenced by a unique epistemological orientation. The New Archaeology was concerned with more explicit archaeological theory based on scientific reasoning situated broadly witliin the logical positivist approach. T h e hypo thetical-deductive reasoning espoused by Carl Hempel was most influential. This view held that the only way that sci entific explanation could be verified was through the for mulation and testing of falsifiable hypotheses (see especially Watson et al„ 1971). In this manner archaeologists could generate "covering laws" or "nomothetic paradigms" that would supposedly represent proven patterns of human de velopment and behavior. While possessing an apparent clar ity, the hypothetical-deductive approach does not reflect the way "science" is actually done—nor does it account for the inherent limitations, and variability, of archaeological data. T h e statistical-relevance approach outlined by Wesley and Merrilee Salmon (Salmon, 1982), which accepts a prepon derance of affirmative evidence within a contingent context of discovery and analysis as supporting an explanation, more accurately reflects scientific and archaeological rea soning. Defined as a science, the New Archaeology drew freely from concepts and methods developed in other social sci ences, such as economics and political science. T h e intro duction of General Systems Theory, developed originally in evolutionary biology, and systems engineering gave archae-
NEW ARCHAEOLOGY ology a highly formalized series of concepts with which to explain social structure and change. Negative and positive feedback had the effects of either maintaining a steady state or bringing about change within a system. Decision-making theories developed originally in management science were also applied to explain how change was formulated and ef fected in human organization. T h e New Archaeology gen erally assumed optimizing and maximizing behavior based on least-effort and least-cost principles, which to an extent rendered past decision makers into protocapitalist business men. All these approaches deliberately compartmentalized aspects of the past and negated the role of the individual and of human agency and free will in favor of systems of terms and explanatory frameworks that appeared scientific and potentially quantifiable (see Moore, 1983). T h e generalizing and rationalizing bases of the New Archaeology attempted to situate archaeology within those sciences relevant to so ciety. Though originally a marginal or fringe approach centered, to a large extent, around Binford and his students, by the late 1960s and 1970s the New Archaeology had become the conventional mainstream, both in terms of method and the ory. By the late 1970s and 1980s, however, the approach per se had been surpassed by other developments, particularly in the areas of theory and epistemology. T h e emphasis on the material, rather than on the symbolic and ideological, and the social and cultural, rather than the individual, was eventually seen as incomplete and antihumanist. The short comings of the hypothetical-deductive approach were also highlighted, though the heightened interest in the philoso phy and epistemology of archaeology was a positive out growth of the New Archaeology's search for clarity and rigor (Redman, 1991; Watson, 1991; cf. Wylie, 1989). While the theoretical or philosophical underpinnings of the New Ar chaeology (empiricism and objectivity, scientism, and hy pothetical-deductive reasoning) have fallen away, the most significant and enduring legacies have been heightened con cern for careful research design, data recovery, and analysis using scientific techniques. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ameri can and European archaeologies have to an extent retained rationalist and empiricist practices while hotly debating a variety of theoretical approaches—including some that are explicitly relativistic, antiscientific, and political in orienta tion (e.g., Shanks and Tilley, 1987a, 1987b; cf. Watson, 1990). In terms of theory, the New Archaeology, as with previous and subsequent trends in anthropological archaeology, had little impact on Syro-Palestinian archaeology. Outside of the study of prehistory there was little interest in the compara tive study of human behavior and societies, and little un derstanding of how to gain insights through the integration of a variety of archaeological data. In Near Eastern archae ology as a whole, however, the New Archaeology had a sig nificant influence in the 1960s and 1970s on research in Iraq
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and Iran. Particularly important to the discussion were Rob ert Braidwood and Robert Adams of the University of Chi cago. Braidwood was vehemently opposed to the rhetoric of the New Archaeology, which he viewed as a humorless cult (Braidwood, 1971). His approach was nevertheless congru ent with the scientific and problem orientation of the New Archaeology. Adams was heavily influenced by the evolu tionary approach of Julian H. Steward and the settlementpattern techniques that had been used in New World ar chaeology. He has also been an acute and influential commentator on trends in archaeology and an advocate of bridging the humanities and social sciences (Adams, 1968, 1983). Adams's work on Mesopotamian settlement patterns and social evolution provides some of the best examples of New Archaeology-influenced research in the Near East (e.g., Adams, 1968, 1981). New Archaeology orientation is also reflected in the work of Kent Flannery, Frank Hole, and others on early village life and the origins of food production (Hole et al., 1969) and that of Gregory Johnson on settle ment patterns and the rise of the state in southwestern Iran (Johnson, 1973). With the exception of Adams, however, the influence of the New Archaeology has been largely re stricted to prehistory and the early historical periods in the Near East. The positive impact of the New Archaeology on archae ology in the Levant was methodological. A variety of new techniques was eventually incorporated into standard prac tice, such as animal bone archaeology, paleobotany, geol ogy, and a regional orientation. T h e most intense internal debates, however, remained parochial and emphasized local issues of philosophy and practice. These included whether archaeology in the southern Levant should be construed as "biblical" or "Syro-Palestinian," whether excavations should emphasize broad horizontal exposures or vertical depth, the relative stratigraphic control involved in these strategies, and the usefulness of section drawings (see Aha roni, 1973; Dever, 1973; 1981). The American Syro-Pales tinian archaeology position stressed independence and professionalization over the traditional secondary position of archaeology to biblical and historical studies; it sought to connect with the main stream of anthropological archae ology. Israeli archaeology has tended to absorb methodolog ical innovations and eschew overt theoretical orientations (see generally Bar-Yosef and Mazar, 1982; Glock, 1985; 1986; Broshi, 1987). Jordanian archaeology remains oriented toward cultural resource management issues, and its re search agenda is dominated by foreign archaeologists. T h e development of a local Jordanian school of archaeology con tinues, with predictable nationalistic and legitimizing ori entations. British, French, and German approaches to ar chaeology in the southern Levant do not appear to have been significantly influenced by the New Archaeology. Several examples trace the incorporation of new methods into American Syro-Palestinian archaeology (see generally
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Dever, 1985; 1988). The excavations at Gezer, in Israel, in the mid- to late 1960s employed a field geologist and also used the then-new flotation method to recover botanical ma terials. The project also hosted a British team that conducted a site catchment analysis, examining regional pedology and vegetation. T h e project, however, placed more emphasis on integrating the American orientation toward detailed ce ramic typology with the then also new Kenyon-Wheeler, or balk-to-locus, approach to digging (Dever and Lance, 1978). The Gezer final reports emphasize ceramics and stra tigraphy rather than an integrated view of the site and its setting through time. The Gezer project was also the progenitor of a number of projects in the 1970s and 1980s that were executed by former staff members. These include Be'er Resisim, Tell elHesi, Meiron, Tel Halif, Tel Miqne, and Ashkelon in Israel; Idalion on Cyprus; and the Wadi Tumilat project in Egypt. Each of these projects has also sought explicitly to incor porate new methodologies into its repertoire and has been, to greater and lesser degrees, self-conscious of develop ments in archaeological theory. These developments have come in part as a response to the institotionalization of the New Archaeology materialist orientation in the United States—and by accompanying changes in the political econ omy of archaeology. The latter include the need to dem onstrate legitimacy through explicit research designs in order to receive funding from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for An thropological Research, and the National Geographic So ciety (Yellen and Greene, 1985). The most self-conscious emulation of the New Archae ology appears in the Tell el-Hesi project (Worrell, 1989; Rose, 1989). Two of the innovations the project attempted to integrate were an explicit research design, with strong ecological and philosophical components, and a multidisciplinary staff. The staff included a geologist, paleoethnobotanist, and cultural and physical anthropologists. In real ity, however, the project had difficulty translating abstract concepts into practical goals for fieldwork. Testing ecolog ical hypotheses became exercises in collecting more and di verse information, rather than specific and constrained in vestigations. Interest in "lifeways," such as food and craft production, became merely the rationale for careful digging. While admirable in its multidisciplinary orientation, and for its early experimentation with computers, the project was ultimately unable to integrate goals and methods. T h e pro ject fell prey to lack of direction, and to the formidable chal lenges of excavating and eventually publishing a large multicomponent tell site. T h e example demonstrates the dif ficulty of applying or modifying a methodological program and scientific paradigm originated by and for archaeologists studying small, single-component sites. It further points out inadequacies in the New Archaeology paradigm itself: that of structuring research designs to address highly abstract questions of "evolution" and "process" for the purposes of
defining "laws." T h e Tell el-Hesi project has begun to pub lish its results in a highly traditional fashion, emphasizing stratigraphy, architecture, and material culture. The most successful examples of tire incorporation of methodological advances into archaeological practice are the Bab edh-Dhra' and Shiqmim projects, both late prehistoric sites. The Bab edh-Dhra' project, for example, examines, with a highly developed multidisciplinary emphasis, an Early Bronze Age site in Jordan, on the southeast plain of die Dead Sea. It includes a physical-anthropological component that has contributed greatiy toward understanding die health, nutrition, and demography of the population buried in the site's extensive cemeteries (Ortner, 1979). T h e geological investigations have led to an understanding of the site and of environmental change, and the ceramic analyses have been strongly emphasized (Beynon et a l , 1986; Schaub, 1987). A number of neighboring sites has also been exam ined, strengthening tire project's regional orientation (Coogan, 1984). [See Bab edh-Dhra'.] The Shiqmim project examines a Chalcolithic site in Israel's northern Negev desert. The site's actual excavation was preceded by an extensive regional archaeological survey tiiat illuminated Shiqmim's importance and larger context. In the excavation of the site and its associated cemetery par ticular attention has been paid to questions of subsistence in a semiarid environment, craft production, especially of cop per and chipped stone tools, and technological and spatial analyses of the ceramic assemblage. The result has been a number of summary and specialized reports that present and integrate the variety of data (Levy and Menahem, 1987; Levy and Shalev, 1989). While broadly conceived with eco logical concerns, the Shiqmim project has concenttated on tire practical matters of excavating, and analyzing and pub lishing data, rather than on self-conscious philosophical dis cussions. [See Shiqmim.] T h e most successful example of a project addressing a multicomponent site and its surrounding regions with an explicit theoretical orientation is the Hesban project. While the original rationale was to investigate what was hoped would be a biblical site, research was structured around the food-systems concept developed by 0ystein LaBianca that broadly addresses changing patterns of food production over time (LaBianca, 1986). This entailed a strong regional orientation, including archaeological and environmental surveys (LaBianca andLacelle, 1986). The project was also concerned with modern evidence for subsistence and social organization and therefore conducted ethnoarchaeological investigations of surrounding villages and bedouin encamp ments (LaBianca, 1990). T h e Madaba Plains Project has continued to creatively combine a variety of approaches within the framework of the food-systems concept (Geraty etal., 1989). [See Hesban.] While informed by advances in methodology, Syro-Palestinian archaeology remains firmly rooted in its culturalhistorical approach. The discipline stands at a crossroads:
NEW ARCHAEOLOGY whether to return to a particularist and parochial orientation or to move into the archaeological mainstream, in terms of integrating and contributing to the development of method and theory. T h e experience of the New Archaeology points out both the advantages and pitfalls of the latter direction. [See also Biblical Archaeology; Environmental Archae ology; Ideology and Archaeology; Settlement Patterns; and Statistical Applications. In addition, many of the sites men tioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A d a m s , Robert M c C . "Archaeological Research Strategies: Past and Present." Science 160 (1968): 1187-1192. A d a m s , Robert M c C . The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopota mia and Prehistoric Mexico. Chicago, 1971. A d a m s , Robert M c C . Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and. Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. A d a m s , Robert M c C . " N a t u r a l Science a n d Social Science Paradigms in N e a r Eastern Prehistory." In The Hilly Flanks and Beyond: Essays on the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia Presented to Robert J. Braidwood, edited by T . Cuyler Y o u n g , Jr., et al., p p . 369-374. Studies in A n cient Oriental Civilization, no. 36. Chicago, 1983. Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . " R e m a r k s on the Israeli M e t h o d of Excavation." Eretz-Israel 11 (1973): 48*-53*. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Amihai Mazar. "Israeli Archaeology." World Ar chaeology 13 (1982): 310-325. Beynon, Diane, et al. " T e m p e r i n g T y p e s and Sources for Early Bronze Age Ceramics from Bab edh-Dhra" and N u m e i r a , J o r d a n . " Journal of Field Archaeology 13 (1986): 297-305. Binford, Lewis R. "Archaeology as Anthropology." American Antiquity 28 (1962): 217-225. Braidwood, R o b e r t J. "Distinguished L e c t u r e 1971." American Anthro pological Association Annual Report 1971, p p . 43-52. Washington, D . C . , 1971. Broshi, M a g e n . "Religion, Ideology, a n d Politics and T h e i r I m p a c t on Palestinian Archaeology." Israel Museum Journal 6 (1987): 17-32. Caldwell, Joseph R. " T h e N e w American Archaeology." Science 129 (1959): 303-307. Clarke, David L. Analytical Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1968. 2d ed. N e w York, 1978. Coogan, Michael David. " N u m e i r a 1981." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 255 (1984): 75-81. Dever, William G. " T w o A p p r o a c h e s to Archaeological M e t h o d : T h e Architectural and the Stratigraphic." Eretz-Israel 11 (1973): i*-8*. Dever, William G., and H . Darrell L a n c e , eds. A Manual of Field Ex cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. Dever, William G. " T h e Impact of t h e ' N e w Archaeology' on SyroPalestinian Archaeology." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 242 (1981): 15-29. Dever, William G. "Syro-Palestinian a n d Biblical Archaeology." In The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, edited by Douglas A. Knight and G e n e M . T u c k e r , p p , 31-74. Chico, Calif., 1985. Dever, William G. " I m p a c t of t h e ' N e w Archaeology.'" In Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An Introduction to Palestinian Archaeology Ded icated to Joseph A. Callaway, edited by Joel F . D r i n k a r d et al„ p p . 337-352- Atlanta, 1988. Fried, M o r t o n H . The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. N e w York, 1967. Geraty, L a w r e n c e T . , et al. " A n Overview of Goals, M e d i o d s , a n d Findings." In Madaba Plains Project: The 1984 Season at Tell el'Umeiri and Vicinity and Subsequent Studies, edited by Lawrence T . Geraty et al., p p . 3-19. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1989.
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Glock, A l b e r t E . "Tradition and C h a n g e i n T w o Archaeologies.'Mwerican Antiquity 50 (1985): 464-477. Glock, Albert E. "Biblical Archaeology: A n Emerging Discipline." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T . Geraty and Larry G. Herr, p p . 85101. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. Hole, Frank A., et al., eds. Prehistory'and Human Ecology on the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran. Univer sity of Michigan, M e m o i r s of the M u s e u m of Anthropology, no. 1. A n n Arbor, 1969. Johnson, Gregory A. Local Exchange and Early State Development in Southwestern Iran. University of Michigan, M u s e u m of Anthropol ogy, Anthropological Paper, n o . 51. A n n Arbor, 1973. LaBianca, 0 y s t e i n S. " T h e Diachronic Study of Animal Exploitation at Hesban: T h e Evolution of a Research Project." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T . Geraty and L a r r y G. Herr, p p . 167-181. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. i LaBianca, 0 y s t e i n S., and L a r r y Lacelje, eds. Hesban, vol. 2, Environ mental Foundations: Studies of Clim'alical, Geological, Hydrological, and Phytological Conditions in Hesban and Vicinity. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. LaBianca, 0 y s t e i n S. Hesban, vol. 1, Sedentarization andNomadization: Food System Cycles al Hesban and Vicinity in Transjordan. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1990. Levy, T h o m a s E., and N . M c n a h e m . " T h e Ceramic Industry at Shiqmim: Typological and Spatial Considerations." In Shiqmim, vol. 1, Studies Concerning Chalcolithic Societies in the Northern Negev Desert, Israel, 1982-1984, edited by T h o m a s E. Levy, p p . 333-355. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 356. Oxford, 1987. Levy, T h o m a s E., and Sariel Shalev. "Prehistoric Metalworking in die Southern Levant: Archaeometallurgical and Social Perspectives." World Archaeology 20 (1989): 352-372. M o o r e , James A. " T h e T r o u b l e with Know-It-Alls: Information as a Social and Ecological R e s o u r c e . " In Archaeological Hammers and Theories, edited by James A. M o o r e and Arthur S. Keene, p p . 1 7 3 192. N e w York, 1983. Ortner, D o n a l d J. "Disease a n d Mortality in die Early Bronze Age Peo ple of Bab e d h - D h r a ' , J o r d a n . " American Journal of Physical Anthro pology 51 (1979): 589-597Patterson, T h o m a s C. " S o m e Theoretical Tensions within and be tween the Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9 (1990): 189-200. R e d m a n , Charles L. "Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology: In D e fense of the Seventies—The Adolescence of N e w Archaeology." American Anthropologist 93 (1991): 295-307. Rose, G. D . " T h e Methodology of the N e w Archaeology and Its Influ ence on the Joint Expedition to Tell el-Hesi." In Tell el-Hesi: The Site and the Expedition, edited by Bruce T . Dahlberg and Kevin G. O'Connell, p p . 72-87. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1989. Salmon, Merrilee H . Philosophy and Archaeology. N e w York, 1982. Service, Elman R. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Per spective. N e w York, 1962. Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilly. Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. C a m b r i d g e , 1987a. Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilly. Social Theory and Archaeology. C a m b r i d g e , 1987b. Steward, Julian H . Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Mul tilinear Evolution. U r b a n a , 111., 1955. Taylor, Walter W . A Study of Archeology (1948). Carbondale, 111., 1983. Trigger, Bruce G. A Histoiy of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge, 1989. W a t s o n , Patty Jo, et al. Explanation in Archaeology: An Explicitly Sci entific Approach. N e w York, 1971. W a t s o n , Richard A. " O z y m a n d i a s , K i n g of Kings: Postprocessual R a d -
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ical Archaeology as Critique." American Antiquity 55 (1990): 673689. Watson, Richard A. " W h a t the N e w Archaeology H a s Accomplished." Current Anthropology 32 (1991): 275-291. White, Leslie. The Science of Culture. N e w York, 1949. Worrell, J. E. " T h e Evolution of a Holistic Investigation: Phase O n e of the Joint Expedition to Tell el-Hesi." In Tell el-Hen: The Site and the Expedition, edited by Bruce T . Dahlberg a n d Kevin G. O'Connell, p p . 68-71. Winona Lake, Ind., 1989. Wylie, Alison. " T h e Interpretive Dilemma." In Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology, edited by Valerie Pinsky and Alison W y lie, p p . 18-27. Cambridge, 1989. Yellen, John E., and M a r y W . Greene. "Archaeology and the National Science Foundation." American Antiquity 50 (1985): 332-341. ALEXANDER H . JOFFE
NEW TESTAMENT. See Biblical Literature, article on New Testament.
NEWTON, CHARLES THOMAS (1816-1894), the most influential classical archaeologist in nineteenthcentury England. Trained in classics at Oxford University, Newton described himself as a historian rather than an ar chaeologist. His scholarship was based in the tradition of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, on a thorough knowledge of Latin and Greek texts. T h e stress Newton placed on die identification of mythological subjects in Greek art prefig ured the modern interest in iconography. Newton entered the British Museum's Department of Antiquities in 1840 and left in 1852 for diplomatic service, mainly in the Aegean area. He was, however, able to devote time to excavations for the British Museum: his work at Kalymnos (1854-1855) produced a large corpus of inscrip tions, but his main archaeological achievement was the 1856-1857 expedition to Halikarnassos, Knidos, and Branchidai (Miletus). Newton was supported by a naval vessel and a contingent of Royal Engineers, the latter com manded by Robert Murdoch Smith, who produced plans of the excavations and was the first to locate the actual site of the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos. Newton's excavation methods were primitive, and he did not maintain a daily list of finds, but he was almost the first excavator to employ a photographer. Newton returned to the British Museum in 1861 as the first keeper of the new Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. His tenure was marked by spectacular acquisi tions, including several major collections and the fruits of excavations conducted by others (e.g., Alfred Biliotti on Rhodes; Robert Murdoch Smith and Edwin Augustus Porcher at Cyrene; Richard Popplewell Pullan at Priene; and John Turtle Wood at Ephesus). The museum's tradition of scholarship was much enhanced by his publications. Newton also contributed to the advance of classical ar chaeology in England. He was the first Yates Professor of Art and Archaeology at University College London (1880-
1888), and he was active in the founding of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (1879), the Egypt Explo ration Society (1882), and the British School at Athens (1885). [See also Halikarnassos; Miletus.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Newton N e w t o n , Charles T h o m a s . A History of Discoveries at Halkarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae. 2 vols, in 3. L o n d o n , 1862-1863. Detailed report on N e w t o n ' s major expedition. L o n g o u t of print a n d rare outside specialized libraries. N e w t o n , Charles T h o m a s . Travels and Discoveries in the Levant. 2 vols. L o n d o n , 1865. N e w t o n , Charles T h o m a s . Essays on Art and Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1880. Collection of lectures a n d reprinted articles, illustrating t h e range of N e w t o n ' s scholarly interests. N e w t o n , Charles T h o m a s , ed. The Collection of Ancient Greek Inscrip tions in the British Museum. Vols. 1-3. Oxford, 1874-1890. Works on Newton Cook, B . F . " S i r Charles N e w t o n , K. C . B . " C o m m e m o r a t i v e lecture on the centenary of N e w t o n ' s death, given at the Eighteenth British M u s e u m Classical Colloquium, 7-9 D e c e m b e r 1994. Sculpture a n d Sculptors of the D o d e c a n e s e and Caria. Publication forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Colloquium, which will also include a detailed bibliography of N e w t o n ' s works. Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 22, p p . 1096-1097. L o n d o n , 1901. Short biography, with references to obituaries. A revised edition of the dictionary is in preparation. Jebb, R. C. "Sir C . T . N e w t o n . " Journal of Hellenic Studies 14 (1894): xlix-liv. C o n t e m p o r a r y appreciation of N e w t o n . Jenkins, Ian. Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, 1800-1939. L o n d o n , 1992. Includes an authoritative m o d e m assessment of N e w t o n ' s work as excavator a n d curator, with a bibliography. B. F. C O O K
NICOLAOU, KYRIAKOS (1918-1981), one of the foremost Cypriot archaeologists. Having earned his doctor ate from the University of Goteborg (his dissertation was published in 1976), Nicolaou spent most of his working life in the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus. H e was ar chaeological officer between 1957 and 1961, assistant cura tor of the Cyprus Museum between 1961 and 1964, and curator from 1964 until his retirement in 1978. As curator he was also responsible for the running of all state museums on the island. Nicolaou reorganized tire stores and the dis plays of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, and he founded district museums in Famagusta, Larnaca, Limassol, and Paphos, as well as a number of local museums. Nicolaou surveyed and excavated throughout the island. His main surveys covered a large part of the Kyrenia district and the Yialias River valley. Of his many excavations, the most important were those of the Hellenistic sanctuary of Aphrodite at Morphou, the Late Bronze Age necropoleis of Deneia, Angastina, and Kazaphani, as well as the Geomet ric-period necropoleis of Marion, which also includes clas-
NILE sical sections, and Kythraia. It is, however, for his work in Nea-Paphos that he is most famous. There, apart from a number of important Hellenistic and Roman tombs, he ex cavated the Greco-Roman odeion and the house of Dionysos with its famous mosaic floors. Pie also started the ex cavation of the gymnasium and the Asldepieion, and in general brought Nea-Paphos, the Hellenistic and Roman capital of the island, to the foreground of archaeological re search. He published many articles on his discoveries and on Cypriot archaeology in general; and he lectured widely in Europe and the United States. He was a member of many learned societies and was honored by several foreign orga nizations. [See also Paphos.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Nicolaou, I. "Nicolaou, Kyriakos." In Megak Kypriake Enkyklopaideia ( T h e Large Cypriot Encyclopaedia), vol. 10, p p . 252-253. Leukosia, C y p r u s , 1984-. Nicolaou, I. "Kyriakos Nicolaou: Biographical N o t e a n d List of P u b lications" (in Greek). Archaeologia Cypria 2 (1990): 3-8. Nicolaou, Kyriakos, " T h e T o p o g r a p h y of N e a P a p h o s . " In Melanges offerts a Kazimierz Michalowski, p p . 561-601. Warsaw, 1966. F o r m a n y years the only topographical study of the Flellenistic a n d R o m a n capital of C y p r u s . Nicolaou, Kyriakos. "Archaeological N e w s from C y p r u s . " American Journal of Archaeology 71 (1967): 399-406; 84 (1980): 63-73. N i c o laou's reports from C y p r u s a p p e a r m o r e or less annually in the jour nal from 1966 t o 1978. Nicolaou, Kyriakos. Nea Paphos: An Archaeological Guide. Nicosia, 1967. Rev. ed. Nicosia, 1978. Nicolaou, Kyriakos. Ancient Monuments of Cyprus. Nicosia, 1968. Nicolaou, Kyriakos. The Historical Topography of Kition. Goteborg, 1976. DEMETRIOS MIGHAELIDES
NILE. Because ancient Egypt rarely received rainfall, the size and the reliability of the Nile River's annual flooding was the basis for the Egyptians' stable agrarian economy. The inhabitants lived almost exclusively within the river val ley and the Delta. They distinguished between tiiese two regions and incorporated them into tiieir world view; the valley was known as Upper Egypt and the Delta as Lower Egypt. T h e Nile Valley is bounded by the Eastern Desert and die Western or Libyan deserts. These remote regions were beyond die Nile's influence and therefore considered wild uncivilized areas. Flowing northward from Central Africa's Lake Victoria (White Nile) and the Ethiopian plateau (Blue Nile and Atbara), the Nile entered Egypt at its southernmost point, El ephantine (modern Aswan) at die First Cataract. This 8.5kilometer-long cataract—five others occur farther upriver in Nubia—consists of a narrowing in the valley made by the granite basement rock that has breached the ground surface. The First Cataract served as a natural barrier preventing unauthorized entrance into Egypt from the south. Farther
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downriver, the Nile cuts through sandstone until it reaches Gebel el-Silsila where the bedrock changes to softer lime stone, allowing a wider floodplain. The Nile Delta begins north of Memphis (near modern Cairo), formed in part from silt deposited as the river's speed decreases. In antiquity, several branches of the Nile dissected the Delta before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea; only the Rosetta and Damietta waterways survive. The most important event in the Nile's regime was the annual inundation. Unfailingly each year in late June, the Nile began to rise as large volumes of water from heavy rains in East Africa drained into its system. The initial flood stage coincided with the heliacal rising of die star Sirius, whose reappearance in the sky marked the beginning of the new year. In a matter of weeks, the river overflowed its banks. T h e waters slowly spread across the floodplain, often to the edge of the low desert margins. T h e flood reached its apex after two montiis, although its duration and height varied depending on the site of the flood's measurement. This in undation soaked the soil, leaving behind a layer of rich silt while also replenishing the marshes in which the Egyptians fished and fowled. Gradually the river returned to its banks, and by late October crops could be planted in the sodden basin areas. Variations in the amount of water entering Egypt deter mined the flood's height, and significant fluctuations seri ously effected the economy. Lower water levels brought diminished crop yields, and an unusually high flood threat ened villages, canals, animals, and fields. When the filling of the Aswan D a m began in 1964, this annual inundation ceased. T h e river connected the inhabitants of ancient Egypt. They thought of north and south in relation to the river: to travel north (downstream) was written with a hieroglyph of a boat witii a steering oar and folded sail, and traveling south (upstream) was identified as a boat in full sail. The valley's topography and the river's cycle impeded overland travel except for short distances, which were covered on paths fol lowing irrigation canals. Given the river's significance to Egyptian life, it is not surprising that Nilotic imagery pervades the culture's my thology. The annual inundation, for example, was seen as a symbol for the creation of the universe. Several deities were associated with die Nile. Hapy symbolized its life-giving properties. T h e river was also under the protection of Khnum, lord of the First Cataract region, because the in undation was believed to spring from caverns located be neath Elephantine. [See also Delta; Egypt.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A b u al-'Izz, M . S. Landforms of Egypt. Translated b y Yusuf A. Fayid. Cairo, 1971. Detailed b u t quite usable book with a focus on the Nile River and its valley. T h e bibliography lists only works in English
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NIMRIN, T E L L
relating to the geology of the Nile Valley within Egypt's m o d e r n borders. Baines, John, and Jaromir Malek. Atlas of Ancient Egypt. N e w York, 1980. Discusses the geology of the river and its valley and its im portance to Egyptian culture (see chapter 1). Butzer, Karl W. Early Hydraulic Civilisation in Egypt: A Study in Cul tural Ecology. Chicago, 1976. Attempts to relate the river a n d the agricultural cycle to other aspects of ancient Egyptian culture, prin cipally focusing on location of setdements. Remains an interesting if dated work. James, T . G. H. Egypt: The Living Past. L o n d o n , 1992. Includes a dis cussion of the adaptation of ancient a n d modern Egyptian life to the Nile Valley and river's yearly cycle (see p p . 8-74). Kees, H e r m a n n . Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography. Translated by Ian F . D . Morrow. L o n d o n , 1961. Includes a very readable discus sion of the importance of die Nile River in ancient Egyptian culture (see chapter 3 ) . DIANA CRAIG PATCH
NIMRIN, TELL (Tell esh-Shuna; Tell Shuna South), site located in the Jordan Valley, approximately 12 Ion (7 mi.) north of the Dead Sea and 16 km (10 mi.) east of Jer icho (3i°54'oo" N, 35°37'3o" E; map reference 2094 X 1451). F. M. Abel, William Foxwell Albright, Claude R. Conder, Alexis Mallon, and Selah Merrill were among the nine teenth- and early twentieth-century explorers and archae ologists to visit and comment on the site. Nelson Glueck was the first to conduct a systematic archaeological survey there, early in 1943 (Glueck, 1943, pp. 7-26). He described Tell Nimrin as a "natural mound" and noted that he had collected "large numbers of Roman through mediaeval Ar abic sherds," but found no evidence of pre-Roman ceramics (Glueck, i95i>PP- 367* 368). Like other Western explorers before him, Glueck was es pecially interested in biblical associations. He suggested that the biblical "Waters of Nimrin" (Is. 15:6; Jer. 48:34) might refer to the Wadi Nimrin, otherwise known as Wadi Sha ib. He thought that Tell Nimrin itself undoubtedly, but mistak enly, preserved the ancient biblical name Beth-Nimrah found in Numbers 32:36 and Joshua 13:27 (Glueck, 1943, p. 11; 1951, pp. 367-368). Lacking evidence for Bronze and Iron Age occupation, Glueck followed Albright and Mallon in identifying nearby Tell Bleibil with biblical Beth-Nimrah, arguing that the name had likely migrated to Tell Nimrin during the Hellenistic period (Glueck, 1951, pp. 368, 371). Glueck was confident that Tell Nimrin was the site referred to as Bethnamaris by Eusebius and Jerome in the fourth century C E (Glueck, 1943, p. 11). The site is also mentioned in the Byzantine synagogue mosaic at Rehob in the BethShean Valley (Naveh, 1978, p . 81,1. 16). Glueck's conclusions were generally accepted as author itative until the site was reexamined in 1976 in a surface survey that recovered pottery dating from the Early BronzeMiddle Bronze, Iron I, Iron II, Umayyad, 'Abbasid, Ayyuc
bid/Mamluk, and Ottoman periods (Ibrahim et a l , 1988, p. 192). In 1980, a sixth-century Byzantine church was exca vated on the western slope of the mound by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities (Piccirillo, 1982). The first full-scale excavation of Tell Nimrin was con ducted by James W. Flanagan and David W. McCreery un der the auspices of Case Western Reserve University during the summer of 1989. Khair N . Yassine joined the project as a codirector in 1990. The project's two seasons were orga nized as a salvage operations designed to clarify the occu pational sequence and assess the importance of the site be fore modern development projects created further damage. An intensive surface survey of the mound was followed by the excavation of ten 5-meter squares. With the help of a road cut that exposed a section of tire tell from top to base, the squares were strategically placed in order to test each level of the site. Approximately 12 m of stratigraphy, accu mulated in a four-thousand-year occupational sequence, were documented. The results of field readings of pottery from the surface survey and excavation, attested the site's occupational his tory. First settled near the end of EB IV (c. 2000 B C E ) , Nim rin was occupied throughout the MB period. Nearly 6 m of MB stratification are preserved, including monumental walls constructed in late MB II. During the Late Bronze and Early Iron I, the site was unoccupied (for approximately five hundred years, c. 1500-1000 BCE). Settlement resumed in Late Iron I/Early Iron II, when tenth-century structures were built immediately above the late MB II stratum. At least part of the site was destroyed by fire in the late tenth century B C E . The Iron II occupational evidence is preserved in mudbrick walls, living surfaces, and almost 4 m of other strati fied material. Late ninth-century and seventh-century de struction levels were encountered, but their extent was not determined in the first season of excavation. T h e site was continuously occupied from the Persian through the Mamluk periods. Most of the post-Hellenistic material has been bulldozed from the top of the tell, but classical through late Islamic strata are well preserved on the western slope. Conttary to Glueck's conclusions, excavation has dem onstrated that the site is a true tell, rather than a natural mound, and that occupation during the MB and Iron II pe riods was extensive. In light of this new evidence, there is no reason to prefer Tell Bleibil over Tell Nimrin as the site of biblical Beth-Nimrah. However, Tell Nimrin's long his tory of occupation and its rich deposits overshadow its rel ative insignificance as a biblical site. T h e site has yielded paleoagronomic remains rich enough to indicate that it and the region were fertile and productive zones in the M B pe riod. Other material and textual artifacts suggest, as R. H. Dornemann (1983) hypothesized, that the Jordan Valley and Tell Nimrin enjoyed a simple but rich and independent life in the midst of surrounding centers of power.
NIMRUD BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e J o r d a n Valley in t h e Bronze A g e . " Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 6 (1926): 13-74. D o r n e m a n n , R u d o l p h Henry. The Archaeology of the Transjordan. M il waukee, 1983. Flanagan, James W . , a n d David W . M c C r e e r y . "First Preliminary R e port of the 1989 Tell N i m r i n Project." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 34 (1990): 131-152, Glueck, Nelson. " S o m e Ancient T o w n s in the Plains of M o a b . " Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 91 (1943): 7-26. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. N e w Haven, 1951. Ibrahim, Mo'awiyah, et al. " T h e East Jordan Valley Survey, 1976." In Archaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports, edited b y Kliair Yassine, p p . 189-207. A m m a n , 1988. K h o u r i , R a m i G . "Tell N i m r i n . " In his The Antiquities of the Jordan Rift Valley, p p . 70-72. A m m a n , 1988. N a v e h , Joseph. On Stone and Mosaic: The Aramaic Hebrew fnscriptions from Ancient Synagogues (in H e b r e w ) . T e l Aviv, 1978. Piccirillo, Michele, " A C h u r c h at S h u n a t N i m r i n . " Annual of the De partment of Antiquities of Jordan 26 (1982): 335-342. JAMES W . F L A N A G A N a n d D A V I D W . M C C R E E R Y
NIMRUD, site located in northern Iraq, on the east bank of the Tigris River, southeast of Mosul (36°o6' N , 43°ia' E). The site covers an area of about 360 hectares (889 acres) and consists of a walled enclosure witii a Citadel in the southwest corner, on which tiiere were many public build ings, and an arsenal, known as Fort Shalmaneser, in its southeast corner. There has been litde excavation in the outer town. In Assyrian texts the city is known as Kalhu (the biblical equivalent is Calah), first attested in the thirteenth century B C E . T h e modern name of Nimrud derives from an association with Nimrod, "the mighty hunter," whose leg end is described (rather differently) in both the Bible (Gn. 10:8-12) and die Qur'an (21:52-69). T h e site's first exca vator, A. H . Layard, originally thought it was Nineveh. It was not until 1853 that H. C. Rawlinson demonstrated that it was in fact Kalhu. Although Nimrud is mainly known as a Neo-Assyrian capital, the site was occupied from prehistoric times, as at tested by Halaf- and Ubaid-period sherds found on the sur face. Layard found pottery vessels of incised Ninevite V ware, and W. K. Loftus discovered a stone cist grave in the southeast part of die Citadel dating to the mid-second mil lennium B C E or slightiy earlier. M. E. L. Mallowan found evidence of Middle Assyrian occupation in the so-called 1950 Building on the Citadel and in private houses built against the town wall on the east side of the Citadel ( T W 53). It was this time that Shalmaneser I (1273-1244 BCE) did some building at Nimrud; however, it was not until the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) that it became a royal capital. This king initiated a major construction program continued by some of his successors, including Shalmaneser III (858-824 B C E ) , Adad-Nirari III (810-783 B C E ) , and Tig-
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lath-Pileser III (744-727 B C E ) . During the reign of Sargon (721-705 BCE) the royal capital was moved to Khorsabad, but Kalhu remained an important provincial capital. Esarhaddon (680-669 BCE) undertook some further building work here. In 614-612 B C E , Nimrud, together with other As syrian centers, was destroyed by the Medes; extensive traces of this destruction were found in the excavations. There is evidence for limited occupation in the post-Assyrian period, albeit of an impoverished kind. There are also slight traces of habitation in the Achaemenid period, supported by the observations of Xenophon, who passed the site (which he called Larissa) in 401 B C E . Remains of the Hellenistic period are more substantial, particularly in the southeast part of the Citadel, where a succession of settlements was excavated dating from about 240 to 140 B C E . This occupation may have continued into Parthian and Sasanian times. Thereafter, Nimrud remained for all intents and purposes, unoccupied. The first recorded excavations at Nimrud were under taken by G. P. Badger in 1844, but it was Layard who re alized the site's true potential and whose name is firmly linked with it. He worked there from 1845 to 1847 and 1849 to 1851, supported first by Sir Stratford Canning and then by the trustees of the British Museum. H e was helped by a young Chaldean Christian from Mosul, Hormuzd Rassam. T h e results were spectacular. In the Northwest palace of Ashurnasirpal II he excavated mainly in the state apartments to the south of the main entrance. Lack of funds prevented him from completely excavating many of the rooms; he con tented himself witii trenching round the walls. Nevertheless, he uncovered many stone relief slabs and a number of co lossal stone gateway figures, some of which are now in the British Museum. Elsewhere on the site, Layard excavated in the Ninurta and Ishtar Sarrat-niphi temples, and the Cen tral, South-East and South-West palaces. In front of the socalled Central Building he found the black obelisk of Shal maneser III that shows die biblical king Jehu submitting to the Assyrian ldng and tribute being brought from various parts of the Near East. H e even worked briefly around the Ziggurat and Fort Shalmaneser. It is difficult to overestimate the enormity of Layard's contribution, not only to what is known about Nimrud, but to Mesopotamian archaeology in general, A complete plan of the city, which is still useful today, was produced by Captain Felix Jones of the Indian Navy in 1852. In 1854—1855 W. K. Loftus, working on behalf of die As syrian Excavation Fund, excavated mainly in the Central Palace area, the South-East and South-West palaces, and the Nabu Temple. His most interesting results, however, were obtained in the Burnt Palace, where he found an im portant collection of ivories. He also discovered a grave dat ing from the early-mid-second millennium B C E . For the next eighteen years no serious archaeological work was done at Nimrud, but two large collections of sculptures were re moved during this time and sent to Zurich and Paris. In 1873
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NIMRUD tion. This vast building's ground plan was established, and many of its chambers were cleared, producing extensive and varied collections of carved ivories. From 1974 to 1976, a Polish team led by Janusz Meuszyhski worked in the central part of the Nimrud Acropolis on what he termed the Central Building, probably a temple built by Ashurnasirpal II, and on the Centtal Palace of Tiglath-Pileser III. T h e Poles were followed, from 1987 to 1989, by an Italian team from the Centra Scavi, Turin, led by Paolo Fiorina. They completed a contour plan of the entire city and undertook a surface-sherd survey. Otherwise, their attention was focused on Fort Shalmaneser. They investi gated the wall separating the fort compound from the rest of the city and its junction with the main city wall; they also excavated or reexcavated a number of storerooms in the southwest sector, particularly SW36 and S W 3 7 . They re covered a number of ivories, but outstanding among the finds from this area was a bronze and iron model of a turreted fortress on wheels. In 1989, a British Museum team, directed by John Curtis and Dominique Collon, returned to Nimrud and also worked in Fort Shalmaneser. They par tially excavated room T 2 0 , finding a bronze horse harness and glazed bricks of Shalmaneser III with Aramaic signs and pictographic symbols on their unglazed surfaces. They also
NIMRUD.
Relief from Nimrud
depicting a battle scene, M u s e e d u
L o u v r e , Paris. (Alinari/Art Resource, N Y )
the cuneiform scholar George Smith of the British Museum worked briefly at Nimrud, investigating various buildings on the Acropolis, but without achieving any significant results. Then, from 1877 to 1879, Hormuzd Rassam returned to Nimrud, also sent by the trustees of the British Museum. In addition to working in the Nabu Temple and the South-East and Central Palace areas, he discovered the Kidmuri Tem ple northeast of the North-West Palace. After Rassam's departure, mere was a lull in archaeolog ical work at Nimrud until 1949 when M. E. L. (Sir Max) Mallowan resumed work on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. This expedition worked at Nimrud un til 1963—after 1958 under the direction of David Oates and in 1963 of Jeffrey Orchard. In the North-West Palace, the British School team excavated the domestic quarters to the south of passage P and cleared part of the Administrative Wing (ZT) on the north side. They also cleared out the wells in rooms AB and N N . Elsewhere on the Acropolis the Brit ish School expedition worked mainly in the Ninurta T e m ple, the 1950 Building, the Governor's Palace, the Nabu Temple, the Burnt Palace, and the South-East Palace. They also investigated houses abutting the town wall (TW53) and cleared a stretch of stone wall on the west side of the Acrop olis. From 1958 onward, the building in the southeast corner of the city (Fort Shalmaneser) was the main focus of atten
N I M R U D . Assyrian
relief from the palace of Ashurnasirpal
II. D e t a i l
f r o m A s h u r n a s i r p a l ' s siege of a city s h o w i n g K i n g A s h u r n a s i r p a l in royal p r o g r e s s . D a t e d to t h e s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. M u s e e d u L o u vre, P a r i s . (Foto M a r b u r g / A r t Resource, N Y )
NIMRUD
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found clear evidence of rebuilding activities, probably in the reign of Esarhaddon. Meanwhile, the Iraq Department of Antiquities had be gun restoration work at Nimrud in 1956; they continued the project in 1959-1960. Since 1969 the work has been carried out annually. T h e emphasis is on reexcavation and resto ration, principally in the North-West Palace and the Nabu Temple. In 1975, the clearance of the well in room AJ, di rected by Muyasser Sa'id, produced another spectacular collection of ivories. Even more remarkable discoveries were made in a series of four tombs excavated between spring 1988 and November 1990 by Muzahim Mahmud in the southern part of the North-West Palace. These tombs con tained vessels in precious metal and an astonishing array of gold jewelry; the tombs seem to have been the graves of the consorts of a number of Assyrian kings. Nimrud's Citadel was surrounded by its own mud-brick wall, which, on the west side, overlooking the Tigris floodplain, was faced with stone blocks (sometimes called the quay wall). T h e largest and most important building on the Citadel in the North-West Palace, built by Ashurnasirpal II and partly restored by several later kings. It measures about 200 m north-south, although its southern limit has not been established. In the center were state apartments lavishly dec orated with sculptured stone slabs as well as painted plaster and glazed bricks. In several of the more important gateways were colossal stone figures of human-headed lions or bulls. The northern wing of the palace (ZT) held offices and store rooms, while the southern wing held private apartments and what may have been the harem. T h e more important finds from the palace include the so-called banquet stela of Ashur nasirpal II describing his conquests and building works at Nimrud and ending with a description of tire banquet to celebrate the building of the palace. This was found in a recess near gate E. T h e excavation of room AB recovered a large collection of bronzes, including furniture ornaments and bowls decorated in Syrian and Phoenician style, and several interesting glass vessels, including a vase inscribed with the name of Sargon. Important finds also came from a number of the wells. In the well in room N N a collection of ivories was discovered that includes the two well-known heads of women popularly known as the Mona Lisa and the Ugly Sister and two ivory plaques with traces of gold over lay, each showing a lioness mauling an African. In the well in room AB were ivory and wood writing boards with waxcoated surfaces. More ivories were recovered from the well in room AJ, including pyxides, bowls, small human heads, and carved tusks. T h e palace's south wing is notable for the discovery there of a series of rich graves, all apparently of high-ranking women. Beneath the floor of room D D , Mallowan had found a terra-cotta coffin with a female skeleton and the socalled Nimrud jewel, but Mahmud's recent discoveries overshadow this grave. He found four subterranean cham-
NIMRUD.
Head of "Madonna"
in ivory from Nimrud,
D a t e d to 720
BCE. I r a q M u s e u m , B a g h d a d . (Scala/Art Resource, N Y )
bers with barrel-vaulted roofs, three of which held astonish ing collections of jewelry. T h e first tomb, in room M M , con tained a pottery sarcophagus and jewelry that included a gold fibula and chain attached to a stamp seal in a gold mount. The second tomb, in room 49, had various inscrip tions mentioning Yab&, Baniti, and Atalia, "queens" or "pal ace women" of Tiglath-Pileser III, Shalmaneser V (726-722 B C E ) , and Sargon, respectively. A stone coffin held at least two bodies and a vast array of grave goods, including gold bowls, earrings, and necklaces. A Phoenician-style gold bowl has embossed decoration showing boats in a papyrus thicket. The third tomb, in room 57, was originally the grave of Mulissu-mukannisat-Ninua, a queen of Ashurnasirpal II, but it had been reused. The original stone sarcophagus was empty, but badly preserved bones and an stunning variety of grave goods were found in three bronze coffins in the antechamber. T h e large number of gold objects included an intricate crown or headdress. The fourth tomb contained large numbers of glazed pottery and alabaster vessels. At the extreme northwest corner of the Citadel was the Ziggurat, and sandwiched between it and the North-West Palace was the Ninurta Temple, built by Ashurnasirpal II. At one entrance a pair of human-headed lions stood watch, while outside a second entrance a massive, round-topped stela of Ashurnasirpal II showed the king with symbols of the gods. Stone reliefs at these entrances show protective genies; one remarkable example shows a god battling with a monster that is a mixture of an eagle and a lion. There were two other temples in this area, one dedicated to Ishtar Sarrat-niphi and the other to the Kidmurri. The former had colossal lions flanking the doorway; a magnifi-
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NINA-SIRARA
cent limestone statue of Ashurnasirpal II standing on a red stone base was set up inside. In the middle of the Citadel, among other important buildings, was the so-called Central Building and the Cen tral Palace of Tiglath-Pileser III. Painted decoration and winged bulls were found here, as well as sculptured slabs, stacked and ready for reuse in the South-West Palace. T o the east of the Central Palace was the Governor's Pal ace, the residence of the governor of Kalhu in the eighth century B C E . An important Archive of administrative tablets was found there. South of this building were the Burnt Pal ace and the Nabu Temple. T h e Burnt Palace was a ninthcentury building that was subsequently rebuilt twice—the second time by Sargon, who may have used it as a royal residence. An important collection of ivories come from this palace (see above). The Nabu Temple included shrines dedicated to Nabu and his consort Tashmetum and a reception suite. Ashur nasirpal claimed to have founded the building, but much of the construction work was done in the reign of Adad-Nirari III. A number of tablets were found here, including the "vas sal treaties" of Esarhaddon. T h e temple held two pairs of statues of attendant gods, one colossal and one life-sized; inscriptions on the latter mention Adad-Nirari III. There was also a round-topped stela of Shamshi-Adad V (823-811 B C E ) , showing the king with symbols of gods. A number of incised ivory plaques in Assyrian style were found in this building. The excavation of the two buildings at the extreme south end of the Citadel is incomplete. T h e South-West Palace was built by Esarhaddon and was decorated with reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II and Tiglath-Pileser III in secondary use. The so-called South-East Palace was apparently built by Shalmaneser III and later restored. The building known as Fort Shalmaneser in the southeast corner of the city was a palace for reviewing troops (ekal masarti) built by Shalmaneser III and restored by Esarhad don. It is within a walled enclosure that covers about 30 hectares (74 acres). Later, stone walls with a postern gate in the south part were built by Esarhaddon. The building in cludes a block of state apartments (T) as well as storerooms and barracks grouped around courtyards. Outstanding finds include the throne-base of Shalmaneser III from throne room ( T i ) . T h e sides are carved with scenes of tribute being brought to the king. A panel of painted and glazed bricks set above a doorway in courtyard T , which shows Shalma neser III standing beneath a winged disk, within a frame work of goats and floral motifs. In addition, important col lections of smaller items have come from many of the rooms: ivories from rooms S W 7 , S W 1 2 , SW37, N W 1 5 , a n d N W 2 i and bronze furniture from room NE26. Tablets, including wine-ration lists, were found at various locations. [See also the biographies o/Layard, Mallowan, soni]
andRawlin-
BIBLIOGRAPHY In addition to the works listed below, readers may wish to consult various articles related to the topic, too n u m e r o u s to list here, that a p peared in the journal Iraq between vol. 12 (1950) and vol. 25 (1963). Curtis, J. E., D o m i n i q u e Collon, a n d A. R. Green. "British M u s e u m Excavations at N i m r u d a n d Balawat in 1989." Iraq 55 (1993): 1-37. Dalley, Stephanie, a n d J . N . Postgate. The Tablets from Fort Shalma neser. Cuneiform T e x t s from N i m r u d , 3. L o n d o n , 1984. H e r r m a n n , Georgina. Ivories from Room SW37, Fort Shalmaneser. Ivo ries from N i m r u d , 4. L o n d o n , 1986. H e r r m a n n , Georgina. The Small Collections from Fort Shalmaneser. Ivo ries from N i m r u d , 5. L o n d o n , 1992. Layard, Austen H . Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. L o n don, 1853. Layard, Austen H . Nineveh and Its Remains (1849). N e w York, 1970. Mallowan, M . E. L. Nimrud and Its Remains. 3 vols. L o n d o n , 1966. Mallowan, M . E. L., a n d L . G. Davies. Ivories in Assyrian Style. Ivories from N i m r u d , 2. L o n d o n , 1970. Mallowan, M . E. L., a n d Georgina H e r r m a n n . Furniture from SW7, Fort Shalmaneser. Ivories from N i m r u d , 3. L o n d o n , 1974. Orchard, J. J. Equestrian Bridle-harness Ornaments. Ivories from N i m rud, 1.2. L o n d o n , 1967. Postgate, J. N „ and J. E . Reade. " K a l h u . " InReallexikonderAssyriologie, vol. 5, p p . 303-323. Berline, 1977-1980. Postgate, J. N . , ed. a n d trans. The Governor's Palace and Archive. C u neiform T e x t s from N i m r u d , 2. L o n d o n , 1973. Reade, J. E. " N i m r u d . " In Fifty Years ofMesopotamian Discovery, edited by J . E, Curtis, p p . 99-112. L o n d o n , 1982. Wilson, J. V. Kinnier. The Nimrud Wine Lists. Cuneiform T e x t s from N i m r u d , 1. L o n d o n , 1972. JOHN CURTIS
NINA-SIRARA. See Girsu and Lagash. NINEVEH, ancient Ninua, one of the noted sites of an tiquity, situated on the east bank of the Tigris River, close to the confluence of the Tigris and the Khosr Rivers (36°24' N , 44°o8' E). Distinguished by the tall mounds of Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus and the remains of a roughly rectangular perimeter wall that is about 2 km wide (1 mi.) and 5 Ion (3 mi.) long, the visible ruins of Nineveh are currently invested on all sides by recent additions to the city of Mosul, in mod ern Iraq. While the core mound, known today as Kuyunjik, may have been occupied almost continuously from the sev enth millennium down to early Islamic times (when the fo cus of settlement moved to the site of medieval Mosul on the opposite bank of tire Tigris), Nineveh's reputation prin cipally rests on its role as the last great capital of the Assyrian Empire. In particular, Nineveh's destruction at the hands of the Medes and Babylonians in 612 B C E still stands as a vivid paradigm for a sudden fall from unrivaled wealth and do minion. Exploration a n d Excavation. T h e first European trav eler to take note of the location of ancient Nineveh was Ben jamin of Tudela, the Spanish traveler and rabbi, in the twelfth century. Others who commented on the site in sue-
NINEVEH ceeding centuries included the Danish scholar Carsten Niebuhr, whose visit took place in 1766. T h e earliest detailed examination of Nineveh is owed to Claudius James Rich, whose admirable map of the site was completed in 1820. Twenty-two years later, Paul-Entile Botta, the consul of France at Mosul, opened the first trenches on Kuyunjik with little success. Then, following a prior period of concentra tion on the Assyrian remains at Nimrud, Austen Henry Lay ard began his own excavations at Nineveh in 1846. [See Nimrud.] Before he left Nineveh in 1851 to take up a career in politics, Layard had revealed a good part of the plan of the Southwest Palace, "the palace without a rival" (Luckenbill, 1924, p. 96) of the redoubtable Sennacherib (704681 B C E ) . Within this structure he revealed close to 3 km (2 mi.) of carved stone reliefs, including tiiose depicting Sen nacherib's spectacular siege and capture of the Judean city of Lachish. [See Lachish; and the biographies of Botta and Layard.] Layard's work on behalf of the British Museum was sub sequently taken up by Hormuzd Rassam, his resourceful assistant, beginning in 1852. Rassam succeeded in discov ering the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, where he not only excavated sculptured slabs depicting memorable lion-hunt sequences, but also a substantial portion of the twenty-four
NINEVEH.
Plan of certain main elements of the city in the seventh cen
tury BCE. T h e t e r r a i n o u t s i d e t h e city wall w a s m a r k e d b y d i e p r e s e n c e of s u b s t a n t i a l m o a t s a n d d i t c h e s , especially t o t h e east. ( C o u r tesy D . Stronach)
145
thousand cuneiform tablets that make up the so-called Li brary of Ashurbanipal (an invaluable resource on ancient Mesopotamia, variously composed of archival documents, manuals, and cultic literary works). [See Cuneiform; Tablet; Libraries and Archives.] T h e year 1852 also saw the com pletion of a further exemplary survey of Nineveh (by the trained cartographer Felix Jones). It was, in addition, the approximate moment when it first became possible to affirm the long-suspected identity of the site on the basis of exca vated cuneiform records. Among other excavators who worked at Nineveh in the latter part of the nineteenth cen tury, it is impossible to pass over the name of the gifted cuneiform scholar, George Smith. In 1872 Smith electrified Victorian England by discovering the greater part of the Babylonian account of the Flood among the tablets exca vated by Layard and Rassam. [See Babylonians; and the bi ography of Smith] Charged with the task of finding the miss ing portions of the story, he effectively achieved this aim within clays of reaching Nineveh in die spring of 1873. Trag ically, however, he was to die of dysentery soon after tire end of his 1876 season. He was no more than thirty-six years old. Subsequent British excavators include R. Campbell Thompson, who was at Nineveh in 1904-1905 and from 1927-1932. While Campbell Thompson did much to ex plore the poorly preserved remains of both the Nabu temple and die adjacent Temple of Ishtar (where he discovered die magnificent copper head tiiat has been variously ascribed to eitiier Sargon of Akkad or Naram-Sin), he also elected to introduce a sounding through the deep prehistoric strata of Kuyunjik in the course of his final season. This last, pioneer endeavor was supervised by his assistant, M. E. L. Mallo wan, whose account (Mallowan, 1933) duly provided the first available overview of the early pottery sequence in northern Mesopotamia. [See the biography of Mallowan.] Each of the more recent excavations at Nineveh—begin ning with those of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage from the second half of the 1960s onward and end ing witii those of the University of California at Berkeley between 1987 and 1990—have been shaped, at least in part, by the rapid post-1960 growth of the city of Mosul. Ex pressly, it was the pressure posed by a series of new building projects drat persuaded Tariq Madhloom of die Depart ment of Antiquities to devote a good part of his own efforts between 1965 and 1971 to the task of precisely locating, and then restoring, critical portions of the walls and gates of Ni neveh's Neo-Assyrian defenses. In a direct complement to Madhloom's work, one of die main concerns of the Berkeley team, led by David Stronach, was to learn more about the nature of Nineveh's extensive lower town, especially within its still largely undisturbed northern sector. Early Nineveh. While little is yet known in any detail about Kuyunjik's very earliest phases of occupation, the site seems to have been closely related to innovative develop ments in southern Mesopotamia during the Uruk period (c.
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4000-3000 BCE). There are also indications that the subse quent Ninevite-5 settlement (c. 3000-2500 BCE) was at least as large as any that had preceded it. However, the original, enduring fame of Nineveh stemmed from the repute of the city's time-honored diety, Ishtar of Nineveh. In an allusion, for example, to an event that had taken place five hundred years before his own reign, Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria (c. 1813-1781 BCE) boasted in an inscription that he was the first monarch to renovate the Temple of Ishtar "since Manishtushu, son of Sargon, king of Akkad." [See Assyrians.] Later Nineveh. Beginning in the reign of Shalmaneser I (1273-1244 B C E ) , a number of Middle Assyrian, and then Neo-Assyrian, rulers chose to erect a royal residence on the high summit of Kuyunjik. Elsewhere, the flat ground di rectly to its north appears to have become the hub of a siz able lower town from at least the beginning of the first mil lennium BCE. T h e principal expansion of Nineveh is directly related, however, to a somewhat later sequence of events: to the ignominious death in 705 B C E of the father of Sennach erib, Sargon II, and to Sennacherib's subsequent decision to move the capital from Dur Sharrukin (Khorsabad)—Sargon's newly created and patently inauspicious seat of gov ernment—to the long-hallowed "eternal foundation" of Nineveh (Luckenbill, 1924, p. 94). [See Khorsabad.]
ward the north end of Kuyunjik, it is perhaps telling that no attempt was made to replicate the 40-ton monolithic winged bulls of his grandfather's time. Conversely, the quality of at least a part of Ashurbanipal's relief sculpture, and most es pecially that depicting the great lion hunt (see above), can be ranked as unsurpassed in the history of Mesopotamian art. An informative relief from about 645 B C E , which shows a royal park watered by a tall aqueduct, also provides one of several indications of the keen delight that Sennacherib and his successors took in providing Nineveh and its envi rons with parks, gardens, and even nature reserves. It dem onstrates as well the singular feats of engineering, including dam and aqueduct construction, that made such choice amenities possible. [See Aqueducts; Gardens, article on Gar dens in Preclassical Times.] As has been recently pointed out, in fact, the true locale of the famed Hanging Gardens may not have been Babylon but, given the nature of the extant evidence, Assyrian Nineveh (Dalley, 1994). Biblical References. Many of the biblical references made to Nineveh can be seen to reflect either changing his torical circumstances, competing religious messages, or de scriptive matter that ranges from the legendary to the real. In Genesis 10:11-12, Nineveh is listed as one of the major cities of Mesopotamia that owed its foundation to Nimrod,
As can be gauged from Sennacherib's successive building inscriptions, the main axis of his palace eventually came to measure a remarkable 500 m in length. Among this struc ture's many "objects of astonishment" (to use Sennacherib's own phrase; see Luckenbill, 1924, p. 97) certain of its tall columns were supported by resplendent bronze lions, each cast in a striding but at the same time weight-bearing pose. The city as a whole was expanded to include an area of 750 ha (1,852 acres) and its imposing double walls came to cover a distance of some 12 km (7 mi.). While the massive inner mud-brick wall is likely to have been at least 25 m high, the less lofty outer wall would have presented a gleaming facade of finely dressed limestone masonry, capped by continuous stone crenellations. No fewer than fifteen city gates pierced this circuit. Of these, the Nergal Gate in the north wall was the most sumptuously appointed. Guarded by giant winged colossi, it stood on the course of a paved royal road that led southward to the palace mound of Kuyunjik. [See Palace.] At the same time, the northwestern portion of the lower town appears to have included both a crowded industrial quarter not far from the Sin Gate and, just inside the Mashki Gate (at a point closer to Kuyunjik), a more affluent district distinguished by spacious courtyard houses. With the death of Sennacherib, the pace of construction slowed considerably. Esarhaddon (680-669 BCE) and Ashurbanipal (668-627 BCE) both continued to build on Tell Nebi Yunus, the second mound of Nineveh, where Sennacherib had already founded an imperial arsenal. However, much of this later work was never finished and, when it came to the construction of AshurbanipaPs extensive North Palace, to
mi
NINEVEH.
Entrance to the recently excavated Halzi Gate. L o c a t e d a t
t h e s o u t h e n d of N i n e v e h ' s l o n g e a s t e r n wall, this g a t e w a s n a r r o w e d t o a w i d t h of t w o m e t e r s in a n t i c i p a t i o n of t h e final M e d i a n a n d B a b y l o n i a n assault. T h e g a t e w a y w a s n o n e t h e l e s s f o r c e d a n d t h e b e d of the r o a d w a y ( b e n e a t h t h e h o r i z o n t a l scale) w a s s t r e w n w i t h t h e h e a p e d r e m a i n s of t h o s e killed in t h a t c o n s t r i c t e d s p a c e . ( C o u r tesy D . Stronach)
the great grandson of Noah. T h e erstwhile glory of Nineveh is perhaps best reflected, however, in tine Book of Jonah (where, as an object of god's grace, the city is said to have been spared, not overdirown). In a reference to the excep tional size of Nineveh, it is said to have taken "three days' journey" to cross it (Jon. 3:3). This is known to be hyperbole and, on the evidence of the tiiree-day period Jonah is said to have spent in the belly of the great fish, a formulaic use of the number 3 can be assumed. On the other hand, die ingathering of people and livestock that would certainly have occurred at the time of the siege of Nineveh could perhaps have brought the city's suddenly swollen population to the figure of "six score thousand persons" (together with "much cattle") that is specified in Jonah 4:11. Apart from the fact that Muslim tradition places the tomb of Jonah on Tell Nebi Yunus ("the mound of the prophet Jonah"), Jo nah's connection with Nineveh is also recalled in Matthew 12:41 and Luke 11:30, 32. These last passages assert that the inhabitants of Nineveh, the "men of Nineveh" to whom Jo nah had preached, would arise at the Last Judgment to con demn the generation of Jesus. Other biblical references to Nineveh are of a more histor ical nature. These include two that allude to Sennacherib residing at Nineveh (2 Kgs. 19:36; Is. 37:37) and another that records his assassination by his sons at the same location (2 Kgs. 19:37). Of most interest, however, is the "vision of N a h u m " in which the overthrow of Nineveh (at tire com mand of, in this case, a vengeful and wrathful god) is "fore told." Despite having been written well after the event, most probably in the Achaemenid period, the Book of Nahum car ries the impact of an eyewitness account of the city's terrible fall. T o begin with, the forceful image of the "myriads of slain" and the "heaps of corpses" that resulted from the sack of "tire bloody city" (Na. 3:1-3) can be said to have found an all-too-realistic counterpart in the outstretched, tangled skeletons that came to light during the recent excavations at the Halzi Gate (Stronach, 1992). In additions, an insistence on the key role that water was made to play in the events that accompanied Nineveh's destruction (Na. 2:6) is not only echoed in other sources (see below), but would seem to stem from a detailed knowledge of the physical nature of the city's devastation. O t h e r Literary References. T h e Babylonian Chronicle indicates tiiat Nineveh fell in the high summer of 612 B C E following a siege of three months. T h e same source also relates tiiat Nabopolassar (625-605 B C E ) , the victorious king of Babylon, held court in the palace at Nineveh before re turning to his homeland with ashes collected from the ruins of the Assyrian capital. [See Babylon.] Herodotus is less in formative. He refers to the march on Nineveh of Cyaxares, the king of Media (1.104); promises to relate in full the de tails of the fall of Nineveh (1.106); and, in the, end, neglects to do so. According to Diodorus Siculus, writing in the late first century C E , Nineveh fell in the third year of a prolonged
NINEVEH
147
Detail of a number of tangled skeletons on thepanly
cobbled
S#
NINEVEH. roadway
.
of the Halzi
-
-r
Gate. T h o s e c u t d o w n a t this s p o t recall N a -
h u m ' s i m a g e of N i n e v e h ' s " m y r i a d s of slain" (Na. 3 : 1 - 3 ) . ( C o u r tesy D . Stronach)
siege, when the Euphrates River rose in flood and breached the wall of the city (Diodorus 1.27.1-2). [See Euphrates.] In reality, however, neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates (in voked in obvious error) would ever have been in flood at the height of summer. Indeed, in following die details of Nahum's account, which mentions the opening of "the gates of the rivers," the dissolving of "the palace" (an expression best taken to refer to rather less-vaunted structures at the level of the plain), and a degree of flooding that turned Nin eveh into "a lake" (Na. 2:6, 8), it is preferable to suppose that the various sources for such an inundation consisted of the waters of the Khosr (which could have been effectively undammed upstream and redammed within the limits of the city) and the discharge of a number of Nineveh's still-op erative canals. In sum, Nineveh was not only overthrown, it was also afflicted, after its fall, with many of the almost ritual terms of destruction (e.g., flooding and die removal of ashes) tiiat Sennacherib had imposed on Babylon seventyseven years earlier. Yet, the city of Nineveh did rise again (if never to its previously exalted status), especially during the last few centuries B C E and the first centuries C E , when it is known that a limited Hellenistic occupation was followed by an interval when both the Parthians and the Romans left a definite imprint on the site. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnett, Richard D . Sculptures from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal Nineveh, 668-627 B.C. L o n d o n , 1976.
at
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NIPPUR
Bleibtreu, Erika, et al. The Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. L o n d o n , 1996. Dalley, Stephanie. "Nineveh, Babylon, and the Hanging Gardens: C u neiform and Classical Sources Reconciled." Iraq 56 (1994): 45-58. Eiland, M . L . " R o m a n Coins F o u n d at Nineveh Provide Evidence of T r a d e between Rival E m p i r e s . " The Celator 6.10 (1992): 30-32. Hill, George F. " A Hoard of Coins from Nineveh." Numismatic Chron icle 12 (1931): 160-170. Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Seton Lloyd. Sennacherib's Aqueduct atfcrwan. Oriental Institute Publications, 24. Chicago, 1935. Layard, Austen H . Nineveh and Its Remains. 2 vols. L o n d o n , 1849. Layard, Austen H. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. L o n d o n , 1853. Luckenbill, Daniel D . The Annals of Sennacherib. Oriental Institute P u b lications, 2. Chicago, 1924. M a d h l o o m , Tariq. "Excavations at Nineveh: A Preliminary R e p o r t . " Sumer 21 (1967): 76-79. M a d h l o o m , Tariq. "Nineveh: T h e 1967-68 C a m p a i g n . " Sumer 24 (1968): 45-51. M a d h l o o m , Tariq. "Nineveh: T h e 1968-69 C a m p a i g n . " Sumer 25 (1969): 43-49. Mallowan, M . E, L . " T h e Prehistoric Sondage of Nineveh, 1931-32." Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Liverpool 20 (1933): 127-186. Rassam, Hormuzd. Asshur and the Land of Nimrod. Cincinnati, 1897. Reade, Julian. "Sources for Sennacherib: T h e Prisms." Journal of Cu neiform Studies 27 (1975): 189-196. Reade, Julian. "Studies in Assyrian Geography, Part I: Sennacherib a n d die Waters of Nineveh." Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orien tate 72 (1978): 47-72, 157-180. Reade, Julian. Assyrian Sculpture. L o n d o n , 1983. Russell, John M . Sennacherib's Palace without Rival at Nineveh. Chicago, 1991. Scott, M . Louise, a n d John Macginnis. "Notes on Nineveh." Iraq 52 (1990): 63-73. Includes a full list of Nineveh's excavators. Scurlock, J. A. " T h e Euphrates Flood and the Ashes of N i n e v e h . " Historiay) (1990): 382-384. Stronach, David, and Stephen L u m s d e n . " U . C . Berkeley's Excavations at Nineveh." Biblical Archaeologist 55 (1992): 227-233, Stronach, David. "Village to Metropolis: Nineveh and the Beginnings of Urbanism in Northern Mesopotamia." In Nuove Fondazioni net Vicino Oriente Antico: Realm e ideologia, edited by Stefania Mazzoni, pp. 85-114. Pisa, 1994. Stronach, David. " N o t e s o n t h e T o p o g r a p h y of Nineveh." In NeoAssyrian Geography, edited by Mario Liverani. R o m e , 1996. T h o m p s o n , R. Campbell, a n d Richard W . Hutchinson. A Century of Exploration at Nineveh. L o n d o n , 1929. T u r n e r , Geoffrey. " T h e State Apartments of Late Assyrian Palaces." Iraq 32 (1970): 177-213. T u r n e r , Geoffrey. "Tell Nebi Y u n u s : T h e Ekal Masarti of Nineveh." Iraq 32 (1970): 68-85. Ussishkin, David. The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib. T e l Aviv, 1982. DAVID STRONACH and K I M CODELLA
NIPPUR (modern Niffar or Nuffar), ancient Mesopo tamian city and cult center located at the center of the south ern Mesopotamian fioodplain (32°io' N , 4 5 ° n ' E), just north of Afak, about 180 km (112 mi.) southwest of Bagh dad. Nippur stands nearly 20 m above the immediately sur rounding plain and measures more than 1.5 km across,
nordieast-southwest. It is divided into an eastern and a west ern portion by tire dried bed of a canal, the Shatt en-Nil. The southern tip of the eastern mound, known as Tablet Hill or the Scribal Quarter because of the large number of tablets found there, is separated from the northern part by a shallow gully. T h e northern part of the eastern mound is commonly termed the Religious Quarter because of the ziggurat complex located there. [See Ziggurat] Austen Henry Layard reported that local Arabs referred to the ziggurat area as Bint il-Amir, "daughter of the emir," and had a tra dition that a golden boat lay buried in the mound (Discov eries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, New York, 1985, p. 473). Chains of low mounds, the remains of the city's fortification wall, are visible on the far northeast and south west. [See the biography of Layard] Hermann V. Hilprecht (Die Ausgrabungen in Bel-Tempel zu Nippur, Leipzig, I903,p. 11) noted that Oppert first iden tified Nuffar as ancient Nippur. Henry C. Rawlinson had already linked Nuffar with ancient Nippur and biblical Calneh (Gn. 10:10) in 1861 (Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, vol. 1, London, 1861, pi. 1) and Hilprecht also noted the link (Explorations in Bible Lands during the igth Century, Philadelphia, 1903, p . 294). T h e identification of Calneh with Nippur is based on a Talmudic tradition (Seder Mo'ed 3 (Yoma'). Genesis 10:10 reads "And his kingdom began at Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh (wkhalneh) in the land of Shinar." In large part because there was no record of a southern Mesopotamian Calneh, William Foxwell Al bright suggested that the Masoretic text was corrupt and should be emended to read wkhullanah. Genesis 10:10 would then read "And his ldngdom began at Babel and Erech and Accad, and all of them were in the land of Shinar" (Albright, " T h e End of Calneh in Shinar," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 3 [1944]: 254-255). Albright's suggestion obviates any link between Nuffar/Nippur and a city mentioned in the Bible. [See the biographies of Hilprecht, Rawlinson, and Al bright.] S e t t l e m e n t History. Nippur was already occupied in the early sixth millennium. Sherds from the second (Hajji M u hammad) phase of the Ubaid period have been found on the surface of the mound and recovered from excavated contexts. The main mound continued to be occupied until 800 CE. Small mounds west of the site date to roughly 9001200 BCE, however, and recent work has uncovered traces of an occupation dating to the fourteenth century BCE just northeast of the mound. McGuire Gibson has provided a concise summary of the history of settlement at Nippur (Gibson, 1992, pp. 33-54)Throughout its early history, Nippur occupied a preem inent, if not unique, position among the cities of Mesopo tamia. N o t only was it equidistant between Sippar in the north and Ur in the south—in effect on the border between Sumer and Akkad—but Nippur was also the site of Ekur, the temple of Enlil, the paramount deity of the pantheon,
NIPPUR and the city served as the major religious center of Meso potamia. [See Sippar; Ur; Sumerians; Akkade.] Probably be cause of its geographically strategic position and religious character, it was early on made a "neutral" city. There exists no trace in Mesopotamian historical tradition of any Icing or dynasty centered on Nippur holding political dominance, but nearly all of the kings of Sumer and Akkad sought le gitimacy for their rule through recognition there. T h e city was large—by the end of the third millennium, 135-150 ha (334 acres) inside its walls—and prosperous, the object of continuous royal/state investments in the form of construc tion projects such as its fortification wall and temple build ings (and, concomitantly, pious donations to temples). In the late eighteenth century B C E , however, Nippur's for tunes began to fluctuate. Perhaps because of a combination of politicoeconomic and environmental factors, including drought and the instability of the branch of the Euphrates River on which it was located, Nippur experienced periodic "abandonments" and, conversely, resurgences as a result of or accompanied by royal/state investments. The archaeo logical and written evidence suggests, for example, that the city was largely abandoned for three hundred years from the late eighteenth through the end of the fifteenth centuries B C E , but was revitalized under the Kassite ldngs in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. [See Kassites.] So, too, Nippur also appears to have been largely abandoned in the first cenmry and a half of the Parthian era—the last 150 years B C E , but was reinvigorated by Vologases II as part of a deliberate strategy to control international trade by curbing the expan sionist policies of Characene. [See Parthians.] Excavations. Excavations have been carried out at Nip pur since the beginning of archaeological work in Iraq, al most 140 years ago. Layard excavated for roughly two weeks in January and February 1851. and seems to have been dis heartened by the results of his work, wondering whether ex tensive excavations would produce any important results (Discoveries, 1985, p. 477). An American expedition affili ated with the University of Pennsylvania carried out work at Nippur in the late nineteenth century. From 1888 to 1900 the expedition undertook four major campaigns at the site. Accounts of their work appeared in popular works by two of the excavators, John Punnett Peters and Hermann V. Hil precht, but only one volume in the planned series of final reports was ever published. In 1948 T h e University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago reopened excavations at Nippur. This Joint Expe dition, under the direction of Donald E. McCown, focused its work on the ziggurat complex, in particular on the socalled kitchen temple, and began two soundings (TA, TB) on Tablet Hill, to the southeast. T h e expedition continued to work in those areas in its second (1949-1950) and third (1951-1952) seasons. T h e results were published in Nippur I (McCown and Haines, 1967).
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In the course of the third season, with work on the ziggurat complex and T A and T B nearing completion, the Joint Ex pedition undertook a number of soundings on the east mound designed to locate promising areas for future exca vations. One of the soundings (E) was laid out about 325 m to the northwest of the ziggurat. The sequence of Early Dy nastic and Akkadian temples—the so-called North Tem ple—encountered there became the primary focus of the fourth season's (1953-1954) work. T h e University Museum withdrew from the excavations at the end of the third season and the Baghdad School of the American Schools of Ori ental Research joined the Oriental Institute in the fourth sea son in sponsoring the excavations. A final report was pub lished in Nippur II (McCown et al., 1978). A second of the third season's soundings (B) was on the northwest slope of a low rise just southwest of the ziggurat. There the excavators came down into the Temple of Inanna. Sounding B was expanded in the fourth season, and the Temple of Inanna was the major focus of work in the fifthseventh seasons, although small-scale excavations were also carried out in the ziggurat complex in the fifth and sixth seasons. In the eighth season (1962-1963) the expedition continued work on the lower levels of the Inanna temple and undertook test soundings on the east mound. Richard C. Haines, who had earlier been the expedition's architect, acted as field director during the work on the temple. Only preliminary reports on the temple excavations have ap peared to date. After a break of two years and the near termination of the program of excavations begun in 1948, the Oriental Institute reopened the Nippur excavations in November 1964. In both the ninth and tenth seasons, the expedition, under James Knudstad's direction, turned its attention to delimit ing the large Parthian fortress that overlay the ziggurat com plex as a first step to excavating earlier levels of Ekur. How ever, it was not possible, largely for political reasons, and work at Nippur had to be halted after two seasons. The results of the excavations of the Parthian fortress have been published only in preliminary reports. T h e Oriental Institute's expedition resumed work at Nip pur in the early 1970s. In the eleventh (1972-1973) and twelfth (1973) seasons, the excavators, led by Gibson, worked in two areas on the west mound: area WA (and a sounding called WA 50c near the main opertion) and area WB. The excavators continued work in those areas in the thirteenth season (1975), but also began a program of ex cavations at the far southwestern end of tire site (area W C ) . T h e stated purpose of the work in area W C was to uncover the remains of the city's wall, but a large Kassite building (area W C - i ) and a series of private houses dating to the seventh century B C E (area WC-2) were also uncovered. T h e expedition continued work in area W C in the fourteenth (1976) and fifteenth seasons (1981-1982), undertaking ex tensive excavations of the city wall (WC-3), in addition to
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work in WC-i and WC-2. The final report on the excava tions in area W C - i was published in Nippur III (Zettler, 1993). The sixteenth's season's work at Nippur (1985) was an outgrowth of excavations in area WC-2. The remains from the WC-2 houses were difficult to date, and so a sounding (area TC) was made at the southern end of area T A to provide a well-stratified sequence for the range of time in question and to provide a check on the published stratigra phy of area TA. In addition to work in area T C , two exca vation areas (WD, WE) were established at the southern tip of the western mound as alternate excavation sites for those days when work in T C had to be halted because of sand storms. In recent years, the excavators undertook a series of op erations in various areas, intended, in some cases, to check and expand on the results of earlier work and, in others, to provide a sequence through poorly known periods. In the seventeenth season (1987), for example, in addition to con tinuing work on the western city wall (area WC-3), the ex cavators focused their efforts on the eastern city wall (areas EA, EB, EC), previously excavated by the University of Pennsylvania, and on a low Islamic mound to the northeast of site (area M). In the eighteenth season (1989), the ex cavators located a 10-X-io-meter sounding (area WF) north of WA-50C T h e sounding was undertaken there be cause excavations in area WA-50C in the early 1970s had shown readily accessible mid- to late third-millennium oc cupation levels. In addition, the excavators worked on the top of the west mound just west of area WA (area W G ) . Area W G was intended to check the transition from the preIslamic to the Islamic periods at the site. In the nineteenth season (1990), in addition to continuing work in Area WF, the excavators resumed work on the WA sequence of tem ples that had been the focus of excavations in the early 1970s. Successive campaigns of work that began with the eleventh season in 1972 have included environmental and landscape studies. (Brandt, 1990, pp. 67-73). Excavation Results. The University of Pennsylvania's expeditions worked largely on the ziggurat complex and Tablet Hill, leaving only the far western end of the mound untouched. Aside from the ziggurat, perhaps the bestknown architectural remains excavated by the expedition was the Court of Columns uncovered on the western mound in the vicinity of area WA. The Court of Columns features a megaron hall with prodomos opening off a columned court. The plan led the excavators to identify the building as a Mycenaean palace, but recent excavations have shown that it could not have been built before the end of the third cen tury B C E (Gibson, 1978, p. 19). In addition to architecture, the nineteenth-century Nip pur expeditions recovered tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, which, along with economic documents, include lexical tablets and exemplars of almost all important Su
merian literary works, most of which probably came from private houses on Tablet Hill (for a bibliography of publi cations of Nippur tablets, see Bregstein and Schneider, 1992). On Tablet Hill, the area T A sounding (20 X 40 m) was located roughly in the center of the mound. Area T B was located approximately 30 m northeast of area T A at the bottom of a large cut made by the Pennsylvania expedition. The remains uncovered in areas T A and T B span a period of nearly two thousand years, from the time of the dynasty of Akkad through the Achaemenid era. Private houses were uncovered in both areas. T h e character of the excavated remains in area T B , however, changed over time. T h e build ings uncovered in the earliest, or lowest, levels (XIII-X) were probably private houses. They were replaced by a large "public" building that was rebuilt four times (levels IX-IV). That public building was, in turn, replaced in the latest area TB levels by private houses. The area T B public building was a private house and "office" of a high state official con cerned with the administration of agricultural lands (Zettler, 1991, pp. 251-281). T h e Inanna temple represents the longest continuous ar chaeological sequence available for Mesopotamia: twentytwo building levels spanning the Middle Uruk through Late
NIPPUR.
Bronze statue of King Ur-Namrnu.
D a t e d t o 2 t o o BCE. I r a q
M u s e u m , B a g h d a d . (Scala/Art Resource, N Y )
NIPPUR
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Parthian periods. T h e Early Dynastic temples (levels I X VII) have a unique building plan with two sanctuaries. T h e temples yielded important relief-carved plaques, sculpture in the round, and clay sealings (Hansen, 1963, pp. 145-166; 1971, pp. 47-54). T h e sequence of buildings and associated artifacts has provided the basis for Donald P. Hansen's re definition of the phases of the Early Dynastic period. Where the Diyala sequence provided for a threefold division of the period (Early Dynastic I-III), the Inanna temple sequence suggested a twofold division (Hansen, 1965, pp. 201-213; Porada et al., 1992, pp. 1 0 3 - 1 1 3 ) . T h e Parthian temples are particularly interesting in that they demonstrate the contin uation of ancient Mesopotamian cults and traditional temple architecture into late periods (Keall, 1970). While E. J. Keall discusses the Parthian Inanna temple, he focuses largely on the fortress built over the top of the ruined ziggurat. Excavations of the Parthian fortress showed that the fort went through three distinct phases of growth, and none of the plans was completed before being abandoned in favor of more ambitious constructions. In the latest phase (phase III), the north quadrant of the fort had a monumental complex that included a court with four iwans. T h e three phases of the fortress date to the first and second centuries BCE.
T h e excavations in area W A yielded a sequence of tem ples from die end of the Third Dynasty of Ur through the Achaemenid period. Based on inscriptions and figurines re covered from the excavations, Gibson has suggested that the WA temple was dedicated to Gula, a healing goddess and the wife of Ninurta. The WA excavations also provided ad ditional evidence bearing on the so-called Mycenaean palace uncovered by the University of Pennsylvania. In area WB, the lower levels contained private houses oc cupied for roughly fifty years from the end of the reign of Rim-Suen (1822-1763 BCE) to the time of Samsuiluna (1749-1712 B C E ) . A Kassite palace (level II) with a plan similar to the 'Aqar Quf (Dur Kurigalzu) palace was un covered above the Old Babylonian houses. The palace, which dates to the thirteenth century B C E is probably the building from which the University of Pennsylvania recov ered a large number of Kassite tablets and would appear to have been the governor's residence. T h e latest occupation phases (levels I, G-F) in area WB were poorly preserved. Level IB contained jar burials. One of the jars had a num ber of unbaked clay tablets packed into the cut into which it had been set. T h e tablets date to late eighth and early seventh centuries B C E and represent one of the few sources of information for that poorly documented period (Cole, 1990). At the southwest end of the site, excavations in area W C 1 yielded remains of the city wall and a large Kassite house whose lower level (level III) had been rebuilt three times; the upper level (level II) provided evidence of two main construction phases. Both levels contained a formal court-
NIPPUR.
Statuette
of a couple.
Iraq M u s e u m , Baghdad.
(Art
Resource, N Y )
yard and reception room, as well as a domestic suite of rooms. T h e upper level could be assigned to the thirteenth century B C E , based on a dated tablet. Surface remains in area W C - i contained fragmentary floors and two chronologically discrete groups of burials. T h e earlier group of jar burials dated to the early first millennium B C E , while the later group of simple inhumations was probably late Parthian. In area WC-2 the excavations yielded two occupational phases of private houses that could be dated to the seventh century B C E . T h e earlier phase also contained a small chapel (Arm strong, 1989). Work in area WC-3 focused on disentangling the various phases of the western stretch of the city wall. Aside from the work in area WA, the most important recent excavations at the site have been in areas T C and WF. T h e sounding carried out in area T C provided incontestable ev idence for the abandonment of the site between the Old Babylonian and Late Kassite periods (fourteenth and thir teenth centuries BCE) and made possible a reassessment of the stratigraphy of area T A (Armstrong, 1989). The se quence uncovered in area W F has been discussed in the context of the transition from the Early Dynastic to Akka dian periods at Nippur (McMahon, 1993). [See also Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; and Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples.]
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NISHAPUR BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e E n d of 'Calneh in Shinar.'" Journal of Near Eastern Studies 3 (1944): 254-255. Armstrong, James A. " T h e Archaeology of N i p p u r from the Decline of the Kassite K i n g d o m until the Rise of the Neo-Babylonian E m pire." P h . D . diss., University of Chicago, 1989. T h e results of ex cavation of post-Kasite N i p p u r , including a discussion of the build ing levels of area T A . Brandt, Margaret C. " N i p p u r : Building an Environmental M o d e l . " Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49 (1990): 67-73. Bregstein, Linda B., and T a m m i J. Schneider. " N i p p u r Bibliography." In Nippur al the Centennial, edited by Maria dejong Ellis, p p . 337357. Philadelphia, 1992. A comprehensive bibliography of the pri mary publications of N i p p u r tablets that includes tablets from the post-World W a r II seasons of excavations. Cole, Steven. " N i p p u r in Late Assyrian T i m e s , 750-612 B . C . " P h . D . diss., University of Chicago, 1990. Discusses the area W B unbaked clay tablets from the jar burials (eighth-sevemh cenUiries BCE). Crawford, Vaughn E. " N i p p u r , the Holy City." Archaeology 12 (1959): 74-83. Fisher, Clarence S. Excavations at Nippur. Philadelphia, 1905. Franke, Judith Ann. "Artifact Patterning and Functional Variability in the Urban Dwelling: O l d Babylonian N i p p u r , Iraq." P h . D . diss., University of Chicago, 1987. Focuses on the area W B private houses. Gibson, M c G u i r e . Excavations al Nippur: Eleventh Season. Chicago, 1975Gibson, M c G u i r e . Excavations at Nippur: Twelfth Season. Chicago, 1978a. Gibson, M c G u i r e . " N i p p u r (1975)." Sumer 34 (1978b): 114-121. Gibson, M c G u i r e , et al. " T h e Southern Corner of N i p p u r : S u m m a r y of Excavations during the Fourteenth and Fifteenui Seasons." Sumer 39 (1983): 170-190. Gibson, M c G u i r e . "Patterns of Occupation at N i p p u r . " In Nippur at the Centennial, edited by Maria dejong Ellis, p p . 33-54. Philadelphia, 1992. Hansen, Donald P . , and George F . Dales. " T h e T e m p l e of Inanna, Queen of Heaven at N i p p u r . " Archaeology 15 (1962): 75-84. Hansen, Donald P . " N e w Votive Plaques from N i p p u r . " Journal of Near Eastern Studies 22 (1963): 145-166. Hansen, Donald P, " T h e Pottery Sequence at N i p p u r from Middle Uruk to the E n d of the Old Babylonian Period, 3400-1600 B . C . " In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, edited by Robert W . Ehrich, p p . 201-213. Chicago, 1965. Hansen, Donald P . " S o m e Early Dynastic I Sealings from N i p p u r . " In Studies Presented to G. M. A, Hanfmann, edited by D . G. Mitten et a l , p p . 47-54. Cambridge, 1971. Hilprecht, H e r m a n n V. Die Ausgrabungen in Bel-Tempel zu Nippur. Leipzig, 1903a. Hilprecht, H e r m a n n V. Explorations in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia, 1903b. See pages 289-577. Keall, E. J. " T h e Significance of Late Parthian N i p p u r . " P h . D . diss., University of Michigan, 1970. Knudstad, James E. "Excavations at N i p p u r . " Sumer 22 (1966): 1 1 1 114; 24 (1968): 95-106. Layard, Austen H . Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. L o n don, 1853. Reprint, N e w York, 1985. See page 562. M c C o w n , Donald E., a n d Richard C. Haines. Nippur I: Temple ofEnlil, Scribal Quarter, and Soundings. Chicago, 1967. M c C o w n , Donald E., et al. Nippur II: The North Temple and Sounding E. Chicago, 1978. M c M a h o n , Augusta Madeline. " T h e Early Dynastic to Akkadian P e riod Transition in Southern Mesopotamia." P h . D . diss,, University of Chicago, 1993. Peters, John P . Nippur. 2 vols. N e w York, 1897.
Porada, Edith, et al. " T h e Chronology of M es opotamia , ca. 7000-1600 B . C . " In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, edited b y R o b e r t W . Ehrich, vol. I , pp. 7 7 - 1 2 1 , vol. 2, p p . 90-124. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Rawlinson, H e n r y Creswicke. Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. Vol. 1 L o n d o n , 1861. Stone, Elizabedi C. Nippur Neighborhoods. Chicago, 1987. Synthetic study of the buildings, artifacts, and texts from the Isin-Larsa a n d O l d Babylonian levels of areas T A a n d T B . Zettler, Richard L. " N i p p u r u n d e r the T h i r d Dynasty of U r : Area T B . " Aula Orientalis 9 (1991): 251-281. Zetder, Richard L. Ur III Temple of Inanna al Nippur. Berlin, 1992. A study of the architecture, artifacts, and tablets from the level IV t e m ple. Zettler, Richard L. Nippur III: Kassite Buildings in Area WC—i. C h i cago, 1993. RICHARD L.
ZETTLER
NISHAPUR, site located in Khorasan province, north eastern Iran, about 65 1cm (40 mi.) west of Mashhad. Founded by Shapur II in die Sasanian period, Nishapur was one of tire major cities of the region during the Middle Ages. However, during the Sasanian and Early Islamic periods, Nishapur had been a somewhat marginal town, even though one of the most important Sasanian fire temples was located in its vicinity. Nishapur gained prominence when die T a hirids proclaimed their dynasty to be semiautonomous and made the city their capital; the founder of tiris dynasty was 'Abd Allah ibn Tahir (AH 213-230/828-845 C E ) . Nishapur's importance was enhanced under die Samanids (tenth-elev enth centuries), when it began to decline; various factors contributed to this process, such as wars and earthquakes, culminating in its sacldng by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. The city was never to regain its former prominence. Under the Samanids, Nishapur competed witii several other courts of semiautonomous princes, such as Merv, Rayy/Tehran and Bukhara, attaining a high level of cultural and intellectual activity. T h e city became a flourishing com mercial center, producing luxury goods such as textiles and remarkable ceramics. In the city a well-known mosque and the palace of the governor were adjacent to the citadel and another quarter. The city appears to have been planned on the classical pat tern, with four gates that must have led to a cardo and a decumanus (most of die streets in the commercial district ran in parallel north-south and east-west directions, intersecting at right angles). What is known of Nishapur is largely the result of exca vations conducted by a team from the Metropolitan M u seum of Art (New York City), primarily from 1935 to 1940, with a final season in 1947. T h e finds were distributed among several mounds (tepes), and were mostiy attributed to the ninth-thirteenth centuries. T h e majority of the ma terial consisted of pottery, both complete vessels and sherds, but kilns were also found, testifying to the local manufacture of these ceramics (Wilkinson, 1973). T h e ceramics are both
NITRIA unglazed and glazed. The unglazed pieces are plain for the most part, though some are decorated by a variety of meth ods; molds were used, some of which were recovered and are particularly noteworthy. T h e various groups of glazed ceramics include a number of distinctive types: buff ware with an underglaze and painted decoration and black-onwhite pottery with abundant epigraphic motifs. Glass, an extensive array of metalwork (Allan, 1982), coins, and frag ments of frescoes were also among the finds. [See also Ceramics, article on Ceramics in the Islamic Pe riod; Metals, article on Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods; and Persia, article on Persia in the Islamic Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Allan, J. W . Nishapur: Metalwork of the Early Islamic Period. N e w York, 1982. Wilkinson, Charles K. Nishapur. Pottery of the Early Islamic Period. N e w York, 1973. MYRIAM ROSEN-AYALON
NITRIA, monastic settlements near Alexandria, visited in the fourth and fifth centuries GE by Greek and Latin writers who came to Egypt to see its holy men. T h e visitors called the settlements Nitria, or more properly, "the mount of Nitria" (Gk., ho oros tes Nitrias; L a t , mons Nitriae). In the Latin text of the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, attributed to Rufinus (c. 345-410 C E ) , who spent eight years in Egypt and was a leading figure in Palestinian monasticism, Nitria was about 65 Ion (40 mi.) from Alexandria and took its name from a nearby town, a center for the collection of salts (nitratos). Its precise location has not been identified; the de scription in the Historia Monachorum, as well as other ref erences to Nitria by Palladius (c. 363-431), author of tire Lausiac History; Cassian (c. 360-435); and other Christian writers, suggests that the region was settled near the modem village of El-Barnugi, about 14 Ion (9 mi.) southwest of Damanhur. In antiquity it lay on the edge of cultivation, in an area of marshy, marginal land. Tradition ascribes the initial settlement to tire ascetic Amoun (Ammon), a contemporary of Antony (c. 251-356), father of Egyptian monasticism. Unlike the coenobitic sys tem introduced by Pachomius (c. 290-346) in Upper Egypt, in which formal, written rules regulated every detail of the monks' daily life, the system developed under the spiritual direction of Antony and Amoun allowed freer associations. T h e monies lived, according to Rufinus, in about fifty indi vidual dwellings (lauras) set close together: in some, many monks lived together, in others only a few, and in still others, there were some true solitaries. T h e pattern of religious life allowed the monks to determine their own course to salva tion, leading a life of prayer and penance in their cells. They met on Saturdays and Sundays for a common celebration of the Eucharist, the church being described by Palladius as
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being large but not magnificent. It was administered by priests who were subject to the authority of the bishop at Damanhur. Monks supported themselves by tending small vegetable gardens and by selling mats and baskets plaited from halfa grass or palm fiber in the villages and in Alexandria. They hired themselves out as laborers at harvest time or wove flax. Their daily life, ascetic practices, conduct and behavior to one another, and relations with the secular world are ex emplified in an anonymous compilation known as the Say ings of the Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum; Verba Seniorum), dating from at least the middle of the fifth century, with translations into Coptic (the last stage of the native language of Egypt), Syriac, and Latin. The proximity of Nitria to Alexandria attracted visitors in great numbers. There was a guest house and a bakery near the church. This influx of visitors and the growing number of disciples resulted in the withdrawal of individuals farther inland to an area that is referred to in the literary sources as Kellia ("cells"). The textual evidence for the site of Kellia confirms that it was in an area of some six hundred mounds of varying height, in the sandy country 16-17 km ( n mi.) southwest of El-Barnugi, remote from the settlements near Qusur el-Tlzeila and Qusur al-Ruba'iyyat. T h e area's archaeological significance was first noticed in 1925, but it was not until 1964 that it became the focus of a joint scientific mission carried out by Geneva University and the French Archaeological Institute of Cairo. After publish ing a preliminary report on their findings, the missions pro ceeded separately with the work, which has not yet been completed. The report on the site's eroded brick buildings— of differing sizes, some with painted scenes—reflects a con glomerate of hermit dwellings, the larger more elaborate than might be supposed from the literary tradition. When the fieldwork is completed, the finds fully documented and published, and the site's chronological sequences defined, it should be possible to use the archaeological evidence to sup plement the literary evidence for the monies' daily life, to clarify die relationship of Kellia with the less remote com munity of Nitria, and to trace the movement toward more closely knit monastic communities. T h e literary evidence, supported by the study and analysis of pottery from Kellia, suggests that the settlements of Nitria and Kellia were in decline at the end of the fifth century and were abandoned in the ninth. In contrast, a third area, even more remote, called Scetis (Shiet) in the ancient texts, has had a continuous but checkered history of occupation. It lies within a depression below sea level, now known as Wadi 'nNatrun, that takes its name from a chain of salt lakes fringed with reed beds. Its origins, in the fourth century, are tradi tionally associated with Macarius tire Great (c. 330-39°)• There is little detailed information about how anchorite set tlements developed into today's imposing monasteries, for tified with walls and keeps, with individual cells and com-
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munal refectories, gardens, wells, oil and wine presses, bakeries, storerooms, and churches with wall paintings. Weakened by docttinal disputes and subject to raids from Berber tribes to the west, the monks experienced periods of decline interspersed witii periods of material prosperity. The history of construction at the different monasteries is com plex: existing buildings, restored and enlarged, obscure more ancient construction that dates to the eighth century. Four monasteries are still active, three of which date to the fourtii century: Deir Abu-Maqar (Convent of St. Macarius), Deir Anba Bishoi (Convent of St. Pschoi), and Deir el-Baramous (Convent of the Romans—that is, of the two Roman saints Maximus and Domitius, said to be the sons of the emperor Valentinian, 364-375 CE). The fourtii mon astery is known as Deir as-Suryan (Convent of the Syrians). Originally founded in the sixth century, it was inhabited by Syrian monks from Mesopotamia in the ninth century. It was still active in the seventeenth century, when the great monasteries of Iraq, Syria, and eastern Turkey had already disappeared. Its library, whose fortunes can be traced back almost continuously to the ninth century, contained impor tant Syriac manuscripts. These communities are die center of Egyptian monasti cism and have, since the seventh century, attracted Euro pean travelers in search of ancient manuscripts. Notable among travelers who left vivid accounts of their experiences was Robert Curzon. His Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, first published in 1849, is a minor classic. [See also Monasteries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY General Sources Badawy, Alexander. Coptic Art and Archaeology: The Art of the Christian Egyptians from Late Antique to the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass., 1978. General study, particularly good on architecture, including a short account of Kellia. Chadwick, Owen. Western Asceticism. L o n d o n and Philadelphia, 1958. Selected translations, with introductions and notes, of the Sayings of the Fathers, Conferences of Cassian, a n d the Rule of Saint Benedict. Evelyn-White, H u g h G. The Monasteries of the Wddi 'n Natrun. part 2, The History of the Monasteries of Nitria and of Scetis, edited by Walter Hauser; part 3, The Architecture and Archaeology. N e w York, 19321933. Fundamental study arising from the mission of the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan M u s e u m of Art, N e w York, 19101911 and 1920-1921. Part 1, published in 1926, is a catalogue of new Coptic texts from the Monastery of Saint Macarius, with an intro duction to the library. Leroy, Jules. Lespeintures de convents du Quadi Natroun. Memoires de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, C i . Cairo, 1982. T h e only full discussion of the paintings in the monasteries of Wadi ' n N a t r u n , with 147 plates. Meinardus, Otto F . A. Monks and Monasteries of the Egyptian Deserts. Rev. ed. Cairo, 1989. Up-to-date general account, with bibliography. Russell, N o r m a n . The Lives of the Desert Fathers. Cistercian Studies Series, no. 34. L o n d o n , 1980. Translation, with an introduction by Benedicta W a r d S L G , of the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, with a bibliography of selected primary a n d secondary sources.
Walters, Colin. Monastic Archaeology in Egypt. Warminster, 1974. G e n eral survey of the material culture of the Egyptian monasteries u p to the twelfth century. Excavation Reports D a u m a s , Francois, a n d Antoine Guillaumont. Kellia 1, Kom 219: Fouil les executees en 1964 et 196$. 2 vols. Fouilles de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, vol. 28. Cairo, 1969. Egloff, Michel. Kellia: La potterie copte. 2 vols. Geneva, 1977. Egloff, Michel. Survey archeologique des Kellia (Basse Egypte): Rapport de la campagne 19S1. Louvain, 1983. Kasser, Rodolphe. Kellia 1965. 2 vols. Recherches Suisses d ' A r c h e o logie C o p t e , n o s . 1-2. Geneva, 1967. Kasser, Rodolphe. Kellia: Topographic Geneva, 1972. A. F .
SHORE
N O R T H AFRICA. Occuping the entire northwestern quarter of the African continent, North Africa, or the Ma ghreb, embraces modern Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and sometimes Libya. North Africa came in contact witii the ancient Near East through the Phoenicians, who founded Carthage and other setdements across the region early in the first millennium B C E . What the Phoenicians called this newly found land is un certain because, in antiquity, North Africa had many names. T o die Greeks it was Libya, by which they denoted every thing from the Nile River westward to the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar). [See Libya.] T h e Romans called it Af rica, subdividing the region according to political and eco nomic organization or ethnic affiliation. Carthago in north ern Tunisia was the city and territory of Phoenician Cartilage. [See Carthage.] Emporia (Gk., "markets") de noted the eastern coast of central Tunisia. Tripolitania des ignated three Phoenician city-states along the coast in south eastern Tunisia and western Libya: Labdah (Leptis Magna), Trablus (Oea), and Sabratha. [See Leptis Magna.] Numidia in eastern Algeria was the territory of indigenous pastoralists, the Numidians (Gk., nomades, "nomads"), and Mauretania in western Algeria and nortiiern Morocco, that of the native Maures. (Roman Mauretania should not be confused with the modern northwest African country of the same name but different location.) Medieval Arab geogra phers took die name ifraqiya ("Africa") from the Byzan tines, but also coined their own, more descriptive phrase, aldjezirat al-maghreb, "die island of the west." Shortened to al-maghreb, "the west," this is today transliterated as Ma ghreb. No record survives of what the Phoenicians called their adoptive land in their own Semitic tongue; nor is tiiere any trace of how it was named by its native peoples, the Numidians, Maures, Garamantes, and others—later known collectively as Berbers. By whatever name the Phoenicians knew it, these new comers to North Africa found a landscape there not unlike the one tiiey had left behind in die east: a narrow coastal plain enclosed by echelons of low hills and high mountains,
NORTH AFRICA beyond which stretched hot, dry desert. The terrain of North Africa, however, is far less compact than that of Leb anon or Syria, and, except in Tripolitania, the desert is far removed from the coast. East and south, the Sahara effec tively isolates the Maghreb from the Nile Valley and from equatorial Africa. T h e waters of the Mediterranean Sea and South Atlantic Ocean border it on the north and west, re spectively. Within these boundaries the Atlas Mountains, a chain of densely folded limestone ridges, form an interior massif extending 2,000 Ion (1,240 mi.) from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Straits of Sicily east of Carthage. Inland, the topography is sharply dissected by numerous short, seasonal wadis that drain the watersheds of the Atlas into the surrounding seas or into marshy, internal depres sions. There are numerous rocky headlands and offshore islands along the lengthy North African coastline but few natural harbors, a circumstance that influenced where on the coast the seafaring Phoenicians made landfall during their journeys westward. T h e North African climate is Mediterranean, with hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. T h e upper elevations of the Atlas are colder and wetter, and the Saharan desert fringes, hotter and drier than the coastal zones. Since the Neolithic period, typical Mediterranean modes of subsis tence have prevailed. Cereal agriculture and sheep/goat pastoralism are long-established livelihoods in North Africa. [See Cereals; Sheep and Goats.] Rainfall is usually adequate for dry cultivation and the annual renewal of pastures, but the amount of precipitation can vary considerably from year to year—with potentially disastrous consequences for both farmers and herders. T h e landscape once supported a nat ural-climax forest vegetation of cedar, pistachio, holm oak, and pine and the wild progenitors of domesticated olive and grape. It proved hospitable to the domesticated vines and olive trees introduced there by the Phoenicians. [See Viti culture; Olives.] Since the time of Phoenician contact, how ever, the human populations in North Africa have greatly altered its original environment. Millennia of exploitation by agriculturalists and pastoralists have resulted in familiar Mediterranean patterns of woodland destruction and en suing soil erosion. Phoenicians and Libyans comprised the two main groups of people inhabiting North Africa in antiquity. The Libyans were aborigines, descended probably from the region's orig inal prehistoric inhabitants. T h e Phoenician newcomers ar rived only in the early first millennium B C E . Classical authors also recognized a.mixture of the two groups, so-called Libyphoenicians, mat inevitably sprang up wherever the Phoenicians landed in North Africa (Livy, 20.22.3). Phoenicians in North Africa are often referred to as Punic. This is an English transliteration of the Latin poeni, itself a Latin transliteration of the ancient Greek phoinix, a common noun for the color purple. In Greek it was also the gentilic name for Semitic speakers of the Syrian coast who special
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ized in the manufacture of purple dye. These were Canaanites, whose name may come from kinahhu, a Semitic word for purple. [See Canaanites.] The modern academic distinction between Phoenician and Punic is based on chronology, geography, and language. "Phoenician" history and archaeology are divided from "Punic" at about the beginning of the sixth century B C E , the time of the Neo-Babylonian siege and conquest of Tyre (586-573 B C E ) . [See Babylonians;Tyre.] Subsequently, Car thage emerged as the leading Phoenician city in the west. Geographically, the Mediterranean is separated into a Phoe nician east and a Punic west. In language, older Phoenician grammatical forms, onomastica, and scripts are differenti ated from linguistically and paleographically evolved Punic ones. [See Phoenician-Punic] T h e distinction is not a rigid one, however, and artifacts, monuments, and settlements in North Africa are sometimes described somewhat ambigu ously as Phoenician-Punic. In this regard, St Augustine of Plippo (354-430 CE), a na tive North African, made a trenchant comment. Speaking of the indigenous inhabitants (rustici) of North Africa, he observed that they still (early fifth century CE) referred to themselves in their own (Punic) language as Chananaei, or "Canaanites" (Letters 209.2-3). This suggests that in North Africa the Phoenicians may never have ceased being Ca naanites. T h e Canaanites who "discovered" North Africa discov ered that it was already occupied. The foundation legends of Carthage, transmitted through classical sources (cf. Justin 18.5 for the fullest account), mention native inhabitants who contested the newcomers' right to settle their land. Beyond the bare fact of their existence, however, little else is known. There is a dearth of direct archaeological data to support generalizations about the society and economy of the native populations of North Africa in the millennium leading up to their first contact with the Iron Age civilizations of the Near East. The best appraisal of the people encountered by the founders of Carthage is that they were probably ceramic Neolithic farmers and herders clustered in villages or camp ing in tents and possessing no knowledge of metal or of writ ing. T h e Stone Age prehistory of the Maghreb is well un derstood into the third millennium, but there is no evidence for a native "Bronze Age" in North Africa. T h e handful of indigenous inscriptions is chronologically very late. Even those that occur bilingually with Punic texts have never been satisfactorily deciphered. What the natives called themselves in their own tongue is not known. Classical authors lumped them under one ru bric, Libyans, though these same writers did record the names and the locations of traditional territories of some native tribes or tribal confederations. These include the Gararnantes of the Sahara, the Massylies and Masaesylii of N u midia (central North Africa), and the Mauri of Mauretania (western North Africa). T h e ancient writers also distinguish
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between native groups that farmed and those that herded. According to the written sources, agriculture was practiced in the Mediterranean zones of the northern and western Ma ghreb, while sheep/goat pastoralists ranged south and east along the Saharan fringe. (Camels and camel pastoralism were inttoduced into the region very late, probably in the Roman period.) [See Agriculture; Pastoral Nomadism; Camels.] Today, native North Africans are collectively called Ber bers, a transmutation of an ancient Greek epithet for nonGreek speakers, barbaroi. The modern Berber language is written in Arabic script and is laden with loanwords, but it remains identifiable with its remote linguistic ancestors, an cient Semitic and Egyptian. Carthage. The best-known and most thoroughly ex plored of the ancient Near Eastern settlements in North Af rica is Carthage. According to legend it was established by Phoenicians from Tyre and Cyprus in the late ninth century BCE. The early date, though not yet the specific origin, of Carthage is now supported by archaeological evidence. Utica, a neighboring site to the north, was (also according to legend) an earlier foundation ( I I O I B C E ) ; archaeologically, however, the site does not date to before the eighth century BCE. Carthage (Lat., Carthago) transliterates the Phoenician words qart hadasht, "new town," an approprite name for a colonial foundation. In the Persian and Hellenistic periods, Cartltage emerged as a military and economic rival to Rome, ultimately contesting with that city, in a series of three socalled Punic Wars (in 264-241 B C E , 218-200 BCE, 149-146 B C E ) , for control of the entire western Mediterranean world. In the end, Phoenician Cartilage lost that struggle. After ward, the city reemerged as the capital of Roman Africa, ranking in size and importance with Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria. [See Alexandria; Antioch on Orontes.] Af ter the Vandal interregnum (439-533 C E ) , Carthage re mained under Byzantine rule until the Islamic conquest in 700. The ruins of ancient Carthage—Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine—now lie in the coastal suburbs of modem Tunis, Tunisia. In antiquity the city spread over the southern tip of the Cartilage peninsula, a low ridge of sand stone hills joined to the mainland by a broad, flat, sandy isthmus. The locale is often described as typically Phoeni cian: an offshore island or remote promontory providing safe haven from the sea and protective isolation from the mainland. Already partly enclosed by the Gulf of Tunis, the twin lagoons north and south of the peninsula offered an cient mariners a choice of sheltered anchorages, depending on the direction of the winds. As late as the Byzantine period (sixth-seventh centuries CE) these lagoons were still navi gable, but continual siltation from adjacent rivers since the end of antiquity has almost cut them off from the sea. Archaeological excavations, ongoing at Carthage since the nineteenth century, have revealed many, though not all, of
the principal features of the Phoenician city: features exca vated in whole or in part include the citadel (Byrsa), cem eteries of all periods, dwellings, fortifications, industrial in stallations of Old and New Carthage, the port, and the tophet, where the Carthaginians allegedly practiced (and ar chaeological evidence now suggests, actually did practice) child sacrifice. Much recent data have resulted from the In ternational Campaign to Save Carthage carried out during the 1970s and 1980s by expeditions from a score of countries under the auspices of U N E S C O . Byrsa. The citadel of Carthage, the Byrsa was so called because its boundaries were legendarily delimited by the city founders with thongs of oxhide (Gk., bursa). T h e Byrsa rises 50 m (164 ft.) above the surrounding landscape and was always the focus of settlement in ancient Carthage. N o ttace of the earliest occupation survives on the summit, however, because Roman engineers truncated it in order to terrace the hilltop for their later monumental constructions. Flank ing the crest of the hill and undisturbed by later occupation are seventh-century BCE extramural tombs built of mono lithic sandstone blocks (see figure 1). Above the tombs are the well-preserved remains of tire second-century B C E mul tistory townhouses of wealthy urbanites destroyed in the fi nal Roman assault on the citadel in 146 B C E . These are the townhouses so vividly described by the Latin author Appian (Libyca 96), who also left an account of the Carthaginian ports. Ruins of these townhouses were later engulfed by de bris pushed dowrislope from the summit during the massive Roman terrace building. Some of the townhouse walls are preserved to a height of more titan 2 m. Cemeteries. From the seventh century B C E onward, cem eteries spread north and east from the Byrsa in ever-wid ening, concenttic semicircles. Their progressive enlarge ment and increasing distance from the Byrsa suggest that the town underwent a gradual expansion through the first three centuries of its existence, followed by an episode of rapid growth after 500 B C E . This growth corresponds with what can be gleaned from the meager written sources, which refer to an Old Carthage and a New Carthage—the latter possibly laid out on an orthogonal grid sometime in the fifth century BCE. Old and New Carthage. Vestiges of both Old Carthage and New Carthage were revealed in German excavations in the 1970s and 1980s under the auspices of the German Ar chaeological Institute (Rome section), directed by Friedrich Rakob, and the University of Hamburg, directed by HansGeorg Niemeyer, on the seafront east of the Byrsa and north of the port. Unearthed there were fifth-century B C E dwell ings protected by a sandstone seawall that also functioned as part of the city's fortifications. These structures had been erected on backfill containing debris of seventh-century B C E buildings apparently razed to make way for them. In ori entation, the new houses conformed to an orthogonal plan set at right angles to the coastline. In the third-second cen turies B C E , larger, more sumptuous seaside villas succeeded
N O R T H AFRICA the fifth-century dwellings but maintained the same align ment. [See Villa.] T h e orientation of the city plan of Roman Carthage corresponds closely to this pre-Roman grid. T o the west, farther from the sea and closer to the foot of the Byrsa, in trenches that reached sterile soil, the German team found several meters of occupational debris laid down in eleven floor levels. T h e architecture consisted of mudbrick structures built on stone foundations with pillar-andrubble walls. (Pillar-and-rubble wall construction, already in use at Megiddo in the tenth century B C E , was so widespread in North Africa the Romans dubbed it opus Africanum, "Af rican work.") [See Megiddo.] Ceramics from these floor and fills, especially imported Greek wares, date this architecture indubitably to the eighth-sixth centuries B C E . Almost a third of the ceramics found in the basal deposits was not imported Phoenician or Greek, but indigenous handmade ware, a ves tige of early contact between the incoming Phoenicians and indigenous Libyans. Also in this area were signs of industrial activity of the seventh-sixth centuries BCE: pottery kilns, metalworking installations, and purple-dye works. The pic ture emerging from these excavations is that of a seaside industrial area between the Byrsa and the tophet taken over for urban housing and public buildings as the Iron Age/Per sian-period city developed into a Hellenistic metropolis. Late in this process, Carthage was provided with a new port befitting its status as a major Mediterranean trading city. Port of Carthage. At die time of the final Punic War, the port of Carthage, according to Appian (Lihyca 96), con sisted of a rectangular harbor for merchantmen and an ad jacent circular one for warships in the city's southeast quar ter. American (ASOR Punic Project directed by Lawrence
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Figure 1
View of seventh-century
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E. Stager, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) and British (British Academy Excavations at Carthage directed by H. Hurst, Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University) excavations in the 1970s confirmed conclusively that the shallow lagoons southeast of the Byrsa (one rectangular, one circular) were indeed the remains of this port. Moreover, both were shown to be relatively late features of the city, built only after about 350 B C E . The location of the pre-Hellenistic harbor remains a mystery. The commercial harbor was a rectangular artificial basin (Gk., cothori) surrounded by a quay wall built of monumen tal sandstone ashlars more than 2 m on a side and almost 1 m high. Near the quayside the American excavators discov ered a large warehouse constructed in the typical Phoenician pillar-and-rubble technique (Stager, 1979). T h e harbor seems to have been only lightly damaged in the final Punic War, and the Romans soon put it back in service. The thickly plastered surface of the first-century C E Augustan quayside overlay a half meter of Punic destruction debris dumped as leveling fill by the Romans. The refurbished Pu nic port continued to serve the Roman city well into Late Antiquity. The military harbor adjoined the commercial one. Inves tigations in the circular lagoon by British mission in the 1970s demonstrated that it too was part of the port described by Appian. This lagoon also was an artificial basin with an island created in the center. Based on the excavator's esti mates, the military harbor (see figure 2) could accommodate 170 to 180 warships in timber-and-stone drydock ramps built on the central island and around the shore of the lagoon (Hurst and Stager, 1978). (Appian put its capacity at 220
BCE Punic tombs on the Byrsa hill, Carthage.
Look
i n g n o r t h w e s t t o w a r d t h e s u m m i t . N o t e t h e t r i a n g u l a r r o o f e d t o m b . (Photograph b y J. A. Greene)
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ships.) Such ramps had existed earlier in the eastern Med iterranean, as in the sixth-century BCE cothon at Phoenician Kition (Larnaca) on Cyprus. [See Kition.] T h e date of the military harbor is surprisingly late—no earlier than the sec ond century B C E , when Carthage was on the brink of the last Punic War. Less surprisingly, the military harbor was heav ily destroyed in the aftermath of that war but was later re built along different lines by the Romans. Tophet. The tophet, or Precinct of Tank, was near the port but was founded much earlier. There, the Carthagini ans practiced child sacrifice, or so charged Greek and Latin textual accounts. Owing to the fate of the city's library after 146 BCE (the Romans gave it to their Punic-speaking N u m idian allies and it was subsequently lost), no Phoenician ac count of the city's history is preserved. Until archaeological evidence for a tophet at Carthage was discovered accidently in 1921, the classical sources might have been dismissed as mere adverse propaganda. The tophet at Carthage was a typical open-air Phoenician sanctuary (see figure 3): an area delimited by a temenos wall and filled with urn burials containing cremated remains of humans or animals surmounted by stone markers, usually decorated or inscribed, or sometimes both. [See Burial Sites; Burial Techniques.] Other such sanctuaries were later dis covered at Phoenician sites in North Africa and on Sicily and Sardinia. [See Sardinia.] They are now known at Amathus on Cyprus and in Tyre in Lebanon. [See Amathus; Tyre.] Tophets at other North African sites in the region of
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Byzacium to the south and along the Mediterranean coast of Algeria continued to be used into the Christian era, though by then animal substitution rather than actual hu man sacrifice was apparently the norm. The term tophet (meaning, perhaps, "roaster") is taken from 2 Kings 23:10, which describes a tophet in the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. T h e Jerusalem tophet was obliterated in the sixth century B C E , during Josiah's reforms "so that no one would make a son or daughter pass through the fire as a mulksacrifice" (NRSV, adapted). Excavations have shown that the tophet at Carthage was in continuous use from the founding of the city in about 800 BCE until its destruction by the Romans in 146 B C E . Excavations at the Carthage tophet began immediately af ter its discovery, with campaigns of Frangois Icard and Paul Gielly (Tunisian Department of Antiquities, 1922), Francis Kelsey (University of Michigan, 1925), G. G. Lapeyre (Tu nisian Department of Antiquities, 1934-1936), and Pierre Cintas (Tunisian Department of Antiquities, 1944-1947). None was ever fully published, though Donald Harden, a junior member of Kelsey's expedition, synthesized the 1925 results in two brief articles that accurately fixed the relative sequence (Tanit I—III) and absolute chronology (eighthsecond centuries BCE) of the tophet urn burials (summarized in Harden, 1980, pp. 82-90). Excavations by the American Schools of Oriental Re search Punic Project during the U N E S C O Save Carthage Campaign in the 1970s verified the broad outlines as well as
F i g u r e 2. Model of the second-century
(Courtesy British Academy Carthage Excavations)
BCE ship sheds at the circular harbor,
Carthage.
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many details of Harden's analysis. T h e Punic Project un covered more than four hundred whole or fragmentary bur ial urns containing the cremated remains of children and young animals. Analysis of the contents and stratigraphic contexts of the urns, together with a reconsideration of the biblical and extrabiblical written sources, demonstrates be yond doubt that child sacrifice was practiced at Carthage. In the area excavated at least nine phases of burials were dated, from about 750 to 146 B C E . T h e lowest levels, on bedrock, corresponded to the earliest period of the tophet, about 750-600 B C E (phases 1-4 = Harden's Tanit I). The intermediate levels spanned die fifth-fourth/third centuries B C E (phases 5-8 = Harden's Tanit II). T h e uppermost stra tum, dating to the third-second centuries B C E (phases 9 = Harden's Tanit III), was mostiy destroyed by the Romans, leaving little of the final level of the tophet in situ. A typical burial consisted of an urn placed in a stonedlined pit capped by a flat cobble. All of the urns contained the charred bones of sacrificial victims, either children (new borns or two-four-year-olds) or animals (lambs, kids, birds). Animal substitutes were interred with the same rites as human victims, including the provision of grave offerings (see figure 4 (glass beads, carved amulets and, more rarely, miniature pottery vessels) and sometimes a burial monu ment. [See Grave Goods.] T h e monuments, sandstone cippi or limestone stelae, were used frequently (though not in variably) to mark the burials. T h e earliest markers were undecorated, L-shaped sandstone cippi. By the fourth century B C E , the monuments were often embellished with the sym
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bols of the deities Tanit and Ba'al Hammon; they were sometimes inscribed with die dedicant's name, profession, and genealogy. Contrary to expectation, animal substitution did not grad ually supplant human sacrifice. In the earliest phases (750600 B C E ) , one urn in three contained the charred remains of lambs, lads, or birds. In later levels (phases 5-8) only one urn in ten contained the remains of an animal substitute. In all cases the integrity of individual skeletons in the urns in-
N 0 R T H A F R I C A . F i g u r e 4 . Tanit Ium amulet group from the Tophet, Carthage.
(Courtesy A S O R P u n i c Project)
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dicated that a deliberate effort had been made by those con ducting the sacrifice to collect from the pyre the particular remains of each victim—human or animal—and place them in a separate urn. The approximate age, but not tire sex, of the human vic tims can be determined. Infant skeletons are composed of a high percentage of cartilage, all of which is destroyed by burning. Only the more completely ossified portions of the skeleton survive. Teeth are the most heat resistant, and the stage of dental development provides important clues for establishing the victim's age at death. While the sex of such young individuals cannot be determined from the skeletal evidence, the textual sources suggest that the rite was not limited to first-born males and that sons or daughters served equally as offerings to Tanit and Ba'al Hammon. Child sacrifice at Cartilage not only had religious dimen sions, but also social and economic ones. Viewed in a com parative cultural perspective, ritual infanticide at Carthage may be seen to fulfil many of the same functions as more informal modes of infanticide—exposure, drowning, stran gulation, poisoning—practiced in the contemporary Greek and Roman world. Thus, the practice served as a mecha nism for regulating population growth. It was less hazardous to the health of the mother than abortion of an unborn fetus and allowed parents to select for the sex and birth order of children. Among the economic elite of Cartilage, the reli gious institution of child sacrifice may have been used by wealthy families to consolidate and maintain their fortunes
N O R T H AFRICA. F i g u r e 5 . Roman
sandstone
by allowing them to regulate the number of male heirs among whom inheritance would have to be shared and the number of females who would have to be dowered into mar riage. Some scholars reject such a materialist analysis and contend that Phoenician tophets merely represent cemeter ies of children who perished of natural causes and whose remains were accorded special treatment. C a p Bon, Byzacium, a n d Tripolitania. Outside Car thage, to the south and west, lay other regions of North Af rica: Cap Bon, Byzacium, Numidia, Mauretania, and the outer limits of the known world in antiquity beyond the Pil lars of Hercules. Cap Bon. A broad peninsula, Cap Bon's low mountains and hilly plains stretch north and east from Carthage. Its extreme eastern tip lies only 150 km (93 mi.) from Sicily, a propinquity that proved advantageous when the Phoeni cians controlled Sicily and Sardinia; it was far less advan tageous later, when, from the fifth century C E onward, Car thage faced military threats from Greek Sicily and from Rome. Easier to reach by sea than by land, Cap Bon formed a hinterland and resource base for the city. The sandstone so ubiquitous in public and private architecture of all periods at Carthage was quarried at El Houaria on Cap Bon's north western shore (see figure 5). By the late fourth century B C E , if not before, the peninsula was richly planted with olive groves, vineyards, and fruit orchards interspersed with pas ture for sheep, cattle, and horses and dotted with luxurious country houses. [See Cattle and Oxen.] In 310 B C E the army
quarries at El Houaria,
Cap Bon. N o t e t h e q u a r r i e d
blocks of s a n d s t o n e . T h e s e w e r e t a k e n b o t h directly f r o m t h e s u r r o u n d i n g cliffs a n d from t h e e x t e n sive s y s t e m of u n d e r g r o u n d caves. (Photograph by J. A. Greene)
N O R T H AFRICA of Agathocles, the Syracusan tyrant, marched through this countryside to attack Megalopolis, a town of unknown lo cation somewhere on Cap Bon (Diodorus Siculus 20.8.34). Historical sources record drat three cities on Cap Bon— Nepheris, Aspis (modern Kelibia), and Neapolis (modern Nabeul)—remained loyal to Cartilage until its ultimate de feat by Rome in 146 B C E . For that loyalty they paid with their own destruction (Strabo 17.3.16). T h e two sites whose locations are known have, however, yielded very little ar chaeological evidence of that destruction or of any pre-Roman occupation. Archaeological surveys by a joint Tuni sian-Italian team at the northern end of Cap Bon have found surface traces of Phoenician occupation at smaller sites. Ex cavations by this same team at three sites (Djebel el-Fortras, Ras ed-Drek, Aspis/Kelibia) uncovered what have been in terpreted as "forts" dating to the fifth century BCE. Also found at Ras ed-Drek was a temple, dated by its excavators to the third-second centuries B C E (Barreca and Fantar, 1983). T h e earliest and most substantial evidence for Phoe nician settlement on the peninsula, however, is from Kerkouane, on the northeast coast of Cap Bon. Kerkouane. Except for Carthage, Kerhouane is, to date, the best-preserved and most extensively excavated Phoeni cian town in North Africa. Its ancient name is lost; the sur viving written sources mention only the larger Phoenician cities of Cap Bon. Archaeologically, however, ancient Ker kouane is quite well known. It was founded in die sixth cen tury B C E and inhabited until the mid-third century B C E . There were two main periods of occupation, the first from its founding down to die late fourth century BCE, about the time of Agathocles' invasion from Sicily. Rebuilt, its second phase of occupation lasted fifty more years, until the town was abandoned permanentiy in the course of the First Punic War. Because tiiere was no later occupation, the excavators of the Tunisian Institut National du Patrimonie, directed by M. Fantar, were able to recover substantially complete plans of structures wherever they dug. A double fortification wall surrounded the town, enclosing an area of 7 or 8 ha (17 or 20 acres). Within the walls a wellplanned system of wide streets intersected at regular angles, unpaved but provided with stone-lined drains. Courtyard houses opened onto the streets through narrow vestibules. Each house had a cistern sunk into the courtyard to provide water, as well as its own private bath (see figure 6). [See Cisterns; Baths.] Near the town center a large courtyard structure witii pillars flanking its entrance and subsidiary rooms was surrounded by benches. Although very likely a temple, nothing found inside this structure offered a clue about the cult celebrated there. [See Cult.] At the edge of the town was an industrial zone of pottery and figurine workshops and kilns. Piles of broken Murex shells unearthed nearby suggest the presence a typical Phoenician enterprise, purple-dye works. Tombs dating from the sixth to the third centuries B C E lay, as expected, outside die town walls. Sig-
N O R T H A F R I C A . F i g u r e 6. house, Kerkouane,
Bath
in a fourth-century
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BCE private
( P h o t o g r a p h by J. A. Greene)
nificandy, there is no natural harbor near the site. Kerkouane was an agricultural village, according well with Diodorus's depiction of Cap Bon as an agricultural hinterland. Byzacium. South of Cap Bon lay Byzacium (the modern Tunisian Sahel), a flat, fertile, sandy plain known in Greek as Emporia. Along its littoral, from the base of Cap Bon to die border of Tripolitania, stretched a string of Phoenician towns: Hadrumetum (Sousse), Rusapina (Monastir), Lepti (Lemta), Thapsus (Ras Dimass), Mahdia (ancient name unknown), Sullectiium (Salakta), and Acholla (Ras Botria). These are known mainly from textual traditions. There are few ancient traces of Hadrumetum and Rusapina because they are buried beneath modern Sousse and Monastir. T h e accidental discovery and subsequent excavation at Hadru metum of burial urns and carved stelae by Pierre Cintas revealed tiiat a tophet was in use there from at least die seventii to the first centuries B C E (Lancel, 1995, pp. 2 9 1 292). Cemeteries dating to the fourth century BCE have also been found. By conttast, Rusapina, Thapsus, Mahdia, and Sullectiium are, before the Roman period, virtually blank archaeologically. Their locations on headlands or near off shore islets are, however, suggestive of Phoenician founda tions, as are the presence at some of difficult-to-date harbor works, such as a cothon at Mahdia and a mole at Thapsus. Lepti, rechristened Leptis Minor by the Romans, to distin guish it from Leptis Magna, its greater neighbor in Tripo litania, similarly lacks any known Phoenician remains; how ever, the site and its region are now the object of renewed archaeological investigations by a joint Tunisian-American project that may file this lacuna. Pliny the Elder remarked on the cultural and ethnic particularity of Byzacium, iden tifying its inhabitants as LibyPhoenicians (Nat. Hist. 5.24). This characterization is reflected archaeologically in ceme teries on the coast at Lepti and inland at Smirat that reveal indigenous (as distinct from Phoenician) funerary practices. Unlike Cap Bon, Byzacium sided witii Rome in the final
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Punic War and in return was spared destruction. Its reluc tance to take a stake in Carthage's quarrel with Rome is perhaps explained by its mixed population, partly Canaan ite, mosdy Libyan. Tripotitania. South of Byzaciumlay Tripolitania ("three cities"), colonized by Phoenicians in the seventh century BCE. It took its name from its three principle cities: Labdah/ Leptis Magna, Trablus/Oea, and Sabratha. Until 146 B C E , Tripolitania formed the eastern province of a western Phoe nician realm dominated by Carthage. After Carthage's de struction, Rome ceded Tripolitania to its Numidian allies but later absorbed it as a Roman province. Numidia, M a u r e t a n i a , a n d Beyond t h e Pillars of Hercules. West of Carthage, the Mediterranean seaboard of North Africa is marked at roughly equal intervals by Phoenician coastal settlements, either known or conjectured, on or near prominent headlands or estuarine embayments. Some are no more than place names cited by ancient au thors, with no firm connection to an identified archaeolog ical site. Others are demonstrably ancient foundations firmly dated by excavated artifacts to as early as the sixth century BCE. Archaeologists have noted this uniform spacing—in time about one day's sail, in distance measured coastwise some 30-40 km (19-25 mi.)—and have connected it with the system of cabotage (short-distance coastal sailing and trading) described in documentary sources for the sixteenthcentury Mediterranean. The Phoenicians were supposed to have practiced a first-millennium BCE version of cabotage as they expanded into the western Mediterranean. The data, though suggestive, are not in perfect accord with this recon struction. The spacing of sites is not invariable, and archae ological evidence is often absent or chronologically too late. Some site identifications are based on nothing more than onomastic guesswork supported by the ambiguous testi mony of the classical geographers. At some coastal sites, extant remains are no earlier than the era of the Punic Wars (third-second centuries B C E ) . Hippo Regius (modern Anaba on the Tunisian-Algerian frontier) has yielded inscribed tophet stelae and evidence of a temple to African Saturn (i.e., Ba'al Hammon), all dated to the third-second centuries B C E . Beyond Hippo, from east to west along the Algerian coast, other late sites include Rusicada (modern Skikda), Chullu (Collo), Iqilgili (Gigel), Salda (Begaya), Iomnium (Tigzirt), Rusucurru (Dellys), and Rusguniae (Tametfoust). Rusazus, Rusippisir, and Cissi are known only by name and have yet to be located. At several of the excavated sites (Iomnium, Rusucurru, Rus guniae), the presence of inscribed tophet stelae dating to as late as the second century C E suggest the continuation of rites connected with child sacrifice (though perhaps not the ac tual practice itself) long after the Romans suppressed it at Carthage. Near modern Algiers the data are better. While Icosium (Algiers) can be dated no earlier than the third-second cen
turies B C E , Tipasa (Zeralda), to the west, had a sizable oc cupation in the fifth and fourth centuries B C E , with strong Libyan funerary traditions and a tophet in use up to the first century CE. West of Tipasa, Iol (Roman Caesarea, modern Cherchel) was founded by the sixth or fifth century B C E . Literary traditions make it a Numidian royal city by the third century BCE. A second-century B C E Neo-Punic inscription found there mentions a temple dedicated to the Numidian king Micipsa, successor to Massinissa; two second-firstcentury BCE Neo-Punic texts attest a local cult of Saturn. West of Iol, Gunugu (Gouraya) has produced fifth-century B C E ceramics, Neo-Punic inscriptions, and Neo-Punic stelae from the second-third centuries CE mentioning Saturn. Phoenician sites in the Gulf of Oran are separated by 160 Ion (99 mi.) from those near Algiers. The intervening stages are not yet located. T h e ancient name of Les Andalouses, a site 30 km (19 mi.) west of Oran, is uncertain. It has two cemeteries, a western one dating to the sixth century B C E and an eastern one dating to the late fourth-second centuries BCE. In between is a fourth-second-century B C E settlement of about 3 ha (7 acres). Both the settlement and the eastern cemetery show strong ceramic affinities with Phoenician Iberia. At Mersa Madakh (ancient name unknown) is a ne cropolis dating to about the sixth century B C E . [See Necrop olis.] It too has ceramic connections with Phoenician Iberia and with Phoenician sites on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Siga (Takembrit), founded in the fifth century B C E , became, in the third century B C E , a Numidian royal city occupied by Syphax, king of the Masaesyles. Neo-Punic inscribed stelae from the third-first centuries BCE attributed to Siga (and now in the Oran Museum) and second-third-century C E anepigraphic stelae excavated near Siga witness the conti nuity of the cult of Saturn at the site for at least five hundred years. Finally, there is Rachgoun, an island near shore on the Gulf of Oran, with a necropolis and dwellings dating to about 650-600 to 500 BCE. It is the earliest site thus far found on the Algerian coast; it too exhibits ceramic parallels with Phoenician Iberia, moreso than with Carthage. T o the west, of the known Phoenician settlements on the Moroccan Mediterranean coast, only Sidi Abdelsalem el Bahar shows any signs of occupation in the fifth century B C E . The others, Rusaddir (Mellila), Emsa, and Tamuda (Tetouan), range from the fourth to second centuries B C E . There are strong literary traditions that the Phoenicians early (mi 1110 BCE) went beyond the Pillars of Hercules to found settlements at Gadir (Cadiz) on the southwest coast of Spain and, even before that, at Lixus (Larache) on the Atlantic coast of Morocco (Pliny, Nat. Hist. 19.63). There is at present, however, no archaeological support for such early foundations. At Tingis (Tangier) there is a necropolis from perhaps the seventh century B C E . T h e evidence for Phoenician occupation at Lixus is substantial, however: cemeteries and remains of habitations and a temple, but none date to before the seventh century B C E . Mogador, 700
N O R T H AFRICA km (434 mi.) south of Tingis, is in a typically Phoenician location, an offshore island close to a small river mouth. Excavations there in the 1950s by A. Jodin have found Attic and Ionian amphora and Phoenician red-slip pottery diag nostic of the seventh century B C E , but the overall nature of the occupation is unclear. In all cases, these sites show the same material cultural connections with Phoenician Iberia demonsu-ated by those on the western Algerian coast. If evidence of settlement is lacking, the written sources do suggest extensive Phoenician contacts with the western coast of North Africa. Herodotus (4.196) recorded their cus tom of silent barter with Libyans on the coast beyond the Pillars, a wordless exchange of Phoenician teade goods for North African gold. T h e Periplus ofHanno (a set of sailing instructions) recounts the voyage of a Carthaginian, Hanno, and his fleet of sixty ships down the west coast of Africa in perhaps the late fifth century B C E "to found cities of Libyphoenicians." The expedition may have gone as far as mod ern Sierra Leone, or perhaps farther, to Cameroon or Ga bon (the coastal features described are consistent for either location) before turning back, their supplies exhausted, without founding any new settlements. By its own account, the text of the Periplus was inscribed on a tablet displayed in the Temple of Kronos (Ba'al Hammon) in Carthage. [See also American Institute for Maghreb Studies; and American Schools of Oriental Research.]
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Early Studies Babelon, Ernest, et al. Atlas archeologique de la Tunisie au 1:50.000. Paris, 1893. Compiled by F r e n c h a r m y surveyors, this atlas records the locations (but little else) of h u n d r e d s of " R o m a n ruins" (not all are R o m a n ) in northern a n d western Tunisia. Rare but worth search ing for. Cintas, Pierre. Manuel d'archeologic punique. 2 vols. Paris, 1970-1976. Comprehensive survey of the subject by the doyen of PhoenicianPunic archaeology. Volume 2 appeared posthumously at the start of the UNESCO Save Carthage Project; the manual is thus dated but still essential. Gauckler, Paul. Necropoles puniques de Carthage. Paris, 1915. R e p r o duces Gauckler's notebooks from his cemetery excavations at Car tilage; to be used with Helene Benichou, Les tombes puniques de Car thage: Topographie, structures, inscriptions et rites funeraires (Paris, 1982), which is indispensable for understanding Gauckler's work. Gsell, Stephane. Histoire ancienne de I'Afrique du Nord. 8 vols. Paris, 1913-1930. First and still fundamental historical study framing the basic questions of N o r t h African history. Tissot, Charles J. Exploration scientifique de la Tunisie: Geographie comparee de la province romaine d'Afrique. 2 vols. Paris, 1884-1888. D e tailed historical geographical study based on texts and inscriptions; the basis for m a n y site identifications proposed in the Atlas archeo logique above, Pre-Phoenieian Period C a m p s , Gabriel. "Beginnings of Pastoralism and Cultivation in N o r t h West Africa and the Sahara: Origins of the Berbers." In The Cam bridge History of Africa, vol. 1, edited by J. D e s m o n d Clark, p p . 548623. C a m b r i d g e , 1982. Summarizes the author's lifelong sUidy of pre- a n d protohistoric N o r t h Africa; full bibliography in French.
BIBLIOGRAPHY C a r t h a g e a n d N o r t h Africa N o r t h Africa is difficult to grasp bibliographically: books and articles concerned with its history and archaeology a n d its connections with the ancient eastern Mediterranean are n u m e r o u s and published in m a n y different languages. W h a t follows serves to introduce essential bibli ography by signaling classic works, s o u n d interpretations of the existing evidence across a range of topics, and recent publications of important new data. Because N o r t h African archaeology has long been a preserve of E u ropean scholars, mainly French a n d Italian, m u c h past and present work appears in those languages. F u n d a m e n t a l early studies, all in F r e n c h , are accessible only in major research libraries. Published p r o ceedings of recent international conferences, despite their tides in F r e n c h , Italian, and G e r m a n , frequently contain important contribu tions in English. T h e major relevant m u s e u m collections are in N o r t h Africa and E u r o p e ; very few exhibits of this material travel to N o r t h America. As a result, exhibition catalogs are usually not in English. A notable exception is Carthage: A Mosaic ofAncient Tunisia. Despite this, m u c h is accessible in English, either as original work or in translation. Scholarly journals in English (e.g., the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Libyan Studies) often contain articles on N o r t h African archaeology. T h e French journal Anliquites Africaines, which focuses on ancient Nortii Africa, sometimes includes lengthy English-language contribu tions. T h e American Journal of Archaeology from time to time publishes a " N o r t h Africa Newsletter" summarizing recent developments. O n e of these comprises a comprehensive bibliography for archaeology in Tunisia (exclusive of Carthage) from 1956 to 1980: Abdelmajid E n nabli, " N o r t h Africa Newsletter 3: P a r t 1. Tunisia, 1956-1980," Amer ican Journal of Archaeology 87 (1983): 197-206, F o r general bibliogra phies, see Richard I. Lawless, Algeria (Oxford, 1980), and Allan M . Findlay a n d Richard I. Lawless, Tunisia (Oxford, 1982) a n d Morocco (Oxford, 1984), in t h e World Bibliographical Series (vols. 19, 33, 47).
Barreca, F , , a n d M . Fantar. Propezione archeologia al Capo Bono II. R o m e , 1983. Charles-Picard, Gilbert, and Colette Charles-Picard. The Life and Death of Carthage. Translated by D o m i n i q u e Collon. N e w York, 1969. Overview of the history, archaeology, a n d religion of Punic Carthage by two noted scholars of ancient N o r t h Africa. Ennabli, Abdelmajid, ed. Pour sauver Carthage: Exploration et conser vation de la cite punique, romaine el byzantine. Paris and T u n i s , 1992. Comprehensive s u m m a r y in French of the results of the UNESCO Save Cardiage Project; contains a complete bibliography of all UNESCO project publications with valuable full listings of titles in multiauthored volumes. N o t widely distributed in N o r t h America. G r a s , Michel, et al. L'univers phenicien. Paris, 1989. Latest synthesis from leading French Phoenician scholars. G r a s , Michel, et al. " T h e Phoenicians and D e a t h , " Translated by Helga Seeden. Beiytus 39 (1991): 127-176. Chapter 6 of L'univers phenicien, a thorough exposition of the "revisionist" view that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice. G r e e n e , Joseph A. Ager and Arosot: Rural Settlement and Agrarian His tory in the Carthaginian Countryside. Redditch, forthcoming. Results of archaeological survey in the city's hinterland; covers the Phoeni cian/Punic, R o m a n , and Byzantine periods. H a r d e n , D o n a l d B. The Phoenicians. 3d ed. Harmondsworth, 1980. Best s u m m a r y in English of Phoenician archaeology (more concise than Cintas, above), with an extensive discussion of Carthage and an notated topical bibliography current to 1980. Hurst, H . , and L a w r e n c e E. Stager. "A Metropolitan Landscape: T h e Late P u n i c Port at Cartilage." World Archaeology 9 (1978): 334-346. Lancel, Serge. Carthage: A History. Translated by AntoniaNevill. C a m bridge, Mass., 1995. T h e 1992 French edition, m u c h enriched by
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Lancel's inclusion of information from previously unpublished nine teenth- and twentieth-century excavations in Tunisia. Law, R. C. C. " N o r t h Africa in the Period of Phoenician and Greek Colonization, c. 800 to 323 B . C . " and " N o r t h Africa in the Helle nistic and R o m a n Periods, c. 323 B.C. to A . D . 305." In The Cam bridge Histoiy of Africa, vol. 2, edited by J. D . Fage, p p . 87-147,148209. Cambridge, 1978. Up-to-date historical summaries (with bibliographies); geographically broader than Warmington (below). Niemeyer, Hans-Georg. " T h e Phoenicians in the Mediterranean: A N o n - G r e e k Model for Expansion and Settlement in Antiquity." In Greek Colonists and Native Populations: Proceedings of the First Aus tralian Congress of Classical Archaeology, Sidney 198$, edited by JeanPaul Descoeudres, p p . 469-489. Canberra, 1990. Argues for a new interpretation of the archaeological evidence for Phoenician settle m e n t at Cartilage. An updated version, presenting new data from his excavations in Cartilage, is forthcoming in Markoe (below). Stager, Lawrence E. "Carthage: T h e Punic Project." Annual Report of the Oriental Institute, 1978-1979, pp. 52-59. Chicago, 1979. Stager, Lawrence E., and Samuel R. Wolff. "Child Sacrifice at Car thage: Religious Rite or Population Control?" Biblical Archaeology Review 10.1 (1984): 30-51, Well-illustrated discussion of a m u c h debated topic in N o r t h African archaeology; an updated version will appear in Markoe. Warmington, Brian H. Carthage, 2d ed. L o n d o n , 1969. Best treatment in English of the history of Phoenician-Punic Carthage, based on written sources.
International Conferences Acquaro, Enrico, et al., eds. Atti del II congresso internazionale di studi fenici e punici, 3 vols. Collezione di Studi Fenici, 30. R o m e , 1991. Bartoloni, Piero, et al., eds. Atti del I congresso internazionale di studi fenici e punici, Roma, 5-10 novembre 1979. 3 vols. Collezione di Suidi Fenici, 16. R o m e , 1983. See Acquaro (above) for the second con gress; proceedings of a third congress (Tunis, 1991) are in press. A fourth congress was held in Cadiz, Spain, in 1995. Devijver, Hubert, and Lipinski, Eduard, eds. Studia PhoeniciaX:Punic Wars. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 33. Louvain, 1989. Proceed ings of an annual Belgian conference on Phoenician archaeology and history; a new topic is selected yearly (see Lipinski, below, as well). Lipinski, Eduard, ed. Studia Phoenicia VI: Carthago. Orientalia Lovaniensa Analecta, 26. Louvain, 1988. Markoe, Glenn E., ed. Carthage Reexplored. Cambridge, Mass., 1996. Cincinnati conference held in 1990 devoted to final reports on the UNESCO Save Carthage Project. T h e volume will include new syn theses of Carthaginian child sacrifice (by Stager and Paul Mosca) and early Phoenician settlement at Carthage (by Niemeyer and Greene). Niemeyer, Hans-Georg, ed. Phonizier im Western Die Beitrage des Internationalen Symposiums iiber "Die phonizische Expansion im wesllicken Mittelmeeraum"inKoln, 24-27 April 1979. Madrider Beitrage, 8. Mainz am Rhein, 1982. Conference on Phoenician archaeology in the western Mediterranean. Pedley, John G., ed. New Light on Ancient Carthage. A n n Arbor, 1980. Conference held in 1979 on initial results of the UNESCO Save Car tilage Project; bibliography of preliminary reports. Senay, Pierre, ed. Carthage VI-IX: Actes du congres. 4 vols. Cahiers des Etudes Anciennes, Trois-Rivieres, 16-19. Montreal, 1984-1986. Proceedings of a 1984 conference devoted to interim reports on the UNESCO Save Carthage Project. Exhibition Catalogs Ben Khader, Ai'cha Ben Abed, and Soren, David, eds. Carthage: A Mosaic of Ancient Tunisia. N e w York, 1987. Exhibition organized by
the American M u s e u m of Natural History that toured extensively in N o r t h America, 1987-1990. Moscati, Sabatino, ed. The Phoenicians. N e w York, 1988. Based on an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, this lavishly illustrated cat alog includes topical essays a n d an extensive bibliography. T r a n s lated from the Italian edition, I Fenici (Milan, 1988). JOSEPH A .
GREENE
NORTHERN SAMARIA, SURVEY OF. T h e area designated in the Bible and Bronze Age sources as Mt. Manasseh or Mt. Shechem is now known as the northern Samarian hills. This broad syncline, extending along a southwest-northeast axis, terminates to the west and north in the 'Anabta and U m m el-Fahm anticlines and to the east in the Far'ah anticline. Rising out of the center of the region are mountain ranges that are higher than the surrounding anticlines. (The tallest of these, Mt. Ebal, is 940 m above sea level.) Of Eocene origin, the syncline is hatched in a soutiieast-northwest direction by a lattice of Neogene faults. Six interior valleys formed along these faults, as did Wadi Far'ah and Wadi el-Malih on the syncline's eastern side. Numerous springs can be found from north of Jenin to the foot of Mt. Gerizim in the south. Abundant water sources, as well as the region's arable soil and broad interior valleys, distinguish the northern Samarian hills from the more rug ged hill country to the south, the Ephraim and Judean an ticlines. Archaeological investigation of northern Samaria has been ongoing since the early years of the twentieth century, primarily because of its biblical importance as the site of three Israelite capitals. Shechem, the earliest Israelite reli gious center, was excavated by Ernst Sellin in 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 1 4 and again in 1926-1927. Samaria (Sebaste), die religious and administrative capital of the northern kingdom for most of its independent history, was excavated in 1908-1910 by George A. Reisner and Clarence S. Fisher. The latter's work was continued between 1931 and 1935 by the Palestine Ex ploration Fund, and resumed by a Drew University-McCormick Theological Seminary expedition between 1956 and 1964. Tell el-Far'ah (North), identified as biblical Tirzali, the capital city of Jeroboam I, first king of the northern kingdom, was excavated by Roland de Vaux between 1946 and i960. [See the biographies of Sellin, Reisner, Fisher, and de Vaux] A few sites on Mt. Manasseh were surveyed before the 1960s, but a systematic examination of the region was not undertaken until 1967-1968, when an emergency survey was conducted by Israeli archaeologists Zecharia Kallai, Ram Gophna, and Yosef Porath. Beginning in 1978, Adam Zertal led the first comprehensive survey of the region for Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities and for the Israel Exploration Soci ety. By 1991 three-quarters of the northern Samarian hills, about 1,800 sq km (1,116 sq. mi.), had been surveyed and some 821 ancient sites classified—632 of them new discov-
NORTHERN SAMARIA, SURVEY OF eries—with every archaeological era from the Chalcolithic through the Ottoman periods represented. T h e survey also determined that, in terms of the region's settlement history and morphology, the division between north and south was not between Judea Qudah) and Samaria, as was formerly believed, but between the Ephraim and Judean anticlines and the Shechem syncline. T h e history of northern Samaria can be characterized by dense settlements alternating in fairly quick succession with periods of rapid decline. Settlement was affected by political events as well as the region's diverse topography: internal valleys, particularly the Tubas (Thehez) and Zababdeh val leys in the east, the Mikhmetat valley in the south, and the er-Rameh and Dothan valleys in the west and north, where settlement was centered; hard limestone and dolomite hills to the west of these valleys, where forests of Palestinian ter ebinth and evergreen oak once stood (and where some spec imens still stand); and a broad band of desert margin to the east, descending into the Jordan Valley. Chalcolithic a n d B r o n z e Ages. An important survey finding was that most Early Bronze Age settlements were established in E B I (start of the third millennium BCE) rather than, as had been assumed, in EB II—III, when settlement actually declined. EB I settlements, like those of the Chal colithic, were concentrated along Wadi Far'ah, Nahal Shechem, and the western slope of the syncline, an area replete with water sources. Of the seventy-eight EB I sites, nineteen were fortified mounds, some indicative of large set tlements. Six fortified enclosures, each positioned for de fense, also were discovered. N o t all of these enclosures housed settlements, but they probably served as a safe haven for the inhabitants of the nearby valleys. After two periods of decline, settlement activity increased significantly in EB IV, when fifty-five settlements were established, several of them likely serving a cultic function. Unlike the earlier EB sites, those from EB IV were situated along the desert mar gin and in the eastern valleys, where water was scarce and the soil poor. Large and clustered in groups, these settle ments were characterized by a central fortified enclosure and an abundance of potsherds and architectural remains. As well as can be determined from pottery dating to the Middle Bronze period (beginning of the second millennium B C E ) , settlement activity came to a virtual standstill in MB I but then exploded in MB II—to 161 sites, a number unequaled anywhere else in Palestine. Many new tells were founded at the region's largest sites (among them, Shechem, Tirzah, Dothan, and Jenin), each protected by exterior walls and earthen ramparts; smaller settlements, some with exte rior protection, developed simultaneously on the edges of valleys. T h e contemporary Egyptian Execration texts refer to the region as Mt. Shechem, or the land of Shechem, but no evidence has been uncovered as to the area's political and ethnic makeup in this period. Although settlement decreased in general during the Late
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Bronze Age (latter half of the second millennium B C E ) , ex tensive historical data from the period indicate that for a certain time the area extended into the Jezreel Valley and was ruled by the family of Lab'ayu of Shechem, the hill country's most powerful prince. T h e number of sites de creased substantially in LB I (to twenty-three), possibly as a result of a decline in rainfall and the desiccation of springs on the eastern edge of the syncline at the end of the sixteenth century B C E . These environmental changes were no doubt exacerbated by the widespread destruction wrought by the eighteenth-dynasty Egyptian pharaohs during their military incursions into Canaan. I r o n Age. Pottery remains from the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BCE indicate that seminomads did enter northern Samaria at the beginning of the Iron Age (c. 1200 B C E ) , the period of Israelite settlement. Moving through Nahal Tirzah (Wadi Far'ah), the trade route that connected the northern Samarian hills with Transjordan, they settled initially in the Jordan Valley, along Wadi Far'ah and Wadi Malih, and in the eastern valleys of Mt. Manasseh, all areas of light Ca naanite settlement. T h e first cultic center of the period prob ably was Shechem and possibly Mt. Ebal. Ceramic evi dence, especially three types of cooking pots, indicates that these settlers moved gradually into the central and northern valleys and later, in search of arable land, into the forested areas and south toward Mt. Ephraim. This interpretation requires further study and is contested by some scholars (e.g., Dever, 1993), but it helps to explain some of the con tradictory biblical references regarding the beginnings of Is raelite settlement on Mt. Manasseh. By Iron II northern Samaria was fully inhabited, the num ber of settlements reaching a high of 238. Israelite admin istration of the region is illuminated by the Samaria Ostraca, which date to this period. [See Samaria Ostraca.] Political upheavals caused by the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in 722 BCE resulted in a sharp decrease in settlements on Mt. Manasseh in Iron IIC (721-530 B C E ) , during which the flee ing inhabitants built fortified farms along the desert margin, from Wadi Far'ah to Wadi el-Malih. A new pottery group was introduced, probably by Cuthean settlers who were sent into the region from Mesopotamia in the eighth-seventh centuries B C E , when Samaria was a province of the Baby lonian Empire. P e r s i a n t h r o u g h O t t o m a n P e r i o d s . Political stability returned to Mt. Manasseh in the Persian period (sixthfourth centuries B C E ) . As a result, settlement was heavy, par ticularly in the Dothan valley. These settlements, and other findings of the survey, support A. Grintz's assertion that Samaria as well as Judea (Judah) was resettled by those re turning from captivity in Babylon after 538 B C E . Settlement was cut in half during the Hellenistic period, however, pri marily in the wake of tire Samaritan Revolt of 332 B C E , when the inhabitants of the region resisted the legions of Alex ander tire Great. [See Samaritans.] Stability returned during
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the Early Roman period, when settlement surged and new sites were founded in the northwest, in the area linked to the small state of Narbata. Of all the historical periods, the great est density of settlement on Mt. Manasseh occurred in the Byzantine period—358 sites—but that number was cut in half in both the Early Arab and the medieval periods (sev enth-fourteenth centuries CE), again as a result of political upheavals. Evidence of renewed settlement, including for tified settlements, was found for the Mamluk period, but another significant decline—to less than a quarter of the number of Byzantine settlements—occurred in tire Ottoman period. [See also Dothan; Far ah, Tell-el (North); Jordan Valley; Judah; Samaria; Shechem; and Southern Samaria, Survey of.] 1
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Site of T i r z a h and the T o p o g r a p h y of Western M a n a s s e h . " Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 11 (1931): 241-251. Dever, William G. "Cultural Continuity: Ethnicity in the Archaeolog ical Record a n d the Question of Israelite Origins." Eretz-Israel 24 (1993): 22-33. Zertal, Adam. " H a r M e n a s h e Survey, 1982." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 2 (1983): 43-44. Zertal, Adam. " T h e W a t e r Factor during the Israelite Settlement P r o cess in Canaan." In Society and Economy in the Eastern Mediterranean c. 1500-1000 B.C., edited b y Michael Heltzer and E d u a r d Lipihski, p p . 341-352. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 23. Louvain, 1988. Zertal, Adam. " T h e Wedge-Shaped Decorated Bowl and the Origin of the Samaritans." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 276 (1989): 77-84. Zertal, Adam. " T h e Pahwah of Samaria (Northern Israel) during die Persian Period." Transeuphratene 3 (1990): 9-30. Zertal, Adam. "Israel Enters Canaan: Following the Pottery Trail." Biblical Archaeology Review 17.5 (1991): 28-47. ADAM ZERTAL
NORTHWEST SEMITIC SEAL INSCRIP TIONS. Reflecting a long tradition of seal inscriptions in Egypt and Mesopotamia, cylinder and stamp seals from Ugarit and other second-millennium B C E Syro-Palestinian sites are inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphics, syllabic cune iform, or bilingual Akkadian-Hittite. On one tablet, the dy nastic cylinder kunukku ia sand ("seal of the king") is placed next to a king's personal alphabetical stamp seal (MI§MN). In the first millennium B C E , the use of bullae to seal papyri became widespread. Hebrew used two Egyptian words for seal, hotdm and tabbcfat, to refer to royal Egyptian (Gn. 41:22) and Persian (Est. 3:10; cf. Aram, 'izqah, Dn. 6:18) stamp seals, respectively. The seals are most often made of hard, semiprecious stones such as carnelian. Aramaic cylinder seals were in use from about 800 B C E until the end of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 330 B C E ) . De scended from Egyptian scarabs and used until about 100 B C E , scaraboid stamp seals were strung on cords or mounted
on rings. A typical example might measure 20 X 15 X 8 mm, with a surface area of 3 sq cm. T h e characters are usually legible on the imprints. T h e decoration, often en graved first by a skilled craftsman, may relate to the inscrip tion (Pierre Bordreuil, "Sceau en calcedoine grise en forme de canard" BAALIM III, Syria 63 [1986], p. 429), or not (Galling, 1941, no. 97; Bordreuil, 1986, nos. 29,139). More than 1,200 different seals are attested either by the seal itself or by an impression: 150 Phoenician, nearly 500 Hebrew, including 220 bullae from the end of the preexilic period, (about 2,000 "royal" stamp sealings on which the text is " L M L K + toponym" are not included), more than 350 Ar amaic, about 100 Ammonite, about 40 Moabite, and about 10 Edomite. Corpora. T h e study of Northwest Semitic seals was in augurated by James Tassie and Rudolf E. Raspe (1791), Moritz A. Levy (1857), Henry C. Rawlinson (1864), Melchior de Vogue (1868), and M. A. Levy (1869). In 1883 Charles Clermont-Ganneau listed thirty seals and in volume 2 of the Corpus Inscriptorum Semiticarum (CIS; Paris, 1889) forty-two seals from different collections were reedited. He brew inscriptions stamped on earthenware jars in Palestine were known to scholars by the end of the nineteenth century: the stamps were inscribed Y H ( W ) D ("Judah") or L M L K ("belonging to the king"), followed by a place name and the depiction of a flying scarab. In 1934, David Diringer sum marized the one hundred and four known inscribed Hebrew seals, and in 1941, Kurt Galling assembled a catalog of 183 illustrated inscribed seals (Galling, 1941). In 1946, Nahman Avigad began publishing a number of then newly discovered seals (selected bibliography, Eretz Israel 18 [1985], Nahman Avigad Volume). In 1951, Sabatino Moscati expanded Diringer's list. Beginning in 1969, Francesco Vattioni assem bled lists of known inscribed seals: 452 in Hebrew (1971, 1978), 178 in Aramaic (1971), and 104 in Phoenician (1981). In 1976, Avigad published more than seventy new Aramaic bullae dating from 515 to 445 B C E and a catalog of the inscribed seals in collections in the museums of Israel (Hestrin and Dayagi-Mendels, 1979) gathered 136 docu ments. T h e importance of Trans Jordanian glyptic has in re cent years been made apparent (more than 150 inscribed seals in Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite; cf. Herr, 1978, PP' 55~78). In 1986 Avigad published 255 bullae of high officials dating to the end of the seventh century B C E (e.g., BRKYHW BN N R Y H W HSPR, Y R H M ' L BN H M L K ; cf. Jer. 36:4, 26) and a catalog of 139 seals from various mu seums in Paris. T h e principle museum collections of in scribed seals are those in the Biblioteque Nationale (106 ex amples), the Louvre (27), the Israel Museum (124), the British Museum (56), and the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin ( 1 1 ) . Inscriptions. T h e first Phoenician seals date from the middle of the eighth century B C E . T h e lapidary script is il lustrated by the scaraboid ' S T R T ' Z (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 17). Systematic excavations have uncovered seals and seal
NORTHWEST SEMITIC SEAL INSCRIPTIONS impressions at Khorsabad (ibid., no. 8), 'Atlit (Galling, 1941, no. 110a), Sarepta (Vattioni, 1981, no. 350), Byblos, Tell Anafa, Tell Kazel, Ras Ibn Iiani, Cyprus, various sites in the western Mediterranean basin, and on Delos (a bulla dating to 128/27 B C E ; Bordreuil, 1992, col. i43ff.). Shordy after 800 B C E , the two Hebrew sigillary scripts, Israelite and Judean, diverged, only to be replaced by Ara maic script just before 500 B C E . T h e writing on the Judean intaglio L'BYW 'BD 'ZYW (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 40: "min ister of TJzziyahu" [781-740?]) is typical of the dominant cursive, whereas the writing on the contemporary seal L § M ' 'BD YRB'M from Megiddo (Galling, 1941, no. 17: "min ister of Jeroboam [II]," 787-747?) is quite different. Other examples come from Samaria, Shechem, Jerusalem, La chish, Arad, Gibeon, Ramat Rahel, and Wadi ed-Daliyeh. Because of the prolonged use and geographic extent of the Aramaic language and script on seals, many varieties of the script are attested. By iconographic criteria the cylinder seals can be dated to between about 800 B C E (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 85) and about 600 B C E (Galling, 1941, no. 148). T h e conoids date from 700 B C E (ibid., no. 113) to 450 B C E (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 132). T h e writing on the stamp seal of Nurshi' ("servant of 'Atarshumki"; ibid., no. 86), and on that of Bar Raldb son of Panamou (Vattioni, 1971, no. 129), is still monumental in style; beginning in about 750 B C E , until the end of its use shortly before 300 B C E , Aramaic script (ibid., nos. 63, 64) was influenced by cursive writing. Be cause Aramaic was an important chancery language in the Achaemenid period, many "Arameo-Persian" cylinder seals have been in use. The first Transjordanian seals were not discovered in ex cavation until after 1945. T h e Ammonite sigillary script was first identified by Avigad on Vattioni's (1969,1978), no. 98: L ' D N P L T 'BD ' M N D B . T h e person in question had al ready been identified as an official of a king of 'Ammon, just as in the case of L ' D N N R 'BD ' M N D B (Vattioni, 1969, 1978, no. 164), whose seal was discovered in a tomb. T h e succession of kings and the evolution of the Ammonite sig illary script in the seventh century B C E were established when the personnages BYD'L 'BD P D ' L (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 69) and M L K M ' W R 'BD B'LYS' (Bordreuil, 1992, col. 154) were identified. This writing was replaced between 600 and 500 B C E first by Aramaic script and later by the Aramaic language. T h e iconography is typified by the use of animal figures. Three Moabite seals have come from excavations: K M S N T N from Ur, B ' L N T N from Tello, and P L T Y BN M ' S H M Z K R from Amman. Qos, the principal diety of the Edomites, appears as the theophoric element in various names attested on Transjordan seals. P e r s o n a l N a m e s a n d Titles, Proper names, official ti tles, and professional titles are, with a few rare place names, the principal information given by the inscribed glyptics. These are not negligible, for not only do they sometimes expand our knowledge of theophorous names (derived from
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the names of deities), but tiiey also present, on occasion, new proper names. Phoenician names. In the Phoenician language, per sonal names may be of one of five consu-uctions: (1) in a verbal phrase: perfect predicate-subject, ST'L ("El has put"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 20); subject-predicate, B ' L Y T N ("Baal has given"; Vattioni, 1981, no. 25); imperfect pred icate-subject, YHZB'L ("Baal will look"; ibid., no. 87); sub ject-predicate, B'LYSP ("Baal will add"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 219), abbreviated, YZBL ("he will exalt"; Vattioni, 1969, 1978, no. 215), or the interrogative, M K ' L ("who [is] like El?"; Vattioni, 1981, no. 84); (2) in a nonverbal phrase: nominal predicate-subject, N ' M ' L ("El [is] agreeable"; Vat tioni, 1969, no. 95); subject-predicate, ' § T R T ' Z ("Astart [is] strength"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 17); or a construct state, G R ' S M N ("host of Eshmun"; Vattioni, 1981, no. 93); (3) as a single noun, KPR ("lion"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 24); (4) a hypocoristic verbal, §B' ("the divinity has returned"; Vat tioni, 1981, no. 7 1 ) ; or (5) a divine name, a place name, such as S R P T (Sarepta), or an occupation, such as I i ' M N ("the artisan"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 256). Hebrew names. Personal names in the Hebrew language may be of one of four constructions: (1) in a verbal phrase: perfect predicate-subject, ' M R Y H W ("Y said"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 2 1 1 ) ; subject-predicate, ' L H N N ("El favored"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 5); abbreviated 'HZ ("he took"; ibid., no. 141); imperfect predicate-subject, Y'ZNYHW ("Y will hear"; Vattioni, 1969, 1978, no. 69); subject-predicate, YHWYFTY ("Y will make live"; Avigad, Eretz Israel 20 [1989], no. 3), abbreviated, Y'R ("he will make light"; Vat tioni, 1969, no. 104); die imperative, D M L Y H W ("live be fore Y"; ibid., no. 19); the interrogative, M(Y)KYHW ("who is like Y?"; ibid., no. 30); (2) a nonverbal phrase: nominal predicate-subject, 'BY(H)W ("Y [is] father"; Bor dreuil, 1986, no. 40); subject-predicate, YW'B ("Y [is] fa ther"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 9); prepositional, BDYHW ("in tire hand of Y"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 393); (3) a consttuct state relation, 'H'B ("father's brother"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 57); an abstract noun, M T N Y H W ("gift of Y"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 268); and (4) a single noun, 'PRH ("chick"; ibid., no. 239); hypocoristic verbal, BRKY ("the divinity has blessed"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 193); nominal 'B' ("the divinity [is] father"; ibid., no. 160); or a construct state: 'SN' ("gift [of god]"; ibid., no. 141); place name, D ' R (Vattioni, 1978, no. 323; or title of occupation, '§R 'L H B Y T ("majordomo"; ibid., no. 149). Aramaic names. In Aramaic, personal names may be one of six consmictions: (1) in a verbal phrase: perfect pred icate-subject, Y P ' H D ("Hadad made resplendent"; Vat tioni, 1971, no. 72); subject-predicate, 'LYHB ("El has pro vided"; ibid., no. 70); abbreviated, N T N ("he has given"; ibid., no. 85); imperfect predicate-subject, Y'DR'L ("El will aid"; ibid., no. 19); abbreviated, Y G ' L ("he will buy back"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 309); verbal adjective, BLHY ("Bel is living"; Vattioni, 1971, no. 1 1 6 ) ; (2) a nonverbal phrase:
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nominal predicate-subject, GBR(H)D ("Hadad [is] pow erful"; ibid., no. 63); subject-predicate, 'BRM ("the father [is] elevated"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 66); prepositional, H D B ' D ("Hadad [is] behind"; Vattioni, 1971, no. 55); (3) a con struct state, N R S ' ("light of sin"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 86); (4) using nouns, S T Y (= S T Y , "little fox"; Vattioni, 1971, no. 7), BRWK (Heb., "blessed"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 308); (5) using a transcription ' N ' H ' T N (Vattioni, 1971, no. 124) of the Akkadian 'Anu-aha-iddin(a) ("Anu has given a brother"), of the Egyptian, HRHRBY ("Horus of Kheb"; ibid., no. 91), or of the Persian, 'RTDT/Artadata ("given by justice"; ibid., no. 75); or (6) a hypocoristic verbal, BRKY ("the divinity has blessed"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 95); an interrogative MYKH ("who [is] like the divinity?"; Vat tioni, 1978, no. 313); the nominal 'DY ("the divinity [is] Adad"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 127); or the title of an occupation P H W ' ("governor"; Vattioni, 1978,110. 306). Ammonite names. In Ammonite, personal names may be one of five constructions: (1) a verbal phrase: perfect postpositive subject, ' M R ' L ("El said"; Battioni, 1978, no. 259); prepositive subject, 'LZKR ("El remembered"; Bor dreuil, 1986, no. 82); an abbreviated form, SM' ("he has heard"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 440); the imperfect postpositive subject Y N H M ' L (unpublished; "El will console"); the ab breviated form, Y N H M ("he will console"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 103); and the interrogative, M K M ' L ("who [is] like El?"; ibid., no. 445); (2) in a nonverbal phrase: nominal predicate subject, N M M (Vattioni, 1969, no. 29, new read ing: "the paternal uncle [is] agreeable"); subject-predicate, 'BGD ("the father [is] fortune"; ibid., no. 234); preposi tional, BDMLKM ("in the hand of Milkom"; Vattioni, 1971, no. 16); (3) in a construct state, M Q N M L K ("pos session of milk"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 73); (4) in a noun, S'L ("fox"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 41); (5) in a transcription of the Akkadian, M N G ' NRT/Mannu-ki Ninurta ("who [is] like Ninurta?"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 225); in a hypocoristic verbal, T M K ' ("the divinity has supported"; ibid., no. 318); in an interrogative, 'Y' ("where [is] the divinity?"; Bordreuil, 1986, no. 72); in a nominal 'L' ("the divinity [is] El"; Vat tioni, 1978, no. 262); and in a construct state, 'BD' ("servant of the divinity"; ibid., no. 217) or an occupation, HNSS ("the standard bearer"; ibid., no. 261). C
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Moabite names. In Moabite, personal names may be one of four constructions: (1) in a verbal phrase: perfect predi cate-subject, ' D ' L ("El testified"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 146); subject-predicate, K M S N T N ("Kamosh has given"; ibid., no. 265); imperfect subject-predicate, KMSYHY ("Ka mosh will make live"); (2) in a nonverbal phrase: nominal predicate-subject, G D M L K ("milk [is] fortune"; ibid., no. 64); subject-predicate, K M S ' L ("Kamosh [is] god"; ibid., no. 113); a construct state; 'BDYRH ("servant of Yarih"; Vattioni, 1971, no. 86); (3) in a noun, 'MS ("fort"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 74); or (4) in a hypocoristic, Y S " ("the divinity has saved"; ibid., no. 85), a gentilic, MSRY ("Musrite";
Bordreuil, 1986, no. 65), or an occupation, H S P R ("the scribe"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 74). Edomite names. In Edomite, personal names may be one of the following constructions: in a nominal phrase, sub ject-predicate, QWS G [BR] ("Qos [is] strong"; F. Israel, Rivista Biblica Italiana 27 [1979], no. 5, p . 172); a preposi tional phrase, B'ZR'L ("with the aid of El"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 118); a hypocoristic phrase, Q W S ' ("Qos [is] god"; Is rael, Rivista Biblica Italiana 27 [1979], no. 16, p. 176); or an occupation, 'BD H B ' L ("servant of the master"; Bordreuil, 1992, col. 197). Titles. Seals belonging to "servants" of kings, such as Shema' and Abyau (see above), of Y H W Z ' R I H . . . 'BD HZ Q~YHW (Hestrin and Dayagi-Mendels, 1979, no. 4), of SBNYW BD ZYW (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 4 1 ) , o f ' S N ' 'BD ' H Z (Galling, 1941, no. ia; Hestrin and Dayagi-Mendels, 1979, no. 40), of 'BD'L . . . BD M T T . . . ("king of Ashkelon"; Vattioni, 1969, no. 73), of BYD'L, ' D N N R , and of M L K M ' W R (see above) include an epigraphic and/or iconographic version of their title. The sovereign is occasionally designated anonymously: Y ' Z N Y H W 'BD H M L K (Vat tioni, 1979, no. 69). A 'BD H M L ' K ("servant of the king") may have been in charge of palace provisions. Was the title Y H W ' H Z BN H M L K ("son of Josiah"? [2 Kgs. 23:3off.]; ibid., no. 252) common to the royal family? Did Y R H M ' L BN H M L K (Avigad, 1986, no. 8) participate in the arrest of Jeremiah (Jer. 36:26)? r
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' M T ("female servant"; ibid., no. 157), as in S L M Y T ' M T ' L N T N PTT[W'L may have been a woman in charge of the provincial archives, subject to the provincial governor (Avigad, 1976, no. 14). ' S T ("wife"), as in ' H T M L K ' S T YS (Vattioni, 1969, no. 63), may be ascribed an important status on the basis of the iconography of the seal. A P H W ' was a "governor" in the Achaemenid administration (cf. the bulla in Vattioni, 1978, no. 408 belonging to the P H T of Samaria Sin-uballit [e.g., Neh. 2:10]). H M Z K R ("the her ald"; Bordreuil, 1992, col. 187) announces (ZKR) royal de cisions. HSPR ("the scribe") could receive an order of the king (Vattioni, 1969, no. 4 1 ) . BRKYHW BN N R Y H W HSPR (Avigad, 1986, no. 9) was in all likelihood Jeremiah's secretary (Jer. 36:26). H N S S was "the standard bearer" (Vattioni, 1969, no. 261). G D L Y H W '§R 'L H B Y T was a "major-domo" (Vattioni, 1978, no. 149), perhaps the gov ernor of Judea (Judah) mentioned in 2 Kings 25:22-25. 'SR 'L H M S (Bordreuil, 1992, col. i88ff.) was responsible for forced labor; S R H M S G R (ibid., col. 189) was the "gate keeper of the prison"); H ' D (ibid., col. 189) was the "the witness," a ministerial officer; and H R P ' (ibid., col. 189) was "the doctor." C
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Six sealings from seals belonging to L ' L Y Q M N ' R Y W K N (N'R means "page"; Vattioni, 1969,1978, no. 108) date to the end of the eighth century B C E , as do the L M L K sealings, which are unknown in other periods. Other occu pations are PR' ("chief; Vattioni, 1969, no. 126), T R T N
N O T H , MARTIN ("commander in chief"; Bordreuil, 1992, col. 192), S R H ' R ("governor of the city"; ibid., col. 192), and P Q D Y H D ("inspector of J u d e V ; ibid., col. 192). T h e Phoenician fis cal seals of the fourth century B C E bear SR ("exaction of the tithe"), a place name (Sarepta, etc.), and a regnal year. Royal seals present an "iconographic" version in which a figure bearing an Egyptian crown and scepter with one hand raised: Musuri, king of Moab (MSRY [?], in Vattioni, 1981, no. 19); Abibaal of Samsimuruna ('BYB'L [?], ibid., no. 27); and Hanunu of Gaza ( H N N [?]; Hestrin and Dayagi-Mendels, 1979, no. 123). A Phoenician stamp seal (550 B C E ) reads L M L K S R P T ("belonging to the Icing of Sarepta"; Bordreuil, 1992, col. i94ff.). There are seals of priests: ZKRYW K H N D'R ("Zekaryau priest of Dor"; Vattioni, 1978, no. 323) and H N N B//N H L Q Y H W // H K H N ("Hanan son of Hilqiyahou die priest"; Bordreuil, 1992, col. I95ff.). On Aramaic seals figures greet a divine represen tation (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 1 1 7 ) or pray (ibid., no. 123). r
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r
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Phoenician tesserae (100 BCE) bear the inscriptions L M L Q R T BSR ("belonging to Milqart of Tyre"; Bor dreuil, 1992, col. 199) and H Y R W ' S L S , the latter a tran scription of the Greek words hiera and asulos ("sacred and inviolable"). Others evoked die favor of the goddess Tannit, H N ( T ) T M T . Seals (Vattioni, 1969, no. 3 1 ) , sometimes made of blue material (lapis lazuli or chalcedony), are dec orated with eyes (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 53) intended to ward off the evil eye. Seals with an inscription consisting of the first twelve letters of the alphabet has been explained as magical in nature (Bordreuil, 1992, col. 200). The only seal labeled with the name of Baal (Bordreuil, 1986, no. 37) may have been used to seal documents from a Phoenician sanc tuary. [See also Names and Naming; Seals; and entries on specific languages.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, N a h m a n . Bullae and Seals from a Post-Exilic Judean Archive. Q e d e m , vol. 4. Jerusalem, 1976. Avigad, N a h m a n . Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah: Remnants of a Burnt Archive. Jerusalem, 1986. Bordreuil, Pierre. Catalogue des sceaux ouest-semiliques inscrils de la Bibliotheque Nationale, du Musee du Louvre el du Musee Biblique de Bible et Terre Sainte. Paris, 1986. Bordreuil, Pierre. " S c e a u x inscrits des pays d u L e v a n t . " In Dictionnaire de la Bible, s u p p . 12, cols. 86-212. Paris, 1992. Galling, Kurt. "Beschriftete Bildsiegel des ersten Jahrtausends v. C h r . vornehmlich aus Syrien u n d Palastina." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palaslina-Vereins 64 (1941): 121-202. Herr, Larry G. The Scripts of Ancient Northwest Semitic Seals. Harvard Semitic M o n o g r a p h Series, n o . 18. Missoula, 1978. Hestrin, R u t h , a n d Michal Dayagi-Mendels. Inscribed Seals. First Tem ple Period: Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite, Phoenician, and Aramaic. Je rusalem, 1979. Vattioni, Francesco. " I sigilli ebraici." Biblica 50 (1969): 357-388; Augustinianum 11 (1971): 433-454. Vattioni, Francesco. " I sigilli, le m o n e t e e gli avori aramaiei." Augustinianum 11 (1971): 47-87.
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Vattioni, Francesco. "I sigilli ebraici, III." Annali dell'lstituto Orientate di Napoli 38 (1978): 227-254. Vattioni, Francesco. "I sigilli fenici." Annali dell'lstituto Orientale di Na poli 41 (1981): I 7 7 - I 9 3 PIERRE
BORDREUIL
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
NOTH, MARTIN (1902-1968), historian and leading figure in the German school of biblical studies. Noth was born in Dresden, Germany, and smdied at Erlangen, Ros tock, and Leipzig. His centtal intellectual concern was die history of Israel in the biblical period. As a student of Ru dolph Kittel and Albrecht Alt, his early work concentrated on die history of early Israelite religion through a study of personal names (1928). This was followed shortly by Das System der zwolf Stamme Israels (1930), a widely influential book proposing the existence of an Israelite twelve-tribe amphictyony in premonarchic Israel. These two works were augmented over the next four decades by studies of die lit erature of the Hebrew Bible (notably Genesis-2 Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah), which Noth believed were the most likely sources of historical information concerning Is rael. In his work, archaeology was seen as necessary for un derstanding the wider context of the written material but limited in the type of information it could provide. Noth's evaluation of the role of archaeology within biblical smdies contrasted sharply with that of American scholars of the same period, most notably William Foxwell Albright and G. Ernest Wright. Although he was not directly involved in ma jor excavations, the issues Noth raised in his synthesis in the History of Israel (i960), and in the studies that led to the volume, have set the questions for much of the archaeolog ical work since his time. A major component of Noth's contribution to the field of archaeology is to be found in his numerous studies of to pography and written materials (e.g., fromMari, Egypt, and Ugarit). Many of these studies appeared in the journal Zeit schrift des Deutschen Palastina- Vereins, which he edited from 1929 to 1964. His approach to archaeological information is illustrated in his 1964 survey of the setting of the biblical material. While acknowledging the independence of archae ology as a discipline, he recognized the difficulty in con necting archaeological material with written evidence (Die Welt des Alten Testaments, Berlin 1964). The depth of his involvement with archaeological data is indicated by his par ticipation in Seminars at the Deutsches Evangelisches Insti tute fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes in Je rusalem and his directorship of that institution from 1964 until the time of his death. Prior to this he had been professor at the Universities of KSnigsberg (1930-1944) and Bonn (1945-1967). Noth's significant contributions within biblical studies in clude work in the areas of form, redaction, and ttadition
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criticism. Particularly important were his proposals of a Deuteronomistic history stretching from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings; his studies on the development of the Pentateuchal traditions, proposing a common source (Grundlage) for the Yahwistic and Elohistic sources; and his work on the Chronicler's history. His wide-ranging interests are exemplified by his editorship of several journals, including Vetus Testamentum (1951-1959), Zeitschriftfur Theologie und Kirche (1950-1962), and Welt des Orients (1947-1964). [See also the biographies of Albright, Alt, and Wright.] BIBLIOGRAPHY McKenzie, Steven L . , a n d M . Patrick G r a h a m , eds. The History of Israel's Traditions: The Heritage of Martin Noth. Journal for the Study of the Old T e s t a m e n t , Supplement Series, 182. Sheffield, 1994. N o t h , Martin. Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemilischen Namengebung. Stuttgart, 1928. Noth, Martin. Das System der zviblf Stdmme Israels. Stuttgart, 1930. N o t h , Martin. A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (1948). Translated by Bernhard W . Anderson. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972. Noth, Martin. The History of Israel (1950). N e w York, i960. Revised translation. N o t h , Martin. The Deuteronomistic History (1957). Journal for the Study of the Old T e s t a m e n t , Supplement Series, 15. Sheffield, 1981. N o t h , Martin. The Old Testament World (1964). Translated b y Victor I. Gruhn. Philadelphia, 1966. Weippert, Manfred, and Helga Weippert. " G e r m a n Archaeologists." In Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An Introduction to Palestinian Archaeology Dedicated to Joseph A. Callaway, edited by Joel F . D r i n kard et al., p p . 87-108. Atlanta, 1988. Survey of the role of G e r m a n archaeologists in Israel in the twentieth century. ROBERT D . HAAK
NUBIA, ancient land that extended from Aswan in the north to die region below Khartoum, the capital of the mod ern Republic of the Sudan. Like Egypt, Nubia was divided into northern and southern regions. T h e northern part (Lower Nubia), bordered on southern Egypt and the south ern part (Upper Nubia) stretched from the Third to the Sixth Cataract of the Nile. Also like Egypt, Nubia was di vided by the Nile; however, the river in Nubia was bounded by a very narrow strip of arable land. The Nile remained an important route of transportation between settlements, serv ing as a conduit to the rest of Africa and enabling the trading. of ivory, ebony, gold, and animal skins. Fishing and hunting game in the marshes beside the Nile was an important part of the Nubian diet. Settlement in Nubia goes back into the paleolithic period (before c. 25,000 B C E ) . Evidence of this occupation consists of scatters of stone tools found on the desert margins of the Nile. Later inhabitants left rock drawings and other remains of one of the world's earliest settlements. Traces of this set tled Mesolithic culture were found in the area of modern day Khartoum and date to around 6000. The Lower Nubian Neolithic cultures are closely linked to the Upper Egyptian Predynastic sequence (c. 50003100). T h e first truly distinctive Nubian civilization to be
identified by archaeologists is known as the A-Group. It ap peared in the area of Lower Nubia in the period immediately preceding the unification of Egypt around 3100. It lasted through the first and second dynasties in Egypt (c. 2985). The A-Group produced very fine ceramics, which were painted to resemble baskets. Along with locally produced wares imported pottery and stone vessels from Egypt are found in A-Group contexts. Excavations at Qustul by the University of Chicago re vealed large, rich graves of local kings (Emery, 1965, Wil liams, 1986). These tombs date to the period just before the unification of Egypt and represent one of the early states found along the Nile at the end of the Neolithic. T h e AGroup disappeared suddenly before the end of the Egyptian second dynasty (c. 2650). Neither the written nor the ar chaeological record provides a satisfactory explanation for the end of the A-Group civilization. Texts indicate that raids were made into Nubia from Egypt by the pharaohs of the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom. Egyptian inscriptions dating to the Old Kingdom have been found in the diorite quarries in Lower Nubia and an Old Kingdom town was excavated at Buhen by Walter Em ery. Snefru, founder of the fourth dynasty (c. 2575-2465) recorded that he brought from Nubia seven thousand pris oners and two hundred thousand head of cattle. T h e loss of such an important economic product as that many cattle may account for the "impoverishment" seen in the archae ological record. T h e prisoners may well belong to the socalled B-Group, the poor successors to the A-Group king dom. By the end of the Old Kingdom (late sixth dynasty, c. 2150), the Egyptian record shows peaceful trade relations between Egypt and Nubia, as is recorded in the tomb of Wenis at Saqqara and the tombs of the governors of Aswan, Harkhuf, and Pepinakht, Egypt's power over Nubia de creased during the First Intermediate Period. By die late First Intermediate Period, a new culture known as the CGroup began to appear in Lower Nubia. A reunited Egypt again exerted control over Nubia in the Middle Kingdom. Fortresses were built at Kuban, Aniba, Serra East, Buhen, Kor, Dabenarti, Mirgissa, Askut, Uronarti, Kumma, Semna, and Semna South. These forts were constructed to protect Egypt from the growing power of the first kingdom of Kush. T h e kingdom was centered in the third cataract area at the site of Kerma, excavated by George A. Reisner for Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Bos ton, from 1913 through 1916. [See the biography of Reisner.] There were three distinct cultural groups active in Lower Nubia during this time: the Kerma culture; the C-Group peoples, who were nomadic cattle herders; and the PanGrave people, desert nomads who served as mercenary sol diers for the Egyptians. The Kerma culture eventually allied itself with the Hyksos (Asiatic) overlords of Egypt in the Second Intermediate Period. The Kerma kingdom and the Hyksos were eventually de-
NUZI stroyed by die Theban pharaohs of the early eighteenth dy nasty (c. 1550—1505). The C-Group remained under Egyp tian control as evidenced by a fortified settlement of C-Group peoples and Egyptians excavated by the Univer sity of Pennsylvania at Areika (Randall-Maclver and Woolley, 1909). T h e New Kingdom (eighteenth-twentieth dynasties, c. 1550-1070) marks an important change in the relations be tween Egypt and Nubia. At the outset of the Egyptian reoccupation the Middle Kingdom fortresses were reoccupied and the temples within them rebuilt. T h e Egyptians insti tuted a gradual process of egyptianization. Nubian princes visited the Egyptian court as depicted in die tomb of the governor of Nubia under Tutankhamun, Huy (Davies, 1926). The temples, rather than the forts served as the main ad ministrative centers by the mid- and later New Kingdom. Rameses II (c. 1290-1224) of die nineteenth dynasty built a great number of temples. One of the more impressive struc tures was the great temple at Abu Simbel. [See Abu Simbel.] However, the most important Egyptian temple complex was that dedicated to Amun at Gebel Barkal; it was established by Thutmosis III (c. 1479-1425) was expanded by nearly every pharaoh of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties through Rameses II. It continued to function long after N u bia had again slipped from Egyptian control at the end of the New Kingdom (Davies, 1991; Kemp, 1989; O'Connor, 1983). Around 800 a local Nubian dynasty began to rise to power in die area of the fourth cataract at Napata. By about 750 it extended its control over all of Nubia, and within another generation it had assumed control of Egypt. The Assyrians invaded Egypt in 663 and the Nubian rule over Egypt came to an end. T h e Nubian rulers of the second kingdom of Kush con tinued to rule for another thousand years. Because Napata remained both the chief cult center of the ldngdom and the burial place of its kings, the first half of the second kingdom of Kush is known as the Napatan period. After the third century, the center of political and religious power in the kingdom of Kush shifted south to the city of Meroe. Cul turally and politically die ensuing Meroitic period was also very different from the preceding Napatan period. Although the Nubians continued to respect Egyptian traditions, they were also influenced both by Ptolemaic, Roman, and central African ideals. Many of the gods they worshiped were unique; their art and architecture were highly original; and they began to express their own language in an alphabetic script. [See Meroe.] Eventually it appears as though Meroe itself was invaded and destroyed by the armies from Axum in Ethiopia. Nubia was divided into three kingdoms in the Christian period— Nabata in the north, Makouria between the Third and Fourth Cataract, and Aiwa at the junction of the Blue and White branches of the Nile. About 350 C E Makouria
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and Nabata became one kingdom under a single ruler with its capital at Old Dongola. Nubia became Islamic territory with the treaty of Baqt (640 CE). In that period, Nubia showed a revival in art, lit erature and architecture, evidencing both Coptic and Byz antine influence. In the sixth century C E missionaries from Egypt and Byzantium converted the various Nubian peoples to Christianity, and two rival Christian kingdoms emerged in the north and south. These survived until the fourteenth century, when they were finally overwhelmed by Arab peo ples and superseded by Islamic states. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, William Y. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. Princeton, 1977. Arkell, A n t h o n y ] . Early Khartoum: An Account, of the Excavation of an Early Occupation Site Carried Out by the Sudan Government Antiq uities Service in 1944-5. L o n d o n , 1949. Davies, N . d e G . The Theban Tomb Series. Vol. 4, The Tomb of Huy. L o n d o n , 1926. Davies, W . V., ed. Egypt and Africa: Nubia from Prehistory to Islam. L o n d o n , 1991. Emery, W . B . Egypt in Nubia. L o n d o n , 1965. Gratien, Brigitte. Les cultures Kerma. Lille, 1978. Kadish, Gerald E. " O l d K i n g d o m Egyptian Activity in Nubia: Some Reconsiderations." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 52 (1966): 2333. K e m p , Barry. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of Civilization. L o n d o n and New York, 1989. O ' C o n n o r , David. " N u b i a before the N e w K i n g d o m . " In Africa in An tiquity: The Arts of Ancient Nubia and the Sudan, vol. 1, The Essays, p p . 46-61. Brooklyn, 1978. O ' C o n n o r , David. " N e w K i n g d o m a n d T h i r d Intermediate Period, 1552-664 B . C . " In Ancient Egypt: A Social History, edited by Bruce Trigger et al. C a m b r i d g e , 1983. O ' C o n n o r , David. Ancient Nubia: Egypt's Rival in Africa. Philadelphia, 1993Randall-Maclver, D . , and C . L . Woolley. Areika. Philadelphia, 1909. Reisner, George. Excavations al Kerma. P t s . 1-3 (Harvard African Studies, 5); pts. 4-5 ( H a r v a r d African Studies, 6). Cambridge, Mass., 1923. Save-Soderbergh, T o r g n y . Agypten und Nubien: Ein Beitrag zur Ge schichte altagyptischer Aussenpolitik. L u n d , 1941. Trigger, Bruce G. History and Settlement in Ixrwer Nubia. N e w Ha v e n , 1965. Trigger, Bruce G. Nubia under the Pharaohs. L o n d o n , 1976. Wendorf, F r e d , ed. The Prehistory of Nubia. 2 vols. Dallas, 1968. Williams, Bruce. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Nubian Ex pedition. Vol. 3, p t . 1, The A-Group Royal Cemetery at Qustal: Cem etery L. Chicago, 1986. ZAHT H A W A S S
NUZI (genitive of Nuzu, modern Yorgan Tepe), site lo cated in northeastern Iraq, 13 1cm (8 mi.) southwest of Kir kuk (35°2i'47" N , 44°i5'30" E). Kirkuk (ancient Arrapha al-ilani) was the source of tablets that had been sold on the antiquities market. Nothing was known about die origin or historical context of these tablets, which were marked by a peculiar dialect of Akkadian and contained Hurrian onomastica that had previously been encountered in letters of
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the Amarna archive in Egypt and in Kassite-period texts from Nippur. T h e search for an uninhabited site more suited for excavation led to Nuzi, where a cache of similar tablets had been discovered near the main mound. Nuzi comprises a main mound and several smaller tells. Oriented northwest-southeast, the mound measures about 200 X 200 m, with an average height of 5 m above the sur rounding plain. Only three of the smaller tells were investi gated: one prehistoric site (Qudish SaghTr), about 5 km (3 mi.) to the south, and two small mid-second millennium B C E sites, about 300 m to the north. Occupation of the main mound extended from the prehistoric to the Mitannian/ Middle Assyrian period, followed by meager remnants of habitation in the Neo-Assyrian, Parthian, and early Sasanian periods (the "late period"). Identified as Gasur by recurrent late third-millennium B C E textual references and as Nuzu/ Nuzi in the mid-second millennium B C E , the site is known primarily for the latter occupation. Its stratified Mitannian/ Middle Assyrian period archives of more than five thousand sealed tablets span five or six generations of a mainly Hur rian population in the kingdom of Arrapha, the easternmost province of Mitanni. Published extensively over the years, the archives sparked intense study of the social, economic, religious, and legal institutions of the Nuzians/Hurrians, whose presumed identity with the biblical Horites (hon[m]J prompted several comparisons with the patriarchal customs of the Hebrew Bible. Nuzi replaced Kirkuk as the generic term for analogous tablets and seal impressions from neigh boring mounds, including Kirkuk/Arrapha and Tell alFahhar/Kurruhanni. The associated material culture, nota bly painted ceramics, glazed wares, and glass and faience objects became diagnostic of the so-called Nuzi period. Excavations a n d Division of Finds. At the request of Gertrude Bell, director of antiquities in Iraq, Edward Chiera led the first campaign to Nuzi in 1925-1926, under the joint auspices of the Iraq Museum and the American Schools of Oriental Research. Work began on the small northwestern tell, in the house of Surki-tilla (two buildings) and the house of Tehip-tilla. The excavated material was divided between the two supporting institutions. The subsequent four campaigns, sponsored jointly by the Fogg Art Museum and the Harvard Semitic Museum in Boston and the American Schools of Oriental Research, were directed by Chiera (1927-1928), Robert H. Pfeiffer (1928-1929), and Richard F. S. Starr (1929-1930, 19301931). The finds were divided between the Iraq Museum and Harvard University. From the northwestern tell, Chiera moved to the northeastern tell, where he excavated the house of Zike and the house of Silwa-tessup before turning to the main mound. Pfeiffer introduced a grid system. In addition to completing Chiera's excavation of the palace and adjacent domestic structures to the southwest and northeast, Pfeiffer initiated two test pits in rooms N120 and L 4 to es tablish the sequence of occupation. Starr concentrated on
the northwestern ridge and the temple complex. Once the upper levels associated with the widespread Nuzi tablets had been cleared, work focused on an investigation of the lower strata in the temple area (temples A - G ) , along the north western ridge (strata I-IV), and on the southeastern edge in the region of the city wall (strata V-VIII). Pit L 4 was ex tended down to virgin soil, providing a continuous sequence of fifteen occupation levels (pavements I-XII). Stratigraphy a n d Chronology. Three stratigraphic schemes were used simultaneously and only tentatively in tegrated into a single system. Their only contact is during the final Nuzi period between pavement I, stratum II, and temple A, which were also linked by a complicated drainage system and the Nuzi tablets. T h e date of the tablets hinged until recently on a letter bearing the seal impression of Saustatar, son of Parsatatar, king of Mitanni, whose reign fluc tuates within the fifteenth century B C E . It now appears that the seal was probably an heirloom and that a later date for sttatum II conforms with the evidence from other sites where Nuzi-related material is dated by associated texts to the mid-fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B C E . T h e range of the Nuzi archives is currently posited between 1445/1425 and 1350/1330 B C E , following the low chronology. T h e vari ant dating of the latest Nuzi texts and the destruction of the site depends, then, on the Assur-mutakkil synchronism in the first or second generation at Nuzi and on historical-po litical factors that best match the socioeconomic turmoil re flected in the latest Nuzi records. T o o little remains of the uppermost stratum I material to extend the duration of the Nuzi period much beyond the stratum II destruction date. T h e origin of this period is less certain. Although architectural and material remains of the Nuzi period are represented in the lower pavement II, strata III—IV, and temples B-E, Starr's correlation between stra tum IV and temple E is contested by Ruth Opificius, who relates stratum IV to temple F, which she considers Old Babylonian by its pottery and figurines (Das altbabylonische Terrakottarelief, Untersuchungen zur Assyriologie und vor derasiatischen Archaologie, 2, Berlin, 1961, pp. 18-19). T h e latter would be compatible with Starr's own comparison be tween the pottery of strata IV and VII. Most scholars agree on the synchronism between pave ments IIA and IIB, strata V-VLI, and temple F. One Old Babylonian tablet and five early Old Assyrian tablets from pavement IIA and one Ur III tablet found in or above pave ment IIB-III (a rubbish deposit) provide a tentative chron ological range (c. 2100-1650 BCE) for pavements IIA, IIB, and IIB-III, whose contents are considered transitional be tween those of the upper Nuzi pavements and the lower Gasur pavements. Opinions diverge over the association of the Gasur pavement III, dated by tablets to the Old Akka dian period, with temple G and sttatum VIII by virtue of their relative position directly below the transitional phase. Structural as well as ceramic links between temples F and
NUZI G and between strata VII and VIII support a later Ur III/ Isin-Larsa date instead. Pavements III to VIII were disturbed by numerous graves, so that any demarcation of the Old Akkadian occupation, linked variously with pavements III-V and III-IX, remains inconclusive. Henry W. Eliot (in Starr, 1939) has tentatively identified pavement VI as Early Dynastic, VII as Late Uruk, and VIII-IX as Uruk. The earliest deposits, pavements X A XII, belong to the Ubaid period. Prehistoric period. Represented in pits L 4 and G50 and on Qudish Saghir, die lowest levels for the prehistoric period are characterized by packed clay (pise) walls and incised, knobbed, and painted wares. T h e painted wares are super seded by unpainted wares in pavement X, which sees the introduction of mud-brick construction and infant burials. A cache of marble stamp seals from G50 is attributed to this period on typological grounds. Gasur and transitional periods. The Gasur occupa tion is encountered in pits L 4 and G50 and, according to Starr, in the City Wall (stratum VIII) and temples G and F. It is identified and dated by 222 tablets attributed to the early Old Akkadian period on linguistic, orthographic, and paleographic grounds. Most notable among the mainly business documents, in which Semitic names predominate, is an in scribed clay " m a p " that accompanies a record of land and appears to locate an estate within the district of Gasur. T h e small finds include a terra-cotta mold for casting animalshaped amulets and a copper statuette from temple G. T h e cultural pottery is typified by incised gray-ware vases, zoomorphic vessels, house-shaped stands, and relief decoration in die form of applied snakes, scorpions, and quadrupeds. T h e glyptic evidence comprises impressions of one cylinder seal and two stamp seals and five cylinder seals (including a shell seal mounted on a copper pin that accompanied a burial). Nuzi period. T h e Nuzi period was fully excavated over the entire mound and on both northern tells. T h e evidence of architecture, texts, glyptic, and luxury products provides the most complete picture of a provincial town on the east ern edge of the Mitannian ldngdom toward die end of its hegemony. As such, die Nuzi material complements the ev idence from Alalakh levels V and IV, which represents a provincial town on die western edge of the Mitannian ldng dom during its formative and mature phase. Architecture and architectural decoration. Stratum II struc tures on the main mound include a palace and temple com plex surrounded by well-constructed municipal buildings along the northwestern ridge and denser residential sectors on die southeast, southwest, and northeast. Five contem porary buildings, associated by their archives with wealthy landowners and high-ranking officials, were excavated out side the citadel walls on the northern tells. T h e tripartite palace plan, incorporating old and new el ements, is divided into a formal area consisting of rooms
173
grouped conventionally around courtyards; an agglutinate administrative section south of the outer courtyard; and res idential quarters beyond the throne room to the southwest. T h e main entrance, though not preserved, would have led into die outer courtyard (M94), which was bordered by benches. A connecting room with a hearth (M89) gave in direct access to the inner courtyard (Mi00), which was flanked by reception rooms and apartments. This separation of the public from the official domain, while reminiscent of the palace plans at Mari and Tell Asmar, becomes a char acteristic of Neo-Assyrian palaces. T h e entrance to the un usually juxtaposed anteroom (L20) and audience hall (L4/ 11) is marked by two freestanding brick pillars that may have supported a portico or canopy. The supposed chapel directiy north of the audience hall was devoid of cult fittings, and Starr's identification of a ldtchen in the administrative sector has also been queried on practical grounds. Luxu riously furnished with a sophisticated drainage system, mar ble paving, and silver-coated copper door studs, the palace is best known for its well-preserved frescoes, also found out side die citadel in die house of Prince Silwa-tessup, which resembles die palace on a smaller scale. T h e more elaborate examples show figured designs in panels of solid red and gray framed by geometric patterns arranged in an architec tural scheme of bands and metopes. The Hathor head, bucranion, and palmette tree are recurrent motifs that also ap pear on ceramics, cylinder seals, and plaques. T h e designs reflect the current taste for foreign, in this case Egyptian and Aegean, imagery. During the Isin-Larsa/Old Babylonian Period (temple F), die sanctuary was transformed from a single temple (G29) into a double temple (G29, G53) complex with forecourts with subsidiary rooms. Where originally G29 was based on a double-flanked main room (temple G), both temples are Herdhaus types—arranged on the standard Mesopotamian bent-axis scheme, witii the hearth or altar and cult podium at the short, southeastern end of a rectangular room that was entered from its nordiern corner. Apart from structural re vetments, neither temple was altered significantly before its destruction in the mid-fourteenth century B C E . The con trasting furnishings of the two cella suggested different pa tron deities. Temple G 2 9 , witii its wall decoration of glazed terra-cotta nails, a sheep's head, a boar's head, zoomorphic jars, and glazed terra-cotta lions, was attributed to Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love and war, whose association with lions extends back to the Akkadian period. This cella also contained nude female figurines, female amulets, and a unique ivory statuette of a seminude female in Hittite attire, who may represent Ishtar's Hurrian counterpart, Sawuska. Temple G 5 3 , marked by its conspicious lack of contents, was attributed to the Hurrian storm god, Tessup, one of Ishtar-Sawuska's numerous partners, who headed die Mi tannian pantheon and whose name is a common onomastic element at Nuzi. Evidence for die cult of Tessup first ap-
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pears in the early second millennium BCE and supports tire later dating of temple F to the Isin-Larsa or early Old Bab ylonian period. Tablets and seal impressions. T h e excavated tablets from Nuzi were stored as public and private archives on the main mound and on botii northern tells. Although associated with the upper strata (I-IV), the vast majority come from stratum II. A relative chronological framework is derived from the five-generation scribal family of Apil-sin and that of the realestate magnate and crown official Tehip-tilla. Through ra tion and personnel lists, contracts, legal records, and letters, the texts, written in a Middle Babylonian dialect of Akkadian mixed with Hurrian idiosyncracies, reflect rapidly declining socioeconomic conditions in the province of Arrapha: die grain surplus was decreasing and both debts and litigation were increasing, forcing the majority to cede their property rights to the privileged few. T h e last years are marked by intensive military activity on both the northern and southern frontiers, but Nuzi's destruction is generally attributed to the Assyrians. The tablets bore the seals of people from all walks of life in Nuzi and in the surrounding towns. They thus provide a unique source of information on sealing practices and on the relationship between seal design, text type, user, rank, period, and origin. T h e style is characterized by the exten sive, often unmasked use of point and tubular drills; the seals' material is sintered quartz (frit). T h e iconography is heterogeneous, drawing on a long tradition of assimilation and adaptation. Superimposed on native designs devoted to hunting and animal rituals centered on a tree, are court fash ions that shift with the political tide. During the first gen erations, which coincided with the Mitannian confederacy, contact with the west brought Egyptian and Aegean iconog raphy, such as tire Hafhor mask, the ankh sign, die sphinx, the griffin, and the winged disk. In time, the tree was re placed by the winged disk and confrontation scenes between human and divine figures, influenced by provincial KassiteBabylonian traditions from Elam and die Hamrin, gave way to a revival of ancient Mesopotamian contest scenes be tween mythical beasts—which presumably had survived on the eastern periphery of the region. Among the Akkadian revivals are the storm god on his lion-dragon mount and mythological representations, including scenes from the myth of a Hedammu-type dragon and, possibly, die death of Huwawa from die Epic of Gilgamesh. Although associ ated with the Hurrians in later literary traditions, the origin of these myths is unknown. Small finds. The material culture associated with the stra tum II tablets became diagnostic of the Nuzi period and, by extention, of the Hurrians, who migrated across the Fertile Crescent from the east. Apart from the difficulties of relating any category of archaeological material to an ethnic sector of a composite population, the redating of stratum II to the
mid-fourteenth century B C E places the origin of much of the characteristic Nuzi material in the west. Nuzi ware (formerly called Hurrian ware and Subartu ware) combines elements from a number of earlier ceramic traditions in Mesopotamia with foreign elements of design. Distinguished by a white pattern painted on a dark (redbrown to black) background, this ware is distributed from the Zab valley east of the Tigris River to the 'Amuq plain and Orontes valley in the west and as far south as Babylonia. At Nuzi, geometric motifs predominate over natural ones. The characteristic shapes include die slender goblet (high cup) with a small foot or button base, and die shoulder cup. Both are thin, fine-grained drinking cups derived from Bab ylonian prototypes of the Isin-Larsa period. Found predom inantly in palaces, temples, and "manor houses," Nuzi ware is considered a luxury product, along with the great quan tities of faience, multicolored glass, and glazed wares tiiat are widely distributed during the Mitannian period. At Nuzi, these products include zoomorphic amulets, figurines, beads, vessels, cylinder seals, and plaques. T h e most com mon glazed objects are terra-cotta wall nails. They appear to be connected with the cult and may have been dedicated by individuals to decorate the walls following an ancient tra dition reaching back to prehistoric times at Qudish Saghir and to Mesopotamia in general. Cultic paraphernalia cast in copper or bronze include small statuettes and a cylindrical pot stand with excised sides and couchant lions on the upper edge. In a military context, bronze scales were used for the armor of men and horses. Most unusual is a bronze dagger, its hilt decorated with inlaid iron plaques secured by iron rivets. Terrestrial and meteoritic iron was a rare and valued metal used primarily for ornamentation until the late period. Late period. Structural remains of the late period were concentrated on the northwestern ridge and many low ad jacent mounds. Three silver coins of the Parthian king Vologases III and a silver coin of the Sasanian Icing Shapur I provide a chronological range from the late second to the late third century C E for the settlement and cemetery. [See also Hurrians; Mitanni.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Preliminary reports by the respective excavators published in Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n u m b e r s 18, 20, 29, 30, 32, 34, 38) and 42 (1923-1931) were followed by a final report o n the e x cavations by Starr (1938, 1939) a n d a n ongoing series of text publica tions. Discrepancies between t h e preliminary a n d final reports in t h e designation of room n u m b e r s m a y account for some of t h e variation in descriptions of r o o m contents, particularly tablets, which were recorded and published separately. F o r the excavations, see Richard F . S. Starr, Nuzi: Report on the Excavation at Yorgen Tepa Near Kirkuk, Iraq, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1939). F o r a complete listing of primary text p u b lications u p t o 1992, see Jeanette Fincke, Die Orts- und Gewassemamen
NUZI der Nuzi- Texte, Repertoire G e o g r a p h i q u e des T e x t e s Cuneiformes, vol. 10 (Wiesbaden, 1993), especially pages xvi-xxx.
Secondary Sources Cecchini, Serena Maria. La ceramica diNuzi. Studi Semitici, 15. R o m e , 1965. Useful assemblage of N u z i w a r e and s u m m a r y of conventional evaluations, though now superseded by new finds and m o r e critical investigations. Dietrich, Manfried, Oswald Loretz, a n d Walter Mayer. Nuzi-Bibliograpkie. Alter Orient u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , Sonderreihe, vol. 11. Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1972. C o m p l e t e listing of primary and secondary publications on N u z i through 1971. Eichler, Barry L . " N u z i and the Bible: A Retrospective." I n DUMUE -DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Ake W. Sjoberg, edited by H e r m a n n Behrens et al., p p . 117-119. Philadelphia, 1989. Critical review of the impact of Nuzi scholarship o n biblical studies from the early comparisons between socio-legal customs at N u z i a n d those in the Bible to more recent skepticism regarding the Hurrian background of the customs at N u z i a n d dieir relevance for the dating and inter pretation of specific biblical narratives and institutions. H r o u d a , Barthel. Die bemalte Keramik des zweitenjahrtausends in Nordmesopotamien und Nordsyrien. Istanbuler F o r s c h u n g e n , vol. 19. Ber lin, 1957. I m p o r t a n t , if outdated, examination of Nuzi ware in rela tion to other painted ceramics, which in o n e way or another were misconstrued as reflections of H u r r i a n culture. Mellink, Machteld J. " A Hittite Figurine from N u z i . " In Vorderasiatische Archaologie: Studien und Aufsatze Anton Moorlgal zum funfundsechzigsten Oeburlstag gewidmet, edited by K u r t Bittel, p p . 155-164. Berlin, 1964. Unusually convincing description of one Hittite/Hur2
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rian c o m p o n e n t in N u z i iconography, citing art historical a n d ar chaeological as well as textual and historical arguments. Porada, Edith. Seal Impressions from Nuzi. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 24. N e w Haven, 1947. Pioneering art historical study of the N u z i glyptic based o n a representative sample of seal impressions from the five-generation archive of Tehip-tilla. Stein, D i a n a L . " K h a b u r W a r e a n d Nuzi Ware: T h e i r Origin, Rela tionship, a n d Significance." Assur 4.1 (1984): 1-65. Redefinition of these two painted wares in terms of their shape, decoration, distri bution, a n d date. M a n y of the results need to b e tested against new evidence from recent excavations in the K h a b u r triangle. Stein, D i a n a L . "Mythologische Inhalte der Nuzi-Glyptik." In Hurtiter und Hurritischj edited by Volkert H a a s , p p . 173-209. Konstanzer Altorientalische Symposien, vol. 2. C o n s t a n c e , Germany, 1988. I n terpretation of mythological imagery in the N u z i iconography relat ing, in particular, to T e s s u p and Ishtar-Sawuska. Stein, D i a n a L . " A Reappraisal of the 'Saustatar Letter' from N u z i . " Zeitschrifl fur Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archaeologie 79.1 (1989): 36-60. Casts d o u b t o n the conventional dating of Nuzi a n d favors a later date based o n sealing practice as well as historical a n d archaeological factors. Stein, Diana L . Das Archiv des Silwa-tesmp. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1993. Comprehensive textual and art historical analysis of the sealings and sealing practice in t h e private archive of Prince Silwa-tessup; based on a reedition of the texts a n d line drawings of the seal impressions. T h e u s e a n d designs of seals are investigated in specific legal, a d ministrative, social, a n d regional contexts within the framework of one community, from about 1440 to 1330 BCE. T h e results compli ment, a m e n d , a n d extend P o r a d a ' s study (see above), DIANA L.
STEIN
o OBODA. 5eeAvdat.
ODEUM (Gk., odeion; Lat., odeum), a small roofed the ater, used for musical performances (Gk., odai), recitations, and lectures. T h e first monument of this kind was built by Pericles near the theater of Dionysus in Athens and was reconstructed in 52 B C E by two Roman architects. It is re corded only later (Vitruvius, 5.9.1; Plutarch, Pericles 13.9) as an odeum. The term is often incorrectiy applied to any small theater (especially in cities that have more than one scenical building), to distinguish it from a city's sometimes more ancient (Greek) theater. For all of Greece, however, in the second century C E , Pausanias knew only four odea: those of Agrippa (1,8.6 and 1.14.1) and of Herodes Atticus (7.20.6) in Athens, and those built or rebuilt at Corinth (2.3.6) and Patras (7.20.6) by the same rich rhetor and ben efactor; however, Pausanias, in the Periegeta was also aware of one at Smyrna (9.35.6). At Caesarea Maritima, in ancient Palestine, Vespasian built an odeum on the site of a de stroyed synagogue (Malalas, 10.338, p. 261.13). In Rome, the word is used for, but limited to, tire Domitianic construc tion in the Campus Martius (Suetonius, Domitianus 5). This kind of monument therefore seems to be much rarer than might be expected. Epigraphic evidence in the western as well as in the eastern provinces, has, however, added other examples (Carthage in North Africa; Gortyna on Crete; Patara; Qanawat; Thessalonike in Greece; and Vienna), which suggests drat the problem of unidentified buildings of this or related types all over the empire needs to be reconsidered. It was once argued that an odeum was characterized by the absence of versurae and of parodoi ("side entrances") leading to the orchestra. However, the identification of the monument in Corinth, which is secured both by a literary source and by an inscription, also has versurae and parodoi. It is first of all essential to put aside an important group of monuments that are linked to an agora; they are probable bouleuteria, rather than real odea. Most have but a few, or reduced, scenical installations, others only a podium behind the facade. In some cases, too (e.g., at Gerasa/Jerash, in modern Jordan), the seats are inscribed with the names of
the uibes into which the assembly of the people was divided; these point to a completely different use for the monument. Some of these consttuctions (Alabanda; Anemurium; Arykanda; the island of Cos; lasos; Pinara; Selinos in Cilicia) have a rectangular plan mat facilitated the use of a roof but limited the width of the cavea, or spectators' section; they are relatively small, the largest rivaling the boundary mea sures adopted, for technical reasons, by the Hellenistic bouleuterion at Miletus (34.84 X 24.28 m). T h e abandonment of this model in the second century C E , a time of splendor in urban life and architectural renewal in the provinces of the Roman Empire, allowed the development of a plan that is still nearer to—and very often quite the same as—that of the dieaters, but roofed. T h e best examples of this type are at Aphrodisias, Aspendos, Cibyra, Ephesus, Magnesia ad Maeandrum, Sagalassos, and Sillyon in Asia Minor, at NeaPaphos on Cyprus, and at Amman, Gadara, Gerasa (the North Theater), and Pella in the Near East. The cavea was then wider, with diameters ranging between 30 and 54 m. The building was still placed close to the city's agora or was directly connected to its porticoes. Whether these construc tions were used both as bouleuteria and odea has been dis cussed: Reudiger Meinel (1979) speaks of a mixed type (Ger., mischtypus, or mischgebaude), on account of the de velopment and magnificence of the rear wall of some of the facades. However, those walls were purely decorative and cannot be considered real scaenae fronte—limited as they were to displaying sculptured groups of the house of Augustus and of the municipal elites who took political advantage of acting as benefactors and propagators of the imperial ideology in their own cities. Despite a real influence by the plan of one and the decoration of the other, there are significant distinctions between the two lands of build ings. A second group that needs to be excluded is the small auditoria (of less than a half-circle) that are usually part of a gymnasium and correspond to what seems to have been called acroateria (Apollonia of Illyria; Arykanda [no. IX on plans of the city]; Cnidus [the so-called bouleuterion], Epidaurus, Syracuse, and perhaps Ariassos and Termessos). Built as they are within the architectural structure of a mon ument devoted to education, they were clearly intended for
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OHNEFALSCH-RICHTER, MAX
lecturing and have no scenical purposes. The so-called odeum of Agrippa in the Athenian agora, dedicated in about 15 B C E , was itself established not far from the gymnasium of Ptolemy—and was probably connected with it. Cultic assembly halls, either semicircular (as on Delos) or inscribed (as at Dura-Europos in Syria), have also been called odea. Indeed, at Delos, religious processions or epiph anies of the goddess's statue did certainly take place, but die monument has no scaena and was evidentiy not used for real sacred dramas, as has sometimes been thought. On the con trary, the auditorium at Dura, suggested by an imperial ded ication and a graffito on one of the seats, was certainly the colony's bouleuterion in the tiiird century C E and has noth ing in common with the nearby hall of the Artemis Nanaia temple. Monuments at Gerasa (die festival theater at the Birketein), Sahr, and El-Hammeh (?) seem to have been dependencies of their respective sanctuaries but do not share architectural characteristics with well-identified odea. They represent a third group of buildings whose purposes and functions were distinct from the odea's. Real odea are certainly larger than a city's boule, a gym nasium, or auditoria for religious spectacles, as they were intended for larger assemblies. The capacities of the build ings at Corinth, Lyon, and Vienna are calculated to have held some three thousand spectators and that of Herodes Atticus to have approached five thousand. There is, there fore, no comparison with simple auditoria and cultal theaters (such as on Delos), which seat only hundreds, and still less witii the largest bouleuteria (Aphrodisias, Ephesus), which may have seated fourteen hundred. With an exterior diameter of about 63-76 m, the odea at Athens, Corinth, Lyon, and Vienna are clearly situated be tween the largest bouleuteria and medium-sized theaters; the monument at Carthage, with its 95-meter diameter, was still wider, and nearer to real theaters. The smallest (Cata nia, Nicopolis, Patras) have the same diameter (about 4 3 48 m) as the largest uninscribed bouleuteria. In plan, many of the real odea "were simply theaters in miniature," as John B. Ward-Perldns put it, which is the sense of the in scription of the theatroeides odeion at Qanawat (W. H. Waddington and P. LeBas, Voyage archeologiques en Grece etAsie Mineure: Inscriptions et Applications, 3 vols., Paris, 1870, 2341) and the expression of the architectural evolution from inscribed rectangular buildings to wider semicircular con structions that clearly resemble theaters. T h e only signifi cant distinctions seem to have been that odea were covered, in order to facilitate a better acoustic environment for con certs and lectures; their stage was of a simple and more se vere design. Except in the great cities of the empire (Athens, Carthage, Corinth, Lyon, Rome, Smyrna), which were often visited by famous rhetors and in which the spectacles were more diversified than in small cities, odea existed where there were
special festivals and games: at Argos, the monument's orchestta is paved with a mosaic that bears an undisputable allusion to the Nemean games; at Nicopolis, it may well be related to the celebration of the Actiaca; at Carthage (built in 207 CE) it may be related to die Pytiiian games; and in Rome itself, the odeum of Domitian was probably intended, just as its stadium was, for the Certamen Capitolinum, insti tuted in 86 CE. Odea are often directiy connected with theaters (Athens, Corinth, Catania, Lyon, and Vienna); both constructions use the same lie of the ground, with its pending particularly adapted for the setting of a cavea. However, at Akrai, Soluntum, and Amman, the bouleuterion also takes the same topographic advantages of this proximity to become, as Statius said for Naples (Silv. 3.5.91), diis geminam molem nudi tectique theatri, an important element in the city's landscape. T h e joining of the two monuments, interesting as it is for ancient town planning, is thus no absolute criterion by itself for identifying the smaller one as an odeum. [See also Public Buildings; Theaters.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Baity, Jean C h . Cvria Ordinis: Recherches d'architecture et d'urbanisme antiques sur les curies provinciales du monde romain. Academie Royale de Belgique, M e m o i r e s de la Classe des Beaux-Arts, Coll. in-4°, 2e ser., XV.2. Brussels, 1991. Devotes an entire chapter to bouleuteria (some of which h a d been called odea) with an inscribed rectangular a n d semicircular plan (see p p . 429-600). Bieber, Margarete. The History of the Greek and Roman Theater. 2d ed. Princeton, 1961. Classic study, providing a list of odea throughout the provinces of the R o m a n Empire (see p p . 174-177, 220-222). Broneer, Oscar T . The Odeum. Corinth, 10. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1932. Excellent m o n o g r a p h on the building at Corinth. Crema, Luigi. L'architettura romana. T u r i n , 1959. O n e of the best guides to R o m a n architecture, with good coverage of odea (see p p . 92-93, 202-203, 4 S-428). Ginouves, Rene. Le Matron a gradins droits et I'Odeon d'Argos. Etudes Peloponnesiennes, 6. Paris, 1972. Exemplary m o n o g r a p h on the o d e u m at Argos, with extended comparative material o n other odea a n d roofed theaters in the R o m a n world. Izenour, George C. Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity. N e w H a v e n , 1992. N e w and interesting approach to the p r o b l e m b y one of the leading specialists of m o d e r n assembly halls, unfortunately confusing odea, bouleuteria, a n d auditoria. Meinel, Reudiger. Das Odeion: Untersuchungen an uberdachten antiken Theatergebduden. Frankfurt, 1979. Standard work o n the subject, drawing special attention to the problem of construction, b u t u n critically mixing odea, bouleuteria, a n d auditoria. N e p p i M o d o n a , Aldo. Gli edifici tealrali greci e romani. Florence, 1961. Brief, uncritical coverage of odea. 2
JEAN C H . B A L T Y
OHNEFALSCH-RICHTER, MAX (1850-1917), German excavator, antique dealer, writer, and one of the pioneers of Cypriot archaeology. After gradation from Halle University, where he studied agriculture, political economy.
OLIVES and natural sciences, Ohnefalsch-Richter traveled exten sively in central and southern Europe before going to Cy prus in 1878 to work as a newspaper reporter. He was soon attracted to the archaeology of the island and began a series of excavations, and except for one trip to Germany, stayed there until 1890. Ohnefalsch-Richter returned to his country and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the cult places of Cy prus at Leipzig University. He went back to Cyprus for fur ther research in 1894-1895 and 1910. Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated throughout the island ei ther for himself or on contract at Athienou, Idalion, Kition, Paphos, Salamis, Tamassos, and at other sites. H e located and excavated a large number of very important sites and recovered an enormous quantity of objects. His interests, however, were not always scientific because he also was a dealer in these antiquities. Although he took issue with Luigi Palma di Cesnola and his methods, his own techniques were sometimes considered controversial. Ohnefalsch-Richter did pioneering work, however, and published widely. Being a good draftsman and an accomplished photographer, he left valuable records of his discoveries and of nineteenthcentury Cyprus in general. Early in his career he wrote some interesting nonarchaeological articles on Cyprus and later helped his wife, Magda, in photographing objects and peo ple and collecting information pertaining to the folk tradition of the island (Magda Ohnefalsch-Richter, Griechische Sitten und Gebrauche aufCypern, Berlin, 1913). He lectured exten sively, illustrating his talks with drawings, watercolors, and photographs, as well as ancient objects from his excavations. [See also Idalion; Kition; Paphos; Salamis; and the biog raphy of di Cesnola.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Buchholz, Hans-GUnter. " M a x Ohnefalsch-Richter als Archaologe auf Z y p e r n . " Cahier du Centre d'Etudes Chyprioles 11-12 (1989): 3-28. Fivel, Leon. "Ohnefalsch-Richter, 1850-1917: Essai de b i b l i o g r a p h i c " Cahier du Centre d'Etudes. Chyprioles 11-12 (1989): 35-40. Krpata, M . " M a x H e r m a n n Ohnefalsch-Richter Bibliography a n d Bio graphical R e m a r k s . " Report of the Department ofAntiquities of Cyprus, VP- 337-341- Nicosia, 1992. Malekkos, Andreas. Studies in Cyprus. Nicosia, [1994]. M a s s o n , Olivier. " L e s visites de M a x Ohnefalsch-Richter a Kouklia (Ancienne-Paphos), 1890 et 1910." Cahier du Centre d'Etudes Chy prioles 3 (1985): 19-28. M a s s o n , Olivier, a n d Antoine H e r m a r y . " L e s fouilles d'OhnefalschRichter a Idalion e n 1894." Cahier du Centre d'Etudes Chyprioles 10 (1988): 3-14. Myres, J o h n L . , and M a x Ohnefalsch-Richter. A Catalogue of the Cy prus Museum, with a Chronicle of Excavations Undertaken since the British Occupation and Introductory Notes on Cypriote Archaeology. Oxford, 1899. Still essential book o n the excavations a n d holdings of the C y p r u s M u s e u m in the nineteenth century. Ohnefalsch-Richter, M a x . Ancient Places of Worship in Kypros. Berlin, 1891. English version of the G e r m a n publication of his very i m p o r tant doctoral diesis. Ohnefalsch-Richter, M a x , Kypros, die Bibel und Homer: Beilrage zur
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Cultur, Kunst-und Religionsgeschichte des Orients im Alterthume. Ber lin, 1893. Detailed and well-illustrated account of m a n y excavations of the period. DEMETRIOS MICHAELIDES
OLIVES. The wild olive (Olea Europaea Var. Oleaster) is indigenous to the natural forests of the Mediterranean re gion, whose wet, cool winters and hot, dry summers are ideal for olive cultivation. A mature ttee can withstand tempera tures as low as — n o ° C , whereas a young sapling may not survive temperatures below — 7°C. On the other hand, to produce maximum fruit yields, the temperature must be be low 7°C for a certain number of hours each year. The wild olive is interfertile with the cultivated varieties, and it is still usual to use wild-olive saplings as root stock: scions are grafted that are taken from the finest tree in the village. Many of the wild trees today are undoubtedly es capees from cultivation. Origin a n d D o m e s t i c a t i o n . Olive stones have been found in Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) contexts and from many Chalcolithic sites in Israel and from Neolithic lb and II contexts on Cyprus. It was once thought that the stones of wild and cultivated olives could be distin guished. T h e transitional forms identified between wild and cultivated types on Crete were regarded as evidence for the olive having been domesticated there independently, but to day many scholars believe that the wood, stones, and pollen of the wild olive cannot be distinguished from those of cul tivated varieties. Proof for the beginning of cultivation is therefore being sought in quantative data and in the archae ological evidence for olive-processing installations. T h e large number of olive stones found at the Chalcolithic site of Teleilat el-Ghassul was considered proof of cultivation. More recent evidence of large quantities of olive wood and stones at Chalcolithic sites in Jordan and in tire Golan region in Israel, and the presence of crushing basins and ceramic oil separators at sites in the Golan, shows clearly that the olive was cultivated in them. At most sites in Israel, however, olive wood is not found in large quantities until the Early Bronze Age. The evidence suggests that large-scale cultivation coincided with the in crease in the size and number of sites now recorded for the period and confirmed by pollen analysis. Colin Renfrew suggested that in the Aegean there was also a connection between the urban revolution of the Early Bronze Age and the beginning of large-scale olive and vine cultivation. This theory has recently been questioned and awaits similar quantitative confirmation. As the possibility of distinguishing between the stones of the wild and cultivated olive is today considered question able, the paleobotanical argument for independent domes tication of the olive in the Aegean is no longer tenable. It is
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perhaps relevant, however, that although the vine is not in digenous to the Levant—and was almost certainly intro duced from Anatolia—the terms used in Semitic and IndoEuropean languages for vine and wine derive from a common source. This is not true for the olive, however. The Greek and Latin terms for the olive and for its oil have no connection to the Semitic roots. This suggests independent domestication in the different regions. Technology of Olive Oil P r o d u c t i o n . The quality of olive oil depends on the ripeness and quality of the olive and on the extraction process. Oil made from unripe olives, vir gin oil, is more bitter and greener in color than other oil. The first oil to come from a batch of olives is the finest, the quality declining in consecutive pressings. There are three stages in the production of olive oil: crush ing the olives to a pulp, pressing the pulp to express the liquid, and separating the oil (20-30 percent of the liquid expressed) from the resulting black, watery lee, or sediment. The simplest method was to crush the olives with a stone roller. The resultant olive pulp was then put in sacks, or frails (baskets). The oil was then extracted by the weight of stones that were placed on a board on the frails. T h e oil was allowed to separate, and, when it floated on the lee, was skimmed. An Early Bronze Age oil press from Ugarit in Syria consisted of stone slabs (on which the olives were crushed and pressed) and, at a lower level, a collecting vat (into which the liquid flowed and in which the oil was separated). T h e installation resembles the wineries/wine presses that are found in the thousands throughout the Levant. In later pe riods, specific devices evolved for each of the three stages, oil presses and wineries differentiated, and various types of installation developed in different regions. The first technical change took place in the Late Bronze Age with the introduction of the lever-and-weights press (beam-and-weights press) found on Crete and Cyprus, and in Ugarit. In Israel the earliest examples are from the Iron Age—two distinct types being discernible by Iron II. In the northern part of the country the olives were crushed in round mortars and then pressed on round press beds as found, for example, at Rosh Zayit from which the liquid flowed to lateral collecting vats. The weights were unworked perforated fieldstones. In the south, in Judah, olives were usually crushed with rollers in rectangular crushing basins. The weights were fashioned either with a horizontal bore at the top or with a vertical bore—the doughnut-shaped weight. The characteristic element was the Beth-Mirsham (Beit Mirsim) central vat in which the collecting vat was cut in the center of the press bed and the frails of crushed olive pulp were placed above it (on slats placed criss-cross, to allow the oil to flow down directly into the central vat). Wil liam Foxwell Albright mistakenly called the freestanding version of this device a dyeing vat. Similar rock-cut instal lations are found at sites in the hill country. T h e next important technological change was the round
OLIVES.
Figure
1.
Phoenician
Zabadi
weight press.
(Courtesy R.
Frankel)
rotary olive crusher. It reached Palestine in the Hellenistic period, but its date and place of origin remain undeter mined. T h e method, however, was used throughout the Mediterranean world until recently. T h e two main types of presses developed at the same time. At Mareshah/Marisa in the south, a press on either side of the central vat appeared with two plain piers that supported the pile of frails. The weight was also a new type: the bore was in the form of a reversed T ; it also is found on Cyprus and in Lebanon. In a press found in the north, in western Galilee at Zabadi (see figure 1), the collection is lateral, and the characteristic el ement is a monumental slotted pier in which the beam was anchored. T h e weights in both types of press were raised by a drum attached to the beam. Other types of lever presses developed in other parts of the world. In the Aegean, the Crimea, North Africa, Spain, and southern France the Semana beam weight, which is rectangular and has external dovetailed mortices, is found. In the Semana weight the drum is attached to the weight and not to the beam. It apparentiy originated in the Aegean or in Anatolia. Both the reversed-T weight and the Semana weight are found on Cy prus, while in North Syria weights were found incorporating the characteristics of both. In Roman Italy, lever and drum presses without weights were used (the drum was attached to the ground). In the second century C E , Cato the Elder described a lever-and-drum press (De Agricultural 18; see
ARBOR
STIPES
VECTIS
OLIVES.
Frankel)
Figure
2. Cato's lever-and-drum press. (Courtesy R.
OLIVES
o l i v e s . F i g u r e 3 . The Judean grooved pier screw press. (Courtesy R. Frankel)
figure 2) as did Pliny the Elder in the first century (Historia Naturalis 18.74.317). Hero of Alexandria (Mechanica 3.13— 14) described a lever-drum-and-weights press that clearly incorporated the drum of the Roman press and the weight of the Levantine press. There were also regional differences in the manner in which the beam was anchored: large free standing stone niches were utilized in North Syria, slotted monoliths on Cyprus, and other techniques in the western Mediterranean. T h e next technical development was the screw. In Judah, a direct-pressure screw press developed with central collec tion. A grooved piers press (see figure 3) clearly developed from the plain piers of the press found at Mareshah. In west ern Galilee, the screw press was a lever-and-screw press— a direct development from the Zabadi Press (see figure 4 ) . Three different types of screw weights developed in die re gion, the Mi'ilya, Beth ha-'Emeq, and Din'ila weights. T h e Din'ila weight was the one described by Hero of Alexandria (Mechanica 3.15). In Samaria the main press was also a le ver-and-screw press, but it used the Samaria screw weight, a type common throughout the Mediterranean; in Lower Galilee and the Golan, direct screw presses were used, but of types different from that in Judah. In North Syria yet another screw weight (the Kafsa weight) was used, a few examples of which have been found in the Jerusalem area. Thus, distinct technical cultures can be discerned that evince strong regional diversity and continuity (figure 5).
181
The Olive in Written Sources. The Hebrew word for olive is zyt (Ugar., zi) and for oil, smn (Ugar./Akk., samnu). T h e Sumerogram (J[A]) denoting oil and olive oil is I.GlS (lit., "tree oil," to be read samnu). The olive tree was [GI$] se/irda, which, in the peripheral eastern regions, was written zejirtu (Hur., zirte), suggesting a connection to the West Semitic zyt-zt. In Egyptian, olive oil was SjK", while the olive tree was dt, a term introduced only at the time of the New Kingdom, again deriving from zyt-zt. There are many Late Bronze Age adminisnative tablets from Ugarit that mention the purchase of olive groves and list quantities of oil paid in taxation by individuals (one to four jars) and by whole villages (up to five hundred jars) and allocations of oil from the royal stores to officials, sol diers, and craftsmen, for example (one to ten jars). An es timate of Ugarit's total oil production is 25 tons per village (two hundred villages thus produced 5,000 tons). Similar documents have been found at Alalakh in Syria and in Hittite archives, both countries where the olive was grown. Hittite texts also describe methods of preparing var ious foods and perfumed oil, some of the latter used in rit uals. Because oil was either not produced or was produced in negligible quantities in Mesopotamia proper and in Egypt, documents often mention it as an exotic luxury. At Mari, imported oil from Aleppo and tire provision of oil for the palace are mentioned but no olive groves. In later Assyrian documents, Assurnasirpal and Sennacherib describe gar dens and wildlife reserves they set up based on plants and animals brought from distant regions of their empire that included the olive. Both kings describe sumptuous banquets attended by notables from afar at which olives and olive oil were served. Sennacherib describes how he drenched the heads of his guests with oil mixed with spices. The Tale of Sinuhe (one of the earliest documents men tioning the land of Israel), from Egypt's Middle Kingdom, describes the land of Yaa (probably in the Galilee or in Syria): "It had more wine than water, abundant was its honey, plentiful its oil." In other documents importing oil from Retenu, Dhaji, and Naharina is referred to. The sol diers of Thutmosis III when in Dhaji "were drunk and annointed with oil as if at feasts in Egypt," and in his lists of
olives.
F i g u r e 4 . The lever-and-screw press. (Courtesy R. Frankel)
182
OLIVES
booty two kinds of oil appear ndm ("sweet") and 103d ("fresh/green," probably virgin oil). (See ANET, p. 239.) Hebrew Bible and Hebrew epigraphy. The olive is one of the triad dgn, tyrws, yshr ("corn, wine, oil") that appears eighteen times in the Hebrew Bible and is one of the Seven Kinds (Dt. 8:8). T h e two lists have come to symbolize the staple products of Mediterranean dry farming. T h e olive tree was the first to be asked to be king over the trees in Abimelech's parable (Jgs. 9:8-9); similarly, Columella, the Roman agronomist, called the olive "queen of all trees" (De Re Rustica 5.8.1). The names of the officials of King David who were re sponsible for the olive groves in the Shephelah and for the royal oil stores are specified in 1 Chronicles (27:28), as are the quantities of oil King Solomon sent to Hiram of Tyre (/ Kgs. 5:25; 2 Chr. 2:29). T h e export of oil to Egypt is referred to by Hosea (12:2). No specific term appears in die Bible for an oil press, but, like wine, oil flows into a yqb (Jl. 4:13; gt and puirh usually are translated as "wine press"), a simple treading installation usually cut into rock. Oil production is actually referred to only once (Mi 6:15), and there the oil is expressed by tread ing. Four types of spiced oil appear: Smn rwqh (Eccl. 10:1); smn hmr, "myrrh oil" (Est. 2:12); smn htwb (2Kgs. 20:13; Ps. 133:2), to be translated "spiced oil," not "good oil"; smn twrq (Sg. 1:3), usually translated "poured oil," but should, perhaps, be corrected to tmrwq, "cosmetic oil." Of the three other types that appear, smn r'nn, "fresh oil" (Ps. 92:11),
may be a technical term for virgin oil; and smn ktyt, literally, "pounded in a mortar" (Ex. 27:20,29:40; Lv. 24:2; Nm. 28:5; 1 Kgs. 5:25) and smn rhs, literally, "washed" (Samaria os traca) designate production techniques—in the first, oil is extracted without pressure after pounding, and in tire sec ond, it was extracted with the aid of hot water. [See Samaria Ostraca.] Oil, then, appears in the Samaria ostraca, which are bills of lading found in die palace of the ldngs of Israel, appar entiy of taxes assigned to royal officials. Of those ostraca in which the products are known, sixteen mention wine only, eight mention only oil, and two name both products. T h e Arad inscriptions are on ostraca from die archives of a Ju dean border fortress. They include fifteen consignment or ders to supply soldiers witii provisions: wine, oil, and flour— dough or bread, depending on the length of their duty. Oil is mentioned on eight of the fifteen ostraca. It is specifically stated tiiat the oil jar is to be sealed. These documents show that oil was in general use but more scarce and valuable than wine or corn. [See Arad Inscriptions.] Talmudic literature. In Mishnaic Hebrew, unlike bib lical Hebrew, there is a clear distinction between a winery, gt, and an oil press, byt bd (lit, "house of the beam"). T h e most detailed reference to a press is to a lever-and-weights press (B.B. 4:5) that mentions six parts: btwlwt, "slotted piers," for anchoring the beam; mml, "press bed"; ym, "collection vat"; qwrh, "beam"; 'kyrym/'kydym, "press weights"; and glgl, "drum." T h e term Iwlbyn for a screw appears in the Tosefta and Talmuds.
OLIVES An important text is that concerned with the oil to be used in the Temple (Men, 8 and related sections in the Talmuds and Tosefta). Lists of types of oil that were forbidden are enumerated, as are the places from which the finest oil came and the factors that affected oil quality. Three grades of ol ives and of oil are described. Rabbi Yehudah was of the opinion that the oil for the Temple (smn ktyt, "pure oil" or "pounded oil") should be prepared the way it had been for the First Temple: by pounding the olives in mortars and extracting the oil without a beam, using only the weight of stones. Other sages favored more modern methods. T h e or dinance in the Mishna accepts Rabbi Yehudah's views about the first grade oil but that of the other sages about the second and third. Uses of Olive Oil. In addition to its use as food and in a ritual context, olive oil was used in cosmetics and perfume and to provide light. These uses are verified in written sources. 1. Cosmetics. There is evidence for the use of oil as an unguent or as a base for perfumes in Mesopotamian, Egyp tian, and Hittite sources. T h e Hebrew Bible mentions many perfumed oils: men annoint their beards and hair with oil (Ps. 133:2, 141:5; Eccl. 9:8), and maidens receive beauty treatments with myrrh oil (Est. 2:12). T h e obvious use for oil was cosmetic (Mi. 6:15). In the Greek world, athletes rubbed oil on their body following strenuous activity, and then removed it, the dust, and their sweat with a sicklelike strigil. Pliny affirmed that "There are two liquids that are agreeable to the human body, wine inside and oil outside" (Hist. Nat. 14.29.150). 2. Food. T h e annual consumption of oil "per capita per annum" in village communities in Greece and Israel in re cent times is 17-20 kg (50-55 g per day). It has been sug gested that in the Aegean the main use for oil was cosmetic and that its main source, until the end of the Late Bronze Age and beyond, was the wild olive. T h e written sources from Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age and from Samaria and Arad in the Iron Age show that in the Levant oil was an important element in the diet in these periods, as the biblical triad dgn, tyrws, yshr implies. 3. Light. Ceramic lamps from the Early Bronze Age used olive oil as their main fuel. 4. Ritual. T h e annointing of kings with olive oil is attested in the Hebrew Bible (1 Sm. 1 6 : 1 - 1 3 ; 2 Kgs. 9:1-3) and in Hittite sources. Priests were annointed (Ex. 29:7), and the word messiah derives from msyh (Heb., "annointed"). Stelae were sanctified by annointing them with oil (Gn. 28:18, 35:14), as was the tabernacle and all its contents (Ex. 30:2329, 40:9). Oil was used in purification ceremonies (Lv. 1 2 32 and in Hittite sources); was part of meal offerings in the Temple, alone (Lv. 2) or with animal sacrifices (Nm. 1 5 : 1 16); and was used to light the Temple candelabrum (Ex. 5 : 6 , 35:15; Lv. 24:2; Men. 8). Hittite sources refer to an nointing the bones of the deceased after cremation, 2
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Amouretti, Marie-Claire, a n d Jean-Pierre Brun, eds. Oil and Wine Pro duction in the Mediterranean Area. Paris, 1993. Baruch, Uri. " T h e Late Holocene Vegetational History of Lake K i n neret (Sea of Galilee), Israel." Pal&orient 12.2 (1986): 37-48. Callot, Olivier. Huileries antiques de Syrie du Nord. Institut Francais d'Archeologie d u P r o c h e - O r i e n t , B e y r o u t h - D a m a s - A m m a n , Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 118. Paris, 1984. Callot, Olivier. " L e s huileries et l'huile au Bronze Recent: Quelques exemples syriens et chypriotes." In Oil and Wine Production in the Mediterranean Area, edited by Marie-Claire Amouretti a n d JeanPierre Brun, p p . 55-64. Paris, 1993. D r a c h m a n n , A. G. Ancient Oil Mills and Presses. Copenhagen, 1932. Eitam, David. "Olive Presses of d i e Israelite P e r i o d . " Tel Aviv 6 (1979): 146-155. Eitam, David. '"Between the [Olives] Rows, Oil Will Be Produced, Presses Will Be T r o d . . .' (Job 24,11)" and "Selected Oil and Wine Installations in Ancient Israel." In Oil and Wine Production in the Mediterranean Area, edited by Marie-Claire Amouretti a n d JeanPierre B r u n , p p . 65-106. Paris, 1993. Eitam, David, and A. S h o m r o n i . "Research of the Oil-Industry during die Iron Age at T e l M i q n e . " In Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer a n d David Eitam. Haifa, 1995. Epstein, C. "Oil Production in t h e Golan Heights during the Chalcol ithic Period." Tel Aviv 20 (1993): 133-146. Frankel, Rafael. " A n Oil Press at T e l Safsafot." Tel Aviv 15-16 (19881989): 77-91, pis. 5-12. Frankel, Rafael, et al. " T h e Olive Press at Horvath Beit Loya." In Christian Archaeology in die Holy Land, N e w Discoveries: Essays in H o n o u r of Virgilio C. C o r b o , edited by Giovanni Claudio Bottini et al., p p . 287-300. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 36. Jerusalem, 1990. Frankel, Rafael. " S o m e Oil Presses from Western Galilee." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 286 (1992): 39-71. Frankel, Rafael, et al. Technology of Olive Oil in the Holy Land. Arling ton, Va., and T e l Aviv, 1994. Frankel, Rafael. "Oil Presses in Western Galilee and the Judea: A C o m parison." In Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer a n d David Eitam. Haifa, 1995. Gal, Zvi, a n d Rafael Frankel. " A n Olive Oil Press Complex at H u r b a t Ros Zayit (Ras ez-Zetun) in L o w e r Galilee." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 109 (1993): 128-140, pis. 16-17. Giiterbock, H a n s G . "Oil Plants in Hittite Anatolia." Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 66-71. Hadjisavvas, Sophocles. Olive Oil Processing in Cyprus. Nicosia, 1992. Heltzer, Michael. "Olive Oil and Wine Production in Phoenicia and in the Mediterranean T r a d e . " I n Oil and Wine Production in the Med iterranean Area, edited by Marie-Claire Amouretti and Jean-Pierre Brun, p p . 49-54. Paris, 1993. Heltzer, Michael, a n d David Eitam, eds. Olive Oil in Antiquity. Haifa, 1995. Kloner, A m o s , and N a h u m Sagiv. " T h e Technology of Oil Production in the Hellenistic Period at M a r e s h a , Israel." In Oil and Wine Pro duction in the Mediterranean Area, edited by Marie-Claire Amouretti and Jean-Pierre B r u n , p p . 119-136. Paris, 1993. Liphschitz, Nili, et al. " T h e Beginning of Olive (Oleo europaea) Culti vation in the Old World: A Reassessment." Journal of Archaeological Science 18 (1991): 441-453. Liphschitz, Nili. "Olives in Ancient Israel in View of D endr oar c h a e o logical Investigations." In Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer a n d David Eitam. Haifa, 1995. Malul, Meir. "Ze/irtu(se/irdu): T h e Olive T r e e and Its Products in Ancient M e s o p o t a m i a . " I n Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer a n d David Eitam. Haifa, 1995.
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Melena, J. L . "Olive Oil and Other Sorts of Oil in the M y c e n a e a n T a b l e t s . " Minos 18 (1983): 110-131. Neef, Reinder. "Introduction, Development, and Environmental I m plications of Olive Culture: T h e Evidence from J o r d a n . " In Man's Role in the Shaping of the Eastern Meditenanean Landscape, edited by Sytze Bottema et a l , p p . 295-306. Rotterdam, 1990. Renfrew, Colin. The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Ae gean in the Third Millennium B.C. L o n d o n , 1972. Runnels, Curtis N . , a n d Julie Hansen. " T h e Olive in the Prehistoric Aegean: T h e Evidence for Domestication in the Early Bronze A g e . " Oxford Journal of Archaeology 5 (1986): 299-308. Singer, Itamar. "Oil in Anatolia according to Hittite T e x t s . " In Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer and David Eitam. Haifa, 1995. Stager, Lawrence E., a n d Samuel R. Wolff. "Production a n d C o m merce in T e m p l e Courtyards: A n Olive Press in the Sacred Precinct at Tel D a n . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 243 {1981): 95-102. Stager, Lawrence E. " T h e Finest Oil in Samaria." Journal of Semitic Studies 28 (1983): 241-245. Stol, Marten. "Remarks on the Cultivation of Sesame and the Extrac tion of Its Oil." Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 2 (1985): 119-126. Waetzoldt, Hartmut. "Olpflanzen u n d Pfianzole in 3. Jahrtausend." Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 2 (1985): 77-96. Weinfeld, M, " T h e U s e of Oil in the Cult of Ancient Israel." In Olive Oil in Antiquity, edited by Michael Heltzer and David Eitam. Haifa, 1995Zohary, Daniel, and F . Spiegel-Roy. "Beginnings of Fruit Growing in the Old World." Science 187 (1975): 319-327. RAFAEL FRANKEL
OMAN. Currently a geopolitical term defining the mod ern country of the Sultanate of Oman, located on the south eastern portion of the Arabian Peninsula, Oman covers an area of about 192,000 sq km, or 120,000 sq. mi. It is bordered on the north by die United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Saudi Arabian Rub al-Khali and on the west by Yemen. Its coastline exceeds 1,600 km (1,000 mi.), from the Musandam peninsula to Yemen (Clements, 1980, p. 5). Although a number of geographic subprovinces, or ecological regions, can be observed (Musandam peninsula, Hajar Mountains, Batinah coast, the Nejd, Rub al-Khali, and Dhofar), archaeologically and historically, two basic regions are of par amount importance: the north (the Oman peninsula, broadly) and the south (Dhofar). The summer monsoon that affects the south may be the most important feature in contrasting the two regions. By far the largest amount of archaeological work has taken place in the north. Work in the south by the Transarabian Expedition led by Juris Zarins concluded a four-year field schedule (1992-1995) whose re sults add to the earlier work of Frank P. Albright (1982), Paolo M. Costa (1979), and Judith Pullar (1974, !975)Paleolithic Period. No Paleolithic industries are known in the north, a phenomenon true not only of Oman, but also the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and eastern Saudi Arabia (Zarins et a l , 1982, pp. 28-29). The dividing line for the Paleolithic appears to run through the Dhofar region. Sites are numer ous to the west in Yemen, rare in Dhofar, and nonexistent
to the northeast of Dauqa. The largest and earliest Lower Paleolithic site was found in the middle of Wadi Ghadun, on its highest, western terrace. Farther south, along its trib utaries, a few scattered artifacts were recovered at Hanun and elsewhere (Biagi, 1994b, p. 84). Oldowan material to the northwest and west, contrasting to the later Early Acheulean handaxe material, suggests a time horizon of about one million years BP for the Wadi Ghadun site and similar sites in western Saudi Arabia and Yemen (Zarins et a l , 1981, pp. 13-16; Amirkhanov, 1991, pp. 10-204; i994> PP- 218-219). Along the southern coast, Paolo Biagi (1994b) suggests that a Late Acheulean industry is to be found at Saiwan. No Middle Paleolithic sites are yet known, but Upper Paleolithic blade industries have been found in the Shisur region of Wadi Ghadun and parallel finds have been found farther west in the Hadhraumaut region (Amirkhanov, 1991, pp. 266-312; 1994, p . 220). In light of new evidence concerning Upper Paleolithic industries and the spread of modern hominids, dates may range as far back as 150,000 BP for these sites. [See Hadhraumaut.] Holocene "Neolithic" Industries (6000-3400 B C E ) . Beginning in the early Holocene period (c. 8000 BCE), the Arabian Peninsula (as well as most of North Africa) was affected by a significant increase in precipitation and mois ture retention. This is reflected in the quite sudden appear ance of blade and bifacial industries found in the north, but more extensively in the south (phase I). T h e largest per centage of sites are dominated by the blade industry, which produced Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN)-type points sugges tive of ties with the Levant (Potts, 1993, pp. 170-173). In the north, distinctive coastal adaptations diverge from this pattern (Uerpmann, 1989); however, in the south, numer ous sites are known from the Nejd on interior drainages and lakes with Fasad-type (blade) points (Edens, 1988a, p. 115). Sites are either lithic scatters, middens, or contain struc tures. Known principally from Dhofar, such a culture ex tended into the Hadhramaut province in Yemen and as far north as Jebel Tuwayq in southern Saudi Arabia (cf. M c Clure, 1994). Subsequent bifacial projectile-point traditions (phase II) are even more widespread on the peninsula; numerous sites have been found in the south, as well as in adjoining areas ' of Yemen and in the Saudi Arabian Rub al-Khali (Edens, 1982; 1988b). T o the north, such sites are known from east ern Saudi Arabia to the UAE (Potts, 1993, fig. 4). Shell mid dens in the north continue to follow a divergent stone-tool technology (Biagi, 1994a), that has a common tradition with sites found on the Yemen and Red Sea coastlines. Of par ticular interest are the Ras al-Hamra sites found near M u s cat (Biagi et al., 1984; 1989). While Ubaid period ceramics are now known from the western Oman peninsula inside the Arab-Persian Gulf in the UAE (Haerinck, 1991; Frifelt, 1989), none have been found in the Arabian Sea along the Batinah coast. This suggests that Ubaid seafarers did not leave the Arab-Persian Gulf. [See Ubaid; Seafaring.] Other
OMAN long-distance contacts are known, however, connecting much of the peninsula. Obsidian beads in a Qatari tomb originated in Yemen or southern Saudi Arabia (Zarins, 1990, p. 531); more recently, obsidian from Matafah in Wadi Ghadun was connected to the Dhamar-Reda field in Yemen or to an Eritrean source (Vincenzo Francaviglia, personal communication; Zarins, 1995). Subsistence activities from the phase I and II groups are most likely attributable to pastoral nomadism and herding. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] Rock art in central and southwest Arabia (Anati, 1968; Zarins, 1982) principally depicts cattle and ovicaprids being herded. This evidence is supported by faunal studies (Uerpmann and Uerpmann cited in Potts, I993> P- 177)- Hunting, fishing, and shellfish gathering are also attested. [See Hunting; Fishing; Paleozoology.] A unique site in tire south (Uruq Ibn Hamuda) produced nu merous pestles, mortars, and pounders, confirming tiiat, at most sites, hand-stone grinders were used to process plant remains. In the south, phase III defines the last stage of die bifacial stone-tool tradition stretching from 3400 to 2500 BCE. There the hallmark is the trihedral rod; peculiar to the south, it is commonly found associated witii numerous lithic scatter and structural sites (Ayun, Hailat Araka) and similar sites are reported from the Hadhramaut region in Yemen (Amirkhanov, 1994, p. 226, fig. 10). Few examples are known from the Rub al-Khali to the north. The trihedral rods may well be imitations of bronze points tiiat were un available locally. In the north, the key stratigraphic site of Hili 8 (3000-1900 BCE) suggests the beginning of complex oasis life involving domesticated animals—sheep, goats, cattie, donkey, dog—and plants—wheat, barley, melons, dates (Cleuziou, 1982; 1989). [See Sheep and Goats; Cattle and Oxen; Dogs; Cereals.] Domestic sorghum from Hili 8, dated to the third millennium (Cleuziou and Costantini, 1980), is now superceded by samples from Ras al-PIamra 5 from the late fifth millennium (Nisbet, 1985). T h e Hamra 5 samples are the earliest known not only from Arabia, but also Sahel Africa and western India. Graves from the north (Hafit type) are single-chambered and double-ring walled. [See Burial Techniques.] Pottery types include imported Meso potamian Jemdet Nasr/Early Dynastic I types. Copper re sources are inferred to have been exploited for the first time (Potts, 1993, pp. 178-180). Written evidence from Meso potamia and Susiana begins in about 3400 BCE, and eastern Arabia is identified as Dilmun. [See Dilmun.] Products com ing from Dilmun, such as copper and stone, may have orig inated on the Oman peninsula. Aromatics from Dhofar may have already been imported into Mesopotamia as well (Zar ins, 1995). Protohistoric Cultures (2500-1300 BCE). In phase A (2500-2000 BCE) in the north, Hili 8 (and now Hili 1) define die archaeological sequence for die region. Sites such as Amlah, Bat, Wadi Bahla, Maysar, and die Ras al-Junayz series add to the picture. T h e tombs and settlement at U m m
185
an-Nar excavated in the 1960s by the Danish archaeological expedition to the Persian Gulf initially defined this midthird-millennium horizon (Frifelt, 1991; 1995). Now the cir cular communal tombs are known from Ra's al-Hadd to Khasab. [See Ra's al-Hadd.] Subsistence activities at Umm an-Nar pinpointed for the first time the possible domesti cation of the camel (Hoch, 1979; 1995, pp. 250-252). [See Camels.] Both ceramic materials and soft-stone vessels, which first appear in complex, carved designs (serie ancienne, to use tiie terminology of Miroschedji, 1973) tie Iran, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia to the Arab-Persian Gulf. By 2200 BCE, the soft-stone vessels evolved into a simpler design using dots and circles (serie recente). Copper sources in Wadi Jizzi and the Maysar complex are known to have been exploited (Weisgerber, 1980; 1981). Historically, the Oman peninsula is mentioned for die first time in the Old Akkadian period as Magan. In the South, Bronze Age sites are defined by megalithic house types, a remnant lithic in dustry, and the inttoduction of copper/bronze (Taqa 60, Hagif 241, Khor Rori). Previous Neolithic populations re treated to the fringes of the Dhofar hills. In phase B (2000-1700 BCE), the north is defined by the Wadi Suq horizon. This subperiod is contemporary to the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods in Mesopotamia and has ties to the Dilmun culture of eastern Saudi Arabia, Bah rain, and Failaka. [See Isin; Larsa; Bahrain; Failaka.] Cist graves contain the distinctive painted Wadi Suq ceramics and die serie tardive soft-stone vessels. Copper mining con tinued to play a major role in the region's economy (cf. Oppenheim, 1954), with evidence not only from the Oman peninsula (Wadi Jizzi, Wadi Samad) but from Masirah Is land as well. Sites on die Ra's al-Junayz coastline continued to provide evidence of a maritime economy (e.g., RJi). In the south, Carbon-14 dates from encampments on now fos sil lagoons on the Salalah plain define the ongoing Bronze Age tradition. Both shell and copper fishhooks have been recovered, as well as marine and land fauna. In phase C (1700-1300 BCE), Tell Abraq, Rumeilah, and Hili 2 on die Oman peninsula define the latest phase of the Wadi Suq complex. Ceramic ties connect Elam and Kassite Mesopotamia. Bronze weapons from Nizwa also point to an Iranian connection. In die south, the Bronze Age probably ends by 1300/1100 BCE (Taqa 60, Hagif 241). Iron Age (1300-300 BCE). In the north, the period be tween 1300 and 300 BCE is known as Iron A-B, or Lizq. A series of sites is found either as coastal middens (Shimal), agricultural towns (Dibba), piedmont villages at the mouths of wadis (Ghalilah), oases (Rumeilah, Hili 2) or fortifica tions (Hili 14, Lizq). Graveyards are also known (Qarn Bint Saud, Maysar, Shimal). T h e largest and most important sites for the period are Rumeilah and Hili 2. Maysar 8 and 42 and Samad 10, among other sites in the area, suggest that the falajlqanat ("channel") system characteristic of irriga tion practices in the north probably originated in Iron Age Iran. [See Irrigation.] Typical Iron A assemblages include
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OMAN
incense burners, Kaftiari ceramic types from Iran, soft-stone vessels, and copper/bronze tools and jewelry (Potts, 1990, p. 376, figs. 41-43). In historical terms, Neo-Assyrian ref erences (640 BCE) to the land of Kade and the city of Iske may refer to modern Izki. The name Kade continued to be used into the classical period by Pliny, and Daniel T . Potts has argued that Kade was the Akkadian equivalent of the Persian Maka/Makkas and its later variants Mykoi/Machiya. Achaemenid control and/or influence over the Oman pen insula was most likely exerted from a coastal center such as Sohar. [See Sohar.] In addition, the Azd Omani migrations into Oman may have begun during the Achaemenid period. In the south, Iron Age sites ( 1 3 0 0 - 3 0 0 BCE) have been found principally on high coastal terraces. Some of the structures are superimposed on Bronze Age sites (Taqa, Khor Rori, Hagif), but others represent large Iron Age pe riod homesteads (Wadi Adonhib, Raysut headland). The archaeological assemblages are characterized by red wares and a microlithic flint technique, both having ties to Yemen. The early phases of the formal buildings at Shisur may par allel the Iron Age buildings at Hili 1 4 , the Bahrain fort, or Jumeirah (Potts, 1990, p. 1 1 2 , figs. 6, 24). Classical Period (300 B C E - 6 5 0 C E ) . Following Hellenis tic expansion into the Gulf and across trade routes into cen tral-southern Arabia, Seleucid-period sites on the Omani peninsula such as Mleiha (Potts, 1990, vol. 2, p. 272) parallel northeastern Arabian sites such as Thaj. [See Thaj.] From the succeeding Parthian period, more sites, such as ed-Dur, Sohar, and Samad (Maysar 43, Samad ash Shan 1) are known. The majority of these sites continued to be occupied in the following Sasanian period. First-century historical sources (Pliny, Ptolemy, and the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea) refer for tire first time to Omana, which is likely Sohar, or perhaps ed-Dur (Groom, 1994). These contemporary sources and later Islamic traditions refer to the Azd Omani as bedouin from the T a nukh confederation (classical Thanuitai). They came from southwest Arabia, perhaps as early as the first century CE, across the south to the north, reaching Basra by 600. T h e Sasanian name for the Omani was Mazun, from the Par thian mzw(n) (Potts, 1 9 9 0 , vol. 2, p. 329, n. 309; for the Islamic conversion, see Potts, 1 9 9 0 , pp. 340-348). In the south, classical sites such as the Shisur fort (prob ably Marimatha in the territory of the Iobaritae) are datable in part to the Seleucid era, based on the recovery of red applique and black-burnished wares. Parthian red wares are paralleled at Sohar (Kervran and Hiebert, 1991). At 'Ain Humran the predominant remains date to the Parthian pe riod, but the baked bricks may be Achaemenid. Other sites along the Salalah plain, such as Taqa and al-Balid have Se leucid- to Parthian-period occupation. The excavations at Khor Rori in the 1950s proved that the site is to be identified as SMHRM and belongs to the first century CE as a
Hadhramaut outpost (Albright, 1982). Survey sites discov ered in 1992-1995 on the Salalah plain can be matched with the references in Pliny, the Periplus, and Ptolemy. Islamic P e r i o d (650-1500 C E ) . Until 1150 political con trol of the north alternated between the local Imamate (Ibadi) and caliphate authorities (Umayyad, 'Abbasid, and Seljuk). [See Umayyad Caliphate; 'Abbasid Caliphate.] T h e expansion of Omani influence into India, China, and East Africa took place in the Early Islamic period. Sohar, as the key maritime trade center, peaked in the ninth-tenth cen turies and was destroyed by 1225 (Grohmann, 1934; Wil liamson, 1973; Wilkinson, 1979). By medieval times, the im portance of Muscat and Qalhat had grown as a result of increased trade and control through the sttaits of Hormuz. With the arrival of the Portugese (1507-1625) and their struggles with the Ottomans and Omani in the interior, forft-ess technology reached new dimensions (Nizwa, Jilani). In the south, Islamic expansion can be documented by Abbasid expansion. Sites such as Jebel Qinqari and Raysut demonstrate the control of harbors and the Indian Ocean coastline. Al-Balid (medieval Mansura), controlled by the Rasulids from Yemen, dominated the Salalah plain (Costa, 1979), and smaller sites such as Taqa were occupied as well. c
[See also Arabian Peninsula; Qatar; United Arab Emirates; and Yemen.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, F r a n k P. The American Archaeological Expedition in Dhofar, Oman, 1952-1953. Publications of the American F o u n d a t i o n for the Study of M a n , vol. 6. Washington, D . C . , 1982. Amirkhanov, Khizri A. Paleolit Iuga Aravii ( T h e Paleolithic in South Arabia). M o s c o w , 1991. Amirkhanov, Khizri A. "Research on the Palaeolithic a n d Neolithic of H a d r a m a u t and M a h r a . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994): 217-228. Anati, Emmanuel. Rock-Art in Central Arabia, vol. 1, The "OvalHeaded" People of Arabia. Louvain, 1968. Biagi, Paolo, et al. "Excavation at the RH5 Settlement, Q u r m , W i n t e r 1984-1985." East and West 34 (1984): 455-465. Biagi, Paolo, et al. "Excavations at the Aceramic Coastal Settlement of RH5 (Muscat, Sultanate of O m a n ) , 1983-5." In South Asian Ar chaeology 1985, edited by K a r e n Frifelt a n d Per Sorensen, p p . 1-8. L o n d o n , 1989. Biagi, Paolo. " A Radiocarbon Chronology for the Aceramic Shell M i d dens of Coastal O m a n . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994a): 17-31. Biagi, Paolo. " A n Early Palaeolithic Site near Saiwan (Sultanate of O m a n ) . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994b): 81-88. Clements, Frank A. Oman, the Reborn Land. L o n d o n , 1980. Cleuziou, Serge, a n d L o r e n z o Costantini. " P r e m i e r s elements sur ['agriculture protohistorique de l'Arabie orientale." Paleorienl 6 (1980): 255-261. Cleuziou, Serge. "Hili a n d the Beginnings of Oasis Life in Eastern Ara bia." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 12 (1982): 15-22. Cleuziou, Serge. " T h e Chronology of Protohistoric O m a n as Seen from Hili 8." In Oman Studies, edited by Paolo M . Costa a n d M a u r izio Tosi, p p . 47-78. Serie Orientale R o m a , vol. 63. R o m e , 1989. Cleuziou, Serge, a n d Maurizio T o s i . " T h e Southeastern F r o n d e r of die Ancient N e a r East." I n South Asian Archaeology 1985, edited by
OSSUARY K a r e n Frifelt a n d Per Sorensen, p p . 15-48. L o n d o n , 1989. Includes basic archaeological/historical information for the O m a n peninsula before the Islamic period. Costa, Paolo M . " T h e Study of t h e City of Zafar (al-Balid)." Journal of Oman Studies 5 (1979): 111-150, Early work at Dhofar. E d e n s , Christopher. " T o w a r d s a Definition of the Western a r - R u b ' alKhali 'Neolithic.'" Atlal 6 (1982): 109-124. E d e n s , Christopher. "Archaeology of the Sands a n d Adjacent Portions of the Sharqiyah." Journal of Oman Studies Special Report 3 (198 8A) : 113-130. E d e n s , Christopher. " T h e R u b al-Khali 'Neolithic' Revisited: T h e View from N a d q a n . " In Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archae ology, edited b y Daniel T . Potts, p p . 15-43. Carsten N i e b u h r Insti tute Publication, 7. C o p e n h a g e n , 1988B. Frifelt, Karen. ' " U b a i d in the Gulf A r e a . " In Upon This Foundation: The 'Ubaid Reconsidered, edited b y Elizabeth F . Henrickson and I n golf T h u e s e n , p p . 404-417. C o p e n h a g e n , 1989. Frifelt, Karen. The Island of Umm an-Nar, vol. 1, Third Millennium Graves. Aarhus, 1991. Frifelt, K a r e n , ed. The Island of Umm an-Nar, vol. 2, The Third Millen nium Settlement. Moesgaard, 1995. G r o h m a n n , Adolf. " S u h a r . " In Encyclopaedia of Islam, p p . 544-547. Leiden, 1934. G r o o m , Nigel. " O m a n a n d the Emirates in Ptolemy's M a p . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994): 198-214. Haerinck, E . " H e a d i n g for the Straits of H o r m u z , a n U b a i d Site in the Emirate of Ajman ( U . A . E . ) . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 2 (1991): 84-90. H o c h , Ella. "Reflections o n Prehistoric Life at U m m a n - N a r (Trucial O m a n ) Based o n Faunal Remains from the T h i r d Millennium B . C . " In South Asian Archaeology 1977, edited by Maurizio T a d d e i , p p . 589-638. N a p l e s , 1979. H o c h , Ella. "Animal Bones from t h e U m m a n - N a r Settlement." In The Island of Umm an-Nar, vol. 2, The Third Millennium Settlement, edited by Karen Frifelt, p p . 249-256. M o e s g a a r d , 1995. Kervran, Monik, and Frederik T . Hiebert. " S o h a r pre-islamique: N o t e stratigraphique." Internationale Archaologie 6 (1991): 337-348. M c C l u r e , Harold A. " A N e w Arabian Stone T o o l Assemblage a n d Notes on t h e Aterian Industry of N o r t h Africa." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994): 1-16. Miroschedji, Pierre de. "Vases et objets en steatite susiens des M u s e e d u L o u v r e . " Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran 3 (1973): 9-79N a y e e m , M u h a m m a d Abdul. Prehistory and Protohistory of the Arabian Peninsula, vol. 1, Saudi Arabia. H y d e r a b a d , 1990. O m a n in the larger context of t h e Arabian Peninsula. Nisbet, Renato. "Evidence of S o r g h u m at Site R H 5 , Q u r m , M u s c a t . " East and West 35 (1985): 415-417. O p p e n h e i m , A. L e o . "Seafaring M e r c h a n t s of U r . " Journal of the Amer ican Oriental Society 74 (1954): 6-17. Potts, Daniel T . The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1990, passim. Offers basic historical/archaeological information about t h e O m a n peninsula before the Islamic period. Potts, Daniel T . " T h e Chronology of t h e Archaeological Assemblages from t h e H e a d of t h e Arabian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, 8000-1750 B . C . " In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vols. 1-2, edited by Robert W . Ehrich, p p . 63-76, 77-89. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Potts, Daniel T . " T h e L a t e Prehistoric, Protohistoric, and Early H i s toric Periods in Eastern Arabia, ca. 5000-1200 B . C . " Journal of World Prehistory 7 (1993): 163-212. Pullar, Judith. " H a r v a r d Archaeological Survey in O m a n , 1973,1: Flint Sites in O m a n . " Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 4 (1974): 33-48. Pullar, Judith. " A Selection of Aceramic Sites in t h e Sultanate of
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O m a n . " Journal of Oman Studies 1 (1975): 49-88. Includes early work at Dhofar. T o s i , Maurizio. " T h e Emerging Picture of Prehistoric Arabia." Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 461-490. O m a n in the larger con text of the Arabian Peninsula. U e r p m a n n , Margarethe. " S o m e R e m a r k s on Late Stone Age Industries from the Coastal Area of N o r t h e r n O m a n . " In Oman Studies, edited by Paolo M . Costa a n d M a u r i z i o T o s i , p p . 169-177. Serie Orientale R o m a , vol. 63. R o m e , 1989. Weisgerber, G e r d . " . . . u n d Kupfer in O m a n . " Der Anschnitt 32 (1980): 6 2 - n o . Weisgerber, Gerd. " M e h r als Kupfer in Oman-Ergebnisse der E x p e dition 1981." Der Anschnitt 33 (1981): 174-263. Wilkinson, John. " S u h a r in t h e Early Islamic Period and t h e Written E vidence ." In South Asian Archaeology 1977, edited by Maurizio T a d d e i , p p . 887-907. Naples, 1979. Williamson, A. Sohar and Omani Seafaring in the Indian Ocean. Muscat, 1973Zarins, Juris, et al. " T h e Second Preliminary Report on the South western Province." Atlal 5 (1981): 9-42. Zarins, Juris. " T h e Early Rock A r t of Saudi Arabia." Archaeology 35 (1982): 20-27. Zarins, Juris, et al. "Preliminary R e p o r t o n t h e Archaeology Survey of the Riyadh Area." Atlal 6 (1982): 25-38. Zarins, Juris. "Obsidian a n d the R e d Sea T r a d e : Prehistoric Aspects." In South Asian Archaeology 1987, edited by Maurizio T a d d e i , p p . 507-541. R o m e , 1990. Zarins, Juris. "Dhofar, Frankincense, a n d D i l m u n : Precursors to the Iobaritae a n d O m a n i . " Paper presented at the Interdisciplinary A r chaeology Conference, H a r v a r d University, 15 October 1994 (to b e published in 1995). Zarins, Juris. "Preliminary Results of the Trans-Arabia Expedition to Dhofar, 1992-1995." P a p e r to b e published in t h e proceedings of the conference "Profumi d'Arabia," Pisa, Italy, 18-22 October 1995. JURIS ZARINS
ONOMASTICS. See Names and Naming.
OSSUARY. A small chest or box, usually made of stone but occasionally of clay or wood, used for reburying human bones after the flesh has decayed, is known as an ossuary. It was used with some frequency in the Early Roman period in Jewish tombs in the vicinity of Jerusalem. A typical ossuary from that period is hollowed from a sin gle block of limestone and measured about 60 X 35 X 30 cm; tiiere were smaller ossuaries for children. It had a re movable lid that might be flat, rounded, or gabled. Most ossuaries were plain, but many were decorated with motifs typical of Jewish art of the period: geometric designs (e.g., die six-petaled rosette) or representations of Jewish archi tectural and religious tiiemes (e.g., tomb monuments or palm branches). (See figure 1.) Often only one long side of the ossuary was decorated and professionally incised by chip carving. Inscriptions, by contrast, were not professionally done but were scrawled with charcoal or scratched with a sharp object almost anywhere on die ossuary—on its sides, ends, lid, or even along a top edge. Written in Greek, Ara-
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OSTEN, HANS HENNING ERIMAR VON DER They note several finds of Jewish ossuaries at locations quite distant from Jerusalem as late as the fourth century CE. Kloner cites tine finds at Horvat Tilla, in the southern Shephelah, in particular. Although there presently is no schol arly consensus, ossuaries can reasonably be regarded as the form of secondary burial drat was most popular among Jews living near Jerusalem in the Early Roman period. It is widely agreed (based on literary evidence from the Mishnah and die two Talmuds) that Jewish secondary burial in ossuaries was driven by two theological beliefs: resurrec tion of the body, and expiation of sin via the decomposition of human flesh. T h e former motivated the use of an indi vidual burial container and the latter the practice of second ary burial. For Palestinian Jews in the Roman period, bones that had been placed in an ossuary were purified from sin and ready for die resurrection. [See also Burial Techniques; Jerusalem; Sarcophagus.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
OSSUARY.
F i g u r e i . Stone ossuary. F r o m M t . S c o p u s , first c e n t u r y
BCE. (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
maic, or Hebrew, ossuary inscriptions identify the deceased by name, only occasionally adding details about family re lations, place of origin, age, or status. The deceased was initially laid in a niche or on a shelf to decompose in a family burial cave. When decomposition was complete, the bones were gathered in ossuaries for sec ondary burial and placed in a niche, on a shelf, or in a sep arate chamber (e.g., in die family tomb located on Rehov Ruppin in Jerusalem, in the "Goliath" tomb in Jericho, and at Dominus Flevit, a first-century cemetery on the Mount of Olives). The bones of more than one individual could by custom be placed in the same ossuary: according to the third-century rabbinic document Semahot 13.8, persons who shared a bed in life could share an ossuary in death. Even the "Caiaphas" ossuary contained the bones of more than one person. The Caiaphas ossuary is a large (74 X 29 X 38 cm) richly ornamental ossuary with a vaulted lid inscribed on the side and back with the name "Caiaphas." This name also belonged to the High Priest during the days of Jesus (Mt. 26:57). The ossuary was found in 1990 in a tomb lo cated in Nordr Talpiyot, a southern suburb of Jerusalem. The historical development of Jewish ossuaries is still de bated. Eric Meyers sees them as an adaptation of the long standing ancient Near Eastern custom of secondary burial, with parallels in Chalcolithic bone containers, Cretan larnakes, and Persian astodans. L. Y. Rahmani argues, how ever, that Jewish secondary burial in ossuaries was unique to Jerusalem in die Early Roman period. Rachel Hachlili and Amos Kloner have in turn questioned Rahmani's view.
Figueras, P a u . Decorated Jewish Ossuaries. Leiden, 1983. Brief inttoductory study with m a n y useful diagrams a n d photographs. Greenhut, Zvi. " T h e 'Caiaphas' T o m b in N o r t h Talpiyot, Jerusalem." 'Atiqotii (1992): 63-71. Exemplary report from a recent excavation of a t o m b containing ossuaries, including one marked with t h e n a m e Caiaphas. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art. and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. T h e most thorough presentation of Haclilili's per spective o n Jewish ossuaries, based o n her t o m b excavations at Jer icho. Meyers, Eric M . Jewish Ossuaries: Reburial and Rebirth. R o m e , 1971. Early attempt to relate Jewish ossuaries to t h e wider context of an cient N e a r Eastern practices of secondary burial. R a h m a n i ' s u n n e c essarily harsh review may b e found in Israel Exploration Journal 23.2 (1973): 121-126. Rahmani, L. Y. "Ancient Jerusalem's F u n e r a r y C u s t o m s a n d T o m b s . " Biblical Archaeologist 45.1 (1982): 43-53; 45.2 (1982): 109-119. Brief and readable s u m m a r y of R a h m a n i ' s view that ossuaries are "uniquely Jerusalernite." BYRON R . M C C A N E
OSTEN, HANS HENNING ERIMAR VON DER (1899-1960), German archaeologist and Orientalist. In 1923 von der Osten was forced by post-World War I politics to leave his archaeological studies in Berlin. He em igrated to the United States where, from 1924 to 1925, he was an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 1926-1927, he was director of the Hittite Survey for the Oriental Institute of Chicago and from 1927 to 1934 director of its Anatolian Expedition to Alisar Hoyiik and Kerkenesdag (1928), Gavurkale (1930), and Terzili Hamam (1932). While chairman of the archaeology department at Ankara University (1936-1939), he worked at Ahlatiibel (1937), Van (1938), and the Roman baths in Ankara (1938-1939). Imprisoned in 1940 as a result of un substantiated accusations of spying, he spent ten years in a Turkish prison. He was rehabilitated in 1950. From 1951 to
OSTRACON i960 he worked at Uppsala University in Sweden, during which time he excavated Tell es-Salihiyeh, Syria (1953); di rected the German-Swedish excavation at Takht-i-Suleiman, Iran (1959); and was director of the German Archae ological Institute in Tehran (i960). Von der Osten's scholarly contribution, some sixty p u b lications and manuscripts, is dominated by his fieldwork, by Anatolian archaeology and historical topography, and an cient Near Eastern glyptics. T h e main objective of his ex tensive topographical explorations and surveys in central Anatolia (putting some three hundred sites on the archae ological map) was to find remains of the then newly discov ered Hittites. This led to his pioneering, carefully dug, and meticulously published excavation at Alisar Hoytik (19271932), in collaboration with Erich F. Schmidt (Chicago, 1930-1937). T h e work produced the first important, albeit controversial, stratigraphy of the Anatolian plateau, with ev idence of almost every period except the Hittite. Unfortu nately, von der Osten's numerous articles on Anatolian ar chaeology never culminated in the completion of his long-term study of the historical geography of Anatolia, the unfinished manuscript "Siedlungsgeschichte Kleinasiens." Osten produced learned volumes on the seal collections of Edward T . Newell (Chicago, 1934), A. Baldwin Brett (Chicago, 1936), and especially Hans S. von Aulock (Upp sala, 1957). A late interest in the archaeology of Iran resulted in the elegant synthesis Die Welt der Parser (Stuttgart, 1956) and in his participation on the excavation at the Sasanian site Takht-i Suleiman in Azerbaijan, in 1959. A forceful, farsighted master of landscape, on an exca vation or in a graduate seminar, H. H. von der Osten was caught in the forces of world politics and robbed of his most creative years. Yet, much of his work endures. BIBLIOGRAPHY M u c h material on H . H . v o n der Osten is available in t h e archives of the University Library, Uppsala, Sweden. In addition, the reader may consult the following works by von d e r Osten. Explorations in Hittite Asia Minor. 3 vols. Oriental Institute C o m m u nications, 2, 6, and 8. Chicago, 1927-1930. Explorations in Central Anatolia, Season of 1926. Oriental Institute P u b lications, 5. Chicago, 1929. The Alishar Hilyiik (with Erich F . S c h m i d t ) . 5 vols. Oriental Institute Publications, 6, 7, 19, 20, 28-30. Chicago, 1930-1937. Ancient Oriental Seals in the Collection of Mr. Edward T. Newell. Oriental Institute Publications, 22. Chicago, 1934. Ancient Oriental Seals in the Collection of Mrs. Agnes Baldwin Brett. Ori ental Institute Publications, 37. Chicago, 1936. Die Welt der Persar. Stuttgart, 1956. Altorientalische Siegelsteine der Sammlung Hans Silvius von Aulock. S t u dia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 13. Uppsala, 1957. CARL NYLANDER
OSTRACON. A loanword from Greek, in which it means "shell" or "sherd," ostracon is used in epigraphy to
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describe generally small inscriptions on shells, irregular pieces of stone, and, most frequently, sherds. Inscriptions were mostly written with ink on these hard materials, al though there are a few incised ostraca. In principle, there is a distinction between an ostracon and an inscription on a vessel. In the latter case, there is generally a connection be tween the inscription and the vessel or its content, such as, perhaps, the name of its owner, its content, place, and date of production. In Egypt and in Palestine occasionally com plete jars seem also to have been used for writing exercises. [See Kuntillet 'Ajrud.] The main reason for using sherds was that they were plen tiful and cost nothing. However, using such objects pre sented difficulties: they were relatively heavy and they were difficult to store because they are irregular in shape. In fact, they were mainly used to write provisional notes, adminis trative lists, short messages, or drafts that could later be cop ied or registered on leather or papyrus scrolls—though they could be used for official messages when papyrus was un available. [See Papyrus; Parchment; Writing Materials.] They were also used for school exercises, and, in Egypt at least, for drafts of drawings and sculptures (e.g., at Khirbet el-Medineh). Because most ostraca were inscribed in ink, they were generally connected with the use of a calamus (rush or reed) to write a linear script. They were therefore unusual and found late in Mesopotamia and Anatolia where cuneiform writing dominated but found frequently in Egypt and in the Levant, especially after the development of alphabetic writ ing (Canaanite, Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, and, later, Greek and Arabic). Egypt can be considered the homeland of ostraca, with thousands of Flieratic, Demotic, Greek, and Coptic ostraca, not to mention hundreds of Phoenician and Aramaic ostraca found mainly at Saqqara and Elephantine and dating mostly from the Persian period. [See Saqqara; Elephantine.] Those osttaca throw a vivid light on everyday life, with its econom ical and daily problems. They also contain numerous schoolboys' exercises, including excerpts of literary texts. In the Levant, scribes chose sherds that were as flat as possible—mainly body sherds from large jars. They some times cut or broke them to get a rectangular shape that is easy to hold in tire left hand (e.g., in the Elyashib archives at Arad, osttaca are about 5-8 X 7 - 1 2 cm). [See Arad In scriptions.] However, there are also very small ostraca of a few centimeters—labels of sorts—and others as large as a modern sheet of paper (e.g., about 21.5 X 28 cm; see Lemaire and Vermis, 1983), or even larger (42 X 60 cm for the Assur ostracon; see below). [See Assur.] They could be inscribed on both sides, the convex side generally written on first. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing and Writing Systems.] Excavations in Israel have produced various kinds or groups of ostraca in addition to a few in Greek and Arabic:
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OSTRACON
1. Hieratic. A few hieratic ostraca have been found in Late Bronze Age strata, mainly at Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish and Tell esh-Shari'a (cf. Goldwasser, 1991). [See Lachish.] 2. "Canaanite" or "Proto-Hebrew." Ostraca from the Iron Age I, an abecedary and a list of names in Canaanite or Proto-Hebrew, have been found at Tzbet Sartah (Kochavi, 1977) and Be±-Shemesh. [See 'Izbet Sartah; Beth-Shemesh.] 3. Philistine. Several ostraca of Philistine origin have been found at Tell Jemmeh. They contain lists of names and date to the seventh century BCE (cf. Naveh, 1985). [SeeJemmeh, Tell] 4 . Paleo-Hebrew. Many Iron Age II Paleo-Hebrew os traca, mainly from Samaria, Jerusalem, Lachish, Mesad Hashavyahu, Arad, and Khirbet Ghazza/Horvat 'Uza, are connected with the royal administration of the kingdoms of Israel (for the Samaria ostraca) and Judah (for the others). T h e latter, dating mainly to about 600 BCE, illuminate the administrative and military organization, as well as the peo ple's state of mind, on the eve of the fall of Judah. [See Sa maria; Jerusalem; Mesad Hashavyahu.] 5. Ammonite. Various ostraca inscribed in Ammonite, generally from the seventh-sixth centuries BCE, have been found in central Transjordan, at Hesban/Heshbon, Tell elMazar, and Tell el-'Umeiri. They are either lists of names or are practically illegible. However, ostracon 3 from Tell el-Mazar is a letter of Palt to his brother. [See Hesban; Mazar, Tell el-; 'Umeiri, Tell el-.] 6. Edomite. A few small ostraca written in Edomite in about 600 BCE have been found at Umm el-Biyara, Buseirah, Tell el-Kheleifeh, and in the Negev; the most interesting is a letter found at Khirbet Ghazza/Horvat 'Uza with a greet ing formula mentioning the god Qos. [See U m m el-Biyara; Buseirah; Kheleifeh, Tell el-; Negev.] 7. Aramaic. During the Persian period, Aramaic became the administrative language of Palestine. Aramaic ostraca have been found in Cisjordan and Transjordan, the two main collections being from Arad and Beersheba. Several hundred new Aramaic ostraca have recently appeared on the market. [See Aramaic Language and Literature; Beersheba; Idumeans.] 8. Aramaic and Greek. A Hellenistic bilingual ostracon, in Aramaic and Greek, was discovered at Khirbet el-Qom (cf. Geraty, 1975, 1981). A dated marriage contract, probably an exercise, was found recently at Mareshah (Kloner and Eshel, 1994). [See Qom, Khirbet el-; Mareshah.] 9 . Square Hebrew and Aramaic. Early Roman ostraca writ ten in Hebrew and Aramaic in a square script have been found at a number of sites: Qumran, Masada, Murabba'at, and Herodium. Some were writing exercises—abecedaries or lists of names—while others were simply tags with let ter (s) or name(s). [See Qumran; Masada; Murabba'at; Her odium.]
So far, only a few ostraca have been found in Phoenicia: a small collection of seven ostraca was found in the Temple of Eshmun in Sidon (cf. Vanel, 1967, 1969; Betlyon, 1973) and a single ostracon was found at Tell el-Fukhar/Akko (Dothan, 1985), dating to the Persian period. [See Sidon; Akko.] In Mesopotamia, ostraca are generally rare, late, and con nected with the use of Aramaic (cf. Rollig, 1990) and even tually of Greek. However, the large Assur ostracon (Donner and Rollig 1966-1969, no. 233; Gibson, 1975, no. 20, pp. 98-110) was written by an Assyrian official at the time of the revolt of Shamash-shum-ukin (c. 650 BCE); it shows that Aramaic was already being used between Assyrian officials. In fact, another ostracon, found at Nimrud and containing a list of probably Ammonite names, may be even earlier; it is dated on paleographic grounds to the end of the eighth century BCE. [See Nimrud; Ammonite Inscriptions.] T h e number of these ostraca pales against the some three thou sand Parthian ostraca found at Nisa, not far from Ashkha bad (Turkmenistan) and dating to the first century BCE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq. " A Literary Ostracon from Horvat ' U z a . " Tel Aviv 20 (1993): 55-65Betlyon, John W . " N o t e s on t h e Phoenician Ostraca from near S i d o n . " Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 26 (1973): 31-34. Cerny, Jaroslav, and Alan H . Gardiner. Hieratic Ostraca. Oxford, 1957. Davies, G r a h a m I., et al. Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Con cordance. C a m b r i d g e , 1991. See especially pages 1 - 1 1 7 . Devauchelle, Didier. Ostraca demotiques du Musee du Louvre. Cairo, 1983. Diakonoff, Igor M . , a n d Veniamina A. Lifshitz. Parthian Economic Doc uments from Nisa. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum: II. Inscriptions of die Seleucid a n d Parthian Periods a n d of Eastern Iran a n d Central Asia, vol. 2.1. L o n d o n , 1976. D o n n e r , Herbert, a n d Wolfgang Rollig. Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften. 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 1966-1969. D o t h a n , M o s h e . " A Phoenician Inscription from "Akko." Israel Explo ration Journal 35 (1985): 81-94. Fischer-Effert, H a ns - W er ner . Literarische Ostraka der Ramessidenzeit in Ubersetzung. Wiesbaden, 1986. Geraty, Lawrence T . " T h e Khirbet el-Kom Bilingual O s t r a c o n . " Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 220 (1975): 5561. Geraty, Lawrence T . "Recent Suggestions on t h e Bilingual Ostracon from Khirbet el-K6m." Andrews University Seminary Studies 19 (1981): 137-140. Gibson, John C. L . Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 2, Ara maic Inscriptions. Oxford, 1975. Goldwasser, Orly. " A n Egyptian Scribe from Lachish a n d t h e Hieratic Tradition of the Plebrew K i n g d o m s . " Tel Aviv 18 (1991): 248-253. Gutgesell, Manfred. Die Datierung der Ostraka und Papyri aus Deir elMedineh und ihre okonomische Interpretation, vol. 1 Die 20. Dynaslie. Hildesheimer Agyptologische Beitrage, 18/19. Hildesheim, 1983. Kaplony-Heckel, Ursula. Die demotischen Tempeleide. Agyptologische Abhandlungen, 6. Wiesbaden, 1963. Kaplony-Heckel, Ursula. "Niltal u n d Oasen: Agyptischer Alltag nach demotischen Ostraka." Zeitschrift fur Agyplische Sprache und Altertumskunde 118 (1991): 127-141.
'OUEILI, TELL ELKasser, Anna D i Bitonto. "Ostraca copti a Deir el Gizaz: F r a m m e n t i di lettere." Aegyptus 72 (1992): 143-160. Kloner, A m o s , a n d E p h r a t Eshel. " M a r e s h a - 1 9 9 2 . " Hadashot Archeologiat 101-102 (1994): 102-104. Kochavi, M o s h e . " A n Ostracon of the Period of the Judges from 'Izbet Sartah." Tel Aviv 4 (1977): 1-13. Lemaire, Andre. Inscriptions hkbra'iques, vol. 1, Les ostraca. Litteratures Anciennes d u Proche-Orient, 9. Paris, 1977. Lemaire, A n d r e , and Pascal Vernus. " L ' o s t r a c o n paleo-hebreu n° 6 d e Tell Qudeirat ( Q a d e s h - B a r n e a ) . " I n Fontes atque Pontes: Bine Festgabe fiirH. Bmnner, edited by M a n f r e d Gorg, p p . 302-326. Agypten u n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , 5. W i e s b a d e n , 1983. Lemaire, A n d r e . " V o n Ostrakon zur Schriftrolle." In XXII. Deutscher Orientalistenlag vom 21 bis 25 Mdrz 1983 in Tubingen, edited by Wolf gang Rollig, p p . 110—123. Zeitschrift der D e u t s c h e n M o r g e n l a n dischen Gesellschaft, S u p p l e m e n t 6. Stuttgart, 1985. L 6 p e z , Jesus. Ostraca ieratici n. 57450-57568, tabelle lignee n. 5800158007. Catalogo del M u s e o Egizio di T o r i n o , Serie S e c o n d a - C o l lezioni, vol. 3.4. Milan, 1984. N a v e h , Joseph. " T h e Aramaic O s t r a c a . " In Beer-Sheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons, edited b y Y o h a n a n Aharoni, p p . 79-82. T e l Aviv, 1973. N a v e h , Joseph. " T h e Aramaic Ostraca from T e l Beer-Sheba (Seasons 1971-1976)." Tel Aviv 6 (1979): 182-188. N a v e h , Joseph. "Writing a n d Scripts in Seventh-Century Philistia: T h e N e w Evidence from Tell J e m m e h . " Israel Exploration Journal 35 (1985): 8-21. N a v e h , Joseph. " A r a m a i c Ostraca a n d Jar Inscriptions from Tell J e m m e h . " 'Atiqot 21 (1992): 49-53. Porten, Bezalel, a n d A d a Yardeni. " T h r e e U n p u b l i s h e d Aramaic O s traca." Maarav 7 (1991): 207-227. Posener, Georges. Catalogue des ostraca hieratiques litteraires de Deir elMedineh. D o c u m e n t s de Fouilles de l'lnstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, vol. 18. Cairo, 1951. R e n z , Johannes. Die althebraischen Inschriften, Teil 1. Text und Kommentar. D a r m s t a d t , 1995. Rollig, Wolfgang. "Zwei aramaische Inschriften v o m Tall Seh Hasan/ Syrien." Semiticas9 (1990): 149-154. Segal, Judah B. Aramaic Texts from North Saqqara. L o n d o n , 1983. See pages 139-145, Vanel, Antoine, "Six 'ostraca' pheniciens trouves au T e m p l e d ' E c h m o u n , pres de Sa'ida." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 20 (1967): 4 5 95Vanel, Antoine. " L e septieme ostracon phenicien trouve au T e m p l e d ' B c h m o u n , pres de Sa'ida." Melanges de I'Universite Saint-Joseph, Beyrouth 45 (1969); 345-364. Wilfong, T e r r y G . " A C o n c o r d a n c e of Published Coptic a n d Greek Ostraca from the Oriental Institute's Excavations at M e d i n e t H a b u . " Enchoria 17 (1990): 155-160. Yadin, Yigael, a n d Joseph N a v e h . " T h e Aramaic a n d H e b r e w Ostraca and Jar Inscriptions." In Masada I: The Yigael Yadin Excavations, 1963-1965, Pinal Reports. Jerusalem, 1989. Yardeni, Ada. " N e w Jewish Aramaic Ostraca." Israel Exploration Jour nal 40 (1990): 130-152. ANDRE LEMAIRE
'OUEILI, TELL EL-, prehistoric site located on the surface of an alluvial plain not far from the present-day Eu phrates River, near the ruins of Larsa, a major city and one of the historic capitals of ancient Mesopotamia ( 3 i ° i 4 ' N , 45°53' E). T h e site of Tell el-'Oueili dominates the sur
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rounding plain from a height of about 4 m, with its visible part covering about 4 ha (9 acres, or 200 m in diameter). However, when the modern water table was reached, close to 4.5 m below the level of the plain (following two major soundings), the inhabited layers continued even beyond that level and virgin soil was still not visible. Clearly, the site encompasses much more territory than the area suggested by the visible remains. However, the earliest occupation lay ers are now under water. Although the ruins of Larsa were discovered in 1854 and periodically excavated by a French team (led by Andre Par rot, Musee du Louvre) beginning in 1933, it was not until 1967 that the same team located a small, low tell 3 Ion (2 mi.) southeast of the historic ruins. That tell, 'Oueili, ap peared to consist entirely of prehistoric remains, rendering the site of particular interest, as the prehistoric levels of southern Mesopotamia are generally covered by massive later historical ruins. Prehistoric levels can only be excavated once the area has been carefully investigated, however, as was the case at Ur, Uruk, and Larsa, among other sites. It had long been known that a prehistoric age existed in lower Mesopotamia, but when the sites were not covered over by subsequent cultural layers, they were buried beneath thick layers of alluvial sediment from the Tigris or Euphrates Riv ers. T h e sherds discovered on the surface of 'Oueili pointed to layers dating from Uruk and, in particular, the Ubaid 3 and 4 eras. This presented a unique opportunity to explore 'Oueili's prehistoric levels, in contrast to Larsa where, though present, they remained inaccessible because they were buried underneath more recent deposits 10-15 m deep. The Ubaid period in Lower Mesopotamia was particularly critical because it immediately preceded urbanization. Prior to the discovery of 'Oueili this period was known only from the excavations at Eridu carried out in 1946-1948. The excavation of 'Oueili was carried out by Jean-Louis Huot and Jean-Daniel Forest (of the Universite de Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne) beginning in 1976; the work gained momentum between 1981 and 1989. Periods previously be lieved to exist were uncovered and explored (Ubaid 3-4 and Uruk), as well as earlier, completely unknown phases that had not been detected in the first surface exploration (Ubaid 0-2). Six periods were identified. They were distinguished from one another by phases of abandonment that were only be ginning to become apparent when the excavation was inter rupted by the international crisis in the Persian Gulf in 1990. T h e origins of 'Oueili are unknown. Similarly, the date the village was established is not known. The most ancient levels excavated—albeit not the earliest—were dubbed Ubaid 0 or the 'Oueili phase. They preceded and heralded the Ubaid 1-4 sequence so named in i960 (on the basis of evidence from Eridu) and still in use, although the phases remain very general, T h e culture to which Ubaid 0 is linked is unknown
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'OUEILI, TELL EL-
(it may be the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B tradition in Syria). Certain architectural similarities suggest a connection be tween Ubaid 0 and the Hassuna culture of Samarra. [See Hassuna.] The two are either contemporaneous or Ubaid 0 is slightly earlier, at least in its final phase. For the time being, Ubaid 0 can only been seen at 'Oueili where its final phase can be dated, on the evidence of two radiocarbon dates (7430 ± 150 and 7320 ± 140 B P ) , to 5480 and 5370 B C E (uncorrected dates) or 6516-6018 and 6414-5955 B C E (cor rected dates). Three phases can be discerned in Ubaid 0 thanks to mudbrick architectural remains, some bearing finger marks. Small parallel or intersecting walls thought to have func tioned as granaries, and tiiree dwellings, each on a tripartite plan, with roofs held up by rows of wooden posts with brick bases were recovered. [See Granaries and Silos.] T h e regular use of posts to support a terracelike roof enabled the rooms, or tire surface of the dwelling, to be enlarged and also an chored the building firmly. Two of the houses at 'Oueili measured approximately 140 sq m, while the third one—the oldest—probably measured 240 sq m. Floor-level ovens, a water jar, and other materials found leave no doubt tiiat the buildings were used for housing. Such a discovery consid erably alters existing notions with regard to early architec ture in Lower Mesopotamia in about the middle of the sixth millennium. With the exception of some burnished sherds (perhaps of Hassuna date) containing vegetal temper, the pottery from this phase is decorated with simple geometric patterns painted dark brown or a very pale pinldsh-gray. Among the types found were large bowls, stemmed goblets.
'OUEILI, TELL EL-.
Building
37,
Ubaid
large convex-concave earthenware jars (possibly a Hassunian survival or a new technique). T h e small objects found— lip ornaments of fine clay and dried or baked objects made of bitumen—reveal little variety. A small, painted head of a figurine, probably intact, with oval "coffee-bean" eyes, bears some resemblance to the Samarran figurines at Chogha Mami. Beginning in Ubaid 0, wheat (Triticum mono/dicoccum) and especially six-rowed hulled barley were grown, and common domestic animals were bred— goats, sheep, and, in particular, oxen and pigs. [See Cereals; Sheep and Goats; Cattle and Oxen; Pigs.] From die earliest discernible phases, it is obvious that a small, sedentary community cultivated and irrigated cereal crops (the only possible method given the latitude and cli mate) and bred cattle and pigs as well as sheep and goats in smaller numbers. Fishing and shellfish harvesting were also practiced. Rather remarkable architecture is also visible, though the group appeared to live practically in isolation. Very small amounts of bitumen and some flint were the only raw materials imported. T h e population was limited in size and was probably highly egalitarian. Unfortunately, the ab sence of tombs makes it difficult to interpret possible social ranking. During Ubaid 1 (the available carbon-14 dates are 6710 ± 160, 6680 ± n o , 6460 ± 140 B P — o r 4760, 4730, 4550 B C E , uncorrected dates; 5976-5369, 5723-5420, 5608-5236 B C E , corrected dates), the most noticeable development was in the pottery: it is much more elaborately decorated and painted, though still geometric. It closely resembles Eridu ceramics. Architecturally, posts continued to be used, as well
0, general view.
(Courtesy J.-L. H u o t )
'OUEILI, TELL EL-
as mud bricks with markings. Housing is not as easily de scribed as for the preceding period. T w o structures con sisting of three adjacent rooms were uncovered, undoubt edly sections of houses along the lines of those from Ubaid 0 (despite a period of abandonment between the two phases). Particularly noteworthy are granary infrastructures similar to those from Ubaid 0—mat is, a pise platform with woven reeds supported by small parallel or intersecting walls. In one case, the platform is supported by a tight net work of low clay pillars. There is a noticeable difference, however, between the two periods: Ubaid 0 granaries oc cupied a considerable surface area (approximately 8o s q m ) , whereas those from Ubaid i were much smaller (around 30 sq m). T h e large collective compounds evident in Ubaid 0 may thus have given way to small, independent family units during Ubaid 1. T h e Ubaid 2 phase, clearly evident at Eridu and Hajji Mohammed, is less well-known, albeit present, at 'Oueili. At Ubaid 3, the excavated (but limited) site consists of a vast terrace 40 m long preserved to a height, in some spots, of more than 1.5 m. Unfortunately, neither the extent, the exact layout, nor for that matter the building's function are known. Like all the oilier construction at 'Oueili, it was made of mud brick. That it resembled the better-known construction at Susa from a later period can only be surmised. [See Susa.] T h e mere existence of such an impressive structure at 'Oueili nonetheless provides some evidence for the settle ment's growth and social evolution. Little more can be said,
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however. Some type of local authority is implied, and, by extension, an increasingly complex society. T h e pottery from Ubaid 3 resembles that found at all the other sites of the same period in Mesopotamia: fewer painted and deco rated examples; standardized motifs on goblets, bowls, and basins; marli dishes; and earthenware jars similar to those discovered at Eridu, Ras al-Amiya, and Tell Abada. From a technical viewpoint, this ceramic pottery heralds the ap pearance of paint made of "black sand" (containing chromite and iron-titanium minerals) typical of Ubaid 3 and 4 and discovered at Telloh, Ubaid, and Ur as well. This paint was more durable than earlier kinds and gradually replaced them, thus indicating increasingly standardized ceramic techniques. The Ubaid 4 phase is represented by a tripartite structure that was later reused as a granary, as revealed by the ex tremely dense network of small intersecting walls. Available carbon-14 dates for Ubaid are 6190 ± 90, 6170 ± 90, 5980 ± 100, 5800 ± 100, 5650 ± 90 BP—or 4240, 4220, 4030, 3850, 3700, BCE, uncorrected dates; 5304-4940, 5293-4926, 5187-4719, 4893-4486, 4725-4357 BCE, corrected dates), a structure divided into three sections was discovered that later functioned as a granary—revealed by the extremely dense network of small, intersecting walls. Ceramics from this period resemble vases from the same period at the large southern sites and on the west coast of the Gulf; at 'Oueili, however, this pottery is less decorated and appears to have been used less frequently. Plain, undecorated vases are far
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OXEN
more numerous. Terra-cotta sickles, which began to appear in Ubaid 3, were by this time commonly used, as were small clay knobs (curved nails); clay lip ornaments (practically unchanged since Ubaid 0); animal figures, or ophidians (hu man figurines with a snake head) polished obsidian "nails"; a few stamp seals (but no seal impressions); and ornaments. [See Seals.] Paleobotanical remains attest to the existence of tamarisk, reeds, and the date palm (one of the earliest known examples), as well as wheat (Triticum mono/dicoccum) and six-rowed hulled barley, cultivated using stone hoes. Animal breeding continued to revolve around cattle and pigs. Only 5.2 percent of the bones identified belonged to goats and sheep. This rather unusual livestock probably reflects the very marshy terrain during the final Ubaid phase. Fish were numerous and undoubtedly provided most of the protein consumed. Unfortunately, no tombs or prestigious buildings were found. It is known from Eridu's contemporary levels, however, that Ubaid 4 had begun to develop a ranked social order. Furthermore, the large "temples" (according to early interpretations) of Eridu VIII-VI attest to the important po sition occupied by heads of families or clans within these agricultural settlements because only they could have or dered such construction. A small worksite at 'Oueili has yielded evidence of a final Ubaid phase (Ubaid 5) characterized by painted pottery found in an area where ceramics were drawn from the kiln, along with obvious wasters. This can be correlated to the discovery of a two-storied pottery kiln, with a preparation area and firing chamber, discovered during the first season of excavation. Pottery remains are the only evidence of this phase. A few Late Uruk remains (bevelled-rim bowls, jugs with a curved spout, incised latticework decoration) repre sent the final period during which 'Oueili is known to have been inhabited. T h e site apparently ceased to exist there after—abandoned, probably, in favor of Larsa. Following a long period of economic and social growth, society was at the threshold of urbanization. The excavation at 'Oueili was originally undertaken to pinpoint the transition toward urbanization. T h e goal was not achieved. On the other hand, discovery of the site led to the identification of the longest sequence known to date in Lower Mesopotamia; despite a few gaps, it encompasses most of the Ubaid phase, from the most ancient levels (pre viously unidentified) to the late prehistoric era. As a result, what is now known of this transitional phase, which had previously rested entirely on the discovery of Eridu, has been corrected and expanded. [See also Eridu; Larsa; Mesopotamia, article on Prehistoric Mesopotamia; Ubaid; Ur; and Uruk-Warka.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Connan, J, " D e la geochimie petroliere a l'etude des bitumens anciens: L'archeologie moleculaire." Comptes Rendus de I'Academie des In
scriptions et Belles-Lettres 1993 4 (1993): 901-921. See pages 910-914 for bitumen from Tell el-'Oueili. H u o t , Jean-Louis, et al. "Larsa . . . et tell el 'Oueili: Premiere c a m p a g n e , 1976." Syria 55 (1978): 183-223. H u o t , Jean-Louis, et al. Larsa (Seme et 9eme campagnes, 1978 et 1981) et 'Oueili (2eme et 3eme campagnes, 1978 et 1981): Rapport preliminaire. Paris, 1983. H u o t , Jean-Louis, et al. Larsa (ioe campagne, 1983) et 'Oueili (4c cam pagne, 1983): Rapport preliminaire. Paris, 1987. H u o t , Jean-Louis. " U b a i d i a n Village of Lower M e s o p o t a m i a : P e r m a nence and Evolution from U b a i d o to U b a i d 4, as Seen from Tell el'Oueili." In Upon This Foundation: The Ubaid Reconsidered, edited by Elizabeth F . Henrickson a n d Ingolf T h u e s e n , p p . 19-42. C o p e n h a gen, 1989. H u o t , Jean-Louis, et al. 'Oueili, travaux de 198$. Paris, 1991. H u o t , Jean-Louis. " T h e First F a r m e r s at 'Oueili." Biblical Archaeologist. 55 (1992): 188-195. H u o t , Jean-Louis, et al. 'Oueili, travaux de 1987-1989. Paris, in press. JEAN-LOWS HUOT
OXEN. See Cattle and Oxen.
OXYRHYNCHUS (Ar., Al-Bahnasa), principal town in the nome (province) Oxyrhynchites in Lower Egypt, lo cated approximately 75 km (47 mi.) southwest of modern Bani Suef and 16 1cm (to mi.) west of Bani Mazar (28°3o' N , 30°4o' E). Oxyrhynchus flourished chiefly during the Roman era, although it has remains from both the earlier Ptolemaic and later Byzantine and Arab periods. T h e toponym for both the town and the province derive from the Greek name for a fish of the sturgeon class in whose honor a temple was built at Oxyrhynchus. Excavations of the ancient rubbish dumps at the site were carried out initially by Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, two young papyrologists, in six campaigns from 1897 to 1898 and 1903 to 1907. They were followed by excavators from Italy, led first by Ermenogildo Pistelli and Giulio Fa rina (191 o, 1 9 1 2 , 1 9 1 3 ) , and later by Evaristo Breccia (19271928, 1932, 1934) for the Societa per la Ricerca dei Papiri. T h e principal object of all of these excavators was the ac quisition of papyrus texts. The result was the discovery of a stunning number of documents. T h e number of published volumes in the series T h e Oxyrhynchus Papyri, for instance, has reached fifty-seven (1990), the edited texts consisting of not only Greek and Latin literary works but chiefly docu mentary writings, in Greek and Latin as well as other lan guages. Other Oxyrhynchus texts have been published elsewhere, primarily in the series Papiri greci e latini (Pubblicazioni della Societa Italiana). As Grenfell and Hunt described it, the site of the ancient town itself stretched about 2 km (1 mi.) from north to south and .8 km (.5 mi.) from east to west. T h e rubbish mounds
OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI were scattered to the west. From the distribution of papyri in the mounds, Grenfell and H u n t determined that the city had expanded during the Roman period and had then con tracted during the Byzantine and Arab periods. The rubbish heaps that lay farthest to the west, running a substantial dis tance into the uncultivated land, contained a majority of documents from the Roman period, with some Ptolemaic texts, whereas those that lay closer to die modern town pre served a large number of texts from later eras. According to their initial report, Grenfell and Hunt began excavating in the cemetery but quickly turned to the rubbish mounds lying to the west of the town where the harvest of torn, discarded texts was plentiful. They soon determined that the manuscripts were much better preserved in the por tions of the mounds that were above the " d a m p " line cre ated by underlying groundwater. Their technique was to cut an initial trench directiy into a mound until the local labor ers, digging chiefly with their hands in order to feel the pa pyrus fragments, reached the midpoint of the mound. At times, the trenches reached a depth of 7 m (23 ft.) below the upper surfaces of the mounds. Of the ancient city, almost nothing remained when Gren fell and Hunt arrived. Long before, the stones of the foun dations of buildings had been robbed and reused in other structures. Only stone chips and windblown sand could be seen where walls had stood. Now the area is crisscrossed by the trenches of peasants who have dug for fertile soil for their own agricultural purposes. Following the work of Grenfell and Hunt, peasants uncovered the partial remains of two colonmades and a theater that was examined by Flin ders Petrie in 1922. Despite the existence of Grenfell's site plan—his work on it was cut short by illness—later scholars have not published it because Grenfell had not completed it. Although Grenfell and Hunt have been criticized for not employing excavating techniques that would have yielded more archaeological data, it is important to realize that in their day the methods associated with modern archaeology were in their infancy. Furthermore, their efforts, largely car ried out with limited funding, led to the discovery of an astonishing number of discarded texts from late antiquity. [See also Oxyrhynchus Papyri.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Breccia, Evaristo. " D o v e e come si trovano i papiro in Egitto." Aegyptus 16 (1936): 296-305. Brown, S. K e n t . "Sayings of Jesus, O x y r h y n c h u s . " In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5, p p . 999-1001. N e w York, 1992. D o n a d o n i , Sergio. " L e prime recerche italiane ad A n t i n o e . " Aegyptus 18 (1938): 285-318. Grenfell, Bernard P. " O x y r h y n c h u s a n d Its P a p y r i . " Egypt Exploration Fund Archaeological Report 6 (1896-1897): 1-12. Grenfell, Bernard P., a n d A r t h u r S. H u n t . " G r a e c o - R o r n a n B r a n c h . " Egypt Exploration Fund Archaeological Report 12 (1902-1903): 1-9;
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13 (1904-1905): 13-17; 14 (1905-1906): 8-16; 15 (1906-1907): 811. Kasher, Aryeh. " T h e Jewish C o m m u n i t y of Oxyrhynchus in the R o m a n P e r i o d . " Journal of Jewish Studies 32 (1981): 151-157. T u r n e r , Eric G . " R o m a n O x y r h y n c h u s . " Journal of Egyptian Archae ology^ (1952): 78-93T u r n e r , Eric G. " T h e G r a e c o - R o m a n B r a n c h . " In Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1882-1982, edited by T . G. H . James, p p . 161-178. Chicago, 1982. S. K E N T B R O W N
OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI. British and Italian ex cavations at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt unearthed several thou sand papyri (and parchments), mostly inscribed in Greek, but also including texts in Latin, Coptic, Demotic, and Ar abic. The Oxyrhynchus papyri range in date from the Ptol emaic through Early Islamic periods, but the majority come from the Roman period. They are an unusually complete record of the town's culture, society, and economy and form one of the largest and most important groups of texts from Roman Egypt. T h e excavation of papyri at Oxyrhynchus began in 1897, under the direction of Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt for the Egypt Exploration Fund. The great success of this first season, in which thousands of papyri were found, led Grenfell and Hunt to continue digging from 1903 through 1907, Oxyrhynchus was excavated by Italian ar chaeologists for the Societa per la Ricerca dei Papiri inter mittently between 1910 and 1934, which resulted in addi tional papyrus finds. Most of the papyri from the British excavations were found in ancient rubbish dumps and la trines, whereas the papyri from the Italian excavations came from the town itself. T h e archaeological contexts of the Oxyrhynchus papyri remain largely unpublished, but the papyri themselves have been the object of extensive publi cation efforts: Greek and Latin texts from the British exca vations have regularly appeared in the series The Oxyrhyn chus Papyri (1898-the present, or sixty-one volumes). Papyri from the Italian excavations were published as Papiri greci e latini (1910-1979). In addition, individual Oxyrhyn chus papyri have been published in monographs and journal articles. T h e contents of the Oxyrhynchus papyri span an enor mous range of literary and nonliterary production. The ini tial goal of die excavation of Oxyrhynchus concentrated on the discovery of Greek literary papyri. In addition to known Greek literature, the Oxyrhynchus papyri have yielded hun dreds of fragments of " n e w " texts by known authors: Sap pho, Euripides, Sophocles (including his satyr play The Trackers), Menander, Lysias, Flyperides, Callimachus, and Chariton (to name a few), along with anonymous poems, plays, orations, grammars, and scholia. T h e Oxyrhynchus papyri include fragments of numerous philosophical, rhe-
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OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI
torical, and historical works, including the so-called Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, published separately (McKechnie and Kern, 1988), which chronicles the events 01396-395 B C E . Scientific, astronomical, astrological, madiematical, medi cal, and magical works are also represented. In addition to this great assemblage of literary material, the Oxyrhynchus papyri include an extraordinary wealth of documentary, nonliterary papyri: official documents, legal contracts, wills, accounts, lists, private letters—the majority of Roman date and in Greek, with a smaller (but significant) number in Latin. Papyri from the Roman period document the impor tance of Egyptian cults at Oxyrhynchus and also attest to a significant Jewish presence there. [See Cult.] Many impor tant Early Christian texts come from Oxyrhynchus, includ ing fragments of biblical manuscripts and documentary ev idence. An important group of Byzantine Greek papyri comes from Oxyrhynchus: the papers of the Apion family, who owned the best attested of the large Byzantine estates in Egypt. Coptic and Arabic papyri from Oxyrhynchus, al most entirely unpublished, include documentary, literary, and magical texts. [See also Arabic; Coptic; Greek; Latin; Oxyrhynchus; Pa pyrus; and Parchment.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Grenfell, Bernard P . , et al. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. 61 vols, to date. L o n d o n , 1898-. O n g o i n g series in which are published Greek a n d Latin papyri from die Grenfell and H u n t excavations, with text, commentary, and English translations of most papyri. H u n t , Arthur S., et al. Select Papyri. 3 vols. L o e b Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1950-1956. H a n d y and accessible anthology of Greek and Latin papyri, including m a n y from O x y r h y n c h u s , with text and English translation of facing pages. Volume 1 contains p r i vate documents, volume 2 public d o c u m e n t s , a n d volume 3 literary fragments. Montserrat, D o m i n i c , et al. "Varia Descripta Oxyrhynchita." Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 31 (1994): 11-80. First in stallment of a larger project to publish the O x y r h y n c h u s " d e s c r i p t a , " papyri that were only briefly described a n d n o t fully published in the early volumes of The Oxyrynchus Papyri. T u r n e r , Eric G. Greek Papyri: An Introduction. 2d ed. Oxford, 1980. Standard introduction to Greek papyrology, with m u c h useful in formation on die Oxyrhynchus papyri a n d their context as well as an extensive bibliography. T u r n e r , Eric G . " T h e G r a e c o - R o m a n B r a n c h . " In Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1882-1982, edited by T . G . H . J a m e s , p p . 161-178. Chicago, 1982. Concise account of t h e Grenfell a n d H u n t excavation of Oxyrhynchus papyri for t h e E g y p t Exploration F u n d and their subsequent publication history. TERRY G . WILFONQ
p
PALACE. As the house of the king, his customary resi dence, the palace contains everything that concerns the ac tivities of daily life in any house, although possibly elabo rated in accordance with the wealth of the individual and his family. Because the lung exercised a specific function and possessed a unique nature, his house could include specific fixtures (such as a tiirone room) that would facilitate the exercise of power and of manifesting it materially. A true palace can exist only in the context of a monarchy, and certainty on this point is possible only when tiiere are texts. Historians date the birth of the first royal dynasties in Mesopotamia, as well as the appearance of the first palaces, to the beginning of the third millennium. T h e actual situa tion is, however, less clear. T h e royal institution was no more born in a day than the palace emerged one fine morn ing from die head of a genial architect. Throughout the N e olithic period in die Near East, the growing complexity of relationships among agricultural production, the need for exotic raw materials in the river basins, and social organi zation, all led to tlie development of a power that often man ifested its existence in the creation of specific architecture. By the end of the fifth and in the early fourth millennium, with the first steps toward urbanization, social hierarchy was already marked by clear architectural differentiation. Tepe Gawra, in northern Mesopotamia, demonstrates this situa tion as early as level XI; the Round House (level XI-A) expresses the real hierarchical social structure because it is the house of the holder of power, sited there, at the summit of the mound. [See Tepe Gawra.] In the Uruk period, the great architectural complexes that have been recognized at Uruk itself, such as die E-anna, or at the sites of the Uruk expansion, such as Tell Kannas, also appear as centers of power (without presuming either a theocratic or secular na ture). Thus, it is necessary to consider these structures if not palaces in the strict sense, at least as the architectural ex pression of the exercise of power in a hierarchical society. [See Uruk-Warka.]
(Palace A and the Piano-Convex Building), at Eridu, and at Tell Asmar/Eshnunna (the northern palaces) can be re tained (see figure i ) . [See Kish; Eridu; Eshnunna.] In these cases the palace appears as a complex comprising several autonomous buildings that are connected by long, periph eral corridors that circulated people as well as air and light. Because the palaces expanded to two levels, the definition of functions is a difficult and uncertain exercise. It seems likely, however, tiiat the upper level was devoted to habita tion and reception. Perhaps even the throne room, if in fact one existed then, was also located there; the ground floor served mainly for storage (the Akkadian palace at Tell Brak in Khabur) and secondarily as a workplace. The palaces of third-millennium Mari, in the process of excavation since 1964, display the unusual characteristic of being closely associated with a cult place, die Sacred Precinct, but with only this single example, it is difficult to define the exis tence of any fundamental relationship between palace and temple. Outside of the Mesopotamian basin, there is still little ev idence, for there are hardly any palaces. The discovery of Palace G at Ebla in Syria, and now the large building at Tel Yarmut in Israel, shows, however, that the institution was not confined to Mesopotamia. [See Ebla; Yarmut, Tel.] Nevertheless, in these two cases the buildings discovered do not permit a definition of their architectural traits as closely related to those of the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Middle Bronze Age. With the third dynasty of Ur, Mes opotamia saw die birth of a new formula that dominated the river basin completely. Varied solutions were adopted si multaneously in die western (Syria-Palestine) and northern (upper course of the Euphrates) regions. It is atUr, with the palace of Ur-Nammu and Shulgi, that the formula appears for the first time; it appears again in the palace at Eshnunna/ Tell Asmar. Throughout a very long history, the palace for mula was transformed many times; however, there is also continuity in die organization of the most significant sectors, such as the complex of official rooms at Mari (the Great Royal Palace and, doubtless, the earlier palaces of the Shakkanakku); at Larsa (the Palace of Nur-Adad, which appears as a veritable architecmral drawing); at Assur (the
Early B r o n z e Age. Mesopotamia has yielded a number of buildings of the Early Dynastic period considered to be palaces, most often because of their scale rather than for precise morphological reasons. It seems, however, that the identification as palaces of the buildings uncovered at Kish
197
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PALACE 10
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Old Palace); Tell er-Rimah; and, finally, at Uruk (the Palace of Sinkashid). [See Mark Larsa; Assur; Rimah, Tell er-.] If Tuttul on the Balikh River has provided an example of a palace close to those at Mari, which belong to the Meso potamian tradition, Syria and Palestine used formulae whose inspiration was clearly Mediterranean. Occupying a more restricted surface area, these sttuctures developed ver tically, occasionally reaching three stories, as was certainly the case in the palace of Yarimlim at Alalakh (eighteenth century B C E ) , or in the cities of the Upper Euphrates (e.g., Karahoyuk). [See Alalakh.] There were numerous palaces at Ebla, but they do not seem to represent the morphological traits associated with royal functions that the palaces in Mes opotamia do; they may not be true palaces—places in which the king exercised his authority. T h e frequent use of the pillar in the columned porch, as well as the court that served as a light well, tended to systematize itself and became a distinctive mark of western architecture. Late Bronze Age. Mesopotamia does not occupy the foreground in the Late Bronze Age. A single palace, difficult to interpret because it differs totally from the others, and is only partially excavated, is that of 'Aqar Quf (Dur Kurigalzu). The Mitannian period is well represented, however, in the provincial palaces at Nuzi and Tell Brak. [See 'Aqar Quf; Mitanni; Nuzi; Brak, Tell] In Syria-Palestine, the pal ace is in general small, as in the preceding period; the ex
(Courtesy J.-C. M a r g u e r o n )
ception is Ugarit, where a true palatial complex evolved, closer to those of the great capitals of the empire than the Levantine cities. [See Ugarit.] Hattusa (Bogazkoy), capital of the Hittite Empire, is a good example of the complex formed by the association of separate buildings to form a true fortress on an imperial scale. This formula seems to belong to Anatolia. [See Bogazkoy.] Iron Age. The evolution toward the formation of the great empires of the Iron Age partly modified die system because if a city possessed a palace, most often a royal gov ernor resided in it. T h e king inhabited or constructed a pal ace in the capital city that had to appear in its splendor, dimensions, and wealth like those in other world centers. The Assyrians were particularly prodigious in palatial consttuctions at Nineveh, Nimrud, and Khorsabad (Dur Sharrukin); however, the approximately ten palaces recovered wholly or in part present great morphological similarities and correspond to a concept well defined by royal function. [See Nineveh; Nimrud; Khorsabad.] T h e Neo-Babylonian kings yielded to the Assyrians in this regard only because of the brief duration of their rule. In this context it is not always easy to know whether, in the Levantine cities, for example, tlie great residences should be considered royal palaces (which is, however, probable at Megiddo, Ramat Rahel, and Lachish), or the seats of local governors. [See Megiddo; Ra mat Rahel; Lachish.] In the specific form of the hilani, whose origin goes back to the Late Bronze Age at Emar, the capitals
PALACE of the small Aramean city-states had a royal building that became very popular, even with the Assyrian kings. [See Emar.] T h e hilani appears in a very compact form: a col umned porch preceded a great elongated room surrounded by smaller rooms, with one or two stories constructed above the whole complex. Expression of a Civilization. In the course of three mil lennia in the ancient Near East, the palace has taken diverse forms. Fundamentally, however, the same functions recur, and the final result is always the fruit of a compromise be tween contradictory demands. T h u s , the need to open the building to the city and the realm of which it is the supreme expression, in which the people must see itself, counterbal ances the necessity to construct a protected place to assure the security of the ldng and his belongings and to guard the wealth accumulated there. T h e palace at Mari from the be ginning of the second millennium BCE—because of its ex ceptional state of preservation and the wealth of the fur nishings and archives recovered there, and in spite of its idiosyncrasies—has greatly advanced what is known of what a palace is and how it functioned (see figure 2), Thus, con trary to what is often stated, a Near Eastern palace is neither
PALACE.
Figure
2. Plan of the second-millennium palace, Mari.
t h e n o r t h w e s t c o r n e r are t h e w o m e n ' s q u a r t e r s . A r e a C is tire a d m i n i s n a t i v e c e n t e r . A r e a B is t h e k i t c h e n . I n area A are t h e slaves q u a r t e r s . (Courtesy J . - C . M a r g u e r o n )
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a city within a city, nor a miniature city. It is an organism that must satisfy specific requirements and whose content varies little. Royal living quarters. As the quarters of the king and his family, or at least a part of it, the first functions of a palace were consistently to provide comfort, whose nature might vary with the climate, and security. At Mari, the house of the king and the house of the women (the location of the queen, all the wives of the lower ranks, concubines, singers, and dancers) were clearly independent. Each was provided with living quarters for the personnel committed to the ser vice of the king and his queens; this dichotomy is not always so clear at other palaces. T h e level of comfort was addressed generally by the quality of construction, the size of the rooms, and the character of the sanitary installations. The wealth of decoration that contributed to the splendor of tire royal house was not only an aesthetic concern: paintings and reliefs served also to manifest royal power in its basic activ ities. T h e themes of the king as hunter, builder, conqueror, protector, and intermediary between the realms of gods and men were repeated endlessly in both the king's apartments and the official quarters.
In
Official quarters. The palace's official area was often closely connected to the living quarters of the king, who had direct access to it. T h e situation is not clear in the third millennium, but it becomes more apparent in the Amorite period. T h e official module at that time was a complex or ganized around a richly decorated great court, intended to enhance the religious aspect of the royal function (e.g., die Court of the Palm at Mari). This court gave access, by way of an intermediary room marked by a certain cultic character (at Mari the statue of a goddess with a flowing vase [now in the Aleppo Museum] stood there), to the throne room (25 m long X 12 m wide), where the king, seated at one end, held audience. Various ceremonies took place there, cer tainly including banquets, as the proximity of the kitchens found in room 31 in the palace of Mari suggests. In the Assyrian period, the room that formed an intermediate stage in the progression between the court and the throne room disappeared, but the principle remained the same. Administrative offices. A meticulous administration characterized the house of tire king, but also that of the women. The administrative offices were located in the upper story, connected to the great room where the king presided over administrative operations. Administration was not lim ited, however, to tire service of the Icing. It also concerned itself with the affairs of the realm, and the principal servants of the king, the viziers and stewards, were responsible for it. The king administered his country from the palace and maintained relations with provincial chieftains and foreign courts; a secretariat functioned to discharge these tasks. T h e palace steward played an essential role: placed at the door way of the palace, he controlled entrance and egress and managed some part of the economic activity. In addition,
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the king was a great employer; he had to compensate his personnel, and for that purpose the palace storerooms con tained provisions that were distributed as payment, includ ing cereals, oils, and cloth. These provisions were compen sation rather tiian reserves hoarded to meet future needs. The palace was not a workplace, however, except occasion ally for a luxury craftsman. The agricultural estates de pended on the palace, and workshops could be located either in tire agricultural areas or in the city. While specific aspects of the palace might vary in impor tance from one period to another, the arrangement of its various components change, and circumstances lead to the expansion of one characteristic at the expense of others, as a rule, die same functions appear behind the variety of forms. Throughout the history of the ancient Near East, the palace conveyed the very essence of Oriental civilization. [See also Building Materials and Techniques.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aurenche, Olivier, ed. Dictionnaire illustre multilingue de I'architecture du Proche-Orienl ancien. L y o n , 1977. T h i s reference work, completed by archaeologists and architects specializing in the ancient N e a r East, aims to clarify mainly technical questions; equivalent terms are given in eight languages. Garelli, Paul, ed. Ij palais et la royaute: Archeologie et civilisation; compte rendu de la ige rencontre assyriologique internationale. Paris, 1974. Contributions are generally philological. Heinrich, Ernst. Die Paldste im alien Mesopotamien. DenkmSler Antiker Architektur, 15. Berlin, 1984. Kempinski, Aharon, a n d R o n n y Reich, eds. The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. Jerusalem, 1992. T h e most recent synthesis, which includes the latest archaeological dis coveries in ancient Palestine. Leick, Gwendolyn. A Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Architecture. L o n d o n and N e w York, 1988. Generally concerns the evolution of architectural forms and styles. Levy, E d m o n d , ed. Le systeme palatial en Orient, en Grece, et a Rome: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 19-22 juin 1985. Leiden, 1987. C o n tributions on t h e ancient N e a r East concern the first appearance of the palace, the organization of space in t h e palace at Mari and t h e economic role of the palace in the Old Babylonian period based o n the texts, the Syrian palaces of t h e Bronze Age, a n d M i n o a n a n d Mycenaean palaces. Margueron, Jean-Claude. Recherches sur les palais misopotamiens de I'dge du Bronze. 2 vols. Paris, 1982. By means of a very careful archaeo logical and architectural analysis, the author arrives at a complete vision of the m o n u m e n t s , which often contradicts accepted ideas, notably about the function a n d the reconstruction of elevations. Margueron, Jean-Claude. " Y a-t-il u n trace regulateur dans les palais m6sopotamiens du l i e mill6naire?" In Le dessin d'architecte dans les societes antiques: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 26-28 Janvier 1984, p p . 29-45. Leiden, 1985. Includes five illustrations. N a u m a n n , Rudolf. Architektur Kleinasiens. 2ded. T u b i n g e n , 1971. Syn thetic reference on t h e architecture of the regions corresponding to m o d e r n Turkey from its origins to t h e eighth century BCE. N u n n , Astrid. Die Wandmalerei und derglasierte Wandschmuck imAlten Orient. Leiden and N e w York, 1988. G o o d compilation of mural decoration, from t h e Neolithic period to the Neo-Babylonian E m pire, that treats palace architecture. Parrot, Andre. Mission archeologique de Mari II: Le palais, vol. 1, Archi
tecture; vol. 2, Peinlures murales; vol. 3, Documents et monuments. Paris, 1958—1959. A good n u m b e r of the interpretations p r o p o s e d by the excavator of this palace, the best preserved in the ancient N e a r East, are n o w out of date. Volume 2 is confined to a catalog. JEAN-CLAUDE MARGUERON
Translated from French by Nancy W . Leinwand
PALEOBOTANY. T o study the interrelationship be tween humans and plants through time, paleobotany (or paleoethnobotany), recovers and analyzes botii macroscopic and microscopic botanical remains. In the Near East, mac roscopic plant remains are preserved primarily through car bonization, or charring. Seeds, wood, or other plant parts that have been exposed to heat of sufficient intensity will turn to carbon while essentially retaining their original shape and size. These remains are often found during excavation in ceramic vessels, storage facilities, and hearths or scattered as debris on floor surfaces. Where remains are not dense and have not been collected by hand during excavation, a flotation, or water-sieving, device is used. In flotation, ex cavated soil is placed in a large container of water and care fully agitated. T h e carbonized material floats to the surface and can be scooped off, poured off, or directed through an overflow spout into a sieve or other container. When dry, the remains are sorted and identifiable plant remains are removed. Microscopic plant remains include pollen or phytolitiis, which are also important in understanding ancient environ ments and plant use. Wind disperses pollen from plants over wide areas. Some is deposited in lake beds, bogs, and otiier permanently wet, still waters, where it sinks to the bottom and is rapidly covered with sediment. There it becomes sealed in an anoxic (oxygen-free) environment, where it can be preserved for thousands of years. Gores of lake-bed sed iments (i.e., sample columns of sediment extracted by forc ing a tube vertically into the sediment) can yield a record of the pollen deposited, thereby allowing a reconstruction of the vegetation in the region and die changes in this vegeta tion through time. These changes can be linked to climatic fluctuations or such human action as deforestation, depend ing on the nature of the change and the types of plants in volved. Phytolitiis are microscopic silica bodies in plants that take on the shape of certain plant cells when the plant dies. Phytolitiis of the particular plant stored or processed are often recovered in storage areas and on stone tools that had been used for plant processing. T h e earliest macroscopic remains identified so far from an archaeological site include species of wild plum and hackberry found in the Douara cave in the Palmyra basin in Syria; they date to approximately 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 years ago. Palynological data (i.e., data for pollen and spores) from western Syria indicate that tiiese species would not have been grow ing very near the cave but may have been collected at a
PALEOENVIRONMENTAL RECONSTRUCTION higher altitude in the nearby hills. Hunter-gatherer popula tions throughout the Near East collected a variety of plant food resources, including the wild cereals and legumes that eventually were domesticated. T h e evidence is that agricul ture was developed about ten thousand years ago: palynological studies suggest increased aridity then in parts of tire Near East; there was a relatively large, settled population in some areas; and new technology in the form of stone sickles made new harvesting techniques possible for wild cereals, which may have, in part, resulted in the selection of domes ticated types. Arboriculture, especially of olives, and viti culture were begun in the Levant at least by 3200 BCE or somewhat earlier. There is written evidence that viticulture was exported to Egypt by 3000 B C E , most likely from the Levant. Paleobotany is used in conjunction with other biological studies, such as zooarchaeology and paleoanthropology, to address questions of ancient subsistence practices, paleonutrition, and paleodiet. Together with geology and geomorphology paleobotany can provide clues to ancient land use, agricultural practices, and the causes of erosion that may have led to the eventual abandonment of an area. For ex ample, a recent study of the wood-charcoal remains from 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan estimates that deforestation resulted in massive erosion of the arable slopes around the site, thus substantially depleting the potential for agricultural subsis tence in the area. T h e site was abandoned by about 5700 BCE.
[See also Agriculture; 'Ain Ghazal; Cereals; Douara; Ethnobotany; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction; and Paleozoology.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
M o o r e , A. M . T . , and G o r d o n Hillman. " T h e Pleistocene to Holocene Transition a n d H u m a n E c o n o m y in Southwest Asia: T h e Impact of t h e Younger D r y a s . " American Antiquity 57.3 (1992): 482-494. D i s cusses the latest palynological data from Lake Huleh in Israel indi cating a period of increased aridity between 11,000 and 10,000 BP. T o g e t h e r with the macroscopic plant remains from the Mesolithic levels of A b u I-Iureyra in Syria, these data suggest an expansion of steppic vegetation at the expense of forest, a change in plant col lecting m a t led t o settlement changes over m u c h of die Levant. Pearsall, D e b o r a h M . Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures. San Diego, 1989. Complete discussion of all aspects of paleoethnobo tany, including their potential to address h u m a n - p l a n t interaction through time and attendant significant social and cultural changes. Rollefson, Gary O., a n d Use Kohler-Rollefson. " T h e Collapse of Early Neolithic Settlements in the S o u t h e r n L e v a n t . " In People and Culture in Change, part 1, edited b y Israel Hershkovitz, p p . 73-173. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 508.1. Oxford, 1989. Discusses the results of the a u t h o r s ' analysis of w o o d charcoal and house construction at Pre-Pottery Neolithic B 'Ain Ghazal, Jor d a n , concluding that production of lime plaster a n d die trees u s e d for structural supports for houses led to deforestation a n d erosion of arable soil. Intensive agriculture a n d grazing contributed to the set tlement's collapse a n d dispersal of the population. Zohary, Daniel, a n d M a r i a Hopf. The Domestication of Plants in the Old World. Oxford, 1988. T h e m o s t complete compilation of the botan
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ical evidence for domestication of the principal Old World crops, with a discussion of the genetic, geographic, a n d ecological data a n d a brief s u m m a r y of plant remains at the most important Old W o r l d prehistoric sites. JULIE HANSEN
PALEOENVIRONMENTAL RECONSTRUC TION. T h e foundation for paleoenvironmental studies in archaeology was laid in the early nineteenth century by Eu ropean geologists such as James Hutton, Ignaz Venetz, A. Bernhardi, Jean de Charpentier, and Louis Agassiz, who convinced the Western world of the evidence for massive glacial movement brought on by striking climatic changes in the past. By the 1860s the concept of a Pleistocene Ice Age was generally accepted, and other types of environmental evidence began to fall into place. Enigmatic fossil remains of cold-loving animals found in temperate climates were suddenly explainable by this new idea. Pollen analysis, first used to identify pollen grains, which could be used as tem poral stratigraphic indicators, later became a powerful tool for reconstructing vegetational history in the light of climatic fluctuations, as well as for delineating the climatic changes themselves. In 1863 T ; F. Jamieson, also a geologist, suggested that even semiarid regions had experienced Pleistocene climatic change, and that those areas had once enjoyed climates that were markedly cooler and wetter than existing ones. Paleolimnologists working in the Near East and North Africa be gan to identify evidence for now extinct pluvial lakes in regions that are today desertic or semiarid. At this time a French archaeologist, Louis Lartet, recognized that the Lisan sediments surrounding the Dead Sea were in fact the remnants of a very much enlarged Pleistocene lake. The archaeological community of the time soon acquired an awareness of the importance of environmental contexts. Pioneering researchers such as the Danish archaeologist J. J. A. Worsaae maintained in 1840 that environmental in formation was essential for understanding archaeological finds. In the 1920s and 1930s, these ideas were brought to Near Eastern archaeology and implemented in studies such as those conducted by Dorothy A. E. Garrod and Dorothea M. A. Bate for understanding the prehistory and animal ex ploitation at the Carmel cave sites in western Palestine, and Gertrude Caton-Thomson and E. Gardiner in studies of the prehistory and environment of the Egyptian Faiyum. C o n c e p t s a n d Goals. A major goal of paleoenvironmen tal reconsttuction is to understand the social, economic, and spatial relationships between past human groups and the environment. This includes such lines of research as spatial patterns of settlement over a given landscape; ancient sub sistence practices; human impact on the landscape; and the influence of climatic change on cultural systems. T o achieve this end, techniques have been borrowed from the biological
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and earth sciences and adapted to address these and other archaeological questions. In his book Archaeology as Human Ecology (1982), Karl W. Butzer outlined five important concepts and methods for approaching paleoenvironmental studies: space, scale, com plexity, interaction, and state of equilibrium. The concern with space and spatial distribution applies to landforms and biological communities, as well as to human settlements. The spatial patterning of these three groups is often inter related and provides insight into the interaction among them. Paleoenvironmental studies in archaeology are carried out in the framework of three scales of research: macroscale, mesoscale, and microscale. These refer to the physical size of the land area being investigated, the extent of a given biotic zone, the size of a human community, and the mag nitude of temporal units. In physical terms, the macroscale refers to major regions with distinctive life zones, or biomes, such as the eastern Mediterranean area or North Africa. Temporally, it can range from about 10,000 to 100,000 years. The mesoscale is a much smaller unit of space, usually within the vicinity, or catchment, of an archaeological site. It may encompass a variety of different landforms—hills, valleys, dunes, lakes, and streams—each with distinctive groups of biota. Temporal changes at this scale could take place at a magnitude of about 100-10,000 years. The microscale of investigation includes the site itself, the patterning of residences, and the location of activity areas. Temporally, it is concerned with periods of fewer than one hundred years. Although the three scales of investigation are interrelated, they all impart different information about en vironmental variability and the interaction between environ ments and past sociocultural and economic systems. Human perceptions of their natural surroundings also vary with re spect to scale, and these perceptions govern the interaction between human groups and their natural milieu. The concept of interaction refers to the interactive rela tionships of human communities with each other and their natural environment at varying scales and rates. T h e rela tionship between people and their environment is not a de terministic one—with climate, landscape, and biotic com munities shaping human responses—or the opposite—with human groups completely manipulating their surroundings. Environmental changes can be viewed as positive or nega tive stimuli to a human system. The response to this stimuli will differ according to internal factors such as technological level, social organization, and cultural perception of the change. The complexity factor maintains that environments and human communities are heterogeneous, and that research ers should therefore structure their investigations to account for spatial and temporal variability at different scales of anal ysis. Finally, the equilibrium state refers to the stability of a
given system, either cultural, or environmental, and its vul nerability to changes of differing magnitudes created by stress from outside factors. M e t h o d s of Reconstruction. In reconstructing ancient landscapes and environments, methods have been borrowed from the earth sciences, botany, and zoology. Although the methods resemble those used in the natural sciences, objec tives and research questions differ because they are related to archaeological goals and concerns. This has given rise to three basic environmentally oriented subdisciplines in ar chaeology: geoarchaeology, paleoethnobotany, and archaeozoology. Often, the goals and techniques of these three areas of research overlap. Geoarchaeology. Some of the major goals of geoar chaeology include reconstructing past climates and inter preting their role in a region's archaeological developments; reconstructing ancient landforms in the vicinity of a site (marshes, springs, floodplains, and streams), including their availability as resources or liabilities and their use in aiding site surveys; assisting in site surveys using methods of geo physical prospecting; identifying the sources of a site's min eral resources; determining the factors that formed an ar chaeological site; and analyzing areas of diverse activities within a site by chemical tests and microartifact analyses. One of the cornerstones of paleoenvironmental recon struction in geoarchaeology is the concept that weathering, transportation, and sediment deposition are controlled by environmental conditions. This life history of sediments is revealed by some of the characteristics of the deposit. Therefore, in describing the color, composition, grain-size distribution, shape, angularity, bedding form, and postdepositional changes of deposits, the geoarchaeologist can find substantial clues for reconstructing ancient land forms and the nature of past environments. Identifying ancient landforms (abandoned stream or beach terraces, playa lakes, and ancient marshy areas) can aid in locating sites in a site survey, as well as in assessing an area's past agricultural, mineral, and water resource po tential. Geophysical prospecting for archaeological sites is conducted by magnetometry, electrical resistivity, and ground-penetrating radar. T h e appropriate geophysical technique depends on the type of site being investigated, the kind of finds expected (e.g., brick walls, stone walls, or pits), and the nature of the sediment matrix. Mineral resources at a site include building stone, clay used in ceramic manufacture, metal ores, obsidian and flint for tool production, metals, and precious or semiprecious stones for jewelry and utensils. Locating the sources of this material involves identifying distinctive minerals through heavy mineral, petrographic, and neutron activation analy ses and having knowledge of the character of local and re gional sources. On the archaeological site the geoarchaeologist helps to identify the processes of stratigraphic development, factors
PALEOENVIRONMENTAL RECONSTRUCTION of site disturbance, and the interface between natural and cultural sediments at the boundary of the archaeological de posits. He or she is concerned with reconstructing die site's formation history and tire amount of postdepositional dis turbance to artifacts. T h e geoarchaeologist may also participate in delineating activity areas. Two procedures used are microartifact and chemical analyses. In microartifact studies, the researcher examines the artifacts, which range in size from about 3 cm down to 0.250 mm. These remains on and in a living surface, too small to be removed or swept away, would have been trampled into the floor or occupation surface. Microartifacts such as sherds, flint chips, charcoal, bone, eggshell, and beads provide a record of activities throughout the life of the living surface. This is one of the only archaeological tech niques that allows direct comparisons of percentages of dif ferent artifact types. Chemical analyses of living surfaces include determining p H and phosphate content of die sediments, with a low p H (indicating acid sediment) and high phosphate value indic ative of high concentrations of decaying organic matter. These analyses can aid in identifying animal pens and sta bles. Along the same line of research is soil micromorphology, in which a small unit of sediment from an archaeolog ical site is solidified and thin sections are taken for microscopic examination. This allows the researcher to ex amine the relationships between site formation and natural soil processes at a microscopic scale. Paleoethnobotany. T h e techniques of paleoethnobotany vary witii the kinds of research objectives. Some of the aims of paleoethnobotany are paleoenvironmental recon struction, both at the macroscale of regional vegetation and at the mesoscale of local site environs; investigating ancient plant use for subsistence, fuel, building materials, medicines, and ritual practices; analyzing farming practices; determin ing the seasonality of site occupation; and understanding the interaction between ancient peoples and their environment. Two techniques commonly applied to the problem of pa leoenvironmental reconstruction at the macro- and mesoscales of investigation are palynology and phytolith analysis. Palynology is the study of pollen grains originating in flowering plants and dispersed primarily through the air. T h e microscopic (silt sized) pollen is identified according to the size, shape, and surface features of individual grains— which are distinctive to family, often to genus, and some times to plant species. At the macroscale of research, pollen samples are usually extracted from water-logged sediments in bog and lake cores and are used to reconstruct regional vegetation and general environmental conditions. This is ac complished by comparing suites of species from the past with modern ones and by identifying "indicator species" that point to a specific ecological situation. One of the problems facing palynological studies of this kind includes the differential output of pollen by different
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types of vegetation. This precludes a simple comparison of pollen frequencies without taking into account the amount of pollen produced by each type of plant. Pollen sequences are dated by radiocarbon dates taken from pollen cores. This dating is sometimes problematic because the dated units are often meters apart and changing sedimentation rates can hinder the extrapolation of dates throughout the core. Al though a large number of trees and shrubs are identifiable by pollen type, the pollen of grasses is usually indistinguish able. Identifying grass families and other types of monocoty ledons (rushes, sedges, and palms) can be accomplished by another microbotanical technique: phytolith analysis. Phy tolitiis are microscopic mineralized bodies, usually com posed of amorphous silica (opal), that form within the epi dermal tissue of living plants. They generally take on the shape of the plant epidermal cells and are seen as microfossils of individual cells or sections of epidermal tissue encom passing from two to hundreds of joined cells. Phytolitiis are commonly identifiable to plant family and often to plant ge nus. Occasional identifications can be made at the species level. As basic research in this field progresses, the range of identifiable plants is rapidly increasing. Phytoliths are ini tially deposited in the location at which the host plant dis integrated and are generally not dispersed through the air, as is pollen. They are washed into lake sediments by streams in die vicinity. T h e combination of pollen and phytolith analyses affords a more exacting method for reconstructing regional vege tation patterns at the macroscale, as well as local plant com munities at the mesoscale. T h e analysis of charred woods from an archaeological site can also offer information about local plant communities, but caution is needed in interpret ing this information because humans can transport woods from other ecological zones. At die microscale of analysis, or site level, the most tra ditional paleobotanical technique is analyzing macrobotanical remains, usually charred seeds, wood, and sometimes fruit and nuts. The most useful method of retrieving this material is by a system of flotation whereby sediment is mixed witii water or a chemical solution. The charred ma terial floats to the top and is removed using a fine-mesh sieve. Macrobotanical remains give information about the types of plants used for subsistence, fuel, building materials, medicines, and ritual pursuits. They are also informative about farming practices, cropping strategies, and the sea sonality of site occupation. On a more detailed level of sig nificance, they contribute to what is known about the timing and location of the first cereal domestication. Phytolith analysis is also an advantageous technique at this level of investigation. Phytoliths are resistant to decay and are commonly preserved where macrobotanical remains are not. Phytoliths have distinctive shapes in different parts of a given plant, which allows differentiation between its stem
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and its flower. They can therefore aid in identifying activity areas by distinguishing, for example, the remnants of straw, or reed mats, from the remains of cereal glumes. One draw back to this technique is the as yet relatively small corpus of plants with known identifiable forms; however, the list of plant types identifiable by their phytoliths is growing. T o date, there are cereals (including maize, wheat, and barley), weed grasses, reeds, sedges, and palms that can be identified at the family and genus level with this technique. Phytoliths are usually extracted from sediment taken from the archae ological site and processed by a researcher specializing in this technique. Zooarchaeology. Some of the concerns of zooarchaeology, faunal studies of bones from archaeological deposits, include paleoenvironments at the macroscale, as well as the mesoscale, in the vicinity of a site; the season of site occu pation; nutritional studies of protein intake from meat; hunt ing strategies, such as the types and sizes of animals hunted, and the energy expended in the hunt; animal domestication; pastoral strategies of animal species mixtures and patterns of transhumance; the use of secondary products such as milk, wool, and draft power; and how animals were raised for domestic use or market sale. The most reliable method of bone collection at archaeo logical sites is the systematic sieving of most archaeological excavation units. This provides the faunal analyst with a large and mostly unbiased sample usable for statistical anal yses. Because bones and botanical remains are not indepen dently assignable to a specific period or archaeological level, much care must be taken to record proveniences and note the temporal homogeneity of the archaeological unit. If there are intrusive artifacts, there can also be intrusive bones and botanical remains. With these considerations in mind, faunal analysts can reconstruct environments in a site's vicinity by tire types of wild species present—and sometimes by the size of the spe cies. Seasonality of site occupation is determined by fauna that is only present in the region during specific months in the year (e.g., migratory birds) or by the characteristics of the fauna that change with the seasons (antler growth or juvenile tooth development). Faunal analysts can also ap proximate the amount of meat consumed by weighing bones because there is a correlation between bone weight and meat. They can also identify butchery practices by the pat terns of cut marks on the bones. Animal husbandry and domestication are recognized by such features as a decrease in species size, signs of draft labor, wear marks from bits, and cultural factors (e.g., the deliberate burial of whole animals and calcium depletion in the bones from milking). The use of secondary products such as milk and wool and the raising of animals for do mestic use or market sale are determined by the age profiles of a population of animals at the time of slaughter.
Integration. In reconstructing climates and paleoenvi ronments at the macroscale of research, each of the three approaches discussed above investigates different and in dependent data sets that are all environmental responses to climatic factors. In any reconstruction of climatic condi tions, it is necessary to compare scenarios from several var ied forms of information. Often, these data sets appear to have contradictory facts that, in essence, can be related to inconsistencies in dating the environmental indices. This can sometimes be reconciled by comparing patterns of trends indicating vacillations to wet or dry and cool or warm conditions that are similar to the trends specified by different methodologies. In applying information about environmental and climatic change to explanations of human responses, it is essential to account for cultural, technological, economic, and settle ment variability. All of these factors control the reaction of human groups to their environment, whether stable or changing. This is also true of the impact of the human group on its surroundings. Broadly speaking, hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, subsistence farmers, and cash-crop farmers will respond in different ways to an environmental stimulus such as drought. They will also impact their environments in dif ferent manners. On the meso- and microscale of research, results from landscape reconstructions, combined with analyses of bio logical and mineral remains from an archaeological site, can assist in delineating site catchment areas or spheres of re source exploitation in the site vicinity. These types of studies are most successful when combined with other factors that influence settlement in a given region: political connections, cultic considerations, and access to resources through long distance trade. T h e combination of paleoenvironmental re construction with settlement-pattern and catchment analy ses provide a powerful body of information that can significantly contribute to our understanding of many as pects of political, social, and economic organizations. [See also Analytical Techniques; Climatology; Environ mental Archaeology; Ethnobotany; Ethnozoology; Geology; Paleobotany; and Paleozoology.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Butzer, Karl W . Environment and Archaeology: An Ecological Approach to Prehistory. 2d ed. Chicago, 1971. Essential introduction to envi ronmental archaeology, oudining techniques a n d their applications to such significant processes as h u m a n evolution a n d the origins of agriculture. Butzer, Karl W. Archaeology as Human Ecology: Method and Theory for a Contextual Approach. C a m b r i d g e , 1982. Theoretical framework for integrating environmental studies with archaeological concerns, with a good introduction to geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, a n d zooar chaeology. Davis, Simon J. M . The Archaeology of Animals. N e w H a v e n , 1987. G o o d introduction to the techniques and concerns of zooarchaeol ogy.
PALEOPATHOLOGY Dincauze, D e n a . "Strategies for Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction in Archaeology." Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory n (1987): 255-336. Integrated a p p r o a c h to environmental studies in archaeology. Evans, John G . An Introduction to Environmental Archaeology, Ithaca, N . Y . , 1978. Primarily concerned with technical m e t h o d s . Hesse, Brian, a n d Paula Wapnish. Animal Bone Archaeology: From Ob jectives to Analysis. Washington, D . C . , 1985. G o o d basic source on zooarchaeological techniques a n d applications to archaeological problems, Pearsall, D e b o r a h M . Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures. San Diego, 1989. T h o r o u g h survey of field a n d laboratory techniques, including pollen, phytoliths, a n d macrobotanical analyses. Piperno, Dolores R. Phytolith Analysis: An Archaeological and Geological Perspective. San Diego, 1988. I n t t o d u c t i o n to phytolith analysis a n d its b r o a d applications. Roberts, Neil. The Holocene: An Environmental History. Oxford and N e w York, 1989. General survey of techniques for environmental reconstruction a n d an outline of environmental history for the last ten t h o u s a n d years. Roper, D o n n a C. " T h e M e t h o d a n d T h e o r y of Site C a t c h m e n t Anal ysis: A Review." Advances in Archaeological Method and Theoty 2 (1979): 119-140. Introduction t o site-catchment analysis and critical review of previous studies. Rosen, Arlene Miller. Cities of Clay: The Geoarchaeology of Tells. C h i cago, 1986. Study of tell formation in a cultural, geomorphological, and environmental context. Schiffer, Michael B . Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. Albuquerque, 1987. Detailed study of the factors responsible for the placement of artifacts a n d the formation a n d erosion of archaeolog ical sites. Stein, Julie K., a n d William R. F a r r a n d , eds. Archaeological Sediments in Context. O r o n o , M a i n e , 1985. Collection of articles on geoar chaeology covering a broad range of site contexts.
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In the Near East, from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s, descriptive studies of Egyptian mummies were the prime concern of paleopathologists. Although much of the research appearing in journals is still descriptive, several scholarly attempts (e.g., Cockburn, 1963; Manchester, 1983) to provide a well-formulated theoretical/historical background for the discipline are providing direction for fu ture research. Research today is rapidly moving in the di rection of biomolecular studies of ancient disease including the extraction of D N A and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). T h e well-established literary tradition in the Near East provides a wealth of information on disease and medical practices spanning five thousand years. While early Assyrian and Egyptian texts deal specifically with the problem of dis ease and medical practices, perhaps the greatest body of knowledge comes from the Hebrew scriptural writings. Al though not intended as medical texts, they are a source of medical practices and folk beliefs. The scientific value of paleopathology lies in its diachronic approach to illness, which enables researchers to perceive chronic diseases, such as leprosy and tuberculosis, over a long period of time. T h e paleopathologist can thus deter mine whether a disease has evolved or changed its pattern. Certain diseases, such as arteriosclerosis, once regarded as the result of diet and modern living conditions, have been found in autopsies performed on Egyptian mummies (Sandison, 1980) calling into question many modern concepts about the etiology of heart disease.
ARLENE MILLER ROSEN
P A L E O P A T H O L O G Y . The scientific study of an cient disease, which has historical and medical implications for human, animal, and plant evolution, began in the late nineteenth century. T h e discipline, known as paleopathol ogy, is today closely allied with archaeology and physical anthropology. Together, those two disciplines provide paleopathologists with the material for their research. Paleo pathology's interdisciplinary nature and broad scope place most modern research in universities and medical schools. According to Calvin Wells, a leader of the field in Europe, one of die main principles of paleopathology is the premise that humans and animals do not exist in isolation from their surroundings: the pattern of disease or injury that affects them is an integral part of that environment. Disease is the manifestation of the stress and strain to which they are ex posed. Disease is reflected in their genetic inheritance, the climate in which they lived, the soil that gave them suste nance, and the other animals and plants with which they shared their world. It is influenced by their daily occupa tions, dietary habits, choice of dwellings, social structure, and even their folklore and mythology (Zias, 1989).
The skeletal remains of all people in all periods are a very valuable scientific-medical resource for ttacing the biologi cal history of the human race. This material needs to be studied to understand better our ancestors, our health, and our world. [See also Paleobotany; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruc tion; Paleozoology; and Skeletal Analysis.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cockburn, Aidan. The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases. Baltimore, 1963. Authoritative and comprehensive work presenting diseases in theoretical/historical perspective. T h e author (d.1981) founded the U . S . Paleopathology Association in 1973, the largest professional association in die field. Jones, Richard. "Paleopathology." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5, p p . 60-69. N e w York, 1992. Manchester, Keith. The Archaeology of Disease. Bradford, 1983. Excel lent survey of die discipline, with a strong emphasis on the Old World, particularly E u r o p e . Ortner, Donald J., a n d Walter Putschar. Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains. 2d ed. Washington, D . C . , 1985. T h e most authoritative a n d scholarly text on the subject; valu able for its comprehensive coverage of disease worldwide. Preuss, Julius. Biblical and Talmudic Medicine (1911). Translated by F r e d Rosner. N e w York, 1978. Standard reference for diseases m e n tioned in Jewish scriptural sources. Rosner's English translation cor-
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rects certain errors in, b u t remains faithful to, the original G e r m a n text. Rafi, A., et al. " D N A of Mycobacterium leprae Detected b y P C R in Ancient B o n e " International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 4 (1994): 287-290. A n attempt to utilize m o d e r n biomolecular techniques in diagnosing ancient disease o n a genetic level. Sandison, A. T . "Diseases in Ancient E g y p t , " In Mummies, Disease, and Ancient Cultures, edited by Aidan Cockburn and Eve Cockburn, p p . 29-44. Cambridge, 1980. Wells, Calvin. Bones, Bodies, and Disease: Evidence of Disease and Ab normality in Early Man. N e w York, 1964. W o o d , James, et al. " T h e Osteological Paradox: Problems of Inferring Prehistoric Health from Skeletal Samples." Current Anthropology 33-4 (l99 ) 343-370. Critical review of the discipline as it relates to prehistoric populations. Zias, Joseph. " L u s t a n d Leprosy: Confusion or Correlation?" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 275 (1989): 27-31. T h i s article reflects on h o w theological and folkloristic concepts are influ enced by disease. Zias, Joseph. " D e a t h a n d Disease in Ancient Israel." Biblical Archae ologist 54.3 (1991): 146-159. T h e most comprehensive treatment to date on the subject as it pertains to the ancient Holy L a n d . 2
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JOSEPH ZIAS
PALEOZOOLOGY. T h e study of animal remains from archaeological sites is known as zooarchaeology, archaeozoology, and faunal analysis as well as paleozoology. As a field it has developed an intellectual territory between and overlapping with several sets of older disciplines. In one dimension it occupies the temporal gap between paleontol ogy, a subject concerned primarily with pre-Holocene phe nomena, and neontology, which deals with modern living populations. In another, it overlaps zoology's primary con cern with wild animals and veterinary/animal science's pre occupation witii domestic species. In a third, archaeological, arena, it has arisen to deal with the collection, identification, and interpretation of the ubiquitous fragments of bone and shell that occur at most sites. Over the century of its exis tence, paleozoology has developed two overlapping empha ses, one primarily concerned with animals and the impact human activity has had on them, the other primarily con cerned with human cultures and the way animals affected and were exploited by them. T h e zoological side of the discipline emphasizes the de velopment of techniques for identifying remains and de scribing changes in animal morphology over time. As ex amples of identification, fragmentary sheep bones are hard to tell from those of goats, and equid remains are notoriously difficult to refer to die various species that inhabited the greater Near East: horses, donkeys, onagers, and their var ious crosses. However, extensive osteometric analyses in re cent years have produced criteria for making some of die separations. Estimating the age at death from teeth and bones has been another achievement. Various methods, in cluding the examination of dental wear and cross-sections of teeth and the study of the schedule of bone maturation,
have been developed to assess mortality patterns in many of the more commonly recovered Near Eastern fauna. In the case of domestication, the process of taming and husband ing produces physical changes in animals, some of which are reflected in the skeleton. T h e horns of goats change from a wild morphology characterized by a quadrilateral crosssection to a domestic morphology of tear-drop shape. Pig and dog skulls are foreshortened and teeth reduced in length by the same process. Many animals also undergo an overall reduction in size and develop greater variability in appear ance. An important component of the husbandry of several species is castration. Osteometric analysis of large samples has the potential to demonstrate the use of the technique. Paleozoologists additionally record incidences of disease and pathology. The use of catde for plowing produces distinctive bony growths on the feet, a feature that appears as early as the Bronze Age in the Near East. Paleozoology is also charged with conuibuting to the re construction of past environments and the estimation of the seasonality of human occupation. Some species of bird, ro dent, and mollusc are diagnostic of past conditions. In the case of snails, the chemical makeup of the shell is also an indicator. In other archaeological problems, it is the relative abundance of different taxa that is the clue. The development of quantitative measures has been a preoccupation of the field. A number of statistics have been developed (minimum number of individuals, relative fre quency, total number of fragments, bone weight), but be cause each method has significant biases, none has proved a panacea in estimating abundance. Concern witii quanti fication has stimulated concern with taphonomy, die study of processes that affect remains between deposition and re covery. As organic material, bone fragments are subject to attritional processes that tend not to affect lithics and ceram ics. Because of these taphonomic biases, the number of bones fragments found and referred to a species is not equivalent to the abundance of that species in the past. Fur thermore, because bones in and of themselves are rarely dat able directly either by species or morphology (the use of radiocarbon and other physiochemical techniques is prohib itively expensive and is tiius restricted to special finds), they must be dated by association witii other artifacts, usually pottery, Paleozoologists have found it necessary to distin guish sharply between the stratigraphic date of an archae ological deposit and the date based on its content. Quanti tative descriptions of paleozoological data are therefore presented as relative trends through time and space rather than absolute quantities for a given period. T h e cultural side of paleozoology targets the reconstruc tion of past socioeconomic systems. Information about the spatial patterning of bone remains, the relative abundance of different species, and the age of a species at death is eval uated with ethnographic and ethnohistorical data. These models have been applied at regional, site, and household
PALESTINE: Prehistoric Palestine levels. Study of modern pastoralists has shown that their management decisions are shaped by the degree of inter action they have with markets. Application of these princi ples to archaeological settings reveals how a community's interaction with its network of surrounding communities was constructed. For instance, at Iron Age Tel Dan in the Galilee in Israel, as the village grew to a city, predictable shifts occurred in the abundance of sheep and goats relative to cattle and in the manner of processing carcasses. At Early Iron Age Ai/Raddanah, in the central hill country of CisJor dan, the relative proportions and age at the slaughter of sheep and goats points to a much greater degree of market involvement than has been posited for a small village from this period. Larger forces are also visible. T h e paleozoological record at Tell Jemmeh in Israel's northern Negev desert and at Tel Miqne (Ekron in ancient Philistia) shows how Assyrian imperial demands for tribute and military provi sions severely dislocated local pastoral production systems in the Late Iron Age. Intrasite spatial variability of animal remains is also infor mative. Access to different resources is predicated on socio economic status and organization of the redistributive sys tem. With respect to animals, this often means that different species and even different parts of the same carcass are dis tributed to households and sectors of the community based on wealth, prestige, ritual status, or the degree of involve ment in pastoral production. Evidence from Tell el-Amarna in Egypt shows that pork was the mainstay of the diet of laborers during the New Kingdom period, while other ele ments of the society ate cattle, sheep, and a few goats. Fau nal remains from Elephantine in the Nile valley, Tell elHayyat in the Jordan Valley, and al-Hiba in southern Mesopotamia show that although pigs were eaten, remains of the animal are not found in temple complexes at those sites, whereas bones of other domesticates are. Spatial variability is visible within the household as well. T h e process of converting animal products to meals is called cuisine. Different stages in food preparation generate dis tinctive carcass debris. Ethnographically based models of the culinary process have, for example, been used to explain the variability in bone remains found in the various rooms of Byzantine houses at Qasrin in the Golan Heights. [See also Animal Husbandry; Camels; Cattle and Oxen; Equids; Ethnoarchaeology; Ethnobotany; Paleobotany; Pigs; and Sheep and Goats. In addition, with the exception of al-Hiba, all of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries^ BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, J o h n , a n d D o n Brothwell. Animal Diseases in Archaeology. N e w York, 1980. Best single source o n animal paleopathology. Chaplin, R a y m o n d E. The Study of Animal Bones from Archaeological Sites. N e w York, 1971. I m p o r t a n t early discussion of the m o d e r n field.
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Cornwall, Ian. Bones for the Archaeologist. L o n d o n , 1964. Classic intro duction in English to t h e field from a zoological perspective. Davis, Simon J. M . The Archaeology of Animals. N e w Haven, 1987. Global review of paleozoology. Grayson, D o n a l d K. Quantitative Zooarchaeology: Topics in the Analysis of Archaeological Faunas. O r l a n d o , Fla., 1984. T h o r o u g h examination of the problems associated with different quantitative methods. Hesse, Brian, and Paula W a p n i s h . Animal Bone Archaeology: From Ob jectives to Analysis. Washington, D . C . , 1985. Introduction to the methods of paleozoology focused o n the archaeology of the late pre historic and historic periods of the N e a r East. Hillson, Simon. Teeth. C a m b r i d g e , 1986. G u i d e to the identification of teeth a n d estimation of age from dental evidence. L y m a n , R. L e e . Vertebrate Taphonomy. C a m b r i d g e , 1984. Exhaustive review of the effects of burial and exposure processes on animal remains. W a p n i s h , Paula, a n d Brian Hesse. " F a u n a l Remains from T e l D a n : Perspectives o n Animal Production at a Village, Urban, and Rural C e n t e r . " ArchaeoZoologia 4.2 (1991): 9-86. Extensive treatment of the mediodology of reconstructing socioeconomic systems from p a leozoological data. B R I A N H E S S E and
PAULA W A P N I S H
PALESTINE. [This entry provides a broad survey of the history of Palestine as known primarily from archaeological dis coveries. It is chronologically divided into six articles: Prehistoric Palestine Palestine in the Bronze Age Palestine in the Iron Age Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods Palestine in the Byzantine Period Palestine in the Islamic Period In addition to the related articles on specific subregions and sites referred to in this entry, see also History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Israel]
Prehistoric Palestine The earliest occurrences of human artifacts, generally clas sified as Lower Paleolithic, were found at 'Ubeidiya in the central Jordan Valley. As the archaeological horizons were embedded within a sequence of lacustrine and fluvial de posits, most of the bone and lithic assemblages were recov ered from lake shores. T h e artifacts are characterized by high frequencies of core choppers, from which flakes were removed and used. Polyhedrons, spheroids, and a few handaxes form the rest of the assemblages. Most core choppers and polyhedrons were made of flint pebbles, spheroids were shaped from limestone, and handaxes were predominantly made of basalt but also from flint and limestone. The entire lithic sequence is attributed to the Early Acheulean and is considered to mark the move of Homo erectus out of Africa about 1 . 4 - 1 . 0 million years ago. [See 'Ubeidiya; Jordan Val ley.] Early hominids at 'Ubeidiya were probably both scaven gers and hunters. Their main sources of meat were hippo,
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horse, and deer. The natural accumulation of more titan one hundred different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mam mals indicates that the climate of the Jordan Valley was sim ilar to that of Israel's coastal plain today. Other Lower Paleolithic sites, all of which are classified as Middle or Upper Acheulean, are found in the Jordan Valley and on the coastal plain. Among these is 'Evron Quarry, a small site that contained some animal bones and an assem blage of a few large flint bifaces and small flakes, indicating that part of the assemblage was transported there. Gesher Benot Ya'aqob, on the banks of the Jordan River is known for its assemblages of lava-flake cleavers made in the African technique. Also found were the remains of large mammals, best correlated with Middle Pleistocene fauna that include elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, wild boar, and deer and two fragments of a human femora. The site overlies a lava flow dated by potassium/argon to 0.68 million years ago and is estimated to be around 0.6-0.5 million years old. Upper Acheulean occurrences, mostly collected from sur face scatters, were located throughout the region and at such cave sites as Tabun (Mt. Carmel) and U m m Qatafa (Wadi Khareitoun, Judean Desert). [SeeTabun.] The incorporated animal bones are often those of large-to-medium mammals, probably indicating the scavenging activities of humans. At several cave sites in the Levant the Upper Acheulean is overlain by the lithic industry known as the Mugharan or Acheulo-Yabrudian tradition. One facies of this entity con tains thick scrapers of various shapes, including canted and transverse forms (known as Yabrudian); the second, to gether with the scrapers, has varying frequencies of often small, oval, or pointed bifaces (called Acheulean); and the third is dominated by blades with a few bifaces and burins (named Amudian). T h e first two are the most common. The Acheulo-Yabrudian is found in the northern and cen tral Levant. Dating techniques based on the relative amount of uranium in artifacts and teeth known as T L and ESR suggest that this entity lasted from about 500,000/400,000 to 270,000/250,000 years ago. The fragmentary skull recovered in Zuttiyeh cave and a broken femur in Tabun cave are the only human remains. The Zuttiyeh skull is attributed to ar chaic Homo sapiens. The Acheulo-Yabrudian is overlaid by the Mousterian complex. T h e long sequence of tire Tabun cave enabled the general description of three types of lithic industries, mostly made through the use of various corereduction techniques. Often, other Mousterian assemblages are compared to those of the Tabun sequence: Tabun D type (earliest Mousterian): contains numerous elongated points and blades not always produced by the Levallois technique. T h e industry is more common in the Negev desert, southern Jordan, and the Syrian desert. Tabun C type: often dominated by radial and bidirectional core reduction, this assemblage resulted in large, oval flakes. Convergent flaking to produce Levallois points is quite rare.
Similar assemblages are known mainly from the coastal Le vant. Tabun B type: characterized by blanks removed from uni directional and convergent Levallois cores, this assemblage's short and broad points are common, as are side scrapers. The industry occurs in southern Jordan. Several human remains were recovered from burials at the Tabun, Skhul, Kebara, Qafzeh, and Amud caves. These fossils were considered to be West Asian Neanderthals (Ta bun, Kebara, Amud) and archaic Homo sapiens (Qafzeh, Skhul). One school views tire entire collection as represent ing the same population, while others see the Mediterranean Neanderthals as either emerging from local ancestors or as Southeast Europeans who migrated into the Levant with the onset of glacial conditions (115,000 or 75,000 years ago). [See Carmel Caves.] c
c
Mousterian people gathered plant foods and hunted ga zelles, fallow deer, and other animals. They opportunisti cally scavenged large animals such as wild oxen, rhinoceros, and hippo. Their tools reflect hide scraping, woodworking, and butchery. Levallois points bear the impact fractures of having been hafted as spear points. T h e use of red ocher and the collection of marine shells occur rarely. Hearths were rounded or oval; amorphous ashy deposits are com mon in well-preserved caves (e.g., Kebara). The transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is reflected in the lithic industries uncovered at Boqer Tahtit in the Negev and Ksar 'Akil in Lebanon. [See Ksar 'Akil] The changes demonstrate a transition in the core-reduction methods. Levallois points were removed with blades from bidirectional Upper Paleolithic, mostly prismatic cores. Later, unidirectional cores became the source for blades. The retouched pieces of the transitional industry (also named Emiran) are mainly Upper Paleolithic. Tool types include end scrapers—sometimes made on Lev allois blanks—blades, and flakes with a few Emireh points. The Ahmarian tradition in the lithic industry follows (38,000-20,000/18,000 B P ) . It is best documented in the N e gev, Sinai, and southern Jordan, as well as in a few layers in caves (e.g., Kebara), and is predominantly a blade industry. The Ahmarian sites are interpreted as the residuum of mo bile hunter-gatherers who hunted gazelle, fallow deer, roe deer, and ibex in semiarid areas. Several grinding tools in dicate a slow change in vegetal food processing to include ground substances in addition to ocher. Bone tools are quite rare, and the use of marine shells began in about 20,000 B P . T h e Levantine Aurignacian is only known from the north ern and central Levant. It is considered to be the archaeo logical expression of a social unit foreign to the Near East that arrived in the region and remained for some time be tween 32,000 and 27,000 B P . T h e Levantine Aurignacian A and B assemblages include carinated and nosed scrapers. Phase A is rich in blades, and phase B is dominated by flake
PALESTINE: Prehistoric Palestine production. Both contain el-Wad points and are often rich in a bone and antier industry. T w o incised slabs from Hayonim cave may represent artistic expressions. T h e following period (27,000-18,000 B P ) incorporates a series of assem blages that are not well dated. Several (previously named Levantine Aurignacian C) are rich in scrapers and burins. In one of the sites, Nahal 'Ein-Gev I, the flexed burial of a 30-35-year-old woman was uncovered. [See also 'Ein-Gev.] Other assemblages, called Late Ahmarian, are dominated by the production of blades and bladelets. Ohalo II, a water logged site radiocarbon dated to 19,000 B P , was discovered in Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). Excavations of this site exposed a series of hut bases with numerous lithics, a rich fauna assemblage including fish bones, and a wealth of plant remains. T h e Late Ahmarian heralds the onset of what is called the Kebaran cultural complex (c. 19,000/18,000-14,000 B P ) , in which the main changes in the lithic industries is in the form of the microlitirs. Nongeometrics such as the obliquely trun cated bladelets (Kebara points) give way to the elongated ttapeze rectangles that characterize the ensuing cultural complex, the Geometric Kebaran (c. 14,000-13,000/12,800 B P ) . Kebaran sites are generally small. A shallow base of a brush hut dug into sandy deposits some 5-7 m in diameter was found at 'Ein-Gev I. Repeated occupations resulted in the accumulation of flints and animal bones, including fal low deer and gazelle. A semiflexed burial of a thirty-thirtyfive-year-old woman was found under one of the levels in the hut. Mortar and several pestles were used in plant pro cessing. T h e only art object from this period was found at Urkan er-Rubb II in the lower Jordan Valley: a flat pebble with several incised series of a "ladder" pattern. The cold and dry climate during the Kebaran, known also as the Late Glacial Maximum, limited occupations to the woodland belt and margins of the steppic belt. Subsequent amelioration brought increased temperatures and precipi tation. This enabled the Geometric Kebaran groups to in habit many of the formerly arid areas and tempted groups from neighboring regions, such as the Mushabian, to pen etrate from northeast Africa. During this time period, most people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, and the larger sites are considered palimpsests of reoccupations. T h e consumption of seeds, grain, acorns, and nuts is best recorded in the use of pounding and grinding tools—mor tars, pestles, and mullers. Marine shells were brought mainly from the Mediterranean and occasionally from the Red Sea. Two burials with fragmentary skeletons were uncovered at Neveh David (Mt. Carmel), and others are known from the site of Kharraneh, near Azraq (Jordan). An abrupt climatic shift in about 13,000/12,800 B P , fol lowed by a rapid increase in annual precipitation, has been interpreted as either a " p u s h " or "pull" motivator in the disruption of the previous socioeconomic scenario. Several
209
groups, known as the Natufian culture, resolved the seasonal shortages by becoming sedentary. Large Natufian sites are about 2,000-5,000 sq m in area and contain rounded and oval houses, ('Ain Mallaha; Hayonim cave, Israel; the Ter race at Wadi Hammeh 27), burials, and rich lithic and bone industties. [See Hayonim.] T h e houses are often dug into the ground and have walls of undressed stone slanting to ward the interior, although in one large house at 'Ain Mal laha a series of postholes was uncovered. Most superstruc tures seem to have been made of organic materials. Natufian burials display various styles. Collective burials are more common in the Early Natufian, when positions are supine, semiflexed, and flexed, and skull removal is rare. T h e Late Natufian sites contain more single burials in flexed position. Grave goods indicate some possible intergroup so cial differentiation. Body decorations were made of bone and stone pendants, shell beads, commonly of Dentalium. Shell decorations appear on headgear, garments, and belts and were used in necklaces and bracelets. Human burials accompanied by dogs (as at 'Ain Mallaha) indicate canine domestication, as well as a change in religious beliefs. T h e skeletal remains indicate that the Natufians were generally healthy, with a life expectancy of thirty-two-thirty-five. Natufian stone tools include geometric microliths, such as lunates shaped by either Helwan or abrupt retouch. Also present are siclde blades, burins, perforators, and some elon gated picks. T h e production of small flakes and short bla delets as blanks for tools distinguishes the Natufian lithic industry from the former cultural complexes. The use of the microburin technique, with which oblique snaps are achieved, may reflect local traditions. Natufian artistic rep resentations include ungulate heads carved on siclde hafts; schematic limestone figurines that represent humans and animals; and zigzag and meander decorations incised or carved on domestic objects. Natufian sites also differ in their use of ornaments, such as bone beads, which are distinctive enough to indicate group identification. The Namfian econ omy was based on the intensive collection of cereals, which leads some scholars to suggest that the Natufians were the earliest farmers. [See Cereals.] However, plant remains are scarce as a result of poor site preservation. Mortars and pesties were used extensively, and the range of hunted game, collected reptiles, and trapped water fowl is wider than for any previous Epipaleolithic entity. Natufian subsistence strategy responded to the increase of basic group size and sedentism. The Harifian culture (c. 10,700-10,1000 B P ) in the Negev and Sinai is interpreted as a cultural adaptation of Late Na tufian to the dry and cold conditions of the Younger Dryas. (This brief cold and dry period is now recognized globally and considered the last cold spell of tire last glacial cycle.) Their small winter sites were dispersed in the lowlands while the larger summer-fall sites were in the highlands. The latter
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contain semisubterranean dwellings, mortars, pestles, grind ing stones, and slabs with numerous cup holes either inside the huts or around them. No plant remains were recovered. The lithic industry is dominated by lunates and the projectile the Harif point, among other numerous microliths. Gazelle, ibex, and hare were tire main game. The Early Neolithic period (10,300/10,000-8000/7800 BP) saw the emergence of small villages of farmers-hunters and later farmers-herders in a narrow Levantine corridor stretching from the Damascus basin through the Jordan Val ley to southern Transjordan. While agriculture as a subsis tence strategy expanded, the Lebanese mountains and the arid region remained the territories of hunter-gatherers who continued to interact with farming communities. [See Ag riculture.] The few known Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA; 10,3009,300/9,200 B P ) sites are found in the Jordan Valley. The early levels contain Khiamian assemblages, which include some microliths, perforators, burins, sickle blades, and ar rowheads, mostly of the el-Khiam type. T h e ensuing Sultanian industry includes axes/adzes and polished celts. Cul tural change is expressed in the range of site size from 2.5 ha (6 acres) to 100 sq m. Demographic estimates suggest a population of about 450 people for the PPNA site of Jericho. [See Demography; Jericho.] In front of Jericho's so-called town wall lies a 3.5-meter-wide shallow ditch dug into the chalky bedrock. Behind the wall, inside the settlement, is the well-known rounded tower (8.5 m high) with a small door and interior staircase. A few large and deep rounded struc tures built of mud bricks were exposed on the northern side of the tower (Kenyon, 1957). Many have interpreted the wall and tower as a defense system. An alternative is that the wall was built in response to the wetter conditions that pre vailed during the PPNA (as compared to the preceding mil lennium), in order to protect the village from flooding. T h e tower is seen as having accommodated a mud-brick shrine on top (Bar-Yosef, 1986). The houses were oval, their foun dations were dug into the ground, they were lined with stones, and their walls were built of plano-convex mud bricks. The roof was probably flat with wooden beams and woven-reed mats covered with mud. The mud floors also were covered with mats and tire hearths were shallow, paved basins. Burials were found in various places, including open spaces that were later built up. The burials were generally single, with the crania of adults removed. No grave goods were encountered at any of the sites. The PPNA lithic industry differs from tire Natufian by having much lower frequencies of microliths. Among the retouched pieces are small projectiles such as the el-Khiam point and others with small tangs. Perforators and burins are common; sickle blades are often plain and rarely have bifacial retouch. T h e group of axes/adzes with transverse
removal shaping the working edge includes chisels and picks. Polished celts made of basalt and limestone occur, while sickle blades and bifacial tools are missing from the desert sites. The art objects are rare and include small fig urines made of limestone or clay that depict seated females, a female with a string skirt, or kneeling females. T h e economy of the Sultanian villages was a mixture of cultivation of emmer wheat (on tire Damascus plain), bar ley, and legumes. Fruits and wild seeds were collected, in cluding figs, nuts, and acorns. Gazelle and foxes were the main game sources; fallow deer, bovids, and hare were ex ploited to a lesser extent; and trapping waterfowl was a sea sonal activity. Little is known about the health of the people although their skeletal remains resemble those of the Natufians. In some cases (Jericho) skull deformation was prac ticed in vivo. In the following period, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB; 9300/9200-7800/7500 B P ) climatic conditions con tinued to be favorable for farming communities in the Le vant, at least until 8000 B P . While most villages remained small, the maximum site size increased to 12 ha or 30 acres ('Ain Ghazal, Basta), reflecting a population increase evi dent in both the more lush areas of Palestine and in the desertic regions. [See Ain Ghazal; Basta.] T h e excavations at Beidha demonstrate that the building of rectangular houses is a local shift in the villages from round or polygonal buildings, where the roof was supported by wooden posts. [See Beidha.] T h e use of lime plaster on floors, as well as in storage facilities, is recorded from various sites. At 'Ain Ghazal preserved postholes demonstrate the use of timber; in the later phases of the site's history, the diminution of this resource is reflected in smaller enclosed spaces and fewer posts. c
PPNB burials are found under floors and in open spaces. Skulls of adults were removed and in a few sites nests of skulls were uncovered. Plastered skulls have been discovered at Jericho, Tel Ramad, 'Ain Ghazal, Beisamoun, and Kefar Hahoresh. At Nahal Hemar skulls modeled in asphalt were found. There is a general consensus that the special treat ment of the skulls provides evidence of an ancestor cult. Additional insights into domestic and cultic activities are gained from the numerous clay figurines representing preg nant females, males, and animals. A cache of human figu rines, stone masks, modeled skulls, and numerous domestic objects at Nahal Hemar indicates that ritual activities also encompassed special sites, perhaps marking territorial own ership. T h e PPNB lithic industry is characterized by blade re moval from bipolar cores that, in their more elaborate, elon gated form, are known as naviform cores, T h e punched blades were shaped into arrowheads, perforators, burins, or sickle blades or were used in their original shape. T h e ear liest types of arrowheads are Helwan point (with bilateral
PALESTINE: Prehistoric Palestine notches and a tang) and the Jericho point (with wings or clear-cut shoulders and a tang); later types are the Byblos point (leaf shaped with a tang) and 'Amuq point (leaf shaped). Sickle blades are either plain blades (which bear the luster resulting from the harvesting of cereals) or elon gated, tanged blades, often finely serrated; burins are com mon at many, but not all, sites. T h e group of bifacial tools including axe/adzes and celts also saw some changes through time. While at most early and middle PPNB sites the Tahunian (tranchet) types dom inate, there is a shift in the later P P N B to objects with a rounded retouched or polished worldng edge. These types seem to have been used to cut and work wood and some times as hoes. Imported raw materials such as obsidian, which first appeared in tire Late Natufian, are more frequent at some PPNB sites—although not necessarily at the large ones. Exotic raw materials include greenstone (serpentine, malachite, rosasite), from which beads and pendants were made. Marine shells were collected on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and distributed through the Levant. Cowries (Cyprea sp.) and Glycimerys. sp. were among the most common species. P P N B village economy was based on the cultivation of domesticated species of cereals and legumes and the contin uous collection of wild fruits and seeds. Hunting gazelles, roe deer, fallow deer, wild boar, and hare was supplemented in agricultural villages by the raising of goats and sheep. [See Sheep and Goats.] In the late stages of the PPNB new ob jects for domestic use were introduced. These products, known as white ware, were made of a mixture of ashes and plaster. T h e forms include bowls, open jars, and bowls on pedestals; most are known from northern Syria and rarely occur in Palestinian contexts. The collapse of the P P N B in the southern Levant mani fested either as a major break or an abrupt change in settle ment pattern. At the site of 'Ain Ghazal, where this phase is called P P N C , the lithic industry and mortuary practices changed. T h e main core-reduction strategy was based on the production of flakes and to a lesser extent of blades. T h e dominant tool types were the burin, with low frequencies of other formal tool types, including arrowheads. Finally, bur ials were less organized and lack evidence for skull removal. Speculations on the reasons behind the population shift in clude group aggression, salinization of fields, mortal epi demic, and the temptation to move to a positive environ ment. T h e Pottery Neolithic ( P N ) period is poorly known, mainly because of a major change in settlement patterns. This change is archaeologically attested in two ways: at strat ified sites, P N remains are found in numerous pits of various sizes that often penetrated and disturbed a wealth of P P N B rectangular buildings Gericho, Munhata, Beisamoun); and many new settlements were established either in the Jordan
211
Valley (Sha'ar ha-Golan) or along the coastal plain. [See Munhata; Sha'ar ha-Golan.] T h e invention of pottery and its introduction for domestic use took place first in the north ern Levant and later in Palestine. In Palestine, clay pots out number white-ware products; the common forms are sim ple: jars, cooldng pots, and bowls decorated first with chevron patterns and red paint and later with paint alone. The economy of this period was based on the cultivation of cereals and legumes, goat and sheep herding, and raising pigs in the more humid parts of the country and some cattle. [See Pigs; Cattle and Oxen.] T h e activities of pastoral no mads, who partially subsisted on herding goats, are reflected at numerous desertic sites. These groups continued to hunt and may have exchanged meat and other animal products for carbohydrates from the farming communities. [See Pas toral Nomadism.] Evidence of burials is rare but indicates a shift from the earlier pattern. One burial under a small cairn was exposed at Sha'ar ha-Golan, and single flexed and semiflexed burials were found at other sites. Further indications concerning belief systems are reflected in clay and stone figurines. T h e Yarmukian culture is renown for its seated female clay fig urines with tall headgear, masks, and exposed breasts. Tem ples or shrines are as yet unknown from the more sedentary sites, occurring mainly at such desertic sites as at Biq'at 'Uvda. The distribution of the P N sites in Palestine documents a settlement pattern that was based on cultivation and herding with seasonal mobility. T h e investment in the more per manent sites seems to have been less than in the PPNB pe riod and probably points to a less regular pattern of mobility. This might reflect the unstable climatic conditions that, by the mid-Holocene, were changing from a stable pattern of precipitation to one resembling the modern, less predictable pattern. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arensburg, Baruch, a n d Ofer Bar-Yosef, eds. Moshe Stekelis Memorial Volume. Eretz-Israel, vol. 13. Jerusalem, 1977. Arensburg, Baruch, L . A., Schepartz, A. M , Tillier, Bernard Vandermeersch, a n d Y. RaU. " A Reappraisal of t h e Anatomical Basis for Speech in Middle Palaeolithic H o m i n d s . " American Journal of Phys ical Anthropology 83 (1990): 137-146. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "Prehistory of the L e v a n t . " Annual Review of Anthro pology 9 (1980): 101-133. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. " T h e Walls of Jericho: A n Alternative Interpretation." Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 157-162. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, a n d B e r n a r d Vandermeersch, eds. Investigations in South Ijevantine Prehistory. British Archaeological Reports, Interna tional Series, n o . 497. Oxford, 1989. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, a n d Francois R. Valla, eds. The Natufian Culture in the Levant. A n n Arbor, M i c h . , 1991. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, a n d A n n a Belfer-Cohen. " F r o m Foraging to F a r m i n g in the M e d i t e r r a n e a n L e v a n t . " I n Transitions to Agriculture in Pre history, edited by A n n e Birgitte G e b a u e r a n d T . Douglas Price, p p . 21-48. M a d i s o n , Wis., 1992.
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Bar-Yosef, Ofer. " T h e Role of Western Asia in M o d e r n H u m a n O r igins." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series 337 (1992): 193-200. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Bernard Vandermeersch, eds. Le Squelelte Mousterien de Kibara 2. Paris, 1992. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and N a ' a m a Goren-Inbar. The Lithic Assemblages of ' Ubeidiya: A Lower Palaeolithic Site in the Jordan Valley. Q e d e m , vol. 34. Jerusalem, 1993. Garrod, Dorothy A. E., and Dorothea M . A. Bate. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: Excavations at the Wady al-Mughara. Oxford, 1937. G o p h e r , Avi. The Flint Assemblages of Munhata. Paris, 1989. G o p h e r , Avi and R a m G o p h n a . "Cultures of the Eighth and Seventh Millennium B P in Southern Levant: A Review for the 1990's." Jour nal of World Prehistory (1993): 297-351. Goren-Inbar, N a ' a m a . Quneitra:A Mousterian Site on the Golan Heights. Qedem, vol. 31. Jerusalem, 1990. Goren-Inbar, N a ' a m a . " T h e Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov: An African or Asian Entity?" In The Evolution and Dispersal of Mod ern Humans in Asia, edited by T . Akazawa, K. Aoki, and T . K i m u r a , p p . 67-82. T o k y o , 1992, Goring-Morris, A. Nigel. At the Edge: Terminal Pleistocene Hunter-Gath erers in the Negev and Sinai. 2 vols. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 361. Oxford, 1987. Goring-Morris, A. N . " T h e Harifian of the Southern Levant." In The Natufian Culture in the I^evant, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and F r a n cois R. Valla, p p . 173-216. International M o n o g r a p h s in Prehistory. A n n Arbor, 1991. Henry, Donald O . " T h e Prehistory a n d Paleoenvironments of Jordan: An Overview." Paleorienl 12.2 (1986): 5-26. Henry, Donald O. From Foraging to Agriculture: The Levant at the End of the Ice Age. Philadelphia, 1989. Horowitz, Aharon. The Quaternary of Israel. N e w York, 1979. Howell, F. C. " U p p e r Pleistocene Stratigraphy a n d Early M a n in the Levant." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 1-65. Kenyon, Kathleen M . Digging Up Jericho. L o n d o n , 1957. Levy, T h o m a s . The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. L o n d o n , 1994. Marks, A. E., ed. Prehistory and Paleoenvironments in the Central Negev, Israel. 3 vols. Dallas, 1976-1983. Marks, A. E. " T h e Early U p p e r Paleolithic: the View from the L e v a n t . " In Before Lascaux: The Complete Record of the Early Upper Paleolithic, edited by H . Knecht, A. Pike-Tay, and R. White, p p . 5-22. Boca Raton, 1993. Neuville, Rene. I^e Paleolithique et le Mesolithique du desert de Judee. Archives de l'Institut de Paleontologie H u m a i n e , M e m o i r e 24. Paris, 1951. Perrot, Jean. " L a prehistoire palestinienne." In Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 8, cols. 286-446. Paris, 1972. Perrot, Jean, and D . Ladiray. Les Homines de Mallaha (Eynan) Israel. Paris, 1988. Rak, Y. and Baruch Arensburg. "Kebara 2 Neanderthal Pelvis: First L o o k at a Complete Intel." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 73 (1987): 227-231. Ronen, Avraham, ed. The Transition from Lower to Middle Palaeolithic and the Origin of Modern Man. British Archaeological Reports, In ternational Series, n o . 151. Oxford, 1982. Ronen, Avraham. Sefunim Prehistoric Sites, Mount Carmel, Israel. British International Reports, International Series, no. 230. Oxford, 1984, Ronen, Avraham. " T h e Lower Palaeolithic Site Evron-Quarry in West ern Galilee, Israel." In Festschrift Karl Brunnacker, edited by Wolf gang Boenigk and W , Tillmanns, p p . 187-212, Cologne, 1991. T c h e r n o v , Eitan, ed. Les mammiferes du pleistocene inferieur de la Vallee
du Jourdain a Oubeidiyeh. M e m o i r e s et T r a v a u x du Centre de R e cherche Prehistoriques Francais de Jerusalem, no. 5. Paris, 1986. T c h e r n o v , Eitan. " T h e Effects of Sedentism on the Exploitation of the Environment in the Southern L e v a n t . " In Exploitation des animaux sauvages a travers le temps, edited by J. Desse and F . A u d o i n - R o u z eau, p p . 137-159. Juan-des-Pines, 1993. T c h e r n o v , Eitan. An Early Neolithic Village in the Jordan Valley II: The Fauna of Netiv Hagdud. American School of Prehistoric Research Bulletin, n o . 44. C a m b r i d g e , 1994. Tillier, A. M . " T h e Origins of M o d e r n H u m a n s in Southwest Asia: Ontogenetic Aspects." In The Evolution and Dispersal of Modern Hu mans in Asia, edited by T . Akazawa, K. Aoki, a n d T . K i m u r a , p p . 15-28. T o k y o , 1992. Tillier, A.-M. "Les h o m m e s d u Paleolithique m o y e n et la question de l'anciennete de l ' h o m m e m o d e r n e en Afrique." Archeo-Nil2 (1992): 59-69. Trinkaus, E. "Morphological Contrasts between the N e a r Eastern Qafzeh-Skhul a n d Late Archaic H u m a n Samples: G r o u n d s for Behav ioral Difference?" I n The Evolution and Dispersal of Modem Humans in Asia, edited by T . Akazawa, K. Aoki, and T . K i m u r a , p p . 277294. T o k y o , 1992. Valla, Francois R. Les industries de silex de Mallaha (Eynan) el du Nalouften dans le I^evant. M e m o i r e s et T r a v a u x d u Centre de R e c h e r c h e Prehistoriques Francais de Jerusalem, n o . 3. Paris, 1984. Vandermeersch, Bernard. Les hommes fossiles de Qafzeh (Israel). Paris, 1981. Vandermeersch, Bernard. " T h e N e a r Eastern H o m i n i d s a n d tire O r igins of M o d e r n H u m a n s in Eurasia." In The Evolution and Dispersal of Modem Humans in Asia, edited by T . Akazawa, K. Aoki, a n d T . K i m u r a , p p . 29-38. T o k y o , 1992. Wendorf, F r e d , and A . E. M a r k s , eds. Problems in Prehistory: North Africa and the Levant. Dallas, 1975. OFER
BAR-YOSEF
Palestine in the Bronze Age T h e period between about 3500 and 1200 B C E in the south ern Levant is termed the Bronze Age and is divided into Early, Middle, and Late periods. These in turn are further divided into numbered and lettered subphases. T h e division of the Bronze Age into three parts was intended to reflect larger contours of sociopolitical, political, and historical de velopment, although transitions continue to be regarded dif ferently. T h e scholarly literature is replete with periodizations and dating schemes that supplement, contradict, and supersede one another, creating a confusing picture. They are, however, important because they manifest the changing perceptions of internal development during tire Bronze Age and the synchronization of the relative chronology of tire southern Levant with the more securely fixed chronologies of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Early Bronze Age. With the end of the Chalcolithic pe riod, in about 3500 B C E , the Early Bronze Age began. T h e former was a village, agropastoral society witii strongly de veloped craft specialization in copper, ivory, and ceramics and elaborate religious iconography. The reasons for its col lapse remain unclear, although climate change may have been involved.
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Bronze Age T h e EB I contains two phases and dates from about 3500 to 3100 B C E . Its early phase is characterized by small settle ments with curvilinear architecture, as at Yiftahel, 'EinShadud, and Tel Teo. Some sites, such as Tell esh-Shuna in the central Jordan Valley, were occupied in both the Chal colithic and EB I periods, although it is unclear whether oc cupation was continuous. Jawa, in Jordan's Black Desert, also straddles the boundary between the Chalcolithic and EB I. T h e earliest EB I phase is poorly represented in the south, with remains such as pit dwellings at Tell el-Hesi and cave dwellings on the Halif terrace. Wadi Gaza site H is an im portant site, with imported Egyptian ceramics and artifacts. Its copper artifacts originated at the Feinan mines in south ern Transjordan. Egyptian material reflects an interest in the resources of the southern coastal plain and the northern N e gev desert. The early EB I witnessed settlement in the south ern Levant, suggesting individual domestic units with little integration or cooperation, such as village planning or social storage. Large villages developed late in EB I in both the north and south. Some sites, such as Beth-Yerah, Tell esh-Shuna (North), Tel 'Erani, and Beth-Shean, reached 20 or 25 ha (49 or 62 acres) although their internal layout remains un clear. The overall number of sites increased, especially in the Galilee, Jordan Valley, and Transjordanian highlands. T h e first unequivocal temples appeared at Megiddo, Jeri cho, Ai, and Hartuv—the last incorporating a previously freestanding row of standing stones into the wall of a struc ture. In the Negev and Sinai there was an increasing ten dency toward sedentarization that peaked in EB II. Egyptian material culture is accompanied by Egyptian architecture, such as the "residency" at the site of 'Ein-Besor and a large building at Tel 'Erani. T h e Egyptian presence is organized as an official mission, demonstrated by the seal impressions bearing the names of dynasty-"zero" and first-dynasty kings found at 'Ein-Besor. A network of sites provisioned the ad ministrative center at 'Ein-Besor and associated outposts, such as Tel Malhata and the Halif terrace. Tel 'Erani and Beth-Shemesh are important examples of large sites where Egyptians lived alongside the local population. Rectilinear architectitre predominates at late EB I sites. T h e new architectural units accommodated larger numbers of residents and were formed into larger blocks, indicating higher levels of cooperation and leadership. Beyond tem ples, little social architecture is known, save for a few sites like Tell Shalem that may have had fortification walls. There is little evidence of social or political institutions outside ex tended kinship ties. Temples and fortifications indicate higher levels of organization, however. T h e EB II (c. 3100-2700 BCE) was the first "urban" period in the southern Levant. Urban.structures—public architec ture such as fortifications, gates, and water systems—and urban institutions—"temples" and political institutions—
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emerge for the first time. A dichotomy between urban and rural segments of society develops, with urban sites con trolling the growing international trade. The process of "ur banization" is unclear, given the limited internal chronolog ical resolution available. T h e transition to urbanism was made on a site or regional basis. Some planned sites, such as Arad, were constructed above small, preexisting EB I communities; others, such as Tel Yarmut, became fortified later in EB II or in EB III. The EB II settlement landscape shows a decrease in the number of sites and the emergence of size classes, as urban centers dominated rural hinterlands. T h e increased settle ment in the Negev and Sinai is associated by some scholars with the copper trade from southern Sinai controlled by Arad. More likely this was in response to the general social and economic conditions created by urbanism in tire Med iterranean core civilizations. Egyptian settlements on the southern coastal plain disappeared at the end of EB I. A trade relationship with Egypt developed instead, the primary evidence being southern Levantine jars and jugs in Egyptian contexts, so-called Abydos wares. T h e goods involved in this trade remain obscure, but Mediterranean olive crops and grape products in particular may be suspected. Production of Mediterranean crops and containers may have been the basis for elite socioeconomic power during EBII. Fortifications are the best-known aspect of EB II archi tecture and were comprised of wall, gate, and tower systems. More than three-dozen fortified sites developed during the course of the period, including Ai, Arad, Tell el-Far ah (North), Beth-Yerah, and Aphek. Other social architecture includes administrative buildings whose functions are un clear. "Palaces" have been claimed at Arad and Megiddo but lack unequivocal evidence of being elite residences. Re ligious architecture is better known, with temples found at Ai, Beth-Yerah, Megiddo, and Arad. EB II domestic archi tecture is based around the broadroom module, the "Arad house," and its variants. Modules are linked with subsidiary structures into compounds, suggesting extended household groups, and also into urban blocks separated by streets. T h e architectural evidence suggests only weakly developed po litical institutions during EB II. Economically powerful kin or domestic groups may have been the source of EB II urban planning and civic authority. The transition from EB II to III is unclear. Ceramic cri teria marlcing this transition were regional, notably the ap pearance of Khirbet Kerak or Red-Black Burnished Wares in the north and the disappearance of the EB II assemblage known at Arad in the south. The EB III was a period of hypercentralization in the southern Levant. Surveys suggest that the rural component of society was absorbed into urban sites at the beginning of EB III. Many important EB II urban sites did not continue into EB III, including Tell ei-Far ah c
c
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PALESTINE: Palestine in the Bronze Age
(North), Aphek, and Arad. New fortified sites were also founded in Judah and the Shephelah and on the coastal plain, such as Tell Beit Mirsim, Tell Poran, and Tell Nagila. The settlement landscape of the arid zones also changed significantly, with a sharp decline in the number of sites. Remaining sites become physically larger and were en hanced with fortification systems, with the best examples being Tel Yarmut and Ai. These defenses suggest that so ciety had become more competitive and more violent after about 2700 B C E , and that the ability of urban institutions to mobilize labor was greater than before. Another feature of the urban landscape was the appearance of new urban in stitutions, notably temples and possibly "palaces." The sim ilarities of temples at Megiddo and Khirbet Zeraqun, com prised of circular altars surrounded by rectangular buildings, suggest a common model. Tel Yarmut provides the best example of a complex or an insula. It is enclosed by a te menos wall and contains large structures and production facilities, interpreted by the excavators as the remains of a palace. The Building with Circles at Beth-Yerah, probably a public granary, also indicates administered redistribution or social storage. During EB III social, political, economic, and religious power were highly centralized at increasingly large urban sites, and rural social institutions and settlements declined correspondingly. Traditionally ascribed to invading "Amorites," and more recently to climatic fluctuations, the end of EB III has been reinterpreted, particularly as details of the EB IV period be come better known. [See Amorites.] Some evidence suggests a long-term trend toward desiccation; tire EB II and III re liance of urban sites on specialized agricultural production of Mediterranean crops would have made sites vulnerable to climatic change. The abandonment of EB III urban sites is not precisely dated but took place over a long period. Sup porting this is the continuation during EB IV of a remnant form of urbanism at lightly fortified sites located on the east ern side of the Dead Sea, such as Khirbet Iskander, Tell Iktanu, and Ader. With village-level occupations in the Mediterranean core, including at formerly urban sites, this may be evidence of less catastrophic collapse than once pos tulated. The EB IV period began in about 2300 BCE. Once a "dark age" in the settlement history of the southern Levant—at tributed to an influx of Semitic speakers from the north— collapse processes now appear to have been largely internal. The EB IV is also described as a pastoral-nomadic interlude, with cities abandoned and settlement shifting back into arid zones. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] There was a tremendous increase in settlement in arid regions, but the village com ponent of society was also becoming better known. Most urban tell sites were abandoned, but at many of them (e.g., Megiddo, Hazor, Beth-Shean, Jericho) damaged remains of EB IV village occupations have been found. The discovery of villages such as Nahal Rephaim outside of Jerusalem,
Nahal Alexander on the coastal plain, and Sha'ar ha-Golan in the Jordan Valley indicate that sedentary agricultural set tlement and production were reconstituted in EB IV. Sites in the arid zones (Be'er Resisim, Ein-Ziq) reflect a mobile component of society emphasizing pastoral production— possibly malting rounds between the central hill country and perhaps even occupying larger sites in the Negev highlands year-round. Among the best-known features of the EB IV are the mas sive cemeteries, often consisting of hundreds or thousands of shaft tombs dug into bedrock, such as Jebel Qa'aqir near Hebron and 'Ain es-Samiyeh in Samaria. [See Tombs.] These cemeteries were used for disarticulated, secondary burials and were reopened when necessary by kin or ex tended family groups on their seasonal return to the central hills and by agriculturalists residing in nearby villages. Site plans suggest that at arid-zone sites kinship organization was reasserted as the primary form of production and authority, with headmen leading extended domestic groups. c
In the Early Bronze Age, the southern Levant was gen erally a social and cultural backwater. T h e EB IV period is the height of literate, urban society in Syria, however, with sites like Ebla exerting sociopolitical and economic hege mony over large areas. Akkadian and Ur III interest in Syria had no impact on the southern Levant. Relations with inland Syria and the northern Levant are only attested by the ap pearance of true tin-bronze and by caliciform ceramic wares, typical at inland Syrian sites such as Hama and Ebla. Middle B r o n z e Age. T h e urban climax of the Bronze Age in the southern Levant took place in the Middle Bronze Age. Renewed urbanism, based on a Syrian model—emu lating its material culture, architecture, and perhaps social organization and literacy—is an example of secondary state reformation of sufficient strength and integration to have controlled Lower Egypt for more than a century during the "Hyksos" period. For the first time, sites in the southern Levant were attested in Syrian and Mesopotamian docu ments, and Egyptian evidence indicates a higher level of de velopment and interaction than the fragmentary and cryptic references from the third millennium. T h e Middle Bronze Age remains paradoxical because it is difficult to explain the wholesale adoption of Syrian and northern Levantine cul tural patterns in the south. Scholars have suggested the in flux of one or more waves of migrating or conquering Am orites, but this no longer appears to be an adequate explanation. A series of factors that led to reurbanization on a Syrian model can be enumerated: the migration of both fellow Semitic-speaking and Hurrian groups from north to south, local elites anxious to emulate foreign practices, and generally higher levels of economic interaction with Syria and with a newly reorganized Egypt. T h e M B I began after 2000 B C E , and major shifts are ev ident in the settlement landscape. Village sites occupied dur ing EB IV disappeared on the coastal plain and in the Jordan
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Bronze Age Valley and the central hills country. T h e remnant urbanism on the eastern side of the Dead Sea also disappeared. Fi nally, settlement disappeared from the arid zones, and there is no evidence of M B occupation or utilization of the Negev and Sinai. A number of urban tell sites on the coastal plain and inland valleys were occupied in M B I (Tell Poleg, Tel Aphek, Tell Burga) and were fortified with characteristic wall and glacis or rampart systems early in the period. Far ther inland, however, sites such as Shechem and Tel D a n were not fortified until later. While reurbanization spread quickly, those sites located on trade routes leading from Syria to Egypt were the first to fortify and assume fully ur ban status. Surveys also indicate many small villages and campsites, especially on the coastal plain. M B pottery was largely derived from contemporary Syria. Only a few forms may have evolved from EB IV prototypes, such as platter bowls and small burnished juglets. Pottery was made on a fast wheel, with centrifugal force allowing the production of thinner and finer vessels than had been possible with the slow wheel or tournette during the third millennium. Bronze was used exclusively for tools and weapons, and texts indicate the shipment of tin from Mari to Hazor and Dan. Art objects include carved bone and ivory, ceramic and metal figurines, and cylinder seals, all similar to Syrian types. [See Seals.] Akkadian cuneiform writing is also found for the first time, indicating that ruling elites were literate, in communication with, and part of the cultural sphere of Syria and Mesopotamia. [See Literacy.] Contemporary Egyptian documents, in particular the story of Sinuhe and the Execration texts, reflect the development of sociopolitical organization. Sinuhe was an Egyptian offi cial who fled to the southern Levant shortly after 2000 B C E and who describes a mobile lifestyle. T h e earlier set of Ex ecration texts lists the names of several leaders in association with each site, indicating that political authority was not cen tered around individual rulers. Later Execration texts list only one person's name in association with individual sites. T h e MB II and III periods represent the peak of urban development in the second millennium B C E . There was widespread settlement in the central hill country during M B II, as third-millennium tells were reoccupied and new lo cations settled. This settlement wave produced many forti fied sites, some of which were cities and others fortresses or redoubts. Settlement geography suggests an increasingly competitive political landscape, perhaps as lowland elites fis sioned and established their own sites. Like those of the EB III, fortification systems of the M B II and III were progres sively enlarged by the addition of walls and ramparts. This style of fortification is characteristic of contemporary Syrian sites (Qatna, Ebla). Fortifications became so large they cre ated the characteristic bowl shape of many large tells. T h e most important M B II and III urban centers include Hazor, Shechem, and Megiddo. During this period Hazor reached its maximum extent of more than 80 ha (198 acres),
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and is the only site whose size rivals those in Syria. Complex internal organization also appears during this period, sug gesting a variety of social institutions. At M B III Megiddo and Shechem there were large, fortified migdal temple struc tures—long rooms with an altar at one end and surrounded by thick walls. Smaller temples are known from such M B rural sites as Tell el-Hayyat, Tel Kitan, Nahariya, and Giv'at-Sharett. Curiously, M B II sites such as Megiddo and Shechem do not appear to have temples, suggesting that religious institutions waned temporarily; individualizing forms of worship, especially the veneration of ancestors bur ied below house floors, took precedence. T h e palaces at Tel Aphek, Megiddo, and Tel Sera' often adjoined temples and were complexes of rooms arrayed around large central courtyards. The examples from Tel Kabri are especially elaborate, with decorated plaster floors and Aegean-style wall paintings. [See Wall Paintings.] Urban planning is pres ent during the Middle Bronze Age, as seen by the erection of fortification and gate systems and adjacent plazas and streets. M B domestic architecture at both rural and urban sites consisted of rectilinear courtyard houses, indicating ag ricultural and pastoral production by domestic units. Larger structures included more elaborate courtyard houses, sug gesting class or wealth distinctions, and palaces. The archi tectural evidence reflects significant stratification and polit ical authority not easily discerned in third-millennium evidence. During MB II and III, sites with southern Levantine ma terial culture, including Tell ed-Dab'a, the Hyksos capital of Avaris, Tell el-Yahudiyeh, and Tell el-Maskhuta, flour ished in the Nile Delta. Hyksos, an Egyptian term meaning "foreign rulers," were southern Levantine elites who had been in Egypt since the end of the third millennium, having come to power during a period of Egyptian weakness. Hyk sos sites are known for their rampart fortifications and, at Tell ed-Dab'a, temples and equid burials, suggesting a mil itary elite. Egyptian sources indicate that the Hyksos fif teenth dynasty ruled Egypt for more than a century and were eventually expelled in about 1540-1525 BCE by Ahmose I of the eighteenth dynasty. T h e Egyptians destroyed the Hyksos Delta sites and those on the southern coastal plain, in particular Tell el-'Ajjul (probably the Hyksos capital, Sharuhen) and then exacted revenge on sites farther north. The complex series of destructions makes it difficult to un derstand the interval between the expulsion of the Hyksos and a renewed series of campaigns by Thutmosis III that marked the beginning of Egyptian imperial domination. [See Hyksos.] Late B r o n z e Age. T h o u g h the height of international ism, the Late Bronze Age was much diminished by Egyptian vengeance and then domination. T h e period represents an extreme concentration of wealth and power in the urban elites, at the expense of all other segments of society. It is difficult to determine archaeologically when the Late Bronze
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PALESTINE: Palestine in the Bronze Age
Age began. The final destruction of the Hyksos in about 1525 BCE by Ahmose is a historical turning point. T h e cam paigns of kings of the eighteenth dynasty, beginning with Thutmosis III (c. 1457 B C E ) , mark the beginning of aggres sive efforts to dominate western Asia. The period from about 1450 to 1300 B C E , corresponding in part to the "Amarna age," saw Egyptians periodically moving north through the southern Levant on campaigns into Syria. T h e Amarna archive reflects conflict and intrigue among petty city-states of the southern Levant and their Egyptian over lords. [See Amarna Tablets.] After 1300 B C E , rulers of the nineteenth dynasty moved to control the soutitern Levant directly, engaging in conflict with the Hittites over bound aries between their respective empires. By 1225 BCE, the Hit tites were no longer a threat. The kings of the twentieth dynasty were then forced to engage the "Sea Peoples" in battle, perhaps even in the Nile Delta itself. Egyptian control over the southern Levant declined swiftly after 1225 B C E and ended soon after, bringing the Late Bronze Age to a close. A few sites escaped the initial Egyptian destructions at the end of MB III, and many others exhibit a gap in occupation until about 1450 B C E . Other decisive changes suggest that LB society never fully recovered. Few, if any, LB sites are fortified, and virtually the entire rural component of society disappeared. The disposition of the rural component is a major outstanding question for scholars. One suggestion is that they became mobile pastoralists who have thus far been invisible to archaeologists. Some recovery of urban society occurred after 1400 B C E , with much-reduced settlements lodged within the areas configured by MB fortifications. MB material culture continued, albeit increasingly impoverished in style and execution. LB pottery styles were derived di rectly from MB types; only minor decorations and Egyp tian-influenced shapes were new. Imported pottery from Cyprus and the Aegean constituted the fine ware of the pe riod. Bronze metallurgy continued, with copper imported from Cyprus and tin probably from southern Anatolia. Many MB institutional features continued into the Late Bronze Age. Temples are well attested, with multiple ex amples found atHazor, Megiddo, Beth-Shean, and Lachish. Some include Egyptian elements, reflecting the deep Egyp tian cultural influence, but more generally they reflect Syrian design and practice. Temples were elaborate, often tripartite in design, and decorated with carved orthostats and statues of deities. Palaces were separated from temples (such as the long series at Megiddo) and consisted of rooms around a central courtyard. Numerous imports and luxury goods, such as carved ivories, indicate the wealth of the ruling elites. Cuneiform literacy is attested by the Amarna archives and by a few tablet finds. A number of other elite residential complexes are known (e.g., at Ashdod, Tell el- Ajjul, Tell Beit Mirsim), consisting of multiple rooms around court yards. A final type of elite structure was the square brick Egyptian "governor's residence," found after 1300 BCE at c
Tell Jemmeh, Tel Sera', Beth-Shean, and possibly Tell esSa'idiyeh. T h e variety of elite structures indicates the growth of institutional power during the Late Bronze Age. Domes tic architecture is more poorly known and again consisted of courtyard houses. At urban sites, domestic architecture and planning were placed between palace and temple pre cincts. While culturally much diminished from the Middle Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age did see a number of in novations that set the stage for important later develop ments. Akkadian cuneiform remained the primary writing form, but the alphabet was also being pioneered. T h e ProtoSinaitic or Proto-Canaanite script, parent to the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets, is found on a small number of in scriptions, mostly votives, and varied in the number of let ters and direction. [See Proto-Canaanite.] A small number of inscriptions in the simplified cuneiform alphabet used at Ugarit are also found. T h e plastic arts, such as ivory and seal carving, were influenced by both Egyptian and Syrian styles, reflecting an international exchange of ideas and ar tisans. International trade reached its zenith, with a range of goods (metals, foodstuffs, wines, oils, art objects) and arti sans moving across western Asia and the eastern Mediter ranean. The ability of the southern Levant to participate in this trade, despite its diminished state, reflects the concenttation of wealth and power. T h e breakdown of LB society came swiftly. Tied to both the Egyptian Empire and the international economy, the southern Levant was pulled down along with the rest of western Asia after 1200 B C E . With the collapse of the Egyp tian and Hittite Empires for internal reasons and the ap pearance of the Sea Peoples as a threat to parts of the eastern Mediterranean, including the coast of the southern Levant, the city-state structure of the southern Levant also col lapsed. Some sites, such as Megiddo, persisted as indepen dent city-states after 1200 B C E , while others were destroyed in internecine warfare. T h e subsequent Iron Age, while con tinuing certain aspects of Bronze Age material culture, such as its ceramic styles, was marked by new technologies and an entirely new sociopolitical and ethnic configuration, no tably the rise of national states. [See also Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages; Palace; and Temples, article on SyroPalestinian Temples. In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Early Bronze Age Amiran, Ruth. " T h e Transition from the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze A g e . " In Biblical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984, edited by Ja net Amitai, p p . 108-112. Jerusalem, 1985. Ben-Tor, Amnon. " T h e Relations between Egypt and t h e L a n d of C a -
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Iron Age naan during t h e T h i r d Millennium B . C . " Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 3-18. B e n - T o r , A m n o n . " T h e T r a d e Relations of Palestine in t h e Early Bronze A g e . " Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 29 (1986): 1-27. B e n - T o r , A m n o n . " N e w Light on t h e Relations between Egypt and Southern Palestine during die Early Bronze A g e . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 281 (1991): 3-10. Esse, Douglas. "Secondary State F o r m a t i o n a n d Collapse in Early B r o n z e Age Palestine." In L'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emmails, 20-24 oclobre 1986, edited by Pierre de M i r o s chedji, p p . 81-96. British Archaeological Reports, International S e ries, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Esse, Douglas. Subsistence, Trade, and Social Change in Early Bronze Age Palestine. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, n o . 50. C h i cago, 1991. G o p h n a , R a m . " T h e Settlement L a n d s c a p e of Palestine in the Early Bronze A g e II—III a n d Middle Bronze Age I I . " Israel Exploration Journal^ (1984): 24-31. G o p h n a , R a m . " T h e Contacts between ' E n Besor Oasis, Soudiern C a naan, and E g y p t during t h e L a t e Predynastic a n d t h e T h r e s h o l d of the First Dynasty: A Furtiter Assessment." In The Nile Delta in Tran sition: Fourth-Third Millennium B.C., edited by Edwin C. M . van d e n Brink, p p . 385-394. T e l Aviv, 1992. Joffe, Alexander H . Settlement and Society in the Early Bronze I and If Southern Levant: Complementarity and Contradiction in a Small-Scale Complex Society. Sheffield, 1993. W a r d , William A. "Early Contacts between Egypt, C a n a a n , and Sinai: Remarks on t h e P a p e r by A m n o n B e n - T o r . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 281 (1991): 11-26. Middle Bronze Age Bienkowski, Piotr. " T h e Division of Middle Bronze IIB-C in Pales t i n e . " Ijivant 21 (1989): 169-179. Broshi, M a g e n , a n d R a m G o p h n a . " M i d d l e Bronze Age II Palestine: Its Settlements a n d Population." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 261 (1986): 73-90. Dever, William G. " T h e M i d d l e Bronze Age: T h e Zeniui of the U r b a n Canaanite E r a . " Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987): 148-177. Dever, William G. "Hyksos, Egyptian Destructions, a n d the E n d of the Palestinian Middle Bronze A g e . " Levant 22 (1990): 75-81, Dever, William G . " T h e Chronology of Syria-Palestine in t h e Second Millennium B.C.E.: A Review of C u r r e n t Issues." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 288 (1992): 1-25. Finkelstein, Israel. " M i d d l e Bronze A g e 'Fortifications': A Reflection of Social Organization a n d Political F o r m a t i o n s . " Tel Aviv 19.2 (1992): 201-220. Gerstenblith, Patty. The Levant at the Beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Series, n o . 5. C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1983. Hoffmeier, J. K. "Reconsidering E g y p t ' s Part in t h e Termination of the M i d d l e Bronze Age in Palestine." Levant 21 (1989): 181-193. Kochavi, M o s h e , et al. "Aphek-Antipatris, T e l Poleg, T e l Zeror, a n d T e l Burga: F o u r Fortified Sites of t h e Middle Bronze IIA in t h e Sharon Plain." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 95 (1979): 121-165. Weinstein, James M . "Egyptian Relations with Palestine in t h e M i d d l e K i n g d o m . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 217 (1975): 1-16. Weinstein, James M . " T h e Chronology of Palestine in die Early S e c o n d Millennium B . C . E . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, n o . 288 (1992): 27-46.
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Late Bronze Age Ahituv, Shmuel. " E c o n o m i c Factors in t h e Egyptian Conquest of C a n a a n . " Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978): 93-105. Dever, William G. " T h e L a t e Bronze-Early Iron I Horizon in SyriaPalestine: Egyptians, Canaanites, 'Sea Peoples,' and Proto-Israelites." In The Crisis Years: The Twelfth Century B.C., from beyond the Danube to the Tigris, edited by William A. W a r d a n d Martha Sharp Joukowsky, p p . 99-110. D u b u q u e , 1992. Finkelstein, Israel. " T h e E m e r g e n c e of Israel: A Phase in the Cyclic History of C a n a a n in the T h i r d a n d Second Millennia BCE." In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel, edited by Israel Finkelstein a n d N a d a v N a ' a m a n , p p . 150-178. Jerusalem and Washington, D . C . , 1994. G o n e n , Rivka. " U r b a n C a n a a n in t h e Late Bronze Period." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 253 (1984): 61-73. G o n e n , Rivka. Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation S e ries, n o . 7. W i n o n a Lake, I n d . , 1992. Leonard, Albert, Jr. " T h e Late Bronze A g e . " Biblical Archaeologist 52 (1989): 4-39. N a ' a m a n , N a d a v . " E c o n o m i c Aspects of the Egyptian Occupation of C a n a a n . " Israel Exploration Journal 31 (1981): 172-185. Ussishldn, David. "Level VII a n d V I at T e l Lachish and t h e E n d of the Bronze Age in C a n a a n . " In Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages: Papers in Honour of Olga Tufnell, edited by Jonadian N . T u b b , p p . 213-228. University of L o n d o n , Institute of Archaeology, Occasional Publication, no. 11, L o n d o n , 1985. Weinstein, James M . " T h e Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassess m e n t . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 241 (1981): 1-28. Weinstein, James M . " T h e Collapse of the Egyptian Empire in the Southern L e v a n t , " In The Crisis Years: The Twelfth Century B.C., from beyond the Danube to the Tigris, edited by William A . W a r d and M a r t h a Sharp Joukowsky, p p . 142-150. D u b u q u e , 1992. ALEXANDER PI. JOFFE
Palestine in t h e Iron Age T h e archaeology of Iron Age Palestine covers most of the period of the Hebrew Bible, from the Israelite settlement until the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem. T o a large ex tent, the term biblical archaeology relates to this period, a field that has inspired extensive research that has, in turn, pro duced rich and varied data. T h e mutual relationship be tween the archaeological data and the biblical texts is one of the crucial methodological problems faced by archaeologists and historians of the period. [See Biblical Literature, article on Hebrew Scriptures.] Chronological F r a m e w o r k a n d Terminology. T h e Iron Age in Palestine is denned archaeologically as the pe riod that follows the Late Bronze Age (c. 1200 BCE) and terminates with the Babylonian conquests of Philistia and Judah (the latter in 5 8 6 B C E ) . There are, however, alternative proposals concerning the beginning, end, and inner division of this chronological framework, samples of which are pro vided in figure 1 . Some Israeli scholars employ the term Israelite period instead of Iron Age. In the following discus sion the terminology used is Iron Age I for the twelfth-elev-
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PALESTINE: Palestine in the Iron Age
PALESTINE:
Iron Age. Figure i. Comparison of Iron Age Chronol
ogies William Foxwell Albright (The Archaeology
of
Palestine,
1949, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, rev. i960) Iron Age I
Twelfth-tenth cenUiry BCE
Iron Age II
Ninth-beginning of the sixth century BCE
Iron Age III
550-333 BCE
Yohanan Aharoni and Ruth Amiran ("A New Scheme for the Subdivision of the Iron Age in Palestine," IEJ8 [1958]: 016015-016015) Iron Age I
1200-1000 BCE
Iron Age II
1000-840
Iron Age III
840-586
Philip J. King (American
Archaeology
in theMideast,
Phil
adelphia, 1983) Iron Age I
1200-930 BCE
Iron Age IIA
930-721
Iron Age IIB
721-605
Iron Age IIC
605-539
The Encyclopedia Holy
Land
of Archaeological
Excavations
in the
(edited by Michael Avi-Yonah and Ephraim
Stern, Jerusalem, 1976) Iron Age IA
1200-1150 BCE
Iron Age IB
1150-1000
Iron Age IIA
1000-900
Iron Age IIB
900-800
Iron Age IIC
800-586
The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (edited by Ephraim Stem, Jerusalem and New York, 1993) Retains the divisions of the earlier encyclopedia, except that the date 800 BCE for the end of Iron IIB was lowered to 700 BCE
Arnihai Mazar (Archaeology
of the Land of the Bible,
New
York, 1990) Iron IA
1200-1150BCE
Iron IB
1150-1000
Iron IIA
1000-925
Iron IIB
925-720
Iron IIC
720-586
Gabriel Barkai (The Archaeology
of Ancient
Israel,
by Amnon Ben-Tor, N e w Haven, 1 9 9 2 ) Iron Age Ha
Tenth and ninth centuries BCE
Iron Age lib
Eighth century
Iron Age Ilia
Seventh century until 586.
Iron Age Illb
586 until the late sixth century
edited
enth centuries and Iron Age II for the tenth-sixth centuries, disregarding furdier subdivisions. Iron Age I ( 1 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 B C E ) . T h e first two centuries of the Iron Age are characterized by the disintegration of the Late Bronze Age socioeconomic and political structure and its gradual replacement by a new social organization. T h e latter was related to the appearance of new ethnic groups bearing individual national and religious identities: the Is raelites, the "Sea Peoples" (among them the Philistines), the nations of Transjordan (Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites), the Arameans, and the descendents of the Canaanites, called Phoenicians by both the Greeks and modern scholars. [See Philistines; Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages; Ammon; Moab; Edom; Arameans; and Phoenicians.] These ethnic entities did not appear si multaneously, and their impact on the cultural development in Palestine during this period was diverse. Several major trends characterize this era: the decline of international trade; the appearance of new modes in pottery manufacture, architecture, and other aspects of material culture; the emer gence of new technologies (particularly the use of iron); and distinct regionalism in the material culture. Demise of Egyptian hegemony. During the first part of its twentieth dynasty, Egypt retained control over the prov ince of Canaan. Egyptian monuments, inscriptions, pottery, and burials in anthropomorphic coffins are evidence of the continuation of this domination at least until the reign of Rameses VI. Beth-Shean continued to serve as an Egyptian administrative center, as demonstrated by a group of mon uments and inscriptions dating to the time of Rameses III, including a full-sized statue of this pharaoh. [See BethShean,] Finds at other sites, such as Akko, Megiddo, La chish, Gezer, Tel Sera', Tell el-Far'ah (South) and the cop per mines at Timna', demonstrate tire continuity of an Egyptian presence on tire coastal and inner plains of the country during the first part of the twelfth century B C E . [See Akko; Megiddo; Lachish; Gezer; Sera', Tel; Far'ah, Tell el(South), Timna' (Negev).] T h e demise of Egyptian occu pation most likely occurred during the reign of Rameses VI, or slightly afterward, when the Egyptian town at Beth-Shean was violentiy destroyed by fire. Continuity of Canaanite culture. Although Hazor, the largest Canaanite city, was destroyed in the thirteenth cen tury BCE, other Canaanite cities, such as Lachish (stratum VI) and Megiddo (stratum VITA), survived well into the twelfth century B C E . [See Hazor.] Destructions in the midtwelfth century B C E , perhaps related to the decline of Egyp tian control and the appearance of new ethnic groups (Sea Peoples and Israelites), devastated those cities. While some (e.g., Hazor, Lachish) did not recover for some time, the finds excavated at others reflect a tiiriving Canaanite culture. The best example is Megiddo (stratum VI) where Canaanite urban life flourished until the late eleventh century B C E . Sim ilarly, a viable Canaanite culture continued on the Plain of
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Iron Age Akko (Akko, Tell Keisan), gradually developing into what can be defined as the Phoenician culture. Canaanites prob ably persisted as a significant component of the population throughout the country, although their previous mode of urban life was disrupted, and many probably integrated gradually into tire new ethnic elements. [See Canaanites; Keisan, Tell] Sea Peoples. T h e invasion and settlement of the Sea Peo ples is documented by Egyptian and biblical sources, as well as by archaeological evidence. T h e battles of the Sea Peoples against Rameses III in his eighth regnal year did not appear to have much impact on Palestine, as they probably took place in Lebanon and Egypt. However, the settlement of Sea Peoples, and particularly of the Philistines, is well docu mented in the archaeological record. T h e development of the Philistine material culture has been investigated at the principal Philistine cities (Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron/Tel Miqne), as well as at peripheral sites (Tell Qasile, Gezer, Timnah/Tel Batash, Tel Sera', Tell el-Far'ah [South]). T h e Philistines maintained a vital urban culture that combined elements brought from their Aegean homeland with local Canaanite and Egyptian components. Philistia was one of the few regions in the entire Levant where an urban system, including fortifications, temples, and public buildings, thrived in the twelfth-eleventh centuries B C E ; cities like Miqne/Ekron reached an area of 20 ha (50 acres). T h e ear liest phase of Philistine pottery was a local variation of the Mycenaean IIIC:ib style. Subsequently, this ware absorbed Canaanite, Egyptian, and Cypriot motifs and forms, devel oping into an eclectic style (the Philistine Bichrome ware). Philistine clay figurines retained Aegean traditions, and some of the seals are inscribed with a unique, still undeciphered linear script. [See Philistines; Ashdod; Ashkelon; Mi qne, Tel; Qasile, Tell; Batash, Tel; and Ceramics, article on Syro-Palestinian Ceramics of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.] Israelites. T h e Israelite settlement in the hill country of central Palestine and in the Galilee is archaeologically well attested. Intensive surface surveys have revealed hundreds of small sites founded during Iron I in these regions. A lim ited number of excavations (at Dan, Hazor, Sasa, Horvat Harashim, the Bull Site, Mt. Ebal, Shiloh, Ai, Khirbet Raddanah, and Giloh) provide data about the nature of the ma terial culture at these sites. T h e central hill country was the heartland of the settlement process, in territories allocated to the Israelite tribes of Manasseh, Ephraim, and Benjamin. In many cases, the settlements were established on harsh terrain, far from water sources and often in the heart of the hilly woodland. This was a "frontier zone," practically un settled by the Canaanites of the Late Bronze Age. T h e new pattern of settlement in these regions reflects the social, eco nomic, environmental, and perhaps ideological factors that distinguished the emerging Israelite society. It appears that this was a sedentary, rural, self-sufficient society that placed
219
an emphasis on familial and tribal relationships. T h e settle ments are usually small and unfortified and display an un sophisticated material culture, although based largely on Ca naanite traditions. Somewhat different settlement patterns have been found in the northern Negev desert (Tel Masos) and foothills ('Izbet Sartah), however. [See Dan; Bull Site; Ebal, Mount; Shiloh; Ai; Raddanah; Giloh; Masos, Tel; and 'Izbet Sartah.] The origin of the settlers in the hill country has been in terpreted in various ways. One school of thought pictures this population as local, indigenous peoples, either pastoralists who changed their way of life or farmers who fled to the mountains from the lowlands of Canaan. Another ap proach claims that the settlers were seminomadic pastoralists who penettated the country's borders. Still others pos tulate a complex process in which population groups of the above-suggested origins, as well as immigrants infiltrating from regions north of Palestine, merged to create the new "Israelite" entity. In any event, the archaeological data are source materials for studying the origins of Israel presented in the biblical texts and in the single mention of "Israel" in Merneptah's victory stela (c. 1207 B C E ) . Iron Age II (1000-586 B C E ) . T W O key factors determined the material culture of the Iron II period in Palestine: the country's geopolitical history, and the influence of artistic and architectural ttends common to the entire Levant. These two opposing trends are discernible in the period's archaeological record. Israelite kingdoms. Intensive archaeological research has been carried out in the territories of the United Mon archy of David and Solomon, as well as in the realm of the divided monarchies of Judah and Israel. Excavations have been conducted at numerous and diverse sites: the main ur ban centers (Jerusalem, Samaria, Dan, Hazor, Megiddo, Jezreel, Dor, Gezer, Lachish); smaller towns and villages (Tel Kinnerot, Ein-Gev, Yoqne'am, Tel Qiri, Tirzah, Tell en-Nasbeh, Timnah/Tel Batash, Beth-Shemesh, Tell Beit Mirsim, Tel Halif, 'Ein-Gedi, Tel Sheva/Beersheba, Tel I r a , 'Aro'er); royal citadels (Arad, Horvat 'Uza, QadeshBarnea); countryside palaces (Ramat Rahel); desert shrines or cultic centers of worship (Kuntillet 'Ajrud, Qitmit); iso lated fortresses and observation towers (Khirbet Abu T u wein, French Hill [Jerusalem], Giloh); small farmsteads and caravanserais (Vered Jericho, Horvat Shilhah, and various sites in the Judean desert and along the shores of the Dead Sea); and unique phenomena such as the short-lived wave of settlement (probably dating to the tenth century BCE) in the Negev highlands, which includes some fifty main struc tures ("citadels"), along with hundreds of houses and in stallations scattered over an extensive area. Surface surveys in many parts of the country round out the excavations by providing data on patterns of settlement in the Israelite ter ritories. [See Jerusalem; Samaria; Jezreel; Dor; Lachish; 'EinGev; Yoqne'am; Qiri, Tel; Nasbeh, Tell en-; Beth Shemesh; c
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PALESTINE: Palestine in the Iron Age
Beit Mirsim, Tell; 'Ein-Gedi; Beersheba; 'Ira, Tel; 'Aro'er; Arad; Qadesh-Barnea; Ramat Rahel; Kuntillet 'Ajrud; Qitmit, Horvat; and Giloh.] This extensive research has facilitated detailed studies of many aspects of the material culture, such as setdement pat terns, comparative stratigraphy, town planning, architec ture, pottery typology, technology, agriculture, industries, trade, religious practices, art, iconography, burial customs, metallurgy, metrology, and paleography. Attempts to recon struct various aspects of Israelite society, such as demog raphy and family structure, have been made utilizing this vast body of data. Relating these archaeological finds to die political, social, and cultural history of the period, based on the biblical texts as well as on extrabiblical written sources, poses a special challenge, however, often raising serious methodological problems. Several historically attested military events during this pe riod resulting in severe destructions serve as "datum points" for establishing absolute chronology, the most outstanding of which are David's conquests sometime after iooo BCE (destruction of Megiddo VIA, Tell Qasile X, Dor); Shishak's conquests during his raid in Israel and the Negev five years after the death of Solomon, in 925 BCE (destruction of Beth-Shean, Tell 'Amal, Megiddo IVB-VA, Gezer VIII, Tel Qasile VIII, Negev sites); the Assyrian conquest of the northern ldngdom of Israel in 735 and 722 BCE (destructions at Dan, Hazor V, Megiddo IVA, Yoqne'am, Samaria, and other sites); Sennacherib's invasion of Judah in 701 BCE (de struction of Lachish III, Tel Batash III, Tell Beit Mirsim A, Tel Sheva/Beersheba II, Arad VIII, and related sites); and tire Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 B C E (destruction of Jerusalem, 'Ein-Gedi, Ramat Rahel, Lachish, 'Aro'er, Arad VI, and other sites). Material Culture. Only a few selected features of Isra elite material culture can be highlighted here, among them the monumental, public architecture of royal Israelite cities. These cities are distinguished by large-scale, meticulous planning, such as evidenced at die royal enclosures at Sa maria, Jezreel, Ramat Rahel, and Lachish, as well as at the sanctuary at Dan. Architectural decoration included the use of ashlar masonry, proto-Aeolic, or "palmette," capitals, and carved windows. These features have been considered typically "Israelite" by some scholars, yet they were prob ably shared by Israel's neighbors and even invented by Phoenician artists (although this cannot be unequivocably proven). The use of squared-off monolithic pillars became a very common feature in both public structures (store houses and stables) and private dwellings. Urban fortifications included both casemate (or double) and solid walls, as well as city gates with two to six chambers, sometimes with an outer gate. These architectural features appear from the reign of Solomon until the end of the mon archy. Although it has been proposed that an inner devel opment and typology exists for tiiese characteristics, there is no consensus on the point. Water-supply projects consti
tute one of the most enterprising and impressive remains of the period, including shafts and tunnels leading to springs outside the cities or to the underground water table. Aque ducts are rare, the best known being Hezekiah's tunnel in Jerusalem, a unique engineering venture that demonstrates sophisticated hydrological ingenuity. [See Water Tunnels.] Settlement patterns. An important factor in under standing this period is the settlements' spatial distribution and hierarchy. In this respect, the growth of Jerusalem dur ing the eighth-seventh centuries B C E in relation to the rest of Judah is significant; the size of Jerusalem in the eightiiseventh centuries is estimated at 60 ha (150 acres), while most other towns in Judah did not exceed 2-3 ha (5-8 acres). [See Judah; Demography.] Thus, the capital became a meg alopolis, with a complex, centralized economic, political, and religious system. Jerusalem's agricultural hinterland consisted of many small villages and farmsteads, which en larged the area of arable land by constructing cultivation terraces on die hillsides. Religion and cult. What is known of Israelite religious practices comes from two excavated shrines (Arad and Dan), several inscriptions, and numerous clay figurines and other art forms. The central Israelite Temple in Jerusalem is known, only from its description in the Bible (1 Kgs. 67), which is sufficient to show tiiat its plan was largely akin to earlier and later tripartite temples throughout the Levant. [See Temples, article on Syro-Palestinian Temples.] Epigraphy. Epigraphic finds (e.g., ostraca, seals, seal im pressions) add important information concerning private names, administrative practices, economic activities, ico nography, and even some specific historical events. [See Ostracon; Seals.] Some discoveries (such as the Khirbet elQom, Kuntillet 'Ajrud, and Ketef Hinnom inscriptions) are of great importance for reconsttucting the development of ancient Israelite religion, as well as the history of the trans mission of the biblical text. [See Qom, Khirbet el-; Ketef Hinnom.] Other ethnic entities. Archaeological research into the Iron Age elucidates the culture of neighboring regions and other ethnic entities, such as the city-states of Philistia, the nations of Transjordan, and the Phoenicians. In Philistia, excavations at Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Ekron/ Tel Miqne have shed light on die flourishing urban material culture of these city-states in Iron II. They reveal massive fortifications, public buildings, and industries. Their pottery indicates local traditions, which means that a regional ma terial culture was created with its own ethnic and geopolitical affinities (now being called Neo-Philistine). These citystates developed at different rates. T h u s , the spurt of growth experienced by Ashdod in the tenth century B C E appears to have allowed it to overtake the role played by the dwindling town of Ekron. T h e latter, however, expanded to the size of almost 30 ha (75 acres) in the seventh century B C E , when it became a center of olive oil production. Trade relations with Egypt, Greece, Transjordan, and Phoenicia are reflected in
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Iron Age the archaeological record, such as the finds from Mesad Hashavyahu on the coast, due west of Tel Miqne/Ekron. [See Mesad Hashavyahu.] Severe destructions uncovered at Ekron, Timnah, and Ashkelon mark the Babylonian con quest of Philistia between 605-600 B C E . T h e Plain of Akko is by and large the soutiiern extremity of the Phoenician entity, which sttetches northward along the Mediterranean coast. At sites such as Achziv, Tel Kabri, Tell Keisan, Tell Abu Hawam, and Dor, the distinctive Phoenician material culture is well represented. [See Achziv; Kabri, Tel; Abu Hawam, Tell] It is particularly well known from the rich cemeteries at Achziv, where different burial customs (rock-cut and ashlar-built chamber tombs and cre mations) reflect varying cultural influences. [See Burial Techniques.] Phoenician pottery traditions and art are known both from Phoenicia itself and from the objects it exported to Israel, such as the Phoenician ivories found at Samaria, which are a superb example of costly Phoenician art objects. Phoenician influence is also represented in the iconography of many Israelite seals. T h e culture of the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites in Transjordan is much less known from that of the Israel ites, although in recent years important advances have been made in this field. Ammonite tomb groups, watchtowers, seals, and inscriptions, dating mainly to the eight-seventh centuries B C E , have been discovered. T h e land of Moab has been explored by intensive surface surveys, as well as in excavations at such key sites as Hesban (Heshbon) and Di bon; the Moabite stone remains the most important discov ery from this region. [See Hesban; Dibon; Moabite Stone.] Surveys and excavations at several sites in Edom (Buseirah, Tawilan, U m m el-Biyara, Tell el-Kheleifeh, and others) provide data concerning settlement history as well as local pottery styles. [See Buseirah; Tawilan; U m m el-Biyara; Kheleifeh, Tell el-.] However, the majority of these discov eries date to the eight-seventh centuries B C E , SO that the ear lier part of the Iron Age remains enigmatic. Edomite activity in the 'Arabah and Negev is also known from excavations at Hatzevah and Horvat Qitmit, where an Edomite shrine was uncovered. Assyrian D o m i n a t i o n . Evidence for Assyrian conquests in Palestine after 732 B C E and for Assyrian domination of large parts of tire country until about 630 B C E , has been found at various sites. T h e conquest of Lachish by Sen nacherib is illustrated by a unique combination of biblical and Assyrian texts, monumental Assyrian reliefs, and ar chaeological discoveries at the site, including the only ex cavated Assyrian siege ramp. Assyrian governmental build ings found at Megiddo (stratum III) and other places, as well as Assyrian objects found at various sites such as Gezer, constitute evidence of local Assyrian administrative centers. A series of sites in the northern Negev (Tell Jemmeh, Tel Sera', Tel Haror, Ruqeish) has produced Assyrian architec tural complexes and a variety of objects, indicating a partic ularly intense Assyrian presence in this region, close to the
221
southern border of Palestine, possibly related to die Assyrian conquest of Egypt. [See Jemmeh, Tell; Haror, Tel.] Conclusion. T h e archaeology of Iron Age Palestine (in cluding Transjordan) has yielded a vast body of rich and varied information on many aspects of life in the country's various geopolitical zones. T h e integration of die archaeo logical data with the biblical and extrabiblical written sources provides a sound basis for reconstructing the material cul ture, social structure, economy, and technology of die Is raelites and their neighbors during most of the period re corded in the Hebrew Bible. [See also Israelites.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Only a few selected general books a n d articles are listed here, out of the many hundreds of publications devoted to this period. T h e reader will find additional references in the works cited below. Aharoni, Miriam, a n d Y o h a n a n Aharoni. " T h e Stratification of Judahite Sites in the Eighth a n d Seventh Centuries BCE." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 224 (1976): 73-90. P r o posed relative stratigraphy at Judahite sites. Aharoni, Yohanan, and R u t h Amiran. " A N e w Scheme for the S u b division of the Iron Age in Palestine." Israel Exploration Journal 8 (1958): 171-184. Proposed subdivision of the period. Aharoni, Yohanan. The Archaeology of the Ijxnd of Israel. Philadelphia, 1982. Discussion of the period based largely o n the author's own work (see p p . 153-279). Bienkowski, Piotr, ed. Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan. Sheffield, 1992. Collection of essays on the history and archaeology of T r a n s j o r d a n in the Iron Age. Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Aviram, eds. Biblical Archaeology Today, 7990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Ar chaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990. Jerusalem, 1993. Articles s u m marizing a session dedicated to the Iron Age II (see p p . 34-115). Dever, William G. " T h e Late Bronze-Early Iron I Horizon in SyriaPalestine: Egyptians, Canaanites, 'Sea Peoples,' and Proto-Israelites." In The Crisis Years: The Twelfth Century B.C., from beyond the Danube to the Tigris, edited by William A. W a r d and M a r t h a Sharp Joukowsky, p p . 99-110. D u b u q u e , 1992. Cultural features of the transition from the Late B r o n z e to the Iron Age. D o t h a n , T r u d e . The Philistines and Their Material Culture. N e w Haven, 1982. T h e most comprehensive work o n the subject. Finkelstein, Israel. 77ie Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, 1988. S u m m a r y and discussion of the archaeological data related to the Israelite settlement. Gitin, Seymour, and William G . Dever, eds. Recent Excavations in Is rael; Studies in Iron Age Archaeology. Annual of t h e American Schools of Oriental Research, 49. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1989. Articles on dis coveries relating to the Iron Age in Palestine. Kempinski, Aharon, a n d R o n n y Reich, eds. The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. Jerusalem, 1992. Articles by various authors on town planning and architectural forms of die period (see p p . 183-309). K e n y o n , Kathleen M . Royal Cities of the Old Testament. N e w York, 1971. Review of the main discoveries in the key urban centers of die kingdoms of Israel and J u d a h . M a z a r , Amihai, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. N e w York, 1990. C o m p r e h e n s i v e survey in the framework of a gen eral textbook o n the archaeology of Palestine (see p p . 295-550). M a z a r , Amihai, and Gabriel Barkay. " T h e Iron A g e . " In 77ie Archae ology of Ancient Israel, edited by A m n o n B e n - T o r , p p . 258-373. N e w Haven, 1992. Comprehensive survey of the period in the framework of a general textbook on t h e archaeology of Palestine.
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PALESTINE: Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods
Sauer, James A. "Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages: A Critique of Glueck's Synthesis." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 263 (1986): 1-26. S u m m a r y and discussion of the finds in Transjordan. Shiloh, Yigal. The Proto-Aeolic Capital and Israelite Ashlar Masonry, Qedem, vol. r i . Jerusalem, 1979. Analysis of ashlar masonry a n d architectural decoration in monumental Israelite masonry. Stager, Lawrence E. " T h e Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Is rael." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 260 (November 1985): 1-35. Discussion of archaeological p h e n o m e n a as a reflection of social structure, particularly the family unit, in an cient Israel. Stern, Ephraim, ed. The Neva Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1993. T h e most authoritative encyclopedia on the archaeology of ancient Palestine, including articles on all excavated sites relating to the period, written in most cases by the excavators; detailed bibliography. AMIHAI MAZAR
Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods After the exile of the Judeans, Palestine fell into obscurity until the return of the exiles under Cyrus the Great in 539 B C E . For the more than a thousand years that followed, the area was administered by imperial powers: the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Hellenistic Ptolemaic Egyptian and Se leucid Syrian dynasts of Macedonia who succeeded Alex ander the Great, and the Roman Empire from Pompey (63 BCE) until the Islamic conquests of the seventh century CE. Until recently, archaeological knowledge of the Persian and Hellenistic periods was veiled in darkness, but exciting dis coveries of papyri, coins, seals, and a few inscriptions have begun to provide new insights into the period, which is still basically known best from literary and documentary sources. T h e century of Jewish independence under the Hasmonean monarchs (167-63 BCE) has also yielded little information from archaeological exploration. In contrast, the archaeological sources for the Roman era are quite sub stantial and more than amply add to the extensive written sources for the period. Persian period (539-332 B C E ) . After the catastrophic conquests by the Mesopotamian empires, Palestine went through a revival under Persian rule. With Cyrus's conquest of Babylon in 539 B C E , the adjacent territories were seized and the Judean exiles permitted to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. [See Jerusalem.] The subsequent Egyp tian campaign by Cambyses (525 BCE) suggests that political motives and propaganda were involved in the decision. After the uprisings and rebellion in the aftermath of the monarch's death, the rise of Darius to the throne may have instilled hopes in some segments of the population of a Davidic mon arch governing the returning exiles in Judah. [See Judah.] Under the "governor" Zerubbabel, the grandson of King Jehoiachin, and a scion of the Davidic house, the rebuilding of the temple was completed, with the events recorded by Haggai and Zechariah (516-515 BCE) . The next seventy-five
years represent somewhat of a literary gap in the Hebrew Bible, casting darkness over the subsequent developments in the region, although the later biblical prophets do offer some vital details. T h e death of Darius in 486 B C E prompted revolts in Babylon and Egypt, and Judah may not have been unaffected by those events. [See Babylon.] A second wave of Judean exiles in the mid-fifth century B C E , under Ezra and Nehemiah, provide the next documented period, and the changes are notable. T h e previous messianic hopes were gone and the Judeans apparently were settled into life under Persian rule with native hierocratic viceroys supervising their activities. T h e earlier governors, between Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, remain a matter of speculation (cf. Neh. 5:15), as do most of those who subsequently served in this capacity. T h e recent recovery of a hoard of bullae from Je rusalem makes a partial reconstruction of the governing gap possible today, however (Avigad, 1976; Meyers, 1985). Because Xerxes' campaign against Greece in 480/79 B C E ended in disaster, it is sometimes assumed that it initiated a period of decline in Persia. However, Persian sources for the period are dismal, forcing the historian to turn to Greek writ ers for any detailed information about the realm. Nonethe less, little credibility should be ascribed to the picture of a weak and tottering Persian regime contained in Xenophon and the Greek orators. Historical reason, not Greek rhetoric, should be the guide for the events of the fourth century. In spite of periodic revolts, Persian rule was maintained throughout most areas of its extensive domain, including Palestine, for another century and a half, until the Mace donian king Alexander the Great's conquest in 330 B C E . For Palestine, the Hebrew Bible provides a more positive per spective of Persia and the events of the period. These in clude the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the Books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, and the more problematic Book of Esther. It appears that the Persians basically maintained the ad ministrative divisions of Palestine inherited from N e o Assyrian imperialistic administration, even if subsequent events forced a number of changes in the organization of the region. [See Assyrians.] Palestine originally comprised only one part of the substantial territory of the "fifth sattapy," administered by the satrap, or governor (phh), of the province better known as "Babylon and Beyond the [Eu phrates] River" (Babili u Ebir Nari). This title is last attested in 486 B C E , sometime after which the territory was divided into two provinces, Babylon and Beyond the River. T h e lat ter contained Palestine and the regions of Syria, Phoenicia, and Transjordan. Within Palestine itself, a number of subdistricts existed: Megiddo (or Galilee), Dor (the Carmel coast), and Samaria in the north and Judah, Ashdod (Philistia), and Idumea (Negev) in the south. [See Megiddo; Dor; Samaria; Ashdod; Negev.] Only Judah and Samaria are explicitly attested; the other divisions are presumed on the basis of the Neo-Assyrian organization of the region or later
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods evidence. Each of these subdivisions of the satrapy was des ignated a province (Heb., medinah) under the rule of an official called a governor (phh). If Judah is typical, there were also internal districts (Heb., pelek) within each of the prov inces. Some remains of tire administrative centers are known, such as a Persian throne from Samaria and the pos sible palace of the capital at Beth-Zur. [See Beth-Zur.] Other regions may have been organized differently. Some scholars assume that the coast was comprised of a network of autonomous cities under the political jurisdiction of the Phoenician kings of Tyre and Sidon (excluding Akko and Gaza), but they initially may only have exercised certain economic rights and tax concessions in the area, without any political authority. [See Phoenicians; Tyre; Sidon.] By the fourth century B C E , however, there appear to be some changes in the system. T h e Shamun'azar sarcophagus from Sidon indicates that the Phoenician king received Dor and Jaffa from the Persian king. [See Sarcophagus; Jaffa.] Ac cording to Pseudo-Scylax, Ashkelon the former capital of Ashdod, became a Tyrian colony with a royal palace. [See Ashkelon.] It is also difficult to ascertain how Samaria was internally organized. Between the time of Nehemiah and Alexander the Great, it was governed by the local native dynasty of Sanballat, but it is not clear how it was admin istered earlier. T h e population was of varied ethnic back grounds as a result of an influx of Babylonians, Iranians, Elamites, and Arabs who settled in the region earlier. [See Babylonians; Elamites.] All are represented in the region's onomasticon. Recent excavations o n M . Gerazim also reveal that the material culture was influenced by both Persia and Phoenicia, in spite of a sttong local component. These early migrants appear to have extensively developed the country side and established many new sites, including fortified towns, villages, and farms. In addition, the more sparely populated Negev of Palestine and southern Transjordan was under the control of the Qedarite Arab tribal confederation in the fifth century B C E , subsidized by Persia to maintain order in the region. Although centered in northern Arabia at Jauf, these Aramaic-speaking Arabs seem to have con trolled the vast territory from Tell el-Maskhuta in the east ern Delta of Egypt across the Negev of Palestine to Trans jordan, including the vital trade route between Gaza and 'Aqaba on the Red Sea. [See Maskhuta, Tell el-; Delta; 'Aqaba.] By the fourth century B C E , the situation had changed, with the Qedarite Arabs replaced by the Nabateans and a new province named Idumea attested for the Negev (Diodorus Siculus 19.94.7). [See Nabateans; Idumeans.] In sum, Judah was surrounded by different ethnic groups: Samari tans to the north, Ammonites to the east, Arabs to the south, and Sidonian and Tyrian merchants to the northwest. Such ethnic and cultural diversity may help to explain the conservative reforms and transformation of the Jewish com munity under Ezra and Nehemiah. T h e latter's struggles with Geshem the Arab, Sanballat of Samaria, and Tyrian
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merchants resident in the city (Neh. 2:19, 6:1-6,13:16) attest the internal divisions and ethnic tensions within Palestine. Some scholars even assume that Nehemiah freed Judah from prior dependency on Samaria, transforming it into a separate province. Emphasis on purity of language (Neh. 13:24), prohibitions against mixed marriages (Ez. 10; Neh. 10:31,13:23-28), and the development of strict religious and cultural traditions may have been stimulated by this xeno phobia. This ethnic diversity within Palestine is supported by the epigraphic finds in the region. Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian realm, was dominant throughout Pal estine. [See Aramaic Language and Literature.] It is repre sented by scattered finds of ostraca at Akko, Yoqne'am in the Galilee, Samaria, throughout Judah, and in the Negev. [See Ostracon; Akko; Yoqne'am.] Phoenician inscriptions appear mainly along the coast, with only random finds in land. [See Phoenician-Punic] From Dor, pottery incised with Greek and Phoenician was recently discovered. Finds of Edomite texts also continue to accumulate in the eastern Negev. In contrast, epigraphic texts in Hebrew are rare for the period. Judah, however, is rich in other lands of documentation. Coins of the Philisto-Arabian Attic type and standard were minted in Palestine during the Persian era, but Gaza no longer appears to be the center for the issues. The discovery, since the 1960s, of hundreds of new coins from Judea and Samaria have substantially expanded the existing numis matic corpus of the Persian period. One coin even mentions Yehezqiyah, a governor (phh) of Judea and a Yohanan the priest (hkwhn) of Judah. T h e legends are mainly in PaleoHebrew script and mention the namejyMor, less frequently, yhwd. Unfortunately, the bulk of the coins lack a precise provenance and none are from a clear, unstratified context. Nevertheless, the reports assign almost all of them to the confines of Judah (Jerusalem, Ramat Rahel, Beth-Zur, Jer icho, and Bethlehem—with a few stray finds outside Judah at Tell Jemmeh near Gaza and also near Jericho). [See Ra mat Rahel; Jericho; Bethlehem.] Finds of stamped seal im pressions within Judah are even more confined; finds are limited to the 25-40 lan (16-25 mi.) around Jerusalem, ex tending from Bethel/Ai in the north to Hebron and Lachish in tire south. [See Seals; Ai; Hebron; Lachish.] They bear the imprint of the governor of Judah (phwh yhd) and leave the impression that the territory of Judah is far more re stricted and compact than what may be assumed from the list of the villages of Judah in the Hebrew Bible (Neh. 3 : 1 32). Stylistic changes in the seals and the possible existence of other governors of Judah have yet to be molded into any chronological scheme. These finds are rivaled by the discoveries from a cave in Wadi ed-Daliyeh near Jericho that make it clear that the Sanballat dynasty continued to rule over Samaria until Al exander's conquest. [See Daliyeh, Wadi ed-.] Coins of the Philisto-Arabian type from the cave were issued by the Sa-
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maritan state, matching those known from Judah and Gaza. They date from 375 to 335 BCE. One contains the name of the Samaritan capital (smryn, "Shomron") and another the name of what was probably one of its governors (yrb'm, "Jeroboam"). According to Josephus [Antiq. 11.301-309), the last Persian king, Darius III, granted approval for the construction of a temple on Mt. Gerazim, similar to the one in Jerusalem. It was even staffed by some priests from Je rusalem, who were given land and subsidized by Sanballat. The events apparently took place shortly before the con quest of the region by Alexander the Great. No such contemporary nonbiblical documents survive from Judah, leaving many matters of its history subject to speculation. It is evident that the returning exiles in the 460s stimulated a slow revival in the region for the remainder of the fifth century B C E that reached its zenith in tire fourth. There are, however, indications that the native population was restless and that there were periodic revolts. According to Ephraim Stern (1990) some cities in Samaria and Ben jamin in the center of Palestine suffered destruction in the 480s, and those of the Shephelah and Negev in the 380s. [See Cities, article on Cities of the Persian Period.] Revolts in Babylon and Egypt for independence, between 404 and 343 BCE, may account for the latter, producing invasions and counterattacks by Persia that affected southern Palestine. A prior revolt by Egypt in the 450s may have resulted in a chain of fortresses being constructed in Judea, either delin eating and protecting its borders or controlling the region's vital roads and trade routes. The second wave of exiles un der Ezra and Nehemiah may have served to create a buffer zone against Egypt in Persian interests. A network of forts and royal granaries was constructed along the entire Pales tinian coast to control the Mediterannean ports and the rest of the region. [See Granaries and Silos.] Akko was an es pecially important military base for the campaigns against Egypt in 374/73 CE (Diodorus 16.41.3; cf. Strabo 16.2.25 [758]). A network of roads was also organized as a communica tion system for the various garrisons of Persian troops or mercenaries in the region. Some of these must have been located at the provincial centers (Samaria, Jerusalem, Dor, Ashkelon, Lachish). Tombs at Gezer and Shechem have been identified with Persian garrisons residing in the area. [See Tombs; Gezer; Shechem.] Another string of garrisons appeared in the Negev between Gaza and the Dead Sea. Hebrew ostraca from Arad, Beersheba, Tel Ira, Yatta, and Tell Jemmeh and Tell el- Far'ah (south) near Gaza perhaps emanate from these military posts. [See Arad; Beersheba; Jemmeh, Tell; Far'ah, Tell el- (South).] The texts from Arad and Beersheba are the most numerous and are basi cally concerned with the delivery of cereal to various men and animals. There are references to the province (mdynh), military units (degel), a "treasurer" (gnzbr), and perhaps "tax bearers" ([bnb]ry'), but it is not clear if these are rations for
local garrisons of soldiers, horsemen, and donkey drivers or tax receipts from the local population or both. There are no architectural remains of a garrison; only store pits from the Persian period attest to an occupation at the sites. Persian occupation of the Negev, farther south, was even more lim ited; it is represented by only a few ostraca at Horvat Ritma, Qadesh-Barnea, and Tell el-Kheleifeh, near 'Aqaba. [See Qadesh-Barnea; Kheleifeh, Tell el-.] T h e material culture of the Persian period has been sum marized by Stern (1982). Palestine appears to have been culturally divided into two distinct regions. T h e culture of Judah and Samaria was still influenced by the traditions of Mesopotamia and Egypt. In contrast, the culture of the coastland and Galilee was heavily influenced by foreigners. Throughout Palestine, pottery from Attica, Cyprus, Phoe nicia, and of the East Greeks appears at numerous sites. Some of the Greek pottery dates to before 475 B C E , but af terward abundant Attic black-glazed wares signal vigorous trade in the region, following a hiatus of more than a century for any notable evidence of Greek imports. T h e finds may mainly be a product of Phoenician and Greek mercenaries and traders active in the area, but ceramic imitations of other eastern prototypes are also common. Persian influence itself was minimal; their presence was reflected only in scattered finds of Iranian-type weapons, riding accessories, bronze and silver Persian-type bowls, and Achaemenid-type jew elry. [See Weapons; Jewelry.] Hellenistic P e r i o d (332-63 B C E ) . After the death of Alexander the Great, his Macedonian successors (Diodochoi) divided up the conquered territory, with Palestine and Phoe nicia becoming the possession of the Ptolemaic dynasty cen tered in Egypt by 301 B C E . These extraterritorial possession of the Ptolemies were governed by a local provincial official called a su-ategos, who was empowered with military and civil jurisdiction of the region. [See Ptolemies.] For admin istrative purposes, Syria and Palestine were organized into divisions known as hyparchies or toparchies; minimal liter ary and archaeological evidence for the period leaves other details unknown. It is known that Ptolemy Philadelphus II (285-246 BCE) created a number of military colonies in the region, including Ptolemais (Akko), Philoteria on Lake Gal. ilee, and perhaps Scythopolis/Beth-Shean in the Jordan Val ley. [See Beth-Shean.] T h e major source for the mid-third century in Palestine is the Zenon papyri from the Faiyum in Egypt. [See Faiyum.] Zenon was the private agent of Apollonios, the financial minister for Ptolemy II, between 260 and 258 BCE Zenon conducted visits to Gaza, the Idumean cities of Adora and Marisa/Mareshah, and other areas in Palestine, including the cities of Ashkelon, Straton's Tower (Casarea Maritima), Jaffa, Akko/Ptolemais, the royal estates at nearby Beth-'Anat and Kedasa, and Jerusalem. [See Caesarea.] T h e focus is obviously the coastal cities and the inland administrative centers. Beginning with Ptolemy II, coins were minted at seven coastal cities (Berytus/Beirut,
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods Tyre, Sidon, Ptolemais/Akko, Jaffa, Ashkelon, Gaza), but not at any inland city. [See Beirut.] T h e Macedonian Seleucid dynast Antiochus III defeated Ptolemy V at Panion/Banias in 200 B C E , after which Palestine came under the rule of the Syrian monarchs. [See Seleucids; Banias.] At first, the hereditary Zadokite high priests served as the viceroys of Palestine for the Seleucid king. In a similar fashion, Samaria (inclusive perhaps of Galilee) and Idumea were probably also separate spheres governed by native rul ers. Macedonian garrisons were located at strategic locations to maintain security in the region, but tire focus was still primarily the coastline and Transjordan. Seleucid regional policy is reflected in two recently discovered inscriptions. T h e Hefzibah inscription found in i960 near Beth-Shean/ Scythopolis provides tire correspondence between Antio chus III and the strategos for Syria and Phoenicia in 200198 B C E regarding the latter's village property in the area and the conduct of his garrison force among the native popula tion. A more recently discovered inscription from the hellenized Sidonian community atjamnia on die Sea (YavnehYam) indicates tiiat Antiochus V Eupator granted diem special status in 163 B C E because of their loyalty to the throne (like the privileges extended by Antiochus IV to the Sidon ian community at Shechem in Samaria; (Antiq. 12.5.5 [258]). [See Yavneh-Yam.] T h e cities founded by the Mac edonian kings were essentially military colonies, not Greek cities with democratic civic organizations disseminating Greek culture to the native population. The language of Je sus and Josephus in the Roman era was still Aramaic, not Greek. T h e hellenization process was a limited affair spon sored by native monarchs and supported by an urban elite, in contrast to the rural countryside where traditional culture prevailed. Events in Judea illustrate tire phenomenon. T h e Seleucid appointment of non-Zadokites to tire priesthood in Jerusa lem and the attempt by a local collaborating elite to trans form the city into a hellenized Antiochene community pro voked the Maccabean revolt in 167 B C E and eventually led, in 142 B C E , to an independent Jewish state (a native Hasmonean dynasty) under Simon Maccabee. [See Hasmoneans.] T h e real transition to independence was marked later by the hiring of mercenaries by John Hyrcanus I ( 1 3 4 104 BCE) and die territorial expansion of Alexander Jannaeus (104-76 BCE) that resulted in the conquest of tire hellenized coastal cities and parts of Transjordan. These efforts pro duced clashes with the neighboring Nabatean monarchs of Petta over the possession of Gaza and the Golan. [See Petra; Golan.] Consolidation of the new territories led to the con version of the Idumeans by Hyrcanus and of die Itureans of Syria, who had infiltrated Galilee, by Aristobulus. Archae ological evidence for tire period is still dominated by the sensational discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls from tire Qumran Essene community, which remain a center of con troversy even after a half century of research. [See Dead Sea
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Scrolls; Qumran.] Their main contribution remains twofold: they provide insights into die transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible and into the complex and varied Jewish sec tarian community they present for die Late Hellenistic and Roman periods, illuminating even further what is known from the Apocrypha and Pseudipigrapha. The scant traces of Hellenistic sites elsewhere remain enigmatic, perhaps concealed by subsequent Roman construction, as indicated by the excavations at Beth-Shean/Scythopolis or still await ing discovery—such as the Hellenistic tombs recently found at the Maccabee family village of M o d i l n . In spite of this lack of evidence within Judah, a Hellenistic military and commercial presence in the region is evident in peripheral areas: excavations at Tel Anafa in Upper Galilee revealed a prospering Greek community in the second century B C E lo cated on the major trade route between Damascus and Tyre; the Hellenistic necropolis at the Idumean capital of Marisa/ Beth-Guvrin reveals Greek and Sidonian influences; and the reconstruction of the Tobiad palace at I r a q el-Amir near Amman in Transjordan provides important insights into die art and architecture of the period. [See Anafa, Tel; I r a q elAmir.] R o m a n P e r i o d (63 B C E - 3 2 4 C E ) . The Roman com mander Pompey's settlement of the East and creation of a province in Syria resulted in the scrambling efforts of neigh boring petty kings and tyrants to preserve their rule, includ ing die Hasmonean and Nabatean lungs, who were at the mercy of die Roman army. By 63 B C E , Jerusalem was taken by Pompey, the Greek cities of the coast and Transjordan were liberated from Hasmonean rule, and Judea was divided into five administtative districts. T h e Roman governor of Syria henceforth became the director of affairs in the region, with the Hasmonean Hyrcanus II surviving as a puppet ruler of the Jews supported by his ally Antipater of Idumea. Their later assistance to Caesar in Alexandria won for die former the position of ethnarch of (lie Jews and for the latter an appointment as procurator of Judea. Antipater's sons,Phasael and Herod, were then given administrative posts in Judea and Galilee, respectively. After Caesar's death, Antony re affirmed the arrangement and eventually had the IdumeanNabatean scion Herod declared the "lung of the Jews" by the Senate in Rome. Later, Octavian confirmed his rule as a client king of Rome. From 37 to 4 B C E , Herod reigned over Palestine. At this time, die urbanization of Palestine began in earnest with Herod's massive building program. At the inception of his rule, Palestine was still a world of small villages, but by the time of his death it had been transformed into a network of cities witii all of the Greco-Roman features—temples, gymnasia, theaters, amphitheaters, stadia, and hippo dromes. [See Theaters.] A palace was constructed in Jeru salem, protected by the adjacent Antonia Fortress, and a theater and anphitheater reputedly were constructed in the city. [See Palace.] His otiier foundations include Caesarea
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Maritima, with its impressive harbor; Samaria, rebuilt as Sebaste as a tribute to the emperor Augustus; his own tripalatial winter palace at Jericho; and a magnificent marble tem ple at Panion/Banias in honor of Augustus. In addition, fortress-palaces were constructed at Herodium, Hyrcania, Cypros, Alexandrium, Masada, and Machaerus. [See Her odium; Masada; Machaerus.] He also subsidized building projects at major cities outside his realm, including the Leb anese ports of Berytus/Beirut, Tyre, and Sidon; Antioch and Damascus in Syria; and Rhodes, Chios, and Nicopolis in the Greek Aegean. His successors also made their contri butions: in Galilee, Sepphoris was rebuilt, Tiberias was founded in 20 C E by Herod Antipas, and Caesarea Philippi (Panion/Banias) was founded by Philip the Tettarch. [See Sepphoris; Tiberias.] T o protect his realm, a native garrison force of one cavalry unit and five cohorts of infantry was established; military colonies were created in Batanea of Idumeans and Babylonian Jews; and veterans from his army were settled near Mt. Carmel and in the Golan and in Esbonitis (Hesban) in Transjordan. [See Hesban.] Vestiges of the Herodian cities and fortresses are still visible, unlike the magnificent temple building project that enlarged the sacred Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the elaborate central shrine of Judaism, where only the temenos walls lie exposed. With Herod's death, the kingdom was assigned by Au gustus to Herod's sons. Archelaus received Judea and Sa maria, Antipas Galilee and Perea (east of the Dead Sea in Transjordan), and Philip the Tetrarch the territories of the Golan and parts of the Hauran (Iturea and Trachonitis in southern Syria). Archelaus's mismanagement of Judea led to its transformation into a Roman province governed by prefects of equestrian rank appointed and supervised by the governor of Syria. Caesarea Maritima became the seat of the officials who administered Judea from 6 to 41 C E , until the old kingdom of Herod the Great was briefly reinstituted under his grandson Agrippa I (41-44 CE), the friend of the emperor Claudian. With Agrippa's death, Roman procu rators were appointed to rule over Judea (44-66 C E ) , again as a Roman province. His son Agrippa II became ruler of the kingdom of Chalcis in Syria and of Philip's territory while exercising some moral authority in Judea. Neverthe less, Agrippa II could not prevent the Roman procurators' harsh and corrupt policies from precipitating the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt (66-70 C E ) . [See First Jewish Re volt.] The crushing of the rebellion led to Judea being ad ministered by legates of senatorial rank with legionary troops at their command and directly responsible to the emperor. T h e effects of a Jewish revolt that broke out in Cyrene and Egypt, before spreading to Cyprus and Mesopotamia in 115 C E , seems to have had repercussions in Judea. [See Cyrene; Cyprus.] It is, however, the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-135 C E that is better known. This is so partially because of the documentation provided from letters written on papyrus by the rebel leader himself and by the Babatha archive found
in caves near the Dead Sea, but mainly because of the di sastrous impact it subsequently had on Palestine. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt; Judean Desert Caves.] Prior to the revolt in 66 C E , the Roman army in Judea was composed of the one cavalry unit and five infantry regiments of the former Herodian garrison transformed into regular auxiliary troops serving at Caesarea and in Jerusalem. With the outbreak of the rebellion, the Syrian governor, C. Cestius Gasslus, marched into Palestine with the Twelfth Le gion (Fulminata), which suffered a serious defeat by the Jews in an ambush. Consequently, Vespasian sent Titus to Alexandria to withdraw the Fifteenth Legion (Apollinarus), while he brought the Fifth (Macedonia) and Tenth (Fretensis) legions from Syria, accompanied by twenty auxiliary units. Between 68 and 70 the camp of the Fifth Legion was at Emmaus near Jerusalem (War 4.8.1 [445]; 5.1.6 [42]). [See Emmaus.] After the revolt, the Tenth legion remained in Jerusalem as the permanent Roman garrison in Palestine (War 7.1.3 [17]). By 120 it was joined by the Sixth Legion (Ferrata), which was stationed at Caparcotna (Legio) in the Jezreel Valley. This addition signals the transformation of Judea from a single-legion province governed by a legatus of ex-praetor status to a double-legion province under an ex-consul. After the Bar Kokhba Revolt and for the rest of the century (according to military diplomas of 139 and 186), three alae (cavalry) and twelve cohortes (infantry) units were stationed in Palestine. T h e ethnic name Judea was replaced by Syria-Palaestinia for the province, and Jerusalem was transformed into the colonia of Aelia Capitolina. By the end of the fourth century, the Tenth Legion was moved to 'Aqaba; a single cavalry unit (Equites Mauri Illyricani) replaced it in Jerusalem. T h e development of the Roman road system in Judea is closely associated with Roman military activity in the region. [See Roads.] Between 51 and 54, veterans of four Syrian legions were settled in a colony at Ptolemais/Akko that was immediately connected by a coastal road to the Syrian cap ital at Antioch; it later served as the base of operations against Lower Galilee for Vespasian during the first Jewish Revolt. [See Antioch.] During the conflict, a road also was constructed between Caesarea and Scythopolis/Beth-Shean, obviously facilitating the movement of troops for the con flict. A lengthy hiatus followed before there were any signs of such activity again. No milestones of Flavian or Trajanic date are attested in Judea, but under Hadrian a dozen roads were constructed between 120 and 130, just prior to the Bar Kokhba Revolt. T h e establishment of the Roman colony of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) and the addition of a new le gion in Judea seem to have been the motivation, but Ha drian's visit to the region in 129/30 was a spur to construc tion projects elsewhere and probably in Palestine as well. At Tell Shalem, in the Jordan Valley, a statue of Hadrian was found with a dedication to the emperor by a vexillation of the Sixth Legion, which was probably stationed in the area.
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods The next documented periods of roadwork are connected with die movement of troops for the Parthian campaigns of the Antonine and Severan dynasties. T h e final known con struction is the Diocletianic road between Aila ('Aqaba) and Jotapata/Ghadyan, 40 1cm (25 mi.) north in Wadi 'Arabah. [See Jotapata.] Some isolated texts dated to Constantine and other fourth-century emperors are known from the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem. These latest additions to the system probably are to be associated with the administrative and military reorganization of the region. Jews were excluded from the territory of Jerusalem with its foundation as a Roman colonia following the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Even in the rest of Palestine, they were faced with a changed situation as the land underwent an even greater urbanization program under Roman auspices. T h e Deca polis city of Scythopolis/Beth-Shean was designated one of Coele Syria's Greek cities in the Antonine era and was de veloped accordingly, as excavations reveal; Sepphoris in Galilee was renamed Diocaesarea under Antoninus Pius; during the Severan dynasty, Lydda/Lod became Diospolis, Beth-Guvrin was renamed Eletheropolis, and Emmaus was called Nicopolis. [See Decapolis; Cities, article on Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods.] Palestine became a world of Greco-Roman cities in which the Jews were a mi nority. The center of Judaism consequentiy shifted to Gal ilee and the Golan, where the rabbis emerged as the domi nant force in villages that were still predominantly Jewish. Throughout the post-135 period, prominent Jews locally and from die Diaspora sought burial in the necropolis of Beth-She'arim on the edge of the Galilee. [See BethShe'arim; Necropolis.] The changed world of Palestine was reflected at Beth-She'arim in the predominance of Greek over Aramaic and Flebrew in funerary inscriptions and in the pagan motifs decorating the tombs. [See Greek; Hebrew Language and Literature.] T h e same emphasis appears in the Graco-Roman mythological and astrological scenes in the synagogue mosaics of the Lower Galilee region. [See Synagogues; Mosaics.] Galilee was apparently extensively developed in the Ro man era, with hundreds of towns divided among two distinct regions. Lower Galilee, dominated by the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias, lay astride the major trade route to the Greek cities of the Palestinian coast and was the center for the ma jority of the local population in the pre-70 era. Excavations at Yodefat/Jotapata and Gamla provide some insight into the centers of rebellion during the First Revolt. [See Gamla.] Upper Galilee appears to have flourished only later, in the second and third centuries, when there may have been a substantial influx of new Jewish migrants. Even there the technical world of Hellenism was absorbed by the popula tion, otherwise known for its religious conservatism. North of the Tiberias-Ptolemais road, tiiere are no Roman roads and there is minimal evidence for any Roman garrisons. T h e Roman road between Panion/Caesarea Phillipi and Tyre
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suggests that the contact in Upper Galilee was with the hel lenized Phoenician coast, as is reflected in the material cul ture and coinage of the region produced by excavations of the synagogues at Khirbet Shema', Meiron, and Gush Halav. [See Shema', Khirbet; Meiron; Gush Halav.] The nature of the population and its relationship to die prerevolt population remains a matter of sharp debate, in spite of the abundant rabbinic literature for the period. Roman occupation of the rest of Palestine must have been extensive. T h e royal lands of the Herodian monarchs and much of Judea were confiscated and transformed into im perial property, beginning with the collapse of Archelaus's rule (Josephus, Antiq. 1 7 . 1 3 . 1 - 2 [340-344]; cf. 18.2.1 [26]), again after the First Revolt (War 7.6.6 [216]), and finally in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (Eusebius H.E. 4.6.1). Even if much of it was later liquidated, die over whelming impression is tiiat large tracts of land continued to exist as Roman villae and imperial property. References to Saltus Geraiticus and Saltus Constantinianus, protected by imperial troops to the southeast of Gaza, indicate that vestiges of these imperial lands survived into the Byzantine era. By this time, the tetrarchic reforms had rearranged the provincial borders by adding parts of the province of Arabia (the Negev, Sinai, and southern Transjordan between the southern end of the Dead Sea and 'Aqaba) to Syria-Pales tine. [See Sinai.] T h e assumption that the Diocletianic mil itary reforms created a fortified frontier commonly known as the limes Palestinae and limes Arabicus is now a matter of considerable controversy. [See Limes Arabicus.] The ef fects of Diocletian's economic reforms on the region must have been felt by the native population in personal and land taxes, but the extant evidence is limited to parts of Galilee and die Golan. T h e persecution of the church between 303 and 313 ended with a Christian emperor, Constantine, and a christianized empire that marked the dawn of a new era of prosperity for Palestine. [See also Galilee, article on Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, N a h m a n . Bullae and Seals from a Post-Exilic Judean Archive. Q e d e m , vol. 4. Jerusalem, 1976. Davies, W , D . , and Louis Finkelstein, eds. The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 1, Introduction, the Persian Period. Cambridge, 1984. U n e v e n collection of studies that still contains valuable information. G o o d m a n , M a r t i n D . State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132-212. T o t o w a , N.J., 1982. Graf, D a v i d F . " T h e Persian Royal R o a d System in Syria-Palestine." Transeuphratene 6 (1993): 149-168. Graf, D a v i d F . "Hellenization a n d the Decapolis." Aram 4 (1994): 148. Analysis of M a c e d o n i a n policies, arguing t h a t Greek civic insti tutions were a late development in Palestine occurring only u n d e r R o m a n rule. Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. 2 vols. Translated by John Bowden. Philadelphia, 1974. Classic work flawed by its extreme e m -
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phasis on the penetration of Hellenistic culture into the Jewish com munity. Hoglund, Kenneth G. Achaemenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Pal estine and the Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah. Society of Biblical Lit erature, Dissertation Series, n o . 125. Atlanta, 1992. Argues, on the basis of a series of forts erected in the mid-fifth century BCE, that Ezra and Nehemiah were imperial collaborators in Persian efforts to consolidate the frontier states as centers of loyalty against rebellious Egypt. Isaac, Benjamin. " A Seleucid Inscription from Jamnia-on-the-Sea: A n tiochus V Eupator and the Sidonians." Israel Exploration Journal 41 (1991): 132-144. Isaac, Benjamin. The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1992. Persuasive attempt to demonstrate that the main concerns of the R o m a n army in Palestine were internal. L a n d a u , Y. H . " A Greek Inscription F o u n d near Hefzibah." Israel Ex ploration Journal 16 (1966): 54-70. Lemaire, Andre. " L e s inscriptions palestiniennes d'epoque perse: U n bilan provisoire." Transeuphralene 1 (1989): 87-105. Exhaustive list of the various finds. Machinist, Peter. " T h e First Coins of Judah a n d Samaria: Numismatics and History in the Achaemenid a n d Early Hellenistic Periods." In Achaemenid History VIII: Continuity and Change, edited by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg et al„ p p . 365-380. Leiden, 1994. Provides a recent statement on t h e coins a n d seal impressions. Meyers, Carol L,, and Eric M . Meyers. Haggai, Zechariah 1-8. Anchor Bible, vol. 25B. G a r d e n City, N . Y . , 1987. Extensive commentary with important archaeological data for t h e sixth a n d fifth centuries BCE.
Meyers, Carol L . , and Eric M . Meyers. Zechariah 9-14. A n c h o r Bible, vol. 25C. N e w York, 1993. Extensive commentary with important archaeological notes for the fifth century BCE. Meyers, Eric M . " T h e Shelomith Seal and Aspects of the Judean R e s toration." Eretz-Israel 18 (1985): 33-38. Meyers, Eric M . "Second T e m p l e Studies in the Light of Recent A r chaeology. Part I: T h e Persian a n d Hellenistic Periods." Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 2 (1994): 25-42. Useful synthesis of major developments in the archaeology and historical reconstruction of the period. Meyers, Eric M . " A n Archaeological Response to a N e w T e s t a m e n t Scholar." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 297 (1995): 17-26. C o m m e n t a r y on the most recent developments in regionalism and R o m a n Palestine. Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD 337. C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1993. Invaluable study of the entire region, with important discussions on Palestine affairs. Safrai, Zeev. The Economy of Roman Palestine. L o n d o n , 1993. I m p r e s sive discussion of the agricultural development and local trading sys t e m of the region. Sherwin-White, Susan, and Amelie Kuhrt. From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire. Berkeley, 1993. Pioneering and provocative analysis of Seleucid policy. Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. Fundamental guide for t h e archaeology of the Persian period. Stern, Ephraim. " N e w Evidence on the Administrative Division of Pal estine in the Persian Period." In Achaemenid History IV: Centre and Periphery, edited by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg a n d Am61ie Kuhrt, p p . 221-226. Leiden, 1990. Stolper, Matthew W . " T h e Governor of Babylon a n d Across-the-River in 486 B . C . " Journal of Near Eastern Studies 48 (1989): 283-305. Wenning, Robert. "Griechische importe in Palastina aus der Zeit vor Alexander d. Gr.: Vorbericht iiber ein Forschungsprojekt." Boreas 4 (1981): 29-46.
W e n n i n g , Robert. "Attische Keramik in Palastina: Ein Z w i s c h e n b e richt." Transeuphratene 2 (1990): 157-167. Preliminary report of the Greek pottery finds in Palestine. DAVID F.
GRAF
Palestine in the Byzantine Period The Byzantine period represents one of the most populous, prosperous, and archaeologically rich periods in the entire history of Israel (ancient Palestine). T h e beginning of the era is usually identified by the date, 324 C E , when the Chris tian emperor Constantine took control of the East; the end of the period is marked by the Islamic conquest in 640. In archaeological terms, a growing body of stratigraphic evi dence from all regions of the country argues against invest ing too much credibility in these dates. Suffice it to say that the period begins sometime in the fourth century, depending on which site or region of the country is being considered, and continues in some places (like the Galilee and Golan) into the seventh century. From a political standpoint, the most dramatic change in the country was its enshrinement in the empire as a Holy Land for Christians, as well as Jews, as has been recently documented from literary sources by Robert L. Wilken (1992). Nothing shows this more dramatically than the building programs carried out in Jerusalem by Christian em perors from Constantine onward. T h e height of this move ment to make Palestine a Christian Holy Land is best illus trated by the emperor Justinian's (527-565) building program in Jerusalem, when the cardo (the major northsouth street) was extended to the south to create a Christian section of the city. A huge basilical church called the Nea was installed near the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the modern city's Jewish Quarter. [See Jerusalem.] Depicted on the sixth century Madaba mosaic map, the cardo and a part of the church have now been securely lo cated and excavated by Nahman Avigad (1993, pp. 1 2 8 135). [See Madaba.] From an archaeological standpoint, the most dramatic feature of the Byzantine period is the density of site settle ment. Byzantine occupation has been found on nearly every known ancient site in what was Palestine. In addition, recent research has focused on the settlement of the area's fragile deserts—in Judaea (Judah) and the Negev and Sinai. After the empire became officially Christian in the late fourth cen tury, the rise of Christian pilgrimage resulted in the settle ment of the Judean Desert by Christian monies. They cre ated a new architectural settlement form, the monastery, some fifty-five of which have been studied and systematized into distinct types (Hirschfeld, 1992). [See Monasteries.] T h e presence of the monasteries brought numerous pilgrims and travelers to and through the country's deserts, in addi tion to the some three thousand permanent inhabitants at the height of the monastic movement. In the northern N e -
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Byzantine Period gev, superb Byzantine hydrology created a system of runoff agriculture (rainwater diverted to field use by sophisticated dams, terraces, and channels) that was able to sustain the greatest flowering of city culture in the Negev's long history. [See Irrigation.] Viticulture was introduced to the Negev, though wine production appears (at least from the Nessana papyri) not to have been carried on. Along witii the revital ized city settlements, a flowering of pastoral nomadism oc curred. T h e camping remains of nomads have been mapped (and some excavated) by Steven A. Rosen and Gideon Avni (t993)j P P > 189-199). In fact, the very boarders of civilized cultivation were pushed several miles south of Nessana's city territory for the first time, as the boundaries of the "inner desert" receded in the face of the Byzantine presence (Mayerson, 1963, pp. 160—172). Mid-sixth-century Palestine had become an "international" province, with trade links to the wider Mediterranean world, as demonstrated by the Pales tinian amphorae found as far west and north as Britain and by the steady flow of imported fine tableware from Asia Mi nor, Egypt, and North Africa into all regions of the country. Already at the very beginnings of the period in the midfourth century, an observant Jewish family in the rural vil lage world of mountainous Upper Galilee had, among its collection of fine-ware bowls, a particularly lovely (and somewhat scarce) red-ware bowl with a flaring rim and a curved body manufactured in far-away Carthage (Groh, 1981, pp. 129-138, pis. 8.29-31). [See Galilee, article on Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Peri ods.] Yet, curiously, for all the new international flavor of this period, regionalism is most deeply ensconced into both the history and material culture of ancient Palestine precisely in these centuries. Politically, the country was first divided into two halves (north and south) in the late 350s and then, in about 400, into three separate provinces: Palaestina Prima (the northern coastal plain plus Judaea, Idumea, Samaria, Peraea) with its capital at Caesarea Maritima; Palaestina Secunda (Galilee, the Palestinian Decapolis, the Golan region) with its capital at Scythopolis (Beth-Shean); and Palaestina Tertia (formerly Palaestina Salutaris), whose capital has not yet been exactly determined (Gutwein, 1981, p. 8). [See Caesarea; Decapolis; Golan; Beth-Shean.] Because almost no Jews lived in the region south of Beersheba (which func tioned as the principal city for the region), the development of a virtual southern Christian Holy Land was made possi ble, organized around the principal northern Negev cities, die bishop's seat for this area being located at Halusa. [See Halusa.] However, the threefold political division does not do full justice to the vast differences that appear in the material culture of the country's various regions and subregions. It is the recognition of regionalism that best characterizes the professional activity being carried out in surveys, excava tions, and the interpretation of material culture from ancient
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Palestine. Little synthetic work has been done on the country as a whole, however. Byzantine Aesthetics. T h e careful attention to architec tural balance and proportion, so characteristic of the earlier Roman-period buildings, gave way in the late third century to a heavy reuse of earlier building materials (columns, fac ings, capitals, inscriptions) employed in ways quite different from their earlier architectonic functions (Groh, 1988, pp. 91-92). For example, in the construction of synagogues and churches in the period, columns with different diameters and bases were used in the same colonnade. [See Syna gogues; Churches.] Despite attempts to find a rational Byz antine proportionality in planning buildings (see Chen, 1981, 1985), archaeology has recovered buildings that of fered overall mass and overall effect (in adaptation to local tastes and topography and availability of materials) as its basic aestiietic. Also, the interiors of public buildings such as synagogues and churches, with their interior forest of bas ilical columns and their second-story galleries or chapels, were formed by the heightened Byzantine aesthetic com mitment to the mysterious interior play of light and shadow on die worshiping faithful. Hanging lamps of metal and glass, found throughout the country in excavations of Jewish or Christian basilical buildings, heightened diis play. The glass factories of Asia Minor and Palestine, one of which was found at Jebel Jaime in the Galilee, seem to have been able to keep up with the increased demand (Weinberg, 1988). T h e tighter and deeper ribbing on the exteriors of fifth-seventh-century crude-ware pottery (especially am phorae) shares in this same aesthetic concern to break up surface appearance into sculptured depth (hence shadow) and light. Most excavators, however, simply consider Byz antine pottery crude and ugly, compared to the more grace ful forms and less-severely and more broadly ribbed exterior surfaces of Roman-period pottery. Colored mosaic floors and interior painted plaster walls in both private and public rooms further added to die new aesthetic. [See Mosaics; Wall Paintings.] C o m m o n Byzantine Characteristics. Standard Byz antine weights and measures met a shopper in whatever re gion, and the city dweller walked on a Byzantine stteet roughly 4.5 m wide. Flouses were consttucted of stone. T h e walls were constructed first (floors were added later) and were sometimes mortared, often chinked with rocks and offcuttings. T h e roofs were made of wood timbers and tile or constructed in the stone-roof slab-and-arch technique of the "Hauranic" style employed in the Golan and the northern Negev. While modern architects point out the utter unsuitability of courtyard houses to a countty witii (alternately) too much rain and too much sun, residents of Byzantine Palestine were addicted to houses with central courtyards (Shereshevski, 1986)—even apartment-building residences (insulae) had them. Most private housing so far excavated from the period are one or two stories high, witii exterior
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stairways from the courtyard to the upper story or roof. T h e Galilean split-level house, called the patrician house, exca vated at Meiron, the Dionysiac house excavated at Sep phoris, and the numerous houses preserved to the first and second stories in the Golan and Negev, provide excellent examples. [See Meiron; Sepphoris.] While private housing can be quite spacious, the huge sprawling urban villas of the rich, so characteristic of these centuries in most other prov inces of the empire, are almost completely absent in the three Palestines. T h e continuous reuse of materials on a site and the wide, contemporaneous variety of plans adapted to local topography, tastes, and pocketbooks, make any at tempt to salvage an architectural chronology of synagogue-, housing-, and church-plan types (that is, without careful stratigraphic excavation) relatively hopeless, despite the rigor of its defenders. [See Building Materials and Tech niques, article on Materials and Techniques of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods.] Regionalism. Eric M. Meyers (1976, 1975) pioneered in identifying an analogous material culture that separated the Galilee from other regions of the country (best represented by the ubiquitous Galilean bowl, seldom found outside the Galilee and Golan) and in separating the Upper Galilee and Upper Golan (following Josephus) into a subregion with its own peculiarities in architectural style, decoration (aniconic and restrained carving), and language preference (primarily Aramaic inscriptions). The material culture of Upper Gal ilee differed markedly from the Lower Galilee of the Kinneret region (with its highly hellenized artistic tastes and pre ponderance of the Greek language testified to by the inscriptional evidence). T h e Jews of the Lower Galilee who lived at sites like Sepphoris or (farmer south) Scythopolis/ Beth-Shean were wealthy, artistically and linguistically so phisticated people, as their synagogues, inscriptions, and homes attest. Dan Urman (1985) has given even more pre cision to the Golan and its subregions, suggesting that ethnic preference in settlement took regional archaeology a giant step forward. Identifying the subregions of the northern Ne gev has furthered helped to see the importance of the way peopled built, lived, adapted, and shopped locally (Gutwein, 1981). The various regions of the country bought most of their common pottery locally. Although kilns for most regions have not been found, recent discoveries permit the conclu sion that certain storage-jar forms and cookers found throughout the Galilee and Golan were manufactured at Kefar Hananyah and Shikhin in Lower Galilee, at least until the Late Roman period (Strange, 1994). It is possible to hypothesize that the characteristically brittle Golan-ware forms were made in that region but did not gain currency in other areas. Judea must have had its own Byzantine pot tery factory, located in the Jerusalem area, that produced local fine-ware forms (termed Judean sigillata), as well as
other vessels that appear at excavated sites in Jerusalem and its environs. The kilns that produced the Gaza jar, which appears all over the south, have now been found at Ashkelon by the Harvard University Expedition. [See Ashkelon.] T h e distinctive wheel-made southern lamp, which rarely occurs in tire north, must be manufactured somewhere in the Ne gev region, as must the late amphorae so characteristic of the region. T h e dark-black metallic amphorae, often deco rated with paint dribbled down them, must be products of the northern coastal plain because they are found frequently in the north but are rarely seen in the southern regions. [See Ceramics, article on Ceramics of the Byzantine Period.] Archaeological Periodization. The vast regional differ ences in ancient Palestine make a chronological division into subperiods for the Byzantine era impossible at this stage of research. No overall events, either natural or political, cut across all regions of the country to mark a clear and sharp break between one subperiod and another. For example, some recent research and excavations have shown that the so-called Persian destruction layers from the 614 Persian invasion do not appear at carefully excavated sites such as Caesarea Maritima, Capernaum, and Naburiya (Groh, 1989, pp. 62-71). [See Capernaum.] Destruction materials that turn up at sites near the Sea of Galilee and in Jerusalem may now be attributable to postinvasion disturbances caused by the populace itself. Similarly, no single event in augurates the Byzantine period. In Galilee, the revolt of a few of the Jewish cities against Gallus Caesar in 352, which resulted in the military destruction of sites like Sepphoris and Beth-She'arim in the Galilee and Juhada in the Golan Heights, vies with the earthquake of 363, which damaged some sites in Upper Galilee (like Khirbet Shema'), for centtal importance in precision dating (Nathanson, 1986, pp. 29-36). For all that has been written about the supposed dating and sequencing of synagogues, the precise dating of only a few is known, where there was clean excavating, re cording, use of balk sections in conjunction with precise ce ramic controls, and clear publication of all finds (see Groh, t995j P P - 5 6 9 ) . A similar problem exists in determining church-plan development (Tsafrir, 1993, p. 13). I -
Appeals to imperial legislation to explain life in Palestine are not helpful either. It is now known that "power decays with distance" (Gill Stein, Northwestern University), and Constantinople was a world away from Palestine. It will fall to the next generation of scholars to trace the exact contours of the subperiodization of material life in Byzantine Pales tine. More Pious Populace. T h e ethnic/religious groups that inhabited the land (Jews, Christians, Arab tribes, Hellenes, Samaritans, descendents of the Nabateans, and resident for eigners—most of them from Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Syria) are known, but very little is known about their physical appearance, marital patterns, or diets because there
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Byzantine Period has been only limited study of their skeletal remains (Hershkovitz et al., 1988, pp. 193-194). Male skeletons tend to pre dominate in the evidence, so even less is known about women (even discussions about such basic questions as "gender space" are only at their very inception among ar chaeologists and historians of this period). The tiny sample suggests that such groups tended to marry within their own intimate ethnic or religious group. T h e literary evidence for the contact between the two numerically largest groups— Jews and Christians—indicates the same carefully cultivated remoteness. People wanted to keep their distance from out siders. This makes the contemporary presence of the beautiful Byzantine synagogue at Capernaum, only a few meters from the Church of the House of St. Peter, all the more intriguing: it signals the ground-level insistence of Jews upon maintain ing their own religious and ethnic identity in the face of the encroachment of Christians in the very Jewish heartland, a struggle enacted across the country in previously Jewish ar eas. Jews in the Holy Land were crowded by the influx of gentiles into their areas; but they were neither repressed nor in internal disarray, as witnessed by the dozens of Byzantine synagogues created all over the country in the fifth-sixth centuries and by the crowning achievement of Talmudic scholarship, the codification of the Palestinian (or Jerusa lem) Talmud (c. 400). T h e patriarchate was eliminated (c. 425), but the communities and their scholars continued in vibrancy. However, the Jews of the period differed from earlier Jews in one important way: they were more focused in their syn agogue life on personal piety and on the study and venera tion of Scripture. T h e synagogue building as a "house of assembly" required a separate beit midrash ("house of study") only in this later period. Thus, the great synagogue at Meroth was equipped with both a hall for assembly and a separate hall for study. T h e growing number of syna gogues in the Byzantine era in which rebuildings of the in terior bema were carried out to increase its height and maj esty underscore this point, as does the new emphasis on prayer in the synagogue (Urman, 1995, pp. 232-255). T h e veneration of holy sites and burials by the Christians of the era who were residents of the land, and not simply foreign pilgrims, also shows this new dedication to personal piety in their communities. The overwhelming number of syna gogue and church donors, as reflected by their dedicatory inscriptions, were neither governmental officials nor official leaders of the communities, but private individuals. In 638, the southern and eastern deserts brought forth a great influx of equally pious people, the faithful of Islam. In their first hundred years of rule, they gradually turned the economy, political links, and orientation of the rulers and peoples of ancient Palestine away from the West and Jerusalem and toward Damascus and Mecca.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adan-Bayewitz, David. Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade. R a m a t G a n , 1993. Alon, Gedalia. The Jem in Their Land in the Talmudic Age, 70-640 CE. Translated and edited by G e r s h o n Levi. 2 vols. Jerusalem, 19801984. Amiran, D . H . K. a n d E. Arieh. "Earthquakes in Israel and Adjacent Areas: Macroseismic Observations since 100 B . C . E . " Israel Explo ration Journal 44 (1994): 260-305. M o s t up-to-date lisdng of earth quakes, including bibliography. Avigad, N a h m a n . " T h e N e a : Justinian's C h u r c h of St. M ar y, M o t h e r of G o d , Discovered in t h e Old City of Jerusalem." In Ancient Churches Revealed, edited by Y o r a m Tsafrir, p p . 128-135. Jerusalem, 1993Avi-Yonah, Michael. " T h e E c o n o m i c s of Byzantine Palestine." Israel Exploration Journal 8 (1958): 39-51. Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Holy Land from the Persian to the Arab Con quests, 536 B.C.-A.D. 640: A Historical Geography. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966. Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Jews of Palestine: A Political Histoty from the BarKokhba War to the Arab Conquest. Oxford, 1976. Broshi, M a g e n . " T h e Population of Western Palestine in the R o m a n Byzantine P e r i o d . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, n o . 236 (Fall 1979): 1-10. C h e n , D o r o n . "Byzantine Architects at W o r k in M a m p s i s and Sobota, Palestina Tertia: A Study in Paleo-Christian Architectural Design." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 31 (1981): 235-244, C h e n , D o r o n . "Byzantine Architects at W o r k in Oboda, Nessana, and Rehovot, Palestina Tertia: A Study in Paleo-Christian Architectural D e s i g n . " Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 35 (1985): 291-296. D a r , S h i m ' o n . Landscape and Pattern: An Archaeological Survey of Sa maria, 800 B.C.E.-636 CE. 2 vols. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 308. Oxford, 1986. Figueras, P a u . "Beersheva in t h e Roman-Byzantine Period." Boletin de la AsociacibnEspanola de Orientalistas 16 (1980): 135-162. Figueras, P a u . Decorated Jewish Ossuaries. Leiden, 1983. See pages 1012 for the contention that Christian adoption of the Jewish practice e n d e d its practice by Jews; b u t for a contrary view, see M c C a n e (below). Foss, Clive. " T h e N e a r Eastern Countryside in Late Antiquity: A R e view Article." In The Roman and Byzantine Near East: Some Recent Archaeological Research, p p . 213-234. Journal of R o m a n Archaeology Supplemental Series, 14. A n n Arbor, 1995. S u m m a r y article of the most recent studies on Syria/Palestine, including Shereshevski, 1986 (below). Gafni, I. M . " T h e World of t h e T a l m u d : F r o m the M i s h n a h to the Arab C o n q u e s t . " In Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: A Parallel Histoiy of Their Origins and Early Development, edited by Hershel Shanks, p p . 225-265. Washington, D . C . , 1992. G r o h , D e n n i s E. " T h e Fine-Wares of t h e Patrician and Lintel H o u s e s . " In Excavations at Ancient Meiron, Upper Galilee, Israel, 1971-72, 1974-75, 1977, edited by Eric M . Meyers et al., p p . 129-138, pis. 8.29-31. Cambridge, M a s s . , 1981. G r o h , D e n n i s E. " T h e Onomasticon of Eusebius of Caesarea and the Rise of Christian Palestine." I n Papers of the Ninth International Con ference on Patristic Studies, Oxford, 1983, vol. 1, Hislorica, Theologica, Gnostica, Biblica, edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone, p p . 23-31. S t a dia Patristica, 18. K a l a m a z o o , M i c h . , 1986. G r o h , D e n n i s E . "Jews a n d Christians in Late R o m a n Palestine: T o wards a N e w Chronology." Biblical Archaeologist 51 (1988): 80-96. G r o h , D e n n i s E . "Judaism in U p p e r Galilee at the E n d of Antiquity:
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Excavations at Gush Halav and en-Nabratein." In Papers of the Ninth International Conference on Patristic Studies, Oxford, 1983, vol. 2, Critica, classica, ascetica, linguisiica, edited by Elizabetii A. Livingstone, p p . 62-71. Srudia Patristica, 19. Louvain, 1989. G r o h , Dennis E. "Recent Indications of Hellenization at Ancient S e p phoris (Lower Galilee), Israel." In The Ancient Eastern Mediterra nean, edited by Eleanor Guralnik, p p . 39-41, figs. 17-22. Chicago, 1990. G r o h , Dennis E. " T h e Religion of the Empire: Christianity from C o n stantine to the Arab Conquest." In Christianity and Rabbinic Juda ism: A Parallel History of Their Origins and Early Development, edited by Hershel Shanks, p p . 267-303. Washington, D . C . , 1992. G r o h , Dennis E. " T h e Stratigraphic Chronology of the Galilean Syn agogue from the Early R o m a n Period through the Early Byzantine Period, ca. 420 CE," In Ancient Synagogues: Historical and Archaeo logical Study, vol. i , edited by D a n U r m a n and Paul V. M . Flesher, p p . 51-69. Studia Post-Biblica, vol. 47.1. Leiden, 1995. Gutwein, Kenneth C. Third Palestine: A Regional Study in Byzantine Urbanization. Washington, D . C . , 1981. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. Hershkovitz, Israel, et al. "Skeletal Remains from the N o r t h e r n C h u r c h . " In Excavations at Rehovot-in-the-Negev, vol. 1, edited by Yoram Tsafrir, p p . 193-209. Qedem, vol. 25. Jerusalem, 1988. Hirschfeld, Yizhar. The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Pe riod. N e w Haven, 1992. Han, Zvi. " T h e Synagogue a n d Beth Midrash of M e r o t h . " In Ancient Synagogues of Israel, Third-Seventh Century C.E.: Proceedings of the Symposium of the University of Haifa, May 1987, edited by Rachel Hachlili, pp. 31-36. British Archaeological Reports, International Se ries, no. 499. Oxford, 1989. Ilan, Zvi. " T h e Synagogue and H o u s e of Study at M e r o t h . " In Ancient Synagogues: Historical and Archaeological Study, vol. 1, edited by D a n U r m a n and Paul V. M . Flesher, p p . 256-287. Studia Post-Biblica, vol. 47.1 Leiden, 1995. Magness, Jodi. Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology, circa 200-800 CE. Shef field, 1993. T h e best overall survey of Byzantine stratigraphic chro nology and pottery types for Judah. Mayerson, Philip. " T h e Ancient Agricultural Regime of Nessana and die Central N e g e b . " In Excavations at Nessana, vol. 1, edited by H a r ris D . Colt, p p . 211-269. Princeton, 1962, T h e most comprehensive study to date of the archaeological remains of Byzantine runoff ag ricultural technology. Also published as a separate monograph u n d e r the same tide (Jerusalem, 1960). Mayerson, Philip. " T h e Desert of Southern Palestine According to Byzantine Sources." In Monks, Martyrs, Soldiers and Saracens: Pa pers on the Near East in Late Antiquity (1962-1993), p p . 40-52. Je rusalem, 1994. M c C a n e , Byron R. "Bones of Contention? Ossuaries and Reliquaries in Early Judaism a n d Christianity." Second Century 8 (1991): 235246. Contrary view t o Figueras's position (see above, 1983) that Jews dropped ossuary burial because of Christian practice. Meyers, Eric M . "Galilean Regionalism as a Factor in Historical R e construction." Bidletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 221 (1976): 93-101. Meyers, Eric M . "Galilean Regionalism: A Reappraisal." In Approaches to Ancient Judaism, vol. 5, Studies in Judaism and Its Greco-Roman Context, edited by William Scott Green, p p . 115—131. Brown Judaic Studies, 32. Adanta, 1985. Nathanson, Barbara G. "Jews, Christians, and the Gallus Revolt in Fourth-Century Palestine." Biblical Archaeologist 49 (1986): 26-36. Negev, Avraham. " H o u s e a n d City Planning in the Ancient Negev and
die Provincia Arabia." In Housing in Arid Lands: Design and Planning, edited by Gideon Golany, p p . 3-32. L o n d o n , 1980. Excellent look at stone-roof construction a n d the central courtyard h o u s e plan. Ovadiah, Asher. Corpus of the Byzantine Churches in the Holy Land. Theophaneia, 22. B o n n , 1970. U p d a t e d in levant 13 (1981): 200261 and 16 (1984): 129-165. Rosen, Steven A., a n d G i d e o n Avni. " T h e Edge of d i e E m p i r e : T h e Archaeology of Pastoral N o m a d s in the Southern N e g e v Highlands in Late Antiquity." Biblical Archaeologist 56 (1993): 189-199. Russell, Kenneth. " T h e Earthquake of M a y 19, A . D . 363." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 238 (1980): 47-64. Ar gues for the extensive damage done b y this earthquake a n d , there fore, its importance in archaeological dating. Russell, Kennedi. " T h e Earthquake Chronology of Palestine a n d Northwest Arabia from t h e Second through t h e M i d - E i g h t h C e n t u r y A . D . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 260 (1985): 37-59. Standard resource for converting evidence of earth quake damage into a calendar date. Schafer, Peter. " D e r Aufstand gegen Gallus Caesar." I n Tradition and Re-Interpretation in Jewish and Christian Literature: Essays in Honor ofjiirgen C. H. Lebran, edited by J. W . Van H e n t e n et al., p p . 184201. Studia Post-Biblica, vol. 36. Leiden, 1986. Questions d i e trust worthiness of the literary accounts of this revolt. Schwartz, Joshua. Jewish Settlement in Judaea after the Bar-Kochba War until the Arab Conquest, 135-640 CE. (in H e b r e w ) . Jerusalem, 1986. See the English review by Daniel Sperber a n d David Adan-Bayewitz in the Journal for the Study of Judaism 18 (1987): 248-252. Shereshevski, Joseph. " U r b a n Settlements in t h e Negev in d i e Byzan tine Period." P h . D . diss., H e b r e w University of Jerusalem, 1986. In Hebrew with English s u m m a r y . Strange, James F . , et al. "Excavations at Sepphoris: T h e Location a n d Identification of Shikhin, Part I . " Israel Exploration Journal 44 (1994): 216-227. T h e discovery of the T a l m u d i c pottery-making site on a n u n n a m e d ridge in Galilee near Sepphoris. N e u t r o n activation of kiln wasters verifies uiat forms found t h r o u g h o u t the Galilee a n d Golan were m a d e here. T h e site's Josephan n a m e is Asochis. Tsafrir, Yoram. " T h e M a p s U s e d by T h e o d o s i u s : O n the Pilgrim M a p s of the Holy L a n d and Jerusalem in the Sixtii Century C E . " Dum barton Oaks Papers 40 (1986): 129-145. Tsafrir, Yoram. " T h e Development of Ecclesiastical Architecture in Palestine." In Ancient Churches Revealed, edited by Y o r a m Tsafrir, p p . 1-16. Jerusalem, 1993. Tsafrir, Yoram, et al. Tabula Imperii Romani, ludaca Palaestina: Eretz Israel in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods. Jerusalem, 1994. M a p s and gazetteer. U r m a n , D a n . The Golan: A Profile of a Region during the Roman and Byzantine Periods. British Archaeological Reports, International S e ries, no. 269. Oxford, 1985. U r m a n , D a n . " T h e H o u s e of Assembly and t h e H o u s e of Study: Are T h e y O n e and t h e S a m e ? " In Ancient Synagogues: Historical and Ar chaeological Study, vol. 1, edited by D a n U r m a n a n d Paul V. M . Flesher, p p . 232-255, Studia Post-Biblica, vol. 47.1. L e i d e n , 1995. U r m a n , D a n . "Public Structures and Jewish C o m m u n i t i e s in t h e Golan Heights." In Ancient Synagogues: Historical and Archaeological Study, vol. 2, edited by D a n U r m a n and Paul V. M . Flesher, p p . 373-605. Studia Post-Biblica, vol. 47.2. Leiden, 1995. Weinberg, Gladys D a v i d s o n , ed. Excavations at Jalame: Site of a Glass Factory in Late Roman Palestine. Columbia, M o . , 1988. T h e discov ery of a L a t e R o m a n glass factory in Galilee. Wilken, Robert L. The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought. N e w Haven, 1992. DENNIS E .
GROH
PALESTINE: Palestine in the Islamic Period Palestine in the Islamic Period Just as the Islamic period is the most recent stratum on every archaeological site (if it has an Islamic stratum), so is the study of Islamic archaeology the most recent of archaeolog ical disciplines. In fact, this state of affairs is not confined to ancient Palestine but is shared by many of Israel's neigh boring countries. T h e belated interest in Islamic archaeology has resulted in relatively limited attention to the later levels of excavations, of which the overwhelming majority have concentrated on ancient periods. Few excavations have aimed from the outset at uncovering and studying Islamic remains, which have only recently received the acknowl edgement they deserve. T h e Islamic history of Palestine (beginning of the seventh century-end of the fifteenth century) can be divided roughly into three main eras—early, middle, and late—each of which is further subdivided. These divisions correspond to the periodization dictated by historical events and, to a considerable extent, reflect the archaeological evidence of their respective material culture. [See Periodization.] T h e weight of the three main periods is far from evenly distributed. Another impor tant factor is drat, during the period under discussion, the area of "Palestine" was not a political entity but, from an administrative point of view, comprised two major units: the first, comprising the coastal area, the northern Jordan Valley, and the east bank of the Jordan River was the Jund al-Urdan (the equivalent of the Byzantine Palaestina Secunda); die second included the southern part of the Jordan Valley and Transjordan (echoing Palaestina Prima) and was known as the Jund Filastin. However, historically and politically they shared die same fate and depended, according to shifts in the balance of power, on either Syria or Egypt. T w o factors preceding tire advent of Islam had an impact on the character of the country, and both are attested in die archaeological record: a series of infiltrations of nomads, mainly from Arabia via the Red Sea, into the southern part of Palestine; and the Sasanian occupation from 614-628 C E , which was accompanied by the destruction of a large num ber of churches. [See Churches.] Thus, prior to the Islamic occupation there was a phase tiiat did not experience wide spread destruction but influenced many of the existing cul tural conditions. Evidence for this phase (c. 600-636) is best known from the survey made of the Negev desert, particu larly in die area of Sede Boqer. [See Negev.] A few pottery sherds that appear to be an extension of Byzantine typolo gies and an enormous number of rock graffiti in Arabic are finds that should probably be viewed as belonging to an "Arab" stratum (reflecting some degree of Arab infiltration in the pre-Islamic period). However, in the same area there is evidence for die existence of several open-air mosques and several hundreds of rock inscriptions in Arabic dating from the period after 636. [See Mosque.] These inscriptions, in
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cidentally, continued into the ninth century, but by then they are Islamic rather than Arabic. Early Islamic Period. T h e major turning point in areas of social, political, and cultural developments took place un der die Umayyads (661-749). [See Umayyad Caliphate.] As early as tire reign of'Abd al-Malik, Jerusalem benefited from an extraordinary renaissance. T h e Dome of the Rock was built in AH 72/691-692 C E , a magnificent artistic landmark that expressed die principles of the Islamic art to come— one of them being the use of the Arabic script for decorative purposes. The focal point created by the Dome of the Rock was augmented by a number of buildings, such as the alAqsa mosque and in particular the series of secular buildings discovered during the excavations of Benjamin Mazar to the south and southwest of the Temple Mount. [See the biog raphy of Mazar.] These buildings created a new Islamic compound on the Temple Mount, henceforth known as the Haram esh-Sharif. It contributed to transformingjerusalem into a major administtative center. In about 7 1 2 - 7 1 5 , the new city of Ramla was founded by Sulayman, who, as governor of Jund Filastin, chose to es tablish his capital at this major crossroad. [See Ramla.] Ex cavations at Ramla have permitted the reconstruction of the layout of the city in this early period. The earliest finds were indeed on virgin soil (the rami of Ramla). The mosque, a series of mosaic pavements, and particularly a large amount of pottery finds, witii some evidence for the existence of a potter's workshop, all combine to offer a new picture of the material culture of Palestine in the eighth century. The phe nomenon of the "Umayyad chateau" is exemplified by Khirbat al-Minyeh, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (be ginning of the eighth century) and Khirbat al-Mafjar in the Jericho area (mid-eighth century). [SeeMafjar, Khirbat al-.] These mansions, linked to agricultural production in the surrounding areas, display a surprising degree of luxury and rich artistic decoration. T h e excavations of both palaces yielded a varied harvest of sculpture, floor mosaics, carved stone, and carved stucco, each in a most distinctive style. (Only the mosaics resemble their Byzantine counterparts.) During this period the country apparently underwent a con siderable reorganization: the roads must have been repaired, for there are several milestones from the reign of 'Abd alMalik as testimony. Another significant innovation inttoduced by 'Abd al-Malik was in die field of numismatics. The Byzantine coinage, which continued in circulation, eventu ally received Arabic countermarks. Somewhat later, com pletely new coins were struck in various centers of the coun try. A major reform was carried out by 'Abd al-Malik in which the typical Islamic coin displayed Arabic script on both sides, including a proclamation of the Muslim faith (Ar., shahadah), a formula that persisted for centuries. Islamic pottery deserves particular attention because it changed significantly from that of the preceding Byzantine
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period. Most of the pottery manufactured during the Early Islamic period was unglazed. However, it was of high artistic quality and great care is exhibited in its manufacture and fin ish. The shapes, of both vessels and lamps, are indicative of a new era. There was a sophisticated use of molds, enabling a wide variety of decoration—particularly evident in finds at Ramla and in some of the pottery from Khirbat al-Mafjar. The clay is almost always buff, fine, and well levigated. Grad ually, glazes made their appearance, and from the ninth cen tury onward, pottery in Palestine was part of the large and varied family of Islamic glazed polychrome ware. [See also Ceramics, article on Ceramics of the Islamic Period.] Middle Islamic Period. Under the 'Abbasids there is lit tle evidence of involvement on the part of the authorities in making improvements in the cities. A rare find is a cistern in Ramla with a dated inscription corresponding to the year 789, during the reign of Harun al-Rashid. [See 'Abbasid Ca liphate.] At Abu Ghosh, excavations uncovered the earliest known public hostel (Ar., khan), with a rich assemblage of pottery, both unglazed and glazed, dated roughly to the tenth century. T h e outstanding remains of the Fatimid pe riod that followed are two contemporaneous monumental inscriptions, one in the Dome of the Rock and the other in the al-Aqsa mosque. Also belonging to the Fatimid period are two spectacular hoards of jewelry, found in the exca vations at Caesarea and Ashkelon. [See Fatimid Dynasty; Jewelry; Caesarea; Ashkelon.] Late Medieval Period. T h e Ayyubid period primarily marks the gradual return to Islamic rule after the interlude of Crusader control. This period, though again a relatively short one (1187-1250), is one of the most fascinating chap ters in Islamic history and archaeology in Palestine. The new theological institution of the madrasa, or school, became widespread; the new cursive script (Naskhi) was preferred in calligraphy over that of Kufic writing; and the confron tation with the Crusaders led to a most unexpected culmi nation: the destruction of the coastal cities of the country as far south as Jerusalem. Excavations have produced dramatic evidence of this policy, which was to continue under the Mamluks. Magen Broshi's excavations along the southern wall of Jerusalem revealed a broken inscription commemo rating the building of a gate in the wall by the Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Mu'azzam 'Isa. It was known from the written sources that this wall had been destroyed by the same ruler shortly afterward. [See Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties; Cru sader Period.] The Mamluk period (1250-1517) is represented by mon uments all over the country, from Safed in the. north to Gaza in the south. It is best exemplified by the concentration of distinctive Mamluk monuments—madrasas, markets, and baths-in the Old City of Jerusalem. [See Jerusalem.] T h e modern city's urban plan inter muros reflects the Mamluk period to a great extent. Sites excavated in different areas of the country (e.g., Abu Ghosh, Yoqne'am, Jerusalem) have
yielded rather homogeneous pottery, but no local centers of production have yet been located. [See Yoqne'am.] In the late medieval period, both glazed and unglazed ceramics continued to be manufactured, but they differed in quality, techniques, style, and motifs from their Umayyad and 'Abbasid predecessors. In the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods, the clay of unglazed pottery is somewhat more green and the shapes are different. A very distinctive family of un glazed pottery made its appearance, consisting of handmade vessels with geometric patterns painted in a dark reddish brown over a pinkish slip. T h e glazed pottery is character ized by a combination of molded and incised (sgraffito) dec oration. Excavations in Jerusalem have uncovered some ex amples of locally made marvered glass. In the Islamic period, the archaeology of Palestine shares many character istics of material culture with both Syria and Egypt. BIBLIOGRAPHY Avni, Gideon, "Early M o s q u e s in the N e g e v Highlands: N e w A r c h a e ological Evidence o n Islamic Penetration of S o u t h e r n Palestine," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no, 294 (1994): 83-100. Broshi, Magen. " M o u n t Zion (Notes a n d N e w s ) . " Israel Exploration Journal 14 (1974): 285. A n n o u n c e m e n t of the discovery in Jerusalem of the Arabic inscription of al-Malik a l - M u ' a z z a m , dated 1212 CE. King, Geoffrey, C . J. L e n z e n , and Gary O. Rollefson. "Survey of Byz antine a n d Islamic Sites in Jordan: S e c o n d Season R e p o r t , 1981." Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 27 (1983): 385-435. Marmardji, A. Sebastianus. Textes geographiques arabes sur la Palestine. Paris, 1951. Northedge, Alastair. Studies on Roman and Islamic 'Amman: Excavations of Mrs. C.-M. Bennett and Other Investigations. Vol. 1, History, Site, Architecture. British A c a d e m y M o n o g r a p h s in Archaeology, 3. O x ford, 1992. Includes analysis of the U m a y y a d palace. Rosen-Ayalon, M y r i a m . The Early Islamic Monuments of Haram alSharif: An Iconographic Study. Q e d e m 28. Jerusalem, 1989. Sharon, M o s h e . " T h e Cities of the Holy L a n d u n d e r Islamic R u l e . " Cathedra 40 (1986): 83-120 ( H e b r e w ) . Sourdel, D o m i n i q u e . "FilastTn I: Palestine u n d e r Islamic R u l e . " Ency clopaedia of Islam, new ed., B . Lewis, et al. ed. 2: 910-13. Leiden, 1965. W h i t c o m b , Donald. " K h i r b e t al-Mafjar Reconsidered: T h e C e r a m i c Evidence." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 271 (1988): 51-67. MYRIAM ROSEN-AYALON
PALESTINE EXPLORATION FUND. Founded on 12 May 1865, at a meeting held in the Jerusalem Cham ber of Westminster Abbey, the Palestine Exploration Fund was the brainchild of George Grove, then manager of the Crystal Palace. Grove's interest in the fund was sparked by the work he had done on biblical place names for George Adam Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. It and the Ordnance Survey ofJerusalem appeared in 1864, raising public interest in the subject sufficiently for a society dedicated to studying the land of the Bible to succeed. This interest was height ened by Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in
PALESTINE EXPLORATION FUND 1859, and by the text-critical work of the German school of biblical scholars led by Julius Wellhausen in Tubingen: it was felt necessary to buttress the historicity of the Hebrew Bible. T h e fund's initial effort was to provide a proper survey and an accurate map of Palestine, as a basis for studying its archaeology (in the broadest sense). In 1865 Charles Wilson of the Royal Engineers carried out a preliminary survey for the fund. T h e substantial cost and difficulties involved in a full-scale survey were daunting. T h e fund decided instead to continue the work of exploring Jerusalem, concentrating on the problem of the location of Herod's Temple—a pro ject chosen to raise the profile of the fund and attract the monies necessary for the larger project. Accordingly, from 1867 to 1871 Charles Warren explored "underground Je rusalem" by means of a series of tunnels around die Temple Mount (Haram esh-Sharif). [See Jerusalem.] His work re vealed for the first time the massive scale of the construction undertaken by Herod and greatly advanced what was known of the location of the Temple. By 1869 the quantity of ma terial resulting from the fund's projects required the regular publication of a journal, the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (PEFQ), the first journal specifically de voted to the study of the region. By late 1871, the fund had enough money to engage a team of Royal Engineers to survey and map Palestine. T h e team's initial leader, R. W. Stewart, was sent home within a month of his arrival, a victim of "fever," probably malaria, which was to take the lives of several members of the survey party. He was replaced by Claude R. Conder, who arrived in July 1872 and led the survey until July 1875, when he was injured in an attack at Safed. He had been joined in 1874 by Herbert Horatio Kitchener, who was also injured in the at tack. T h e survey was suspended until 1877, when it was resumed under Kitchener's command. It was completed in September of that year; the map was published in 1880 and the text volumes in 1881-1884. In 1881-1882 the American Palestine Exploration Society attempted to do a similar sur vey east of the Jordan River, but with the society's demise the work was left incomplete. T h e fund's attempt was cut short, after more than 800 sq km (500 sq. mi.) of central Jordan had been surveyed, as a result of the opposition of the Ottoman governor of es-Salt. Between 1885 and 1889, Gottlieb Schumacher surveyed the area of Transjordan be tween Amman and the Syrian border for the fund, while surveying the line of the Hejaz Railway for the Ottoman government. In 1883-1884, an expedition led by Edward Hull, assisted by Kitchener, carried out a geological survey of Wadi 'Arabah. This expedition concluded the first phase of the fund's activities—the mapping and survey of the land. T h e next phase began with the first excavation carried out in Palestine by a professional archaeologist, W. M. F. Petrie, who chose Tell el-Hesi, believed then to be ancient Lachish. [See Hesi, Tell el-; Lachish.] Petrie spent six weeks on the
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site, during which time he laid the foundations for a strati graphic excavation and established the outlines of the site's ceramic sequence as the basic means of dating the archae ological remains. Although Heinrich Schliemann's work at Troy had already shown that the tells that dotted the Near East were formed by continuous human settlement, this was the first time it was being demonstrated in the Levant. Petrie's use of pottery for dating purposes was at first opposed, notably by Conder, but soon became widely accepted. When Petrie expressed a desire to return to his beloved Egypt, the fund found a replacement in a young American, Frederick Jones Bliss, son of Daniel Bliss, who had founded what was to become the American University of Beirut. Bliss excavated at Hesi until the end of 1893. The fund's international character was reinforced in this period by employing Charles Clermont-Ganneau, a French diplomat and antiquarian who had studied the antiquities of the country in connection with the 1873-1874 survey, and Conrad Schick, a German architect who had originally gone to Jerusalem as a missionary in 1846. Schick maintained a close connection with the fund from its inception until his death in 1901, during which time he carried out extensive research in Jerusalem. From 1894 to 1897, the fund again turned its attention to Jerusalem, and excavations were car ried out in a number of areas by Bliss, assisted by the ar chitect A. C. Dickie. Between 1898 and 1900, excavations directed by Bliss, assisted by R. A. S. Macalister, were car ried out at four sites in the Shephelah: Tell Zakariya CAzekah), Tell es-Safi (Gatli?), Tell el-Judeideh (Moreshet-Gath), and Tell es-Sandahanna/Mareshah (Marisa). [See 'Azekah; Judeideh, Tell el-; Mareshah.] From 1902 to 1905 and 1907 to 1909, the fund carried out its largest ex cavation, at Tell el-Jezer (Gezer), under Macalister's direc tion. [See Gezer.] T h e large-scale and prompt publication of these excavations should have made them the cornerstone of future work in the area; however, Macalister's decision to publish the material by stratum/period, without any indi cation of fmdspot, and his crude stratigraphy made his re port difficult to use. T h e fund's final excavation prior to World War I, which brought a halt to archaeology in the field, was in 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 1 2 at Ain Shems (Beth-Shemesh), di rected by Duncan Mackenzie, assisted by F. G. Newton, an architect. [See Beth-Shemesh.] T h e fund then began to pub lish a series of annuals, of which only six volumes appeared. In spring 1914, with war looming, Kitchener asked the fund to survey the Negev desert, the last unmapped area in west ern Palestine. [See Negev.] A team of Royal Engineers com manded by S. F. Newcombe, carried out the mapping. T h e fund had chosen the distinguished Egyptologist T. E. Peet to carry out the archaeological survey, but Peet had a prior commitment. T h e fund turned to the director of the British Museum, Frederick Kenyon, who, in turn, obtained the ser vices of two young archaeologists then excavating at Carchemish for the museum, C. Leonard Woolley and T . E. c
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Lawrence. The resulting map was completed in the first year of the war and released for publication in 1921; the archae ological survey results were published in 1915. The establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine cre ated a new situation. A Mandatory Department of Antiq uities was created and in 1918 the British School of Archae ology in Jerusalem was established. A number of other organizations also operating in the field included tile Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, the Ecole Biblique et Ar cheologique Frangaise, andtireJewish Palestine Exploration Society. The fund renewed its own excavations in Jerusalem from 1923 to 1925, directed by Macalister, assisted by J. Garrow Duncan, and from 1925 to 1927, directed by Crow foot, assisted by G. M. Fitzgerald. In 1934 Alan Rowe car ried out a brief excavation at Gezer for the fund, intended to clarify the site's stratigraphy. Unfortunately, the stratig raphy in die area chosen for excavation was so shallow the promised final report never appeared. The fund's last major excavation, at Samaria/Sebaste (1931-1935), was a joint project with Harvard University, the British Academy, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [See Samaria.] T h e excavations re vealed remains from the tenth century BCE, prior to the foun dation of the royal citadel, and from the occupation follow ing the move to the site by Omri in about 880 B C E . An important area of the Flellenistic and Roman city was ex cavated and the stratified sequence of terra sigillata ware be came important for the study of the archaeology of the Ro man Empire in regions as far away as Scotiand. T h e period following World War II was a difficult one for the fund. The last of the generation of the founders and their immediate successors was gone, and public interest in bib lical matters—and the funds available for diem—had greatly diminished. The fund did, however, continue to publish its journal, now known as the Palestine Exploration Quarterly (PEQ), hold lectures, and give some limited financial support to promote research. In 1989 the fund resumed the publi cation of monographs. [See also American Palestine Exploration Society; British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; Ecole Biblique et Ar cheologique Francaise; Israel Exploration Society; Nation alism and Archaeology; and the biographies of Bliss, Conder, Clermont-Ganneau, Crowfoot, Kitchener, Lawrence, Macalis ter, Petrie, Rowe, Schumacher, Schick, Smith, Warren, Wilson, and Woolley] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bartlett, John R . Edom and the Edomites. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 77. Sheffield, 1989. Condor, Claude R., a n d Horatio H . Kitchener. Survey of Western Pal estine. 8 vols, a n d cased m a p . L o n d o n , 1881-1888. Of the m a n y p u b lications (surveys a n d excavations reports) sponsored b y the P B F , this is perhaps the best known. H o d s o n , Yolande. " T h e Palestine Exploration F u n d : Recollections of the Past." In Biblical Archaeology Today 1990, edited b y Avraham Biran et al., p p . 6-8. Jerusalem, 1993.
L i p m a n , V. D . " T h e Origins of the Palestine Exploration F u n d . " Pal estine Exploration Quarterly 120 (1988): 45-54. Includes extensive notes and bibliography. Palestine Exploration Fund Annual. L o n d o n , 1911-1927. Five volumes, issued irregularly. Palestine Exploration Fund Pamphlets. L o n d o n , 1878. Covers various subjects; includes proceedings a n d a n n o u n c e m e n t s of early publi cations. Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1869-1936); continued from 1937 as Palestine Exploration Quarterly. RUPERT CHAPMAN
PALESTINE ORIENTAL SOCIETY. While in Jerusalem as the first Annual Professor of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), Albert T . Clay, a professor of Assyriology at Yale University, perceived a need for greater communication and cooperation (from cul tural and ecumenical perspectives) among scholars con ducting research in Palestine. T o that end, on 9 January 1920, he organized a meeting attended by twenty-nine scholars. T h e society held its first official meeting on 20 March of that year, at which time Pere Marie-Joseph La grange of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise was elected its first president. Thereafter, the Palestine Oriental Society met quarterly, usually at the ASOR facilities. Other prominent charter members of the society were William F. Albright, Eliezer Ben Yehudah, Herbert Danby, Pere Edouard Dhorme, and Pere Louis Vincent. T h e society's last president, serving from 1941 to 1948, was J. H . Iliffe. T h e society's stated purposes were to provide scholars from different backgrounds and nationalities with a forum in which to share their findings in all aspects of archaeolog ical and oriental studies; to facilitate greater cooperation and coordination of efforts; to sharpen the focus of research through mutual criticism; to promote publication of find ings; and to take advantage of the new openness toward ar chaeological excavations that characterized British rule in Palestine. One of the society's major contributions was its publica tion, the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society. Twenty vol umes of the journal were issued from 1920 through 1941; an index was published in 1948, at the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, as its twenty-first and final edition. Virtually every aspect of Near Eastern archaeology is rep resented in the numerous articles the journal published, in cluding Bible, botany, climatology, folklore, geology, his tory, inscriptions, epigraphy, linguistics, literature, mosaics, numismatics, pottery, prehistory, religion, and synagogues. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise; and the biographies of Albright, Lagrange, and Vincent] BIBLIOGRAPHY King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. I n addition to being the standard book o n die history of A S O R , this work con-
PALESTINIAN ARAMAIC tains valuable information about significant research organizations related to A S O R . Glueck, Nelson. The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society: Indices to Volumes I-XXI, 1920-1948. Jerusalem, 1966. Published on the o c casion of the reprinting of the complete set of JPOS volumes, with a list of all the articles published in t h e journal by author a n d subject. CHARLES E . CARTER
PALESTINIAN ARAMAIC. T h e language of the corpus of written material from Palestine from roughly 200 B C E to 200 C E are written in Palestinian Aramaic. T h e corpus principally comprises literary and ephemeral texts from Qumran, Murabba'at, and Nahal Hever, but include in scriptions on ossuaries, tombstones, and coins; Aramaic words found in Josephus and the New Testament; and cer tain very early rabbinic texts, such as Megillat Ta'anit. Pal estinian Aramaic belongs to the phase of the language that Joseph Fitzmyer (1979) has called Middle Aramaic, distin guishing it from the earlier Official or Imperial Aramaic, on the one hand, and the dialects of Late Aramaic on the other. Contemporary with Palestinian Aramaic are the Aramaic di alects of Nabatea, Edessa, Palmyra, and Hatra. Morphologically, Palestinian Aramaic differs little from Official Aramaic. T h e principal differences are the use of third-person plural feminine forms of the pronoun, suffix, and verb; the use of dn rather than dnh for the demonstra tive; and the occasional use of d for the earlier relative par ticle dy. Syntactically, Palestinian Aramaic displays a pref erence for historic Semitic word order (verb-subject-object), whereas Official Aramaic tends to free word order. In com parison with contemporary Aramaic dialects, Palestinian Aramaic tends to make more conservative use of Official Aramaic dialect traits than most. For example, unlike its contemporaries, Palestinian Aramaic retains the use of the jussive. A major question in research on this dialect is the degree to which it represents the spoken Aramaic of Palestine—that is, how different were the spoken and written forms of the language? In all languages there are some differences, so the question is one of degree. Was there a "Standard Literary Aramaic," as many scholars contend, that was used to write most types of literary text? T h e existence of such a standard would imply a diglossia, in which different forms of a lan guage serve different functions in complementary distribu tion. It would also imply, therefore, that various spoken Ar amaic dialects existed in Palestine in this period—dialects whose distinctive forms would never appear in written texts except inadvertently. One of the larger issues involved is what sort of Aramaic texts scholars might rightly use in at tempting to reconstruct hypothetical Aramaic originals of the sayings of Jesus. Aramaic texts from Qumran number approximately one hundred, one-sixth of the nonbiblical scrolls; virtually all are literary as opposed to documentary. Broadly speaking, these are theological writings. Their dates correspond to the dates
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of the Dead Sea Scrolls generally (c. 150 B C E - 7 0 C E ) . At tempts to date individual texts more precisely have not taken into account the possibility of significantly variant scripts among scribes working in a given period and are therefore unreliable. These Aramaic texts are for the most part written in the Jewish square script that developed from the Aramaic script used in the Persian period. Some are written in cursive or semicursive forms, but those scripts more commonly characterize contracts and other ephemeral writings such as are frequent among the Bar Kokhba materials. Among the best-preserved Aramaic scrolls from the Qumran caves are the Genesis Apocryphon, 11 QTargum Job, the Enochic liter ature, and several copies of the Book of Tobit. A group of works that are more or less closely related to the biblical Book of Daniel are, like several chapters of that book itself, written in Aramaic. These writings include the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), the "Son of G o d " text (4Q246), and the pseudoDame/ apocalypse (4Q243-245). Numerous Palestinian Aramaic texts from Murabba'at and Nahal Hever are associated with the Bar Kokhba-led Second Jewish Revolt (132-135 CE). These texts include marriage contracts and writs of divorce, IOUs, deeds of sale, and subscriptions to contracts. Perhaps most significant is the correspondence from Bar Kokhba to his lieutenants, and from his lieutenants to others. A substantial proportion of the Bar Kokhba letters are in Aramaic, but others are in Hebrew or Greek. Alongside the Aramaic contracts are Nabatean analogs. Thus, these materials illustrate the linguistic complexity that characterized Palestine in this period. How Aramaic functioned socially vis-a-vis the other languages in use in this complex is still uncertain. Aramaic ossuary and tomb inscriptions come principally from the region of Jerusalem and number nearly one hun dred. New ones continue to be discovered almost every year. Excavations at Masada discovered many Aramaic-inscribed ostraca—letters and titulipicti, or "labels." A potentially confusing imprecision in the literature is sometimes encountered in which Palestinian Aramaic is used loosely to connote very different corpora from the one described here. It is important to distinguish the term as defined above from the Aramaic of Palestine: the earliest Aramaic materials found in Palestine date to the ninth cen tury B C E , long before the period under discussion here. The terms Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, denoting materials from the Byzantine period, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic, for materials from the same general period, are also used. [See also Aramaic Language and Literature; Dead Sea Scrolls; Murabba'at; and Qumran.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Fitzmyer, Joseph A. " T h e Phases of the Aramaic L a n g u a g e . " In A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays, p p . 5 7 - 8 4 . Missoula, 1 9 7 9 . Seminal essay on the division of Aramaic, clearly proposing basic aspects of the view of Palestinian Aramaic adopted in this ar ticle.
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Fitzmyer, Joseph A., and Daniel J. Harrington. A Manual of Palestinian Aramaic Texts: Second Century B.C.-Second Century A.D. R o m e , 1978. H a n d y collection of Palestinian Aramaic texts, including vir tually everytiting then known and a bibliography for each text. D o z ens of new texts are available, however, principally from Q u m r a n Cave 4, Masada, a n d the Babatha archive. Lewis, Naphtali, et al. The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Ijetters: Greek Papyri, Aramaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions. Jerusalem, 1989. T h e Greek contracts from the Ba batha archive, Papyri 15, 17-19, 20-22, and 27 have Palestinian Ar amaic subscriptions that Jonas C . Greenfield treats in a separate sec tion of the book. Muraoka, Takamitsu, ed. Studies in Qumran Aramaic. Abr-Nahrain, Supplement Series, vol. 3. Leiden, 1992. Eight studies on Q u m r a n Aramaic that touch on virtually all the central issues involved in de fining Palestinian Aramaic. Reed, Stephen. Dead Sea Scroll Inventory Project: List of Documents, Photographs, and Museum Plates. 14 fascs. Claremont, Calif., 19911992. Complete list of all the D e a d Sea Scrolls and Bar Kokhba a n d related materials, including an indication of the language in which the text is inscribed; the place to begin compiling an inclusive text of all Palestinian Aramaic materials. N o w revised in Emanuel T o v , et al„ eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche: A Comprehensive Fac simile Edition of the Texts from thejudean Desert (Leiden, 1993). N o t e as well Reed's Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers (Atlanta, 1994). T o v , Emanuel. " T h e Unpublished Q u m r a n Texts from Caves 4 a n d I I . " Journal of Jewish Studies 43 (1992): 101-136. Provides a quick overview of texts from Q u m r a n caves 4 and 11, indicating those in Palestinian Aramaic. Yadin, Yigael, and Joseph Naveh. The Aramaic and Hebrew Ostraca and Jar Inscriptions. M a s a d a I, the Yigael Yadin Excavations, 1963-1965, Final Reports. Jerusalem, 1989. Includes the Palestinian Aramaic in scriptions, letters, and lists, a n d The Coins of Masada by Ya'acov Meshorer. MICHAEL O .
WISE
PALMER, EDWARD HENRY (1840-1882), Brit ish Orientalist. Born in Cambridge, Palmer was a small, slender man with a low and remarkably receding forehead and an inherited tendency to asthma and bronchial disease. Orphaned when he was young, he was raised by an aunt and educated at Perse Grammar School in Oxford, where he studied Latin and Greek. As a boy he spent his pocket money on lessons in Romany from Gypsies passing through the area. He did not excell at school and, instead of going on to the university, went to work as a clerk in a firm of brokers in the City of London. During his time there he learned Italian and French in the same way he had learned Romany. He left the City following a serious attack of bron chial disease, from which he nearly died. He had already begun studying Oriental languages and in 1863 entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from which he received his B.A. degree in 1866; he was elected a fellow of St. John's in 1867. In 1869 Palmer took part in the Ordnance Survey of Sinai, in which his duties were to collect the traditions, names, and legends of the local people, to copy and decipher any in scriptions encountered, and to observe any dialectical dif
ferences that appeared. Following the success of the Sinai expedition, Palmer was engaged by the Palestine Explora tion Fund to explore the North Sinai and Negev deserts (December 1869-May 1870). T h e ten years that followed were taken up with the publication of reports on his explo rations and books on the history of the region. In 1871 Palmer was appointed to fill the vacant post of professor of Arabic at Cambridge, a preferment of a kind then most unusual there because it allowed the holder to keep his position if he married. Palmer married and began a period of intense and productive work. In 1881 the Egyp tian army rebelled against the Anglo-French domination of its country, and London feared for the safety of the Suez Canal, the strategic link to India. Britain's military occupa tion of Egypt made it necessary to secure the loyalty of the bedouin tribes in Sinai, and Palmer was asked to undertake the mission with government backing and a few men. He left Gaza on 15 July 1881 and traveled through the desert, visiting the leaders of the tribes. He reached Suez on 1 Au gust. On 6 August, Palmer and his party again set off into Sinai, but this time one of their guides betrayed them and they were ambushed and murdered in Wadi Sudr. [See also Nationalism and Archaeology; Negev; Palestine Exploration Fund; and Sinai.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Besant, Walter. The Life and Achievements of Edward Henry Palmer: Late Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Saint John's College. L o n d o n and N e w York, 1883. A p p e n dix 3, pages 427-430 gives a bibliography, " W o r k s of E d w a r d H e n r y Palmer." A biography by a friend; includes a portrait engraving of Palmer in oriental attire. Lane-Poole, Stanley. "Palmer, E d w a r d H e n r y . " In Dictionary of Na tional Biography, vol. 15, p p . 122-126. L o n d o n , 1921-1922. Palmer, E d w a r d Henry. The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years' Wanderings; undertaken in connection with the ordinance survey of Sinai and the Palestine Exploration Fund. Cambridge, 1871. Palmer, Edward Henry. Arabic and English Name Lists Collected During the Survey. Survey of Western Palestine. L o n d o n , 1881. Palmer, Edward H e n r y . The Arabic Manual. L o n d o n , 1881. RUPERT CHAPMAN
PALMYRA (Tadmor), oasis 245 Ion (152 mi.) east of the Mediterranean Sea and 210 km (30 mi.) west of the Euphrates River, in the center of the Syrian steppe, which is generally known as the Syrian desert (Badiat ash-Sham). Palmyra lies at the northeastern slope of Jebel al-Muntar of the Palmyrene mountain chain at an altitude of about 600 m. Palmyra is 235 km (146 mi.) from Damascus, 155 km (96 mi.) from Horns, and 210 km (130 mi.) from Deiz ezZor. It was always a rest stop, and for at least four thousand years a caravan station between Syria and Mesopotamia. The etymology of its ancient, and also actual, name in all Semitic languages, Tadmor, is unexplained in all known di-
PALMYRA alects. It may be derived from the West Semitic dh-m-r, which means "protect." It is called Palmyra in Greco-Latin sources, probably because of the extensive palm groves there. T h e field of ruins of Palmyra and a part of the oasis are encircled by a rampart of about 6 km ( 4 mi.) long. A larger enclosure, known as the custom's rampart, rises up toward the mountain; its traces are still visible south of the Afqa Spring. T h e city's "Grand Colonnade," a main street more than one Ion long, has been the city's axis since about the end of tire second century C E . (Another axis belonged to the Late Hellenistic city; it was related to the Temple of Bel. T h e temple was later connected to the new axis through a tri angular monumental arch misnamed the Arch of Triumph.) T h e Temple of Bel, called the Temple of the Sun in an cient texts, is the largest and the most imposing building at Palmyra: it consists of a large, square courtyard more than 200 X 200 m in area, surrounded by four porticoes, a huge central sanctuary, a propylon, and vestiges of a large ban-
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quet hall, a basin, and an altar. T h e columns of the left por tico and four tall columns of a nymphaeum led from the temple to a monumental arch decorated in the Severan-period style (beginning of the third century). Across from the arch, on the left portico, stand the ruins of the Temple of Nabu, which was refbunded, with a beautiful propylon, in about the fourth quarter of the first century CE and com pleted in the second. Its monumental altar was constructed in the third century. On the right portico stands the monu mental entrance added to the baths during the reign of Di ocletian, at about the end of the third century. Also on tire left is an arched path leading to the semicircular colonnaded square around the theater. T o the right, near the tetrapylon, is another nymphaeum and two stepped column bases that point the way to a narrow road leading to the Temple of Ba'al Shamin, which was rebuilt in 131. Another street to the left is flanked by a banquet hall and a caesareum. This street leads to the theater, senate, and agora whh its annex. Beyond die tetrapylon an Umayyad market was built inside the main street. T o the left there is an exedra. At the end of the street, on the hill inside the enclosure of Diocletian's camp, is the Temple of Allat. From it there is a panoramic view of the ruins, the necropolis surrounding the city, and particularly the Valley of the Tombs. The valley was the site of the tower tombs belonging to the city's richest families in the first century C E , witii some dating to the first century BCE.
Prehistory. In the Upper Paleolithic, the area to the southeast of the site was filled with a large lake whose re mains are the present salt flats. It was an excellent place for hunting, which explains the existence of the LevalloisoMousterian flint industry from about 75,000 B P in the caves and shelters in the surrounding mountains (Jarf al-'Ajla, thaniyat al-Baidah, Ad-Dawarah). Neolidiic materials are en \ . f. \> Kr. . J * — v •' countered at different mounds in the vicinity of die oasis. Traces of scattered seventh-millennium settlements proba ; ^ f e ^ | P ^ ^ ! i |I1;-V 1 ; ^ f l f bly belong to the first sedentarization there, principally en couraged by the abundant sulfuric spring that gave birth to • m the oasis and subsequently to the city. Recent discoveries at el-Kowm, in the Palmyrene oasis region, confirm that the I Uruk culture (end of the fourth millennium) extended to I,!?'' ly\>r' ? 1 1 1 this region. " •111 B r o n z e a n d Iron Ages. Excavation on the mound, un derneath die courtyard of the Temple of Bel, uncovered pri X .J|!I;I|> marily Early Bronze Age pottery (c. 2200-2100 BCE) espe V cially tiiat in the calciform Syrian tradition. A^ The oldest written texts known relating to Palmyra (Tadi 4 mor) and the Palmyrenes (Tadmorim) were found at the Assyrian colony of Kanes (Kultepe) in Cappadocia and date to the nineteenth century B C E . The texts from Mari (Tell Hariri) also mention Palmyra and the Palmyrenes. AtEmar (Meskene), texts dealing with Palmyrene citizens have been PALMYRA. The gate of the central building in the Temple of Bel. found. T h e eleventh-century B C E annals of Tiglath-Pileser refer to Tadmor as being in the country of Amurru. [See (Courtesy D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities a n d M u s e u m s , Syria) -1
1
A
1
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PALMYRA
PALMYRA.
The main gate of the Temple of Nabu. (Photograph by A d n a n Bounni)
Kiiltepe Texts; Cappadocia; Mari Texts; Emar Texts; Amorites.] Seleucid and R o m a n Periods. Like Emesa/Homs, Pe tra, and Iturea at that time, Palmyra was independent, keep ing its status as an Arab principality. It is known from Polybius (5.79) that at the battle of Raphia (217 B C E ) , between the Lagid Ptolemy IV and the Seleucid Antiochus III, a cer tain Zabdibel with ten thousand Arabs supported the Seleucids. These were certainly Palmyrenes because the name of their chieftain is known only in Palmyrene onomastica and means "the gift of (the god) Bel." While Syria became a Roman province in 63-64 B C E , Pal myra maintained its independence and enjoyed—according to Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. 5.88)—a privileged position between Rome and Parthia. Both, it seems, were interested in Palmyra. In 41 B C E , Marcus Antonius undertook a futile push toward the city. T h e Palmyrenes had, as Appian re ports (5.9), gained a key trade and political position. They procured exotic goods from India, Arabia, and Persia and then traded them to the Romans. When, precisely, Palmyra
was incorporated into the Roman state is a contested issue, but it may have occurred under Tiberius (14-37 C E ) . In the second half of the first century C E , Palmyra was occupied by a Roman garrison. Beginning in the reign of Trajan (98-117 CE) the city's own archers, cavalry, and cam eleers participated in the defense of the empire's borders on the Danube River, in England, and in Africa. In 106, follow ing the fall of Petra, Palmyra became the most important trading center in the East. Its great prosperity was expressed in the restoration of old monumental buildings and the re construction of temples. [See Petra.] Under Hadrian (117-138) Palmyra achieved the status of a free city, as Hadriana Palmyra and, in the name of its senate and people's council, defined its own taxes and pro claimed its own decisions. Under Septimius Severus and the Syrian dynasty (first half of the third century), Palmyra was at its largest (12 km, or 7 mi., in diameter). Emperor Caracalla raised the city to the rank of a Roman colony in 212. The foundation of the Sasanian Empire in 228 resulted in the loss of Palmyra's control over trade routes. T h e Pal-
PALMYRA myrenes then sought new economic opportunities under the leadership of a well-known Arabian family headed by Odainat, who held the title of governor of the Syrian prov ince. In 262 and 267 he led two campaigns against the Sas anian capital. Odainat became dux romanorum, "chief gen eral," of the armies of the East, corrector of the Orient, and king of the kings and imperator. T h e hope simultaneously of Palmyra and Rome was murdered along with his older son under mysterious circumstances. [See Sasanians.] Because his second son was too young to succeed him, his wife Zenobia took the post of regent. Flighly intelligent, knowledgable, and ambitious, Zenobia knew the political sit uation of the Orient and the weakness of Rome. She did not hesitate to proclaim her independence and took with her son the tide of the Augusti. She soon conquered all of Syria, and her armies also occupied Egypt and Anatolia. The emperor Aurelian, forced to react quickly, defeated the Palmyrene army at Antioch and Emesa/Homs. Zenobia retreated to Palmyra, where Aurelian laid siege to her heavy defenses. Zenobia attempted to flee to the Sasanians but was caught and imprisoned in 272. In this critical situation the Palmyrenes rose up and massacred the occupying Roman garri son. Aurelian's retaliation was devastating. T h e ancient au thors offer different versions of Zenobia's end. In 297, the emperor Diocletian made peace with the Per sians in the treaty of Nisibis, which moved the Syrian border to the Khabur River. Palmyra became a center of a network of roads where the principal road was the Strata Diocletiana linking Damascus to the Euphrates River. Inside the city a Roman camp was established and the ramparts were mod ified to protect the camp. Byzantine a n d Islamic P e r i o d s . Christianity was well established in Palmyra in the fourth century. During the Byzantine period, the cellas of the temples of Bel and Ba'al Shamin and some other buildings were transformed into churches. At the end of the fifth century and at the beginning of the sixth, Palmyra was one of the residences of the Ghassanid ally of the Byzantines. According to Procopius (De aedificiis 2.11), Justinian (527-565) fortified Palmyra's ram part and reestablished its irrigation system. In 634 Khaled ibn al-Walid, the general of the Muslim armies, occupied Palmyra peacefully. During the Umayyad period Palmyra regained some of its importance but during the 'Abbasid period was neglected by the caliphs of Bagh dad. It became important under the Burids of Damascus (twelfth century), the Ayyubids (twelfth-thirteenth centu ries), and the Mamluks (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries). T h e Temple of Bel was transformed into a fortress, the cella be coming a mosque. T h e castle overlooking the city is attrib uted to tire emir Ibn Ma'an Fakhr al-Din (1595-1634). T h e historian and high functionary Ibn Fadl Allah (1301-1349) refers to the splendid homes and gardens of Palmyra and to its prosperous commerce. In 1401 Timur (Tamerlane) sent a detachment against Palmyra that pillaged it. T h e city's
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decline accelerated during the Ottoman period ( 1 5 1 6 1919). It was soon reduced to a village, at the mercy of no madic ttibes. In the last half of the twentieth century it ex perienced a renaissance. Exploration. T h e story of Palmyra and Zenobia, its beautiful and noble queen, have fascinated the Western world since the Renaissance. They have inspired literary masterpieces by D'Aubignac, Labruyere, and Moliere and paintings and tapestries. Many travelers were drawn to Pal myra: the Neapolitan Pietra della Valle (1616-1625); the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1638); English mer chants from Aleppo (1678, 1691), the Frenchmen Girod and Sautet (1705); and the Swede Cornelius Loos (1710). They returned to Europe with copies of inscriptions, draw ings of ruins, and sometimes incredible travel stories. T h e visit of two Englishmen, Robert Wood and H. Dawkins in 1751 had far-reaching effects. Their work, The Ruins of Pal myra, which appeared in English and French in 1753, sig naled the beginning of systematic exploration at Palmyra. A year later, the Frenchman Jean Jacques Barthelemy and the Englishman John Swinton deciphered the Palmyrene alpha bet. An ever-larger number of travelers and researchers then followed: Louis Francois Cassas (1785), C. F. Volney (c. 1785), Melchior de Vogue (1853), and J. L. Porter (1851). In 1861 William Henry Waddington copied a number of inscriptions. In 1870 the German A. D. Mordtmann edited several new texts and E. Sachau, who visited the city in 1879, devoted many articles to it. In 1881 a Russian, S. A. Lazarew, discovered a text of the city's fiscal law, the longest economic text from the ancient world. This important document is now in the Hermitage museum. In 1889 D . Simonsen published the Palmyrene sculptures and texts of the Glyptotheque Ny Carlsberg. The collection is the result principally of the activity of M. J. Loytved, the Danish consul in Beirut. In 1899 M. Sobernhein discovered a house tomb in the Valley of the Tombs and took the first photographs of Pal myra. Research on the entire city began in 1902 and contin ued in 1917 under the direction of Theodor Wiegand (1932). In 1908, 1912, and 1915 Alois Musil undertook ex plorations of the more distant reaches of the city. In 1914 tire French Acad6mie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres initiated a project under the direction of Antonin Jaussen and Raphael Savignac to copy all hitherto known texts, which were subsequently published by Jean-Baptiste Chabot (1922). In 1924 and 1928 Harald Ingolt opened an excavation on Palmyra's western necropolis area, on behalf of the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Univer sity of Copenhagen. Again in 1928, with the architect Charles Christensen, he excavated many hypogea in the same area on behalf of the Rask Orsted Foundation. Once again he dug a new hypogeum in 1937 whose excavation was completed by Obeid Taha.
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PALMYRA
In 1929 A. Gabriel achieved the first precise topographic plan of the city. New epigraphic research was undertaken by Jean Cantineau (1930-1936) that was continued by Jean Starcky in 1949, Javier Teixidor in 1965, and Adnan Bounni and Teixidor in 1975. The large Temple of Bel was cleared in 1929-1930 by Henri Seyrig, who was then director of the Antiquities Service of Syria and Lebanon, with Ja'far al-Hasani, director of the National Museum in Damascus (Seyrig, Amy, and Will, 1968-1975). Between 1934 and 1940 Seyrig and al-Hasani were the strongest proponents of carrying out archaeological research at Palmyra. [See the biographies of Starcky and Seyrig.]
amaic of Palmyra reflects western and eastern characteristics and has some Arabic expressions. An essential source on Palmyra is certainly the Palmyrene texts found in different countries, from the Euphrates to northern England. In Palmyra itself about three thousands texts have been recovered. Hundreds of these inscriptions are bilingual (Palmyrene and Greek). Latin texts are very few. The oldest known Palmyrene text is dated to 44 B C E and the latest to 272 CE. In 1754 the Frenchman Barthelemy and the Englishman Swinton deciphered some Palmyrene texts independently. Palmyrenes used the Seleucid era (which began in October 312 BCE) for candendrical dates.
Robert Amy, Ernest Will, Michel Ecochard, Raymond Dura, and others participated in the excavations or the study of the Temple of Bel, the tomb of Yarhai (now exhibited in the National Museum of Damascus), the agora, the Villa Cassiopeia, and the Valley of the Tombs. Daniel Schlumberger (1951) investigated the environs of Palmyra and Starcky published the first comprehensive summary of Pal myrene research results. [See the biography of Schlumberger.] With independence in 1946, national research at Palmyra expanded considerably. In 1952 Selim Abdul-Hak exca vated the Hypogeum of Ta'i in the southeast necropolis. Beginning in 1957 Bounni initiated what is now some twenty years of research at Palmyra. Nassib Saliby, Taha, and Khaled As ad have been his principal collaborators. This research has focused on three hypogea in the Valley of the Tombs, the main street, the Temple of Nabu, the annex of the agora, nymphea A and B, and the street of Ba'al Shamin. As'ad excavated the ramparts, the Temple of Arsu, and the Hypogeum of Amarisha, continued the excavation of the main street, and restored many buildings in collaboration with Ali Taha and Saleh Taha. Foreign missions have been authorized by the Syrian au thorities to participate in the excavations of several monu ments: Paul Collart and his Swiss team worked on the tem ple of Ba'al Shamin in 1954-1956; since 1959 Polish excavations in the area of Diocletian's camp have been led by Kazmierz Michalowski, Anna Sadurska, and Michal Gawlikowski. In 1966-1967 Robert Du Mesnil du Buisson led excavations in the courtyard of the Bel Temple and also excavated the Temple of Belhamon, while Manot worked on the peak of Jebel al Muntar. Joint expeditions—Japanese, Swiss, and Polish—are also working with Syrian teams at Palmyra.
E c o n o m y . Palmyra's prosperity made it an important metropolis in the ancient world. An oligarchic class of mer chants and caravaneers amassed considerable fortunes from the caravan trade. The luxurious life-style of the Palmyrene aristocracy was displayed in its fondness for temples, col onnaded stteets, and monumental tombs. Entertainment was provided by theater, thermal baths, and banquets. Mi chael Rostovtzeff has correctly identified Palmyra as "tire caravan city." T h e caravans were the hub of Palmyra's eco nomic life. Indeed, Palmyra's social order, religious beliefs,
c
Language and Writing. Palmyrene onomastica, cults, rituals, and several deities represent definitive evidence of the Arab origin of the majority of the inhabitants of the city and its principality. They kept their tribal social organization and were attributed to four main tribes. Palmyrene texts are written mostly in Aramaic, which was the lingua franca in western Asia from the Achaemenid period onward. T h e Ar
PALMYRA.
A relief depicting the great Palmyrene goddess and Tyche.
(Courtesy D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities a n d M u s e u m s , Syria)
PALMYRA and architecture were all products of its caravan economy. The Palmyrene fiscal law found in 1881 (see above) reflects this clearly and gives an accurate image of daily life. Religion. Palmyrene cults were characterized by eclecti cism and syncretism. T h e city's pantheon constituted more than sixty deities headed by the Babylonian god Bel/Zeus, often represented with Yarhibol (sun) and 'Aglibol (moon). Nabu/Apollo, son of Bel, also had great popularity in the city, as in the rest of the region. T h e Canaanite Ba'al Shamin was the chief of another triad. Allat/Afhena, the Arab god dess, and Arsu (the Arab Radu) had also their temples in the city. Many Gods were dressed in military costumes and some rode horses and camels. T h e main practice in Palmyrene religion was the ritual of procession around the main temple, following the Arab tra dition. Attendance at ritual banquets (thiases) was wide spread. T h e priesthood was well organized; its highest au thority was the symposiarch of the Temple of Bel. Art and Architecture. All through the three centuries of its history (first-third centuries), Palmyrene art followed the Oriental and Greco-Oriental ttaditions of Syria and Meso potamia, with a strong Central Asian influence—particularly Indian and Persian. T h e Greco-Roman impact on its aes thetics was very strong beginning in the second century. Palmyrene arts produced mostly sculpture, particularly for religious and funerary purposes. Bas-reliefs predomi nated, while statuary was rare. In general, Palmyrene art is static, idealized, and stylized, giving little care to dramatic representation and portraiture. Special care was given to de tails of dress and jewelry, which on many stelae were col ored. Frescoes have been discovered in Palmyrene under ground tombs. [See Wall Paintings.] They follow the tradi tional Oriental use of linear technique, frontality, and de tailed accessories. In die mosaic pavements, themes are usually related to Greco-Roman mythology. [See Mosaics.] According to Harald Ingholt there were three phases of Palmyrene art, following an Archaic period, from about the first century B C E to the first century C E , that produced more original and naturalistic work whose originality is unani mously recognized (Ingholt, 1928; Ingholt et al., 1955). T h e Palmyrenes excelled in many aspects of architecture, but their unique achievement was the tomb—and especially tower tomb, such as the Elabel tower tomb built in 103. In the field of religious architecture they built or refounded many temples. From 32 C E through the following two cen turies they completed the monumental Temple of Bel, one of the most collossal and beautiful temples in the Orient. T h e rich decoration on Palmyrene religious architecture de veloped at about the end of the first century C E from Oriental and Greco-Oriental traditions, while maintaining Syrian traditions, such as vast courtyards adytons, monumental al tars, windows in the cella, and merlons. Local limestone was
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Limestone portrait on a funerary monument. D a t e d firsts e c o n d c e n t u r y CE. (Courtesy A S O R Archives) PALMYRA.
used in the construction of public buildings and streets, but private houses were only partly constructed in stone. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abdul-Hak, Selim. " L ' h y p o g e e de T a ' i a P a l m y r e . " Annates Archealogiques Arabes Syriennes 2 (1952): 193-251. Bounni, Adrian, and Nassib Saliby. "Six nouveaux emplacements fouilles a Palmyre, 1963-1964." Annates Archeohgiques Arabes Syr iennes 15 (1965): 121-138. Bounni, A d n a n , et al. Le sanctuaire de Nabu a Palmyre. 1994 (catalog only; printed text due 1997). Bounni, A d n a n , and Javier T e i x i d o r , eds. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vol. 12. D a m a s c u s , 1975. Bounni, A d n a n , a n d Khaled al-As'ad. Palmyra. 2d ed. D a m a s c u s , 1988. Cantineau, Jean, ed, Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vols. 1-9. Beirut, 1930-1936. Chabot, Jean-Baptiste. Choix d'inscription de Palmyre. Paris, 1922. Collart, Paul, et al. Sanctuaire de Baalshamin a Palmyre. 6 vols. N e u chatel, 1969-1975. Colledge, M a l c o l m A. R. The Art of Palmyra. Boulder, Colo., 1976. D u n a n t , Christiane. Le sanctuaire de Baalshamin d Palmyre, vol. 3, Les inscriptions. R o m e , 1971. D u n a n t , Christiane, and R. Fellman. Le sanctuaire de Baalshamin a Pal myre, vol. 6, KleinfundejObjets divers. R o m e , 1975. Fellman, R. Le sanctuaire de Baalshamin a Palmyre, vol, 5, Die Grabanlage. R o m e , 1975,
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PALMYRENE INSCRIPTIONS
Fevrier, James-Germain. Essai sur I'histoire politique et economique de Palmyre. Paris, 1931. Fevrier, James-Germain. La religion des, Palmyreniens. Paris, 1931. Gawlikowski, Michal. " D i e polnischen Ausgrabungen in Palmyra, 1959-1967." Archaologischer Anzeiger (1968): 289-307. Gawlikowski, Michal. Le temple palmyrenien: Etude d'epigraphic et de topographic hiuoiique. Warsaw, 1973. Gawlikowski, Michal. Recueil d'inscriptions palmyreniennes provenant de fouilles syriennes et polonaises recentes a Palmyre. Memoires de 1'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 16. Paris, 1974. Ingholt, Harald. Studies over palmyresk skulptur. Copenhagen, 1928. Ingholt, Harald. "Five D a t e d T o m b s from Palmyra." Berytus 2 (1935): 57-120. Ingholt, Harald, et al. Recueil des tesseres de Palmyre. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 58. Paris, 1955. Michalowski, Kazmierz, et al. Palmyra, fouilles polonaises, 1959-1964.7 vols. Warsaw, 1960-1977. Milik, J. T . Dedicaces faites par des dieux. Paris, 1972. Rostovtzeff, Michael. Caravan Cities. Oxford, 1932. Schlumberger, Daniel. La Palmyrene du nord-ouest. Paris, 1951. Seyrig, Henri. " O r n a m e n t a palmyrena antiquiora." Syria 21 (1940): 277-328. Seyrig, Henri, Robert A m y , and Ernest Will. Le temple de Bel it Palmyre. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 83. Paris, 1968-1975. Starcky, Jean, ed. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vol. 10. Beirut, 1949. Starcky, Jean. Palmyre. Paris, 1952. Starcky, Jean. " P a l m y r e . " In Supplement du Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 6, cols. 1066-1103. Paris, 1964. Stark, Jiirgen K. Personal Names in Palmyrene Inscriptions. Oxford, 1971. Teixidor, Javier, ed. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vol. r i . Bei rut, 1965. Teixidor, Javier. The Pantheon of Palmyra. Leiden, 1979. Wiegand, T h e o d o r . Palmyra: Ergebnisse der Expeditionen von 1902 und 1917. Berlin, 1932. W o o d , Robert. The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedrnor, in the Desert. L o n d o n , 1753. ADNAN BOUNNI
PALMYRENE INSCRIPTIONS. The Semitic lan guage spoken in the oasis of Palmyra in Syria developed from a dialect of the official ("Imperial") Aramaic used in the Achaemenid Empire. After the settlement of Amorites and Arameans in the oasis, the arrival of the Arabs in the area by the middle of the first millennium BCE made Palmyra the center of major Semitic groups for whom Aramaic, by then an international language, must have served as a com mon link. Spoken and written all over Western Asia, Ara maic outlasted the end of the empire; distinct dialects ap peared once the politically and religiously fragmented region restabilized under the Macedonians and the Romans. It seems, however, that when used by people whose native lan guage was not Aramaic the language developed divergences in syntax and vocabulary that were more conspicuous than in the language of native speakers. This would explain the idiosyncrasies of Palmyrene related in some points to East ern Aramaic—the plural in aleph, the adverbial ending -aith,
and the infinitive ending -A—but with some features closer to Western Aramaic—the plural in -yod aleph, the imperfect with the prefix y - instead of n- or /-, and the relative dy. Other noteworthy features are the diacritic point often used, as in Syriac, to distinguish d from r, ligatures binding some letters to the letter that precedes or follows, and the final form of n. Palmyrene is known through some twelve hun dred honorary, official, votive, and sepulcral inscriptions dating from the first century B C E to the fourth century CE. No literary text or document on leather has yet been dis covered. Palmyrene was the first of the Semitic inscriptional languages to be deciphered (see Daniels, 1988) and new in scriptions appear regularly, both in official excavations and on the antiquities market. T h e epigraphic material from Palmyra constitutes a re markable legacy of an exuberant assemblage of traditions. T h e substratum of the Aramean tribes who populated the area of Palmyra in the second millennium B C E is perceivable in the names borne by gods and individuals alike. T h e Bab ylonian pantheon is present in some liturgical inscriptions discovered in the Temple of Bel. T h e pervasiveness of Phoenician influence is a less well-known phenomenon, but it cannot be depreciated. T h e rituals reflect the presence of both Syro-Palestinian traditions and Arabian cults. A statis tical survey of the personal names appearing in the inscrip tions has revealed that the bulk of the population was of Arab origin—and therefore more than half of the names can be best explained through Arabic; several Arabic words oc cur, too, in the vocabulary. On tire other hand, the technical terms of municipal and administrative life are mostly Greek, and under the Romans the use of Latin words was frequent. The inscriptions are occasionally given in a Greek version after the Palmyrene. This is particularly the case in the hon orary inscriptions written on Corinthian columns that were ranged along the principal streets, or stood in the porticos of the temples and of the agora. On the column there is a bracket for the statue to which the text refers. T w o examples of this land of inscription are " T h e council and people have made these two statues of Bariki son of Amrisa son of Yarhibola, and of Moqimu his son, lovers of the city and fearers of the gods: to their honor. In the month Nisan, the year 450" (139 CE), and "This statue is that of Taimarsu son of Taima son of Moqimu Garba, chief of the caravan, which has been made for him by the members of the caravan who came up with him from Charax, because he saved them (their) expenses, three hundred denarii of gold, ancient cur rency, and was well pleasing to them: to his honor, and to the honor of Yaddai and Abdibol his sons. In the month Nisan, tire year 504" (193 C E ) . Tombs at Palmyra showed formal variation according to period and resources. T h e inscriptions outside the hypogea and in the tower tombs are often bilingual, whereas within they are only in Palmyrene. Votive inscriptions are rarely bilingual. T h e following text is an example of a Palmyrene
PAPHOS votive text, commemorating the gift of a column to a deity: "In the month Tebet, the year 363, Amtallat daughter of Bara a son of Attenatan, from the tribe of the Bene Mitha, wife of Taima son of Belhazai son of Zabdibel, from the tribe of the Bene Maazin, dedicated this column to Baal Shamen, the good and bountiful god, for her and the lives of her sons and brothers" (52 C E ) . T h e Palmyrene script is a modified form of the elegant cursive used in the Persian chancelleries, and in many re spects it approximates Hebrew square characters. T h e scribes carved their texts on the local limestone, using either the lapidary or the cursive technique, the former being close to the model of Greek epigraphic letters. N o major changes are noticeable in either of the script types during the four centuries they were in use. [See also Palmyra.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bounni, A d n a n , and Javier Teixidor, eds. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vol. 12. D a m a s c u s , 1975. Cantineau, Jean, ed. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vols. 1-9. Beirut, 1930-1936. Cantineau, Jean. Gramtnaire du palmyrenien epigraphique. Cairo, 1935. Chabot, Jean-Baptiste. Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum, part 2.3, In scriptions Aramaicas continens. 2 vols. Paris, 1926-1947. Daniels, Peter T . "'Shewing of H a r d Sentences a n d Dissolving of D o u b t s ' : T h e First D e c i p h e r m e n t . " Journal of the American Oriental Society 108 (1988): 419-436. Gawlikowski, Michal. Recueil d'inscriptions palmyreniennes provenanl de fouilles syriennes et polonaises recentes a Palmyre. Memoires de l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 16. Paris, 1974. Rosenthal, Franz. Die Sprache der palmyrenischen Inschriften. Leipzig, 1936. Starcky, Jean, ed. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vol. 10. Beirut, 1949. Stark, Jiirgen K . Personal Names in Palmyrene Inscriptions. Oxford, 1971. Teixidor, Javier, ed. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Vol. 11. Bei rut, 1965. JAVIER T E I X I D O R
PAPHOS, ancient city on the southwest coast of Cyprus (34°42' N , 32°3s' E), situated on a low hill above the coastal plain, fewer than 2 km (about 1 mi.) from the shore. T h e original settlement was also called Paphos, but since the end of the fourdi century B C E has been called Old Paphos (Gk., Palaipaphos; Lat., Palaepaphus), to avoid confusion with the recently founded harbor town of New Paphos (Nea Pa phos), some 19 km (12 mi.) along the coast to the nordiwest. T h e ancient name of the city was lost during die Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century, the Swiss traveler Ludwig Tschudi (1519) and the Venetian official Francesco Attar (1540) discovered that the ruins outside the village of Kouklia marked the site of the renowned Sanctuary of the Paphian Aphrodite. T h e first excavations at PalaipaphosKouklia were carried out in 1888 by an expedition from the
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Cyprus Exploration Fund. After an interval of more than seventy years, the British Kouklia Expedition (1950-1955) initiated a systematic archaeological investigation of the city and the sanctuary. Since 1966, regular excavations have been conducted under the auspices of the German Archae ological Institute and the University of Zurich. Paphos represents the only capital of the ancient king doms of Cyprus whose history dates to the early third mil lennium B C E . The site was inhabited in the Chalcolithic pe riod (c. 2800 BCE) . Greek immigrants began to appear in the extensive Late Bronze Age settlement at Paphos (late twelfth or early eleventh century B C E ) . The city remained the capital of the Kingdom of Paphos from the Iron Age until the con quest of Cyprus by the Ptolemies, in 294 B C E , who abolished the island's local monarchies. T h e city of Palaipaphos, how ever, continued to function as a noted place of worship throughout antiquity. A local fertility cult is attested at Paphos as early as the third millennium. It seems that the Greek immigrants trans formed it into the worship of the Paphian Aphrodite, whose cult later also adapted elements of the Syrian Astarte. T h e shrine at Paphos, situated close to the spot on the coast where the "foam-born" goddess was believed to have risen from the sea, gradually became one of the most famous sanctuaries of Aphrodite in the Greek and Roman world. The sanctuary therefore formed the chief architectural fea ture of Paphos. T h e first monumental sanctuary buildings date to about 1200 B C E . Basically, they represent a type of Near Eastern court sanctuary, combining a small, covered hall with a large, open temenos (a sacred precinct), origi nally filled with altars and votive gifts. T h e hall probably housed the idol of the goddess in the shape of a conical stone, a symbol of fertility. T h e aniconic worship of Aph rodite at Paphos throughout the sanctuary's history was a legacy of the original autochthonous cult. In the large Late Bronze Age city of Paphos, workshops produced refined pottery, jewelery, and ivory objects that exhibit a characteristic fusion of Cypriot, Aegean, and Lev antine traditions. Yet, probably the most flourishing phases in the history of the city were the Archaic and Classical pe riods, as shown by the large number of tombs of the wealthy and by an architectural heritage. In the sanctuary itself, a thorough Roman remodeling destroyed the LB buildings, but the cult's continuity is amply attested by more than four thousand fragments of Geometric, Archaic, and Classical terra-cotta votives. An imposing Late Archaic or Early Clas sical ashlar building most likely served as a royal residence. It is modeled on Achaemenid prototypes and exhibits a cer tain monumental elegance. A large Late Classical peristyle mansion, discovered a few years ago, may have served a similar purpose in the fourth century B C E . Another impor tant feature of the Classical period is the vast chamber tomb Spilaion lis Ragainas, the burial place of two fourth-century kings of Paphos.
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PAPYRUS
The city of Paphos was defended by a circuit of walls built in the Early Archaic period and maintained until about 300 B C E . The northeast gate, which forms a sector of these for tifications, represents an important and, in some respects, unique monument of military architecuire. Elaborate siege and countersiege works excavated on the site allow a detailed reconstruction of the siege of Paphos by a Persian army dur ing the Ionian Revolt in 498 BCE. In order to amass the ma terials to construct a vast siege ramp, the attackers destroyed a sanctuary outside the walls. This debris contained several hundred fragments of sculptures and votive monuments that include some of the finest Archaic Gypriot statues known. These finds testify to a considerable local school of sculptors whose work combines Egyptian trends with Greek and Phoenician influences; they also provide a key date for the art history of ancient Cyprus. The potter's craft also lived on in the Iron Age, as shown by a large number of remarkable vessels decorated in the rather severe Paphian style that relies mainly on austere geometric patterns. At the beginning of the third century B C E , when a consid erable part of the population was transferred to the harbor city of Nea Paphos, the importance of the old city of Paphos declined, but it did retain its fame as an important religious center in the Hellenistic and later the Roman world. T h e sanctuary was rebuilt in about 100 CE, possibly after a de struction caused by the earthquake of 76/77 CE. This Roman sanctuary, which incorporated part of the LB buildings, was not in the classical Greco-Roman design. The building re tained tire basic Oriental character of an open-court sanc tuary, reminiscent of the cult's Near Eastern antecedents. The shrine with the longest cult tradition on Cyprus did not survive the final outlawing of all pagan religions by Em peror Theodosius I (391). Yet, several centuries later, at the beginning of the twelfth century, Palaipaphos (then named Couvoucle) regained some of its former importance. T h e royal manor house was erected adjacent to the sanctuary site, incorporating a thirteenth-century hall that is one of the finest surviving monuments of Gothic secular architecture on Cyprus. T h e manor served as a center of cane sugar production. On the coastal plain below it, a large and fairly well-preserved cane-sugar refinery was discovered and ex cavated. Erected in the late thirteenth century, it represents a so-far unique example of a medieval industrial plant; it remained in use until the end of the sixteenth century. [See also Cyprus.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Maier, Franz G., ed. Ausgrabungen in Alt-Paphos. 4 vols. Konstanz, Germany, 1977-1986. Maier, Franz G., a n d Vassos Karageorghis. Paphos: History and Ar chaeology, Nicosia, 1984. Maier, Franz G. Alt-Paphos aufCypem. Mainz, 1985. Maier, Franz G , and M . - L . von Warfburg. "Reconstructing History from the Earth, c. 2800 B.C.-1600 A.D.: Excavating at Palaepaphos,
1966-1984." In Archaeology in Cyprus, 1960-1985, edited by Vassos Karageorghis, p p . 142-172. Nicosia, 1985. FRANZ GEORG MAIER
PAPYRUS. The writing material named after the plant from which it is made, papyrus, was manufactured as early as the first Egyptian dynasty (c. 3100 B C E ) . T h e emergence of writing and the concomitant use of papyrus seem to be outcomes of the imperial bureaucracy. T h e Egyptians used papyrus until the ninth-eleventh centuries CE—some four thousand years. Papyrus was first exported to Syria no later than the twen tieth century B C E . It found its way to other societies that had developed writing, such as the Greeks. The majority of ex tant papyri have been discovered in Egypt, where they sur vived because of the dry climate, but they have also been found in Asia and Europe. While only a few fragments dat ing from the Classical period have been found in Greece, dozens of depictions of rolls and papyri appear on vases of the same period. These vase paintings supplement the tex tual sources with many details of Classical and Hellenistic Greek book culture. That biblical literature was originally written on papyrus (rather than on parchment) is evident from archaeological finds and textual analysis: a seventh-century B C E papyrus was found in Wadi Murabba'at near the Dead Sea and one from the fourth century BCE was found near Jericho. [See Murabba'at; Jericho.] Imprints of papyrus fibers have been found on the underside of bullae used to seal papyri. These findings support scholarly claims that tire "books" men tioned in the Bible (Jer. 36:15-16; Ez. 2:8, 3:1-3) were ac tually written on papyrus. Probably only under Hellenistic influence were biblical writings committed to parchment. Jewish sages disqualified biblical scrolls written on papyri for ritual purposes (see Mishnah, Meg. 2:2), probably because papyri were considered to be less valuable and less reliable than parchment. This habit of disqualifying papyri is seen also at Qumran: more than eight hundred scrolls have been found there and only some sixty of them (8 percent) are papyrus scrolls. Egyptian Jews, however, continued to use papyrus as was regular in Egypt. Papyrus was manufactured in Palestine in the Byzantine period (fourth-seventh centuries). According to the Jewish mystical literature of the time, as well as the Testament of Abraham (probably composed in Egypt), in heavenly ad ministration human deeds are written on pinax (Gk., wooden tablets with wax) and on papyrus, from which the same practice can be inferred for earthly administration. Technology. T h e papyrus-manufacturing process de scribed by Pliny (Nat. Hist. 13.74 ff.) did not change over its thousands of years of use. T h e product was made by tearing off the "skin" of the papyrus reed. T h e strips thus
PARCHMENT formed were laid in lengthwise and crosswise layers to achieve strength (sometimes a bit of vegetal glue was added), and the layers were pressed and beaten to meld them. T h e papyrus was then stretched and smoothed to make it fit for use. T o create a roll, the sheets thus produced were glued together with the horizontal fibers on the inside, perpendicular to the join. A text on a scroll was normally arranged in columns, so that the writing followed the hori zontal lines of the fibers. Normally, writing was done on only one side of the papyrus, although exceptions are known. For practical purposes, the papyrus was limited to a stan dard size: 47 cm long at the most (29-33 cm on the average) and 22 cm wide. T h e total length of a typical papyrus scroll, consisting of some twenty "pages," was about 4.5 m—al though much longer examples are known. T h e dependence on a single raw material, a plant that grew mainly in Egypt, determined where papyrus was man ufactured and had a significant effect on its cost when it was exported. T h e Egyptian embargo on exporting papyrus at the end of the seventh century C E opened the way for the use of parchment, and later of paper, its successors. " G r o u n d " paper (the predecessor of modern paper) was invented in China in the second century C E , but reached western Asia only after the Muslim conquest of Turkestan in 7 5 1 . After the secrets of manufacturing ground paper (from a selection of plants) were disclosed, paper gradually replaced papyrus for economic reasons. In Egypt, the largescale manufacture of papyrus continued until the end of the eleventh century. It is manufactured today on a small scale, for the tourism industry. Scribal Technique. T h e scribe's primary instrument was the pen (Gk., kalamos), a reed that was cut to some 15 cm and whose end was chewed to form a brushlike edge. T h e desired width of the script and the color of the ink deter mined which of several pens would be used. T h e ancient Egyptian scribe initially used several colors (with organic and mineral bases) because writing hieroglyphs was so much like drawing. In the course of time, the number of colors was reduced to two: black and red. T h e scribe's kit included an inkwell, a few pens, two dry inks, and a small container of water to prepare the ink for use. (see, e.g., Pierre Montet, Everyday Life in Egypt in the Days ofRamesses the Great,
L o n d o n , 1958, p.
255).
T h e ancient scribe usually wrote while standing or kneel ing, without the aid of a table (as does his modern Yemenite Jewish counterpart). In the second millennium B C E , some Egyptian scribes began to use desks. In Western culture, the desk became an essential accessory only at the beginning of the Middle Ages (or perhaps earlier at Qumran; see Clark, 1963)A scribe usually worked with other scribes, who were ei ther his equal (official scribes like himself) or of different ranks and subordinate to the chief scribe. Using groups of
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scribes facilitated writing in more than one language and writing from dictation. Whole families (or a guild) of scribes created an apprenticeship system. [See also Parchment; Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Seals; and Writing Materials.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beck, Frederick A. G . Album of Greek Education, Sydney, 1975. Cerny, Jaroslav. Paper and Books in Ancient Egypt (1952). Chicago, 1977Clark, K. W . " T h e Posture of t h e Ancient Scribe." Biblical Archaeologist 26 (1963): 63-72. G r o h m a n n , Adolf. From the World of Arabic Papyri. Cairo, 1952. H a r a n , M e n a h e m . "Book-Scrolls in Israel in Pre-Exilic T i m e s . " Journal 0} Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 161-173. Hunter, D a r d . Papermaking through Eighteen Centuries (1930). N e w York, 1971. Lewis, Naphtali. Papyrus in Classical Antiquity. Oxford, 1974. Metzger, Bruce M . Historical and Literary Studies. Leiden, 1968. See pages 123-137. Porten, Bezalel. "Aramaic Papyri a n d Parchments: A N e w Look." Bib lical Archaeologist 42 (1979): 74-104. Sirat, Colette. IJIS papyrus en caracteres hebraiques trouves en Egypte. Paris, 1985. Skeat, T . C . " T h e Length of the S t a n d a r d Papyrus Roll a n d the CostAdvantage of the C o d e x . " Zeitschrift fiir Papyrologie und Epigraphic 45 (1982): 169-175. M E I R BAR-ILAN
PARCHMENT. Animal skins have been treated for hu man use since Paleolithic times, but processing skins for writing (parchment) is a relatively late development, post dating the invention of papyrus. Early evidence for writing on skins comes from the Egyptian fourth dynasty, before 2750 B C E . T h e practice was limited to religious and other special writings (such as the Book of the Dead). Although the Assyrians and the Babylonians wrote on clay tablets, there is evidence that they also wrote on parchment, at least from the sixth century B C E onward. The parchment scroll was unknown in the Hellenistic and Roman world. In the first century C E , Pliny (Nat. Hist. 13.70) the statement of Varro (a Roman scholar and poli tician, 116-27? B C E ) that the preparation of skins for writing was invented in Pergamon in Asia Minor at the beginning of the second century B C E (see below). In the Hellenistic world at least, the transition from papyrus to parchment may have been the result of the Egyptian embargo on ex porting papyrus. T h e transition to parchment took place in Palestine as well, and the Jewish sages of the Roman period were of the opinion that any mention of a "book" in tire Bible referred to a parchment scroll. It is possible that the use of parchment in Judaism became dominant under the influence of Hellenistic scribal culture: it is attested that the Hebrew and Aramaic languages borrowed more than twenty technical Greek terms pertaining to the manufacture
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of parchment during drat period, among them diphtera (Gk., untanned hide for writing), duchsustos (the inferior of parch ment), tomos (scroll), and tophos (formula, form). Unlike papyrus, a strictly Egyptian product, parchment could be produced anywhere and was considerably more durable. In Egypt, low humidity and the ready availability of the papyrus plant kept papyrus the material of choice. Technology. While the production of papyrus remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years, methods of skin preparation evolved over time. The skin was taken from co mestible animals such as sheep, goats, or cows; tire hair and fat were removed; and the skin was made smooth. The traditional method of preparing a hide was to soak it in water, to which calcium (Ca(OH) ) or flour (to cause fermentation) and salt had been added. Subsequently, tan nin, made of oak gall, was added, which produced an irre versible chemical reaction that strengthened the product. T o remove hair or to improve the product some tanners used dates in the process (or dog dung—although not all the Jew ish sages favored it). Different treatment processes applied to the raw skins led to a variety of final products, each with a different name, such as diphtera or gewil (Gk., the whole, unplaned hide). 2
A material called pergamena, first mentioned in 301 C E , is assumed to have been prepared by the people of Pergamon. The process did not include tanning, so that the skin dried while it was being stretched. The final product was thin and very delicate. The ancient preparation techniques were passed on into the Middle Ages but were abandoned when the technology for producing paper became available in Europe—in Spain, in the twelfth century. T h e use of paper increased after the development of printing in the sixteenth-seventeenth cen turies. The use of parchment became purely ceremonial or ritualistic; it is, for example, the material of the modern Jew ish Torah scroll. Scribal Technique. Scribes used two types of pens for writing on parchment. One, made of iron or wood, was stiff; the other, the kalamos (Gk., "pen"), of reed, was much softer and was used as a brush. T h e ink used was usually made out of lampblack mixed with the sap of plants. Scribes soon discovered, however, that by adding various minerals to the mixture they could strengthen the dye, making the ink more difficult to erase. Different types of inkwells, from the pharaonic period to the Roman-Byzantine periods, have been found in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and elsewhere in the Near East (Khairy, 1980). Scribes writing in Aramaic wrote in ink on clay tablets, using only black ink. Jewish scribes in tire Roman period sometimes used ink in other colors, but religious tradition limited writing on tire Torah scroll to black only (out of a few examples from Qumran). [See also Leather; Papyrus; Scribes and Scribal Tech niques; Tablet; and Writing Materials.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Carvalho, David N . Forty Centuries of Ink (1904). N e w York, 1971. Dougherty, R a y m o n d P . "Writing u p o n P a r c h m e n t a n d Papyrus a m o n g the Babylonians a n d the Assyrians." Journal of the American Oriental Society 48 (1928): 109-135. H a r a n , M e n a h e m . "Book-Scrolls in Israel in Pre-Exilic T i m e s . " Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 161-173. Haran, M e n a h e m . "Book-Scrolls at the Beginning of the S e c o n d T e m ple Period: T h e Transition from Papyrus to Skins." Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983): 111-122. Haran, M e n a h e m . "Bible Scrolls in Eastern and Western Jewish C o m munities from Q u m r a n to High Middle A g e s . " Hebrew Union College Annual 56 (1985): 21-62. Haran, M e n a h e m . "Technological Heritage in the Preparation of Skins for Biblical T e x t s in Medieval Oriental Jewry." In Pergament: Ges chichte, Struklur, Restaurierung, Herstellung, edited by Peter Ruck, p p . 35-43. Sigmaringen, 1991. Khairy, Nabil I . "Ink-Wells of the R o m a n Period from J o r d a n . " Levant 12 (1980): 155-162. Olnik, Yael. "Pottery Ink-Wells of the R o m a n Period from t h e L a n d of Israel" (in H e b r e w ) . Israel: 'Am waAretz 1 (1983-1984): 55-66. Pinner, Harry L . The World of Books in Classical Antiquity. Leiden, 1958. M E I R BAR-ILAN
PARROT, ANDRE (1901-1980), French archaeolo gist noted for his exploration of the site of Mari in Syria. The son of a minister, Parrot studied theology, during which time he first became interested in the ancient Near East when he took some art history courses at the Ecole du Lou vre. T h e year he spent at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem determined his vocation. H e did his first archaeological work in 1926 at Nerab in North Syria and a year later at Baalbek in Lebanon. He participated in the excavation of Sumerian Telloh (1930) and ultimately became director of that project (1931-1933). Parrot also ex plored at Tell Senkere (ancient Larsa) in 1933, until diffi culties with tire Iraqi authorities ended his excavation. Al though he r e U i m e d to Larsa for two campaigns in 1967, he concentrated his field research at Mari, where he conducted twenty-one campaigns before 1974. Throughout his career, Parrot worked at the Louvre mu seum, first as conservator, then as chief conservator of the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities. He became direc tor of the museum in 196s. After World War II he reorgan ized the museum's Near Eastern galleries, which remained unchanged until 1992. Especially concerned with tire history of art in its traditional form (cf. Parrot, Sumer [i960] and Assur [1961]), Parrot drew from the exceptionally rich dis coveries at Mari, realizing that they would be of interest not only to specialists, but to a broad public. In his studies of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the Patriarchs, Parrot sought to show connections between the biblical world and that of other Near Eastern civilizations. [See also Baalbek; Larsa; and Mari.]
PARTHIANS BIBLIOGRAPHY Parrot, Andre. Tello: Vingl campagnes defouilles, 18/7-1933. Paris, 1948. Parrot, Andre. Glyptique mesopotamienne, fouilles de Lagash (Tello) et de Larsa (Senkereh), 1931-1933. Paris, 1954. Parrot, Andre. Mission archeologique de Mari. 4 vols. Paris, 1956-1968. Parrot, Andre. Sumer. Paris, i960. Parrot, Andre. Assur. Paris, 1961. Parrot, Andre. L'aventure archeologique. Paris, 1979. Autobiography of the excavator of Larsa, Telloh, a n d Mari. JEAN-CLAUDE MARGUERON
Translated from French by Nancy W. Leinwand
PARTHIANS. Parrhava, which lies southeast of the Caspian Sea, was part of the Achaemenid Empire. It is re corded in royal inscriptions, including Darius's report of a revolt in 521 B C E . Yet, there is no record of the Parthians in the Hebrew Bible or in Assyrian annals. Those who ruled Parthava in the third century B C E , as Parni, were outsiders related to the Saka (Scythians). They adopted the local Ira nian dialect and culture of the Parthian residents, calling themselves Arsacid, after the founder of the dynasty, Arsaces (c. 247 B C E ) . In about 171 B C E , Mithridates I expanded the Parthian realm dramatically, at the expense of tire Seleucids. By 141 B C E , Babylonia had become the center of the new Parthia. Continuing expansion toward Asia Minor brought the Par thians into conflict with the Romans, who felt their eastern interests threatened. T h e best-known confrontation, be cause of the loss of legionary standards, was the Roman pro consul Crassus's defeat at Carrhae, in northern Syria, in 53 B C E . Subsequent rivalries within Parthia weakened the state and eventually allowed the emperor Augustus to engineer the return of the standards, a peace celebrated in his Odes (no. 15) by the poet Horace. Knowledge of the Parthians comes mostly from these western sources. Parthian sources tend to be rare. Their own successors downplayed Parthian history and deliberately suppressed the Parthian version of Zoroastrianism, so that few texts were consciously preserved. Coins, with individual bust portraits, furnish the outlines of the chronology (247 B C E - 2 2 6 C E ) . Commercial documents were often written in ink, as ostraca, or on parchment. As a variant of Aramaic, the script is imprecise, and the heavy use of ideograms makes it difficult to decipher. Used by their successors at first, the Parthian language was abandoned in official in scriptions after seventy-five years of Sasanian rule. Commentators tend to represent the Parthians as unso phisticated because of their origins as horse-riding tribes men from the steppes of Central Asia. Fratricide over who should inherit the throne did eradicate most advantages gained through territorial conquest; and the use of Crassus's head as a gruesome stage prop in a performance of the Bacchae is a reasonable example of "eastern barbarity." How
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ever, the fact that, as Plutarch tells us (Life of Crassus), this Greek play was being watched by the Parthian King Orodes II and Artavazd of Armenia, while drawing up a military alliance through marriage of a son and daughter to counter a Roman invasion, tells a lot about the culture and diplo macy of the first-century B C E Parthians. Greek was one of the formal languages used in Parthian administration. Al though the use of the language has been given as an example of Parthian political weakness, it should rather be seen as an astute acknowledgment of the distinct heritage of Parfhia's Macedonian settlers and a readiness to use the technical and administrative skills of an immigrant population. Through his self-claimed title "king of Icings," as ex pressed on all royal coins, the Parthian monarch was a su preme ruler. But there was a variety of governments in the provinces and principalities; some areas occasionally ac quired degrees of independence that lasted for a short time, including the right to strike coins, which makes it difficult to define the political boundaries. If describing only those cities ruled directly from the capital, Parthia would appear to have been on the wane as soon as its greatest limit was fixed, in the expansionist years of the second century BCE. A definition by culture allows a broader scope, but it is dif ficult to know where to stop. Palmyra (Syria) and Taxila (Pakistan) have strong Parthian elements but cannot be claimed to be Parthian, any more than Hatra (Iraq)—be cause Hatra was the seat of a completely independent Arab principality. Yet, the latter's artwork is always called Par thian. Other excavated sites, such as Nisa (Turkmenistan), Kuh-i-Khwaja (Seistan), and Shahr-i Qumis (Gurgan) were far from the royal capital and eventually lay outside of Par thia proper. Even Qal'eh-i Yazdigird (Media), which lay within easy reach of the capital, was a rebel fortress. Parthian art is as difficult to define as Parthian govern ment. Rather than be judged as a culture in which Greek standards became debased, Parthian art should be seen as part of an evolution of the distinctive "eastern" modes that became fundamental in later Iranian and Islamic art. In ar chitecture, the vaulted eyvan/iwan, or hall, opening onto a courtyard, replaced the older columned style, becoming an Iranian norm. Overall wall coverings of geometric ornament in plaster, based on textile designs, became another distinc tive development in Parthian art. In pottery production, the glazed traditions of ancient Assyria were continued, and it is said that the Parthians applied the principle of the battery in the electroplating of metal. T h e almost five hundred years of Parthian culture formed an important link between the ancient world and the world of Islam. [See also Persia, article on Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam.] BIBLIOGRAPHY The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 , parts 1 a n d 2, The Seleucid, Par thian, and Sasanian Periods. Edited by E h s a n Yarshater. Cambridge,
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1983. See, in particular, notable contributions by A. D . H . Bivar, " T h e Political History of Iran under the Arsacids" (pp. 21-100); M a r y Boyce, "Parthian Writings and Literature" (1151-1165); and Daniel Schlumberger, "Parthian A r t " (1027-1054). College, Malcolm A. R. Parthian Art. Ithaca, N . Y . , 1977. T h o r o u g h but highly Eurocentric reference work for a wide range of Parthian art. Debevoise, Neilson C . A Political History of Parthia. Chicago, 1938. Slightiy out-of-date but extensive overview from the standpoint of Western sources. Keal [sic], E. J. " T h e Art of the Parthians." In The Arts of Persia, edited by R. W. Ferrier, p p . 49-59. N e w Haven, 1989. Short essay focusing on Parthian archaeological discoveries but usefully published in a volume in which the wider context of Islamic art in Iran can be appreciated. Mathiesen, Hans E. Sculpture in the Parthian Empire. 2 vols. Aarhus, 1992. Revolutionary look at an old subject, using the well-defined premises of classical art history.
Sellwood, David. An Introduction to the Coinage of Parthia. L o n d o n , 1971. Reasonably up-to-date and complete catalog of the Parthian royal coins that form the basis of the political history. E . J.
KEALL
PASARGADAE, site located in the mountain-ringed Morghab Plain of southwestern Iran at an elevation of 1,900 m above sea level (30°i5' N , 5 3 ° I 4 ' E). Pasargadae was founded by Cyrus the Great (559-530 B C E ) soon after his conquest of Lydia (c. 547 BCE) . According to Strabo (Geog. 15.3.8), the site marked the scene of Cyrus's prior victory (c. 550 B C E ) over his erstwhile suzerain Astyages of Media. Early Achaemenid art and architecture took shape at Pasar gadae and Cyrus, founder of the Persian Empire, was buried
PASARGADAE. F i g u r e 1. The tomb of Cyrus seen from the west. T h e s t o n e e l e m e n t s in t h e f o r e g r o u n d were installed in t h e thirteenth c e n t u r y CE w h e n the t o m b served as t h e c e n t r a l p a r t of a m e d i e v a l m o s q u e . (Photograph by 0 . Kitson, 1961)
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there. While the name of the site is rendered as Batrakatas in the Elanite cuneiform of the Persepolis fortification tab lets, the name in current usage derives from a Greek trans literation of an Old Persion toponym of still-uncertain meaning. From the fifteenth century onward, the distinctive, wellpreserved T o m b of the Mother of Solomon (the name then ascribed to Cyrus's long-forgotten resting place) was noted by European travelers traversing the main caravan route be tween Isfahan and Shiraz. Beginning in 1812, a number of such observers raised die possibility that the Morghab mon uments might indeed constitute the lost remains of Cyrus's capital, but it took the detailed arguments first of George N . Curzon ( 1 8 9 2 ) and then of Ernst Herzfeld (1908) to affirm the correlation. Herzfeld conducted the first excavations at Pasargadae in 1 9 2 8 . Six years later Aurel Stein examined several of the prehistoric mounds standing on the fringes of the Morghab Plain, and in 1935 E. F. Schmidt took the first aerial photographs of the site. Subsequent excavations were carried out by Ali Sami from 1949 to 1955 under the aus pices of the Iranian Antiquities Service and by David Stron ach from 1961 to 1963 on behalf of die British Institute of Persian Studies. T h e principle remains of Achaemenid Pasargadae are dis tributed over an area some 3 Ion (2 mi.) long and 2 km (1 mi.) wide. Individual monuments witiiin this parklike stretch of ground adjacent to the Pulvar River include the tomb of Cyrus, a monumental gatehouse (R), two palaces, a royal garden, an enigmatic stone tower (the Zendan-i Suleiman), two hollow limestone plinths, and an impressive stone plat form jutting from the western side of a low hill now known as the Tall-i Taklit, or "throne hill." T o m b of Cyrus. Arguably an intentional synthesis of many separate Near Eastern architectural elements, the tomb of Cyrus stands at the southern limit of the site, ap proximately one kilometer south of the palace area (see fig ure 1). With its massive ashlar masonry and plain surfaces balanced by only a minimal number of decorative moldings, the structure creates an indelible impression of dignity, sim plicity, and strength. Witii an estimated original height of 11.10 m, the tomb consists of two parts: a high plinth with six receding tiers and a rectangular cella witii a steeppitched, gabled roof. The stepped plinth measures 13.35 12.30 m at the base, and the compact tomb chamber, reached through a low doorway, is 3,17 m long, 2.11 m wide, and 2.11 m high. Until just after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 B C E , the body of Cyrus is said to have lain here in a golden coffin, on a golden couch beside a table (Geog. 15.3.7). Much later, in the thirteenth century C E , a shallow mihrab, or prayer niche, was cut into the southwest wall of the tomb chamber. For an unknown period of time, the tomb served as the focal point of a medieval mosque. x
G a t e R. Placed on the eastern approach to the palace area, Gate R (also known as the Palace with the Relief) ap-
PASARGADAE.
F i g u r e 2. Apotropaic four-winged
figure.
T h e figure
is c a r v e d in low relief o n t h e o n e w e l l - p r e s e r v e d d o o r j a m b of G a t e R . Before t h e t o p m o s t p o r t i o n of d i e i m p o s i n g hmhm c r o w n was b r o k e n off s o m e 130 y e a r s a g o , t h e i n t a c t figure m e a s u r e d a b o u t 2.85 m in h e i g h t . ( P h o t o g r a p h by O . Kitson, 1961)
pears to have provided the chief ceremonial means of en trance to the site as a whole. Now greatly denuded, this free standing rectangular structure originally housed a markedly tall, stone-floored hypostyle hall with two rows of four stone columns and four axial doorways. While the broad, main doorways on die opposed short walls were at one time flanked by paired colossi of Assyrian inspiration, the worn relief of a four-winged apotropaic genius still stands guard over the northeastern side door (see figure 2). Based on yet another kind of Assyrian protective image, the latter figure is distinguished by a short-bearded face witii a distinctly Per sian physiognomy, a traditional Elamite robe, and an Egyp tian hmhm crown (an impressive headdress that rested on the long twisted horns of the Abyssinian ram). This last at tribute, which was at home in die egyptianizing art of Syria and Phoenicia, may only have been introduced in order to underscore the submission of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard in 539 B C E ; equally, however, it may have been intended to advertise what was (at the time) a still-unfulfilled Achaemenid claim to Egypt. P a l a c e S. In reference to this structure's one surviving
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13-meter-high stone column, Herzfeld (1908) opted for the label palace S, an abbreviation from der palast mit der mule ("the palace with the column"). T h e architects of palace S succeeded in combining, in one harmonious design, certain longstanding Iranian traditions (e.g., a lofty audience hall with two rows of four columns) with particular imported Ionian concepts (such as, most notably, that of placing an open and inviting columned portico on each side of a free standing building). In terms of innovation, palace S also documents the first known use of one of the more distinctive (and indigenous) emblems of Achaemenid architecture: a stone capital in the form of a double animal protome. At the same time, however, certain of the now severely truncated doorway reliefs of palace S (including one in which the relief shows the legs of a bull man and those of a fish-cloaked genius) show a clear debt to the rich, exotic imagery of As syria. Seventy years after the fall of Nineveh, Cyrus appears to have realized, in short, that various of the more distinctive elements in the art of Assyria could be borrowed with ad vantage to proclaim the return of a degree of dominion not seen since the days of Ashurbanipal. [See Assyria; Nineveh.] Palace P . Herzfeld (1908) named palace P (palast mit der or "palace with the anta") for its once single visible feature: a protruding stone anta. In contrast to Cyrus's other palatial constructions, this innermost palace appears to have been intended to supply a relatively private, if still represen tational, setting for royal audiences. This circumstance probably accounts, for example, for the small scale of the thirty columns that once graced the central hall; for the nar row width of even the two main doorways that led into the hall; and for the importance given to the exceptionally long, well-appointed "garden portico" on the southeast side of the building. In many ways, in fact, palace P stands out not so much as a formal palace as a garden pavilion of exceptional size and stams. More that this, the building was far from complete when Cyrus died in battle; and, as the latest pat terns of research now indicate, neither palace P's Persepolitan-style doorway sculptures (each of which once included a figure of Cyrus followed by an attendant) nor any of the building's three separate inscriptions (including a single ex ample of the standard nilingual building inscription that can be understood to have carried the meaning "I, Cyrus, the king, the Achaemenid [built this]") are to be attributed to Cyrus. Instead, each of these features has to be attributed to Darius: a monarch who apparently found it advisable— not least at the emotive site of Pasargadae—to project his own carefully nuanced image of the memorable ruler whose line he had supplanted.
pfleiler,
Palace Garden. Although Cyrus did not live long enough to enjoy the prospect, it is clear that he had an external throne seat placed at the midpoint of the southwest portico of palace P in order to contemplate a well-ordered, luxuriant inner garden. Long, white limestone water channels, stud ded at intervals by square basins, still define the rectilinear
lines of this early Achaemenid garden. It appears to have been divided into four quadrants—a division that may, at the time, have been understood to symbolize the "four quar ters" of universal rule. [See Gardens, article on Gardens in Preclassical Times.] The possibility that the palace garden was scrupulously maintained for two hundred years (perhaps as one expres sion of the homage that continued to be paid to Cyrus in his capital and burial place), is not at all improbable. Such a claim not only derives credibility from the long-term, clearly detectable impact of Cyrus's fourfold garden plan (Stronach, 1994, but could also be said to be substantiated by the discovery, within the confines of the garden, of the elegant Pasargadae treasure, a rich hoard of Achaemenid gold and silver objects that, based on the objects themselves, is not likely to have been hidden before 350 B C E . Zendan-i Suleiman. One of Cyrus's most carefully con structed and enigmatic stone monuments, the Zendan-i Su leiman ("prison of Solomon") originally consisted of an al most square, 14-meter-high tower in which a solitary, raised room was approached by a projecting monumental stone staircase. Copied by Darius at Naqsh-i Rustam, and vari ously regarded as either a tomb, a fire temple, or a deposi tory, this now-fragmentary construction continues to defy secure interpretation. [See Naqsh-i Rustam.] Stone Plinths. T h e extreme northern limit of Pasargadae is marked by two isolated limestone plinths, each of which is square in plan and more than 2 m high, and each of which can be ascribed to the reign of Cyrus on the basis of datable stone working techniques. While numerous interpretations of the function of these features have been put forward, it is most likely (on the basis of comparable evidence con tained in the funerary relief of Darius) that Cyrus ascended the step-topped southern plinth (by means on an eightstepped staircase block) in order to worship opposite an el evated altar that stood on the adjacent, northern plinth. Tall-i Takht. T h e towering stone platform that protrudes from the west side of this hump-backed hill offers one fur ther proof of the scale and quality of Cyrus's building activ ities. Left unfinished upon Cyrus's death in 530 B C E , this rigorously constructed palace platform provides a manifest link between the earlier ashlar terraces at Lydian Sardis and the huge, later terrace Darius chose to erect at Persepolis. [See Sardis; Persepolis.] In the case of the Tall-i Takht, how ever, Cyrus's suddenly obsolete platform/terrace came to be incorporated—most probably during Darius's reign—in a sprawling citadel with substantial mud-brick defenses. This fortified complex may in fact represent a notable storehouse, mentioned by Arrian, said to have been surrendered intact to Alexander the Great (Anabasis 3.18.10). With reference to the Tall-i Takht's later history, the excavations of the early 1960s served to document a burning of part of the citadel in or near 300 B C E (an event likely to have marked the end of direct Seleucid control in Fars); the subsequent
PASTORAL NOMADISM introduction of a more independent local occupation that may have extended down to 180 B C E ; and the establishment of a short-lived fortified settlement tentatively dated to the beginning of the Islamic era (seventh and eighth centuries CE).
BIBLIOGRAPHY C u r z o n , George N . Persia and the Persian Question. 2 vols. L o n d o n , 1892. Flandin, E u g e n e , and Pascal Coste. Voyage en Perse deMM. E. Flandin, peintre, et P. Coste, architecte, pendant les annees 1840 et 1841, 5 vols. Paris, 1843-1854. Herzfeld, Ernst. "Pasargadae: U n t e r s u c h u n g e n zur persischen Archaologie." Klio 8 (1908): 1-68. Herzfeld, Ernst. "Bericht iiber die A u s g r a b u n g e n von Pasargadae, 1928." Archiiologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 1 (1929-1930): 4-16. Herzfeld, Ernst. Iran in the Ancient East. L o n d o n , 1941. Nagel, Wolfram. "Pasargadae: Ein Lagebericht z u m Problem des Beginns achamenidischer K u n s t u n d altpersischer Schrift." Mitteilun gen der Deutschen Orienl-Gesellschaft zu Berlin m (1979): 75-88. Nylander, Carl. " W h o W r o t e the Inscriptions at Pasargadae?" Orientalia Suecana 16 (1967): 135-180. Nylander, Carl. lonians in Pasargadae: Studies in Old Persian Architec ture. Uppsala, 1970. Sami, Ali. Pasargadae: The Oldest Imperial Capital of Iran. Shiraz, 1956. Stronach, David. Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conductedby the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963. Oxford, 1978. Stronach, David. " P a s a r g a d a e . " In The Cambridge Histoiy of Iran, vol. 2, The Median and Achaemenian Periods, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, p p . 838-855. C a m b r i d g e , 1985. Stronach, David. " O n the Genesis of the Old Persian Cuneiform Script." In Contributions a I'histoire de I'Iran: Melanges Jean Penvt, p p . 195-203. Paris, 1990. Stronach, David. "Parterres a n d S t o n e Watercourses at Pasargadae: Notes on the Achaemenid C o n t r i b u t i o n to die Evolution of G a r d e n D e s i g n . " Journal of Garden History 14 (1994): 3-12. T r u m p e l m a n n , L e o . "Metrologische U n t e r s u c h u n g e n a m Kyrosgrab in Pasargadae." I n Memorial Volume of the Sixth International Con gress of Iranian Art and Archaeology, Oxford, 11-16 September 1972, p p . 319-326. T e h r a n , 1976. DAVID STRONACH
PASTORAL NOMADISM. A strategy for produc ing food that emphasizes breeding—the care and use of herd animals, in particular, in the Near East, of camels, cattle, sheep, and goats—is known as pastoral nomadism. Recent research into the history of pastoral nomadism in the Near East has benefited from three independent yet interrelated lines of scholarship. T h e first is the accumulation of a wealth of ethnographic information on pastoral nomadism in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries gathered by explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. T h e second is die more recent infusion of ideas and approaches from anthropology into the research agendas of historians and, especially, archaeologists (the so-called New Archae ology revolution). [See New Archaeology.] This led not only to renewed interest in ethnography by archaeologists (ethnoarchaeology), but to a virtual explosion of reexaminations
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by researchers of the documents (reports, artistic render ings, early photographs) of nineteenth-century explorers and missionaries—which has had an impact on biblical scholarship as well (see, e.g., Finkelstein and Na'aman, 1994). T h e third is the growth of regional archaeological surveys throughout the Near East mandated both by the New Archaeology and by the threat to antiquities sites by the rapid expansion of modern roads, farming, and settle ments. Not surprisingly, a very significant proportion of the sites surveyed have produced information relevant to recon structing the nature and contribution of pastoral nomadism over millennia. An outcome of this recent escalation of research is an emerging consensus that the lives of nomadic pastoralists in the Near East have always been enmeshed with those of village-based farmers. T h u s , the tendency of early scholars to emphasize differences and hostilities between farmers and herders has given way to perspectives emphasizing the var ied ways in which raising crops and raising animals pre sented strategic food-production alternatives. Rural house holds and whole communities had to chose among them in order to adapt to shifting environmental, economic, and po litical conditions. Three factors are especially important for understanding the migratory aspect of food production in the Near East. T h e first is the availability of water. In much of the region there are two seasons: the rainy season, which usually begins in November and ends in March or April, and summer, when there is little or no rain, only dew. In virtually rainless places, such as Egypt and Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia), the rainy season is nevertheless evident by the annual flooding of the Nile River and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, re spectively. Rainwater and floodwater have been counted on not only to irrigate fields, but also to replenish hewn cisterns and res ervoirs, as well as natural reservoirs and underground aq uifers. In many cases the latter provide fresh water to springs and streams year-round. An important advantage of pas toral nomadism in this regard is that—unlike sedentary ag riculture—it is not dependent to the same extent on human labor to maintain irrigation canals, terraced hillsides, cis terns, and reservoirs to provide water for their crops, ani mals, and households during the dry season. On the con trary, pastoralists rely to a greater degree on their mobility and knowledge of natural pastures and watering places for year-round access to water. A second factor is the presence of the three great deserts in the region: the Sahara and Sinai in North Africa and the Arabian desert along the frontier of the Fertile Crescent. During the rainy season, these vast deserts produce pastures of sufficient quantity and quality to feed hundreds of thousands of herd animals. By visiting these deserts, herders take advantage of the ability of ruminants to convert cellu lose, which humans cannot digest directly, into animal pro-
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tein, which humans can digest. During the dry season, when the desert becomes too inhospitable for people and animals, most herders bring tiieir herds back to graze them on the stubble that remains following the grain harvest in the wellwatered areas surrounding villages and towns. A third factor affecting an understanding of nomadic pastoralism in the ancient Near East is the shifting of political and economic realities, which at times made sedentary ag riculture very risky. This was especially true along the desert frontiers, where settlers sometimes abandoned their villages and farms and moved to safer areas or adopted subsistence pastoralism to provide for their food and security needs. When conditions became more favorable again, they or their descendents often resettled their former homelands. Such sedentarization and nomadization has been docu mented by geographers, historians, and archaeologists for the countries along the North African coast, the Levant, and ancient Mesopotamia. Where these processes have been studied intensively—such as in Cyrenaica on the Libyan coast (Johnson, 1973), in the Madaba region of Jordan (LaBianca, 1988), and on tire Mesopotamian floodplain (Adams, 1981)—sedentarization has typically been linked with the buildup of permanent settlements such as farm steads, villages, and towns; with gradual increases in craft specialization; with the production of field crops and tree crops; with the centralization of power and bureau cratization of production; with the stratification of society; and with the derealization of the food supply. Nomadiza tion, on the other hand, has been linked with the partial or complete abandonment of settled areas; with increased re liance on animals; with dwelling in tents, caves, and aban doned buildings; and with increased reliance on tribal affil iation for access to lands and protection against hostile tribes and states. [See Tents.] There is little scholarly dispute that subsistence pastoral ism is a very ancient phenomenon in the Old World. The prevailing view is that nomadic pastoralism emerged as a consequence of the expansion of crop cultivation (BarYosef and Khazarov, 1992). This likely first occurred some time during Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (c. 6000-5500 B C E ) , when the first experiments with the migratory herding of animals away from arable areas were made. This early pastoralism likely began with herds of goats, which are a greater hazard to cultivated fields than are sheep. [See Sheep and Goats.] The extent to which pastoralism developed during Pottery Neolithic times (c. 5500-4500 BCE) is uncertain, although it is likely tiiat it was during this period that sheep were added to mobile herding operations. There is some evidence that these animals were raised primarily for their meat until the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500-3500 B C E ) , when they began to be kept for their milk and wool as well. The emergence of the first cities during the Early Bronze Age (c. 3500-2300 BCE) provided additional impetus to die
specialized production of sheep and goats: expanding urban populations needed to be supplied with meat, milk, fiber, skins, and wool. [See Textiles, article on Textiles of the N e olithic through Iron Ages.] This "secondary products rev olution" coincided with the ass coming into full use as a means of transport, thus facilitating the hauling of the ani mal products produced in distant pasttires to urban centers. [See Transportation.] By the end of the Early Bronze Age, people's experience with the specialized production of animals had developed to the point where pastoral nomadism was fully established as a viable alternative to sedentary agriculture. Throughout most of the Old World, this mobile production of animals typically involved some sort of transhumance, whereby shepherds migrated with their flocks between summer and winter pastures. This ascendancy of nomadic lifestyles—es pecially toward the end of the Early Bronze Age—signaled the beginning of the cycles of sedentarization and nomadi zation that thereafter left their marks on the cultural land scape of the ancient Near East. The secondary products revolution appears to have played a pivotal role in leading to the ascendancy of subsis tence pastoralism as an alternative to village agriculture. Three subsequent events had a profound effect on this de velopment in the Near East: the introduction of the camel, the invention of the North Arabian saddle, and the recent introduction of the pickup truck. [See Camels.] Experts seem to agree tiiat the one-humped camel, or dromedary, was domesticated (possibly in Somalia) some time during the third millennium. Prior to its domestication, herders relied primarily on domestic sheep, goats, cows, and donkeys for their livelihoods. [See Cattle and Oxen.] T h e introduction of the camel allowed them to penetrate deeper into the desert in search of pastures. This increased capacity for mobility in previously uninhabitable desert regions, in turn, led to new opportunities for camel-breeding nomads when it came to long-distance trade. It is a curious fact that, especially in the Levant, the camel does not appear to have played a very significant role either as a herding animal or as a ttansport animal until after about 1400 BCE. After that time, however, its importance gradually increased, apparentiy because of its usefulness to the bur geoning overland trade in incense. T h e trade was at first controlled by settled merchants; after the invention of the North Arabian saddle in about 500 B C E , however, the use fulness of the dromedary in transport increased so signifi cantly it put the camel-breeding nomads in control. T h e rise of such desert commercial centers as Petra and Palmyra fol lowed. [See Petra; Palmyra.] The military and economic advantages provided by the camel, the North Arabian saddle, and subsequent techno logical advances related to riding and raiding by nomads on camel, led to the beginning of what is often referred to as bedouin society (cf. Bulliet, 1975). T h e auspicious ascent of
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bedouins as the undisputed masters of the overland trade routes crisscrossing the Arabian desert only lasted a few cen turies. Ironically, as Richard W. Bulliet has noted, the very "technological changes that originally made it possible for desert tribes bordering settled empires to gain control of the trade passing through their lands eventually raised the mil itary capacity of all the Arab tribes to such a level that anar chy replaced the control exercised by the first trading states" (1990, p. 104). N o doubt other factors contributed to the waning role of the bedouin when it came to controlling overland trade routes—not the least of which were the deliberate and even tually successful attempts by the Roman overlords of an cient Palestine to take over this control. In the nearly two millennia since then, the fortunes of the bedouin with re spect to control of the desert trade routes of Arabia have waxed and waned. Pivotal to the persistence of their way of life in the face of constantly shifting political fortunes has been their skill as breeders of camels, horses, sheep, and goats; their intimate knowledge of the desert; and their re silient tribal organization, which invariably includes com plex partnerships not only among their own groups, but also with the villagers and townspeople bordering their desert territories.
has come to rely explicitly on the anthropological concepts of sedentarization and nomadization to understand this phe nomenon (cf. Finkelstein and Na'aman, 1994; Levy, 1995). As Israel Finkelstein has argued, the settlement of the Isra elites in the highlands of Canaan toward the end of the sec ond millennium BCE was thus not a singular event of some kind, but rather "a phase in the cyclic history of Canaan" (Finkelstein, 1994). The fluidity that has characterized the social landscape of the Near East over the millennia has in a large measure been possible because of the persistence at the local level of var ious forms of tribalism. Since prehistoric times, tribal ide ology has served as the enabling mechanism whereby small groups of kin have been able shift back and forth between nomadic and sedentary ways in order to adapt to changes in their natural and social environment. Thus, when it comes to understanding the origins, rise, and collapse of such local kingdoms as Israel, Judah, Ammon, Moab, and Edom toward the end of the second and throughout most of the first millennia B C E , insights gained from anthropolog ical research on tribalism—as manifest both among seden tary and nomadic groups—will be crucial to future attempts to understand the nature of the polities of these early king doms (cf. LaBianca and Younker, 1995).
T h e twentieth century brought enormous challenges and changes to the bedouin way of life. In modern Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Syria their numbers have dwindled as their tra ditional dry-season pastures in the settled areas have been converted to the intensive cultivation of legumes, vegetables, and fruit trees and their traditional reliance on raiding and collecting protection taxes from villagers and townspeople has been ended by local governments. Furthermore, the in troduction of well-guarded national borders has impeded their traditional long-distance migrations. Despite these changes, bedouin continue to survive. Be cause of their expertise at utilizing some of the most mar ginal lands in the world, they have an important contribution to make to the economies of their host countries; their strat egies for doing so are likely to change, however, not the least because of modern technology. Thus, the camel as a means of desert transport is rapidly being replaced by trucks, es pecially small pickup trucks. As new technologies continue to be introduced, the question remains as to whether the bedouin way of life will persist as a type of subsistence pastoralism or, as some predict, it will become a Near Eastern version of commercial ranching. T h e infusion of anthropological understanding of pastoral nomadism since the 1960s into historical and archaeological research on the ancient Near East has led to many new in sights with broad ramifications for our understanding of the prehistory and history of the Holy Land. For instance, re cent scholarship concerned with the cyclic appearance and disappearance of settled villages and towns in ancient Pal estine throughout the Chalcolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages
[See also Agriculture; Egypt, article on Prehistoric Egypt; Mesopotamia, article on Prehistoric Mesopotamia; North Africa; Palestine, article on Prehistoric Palestine; Syria, ar ticle on Prehistoric Syria; and Transjordan, article on Prehis toric Transjordan.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A d a m s , Robert M c C . Heartland of Cities. Chicago, 1981. D o c u m e n t s cycles of sedentarization a n d nomadization along the Mesopotamian floodplain, Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Anatoly K h a z a n o v , eds. Pastoralism in the Levant: Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Perspectives. Prehistoiy Press M o n o g r a p h s in W o r l d Archaeology, n o . t o . Madison, Wis., 1992. A variety of autiiors examine the current state of research on pastoralism in the Levant. Bulliet, R i c h a r d W . The Camel and the Wheel (1975). Cambridge, 1990. Pivotal study of the history of the camel a n d its uses in the Old World. Cribb, Roger. Nomads in Archaeology. Cambridge, 1991. Important work on how to investigate n o m a d i c pastoralism using archaeology. Eph'al, Israel. The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Border of the Fertile Crescent, Ninth-Fifth Centwy B. C. Leiden, 1982. Survey of Akkadian and biblical sources dealing with ancient n o m a d s on the border of the Fertile Crescent. Finkelstein, Israel. " T h e E m e r g e n c e of Israel: A Phase in the Cyclic History of C a n a a n in t h e T h i r d a n d Second Millennia B C E . " In Finkelstein and N a ' a m a n , eds., 1994 (below), p p . 150-177. Finkelstein, Israel, a n d N a d a v N a ' a m a n , eds. From Nomadism to Mon archy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. Jerusalem and Washington, D . C . , 1994. Examines cycles of sedentarization and nomadization leading to the rise of die monarchy in ancient Israel, Johnson, Douglas L . Jabal-al-Akhdar, Cyrenaica: An Historical Geog raphy of Settlement and Livelihood. University of Chicago, D e p a r t -
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raent of Geography Research Paper, no. 148. Chicago, 1973. D o c uments cycles of sedentarization and nomadization in Cyrenaica (ancient Libya). Khazanov, Anatoly. Nomads and the Outside World. Cambridge, 1984. Seminal work on the history of nomadism in the Old World. LaBianca, Oystein S. Hesban, vol. 1, Sedentarization and Nomadization: Food System Cycles al Hesban and Vicinity in Transjordan. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1990. D o c u m e n t s cycles of sedentarization and n o madization in Central Transjordan. LaBianca, Oystein, a n d Randall Younker. " T h e Kingdoms of A m m o n , M o a b and Edom: T h e Archaeology of Society in Late Bronze/Iron Age Transjordan (ca, 1400-500 B C E ) . " In Levy, ed., 1995 (below), PP- 399-415Lancaster, William. The Rwala Bedouin Today. Cambridge, 1981. Eth nographic study of the changing lives of bedouin in Jordan and Iraq. Levy, T h o m a s E. The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. L o n d o n , 1995M a r x , Emmanuel. The Bedouin of the Negev. N e w York, 1967. E t h n o graphic study of the changing lives of the bedouin in t h e Negev desert. Matthews, Victor H . Pastoral Nomadism in the Mari Kingdom, ca. 18301760 B.C. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation S e ries, no. 3. Cambridge, Mass., 1978. Study of pastoral n o m a d i s m based on an examination of the Mari texts. Rowton, M . B . "Enclosed N o m a d i s m . " Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974): 1-30. Study of the role of nomads in Mesopotamia during the third and second millennium BCE.
ShahTd, Irfan. Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of By zantium and the Arabs. Washington, D . C . , 1984. T h e role of pastoral nomads on the frontiers of Palestine in t h e Late R o m a n a n d Byz antine periods. 0 Y S T E I N S. L A B I A N C A
PELLA (modern Tabaqat Fahl, Early Islamic Fihl), site located in the lower foothills of the eastern Jordan Valley, 28 km (17 mi.) south of the Sea of Galilee and 4 km (2.5 mi.) east of the Jordan River (32°27' N , 35°37' E). T h e site, nes tled among rugged hills and deep valleys, overlooks the north Jordan Valley and the plain of Esdraelon. Pella's prin cipal archaeological feature is an oval mound on the north side of Wadi Jirm el-Moz, a small valley that descends from the highlands that lie to the east. On its steep, eroded southern slope the mound rises 30 m (100 ft.) above the valley floor. Beneath its deep occupational remains is a natural hill ock, at whose foot a powerful spring has flowed into the valley for thousands of years. On the south side of Wadi Jirm rises a large, dome-shaped natural hill known as Tell el-Husn, which was used both for interment and for occu pation at various times in tire past. T h e surrounding region reveals abundant evidence of ancient utilization.
PELLA. View of excavations from the south. A p o r t i o n of t h e m a i n m o u n d is visible o n t h e left. A t c e n t e r r i g h t is t h e Civic C o m p l e x of the R o m a n - B y z a n t i n e p e r i o d . T h e R o m a n o d e o n (small t h e a t e r ) is visible, as well as t h e Civic C o m p l e x C h u r c h , w h i c h m a y h a v e b e e n t h e city's c a t h e d r a l . (Photograph courtesy College of Wooster)
PELLA Pella was highly desirable as a place of habitation because it commanded the resources of three ecosystems: its own and those in the ascending hills to the east and the Jordan Valley on the west. Although hot in the summer, it had, as it still does, one of the best climates in the region. Even today, after centuries of environmental degradation, it has rich soils and sufficient rainfall to make the vicinity excellent for agriculture. In ancient times it also lay near the junction of two of the major trade and military routes of the ancient Levant, one running along the eastern side of die Jordan Valley and the other descending northwest from the Central Transjordanian highlands, crossing the Jordan River near Beth-Shean and continuing through the Plain of Esdraelon to the coast. T h e site has been known to Western travelers and ex plorers since it was visited, but not identified, by Charles Irby and James Mangles in 1818. It appeared as "Pella" on Heinrich Kiepert's 1842 map, an identification confirmed, on the basis of both research and visitation, by Edward Rob inson in his Later Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Ad jacent Regions (London, 1856). It was recognized by William Foxwell Albright in 1926 as the Pihil, or Pihir, in several Egyptian texts, a correlation that opened up a textually doc umented history going as far back as the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. Several dozen Greek, Latin, and Arabic texts al lude briefly to Pella, as does a Talmudic passage (Smith, 1973, pp. 23-82). Archaeological exploration of the site began with sound ings made in 1958 by Robert Funk and Neil Richardson of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The first fullscale excavations were begun in 1967 by the College of Wooster, under the direction of Robert H. Smith, but were curtailed by the June war of that year. Smith returned in 1979 with J. Basil Hennessy and Anthony W. McNicoll as directors of a joint University of Sydney-College of Wooster expedition. T h e Wooster team had its last season in 1985; Sydney's excavations continued into the 1990s. It is only with this most recent research that the long and rich history of the area has been illuminated. Surface surveys and excavation have demonstrated oc cupation in the region of Pella from the Lower Paleolithic (perhaps as many as a million years ago) to the present day. Important Early and Middle Paleolithic sequences predate the formation of the Lisan lake that dominated the region's geography and economy between 100,000 and 14,000 years ago, after which the lake began to retreat and, in its retreat, to create the deep ravines that are so prominent a feature of the existing landscape. Six sites from the Upper Paleolithic, Kebaran, and Na tufian periods have been excavated by the joint expedition; they provide a detailed picture of the environment and hu man activity in the vicinity of Pella between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago. Excavation of the Early Natufian settle ment exposed two large, circular buildings containing de
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posits of thousands of domestic and agricultural stone tools, as well as carefully worked basalt bowls, pedestal mortars and pestles, small animal sculptures in both basalt and lime stone, and large limestone stelae decorated widi deeply carved concentric rectangles. Dietary staples included wild barley, lentils, and peas. Human burials and offerings were found beneath some of the domestic structures. Prepottery Neolithic remains are evidenced so far only in unstratified contexts, but excavation and surface survey in dicate a widespread Pottery Neolithic settlement of the Yarmukian horizon in the sixth and fifth millennia, both on the main mound and along the banks of Wadi Jirm el-Moz. Numerous Chalcolithic settlements are attested through out the vicinity of Pella. One of these, a large village situated southeast of the central mound on the slope of a large hill known as Jebel Sartaba, has been excavated. The plan ap pears to consist of broad courtyard areas between clusters of roughly rectangular stone and mud-brick houses partly cut into the hill's soft bedrock. T h e ceramic and lithic in dustries are closely related to those of the upper levels at Teleilat el-Ghassul, the basic levels of the Beersheba Chal colithic, and some settlements in the Golan in Israel. The village had an agricultural economy based on barley, emmer wheat, lentils, chickpeas, and peas. A radiocarbon sample dates the short-lived settlement to 3480 ± 60 B C E . Early Bronze Age remains have been found on both die mound and at Tell el-Husn; where many of the areas of deep excavation have reached EB levels. A substantial EB I build ing has been found on the mound. It is probable tiiat a mas sive defensive wall exposed in the deep excavations carried out on the southeastern part of die mound had its origin in the Early Bronze Age. An EB IIA large stone platform was discovered at Tell el-Husn. There are few remains of the EB III period. An EB IV cemetery was partly excavated in Wadi Hammeh, near the Natufian settlement mentioned above, and there is evidence of a small settlement from the same period in that vicinity. Pihil was a city of some significance throughout the Mid dle and Late Bronze Ages, as might be expected from die Egyptian references. It was defended by a substantial mudbrick wall that continued in use, with occasional patching, into the Iron Age, Rich settlement and tomb remains attest to a continuous and widespread occupation throughout the second millennium B C E , perhaps extending beyond the city wall. Unlike the situation in much of Palestine and Trans jordan, there does not appear to have been a reduction in the city's size or any evidence of destruction until the end of LB II, and many M B II buildings continued in use into the Late Bronze Age. Contact with Egypt is archaeologically attested as early as the M B lib period by the presence of alabaster and faience vessels, scarabs, and other trade items, and with Cyprus and the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age, when ceramic ves sels were imported in some quantity. Fragments of cunei-
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PELLA were built. Greek became the language of culture and com merce, although the indigenous language of the city was never completely abandoned. T h e ancient Semitic name of the city was hellenized to Pella, calling to mind the city of Alexander's birth. Late Hellenistic artifacts, found in abun dance, include not only fine artifacts imported from Syria and elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region, but also a new repertoire of local ceramic vessels. Contemporary with Pella's Late Hellenistic development was the rise of the Maccabean kingdom west of the Jordan River. Having traditionally stood outside the Hebrew cul tural sphere, Pella maintained an uneasy relationship with the Jewish state; nevertheless, by keeping a low profile and probably serving as a useful conduit for Seleucid commerce, the city managed to remain relatively free from Hasmonean domination for almost a century. In 83/82 B C E , however, the Hasmonean ruler Alexander Jannaeus, displeased, accord ing to Josephus, that a city so near its border would not accede to Jewish practices, overran and destroyed the city (Josephus, Antiq. 13.392-397; War 1.103-105). Evidence of extensive burning is present in the Late Hellenistic stratum on the mound.
PELLA.
Egyptian style box. R e s t o r e d e b o n y b o x with ivory inlays.
L a t e B r o n z e A g e , fifteenth c e n t u r y BCE. (Photograph courtesy U n i versity of Sydney)
form tablets of LB I date suggest a literate society, as do the previously known Amarna letters from Mut-bal'lu of Pella to pharaoh Akhenaten. One substantial building may prove to be the equivalent of the now well-attested governors' res idences in contemporary Palestinian cities. There was no marked change in prosperity during LB II, although the town's area may have been more restricted in the thirteenth century BCE. There are very rich burials of LB I and II. The beginning of the Iron Age saw rebuilding and con tinuity of local ceramic and other material cultural elements, but the large, MB-LB prosperous city gave way to a some what smaller and poorer town. Pella receives no mention in the Hebrew Bible, unless it appears there under some other name. It is possible that during the later biblical period the city was virtually unoccupied, as there is little at the site that is datable to the period from the late seventh through the fourth centuries B C E . Following the conquests of Alexander the Great in Syria and Palestine in 332-331 BCE and the ensuing reconfigura tions in government, economy, and culture, Pella began to revive. Although the late tradition of Stephanos Byzantios (Ethnica, pp. 103-104) that the city was refounded by Alex ander is probably fictional, it began to rebuild its population and participate in Hellenistic commerce under Ptolemaic suzerainty. Following the Seleucid conquest of the southern Levant in 200 B C E , Pella experienced a century of expansion and prosperity. New residences and public or military structures
The advance of the Roman general Pompey through Syria in 63 BCE brought an end to Seleucid and Hasmonean domination alike. Pella was one of ten hellenized cities in southern Syria and northern Transjordan that from this time on were known collectively as the Decapolis—if, indeed, that term had not already come into existence in Late Hel lenistic times. Although the cities were placed within the newly created province of Syria, Pompey in fact returned to them much of the independence they had enjoyed under the Seleucid Empire. Archaeological evidence shows that while commerce was important, Pella was no more involved in international trade than many other cities outside that league. Stratified archaeological deposition from the first three centuries C E has not been found on the mound to the extent that might be expected; nevertheless, it is clear that Pella underwent considerable development during the Roman pe riod. In 82/83 C E the city issued its first modest bronze coin age. Excavations in the Civic Complex near the spring have exposed the remnants of public baths and a small theater constructed about this time, and a forum probably was built in Wadi Jirm. Several of the city's early third-century coins show the facade of a nymphaeum, which was undoubtedly located in the Civic Complex. There was a popular spa at Pella, probably the warm mineral spring that still flows in Wadi Hammeh, 3 km (2 mi.) north of the city. T h e road between Pella and the Decapolis city of Gerasa/ferash was improved in 160/61 C E , as inscribed milestones found along its route indicate. Throughout this period the city continued to have its cul tural roots in an intermingling of its ancient Syro-Palestinian heritage with Flellenism. T h e Greco-Roman deities that ap-
PERGAMON pear on the coins the city issued between 177 and 222 C E include Athena, an unidentified male deity, and perhaps Heracles, while another coin depicts a large hexastyle tem ple. Inscriptions found during excavation mention "the el ders of Zeus-Ares" and "the Arabian God." Excavations have brought to light scattered evidence of the everyday re ligious practices of the city's inhabitants, such as the wearing of amulets and the inclusion of hens' eggs in the burial of a newborn child. Although Pella is not mentioned in the New Testament, the interaction of Judaism and Christianity in tire city during this period is of particular interest. Josephus states that Pella was among a number of hellenized cities and villages in Transjordan and Syria that were pillaged by Jews in 66 C E (War 2.457-465). Evidently the damage to the city was lim ited, for some two years later, as Roman troops were on the verge of attacking Jerusalem during the First Jewish Revolt, the Christians who lived in Jerusalem are said to have fled for safety across the Jordan River to the region of Peraea, especially to Pella (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.5.3-4; Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses 30.2.7-8). T h e choice of Pella as a city of refuge is further said to have been divinely re vealed to a prophet in the Jerusalem church, but it can also be viewed on the pragmatic ground that Pella was the most easily reached of the hellenized cities of Transjordan and would have had no involvement in the insurrection against Rome. In view of the aforesaid distaste that the citizens of Hellenistic Pella had for Jewish customs and nationalism, it is likely that the majority of the Christians who took refuge in Pella came from a hellenized Jewish background. A sar cophagus excavated beneath the floor of the West Church at Pella may originally have contained the remains of a leader of that group who died during the sojourn. Although these Christians are reported later to have re turned to Jerusalem, the fact that the mid-second-century apologist Aristo came from Pella suggests that Christianity continued to exist in the city from that time onward. By the end of the fourth century C E , Pella had become a bishopric and Christianity had displaced most or all of the city's for mer religions. Three large churches were constructed during the Byzantine period, one of which—probably the city's ca thedral—was located in the Civic Complex, another on the west side of the city, and the third on a high slope east of the city. T h e names of several bishops of the fifth and sixth centuries are known as participants in the church's ecumen ical councils. Pella probably reached its greatest size in the sixth cen tury, when its international trade was extensive and its citi zens were enjoying considerable prosperity. T h e city fell to its Islamic conquerors in 635 C E , after a major battle between the Byzantine and Islamic armies on the nearby plain of Fihl. Excavations have demonstrated that the city was taken peacefully into the Early Umayyad Empire, with a gradual transition from its former Byzantine culture and economy.
259
The city was destroyed in a violent earthquake in 746/47 C E but was not entirely deserted. Excavations to the north east of the mound have uncovered substantial buildings from the 'Abbasid period in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. These remains, along with those of the earlier Umayyad occupation, make Pella a type-site for the early Islamic set tlement of Jordan. There was some occupation of the site during Mamluk and Early Ottoman times, supported by sugar production. During the Mamluk period a mosque was constructed on top of the mound, but the city itself was never rebuilt. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hennessy, J. Basil, et al. "Pella." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by D e n y s H o m e s - F r e d e r i c q and J. Basil Hennessy, p p . 406-441. Louvain, 1989. Lengthy survey of the Pella excava tions; the bibliography should also b e consulted. McNicoll, Anthony W „ R o b e r t H o u s t o n Smith, a n d J. Basil Hennessy. Pella in Jordan 1: An Interim Report on the Joint University of Sydney and the College of Wooster Excavations at Pella, 1979-1981. Canberra, 1982. Contains some material that will n o t b e repeated in the final excavation report series, Pella of the Decapolis. McNicoll, Anthony W . , a n d Robert H o u s t o n Smith, et al. Pella in Jor dan 2: The Second Interim Report of the Joint University of Sydney and the College of Wooster Excavations at Pella, 1982-1985. Sydney, 1992. Detailed report of excavations to the end of 1985, containing some material that will n o t be repeated in t h e final excavation report series. Smith, R o b e r t Houston. The 1967 Season of the College of Wooster Ex pedition to Pella. Pella of the Decapolis, vol. 1. Wooster, Ohio, 1973. First volume in a series of final excavation reports of the Wooster Expedition to Pella a n d t h e Sydney-Wooster Joint Expedition. Smith, Robert Houston. "Excavations at Pella of the Decapolis, 19791985." National Geographic Research 1 (1985): 470-489. Overview of the results of the first seven seasons of the Sydney-Wooster Joint Expedition to Pella. Smith, R o b e r t Plouston. " T r a d e in t h e Life of Pella of the Decapolis." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by Adnan Hadidi, p p . 53-58. A m m a n , 1987. Discusses the extent to which international c o m m e r c e was a factor in Pella's history. Smith, R o b e r t H o u s t o n , a n d Leslie P. Day. Final Report on the College of Wooster Excavations in Area IX, the Civic Complex, 1979-198$. Pella of the Decapolis, vol. 2. Wooster, Ohio, 1989. Second volume in a series of final excavation reports. Smidi, R o b e r t Houston. " T h e Southern Levant in the Hellenistic P e riod." Levant 22 (1990): 123-130. Discusses t h e Hellenistic period in Palestine and T r a n s j o r d a n in light of historical and archaeological evidence, with particular reference to Pella. J. B A S I L H E N N E S S Y a n d R O B E R T H O U S T O N S M I T H
PERGAMON, ancient city situated in the region of Mysia in northwestern Asia Minor. T h e city occupies the sum mit and south slope of a dramatic hill that towers over the fertile valley of the Caicus River, about 25 Ion (15.5 mi.) east of the Aegean coast, opposite the Greek island of Les bos. The location of Pergamon was never forgotten, and the name survives in that of the modern Turkish town of Bergama. Pergamon was visited and described by numerous early European travelers, starting with Cyriacus of Ancona
260
PERGAMON
in the mid-fifteenth century. German excavations sponsored by the Berlin Museum and later by the German Archaeo logical Institute began in 1878 and have continued intermit tently ever since. In Greek myth, Pergamon was founded by Telephos, the son of Heraldes; although prehistoric pottery has been found in places on the Caicus plain, the earliest archaeological ev idence for settlement on the hill of Pergamon are scattered Greek Geometric sherds of the seventh century B C E . Until the end of the fourth century BCE, Pergamon was a small fortress settlement, inhabited by a mixed population of Greeks and indigenous peoples. The decisive turning point in the history of the city came in 301 BCE, when the Helle nistic warlord Lysimachos of Thrace secured his war chest in its fortress, entrusting it to a lieutenant named Philetaerus. In 282 B C E , Philetaerus revolted from Lysimachos and founded the so-called Attalid dynasty, which ruled Perga mon for the next century and a half. The Attalids made the city an architectural showpiece and the capital of an increas ingly powerful kingdom. This most distinctive epoch in Pergamene history came to an end in 133 BCE, when the last of the Attalid rulers, Attalus III, took the remarkable diplomatic step of leaving his kingdom on his death to the People of Rome. Pergamon continued to grow and prosper under Ro man rule, ranking as one of the two or three leading cities in the province of Asia. It became the home, eventually, of one of the seven churches of that province addressed in the Book of Revelation (2:12-17). The strategic value of its for tress ensured Pergamon's continued importance in the Byz antine period. Early in the fourteenth century, the city was taken by the Turks and incorporated into the newly founded Ottoman kingdom. T h e site of Pergamon falls into three major areas: the for tified hill to which the Hellenistic city was confined; the rel atively level area south of the hill, built up in Roman times and now occupied by Bergama; and an exttamural sanctu ary of Asclepius, southwest of Roman Pergamon. The hill of Pergamon can be divided into two parts: the hilltop, or acropolis, which housed the original fortress; and the south slope, which contained the residential part of town and was entirely enclosed by fortifications in the second century B C E (the total area of Hellenistic city was about 90 ha, or 222 acres). Although the hilltop was settled as early as the seventh century BCE, the earliest substantial architectural remains be long to the Hellenistic period. The north and east sides— the highest parts—are occupied by the fortress proper: the palaces of the kings (relatively modest peristyle structures) and various military installations. T o the west lie the theater, built into the slope of the hill, and a series of grand terraces that run radially around the outside of the theater, stepping down from north to south. The earliest of the building com plexes supported by these terraces is the sanctuary of Athena, directly east of the theater. It consists of a Doric temple of the late fourth or third century B C E , which was
later enclosed on its north, east, and south sides by stoas and other structures, including a library. An elaborate propylon dates to the reign of Eumenes II (197-159 B C E ) . South of and below the sanctuary of Athena lies Pergamon's most famous monument, the altar of Zeus, also begun, if not per haps entirely finished, during the reign of Eumenes (see fig ure 1). The sculptured frieze that decorated its podium rep resents the battle between the gods and the giants. It is now the centerpiece of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. South of the altar lies a monumental marketplace, or agora. By the end of tire Hellenistic period, the architectural elaboration of tire acropolis of Pergamon was essentially complete. T h e only major new building from the Roman era is the Trajaneum, a temple on a monumental terrace northeast of the theater, in which colossal statues of both Trajan (98-117 C E ) and his successor, Hadrian (117-138 C E ) , were found. T h e partial restoration of the Trajaneum was begun in the 1970s and is still underway. New fortifications which enclosed the whole south slope of the hill of Pergamon were built, like much of the acropolis, during the reigns of Eumenes II (197-159 BCE) and his suc cessor, Attalus II (159-138 B C E ) . Excavation has concen trated on four areas: the so-called stadtgrabung, or "city ex cavations," a residential area which was a major focus of work from the 1970s into the 1990s; the sanctuary of Demeter, a small Ionic temple enclosed by stoas on a monu mental terrace, which was built largely in the third and early second centuries B C E ; the gymnasium, a grand complex oc cupying a series of three terraces, which includes stoas, meeting rooms, public baths, and several small sanctuaries, in addition to a large palaestra, or exercise ground, built in the second century B C E and substantially renovated in the Roman period; and the lower agora, together with a nearby group of houses. T h e lower agora lies just inside the "Eu menes gate," at the southern edge of the Hellenistic city. T h e Roman development of the area south of the hill of Pergamon is largely hidden by Bergama. Monumental buildings include a theater, a stadium, and an amphitheater, as well as the so-called Red Hall, a huge and unusual temple complex from the second century C E which was dedicated to a trio of Egyptian gods. T h e sanctuary of Asclepius, southwest of the Roman city, was said to have been founded in the fourth century B C E , but the surviving complex belongs largely to the Roman period, especially the second century CE (see figure 2). It consists of a large courtyard flanked by stoas on its north, west, and south sides (with a theater be hind the north stoa) and a row of monumental buildings on the east. T h e most remarkable of those buildings is the T e m ple of Zeus-Asclepius, a small replica of the Pantheon in Rome. With the advent of Christianity, many of Pergamon's pa gan sanctuaries were converted into churches, including the Asclepium and the Red Hall in the lower city. In Late An tiquity, however, the lower city was abandoned, as the pop ulace retreated to the fortified slopes of the Hellenistic town.
PERGAMON
I'ISKUAMON.
F i g u r e I. Aliar o/Zkhs.
Figure 2.
P e r g a m o n M u s e u m , Berlin. (Foio Murbnrg/An. Resource, N Y )
General view of //•,
i-' A;»,
.,!•..!.. Marburg/,
26
262
PERIODICAL LITERATURE
The area between the gymnasium and the acropolis was en closed by new fortifications (built partly on top of earlier walls). The city enjoyed relative prosperity until as late as tile thirteenth century. It fell to die Turks in die early four teenth century. BIBLIOGRAPHY Final reports of the G e r m a n excavations are published in Altertumer von Pergamon (Berlin, 1885-). T h e supplements (Berlin, 1968-) are devoted especially to t h e publication of small finds. Preliminary reports on current excavations can b e found in Archaologischer Anzeiger; see, for example, Wolfgang Radt, "Pergamon: Vorbericht iiber die K a m pagne 1993," Archaologischer Anzeiger (1994): 403-432. F o r further reading, consult the following: Hansen, Esther V. The Attalids of Pergamon. 2d ed. Ithaca, N . Y . , 1971. Hellenistic history, with extensive bibliography, Radt, Wolfgang. Pergamon: Geschichte und Bauten, Funde und Erforschung einer antiken Metropole. Cologne, 1988. Excellent introduction to the site, written by the longtime director of excavations. Smith, R. R. R. Hellenistic Sculpture. L o n d o n , 1991. See chapter 9, " P e r g a m o n and the Great Altar," for t h e altar of Zeus. CHRISTOPHER RATTE
PERIODICAL LITERATURE. The range of cur rent periodical literature dealing with the archaeology of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin runs die gamut from popular newsletters and magazines to extremely technical, scientific journals. Much of this literature is pro duced by the major institutes and schools of archaeological research in the United States and Europe; some is regionally specific, while other journals deal with issues tiiat transcend regional boundaries. A growing number of technical jour nals deal witii the scientific aspects of archaeology and re lated disciplines, including geology, zoology, microbiology, and ethnoarchaeology. Archaeological and related studies are also found in jour nals devoted primarily to biblical research, such as the Jour nal of Biblical Testamentum,
Literature,
the Catholic
and Zeitschrift
Biblical
Quarterly,
fiir die alttestamentliche
Vetus Wissen-
which will not be considered here. What follows is an annotated description of the most useful and best-known periodicals dealing with archaeological research and meth ods, excavation reports, and the artifactual remains (either physical or literary). For a comprehensive list of what is cur rently available, see the annual Archaologische Bibliographic (Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Werner Hermann and Richard Neudecker et a l , eds., Berlin), an index of articles, subjects, and authors on the archaeology of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world. schaft,
T h e periodical literature can be organized into two major categories: popular sources and technical sources. Within each category are subcategories of publications. Popular sources include newsletters, abstracts, and popular journals and magazines. Technical sources are comprised of journals of Near Eastern archaeology; Near Eastern history, lan guages, and culture; classical or Mediterranean archaeology;
classical history, languages, and culture; related areas and nonregional archaeological studies; scientific methods that relate to archaeology; and anthropological studies. Within each category and subcategory, the most useful and acces sible of these publications are listed here first, in alphabetical order; those that are not as accessible to the general com munity are listed separately, also in alphabetical order. P o p u l a r Sources Newsletters. For the general reader or the scholar who wishes to be informed about fellowships, conferences, and preliminary site reports, the newsletter is a helpful publica tion. Newsletters. Quarterly report of news from the ar chaeological institutes of the American Schools of Ori ental Research—the W. F. Albright Institute of Ar chaeological Research (AIAR), Jerusalem; the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR), Am man; and the Cyprus American Archaeological Re search Institute (CAARI), Nicosia (see below). T h e newsletter also includes announcements, fellowship op portunities, and general information on ASOR-sponsored activities; illustrated. Mar Sipri. Biannual newsletter of the Committee on Me sopotamian Civilization; contains short articles, news items, and communications pertaining to research and archaeology in Syria and Iraq; illustrated.
ASOR
AC OR Newsletter. Biannual published by the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman (see above); contains preliminary excavation reports, news, fellow ship information; illusttated. Art
and Archaeology
Newsletter.
Quarterly in English; oc
casionally articles contain texts in ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Latin; book reviews; illustrated. CAARI News. Biannual published by the Cyprus Ameri can Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia; con tains research reports, news, fellowship opportunities, and conference information; illustrated. Diggings. Monthly published in Australia; contains ar chaeological news on the latest discoveries in the lands of the Bible. ' La Tinaja. Quarterly newsletter of archaeological ceram ics; contains short reports and announcements. Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt. Quar terly; contains short articles, reports from the field, and announcements; illustrated. Abstracts. Abstracts provide individuals witii the oppor tunity to review a larger body of information than would otherwise be possible. These short summaries of articles give an overview of current research. Testament Abstracts. Three issues per year; contains sections on " T h e Ancient Near East: History, Texts, etc." and "Archaeology, Epigraphy, Philology."
Old
PERIODICAL LITERATURE Quarterly review of German research contribu tions on Asia, Africa, and Latin America; book notes and abstracts in English. New Testament Abstracts. Three issues per year; contains a section on the "New Testament World." Mundus.
Religious
and Theological
Abstracts.
Biannual; contains
short abstracts in English, with sections under "Old Testament" on "History and Literature of the Ancient Near East" and on "Archaeology." Religious Studies Review. Quarterly review of books, in cluding a section on the "Ancient Near East." Journals and magazines. For the general reader, per haps the best way to keep up with developments in archae ology is through popular journals and magazines. T h e fol lowing illustrated publications provide semischolarly and popular articles that inform without overwhelming. Bimonthly publication of tire Archaeological Institute of America; contains refereed, lavishly illus trated articles on archaeological excavations throughout the world as well as interpretative research reports, news briefs, and book notes.
Archaeology.
Biblical from
Archaeologist:
Perspectives
Mesopotamia
to
on the Ancient
the Mediterranean.
World
Quarterly
ASOR publication; contains refereed, semischolarly, and occasionally thematic issues on current archaeolog ical discoveries in the Near East and Mediterranean area; includes interpretative and historical articles, short book reviews, and news from the field; illustrated. Biblical Archaeology Review. Six issues per year; contains popular articles, news, short book reviews, and letters from readers. Articles highlight recent excavations, in terpretative research, and current developments in the publication and presentation of archaeological infor mation; color illustrations. History: Resources for Teachers. Three issues per year, published by the Macquarie Ancient History As sociation, North Ryder, N e w South Wales, Australia, for secondary school teachers; contains new develop ments in ancient history and archaeology. Antiquaries Journal. Annual publication of the Society of Antiquaries of London; international journal of record within archaeology, reporting the work of specialists to a general readership as well as specific issues of concern for every archaeologist.
Ancient
Archaeology
and Biblical
Research.
Quarterly (formerly Bi
contains book and film reviews, popular articles on recent discoveries. Archaeology in the Biblical World. Bimonthly publication of the Near East Archaeological Society, Shatter, Cal ifornia; contains popular articles from a conservative viewpoint, news, letters, and reviews; illustrated. Biblical Illustrator. Quarterly publication of the Southern ble and Spade);
263
Baptist Sunday School Board, devoted to articles to aid teachers and ministers; color illustrations. Bulletin
of the Anglo-Israel
Archaeological
Society.
Annual
or biennial dedicated to the subjects of ancient Israel and Jerusalem; contains short articles and book reviews; illustrated. Buried History. Quarterly journal of the Australian Insti tute of Archaeology; contains brief articles on aspects of archaeology and social history in the ancient Near East; illustrated. Expedition. Three issues per year; refereed journal from the University of Pennsylvania; contains short articles on current research in archaeology and anthropology. Hadashot Arkheologiyot. (Hebrew version; English version title is Excavations and Surveys in Israel). Published by the Israel Antiquities Authority; contains preliminary excavation reports of sites in Israel; illusttated with color plates and black and white photos. JACT Review. Biannual publication of the Joint Associa tion of Classical Teachers; contains short articles and book reviews covering all aspects of the classical world. Technical Journals. Technical journals (all refereed) have a variety of agendas. Some are designed to provide preliminary excavation reports, while others produce final reports or analytical studies of artifactual remains. Still oth ers are concerned with scientific methods or anthropological studies. In every case, however, these publications are writ ten for specialists. T h e assumption is made that those using them will understand the technical language the authors em ploy. Near Eastern archaeology Bulletin
of the American
Schools
of Oriental
Research
(BA-
SOR). Quarterly; contains reports from ASOR-sponsored excavations, interpretative research on archaeo logical data, and a thorough examination of artifactual and philological remains from the ancient Near East; illustrated. Israel
Exploration
Journal
(IEJ).
Quarterly published by
the Israel Exploration Society; contains preliminary ex cavation reports, analysis of newly discovered artifacts, publication of inscriptional materials; illusttated. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Annual; contains excavation reports as well as philological and historical studies on all periods in Egyptian history. Levant. Annual jointly published by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History; contains studies on the history and archaeology of Near East and eastern Mediterranean world. Palestine Exploration Quarterly (PEQ). Semiannual pub lished by the Palestine Exploration Fund, London; con tains preliminary excavation reports, artifactual analy sis, illustrated. Tel Aviv. Semiannual journal published by Tel Aviv Uni-
264
PERIODICAL LITERATURE
versity; contains site reports and interpretative articles on aspects of history and archaeological discoveries in Israel and on the West Bank of the Jordan River; illus trated. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins (ZDPV). Bian nual journal; contains articles in English, French, and German on the history, culture, and archaeology of the ancient Near East. Quarterly publication, in English, Ger man, French, and Russian, of the Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, contains articles on Hittite, Mediter ranean, and eastern European archaeology. Acta Sumerologica. Annual or biennial in English, German, and French published by the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan; contains articles about artifacts and inscriptions in Japanese collections. Anatolica. Annual publication of the Netherlands Histor ical Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, Turkey; con tains historical studies, excavation reports, and archae ological analysis of sites in Turkey—from the prehistoric to the Hittite to the medieval period. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. Annual; contains excavation reports and illustrated articles an alyzing newly discovered artifactual and inscriptional materials from sites in Jordan. Atiqot. Published irregularly, in a Hebrew and an English version, by the Israel Antiquities Authority; contains ex cavation reports from sites in Israel. Baghdader Mitteilungen. Annual publication in German of the Deutsches Archaologische Institut; contains analyt ical articles and excavation reports. Acta Archaeologica.
Berytus:
Archaeological
Studies.
Annual of the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences of the American University of Beirut; contains historical, philological, and archaeological studies of Syria and Lebanon from prehistoric to Is lamic times. Bulletin
of the Society
for Near
Eastern
Studies
in
Japan.
Biannual in Japanese; contains articles discussing the history of the ancient Near East and excavation and survey reports from sites in Syria, Iran, Egypt. Eretz Israel. Annual published by the Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem, in English and Hebrew (with En glish summaries); contains articles on Israeli archae ology, ancient history, and geography. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. Annual; contains philo logical and historical articles dealing with all periods of Egyptian civilization. Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society. Annual'in English; contains illustrated articles on prehistoric archaeology and methodology. Judean Desert Studies. Published irregularly in English by the Israel Exploration Society; contains monographs on archaeological discoveries in Israel.
Qadmoniot. Quarterly published in Hebrew by the Israel Exploration Society; contains articles on biblical ar chaeology, ancient history, the history and archaeology of later periods, and preliminary excavation reports. Michmanim. Annual publication in Hebrew and English of the University of Haifa; contains articles on archae ological and historical analysis. Mitteilungen
der Deutschen
Orient-Gesellschaft
zu
Berlin.
Annual; contains preliminary reports on excavations in the Near East, with an emphasis on philology and ar chaeology. Phoenix. Three issues per year in Dutch; contains articles on recent discoveries in the ancient Near East and Egypt. Qedem. Published irregularly in English by the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; contains monographs on current research and excava tion reports. Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus. Annual in English and French; contains preliminary excavation reports for the previous year on Cyprus; illustrated. Near Eastern history,
languages,
and culture
of Near Eastern Studies. Quarterly; contains a broad scope of examinations into the ancient and me dieval civilizations of the area; the latest theories and research are presented. Journal of the American Oriental Society. Quarterly; con tains articles dealing with the history, culture, and phi lology of the ancient Near East, Islam in all periods, Asian and African studies, and an extensive book review section and lengthy reviews. Orientalia. Quarterly in English, French, and German; contains philological and historical studies of ancient Near Eastern civilizations and an extensive book review section. Revue d'assyriologie et d'archeologie orientale. Biannual in French, German, and English; contains philological and historical examination of the literate cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. Journal
Zeitschrift
fur Assyriologie
und vorderasiatische
Archaologie.
Biannual in German, French, and English; contains his torical, philological, and archaeological studies of the major cultures of ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Abr-Nahrain. Annual in English, French, and German published by the University of Melbourne; contains studies dealing with the history, languages, and culture of the ancient Near East. Acta Orientalia. Three issues per year published in En glish, German, French, and Russian by the Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae; contains articles on Oriental philology.
PERIODICAL LITERATURE Aegypius:
Rivista
itaiiana
di egittologia
e di
papirologia.
Semiannual published in English, French, and German; contains scientific articles on the study of ancient Egypt, its culture, people, history, and other related areas. Akkadica. Five issues per year published in French, En glish, and German by the Foundation Assyriologique Georges Dossin; contains articles on the history and philology of tire ancient Near East, as well as excavation reports; includes the list of papers from the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Anatolian Studies. Annual journal of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara; contains articles on the his tory, philology, and archaeology of the civilizations of ancient Anatolia. Annual
Review
of the Royal
Inscriptions
of
Mesopotamia
Annual publication of the RIM Project; contains compilations of cuneiform collections in standard Assyriological format; includes photos.
Project.
Archiv
fur Orientforschung.
Annual in German, French,
and English; contains articles on the philology and his tory of the ancient Near East, with an extensive book review section. Archiv orientdlni. Quarterly publication in English, French, German, and Russian of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Oriental Institute; contains articles on the history, economy, culture, and society of the ancient Near East, Judaica, Asian studies, African studies, and archaeological analysis. Bibliotheca orientalis. Bimonthly publication in German, French, and English of die Nederlands Instituut voor Flet Nabije Oosten; contains lengthy articles and an ex tensive book review section dealing with the history and philology of the Near East from ancient through Islamic times. Bulletin for Biblical Research. Annual journal of the Insti tute for Biblical Research; contains articles primarily on biblical theology and exegesis from a conservative per spective. Some articles deal with issues touching on ar chaeological research. Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists. Irregularly published journal of philological studies of papyri doc uments. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (Uni versity of London). Three issues per year; contains ar ticles and reviews on ancient Near Eastern history and culture, Islamic studies, Asian and African studies, and anthropology. Computer Aided Research in Near Eastern Studies. Pub lished irregularly as part of the Cybernetica Mesopo tamia series. Data Sets: Cuneiform Texts. Published irregularly; elec tronic data processing of Mesopotamian materials, phil ological and artifactual. Dilmun. Biannual published in Arabic and English by the
265
Bahrain Historical and Archaeological Society; contains excavation reports and articles on sites on the Arabian Peninsula and in the Persian Gulf area. Iraq. Annual; articles on the history, archaeology, philol ogy, and culture of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. Istanbuler Mitteilungen. Annual; explores the prehistory, archaeology, history and art history of Asia Minor up until the Ottoman period. Journal of Coptic Studies. Annual; contains articles on all aspects of premodern Coptic society, including its lit erature, history, archaeology, art, religion, linguistics, and related studies. Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Semiannual ASOR publi cation; contains technical articles on the history and lan guages of ancient Mesopotamian and Anatolian literate cultures. Journal of Semitic Studies. Biannual; contains articles deal ing primarily with the philology of the ancient Near East. Journal
of the Ancient
Near
Eastern
Society
of
Columbia
Annual; contains articles on all aspects of the history and culture of the ancient Near East; illus trated. University.
Journal
of the Economic
and Social
History
of the
Orient.
Quarterly in English, French, and German; contains specialized studies furthering knowledge of the eco nomic and social history of Asia and Africa from the earliest times to tire beginning of the nineteenth century. Oriens antiquus. Quarterly in English, French, and Ger man; contains articles on the history, philology, and ar chaeology of the ancient Near East. Orientalia JLovaniensia Periodica. Annual publication of the Catholic University of Leuven; contains studies on the history, languages, and culture of tire ancient Near East and Asia. Orientalia Suecana. Annual published in Sweden; contains philologic studies of Near Eastern languages from Ca naanite to Arabic. Revista degli studi orientali. Quarterly in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish; covers all fields of Ori ental studies from the ancient Near East to modern Ja pan. Revue de Qumran. Semiannual published in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish; contains studies in linguistics and culture pertaining to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sefarad. Quarterly; studies the text of the Hebrew Bible and its ancient versions and cultures, as well as the his tory and culture of Jews in Spain and the Hebrew and Aramaic languages. Semitica. Annual; contains articles in French on the his tory and philology of the classical world and Ugaritic and Islamic studies. Studi epigrafici e linguistici sul Vicino Oriente antico. Annual
266
PERIODICAL LITERATURE
in Italian, French, and English; contains articles on phi lology and ancient Near Eastern studies. Sumer. Annual in Arabic and English; contains prelimi nary excavation reports from sites in Iraq and artifactual analysis from all periods. Syria: Revue d'art oriental et d'archeologie. Quarterly in French and English; a review of art history, philology, and archaeology, primarily from sites in Syria and Iraq. Ugarit-Forschungen. Annual in English, French, and Ger man; provides linguistic, historical, and cultural studies, with an emphasis on Ugarit and Mesopotamian civili zations. Wiener Zeitschrift filr die Kunde des Morgenlandes. Annual; studies in philology, including Egyptian and Coptic texts, Islamic studies, and an extensive book review sec tion. Zeitschrift
der
Deutschen
Morgenldndischen
Gesellscha.fi.
Semiannual in German; studies in the philology of the ancient Near East, Islamic periods, and Asia. Classical and Mediterranean
archaeology
Journal of Archaeology. Quarterly publication of the American Institute of Archaeology; contains schol arly essays and book reviews on Old World archaeology from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages; illustrated. Archaeological Reports. Annual publication of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and the British School at Athens; contains accounts of recent archae ological work in Greece, with supplementary reports from other parts of the ancient Greek and Byzantine world. Greece and Rome. Semiannual; contains literary evalua tions of the major Greek and Roman authors and arti cles on ancient history, art, archaeology, the classical tradition, and teaching classics at the tertiary level. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology. Biannual; contains articles on local and regional production, development, interaction, and change in the Mediterranean, including Anatolia, with the theoretical implications or method ological assumptions extrapolated from archaeological data. Journal of Roman Archaeology (JRA). Annual; contains coverage of all aspects of archaeology in every part of the Roman world, from 700 B C E to about 700 CE. Nestor. Nine issues per year in English, containing original languages; contains bibliographies of material relevant to prehistoric archaeology, Homeric studies, Indo-Eu ropean linguistics, and related fields in tire eastern Med iterranean area and southeast Europe. American
dell'Istituto imiversitario orientale di Napoli. Three issues per year; contains philological and archaeological
Annali
studies on the ancient Near East, Africa, and Mediter ranean cultures. Mitteilungen
des Deutschen
Archdologischen
Instituts
Rbm-
Annual; contains articles, primarily in German, on classical studies and archaeology. Opuscula aiheniensia. Annual published in Stockholm; contains articles on classical archaeology. Revue archeologique. Semiannual in French; contains re cent studies on the Greco-Roman period, Bronze Age, and the start of the Middle Ages. ische Abteilung.
Classical history,
languages,
and
culture
Antiquity. Biannual; contains interdisciplinary research and discussions of major issues from the entire spectrum of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. The Classical Journal. Bimonthly; contains philological re search and language studies in modern literature and book reviews. Classical Philology. Quarterly; devoted to research in the language, literature, history, and life of classical antiq uity. The Classical Review. Biannual; contains critical reviews of books dealing with all aspects of classical language, literature, and history from all countries. Classical World. Bimonthly; contains broad-ranging arti cles on classical languages and literature and pedagogic aids; includes lists of meeting programs. Hesperia. Quarterly in English of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens; some articles contain an cient Greek; presents the scholarly research of members and alumni of ASCSA on historical, archaeological, and epigraphic topics on ancient Greece. Journal of Hellenic Studies. Annual; contains articles cov ering the Greek language, literature, history, and art in the ancient and Byzantine periods. Journal of Roman Studies. Annual; contains articles dealing with all aspects of Roman history and culture and lin guistics. Classical
Society. Annual in Dutch, English, French, Ger man, and Italian; articles deal with the cultural history of the Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman world.
Ancient
Classica
et. Mediaevalia:
Revue
danoise
de philologie
et
Annual in English, French, and German; con tains studies in classical philology and history through the medieval period. Das Altertum. Quarterly in German; contains classical studies, including linguistics, history, and culture. East and West. Annual; includes studies in the language, culture, and philosophy of the classical and eastern Mediterranean world. Genava. Annual publication of the Musee d'art et d'his toire Geneve; contains articles dealing primarily with d'histoire.
PERIODIZATION archaeological remains in Europe; does include studies on ancient Near Eastern archaeology based on items in their museum. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies. Quarterly; contains research articles on all aspects of the Greek world, from the prehistoric through the Hellenic, Hellenistic, Ro man, and Byzantine periods. Mediterranean Historical Review. Biannual; provides an in ternational forum for a discussion of topics on the an cient, medieval, and modern history of the Mediterra nean basin. Pallas: revue d'etudes antiques. Annual; contains articles on the literature, linguistics, history, and archaeology of the Greek and Roman periods. Related journals
areas
and
nonregional
archaeological
Quarterly; a periodical review of archaeology with reports on the work of specialists and archaeology and a book review section. World Archaeology. Three issues per year; presents the matic issues, including interpretative examinations of cultural development, illustrated.
Antiquity.
Archaeological Review. Annual; studies all aspects of the archaeology of Africa and neighboring islands, with an emphasis on new data from the field as well as areas of wider than regional significance.
African
Journal
of the Royal
Asiatic
Society
of Great
Britain
and
Three issues per year; contains articles dealing with archaeology, art, anthropology, and the history of Asia, North Africa, and Ethiopia. Raydan. Published irregularly in Belgium; contains stud ies dealing with ancient Yemeni antiquities and epig raphy. Ireland.
Scientific
methodology
of Archaeological Science. Six issues per year; arti cles directed to archaeologists and scientists who have a particular interest in advances in applying scientific techniques and methodologies to all areas of archae ology. Journal of Field Archaeology. Quarterly publication of Bos ton University; reports on field excavations and surveys the world over, methodological and technical matters, scientific advances in archaeology, and larger interpre tative studies. Archaeomaterials. Semiannual publication of the Univer sity of Pennsylvania Museum; contains articles on the pre- and nonindustrial manipulation of materials, using scientific methods for humanistic ends. Archaeozoologia. Biannual; devoted to publishing papers presented at the International Congress of Archaeozoology. Journal
267
Bimonthly; contains original reports on the environmental settings of archaeological sites, ma terials analysis of artifacts, and process papers describ ing new techniques and equipment.
Geoarchaeology.
International
Journal
of Nautical
Archaeology.
Quarterly
publication of the Nautical Archaeology Society; con tains nonregional studies of marine archaeology. Radiocarbon. Annual; publishes the radiocarbon dating of archaeological, geological, and other samples and arti cles on conventional and new techniques and related subjects. Readings in Glass History. Published irregularly, contains monographs on topics in the history of glass vessels and beads and the glass industry, with a focus on the an cient, medieval, and premodern Near East up to the rise of the Venetian glass industties. SAS Bulletin. Quarterly published by the Society for Ar chaeological Sciences; contains articles on cooperative and interdisciplinary research between archaeology and the natural and physical sciences. Anthropological
studies
Anthropologist. Quarterly; covers cultural, phys ical, linguistic, and applied anthropology; includes in formation on archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Quarterly; nonre gional; primarily contains studies in ethnoarchaeological methods and fieldwork. Man. Quarterly published by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; covers all areas of anthropology—physical, social, and cultural; in cludes information on archaeology and linguistics. Nomadic Peoples. Biannual publication of the Scandina vian Institute of African Studies, ethnographic articles on the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Tempus. Published irregularly by the University of Queensland; provides a forum for communicating an thropologically oriented studies in archaeology and ma terial culture. American
[See also nizations dent
Reference Works.
and institutions
In addition,
mentioned
many
are the subject
of the of
orga
indepen
entries.} V I C T O R H . M A T T H E W S and
JAMES C . M O Y E R
PERIODIZATION. T h e division of past time into se quential segments based on technological, politico-histori cal, or religio-ethnic factors is known as periodization. The following discussion is of periodization in ancient Palestine and its application to other parts of the Near East. Limitations and History. Most periodization charts find their roots in the 1836 publication of Christian Thomsen,
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who first designated worldwide ancient eras with technolog ical terms (Stone, Bronze, Iron). Although used widely in Europe in die nineteenth century, this "three-age" system was not influential in the Near East until much later. Re searchers within some regions of the Near East, especially those with copious written texts, adopted politico-historical terms handed down by ancient authors (e.g., in Egypt, king dom and dynasty, based on Manetho). In Syria-Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most ex cavators used terms of their own devising. The resulting confusion compelled the British mandatory government of Palestine in 1922 to bring together representatives from the chief foreign schools in Jerusalem to hammer out a common set of terms. The group, which included John Garstang, Louis-Hugues Vincent, and William Foxwell Albright, adopted Thomsen's nomenclature, with subdivisions adapted to Palestine but related to Aegean periodization (Gitin, 1985, p. 101). Primarily because of Albright's force ful scholarship and his prompt publication of the Tell Beit Mirsim excavation in the 1930s, these terms as interpreted by him were accepted as the framework for Syro-Palestinian archaeology. For periods after the Iron Age, the names of various historical empires controlling the area were adopted from classical and medieval authors. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell; and the biographies
of Albright,
Garstang,
and
Vincent.]
Terminology. T h e term age is used for a broad time pe riod, usually for the three technological ages, but could also be used for other macroperiods, such as Classical Age, or Islamic Age. T h e term era is used similarly, but in a less formal sense, especially for post-Iron Age designations (the classical era). Period normally refers to a subdivision of an age, such as Late Bronze II period or Roman period, whereas stage or phase can refer informally to subdivisions of periods. These terms are not used consistentiy or uni formly. T h e different types of names for periodization in SyriaPalestine include technological ones, like those Thomsen in troduced; dynastic names for political periods (Persian or Umayyad); religious or ethnic terms for periods in which a dominant group is evident (Islamic, or Arab); and chrono logical parameters for broad designations (millennium) or specific designations (century). Technological terms reflect the tools in use during certain periods but, except for the Stone Age, do not necessarily reflect the predominant technologies. While they do accu rately present the growth of civilization and can be corre lated with broad societal, historical, and technological changes, they span the antiquity of the Near East only until the sixth century B C E , giving the impression that later peri ods are of less interest. Dynastic names have the advantage of connecting the ar chaeological finds with particular political and social events known from written records. Because archaeological change
does not necessarily move in concert with or as rapidly as political change, the temptation to ascribe a dynasty's pre cise range of dates to the archaeological remains can distort the finds, however. For instance, because the Umayyad dy nasty ruled from about 640 to 750 CE does not mean that the Umayyad period produced an isolatable archaeological assemblage limited to tiiose precise years. Moreover, al though a dynastic term may be appropriate for one period of time in one place, a new dynasty may move in while the original dynasty still holds power elsewhere. For example, the Fatimid period refers to the time when the Fatimid Egyptian dynasty wrested Palestine from the 'Abbasids of Baghdad; however, farther north and east, where the Fatimids were not in control, it was still the 'Abbasid period. Aldiough religious or ethnic terms make sense when they reflect a region's significantly dominant makeup, tiieir deemphasis of minorities can lead to a distorted historical picture: for example, it was once erroneously believed tiiat the arrival of the Islamic or Arab period erased Christianity. Chronological designations are useful approximations, but they do not characterize a period in any way. N o terminology is entirely appropriate or entirely faulty. Moreover, periodization is a dynamic process; it slowly changes its designations as a greater accumulation of data forces a new consensus. Chronology. None of the above systems relate archaeo logical assemblages to chronological time witii precision. Periodization is relative, emphasizing more the approximate fix of an assemblage in time than precise chronological lim its. However, as more data are unearthed, archaeologists tend to become more confident in closer dating schemes. Using principles he had already outlined in Egypt, Wil liam Flinders Pettie was the first to realize that pottery could be a key to date archaeological deposits when he dug Tell el-Hesi in 1890. He established a sequential system whereby certain ceramic forms could be ascribed to specific strata. From there, it was an easy step to the principle of compar ative stratigraphy, in which deposits from a sttatum at one site can be equated with those from another, based on iden tical or similar finds. T h e system enabled a comparison of the pottery of Palestine with that of other regions whose chronologies, like Egypt's, were tighter, based on their re lationship to written texts. Palestinian pottery found in Egypt (or Egyptian pottery found in Palestine) and Egyptian inscriptions in Palestine thus became the foundation for the absolute dates associated with the periodization of Palestine. [See Hesi, Tell el-; and the biography of Petrie.] Ancient Egyp tians sometimes dated their writings by astronomical obser vations, which modern astronomers can reconstruct. T h e Sothic cycle is the most significant of these (Rast, 1992, p. 42). For the Iron Age, die Neo-Assyrian eponym lists from Mesopotamia perform a similar function and allow the tiein of some biblical events (Thiele, 1951, pp. 42-54). For
PERIODIZATION periods before the onset of writing, carbon-14 dates are re lied on, corrected by dendroarchaeological computations (tree-ring dating). For Paleolithic dates, other geological time clocks provide only very approximate dates. The fol lowing discussion is a summary of periodizafion for Pales tine. S t o n e Age. T h e origins of human material culture until the arrival of bronze is known as the Stone Age. Lower Paleolithic. T h e most common artifact of Pale olithic, or Achulean, culture (c. 1,000,000-120,000 B P ) is the stone handaxe used by hominids (prehumans); deposits are found in caves or on old lake shores where hunters skinned game. T h e most important site in Palestine is an old lake bed, now tipped almost vertically by tectonic action, at 'Ubeidiya, south of the Sea of Galilee. Middle Paleolithic. Found stratigraphically above the Lower Paleolithic at Kebara and other sites, the Middle Pa leolithic, or Mousterian, culture (c. 120,000-45,000 B P ) is characterized by mostly triangular medium-sized flint tools. Settlements occur in many different ecosystems at sites such as the Mt. Carmel caves, Wadi Zerqa, and the Azraq oasis. Upper Paleolithic. Mostly contemporary with the Aurignacian culture in Europe, the stone tools typical of Upper Paleolithic (c. 45,000-20,000 B P ) include long blades and burins. Sites with these remains are not numerous, but they include Nahal Ein-Gev on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee and the Qafzeh cave in Lower Galilee. Epipaleolithic. Formerly called the Mesolithic period, the Epipaleolithic (c. 18,000-8500 BCE) is equated with the Natufian and Kebaran cultures. Its present name character izes it accurately as the end of the Paleolithic period. Ex tremely small flint tools called microliths are ubiquitous at sites like Eynan in tire Hulah Valley and the Kebara cave on Mt. Carmel. Pre-Pottery Neolithic. During the first part of the PrePottery Neolithic (PPNA; c. 8500-7200 B C E ) , a gradual change in subsistence took place in agricultural communi ties, with circular huts for dwellings (Jericho was the largest). In its second stage, the P P N B (c. 7200-6000 B C E ) , the " N e olithic revolution" completed the shift to full-fledged cereal farming and sheep/goat herding. Houses were rectangular in plan and often had thick plaster floors containing finds related to textile production. Mortuary rituals used plastered skulls (portraits?), while at 'Ain Ghazal, the largest settle ment of the period, other ceremonial activities are repre sented by anthropomorphic statues about 90 cm tall. Other important sites were Munhata, Jericho, and Beidha. Pottery Neolithic. T h e earliest of the Pottery Neolithic stages (c. 6000-4500 B C E ) , called Yarmukian after the lo cation of its discovery (Sha'ar ha-Golan, near the Yarmuk River), includes the first evidence of pottery, similar to that of the Hassuna culture in Mesopotamia. T h e second stage, c
269
called Munhata after a key site in the Jordan Valley, saw the introduction of dark-faced burnished ware, a ceramic style connecting Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia. The third stage, named after the Wadi Rabbah near the Yarkon River, saw the introduction of weapons of war beyond flint points: slingstones and mace-heads. These weapons also occurred at Halafian sites in Mesopotamia. Chalcolithic. A diversity of subcultures characterize the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500-3300 BCE) . The Ghassulian cul ture, named after the site in the southern Jordan Valley (Teleilat el-Ghassul), is characterized by colorful paintings on plastered walls, ivory objects, terra-cotta figurines, and ba salt bowls. T h e temple complex at 'Ein-Gedi, and the nearby cache of ceremonial copper objects from a cave in Nahal Mishmar, may be Ghassulian. T h e Beersheba cul ture, comprising fifty-seven sites in the region of the north ern Negev desert (Shiqmim is of special importance), dis plays subterranean dwellings and storerooms and a unique pottery vessel called a churn. In tire Golan, villagers built their houses in rows of adjacent broadrooms, in which styl ized busts of human heads called pillar figures are found frequently. B r o n z e Age. T h e various phases in the period that marks the beginning of the urbanization process in Palestine, the Bronze Age, are designated Canaanite by some Israeli ar chaeologists. The practice is now diminishing and a more uniform nomenclature is appearing in the literature. Early Bronze I. There are four distinct ceramic assem blages related to regions in the Early Bronze I period (c. 3300-3000 B C E ) : gray-burnished ware in the north; red-bur nished ware in the north and south; line-group painted ware (groups of parallel lines) in the central hills and the south; and impressed-slashed ware (relief decoration with pie-crust finger indentations) in the central hills and the south. Until recently, several scholars identified these ware groups as Chalcolithic. Settlements seem to have grown from the val leys and coastal plain into the hills. Connections can be es tablished with Gerzean Egypt and the Proto-Literate period in Mesopotamia via Jawa in the eastern desert. Important sites include Bab edh-Dhra', Arad, Jericho, and Beth-Shean. Early Bronze II-III. T h e Early Bronze II—III periods (c. 3000-2250 BCE) represent a unified flow of cultural devel opment. They are a time of reduced regionalism and inter national trade in which donkey caravans carry wine and oil from Palestine to Egypt (Stager 1992). This provides good synchronisms with Egypt, where nearly two-hundred Pal estinian pots have been found in tombs. In Egypt the period includes the Old Kingdom: the first dynasty marks the be ginning of EB II, whereas the latest connections in EB III are with Pepi II of the sixth dynasty, In Mesopotamia, it is the Early Dynastic period. T h e highly burnished EB III pot tery known as Khirbet Kerak ware also provides links to Syria and Anatolia. During this long period the largest for-
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tified cities prior to Roman times were built, including Tel Yarmut, Ai, Arad, Tell el-Hesi, and Tell el-Far'ah (North). City walls were enormous, sometimes reaching 10 m in width. Houses often were of the broadroom type, as were palaces and temples. Early Bronze IV. Although not all scholars use the term Early Bronze IV (c. 2250-2000 B C E ) , a rapidly growing con sensus favors it. Originally called Middle Bronze I by Al bright, others (especially archaeologist William G. Dever; see, e.g., his "The Early Bronze IV Period in Transjordan and Southern Palestine," BASOR 210 [1973]: 37-62) noted its closer connections to EB culture and called it Interme diate EB-MB, Intermediate Bronze, or EB IV. The period witnessed a massive change in life-style: gone were the large fortified EB II—III sites (except for moderately sized Khirbet Iskander in Transjordan). Instead, the period is character ized by pastoralists who buried their dead in large cemeteries with shaft tombs, such as at 'Ain es-Samiyeh and Bab edhDhra'. Sites with small, circular structures (dwellings?) are found in the Negev highlands (Be'er Resisim), and an un fortified hillside village has recently been discovered in the Rephaim Valley near Jerusalem. Middle Bronze IIA. T h e renaming of MB I as EB IV created a gap in the nomenclature. Some scholars, therefore, renamed the three phases of MB II: MB IIA became M B I; MB IIB became MB II; and MB IIC became MB III. But this nomenclature has not found consistent support, and most scholars retain the original terms and tolerate the lack of an MB I. MB IIA (c. 2000-1800 BCE) begins the second period of urbanization with settlements refortifying old EB II—III sites or constructing new ones, but in both cases using huge sloping ramparts (glacis) as part of their fortification system. EB pottery had been mostly handmade, but in MBIIA a slow tournette produced some of the most delicate pottery made in Palestine, especially forms with carination (an elegant, sharp bend in the body). The most important site of the period is Aphek, but Tell el-Hayyat in the Jordan Valley provides die best continuity from EB IV to M B IIA. This was the Middle Kingdom in Egypt and the Old As syrian kingdom in Mesopotamia and western Anatolia. Middle Bronze IIB-C. The cultural direction of MB IIA continued smoothly through MB IIB-C (c. 1800-1550 B C E ) , and many more sites were fortified with ramparts: Shechem, Gezer, and Hazor (the latter the largest site of any period in Palestine). Pottery forms became more varied, but still maintained the earlier commitment to fine, elegant wares. Burials were often in jars beneath the floors of houses. At this time the Canaanites invented the alphabet, probably in the north. The Old Babylonian kingdom and Mari shared power in Mesopotamia, while the foreign Hyksos ruled Egypt. Indeed, the period comes to an end when the indig enous Egyptians of the seventeenth dynasty chased out the Hyksos and destroyed a number of Palestinian sites in the process. A recent debate about the chronology of this event.
spearheaded by the Egyptologist Manfred Bietak, has made some scholars question the date of the end of M B IIB-C. Late Bronze. At several Palestinian sites there is strong evidence for a three-fold separation of the Late Bronze pe riod into LB I (c. 1550-1400), LB IIA (c. 1400-1300), and LB IIB (c. 1300-1200). Because the culture is a continuous and gradual breakdown of that inherited from the Middle Bronze Age, they will be considered together here. T h e Late Bronze was an international age, when the Egyptian Empire reached its apogee in Asia (the Amarna period is LB IIA). Large amounts of imported pottery and other objects occur at Palestinian sites, especially Mycenaean pottery from the Aegean and base-ring and white-slipped wares from Cy prus. The most important sites include Megiddo, Hazor, Aphek, Lachish, and Beth-Shean. At the latter, several Egyptian inscriptions connect Palestinian sttatigraphy with various New Kingdom pharaohs, while many inscriptions in Egypt speak of pharaonic military campaigns into Palestine. At Aphek a large building may have been an Egyptian gov ernor's residence. In Mesopotamia the Hurrian Empire of Mitanni was influential, while farther west the Hittites were at the height of their power. The period came to an end as part of the larger disruptions in the eastern Mediterranean, most often associated with the Sea Peoples. Iron Age. Many archaeologists date Iron Age materials by century rather than by period terminology. Among Israeli archaeologists, a few refer to it as the Israelite period. Iron I. Most Israeli archaeologists date the end of Iron I (c. 1200-925 BCE) to the rise of the United Monarchy in ancient Israel (c. 1000 B C E ) ; other scholars favor the more traditional view that it ended with the invasion of Pharaoh Sheshong (Shishak, dated to about 925 B C E by the Bible and Egyptian texts), which left clear destruction layers at many sites. On the northern coastal plain and in the broad valley regions, the LB Canaanite culture continued (Megiddo) into Early Iron I, while, on the southern coastal plain, a dis tinctive material culture related to the Aegean and southern Asia Minor undoubtedly represents that of the Philistines (and other Sea Peoples). Sites in the central hills and Trans jordan probably represent the coalescence of tribal and some local urban elements toward the national groups known from the Hebrew Bible: Israelites, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and others. T h e small settlements in the hilly regions, probably of extended families, were farming villages with a limited repertoire of artifacts (Raddanah, Giloh, Shiloh, 'Umeiri ['Umayri]); during the period, however, larger towns and cities gradually developed until, during Israel's United Monarchy, large, fortified cities were built (Jerusa lem, Gezer, Megiddo, Hazor). T h e Iron I period is often subdivided into Iron IA (c. 1200-1125), I IB (c. 1 1 2 5 1000), and Iron IC (c. 1000-925). In Mesopotamia, Assyria was strong only for brief periods and, after the strong lead ership of Rameses III at the beginning of the twentieth dy nasty, Egyptian influence in Asia was largely absent through r o n
PERIODIZATION the twenty-first dynasty until Sheshonq (twenty-second dy nasty). Iron II. Schemes to subdivide the Iron II period (c. 9 2 5 586 BCE) attach a variety of dates to periods labeled Iron IIA, B, C, and sometimes D. It is easiest to subdivide the period into two: Iron IIA from Sheshonq's destruction to the As syrian invasions at the end of the eighth century B C E , and Iron LIB from those destructions to the Babylonian invasions in the early sixth century B C E . This period witnessed the high points of the region's various national groups (small king doms or chiefdoms) and, toward the end of the period, the composition of much of the Hebrew Bible. The various royal courts bred regionalism and an elite social class, both of which are reflected in the archaeological remains. Assem blages of pottery and writing styles are characteristic of de finable regions, and finds are richer at royal cities, such as Samaria, Megiddo, Hazor, Jerusalem, Lachish, and Amman than at more provincial sites. In Mesopotamia the dominant power was Assyria, which, in the seventh century B C E , con quered Egypt briefly. The Egyptian twenty-second-twentysixth dynasties remained relatively weak until the late sev enth century BCE when Neco II (twenty-sixth dynasty) briefly controlled Palestine. In Syria various city-states, such as Damascus and Aleppo, managed to carve out significant kingdoms. Neo-Babylonian period. Because the culture is still fun damentally Iron II, many attach the Neo-Babylonian period (c. 586-539 BCE) to it as Iron III. However, most begin to use terms that reflect the large empires at this time. Until recently, very few sites were ascribed to these years. There is a new awareness, however, that a significant number of sites existed, especially in Transjordan ('Umeiri), in the re gion north of Jerusalem, and in Phoenician areas along the coast (Dor). Persian period. The Persian period (539-332 BCE) was also international in scope, with imports into the Levant from Attic Greece reflecting the maritime trade of the Phoe nicians and their colonies in the western Mediterranean as well as the presence of Greek travelers and mercenaries. The Persians built small administrative centers and a vast road system to connect them. Important sites in Palestine were Megiddo, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Akko, Dor, Samaria, and Am man. T h e imperial bureaucratic system, and the common language of Aramaic it used, broke down barriers and al lowed the long-range exchange of ideas and material culture. Coins began to be used with frequency. Classical Age. The term Classical Age is not frequent, but it may be used to provide continuity with the preceding "Ages." It includes the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Hellenistic period (332-63 BCE). With Alexander the Great's conquest of the Near East in the late fourth century B C E , Greek influence sustained a movement toward Western ideals that lasted into the Islamic Age. T h e two Greek king
271
doms that controlled Palestine, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria, established and supported certain key sites, to which they imported Hellenism: Samaria, Anafa, Jerusalem, and Dor. Indigenously supported settlements tended to be smaller and poorer. Hundreds of amphoras (probably containing wine) were sent from the Aegean to the Levant, many bearing historically important stamped in scriptions in Greek on their handles. T h e Jewish revolt in the mid-second century B C E against Seleucid inroads of Hel lenism into Judaism founded the Hasmonean (Maccabean) dynasty. Early Roman period (63 BCE -135 CE). Pompey's ar rival in Palestine signaled a new era, but the greatest devel opments took place under the rule of Herod the Great and his followers. Indeed, archaeologists also use Herodian to characterize the period until 70 CE. At no time in the past did so much building activity take place in such a short time as under Herod. He built large, opulent Roman-style palaces at Jerusalem, Jericho, Masada, Herodium, and Machaerus. T h e largest temple complex and harbor in the Roman Em pire at the time were at Jerusalem and Caesarea, respec tively, with a Roman-style city at the latter site. Other Ro man cities, such as the ten cities of the Decapolis (all but one of them in Transjordan), Samaria, and Banias (Caesa rea Philippi) were built with huge inflows of capital. Again, indigenous groups lived in more modest surroundings. This was the age of Cleopatta, Julius Caesar, Augustus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Jewish sectarianism, out of which rabbinic Judaism and the Talmud, as well as Jesus and the New Tes tament, grew. Overland trade flourished in tire hands of the Nabateans from their capital at Petra and other cities in the Negev. T h e period came to an end in 135 C E , with the defeat of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome under Bar Kokhba, although some scholars place it earlier, with the end of the First Revolt, in 70 CE. Late Roman period (135-c. 325 CE). The Late Roman period is sometimes subdivided into Middle Roman ( 1 3 5 c. 250) and Late Roman (c. 250-325). Emperor Hadrian's restructuring of Palestine gave it Roman temples, palaces, and villas at many sites, including Jerusalem. T h e Romans took over the Nabatean trade routes and, toward the end of the period, built a line of fortress settlements, known as the limes, fronting the eastern desert. Also toward the end of the period, synagogues and churches began to multiply. Constantine's moving of his capital from Rome to Byzantium, marks the historical end of tire period, although some schol ars place it at the time of the great earthquake of 363. Byzantine period (c. 325-640 CE). The period during which churches proliferated in Palestine at almost every non-Jewish settlement larger than a village is known as the Byzantine, or Christian, period. Especially impressive are the roughly fifteen churches in Madaba (a moderately sized town) and another twelve or so churches on Mt. Nebo (a pilgrimage center) in Transjordan. Jewish towns contained
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PERIODIZATION
synagogues, and both churches and synagogues were built on the basilica plan and paved with beautifully designed mo saic floors, many with historically important Greek and He brew inscriptions. [See also Churches; Synagogues; Mosa ics.] Not until the modern period did the number of settlements and the size of the population of Palestine ap proach that of the Byzantine period. Many of the Roman cities grew large (Kurnub, Umm el-Jimal, Jerash), and money flowed into the region from pilgrims, who traveled everywhere in the Holy Land. Whereas in the Roman period there had tended to be a wide disparity between the very wealthy and the poor, the booming Byzantine economy al lowed a more egalitarian spread of wealth, so that many houses were well built. [See Byzantine Empire.] Islamic Age. With the Islamic conquest of the Near East in the mid-seventh century, a new idealism began to alter the features of the region. A rising consensus among Islamic archaeologists is to abandon the old dynastic names for per iodization and instead group them into broad categories. Such categories will facilitate tying Islamic ceramics to chro nology. The present divisions belong to this writer. Early Islamic period (c. 640-1100 CE). The Early Is lamic period comprises three foreign dynasties who ruled Palestine: the Umayyads from Damascus (Early Islamic I, c. 640-750 CE); the 'Abbasids from Baghdad (Early Islamic II, c. 750-969 CE); and the Fatimids from Egypt (Early Is lamic III, 969-c. 1100). Recent research emphasizes how dif ficult it is to locate breaks in the stratigraphic record to cor respond with these historical and dynastic periods. For instance, much of what used to be limited to Umayyad times is now seen to extend well into the 'Abbasid period. Thus, Khirbat al-Mafjar in the Jordan Valley, the best known of the Early Islamic palaces, is now known as 'Abbasid as well as Umayyad. The coming of Islam did not mean the rejection of Chris tianity. Many churches continued to function unabated into Umayyad times, and some were even built then, lasting into the 'Abbasid period. (The mosaic in St. Stephen's Church at U m m er-Rasas, southeast of Madaba, is dated by an in scription to early 'Abbasid times.) Palestine prospered while the caliphs were in Damascus. They established a provincial capital at Ramla, west of Jerusalem, whose Early Islamic ru ins are still preserved. Jerusalem, as a holy city, also saw grandiose building activity, such as the Dome of the Rock, the al-'Aqsa mosque, and a major palace. Some of the most pristine structures are the desert castles in the eastern desert. When the caliphate moved to Baghdad, the intensity of set tlement abated in Palestine, though cities like 'Aqaba (where a vessel imported from China was found) show that it con tinued to be productive. [See Umayyad Caliphate; 'Abbasid Caliphate; Fatimid Dynasty.] Middle Islamic (c. 1100-1516 CE). Comprising foreign rule by the Crusaders (Middle Islamic I, c. 1100-1291 C E ) , who took over while the 'Abbasids still ruled in Baghdad;
tire Ayyubids (1174-1263); and the Mamluks (Middle Is lamic II, 1250-1516), the Middle Islamic period illustrates the problem of overlapping dynastic periods. T h e Crusaders brought European architecture in the form of castles (Nim rud, Kerak, Shobak, Belvoir, 'Atlit), churches (the Holy Sepulcher and St. Anne's in Jerusalem, the church at Yoqne'am); institutional structures (monasteries, hospices); and cities/forts (Caesarea, Akko). They also inspired M u s lims to follow suit: 'Ajlun Castle was built by the Ayyubid Salah ad-Din. A renaissance of settlements during the Mamluk dynasty made the population the highest in the re gion since Byzantine times. Many villages and towns dotted the countryside (Heshbon, 'Aqaba, Pella) to complement the major cities (Jerusalem, with its suqs, and Ramla, with the White Mosque). Heightened water control permitted the introduction of sugarcane and its processing sites in tire Jor dan Valley. Although the period's pottery is mostly hand made, glazed wares were introduced from Egypt, which in turn had been inspired by Chinese ceramics. [See Crusader Period; Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties.] Late Islamic period (1516-1918 CE). With tire arrival of the Ottoman Turks (after whom the period is also called), consistent administrative neglect gradually produced a cha otic cycle of rebellions by local strongmen (pashas) and crackdowns by Turkish troops. As a result, settlements di minished until Akko, Jaffa, and Jerusalem were virtually all that was left. A concomitant rise in nomadic pastoral life styles saw people tenting during the summer and living in caves during the winter. Siileman the Magnificent recon structed tire walls around Jerusalem in the sixteenth century, and much of the Old City of Akko, famous for Napoleon's siege, dates to this period. The most important artifact as sociated with the period is the clay pipe, which swept the Mediterranean after tobacco was brought from the New World. Toward the end of the period, in the nineteenth cen tury, the European powers became interested in the region and established religious missions and encouraged trade, ar chaeology, and pilgrimage, bringing an upswing in wealth and settlement. M o d e r n P e r i o d (Since 1 9 1 8 ) . T h e period since World War I has been witness to the most rapid rise in settlement intensity in the region's history. Modern construction with bulldozers has destroyed architectural remains from preced ing periods, and governments have encouraged sedentarization, so that pastoral and nomadic life-styles have dimin ished. Rapid technological change has also made traditional artifact types obsolete: the use of pottery is virtually nil, re placed with plastic, glass, and metal, probably the datable artifacts of future excavations, and in a period of interna tional trade objects from all over the world are entering the archaeological record. Copious written records make ar chaeology more of a historical science than previously. Al though it is too early to subdivide the modern period, it may be that, for Palestine, a new subperiod should begin with
PERSEPOLIS 1967 when the six-day war caused a massive explosion in the population and settlement of Transjordan and began a process of new setdement in the hill country of Cis-Jordan. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bright, John. A History of Israel. 3d ed. Philadelphia, 1981. Fleming, Stuart. Dating in Archaeology: A Guide to Scientific Techniques. L o n d o n , 1976. Gitin, Seymour. "Stratigraphy a n d Its Application to Chronology and T e r m i n o l o g y . " In Biblical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the In ternational Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984, edited by Janet Amitai, p p . 99-107. Jerusalem, 1985. Kitchen, K . A. " T h e Basis of Egyptian Chronology in Relation to the Bronze A g e . " In High, Middle, or Low? International Colloquium on Absolute Chronology Held al the University of Gothenburg, 20-22 Au gust 198J, edited by Paul Astrom, p p . 37-55. Gotiienburg, 1987. Porada, Edith. " T h e Chronology of M e s o p o t a m i a , ca. 7000-1600 B . C . " In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology,, edited by R o b e r t W . Ehrich, vol. 1, p p . 7 7 - 1 2 1 , vol. 2, 90-124. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Rast, Walter E. Through the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology. Philadel phia, 1992. Stager, Lawrence E. " T h e Periodization of Palestine from t h e Neolithic through Early Bronze T i m e s . " In Chronologies in Old World Archae ology, vol. 1, edited by Robert W . Ehrich, p p . 22-41. 3d ed, Chicago, 1992. Thiele, Edwin R. The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings. Chicago, 1951LARRY G , HERR
PERISTYLE H O U S E . T h e term
peristyle, from the Greek words peri and stylos, refers to the arrangement of columns encircling an architectural feature. In a peristyle temple, for example, the columns surround the outside of tire building; in a peristyle house, tire columns encircle a central court. T h e columns in a peristyle house support a roofed porch around the center of the court, which is open to the sky. T h e rooms of the house surround the four sides of the central court and open onto the porch. Early examples of peristyle houses dating to the second century B C E are found on the island of Delos. T h e outside walls of the Delian houses are irregular in shape (i.e., not square or rectangular in layout), but the large central court yard usually has a perfectly square peristyle. T h e area within the columns is a sunken impluvium (a shallow depression or sunken area, provided to receive rainwater from the roof), often with a mosaic pavement covering a water cistern. In a variant of the peristyle house known as the Rhodian type, the columns on the south side of the court are taller than the others, enabling die porch to catch the sunlight from that direction.
Peristyle houses enjoyed great popularity throughout the Hellenistic world and beyond. A Hellenistic example from northern Palestine is located at Tel Anafa. [See Anafa, Tel.] T h e northern half of the mound at the site is dominated by a large stucco building that had rooms on four sides of a peristyle courtyard, including a bath complex on the east.
273
Evidence for the adoption of this type by Palestine's Jewish population comes from the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem, where fragmentary remains of a peristyle house dating to the first century C E were uncovered in Nahman Avigad's excavations. T w o of the rooms opening off the peristyle court were paved with opus sectile (colored stone tiles). Per istyle houses found elsewhere in the Near East display ad aptations of the type to local building materials and condi tions. At Dura-Europos and Nippur, for example, the walls of the houses and sometimes even the columns were con structed of mud brick instead of stone. [See Dura-Europos; Nippur.] A large peristyle building was discovered in the excava tions at Rarnat Rahel outside Jerusalem. It appears to have been constructed during the third century C E , when the Tenth Roman Legion occupied the site. During the last phase of the building's use, the floors were deepened, benches were added along some of the walls, and a thin wall was erected in the center of the western colonnade, to the south of which a kitchen was installed. Such subdivisions of peristyle buildings were common throughout the Roman Empire, from the fifth to seventh century CE. While the con struction of new peristyle houses declined dramatically then, the few that were constructed were larger than ever. Simon P. Ellis suggests that these developments reflect the in creased concentration of wealth in the Late Roman Empire and a more autocratic form of patronage. The consttuction of peristyle houses appears to have come to an end by the middle of the sixth century C E . [See also Building Materials and Techniques, article on Materials and Techniques of the Persian through Roman Periods.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dinsmoor, William Bell. The Architecture of Ancient Greece. 3d ed. N e w York, 1950. Contains a survey of the development of the peristyle house in the classical a n d Flellenistic worlds. Ellis, Simon P. " T h e E n d of d i e R o m a n H o u s e . " American Journal of Archaeology 92 (1988): 565-576. Discussion of the latest examples of peristyle houses in die R o m a n East and the possible reasons for the disappearance of the type. Kraeling, Carl I-I. The Excavations at Dura-Europos; Final Report VIII, Part I: The Synagogue. N e w H aven, 1956. Discussion of the houses at D u r a - E u r o p o s . JODI M A G N E S S
PERSEPOLIS, site located in the southwest Iranian province of Fars, on the eastern edge of the broad plain called Marv Dasht (29°Sf' N , 52°59' E). The Achaemenid Persian ruler Darius I (522-486 BCE) elected to build a new dynastic seat here to replace the prior capital, Pasargadae, some 40 km (25 mi.) to the north. The site includes a lofty stone terrace close to 450 m long and 300 m wide (see figure 1); the substantial remains of a series of relief-decorated pa-
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PERSEPOLIS
PERSEPOLIS. Figure I .
The terrace viewed from the southeast.
S t a r t i n g clockwise, f r o m t h e left, t h i s
view i n c l u d e s t h e P a l a c e of X e r x e s , the relatively c o m p a c t P a l a c e of D a r i u s , t h e a p a d a n a (with t h e b u i l d i n g ' s relief d e c o r a t e d eastern f a c a d e h i d d e n b e h e a t h a t e m p o r a r y p r o t e c t i v e c o v e r i n g ) , t h e G a t e of All L a n d s , t h e Hall of O n e H u n d r e d C o l u m n s , a n d t h e n o w severely d e n u d e d fabric of t h e m u l t i r o o m e d T r e a s u r y . (Courtesy D . Stronach)
lalial buildings; a fortified hill directly to the east; and a series of lesser representational buildings on the adjacent plain. The settlement in which the common people lived has not been identified. The sheer cliff face at Naqsh-i Rustam, 6 lcm (3.5 mi.) to the north, is the dramatic setting for the rockcut tombs of Darius and three others of his line. [See Pasar gadae; Naqsh-i Rustam.] Four trilingual cuneiform inscriptions (in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian) on the gate of Persepolis combine with other textual evidence (Hallock, 1969) to affirm that Darius's extensive palace fortress was given the same name, Parsa, as the surrounding homeland of the Persians. [See Cuneiform; Persians.] Centuries later, when the original name and associations of the terrace had long been forgot ten, certain of the carved figures in the doorway reliefs of Darius's palace were taken to represent the mythical Jamshid, the great hunter and paramount ruler of Iran's heroic tradition. Thus, while Biruni, an eleventh-century scientist and geographer at the court of the Ghaznavids, was not
without some knowledge of Alexander the Great's fateful actions at the site (see below), most medieval and later Per sian visitors appear to have known the terrace and its asso ciated remains as Takht-i Jamshid, or the "throne of Jamshid." At the same time, the site's currently preferred designation, Persepolis, is directly drawn from the name by which it was known to the ancient Greeks (an apparent con traction of Persai polis or "the city in Persis"). T h e first mention of the ruins appears in the journal of Odoric of Porderone, who passed through Fars in 1318. He refers to the site as Comerun, a corruption of a second pop ular designation: chehelsotun or "forty columns," a term sig nifying "many columns." In the course of the seventeenth century, however, interest intensified: the first detailed drawings of the well-preserved site and its sculptures began to be published in Europe. Some visitors, such as D o n Gar cia de Silva y Figueroa, proclaimed their conviction that the ruins had to be those of Persepolis. There matters rested until the early nineteenth century, when G. F. Grotefend
PERSEPOLIS of Heidelberg University, worldng from copies of Old Persian cuneiform texts made earlier at the site, was able to distinguish the names of Darius and several of his successors. This triumph of decipherment cut through all previous speculation and pointed to the undeniable re discovery of the Persian capital, the Persepolis of classical accounts, that Alexander had sacked and burned in 330 BCE.
275
incorporate many disparate elements under one roof (see figure 2). [See Palace.] In a process that was presumably intended to underscore the exalted rank of the Persian king, all visitors to Achae menid Persepolis were obliged to ascend the 14-meter-high double-return stairway that led to the single formal enttance to the terrace: the freestanding Gate of All Lands. This for midable square structure was marked by a single soaring hall
Formal excavations were slow to begin. It was only in 1924 that the Iranian government invited Ernst Herzfeld, the fore most Iranologist of the day, to prepare a detailed plan of Persepolis, together with an estimate of what it would cost to clear the site. Then, in die new circumstances that at tended the abrogation (c. 1930) of France's hitherto exclu sive concession to excavate in Iran, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago was invited to sponsor the work and Flerzfeld was chosen to head die expedition. Following four campaigns, from 1931 to 1934 (during which the famed reliefs on the east side of die apadana were uncovered), the direction of the work passed to Erich F. Schmidt, who con tinued to excavate from 1935 to 1939. Itwas Schmidt, more over, who published the results of the Oriental Institute's all-important excavations in a comprehensive three-volume final report. Subsequent excavations, initially conducted by Andre Godard, M. T . Mostafavi, and Ali Sami on behalf of tire Iranian Archaeological Service, did much to reveal die plan of the few remaining unexamined areas of the site. The most productive advances in the last few decades may be said to have come, however, from other directions: in a new interest in the organization and chronology of the work at Persepolis (where the contributions of Carl Nylander, Michael Roaf, Margaret Root, and Ann-Britt Tilia each call for special note) and in a new level of concern for the conservation and restoration of the monuments. [See Conservation Archae ology; Restoration and Conservation.] While work on the massive retaining wall of the partiy rubble-filled terrace and on the magnificent stairway in the northwest corner of the site is likely to have begun at least as early as 515 B C E , a string of building inscriptions of Darius himself, Iris son Xerxes (486-465 B C E ) , and his grandson Artaxerxes (465-425 B C E ) helps to document a subsequent, prolonged sequence of construction on die surface of the terrace from about 500 B C E down to about 440 B C E . Such inscriptions not only reflect the measured pace that was de manded by die uncompromising standards of Achaemenid construction, but they also do much to illustrate the sense of dynastic continuity that apparentiy inspired the comple tion of much of an original masterplan. It is also striking that, while there are necessarily many contrasts between the spacious plan of Pasargadae and the more condensed plan of Persepolis, both sites adhere to a distinctive Iranian pref erence for multiple freestanding units, rather than to the characteristic palace plan of Mesopotamia, which tended to
PERSEPOLIS. tion,
F i g u r e 2 . Plan of the terrace. A = E a s t e r n Fortifica
garrison; B = T r e a s u r y ; C / N o r t h =
Service Q u a r t e r s of
H a r e m ; C / S o u t h = M a i n W i n g of H a r e m ; D = P a l a c e D ; E = C o u n c i l Hall; F = X e r x e s P a l a c e ; G = P a l a c e G ; H = P a l a c e H ; I = P a l a c e of D a r i u s I; J = A p a d a n a ; K = G a t e of X e r x e s ; L = T e r r a c e S t a i r w a y ; M / N o r t h = U n f i n i s h e d G a t e ; M / S o u t h = Hall of O n e H u n d r e d C o l u m n s ; N = S t a i r w a y t o D r a i n a g e T u n n e l ; O = N o r t h e r n Fortification; R = S o u t h e r n Fortification; S = F o u n d a t i o n I n s c r i p t i o n of D a r i u s I . T h e d o u b l e - r e t u r n stairway at the n o r t h w e s t c o r n e r of t h e p l a t f o r m p r o v i d e d t h e only f o r m a l access to b o t h t h e a d j a c e n t , s u p r e m e l y s p a c i o u s p u b l i c b u i l d i n g s a n d t h e m o r e p r i v a t e s t r u c t u r e s l o c a t e d w i t h i n t h e s o u t h e r n half of t h e t e r r a c e . (After Schmidt, 1 9 5 3 )
276
PERSEPOLIS
with four stone columns and three doorways. In keeping with the Assyrian-inspired colossi that once formed part of the fabric of gate R at Pasargadae, two massive stone bulls guarded the outer doorway and two winged human-headed bulls guarded the opposite, inner doorway. Trilingual in scriptions indicate that Xerxes erected, or at least com pleted, this aptly named structure. T h e hub of all else on the terrace was the imposing au dience hall, or apadana, a building that was founded by Da rius and completed by Xerxes and which stood on a separate podium 2.60 m high. With a plan that can be seen to have followed that of the slightly earlier apadana of Darius at Susa, each side of this square edifice was n o m long. [See Susa.] Six rows of six columns (each with a square base, a fluted shaft, and a composite capital that was crowned by addorsed bull protomes) supported the cedar beams of the main hall, a vast room that stood more titan 19 m high and measured 60.50 m on each side. The hall's 5-meter-thick mud-brick walls were flanked by four corner towers and by deep recesses between the towers. T o the north, east, and west these recesses took the form of tall porticoes, each marked by two rows of six stone columns set on circular, bell-shaped bases. While the west portico provided a focal point from which the monarch could review parades on the plain below, the remaining two porticoes were each approached by monu mental stairways composed of four symmetrically arranged flights of steps. Effectively carved at eye level, where all who sought an audience could not fail to observe them, the fa cades of these matching stairways still boast a series of reliefs that rightly remain among the most celebrated expressions of Achaemenid art (see figure 3). When first conceived, each mirror image relief showed a procession of twenty-three tribute-bearing delegations of the empire; a central panel in which the king and the crown prince are giving audience to an official; and a third, com plementary tableau that depicts (behind the royal figures) the massed files of royal guards, followed by members of the court entourage. In addition, the left and right edges of tire central panel and the extreme limits of the overall compo sition are each flanked by the sole motif that carried any direct reference to active force: namely, the often-repeated scene of a bull being attacked by a lion (in what appears to be a representation of great power being overcome by yet greater power). Debate will of course persist, but while these and other reliefs from Persepolis were once thought to doc ument the details of an annual new year's festival, it now seems more probable that the above-mentioned scenes were expressly designed to illustrate Darius's personal vision of empire: one of far-reaching, harmonious government at once secure in terms of the power and authority of the mon arch and the assured condition of the royal succession. Like the apadana, Darius's palace stood on its own sep arate podium near the western edge of the terrace. An ar-
PERSEPOLIS.
F i g u r e 3 . Detail from the east facade
of the
apadana.
T w o m e m b e r s of t h e C a p p a d o c i a n d e l e g a t i o n d i s p l a y gifts of M e dian-style clothing as t h e y m o v e t o w a r d s t h e royal d i a s . T h e c a p e of e a c h figure is f a s t e n e d b y a n a r c h e d a n d r i b b e d fibula. (Courtesy D. Stronach)
chetype for later royal residences, the building was distin guished by a single entrance portico flanked by guardrooms, a hypostyle central hall, and a series of symmetrically planned, adjoining suites. T h e extant stone elements of this compact structure include highly polished door, window, and niche frames (each capped by fluted, egyptianized cor nices), low wall socles, and a series of elegant doorway re liefs. The latter are especially remarkable for those examples in which Darius chose to introduce a novel type of apotropaic relief: the Persian "royal hero" shown in the act of van quishing one or another real or fabulous beast in defense (in all likelihood) of not only the actual residence of the ruler, but also the realm as a whole. Darius also founded, but did not himself complete, a three-doored tripylon. This monumental, enigmatic struc ture appears to have served as the main link between the open courts and public buildings in the northern portion of tire site and the more southerly areas of the terrace that largely came to be given over to the private palaces of Dar ius's successors. He also laid out the first stage of the trea sury, an eventually much altered and expanded structure that served as one of the Achaemenid Empire's richest store houses (as well as one of the more prolific sources of metal objects, administrative tablets, seal impressions, and other notable finds recovered during Schmidt's excavations). Af ter 486 B C E , this latter structure came to be flanked on the west by the so-called Harem of Xerxes and, closer to the southwest corner of the terrace, by Xerxes' palace. In ar-
PERSIA: Prehistoric Persia chitectural terms, however, the most impressive of all the later buildings at Persepolis consists of the so-called throne hall (or Hall of One Hundred Columns), which was most probably begun by Xerxes and completed by Artaxerxes. Aldiough the square hall of this structure was not given the towering height of the main hall of die apadana, its ground area was substantially larger, with each side measuring 68.50 m. Subsequent construction at Persepolis was mainly con fined to the southeast corner of the terrace and to die cre ation of a series of private palaces of lesser note. A welldocumented exception concerns the addition of a double staircase on the south side of Darius's palace. There an Old Persian inscription proclaims the authorship of Artaxerxes III (359-338 BCE) and an analysis of the associated reliefs shows them to be of the same late date (Roaf, 1983). Else where, both Artaxerxes II (404-359 BCE) and Artaxerxes III chose to locate their sizable rock-cut tombs on the western slope of the fortified hill tiiat overlooks the terrace. With the completion of these last two major monuments, however, a singular record of sustained architectural and artistic accom plishment came to an effective close only a handful of years before the fateful destruction of the site. [See also
Persia, article on Ancient Persia.]
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Schmidt, Erich F. Persepolis, vol. 2, Contents of the Treasury and Other Discoveries. Oriental Institute Publications, 69. Chicago, 1957. Schmidt, Erich F . Persepolis, vol. 3, The Royal Tombs and Other Mon uments. Oriental Institute Publications, 70. Chicago, 1970. Shahbazi, A. Shapur. Persepolis Illustrated. T e h r a n , 1976. Stronach, David. " T h e A p a d a n a . A Signature of the Line of Darius I." In De TIndus aux Balkans. Recueiljean Deskayes, p p . 433-445. Paris, 1985. Tilia, A n n Britt. Studies and Restorations at Persepolis and Other Sites in Fars. Istituto Italiano per il M e d i o ed Estremo Oriente, Reports and Memoirs 16, 18. R o m e , 1972, 1978. T r u m p e l m a n n , L e o . Persepolis: Ein Weltwunder der Antike. M a i n z , 1988. D A V I D S T R O N A C H and
PERSIA. of Persia
[This entry provides
as known
is chronologically
primarily divided
a broad
from
into four
survey
archaeological
K I M CODELLA
of the
history
discoveries.
It
articles:
Prehistoric Persia Ancient Persia Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Persia in the Islamic Period In addition referred
to the related
to in this entry,
articles see also
on specific
subregions
and
sites
History of the Field, article on
Archaeology in Persia.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY B a k e r , Jack. "Alexander's B u r n i n g of Persepolis." Iranica Antiqua 13 (1978): I I 9 - I 3 3 Cahill, Nicholas. " T h e T r e a s u r y at Persepolis." American Journal of Archaeology 89 (1985): 373-389. Calmeyer, Peter. " T e x t u a l Sources for the Interpretation of Achaemenian Palace D e c o r a t i o n . " Iran 18 (1980): 55-63. C a m e r o n , George G . Persepolis Treasury Tablets. Oriental Institute Publications, 45. Chicago, 1948. G h i r s h m a n , R o m a n . " N o t e s iraniennes VII. A p r o p o s de Persepolis." Artibus Asiae 20 (1957): 265-278. Hallock, Richard T . Persepolis Fortification Tablets. Oriental Institute Publications, 112. Chicago, 1969. Herzfeld, Ernst. Iran in the Ancient East. L o n d o n , 1941. Krefter, Friedrich. Persepolis Rekonstruklionen. T e h e r a n e r F o r s c h u n gen, 3. Berlin, 1971. Nylander, Carl. " M a s o n ' s M a r k s in Persepolis: A Progress R e p o r t . " I n Proceedings of the Second Annual Symposium on Archaeological Re search in Iran, p p . 216-222. T e h r a n , 1974. Porada, Edith. "Classic A c h a e m e n i a n Architecture a n d S c u l p t u r e . " In The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2, The Median and Achaemenian Periods, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, p p . 793-827. C a m b r i d g e , 1985. Roaf, Michael. Sculptures and Sculptors at Persepolis. Iran 21 (1983). Root, Margaret Cool. The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art; Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire. Acta Iranica, 19. L e i d e n , 1979Root, M a r g a r e t Cool. "Circles of Artistic P r o g r a m m i n g : Strategies for Studying Creative Process at Persepolis." I n Investigating Artistic En vironments in the Ancient Near East, edited by A n n C . G u n t e r , p p . 115-139. Washington, D . C . , 1990. Sami, Ali. Persepolis. T r a n s l a t e d by R. N o r m a n Sharp. 2d ed. Shiraz, I95SSchmidt, Erich F . Persepolis, vol. 1, Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions. Ori ental Institute Publications, 68. Chicago, 1953.
Prehistoric Persia Persia is mostly a high, desertic plateau surrounded by for ested mountains. As a result of its rugged topography and severe seasonal climates, permanent settlements were always localized around oases or riverine water sources and near the 5-10 percent of the land surface that is arable. About half of the arable land must be farmed witii the aid of irri gation. Persia's prehistory is understood as a result of numerous expeditions to discover sites and then through selective ex cavations. In the late nineteenth century, French archaeol ogists pioneered research in Persia, primarily in the central Zagros Mountains and Khuzistan. Following World War II, and until all foreign research ceased with the Iranian Rev olution of 1979, archaeologists from the United States, Brit ain, Canada, and most western European countries, as well as Japan, also carried out projects there. Rather than exca vate single sites, many archaeologists during the postwar era explored whole regions. During two decades of intensive research, they surveyed most of western Iran, providing a wealth of information on changes in population from period to period and differences among regions. [See Demogra phy.] Nevertheless, this information represents only a pre liminary stage in archaeological understanding, for excava tions of some critical sites tiiat would provide a solid basis for interpreting the survey results could not be carried out or completed.
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Initial Village Period. T h e first period of human settle ment in Persia, following a long and poorly known Paleo lithic era, is the Neolithic. Agriculture and the domestication of goats and sheep—a process that may have taken place in the mountains of Persia—were introduced. [See Agriculture; Sheep and Goats.] Agriculture appeared in Persia in about 7000 B C E , one thousand years after it began in the southern Levant and probably spread by diffusion from that source. By this time Anatolian obsidian was reaching sites in both the Levant and the Zagros, an indication of very widespread contacts among these early peoples. Beginning with the Ne olithic, there was increasing sedentism across Southwest Asia, as farmers began to settle near arable land and build houses out of mud. A small number of excavated sites, sometimes widely scat tered geographically, define the successive archaeological periods. The Aceramic Neolithic, the period when the first permanent agricultural settlements were established, is known from excavations at Ganj Dareh and Tepe Guran; in the mountain plains of Kurdistan; and at Ali Kosh in the lowland Deh Luran plain. [See Ali Kosh; Deh Luran.] The inhabitants of each site consumed wild foods, supplemented by cultivated cereals and domestic goats. [See Cereals.] Shortly before 6000 B C E , pottery came into common use, and the number of villages began to increase—a trend that was to continue for nearly two thousand years. Late Village Period. From 5500 to 3800 B C E , cultures arose in Persia that paralleled the Ubaid in Mesopotamia but displayed many regional variants reflecting local, some what isolated adaptations to scattered resources. On some of the most favorable agricultural plains, a few sites became much larger than others, but hundreds of villages held fewer than one hundred inhabitants. In addition, a few excavated campsites and cemeteries show that migratory herders, in numbers that are impossible to estimate, utilized the vast stretches of mountain pastures. Patterns of transhumance, similar to those in recent periods, were well established by the mid-fifth millennium. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] After two thousand years of increase, evidence indicates that from 4500 to 4000 B C E there was a general decline in the number of villages and even the abandonment of some regions. The situation may have been related to climatic changes, as well as to regional political and economic ones. Some of the prominent Late Village period excavated sites are Dalma Tepe, Pisdeli, and Gabrestan in the northern Zagros; Sialk, on the plateau; Giyan, Siabid, and Seh Gabi in the central Zagros; Bakun and Tepe Yahya in the south ern Zagros; and Tepe Sabz, Farukhabad, Jaffarabad, Chogha Mish, and Susa in lowland Khuzistan. [See Tepe Yahya; Tepe Farukhabad; Susa.] Susa, on the western edge of the lowland Khuzistan plain, has provided the most information of all these sites. Well known for its historical periods, Susa was founded shortly
before 4000 B C E , when the local population had fallen to near its lowest point in two millennia. At Susa, the inhabitants erected a stepped platform of mud bricks on which they placed a number of large buildings, but the ruins give few clues to the buildings' original functions. Nevertheless, by analogy with Eridu and other early temples in Mesopotamia, it is likely that Susa's platform was also the base of at least one religious edifice. [See Eridu.] T h e buildings were de stroyed, probably twice, partially by fire, in violent events in about 3800 B C E . At the base of the platform, the burial remains of a thou sand or more individuals, accompanied by elaborately painted ceramics, were crammed into a small cemetery. T h e conditions that led to this mass interment, often of bones that had been moved from another location, remain a mys tery. [See Burial Techniques; Grave Goods.] Known as the Susa I period, this is the final phase of painted pottery in the Ubaid tradition that had begun two thousand years earlier (its demise is later in Persia than in Mesopotamia). T h e reasons for the disappearance of painted ceramics throughout Southwest Asia at this time are obscure; the type was replaced by undecorated, mass-pro duced, often wheelmade pots in the Uruk style. U r u k Period. Without further excavation, it is not pos sible to resolve debates concerning the nature of the change between Susa I and Uruk in Persia. Some hold that it was a gradual, indigenous transition; others that it signifies an in vasion by people from southern Mesopotamia, the region of Warka (Uruk). [See Uruk-Warka.] Whatever the case, the pattern of settlement changed. A hierarchy of sites devel oped, with large ones surrounded by small satellites, imply ing that some sites may have served regional administrative and economic functions. On the surrounding plain, there was a threefold increase in population. At Susa, a narrow excavation trench has revealed a succession of devices that were precursors of writing: seals, tokens, and bullae (clay envelopes that held tokens and preserved a record of com modity exchange). At Godin Tepe in the central Zagros, a Late Uruk build ing is situated in the midst of a local settlement; it may have been an entrepdt, where trade between the lowlands and highlands was effected. [See Godin Tepe.] Around Tepe Malyan, on the Marv Dasht plain near Shiraz, there was a severe decline in settlement, and at Tepe Yahya, after a pro longed disruption of settlement in the late fourth millen nium, a Proto-Elamite colony was installed. [See Malyan.] Both the disruptions of settlement and the incursion of the Proto-Elamites may be related to tire emergence of cities in Khuzistan and southern Mesopotamia. By this time, sites in northern Persia were following a trajectory more related to that of Anatolia, the Caucasus, and central Asia than to Mes opotamia. Unfortunately, there have been few excavations of sites pertinent to this dynamic period of social change in
PERSIA: Ancient Persia Persia. It resulted, in the third millennium, in an Elamite course of development quite separate from the Sumerian in Mesopotamia. [See also Elamites; Persians; and Mesopotamia, article on Prehistoric Mesopotamia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Alizadeh, Abbas. Prehistoric Settlement Patterns and Cultures in Susiana, Southwestern Iran. Technical R e p o r t 24, M u s e u m of Anthropology, University of Michigan. A n n Arbor, 1992. Analysis of prehistoric Khuzistan, based on archaeological survey with m a n y illustrations of ceramics. Hole, Frank. "Chronologies in t h e Iranian Neolithic." In Ckronologies in the Near East, edited by O. A u r e n c h e , J, Evin, a n d F . H o u r s , p p . 353-379- British Archaeological R e p o r t s , n o . 379(i). Oxford, 1987. Along with Voigt (1987), reviews c u r r e n t knowledge of chronology for the prehistoric cultures of Iran. Hole, Frank, ed. The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and Society from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest. Washington, D . C . , 1987. M u l tiauthored review with an index to sites a n d a full bibliography. Hole, Frank. " C e m e t e r y of M a s s Grave? Reflections on Susa I . " I n Contributions a I'histoire de I'Iran: Melanges Jean Penot, p p . 1-14. Paris, 1990. Interpretive essay. Lamberg-Karlovsky, C . C , a n d T h o m a s Wight Beale. Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967-1975. P e a b o d y M u s e u m , Harvard Univer sity, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 38. C a m bridge, Mass., 1986. Site report a n d discussion of die regional i m plications of developments in southern Persia. Neely, James A., and H e n r y T . Wright. Early Settlement and Irrigation on the Deh Luran Plain: Village and Early State Societies in South western Iran. Technical Report 26, M u s e u m of Anthropology, U n i versity of Michigan. A n n Arbor, 1994. Reports the results of inten sive survey of the D e h L u r a n Plain; includes m a n y figures and m a p s . Smith, Philip E . L . Palaeolithic Archaeology in Iran. Philadelphia, 1986. Concise s u m m a r y of current knowledge. Voigt, M a r y . "Relative a n d Absolute Chronologies for Iran between 6,500 a n d 3,500 B C . " I n Chronologies in the Near East, edited b y O . Aurenche, J. Evin, a n d F . H o u r s , p p . 615-646. British Archaeological Reports, n o . 379(a). Oxford, 1987. FRANK H O L E
Ancient Persia Persia is an ecological and cultural mosaic characterized by variation rather then uniformity. Variation dominates the geographic and cultural landscape from the Neolithic period (7000 BCE) to the end of the Bronze Age (1200 B C E ) . Dis tinctive "culture areas" were characterized by shifting boundaries whose core regions, nevertheless, can be iden tified. T h e following list of core areas is in descending order of the extent to which they are known archaeologically: ( 1 ) south and southwest Iran—the modern province of Khuzi stan; (2) central southern Iran, comprising modern Pars and Luristan; (3) northwest Iran—the provinces of Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Kermanshah; ( 4 ) southeastern Iran—the provinces of Kerman and Seistan, extending into Baluchi stan; and (5) northeastern Iran, comprising the regions southeast of the Caspian Sea and Khorasan, extending to
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the foothills of the Kopet Dagh Mountains in Turkmenis tan. Neolithic C o m m u n i t i e s . T h e earliest Neolithic com munities on the Iranian plateau appear in the Zagros Moun tains and date to the second half of the eighth millennium (Young et a l , 1983). At this time such sites as Ganj Dareh appear, a site approximately one hectare in size (Smith, 1975). It is unlikely that the community represented more titan a small number of individual households. T h e upper levels of this site contain the remains of an early village con structed of mud-brick architecture. Structures took the form of rectilinear two-story structures—the first floor for storage and/or animal pens and the upper story for living accom modations. Ganj Dareh offers the earliest known pottery in the Near East. It is a lightly fired, chaff-tempered coarse ware that takes the form of small pots and large storage ves sels. Other clay artifacts included human and animal figu rines, as well as small geometric tokens. T h e stone industry at Ganj Dareh is characterized by numerous blade types, some containing siclde sheen, used to harvest grain. Mortars and pestles for processing cereals occured in abundance. The subsistence economy at Ganj Dareh is incompletely understood, but sheep and goats were certainly domesti cated, as was barley. [See Sheep and Goats; Cereals.] In one of the rooms, two skulls of wild sheep were discovered em bedded in the wall and plastered over with clay. Throughout the Neolithic, either entire structures or parts of buildings were increasingly turned over to ritual functions. Perhaps the most complete Neolithic sequence in Iran is known from the region of Deh Luran in Khuzistan (Hole et al., 1969). T h e excavations at Ali Kosh uncovered a Neo lithic sequence that ranges from about 7500 to 5500 BCE. Ali Kosh is a roughly circular settlement (135 m in diameter) with an accumulated depth of 7 m of deposit. In the earliest settlement, referred to as the Bus Mordeh phase, the inhab itants relied on a combination of wild and domestic re sources. A majority of the seeds recovered were wild annual legumes and grasses native to the environment. T h e recov ery of a limited number of cultivated barley and wheat seeds, of the type not native to the local environment, indicate that the inhabitants were also farming. During this early phase there is also evidence for the primary herding of goats, but less for sheep. It has been suggested that this phase may represent a seasonal settlement—a winter-spring station for the community that moved to higher pastures in the summer months. T h e Ali Kosh phase (6750-6000 BCE) represents a fully developed Neolithic community. T h e architecture con sisted of large, well-constructed dwellings with a consider ably developed material culture. Containers included stone vessels, baskets, and, toward the very end of the phase, pot tery. At this time tire inhabitants of Ali Kosh participated in far-reaching trade that brought them obsidian from the highland mountains of eastern Anatolia, shells from the Per-
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sian Gulf, copper from central Iran, and turquoise from northeastern Iran. Some of the earliest burials on the Iranian plateau belong to the Ali Kosh phase. The dead were buried in a shallow pit beneath the floors of the houses. Frequently, the body was covered with ocher, tightly flexed, wrapped within a reed mat, and buried with items of personal adorn ment. [See Ali Kosh; Tombs; Burial Practices; Grave Goods.] During the last period of occupation, in about 6000-5600 B C E , (the Muhammad Jaffar phase), the effectiveness of do mesticated resources, building techniques, and agricultural tools all continued to increase and pottery is found through out the Iranian plateau. This earliest pottery is referred to as the Soft Ware horizon, for wherever it is found it is in variably a coarse, low-fired, chaff-tempered ceramic with minimal design motifs. Laboratory studies of this type of pottery from a number of different sites on the Iranian pla teau and beyond has shown an identical production tech nique (Vandiver, 1986). T h e technique, referred to as con secutive slab construction, endured for more than a millennium, thus typifying the conservative tradition of technological innovation. However, its wide distribution in dicates that, by the middle of the sixth millennium, there was considerable diffusion and sharing of technological skills. Prehistory at Susa a n d Susiana. Archaeologically, the region of southwestern Iran, Khuzistan, is the best known and most documented in all of Persia. The province of Khu zistan is an extension of the Mesopotamian plain. T h e lower plains of Khuzistan lie between the Persian Gulf and include the Tigris River marshes. T o the west of the Karkheh River, the northern reaches of Khuzistan touch the Zagros Moun tains and extend to the eastern edge of tire Ram Hormuz plain. In the valleys of Khuzistan, as well as in the lowlands, the yearly rainfall ranges from 250 to 400 mm. This allows for dry farming, which, nevertheless, would be greatly en hanced by irrigation in regions of marginal precipatation. The archaeology of Khuzistan is responsible for revealing the history and the archaeology of Persia's oldest kingdom, Elam. The most important city within this kingdom was Susa; a site that has been excavated for nearly a century. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, excavations at Susa were directed by a number of French archaeologists: Marcel Dieulafoy, Jacques de Morgan, Roland de Mecquenem, and Roman Ghirshman. T h e results of these excavations have been published in scores of monographs in Memoires de la Delegation en Perse (Paris). In 1968 Jean Perrot took over the French Archaeological Mission at Susa and provided the first systematic stratigraphic excavation and comprehensive picture of the prehistory of Susa (Perrot, 1976). In addition to the recent excavations at Susa, Genevieve Dollfus (1978), on behalf of the French Mission, excavated several prehis toric settlements in Khuzistan that predate the earliest set tlement at Susa and provide an understanding of the region
from 6000 to 4000 B C E , when Susa emerged as a regional center. Major excavations at Choga Mish (Kantor, 1976) and Haft Tepe (Negahban, 1991) have also added to what is understood of Elam in the third and second millennia B C E . Archaeological surveys undertaken in Khuzistan by Robert Adams (1962) and Henry Wright and Gregory Johnson (1975) have led to an unparalleled understanding of the local sequences and settlement regimes in this part of Persia. [See Susa; Haft Tepe.] For the Kur River basin of Fars, John R. Alden (1982) and William M. Sumner (1972) have offered an archaeo logical sequence from both settlement survey and excava tion. Research at the site of Malyan in Fars, identified as the Elamite city of Anshan, adds an important understanding of a highland Elamite capital. [See Malyan.] In northwestern Iran, survey and excavations in the vicinity of Hasanlu (Dy son, 1965) and Godin Tepe (Young and Levine, 1974) offer a comprehensive picture of settlement and social organiza tion from the Late Neolithic site of Hajji Firuz (Voigt, 1983) to the Median citadel uncovered at Godin Tepe. [See Ha sanlu; Godin Tepe; Hajji Firuz.] Sites in the Zagros range occasionally exhibit cultural ties to the settlements of Khu zistan. Materials recovered from the excavations at T e p e Sialk (Ghirshman, 1938), Tall-i Iblis (Caldwell, 1967), Tepe Yahya (Lamberg-Karlovsky and Beale, 1986), and Shahdad (Hakemi 1972), at the western edge of the Dasht-i Lut, in dicate far-reaching contacts with sites to the west. [See T e p e Yahya.] Excavations atTepeHissar (Schmidt, 1937; Dyson, 1989) in the Damghan region indicate cultural ties to sites in central Asia as well as with distant Khuzistan. T h e work of the Italian Mission at Shahr-i Sokhta, in Sistan, has ex tended what is known of the urban process in this region, as well as this site's role in the production and trade of lapis lazuli (Tosi and Piperno, 1973). Beatrice de Cardi's (1970) excavations in Iranian Baluchistan indicate its cultural re lationships with archaeological sites excavated in the Persian Gulf and in the United Arab Emirates. [See United Arab Emirates.] Given what presently is known, there can be little doubt that the emergence of a centralized state is first documented in the region of Khuzistan. T h e fact that this region was an extension of the Mesopotamian plain readily explains why tire prehistoric sequence in Khuzistan is closely related to Mesopotamia's. Throughout the fifth and fourth millennia, Khuzistan was the most densely settled region in Persia. T h e period in Khuzistan referred to as Susa I, or Susa A, was roughly contemporary with the Ubaid 3-4 culture in south ern Mesopotamia (Porada et al., 1992). [See Ubaid.] Al though there is no doubt that the peoples of Khuzistan were in direct contact with southern Mesopotamia, the develop ments in the two regions were distinctly different. This may be the result in part to the peoples of southern Mesopotamia being ethnically Sumerian, while those of Khuzistan were Elamite—representatives of entirely distinctive language
PERSIA: Ancient Persia families. During Susa A, the site of Susa reached 25-30 ha (62-74 acres) in size, and numerous intermediate-sized communities of 10 ha (25 acres) dotted the Khuzistan coun tryside. These towns, in turn, were surrounded by numer ous smaller villages of 2-3 ha (5-7 acres). During this period at Susa, a large terrace or platform (80 X 80 X 10 m) was constructed that is associated with an enigmatic structure called the massif funeraire by its excavator, Jacque de Mor gan. T h e structure contained more than two thousand bur ials and a considerable wealth of grave goods (Hole, 1987). By 4000 B C E , Susa had established itself as the preeminent community in Elam, a position it was to maintain through out most of the following three thousand years of Elamite history. Susa I (A) is followed by Susa II, T h e nature of the ttansition remains unclear, but there are several phases of aban donment, destruction, and rebuilding of the terrace at the end of Susa I. T h e nature of the Susa II assemblage is best documented in the recent excavations of Acropole (acrop olis) I (levels 22-17) and Acropole II (levels 6-1) (LeBrun, 1978). T h e material culture of Susa II is of outstanding sig nificance: in private houses pottery, inscribed tablets, sealings, and stone objects were uncovered. T h e ceramics, tab lets, and sealings are identical to those of the Late Uruk period (c. 3400-3200 BCE) in southern Mesopotamia. A comparable assemblage has also been recovered from Godin T e p e (Weiss and Young, 1975). In both instances it appears that the sites were impacted by the "Uruk expansion." [See Seals; Uruk-Warka.] The Uruk expansion represents a massive emigration from southern Mesopotamia to regions as distant as central Anatolia. T h e reason(s) for the massive exodus remains elu sive and is much discussed (Algaze, 1993). There is a pre disposition to view the expansion and its colonization of for eign regions as motivated by the desire to control trade routes and exploit resources for shipment to southern Mes opotamia. T h e southern Mesopotamian artifacts recovered from Susa II represent an inventory of administrative de vices dedicated to a technology of social control. T h e in scribed tablets and bullae (hollow, unbaked clay balls con taining geometric tokens believed to represent specific numbers) were devices for monitoring economic production and consumption; the seals and sealings were used to mon itor security and access by sealing doors, vessels, and reed bundles. It has been suggested that the beveled-rim bowls were standard units for measuring the rations given in return for labor (Nissen, 1988). It has been argued that tire bullae stratigraphically precede die inscribed numerical tablets, which in turn precede the inscribed tablets containing numbers and text (SchmandtBessarat, 1992). Should this be further documented itwould represent a stratigraphic unfolding from numeracy to liter acy, from symbol to writing. T h e common use of adminis trative artifacts at Susa, Chogha Mish, and smaller sites in
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Khuzistan thus suggests an extensive colonization of Khu zistan by the Late Uruk peoples of southern Mesopotamia. The presence of a three-level settlement hierarchy indicates the specialization of settlement function and the emergence of a social organization and political structure dependent upon state-level bureaucracies. P r o t o - E l a m i t e P e r i o d . Dated to 3400-3200/2600 B C E , the term Proto-Elamite refers both to a specific language and to an archaeological assemblage. T h e beginning of this pe riod, as determined by the excavations at Susa, are in level 16 at the acropolis I and define the nature of Susa III: ProtoElamite culture (LeBrun and Vallat, 1978). The origins of Proto-Elamite culture are to be sought in Khuzistan follow ing the Late Uruk colonization. Shared features of the Proto-Elamite culture include administrative texts (Damerow and Englund, 1989), heavily influenced by die earlier Uruk IV texts of southern Mesopotamia written in an undeciphered Proto-Elamite script; a distinctive style of cyl inder seal known from numerous seals and sealings on tab lets; ceramics, particularly the ubiquitous beveled-rim bowl; and miniature zoomorphic stone objects and vessels manufactured from raw resources procured from distant regions on the Iranian plateau. At the time in which Proto-Elamite cidture was emerging in Khuzistan, there was a major decline inpopulation. Greg ory Johnson (1973) estimates that by the end of the Late Uruk period tiiere was a 41 percent decline in the occupied area of Khuzistan. Populations were almost entirely concen trated in the urban centers—Susa and Chogha Mish—leav ing the village settlements of the hinterland abandoned. Throughout the Proto-Elamite period, the settlement size of Susa ranged between 10 and 20 ha (25 and 50 acres). The appearance of scenes of warfare depicted on cylinder seals suggest that these dramatic shifts in population and settle ment occurred within a context of conflict believed to be responsible for die breakdown of the local exchange sys tems. In about 3000 B C E , Susiana became independent of the Mesopotamian sphere of influence. T h e loss of population in Susiana may be related to the unprecedented urban growth tiiat took place in contemporary southern Mesopo tamia and the rise of a strong Proto-Elamite state centered around Malyan in Fars. Aldiough Malyan may have been the center of a strong regional polity, it is clear from the archaeological record that a Proto-Elamite influence was felt in virtually every corner of the Iranian plateau. Following the collapse of die Uruk expansion in Khuzistan, the ProtoElamites replicated the expansionist process and colonized distant sites. Excavated Iranian sites sharing the character istic Proto-Elamite assemblage include Susa, Chogha Mish, Tall-i Ghazir, Tepe Sialk, Tall-i Malyan, Tall-i Iblis, Tepe Yahya, and Godin T e p e (Lamberg-Karlovsky, 1978). Ma terials recovered from the surface of Shahdad, a single Proto-Elamite tablet and sealings from Shahr-i Sokhta, and
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a single tablet from Hissar suggest that these sites and regions were also influenced by the Proto-Elamite expan sion. Russian archaeologists, excavating at Altyn Depe (Altin Tepe) in Turkmenistan, have argued that distant rever berations of a Proto-Elamite influence can be detected there in the presence of Proto-Elamite signs on ceramics and fig urines (Masson and Sarianidi, 1972). The sparse settlement in Susiana throughout the Susa III period contrasts with the relatively high populations in west ern and eastern Khuzistan. In the Deh Luran plain, 60 km (37 mi.) northwest of Susiana, early third-millennium set tlement reached a peak unsurpassed until the Achaemenid period. Excavated sites include Tepe Mussian (which may have exceeded contemporary Susa in size), Tepe Farukhabad, Tepe Khazineh, and Tepe Aliabad. [See Deh Luran; Tepe Mussian; Tepe Farukhabad.] Many of these sites con tained ceramics that can be easily paralleled in the Diyala region of Mesopotamia during the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic I periods. [See Diyala; Jemdet Nasr.] At Fars, ex cavations and extensive surveys in the vicinity of Malyan offer a relatively comprehensive picture of Proto-Elamite culture, referred to as the Banesh phase (c. 3400-2600 B C E , and at Malyan excavators identified five ceramic phases (4500-3400 BCE) preceding it. In the early third millennium, Malyan reached 50 ha (124 acres), almost four times the size of Susa. In the Banesh phase at Malyan three major phases of superimposed architecture were revealed, includ ing public buildings containing extensive wall paintings. From the rooms of private houses, excavators recovered characteristic Proto-Elamite tablets, seals, and sealings. In various areas of excavation, craft production included the working of mother-of-pearl, Dentalium shells, bead produc tion, and installations for producing metals and ceramics (Nicholas, 1990). The results of the settlement surveys undertaken in the vicinity of Malyan (Summer, 1972) are comparable in im portance to those in Khuzistan and around Tepe Yahya in Kerman province (Prickett, 1986). The growth of the Ba nesh phase at Malyan is believed to be the result of the ab sorption of numerous small surrounding settlements dated to the Susa I and II periods. In about 3000 B C E , Malyan attained the status of an urban center by absorbing the sur rounding village populations and by immigration from the lowlands. At this time, toward the end of the Middle Banesh phase, Malyan experienced explosive growth, from 10 to 50 ha (25 to 124 acres) within a couple of centuries, concen trating a regional administration within its authority. The evidence for an immigration to Malyan from Susiana is sup ported by the increasing similarities between their material culture; the distribution of Proto-Elamite sites east and west of Malyan that link the natural routes connecting the re source-rich areas of the Iranian plateau with resource-poor Mesopotamia; and the marked decline in tire population of
Susiana, which coincides with the increase at Malyan (Alden, 1982). Other Proto-Elamite communities, represented by such sites as Tepe Yahya, Sialk, and Godin, suggest the presence of a Proto-Elamite colony established within a dis tinctive local culture. Excavations at each of these distant settlements indicates a local culture that preceded, by at least a millennium, the establishment of the Proto-Elamite col ony. The excavators of these sites have independently sug gested that the exploitation of local resources and/or com merce was the motivating factor for the establishment of the Proto-Elamite colony. In the second half of the fourth millennium, a number of widely scattered sites in Khuzistan, Kurdistan, Fars, Ker man, Sistan, and Khorasan participated in a Proto-Elamite ecumene whose primary motivation was economic. It was recognized that differential access to natural resources re quired economic interdependence between the highlands of the Iranian plateau and the lowlands of Khuzistan and Mes opotamia. It is believed that eventually economic interde pendence led to the incorporation of military, political, and even religious alliances. Increased conflict and warfare re sulted: late third- and second-millennia B C E texts indicate a nearly constant state of bellicosity between southern Mes opotamia and Elam (Hinz, 1964, 1971). T h e origins of Proto-Elamite culture in Khuzistan and its dissemination across the Iranian plateau were contemporary with the growing internationalism that characterized the early urban environments in Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt in the Late Uruk period. T h e foundations for the interaction that united the resource-rich highlands with the resource-poor lowlands, so characteristic of later historical periods, were initially framed within the context of tire Uruk and ProtoElamite expansions. Third Millennium. Proto-Elamite administrative texts, associated glyptic, and diagnostic ceramics all but disap peared by 2800 B C E . Sites such as Malyan and Yahya were abandoned and only resettled in the last centuries of the third millennium. The precise cause for this decline and abandonment remains elusive. T h e reabsorption of Susa into the Mesopotamian political community, accomplished by the conquest of Susa by the city-state of Lagash (c. 2450 BCE) and later by the Akkadian and Ur III Empires in tire last half of the tliird millennium, may have been important factors. [See Girsu and Lagash; Akkadians; Ur.] Equally sig nificant for the collapse of a centralized Elamite power over the periphery was the rise of powerful independent polities, such as the kingdom of Marhasi, mentioned in numerous Mesopotamian texts of the late third millennium. Marhasi is believed to be centered in eastern Iran in the region that includes Shahdad and Tepe Yahya (Steinkeller, 1982). In the last half of the tliird millennium, southern Mesopota mian maritime commerce extended to the settlements in the Persian Gulf and reached the Indus Valley (Edens, 1993).
PERSIA: Ancient Persia T h e marked increase in maritime trade appears to have by passed, if not intentionally replaced, tire overland routes that crossed the Iranian plateau. T h e effort to isolate the plateau may have been the byproduct of die increasing enmity be tween southern Mesopotamia and Elam. By the middle of the third millennium, the archaeological picture is embellished by the written texts. T h e Sumerian king list claims that, as early as 2600 B C E , King En-Mebaragesi of Kish "carried away as spoil the weapons of the land of Elam" (Jacobsen, 1939). T h e Sumerian king list also at tributes 356 years of sovereignty to a "dynasty" of Awan tiiat ruled in about 2500 B C E . Although the existence of tiiese rulers is confirmed in other texts, the kingdom's precise lo cation remains unknown. Early Dynastic inscriptions from the Mesopotamian city-state of Lagash indicate that the king, Eanatum, claimed victory over Elam (c. 2450 BCE) af ter he conquered Susa. Less then a century later, Enetarzi claims to have defeated a band of Elamites and recovered goods pillaged from Lagash in earlier raiding. Comple menting the texts that address the constant conflicts that characterized Elam and the Mesopotamian city-states are tablets that record commercial contacts and literary texts. One of these literary texts, "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta," enjoyed a long popularity in Mesopotamia and in volves the relationships of a number of semidivine figures (including Enmerkar, Dumuzi, and Gilgamesh) with the lord of Aratta, who presided over an undiscovered kingdom thought to be on the Iranian plateau (Cohen, 1973). In this epic the Sumerian hero, Enmerkar, sends repeated demands to the ruler of Aratta for craftsmen, metals, and lapis lazuli. En route to the kingdom of Aratta, the messenger passes through Susa and Anshan (Malyan). In failing to obtain the desired materials, another epic relates a siege of Aratta. Yet another fragmentary literary text alludes to an Elamite in vasion of Sumer in the time of Dumuzi. Literary traditions also invoke the martial exploits of the great Sumerian hero Gilgamesh in Khuzistan and the mountains beyond. Al though tiiese heroic tales are not historical treatises, they can be taken as metaphors of genuine reminiscences that allude to the incessant warfare and administered commerce that characterized southern Mesopotamia and Elamite relations. With the consolidation of the Akkadian Empire by Sargon of Agade (2334-2279 B C E ) , Mesopotamian texts begin to provide a relatively continuous archive of warfare and com merce with Elam. Mesopotamian boasts of victory can be checked against the contemporary texts of Susa. Sargon's victory over the Elamites is reliably recorded in later Old Babylonian texts. Sargon's successor, Rimush, repeated the war on Elam and Marhasi and is credited with dismantling the fortifications of the Elamite cities. His brother, Manishtushu, succeeded him and in his campaigns against the Elamites is credited with the capture of a king of Anshan. Naram-Sin, one of the greatest of Akkadian conquerors and
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the first to proclaim himself a divinity, boasts of having at tained control "of all Elam, as far as Marhasi and the land of the Subartu" (northern Mesopotamia). Akkadian influence was well enuenched at Susa through out the second half of die third millennium. T h e texts from Susa indicate diat the Akkadian language, administrative techniques, and even pedagogical methods were employed in that Elamite city. T h e texts from both Mesopotamia and Susa indicate that commerce (trading) and warfare (raiding) typified die relations of both the Akkadian and subsequent Ur III empires with Elam. T h e city of Umma in Mesopo tamia appears to have acted as an entrepSt of trade with Khuzistan, while Susa, and its surrounding territory, was integrated into the Akkadian conquest state. Local Elamite rulers continued to hold office, but only as "governors of Susa" under Akkadian patronage. Although the Akkadians waged war against Anshan, they were less successful in its complete subordination. Beyond Anshan and Elam remained die persistently hostile kingdom of Marhasi. T h e Akkadian and subsequent Ur III empires managed tiieir relations with these autonomous polities by occasional warfare and diplomatic alliances—one of the daughters of Shulgi (2094-2047 B C E ) , the greatest of the Ur III kings, married the king of Marhasi, while anotiier married the king of Anshan. Throughout die Ur III period, Meso potamian relations with Elam were both intensive and ex tensive. Mesopotamian administrative texts refer to couriers traveling between Susa, Marhasi, Sabum, Adamdun, Huhnuri, the Su-lands, Anshan, Shimashki, and other regions (Carter and Stolper, 1984). T h e location of most of these regions is elusive, as is the degree of their political subordi nation to the Ur III Empire. Tantalizing references allude to a "dynasty" of twelve kings tiiat ruled over die "lands of Shimashki" and an equal number of kings that presided over the kingdom of Awan. Such evidence suggests die existence of indigenous political traditions beyond the immediate con trol of Mesopotamian empires. The locations of Awan and Shimashki are unknown, but the context of these toponyms indicates that the place names refer to regions rather than to specific sites. S e c o n d M i l l e n n i u m ( S u k k a l m a h period, 1900-1500 BCE). Dynastic alliances and diplomatic relations increas ingly became the hallmark of Elamite and Mesopotamian political relations. This period was characterized by the rule of tire Elamite sukkalmah "grand regent" (see below), whose emergence was contemporary with significant changes in the political life of Mesopotamia. (With the col lapse of the Ur III Empire, Mesopotamia reverted to the rule of independent city-states in alliance with powerful leaders of tribal federations.) Excavations at Susa, Chogha Mish, Sharafabad, Chogha Zanbil, and Haft Tepe offer substantia] archaeological remains of this period. [See Chogha Zanbil] The site of Malyan, on the other hand, appears to have lost
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much of its significance after 2000 BCE. Sites on the eastern Iranian plateau—Shahr-i Sokhta, Tepe Yahya, Shahdad, Hissar, and Bampur—all appear to have been abandoned by 1800 BCE. The reason (s) for the large-scale abandonment of these sites remains elusive (Dyson, 1973). There is evidence at some of tire sites (Shahdad, Yahya, Hissar) of a material culture readily paralleled in central Asia in the Murghab and Bactrian oases (Hiebert and LambergKarlovsky, 1992). T h e discovery of burials in eastern Iran at Shahdad, Khinaman, and Khurab and in Pakistan at Sibri containing artifacts of this central Asian culture suggests a movement of populations. There is an irresistible tempta tion to associate this migration with the movement of IndoIranians onto the Iranian plateau (Parpola, 1988). The role, if any, played by this emigration of central Asian peoples into eastern Iran and the coterminous abandonment of set tlements remains an intriguing correlation, but not one nec essarily causally related. Thus, on the eastern and central Iranian plateau, the second millennium BCE represents a gap that extends from about 1700 to 1200 BCE (the latter date being when settlements were reestablished). Archaeological sites in northern and northwestern Iran, largely unrelated to the Elamite polities, appear to sustain their settlement regimes. Excavations atTureng Tepe (Deshayes, 1975) on tire Gurgan plain and at Godin Tepe offer a relatively comprehensive picture of the second millennium BCE in these regions of Iran. The long-term abandonment of numerous sites in the first half of the second millennium; an absence of settlement-pattern studies; and the relatively small number of excavations detailing the period offer only the most limited understanding of the political, economic, and social conditions that characterized the Iranian plateau then. The exceptions are the settlement studies and exca vations in Khuzistan and Fars and the excavations at Susa, Haft Tepe, and Chogha Zanbil. The excavation of and texts from Susa indicate that fol lowing the demise of the Ur III dynasty Susiana became independent from Mesopotamia and was ruled by a dynasty of Shimaskian ldngs. After a few centuries, this dynasty was replaced by the Sukkalmah, a dynasty that may have ema nated from Fars and that maintained important diplomatic relations with the Babylonian state of Hammurabi. In Fars, Malyan regained its position as a regional center during the Kaftari phase (2200-1700 BCE) and may have been the point of origin of the Sukkalmah dynasty; later, Malyan, referred to in the Elamite texts as Anshan, was, together with Susa, the cocapital of the Elamite kingdom. Two Elamite rock carvings are believed to be dated to the Late Kaftari phase. One of them, 200 m above the Fahlian plain, depicts a divine couple seated between worshippers. A second relief, at Naqsh-i Rustam, illustrates a number of worshipers and a divine couple seated on a serpent throne. [See Naqsh-i Rus tam.] The location of these shrines suggests that the Elamites positioned their divinities to indicate symbolically the
incorporation of specific territories and to protect the main lines of communication between Susiana and Malyan. Throughout the first half of the second millennium B C E , the regions surrounding Susa and Malyan experienced an unprecedented prosperity. The extensive use of irrigation near Malyan was not to be replicated until the time of the Achaemenids. Few settlements existed in the valleys and plains separating the two sites, but those known from Luristan (Tepe Guran) suggest that they were culturally distinct from and politically unaligned with the Elamite state. Throughout the first half of the period, the rapid population growth in Khuzistan and Fars was enabled by an increase in agricultural production. It was made possible, at least in part, by the adoption of a Mesopotamian administrative bu reaucracy that emphasized agricultural production; alliances with tribal federations and distant autonomous polities; a professional military organization; and a civil bureaucracy dependent upon a tax base for its support. T h e textual and archaeological record from the end of the Sukkalmah period (c. 1600 BCE) to the rise of the Middle Elamite ldngs in the thirteenth century B C E — i . e . , Tepti-ahar, 1375 BCE) is poorly known. This gap roughly coincides with the time in which the aforementioned sites on the Iranian plateau were abandoned. In Khuzistan and Fars there is no evidence of continuity from the early (Sukkalmah) to the late (Middle Elamite) second millennium B C E . Nevertheless, archaeological remains from the second half of the period have been recovered from the Ville Royal at Susa, Tepe Sharafabad, and Haft Tepe, 15 1cm (9 mi.) southeast of Susa, where monumental temple architecture dates to the time of King Tepti-ahar. The royal city of Al Untash-Napirisha (modern Chogha Zanbil), 301cm (19 mi.) southeast of Susa, is the most prominent archaeological monument of the Middle Elamite period (Ghirshman, 1966-1968). T h e major excavated complex at Chogha Zanbil is a ziggurat surrounded by a double wall. [See Ziggurat.] T h e area en closed within the city walls is in excess of 100 ha (247 acres). T h e ziggurat incorporates several different building phases, of which the last resulted in a five-story stepped pyramid crowned by a temple dedicated to the Elamite divine couple Inshushinalc and Napirisha. At the foot of the ziggurat ar chaeologists exposed a number of lesser temples and shrines; several were lavishly decorated with glazed tiles, wooden doors embedded with glass beads, and winged grif fins and bulls of glazed frit placed over vaulted stairwells leading to the summit. Large, vaulted structures of baked brick were uncovered at Chogha Zanbil, Haft Tepe, and Susa that served as family tombs. Similarities in the com plexity of burial pattern at Haft Tepe and Chogha Zanbil suggest that they were centers of a burial cult. The last half of the second millennium B C E experienced an "elamization" in southwestern Iran, particularly in Khu zistan and Fars and perhaps in Luristan. The Middle Elam ite period was not without its continuing hostility with Mes-
PERSIA: Ancient Persia opotamia: an Elamite stela records the capture of seven hundred towns including Sippar, Opis, Dur Kurigalzu, Eshnunna, and perhaps even Akkad. [See Sippar; Eshnunna; Akkade.] War booty was carried off to Susa—the law code of Hammurabi and the victory stela of Naram-Sin—and dis played in the Temple of Inshushinak, tangible evidence that the spoils of war contributed to the wealth of the Middle Elamite kings. Texts recording military campaigns, building projects, and religious commemorations have been recov ered from Susa, Haft Tepe, Chogha Zanbil, and Malyan. Archaeological remains recovered from the first three indi cate the high level achieved in the production of crafts, es pecially metalworking. Many Middle Elamite settlements in Khuzistan were abandoned in about iooo B C E . The slow decline in the set tlements and populations of Susiana indicate that more was involved in the decline of the Middle Elamite period than the defeat of the Elamite king Huteludush-Inshushinak by the Assyrian king Nebuchadrezzar I in m o BCE. Once again, it is quite likely tiiat the fortunes of the Elamites were ironically tied to those of their traditional enemy, Mesopo tamia. At the turn of the millennium, in Babylonia and As syria, written texts speak of severe food shortages precipi tated by the raiding of nomadic peoples. Susiana may have experienced comparable raids, for one of the tribes respon sible, the Arameans, are known to have settled in Khuzistan from tire Karkheh River to the Gulf. [See Arameans.] In the first half of the first millennium B C E , the general decline in Susiana was complemented by an overall prosperity in Luristan and Kurdistan. In the northeast, the Medes established varying control over independent kingdoms, while the As syrians exercised dominance over the Mesopotamian bor derlands. [See Medes.] By iooo B C E , numerous independent kingdoms are attested in the texts and documented in the archaeological record: Hasanlu, in the northeast, attempted to maintain its independence in the face of a rising ascen dancy of Assyrian, Median, and Urartean power. In 6 4 6 B C E , Ashurbanipal plundered Susa with a ferocity unparalleled in the Assyrian annals. T h e texts detail the raz ing of all the temples, the destruction of the sacred groves, the desecration of Elamite gods and royal tombs, the de portation of tire population and their livestock, and the sow ing of salt on the devastated land. Ashurbanipal's lengthy description of the pillaging of Susa was intended to stun the world and deliver die message of Elam's political and cul tural eradication. T h e devastated Elamites were further pressured by the Babylonians to the west, die Medes to the northeast, and the Persians to the southeast. By die midsixth century B C E , much of the former Elamite territory was under Achaemenid rule. Inscriptions of Cyrus the Great (559-530 BCE) indicate that his great grandfather, Teispes, claimed to be "king of Anshan." Although it is not docu mented, it is more than likely that Cyrus took possession of Susa and Khuzistan before he conquered Babylon. T h e doc
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umentation of die decline, fall, and eventual assimilation of Elamite territories by the Achaemenid Empire remains one of the major research questions pertaining to the second half of the first millennium B C E . [See also Elamites; and Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert M c C . "Agriculture a n d U r b a n Life in Early South western Iran." Science 136 (1962): 109-122. Alden, J o h n R. " T r a d e a n d Politics in Proto-Elamite Iran." Current Anthropology 23 (1982): 613-640. Algaze, Guillermo. The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilisation. Chicago, 1993. Berghe, Louis Vanden. Bibliographic analytique de I'archeologie de I'Iran ancien. Leiden, 1979. C o m p r e h e n s i v e bibliography of Iranian ar chaeology. (See also 1981, 1987.) Berghe, Louis V a n d e n , a n d E . Haerinck. Bibliographic analytique de I'archeologie de I'Iran ancien: Supplement 1, 1978-1980. Leiden, 1981. Berghe, Louis V a n d e n , a n d E . Haerinck. Bibliographic analytique de I'archeologie de I'Iran ancien: Supplement 2, 1981-198$. Leiden, 1987. Caldwell, Joseph R. Investigations at Tal-i-Iblis. Illinois State M u s e u m Preliminary Reports, 9. Springfield, 1967. Carter, Elizabeth, a n d M a t t h e w W . Stolper, Edam: Surveys of Political History and Archaeology. Berkeley, 1984. Excellent overview of die political history a n d archaeology of Elam. Cohen, Sol. " E n m e r k a r a n d t h e L o r d of Aratta." P h . D . diss., Univer sity of Pennsylvania, 1973. D a m e r o w , Peter, and R o b e r t K . Englund. The Proto-Elamite Texts from Tepe Yahya. Peabody M u s e u m , Harvard University, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 39. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. T h e most recent a n d thorough discussion of the nature of Proto-Elamite texts. de Cardi, Beatrice. Excavations at Bampur: A Third Millennium Settle ment in Persian Baluchistan, 1966. American M u s e u m of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, vol. 51.3. N e w York, 1970. Deshayes, Jean. " L e s fouilles recentes de T u r c n g T e p e : La terrasse haute de la fin du Hie millenaire." Comples Rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Leltres (1975): 522-530. Dollfus, Genevieve. "Djaffarabad, Djowi, Bendebal: Contribution a 1'etude de la Susiane au Ve millenaire et au d6but d u IVe millenaire." Paliorient 4 (1978): 141-167. Dyson, Robert H., Jr. " P r o b l e m s of Protohistoric Iran as Seen from Hasanlu." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24,3 (1965): 193-217. Dyson, Robert PL, Jr. " T h e Archaeological Evidence of the Second Millennium B . C . o n the Persian Plateau," In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 2.1, History of the Middle East and the Aegean Region c. 1800-1380 B.C., edited b y I. E. S. Edwards et al., p p . 686-715. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1973. D y s o n , Robert H . , Jr., and Susan M . Howard. Tappeh Hesar: Reports of the Resttidy Project, 1976. Florence, 1989. An important excavation and reanalysis of this site. E d e n s , Christopher. " I n d u s - A r a b i a n Interaction during the Bronze Age: A Review of E vidence ," In Harappan Civilization: A Recent Perspective, edited by Gregory L . Possehl, p p . 335-364. 2d rev. ed. N e w Delhi, 1993. Fisher, William B., ed. " T h e L a n d of I r a n . " I n Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 1. C a m b r i d g e , 1968. Environmental and ecological aspects of Iran. G h i r s h m a n , R o m a n . Fouilles de Sialk pres de Kashan 1933,1934, 1937. Paris, 1938. G h i r s h m a n , R o m a n . Tchogha Zanbil (Dur Untash), vol. 1, IJX ziggurat;
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vol. 2, Timing's, temples, palais, tombes. Memoires de la Mission A r cheologique en Iran, vol. 39. Paris, 1966-1968. Hakemi, Ali. Catalogue de Texposition: Lut, Shahad "Xabis." T e h r a n , 1972. H i e b e r t , F r e d e r i k T . , and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky. "Central Asia a n d the Indo-Iranian Borderlands." Iran 30 {1992): 1-15. Hinz, Walther. Das Reich Elam. Urban-Biicher, 82. Stuttgart, 1964. Hinz, Walther. "Persia c. 2400-1800 B . C . " In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1.2, Early History of the Middle East, edited by I. E . S. Edwards et al., p p . 644-680. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1971. Hole, Frank, et a t , eds. Prehistory and Human Ecology on the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran. University of Michigan, Memoirs of t h e M u s e u m of Anthropology, n o . 1. A n n Arbor, 1969. Hole, Frank, ed. The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and Society from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest. Washington, D . C . , 1987. Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Sumerian King List. Oriental Institute, Assyriological Studies, 11, Chicago, 1939. Johnson, Gregory A. Local Exchange and Early State Development in Southwestern Iran. University of Michigan, M u s e u m of Anthropol ogy, Anthropological Papers, n o . 51. A n n Arbor, 1973. Kantor, Helene J. " T h e Excavations at Coqa M i s . " I n Proceedings of the IVth Annual Symposium of Archaeological Research in Iran, edited by Firouz Bagherzadeh, p p . 113-142. T e h r a n , 1976. Lamberg-Karlovsky, C . C . " T h e Proto-Elamites o n the Iranian Plateau." Antiquity 52 (1978): 114-120. Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C , and T h o m a s Wight Beale, eds. Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967—197s: The Early Periods. Peabody M u seum, Harvard University, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 38. Cambridge, Mass., 1986. L e B r u n , Alain. "Suse, chantier de 'Acropole 1."' Paliorient 4 (1978): 177-192. L e B r u n , Alain, and Francois Vallat. "L'origine d e l'ecriture a S u s e . " Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran 8 (1978): 1 1 70. Masson, Vadim M . , a n d V. I. Sarianidi. Central Asia: Turkmenia before the Achaemenids. L o n d o n , 1972. Negahban, Ezat O. Excavations at Haft Tepe, Iran. Philadelphia, 1991. Nicholas, Ilene M . The Proto-Elamite Settlement at TUV. M a l y a n E x cavation Reports, vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1990. Nissen, Hans J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. Chicago, 1988. Parpola, Asko. " T h e C o m i n g of the Aryans to Iran a n d India and t h e Cultural and Ethnic Identity of the D a s a s . " Studia Orientalia (Hel sinki) 64 (1988): 195-302. Perrot, Jean. " L e s fouilles de Suse e n 1975." In Proceedings of the IVth Annual Symposium ofArchaeological Research in Iran, edited by Firouz Bagherzadeh, p p . 224-225. T e h r a n , 1976. Porada, Edith, et al. " T h e Chronology of Mesopotamia, ca. 7000-1600 B . C . " In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, edited by Robert W . Ehrich, vol. 1 p p . 77-121, vol. 2, p p . 90-124. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Prickett, Martha. Man, Land and Water: Settlement Distribution and the Development of Irrigation Agriculture in the Rud-i Gushk Drainage, Southeastern Iran. A n n Arbor, 1986. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. Before Writing. Austin, 1992. Schmidt, Erich F . Excavations at Tepe Hissar, Damghan. Philadelphia, 1937. Smith, Philip E, L. " G a n j D a r e h T e p e . " Iran 13 (1975): 178-180. Steinkeller, Piotr. " T h e Question of Marhasi: A Contribution t o the Historical Geography of Iran in the T h i r d Millennium B . C . " Zeit schrift fiir Assyriologie 72 (1982): 237-265. Sumner, William M . "Cultural Developments in t h e K u r River Basin, Iran: A n Archaeological Analysis of Settlement Patterns." P h . D . diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982. T o s i , Maurizio, and Marcello Piperno. "Lithic Technology behind t h e Ancient Lapis Lazuli T r a d e . " Expedition 16 (1973): 15-23.
Vandiver, Pamela B. " T h e Production T e c h n o l o g y of Earthenware C e ramics, 4900-2800 B . C . " I n Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967197$; The Early Periods, edited b y C. C. L a m b e r g - K a r l o v s k y and T h o m a s Wight Beale, p p . 91-100. Peabody M u s e u m , H a r v a r d U n i versity, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 38. C a m bridge, Mass., 1986. Voigt, M a r y M . Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran: The Neolithic Settlement. H a s a n l u Excavation Reports, vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1983. Voigt, M a r y M . , and Robert H . D y s o n , Jr. " T h e Chronology of Iran, ca. 8000-2000 B . C . " In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, edited b y Robert W . Ehrich, p p . 122-125. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Detailed chronological discussion on t h e archaeology of Iran, including a syn optic c o m m e n t o n the major sites. Weiss, Harvey, and T . Cuyler Young, Jr. " T h e M e r c h a n t s of Susa: G o d i n V a n d Plateau-Lowland Relations in t h e L a t e F o u r t h Millen n i u m B . C . " Iran 13 (1975): I—17. Wright, H e n r y T . , a n d Gregory A. Johnson. " P o p u l a t i o n , E x c h a n g e , and Early State Formation in Southwestern I r a n . " American Anthro pologist 77 (1975): 267-289. Young, T . Cuyler, Jr., and Louis D . Levine. Excavations at the Godin Project: Second Progress Report. Royal Ontario M u s e u m , Occasional Paper, 26. T o r o n t o , 1974. Young, T . Cuyler, Jr., et al., eds. The Hilly Flanks and Beyond: Essays on the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia Presented to Robert J. Braidwood. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, n o . 36. Chicago, 1983. C. C.
LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY
Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam With the defeat of the last Achaemenid king, Darius III (336331 B C E ) , and the final victory of Alexander the Great at Gaugamela in 331, the vast empire of die Achaemenids came under Hellenistic rule for the next two hundred years. After Alexander's premature death in 323, his empire became tire center of a political struggle between his Macedonian gen erals as well as witnessing opposition by local dynasts. Al though the Achaemenid system of satrapies (provinces) was basically maintained under Alexander, it seems that even before his death Macedonian satraps (provincial governors) had replaced the Iranians and tiiat the so-called policy of integration between Greeks and Iranians had been aban doned. Despite the lack of sources reporting on the feelings of the local population, there are some Akkadian texts that indicate hostility toward Alexander and the years of his rule are described as bad (Grayson, 1975, p p . 30-36; Oelsner, 1986, p . 52). At the same time we have an indication of position through Greek rebellions in Bactria where the local population joined die Greeks in a bid for independence. Seleucus became satrap of Babylonia in 319, and during the years after Alexander's death and the struggle for power, he enjoyed the support of the population of Babylonia, as recorded in the Chronicle of the Diadochoi. After beating off a challenge from Antigonus that had resulted in a period of war ending in 308, Seleucus became sole ruler of Baby lonia. He soon turned his attention to Iranian satrapies, such as Media and Susiana, which he successfully incorporated into his kingdom. By 302 Iris realm included the inner sa trapies, that is, Media, Persis, and Susiana as well as outer satrapies—the area of eastern Iran and further east. T h e em-
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pire of Seleucus stretched from Mesopotamia in the west to Central Asia in the east. With the expansion of the Hellenistic Empire, coloniza tion followed and, particularly during the reign of Seleucus and his son, Antiochus, a number of Greek colonies were established throughout the Seleucid Empire. In Iran these include Seleucia Eulaeus at Susa and Seleucia Hedyphon elsewhere in the southwest, Rhagae (modern Ray) near Tehran and Hecatompylos, probably the site of Shahr-i Qumis near Damghan in northeastern Iran. In the eastern satapies the most famous of the colonies is Antioch-Margiana, Gjar Kala near modern Merv in Turkmenistan, and at Ai Khanum in northern Afghanistan, the first occupation level dates to the early Seleucid period. In the Persian Gulf, the island of Failaka was also occupied during this time. [See Failaka.]
attention once again to the west and this may have given Andragoras, the Greek satrap of Parthia, the opportunity to declare independence in 245. Already by this time the Parni, a nomadic group of Iranian-speaking tribes, who, according to ancient sources such as Justin and Strabo, were related to the Scythians, had left their homeland in the Atrek Valley (Strabo 11.9.1; Justin 41.4.5-41.5.6). T h e Parni pose two questions that so far have no answers. Did they conquer the province of Astauene around the middle of the third cen tury? Was their center of power at modern Turkmenistan, that is, the area to the northeast of the Elburz and Kopet Dagh mountains? Archaeological evidence for the early Par thian Period in northeastern Iran is meager because archae ological sites are largely unknown. Further excavation of possible Parthian sites in Iran could radically change the usual reconstruction of early Parthian history.
Antiochus, who was already acting as joint ruler at the time of his father's murder, came to tire throne without any apparent opposition, but there is some suggestion of a local Iranian revolt against Seleucid rule at this time. This is ev idenced by tire destruction level of the citadel at Pasargadae in southwestern Iran, which on the basis of numismatic ev idence dates to the end of Seleucus's reign. [See Pasargadae.] In addition, Persian troops in Persis started a mutiny, which resulted in their massacre by Greek infanuy and cavalry, and we also hear of a massacre of three thousand Macedo nian settlers by local troops in Persis. By the time of his death in 261, Antiochus had consolidated the empire of his father. Both Seleucus and Antiochus attempted to foster an image of tolerance and caring for local beliefs and traditions, but at the same time they were keen to stress their dynastic mythological link with the Greek god Apollo.
After the revolt in Bactria under its satrap Diodotos, Arsaces, the eponymous founder of the Parthian Arsacid dy nasty, may have conquered Parthia around 238 and shortly afterwards Hyrcania. This triumph of the Parthians over former Seleucid territories resulted in the campaign of Se leucus II against Arsaces sometime between 231 and 227. The result was a victory for Arsaces partly because of Se leucus's enforced retreat to Asia Minor, where revolts had started. Antiochus III (223-187) successfully supressed re volts in Media and Persia in 220 and began a campaign to the east in 209. Peace was eventually made between the Se leucids and the Parthians, however, and the Parthians prob ably remained vassals of the Seleucids with a certain degree of political freedom. Antiochus returned from his eastern campaign via Arachosia, Drangiana, and Kermania and marched through Persis into Susiana and Seleucia in 205. It was after this campaign that he adopted the title of great king, but he was soon to become the victim of another grow ing force. In 190 the Seleucid Empire fell to the Romans, and Antiochus himself was brutally murdered while plun dering a temple in Elymais.
T h e policy of new foundations and refoundations contin ued under Antiochus and his successors. These included poleis or cities as well as military occupations or strathmoi. Nihavand-Laodicea, near Hamadan, was an important Greek city, which was placed snategically on the main route from Media to Babylonia. At nearby Kangavar, the monu mental architecture and tire pottery indicate some Greek Hellenistic influence. Susa in the southwest became a Greek city with Greek law. T h e various architectural remains such as a gymnasium and a theater with inscriptions in Greek testify to its stature as a city. During the corulership of Seleucus and Antiochus, the latter had received the eastern part of the empire with its center in Babylonia, and Seleucus had moved his capital from Seleucia on the Tigris to Antiochea on the Orontes in Syria. T h e reason behind this shift was the ongoing struggle for power in the west between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, which resulted in the Syrian Wars of 274-271, 260253, and 246-225. [See Seleucia on the Tigris; Antioch on Orontes; Ptolemies; Seleucids; and Alexandrian Empire.] P a r t h i a n P e r i o d . Danger in the east from the Parthians did not emerge until the middle of the third century during the reign of Seleucus II. T h e Third Syrian War diverted
Thereafter the rise and expansion of the Parthian empire began. Phraates I (c. 1 7 6 - 1 7 1 ) successfully moved the boundaries to the south of the Elburz Mountains and tire southern shores of the Caspian Sea, but a significant break through came only with the accession of his brother, Mithridates I, to the throne in 1 7 1 . T h e n a new period began in the history of the Arsacid Parthians. After recapturing areas in the east, Mithridates turned his attention to the west where his most important task was to conquer Media for access to Mesopotamia. This process probably took several years, and a Greek inscription on the Herakles relief from Bisitun in western Iran (see Vanden Berghe, 1984, pi. 10) shows that parts of Media were still under Seleucid control between 149 and 148, thus dating the actual transfer of power after 148. [See Bisitun.] T h e conquest of Mesopota mia was likewise not a swift and straightforward matter, as indicated by contemporary cuneiform tablets (Debevoise, 1969, p. 22, n. 99). After a long struggle against the Seleucid
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king Demetrius II, the Parthians finally gained the upper hand. Mithridates was probably crowned in Seleucia on die Tigris in 141, and in die same year his rule was acknowl edged as far south as Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. After these successes the king soon had to turn his atten tion to the eastern provinces where he successfully dealt with an invasion by the Saka nomads. While Mithridates I was fighting in the east, part of his army left behind in Meso potamia entered Elymais and captured Susa, which had be come independent under the local Elymaian ruler Kamnaskires I. By the time of his death in 138 or 137 Mithridates' empire had reached its maximum extent; he had trans formed the insecure Parthian kingdom into an empire that stretched from eastern Bactria to Mesopotamia. However, his successors were faced with invasions on both eastern and western frontiers, and it was only the accession of a second able ruler, Mithridates II (c. 124-87), tiiat saved the empire. The new ruler first turned his attention to Babylonia, where an Arab called Plyspaosines had formed the state of Characene at die head of die Persian Gulf. After his victory in southern Mesopotamia, he turned his attention to the north where large areas were annexed in 113. At diis time we hear of direct interference of the Parthians in the affairs of Armenia and contact and conflict with Rome (Strabo 11.14.15). Mithridates II restored die empire of the Arsacids to its maximum extent, and his close control over the empire as well as the overland trade routes gave a great boost to trading activities. Parthia by now seems to have been in control of the so-called Silk Road, which passed through its territories, connecting Rome with China. T h e Parthians were probably beginning to profit from their position as middlemen in this overland trade and the growing demand of Rome for luxury goods from the East. Mithridates' increase in power is reflected in his changing tide on his coins. As a young king wearing a diadem, he called himself "the great king Arsaces, (god) manifest." As an aged king he wore a tall bejeweled tiara and diadem, and die accompanying legend reads "the great king of kings, Ar saces. . . ." According to cuneiform tablets from Babylonia the new title "king of kings" was introduced around 109. By the end of his reign, however, there were internal prob lems, which were to become a recurrent feature in Parthian history. Babylonian tablets of 91 B C E mention a rival ldng, Gotarzes, who had control over Babylonia, and Mithridates' power probably extended over Iran and northern Mesopo tamia. Gotarzes may be the same figure who appears on the so-called Mithridates relief at Bisitun as satrap of satraps. After Mithridates' death in 87, a new ruler, Orodes II, suc ceeded to the throne. During his reign Roman forces under Crassus came face-to-face witii the Parthian army in 53, under Surena at Carrhae in Syria. T h e result was devastat ing for the Roman army, which was helpless against the Par thian cavalry and its hail of arrows. By now the Euphrates
was definitely recognized as the frontier between the two superpowers. After Mark Antony's unsuccessful march into Media in 36, a period of peace set in between Parthia and Rome. This new peaceful relationship must have provided a boost to the trade of luxury goods across the Euphrates from the east to the west. Internally Parthian history was overshadowed by rivalry, the emergence of contenders to the throne, and the murder of most of die rulers by their sons or wives. Under Artabanus the superpowers again came into conflict over Armenia, and when die Parthian nobility became discontent with die growing power of Artabanus, they turned to Rome for help. After Tiridates, a grandson of Phraates IV was sent by the Romans to Parthia in 35 C E . Artabanus fled to Hyrcania where he gatiiered forces. H e returned to Mesopotamia, ex pelled Tiridates, and became sole ruler in 36. Artabanus's son and successor, Vardanes II, was soon op posed by a certain Gotarzes II, who may have been a brotiier of the former Gotarzes, but their relationship is unclear. T h e town of Seleucia began a revolt and forced the two con tenders to the throne to come to a temporary agreement in 45. Vardanes was murdered in 47 during a hunting expe dition. It was probably at about this time that Elymais in southwestern Iran rebelled against Parthian supremacy and the Elymaians began to issue their own coins by 75. Their control over Susa is evidenced by the find of Elymaian coins at the city. After the death of Vardanes, Gotarzes became die sole ruler but was soon opposed by some of die Partiiian nobility, who again turned to Rome for help. Gotarzes cap tured and killed die Roman puppet king Meherdates. T h e jousting relief at Bisitun near Kermanshah seems to com memorate his victory (Herrmann, 1977, p. 53). Gotarzes himself died in 51. Vonones, apparentiy king of Media, now came to the throne but was soon succeeded by his son Vologases I (c. 51-78). Once again tiiere was conflict with Rome over Ar menia but in 63 CE peace was made. [See Armenia.] In ad dition, Vologases was soon faced witii a revolt by one of his own sons, Vardanes III but soon reestablished power and gained control over the country. T h e last years of Vologases' reign were troubled by the advance of the nomadic tribe of the Alani from die Black Sea area. Despite internal and ex ternal problems Vologases' rule succeeded in securing Parthia's position and consolidating its share of the growing trade between die west and the Persian Gulf. During Vol ogases' long reign a few contenders to the throne, namely Pacorus and Osroes, issued coins. Osroes may have been in control over Babylonia and Elymais while Vologases was die "king of kings." Such a division of power was to become a characteristic feature of Parthian politics, indicating the weakness of central authority. In 114 Trajan invaded Ar menia, northern Mesopotamia, and also furtiier south but his successor Hadrian made peace with Parthia. During the long reign of Vologases IV (148-191) relations
PERSIA: Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam with Rome were calm only until the death of Antoninus Pius in 161. For some unknown reason, probably because of eco nomic problems, Vologases declared war on Rome after the accession of Marcus Aurelius. By now trade routes were under die control of Palmyrene merchants who were also keeping them under their protection. Thus, Parthia was no longer in charge of the east-west traffic of luxury goods. Having advanced into Parthian territory in Mesopotamia, the Roman army was forced to retreat in 166 only because of an epidemic of smallpox. T h e end of the Parthian era is marked by Roman ad vances into northern and also southern Mesopotamia under Septimius Severus (193-211). Soon after Vologases came to the Parthian throne, he was challenged by his brother Artabanus IV, who was in control of Media and Susa by 216 C E , T h e so-called Artabanus relief from Susa dated to 215 shows the enthroned Artabanus handing over the ring of power to the satrap of Susa (Colledge, 1967, pi. 29). Elymais at this time was ruled by its local kings. Rock reliefs from sites such as Tang-i Sarvak, Shimbar, and Hung-i Nauruzi, together widi the reliefs and sculpture from Masjid-i Sulei man and Bard-i Nishandeh document a certain degree of independence (Colledge, 1967, pis. 17-20; Vanden Berghe and Schippmann, 1985). [See Susa.] When the request of the Roman emperor Caracalla to marry a daughter of Artabanus was rejected, he went to war against the Parthians in 216, and his forces attacked Media. Artabanus fled to the east but returned when Macrinus, the new Roman emperor, offered him peace. A tteaty was finally signed in 218. [See Parthians; Roman Empire.] S a s a n i a n P e r i o d . Artabanus had successfully withstood the Roman advance but was soon to become the victim of an internal usurper, who finally put an end to Parthian rule. In 224 Artabanus was lulled at Hormizdgan by the forces of Ardashir, the son of Papak, the local ruler of Istakhr in Pars and of the house of the legendary Sasan. This victory of the Sasanians was commemorated on the rock relief of Tang-i Ab at Firuzabad in Fars. Ardashir went on to capture Ctesiphon, in 226. Before 230 he had consolidated his position as the new king of lungs of a dynasty that was eager to stress its lineage from the Achaemenids kings. Zoroastrianism be came the state religion, and coins of Ardashir show a com bination of the fire altar and the royal throne that emphasize the unity of the religion and the state. In the following years Ardashir concentrated on his west ern enemy, Rome, and the annexation of territories in north ern Mesopotamia, in particular Hatra, which had fallen into Roman hands in the late Parthian period. T h e advance of the Sasanians into Roman occupied territories resulted in a series of clashes, first in 242 with the emperor Gordian III, with Phillip the Arab who made peace in 244, and finally with Valerian. These historic events and campaigns are doc umented in the inscriptions and reliefs at Kaaba Zardusht, Naqsh-i Rustam, Bishapur, and Darab. After 239 Ardashir
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appointed his son Shapur as coregent, and he became sole ruler after the death of his father in 241. Other military and political victories of this time include the conquest of Ar menia in the northwest and a final defeat of the Kushan Empire in the east. New Sasanian cities were built. They include Ardashir Khurrah (Gur Ardashir, Firuzabad), Jundeshapur, and Bis hapur, all three situated in the region of Fars, the homeland of the Sasanians. In religious matters Shapur showed a cer tain degree of tolerance, which is best evidenced in his re lationship with Mani, the prophet of the Manichaeans, who spent some years at the royal court and enjoyed religious freedom. After the death of Shapur between 270 and 273 and during the reign of Hormizd I and Bahram I, the policy of tolerance was to change as the power of the Zoroastrian priesthood grew, and finally under Kardir, the high priest of Istakhr, Mani was executed in 276. During the reign of Bah ram many Manichaeans, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists were killed. Only after the accession of Bahram III in 293 did tolerance toward minority groups became evident again. Politically the old conflict with Rome continued, espe cially over Armenia, which was lost to the Romans during the reign of Narseh (293-302), a son of Shapur I, in 297. By now the Tigris had become the official border between the Roman and Sasanian empires. Not until the reign of Shapur II (c. 309-379), a grandson of Shapur I, did the Sasanian empire once again reach its maximum extent. Shapur's main adversary in the early years of his reign was the emperor Constantine, who had converted to Christianity in 312 and later transferred his capital to Byzantium, later called Constantinople. [See Byzantine Empire; Constanti nople.] T h e recognition of Christianity as the official religion of Rome resulted in the persecution of Christians. The latter part of Shapur's long reign of seventy years was overshad owed by continuous clashes with Rome under the emperors Constantine II and Julian and war over Armenia, which fi nally resulted in an official division of Armenia in 377. The Sasanians now had a new enemy in the East, the Hephthalites, whose first attack on Sasanian territory dates to 427 during the reign of Yazdigird I (c. 399-421), known by Is lamic historians as "the Sinner" because of his initially tol erant views toward Christians. This situation was to change at the end of his rule when Christians set fire to a Zoroastrian fire temple in Fars, and mass executions of the Christians followed throughout the empire. After his death, Bahrain, one of his three sons who had grown up at the court of the king of Hira, succeeded in gaining support from the nobility and was crowned as Bahram V in 421. He was hailed in Persian literature and art as Bahram Gur ("ass"), the skillful hunter. His successor, Yazdigird II (439-457), continued the persecution of Christians in Armenia that had begun earlier. His vizier, Mihr Narseh, tried to impose Zoroastri anism as the state religion. After Yazdigird's death in 457 there was a lengthy struggle
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between different contenders to the throne, which finally ended in Peroz's victory in 459 with the help of the Hephthalites. When a period of drought paralyzed tire country a few years later, however, Peroz turned against his Hephthalite allies in 465. He and his son were imprisoned, and only after a heavy payment to die Hephthalites was he re leased. Once again Peroz went into battle against the eastern enemy, but the campaign proved abortive, and in 484 Peroz lost his life. The Hephthalites advanced into eastern Iran and forced the Sasanian state to pay an annual tax. An important event during Peroz' reign was the formation of the Nestorian church named after Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople. In 4 8 4 a meeting of Iranian Christians in Jundeshapur marked the official beginning of this denomi nation. Throughout their long history, the Nestorians were involved in many struggles with other Christians. Peace with the Hephthalites was made under Valkash (484-488) but internal struggles overshadowed the reign of this king. Finally, in 488, Kavad, a son of Peroz came to the throne. The most significant feature of his reign was the rise of Mazdakite movement under its leaders, Mazdak and a certain Zardusht. It was initially of a religious nature but then developed into a social uprising, attacking the power of the nobility. This revolutionary movement, which en joyed Kavad's support at first, was temporarily halted in 496 when the nobility and the Zoroastrian clergy joined forces against the king and imprisoned him in Khuzistan. Kavad managed to escape and sought refuge with the Hephthalites. A few years later he returned with a Hephthalite army and removed his brother Zamasp from the throne. During the latter part of his reign, Kavad ended his support for the Mazdakites, and Mazdak was executed around 528. By this time Kavad had appointed his son Khusrau I Anushirvan "of the immortal soul" (r. 531-579) as his successor. Khus rau introduced a series of reforms, particularly in connection with the army, the nobility, and taxation, which were prob ably inspired by the Mazdakite movement. A new social level was created, the class of the dihqan or land-owning nobility which stood up against the powerful feudal lords or vassals. In 532 Khusrau made "eternal" peace with Byzantium, but it lasted only for a short while, and war broke out once again. A so-called fifty-year peace began in 556, enabling Khusrau to turn his attention to the Hephthalites in the east. He now had the support of powerful allies, the Turks, and together they defeated the Hephthalites. The result was that the Turks became the eastern neighbors of the Sasanian Empire. Soon a coalition of Byzantium and Turks excluded the Sasanians from the trade of silk, however, and this move led to yet another confrontation between Iran and Byzan tium in 572. Before peace could be declared Khusrau died in 579. The Byzantine Empire now proved crucial in the succession to the throne. When Bahram Chubin, a Parthian general of the house of Mihran, who had successfully
pushed back an advance of the Turks under Khusrau's fa ther, Flormizd IV (579-590) crowned himself as Bahram VI at Ctesiphon, Khusrau fled to Byzantium where he was given support. With a large Byzantine army Khusrau started his campaign against Bahram Chubin in 591, who fled to the east where he was murdered. During the second part of Khusrau's reign many of the old nobility and generals who had sided with Bahram were removed. His support for the Christian church is shown by his marriage to Mariam, a Byzantine princess, and his legendary love for Shirin, an Armenian princess. This situation created enemies amongst the Zoroastrian clergy. In addition, mistakes in Khusrau's foreign policy and particularly his wars with the Lachmid kingdom and the execution of their king, Numan, proved to be costly in the long run. Also, Khusrau turned against By zantium in 603 after the murder of his ally, the pro-Sasanian emperor Mauritius. Initially the Sasanians enjoyed victories and recovered important cities in Syria and Mesopotamia. Another part of the Sasanian army reconquered Armenia. The new Byzantine emperor was no longer able to withstand the advance of the Sasanian army, which reached Jerusalem in 614, supposedly taking the Holy Cross with them to Cte siphon. In 615 the Persian army reached the Bosporus, op posite Constantinople, and in 619 they conquered Egypt, where they went up the Nile to Nubia. T h e Sasanian empire had reached its maximum extent, only to fall to the forces of Heraclius in 627; in 628 the Byzantine army entered Cte siphon, the capital of the Sasanian empire. But the final blow came from an Arab army under the banner of Islam in 637 at Qadisiya near Ctesiphon. A further defeat followed at Nihavand in 642 and YazdigirdHI (632-651), the last Sasanian king, was forced to flee to Merv, where he was murdered. [See Ctesiphon; Sasanians.] The splendor of the art of the late Sasanian period is best seen in the rock reliefs of Khusrau II at Taq-i Bustan near Kermanshah. Here, the king appears in an investiture scene flanked by Anahita and Ahura Mazda, and another relief shows him as a knight in armor riding a horse. T h e reliefs on the sides of the iwan depict scenes of the royal hunt with the king standing in a boat and surrounded by boars and elephants (Herrmann, 1977, pp. 132-135; Vanden Berghe, 1984, pis. 37-39)Among the sites of the late Sasanian period, Takht-i Su leiman in Iranian Azerbaijan, is especially important. Built around a lake, the site was one of the most important reli gious centers of the time. It is assumed that the Gushnasp fire, the fire of the warriors, burned eternally. BIBLIOGRAPHY Christensen, Arthur E m a n u e l . LTran sous les Sassanides. 2d. ed. O s nabriick, Germany, 1 9 7 1 . Colledge, Malcolm A. R . The Parthians, L o n d o n , 1 9 6 7 . Curtis, John. Ancient Persia, L o n d o n , 1 9 8 8 .
PERSIA: Persia in the Islamic Period Debevoise, Neilson C. A Political History of Parthia. 2d ed. N e w York, 1969. Grayson, A. Kirk. Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts. T o r o n t o Se mitic T e x t s a n d Studies, 3. T o r o n t o , 1975. H e r r m a n n , Georgina. The Iranian Revival. Oxford, 1977. Oelsner, Joachim. Materialien zur babylonischen Gesellschaft undKultnr in hellenistischer zeit. Budapest, 1986. S c h i p p m a n n , Klaus. Grundziige der Parthischen Geschichte. Darmstadt, 1980. S c h i p p m a n n , Klaus. Grundziige des Geschichte des Sasaniden Reiches. Darmstadt, 1990. Sherwin-White, Susan M . , and Amelie Kuhrt. From Sardis to Samar kand. L o n d o n , 1993. Vanden Berghe, L . Reliefs rupestres de Than Ancien. Brussels, 1984. Vanden Berghe, L . , a n d Klaus S h i p p m a n n . Les reliefs rupestres d'Elyma'ide {Iran) de I'epoque parthe. G h e n t , 1985. Yarshater, Ehsan. Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3.1. The Seleucid, Par thian, and Sasanian Periods. C a m b r i d g e and N e w York, 1983. VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS
Persia in the Islamic Period T h e Islamic period in Persia (Iran) was inaugurated politi cally and historically by die crucial defeat of die Sasanian dynasty in the batde of Nehavend in 642 CE. T h e transitional period, in which it is difficult to distinguish between the preIslamic and Islamic periods, lasted for some time and is un evenly discernible in different parts of Iran, as well as in the various spheres of cultural and artistic activity. Throughout the Middle Ages and even beyond, the Persian-Iranian world comprised vast territories outside the frontiers of modern Iran, such as Afghanistan in the east and Bukhara and Samarkand in the northeast. T h e heterogeneous nature of the population, then, with its tribal affiliations and local political developments, contributed to the creation of a number of centers of cultural importance. The centers es sentially revolved around princely courts tiiat were more or less autonomous and often in competition with one another. This was the case for major capitals—Merv, Bukhara, Ni shapur, Rayy/Tehran and Samarkand—each of which be came the focus of important intellectual developments while retaining distinct artistic characteristics in pottery, architec ture, and literature. [See Nishapur.] In the Late Middle Ages, other centers—Herat, Tabriz (painting), Kashan (ceramics), Kazvin, and Shiraz—rose to fame, culminating, in the seventeenth century, in the ex traordinary role played by Isfahan as the cradle and capital of the Safavid dynasty, with its remarkable urbanization pro ject that included a distinctive system of irrigation based on connected underground channels, or qanats (Goblot, 1979). [See Irrigation; Isfahan.] Throughout this period Iran, de spite its adoption of Islam and the Arabic script, retained the Persian language. [See Persian.] T h e country maintained a distinct identity from the Muslim world while remaining part of it. One of the oldest mosques in Iran has been excavated by Roman Ghirshman (1948, p p . 77-79) at Susa. [See Susa.]
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Its plan appears to reflect the impact of the Mesopotamian mosque type, which can be ttaced to the Early 'Abbasid mosque in Isfahan (Galdieri, 1984). The first mosque with a pointed arch occurs, apparently, at Damghan in about 760. By the twelfth century, the plan most typical of Iranian mosques, that of the four iwans, is found at Isfahan. [See Mosque.] Iran's architecture is essentially in brick. Its use entailed a number of distinctive techniques that became integral fea tures of Iranian architecture, particularly in the Islamic pe riod. One of these techniques was the use of stucco deco ration. At an early stage, smcco decoration appears in various parts of the Nayin mosque; this form of embellish ment continued in use throughout the Middle Ages, as can be seen in the classic example of Gunbad-i Alavian near Hamadan/Ecbatana. [SeeEcbatana.] Moreover, die medium of brick stimulated die imagination of artists and craftsmen, who created, with much virtuosity, the most extraordinary works of art, such as the incomparable tomb of Ismail the Samanid in Bukhara (c. 907). More than a dozen patterns were created in the tomb's unadorned brick. The towertomb at Gunbad-i Qabus in die Gurgan area (c. 1006) dis plays the opposite concept: apart from a few cartouches with inscriptions, the monument is devoid of decoration. It relies for its effect on its very striking plan and the perfect exe cution of its severe brickwork. The next step was the inte gration of glazed tiles into brick structures; eventually, in the Safavid period, the color scheme of the tiles came to dom inate the architecture. [See Tile.] Iran has undergone excavations that concentrated pri marily on the glory of ancient Iran: at Susa, for example, initiated by the French as early as the nineteenth century, along with those at Persepolis and, more recentiy, Pasarga dae, an exception was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's excavations at Nishapur. It was only after the World War II that Iran's Islamic period began to attract interest. [See Per sepolis; Pasargadae.] Meanwhile, many clandestine digs have been carried out (e.g., at Gurgan and Rayy, to mention only the most flagrant instances), destroying archaeological contexts and dispersing items on the international antiquities market. [See Etiiics and Archaeology.] Pottery, metalwork, textiles, and jewelry have found their way into collections, though they lack adequate data as to their provenance. Islamic archaeology in Iran has concentrated on a rela tively limited number of sites. In the northeast, the abovementioned excavations of Nishapur took place as early as the 1930s. Istakhr, in the center of the country, has yielded important finds of coins, pottery, and other artifacts that are being studied by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. In the south, the port of Siraf was excavated for a number of seasons beginning in 1966 (Whitehouse, 1968, pp. 1-22, and subsequent reports), contributing much to what is understood about the continuity of Sasanian traditions into Islamic Iran and their ultimate integration.
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Finally, Susa in the southwest, one of the richest sites in ancient Iran, also yielded a considerable amount of impor tant information for the Islamic period (Boucharlat and Labrousse, 1979, pp. 155-237; Rosen-Ayalon, 1974). One salient feature clearly emerges: an imaginary diagonal line can be drawn between the very different cultural spheres of the northeast and the southwest. For the ceramics found at Susa, the cultural affiliations are with the area to its west, Mesopotamia, with close connections to Samarra in Iraq; the pottery of Nishapur, however, lacks some of the typical blue-and-white and lusterwares and displays a range of rather different types, such as brown and black-on-white wares. [See Samarra, article on Islamic Period.] Unlike the pottery, the spectacular metalwork for which Iran is known has, as yet, no archaeological documentation. Most of the metal artifacts found at Nishapur are rather modest, so that analysis of the stratigraphic contexts of pieces found in the excavations cannot provide answers to the many unsolved questions surrounding metalware. Some of the most original products of Islamic pottery were devised and manufactured in Iran. The Minai family of ceramics, with its polychrome overglaze painting (thir teenth-fourteenth centuries), is probably the most famous, while tire lusterwares in the distinct styles of Rayy and Kashan comprise another category. Iranian potters attempted to compete with Chinese porcelain ware; frit wares were invented under the Seljuks (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), and Chinese wares were imitated under the Safavids (sev enteenth century). [See also Ceramics, article on Ceramics of the Islamic Pe riod; and Sasanians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Boucharlat, Remy, and Audran Labrousse. " U n e sucrerie d'epoque islamique sur la rive droite d u Chaour a Suse." Cahiers de la Dele gation Archeologique Frangaise en Iran 10 (1979): 155-237. Galdieri, Eugenio. Esjahan: Masgid~i Gum'a. 3 vols. Translated from Italian by Ian McGilvray. R o m e , 1984. Ghirshman, Roman. " U n e mosquee de Suse du debut de FH6gire." Bulletin d'Etudes Orientates 12 (1947-1948): 77-79. Goblot, Henri. Les Qanats, une technique d'acquisition de I'eau. Paris, 1979. Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam. La paterie islamique: Ville royale de Suse IV. Paris, 1974. Whitehouse, David. "Excavations at STraf: First Interim R e p o r t . " Iran 6 (1968): 1-22. MYRIAM ROSEN-AYAI.ON
PERSIAN. T h e dominant Iranian language, Persian in its oldest documented form was the language of tire Achaemenids (559-330 B C E ) . In its middle form, Persian was the official language of the Sasanian empire (227-651 C E ) . It emerged in its new form after islamization in the middle of the seventh century CE. The Medes, who preceded the Achaemenids, spoke a language closely related to Old Per
sian. The Parthians (247 B C E - 2 2 7 C E ) , who reasserted Ira nian rule after the interregnum of Alexander and the Seleucids, spoke a language closely related to Middle Persian. These Iranian-speaking empires, centered in Iran, at one time or another extended over two vast areas: (1) much of the Near East and (2) southern Eurasia and the northern Indian subcontinent. As such, they played a major role in the political, cultural, and religious history of two major regions of the world. Geographically, Parsa and the western Iranian plateau as the bridgehead of the ancient Iranian empires represent the area of the southernmost extension of Iranian speakers, whose historical areas were the vast expanses of southern Eurasia from the western shores of the Black Sea to China. The English term Persian derives from the Greek Persis and Old Persian Parsa, and originally referred to the south west region of the Iranian plateau, where the Achaemenids first established their empire. They referred to themselves as "Parsa" or as rulers "in Parsa." T h e arabicized form of the term is Fars, from which derives the Arabo-Persian des ignation Farsi for the language. Although the term Persian in its origin referred to a specific region and its local dialect, the term Iranian refers to the totality of the members of the large family of related languages called Iranian. The Iranian tongues are a branch of the Indo-Iranian or Aryan family of Indo-European languages together with the Indo-Aryan and Nuristani languages. T h e latter are found in minute remnants in the mountainous Pakistan-Afghani stan border areas, and recognized as distinct only in this century (Morgenstierne, 1973). The term arya, whose suggested meanings includes "no ble," was a self-designation in the Old Persian inscriptions, in the Avcsta and Zoroastrian books, as well as in the Old Indie Vedas (Schmitt, 1986; 1989, pp. 1-3). It came to refer specifically to the western Aryans, that is, the "Iranians." P e r s i a a n d Iran. The name of the country Iran derives from Old Iranian aryanam khshathram "realm of the Aryas" (Schmitt, 1989, pp. 1-3), later eran shahr, Modern Persian Iranshahr, ultimately reduced to Iran. T h e confusion be tween the terms Persia and Iran stems from the political de cision of the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty early in the twentieth century to identify his country ethnically and all inclusively as Aryan. It appears that the areas where Indo-Iranian originally be gan to develop were the middle Volga River and Kazakh stan. From there the ancestors of the later Indo-Aryan branch first moved south into Central Asia, and further south into eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northwest India in the early second millennium B C E . These were followed by moves of the ancestors of the later Iranian speakers across southern Eurasia to the west, east, and south, probably be ginning around tire middle of the second millennium. In the eastern regions, there appears to have occurred a long pro cess of symbiosis and interchange with Indo-Aryan, by
PERSIAN which the latter became increasingly absorbed and ulti mately confined to the southeastern areas of this expanse and the northwestern areas of the Indian subcontinent. In the western regions, between the Caspian and the western shores of the Black Sea, there appear to have occurred sim ilar processes with other Indo-European branches. This tentative reconstruction is essentially based on the later linguistic evidence. T h e correlation of linguistic and ethnic dynamics and archaeological evidence is complex by necessity. T h e most prominent Indo-Iranian archaeological cultures during the second millennium are Andronovo, Namazga, and Tazabagyab in the delta of the Amu Darya River on the southeastern Aral Sea. Forays to tire south as well appear to have happened fre quently but without lasting results. Best known are the lin guistic Indo-Aryan-type traces in texts of the Mitanni period of the fifteenth century. Similarly, there may have been Indo-European or pre-Indo-Iranian influences on the Kassites in the central Zagros in western Iran. [See Kassites.] T h e Iranians in Eurasia included such better-known peo ples as the Scythians, known in the classical periods as the most numerous barbarians beside the Celts. The Scythians' forays found them in Poland and Siberia; their cousins, the Saka, reigned in eastern Eurasia, Afghanistan, and nordiern India. Other prominent Eurasian Iranians were the Sarmatians and Alans (from *arya-) in the areas between the Black and Caspian Seas, who at one time entered the Hungarian plains; and the widely urbanized Sogdians who resided be tween the Aral Sea and Chinese Turkistan, a vital link in east-west commerce. It is possible that the Cimmerians, who were driven by the Scythians from the eastern Pontic areas across the Caucasus in the eighth century B C E had a strong Iranian component. As to the plateau of Iran proper, the Medes, probably from across the Caucasus were the first Iranians to extend their rule in northwestern Iran. Simultaneously, groups of Persians appear to have made forays from the northeast of the plateau and moved further to the west and finally south. Both were first mentioned as Mada and Parsua in inscrip tions of Salmaneser III (858-854). [See Medes.] Overall, it appears that the East, including Sistan, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, remained a major linguistic and cul tural Iranian center during the first millennium. In fact, it retained its status throughout the first millennium C E and beyond, until its devastation by the Mongols during the first half of the thirteenth century (Geiger and Kuhn, 1895-1904, vol. 2; Grantovskij, 1970; Burrow, 1973; Ghirshman, 1977; Parpola, 1988; Renfrew, 1987, pp. 178-210; Mallory, 1989, pp. 227-31; Anthony, 1991; Boyce, 1992, with implications for Zoroastrianism). Dialectology a n d Periodization. T h e documented Ira nian languages are divided into three diachronic (chrono logical) stages—Old Iranian, Middle Iranian, and Modern Iranian—roughly following major political changes. T h e
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Iranian languages are divided into two major dialects: (1) South Iranian, which comprises the languages of the Iranian plateau and (2) North Iranian, which covers the remainder of the Iranian languages. (The ttaditional terminological dis tinction, still often followed, is West vs. East Iranian.) In turn, South Iranian is divided into two subdialects: (1) Southwest Iranian, which comprises Persian and related di alects, and (2) Northwest Iranian, sometimes called Median, which includes the remainder of South Iranian. (For general overviews, see Geiger and Kuhn, 1895-1904; Schmitt, 1989, pp. 1-3; and for early history, see Mayrhofer, 1989; Schmitt, 1989, pp. 25-31; Schmitt, 1994). Old Iranian languages. Only two languages, Old Per sian and Avestan, are well documented. Old Persian was the court language of the Achaemenids. It is attested by a rather limited corpus of inscriptions and is probably based on the local dialect of the province Parsa (Kent, 1953; Brandenstein and Mayrhofer, 1964; Schmitt 1989, pp. 56-85). Avestan (probably a caique on Greek episteme "received knowledge"), the sacred language of the Zoroastrian texts, was originally spoken in northeastern Iran and Central Asia. It is documented by a much more extensive corpus, ranging from the Gafhas of Zarathushtra (possibly dating from be fore 1000 BCE) to the so-called Younger Avestan texts, some of which in origin may have predated Zarathushtra, and later compositions. The oldest preserved manuscripts date from the thirteenth century B C E (Jackson, 1892; Reichelt, 1909; Beekes, 1988; Kellens, 1989). These two languages are also known from references in other languages (Hinz, 1975; Schmitt, 1989, pp. 86-94). A number of other Old Iranian languages are attested only by a small number of words, names, and phrases scattered throughout the writings of additional languages such as Old Scythian in southern Russia, Old Parthian in eastern Iran, and Old Sogdian in Central Asia. Old Persian and Avestan are southwestern and northern dialects respectively. Within Avestan both diachronic and dialectical differences are apparent. Old Persian has several dialectical features, including "Medisms" and incipient Middle Persian features in later inscriptions. Middle Iranian languages. The beginning of the Mid dle Iranian stage can be dated to the third century B C E , based on the evidence found in later Achaemenid inscriptions (Schmitt, 1989, pp. 95-105; Sundermann, 1989, pp. 106113). Although Middle Persian was replaced by New Per sian beginning about the seventh century C E , some other Middle Iranian languages are documented in the thirteenth century. The Middle Iranian languages described in tire fol lowing paragraphs are documented by texts. Middle Persian was the official language of tire Sasanians. It is best attested in the writings of their state religion, Zo roastrianism, most of which date from the ninth century C E but represent an earlier stage of the language. Middle Per sian was also used by Christians, and it was one of the
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church languages of the Manichaeans in eastern Iran and Central Asia. Mani (d. 277) himself, though an Aramaic speaker, composed a book in Middle Persian for Shapur I. It was used until the eleventh century, as evidenced, e.g., by the signature of witnesses on a copper-plate grant to a Syrian Church in southern India (probably ninth century) and by coins and inscriptions of several local Iranian dynasties (Nyberg, 1964; 1974; Heston, 1976; Brunner, 1977; MacKenzie 1971; Sundermann, 1989, pp. 138-164). A dialect of the Northwestern subgroup, Parthian was the official language of the Parthians or Arsacids and was spo ken in northeastern and partially also northwestern Iran. There are also extensive Manichaean texts in Parthian, which provide evidence for the continuation of this language in Central Asia until the tenth century (Ghilain, 1939; Hes ton, 1976;Brunner, 1977; Sundermann, 1989,pp. 1 1 4 - 1 3 7 ) . Several languages comprise the northern dialects (SimsWilliams, 1989, pp. 165-172). Sogdian, spoken from Cen tral Asia to the borders of China, is likewise found in many Manichaean texts (Gershevitch, 1954; Sims-Williams, 1989, pp. 173-192). Khwarezmian was spoken in the area south of the Aral Sea and is attested mainly by glosses to Arabic texts (Humbach, 1989). Saka appears in many Buddhist texts found in Chinese Turkestan (Emmerick, 1968, 1989). Bactrian in northern Afghanistan is evidenced by several inscriptions and texts mainly from the first to the third cen tury C E (Humbach and Grahmann, 1966; Humbach, 1989). Scytho-Sarmatian and Alanian were used in the northern Pontic (Bielmeier, 1989; Sims-Williams, 1989, pp. 230235)-
Median and Parthian dialects in centtal and northwestern Iran, and also in northern Iraq, and eastern Turkey. The modern northeastern languages include Pashto, which is widely spoken in Afghanistan and Paldstan; Yaghnobi in southern Tajikistan, which is the sole remnant of Sogdian; and a great variety of dialects in northeastern and central Afghanistan and Paldstan. Finally, Ossetic is isolated in the central Caucasus, and the last remnant of the ScythoSarmatian dialects that in antiquity were spoken over vast areas of South Russia (see respective chapters in Schmitt, 1989). Writing S y s t e m s . Most Iranian scripts are varieties of and developments from Aramaic, which was the adminis trative language of the Achaemenid Empire. Subsequentiy Iranian languages—first Parthian, then Middle Persian— were written in variants of Aramaic. Middle Persian is most familiar from the Zoroastrian books in the script Book-Pahlavi in which the original twenty-two letters had coalesced to some fourteen distinct shapes in cursive and partially con nected ligatures. T h e Avestan script, which was highly dif ferentiated to allow the smallest record of the standard pro nunciation of the sacred texts, was developed out of Book-Pahlavi (Morgenstierne, 1942; Windfuhr, 1972). Scripts not derived from Aramaic are the thirty-six signs of Old Persian cuneiform, which were invented for die in scriptions of Darius I (Diakonoff, 1979; Windfuhr, 1970; LeCoq, 1974); the Greek alphabet of Bactrian; and the cen ttal Asian Brahmi variant used for tire Saka documents. [See also Parthians; Persia; Persians; and Sasanians.]
Middle Persian is a successor, albeit with more typical "southwestern" features, of Old Persian. Parthian does not have a known direct ancestor but shows certain northern features attributable to the origin of the dynasty from among the Parni between the Caspian and Aral Seas. N o direct successor of Avestan is attested. (On the multiethnic and linguistic variety of Middle Persian with a focus on the Achaemenid Empire, see Rossi, 1981; Delauney, 1985; Schmitt, 1978,1989, pp. 56-85.) Modern Iranian languages. Modern Iranian emerged during the eighth century CE. First attested is Modern Per sian (three Judeo-Persian inscriptions in Hebraic script, dated 752/3, found in central Afghanistan; and a letter frag ment found near Khotan in Xinjiang, China, also dating to the eighth century). The modern Iranian dialects are spoken in an area that roughly reflects the extent of earlier Iranian rule, stretching from Central Asia and Paldstan through Afghanistan and Iran to Iraq and Turkey, and into die Caucasus. T h e mod ern southern Iranian languages include southwestern Per sian (in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan); northwestern Baluchi (in eastern Iran, western Afghanistan, and south western Pakistan) and Kurdish (in northwestern Iran, north ern Iraq, and eastern Turkey); and numerous remnants of
BIBLIOGRAPHY Anthony, David W . " T h e Archaeology of I n d o - E u r o p e a n Origins." Journal of Indo-European Studies 19 (1991): 193-222. Beekes, R. S. F . A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan. Leiden, 1988. Bielmeier, Roland. "Sarmatisch, Alanisch, Jassisch u n d Altossetisch." In Compendium linguarum iranicarum, edited by Riidiger Schmitt, p p . 236-245. Wiesbaden, 1989. Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrianism; Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour. Costa M e s a , Calif., 1992. Brandenstein, Wilhelm, and Manfred Mayrhofer. Handbuch des Altpersischen. Wiesbaden, 1964. Brunner, Christopher J. A Syntax of Western Middle Iranian. D e l m a r , • 1977Burrow, Christopher B . " T h e P r o t o - I n d o - A r y a n s . " Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1973): 123-140. D a n d a m a e v , M . A. Persien unterden ersten Achameniden (S.Jahrhundert v. Chr.). Wiesbaden, 1979. Delauney, J. A . " L ' a r a m e e n d ' E m p i r e et les debuts de l'ecriture e n Asie Centrale." Acta Iranica 2 (1985): 219-236. Emmerick, Ronald E . Saka Grammatical Studies. L o n d o n , 1968. Emmerick, Ronald E . " K h o t a n e s e a n d T u m s h u q e s e . " I n Compendium linguarum iranicarum, edited by Riidiger Schmitt, p p . 204-229. Wiesbaden, 1989. Geiger, Wilhelm, a n d Ernst K u h n , eds. Grundriss der iranischen Philologie. 2 vols. Strassburg, 1895-1904. Gershevitch, Ilya. A Grammar of Manichaean Sogdian. Oxford, 1954-
PERSIANS Ghilain, A. Essai sur la language parthe. San systeme verbal d'apres les textes manicheens du Turkestan Oriental. Louvain, 1939. G h i r s h m a n , R o m a n . LTran et la migration des Indo-Aryens et des Iraniens. Leiden, 1977. Grantovskij, E. A. Rannaja istorija iranskikh piemen PeredneijAzii ( T h e Early History of t h e Iranian Peoples of Southwest Asia). M o s c o w , 1970. Heston, Wilma. "Selected Problems in Fifth- and T e n t h - C e n t u r y Ira nian Syntax." P h . D . diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1976. Hinz, Walther, Altiranisches Sprackgut der Nebeniiberlieferungen. W i e s baden, 1975. H u m b a c h , Helmut, a n d Adolf G r o h m a n n . Baktrische Sprachdenkmaler. Vol. I . Wiesbaden, 1966. H u m b a c h , Helmut. " C h o r e s m i a n . " In Compendium linguarum irani carum, edited by Rudiger Schmitt, p p . 193-203. Wiesbaden, 1989. Jackson, A. V. W . An Avestan Grammar in Comparison with Sanskrit. Stuttgart, 1892. Kellens, Jean. "Avestique." In Compendium linguarum iranicarum, ed ited by Rudiger Schmitt, p p . 32-55. Wiesbaden, 1989. Kent, Roland G . Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon. 2d rev. ed. N e w Haven, 1953. L e C o q , Pierre. " L a langue des inscriptions ach6menides." Actalranica 2 (1974): 55-62M a c K e n z i e , D . N . A concise Pahlavi dictionary. L o n d o n , 1971. Mallory, J. P . In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. L o n d o n , 1989. Mayrhofer, Manfred. "Vorgeschichte der iranischen Sprachen: Uriranisch." In Compendium linguarum iranicarum, edited by Rudiger Schmitt, p p . 4-24. Wiesbaden, 1989. Mayrhofer, Manfred. " U b e r die Verschriftung des Altpersischen." Historische Sprachforschung 102 (1990): 174-186. Morgenstierne, G e o r g . " O r t h o g r a p h y a n d Sound-System of the Avesta." Norsk Tidsskriftfor Sprogvidenskap 12 (1942): 30-82. Morgenstierne, Georg. Irano-Dardica. Wiesbaden, 1973. See " D i e Stellung der Kafirsprachen" ( p p . 327-343). N y b e r g , H . S. A Manual of Pahlavi. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1964-1974. Parpola, Asko. " T h e C o m i n g of t h e Aryans to Iran and India a n d the Cultural a n d Ethnic Identity of the D a s a s . " Studia Orientalia (Hel sinki) 64 (1988): 195-302. Reichelt, H a n s . Awestisches Elementarbuch. Fleidelberg, 1909. Renfrew, Colin. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. N e w York, 1987. Rossi, Adriano V. " L a varieta linguistica nell'Iran achemenide."/3w«aK del Seminario di Studi del Mondo Classico: Sezione Linguistica 3 (1981): 141-196. Schmitt, Rudiger. "Fragen der Anthroponomastik des achamenidischen Vielvolkerstaates." Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 128 (1978): 116-124. Schmitt, Rudiger. " A r y a n s . " I n Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 2, p p . 684687. L o n d o n , 1987. Schmitt, Rudiger, ed. Compendium linguarum iranicarum. Wiesbaden, 1989. Schmitt, Rudiger. "Sprachzeugnisse alt- u n d mitteliranischer S p r a c h e n aus Afghanistan." I n Indogermanica et Caucasica. Festschrift fur Karl Horst Schmidt zum 6s, edited b y R. Bielmeier a n d R. Stempel, p p . 168-196. Berlin, 1994. Sims-Williams, Nicholas. "Eastern M i d d l e Iranian"; " S o g d i a n " ; a n d "Bactrian." In Compendium linguarum iranicarum, edited by Rudiger Schmitt, p p . 165-192, 230-235. Wiesbaden, 1989. S u n d e r m a n n , Werner. "Westmitteliranische S p r a c h e n " ; " P a r t h i s c h " ; and "Mittelpersisch." In Compendium linguarum iranicarum, edited by Rudiger Schmitt, p p . 106-164. Wiesbaden, 1989. Windfuhr, G e m o t L . " N o t e s o n t h e O l d Persian Signs." Indo-Iranian Journal 12 (1970): 121-125.
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Windfuhr, G e m o t L . "Diacritic and Distinctive Features in Avestan." Journal of the American Oriental Society 91 (1972): 104-124. Windfuhr, G e m o t L . " L a n g u a g e s of Ancient I r a n . " In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, p p . 217-220. N e w York, 1992. GERNOT L. W I N D F U H R
PERSIANS. T h e Persians were one of several Iranianlanguage groups who migrated onto the Iranian plateau from lands east of the Caspian Sea, perhaps as early as the mid-second millennium B C E . These Old Iranians are divided into three sublanguage groups: Old Northeast Iranian (known from Gathic Avestan); Old Northwest Iranian, or Median (known from Persian personal names and loan words); and Old Southwest Iranian (known from Old Per sian cuneiform inscriptions, the ancestor of modern Per sian). [See Persian.] By the mid-ninth century B C E , Mesopotamian records at test the presence of both the Medes and the Persians in the central western Zagros Mountain region. After these sources fall silent (c. 640 B C E ) , the Persians appear in the south western Zagros, in the land of Parsa, modern Fars. T h e pos sible relationship between nindi-century BCE Parsua/Parsumash and sixth-century B C E Parsa is a matter of debate. There is no consensus on whether the Persians migrated from north to south; whether two Persias existed at the same time; or which Persia Herodotus described as a Median vas sal (1.102). [See Medes.] T h e best explanation may be that tit ere were indeed two groups of Persians, one in the centralwestern and one in the southwestern Zagros. T h e former may have been tributary to, and eventually absorbed by, the Medes. T h e latter, under Cyrus II, may have either rebelled against the Medes, or may, as an independent Iranian group, have attacked them. Efforts to trace these migrations in the archaeological rec ord have met with little success. One hypothesis, that the radical shift from painted to plain gray-black and buff ce ramics at the end of the Bronze Age in central and north western Iran represents the arrival of Iranians in about 1450 B C E , is not widely accepted (Young, 1967). Others have sug gested that the appearance of the distinctive plain buff pot tery of the Iron Age III period in central-western Iran in the ninth century B C E marks tire appearance of Iranians in the Zagros. This hypothesis has also gained little support. More widely accepted is the proposition that the rapid spread of Iron III pottery throughout the Zagros in the seventh cen tury BCE may be archaeological evidence of the rise of the unified and powerful Median kingdom that is documented textually (Young, 1988). In Parsa, the Achaemenid Persian homeland, there is al most no archaeological evidence for the centuries immedi ately preceding the rise of the Persians to imperial power. This may indicate that these early Persian tribes were tentdwelling pastoralists.
PERSIANS Rise to I m p e r i a l P o w e r . Cyrus II (559-530 BCE) was the first great king of the Persian royal house, the Achaemenids. His initial task was to unite the Persian tribes. He then suc cessfully attacked the Median king Astyages (550 B C E ) . Among Iranians this event may have been seen as nothing more titan an internal dynastic power struggle, for the Medes became so closely allied with the Persians that the Greeks often had difficulty distinguishing between them. In 547 B C E Cyrus defended himself against Lydian attack, and after an inconclusive battle, successfully besieged the Lydian capital, Sardis. [See Sardis.] Shortly thereafter, all of Asia Minor came under Persian rule (Herodotus, 1.74-84). In October 539 B C E , Cyrus invaded Babylonia, where he fought only one battle, at Opis; the Persians then marched unopposed into Babylon. Cyrus performed the religious rit uals required of a Babylonian king and returned confiscated deities to their native Mesopotamian cities. That same year, his decree (Ez. 1-4) permitting the Jews to rebuild the T e m ple in Jerusalem established the Persian custom of ruling with religious and cultural tolerance. Cyrus died in 530 B C E , fighting the Scythian Massagetae on the northeastern frontier of the empire. His conquests included all of eastern Iran, Afghanistan, much of central Asia, Anatolia, and all of the Babylonian Empire. Of the four kingdoms that held the balance of power in the Near East at tire time of Cyrus's succession, only Egypt remained in dependent. Cambyses II (530-522 B C E ) , Cyrus's son, conquered Egypt in 525 B C E in a well-planned campaign. He remained there for three years, extending Persian conquest south into Nubia and west into North Africa. He ruled in Egypt as a legitimate pharaoh, but, probably because of a reorganiza tion of the Egyptian religious establishment, gained a poor historical reputation. While he was in Egypt, rebellion broke out in Persia. He turned homeward in 522 B C E but died en route. It fell to Darius I to suppress the rebellion and to restore the Achaemenid family to power. Darius I (521-486 BCE) dealt first with the rebellion of Gaumata (Bardiya/Smerdis). T h e story of the rebellion in Herodotus (3.67-88) and in Darius's Bisitun inscription is that Cambyses lulled his brother Bardiya before leaving for Egypt. [See Bisitun.] T h e n Gaumata (Greek Smerdis), a Magian (Median) priest, claiming he was Bardiya, rebelled. Darius and six other nobles were the only Persians willing to challenge tire false Bardiya. They killed him and the king ship was given to Darius. He then restored the sanctuaries Gaumata had destroyed, returned confiscated private prop erty, and "reestablished the people on its foundation, both Persia, Media, and the other provinces" (Bisitun inscription, I. 7 1 - 7 2 ) . Clearly, this was more than a palace coup. T h e empire had been shaken to its foundations by issues involv ing Mede versus Persian, "haves" versus "have nots," upper versus lower social orders, and different religions. These confusions provided the climate for widespread re
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bellion in the first year of Darius's kingship. Elam and Bab ylon rebelled first but were quickly retaken. In the meantime, Armenia, Persia, Media, Assyria, Parthia, Margiana, Sattagydia, and Scythia rebelled. Subordinate generals were sent to deal with distant trouble spots; the king himself concen trated on the most dangerous core rebellion, in Media and neighboring regions. Once those provinces were under con trol, troops were available to crush rebellion elsewhere. Da rius won because he retained control of tire professional army, used his central position to prevent rebel coordina tion, and was a first-class general. After an administrative reorganization of the empire, Da rius turned to further expansion. Sometime between 520 and 513 BCE, India (the Punjab) was conquered. By 517 BCE Persia controlled the Ionian islands, and in 513 BCE Darius campaigned, with some success, against the Black Sea Scythians and conquered European Thrace and most of the northern Aegean. [See Scythians.] In 499 B C E peace in the west was disturbed by the Ionian Revolt. Fierce fighting restored the power of Persia through out western Asia Minor and northern Greece by 494 BCE. In response to Athenian support for the Ionians, Darius de cided to invade mainland Greece, which the Persians did in 490 B C E , only to lose the battle at Marathon. T h e Persians retired to Asia. Darius was determined to return, but he died before he could do so, in 486 B C E . Xerxes (486-465 B C E ) , Darius's son, assumed the task of conquering Greece. First, however, he had to put down re bellions in botii Babylon and Egypt. T h e invasion of Greece began in 480 B C E , with initial success for the Persians: they outmaneuvered the Spartans at Thermo pilae, conquered Attica, and burned the Acropolis in Athens. Their navy, however, was defeated in the confined waters of the Bay of Salamis. Xerxes returned to Persia, leaving general Mardonius in command. In spring 479 BCE, Persians and Greeks fought a close battle at Plataea. Only when Mardonius him self was killed did the Persians collapse and flee both the field and Greece. In the decade that followed, Persian power in western Asia Minor and the Aegean was at its nadir. Xer xes was effectively not heard of again until he was assassi nated in 465 B C E . Late E m p i r e . The Persian Empire survived for 134 years after the death of Xerxes, but its days of expansion were over. Persia continually intervened, to her advantage, with diplomacy and bribery in fire internecine wars in Greece. The Peace of Callis was signed with Athens in 448 BCE by Artaxerxes I (464-425 B C E ) , which left Asia Minor to Persia and tire Aegean to the Greeks. T h e agreement broke down, however, and in 400 B C E Persia and Sparta were at war. Persia supported Sparta's enemies with gold, and eventually Artaxerxes II (405-359 BCE) was invited by the Greeks to mediate their disputes. T h e result was the so-called King's Peace of 387-386 B C E , with which the Persian Empire firmly reestablished its hold on Asia Minor.
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Artaxerxes II had to deal with two major challenges from within. His brother, Cyrus the Younger, rebelled but was defeated at tire battle of Cunaxa in 401 B C E . Then, in 373 B C E , the Revolt of the Satraps ("protectors of the Kingdom/ Kingship") began. Several satraps, mainly from Asia Minor, combined in rebellion. The rebels, however, fell out among themselves and Artaxerxes triumphed. Egypt had successfully rebelled in 405 BCE and was not brought back into the empire until 343 BCE under Artaxerxes III (359-338 B C E ) . The real threat to the Persian Empire by this time, however, was not from rebellion but from die growing power of Macedonia. By the time Darius III (336331 BCE) was on the throne, Alexander the Great was ready to invade Asia. Alexander won his first battle at the Granicus River in 334 B C E . Victory also went to the invaders at a sec ond battle shortly thereafter, near the Cilician Gates. Alex ander spent the next two years consolidating his hold on the Levant and Egypt. T h e final Persian defeat took place on 1 October 331 BCE, at Gaugamela, near modern Erbil. Alex ander captured Persepolis in April 330 B C E , and the fleeing Darius was murdered that summer. [See Alexandrian Em pire.] G o v e r n m e n t a n d Society. The royal court was the cen ter of imperial government. At its center was the king, so that the capital was wherever the king was. Fixed capitals were Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana/Hamadan, and sometimes Babylon. [See Susa; Persepolis; Ecbatana; Babylon.] King, court, and government were supported by a large scribal bureaucracy concentrated in the treasuries of the empire, for which the best evidence comes from Persepolis. The treasuries were repositories from which stores of imperial wealth in kind were administered. The Persepolis texts tell of provisions issued to work parties, craftsmen, travelers, treasury officials, priests, members of the royal household, and the ldng himself. These texts make clear that the central government was highly organized and accountable to a hi erarchy of officialdom, ending with the king. Into the reign of Xerxes, the language of the treasury at Persepolis was Elamite. The end of the Elamite record sug gests that the language of the treasury became Aramaic, the lingua franca of the empire, which was written not on clay tablets but on perishable materials. [See Aramaic] The lan guage of the royal inscriptions was alphabetic Old Persian, probably invented under Darius I in order to write the Bis itun inscription (see above). Provincial organization. The empire was organized into provinces (satrapies), each ruled by a satrap. This sys tem existed under Cyrus II but was restructured by Darius I. Satraps were appointed by the king, often from among his relatives. Except for certain royal fortresses, the satrap was both the military and civil commander of his province. Rep resentatives of the king, however—the "king's eyes" or "king's ears"—traveled in the provinces and reported di
rectly to him. Control of the empire was also facilitated by an extensive system of "royal roads," the most famous of which ran from Susa to Sardis. Military forces. T h e military was divided into the army and navy. At the core of the standing army were the ten thousand Immortals, a thousand of whom formed the king's elite bodyguard. There were also ten thousand cavalry in the standing army. Troops of the standing army—exclusively Persians, Medes, Elamites, and perhaps Scythians—were often permanently stationed in the satrapies. Provincial forces were supported by native troops and long-term mer cenaries, such as the Jewish soldiers stationed at Elephantine on the southern Egyptian frontier. In time of full-scale war, the army was augmented by a levy called up from almost all of the empire's subject peoples. The standing forces in the navy were supplied by Phoenicians, Egyptians, and perhaps Cypriots. Ionian Greeks often participated. All marines were Persians, Medes, or Scythians. Law and the economy. Little is known of ancient Per sian law. Following the model set by Cyrus II, the Achaemenids generally governed with tolerance of, and respect for, the customs, traditions, and laws of its conquered peo ples. The best evidence comes from Babylonia, where, in the main, legal affairs were conducted according to long standing Babylonian law and custom. There is, however, evidence of what might be a "king's" law administered in a "king's" court, though the available texts suggest that even there the Persians were introducing new economic and ad ministrative arrangements rather than rewriting law. The wealth of the empire was founded on agriculture, but manufacturing and commerce played important roles in the economy. The government taxed with vigor. State and royal properties were rented, funds were collected in lieu of ob ligations, tribute was paid by peoples outside the provincial structure, customs charges were collected, and selected sales taxes were levied. Most taxes were paid in kind. Some of this wealth, however, went back into the economy. Seed grain and seedlings (probably fruit trees) were issued to pri vate estates by the treasuries. Archaeological evidence dem onstrates that state investment in irrigation systems greatly increased productivity in Mesopotamia. [See Irrigation.] Manufacturing, at least in cottage industries, was encour aged by payments from the treasuries, and exploratory sea voyages were undertaken at government expense to discover trade routes. Darius dug a canal from the Nile River to the Red Sea, and on land the state-supported road network al lowed the peoples of the empire to benefit from what was, for ancient times, a very large common market. [See Roads; Transportation.] Social organisation. Persia's tolerance of the customs of her subjects precludes speaking of an imperial social orga nization. There were two reasons for that tolerance: it was a realistic policy, given the empire's size and cultural diver-
PERSIANS sity; and such a policy fit the Persians' own sense of social structure. Their vertical view of society began at die base, with the family, and progressed upward dirough the levels of clan, tribe, and country, to culminate in a people or na tion. Viewed horizontally, Persian society had four classes: priests, warriors, scribes, and artisans/peasants. At the sum mit of society was the king, surrounded by the concept khvarna, or "kingly glory," that attached itself both to die man and the office. Thus, the king functioned only at the highest level: he was Idng of countries, peoples, and nations; it was therefore logical that imperial policy not interfere with the affairs of tribes, clans, and families. If the peoples of the empire remained loyal and functioned well, how they did so was not the business of the central government. Tolerance was built into the Persian concept of how the world was organized. Religion. As wide a variety of religions were practiced in the empire as there were subject peoples. From the Persep olis texts we know that a number of different beliefs and practices were found even in Persia. T h e critical question, however, remains whether the Achaemenid ldngs were Zoroastrians, in terms of what Zoroastrianism may have been like in the sixth-fourth centuries B C E . Zoroaster was a great ethical prophet who preached in northeast Iran sometime prior to the rise of the Achaemenids. In due time his message triumphed over the polytheism of the Iranian world, and Zoroastrianism eventually became the state religion of Iran in Sasanian times. [See Sasanians.] There are no data on the religion of Cyrus. Darius I, in several of his inscriptions, uses wording compatible with Zo roaster's teaching, however: truth (arta) is in conflict with the lie (druj). Ahuramazda is the supreme and only god men tioned. Darius may have been a Zoroasttian. Xerxes ele vated Arta to the role of a deity and seemed particularly concerned about devil worship, as Zoroaster was. T h e re lapse into polytheism must have continued under Artaxer xes I, as the goddess Anahita and the god Mithra appear in royal inscriptions. Yet, with the imperial adoption of the Zoroastrian religious calendar, a clear commitment to Zoro astrianism is made under this king. T h u s , beginning with Darius I, the Persian kings seem to move steadily toward a Zoroasttian theology. Evidence of ritual practice from Persepolis confirms this drift. That fire, whose purity and importance Zoroaster em phasized, was central to Persian royal religious ritual can be seen in the royal tomb reliefs and the great fire altar at Pa sargadae. [See Pasargadae.] There also appears to have been no animal sacrifice at court—a practice Zoroaster had con demned. The Persepolis texts yield evidence of offerings only of wine, beer, wheat, and flour. Zoroaster had preached against the Haoma cult, a drunken pagan ritual; however, textual and archaeological evidence from Persepolis indi cates that the cult was practiced. Nevertheless, on balance,
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Persian royal religious ritual seems to have come close to Zoroastrian practice at the time. Art a n d Architecture. Achaemenid Persian art is a blend of two elements: the experiences Persians had with material culture on the Iranian plateau during the centuries prior to the rise of Cyrus II, and the material culture of the empire's conquered peoples. These elements are most evident in ar chitecture. T h e artists who decorated the great imperial cap itals of Pasargadae, Susa, and Persepolis came from every corner of the empire. Their influence on individual elements is so great as to lead some scholars to argue that Achaemenid art and architecture are only eclectic. A closer look at Pa sargadae and Persepolis shows that this is not true. At Pasargadae, founded by Cyrus II, a clear Egyptian and Mesopotamian influence is evident and a considerable amount of decorative detail; Greek influence is also patent. T h e layout of the site and the conception of the "whole" is entirely Persian, however. T h e Pulvar River, which runs through the site, is the key to understanding the plan of the "city": the tomb of Cyrus, the main gate, two major palaces, two pavilions, a bridge, the so-called Zendan, the sacred precinct, and the hilltop fortress, the Tall-i Takht. Most of tiiese structures were oriented to life in the open air. The various water channels feeding off die river and running among the buildings make it clear that the site was in fact a great park, not a city: a physical manifestation of a Persian paradise. T h e concept and the details—of the columned halls and pavilions—are fundamentally Persian. Although the col umned hall was foreign to the ancient Near East outside of Egypt, it was an architectural ttadition that can be traced back in western Iran to Median times at such sites as Tepe Nush-i Jan and Godin II and from there back to the Early Iron Age at Hasanlu V (1450-1150 BCE) . It was an architec tural concept the Persians brought with them to Parsa. Pa sargadae remains a superb expression in stone, wood, and brick of what the city of the king of a new empire (only recently the ruler of tent-dwelling pastoralists) might look like. That imperial authority was yet more forcefully expressed at Persepolis and Susa—the former grander and better pre served. At Persepolis Darius built a great stone platform jut ting westward from the base of the Kuh-i Rahmat ("moun tain of mercy"). Xerxes expanded tire platform and completed buildings his father had begun and added others. Consttuction continued under Artaxerxes, and, in a more desultory way, under even later kings. Two large columned audience halls (the Apadana and tire Hall of a Hundred Col umns), a columned gateway (Gate of All Nations), private columned residence palaces, a treasury, and a harem were the main structures on the platform. Some of the most remarkable reliefs ever carved in the ancient Near East adorn the walls of tiiese structures. Again,
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foreign influence is clear, but the basic Persian conception of the totality is equally clear. T h e carving was done by a team of artisans: a master craftsman worldng with others, each assigned special elements of each figure. In short, the reliefs were created in an assembly line—the master artist(s) was not the carver of the reliefs (where foreign influences show). Rather, die master was he who conceived, designed, and decided on the final layout of the reliefs. He was a Per sian, for the story he told, and the way he told it, was an original conttibution of the Achaemenid Persians to the art of the ancient world. The reliefs are unhistorical. Unlike those of Egypt and Assyria, they tell no story. Instead they are a static picture of accomplishments—they are not scenes of warfare, of the king's conquests, or of enemies defeated, but of contented subject peoples paying homage to their ruler. The Icing is the centtal focus, but he is not an individual: he is not Darius or Xerxes or Artaxerxes, but the image of khvarna, of the glory of kingship in the abstract. T h e reliefs are a sculptured statement of the philosophy behind the tolerance of Persian imperial rule, the perfect pax persica. Achaemenid sites have produced few small objects from foreign countries, for the Persians preferred their own prod ucts. Relatively plain stone and pottery vessels, with an em phasis on crisp shapes derived from metal prototypes, are common. Bird and animal heads are used as decoration, of ten on handles—a tradition going back to Median times. Stone-seal cutting was a consummate art, as were metalwork and jewelry. Metal vessels were practical, even when ornate, with an emphasis on intricate, repetitive, and highly geo metric decorative elements; animal motifs, long a tradition on the plateau, also were common. Achaemenid jewelry and tableware represent some of the most delicate achievements in ancient metalwork. Almost nothing is known outside of ceramics of the ma terial culture of the common people for excavation has con centrated on royal sites. At Persepolis the platform was only the acropolis of a large city which may have spread north and west as far as the royal rock-cut tombs at Naqsh-i Rustam. Excavations off the terrace revealed some palaces of the nobility, but no peasant or artisan compound. The Achaemenids combined the art of others before them with traditions of their own. In doing so they produced an art which, like their empire, marked the end of the ancient world and the beginning of something new. [See also Persia.]
in Gershevitch (below); some excellent insights, b u t u n e v e n in qual ityD a n d a m a e v , M u h a m m a d A., a n d Vladimir G . L u k o n i n . The Cultural and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran. Translated by Philip L . Kohl. Cambridge, 1989. Stimulating, somewhat idiosyncratic discussion, very worthy b u t sometimes m a r r e d by factual inaccuracies. Frye, Richard N . The History ofAncient Iran. H a n d b i i c h der Altertumswissenschaft, III.7. M u n i c h , 1984. T h e most recent statement on ancient Iran by a distinguished American scholar. Gershevitch, Ilya, ed. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2, The Median and Achaemenian Periods. C a m b r i d g e , 1985. U n e v e n b u t very useful series of articles, with a n excellent bibliography. Miroschedji, Pierre de. " L a fin d u r o y a u m e d'Ansan et de Suse et la naissance de l'empire perse." Zeitschrift fiir Assyriologie 75 (1985): 265-306. Excellent discussion of the relationship between the L a t e Elamites and t h e rise of the first Persian E m p i r e . Roaf, Michael. "Sculptures a n d Sculptors at Persepolis." Iran 21 (1983). Definitive work on t h e reliefs at Persepolis. Schmidt, Erich F . Persepolis, vol. 1, Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions. O r i ental Institute Publications, 68. Chicago, 1953. T h e first volume on the University of Chicago excavations at Persepolis. S u p e r s e d e d in some details since, b u t the starting point for a n y u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the site. Schmidt, Erich F . Persepolis, vol. 2, Contents of the Treasury and Other Discoveries. Oriental Institute Publications, 69. Chicago, 1957. Final report o n the small finds of the Chicago Persepolis expedition. Schmidt, Erich F . Persepolis, vol. 3, The Royal Tombs and Other Mon uments. Oriental Institute Publications, 70. Chicago, 1970. T h e final report on the excavations and investigations of the A c h a e m e n i d royal tombs at Naqsh-i R u s t a m and related structures (some dating to t h e Sasanian period). Stronach, David B. Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963. Oxford, 1978. Definitive excavation report, incorporating all previous work at t h e site. Sumner, William M . " A c h a e m e n i d Settlement in t h e Persepolis Plain." American Journal of Archaeology 90 (1986): 3-31. Poses t h e p r o b l e m of t h e lack of archaeological evidence for any settled village life in the Persepolis area immediately prior to the foundation of Persepolis u n d e r Darius I. Vogelsang, W . J. The Rise and Organisation of the Achaemenid Empire: The Eastern Iranian Evidence. Leiden, 1992. Stimulating, thoughtful, but not always convincing argument on t h e organization of the east ern Achaemenid E m p i r e and t h e role played by the Scythians in the first Persian Empire. Y o u n g , T . Cuyler, Jr. " T h e Iranian Migration into the Z a g r o s . " Iran 5 (1967): 11-34. Attempt to demonstrate that both t h e M e d e s and t h e Persians came to western Iran from the northeast, a n d that their appearance can be traced in t h e archaeological record; dated b u t useful. Young, T . Cuyler, Jr. " T h e Persian E m p i r e . " In The Cambridge Ancient Histoiy, vol. 4, Persia, Greece, and the Western Mediterranean, edited by J o h n Boardman, p p . 1-253. Cambridge, 1988. Narrative report on the early history of the M e d e s and the Persians to t h e death of Xerxes, with an excellent bibliography. T. CUYLER YOUNG, JR.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Balcer, Jack Martin. " T h e Athenian Episkopos and the Achaemenid 'King's Eye.'" American Journal of Philology 98 (1977): 252-263. Burn, Andrew R. Persia and the Greeks: The Defense of the West, c. 546478 B.C. 2d ed. L o n d o n , 1984. Authoritative study of Persian-Greek relations from the time of Cyrus to Xerxes. Cook, J. M , The Persian Empire. L o n d o n , 1983. Expansion of his essay
PERSONAL HYGIENE. In the hot, dry climate of the Near East, washing the body and anointing it with oil were hygienic necessities of the first order. T h e frequency of bathing was influenced not only by the availability of wa ter, but also by social status: wealthy individuals could pay
PERSONAL HYGIENE stricter attention to personal hygiene than poor people. Gen erally, in the ancient Near East people contented themselves with washing only their face, hands, and feet, although the Egyptians appear to have batiied daily and the Babylonians washed their entire body mainly in preparing for religious festivals (Dayagi-Mendels, 1989, pp. 13-34). the Bible, too, bathing is mentioned most often in connection with rit ual purity (Lv. 16:24). It was also the rule among tire He brews to bathe after an illness or a battle, and women were instructed to purify themselves through immersion in the miqveh, or "ritual bath" from their menstrual uncleanness. Washing the hands was a practice common to all people in the ancient Near East. It was customary to wash the hands upon rising in the morning and before meals (Mk. 7:3), and usually after meals, as well. In the Talmud it is said that one must wash one's hands every morning and evening and be fore prayer (B.T., Shab. 109a). In ancient Greece, banquet guests washed their hands in warm, perfumed water and wiped them on a common towel (Dayagi-Mendels, 1989, p. 14). In the Near East, no special vessels for rinsing the hands are known, with the exception of Egypt, where spouted vessels have been found next to basins. These vessels are frequently depicted on reliefs and in paintings, where they are seen under a table. They are known from the third and second millennia B C E , made mostly of bronze but sometimes of alabaster or pottery. The custom of washing the feet is mentioned in the Bible as ceiTtral to the conventions of hospitality (Gn. 18:4; 19:2; 2 Sm. 11:8). It is probably in the context of this custom that the footbaths known from Palestine in the Iron Age should m
PERSONAL HYGIENE.
be interpreted. In the bathrooms of first-century C E houses in the Upper City of Jerusalem, stone installations have been found (Nahman Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem, Nashville, t983) pp. 84-86) that probably served as footbaths of the kind mentioned in the Mishnah (Yad. 4:1). According to Jewish literary sources it was one of the wife's duties to wash the feet, hands, and face of her husband, even if there were servants in the house (B.T. Ket. 61a). This washing was intended to be enjoyable and was done with hot water, in contrast to the hasty washing in the mornings, for which cold water was used. The tomb of Ruaben, an official of the Egyptian second dynasty, a house containing a bathroom is planned; as in houses of the twelfth dynasty excavated at Kahun, bath rooms were uncovered next to bedrooms; and in houses of the eighteenth dynasty at Tell el-Amarna, the bathrooms were located at the rear. T h e bathing was actually more like a shower: the bathroom contained a large stone slab raised slightiy above the floor, with a drain next to it. The bather stood on tire stone while his servant poured water over him through a sieve. Clearly such bathrooms only existed in pal aces and in the homes of the wealthy; people of lesser means must have washed in a basin or bathed in the river. The people of Mesopotamia washed their entire body only on festive occasions (see above). The common people bathed in the rivers or in reservoirs in courtyards, while notables and wealthy citizens had special bathing installations in their palaces and mansions. Bathtubs existed also at Mari (see figure 1 ) , where two basins set on a raised platform were uncovered in one of the rooms of the palace (G. E. Men-
F i g u r e 1. Bathroom from the palace at Mari.
a r e a are s h o w n (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
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T w o t e r r a - c o t t a t u b s a n d a toilet
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denhall, in Biblical Archaeologist n [1948]: 8-10). Paved batiirooms equipped with drains and the remains of a bronze bathtub were unearthed at Zincirli in northern Syria. Many bathrooms containing bathtubs have also been found in palaces on Crete and Mycenae from the second millen nium B C E (Ardiur Evans, The Palace of Minos, vol. 3, Lon don, 1930, pp. 384-385). In the Neo-Babylonian period, bathrooms in private houses became commonplace. Although bathrooms were a rarity in ancient Palestine un til the Hellenistic period, several early examples have been discovered (e.g., at Tell el-'Ajjul, Tell Jemmeh, and Me giddo). Some people also washed in basins or tubs, as dem onstrated by the seventh-century B C E figurine of a woman washing herself found in a Phoenician tomb at Achziv. Bib lical stories imply that it was also customary to wash in en closed courtyards (2 Sm. 11:2). Presumably, many people also bathed in streams and springs. Various vegetal or mineral substances were added to the bathwater in antiquity (Jer. 2:22), and Pliny says it was tire Gauls who invented soap (Nat. Hist. 28.191). T o prevent the sldn from drying and cracking after using harsh minerals, and to protect it in a hot, dry climate, it was customary to anoint die body with oil after bathing (Ru. 3:3). Oiling the body was not considered a luxury and in most countries in the ancient Near East, body oils were regarded as an every day commodity that was in fact used by the majority of the population. It was therefore a sign of mourning to refrain from anointing oneself (2 Sm. 14:2). The Egyptians knew more than thirty different oils and ointments for anointing the sldn, and in Persia, too, various oils and cosmetics were well differentiated, as is learned in the story of Esther (2:12). In the Greek world, the attitude toward body hygiene was very different, essentially because there the need to take care of the body was connected with sports. As early as the fourth century BCE, die palaestrae and gymnasia in which athletes exercised were equipped with bathing facilities that were continually improved over the centuries. Relatively few re mains of bathtubs have been found in private houses in the Greek world. Most of what is known comes from literary sources (e.g., Odyssey 4.49-53) and from depictions on vase paintings. The paintings show bathers in a fountain or women washing themselves from a basin. Footbaths were also used, and in banqueting scenes they are depicted underneadi the couches. In Greece anointing the body with oil was also part of the daily routine, often even replacing wash ing or bathing. In the Hellenistic world, the bathroom became a regular fixture in the homes of the middle class, as seen at Olynthos. At the same time, public baths were established, serving es pecially those exercizing in the palaestrae and gymnasia, as at Olympia. The Romans took over the concept and con struction of bathing installations from the Greeks and per fected them. Under die influence of Hellenistic culture, baths also began to appear in Palestine—and not only in the
houses of the nobility (Dayagi-Mendels, 1989, p. 25). T h e Romans regarded bathing not only as a hygienic necessity, but also as a form of entertainment that went on for many hours. The many public baths they founded were open to all. T h e patron, after bathing, was massaged with ointments, either by his personal servant or by an individual employed for this task by the baths. T h e pampered Roman lady emrusted herself, immedi ately after her bath, to the hands of her personal staff of maids who massaged her, rubbed her sldn with unguents, cared for her hands and feet, and plucked out unwanted hairs. When the lady set out for the baths, she took her creams and unguents with her (Dayagi-Mendels, 1989, p. 25). The unguents used for anointing the sldn after bathing were composed of a base of vegetable oils—olive oil, almond oil, or sesame oil—or were made from animal fat taken from geese, sheep, goats, or cattle. T o these, various fixatives were added, including milk, honey, and different salts. While the wealthy treated their skin with precious and perfumed un guents, those witii lesser means used oils of inferior quality, such as castor oil. T h e ointment and oil industry led to the development of an entire field devoted to the manufacture of beautiful containers. Stone vessels, especially those made of alabaster, were popular in Egypt, and beautifully painted pottery vessels are known from the classical world. [See also In addition, dependent
Baths; Cosmetics; Medicine; and Rittial Baths. many
of the sites mentioned
are the subject
of in
entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dayagi-Mendels, Michal. Perfumes and Cosmetics in the Ancient World. Israel M u s e u m Catalogue, 305. Jerusalem, 1989. Ginouves, Rene. Balaneutike: Recherches sur le bain dans Vanliquite grecque, Paris, 1962. Laser, Siegfried. Medizin undKdrperpflege. Gottingen, 1983. See pages 138-172. MICHAL DAYAGI-MENDELS
PETERS, JOHN PUNNETT (1852-1921), profes sor of Old Testament language and literature at the Episcopal Divinity School, Philadelphia (1884-1891), and professor of Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania (1886-1893), best known for organizing the first American archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia, at Nippur (1888-1900). Peters was involved in arousing interest in ar chaeological work in Mesopotamia as early as 1883, solicit ing funds from Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, a wealthy New Yorker, to send an exploratory expedition to southern Mes opotamia (1884-1885). Peters then tried to elicit interest in a second expedition to carry out excavations. No tiling came of his efforts until 1887, when he met Edward White Clark, a Philadelphia financier, who, as a young man, had traveled to the Near East and was an avid reader of Austen Henry
PETRA: History of Excavation Layard's accounts of his travels and excavations. Clark raised the funds for an expedition affiliated with the Uni versity of Pennsylvania. In 1888, with pledges of funding in hand, the Babylonian Exploration Fund (with William Pep per, provost of the university, as president) came into ex istence. Peters served as director of the first and second excavation campaigns at Nippur (1888-1889, 1889-1900). Despite ri valries and quibbling among the expeditions' crews and lim ited digging techniques, the first two seasons' excavations were thoroughly recorded and were adequate, held to the standards of the time. Peters' detailed journal, notes, mea surements and sketches of walls and buildings, and his cat alog of objects from tire second campaign, which are in the University Museum's archives at the University of Penn sylvania, constitute a usable source of information on the excavations. Peters became assistant rector of St. Michael's Church in New York City in 1891 and resigned his position at the Epis copal Divinity School. He became rector when his father died in 1893, at which time he left his position at the Uni versity of Pennsylvania. Although no longer director in the field, Peters neverthe less served as scientific director of the tliird campaign (18931896) to Nippur and maintained an active interest in the excavations throughout his life. From 1905 to 1908 he was embroiled in a bitter dispute with Herman V. Hilprecht, pro fessor of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania. T h e dispute involved not only everyone connected with the Nip pur excavations, but also a good number of scholars in the discipline. Peters sparked the so-called Peters-Hilprecht controversy when he alleged that Hilprecht had exaggerated his claims to having found a temple library during the fourth campaign of excavations in 1900, had misrepresented pur chased tablets as excavated artifacts, and had falsified the findspots of other excavated artifacts. The trustees of the university appointed a committee to act as a court of inquiry and, in its report dated 26 June 1905, found the charges untrue; its report did not end the controversy, however. [See also Nippur; and the biography of Hilprecht.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence. Universities and Their Sons: University of Pennsylvania. 2 vols. Boston, 1902. See pages 399-400. Hilprecht, H e r m a n n V. The So-Called Peters-Hilprecht Controversy. Philadelphia, 1908. Includes the proceedings of the committee a p pointed b y the University of Pennsylvania's board of trustees to act as a court of inquiry in the Peters-Hilprecht controversy a n d Hilprecht's response t o continued accusations against h i m . Peters, J o h n P . " S o m e Recent Results of tire University of Pennsylvania Excavations at N i p p u r , Especially of the T e m p l e Hill." American Journal of Archaeology 10 (1895): 13-46. Peters, J o h n P . Nippur. 2 vols. N e w York a n d L o n d o n , 1897. Peter's account of the b a c k g r o u n d of t h e N i p p u r excavations a n d his public report on the results of the first t w o campaigns.
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Peters, John P. " T h e N i p p u r L i b r a r y . " Journal of the American Oriental Society 26 (1905): 145-164. Peters's initial charges against Hilprecht. Peters, John P. Hilprecht's Answer. N . p . , 1908. Peters's response to Hilprecht's statements in the so-called Peters-Hilprecht controversy, part 2. Ritterband, Paul, a n d Harold Wechsler. " A Message to Lushtamar: T h e Hilprecht Controversy a n d Semitic Scholarship in America." History of Higher Education Annual 1 (1981): 1-41. RICHARD L . ZETTLER
PETRA.
[In order to treat the separate
at this site,
this entry
history
of excavation
comprises
phases
two articles,
and the second
of
excavations
the first on the
on more recent
finds.]
History of Excavation Petra is an ancient city in modern Jordan situated in a broad north-south basin bordered on the east and west by moun tain ridges (30°i9' N , 35°26' E). The traditional entrance to the city is through a cleft in the eastern ridge, El-Kubtha, called the Siq, although access from both the north and the south is possible and was defended by walls during the Nabatean period (from the fourth century onward). T h e basin is watered by two perennial springs, with a natural water channel running east-west within the city area called Wadi Musa ("valley of Moses"). T h e Nabateans augmented the water supply with an intricate systems of runnels, cisterns, catchments, and a gravity-fed pipeline extending from an other natural spring, 'Ain Musa ("spring of Moses"), about 3 km (2 mi.) from the basin proper. Occupation of the basin area is documented archaeologically from at least die Neolithic period (6800) and sporad ically thereafter, in the biblical Edomite, Hellenistic, Nabatean (to 363 C E ) , Byzantine, and Crusader periods. With the Islamic conquest in the seventh century C E , the area lost both its place along the major commercial routes and its strategic value. Although known to geographers of the Islamic period, the site became more and more obscure and was not rec ognized again until its "discovery" by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812. Since that time, most of the "learned travelers" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have visited the site and left their ac counts. They were followed, in 1929 by the first excavations, undertaken by George and Agnes Horsfield working under the Department of Antiquities of Palestine during the man date period (Horsfield, 1938; 1941). [See Nabateans; and the biography
of
Horsfield.]
T h e major period of modern scientific excavation actually began in the 1950s, with the work of Diana Kirkbride and Peter J. Parr of the British School of Archaeology in Jeru salem (BSAJ), Philip C. Hammond, director of the Ameri can Expedition to Petra, Fawzi Zayadine of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, Manfred Lindner of the Nurem berg Natural History organization, Nabil Khairy of the Jor-
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PETRA: History of Excavation
dan University, and Rolf Stucky of the Archaeological Sem inar of the University of Basel. Hammond and Parr excavated a Nabatean domestic structure in the city dump area of El-Katute in 1959, the first excavation of built struc tures on the site. Since that time considerable reconstruc tion, exploration, and excavations have been conducted, primarily through the activities of the Department of Antiq uities ofJordan. Kirkbride cleared the Paved Street sector of the City Cen ter. Hammond excavated the first major monument on the site at the Main Theater, in cooperation with the Depart ment of Antiquities; and Parr constructed revetment walls along the banks of Wadi Musa and conducted excavations in the temenos area of the temple (Qasr Bint Faroun) ded icated to Dhushares, the chief male deity of the Nabateans. The Department of Antiquities excavated a bath complex near the Monumental Gate and partially reconstructed it, rebuilt the frontal area of tire Urn Tomb, and carried out other similar projects in the northern suburb of tire city at El-Barid. Parr and G. R. H. Wright investigated the architectural details of the Qasr and Zayadine began a durative study of its decorative motifs, as well as more extensive research on Nabatean architecture. Khairy excavated the first "villa" on the southern slope of the City Center. Lindner began exten sive surveys of local graves, roads, flora, and geology and investigated the suburb of Sabra, to tire south. His investi gations also revealed data relating to Nabatean copper min ing and discovered a small temple in the southern part of the basin. Stucky began a series of excavations of other res idential structures in the Zantur sector, paying special atten tion to the ceramic materials. Hammond undertook the most extensive work at the site in 1973, beginning with an electronic survey. The long-term excavation of a residential site and a public installation on the north slope of the City Center followed. It uncovered a temple dedicated to Allat, the chief female deity of the Na bateans, with a complex of outbuildings, both residential and industrial. Because of feline-decorated capitals around the altar platform of the building, it acquired the popular name of the Temple of the Winged Lions. T h e American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR), in Amman, under took excavations at the site of a suspected Byzantine church to the east of the Temple of the Winged Lions, beginning in 1992. In addition to tire strictly Nabatean interest of the site, other periods were investigated. Crystal-M. Bennett under took a short excavation project on top of the mountain called Umm el-Biyara, exposing Edomite ruins and recovering considerable materials from that period. Her excavations also called into question the identification of that mountain with biblical Sela, the acropolis of the Edomites during the Iron Age. [See Umm el-Biyara; and the biography of Bennett.]
Hammond and James Jeffers surveyed the small Crusader fort on top of the mountain called El-Habis, during the joint excavation project with the BSAJ in 1959. Kirkbride devoted her attention to materials from earlier periods of occupation in the basin, having discovered and excavated an Early N e olithic settlement at el-Beidha, to the north. [See Beidha.] Because of the relative paucity of Nabatean epigraphic materials from Petra proper, studies on the Nabatean lan guage have concentrated on the hundreds of minor inscrip tions in the Sinai and Negev deserts and at Meda'in Saleh in modern Saudi Arabia. [See Meda'in Saleh.] Beginning with the work of J. Cantineau in 1930, the basic vocabulary of the Nabateans has been assembled and the language can be read witii little difficulty. Excavations on the Paved Street produced a quantity of ostraca, all of which were subse quently lost. Excavations at tire Temple of the Winged Lions produced both ostraca and lapidary inscriptions. T h e for mer, because of close dating, are of importance for the tran sition between Nabatean and Arabic script, in keeping witii the documentary evidence of a Nabatean teacher of writing during the Early Islamic period, after die destruction of Pe tra. [See Nabatean Inscriptions.] Horsfield began the study of Nabatean ceramics in 1929 by recognizing fine, thin, red-painted pottery as Nabatean. Since then, a number of studies have been done, including Hammond's on the fine wares, Khairy's on fine and com mon wares, David Johnson's on unguentaria, and Karl Schmidt-Korte's on decorative patterns and modern repli cation studies. Since Burckhardt's rediscovery of the site, a number of maps of the basin have been produced that have benefited from aerial, photogrammetric, plane, and subsurface elec tronic surveys. However, absolute identification has only been possible by excavation because of the tremendous rock falls that resulted from the earthquakes of 363 and 551 C E in particular. However, the work of Rudolf Ernst Briinnow and Alfred von Domaszewski (1904) at the end of the eighteenth century thoroughly documented the site's more than eight hundred rock-cut monuments and added the modern names of mountains, wadis, and other topographic features. Pres ently, however, only the Main Theater, the Paved Street, and its related temenos area, the Qasr Bint Faroun, tile Bath Complex, the excavated residential sites, and the Temple of the Winged Lions represent proper identifications of oncesubsurface structures. Judith McKenzie (1990) examined die major architectural structures and has produced a chro nology based on typology. Diodorus of Sicily is the earliest recorder of Nabatean settiement, and he cites an author some three hundred years earlier (History 19.94-100). Recent studies have sought to place the original homeland of the Nabateans in what has become modern Saudi Arabia, witii the dating of the arrival of the people placed considerably prior to the 312 B C E date
PETRA: History of Excavation of Diodorus's report of Nabatean relations with the Seleucid Greeks. Strabo used an informant in his report of the ur banized city of Petra in the first century C E (Geog. 16.4.8; 21). Unfortunately, the informant was blind, and so not all of Strabo's analysis of the culture of the people at that point in history can be trusted as accurate. Nor is the picture of the manner in which the Nabateans urbanized Petra com pletely understood, in spite of various attempts to analyze the data. It does appear, however, from the archaeological record of building activities, that the main thrust toward ur banization took place under the most energetic of Petra's kings, Aretas IV (9 B C E - 4 0 C E ) . Although king lists have been reconstructed, the early history of the people remains un clear, and data concerning such societal factors as ranking, actual political organization at lower levels, slavery, and con trol of sites outside the capital remain to be gathered. What is known of religious life at Petra is based on its stone-cut monuments and the mention of deities encoun tered in inscriptional materials within and outside the city (see above). Further information has been made available by the excavations at the Temple of the Winged Lions, in cluding probable cultic practices, the cultic model, and a number of cultic objects recovered, but the story of the cult at Petra, despite lists of deities, two temples known at the site, and many figurines recovered that are presumed to be cultic, is still incomplete. Recent interest in Nabatean technology, at Petra and else where, has provided a more informed idea of the crafts manship, products, and even the names of artisan "families" connected with the site and its many tributary areas. Of greatest interest is the profound eclecticism shown by the people in their adoption, adaptation, and innovation of tech nologies. Thus far, the main areas studied have involved architecture (Parr, Wright, Hammond, Zayadine, Stucky, and Others), metallurgy (Lindner), ceramic production (Hammond, Parr, Khairy, Schmidt-Korte), marble sources (Slaughter), and art. T h e Nabatean people have emerged as perhaps the most prominent commercial groups operating in the Near East from the Augustan Age through the Early Byzantine period (first-fourth centuries CE) . Their variety of products, reac tion to the varying tastes of the western market, and sheer business energy qualify their preeminence in the commercial life of the West. Their assumed earlier seminomadic wan dering in the Arabian Peninsula apparently brought knowl edge of the ttade routes and their skillful choice of products brought profits—especially from oils and balms, T h e prod ucts appear to have been processed from raw materials se cured in the area and packaged for sale, with Petra func tioning as the main redistribution center. Later sources cite medicinal products from Petra as of the highest quality; along with frankincense, myrrh, bitumen, silk, gems, and spices, they may have been among the luxury items traded
305
to the Western world. Even the Roman occupation of the site (106 CE) does not seem to have reduced the level of the Nabateans' economic activities, as recovered remains from after that date indicate. BIBLIOGRAPHY Brock, Sebastian P . " A Letter Attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem on t h e Rebuilding of the T e m p l e . " Bulletin of the School of Oriental and Af rican Studies 40.2 (1977): 267-286. B r u n n o w , Rudolf-Ernst, a n d Alfred v o n Domaszewski. Die Provincia Arabia. Vol, i, Strassburg, 1904. H a m m o n d , Philip C. The Excavation of the Main Theater at Petra, 196162: Final Report. L o n d o n , 1965. H a m m o n d , Philip C. The Nabataeans: Their History, Culture, and Ar chaeology. Studies in M e d i t e r r a n e a n Archaeology, vol. 37. Goteborg, 1973H a m m o n d , Philip C . " S u r v e y a n d Excavation at Petra, 1973-1974." Annual ofthe Department ofAntiquities of'Jordan 20 (1975): 5-30,145154H a m m o n d , Philip C. "Excavations at Petra, 1975-1977." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 22 (1978): 81-101, 229-248. H a m m o n d , Philip C. " N e w Evidence for t h e F o u r t h - C e n t u r y A . D . Destruction of Petra." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 238 (1980): 65-67. H a m m o n d , Philip C . " N a b a t a e a n Settlement Patterns inside Petra." Ancient History Bulletin 5.1-2 (1991): 36-46. Horsfield, George, a n d Agnes C. Horsfield. "Sela-Petra, the Rock, of E d o m and N a b a t e n e , " Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine 7 (1938): 1-42; 8 (1938): 87-115; 9 (1941): 105-204. Khairy, Nabil. "Nabataischer Kultplatz u n d byzantische Kirbe." In Pe tra: Neue Ausgrabungen und Entdeckungen, edited by Alanfred L i n d ner, p p . 58-73. M u n i c h , 1986. Lindner, Manfred. " D e u t s c h e A u s g r a b u n g e n in P e t r a . " Bonner Jahrbiicher 180 (1980): 253-264. McKenzie, Judith. The Architecture of Petra. British Academy M o n o graphs in Archaeology, 1. L o n d o n , 1990. Milik, J. T . "Origines des N a b a t e e n s . " In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited b y A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 261-265. A m m a n , 1982. Negev, Avraham, ed. " D i e N a b a t a c r . " Antike Welt 7, S o n d e r n u m m e r (1976). Special issue. Oldfather, C . H., et a l , trans. Diodorus Siculus. 12 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, M a s s . , 1933-1957. Parr, Peter J. "Excavations at Petra, 1958-59." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 92 (July-December i960): 124-135. Parr, Peter J. "Recent Discoveries in t h e Sanctuary of the Qasr Bint F a r ' u n at Petra. I: Account of t h e Recent Excavations." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 12-13 (1967-1968): 5-19. Parr, Peter J. "Decouvertes recentes au sanctuaire d u Qasr a Petra. I. C o m p t e r e n d u des dernieres fouilles." Syria 45.1 (1968): 1-40. Russell, Kenneth. " T h e Earthquake Chronology of Palestine and Northwest Arabia from the Second through t h e Mid-Eighth Century A . D . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 260 (1985): 37-59Schmidt-Colinet, Andreas. " T h e M a s o n ' s W o r k s h o p of Hegra: Its R e lations t o Petra a n d the T o m b of Syllaios." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 143150. A m m a n , 1987. Starcky, Jean. "Quelques aspects de la religion des N a b a t e e n s . " I n Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by A d n a n Hadidi, p p . 195-196. A m m a n , 1982.
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Strabo. Geography. Vol. 12. Translated by Horace L. Jones. Loeb Clas sical Library. Cambridge, Mass., 1966. Stucky, Rolf A. " D a s NabatSische Wohnhaus u n d das urbanistische System der Wohnquartiere in Petra." AntikeKunst 35.2 (1992): 129140. Wright, G. R. H. "Structure of the Qasr Bint Far'un: A Preliminary Review." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 93 (1961): 8-37. Wright, G. R. H. "Recent Discoveries in the Sanctuary of the Qasr Bint Far'un at Petra." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jor dan 12-13 (1967—1968): 20-29. Zayadine, Fawzi. " D i e Gotter der Nabataer." In Petra und das Konigreich der Nabataer, edited by Manfred Lindner, p p . 108-117. M u nich, 1970. Zayadine, Fawzi. " T e m p l e , Graber, Topferofen." In Petra: Neue Ausgrabungen und Entdeckungen, edited by Manfred Lindner, p p . 2 1 4 269. Munich, 1986. Zayadine, Fawzi. "Decorative Stucco at Petra and Other Hellenistic Sites." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by Adnan Fladidi, p p . 131-142. A m m a n , 1987. HAMMOND
and Alfred von Domaszewsld, but it was Walter B. Bach mann, in his 1921 revision of the Petra city plan, who pos tulated die existence of a "Great Temple." While no struc tures were revealed before the Brown University 1993 excavations under the direction of Martha Sharp Joukowsky, the precinct, which is constructed on an artificial terrace, was littered with carved architectural fragments top pled by one of the earthquakes that have rocked the site throughout its history. In 1990 Kennetir W. Russell discov ered tire late fifth-century Byzantine church. Following Rus sell's death, its excavation was directed by Pierre Bikai of the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) with principal archaeologist Zbigniew Fiema assisted by Robert Schick and Khairieh 'Amr. These excavations, which ended in 1993, were supported by the United States Agency for International Development and Jordan's Ministry of Tour ism and Department of Antiquities.
Since the initial exploration and excavation of the site, recent finds include a southern temple and a Byzantine church. The temple was first explored by Rudolf-Ernst Brtinnow
S o u t h e r n T e m p l e . Located to the south of the colon naded street and southeast of the temenos gate, the southern temple represents one of the major archaeological and ar chitectural components of central Petra. This precinct (7,000 sq m) is comprised of a propylaeum, a lower teme nos, and a monumental grand stairway that in turn leads to
P H I L I P C.
Recent Finds
PETRA: R e c e n t F i n d s . F i g u r e 1. View of the excavated
church. (Courtesy A C O R )
PETRA: Recent Finds
PETRA:
307
R e c e n t F i n d s . F i g u r e 2. Fragments of the Petra scrolls. (Courtesy A C O R )
the upper temenos—die sacred enclosure for the temple proper. T h e southern temple was a white-stuccoed building whose impact must have been dramatic set against its rosered environment. It is tetrastyle in anus with widely spaced (about 7.50 m) central columns at the entrance and two end columns located about 5 m to the east and west, respectively. T h e porch columns (approximately 15 m high) plus the tri angular pediment and the entablature indicate that its height would have been at least 19 m. The temple measures 28 m east-west and is some 40 m long. T h e podium rests on a forecourt of hexagonal pavers; a stairway approaches a broad, deep pronaos tiiat leads up and into die naos, or cella. T h e naos entry is marked by two columns equal in diameter (1.50 m) to those at the temple entrance but larger than either the eight flanking the cella walls or the six at the rear of the temple (whose diameter is 1.20 m). T h e naos, or cella, is some 29 m nortii-soutii by 18 m east-west. In the interior north a massive anta wall rests on a finely carved Attic base. T o the south a two-ordiree-storied adytum is dominated by a large, central vaulted arch. Twin-stepped, arched passages lead to paved platforms and a series of steps that give access to the temple cella and/or are an exit. Sculpted fragments of faces and fine, deeply carved architectural elements were recovered on an exterior paved walkway in die western part of the temple. In the lower temenos large white hexagonal pavers were positioned above an extensive system of canals tiiat can be traced to the temple forecourt. In the western exedra tiiere were thousands of architectural fragments, one of them a capital decorated with elephant-headed volutes, and frag ments of limestone friezes of faces, in addition to coins,
lamps, Roman glass, and ceramics, including figurines, Na batean bowls, small cups, and juglets. Elaborate floral friezes and acanthus-laden limestone capitals (carved witii the rip ple technique) suggest that the temple was constructed at the beginning of the first century C E by the Nabateans, who combined their native traditions with the classical spirit. Byzantine C h u r c h . T h e tripartite basilica (26 m eastwest X 15 m north-south) has three entrances on the west, three apses to the east, and walls preserved some 3 m above a mosaic floor (see figure 1). [See Basilicas; Mosaics.] In constructing the edifice, the builders recycled Nabatean and Roman architectural elements, including capitals, doorjambs, and reliefs. Although the structure was modified after a fire, its final form included a synthronon in the centtal apse, with a chancel platform and marble chancel screens. A stone-paved atrium was located to the west. T h e side aisles have mosaic pavements dated to the early sixth century. Three parallel rows of roundels depicting na tive and exotic animals and vessels are found in the pave ment in the north aisle; the eastern portion of the pavement in the south aisle is similar. The remaining central panels portray the Seasons, Ocean, Earth, and Wisdom flanked by birds, animals, and fish. T h e remains of the central nave consist of a fragmented marble opus sectile floor and a mar ble stylobate that held a row of columns. Thousands of glass tesserae (some gilded) indicate that the upper walls, arches, and the central apse were decorated witii mosaics. Numerous finds include coins, bronze and iron door fittings, glass, ostraca, fragmentary Nabatean and Greek inscriptions, and a large marble vessel decorated with two lioness-shaped handles. The earliest date found is 537
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PETRIE, WILLIAM M A T T H E W FLINDERS
CE and the latest is 559, but earlier or later dates are not precluded. Thereafter, squatters occupied the atrium. T h e structure was abandoned in the early seventh century. In a room adjacent to the church, some 152 carbonized papyrus scrolls (30 m wide and some 5-8 cm in diameter) were discovered in 1993 that represent the largest collection of textual material from antiquity yet found in Jordan (see figure 2). They had been crushed under carbonized shelv ing, on which they originally had been stored, as well as under about 4 m of stone debris. ACOR has assembled an international group of experts to help in the task of conser vation and restoration. Ludwig Koenen, professor of papyrology at the University of Michigan, dates the scrolls to tire fifth-sixth centuries. Jaakko Frosen, a conservator at the Academy of Finland, has unrolled twelve of the scrolls, which are written by many hands in a cursive Greek "doc umentary style." The contents are personal records—lec tures, sermons, wills, contracts, and agreements with socio economic, topographic, and demographic implications for the mid-sixth century in Palestine. BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACOR Newsletter 6.2 (Winter 1994): 1 - 3 . M A R T H A SHARP JOUKOWSKY
PETRIE, WILLIAM MATTHEW FLINDERS (1853-1942), British Egyptologist and archaeologist, con sidered by many scholars to be the founder of modern Near Eastern archaeology. In the course of his long professional career, Petrie excavated more than sixty of the most histor ically important—and richest—sites in Egypt and Palestine; published well over one hundred excavation reports, general works, and monographs; and wrote almost 450 articles and almost 400 reviews. His lasting importance to the develop ment of Near Eastern archaeology is in his methodological innovations. Petrie was the first excavator in Egypt to rec ognize the chronological significance of ceramic evidence and, in his 1890 excavations at Tell el-Hesi, the first in Pal estine to utilize the principles of stratigraphic analysis. Born in Charlton, Kent, he was a sickly child and was educated at home. From an early age, Petrie showed interest in antiquarian matters: an avid collector of ancient coins, he was also a frequent visitor to the galleries of the British M u seum. Under the influence of his chemist father, Petrie was eventually encouraged to take up surveying; his precise, de tailed plans of ancient British earthworks and monuments, including Stonehenge, brought him to tire attention of the archaeological world. T h e mystical attraction of Piazzi Smyth's pyramid theories turned Petrie's interest to Egypt. For a survey of the pyramids at Giza, Petrie traveled alone to Egypt in 1881. Ironically, his characteristically meticulous survey, published by the Royal Society, utterly disproved
many of Smyth's sweeping matiiematical assertions about the design of the Great Pyramid. Petrie remained in Egypt, where he was employed in 1883 by the newly established Egypt Exploration Fund, and ex cavated the Delta sites of Tanis and Naukratis, Nebesha, and Daphne. Expressing great dissatisfaction with the fi nancial administration of the fund, however, he set off on his own. Long an admirer of the eugenical theories of Sir Francis Galton, Petrie accepted an assignment to collect ac curate measurements and photographs of ancient races as they were depicted in relief on tire various temple walls throughout Upper Egypt. T h e result of this expedition was Petrie's book Racial Photographs from the Egyptian Monu ments (London, 1887), in which he began to apply Galton's modern ideas about racial mixture and the stability of types to archaeological material. Petrie's interests and excavation sites were eclectic: in 1887, he discovered a vast cemetery of Roman-period mum mies with painted portraits at Hawara in the Faiyum. In 1888, in the Middle Kingdom levels at Lahun and the New Kingdom tombs at nearby Gurob, Petrie perceptively rec ognized the presence of Bronze Age Aegean pottery. Peuie's initial historical theories in Egypt were based on a collation of finds from widely scattered sites. It was his employment by the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1890 and his subse quent work at Tell el-Hesi in southern Judea Qudah), how ever, that confronted him with the challenge—and oppor tunity—of utilizing the stratigraphic methods of excavation pioneered by Heinrich Schliemann at Hissarlik in 1870. Al though Petrie misidentified the site as ancient Lachish, his excavations there (carried on by Frederick Bliss for several seasons after his departure) inaugurated a new era in Pal estinian archaeology. For nearly a century to come, a pri mary focus of excavation there would be the separation of uniform stratigraphic levels at large tells. Petrie returned to Egypt in 1891 and explored important sites, including Tell el-Amarna, Coptos, Abydos, Balks, Hu, Abadiya, and Naqada, at which he introduced his method of pottery seriation to arrange the relative chronol ogy of types. He was appointed professor of Egyptology at the University of London in 1892 and, with his wife Hilda, founded the British School of Archaeology in Egypt in 1906 to support his field research. Race and racial mixture con tinued to be a main focus of Petrie's historical interpretation; his ideas were fully articulated in his book The Revolutions of Civilisation (London, 1911), in which he suggested that "the source of every civilization has lain in race mixture, it may be that Eugenics will, in some future civilization, care fully segregate fine races, until they have a distinct type" (p. 131). This dogma of progress through the triumph of "fine" races was to guide his work for the rest of his life. With the rise of nationalist agitation in Egypt in the early 1920s, Petrie shifted his work to Palestine, excavating the
PETROGRAPHY sites of Tell Jemmeh (1926-1927), Tell el-Far'ah South (1928-1930), and Tell el-'Ajjul (1930-1934,1937-1938). At these sites he trained a number of young British archaeol ogists, including James Starkey, Olga Tufnell, and G. Lankester Harding, who would play prominent roles in Pales tinian archaeology in the coming years. In recognition for his life's work, Petrie was knighted in 1923. He spent his last years in residence at the American School of Oriental Re search in Jerusalem. [See also British School of Archaeology in Egypt; Palestine Exploration Fund; and the biographies of Bliss, Harding, Starkey,
and Tufnell.
the subject
In addition,
of independent
many
of the sites mentioned
are
entries.}
BIBLIOGRAPHY Callaway, Joseph A. " S i r Flinders Petrie: Father of Palestinian A r c h a e ology." Biblical Archaeology Review 6.6 (1980): 44-55. Drower, Margaret S. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1985. Fargo, Valerie M . " B A Portrait: Sir Flinders Petrie." Biblical Archae ologist 47 (1984): 220-223. Petrie, W . M . Flinders. Racial Types from Egypt. L o n d o n , 1887. Also known as Racial Photographs from the Egyptian Monuments. Petrie, W . M . Flinders. Methods and Aims in Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1904. Petrie, W . M . Flinders. The Revolutions of Civilisation. L o n d o n , 1911. Petrie, W . M . Flinders. Seventy Years in Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1931. Uphill, Eric P . " A Bibliography of Sir William M a t t h e w Flinders Petrie (1853-1942)." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 31 (1972): 356-379. N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN
PETROGRAPHY. T h e study of rocks and similar ma terials in thin sections under a microscope, using high mag nifications, is known as petrography. T h e method has been applied to pottery since the end of the nineteenth century— for almost as long as it has been in use in geology to examine rocks. T o make a thin section, a 5-millimeter-thick slice of the object to be examined is glued to a glass slide and then ground to a thickness of 30 microns (0.03 mm). At this thickness most minerals become transparent to light. T h e petrographic microscope includes several components that alter the light passing through the thin section and provide each mineral with a unique set of optical properties that can be identified under the microscope. Thin sections are in expensive to prepare; the training to analyze them is not complicated; and they can be stored for future reference and reexamination as many times as necessary. Petrography is applied mainly to pottery, but also to plas ter, stone, and metal artifacts. T h e method has been used to identify the sources of raw materials in pottery produc tion, to locate the provenance of vessels, to assess the tech niques used by potters, and to estimate firing temperature. The fabric (tire combination of raw materials and texture as seen under the microscope) consists of matrix and tem
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per. The matrix consists of clay (of clay minerals too fine to be identified under the microscope) and silty components. By identifying microfauna and silty minerals, the source of the clay can be determined. T h e temper is the sand-size fraction that, in most cases, the potter added to the clay. Rock fragments, minerals, fossils, and plant material are nat ural tempering materials; grog (crushed pottery) and ash are temper assembled by potters. T h e composition of the tem per reveals which rocks were used; its texture (shape, sort ing, size, quantity) reveals how it was prepared before being added to the clay. Firing temperature can be estimated using optical changes that occur in different minerals at different temperatures. Grain counting, a useful petrographic tech nique, is used to obtain quantitative information on the var ious temper components. Thus, from a thin section which ingredients the potter mixed and in what proportion can be determined, as well as how the materials were processed and fired and the source(s) of the raw materials. This kind of technological information is the advantage pettography offers over neu tron activation analysis (NAA), a method mainly used in provenance studies. [See Neutron Activation Analysis.] Moreover, using petrography to identify the provenance of a sample does not require a large database of vessels from known sources (such as kiln wastes). A thorough knowledge of the regional geology and the raw materials available can tell a petrographer whether a sample is local. Petrography is particularly useful for analyzing coarse, low-fired ware, when abundant information can be obtained; however, it is also applicable to fine ware. It can be used on its own or as a preliminary study preceding other types of analyses to se lect representative samples for more expensive or less avail able techniques. BIBLIOGRAPHY Amiran, R u t h , et al. " T h e Interrelationship between Arad and Sites in Southern Sinai in the Early Bronze Age I I . " Israel Exploration Journal 23 (1973): !93 I97. C o m b i n i n g typology and petrography to solve an archaeological problem neatly. A classic. Gilead, Isaac, and Yuval G o r e n . "Petrographic Analyses of F o u r t h Mil lennium B . C . Pottery a n d S t o n e Vessels from the N o r t h e r n Negev, Israel." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 275 (1989): 5-14. Petrography used for stone artifacts with unexpected results and an application of the grain-counting technique in pottery analysis. Porat, N a o m i . "Petrography of Pottery from Southern Israel and the N e g e v . " I n L'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'age du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actes du Colloque d'Emrnaiis, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, vol. 1, p p . 169-187. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. D e m o n s t r a t e s the wealth of information obtained from petrography a n d gives an example of die variety of fabrics found in pottery within a limited area and period. Porat, N a o m i , et al. "Correlation between Petrography, N A A , and I C P Analyses'. Application to Early Bronze Egyptian Pottery from C a n a a n . " Geoarchaeology 6 (1991): 133-149. Petrography used in c o m _
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PHILISTINES: Early Philistines
bination with other analytical techniques, demonstrating its effec tiveness. Rothenberg, Benno, a n d Jonathan Glass. " T h e Midianite Pottery." In Midian, Moab, and Edom: The History and Archaeology of Late Bronze and Iron Age Jordan and North-West Arabia, edited by John F . A. Sawyer and David J. A. Clines, p p . 65-124. Sheffield, 1983. M e thodical study, using petrography to its utmost capacity. NAOMI PORAT
PHILISTINES. as known
primarily
comprises
two articles:
[To survey from
the history
the archaeological
of the record,
Philistines this
entry
Early Philistines and Late Philistines.]
Early Philistines T h e Philistines were one of the ancient Sea Peoples of un specified Aegean origin who settled along the coast of Ca naan in the Early Iron I period (beginning of the twelfth century B C E ) , soon after the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland. They were a people of cul tural and material sophistication who maintained their own sense of cultural identity in their cities and settlements in southern Palestine for about six hundred years. There are two major sources for the early history of the Philistines after their arrival in the ancient Near East: Egyp tian records and the Hebrew Bible. T h e first specific men tion of the Philistines is from the twelfth century B C E (prob ably 1191 BCE) , in the inscriptions and reliefs of the mortuary temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu in Thebes. T h e texts refer to a people called the prist or plst, which must be no other than the biblical Philistines. The records describe their defeat, as well as that of other allied peoples, by the Egyptian army led by pharaoh, who repulsed a combined land and sea attack at the mouth of the Nile River. T h e accompanying battle scenes depict ships with prows deco rated with lion or bird heads; the Sea Peoples' warriors wear high feathered headdresses and are armed with straight swords, spears, and round shields. In another scene the women and children are being borne in oxcarts. This infor mation is supplemented by Papyrus Harris I and the Onomasticon of Amenope. Papyrus Harris I also describes Ram eses' defeat of the Philistines in which they "are made as ashes." The Onomasticon of Amenope is an encyclopedia of such various subjects as nauiral history, customs, and for eign peoples. In it tire Philistines are reported as dwelling in the coastal cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ashdod. [See Ash kelon; Ashdod.] The Hebrew Bible provides supplemental information on the early history of the Philistines in Palestine and lists the cities of the Philistine Pentapolis as Ashkelon, Gaza, Ash dod, Ekron/Tel Miqne, and Gath/Tel 'Erani (cf. Jos. 1 3 : 2 3) as well as smaller, semiautonomous centers such as Ziklag (cf. 1 Sm. 27:5) and Timnah/Tel Batash (cf. Jgs. 14). Other references suggest that their territorial expansion may have
reached much farther north and inland, perhaps as far as Beth-Shean. [See Miqne, Tel; 'Erani, Tel; Batash, Tel; BethShean.] A number of passages point to the Philistines' tech nological expertise, suggesting that they possessed a monopoly on smithery (cf. 1 Sm. 13:19-23). Their warrior champion, Goliath, is described as having worn a bronze helmet and a coat of chain mail with greaves and having carried a bronze javelin and a spear with an iron tip. Cou pled with die description of the battle, whose outcome was decided by a duel between champions, the Goliath narrative is strongly reminiscent of the Homeric epic tales of Greek heroes engaged in single combat. Modern archaeological investigation of the Philistines be gan in 1889, when Sir William Flinders Petrie, excavating New Kingdom tombs in the Faiyum discovered evidence of cultural and commercial contacts between Egypt and the Aegean in the fifteenth-twelfth centuries B C E . [See Faiyum.] Included among the typically Egyptian tomb goods was My cenaean pottery that could be dated by the inscribed scarabs found with them. [See Grave Goods.] This was followed by the discovery of Mycenaean sherds in Palestine at Tell esSafi, the presumed site of Philistine Gath. It soon became accepted that a particular repertoire of elaborately decorated red-and-black-painted vessels was the identifying hallmark of Philistine ceramics. Duncan Mackenzie's discovery of similar pottery at Ashkelon in a stratum directly above an earlier thick layer of ash suggested tiiat the Philistines had conquered and razed that flourishing Canaanite city in the twelfth century B C E and subsequently built their own settle ment on the ruins. Recent investigations have expanded upon the Aegean context of Philistine culture with regard to Egyptian, Ca naanite, and Israelite cultures, exploring social, economic, and cultic aspects of Philistine life: Ashdod has been exten sively excavated and excavations at Ekron/Tel Miqne and Ashkelon are still in progress. Excavations at Tell Qasile near Tel Aviv indicate that Philistine settlement was more widespread than previously thought and its patterns consid erably more varied. [See Qasile, Tell.] It is clear from the discovery of underground silos, flint siclde blades, millstones, oil presses, loom weights, and wine jars that the Philistines were not merely die warriors de picted on Egyptian reliefs and in the biblical narratives: they were experienced farmers as well. They were, for the most part, however, urban dwellers, living in well-planned and well-fortified cities with developing industries. T h e very ear liest Philistine levels, exhibited best at Ashdod and at Miqne, show the cities divided into zones: an industrial belt, a cen tral area witii monumental public architecture and shrines, and a domestic area. T h e cities were ringed by thick mudbrick fortification walls. T h e general plan was more or less adhered to in each successive level as expansion took place. Philistine cult practices incorporated such Aegean traits as the seated female deity (best exemplified by the numerous
PHILISTINES: Late Philistines examples found at Ashdod), temples with apses (also known from Ashdod), offering benches (Tell Qasile), votive vessels called kernoi, ritual burial pits, hearth rooms (Miqne, Tell Qasile), and connecting cult and industry—exhibited most clearly in the Late Iron II (seventh century BCE) phases by the four-horned alters associated with the olive-oil industry. [See Cult; Olives.] Over the course of time, the Pliilistines gradually assimilated elements of Semitic and Canaanite be liefs into their own religion. T h e Hebrew Bible, for instance, mentions the Semitic deity Dagon being worshipped in Ash dod (i Sm. 5:2). So far, no Philistine burials have been uncovered in any of the major cities of the Pentapolis. However, several cem eteries that may be related to Philistine culture on the basis of tomb contents (e.g., Azor), show great diversity in the manner of interment. [See Burial Techniques.] Interment practices included simple single inhumations in earthen graves and jars (Azor) and rock-out, communal graves (Tell el-Far'ah [South], Beth-Shean). T w o other Philistine burial customs—both ostensibly borrowed from foreign traditions—are the use of anthropoid clay sarcophagi (cf. Deir el-Balah), modeled after Egyptian examples, and rockcut chamber tombs reminiscent of Mycenaean burial cus toms. [See Deir el-Balah.] There is also some evidence from Azor that cremation may have been employed, a practice unknown in Mycenaean Greece but documented in Asia Minor. Glimpses of Philistine mourning customs may be gleaned from terra-cotta female mourning figurines with their hands placed on their head or with one hand placed across the breast that have been found at burial sites at Azor and Tell Jemmeh. [See Jemmeh, Tell.] Similar examples are known from the Aegean from tire cemetery at Perati on the Greek mainland; from Ialysos on Rhodes; the island of Naxos; and eastern Crete. These figurines are often attached to the rims of Philistine kraters and are similar to large Aegean bowls called kalathoi that have figurines attached to their rims. Four different influences can be seen in the decoration of Philistine pottery: first and most dominant is the Myce naean. A Cypriot, Egyptian, and local Canaanite influence is also evident in form and decoration. T h e earliest Philistine pottery has a monochrome decoration, but "classical" Phi listine pottery is red-and-black bichrome ware on a white slip. Most of the motifs—birds, fish, spirals, concentric sem icircles, chevrons—were borrowed from die Mycenaean LUC:ib decorative repertoire. At a later stage, the white slip gave way to red slip, hand burnished witii dark-brown dec oration. Common Philistine shapes are the bowl, krater, stir rup jar, pyxis, amphoriskos, three-handled jar, strainer spout, and juglet pinched in at its middle. Types of cult vessels include ring kernoi, kernos bowls, zoomorphic ves sels, rhyta, cup-bearing kraters, and seated female terra cotta figurines called Ashdoda (named for Ashdod, where they were initially discovered).
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Very little is known about die language of the Philistines, except what can be gleaned from the Flebrew Bible. For instance, die title seren given to the rulers of the Philistine cities is thought to be Indo-European—perhaps ProtoGreek or Lydian—and related to the Greek word turanos, "tyrant." N o inscriptions from Iron I Philistine levels have yet been found, although two seals from Ashdod bear as yet undeciphered signs. Some scholars have suggested that clay tablets discovered at Tell Deir 'Alia may represent Philistine script. [See Deir 'Alia, T e l l ] However, both the nature and alphabet of the Philistine language continue to be the subject of controversy. The Philistines played a significant role in the history of the ancient Near East by furthering the connections between Canaan and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world. They brought to the region a developed material culture tiiat continued to evolve, even as it was affected by local, indig enous influences. The Philistines were accomplished archi tects and engineers, artistic potters, textile manufacturers, dyers, metalworkers, silversmiths, farmers, soldiers, and so phisticated urban planners. They played a pivotal role in the political upheavals and population movements that marked the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age in southern Canaan. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . The Land of the Bible. 2d cd. Philadelphia, 1979. D o t h a n , T r u d e . The Philistines and Their Material Culture. N e w Haven, 1982. D o t h a n , T r u d e . " T h e Arrival of the Sea Peoples: Culmral Diversity in Early Iron Age C a n a a n . " I n Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited b y Seymour Gitin a n d William G . Dever, p p . 1-14. Annual of tlie American Schools of Oriental R e search, 49. W i n o n a Lake, I n d . , 1989. D o t h a n , T r u d e . "Ekron of the Philistines, Part I: Where T h e y C a m e F r o m , H o w T h e y Settled D o w n , a n d the Place T h e y W o r s h i p p e d I n . " Biblical Archaeology Review 16.1 (1990): 26-36. D o t h a n , T r u d e , a n d M o s h e D o t h a n . People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines. N e w York, 1992. D o t h a n , T r a d e . " T e l M i q n e Ekron: T h e Aegean Affinities of the Sea Peoples' (Philistines') Settlement in C a n a a n in the Iron Age I . " In Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West. Reports on Kabri, Nami, Miqne-Ekron, Dor, and Ashkelon, edited by Seymour Gitin, p p . 41-59. Archaeological Institute of America Colloquia a n d C o n ference Papers, no. 1. D u b u q u e , Iowa, 1995. M a z a r , Amihai. Excavations at Tell Qasile, part 1, The Philistine Sanc tuary: Architecture and Cult Objects; part 2, The Philistine Sanctuary: Various Finds, the Pottery, Conclusions, Appendixes. Q e d e m , vols. 12, 20. Jerusalem, 1980-198 5. TRUDE DOTHAN
Late Philistines The Late Philistine period (Iron Age II, 1000-600 BCE) rep resents the second and final chapter in the history of an im migrant society as it adapted to the continuous impact of external forces, while maintaining tlie features diat gave it
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PHILISTINES: Late Philistines
its own peculiar identity. By the beginning of the tenth cen tury BCE, this dual process was well advanced in Philistia. Most of the material culture traditions of the early immi grant Sea Peoples had disappeared, and new traditions had been adopted from neighboring societies. This process, dur ing which Philistia experienced periods of decline and growth, continued until the end of the Iron Age. T h e phe nomena that demonstrate the long-term regional character of Philistia in Iron II are the continuity of occupation at traditional Philistine sites, the development of Philistine coastal plain material culture traditions, and the dynamics of the behavioral patterns and interactions between Philistia, Judah, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire. [See Judah; Assyr ians.] The excavations at Ashdod and Tel Miqne/Ekron, two of the five Philistine capital cities, provide the evidence for the regional character of Philistia throughout Iron II. Thus far, Ashkelon has produced evidence only for the end of the period, and Gaza and Gath (possibly Tel es-Safi), offer little or no secure archaeological data. [See Ashdod; Miqne, Tell; Ashkelon.] Ashdod, following the destruction of its 200-year-old Phi listine city at the beginning of the tenth century, was rebuilt in sttatum X. This stratum contained pottery characteristic of the end of Iron I, such as bowls with horizontal handles of the "degenerative" Philistine type. It also produced pot tery with features that represent new elements of material culture that developed through most of the Iron II period. One such group of pottery forms is Ashdod ware, with its decorative pattern of red-slipped and hand-burnished pot tery with black and white bands. Together with the other decorated and coarse ware forms of the Philistine coastal plain ceramic tradition, they belong to a corpus that devel oped through stratum VI until the end of the seventh cen tury BCE. During these three hundred and fifty years, the acropolis and the large fortified lower city of more than 75 acres were both occupied, although the latter not continu ously in all areas. At Ekron, with the destruction of stratum IV in the first quarter of the tenth century, the large lower Iron I city was abandoned, not to be resettled until the very end of the eighth centuty. T h e Northeast Acropolis continued to be occupied, however. Strata III—II (tenth-the eighth centuries) produced new fortifications, monumental architecture, and the continuation of the stratum IV ceramic tradition of redslipped and burnished decoration. Also, coarse-ware forms, including jars, jugs, and bowls, among others, some of which had developed out of Iron I ceramic traditions, came to con stitute part of a new southern coastal tradition. This corpus is fully represented in its final development in sttatum I of the seventh century, not only at Ekron, but at Ashdod, Ash kelon, and Timnah/Tel Batash. [See Batash, Tel.] It is in stratum I, following tire 701 BCE conquest by Sennacherib (see below), that Ekron expanded to more than 75 acres and
became an international entrepot, with the largest industrial center in antiquity known to date for the production of olive oil. [See Olives.] T h e sttatum I city also produced five caches of jewelry with two hundred pieces of silver jewelry and sil ver ingots. [See Jewelry.] These were most likely used as currency, vital to the advancement of the multinational As syrian commercial policies that also involved Phoenician maritime trade. [See Phoenicians.] While maintaining its coastal plain traditions in architecture and pottery, Ekron, like Philistia in general, developed into a multicultural so ciety, as indicated by the presence of Israelite, Neo-Assyr ian, Phoenician, and Egyptian elements of material culture. At Ekron, these include, among others, the monumental Neo-Assyrian-type palace and cultic objects (e.g., a silver medallion with a Neo-Assyrian motif depicting the goddess Ishtar), Israelite incense-type four-horned stone altars, Phoenicianlike inscriptions (qds I'srt, "dedicated for the god dess Asherah," and Imqm, "for the shrine"), and an Egyp tian Hathor sistrum. [See Cult; Altars.] At Ashkelon, to date, only the final (seventh century) Iron Age occupation phase has been exposed on a large scale. This evidence, similar to that at Ashdod and Ekron, but containing a larger sample of imports, has enhanced the scope of material culture features that define the final corpus of Philistine coastal plain material culture. Tell Qasile, Tel Batash/Timnah, and Tell esh-Shari'a/Tel Sera' on the pe riphery of Philistia provide further evidence of continuity and the impact of other cultures. [See Qasile, Tell; Sera', Tel.] Textual references from as late as the eighth and seventh centuries B C E that reflect Philistia's status as a separate ge ographic, political, and demographic entity are found in sev eral of the prophetic books of the Bible (Am. 1:6-8; Jer. 25:20; Zep. 2:4; Zee. 9:5-8). In them the Philistines are seen as the Israelites' principal "other," or main antagonist. Their separate existence is also documented in Neo-Assyrian texts: in the royal annals, Sargon II cites his 7 1 2 B C E con quests of Ashdod, Ekron, Gath; the 701 B C E conquest of Ekron is described in the annals of Sennacherib; in the first half of the seventh century BCE it was recorded in the annals of Esarhaddon that the kings of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, .and Gaza supplied materials for the construction of the pal ace in Nineveh; in 667 B C E Ashurbanipal, in his royal annals, is quoted as ordering the vassal Icings of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, and Gaza to support his military campaigns against Egypt and Cush; and Nebuchadrezzar's campaign against Ashkelon in 604 B C E and against a Philistine city in 603 B C E (probably Ekron) is described in the Babylonian chronicles. [See Nineveh.] T h e texts use the names Palastu (Philistia), 'Amqar(r)una
(Ekron), Asdudu
(Ashdod), Hazatu
(Gaza),
and Isqaluna (Ashkelon) to refer to the region, cities, and people of Philistia. Philistia's collapse at the end of the seventh century B C E was the result of the cumulative effect of the process of ac-
PHOENICIA culturation, accelerated by the new economic patterns es tablished when Philistia became integrated into the Neo-Assyrian Empire in that century and subject to a wide range of cultural influences from Mesopotamia and the Mediter ranean basin. The impact was so overwhelming that, by the time of the Neo-Babylonian conquest of 604-601 BCE, Phi listia no longer had a sufficiently strong or resilient core cul ture to survive tire destruction of its cities and the deporta tion of its population. T h e ultimate fate of the inhabitants of Philistia is hinted at in the Babylonian ration lists of the first quarter of the sixth century, in which the sons of Aga, the last king of Ash kelon, are mentioned. T h e final echo of the Philistines can be heard in the second half of the fifth century B C E , in the toponyms from die Murasu archives from Nippur. [See Nippur.] They point to ethnic self-identification among the exiles in Babylonia, who are listed by the name of a local region: Isqalunu, "Ashkelon," and Hazatu, "Gaza." With this, the Philistines disappear from the pages of history.
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doms of South Arabia. Phillips subsequently assembled some of the leading researchers of his day and in 1950-1952 led an expedition to Yemen. T h e expedition excavated at several sites, including Timna', the capital of ancient Qataban, and Marib, the capital of ancient Sheba. Despite the fact that the project had to be terminated prematurely, it generated a wealth of information that was later published in detail by specialists. It also gave Phillips the material for his popular book, Qataban and Sheba, cited as one of the fifty best books published in the United States in 1955. Phillips later began woiicing in Oman. Following a thirtyyear hiatus, the AFSM continued its work in Yemen. From 1982 to 1987, it sponsored renewed surveys and some lim ited excavations in the Wadi al-Jubah. While in Arabia and elsewhere, Phillips was given personal oil concessions and leases, ranking him at one time among the wealthiest men in the United States. H e was awarded many honorary de grees and was a member of die Explorers Club. [See also Jubah, Wadi al-; Marib; Oman; Qataban; Sheba; Timna' (Arabia); and Yemen.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Gitin, Seymour. " T e l M i q n e : A T y p e - S i t e for the Inner Coastal Plain in the Iron Age II P e r i o d . " In Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, edited b y S e y m o u r Gitin a n d William G. Dever, p p . 23-58. Annual of die American Schools of Oriental R e search, 49 W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1989. Gitin, Seymour. " E k r o n of the Philistines, Part II: Olive Oil Suppliers to the W o r l d . " Biblical Archaeology Review 16.2 (1990): 32-42, 59. Gitin, Seymour. " L a s t Days of t h e Philistines." Archaeology 45.3 (1992): 26-31. Gidn, Seymour. " T e l M i q n e - E k r o n in the Sevendi Century BCE: T h e Impact of E c o n o m i c Innovation a n d Foreign Cultural Influences on a Neo-Assyrian Vassal City-State." In Recent Excavations in Israel: A Viae to the West, Reports on Kabri, Nami, Miqne-Ekron, Dor, and Ashkelon, edited b y Seymour Gitin, p p . 61-79. Archaeological Insti tute of America Colloquia a n d Conference Papers, no. 1. D u b u q u e , Iowa, 1995. M a z a r , Amihai. Archaeology of the iMnd of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. N e w York, 1990. See chapter 12, "Philistia." Porten, Bezalel. " T h e Identity of K i n g A d o n . " Biblical Archaeologist 44 (1981): 36-52. T a d m o r , Hayim. "Philistia u n d e r Assyrian R u l e . " Biblical Archaeologist 29 (1966): 86-102, SEYMOUR G I T I N
PHILLIPS, WENDELL (1921-1975), founder of the American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM), a nonprofit research organization, and its first president. Phil lips received a bachelor's degree in paleontology with honors from the University of California in 1943. In addition to his work in archaeology, he was an explorer, a successful oil man, and an author. Archaeology, however, was his first love. Phillips led the University of California African Expedition in 1947 in its successful search for fossil hominid remains. While there, he met the Aga Khan, who told him about the ancient king
BIBLIOGRAPHY Phillips, Wendell. Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia. N e w York, 1955. Award-win ning and fascinating account of die author's 1950-1952 expeditions t o southern Arabia ( Y e m e n ) . Phillips, Wendell. Unknown Oman. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 6 . Popular account of his 1 9 5 2 - 1 9 6 6 travels, explorations, and excavations. Phillips, Wendell. Oman: A History. L o n d o n , 1967. Valuable history u p to 1966; includes some archaeological background, which should be read in the light of events a n d work conducted there since publica tion. J A M E S A. S A U E R
PHOENICIA. Coined by the ancient Greeks to desig nate the narrow strip of land between the Lebanon moun tains and the Mediterranean coast from southern Syria to northern Palestine, the term Phoenicia now generally refers to this region in the Iron Age (c. 1200-332 B C E ) , even though the culture had earlier antecedents. The following discussion is restricted to these geographic and chronological limits. T h e inhabitants of Phoenicia, because of their seacoast location and the region's limited agricultural land, developed a mercantile economy based on the export of products from the abundant coniferous forests that covered the mountains. This was supplemented by a thriving industrial complex for the manufacture of small objects that became the hallmark of their business interests throughout the Mediterranean world. Iron Age Phoenicia was not a nation, but rather a collection of cities built around natural harbors along the coast. While they shared a common culture, these small states remained independent, competing with each other in the international marketplace. A true history of Phoenicia would thus be that of die individual cities; however, it is a
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PHOENICIA
history that cannot be written because there are insufficient textual and archaeological data. The rare written documents from Iron Age Phoenicia are mostiy short funerary inscriptions and brief accounts of temple construction and repair. These texts do not recount history, so that exterior sources, such as contemporary Egyptian and Mesopotamian documents, die Hebrew Bible, and numerous classical writers, must be used. Although there was a native Phoenician literary tradition, this is now known only from quotations in later works, often at third hand. For example, the Roman historian Josephus and the early Christian writer Eusebius preserve portions of histories by earlier classical authors based on still earlier Phoenician originals. Most of the facts and events of internal Phoenician history are gleaned from these and similar works and must therefore be treated with caution. The archaeological record is inadequate, as many of Phoenicia's principle cities lie beneath modern ones and cannot be examined. Even where excavation is possible, in formation is disappointing. At Byblos, which has been com pletely uncovered, for example, most of the Phoenician pe riod is lacking. Sarafand (classical Sarepta) and Tyre have yielded only limited Phoenician remains, and current exca vations at Tell Kazel and Tell 'Arqa on die Syro-Lebanese border have discovered small provincial Iron Age towns. Nothing is known of important coastal cities like Arwad, Beirut, and Sidon. Fortunately, there are important ceme tery sites of the period near Beirut, Sidon, and elsewhere, and imposing temple complexes at 'Amrit and Sidon. History. T h e end of the Late Bronze Age (twelfth cen tury BCE) was a watershed in ancient history. Throughout the Mediterranean world, socioeconomic systems collapsed, empires disappeared, and a wave of immigrants from the Aegean and western Anatolia moved eastward by land and sea. Dubbed the Sea Peoples by modern scholars, after die Egyptian term for them, they are usually credited witii most of the destruction that took place in the eastern Mediterra nean. They remain elusive, however, and recent studies sug gest tiiey were but one element of a much broader phenom enon. In Phoenicia, tiiere is little trace of these western invaders, and opinion remains divided as to what role, if any, they played there. The first two centuries of tlie Iron Age must have been a • "golden age" for Phoenicia, in spite of the paucity of data to prove it. Still, the archaeological record and contempo rary Egyptian and Assyrian documents show that Tyre, Si don, Sarafand, Byblos, and Aradus flourished then. As a result of the collapse of the Late Bronze Age palace econ omies that destroyed all major powers from Greece to the Levant, there was no external interference in the develop ment of the coastal cities. By the beginning of the tenth cen tury BCE, die formation of classical Phoenician civilization was complete, along with a rapidly expanding population indicated by new town sites and cemeteries. The Phoeni
cians emerged as the chief sea power in eastern Mediterra nean waters and, at least as early as the ninth century B C E , began their commercial expansion toward the west. Many reasons have been given for this expansion, but the main stimulus was undoubtedly the search for metals needed for die growing Phoenician manufacturing industry, metals they found in the rich copper mines of Cyprus and in the silver, tin, and copper mines of the Iberian Peninsula. From the ninth century onward, Phoenicia was subjected to varying degrees of domination by the new empires that succeeded each other in the east. Assyrian kings from Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) to Ashurbanipal (668-633 BCE) regularly campaigned eastward to the Mediterranean coast. It is clear from the Assyrian annals that while they regularly wreaked punishment and destruction on the Aramean and North Syrian states, they generally did not attack the Phoenician cities but instead exacted tribute. Phoenicia also gave the land-bound Assyrians access to the lucrative Mediterranean commerce from which they extracted addi tional income. According to documents from the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III (745-727 BCE) and a treaty between Esarhaddon (680669 BCE) and the lung of Tyre, Assyrian officials were resi dent at key port cities. They oversaw the shipping tiiere, collecting taxes on the export-import trade and on the felling of cedar trees. As long as the tribute and taxes were forth coming, Assyrian rule over tlie Phoenician cities was rela tively mild, allowing them a semiautonomous status. While hostile military action may have been undertaken against the Phoenician cities by Tiglath-Pileser III, the first clear indi cation in the annals is to battles against Sidon and Tyre by Sennacherib (704-681 BCE). The following two rulers de scribe a second destruction of Sidon and both mainland Tyre and its island stronghold, which, like numerous cities and kingdoms in Assyria's western provinces, had refused to pay tribute. The destruction of Nineveh by tlie Babylo nian Idng Nabopolassar (626-605 ) in 612 B C E ended As syrian domination in the west. Nebuchadrezzar (605-562 BCE) then led a series of campaigns that brought all of SyriaPalestine under his control. Babylonian rule in Phoenicia was similar to that of Assyria, including annual tribute and taxes and resident officials to assure their payment. A few decades later Nabonidus (556-539 BCE) was defeated by Cy rus of Persia, and the short-lived Babylonian Empire came to a close. B C E
With the creation of an even larger and better-organized Persian Empire under Cyrus (559-530 B C E ) , Phoenicia, Cy prus, and Egypt formed tlie Fifth Satrapy (province), whose capital was Sidon. Like the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Persians were interested in the Phoenician commercial ties to the west, but also in the Phoenician fleets and maritime expertise used extensively in Persia's long and ultimately un successful attempt to conquer Greece. T h e Phoenician cities prospered under the Persians and the whole period (539-
PHOENICIA 332 BCE) was generally a time of peace. T h e trade network in which the Phoenicians then played a central role stretched from Gibraltar to Persia, from the Caucasus to Nubia. T h e inttoduction of coinage in Phoenicia greatiy facilitated this international commerce—at Sidon in about 450 B C E and shortly thereafter at Tyre, Aradus, and Byblos. The material affluence of these cities under the Persians is reflected in the temples at Amrit and Sidon and in the high level of wealth among the populace at large. This prosperous and peaceful life of the Phoenician cities was interrupted several times in the fourth century B C E by local uprisings attempting to get rid of Persian rule. Although such revolts were put down, they were one sign of the unrest and divided loyalties within tire Phoenician cities that eventually helped pave the way for the Macedonian conquest in 332 B C E . It is more difficult to define the role of Egypt in Phoenician affairs during the Iron Age. By the mid-twelfth century B C E , Egypt had ceased to be a power in Southwest Asia. Its for eign policy was reduced to playing one local state against another, to joining Canaanite coalitions against the Assyri ans and Babylonians, and to isolated military campaigns of their own. T h e one attempt to rebuild an empire is credited to Psamtik I (664-610 BCE) and Necho II (610-595 BCE) of the twenty-sixth dynasty. This was brief, however, as Necho II was defeated by the Babylonians at Carchemish in 605 B C E , ending any Egyptian hopes of rebuilding its empire in the region. In tlie face of tlie Assyrian and Babylonian em pires, Egypt could do little more than safeguard its own frontiers while undertaking a policy of fomenting unrest in Canaan whenever possible. Egypt's northern border was breached in 525 B C E at the battle of Pelusium, when the Per sian ruler Cambyses added the Nile Idngdom to his expand ing empire. C u l t u r e . T h e Phoenician language is a later form of Ca naanite (or West Semitic) used in Phoenicia itself and in North Syria, Cilicia, Cyprus, and elsewhere, preserved in texts dating from the eleventh to the first cenUtries BCE. Sev eral local dialects can be identified through differing gram matical features. Texts of historical, economic, or religious (other than funerary) content are rare. Phoenician was writ ten from right to left in a consonantal alphabet which, on present evidence, originated in Palestine during the middle centuries of tlie second millennium B C E . All known texts, however, are inscribed on durable materials such as stone or bronze. Alphabetic writing could well have been used ear lier in Phoenicia and elsewhere on a perishable material such as papyrus that has not survived the wet climate of tlie re gion. T h e Phoenicians transmitted this alphabet to Greece, perhaps in about the mid-eighth century B C E , when Greek texts appear in the Phoenician script witii a few changes to accommodate the phonemes of the Greek language. Some now argue tiiat this borrowing took place as early as the eleventh century B C E . T h e basic characteristic of Phoenician art is its blending
315
of styles borrowed from most artistic traditions of the an cient world. T h e inventiveness by which tlie Phoenician art ist combined, for example, Aegean, Hittite, and Egyptian artistic forms and motifs formed a distinct style easily rec ognizable as Phoenician. This style, however, originated in Canaanite antecedents of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages as seen, for example, on North Syrian cylinder seals and the ivories of Ugarit and Megiddo. These illustrate that the Phoenicians of the Iron Age improved upon but did not invent the style that became a hallmark of their civilization. Phoenician craftsmen excelled in die manufacture of small objects such as gold jewelry, engraved metal dishes, and ivories. They were particularly adept at producing vari colored glass bottles and flasks because the chemical prop erties of the sand along the Phoenician coast were especially suited to this industty. Among their finest products were scarabs of hard stones based on Egyptian originals but made in a unique Phoenician, or Greco-Phoenician, style. All these objects were easily transported and were an essential element in the Phoenician mercantile economy. Their pop ularity is evidenced not only by their widespread distribu tion, but also by local imitations. As Phoenician ttade cen ters were established overseas, immigrant craftsmen set up local workshops, training foreign artists to help meet the de mand for Phoenician manufactured items. The purple dye industry for which the Phoencians are so well known had a similar history. The dye was made from secretions in the Murex marine snail, common around die Mediterranean coastiine. Dye installations were already in existence along the Phoenician coast in the Late Bronze Age, but it was in the Iron Age tiiat production reached its height. As they expanded their commercial interests and trade cen ters, die Phoenicians established dye factories at many sites in the west. Although they were expert in the production of small ob jects, Phoenician artists fell short when it came to larger ob jects in stone, represented mostly by sarcophagi and funer ary stelae. While there are some fine pieces, like the marble figures of children dedicated to Eshmun at Sidon and die stone sarcophagi from that site, they are of the Persian and later periods and show the influence of Hellenistic art. Ear lier pieces, such as the sarcophagus of Ahiram from Byblos and the newly discovered funerary stelae from Tyre, are clumsy and technically unappealing. Religion. Most of what is known about Phoenician reli gious beliefs and practices comes from secondhand sources, primarily classical and early Christian writers and the He brew Bible, all of which viewed the Phoenician religion from their own perspective. Philo of Byblos, for example, trans mits earlier Phoenician ideas via the euhemeristic approach of his day; statements in the Hebrew Bible, while contem porary to Iron Age Phoenicia, were influenced by the pro phetic movement that saw all foreign religious systems as
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PHOENICIA
enemies of Yahweh. Even the Late Bronze Age Canaanite religion, as described primarily in the cultic and mytholog ical literature of Ugarit, is not a sure guide to Phoenician thought because it represents a theological system of an ear lier time. Iron Age Phoenicia itself offers only meager textual and archaeological data. While several Phoenician deities are noted in the texts, little is known of their function and char acter. No national pantheon can be defined as there was no national political identity that required one; deities were, rather, associated with individual cities. The chief god at Byblos is known only from his title Baal, "The Lord," a common appellation of Phoenician gods, often referred to as "Lord" of a place, city, or attribute. Other "Baals" appear in the Byblian texts, namely, Baal Shamem, "Lord of the sky," and Baal Addir, "Mighty Lord." Scholars are divided as to whether these should be considered divine epithets or epithets hypostatized into distinct new deities. Is Baal Sha mem, for example, a deity in his own right or is this merely a title of another, perhaps El, head of the older Canaanite pantheon? All these gods were overshadowed by Baalat Gubla, "Mistress of Byblos," a fertility goddess attested from earlier times and portrayed with the attributes of the Egyptian Hathor. She was the protectress of the city and its lungs and was later identified with Aphrodite. Texts from Byblos also mention "the assembly of the holy gods of Byb los," recalling similar divine assemblies at Ugarit and else where. The chief god of Sidon was "the lord of Sidon," though he is mentioned only once and his personal name is un known. As at Byblos, a fertility goddess, Ashtart (Astarte), held the preeminent position in the Sidonian pantheon. Ash tart played a minor role in the older Canaanite religion but became the protectress of Sidon and its rulers in Phoenician times. Ashtart was similarly an important goddess at Tyre where she was also known as Tannit, probably an attribute of Ashtart later personified as a distinct goddess in the west ern Punic world. Another prominent god of Sidon was Eshmun, a god of healing worshipped there from the seventh century BCE in his large temple outside the city. As a god of healing, Eshmun was widely honored. It seems likely that he was the god of healing in the temple at Amrit, known there by his epithet Shadrapa, "the protective spirit of healing." Like Tannit, Shadrapa, originally an attribute, became a separate deity (Satrapes) in Hellenistic times. The chief god of Tyre was Melqart (*Milk-qari) "King of the City," unknown before the first millennium B C E . It is generally felt that Melqart was the divinized personification of the ideal Phoenician king, perhaps a semidivine ancestor of the Tyrian rulers and founder of the city. Texts from Phoenicia itself mention Melqart only as a human personal name, but the god does appear in the treaty between Tyre and Esarhaddon of Assyria as one of the principle deities of the city (among whom were Ashtart, Baal Shamem, and c
s
Baal Malage, the latter perhaps a maritime deity). Although maritime deities must have been of great importance to Phoenician seafarers, the extant Iron Age documentation produces only one sure example, portrayed but not named on the earliest coinage of Aradus. Classical sources, of course, are replete with Phoenician gods of the sea such as Baal of Beirut, equated with Poseidon. T h e religious role of Phoenician kings is little known. By analogy to contemporary societies, priestly functions were part of a ruler's duties. T h e stela of Yehawmilk of Byblos shows him before the "Lady of Byblos" apparently offici ating at some ritual, echoed by the same scene on a small plaque from Byblos of about the same date. A king and queen of Sidon as well as their son carried the title "priest(ess) of Ashtart" but this may have been a local prac tice and it cannot be assumed that Phoenician kings in gen eral served as high priests of their city goddesses. Kings built and repaired temples, ruled on behalf of the titular deity of their cities, and were referred to as "the father and mother" of their people, perhaps as the earthly representative of that deity. While the texts indicate that many temples were active, archaeology has produced little more than the temples of Eshmun (Shadrapa) at 'Amrit and Sidon. A tiny shrine was found in the industrial quarter at Sarepta and a small temple is known from Tell el-Ghassil in the Biqa' Valley outside ancient Phoenicia proper. Nothing is known of the mortuary beliefs of the Phoeni cians, but they were probably similar to those in contem porary Canaanite societies. The funerary texts usually in clude a wish for a long life. One Sidonian king laments: "I was taken away before my time (to die)." Such statements indicate that the Phoenicians shared the common view that the gods meted out reward and punishment in this life, not the next. There is no mention of the underworld, other than in the curse that any who desecrate a burial will have no place among the rephaim, the netherworld inhabitants. What deity presided there cannot be determined; the general opin ion is that, by analogy to the Canaanite pantheon, it would be Mot. Tombs of the period were of several types, including ver tical shafts leading to a burial chamber, stone-lined pits, and natural caves. Cemeteries throughout Phoenicia show that both inhumation and cremation were practiced side by side, sometimes in the same tomb, for both adults and children. Whether or not the Phoenicians engaged in child sacrifice, as stated by Hebrew and classical writers, has been debated for decades. Both tire linguistic and archaeological evidence are inconclusive, and no scholarly consensus has yet been reached. The recent discovery of a possible tophet, or child cemetery, at Tyre has already produced some new infor mation. A final judgment must await the complete excava tion of the site. [See also 'Amrit; Byblos; Glass; Hittites; Nineveh; Phoe-
PHOENICIAN-PUNIC nician-Punic; Phoenicians; Semitic Languages; Sidon; and Tyre.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Archaeology 43.2 (1990): 22-56. Special section o n Phoenician history and culture. Baumgarten, Albert I. llie Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos. Lei den, 1981. Detailed study a n d analysis of a native Phoenician his torian of tire R o m a n period. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 279 (1990). Special issue devoted to all aspects of Phoenician history and culture. B u n n e n s , G u y . L'expansion phenicienne en mediterranee: Essai d'interpretation fonde sur une analyse des traditions litteraires. Brussels, 1979. Balanced approach t o die use of classical writers as source material for writing Phoenician history. Culican, William. Opera Selecta: From Tyre to Tartessos. Studies in M e d iterranean Archaeology, vol. 40. G o t e b o r g , 1986. Reprint of thirtyone articles on Phoenician art a n d archaeology b y a leading scholar in the field. Gibson, John C. L . Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 3, Phoe nician Inscriptions. Oxford, 1982. M o s t of the k n o w n Phoenician texts from Phoenicia a n d elsewhere are translated here, with commentary and philological notes. G r a s , Michel, Pierre Rouillard, a n d Javier Teixidor. " T h e Phoenicians and D e a t h . " Berytus Archaeological Studies 39 (1991): 127-176. Wellbalanced discussion of funerary practices throughout tire Phoenician and P u n i c world, including a new look at the alleged practice of child sacrifice. H a r d e n , D o n a l d B . The Phoenicians. 3d ed. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1980. Somewhat out of date, b u t a g o o d survey of history a n d culture. Jidejian, Nina. Byblos through the Ages. Beirut, 1968. Tyre through the Ages. Beirut, 1969. Sidon through the Ages. Beirut, 1971. Beirut through the Ages. Beirut, 1973. Histories of the major Phoenician cities, es pecially valuable for die Persian a n d Hellenistic periods, including extensive photographic d o c u m e n t a t i o n a n d bibliographies of both ancient a n d m o d e r n sources. Katzenstein, H . Jacob. The History of Tyre: From the Beginning of the Second Millennium B.C.E. until the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 538 B.C.E. Jerusalem, 1973. Detailed history of the city tiiat per haps relies too m u c h on classical a n d biblical sources. Lipihski, E d u a r d , et al., eds. Dictionnaire de la civilisation phenicienne et punique. T u r n h o u t , 1992. C o m p r e h e n s i v e encyclopedia of P h o e n i cian studies written by n u m e r o u s experts, including bibliographies for each entry. Moscati, Sabatino, ed. IFenici. Milan, 1988. Translated into English as The Phoenicians. N e w York, 1988. T h e most authoritative general survey of Phoenician and P u n i c culture to date, by some thirty lead ing scholars in die field; lavishly illustrated with a n extensive bibli ography. Rivista di studifenici. R o m e , 1973-. Scholarly journal devoted entirely to Phoenician a n d Punic studies, widi an annual bibliography of all works o n the subject. Vance, Donald R. "Literary Sources for t h e History of Palestine a n d Syria: T h e Phoenician Inscriptions." Biblical Archaeologist 57.1 (1994): 2-19; 57.2 (1994): 110-120. Well-researched, popular essay on the Phoenician language and the extant texts. W I L L I A M A. W A R D
PHOENICIAN-PUNIC. A Northwest Semitic lan guage of the first millennium B C E , Phoenician-Punic belongs to the Canaanite group of languages (Ammonite, Edomite,
317
Moabite, and Hebrew), distinct from Aramaic. [See ProtoCanaanite; Ammonite Inscriptions; Hebrew Language and Literature.] In the continuum of Northwest Semitic dialects of the first millennium B C E , Phoenician-Punic stands at one extreme, Aramaic at the other (Garr, 1985, pp. 205-235). Originally spoken on the coastal strip of what are modern Lebanon and southern Syria, it spread, beginning in the ninth century B C E , to those regions reached by Phoenician merchants or mercenaries—Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, and the Aegean Islands. Following its overseas ex pansion, Phoenician was transplanted to the colonies it founded on Cyprus and westward into Nordi Africa, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, and southern Spain, including the Balearic Islands. The name Punic is used for the phase of language and the type of script developed in Carthage and used throughout its empire, from the beginning of the sixth cen tury B C E onward. As with all the Canaanite languages, with the exception of Hebrew, Phoenician-Punic is attested mainly by inscriptions. T h e only literary evidence consists of some Punic passages in the Latin comedy Poenulus, by Plautus. Phoenician-Punic personal names are attested in Akkadian, Greek, and Latin ttanscriptions, while some Phoenician-Punic words are cited in classical sources, as late as St. Augustine (fourth century C E ) . [See Akkadian.] Chronologically, Phoenician-Punic inscriptions range from approximately the eleventh century B C E (Ahiram, ICAI 1-2) to the second century C E (Bitia in Sardinia, KAI173). [See Ahiram Inscription.] A few earlier inscriptions may also plausibly be identified as Phoenician: a small number of brief texts engraved on arrowheads, from different sources, and some on clay objects (cones) from Byblos, dated to the twelfth-eleventh centuries B C E . [See Byblos.] On the other hand, a small collection of inscriptions, called Latino-Punic, dated to the fourth-fifth centuries C E and written in Latin characters (with special signs $ and 2 for s and s), express a developed form of the Punic language. P h a s e s a n d Dialects. Phoenician-Punic can be divided into broad chronological and geographic phases. Only the inscriptions from Byblos show a clearly distinct dialect, ar chaic in respect to the rest of Phoenician. That dialect un derwent changes over time that can be classified in three phases, the first two of which are usually called Old Byblian: the Ahiram inscription, preceding the tenth century B C E , which is archaic; the royal inscriptions of the tenth-ninth centuries B C E , which are more developed, especially in re spect to the form of the pronominal suffix of the third-per son masculine singular (0/-W, still - H in the preceding phase); and the inscriptions of the Persian and Hellenistic periods that preserved some peculiarities of the ancient di alect (e.g., the suffix 0/-W) but also adopted some features of the Tyro-Sidonian dialect (e.g., the relative ' § ; Z in the preceding phases). All other documents from the Phoenician homeland, as well as from the eastern and western colonies (until the sixth
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PHOENICIAN-PUNIC
century BCE) are written in a homogeneous language. It cor responds to the dialect of Tyre and Sidon and has been named Standard Phoenician. [See Tyre; Sidon.] This ho mogeneity was the result of the supremacy of the Tyro-Sidonian area over all of Phoenicia. T h e identification of northern Phoenician ('Amrit) and Cypriot-Phoenician dia lects is problematic. [See 'Amrit.] In the West, the Punic language, with its own distinctive features (mainly phonological and orthographic), is not at tested before the fifth-fourth centuries B C E , although some peculiarities probably existed somewhat earlier. After the fall of Carthage (147 B C E ) , but again probably after the begin ning of the second century B C E , Punic underwent a char acteristic phonologic and morphologic development: loss of the laryngeal and pharyngeal consonants, the suffix pronoun -M, and the demonstrative pronoun S T and the relative use of MY and M \ This phase is classified as Late Punic. G r a m m a r . T h e grammar of Phoenician-Punic may be discussed in terms of its phonology, morphology, and syn tax. Phonology. T h e consonants and vowels will be treated separately. Consonants. Phoenician had twenty-two consonantal pho nemes, as is shown by its alphabetic series. As compared with the reconstructed Common Semitic system, the velar fricatives h and g had merged with the pharyngeals h a n d ' ; for example, *'ah, "brother"; *galmat- > 'almat, "girl." T h e four interdental fricatives—t, d, t, and d—had merged as follows: t > s, d > z, and t and d > s; for example, *taldt> salos, "three"; *d- > z, demonstrative-relative element, * tor, "rock" > sor, the name of Tyre; and *'ard > 'ars, "land/country." This situation is shared by the other Ca naanite dialects. As in Ugaritic, s was not distinct from 5 ; compare ns', "to lift" (Masoretic Hebrew, ns"). [See Uga ritic; Ugaritic Inscriptions.] Transcriptions indicate that the pronunciation of s was probably [c]. Changing or dropping consonants is attested during the history of Phoenician-Punic, particularly as regards the se ries of pharyngeals and laryngeal. Aleph tends to be dropped in closed or doubly closed syllables: for example, Phoenician RS for R'S, "head/cape" (perhaps in KAI46.1), Punic M L K T , "work" (CIS 1.3914.2) for M L ' K T (KAI I O - I I ) . Punic and Late Punic show a weakening and con fusion of pharyngeals and laryngeals, which, in the most re cent phase, were dropped in pronunciation and used as vowel-letters (see below). Examples are ' K H N for H K H N , "the priest" (CIS 1.246); B'L H M N for B'L H M N , the name of the deity (CIS 1.302); B'L ' M N (CIS 301); 'MS for HMS, "five" (KAI 112.3-4). T h e assimilation of nun to a following consonant is characteristic of all Phoenician-Pu nic (cf., e.g., YS', *yinsa > yissa\ "he pulls down" (KAI 26.AIiI.15). c
Vowels. There are no vowels represented in Phoenician orthography, and matres lectionis were used only very
rarely—for example, in foreign personal names, such as H R N ' for the Greek erene, (KAI 56). A system of marldng vowels was used, seldom in Punic but frequentiy in Late Punic, where, at least in some centers, as in Tripolitania, regular use can be observed of the pharyngeal and laryngeal series and of yod and waw as vowel-letters (aleph is used originally for any vowel, then specifically for 0 and e; H is used specifically for e, but also for any vowel, and, similarly, but more seldom, H; ' is used frequently for a, Y for z, and W for u ) . From this late usage and from transcriptions it is possible to reconstruct a system consisting of a, e, i, 0 , u and a, o, it. T h e following developments of Common Semitic vowels and of diphthongs are characteristic. At Amarna the shift *a > o, typical of Canaanite, had already occurred. [See Amarna Tablets.] In the development of Phoenician-Punic, this shift remains operative. Indeed, every secondary a changed to 0; for example, *maqamu, "place" > maqom in Phoenician and in Hebrew; however, the original *nasa% "I carried," with the supposed quiescence of aleph in a closed syllable, goes to nasoti in Phoenician (cf. nasot, "I carried," Poenulus v. 937; nasa'ti in Hebrew). Later, 0 changed to it, invariably in open, unsttessed syllables, but often also in closed, stressed syllables (Krahmalkov, 1992): for example, *talat- > salos > salus, "three" (cf. salus, SanctiiAureliAugustini
Opera, section 4, pt. 1, edited by I. Dijvak,
Vienna, 1971, pp. i86ff.: Epistola adRomanos inchoataExpossitio, 13). While it has not been proved that every ac cented a changed to a and then to 0 , there was a tendency for a to shift to 0 in stressed syllables. Diphthongs are always reduced: *ay > e and a; for instance, *yadaym-
>
yadem,
in Latino-Punic iadem, "his hands" (dual + suffix; KAI t78.i); *aw > o and i7, for instance, *'ittaw-ba l (<'ittahu), in Greek ilhobalos (Josephus, Against Apion 1.156, for a per sonal name), "Ba'l is with him"; and *mawt > *mot > mut. Mouth (Sanchuniaton 34, in Eusebii Caesariensis Praeparatio Evangelica, edited by K. Mras, Berlin, 1954, vol. 8), is the name of the deity Mot. Reduction of vowels is attested in pretonic and propretonic syllables: the pretonic i is elided in dobrim, "saying (pi.)" (Poenulus v. 935, < *ddbirim); the pretonic a becomes a vowel of the kind of Hebrew shewa in bynuthi (Poenulus v. 932, *b nuti < *banati). c
e
Morphology Pronouns. Pronouns take on independent forms in Phoe nician-Punic: 1 c. sg. ' N K 'andki or 'aniki ("anech" in Poen ulus v. 995); 2 m. sg. ' T 'atta; hu'(a),
2 f. sg. ' T 'alti; 3 m. sg. H '
Old Byblian H ' T , hu'atu; 3 f. sg. H ' hi'(a), Late Punic
HY (KAI 130.3); 1 c. pi. ' N H N 'anahnu;
and 3 m. pi. H M T
Suffix forms exist for the possessive and object: 1 c. sg., possessive Phoenician, Byblian 0 -f, -Y -ya; Phoe nician and Punic -Y; object - N -nt; 2 m, sg. -K -ka; 2f. sg. -K -ki (Late Punic -KY); 3 m. sg. Old Byblian -H, -W; Byblian - 0 , 0, -W, w, Phoenician 0 , -o, -Y, -yu; Punic -', -o, -Y, -yu; Late Punic, also -M, -imj-em; 3 f. sg. Byblian humatfu).
PHOENICIAN-PUNIC -H; Phoenician 0 , -a, -Y, Punic -', -a, -Y, -yd; i c. pi. -N, -nil; and 3 m. pi. Byblian - H M ; Phoenician -M, -om, - N M , -nom; 3 f. pi. Phoenician probably -M, -em, - N M , -nem. In Byblian and in tire earliest phase of Phoenician (Old Phoenician) there is a distinction in the form of the firstperson object suffix according to the case of the noun. It was f, attached directly to the stem, and unwritten when the case was nominative and accusative, but it was -ya, written -Y, when the noun was in the genitive or in the plural: Phoeni cian, 'B, 'ab-i, "my father" (KAI24.3) and 'BY, 'abT/ya, "of my father" (KAI5); Byblian, H R B T , ha-rabbot-T, "my lady" (KAI 10.2), but L-RBT-Y, la-rabboti-ya, "to my lady" (KAI 3; -i- is the genitive ending), BBNY, "among my sons" bibane-ya (KAI 24.13). Early in Phoenician-Punic (but not in Late Byblian), tire orthography -Y extended to all cases (SMY, "my name" [ace], KAI26.C4.8). T h e possessive suffix at Byblos of the third-person mas culine singular was -H (Ahiram inscription: L ' H R M 'BH, "to Ahiram his father," Li; SPRH, "his inscription [nom.]," 1.2), or 0 , o, -W (tenth-ninth centuries BCE and in the Per sian and Hellenistic periods: Y M W , "his days"; S N T W , "his years" [KAI 4.4]; ' D T W , "his mistress" [gen.; KAI 6.10]), according to the case and number of the noun, as in Phoenician (see below). T h e feminine suffix was - H in Late Byblian ( M S P N T H , "its ceiling"; KAI 10.6). Phoenician and Punic possessive pronouns have complementary forms according to the noun ending. When the singular noun was in the nominative or accusative, the suffix was vocalic (-0 for the masculine, -a for the feminine); it was not expressed graphically in Phoenician but was written -' in Punic: for example, R'S, *ras-a-hu > *ro's-aw > ro-so, "his head" (nom.; KAI 24.15-16); Q L and QL', *qol-a-hu > *qol-aw > quid, "his voice" (ace; KAI38.2, 63.3); and koulo (KAI 175.4). When the singular noun was in the genitive, the orig inal m. *-hu, f. *-/?a, combining with the genitive ending -i, became -yu (masc.) or -yd (fem.), written -Y in PhoenicianPunic (Late Punic is also -Y')—for example, L-'DNY, *la-'adon-i-hu > la-'adoniyu, "to his lord" (KAI 17.7). An analogous complementarity appears for the suffix of the third-person plural, which is for the masculine -om, written -M, after die noun in the nominative-accusative, and -nom, written - N M , after the noun in the genitive; for example, QLM, "their voice," *qol-a-humu > qolom (KAI'39a.3, b.4); L ' D N N M , la-'adoni-nom, "to their lord" (KAI 40.5). For the feminine it is probably -eml-nem
(cf. msprm,
"their [f.]
number," Iknnm, "that they [f.] might belong" [lit., "for their being"]—cf. Krahmalkov, 1993a). As regards the plural noun, the suffix of the third-person singular is -yu ( m a s c ) , -ya (fem.), written -Y, attached to the ending -e of the bound plural in Phoenician and in Punic (Late Punic is also -Y')—for example, QL DBRY, "the voice of his prayers" (KAI 61.6); LBNY', "for his sons" (IPT14.1). T h e suffix of the third-person plural masculine and feminine is -nom, written -NM—for example, Q L
319
D B R N M , "the voice of their prayers" (Gibson, 1982, n. 16, 1. 5); HBRNM, "their colleagues" (KAI69.14). In Late Punic, the picture of the possessive suffixes of the third-person singular and plural, masculine and feminine, is slightly different: for the third-person singular masculine the suffixal form - M (pronounced -im or -em according to the end of the noun) appears. It was probably used with genitive and plural nouns but it soon extended to the nominativeaccusative. Its supposed origin is *-i-hu > *iw > -im; *-e-hu > *-ew > -em (Huehnergard, 1991, p. 190). Exam ples are B N M , "his son" (gen.; CIS 1.2805.5); libinim, "for his son" (IRT 873.4); baiaem, "during his life" (IRT828.3); QLM, "his voice" ( a c e ; KAI 77.3). In a similar way, with the complementary use of the variant -', Y of the third-per son suffix singular was often lost (cf. SKR DR', "the me morial of his family" [KAI 128.2]; QLY, "his voice" [ace; KAI 77.3]). The object suffix of the third-person (masc. and fem.) singular and plural follows the same rules as the possessive: the complementary distribution of the forms, depending on whether the verbal form ends in a vowel or a consonant. Examples are Byblian YBRK, "may he bless him" (KAI 12.4); Punic BRK', "he blessed him" (CISi passim); barako (KAI 175.4!'.); BRKY', "they have blessed him" (KAI 105.5); and YBRKYS, "may they bless him" (CIS 1.5620.4). For determinative-relative pronouns, Old Byblian has Z zii and Standard Phoenician '§ 'is. T h e use o f ' S , §, and $ L is attested to express relationship. For demonstrative pro nouns, such as this, Old Byblian has Z N and Byblian Z and Z N (fem. Z', only in the Yehawmilk inscription, KAI 10 passim). Standard Phoenician and Punic have Z (masc. and fem., differing in vocalization); Z' is attested for masculine in KAI 30.2 (ninth century BCE on Cyprus); 'Z, with the prothetic aleph, present in the Phoenician homeland and sel dom in the western colonies, is frequently used on Cyprus. Late Punic has the innovation S T , used for both genders. 'L (cf. ily, Poenulus, v. 938) is the plural for both genders. For that, die independent pronouns are used. As adjectives, the demonstratives follow the noun and, with rare excep tions, do not have the article. As in all Canaanite languages, determination is shown by the preposed article H-. Late Punic orthographies demon strate the gemination of the following consonant (cf. ' M M Q M , ammaqom, "the [holy] place," KAI 173.5). T h e article does not appear in the Old Byblian Ahiram inscrip tion, although it is already present in that of Yehawmilk, M P L T H B T M 'L, "the ruins of these temples" (KAI 4.2.f). Regarding interrogative and indeterminate pronouns, M Y and M (M' in Punic) are attested, the first for who? and whoever and the second for what? and whatever. Interroga tive usage is only attested by Plautus (cf, Poenulus v. 1010 [mi and mu]). Compounds are QNMY, "whoever" (KAI 14.20, Eshmunazar); M ' S , for example, in M'S P ' L T , "what
320
PHOENICIAN-PUNIC
I accomplished" (KAI24.4). [See Eshmunazar Inscription.] Late Punic and Latino-Punic use MY and M ' (mu) as rela tive pronouns: L M Y LPNY = Latin cui primo, "to whom, for the first time" (/FT 27.7); M N S B T M ' P ' L ' + BN['M], "stela that [his] son[s] made" (IPT 77.1 = myncysth mu fel + Bibi [IRT 873.1]). For every and each, Phoenician-Punic uses KL; for another, it uses ZR or SNY (lit. "the second"; Flebrew uses 'aher) and 'HRY, apparentiy a noun in a con struct state (cf. K L 'HRY H[MQD$]M, "all the other sanc tuaries [?]" [KAI 19'of.] and 'HRY H§'R, "tire rest of tlie flesh" [KAI 69.4, 8]). Nouns and adjectives. When transcriptions are present, it is possible to verify that Phoenician-Punic possessed the main schemes of Common Semitic. The class of the socalled segolate nouns deserves special mention. Unlike Masoretic Hebrew, these nouns only seldom have an anaptyctic vowel. Examples are *'alp, "ox," in lasounalph, a plant name (Pedanii Dioscurides, De materia medica 1.128); *milk, "king" (or die god Milk), in the personal name 'Mil-ki-asa-pa (Asarhaddon 60.59—see R- Borger, Die Insehriften Asarhaddons Konigs von Assyrien, Graz, 1959); but *zerd or
*zura\
"seed," in zera
(Dioscurides 2.125); zura
(Pliny,
24.71); and *suris (?), "root," in suris (Dioscuri des 2.193). The inflection of nouns and adjectives is summarized in table 1. The feminine singular retains its original -t, as op posed to Hebrew, which has *~at > a (a). As observed, -at of the feminine (bound and unbound) was generally pro nounced -ot (see above). There is no compelling evidence to prove tiiat a long vowel existed between the feminine plu ral stem and pronominal suffixes, as in Hebrew. Poenulus v. 932, bynuthi, "my daughters," seems to prove the contrary. The dual is rare, its usage largely limited to parts of the body that occur in pairs, such as hands (cf. Latino-Punic iadem, "his two hands" [KAI 178.1]). Declension may have been maintained in the oldest phase of the language. Later, the different forms of the third-per son pronominal suffix (and of the first singular in Byblian) indicate preservation of the genitive case ending, at least in the singular bound forms. Only for Late Punic is there ev idence of confusion. Verbal stems. T h e verbal stems correspond to those at tested in Hebrew. There is no evidence before Late Punic of the passive of the D stem (doubled second radical) or of Nat.
Hist.
TABLE
A distinction between indicative and jussive is attested in the third-person plural with the forms ending, respectively, in -tin and -u (cf. Y § ' N , "tiiey shall pay" [KAI 60.6], and L K N Y D ' H S D N Y M , "so that die Sidonians might know" [KAI 7]). A volitive mood (energicus) is attested in ' P Q N , "may I find" (KAI 50.3). T h e imperative, participle, and infinitive seem to correspond to Hebrew. However, for the passive participle, Late Punic has the orthography B'RYK, indicating a qatil form (CEDAC, Carthage, Bulletin 8 , 1 7 S S . , 1.3; cf. also personal names, Baric, meaning "blessed," CIL 10686). Particles. Most adverbs and prepositions are Common West Semitic. B- presents the variants 'B-, with the prothetic aleph, and BN- expanded with N before suffix pronouns. With the preposition L-, the third-person suffix singular was only vocalic—not written in Phoenician but written -' in Pu nic. Combinations of prepositions are common: for exam ple, LMN'RY, "from his youth" (KAI 2 4 . 1 2 ) , and LMBHYY, "during my lifetime" (KAI 35.2). T h e prepo-
1. Inflection of Nouns and Adjectives SINGULAR
Unbound
Bound
- T -(a)t
- T -(a)t
Masc. Fern.
the causative stem. T h e Ahiram inscription presents two ex amples of Gt (-t infixed) used as a passive or reflexive: T H T S P (fern, subject, H T R , the "scepter"), "may it be snipped," and T H T P K (fern, subject, K S ' , "throne"), "may it be overturned" (KAI 1.2). T h e prefix of the caus ative stem is Y- (H- in Hebrew); consequently, the D t stem (doubled second radical + t) (Hebrew hitpael) must be yitpael (perhaps Y T L N N , "they used to whimper" [KAI 24.10]). As the prefix of the causative normally corresponds to the pronominal suffix of the third-person singular, it is possible that, in its earliest phase, Old Byblian (the Ahiram inscription) still had H-. Conjugations. T h e suffix conjugation for Phoenician-Pu nic has the same consonantal skeleton as Hebrew, with the exception of the third-person feminine singular of the suf fixed form, which ends in -a (cf. Late Punic N D R ' [CIS I.2i6.3f], and N D R ' [CIS 1.207.3], "she vowed"); only forms with an object suffix maintain -t (cf. Byblian P ' L T N [KAI 10.2], "she made m e " ) . Vocalization -ti of the firstperson singular is shown by Poenulus v. 930, cahohhi, "I implore," and Late Punic K T B T Y , "I wrote" (KAI 145.6); -u of the third-person plural is shown, for example, by the Late Punic P'L', "they did" (KAI 130.5). T h e prefix con jugation also has the same consonantal structure as Hebrew. Vocalization is not surely attested.
PLURAL
Unbound
Bound
DUAL
Unbound
Bound
- M -im
- 0 -e
- M -em
- 0 -e
- T -ot
- T -ot ( + V ? )
- 0 -e
- T -at-e
PHOENICIAN-PUNIC sition ' L has the variant ' L T ; for "with," Phoenician uses ' T (Heb., 'M). T h e accusative particle is ' Y T (like ancient Aramaic—later, only ' T ; for a different use, see Krahmalkov, 1992; and Late Punic 4th Poenulus 939), which governs die genitive: SM ' Y T N D R Y "(the deity) fulfilled his vow" (suffix -Y and not -'; but later, S L M ' Y T N D R ' , "he fulfilled £
his vow" [KAI
115.1-2]).
T o negate, Phoenician-Punic uses 'Y, BL, and 'BL with die indicative mood (die Plebrew L ' does not exist). 'L is used for prohibitions. Syntax. Some syntactical rules have already been men tioned. Some remarks concerning the use of tenses need to be made. Phoenician-Punic did not employ, at least exten sively, as a narrative past tense, the so-called conversive waw + prefixed form. There may be two cases in Hassan Beyli, KAI 25. WYB' (?), "and he came" (1.4) and WYP'L, "and he did" (1.5; cf. Andre Lemaire, 1983, p. 11). Conversely, as early as the second millennium B C E , the waw + suffixed form is frequently used in the apodosis of conditional clauses, with a future or jussive sense: ( W ' M MLK) W M H B'L S M M . . . ' Y T H M L K PI' "(and if a ldng . . .), let Ba'lsamem destroy that ldng" (KAI 26 A3.i8f.). In the Ahiram inscription (KAI i . i f ) , W ' L M L K . . . 'LY GBL W Y G L 'RN Z N . . ., "and if a k i n g . . . should come against Byblos and uncover this coffin . . .," has to be explained in a conditional context. As a narrative past, Phoenician-Punic often uses the in dependent infinitive followed by the subject, as WSKB 'NK, "and I hired" (KA124.7-8). This "narrative" infinitive can take object pronouns, as in Y R D M ' N K YSBM 'NK, " I brought them down; I settled them" (KAI 26 A1.2Q). T h e common use of the L - + infinitive construct to ex press a future action, sometimes with a jussive or an imper ative sense, is peculiar: L K T B H ' D M M , "the men shall in scribe (they must inscribe)" (KAI 60.4); K L ' § L N G B T 'BN Z, "every person who shall steal this stone" (CIS 1.3784); W ' L K L ZBH ' § ' D M LZBH, "for every sacrifice tiiat a man shall offer" (KAI 69.14). Scripts. Phoenician-Punic is written from right to left in an alphabet of twenty-two consonantal signs. It developed from a system already known in Syria-Palestine in about 1600 B C E , from which the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet had also derived. Phoenician-Punic writing exhibits a clear gen eral chronological development, as well as some local p e culiarities. It is possible to identify more formal or more cur sive styles, even though a really cursive script is present only in a few papyri and in ostraca. [See Papyrus; Ostracon.] Phoenician-Punic script is never completely formal, even in tlie most accurate stone inscriptions. Chronologically, it is possible to distinguish Phoenician, Punic, and Neo-Punic scripts corresponding roughly to Standard Phoenician, Pu nic, and Late Punic. Phoenician (including the Byblian in scriptions and those from Cyprus and Greece) undergoes an evolution tiiat is, on the whole, characterized by a pro
321
gressive lengthening and slanting of the shafts and by spe cific changes in letter forms. Typical are those that affect the forms of aleph, he, zayin, kaph, lamed, mem, samekh, shin, and taw (cf. figure 1). Local peculiarities can be distin guished, especially in Byblos (Old, Persian, and Hellenistic), on Cyprus, and in Greece. An uneven concentration of doc uments prevents wide knowledge of local peculiarities (e.g., the Tyrian script itself is virtually unknown). Punic script cannot be distinguished from Phoenician script before the fifth-fourth centuries BCE. However, unlike the spoken language, some specificities, like the pointed head of bet, dalet, and resh and the crossbar of taw, which cuts the shaft horizontally (cf. figure 1 ) , are already present in inscriptions of the second half of the sixth century B C E (Motya, Pyrgi). Punic is recognizable at first glance by ex tremely long shafts that are often shaded. The origin of this script, certainly a cursive one, which was typical of Carthage and the territories under its influence, is not yet clear. Punic script continues to be used in the Late Punic phase of the language, but in the second century B C E , and especially after the fall of Cartilage, a new variant, called Neo-Punic, pre dominates. Once again its origin is unknown. It is likely that Neo-Punic derives from a cursive Phoenician script, already present in a less-developed form in Phoenicia no later than the fifth century B C E (some Neo-Punic forms, for instance, are present on Elephantine osttaca). [See Elephantine.] It is probable that this variant became tlie primary lapidary script with the weakening of a strong scribal tradition, especially in the West and with the fall of die metropolis. Typical of Neo-Punic are the shapes of aleph,
he, waw, het, lamed, mem,
and shin. Bet, dalet, resh, nun, and taw, being very cursive and schematized, tend to resemble each other and may be confused by the reader. Neo-Punic is attested in Nortii Af rica until tlie end of the first century CE. T h e latest inscrip tion in Punic letters has been found in Sardinia and is dated to die second century C E (KAI 173). It shows a developed form of script that is not, however, Neo-Punic. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing and Writing Systems.] Typology of Inscriptions. Phoenician-Punic has a cor pus of fewer than ten thousand inscriptions. A small number come from the Phoenician homeland and from die eastern Mediterranean (western Asia, Cyprus, Crete, Rhodes, Cos, the Greek mainland). Most, however, come from the west ern colonies, especially North Africa. At Cartilage, mainly from the tophet, more than six thousand texts have come to light. [See Carthage.] T h e main classes represented are vo tive, commemorative, and funerary. These classes originally had tlie same or related typologies in all the Western Semitic areas, and it is likely that they spread along with alphabetic writing. As bureaucratic and literary texts were written on perishable material (especially papyrus), tiiere are only very few administrative texts (cf., e.g., the so-called fiscal seals, tlie Kition temple tarif, KAI 37); the Neo-Punic Cussabat osttacon (IPTS6); legal texts (cf, e.g., the "Marseille tariff,"
322
PHOENICIAN-PUNIC F i g u r e i . Phoenician, Punic, and Late Punic scripts, ( i ) Byblos, A h i r a m , c. i o o o
PHOENICIAN-PUNIC.
BCE;
(2) C y p r u s , n i n t h c e n t u r y
BCE; (3) Zincirli, K i l a m u w a , late n i n t h c e n t u r y BCE; ( 4 ) K a r a t e p e , late e i g h t h - e a r l y s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE; (5) A b u S i m b e l , c. 591 BCE; ( 6 ) Byblos, Y e h a w m i l k , fifth c e n t u r y BCE; ( 7 ) Byblos, B a t a o ' a m , late fourth c e n t u r y BCE; ( 8 ) S i d o n , T a b n i t a n d E s h m u n a z a r , late s i x t h fifth century BCE; (9) C y p r u s , f o u r t h - t h i r d c e n t u r y BCE; (10) G a u l o s , t h i r d - s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE; ( I I ) Sardinia, t h i r d - s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE; (12) C a r t h a g e , t h i r d - s e c o n d c e n t u r y BCE; ( I 3) L e p t i s M a g n a , late first c e n t u r y BCE-first c e n t u r y CE. (Courtesy M . Amadasi G u z z o )
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PHOENICIAN-PUNIC KAI 69); and letters (cf., e.g., KAI 50, the "Saqqara papy rus"). [See Marseille Tariff.] T h e only existing decree (KAI 60, from Piraeus) reflects a Greek formulary. A small num ber of magic texts exist (the Arslan Tash amulets [Degen and Mtiller, 1972-1974, vol. 2, pp. 17-36], which are still problematic, a pendant [KAI 73], a small papyrus from Malta, and metal sheets found at Carthage and in Sardinia). A few objects (especially seals, but also vessels) bear the name of their owner and a few ostraca (especially from Egypt, Sidon, and Kition) contain mainly personal names. Votive texts dedicate a certain object (a stela, a statuette, a vessel, but also entire buildings) to a deity, in exchange either for a benefit already obtained, or one desired. In the earliest formularies (Byblos [KAI 3-7], tenth-ninth centu ries B C E ) , the word designating the object offered, generally followed by a demonstrative and/or a relative pronoun, oc cupies the first place. T h e second is occupied by the verb; then comes the name of the dedicator; and then, at the end, the name of the god who receives the gift (preceded by the preposition L-). A concluding formula, which contains the reason for tire dedication—a thanksgiving or a request, or both—may follow; a curse against anyone who dares to touch the gift may also be present. This kind of formulary is used through the entire period of Phoenician-Punic. How ever, it develops and changes, either in general or peculiar to specific places or occasions. T h e most important varia tions are in the placement of parts of the dedicatory text and in the choice of vocabulary. From the beginning of the sixth century B C E in the West and later, although rarely in the East, the name of the god takes the first place. It is followed by the other elements in their usual order (i.e., object, relative pronoun and verb, dedicator, final formulas). This change certainly corresponds to the prominence in that period given to tire divine sphere, as compared with the offering. T h e latter can even become purely symbolic: in place of the real objects, models of vessels or of shrines could be dedicated. T h e god is not only preeminent, it is also probably in a world separated from that of humanity (earlier, the divine sphere appeared to be simply higher in rank). While in the oldest dedications a beautiful object was made (P L) for, given (YTN) to, and placed (SM) before the god, later, as early as the fifth century B C E , but especially in Hellenistic times, the object is simply a gift ( M T N T ) or a vow (NDR) that is dedicated (NDR); it gives a merit (SM N ' M ) to the dedi cator, so that he can be remembered (SKR), and probably not only during his lifetime (L/LM, "for ever"; cf., e.g., KAI 19). C
Commemorative texts (or propagandistic inscriptions) appear at the same time as votive ones, or only slightly later. They are the longest Phoenician texts preserved and the richest in linguistic data, especially lexical and syntactical. They relate the high deeds of Icings (Kilamuwa, KAI 24) or governors (Karatepe, 104/26), under the protection of per sonal or family gods, and are spread across the whole West
323
Semitic area (cf. the Mesha stela, KAI 180; the Aramaic Zakkur inscription, KAI 2 0 2 ; the Samalian inscriptions, KAI 214-215; and the Aramaic Barrakub orthostat KAI 216). [See Karatepe Phoenician Inscriptions; Moabite Stone; Zak kur Inscription.] Their main characteristic is the narration in the first-person singular, the text beginning with the per sonal pronoun ' N K (Aram., ' N H ) . They are principally at tested in the late ninth through the eighth centuries B C E , cor responding to the period of existence of independent city-states. Being in some cases preserved on dedicatory monuments, commemorative texts can also have the func tion of votive inscriptions: such is the case of the Karatepe text inscribed on a divine statue. However, the structure of the text is not modified (tire Zakkur inscription, on the other hand, begins with dedicatory formulas). Their literary style suggests that they may be copies or abbreviated versions of official documents. Although it is modified, this form survives in later periods for dedications made by kings, of which the best example is the Yehawmilk inscription from Byblos (KAI 10). It com bines the usual votive structure, written in the third-person singular, with the commemorative style in the first person. Finally, dedications of kings or persons of high rank, from the middle of tire eighth century B C E onward (KAI 3 1 , from Limassol), may be written in the third person; as in propa gandistic inscriptions, however, the name of the sovereign occupies the first place (cf. also, from Sidon, KAI 1 5 - 1 6 ) . Funerary inscriptions are generally simpler. They first mention the funerary monument itself (QBR, "tomb"; HDR, "funerary chamber"; 'RN, "sarcophagus"; M ( N ) S B T , "[funerary] stela") and then the name of the deceased. Royal funerary inscriptions, however, all of them from Phoenicia (Byblos and Sidon), have more complicated structures, compared to the dedicatory and commemorative ones. The components of Ahiram's inscription have the same order as those of dedicatory texts: name of the object ('RN), relative pronoun and verb, donor, name of the de ceased preceded by L-, the occasion (thanksgiving or re quest), and a curse. T h e later Byblian (Batno'am sarcoph agus, KAI n ) and Sidonian royal inscriptions, on the conttary, show a different structure: the deceased speaks in the first-person singular and the inscription begins with 'NK, as in the earlier commemorative documents. In the Tabnit funerary inscription (KAI 13), the presentation is followed by a long curse against an eventual robber; the Eshmunazar text (see above) is more elaborate and recounts the royal accomplishments (Eshmunazar's mother is associated with the young king) on behalf of tire gods (the building of temples) and his "merits" toward the Persian king. Punic and Late Punic, which, from die earliest times, con form to the typologies discussed above, do not attest the commemorative type (royalty is never attested in the West in antiquity; only indigenous Numidian kings wrote in Punic in the Roman period). T h e votive and funerary texts may
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present specific formularies. Peculiar to the western type are the tophet inscriptions (seventh century BCE; KAI 61 A-B): votive in structure, they present a technical terminology that has not yet been satisfactorily explained (the "offering" is often designated M L K B'L, M L K 'DM, or M L K 'MR [Lat., mol/rchomor], where M L K is probably the name of the sacrifice and the meaning of 'ZRM 'S[T], BS[']RM B T M is completely obscure). In Roman times, monumental and funerary texts, sometimes bilingual (in Latin and Punic), may adapt to Punic not only Latin names of specific objects (e.g., QDRYG' = quadriga; KAI 122.2), buildings (e.g., P'DY = podium; IPT 27.10), and names of functions (e.g., 'YDLYS = aedilis; KAI 125), but also entire formularies (cf., e.g., IPT, 27). [See also Phoenicians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Amadasi G u z z o , Maria Giulia, and Vassos Karageorghis. Kition, vol. 3, Inscriptions pheniciennes. Nicosia, 1977. Amadasi Guzzo, Maria Giulia. Scavi a Mozia: Le iscrizioni. Collezione di Studi Fenici, 22. R o m e , 1986. Amadasi G u z z o , Maria Giulia. " P e r u n a classificazione delle iscrizioni fenicie di d o n o . " Scienze dcll'Antichitd 3-4 (1989-1990): 831-843. Benz, Frank L. Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions. Studia Pohl, 8. R o m e , 1972. Berthier, Andre, and Rene Charlier, Le sanctuaire punique d'El-Hqfra a Constantine. Paris, 1955. Bertrandy, Francois, a n d Maurice Sznycer. Les steles puniques de Con stantine. Paris, 1987. Bordreuil, Pierre. Catalogue des sceaux ouesl-semitiques inscrits de la Bibliotheque Nationale, du Musee du Louvre et du Musee Biblique de Bible et Terre Sainte. Paris, 1986. Bron, Francois. Recherches sur les inscriptions pheniciennes de Karatepe. Hautes Etudes Orientales, 11. Geneva, 1979. Chabot, Jean-Baptiste. Punka. Paris, 1918. Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum (CIS), part 1. Paris, 1867-. Degen, Rainer, and Walter W . Muller. Neue Ephemeris fur semitische Epigraphik 3 vols. Wiesbaden 1972-1974. D o n n e r , Herbert, and Wolfgang Roilig. Kanaandische und aramdische Inschriflen (KAI). 3 vols. 2d ed. Wiesbaden, 1966-1969. Fantar, M ' h a m e d H . Teboursouk: Steles anepigraphes et steles a inscrip tions neopuniques. Paris, 1974. Fevrier, James-Germain et al. Inscriptions antiques du Maroc. Paris, 1966. Friedrich, Johannes, a n d Wolfgang Roilig. Phonizisch-Punische Grammatik. Analecta Orientalia, 46. 2d ed. R o m e , 1970. Fuentes Estafiol, Maria-Jose. Vocabulario fenicio. Barcelona, 1980. Garr, W . Randall. Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E. Philadelphia, 1985. Gibson, John C. L. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 3, Phoe nician Inscriptions. Oxford, 1982, Harris, Zellig S. A Grammar of the Phoenician Language. N e w York, 1936. Hoftijzer, Jacob, a n d Karel Jongeling. Dictionary of the North-West Se mitic Inscriptions. Leiden a n d N e w York, 1995. Huehnergard, John. " T h e Development of T h i r d Person Suffixes in Phoenician." Maarav 7 (1991): 181-194. Jongeling, Karel. " N a m e s in N e o - P u n i c Inscriptions." P h . D . diss., Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen, 1984. Krahmalkov, Charles R. " T h e Punic Speech of H a n n o . " Orientalia, n.s. 39 (1970): 52-74'
Krahmalkov, Charles R. " T h e P u n i c Monologues of H a n n o . " Orien talia, n.s. 57 (1988): 55-P]. Krahmalkov, Charles R. "Languages: Phoenician." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, p p . 222-223. N e w York, 1992. Krahmalkov, Charles R. " T h e T h i r d Feminine Plural Possessive P r o n o u n in Phoenician-Punic." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52 (1993a): 37-41. Krahmalkov, Charles R. " T h e Byblian Phoenician Inscription of ' B D ' S M N : A Critical N o t e on Byblian G r a m m a r . " Journal of Semitic Studies 39 (1993b): 25-32. Lemaire, Andre. "L'inscription phenicienne de Hassan Beyli reconsideree." Rivistadi Studi Fenici 11 (1983): 9-19. Levi Delia Vida, Giorgio. "Sulle iscrizioni 'latino-libiche' della T r i p o litania." Oriens Anliquus 2 (1963): 65-94. Levi Della Vida, Giorgio, and Maria Giulia Amadasi G u z z o . Iscrizioni puniche della Tripolitania, 1927-1967 ( I P T ) . Monografie di A r c h e o logia Libica, 22. R o m e , 1987. Masson, Oliver, and M a u r i c e Sznycer. Recherches sur les Pheniciens a Chypre. Hautes E t u d e s Orientales, 3. Geneva, 1972. Peckham, J. Brian. The Development of the Late Phoenician Scripts. H a r vard Semitic Studies, no. 20. Cambridge, Mass., 1968. Ripertoire d'epigraphie semitique ( R E S ) . Paris, 190c—. Reynolds, J. M . , and J. B. Ward-Perkins. The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania ( I R T ) . R o m e , 1952. Segert, Stanislav. A Grammar of Phoenician and Punic. M u n i c h , 1976. Sznycer, Maurice. Les passages puniques en transcription latino dans le Poenulus de Plaute. Paris, 1967. T o m b a c k , Richard S. A Comparative Semitic Lexicon of the Phoenician and Punic Languages. Society of Biblical Literature, Dissertation Se ries, 32. Missoula, 1978. MARIA G I U L I A AMADASI GUZZO
PHOENICIANS. In spite of recent advances in histor ical and archaeological research, the story of the Phoenicians remains an elusive one. T h e broad geographical spread of their civilization, which extended throughout the Mediter ranean basin and beyond, makes any synthesis of the subject difficult. The problem is further complicated by die paucity of written and archaeological evidence for their existence in ancient Phoenicia (modern Lebanon). With the notable ex ception of Byblos and Sarepta (biblical Zarephath), none of the primary Phoenician coastal sites has been systematically excavated below Roman-period occupation levels. For Byb los itself, the evidence is largely restricted to the preceding Bronze Age (third and second millennia B C E ) , die period antedating the flourishing of Phoenician culture in tire Iron Age. Even the etymology of tire term Phoenician, which is adapted from die ancient Greek Phoinikos, remains unclear (Muhly, 1970). Among other meanings, it signified tlie color red-purple or crimson, which may have denated the reddish color of the Phoenicians' hair or skin or perhaps their pro duction of a highly prized purple dye. At any rate, it was clearly a term applied to them by others. As for the desig nation that the Phoenicians applied collectively to them selves, the evidence is unclear. T h e term Canaanite (used broadly in ancient Near Eastern documents to describe the inhabitants of Syria-Palestine) remains the most likely guess.
PHOENICIANS The origins and ethnic identity of the Phoenicians are also unclear (Rollig, 1983). Classical antiquity has preserved a tradition associating them with the region of the Red Sea; modern scholars, however, have tended to reject this ac count as an etiological attempt to explain the color associ ations of the Greek term Phoinikos (Rollig, 1983, p. 80, n. 12). At the heart of this issue is the question of the Phoe nicians' ethnic relationship to their Levantine predecessors, the biblical Canaanites. T h e extent to which the Phoenicians were the direct descendants of these Semitic peoples and the degree to which they were affected racially and politically by the later influx of other Semitic as well as non-Semitic western peoples remains an open question. In geographical terms, Phoenicia is more easily defined. Its heartland consisted of a narrow strip of Levantine coastal plain between the cities of Aradus (modern Arwad) in tire north (some scholars would extend this limit to Tell Sukas) and Akko (modern Acre) in the south. Its inland border is defined by the mountainous region comprising tire Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges to the east. C o m m e r c e a n d I n d u s t r y . In several important respects, the mountains of Lebanon defined the historical outlook of the Phoenicians—on the one hand, by limiting available ag ricultural land and on the other, by yielding their most valu able and exportable commodity: timber. Maritime trade thus became the linchpin of Phoenician livelihood and econ
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Depiction
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omy. T h e cedars of Lebanon were coveted in antiquity as building material, especially for ships. An active export trade in timber between Byblos and Egypt is attested as early as the Egyptian fourth dynasty under Pharaoh Snefru, c. 25752551). As a result of limited resources, Phoenician industry concentrated largely on the production of finished goods from imported materials. Carved ivory and wood, decorated clothing and textiles of wool and linen, stone sculpture, and engraved metals are just a few of the product categories manufactured for the export trade. T h e most important na tive industry, aside from timber, was the production of pur ple dye, for which the Phoenicians were renowned in antiq uity. Derived from the murex shell, which was available in Lebanese coastal waters, "Tyrian purple," as it was known in antiquity, was highly prized as a colorant in garments and textiles. Large piles of crushed murex have been found at numerous coastal sites in Phoenicia and abroad, testifying to the large-scale production of this labor-intensive dye. As commercial traders, the Phoenicians often acted as middlemen for other peoples' goods as well as their own (Herodotus, 1.1). T h e objectives of long-range trade were precious natural commodities, such as ivory, ebony, san dalwood, precious stones, and exotic spices and aromatics. Phoenician long-distance trade was, however, driven by an other category of natural resource—precious metals (gold, silver, tin, and, to a lesser extent, copper, iron, and lead).
merchant ship. F r o m a R o m a n - p e r i o d s a r c o p h a g u s relief
f r o m S i d o n . M u s e e d u L o u v r e , P a r i s . (Giraudon/Art Resource, N Y )
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The Phoenicians' search for precious metals was nothing new. Many of their trade routes and ore sources were al ready established by the Mycenaeans. The Phoenician con tribution lay in expanding the scale and geographic scope of such exploitation. As tire primary medium of ancient Near Eastern com mercial exchange, silver attracted Phoenician interest above all. At an early date, perhaps by the eighth century, the Phoenicians had begun to exploit the rich silver mines of southern Spain (in the Rio Tinto region initially and later in upper Andalusia). Archaeological evidence would suggest that they had also targeted tire silver resources of south western Sardinia and northern Etruria, which, like southern Spain, were rich in silver-bearing lead ores. Phoenician skill and artistry in the working of both gold and silver was highly regarded in antiquity, as Homer records (Iliad, 23.741 ff.) and as numerous finds of ornately embellished Phoenician vessels and jewelry attest. Phoenician History, 1 2 0 0 - 6 4 BCE. Despite a long rec ord of activity in tire region extending back to the Early Bronze Age, Phoenician culture today is generally regarded as an Iron Age phenomenon associated with the reemergence of the Levantine city-states at the close of the Late Bronze Age. The arrival of the western Sea Peoples around 1200 and their impact upon Phoenicia is a complex and highly debated issue. In contrast to the northern Levantine coast, where the archaeological evidence speaks unambig uously for destruction and discontinuity at sites such as Ugarit, the archaeological picture for the Phoenician cities reveals evidence of less abrupt change and in some instances outright continuity. This phenomenon, coupled with the strong similarities in material record between the early Phoe nician and the Cypriot and Philistine assemblages, has led to the speculation that the Phoenicians were not victims but rather allies of these incoming western sea raiders and ben efited from their intervention (Bikai, 1992). The events of the late thirteenth century, at any rate, marked a watershed in the political and economic fortunes of the Phoenician city-states. The documentation for this emergent period, al though scanty reveals an era of modest economic prosperity for a number of the Phoenician cities, including Sidon, Byb los, and Aradus. Two historical documents of the period— the Egyptian story of Wenamun (c. 1075) and a foundation text of Tiglath-Pileser I (c. 1100)—indicate that the Phoe nicians possessed an active mercantile fleet and were en gaged in a prosperous timber trade by the early eleventh century. Archaeological finds document an active reciprocal trade relationship between Cyprus and the southern Phoenician coast. Moreover, excavations at a number of coastal sites along the Akko Plain attest to a strong Phoenician presence in northern Israel. Under King Hiram I, Tyre entered into commercial alliance with its southern neighbor, under David (2 Sm. 5:11) and subsequently under Solomon with whom
a joint mercantile expedition in the Red Sea was launched (/ Kgs. 9:27). Phoenicia's growing prosperity attracted the interest of Assyria, beginning in the early ninth century. Ashurnasirpal IPs reimposition of tribute on the Phoenician coastal cities in 876 set the stage for a period of more than two hundred years of intermittent Assyrian control and involvement in the economic affairs of Phoenicia. By the second half of the eightii century, Assyrian political control over the region tightened and military activity escalated, resulting initially in the Assyrian capture of Phoenician defensive camps and ul timately, under ldngs Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, in the siege and reduction of the major Phoenician cities, including Sidon and Tyre. Under Ashurbanipal (668-627), Assyrian control over the Phoenician coast eventually lapsed, usher ing in a relatively brief period of Phoenician political inde pendence in the latter half of the seventh century. Following a brief and uncertain interval of Egyptian political suprem acy in the region, Phoenicia succumbed in the early sixth century to the Babylonians and Nebuchadrezzar (605-562), under whom the city of Tyre was taken after a thirteen-year siege. h i 539 Phoenicia fell under Achaemenid rule, ushering in a prolonged period of relative peace and prosperity for the Phoenician cities, which were now granted a much greater degree of local autonomy than under previous Near Eastern overlords. Sidon assumed prominence, serving as the ad ministrative seat for the Achaemenid fifth satrapy. With the encouragement of the Persians, Phoenician trade and econ omy flourished. T h e impact of Egyptian and Greek culture was now increasingly felt through trade and cultural ex change. The Persians themselves benefited militarily and commercially from their control of the prosperous Phoeni cian cities, whose fleets (especially those of Sidon) contrib uted substantially to the Persian war efforts in the fifth cen tury. With encouragement from Greece and Egypt, a number of the Phoenician cities joined in a series of unsuccessful revolts against Persian authority in the fourth century, end ing ultimately in the destruction of Sidon in 347. Shortly thereafter, with the collapse of the Persian Empire, Phoe nicia fell under Macedonian Greek control, Tyre alone among the Phoenician cities refusing to submit to the Mac edonian authorities. Tyre's resistance was met with a suc cessful siege and sack of the city by Alexander in 332. Despite blows recently inflicted on its two most prominent cities, the Phoenicians (Tyre and Sidon included) prospered as a whole during the ensuing Flellenistic period. During the third century, the region was contested by the two Greek dynastic houses which had emerged in the Near East follow ing the death of Alexander, the Seleucids and Ptolemies. During this time, most of Phoenicia with the exception of Arwad in the north fell under Ptolemaic rule. At the end of the fifth Syrian war in 198, Phoenicia succumbed to Seleucid
PHOENICIANS control until the final decades of the second century, when the various Phoenician cities regained their autonomy. Under the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, the process of hellenization in Phoenicia and tire Punic (Carthaginian) West accelerated, and numerous Phoenician cities and sanctuaries underwent marked expansion and redevelopment in the Greek style. The period also witnessed the emergence of a number of thriving communities of Phoenician emigres abroad—on the island of Rhodes and in cities such as Ath ens and Memphis. Phoenician autonomy ended in 64 with the conquest by Pompey and Phoenicia's incorporation within the Roman Empire. [See Ptolemies; Seleucids.] Phoenician Expansion Abroad and the Punic West. As is attested by numerous ancient accounts of their voyages along the Atiantic coasts of Europe and Africa, the Phoe nicians were renowned in antiquity as explorers and navi gators . Phoenician exploration laid the groundwork for long distance trade, which in turn led to the establishment of Phoenician trading posts and relay stations throughout the Mediterranean basin. These were typically situated on off shore islets, promontories, and inlets—wherever safe an chorage was afforded. T h e majority of these ports-of-call were probably little more than temporary installations (or enclaves within existing harbor towns) and have left little or no archaeological trace. As for the development of Phoenician trade, a growing number of scattered archaeological finds throughout the Mediterranean attest to a period of incipient or "precolonial" mercantile activity on the part of the Phoenicians, be ginning perhaps as early as the twelfth century and persist ing through the early first millennium (Negbi, 1992; Niemeyer, 1993). Such incipient entrepreneurial trade may at least partly explain the early foundation dates recorded in the classical sources for the Phoenician cities of Lixus (c. 1180), Cadiz (1110), and Utica (1101). Archaeo logical proof of Phoenician settlement in the western Mediterranean prior to the second half of the eighth cen tury, however, is presently lacking. T h u s , 750 B C E is cur rently accepted as the starting date for Phoenician territorial expansion abroad. Unlike the Greek city-states, the Phoenician foundations were not true colonies in the traditional sense, but commer cial or industrial facilities of limited scope. A major excep tion is the city of Carthage, whose urban extent and geo graphic situation (with extensive agricultural hinterland) clearly identify it as a colonial enterprise. Archaeological work at Carthage has furnished proof of the existence of a large, densely populated urban settlement already in tire first half of the eighth century, lending credence to the city's his torical foundation date of 814 (Niemeyer in Markoe, 1996). T h e subsequent growth of Carthage and other Phoenician settlements within Carthage's cultural and political orbit (in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain) constitute what is known as the Punic horizon. (The emergence of this hori
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zon, while not clearly defined, is usually placed around the mid-sixth century.) T h e issue of Punic identity, which is based on our often limited understanding of the ethnic and cultural integration between the Phoenicians and the indig enous peoples with whom they settled and traded, is a com plex one. As the archaeological evidence shows, various Pu nic setdements differed widely in character not only from region to region (e.g., Spain and Sicily) but within the same area. This situation is especially true of Tunisia—the Car thaginian heartland—where Punic presence extended inland as well as along the coast. T h e terminal date of the Punic period is conventionally set in tire second century, based on the date of Carthage's destruction (it fell to the Romans in 146 BCE) and the latest attestations of Punic script. Phoenician Culture: Language, Religion, and Funer ary Practices. T h e language of the Phoenicians represents a later dialect of Canaanite or West Semitic, akin to biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. Its corpus consists of approximately six thousand inscriptions found throughout the Phoenician cultural realm—in the Near East (Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Mesopotamia) and in the Mediterranean ba sin, including Cyprus, the Aegean, North Africa, Sicily, Sar dinia, Italy, Malta, the Balearic Islands, and Spain. Of the once extensive body of Phoenician literature known to have existed, virtually nothing is preserved apart from scattered passages in late classical texts. As for the Phoenician alpha bet with its twenty-two consonantal phonemes, the inscriptional evidence presently points to its emergence in the late second millennium (around 1100). Controversy persists over the question of the date and mode of transmission of tire Phoenician alphabet to Greece. In spite of recent at tempts to place this event in the late second millennium, the current evidence suggests that the process occurred no ear lier than the ninth century (McCarter, 1975; Burkert, 1992, PP- 2,5—33). [See Phoenician-Punic] The dearth of direct and informative sources on Phoeni cian civilization in general is even more pronounced for Phoenician religion, a subject that, in spite of recent ad vances in interpretation, is still poorly understood. Like other polytheistic religions in the Levant, Phoenician wor ship focused on the processes and phenomena of nature and its cyclical development. Individual deities were local and site specific, often relating to particular places or topo graphic feattires considered sacred. A variety of local deities (designated by the generic title of ba'al [Phoenician for "lord"]) were associated with mountains: the Amanus, Leb anon, Mt. Zaphon, and Mt. Carmel. Springs and other wa ter sources were often associated with cults of healing and fertility (e.g., the temple of Eshmun at Sidon and its con nection with the Yidlal spring). Paired male and female de ities, such as Eshmun and Astarte of Sidon, or Baal Hammon and Tanit of Carthage, were frequently associated with individual cities. Many of these, such as Baalat Gubal (the "mistress of Byblos"), were rooted in older indigenous cults
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which antedated Iron Age Phoenician practice. Others like Tyrian Melqart ("king of the city") were intimately asso ciated with local dynasties, underscoring the central role played by tlie deity as emblem and protector of the royal house. Iron Age Phoenician cults owed much to Late Bronze Age Canaanite practice, as attested by the presence of features common to both religions (i.e., a shared focus on natural and cosmic phenomena, the notion of divine assemblies, the adoration of "dying and rising" gods, and the cult of royal ancestors or rephaini). Attention has focused on die inno vative features and emerging regional character of Phoeni cian religion in the Iron Age, a phenomenon evident, among other instances, in the elevation of Astarte and the intro duction of (previously unattested) deities like Ba'al Hammon, Ba al Shamem, Melqart, and Eshmun (S. Ribichini in Moscati, 1988). (The worship of both Astarte and Melqart at Tyre may, in fact, be associated with die religious reforms of King Hiram of Tyre in the tentii century.) Attention may be drawn also to the emergence of various healing cults cen tered around deities such as Eshmun, Shadrapha, Horon, and Sid. c
Unfortunately, the varying traditions associated with Phoenician deities are poorly understood; in many in stances, we have little more than the etymology of the names themselves to go on. Such uncertainties extend even to prominent deities such as Tyrian Melqart, whose worship was widely exported to the West (e.g., at Carthage and Cadiz). The identity of Melqart has been variously inter preted, as agricultural, maritime, civic, dynastic, and even netiierworld deity. Such ambiguities undoubtedly reflect the adaptability and functional flexibility of Phoenician deities. Like the gods, the rituals and cultic practices of the Phoe nicians are poorly understood. Of the Phoenician liturgy it self, nothing is preserved apart from various formulaic ben edictions recorded on Phoenician dedicatory reliefs. As documents reveal, the priesthood was a hereditary institu tion chiefly involving members of royalty and aristocracy. An inscription of the fifth century from Kition on Cyprus offers some idea of the variety of personnel employed in die service of the goddess Astarte. The list includes scribes, cho risters, butchers, bakers, barbers, sacrificers, and prostitutes attached to sacred places. Pictorial scenes on Phoenician ivories and metal vessels depict musicians and dancers (principally female) participating in religious votive proces sions. Sin- and thank offerings (in the form of incense, per fume, milk, oil, wine, honey, fruit, and bread) were prof fered to deities in fulfillment of successful prayers. Votive gifts included models of sanctuaries, plaques and stelae, metal bowls and utensils, weapons, and statuettes depicting the deity or offerer. (Such temple offerings were periodically removed and redeposited in special pits or trenches, known as favissae). As surviving documents record, blood sacrifices (involving a variety of animals, including birds) were ad
ministered by priests and otiier temple officiants on behalf of the devotee. Divination, too, played an important role in Phoenician cult. Signs and omens were variously interpeted through the study of dreams, animal livers, natural phenomena, and communication with tlie spirits of the dead. Prophecy, de livered through ecstatic revelation (often in consultation with a temple oracle), figured prominently as well. The various Phoenician cults were governed by a calendar of regular feasts and celebrations which revolved around the agricultural cycle. Attention may be drawn in this regard to tlie Phoenician worship of "dying and rising" vegetation gods (such as Melqart, Eshmun, and Adonis), whose central rite involved the spring "awakening" or resurrection of tlie deity following his ritual cremation. Sacred prostitution, which was offered at places of worship and involved young women and boys in the service of Astarte, formed another well-known Phoenician custom. This rite is well docu mented in the Phoenician realm, especially on tlie island of Cyprus. Although the evidence for its practice on the main land is primarily late (second-fourth century C E ) , the prom inence of the cults with which it was associated (Aphrodite/ Astarte at Byblos, Heliopolis, and Afka) argues strongly for the antiquity of this sacred practice. As for the private or popular religious practices of the Phoenicians, what little is known may be gleaned from the archaeological record. T h e importance of magic and a con cern with protection against evil spirits is manifest in the numerous occurrence, in tombs, of prophylactic charms, such as painted ostrich eggs, glass head-beads, terra-cotta masks, and a host of Egyptianizing amulets and talismans (including scarabs). Numerous terra-cotta statuettes of the Egyptian god Bes and the ubiquitous "Astarte" figurines (depicting a nude, often pregnant, female with hands held to or clasped beneath the breasts) attest to tlie popularity of Phoenician domestic cults concerned with procreation and childbirdi. The far-flung commercial interests of the Phoenicians led ultimately to the widespread diffusion of Phoenician cult. This was particularly true in North Africa, where Phoeni cian and later Punic religious practice exerted a profound and enduring impact upon the indigenous African popula tions, particularly in tlie Tunisian heartland. Phoenician cul tic influence in Israel is well documented in the Hebrew scriptures, beginning witii Solomon (r Kgs. 11:5]) and cul minating, in the following century, under Ahab and the Om ride Dynasty (1 Kgs. 16:31-32; 2 Kgs. 8:16-24). Recent ar chaeological investigation at sites in northern Israel supports the veracity of such biblical accounts. Contemporary inscriptional evidence likewise attests to the adoption of Phoe nician cult in north Syria (at Zincirli) and Cilicia (at Karatepe). [See Cult.] No traces have yet been found of any of tlie great main land Phoenician urban sanctuaries of the Iron Age. (The great temple [I] at Kition on Cyprus remains the only ex-
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PHOENICIANS.
Phoenician statuettes. M u s e e d u L o u v r e , P a r i s . (Alinari/Art Resource,
cavated example of a monumental sanctuary complex in the East [Karageorghis, 1976].) T h e best written source of doc umentation remains the biblical description of the Temple of Solomon (1 Kgs. 6:2-5), whose form must clearly have reflected contemporary Phoenician models and whose con struction was, in large part, due to Phoenician artisans (J Kgs. 5:20, 32). Along the Phoenician coast itself, two Iron Age rectangular shrines of modest proportions have been uncovered—at Sarepta (biblical Sarafand) and Tell Sukas. Both provide important evidence for the emplacement of Phoenician cultic furnishings. In addition to a series of low benches along its long walls, tire eighth-century structure at Sarepta contained a rear altar or offering table made of ash lar masonry and a stone socket for a dressed standing stone or betyl ("house of G o d " ) . T h e most monumental example of a Phoenician open-air precinct or enclosure may be found in the temple of Eshmun at Bostan esh-Sheikh near Sidon (sixth-fifth century B C E ) , a massive quadrangular podium with central chapel situated
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upon a series of excavated hillside terraces. At Amrit (an cient Marathus), two rock-cut open-air enclosures are also preserved, the larger of the two (the so-called ma abed) con sisting of a raised shrine (naiskos) set within a rectangular basin or pool surrounded on three sides by a porticoed en closure. Regarding the funerary practices of the Phoenicians, nu merous excavated cemetery sites, especially in the Punic west, have provided much information (Gras, 1991). The Phoenicians buried their dead in extramural cemeteries gen erally located well outside of their settlements. The form of burial varied considerably. Deep rock-cut shaft tombs (often with multiple burial chambers) and built or semibuilt cham ber tombs of ashlar masonry were favored by the wealthy, and shallow rectangular pits, often slab-lined and covered with a stone lid, were common with the less affluent. [See Shaft Tombs; Pit Graves.] T h e main Phoenician burial rite was inhumation, but cremation was also widely employed, especially in the Archaic period (eighth-sixth century),
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when it frequently occurs alongside inhumation in Phoeni cian burial contexts. (It recurs again in the Punic "West dur ing the Hellenistic era.) The practitioners of cremation are assumed to have been foreigners of non-Semitic descent, suggesting that the Iron Age Phoenicians were of mixed eth nic composition. For inhumations, the use of anthropoid stone sarcophagi is widely attested, reflecting Egyptian in fluence. Phoenician burial ritual is poorly documented; it probably involved some form of ceremonial leave-taking marked by ritual mourning. Surviving evidence suggests that the deceased was wrapped or garbed in linen and anointed with perfumes and other aromatics prior to burial. The wealthy were often elaborately adorned with jewelry (including gold burial masks) and occasionally embalmed, as in the case of King Tabnit I of Sidon. Few surviving texts or inscriptions shed any light on the Phoenician concept of death; a variety of evidence, however, suggests that the Phoenicians believed in an afterlife and in the notion of "re birth" in the hereafter. T h e pervasive influence of Egyptian cults on Phoenicia and the widespread belief in a dying and rising god lends support to this assumption. [See Burial Techniques.] The most notorious aspect of Phoenician religion is the practice of child sacrifice. Known as mulk in Phoenician, this rite is recorded in various classical texts and in the He brew Bible, which refers to the practice of "passing children
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Phoenician gold masks from Byblos.
(Giraudon/Art Resource, N Y )
through fire" (2 Kgs. 16:3). Evidence for this phenomenon may be found in the numerous ritual burial precincts or tophets, which have been discovered throughout the Phoeni cian realm: in North Africa, Sicily, and Sardinia. T h e most extensive tophet so far uncovered is at Carthage, where as many as twenty thousand urns with cremated infant and animal remains may have been buried over a six hundredyear period, extending from the late eighth through the sec ond century). Here, as elsewhere, the urns were typically accompanied by stelae bearing dedications to the deities Tank and Ba'al Hammon. T h e subject has been recently reexamined by scholars who would argue that the practice was exceptional, undertaken only in circumstances of ex treme hardship, and that the tophet, far from being a precinct of institutionalized child sacrifice, was actually a cemetery for infants deceased from natural causes (S. Ribicini in Moscati, 1988, pp. 120-122). The extensive archaeological evi dence and ancient written documentation, would suggest otherwise, however, and strongly support tire existence of this practice and the veracity of the ancient classical ac counts (R. J. Clifford in BASOR 279 [1990]: 58; see also Lawrence Stager and P. Mosca in Markoe, 1996, for the archaeological and textual evidence for the rite at Carthage). [Many
of the sites mentioned
entries; see especially Tyre.]
are the subject
of
independent
Byblos; Carthage; Sarepta; Sidon; and
F i r s t m i l l e n n i u m BCE. M u s e e d u L o u v r e , P a r i s .
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts BIBLIOGRAPHY Aubet, Maria E. The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade. N e w York, 1993. Interesting new study which examines the dynamics of Phoenician trade a n d colonization in the Mediterranean during the eighth through sixth centuries BCE. Bikai, Patricia M . " T h e P h o e n i c i a n s . " In The Crisis Years: The Twelfth Century B.C., edited by William A. W a r d a n d M a r t h a Sharp Jou kowsky, p p . 132-141. D u b u q u e , Iowa, 1992. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 279 (1990). Proceedings of a s y m p o s i u m held at die annual meeting of A S O R in 1988, examining t h e emergence of Phoenician culture in the Early Iron Age from a wide variety of perspectives; for further readings on the Phoenicians, see especially the article b y Patricia M . Bikai, pages 65-66. Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. C a m b r i d g e , 1992. Charles-Picard, Gilbert. Carthage: A Survey of Punic History and Cidture from Its Birth to the Final Tragedy. L o n d o n , 1987. Culican, William. The First Merchant Venturers: The Ancient Ijevant in History and Commerce. L o n d o n , 1966. Although somewhat outdated, tiiis highly readable work (by one of the great scholars of Phoenician art) outiines the cultural b a c k d r o p for the development of Phoeni cian civilization. G r a s , Michel, et al. L'univers phenicien. Paris, 1989. G r a s , Michel, et al. " T h e Phoenicians a n d D e a t h . " Rerytus 39 (1991): 127-176. Gubel, Eric, et al. Les Pheniciens et le monde mediterranean. Brussels, 1986. H a r d e n , D o n a l d B. The Phoenicians. 3d ed. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1980. R e mains one of die m o s t readable a n d comprehensive introductory sur veys of Phoenician civilization. Karageorghis, Vassos. Kition: Mycenaean and Phoenician Discoveries in Cyprus. L o n d o n , 1976. Katzenstein, H . Jacob. The History of Tyre: From the Beginning of the Second Millennium B. CE. until the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 53S B.C.E. Jerusalem, 1973. Lipinski, E d u a r d , et al., eds. Dictionnaire de la Civilisation phenicienne etpunique. T u r n h o u t , 1992. Collaborative effort of m o r e than eighty specialists in the field, representing t h e first comprehensive, ency clopaedic work o n Phoenician a n d Punic civilization. M a r k o e , Glenn, ed., New Perspectives on Phoenician and Punic Carthage. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1996. M c C a r t e r , P . Kyle, Jr. The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet and the Early Phoenician Scripts. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . 1975. Moscati, Sabatino. The World of the Phoenicians. T r a n s l a t e d by Alastair Hamilton. L o n d o n , 1968. Moscati, Sabatino, ed. The Phoenicians. N e w York, 1988. P r o d u c e d in conjunction with a n exhibition held at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 1988, this richly illustrated volume explores various aspects of P h o e nician civilization in an e x t e n d e d series of essays. Mulily, James D . " H o m e r a n d t h e P h o e n i c i a n s . " Bcrytus 19 (1970): 19-64Negbi, Ora. "Early Phoenician P r e s e n c e in d i e Mediterranean Islands: A Reappraisal." American Journal of Archaeology 96.4 (1992): 599615. Niemeyer, H a n s G . " T r a d e Before t h e Flag? O n the Principles of P h o e nician Expansion in t h e M e d i t e r r a n e a n . " In Biblical Archaeology To day, edited by A v r a h a m Biran a n d Josef Aviram, p p . 335-344. Je rusalem, 1993. Niemeyer, H a n s G . , a n d Ulrich G e h r i g , eds. Die Phonizier im Zeitalter Homers. M a i n z , 1990. Pritchard, James B. Recovering Sarepta, a Phoenician City: Excavations at Sarqfand, Lebanon, 1960-1974, by the University of Pennsylvania. Princeton, 1978.
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Rollig, Wolfgang. " O n the Origins of die Phoenicians." Berytus 31 (1983); 79-93. Sader, Helene S. " P h o e n i c i a n Stelae from T y r e . " Berytus 39 (1991): 101-124. Sader, Helene S. " P h o e n i c i a n Stelae from T y r e ( C o n t i n u e d ) . " Studi Epigraficie Linguistici 9 (1992): 53-79. W a r d , William A. " P h o e n i c i a n s . " I n Peoples of the Old Testament World, edited b y A, J. H o e r t h , Gerald Mattingly, a n d E. M . Yamauchi, p p . 183-206. G r a n d Rapids, 1994. GLENN MARKOE
PHOTOGRAPHY. features,
and
its objectives
[To treat the uses of photography, and
techniques
in
its
archaeological
work, this entry comprises two articles: Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts and Photography of Manuscripts.]
Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts Photography has long been a key aspect of the overall re cording system in archaeology. Its purpose is to preserve images of excavated areas and of the artifacts discovered, in order to facilitate analysis and dissemination of the data. Be cause the end product of an archaeological excavation is an empty hole in the ground, thorough and high-quality pho tographic control over an excavation is essential. An advantage of photography is that it is detail rich and neither edits nor simplifies arbitrarily. A disadvantage of photography is that it records everything within its view, and does not edit or focus its perspective. As the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler noted: " T h e overriding difficulty of the archaeological photographer is to induce his camera to tell the truth" (Wheeler, 1954, p. 174). If the traditional limi tations inherent in the medium (the translation of color and tone to monochrome; the reduction of shape, size, depth, and space to two-dimensional prints) are understood, pho tographs—along with field notes, plans, and drawings—can preserve what is destroyed by the process of excavation. In deed, the photograph has the capacity to return a viewer to the original site, jog the memory, and help to notice forgot ten details. However, as Peter Dorrell of the Institute of Ar chaeology, University College London, observed, archaeo logical photography is "rather like the English language, it is easy to learn and even easier to use badly" (Dorrell, 1989, p. ix). Historically, there have been four practical uses for pho tographs in archaeology: to locate and evaluate potential ar chaeological sites; to preserve data as an integrated part of a comprehensive field recording system; to facilitate analysis and interpretation of the discoveries; and to provide illus trations for published reports as well as lectures and other scholarly accountings. Development. O n an oppressively hot evening in August 1839, several hundred people were packed into the audito rium of the French Academy of Sciences to hear the first
332
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts
public report of the work of Louis Jacque Mande Daguerre, who had succeeded in recording natural images on silvercoated copper plates. It was reported that, for the first time, "the rays of the sun were caught and imprisoned" (New York Morning Herald, 30 September 1839). The technical history of photography has been well doc umented (e.g., Gernsheim, 1971) and its milestones, from the daguerreotype to Polaroid, are well known. Photograph ing antiquities began in the nineteenth century. Fox Talbot photographed manuscripts, engravings, and busts in his stu dio on silver-chloride-impagnated paper. In the early 1850s British Museum officials proposed photographing its collec tion of cuneiform tablets. In 1853 they considered building a studio and darkroom at the museum for photographing images of their Nineveh artifacts for distribution to scholars. However, the museum ran out of funds for both projects (Dorrell, 1989, p. 1 ) . During the first years of photography, long before the technology had become either convenient, consistent, or re liable, many field expeditions were quick to employ tire pow erful new tool to document their discoveries. In 1854 Roger Fenton was sent out with the British Army to the Crimea, ostensibly to photograph monuments and artifacts the troops encountered. No archaeological photographs re sulted, but his 350 photographs of the Crimean conflict, a decade before Matthew Brady's photographic record of the American Civil War, were the first to be taken on the batdefield (Dorrell, 1989, p. 2). Baron Gros made daguerreo types of the monuments of North Africa in 1850, and du Camp took photographs of monuments in Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, and Syria during his travels with Gustav Flaubert from 1849 to 1851 (Dorrell, 1989, p. 3) thathe made popular and accessible to scholars and die public. The photographs of Tranchand took in Assyria from 1852 to 1855, in Khor sabad, and later in Armenia and Kurdistan, first by da guerreotype and later by calotype, are of remarkable quality, both technically and artistically (see Dorrell, 1989, p. 3, pi. 1). When Charles W. Wilson of the British Royal Engineers first excavated Jerusalem's walls in 1864 for the Ordnance Survey, he recorded the finds with pencil and pad, holding a candle in his teeth as he crawled through the tunnels bored along the base of the walls. Because the candle would often be extinguished by rising water in the tunnels, Wilson quickly realized the potential of photography and began sys tematically malting photographic images in 1867 (Wilson, 1871, p . 188), [See Jerusalem; and the biography of Wilson.} There was at first no practical printing technology for in cluding these new photographs in publications; editors were forced to have the photos transferred to block cuttings, en gravings, or lithographs to be printed. Such images are often described in these early reports as "taken from a photo graph." In 1880, the classical archaeologist Alexander
Conze was the first to use photographs printed on albumen paper, gold-toned and tipped into the pages, in his excava tion report of Samothrace (Conze et a l , 1880). T h e images were made on glass "wet plates" that had to be kept moist throughout preparation, exposure, and development. Dry glass plates replaced them in the late 1870s, malting photog raphy much more convenient to do. Although flexible film was popularized by George Eastman as early as 1885, most archaeological photographers continued to use glass plates until World War II and view cameras until the 1960s. As late as 1934, W. F. Bade, excavating at Tell en-Nasbeh, 10 km (6 mi.) northwest of Jerusalem, had to argue for the use of cut film (Bade, 1934, p . 69). [See Nasbeh, Tell en-; and the biography
of
Bade.}
Tilting-bed view cameras, usually full- (6.5" X 8.5"), halfplate (4.25" X 6.5") or quarter-plate (3.25" X 4.25") affairs, with their ground glass and black cloths, were long seen as indispensable to proper composition: for preserving the rec tilinear perspective of architecture and for obtaining tire image size necessary for quality publication photos. View cameras were recommended in certain circumstances into the late 1980s (V. M . Conlon, Camera Techniques in Ar chaeology, London, 1973, p . 1; Dorrell, 1989, p . 2 1 ) , but by the mid-1970s, 35-mm cameras were the instruments of choice (Harp, 1975, p . 53), largely because of their low cost and ease of use. A few excavations that could afford the larger "medium format," 2.5 sq. in., found the detail greater while retaining die ease of use of the smaller cameras. Conditions endured by early photographers were difficult: hot developer, dirty equipment, and oil lamps witii lealdng safelight filters. One photographer, when his camera jammed in the field, had himself sealed in a Bronze Age tomb until he could safely remove the film from the camera. (Bade, 1934, p. 70). Often, photographers would pitch one camel's hair tent inside another to create a darkroom: the working temperatures of the developer and the sound of sand grinding between the glass photographic plates must have been daunting. William Flinders Petrie decided to inttoduce photography to his explorations in 1881 and promptly built his own cam era. It was made of japanned tin, about the size, he said, of a biscuit tin. T h e lens had two apertures, witii holes of dif ferent sizes drilled in a piece of tin that was slid in front of tlie lens. It employed a drop shutter, also of tin, and a dark sleeve for changing photographic plates. This simple cam era, rebuilt several times during his professional career pro duced photos of extraordinary detail and clarity (Drower, 1985). [See the biography
of
Petrie.}
T h e first photographs taken from the air were of Paris in 1858, but the use of aerial photography in archaeology was not attempted until 1891, when a British army officer, Charles Close, used free, unmanned balloons flying glassplate cameras over the ruins near Agra, India. Although his
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts attempts were unsuccessful, in 1906 P. H, Sharpe, appar ently by accident, took aerial photos of Stonehenge in En gland, producing an impressive vertical image of the entire complex (Deuel, 1969, p. 12; Detweiler, 1948, p. 35). T h e first underwater archaeological photography was success fully attempted by Antoine Poidebard, a French Jesuit who excavated the harbor installations at Tyre in 1935-1937. Working before the invention of scuba equipment, Poi debard employed helmeted divers and a skin diver holding his breath to map the Phoenician facilities. He photographed the masonry under water, plotted buoys set at critical points, and took aerial photographs; he even took stereophotographs through a glass-bottomed bucket (Bass, 1970, pp. 88-89). [See Tyre; and the biography of Poidebard] During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, photography became one of the stan dard tools in recording excavations and artifacts. Neverthe less, for many decades photography was little more than a way of illustrating monuments, enlivening reports, and pro viding visual aids for fund-raising efforts. It was not until Wheeler (see above) and his photographer Maurice B. Cookson insisted that site photographs should "reveal every detail of the excavations as they proceeded" (Wheeler, 1954, p. I74ff.) that archaeological photography made the tran sition from snapshots to scientific recording. Aerial P h o t o g r a p h y . As a tool for exploration and re cordkeeping, aerial photography can be carried out from a variety of platforms: satellites, aircraft, balloons, kites, and even tall towers. Useful in a rapid initial survey of sites that have excavation potential, air surveys often reveal clear ev idence of successive occupations, actual "palimpsests of cul tural landscapes," invisible to observers on the ground, that can be readily deciphered. Photogrammetry, the systematic process of aerial survey often used in map production, can provide detailed and accurate mapping for a fraction of the time and cost of a land survey. Archaeological features appear in aerial photographs in several ways: shadows are visible when photos are taken with low, raking light, allowing the flattened features invisible from the ground to appear; crop marks are the differences in color or density of growth often revealed when plants are growing over underground objects; and soil marks are the visible differences in the color of soil over subsoil installa tions in a freshly plowed field (Detweiler, 1948, pp. 35-36; Bacon, i960, p. 303). At Seleucia on the Tigris, for example, what looked like 8 sq km (5 sq. mi.) of undistinguished sand dunes was re vealed from the air to be a grid system of streets interrupted by what proved to be large public buildings (Detweiler, 1948, p. 35). At Gezer, the layout of the site's massive for tifications was first noticed in a balloon photograph, even though the excavators had walked the wall daily for weeks. Periscope cameras were used with great success (and at
333
much less the cost of trial excavations) to inspect Etruscan tombs north of Rome in order to identify those not pillaged in antiquity (Bacon, i960, p. 304). [See Seleucia on the Ti gris; Gezer.] Recording. In recent decades, personnel trained in both archaeological history and photographic technique have been represented on the staff of many excavations. When photography is incorporated into a project's comprehensive recording system, the result is an integrated scheme of doc umentation that provides a record of progress in the field and of finds, as well as immediate feedback for area super visors and field directors. As an excavation progresses, the details of artifacts, strucmres, strata, and topography contribute to theories of how the site's strata were laid down and what the purpose and function of their tools, buildings, and plans were. Working theories change with the appearance of new data and further reflection. Those emerging reconstructions must be coor dinated with the photographic work: photographs should document the evidence as new theories emerge about the sequence of occupation or the purpose of installations, so that when the stratum has been cleared and the level de stroyed, the photographic record replaces them. Because the photographic record must be accurate and comprehensive, considerably more photographs of a site and its objects are taken than will ever be published. How ever, if details overlooked in the field or considered unim portant take on new significance as the analysis of tire finds, plans, and field reports progresses, they often will have been preserved in a well-considered, full-coverage photographic record. A successful photographic record must be able to fulfill four criteria. 1. Identification. Do the photos clearly illustrate the sub ject? Are the form, outline, and texture of the objects ap parent? Are all tire features that constitute the character of the subject present in the photograph? 2. Context. Do the photos clearly indicate the contextual relationships between the subject and the surrounding area, including vertical relationships (to what has preceded) and horizontal relationships (to other objects and structures in the area)? 3. Significance. Have judgments about the identity and importance of the object changed since the photographs were made? 4 . Coverage. Have enough photographs of the site been taken to assure complete coverage of the subject? Light a n d Shadows. T h e extremes of light and contrast have always posed problems for archaeological photography in the Near East. The light falling on archaeological sites there is about half again as much as on pastoral scenes in Europe and North America. This intense light produces a tonal range between subjects in bright sunlight and those in
334
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts
shadow that is three times as great as is normally encoun tered. This reality conspires with the limited chromatic range of most archaeological subject matter—tan stones on tan soil—to produce extreme photographic conditions. Thus, photographs at Near Eastern archaeological sites of ten are taken in the early morning, before the direct light of the sun hits die site (Wheeler, 1954, p. 175; Wright, 1978, p. 185), or late in the afternoon, just before dusk, when the sun's harshness is diminished, and the light of the reflected sky softens the landscape. (The analog is the north studio light preferred by artists.) Photographic manuals for archaeology emphasize that ar eas to be photographed must be meticulously clean, for the camera records every intrusive blade of grass, every distract ing bit of debris. Anything that might divert from the subject of the photograph should be made as unobtrusive as pos sible. Surfaces should be evenly brushed to an artificial smoothness so that they do not appear to be significant el ements. Brushing, stippling, wetting, and careful undercutting to provide shadow lines are common techniques used to em phasize a scene's salient features. As Kathleen Kenyon cau tioned: "The only justifiable use [of outlining] is to attract the eye to differences which the rest of the visible evidence confirm" (Kenyon, 1953, p. 138). Elements of a scene can be highlighted but should not be falsified. Occasionally, this may mean tiiat the photograph will be ambiguous, for it should not introduce interpretations tiiat were not apparent at tlie site. It should be no more (or less) certain than the director's original interpretation. Usually, only one excavation level is shown in a photo graph to avoid confusing the presentation of the occupation sequence; however, a photo of where a garbage pit was dug would also show how it cut through earlier layers. Some images are intended to demonstrate the relationships among strata, a point of view for which the photographer must pre pare. The goal is to have the photographs, top plans, and balk sections complement each other, so that tlie dimensions and location of each locus can easily be cross matched to the images. Technical Control. Photography depends on the several variables inherent in the mechanical and chemical charac teristics of the system; changing exposure and shutter speeds and altering development and printing times con tribute to the creativity of the craft. However, controlling and standardizing the system's variables can produce pre cise, uniform photographic prints. Based on Ansel Adams's zone system, the variables are recalibrated at tlie beginning of an excavation season: film speed, light-meter readings, and film and paper developing time are integrated into a single system of fixed specifications. Beginning with the pre cise exposure of each scene, not on die object itself, but on a standard photographic 35 percent "gray card," through to fixed-time print processing, eliminating variables will pro
duce uniform photographs throughout the season (see Wright, 1978). Special Techniques. Underwater photography imposes challenges that do not exist in recording surfaces on land. Even simple tasks, such as laying out a grid and measuring levels, become major feats of planning and dexterity under water. Although nearly any good-quality camera can be used for underwater photography if enclosed in waterproof hous ing, there are several special cameras that can be used down to more than 1,000 m. T h e difference in diffraction indices between air and water (e.g., tlie "bending" of a pencil in a glass of water), causes distortion unless special corrective lenses are added to the camera or its housing. Because water absorbs light waves at different rates than air does, it absorbs colors sequentially as the depth increases: red fades under just a few feet of water, then orange dis appears, and then yellow vanishes. Only blue remains, which gives underwater color photographs a pervasive azure cast, a problem correctable with artificial flood or strobe lights. Mosaics can be constructed from a series of overlapping photographs to show an area too large to capture in a single image. Because not all of a site is excavated, cleaned, and prepared for photography at the same time, photos are taken in the course of an excavation, as each area is excavated and exposed. Ultimately, photographs may collectively reveal what no one could have seen in a single glance. Since Poidebard's early efforts at Tyre, many maritime sites have been photographed with increasingly sophisti cated equipment. Notable examples are tlie massive under water port facilities at Caesarea Maritima in Israel and largely intact ships, such as the Galilee fishing boat, the Ma'agen Mikha'el boat, and the Uluburun and Yassiada wrecks off Turkey. [See Caesarea; Galilee Boat; Ma'agen Mikha'el; Uluburun; Yassiada Wrecks.] Photography using parts of die electromagnetic spectrum beyond visible light has been employed in a variety of at tempts to coax information out of archaeological remains. Infrared (IR) and X-ray photography have been useful in illuminating obscured text on damaged parchment and pa pyrus manuscripts and in revealing palimpsest text where the original text had been scraped or rubbed off. Both have been used to detect degrees of deterioration for tlie frag ments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. IR also has been used to locate painted floors and other decorations invisible to die unaided eye. Infrared and ultraviolet studies have been per formed on the Shroud of Turin and Egyptian mummies have been X-rayed with great success to detect whether the wrappings contain a body or to locate jewelry or other dec oration. X-rays also aid in paleopathology (the study of dis ease and medicine) by helping to determine skeletal struc ture, malformations, and often the cause of death (a broken neck or crushed skull). [See Paleopathology.] On a larger scale, X-rays have been used to examine the great pyramids
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts at Giza. [See Dead Sea Scrolls; Pyramids; Giza.] Multispectrum "false color" imaging has been used in aerial photog raphy, where the normal spectrum colors of green, blue, and red are shifted so the IR image can be seen as red (Dorrell, 1989, p. 206). F u t u r e Technology. Archaeological photography is changing as new technologies are developed. As desk-top and portable computers and digitizing cameras become more powerful and less expensive, photography may be come increasingly digital; it is possible to envision the merg ing of the photographic recording and computer analysis of excavations and the artifacts they produce into a compre hensive system of recording, manipulation, storage, and publication. When the issues of power, speed, cost, storage, and graphic resolution are resolved, computer graphics may unite still photography, computer and video graphics, mo tion pictures, color slide photos, and databases into a com prehensive system. "Field digitalization units" may replace cameras at exca vation sites, producing images from a computer printer for field notebooks. T h e system will provide publication-quality images and, with a computer projection unit, "slides" for public lectures. Powerful personal computers and laser color printers may replace the photo lab and chemicals. T h e cam era obscura, the "dark room," and the fixative hypo, which have been necessary since the beginning of photography, may one day be obsolete. With CAD (Computer Aided Design) and graphics pro grams to input the data from photos and site plans, a house or a town may be re-created in "virtual reality," allowing the viewer to "walk" from room to room, down streets, and out city gates. Sequences of levels at a site could be assembled so that each phase of a building or a entire town can be viewed on command. It may be possible to re-create the successive stages of a building's construction, destruction, and reconstruction. These creative sequencings could be re corded on videotape for classroom or public use. As in med ical imaging, sequence photos in horizontal "slices" of an excavation area could be reconstructed in a computer pro gram to form coherent occupation levels in three dimen sions. T h e caveat is that with digital imaging, a photo can be altered into something that never existed. Ironically, Wheeler's concern (see above) will have come full-circle: instead of coaxing truth from a photographic image, the new concern may well be to avoid falsifying data by manipulating the digital images. Secure archival storage is possible with optical C D ROMs. They provide relatively permanent digital storage that will exceed that of silver photographic images, which deteriorate with handling and storage. Unlike duplicates of photographic negatives and prints, the quality of digital cop ies is as high as that of the originals. For photographing small finds, available graphics soft ware for personal computers can scan in a photograph (or
335
start with a profile sketch) of a juglet, for example. It can reconstruct the image in three dimensions, rotate it, apply an appropriate texture pattern, light it with full modeling, slice it into sections, and produce photorealistic renderings. It is now possible to return to early excavation reports and digitize their plans, sections, and photographs, including small objects, and from them produce full-color, photoreal istic images. Also on the horizon are holographic imagining techniques that will further enhance the realism of photo graphic representations. [See also Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpreta tion; and Recording Techniques.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bade, William Frederic. A Manual of Excavation in the Near East: Meth ods of Digging and Recording of the Tell en-Nasbeth Expedition in Pal estine. Berkeley, 1934. Bass, George F. Archaeology under Water. 2d ed. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1970. Blakely, Jeffrey A., a n d L a w r e n c e E. T o o m b s . The Tell el-Hesi Field Manual. Edited by Kevin G. O'Connell. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1980. O n e of the best of die m a n u a l s describing die new archaeological methods of the mid-twentieth century (see p p . 112-115). Blaker, Alfred A. Field Photography. S a n Francisco, 1976. ChSne, Antoine, a n d G e r a r d Reveillac. La photographie en archeologie. Les Dossiers de l'Arch6ologie, 13 ( N o v e m b e r - D e c e m b e r 1975). C o n z e , Alexander, et al. Neue Arehaeologische Untersuchungen auf Samothrake. Vienna, 1880. Cookson, Maurice B. Photography for Archaeologists. L o n d o n , 1954. Detweiler, A. Henry. Manual of Archaeological Surveying. N e w Haven, 1948. A n old classic that h a s some useful b u t dated materials on photography. Deuel, L e o . Flights into Yesterday: The Story of Aerial Archaeology. N e w York, 1969. Dorrell, Peter G. Photography in Archaeology and Conservation. N e w York a n d Cambridge, 1989. Probably the best comprehensive survey of archaeological p h o t o g r a p h y . Drower, Margaret S. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1985. Biography of the early pioneer, with some interesting anec dotes on his experiences with photography. H a r p , Elmer, Jr. Photography in Archaeological Research. Albuquerque, 1975Joukowsky, Martha S h a r p . A Complete Manual of Field Archaeology: Tools and Techniques of Field Work far Archaeologists. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980. Kenworthy, M a r y A n n e , et al. Preserving Field Records. Philadelphia, 1985. K e n y o n , Kadileen M . Beginning in Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1953. Classic beginner's book, containing some insights o n the use of photography at mid-century. Malina, Jaroslav, and Vasie ZdenSk. Archaeology Yesterday and Today. Translated by M a r e k Zvelebil. Cambridge, 1990. Nassau, W . E. Practical Photography for the Field Archaeologist. Ontario, 1976. Petrie, W . M . Flinders. Ten Years' Digging in Egypt, 1881-1891. N e w York, n.d. Some of Sir Flinders's o w n comments on his photographs and photography. Petrie, W . M . Flinders. Seventy Years in Archaeology. N e w York, 1932. Riley, Derrick N . Air Photography and Archaeology. Philadelphia, 1987. S i m m o n s , Harold C. Archaeological Photography. N e w York, 1969, Stewart, H . M . " P h o t o g r a m m e t r y in Archaeology." In Archaeological
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PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Manuscripts
Theory and Practice: Essays Presented to W. F. Grimes, edited by D o n ald E. Strong, p p . 2 7 5 - 2 8 2 . L o n d o n , 1 9 7 3 . Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought, C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 9 . Contains some conceptual observations on photography. Warren, Charles, and Charles W . Wilson. The Recovery of Jerusalem: A Narrative of Exploration and Discovery in the City and the Holy Land. London, 1 8 7 1 . T h e classic of Palestinian exploration, including e n gravings from old photos. Wheeler, Robert Eric Mortimer. Archaeology from the Earth. Oxford, 1954-
White, Minor. Zone System Manual: Previsualization, Exposure, Devel opment, Printing; the Ansel Adams Zone System as a Basis of Intuitive Photography. 4th ed. D o b b s Ferry, N . Y . , 1 9 7 2 . Technical manual for controlling the photographic system by one of the foremost photog raphers of tlie century, Wilson, Charles N . 1864 Ordnance Survey of Palestine. N e w York, 1 8 7 1 . Wright, Robert B . "Archaeological Photography." In A Manual of Field Excavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists, edited by William G, Dever and H . Darrell Lance, p p . 1 7 5 - 1 9 5 . Cincinnati, 1 9 7 8 . P r a c tical guide to photographic practices at the Gezer Excavations. Zayadine, Fawzi, and P h . Hottier. "Releve photogrammetrique a P e tra." Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 2 1 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 9 3 104. ROBERT B . W R I G H T
Photography of Manuscripts When it comes to the study of ancient Near Eastern docu ments, visual documentation—that is, the record of what a given ancient text actually looks like—is usually an after thought. Typically, one encounters technically poor images even more poorly reproduced. On die basis of such inferior images, it is usually difficult for a scholar to evaluate whether the readings published for a given text have validity, and rarely is the visual data sufficiently detailed for one to de marcate the ldnds of subde distinctions that often prove cru cial to reading a difficult text correctiy. Instead, one is usu ally forced to rely on "eyewitness" testimony as evidenced in a given editor's transcription and commentary or in his or her representation of the text as a line drawing. However, in recent years there has been an influx of im proved techniques, superior technologies, and new, ex tremely powerful tools that are compelling scholars to re think how they visually document ancient documents. Indeed, the traditional mode of documentary visualization— the photograph—is gradually being replaced by the digital image conveyed on a computer screen. Capturing a visual image of an ancient text has always been a daunting and challenging task. For one thing, the vast majority of ancient texts are hardly preserved in mint con dition, that is, as beautiful, legible, comprehensive, and highly photogenic manuscripts or inscriptions. Rather, in the vast majority of cases, they come in small bits and pieces; ragged and warped; blackened with age or faded to nearly nothing; full of worm holes, water damaged, and weathered; gouged and dented; even encrusted with bat guano. In order
to capture the textual data on tiiese mutilated objects, con siderable technical skill—especially photographic and digital imaging skill—is absolutely required. And here the problem has usually been most acute. This is because those having the technical ttaining to photograph and image process the textual data on ancient objects are, from a scholarly stand point, illiterate. Hence, although they can frequently pro duce technically "photogenic" picmres, more often than not tiiese pictures are inadequate in conveying crucial evidence for epigraphical and philological analysis simply because the technician cannot distinguish the "signal" from the "noise." On the other hand, those having tlie scholarly knowledge crucial for producing the most effective and revealing im ages of ancient texts lack the technical know-how to produce the images themselves. In order for optimal visual data to be produced, a different sort of archivist is therefore required, a scholar-technician, trained in the study of both ancient Near Eastern docu ments, their scripts and languages, as well the skills required to reproduce sophisticated visual imagery. As a general rule, die most effective approach has been to train scholars to be technicians rather than the other way around. T h e reason is that the skills required for scholarly judgment in epigraphy and philology take years to acquire; in contrast, sophisti cated ttaining in documentary photography and computer imaging can be done at a far quicker pace. Basic Photographic Approaches. Photographic docu mentation involves several techniques adopted from com mercial and forensic photography. Foremost is the elec tronic, or strobe, flash as a light source. Some curators have resisted flash photography in favor of the more traditional tungsten or quartz photo floodlights, in the mistaken belief that the latter are less damaging to ancient manuscript media titan the former. In contrast, Marjorie Shelley, conservator of Prints and Drawings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, forthrightly voices the consensus opinion among most trained conservators that "the safest lighting for photographing vulnerable material is considered to be electronic flash (strobe)" (The Care and Handling of Art Ob jects: Practices in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York, 1987, p . 72). Besides being far less damaging to ancient texts, the use of strobe offers great advantages in terms of both the crispness of tlie image and die sharpness of die focus. T h e second important innovation has been the use of photographic previewing, utilizing special Polaroid films de signed for this purpose. Once again, this is a technique long in vogue in commercial photography—especially where strobe flash is employed. Since it is frequentiy difficult to predict the play of light with strobe flash as well as tlie ex posure, commercial photographers typically make a Polar oid test once they have established what they believe to be the optimal set up. Then after a short wait (30 to 60 seconds,
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Manuscripts depending on the film type) the set up can be verified by examination of the Polaroid test; moreover, the Polaroid shot becomes a "paper light meter" that verifies the correct exposure. Once a satisfactory preview has been achieved, one can proceed with confidence to do a full documentation in permanent, high resolution films. This previewing technique has adapted extremely well to the documentation of ancient texts. Besides giving the pho tographer the ability to know in advance that "what you see is what you get," there is a further, very significant advan tage inherent in this ability to preview: It offers an oppor tunity for the expert scholar to control the documentary pro cess. That is, even when the scholar has no photographic expertise, he or she can still review the previews in order to make sure that the picture misses no subtlety in the data. Moreover, with this methodology photography becomes more than merely a means for documentation; rather, it be comes fully integrated into the investigative process itself. T h e photographic lens is a powerful tool of visualization which can often see tilings the eye cannot see. It is typical that a polaroid preview will reveal some aspect of the data of a text that was missed by eye, especially if the text is properly lit. Hence, Polaroid-previewing frequently leads to discovery, especially if an expert is available who can take fullest advantage of the data as it is produced on film. T h e third basic technique that leads to better documen tation of ancient texts can be summarized in a single phrase: more choice. T o be more specific, it is essential to document ancient texts employing a variety of films for each set up as well as a range of exposures for each film type. This is in decided contrast to conventional practices of documentation in which, typically, a single exposure is made in only one film type. This requires a single image to carry all the data, and in fact, no single film or exposure is adequate to this task. Once again, this broadening of choice follows the gen eral practice in commercial photography where the tenet, "when in doubt, shoot more" has long held sway. Films must be used in a complementary fashion, thereby compen sating for the inherent weaknesses of one film type with the strengths of another. At minimum at least two films should be employed—a high-resolution black-and-white film and a high quality color-reversal, that is, transparency film. The former allows the epigrapher to study a text in greatest detail while the latter allows him or her to clarify ambiguities of shade and color that black-and-white images can distort or mask. Depending on the circumstance, other films should be used as well—for example, infrared-sensitive films for shooting soft-media documents such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. [See Dead Sea Scrolls.] Sometimes color-negative film is also a better choice if the image is to be scanned for digitizing. Moreover, it is essential to do a range of expo sures—to bracket the shots—in order to insure that there is sufficient latitude to encompass the wide range from light to
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dark one frequently finds in the ancient materials upon which textual data have been written. [See Papyrus; Parch ment; Tablet; Writing Materials.] The fourth basic concept is closely related to this issue of choice in terms of film and exposure: namely, a range in resolution or scale. In the past the custom has been, once again, to force a single image to cover all the data. A far superior documentation can be achieved, however, working at three levels of resolution/magnification. 1. Reference shot. A text should be photographed in the largest reasonable size—for example, a plate of related frag ments, a column of text, or the inscribed face of a stela or clay tablet. Even when the very best films are employed, however, this level of documentation will be inadequate to achieve everything needed. 2. Section shot. A second level of magnification, the sec tion shot, is also required. T h a t is, the given artifact is shot in sections at a mid-range magnification. This allows for a fairly close survey of the letters or signs as well as the scribal hand or ductus, 3. High resolution. A tliird level of magnification should be used at very high resolution to target specific problems. Virtually all ancient inscriptions have serious problem areas in which a high-resolution photograph at high magnification does wonders to resolve philological ambiguity. This is es pecially so if an expert on a particular text can target such areas in advance and give the photographer a "shooting script" by which to plan the documentation of problem ar eas. Even better, if the expert is also available on site, a sig nificant number of problems can often be resolved as he or she reacts and adjusts the documentation based upon what can be seen in successive Polaroid previews. Resolution problems are dramatically lessened when larger-format films are used. Unfortunately, 3 5 mm, the most widely available film size and hence the one most often employed for documentation, is inherently poor in resolu tion regardless of film type employed. Even more significant limitations in resolution are encountered when a microfiche or microfilm is used for primary documentation. A better choice is a mid-format 1 2 0 film ( 2 3 in. wide) and by far the most effective film size for serious, detailed documentation is the standard professional 4 inch by 5 inch film size. For particularly large documents, it is sometimes even necessary to go to an 8 inch by 1 0 inch format in order to gain a highly detailed reference shot. There is a further advantage to working with mid- or large-format films. T h e cameras that can handle these films virtually all allow for the use of interchangeable film maga zines. Hence one can line up a shot, verify it with a Polaroid test using a Polaroid magazine, then proceed to do a per manent documentation with several magazines, each con taining a different film—all while the camera itself and tire photographic set up remain essentially unchanged. Thus, all
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M a n u s c r i p t s . F i g u r e I . Papyrus 1 3 4 6 4 (recto), known as the "Passover Papyrus," with both top and backlighting. (Photography by Bruce and K e n n e t h Z u c k e r m a n , W e s t Semitic Research; courtesy Staadiche Museen, Berlin) PHOTOGRAPHY:
the pictures match precisely in format and scale—an invalu able advantage for purposes of comparison at a later time. Soft Media. Certain artifacts containing textual data are classified as "soft" media—that is, media that are written on pliable, frequently perishable, organic materials such as an imal skin (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls), parchment or vellum (e.g., early medieval codices), and papyrus (e.g., letters and legal documents like those from Elephantine, Egypt). T h e media of writing is almost always some form of ink applied to the prepared surface. Since tire ink itself has no significant thickness, soft media documents can essentially be treated as two-dimensional for photographic purposes. Nonetheless, it is still of significant value to employ films of sufficient resolution to be able to distinguish the thicknesses of ink strokes—especially as they cross over one another—on the surface. Such data is invalu able for analysis of the order and direction of strokes in a given scribal hand. Depth-of-field problems are usually minimal as long as extra care is taken to make sure that there is close parallel alignment between the plane of the writing surface, the lens and the film plane. This alignment must be checked and readjusted frequently. On those occasions where the surface has buckled or warped significantly, even greater care in focusing must be taken. The main concern with regard to lighting is to make sure
that the illumination is diffuse (what photographers call a soft light) and even. T h e use of special diffusers known as soft boxes are ideal for this sort of work and will usually serve to eliminate any shadowing caused by undulations in the writing surface. It is almost impossible to light a surface evenly with a single light source; thus, a typical setup in volves two strobe lights set precisely opposite each other on either side of the camera and angled downward at 4 5 . If it is practical, soft-media documents should be photo graphed with backlighting; that is, a highly diffused third strobe placed behind the document. Almost all ancient softmedia documents contain holes and cracks, many of which are extremely small. If the document is only illuminated from above, those imperfections may fall into shadow. Par ticularly with black-and-white images (but also, to some ex tent, with color) it can be difficult to distinguish such shad ows (sometimes as small as a pinhead) from the ink on the writing surface. Furthermore, if the soft-media text is mounted between glass plates (or some similar material), then, from a photographic standpoint, the document will "float" slightly above the surface on which it is being pho tographed. When lit only from above, the document will cast a distinct shadow against the backdrop. These shadows not only interfere with reading the ink, but can obscure docu ment edges. Once again, back lighting can be employed to 0
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Manuscripts cancel out these shadows so that every edge is sharp and clear, every hole, every hairline crack, no matter how small, distinct from the writing surface. Back lighting offers an added bonus in that it tends to give fine illumination to pa pyrus and skin grain, thus maldng the task of matching frag ments based on die grain of the writing surface, a far easier endeavor than would otherwise be the case (see figure i ) . A major concern in photographing soft-media texts (typ ically papyri) mounted between plates is glare. T h e shiny surface of tlie mounting plates should be cleaned as well as possible before photographing (even a stray fingerprint can become an occasion for glare), and Polaroid tests must be continually monitored. Glare can be eliminated by using black cardboard and black "gaffer's" tape to mask any re flecting surface. Considerable success can often be achieved in rettieving information from obscured inks on soft media by photo graphing and lighting with particular band widtiis of light, especially ultraviolet and/or infrared illumination. Crucial in this regard is die type of ink employed and die nature of the damage to the writing surface. Where ink has faded, a very effective technique is to photograph the text in black and white with a colored filter over the lens. T h e filter should match the color of the writing surface—yellow, orange, red,
PHOTOGRAPHY:
Manuscripts. Figure
or sepia filters are the most effective. In a black-and-white photograph, the background, correctly filtered, will appear to drop out—either as white or considerably lighter than the surface looks in the visible light spectrum. This, in turn, increases the contrast between the surface and the ink, mak ing the latter more visible. T h e technique is effective re gardless of ink type. Infrared illumination and photographing in infrared-sen sitive film are effective in the opposite scenario: when ink is obscured against a dark or blackened surface—where black is seen against black in visible light. This is typically the case, for example, with obscured ink on the skins of Dead Sea Scrolls. If the inks involved are essentially carbon black in composition, then infrared photographic techniques can de liver surprising, indeed often stunning results for manu scripts that look hopelessly illegible in visible light. The conventional approach to infrared photography of ancient documents has been to photograph a surface in a relatively broad band of wavelengths. Indeed, the conven tional wisdom has been to use a red filter (thereby blocking all illumination beyond red) and to photograph witii infra red sensitive films the entire range in which the film is sen sitive to infrared illumination. This technique has proven to be generally effective since across the infrared spectrum or-
2. Ms 192614, fragment C. A small D e a d S e a Scroll f r a g m e n t
as it looks in visible light. (Photograph b y B r u c e and K e n n e t h Z u c k e r m a n , W e s t Semitic Research; courtesy S c h a y e n Collection, Oslo)
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ganic writing surfaces (animal skin and papyrus) are highly reflective while carbon black ink is not. Thus a surface that appears black in visible light will often drop out as white in a black-and-white infrared image, thus revealing the ink it had previously obscured. On the other hand, when the ink itself has faded against a lighter background, infrared pho tographic techniques are largely ineffective and generally in ferior to the colored-filtration technique discussed above. Even more dramatic infrared results can be achieved if a target is photographed in discrete narrow bands in the in frared spectrum, where blackened organic materials are not evenly reflective (that is, at given wavelengths they are more reflective). When a surface is photographed in a broad in frared band width, a degree of leveling, or averaging, occurs (i.e., the less reflective are averaged in with the more reflec tive), thereby lessening tire contrast against the ink. A better
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result is achieved when narrow band-pass filters are used over the camera lens that will only pass illumination where the reflectivity of the surface is optimal. In such instances, startling gains have been achieved that significantly surpass those of infrared photography using the conventional broad band approach (see figures 2 and 3). After about the fifth century C E , carbon-black inks began to be replaced by what are known as iron-gall inks—inks with a very high iron content as well as tannic acid—ex tracted from the galls, or irregular growths, that often de velop on oak trees. Such inks show up poorly under infrared illumination; indeed, in all areas of the infrared spectrum, they tend to fade away in photographic documentation. On the other hand they respond well to the stimulus of ultra violet light. That is, under the stimulus of ultraviolet illu mination iron gall inks tend to be unusually absorptive.
M a n u s c r i p t s . F i g u r e 3 . Ms 1 9 2 6 1 4 , fragment
C. T h e s a m e f r a g m e n t f r o m
figure
2 p h o t o g r a p h e d in a n a r r o w b a n d of i n f r a r e d illumination. T h e f r a g m e n t is r e v e a l e d t o b e p a r t of b
i Q D a n . N o t e t h a t at least t w o letters ('aleph a n d l a m e d ) are just visible f r o m a n u n d e r l y i n g layer of skin. (Photograph by Bruce and K e n n e t h Zuckerman, West Semitic Research; courtesy S c h a y e n C o l lection, Oslo)
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Manuscripts Thus, in a case where the ink appears in visible light to have faded beyond legibility, under ultraviolet stimulation the ink tracing can often be dramatically retrieved. While most color and black-and-white films are sensitive well into tire ultraviolet spectrum, it is not so much the data in the ultraviolet per se that are die most useful for retrieving information from faded iron-gall inks: it is the fluorescent stimulus that ultraviolet illumination causes in the visible light spectrum that brings out the best data. Thus, the best approach is to use an ultraviolet illuminator (a simple method is to use a filter that only passes ultraviolet light over a strobe flash) and then photograph through a filter that blocks out the ultraviolet. Unfortunately, this technique is not effective for retrieving data from iron-gall inks against a dark background, for example, where the parchment or vel lum has darkened due to water staining. In such cases the dark areas of the writing surface become even darker under ultraviolet stimulation and block out the data from the irongall ink. Hence it is usually necessary to work with a con ventional visible light image in coordination with an image stimulated by ultraviolet light to get the best data from man uscripts written in iron-gall inks. Occasionally one encounters red-colored inks on soft me dia, especially scrolls. Such inks usually have a high iron content and seem not to show any especially useful char acteristics in either the infrared or ultraviolet range. Colored filtration can be helpful—especially a red filter, which will cause the ink to appear white against the background in a black-and-white print. H a r d Media. Written on durable, usually (but not exclu sively) nonorganic materials, hard-media texts are typically pottery, plaster, clay, stone, metal, bone, or gemstones. [See Seals; Metals; Bone, Ivory, and Shell.] Ink may be applied to hard writing surfaces (e.g., ostraca, or "pottery sherds"), but more frequently inscriptions are created by carving the surface either through simple incision or impression; occa sionally it is done by sculpting or stamping in bas-relief. [See Ostracon.] By far the most common such inscriptions are ostraca, that is, sherds of pottery with ink (usually carbon black) inscribed on either the concave or convex surface, some times both. T o a large extent, the techniques involved in photographing ostraca are the same as those employed for soft-media manuscripts. T h e one proviso is that great care must be taken to mount ostraca generally parallel to the film plane, since the curved surface makes depth of field a con stant concern. Then focus should be made sharp at the av erage distance of the curved surface from the film plane. All effort should be made to keep the lens opening as narrow as possible in order to increase the depth of field. If an os tracon is particularly curved, it may be necessary to photo graph it in sections in order to compensate for depth-offield/focus problems.
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As with soft-media documents, color filtration increases the contrast between the ink and the writing surface, as de scribed above; it is often extremely effective in increasing the legibility of faded ink on a smooth clay surface. Less effective but still of some value are the infrared techniques noted above. Rarely does such an approach make the ink itself significantly clearer to read; however, an infrared image often is effective in screening out the visual interfer ence that often is the result of the rough or variable texture of tire clay. Ultraviolet stimulation has not shown effective ness in enhancing readings on clay although some gain may be possible when other surfaces are involved, for example, bone. Results similar to those described above for red ink on soft media have been achieved for ostraca as well. Perhaps the most effective means for making significant gains in readings for ostraca is employing a wetting tech nique. Considerable caution must be employed when wet ting ostraca. Initial testing should be done on a small area of the inked clay to confirm that the ink will not run or oth erwise be significantly damaged through the application of water. Only a fine spray of distilled water should be used; the best means of application being short bursts of spray from an airbrush. When wet, ink traces that are often completely invisible to the eye when the clay surface is dry will suddenly appear. Speed and timing are essential. As an ostracon dries, the ink will begin to fade again. T h e type of clay and how it was shaped, burnished, slipped, or fired determine the optimal amount of time for photographing—sometimes only sec onds. Moreover, when first wet, an ostracon can appear shiny (especially its convex surface) and therefore suscep tible to glare reflected from the illumination. Hence, it is sometimes necessary to wait until the surface has dried somewhat to a more matte-like appearance so that this glare problem is minimized. Other hard-media inscriptions pose different problems because they have a tliird dimension: height and/or depth. Whereas with soft-media texts and ostraca, an even, diffuse light is preferable, for these other types, readings are clarified by establishing shadows; hence, a low-raking, harsh light is generally preferable. Three-dimensional hard-media in scriptions are divided into two broad subcategories: large and small artifacts. Large artifacts. In most instances, a "key" and "fill" lighting technique is the best for large artifacts. Dominant shadows are established by a low, raking light positioned to bring out the text readings most clearly. If the text is a cu neiform tablet, conventionally this light is placed so that it sweeps down diagonally from the upper left-hand corner. This establishes continuity with the convention of drawn cuneiform signs. [See Cuneiform.] Assyriologists conven tionally depict signs graphically as seen with a dominant light from the upper left. In general, this is the convention
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for other cuneiform drawing (e.g., Ugaritic) as well. The key light should be shifted as irregularities in the surface dictate. With other types of texts, the key is placed where it will best throw die signs into sharp relief—the position being judged by eye and verified by the results of Polaroid testing. A second light source is typically employed from the pre cise opposite angle and from the opposite end of the in scribed object, in order to fill and buffer the dominant shadow. This light establishes definition of the opposite end of the signs or letters. This fill light is softer; indeed, it can often be established with a highly reflective white fill card (or sometimes a shinier reflector,'such as a mirror) that sim ply bounces the key light in the opposite direction (see figure 4 ) . Where a stronger fill is needed, a second strobe flash can be used. In some instances, especially where a surface is curved (as on the incised surface of a jar), dominant, or key, lights are set at both ends of the inscription and are balanced so that they fill for each other. This is also often die best approach
PHOTOGRAPHY: Manuscripts. inscription.
F i g u r e 4.
The El-Kerak
Moabite
P h o t o g r a p h e d in typical "key-fill" lighting s e t - u p . T h e
key c o m e s from t h e u p p e r left a n d d i e fill is established w i t h a w h i t e c a r d at the lower right. (Photograph by Bruce and K e n n e t h Zucker m a n , West Semitic Research in collaboration with the Princeton T h e o logical Seminary; courtesy D e p a r t m e n t of Antiquities of Jordan, A m man)
for a long, narrow one- or two-line inscription (e.g., on the base of a statue or votive object). In such cases, "fill-fill" lighting is the only proper approach. Care must be taken regarding the sort of reflectors used with the lights. In some cases (especially where considerable area needs to be covered) a reflector that throws a fairly broad, diffuse light will work; however, when an inscription is shallow (lightly incised or impressed), where it has been worn away (e.g., weathered), or where the bas-relief is min imal (e.g., on a poorly rolled cylinder seal impression) or partially chipped away, a much narrower light is needed to cast harsher shadows to define the letters or signs. As a gen eral rule, the narrower the conduit of the light, the harsher the shadow created. A "snoot" reflector is the ideal tool for throwing such light. A snoot is essentially an open-ended cylinder about 6 inches long through which the light gen erated from an electronic strobe is converted into a narrow column. Because the light column is so narrow, it can be sent at an extremely low angle relative to the surface being illuminated; thus, the shadows created often throw even the most subtle indentations into startling relief. T h e major drawback of working with snoots is that their light covers only a limited amount of area. This makes them especially serviceable for detail work (e.g., a close-up of several letters or signs), but less well-suited for larger surface areas. This problem of coverage can be mitigated by stacking snoots; that is, by positioning two or more snoots diagonally on top of each other so that their lights overlap. Using this tech nique requires care: the lights must be evenly balanced, so that no unevenness is perceived in the transition from the illumination of one light to the next. When an even narrower column of light is needed than can be projected through a snoot, black paper (or paper that is black on one side and white on the other) can be rolled into a cone (black on the outside, white on the inside) and taped to the end of a snoot. The end of the cone can then be adjusted to deliver a variable column of light, depending on the size of the area needing coverage. This works espe cially well for detail shots involving one or two letters or signs. A fiber-optic light source with a small probe can also be used, although it is usually not required for large hardmedia objects. Small artifacts. Essentially, three types of small hardmedia objects contain inscriptions: seals, seal impressions, and coins. On occasion, other small artifacts are encoun tered with minute inscriptions (e.g., the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls from Jerusalem), but the techniques for photograph ing them do not differ significantly from those used in the three main categories. [See Ketef Hinnom.] Coins. Probably the easiest and best understood tech niques are for photographing coins. Because ancient coins are invariably metal, their reflective surface can be used to advantage in delineating iconography and inscriptions. Usu ally, all that is required is a fairly diffuse light nearly on top
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Manuscripts of the target. This can be achieved by employing what is known as a "ring light," that is, an illumination source that literally wraps around the camera lens and projects its illu mination down on the target. Seals. There are two types of seals, stamp and cylinder. The former are typically scaraboid, although outer shapes can be encountered. Regardless of a seal's shape, the textual data are found on a stamping surface that is either flat or somewhat rounded. T h e range of materials for seals is con siderable in its variety: from multicolored semiprecious stones (e.g., lapis lazuli, jasper, agate) to single-colored me dia (e.g., carnelian, shale, limestone, clay, ivory, bone) to nearly clear crystalline stones. Proper lighting is a challenge, since each seal usually involves an individual solution. Still, several basic approaches will yield good results. If a stamp seal surface is relatively flat and not highly re flective, the key-and-fill technique (see above) is usually ef fective. A narrow light from a snoot, a coned snoot, or a fiber-optic probe works best as the key; normally, a white card is sufficient as a reflector to bounce back a fill. Care must be taken in establishing the direction of the key light. In cases where the incised strokes of the letters are essentially parallel to tire direction of the key light, they will be signif icantly deemphasized and often will virtually disappear. Hence it is preferable to place the key light in such a position that the beam it projects parallels as few letter strokes as possible. Typically, a diagonal direction works best, al though a number of directions should be experimented with. There are instances where no single angle of light is suffi cient for gaining the optimal data from a seal of this sort. In such a case, two or several shots should be employed, illu minated from differing light directions in order to give the fullest picture of the letter forms achievable. Obviously, a knowledgeable expert who knows what letters should look like at a given time in a given script is absolutely essential for success in this work. If a seal's stamping surface tends to be highly rounded rather than flat, a fill-fill approach (see above) needs to be employed—at least two, and sometimes as many as four, light sources should be positioned to cover the surface. For such work, fiber-optic light sources are more serviceable than conventional lights. If a seal's stamping surface is reflective, it may be almost like a mirror at a particular discrete angle of light. Depend ing on the polish of the surface and the type of material, this angle can vary from 4 5 to 70°. Such a reflection is the ideal light in which to illuminate a seal's surface because every aspect of the carving is displayed, down to the finest detail. Indeed, the image often will seem to glow as if lit from witliin. This reflection cannot be captured in the camera lens if a stamp seal is mounted directly under the camera lens with the stamping surface and the lens plane flat. Rather, the seal should be mounted on a tilt adjusted until the re fracted light is bounced into the lens at precisely the optimal 0
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M a n u s c r i p t s . F i g u r e 5. Hebrew seal on a carnel ian gemstone belonging to Hananyahu. T h e seal w a s lilted in o r d e r t o u s e d i e reflection of t h e light off its polished surface to gain o p t i m a l detail. (Photograph by Bruce and K e n n e t h Zuckcrman, W e s t PHOTOGRAPHY:
Semitic Research; courtesy Flarvard Semitic M u s e u m , Cambridge)
angle. Because of this tilt, there is a potential for focusing problems; hence, all effort must be made to achieve the greatest depth of field by closing the lens opening as much as possible (see figure 5). Especially for a seal composed of clear crystal, this is virtually the only way to get a clear pic ture of the stamping surface. Because of the tilt of the seal, the picture can be slightly distorted; however, the image produced will look flat to the viewer. Nonetheless, for greatest precision one should work with a view camera in which both the lens plane and the film plane can be tilted. Then these planes can also be tilted so that the lens and film plane parallel the tilted stamping sur face of the seal, thereby minimizing all potential distortion
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In so doing, considerable care must be taken to adjust the planes laterally so that they are in the middle of the lens's imaging circle (the maximum viewing circle covered by the lens); otherwise, a phenomenon known as vignetting may occur and part of the image may be cut off. This can be checked in a Polaroid test. The conventional practice in photographing a cylinder seal is to photograph its impression rolled out on clay. While tire impression gives a general sense of the seal's inscription and design, it inevitably the lacks the precision and detail of the real thing. Conventional photographs of cylinder seals show only a portion of tlie seal; and, because of the curva ture of the surface, proper lighting is always very difficult to achieve. Recentiy however, an approach has been developed tiiat allows one to make a picture of the actual sealing surface as a 360 time exposure. T h e technique involves an adap tation of panoramic photographic techniques, which employ specially adapted cameras to photograph a scene in a 360 arc. In panoramic photography, instead of a standard opening behind the lens and in front of the film plane, a small vertical slit allows light onto the film. As an electric motor rotates tire camera at a precise and unvarying speed in a 360 arc, a similar, synchronous motor advances tlie film in the op posite direction at precisely the same speed. Thus, the scene is "wiped" onto die film during a time exposure. For cyl inder seals, this setup is adapted by keeping the camera sta tionary and rotating tlie seal in a 360 arc on a small turn table. A motor is used that is synchronized to the one moving the film in the opposite direction in tlie camera. Il lumination is placed so that it highlights the area falling un der the slit. Once again, the picture is wiped onto the film in a time exposure. Previewing with Polaroid film will not work with this ar rangement, but Polaroid instant slide film can be used for the same purpose. This is a special 35-millimeter film (avail able in both color and black and white) loaded and shot in a 35-millimeter camera in the conventional fashion. Once a roll is fully exposed, it can be processed in a small, easy-tooperate portable processor made by Polaroid that produces images for viewing in about five minutes. Thus, a test time exposure employing instant slide film can be reviewed on site. Any necessary adjustments can be made before doing a final documentation with archival-quality color and blackand-white films. Seal impressions. Seal impressions are typically found on clay jar handles or as bullae. In either case, the inscriptions can be photographed using a standard key-and-fill or a fillfill setup. Because in antiquity seal designs were often made quickly and with little care, the impressions they leave may only be partially clear and frequentiy so slight as to be in visible in ambient light. The difficulty of getting the light to fall at precisely the right angle for gaining optimal infor mation becomes particularly acute with impressions. T h e 0
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problem is exacerbated with jar-handle impressions in which die seal creates a tiny bowl-shaped indentation that can be difficult to light. A fiber-optic light probe is best adapted for illumination, but it is difficult to mount a stationary probe. Instead, a hand-held fiber-optic probe, known as a light brush, often proves to be the easiest and most effective approach. These probes are employed in commercial photography to apply artificial highlights to pictures—for example, to create areas of high reflection on ice cubes. Similarly, this probe can be utilized in a time exposure to "paint" a seal impression with light. In some instances, this is done essentially by holding the probe in one position; frequentiy, however, the best re sults are achieved by moving the probe during a time ex posure of 5-15 seconds, so that its light illuminates areas of the impression from slightly different angles. Experimenting with combinations of movements and angles with Polaroid tests assesses the results. Again, a trained scholarly observer should examine the tests to ensure the best results. "Light brushing" a seal impression in this manner can achieve dra matic results beyond what is possible with any other lighting (see figure 6). Digital Imaging. Computers translate an image (digital imaging) into a discrete number of small elements called pixels (short for "picture elements") and assign a color and intensity to each pixel (see below). Subsequently, manipu lation of tlie digital information can change the appearance of the image by adjusting contrast and brightness, sharp ening, applying false coloring, and "cutting and pasting," to create composite images and other effects. Digital images are also convenient for archival storage and electronic transmission. Once an image has been digitized, it can be copied over and over again with no loss of image quality. Even as digital storage media technology changes, the data from older media can be copied onto the new and preserved for the next generation with no loss of informa tion. This is not the case when copying film negatives, trans parencies, or photographs, where each subsequent copy produces an image somewhat inferior to its parent. In contrast, electronic transmission of data over any of the avail able networks including the Internet will give the recipient a perfect clone of the original digital image. The demands placed on digital-imaging technology when dealing with ancient documents are considerable because of the necessity of preserving minute details. This requires the use of the highest available resolution. This demand can handicap even tlie most state-of-the-art computer system and frusttate the unsophisticated user. Input. T h e first task in digital imaging is to deliver the image so that the computer can read it. This can be achieved in one of two ways: direct-image capture (attaching an electtonic camera directiy to a computer) or scanning a con ventional photographic image (a print, transparency, or negative) with a scanning device driven by a computer.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photography of Manuscripts
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P H O T O G R A P H Y : M a n u s c r i p t s . F i g u r e 6 . Bulla excavated at Megiddo. T h e bulla is i l l u m i n a t e d b y a light b r u s h . ( P h o t o g r a p h by Bruce and K e n n e t h Z u c k e r m a n , W e s t Semitic Research; courtesy Israel Antiquities Audiority)
Direct-image capture, sometimes called filmless photog raphy, has the advantage of nearly instant preview of the result (the Polaroid of the electronic world); it also has the ability to work in discrete wavelengths of light, including those beyond the sensitivity of film in the infrared range. Various bands within the spectrum can be selected using an electronic device called a liquid crystal tunable filter (LCTF); the infrared reflective properties of documents can be imaged by cameras designed for that purpose. Witirin the spectral range of color and infrared Alms, L C T F s or more conventional narrow band-pass filters can be used with con ventional photographic cameras to achieve similar results. T h e disadvantages of direct-image capture are the need usu ally to be connected to a fairly powerful (usually cumber some) computer equipped with a C R T (cathode ray tube) color monitor to control the camera operations, view the results, and save the images. Some stand-alone digital cam eras can produce good reference images, but the limitations of the system's resolution preclude enlarging them. In such systems there simply are not enough pixels (typically fewer than iooo across the longest dimension of the image) to de liver a detailed image. High-end digital cameras that pro duce dramatically more pixels (5,000-6,000 across the image) are not yet available as stand-alone devices, may re quire three exposures to capture a color image (a technically more difficult procedure because registration has to be maintained for all three exposures), use slow exposure times that in turn require the use of constant bright light sources
(a serious drawback from a conservation standpoint for softmedia documents, as noted above), and are priced substan tially beyond the costs of even the finest conventional pho tographic equipment. As a result, for at least the immediate future, conventional photographic methods will be the pre ferred image-capture technique for reproducing ancient documents. The breakdown of an electronic image to the point where it no longer looks photographic but like an assemblage of discrete blocks is called pixelization. T h e unaided human eye will usually not perceive pixelization if there are at least 300 pixels per inch (ppi) in the image being viewed. As a point of comparison, a conventional photographic image contains the equivalent of at least twice this number of pixels and looks considerably better in a side-by-side comparison with a 300-ppi image. In addition, a digital image can break down if there is an insufficient range of gray levels and colors available for display. In order for computer-imaging output devices to produce a black-and-white image of photographic quality, the device must be based on a scan that contains some 256 levels of gray (sometimes referred to as an 8-bit image). Similarly, a full-color image of photographic quality requires a file with approximately sixteen million colors (called a 24-bit color image: eight bits each of red, green, and blue—if using an additive color system—or eight bits each of cyan, magenta, and yellow—if using a subtractive color system). As tire above statistics suggest, a digital image of any sig-
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nificant resolution involves a tremendous amount of data. For example, to scan a standard 4 by 5 inch original negative without significant pixelization, in order to enlarged it to 11 by 14 inches, die digital image would have to encompass 3,300 X 4,200 pixels for a total of 13.86 million pixels. For a black and white image with 256 levels of gray, this repre sents 13.86 megabytes (MB) of data; for a full-color image, it represents a considerable 41.58 MB—all for a modest en largement of less than three times the size of the original. The original 4 by 5 image would need to be scanned into the computer at a pixel density of at least 840 ppi. A 35millimeter original would need to be captured into the com puter at approximately 2,800 ppi. If die minute details of an image at high magnification are needed, even larger files sizes will be necessary. It is here that the intelligent application of imaging technology be comes important. Just as in conventional photography, only those areas of special concern to the scholar should be dig itized at the highest resolutions. (The significance of these numbers will become even more evident in the discussion of film scanners below.) T h e hybrid use of high-magnifi cation photos digitized with a modestly high-resolution film scanner may be the most efficient use of both technologies. Scanners. There are three broad categories of scanners: flat-bed scanners, Charged Coupled Device (CCD) film scanners, and drum scanners. Flat-bed scanners look and appear to operate much like a desktop copying machine. A photo (usually a paper print) is placed face down on a glass plate, a cover is lowered over the photo, and a linear light and C C D scanning array pass under the photo to capture the data. Some units are equipped with transparency adap ters that allow the device to scan negatives and transparen cies. These units are usually limited to 300-600 ppi. Some units make up for this deficiency by adding pixels through software, using a process called interpolation. These extra pixels are not real data, and die images produced should not be confused with images based on true optical data. Film scanners project a focused image on a C C D that may be linear (in which case the C C D is swept across the image plane) or rectangular (in which there is a rectangular array of sensers that directly captures the image). Color filters may be used to achieve tirree successive scans to capture a fullcolor image. The better film scanners have true optical res olution of 1,000-3,000 ppi and can detect more than 256 levels of intensity for each primary color. The ability to rec ord information in more than 256 levels enhances an image's level of detail, especially in its brightest (highlights) and darkest (shadow) areas. Only a few of the high-end film scanners will support large-format ( 4 X 5 in.) originals. These large-format devices are also slow and require per haps as much as 10-15 minutes to complete a high-resolu tion color scan to produce digital files as large as 50 MB. The best digital scans are obtained with drum scanners. These devices require that the film be mounted on a clear cylindrical drum that is spun at high speed while a very fine
point of light is focused on the film. T h e resulting changes in light intensity and color are measured by a photo multi plier tube (PMT). P M T s are inherently better at detecting light then CCDs. As a result, drum scanners achieve higher resolutions and greater density ranges than any of tlie other devices discussed above. D r u m scanners are also the most expensive and slowest of the choices. However, for the high est quality work, where the application demands file sizes of 100 MB and more, drum scanners are die only choice. Eastman Kodak has produced a system of film scanners tiiat create files on C D ROMS (compact disks that are "read only" and cannot be edited) called Photo C D . T h e files on these disks are available in a variety of sizes. T h e highest resolution is available only on the Pro-Photo C D version, which is capable of scanning a 4-X-5-in. negative or trans parency to a file that, when opened with the appropriate software, contains about 70 MB of data. T h e Kodak system, designed for commercial operations, is very fast; as a result, the cost of the scans is reasonable. A Pro-Photo C D can contain approximately twenty-twenty-five reasonably highresolution images. Pro-Photo CD is a good place to start for editing images with large file sizes. Computer enhancement. Once the image of interest is digitized, there are excellent software packages on various computer platforms that can be used to improve and oth erwise manipulate images. The manufacturers of imagingediting programs are constantiy improving their products. When processing large images, work should be limited to selecting areas of interest. Some programs feature a proxy system tiiat enables the user to apply effects to a low-reso lution version of the image and subsequentiy apply identical effects to the high-resolution version while the computer is unattended. Tools that "float" one image or a portion of one image over another are very useful for comparing in dividual letter shapes in documents or in reconstructing, in a scribe's own hand, a partial letter or words and phrases in lacunae. Still, such tools cannot be used with impunity. It is nec essary to establish protocols for moving and restoring textual data so as not to create a "fake." In any publication or pre sentation of digital images, both tlie original and the altered image should be shown; moreover, the manipulations should be documented, explained, and preferably illustrated in detail. It is also possible to undo effects applied to an image. Image manipulations in some programs only allow the last action to be reversed, whereas others allow unlimited un doing. The power of image processing to correct poorly ex posed photographs, sharpen areas in poor focus, build com posites, rebuild fragmented texts, cut out individual letters to build script charts, add interpretations by drawing on or electronically tracing over a photograph, and combine pho tographs made with various filters or at wavelengths beyond tlie visible are just a few of the tools available to a scholar equipped with a computer and some imaging software.
PIGS Many of these approaches to processing and enhancing data have only just begun to be applied by epigraphers and phi lologists. As this work progresses, the toolbox of techniques easily available to the scholar will undoubtedly grow, thereby dramatically enhancing the ability to see what could not hitherto be seen. Image processing is one of the most demanding tasks a computer can perform. T o work efficiently the computer must be equipped with a fast and powerful processor, have large and fast disk-storage capacity to handle the large files involved, have a high-quality monitor and fast video card with adequate video ram (VRAM), and, most important of all, have very large quantities of internal random access memory (RAM). A further prerequisite is a means of per manent storage beyond the computer's internal hard disk. At the moment, high-capacity tapes, such as digital audio tape (DAT) systems and recordable CD-ROMs, are the storage media of choice. Storage can be increased even more by means of a technology called image compression, which can reduce image sizes for storage. Such compression pro grams must be used with caution, however, because some programs are designed to discard "unimportant" image data. Such forms of compression may be acceptable for stor ing images for casual study, but for more rigorous storage, only programs employing "lossless compression" should be used. O u t p u t T o produce hard-copy output from digitally en hanced images (i.e., images in tangible form, equivalent to a photographic print), the choices are as varied as on the input side. They range from relatively inexpensive laser and ink-jet printers to much more expensive film recorders that can convert a digital file back into a photographic image. Presently, the best compromise is device called a dye-sub limation (dye-sub) printer. Dye-sub printers produce nearly true photographic quality output at a reasonable price. Sizes are limited typically to 8 by 10 inches, but some models can produce n by 14 inch output. For even larger dimensions, high-quality ink-jet devices can produce nearly photo-qual ity output up to poster size. This is usually achieved by add ing extra pixels through interpolation; as mentioned above, however, this method does not add real resolution to the picture. Image output devices can print directly onto photographic paper or transparency materials at 300 ppi. T h e output is almost indistinguishable from photographic prints but is now limited to 8 by 10 inches. These are relatively large machines, approximately the size of a freestanding office copier, and are more costly than dye-sub printers, making them practical only in an institutional setting. If hard-copy output is the primary goal, it is important to balance the resolution of input and output. Sufficient data should be available to produce quality output on the printer or film writer. However, there is little point to processing more data than the output device can handle as this need lessly slows down the processing time without tangible ben
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efit. As already mentioned, in order to have a hard-copy image of photographic quality, it must have in the range of 300 ppi. Higher resolutions are only desirable if images are to be examined under magnification. Permanence is a problem with dye-sub and ink-jet output: both are subject to fading and physical damage from han dling unless special precautions are taken. Some dye-sub printers now apply a protective coating on hard-copy images to protect them from scratching, fingerprints, and rapid ul traviolet fading. Some ink-jet services also offer special faderesistant dyes and archival paper to create a more permanent image. Ironically, the best means of obtaining hard-copy output, especially for long-term storage, is to record an image back onto a piece of film. T h e best film recorders can produce output indistinguishable from a camera-made orig inal. Needless to say, achieving an optimal result means be ginning with a high-resolution drum scan and image pro cessing the resulting large file. For purposes of publication, it may not be necessary to produce hard copy or film output at all. Publishers may pre fer to receive the digital image file for direct input into their page-makeup system. If the images are to be included in a C D - R O M publication or as part of a multimedia publica tion, a digital file is ideal. In fact, digital editions of texts are certainly coming in the near future, probably with C D R O M as the mode of dissemination. Such editions are the ideal tool for scholars, because they offer far superior visual data than could ever be obtained in the photographic repro ductions in a conventional book. Moreover, the data invite interaction because they are ready for downloading into computer-imaging and enhancement programs. Photographic/Digital R e c o m m e n d a t i o n s . In the final analysis the large-format camera is still the most suitable tool for the recording of textual data on ancient documents. Dig ital imaging can then be performed on the high-resolution films. Indeed, today digital scanning, retrieving, and pro cessing of an original film image is now the superior means of getting the most usable data from an ancient inscription and is certainly superior to the chemical processing of a film image in the darkroom. Film should be scanned at high res olution and high bit depth and stored to archival media such as C D - R O M . Processed images should be likewise digitally archived. For hard-copy output dye-sub printers are the most practical at this time; however, prints on dye-sub me dia should not be considered archival. T h e best long-term approach for making archival hard copies of digital images is to write the processed images back to film with a highresolution film recorder. [See also Codex; Libraries and Archives; and Scrolls.] BRUCE Z U C K E R M A N and
K E N N E T H ZUCKERMAN
P I G S . T h e pig, Sus scrofa, was domesticated in the Near East from two wild subspecies, S. s. attila—a habitant of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq—and 5. s, libycus—common to the
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eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. The earliest evidence for domestic pig comes from Hallan Cemi in southeastern Tur key. Based on morphological changes and mortality pat terns, domestication is dated by radiocarbon analysis to c. 8500 to 8000 BCE. This preliminary new evidence supersedes the well-known morphological evidence for domestic pig (shortening of the skull and teeth) found at the Neolithic site of Jarmo in northern Iraq, dated to c. 6500 to 6000 B C E . A few sites, particularly in Anatolia, show extensive exploita tion of the animal in later phases of the Neolithic. In the Levant, one molar documents pig domestication at Tell Judeideh, a site on the Plain of Antioch, shortly after 6000 B C E . Husbanded pigs spread to the southern Levant by 50004000 BCE, at such sites as Tell Turmus in Israel. Pigs were a mainstay of the Levantine diet in the Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, preceding the advent of complex so ciety. Domestic pigs were present in the Nile valley by the Gerzean period (c. 3500-3000 B C E ) . A number of principles underlie the distribution of pigs. Environmental factors are primary because pigs require habitats receiving more than 300 mm of rain per year or the presence of marshlands. In all periods, increased moisture is predictive of swine ex ploitation. Pigs also prefer a forested habitat; some of the overall decline in swine husbandry seen over the sweep of Near Eastern history is the result of a steady deforestation of much of the environment. With the emergence of complex society in tire Early Bronze Age, factors beyond environment influenced the use of pigs. Based on the faunal record in the Levant, pigs were a rural subsistence strategy, becoming particularly impor tant in periods and places of decreased political centraliza tion. In general, pigs are substantially less abundant in the whole of the Near East after the onset of the Middle Bronze Age. An exception is the first wave of Philistine settlement, a phenomenon more likely an example of the worldwide pattern in which immigrants in the first phase of settlement turn to pig husbandry than a reflection of ideology. Because the animal reproduces more rapidly than other domestic stock, it provides a quick and abundant source of protein. Certainly, in later phases of Philistine settlement, pig hus bandry declines abruptly. Throughout the rest of the Iron Age in the Levant, pork is only a marginal addition to the larder. Swine were uncommon in other parts of the ancient Near East after the onset of complex society, again with a few exceptions. Pigs were a dietary mainstay at the Early Bronze Age city of Leilan in Syria. Other large and politically im portant sites in the same region, Lidar Iioyiik and Korucutepe in modern Turkey, for example, show continued ex ploitation of the pig into the Late Bronze Age. Hittite texts indicate that the animal was used in ritual contexts, though perhaps not those of the official cult. In southern Mesopo tamia—though the faunal record is very sparse—a few large sites, such as Isin, even as late as Neo-Babylonian times,
have significant amounts of pig remains. Cuneiform texts indicate that the animal, which lived as a loosely controlled urban scavenger, was held in low esteem. In Egypt, pigs are very infrequently mentioned in texts or depicted in art. Osteological evidence shows that their exploitation was related to the intensity of political control of the economy. Addi tionally, pig consumption in Egypt was related to social class. The comments of Herodotus about the status of swine herds are reflected in much earlier remains from Amarna, where pork was the food of the working class. T h e dietary laws of the Hebrew Bible, a product of the Priestly source (dated variously from tire eighth century B C E to the Persian period in the sixth century B C E ) were com posed when and where swine husbandry was a nearly invis ible pursuit, at least on the basis of the archaeological record. T h e inclusion of the animal in the list of prohibited species would therefore seem to be the incorporation of a regionwide bias into the biblical tradition rather than a theological innovation directed toward pigs. [See also Animal Husbandry.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Firmage, Edwin. " T h e Biblical Dietary Laws a n d the C o n c e p t of H o liness." I n Studies in the Pentateuch, edited b y J. A. E m e r t o n , p p . 1 7 7 2 0 8 . Supplements to Vetus T e s t a m e n t u m , vol. 4 1 . L e i d e n , 1 9 9 0 . Recent survey of the dieological implications of the dietary laws in the Hebrew Bible, with some attention t o the archaeological evi dence. Flannery, K e n t V. "Early Pig Domestication in the Fertile Crescent: A Retrospective L o o k . " In The Hilly Flanks and Beyond: Essays on the Prehistoiy of Southwestern Asia, edited by T . Cuyler Y o u n g , Jr., et al„ pp. 1 6 3 - 1 8 8 . Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, n o . 3 6 . C h i cago, 1 9 8 3 . T h o r o u g h review of die Neolithic evidence for d o m e s tication of the pig. Hesse, Brian. "Pig Lovers a n d Pig Haters: Patterns of Palestinian Pork Production." Journal of Ethnobiology 1 0 . 2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 1 9 5 - 2 2 5 . Survey of pig u s e from the Neolithic to die Iron Age a n d t h e relationship of the archaeological evidence for swine to the anthropological a n d his torical explanation of its use and avoidance. Redding, R. W . " T h e Role of the Pig in d i e Subsistence System of Ancient Egypt: A Parable on the Potential of Faunal D a t a . " In An imal Use and Culture Change, edited by P a m J. Crabtree a n d Kathleen Ryan, p p . 2 0 - 3 0 . Philadelphia, 1 9 9 1 . Survey of pig u s e in Egypt a n d its relationship to political centralization. "Wilford, J o h n N o b l e . "First Settlers Domesticated Pigs before C r o p s . " The New York Times, 3 1 M a y 1 9 9 4 , p p . B 6 a n d B 9 . BRIAN HESSE
PIT GRAVES. Simple, or pit, graves consist of a hole cut into sand, rock, or tell debris, to accommodate a body or a collection of bones with mortuary provisions, T h e cist grave is a more elaborate stone-lined version of a pit grave. Southern Levantine pit graves are either intramural (within settlements), cut into the tell debris (Natufian, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Middle Bronze Ages), or in extramural cem eteries (Late Bronze, Iron Ages). T h e deceased were laid
POIDEBARD, R. P. ANTOINE either in a flexed position on their side (Natufian-Middle Bronze Ages) or extended on tiieir back (Late Bronze-Iron Ages). In the Natufian period (10,500-8,500 B C E ) , intramural graves with one or more individuals were grouped and marked at the surface. At Nahal Oren, bodies were interred in shallow pits in a designated area around a large stonebuilt hearth. T h e single, paired, or multiple bodies, adorned with ornaments, usually lay in a flexed position with the head facing north. Limestone mortars resembling stone pipes placed near several burials have been interpreted as marking tlie grave location and establishing a conduit between the worlds of the living and the dead (Stern, 1993, vol. 3, p. 1168). At the northern Jordan Valley site of 'Enan, tomb 9 apparentiy housed a family (six skulls, plus three adults, one adolescent, and four children). In later burials, many bones were covered with red ocher, and graves were marked with large, flat standing (?) stones, similar to the Nahal Oren mortars (Stern, 1983, vol. 2, p. 392). Most Neolithic burials date from the Pre-Pottery Neo lithic (PPN) period (8500-6000 B C E ) . Intramural, primary burial in a contracted position continued from the preceeding period. A P P N innovation was to remove adult skulls, without jaws, to keep in groups in the house, while the bod ies were buried under the house floor or in an open space (Jericho, Nahal Oren). In several cases, skulls were plastered and shells inlaid for eyes, to give a lifelike appearance ('Ain Ghazal, Jericho). T h e arid conditions in Jericho have pre served bone needles and points (perhaps used to fasten the clothing of the dead or tiieir wrappings) and traces of mat ting. Beginning in the Chalcolithic period (4300-3300 B C E ) , while the majority of adults were buried in extramural cave and shaft-tomb cemeteries, infants, children, and adults un der special circumstances were still being interred beneath house floors. At Beersheba, infants and children lay in the fetal position on their right side; some of die burials were provided witii fine pottery vessels. Pit burial virtually ceased in tlie region during the Early Bronze Age, but was reintroduced from the north in M B II (2000-1550 B C E ) . Beginning in M B IIA, intramural pit burial was practiced at sites from Ugarit south to Tell el-'Ajjul (Dan, Jericho, Lachish, Megiddo, Tell el-Far'ah [South]). One or two mature individuals, positioned on tiieir side with a small selection of pottery vessels and jewelry, were buried in a pit cut into the earth beneath their home or in tlie court yard. During diis same period, children were interred in jars under the house floor. T h e northern-inspired MB inttamural pit graves were succeeded by Egyptian-inspired extramural or isolated pitgrave cemeteries in the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 B C E ) . Extramural pit-grave cemeteries reached their height of dis tribution through the Egyptian-administered or influenced lowlands in LB II (1300-1200 B C E ; e.g., at Tell Abu Hawam,
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Tell el-Far'ah [South], Tell es-Sa idiyeh, Tel Zeror). One person, and rarely two or three, were provisioned witii bowls for food, jugs with dipper juglets for liquids, and luxury items such as imported pottery, jewelry, and metal objects. The pattern of burial practices changed little from die Late Bronze Age through all the social and political up heavals of the Iron Age (1200-586 B C E ) . Pit and cist graves remained die predominant lowland burial type throughout tlie Iron Age (Achziv, Tell el-'Ajjul, Ashdod, Megiddo, Tell el-Far'ah [South]). One or more individuals, of any age or either sex, were laid out on their back, with hands out stretched along their sides or crossed on the chest or pelvis. Continuing the LB practice, bowls and jars were character istically provided. T h e lowland distribution of pit graves for individuals diverged markedly from the highland practice of multiple burial in caves. It may be that the lowland cultural group collectively referred to in die Bible as Canaanites practiced pit burial as opposed to the highland Israelites and Amorites. [See also tioned
Cave Tombs. In addition,
are the subject of independent
most of the sites
men
entries]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael, a n d E p h r a i m Stern, eds. Encyclopedia of Archae ological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 975 978. S u m m a r y of excavations including results of all earlier expeditions to tlie sites. B e n - T o r , A m n o n , ed. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. Translated by R. Greenberg. N e w Haven, 1992. Essays with differing emphases on the Neolithic through the Iron II—III. Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old T e s t a m e n t , Supplement 123. Sheffield, 1992. S u m m a r y a n d comprehensive catalog of the Iron Age burials. Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B. CE. N e w York, 1990. Comprehensive, detailed, well-illustrated survey of biblical archaeology, limited only by the traditionalist biblical inter pretation. Stern, Ephraim, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1993. Supple ments Avi-Yonah a n d Stern (above), with results of more recent excavations and revised interpretations. I
-I
ELIZABETH B L O C H - S M I T H
POIDEBARD, R. P . ANTOLNE (1878-1955)3 of ficer, explorer, and missionary of the Jesuit order, which he joined in 1897. Bom in Lyon, Poidebard was sent to study at Tokat (Turkey), where he learned Turkish and Arme nian. He was ordained as a priest in 1910 and sent as a missionary to Armenia from 1911 to 1914. During World War I, he enlisted as a military chaplain with die rank of officer-interpreter in die French military mission in the Cau casus. After having shown his mastery among the Armeni ans in Erevan, he was sent to Georgia, which was, at that time, independent and at war witii Russia, From 1924 on ward, he was posted in Beirut.
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As a reserve officer, Poidebard was transfered to the air force. During his flights on the edge of the Syrian desert, he noticed that, in a certain light, it was possible to distinguish ruins that though just barely covered, were imperceptible from the ground. Excavations later allowed him to confirm the accuracy of his observations. He involved himself in pi oneering research in the border areas between inner Syria and the steppe. T h e results are available in two majors works as yet unequaled: La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie and, in collaboration with Rene Mouterde, Le limes de Chalcis. Poidebard's research methodology was then innovative: observation in flight (at an altitude that might vary but that would be near 300 m for the best light conditions) and above all later verification of the find, either upon landing or through subsequent exploratory expeditions. T h e result is a work of the first order, with one volume of text and one of plates. Poidebard demonstrated the existence, to the east of Syria, at the edge of the steppe, of a complex network of military routes and small forts representing the successive extensions of the empire from Trajan's time to Justinian's; he described the network's organization, distinguish ing above all the presence of an inner and outer boundary line. In the Limes of Chalcis, Mouterde and Poidebard began with Malalas's allusion to to Limiton Chalkidos. They then searched the land for vestiges of routes and forts that would permit them to verify the existence of the lines and to un derstand the organization of this defensive system installed around the ancient village of Chalcis, modern Qinnishrin. [See Qinnishrin.] There are many reasons to think that the Limiton Chalkidos was not in reality a "border" in the stra tegic sense of the term, but that it merely designated the extent of the city. T h e authors did, however, locate, map, and date a number of very important sites, unknown before their efforts, that proved that in the Byzantine period there was a considerable extension east of the territory occupied by garrisons. While the work does not prove the validity of its initial hypothesis, it reveals the dynamism of the history of the campaigns in northern Syria in the Roman and Byz antine periods. Poidebard was again a pioneer when he ap plied his method to locate the vanished port of Tyre and study the ancient arrangement of the port of Sidon, the sub ject of two other works. [See Tyre; Sidon.] According to those who knew him, Poidebard was courageous, warm, and cordial. With the perspective of hindsight, he belongs to a small group of men, more imaginative adventurers than re searchers in the academic sense of the word. T h e merit of their enterprise, rather than the possible weakness of their scientific work, should be emphasized, At the time they un dertook their research, conditions of instability prevailed. They did things on a vast scale, turning to new methods that have since proven their usefulness. Poidebard died in Beirut, his last years saddened by attacks of amnesia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Poidebard, Antoine. La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie. Paris, 1 9 3 4 . Poidebard, Antoine, and R e n e M o u t e r d e . Ix limes de Chalcis. Paris, 1945GEORGES T A T E
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
POOLS. A pool is an unroofed, built installation, de signed to store runoff or spring water, whose length and width are always greater than its depth. A pool requires very thick walls built of large stones (a minimum of 1 m and a maximum of 14 m as the Israin pool in Jerusalem), usually with smaller stones filling in the gaps. An impermeable ma terial was inserted between the stones for reinforcement and to ensure against seepage. A thick layer of plaster applied to the walls after their construction prevented percolation of the water; plaster was also applied to a pool's floor, which often was smooth, bare rock. T h e corners of the pool were usually curved or formed by two obtuse angles to prevent cracks from developing at weak spots in its perimeter. Many pools were built in low-lying areas, such as river beds, whose topography facilitated construction, as well as the drainage of runoff. A dam was generally first built across the riverbed. T h e bedrock was then plastered and used as the floor of the pool, longitudinal walls were built along the slopes of tire ravine (incorporating the naturally exposed rock), and an upper cross-wall was constructed. This method was used to build the Sultan's Pool and Solomon's Pools in Jerusalem, as well as many others. [See Jerusalem.] A pool's large surface area results in a great deal of evapo ration—a major drawback because it is virtually impossible to roof such a large area. Pools were used to store and to regulate the supply of drinking water, as well as water for bathing, swimming, and irrigating gardens and crops. T h e water entered the pool at its most elevated point, flowed through a filtering basin where heavier materials (dettitus, wood, and soil) mixed in the water stream could settle. Pools used for regulating water flow had openings at the bottom, through which the water continued to flow toward its destination. Pools were usually rectangular or trapezoidal; only rarely were they circular. The most ancient pool so far discovered is at Ai (Khirbet et-Tell) and dated to the Early Bronze Age. [See Ai.] It forms part of a system for draining runoff. T h e capacity of this pool is 1,800 cu m and its maximum dimensions are 29 X 25 m; it is 2.5 deep. Red clay was used for caulking. Other pools from the same period have been found at Arad in Israel's Negev and at Jawa in Jordan's Black Desert. T h e storage volume for the pool at Arad has been estimated to be 2,000 cu m; at Jawa seven pools were discovered behind dams in the wadi below the city, with a total capacity of
PRIENE about 22,000 cu m of water. These were intended primarily to supply drinking water for the city's inhabitants. [See Arad, article on Iron Age Period; Jawa.] The Hebrew Bible mentions several pools: the Old Pool, the Upper Pool, the Lower Pool, the King's Pool, the Arti ficial Pool, and the Siloam Pool in Jerusalem; as well as pools in Hebron, Gibeon, Samaria, and Hesban. Only few of these have been identified. [See Hebron; Gibeon; Samaria; Hesban.] T h e largest pools, Solomon's Pools and one of the pools at Jericho, date to the Second Temple period. Solomon's Pools form part of one of the most impressive and largest water installations in the land of Israel. As part of the water supply system for Jerusalem they served a dual purpose: to regulate the water supply and to store water (reservoirs). The total capacity of the pools is 180,000 cu m; the maxi mum dimensions of the largest pool are 177 X 83 m; it is 12 m deep. At Jericho, the Musa Pool is the largest reservoir pool (220 X 160 m and 21.5 m deep). It too dates to the Second Temple period. Several swimming pools have been discovered from this period as well, at Jericho (92 X 40 m) and Herodium (70 X 46 m and 3.5 m deep). [See Jericho; Herodium.] During the Second Temple period there were twelve pools in Jerusalem that had originally been quarries and that were subsequently used secondarily for defense purposes. During the Roman and Byzantine periods in many loca tions in the Galilee, on Mt. Carmel, and in Samaria, pools were the center of village life. [See Samaria.] Their water was used for livestock, laundry, drinking, and badiing. T w o large pools at the center of the site of Shivtah in the Negev served as one of the major water sources for that town. A pool on the outskirts of Sepphoris was probably used for swimming. [See Sepphoris.] Some of the Byzantine mon asteries in Israel also had water installations that included pools, such as Deir KaPah in Samaria, whose three pools have crosses engraved on their walls. From the beginning of the Early Arab period and onward, the development of waterworks in Israel was neglected; only a few pools have been discovered from this period, such as the decorative pools at Hisham's palace and the irrigation pool at 'Ein-'Evrona. During the Crusader period a pool was constructed near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem known as Lac de Leger. No pools are known to have been built in later periods, but Solomon's Pools continued to be used until tire middle of the twentieth century. [See also
Aqueducts; Hydraulics; Hydrology; Irrigation;
Reservoirs.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Callaway, Joseph A. " A i . " In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, p p . 3 6 - 5 2 . Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1 9 7 6 . Heker, M . " W a t e r . . . in Jerusalem in t h e Ancient P e r i o d " (in H e b r e w ) .
351
In Sepher Yerushalaim, edited by Michael Avi-Yonah, p p . 1 9 1 - 2 1 8 . Jerusalem and T e l Aviv, 1 9 5 6 . H e l m s , S. W . Jawa: Last City of the Black Desert. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 1 . TSVIKA T S U K
Translated from Hebrew by Dana Goldberg
POPULATION. POTTERY.
See
See
Demography.
Ceramics.
PRESERVATION. See Restoration and Conservation.
PRIENE, ancient Ionian city (37°38' N, 27°i7' E) situ ated on the southern slopes of Mt. Mycale, just north of the Meander River, near the Aegean coast of Turkey, across from the island of Samos. Priene now lies about 15 km (9.3 mi.) inland, but it was originally much closer to tire sea; silt carried downstream by the Meander River continues to push the coastline ever westward. The identification of Priene is secured by numerous in scriptions found on the site. Archaeological investigation be gan with the expeditions of the British Society of Dilettanti to Ionia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Exten sive excavations were carried out by the Berlin Museum from 1895 to 1899 (Wiegand and Schrader, 1904). A Ger man team resumed investigation of the site in 1977. The history of Priene may be traced back to at least 700 B C E , but the current site was apparently not settled until the mid-fourth century; the original location of the city remains unknown. T h e area of new Priene falls into two parts: to the south, a lower city (the main area of occupation), built on gently sloping ground; to the north, an acropolis on a high hill, separated from the lower city by steep cliffs. Both acropolis and lower city are surrounded by fortifi cations, enclosing a total area of about 40 ha (99 acres). T h e lower city was laid out on a grid pattern, oriented northsouth and covering an area of about 15 ha (37 acres). T h e grid is based on a block size of approximately 47.2 m X 35.4 m (160 X 120 Ionic feet). In tire center of the city, a nearly square area of three blocks (two full blocks plus two half blocks) was reserved for the agora (marketplace). Northwest of the agora, an area of the same size was set aside for the sanctuary of Athena. T h e construction of the fortifications, the layout of tire city grid, and tire basic town-planning all seem to have been parts of the original urban design. The Ionic temple of Athena rests on a high terrace that dominates the lower city of Priene. The temple was designed by Pytheos, a celebrated architect, and dedicated by Alex ander the Great, probably in 334; construction apparently was not finished until the Augustan period (27 B C E - 1 4 C E ) ,
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however, when the temple received a supplementary dedi cation to the emperor. The agora and associated structures were also built up over several hundred years; the agora reached its final form, in which it was surrounded on all sides by stoas (portico-like structures), in the second half of the second century. T o the east lies a small sanctuary, dedicated either to Zeus or to Asklepios. North of the agora are the
Raeder, Joachim. Priene: Funde aus einergriechischen Stadt. Berlin, 1984. Schede, Martin. Die Ruinen von Priene. 2d ed. Berlin, 1964. Very useful short introduction to the site. Wiegand, T h e o d o r , a n d H a n s Schrader. Priene. Berlin, 1904. T h e basic publication of the G e r m a n excavations of 1895-1898.
bouleuterion
PROTO-CANAANITE. In the latest thorough treat
(council house) and prytaneion
(administrative
headquarters); the former building is unusually well pre served and had an estimated seating capacity of 640 persons. Other public buildings and lesser sanctuaries are scattered throughout the city. Of these the most important are the theater and the lower gymnasium and accompanying sta dium. The theater is built into the hillside on the northern edge of the city grid. The seating area may be as early as the founding of the city in the mid-fourth century; the stage building is somewhat later, but it is still one of the earliest and best-preserved buildings of this type known. The lower gymnasium lies just inside the fortifications on tire southern edge of town. It has been dated to the mid-second century, and consists of a colonnaded exercise ground with a row of rooms on the north side, including a large classroom, whose walls are inscribed with the names of hundreds of school boys. T h e stadium lies east of the gymnasium and is the only major building at Priene oriented according to the nat ural hillslope, rather than the city grid. Priene is unusual in the preservation and extensive exca vation of its residential districts, in which approximately sev enty houses have been revealed. These houses, four to a block on average, vary both in size and plan; the state in which they survive is that of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods (second century BCE-fourth century C E ) , however, and it is possible that they were originally more uniform. Features of these houses often singled out as typical are a square room (oikos) on the north side of the house, entered by way of a simple porch (prostas), which opens in turn on an interior court. There is little new building of the Roman era at Priene, probably because the ever-advancing coastline caused the economic fortunes of the city to decline. Several churches were built in late antiquity, and die city remained the seat of a Christian bishop until the Seljuk conquests of the thir teenth century CE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Carter, Joseph C . The Sculpture of the Sanctuary of Athena Polias al Priene. L o n d o n , 1983. Gerkan, Armin von. Das Theater von Priene. M u n i c h , 1921, Hiller von Gaertringen, Friedrich. Inschriften von Priene. Berlin, 1906. H o e p m e r , Wolfram, a n d Ernst-Ludwig Schwander. Haus und Stadt im klassischen Griechenland. 2d ed. M u n i c h , 1994. Controversial study (see p p . 188-225). F o r criticisms of the first edition's treatment of Priene, see the article by Koenigs below. Koenigs, Wolf. " P l a n u n g u n d Ausbau der Agora von Priene." IstanbulerMitteilungen 43 (1993): 381-397.
CHRISTOPHER RATTE
ment of Proto-Canaanite inscriptions (Sass, 1988), twentytwo inscriptions in a quasi-pictographic script from south ern Canaan are accepted as representing Proto-Canaanite. They show the evolution, although with many gaps, of the script from the early seventeenth to the twelfth centuries B C E , by which time a script very similar to that of tire earliest Phoenician inscriptions had clearly evolved. [See Phoeni cian-Punic] Depending on the date ascribed to the ProtoSinaitic inscriptions, written in a similar script, the inscrip tions from Canaan either provide the earliest examples of alphabetic writing or come soon after the Sinai inscriptions. (An earlier chronology for the Sinai inscriptions is deemed the more likely. [See Proto-Sinaitic.]) The state of preservation of the Proto-Canaanite inscrip tions is generally even poorer than that of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. T h e identification of their script as West Semitic alphabetic rests on its formal similarity with the ear lier Proto-Sinaitic script, on the actual decipherment of a minority of the texts, and on the formal evolution toward the script known as Phoenician. Whereas the inscriptions from Sinai are in stone and are relatively long and well pre served, the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions are usually very brief and for the most part are written on pottery, either whole pieces or sherds (ostraca), and have suffered through the millennia. [See Ostracon.] For these reasons, there is very little textual material that can be identified with certainty as Proto-Canaanite. The clearest example of a meaningful Canaanite text is the Lachish Ewer inscription, discovered in the 1933-1934 excavations at Tell ed-Duweir/Lachish and dated to the thir teenth century B C E (Tufnell et al., 1940, frontispiece, pp. 4 9 54, pis. LI A: 287, LX: 3; Sass, 1988, pp. 60-61, figs. 1 5 6 160). [See Lachish.] T h e script is still reasonably close to its pictographic origins and reads {mtn . sy [—]ty 'it [. . .]}. The first word has been interpreted as a common noun meaning "gift" or as the proper name Mattan. Frank M . Cross (1954, pp. 20-21) has plausibly reconstructed the first lacuna as containing the preposition /, "for," which may even be partially visible, and the first two letters of the title rbt, "lady." T h e word 'It is the standard West Semitic word for "goddess" and could either be a title or function as a divine name. Thus, this text can be interpreted as meaning "a gift of tribute [for the La]dy, the goddess of [. . . ] , " or perhaps "(From) Mattan: a tribute [a La]dy 'Hat [. . . ] . " In any case, the preserved text fits plausibly with the object
PROTO-CANAANITE itself, a large decorated urn found in a temple, inspiring con fidence diat, had die object been found intact, it would have been possible to decipher die entire inscription. At the other extreme of comprehensibility are four lines of the five-line inscription on an ostracon from Izbet Sartah that has been dated to about 1200 B C E (Kochavi, 1977; D e m sky, 1977; Cross, 1980, pp. 8-15; Puech, 1983, pp. 563-567; Sass, 1988, pp. 65-69, table 6, figs. 1 7 5 - 1 7 7 ) . [See 'Izbet Sartah.] One line (line 1 or 5, depending on whether the text is read from top to bottom or from bottom to top) is cer tainly an abecedary, the earliest attested from southern Ca naan. [See Alphabet.] This abecedary clearly represents the short twenty-two letter alphabet, but the other four lines have so far defied interpretation. It appears likely, therefore, that the West Semitic alphabet was in this instance used to write a text in another language, as yet unidentified. Al though it is illegitimate to use this text to call into doubt the West Semitic and alphabetic character of all the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions (Garbini, 1978), this example does show tiiat no given inscription can be considered West Se mitic with certainty until it is satisfactorily deciphered (Gar bini and Durand, 1994, p. 39). Forming somewhat of a link between the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions and those in Phoenician is a series of inscrip tions on arrowheads, of which the number of known ex amples is now approaching thirty (Bordreuil, 1992, p. 212, n. 34; Cross, 1992; Cross, 1995), that is dated to about 1 1 0 0 900 B C E . Some were found in excavations at Bethlehem and in Lebanon, but they have appeared for the most part on the antiquities market. [See Bethlehem.] T h e standard in scription consists of only a personal name, usually preceded by the word hs, "arrow"; sometimes a title is indicated. One, for example, reads {hs zkrbl mlk ' m r } , "arrow of Zakarba'al, ldng of Amurru" (Starcky, 1982). T h e function of the inscribed arrowheads is uncertain (Sass, 1988, pp. 72-75; Cross, 1992, p . 25*), and the fact that they have been dis covered in two rather widely separated locations constitutes an enigma. It is plausible to assume tiiat the Proto-Canaanite inscrip tions represent the use of the West Semitic alphabet to write tlie local Canaanite dialects as early as the end of the Middle Bronze period (mid-second millennium B C E ) . T h e earliest inscriptions in a similar script presentiy known are from northern Canaan and Syria—the arrowheads and the very rare and brief "Phoenician" inscriptions dating to before 1000 B C E (primarily from Byblos). [See Byblos.] T h e exis tence of die Ugaritic alphabetic writing system, which seems to reflect an existing linear alphabetic script, makes it rea sonable, however, to posit that a system similar to tiiat used for Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite was also in use in the nortii at the latest by the middle of the second millen nium B C E . [See also Writing and Writing Systems;]
353
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bordreuil, Pierre. "Fleches pheniciennes inscrites: 1981-19911." Revue Biblique 99 (1992): 205-213. Overview of recently discovered in scribed arrowheads. Colles, Brian E. "Recent Discoveries Illuminating the Origin of the Alphabet." Abr-Nahmin 26 (1988): 30-67. Rather sanguine attempt at decipherment of the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions. Cross, Frank M o o r e . " T h e Evolution of tlie Proto-Canaanite Alpha bet." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 134 (1954): 15-24. Proto-Canaanite inscriptions in the context of alpha betic origins. Cross, Frank M o o r e . " N e w l y F o u n d Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 238 (1980): 1-20. Reappraisal of alphabetic origins and developments. Cross, Frank M o o r e . " A n Inscribed Arrowhead of the Eleventh C e n tury BCE in t h e Bible L a n d s M u s e u m in Jerusalem." Eretz-Israel 23 (1992): 21-26. Edition of a n e w arrowhead inscription. Cross, Frank M o o r e . " A N o t e on a Recently Published Arrowhead." Israel Exploration Journal 45 (1995): 188-189. Rereading of a recently published arrowhead inscription. Demsky, Aaron. " A Proto-Canaanite Abecedary Dating from the P e riod of the Judges and Its Implications for the History of the Alpha bet." Tell Aviv 4 (1977): 14-27. Attemps to place the 'Izbet Sartah ostracon in the history of t h e alphabet a n d considers it to be an exercise by an Israelite scribe. Garbini, Giovanni. " L e iscrizioni 'protocananaiche' del XII e XI secolo a.C." Annali del Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 34 (1974): 584-590. Considers the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions to be undeciphered a n d to have been dated too early by most scholars, arguing that they d o not predate t h e earliest Phoenician inscriptions. Garbini, Giovanni. "SuU'alfabetario di 'Izbet Sartah." Oriens Antiquus 17 (1978): 287-295. Uses tlie Tzbet Sartah ostracon to discredit the West Semitic character of tlie Proto-Canaanite inscriptions. Garbini, Giovanni, and Olivier D u r a n d . Introduzione alle lingue semiliche. Brescia, 1994. Considers t h e Proto-Canaanite inscriptions in tlie context of describing tlie Semitic languages, emphasizing difficulties of decipherment and linguistic identification. Kochavi, M o s h e . " A n Ostracon of the Period of the Judges from 'Izbet Sartah." Tel Aviv 4 (1977): 1-13. Editio princeps of the 'Izbet Sartah text, with discussion of the archaeological context. N a v e h , Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography. 2d ed. Jerusalem, 1987. Suggests that some of t h e Proto-Canaanite texts antedate tlie Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. Puech, Emile. "Quelques r e m a r q u e s sur Falphabet au deuxieme millenaire." In Atti del I congresso internazionale di studi fenici e punici, Roma, 5-/0 novembre 1979, vol. 2, edited b y Piero Bartoloni et a l , p p . 564-581. R o m e , 1983. S o m e of the early texts from Canaan seen in the context of the history of tlie alphabet, with a new hand copy of tlie 'Izbet Sartah inscription. Puech, Emile. "Origine de l'alphabet: D o c u m e n t s en alphabet lineaire et cuneiforme du He millenaire." Revue Biblique 93 (1986): 161-213. Early texts from Canaan seen in the context of other second millen n i u m groups of texts. Sass, Benjamin. The Genesis of the Alphabet and Its Development in the Second Millenium [sic] B. C. Agypten u n d Altes Testament, 13. Wies baden, 1988. Latest thorough treatment of t h e Proto-Canaanite in scriptions, which exhibits a very careful epigraphic, philological, and historical metiiod. Highly r e c o m m e n d e d . Sass, Benjamin. Studia Alphabetica: On the Origin and Early History of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic, and Greek Alphabets. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 102. Freiburg, 1991. Discusses the place of the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions in the history of tlie alphabet.
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Shea, William H. " T h e I z b e t Sartah Ostracon." Andrews University Seminary Studies 2 8 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 5 9 - 8 6 . Unconvincing attempt to deci pher the 'Izbet Sartah text. Starcky, Jean. " L a fleche de Zakarbaal roi d ' A m u r r u . " In Archeologie au Ij>vant: Recueild la memoire de Roger Saidah, p p . 1 7 9 - 1 8 6 . Lyon, 1 9 8 2 . Editio princeps of one of the more interesting and important of the arrowhead inscriptions. Tufnell, Olga, etal. Lachish II: The Fosse Temple. L o n d o n , 1 9 4 0 . Official publication of die Lachish Ewer, with an epigraphic and philological discussion by T h e o d o r H . Gaster. D E N N I S PARDEE
PROTO-SLNAITIC. During excavations in 19041905 led by W. M. Flinders Petrie at the ancient Egyptian turquoise-mining site in west-central Sinai known as Serabit el-Khadem, ten inscriptions were discovered that were writ ten in a pictographic script that was not Egyptian. [See Sinai.] All were engraved in the local sandstone. Petrie (1906, pp. 129-132) reported immediately on these inscrip tions, and the texts were published in facsimile in 1917 (Gar diner and Peet, 1917, nos. 345-355; see Gardiner, 1917, pis. III-V). Working from these inscriptions and an eleventh known from a squeeze taken a few years earlier (Weill, 1904, p. 154, no. 44), Alan Gardiner (1916) deciphered the crucial word b lt, "lady," identified the script as West Semitic al phabetic, and proposed an Egyptian origin for the alphabet. [See Alphabet.] Since those first steps, another twenty cer tain Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions have been discovered and nearly as many dubious proposals have been made (Sass, 1988, pp. 8-50, table I). As Gardiner (1916, pp. 6-14) observed in his pioneering study, the Proto-Sinaitic letter forms appear to reflect the pictographic form of West Semitic letters according to the so-called acrophonic principle: the sign represents the object corresponding to the name of the letter, while the first letter of the name corresponds to the consonantal phoneme in question. For example, a bovine head represents /'/, and the West Semitic word for bovine is 'alp-', a human eye repre sents /'/, and the word for eye is 'ayn-; and a human head represents /r/, and the West Semitic word for head is ra's-, or ri's-. That the forms of the Proto-Sinaitic signs are to be explained by the acrophonic principle has been accepted by all who identify the script as the precursor of the later West Semitic alphabetic scripts (e.g., Naveh, 1982/1987, pp. 2 3 27). Whether this early pictographic form is in fact the earliest known depends on the dating of the inscriptions. No single inscription is dated with certainty and the associated Egyp tian finds date from late twelfth dynasty (c. 1800 BCE) to the early New Kingdom (Thutmose III). Joseph Naveh (1982/ 1987, pp. 26-27), for example, unquestioningly accepts the later date, and thereby places some Proto-Canaanite inscrip tions earlier than the Proto-Sinaitic, while Sass (1988, pp. 135-144, pp. 158-159; 1991, p. 4) rejects tire dating of some l
objects on which inscriptions were engraved to the New Kingdom, finding the best parallels in the twelfth dynasty. [See Proto-Canaanite.] Accepting Sass's conclusions means that the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions represent the earliest known attestations of West Semitic alphabetic script. This does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the alphabet was invented at Serabit el-Khadem, however, for there is insufficient data on the social status of the West Semites who worked there. It is unlikely, in any case, that slaves or un educated workers would have invented the alphabet. If the Sinai inscriptions do in fact reflect the invention of the al phabetic writing system, they imply the presence there of a West Semite ttained in Egyptian who would on the spot have had the idea of reducing the many Egyptian signs to a small number of signs representing the consonantal pho nemes of his own language. In fact, the Proto-Sinaitic signs may well represent tire borrowing of the pictographic prin ciple from Egyptian hieroglyphs (Sznycer, 1972, p. 1394; 1974, pp. 7-9; Sass, 1988, p. 161)—which in theory could have taken place in any of the centers of Egypto-Canaanite contact since the beginning of writing in Egypt in the late predynastic period. [See Hieroglyphs.] According to Ben jamin Sass (1991, pp. 24-27), the Egyptian use of certain signs in a quasi-alphabetic fashion for the rendition of for eign names is best attested in the Middle Kingdom, and this usage provides the best contact for the invention of the al phabet by a West Semite. Whatever the relationship may be of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions to the invention of the al phabet, the fact that they were carved on stone has meant that this very early group of witnesses to early alphabetic writing has survived to this day in reasonably good condi tion. Although claims of virtually complete decipherment have been made (e.g., Albright, 1966; Colless, 1990), and at the other extreme it has been claimed that no decipherment is yet possible (Garbini, 1976, 1980, pp. 89, 103), the most careful treatments (Sznycer, 1972; Sass, 1988, pp. 159-161) accept the decipherment of only a few words. These few words, however, appear sufficient to identify the script as alphabetic and the language as West Semitic: b'lt, "lady"; m'hb, "beloved"; rb nqbn, "chief of the mine(rs)." Although they are best identified as West Semitic words, no precise linguistic identification is possible (Garbini and Durand, 994> P' 34)- Until sufficiently well-preserved inscriptions are discovered to permit a full decipherment, such is the hypothesis that commands the highest probability. I
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and Their De cipherment. H a r v a r d Theological Studies, 2 2 C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1 9 6 6 . Attempt at full decipherment of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, which has heuristic value b u t cannot b e accepted as a systematic decipherment. Colless, Brian E. " T h e Proto-Alphabetic Inscriptions of Sinai." Abr-
PTOLEMAIS Nahrain 28 (1990): 1-52. Another attempt at full decipherment of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions that also cannot be accepted. Garbini, Giovanni. " G l i 'alfabeti' semitici settentrionali." Parola e Passaw 31 (1976): 66-81. Considers t h e Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions to be nonalphabetic a n d u n d e c i p h e r e d . Garbini, Giovanni. Ifenici: Storia e religione. N a p l e s , 1980. Repeats t h e stance of die earlier article in the context of t h e history of writing leading to Phoenician. Garbini, Giovanni, a n d Olivier D u r a n d . Introduzione alle lingue semitiche. Brescia, 1994. Considers the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions in t h e context of describing the Semitic languages, arguing that the lan guage is Semitic a n d the writing consonantal, that is, alphabetic. Gardiner, Alan H . " T h e Egyptian Origin of t h e Semitic Alphabet." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 3 (1916): 1-16. Pioneering identifi cation of d i e Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions as alphabetic a n d West S e mitic. Gardiner, Alan H . , a n d T . Eric Peet. The Inscriptions of Sinai, vol. 1, Introduction and Plates, Publications of the Egyptian Exploration F u n d , 36 L o n d o n , 1917. H a n d copies of the first group of inscrip tions discovered during regular excavations. N a v e h , Joseph. An Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography. 2d ed. Jerusalem, 1987. Adopts a low chronology (ca. 1500). Petrie, W . M . Flinders. Researches in Sinai. L o n d o n , 1906. Discussion of a first g r o u p of inscriptions discovered during regular excavations, with p h o t o g r a p h s of two inscribed objects. Sass, Benjamin. The Genesis of the Alphabet and Its Development in the Second Millenium [sic] B.C. Agypten a n d Altes T e s t a m e n t , 13. W i e s baden, 1988. Latest t h o r o u g h treatment of die Proto-Sinaitic inscrip tions, which exhibits a very careful epigraphic, philological, and his torical method. Highly r e c o m m e n d e d . Sass, Benjamin. Studia Alphabetica: On the Origin and Early History of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic, and Greek Alphabets. Orbis B i b licus et Orientalis, 102. Freiburg, 1991. Discusses the place of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions in the history of t h e alphabet. Sznycer, M a u r i c e . "Protosina'itiques (Inscriptions)." In Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 8, cols. 1384-1395. Paris, 1972. T h o r ough overview of discovery, publication, a n d decipherment, with a balanced assessment of the contribution of these texts to knowledge of alphabetic origins. Sznycer, Maurice. " Q u e l q u e s r e m a r q u e s a p r o p o s de la formation de l'alphabet phenicien." Semilica 24 (1974): 5-12. Broader and briefer treatment of alphabetic origins, including the contribution of d i e Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. Weill, R a y m o n d . Recueil des inscriptions egyptiennes du Sinai. Paris, 1904. Earliest publication of a Proto-Sinaitic inscription, from a squeeze taken near Serabit e l - K h a d e m , in the W a d i M a g h a r a h . D E N N I S PARDEE
PTOLEMAIS, provincial capital of the Libyan Pentapolis from the time of Diocletian (284-305 CE) until the be ginning of the fifth century C E (32°4o' N , 20°55' E). Ptolemais occupied a coastal position 88 km (55 mi.) west of Cyrene and 105 km (65 mi.) northeast of Benghazi (ancient Euesperides/Berenice). Random pottery finds suggest that it may have already served as a harbor facility by the late seventh century B C E . Nonetheless, the name of tire settle ment during the Archaic or Classical periods has not sur vived. Eventually Ptolemy III (262-221 BCE) refounded it as Ptolemais, and it is as a Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine
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center that the town is best known. It came into Roman possession in 96 B C E and flourished until various poorly un derstood factors (perhaps tribal incursions and the silting up of its harbor) forced the city to cede its role as the head of the provincial government to nearby Apollonia-Sosuza. Al though the invasions under Amr ibn al-'As in the seventh century C E brought an end to the Greek settlement, recent excavations provide clear evidence for a continued occu pation well into the Islamic period. Excavations that had been undertaken by Italian archae ologists between the two world wars were later extended by the Libyan Department of Antiquities and were directed by Richard Goodchild and others. Carl Kraeling undertook a major clearance in the later 1950s for the University of Chi cago, and more recently, various British archaeologists have conducted tests of both the harbor and land portions of the site for the Society for Libyan Studies. The main harbor basin was sheltered by a small prom ontory to its west on which stands an ancient pharos (light house). T h e urban plan occupies a rectangle about 1,650 X 1,400 m (5,413 X 4,593 ft.) with two major cardines (northsouth streets) and five decumani (east-west streets) creating standard blocks of 180 X 36 m (590 X 118 f t ) . The eastwest Road of the Monuments was lined with cippi or stone bases carrying honorific statues, as well as decorated with a triple-arcaded triumphal arch of the time of Constantine. Although little remains of the Hellenistic defensive walls apart from elements of projecting rectangular towers set out at regular intervals, tire Tocra gate to the west is still im posing. Traces exist of an amphitheater (see plan, item 1) in the northwest corner, a hippodrome (27) to the south and three theaters (7, 9, 28). Urban water needs were partially met by the Court of the Cisterns (10), whose seventeen un derground vaulted cisterns had a combined capacity of more than 8.5 million gallons, and a nearby open public reservoir (12) supplied an additional 26 million gallons. Private cis terns and an aqueduct from Wadi Habbun 24 1cm (15 mi.) to the east supplied the remainder of the city's water. Al though the nearby extramural quarries are honeycombed with chamber tombs, the most impressive expression of fu nerary architecture is unquestionably the Qasr Faraoun, modeled after the pharos at Alexandria, that lies a short dis tance west of the city. T h e more important later civic mon uments include the city's Byzantine baths (15), its ducal headquarters (23), and the important fortified church (2). The private town houses of the wealthy, providing some of the best examples of their type thus far uncovered in the Pentapolis region ("land of the five cities"—Cyrene, Apollonia, Ptolemais, Tauchira, and Berenice) have been the tar get of considerable recent investigation. T h e substantial "Palazzo delle Colonne" (13), which was built around two peristyles, occupies the entire width of a city block and half its length. Known since the 1930s, it remains the most fa miliar monument of Ptolemais, as well as a model for ur-
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ban villa construction throughout the eastern Mediterranean region. Ptolemais has yielded a number of important inscriptions, including a copy of the price edict of Diocletian and a decree of Anastasius. T h e local museum contains important sculp tures and other locally discovered artifacts. Despite what has been accomplished, much remains to be excavated inside the walls, and useful survey should be undertaken some day in the neighboring environs.
of their pharaonic and Hellenistic traits. As the Greek rulers of Egypt, however, they stressed their Greek aspects, re cruiting Greekphiloi ("friends of the king"—namely, his ad visory board), spealdng Greek in the royal court, appearing on their coins as Greek deities, and founding Greek temples. They also supported the many Greek scholars who gathered in Alexandria around the Mousseion (Museum, a kind of academy), and some of the Ptolemies were ardent collectors of Greek manuscripts. Thus, tlie Ptolemies posed, to vary ing degrees, as dualistic ldngs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
During the Hellenistic era (323-30 B C E ) the Ptolemies faced several crucial challenges. Foremost was dealing with Egypt's internal dynastic power politics, which became more troublesome in the second and, in particular, the first centuries BCE. They also had to contend witii a strong local priesthood, which played a leading role among native Egyp tians. Two documents from tlie Hellenistic period reflect those tensions: the Canopus document (238 B C E ) and die Rosetta Stone (196 B C E ) . Finally, the Ptolemies had to con front harsh international power politics, especially in their relationships with the Seleucids and Macedonians (until die downfall of Macedonia in 168 B C E ) . Throughout the third century BCE, Egypt fought the Seleucids at least five times, in the so-called Syrian Wars—about most of which we have little information. Egypt had the upper hand in Palestine in the third century B C E . Some useful information concerning economic activities during Ptolemaic rule in Palestine is pre served in the Zenon papyri.
Kennet, D . " S o m e Notes on Islamic Tolmeita." Libyan Studies 2 2 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 8 3 - 8 9 . Summarizes recent work on the post-Greek phase of urban occupation. Kraeling, Carl H . Ptolemais, City of the Libyan Pentapolis. Chicago, 1 9 6 2 . T h e principal site monograph, which includes an extensive discussion of Ptolemais's history. Lloyd, ] . " U r b a n Archaeology in Cyrenaica, 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 8 9 : T h e Hellenis tic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods." Libyan Studies 2 0 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 7 7 9 0 . Contains a useful summary of fieldwork carried out at Ptolemais since the conclusion of tlie Chicago Expedition led by Kraeling. Pesce, Gennaro. II "Palazzo delle Colonne" in Tolemaide di Cirenaica. Monografie di Archeologia Libica, 2 . R o m e , 1 9 5 0 . T h e definitive description of the city's most important architectural m o n u m e n t . Ward-Perkins, J. B . , et al. " T o w n Houses at Ptolemais." Libyan Studies 1 7 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 1 0 9 - 1 5 3 . Analysis of work on various urban villas carried out for die Society of Libyan Studies during the previous decade. DONALD WHITE
PTOLEMIES. Ptolemy, a general of Alexander the Great and the author of a history of Alexander (now lost), received Egypt as his domain as a result of the partitioning of the empire following Alexander's death. Ptolemy was crowned ldng of Egypt in 304 B C E . This date marks the be ginning of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt until 30 B C E , when the Romans conquered the country. From the outset the Ptolemies were crowned at Memphis, Egypt's ttaditional capital (although firm evidence exists only for the crowning ceremony of Ptolemy V). T h e first four Ptolemies were extremely active in foreign policy and ruled over many regions outside Egypt, including Cyrene, Cyprus, southern Asia Minor, some of the Aegean islands, and Palestine. Most of these regions were lost between the end of the third and the second centuries B C E . The Ptolemies were well aware from the start of tiieir rule how to conduct themselves as kings both for the Greek col onizers of Egypt and its native population. For the latter, they were Pharaohs who had been Horus and upon their death had become Osiris. In Egyptian temples they were considered Egyptian deities. The temples they erected for the indigenous population followed traditional Egyptian temple architecture but with some Hellenistic additions, such as at Philae and Edfu. The literature composed by na tive Egyptians such as Manetho (third century BCE) seems to be full of legitimations of the dualism their reign reflected,
At the m m of tlie century (204 B C E ) , following the death of Ptolemy IV, Philip V of Macedonia and the Seleucid king Antiochus III made a pact to divide Egypt's overseas pos sessions between them. This brought about the Second Macedonian War (Rome and her Greek allies against Mac edonia, in 200-197 B C E ) . T h e Seleucid Empire, under An tiochus III, annexed Palestine after the battle of Panion, in which he crushed the Ptolemaic army. T h e Ptolemies also lost many of their other possessions outside Egypt. Rome defeated the Seleucids in the so-called Roman-Syrian War (192-189/88 B C E ) , and then crushed Macedonia (in the Third Macedonian War in 172-168 B C E ) , the beginning of tiieir more intensive intervention in tlie affairs of tlie ancient Near East. During tlie second century B C E , Rome often sup ported Egypt against the Seleucids. Antiochus IV's wellattested second invasion of Egypt in 169/68 B C E illustrates Rome's position vis-a-vis Ptolemaic Egypt at the time. T h e Roman envoy issued an ultimatum and Antiochus obeyed: he left Egypt, which he had wished to treat as his own do main. Later, it was Ptolemaic Egypt, along with Pergamon and Rome, that supported the Seleucid pretender Alexander Balas against Demeuius. Rome was interested in a weak Egypt but supported it against other powers in the region. From the end of the second century B C E onward, tlie Ptol emaic dynasty declined sharply, with Egypt embroiled in the continuous strife among the Ptolemaic princes.
L a n d s of the
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Ptolemaic Egypt was organized into forty districts called nomes. Every nomas, was subdivided into topoi. The nomos was managed by the nomarches, apparently until tire third century B C E , when their functions were gradually taken over by tire strategos, who had until then been in charge of the army in the district. The strategos was assisted by an oikonomos, who was in charge of finances, and by a basilikos grammateus, who administered the district's land register. All of diese magistrates received their orders from the dioiketes, the chief administrator of Egypt, stationed at Alexandria, the new capital. High officials in Ptolemaic Egypt in the time of the first Ptolemies were recruited mainly from among the Greek colonizing stratum of the society; later, people indig enous to Egypt were also recruited, provided they were Hel lenized. The same pattern held for the higher ranks in the Ptolemaic army. Like other Hellenistic armies, the Ptolemaic army was composed of mercenaries (from Crete, Greece, and Asia Minor) and soldiers who received allotments (klerouchiai) and were recruited when needed. Even indigenous Egyp tians were recruited, such as the twenty thousand Egyptians who participated in the battle of Raphia (217 B C E ) . This recruitment of Egyptians led to unrest, however, when they demanded more freedom from Ptolemaic rule. The economy of Ptolemaic Egypt was based on tightiy centralized management. There was intense commercial ac tivity in the Greek cities (of which there were only three), and particularly in Alexandria. The cities were the main consumers of imported goods, as well as of goods from the chora (the land around the cities). The lands of Egypt were divided into the ge basilike, "the king's land"—and therefore under his direct control—cultivated by Egyptian farmers who received part of the crops; ge en ephesei, land the king alloted to soldiers (ge klerouchike) and senior magistrates in the Ptolemaic bureaucracy (ge en dorea); and land owned by the temples (ge hiera), perhaps a third of all Egyptian lands. The Egyptian legal system also was dualistic in character. The Greek population adhered to Greek law while the native population followed the local law. Ptolemaic Alexandria was famous for its rich cultural life, which included being an important center of Jewish life in tire Greco-Roman period. [See also Egypt, article on Postdynastic Egypt; and Seleu cids.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bevan, Edwyn Robert. A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty. London, 1 9 2 7 . Bowman, Alan K. Egypt after the Pharaohs, 332 BC-AD 642. L o n d o n , 1986.
Fraser, P . M . Ptolemaic Alexandria. 3 vols. Oxford, 1 9 7 2 . Mendels, D o r o n . " T h e Polemical Character of Manelho'sAegyptiaca." In Purposes of History, edited by H . Verdin et al., p p . 9 2 - 1 1 0 . L o u vain, 1 9 9 0 . DORON MENDELS
PUBLIC BUILDINGS. Although frequently used, the term public buildings is somewhat misleading when ap plied to palaces, temples, storehouses and other administra tive units, which were not intended to serve the "public": they were built exclusively to meet the needs of the ruling class and should, thus, be labeled elite structures. [See Pal ace.] Along with fortification systems, elite structures signify the architectural manifestation of the institutions controlled by the ruling class—political, military, administrative, reli gious, and economic. In many cases elite structures were built on a monumental scale, with a unique plan that ex pressed die high status of their users. T h e architecture of elite structures thus became an ideological tool used by rul ers to sustain social order and their high standing within it. T e m p l e s . Ceremonial, cultic structures usually are re ferred to as temples. [See Cult.] T h e earliest example of this type is the colossal round tower assigned to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period at Jericho. [See Jericho.] T h e tower apparentiy served as a podium for a brick-made ceremonial structure that was not preserved (Bar-Yosef, 1986). Entry into this shrine was through an inner staircase incorporated within the solid building. From the Chalcolithic period throughout the Iron Age, monumental temples in Israel were constructed either as a broad-room house type or in the long-room style (Ottosson, 1980). A group of temples common in the Middle Bronze Age IIB throughout the Late Bronze Age is identified as monumental symmetrical temples or Syrian temples (Mazar, 1992). Temples with a long-room or with a broad-room hall are included in this category, despite the basic difference between the two architectural types. In Mesopotamia, a third type of temple was common, the bent-axis temple. All other cultic structures should be considered composite in type. Unlike modern churches, synagogues, and mosques, which serve the community for cultic ceremony, ancient temples were considered to be the dwelling place of the gods. [See Churches; Synagogues; Mosque.] T h e presence of the deity was exhibited by a statue or a stela, usually erected on a podium. The participants in the ceremonies gathered in the courtyard outside the temple. T h e basic shape of the sanctuary dictated the level of intimacy the builders of the temple allowed the worshippers with their deity. In a broad-room temple, the platform for the deity was usually placed next to the rear wall, in line with the central entrance, providing a close and direct view from out side. In a long-room temple, the podium was set in the back and could not be seen by most of the audience. T h e bentaxis temples common in Mesopotamia totally prevented a view of the deity. Broad-room temple. Like broad-room houses, broadroom temples were the prevalent form of rectangular build ings in ancient Israel (Herzog, 1980). Compounds consist ing of a broad-room temple encompassed by a fence had
PUBLIC BUILDINGS been commonly used as ceremonial-cultic centers since the Chalcolithic period. Typical examples are the compounds at 'Ein-Gedi and Teleilat el-Ghassul. [See 'Ein-Gedi; Teleilat el-Ghassul.] T h e continuity of this plan into the Early Bronze I period is evident in the plans of Megiddo stratum XIX and the Hartuv compounds. [See Megiddo; Hartuv.] The EB II broad-room temples at Ai and Megiddo XVIII apparentiy were also incorporated into such compounds. [See Ai.] T h e broad-room temple is the dominant type in EB III, as attested in the plan of the White Building at Tel Yarmut, at Beth-Yerah (where the structure was sur rounded by circular silos), and in the temples at Bab edhDhra' and Khirbet ez-Zeraqun in Jordan. [See Yarmut, Tel; Beth-Yerah; Bab edh-Dhra'; Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-; Granaries and Silos.] T h e EB III temples of Megiddo sttata XVII-XV present an architectural combination of a broadroom plan with a portico of the megaron (long-room) house type. The later history of tlie broad-room temple type is notable in M B IIA temples at Nahariya and Kefar Shemaryahu and in the M B IIB temples at Hazor (stratum 3 in area H). [See Hazor.] T h e latter temple was built with heavy walls, and two towerlike rooms were added to the front of the broad room. This temple is usually listed among the Syrian-type temples, although most temples in this category were longroom sanctuaries. Excavations at Tell el-Hayyat in Jordan uncovered a sequence of four temple phases, at die same location, covering the entire Middle Bronze Age (MagnessGardiner and Falconer, 1994). [See Hayyat, Tell el-.] Other temples in tire Jordan Valley are known from Kfar Ruppin and Tel Kitan. [See Jordan Valley; Kitan, Tel.] An almost square temple dating to LB II was exposed at 'Ain Dara' in northern Syria, but the broad-room form was reintroduced into the religious architecture of the Iron Age, as evidenced by the temple at Arad. [See 'Ain Dara'; Arad, article on Iron Age Period.] The form was further utilized in the Hellenistic temple at Lachish. [See Lachish.] Long-room temples. T h e long-room form was popular in the northern part of the ancient Near East (Heinrich, t 9 7 3 ) . Typical long-room temples have been uncovered at MB IIB Megiddo and Shechem. [See Shechem.] At both sites the structures had been rebuilt and reused during the Late Bronze Age. A smaller long-room temple was erected on the high tell at Hazor in LB I. Long-room temples were common in Syria: since the late third millennium BCE at Tell Chuera, die first half of the second millennium BCE at Tell Mardikh (Ebla), and in the second half of die second mil lennium B C E at Tell Munbaqa (Mumbaqat) and Tell Meskene (Emar). [See Chuera, Tell; Ebla; Emar.] Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem was also constructed on the long-room principle. Palaces. T h e political elite operated and resided in tlie same building, namely the palace. T h e presence of palaces indicates a considerable accumulation of wealth and power
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in the hands of the ruling family. In the Early Bronze Age, well-defined palaces appeared later tiian temples and forti fications. At Arad the excavator identified a palace in tlie largest residential unit in stratum 2, dating to EB II (Amiran and Ilan, 1992). However, other scholars doubt this attri bution and assume that the palace at Arad stood on one of the site's summits. Nevertheless, the structure lacks any monumental qualities. If it was a palace, it reflects a very low level of social stratification. It is only for the EB III pe riod that buildings are found that clearly justify the term palace. One such structure was exposed in strata XVII-XVI at Megiddo and another in the lower city at Tel Yarmut. T h e latter building consists of a rectangular wall with inter nal buttresses covering an area of 84 X 72 m. T h e north western wing of the building was filled with a series of rec tangular rooms that served as dwelling and storage units. The rest of the space was utilized as an open courtyard. The large palace at Tel Yarmut indicates a crystallization of the political role of die urban elite. During the Middle Bronze Age, die palace became the dominant building in cities. Large palaces, commonly ar ranged around internal courtyards, have been uncovered throughout Syria and Palestine. Large steuctures are known in Syria at Mari, Ebla, and Alalakh and in Israel at Hazor, Tel Kabri, Megiddo, Shechem, Aphek, Tell el-'Ajjul, and Tel Sera'. [See Mari; Alalakh; Kabri, Tel; Aphek; 'Ajjul, Tell el-; Sera', Tel.] During the Late Bronze Age, builders erected palaces next to the gate area and not on the city's acropolis. Examples of die shift are observable at Ugarit and Alalakh in Syria and perhaps also at Megiddo. [See Ugarit.] Locating tlie palace near the city gate provided rulers witii a protected royal compound, while the rest of the city was enclosed only by the rear walls of an outer belt of houses. During the thirteenth century B C E , isolated palaces were erected over die ruins of several Canaanite cities. [See Canaanites.] These were relatively small and compact struc tures (about 25 X 25 m) with a central hall surrounded by rows of rectangular rooms on all four sides. The roofing over the central hall was supported by wooden pillars, as indi cated by the stone bases found. Such buildings may have been used as a residency for die Egyptian governor at the administtative sites of Beth-Shean, Tell el-Far'ah (South), Tel Sera', and Deir el-Balah (Oren, 1992), [See Beth-Shean; Far'ah, Tell el- (South); Deir el-Balah.] At other sites, such as Aphek and Tel Gerisa, die palaces were inhabited by die local rulers. [See Gerisa, Tel.] Some of the LB palaces were also used in the Iron Age IA, during the first half of the twelfth century B C E . Few examples of palaces are known from the eleventh century BCE: building 2072 in stratum VIA at Megiddo is the clearest one. From the tenth century B C E onward, a new type of palace appeared, called the bit-hilani. It consisted of a broad-room main hall and a broad-room porch with a pil lared facade wall. Palaces attributed to this type (founda-
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lions only) were uncovered in stratum VA at Megiddo (buildings 1723 and 6000). These palaces were consttucted of ashlar masonry with drafted margins. Proto-Aeolic cap itals may have adorned the buildings, but they, as most of the wall stones, were removed and reused by builders in later periods. Characteristic examples of bit-hilani palaces were exposed in North Syrian cities dated to the ninth-eighth cen turies BCE—Zincirli, Carchemish, and Tell Ta'yinat. [See Carchemish.] Monumentally built palaces, but of no distinct type, have been exposed at Lachish (strata V-III), Samaria, Hazor, Ramat Rahel, and Beersheba (Fritz, 1983). [See Ramat Rahel; Beersheba.] Following tire Assyrian conquest, palaces with character istics of royal Assyrian architecture were constructed in northern Syria, northern Israel, and Transjordan. [See As syrians.] These were rectangular buildings, often built over a raised podium, with a central courtyard surrounded by rooms. On one side a reception wing contained a large au dience hall, usually entered through a doorway whose threshold was ornamented with horseshoe-shaped stones. Additional Assyrian elements include a shallow niche in the reception room and a bathroom with a drainage system. Ex amples have been found in stratum III at Megiddo (build ings 1369 and 1052), below Tel Hazor (Kibbutz AyyelethaShahar), and at Buseirah in Edom. [See Buseirah.] Later development of this type in the Babylonian and Persian pe riods can be observed in the Lachish "residency" and in stratom III at Hazor (Reich, 1992). Silos, Storehouses (or Stables), Treasuries, a n d Scribes' C h a m b e r s . T h e agricultural basis of ancient econ omies and the fact that taxes in kind were paid by farmers necessitated the erection of storage facilities by the ruling administration. [See Agriculture.] Foodstuffs were redistrib uted as supplies for military forces, cult functionaries, mer chant caravans, and other dependents of royal courts. The simplest form of storage was achieved by silos for grain. An elaborate example is seen in the large granary complex at Beth-Yerah, which contained nine circular silos (arranged around a broadroom temple; see above). The round structure behind temple 4040 in stratum XVI at Me giddo also seems to be a stone base for a granary made of bricks, rather than an altar. [See Altars.] In MB and LB citystates, rooms within the royal palace were used for storage. Structures built specifically for administrative purposes are observed from the late eleventh century B C E onward, throughout Iron II. T h e best-known type is the tripartite pillared building found all over ancient Israel: at Tel Hadar, Ein-Gev, Hazor, Tell Abu Hawam, Megiddo, Tell Qasile, Beth-Shemesh, Tell el-Hesi, Beersheba, Tel Malhata and Tel Masos. [See Hadar, Tel; 'Bin-Gev; Abu Hawam, Tell; Qasile, Tell; Hesi, Tell el-; Masos, Tel.] Wide scholarly de bate exists regarding the functional interpretation of these buildings, whether stables (Holladay, 1986), storehouses (Herzog, 1973), army barracks (Fritz, 1977), or markets c
(Herr, 1988). [See Stables.] They should be identified with the biblical term miskenot (2 Chr. 32:28). T h e assemblage of objects found in the three tripartite pillared buildings at Beersheba suggests that these houses contained not only the foodstuffs for redisnibution but also pottery vessels and other household tools, assumingly delivered to the state functionaries acting in the region. Elongated rooms without pillars have been found at sev eral sites: at Hazor (next to the tripartite pillared building), at Lachish, Megiddo, and Samaria. [See Samaria.] These long halls (up to 30 m long at Lachish) may be interpreted as treasuries for weapons and other precious objects. [See Weapons and Warfare.] Such materials did not require the light and ventilation offered by the pillared buildings. These strucmres may be identified with the biblical osarot in 2 Chronicles 32:27 (Herzog, 1992). A third type of building contained a series of adjacent units, each of which included a long corridor flanked by two or three square rooms. These structures served the city ad ministrators as recording and documentation centers and have been found in several Iron Age cities. This type of house may be the scribe's chamber of Jeremiah 36:12 (AviYonah and Yeivin, 1955, pp. 118). This attribution is based primarily on the scores of administrative documents found at Samaria in one such house, known as the Ostraca Flouse. Similar houses have also been found at Megiddo (building 1482 in strata VA and IVB) and Hazor (stratum VB in area B). Water-Supply Systems. A supply of water was essential to every settlement (Miller, 1980). However, it was military considerations that dictated the need to provide city dwellers with direct access to a water source from within the city walls. With this type of water system, a city under attack could sustain a durable siege. Every fortified city can be ex pected to have found some kind of solution for this neces sity. Indeed, from the first urban phase of EB II, a large cistern was exposed at Ai and some kind of a reservoir ex isted at Arad. [See Cisterns; Reservoirs.] A circular water system hewn in the rock at Tel Gerisa is attributed to M B IIA. The straight, sloping tunnel at Gezer is dated to M B LIB, and a deep well is attributed to Iron I at Tel Beersheba. In Iron II, the systems became considerably more elabo rate (ShUoh, 1992). In tire northern part of Israel a natural water source (spring or water table) was reached through a deep shaft and sloping tunnel. Such systems are found at Hazor, Megiddo, Gibeon, and Ible'am and in Warren's Shaft in Jerusalem. [See Gibeon; Jerusalem.] In the southern regions, water was directed into reservoirs from a source outside the city. A well-preserved system at Beersheba con sists of a staired shaft, five plastered reservoirs, and a feeding tunnel. T h e system could be filled by floodwaters from the nearby wadi. T h e same principle, but with a spring as tire source, was used in Hezekiah's Tunnel in Jerusalem, at Qadesh-Barnea, and possibly also at Beth-Shemesh. [See Qa-
PYRAMIDS desh-Barnea; Beth-Shemesh.] At Arad, underground cis terns were fed by a rock-hewn channel, to which water was brought in containers from the well at the foot of the hill. At Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, an ascent of constructed stairs led from the top of the mound to tire spring at the base of the hill. [See also Building Materials and Techniques; Fortifica tions; and Temples.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Amiran, Ruth, and Ornit Ilan. Arad: Eine 5000 Jahre alte Stadt in der wuste Negev, Israel. N e u m u e n s t e r , 1 9 9 2 . Avi-Yonah, Michael, and Shmuel Yeivin. The Antiquities of Our Land (in H e b r e w ) . T e l Aviv, 1 9 5 5 . Bar-Yosef, Ofer. " T h e Walls of Jericho: An Alternative Interpretation." Current Anthropology 2 7 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 1 5 7 - 1 6 2 . Fritz, Volkmar. " B e s t i m m u n g u n d Herkunft des Pfeilerhauses in Is rael." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 9 3 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 3 0 - 4 5 . Fritz, Volkmar. "Palaste w a h r e n d d e r Bronze u n d Eisenzeit in Palas tina." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 9 9 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 - 4 2 . Henrich, Ernst. " H a u s . B: Archaologisch." In Reallexikon der Assyriol ogie, vol. 4 , p p . 1 7 3 - 2 2 0 . Berlin, 1 9 2 8 - . Herr, Larry G . "Tripartite Pillared Buildings and the Market Place in Iron Age Palestine." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, n o . 2 7 2 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 4 6 - 6 7 . Herzog, Ze'ev. " T h e Storehouses." In Beer-Sheba I, edited by Y o h a n a n Aharoni, p p . 2 3 - 3 0 . T e l Aviv, 1 9 7 3 . Herzog, Ze'ev. " A Functional Interpretation of the Broadroom and L o n g r o o m H o u s e T y p e s . " Tel Aviv 7 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 8 2 - 8 9 . Herzog, Ze'ev. "Administrative Structures in the Iron A g e . " In The Architecture of Ancient Israel, edited by A h a r o n Kempinski a n d R o n nie Reich, p p . 2 2 3 - 2 3 0 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Holladay, John S. " T h e Stables of Ancient Israel." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies: Presented to S. H. Horn, edited b y L a w rence T . Geraty a n d Larry G . H e r r , p p . 1 0 3 - 1 6 5 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 8 6 . Magness-Gardiner, Bonnie, a n d Steven Falconer. " C o m m u n i t y , Polity and T e m p l e in a Middle Bronze Age Levantine Village." Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 7 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 2 7 — 1 6 4 . Mazar, Amihai, " T e m p l e s of the M i d d l e and Late Bronze Ages and the Iron A g e . " In The Architecture of Ancient Israel, edited by Aharon Kempinski and R o n n i e Reich, p p . 1 6 1 - 1 8 7 , Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Miller, R. " W a t e r U s e in Syria a n d Palestine from the Neolothic to the Bronze A g e . " World Archaeology 1 1 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 3 3 1 - 3 4 1 . Oren, Eliezer D . "Palaces and Patrician Houses in the Middle a n d Late Bronze A g e s . " In The Architecture of Ancient Israel, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronnie Reich, p p . 1 0 5 - 1 2 0 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Ottosson, M a g n u s . Temples and Cult Places in Palestine. Uppsala, 1 9 8 0 . Reich, Ronnie. "Palaces a n d Residences in the Iron A g e , " In The Ar chitecture of Ancient. Israel, edited by A h a r o n Kempinski and Ronnie Reich, p p . 2 0 2 - 2 2 2 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Shiloh, Yigal. " U n d e r g r o u n d W a t e r Systems in the L a n d of Israel in the Iron A g e . " In The Architecture of Ancient Israel, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronnie Reich, p p . 2 7 5 - 2 9 3 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . ZE'EV HERZOG
PUBLIC HYGIENE.
See Medicine.
PYRAMIDS. For more than a millennium—from the twenty-seventh century B C E to the early sixteenth century
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BCE—pyramids served as monumental funerary structures (tombs) for the kings of Egypt and sometimes also their principal queens. Pyramids have a square base and four sloping, triangular sides (most have an angle of incline of between 50 and 54 degrees) that meet at the top and are oriented toward the cardinal points. There were two major periods of pyramid construction: the Old Kingdom (thirdsixth dynasties, c. 2700-2190 B C E ) and the Middle King dom-early Second Intermediate period (mid-elevenththirteenth dynasties, c. 2033-1633 B C E ) . From the fourth dynasty onward, each pyramid had its own name. T h e Egyptian word for pyramid, mr, is of uncertain ori gin. T h e hieroglyphic determinative (meaning sign) in the word shows a pyramid with one side of an enclosure wall around the base. The English word pyramid comes not from the Egyptian term, but from a Greek word, pyramis, mean ing "wheaten cake." Most Old Kingdom pyramids were built in the Memphite necropolis, which stretches about 80 km (50 mi.) northsouth from Abu Roash to Meidum, along the edge of the desert plateau west of the Nile River. Pyramid complexes were built close enough to the river to facilitate the hauling of heavy stone blocks on sledges from river barges to the construction site, where they were dragged up ramps and set into position with the aid of levers. The core of an Old Kingdom pyramid generally was of local limestone, with the smoothed casing blocks made of fine limestone from the quarries at Tura on the east bank of the Nile, south of Cairo; the lower levels of some pyramids were faced with granite blocks. From the fourth dynasty onward, the standard pyramid complex contained several basic elements: a valley temple where the king's body underwent purification and mum mification, a mortuary temple for the daily cult of the de ceased king, and a long connecting causeway, all on the east side of the pyramid; one or two enclosure walls around the pyramid itself; and a small pyramid south or southeast of the main pyramid, perhaps for tire spirit (Egyp., ka) of the dead ruler. T h e passage leading to tire burial chamber nor mally began on the north side of the pyramid in the Old Kingdom, but was switched to one of the other sides in the twelfth dynasty. A pyramid-shaped stone (pyramidion) served as the capstone for the pyramid. Finally, there might be one or more subsidiary pyramids or shaft tombs for im portant queens. The history of Egyptian pyramids begins in the early dy nastic period (first-second dynasties, c. 3100-2700 B C E ) . At that time, both royalty and important officials were interred in funerary structures now known as mastabas (Ar., "benches"). These tombs, which first appeared just prior to the first dynasty, were so named because they looked like the benches outside the homes of modern Egyptians. Early mastabas had a rectangular mud-brick superstructure with internal cells and a flat top, and a subterranean burial pit
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(often divided by walls into a series of chambers). Some first-dynasty mastabas at Saqqara had a brick-enclosed mound of rubble and sand immediately above the burial pit. The outer support for these internal mounds developed into a series of brick-encased "steps," or terraces (as in the case of tomb 3038 at Saqqara, attributed to King Anedjib or his reign). Already in the early first dynasty, a long pit was sometimes dug outside die mastaba's enclosure wall to con tain a boat, perhaps intended for use by the deceased in the afterworld. (Boats occur in conjunction with both royal and private mastabas during the early dynastic period; in the Old Kingdom these ships have been found only with royal bur ials.) In addition, small models of buildings of uncertain function were occasionally constructed outside the tomb (e.g., at tomb 3357 at Saqqara, attributed to King Aha or his reign). An innovation of the second dynasty was the con version of the mastaba superstructure into a mass of rubble enclosed in brick, with an increase in the number of rooms in the substructure. Another change was the use (at Helwan, on the east bank of the Nile) of stone for some architectural elements in private tombs. The "step pyramids" of the third dynasty mark the tran sition from mastaba to pyramid. The most famous of these structures is the Step Pyramid of Netjerikhet (later known as Djoser) at Saqqara. The architect of this extraordinary complex was Imhotep. The Step Pyramid began as a square mastaba built entirely of limestone blocks (the oldest pre served building in Egypt made entirely of stone). Subse quently, the mastaba was enlarged on all four sides to form a rectangular structure, and a series of progressively smaller "mastabas" was placed on top of it. The resulting tomb had six levels and was about 62 m (204 ft.) high. A deep shaft beneath the original mastaba led to the burial chamber and a network of rooms and corridors. A conglomeration of buildings set within a rectangular limestone enclosure wall nearly 10 m (33 ft.) high sur rounded the Step Pyramid. A courtyard southeast of the pyramid was flanked on its east and west by a series of small dummy structures; this complex was designed to allow Ne tjerikhet to perform his periodic jubilee ceremony (Egyp., heb-sed) in the afterworld. A mastaba with subterranean chambers at the southern end of the Step Pyramid complex may have served as the king's cenotaph. The engaged col umns in the Step Pyramid complex are the oldest known columns in Egypt; the builder's failure to let the pillars stand alone may reflect his lack of confidence in the structural integrity of stone columns. The fourth dynasty saw the construction of the earliest as well as the largest of the true pyramids. T h e first Idng of the dynasty, Snefru, built two pyramids at Dahshur. T h e south ern pyramid is often called the Bent Pyramid because it has a change in angle about halfway up the sides. The later, northern pyramid was designed from the start as a true pyr amid. Snefru also completed as a true pyramid a step pyr
amid possibly started by his third-dynasty predecessor, Huni, at Meidum. Because of a structural failure, the outer casing of that pyramid later collapsed, leaving the structure looking like a pyramid having three steps. The pyramids erected at Giza by several pharaohs of the fourth dynasty—Khufu (Gk., Cheops), Khafre (Gk., Chephren), and Menkaure (Gk., Mycerinus)—are the bestknown monuments of ancient Egypt. T h e largest of the three great pyramids, that of Khufu, originally contained an estimated 2,300,00 blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons, stood about 145 m (481 ft.) high, and was 229 m (756 ft.) long at the base of each side. T h e structure has three burial chambers: an unfinished one below ground level, a second chamber (popularly known as the Queen's Chamber) just above the base of the pyramid, and the magnificent King's Chamber near the center of the structure. T h e King's Chamber was lined and roofed with huge granite blocks and was reached through a 46-meter-long (153 ft.) ascending corridor known as the Grand Gallery. Herodotus reports that one hundred thousand men labored twenty years to build Khufu's pyramid, and another ten years to construct its causeway. Regardless of whether these figures have a fac tual basis, large numbers of workmen would have been available during the annual flood season, when work in the fields came to a halt. On the eastern and southern sides of Khufu's pyramid was a series of pits for the royal funerary barges. One of these boats was uncovered in 1954 in a pit immediately south of the pyramid. When reconstructed, the ship, built mostly of Lebanese cedar, was found to be approximately 43 m (143 ft.) long. Close to the Giza pyramids is a series of small pyramids for some of the queens, while nearby there are extensive fields of mastaba tombs for major officials, important mor tuary priests, and members of the royal family. On the north side of the valley temple of Kliafre's pyramid is the Sphinx, an enormous rock sculpture (about 72 m [240 ft.] long and 20 m [66 ft.] high) in the form of a recumbent lion with a head that is a representation of the king himself. The last ruler of the fourth dynasty, Shepseskaf, con structed a tomb at Saqqara known as the Mastabat Fara'un. Built in the form of a huge stone sarcophagus with a vaulted roof, this structure lies outside the evolutionary path of the Old Kingdom pyramid. Change and innovation highlight pyramid construction in the fifth-sixth dynasties. A gradual weakening in the au thority of the central administration resulted in a decline in the size of the mastaba fields, many officials choosing to be buried in provincial cemeteries rather than near their king. T h e pyramids themselves were smaller than their fourthdynasty predecessors and often had cores of small limestone blocks. T h e pyramids of the fifth dynasty were built at Saq qara (for Userkaf, Djedkare Isesi, and Wenis) and Abu Sir (for Sahure, Neferirkare, Neuserre, and an unidentified
PYRAMIDS Icing), while the pyramids known from the sixth dynasty were all built at Saqqara (for Teti, Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II). Fifth-dynasty pyramid complexes are notable for their use of columns with plant-shaped capitals; the expanded use of reliefs in the temples and causeway; and, starting in the pyr amid of Wenis at the end of the dynasty, the writing of in scriptions collectively known as the Pyramid Texts on the walls of the burial chamber and corridors. These magical texts, which include spells designed to protect and assist the king in the afterworld, as well as hymns and prayers to the gods, regularly occur in pyramids through the eighth dy nasty. T h e pyramid complexes of the sixth dynasty are remark ably similar because the funerary complex of tire first king of the dynasty, Teti, was used as a model for those erected later by Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II. T h e pyramids of these four kings have the same height (about 52 m) and the same base length on each side (about 79m); are all made of small stones held together with mud and an outer casing of T u r a limestone; and are part of mortuary complexes having the same overall layout. T h e complex of Pepi II is tire best pre served and most interesting. Outside the enclosure wall are miniature versions of the king's complex for three of his queens; each of these complexes had its own subsidiary pyr amid as well as Pyramid texts. T h e First Intermediate period (seventh-mid-eleventh dy nasties, c. 2190-2033 BCE) witnessed a sharp decline in pyr amid building. T h e country's internal disarray left it without the highly centralized authority required to construct, dec orate, and staff such large mortuary complexes. In such cir cumstances, only a few pyramids were built: the best known is that of an eighth-dynasty ruler, Ibi, in the southern sector of Saqqara. His pyramid, which lacks a valley temple and causeway, is made of mud brick (a forerunner of the pyra mids of the Middle Kingdom). At the end of the First In termediate period, the Theban kings of the early eleventh dynasty were buried in long saff(Av., "row") tombs cut back into the rock; at least some of these tombs were surmounted by small brick pyramids. The reunification of Egypt in the mid-eleventh dynasty and the transfer of the capital at the beginning of the twelfth dynasty to Ititawy near Lisht in the Faiyum region inaugu rated the Middle Kingdom. Although the mortuary temple of tire eleventh-dynasty ruler Nebhepetre Mentuhotep at Deir el-Bahri is now thought to have been surmounted by a flat roof rather titan a pyramid, about a dozen ttue pyramids are attested for the twelftli-thirteenth dynasties. These were built at Dahshur, Mazghuneh (situated just south of Dah shur), and in the Faiyum region (at Lisht, Lahun, and Hawara). Twelfth-dynasty pyramids were larger than those built during the fifth and sixth dynasties. One Icing, Amenemhet III, built two pyramids—one at Dahshur (which was aban
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doned after a partial structural collapse) and another (his actual burial place) at Hawara. Classical writers later de scribed his enormous mortuary temple at Hawara as the Labyrinth. Middle Kingdom pyramids differ considerably from ear lier ones. Although the first twelfth-dynasty pyramid—that of Amenemhet I at Lisht—was made entirely of stone (in cluding many removed from Old Kingdom pyramid com plexes), those of his three immediate successors (Senwosret I, Amenemhet II, and Senwosret II) had interior stone walls with rubble and/or sand fill. Later Middle Kingdom pyra mids were constructed of brick with a casing of limestone blocks. The other principal development in pyramid construction during the Middle Kingdom was the emphasis placed on the security of the royal burial. The entrance to the passage leading to the burial chamber was shifted from the north face to one of the other sides. Some other devices used in (unsuccessful) efforts to protect the dead king included blind corridors and false shafts, ingeniously set portcullis blocks, large granite plugs, trap doors, and sarcophagi cut from huge monolithic blocks of stones. Information on the people who built pyramid complexes comes mainly from the excavation of a town occupied by the workmen for Senwosret II's pyramid at Lahun. (Exca vations have recently begun on an Old Kingdom workmen's village at Giza.) This planned town, surrounded by a nearly square enclosure wall and divided by a long wall into two main sections, contained a number of mansions for senior officials as well as many parallel rows of small houses for ordinary workmen and artisans. Three unfinished mud-brick pyramids are known from the thirteentlr dynasty—two at Saqqara (one belonging to Khendjer, the other being anonymous) and one at Dahshur (for Amenyqemau). No pyramids have survived from the late Second Intermediate period (the fifteenth-seventeenth dynasties, c. 1648-1540 B C E ) , but there are references in a late New Kingdom document known as the Abbott T o m b Robbery Papyrus to pyramids associated with the royal tombs of the seventeenth dynasty at Thebes. Observations made by nineteentii-century observers indicate that these small mud-brick pyramids had one or more interior cham bers, were topped by a stone -pyramidion, and sat on the hillside above the rock-cut tombs. T h e first king of the New Kingdom, Ahrnose, constructed a small pyramid at Abydos to serve as a cenotaph for his grandmother, Tetisheri; this solid structure was made of rubble and small stones and was held together by a stone facing. Through most of the New Kingdom, Egyptian roy alty was buried in less obtrusive, rock-cut tombs in western Thebes (in the Valley of the Kings and tire Valley of the Queens), while the mortuary temples were erected out on the plain, well away from the tombs. T h e pyramid continued in use in New Kingdom (c. 15 50-
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1069 BCE) Egypt and Nubia in conjunction witii private tombs. Such tombs are especially well known at Deir elMedineh and Dra'Abu 'n-Naga in the Theban necropolis. Typically they had a small steep-sided mud-brick pyramid topped by a stone pyramidion set above a columned portico or chapel. No pyramids were built in Egypt after the New Kingdom. Later on, however, the pyramidal tradition was revived for ldngs as well as some queens and princesses in the northern Sudanese kingdoms of Napata (c. 900-300 BCE) and Meroe (c. 300 BCE-300 C E ) . Small pyramids (all fewer tiian 30 m high) were built in the Napatan royal cemeteries at el-Kurru and Nuri, and subsequentiy in the Meroitic royal cemeteries at Gebel Barkal and Meroe. These steep-sided pyramids had a chapel on the east side and the burial chamber cut into the rock below die pyramid. Initially they were built of stone, but later pyramids at Meroe were constructed of stone over a rubble core and, finally, of brick. [See also Abydos; Egypt, article on Dynastic Egypt; Giza; Meroe; and Saqqara.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Dieter. Der Pyramidenbezirk des Konigs Amenernhet III. in Dahschur, vol. 1, Die Pyramide. M a i n z a m Rhein, 1987. Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Kairo, Archaologische Veroffentlichungen, vol. 53. Best modern report on t h e excavation of a Middle K i n g d o m pyramid. Arnold, Dieter. Building in Egypt: Pharaonic Stone Masomy. N e w York, 1991. Fundamental reference work on ancient Egyptian stone con struction, essential for understanding how the pyramids were built. Badawy, Alexander. A History of Egyptian Architecture. 3 vols. Berkeley, 1954-1968. Survey of Egyptian architecture through the N e w King dom, including basic descriptions, plans, and drawings of many pyr amids. David, A. Rosalie. The Pyramid Builders of Ancient Egypt. L o n d o n , 1986. Study of the Middle Kingdom town in which the officials and workers associated with Senusert IPs pyramid at L a h u n lived. D u n h a m , Dows. The Royal Cemeteries of Kush. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1950-1963. Final publication of the Harvard University-Mu
seum of Fine Arts, Boston, excavations at tlie royal cemeteries of the N a p a t a n and Meroitic kingdoms in northern S u d a n . Edwards, I. E. S. The Pyramids of Egypt. Rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1991. T h e most readable and authoritative introduction to the pyramids in t h e English language. Emery, Walter B. Archaic Egypt. Baltimore, 1961. G o o d introduction, though now somewhat outdated, to the archaeology of E g y p t during the early dynastic period, focused principally on tlie t o m b s at Abydos and Saqqara. Fakhry, Ahmed. The Pyramids. 2d ed. Chicago, 1969. General intro duction to the pyramids, now somewhat out of date a n d n o t as c o m prehensive as Edwards (1991). Faulkner, R a y m o n d 0 . The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. 2 vols. Oxford, 1969. Provides excellent translations of t h e texts as well as a limited a m o u n t of background information. Jequier, Gustave. Deux pyramides du Moyen Empire. Cairo, 1933. E x cavation report on tlie two thirteenth-dynasty pyramids at Saqqara. Jequier, Gustave. La pyramide d'Aba. Cairo, 1935. Excavation report on tlie eighth-dynasty pyramid of Iby at Saqqara. Lauer, Jean-Philippe. La pyramide a degris. 5 vols. Cairo, 1936-1965. Volumes 1-3 of this excavation report cover the architecture of t h e Step Pyramid complex; volumes 4-5 (coauthored by Pierre L a c a u ) are devoted to t h e vase inscriptions. Lauer, Jean-Philippe. Histoire monumentale des pyramides d'Egypte, vol. 1, Les pyramides a degres (Hie dynaslie). Institut Francais d ' A r c h e o logie Orientale, Bibliotheque d'Euides, vol. 39. Cairo, 1962. C o m prehensive study of t h e step pyramids of the third dynasty. Lauer, Jean-Philippe. Saqqara, the Royal Cemetery of Memphis: Exca vations and Discoveries since 1S50. L o n d o n , 1976. Authoritative a n d well-illustrated history of research on the Old K i n g d o m pyramid complexes at Saqqara. Lauer, Jean-Philippe. Les pyramides de Sakkarah. 6th ed., rev. and e x p . Cairo, 1991. Basic guidebook, in French a n d English, for die pyra mids at Saqqara. Malek, Jaromir. In the Shadow of the Pyramids: Egypt during the Old Kingdom. N o r m a n , Okla., 1986. G o o d popular survey, with excellent color photographs, of Egypt in t h e age of the pyramid. N o u r , M o h a m m a d Zaki, et al. The Cheops Boats. Cairo, i960. Prelim inary report on the Khufu funerary boat discovered in 1954. Spencer, A. Jeffrey. Brick Architecture in Ancient Egypt. Warminster, 1979. Detailed study of brick architecture and construction, with a discussion of t h e brick pyramids of the second millennium BCE. JAMES M .
WEINSTEIN
Q QADESH-BARNEA, site identified with Tell el-Qudeirat in northern Sinai (30°38' N , 34°27' E; map reference 0949 X 0064), a central camp for nomadic and seminomadic tribes in tire Negev-Sinai deserts. Encompassing about three-quarters of an acre, the site, which overlooks the Wadi el-Qudeirat ravine, is situated just to the west of 'Ein-Mishpat, the Sinai's most bountiful spring (the biblical "waters of Meribah" of, for example, Nm. 20:13). In tire biblical tradition, Qadesh-Barnea played an impor tant role in the Israelite wilderness wanderings. It was the site from which Moses, at God's command, sent a group of twelve men, one from each tribe, to investigate the Promised Land (Nm. 13:26). Later it was where the king of Edom, meeting with another delegation, denied the Israelites per mission to pass through his realm on their way to Canaan (Nm. 20:14). Kadesh is also where Miriam, the sister of M o ses and Aaron (Nm. 20:1) died and was buried. However, tire lack of any material at Qadesh-Barnea earlier than the tenth century B C E , especially datable pottery, calls the bib lical traditions into question. T h e Exodus stories, in their present form, may have originated instead in the period of the monarchy, when pilgrimages to the site may have begun. T h e traditions would then be best understood as etiologies.
gated circle around a central courtyard. Thick layers of ash above the floors in the rooms contained the wheel-made ves sels typically found at tenth-century BCE sites in Israel as well as handmade Negebite ware. An adjacent settlement, made up of several buildings and silos, was uncovered 5 m below the surface just west of the fortress. It too dates to the tenth century B C E . At the north western edge of the site, a room (about 4 x 6 m ) lined with stone benches was found in one of the buildings. Middle Fortress. In the eighth century BCE following what appears to have been a long period of abandonment after the lower fortress was destroyed, a second fortress was erected over its remains. T h e design of this second, or mid dle, fortress differed from that of the first: it was rectangular (about 40 X 60 m) and had eight towers protruding from an outer wall (4 m wide, preserved to a height of 1.8 m). The fortress itself was surrounded by an earthen rampart supported by a revetment wall (2.5 m tall) and by a 4-meterwide fosse that was 2.5 m deep on all but the south side, where the fortress was protected by the steep wall of the wadi. Two silos, one rectangular (3,8 X 5.5 m) and the other round (2 m in diameter), were found inside the fortress. Just outside the north wall of the fortress, flanked by two of the eight towers, were four stone-built granaries, the largest measuring 1.8 m in diameter. West of the granaries, a clay oven (tabun) was found in a room (3 X 4 m) abutting the wall of the fortress. Among the material remains were wheel-made vessels characteristic of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE and many examples of Negebite ware. Two ostraca were found, one the base of an oil lamp and the other tire rim of a Ne gebite bowl; each carries a fragmentary Hebrew inscription that is probably part of a name. The internal structures indicated three settlement phases, which demonstrates that the middle fortress was inhabited for a long period of time. T h e principal phase was distin guished by the division of buildings inside tire fortress into northern and southern blocks separated by a street (3.5 m wide). T h e remains of five mud-brick structures (each ab out 10 m long) were uncovered in the northern block. These structures also were separated from each other by narrow
In 1914 C. L. Woolley and T . E. Lawrence found the first remains at Qadesh-Barnea, fortress with eight towers (see below). [See the biographies of Woolley and Lawrence.} In 1956 a team led by Moshe Dothan for the Israel Department of Antiquities partially excavated the fortress, further exposing its ground plan and dating it. Rudolph Cohen excavated for ten seasons between 1976 and 1982, during which he com pleted the exposure of the upper fortress and uncovered two additional fortresses, each built on the remains of the other following a succession of destructions and indicating occu pation at the site from tire tenth through the sixth centuries B C E , probably with periods of abandonment. Cohen also dis covered, built on the remains of the last fortress, an unfor tified settlement dating to the fifth-fourth centuries B C E . Lower F o r t r e s s . T h e earliest—and apparently the small est (27 m in diameter)—of tire three fortresses dates to the tenth century B C E . Its remains indicate that this lower for tress was made up of casement rooms arranged in an elon
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streets (1.5 m wide). In the northwestern block, adjacent units (each 7 X 10 m) contained five elongated rooms (about 2.5 X 4 m) and mud-brick installations showed evi dence of fire damage. South of the adjacent units a plastered channel and cistern were uncovered. The cistern (about 10 m in diameter), which was twenty-five steps deep, could hold about 180 cu m of water and was fed via the channel by a spring outside the fortress. [See Cisterns.] U p p e r Fortress. Not very long after the middle fortress was destroyed—possibly in the mid-seventh century BCE— another fortress was built on its remains. This third, or u p per, fortress also was rectangular; it made use of features of the second fortress, but its outer wall was ringed by about twenty casement rooms. As a result, although the fosse was still useful, tire earthern rampart had to be brought into alignment with the casements' outer wall. T h e internal plan of the upper fortress differed impor tantly from that of the second in that its inside structures were not divided into distinct blocks. In the northwest corner of the upper fortress was a rectangular building (10 X 25 m) with three elongated rooms whose floors were covered with a thick layer of ash and to which access was through an open courtyard (10 X 15 m). At the western end of the stone-paved courtyard a round mud-brick structure (1.9 m in diameter) was preserved to a height of 1.2 m. As was the case with the two earlier fortresses, an abundance of pottery was found on the floors of structures inside the upper for tress, both sherds and complete specimens, including wheelmade vessels characteristic of the seventh and sixth centuries B C E and of Negebite ware. Because the level of the fortress
QADESH-BARNEA.
had been raised, the number of steps to enter the cistern was increased. Many ostraca were found throughout the upper fortress. East of the cistern and alongside the casement rooms on the south, a large ostracon was found in a building with many rooms. Of these inscribed sherds, one (22 X 23 cm) consists of six columns of numbers and measurements in a hieratic script. The numbers are arranged in columns of one to ten, ten to one hundred (in units of ten), one hundred to one thousand (in units of one hundred), and one thousand to ten thousand (in units of one thousand), and may have been used to practice arithmetic. Another ostracon (10 X 15 cm) has three columns of script, mostiy numbers. T h e last col umn is the clearest: it contains a series of hieratic numerals that reaches 800; next to each number is inscribed grh, the Hebrew word for the smallest unit of weight then known (about half a gram). A third ostracon (45 X 45 cm), con sisting of the Flebrew letters zht, probably is a fragment of an abecedary. T h e upper fortress was most likely destroyed by fire in a violent attack. T h e destruction likely took place concurrently with the conquest of Judah and the destruction in Jerusalem of the First Temple in 586 B C E . Postexilic Period: An Unfortified S e t t l e m e n t . In the northern and southern parts of the upper fortress, two small rooms dating to the postexilic period (fifth-fourth centuries BCE)—the period following the return of the Exiles from Babylon—were found that had been used by an unfortified settlement. T h e casements of the Early Iron Age fortresses also provided temporary housing for the new settlers. Most
General overview of excavations.
(Courtesy R. C o h e n )
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QAL AT AL-BAHRAIN of the finds from this period, including imported Greek ware, however, were recovered from pits. Among them was a yhd seal impression, found elsewhere as well in postexilic Judah, and an ostracon containing the Hebrew words 'skr tb ("offering" or "merchandise"). BIBLIOGRAPHY C o h e n , R u d o l p h . " D i d I Excavate K a d e s h - B a r n e a ? " Biblical Archae ology Review 7.3 (1981): 21-33. C o h e n , R u d o l p h . "Excavations at K a d e s h - B a r n e a , 1976-1978." Bibli cal Archaeologist 44 (1981): 93-107. C o h e n , R u d o l p h . Kadesh-Barnea: A Fortress from the Time of the Judaean Kingdom. Israel M u s e u m Catalogue, no. 233. Jerusalem, 1983. C o h e n , Rudolph. " Q a d e s h - B a r n e a . " Le Monde de la Bible 39 (1985): 9-27. D o d i a n , M o s h e . " T h e Fortress at K a d e s h - B a r n e a . " Israel Exploration Journal 1$ (1965): 134-151. Hogarth, David G . " T h e Wilderness of Z i n . " Palestine Exploration Fund 23 (1914-1915): 61-63. R a u m e r , Karl G e o r g von. Palastina. 2d ed. Leipzig, 1838. See pages 480-486. Robinson, Edward. Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions: A Journal of Travels in the Year 1S38. 2d ed. Boston, i860. See pages I75ff. Schmidt, Nathaniel. " K a d e s h B a r n e a . " Journal of Biblical Literature 29 (1910): 61-76. Vaux, Roland de. "Nouvelles recherches dans la region d e Cades I IV." Revue Biblique 47 (1938): 89-97. RUDOLPH COHEN
QAL'AT AL-BAHRAIN, site in the Arabian Gulf, lo cated on the north coast of the island of Bahrain, with an areal extent of about 18 ha (46 acres), and its largest settle ment ( 2 6 ° I 3 ' 2 8 " N , 50°28'45" E). Excavations began at the site in 1954, when Peter Vilhelm Glob and a Danish team from the University of Aarhus's Prehistoric Museum Moesgard, initiated work that was to continue uninterrupted until 1965. A follow-up season was carried out by T . Geoffrey Bibby in 1970, and in 1977 a new program of excavations, concentrating principally on a Parthian/Early Islamic for tress to the north of the main mound, was begun by the French archaeologist Monique Kervran. During the 1980s, the Bahrain Department of Antiquities carried out extensive restoration of the sixteenth-century Portuguese fort tihat crowns the site. In 1988 the French excavations were re sumed under the direction of Pierre Lombard, who began work near the site of an Iron Age building originally exposed by the Danes, in a project which is still in progress. The occupation of Qal'at al-Bahrain dates to about 2400 B C E . Late Early Dynastic and/or Early Akkadian-related pot tery, as well as sherds of painted Umm an-Nar pottery from the Oman peninsula occur in the settlement's basal city I levels alongside a local "chain-ridged" ware typical of Bah rain and the adjacent parts of the northeast Arabian main land during that period. Soft-stone weights (imported from
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Oman) and cubical chert weights of Harappan type also ap pear in late city I contexts. At the beginning of the period known as city II (c. 2100 B C E ) , a distinctive stamp-seal form appears. T h e earliest so-called Persian Gulf seals are round, with a high, grooved boss and display animals and other nonhuman motifs. Nearly a dozen of the earliest seals also bear short Harappan inscriptions together with a humped bull (zebu) shown in profile. The iconography suggests that an Indian element in the population, or trade with India, played an important role at the site in the late third millen nium. In about 2000 B C E , a 3.5-meter-thick stone wall with a rubble core was built around the settlement. A system of lanes and streets, with well-planned houses, was exposed in the Danish excavation of levels dating to this period. A more developed seal type (Dilmun seals) with incised lines and four dotted double circles on the boss was in use from about 2000 to 1700 B C E . Seals of this type show a complex ico nography that includes a wide variety of human, animal, and architectural features. Certain iconographic and stylistic de tails suggest that Dilmun glyptic may have influenced An atolian glyptic of the Old Assyrian caravan period (e.g., at sites like Acemhoytik). Links to Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian Ur are also clear, both from cuneiform and glyptic evidence. An Amorite element, perhaps originating on the mainland opposite Bahrain, appears to have been present at Qal'at al-Bahrain as well, for at least one cune iform text found there contains several Amorite personal names. City III shows strong ties to the Kassite state, and a sizable proportion of Kassite pottery types appears in Qal atal-Bahrain's ceramic assemblage of the mid-second millennium BCE [See Kassites.] A large building from that period, which contained thousands of burnt date stones, has been identi fied as a storehouse. Above this level, in city IV levels, is a building complex that is, in some ways, reminiscent of NeoAssyrian and Neo-Babylonian palace architecture. Ceramic bathtub coffins, with close analogues in Neo-Babylonian Mesopotamia, were buried in the ruins of the building after its abandonment. City V represents the Hellenistic and Par thian occupation of the site, probably extending into the Early Sasanian period; city VI was the designation used for the later Islamic remains. A square fortress with round cor ner towers, originally excavated by the Danish expedition and later reinvestigated in 1977-1983 by Monique Kervran for the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, was probably founded in the second or third century C E under Parthian or Characene influence and then rebuilt and reused in the thirteenth century. Imported Chinese ceramics and coins bear witness to the existence of far-flung trade with East Asia at this time. T h e largest monument on the site, however, is a fortress originally built by a local Arab dynasty and taken over and remodeled by the Portuguese in the sixc
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QAL'AT AL-BAHRAIN. View of QaTat al-Bahrain. T h e P o r t u g u e s e fort lies in t h e b a c k g r o u n d , t h e N e o - A s s y r i a n building c o m p l e x i n the f o r e g r o u n d . (Courtesy D . Potts)
teenth century. The fortress, which is shown clearly on Por tuguese drawings of the period, was surrounded by a dry moat. As the main ancient settlement on the north coast of Bahrain island, Qal'at al-Bahrain was ancestral to the later population centers of Bilad al-Qadim and Manama. [See also Bahrain; Dilmun.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bibby, Geoffrey. Looking for Dilmun. N e w York, 1969. Popular account of the Danish Gulf expedition, with primary reference t o the work carried out on Bahrain and the search for Dilmun. Khalifa, Shaikha Haya A. al, and Michael Rice, eds. Bahrain through the Ages: The Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 6 . Proceedings of a confer ence held in 1 9 8 3 ; touches on most aspects of Bahraini archaeology. Kervran, Monik, et al. Fouilles a Qal'at al-Bahrein/Excavation of Qal'at al-Bahrain, lire partielist part, 1977-1979. Bahrain, 1 9 8 2 . Prelimi nary report on the first three seasons of excavation at Qal'at al-Bah rain by the French mission. L o m b a r d , Pierre, and Monik Kervran, eds. Bahrain National Museum Archaeological Collections, vol. 1 , A Selection of Pre-Islamic Antiquities from Excavations, 1954-197$. Bahrain, 1 9 8 9 . Catalog of objects in the Bahrain National M u s e u m , m a n y of which come from the D a n ish excavations at Qal'at al-Bahrain. Potts, Daniel T . The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1 9 9 0 . General survey of the archaeology of the Gulf region, with reference to the occupation of Qal'at al-Bahrain in all periods, D. T . POTTS
QAL'AT SIM'AN (Ar., "sanctuary of St. Simeon"), site situated on a promontory overlooking the 'Afrin Valley, at tire heart of tire Syrian tetrapolis in Antiochea, 60 km (37
mi.) from Aleppo; 80 km (50 mi.) from Antioch, 140 1cm (87 mi.) from Apamea, and 180 km (112 mi.) from Latakia. Although some of the earliest visitors to the site published descriptions and drawings (A. Drummond, 1754), it is since the middle of the nineteenth century that this monumental group of buildings has been the subject of exploration and detailed publications. Melchior de Vogue completed the first important study of the site, and those by M. van Berchem and E. Fatio, Howard C. Butler, J. Mattern, D . Krencker, and Georges Tchalenlco followed. Since 1980, Jean-Pierre Sodini and Jean-Luc Biscop have made regular expeditions for purposes of excavation and survey, under the aegis of the French Institute of Archaeology of the Near East (IFAPO) in Damascus. [See the biographies of Vogue and Butler.]
The promontory the sanctuary occupies is the site of the column where St. Simeon practiced his asceticism from 412 to 459. According to Tchalenlco, the sanctuary is on an ar tificial platform formed by the leveling of the north-south ridge and by the embankment of the east and west flanks. The monuments cover a surface of approximately 1,200 sq m. T h e buildings are divided into two groups: to the north, a cross-shaped martyrion, a monastery, and a conventual tomb; and to the south, a baptistery bordered by a church and propylaeum. In between are many inns on the east, west, and south. A sacred way from the village of Telanissos (Deir Sim'an), situated below, leads to the sanctuary from the south; this sacred way, with shops on both sides, passes through an arch and then climbs the slope to tire propy laeum.
QAL'AT SIM A N Verifying the date of the construction of Qal'at Sim'an remains elusive. What is known is that in 472/73, the date the life of St. Simeon was written in Syriac, there was as yet no edifice around the column. By 517, however, monks from Apamea were maldng pilgrimages to die sanctuary. Its con struction should be placed in the context of the politics of Zeno: St. Daniel had learned from him that he had had the relics of St. Simeon transported from Antioch to Constan tinople, and so between 471 and 474 a martyrion was con structed to shelter them. It was perhaps on the urging of St. Daniel, and finally to appease tlie religious discord dividing the patriarchate of Antioch, which was well within the line of the Henoticon (482), that Zeno had the martyrion built around the column on which the first of the Stylites had lived. The work must have been finished before 491/92, for by that time the church at Basufan, a partial copy of tlie sanctuary of Qal'at Sim'an, had been built. For an enterprise of this magnitude, it took a relatively short amount of time to build. Tchalenko calls attention to the results of that haste: faulty connections in the different decorative elements of the martyrion, demonsttating tiiat the gantry had been open in many places at once. [See Martyrion.] The martyrion is made up of four three-naved basilicas positioned in the form of tlie Greek cross. [See Basilicas.] The basilicas meet again in the shape of an octagon formed by eight large arches. T h e column of the saint (18-20 m high), stands in tlie center of this arrangement. Only the rocky base and a block of stone of the column remain, per haps because it was cut up to be sold as relics. T h e column was square-cut and had three superimposed shafts. T h e saint lived on a platform enclosed by a railing. Of the eight arches, four open onto the basilicas and the other four onto small apses which made the links. The largest of tlie basilicas is on the east. It is the true sanctuary in which the liturgy unfolds. It ends in three projecting apses. T h e west basilica, which opens to the outside, has the function of a rostrum. The cult of the saint was therefore disassociated from tlie divine cult, which had its center around die octagon. T h e south basilica is preceded by a narthex to which access was through a great central arch of two arches of weaker bearing. T h e monastery, which is adjacent to the martyrion to die southeast, includes a two-story building witii porticoes on three sides (there is none on the east), placed at right angles. T h e porticoes form, with the martyrion's south and east ba silicas, a rectangular court that opens to the outside onto a small church. Outbuildings were joined to the principal building. T o tlie north of the martyrion, tlie collective tomb is an example of a one-nave basilica. [See Tombs.] The southern group of buildings includes, most impor tantly, the propylaeum, which is situated 80 m south of the baptistery: it opens with two series of three arches onto a vast space bordered to the south and west by inns and to the east by die baptistery. [See Baptisteries.] T h e inns are
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one-story buildings that open on one side, like the houses, and are preceded by pillared porticoes. T h e baptistery is an octagon inscribed in a square. T h e principal room is square in plan. It is topped by an octagonal drum covered by an eight-sided pyramidal roof and flanked by three long rooms replaced on the east by an apse that contains the baptismal tank. Entrance and egress are by means of stairs located in side rooms, not in tlie central room. Qal'at Sim'an poses three archaeological problems: how die octagon of the martyrion was covered; its place in tlie evolution of the architecture and ornamentation of churches in Syria's limestone massif; and the duration of its occupa tion. By observing and identifying fallen blocks, Krencker was the first to show that the octagon was not originally open but covered. Fie proposed a wooden dome, an untenable hypothesis because wood would have been too heavy for the stone construction on which it must have rested. Taking its span into account, an exterior diameter of 29 m, with a height of 18 m, the drum, with a height of 10 m, on which the roof would have exerted its force, would have inevitably been dislocated. (It is made of courses not exceeding 90 cm in width and its blocks are laid on top of each other without mortar or another bonding substance. Tchalenko has pro posed an eight-sided pyramidal roof, like that of the baptis tery. T o reduce the load and the lateral thrust, he suggested that there were intermediate supports between the column and the pillars bearing the arches of the octagon. In the tenth century, at the time of the Byzantine reconquest, tlie floor of the octagon was recovered with tiles. Sodini and Biscop removed tiiat floor, under which a beaten-earth floor re vealed no trace of the base of an intermediary pillar. They hypothesize that tlie roof was in fact an eight-sided pyramid, as Tchalenko thought, but tiiat it covered the entire surface of the octagon. The second problem, the place of Qal'at Sim'an in the religious architecture of the limestone massif of northern Syria, has been studied by Butier, Tchalenko, Charles Strube, F. W. Deichmann, Sodini, and A. Naccache. For Butler, Qal'at Sim'an marks a break in die architectural and ornamental evolution of die churches of the massif, in which mediods and ornamentation appear that were to experience wide diffusion in the churches of the sixth century, and no tably in the basilica of Qalbloze, which he dates later than St. Simeon. Tchalenko, however, followed by Strube and Deichmann, placed the construction of Qalbloze in about 450, before tiiat of Qal'at Sim'an. Fie established also tiiat the church of Bettir, close to Qalbloze in the Jebel el-A'la, and dated by inscription to 471, was a pared-down copy of its neighbor—each using pillars, rather than columns, to support the great arches of die nave, in a pure local tradition. This long-accepted view is now challenged by Sodini and Biscop, who show that Bettir combines two stages (perhaps three according to Naccache) and that tlie inscription dating
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the church refers only to the first stage; they show further that the inscription describes a one-nave basilica, which owes nothing to Qalbloze. The terminus ante quem of 471 for Qalbloze thus disappears. In one study (Biscop and Sodini, 1984), the two authors show that the apse of Qal'at Sim'an combined two superimposed rows of columns. This feature gave the basilica a plan constituting a truly orna mental overlaid order. The other churches of northern Syria with columned apses show the same device, but incom pletely: they were imperfect copies and Qalbloze does not belong to the category. Naccache, in his work on the churches of Antiochea, drew up a complete inventory of ornamental innovations at Qal'at Sim'an that had also been found in later churches. If Qal bloze is dated to about 450, these innovations would have had to have existed without imitation for nearly forty years before being reprised at Qal'at Sim'an. It is thus preferable to reestablish tire evolution of the decoration of churches by saying that the great edifice of Qal'at Sim'an, constructed by the state, owes its form to a foreign master worker and that its innovations were imported. On tire third problem, the duration of occupation at the site, the excavations have been less helpful. It is known, from Michael the Syrian, that the sanctuary was burned in about 546 and that it was then that the octagon became open—a description confirmed by Evagrius after his visit in about 561. According to him, the neighboring peasants used to go into the sanctuary with their beasts of burden and dance around the column. The monastery was in use until nearly the second third of the tenth century. The emperors of By zantium, Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969) and John I Tzimiskes, reconquered the occidental part of northern Syria. The soldiers who occupied Qal'at Sim'an evicted its monks and turned the sanctaary into a fortress to guard the border that henceforth separated the empire from the emirate of Aleppo. It was they who built the surrounding wall and the towers that still stand and who placed a tiled floor in the octagon (see above). The Byzantine garrison remained in place until the end of the eleventh century and the conquest by the Ottoman Turks, Sodini's excavation in the area west of the baptistery attests to an occupation uninterrupted until the Mamluk period. BIBLIOGRAPHY Biscop, Jean-Luc, and Jean-Pierre Sodini. "Qal'at Sem'an et les chevets a colonnes de Syrie du N o r d . " Syria 61 (1984): 267-330. Biscop, Jean-Luc, and Jean-Pierre Sodini. " T r a v a u x a Qal'at S e m ' a n . " In Acts of the Eleventh International Congress of Christian Archaeology, vol. 2, p p . 1675-1695. R o m e , 1989. Biscop, Jean-Luc, et al. "Qal'at Sem'an: Quelques donnees nouvelles." In Acts of the Twelfth International Congress of Christian Archaeology. R o m e , 1996. Deichmann, F . W . Qalb Lbze und Qal'at Sem'an. M u n i c h , 1982. Shaath, Shawqi. Qal'at Sim'an (in Arabic). 2d ed. Halab, Syria, 1991. Sodini, Jean-Pierre. "Qal'at Sem'an: Ein Wallfahrtszentrum." In Syr-
ien: Von den Aposteln zu den Kalifen, edited by Erwin M . R u p r e c h t s berger, p p . 128-143. Linzer Archaologische F o r s c h u n g e n , 21. Linz, Austria, 1993. Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: Le massif du Belus a I'epoque romaine. 3 vols. Paris, 1953-1958. See volume 1, pages 205-276; volume 3, page 124. GEORGES TATE
QARQUR, TELL, site located less than 2 km (1 mi.) east of the Orontes River and about 7 km (4 mi.) south of Djisr Choghour, the major crossing point on the Orontes for the road from Aleppo to Latakia, Syria (35°44' N , 36°2o' E). The fertile Orontes Valley at this point is about 10 km (6 mi.) wide. Tell Qarqur is situated at the northern end of the portion of the valley known as the Ghab. T h e Ghab was once a marshy area that extended south for about 42 km (26 mi.) to Asharneh. According to inscriptions on temple walls at Luxor, in antiquity Egyptian New Kingdom pharaohs hunted elephants in the marshy area. Much later, the Car thaginian Hannibal trained soldiers there in the art of using the elephant in warfare. Tell Qarqur has been equated with Karkara/Qarqar men tioned in the records of Shalmaneser III (958-824 BCE) and Sargon II (721-705 BCE) of Assyria. The texts mention that the site was destroyed several times. In Shalmaneser Ill's monolith inscription it is called the royal residence of King Irhuleni of Hamath. In the annals of the second year of Sar gon II it is mentioned as the favorite city of Iaubi'di, king of Hama. Both Assyrian rulers fought battles in the vicinity of Karkara/Qarqar and confronted the ldng of Hama and a co alition of armies from states in Syria and Palestine. T h e co alition of twelve kings against Shalmaneser included Ahab of Israel, Ba'asa of Ammon, and a contingent of Arab camel riders. The equation of Tell Qarqur with Karkara/Qarqar is still not confirmed. Excavations were undertaken by tire Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research in 1983 and 1984 under the direction of John Lundquist and resumed in 1993 under the direction of Rudolph H. Dornemann. They indicate quite clearly that Tell Qarqur was a major site during the ninth and eighth cenmries B C E , the period that includes the two Assyrian rulers mentioned above. T h e total 55 acres covered by the site may have been occupied then. Iron Age II material was found close to the surface on the highest part of the mound, in area B, in area C (on the western side of the tell), in area A (in a gateway area), and in area D (on the lower portion of the mound). T h e tell consists of two portions, a high, 20-acre southern tell and a lower, 35-acre northern tell. Excavation has been limited to the four areas mentioned. Pottery from the Ayyu bid, Umayyad, Byzantine, Roman, Hellenistic, and Persian periods has been found scattered over the entire surface of the mound; however, only limited architectural remains of any of these periods have been encountered so far. T h e most
QARYAT AL-FAU extensive excavations have concentrated on the gateway area (area A), where several Iron IIA phases have been en countered as well as other substantial wall foundations. In side tire gateway a 2-meter-wide stone-paved street has been traced to 15 m beyond the gateway; tire street is covered in places by 3 m of later erosional deposits washed into the area. T h e ceramic inventory parallels very closely the 'Amuq phase O materials of the ninth and eighth centuries B C E . Red-burnished platters and characteristic jar and cook-pot rims are well represented, as are typical painted wares and imported Cypriot pottery. Bronze Age walls were found downslope in area A, but the most extensive evidence for earlier occupation on the site comes from pottery found in fills associated with tire gateway complex. M B II pottery is present in addition to a very complete tliird-millennium sequence. This raises the possibility that the name of the site may have continued for many millennia and that the reference to a Qarqar in Egyp tian execration texts may prove to be associated with Qarqur as well. A few sherds indicate still earlier material on the site. Dark-faced burnished and impressed sherds of the Neolithic period are contemporary with phases A-B on the 'Amuq plain to the north; painted sherds demonstrate the Ubaid tradition of 'Amuq phases E - F ; and beveled-rim bowl rims and triangular lug handles indicate the 'Amuq phases F - G range of the Uruk through Early Bronze I periods. EB remains include ceramic materials well known from tire 'Amuq area, from the early reserved-slip wares, crosscombed metallic ware sherds, and diminutive ring bases that go with cyma-recta profiled cups, to later plain simple and scrabbled wares with distinctive washes and painted and in cised bands. Also well represented are sherds of red and black burnished or "Khirbet Kerak" ware with its typical
QARYAT AL-FAU.
F i g u r e 1. Architectural
3 71
range of colors and shapes and incised and molded deco ration. BIBLIOGRAPHY D o r n e m a n n , R u d o l p h H . " T h e 1993 Excavations at Tell Q a r q u r . ' M n naks Archeologique Arabes Syriennes (1994), in press. D o r n e m a n n , R u d o l p h H . "Excavations at Tell Q a r q u r , 1994." Annates Archeologique Arabes Syriennes (1995), in press. D o r n e m a n n , R u d o l p h H . " C o m p a r i s o n s in t h e Bronze and Iron Age Inventories between Orontes Valley Sites, Ugarit and Ebla, from the Point of View of Tell Q a r q u r . " I n Proceedings of the International Colloquium, Aleppo a n d t h e Silk Road, Aleppo, Syria, September, 1994. Annales Archeologique Arabes Syriennes (1995), in press. L u n d q u i s t , John. "Tell Q a r q u r — T h e 1983 Season." Annates Archeo logique Arabes Syriennes 33.2 (1983): 273-288. RUDOLPH H . DORNEMANN
QARYAT AL-FAU, site located in southwestern Saudi Arabia at the escarpment of Wadi al-Dawasir and tire T u waiq Mountains on the ancient transpeninsular trade routes linking the South Arabian states not only with Arabian trade centers but with neighboring countries. T h e site is located at the mouth of a dry channel, al-Fau ("the gap"), from which die village acquired its name. Sabaean inscriptions refer to it as Qaryat or Qaryat Dhat Kahl, a deity whose lifesized figure is found on the mountain adjoining al-Fau. The site was discovered accidentally by officials of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company in the 1940s. In 1952 H. St. John Philby, Jacques Ryckmans, and P. Lippens visited tire site and wrote about its archaeological importance. Albert Jamme, with the collaboration of Saudi Arabia's Depart ment of Archaeology and Museums, in 1969 made a study of tire Sabaean rock inscriptions on the Tuwaiq Mountains
remains of the suq at al-Fau. (Courtesy A . T . al-Ansary)
372
QARYAT AL-FAU
flanldng al-Fau. In 1971 Abd al-Rahman al-Ansary surveyed the site and undertook excavations the following year. Twenty seasons of excavations were conducted from 1972 to 1994 tiiat unearthed a full-fledged settlement with unique features and an enormous number of artifacts. The work revealed an advanced stage of civilization that had flourished between about 300 B C E and 300 C E . Stratigraphy revealed two phases at the site: the Minaean period and die Kindite period. The former lasted from tlie third century BCE to the beginning of die first century C E , and die latter from the first half of the first century BCE to the end of third century. For a certain amount of time, the two overlapped and co existed.
A
The site's geographic location was die main factor con tributing to the rise and flourishing of civilization at al-Fau. This is manifested in the large variety of small finds and architectural remains, recovered through excavation: coins; pottery and stone vessels; glass; jewelry; metal objects, in cluding figurines; textiles; ivory and bone objects; inscrip tions; and frescoes. T h e architectural remains include a dou ble-storied market, or suq (30.25 X 25.20 m), which is so far unique in Arabia, with well-planned shops, a courtyard, cor ridors leading to die shops, staircases, wells, and lavatories (see figure 1). Built of stone and mud brick, its wide doors are capped with semicircular lintels. Al-Fau's five temples are also unique: they are the only ones discovered to date within Saudi Arabia. They are de voted to die gods Shams, Sin, Wud, Abat, and al-Hawar, and seem to belong to different periods. T h e figurines found inside and outside the temples resemble those from Syria, Egypt, and the Mediterranean basin, suggesting foreign links and influences in religion and civilization at al-Fau (see figure 2), The lower portion of an alabaster statuette was recovered from the Wud temple along with an incense burner for burning aromatics for the god. [See Incense.] From a room adjoining the Wud temple were recovered bronze figurines of Herakles and Hippocrates. The blending of different architectural elements is evident in the general plan of the temples, which are rectangular and similar to those found in contemporary South Arabian states as well as at die Awratian temple at Altin Tepe in Anatolia. All the inscriptions, are in South Arabian. [See South Arabian.] The site's social organization is demonstrated by the va riety of burial tombs. Three groups of tombs for three cat egories of people were distinguished: kings, nobility, and the general population. The tombs are underground, perma nent stone structures with arches over the doorways and stairs. Rectangular sections, or chambers, to accommodate several peole, suggest that these were family tombs. T h e tombs are like underground houses. A Sabaean inscription on one tombstone reads "The tomb of Mu'awiyah ibn Rabia al / al-Qahtani king of Qahtan and Mudhhyg built b y . . . . / His servant HaFam ibn Beran of al-ti.. . . " Gold jewelry was
QARYAT AL-FAU. excavation
F i g u r e 2 . Statuette
of Harpocrales
found
during
of al-Fau. (Courtesy A. T . al-Ansary)
recovered from one of the tombs. [See Tombs; Grave Goods.] It's municipal planners assigned particular areas for tlie different town functions—the king's palace, the market, re ligious shrines, public buildings, tombs, and so forth. A res idential area with well-planned houses, streets, lanes, hotels, rest-houses, water channels, a water-storage tank, overns, heartiis, and lavatories gives a vivid picture of the life and society in the town in pre-Islamic Arabia. By all standards, apparent from the artifacts, its society was learned and ad vanced. A variety of pottery (coarse, fine, and glazed) for different domestic purposes has been used in dating the town. Some
QASILE, TELL sherds, inscribed in South Arabian, bear die name of the god Kahl or the name of the Himyarite king. [See Himyar.] Nabatean sherds found at al-Fau suggest commercial rela tions with the Nabateans who ruled in north-western Arabia. [See Nabateans.] Soft-stone vessels with geometric designs similar to those found in the Arabian Gulf states were re covered from the houses at al-Fau. They probably were lo cally made, for the raw material was available nearby, in Saudi Arabia, at ad-Dawadmi, at-Ta'if, and Hajlah-Abha, among other sites. T h e Kinda ldngdom minted its own silver and bronze coins in various denominations for domestic consumption and for commercial transactions with traders passing through it. T h e coins depict their god Kahl and bear the monogram of Kahl in South Arabian. Their nature and mode of manufacture suggest the profound influence of the South Arabian states. Wall paintings found in the settlement depict daily life, socioeconomic conditions, manners, customs, costumes, and leisure activities. Among the scenes depicted are a hunt, chasing game, royalty on horseback, and a man holding on to a camel. Animals, fruits, and naked people are also de picted. T h e paintings also carry rather short inscriptions in South Arabian. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ansary, A b d u l R a h m a n T . al-. "Inscriptions from Qaryat a l - F a u " (in Arabic). Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Riyadh
3 (1973-
1974).
Ansary, A b d u l R a h m a n T . al-. " N e w Light o n t h e State of K i n d a from tlie Antiquities a n d Inscriptions of Qaryat a l - F a u " (in Arabic). I n Sources for the History of Arabia: Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Studies in the History of Arabia, 23rd-28th April 1971, edited by Abdul R a h m a n T . al-Ansary et al., p p . 3 - 1 1 . Studies in the History of Arabia, vol. 1. Riyadh, 1 9 7 9 . Ansary, A b d u l R a h m a n T . al-. Qaryat al-Fau: A Portrait of Pre-Islamic Civilization in Saudi Arabia. N e w York, 1 9 8 2 . J a m m e , Albert. " S a b a e a n Rock Inscriptions from Qaryat al-Fau." Misceilanees d'Ancienl Arabe 4 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 - 9 6 . L i p p e n s , Philippe. Expedition en Arabia Centrale. Paris, 1 9 5 6 . Philby, H . St. John. " T w o N o t e s from Central Arabia," Geographical Journal 1 1 3 ( 1 9 4 9 ) : 8 6 - 9 3 . ABDUL RAHMAN T , AL-ANSAUY
QASILE, TELL, small mound (14 acres) located on a sandstone ridge on die northern bank of the Yarkon River, about 1.5 km (1 mi.) from die Mediterranean coast (today in die center of a northern suburb of Tel Aviv). T h e ancient name of die site is unknown, but it may be one of the towns of the tribe of D a n in the region of the Yarkon, such as Harakon (Jos. 19:46). T h e site's proximity to the river and tlie coast made it a convenient harbor for trading ships. In the Iron Age I, its location made Tell Qasile a commercial center, a role formerly played by the Canaanite town at Tel
373
Gerisa, on the opposite bank of tlie river. While maritime trade was probably a major feature in the town's economy, agriculture was as well. A relatively large number of hip popotamus bones found at the site suggests that the animal was part of the local diet. The site came to the attention of scholars in the late 1940s, when two Paleo-Hebrew inscriptions incised on potsherds were found on its surface. One reads "Gold of Ophir (be longing) to Beth-Horon, thirty shekels." T h e second reads "(Belonging) to the king, one thousand and one hundred [units] of oil. . . Hiyahu,") Excavations at the site were conducted by Benjamin Ma zar from 1949 to 1951 and in 1959, and by Amihai Mazar from 1971-1974 and from 1982-1992, on behalf of the In stitute of Archaeology of die Hebrew University of Jerusa lem and the Ha-aretz Museum in Tel Aviv. Iron Age I: U r b a n D e v e l o p m e n t . The major period of occupation at Tell Qasile was in Iron Age I (twelfth-elev enth centuries B C E ) . T h e town was probably founded by the Philistines in connection witii tiieir expansion from the nu cleus of their settlement in the heart of Philistia. Philistine bichrome ware was introduced during this period (c. 1 1 5 0 B C E ) , replacing the earlier Philistine monochrome pottery, a local product made in the Mycenaean IIIC style. T h e latter pottery was not found at Tell Qasile, but bichrome ware was abundant in the earliest occupation level on the mound (sttatum XII). It continued to appear in large quantities in the following level (stratum XI) and to some extent also in the tiiird level (stratum X). In stratom X, however, a local decorative style appeared, characterized by black paint on red slip, a degeneration of tire original Philistine pottery. Strata XII-X represent the town's gradual development, with transitions unmarked by violent destruction. However, stratum X, tlie level in which the town reached the peak of its urban development and economic prosperity, came to a violent end, probably as a result of King David's annexation of tlie coast north of Jaffa to his kingdom in the early tenth century B C E . Evidence of the town's urban development in Iron I was uncovered over a large area: more than 2,500 sq. m were excavated. In its earliest phase (stratum XII), the town was only partially built up. Thick deposits of gray ashy earth in the remaining large open areas constitute evidence of a com paratively long occupation. Mud-brick structures without stone foundations were built on bedrock in this stratum. A public building south of tlie temple (see below) had a large hall with benches along the walls and a hearth at its center. T h e latter element is foreign to Canaanite architecture and may reflect Aegean or Cypriot traditions brought by the Philistines from their homeland. In the following phase (stratum XI), more substantial buildings were erected witii stone foundations and a mudbrick superstructure. Many of the stratum X buildings had
374
QASILE, TELL
probably been founded in stratum XI, yet their exact plans in stratum XI are not entirely clear. In the third phase (stra tum X), the town was fully developed. As a result of the fire that desttoyed the town, its mud-brick walls were found fired and, thus, well preserved. The excavations revealed a careful planning, with an orthogonal grid of streets that cre ated clearly defined blocks of buildings. In a residential quar ter in the southern part of the mound, seven houses, almost identical in plan, were excavated. Most of them are rectan gular (about ioo sq m), of the pillared house, or four-room house type. [See Four-room House.] Such houses are one of the cultural features that characterize various ethnic groups coexisting during the Iron Age I in ancient Palestine. The structures contained a central space (open courtyard?) with a roofed side space paved with flagstones that was probably used as an animal shelter. This side space was sep arated from the courtyard by a row of four or five pillars made of wooden beams standing on end on stone bases. On one or both sides of the courtyard were additional rooms. In the courtyard itself were various installations: baking ov ens, grinding stones, wine presses, looms (piles of up to forty clay loom weights were found in almost every house, evi
QASILE, TELL.
F i g u r e 1.
View of the Philistine
dence for home industry). In one house a bronze workshop was found that contained a circular lain and two smelting crucibles. Each of the houses contained dozens of pottery vessels; some houses had storerooms, each containing more than fifty storejars of about 20 liters in volume. T h e storejars were probably used as portable containers in the trade of liquid commodities such as wine and oil. They would have been transported by the ships anchored in the Yarkon. Two public buildings were also constructed in this quar ter: a storehouse composed of a rectangular hall divided by two rows of pillars (one of the earliest examples of the store houses that became common in the Iron II period). Another building probably served an administrative function: it con tained three rectangular storerooms, in addition to a number of other rooms, and a large hall. No fortifications could be detected because of severe erosion along the edge of the mound. However, on the western slope of the mound, a short segment of a thick mud-brick wall was recovered that may be a remnant of a city wall. Iron Age I: S a c r e d Area. T h e Iron Age sacred area at Tell Qasile is the only one in ancient Philistia that has been completely excavated. It exhibits extensive architectural
temple (stratum Xf
looking east. (Courtesy A. M a z a r )
QASILE, TELL
375
changes over a comparatively short time. T h e architecture and many of the cult objects from its sanctuary are unique. Although rooted mainly in local Canaanite traditions, some Aegean and Cypriot components are recognizable. In stratum XII, a modest shrine was constructed on bed rock: a one-room structure (outer dimensions 6.4 X 6.6 m) with benches along its walls and a raised platform in front of die entrance, which was at the center of the east facade. A large courtyard with an auxiliary room was found east of the shrine. In stratum XI, the older shrine went out of use and was replaced by a larger temple with stone walls (outer dimensions 7.75 X 8.50 m). T h e entrance was at the end of the east facade; inside the building benches lined the walls and an inner room served as a treasury. T h e holy of holies was probably in a niche opposite the entrance. Attached to the temple on the west was a small mud-brick shrine widi a bent-axis approach, benches lining its walls, and a raised platform in its southwestern corner. In the large courtyard in front of the temple were two attached auxiliary rooms. A bothros (Gk., a pit where sacred objects were buried) found in the courtyard contained layers of animal bones, discarded cult vessels, and many pottery vessels. T h e plans of both the temple and the shrine are unknown in Canaanite architec ture. This unique combination of a main temple and a side shrine with a bent-axis approach recalls the somewhat ear lier sacred complex at Philakopi, on the island of Melos. T h e stratum X temple represents a rebuilding and en largement of the previous strucmre (see figure 1 ) . An an techamber was added on the east, enlarging die building to 8 X 14.5 m. T h e antechamber created a bent-axis approach to the main hall. Stepped plastered benches were con structed along the walls of the antechamber and the main hall. T h e roof of the latter was supported by two cedar-wood columns that stood on cylindrical stone bases running along the hall's long axis. A raised platform was located opposite the entrance to the main hall; behind the platform a narrow cell was used perhaps as a treasury. A courtyard north and east of the temple was enclosed by stone walls. In the court yard in front of the temple the square foundation of a sac rificial altar was found. T h e small shrine of the previous stratum continued in use, but with its own fenced courtyard and an auxiliary room used as a kitchen. A considerable number of ceramic cult objects was found in the sanctuary. Some are based on local Canaanite or Egyptian traditions, while others are original shapes with al most no precedents. Among them is a plaque showing the facade of a shrine and two figures of what may be goddesses that were intentionally destroyed in antiquity; an anthro pomorphic vessel with breasts serving as spouts (see figure 2); a lion-shaped cup made in a tradition known from Ugarit and paralleled at other Iron I sites settled by Sea Peoples; a large jar with five openings that may have been used to hold sacred plants in the temple; various cylindrical stands dec orated with animal and human figures; and offering bowls
F i g u r e 2 . Anthropomorphic libation vessel found in the Philistine sanctuary. (Courtesy A. Mazar)
QASILE, TELL,
decorated with bird figurines. Among the metal objects were an iron knife with bronze rivets and an ivory handle that ends in a ring-shaped pommel and a bronze ax/adze, both known in the Aegean and Cyprus but foreign to local Ca naanite traditions, T h e Iron I culmre at Tell Qasile as revealed in tire dwell ings and sanctuary retains many Canaanite characteristics; it can drerefore be assumed that indigenous Canaanites were an important component of the local population. However, the abundance of Philistine pottery and the appearance of Philistine motifs on several cult objects, as well as cultural elements that retain Aegean traditions, lead to the conclu sion that Philistines founded the site and were the leading element in its social structure. Following die violent destruction and burning of stratum X, the town was rebuilt, in the tenth century B C E . The two strata that can be dated to this period (strata IX-VIII) give
376
QASR AL-HALLABAT
evidence of the town's partial rebuilding. The new town was a pale reflection of its predecessor—smaller in area and much less densely built. Some of the older buildings were reconstructed with modifications, but other houses went out of use and paved open spaces replaced them. Stone-lined silos were found in several places. T h e ruined stratum X temple was reconstructed to some extent, but it is doubtful whether it was a roofed structure in this phase. Around it was a large open space that was occasionally repaved with a new lime floor. T h e pottery in this period is characterized by red slip and hand burnishing, typical of the tenth century B C E ; Philistine painted pottery disappeared altogether. It seems that during this period Tell Qasile served as a port town for the united kingdom under David and Solo mon. The town was probably destroyed by Pharaoh Sheshonq on his return to Egypt from Megiddo. Yet, it is difficult to say whether he destroyed stratum IX or VIII. If the former is the case, than stratum VIII denotes a partial rebuilding of the town after this destruction, in the ninth century B C E . E n d of t h e Iron Age. After a long gap in occupation, a small settlement was founded at Tell Qasile in the late sev enth century BCE. Agricultural installations found around the tell are evidence of a small farm. However, the Hebrew in scriptions mentioned above hint that the site had been an administrative and trading center in the eighth-seventh cen turies BCE. Persian Period. A single building with a frontal fenced courtyard probably served as an agricultural or administra tive center in the fifth-fourth centuries BCE. Refuse pits from this period were dug around the building, and a square well was found at the foot of the mound. Imported Greek pottery is evidence of maritime trade connections. T h e site may have been destroyed during the conquest of Alexander the Great. Late Periods. Evidence of some limited activity during the Hellenistic and Roman periods was found on the summit of the mound. A large building with rows of pillars may have been a marketplace. In the Byzantine period a small village was scattered over and around the mound. A synagogue with a Samaritan inscription was found at the foot of tire mound, and a bathhouse was uncovered on its summit. In the Early Islamic period a caravanserai was located at the summit of the mound. In the Middle Ages a small sugar factory was constructed there, probably to process the sugar cane being grown in the vicinity. BIBLIOGRAPHY Maisler [Mazar], Benjamin. " T h e Excavations at Tell Qasile: Prelimi nary R e p o r t . " Israel Exploration Journal 1.2 ( 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 1 ) : 6 1 - 7 6 , 1 2 5 - 1 4 0 . T h e first seasons of excavations. Mazar, Amihai. Excavations at Tell Qasile, part 1 , The Philistine Sanc tuary: Architecture and Cidt Objects. Q e d e m , vol. 1 2 . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 0 . Mazar, Amihai. Excavations at Tell Qasile, part 2 , The Philistine Sanc tuary: Various Finds, the Pottery, Conclusions, Appendixes. Q e d e m , vol. 2 0 . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 5 . Final report (with M a z a r [ 1 9 8 0 ] ) of the
1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 4 excavation seasons, covering mainly the I r o n Age sanc tuary. Mazar, Amihai. "Excavations at Tell Qasile, 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 4 : Preliminary R e p o r t . " Israel Exploration Journal 3 6 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 1 - 1 5 . Mazar, Amihai, "Qasile, T e l l . " In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeolog ical Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by E p h r a i m Stern, vol. 4 , pp. 1 2 0 4 - 1 2 1 2 . Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . AMIHAI MAZAR
QASR AL-HALLABAT, site located in Jordan (32°o6' N , 36°2o' E), 25 km (15.5 mi.) northeast of Zerqa, 55 km (34 mi.) northwest of Azraq, and about 18 km (11 mi.) from the nearest point (to the northwest) of the Via Nova Trajana. It comprises a conglomerate of separate and widely spaced units that include a qasr ("castle"; see figure 1), a mosque, a huge reservoir, and eight cisterns dug into the western slope and into the plain alongside the reservoir. T h e site also includes an irregularly shaped agricultural en closure with an elaborate system of sluices and a cluster of poorly built houses that extends to the northwest of the res ervoir. T o these units should be added the bath complex at Hammam as-Sarah, 2 km east of the castle. T h e Princeton Archaeological Expedition to Syria, under the direction of Howard C. Butler (1907-1921), visited the site twice in 1905 and 1909. They drew plans of the castle and mosque, published numerous inscribed stones, and mentioned the reservoir, at the bottom of which they had pitched their camp. T h e remains are also mentioned by, among others, Rudolf-Ernst Brunnow and Alfred von D o maszewski, Henry Field, G. Lankester Harding, Nelson Glueck, Aurel Stein, Jean Sauvaget, and L. W. B. Rees. Rees published a vertical aerial view that reveals many of the an cient remains associated with the castle. [See the biographies of Harding, Glueck, and Sauvaget.] More recently, Hallabat was the subject of detailed investigation by David Kennedy (1982), who published a new plan for the castle and addi tional inscribed stones, and by Fawwaz Touqan, who em phasized the Early Islamic aspect of the site. Between 1979 and 1985, five seasons of excavation were carried out jointly by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and La Maison de L'Orient Mediterraneen de Lyon. In the course of these excavations, the plan of the mosque was confirmed and the agricultural enclosure investigated. In addition, all tire rooms along the north, south, and east walls of tire castle were cleared to floor levels, and eleven probes, placed inside the rooms and outside tire castle, penetrated the floors down to bedrock. T h e pottery sherds the probes in the castle pro duced cannot be assigned earlier than the Umayyad period (661-750 C E ) . This would indicate that, in the last phase of construction, the earlier occupational debris and whatever floors existed within the castle were thoroughly removed. That there was a pre-Umayyad building, however, is beyond doubt, confirmed by the ceramic evidence from outside the castle as well as by the fact that the enclosure and partition
QASR AL-HALLABAT
QASR A L - H A L L A B A T .
Figure I .
377
General view of the ruins. (Courtesy G . Bisheh)
walls were set on tlie outer edges of earlier walls. This may explain the anomalous plan of Qasr al-Hallabat compared to odier Umayyad buildings. T h e plan of the casde (see figure 2) is square (44 m to the side), witii square towers and a single entrance in tlie eastern wall. A central courtyard paved with flagstones is sur rounded on three sides by a series of oblong and nearly square rooms. The northwestern quadrant is occupied by a stt-ucture that also consists of a central courtyard surrounded on all but die south side by a number of rooms. This quad rant, which is set apart from the rest of the castle, may have been a low-status area reserved for servants. There is a cis tern in each of the two courtyards. Two inscriptions are thought to have some bearing on the architectural phases of the castle: one in Latin, dated to 212 C E that refers to the construction of a novum castellum; and die other in Greek, dated to 529 CE. Excavations and clear ance work inside the castle uncovered a total of 146 Greek inscriptions—as well as two in Nabatean, one in Safaitic, and a fourth in modern Armenian—engraved on regularly cut basalt stones. [See Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions; Naba tean Inscriptions.] T h e vast majority of tiiese inscribed stones belong to an edict issued by the Byzantine emperor Anastasius (491-518) for the administrative and economic reorganization of tlie Provincia Arabia. It is quite likely that all of the inscribed stones were brought from a nearby set tlement, possibly U m m el-Jimal, and reused as building ma terial during the Umayyad reconstruction of the castle. [See U m m el-Jimal] In tlie course of this reconstruction, the cas tle was elaborately decorated with carved stucco, frescoes,
QASR A L - H A L L A B A T . Bisheh)
F i g u r e 2 . Plan of the casde.
(Courtesy G.
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QASR AL-HAYR AL-GHARBI
and colored mosaics, thus transformed from a fortified building into a palatial residence. T h e transformation was accompanied by a remarkable development of the site, ap parent in its extramural mosque, agricultural enclosure with its elaborate irrigation systems, and the bath complex at Hammam as-Sarah. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bisheh, Ghazi. "Excavations at Qasr al-Hallabat, 1 9 7 9 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 2 4 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 6 9 - 7 7 . Bisheh, Ghazi. " T h e Second Season of Excavations at Hallabat, 1 9 8 0 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 2 6 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 1 3 3 - 1 4 3 . Bisheh, Ghazi. " Q a s r al-Hallabat: A S u m m a r y of the 1 9 8 4 a n d 1 9 8 5 Excavations." Archiv fiir Orientforschung 3 3 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 1 5 8 - 1 6 2 . Butler, Howard Crosby, et al. Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to Syria in 1904-1905 and 1909. 4 vols, in 9 . Leiden, 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 2 1 . See Division II, Section A, p p . 7 0 - 7 7 (archi tecture); Division III, Section A, p p . 2 1 - 4 2 (Greek a n d Latin in scriptions); and Division IV, Section A, p p . iff. (Nabatean inscrip tions). Kennedy, David L. Archaeological Explorations on the Roman Frontier in North-East Jordan. British Archaeological Reports, International Se ries, n o . 1 3 4 . Oxford, 1 9 8 2 . See pages 1 7 - 6 5 . Marcillet-Jaubert, Jean. "Recherches au Qasr el-Hallabat." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 2 4 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 1 2 1 - 1 2 4 . Marcillet-Jaubert,Jean. " L e s inscriptions grecques de Hallabat, U." An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 2 6 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 1 4 5 - 1 5 8 . GHAZI BISHEH
QASR AL-HAYR AL-GHARBI, one of the two de sert estates of die Umayyad caliph Hisham (r. A H 105-125/ 724-793 CE) that is part of a group often strucmres extend ing for 20 km (12 mi.) and connected by a sophisticated system of water channels starting at the Kharbaqa dam on the northern fringes of die Jabal Rawaq. T h e caliph resided mostiy at Rusafa in Syria, the former Sergiopolis, between Palmyra and ar-Raqqa. He first commissioned the Palace of tlie Western Game Park, about 180 km (112 mi.) southwest of Rusafa, built in about A H 109/727 C E ; shortiy thereafter he commissioned the Palace of the Eastern Game Park (Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi), dated to A H 110/728-729 C E , about 70 km (43 mi.) southeast of Rusafa. [See Rusafa; Raqqa, ar-; Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi.] Antoine Poidebard (1930) carried out an aerial and topographical survey and Daniel Schlumberger excavated the site in 1936-1938. [See the biographies
of Poidebard
and
Schlumberger.}
The Kharbaqa dam is a mighty construction 345 m long and more than 20 m high that originally created a storage lake of more than one square kilometer. From it the water is channeled north in a surface canal. About 4 km (2.5 mi.) away is an almost square building (63 X 58 m), supposedly a Roman post on the Strata Diocletiana. About 11 km (7 mi.) farther north the channel's first bifurcation conducts the water west, to the palace proper, and to an isolated bath in the immediate vicinity. About 2 km later the main channel
leads to a square pool (60 m on each side). Close by, a second western bifurcation leads to another square structure (55 X 55 m), probably a caravanserai, with a reused Roman doorframe inscribed with an Arabic text commemorating its construction in A H 109/727 C E , now exhibited in the D a mascus Museum; two wings project from the facade: one contains a small oratory (masjid) and the other a water trough. About 500 m along tlie main canal, a side channel operates a water mill (about 5 X 7 m ) , a clear indication of local grain production. T h e neighboring courtyard struc tures to the east of the mill have not yet been excavated. T o the west another barrage (i.e., a dam) with a 560-meter-long wall, in the shape of a horseshoe, from which the collected rainwater was conducted to the garden at the northwestern end of the complex. T h e large, walled, rectangular garden compound (1,050 X 440 m) is subdivided into square com partments (80 m on each side). It is watered by the main canal, which originates at the Kharbaqa dam, more than 18 km (11 mi.) away, and occasionally by the surplus rainwater from the horseshoe barrage. This pleasure ground, acces sible through two portals accentuated by flanking columns, may have been a game park, as the traditional name of the site suggests. [See Irrigation.] T h e focal point of this artificial oasis is the square building (about 72 m on each side) initially distinguished by double stories and exceptionally rich architectural decoration, which obviously served as the part-time residence of Caliph Hisham. Of its original splendor almost nothing remains. Only half of die tower of a monastery founded in 559 by the Christian Ghassanid ruler al-Harith ibn Jabala, to which the palace was attached, dramatically surmounts the surround ing field of ruins. In a new wing of the Damascus Museum, tlie building's original entrance has been reconstructed by the architect Michel Ecochard from the excavated frag ments, including the facade's stucco decoration and tlie u p per story's stately reception rooms, in which plaster sculp tures, fresco floors, ornamented window grills, and wood lintels are exhibited. T h e sumptuous decoration program was evidentiy executed by artists from various parts of the Umayyad Empire. They created an architectural master piece that borrows from classical Syrian as well as Sasanian (Persian) features. [See Umayyad Caliphate.] Although an Umayyad origin, based on the inscription in the caravanserai (see above), is generally accepted for the palace and most of the other structures, the excavators as sumed that the artificial oasis was first designed in tlie Ro man period. They thus dated the Kharbaqa dam to the sec ond or third century, assuming the existence of a pre-Islamic military post on the ancient road crossing the Syrian desert. An extensive Umayyad estate that included agricultural land, gardens, and a game preserve seems a reasonable ben efactor for the construction of a sophisticated irrigation pro ject that depended on a water supply from the sizable res-
QASR AL-HAYR ASH-SHARQI ervoir the monumental dam created. T h e dam, therefore, probably also originated in tire Umayyad period. Eventually, the history of the site may reach back into the Roman period, but the first attested building activity so far is for the Ghassanid monastery tower incorporated into the palace by Caliph Hisham shortly before A H 109/727 CE (see above), when the new oasis in the desert, at the crossroad of major nomadic routes, was installed as a visual symbol of imperial might. T h e tower probably fell into disuse soon after Hisham's death in A H 125/743 ' Its partial reactivation in medieval times is attested by a restoration inscription of A H 583/1187 C E on the massive Ghassanid tower, and by later construction in the palace area identified by Jean Sauvaget (La paste aux chevaux dans VEmpire des Mamelouks, Paris, 1941) as a way station of tire Syrian postal route, established by the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars (r. A H 658-676/ 1260-1277 C E ) . [See Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties.] C E
BIBLIOGRAPHY Creswell, K. A. C . Early Muslim Architecture, vol. i, Umayyads, A.D. 622-750 (1940). 2 d ed. Oxford, 1969. See pages 506-518 for a s u m mary of Schlumberger's excavation report (1939), with a complete bibliography. Creswell, K. A. C . A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Rev. ed. Aldershot, 1989. T h e m o s t accessible standard reference; see pages 135-146. Grabar, Oleg. " U m a y y a d Palaces R e c o n s i d e r e d . " Ars Orientalis 23 (i993): 93-108. Analysis of Early Islamic imperial architecture, i n cluding Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi. Poidebard, Antoine. La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie; Le limes de Trajan a la conquete arabe; recherches aeriennes, 1925-1932. Paris, 1934. T h e first m o d e r n study of the site using aerial photography; see pages 187-190. Schlumberger, Daniel. " L e s fouilles d e Qasr el-Heir el-Gharbi, 19361938: R a p p o r t p r e l i m i n a i r e . " Syria2,o (1939): 195-238, 324-373.Ex tensive excavation report. Schlumberger, Daniel. " D e u x fresques o m e y y a d e s . " Syria 25 (19461948): 86-102. T h e floor frescoes of the palace, now in t h e D a m a s cus M u s e u m . Schlumberger, Daniel. Qasr el-Heir el Gharbi. Edited by Odile E c o chard and Agnes Schlumberger. Bibliotheque Archeologique et H i s torique, vol. 120. Paris, 1986. Mainly a reprint of Schlumberger's (1939) preliminary report, b u t with extended documentation a n d thus the best available publication o n the subject; includes contri butions b y Michel Ecochard a n d Nassib Saliby. MICHAEL MEINECKE
QASR AL-HAYR ASH-SHARQI, site located about 110 1cm (68 mi.) north-northeast of Palmyra, Syria, at the northern end of a flat steppic area, at the foot of a low mountain chain, the Jebel Bishri. This is more or less the area in which the rains from higher altitudes gather toward the plain and occasionally flood it. It is also located at the approximate place where the Baghdad to Aleppo and D a mascus to ar-Raqqa routes cross. Long assumed to be a Roman defensive establishment against nomads, Qasr al-
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Hayr has now been shown to have been one of tire many early Islamic foundations that cover the entire area from the Euphrates River to the Gulf of 'Aqaba. Because of its spectacular ruins, which are visible from afar, the site has been recorded by travelers since the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was partially mapped and surveyed by the more thorough explorers, such as the Czech Alois Musil, of the decades before World War I. Dur ing the French Mandate, the site was surveyed by Andre Gabriel and entered into the various reconstructions of Late Antique and Early Medieval Syria by Rene Dussaud. It was the subject of an extensive archaeological investigation di rected by Oleg Grabar under the auspices of the University of Michigan and Harvard University between 1964 and 1972. T h e results of those excavations were published in 1978 (see Grabar, 1978). T h e material remains are in the archaeological museum in Palmyra. T h e site (7 sq 1cm, or roughly 2.75 sq. mi.) is enclosed by a wall 15 km (9 mi.) long. T h e wall has been provided with sluices and retaining walls at strategic points where sudden flooding could become harmful. T h e technology of these waterworks seems to have been imported from southern Arabia and Yemen rather than to be indigenous to Syria. At the northern end of this enclosure three buildings were erected. T h e largest, a square of about 167 m to the side, was provided with four gates leading up to a large central open area surrounded by a portico. Around the central area, twelve approximately equal squares were mapped out with a single course of stones. They included four backyards in the corners, one mosque, one oil press, and seven dwellings, each of which had a central porticoed court and rooms of varying sizes around the portico. T h e living unit nearest to the mosque had elaborate stucco decoration of vegetal and geometric motifs and may well have been an official build ing. An inscription, now gone, identifies this enclosure as a madinah, "a city"—although the word should probably be understood in its earlier meaning, "estate." In spite of the enclosure having been laid out at one time, the various units were not completed together or with the same construction techniques. T h e inscription dates the foundation of the en closure to 728-729 CE and die rule of the caliph Hisham. However, tire wall decoration and some of tire material re mains indicate that much of the "city" was not really in full activity before the early ninth century. The second building is a well-preserved and massive square (70 m to the side) monument with a single entrance, walls preserved to a height of more than 1 1 m, and corner towers that offer views of the terrain for miles. Around a porticoed courtyard, the interior consisted of large numbers of high and dark halls vaulted in a brick technique hitherto unknown in Syria. These halls appear to have existed with out any amenities or apparent differentiations in function. The second floor has not been preserved, but such evidence
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as exists suggests the repetition of the same plan. T h e ex cavators have interpreted the building as a work of com mercial architecture, as a caravanserai for the repose of trav elers and the safeguarding of goods; the huge area surrounding it would have served for animals. The third major building was a bath, typical in all respects of the Early Islamic baths that came out of the architectural traditions of Late Antiquity. In addition, cisterns and com plex systems of canals distributed water to the walled enclo sures. Ceramic finds also point to tire existence of rather simple and short-lived residential quarters to the north of the main buildings. [See Batiis.] Excavation made it possible to establish the history of the site. It was planned in Umayyad times as an estate for ag riculture and trade (perhaps the Zaytunah of medieval Ar abic texts). Using remains from earlier Roman and Palmy rene monuments, the site was completed and flourished throughout the Early 'Abbasid period (until about 900). It was then almost completely abandoned. It was revived as a small and miserable twelfth-fourteenth-century city, and then finally abandoned in about 1350. T h e material culture of all but the first of these periods can be reconstructed from excavated fragments and from analysis of the architectural remains. [See also Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi; and the biography ofDussaud.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Creswell, K. A. C. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, Rev. ed. Aldershot, 1 9 8 9 . See pages 1 4 9 - 1 6 3 for Qasr al-Hayr esh-Sharqi. Grabar, Oleg, et al. City in the Desert: Qasr al-Hayr East. C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1 9 7 8 . Hillenbrand, Robert. Islamic Architecture. Edinburgh, 1 9 9 4 .
The carvings on the facade of the palace are of floral, animal, and geometric motifs: bold rosettes; large, rhythmic triangles; looped and grape-laden vine stalks; birds; lions; acanthus leaves; and great octagons. T h e motifs in the dec orations varied from bastion to bastion, and the work of sev eral distinct hands can be discerned. Some of the motifs are essentially Hellenistic, while others show a Sasanian (Per sian) influence, especially in the frontal poses of animals, with candelabra forms or double wings. T h e other sides were undecorated. Almost the entire palace facade was given as a gift to the German Kaiser Wilhelm II by the Ot toman sultan Abdtilhamid, just before World War I. It was removed and dispatched to Berlin, where it was set up in the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum (Pergamon Museum). The palace itself is considerable in size but had only one entrance, which led to the living quarters (see above). Those quarters were arranged in three sections, separated from one another by large rectangular courts. T h e courtyards appar ently were used to stable camels and horses and to store goods. T h e palace mosque was sited in the traditional p o sition, inside and to the right of the main entrance. [See Mosque.] T h e palace interior, including a three-apsed hall, re mained in various stages of completion. Some walls and vaults were built with light-brown fired bricks. There is sym metry throughout, created by its plan, on an axis, with a tendency to compartmentalization, often into three sections. The vaulting systems are essentially Mesopotamian in style, but the masonry is Hellenistic. T h e style of the carved dec oration is both Sasanian and Hellenistic, a fusion of the two traditions in Umayyad architecture. [See Palace.]
OLEG GRABAR BIBLIOGRAPHY
QASR AL-MESHATTA (Ar., "palace of winter ing"), site located on the edge of the Jordanian desert (31°49' N, 36°28' E). At approximately 200 m above sea level, alMeshatta commands a strategically broad view in all direc tions and is the largest and most ambitious of the Islamic palaces in Jordan. T h e site was discovered by H. B. Tristram in 1865 (The Land of Moab, London, 1873), Its date and origin were once disputed, but it is now generally accepted as an Umayyad structure and is identified as the work of Caliph al-Walid II (r. 743-744 C E ) . The qasr, or palace, is a square, walled enclosure con structed of burnt clay brick (144 m to a side) and is flanked by polygonal towers at its corners. Two octagonal salient angles, to the right and left of the entrance, formed a splen did limestone facade (60 m long, 5 m high) covered with highly formalized ornaments and sculpture carved in deli cate relief. Only a few lower courses are preserved.
Berchem, M a x van. Opera Minora. I. Geneva, 1 9 7 8 . C o m p r e h e n s i v e and well-documented presentation of the scholarly dispute over t h e date and origin of this Islamic m o n u m e n t . Creswell, K . A. C. Early Muslim Architecture. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1 9 6 9 . Basic and essential study for students of Islamic architecture in general and Q a s r al-Meshatta in particular. Grabar, Oleg. " A l - M u s h a t t a , Baghdad, and W a s h . " I n The World of Islam: Studies in Honour of Philip K. Hitti, edited by James Kritzeck •and R. Bayly W i n d e r , p p . 9 9 - 1 0 8 . L o n d o n , 1 9 5 9 . A c c u r a t e , u p - t o date, a n d concise description of Q a s r al-Meshatta a n d its plan. Schulz, B r u n o , a n d Josef Strzygowski. Mschatta. Berlin, 1 9 0 4 . Publi cation prepared o n the occasion of d i e o p e n i n g c e r e m o n y of t h e Kaiser F r i e d r i c h - M u s e u m , Berlin, in October 1 9 0 4 , which consists of a detailed description of die Qasr al-Meshatta by Schulz a n d an analytical study of its character, origin, a n d i m p o r t a n c e . T r t i m p e l m a n n , L e o . Mschatta. T u b i n g e n , 1 9 6 2 . Highly scholarly con tribution to the study of Qasr al-Meshatta, with an emphasis o n t h e problem of the date, character, a n d origin of its facade's stone d e c orations. Essential reference for a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g of this m o n u m e n t and its artistic aspects. ADNAN HADIDI
QASRIN QASR BURQU', structural complex in northeastern Jordan comprising a tower and rooms that surround a small courtyard (32°4o' N , 37°5o' E). T h e buildings were con structed next to a large seasonal pool whose water-storage capacity was at some time augmented by a stone dam. T h e site lies on the eastern edge of die basalt harra, some 150 km (93 mi.) beyond the limes Arabicus, in a zone that re ceives between 50-100 m m of rain per year. T h e main inner "desert" route from North Arabia Qauf/Dumatha) to D a mascus and Palmya passes near the site; many east-west routes lead through the hammada/wudiyan to the Euphrates River in the east. Several building phases have been identified. T h e first consisted of a massive rectangular tower of at least four sto ries, probably more than 12 meters high. T h e tower had only one small door and a few narrow ventilation slits in the upper levels. Larger openings may once have existed near the roof line. At ground level there are three chambers, one of which has a low rounded ttansverse arch. T h e upper floors were stone corbeled. Excavations into the foundations did not re veal conclusive dating evidence, aldiough it is clear that the tower must predate at least 700 CE. Its original function is, similarly, uncertain. It could have been built as a watchtower to control the site's water resources or as a hermit's tower (Syr., burga). T h e project may have been financed by tlie Ghassanids in die sixtii century, the period in which the dam must have been built. It was repaired and rebuilt often. At some time between the towers' construction and 700 C E , a series of rooms was built in a rough square surrounding the tower. These buildings consist of a round structure that may have been a windmill, several small storage rooms, five or six long rooms, and a small, two-storied tower at one corner. T h e "windmill" has a small cross carved on tlie lintel of its enuance; one of die rooms leads to a small apse under a possibly pointed arch. These features suggest a monastic function for tlie buildings. Several gravestones were found inside these structures, among them two with (undated) Greek inscriptions, mostiy lists of names. Excavations at several points along the walls have produced both Umayyad and pre-Umayyad pottery. T h e new buildings at Burqu' may have served as a monastery between the sixth and the early eighth centuries. An Arabic inscription in Kufic script was cut into the lintel of tlie doorway into one of the long rooms. T h e lintel may have been reused. T h e inscription is dated to 700 C E . It tells of rooms (Ar., buyut) being built on behalf of the Amir Walid, son of Abd al-Malik (Umayyad caliph, 685-705). Walid's gift may be viewed in the light of Abd al-Malik's diplomacy with the bedouin, notably the Kalbi in tlie Badiyat ash-Sham, in order to assure the suc cession of his son. T h e room with die apse has also been identified as a humble version of an audience chamber, rather than a chapel. It may, like tlie rest of the buildings, have served both of tiiese functions at various times, as well
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as others—which can be subsumed under the notion of a badiya, a formal venue for tribe-state relations, Qasr Burqu may still have functioned as a Monophysite monastery in Kalbi territory well into the eighth century. How long after the eighth century the place was used, and for what pur p o s e ^ ) , is not known. T h e next epigraphic evidence comes from an Arabic inscription, dated to the early fifteenth cen tury, mentioning the "discovery" of the Kufic inscription of al-Walid.
1
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Field, Henry. North Arabian Desert Archaeological Survey, 1925-50. P a pers of t h e P e a b o d y M u s e u m of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 45.2. Cambridge, Mass., i960. Contains a brief mention of an early examination of Qasr B u r q u ' , including tlie first plan of the site. G a u b e , Heinz. " A n Examination of the Ruins at Qasr B u r q u ' . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 19 (1974): 93-100. Short technical survey report. H e l m s , S. W . Early Islamic Architecture of the Desert: A Bedouin Station in Eastern Jordan. E d i n b u r g h , 1990. Historical and archaeological study of an early Islamic site in eastern Jordan; includes a discussion of the area's history a n d t h e n a t u r e of nomad/state relations, as well as a short section on the m o s t recent work at B u r q u ' . H e l m s , S. W . " A N e w Architecuiral Survey of Qasr Burqu", Eastern J o r d a n . " Antiquaries Journal 71 (1991): 191-215. Detailed technical report on tlie most recent architectural survey of the Qasr a n d the ancient d a m . S . W . HELMS
QASRIN, site located in the central Golan Heights, ap proximately 13 km (8 mi.) nordieast of die Sea of Galilee and 1 km southeast of the modern city of Qasrin (32°59'i5" N , 35°42'i5" E; map reference 2161 X 2661). T h e site's ancient name is unknown. It was first recorded and identi fied by Gottlieb Schumacher during his surveys of the re gion in 1884; he revisited it in 1913 and described "Kisrin" as a "small Bedouin winter village with a group of beautiful oak trees and old ruins" (Schumacher, 1888, p . 194). The name Kisrin, perhaps derived from the Arabic word qasr, meaning "fort" or "palace," may refer to tlie monumental ancient remains visible to the inhabitants of this nineteenthand twentieth-century village (see figure 1). During archaeological surveys of the region in 1967, Shmaryahu Gutman identified the remains of an ancient synagogue inside the modern Syrian village of Kisrin. Sub sequent surveys by Dan Urman from 1969 to 1971 revealed numerous architectural elements originally belonging to the synagogue and several ancient Hebrew and Aramaic in scriptions. In 1971-1972, Urman initiated excavations in the synagogue, which continued under the direction of Muni Ben-Ari (1975-1976) and Zvi Ma'oz (1978). From 1982 to 1984, Rachel Hachlili, Ann Killebrew, and Zvi Ma'oz con ducted a new series of excavations in the synagogue; from 1983 to 1990, Killebrew directed excavations in the adjacent
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QASRIN
Q A S R I N . F i g u r e I . General view of the site, looking west toward the synagogue.
T h e village h o u s e s ,
before r e c o n s t r u c t i o n , are in t h e f o r e g r o u n d w i t h h o u s e B t o t h e left. C o m p l e x C is to t h e r i g h t a n d h o u s e A is n e x t to t h e s o u t h e a s t c o r n e r of t h e s y n a g o g u e . (Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority)
village. Approximately 1,500 sq m, or nearly 10 percent of the site, has been uncovered. The excavators identified nine strata at Qasrin. Ceramic finds and fragmentary architectural remains indicate that the site was inhabited during the Middle Bronze II (stratum IX), Iron II (stratum VIII), Hellenistic (stratum VII), and Late Roman (stramm VI) periods. The main periods of occu pation were the Late Roman through Early Islamic periods (synagogues A and B, strata V-IV); the Mamluk period (mosque, stratum II); and tire late nineteenth century-1967 GE (stratum I). Late R o m a n - E a r l y Byzantine Periods ( S t r a t u m V A B). The construction and use of synagogue A span stratum VA-B) (fourtli-fifth centuries CE) . T h e earlier phase of the village, VA, dates to late third-mid-fourth centuries C E , based on pottery assemblages found in the structures and coin hoards, including a deposit of nine thousand coins hid den under a stratum VA courtyard floor. Stratum VB (late fourth-fifth centuries CE) follows the earthquake of 363 and
is characterized by the continued use of synagogue A and the repair of tire village houses. The earliest monument, synagogue A, was nearly square (15.2 X 15.3 m), with two rows of three columns each. Its main entrance was located in the northern facade wall, with a side entrance in the western wall. The hall was lined with benches on three sides, and a stone platform was con structed against the southern wall, facing Jerusalem, to hold the Ark of the Law. Artifacts sealed below the white plaster floor of synagogue A included Late Roman period pottery sherds and a coin minted in 218-219, indicating a late thirdor early fourth-century date for the building's consttuction. Most of the village houses built at tire same time as syn agogue A continued in use until the mid-eighth century, but were remodeled numerous times. T h e plan of a typical do mestic unit at Qasrin consisted of a large, rectangular mul tipurpose room (traclin; Lat., traclinium), a smaller rectan gular storage room, a sleeping loft above the storage room, and an unroofed courtyard. Additions to this typical do-
QATABAN mestic unit included small storage spaces or indoor kitchens. Generally, several of these household units were connected to form a large complex, or insula, inhabited by several gen erations of an extended family. B y z a n t i n e - E a r l y Islamic P e r i o d s ( S t r a t u m IVA-B). Synagogue B, constructed on top of synagogue A, marks the beginning of stratum IVA (sixth century). Although the general plan of the two synagogues is similar, in synagogue B the northern facade wall was extended northward for 2 2.5 m, increasing the size of tire synagogue, necessitating two rows of four columns each. T h e building's exterior mea surements became 15.4 m along the north wall; 14.95 m along the south wall; 17.95 m along the east wall and 17.4 m along the west wall. T w o surfaces are related to syna gogue B's use: an earlier mosaic floor (stratum IVA), dated to the sixth century by coins found inside the benches along the rebuilt northern wall of synagogue B; and a later plaster floor (stratum IVB) laid over the dismantled mosaic floor, dated to the seventh century, based on a coin hoard found sealed below tire plaster floor. During stratum IVA-B, a street and drain were added to tire area outside and adjacent to the northeastern half of the synagogue, converting it for use as a public space. Most of the original domestic structures remained in use during the period, and tire village reached its maximum size (approx imately 5 acres). Analysis of the faunal evidence from the strata V-IV vil lage reveals that sheep and goat were tire largest category of species, followed by cattle and then chicken. The relative percentages of different domesticated livestock indicate that animal production, consumption, and processing occurred at the household level. In addition to the rearing of sheep, goats, and cattle, the economic base of the Byzantine village was diverse, depending mainly on household production of cereals, wine, and a surplus market production of oil. T h e synagogue remained in use through the mid-eighth century. Based on the uniform direction of the superstruc ture's collapse, tire destruction of this synagogue is attrib uted to the earthquake of 749. In the village, several rooms showed signs of reuse by squatters (stratum III) on top of the collapsed rubble. M a m l u k P e r i o d ( S t r a t u m II). Following a settlement gap of nearly five hundred years, the site was reoccupied during the Mamluk period (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries). T h e inhabitants constructed a mosque (8.1 X 15.5 m) in the northern third of the ruined synagogue, reusing several of the earlier walls and architectural elements. The southern wall and its niche (mihrab) were added then. T h e poorly pre served Mamluk village covered the entire 5-acre Byzantine site. Faunal analysis for the Mamluk period indicates that cat tle were far more numerous than previously at Qasrin. T h e more specialized approach taken by the stratum II inhabi
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tants and tire relatively higher proportion of cattle suggest participation in a larger market economy. In the nineteenth century, bedouin resettled the site, re pairing ancient structures or constructing new houses re using the ancient basalt building stones. The stratum I site was in use until 1967. [See also Golan; Mosque; Synagogues; and the biography of
Schumacher.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
G r a n t h a m , Billy. " M o d e r n Bugata and Ancient Qasrin: T h e E t i i n o a r chaeology of Cuisine in the G o l a n Heights." Master's thesis, U n i versity of Alabama, 1 9 9 2 . Killebrew, A n n , and Steven Fine. "Qatzrin: Reconstructing Village Life in T a l m u d i c T i m e s . " Biblical Archaeology Review 17 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 4 4 - 5 6 . M a ' o z , Zvi, and A n n Killebrew. "Ancient Qasrin: Synagogue a n d Vil lage." Biblical Archaeologist 5 1 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 5 - 1 9 . S c h u m a c h e r , Gottlieb. Thejauldn. L o n d o n , 1 8 8 8 . A N N KILLEBREW
QATABAN, pre-Islamic state in southern Arabia, lo cated in modern Yemen. Adjoining Sheba on tire northwest and west, Ausan on the south, and Hadhramaut on the east, Qataban, at its zenith, included a territory of mountains and valleys extending from Bab al-Mandeb to the sands of the Ramlat as-Sab'atayn on the north, and to tire western border of the Hadhramaut on the east. Qataban is not mentioned in the Table of Nations (Gn. 10), or elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, probably because it was not an independent kingdom at the time of writing. Qa taban was known to Strabo (Geography 16.4.2-4,19,22-25) as Cattabania and to Pliny tire Elder (Natural History 6.26.104; 32.153-55, 160-62; 12.30-35, 41) as Gebbanitae (i.e., Qatabanians), in conjunction with international trade in frankincense and myrrh. Both mention Timna', the Qatabanian capital—spelled " T a m n a " by Strabo, and " T h o m n a " by Pliny the Elder—as an important city on the incense route. Pliny reports that Timna' was 1487.5 (Ro man) miles from Gaza. Exploration a n d E x c a v a t i o n . Early visitors to Qataban include G. Wyman Bury (1898-1899), who recorded in scriptions at Timna', its capital; Stewart Perowne (1938), who described Timna' and collected artifacts; and Nigel Groom (1948), a British political officer. Timna', its cem etery, and Hajar Bin Humeid, a town under the aegis of Timna', were excavated in 1950 and 1951 by an expedition of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, orga nized and led by Wendell Phillips, with William Foxwell Al bright as archaeological director. During the 1980s, inves tigations in Qataban were resumed under the direction of J. F. Breton for the French Archaeological Mission in San'a. [See Hajar Bin Humeid; Timna'.]
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QATAR
History. Although settlement in Qataban can be traced from the eleventh to tenth centuries BCE, human occupation probably goes back a millennium or so earlier, to at least a Neolithic stage of cultural development. Linguistic evidence seems to indicate that southern Arabia was populated by various waves of migration from the Levant and Mesopo tamia. Qataban, Ma'in, and Hadhramaut share common language characteristics: the use of the sh prefix for the caus ative verb form and third-person pronouns, corresponding to structure and usage in East Semitic, such as Akkadian. Saba' (Sheba) differs in employing the h prefix for causative verbs and third-person pronouns, as is common in North west Semitic, such as Canaanite and Hebrew. Early pottery recovered in archaeological excavations appear to support a similar diversity of sources. Immigrants brought many cul tural features to southern Arabia from their homelands. With the passage of time and the selective acceptance of indigeneous and foreign ideas and designs, a distinctive South Arabian culture emerged and soon prevailed through out the region. As in Sheba, centralized authority prevailed in Qataban. T h e first royal inscriptions of Hawfi'amm Yuhan'im, son of Sumhu'alay Watar, appear in the late seventh-early sixth centuries B C E , when rulers were known as mkrb (mukarrib), a title perhaps meaning "priest-king." Inscriptions of this period are written either left to right, or boustrophedon (the direction of successive lines is right-left and then left-right). At about the end of the fifth century BCE, Qataban freed itself from Saba' (Sheba) and became a dominant power along with Hadhramaut and Ma'in. Rulers adopted tire title "Icing," which was used thereafter. Qataban conquered Ma'in in the second century B C E , but later lost tire south western part of its kingdom to Dhu-Raydan, which had joined with Saba'. Thus, the zenith of Qatabanian power extended from the fifth to the first centuries BCE. In the first century CE Qataban was conquered and Timna' was burned in a great conflagration; soon after, it was incorporated into the kingdom of Hadhramaut. The economy was based on subsistence agriculture, trade in frankincense and myrrh, and transshipping South Asian products. Farmers developed flash-flood irrigation systems that were more ingenious than the constant-flow systems of the ancient Near East. Well irrigation was utilized year round for crops. Religion seems to have been highly organized, with tem ples ranging from simple to elaborate. The principal deity of the Qatabanian pantheon was the moon god 'Anbay. This is to be expected among a people heavily involved in the caravan trade, in which the advantages of traveling at night included the precise navigational aid of the night sky. The supremacy of the moon over the sun is represented in a pair of Hellenistic sculptures, each featuring a bronze lion (the sun) and small boy rider (the moon). The boy controls tire lion by holding its chain, attached to its collar, in one hand
and a South vators [See
small dart in the other, which were found inside the Gate of Timna' by the American Foundation exca in 1 9 s o . also Hadhramaut; Marib; and Sheba.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Chronology of Ancient South Arabia in the Light of the First C a m p a i g n of Excavation in Q a t a b a n . " Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 1 1 9 ( 1 9 5 0 ) : 5 1 5 . Succinct, conservative chronological listing of t h e kings of Q a t a b a n , M a ' i n , and H a d h r a m a u t and their relationships. Cleveland, Ray L. An Ancient South Arabian Necropolis: Objects from the Second Campaign (1951) in the Timna' Cemetery. Publications of the American Foundation for t h e Study of M a n , vol. 4 . Baltimore, 1 9 6 5 . Excellent resource for Qatabanian material culture. Phillips, Wendell. Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia. N e w York, 1 9 5 5 . Semipopular, highly readable account of t h e American F o u n d a t i o n for the Study of M a n archaeological expeditions to Qataban ( 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 1 ) a n d to Sheba and Dhofar ( 1 9 5 2 - 1 9 5 3 ) . Van Beek, G u s W . " P r o l e g o m e n o n " to reprinted edition of James A. M o n t g o m e r y , Arabia and the Bible. N e w York, 1 9 6 9 . U p d a t e s d e velopments in w h a t is k n o w n of the relationship between Arabia a n d the Bible as described by M o n t g o m e r y in t h e Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College in 1 9 3 0 . Gus W . VAN BEEK
QATAR. The State of Qatar occupies a small peninsula roughly 160 km, (99 mi.) long and, at most, 80 1cm (50 mi.) wide (about 10,437 sq km, or 6,471 sq. mi.), on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It borders the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and tire Western Region of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A generally flat, semidesertic area with a maximum elevation of 120 m above sea level, Qatar's topography ranges from a limestone plateau (Dukhan Heights) opposite Salwa Bay on the southwestern side of the peninsula, through sandy desert throughout most of the interior, to low-lying sabkha, or salt flats, along much of the east coast. The archaeological exploration of Qatar dates back to 1956, when a Danish expedition from the University of Aarhus, under the direction of Peter Vilhelm Glob, discovered several lithic sites and burial mounds there during a brief visit. This was followed by Danish fieldwork, concentrating mainly on lithic sites, between 1957 and 1964, and ultimately by the publication of the first major work on Qatar's pre history by Holger Kapel (1967). In 1973 a British team, led by Beatrice de Cardi, conducted a season of survey and ex cavation (di Cardi, 1978). An important French mission un der the direction of Jacques Tixier worked in Qatar from 1976 to 1982 (Inizan, 1980; Hardy-Guilbert, 1984), and in 1988 a Japanese team under tire direction of Masatoshi A. Konishi, Takeshi Gotoh, and Yoshihako Akashi returned to the site of U m m al-Ma', the scene of some preliminary in vestigations by the Danish expedition tlrirty years earlier, to excavate two burial cairns (Konishi, 1989).
QATAR Kapel grouped the lithic material discovered by the Dan ish expedition into four categories: Qatar A, a Middle Pa leolithic industry in the Levalloiso-Mousterian tradition; Qatar B, a Mesolithic blade-arrowhead industry; Qatar C, a Late Mesolithic scraper culture; and Qatar D , a Neolitiiic industty characterized by tanged and barbed arrowheads and fine, pressure-flaked bifaces. T h e work of the French mission showed conclusively, however, tiiat all of the ma terial assigned to groups A, C, and D is late prehistoric, dating principally to the late fifth and fourtii millennia. This is borne out by tlie presence, on some sites belonging to this group (such as Khor F.P.P., an abbreviation used to des ignate this particular site at Khor, of which there are many), of imported pottery from Mesopotamia of the Ubaid 3-4 type. The earliest material found by any of the teams working in Qatar is KapePs Qatar B (e.g., at Shagra), excavated by the French at site 36 near Acila in western Qatar, This com plex includes blade arrowheads that compare closely with material found on Pre-Pottery Neolitiiic B sites in Syria and Israel; it probably represents the remains of the hunting camps of a mobile population tiiat originated in the SyroPalestinian desert region and colonized eastern Arabia sometime around 5000 B C E . Pollen analysis suggests that site 36 may have been situated alongside a lake ringed by halophytic plants, reeds, and trees, no doubt a watering hole that attracted game. T h e later prehistoric sites, on tlie other hand, provide ev idence for the intensive exploitation of fish (particularly Sparidae) and shellfish (Turbo, Veneridae, and oyster). T h e local population at this time was in contact with Ubaid-period Mesopotamia. This was demonstrated, inter alia, by the presence of small numbers of Ubaid 3-4 sherds in the simple pit burials the French team excavated at Khor F.P.P. At least two other exotic materials, carnelian and obsidian, also reached Qatar at this time as beads. Qatar's later pre-Islamic past is poorly represented in the archaeological record. An early to mid-second millennium B C E site at Khor excavated by die French mission yielded small numbers of Barbar city II red-ridged sherds, probably originating on Bahrain, as well as a small amount of so-called Wadi Suq pottery with close parallels at Tell Abraq in tlie UAE. These were found in connection witii the stone foun dations of several small huts or tents. T h e British team sim ilarly found red-ridged pottery at the site of Bir Abaruk 3. T h e presence of large quantities of the shellfish (gastropod) Drupa concactenata at Khor led to the suggestion that purple dye may have been produced at the site, but some malacologists dispute this. Some slight indication of Qatar's occupation during tlie Hellenistic and/or Parthian period was provided in 1 9 6 1 1962 by a single sherd found outside of a cairn burial ex cavated by tlie Danish team. It belongs to a type of pottery well represented at the major Hellenistic metropolis of Thaj,
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in northeastern Saudi Arabia. In 1962-1963 tlie Danish mis sion carried out excavations at a settlement on Ras Uwainat Ali, just north of Duldian on the west coast of the peninsula, where more Thaj-type pottery was recovered. T h e presence of the toponym Kadara polis (cf. Qatar) on Claudius Pto lemy's map of Arabia and of the tribal name Catharrei in Pliny's Natural History (6.32.149) also gives a hint of oc cupation in Qatar in the Hellenistic/Parthian period. Con temporary, or just slightly later, remains of Parthian or Sas anian date were also discovered atMezruah, south of Khor, where the Danish expedition uncovered two camel burials, one of which contained a glass vessel. Comparable camel burials are now known in Oman, the UAE, eastern Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The Islamic archaeology of Qatar was investigated by Claire Hardy-Guildbert for the Centre Nationale de la Re cherche Scientifique between 1977 and 1986, when an in ventory of more than two hundred monuments was made. Excavations were also conducted by the French team in 1979 and 1982-1983 at the site of Murwab, a large rural site covering about 125 ha (309 acres) in northeastern Qatar. Material dating to about 800-850 CE was recovered during tlie course of excavating a small fort, private houses, two mosques, and a cemetery. T h e most important later Islamic site in Qatar is surely al-Huwaila, which appears on Carsten Niebuhr's map of the Arabian Gulf as Huale. (Niebuhr was tlie surveyor on the Danish expedition of 1761-1767 charged witii exploring Arabia.) Al-Huwaila was the prin cipal town on Qatar until the nineteenth century. Finally, at various points along tlie east coast of Qatar, cup marks, small holes, gaming boards, and representations of ships have been carved into the surface of rock outcrops. Al though the dating of tiiese features is difficult, it has been suggested tiiat they are the work of pearl divers working off die coast of Qatar in the last several centuries who whiled away their free time playing board games and carving pic tures of local seacraft. BIBLIOGRAPHY de Cardi, Beatrice. Qatar Archaeological Report; Excavations, 1973. O x ford, 1 9 7 8 . Final report of t h e 1 9 7 3 British expedition. Facey, William. " T h e Boat Carvings at Jabal al-Jussasiyah, Northeast Q a t a r . " Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 1 7 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 9 9 222.
Hardy-Guilbert, C. "Fouilles archeologiques a M u r w a b , Qatar." In Ar able orientale: Mesopotamie et Iran meridional, de I'age ditfer au debut de laperiode islamique, edited b y R e m y Boucharlat and Jean-Francois Salles, p p . 1 6 9 - 1 8 8 . Paris, 1 9 8 4 . Inizan, Marie-Louise. Prehistoire a Qatar. Mission Archeologique Fran caise a Qatar, vol. 2 . Paris, 1 9 8 0 . Final publication of tlie work of tlie F r e n c h mission u n d e r Jacques Tixier on the Qatar peninsula. Su persedes all earlier publications on the prehistory of Qatar by the Danish, British, a n d F r e n c h missions. Kapel, Holger. Atlas of the Stone-Age Cultures of Qatar. Aarhus, 1 9 6 7 . Konishi, M . A., et al. Excavations in Bahrain and Qatar, 1987/8. T o k y o , 1989.
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Parts, Daniel T . The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1 9 9 ° . General survey of the archaeology of the Gulf region, with references to the occupation of Qatar in all periods. D . T . POTTS
QINNISHRIN (Ar., "eagle's nest"; Chalcis ad Belum), setdement located in Norm Syria about 28 km (17 mi.) south-southwest of Aleppo (39°46' N , 4 i ° i o ' E). T h e local name for the place was already attested in the Talmud and has always remained alive among the Arab population; it certainly derives from the widely visible, striking limestone mountain on whose south slope tire settlement lies. It was one of many new Syrian cities founded by Seleucus Nicator (Appianus, Syria 57; Kai Brodersen, Appians Abriss derSeleukidengeschichte,
Munich, 1989, p. 156).
The identification of the city is supported by the Itiner arium Antonini (Antonine Itinerary), according to which it lies 29 km (18 mi.) south of Beroea (Aleppo) on the way to Emesa (Horns), and by the Tabula Peutingeriana (Peutinger map), which on the way from Antioch to Beroea incorrectly gives a distance of 47 km (29 mi.). It is at least clear that Chalcis lay on a geographical crossroads and formed one of the centers in North Syria. Claudius Ptolemaeus (Geog. 5.18) mentions it as the chief city of the district of Chalcidike, a region he places between the Chalybonitis and the Apamene, proceeding from east to west. T o differentiate it from Chalcis ad Libanum, Pliny (Nat. Hist. 5.19) calls the place in question Chalcis ad Belum. According to a new and convincing interpretation, Belus refers to the Qoueiq River and not to the easternmost foothills of the Syrian limestone mountain range opposite the flat, arable land stretching to ward the Euphrates River (Baity, 1982). Strabo ( 1 6 . 2 . n ) mentions only the district of Chalcidike, which he says is inhabited primarily by the Skaenites (tent dwellers), a n o madic population expressly differentiated from the Arabs that displayed only a low standard of civilization. This re mark, recorded during the Augustan period, is pertinent be cause it contrasts with numerous pieces of archaeological evidence from the imperial and early Christian periods. That evidence bears witness to dense settlement of the area and suggests a change from a nomadic mode to a larger and more fixed one, which in turn should have had an effect on the makeup of the population of Chalcis. The first concrete historical events after the founding of tire city are recorded for the year 145 BCE, when Diodotos Tryphon from Apamea, at the beginning of a revolt against Demetrius II, captured Chalcis with the help of the native leader Malchos, or Iamblichos, and then became the first non-Seleucid to ascend the Seleucid throne (Grainger, 1990). [See Seleucids.] In 92 CE the coins show the beginning of a new era, providing a basis for the plausible supposition that at this time the city was "freed" by a native dynast (who could have been a successor of Iamblichos or Malchos). Like many other places ruled by local dynasts, it was made
completely subject to Roman administration (Grainger, 1990, pp. 132, 162). In 256 C E , Sapor I overran the "limes of Chalcis" (Malalas 295.17), whereupon he completely captured Syria and Antioch. This historical notice provided modern researchers with a name for the section of the limes between the Euphrates and the mountains of Palmyra (Poi debard and Mouterde, 1945). After that, however, Chalcis must have again been considered a secure place because, in 363 CE, the population of the Euphrates fortress Anatha was resettled there (Ammianus Marcellinus 24.1.9). In 529 C E it was again devastated by the Ghassamid leader al-Mundhir (cf. D. Feissel, "Remarques de toponymie syrienne," Syria 59 [1982]: 326). During Justinian's Persian wars, his general, Belisarius, moved south via Chalcis (Procopius, De Bellis Persicis 1.18.8; 90.21; 181.3). After being captured by Chosroes, the city had to ransom itself with 200 pounds of gold (Proco pius, De Bellis Persicis 1.205.5). Furthermore, Procopius re ports in two places drat after the withdrawal of the Persians, the fortifications of Chalcis were renewed under Justinian in 550 and were also supplemented with an outwork. If there is no oversight on the part of the author here, perhaps both Chalcis ad Libanum and Chalcis ad Belum are meant (Pro copius, De Aedificiis 2.11.1.8). An inscription from Qinnish rin preserved in situ as a door lintel (Jalabert and Mouterde, 1939, no. 348) further specifies that the city wall was built by Isidorus of Miletus, a nephew of Justinian's chief archi tect of tire same name (cf. Procopius, De Aedificiis 1.1.24). After the Battle of the Yarmuk in 636, die city was finally conquered by Abu Ubayda in the course of his conquest of North Syria. Furthermore, in the Umayyad period the city possessed a military garrison and remained the chief city of the djund Qinnishrin. After being destroyed a number of times, in the eleventh century it finally lost its significance to Aleppo (Elisseeff, 1986). T h e ancient setdement, like the modern one, lay on a plain between two mountains. T h e Nebi Is, a foothill of the north ern limestone mountain range, lies to the northwest; to the south there is a fortified tell. T o the north, the Qoueiq River forms a natural boundary. T h e remains of the settlement that are visible on the surface have been mapped and de scribed (Monceaux and Brosse, 1925; Jean Lauffray in Poi debard and Mouterde, 1945, p. 7, plan 1 ) . N o excavations have been carried out. Accordingly, it can only be reason ably assumed that die pre-Greek settlement lay on the east ern tell. This still shows an approximately trapezoidal for tification wall along the flanks of the hill and can be designated as the upper city. Its wall is certainly older than the walling off of the lower city that can be ascribed to Isi dorus of Miletus; however, it would be difficult to provide a more precise date. Only a number of unconnected traces of foundations and ruins have been preserved of the city's architecture. The massiveness of die foundations and the use of columns of Egyptian granite show that presentation architecture was a element here. T h e large quarries on the
QIRI, TEL south slope of the Nebi Is that extend u p to the settlement provided abundant construction material for tlie building activity in Chalcis. Numerous hypogea, with arcosolia ar ranged in a cross-shaped pattern, were situated here. Some of the burial chambers are decorated with reliefs. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baity, Jean C h . " L e belus de Chalcis et les fleures de Ba'al de SyriePalestine." I n Archeologie au Ixvant: Recueil a la memoire de Roger Saidah, p p . 287-298. Lyon, 1982. Brodersen, K a i . Appians Abriss der Seleukidengeschichte. M u n i c h , 1989. Elisseeff, Nikita. " K i n n a s n n . " I n Encyclopaedia of Islam, new e d „ vol. 5, p p . 124-125. Leiden, i960-. Grainger, John D . The Cities of Seleukid Syria. Oxford, 1990. Jalabert, Louis, and R e n e M o u t e r d e . Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie. Vol. 2. Paris, 1939. M o n c e a u x , Paul, a n d L e o n c e Brosse, "Chalcis ad B e l u m . " Syria 6 (1925): 339-350. Poidebard, Antoine, a n d R e n e M o u t e r d e . Le limes de Chalcis. Paris, 1945-
RUDIGER GoGRAFF. Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
QIRI, TEL, (Heb., Hazorea) village site situated on the eastern end of a spur of the Carmel ridge that slopes steeply into Nahal Shofet, near the site's main water supply (map reference 1611 X 2278). Tel Qiri is approximately 2 k m (1.2
J
mi.) southeast of Tel Yoqne'am, the major site in the vicin ity, of which it was undoubtedly a satellite. T h e pottery, coins, tombs, and other remains noted in various surveys here range in date from the Neolithic to the Early Arab pe riod, but no historical identification has ever been suggested. A considerable part of the site has been damaged by modern building activity. When rescue excavations were begun in 1975, less than half of its original area (estimated at approx imately 2.5 acres) was intact. Today, the entire site is cov ered by modern houses. Tel Qiri was excavated between 1975 and 1978 as part of die Yoqne'am Regional Project, under the direction of Amnon Ben-Tor, on behalf of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jeru salem. The main period of occupation at the site was in the Iron Age, of which an accumulation of about 4 m was noted. Remains of earlier as well as later periods were also encoun tered, some represented only by isolated small finds such as coins and sherds. Stratum numbers were assigned only to periods for which there are architectural remains. The u p permost remains of the later periods (strata I-IV) were se verely damaged across die site by recent building activity, so that tlie Ottoman, Crusader, and Umayyad periods are represented only by sttay finds. A few isolated walls of what were apparentiy private houses date to the Byzantine-Early Roman periods. Remnants of an impressive public building,
. > ' « . - /
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.
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waSmSmm QIRI, TEL. Ben-Tor)
Israelite houses and agricultural
387
installations.
N i n t h - e i g h u i c e n t u r y BCE. (Courtesy A .
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QIRI, TEL
with a large paved courtyard, date to the Hellenistic period. A few walls, which are not part of a coherent plan, and some twenty rock-cut tombs in the higher, western part of the site, are dated to the Persian period. An anthropological study of the bones indicates that the interred population was not local but is related to types common in Iran. Some of the tombs were reused in tire Roman period. Five sttata of the Iron Age (strata V-IX), divided into twelve phases, were identified that form a continuous se quence. Most of the buildings remain in use during several phases. A significant change in the plan of buildings is no ticeable only once in the sequence: in the transition from stratum VIII to VII—that is, from Iron I to Early Iron II. This change may reflect die arrival of the Israelites: neigh boring Yoqne'am was thoroughly destroyed at diat time, whereas at Tel Qiri the transition seems to have occurred peacefully. T h e ceramic repertoire indicates an occupation beginning in the twelfth century BCE (stratum IX), including Philistine ware and collar-rim storejars, down to the eighth century (stratum V), characterized by an Iron IIB assem
QIRI, TEL.
blage. The agricultural nature of the site is clearly indicated by the large number of silos scattered throughout and by a large oil press. Agricultural remains include mainly wheat, peas, vetch, and olive pits, while sheep and goats constitute about 80 percent of the faunal remains. Of particular interest is a building of regular plan in stratum VIII, in which a fine assemblage of clay vessels, cultic in nature, and a few dozen right foreleg bones of goats and sheep, undoubtedly remains of the right thigh offerings (Lv. 7:32-33), were found. Two strata (X-XI) are associated with earlier periods. Walls of residential structures, found in a deep section cut into the eastern slope of the site, belong to the Middle Bronze Age. Sherds from the Early Bronze Age, including gray-burnished and band-slip wares, as well as Chalcolithic churn and cornet fragments, indicate occupation during those periods. A few narrow stone walls, a stone-lined silo, and a large assemblage of stone tools and sherds, including dark-faced burnished ware, probably represent the first set tlement at Tel Qiri and are attributed to the Late Neolithic period (second half of the fifth millennium B C E ) .
Cultic vessel assemblage. F r o m s t r a t u m V I I I , eleventh c e n t u r y
BCE.
(Courtesy A . B e n - T o r )
QITAR, ELBIBLIOGRAPHY B e n - T o r , A m n o n . "Tell Qiri ( H a z o r e a ) . " Israel Exploration Journal 2 5 (1975): 168-169; 26 (1976): 200-201.
B e n - T o r , A m n o n . "Tell Qiri ( H a z o r e a ) . " Revue Biblique
83 (1976):
272-274.
B e n - T o r , A m n o n . "Tell Qiri: A L o o k at Village Life." Biblical Archae ologist 4 2 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 1 0 5 - 1 1 3 . B e n - T o r , A m n o n . " T h e Regional Study: A N e w A p p r o a c h to A r c h a e ological Investigation." Biblical Archaeology Review 6.2 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 3 0 44.
B e n - T o r , A m n o n , et al. Tell Qiri, a Village in the Jezreel Valley: Report of the Archaeological Excavations, 1975-1978. Q e d e m , vol. 2 4 . Jeru salem, 1 9 8 7 . Brandl, Baruch, and Aviva Schwarzfeld. "Tell Qiri (Hazorea), 1 9 7 7 . " Israel Exploration Journal 2 8 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 2 4 - 1 2 5 . H u n t , Melvin L . " T h e Iron A g e Pottery of t h e Y o q n e ' a m Regional Project." P h . D . diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1 9 8 5 . AMNON BEN-TOR
QITAR, EL- (Til-Abnu in Hittite hieroglyphs), Late Bronze Age mountain fortress, located on the right bank of the Euphrates River in Syria, about 60 km (37 mi.) south of Carchemish, at a narrows from which traffic along the river could be controlled and where the Tishreen dam is under construction. Excavations were conducted at el-Qitar in 1976 by the Milwaukee Public Museum under the direction of Rudolph Dornemann; from 1982 to 1985 by Thomas L. McClellan for the University of Melbourne; and in 19861987 by McClellan for the University of Chicago. Prior to excavation, large portions of the settlement's layout were visible on top of the mountain and on a lower eastern spur; their plans were recorded, utilizing lute photography and photogrammetry. Ceramics and radiocarbon dates indicate that the main period of occupation was in the fifteenth century B C E , pos sibly under the loose suzerainty of the Mitanni. Reoccupation during the fourteenth-thirteenth centuries B C E of this military position was probably under Hittite direction. Ear lier occupation from the Middle Bronze Age was largely masked by subsequent construction, but portions were ex cavated of what may have been an official residence, the Orthostat Building (its rooms were lined with limestone orthostats). Traces of Early Bronze IV material (tliird millen nium) were also recovered within the lower settlement. Dur ing the Hellenistic period, four tumuli were constructed on the northern part of the mountaintop and graves were lo cated nearby. A stone circle grave, probably from the Ro man period, was found near the water's edge, in the lower settlement. In the Late Bronze Age (and possibly earlier) the upper and lower settlements were connected by a rock-cut stair way. A fortification wall could be traced along the western and southern sides of the upper settlement that connected to a North Tower, the Lower West Gate, and a South
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Tower. Streets divide the settlement into several residential blocks. Triangular in layout, the lower settlement was on a spur that jutted into the river. T h e mountain's steep slope pro tected die base of the triangle; the two other sides were de fended by fortification walls, the northeastern portion utiliz ing the natural cliff line along the river. T h e settlement was divided into blocks of houses; some buildings were con structed against die fortification walls and opened onto streets that ran parallel to the walls and led to the River Gate. The L B fortifications consisted of curtain walls, made of large, irregularly cut limestone blocks, as were towers and two city gates. Both the River Gate and the Lower West Gate were designed with two sets of shallow piers of lime stone orthostats. T h e absence of public buildings is notable, although one structure (building 10) had two rooms that contained benches and platforms. Although originally iden tified as a temple or shrine, this interpretation is called into question by the many domestic houses nearby at Munbaqa with similar installations. Objects from the Late Bronze Age included a Middle As syrian cuneiform tablet with a Syro-Hittite sealing on it whose hieroglyphs may identify the site as Til-Abnu. It is an adoption contract in which more than twenty personal names are Hurrian. A silver cache weighing 2,5 kg contained bent and broken pins, medallions, and blanks. Although neither the domestic architecture nor the arti facts hint at the site's military function, its mountain setting identifies it as a fortress. Among the faunal remains many species were present: seven domesticated species (including numbers of Equidae—the horse Equus caballus, donkey, mule, and wild half-donkey), nine wild mammals (including beaver, fox, wild boar, brown bear, and Indian elephant), and sixteen bird species. This large number of hunted ani mals, compared to other sites on the Middle Euphrates, may indicate the inhabitants' privileged or military status. [See also Euphrates Dams, Survey of.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Archi, Alfonso. " A Seal Impression from el-Qitar/Til-Abnu (Syria)." Anatolian Studies 4 3 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 2 0 3 - 2 0 6 . Culican, William, and T h o m a s L . McClellan. "El-Qitar, 1 9 8 2 - 8 3 : A Preliminary R e p o r t . " Annales Archiologiques Arabes Syriennes 2 3 . 2 (1983): 289-297.
Culican, William, and T h o m a s L . McClellan. "El-Qitar: First Season of Excavations, 1 9 8 2 - 8 3 . " Abr-Nahrain 2 2 ( 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 8 4 ) : 2 9 - 6 3 . McClellan, T h o m a s L . " T h e S e c o n d Season of t h e Australian Exca vations at el-Qitar, 1 9 8 3 - 8 4 . " Annales Archiologiques Arabes Syriennes 23.2 (1983): 315-324.
McClellan, T h o m a s L . "El-Qitar: S e c o n d Season of Excavations, 1 9 8 3 - 8 4 . " Abr-Nahrain 2 3 ( 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 8 5 ) : 3 9 ~ 7 2 McClellan, T h o m a s L . " A Syrian Fortress of the Bronze Age: ElQitar." National Geographic Research 2 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 4 1 8 - 4 4 0 . McClellan, T h o m a s L. "El-Qitar: T h i r d Season of Excavations, 1 9 8 4 8 5 . " Abr-Nahrain 2 4 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 8 3 - 1 0 6 . THOMAS L . MCCLELLAN
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QITMIT, HORVAT
QITMIT, HORVAT, site located along the eastern margin of a broad valley some 10 1cm (6 mi.) south of Tel Arad ( 3 i ° n ' o o " N , 35°03'io" E; map reference 1564 X 0660) in Israel. T h e site is on a long, flat, stone-covered hilltop whose slopes are stepped flint cliffs. Nahal Qitmit (Wadi Qatamat), cuts the hilltop off from the surrounding range of hills. Horvat Qitmit lies within a radius of approximately 5-10 km (3-6 mi.) of other contemporary sites—Tel 'Aro'er, Tel Masos, Tel 'Ira, Tel Malhata, Tel Arad, Horvat Tov, Horvat 'Uza, and Horvat Radum. It is located between two major ancient roads: one that leads to the "Land of Edom" to the east and one to the Negev highlands to the southwest, within sight of Tel 'Ira, Tel Malhata, and Tel Arad. N o permanent water sources are known to be within its imme diate vicinity, but wells near Tel Malhata probably served as a water supply for Qitmit in antiquity. Horvat Qitmit is a one-period site from the end of the seventh century B C E , erected directly on the limestone bedrock. T h e site covers an area of about 650 sq m. It consists of two complexes on its west side: A and B; each comprises a number of rooms, a courtyard with various installations, and two enclosures (nos. 114 and 60). Complex A consists of one structure with three rooms, a bama ("platform"), bounded on three sides by a stone wall (hereafter referred to as the bama enclosure); and a stone basin and an altar, also apparently enclosed by a stone wall (hereafter referred to as the altar enclosure). The structure is rectangular and measures 10.5 X 5 m, with each room opening to the south for its entire width. Podiumlike wall segments, whose upper courses consist of large, flat stones, were erected perpendicular to the en trances in all three rooms. It is fairly clear, however, that these podiumlike elements served no structural function. Rather, they should be seen as elements of the room's fur niture. They may have served as a table on which rituals were performed in the room's entrance spaces. T h e platform, or bama, measures 1.25 X 1 m. It was built of medium-sized fieldstones directly on the bedrock and is preserved to a height of about 30 cm. It was enclosed on three sides—south, east, and west—by straight walls; its northern side, which faces the rooms, was left open. Crev ices and hollows in the rock were filled with pebbles and the entire surface completely covered with a heavy coat of plas ter, creating a table with a smooth surface for placing cult vessels around the bama. T h e altar enclosure (locus 24) is located south of the rooms, near the eastern wall of the bama enclosure, on a smooth rock surface that slopes to the south east. It comprises a stone altar, a basin, and a pit enclosed by an elliptical or circular wall. Complex B was erected on level ground about 15 m north of complex A. Enclosed by a massive wall (1.20 m thick), it contains a number of rooms and an open courtyard. Near the southeast corner of room 108, a rectangular flintstone was found in situ, probably a massebd (a ritual standing
stone, 0.8 X 0.6 X 0.3 m). An area (1.3 X 1.1 m) in front of the courtyard was paved with small flintstones slabs framed by rectangular stones. Most of tire finds are from complex A. They were scat tered over the enclosure area, concentrated either in groups on the rock surface or in the shallow earth layer. T h e largest quantity is from the bama enclosure. T h e finds include var ious clay figurines, different types of ceramic cult stands, pottery vessels, bronze and stone artifacts, and seashells. T h e pottery from the site can be divided into three groups: domestic vessels, Edomite-type vessels, and vessels widely found at sites in Judah and Transjordan. Five potsherds bear fragmentary incised inscriptions (four from complex B and one from complex A). One consists of only a single line, too fragmentary to be interpreted, with the exception of the let ters qws in the middle, the name of the principal Edomite god, Qos. T h e same name is found in another inscription on a rim fragments of a lcrater and in a bronze stamp from complex A. T h e largest accumulation of iconographic finds was ex-
QITMIT, HORVAT. F i g u r e i .
Three-homed
goddess.
(Photograph by A v r a h a m H a y ; courtesy I. Beit-Arieh)
H e i g h t , 13 c m .
QOM, KHIRBET EL-
of the First Temple period or a few years later. The biblical prophets' wrathful denunciations of Edom, along with ex pressed sentiments for revenge, reflect a historical reality of dire conflict between the two ldngdoms that may have had many causes (Jos. 34; 63:1-6; Jer. 49:7-22; Ez. 25:12-14, 35:1-6; Jl. 4:19; Am. 1 : 1 1 - 1 2 ) . T h e most plausible expla nation of this enmity may be Edom's attempt to exploit the weakness of the Judean kingdom at the very time that the latter was engaged in a life-and-death snuggle against the Babylonian army.
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— Bill
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. Arad Inscriptions. Translated by Judith Ben-Or. Je rusalem, 1 9 8 1 . Bartlett, J. R. Edam and the Edomites. Sheffield, 1 9 8 9 . Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq, " N e w D a t a o n t h e Relationship between Judah and E d o m toward t h e E n d of t h e Iron A g e . " Annual of the American
Schools of Oriental Research
4 9 (1989):
125-131.
Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq. " T h e E d o m i t e Shrine at H o r v a t Qitmit in the Ju dean Negev: Preliminary Excavation R e p o r t . " TelAviv 1 8 . 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 93-116.
ITZHAQ BEIT-ARIEH
mm. QITMIT, HORVAT.
F i g u r e 2 . Anthropomorphic
stand.
H e i g h t , 60
c m . (Photograph by A v r a h a m H a y ; courtesy I. Beit-Arieh)
posed in the bama enclosure. In addition to everyday pottery vessels, more than one hundred ceramic figurines, statues, reliefs, stands, and cultic vessels were discovered in this area. T h e figurines depict humans and animals (sheep, cattle, and birds). All the large animal figurines are hollow; some were punctured with small holes both on their sides and under neath their tail. Of special interest are the head of a threehorned goddess (see figure 1 ) , a sphinx with a bearded hu man head, the body of an animal (perhaps a lion) that has wings spread loftily upward, and assorted anthropomorphic stands (see figure 2). Cultic vessels include chalices covered with pendant pomegranates as surface decoration; fragments of a square, windowed stand; and perforated incense bowls. T h e pottery figurines and cultic stands are tentatively interpreted as closely related to the eastern Mediterranean traditions em bodied in Phoenician culture. T h e shrine at Qitmit in the Judean Desert is indicative of relations between Edom and Judah at the end of the period of the Judean kingdom. It may be construed as evidence of Edomite domination of several regions in Judah at the end
QOM, K H I R B E T EL-, small hilltop site 20 km (12 mi.) west of Hebron at the border of the Shephelah and the Judean foothills (map reference 1465 X 1045). It is probably to be identified with the Makkedah of Joshua 10. Khirbet el-Qom was discovered after the 1967 war by tire Archaeological Survey of Israel and then excavated by Wil liam G. Dever in salvage campaigns in 1967-1968, spon sored by the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. T h e prin cipal find was a recently robbed Iron Age cemetery on die slopes below the modern Arab village. In addition to dozens of pieces of pottery dated to the ninth-seventh century B C E , there were recovered Hebrew shekel-weights; an inscribed decanter reading "(Belonging to) Yahmol"; and a bowl reading "El" (or " G o d " ) . Several of the eighth-century B C E tombs recleared and planned were typical Iron Age benchtombs. T o m b I had an inscription to the left of the doorway into one chamber reading "Belonging to 'Ophai BenNetiianyahu; this is his tomb-chamber." Over tire doorway the lintel read "Belonging to 'Uzza Bat-Nethanyahu." A longer inscription from tomb III read: U r i y a h u t h e G o v e r n o r ( o r singer) w r o t e it. M a y Uriyahu be blessed b y Yahweh, F o r f r o m h i s e n e m i e s h e h a s b e e n s a v e d b y his a/Asherah.
T h e reference to "his (i.e., Yahweh's) a/Asherah" is prob lematic, but it is now paralleled almost exactly by eighthcentury B C E inscriptions from the Judean fort-sanctuary at Kuntillet 'Ajrud in tire eastern Sinai. [See Kuntillet 'Ajrud.] Some scholars prefer to see in "asherah" merely a symbol of the old Canaanite Mother Goddess, such as the neelike effigies condemned in many passages in the Hebrew Bible.
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QUADRANT PLAN
Others see evidence here for the continuation of the cult of the Asherah, "Asherah" being either a hypostatization of some aspect of Yahweh, or perhaps his consort. In 1971 John S. Holladay, James F. Strange, and Law rence T . Geraty conducted soundings in the modern village. These were scattered Early Bronze Age remains, but the principal settlement was that of the tenth-early sixth century BCE. Part of the cyclopean Iron Age wall is still visible, and remains of a two-entryway gate were brought to light. The Babylonian destruction evidently ended the Iron Age site, but several domestic houses of the fourth-third century BCE were found, reusing earlier dwellings. In some of the rooms were ostraca, six in Aramaic, one in Greek, and one bilingual text of nine lines. T h e latter records a transaction between a certain "Qos-yada" and a Greek named "Nikeratos," noting the payment of 32 drachmas. T h e date given is tire 12th of Tammuz, year 6, no doubt of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, or 277 B C E .
An area is divided into quadrants following a full site sur vey. T h e survey will determine where the most productive excavation areas are likely to be found and where the first ttenches should be dug. T h e use of subsurface interface ra dar, magnetometers, and aerial infrared photography en hances the surface survey by locating stone structures be neath the surface. In countries whose entire landscape has been plotted onto a national grid and for which elevation benchmarks exist, site surveys correlate with the grid and utilize quadrant plans within its framework. [See also Excavation Strategy; Grid Plan; and Site Survey.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
M c R a y , John. Archaeology and the New Testament. G r a n d R a p i d s , Mich., 1 9 9 1 . See pages 1 7 - 3 4 . Sharer, Robert J., and W e n d y A s h m o r e . Fundamentals of Archaeology. Menlo Park, Calif., 1 9 7 9 . See pages 1 7 7 - 2 1 0 . JOHN M C R A Y
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dever, William G . " I r o n Age Epigraphic Material from the Area of Kh. el-K6m, West of H e b r o n . " Hebrew Union College Annual 4 0 - 4 1 (1969-1970): 1 3 9 - 2 0 4 .
Geraty, Lawrence T , " T h e Khirbet el-Kom Bilingual Ostracon." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 2 0 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 5 5 61.
Hadley, Judith M . " T h e Khirbet el-Q6m Inscription." Vetus Testamentum 3 7 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 5 0 - 6 2 .
Holladay, John S. "Khirbet e l - Q 6 m . " Israel Exploration Journal 21 (1971): 175-177.
Lemaire, Andre. "Les inscriptions des Khirbet E l - Q 6 m e t l ' A s h e r a h de YHWH." Revue Biblique 8 4 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 5 9 7 - 6 0 8 . Mittmann, Siegfried. " D i e Grabinschrift des Siingers U r i a h u . " Zeit schrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 9 7 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 3 9 - 1 5 2 . Zevit, Ziony. " T h e Khirbet el Q o m Inscription Mentioning a G o d dess." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 5 5 (1984): 39-47'
WILLIAM G . DEVER
QUADRANT PLAN. T h e standard method for laying out a large site is the grid plan, according to which the site is configured like a checkerboard in 5-meter squares and each square is given an identifying control number. Al though a large site can be effectively controlled in this way, tire grid plan is overly complex for digging a small area, which does not require numerous squares. At small sites, especially round ones, therefore, the quad rant plan is utilized. It involves dividing the site into four areas, or sections, by drawing 90 degree intersecting lines through its center, which produces a quadrant, each quarter of which is then numbered. When opposite quadrants are dug, the balks of their axes reveal the full stratigraphy of the area. Thus, it is not necessary to dig all four quadrants: four balks have been exposed, providing the stratigraphical his tory of the entire area.
QUMRAN, site located near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, 12 km (7 mi.) south of Jericho, some 32 Ion (20 mi.) north of 'Ein-Gedi, and 21 km (13 mi.) east of Jerusalem (3i°44'i8" N , 35°27'3o" E; map reference 193 X 127). T h e ruins of Qumran stand on a marl terrace, 338 m below sea level, at the foot of cliffs edging the Judean Desert, whose caves yielded part of the remarkable manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The site was visited in the nineteenth century by Felicien de Saulcy, Baron Rey, Claude R. Conder and Horatio Her bert Kitchener, and Charles Clermont-Ganneau, when it was known as Khirbet Yahud (Ar., "ruins of the Jew") or Khirbet Qumran ("die grayish spot," according to E. H. Palmer, The Survey of Western Palestine: Arabic and English Name Lists, London, 1881, folio 18, p . 345). Wadi Qumran, which is the lower course of the Kidron Valley runs along its southern edge. John M . Allegro (The Copper Scroll from Qumran, Transactions Glasgow University Oriental Soci ety, 1959-1960, p. 64) proposed a synonymy between Qimron, which is not attested textually, and the Kippah torrent mentioned in the Copper Scroll from nearby Cave 3, along which there is a place called Sekaka. Other proposals for the ancient name of the ldiirbeh ("ruins") are de Saulcy's G o morrha, Martin Noth's Ir ha-Melah (Heb., "salt city," from Jos. 15:62, for which Pessah Bar Adon proposes 'Ein Ghuweir: "Another Settlement of the Judean Desert Sect, BASOR 227 [1977]: 22-23); Allegro's other synonym, Mesilla (Zee. 1:1, 8), which may be Josephus's Bemeselis (War, 1.4.6); and, for its last period of occupation, Mesad Hasidin (Heb., "Fortress of the Hasidim/the Pious"), known from document 45 from the nearby Wadi Murabba'at caves as having played a role during the Second Jewish War ( 1 3 4 135 C E ; J. T . Milik, Discoveries in thejudaean Desert, vol. 2, 1961, p . 163).
QUMRAN
QUMRAN. Plan of the site. (Courtesy R. Donceel)
Except for the tomb cleared in 1873 by Clermont-Gan neau, the Qumran ruins were first excavated in NovemberDecember 1951 by a small team led by Fr. Roland Guerin de Vaux, director of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise (EBAF) in Jerusalem, and G. Lankester Harding, for tire Department of Antiquities of Jordan, with technical assistance (restoration and photography) from die Palestine Archaeological Museum of Jerusalem (now the Rockefeller Museum). Five campaigns followed regularly between 1953 and 1958 under de Vaux's direction. (Work was suspended in 1957 because of the Suez conflict.) T h e neighboring site of 'Ain Feshkha was also uncovered, evidencing die same historical periods, but with an additional occupation in the Byzantine period. T h e caves were further explored between and during the seasons in the field. Between December 1959 and April i960, a year after the Franco-Jordanian excavations, Allegro undertook deep soundings at a series of Qumran loci (at twenty-nine, mostly peripheral, locations), causing damage under certain walls. Extensive restoration was subsequently carried out by Jor dan and then Israel, during which other discoveries were made ("Chronique archeologique," Revue Biblique 73 [1966]: 147). Solomon H. Steckoll excavated ten tombs in
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the main cemetery, which the de Vaux team had only par tially explored (principally Joseph T. Milik and Henri de Contenson). There are traces of unofficial digging there in recent years. A comparison of the photographs taken in the 1950s and 1980s shows the extent of the damage caused by excavation, erosion, and tourism—many installations and some loci hav ing entirely disappeared. D e Vaux proposed the following chronology of the site's occupational phases: 1. Period la. T h e Iron Age fortress was reoccupied at the end of the second century B C E , in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus or even of his predecessor, John Hyrcanus ( 1 3 4 104 B C E ) . 2. Period lb. The site's greatest expansion and wealth took place prior to tire earthquake in spring 31 BCE thatcaused its abandonment for most of the reign of Herod the Great (37-4 B C E ) . 3. Period II. Reoccupation took place between 4 and 1 BCE (see de Vaux, 1973, p. 36), a date de Vaux determined from a hoard of 561 silver coins discovered in locus 120. All are from the mint of Tyre, mostly tetradrachmae but also didrachmae. The earliest may date back to the Seleucid kings, but the majority comes from the autonomous mint of Tyre; the latest date is 118 of the Tyrene era, that is, 9/8 B C E . The hoard, in three different pots, must have been hid den between then and 1 B C E / I C E . De Vaux suggested that this was during the site's period of temporary abandonment, after which life continued along the same lines it had prior to the earthquake. 4. Period III. The locality was taken by a Roman detach ment during the First Jewish War eitiier at the end of June 68 C E , or immediately afterward. Some of the ruins were restored by a small garrison that may have been stationed there for about ten years, until the entire region had been completely pacified (by the time of the fall of Masada, in 73 C E ) . T h e site was then abandoned for about half a century. Traces of a wall and some coins signify that what was left of the buildings knew a brief reoccupation, related to the Second Jewish War. De Vaux's outline has been contested on some significant points. Milik, one of his field collaborators, questions whether die site had been completely abandoned during Herod's reign, as well as the chronology of the successive lb and II periods of locus 84/89 (the "crockery" room found near to what de Vaux interpreted as a refectory, great quan tities of which are intact; cf. Milik, 1959, p. 5 5, and de Vaux's response, 1973, pp. 1 1 - 1 2 ) . Ernest M. Laperrousaz (1976) disputes the use de Vaux made of the coins, especially of the silver ones, to date the Hellenistic occupation (cf., e.g., Philip R. Davies, "How Not to Do Archaeology—The Story of Qumran," Biblical Archaeologist 51.4 [1988]: 204; Davies also favors lower dates). Laperrousaz sees the site first aban doned at about the time of Pompey's conquest of Palestine, in relation to the 67-63 B C E Jewish internecine war; conse-
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QUMRAN
quently, the earthquake, for which de Vaux's evidence has frequently been disputed, would have taken place while the site was abandoned. De Vaux's distinction between phases la and lb, which he admits is not clear ("Fouilles de Khirbet Qumran," Revue Biblique 63 [1956]: 551), is rejected by many archaeologists. The building techniques used at Qumran are strikingly basic. Walls are of local rough-hewn stone and dry joints, but mortar and stucco were used generously for their faces. Most of the internal fittings—seats, benches, cupboards, raised platforms—and a few walls are of unbaked mud brick, carefully plastered over. Most door and window frames, of local soft coral limestone, were finished with care, while col umn bases and drums carry traces of a stucco revetment. De Vaux retraced the evolution of the architecture at Qum ran from an Iron Age rectangle to a wider and more complex settlement; tire tower, which still dominates the center of its north flank, was built in period lb and restored after the earthquake according to him. The hypothesis that it was there from the start was made by a team member, R. F. M. du Buit {Le Monde de la Bible 4 [1978]: 22). The site's most striking feature is its important water sys
QUMRAN.
tem. T h e volume of water that can be collected per year has been estimated at some 100,000 liters (Laperrousaz, 1976, p. 107). This water is caught in natural basins in the Wadi Qumran torrent situated upstream and is brought to the site by an aqueduct that is in all ways comparable to those of neighboring Hasmonean fortresses and residences. Passing through decantation basins, it is then distributed among the different cisterns. Except for one round cistern (locus 110), that appears to have been built in the Iron Age, all are rec tangular, though of different sizes. There are two small, neatly finished reservoirs that the excavators maintain are baths—ritual or not (locus 138, northwest, near one of the entrances, and locus 68, southeast; cf. de Vaux, 1973, p. 132). T h e annual local rainfall is less than 100 m m in ten to twenty days, and Qumran has no springs. About 3 Ion south, and on even lower ground, 'Ain Feshkha enjoys the water of several somewhat briny springs. The buildings, at ground level, mainly consist of what the excavators describe as collective facilities (e.g., a refectory, places to wash, workshops, ovens, mills, stables, and lava tories) . De Vaux interpreted the plastered furniture from the upper floor of locus 30 as proving the existence of a scrip-
The so-called "Scriptorium."
(Courtesy A S O R Archives)
QUMRAN torium, an installation in which texts were copied. T h e cem etery is notable for its tombs' orderly distribution although their north-south, rather titan east-west, disposition is not traditional for a Jewish population. The precise chronological framework de Vaux proposed and the abundant archaeological material from the site have become a chronological point of reference for archaeologists working on this period of Near Eastern history (cf. Paul W. Lapp, Palestinian Ceramic Chronology, 200 B.C.-A.D. 70, New Haven, 1961; p . 12). De Vaux's finds included nu merous very fragmentary items not selected for the inven tory and the publication but that were kept and marked with their date and place of discovery. Except for the few dozen artifacts used to illustrate his preliminary reports and his only, relatively short, synthesis (see. Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1973), the finds were left unpublished, much as those of the more recent excavations at the site. T h e EBAF launched the final publication of all the finds on the occasion of its centenary (Donceel and Donceel-Voiite, 1994). At tire time of the excavations, the pottery, including the lamps, together with the material from the caves, appeared to be unique when compared with same-period sites (cf. de Vaux, 1973, pp. 1 7 - 1 8 , in which he is slightly more reserved on this point than in the French edition, pp. 13-14). How ever, Lapp (1961) had already shown that certain Qumran I and II pottery shapes were aldn to other Hellenistic and Eastern Terra Sigillata wares. T h e initial publications say little about other categories of objects that might be signifi cant for the history and chronology of Qumran, such as the stone- and glassware, and the metal objects, mainly tools, which offer insights into everyday activities. More than twelve hundred coins were recovered from all over the site, including several hoards. Organic material—wood, reeds, and palm leaves—was found, but no scrolls were discovered in or among the buildings. Endeavoring to explain the topographical relationship be tween the site and the nearby scroll caves, and struck by characteristics that, according to him, only communal life could explain, de Vaux proposed an occupation of the build ings in periods I and II by a monastic community of Essene inspiration ("Fouilles de Khirbet Qumran," Revue Biblique 60 [1953]: 104). He was encouraged by the contents of cer tain Qumran cave scrolls and the indication of a dwelling place of the "Essene" sect, localized as having Ein-Gedi "underneath them," by Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist., 5.17.4). De Vaux and other supporters of a Qumrano-Essenic theory have been accused of forcing the archaeological evidence from Qumran, and from other nearby sites, into the frame of this theory (see Norman Golb, " W h o Hid the Dead Sea c
Scrolls?" Biblical
Archaeologist
48.2 [1985]: 68-82).
With the increase in comparative archaeological material for the region of ancient Syria-Palestine, other hypotheses have been formulated. Scholars such as Golb, for example, have underlined the military character of the site's defensive
395
features; as early as 1914 Gustaf Dalman had suggested that Qumran had been a Roman fort (Palastina Jahrbuch 10 [1914]: 9). Even though the tower is sturdy, especially in its last phase, the circumference of the site would not be easily defended; the long east wall, to which de Vaux also attrib uted a ritual function (separating the worlds of the living and the dead in the cemetery on the east), encloses the large southern terrace that is characteristic of the site; it may have been a cultivated area because it received water from the central system and its outlets, as from cistern 7 1 , at the southern end of the buildings. This may have served to ir rigate a vineyard—as Robert Donceel was able, in 1988, to identify a wine-press in the isolated southern locus 75—and/ or other plantations, in relation with regional products, such as palm dates, or balsam, well known from classical authors. Indeed, Qumran pottery counts a good number of a type of narrow-necked, round-bellied juglets, one of which was found intact in a nearby cave still containing a vegetable extract, which is akin to the famous essences retrieved from such shrubs as the Balsamodendron Opobalsamon that were among the area's main economic assets in antiquity Q. Patrich and B. Arubas, "A Juglet Containing Balsam Oil(?) from a Cave near Qumran," Israel Exploration Journal 39 [1989]: 43-59). The finds at the site include quantities of soft limestone objects: chip-cut mugs, small jugs, deep dishes and bowls, as well as lathe-turned vessels such as flat-based semi-glob ular goblets and large pedestalled urns, often finely orna mented with a fluted band. Lamps show a diversity of clays, production methods, and shapes. T h e few "cornucopia" lamps, tire series of current, small, "Herodian" anvil nozzled types, and an unusual, large and long-nozzled model are wheel turned. Molded lamps can be delphiniformic, or carry simple radiating designs or richer vegetable motifs. T h e blown glassware is quite abundant and presents some rare colors and mold-blown pieces, the shapes being mostly of small bowls, balsamaria, and bottles. T h e pottery includes some fine wares, such as "painted Jerusalem" plates, Hel lenistic black ware, Western and Eastern A Terra Sigillata, beside vast quantities of common wares for the table, cook ing, and storage, among the more remarkable of which are the cream ware with combed and punched decoration, the large lopsided flasks, and the delicate shapes of cups, bowls, and rimmed plates. T h e archaeological remains at Qumran included at least three stone staircases to upper floors and comprised both a complex of industrial installations—workshops, various shallow basins, tall plastered earthen vats, different kilns and heating installations—and a residential core that includes the multistoried tower and an upstairs dining room (de Vaux's scriptorium; see P. Donceel-Voute, "'Coenaculum'—lasalle a manger a l'etage du locus 30 a Khirbet Qumran sur la Mer Morte," Res Orientales 4 [1992]: 61-84). These workshops, the few defensive structures, and die number of coins found
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QURAYYAH
at the site suggest economic activities whose yield was great. Roads and far-reaching defensive systems had been built in the area well before tire common era, as part of the exploi tation of salt and bitumen from the Dead Sea, while all of the Jericho region, which may have included Qumran and 'Ain Feshkha, traditionally produced and traded precious vegetable essences and the various yields of its extensive palm groves. The date of the necropolis is still considered uncertain. Part of the excavated tombs were found in one of the fill levels, maybe the same as those, in the northern part of uie site, which the excavators described as having an inverted stratigraphy (sounding A). In 1956 grave 26 was found dug into earth that contained a Herodian lamp, of the type com mon in de Vaux's period II of the site (ending in 68 B C E ) . For other graves, stone blocks had been reused to build the tomb's side chamber. However, Carbon-14 datings con firmed the antiquity of the necropolis. It included more than eleven hundred burials, remarkably poor and deep, and reg ularly laid out, which suggests a strong organization for quite an important human group (a religious community, accord ing to de Vaux, or possibly an abundant labor force, even tually "forced," with distinct funerary practices). Certain rooms offer evidence for occupational periods more numerous than those described in print by the exca vators (e.g., the case of locus 4 "council hall") or for a denser later occupation (probably second century CE) of tire settlement (e.g., loci 32 and 36). [See also Essenes; Dead Sea Scrolls; and the biographies of Harding
and
bibliography (on the m o d e r n a n d ancient place n a m e s ) , a n d discus sion of certain points of d e Vaux's interpretations. F o r a shorter, u p d a t e d version, see " Q u m r a n et decouvertes au desert d e J u d a " in Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement, vol. 9, cols. 783-789 (Paris, 1978). Milik, J. T . Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea. Studies in Biblical Theology, vol. 26. L o n d o n , 1959. Translation, with m i n o r additions, of the French edition of 1957. Evidence of die excavation presented by a m e m b e r of the t e a m , with his original views on certain aspects of uncovering Q u m r a n and 'Ain Feshkha. Milik, J. T . " Q u m r i n . " In Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. 19, p p . 417419. Paris, 1990. N o r t h , R. " T h e Q u m r a n Reservoirs." In The Bible in Current Catholic Thought, edited by J o h n L . M c K e n z i e , p p . 100-132. N e w York, 1962: Sharabani, Marcia. " M o n n a i e s d e Q u m r a n au M u s e e Rockefeller de Jerusalem." Revue Biblique 87 (1980): 274-284, pis. 3-4. Study of the silver coin hoard. Steckoll, Solomon H . "Preliminary Excavation R e p o r t in t h e Q u m r a n Cemetery." Revue de Qumran 6.3 (February 1968): 323-336. E x c a vations in t h e necropolis. Vaux, Roland de. " U n e hachette ess6nienne?" Vetus Testamentum 9 (1959): 399-407. Study of a small hatchet found at the site, presented as a ritual object. Vaux, Roland d e . Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. L o n d o n , 1973, T h e excavator's only synthesis (aluiough only half of the book covers the site), with basic information on the site a n d finds; slighdy a m plified and p o s t h u m o u s version of t h e first F r e n c h edition (1961), with references to de Vaux's preliminary reports in the Revue Biblique (1951-1958). Zeuner, F . E. " N o t e s on Q u m r a n . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 92 (i960): 27-36. Results of laboratory analyses of animal b o n e s , C14 in wood, and the sediment a n d clay deposits in cisterns from a ceramological perspective, ROBERT DONCEEL
Vaux.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibliography for the archaeological remains is less a b u n d a n t t h a n for the texts; only publications by excavators and archaeologists in direct contact with the material a p p e a r here. Cross, Frank M o o r e . The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modem Bib lical Studies. Rev. ed. G a r d e n City, N.Y., 1961. Traditional presen tation of the site as the center of an Essene community by one of the driving forces behind the early activities in the field for the American Schools of Oriental Research. T h e G e r m a n edition (1967) has a more up-to-date bibliography. Donceel, Robert, and Pauline Donceel-Voute. " T h e Archaeology of Khirbet Q u m r a n . " In Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site, edited by Michael O. Wise et al., p p . 1-38. Annals of the N e w York Academy of Sciences, vol. 722. N e w York, 1994. T h e available evidence and final publication plan by t h e Ecole Biblique and the Catholic University of Louvain team. Goranson, Stephen. " F u r t h e r Q u m r a n Archaeology Publications in Progress." Biblical Archaeologist 54.2 (1991): I I O - I I I . Inkwells from the site. Harding, G, Lankester. The Antiquities ofJordan. L o n d o n , 1959. G o o d presentation of the site by one of the two archaeologists responsible for die first excavation (see p p . 195-200). Laperrousaz, Ernest M . Qoumran, I'etablissement essinien des bords de la Mer Mortc: Histoire et archeologie du site. Paris, 1976. Collection a n d classification of all the published evidence, by a m e m b e r of the team during the last campaigns. Includes this excavator's complete diary,
QURAYYAH, site located in northwest Arabia (28°47' N, 36°oo' E), about 63 1cm (39 mi.) northwest of Tabulc. It lies near die main pilgrim and trade route through the pen insula connecting Yemen with the Levant. Qurayyah is sit uated in a region of broken sandstone hills and gravel plains which, though barren throughout most of the year, receives flash floods in the spring from the higher granite mountains to the west. It was mentioned by nineteenth-century Euro pean ttavelers such as Augustus Wallin, Richard Burton, and Charles M . Doughty but not visited and described until 1906, by Bernard Moritz. T h e next European visitor seems to have been St. John Philby in 1951, who left a reasonably accurate account of the visible remains. T h e first real ar chaeological exploration was not undertaken until 1968, however, when a team from the University of London made a rapid survey of the site and its surroundings, described by Peter J. Parr et al. ("Preliminary Survey in N . W, Arabia, 1968," Bulletin London
8-9
of the Institute
of Archaeology,
University
of
[1970]: 2 1 9 - 2 4 1 , pis. 2 1 - 4 2 ) . Archaeologists
from the Saudi Arabian Antiquities Department have made a few minor soundings at the site, but it remains poorly ex plored and recorded. Any account of its historical and cul-
QUSAYR 'AMRA rural significance is, thus, necessarily tentative and specu lative. Qurayyah's ruins comprise three main elements. T h e first is an isolated hill, the citadel (about 1,000 X 350 m), whose nearly vertical sides rise some 50 m above the surrounding terrain to a flattish summit. T h e summit is divided into three parts by two walls built of thin slabs of the local shale (ap proximately 1.40 m thick at tiieir base and 3 m high). Several towers attached to them and a possible gateway are visible. The remains of other buildings on the summit are of tlie same masonry style and may be watchtowers or aboveground tombs. T h e second element appears about 200 m away, at the foot of the citadel: the remains of a small setdement (about 400 X 300 m) are surrounded by a stone wall now largely buried by wind-blown sand. Finally, over many square kilometers to tlie east the third element, the outlines of small fields can be traced, delineated by single lines of stones and crossed by stone irrigation channels. Extensive areas of these fields are enclosed by substantial stone walls, mostiy covered by sand but similar where visible to the walls on top of the hill. Only three other structures are visible whose style of ashlar masonry is very different, and they clearly are later than the other remains. They exhibit archi tectural features characteristic of tlie Nabatean/Roman pe riod. Despite the lack of detailed examination and excavation, it seems evident that these remains (with the exception of the three late buildings) form part of a single contemporary occupational complex. An idea of their date can, at present, only be gained from the surface pottery. This includes quan tities of a distinctive ware decorated with naturalistic and geomeuic motifs derived from the Aegean and Egypt and reminiscent of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age decorated pottery found elsewhere in the Levant. However, that the ware was locally made is indicated by the number of sherds lying near a ruined kiln and has been confirmed by petrographic analysis. This Qurayyah painted ware has also been discovered at otiier sites, notably at Timna' in the Wadi 'Arabah in Israel, by Benno Rothenberg, where it is associ ated witii Egyptian copper mining and smelting installations dated by inscriptions to the nineteenth dynasty (c. 13001150 B C E ) . [See Timna' (Negev).] T h e main occupation at Qurayyah is thus tentatively attributed to this period. This part of Arabia is usually identified with ancient Mi dian. According to the Hebrew Bible, Moses took refuge there after he murdered an Egyptian overseer and married the daughter of its ruler, Jethro; tiiese events are usually also dated to the time of tlie nineteenth dynasty. In the Bible tlie Midianites are portrayed as pastoralists and camel raiders, but if Qurayyah is, as die evidence suggests, a Midianite settlement, this picture needs revision. [See Midian.] T h e inhabitants of Qurayyah built fortification walls and prac ticed irrigation agriculture; they almost certainly were par ticipating with the Egyptians in tlie metallurgical industry at
397
Timna'. Judging from the location of the site, they may well have already been active in the incense trade. Although this interpretation of the evidence is controversial, so is the part played by Egypt in this "urban" development (Parr, 1988, 1993; Bawden, 1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY T h e following articles represent a discussion between the authors over the dating a n d implications of t h e material from Qurayyah a n d elsewhere in northwest Arabia. Bawden, Garth. "Continuity a n d Disruption in t h e Ancient Hejaz: A n Assessment of C u r r e n t Archaeological Strategies." Arabian Archae ology and Epigraphy 3 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 - 2 2 . Parr, Peter J. "Pottery of tlie L a t e Second Millennium B . C . f r o m N o r t h W e s t Arabia a n d Its Historical Implications." In Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archaeology, edited by Daniel T , Potts, p p . 7 3 - 8 9 . Copenhagen, 1988. Parr, Peter J. " T h e Early History of the Hejaz: A Response to G. Baw d e n . " Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 4 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 4 8 - 5 8 . PETER J. PARR
C
QUSAYR AMRA, site located 85 km (53 mi.) east of Amman, Jordan, and 32 km (20 mi.) southwest of the oasis of Azraq (3i°48' N , 36°33' E). This bathhouse complex was built in the first half of the eighth-century CE on the Jorda nian steppe, unconnected to any visible earlier settlement. T h e Austrian Orientalist-explorer Alois Musil discovered tlie monument in 1898. Soon afterward, he made two ad ditional trips to the site, tlie third in the company of a painter, A. L. Meilich, who copied die frescoes that cover virtually all the interior surfaces, which the Academy of Vi enna published in 1907. Following Musil's rediscovery, the paintings became smoke blackened by bedouin campfires. Visitors and passersby caused additional damage by scratch ing tiieir names on the frescoes. Perceiving the precarious condition of die paintings, tlie Department of Antiquities of Jordan commissioned a Spanish team from die National Museum of Madrid to clean them. This task was accom plished in tiiree seasons of work (1971-1973). T h e complex is built of roughly shaped, hard limestone blocks, except the doorjambs and the monolithic lintel above the main doorway, which are of basalt. T h e plan consists of three main elements: a rectangular audience hall, a bath complex, and hydraulic structures. The audience hall is divided into tiiree bays by two slightly pointed transverse arches that spring from low pilasters. T h e bays are roofed by three tunnel vaults; on the axis of the entrance doorway a tunnel-vaulted alcove is flanked by two small, poorly lit rooms paved with colored mosaics. T h e northeastern corner of the audience hall is occupied by a shallow fountain pool. T o the east of tlie audience hall is a bath complex consisting of three small rooms corresponding to tlie apodyterium, tepidarium, and caldarium. The floors of the second and third rooms rested on basalt supports; the
398
QUSAYR 'AMRA
space between the supports allowed for the circulation of hot air (hypocaust). On the east side of the caldarium is a tunnel-vaulted passage; at the far end, below this passage, are the strokehole and furnaces. T h e passage opens onto an unroofed enclosure that served as the stroking area and for fuel storage. At a distance of 5 m to the north is an elevated water tank, along-side which is a deep masonry-lined well. Immediately to the west of the well two piers of masonry stand opposite each other alongside a low circle; originally there must have been a third pier in the middle. These piers formed part of the apparatus for drawing water from the well into the water tank. From the elevated tank two feeder pipes set in slab-covered channels led to the fountain pool in the audience hall and to a plastered tank set above the furnace. The first impression to strike the visitor to Qusayr 'Amra is the sharp contrast between the rough appearance of the exterior walls and the extensive paintings, in the interior (see figure 1 ) . These paintings include bathing and hunting scenes, dancing, athletes practicing, wrestlers, gift bearers, various activities connected with the builder's trade, as well as a cluster of isolated scenes of pastoral life. T h e dome of the caldarium is decorated with the constellations of the Northern Hemisphere and the signs of the zodiac. It has long been recognized that the roots of these paint ings lay in the Greco-Syrian artistic tradition, apparent in the themes adopted from the classical repertoire: flying an gels; putti; the personifications of history, philosophy, and poetry identified by accompanying Greek inscriptions; and
the flamboyant representions of bathing scenes. However, a closer look at the figural representations shows that more than one style existed concurrently in the paintings—from elegantiy formed shapes whose poses differ to formalized Byzantine figural representations and compositions of clumsy proportions and woodenlike, frozen shapes drawn schematically with heavily charged brushstrokes. These styles sum up the possibility of assimilation of the various local artistic traditions enriched by Eastern ideas. Another striking feature of these paintings is their rich and varied iconographic repertoire. T h e themes are very diverse with no apparent unity or relationship to each other. T h e scenes of dancing females, hunting figures, and figures listening to music were considered by Oleg Grabar to be reflections of royal pleasures and pastimes, majlis al-lahwa ("a place used for ceremonial entertainment"), in which the life of the prince was expressed through his association with hunting, banqueting, and dancing—amusements common in the Sasanian court. It is also likely that such themes were stock motifs and subjects in the decorations of high-quality baths. Qusayr 'Amra was not a residential building. It may have served as a stopping place for caravans of high government officials and civil servants traveling from the Belqa to Iraq and the Hijaz via Wadi es-Sirhan. BIBLIOGRAPHY Almagro Basch, M a r t i n , et al. Qusayr'Amra: Residenciay Banos Omeyas en el Desierlo de Jordania. M a d r i d , 1 9 7 5 . General discussion (with
QUSAYR ' A M R A . F i g u r e 1 . Interior paintings of the audience hall, looking west. (Courtesy G. Bisheh)
C
QUSAYR AMRA summaries in English, Arabic, a n d F r e n c h ) , useful for its accom panying plans a n d p h o t o g r a p h s . Bisheh, Ghazi. " Q u s a y r A m r a : L e s fresques d ' u n Palais O m e y y a d e . " Dossiers Histoire et Archeologie, n o . 118 (1987): 70-73. A t t e m p t to interpret t h e paintings in an U m a y y a d context. Blazquez, J. M . " L a pintura helenistica de Qusayr 'Amra (Jordania) y sus fuentes." Archivo Espanolde Arqueologia, n o . 54 (1981): 157-202; no. 56 (1983): 169-212. Creswell, K . A. C. Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 1, Umayyads, A.D.
399
622-750 (1940). 2d ed. Oxford, 1969. See pages 390-449 for a d e tailed description of the m o n u m e n t , with a full bibliography arranged chronologically. Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art. N e w H a v e n a n d L o n d o n , 1973. See pages 139-187 for a sustained analysis of secular art and architecture in the U m a y y a d period. Grabar, Oleg. " L a place de Q u s a y r A m r a h dans l'art profane du haut moyen a g e . " Cahiers Archeologiques 36 (1988): 75-83. GHAZI BISHEH
R RABUD, KHIRBET, site located south of Hebron, surrounded by the namesake river Wadi en-Nar, a region that experiences meager precipitation (3i°25' N , 35°oi' E; map reference 151 X 093). For water sources, residents of Khirbet Rabud depended on cisterns and two wells, about 3 1cm (2 mi.) north of the site. Based on topographic clues in die Hebrew Bible, Kurt Galling identified the site with biblical Debir ("Zur Lokalisierung von Debir," Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 70 [1954]: 1 3 5 - 1 4 1 ) , an identification challenged by William Foxwell Albright ("Debir," in Archaeology and Old Testament Study, edited by David Winston Thomas, Ox ford, 1967, pp. 207-220), who believed Debir to be his own site, Tell Beit Mirsim. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell] However, recent surveys in the Judean hill country and the excavation of Khirbet Rabud support Galling's proposal: Khirbet Ra bud and biblical Debir are located in the same southern Ju dean district as 'Anab, Socoh, and Eshtemoa (Jos. 15:49); Khirbet Rabud is the only Late Bronze Age city located south of Jerusalem (the Bible depicts Debir as the major Canaanite city in the area [Jos. 1 1 : 2 1 , 1 5 : 1 5 - 1 7 ; J,?, r . n 15]); and the town is located in a dry region that depended on cisterns and an upper and lower water source (the Wells of 'Alaqa), like the ones described in the story of Achsa, daughter of Caleb, in Joshua
15:19 and Judges
1:15. [See
tion of the LB city wall. T h e LB II pottery from trench A and from the cemetery included a high percentage of im ported Mycenaean and Cypriot wares. An Iron I stratum and a tenth-century BCE cistern were also exposed at the lower part of trench A, A massive stone wall, 4 m wide and about 1 km long, had been noted prior to the excavation. It encircles about 5 ha (12 acres) of diis 6-ha (15 acres) mound and was encoun tered in both trenches and dated to the ninth century B C E . T h e wall was built in sttaight sections, in uneven lengths, with half-meter projections at their joints. The topography of die site suggests the existence of a gateway on the south eastern slope, where the modern hamlet of Khirbet Rabud now stands. A major destruction level, with large amounts of pottery and other finds lying in the ashes, was detected in both trenches and attributed to Senacherib's campaign against Judah in 701 B C E . T W O stamp seals inscribed in Hebrew, SLM BN ' H ' ("Shalom son of Aha") and a four-winged lamelekh seal, found in diis stratum fit the suggested chron ological horizon. In the seventh century BCE the city wall was doubled in width and a small, unwalled suburb, Khirbet Rabda, was built at die foot of the mound. Some buildings from the Persian period and a Roman lookout tower rep resent the end of the site's occupational history.
Judah.] In 1968-1969, Moshe Kochavi directed excavations atthe site on behalf of Tel Aviv University's Institute of Archae ology. Rescue excavations were also carried out at several robbed burial caves, part of the large burial ground, TJsh es-Saqra, across the wadi. Because, like many hill country sites, most of Khirbet Rabud is eroded to bedrock, remains of ancient occupation were discerned only in a narrow sttip adjacent to the city wall, in two trenches, A and B, on the mound's western slope. Early Bronze Age I and IV sherds were found in the cem etery and in the excavated areas. A stone wall running along the mound's lowest terrace on the northwest was encoun tered in trench A and dated to the Late Bronze Age. Four strata of the fourteenth-thirteenth centuries B C E were asso ciated with tills wall. LB I sherds found on the mound and in its cemetery may indicate an earlier date for the construc
401
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " T h e Excavations at Tell Beit Mirsim." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 3 ( 1 9 2 6 ) : 2 - 1 4 . Albright's identification of Debir with his excavation at Tell Beit Mirsim. D o n n e r , Herbert. " D a s D e u t s c h e evangelische Institut ftir Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen L a n d e s , Lehrkursus 1 9 6 3 , 2 . D i e Exkursionen in Palastina." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 81 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 3 - 5 3 . T h e first report on L B sherds found at Khirbet Rabud. Kochavi, M o s h e . "Khirbet R a b u d = D e b i r . " Tel Aviv 1 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : Report o n the excavation and discussion of the identification.
2-33.
M O S H E KOCHAVI
RADANNAH, site located on die northern perimeter of Ramallah, 16 1cm (10 mi.) norfli of Jerusalem on a ridge surrounded on tiiree sides by deep valleys with perennial
402
RAMAT RAHEL
springs (map reference 70835 X 553305). It was, therefore, strategically located with regard to security. Radannah is not mentioned in the Bible and remains essentially anonymous. Yohanan Aharoni (1971) proposed identifying the site with biblical 'Ataroth (Jos. 16:5, 18:13), a border town between Benjamin and Ephraim. Four seasons of excavation were conducted at the site (about 32-40 acres) between 1969 and 1974 by Joseph Cal laway and Robert Cooley on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities. Its occupational history includes four phases. The earliest evidence is represented by a few Early Bronze I sherds and no definable structures. The second and third phases appear to be an Iron Age I setdement comprised of five-six structures that give evidence of their original con struction and subsequent remodeling. Settlers of unknown origins seem to have arrived at the site toward the end of the thirteenth century or early twelfth century B C E , lived through two phases of village life, and then disappeared in the middle of the eleventh century BCE. Ashes and disturbed architecture indicate that this phase was terminated by a vi olent destruction. After a long period of abandonment there is evidence of a fourth occupational phase, during the Byz antine period. The site was excavated in three major areas (R, S, T ) , moving east-west.
is in the shape of a bull's head. A cultic function may be inferred. Large collar-rim storage jars were recovered throughout the site.
The first and fourth phases suggest minimal human ac tivity, whereas the second and third phases point to a wellpreserved single-period site with a relatively well-developed material culture. A common feature of the Iron I settlement is the pillared house. [See Four-Room House.] A large room was divided by hewn pillars or stacked stone piers to support the roof beams, and there was a chamber at tire back. Mul tiple chisel marks were preserved on the top and sides of the hewn pillars. Benches were built against the outer wall of the largest room, and in one case they were cut into bedrock on two sides. A hearth was located in the center of the room. Bell-shaped cisterns for water storage and silos for grain storage were regular features in the houses. These pillared houses were clustered around the top of the ridge, leaving a common open space in tire middle area of the settlement that probably served as an animal enclosure and storage space for grain. Below the settlement the hillsides were shaped by agricultural terraces.
RAMAT RAHEL, site located on a hill midway be tween Jerusalem and Bethlehem (3i°4o' N , 35°i5' E; map reference 1708 X 1275). Yohanan Aharoni excavated the site for four seasons between 1954 and 1962 under the aus pices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Israel De partment of Antiquities, the Israel Exploration Society (IES), and the University of Rome. In 1984 Gabriel Barkay excavated there for Tel Aviv University and the IES. In 1931 Benjamin Mazar and Moshe Stekelis excavated a burial cave south of the site for the Palestine Exploration Society. Five main strata were identified dating from the Iron Age IIC through the Early Arab period. T h e ancient name of the site is unknown, although Aharoni suggests that it may be Bethha-Kerem; Barkay rejects this identification. Stratum VB was founded on bedrock. Though little re mains of its architecture, there is some evidence of a case mate wall and a stone quarry. Two seal impressions similar to impressions known from Tel Nagila and Lachish mention "to Shebna [son of] Shahar." [See Lachish.] One hundred and seventy Imlk stamped handles, of both the two-winged and four-winged varieties, were found in constructional fills used in stratum VA. Private seal impressions were also re covered, some of whose names correspond to seals from Tell en-Nasbeh, Beth-Shemesh, and Lachish. [See Nasbeh, Tell en-; Beth-Shemesh.] T h e Imlk handles found in fills below stratum VA surfaces help date stratum VB to the reign of Hezekiah. T h e destruction of the site can be attributed presumably to Sennacherib's campaign of 701 B C E .
An abundance of cereal food-processing tools was found throughout the site, including large, well-worn saddles and querns, stone mortars and pestles, rubbing stones, and flint sickle blades. There is considerable evidence for primitive metalworking. Fragments of crucibles, some with slag ad hering to the inside, were discovered, along with pieces of tuyeres, or bellow tips. Numerous bronze objects were iden tified along with three iron implements. Other significant finds include an inscribed jar handle with three letters in Proto-Canaanite script and a large multihandled krater. A channel built into the Krater's upper wall ter minated in spouts on the inside of the bowl, each of which
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. " K h i r b e t R a d d a n a a n d Its Inscription." Israel Ex ploration Journal 2 1 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 3 0 - 1 3 5 . A useful discussion of the date for the inscribed jar handle and the identification of the site witit biblical 'Ataroth. Callaway, Joseph A., a n d Robert E. Cooley. " A Salvage Excavation at Raddana, in Bireh." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, n o . 2 0 1 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 9 - 1 9 . T h e first synthesis of archaeological work at this site, which m u s t be supplemented by later reports. Cooley, Robert E. " F o u r Seasons of Excavation at Khirbet R a d d a n a . " Near Eastern Archaeological Society Bulletin, n o . 5 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 5 - 2 0 . F e a tures a reconstruction of the cultural pattern at the R a d a n n a h settle ment. Cross, Frank M o o r e , and David Noel F r e e d m a n . " A n Inscribed Jar Handle from R a d d a n a . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 2 0 1 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 9 - 2 2 . A brief description of the jar handle and its chronological significance. Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 8 . Provides a cultural context for R a d a n n a h as a flourishing farm ing village in the Israelite settlement pattern. ROBERT E . COOLEV
A new citadel, dated to the late seventh-early sixth cen turies BCE, was constructed in stratum VA. A double wall
RAMAT RAHEL system, enclosing 2.5 acres, partially surrounded the citadel. The area between the walls and the citadel was intentionally leveled with extensive fills. Only fragments of the outer wall were excavated and it appears to surround tire citadel only partially. T h e citadel itself is rectangular (56 X 72 m). It consists of the fragments of two buildings along the western and northern sides of its inner casemate wall. T h e casemates functioned as storerooms. In the center of the eastern wall a paved opening served as a gate and led to a well-plastered courtyard. A second, smaller gate was found to the south of the main gate. A hewn tunnel outside the citadel may orig inally have been linked to a narrow postern along the north wall. Architectural elements from the citadel include fine ashlar masonry, header-stretcher construction, the remains of ten proto-Aeolic capitals (see figure 1), carved stone crenelation fragments, and carved stone window balustrades. These types of balustrades are identical to those portrayed in Phoenician ivory plaques depicting the "woman in the window" motif. A small quantity of Assyrian Palace ware was found, along widi a sherd depicting a seated individual. Originally, this painted sherd was thought to imitate an As syrian pictoral style. However, Shulamit Geva (1981) has suggested that this sherd better reflects Aegean traditions. Rosette stamp impressions, which may have been used as royal sealings after the seventh century B C E , were also found. A seal impression "to Eliakim, steward of Yochin" is iden tical to seal impressions from Tell Beit Mirsim and BethShemesh. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell.] T h e high quality of the ashlar masonry, the types of architectural adornments, and
RAMAT RAHEL.
F i g u r e 1 . Proto-Aeolic
403
the overall site plan are reminiscent of Samaria and suggest a Phoenician influence [See Samaria; Phoenicians.] T h e use of these distinctive architectural elements, along with the small finds, supports the contention that Ramat Rahel was indeed a royal citadel, perhaps during the reign of Jehoiachin. The Late Persian/Early Hellenistic ceramic assemblage dates stratum IVB to the fourth century B C E . This stratum is poorly preserved, but two hundred and seventy seal im pressions were recovered. T h e wide variety of inscribed seal impressions includes the use of name Jerusalem, Yehud stamps, and private names. T h e anepigraphous seal assem blage is also rich and diverse. Most of these seals belong to Stern's type A, which depicts lions in various positions (Stern, 1982). The Herodian remains of stratum IVA are limited to scat tered architectural fragments and burial caves on the slopes. Stratum III is dated to die late third century C E , when the site was utilized by die Roman Tenth Legion. T h e Church of Kathisma and a monastery from stratum II date to the Byzantine period (fiftii-late seventh centuries). T h e last use of the site (stratum I) was in the Early Arab period. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . "Excavations at R a m a t Rahel, 1 9 5 4 : Preliminary R e p o r t . " Israel Exploration Journal 6 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 1 0 2 - 1 1 1 , 1 3 7 - 1 5 7 . R e port of t h e first season, complimentary to and in part superseded by die excavation volumes (below). Aharoni, Y o h a n a n . Excavations at Ramat Rahel. 2 vols. R o m e , 1 9 6 2 1 9 6 4 . Preliminary reports with architectural plans, photographs, a n d
capital. (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
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RAMLA
pottery plates. Although not a final report, includes all the archaeo logical work done by Aharoni. Geva, Shulamit. " T h e Painted Sherd of Ramat Rahel." Israel Explo ration Journal 31 (1981): 186-189. Reich, Ronny. "Palaces and Residencies in the Iron A g e . " In The Ar chitecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, p p . 202-222. Jeru salem, 1992. Excellent synthetic article on Iron Age architectural traditions. Shiloh, Yigal. The Proto-Aeolic Capital and Israelite Ashlar Masonry. Qedem, vol. 11. Jerusalem, 1979. Comprehensive analysis of p r otoAeolic capitals found in Palestine, with important discussions of ash lar masonry and Phoenician influences on Israelite architectural traditions. T h o u g h a few new capitals have been found at sites such as D a n , this volume remains the definitive study. Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 338-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. Stern, Ephraim. " T h e Phoenician Architectural Elements in Palestine during tlie Late Iron Age and Persian Period." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited b y Aharon Kempinski and R o n n y Reich, p p . 302-309. Jerusalem, 1992. Excellent synopsis of Phoenician influences on Israel from die L a t e Iron Age through the Hellenistic period. Yadin, Yigael. " T h e ' H o u s e of Ba'aP of Ahab and Jezebel in Samaria, a n d T h a t of Athalia in J u d a h . " I n Archaeology in the Levant: Essays for Kathleen Kenyan, edited b y P . R. S. Moorey a n d Peter J. Parr, p p . 127-135. Warminster, 1978. Important, though dated, critique of Aharoni's work at R a m a t Rahel, questioning his methodology, chronological conclusions, and historical reconstructions. J. P . D E S S E L
RAMLA, site located at the crossroads leading from Is rael's western seacoast (Jaffa) to Jerusalem on the east, and from Syria in the north to Egypt in tlie soutii, about 4 1cm (2.5 mi.) south of Lod (map reference 138 X 148). T h e name ar-Ramla is believed to derive from the Arabic word rami, meaning "sand," referring to the sand dunes of the region. Ramla was the only new city founded in Palestine during the Islamic period; its founder was Sulayman, son of 'Abd al-Malik, who, as governor of the Jund Filastin, estab lished his capital there. This must have taken place some time between 712 and 7 1 5 , when Sulayman became caliph after his brother Wahid I. The first excavation at the site was conducted by Jacob Kaplan in 1949, on behalf of the Ministry of Religious Af fairs and the Department of Antiquities of Israel. The ex cavation focused on tlie White Mosque, which was at the core of the first buildings constructed at the site in the eighth century. Excavation established that tlie mosque was built in the form of a quadrangle (93 X 84 m), with its walls oriented to the cardinal points. The right half of the mosque deviates some 6° to the north of tlie traditional east-west orientation. The major remains are the foundations of the east and west porticoes, tlie qiblah wall (the wall oriented toward Mecca) on the south with its mihrab (niche) in tlie middle, and two rows of massive pillars running parallel to the qiblah wall. These remains appear to be from a later
restoration under the Ayyubids, after die Crusader period, as there are clear remnants of cross vaulting for tlie roof. The mosque's most prominent feature is its square minaret, which was rebuilt in the Mamluk period and still preserves an inscription giving the name of Sultan Muhammad ibn Qala'un and the date A H 714/1318 CE. Another building was discovered in the center whose function is as yet unidentified (it may be an ablution basin). Three subterranean cisterns were revealed in the courtyard. In 1965 Myriam Rosen-Ayalon and Avraham Eitan, on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Muse ums, conducted an excavation that concentrated on the southwestern part of the town; they also made several smaller-scale trial soundings that contributed to understand ing the city's topography and urban development in antiq uity. A large number of finds—mainly pottery, but also glass, stone, and metal—were recovered immediately beneath the surface. T h e material was homogeneous in character and could be ascribed to the eighth or beginning of the ninth century CE. Although this suggests a relatively brief period of occupation, four settlement levels were distinguished, the lowest resting directly on virgin soil. The nature of the finds, togetiier with evidence of elements of installations, points to what might have been a potter's workshop. In 1973, in the southeastern part of die town, (the Old Quarter), in die courtyard of a private house, Magen Broshi excavated a mosaic pavement comprised of three "carpets." Two are geometric compositions reminiscent of pre-Islamic patterns; the third bears an inscription of a Qur'anic verse in an early Kufic script set within an arch supported by two columns. The ceramic material found with the mosaic also lay on virgin soil, confirming the eighth-century date. BIBLIOGRAPHY Conder, Claude R., a n d H . H . Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine; Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. 2, Samaria. L o n d o n , 1882. See pages 264ff. Kaplan, Jacob. "Excavations at the White M o s q u e in R a m l a . " 'Atiqot 2 (1959): 106-115. L e Strange, G u y , trans. Palestine under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to isoo. L o n d o n , 1890. See pages 15-16, 20, 28, 39, 41, 56, and 303-308. Rosen-Ayalon, M y r i a m , and A v r a h a m Eitan. Ramla Excavations: Finds from the Vlllth Century CE. Jerusalem, 1969. Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam. " T h e First Mosaic Discovered in R a m l a . " Is rael Exploration Journal 26 (1976): 104-119. Wiistenfeld, Ferdinand, ed. Jacut's Geographisches Worterbuch, vol. 11, p . 817. Leipzig, 1866-. MYRIAM ROSEN-AYALON
RAQQA, AR-, site located on the eastern (left) or M e sopotamian (Syrian Jezireh) bank of the Upper Euphrates River, where the river meets its tributary, tlie Balikh River. Facing Deir az-Zor, Mari is to tlie east and Flama to the
RAQQA, ARwest; facing Harran, to the north, Palmyra is to the southsouthwest. Today, ar-Raqqa is the capital of the governorate of arRaqqa, one of fourteen that constitute the Syrian Arab Re public. T h e name is as old as the Islamic domination of Syria: the area was peacefully conquered by Tyad ibn Ganm in A H 18/638-639 CE. Medieval Muslim historians such as al-Baladhuri and ge ographers such as Yaqut used its post-Islamic name, whose Arabic meaning corresponds to its topography: according to Yaqut, it means "flat land, marshland, or soft land." In fact, the city is situated on the flat, soft, partial marshland of the Euphrates Valley. Ar-Raqqa is identified with a pre-Islamic city known by three different names—Nicephorion, Callinicos, and Leontopolis—and most probably founded during the Seleucid era (third century C E ) . Cuneiform texts from Mari (second millennium BCE) had situated the city of Tutul at the same site. It is commonly believed tiiat Tutul must be identified with Tell Bi'a, 800 m north of ar-Raqqa (see be low). Recent discoveries at the tell itself in 1990 confirmed this identification. Between A H 18/638 C E and A H 155/772 C E , the only major architectural changes at the site were the building of a Friday mosque, markets, and probably some extramural exten sions. In A H 155/772 C E , the 'Abbasid caliph Abu Ja'far alMansur, after having built the round city of Baghdad as a new capital of the caliphate, ordered a similar city built west of old ar-Raqqa/Nicephorion. He named it ar-Rafiqa ("the companion"). His grandson, Harun al-Rashid, made ar-Rafiqa/ar-Raqqa his permanent residence for thirteen years ( A H 180-192/796-809 C E ) . During this period, the sister cities witnessed an urban explosion. T h e area north of them be came residential, full of spacious palaces and mansions for the caliph Harun ar-Rashid and members of his family and court. A large canal, 16 Ion (10 mi.) long, which terminates in marshes near die Balikh River, was dug to carry water from the Euphrates to the area. After some periods of instability, the city was revived un der the Zangid Atabeg Nur ad-Din and the Ayyubids in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries C E . T h e fourteenth-century ge ographer Abu al-Fida' reported that in 1258 the Mongols devastated ar-Raqqa. European travelers began visiting ar-Raqqa in the six teenth century. T h e first archaeological exploration there was conducted in 1907 by the German scholars Frederich Sarre and Ernst Herzfeld, who photographed and sketched its ruins. T h e French Geographical Institute took the first aerial photographs in 1924, introducing scholars to the pal aces of Harun ar-Rashid and the course of the canal. T h e first archaeological excavation carried out in ar-Raqqa was by Maurice Dunand and Raymond Duru (1944-1945). They unveiled the northeastern part of a representative building labeled palace A, which lay about 400 m north of the city wall (see below). Between 1966 and 1970, Kassem
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Toueir of the Department of Antiquities and Museums of Syria resumed the excavation of palace A. This rectangular building (140 X n o m) is oriented east-west and has an nexes on the south. It is constructed of mud brick and whit ish limestone plaster. On the west are corner towers, but tresses, and a gate. T h e coins found refer to Harun al-Rashid and his successor, al-Ma'mun (early ninth century C E ) . Thin-walled subdivisions of rooms and halls indicate a rehabitation in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. Between 1950 and 1954, Nassib Saliby, also for the D e partment of Antiquities, excavated three palaces (B-D) some 1,200 m northeast of the city wall that resemble palace A. A painted inscription in palace B is attributed to the son of Harun al-Rashid, al-Mu'tasim. Beginning in 1982, Michael Meinecke of the German Ar chaeological Institute, Damascus, excavated three palaces some 800 m north of the city wall that are similar to palaces A - D and also show evidence of rehabitation in the twelfththirteenth centuries. Between 1977 d 1990 Kassem Toueir excavated and restored tire Qasr al-Banat, a palace of tire period of Harun al-Rashid in the southeastern part of arRafiqa. T h e building, whose perimeter has not yet been re vealed, is constructed entirely of baked bricks and consists of a central courtyard with fountains in the middle tirat are shaped like eight-pointed stars. Four iwans open to the four sides of the courtyard. T h e building was erected on virgin soil, which dates it to the foundation of the city in 772 C E or shordy afterward. It was reused in tire twelfth-tliirteenth centuries as a storehouse and workshop for producing glazed Raqqa ware. T h e Great Mosque (108 X 92 m), in the northern part of tire city, within the city wall, was also erected when the city was founded. Built of mud brick with a baked-brick coating on the outer faces of its walls, it is the second-largest mosque in Syria (after die Umayyad mosque in Damascus). Its square courtyard and the round towers buttressing its cor ners and sides follow the Iraqi model, but its three-aisled division and its prayer hall's gabled roofing follow the Syrian type (Damascus mosque). T h e Department of Antiquities is also clearing and re storing the unique horseshoe-shaped city wall (1,500 X 1,500 m) with its double enceinte and intervallum. The wall, dre only surviving one of die Early 'Abbasid period, is mas sive, buttressed with round towers at regular distances, and built of mud brick with baked-brick coating. The outer wall was thinner than the inner one. T h e only surviving gate on tire outer wall, known as tire Gate of Baghdad, is in the southeastern corner. It is constructed entirely of baked brick and is richly decorated in the Hazarbaff technique (arrang ing bricks in the face of a wall in a way that creates an or namental design). T h e outer wall has disappeared since 1980, but its original height, if it followed the Baghdad ex ample, would have been about 20 m. In 1983, Kay Kohlmeyer, on behalf of the Department of a n
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R A Q Q A , AR-
KAQQA, AR-. Qasr el-Banat after excavation unci restoration. (Courtesy K . Toueir)
RAQQA, AK-.
Crat,r
ro.nn
;
u,i,i ., •ll.iitai.
• ( Juries}' K. Toueir)
RAS, TELL ERAntiquities and the German Institute made soundings in the area of old ar-Raqqa/Nicephorion, currentiy the suburb alMaslab, in order to observe its pre-Islamic rectangular city wall (1,200 X 650 m ) . T h e wall is 2.5 m thick and built of baked brick. It dates to die time of Justinian (first half of the sixth century). Since 1980, Eva Strommenger (1981) has been excavating at Tell Bi a, some 800 m north of ar-Raqqa/Nicephorion. In addition to unveiling third- and second-millennium B C E ma terial in the 1990 season (including part of a royal palace similar in plan to the palace at Mari and cuneiform tablets confirming identification of Tell Bi'a with Tutul), she un covered two mosaic pavements with Syriac inscriptions re ferring to the building of a Christian monastery (sixth cen tury), which is, perhaps, to be identified with the much-celebrated Early 'Abbasid church/convent of Dayr Zakkai (Krebernik, 1991, 1993). c
[See
also 'Abbasid Caliphate.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
For the history of Islamic A r - R a q q a , t h e reader m a y consult Joan's Geographisches Worterbuch, edited b y F e r d i n a n d Wiistenfeld (Leipzig, 1 8 6 6 - ) ; A h m a d ibn Yahya Baladuri, The Origins of the Islamic State, translated b y Philip K. Hitti ( N e w York, 1 9 1 6 ) ; a n d M u h a m m a d alTabarT, Kitab ahbar ar-rusul wa-al-muliik, vol. 2 ( 1 8 7 9 ) . T h e recon struction of A r - R a q q a is covered in Friedrich P . T . Sarre and Ernst Herzfeld, Archaologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigris-begiet, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 2 0 ) , and K . A. C . Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1 9 4 0 ) . F o r excavation reports, see N a s s i b Saliby, " R a p port preliminaire sur la deuxieme c a m p a g n e ( a u t o m n e 1 9 5 2 ) d e fouilles a R a q q a , " Annales Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 4 - 5 ( 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 5 ) : 2 0 5 - 2 1 2 ; a n d the following articles from Damaszcner Milteilungen 2 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : Jan-Christoph H e u s c h a n d Michael Meinecke, " G r a b u n g e n im 'abbasidischen Palastareal von ar-Raqqa/ar-Rafiqa, 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 3 " ( p p . 8 5 - 1 0 5 ) ; M u r h a f al-Khalaf and K a y Kohlmeyer, " U n t e r s u c h u n g e n zur ar-Raqqa-Nikephorion/callinicum" ( p p . 1 3 3 - 1 6 2 ) ; K a s s e m Toueir, " D e r Qasr al-Banat in ar-Raqqa: A u s g r a b u n g , Rekonstruktion u n d Wiederaufbau, 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 8 2 " ( p p . 2 9 7 - 3 1 9 ) ; a n d M u r h a f al-Khalaf, "Die 'abbasidische S t a d t m a u e r v o n ar-Raqqa/ar-Rafiqa mit e i n e m B e i trag von N o r b e r t H a g e n " ( p p . 1 2 3 - 1 3 1 ) . Tell Bi'a is discussed in Eva Strommenger, " D i e archaologischen F o r s h u n g e n in Tall Bi'a, 1 9 8 0 , " Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft (MDOG) 1 1 3 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 2 3 3 4 , and " A u s g r a b u n g e n in Tall Bi'a 1 9 9 0 , " MDOG 1 2 3 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 7 - 3 4 ; in addition, the mosaic a n d Syriac inscriptions a n d cuneiform tablets of Tell Bi'a were published by M a n f r e d Krebernik, "Schriftfunde aus Tall Bi'a," MDOG 1 2 3 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 4 1 - 7 0 , 1 2 5 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 5 1 - 6 0 . K a y K o h l meyer discusses the statements of pre-Islamic historians and E u r o p e a n travelers in t h e survey, " U n t e r s u c h u n g e n zu ar-Raqqa/Nikephorion/ Calinicum," Damaszcner Mitteilungen 2 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 4 6 - 1 6 1 . KASSEM T O U E I R
RAS, TELL ER- ( 3 2 ° i 2 ' o " N , 35°i7'3o" E), site lo 3
cated on top of one of the northernmost peaks of Mt. Gerizim (Jebel et-Tur), 831 m above sea level, overlooking the short, narrow east-west pass between Mt. Gerizim (881 m above sea level) and the higher M t . Ebal (940 m above sea level) to the north. On the western watershed of the pass 350 m below the tell, lies Nablus (ancient Neapolis), the
407
largest city in Samaria. Jacob's well (Bir Yaqob) and Tell Balatah (ancient Shechem), once the chief city of the Sa maritans, lie at the entrance to the pass on the eastern wa tershed. O n the highest peak of Mt. Gerizim, 750 m south of Tell er-Ras, an expanse of limestone bedrock, devoid of structure, marks for the Samaritan community the location of their temple. Nearby are the octagonal remains of the Theotokos church built in about 484 C E by the emperor Zeno and the remains of fortifications built around die church by tlie emperor Justinian in about 532 C E . Farther south lie the Hellenistic remains of the walled Samaritan town of Lozeh. Charles W. Wilson of the Survey of Western Palestine examined Tell er-Ras in 1866 and noted it was a partiy ar tificial mound containing building remains. A century later, Robert J. Bull of Drew University discovered frusta of red Aswan granite columns at the foot of Mt. Gerizim and, in a search for the structure from which the columns came, led a team, formed initially from the Drew-McCormick Expe dition to Tell Balatah, to excavate Tell er-Ras 1964, 1966, and 1968. T h e tell, 120 m long by 80 m wide, covered with limestone chips and marble architectural fragments, was iso lated from the rest of Mt. Gerizim by an east-west fosse approximately 100 m long, 30 m wide, and 8 m deep cut into the limestone bedrock. Sttatigraphic excavation uncov ered the remains of building A (21.48 m long north-south X 14.14 m wide), with a three-stepped stylobate, a 8.24 m X 3.05 m pronaos and a 8.24 m X 10.13 naos, a marble floor, and Corinthian captial fragments. T h e .85-meter-diameter Aswan granite column frusta discovered at the foot of Mt. Gerizim matched the diameter of the column bases excavated at the tell. Building A was identified as a tetrastyle, prostyle, pseudoperiptal temple centered on a platform 64.91 m long north-south X 44.21 m wide. T h e platform, made up of earth, rubble and cement, was encompassed by a rectangle of stone walls 9 m high and 2 m thick. At the northern end of the platform, a 7.74-meter-wide staircase descended to a broad esplanade of green marble squares and areas of patterned mosaic. T h e esplanade served as tlie up per terminus of a very long and very steep stairway that led from the city of Neapolis u p the side of Mt. Gerizim to Tell er-Ras. In 1968, Bull excavated eighty of die 7.50-meterwide stairway steps, some cut into bedrock, some arranged in flights of five steps or more between landings, some with evidence of marble facing, and all on a line from a point beside the mosque, Rijal el-'Amud, at die foot of Mt. Ger izim, to the temple at Tell er-Ras. m
In the second and third centuries C E , the reverse of coins struck at the Neapolis mint exhibited the likeness of a te trastyle, peripteral temple at the top of a mountain peak. A stairway ran from a colonnade at the mountain's base up the mountain side to the temple on top (Hill, 1914, pp. 48-50, pis. 5-7). T h e earliest and most detailed coins were issued under Antoninus Pius (138-161 CE) and the last and least detailed, under Volusianus (251-253 C E ) . Marinus of Nea-
408
RAS, TELL ER-
polis (fl. 440 CE) indicated that the emperor Hadrian had built a temple to Zeus Hypsistos on Mt. Gerizim (Photius, Bibliotheca 242.348B. 18-20). A stairway of three hundred steps (gradii) on the side of Mt. Gerizim was reported by the Bordeaux Pilgrim (fl. 333 C E ; Itineraarium Burdigaknse 587.3), but Epiphanius (315-403 C E ; Libri de XII Gemmis 258) stated that the stairway contained more than fifteen hundred steps, a number confirmed by Procopius of Gaza (d. 440 C E ; Commentarii in Deuteronomium 440). The dis crepancy in the number of steps reported in tire stairway was due to the fact that broad steps or platforms were dis covered at intervals of five steps or more in the line of steps up the side of the mountain. The Bordeaux Pilgrim counted the platforms (gradii) while Epiphanius and Procopius knew or counted the individual steps. The temple was modified in the third century when six vaulted cisterns were built in front of and against the north platform wall necessitating a new approach to the temple. In the fourth century, earthquakes collapsed the vaulted cis terns, filling the cisterns with voussoir and architectural el ements from the temple. The latest coins recovered from the sealed silt layers of the cisterns were those of Julian II (360-363 C E ) . In 1966, beneath the foundations of the Zeus temple, Bull excavated a second major structure, building B, 20.94 long north-south X 20.04 m wide and 8.50 m high. Strati graphic excavation disclosed that building B was founded on the leveled bedrock of Tell er-Ras at 819 m above sea level and consfructed of at least eighteen courses of unhewn limestone slab taken from the local geological bedding planes and laid in without mortar. No construction was found internal to building B. Its geometric form was roughly that of a half cube with approximately 4,000 cubic m of limestone slab laid in courses with obvious care and preci sion. It was first assumed that building B was a foundation built by tire Roman builders of the Zeus temple, but after further excavation, it was discovered that building B stood in die center of a rectangular courtyard of stone walls 60 m long X 40 m wide and r.50 m thick made of unhewn stone and without mortar. T h e 7-meter-high courtyard of walls rested on leveled bedrock and a gateway 7.50 m wide was found at the center of the north courtyard wall. T h e 2-meter-wide walls of the Zeus temple platform, built of ashlar and mortar, were constructed against the standing 1.50-meter-wide unhewn stone walls that formed the building B courtyard. After building B at the center of the doublewalled courtyard was stabilized with revetments of rubble and cement, the courtyard was filled earth and stone to form the massive platform on which the Zeus temple stood. Thick layers of sterile white huwwar were found in trenches dug against the sides of building B. The tip lines of the huwwar visible in the balks of the trenches beside building B have an angle of repose for the dumped huwwar that indicates it was dumpted from a height two or more meters higher than the discovered hight of building B. Prior to building A, building m
B and at least part of its courtyard had been covered by layers of sterile earth that contained no dating material. Be low the huwwar, earth, rubble, and cement makeup of the temple platform and at the bottom of the walls in the north east corner of the building B courtyard, pottery dating from the third and second centuries B C E was found. Also in the lowest silt layers of a rock-hewn cistern found beside the steps of the temple platform, water vessels of the third cen tury B C E were recovered. From 1983 to 1988 Yitzhak Magen of the Israel Depart ment of Antiquities uncovered additional stairways and ex tensive Hellenistic remains on Mt. Gerizim, including Lozeh. The identification of building A with the Zeus temple at Tell er-Ras seems assured. The identification of building B is less clearly understood. The fact that a massive, carefully fashioned structure of unhewn stones was constructed on the leveled bedrock of Mt. Gerizim and surrounded by a courtyard of walls built of unhewn stone indicates that a major building complex predated the Zeus temple at Tell er-Ras. Limited ceramic evidence indicates that the building B complex was standing in the third century B C E . T h e mas sive size of the building B complex, its location directly above the ancient Samaritan capital city of Shechem, and its third-century B C E date suggest it was part of the Samar itan temple that Josephus (Antiq. u.302ff., 13.255ft.; War i.62ff.) notes was built on Mt. Gerizim and modeled after the Jerusalem temple. BIBLIOGRAPHY T h e Site Adler, Elkan N . , a n d M . Seligsohn. " U n e nouvelle chronique S a m a r atine." Revue des Etudes Juives 3 0 ( 1 9 0 2 ) : 1 8 8 - 2 2 2 , Anderson, Robert T . " M o u n t Gerizim: Naval of die W o r l d . " Biblical Archaeologist 4 3 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 2 1 7 - 2 2 1 . Bull, Robert J „ and G . Ernest Wright. "Newly Discovered T e m p l e s o n M t . Gerizim in J o r d a n . " Harvard Theological Review 5 8 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 2 3 4 237-
Bull, Robert J. "A Preliminary Excavation of an Hadrianic T e m p l e at Tell er Ras on M o u n t Gerizim." American Journal of Archaeology 7 1 (1967): 387-393-
Bull, Robert J. " T h e Excavation of Tell er-Ras on M t . G e r i z i m . " Bib lical Archaeologist 3 1 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 5 8 - 7 2 . Bull, Robert J., and E d w a r d F . Campbell. " T h e Sixdi C a m p a i g n at Balatah ( S h e c h e m ) . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 1 9 0 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 2 - 4 1 , Bull, Robert J. " T o w a r d s a ' C o r p u s Inscriptionum L a t i n a r u m Britannicarum in Palentina.'" Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 0 2 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 108-110.
Bull, Robert J. " A n Archaeological Context for U n d e r s t a n d i n g J o h n 4 : 2 0 . " Biblical Archaeologist 3 8 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 5 4 - 5 9 . Bull, Robert J. " A Tripartite Sundial from Tell E r Ras on M t . G e r i z i m . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, n o . 2 1 9 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 29-37-
Bull, Robert J. " T e l er-Ras ( M o u n t G e r i z i m ) . " In Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4 , p p . 1 0 1 5 - 1 0 2 2 . E n glewood Cliffs, N.J., 1 9 7 8 . C o n d e r , Claude R., a n d H . I-I. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal-
RAS EN-NAQB estine; Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. 2 , Samaria. L o n d o n , 1 8 8 2 . Hill, George F . Catalogue of the Greek Coins in Palestine. L o n d o n , 1 9 1 4 . See pages 2 5 - 3 4 , plates 5 - 7 , 3 9 . Kee, H o w a r d C. "Tell-er-Ras a n d the Samaritan T e m p l e . " New Tes
tament Studies
13 (1967): 401-402.
M a g e n , Yitzhak. " M o u n t Gerizim, a T e m p l e C i t y " (in H e b r e w ) . Qad-
moniotz'i
(1990): 70-96.
M a g e n , Yitzhak. " G e r i z i m , M o u n t . " In The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2 , p p . 4 8 4 - 4 9 2 . Jeru salem and N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . Schneider, A. M . " R o m i s c h e u n d byzantinische Bauten auf d e m G a r izim." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palaslina-Vereins 6 8 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 2 1 1 - 2 3 4 . Wilson, Charles W . " E b a l a n d G e r i z i m . " Palestine Exploration Fund 2 (1873): 66-71.
The Samaritans Dexinger, F e r d i n a n d , a n d Reinhard P u m m e r , eds. Die Samaritaner. Darmstadt, 1992. M o n t g o m e r y , James A. The Samaritans: The Earliest Jewish Sect. Phil adelphia, 1 9 0 7 . P u m m e r , Reinhard. The Samaritans, I c o n o g r a p h y of Religions 2 3 , 5 . Leiden, 1 9 8 7 . Purvis, James D . The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origin of the Sa maritan Sect. H a r v a r d Semitic M o n o g r a p h s , 2 . C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1968.
Rowley, Harold H e n r y . Men of God: Studies in Old Testament History and Prophecy. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 3 . ROBERT J. BULL
RA'S AL-HADD, site located in the Sultanate of Oman (22°3i' N , 5o°47' E), at die point where the Arabian coast turns from running soutiieastward to running southwestward and the Gulf of Oman joins the Arabian Sea. The Arabic name, meaning "headland of the limit," correspond ing roughly to "Land's End," describes its situation and has been used since before A D 1500 when the Portuguese re corded the toponym. A small modern town stands on the neck of a sandy prom ontory which encloses a shallow lagoon, with low hills be hind. Though strategically placed, the region has little fresh water, but marine resources are abundant. Archaeological remains, scattered at different sites (designated H D r - H D 27) across some 1,000 ha (2,470 acres) and representing most periods from modern times back to 4000-3000 B C or earlier, document substantial continuity in lifestyle coupled widi long-distance trading relations overseas. Remains of fish, shellfish, and turtles dominate the organic finds from excavation; there is also evidence for dates, today grown in inland oases widi which there are close traditional links. Donald Whitcomb (1975) first drew attention to the Islamic remains. Bronze Age material was identified in 1986 by Jul ian Reade, who directed excavations during 1988,1989, and 1992. T h e site complements nearby Ra's al-Junayz. T h e earliest site identified, H D 2, is a midden producing small flints and molluscs, to be dated before 3000; terebralia shells suggest tire presence of a mangrove' swamp in the la goon. At H D 6, dating to about 3000-2500, there is evidence
409
for the use of copper and of distinctive large flint tools, and for the manufacture of stone and shell ornaments; contem porary tombs at H D 10 are circular stone structures with corbelled roofs. H D 1 (c. 2500-2000), has stone ovens (for fish prepara tion) and much cooper, including fishhooks and a bun ingot; there are a few bronze pieces. Pottery was introduced during the occupation of H D 1 and mainly comprises Mature Harappan types, including one inscribed with two Indus signs. Buildings of this phase have not been located. T h e man groves were declining. An aceramic village at H D 18, beside die lagoon, with subrectangular stone house-footings, is ten tatively dated about 2000-1500. Early "Iron Age" tombs abound on the hills. Those ex cavated at H D 9, perhaps dated about iooo, are stone, roughly oblong in shape, often abutting on one another. Copper or bronze arrowheads and some pottery vessels re call Wadi Suq types. There are many beads, stone vessels, and scraps of copper or bronze bowls. No contemporary setdement has been identified, but a Late Iron Age village was established at H D 21 (perhaps c. 500 B C ) , significantly located on die hills out of sight of die sea and exploiting animal rather than mainly marine resources. The village comprises agglomerations of rounded rooms and yards, with stone footings to the walls. T h e pottery is mainly a very coarse gritty ware similar to that found at Samad (in central northern Oman). Hellenistic-Sasanian setdement has not been securely identified, but traces of a well-built stone structure with rec tangular walls suggest a strongpoint near the lagoon. Islamic occupation is widely attested, and the H D 2 area on the promontory is rich in sherds dating from before A D iooo to recent times. Plain and glazed wares probably derive from Oman, the Gulf, Iran, India, and Paldstan; Chinese and Af rican wares are common. Excavations at H D 4 exposed a building of coral blocks, There is much glass, and evidence exists for the manufacture of lapis lazuli and carnelian beads. An oyster midden extends beside the sea. T h e modern town has developed around a castle, which may have been built within a century of A D 1700, because no older traces were observed during restoration work about 1990. BIBLIOGRAPHY Reade, Julian E . "Excavations at R a ' s al-I-Iadd, 1 9 8 8 : Preliminary R e p o r t . " In The Joint Hadd Project, edited by Serge Cleuziou et al., pp, 3 3 - 4 3 . Rome, 1990. W h i t c o m b , D o n a l d S. " T h e Archaeology of O m a n : A Preliminary D i s cussion of the Islamic P e r i o d s . " Journal of Oman Studies 1 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 123-157.
JULIAN E . READE
RAS EN-NAQB, a commanding promontory, located near a village of die same name, in the mountainous region
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of southern Jordan (29°55' N, 35°3o' E). A long-term, on going research program, directed by Donald O. Henry and sponsored by the University of Tulsa, the American Center of Oriental Research, and the Jordanian Department of An tiquities was initiated in the vicinity of Ras en-Naqb in 1977. By 1994, exploration of approximately 32 square kilometers had resulted in the discovery of more than 130 prehistoric sites with occupations spanning the late Lower Paleolithic through the Chalcolithic periods. The research focused on understanding the prehistoric human ecology and the evo lution of human adaptation in the area. Excavation exposed Middle Paleolithic, Upper Paleo lithic, Epipaleolithic, Neolitiiic, and Chalcolithic occupa tions at twenty-nine sites. Paleoenvironmental studies of pollen, geological, and faunal evidence recovered by exca vation generated paleoclimatic reconstructions covering much of the last sixty-five thousand years. Strategy of T r a n s h u r n a n c e . Perhaps the most signifi cant result of the research was establishing die length of time (on the order of sixty-five thousand years) the inhabitants of the region had followed a transhurnance strategy. T o util ize transhurnance, the area's prehistoric groups followed an annual settlement schedule that involved seasonal shifts to different elevational belts, ranging from 800 to 1,700 m above mean sea level. Such a settlement schedule enabled diem to exploit area-specific resources seasonally. This meant occupying an elevation when it offered optimum creature comforts. Transhurnance is typically associated with pastoral no mads, such as the modern bedouin. Few research efforts have yielded the quantity and diversity of evidence confirm ing the strategy for such a temporal sweep during die Pa leolithic era, however. Comparing sites by elevation revealed a time-transgressive pattern. This pattern showed an asym metry within several data sets (e.g., site area, thickness of cultural deposit, artifact density, artifact inventory) that was linked to the different elevational belts. Pleistocene settle ment remains (Middle, Upper, and Early Epipaleolitiiic pe riods) in the high-elevation belts reflected short-term, warmseason camps. Pleistocene on the low-elevation belts revealed apparent settlement remains from long-term winter camps. In contrast, sites occupied at the end of the Pleis tocene and Holocene (Natufian and Chalcolithic) reversed the pattern: sites indicating long-term winter camps were found in the high-elevation belts, whereas small, ephemeral camps were found in the lowlands. Lower Paleolithic. Wadi Qalkha, identified as a Late Acheulean site, exhibited an artifact-bearing horizon near tlie top of a 30-meter-thick section of alluvial silts and sands. A geomorphic study placed the alluvial fill in the last interglacial period. The lithic assemblage is composed mainly of finely fashioned ovate handaxes. Middle Paleolithic. Tor Faraj and Tor Sabiha are rockshelters with extensive Levantine Mousterian deposits. The differences in natural setting and artifacts between the two
sites suggest that they represent winter (Tor Faraj) and summer (Tor Sabiha) segments of an annual cycle of trans hurnance. T h e artifact assemblages are dominated by Levallois points. Microscopic analysis suggests tiiat most of the points were hafted and used for various tasks, ranging from cutting to scraping and to use as projectiles. Amino acid racemization and uranium series dates indicate that the oc cupations were contemporaneous, archaeologically, dating to about 62,000 B P . Examination of the pollen, sediments, and animal remains from the deposits points to very dry climatic conditions during the time of occupation. U p p e r Paleolithic. The rockshelter sites of T o r Hamar, Tor Aeid, and Jebel Humeima contain the most important of several Upper Paleolithic occupations. Based on artifact analysis, these occupations include both Ahmarian and Lev antine Aurignacian industries. T h e Ahmarian horizons at Tor Hamar and T o r Aeid most likely date from about 38,000 to 29,000 B P , whereas Jebel Humeima's Levantine Aurignacian occupation may be somewhat younger. T h e Upper Paleolithic deposits, formed of pinkish silt, yielded pollen that traced a succession from slightly humid condi tions (represented by trees and grasses) to drier conditions (defined by desert shrubs). Epipaleolithic. About 40 percent of tlie sites encom passed by this research belong to the Epipaleolithic, an in terval of considerable cultural-historic complexity. Five cul tural-historic complexes (Qalkhan, Kebaran, Geometric Kebaran, Mushabian, and Natufian) were identified, with the Qalkhan being newly defined and unique to southern Jordan. At a more specific taxonomic level, new industries were identified within the Kebaran (Early Hamran), Geo metric Kebaran (Middle, Late, and Final Hamaran), and the Mushabian (Madamaghan). 1. Qalkhan occupations. Characterized by a large uiangular point type, Qalkhan occupations have been recovered from several sites, including Tor Hamar. T h e industry has been fixed stratigraphically between Upper Paleolithic and Kebaran horizons at the site of Wadi Aoud, in area B (al though without radiometric dates). 2. Kebaran complex occupations. Represented by Early Hamran assemblages, Kebaran occupations were identified in tlie stratified deposits of several rockshelter sites, of which the most important are Jebel Hamra and Jebel Misraq. Dated to between 18,000 and 15,000 B P , these occupations were linked to quite moist conditions, as indicated by high frequencies of tree (especially oak) and grass pollen. 3. Geometric Kebaran complex occupations. Represented by Middle, Late, and Final Hamran assemblages, Geometric Kebaran occupations occur within several stratified rock shelter deposits adjacent to Pleistocene lake beds in the low lands, as well as in open-air sites in the uplands. T h e most important of tiiese include Jebel Hamra, Qa Salab, and elQuweira. The cultural-stratigraphic sequences tracing the Late and Final Hamran at Qa Salab and el-Quweira are of special significance: they show a progressive change in di-
RAS IBN HANI agnostic microlithic artifacts—lunates replace trapeze-rec tangles—that suggests an age immediately preceding die Natufian (i.e., 14,000-13,000 B P ) . Pollen evidence indicates that dry conditions during the Middle Hamran (c. 15,00014,000 B P ) were followed by warm, moist conditions during the Late Hamran—which, in turn, were replaced by dry, cold conditions during the Final Hamran. 4. Natufian Complex. Represented by early (Wadi Judaiyid) and late (Wadi Aoud, area A) phases of occupations, the Natufian deposit at Wadi Judaiyid yielded rich flint and bone assemblages radiometrically dated to about 12,500 B P . It is one of the earliest Natufian sites yet recorded. T h e pres ence of wild sheep remains in the deposit is also noteworthy, for diis significandy extends the species's known biogeographic range. Paleoenvironmental data point to an initial extension of die dry, cold conditions of the Final Hamran followed by climatic amelioration and a return to drier con ditions during the Late Natufian (after c. 11,000 B P ) . Neolithic a n d Chalcolithic. T h e Neolithic is poorly rep resented in die research area, but Chalcolithic sites dating to about 6,000 B P are common. These sites reflect an econ omy based on pastoral nomadism following a transhumant setdement strategy. Material culture inventories include a wide range of ground stone, worked bone, pottery, and a microlithic flint industry. Stone-lined pit houses and stone corrals occur at several sites, the most important of which include Jebel el-Jill and Jebel Queisa. BIBLIOGRAPHY Henry, D o n a l d O. " T h e Prehistory of S o u d i e r n J o r d a n a n d Relation ships with the L e v a n t . " Journal of Field Archaeology 9 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 4 1 7 4 4 4 . S u m m a r y of t h e initial stages of research a n d a description of die finds for each of the major Paleolithic periods, with comparisons to those in t h e rest of the Levant. Henry, D o n a l d O., a n d Priscilla F . T u r n b u l l . "Archaeological a n d F a u nal Evidence from Natufian a n d T i m n i a n Sites in Southern J o r d a n . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 5 7 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 4 5 - 6 4 . Site reports for Jebel el-Jill, Jebel Queisa (Chalcolithic-Timnian), a n d W a d i Judaiyid (Natufian). Henry, D o n a l d O. " T o p o g r a p h i c Influences on Epipaleolithic L a n d Use Patterns in Southern J o r d a n . " In Studies in the History and Ar chaeology of Jordan, vol. 3 , edited by Adnan H a d i d i , p p . 2 1 - 2 7 . A m m a n , 1 9 8 7 . A pattern of t r a n s h u m a n c e reconstructed for the Epipaleolithic by c o m p a r i n g cultural and natural data linked to n u merous sites. H e n r y , D o n a l d O. " S u m m a r y of Prehistoric a n d Paleoenvironmental Research in t h e N o r t h e r n H i s m a . " In The Prehistory of Jordan, edited by Andrew N . G a r r a r d a n d H a n s G . Gebel, p p . 7 - 3 7 . British A r chaeological R e p o r t s , International Series, n o . 3 9 6 . 1 . Oxford, 1 9 8 8 . Detailed description of the cultural-historical units, diagnostic arti facts, chronology, a n d paleoenvironmental reconstructions. H e n r y , D o n a l d O., a n d A n d r e w N . Garrard. " T o r H a m a r : A n E p i paleolithic Rockshelter in S o u t h e r n J o r d a n . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 2 0 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 1 - 2 5 . Detailed description of the newly found M u s h a b i a n presence in southern Jordan; includes a discussion of its relationship to occupations in t h e N e g e v a n d Sinai deserts and early evidence for t h e u s e of the b o w a n d arrow. H e n r y , D o n a l d O, " T h e Epipaleolithic Sequence within t h e R a s E n N a q b - E l Quweira Area, S o u t h e r n J o r d a n . " PaUorient 1 4 . 2 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 2 4 5 - 2 5 6 . Paris, 1 9 9 0 . I n - d e p t h discussion of the complex and richly
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diverse Epipaleolithic period, along with an organizational frame work for the various archaeological units. H e n r y , D o n a l d O . " T r a n s h u m a n c e during t h e L a t e Levantine M o u s terian." In The Middle Paleolithic: Adaptation, Behavior, and Vari ability, edited by H a r o l d L . Dibble a n d Paul Mellars, p p . 1 4 3 - 1 6 2 . Philadelphia, 1 9 9 2 , C o m p a r e s t h e Middle Paleolithic sites of T o r Faraj a n d T o r Sabiha, emphasizing reconstructing settlement-pro curement strategies a n d hominid cognitive development. H e n r y , D o n a l d O . "Prehistoric Cultural Ecology in Southern J o r d a n . " Science 2 6 5 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 3 3 6 - 3 4 1 . Stresses the importance of seasonal shifts in surface water and temperature in defining prehistoric setde ment patterns. Henry, D o n a l d O. Prehistoric Cultural Ecology and Evolution: Insights from Southern Jordan. N e w York, 1 9 9 5 . Detailed overview of the research in the area conducted between 1 9 7 9 and 1 9 8 8 . DONALD O . HENRY
RAS IBN HANI (Ar., "cape of Ibn Hani"), site ex tending 2.5 km (1.5 mi.) into the Mediterranean Sea, 8 km (5 mi.) north of old Latakia (35°35' N , 35°44' E). Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) is 4.5 km (3 mi.) northeast, about 1.6 km (1 mi.) inland, and Cyprus is 100 km (62 mi.) across die sea. T h e cape is 0.4-1 km wide; its rocky western part, originally an island, was eventually connected with the coast by sand deposits. Two bays offer good harbors for small ships. Hellenistic and Roman remains were noted as early as die eighteenth century. They include (Hellenistic?) moles in both bays and a large, built Late Hellenistic tomb with Ioculi. An archaeological mound was reported by Gabriel Saade (1964). A Late Bronze Age tomb was accidentally discov ered and subsequendy excavated by the Directorate General of Antiquities of Syria in 1973. A joint Syrian and French expedition, headed by Adnan Bounni and Jacques Lagarce, with Elisabeth Lagarce and Nassib Saliby, began work in 1975, holding its twentieth season in 1995. Excavation began on die southern slope and summit of the tell (9.40 m above sea level). T h e examination of walls in areas where modern buildings were under construction led to die discovery of a Hellenistic city wall (third century BCE) . In 1977, work was initiated near die Bronze Age tomb, close to die northern coast of the cape; excavation has grad ually been concentrated on that area. In the tiiirteenth century B C E , the last century of the Late Bronze Age, a complex of palaces and residencies was built by a ldng of Ugarit. [See Ugarit.] T h e site offered excellent possibilities for controlling seaborne traffic. Two main areas have been excavated. T h e Southern Palace covers more than 5,000 sq m. [See Palace.] Its construction was an enor mous undertaking: sand was dumped 4 m high on the nat ural rock, between the 1.80-meter-thick walls, to raise die levels of the floors. Despite die scarcity of finds, such a building could only be interpreted as a royal palace. On its northeastern limit, it is maintained and protected by an em bankment faced with an ashlar wall. The Northern Palace covers about 2,000 sq m. Its unusual
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plan allows only one obligatory way to circulate through the entire building (i.e., having entered a group of rooms, one must return to the main passage in order to reach any other group). Staircases lead to the upper story(ies). Each group of rooms around the main, paved courtyard seems to have a specific function: an office and archive on the east; a pos sible throne room with a two-columned porch on the north; and two areas devoted to metallurgical activities on the west. The eastern part of the palace also produced an administra tive archive. T o the east, another building, considered a sat ellite of the administrative building, held a bread-making workshop with two large ovens (tannurs) and a toilet pro vided with a seat. T h e finds were few, but significant, and include two groups of tablets. The first group, mostiy in Ugaritic, some times in Akkadian, illustrates nearly all types of texts attested in Ugarit, except contracts: letters to and from the king, the queen mother and officials; ritual, magical, and lexical texts; and administrative documents. [See Ugaritic; Akkadian.] They shed considerable light on Ugaritic culture and show tiiat the Northern Palace belonged to a queen of Ugarit, perhaps to King 'Ammishtamru IPs (c. 1260-1230 B C E ) mother. According to one of the letters, the city could have been called Biruti. The second group of texts is exclusively administrative: receipts and memoranda, "banking" prac tices apparentiy used a silver standard. A clay sealing bears 'Ammishtamru IPs name. The ashlar-built chamber tomb matches the aristocratic sepulchers of Ugarit. A stepped dromos leads to a rectan gular corbeled chamber. [See Tombs.] At the farther end is a closet, connected with tlie chamber only through a narrow hole. The purpose of this annex is not clear. Looted in an tiquity, the tomb still contained local, Cypriot, and Aegean material of the fourteenth-thirteenth centuries BCE. Workshops were numerous in this palace. One was de voted to cutting and polishing hard stone with emery. In the metal workshops, the main find was a mold for "oxhide" copper ingots—a large and thick slab of beach sandstone with the shape of tire ingot hollowed in its upper surface. Based on analysis, the copper came from Cyprus. Oxhide ingots (rectangular witii concave sides and elongated cor ners) have been recovered by the hundreds in the Mediter ranean area. Copper was one of the staple commodities of LB trade, and considerable quantities were imported by Egypt from Alashiya (Cyprus?), Syria, and the Aegean. The Ras Ibn Hani mold, the only one ever found, is a document of utmost significance for die technology of ingots and tlie implication of Ugarit in the metal trade. West of the Northern Palace another, similar building held two large kilns, one built into a platform (2 x 2 m) accessible via four steps. T h e palace had been nearly de serted before it was destroyed by heavy fire, early in the twelfth century BCE apparentiy by "Sea Peoples" whose pre cise nature is a debated question. On a part of the ruins that
was leveled, small dwellings were built bordered by perpen dicular streets. T h e painted pottery recovered, of types common on Cyprus and in Palestine in the twelfth century, are considered to be the last development of Mycenaean pottery, suggesting that this settlement was founded by the very sackers of the Ugaritic city. Desttuctions and rebuilding phases alternate during tlie twelfth-tenth centuries B C E . New types of pottery show con nections witii Cyprus, but also with Hama on the Orontes River. With al-Mina, Ras el-Bassit, and Tell Sukas, Ras Ibn Hani is one of very few sites in die area containing infor mation about this period, die Early Iron Age. [See Hama; Bassit; Sukas, Tell.] N o architectural remains were recov ered for the remainder of die Iron Age, but settiement was uninterrupted until the early fifth century B C E at least. In the Hellenistic period, a fortified city, nearly 1 Ion long, was built on the cape. A list of mercenaries and Ptolemaic coins point to the Lagid ldng of Egypt, Ptolemy III (246221 B C E ) , as its founder. In 246, he conquered Seleucia and Antioch. [See Seleucia; Antioch on Orontes.] T h e city at Ras Ibn Hani was probably meant to secure these new posses sions against an attack from Seleucid Laodicea (Latakia). It demonstrates that the king's domination reached much far ther south than had been thought. T h e city wall is rare tes timony of tlie Hellenistic art of fortification in this region. Mainly the wall's eastern part has been studied by Pierre Leriche, a member of the Ras Ibn Hani expedition. It com prised an inner wall of large blocks, with massive founda tions supporting coffered masonry, an outer wall of boul ders, and a fosse. Alternately square and U-shaped towers protected the curtain and a gate opened into a circular area surrounded by columns. Ras Ibn Hani probably returned to Seleucid hegemony under Antiochus III, in about 200 B C E . Life went on eagerly during the second and part of die first centuries B C E , as dem onstrated by stamped amphora handles, bronze coins, clay figurines, and rich pottery finds. At some time in the first century B C E , a stronghold was built, reusing part of tlie an cient city wall. It was destroyed violently, perhaps the first decades of the Roman conquest of Syria, around 30 B C E . The site experienced a final revival from the time of Con stantine (fourth century CE) to Justinianus or to tlie early seventh century C E . Remains of large houses, fishing and agricultural tools, small bronze coins, and a necropolis illus trate the life of a medium-sized city. T h e diversity of tlie pottery, with many imports, is nevertheless typical of the prosperity and overseas connections of this coastal area. BIBLIOGRAPHY Preliminary reports o n the results of tlie excavations a n d o n tlie texts have been published b y m e m b e r s of the excavation team in F r e n c h in the journal Syria: 53 (1976): 233-279; 55 (1978): 233-325; 56 (1979): 217-234; 57 (1980): 343-373; 58 (1981): 215-299; a n d 61 (1984): 13> 153 i79> a n d in Comptes rendus de I'Academie des inscriptions et belles2
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RECORDING TECHNIQUES lettres
(1978): 45-65; (1979): 277-294; (1980): 10-34; (1983): 249-290;
a n d ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 7 4 - 3 0 1 ; a n d in Arabic in Annates archeologiques arabes syriennes ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 2 7 - 6 4 ; ( 1 9 7 7 - 1 9 7 8 ) : 2 3 - 8 4 ; and ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 3 1 - 5 9 . Additional publications include the following: (1984): 398-438;
which yielded the celebrated Deluge tablets, deciphered by one of his proteges, George Adam Smith, in 1872. [See also Bisitun; Cuneiform; Nimrud; Nineveh; and the biographies
D u s s a u d , Rene. Topographic hislorique de la Syrie antique et medievale. Paris, 1 9 2 7 . T h e first mention of R a s I b n H a n i in archaeological literature appears on pages 4 1 6 - 4 1 7 . Lagarce, Jacques, a n d Elisabeth L a g a r c e . Ras Ibn Hani. Archaologie et histoire. D a m a s c u s , 1 9 8 7 . Brief a n d syndietic presentation of the site, primarily intended for visitors. W i t h a similar version in Arabic by A d n a n B o u n n i a n d N a s s i b Saliby. Lagarce, Jacques, a n d Elisabeth L a g a r c e . " R a s I b n Hani au Bronze r i c e n t . Recherches et reflexions en c o u r s . " In Acts of the Colloquium "Le pays d'Ougarit autour de 1200 av. J.-C." Paris, 1 9 9 5 . Saade, Gabriel. Histoire de Lattaquii. Vol. 1 , Ramitha, problhnes des origines. D a m a s c u s , 1 9 6 4 . First mention a n d cursory description of the archaeological m o u n d ; see page 9 4 , fig. 1 1 , a n d pages 9 8 - 9 9 . A D N A N B O U N N I a n d JACQUES LAGARCE
413
of Layard
and
Smith.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Lloyd, Seton. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Ex ploration. Rev. a n d enl. ed. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 0 . General history of M e sopotamian archaeology that offers an assessment of Rawlinson's work. Rawlinson, George. Memoir ofMajor-General Sir Henry Creswicke Raw linson. L o n d o n , 1 8 9 8 . Hagiographic biography of Rawlinson by his brodier; useful as a narrative s u m m a r y of his life. Rawlinson, H e n r y Creswicke. The Persian Cuneiform Inscription al Behistun Decyphered and Translated. L o n d o n , 1 8 4 6 . Rawlinson's d e scription of his decipherment of Behistun (Bisitun), Rawlinson, H e n r y Creswicke. A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscrip tions of Babylonia and Assyria. L o n d o n , 1 8 5 0 . T h e first description of the Assyrians from cuneiform sources. BRIAN FAGAN
RAS SHAMRA. See Ugarit.
RAWLINS ON,
HENRY CRESWICKE ( 1 8 1 0 -
1895), known as the "father of cuneiform." Rawlinson was born in Oxfordshire, England. While an officer cadet in the East India Company in 1827, he demonstrated a remarkable ability for languages, mastering five Oriental languages in a very short time. In 1833, he was one of a party of British officers sent to reorganize the shah of Persia's army. Posted to Kurdistan, he decided to attempt a decipherment of King Darius's trilingual inscription on the Great Rock of Bisitun, commemorating that monarch's victory over five rebel chiefs. Over the next decade, Rawlinson copied and deci phered the Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian texts, es tablishing that Babylonian was a Semitic, polyphonic lan guage. Rawlinson shares credit for the decipherment of cunei form with the Irish cleric Edward Hincks and die French man Jules Oppert, who worked on vowels, syllables, and word values. He was appointed British consul in Baghdad in 1843. This gave him ample time to work on the cuneiform tablets Austen Henry Layard found at Nimrud and Nine veh, which he identified as Assyrian cities. In 1850-1851, Layard unearthed the royal archives of the Assyrian mon arch Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. It was Rawlinson who real ized the crucial importance of this unique library with its grammars and rich archives and arranged for their study in the British Museum. Rawlinson excavated on his own ac count only once, at the ziggurat of Borsippa, near Babylon, in southern Mesopotamia, in 1853, where he unearthed the commemorative cylinders that recorded how Nebuchad nezzar, king of Babylon had rebuilt and repaired the temple. Fie resigned from the East India Company in the same year. In later life, Rawlinson continued in cuneiform research. He fostered long-term research on the Ashurbanipal collection,
RECONNAISSANCE, ARCHAEOLOGICAL. See Survey, Archaeological.
RECORDING
TECHNIQUES. Archaeologists document the process of removing debris and successive occupational remains in a controlled excavation by means of recording techniques. By its nature, archaeological ex cavation is a nonrepeatable experiment, destroying its evi dence as it produces data. Any information not recorded accurately and fully when a site is being excavated is knowl edge lost forever. T h e goal of archaeological recording is to document fully how and where each element encountered in a site's systematic excavation was found and recovered. T h e degree of detail provided in such an effort is determined by an excavation project's research design. Excavations differ in how they are organized, but gener ally a series of 5-X-5-meter squares in the same portion of a site are grouped into a "field" or "area." Each square is established by a project surveyor or an architect, who main tains a large-scale plan of the site grid and the specific lo cation of each excavation area in relation to the grid. [See Grid Plan.] A staff member is assigned to supervise each area and is responsible for ensuring that all excavation ac tivities at the location are comprehensively documented. This documentation is in both descriptive and graphic form and is entered in a notebook that contains the excavation season's records for the area. Daily activity in each square is recorded in a running com mentary that creates a daily log of excavation. Details such as tire changing of loci, brief descriptive assessments of char acteristics of new loci, notable finds, or questions regarding occupational activities are recorded, as are lists of recovered materials sent to laboratories for further analysis. For each
414
RECORDING TECHNIQUES
day, a precisely scaled top plan of the excavation unit is prepared, showing not only new architectural elements en countered in excavation but also, by shading or coloration, indicating where various soil loci or artifact concentrations were located. T h e end-of-day elevations of each locus, which chart tire daily progress of revealing successive cul tural deposits, are also a normal part of field recording. As tire excavation of an area progresses, informal photographs of significant features often are taken to allow for the clear identification of loci and related features. [See Photography, article on Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts.] Many excavations use instant photographs for this purpose, with the resulting prints being glued into die area supervisor's notebook. Because worldng in the field presents many possibilities for overlooking essential information, most excavations use a variety of supplementary recording forms in an attempt to ensure complete documentation. T h e registration and de scription of each soil locus and each architectural unit (e.g., walls, doorways, cisterns) and special features such as bur ials are recorded on special forms usually maintained by the area supervisor. As artifacts are uncovered in die field, the use of field tags becomes an integral part of the recording system. Most tag ging systems utilize some form of reference to the specific excavation location, the soil locus from which the artifact came, and some designation of the class of die artifact (metal, glass, ceramic) that will guide the registrar in further processing the item and die project expert in evaluating it. Once an occupational level is fully excavated, die results are recorded by some combination of architect's drawing, formal photography, and section drawing. [See Architectural Drafting and Drawing.] T h e excavation architect prepares a precisely scaled drawing of die full excavation area, show ing all relevant features. T h e excavation photographer takes several carefully planned photographs of the area, seeking to show as completely as possible the relationships of the various features to each other. The area supervisor prepares a section drawing showing at least one face of the balk in the excavation area in which all soil layers will have been distinguished and labeled. [See Balk.] These primary re cording elements are frequentiy among the more important of the published forms of excavation documentation. Once the excavation of an area has been completed, the supervisor is responsible for writing up a final report, sum marizing the main periods, or phases, of occupation and connecting die area's various features to them. While much of the excavation's recordkeeping up to diis point has been descriptive, the area report is interpretive, correlating soil loci and architectural elements into a coherent picture of human activity. This final area report becomes part of the area notebook and of the permanent record of the excava tion in an area. Other records are usually inserted in the notebook as well: field reports of ceramic dating and iden
tification, preliminary coin reports, and flora and fauna re ports. While every excavator strives to maintain a comprehen sive documentation of an excavation, there are always con ditions that call for a balance between recording the detail of every facet of excavation and the practical limitations of fieldwork. Each excavator is confronted with the need to determine which information is of such central importance that time and money should be allocated for its retrieval and recording. These decisions are made on the basis of die pro ject's research design, which not only should address the general goals of the excavation but also should include some consideration of die analytical processes and recording tech niques to be used to meet those goals. Collecting and re cording vast amounts of information about issues that are of limited analytical value may only complicate the exca vation process and the eventual publication of its research results. The development of increasingly computerized fieldwork has meant significant time saving for archaeological record ing. Laser transits generate digitalized data tiiat can be readily converted into a variety of renderings, making it pos sible to produce top plans of excavation areas with greater accuracy and speed. T h e use of digitalizing imaging equip ment, still in its infancy in archaeological fieldwork, may enable archaeologists to produce images of an excavation's progress that can be further enhanced to show greater or fewer details, in ways that are impossible with conventional instant photography. Establishing local computer networks on a site now allows field excavators instant access to the results of specialized analyses of materials from across the site; as a consequence, excavation techniques or sampling suategies can be adjusted to the data flow. As more powerful portable computer equipment becomes available to exca vation projects, field recording will be the beneficiary. [See also Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpreta tion; Excavation Tools; and Excavation Strategy.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Blakely, Jeffrey A., a n d L a w r e n c e E. T o o m b s . The Tell el-Hesi Field Manual. Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi, vol. i . W i nona Lake, Ind., 1980. Very complete assessment of t h e goals a n d • processes of field recording, including m a n y forms a n d plans used in the excavation of Tell el-Hesi (see p p . 28-59). Dever, William G., a n d H . Darrell L a n c e , eds. A Manual of Field Ex cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. C o m prehensive description with examples of the actual system u s e d for field recording during the A S O R excavations at Gezer in the 1970s (see p p . 74-97). M o s t contemporary excavations in t h e N e a r East use some variation of this same system. Dibble, Harold L . , a n d S h a n n o n P . M c P h e r r o n . " O n t h e C o m p u t e r ization of Archaeological Projects." Journal of Field Archaeology 15 (1988): 431-440. R e p o r t o n the successful computerization of field recording for the excavation of a E u r o p e a n prehistoric site. While written before the ready accessibility of powerful portable e q u i p -
REFERENCE WORKS m e n t , the authors' insights on t h e n e e d to incorporate c o m p u t e r r e cording at t h e inception of a project's development are still valuable. McMillon, Bill. The Archaeology Handbook: A Field Manual and Resource Guide. N e w York, 1 9 9 1 . Very readable work for a general N o r t h American audience, with a brief chapter devoted to the recording process (see p p . 1 0 2 - 1 1 0 ) . Meyers, Carol L . , and Eric M . M e y e r s . " R e c o r d i n g a n d Reporting: N e w Challenges in Archaeological R e s e a r c h . " Erelz-Israel23 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 8 0 - 8 6 . Readable essay o n tlie use of quantification in archaeology, its applicability to studies in tlie world of the Bible, a n d the potential that computerization m a y hold for enabling such studies to appear in published form with greater rapidity. R a a b , L . Mark. " L a b o r a t o r y Automation: C o m p u t e r - L i n k e d M e a s u r e m e n t Devices a n d Videomicroscopy." Journal of Field Archaeology 2 0 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 2 1 9 - 2 2 4 . Brief overview of t h e problems and one working solution to automating t h e measuration a n d registration of artifacts in tlie archaeological field lab. Schiffer, Michael B., et al. " T h e Design of Archaeological Surveys." World Archaeology 1 0 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 - 2 8 . Excellent overview of the inter related problems of research design, methodology, and recording of archaeological fieldwork. KENNETH G . HOGLUND
415
translations of the more important texts of the ancient Near East, none too readable and somewhat dated. Smelik, K. A. D. Writings from Ancient Israel: A Handbook of Historical and Religious Documents. Translated by Graham I. Davies. Louisville, 1991. Translations are limited to inscriptions from Israel and Jordan, dated to 1000-500 B C E , and selected for their historical and re ligious value. Commentaries. There are many commentary series and numerous commentaries on individual books of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Most are devoted to biblical books rather than ancient Near Eastern literature, and the use of archaeological data varies widely. Two recent texts, both by Philip J. King, which set a superb standard for deploying archaeological information to illuminate the text are Amos, Hosea, Micah: An Archaeological Commentary (Philadelphia, 1988), and Jeremiah: An Archaeological Com panion
(Louisville, 1993).
Bible. Garden City, N.Y., 1964-. Multivolume se ries. Individual commentaries vary immensely in the use of archaeological information. Originally intended for the educated general reader, the series (nearly com plete) has evolved into lengthy technical works for scholars. Brown, Raymond E., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E . Murphy, eds. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1990. Revision of the 1968 edi tion, with significant additional material. T h e most comprehensive coverage of any one-volume Bible com mentary available. Extensive topical articles do full jus tice to the archaeological data, with an extremely useful subject index for locating such information. However, tlie scholarly style and verse-by-verse format is tedious and difficult. Bruce, Frederick F., ed. The International Bible Commen tary. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986. The best of the onevolume conservative commentaries, including topical articles on archaeology and the Bible. Makes good use of archaeological information, but needs a subject in dex. Hermeneia. Philadelphia and Minneapolis, 1971-- Multivolume series. Lengthy technical commentaries on in dividual books, with varying use of archaeological in formation.
Anchor
REFERENCE WORKS. There are numerous refer ence works available to those studying archaeology and the ancient Near East. What follows is a corpus of the most significant recent volumes, with emphasis on English-lan guage works. T h e first section covers the ancient Near East ern world; the second section offers a selective survey of the New Testament (Greco-Roman) world, but does not repeat those works in the first part that cover both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. T h e annotations attempt to give the scope of each work along with its strengths and weak nesses. Ancient N e a r E a s t e r n W o r l d Primary sources in translation Charlesworth, James H., ed. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y., 1983-1985. Over fifty scholars introduce, translate, and annotate more tiian sixty ancient texts. Despite its unevenness, inconsistent inclusion criteria, and the need for a revision, this re mains the definitive work. Coogan, Michael David. Stories from Ancient Canaan. Philadelphia, 1978. Readable translations of four im portant myths from ancient Ugarit. Lichtheim, Miriam, comp. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. 3 vols. Berkeley, 1973-1980. [Anno tation] Matthews, Victor PL, and D . C. Benjamin. Old Testament Parallels:
Laws
and Stories
from
the Ancient
Near
East.
New York, 1991. Readable translations of ancient Near Eastern texts designed for students. Pritchard, James B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts. 2d ed, Princeton, 1955. Abridged in The Ancient Near East. 2 vols. Princeton, 1958-1975. Literal and traditional
International
Critical
Commentary
on the Holy
Scriptures.
Edinburgh, 1895-. Multivolume series. Standard tech nical coverage, but die archaeological information is too old to have value. T h e series is being extended and re newed, with new commentaries in preparation. Mays, James Luther, ed. Harper's Bible Commentary. San Francisco, 1988. Mainline, up-to-date, readable schol arship with an emphasis on literary analysis and very
416
REFERENCE WORKS
limited use of archaeological information. Includes good maps and a map index, but no subject index. Word Biblical Commentary. Waco, Texas, 1982-. Multivolume series, nearly complete. Fairly technical evan gelical critical commentaries, with varying use of ar chaeological information. Bible atlases. Bible atlases can be divided into reference and student works. Reference atlases generally feature ex tensive color photos and maps with textual commentary. Student atlases, less expensively produced are also more rea sonably priced and often available in paperback editions.
Bahat, Dan, with Chaim T. Rubenstein. The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem. New York, 1990. Excellent maps and line drawings by Carta. Bahat is the official archaeolo gist for the city of Jerusalem. The text serves die general reader well, but specialists will find some issues ad dressed too briefly. Baines, John, and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt. New York, 1980. Includes color photos and maps. T h e nontechnical text deals with individual sites, the cultural setting, and Egyptian society. Beek, Martinus A. Atlas of Mesopotamia. Translated by D . R. Welsh. Edited by H. H. Rowley. London, 1962. Though somewhat dated, includes good maps and black-and-white photos. Beitzel, Barry J. The Moody Atlas of Bible Lands. Chicago, 1985. Reference Bible atias. Balanced, conservative treatment with excellent color maps designed to aid the colorblind. T h e geographical commentary is exhaustive and often too detailed for the general reader. Archaeo logical data is minimal but current. A gazetteer would be helpful. Bimson, John J., and John P. Kane. New Bible Atlas. Wheaton, 111., 1985. Student Bible atias. Balanced con servative approach, organized according to archaeolog ical periods, with extensive discussion of important sites and archaeological methods and limitations. The color maps and illustrations are well coordinated with the text. This is the best of the student atiases, along with The Harper Concise Atlas of the Bible (Pritchard 1991). Freeman-Grenville, G. S. P. Historical Atlas of the Middle East. New York, 1993. Designed for the general reader, with an emphasis on the medieval and modern Middle East. Includes excellent maps by Carta; the brief com mentary is accompanied by many smaller maps. Gardner, Joseph, ed., with Harry Thomas Frank. Reader's Digest Atlas of the Bible. Pleasantville, N.Y., 1981. Ref erence Bible adas. Mainstream approach, lavishly illus trated with excellent color maps. The accessible text, now somewhat dated, is augmented with an informative gazetteer. T h e volume would be more useful geograph ically if the maps were gridded and clear topographical distinctions shown.
Pritchard, James B., ed. The Harper Atlas of the Bible. San Francisco, 1987. Reference Bible atlas. Mainstream scholarship, visually beautiful, with excellent maps and illustrations. T h e large size and high production cost of the horizontal maps restrict use. A scripture column should be added in tire site index and more focus placed on geographical features. Pritchard, James B., gen. ed. The Harper Concise Atlas of the Bible. New York, 1991. Student Bible adas. Main stream approach. An abridged version of the Harper Atlas of the Bible (Bimson and Kane 1985), with some improvements and most of the maps retained. Selected commentary has been rewritten and improved. Rainey, Anson F., et al., eds. Macmillan Bible Atlas. 3d ed. New York, 1993. Reference Bible adas. Standard work, revised and improved. Rasmussen, Carl G. Zondervan NIV Atlas of the Bible. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1989. Reference Bible adas, no table for its visual quality, with excellent color maps (especially the block maps depicting physical features) and numerous illustrations. T h e conservative commen tary is written for the general reader, with an extensive gazetteer. Occasionally the coordination between text and maps is not apparent. Rogerson, Joseph W. Atlas of the Bible. New York, 1985. Reference Bible adas. Mainstream commentary, with lavish use of color illustrations and maps. T h e regional approach to historical geography is helpful, but die maps should be more colorful and less cluttered. T h e gazetteer should be expanded. Archaeological dictionaries. Dictionaries that cover ar chaeology broadly, for instance, The Facts on File Dictionary of Archaeology (New York, 1983) or The Cambridge Encyclo pedia of Archaeology (New York, 1983), provide limited cov erage of the ancient Near East. T h e reader would find much more information in tire following works.
Ben-Tor, Amnon, ed. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. New Haven, 1992. Eight Israeli scholars have collabo rated to provide the full sequence of archaeological pe riods for sites in ancient Canaan from the Neolithic to Iron III. The volume is effectively illustrated widi color • and black-and-white photos, maps, and line drawings. Technological advances and cultural transitions are dis cussed with a minimum of technical language. Infor mation on sites and artifacts provide both specific top ical data as well as an excellent overview. Blaiklock, Edward M., and R. K. Harrison, eds. The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1983. Twenty scholars cover a wide range of topics and provide brief bibliographies, al though the articles are uneven in quality and becoming dated. Includes black-and-white photos and sixteen pages of color photos in the center of the volume.
REFERENCE WORKS Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. New York, 1990. Advanced survey from an Israeli perspective. Negev, Avraham, ed. The Archaeological
Encyclopedia
of
3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1990. More than twenty American and Israeli archaeologists contribute about six hundred entries covering approx imately ten millennia, from the earliest societies down to the Arab conquest. Includes a glossary of archaeo logical terms and about three hundred black-and-white photos, charts, and maps. Generally reliable and up to date, but coverage is more limited than Stern. the
Holy
Land.
Pfeiffer, Charles F . , ed. The Biblical
World:
A
Dictionary
Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966. Pi oneering effort when it appeared, but the archaeological information is badly dated now. Includes articles on texts (e.g., Sinuhe, Enuma Elish), people (e.g., Moab, Moabites), and sites (e.g., Masada). Rast, Walter E. Through the Ages in Palestinian Archae of Biblical
Archaeology.
ology: An Introductory
ITandbook.
Philadelphia, 1992. A
more popular survey than Mazar by an American ar chaeologist. Sasson, Jack M., et al., eds. Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. 4 vols. New York, 1995. A welcome addition to tire secondary literature, this work is a very useful and ambitious collection of essays on many aspects of the ancient Near East. It is particularly strong in areas of the history and literatures of the region but touches less systematically on the physical and cultural aspects of ancient society. Stern, Ephraim, et a l , eds. The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. 4 vols. Jeru salem and New York, ^ 9 3 . Definitive work (revised and updated from the 1975-1977 edition), covering ex cavations in Israel and parts of Jordan, Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula. Features some four hundred articles by international scholars (primarily Israeli) on 420 sites as well as regions and topics (i.e., "Churches, Monaster ies, and Synagogues"), with excellent bibliographies. Each site is discussed in detail, often by the original excavator. Bible
Achtemeier, Paul J., ed. Harper's Bible Dictionary. San Francisco, 1985. Balanced mainstteam approach. Ex cellent presentation of up-to-date archaeological infor mation written by many of the leading scholars in their fields. Bibliographic data is limited, even in the longest articles. Includes excellent color maps, numerous illus trations, and an index. Overall this is the best one-vol ume Bible dictionary, but it is becoming dated. Bromiley, Geoffrey W., ed. The International
Standard
Bi
4 vols. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1 9 7 9 1988. T h e definitive conservative work, almost com
ble Encyclopedia.
pletely revised from the 1915 and 1929 editions. Delays in publication have produced some unevenness. Gen erally balanced approach; many articles interact with the full range of critical scholarship. Butler, Trent C , ed. Holman Bible Dictionary. Nashville, 1991. About 5,000 popularly written articles (without bibliographies), authored by 250 teachers and minis ters, with lavish use of color illustrations and maps and fairly balanced use of archaeological information. Con servative approach. A good Bible dictionary for the gen eral reader. Buttrick, George A., ed. The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. 4 vols. Nashville, 1962. Remained the definitive work until the publication of The Anchor Bible Diction ary (Freedman 1992), although because of tire latter's uneven quality, this volume is still very useful, especially in philological studies. A supplementary volume was published in 1976. Douglas, James D., ed. The New Bible Dictionary. 2d ed. Wheaton, 111., 1982. Excellent presentation of archaeo logical information with good bibliographies for the longer articles. Includes a comprehensive index useful for locating archaeological information, but no map section or color photos. Balanced conservative ap proach, but slightly dated, malting this a close second to Eerdmans (Myers 1987) as the best conservative Bible dictionary. Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. New York, 1992. T h e definitive work in English, witii over six thousand enuies authored by nearly a thousand contributors. T h e articles and bibliographies are extensive, up to date, and often written by the lead ing international scholars. Archaeological information is comprehensive and includes articles on the newest ap proaches. However, the selection of sites and coverage given to those included is uneven, for instance, there is no article on Carchemish, and the article on Hazor is less than one page. Though the arrangement is alpha betical, the forthcoming index volume will help the reader to make full use of the massive amount of infor mation. Mills, Watson E., ed. Mercer
dictionaries
417
Dictionary
of the Bible. M a
con, Ga., 1990. T h e best coverage of extra-biblical literature, with signed contributions by more than 225 scholar/teachers and bibliographies. Features u p to-date archaeological information b u t fewer (1,450) entries than other Bible dictionaries; limited but visually attractive illustrations; and color maps (but no map in dex). Succeeds well as a volume designed for students and classroom use. Myers, Allen C , ed. The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1987. T h e best conservative Bi ble dictionary, a revision and translation of Bijbelse En cyclopedia (1975), with substantial additions of up-to-
418
REFERENCE WORKS date archaeological information. Articles are balanced (though unsigned) and frequentiy accompanied by bib liographies. Includes excellent color maps by Ham mond, but no map index. No other color illustrations and a limited number of black-and-white photos make diis dictionary less visually appealing.
Flora
and
Fauna
Cansdale, George S. All the Animals of the Bible Lands. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1970. Comprehensive discussion of animals, birds, and fish, with drawings and pictures (some in color), plus good indices. Zohary, Michael. Plants of the Bible. New York, 1982. Handbook to all the plants of the Bible, with bibliog raphy, index, and about two hundred color illustrations. Dissertations. Often technical and difficult to read, dis sertations nevertheless represent a source for tire most cur rent research available. The Dissertation Abstracts Interna tional (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1938-) provides abstracts of the latest archaeological dissertations from all over the world (although coverage of European dissertations is limited). Section A of DAI covers the humanities and social sciences, with several relevant categories for the archaeological re searcher (anthropology, archaeology, history: ancient, reli gion, biblical studies, language: ancient, etc.), as well as a keyword title index and an author index. Religious Studies Review (Atianta, 1975-) notes completed dissertations as well as research in progress. The Zeitschrift fiir die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin, 1881-) lists dissertations in progress. Indices
and
bibliographies
Egyptological Bibliography. Leiden, 1947-. The most comprehensive annual bibliography of ancient Egypt, with numbered abstracts classified in ten sec tions, and author and title indices. Art Index. New York, 1929-. Indexes several journals de voted to art and archaeology, with a separate section for book reviews. Well indexed. Elenchus Bibliographicus Biblicus. Rome, 1920-. T h e most comprehensive annual biblical bibliography, indexing virtually every relevant journal, as well as newsletters and occasional publications. Archaeology and the an cient Near East are very well covered. Extensive indices are very helpful. Unfortunately, there is a delay of a few years before publication. Heizer, Robert F. Archaeology: A Bibliographical Guide to the Basic Literature. New York, 1980. Almost five thou sand unannotated items, with a very thorough review of tire literature. Flospers, J. H., ed. A Basic Bibliography for the Study of the Semitic Languages. 2 vols. Leiden, 1973-1974. Vol ume 1 has chapters devoted to several languages, writ
Annual
ten by specialists, and a section on comparative Semitics. Volume 2 covers all aspects of Arabic. Includes almost ten thousand entries, but no annotations or in dex. Humanities Index. New York, 1974-. Separated from the Social Science and Humanities Index in 1974, with sig nificantly improved humanities coverage. Indexes sev eral journals dealing witii archaeology, with a separate section for book reviews. Hupper, William G. An Index to English Periodical Liter ature
on the Old
Testament
and Ancient
Near
Eastern
Metuchen, N.J., 1987-. Five volumes of this projected ten-volume series have appeared to date. In dexes English-language works in over six hundred jour nals of archaeology, history, language, science, and tiieology from 1793 to 1970. T h e special value of this index is the extensive coverage of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury articles, including many on archaeology which are compiled in no other source. Includes articles not found in Part I of Vogel's bibliography. Not yet in dexed. Index of Articles on Jewish Studies. Jerusalem, 1969-. Valu able for Hebrew-language publications, but not espe cially useful for archaeology. Includes festschrifts and several journals not indexed elsewhere. Well indexed. Keilschriftbibliographie. Rome, 1940-. Published as part of the periodical Orientalia. Biannual index for die ancient Near East arranged alphabetically in a continuously numbered list, with subject and name indices. This in dex does for the ancient Near East what Elenchus does for the Bible. Langevin, Paul-Emile. Biblical Bibliography. 3 vols. Que bec, 1972-1985. Covers journals and some books from 1930 to 1983. Well indexed witii many subcategories dealing with archaeology. Organization of biblical sec tions by verse references make the biblical sections very useful. Includes an introduction in five languages. Purvis, James D . Jerusalem, the Holy City: A Bibliography. 2 vols. Metuchen, N.J., 1988-1991. T h e definitive bib liography on all aspects of Jerusalem. Religion Index One. Chicago, 1949-. Originally titled Index to Religious Periodical Literature. Indexes journals relat. ing to a much broader spectrum of topics than Elenchus, including biblical archaeology, but ancient Near East ern coverage is limited. Features subject, author, editor, and scripture indices. Religion Index Two. Chicago, i960-. Companion to Reli gion Index One, with additional indexing of multi-au thored books, series, and festschrifts. Vogel, Eleanor K., et al. "Bibliography of Holy Land Sites." Hebrew Union College Annual 42 (1971): 1-96; 52 (1981): 1-92; 58 (1987): 1-63. T h e definitive bibli ography of individual sites in Israel and parts of Jordan Studies.
REFERENCE WORKS and Syria. Each articles brings the bibliography up to date to the time of publication. Also available in off print. New T e s t a m e n t ( G r e c o - R o m a n ) World. Archaeology has not been utilized as much to illuminate the New Tes tament as it has for tire Hebrew Bible. T h e following list is very selective. In addition, many items above deal with both the Hebrew Bible and die New Testament, and will not be relisted in this section. Primary sources in translation Hennecke, Edgar, Wilhelm Schneemelcher, and Robert McL. Wilson, eds. New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols. Rev. ,ed. Philadelphia, 1991-1992. T h e revision brings the translation fully up to date. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass. T h e most extensive collection of Greek and Latin texts widi En glish translations. Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3d ed. San Francisco, 1988. Thorough revision of the Gnostic texts, and the definitive translation of the world's leading Gnostic scholars. Atlases Cornell, Tim, and John Matthews. Atlas of the Roman World. New York, 1982. Excellent color maps and pic tures and a popularly written text. Includes a gazetteer, index, and bibliography. Levi, Peter. Atlas of the Greek World. New York, 1980. Excellent color maps and pictures and a popularly writ ten text. Includes a gazetteer, glossary, index, and bib liography. Meer, Frederik van der, and Christine Mohrmann. Atlas of the Early Christian World. Translated and edited by Mary F. Hedlund and H. H. Rowley. London, 1966. Older and still valuable standard work which should be supplemented by the Levi and Cornell/Matthews vol umes.
der classichen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart, 1839- The definitive reference work covering all as pects of classical antiquity. A supplement, Der Kleine Pauly, 5 vols., edited by Konrat Ziegler and Walther Sontheimer (Stuttgart, 1964-1975), is more accessible than tire original publication. Rousseau, John J„ and Rami Arav. Jesus and His World: An Archaeological and Cultural Dictionary. Minneapolis, 1994. A work that includes entries on sites, customs, and artifacts relating to the New Testament; to be used critically. cyclopadie
Stillwell, Richard, et a l , eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. Princeton, 1976. Covers sites that show remains from the Classical period, mid-eighth century B C E to the beginning of the sixth century CE, with the exception of Early Christian sites of the fourth and fifth centuries. Includes maps, map indices, and a glossary, but no illustrations or drawings. Helpful bibliographies accompany each article. Dictionaries Ferguson, Everett, ed. The Encyclopedia of Early Chris tianity. New York, 1990. Helpful overall, but often in adequate on excavations. Hammond, N . G. L., and H. H. Scuflard. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 2d ed. Oxford, 1970. The best sin gle-volume reference work, though somewhat dated. Articles are signed and include bibliographies. Bib liograp hies L'annee
Finegan, Jack.
dictionaries The Archaeology
Mediterranean
Boulder, Colo., tament:
World
and
textbooks
of the New
of the Early
1 9 8 1 . The Archaeology
The Life of Jesus
and
Testament:
Christian
of the New
the Beginning
The
Apostles. of the
Tes Early
Church. Rev. ed. Princeton, 1992. Companion volumes, the latter extensively revised from die 1969 edition. Fairly detailed archaeological review, lavishly illus trated, with an alphabetical list of ancient sources, an index of biblical references, and a general index. McRay, John. Archaeology and the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991, T h e most comprehensive and u p to-date undergraduate textbook available in this field. Pauly, August, and Georg Wissowa, et a l , eds. Real-En-
philologique:
Bibliographie
critique
et analytique
de
Paris, 1928-. The definitive an nual bibliography of Greek and Latin philology. In cludes helpful indices of collections, ancient audrors, modern authors, humanists, and geography. Tantiquite
greco-latine.
Charlesworth, James H. and Pseudepigrapha:
The New
A Guide
Testament
to Publications
Apocrypha with
Excur
Metuchen, N.J., 1987. Introduc tion to and extensive bibliography on Christian extracanonical writings dating from 125 to 425. Oster, Richard E. A Bibliography of Ancient Ephesus. Me tuchen, N.J., 1987. Extensive bibliography of ancient Ephesus, including archaeological aspects. Scholer, David M. Nag Hammadi Bibliography. Leiden, 1971. T h e definitive bibliography of Nag Hammadi, updated annually as "Bibliographia gnostica" in Novum suses
Archaeological
419
on Apocalypses.
Teslamentum.
Other Ferguson, Everett. Backgrounds of Early Christianity. 2d ed. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1993. Encyclopedic work covering Flellenistic-Roman and Jewish backgrounds to
420
REHOVOT
early canonical Christianity. Includes archaeological re mains. Meshorer, Ya'acov. Ancient Jewish Coinage. 2 vols. Dix Hills, N.Y., 1982. Definitive work on Jewish coins. White, L. Michael. Building God's House in the Roman World: Architectural
Adaptation
among Pagans,
Jews,
and
Baltimore, 1990. Traces the architectural de velopment of the meeting places of Christians from the earliest evidence until after Constantine. Christians.
V I C T O R H . M A T T H E W S a n d JAMES C . M O Y E R
REHOVOT (Ar., Ruheibe), site located 32 Ion (18 mi.) southwest of Beersheba, i r Ion (7 mi.) southwest of Elusa (Halusa), and 22 km (13 mi.) northeast of Nessana, on the northeast side of Wadi Ruheiba. Positioned on the biblical Way of Shur (Gn. 16:7; 20:1), this second-largest Negev city (after Elusa) functioned as an important caravan stop and, in the Byzantine period, as a rest stop for pilgrims traveling between the Sinai desert and Jerusalem, as the Byzantine khan and stable excavated in area C and tire city's four churches indicate. T h e Hebrew name of the site (Rehovot) derives in mod ern times from the similarity of its Arabic name (Ruheibe) to the biblical Rehovot, where a patriarchal well was located (Gn. 26:2). The huge, ancient well (largest in the Negev), located outside the town near a now-destroyed Byzantine bathhouse, was mistaken for the well mentioned in Gen esis. The ancient name of the site is not known, although it is probably one of die towns mentioned inNessana papyrus 79, as Yoram Tsafrir argues (Tsafrir, 1993, p. 295)Excavations carried out by Tsafrir from 1975 to 1979 and in 1986 indicate that the site was founded in the first century B C E / C E and terminated in about 700. The presence of postabandonment Arab squatters in the site's north church and the absence of Arab glazed pottery indicate the probability of such a date. Estimates of the site's size vary in the liter ature, but the most recent estimate by Tsafrir of about 30 acres, with a population of about 4,800 at the city's height in the Byzantine period, is probably best. Very little of the site has been excavated: some domestic housing (areas A and B), the khan and stable (area C), and only two (one partially) of the city's four churches (Tsafrir, 1988). Partial excavation of the central church (area D) re vealed a well-preserved synthronon in a single-apsed build ing. Extensive excavation of the northern church revealed one of the largest triapsidal church buildings in the Negev, erected in several stages, with a chapel to the north and a large atrium that may have functioned as a monastery at the southern end of the nave. T h e dedicatory inscription dates
its construction to the mid-sixth century. T h e most remark able feature of this church is its crypt, equipped with a stair way for pilgrims to visit and venerate the unknown saint buried there. T h e 1986 excavations carried out at the site under the auspices of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem and the University of Maryland gave welcome stratigraphic precision to particular areas (Tsafrir and Holum, 1987-1988 and 1988). On ceramic grounds, the southern edge of the town (area B) cannot have been built before the fifth or sixth centuries C E ; and the floor of the stable house (area C) overlay pottery of the first centuries B C E / C E . In addition to excavations carried out in the Byz antine cemetary, work in the atrium of the North Church (area E) yielded a Kufic officer's inscription with the earliest epigraphic mention of 'Amr ibn al-'As, the conqueror of Byzantine Palestine. Smdies of the names of the city's inhabitants (as revealed by dedicatory and cemetery inscriptions) indicate a prepon derance of Greek personal names of Nabatean and Arab origin in the early sixth century. They are replaced by a preponderance of Semitic personal names by the end of the century (Gutwein, 1981). This pattern seems to be rein forced by the small skeletal sample recovered and published, which indicates a nomadic, rather than either Jewish or Greek, ethnic type. Among the skeletal samples are those of three females, which are significant because so little is known about female skeletons in general. [See also Churches; Halusa; and Nabateans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Gutwein, Kenneth C . Third Palestine: A Regional Study in Byzantine Urbanisation. Washington, D . C . , 1 9 8 1 . Shcreshevski, Joseph. " U r b a n Settlements in t h e Negev in the Byzan tine Period." P h . D . diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1 9 8 6 . In Hebrew with English s u m m a r y . Tsafrir, Yoram, a n d K e n n e d i G . H o l u m . " R e h o v o t — 1 9 8 6 . " Excava tions and Surveys in Israel, 1987/88 ( 1 9 8 7 - 1 9 8 8 ) : 8 9 - 9 1 . Tsafrir, Yoram, a n d K e n n e t h G . H o l u m . "Rehovot-in-the-Negev: Pre liminary Report, 1 9 8 6 . " Israel Exploration Journal 3 8 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 1 1 7 127.
Tsafrir, Y o r a m , et al. Excavations al Rehovot-in-the-Negev, vol. 1 , The Northern Church. Q e d e m , vol. 2 5 . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 8 . Tsafrir, Yoram. " O n the Pre-Planning of Ancient C h u r c h e s a n d Syn agogues: A T e s t C a s e — T h e N o r t h e r n C h u r c h at Rehovot in the Negev." In Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land, New Discoveries: Essays in Honour of Virgilio C. Corbo, edited by Giovanni Claudio Bottini et al., p p . 5 3 5 - 5 4 4 . Studium Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m , Collectio Maior, 3 6 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 0 . Tsafrir, Yoram. " T h e Early Byzantine T o w n of Rehovot-in-tiie-Negev and Its C h u r c h e s . " In Ancient Churches Revealed, edited by Y o r a m Tsafrir, p p . 2 9 4 - 3 0 2 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 3 . Tsafrir, Y o r a m , a n d K e n n e t h G. H o l u m . " R e h o v o t - i n - t h e - N e g e v . " I n The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by E p h r a i m Stern, vol. 4 , p p . 1 2 7 4 - 1 2 7 7 . Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1 9 9 3 . DENNIS E . GROH
RENAN, JOSEPH ERNEST REISNER, GEORGE ANDREW, (1867-1942), American Egyptologist. Born of German-American parents in Indianapolis, Reisner obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Semitic history and languages in 1892 and re ceived a traveling fellowship to continue his studies in Ger many, where he became fascinated by ancient Egypt. In 1899 he entered into an agreement witii Phoebe Apperson Hearst to direct excavations at several sites in Egypt on be half of the University of California. From 1905 until his death he worked almost continuously for the Harvard Uni versity-Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) Egyptian Expedi tion. Reisner died at his house behind the Great Pyramid of Giza, where he had spent most of his adult life. Although he held academic appointments, primarily at Harvard University, and was curator of the Egyptian De partment at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, (1910-1942), Reisner spent most of his time in the field. He worked long est at Giza, but many other areas also drew his attention including Deir el-Ballas and Nag ed-Deir (Upper Egypt), Samaria (Israel), and Lower Nubia (Sudan). Reisner set the highest standards in field methods, insisting on meticulous recordkeeping in all aspects of excavation. He was among the first to use complete photographic recording as a stan dard field technique. Although he spent only three seasons at Samaria (1908-1910), his work tiiere greatly influenced Byro-Palestinian archaeology. Reisner's contributions on a scholarly level were no less important. The publications of his fieldwork were unusually complete, both as catalogs of remains recovered and as de tailed historical and cultural syntheses. His History of the Giza Necropolis, volume 1 (1942) and The Development of the Egyptian
Tomb
Down
to the Accession
of Cheops
(1936) re
main two of the most important works published on tiiese subjects. He made anotiier lasting conttibution by training a succeeding generation of Egyptologists and archaeologists in his meticulous scholarly and field methods. [See also Giza;
Samaria.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
D a w s o n , W a r r e n R., a n d Eric P . Uphill. Who Was Who in Egyptology. 2d rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1972. C o n t a i n s biographic entries on most W e s t ern a n d Egyptian scholars of ancient E g y p t of the past two to three centuries. Reisner, George A. Israelite Ostraca from Samaria. Cambridge, Mass., [191?]. Reisner, George A. The Archaeological Survey of Nubia: Report for 19071908. vol. 1, Archaeological Report; vol. 2, Plates and Plans. Cairo, 1910. Reisner, George A., Clarence S. Fisher, and D a v i d G. Lyon. Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908-1910, vol. 1, The Text; vol. 2, Plans and Plates. C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1924. Reisner, George A. Mycerinus: The Temples of the Third Pyramid at Giza. Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 3 1 . Reisner, George A. The Development of the Egyptian Tomb Down to the Accession of Cheops. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1936.
421
Reisner, G e o r g e A. History of the Giza Necropolis. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1942-1955. PATRICIA V. PODZORSKI
RENAN, J O S E P H ERNEST (1823-1892), French philosopher, Semitist, historian of religions, archaeologist, and prolific writer. Ernest Renan was born at Treguier in Brittany, the third and last child of Philibert Renan, a marine merchant, and his wife Magdeleine Feger, a grocer. Des tined to the priesthood, he studied rhetoric, theology, Latin, and Hebrew at the Grand Seminaire de Saint-Sulpice in Paris but left the seminary to do graduate work at the Sorbonne. He completed his doctoral degree in 1852 with a dissertation on Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) "Averroes et I'Averroi'sme, essai historique." In 1856 Renan married and joined the Academie des In scriptions et Belles-Lettres. He published his translation of the Book of Job in 1859 and a year later, of the Song of Songs. In i860 Renan was given the opportunity to lead an archae ological expedition to Phoenicia, where his research focused on four areas: Ruad/Aradus, Tortose/Antarados, and Amrit/ Maratiius; Jbail/Byblos; Saida/Sidon; and Sour/Tyre. He be gan by excavating at Byblos; two months later he went to Sidon and the region of Tyre, where he opened several more digs. Until his departure for France in late 1861, Renan trav eled widely in Phoenicia and Palestine. He began publishing his monumental Mission de Phenicie in Paris in 1864. Com pleted in 1874, die survey details his exploration and exca vations in Phoenicia. T h e work is topographical, historical, ethnological, descriptive, and archaeological. Upon his return from the Near East, Renan was elected professor of Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syrian at die College de France. His opening lecture upset the college's clerical faction and his lectures were suspended within the week. However, tlie government allowed him to lecture at home and did not deprive him of his title or salary. Within imperial circles Renan enjoyed the protection of Prince Jerome Bo naparte and Princess Mathilde. In 1863 he published his Life of Jesus (vol. 1 of Les Origines du christianisme). The work questions scientifically the su pernatural in the Gospels and was reprinted ten times before the end of the year. It generated such fierce attacks that Re nan was forced to spend the summer of 1863 in Jersey and Brittany. T h e book was translated and published outside France in 1864. A revised thirteenth edition was published, he was dismissed from the College de France by the Min istry of Culture, and he was appointed assistant director of the Department of Manuscripts at die Bibliotheque Imperiale, all in that same year. His professorship was reinstated in 1870, after the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Na poleon III. Meanwhile, in 1866, he published Les Apdtres
(as vol. 2 of
422
RESERVOIRS
Les Origines
du christianisme)
and in 1867 initiated the
Cor
Elected to the Academie Francaise in 1878, he received die Legion of Honor (grand officier) in 1888. Renan died in Paris after a long illness. [See also Byblos; Phoenicia; Sidon; awiTyre.]
pus
Insciiptionum
Semiticarum.
BIBLIOGRAPHY F o r a comprehensive bibliography of Renan's works, see Henri G i rard and Henri Moncel, Bibliographic des oeuvres d'Emest Renan (Paris, 1923). Biographical entries o n Renan may be found in the Chambers Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, 1990); Dictionnaire des biographies (Paris, 1958); Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris, 1992); Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (London, 1929); La grande encyclopedic (Paris, 1976); The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1905); The Macmillan Dic tionary of Biography, new ed. (London, 1986); and Webster's New Bio graphical Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., 1988). Works by R e n a n Histoire generate et systeme compare des langues semitiques. Paris, 1855. Mission de PMnicie. Paris, 1864. L'Amechrist. Paris, 1873. Marc-Aurele et la fin du monde antique, Paris, 1882. Histoire du peuple d'lsrael. 5 vols. Paris, 1887. L'avenir de la science. Paris, 1890. Oeuvres completes. 10 vols. Edited by Henriette Psichari. Paris, 19471961. N o t comprehensive. Works about Renan Chadbourne, Richard M . Ernest Renan. N e w York, 1968. Dussaud, Rene. L'oeuvre scientifique d'Emest Renan. Paris, 1951. T h e best reference on Renan's Mission de Phenicie. Espinasse, Francis. Life of Ernest Renan. L o n d o n , 1895. See chapter 5, pages 87-91. Exposition Ernest Renan: Souvenirs d'enfance et dejeunesse, 20 avril-13 juin 1959. Paris, 1959. Inauguration du Musee Renan la 20 juillet 1947 a Trequier (discours sten ographies). Paris, 1948. Mercury, Francis. Renan. Paris, 1990. See pages 317-332 for a discus sion of Mission de Phenicie. Robinson, Agnes M a r y F . The Life of Ernest Renan. Boston, 1898. W a r d m a n , Harold W . Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography. L o n d o n , 1964. See pages 72-77 for the Mission de Phenicie. HAFEZ K . CHEHAB
RESERVOIRS. A large natural or an artificial under ground space enhanced to store large quantities of water, primarily for drinking, is known as a reservoir. Water storage is essential to life in regions where there is no rainfall during part of the year and the total amount of precipitation is low enough to require conservation of water from one period to the next: winter to summer, night to day, and a rainy year to a drought year. Syria-Palestine abounds with reservoirs created for diis purpose. Reservoirs were either hewn from natural rock or built of stone; sometimes both engineering methods were combined. In several cases, large supporting pillars were constructed to
hold up the installation's ceiling. T h e walls were thickly plas tered, usually with a layer 5-10 cm tiiick, to prevent loss of water from percolation. T h e earliest reservoirs discovered in the region are small and should properly be designated cisterns. T h e earliest res ervoir in the land of Israel was discovered at Hazor and dates to the Middle or Late Bronze Age. [See Hazor.] This res ervoir, located beneath a Canaanite palace, is shaped like a cross or a clover leaf and is coated with white plaster. T h e water entered the reservoir by means of a monumental drain made of basalt. Its volume is 150 cu m. Two reservoirs for the collection of runoff are known from the Iron Age II period: at Beth-Shemesh, at Eitam, and at Beersheba. [See Beth-Shemesh; Beersheba.] T h e reser voir at Eitam is a system of natural caves whose volume is 240 cu m. The Beth-Shemesh reservoir is hewn out of soft, chalky rock; it is square and has four extensions and a ca pacity of 500 cu m. Botir reservoirs display a double layer of plaster, one gray and the other yellow. T h e one at Beer sheba has a volume of about 600 cu m and the plaster is similar to the one at Beth-Shemesh. During the Second Temple period (Hellenistic and Early Roman periods) several reservoirs were cut out of the rock to serve the desert fortresses at Sartaba (nine reservoirs with a total capacity of 5,000 cu m), Duk (Dagon/Mt. Quarantale; nine reservoirs with a capacity of about 2,000 cu m), Cypros (four reservoirs, one with a volume of 500 cu m), Hyrkania (twenty-four reservoirs with a capacity of 20,000 cu m), Herodium (four reservoirs), and Masada (twelve res ervoirs with a volume of 40,000 cu m). [See Herodium; Ma sada.] The water reached the reservoirs by means of con duits or aqueducts that either diverted water from flash floods, collected runoff, or conveyed water from natural springs, such as at Cypros (phase II). Also from tire Second Temple period are the thirty-four reservoirs beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, whose total capacity is 36,000 cu m. T h e largest of these, with a volume of 12,000 cu m, located not far from the al-Aqsa mosque, is called the Small Sea; it is the largest ancient res ervoir in the region. [See Jerusalem.] In die Roman and Byzantine periods, many more reser voirs were hewn or constructed. At Sepphoris, a sausageshaped reservoir was hewn from the rock with a volume of 4,300 cu m (see figure 1). [See Sepphoris.] A reservoir at Beit Ras (Capitolias) in Jordan has a similar shape and size to the one found in Sepphoris. [See Beit Ras.] In Jerusalem, the domed reservoir of the Nea Church, built of two lon gitudinal galleries and two cross galleries, has a total volume of 3,500 cu m (its wall has an inscription dating it to the reign of Justinian). T h e built reservoir at Tiberias has a vol ume of 2,000 cu m; and the partly hewn and partiy con structed reservoir at Hippos/Susita has a volume of 1,500 cu
RESISTIVITY
R E S E R V O I R S . F i g u r e I . Entrance to the reservoir at Sepphoris,
m. [See Tiberias.] These large reservoirs were fed by aq ueducts, with tire exception of the ones in Jerusalem. In the Byzantine period, large reservoirs were built for the mon asteries in the Judean Desert. T h e Martyrius monastery has a reservoir of 2,000 cu m; the Haritun monastery has a res ervoir of 1,000 cu m and walls decorated with crosses. In tire Early Arab period, four underground reservoirs were built in the city of Ramla (the Pool of Arches and three located next to the White Mosque). [See Ramla.] These were fed by an aqueduct that originated at Tel Gezer; their total volume is 10,000 cu m. Numerous pillars support these reservoirs' ceilings. In the Crusader period, reservoirs were built inside fortresses to collect runoff; especially well known are those at Qal'at Nimrod and Belvoir (Kokhav ha-Yarden). In the Ottoman period a large reservoir was built at Acre/Akko underneath the courtyard of the Jazzar mosque, which had been a Crusader church. This reservoir was the terminal point for the Kabri aqueduct. [See Akko; Kabri, Tel.] [See also Aqueducts; Cisterns; Hydraulics; and Hydrol ogy.] BIBLIOGRAPHY 'Amit, David, et al., eds. The Aqueducts of Ancient Palestine (in H e b r e w ) . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 9 . Brinker, Werner. "Antike Z i s t e m e n : Stationen ihrer Entwicklungsgeschichte." Mitteilungen: Leichtweiss-Institut fur Wasserbau der TechnischenUnwersitat Braunschweig 1 0 3 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 2 4 7 - 2 7 9 . Heker, M . " W a t e r . . . in Jerusalem in die Ancient P e r i o d " (in H e b r e w ) . In Sepher Yerushalaim, edited b y Michael Avi-Yonah, p p . 1 9 1 - 2 1 8 . Jerusalem a n d T e l Aviv, 1 9 5 6 .
423
(Courtesy E . M . Meyers)
T s u k , Tsvika. " T h e A q u e d u c t s to S e p p h o r i s . " Master's thesis, T e l Aviv University, 1 9 8 5 . In H e b r e w with an English summary. TSVIKA T S U K Translated from Hebrew b y liana Goldberg
RESISTIVITY. Subsurface electrical resistivity survey ing exploits the fact that soil masses and rocks are able to conduct electricity because water in their interstices contains dissolved mineral salts and/or humic acids of biological or igin. Measurement equipment includes a set of four or more electrodes, an electrical source, and a metering device. Sur vey technique involves placing the electrodes in the ground at regular intervals in a linear array and then connecting them sequentially in pairs to respective positive and negative voltage sources. Electrical resistance is measured as voltage is passed through the ground between the electrodes. The resistivity is die ratio of the applied voltage to the magnitude of the current. Ditches and pits with loose silts and soils generally show low resistivity readings, while structures and deposits with clay, brick, and stone will be relatively high. Testing is most successful when the linear transverse runs perpendicular to subsurface features—across ditches or stone or brick walls. Soil resistivity measurement has been used by geologists and civil engineers since World War I. However, the first major application to archaeological work was only made in 1946, by R. J. C. Atkinson (1953), on a group of Neolithic monuments at Dorchester, England. One advantage of re sistivity testing is that deep-current penetration can be ob-
424
RESTORATION AND CONSERVATION
tained with only short probe insertion because the depth of electrical penetration is governed by, and is roughly equal to, the spacing between the electrodes. Another advantage is that the equipment setup is simple and of reasonable cost—although the development of more modern and so phisticated electronic instruments and of complicated probe array systems may now belie that claim. The advent of mag netic detection in the late 1950s provided archaeologists witii an alternative tool to supplement the linear-array limitation of resistivity survey by providing a means for sweeping cov erage of a survey area. [See Magnetic Archaeometry.] Like other systems that test subsurface conditions, the re sistivity surveyor must contend with a multitude of variables within the test environment. Stone-filled soils make inserting probes difficult and produce erratic resistivity results; dry, sandy soils are often incapable of conducting current; and subsurface features parallel and adjacent to the array trans verse may skew resistivity readings. Accordingly, while anal ysis of resistivity readings can help the archaeologist to de velop a plot of assumed subsurface features, "ground truth" can be finally determined only by excavation. [See also Survey, Archaeological] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aitken, Martin J. Physics and Archaeology. 2d ed. Oxford, 1 9 7 4 . Atkinson, R . J . C. Field Archaeology. L o n d o n , 1 9 5 3 . Clark, Anthony. "Resistivity Surveying." I n Science in Archaeology, ed ited by D o n Brothwell et al., p p . 6 9 4 - 7 0 7 . L o n d o n , 1 9 7 1 . J O E D. S E G E R
RESTORATION AND CONSERVATION. T o discuss restoration of monuments is to speak of a very vexed and controversial matter—and to avoid the controversy is to avoid die substance. The social factors standing behind res toration are complex (and mutually antagonistic), the inter ests to be served in the monument itself are conflicting, and in some essential respects the technical means available are limited to nonexistent. Thus, popular expectations may be quite out of proportion to possibilities. It is possible to ex hibit ancient monuments for the short term in a manner agreeable to contemporary taste, but very frequentiy this does little to preserve them across the ages. On the other hand it is possible to preserve them well (e.g., by building a shelter over them or, in extremis, by burying them), but this is often at the expense of exhibiting them in an agreeable manner. There is no magic in the .words conservation and restoration to ensure perfect preservation and exhibition con currently. All that is material is subject to decay, stones and men alike. Sometimes results can be achieved which will last for more or less limited time. Results can not always be achieved. And no results can be guaranteed for ever. In the final instance perhaps the restorer must serve his gen eration.
Origin a n d Theory of Restoration. T h e theory of res toration of monuments is very well developed. It originated in specific circumstances in western Europe during the nine teenth century but is now reckoned to be of international application. Nonetheless, since the theory is based on Eu ropean concepts of aesthetics and history, there is no reason why this should be so, and it would always be quite reason able for another region to reject this theory in favor of one based on different cultural values—for example, on those of Confucianism or Islam. However, as yet this attitude has not been manifested in practice. T h e concept of restoration emerged out of the historicism of the Romantic movement sub specie the Gothic Revival and the basic principle was established in the polemics surround ing its enunciation. T h e first person to deal systematically with the term and the activity (both novelties) was Violletle-Duc (1814-1879). Both in word and deed he proclaimed a concept of restoration which was immediately refuted (in theory) by his English contemporaries Ruskin and Morris. For Viollet the subject of restoration was the "form" of the building, its style—the Zeitgeist which the builders had re alized (or sought to realize) in their structure. T h u s , the restorer must be a master of building history together with all the techniques of construction necessary to reproduce perfectly the exact style in question. Metaphysically consid ered, Viollet's approach was Platonic (and he was much concerned with the ideal castie or church). In their often unsuccessful efforts to prevent its practice in England, Rus kin and Morris denigrated this theory, which they called tlie worst form of destruction. Metaphysically considered their understanding was Ar istotelian. T h e monumental form was a quality of tlie ma terial—it was embodied in the material and existed nowhere outside of it: destroy the surviving material and you destroy die monumentality. T h e problem of restoration was thus how to preserve the surviving material in such a manner as to exhibit its monumentality to maximum effect. This has remained ever since the basic principle of restoring monu ments and thus the controversy between three men of great genius (expressed equally in literature, art, and society) on the correct manner of caring for Gothic churches in nine teenth-century England and France has been extended au tomatically to monuments of all types, periods, and places (e.g., by influence to the newly independent countries of Greece and Italy and by colonialism to die ancient Near East). This basic concept was systematized and elaborated a century later in the aftermath of World War II. In the first instance the enormous destruction by high explosives in Eu rope made restoration an issue of tlie moment. Supervening on this was the anticolonialism and prointernationalism which expressed itself emphatically on the cultural plane (cf. the idea of U N E S C O ) . As a result, Rome became the in ternational center for restoration of monuments, with a spe-
RESTORATION AND CONSERVATION cial provision for disseminating its teaching to underdevel oped countries. Men of great practical experience and/or acute analytical disposition refined experience into princi ples during the mid-twentieth century, and it is those prin ciples which have since been applied in restoration work in the Near East. As a condition precedent to any discussion of this work, it is therefore necessary to outiine the principles on which it is based. (Even if this is restricted to a cursory naming, it will show the severe conflicts inherent in the ac tivity). Restoration distinguishes itself from simple repairs, ren ovation, and rebuilding by having as its subject monumentality. An architectural monument reminds the viewer of some significant human experience; it calls to mind history and does so through art. That is, it can be viewed in an aesthetic instance and in a historic instance. Monumentality is incorporated in a twofold manner: as material and image, structure and aspect (this latter be it noted only partiy of human design being partiy of natural development over time). Both structure and aspect are equally constituted in the building material and are equally proper vehicles for in tervention by die restorer. All interventions are per se un desirable and are to be limited to the minimum necessary (in restoration very definitely "least is most"). They operate via two modes: by removal and by addition. Restoration by removal is directed to the aspect and can be astonishingly rewarding. T h e attendant problem is that of periods: it may be difficult to decide between the aesthetic significance of one period and the historic significance of another. Addition of new material can be to die aspect or to die sttucture. Addition to the aspect must be kept to die minimum and never be practiced for its own sake. It must proceed by way of representation not reproduction: that is, it must always be clearly seen to be not original (odierwise it is falsifica tion), but this distinction in appearance should not detract from die surviving monumental aspect. In short, restoration does not consist in reproducing die appearance of the mon ument as originally constructed, far less as it would or should have appeared in some ideal circumstances as Viollet le D u e taught. Widi additions to the structure, the limiting consid eration is possible adverse reaction between old and new material. Thus, the safest practice is to consolidate the struc ture with the same material as the original. The first step in restoring damage to monumentality is the investigation of die causes of damage. These may be human or natural, catastrophic or continuous. And it is based on the understanding of these causes that interventions are de cided on to provide either for better preservation and/or bet ter exhibition of the monument, but regrettably these two claims are often irreconcilable. The prerequisite analysis of any restoration project into its constituent problems according to the above-mentioned categories is straightforward. However, difficulty arises in the endemic conflicts between the various categories: be
425
tween the historic instance and the aesthetic instance; be tween monumental demands and functional demands; and the bitter conflict between exhibition and preservation. The analytical categories bring these conflicts into consciousness, so that an intervention is only made in some interest and with an awareness of its damage to another. The nature and incidence of these conflicts vary accord ing to the class of monuments, and in diis connection, mon uments can be classified as follows. 1 . Archaeological ruins. When only vestiges of the original building survive (often retrieved by clearance or excavation) and the original integrity of the monument cannot be rec ognized. T h e ruin is thus the subject of the intervention and not the original building. 2. Ruined monuments. These are structures which are no longer functional as monuments but where the original form is or can be made recognizable; here the original building is the subject of the intervention. 3. Living monuments. Where the monument is still in use for its designed purpose (church, mosque) but die art by which it was built no longer survives, great problems arise between monumental and functional interests and it is by no means assured that any restoration qua monument will prove acceptable to the current functional interest. 4 . Modern monuments. T h e monument is built entirely within the artistic and social framework of contemporary society. These are exceptional to die theory and can be treated in the same way as other contemporary buildings (maintained, repaired). T h e new work will be matched up witii die old and a normal building inscription will satisfy the demands of history. Practice in the N e a r E a s t . As the place of origin of civ ilization, the Near East contains monuments of all types and ages, from the earliest Neolithic to recent Islamic times. Fur thermore, because of its archaeological interest, new mon umental remains are continually being unearthed. Almost the entire region was under Ottoman (or quasi-Ottoman) rule until the present century. The Ottoman authorities made provision for archaeological excavation and in special instances they permitted the excision of monumental re mains for transport to European museums. However tiiey did not receive the practice of restoration of monuments. This was introduced only with colonial (mandatory) admin istrations, in die twentieth century, namely French activity in the Maghrib, Syria, and Egypt, and Italian activity in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. The British antiquities services in Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan did not carry out routine restoration work but provided for some exceptional projects only. T h e striking majority of these activities dealt with Greco-Roman building but some work on Pharoanic re mains was carried out in Egypt and there was also work on Early Christian and Mediaeval remains (Crusader or Arab casdes, etc.). All the work was done more or less in the light of the above tiieory and certainly no local or regional style
426
RESTORATION AND CONSERVATION
of restoration was evolved. This colonial activity, however, was only a curtain raiser to the large-scale restoration pro grams instituted in the region from the 1960s onward (often provided with international funds and/or international "ex perts"). Archaeological ruins. Very successful work has been carried out with archaeological ruins all over the Near East (e.g., in Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Jordan, Syria, etc). It is much appreciated by the public and arouses little if any con troversy. With appropriate landscaping it is equally at home in frequented antiquities sites and in remote deserted regions. T h e ruined aspect which is tire subject of the work is maximized by setting up any coherent fragments and ar ranging disjecta membra in a systematic fashion, without any additions in the interest of the original form. Column drums, which often form the principal surviving material on clas sical and Early Christian sites, are its stock-in-trade and thus the colonnaded streets of the hellenized Orient are excellent vehicles. Familiar scenes from, for example, Palmyra, Jerash, Petra, and elsewhere illustrate this "anastylosis." One complicated factor here may be the presence of mosaics. Their exhibition in situ greatly adds to the picturesqueness of the ruins but in this event their preservation will inevitably demand measures which compromise the overall aspect. The situation is very different with less durable remains which nonetheless may be of considerable monumental value in the historic instance. It may be possible to exhibit, and also preserve to some degree, vestigial rubble walls by regular seasonal consolidation, but this site maintenance is a heavy burden on departmental budgets. The critical prob lem of mud-brick remains will be referred to in this conclu sion. Ruined monuments. These form tire core of restoration projects in the Middle East—temples, tombs, theatres, tri umphal arches, towers, and so forth, sometimes more or less standing, sometimes more or less fallen to the ground and more or less buried. Architectural scholarship finds rela tively little difficulty in correctly placing the surviving re mains and engineering resources permit their effective re integration. The difficulty here is the question of the aspect of the "new work." And, even within the rule of "represen tation without reproduction," taste in this matter changes as drastically as that in restoration of sculpture. Some types of monuments are especially rewarding to re store. Underground (or rock cut) monuments of interior ar chitectural development provide for their own preservation after their internal aspect has been restored (cf. e.g., the Greco-Roman cemeteries in Alexandria and tlie pharaonic Tombs of the Kings at Thebes). However even this advan tage is not proof against tourist invasion. Other types of fa vored monuments are those of vertical development, for ex ample, the monumental gate, triumphal arches, tetrapylons, and so forth. Here the plan generally involves the repetition of a standard element (e.g., a pier) and the new work can
be safely concentrated on the lowest preserved element leav ing the surviving remains of the others to maintain the orig inal monumental aspect. Ruined monuments are the class which has been subject to rescue operations occasioned by tlie epidemic of dam building in the later twentieth century. T h e dismantling, transfer and re-erection of ashlar masonry is a sttaightforward operation (but regrettable unless absolutely neces sary). T h e excellence of the result is largely dependent on sympathetic new siting (cf. the transfer of the Nubian T e m ples consequent on the building of the High D a m ) . Living
monuments.
Although
recently
medieval
mosques and the like have been restored in Cairo, Iraq, and Iran, the restoration of living monuments has not been as prominent in the Near East as much as in Europe. T h e con flict of monumental and functional interest here can be in superable and it is to be noted that the established Church of England from the beginning has refused to allow the fab ric of its cathedrals to pass into the care of the Ancient Mon uments Commission. Similarly when structural instability occasioned by earthquake necessitated restoration of the Church of tlie Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the work was controlled and carried out by church authorities. Here a half-dozen sects had to reconcile their claims, and with these was involved a very acute problem of conflicting periods (i.e., Byzantine = Eastern Churches, Crusader = Western Churches). On the other hand an example of good coop eration between tlie monumental authority (Antiquities D e partment) and the functional authority (Orthodox church) exists in Cyprus, where functioning mid-Byzantine churches have been restored by tlie antiquities service with the good offices of the church. However of recent years a related problem has emerged in the Near East—what might be called conversion resto ration, or transferred function. Arab castles make good an tiquities offices, Ottoman city gates good cultural centers, and so on. Above all is the question of site museums which everyone agrees are a good thing, and if some salient ruin can be restored and converted to this end tiiere is a double gain, Yet, such restoration can be completely beyond or con trary to the general dictates of theory. In this event instead of killing a reasonably preserved monument with a mass of new work, the better solution may be to take a suitable plan (e.g., a basilica) where only vestiges survive and rebuild its form, with complete freedom to detail according to func tional requirements. Somewhat similar considerations apply to ancient thea ters. On occasions the superb siting of a rock-cut Greek theater (e.g., Kourion, Cyprus) recommends very strongly that it be put into commission for staging theatrical perfor mances (particularly in conjunction with festivals). Quite frequently so far as the cavea is concerned there is virtually not a block in place, although it may be perfectly possible to work out the scheme of the seating quite accurately. In
RIFA'AT, TELL such case, it is reasonable to rebuild the cavea out of new stone and leave the scaena untouched, allowing the perfor mances to provide their own sets. In this way a restricted passage of fine masonry will not be "killed" and an excellent venue will be provided for performances. On the other hand to reproduce the elaborate architectural ornament of a scaena frons in new work is a monumental error. Another allied category of restoration work has become of great importance in the Near East—"ethnological resto ration." Palaces and palatial houses fallen into decay during the previous century or so have been renovated and rebuilt according to the original model to serve as ethnological mu seums or otherwise to illustrate the traditional life of the re gion (Emir Shihab's palace at Beit ed-Din in the Lebanon; the Azm palace at Damascus together with numbers of in stances in Isfahan and Shiraz). Modern monuments. This class of monuments, which normally only comes into consideration with catastrophic destruction by war or natural disasters, has acquired great importance in the Near East because of drastic social changes in the last generation. T h e almost instant disap pearance of traditional domestic architecture has evoked concern for preserving and exhibiting what relics can be sal vaged, with the consequent designation of "Old Towns," "Traditional Quarters," and so forth. All this stands within the theory of modern monuments since artisans and crafts men still survive who can carry out this work and their con tinued survival can be promoted if this becomes an estab lished activity. T h e challenge here is to establish the social framework so that the restored buildings remain alive. T h e principles reviewed here have a fragile foundation and may seem somewhat recondite. However, surprisingly they are generally apprehended by the public, and public condemnation quicldy attaches to illogical solutions founded on no principle at all. Difficulties in restoration are not in consolidating the structure of ancient monuments. With the resources of modern engineering this can be done without impairing the aspect of the monument. T h e abiding difficulty is in pre serving the aspect from deterioration by weathering or ac tion of time without impairing the exhibition. A small mudbrick building was constructed in antiquity with tire expectation that its fabric might survive for a generation or so. Yet, when the ruins of these structures are dug up out of the ground, the mere fact that they are ancient ruins raises the expectation in common belief that they can/should be made to survive indefinitely with dreir agreeable aspect agreeably exhibited. It is commonly thought that some (liq uid) preparation is available which can be sprayed on to delicate surfaces (decaying stone or mud brick) which will consolidate and preserve them without damaging their as pect. Many such preparations have been publicized but hitherto none has been found to give satisfactory results for any extended period of time—and many have done great
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damage. This is the "elixir of life" which is lacking in res toration of monuments—or the lack could equally well be described as that of the simplest and most basic technical device. Finally a great difficulty in restoration is not technical but social. This is the difficulty of carrying out restoration of monuments according to the accepted theory free from so cial interests which operate directly to the destruction of monumentality. Proposals to make circus grounds or pop ular entertainment centers out of an ancient monument's site can have no place in the discussion of the theory of restoration. [See also Conservation Archaeology; Field Conservation.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brandi, Cesare. Teoria del restauro. R o m e , 1 9 6 3 . Collected papers which give excellent coverage strongly developed on t h e conceptual basis of restoration. C r e m a , Luigi. Monumeniie restauro. Milan, 1 9 5 9 . Fully illustrated m a n ual of practice a n d p r o c e d u r e . Monuments and Sites of History and Art and Archaeological Excavations: Problems of Today. Paris, 1 9 5 0 . Global survey which provides a m a n ifesto of the n e w concern for restoration arising out of the destructiveness of W o r l d W a r II a n d supplied to the Middle East. A U N E S C O publication. M o r r i s , William. Manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. L o n d o n , 1 8 7 7 . Embodies Ruskin's attitude and has r e m a i n e d the policy of t h e S P A B , which is still influential. Ruskin, John. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (VI The Lamp of Memory). L o n d o n , 1 8 4 9 . Clear presentation of tite essential premise of resto ration theory, set against a system of aesthetic and social philosophy. T h o m p s o n , Michael W . Ruins: Their Preservation and Display. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 1 . Very clear exposition of general principles as derived from long practice. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene. " R e s t a u r a t i o n . " In Dictionnaire raisonne de Tarchitecture francaise. Paris, 1858—. A resume which needs to be s u p plemented by further reading from and about this giant of his age who is both t h e patriarch a n d heresiarch of restoration. W a r d , Pamela, ed. Conservation and Development in Historic Towns and Cities. N e w c a s d e - o n - T y n e , 1 9 6 8 . Provides useful background infor mation on restoration of m o d e r n m o n u m e n t s with indication of legal, economic, and administrative considerations. Wright, G , R. H . Kalabsha: The Preserving of the Temple. Berlin, 1 9 7 2 . Details how accepted principles of restoration were applied in prac tice to a major project of dismantling and reerecting an Egyptian temple. Wright, G . R. I-I. The Ptolemaic Sanctuary of Kalabsha: Its Reconstruc tion. Mainz, 1 9 8 7 . Detailed account of a highly unusual project and its attempted justification in terms of accepted theory. G. R. H.
WRIGHT
RIFA'AT, TELL, site located 3 5 km (22 mi.) north of Aleppo, Syria, in the middle of a village of the same name ( 3 6 ° 5 ' N , 3 7 V E). T h e village is 5 km ( 3 mi.) east of the Aleppo-I'azaz road and about 14 km (9 mi.) southeast of the modern city I'azaz. Tell Rifa'at is strategically positioned on the plain between the Qouiq River in the east and Jebel
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RIMAH, TELL ER-
Sama'an in the west. It is the largest tell in the area and is about 360 m above sea level. The tell itself is composed of two parts: the citadel and the lower city. T h e citadel (30 m high and 142 X 142 m at the top and 250 X 233 m at its base) stands approximately in the middle of the lower city. The citadel is freestanding, with extremely steep slopes; the lower city is partially oc cupied with modern houses. T h e inhabitants of the village Tell Rifa'at reported that the old name of the site was Arpad, an identification that can be made on etymological and geographical grounds as well. In antiquity, Arpad was the capital city of the Aramean state of Bit-Agusi. T h e Aramean ldngdom emerged in the tenth cenmry BCE and appears in Assyrian texts as the land of Arpad or as the land of Bit-Agusi. Like all Aramean king doms in Syria and Mesopotamia, Arpad paid tribute to the Assyrian kings approximately every year. Arpad finally lost its independence in 740 B C E , when it was made a province and given an Assyrian governor. The equation of Tell Rifa'at with Arpad remains a hy pothesis, however, for none of the excavations at the site succeeded in recovering sufficient evidence for the identi fication. Limited excavations on the tell have been con ducted. From fall 1924 to spring 1925, the Czech philologist Bedrich Hrozny excavated Tell Rifa'at and identified it as biblical Arpad. FIrozny abandoned his investigation after three montirs without publishing a report. Only a very brief report appeared in a Prague newspaper, The Central Euro pean Observer (16 July 1929, p. 512). In 1956, i960, and 1964, an expedition from the Institute of Archaeology, Uni versity of London, directed by M. V. Seton-Williams un dertook excavations at Tell Rifa'at, during which the team made soundings and distinguished five levels, from the Chalcolithic period (fifth-fourth millennia) through the Ro man period (first-fourth centuries C E ) . According to Seton-William's preliminary reports (1961, 1967), the old city of Arpad had been surrounded by a very sttong brick fortification wall. In the nordrwestern part of the tell his team unearthed a monumental limestone stair case that led dirough the fortifications and was later in date, probably Greco-Roman. On the western side of the tell he discovered a large palace (923 m wide and 30 m long) with a large porch with two columns and a great paved courtyard. The palace was flanked by two rooms, in front of which there had been a large hall. T h e palace belongs to the first millennium B C E . Seton-Williams also discovered the east gate in the Bronze Age city wall. The gate's first phase belongs to the sixteenthfifteenth centuries B C E . In its last phase, it was 3.90 m wide, was lined with limestone orthostats, and had a drain 60 cm wide running down the center of the passageway. T h e en trance area was paved with limestone and basalt slabs and broken glazed bricks. Among the small finds recovered by Seton-Williams are
stamp seals—seventh-century B C E Assyrian and sixth-cen tury BCE Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid—and elaborate and common style Mitannian cylinder seals; Late Bronze and Iron Age terra-cotta figurines, among them numerous examples of the so-called Scythian horseman and an Astarte plaque; a limestone Aramean grave stela (0.57 m high and 0.37 m wide) depicting a banquet; and eight fragments of Assyrian cuneiform tablets and a fragment of an inscription in Phoenician. BIBLIOGRAPHY Matthers, John. The River Qoueiq, Northern Syria, and Its Catchment: Studies Arising from the Tell Rifa'at Survey, 1977-79. vols. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, n o . 9 8 . Oxford, 1 9 8 1 . Sader, Helene. Les etats arameens de Syrie depuis leur fondation jusqu'a leur transformation en provinces assyriennes. Beirut, 1 9 8 7 . See pages 2
99-152.
Seton-Williams, M . V. "Preliminary R e p o r t on t h e Excavations at Tell Rifa'at." Iraq 2 3 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 6 8 - 8 7 . Seton-Williams, M . V. " T h e Excavations at Tell Rifa'at, 1 9 6 4 : S e c o n d Preliminary R e p o r t . " Iraq 2 9 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 6 - 3 3 . A L I A E O U ASSAF
RIMAH, TELL ER-, also known as Tell Ermah, site located in northern Iraq (36°i5' N , 42°37' E), 13 1cm (8 mi.) due south of modern Telafar and 65 km (40 mi.) west of Mosul. Austen Layard, under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, visited and described the site in 1850, and Seton Lloyd, under the auspices of the Uni versity Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, surveyed it. T h e walled city of the second millennium B C E enclosed an area about 600 m in diameter. British and American ex cavation teams, led respectively by David Oates and T h e resa Howard-Carter, worked jointly from 1964 to 1966; the British worked alone there from 1967 to 1971. Occupation of the site goes back to prehistoric times, al though excavation did not reach the lowest levels. A building with pitched brick vaults was dated to about 2000 B C E and several cylinder seals, perhaps heirlooms, were found drat are earlier than die Old Babylonian period (c. 1900-1600 BCE).
Early second millennium texts show tiiat Tell er-Rimah benefited from die caravan trade passing between Assur and central Anatolia. T h e temple was the central and highest feature of the city, which was walled. T h e temple may have been built by Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria. It sits on two mas sive terraces that are approached via a monumental staircase from a courtyard. T h e temple faced roughly eastward and was backed on its west side by a solid tower, or ziggurat. T h e shrine inside the temple could be reached directiy from the main door by passing through a central courtyard. An internal stairway in the northeast corner of the building led to the roof, and perhaps also to a shrine on top of the tower. T h e exterior facades were decorated with semiengaged
RIMAH, TELL ERmud-brick columns imitating the trunks of two ldnds of palm trees. Similar architectural decoration is known from Larsa, on tlie temple of the sun god; at Tell Leilan in the Upper Khabur; and on the so-called bastion of Warad-Sin at Ur. Clay tablets consisting of administrative letters and records were found in the temple of this phase and beside the main stairway. T h e temple may have been dedicated to the storm god Adad or to the goddess Geshtin-anna. In it were found two sculptured heads of Humbada and a stone relief of a goddess between palm trees. A palace, perhaps contemporary with the temple, was built on virgin soil to tlie northeast of tlie temple. Most of one wing was excavated, which included a throne room with a dais. A small number of early Old Babylonian personnel lists was found in the wing. T h a t palace was demolished almost to ground level and replaced by a new building tiiat followed a slightly different alignment, perhaps soon after the death of Shamshi-Adad I. In it were found letters, rec ords, and seal impressions indicating association witii four rulers: Hatnu-rapi, a contemporary of Zimrilim of Mari, now identified from Mari texts as a ldng of Qattara; AshkurAddu, also contemporary with Zimrilim, identified from Mari texts as a ldng of Karana; Zimrilim, king of Mari, whose official seal was found impressed on two envelope fragments; and Aqba-Hammu, brother-in-law of AshkurAddu, whose wife Iltani was at the center of the main archive of letters and administrative records and who appears to have ruled the city as a vassal of Hammurabi of Babylon after tlie latter brought the reign of Zimrilim at Mari to an end. T h e kingdom to which Tell er-Rimah belonged is now thought to have contained two major cities, Karana and Qattara, tiiat were alternatively named according to the res idency of the current ruler. Therefore, it is still uncertain from the Old Babylonian evidence whether the site is Kar ana or Qattara. A foundation inscription of a ldng of Razama, found out of stratigraphic context, may be loot from a siege of tiiat neighboring city. During the Nuzi period, in the third quarter of the second millennium, the site was still extensively occupied, with a large administrative building and domestic houses built over the old palace area. Much fine glass and frit work was found, especially in connection with a small domestic shrine, and many cylinder seals, but no inscribed material. Texts of the period found at Nuzi mention a Karana, but that may refer to another town with the same name on the Lower Zab, depending on the interpretation of the texts. T h e temple continued in use. During the Middle Assyrian period, in the last quarter of the second millennium, the temple and domestic structures continued to flourish under the aegis of Assyrian kings. Business records found in the temple, mainly concerned with tin and barley, date to the reigns of Shalmaneser I and Tukulti-Ninurta I. T h e place name Qattara is frequently
429
attested in them; Karana does not occur. In texts of this time from Assur, both Karana and Qattara are found, but witiiout indications for locating them. The site was completely abandoned after the Middle As syrian period. It was partly resettled in the Neo-Assyrian period, but the old temple was not restored. Under the As syrian king Adad-Nirari III, it belonged to the province of Rasappa and was renamed Zamahe. There, the semi-inde pendent governor Nergal- (or Palil-) Eresh set up a stela beside the altar in a small, new temple dedicated to Adad, built into the north side of the old temple mound. The new temple had a different alignment, and its entrance on the northeast gave direct access to the cella through a long hall. The entrance to the cella was decorated with stone pillar bases in the shape of lion heads with huge, protruding dag ger-blade tongues; it featured a gigantic lion-headed bird made from a bitumen core. T h e stela recorded the titles and deeds of Adad-Nirari III, including his taking tribute from Syrian rulers and from Jehoash of Israel, as well as new setdements built in the vicinity by Nergal-Eresh; the latter part of the inscription was erased in antiquity. A tablet recording a real estate transaction by Nergal-Eresh also was found. BIBLIOGRAPHY Charpin, D o m i n i q u e , a n d Jean-Marie D u r a n d . " L e n o m antique de Tell R i m a h . " Revue
d'Assyriologie
et d'Archeologie
Orientale
81.2
(1987): 125-146.
Dalley, Stephanie. " K a r a n a . " I n Reallexikon derasiatischen
Archaologie,
der Assyriologie
und Vor-
vol. 5 , p p . 4 0 5 - 4 0 7 . Berlin a n d N e w York,
1980.
Dalley, Stephanie, C . B. F . Walker a n d J. D . Hawkins. The Old Baby lonian
Tablets
from
Tell al Rimah.
F a d h i l , Abdulillah. Studien Provinzstddte
des Konigreichs
zur
London, 1976. Topographie
Arraphe.
und Prosopographie
der
M a i n z a m Rhein, 1 9 8 3 . See
pages 9 2 - 1 0 1 .
H o w a r d - C a r t e r , Theresa. "Excavations at Tell al-Rimah, 1 9 6 4 . " letin of the American
Schools
of Oriental
Research,
Bul
n o . 1 7 8 (April 1 9 6 5 ) :
40-69.
H o w a r d - C a r t e r , Theresa. " A n Interpretation of tlie Sculptural D e c o ration of the Second Millennium T e m p l e at Tell al-Rimah." Iraq 4 5 (1983): 64-72.
Layard, Austen H . Discoveries in the Ruins oj'Nineveh don, 1 8 5 3 . See page 2 4 3 .
andBaiyto«.
Lon
Lloyd, Seton. " S o m e Ancient Sites in the Sinjar District." Iraq 5 ( 1 9 3 8 ) : 123-142.
Oates, David. " T h e Excavations at Tell al R i m a h . " Iraq 2 7 ( 1 9 6 5 ) : 6 2 80; 2 8 (1966): 1 2 2 - 1 3 9 ; 2 9 (1967): 7 0 - 9 6 ; 3 0 (1968): 115-138; 3 2 (1970): 1-26; 3 4 (1972): 77-86.
Oates, Joan. " L a t e Assyrian T e m p l e Furniture from Tell al R i m a h . " Iraq 3 6 ( 1 9 7 4 ) : 1 7 9 - 1 8 4 .
Page, Stephanie M . " A Stela of Adad-Nirari III and Nergal Ere§ from Tell al R i m a h . " Iraq 3 0 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 1 3 9 - 1 5 3 . See T a d m o r (below) for corrections. Parker, Barbara. "Cylinder Seals from Tell al R i m a h . " Iraq 3 7 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 21-38.
Postgate, J. N . " A Neo-Assyrian T a b l e t from Tell al R i m a h . " Iraq 3 2 (1970): 31-50-
Saggs, H . W . F . " T h e Tell al R i m a h Tablets, 1 9 6 5 . " Iraq 3 0 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 154-174.
430
RITUAL BATHS
T a d m o r , Hayim. " T h e Historical Inscriptions of Adad-Nirari III." Iraq 35 (1973): 141-15°-
Wiseman, D . J . " T h e Tell al Rimah Tablets, 1 9 6 6 . " Iraq 3 0 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 175-205. STEPHANIE DALLEY
RITUAL BATHS
(Heb., miqva'ot; sg., rniqveh; lit. "a gathering of water"). A rniqveh is a built water installation whose construction complies with tenets of Jewish law (halakhah), and in which the observant Jew, disrobed, purifies him- or herself through total immersion. In the late Second Temple period, the Jews developed an elaborate system of regulations concerning matters of ritual purity, based on biblical law but emended and influenced by the dominant contemporary religious interpreters of the time (e.g., Phar isees and Saduccees). In tire early stages of the practice, a state of purity was achieved through immersion in a natural body of water—a spring, river, or lake. Eventually, however, the demand for pools of natural water to service the com munity was met via the introduction of the rniqveh. T o draw a distinction between a ritual immersion and or dinary washing, tire sages decreed that the rniqveh's waters should be "in the hands of heaven," distinct from waters that are "in tire hands of man." They decreed that rniqveh waters meeting the following requirements have intrinsic powers of purification. The rniqveh was to be cut into bed rock or built directiy into the ground—it could not be a pre cast container. It was not to be filled with drawn (i.e., "in the hands of man" and therefore impure) water. Only rain water that collected by itself into the rniqveh (i.e., by gravity) was acceptable. Spring water led by aqueduct was also per missible. The rniqveh must hold a minimum volume of 40 se'ah of water (somewhat less than a cubic meter). T h e wa ter in the rniqveh must maintain the natural appearance of water (meaning, for example, that oil finding its way into a rniqveh defiled it, even though all other requirements were met). The rabbis did not set regulations for the shape or the number of steps leading into the rniqveh, which is attested in the archaeological record, as installations are found in various shapes and with differing numbers of steps. The main rabbinic sources for the ttadition are the trac tates Miqva'ot in the Mishnah and Tosefta. These are com pilations of halakhot ("religious regulations") prescribing the minimal requirements for a rniqveh and of discussions of problems already solved by tire sages regarding the use of this installation (they are not manuals of instruction for how to build a rniqveh). Archaeologist Yigael Yadin first drew attention to the in stallation in the excavations on Masada (1963-1964). How ever, it was not until the findings from Nahman Avigad's excavations in the Jewish Quarter and those of Benjamin Mazar near die Temple Mount, both in Jerusalem, that mi qva'ot began to.be studied formally. Such installations have
been found in large numbers in archaeological contexts in Israel, mainly in bathrooms in the basements of every one of the large private houses dated to the first century B C E and the first century C E until the year 70, where they appear in addition to cisterns, bathtubs, and footbaths. A recent com prehensive study by Ronny Reich (1990), based on the above-mentioned excavations and others, has proven tire identification of these installations with the rniqveh known from the written sources and has defined their characteris tics and significance. The lower part of the rniqveh typically was cut into bed rock, while its upper part was built and roofed with a barrelshaped vault or, alternatively, also hewn completely out of bedrock. Its average size was 2 x 4 m . T h e steps in the rniqveh usually occupy its entire width and have risers about 25-30 cm high; the lowest step usually has tire highest rise (60-70 cm) and one or two small auxiliary steps are cut at the bottom expressly to overcome this height. T h e tread of the steps also varies in depth. In many cases a step with a deep (50-70 cm) tread alternates with two-four 30-cm steps enabling the use of the rniqveh in different water levels. Vari ations of miqva'ot occur: there are installations with a narrow staircase attached to one or two sides of the basin (typical to Hasmonean Jericho), and miqva'ot equipped with two ad jacent openings (instead of one) and/or a low built partition (10-30 cm high) that divides the staircase into two lanes (to separate the descending impure person from contact with the ascending purified individual), a type typical mainly to Jerusalem. Miqva'ot are filled with rainwater during tire first rain storm of each year. T h e chief operational/maintenance problem with miqva'ot in ancient Israel was guaranteeing a constant supply of pure water throughout the year in a land with a long rainless season (April-November). T h e sages decreed that a minimum volume of 40 se'ah can also purify drawn water; thus, a solution for maintaining the purity of the water was simply occasionally to add drawn water to tire rniqveh as long as the amount of the original pure water in the pool was more titan 40 se'ah—instantaneously purifying tire drawn water (which was probably tire common means to purify additional amounts of water). In addition, an op erational device is in evidence based on the principle given in the Mishnah that any body of water linked to the water in a valid rniqveh becomes equally pure: at a few sites (Ma sada, Herodium, and Jericho, and in a few examples in Je rusalem) a pair of miqva'ot were excavated that are linked at their rims by a pipe or channel. Both miqva'ot were ini tially filled with pure rainwater, but only one was used for ritual immersion (in later periods the unused one is referred to as an osar, "treasury"). When the water in the rniqveh in frequent use became dirty, it was replaced with clean drawn water (still unqualified for purification). When the stopper was pulled from the connecting pipe, and momentary con tact occurred between the two bodies of water, the water
ROADS
431
R I T U A L B A T H S . A plaster bath with steps, from excavations at Sepphoris. (Courtesy E . M . Meyers)
from the "treasury" purified the freshly drawn water. This procedure could b e repeated as often as required. T h e method was used only rarely in the Second Temple period, probably reflecting the habits of certain religious/social seg ments of Jewish society at that time, but is obligatory today. In addition to domestic miqva'ot and those excavated near the gates of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem are examples excavated in the palaces and mansions of the Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties in Jericho (which were supplied by spring water conducted by aqueducts) and at Masada, Her odium, and Cypros. Others have been found at Qumran, Gezer, Gamla, and elsewhere, in rural areas near oil and wine presses. T h e latter examples enabled commodities to be produced in a state of ritual purity. Frequently used in the Second Temple period in Judea (Judah) and die Galilee, miqva'ot were absent from the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman world. Like Jewish inscriptions and symbols, the rniqveh is a clue (an architectural one) for identifying a Jewish presence at sites. After die Romans de stroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 C E , the need for ritual purity was considerably minimized, resulting in a sharp decline in the number of the miqva'ot in use, which is attested in die archaeological record. From an average fre quency of two-three installations per private house (in Je rusalem), die number declined to one-two miqva'ot per vil lage or neighborhood at most sites. (Although the site of Sepphoris in Galilee seems to present a much higher rate of frequency in the period after 70 CE.) In medieval Europe the installation rate was also one or two per Jewish neighbor hood.
[See also
Personal Hygiene; Public Baths. In addition,
of the sites mentioned
are the subject of independent
most
entries]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Netzer, E h u d . "Ancient Ritual Baths (Miqvaot) in Jericho." In The Je rusalem Cathedra, vol. 2, edited by L e e I. Levine, p p . 106-119. D e troit, 1982. Reich, R o n n y . " T h e H o t B a t h - H o u s e (balneum), the Miqweh, and the Jewish C o m m u n i t y in the S e c o n d T e m p l e Period." Journal of Jewish Studies 39.1 (1988): 102-107. Reich, R o n n y . " M i q w a ' o t (Jewish Ritual Immersion Baths) in EretzIsrael in the Second T e m p l e a n d M i s h n a h a n d T a l m u d Periods." P h . D . diss., Plebrew University, 1990. In Hebrew with English a b stract. RONNV REICH
ROADS. A region's geopolitical history cannot be un derstood without a basic knowledge of its roads. The roads and highways in die ancient Near East determined its de mographic patterns to a large degree because population centers generally developed along them. Moreover, the lo cations of roads dictated, or at least prescribed, die move ments of armies, merchants, and ordinary citizens. Consequendy, they exerted a profound influence on a region's development and history. R o a d Dimensions. In order to bear die traffic of wheeled vehicles such as chariots, carts, and wagons, roads in the ancient world were generally two or more lanes wide. In Mesopotamia, for example, city streets were often several meters wide. Aibursabum Street in Babylon was as much as 20 m wide in its excavated sections. Other excavated streets
432
ROADS
in Babylon varied in width from 2 to 10 m, most having been about 3-6 m wide. In Neo-Babylonian warranty deeds from Babylon and Erech, "broad streets" (Akk., suqu rapsu) and "narrow streets" (siiqu qatnu) are frequendy mentioned. Sennacherib boasts that he broadened Nineveh's market streets for the passage of the "royal road" and made this road 62 large cubits (about 30 m) wide. Open roads were also wide, probably averaging 3-6 m. The Assyrians rarely encountered roads too narrow for their wagons and chariots. According to their records, they drove freely throughout the land and considered it a matter worthy of note when they met witii narrow roads outside Assyria. In Egypt an Old Kingdom road was discovered leading to the alabaster quarries east of el-Amarna; it was 5 m wide, with two branches, one 9 m and one 3 m wide. A road sys tem discovered in the environs of el-Amarna comprised roads approximately 5 m wide, with rows of stones marking the edges. Another network of roads from the Old Kingdom has been traced in the region of the Second Cataract of the Nile. These also were about 5 m wide, with one widening to 8 m as it approached the fortress of Mirgissa. Evidence indicates that most open roads in ancient Egypt were rela tively wide. Rameses II boasted that he marched northward to Qadesh with his infantry and chariotry, with his army "traveling on the narrow paths as if on the roads of Egypt." The same picture holds for Syria-Palestine. From the ex cavated remains it appears that streets in this region were generally 2-3 m wide (as found, for example, in the Iron Age strata at Megiddo, Tell Deir Alla, Tell Qasile, Tell enNasbeh, Beth-Shemesh, Ashdod, and Tell Beersheba), with streets 4.5 m wide being fairly common (for example, in Iron Age levels at Megiddo, Tell Qasile, Gezer, and Beth-She mesh). Evidence suggests tiiat open roads in ancient Israel were typically two lanes wide (3-4 m), although roads of three or more lanes also undoubtedly existed (wider than 5 m). During the Roman period, roads in the ancient Near East were generally two to four lanes wide. Roman roads discov ered in the Judean Wilderness measured from 3 to 12 m in width. One of the Roman roads through tlie Beth-Shean valley measured 9-10 m in width—at least the width of a modern five-lane highway. In the Byzantine period, the standard width of streets in Palestinian cities seems to have been 5.4 m. More than a dozen streets this wide have been excavated in Jerusalem alone, and additional examples have been found elsewhere in the Near East, including Gerasa in Jordan and Dura-Europos in Syria. On the other hand, the main streets of cities were much wider: those in Jerusalem, Samaria, and Gerasa/ Jerash, for example, were 22 m wide, four times the width of the average street. Until the Roman period, roads in the open countryside were generally unpaved, and city streets were only occa c
sionally paved. (Josephus's assertion that Solomon paved the roads leading to Jerusalem with black stones [Antiquities 8.7.4] ' anachronistic.) No paved road from the pre-Roman period has been found in Palestine, and unpaved thorough fares are assumed in the biblical literature—briers, thorny bushes, and other plants may be found growing in a road (cf. Hos. 2:6 [Hebrew, verse 8]; Pro. 15:19, 22:5). T h e same was generally true throughout the Fertile Crescent. Accord ing to a third-millennium inscription from Sumer, when Agade fell and the Gutians took over the land, tiiese bar barians "made the weeds grow tall on tlie highways of the land." Even stretches of the Persian Royal Road often be came impassable mud holes, in which, on one occasion, the retreating Greeks repeatedly became stuck. In tlie Letter of the Satirical Scribe, the road through the Megiddo pass is described as filled with boulders and pebbles and overgrown with reeds, brambles, briers, and "wolfs paw." s
R o a d Construction. Certainly the technology of paving existed in the pre-Roman period (Walter Andrae, Alte Feststrassen im Nahen Osten, Leipzig, 1941). Aibursabum Street in Babylon, like similar streets in ancient Mesopotamia, was consUucted with a technique almost matching that of the Romans: a foundation layer of bricks was set in asphalt, a surface of heavy limestone slabs was laid over it, and the joints were sealed with more asphalt. Other examples of such paving include the processional streets discovered in Assur, the approach road at Khorsabad, and the paved streets Sennacherib constructed in Nineveh. In Egypt, ap proach roads to temples were often paved. In Israel, paving is attested as early as the Early Bronze Age, witnessed, for example, by the paved sueet at BethYerah near the Sea of Galilee. Examples of other paved streets from pre-Israelite periods include a cobbled street at Shechem, from the Middle Bronze II period, and a paved street from the Late Bronze period discovered at Jaffa. Pav ing is also well attested in the Iron Age. T h e Iron Age streets at Tell Deir 'Alia were paved, and the paving was regularly refurbished. The main street of the Israelite city of Dan was paved with stone. Cobbled streets from the Iron Age include the 3.5-m-wide street discovered at Ashdod and die tenthninth-century B C E street found at Gezer. At Megiddo the approach road to the city gate (eleventh century B C E ) was payed with a hard, cementlike plaster on a crushed-stone base. The parapet and retaining wall on the outside and in side of the roadway were also of rubble and plastered like the roadway. It was die Romans, however, who brought to the ancient Near East the practice of paving open highways; and during the Roman era many of the thoroughfares of the region were paved. T h e technology of Roman roads, featured superb foundations, adequate drainage, and one or more layers of cement or stone paving designed to last for centuries (see Forbes, 1934, 1965; and Casson, 1974, pp. 163-175). T h e
ROADS remains of many of these paved Roman highways can be seen throughout the Near East. Preparation of road surfaces during the pre-Roman pe riod is occasionally referred to in contemporary records. The Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I recounts that during his campaign against the mountainous Nairi-lands, he cut through the mountain ranges with copper pickaxes and wid ened their closed paths. Tiglath-Pileser I describes how, in his campaign against the land of Kutmuhi, he attacked the rugged highlands and their difficult paths with copper pick axes, improving the roads so that his chariots and army might advance. When Sargon II encountered a road too dif ficult for his chariots, he summoned his engineering corps to hew out a better one. When the road was completed, he marched ahead, followed by his chariotry, cavalry, army, and baggage train. Nebuchadrezzar recounts how he opened passes to make a road for transporting cedars. T h e tool most often referred to as employed in road preparation is the akkulu, a pickaxe often used otherwise for hewing building blocks and tunneling through mountainsides. In Egypt, road construction is also occasionally mentioned in the records. During the twelfth dynasty, Thuthotep de scribes how he employed miners, quarrymen, and others to help hew a rocky trail, whose rugged surface was hard stone, to create a smooth road along which he was attempting to haul a 6o-ton block of stone. From the remains of Egyptian roads from the pre-Roman period, it appears that road prep aration in Egypt consisted of leveling out a track by scraping smooth the surface and lining the sides with the scrapings and gravel. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the process of road building is apparently alluded to in Isaiah 40:3, 57:14, and 62:10 and in Malachi 3:1. There, too, the procedure appears to have in volved simply "clearing" (pinna) the roadway and "smooth ing" (yisser) and "leveling" (soldi) the surface. Generally, the government was responsible for both con structing and maintaining roads. Road maintenance and re pair were regularly carried out during tire spring, following the damage done by tire winter rains (Mishnah, Sheq 1:1 and Mo'ed
Q. 1:2; B.T.; San. 1 1 a ) .
R o a d Markings. Roads were generally named according to their destinations. The "Uruk Road" was, thus, the name of a Mesopotamian road that led to Uruk. This custom was common throughout the ancient Near East. In the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, the "Beth-Shemesh Road" men tioned in 1 Samuel 6:12 was tire road that led to the town of Beth-Shemesh; the "Bashan Road" (Nm. 14:25; Dt. 3:1) was the highway leading to Bashan; and the Beth-Gan Road (2 Kgs. 9:27) was the road leading to Beth-Gan. T h e major exception to this practice would appear to be the designation "tire king's highway." However, this designation, which oc curs in Sumerian (kaskal lugal), Akkadian (harran sarri), Ar amaic ('5rah malkd'f and Hebrew derek ha-melek), was not
433
the name of a road but a descriptive designation of a partic ular kind of road, to be translated "the main road" or "the public road." Roads do not generally appear to have been marked by signs in the pre-Roman period. In Egypt a road dating from the Old Kingdom that led to the alabaster quarries east of el-Amarna was marked by a series of cairns constructed of black stones, limestone, and flints. Similar markers were used in the road network in the el-Amarna region during the Late Kingdom. Although in Mesopotamia Sennacherib set up stelae along his great processional road in Nineveh, they are not to be equated with road markers in the open coun tryside, for which there is little evidence in Mesopotamia. In the Hebrew Bible, road markers similar to those used oc casionally in Egypt may be alluded to in Jeremiah 31:21 (siyyunim). T h e Romans, on the other hand, marked their highways with inscribed mile markers, many of which can still be seen along Roman roads in the Near East. Because few clearly identifiable physical traces of roads in the ancient Near East prior to the Roman era have been discovered, reconstructing their courses is inferential, in volving at least four lines of evidence. First, there are the historical sources: for example, the highway that went from Bethel to Shechem, passing west of Shiloh, is mentioned in Judges 21:19. Second, lines of ancient settlements, revealed by archaeological excavations and surveys, can be testimony to the existence of an ancient thoroughfare. Cities, towns, villages, way stations, and forts, for example, tended to grow up along roads. Long after a road had fallen into disuse and disappeared, settlement ruins attested to its erstwhile exis tence. Third, the courses of later routes—Roman, medieval, and nineteenth-century—may preserve the courses of ear lier, unpaved roads they simply followed. Finally, an area's geographic and topographic conditions determined to a large degree the courses roads took: mountain passes, river fords, harbors, easily traversed valleys, ascents, and springs attracted roads; whereas deep canyons, high mountains, swamps, deserts, and unfordable rivers were natural barriers to be avoided. [See also Carts; Chariots; Transportation.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A h a r o n i , Y o h a n a n . The Land
of the Bible: A Historical
Geography.
Rev.
ed. Translated a n d edited b y A n s o n F . Rainey. Philadelphia, 1 9 7 9 . G o o d overview of the n a t u r e of roads in ancient Israel, with a r e construction of the country's main routes. A n d r a e , W a l t e r . Alte
Peststrassen
im Nahen
Osten.
Leipzig, 1 9 4 1 .
Avi-Yonah, Michael. " M a p of R o m a n Palestine." Quarterly partment
of Antiquities
in Palestine
of the De
5 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 3 9 - 1 9 3 . Extensive study
of the R o m a n road system in Palestine, b r o u g h t current by the con tinuing work of Israel Rol a n d others. Broshi, M a g e n . " S t a n d a r d s of Street Widths in the Roman-Byzantine P e r i o d . " Israel
Exploration
Journal
27',4 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 2 3 2 - 2 3 5 .
Suggests
that t h e average width of city streets during this period was 5 . 4 m , p e r h a p s a standard at the time.
434
ROBINSON, EDWARD
Casson, Lionel. Travel in the Ancient World. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 4 . Dorsey, David A. " S c h e c h e m a n d the Road Network of Central Sa m a r i a . " Bulletin
of the American
Schools
of Oriental
Research,
n o . 268
(November 1987): 57-70. Reconstructs the course of about two dozen routes comprising the road network in the central highlands of Iron Age Samaria. Dorsey, D a v i d A. The Roads
and Highways
of Ancient
Israel.
Baltimore,
1991. T h e only comprehensive treatment of the subject in the ancient N e a r East, particularly in Israel. Deals with the nature a n d physical characteristics of roads, road terminology in the ancient N e a r East and in the Hebrew Bible, and methodology in reconstructing ancient Israel's road network. Reconstructs the course of some 245 routes that comprised Israel's road network in die Iron Age. F o r b e s , R o b e r t J. Notes
on the History,
of Ancient
Roads
and their
Con
struction. Amsterdam, 1934. Forbes, Robert J. " L a n d T r a n s p o r t and Road Building" in A History of Technology, edited by C. Singer, et al., vol. 2, p p . 493-516. Leiden, 1965. Goodchild, R. G. "Evolution of the R o m a n R o a d s . " In A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer et al., vol. 2, p p . 500-509. L o n don, 1956. Helpful survey. K a r m o n , Yehuda. "Geographical Influences on the Historical Routes in the Sharon Plain." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 93 (1961): 4 3 60. Illustrates how topographic and geographic factors determined the course of roads in ancient times, particularly in the Sharon plain. Roll, Israel. Roman Road System. Historical Geography of the Bible Lands, Wide Screen Project, M a p 12. T e l Aviv, 1979. Convenient, up-to-date wall m a p of die R o m a n road network in Palestine, based on Rol's extensive research. Wilkinson, John. " T h e W a y from Jerusalem to Jericho." Biblical Ar chaeologist 38.1 (1975): 10-24. A n example of good methodology in reconstructing the course of an ancient road. D A V I D A. D O R S E Y
ROBINSON, EDWARD (1794-1863), American biblical scholar, philologist, and explorer. Although Robin son belongs to an era before the inception of modern ar chaeological excavation in Palestine, his influence on the later development of the discipline was enormous. In his utilization of historical sources, linguistic evidence, and physical explorations throughout Palestine and the Sinai Desert, Robinson was among the first to attempt to recon struct a historical geography of die Holy Land based on scholarly research rather than ecclesiastical tradition. Born in Southington, Connecticut, Robinson, the son of a Congregationalist minister, was educated at Hamilton Col lege. After briefly sttidying law, he returned to Hamilton as an instructor in Greek and mathematics. He published a detailed commentary on the Iliad in 1822. After ordination as a Congregationalist minister, he devoted himself to bib lical studies under the guidance of Moses Stuart at the Andover Theological Seminary. Robinson subsequentiy spent several years in Germany, becoming familiar with tire latest techniques of historical research and textual criticism. A theological conservative, he returned to America intent on utilizing these methods in defense of die historical reliability of the biblical text.
In 1831, Robinson accepted a professorship in biblical lit erature at Andover and founded the American
Biblical
Re
a journal devoted to biblical research. After pub lishing lexicons of the Hebrew and New Testaments, Robinson accepted a position on the faculty of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Before assuming his teaching responsibilities, however, Robinson set off in 1838 on an extended exploration of Sinai and Palestine, in which he hoped to establish the historical geography of the Holy Land as a serious and systematic discipline.
pository,
Robinson was well aware that the initial attempts at sound geographical identifications for localities mentioned in the Bible were for the most part desultory and unsystematic, based on the often haphazard guesses of Western travelers. He was therefore determined to prepare his own exploration carefully. His most important achievement in this respect was gaining the services of Eli Smith, an American mission ary, fluent in Arabic and a long-time resident in Lebanon. During the course of his ambitious tiiree-month journey in 1838 from Suez to Beirut, Robinson and Smith succeeded in identifying dozens of previously overlooked biblical lo calities, speculated on the ancient landscape of the country, and formulated a system of linguistic rules to account for die transformation of ancient Hebrew geographical termi nology into modern Arabic. Robinson and Smith's analysis of the transformation of geographical terminology was deeply influenced by contem porary German comparative philology, with its theoretical emphasis on linguistic "degenerationism." T h a t theory, which Robinson had studied under the philologists Wilhelm Gesenius and Emil Rodiger and the geographer Karl Ritter, posited the existence of several original, primitive languages (suggestively named for die migrating sons of Noah: Hamitic, Semitic, and Japhetic), each of which had undergone distortion and grammatical deterioration over the centuries. T h e modern geographical terminology of Palestine, Rob inson believed, was the result of "a truly national and native ttadition," which was "deeply seated in the genius of the Semitic languages," through which die transformations from Hebrew to Aramaic to Arabic could be traced (Rob inson, 1841, vol. 1, p. 255). The goal, then, in Robinson's study of the historical ge ography of Palestine was "a first attempt to lay open the treasures of biblical geography and history still remaining in the Holy Land; treasures which have lain for ages unex plored, and had become so covered with the dust and rub bish of many centuries, that tiieir very existence was for gotten" (ibid., p . xi). T h e distinct intellectual strains of conservative American Protestantism and German scientific linguistics were merged in the service of Robinson's brand of biblical geography. T h e impact of diis scholarly under taking was far-reaching: a new, modern territorial entity was effectively defined through the replacement of an existing
ROMAN EMPIRE landscape of Arabic place-names with a "biblical" geogra phy. Robinson's three-volume report on his expedition, cal Researches
in Palestine,
Mount
Sinai,
Bibli
and Arabia
Petraea
(Boston, 1841) quickly became a standard work. An addi tional volume, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions (Boston, 1856), was based on an expedition to Palestine Robinson undertook in 1852, again in the com pany of Eli Smith. T h e continuing influence of Robinson's work can be seen in its use by the British-sponsored Survey of Western Palestine (1871-1882), which followed Robin son and Smith's linguistic lead by compiling an encyclope dic list of Arabic place-names and their relationship to bib lical localities. Plagued by poor health and failing eyesight in later years, Robinson was gradually forced to restrict his teaching and research responsibilities; yet, by the time of his death, he was already regarded as the father of a uniquely American brand of biblical geography. [See also Biblical Archaeology; Historical Geography.] BIBLIOGRAPHY B e n - A r i e h , Y e h o s h u a . The Rediscovery
Century.
of the Holy
Landin
the
Nineteenth
Jerusalem, 1979.
Bliss, Frederick Jones. The Development
of Palestine
Exploration.
New
York, 1906. Hitchcock, Roswell D . , a n d H e n r y B . Smith. The Life, Character
of Edward
Robinson.
K i n g , Philip J. American American
Schools
Archaeology
of Oriental
R o b i n s o n , E d w a r d . Biblical
Arabia
Petraea.
in the Mideast:
Research. Researches
A History
of the
W i n o n a L a k e , I n d . , 1983. in Palestine,
Mount
Sinai,
and
Biblical
Researches
in Palestine
and the
Adjacent
Boston, 1856.
Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging chaeology,
and
3 vols. Boston, 1841.
R o b i n s o n , E d w a r d . Later
Regions.
Writings,
N e w York, 1863.
and the Secret
for God and Country:
Struggle
for the Holy
Land,
Exploration,
Ar
1799-7917. N e w
York, 1982. Silberman, Neil Asher. "Desolation a n d Restoration: T h e Impact of a Biblical C o n c e p t o n N e a r E a s t e r n Archaeology." Biblical
Archaeol
ogist 54 (1991): 76-87N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN
ROMAN EMPIRE. T h e lands around die Mediterra nean have been politically and administratively united only during tile Roman period. For four centuries (first to fourth century CE) Rome presided over an empire that at its height around 200 C E covered some 5 million sq km extending from central Scotland to northwestern Saudi Arabia. Complete control was achieved only in the first century B C E . Even in the fifth century C E when barbarian kingdoms emerged in the western half, die Byzantine Empire lived on in the east for an additional one tiiousand years. Beginning with the province of Asia (western Anatolia) in 133 B C E Rome embarked on a series of conquests that cul
435
minated in 30 B C E with tlie overthrow of Cleopatra's Egypt. For the Near East in tlie narrower sense, there were prov inces of Syria (63 B C E ) ; Judaea (70 C E ) , later called Syria Palaestina; Arabia (106 C E ) , and Mesopotamia (198 CE). Di rect administration in the first century BCE was restricted mainly to the northwest where tlie major cities of Hellenistic Syria were located. Later acquisitions extended direct con trol to the Gulf of Aqaba and to the Tigris at Mosul. Mil itary expeditions saw Roman armies campaigning as far as the Caspian Sea, Persian Gulf, and Yemen. Government was in die hands of a legatus (called praefectus in Mesopotamia) drawn from the imperial aristocracy. Equipped with a slim and largely unprofessional bureau cracy, these officials controlled their extensive provinces through a combination of delegation to internally self-gov erning cities and the threat of intervention by an efficient and ruthless army. In addition to the cities and often exten sive territories that were administered by local aristocracies, there were various principalities and petty kingdoms. T h e emperor Augustus (30 B C E - 1 4 CE) swept away many of tiiese in Syria, but some well-known allied states remained. Best known is Herod the Great's Judaea, but longer lasting was the Nabatean kingdom, which was only annexed in 106 CE. The quality of government improved after the civil wars (49-30 BCE) . T h e monarchy of Augustus replaced the Ro man republic. Governors resided in palaces in their provin cial capitals but were often absent on tours of assize (legal and juridicial) centers or on campaigns. Their primary re sponsibilities were security, the administration of justice, and tlie collection of tax. Despite the great Jewish rebellions (66-70, 1 1 6 - 1 1 8 , and 132-135 CE) the eastern empire en joyed a long period of largely peaceful, stable administration for nearly three centuries. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt; First Jewish Revolt.] E a s t e r n Cities. Greco-Roman civilization was essentially urban, and the East had many cities. Antioch and Alexan dria reached populations of about 200,000 to 250,000. There were many other great cities, such as the provincial capitals at Ephesus (Asia), Ancyra (Galatia), Nisibis (Mesopota mia), and Caesarea (Palaestina) witii scores of others, mostly of already great antiquity. T h e pattern of cities— overwhelmingly pre-Roman in origin—was largely deter mined by geography: fertile soils, trade routes and ports, and strategic requirements. Most of the cities in greater Syria were on or within fifty miles of the coast. The Roman impact was superficially modest. A few new cities, coloniae, were founded in southwestern Anatolia, with fewer still in Syria, although Berytus (now Beirut) grew into one of the great cities of tlie East. But this overlooks the contribution of the allied rulers who founded Greco-Roman cities, some of which—Herod's Caesarea Maritima in Pal estine is the outstanding example—flourished and helped transform tlie character of the region. T h e real impact of c
(JJ ON
ROMAN EMPIRE Rome on the urban landscape was more subtle but impor tant. Peace and stability provided the ideal conditions which permitted growth, prosperity and development. It was only in the Roman period that most cities achieved their fullest flowering. Under Roman prosperity civic architecture flourished. Theaters, stoas, and gymnasia became regular features of Greek cities in the Roman Empire. T h e Roman contribu tion, however, was uneven. T h e basilica is rarely found in the East. T h e amphitheater occurs in such "Roman" cities as Berytus and Caesarea Maritima but is otherwise rare. In contrast, the hippodrome and that quintessentially Roman structure, tire monumental arch, were popular features. Probably the best-preserved hippodrome in the empire is at Tyre, and there are fine combinations of city gate, hippo drome-stadium, and monumental arch at Gadara (Umm Qeis) and nearby Gerasa Qerash) in Palestine in what may be an example of civic rivalry. Public amenities were most developed in tire Roman period, whether the great public baths or aqueducts, such as those to be seen still at Caesarea (drawing water from 14.5 1cm distant), Apamea (75 km long), and around the cities of eastern Cilicia. Overall, however, the greatest Roman contribution was grandeur. It is most striking in the treatment of the main streets. Broadened, lengthened, flanked by shady colon nades and shops, they became monuments in their own right. T h e street at Antioch in Syria two miles long, is known only from excavation. Their character can be seen readily at Apamea also in Syria, Gerasa, and elsewhere. [See Cities, article on Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods.] A r t a n d Architecture. Despite numerous Greco-Roman features, the eastern cities lay in an alien environment. At Palmyra in Syria, for example, the column brackets that were intended for statues are a native embellishment. In most cities the pre-Roman ttadition of post-and-lintel ar chitecture remained dominant in the face of Roman pref erence for brick-faced concrete, and there was a continued confident Plellenistic artistic tradition. At Samosata the native rulers used opus reticulatum, dia mond-shaped facing stones on a concrete core, even on their city walls, a construction style rarely found outside Italy. At Caesarea Maritima, Herod the Great evidentiy employed not just Roman engineers and craftsmen but Roman tech niques and material for his great artificial harbor. In Herod's palace at Masada, however, the wall paintings were of Al exandrian (Hellenistic) style. Most representational art of the period is known to us only through the many fine mo saics to survive—more than tirree hundred at Antioch and Daphne alone and many more superb examples from Apa mea, Zeugma, Palmyra, and Scythopolis in Syria-Palestine, reflecting a vigorous Hellenistic style of three dimensionality and illusionism, Where wall painting does survive exten sively, it is in peripheral areas, providing the evidence for a continuing oriental tradition. At Dura-Europos, for exam
437
ple, a city widi a strong army presence, the figured scenes in the synagogue are in the unrealistic, frontal poses of the Near East. Even the third-century painting in the temple of Bel at the same site depicting the Roman nibune Julius Terentius sacrificing with his soldiers, is in the same style. [See Wall Paintings.] Sculpture was common. Full-size bronzes such as that of Hadrian from Tirat Zevi near Scythopolis are rare any where, but there is much fine heavily classical stone statuary and relief sculpture from the towns. Once again, native tastes remained vibrant. Best known are the relief sculpture and depictions on tombstones from northern Syria, espe cially Palmyra, where it is the staring frontal pose which strikes the observer rather than tire Greek of the inscription. Syrian style was exported to imperial art where it appears in die relief portraits of Septimius Severus (193-211 CE) and his family on the Porta Argentariorum in tire Roman forum. The porphyry sculpture of the four tetrarchs now at St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice is perhaps the most obvious ex ample of Palmyrene tradition in the art of the Roman East (Rice, 1968, pp. 52, 390). Popular art and architecture remained little changed: mud-brick and pise (clay) for houses in many areas, stone orthostats (supports) and arches in the villages of the largely treeless limestone massif of northern Syria and the lava lands of the Hauran. Amongst the sedentary population, artwork tended to be cruder versions of traditional oriental forms. The thousands of so-called Safaitic graffiti of the desert and semidesert often reveal the tastes of the nomads for scenes of everyday life, especially hunting and herding. [See Build ing Materials and Techniques, article on Materials and Techniques of die Persian through Roman Periods.] Religion a n d F u n e r a r y P r a c t i c e s . The deified Roman emperors and the "classical" deities were certainly wor shiped in the eastern empire; nonetheless, the Greco-Roman pantheon figured only superficially in local cults. The god of Doliche in northern Syria may have been called Jupiter, but he was an oriental syncretism, Jupiter Dolichenus, clad in Hellenistic military costume and standing on the back of a bull. The important excavations at Dura-Europos illus trate the complexity and diversity of religious belief. Wor shipers had access to Palmyrene deities such as Bel and Atargatis, Greco-Roman personifications of Nemesis and die Fortune of Dura, and to a synagogue. Alongside these mixed practices, die army was engaged in the official com memoration of defied emperors and the gods of Rome, as we know from a unique military religious calendar (see Welles et al„ 1959). In die soutii the important Nabatean sanctuary at Si in the Hauran and numerous smaller Na batean temples and "high places" continued to flourish un der Roman rule, giving way to Christianity only in the third century. In the northwest, too, oriental religions dominated. T h e oriental priest of the cult of Atargatis at Hierapolis is depicted in traditional long robe and conical hat. At Emesa,
438
ROMAN EMPIRE
Diadumenianus, priest of the sun god Elagabalus, became emperor in 218. The most famous temples of Roman Syria were those at the great sanctuary of Heliopolis at Baalbek. Nominally ded icated to a Roman triad of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, they rapidly became powerful, elevated, oriental deities, the tem ples tiiemselves incorporating features alien to Roman tra dition. Monumentality on the scale of Baalbek was not a Roman innovation, but it was surely Roman wealth and de termination that finally completed the vast sanctuary. At a much lower level at Dura, we find small, irregular mud-brick temples to Semitic deities that are quite unlike even the semi-classical monumental stone versions at Palmyra. Funerary practices, too, were less touched by Roman rule, much of the impact being superficial. Notable native traditions which continue are the great tower tombs of Pal myra and Dura and the royal examples at Emesa, and the superb rock-cut tomb facades of Petra in Jordan and Me da'in Saleh in Saudi Arabia. Even when cremation was the common practice in much of the Roman Empire through the first to third centuries CE, inhumation remained the norm
I
.•:•£
ROMAN EMPIRE.
*• ..... Roman
tomb
^ in Syria.
t u r y CE. (Courtesy D . L . Kennedy)
D a t e d to the second c e n
in tlie East. The well-to-do were interred in stone sarcophagi or in niches in rock-cut tombs such as those which are found in the cemeteries of Roman Zeugma. Also found at Zeugma and elsewhere in northern Syria, are a handful of tumulus graves, a fashion most strikingly found in use among the rulers of Samosata farther north. A novel feature, which does reflect a characteristically Roman fashion, is the great increase in the erection of inscribed stelae. Most carry little more than a brief text—usually in Greek—but many bear relief portraits of the deceased. Throughout much of the Near East, however, symbols of the Sun are common on tombstones, especially the eagle, which also implies apothe osis. Material Culture. Throughout the East the material cul ture of the pre-Roman societies continued. T h e novelty was less one of new characteristically Roman artifacts than a broadening of the range and quantity. Finds are generally much more abundant and die drier conditions of much of Syria and Egypt have preserved even organic materials from human hair tiirough textiles to wood and foodsttrffs. Espe cially useful are the huge numbers of papyri recovered in Egypt and, now, from similar conditions around the Dead Sea at Dura-Europos and in Mesopotamia. Coinage became more abundant with the proliferation of both local and imperial mints. Many towns such as Zeugma, Damascus, Pella, Philadelphia (Amman), and even little Areopolis (modern Rabba, Jordan) occasionally struck their own coins, but the principal imperial mints in the Near East were at Antioch and Alexandria. Glass is much more com mon too, best preserved when recovered among grave goods. Pottery is well made and includes the major fine wares of the Roman world, die red-gloss wares known as Eastern sigillata and African red slip. Metalwork, especially in bronze, is common too for jewelry, tools, and household cult images. [See Coins; Glass; and Ceramics, article on Ce ramics of die Hellenistic and Roman Periods.] R u r a l Areas. Agriculture was already well-developed and widespread in the Near East and Roman rule brought no great technological breakthroughs. What Rome did contrib ute, however, was the long period of sustained peace which permitted the easier spread of ideas and what may have been the fullest expansion of agriculture until modern times. For the former, it was the spread of technical inventions, largely those developed at Alexandria in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods. For example, the geographer Strabo de scribes a water screw used for raising water from the Nile to the Roman fortress at Babylon in Egypt in the early first century CE; half a century later an example is attested epigraphically on the Euphrates near Samosata. N o certain trace has yet been found anywhere in the Near East of the characteristic Roman practice, so common in Europe and parts of North Africa, of centuriation—dividing the land scape up for colonists into great regular squares of, typically, 7 7 6 yards. Farmsteads dated to the Roman period are emerging in large numbers from the landscape surveys now
ROMAN EMPIRE so common in Jordan and Israel in particular. In the mar ginal regions of the Hauran in southern Syria into which agriculture spread very fully in the Roman period, old air photographs preserve traces of fossilized field systems prob ably belonging to tire Roman and Byzantine settlements in their midst. Not the Roman centurial squares but fairly reg ular long, narrow strip fields, marked by stone boundary walls. T h e pattern emerging from field surveys is uneven, but tire impression is of a densely settled landscape in which even in marginal regions with inadequate rainfall, pre-Ro man methods of water harvesting, permitted farming to be sustained for generations. [See Agriculture.] In supply, communications, and transport there was a ma jor impact. T h e change was brought about not so much by Roman engineering skill as by the opportunity for devel opment of native traditions in the construction of dams, res ervoirs, and cisterns which now abound in the region. T h e Romans, however, were great bridge builders and many of the finest surviving examples are to be seen in the Near East, especially those on the tributaries of the Euphrates around Samosata. Many ancient roads became Roman highways, and scores of new roads were constructed, creating a net work that in scale and quality was unsurpassed till the nine teenth and twentieth centuries. Superb examples can be viewed all over the region from the frontier roads of the upper Euphrates, through the desert roads of Syria and Ara bia, to the great highways which bound together the region as a whole. T h e ancient coast road of the Levant, the Via Maris to Egypt, was paved and marked by milestones under Roman rule, other roads were built to join Palmyra to the Euphrates and southwards to Damascus, and numerous new surfaced roads connected the towns of the Near East
ROMAN EMPIRE.
Via Nova
439
to one another. Especially notable is the Via Nova Traiana in Jordan where not just tire road but even the regular towers and groups of inscribed milestones at each Roman mile is often visible. Terrain was no impediment, as the zigzags which carry the Via Nova across the great slash of Jordan's Wadi el-Mujib attest. [See Transportation; Roads.] T r a d e a n d Industry. T h e remarkable sea captain's handbook, The Periplus
of the Erythraean
Sea (c. 40-70 G E ) ,
provides details of trade between Egypt and India, which is confirmed by finds of Roman artifacts, including terra sig illata (at Arikamedu in Tamil Nadu) and coins (in southern India and Sri Lanka). Trade provided a wider range of items from distant points within the empire and beyond. Thus amphorae attest to wine imports from the Aegean, fine redgloss terra sigillata to trade with Gaul and tire province of Africa, and numerous marbles can be traced to their origins in Asia Minor and North Africa, the Aegean, and Italy. Ex otic commodities from outside tire empire include Chinese silk from a Palmyrene tomb, lapis lazuli from the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, ivory from Sub-Saharan Africa, am ber from the Baltic. T o facilitate trade, not only Caesarea Maritima but also Seleucia Pieria were given sophisticated artificial harbors to supplement the many others along the coast from Cilica to Egypt. At Antioch, the river Orontes was tamed by canals, which allowed goods to be brought upriver, possibly as part of a military supply route linking the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. Industries included the dyeworks of the Levant, fulling at Antioch, silk weaving at Damascus, and the production of fine linen, jewelry and glass. Natural resources were ex ploited: copper from tire Wadi 'Arabah, the cedar forests of Lebanon, and bitumen from the Dead Sea.
Trajana, looking south. (Courtesy D . L . K e n n e d y )
440
ROMAN EMPIRE
The nature and role of Roman influence on provincial economies is keenly debated. Although most scholars accept that there was little direct intervention, the needs of the fron tier armies, the effects of taxation, and the impact of transforming large areas into imperial estates, will certainly have brought about changes in scale, character and direction. More passively, peace and political unification permitted the gradual filtering of ideas around the region as a whole. In agriculture, the ubiquitous olive presses still to be seen on the limestone massif illustrate one area of development, and recent surveys and examination of air photos have revealed how farming penetrated even the more marginal areas. R o m a n Army. T h e work of the military is much harder to trace. We know that upward of one hundred thousand soldiers were based in die eastern provinces, over half in greater Syria but, unlike the West, few of their bases have been located or investigated. Most are known only from lit erary references or artifacts, such as military tombstones and stamped tiles. There is a legion fortress at Satala in north eastern Anatolia, and the outiine of tiiat at Bostra in Arabia is visible from the air, but the location of a first-century fort has been excavated at Tell el-Hajj on the Euphrates, re vealing typical round corners, which contrast with the pos sibly second-century fort at Humeima in Jordan where the circuit has small projecting towers. The best evidence comes from the third century C E , when the Diocletianic castella or fortresses appear along the desert fringes of Syria and Ara bia. Part of the explanation for the spotty attestation for mil itary structures seems to be that troops were largely based in earlier periods in the towns where the evidence is lost or hidden. The classic case is at Dura-Europos, where exca vation has revealed how an entire quarter within the town walls had been taken over—indeed, walled off—by die mil itary. The garrison built new, characteristically Roman mil itary structures, such as barrack blocks, and also made use of what was there, as in the case of the temple of Azzanathkona, which became the regimental archive. Finally, the East has superb examples of Roman siege works; not just the well-known first-century CE example at Masada, but another at Machaerus, in Jordan. There are also second-century ex amples at Battir and Nahal Hever in Israel and a possibly third century example at Hatra in Iraq. [See Fortifications; article on Fortifications of the Hellenistic and Roman Peri ods.] Population. Ethnic Italians were rare outside the admin istration and army; even Greeks were few and scattered in the newer urban centres. Many urban natives throughout the eastern provinces, however, became Hellenized in lan guage and, to some extent, culture. In greater Syria the na tive population was largely Semitic. Latin is rare in inscrip tions; Greek is much more common. Indigenous languages such as Palmyrene and Nabatean are preserved on numer ous inscriptions; even more startiing is the survival of tens of thousands of so-called Safaitic graffiti scratched on the rocks of the harra (the boulder-strewn southern part of
the Syrian desert) and hammada (the gravel- and pebblestrewn parts) farther south, attesting to a degree of literacy and self-awareness amongst die nomads. [See Greek; Latin; Palmyrene Inscriptions; Nabatean Inscriptions; Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] Soldiers from distant provinces settled and intermarried in the East. Traders and refugees from the Parthian (Per sian) Empire came as well. In crude terms we can measure the size of the military impact. Initially most of the approx imately 100,000 soldiers were foreigners, but there contin ued to be recruitment from throughout the East as well as beyond—Italians in the legions and Thracians, Gauls, Moors, and Goths in the auxiliary regiments. An inscription (ILS 2683) records the tally of 117,000 homines (probably those citizens of tax-paying age) at Apa mea in Syria one of the larger cities, under Augustus. An tioch may have reached 250,000 in habitants. Archaeology can assist. Scholars will dispute likely and possible popula tion densities, and must make subjective allowances for the amounts of open space. Nevertheless, broad population pa rameters may be calculated for individual towns from the extent of area walled; at Samosata, for example, the walls run for 5 km (3 mi.). Then there is the impressionistic value of the numbers and supposed sizes of towns. There is also die evidence of field survey for the size and number of sites of all kinds in the Roman period. Finally, there is the mount ing evidence for the extent and intensity of agriculture, im plying a large population. At its peak, a population of thirty to fifty million persons may have lived between Bosphorus and Cyrenaica in the second century C E and about ten mil lion in greater Syria. F u t u r e of R e s e a r c h . Roman sites abound in the Near East. Cities have always been attractive to archaeologists, but excavation has extended now to military sites—espe cially in Jordan—and field survey has produced rich harvests of "Roman" sites of all kinds. T h e pressing need today for the understanding of die Roman period, as for other histor ical eras, is for salvage of die many sites threatened not only by population growth and land development but also by hy droelectric projects and other irrigation schemes. [See also Byzantine Empire. In addition, most of the sites mentioned
are the subject
of independent
entries.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bowersock, Glen W . Roman Arabia. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1983. Standard study of an area undergoing increasingly intensive research. B o w m a n , Alan K . Egypt
after the Pharaohs,
332 BC-AD
642. L o n d o n ,
1986. Beautifully illustrated and evocative study of a key a n d highly distinctive province. The Cambridge Ancient History. 3d ed. L o n d o n , 1970-. T h i s revised edition of volumes 9- incorporates solid accounts b y international scholars of all the major themes of the R o m a n period, including chapters devoted t o specific eastern provinces (e.g., D a v i d L . K e n nedy, "Syria," vol. 10). Cornell, T i m , and J o h n Matthews. Atlas of the Roman World. N e w York, 1982. Superb m a p s a n d color photographs illustrate a n d evoke t h e R o m a n Empire.
ROWE, ALAN Dentzer, Jean-Marie, a n d Winfried O r t h m a n n , eds. Archeologie
et his
441
Northern Jordan, I, edited by Bert D e Vries. Journal of R o m a n A r chaeology Supplementary Series. In press ( d u e October 1995). Based mainly on air p h o t o g r a p h s , this study illustrated the extent to which even marginal areas were settled intensely. Kennedy, David L . "Syria," In Cambridge Ancient History. 3d ed. Vol. 10, p p . 703-736. Cambridge, in press (due 1996). Kennedy, David L., a n d Derrick N . Riley. Rome's Desert Frontier from the Air. Austin, 1990. Air views illustrate the range, character, a n d context of R o m e ' s military installations. Levi, D o r o . Antioch Mosaic Pavements. Princeton, 1947. T h e principal collection of R o m a n mosaics from, in this case, the provincial capital.
University of Pennsylvania Museum. He was director from 1925 to 1928. Rowe uncovered a series of Canaanite tem ples, which he partially published in 1940. Full publication and reanalysis of tire Beth Shean excavations has lowered the dates and produced a new evaluation of much of the material (Kenyon, 1970, p . 219; James, 1966). T h e site is being reexcavated by Amihai Mazar for the Hebrew Uni versity of Jerusalem. From 1923 to 1925 Rowe worked as assistant to George A. Reisner at Giza, Egypt, where in 1925 he discovered the fourth-dynasty tomb of Hetepheres J, wife of Pharaoh Sne fru and mother of Khufu (Smith, 1956, pp. 144-145). From 1929 through 1931 Rowe directed the University Museum's excavations at Meidum, Egypt, for which he provided de tailed documentation of the earliest classic "residence-cem etery" of the Old Kingdom, including the funerary temple and causeway to the pyramid, which dates to the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth dynasty (Rowe, 1931), In 1934 he undertook minor explorations at the site of Gezer for the Palestine Exploration Fund. In 1936 Rowe published
M a c D o n a l d , B u r t o n . The Wadi
his important A Catalogue
toire de la Syrie,
vol. 2 La Syrie
de I'epoque
achemenide
a
I'avenement
de I'Islam. Saarbriicken, 1989. A m o s t valuable collection of essays by leading scholars o n n u m e r o u s aspects of Classical Syria not often surveyed outside specialist publications. Isaac, Benjamin. The Limits
of Empire:
The Roman
Army
in the
East.
Rev. ed. Oxford, 1992. Broad-ranging and provocative study. Jones, Arnold H . M . The Cities
of the Eastern
Roman
Provinces.
2d ed.
Oxford, 1971. Classic study of the m a n y cities of the region, here revised b y several regional experts. Kennedy, David L . " T h e Archaeology of die U m m el-Jimal Area: M a p s , Air P h o t o g r a p h s , a n d Surface Survey." In Umm el-Jimal, a Nabataean,
Roman,
Byzantine
and Early
el-Hasa
Islamic
Rural
Archaeological
Community
Survey,
in
1979-
1983, West-Central Jordan. Waterloo, Ontario, 1988. O n e of die first and most fully published field surveys which has helped to quantify die R o m a n presence in the N e a r Eastern landscape a n d place it in a broader chronological context. Macready, Sarah, and Frederick H . T h o m p s o n , eds. Roman Architec ture in the Greek World. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 7 . Superb collection of essays on an increasingly popular t h e m e ; note in particular references to other works b y D o d g e . Millar, F e r g u s . The Roman
Near
East,
31 BC-AD
337.
Cambridge,
Mass., 1993. T h e first major study of die region to appear for m a n y years, b y a leading historian of R o m e . Mitchell, S t e p h e n . Anatolia:
Land,
Men, and Gods in Asia Minor.
2 vols.
N e w York, 1993. Substantial a n d thoughtful study of R o m a n A n a tolia. Perkins, A n n . The Art of Dura-Europos. Oxford, 1973. A short b u t lively survey of the art and architecture, including t h e wall paintings. Rice, David Talbot. Byzantine Art. Rev. ed. H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1968. General, well-illustrated discussion of art from die R o m a n East. Schiirer, Emil. 'The History
of the Jewish
People
in the Age of Jesus
Christ,
17$ B.C.-A.D. 135. 4 vols. Revised a n d edited b y Geza Vermes et al. Edinburgh, 1973-1987. Superbly d o c u m e n t e d study of Judaea and neighboring regions. W a r d - P e r l d n s , J. B . Roman
Imperial
Architecture.
2d ed.
Harmond
sworth, 1989. Classic treatment whose major chapters on die N e a r East provide b o t h analysis a n d context. Welles, C . Bradford, R o b e r t O. Fink, a n d J. F r a n k Gillian. The Exca vations
at Dura-Europos:
The Parchments
and Papyri.
Final
Report,
Vol. 1. N e w Haven, 1959. Superb collection of military papyri from Syria a n d including t h e military calendar. Wells, Colin. The Roman Empire. Stanford, Calif., 1984. Short but stim ulating study of die R o m a n E m p i r e as a whole, combining d o c u mentary a n d archaeological sources in an enterprising manner. DAVID L. KENNEDY
ROWE, ALAN (1891-1968), British archaeologist and Egyptologist. Born in Horshonds, Essex, England, Rowe spent his early years in Australia. Between 1922 and 1928 he worked at Beth-Shean on the Palestine Expedition of the
Seals,
and Amulets
of Egyptian
in the Palestine
Scarabs,
Scaraboids,
Archaeological
Museum.
From 1942 to 1943 Rowe reported twice to the British War Office in Cairo on the state of monuments in Cyrenaica, formerly an ancient Greek kingdom in Libya. This activity led to Rowe's excavations (1952,1955-1957) around the an cient capital Cyrene for tire University of Manchester (Rowe, 1956, 1959). While curator at the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria (1940-1949), he explored the re mains of ancient Athribis (also Kom el-Atrib or Tell Atrib) near Benha in the central Delta. From 1945 to 1946 he ex cavated the temple and enclosure of the god Serapis (dis covered in 1943) at Alexandria (Rowe, 1946,1957). In 1950 he joined the faculty at the University of Manchester, where he remained until his death in 1968. During this time, when not in the field, Rowe wrote about the archaeology of Egypt, its western desert, and other areas of the Near East (Rowe 1953-1957, 1961). [See also Beth-Shean; Cyrene; Gezer; Giza; and the biog raphy
of
Reisner] BIBLIOGRAPHY
A n o n y m o u s . "Excavations in Palestine, 1932-4: Gezer." Quarterly the Department of Antiquities of Palestine 4 (1935): 198-201. J a m e s , Francis W . The Iron Age at Beth Shan:
A Study
of Levels
of
VI-IV.
Philadelphia, 1 9 6 6 . Kenyon, Kathleen M . Archaeology in the Holy I-and. 3d ed. N e w York, 1970. R o w e , Alan. The Four Canaanite Temples of Beth-Shan. 2 vols. Phila delphia, 1930-1940. R o w e , Alan. The Topography and History of Beth-Shan. Philadelphia, 1930. R o w e , Alan. "Excavations of t h e Eckley B . C o x e , Jr, Expedition at M e y d u m , Egypt, 1929-30." Museum Journal (University of P e n n sylvania) 22 (1931): 5-36. Rowe, Alan. " T h e 1934 Excavations at G e z e r . " Palestine Exploration Quarterly
4.4 (1935): 19-33-
442
RUJM EL-HIRI
R o w e , Alan. A Catalogue Amulets
of Egyptian
in the Palestine
R o w e , Alan. Discovery Alexandria.
Scarabs,
Archaeological
of the Famous
Scaraboids,
Museum. Temple
Seals,
and
Cairo, 1 9 3 6 ,
and Enclosure
of Serapis
at
Annales du Service des Antiquites de l ' E g y p t e , Cahier
no. 2 . Cairo, 1 9 4 6 . R o w e , Alan. " A C o n t r i b u t i o n t o the Archaeology of the W e s t e r n D e sert." Bulletin
of the John
Rylands
Library
36.1 (1953-1954): 1 2 8 -
145; 36-2 ( 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 5 4 ) : 4 8 4 - 5 0 0 ; 38.1 (1955): 1 3 9 - 1 6 5 ; 39.2 (1957): 485-520. R o w e , Alan. Cyrenaican
Expedition
of the University
of Manchester,
1952.
Manchester, 1 9 5 6 . R o w e , Alan. Cyrenaican j
9S5J
Expeditions
of the University
of
Manchester,
1957. M a n c h e s t e r , 1 9 5 9 .
R o w e , Alan. " S t u d i e s in t h e Archaeology of the N e a r E a s t . " Bulletin the John
Rylands
Library
of
43.2 (1960-1961): 480-491; 44.1 (1961-
1962): 1 0 0 - 1 1 8 . Smith, Joseph L . Tombs,
Temples,
and Ancient
Art. N o r m a n , Okla.,
1956. W i n e g r a d , Dilys P . Through of Archaeology
Time,
and Anthropology
Across
Continents:
at the University
A Hundred Museum.
Years
Philadel
phia, 1 9 9 3 . ROBERT H . D Y S O N , JR.
RUJM EL-HIRI (Ar., "stone heap of the wild cat"), a large Bronze Age megalithic complex also known as Rogem Hiri and Gilgal Rephaim, situated in the central Golan, about 16 km (10 mi.) east of tire northern shore of the Sea of Galilee (map reference 2254 X 2573), about 515 m above sea level. With major occupational remains from the Early and die Late Bronze Ages, the site consists of a massive, carefully constructed central cairn roughly 20 m in diameter and 4.5 m high, encircled by several concenttic stone circles. The outermost circle is about 156 m in diameter and 500 m in circumference. T h e 2.5-meter-high and 3.5-meter-wide stone rings are sporadically connected by a series of short radial walls. There are two monumental entryways to the complex, one facing the northeast and the other the south east. T h e cairn, circles, and hundreds of dolmens—the straight, shallow stone walls that surround the monument— constitute a large megalithic complex that is one of the most impressive archaeological stone monuments in the southern Levant. Petroglyphs have been reported both from the mon ument and from areas neighboring it. Rujm el-Hiri was discovered during the 1967-1968 ar chaeological survey of the Golan Heights. Initial explana tions for the function and the date of the complex described it as a ceremonial center, a defense enclosure, a central stor age facility, a large burial complex, a center for asttonomical observations, and a calendrical device. Rujm el-Hiri yielded almost no surface artifacts, limiting the possibilities for dat ing it. Tentative dates offered for the site were usually witiiin the temporal framework of the third millennium B C E , al though bodi slightiy earlier and later dates were also sug gested. T h e ongoing debates over the date and the function of Rujm el-Hiri triggered the Rujm el-Hiri Project (19881991), directed by Yonathan Mizrachi of Harvard Univer
sity, as part of the Land of Geshur Project of Tel Aviv Uni versity, in cooperation with the Israeli Antiquities Authority. The research program at Rujm el-Hiri was designed from the outset as a long-term, problem-oriented multidisciplinary effort, including a large excavation project, a geophysical survey program, a lichenometric study, and a comprehen sive study of the geometry and astronomy of the complex. A preliminary geophysical survey provided data on subsur face elements and valuable information on the central cairn: data from a magnetometer survey suggested tiiat the cairn was built on a naturally elevated basalt formation. Based on die radar data, several targets were identified within the cen tral cairn, one of which was excavated and turned out to be a carefully constructed burial chamber. Seismic data helped in isolating areas with deep stratification for future excava tions. Four main excavation areas were opened in the cir cular complex: NE-I and NE-II in the nordieast quadrant, SW-I in die southwest quadrant, and cairn I in the central cairn. Excavation exposed substantial examples of architec ture in the northeast gate and the central cairn and a dromos-based burial chamber measuring 2 x 2 m witiiin die central cairn. T h e looted chamber contained the remains of a dozen carnelian beads, arrowheads, and three gold ear rings. Excavation and survey data, lichenometric studies, and studies of the geometry and astronomy of the complex in dicate that die concentric stone circles and the two gates were already in place by the later part of the tiiird millen nium B C E . By contrast, evidence excavated from the central cairn and analysis of the geometry of the complex all point to the surprising possibility that the cairn in its present for mat was extensively used, and probably built, sometime dur ing the late second millennium B C E . Although alternative re constructions are possible, it appears that Rujm el-Hiri is a LB megalithic cairn built within a preexisting EB monu mental complex, rather than a single contemporary EB monumental complex built around a megalithic cairn (for the latter view, that die LB material represents a secondary usage of die cairn, see Kochavi, 1989). During the mid-third millennium B C E , a large ceremonial center was erected at Rujm el-Hiri. T h e complex reflects such care in engineering and design that there can be little doubt that the alignments of die architecture were inten tional and meant to manifest notions of religion and cos mology and permanently record culturally significant align ments (e.g., alignments associated with the agricultural calender) by using the entryways and tire radial walls as alignments fixing devices for botii celestial and noncelestial elements or phenomena. This EB monument served as a socioeconomic and a political central place for the local third-millennium urban populations—the inhabitants of the Golan enclosure sites. Concurrently, the site served as a spiritual focal point for tiiese populations, a node at which religious ceremonies associated with ritual observations
RULE OF T H E COMMUNITY were performed. T h e fact tiiat the Rujm el-Hiri complex falls within the temporal horizon in which complex society and subsequent urbanization emerged in this region is of special significance. Thus, Mizrachi interprets the hypermonumentality of the complex as a means of symbolizing power through the conspicuous consumption of energy, control of which is the fundamental measure of power in complex, urban societies. By the late second millennium B C E , the central cairn was built in its present format. This reconstruction is plausible in light of the accumulated evidence for construction and reuse of dolmens in tlie late second millennium that has been reported from other sites in neighboring areas and from the northern Golan. It is known from the astronomical and geo metric analyses that during this time tlie complex could not have functioned as a celestial-bodies alignments-fixing de vice. This observation, as well as the nature and the asso ciation of the late second-millennium material recovered, leads to die suggestion that tlie primary function of tlie com plex during the Late Bronze Age was associated witii burial. Something during the post-LB era, Rujm el-Hiri ceased be ing a focus of ceremonial or burial activity, and its primary function shifted toward something more earthly. It seems that by diis time the large stone complex had been used as a source of construction material, a cattle pen, a storage place, and perhaps even as a defense post. [See also Dolmen; and Golan.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aveni, A n t h o n y , a n d Y o n a t h a n Mizrachi. " A S t u d y of the G e o m e t r y and Astronomy of R o g e m Hiri, a Megalithic M o n u m e n t from t h e Southern L e v a n t . " F o r t h c o m i n g . Detailed study of the astronomical and geometric aspects of the complex. Essential reading. Kochavi, M o s h e . " T h e L a n d of G e s h u r Project: Regional Archaeology of t h e S o u t h e r n G o l a n , 1 9 8 7 - 1 9 8 8 S e a s o n s . " Israel Exploration
Jour
nal 3 9 . 1 - 2 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 - 1 7 . Survey of s o m e recent Bronze and Iron Age work in the Golan. Mizrachi, Yonathan. " M y s t e r y Circles o n the G o l a n . " Biblical ology Review
Archae
1 8 . 4 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 4 6 - 5 7 . T h e story of five years of research
at Rujm el-Hiri, including a description of each of the major research programs, color p h o t o s , drawings, a n d reconstructions. Mizrachi, Y o n a t h a n . " R u j m el-Hiri: T o w a r d an U n d e r s t a n d i n g of a Bronze Age Megalithic M o n u m e n t in the L e v a n t . " P h . D . diss., H a r vard University, 1 9 9 3 . T h e m o s t detailed a n d comprehensive study available o n Rujm el-Hiri, including site plans, drawings, a n d color plates. Mizrachi, Yonathan, M a t t a n y a h Z o h a r , M o s h e Kochari, Pirhiya Beck, Vincent M u r p h y , A n t h o n y Aveni, a n d Simcha L e v - Y a d u n . " R e p o r t of t h e 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 9 1 Exploration Efforts at R o g e m Hiri, G o l a n Heights." Israel Exploration Journal (forthcoming). Detailed techni cal report of the R u j m el-Hiri excavations. Z o h a r , M a t t a n y a h . " R o g e m Hiri: A Megalithic M o n u m e n t in the G o l a n . " Israel
Exploration
Journal
3 9 . 1 - 2 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 8 - 3 1 . S u m m a r y of
the available information a b o u t R u j m el-Hiri prior to t h e Rujm elHiri Project, with detailed description of the complex's architecture. Z o h a r , M a t t a n y a h . "Megalithic Cemeteries in the L e v a n t . " In alism
in the levant;
spectives,
Archaeological
Materials
in Anthropological
Pastor Per
edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef a n d Anatoly K h a z a n o v , p p . 4 3 -
443
6 3 . Prehistory Press M o n o g r a p h s in World Archaeology, n o . 1 0 . M a d i s o n , Wis., 1 9 9 2 . C o m p r e h e n s i v e survey of megalithic remains in the Levant. YONATHAN MIZRACHI
RULE OF THE COMMUNITY. T h e abbreviated tide of the Rule of the Community is i Q S ; the iQ indicates tiiat it comes from the first cave at Qumran to yield manu scripts. T h e original find was made in 1947, and the text, photographs of its eleven columns, and a transcription into Hebrew characters were published by tiieir editors, Millar M. Burrows, John C. Trever, and William H. Brownlee, in 1951. T h e S in the abbreviated title represents the Hebrew word serek ("rule"), which occurs several times in the scroll. T h e closest analogy to the scroll's contents is to be found in the rules of monastic orders, with their mixture of disciplin ary directives and idealistic exhortation. T h e Rule reveals the internal organization of the Qumran community, whose in stitutions, many believe, identify its members as Essenes. Surveys of research into the scroll have been published by Hans Bardtke and Mathias Delcor (851-857). T e n badly damaged manuscripts of the Rule were found among the thousands of fragments scattered in Cave 4 at Qumran. One other extremely fragmentary copy (5Q11) was found in Cave 5 (Milik, 1962). Fragments detached from the scroll when it was removed from the cave were published by Dominique Barthelemy and J. T . Milik (1955, pp. 107-130). They are tlie Rule of the Congregation (iQSa) and the Book of Blessings ( i Q S b ) . All these texts are now available in volume 1 of the Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project edited by J. H. Charleswortli. On paleographic grounds, Nahman Avigad (1958, p. 71) and Frank M. Cross (1961, p . 258, n. 116) assign i Q S to the first quarter of the first century B C E . Neither it nor any of the extant copies of the Rule is tlie original. Hence, the composition of the Rule in its present form must be dated sometime in tlie second century B C E (Cross, 1967, p. 120). The earliest commentators noted, but did not analyze, the scroll's composite character (Dupont-Sommer, 1953, p. 90; Wernberg-Maller, 1957, p . 56, 11. 49). Although acute in their observations, the attempts of Jiirgen Becker (1963, pp. 39-42) and Alfred R. C. Leaney (1966) to define the scroll's component elements ultimately proved unsatisfactory be cause they failed to explain how and why the elements were assembled. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor (1969) was the first to suggest a general hypothesis of composition; his conclu sions were accepted with minor modifications by Jean Pouilly (1976). Their hypothesis integrates tlie partial hy potheses of their predecessors (Denis, 40-44; Duhaime, 1977; and von der Osten-Sacken, 1969, pp. 17-27) and has raised no decisive objections (Schurer, 1986, vol. 1, p. 383; Davies, 1987, p. 60). It postulates that i Q S developed in
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RUMEITH, TELL ER-
four stages in order to meet the community's changing needs. The first stage of development ( t Q S 8:i-ioa, i 2 b - i 6 a , 9:3-10:8) represents the manifesto in which the Teacher of Righteousness proposed the establishment of a community in the desert to the Essenes (Murphy-O'Connor, 1974, p. 237; Knibb, 1987, p. 127). The community would be a spir itual temple ( i Q S 8:5) in which spiritual sacrifices ( i Q S 9 : 4 5) are offered to expiate the sins of the land ( i Q S 8:6, 10). Its core would be composed of priests (iQS 9:7). The second stage, consisting of two interpolations ( i Q S 8:io-i2a, 8:i6b-9:2), was inserted into the manifesto not long after the community was established (Knibb, 1987, p. 136). T h e manifesto continued to define tire community, but legislation to deal with failures of obedience had become necessary. The third stage reflects a completely different social sit uation. T h e community's need to redefine itself as a de mocracy (iQS 5:1-13), to enact legislation for the conduct of a general assembly ( i Q S 6:8-13), and to admit new re cruits ( i Q S 6:13-23) suggests that the original idealism had been instimtionalized. T h e casuistry of the penal code (iQS 6:24-7:25) confirms the inference that we have here tire problems typical of a late stage of development in a large community (Weinfeld, 1986). The fourth stage is designed to counteract the commu nity's descent into formalism by revitalizing its spiritual life. It bracketed stages 1-3 with material taken from the liturgy of the renewal of die covenant ( i Q S 1:1-3:12,10:9-11:22), during which members recommitted themselves. T h e ad dition of i Q S 4:23b-26, which sttesses the crucial impor tance of individual decision, adapted the originally indepen dent Instruction on the Two Spirits (iQS 3:t3~4:23a) to the same end (Duhaime, 1977). Such indirect appeals were strengthened by new legislation regarding the quality of en trants and the continuous study of the Law ( i Q S 5:13b6:8). [See also Dead Sea Scrolls; Qumran.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gottes:
Heils-
und Siindenbegriffe
in den
Qurn-
rantexten und im Neuen Testament. Studien zur Umwelt des N e u e n Testaments, 3. Gottingen, 1963. Burrows, Millar, ed., with John C . T r e v o r and William H . Brownlee. The Dead
Sea Scrolls
and Transcription
of St. Mark's
of the Manual
Monastery,
of Discipline.
Whitaker. The Dead with
English
Sea Scrolls:
Translations,
Hebrew,
vol. 1, Rule
Aramaic,
and Greek
of the community
and
Texts Related
Documents. T u b i n g e n , 1994. Cross, Frank M o o r e . " T h e D e v e l o p m e n t of the Jewish Scripts." In The Bible
and the Ancient
Near
East:
Essays
in Honor
of William
Foxwell
Albright, edited b y G. Ernest Wright, p p . 133-202. G a r d e n City, N.Y., 1961. C r o s s , F r a n k M o o r e . The Ancient
lical Studies.
Library
of Qumran
and Modern
Bib
Rev. ed. G a r d e n City, N . Y . , 1976.
D a v i e s , Philip R. Behind
the Essenes:
History
and Ideology
in the
Dead
Sea Scrolls. Brown Judaic Studies, n o . 94. Atlanta, 1987. Delcor, Mathias. "Litteratur essenienne." In Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement, vol. 9, cols. 828-960. Paris, 1978. D u h a i m e , Jean. "L'instruction sur les deux esprits et les interpolations dualistes a Q u m r a n . " Revue Biblique 84 (1977): 566-594. D u p o n t - S o m m e r , A n d r e . Nouveau
apercus
sur les manuscrits
de la Mer
Morte. Paris, 1953. K n i b b , Michael A. The Qumran Community. C a m b r i d g e , 1987. Leaney, Alfred R. C . The Rule of Qumran and Its Meaning. London, 1966. Milik, J. T . "Review of P. Wernberg-Maller, The Manual of Discipline." Revue Biblique 67 (i960): 410-416. M u r p h y - O ' C o n n o r , Jerome. " L a genese litteraire d e la Regie d e la C o m m u n a u t e . " Revue Biblique 76 (1969): 528-549. M u r p h y - O ' C o n n o r , Jerome. " T h e Essenes a n d T h e i r H i s t o r y . " Revue Biblique 81 (1974): 215-244. O s t e n - S a c k e n , P e t e r v o n d e r . Gotl Untersuchungen
zum Dualismus
und Belial:
Traditionsgeschichtliche
in den Texten
aus Qumran.
Studien
zur Umwelt des N e u e n T e s t a m e n t s , 6. Gottingen, 1969. Pouilly, Jean. La Regie
de la Communaute
de Qumran:
Son evolution
lit
teraire. Cahiers d e la Revue Biblique, 17. Paris, 1976. Schiirer, Emil. The History
of the Jewish
People
in the Age of Jesus
Christ,
175 B.C.-A.D. 13$. Vol. 3, part 1. N e w English version revised a n d edited by Geza Vermes et al. Edinburgh, 1986. Weinfeld, M . The Organisational ran Sect: A Comparison
with
Pattern Guilds
and the Penal and Religious
Code of the Associations
Qum of the
Hellenistic-Roman Period. N o v u m T e s t a m e n t u m et Orbis A n t i q u u s , vol. 2. Fribourg a n d Gottingen, 1986. W e r n b e r g - M e l l e r , P r e b e n C . H . The Manual
of Discipline
Translated
and Annotated. Studies on the T e x t s of the Desert of J u d a h , vol. 1. Leiden, 1957. JEROME M U R P H Y - O ' C O N N O R , O . P .
RUMEITH, T E L L E R - , site located near die northern
Avigad, N a h m a n . " T h e Palaeography of the D e a d Sea Scrolls a n d Re lated Documents.'' In Aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by C h a i m Rabin and Yigael Yadin, p p . 56-87. Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 4. Jerusalem, 1958. Baillet, Maurice, J. T . Milik, a n d Roland de Vaux. Les "petites grottes" de Qumran. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, vol. 3. Ox ford, 1962. Bardtke, H . "Literaturbericht iiber Q u m r a n VII: Die Sektenrolle 1 Q S . " TheologischeRundschau 38 (1973): 257-291. Barthelemy, Dominique, a n d J. T . Milik. Qumran Cave I. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 1. Oxford, 1955. Becker, Jtirgen. Das Heil
Charlesworth, J. H . , ed., with Frank M o o r e Cross, J. M i l g r o m , Elisha Qimron, Lawrence H . Schiffman, L . T . Stuckenbruck, a n d R. E .
vol. 2, fasc. 2,
Plates
N e w H a v e n , 1951.
border of Jordan and the town of Ramtlia (map reference 247 X 212). T h e site's excavator, Paul W. Lapp, identified it with Ramat-Gilead based on the apparent linguistic sim ilarity, its location, and the occupational evidence. T h e site's small size could disqualify the identification, but it is the only excavated site in the area whose occupational history cor responds to the biblical record. Tell el-Husn, for example, tire largest site in the area with any archaeological remains, has not been excavated. In a sounding at Rumeith in 1962, sponsored by the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), Lapp in vestigated the occupation on the mound, and he uncovered Hellenistic and later material to the east, which, without sub stantial architecture, seemed to indicate only transient oc-
RUSAFA cupation. H e returned for a six-week excavation in 1967 with the additional sponsorship of the Pittsburgh Theolog ical Seminary, limiting the second campaign to the fort on the mound, which had been occupied for about two cen turies during the Iron Age. Lapp investigated the four Iron Age strata (VIII-V) by clearing the nordieast quadrant of the fortress down to bedrock and clearing a portion of the southeast quadrant along the east wall. T h e plans of the four strata were recovered and ceramic groups whose typology is Syrian were collected. T h e contours of the mound suggest that the stratum VIII fort, believed to be Solomonic, was symmetrical (approxi mately 37 X 32 m). Its mud-brick walls were about 1.5 m thick and the north wall had a recessed gate. Excavation to bedrock revealed a leveling operation prior to construction. The destruction debris above the stratum VIII floors was as much as a half-meter thick. T h e stone grinding implements, craters and bowls, ovens, and bins recovered indicate that tire occupants had produced and processed grain. In stra tum VII (probably when the site was under dre control of the Arameans), which followed soon after the stratum VIII destruction, a stone defense line more than 1.5 m wide was built of very large and roughly dressed boulders around the mud-brick fort. Thin walls divided the space between the stone and mud-brick walls into casemates and the earlier gateways were reused. T h e Arameans may have converted tire site into a border fort. About 2 m of destruction debris preserved the stratum VII plan and assemblages of pottery and stone implements that show a distinct Syrian influence of the mid-ninth century B C E . T h e destructions could date to the reigns of Jehoshaphat and Ahab or to Ahaziah and Jehoram. T h e stratum VI occupation could be attributed to the Ar ameans and Hazael's extending Syria's borders to the south. T h e entire area within the walls of the stratum VI fort had been leveled in order to construct a platform out of thick gray clay. T h e houses in the southeast quadrant consisted of two rooms with a cobbled floor and evidence of a stairway to the roof. T h e lower half-meter of the 50-cm-tirick walls was constructed of small rough stones topped by mud brick. Ceramic assemblages, found on tire floor in the thick de struction layer, dated the destruction to about 800 B C E , pos sibly relating it to Joash's defeat of the Arameans at Aphek. T h e strata VI and V occupations extended beyond the fortress walls, but there was no sign of their defenses. Inside the lines of the fort, the stratum V walls were preserved to a height of 1.5 m. Rooms were filled with destruction debris that may belong to Tiglath-Pileser Ill's 733 B C E campaign in Palestine. BIBLIOGRAPHY L a p p , N a n c y L . " R u m e i t h . " In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2 , Field Re ports, edited by D e n y s H o m e s - F r e d e r i c q a n d J. Basil Hennessy, p p . 4 9 4 - 4 9 7 . Louvain, 1 9 8 9 .
L a p p , Paul W . " T e l l e r - R u m e i t h . " Revue
Biblique
445
7 0 (1963): 406-411;
7 5 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 9 8 - 1 0 5 . Preliminary reports after the excavations. L a p p , Paul W . "Excavations at Tell e r - R u m e i t h . " In The Tale of the Tell: Archaeological
Studies,
edited b y N a n c y L . L a p p , p p . 1 1 1 - 1 1 9 .
Pittsburgh Theological M o n o g r a p h Series, 5 . Pittsburgh, 1 9 7 5 . P o p ular report of the excavations reprinted from an A S O R newsletter. NANCY L. L A P P
RUSAFA (Old Syriac, Rasappa; in Ptolemy, Resapha; Lat., Rosapha, Risapha; since the sixth century C E also Sergiopolis; Ar., Rusafat Hisham), site located 180 km (112 mi.) east of Aleppo, Syria, and 35 1cm (22 mi.) south of the Euphrates River. Excavations were conducted by tire Ger man Archaeological Institute from 1952 to 1965 under the direction of Johannes Kollwitz and since 1975 of Tilo Ulbert. T o date, no traces of a pre-Roman settlement have been found. T h e most recent excavations have recovered evi dence for the presence of the Roman army beginning in the first century C E (see below). In about 300 C E the Christian officer Sergius suffered a martyr's death in the Diocletianic limes fort of Rusafa (Vita Ss. Sergii et Bacchi, Acta Martyrum, Analecta Boll. 14, 1895, 373ff). The fort later grew into a city that prospered as a result of the number of pil grims visiting the grave of St. Sergius. It became in the fifth century the seat of a bishop and later of a metropolitan. In the Byzantine period (sixth century), the city was fortified (Procopius, de Aedificiis 2.9.3-8). From 724 to 745 it was the residence of the Umayyad caliph Hisham and was a Chris tian/Islamic city until the Mongol invasion of Syria in 1 2 5 9 1260. T h e site has been uninhabited since. In die sixth century the fortification walls were expanded to enclose a rectangular city area of 21 ha (62 acres). Their four monumental main gates and fifty towers have been largely preserved. Vaulted cisterns in the southwest area of tire city also belong to this period. In 1986, in tire course of investigating the ancient city's water supply system, it was possible to determine that there had been a dam outside the walls that collected the water from winter and spring rains and directed it into the city. Through a complicated canal system, the water flowed into four giant cisterns, whose an nual levels would have sufficed for about six drousand in habitants for one year, based on an assumed use of 10 1 per person. In addition, each residential unit possessed its own cistern for collecting rainwater. Deep shafts, from which the saline groundwater could be drawn for watering livestock and gardens, were also distributed throughout die city. The investigation of a residential quarter in die vicinity of the cisterns showed a continuity of settlement in the same stone houses from the sixth to the thirteenth century CE. T h e most recent excavations also permit a better understanding of the system of streets and open squares in the city. T h e sixth-century public buildings, such as the forum, baths, and pilgrim lodgings, have not yet been excavated. It is the ruins of the city's large churches that have determined Rusafa's
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appearance and that were the object of past investigations. [See Churches.] T h e oldest preserved church (Basilica B) was erected in the early sixth century on the site of an earlier structure. [See Basilicas.] The most recent excavations have produced finds from die first century CE from under its floor (the evidence of the first phase of Roman occupation on the Syrian limes). The so-called Central Building also dates to the sixth century; this is a church that manifests both a basilican and a centralizing architectural schema. Basilica A, the bishop's church probably originally dedicated to the Holy Cross, also housed the relics of the city's patron, St. Sergius, from the Early Byzantine period until the city's de mise in the thirteenth century. In antiquity, this basilica, with its wide arcade (54.40 m long, 28.60 m wide, and preserved to a height of 18 m), suffered repeated earthquake damage; however, in contrast to the two other large Christian build ings at the site, it was always repaired. Both a baptistery and a residential building for the metropolitan were annexed to the basilica. [See Baptisteries.] A spacious peristyle court yard in die northern part of die church was probably re served for pilgrims. T h e grave itself was housed in the es pecially artfully outfitted subsidiary room in the north, next to die basilica's apse. The large three-nave mosque of Hisham built in the pil grim courtyard in the early eighth century is evidence of die probably peaceful coexistence of the Christian and Islamic communities at Rusafa at the start of the Umayyad period. [See Mosque.] During diis period, a suq ("market") was es tablished to the west of the mosque and the church. T o judge from the finds, it was still functioning into die thir teenth century. T h e few rooms excavated so far have given valuable indications about the types of crafts produced (metal handicrafts, dye-works). In 1982 a hoard of five gilded silver vessels decorated in niello was discovered con cealed in a pottery vessel in the pilgrim courtyard. This unique treasure was restored in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany, and is now on display in the National Museum in Damascus. It consists of votive offer ings to the grave of Sergius that were hidden shortiy before the Mongolian invasion. All of the pieces date to the twelfththirteenth centuries; some were made in Syria, partially fol lowing western models. At least two of the other vessels came from western workshops and has reached the Near East in conjunction with the Crusades. Especially interesting is the drinking vessel that belonged to Raoul I of Couzy, a French noble, who took part in the Third Crusade and fell in die Battle of Akko in 1 1 9 3 . His own coat of arms and that of his family are engraved on the cup. Inside the city, the fourth of the large basilicas (the so-
called Basilica C, a columned basilica from the fifth-sixth centuries with a surrounding step podium) has also been investigated, as has a khan (a caravanserai within the walls). Research into the extensive construction outside the city walls has begun. This includes a fortified Late Antique sub urban villa, occupied until the Umayyad period, and die socalled al-Mundir building, probably a reception hall of the sixth-century Ghassanid ruler of the same name. In an area south of Rusafa, the remains of large buildings constructed from mud bricks can still be recognized. One was excavated by Katarina Otto-Dorn during the first Rusafa campaign in 1952 and published as the Palace of Hisham. T h e most re cent excavations have revealed a garden pavilion, richly dec orated with stucco, that is also dated to the Umayyad period. It belonged to another very extensive palace area. BIBLIOGRAPHY Brinker, Werner. " Z u r Wasserversorgung v o n Resafa-Sergiupolis." Damaszener
Mitteilungen
5 (1991): 119-146.
Gatier, Pierre-Louis, and T h i l o Ulbert. "Eine Tursturzinschrift aus R e safa-Sergiupolis." Damaszener
Mitteilungen
5 (1991): 169-182.
K a r n a p p , Walter. Die Stadtmauer von Resafa in Syrien. Berlin, 1 9 7 6 . Kollwitz, Johannes, et al. "Vorberichte iiber die G r a b u n g e n . " Archaologischer Anzeiger
(1954): 119-159; (1957): 64-109; (1963): 328-360;
( 1 9 6 8 ) : 3 0 7 - 3 4 3 . Preliminary reports of the excavations.
Kollwitz, Johannes. " D i e G r a b u n g e n in Resafa." I n Neue deutsche grabungen
im Mittelmeergebiel
und im Vorderen
Orient,
Aus
edited b y E r i c h
Boehringer, p p . 4 5 - 7 0 . Berlin, 1 9 5 9 . K o n r a d , Michaela. "Flavische u n d spatantike B e b a u u n g u n t e r der Basilika B v o n Resafa-Sergiupolis." Damaszener
Mitteilungen
6 (1992):
313-402.
Logar, N u s a . " K a t a l o g der Keramikfunde aus d e m Wasserverteiler." Damaszener
Mitteilungen
$ (1991): 147-168.
Logar, N u s a . " D i e Kleinfunde aus d e m Westhofbereich d e r Grofjen Basilika v o n Resafa." Damaszener M a c k e n s e n , M i c h a e l . Resafa
Stadtmauern
von Resafa,
S a c k - G a u P , D . , Resafa
Mitteilungen
I: Eine Befestigte
6 (1992): 417-478.
spatantike
Anlage
vor den
M a i n z a m Rhein, 1 9 8 4 . IV: Die
Grofie
Moschee
von
Resafa-Rusafat
Hisam. Mainz a m Rhein, 1 9 9 5 . Sarre, Friedrich P . T . , a n d Ernst Herzfeld. Archaologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigris-Gebiet. Berlin, 1 9 2 0 . See volume 2 , pages 1 - 4 5 . Spanner, Harry, a n d Samuel Guyer. Rusafa: Die Wallfahrtsstadt des Heiligen
Sergios.
Berlin, 1 9 2 6 .
Ulbert, Thilo (Tilo). " E i n e neuentdeckte Inschrift aus Resafa." Archdologischer
Anzeiger
U l b e r t , T h i l o . Resafa
Sergiupolis.
(1977): 563-569. II: Die Basilika
des Heiligen
Kreuzes
in
Resafa-
aus
Resafa-
M a i n z a m Rhein, 1 9 8 6 .
U l b e r t , T h i l o . Resafa
III: Der kreuzfahrerzeitliche
Silbersehatz
Sergiupolis. M a i n z a m Rhein, 1 9 9 0 . Ulbert, Thilo. " B e o b a c h t u n g e n im Westhofbereich der GrofJen Basilika v o n Resafa." Damaszener
Mitteilungen
6 (1992): 403-416.
Ulbert, Thilo. " E i n umaiyadischer Pavilion in Resafa-Rusafat HiiSam." Damaszener
Mitteilungen
7 (1994): 213-231. T I L O ULBERT
Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
s SAFAITIC-THAMUDIC INSCRIPTIONS. Old Arabian script was used from perhaps as early as the eighth century B C E to as late as the fourth century CE, undergoing alterations as it spread across the vast Arabian Peninsula. Of die regional varieties, it is those conventionally termed Thamudic and Safaitic tiiat appear in North Arabia. Occasion ally, finds have been made of Old Arabian texts in the Le vant of the Hijaz variety called Dedanite and Lihyanite, but the vast majority are concentrated at al-'Ula (Dedan) in the Hijaz. T h e terms Thamudic and Safaitic are commonly used as conventional labels for these North Arabian inscriptions. They are in a South Semitic script and appear mainly on the desert fringe of the Levant. It is commonly assumed that the script evolved from Soutii Arabian through the influence of Dedanite and Lihyanite, with the various script types of Thamudic developing from those earlier writing systems and ending with the Safaitic texts. T h e language of the Tha mudic and Safaitic texts represents the linguistic family of what has been called Early North Arabian. T h e most distin guishing linguistic feature of these dialects is the use of the definite article h - . Thamudic texts are found throughout the Arabian Pen insula and represent the oldest of tlie North Arabian texts. The concentration of such texts in the northern Hijaz led initially to their ascription to tlie tribe of Thamud, known from the Assyrian annals and die Qur'an. Attempts have also been made by some scholars to associate the users of tlie script with the descendents of the Midianites. Neither theory has gained acceptance. T h e earliest forms of the script seemed to have emanated from the North Arabian oases of Tayma' and Dedan in the Hijaz, from which they spread elsewhere. [See Tayma'; Dedan,] In 1937, Fred V. Winnett proposed classifying the texts into five types labeled A-E, suggesting a sequential chronological and geographic development for the script. T h e problem with this classifi cation is that tlie categories are not ironclad: some texts ex hibit the characteristics of more than one group. Primitive forms also appear with more evolved forms of the script, defying any simple chronological arrangement of the texts. In 1970, Winnett revised the categories into geographic des ignations, with Najdi (B), Hijazi (C, D ) , and Tabuki (E) replacing the older categories. Both systems are still utilized
447
for convenience, in full recognition that further modification is needed. [See the biography of Winnett] The now more tiian fifteen thousand recorded Thamudic texts are mainly graf fiti, containing the name and patronymic of an individual, sometimes witii a petition to a deity or an individual and accompanying phrase. Their laconic nature makes dating precarious. Safaitic inscriptions primarily appear in southern Syria, northern Jordan, and northern Saudi Arabia, but a few iso lated finds have been made in western Iraq, on Lebanon's coasts and Biqa Valley, and as far afield as Pompeii, Italy. T h e name Safaitic is derived from the safa, the basalt desert southeast of Damascus, Syria; die term is, however, a mis nomer resulting from the initial discovery of the texts in the region in 1857. Most of tlie fourteen thousand published texts are concentrated in the basalt desert, or harm, of north east Jordan and neighboring southern Syria. Literally thousands more exist in this region and need to be recorded. T h e main contributors to the decipherment of the texts were Joseph Halevy in 1877, F. Praetorius in 1883, and E. Littmann in 1901. T h e latter was the first to recognize that the alphabet consisted of twenty-eight letters comparable to the Arabic alphabet. Some of the Thamudic E, or Tabuki, texts have a more marked similarity with the orthography of Sa faitic than the common varieties of Thamudic and have been designated Soutii Safaitic by some. The texts fre quently contain extensive geneaologies that trace the lineage back to an eponymous ancestor; they sometimes include an individual's social group or tribe ('I), along with various for mulae and religious petitions, with occasional allusions to some historical event. T h e date is normally of an unidenti fiable or ambiguous nature. e
Few of the Safaitic texts can be dated witii any precision, but tiiey seem generally to begin as early as the first century B C E and cease probably by the fourth century C E because they reflect no evidence of any Christian or Islamic influ ence. T h e overwhelming impression is tiiat they mainly stem from the first century CE, based on references to the Herodian dynasts, Nabatean kings, and Roman authorities, as well as the "Jews" (yhd), Itureans (yzr), and Persians (mdhy). Because most of the Thamudic and Safaitic inscriptions are found in the remote desert regions of North Arabia, some
448
SAFAR, FUAD
distance from settled regions and villages, they have tradi tionally been perceived as the product of a nomadic popu lation. Many of the texts speak of seasonal migrations with flocks and herds and many are accompanied by rock-art drawings of camels and horses, suggesting that pastoralists are the authors. Others, however, speak of attachments to villages and express intimate knowledge of political devel opments and imperial authorities, implying a population that was not just on the fringe of the sedentary population. The deities mentioned in the texts also include the Syrian Ba'al Shamin and Nabatean Dushara—cults associated with the shrines and temples of the settied population. Additional texts are being found scattered along the villages and settle ments of tire Transjordanian plateau and southern Syria. BIBLIOGRAPHY Graf, David F . " R o m e a n d die Saracens: Reassessing t h e N o m a d i c M e n a c e . " I n L'Arabie culturel: Actes
preislamique
du Colloque
et son environnement
de Strasbourg,
historique
et
edited by T o u f i c F a h d , p p .
3 4 1 - 4 0 0 . Leiden, 1 9 S 9 . Adventuresome reappraisal of the traditional " n o m a d i c " interpretation that needs to be refined in light of newly published texts. H a r d i n g , G. Lankester. An Index and Concordance
of Pre-Islamic
Arabian
Names and Inscriptions. T o r o n t o , 1971. Complete listing of the p u b lications a n d onomasticon of the texts. Macdonald, M . C. A. " N o m a d s a n d the H a w r a n in the Late Hellenistic and R o m a n Periods: A Reassessment of the Epigraphic Evidence." Syria 7 0 (1993): 3 0 3 - 4 1 3 . Defense of the traditional " n o m a d i c " view (formulated by die pioneer interpreters of the texts) that ignores the implications of many of the texts. Winnett, Fred V., a n d G. Lankester Harding. Inscriptions from Fifty Safaitic Cairns. T o r o n t o , 1 9 7 8 . Valuable collection and discussion of many of the texts. DAVID F . GRAF
joined Seton Lloyd again in 1943--1944 at Hassuna, a small mound south of Mosul, where they identified a new Chal colithic culture with distinctive pottery. In 1948 Safar and Lloyd began excavations on the ancient mound of Eridu, which proved to be of great importance in understanding the origin of the Sumerians and the development of the re ligious beliefs of ancient Mesopotamians. A sequence of eighteen occupation levels was established. A small temple belonging to the late Ubaid period was found at the top of the mound and primitive chapel founded on clean sand was uncovered on the lowest level. Safar's excavations undertaken at the Parthian-Arab site of Hatra in 1950 are still underway. H e directed only the first few seasons himself, but greatly influenced the subse quent fieldwork. H e published numerous articles about the site, particularly its Aramaic inscriptions. [See Hatra Inscrip tions.] In 1951-1952, Safar was one of the founders of the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Baghdad, in which he lectured in addition to his work at the Department of Antiquities. In 1956, Safar was appointed inspector gen eral of excavations, a post he held until his death, with the exception of a brief period when he was director general of antiquities. Fuad Safar died in an automobile accident while on his way to inspect the international rescue excavations in the Hamrin basin. His work covered nearly all of Iraq's major historical periods, and his interpretation of his discoveries was influential. His students are today distinguished archae ologists in Iraq. [See also Eridu; Hassuna; Hatra; and the biography of Lloyd.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
SAFAR, FUAD (1913-1978), Iraqi archaeologist. Born in Mosul, Safar studied at Safed College in Palestine ( 1 9 3 1 1932) and then graduated from the American University in Beirut (1933) with a degree in history and archaeology. H e continued his studies (1934-1938) on a scholarship at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree. Upon returning to Baghdad, he joined the antiquities department, where he began his career as Iraq's most outstanding excavator and archaeol ogist. In 1940-1941, Safar and Seton Lloyd excavated Tell 'Uqair in Lower Mesopotamia, whose material belongs to the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods. The remarkable painted murals in a temple from the Late Uruk period (c. 2800 B C E ) remain the only known examples from predynastic levels in southern Mesopotamia. In 1942 Safar directed the excava tions at the Islamic city of Wassit, near the modern town of Kut, built by al-Hajaj, the Umayyad governor of Iraq, H e subsequently published the results of the excavations in 1952. This publication is the only source of information about one of the most important Islamic ruins in Iraq. Safar
Lloyd, Seton, a n d F u a d Safar. " T e l l 'Uqair: Excavations b y t h e Iraq G o v e r n m e n t D i r e c t o r a t e of Antiquities in 1 9 4 0 - 4 1 . " Journal Eastern
Studies
of
Near
2 (1943).
Lloyd, Seton, a n d F u a d Safar. "Tell H a s s u n a : Excavations b y the Iraq G o v e r n m e n t Directorate of Antiquities in 1 9 4 3 a n d 1 9 4 4 . " Journal of Near
Eastern
Safar, F u a d . Wash,
Studies
4 (1945): 255-289.
the Sixth
Season's
Excavations
(in A r a b i c ) . Cairo,
1945.
Safar, F u a d , and M u h a m m a d A. Mustafa. Hatra, God (in Arabic). B a g h d a d , 1 9 7 4 . Safar, F u a d , et al. Eridu. B a g h d a d , 1 9 8 1 .
the City
of the Sun
LAMIA AL-GAILANI WERR
SAFUT, TELL, site located geologically on the central Transjordan plateau at 927 m above sea level, overlooking the amply watered Baq'ah Valley, whose agricultural activ ities it. administered on behalf of ancient Ammon (32°5'io" N , 35°4o'2o" E; map reference 228 X 168). Today, the tell stands within the northwest boundary of Greater Amman, just north of Suweileh and east of the modern village after which it is named, It is on the main Amman-Jerash road. In
SAFUT, TELL antiquity, Tell Safut also functioned as gatekeeper on a main access route to the capital of Transjordan, Rabbat Ammon, approximately 12 Ion (7 mi.) to the southeast. Selah Merrill visited Tell Safut in 1868 and named it as one of four major sites surrounding Amman. Subsequent published accounts of tours of biblical lands included Tell Safut on the Transjordanian leg of tire journey. An archae ological survey by Alexis Mallon in 1934 noted the existence of rampart fortifications built of large stones. Mallon sug gested that the ancient name of the place was Nobah (near Jogbehah, cf. Jgs. 8:11) Roland de Vaux (1978, p. 590), has, however, shown that Nobah of Numbers 32:42 has to be lo cated elsewhere. Surveys by Nelson Glueck (1939) and de Vaux (1938) noted the importance of Tell Safut relative to controlling the Baq'ah Valley. Except for some founda tion stones of a (possibly square) tower, practically no ar chitecture remained on the surface. In tire mid-1950s, how ever, the rerouted Amman-Jerash road carved its way past tire tell, cutting off a portion of tire southern sector. Farah Ma'ayeh (i960) and de Vaux (i960) believed that the bull dozing revealed a Middle Bronze Age glacis. Further widening of the highway occasioned initial exca vations in 1982 that are, under tire direction of Donald Wimmer, jointly sponsored by Seton Hall University (New Jer sey) and the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The new cut revealed flat, geologically laid stratigraphy that the bulldozer had cut at an angle, giv ing the false (but frequently cited) impression of a glacis. Five seasons of excavation followed (1983,1985,1987,1989, 1995). Material cultural remains clearly correlate with other Ammonite sites: tire Amman citadel, Tell el-'Umeiri, Tell Jawa, and U m m ad-Dananir. [See Amman; 'Unrein, Tell el-.] At Tell Safut excavation activity has been divided into areas A-J, omitting I. Squares are generally 5 x 5 m but no larger. Area A contains five squares at the eastern end of the southern slope, where the largest highway cut was made; to the north and adjacent to area A, area B contains nine squares, and, continuing in counterclockwise fashion, area C rises to tire summit through three 5 X 10 m squares di rectly west of area B, with four more squares directly north of these three. South of area C, separated from and lower by 10-15 m because of the highway cut, was the now almost totally eroded area D , two squares to bedrock shaved to a 45 degree angle by bulldozers in the 1950s. Area E has a single shallow square that is off the tell and across the wadi to the east; area F has one square, on the northern perimeter defense wall, directly across from areas A and B; area G has a single Iron Age tomb (fragment) and is where two probes were made, along the wadi at the northern base of the tell, that were occasioned by construction activity; area H has two squares on the hill across the wadi to the east; and area J has twelve squares on the southeast slope of dre tell, where the surface has been excavated only to expose architecture in order to forestall modern development.
449
Major architectural remains on the tell itself date to tire Late Bronze Age and the Late Iron Age into the Persian period. Some reuse of architectural materials on the summit in the Byzantine period is clear, but the material culture re mains from the Middle Bronze Age and Hellenistic period are scant. Late Roman ware seems to be continuous with the Byzantine ware off the tell in area E and across the wadi in area H, where the overview of the valley seems to have moved permanently by Islamic times. Two seasons of dia chronic excavation penetrating vertically reached LB archi tecture built direcdy on bedrock (areas B, D) or virgin soil (area A). In subsequent seasons understanding the Late Iron phases was sought by synchronic excavation, which exposes as much material from a single period as possible. Settlement at the site was fully underway in the Late Bronze Age, when a major perimeter defense wall was con structed running drrough area B into area J. It enclosed a stone structure (square B.5) into which a mud-brick super structure had collapsed, crushing a once-gilded bronze LB deity and associated sacred vessels. In all likelihood, despite destruction layers elsewhere on the tell, this enclosed sacred area, possibly a temple or shrine, and the perimeter wall continued in use through the Iron Age. In the adjacent square (B.4), Iron I pottery characterized a few intervening layers under an extensively expanded Late Iron occupation that had overflowed earlier walls, including a lower Late Iron perimeter defense wall that, by itself, had already more than doubled the area of concentrated architecture. T o date, no inscriptions have been recovered, but several seals and seal impressions, mostly on jar handles, have been. Tell Safut boasts of an excellent repertoire of Ammonite painted pottery reconstructed from sealed destruction lay ers. [See Ammon.] Terra-cotta pillar figurines comple mented the seated bronze deity of this Ammonite agricul tural administrative center, where fertility religious beliefs undoubtedly prevailed. T h e high point of life at the tell seems to have occurred under Assyrian and then Babylonian hegemony. [See Assyrians; Babylonians.] T h e discovery of a four-winged Assyrian-type scarab stamp seal was accom panied by probably locally made Assyrian-type bottles and bowls. A Late Babylonian seal impression that was once af fixed to a document was also found (Wimmer, 1987a, p. 281). After a modest Byzantine-period presence, settlement ac tivity moved to the east. Tell Safut was then used only for burials (on tire summit) and farming (along the terraces). [See also Transjordan; and the biographies of Glueck and Vaux.] BIBLIOGRAPHY D o r n e m a n n , R u d o l p h . The Archaeology
of the Transjordan
in the
Bronze
and Iron Ages. Milwaukee, 1 9 8 3 . Incorporates discussion about sur face pottery taken from Tell Safut prior to stratigraphy excavation. Glueck, Nelson. "Exploration in the L a n d of A m m a n . " Bidletin of the American
Schools
of Oriental
Research,
no. 6 8 ( 1 9 3 7 ) : 1 3 - 2 1 .
450
SAHAB
Glueck, Nelson. "Exploration in Eastern Palestine, III." Annual American
Schools
of Oriental
Research,
of the
n o s . 18-19. N e w H a v e n ,
1939-
Glueck's exploration summaries amply illustrate the vast multipli city of sites now lost to m o d e r n development. F o r example, in his day, Safut is tlie only village in the valley. T o d a y , there are at least three municipalities in addition to a very large Palestinian refugee camp. Ma'ayeh, Farah S. " R e c e n t Archaeological Discoveries in Jordan: T e l Safut (Sweileh)." Annual
of the Department
of Antiquities
of
Jordan
4-5 (i960): 135. A single paragraph o n the site providing the first attribution of a glacis to Tell Safut, based only on visual observation after bulldozing and before excavation. T h i s assumed attributation, picked u p by D o r n e m a n n , Sauer, and others, becomes a c o m m o n place in the literature. Mallon, Alexis, " L e s Tells riverains du Jabbok inferieur (Sukkoth, P h a n u e l , N o b e ) . " In Miscellanea Biblico
ad celebrandum
annum
Biblica XXV
Edita
a Pontiftcio
ex quo conditum
esc
Instituto institution,
pp. 57-68. Rome, 1934. Describes the site as a classical example of an ancient town whose pottery spans from 1200 to 600, and is suit ably identified with N o b a h of Gideon's travels as narrated in t h e Book
of
Judges.
Vaux, Roland de. " C h r o n i q u e ; Exploration de la region de Salt." Revue Biblique 47 (1938): 398-425. Includes Tell Safut a n d associated tombs in megaliths nearly. Vaux, Roland de. The Early History of Israel, translated by David Smith. Philadelphia, 1978. Discusses N o b a h of the Book of Numbers 32:34 relating it to research about a t o w n called Kenath. T h e historian cannot use this information in connection with t h e N o b a h of the Book of Judges 8:11, which, with Jogbehah = m o d e r n Jubeihat, is o n the road from es-Salt to A m m a n . Wimmer, Donald H . " T h e T h i r d Archaeological Expedition t o Tell Safut," Liber Annuus, 35 (1985): 408-410. Wimmer, Donald H. " T h e Excavations at Tell Safut." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3, edited by A d n a n Hadidi, pp. 279-282. A m m a n , 1987a. Highlights include a gilded bronze d e ity, Late Babylonian seal impression, and L a t e Iron Age casemate wall reinforced in its most vulnerable segment by a battered wall. W i m m e r , Donald H . "Tell Safut Excavations, 1982-1985: A Prelimi nary R e p o r t . " Annual
of the Department
of Antiquities
of Jordan.
31
(1987b): 159-174. Discusses findings from areas A - E , including es pecially area D a n d segments of area A subsequently removed as part of the highway construction project. Wimmer, Donald H . "Tell Safut." In Archaeology of Jordan. In Akkadica. Supplementum VII, edited by Denyse Homes-Fredericq a n d J. Basil Hennessy, vol. 2, p p . 512-515. 1989. W i m m e r , Donald H . "Tell Safut.'' In Bert D e Vries, "Archaeology of Jordan," American Journal of Archaeology, 95 (1991): 268. A t h u m b nail sketch of five architectural phases divided into three strata: I, Byzantine; II, Iron IlC/Persian; III, possibly Iron I/Late Bronze Age, depending u p o n unresolved questions about ceramic typology re lated to historical periods. W i m m e r , Donald H . "Tell Safut." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed ited by David Noel F r e e d m a n ct al, vol. 5, p p . 896-897. N e w York, 1992. Summarizes location and history of occupation from tlie M i d dle Bronze Age t o the Late Iron Age and Late Byzantine period in light of the history of exploration and excavation. W i m m e r , Donald H . "Tell Safut: T h e N o r t h e r n Perimeter Wall." In Glen L . Peterman, "Archaeology in Jordan." American Journal of Archaeology 98 (1994): 540-541. T h e northern counterpart ( a r e a F ) of the perimeter defense wall in area A. Zayadine, Fawzi. The Archaeological Heritage of Jordan. A m m a n , 1973. Of all surveys, this accurately attests to the broadest range of histor ical periods reflected in the ceramic corpus. DONALD WIMMER
SAHAB, site located about 12 1cm (7 mi.) southeast of Amman, Jordan, in a transitional zone between the high lands and the desert. It has a long history of occupation, extending from the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic period (fifth and fourth millennia) to the Late Iron Age. After the sixth century B C E , the site was probably abandoned until the M e dieval Arabic period (eleventh-thirteenth centuries CE) as evidenced by the Ayyubid-Mamluk handmade sherds found there. Neolitliic/Chalcolithic P e r i o d s . Sahab was largest in area during its earliest period of habitation, when it sup ported itself with extensive agriculture and evidentiy pro duced an abundance of food. This agricultural abundance is demonstrated by the large number of storage facilities both inside houses and outside in courtyards. A unit was excavated in area E that consists of several rooms (built of mostiy unhewn stone) surrounding a courtyard in which large storage pits were cut into virgin soil and lined with small stones. These settlers coexisted with cave dwellers: caves were found in areas A, B, Cave C, and D. Some show a series of floors, the uppermost of which date to the Early Bronze Age. It is quite possible that the inhabitants contin ued to live in caves even after the main Neolithic/Chalcolithic settlement was deserted or destroyed. Transitional Period. There appears to have been a tran sitional period just prior to the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, in which tiiere was no permanent settlement at the site. In area E, above tlie Neolithic/Chalcolitiiic levels, several fragmentary walls were uncovered. These wall remains do not conform to any definite architectural plan. T h e present evidence suggests that the site was a seasonal settlement toward the end of the fourth millennium, probably at the very beginning of the Early Bronze Age (Kathleen Kenyon's Proto-Urban period). Related to this transi tional period were two burial jars with human skeletons and a reused pit witii seven-nine animal burials excavated in area E. Bronze Age. T h e Early Bronze Age proper is represented at Sahab by a number of sherds found in a sounding in area B; they were not associated with any structure. During tlie first and second seasons of the 1972-1973 excavations, two caves reused as burials in the Middle Bronze Age were ex cavated in areas A and B north of the site. Each of the graves has a deep shaft dug into earlier deposits. T h e shaft leads to a pavement on which the skeletons and objects were placed. In the last excavation campaign of 1980, close to the center of the site, part of an MB fort connected to a typical glacis rampart was excavated. The area was too limited to recover more definite information about the extent of the M B set tlement. In another area (area H III), a massive M B wall was excavated. Unfortunately, no direct connection between it and the rampart in area Gil can yet be established because the area between them is covered with modern houses. Sahab is probably the closest of the M B II forts to the desert
SAHAB area, and its location must have been significant in defending the highland from attacks from the desert. T h e Late Bronze Age is well represented but because of the location of the modern settlement, investigations were mainly restricted to the LB town wall. Most of the portion excavated (nearly 75 m) is in the western part of the LB settlement (areas G II, G III, B IV). Soundings made in other areas of the tell to the south and southeast (areas H III, H I V ) , to the east (area H I I ) , and to the north (areas H II, B019) allow tire reconstruction of the town wall; the inner part of the LB settlement remains largely unexcavated. What is left from the LB wall are, in effect, its foundations, sunk in earlier deposits in the form of a deep trench lined on both sides with large- and medium-sized stones, which most probably served as a secret corridor. T h e complete enclosure appears to have been symmetrical—oval with rounded angles—and oriented north-south along its long axis. The LB town may have had a long occupation, from the fifteenth into the late thirteenth centuries B C E . T h e earlier date is based on a seal impression on a typical LB storage jar handle found in association with the foundation trench of tire town wall. T h e scene as a whole is typical of the period at about the time of Thutmosis III of tire eighteenth dynasty. It combines the three signs of seated sphinx, uraeus (snake), and god beard. In front of the sphinx (at the left of the scene) is an ankh. T h e pottery associated with the town wall shows a range of types, including imports and imitations of Mycenaean pieces, as well as examples of local ware. Although the final pottery analysis is not yet complete, it appears that the types represented cover most of the Late Bronze Age up to the late thirteenth century B C E . Information about the inner structure of the LB town comes primarily from an important public building partially uncovered in area E, south of tire main mound. It consists mainly of a long, massive wall (more than 17 m long) with a projecting towerlike room. T h e building's inner parts appear to be under a deep ac cumulation of Iron Age deposits and modern structures that have made excavation difficult. Apart from a rich LB-Iron Age tomb excavated by Rafik Dajani in 1968 (Dajani, 1970), no other LB tombs were found in the course of the 1 9 7 2 1980 excavations. I r o n Age. T h e Early Iron Age settlement is well repre sented and—at least on the west and north—seems to extend beyond the LB town. Domestic architecture from this pe riod appeared in most of tire areas (A, B, D , E, E/W, H, G). T h e evidence, though, is fragmentary and does not give a clear picture of Iron I. T w o houses have almost complete ground plans. In general, the houses (especially in area B) follow a pattern of rectangular rooms that were, in most cases, plastered with stones. In one of them, in area A, a large number of storage jars (pithoi) were excavated. Since their excavation at Tell Beit Mirsim, these jars have been
451
designated collared-rim jars. William Foxwell Albright and others considered them evidence for the presence of early Israelite settlers in Canaan. However, more recent research (Ibrahim, 1978) concludes titat the makers of this type of jar cannot be ethnically identified. The jar was, however, pro duced on a large scale in central workshops and played an important role in storing products and in the trade of various parts of Bilad ash-Sham, ("Greater Syria") in the Early Iron Age. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell; and the biography of Albright.] Some of these twelfth-century storage jars bear seal im pressions or fingerprints (Ibrahim 1978; 1983, pp. 48-50). One seal impression, identified on the rims of two jars, shows an animal with long horns followed by a human being raising his hands. Another impression of a roughly circular seal, repeated tiiree times on a single jar, depicts two seated animals: an ibex on top and a lioness below. It is not obvious to what extent LB structures were reused in the Iron I period, but in area Gil (squares 15-17) it was evident that part of the LB town wall was reused in the Iron I for domestic housing. This continuity can also be observed in the continuous reuse of the tomb excavated by Dajani in 1968 (see above) drat was in use in the LB I(?)-II until the Iron I—II periods. Certain LB bronze weapons and pottery types, including bowls, small craters, jugs, dipper juglets, and flasks, were also found in the Iron I tomb in area C excavated in 1972 (Ibrahim, 1972). T h e Iron II period was attested mainly in area B019, where an extensive architectural complex and a piece of the town wall have been uncovered. It could also be found in area G i l and in two soundings in the center of the site and in the deep bulldozer cut at the norfli edge of tire excavated area in E. During the Iron II period, the walled town became smaller but better planned than it had been in Iron I. Its eastern border is defined by the town wall on that side of the site. A small area in the center, to the soutit, probably of the same wall, was visible on line with the area excavated in B019. This wall cannot extend much farther north because there was no Iron II material in area A or B fewer than 10 m from this wall. In area GIL in die west, the Iron II settle ment goes beyond the LB town wall. T h e excavated evi dence shows drat the walled setdement was planned. T h e main architectural complex in area Bo 19 consists of rectangular rooms oriented nordi-south. The largest is a spacious, rectangular, pillared room in the center of the ex cavated area. Four pillars of large stones were built in a row along the central length of the room. There are at least two otiier rooms on die west titat join with this one to form a house or unit separated by a corridor from another unit in the west. Another pillared room was excavated in area GIL It resembles the one mentioned above but is smaller. It is clear that tiiese columns supported the roof of large rooms and probably had a special function within the architectural unit. On the basis of die finds from area B019, the pillared house at Sahab most probably served as an industrial and
452
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perhaps a commercial and guest facility. The finds include a large number of loom weights of two main types (conical and round), weights in at least three units, and various tools and pots made of stone and basalt, used mainly for grind ing and polishing. T h e pottery included storage jars and red- and black-burnished pottery with bowls and platters often slip painted in bands inside and outside. Some of the bowls and small jars were painted with dark, tirin bands. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. " A n Anthropoid Coffin from Sahab in T r a n s j o r d a n . " American
Journal
of Archaeology
3 6 (1932): 295-306.
Dajani, R. " A L a t e Bronze-Iron Age T o m b Excavated at Sahab, 1 9 6 8 . " Annual
of the Department
of Antiquities
of Jordan
1 5 (1970): 29-34.
Ibrahim, Moawiyah. "Archaeological Excavations at Sahab, 1 9 7 2 . " An nual of the Department
of Antiquities
of Jordan
1 7 (1972): 23-36.
Ibrahim, Moawiyah. " S e c o n d Season of Excavations at Sahab, 1 9 7 3 . " Annual
of the Department
of Antiquities
of Jordan
1 9 (1974): 55-61.
Ibrahim, Moawiyah. " T h i r d Season of Excavations at Sahab, 1 9 7 5 . " Annual
of the Department
of Antiquities
of Jordan
2 0 (1975): 69-82.
Ibrahim, Moawiyah. " T h e Collared-Rim Jar of the Early Iron A g e . " I n Archaeology
in the Levant:
Essays
for Kathleen
Kenyon,
edited by P .
R. S. Moorey and Peter J. Parr, p p . 1 1 6 - 1 2 6 . Warminster, 1 9 7 8 . Ibrahim, Moawiyah. "Siegel u n d Seigelabdriicke aus S a h a b . " Zeitschrift des Deutschen
Paldstina-Vereins
99 (1983): 43-53.
Ibrahim, Moawiyah. " S a h a b and Its Foreign Relations." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 3 , edited by A d n a n Hadidi, pp. 7 3 - 8 1 . Amman, 1 9 8 7 . MOAWIYAH IBRAHIM
SA'IDIYEH, TELL ES-, large double mound tenta tively identified as the biblical Zarethan, situated in the cen tral Jordan Valley, approximately 1.8 km (1.1 mi.) east of the Jordan River, on the south side of Wadi Kafranja (32°i6'i5" N , 35°35'oo" E; map reference 2046 X 1861). The higher of the two mounds lies to the east, rising to about 40 m above the present plain level. Approximately 20 m below the summit, the Lower Tell extends from the western side as a benchlike projection. Altogether, the site occupies an area of about 10 hectares (25 acres). The first detailed archaeological survey of the site was undertaken by Nelson Glueck during his Survey of Eastern Palestine between 1939 and 1947. His collections of surface pottery indicated a long history of occupation from the Chalcolithic period to the Byzantine era. In 1953, small-scale soundings were made by Henri de Contenson at yet a third element of the site, Tell es-Sa'idiyeh et-Tahta, a small, al most imperceptible mound lying about 400 m west of the Lower Tell. A thin occupation layer was found, with flints and pottery, dating to the Middle Chalcolithic period (fourth millennium). It was not until 1964, however, that large-scale systematic excavations were begun at the main double mound. Between 1964 and 1967, four seasons were undertaken by a Univer sity of Pennsylvania expedition directed by James B. Prit-
chard. In 1985, a new campaign of excavations was initiated by Jonathan N. T u b b on behalf of the British Museum; to date (1993), seven seasons have taken place. Combining the results of the two expeditions, the earliest remains so far excavated belong to the Early Bronze II pe riod. At this time, occupation was extensive, covering not only the Lower Tell, but also, in all probability, the base area of the Upper Tell. On the Lower Tell, three main areas have yielded signif icant and sophisticated architectural remains. In the bestpreserved exposure, part of a large domestic complex shows a suite of carefully planned and well-constructed rooms built of mud brick on stone foundations (see figure 1). This com plex, together with most of the buildings revealed in the other excavation areas, is assigned to stratum L 2 , which was destroyed by fire toward the end of the first quarter of the third millennium. Following the destruction of L 2 , there seems to have been some short-lived occupation within the burnt ruins. This somewhat ephemeral phase of campsite occupation (stra tum L i ) is characterized by the patching and modification of surviving L 2 structures, with only minor and poorly con structed additions. Stratum L i has all the appearances of a temporary squat ter occupation. It is not yet known whether occupation con tinued uninterrupted on the eastern. Upper Tell; however, as far as the Lower Tell is concerned, it appears to have been completely abandoned until the very end of the Late Bronze Age, when it became the site of an extensive and intensively used cemetery. Between 1985 and 1992, some 480 graves were excavated in an area toward the center of the mound; fifty had been excavated on the north side by the Pennsylvania expedition. Of the total, about 5 percent can be attributed to the Late Iron-Persian periods; the remainder, possessing datable finds, can all be assigned to LB III (end of the thirteenth, beginning of the twelfth centuries B C E ) . T h e graves show considerable variety with regard to construction method, disposition of the deceased, grave goods, and burial cus toms—indicative indeed of a mixed population. Many of the graves consist of simple pits without further elaboration. In some instances, use was made of structural elements (foundation stones, mud bricks) from tire under lying EB occupation to create kerbs or markers. Toward the center of tire area, a group of more elaborate graves was found. These should more correctly be considered tombs and were clearly intended to be partially visible above ground level: they are constructed of purpose-made m u d bricks and roofed with slabs of the same material. T h e grave goods and burial practices pertaining to the Sa idiyeh cemetery make it quite clear that the site was under Egyptian control during this period. T h e richness and va riety of the finds indicate society's affluence. Large numbers of bronzes have been found—vessels, weapons, and ornac
SATDIYEH, TELL ES-
SA'lDIYEH, TELL ES-. F i g u r e i .
453
Early Bronze Age house. T h i s r e s i d e n c e w a s d e s t r o y e d b y fire a r o u n d
2700 BCE. T h e p h o t o g r a p h s h o w s t h e n a t u r e of t h e d e s t r u c t i o n d e b r i s a n d a fine collection of p o t t e r y vessels o n t h e floor. (Courtesy J. N . T u b b )
ments—many of them Egyptian in style. It is, however, the seals, amulets, stone vases, items of jewelry and ivory objects which most clearly display Egyptian craftsmanship. More significantly, perhaps, the burial practices also appear to be Egyptian in origin: the use of linen for wrapping the burial gifts and for the tight binding of the deceased. One of the most interesting and important burial types found in the cemetery is the so-called double pithos, in which the deceased was enclosed in a "coffin" composed of two large storejars joined shoulder to shoulder. This type of burial, represented at Sa'idiyeh by twenty-seven examples, while extremely rare elsewhere in ancient Palestine, is quite commonly found in LB cemeteries in southern and south western Anatolia. Its occurrence in some number at Sa'idiyeh may well indicate the presence within the popu lation of an alien, perhaps Sea Peoples, element—not alto
gether unexpected for a city under Egyptian control. T h e results of die cemetery are supplemented by those from the Upper Tell, where excavation revealed remains of the con temporary setdement. [See Jar Burials.] Stratum XII, the lowest phase of occupation so far reached on the Upper Tell, has been examined in three ex cavation areas. Toward the center of die mound, parts of a large and impressive public building were found whose plan and construction methods conform to the so-called Egyp tian Governors' Residency. This type of building, known from a number of Egyptian-controlled sites west of the Jor dan River (e.g. Beth-Shean, Tell el-Far ah [South]), is char acterized by a peculiarly Egyptian method of construction which, for example, utilizes deep brick foundations instead of the more usual stone. On the west side of the tell, behind a substantial casemate 1
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city wall, a second administrative complex has been partiy excavated (see figure 2 ) . Termed loosely the Western Pal ace, this complex consists of a series of rooms, courtyards, and chambers laid out on either side of a narrow passageway which leads through the city wall to the exterior by means of a small opening (possibly a postern). The complex's most interesting features are a pair of interconnecting vaulted cis terns and a semicircular pool with an elaborate system of inlet and outflow channels. That the pool was concerned with commercial activities rather than purely domestic func tions is clear from the large number of storejars of Egyptian design found at its base. It is possible that this pool served as a cooling tank, perhaps for storing wine. T h e third main structure which can be assigned to stra tum XII is the water-system staircase, beautifully con structed out of stone and cut into the tell's north slope. Hav ing descended the mound in a series of broad, shallow steps, the staircase turns 90 degrees at the base and continues down through a flight of much steeper steps to a depth of some S m below plain level. At this point, the two sidewalls curve in to enclose a small semicircular pool; the water is supplied to the system by an underground spring and fed into the pool by a skillfully manufactured conduit.
SA'IDIYEH, TELL ES-.
CO
7
9
10
1
F i g u r e 2. Plan of the Western Palace
T w e l f t h c e n t u r y BCE. (Courtesy J . N . T u b b )
complex.
T h e stratum XII architecture and the contemporary cem etery provide clear evidence for an Egyptian presence at Sa'idiyeh during the twelfth century B C E . It seems likely that the city was a major taxation center or entrepot, serving the needs of the Egyptian Empire during its final phase under the pharaohs of the twentieth dynasty. Stratum XII was destroyed by fire toward the middle of the twelve century B C E , when use of tlie Lower Tell cemetery also came to an end. The site appears to have been aban doned for some time following, perhaps for as long as one hundred years. Toward the end of the eleventh century B C E , a rather ephemeral phase of campsite occupation (stramm XIB) was established within the now silted-up stratum XII ruins. Consisting of little more than beaten-earth surfaces, fireplaces, and postholes—presumably for shelters—this phase seems to have been preconstruction rather than postdestruction. In any event, stratum XIA, which follows it, represents a very restricted occupation. It remains, which can be dated to die early tenth century B C E , have only been found near the center of the tell. A single, rather poorly con structed building was excavated which, for reasons of its proportions and ground plan, is thought to be a type of tem ple. It is bipartite, with the smaller room to tlie rear. This rear room, or sanctuary, had a plastered bench against the back wall, incorporating an inset niche; a burnt area with an incense stand and a pile of gazelle bones was found in front of the niche. Little can be said of tlie next three phases (sttata X-VTII). Again, they appear to represent restricted and poor settle ments which, in the area examined, consisted of roughly paved, cobbled courtyards with traces of flimsily built mudbrick walls. The next important period in the site's history appears with stratum VII (late ninth-early eighth centuries BCE) . Per haps as a consequence of the renewed occupation of Transjordan by the Israelite king Jeroboam II, Sa'idiyeh un derwent a major expansion at this time. Stratum VII, exten sively excavated by both the Pennsylvania and the British Museum expeditions, shows a densely packed settlement consisting of houses, stores, workshops, and industrial in stallations arranged on a well-planned grid of intersecting streets and alleyways. For tlie first time since stratum XII, a city wall encircled the settlement. Weaving and textile prep aration seem to have been the main industrial activities: many hundreds of clay loom weights were found in what must have been workshops, often in distinctive alignments indicating the configuration of the looms. Almost all of the stratum VII housing units had bathrooms containing both basins and toilets, suggesting tiiat cleanli ness and sanitation were major concerns of the inhabitants. T h e best-preserved example consisted of a raised room ap proached by tiiree steps. Inside was a large plastered basin and a sitting-height mud-brick pedestal with a comfortably rounded seat made of fine mud plaster. Both units could be
SAID NAYA flushed through with water, being provided in each case with inlet and outflow channels, the latter leading to a combined soak-away drain (a drainage basin that does not have a con structed conduit) in the courtyard below. By the end of the first decade of the eighth century B C E , the prosperity of the city had declined; stratum VI, which succeeded VII without any evidence of a catastrophe of any sort, shows Sa'idiyeh, once again, as a small settlement con fined to an inner zone on the tell's surface. Fortunes must have revived, by the middle of the eighth century B C E , how ever, for stratum V is extensive. It has a new city wall and is similar in most respects to stratum VII, with die same pattern of workshops and industrial units arranged on a grid. In stratum V, however, the plan is even more strictly for malized, with insulae of workshop complexes, all with very similar internal room arrangements. Again, like stratum VII, the emphasis of the industry was on textile manufacture. Stratum V was relatively short-lived. It was destroyed by fire around 720 B C E , perhaps by the Assyrians. Although the in habitants probably had time to escape, some of their unfor tunate animals were abandoned: several burnt-out stalls have been excavated, each containing tire charred bones of equids (donkeys). The destruction of 720 B C E was one from which the city never really recovered. Stratum V was succeeded by an en igmatic phase (stratum IV) represented solely by large num bers of deep, unlined storage pits which had contained an imal fodder. During the Persian period (fifth century B C E ) , an administrative building, or perhaps a fort, was established on the highest point on the Upper Tell (the so-called acrop olis), but remains of any contemporary settlement (stratum III) have proved to be elusive. It may well be that occupation moved to the as-yet completely unexplored eastern side of die mound. Certainly some occupation is indicated by the presence in tlie Lower Tell cemetery of a number of graves of this period. The Persian period building on the acropolis was replaced by a similar, but larger fortress in the Hellenistic period (stratum II); by then, however, the presence at the site may have been little more than token or strategic: no finds from this period have been found anywhere else on die site. T h e Roman period (stratum I) is represented by a solitary watchtower guarding the northwest corner of the Upper Tell. T h e very last traces of occupation consist of a single-roomed farmhouse on the Upper Tell and what may be a type of khan, or caravanserai, on the north side of the Lower Tell, both dating to the seventh-eighth centuries CE. BIBLIOGRAPHY C o n t e n s o n , Henri de. " T h r e e Soundings in t h e Jordan Valley." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 4-5 (1960): 12-98, 36 figs. Account of tlie soundings u n d e r t a k e n at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh et-Tahta. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. N e w H a v e n , 1951.
455
T h e first detailed survey of t h e site, including an extended discussion of the identification. Pritchard, James B. " T w o T o m b s a n d a T u n n e l in the Jordan Valley: Discoveries at the Biblical Z a r e t h a n . " Expedition 6.4 (1964): 2-9. Pritchard, James B. " A Cosmopolitan Culture of the Late Bronze A g e . " Expedition 7.4 (1965): 26-33. Popular account of t h e work of the Pennsylvania expedition; see also Pritchard (1964). P r i t c h a r d , J a m e s B . The Cemetery
at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh,
Jordan.
University
M u s e u m , M o n o g r a p h 41. Philadelphia, 1980. Definitive report on Pritchard's excavation in tlie cemetery. Pritchard, James B. Tell es-Sa'idiyeh: Excavations on the Tell, 1964-1966. University M u s e u m , M o n o g r a p h 60. Philadelphia, 198 5. Final report of the Pennsylvania expedition's work o n the U p p e r Tell. T u b b , Jonathan N . "Tell es-Sa'idiyeh: Preliminary Report on the First T h r e e Seasons of R e n e w e d Excavations." Levant 20 (1988): 23-88. T u b b , Jonathan N . "Preliminary Report on tlie Fourth Season of Ex cavations at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh in the Jordan Valley." Levant 22 (1990a): 21-42. T u b b , Jonathan N . , a n d R uper t L . C h a p m a n . Archaeology and the Bible. L o n d o n , 1990b. C h a p t e r 4 offers a popular account of the British M u s e u m excavations. T u b b , Jonathan N . , and Peter G . Dorrell. "Tell es-Sa'idiyeh: Interim Report o n t h e Fifth (1990) Season of Excavations." Levant 23 (1991): 67-86. T u b b , Jonathan N . "Tell es-Sa'idiyeh: Interim Report o n the Sixth Season of Excavations." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 125 (1993): 50-74. JONATHAN N . T U B B
SAID NAYA (Sardenay, Saydeneia), predominantly Christian settlement located about 20 km (12 mi.) northeast of Damascus on one of the high plateaus of the Qalamun Mountains, which comprises a section of the Anti-Lebanon range (37°43' N , 40°4o' E). Following the orientation of the mountain chains, the high valley stretches out in a northsouth direction. The chief routes from Damascus to Emesa/ Horns and farther on to North Syria described in ancient itineraries seem, however, not to have touched this region. They led north either through tlie Biqa' plain via Fleliopolis/ Baalbek in the west or via a route that lay farther east. Con sequently, the identification with the Danaba mentioned in the Peutinger map, which was championed in the older lit erature Q. L. Porter, Five Years in Damascus, London, 1855), cannot be maintained. Monuments from the Roman imperial period demonstrate that the place had a certain sig nificance then. There are two explanations of the place name. In the first it derives from the Old Syriac sayda ("lady") and naya ("our"). According to this explanation, the name of the cloister on the cliff that dominates the entire area was transferred to tlie city. T h e second and more popular explanation is closely connected with one of the legends of the founding of the cloister (see below); according to this variant, tlie name means "hunting place" (Old Syriac seid, "to hunt"; dnaya, "place"). Old Syriac was still spoken in Said Naya in the nineteenth century C E . It is possible that a Christian
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legend attached itself to a local place name, but more exact details are unknown. Three rock tombs are located below the cloister and are dated to 198 C E (W. H. Waddington, Inscriptiones grecques et latines de la Syrie, 25620, vol. 3 of Philippe Le Bas, Voyage archeologique en Grece et en Asie Mineure, Paris, 1870). The tombs are decorated with reliefs of deceased couples. In the older literature these were often misinterpreted as pictures of saints. A mausoleum in an area to the east, below the cloister, is today Peter and Paul's Church, a windowless rectangular building on three steps. A small entrance door is located in the east side; a partially worked outline of a base and a ledge are the only architectonic decoration on this otherwise un dated building (second-fourth centuries CE?). The interior is in die form of a cross with three large arcosolia formed from massive blocks. In one of the building's resulting mas sive corner pilasters, a stairway leads to the roof. (jean Lassus, "Deux eglises cruciformes du Hauran, Bulletin d'Etudes Orientates
1 [1931]: 45-48).
St. Mary's Cloister, which is Greek Orthodox, is today occupied only by nuns (in the Middle Ages it was occupied by nuns and monks). There are various versions of the founding of the cloister in numerous legends; however, there are no certain historical or archaeological data. Since the Middle Ages it has been repeatedly visited, even by Euro pean travelers (the first known visitor was Magister Thietmar in 1217), because of the Mary icon, which was already widely known. According to the earliest travelers, the cloister was founded either by a pious lady from Damascus or by a monk from Jerusalem. Ernst H. Maundrell (Voyage d'Alep a Jerusalem d Paques en I'annee 1607, Paris, 1706) mentions the legend that is today most popular and disseminated by the Orthodox patriarchy. In it the cloister was founded in 547 by Justinian, before whose eyes, during the course of a hunt, a gazelle transformed itself into an image of the Virgin Mary on the spot of the current cloister. There are other widely different legends concerning the icon's age and ori gin. Later variants report that Eudoxia, the wife of the em peror Theodosius, brought this picture painted by St. Luke the Evangelist to Said Naya and built a cloister for the icon there. In the foundation of the current, drastically renovated and enlarged structure, some masonry may be ancient; how ever, clearer indications of a date are absent. Deir Mar Tuma, to the west, above the settlement, is a church integrated into a Roman building that was in the form of a small porticoed temple with a north-south ori entation. There is no inscription to provide information about the building's original purpose. It stands in an ancient rectangular precinct that was hewn into the cliff and con structed from massive blocks. In the immediate vicinity are other rock tombs and rooms hewn into the cliff, one of which was designated a meeting room by Richard Pococke, (A Description of the East, London, 1743-1745).
T h e Cherubim Cloister is located on a 2,011-meter-high mountain peak northwest of the settlement. Numerous ruins show that a very holy shrine has stood there since at least the early imperial period. A series of rock-cut rooms is as sociated with later use as a hermitage. BIBLIOGRAPHY Peeters, Paul. La legende de Saidnaya. Analecta Bollandiana, 2 5 . B r u s sels, 1 9 8 5 . See pages 1 3 7 - 1 5 7 . M o r e easily obtained b u t less c o m plete in its inclusion of older literature than Zeiad (below). Zeiad, H . Geschichte von Said Naya (in Arabic). D a m a s c u s , 1 9 3 2 . C o n tains citations from all of the older literature, b u t not readily service able as a m o d e r n historical reappraisal. . RtJDlGER G O G R S F E Translated from German by Susan I . Schiedel
SALAMIS, fortified city on Cyprus, settled in the elev enth century B C E . Located on the eastern coast of Cyprus on the northern side of the Pediaios River where it enters Famagusta Bay approximately 7.5 1cm (4.6 mi) north of Famagusta. Salamis was one of the leading cities on the island from the earlier Iron Age through the Late Roman period. A portion of the city was occupied until at least the early eighth century C E and probably as late as the twelveth cen tury C E . Altirough the architectural and sculptural remains of Salamis always have been visible, it was not until tire 1860s and 1870s that fire epigraphical finding of the first European visitors identified the church and monastery of Apostolos Varnavas immediately to the west of the site as part of the ruins of Salamis. According to the legend of the eighth to fifth century B C E , the Homeric hero Teukros, son of Telamon, who was the king of the island of Salamis in tire Saronic Gulf in Greece, founded the city in 1184 after the Trojan War. Actually the settlement was established in the mid- to late eleventh cen tury B C E , probably as a consequence of the destruction by earthquake(?) and abandonment of the nearby Late Cypriot city of Enlcomi, about 2 km (1.25 mi.) inland to the south west. [See Enkomi.] T h e estuary of the Pediaios River may have silted up around this time, malting Enkomi inaccessible directly to the Mediterranean. T h e southern portion of the city was occupied continuously from the eleventh through second centuries B C E . This region then appears to have been uninhabited until the late fourth century C E . T h e city was the metropolis of the island under the Ptolemies from the end of the fourth through the second century B C E when this role shifted to Nea-Paphos. At its height Salamis covered about 150-275 ha. Major earthquakes shook the city in 16/ 7> 76/77,342, and 394 CE. A revolt by the Jewish population in 116/117 C E caused extensive damage within the city. Un der the aegis of the emperor Constantius II (344-361 C E ) the city was rebuilt after the earthquake of 342. In his honor the new city was called Constantia and resumed its earlier J
SALAMIS position as the metropolis of the island. T h e Arab raids, beginning in 647/48 C E , resulted in more destruction. Al though there is evidence for limited reoccupation in the late seventh through early eighth centuries C E , including a de fensive fortification built around the basilica of Ayios Epiphanios, most of the urban area was abandoned. The rem nants of tire large residence called L'huilerie ("the olive press") provide evidence of continued use in dais section after the seventh century. E x p l o r a t i o n a n d Excavation. Small sections of tire an cient city were inhabited through the twelveth century CE. Marble and granite architectural fragments and an inscribed statue base from tire gymnasium were used in some late me dieval and Venetian buildings in Famagusta demonstrating that the ruins of the city were accessible in the thirteenth through sixteenth centtrries. T h e first published description of Salamis was in 1862 by Melchior de Vogue, William Waddington, and Edmond Duthoit. Luigi Palma di Cesnola and later his brother, Alexander, were tire first non-Cypriots to "excavate" at Salamis (1866-1878). In 1888 D . G. Ho garth published his observations of his visit. Formal exca vations of the western and northern cemeteries and a Roman house with floor mosaics were carried out by Max Ohnefalsch-Richter in 1880-1882 for tire British Museum under the direction of Charles Newton. H. H. Kitchener and G. Hake excavated more tombs in the western cemetery in 18 82 for the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). The Cyprus Exploration Fund organized by the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), and the FitzWilliam Museum (Cambridge) and led by J. A. R. Munro and H. A. Tubbs in 1890 and 1891 opened up many trenches within the city itself. Another British team consisting of A. S. Murray, A. H. Smith, and P. Christian excavated more tombs in 1896 in the western cemetery for the British Museum. In 1913 J. L. Myres and G. E. Jeffrey worked at the "prison/tomb of St. Catiierine/Haghia Haikaterini" in the western cemetery. Jeffrey in 1923-1925 and Joan duPlat Taylor in 1933 carried out small-scale excavations of pri marily Late Roman structures. In 1952 the Department of Antiquities began regular large-scale excavations within the city which continued until 1974. T h e systematic excavation of the western cemeteries by tire Cypriot Department of An tiquities began in 1957 first under the direction of Porphyrios Dikaios and then from 1962 to 1967 by Vassos Kara georghis. A French expedition from the Institut F. Courby, Universite de Lyon, dug in die southern section of the city from 1964 to 1974, focusing on tire Temple of Zeus and the Late Roman Christian basilica called Campanopetra. In 1973 N . C. Flemming undertook a preliminary underwater survey of the harbor facilities of Salamis. Major R e m a i n s . The earliest remains of the city date to the late eleventh century B C E : French tomb no. 1, a cult place (through the sixth century B C E ) , and the southern rampart.
457
Iron age elite burials were located in various extramural cemeteries: "Royal tombs" (c. 800-500 B C E ) , Cellarka (c. 700-400 B C E ) , and Koufoumeron (c. 550-500 B C E ) . There were extramural sanctuaries dating to the sixtii century B C E to the west around Apostolos Varnavas (site A; Great God dess/Aphrodite) and to die soudi at Toumba (site G). T u mulus/tomb 77 represents the funerary pyre and cenotaph of King Nikokreon(P), the last king of Salamis, and his fam ily, about 311 B C E . T h e Temple of Zeus Olympios (Zeus Salaminios?) was first constructed in late second century B C E and a ramp was added at the end of first century CE. It was destroyed by earthquakes in 332 and/or 342 CE. T O die north of the temple there was an elongated porticoed forum or "Agora" (site C), probably constructed before 22 B C E and then reconstructed in the first or second century CE. At the north end of the forum a large rectangular cistern or loutron widi a vaulted roof was built during reign of Septimius Serverus (fl. 1 9 3 - 2 1 1 ) . It was fed by an aqueduct from the spring at Kythrea. An elevated arched section is preserved southeast of Ayios Sergios. The gymnasium (site B) probably existed in the second and first centuries B C E . There were major building phases and repairs to it at the beginning of the first century C E and again during the reigns of Trajan (fl. 9 7 - 1 1 7 ) and Hadrian (fl. 117-138). After dam age by die fourth-century earthquakes, it was restored as public baths by Justinian (fl. 527-565) then abandoned. Ad jacent to the gymnasium there was a xystos or staditim with eight rows of seats on the north. A propylaeum entrance or vestibule (c. 100-150 CE?) on the western end opened on a north-south colonnaded street leading from the gymnasium to die theater. T h e theater was built at end of first centory B C E . It was reconsttucted after earthquake of 76/77 C E with additional repairs and reconstruction under Hadrian. Furtiier modifications followed in the third century CE. Follow ing its destruction by the fourth-century earthquakes the stage was rebuilt in a crude fashion about 375-425. Aban donment occurred in the sixth century CE. The amphitheater built in die late first century CE completed the city's enter tainment complex. Ayios Epiphanios (site H) was die earliest and largest Christian basilica on the island. It was built in 375-400 and later partially reconstructed. This "cathedral" of Epiphan ios, the first archbishop of Salamis (fl. 368-403), was en closed witiiin a limited defensive circuit around the core of the city. The wall was built in die early seventh century in response to Arab raids. After the basilica was destroyed in 447/48 by the Arabs, a church was built immediately to the soudieast to replace it in around 698. This church was re built in the ninth century and continued in use through at least 1344. Three important edifices were built around 470-500. T h e "Campanopetra" Christian basilica and monastery (? site E) is one of the largest and most refined known on the island. After 647 the baptistery was turned into a chapel. Immedi-
458
SALLER, SYLVESTER JOHN
ately to the west across a street was an official residency. Nearby was a large elite residence, "L'huilerie" (see above). Following its destruction during Arab raids squatters inhab ited it in the mid- to late seventh century. Afterward the complex was divided into at least three independent struc tures, one of which was an olive oil pressing establishment. They were occupied through the twelfth century. [See also the biographies Kitchener,
Myres,
of Di Cesnola,
Newton,
Dikaios,
Ohnefalsch-Richter,
Hogarth,
and
Yon, Marguerite. La Tomba T1 du XT s. av. J.-C. Salamine de C h y p r e , 2. Paris, 1 9 7 1 . Y o n , M a r g u e r i t e . Un depot de sculptures
archaiques:
Ayios
Varnavas,
Site
A . Salamine de C h y p r e , 5 . Paris, 1 9 7 4 .
Excavation Reports: Department of Antiquities Expedition Karageorghis, Vassos, and Cornelius C . Vermeule. Sculptures lamis.
from Sa
2 vols. Salamis, 1 . 1 - 2 . Nicosia, 1 9 6 4 - 1 9 6 6 ,
Karageorghis, Vassos. Excavations
in the Necropolis
of Salamis.
4 vols.
Mitford, T e r e n c e B . , a n d l n o K. Nicolaou. The Greek and Latin
Inscrip
Salamis, 1 . 3 - 5 / 7 . Nicosia, 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 8 .
Vogue.}
tions from
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Salamis.
Salamis, 1.6. N i c o s i a , 1 9 7 4 . DAVID W . RUPP
Karageorghis, Vassos. Salamis:
Recent Discoveries
in Cyprus.
N e w York,
1 9 6 9 . General introduction to the history of the site a n d t h e D e partment of Antiquities excavations in the "Royal T o m b s " and Cellarka cemeteries, as well as the gymnasium a n d theater. R u p p , David W . " T h e 'Royal T o m b s ' at Salamis (Cyprus).Tdeological Messages of Power a n d Authority." Journal of Mediterranean Ar chaeology 1.1 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 111—139. Analysis of the eighth to sixth century BCE "Royal T o m b s " in the context of a study of the reemergence of sociopolitical complexity in Iron Age Cyprus u n d e r the stimulus of Phoenician trade and colonization. Wallace, Paul W . , a n d Andreas G . Orphanides, eds. Sources for the History
of Cypnis,
vol. I , Greek
and Latin
Texts to the Third
Century
A.D. Albany, N . Y . , and Nicosia, 1 9 9 0 . Translation of Greek a n d Latin Texts which refer to Cyprus, including an index with refer ences to Salamis, Y o n , Marguerite, ed. Salamine
de Chypre:
Histoire
et archeologie,
etat des
recherches. Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientiflque, no. 5 7 8 . Paris, 1 9 8 0 . Proceedings of an international colloquium held in Lyon in 1 9 7 8 o n the various excavations and research relating to Salamis. Y o n , Marguerite, ed. Kinyras.
VArcheologie
francaise
a
Chypre/French
Archaeology in Cyprus. T r a v a u x de la Maison de l'Orient, n o . 2 2 . Paris, 1 9 9 3 . An up-to-date summary in French and English of the results of the French excavations at Salamis; with extensive bibli ography. See Yon's article " L a ville de Salamine/The T o w n of Sa lamis," p p . 1 3 9 - 1 5 8 ; a n d Georges Roux, "Basiliques et residences byzantines/Byzantine Basilicas and Residences," p p . 1 9 5 - 2 0 4 .
Excavation Reports: French Expedition Argoud, Gilbert, et al. Une residence byzanline "I'Huilerie." Salamine de Chypre, 1 1 . Paris, 1 9 8 0 . Calvet, Yves. Les timbres amphoriques, 1965-1970. Salamine de Chypre, 3 . Paris, 1 9 7 2 . Chavane, Marie-Jose. Les perils objets. Salamine d e C h y p r e , 6 , Paris, 1975-
Chavane, Marie-Jose, a n d Marguerite Yon. Testimonia Salamine de Chypre, 1 0 . 1 . Paris, 1 9 7 8 .
Salaminia
Diederichs, Catherine. Ceramiques
et
hellenistiques,
romaines
Salamine de Chypre, 9 . Paris, 1 9 8 0 . Institute Fernand Courby. Anthologie salaminienne. pre, 4 . Paris, 1 9 7 3 . Jehasse, L a u r e n c e , i a ciramique
a vernis
1.
byzantines.
Sailer was elected a member of the Palestine Archaeolog ical Council during the British Mandate and was religious superior in the SBF community (in the Flagellation Con vent, on the Via Dolorosa); he generally avoided the lime light, living the life of an exemplary friar. His principal ar ticles are to be found in Liber Annuus. [See also Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land; Nebo, Mount.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Salamine d e C h y
noir du rempart
meridional.
de terre cuite de tradition
Bagatti, Bellarmino. " P . Sylvester Sailer, 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 7 6 . " Sludii Franciscani/Liber
Salamine de Chypre, 8. Paris, 1 9 7 8 . M o n l o u p , T h e r e s e . Les figurines
SALLER, SYLVESTER J O H N (1895-1976), American Franciscan archaeologist based in Jerusalem. S. J. Sailer was born in Petosky, Michigan. H e entered the Fran ciscans in 1913 and was ordained a priest in 1922. He taught at the Franciscan house of studies in Teutopolis, Illinois, until he was invited to study Scripture at the Antonianum in Rome in 1928. After two years in Rome he moved to the school's Jerusalem campus, where, two years later, he grad uated as a lector generalis in Scripture. From 1932 untilhis death, he remained, with rare exceptions, in Jerusalem, as a professor at the Studium Biblicaum Franciscanum (SBF). There he taught biblical archaeology and Greek and di rected excavations on Mt. Nebo (Siyagha, Jordan), at 'EinKerem, and at Bethany. His two-volume work on Nebo in augurated the SBF's publication series. H e also helped launch and edit die SBF's periodical Liber Annuus (1950-). Sailer initiated the SBF's Collectio Minor (Minor Series) with his study of Bethphage. H e followed this with the im portant "Catalogue of the Ancient Synagogues of the Holy Land" (Liber Annuus 4O954]: 219-246), updated and sep arately printed in the Collectio Minor (Jerusalem, 1969, 1972).
archaique.
Sal
amine de Chypre, 1 2 . Paris, 1 9 8 4 . Oziol, Therese, and Jean Pouilloux. Les lampes (octobre 1964-mai 1967). Salamine de Chypre, 1. Paris, 1 9 6 9 . Oziol, Therese, Les lampes du Musee de Chypre. Salamine de C h y p r e , 7 . Paris, 1 9 7 7 . Pouilloux, Jean, et al. Testimonia Salaminia 2. Salamine d e C h y p r e , 1 3 . Paris, 1 9 8 7 .
Annuus
Biblici
2 6 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 3 3 4 - 3 3 9 . I n c l u d e s a bibliography
of Sailer's work. Sailer, Sylvester J. The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo. 2 vols. Stu d i u m Biblicum F r a n c i s c a n u m ( S B F ) , Collectio Maior, 1. Jerusalem, 1 9 4 1 . Comprehensive report of the 1 9 3 3 , 1 9 3 5 , a n d 1 9 3 7 seasons o n the hill of Siyagha. Part 1 was completely reedited in 1 9 6 5 . Sailer, Sylvester J. Discoveries at St. John's 'Ein Kerem, 1941-42. S B F , Collectio Maior, 3 . Jerusalem, 1 9 4 6 . Sailer, Sylvester J., a n d Bellarmino Bagatti. The Town of Nebo (Khirbet
SALVAGE EXCAVATION: An Overview el-Mekhayyat)
with
a Brief
Survey
of Other
Ancient
Christian
Monu
ments in Transjordan, S B F , Collectio Maior, 7 . Jerusalem, 1 9 4 9 . T r e a t s the Greek inscriptions a n d lists the Christian towns, widi b i b liography. Sailer, Sylvester J. Excavations at Bethany, 1949-1953, S B F , Collectio Maior, 1 2 . Jerusalem, 1 9 5 7 . Covers digs near the T o m b of Lazarus a n d die early history of the village. Sailer, Sylvester J. The Jebusite Burial Place. S B F , Collectio Maior, 1 3 . Jerusalem, 1 9 6 4 . Excavation report of the Bronze Age burial cave at the D o m i n u s Flevit o n the M o u n t of Olives. BENEDICT T . VIVIANO
SALT. Although salt is an essential mineral in the human diet, it is generally believed that hunter-gatherer and fishing groups do not require it as a diet supplement, whereas ag riculturists do. In addition to its dietary role, salt has many industrial uses. It is employed, for example, to treat hides, preserve fish, and separate silver from gold (the cupellation process). Salt occurs naturally in various forms, and its method of extraction varies accordingly. In Western Asia, rock salt has been mined (e.g., in northern Arabia, Anatolia, Assyria, Yemen); sea salt has been evaporated (e.g., on the west coast of Turkey); and certain salt-rich plants may oc casionally have been used to produce salt, as in parts of Af rica (Potts, 1984). Salines, however, present another, easily accessible source of salt. T h e intense heat in the Near East evaporates the saline solution leaving the crystalized salt be hind. Extraction can then take place by digging the salt out of the ground, often in the form of "bricks" of salt that can be transported by pack animals. T h e ubiquity of salines throughout the Near East has meant that it was always the most important source of salt in antiquity—particularly Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anato lia. Cuneiform texts contain a number of pertinent refer ences. T h e profession of salt gatherer (mim-ur4) is attested at Fara in the early dynastic period, and designations for leather bags for salt (Sum., kus-dug-gan-mun; Akk. tukkan tabti) are found in lexical lists. A list of salines (Ugar., ss or sisumd) and their harvesters (?) is contained in a pair of Ugaritic texts (Palais Royale d'Ugarit, vol. 5,96 and 97). T h e division of a saline (Akk., eqil tabti) between the kings of Ugarit and Siyannu is mentioned in a letter from Mursilis II. Prices for salt are specified in Ur III economic texts, as well as in the laws of Eshnunna (sec. 1: A i 14). Ur III sources also mention bricks of salt (sig4~mun; e.g., Ur Ex cavation Texts, III 1021), while a text (Ur Excavation Texts III 1498) which lists 20 sila of salt in the inventory of a gold smith's workshop during the reign of Ibbi-Sin points to the practice of the salt method of cupellation in Mesopotamia by the late third millennium. In addition to its utilitarian uses, salt played a role in an cient Near Eastern cultic practices. This is best exemplified in the Maqlu series: " O salt, created in a clean place, for food of gods did Enlil destine thee, without thee no meal is
459
set out in Ekur, without thee god, king, lord and prince do not smell incense" (tablet VI: 1 1 1 - 1 1 9 , trans. T. Jacobsen). Salt was burned in a number of different Assyrian and Hit tite magical spells, ceremonies, and incantations. It was in cluded in ritual meals prepared for Ishtar and other deities, and was strewn on the ground at the conclusion of certain rituals performed at Assur. Finally, salt was a component in a number of ancient Mesopotamian medicinal recipes. T h e Akkadian idiom "to eat the salt of a person" (tabat PN lehemum) signified the malting of a covenant or arriving at a reconciliation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Buccellati, Giorgio. "Salt at the D a w n of History." In Resurrecting Past: A Joint
Tribute
to Adnan
Bounni,
the
edited by Paolo M a t t h i a e , et
al., p p . 1 7 - 4 0 . Istanbul, 1 9 9 0 . A t t e m p t to link salt use and die bevelrim bowl, with particular reference to Syria. Butz, Kilian. " O n Salt Again . . . Lexikalische R a n d b e m e r k u n g e n . " Journal
of the Economic
and Social
History
of the Orient
2 7 (1984):
2 7 2 - 3 1 6 . Philological discussion of die technical vocabulary of salt in Sumerian a n d Akkadian, with particular reference to die lexical sources. Levey, M a r t i n . " G y p s u m , Salt, a n d Soda in Ancient Mesopotamian Chemical T e c h n o l o g y . " Isis 4 9 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 3 3 6 - 3 4 1 . Early attempt to elucidate the industrial uses of salt in ancient Mesopotamia. Potts, Daniel T . "Salt of t h e Earth: T h e Role of a Non-Pastoral R e s o u r c e in a Pastoral E c o n o m y . " Oriens
Antiquus
2 2 (1983): 205-215.
Study of salt exploitation b y pastoral n o m a d s in greater M e s o p o t a mia, drawing o n anthropological, ethnohistoric, and cuneiform evi dence. Potts, Daniel T . " O n Salt a n d Salt Gathering in Ancient M e s o p o t a m i a . " Journal
of the Economic
and Social
History
of the Orient
27
( 1 9 8 4 ) : 2 2 5 - 2 7 1 . Wide-ranging look at salt extraction a n d use in ancient M es opotamia , combining philological and archaeological ev idence. DANIEL T. POTTS
SALVAGE EXCAVATION. ical process
known
an overview and limitations, erations
in
as salvage
[To treat the
excavation,
of the method's
procedures,
and a study
of specific
this entry objectives, salvage
archaeolog comprises potentials,
excavation
op
Israel]
An Overview Stepped-up destruction of the world's archaeological heri tage has been a by-product of the intensified economic and industrial development of the later twentieth century. Con fronted with this challenge, archaeologists have scrambled to rescue what evidence they can. In the Near East, salvage archaeology began in earnest in the 1960s, when the first large-scale dam construction projects were announced, ini tiated to harness hydroelectric power and to facilitate largescale agricultural development. Faced with the imminent flooding of sites in the threatened river valleys, national an tiquities organizations, often in concert with U N E S C O , or-
460
SALVAGE EXCAVATION: An Overview
ganized salvage programs and encouraged archaeologists to excavate doomed sites. Salvage excavation has become an increasingly important concern in Near Eastern archae ology. In Syria, for example, new excavation permits granted in recent years have almost exclusively been limited to salvage projects, and such trends may well persist if not intensify. The major dam projects in southwest Asia have largely been in the valleys of tire Euphrates and Tigris Rivers and their tributaries. [See Euphrates; Tigris.] Sponsoring coun tries include Syria (the Tabqa and Tishrin dams on the Eu phrates, and the Khabur dams), Turkey (the Keban, Karakaya, Atatiirk, Birecik, and Karkam dams on the Euphrates and a set of dams on the Tigris), and Iraq (the Hamrin dam on the Diyala, Saddam/Eski Mosul dam on the Tigris, and Haditita/Qadisiyah dam on the Euphrates). [See Khabur; Hamrin Dam Salvage Project; Diyala; Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project.] The archaeological heritage is also tiireatened by the trend toward large-scale agricultural intensification: regions formerly cultivated with traditional technologies and methods are now subjected to mechanized agriculture with tractors and deep plowing. Such activity results in the destruction of archaeological sites as well as such off-site features as ancient roads, canals, and sherd scatters. The North Jezireh project in northern Iraq is an example of a salvage operation organized specifically to col lect archaeological evidence from an area of some 800 sq l<m (496 sq. mi.) targeted for agricultural development. Other types of economic development also encroach. The important Neolithic site of 'Ain Ghazal near Amman, Jor dan, was discovered when highway consttuction damaged it; more recently the site was endangered by real estate de velopment. [See Ain Ghazal] In Beirut, plans for massive urban renewal in the downtown area precipitated salvage excavations of the ancient city below. The developers are said to be planning the integration of excavated remains into the modern constructions with an eye to tire cultural and touristic value of those remains—an increasingly common practice. [See Beirut; Tourism and Archaeology; Restora tion and Conservation.] There has been relatively little discussion of methodolo gies for mounting salvage projects in die Near East. Gen erally, national antiquities organizations sponsor surveys of threatened regions that locate sites for excavation (Whallon, 1979). After survey, excavation projects are speedily orga nized to sample as much as possible before sites are de stroyed. Unfortunately, haste only compounds die problem of die site's destruction: the archaeologist cannot return to check the results after the site has vanished. Although the destruction of archaeological sites can only be viewed as a calamity, there are some positive aspects to salvage archaeology. One is the concentration of intensive archaeological efforts in specific geographic areas, facilitat ing an unusually comprehensive and coherent understand c
ing of regions and tiieir changes through time. In the case of the Euphrates valley, continual dam construction resulted in an almost unbroken zone of archaeological research from die Keban dam area in eastern Turkey to the Tabqa dam in Syria. Because of the association with dam projects, largescale salvage operations are typically focused on (and biased toward) riverine communities. Coordination of salvage excavations, both foreign and lo cally sponsored, is usually undertaken by die national antiq uities organizations, which often organize international sym posia of scholars involved in salvage work (for published proceedings on symposia held in Iraq, for example, see Su mer 35 [1979], 40 [1982], 42 [1983]). Such cooperation al lows archaeologists to compare results and work toward an integrated perspective of societal changes in the relevant regions. Antiquities organizations have also offered induce ments for foreign participation in salvage work, by providing labor, equipment, housing, and even financial support (in the case of Iraq), and permission to retain and exhibit a portion of the excavated museum-quality objects (Syria). A second "blessing in disguise" provided by salvage proj ects is their tendency to compel archaeologists to concen trate their efforts on "peripheral" or "marginal" regions that would otherwise be neglected in favor of the urban heart lands (e.g., Uruk, Babylon, Assur, Mari). T h e investigation of marginal areas has produced surprising results that the core areas could never have yielded. For example, excava tions at Mureybet and Abu Hureyra in die Tabqa dam re gion supplied crucial data on the transition from mobile hunting-gathering to Neolithic agricultural lifestyles, providing evidence that sedentary village life preceded ag riculture by several millennia. [See Mureybet.] Excavations in the Euphrates valley in Syria and Turkey have provided testimony of a southern Mesopotamian "expansion" and colonization of the region coincident widi the appearance of the first urban societies in southern Mesopotamia (Uruk pe riod, c. 3600-3100 B C E ) . A rich body of material has been obtained from a range of relevant sites, including die fullfledged colonies of Habuba Kabira and Jebel 'Aruda (Syria), smaller outposts like Hassek Hoytik (Turkey), and southern Mesopotamian "enclaves" in local towns, as at Hacinebi (Turkey). [See Habuba Kabira.] The Hamrin salvage region in Iraq and the Middle Kha bur project in Syria have both revealed networks of special ized small third-millennium communities apparentiy asso ciated with (and established by?) emerging urban centers. The results indicate that the development of urban civili zation had a significant effect even on marginal rural areas, where local resources were mobilized or exploited within newly established regional economic systems. Unexpected results have also been supplied by excavations in more re cent historical periods. T h e excavations at Khirbet-ed Diniye (ancient Haradum) in the Fladitha dam region exposed a centrally planned small city of the Old Babylonian period
SALVAGE EXCAVATION: Salvage Excavation in Israel (c. 1800 B C E ) ; tlie tiiirteenth-century B C E cuneiform archives from the city of Emar in the Tabqa dam area have provided an invaluable textual source for a prosperous Late Bronze Syrian city, supplying an alternative model from that of Ugarit. [See Emar; Ugarit.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Algaze, G u i l l e r m o , ed. Town vol. 2 , The Straligraphic
and Country
Sequence
in South-Eastern
at Kurban
Hoyiik.
Anatolia,
Chicago, 1 9 9 0 .
Final report from a T u r k i s h salvage project. See Wilkinson ( 1 9 9 0 ) . Algaze, Guillermo, et al. " T h e T i g r i s - E u p h r a t e s Archaeological R e connaissance Project: A Preliminary R e p o r t of the 1 9 8 9 - 1 9 9 0 Sea s o n s . " Anatoiica 1 7 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 7 5 - 2 4 0 . R e p o r t o n surveys c o n d u c t e d in the E u p h r a t e s and Tigris salvage regions of southeastern T u r k e y , with general c o m m e n t s o n t h e nature of the rescue programs. Ball, Warwick, et al. " T h e Tell al-Hawa Project: Archaeological Inves tigations in the N o r t h Jazira, 1 9 8 6 - 8 7 . " Iraq 5 1 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 - 6 6 . Exca vation a n d survey in the n o r t h e r n Jezireh salvage area of Iraq. H u o t , J e a n - L o u i s , ed. Prehistoire prehistoire
et Texploralion
recenle
de la Mesopotamie: du djebel Hamrin,
La Paris
Mesopotamie 17-19
decetn-
bre 1984. Paris, 1 9 8 7 . R e p o r t s from an international colloquium o n the H a m r i n excavations, illustrating tlie cooperative character of sal vage work. M a r g u e r o n , J e a n - C l a u d e , ed. Le Moyen d'echanges:
Acts
du colloque
Euphrate,
de Strasbourg,
10-12
zone mars
de contacts
et
1977. L e i d e n ,
1 9 8 0 . Proceedings of a s y m p o s i u m on t h e results of excavations in the T a b q a salvage area. W h a l l o n , R o b e r t . An Archaeological
Survey
of the Keban
Reservoir
Area
of East-Central Turkey. M e m o i r s of tlie M u s e u m of Anthropology University of Michigan, n o . I I . A n n Arbor, 1 9 7 9 . R e p o r t of an u n usually systematic a n d detailed survey conducted prior t o salvage excavation. Wilkinson, T . J. Town Settlement
and Land
and Country Use at Kurban
in South-Eastern Hoyiik
Anatolia,
vol. 1 ,
and Other Sites in the
Lower
Karababa Basin. Chicago, 1 9 9 0 . Final report from a T u r k i s h salvage project. See Algaze ( 1 9 9 0 ) . G L E N N M . SCHWARTZ
Salvage Excavation in Israel Also known as rescue excavation, the term salvage excavation does not appear in Israel's Antiquities Law of 1978; it is, rather, a technical term used, since die early 1960s, by of ficials of die Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA, previously the Israel Department of Antiquities) to describe small ar chaeological excavations IAA archaeologists conduct at sites discovered and damaged in the process of building and highway construction and other development work. In the last thirty years, nearly two thousand licenses have been is sued for such excavations. A salvage excavation is not planned and prepared for in tlie way that a large-scale archaeological excavation is, witii tlie specific goals of providing a key to a historical or an archaeological problem, within a time frame of several sea sons stretching over many years. Instead, it is organized in a matter of days, conducted under time pressure, and in a general environment and under physical conditions inimical to its goals and objectives: to learn as much as possible in a
461
short time about a site and to register, describe, and pho tograph a maximum of its archaeological data. The archae ologist assigned to a salvage excavation has had no time to sUidy the site to prepare for tlie dig. H e or she learns about it, appreciating its importance and special contributions to the archaeology and history of the land, only as the exca vation proceeds. T h e small size and scope of such an ex cavation does not, however, diminish its importance. One of the principal limitations of a salvage excavation is that it is conducted in the part of the site threatened with destruction, which is not always the most important area in terms of its history and material culture. T h e initial archaeological information recovered from a salvage excavation is published in the IAA's Hadashot Arkheologiyot (Hebrew) and its English version, Excavations and Surveys in Israel. Final reports are published in 'Atiqot (English and Hebrew), the IAA's official journal. In recent years, salvage excavations have been carried out in several of Israel's larger cities (Jerusalem, Beersheba, Ash kelon, Qiryat Ata), where intensive development work has been underway to provide housing for new immigrants. Tens of salvage excavations in Jerusalem alone have pro vided archaeological data of cardinal importance. For ex ample, the "Third Wall," segments of which had already been revealed through excavation, was excavated in 1990 by Vassilios Tzaferis, Alexander Onn, and Nurit Feig when new road construction uncovered additional sections, as well as tlie remains of an American monastery and a number of Armenian inscriptions. Discoveries at other salvage excavations necessitated by roadwork in Jerusalem in 1990 include the T o m b of Caia phas, die high priest in whose time Jesus was tried and sen tenced, found during Zvi Greenhuf s excavations in East Talpiyot (Ya'ar ha-Shalom). Salvage excavations directed by Ronny Reich in the Mamilla Street area, where a major development project is underway, led to the discovery of several Iron Age and Byzantine period tombs: a huge Byz antine burial cave containing hundreds of human remains was found adjoined by a small chapel whose walls are dec orated with frescoes. One such fresco represents an angel facing to the right and extending its arms. In adjacent ex cavations, Aren Maeir exposed an aqueduct built in the third or fourth century C E that was in use through the Middle Ages. Parts of this aqueduct had previously been exposed north and west of diis area. T h e 1990 construction and expansion of Jerusalem's sub urbs have resulted in a large number of salvage excavations in the area. At Pisgat Ze'ev, Rina Avner uncovered a Byz antine monastery, part of a complex that included an oil press, flour mill, and wine presses. In a later phase, prior to its destruction in a fierce conflagration, this complex served as an inn. Other parts of the same suburb revealed a site dating from the Early Bronze IV~Early Arab period, whose Roman-Byzantine remains include a complex system of
462
SALVAGE EXCAVATION: Salvage Excavation in Israel
buildings and installations: three miqva'ot (ritual baths), a lever-and-screw oil press, and a wine press (excavated by Jon Seligmann, 1990); a large Persian period fortress (60 X 70 m) with an outer casemate wall (uncovered by Yonatan Nadelman, 1990); and a Second Temple period farmstead with an adjacent hidden cave, rniqveh, wine press, and un derground oil press (excavated by Eli Shukron, 1991). [See Jerusalem; Ritual Batirs.] In Beersheba, building construction in the Horvat Matar area in 1990-1991 exposed an Early Arab farmhouse exca vated by Itzhaq Gilead and Steven Rosen. T h e farmhouse was built on top of a monumental Byzantine building that in turn was erected over scanty Chalcolithic remains. T h e walls of the Byzantine structure were plastered and were faced either with mosaics or red paint; its floors were paved with plastered stone slabs. Nearby, several farmhouses from tire Iron Age and Byzantine periods were uncovered. At the construction site of a shopping mall northwest of the Beer sheba central bus station, Yehudah Govrin unearthed twenty-five Byzantine graves in 1988-1989. At Nahal Kovshim, in nortirern Beersheba, where building construction is planned, buildings dating to the Byzantine period were un covered during excavations directed by Pirhiya Nalrshoni, Yulia Ustinova, and Hayim Bar-Ziv. Remains included sev eral structures, a complex of rooms arranged around a courtyard, a bell-shaped cistern, and a cistern and plastered sediment pool connected by clay pipes. Remains of a Chal colithic settlement were also evident at the site and included twelve cisterns containing pottery. Of note is a violin-shaped limestone figurine. [See Beersheba.] In the Afridar neighborhood in Ashkelon, salvage exca vations directed by Baruch Brandl and Ram Gophna un covered a site dating to the Early Bronze Age I. Massive wall remains from a large public building were located through out the site. Seven rooms have been identified. A locally manufactured Egyptian-type bowl was found top of a stair case in one of the rooms. One of tire earliest Canaanite cop per daggers found in Israel was unearured in these excava tions, along with a considerable amount of Egyptian pottery, providing invaluable information regarding the Egyptian presence in the country's southern coastal region in the EB I. Application for a building permit in Qiryat Ata, an eastern suburb of Haifa, led to salvage excavations in 1990 by Eliot Braun and Amir Golani at a site covering more than 240 acres. Several well-preserved EB I oval structures were un covered, oriented east-west. One of the structures was de stroyed by fire. At a second site in Qiryat Ata, salvage ex cavations were conducted in a previously robbed burial cave damaged during foundation work on a building. T h e cave contained several clay saroophagi. Salvage excavations were conducted in northern Israel during construction of the new Tefen-Karmiel road. Three Middle Bronze I burial caves, containing skeletal remains,
pottery, and a bronze dagger, were discovered and exca vated by Mordechai Avi'am in 1990. Each cave comprised at least two burial chambers. Preparations for laying a water pipe at Bab el-Hawa, near Quneitra, revealed a 400-acre ancient site. Moshe Hartal's excavation of 1988-1990 unearthed, among other remains, an elongated Byzantine structure built over an Iron II build ing. The walls and doorjambs are of smoothed basalt blocks and still stand more than 2 m high. Of the eight rooms un covered, two had round pottery installations (tabuns or si los). The building was used from the fourth-seventh cen turies C E , with various changes made to its floors, doorways, and walls. Ceramic remains included imported ware and eight hundred decorated lamps. Also found were nine hun dred coins; bronze, bone, metal, and glass jewelry; cosmetic utensils; and a stone seal carved with a seated figure milking a goat. The settlement was probably involved in animal hus bandry (as evidenced by the hundreds of animal bones found), weaving, and milling and was most likely Christian (a large number of cruciform pendants were unearthed, and many of the lamps were decorated with crosses). A stonebuilt tomb was also discovered at the site containing pottery, human skeletal remains, animal bones, and turtle shells that may have been associated with funerary rites. A group of interconnected rock-out caves was uncovered during construction work at Gush Halav. T h e caves date to the first-second centuries C E and were probably used for storage. Their concentration indicates the location of an cient Gush Halav. One cave, excavated in 1989 by Emanuel Damati and Hana Abu 'Uqsa, revealed four chambers and a corridor. Round and triangular hollows dug into the walls were used as shelves. Pottery and forty-one lines of graffiti were also found. Tirat ha-Carmel was the cemetery of a large settlement in existence from the Roman-Byzantine to the Early Arab pe riod. Twenty-two of its sixty caves were excavated in 1990 by Shalom Yankelevitch; those belonging to the Roman and Byzantine periods were irregular in plan and contained clay saroophagi. T h e Early Arab period caves were arcosolia caves containing burial troughs. All the caves had been looted, so that the finds were out of context: bronze coins; shell, bronze, and glass jewelry; pottery; glass vessels; and cosmetic objects. Of note is a fragment of a blue duckshaped glass vessel. T h e site is first mentioned in Crusader sources as having been named after the Christian saint Jean of Tyre. In the Tel Aviv area, during a sounding conducted in 1989 by Yossi Levy along the projected "Netiv Ayalon North" Project, a (Samaritan?) burial complex consisting of a court yard and two chambers was uncovered. Finds included skel etal remains, pottery, lamps, jewelry, coins, and glass dating to the second-third centuries CE. At Gelilot, during road-widening work on one of tire area's main arteries in 1990, Levy uncovered rock-out wine
SAMARIA presses characteristic of the Late Roman and Byzantine pe riods, including a treading surface, pools, and collection vats; an underground storehouse; a bathhouse, whose hypocaust and tepidarium are now partially excavated; a subterranean miqveh complex (with steps and a step bench, an entrance, and a threshold) covered with several layers of plaster (evidence of its extended use); a bell-shaped cistern used secondarily as a refuse pit; and a burial cave consisting of an entrance and small burial chamber that had been pil laged and thus produced few finds. All were probably used by a Late Roman period Samaritan agricultural settlement. [See Samaritans.] In the south, in Israel's Negev desert, Chalcolithic remains were discovered during preparations for roadwork on the Kissufim-Katif road at Nahal Rissufim. Excavations di rected by Yuval Goren and Peter Fabian revealed limestone ossuaries containing human bones, pottery, and a bird fig urine engraved in ivory. A large pit contained remains of a least ten burials. West of this area, which was damaged in the construction, was an underground rectangular burial chamber. Several shallow pits contained clay ossuaries. Small rectangular niches, one of which held an ossuary, were carved into two of the chamber's walls. Offering vessels were also found, some containing organic material. People of es teemed social status were probably buried there. Individual and group burials were also found around die periphery of the chamber, accompanied by very simple pottery forms. A secondary burial of three individuals was found nearby. T h e pottery at this site suggests a strong connection with the sites along Israel's coastal plain. Several tumulus burials, including nine that are well-pre served, were uncovered when construction began in a new residential suburb on the outskirts of Eilat. Excavation in 1988-1989 by Uzi Avner and Israel Hershkovitz revealed that most were secondary burials and include die skeletal remains of at least one child. Finds included Neolithic ar rowheads, grinding stones, flint scrapers, a sandstone bowl and fragments, pottery, and beads. An M B IIB cooldng pot and a complete, primary male burial were found nearby, the first remains of this period found south of Tel Masos and Tel Malhata. An Iron II burial cave containing the fragmentary skeletal remains of ten people and dozens of pottery vessels was uncovered during road building operations at Horvat Anim. Yeshayahu Lender's 1989 excavations revealed a single bur ial chamber with arcosolia hewn into three of its walls. [See also Israel Antiquities Authority; Survey of Israel] c
BIBLIOGRAPHY Excavations
and Surveys
in Israel.
English edition of Hadashot newsletter.
Vols. 1 - 1 2 . J e r u s a l e m ,
Arkheologiyot,
1982-1993.
t h e IAA's archaeological RUDOLPH COHEN
463
SAMARIA, site located 56 Ion (35 mi.) north of Jeru salem (map reference 168 X 187) and west of the Ephraimite watershed, rising to a summit height of 430 m above sea level at 32°i7' N , 35°i2' E, near the center of the Nortiiern Kingdom of Israel. Samaria overlooked the main road (Via Maris) connecting Egypt and die Southern Kingdom of Ju dah with the strategic Jezreel Valley and northern routes to Phoenicia and Damascus. Its biblical names Samtr (jfgs. 10:1-2) and, somewhat later, Someron (1 Kgs. 16:24 et pas sim), mean "watch" or "Watchman." Both designations stem from an original *qatil participle and reflect successive changes in the pronunciation of that verb form (*samir-v —> *somir —* somer). T h e name of the site's earliest recorded private owner, Semer, represents a secondary nominal for mation from this verbal antecedent. Archaeology. Excavation at Samaria began in 1908 with the Harvard expedition directed by Gottlieb Schumacher. George Andrew Reisner and architect Clarence Fisher suc ceeded him in the second phase of the project, which ran from 1909 to 1910. Their combined efforts concenttated on the western half of the summit and exposed a substantial portion of the Israelite royal palace and, immediately to its west, a sizable storeroom complex. Reisner called die latter feature the Ostraca House because of the discovery inside of more than one hundred laconic shipping dockets record ing the transfer of various commodities (primarily wine and oil) to the capital during the early eightii century B C E , in the time of Jehoash^feroboam II (see figure 1 ) . [See Samaria Os traca.] Between 1932 and 1935, five institutions (mostiy from En gland and Israel) sent a Joint Expedition to Samaria under the leadership of John W. Crowfoot. As primary field su pervisor in the royal quarter, Kathleen M. Kenyon intro duced new techniques of debris-layer analysis to die project. She exposed a north-south section across the entire summit east of Schumacher's and Reisner's earlier excavations. In die final reports, Kenyon held tiiat Samaria's pottery pro vided crucial guidelines for evaluating the stratigraphic his tory and ceramic traditions at other Iron II sites in Palestine. Her publications quickly became the standard references for studying Samaria and die early Iron Age II generally; more over, Aegean archaeologists began mooring their chronol ogies to Kenyon's proposed framework at Samaria. Though Kenyon found some Early Bronze Age I pottery on die rock surface, most remains came from the Iron Age. Here she distinguished eight major building phases (periods I-VIII) and concluded that periods I-VI spanned the earliest Iron Age II occupation under Omri to die Assyrian desttuction of Samaria in 722/21 B C E . Kenyon also believed that each new building phase corresponded directiy to a shift in ceramic tradition. Appealing to 1 Kgs. 16:24 to buttress her archaeological interpretations, she argued decidedly against any Iron Age occupation of Samaria earlier than Omri's reign.
464
SAMARIA
Prior to Kenyon's official publication of the pottery (1957), however, Roland de Vaux (1955) suggested thather two earliest ceramic phases actually predated all Omride building activities and indicated an Iron I occupation of the site. Whereas this view merely questioned the direct corre lation of architectural and ceramic periods, George Ernest Wright (1959) later proposed a formal distinction between them. Other contemporaneous studies by William Foxwell Albright (1958) and Yohanan Aharoni and Ruth Amiran (1958) agreed thatthe earliest Iron Age pottery predated the first royal architecture at Samaria. The resulting controversy stemmed mainly from differences in archaeological method and interpretation. Kenyon's assertion that i Kgs. 16:24 precluded any oc cupation on the hill prior to Omri compelled her to correlate the earliest ceramic remains with the earliest royal architec ture and to assign both to Omri. Although the earliest Om ride courtyard lay several depositional layers above bedrock, Kenyon's system demanded that she associated all Iron Age pottery lying directly on the bedrock (and often mixed with scrappy Early Bronze Age remains) with that higher floor level. Having started this way, she dated each successive floor level by the material found beneath it. Wright and oth ers, however, proposed dating these surfaces by the material lying directiy on them. In fact, both systems had merit; they simply addressed different aspects of the same methodolog ical issue. Kenyon's approach yielded a floor's terminus post quern (construction date), whereas Wright's provided its ter minus ante quern (occupational dates).
The early studies that challenged Kenyon's principles of dating had only her published pottery to evaluate. More re cent ceramic (Stager, 1990) and stratigraphic (Tappy, 1992) investigations have examined unpublished material to de termine the original findspots of the pottery and thereby set tle the unanswered questions. The results have confirmed a pre-Omride occupation of Samaria and have associated the Iron I pottery there with various nonmonumental architec tural features resting immediately on or set into the rock surface (remains of a possible beam press, numerous rock cuttings, storage pits, separator vats, and cisterns). A narrow reading of 1 Kgs. 16:24, therefore, can no longer support Kenyon's proposed chronological framework for Israelite Samaria. Kenyon's initial pottery analysis raised hopes that the strict stratigraphic controls that presumably attended her ex cavation method might strengthen typologies for the nintheighth centuries B C E . However, Tappy's recent stratigraphic study has shown that much of the published pottery came from secondary or disturbed contexts, while those pieces from primary contexts often came from deposits several lay ers above or below the floors and architecture they pur portedly dated. When analyzed typologically against ce ramic groups from traditional and more recently excavated sites, the pottery recovered from these deposits supports the new stratigraphic analysis. T h e collective attributes of ves sels such as bar-handle bowls, cup-and-saucer forms, lentoid flasks, collar-rim store jars, and Early Iron Age krater, chalice, and cooking pot rims point to a significant Iron I
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Figure I .
Ostraca house. (Courtesy Reisner-Samaria Archive/Semitic M u s e u m , H a r v a r d U n i
SAMARIA occupation for many of the levels exposed in Kenyon's large section across the summit and labeled "periods I—II." In short, while Kenyon correctly associated the first mon umental building activities with the early nintii-century Om ride dynasty, recent studies have demonsttated the need to adjust her proposed ceramic chronology. Pottery Periods i 2 belong to as early as the eleventh (possibly late twelfth) century B C E . It does not follow, however, that we should automatically shift the pottery from Pottery Period 3 upward to fill the resultant gap in the Omride era. In fact, only some of the Pottery Period 3 wares can relate to the Omrides. Other vessels in that assemblage must remain in Jehu's time period, while a significant number extend into die early eighth century. Clearly, we have many fewer stratigraphically secure archaeological data pertaining to ninth-century Samaria than the excavation report implies. Therefore, we must exercise caution when relying on the published mate rials from Samaria to establish or adjust chronologies at sites elsewhere in die Levantine and Aegean worlds. History. When Omri rose to power over Israel in the early ninth century B C E , he soon moved the capital from Tirzah to Samaria (1 Kgs. 16:21-24). Together with Ahab, his son and successor, Omri subsequently transformed this one time family estate of Shemer into a cosmopolitan royal city complete with impressive fortification walls, a palace, large courtyards with rectangular pools, public buildings, and storerooms. Ahab's politically motivated marriage to the Si donian princess Jezebel opened the way to Phoenician wealth and religious influence. Later biblical references (/ Kgs. 22:39; Am. 3:15, 6:4; Ps. 45:9 [MT]) to ivory-appointed houses preserve a memory of the site's grandeur, confirmed by the discovery of numerous ivory furnishings spanning the period from Ahab to Jeroboam II, At the same time, Ahab's syncretistic tendencies won him the scorn of the religious establishment, epitomized in the figure of Elijah (1 Kgs. 1 7 19), whose victory against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel enhanced the credibility of the monotheistic Yahweh Alone Party. With backing from this faction, comprised mainly of prophets, ultra-conservative social groups such as the Rechabites, and undoubtedly some segments of the mil itary, Jehu seized control of the throne in Samaria sometime around 842 B C E (2 Kgs. 9-10). Nevertheless, long after this event die Assyrians continued to refer to Samaria as tlie House of Omri. Over a span of roughly 150 years (c. 870-722 B C E ) , four teen Israelite ldngs ruled from Samaria as the city became Israel's political and cultural center, the undisputed "head of Ephraim" (Is. 7:9). Yet its newly acquired centrality also made Samaria the clearest and most dangerous symbol of opposition to the Southern Kingdom of Judah and its cult in Jerusalem. This deeply rooted north-south schism and die Judahite perspective taken in tlie final Deuteronomistic History produced a critical treatment of the rulers and ac
465
tivities at Samaria in the Hebrew Bible, while exttabiblical sources (Mesha Stele; Assyrian annals) often pointed to the capital's regional and international prominence. The com plexities attending both textual and archaeological investi gations into the Israelite period have led historians to con centrate their research on this phase of the city's existence. In 722/21 B C E , Assyrian armies led by Shalmaneser V and Sargon II besieged and occupied Samaria, deporting large numbers of Israelites and resettling the site primarily with South Arabians (2 Kgs. 17; the Display, Bull, Khorsabad Pavement, and Cylinder inscriptions of Sargon). Though excavators recovered few building remains from diis occu pation, an Assyrian stele fragment (attributable to Sargon II), pieces of various cuneiform tablets (some apparently representing a letter to Avi-ahi, the local governor), and sig nificant quantities of Assyrian palace ware attest to Samar ia's use then as an administrative center. Following Assyrian rule, the city passed into the hands of each successive world power. Although archaeology has revealed little from the subsequent Babylonian period, Jeremiah 41 alludes to the site's occupation during tiiat time. From the late sixth to the late fifth centuries B C E , Persia retained Samaria as an administrative center. Concurrent efforts to restore and strengthen Jerusalem rekindled old an tagonisms between the two cities (Ez. 4; Neh. 2, 4, 6; 1 Esd. 2). Though few architectural remains survive from tiiese years, excavators did recover a .25 m-thick deposit of fertile brown soil spread over a 45 X 50 m area of the summit. This area surrounded the district governor's palace and seems to have served as a large garden similar to those found elsewhere in the Babylonian-Persian empires. Small finds from this period include seal impressions in both Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid styles; fragments of an Achae menid throne; a fifth-century Athenian coin; tiiree Sidonian coins (from the reign of Abdastart I, 370-358 B C E ) ; painted and incised limestone incense altars; an alabaster alabastron; fourteen Aramaic ostraca (bearing dates from the late sixth to early fourth centuries); plus significant quantities of black- and red-figure, white-ground, and black-burnish wares imported from die Aegean world during die late sixth to late fourth centuries B C E . The conquests of Alexander the Great initiated the tur bulent Hellenistic period throughout the Levant. Following Alexander's death, the Ptolomies and Seleucids competed bitterly for control over Palestine. At Samaria, a series of beautifully constructed round towers and a subsequent mas sive defense wall (4 m thick) witii square towers attest to the political vicissitudes of the time (see figure 2). T h e round towers, originally misdated to the Israelite period, stand 8.5 m high, with diameters ranging from 13 to 14.7 m. They represent some of the most impressive Hellenistic architec ture unearthed anywhere in the country. Significant quan tities of Megarian bowls and fragments from thousands of
166
SAMARIA
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F i g u r e 2.
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SAMARIA Rhodian stamped jars reflect Samaria's international com mercial contacts during this era. Late in the period (c. 108/ 07 B C E ) , the Hasmonean high priest John Hyrcanus (135/ 34-104 BCE) led an assault against the city, destroying much of die so-called Fortress Wall and bringing Samaria tem porarily under Judean control (Josephus, Antiquities 13.275281; War 1.64-65). Following Pompey's conquest of Palestine in 63 B C E , Sa maria underwent its period of greatest physical change. The provincial governor, Gabinius (57-55 B C E ) , rebuilt its walls and residential areas and established a forum with an ad joining basilica northeast of die summit. But the most dra matic program of construction came under Herod the Great (Josephus, Antiquities 15.292; War 1.403), who renamed the city Sebaste (a Greek name honoring Emperor Augustus) and commissioned the Augusteum, a summit temple (35 X 24 m) with portico and cella, all situated on a platform whose retaining walls stood 15 m high. A 21-m-wide staircase led from the forecourt up 4.4 m to die temple proper (see figure 3). Other impressive features, including anotiier temple and altar dedicated to the goddess Kore and a large stadium (230 X 60 m), lay on the city's north and northeast slopes, then enclosed by an outer city wall more than 3 kilometers (al most 2 mi.) in circumference (encompassing roughly 160 acres). A main entrance gate, flanked by two massive round towers, stood west of the city, and shops of all kinds lined the columned street (12.5 m wide) that angled around the south side of the hill and eventually approached die summit from the east. Under Constantinian rule, in die Byzantine period, Samaria-Sebaste sent bishops to councils at Nicea, Constan tinople, and Chalcedon and to the Synod of Jerusalem. Few remains from this period have survived. Between diis time and the Middle Ages, tradition identified Samaria as the bur ial site of John the Baptist, and two separate shrines marked the proposed resting places of his body and head.
earlier b y Crowfoot et al. comprise t h e official excavation report of the Joint Expedition ( 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 5 ) . Although the report received praise as a hallmark in the study of Palestinian archaeology, it failed to present the stratigraphic data necessary t o evaluate critically t h e authors' opinions. Crowfoot, J. W . , Kathleen M . K e n y o n , and E. L . Sukenik. The Build ings at Samaria. Samaria-Sebaste: R e p o r t of the Work of the Joint Expedition in 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 3 and of the W o r k of the British Expedition in 1 9 3 5 , no. 1 . L o n d o n , 1 9 4 2 . Kaufman, Ivan T . " T h e Samaria Ostraca: A n Early Witness to H e b r e w W r i t i n g . " Biblical
Archaeologist
Albright, William Foxwell. " R e c e n t Progress in Palestinian A r c h a e ology: Samaria-Sebaste III a n d H a z o r I . " Bulletin of the American Schools
of Oriental
Research
1 5 0 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 2 1 - 2 5 . A n early a n d quite
positive review of K e n y o n ' s 1 9 5 7 publication of the Samaria pottery, though it questioned her dating of some early Iron Age vessels. Avigad, N a h m a n . " S a m a r i a . " In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations
in the Holy
Land,
vol. 4 , p p . 1 3 0 0 - 1 3 1 0 . N e w York, 1 9 9 3 .
Well-balanced article written by a participant in the Joint Expedition to Samaria. Crowfoot, J. W . , a n d G . M . C r o w f o o t . Early
Ivories from Samaria.
Sa
maria Sebaste: R e p o r t of the W o r k of the Joint Expedition in 1 9 3 1 1 9 3 3 and of the W o r k of the British Expedition in 1 9 3 5 , no. 2 . L o n don, 1 9 3 8 . Crowfoot, J. W „ G. M . Crowfoot, a n d Kathleen M . K e n y o n . The Ob jects from Samaria. Samaria-Sebaste: R e p o r t of the W o r k of the Joint Expedition in 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 3 and of t h e W o r k of the British Expedition in 1 9 3 5 , no. 3 . L o n d o n , 1 9 5 7 . T h i s volume a n d the two published
4 5 . 4 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 2 2 9 - 2 3 9 . Synopsis of the
author's 1 9 6 6 dissertation, " T h e Samaria Ostraca: A Study in A n cient H e b r e w Palaeography," summarizing the evidence available from archaeology a n d from t h e study of early scripts a n d hieratic numerals. Rainey, Anson F . " T o w a r d a Precise Date for the Samaria Ostraca." Bulletin
of the American
Schools
of Oriental
Research,
no. 2 7 2 (Novem
ber 1 9 8 8 ) : 6 9 - 7 4 . Presents a viable new proposal to clarify the dating of the Samaria ostraca, explaining how they can b e assigned to J e hoash a n d his coregent, J e r o b o a m II. Reisner, G e o r g e A. Israelite Ostraca from Samaria. Cambridge, Mass., [191?].
Reisner, G e o r g e A., Clarence S. Fisher, and David G . Lyon. Excavations
at Samaria,
1908-1910,
Harvard
vol, 1 , The Text; vol. 2 ,
Plans
and Plates. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 9 2 4 . T h e official excavation report from the initial exploration of Samaria by H a r v a r d University from 1 9 0 8 to 1 9 1 0 , including L y o n ' s brief summary of Schumacher's work in 1 9 0 8 ; it is often difficult t o relocate specific findspots on the basis of these reports. Stager, Lawrence E. " S h e m e r ' s Estate." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental
Research,
n o . 2 7 7 - 2 7 8 ( F e b r u a r y - M a y 1 9 9 0 ) : 9 3 - 1 0 7 . Sa
lient study of Early Iron Age bedrock installations that represent fa cilities for processing wine and oil. T a p p y , R o n E . The Archaeology
of Israelite
Samaria,
vol. 1 , Early
Iron
Age through the Ninth Centwy BCE. H a r v a r d Semitic Studies, n o . 4 4 . Atlanta, 1 9 9 2 . T h o r o u g h evaluation of Kenyon's proposed chronological framework for t h e occupation of Early Iron Age Sa maria, based o n a critical assessment of data contained in both p u b lished reports a n d unpublished field notebooks. T h e discussion is technical and intended for the specialist. T a p p y , R o n E . The Archaeology
of Israelite
Samaria,
vol. 2 , The
Eighth
Century BCE. Forthcoming. Vaux, Roland de. " L e s fouilles d e Tell el-Far'ah, pres Naplouse, Cinq u i e m e C a m p a g n e . " Revue
BIBLIOGRAPHY
467
Biblique
6 2 ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 5 4 1 - 5 8 9 . A n essay
that predated K e n y o n ' s official publication of the pottery from Sa maria and that proposed tentative correlations between the Samaria pottery a n d that which d e V a u x h a d recovered at Tell el-Far'ah ( N o r t h ) ; the correlations disagreed with Kenyon's conclusions re garding the earliest Iron Age materials from Samaria. Wright, G. Ernest. "Israelite Samaria and Iron Age Chronology." Bul letin of the American
Schools
of Oriental
Research,
no. 1 5 5 (October
1 9 5 9 ) : 1 3 - 2 9 . Praises K e n y o n ' s work at Samaria as " o n e of the m o s t remarkable achievements in t h e history of Palestinian excavation" (p. 1 7 ) , b u t disagrees strongly with both her methodology and con clusions. W r i g h t , G . Ernest. " S a m a r i a . " Biblical
Archaeologist
22.1 (1959): 6 7 -
78.
Wright, G . Ernest. "Archaeological Fills a n d Strata." Biblical Archaeologistz%.z ( 1 9 6 2 ) : 3 4 - 4 0 . Although here the a u t h o r analyzes selected vessels from a m o n g K e n y o n ' s published assemblage, his articles in Biblical Archaeologist function more as brief methodological treatises than comprehensive ceramic studies. RON
TAPPY
468
SAMARIA OSTRACA
SAMARIA OSTRACA. Inscribed broken pieces of pottery (ostraca) recording the delivery of wine and oil to Samaria, the capital of Northern Israel, in die late first/early second quarter of the eighth century BCE were excavated at Samaria in 1910 by George A. Reisner of Harvard Univer sity. They are now in the Archaeological Museum in Istan bul. There are sixty-three ostraca as published by Reisner and forty others that he considered too illegible to publish. Nevertheless these latter ostraca are useful for study of the shapes of individual letters of the alphabet. These ostraca comprise the earliest corpus of Hebrew writing and were inscribed by a number of distinguishable hands. Their fine cursive script is pen drawn, with ink, in tire early Hebrew forms derived from Phoenician. F. Briquel argues, however, that the language of the ostraca is a dialect of Hebrew (Jour nal Asiatique 274 [1986]: 478-479). In constructing a relative typology of early Hebrew scripts, the ostraca provide price less evidence for how the forms of the alphabet developed, including how letters were made. They flow in a style that resembles Egyptian hieratic writing. The ostraca could be dated with reasonable accuracy to a period considerably earlier than the destruction of samaria in 722/21 BCE. As if discarded, they were found widely scat tered in the fill beneatii the floor of a large building complex that, after it was built, underwent reconstruction of rooms and doorways before the fall of the city. Some of the ostraca bear the Egyptian hieratic numerals for 5 and 10, indicating the fifteentii year of the king, which dates them as far back as Jeroboam II (786-746), as has been clear since 1966, when Yohanon Aharoni wrote that the numerals on the Sa maria Ostraca are to be read with the Egyptian values (Ahar oni, 1966). Finally, a typologically later form of writing than that on the Samaria Ostraca is known on a type of pottery that is datable to the last period before the fall of the city, according to Kathleen M. Kenyon (Crowfoot, 1957). T h e ostraca functioned as an accounting system when aged wine and refined oil were delivered from towns to the royal city. There is, however, a division of opinion over the precise function of the inscriptions. T h e issue centers on the identity of the person whose name on the ostraca is pre ceded by the preposition lamed. Frank M. Cross and Ivan Kaufman, following Yigael Yadin, have held the view that this person, now commonly referred to as the /-man, was a property owner who sent the wine or oil to the city of Sa maria as tax paid in Idnd, and that the ostraca are records and perhaps receipts for goods received and credited to the /-man. There are eleven named /-men in the Samaria Os traca. The other main point of view, held by Anson Rainey, is that die /-man was an official who resided in Samaria, was favored by tire king, and received the commodity from land given to him by the king. He was, in effect, providing for himself from the produce of his land. T h e ostraca in this case were directives that the commodities be sent to the of ficial for his use. Rainey's argument is detailed, and it fits
some Ugaritic inscriptions in which the preposition lamed means " t o " with reference to a person named (Rainey, 1988). Whether it holds for die Samaria ostraca is not en tirely clear. T h e ostraca show that the towns related to die /-men are clustered around the city of Samaria, within a radius of 6 13 km (4-8 mi.), with only two exceptions, and that all are within the tribal area of southern Manasseh. None are in Ephraim, which would rule out identifying the operation with the administration of the first Solomonic district. T h e configuration suggests local sources for wine and oil, rather than a broad system of taxation. T h e reading of some town names has been clarified, as is spr (Sefer) earlier read as sq. T h e qoph, which Reisner identified as an "S-headed" type is now understood to be a joined pe and resh. Sefer, if iden tified with modern Saffarin, locates the clan of Shemeida, as Cross has pointed out (1961). A number of new readings of personal names have come to light in the ostraca as has a significant sociological datum: while the ratio of Baal names to Yahwistic or non-Baal names is 7:11. (Albright, 1956), all but one of the Baal names belong to men secondarily listed who appear to work for an "/-man." T h e Samaria Ostraca are important to tire study of the early Hebrew language and writing practices. Their precise function is elusive and will probably only become clearer with future discoveries and research. [See also Samaria.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Y o h a n a n " T h e U s e of Hieratic N u m e r a l s in H e b r e w Ostraca a n d t h e Sheckel W e i g h t s . " Bulletin Research
of the American
Schools
of
Oriental
184 (1966): 13-19.
Albright, William T . Archaeology
and the Religion
of Israel. Baltimore,
1956.
Cross, Frank M o o r e " E p i g r a p h i c N o t e s o n H e b r e w D o c u m e n t s of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: A N e w Reading of a Place N a m e in t h e Samaria O s t r a c a . " Bulletin
of
Oriental
Cross, Frank M o o r e " A m m o n i t e Ostraca from H e s h b o n . "
Andrews
Research
University
of the American
Schools
163 (1961): 12-14.
Seminary
Studies
1 3 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 1 - 2 0 . T h e a u t h o r ' s fullest a r
g u m e n t for interpreting the Samaria ostraca as tax receipts. Includes bibliographical notes a n d a discussion of Rainey's position. Crowfoot, J. W . The Objects from
Samaria.
London, 1957.
Kaufman, Ivan T . " T h e Samaria Ostraca: A S t u d y in Ancient H e b r e w Palaeography." T h . D . diss., H a r v a r d University, 1 9 6 6 . Extensive paleographic study based on infrared p h o t o g r a p h s of t h e ostraca. Kaufman, Ivan T . " T h e Samaria Ostraca: A n Early Witness to H e b r e w W r i t i n g . " Biblical
Archaeologist
4 5 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 2 2 9 - 2 3 9 . S u m m a r i z e s the
conclusions of his dissertation (above), with samples of the text, p h o tographs of the ostraca, charts, h a n d - d r a w n examples of die alpha bet, a n d a bibliography. Kaufman, Ivan T . " S a m a r i a Ostraca." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 , p p . 9 2 1 - 9 2 6 . N e w York, 1 9 9 2 . Alternative to t h e article in Biblical
Archaeologist
(see a b o v e ) .
Lemaire, Andr6. "Writing a n d Writing M a t e r i a l s . " I n The Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited b y D a v i d N o e l F r e e d m a n , vol. 6 , p p . 9 9 9 - 1 0 0 8 .
SAMARITANS N e w York, 1 9 9 2 . T r e a t s the early history of the alphabet, broad as pects of ancient writing, and h a s an extensive bibliography. Rainey, Anson F . " T o w a r d a Precise D a t e for t h e Samaria Ostraca." Bulletin
of the American
Schools
of Oriental
Research,
no. 2 7 2 (Novem
ber 1 9 8 8 ) : 6 9 - 7 4 . Significant article with bibliography. T h e author supports Kaufman's dating of t h e ostraca to J e r o b o a m II on the basis of the paleographic a n d archaeological evidence, but dates Jero b o a m ' s first year to 7 9 3 as coregent with Jehoash, with the resulting date of 7 8 4 - 7 8 3 for nineth-, tenth-, a n d fifteenth-year ostraca. Rai ney further defines his position that t h e ostraca functioned as direc tives for delivery to residents in Samaria from their estates. Reisner, George A., Clarence S. Fisher, a n d D a v i d G. Lyon. Excavations
and Plates. Samaria.
al Samaria,
1908-1910,
vol. r, The Text;
vol. 2 ,
Harvard Plans
C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1 9 2 4 . Reisner's major publication o n IVAN T . K A U F M A N
SAMARITANS. T h e origin of Samaritanism and die Samaritans is in the second-first centuries B C E , as an ancient off-shoot of Judaism. This date is now generally accepted by scholars of Samaritanism. T h e Samaritans themselves still hold the view that a schism occurred in die time of Eli, the priest at Shiloh (1 Sm. 1:9, 2:11). According to Samar itan tradition Eli, "the insidious o n e " (Samaritan Book of Joshua, ch. 43), leftMt. Gerizim and settled in Shiloh, where "he gathered the children of Israel into a schismatical sect" (Samaritan Book ofJoshua, ch. 43; cf. also Abu '1-Fath, Kitab al-Tarikh, ch. 10). Jewish tradition, on the other hand, holds that Samaritanism arose after the fall of the northern king dom when, according to 2 Kings 17, Israelites were deported and pagans were settled in their stead. T h e same view was current in early scholarship. Gradually, it was realized that it was untenable and that the split between Jews and Sa maritans must have occurred much later. On the basis of Ezra 4:1-5, many thought that the separation had taken place after the Exile, in the time of Ezra. It is now clear, however, that in the early post-Exilic period there was no real break, only the beginning of tensions between northern and southern Israelites. Thus, the prehistory of the Samar itans, as it were, begins then. T h e history of the Samaritans proper (as opposed to the Samarians, or inhabitants of Sa maria, and "proto-Samaritans"—i.e., northern Israelites in the time leading up to the break) begins in the Maccabean period, witii the hostilities they endured from the southern Israelites, which culminated in the destruction of their tem ple by John Hyrcanus in approximately 110 B C E . [See Sa maria,] Jerusalem and its Temple ceased to be of importance to the northern Israelites, whose main defining criterion be came their exclusive orientation toward Mt. Gerizim. Al though the two communities went their separate ways, they did have contacts with each other throughout the centuries. During Byzantine and Muslim rule, tlie number of Sa maritans dwindled rapidly, until there were fewer than two hundred individuals left, It was only in the twentieth century tiiat their numbers increased from approximately 139 in
469
1909 to 560 in 1994. Today the Samaritans live in two cen ters, Nablus and Holon, tlie latter a southern suburb of Tel Aviv. However, from the Hellenistic period to the eighteenth century C E a far-flung diaspora existed whose traces are to be found in literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources. Samaritans have lived in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Italy, and North Africa. As a branch of Judaism, Samaritan religion shares its foundations. T h e Samaritan Bible, however, comprises only the Pentateuch but excludes the Prophets and Writings. The Samaritans do not of course recognize rabbinic writings; they developed their own ttaditions, albeit in a less struc tured and canonical form than those of the Jews. They also have their own Aramaic Targum, tiieir specific liturgy and liturgical compositions, and their chronicles. The center of Samaritanism is and has always been Mt. Gerizim (map reference 175 X 178) south of Nablus, an cient Shechem. [See Shechem.] According to Josephus, the Samaritans built a temple on the mountain in the time of Alexander the Great (Antiq. 11:302-347) that was destroyed two hundred years later by John Hyrcanus (Antiq. 13:255256; War 1:63). Before Yitzhak Magen's recent excavations on the main peak (map reference 175 X 178), which began in 1984, archaeological finds had suggested that tlie temple mentioned by Josephus stood on Tell er-Ras (map reference 1761 X 1793), a lower peak of Mt. Gerizim, north of the main peak. [See Ras, Tell er-.] Beneath the Roman temple to Zeus, built in the time of Antoninus Pius (138-161 C E ) and probably renewed by Caracalla ( 2 1 1 - 2 1 7 C E ) , a large
S A M A R I T A N S . Roman
coin of the city of Neapolis.
Depicts R o m a n
t e m p l e t o Z e u s at T e l l e r - R a s . S e c o n d / t h i r d c e n t u r y CE. (Photograph by R. P u m m e r )
470
SAMARITANS
structure was discovered that was thought to have been somehow connected with a Hellenistic Samaritan sanctuary, a hypothesis subsequently questioned. Magen's extensive excavations on the main peak (1995 was the twelfth season) have, however, brought to light remains of a large settlement from the Hellenistic period. The fortified city on Mt. Gerizim was approximately 40.5 hectares (100 acres) in size; it was built in about 200 B C E , in the time of Antiochus III (223-187 B C E ) , and destroyed by John Hyrcanus (134-104 BCE) between 114 and 1 1 1 BCE. The finds include sections of the city wall, towers, large dwellings and service buildings, oil presses, storage jars, lamps, numerous coins, and inscriptions in Hebrew, Ara maic, and Greek. Magen identifies an area of more than 2 hectares (5 acres) on the summit as a sacred precinct, en closed by a wall and accessed via a 10-meter-wide staircase ascending from the west. The excavations in 1995 have brought to light remains of a gate and enclosure walls from the Persian period. Ashes and bones found at the site have been dated by the C-14 method to the fifth century B C E . The implications of the new finds have yet to be assessed. The Hellenistic pottery and coins found under the temple to Zeus and dating from the second century BCE come, in Ma gen's opinion, from the Hellenistic city on the main peak (see his article in New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Exca vations in the Holy Land, Jerusalem and New York, 1993, vol. 2, p. 489). Outside Samaria, Samaritan settlements are known from literary and epigraphic sources, the most important of which
S A M A R I T A N S . Hellenistic
remains.
are Damascus, Egypt, Athens, Delos, Corinth, Rome, and Syracuse. From a seventh-century C E literary source, Sa maritans are known to have lived also in Carthage (Vat. gr. 1502, fol. 175). N o archaeological remains, apart from in scriptions, that can be identified as Samaritan have been uncovered in the diaspora. It should be kept in mind for the literary sources, that the occurrence of such terms as Samareus, Samarites, and Samaritis are not unequivocal refer ences to Samaritans in the religious sense; they may well be, and probably often are, an ethnic designation characterizing colonists from Samaria. Only terms such as Samaritai ten ihrescheian (Corpus Papyrorumjudaicarum, sixth century C E ) or Israeleitai
hoi aparchomenoi
eis hieron Argarizein
(two
in
scriptions found on Delos and tentatively dated to the third/ second and second/first centuries B C E respectively); clearly designate Samaritans by religion. Inscriptions engraved in Samaritan script or in Greek and Samaritan letters are of course also clear indications. In antiquity, the Samaritans used a modified form of He brew script, known as Samaritan script, although for inscrip tions they also utilized Greek; Samaritan script remains dis tinctive of the group. Its immediate ancestor is the Flebrew script of the end of the Second Temple period. T h e lan guages used by the Samaritans in antiquity were Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. They began to use Arabic in the Mid dle Ages. Eventually, a hybrid Samaritan Hebrew language developed. Samaritan material culture in Greco-Roman times and in the Byzantine era was practically indistinguishable from its
S e c t i o n of t h e Hellenistic city r e c e n t l y u n e a r t h e d o n t h e m a i n
p e a k of M t . G e r i z i m a n d , in t h e b a c k g r o u n d , T e l l e r - R a s . (Photograph by R. P u m m e r )
SAMARITANS Jewish counterpart. In the last analysis, only the presence of Samaritan script allows the attribution of remains to the Sa maritan sphere. In Samaria, the fact that the area was in habited primarily or exclusively by Samaritans is another means by which the provenance of material remains can be determined. On the basis of the latter criterion, oil presses, miqva'ot ("ritual baths") jars, oil lamps, and tools excavated at Qedumim (map reference 165 X 179), located 10 km (6 mi.) west of Nablus, have been identified as Samaritan. Similarly, a considerable number of oil lamps found in the region of Samaria are considered to be of Samaritan origin, even though only a very small number are inscribed in Samaritan script. T h e symbols on the lamps are the same as on Jewish lamps—the menorot ("candelabra") and other cultic imple ments used in the Temple in Jerusalem. T h e Samaritan lamps exclusively are decorated with daggers or knives and ladder or steplike designs as well. T h e former may be con nected to the Offering of Isaac, the latter to the staircase leading from Neapolis (Nablus) u p to the temple on Tell er-Ras, although the latter was a Roman temple. A number of sarcophagi were found that were called Samaritan, even though tire same type was also found outside the area of Samaria; they clearly show Roman and Jewish influences. T h e city of Samaria probably began minting coins in about 375 B C E and continued to do so until 333/32 B C E . T h e coins bear the inscription hnryn, either in full or in various abbreviations; it is not clear whether this refers to the city or the region. Much discussed are those coins bearing tire name yrb'm. However, the evidence of these coins is too vague to shed light on the development of Samaritanism, or protoSamaritanism. Roman coins from the cities of Samaria depict emperors and symbols from Greco-Roman mythology. Of particular interest are the city coins of Neapolis minted between the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Volusian (251-253 C E ) , with a gap in the reign of Septimius Severus (193-211 C E ) . They depict Mt. Gerizim with a colonnade at its foot, a staircase leading up to a temple, and a second, smaller structure on tlie second peak. Whereas the identity of the latter building is unknown, the temple must represent the Roman temple to Zeus built in the second century CE on Tell er-Ras. T h e many gods and goddesses, together with their temples or cult places, depicted on the coins from Neapolis after D o mitian (81-96 C E ) , are testimony to tlie predominantly pa gan character of the city. Under Domitian the city coins of Neapolis do not depict any pagan symbols. Some scholars therefore believe that this was out of regard for the Samar itan population. In contrast, contemporary coins of the city of Samaria, a Roman settlement at the time, do bear symbols proper to the worship of Kore/Persephone. Although it was known from literary sources and inscrip tions that the Samaritans had a number of synagogues dur ing the Roman-Byzantine period, archaeological remains of
471
some of them were only recently uncovered. They are iden tified as Samaritan either by mosaic inscriptions in Samar itan script or by their location within the core area of tlie Samaritan settlement. T o the former category belong syn agogues in Shaalbim (map reference 148 X 1 4 1 ) , BethShean (197 X 213), and Ramat Aviv (131 X 167); and to the latter, Husn Ya'qub in Nablus, Mt. Gerizim, Khirbet Samara (1609 X 1872), El-Khirbe (1671 X 1846), Sur Natan (Khirbet Majdal) (1508 X 1832), and Kefar Fahma (167 X 199). Epigraphic evidence shows that Samaritan syna gogues also existed outside of Palestine: in Thessalonike, or Delos, and in Syracuse. Literary evidence alone is available for the existence of a Samaritan synagogue in Rome in the sixth century CE. T h e synagogues in Palestine were built in the fourth/fifth-sixth/seventh centuries C E . They were prob ably destroyed during the Samaritan revolts in the sixth cen tury; some were rebuilt in the late Byzantine period. T h e synagogue on Delos has been tentatively dated to the third/ second century B C E , the one in Thessalonike to between the fourth and sixth centuries C E , and the one in Sicily to the third/fourtii centuries; the existence of a Samaritan syna gogue in Rome is inferred for die fifth century CE. The architecture and mosaic art of Samaritan synagogues are virtually identical to those of Jewish synagogues. Differ ences exist in the orientations of the buildings—toward Mt. Gerizim rather than Jerusalem—and possibly also in the complete avoidance of the depiction of living beings on mo saics, which no Samaritan synagogue has but some Jewish synagogues do. Because a large part of the region of Samaria still awaits thorough archaeological exploration, the picture that has begun to emerge can only be considered prelimi nary. BIBLIOGRAPHY C o g g i n s , R i c h a r d J. Samaritans
and Jews:
The Origins
of
Samaritanism
Reconsidered. Atlanta, 1975. T h o r o u g h assessment of biblical a n d postbiblical Jewish texts, archaeological evidence, and Samaritan lit erature concerning the early history of Samaritanism. C r a n e , Oliver T . The Samaritan
Chronicle,
or, The Book
of Joshua
the
Son of Nun. N e w York, 1 8 9 0 . A n old translation, but tlie only one in print. Crown, Alan D . , ed. The Samaritans. T u b i n g e n , 1989. T h e most c o m prehensive modern treatment of all major questions related t o tlie Samaritan tradition by specialists. Crown, Alan D . A Bibliography of the Samaritans. 2d ed. M e t u c h e n , N.J., 1993. Complete bibliography on all aspects of Samaritanism. Crown, Alan D . , Reinhard P u m m e r , a n d A b r a h a m T a l , eds. A Com panion to Samaritan Studies. T u b i n g e n , 1993. Encyclopaedic dictio nary that complements a n d e x p a n d s the anthology by C r o w n (1989). Dexinger, Ferdinand, a n d Reinhard P u m m e r , eds. Die Samaritaner. D a r m s t a d t , 1992. Besides tracing the development of Samaritan studies in G e r m a n a n d English contributions, the book contains a n article assessing tlie present state of research and a comprehensive discussion of the origins of Samaritanism. M a g e n , Yitzhak. " M o u n t Gerizim a n d tlie Samaritans"; " T h e 'Samar itan' Sarcophagi"; " Q e d u m i m : A Samaritan Site of t h e R o m a n - B y z antine Period"; " T h e Ritual Baths (Miqva'ot) at Q e d u m i m a n d the
472
SAMARRA: Chalcolithic Period
Observance of Ritual Purity a m o n g the Samaritans"; a n d " S a m a r i tan S y n a g o g u e s . " In Early
Christianity
in Context:
Monuments
ana"
Documents, edited by Frederic M a n n s and Eugenio Alliata, p p . 9 1 2 3 0 . Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 3 8 . Jerusa lem, 1 9 9 3 . T h e most complete and up-to-date accounts in English of the excavator's recent findings. M e s h o r e r , Ya'acov. City-Coins Roman
of Eretz-lsrael
and the Decapolis
in the
Period. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 5 .
P u m m e r , Reinhard. The Samaritans. Leiden, 1 9 8 7 . Concise introduc tion with forty-eight plates illustrating historical and contemporary aspects of Samaritanism. Purvis, James D . The Samaritan
Pentateuch
and the Origin
of the Sa
maritan Sect. Harvard Semitic M o n o g r a p h s , 2 . C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 9 6 8 . Seminal work with a detailed discussion of the Samaritan script. Reeg, Gottfried. Die antiken
Synagogen
in Israel, vol. 2 , Die
samaritan-
ischen Synagogen. Beihefte z u m T u b i n g e r Atlas des Vorderen Ori ents, Reihe B, no. 1 2 . 2 . Wiesbaden, 1 9 7 7 . Discusses all those places for which literary or epigraphic evidence exists. However, it is n o w believed that n o t all stone inscriptions necessarily come from syna gogues. T h e new excavations of synagogues were not yet known (see Magen above). Stenhousc, Paul. The Kitab al-Tarikh of Abu 'l-Fath. Sydney, 1 9 8 5 . E n glish translation with notes of the most important Samaritan chron icle, based on the author's unpublished critical edition of the Arabic text. Sussman, Varda. "Samaritan L a m p s of the T h i r d - F o u r t h Centuries A.D."
Israel Exploration
Journal
T a l , A b r a h a m . The Samaritan
28 (1978): 238-250.
Targum
of the Pentateuch:
A Critical
Edi
tion. 3 vols. T e l Aviv, 1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 3 . N e w , critical edition with an ex tensive introduction (in English and Hebrew). REINHARD PUMMER
SAMARRA. remains
[This entry comprises
of the Chalcolithic
and Islamic
two articles
treating
periods,
respectively]
the
Chalcolithic P e r i o d Located on the Tigris River some 96 km (60 mi.) north of Baghdad (34°i3' N , 43°52' E), Samarra was a capital of the Abbasid caliphs in the ninth century CE. It was built for the most part by al-Mu'tasim (833-842) and his son al-Mutawakkil (847-861), and it remained the seat of government for fifty-six years before the capital was moved back to Baghdad. Next to the Great Mosque at Samarra still stands the minaret known as Malwiyah. It has an external spiral staircase and has been thought by many to be a descendant of the ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat or temple tower. There is a long history of exploration and excavation of the Islamic city of Samarra, but of special interest to the archaeology of early Mesopotamia was the find of Chalcol ithic period remains by Ernst Herzfeld in 1904-1905 and published by him in 1930. Beneath some private houses of die nimh century CE was a layer of earth approximately 1.5 m (5 ft.) thick, a stratum resting apparentiy on virgin soil. Badly preserved unstratified simple inhumations accompa nied by a very distinctive handmade painted pottery were recovered from this layer. T h e stratum was so disturbed
that it was impossible to determine proper grave groups. As this was the first time such pottery was excavated, it came to be known as Samarra ware, and the duration of time in which it was produced is known as die Samarra period or phase. Usually of a medium thickness, Samarra ware is relatively well made. In many small vessels, however, the ware is very thin. Because a wide range of firing temperatures were used, the ware varied in color. In many cases the pottery was ov ertired and even vitrified. T h e matte-finish painted deco ration also varied in color ranging from reddish earth tones to a deep black. Much of the paint was also what is now a gray green. T h e painted designs included geometric pat terns as well as absttact animal and human motifs. T h e painters often exhibited an exttaordinary sensitivity to de sign problems and produced "tour de force" pieces like jar necks made into the faces of women with "coffee-bean" shaped appliques for eyes. The Samarra pottery is distributed over a wide geograph ical area ranging from north of Baghdad and die foodiills to the east of Baghdad throughout the central part of northern Mesopotamia. Some of the major sites in which die ware has been found include the following: Chogha Mami to the east of Baghdad in die Mandali region, Tell Songor, and Tell Rihan in the Hamrin region of the upper Diyala, Tell as-Sawwan next to Samarra north of Baghdad, Mattarah near Kirkuk, Shemshara in the Rania plain in the northeast hills, Hassuna south of Mosul, Yarim Tepe in die Sinjar, and Baghouz in the west on the upper Euphrates. T h e ar chaeological remains associated with this pottery are part of a distinct culture of village farmers that dates to die first half of the sixth millennium and may begin as early as the late seventh millennium. At some sites the Samarra culture stands alone while at others the pottery coexists with tradi tional pottery of the Hassuna culutre. At Hassuna itself the Samarra pottery first appears in Hassuna III-IV and contin ues to be found in die later levels of that site. It seems clear that the Samarra ware is an import into Hassuna. T h e fact that so much of the pottery was repaired in antiquity would suggest that it was a valued commodity. T h e stratification of Hassuna also indicates that chronologically the Samarra phase overlaps with the Hassuna period which begins some what earlier. T h e more recent excavations at Yarim Tepe I would support the conclusions derived from the Hassuna excavations. T h e archaic phase of the Hassuna culture is represented at Yarim Tepe I by levels 8 through 12, and the "standard" Hassuna pottery characterizes levels 1 dirough 7. Painted Samarra ware first appears in level 6. Generally, the Hassuna sites are situated further north than the majority of Samarra sites; however, the stratigraphic situation at Tell as-Sawwanj where the Samarra pottery first appeared in Level III along with Hassuna wares, indicates tiiat die Has suna potteries extended further south in Mesopotamia than is sometimes assumed.
SAMARRA: Islamic Period Evidence would suggest tiiat the Samarra culture over lapped with the following Halaf period, an archaeological phase characterized by a new painted pottery first found at Tell Halaf in the Khabur region of northern Syria. Some Halaf pottery dating to the early Halaf period was found at Samarra itself, although the sherds from Samarra do not include any of the famed polychrome painted pottery of the later part of the Halaf period. [See Halaf, Tell.] Besides Yarim Tepe in the Sinjar, comparatively exten sive exposures of Samarra period remains have been exca vated further south at such sites as Tell as-Sawwan and Chogha Mami where diere is evidence tiiat farming was de pendent on irrigation. At Tell as-Sawwan the third level of the settlement had a defensive wall and a protective ditch at least three meters wide. Impressive large mud-brick build ings with T-shaped plans were found, and beneath tlie first and earliest level there were very rich graves with stone idols and stone vessels of superior workmanship. N o pottery ac companied these burials that must predate tlie actual ap pearance of Samarra pottery at Tell as-Sawwan and belong to an early Hassuna or even Proto-Hassuna period of the second half of the seventii millennium. At Chogha Mami tlie excavators distinguished a late phase of Samarra pottery which was termed "Transitional Ware." This pottery is re lated to pottery in Iran and to pottery of the early Ubaid period in the south of Mesopotamia. It forms an important chronological link between north and south. It is now clear from the excavations at Tell el-'Oueili that there is a phase in the south earlier than tlie period represented by the Chogha Mami "Transitional Ware" probably contempo rary in part witii the earlier Hassuna. [See
also
Hassuna; 'Oueili, Tell el-.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Herzfeld, E r n s t . Die
Vorgeschichtlichen
Tbpfereien
von Samarra.
For-
schungen z u r Islamischen K u n s t , 2, D i e A u s g r a b u n g e n v o n S a marra, vol. 5. Berlin, 1930. Original publication of the pottery from Samarra. P o r a d a , Edith. " T h e Chronology of M e s o p o t a m i a , ca. 7000-1600 B . C . " I n Chronologies
in Old World
Archaeology,
edited by R o b e r t W .
Ehrich, vol. 1, p p . 77-121, vol. 2, p p . 90-124. 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. Provides good bibliography for the Samarra sites and discussions of tlie period. Yoffee, N o r m a n , a n d Jeffery Clark, eds. Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian
Civilization:
Soviet
Excavations
in Northern
Iraq.
Tuc
son, 1993. DONALD P. HANSEN
Islamic Period Samarra, capital of the 'Abbasid caliphate from 836 to 892 C E , located on the left bank of the Tigris River, 96 km (60 mi.) north of Baghdad, Iraq (34°i3' N , 43°52' E). It may be tlie largest archaeological settlement site in the world.
473
History. Before die advent of Islam, Samarra was known only as the site of a fort near which tlie Roman emperor Julian tlie Apostate was killed in battle in 364 CE. In the sixth century C E the Sasanian king Khusrau Anushirvan dug the Qatul al-Kisrawi, a northern extension to the Nahrawan ca nal, which watered tlie left bank of tlie Tigris below Bagh dad. There were two inlets north and south of Samarra: the modern Nahr al-Rasasi and the Nahr al-Qa'im. A palace was built at the entrance to the first, and a monumental tower, the Burj al-Qa'im, at the entrance to the second. T h e 'Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809) added the Qatul Abi al-Jund, whose inlet lay soutii of Samarra (now largely eroded), and built a palace city there called al-Mubarak. T h e caliph al-Mu'tasim (833-842) sought a new site for a city after disturbances between the population of Baghdad, and the Turkish army corps. In 836 he settled in Samarra, formally called Surra man ra'a ("He who sees it is de lighted"). Although considered a city, Samarra was mainly a court residence and cantonment of the 'Abbasid army. Al-Mu'tasim's second successor, Ja'far al-Mutawakkil (847-861), the greatest of the builders of Samarra, doubled the size of the city and is credited witii nineteen palaces. Mutawalddl was murdered in 861, and during the following decade the leaders of the Turkish corps made and unmade four caliphs. In 892 al-Mu'tadid (caliph, 892-908) returned to Baghdad. During the 880s the city declined rapidly, con tracting into the market areas of the 'Abbasid city. Today it is a small town whose economy is supported by the pil grimage to the tombs of die Shi'i Imams al-'Askari and al-Hadi. Archaeology. T h e site was first worked on by die French architect Henri Viollet, who dug soundings in the palace in 1910. T h e first major excavation was the German Samarra Expedition ( 1 9 1 1 , 1913), directed by Ernst Herzfeld. T h e expedition conducted rapid large-scale excavations of nine teen sites in twenty months. T h e series Ausgrabungen von Samarra (Herzfeld, 1923-1948) published most of tlie finds and a history of tlie city, but not the excavations themselves. The major architectural findings were summarized by K. A. C. Creswell (1940). The Iraq Directorate-General of Antiquities initiated excavations 1936 that are still under way. In the 1980s Alastair Northedge, in an archaeological survey, recorded surface remains on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and excavated soundings at Qadisiyya. The site extends for 50 Ion (31 mi.) along the bank of the Tigris and consists of 57 sq km (35 sq. mi.) of mounds whose arrangement reveals the lines of avenues and plans of buildings in aerial photographs. Samarra is, thus, an ex cellent subject for the application of the principle of hori zontal stratigraphy and comparison of archaeological evi dence with historical texts. 'Abbasid building construction at Samarra used fired brick, mud brick, and pise. About 5,700 'Abbasid buildings have been identified. While only
SAMARRA: Islamic P e r i o d .
Plan
of the site. (Courtesy A. N o r t h e d g e )
SAMARRA: Islamic Period one or two major phases of construction can be seen over much of the site, four sites, representing pre-Islamic towns on the bank of the Tigris, have a complex stratigraphy ex tending from the Sasanian period to the thirteenth century CE.
Octagon of Husn al-Qadisiyya. Husn al-Qadisiyya, a regular octagon 1,500 m in diameter, is an unfinished com plex; only its mud-brick outer walls were built, but the lines were laid out for a mosque, a palace, a central square, and three avenues. Historical sources suggest an identification with the palace of Harun al-Rashid, al-Mubarak, whose con struction was abandoned in 796. Dar al-Khilafa (Jawsaq al-Khaqani). T h e main palace of al-Mu'tasim, a vast complex of 125 ha (309 acres), in cluded a block of reception halls, excavated by Herzfeld in r 9 i 3 . The halls were fronted by a triple iwan known as the Bab al-'Amma. Behind them was a large rectangular court yard, two birkas ("sunken pools"), a polo ground, and a residential palace to the north. T h e birkas, excavated in the 1980s, were cut into the conglomerate, one square and one circular, each surrounded by a four-iwan plan of rooms for occupation in the summer. Herzfeld identified the complex as the Jawsaq al-Khaqani, but the palace is more likely to have included both the official palace of Mu tasim (the Dar al-'Ammi) and the residence (al-Jawsaq). c
Military cantonments. T h e military cantonments (Ar., all follow a similar plan that includes a major palace, a number of lesser residences, a ceremonial avenue, and a grid of streets. Istablat and Balkuwara are walled; others are not. T h e ttoops were quartered in houses rather than bar qatfa)
t s . ,"™V.. ,jr . •* . V . • < • - SAMARRA:
Islamic Period.
racks; al-Mu'tasim arranged for the purchase of Turkish slave girls for marriage partners, in order to avoid the mixing of Turks with the indigenous population. In the north, and separated from the main city, tire can tonment of the Turkish general Ashnas was built outside the walls of the former Sasanian town of Karkh Fairuz. The palace, now called Sur Ashnas, is quadrilateral, with a mosque in the center. Adjacent to the Dar al-Khilafa, the cantonment of Khaqan Urtuj has a palace facing onto the steppe. South of Samarra, and at first separated from it, tire cantonment of the Central Asian Iranian prince Afshin was built at Matira, with a square palace on the river, now called Sur Jubairiyya. In the 850s a new cantonment for MutawakkiPs son alMu'tazz was built in the south, at Balkuwara, with a rectan gular palace facing the river, set in an 1,171 meter square enclosure. The reception halls, excavated by Herzfeld in 1911, form a square block with a central dome chamber and four iwans in a cruciform pattern. Al-Istablat is a cantonment on the west bank of the Tigris, with a rectangular palace and a second walled rectangle. T h e rectangle contains a pardy finished cantonment, 2.5 Ion (2 mi.) long and 500 m wide. It is apparentiy the short-lived palace of al-'Arus, constructed in the 850s by al-Mutawakkil and demolished a decade later. Congregational mosque of al-Mutawakkil. Between 848/49 and 852, al-Mutawakkil built a new congregational mosque (239 X 156 m) that was, for a long time, the largest mosque in the Islamic world. Its exterior is marked by semi circular buttresses and a minaret 52 m high, with an external
'
Congregational
475
mosque of al-Mutawakkil.
(Courtesy A. N o r t h e d g e )
476
SAMOSATA
spiral ramp. This unusual style of minaret is apparently de rived from the Assyrian ziggurat (cf. Khorsabad) and pro vided the inspiration for European depictions of the Tower of Babel. c
Al-Mutawakkiliyya
(al-Ja fariyya).
In 859 al-Muta-
wakkil began a new caliphal city to the north, called al-Mutawakkiliyya. T h e new main palace, al-Ja'fari, has its recep tion halls at the junction of the Tigris and the Qatul al-Kisrawi, while residential blocks spread for 1.7 Ion to the east. A major avenue, 98 m wide, leads south to Sur Ashnas, with palaces and houses on either side. In 861 Mutawakkil was murdered and al-Mutawakkiliyya abandoned. T h e mosque of Abu Dulaf, bordering on die preexisting town of al-Mahuza, was the congregational mosque for al-Muta wakkiliyya and a smaller replica of Mutawakkil's congrega tional mosque at Samarra, with a spiral minaret and fired brick arcades supported on piers. Racecourses. T o the east of the city, in the steppe, are three racecourses for horse racing. Two are out-and-back courses, each 10.42 1cm (6.5 mi.) long, and 80 m wide. One has a rest house for the caliph and a viewing mound, Tell al-'Aliq, on which Herzfeld found a small pavilion. The third is a closed cloverleaf, 5.31 km (3.3 mi.) long, also with a central viewing pavilion. A fourth, linear course, 9.78 km (6.1 mi.) long, and 104 m wide, lies adjacent to the Turkish cantonments at al-Karkh.
A quadrilateral enclosure ( 9 X 6 km, or 5 X 4 mi.) to die southeast appears to be a hayr, or "hunting park"; a palace on the south, at al-Musharrahat, faces a ba sin. A second park, to the north of the al-Ja'fari, has a double enclosure wall with four gates and a viewing mound at Tell al-Banat. [See also 'Abbasid Caliphate.] Hunting
parks.
BIBLIOGRAPHY A d a m s , Robert M c C . Land
behind
Baghdad:
A History
of Settlement
on
the Diyala Plains. Chicago, 1 9 6 5 . T h e major reference o n regional history and environment. Creswell, K. A. C . Early
Muslim
Architecture.
Vol. 2 . Oxford, 1 9 4 0 .
Directorate General of Antiquities. Excavations at Samarra, 1936-1939. 2 vols. Baghdad, 1 9 4 0 . T h e palace of al-Huwaisilat a n d large houses. Herzfeld, Ernst. Ausgrabungen der Bauten
von Samarra
von Samarra;
von Samarra,
vol. 1 , Der
und seine Ornamentik;
vol. 6 , Geschichte
der Stadt
Wandschmuck
vol. 3 , Die
Samarra.
Malereien
Berlin a n d H a m
burg, 1 9 2 3 - 1 9 4 8 .
Northedge, Alastair. " K a r k h Fairuz at Samarra'." Mesopotamia
22
(1987): 251-263.
Northedge, Alastair, and Robin Falkner. " T h e 1 9 8 6 Survey Season at Samarra'." Iraqis ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 4 3 - 1 7 3 . Treats the Octagon of H u s n alQadisiyya and surrounding sites. Northedge, Alastair. " T h e Racecourses at Samarra'." Bulletin of the School
of Oriental
and African
Studies
53.1 (1990); 3 1 - 5 6 .
Northedge, Alastair. " T h e Palace at Istabulat, Samarra'." Islamique
Archeologie
3 (1992): 61-86.
Northedge, Alastair. " A n Interpretation of the Palace of the Caliph at Samarra (Dar al-Khilafa or Jawsaq al-Khaqani)." Ars Orientalis 2 3 (1993): 143-170-
Rogers, J. M . "Samarra: A Study in Medieval T o w n - P l a n n i n g . " In The Islamic City, edited by Albert Hourani a n d S. M . Stern, p p . 1 1 9 1 5 5 . Oxford, 1 9 7 0 . Susa, A h m a d . Rayy
Samarra'
ft 'Ahd al-Khilafa
al- Abbasiyya
("The
Irrigation of Samarra' u n d e r the 'Abbasid C a l i p h a t e " ) . 2 vols. Bagh dad, 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 4 9 . T h e major Iraqi work, in principle o n t h e canal system, but actually treats everything, including questions n o t dealt with in Western works. ALASTAIR NORTHEDGE
SAMOSATA (Tic, modernSamsat; Ar., Sumaisat;Syr., Semisat), ancient capital of Commagene, located on the right bank of the Euphrates River, 64 1cm (40 mi.) downstteam from the river's rapids and 116 km (72 mi.) upstream from Zeugma (Pliny, Nat. Hist. 5.85), 21 km (13 mi.) from Tarsus in Cilicia, and 19 km (12 mi.) from Edessa in Osrhoene. It occupies a site of confluence widi the Marsyas River. W. F. Ainsworth visited its ruins in 1836 and V. Moltice in 1838; it was the late publications of Carl Humann and Otto Puchstein (1890), however, tiiat provided a plan and illustrations. Finally, in 1896, David G. Hogarth and Vincent Yorlce published four of the site's inscriptions. N o excava tion is known to have been undertaken or published. T h e site has been in danger of disappearing since the great dams on the Euphrates were constructed. The site lent itself admirably to the development of a large city: it is on a plain 1,200 m wide lying between die Eu phrates on the west and a mountainous area on the east—a position that destined it to be an important crossroads on a nortii-soudi axis. It supplied the Euphrates valley and the valley between Osrhoene and Cilicia widi access through the passes in the Anti-Taurus Mountains. [See Cilicia.] The oldest evidence of the existence of Samosata is a Hit tite stela that reveals tiiat the city already had its name. Dur ing die Assyrian period it was the capital of Kummuh. It survived the attacks of the Assyrian lungs until Sargon II reduced it to an Assyrian province. It became the capital of the kingdom of Commagene, which Pompey entrusted in 62 or 61 B C E to King Antiochus I, son of Mithridates Kallinikos. His reign is known for the building projects he un dertook at Arsameia, which his ancestor Arsames founded and where his father Mithridates had his tomb, as well as for the monumental tomb he had made for himself at the summit of Nemrud Dagi. Its enormous seated statues of gods and of kings reflect a Greco-Oriental art in which Per sian influences, notably in dress, combine with the purest Greek style. These composite traits testify to the mixed civ ilization that characterized Commagene. From 17 to 38 C E , the kingdom was merely a Roman prov ince. Caligula reestablished the dynasty in the person of An tiochus IV, but Antiochus was accused of collusion with die Parthians under Vespasian, who then authorized die gov ernor of Syria, L. Caesennius Paetus, to annex Commagene
SAN'A (72 CE) . Vespasian sent the sixteenth Flavian Legion to oc cupy Samosata. T h e legion sprang into action and was cited in Trajan's war against the Parthians in 114. Samosata's fame in the drird century is owed to Lucien and the bishop Paul, who was deprived of his office for his heretical ideas. According to the Peutinger map, Samosata is at tire con vergence of five routes that lead to Melitene, Comana, Heracome, Tarsus, and Zeugma. In the fourth century, Libanios described it as a large, heavily populated city. It may have suffered misfortune in 531, under Justinian, when tlie area was ravaged by Arab tribes allied with the Persians (Procopius I . i 7 . 2 2 f ) . Under Heraclius it was conquered by the Arabs and became Muslim, but it was briefly reconquered many times by the Byzantines, in 700, 836, 858, 872, 927, and 958. Mokke (see above) identified a fragment belonging to a decorated marble entrance that was no doubt Byzantine. T h e city was fortified during the Roman period and, ac cording to Strabo and Lucien, it had a basilica of which no trace remains. Its murals, on the other hand, have survived, with many alterations, but without their layout being greatly modified. T h e city's perimeter is nearly 8 km long, and its border on the east, for 2 km, is the Euphrates. The acropolis (45 m high) lies to tlie south of the city, rather than at its center. Remains of walls belonging to a house from the Ro man period were seen at the foot of the acropolis, on the south side. At the beginning of the twentieth century the south side of the city was the best preserved, but there were no more than one hundred houses in the village. Today, the village is a medium-sized town. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ainsworfh, William F . A Personal
Narrative
of the Euphrates
Expedition.
2 vols. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 8 . H o n i g m a n n , E r n s t . Die Ostgrenze ioyi
nach griechischen,
arabischen,
des byzantinischen syrischen
reiches von 363 bis
und armenischen
Quellen.
Brussels, 1 9 3 5 . See especially pages 1 3 4 - 1 3 7 . H u m a n n , Carl, and O t t o Puchstein. Reisen inKleinasien undNordsyrien. 2 vols. Berlin, 1 8 9 0 . Yorke, Vincent W . " A Journey in the Valley of the U p p e r E u p h r a t e s . " Geographical
Journal
8 ( 1 8 9 6 ) : 3 1 7 - 3 3 5 , 4 5 3 - 4 7 4 . David G . Hogarth
led the expedition o n which Yorke reports. GEORGES T A T E
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
1
SAN A, since 1990 the capital of tlie unified Republic of Yemen, located 2,200 m above sea level, in the middle of a plain between tall mountains, through which the Yislah pass (altitude 2,700 m) enables communication with the south and another, the bin Ghaylan pass (altitude 2,300 m), with Marib in the east; there are n o obstructions to the north ( i 5 ° 2 i ' N , 44°i3' E). T h e walled city is cut by Wadi alSa'ilah, and encompasses about 100 ha (247 acres) with about six thousand tower houses (multi-story brick, stone, and wood houses) built in it.
477
San'a has its roots in prehistory. Pre-Islamic San'a is known primarily from late sources that recount its history. Very few inscriptions have been found in San'a, and sources from elsewhere mentioning it are rare. A Swiss Mission di rected by J. Schneider began excavations in San'a, as yet unpublished, in the Bayt al-Ambassi. The only available stratigraphy of the Old City of San'a was salvaged from a pit sunk in the courtyard of the Imam 'Ali mosque, at the site of the house where 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Shi'i Imam, reportedly stayed during the lifetime of the Prophet, on the edge of the contemporary suq. Daily life in San'a takes place in the upper stories of the tower houses, so that leveling operations, which leave little more than wall stumps on the ground floor (where animals and grain were kept), limit the value of the archaeological material, as hu man living floors are not preserved. The observed stratigraphy is no earlier than the seventh century C E , but pottery suggests that settlement at the site of the mosque may date to the late prehistoric period (c. second millennium B C E ) in Yemen. T h e sherds and wall stumps found there, along with reused bits of monumental architecture encountered elsewhere in the city, confirm tex tual sources indicating that San'a was a town of at least 7 ha (17 acres) in the first centuries C E , with commercial, resi dential, public, and religious areas. It continued to grow dur ing the centuries of upheaval as the Sabaean rulers gave way to the HimyariteSj who were overthrown by the Ethiopians and Sasanians before adhering to Islam. [See Sheba; Himyar; Ethiopia; Sasanians.] Under the 'Abbasids, San'a was increasingly subjected to local pressures: the native Yu'frrid dynasty competed with both the Fatimids and the 'Abbasids, as well as the emerging Zaydis. [See 'Abbasid Caliphate; Fatimid Dynasty.] Serious damage may have been done to the city in about 905 C E and again in 911 C E , when it changed hands, but this may not have taken place, being merely slanderous accusations against tlie Fatimid general Ibn al-Fadl. San'a probably grew to about 50 ha (124 acres) before the period of Ayyubid hegemony. [See Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties.] A Sabaean inscription records the presence of an Awa sanctuary at San'a that has been interpreted as indicating that San'a was a supratribal Sabaean national center. San'a was also a Sabaean mahram, a "protected place." The name San'a is interpreted as meaning "well fortified"; it was tlie base of Sabaean military operations against the southern and western areas. Texts occasionally refer to San'a as Azal, per haps related to Uzal ( G K . 10:27). A Sabaean ldng named Ilisharah is cited in later Muslim sources as having constructed the Ghumdan palace in about the middle of the third century C E , when the city was very prosperous. It was a very large building with windows of thinly cut, transluscent alabaster and bronze lions at the cor ners that "roared" when the wind blew. T h e ruins of the Ghumdan palace form a large mound facing die eastern
478
SANIDHA
doors of the Grand Mosque, reputedly built in about 630 CE (during the Prophet's lifetime) in the Sasanian governor's garden. The citadel is situated on a rock outcrop on the eastern edge of the city. Within its walls are both a fortified acropolis and a lower town. The oldest structures yet identified appear to date to the nindt century C E , but there may be earlier material. Urban San'a grew from the citadel to the west, rather than from the area of the Ghumdan east, as the etymological connotation of San a can only be applied to the citadel. T o the west of the citadel is the site of an enormous church built by the Axumite general and ruler Abrahah at the time of the Ethiopian occupation, in about 540 C E . [See also Yemen.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Lewcock, Ronald. The Old Walled City of San'a. Paris, 1 9 8 6 . Serjeant, R. B „ a n d Ronald Lewcock, eds. San'a: An Arabian Islamic City. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 3 . Contains articles by some of the foremost au thorities on ancient and medieval San'a. Some minor details will nec essarily b e corrected, such as the date of the I m a m 'AIT m o s q u e . Warburton, David A. " A Stratigraphic Section in the Old City of S a n ' a . " Proceedings
of the Seminar
for Arabian
Studies
(forthcoming).
Account of the stratigraphy of San'a based o n a last-minute rescue operation making levels from the seventh-eightii centuries t o the twentieth century CE accessible. D A V I D A. W A R B U R T O N
SANIDHA, small village lying in the Troodos Mountain foothills, adjacent to die southern coast of Cyprus, 20 km (12.5 mi.) northeast of Limassol (34°49' N , 33°i2' E). T h e Late Bronze Age ceramic manufacturing site, however, is situated 1 1cm (.6 mi.) northeast of the village at the locality Moutti tou Ayiou Serkou at an elevation of 520 m (1,706 ft,). N o other sites are known in the area, but a detailed field survey has not been undertaken. The discovery of the Late Bronze Age site in 198S was accidental, and it highlights the potential archaeological wealth of the mountain zone. Fol lowing an extensive collection of surface material, an initial season of rescue excavation, under taken by Ian A. Todd for the Vasilikos Valley Project, was necessary in 1990 be cause the site was destined for significant agricultural dis turbance. The second and third excavation seasons were un dertaken in the autumn and spring of 1991-1992. Attention was drawn to Sanidha because of tire dense scatter of Late Bronze Age White-Slip II sherds on the sur face. T h e concentration is greater than that on any otiter known Cypriot site. Some wasters (sherds deformed in fir ing) were identified, and the surface survey suggested that the site must have served a specialized function. The surface ceramics comprised White-Slip and Monochrome types, but almost none of the other types such as Base Ring, which commonly occur on tire surface of setdement sites. In ad
dition to ceramics, quantities of "brick" fragments were also found. These "bricks" are formed of mud and vegetable matter with parallel sides, rounded ends, flat bottoms, and curved tops. N o complete "bricks" were found, and all frag ments showed evidence of firing or burning. According to the surface survey the site measures about 675 X 325 m (2,215 X 1,066 ft.) and was certainly large, even if not used for a long duration. Three seasons of excavation have failed to reveal any pot tery kilns in situ, but abundant evidence has been retrieved which derives from different stages in pottery manufacture. Several activity areas were located consisting of extensive scatters of sherds and other artifacts in one place in associ ation with shallow pits. Two larger pits were filled with rub bish, probably derived from nearby manufacturing activi ties. Around the edges of one pit were found approximately five hundred well-preserved "brick" fragments in associa tion with small amounts of sherds. In the other, large quan tities of sherds were found, but only few and poorly pre served "brick" fragments. Such variety within a small area is characteristic of Sanidha. Few scientific analyses of White-Slip ware have been con ducted, but it seems that all the required raw materials for the manufacmre of pottery were available locally, including timber for fuel, water, clay, and the minerals necessary for die temper. "Bricks" of somewhat similar shape to those at Sanidha were used in a Roman kiln at Tell Qasile in Israel and in modern kilns in Crete. All available evidence, there fore, suggests ceramic production as the purpose of the San idha site. Further excavations are planned, and a program of ceramic analysis will be undertaken to establish the sites in Cyprus and abroad to which the ceramics were traded. BIBLIOGRAPHY T o d d , Ian A. " S a n i d h a - M o u t t i t o u Ayiou Serkou: A L a t e B r o n z e Age Site in the T r o o d o s Foothills." Archaeologia
Cypria
2 (1990): 53-62.
Report on the initial discovery a n d surface collection of the site. T o d d , I a n A., a n d Maria Hadjicosti. "Excavations at Sanidha, 1 9 9 0 . " Report
of the Department
of Antiquities,
Cyprus
( 1 9 9 1 ) : 3 7 - 7 4 . Prelim
inary report o n t h e first season of excavation, containing references to technical analyses of Cypriot ceramics. T o d d , I a n A., et al. "Excavations at Sanida 1 9 9 1 . " Report, of the De partment
of Antiquities,
Cyprus
( 1 9 9 2 ) : 7 5 - H 2 . Preliminary report on
the second season of excavation. T o d d , Ian A., a n d D e s p o Pilides. "Excavations at Sanida 1 9 9 2 . " of the Department
of Antiquities,
Cyprus
Report
( 1 9 9 3 ) : 9 7 - 1 4 6 . Preliminary
report on the third season of excavation. IAN A . T O D D
SAQQARA, largest and most important necropolis in Egypt (29°5o-53' N , 3 i ° i 3 ' E), stretched out along the de sert plateau west of the capital city of Memphis for 6 km (3.7 mi.). At Abu Sir and Giza just to the north and at Dah shur to the south there are pyramid cemeteries. Altogetiier tiiese desert sites comprise one vast cemetery that served the
SAQQARA Memphite region for more than three thousand years, from the first dynasty until the rise of Christianity in Egypt (c. 2920 BCE-late second century C E ) . The name is derived from Sokar, Memphite god of the dead, and carries over to Arabic as the name of the nearby village, Saqqara. Located along the edge of the north escarpment, the ear liest monumental tombs at Saqqara are those of the first dynasty. T h e site was excavated by James E. Quibell in 1912 and by Cecil M. Firth in 1932. T h e most extensive exca vations were those of Walter Emery from 1936 until 1952. Influenced by the impressions on mud sealings of pottery in the tomb chambers, Emery initially understood the great mud-brick mastabas with elaborate "palace facade" niches as tombs of high officials. He later changed his mind and assigned several of the fourteen mastabas to first-dynasty kings beginning with Hor-Aha, whom most Egyptologists equate with Menes, first king of the dynasty. According to literary tradition, Menes established Memphis as the new capital. There followed an Egyptological dispute that pitted the tombs of Abydos against the Saqqara mastabas as the actual, as opposed to symbolic, burial place of tiiese earliest kings. Although the argument is unresolved, most Egyptol ogists accept that the Saqqara mastabas do belong to high officials of the first dynasty (Kaiser, 1969, 1981; Kaiser and Dreyer, 1982; Kemp, 1967; Stadelmann, 1985; Trigger, 1983). Saqqara has about thirty pyramids, fifteen of which are king's tombs, the rest being for queens or royal children. Egypt's first pyramid, and first major monument in stone, is the third-dynasty Step Pyramid, which rises in six courses
SAQQARA. F i g u r e 1 . Step pyramid graph by J. S. Jorgensen)
of Djoser.
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to 140 m (460 ft.) and still dominates the Saqqara plateau (see figure 1). It was built for King Djoser (c. 2630-2611), whose Honrs name, Netjerikhet, found in the chambers of the complex, is the only one of Djoser's five official names inscribed in the pyramid. T h e structure is surrounded by a great rectangular enclosure with " d u m m y " models in stone of courtyards and reed and wood shrines that were actually used in Memphis for ceremonies, rituals, and administra tion. T h e stone simulation magically function for the king and his court into the afterlife. The Djoser pyramid had no real precedent, except for die great enclosure at Abydos of Khasekhemwy (died c. 2650), last king of the second dynasty although it is a mud-brick rather than a stone monument Sekhemkhet, who ruled just after Djoser, attempted another step pyramid in a rectan gular complex just to the soudreast of the latter, but it was left unfinished. T h e only fourth-dynasty monument at Saq qara is tire huge mastaba-shaped tomb, the "Mastabat Faraoun" in the southern part of tire site. It was built for King Shepseskaf, who ruled after Menkaure, builder of the third and smallest pyramid at Giza. All die other fourth-dynasty pyramids, which were built on a gigantic scale, were erected at Meidum, Dahshur, and Giza. With the collapse of the fourth dynasty, however, the first fifth-dynasty king, Userkaf (2465-2458) renirned to Saqqara to build his pyramid just off the nordteast corner of the Djoser enclosure. During the reigns of the next three kings (Sahure, Neferirkare, and Neuserre), pyramid building, now on a smaller scale with a standard design, moved to Abu Sir, until Djedkare Isesi built the first of the pyramids, known as Haram
I n t h e f o r e g r o u n d are s u b s i d i a r y s h r i n e s . (Photo
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SAQQARA
es-Shawaf, at South Saqqara. Unas (c. 2356-2323), last ldng of the fifth dynasty, built his pyramid just off the southwest corner of the Djoser enclosure. Because it is so far out in the desert, this pyramid had an extraordinarily long cause way to a valley temple and a harbor, the ruins of which are just beside the modern entrance to Saqqara. Unas was the first ldng to inscribe within his burial the Pyramid Texts, which were Egypt's oldest funerary literature and the pre cursor of the later Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. Ted, first king of the sixth dynasty, located his pyramid to the northeast of Userkaf s. The other pyramids of the sixth dynasty, belonging to Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II, are all in south Saqqara. T h e name of the pyramid of Pepi I, Men Nefer, is the origin of the name of the capital city, Memphis, Jean Leclant and Jean-Philippe Lauer are exca vating the sixth-dynasty pyramids, carrying out conserva tion work, and studying the Pyramid Texts in the inner chambers of these pyramids. In the Pepi I complex, south of the king's pyramid, they found four subsidiary queens' pyramids, names of two of the queens, and four obelisks. Zahi Hawass excavated around the pyramid-temple of Queen Iput, one of the wives of Pepi I. A stela that must belong to the Djoser complex was found; it contains the name Netjerikhet within a palace-facade emblem known as a serekh, which is surmounted by a falcon wearing the double crown of Egypt with repeating registers below alternating with enclosed jackals and lions (Hawass, 1994). The king's family and court officials were buried near their ruler's pyramid in tombs that became larger and more elaborately decorated as the period progressed. The scenes of everyday life sculptured on the walls insured a magical supply of commodities for the deceased in the Afterlife. Some of the finest of these Old Kingdom tombs are in the Saqqara necropolis. T h e most famous is the tomb of T i (Wild, 1953-1966), a high official of the fifth dynasty who served kings Neferirkare and Neuserre. Ti's tomb, found by Auguste Mariette, is north of die Serapeum. [See the biog raphy of Mariette.] Other fine tombs include tire fifth-dy nasty burials of Ptahhotep and Akhethotep south of the Djoser pyramid, the " T w o brothers tomb" of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in the line of tlie Unas causeway, and the sixth-dynasty tomb of Mereruka in front of the Teti pyramid. King Ibi of the eighth dynasty built a small brick pyramid to the east of that of Pepi II. Its small size indicates die dramatic disintegration of the Old Kingdom at the end of Pepi IPs long reign. East of the pyramid of Teti are the remains of another small pyramid that may date to the ninth or tenth dynasties of tlie First Intermediate Period (c. 2 1 5 0 2040). At the southernmost end of Saqqara are two thir teenth-dynasty pyramids, one of which belongs to a king named Khendjer. During the New Kingdom (beginning c. 1550 B C E ) , Mem phis became the second capital of Egypt after Thebes. T h e
sons of kings used the site as a base for their military training. Amenhotep II left an inscription inside his temple located northeast of the sphinx indicating his military training. Al though the administration was established in Thebes and that city became the place of burial for the officials of Upper Egypt, those who controlled Lower Egypt lived in Memphis and were buried in Saqqara. Most of the tombs are dated to the eighteenth-dynasty reigns of Amenhotep III, Amenhotep IV (known as Akhenaten) and Tutankhamun. Geoffrey Martin reexavated the tomb that Horemheb built for himself before he became pharaoh, while he was still the overseer of the army. Martin also found the tomb of Maya, the treasurer of King T u tankhamun. Alain Zivie found the tomb of the vizier AperEl, whose name was shortened to Aperia. He served as the prime minister of Lower Egypt in the fourteenth century B C E under King Amenhotep III and under his son Akhenaten. The tomb was discovered in 1987. In addition the fu nerary room, full of funerary equipment and other furnish ings, was discovered hidden behind the stair. Zivie found other tombs, such as the tomb of the royal scribe and chief of the granaries Mery-Sekhmet, who lived in the nineteenth dynasty. Sayed Tawfik has excavated the N e w Kingdom cemetery south of the causeway of Unas for Cairo Univer sity. He found the tombs of tlie officials in charge of Lower Egypt during the Ramesside period. T h e Serapeum lies southwest of the Djoser pyramid. When Mariette discovered it in 1852, tiiere was an avenue lined with sphinxes leading from the escarpment of the Saq qara plateau to the opening in the desert floor. This avenue gives access to vast underground galleries with individual caverns for burial of the successive sacred Apis bulls, each one considered an incarnation of Osiris. T h e burials began in the reign of Amenhotep III and continued into the Ptol emaic and Roman periods. One of the latest ruins of antiq uity at Saqqara is the monastery of St. Jeremias, located southeast of the Unas Pyramid and dated to 43 CE. T h e ar chitecture and painting from this site are among the finest of Coptic remains. [See also Pyramids.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Edwards, I. E . S. The Pyramids of Egypt. Rev. ed. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 1 . E m e r y , Walter B. Archaic Egypt. Baltimore, 1 9 6 1 . G h u n a i m , M u h a m m a d Zakariya. The Buried Pyramid, L o n d o n , 1 9 5 6 . Hawass, Zahi. The Pyramids of Ancient Egypt. Pittsburgh, 1 9 9 0 . Hawass, Zahi. " A F r a g m e n t a r y M o n u m e n t of Djoser from S a q q a r a . " Journal
of Egyptian
Archaeology
Jequier, G u s t a v e . Fouilles
8 0 (1994): 45-56.
d Saqqarah:
Le monument
funeraire
de Pepi
II.
3 vols. Paris, 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 4 0 . Kaiser, Werner. " Z u d e m konigichen Talbezirken d e r 1. u n d 2 . D y nastie in Abydos u n d z u r Baugeschichte des D j o s e r - G r a b m a l s , " Mittelungen
des Deutschen
Arehdologischen
Insliluts,
Kairo
25 (1969):
1-21.
Kaiser, Werner. " Z u den Konigsgrabern d e r 1. D y n a s t i e in U m m el-
SARCOPHAGUS Q a a b . " Mittelungen (1981):
des Deutschen
Archaologischen
Instituts,
Kairo
37
247-254.
Kaiser, W e r n e r , a n d Giinter Dreyer. " U r n m el-Qaab: N a c h u n t e r s u chungen i m friihzeitlichen Konigsfriedhof. 2 . Vorbericht." Mittelun 3 8 (1982):
262-269.
K e m p , Barry J. " T h e Egyptian 1st D y n a s t y Royal C e m e t e r y . "
gen des Deutschen
Antiquity
41 (1967):
Archaologischen
and Discoveries
the Royal
the Time of Tutankhamun
Tombs
of Memphis:
of Memphis:
and Ramesses
S t a d e l m a n n , Rainer. Die dgyptischen
Weltwunder.
Cemetety
Exca
since 1850. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 6 .
M a r t i n , Geoffrey T . The Hidden from
Kairo
22-32.
L a u e r , J e a n - P h i l i p p e . Saqqara, vations
Instituts,
New
Discoveries
the Great. L o n d o n , 1 9 9 1 .
Pyramiden
vom Ziegelbau
zum
Mainz, 1 9 8 5 .
Trigger, Bruce. " T h e Rise of Egyptian Civilization." In Ancient A Social Histoty,
Egypt:
edited b y Bruce T r i g g e r e t a l , p p . 1 - 7 0 . C a m b r i d g e ,
1983.
Wild, Henri. Le tombeau
de Ti. 2 vols. C a i r o , 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 6 6 . ZAHI
SARCOPHAGUS. From the Greek
HAWASS
sarx ("flesh") and ("to eat"), a sarcophagus (pi., sarcophagi) is a con tainer for the primary burial of a human corpse. Sarcophagi were widely used throughout die ancient Near East. Made of wood, clay, or stone, sarcophagi range in size from small specimens like the Jebel el-Mukabbir sarcopha gus (2.02 X 0.65 X 0.56 m) to the very large examples found in catacomb 20 at Beth-She'arim (approaching 2 X 1.5 X 0.75 m) in Israel. [See Beth-She'arim.] Stone sarcophagi were typically hollowed out from large blocks of basalt, lime stone, or marble, with limestone being the most common material used. The rims of stone sarcophagi are typically at least 10—12 cm titick, although R. H. Smith has reported on several samples with rims as thin as 4.5 cm (Smith, 1973). T h e interiors of many sarcophagi feature a rounded head rest at one end, indicating the expected orientation of the corpse. Most specimens bear ornamentation on the sides and/or lid, including decorative friezes, gabled lids, acroteria on the corners of lids, and carrying handles on the short sides. Decorations frequentiy appear only on those sides of a sarcophagus tirat remained visible after placement in the burial site. Sarcophagi stand on two brackets running be neath the short sides, on feet located under each corner, or on a flat bottom. Anthropoid clay sarcophagi appear as early as the fourteenth century B C E , in Bronze Age graves at Deir el-Balah, southwest of modern Gaza. [See Deir el-Balah.] Such burial containers, in the form of a human body (including repre sentations of facial features, hands, feet, and calves) were first introduced into Canaan from Egypt during the Late Bronze Age. Similar anthropoid sarcophagi are also known from Iron Age sites in Jordan, including Sahab, Jebel elQusur and Dibon, and in Lebanon during the Persian pe riod in and around Sidon. In each case Egyptian influence is present, as anthropoid sarcophagi had been employed in Egypt since about 1900 B C E . [See Sahab; Dibon.]
phagein
481
One of the earliest examples of an ornamented sarcoph agus is the Ahiram sarcophagus from the Early Iron Age (early tenth century BCE) at Byblos. Decorative friezes on its sides and lid include depictions of King Ahiram, votive cer emonies, and recumbent lions that typify Phoenician art during this period, particularly in their increasingly Syrian (rather than Egyptian) themes and motifs. Greek influence becomes evident during the Persian pe riod (late fifth century BCE) in, for example, the so-called Satrap Sarcophagus from Sidon. It bears decorative friezes depicting scenes of a banquet, a procession, and tire Persian court. Interpretation of these scenes is vexed by the question of whether they represent episodes from real life or visions of the afterlife: is the deceased being remembered as he was, or is he being depicted as heroized among the divinities? T h e possible presence of mythological elements, including perhaps Dionysus and Pluto, renders such questions prob lematic, and the likelihood of polyvalent symbolism cannot be discounted. Mythological symbolism is certainly present—indeed, is prevalent—in decorated sarcophagi from the Roman period, especially from the second and diird centuries C E , when pri mary burial in sarcophagi was very widely practiced by pa gans. Three specimens from Caesarea Maritima in Israel, for example, are extensively ornamented with Dionysiac scenes of satyrs, maenads, erotes, and even Leda and the
SARCOPHAGUS.
Lid of a sarcophagus.
F r o m Beth-Shean, dated to
t h e I r o n I p e r i o d . (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
482
SARDINIA
swan; several sarcophagus reliefs from Tyre from the sec ond century C E also feature elaborate mythological scenes of Achilles and Dionysus. A basalt sarcophagus from Umm Qeis (Gadara) in Jordan from the third century C E bears a depiction of Dea Syria at each end. Such decorations seem to express hopes for immortality in the afterlife through mythic union with the gods. [See Umm Qeis.] Jewish sarcophagi from the Roman period, by contrast, are noteworthy for their geometric and floral rather than mythological decorative diemes. Specimens from Benyamina; Dominus Flevit, Mt. Scopus, and Sanhedria in Jeru salem; Nablus; and Rosh ha-'Ayin all feature carved friezes of geometric design on their anterior faces or lids, without iconic representations. As such, these sarcophagi cohere with patterns of decoration on Jewish ossuaries from the Ro man period typically ornamented with compass-drawn ro settes. Later, by die third century C E , Jewish sarcophagi at Beth-She'arim display images of lions, eagles, shells, and masks; even there, however, mythological depictions are generally lacking, except in the Leda sarcophagus discussed by Michael Avi-Yonah (1967). Early Christian sarcophagi appear outside of Palestine by tlie third century C E , exploiting and transforming typical pa gan mythical motifs. Decorative depictions of Jonah in par ticular symbolize Christian hopes for resurrection. [See also Burial Techniques.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Avigad, N a h m a n . Beth She'arim:
Report
on the Excavations
during
1953-
19$8, vol. 3 , Catacombs 12-23, Jerusalem, 1 9 7 1 . Report and discus sion, including plates a n d drawings, of the Jewish sarcophagi of the R o m a n period from catacomb 2 0 . Avi-Yonah, Michael. " T h e Leda Coffin from Beth S h e ' a r i m " (in H e brew). Eretz-Israel 8 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 4 3 - 1 4 8 . Brief b u t very useful discus sion of this specimen and its mythological symbols. Bivar, A. D . H . " D o c u m e n t and Symbol in the Art of the Achaemen ids." In Monumenlum
H. S. Nyberg,
vol. I , p p . 4 9 - 6 7 . L e i d e n , 1 9 7 5 .
Photographs and discussion of the Satrap Sarcophagus. D o t h a n , T r u d e . Excavations
at the Cemetery
of Deir el-Balah.
Jerusalem,
1 9 7 9 . Report a n d discussion of Bronze Age anthropoid clay sar cophagi, including instructive typological distinctions. Koch, Guntran, and Hellmut Sichtermann. Romische Sarkophage. M u nich, 1 9 8 2 . Standard reference work for R o m a n sarcophagi in the Mediterranean world. Smith, R. H . " A n Early R o m a n Sarcophagus of Palestine a n d Its School." Palestine
Exploration
Quarterly
103 (1973): 7 1 - 8 2 . B Y R O N R. M C C A N E
SARDINIA. The largest island in the western Mediter ranean, Sardinia is within easy sailing distance of Italy, North Africa, and southern France. Its coasts tend to be rugged and lacking in maritime approaches, but the west and south have some safe harbors, where Phoenician, Punic, and Roman cities arose. Although there are very few high
mountains, Sardinia is a mountainous region. About 20 per cent of the island is comprised of low-lying plains with ad jacent terraces to about 200 m; about two-thirds of the is land's surface lies between these zones and the 500-m line. Disregarding tlie still enigmatic Paleolithic period, the be ginning of Sardinia's prehistory can be dated to the arrival of cardial impressed ware early in the sixth millennium. From the earliest period, Sardinia was in contact with Cor sica, Liguria, Lombardy, and Provence, as is attested by the presence of Sardinian obsidian in those regions. This earliest Neolitiiic culture evolved into the Middle Neolithic culture known as Bonu Ighinu (c. 4500—4000 B C E ) . T h e obsidian trade produced in Sardinia ceramic parallels witii a wide range of cultures in the 5500-4000 BCE horizons from northem Italy and Provence. T h e size of die known early sites suggests that society was based on small bands, perhaps no more than individual extended families, whose economy was based largely on herding, foraging, and the small-scale cul tivation of barley, wheat, and legumes. Settlement in the Bonu Ighinu period was more widespread and more devel oped. Local groups began to exercise control over the ob sidian sources and trade was probably mediated through the coastal villages. These factors suggest the development of social and economic hierarchies, which find their material manifestations in jewelry and fine pottery in mortuary con texts. During this period the first indications of cultural in teractions occur, either direct or indirect, with the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. By about the end of the fifth millennium, Bonu Ighinu had evolved into the Late Neolithic San Michele or Ozieri culture (c. 4000-3400 B C E ) . This was a period of profound, often rapid, changes and marked increases in prosperity that began in die eastern Mediterranean (notably in Gerzean Egypt) and southeastern Europe and rippled westward. Ex cept for a few habitations in caves, Ozieri was a culture of unwalled open-air villages with marked social and economic hierarchies. During the latter phases of this period, large stone architecture makes its first appearance at the sacred site of Monte d'Accoddi-Sassari, an artificial "high place" witii a ramp and village. The presence of copper and silver allows us now to consider the Late Neolithic as transitional to the Chalcolithic, or Copper, Age, which on Sardinia is almost coterminous witii the third millenium B C E and is tran sitional to the Bronze Age culture known as Nuragic. Large stone architecture now developed into the first defensive structures, suggesting a further evolution of society and economy. Extrainsular contacts include the late fourtii-/ early tiiird-millennium Copper Age cultures of southern France, Iberia, Italy, and Sicily, the latter being the probable mediator of more widespread parallels with material from the eastern Mediterranean. During the Copper Age, megalithic architecture pro duced fortifications known collectively as protonuraghi, es-
SARDINIA sentially rectangular, ovoid, or circular raised platforms on top of which one or more huts were constructed. These eventually evolved into corbeled tiioloi, or mie nuraghi, the characteristic feature of the Bronze Age. Most nuraghi were simple, single-towered structures, but some were made more elaborate by the addition of a walled courtyard, some times with a second tower in it. A few walled courtyards, apparentiy through a series of additions over time, became even more developed, until, by about 1200 B C E , a small num ber of them had been transformed into veritable fortresses with multiple-towered, interconnected external bastions. Most, if not all, nuraghi had associated villages, but there are many nuragic villages without nuragic towers. With few exceptions, the huts in these villages are circular stone con structions tiiat would have supported thatched roofs; tiieir interior diameters range from about 5 to about 8 m. In some cases, several huts are interconnected, appearing to form part of a single domicile; in an apparentiy later development, groups of interconnected huts appear around a courtyard, each group remaining isolated from its counterparts, per haps the dwellings of the village's elites. Evidence for the social and economic activities of nuragic villages is exiguous. Faunal remains attest to the continued importance of hunting alongside stock raising and cultivation, and many villages have yielded evidence for the production of wool and cheese. Copper and bronze were worked in some vil lages, but it is excessive to suggest that these were wide spread cottage industries. An extensive obisidian industry continued. Probably the most important and certainly the most visi ble of nuragic cults is that of water. In its most fully devel oped form, the water cult focuses on sacred wells, most of which are associated witii nuragic villages. Many of these sacred sites have yielded remarkable amounts of bronze ob jects, jewelry, and imports. Some of the sites were surely the religious centers of tribes or confederations whose names are known from later texts and inscriptions, but any attempt to make direct correlations seems futile. It was at such centers that the Romans would find attacking the natives most ef ficient. There is virtually no evidence in Sardinia of external con tacts in the late third and early second millennia, apart from late bell beakers and the remarkably close parallels, perhaps fortuitous, between indigenous pottery and tiiat of tlie northern Italian Polada culture. By about 1400 B C E , how ever, if not earlier, Sardinia was an integral part of a com mercial network that extended from the Near East to north western Europe. T h e principal eastern component of this network was Cyprus, and it seems tiiat the peak period of the Sardinia-Cyprus nexus was the twelfth century B C E ; it is evident that the connection continued to the end of the sec ond millennium, or even beyond, when it can be considered part of the Phoenician trade. During the high-water period
483
of Cypriot ttade, Sardinia was also in direct and/or indirect contact with the Mycenaean world. It is arguable that indig enous Sardinians, known in the east as Sherden, were car riers of some of the eastern material found on tlie island. An inscription that may date to the eleventh century B C E and some bronze figurines found at nuragic sites and dated to around 1000 B C E provide the first clear evidence for Phoe nician contacts, probably at this time no more than the spo radic or periodic visits of merchants making ports of call on their way to or from the Iberian Peninsula. Contact with Iberia put Sardinia from the tenth to the eighth century in directly in contact with the broader world of the west, and it may be that Phoenician Sardinia was the mediator be tween the Atlantic world and the Italian mainland. Three Sardinian bronze figurines found in the Cavalupo tomb at Vulci have been interpreted as evidence for (surely not unique) marriage relationship between Sardinian and Villanovan aristocrats. In the eighth and seventh centuries, B C E the Phoenicians began to develop permanent settlements. Shortly after the middle of the sixth century, Carthage directly intervened in Sardinia by sending an expeditionary force that was at first defeated; over the course of the next century, however, the Carthaginians vigorously and successfully pursued a policy of active imperialism which resulted, in around 450 B C E , in the establishment of an interior frontier system. By the fifth century, the Phoenician coastal settlements and some more recently established Punic ones had arrived at a mature level of urbanization; they would continue to evolve and play im portant social and economic roles throughout the Roman period and into the Middle Ages. After the establishment of the Punic internal frontier, Carthaginian influences on the native populations—both within their sphere of control and beyond—intensified, imported goods at native sites in creased dramatically, and some rural colonies were founded. As far as we can tell from surviving accounts, Sardinia played a minor role in the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage, although in tlie earliest phases of the conflict it would have seemed destined to be a major battleground. In 238 or 237 B C E , in response to Carthage's Mercenary War, the Romans, in a complete transformation of policy, sent a naval expedition to the island. When Cardiage ex pressed indignation at Rome's action and informed the Ro mans that they were preparing to recover the island, the Romans declared war, causing the Carthaginians to aban don their claim to Sardinia and to pay an additional indem nity of 1,200 talents. T h e consul of 238, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, witii a fleet and troops, took possession (probably in 237) of Sardinia without a struggle—tiiat is, he established control over the Punic cities of the littoral. From this began a long series of wars in the interior and the gradual transformation of the island into a Roman province, one of the chief suppliers of grain to the imperial capital. Roman
484
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culture, including the Latin language, supplanted the indig enous culture, elements of which, nonetheless, survived for centuries, as is best evidenced by dre fact that some natives were still worshiping wooden and stone idols in the late sixth century C E , undoubtedly a continuation of customs that had evolved from the Neolithic. Pre-Roman words (including the Punic mitza for "spring" or "fountain") persist in the modern Sardinian language, the closest to Latin of all Ro mance languages. As excavation and archaeological surveys have demonstrated, a very large number of indigenous sites continued to be occupied, or were reoccupied, during the Roman period, especially during the high empire. Some of these indigenes have left us epigraphic records of their names, such as, Tarammon, Urseccur Tertelli (films), Miaricora Turi (filius), and Asadiso Osurbali (Alius). Punic culture also survived. We know from Cicero's speech in defence of Scaurus, who had governed the island in 55, that the ruling class of the city of Nora still had Punic names (Aris, Bostar), a phenomenon repeated elsewhere. T h e magistrates (sufetes) in the city of Cagliari, perhaps in about 40 B C E , were named Aristo and Muthumbal, and the name of the modern city of Oristano evidently derives from the landholdings of someone name Aris (i.e., agerAristanus). In Cagliari, the atrium of a Roman house had a mosaic floor with the symbol of the goddess Tank. At Bithia, coins as sociated with the votive deposits made to dre Egyptian god Bes continued into the time of the early empire; and the temple to that deity was restructured by the people—sufetes and other citizens—an activity recorded on a neo-Punic in scription from the late second or early third century CE. Very little is known of the formerly Punic cities during the Republican and early imperial periods. Even where exten sive excavations have been conducted, scholarly interest has focused on the imperial and the Punic periods. Tharros and other cities (Othoca, Neapolis, Sulcis/Sant' Antioco, Bithia, Nora, Cagliari, Olbia, Cornus) became relatively more pros perous and well appointed during the high empire, but they were probably not excessively depressed in the interval. T h e extensive agricultural settlements in the hinterland, which archaeological survey has recently elucidated, required a port to export their products and to import, if nothing else, the black-glazed wares and Dressel-i amphoras that are of ten the only witnesses to the villages' existence. In the fifth century C E , the Romans were replaced by the Vandals, who were soon ousted by tire Byzantines. Tradi tionally, in Sardinia the Dark Ages begin earlier than else where. However, archaeological evidence is beginning to provide a clearer picture of Late Roman and early medieval Sardinia than was available only a few years ago, when the evidence consisted largely of literary and legal texts along with a few inscriptions; although the gaps in our knowledge are so great that many years of research will be required to provide adequate documentation, the trend is manifest. For example, the importation of African Red-Slip Ware, which
continued long after the Vandal conquest of the island c. 450 C E , reveals that trade and economic life continued. It invites a vastly different understanding of life in Sardinia between about 450 and 600 C E than was possible when the only evidence was tire pages of Procopius: if nothing else, we now know that the countryside was much more popu lated than it had seemed to be. Our knowledge of early Christianity is constantly increasing, almost annually revis ing an outdated conclusion (that Sardinia was largely pagan) based on a single literary text. Most importantly, recent years have witnessed a revolution in our understanding of the impact on Sardinia of the Byzantine world, which began with Justinian's reconquest in 533/34. Future research should allow us eventually to fashion a more comprehensive analysis of the processes by which Sardinia was transformed between the fifth and eleventh centuries CE. [See also Carthage; Cyprus; and Phoenicians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Atzeni, Enrico, et al. Ichnussa:
La Sardegna
dalle
origini
all' eld
classica.
2d ed. Milan, 1985. Lavishly illustrated overview, particularly of p r e history. Balmuth, Miriam S., a n d Robert J. Rowland, Jr., eds. Studies in Sar dinian Archaeology. A n n Arbor, 1984. A collection of u p - t o - d a t e es says by an international group of specialists. B a l m u t h , M i r i a m S., ed. Studies
in Sardinian
Archaeology,
vol. 2. A n n
Arbor, 1986. Similar to t h e above, with a focus o n p a n - M e d i t e r r a nean contacts. Barreca, Ferruccio. La civilta fenicio-punica in Sardegna. Sassari, 1986. Comprehensive and well-illustrated overview by the late archaeolog ical superintendant of t h e provinces of Cagliari a n d Oristano. B o n d i , S. F „ et al. Storia alia
fine
dei Sardi
dell' eta bizantina.
e dell Sardegna,
M i l a n , 1987.
vol. I , Dalle
origini
A c o m p r e h e n s i v e survey
written b y a t e a m of specialists. Boscolo, Alberto. La Sardegna. bizantina e alto-giudicale. Sassari, 1978. T h e standard survey. Dyson, Stephen L . , and Robert J. Rowland, Jr. "Survey a n d Settlement Reconstruction in West-Central Sardinia." American Journal of Ar chaeology 96 (1992): 203-224. Presents a s u m m a r y of the results of a large-scale, multi-phased survey archaeology project. Lilliu, G i o v a n n i . La civilta
dei Sardi
dal paleolitico
all' etd dei
nuraghi.
3d ed. T u r i n , 1988. T h e standard survey. Meloni, Piero. La Sardegna romana. 2d ed. Sassari, 1990. T h e standard survey. Paulis, G. Lingua
e cultura
nella Sardegna
bizantina.
Sassari, 1983.
The
best starting point for Sardinia in die Byzantine period. R O B E R T J. R O W L A N D , J R .
SARDIS, site located in western Anatolia about 100 km (62 mi.) due east of Smyrna (Izmir), where the valley of the Hermus River (Gediz cayi) meets the foothills of Mt. T m o lus (Boz dagi). Sardis has always been identifiable because the toponym (Sart today) has survived, occurring in many ancient in situ stone inscriptions. T h e factors that account for the growth and prosperity of the city are the natural cor ridor of the river valley, which connects the Aegean coast with tire interior of Anatolia; the fertility of the valley and of
SARDIS mountain highlands; the perennial water source of a moun tain stream, the Pactolus River (Sart cayi), which empties into the Hermus; and the security of a high spur of Mt. Tmolus, which provided a defensible place of refuge (a cit adel or acropolis) and mineral resources, notably gold (for which the Pactolus with its placer deposits was the most famous source in antiquity). History. T h e oldest stratified occupation dates to the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1400 B C E ) , but Early Bronze Age and Neolithic artifacts have been recovered out of context. In the first millennium, Sardis was die chief city of the Lydians, an Anatolian people who occupied the central western river valleys, especially those of the Hermus and Kayster (Kuciik Menderes cayi), and who spoke an Indo-European language (belonging to the Palaic-Anatolian subgroup). T h e Lydian language is known from a relatively small number of texts (somewhat more than 110), mostiy from Sardis and mostiy dedicatory and funerary inscriptions on stone and pottery. Before the seventh century tiieir history (under a five-hundred-year-old Heracleid dynasty that traced its de scent from Herakles) is shadowy. From about 780 to 546, under their aggressive Mermnad dynasty (and successive kings Gyges, Ardys, Sadyattes, Alyattes, and Croesus), the Lydians were masters of an empire in western Anatolia tiiat extended as far east as the Halys River (Kizihrmak cayi). Around 546 the Lydian Empire was conquered by the Per sians, under Cyrus tlie Great, who besieged and captured Sardis and made it the capital of an important satrapy or viceroyalty, named Sparda, like the city. Sardis was the chief western terminus of a major administtative route, the Per sian "royal road," which originated at Susa in Iran. During more than two centuries as a western outpost of the Persian Empire, Sardis played a role in Persian relations with the Greeks. Capture and burning of the lower city by Athenians and Eretrians around 498 during the Ionian revolt led to the Persian Wars of 490 and 480-479; and Sardis was a stopping place for King Xerxes and his forces before their invasion of Greece in 480. T h e Athenian Alcibiades was a guest and councilor of the satrap Tissaphernes at Sardis in 4 1 2 - 4 1 1 , where King Lysander of Sparta visited the satrap Cyrus the Younger, younger son of King Darius II, in 405. Sardis was the mustering place for Cyrus tlie Younger's illfated expedition witii ten thousand Greek mercenaries against his brother, King Artaxerxes II, in 401. T h e Spartan ldng Aegesilaus won a victory over troops of satrap Tissa phernes in 395, which resulted in the latter's disgrace and execution. T h e Athenian admiral Konon was briefly im prisoned at Sardis by the satrap Tiribazus, in 392. The terms of the Peace of Antalcidas or the King's Peace, favorable to Persia and Sparta, were announced at Sardis in 387. Persian rule ended in 334 when Sardis surrendered to Alexander the Great, who restored "to Sardians and other Lydians the ancient nomoi (customs or laws) of the Lydi ans" (Arrian, Anabasis
Alexandria
1.17.3-8). In the Hellenis
485
tic Period, Sardis was controlled first by Antigonus and Lysimachus, around 323-281. During part of this time, it was the residence of Alexander's only full sister, Cleopatra. T h e n Sardis was ruled by the Seleucid kings from 281 to 190 B C E and next by Pergamon from 190 to 133. During Seleucid rule, the city was for a time headquarters of the rebel Seleu cid prince Achaeus, uncle of the legitimate ldng, Antiochus III, who besieged the city and captured and executed Achaeus in 214. Antiochus's reparations to Sardis thereafter were recorded in an inscription on the Metroon at Sardis. After die bequest of Attalus III of Pergamon in 133, Sardis became part of the Roman province of Asia. In Roman times, Sardis was the principal city of a assize or judicial district (dioecesis, conventus), which included twenty-seven or more other settlements of Lydia and Phrygia. In 17 C E extensive desu-uction by an earthquake, which also damaged eleven other cities of western Anatolia, was the occasion for a five-year tax remission and a grant-in-aid of ten million sesterces from Emperor Tiberius. Sardis was visited by tlie emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius with Commodus and perhaps also by Lucius Verus and Caracalla. With Diocletian's provincial reorganization in the late third and early fourth centuries C E , Sardis became capital of tlie province of Lydia within the larger diocese of Asiana. Under Diocletian or Constantine I it was the site of a weap ons factory. Beginning in the first century C E , Sardis was an important center of Christianity, as one of the "seven churches which are in Asia" (Rev. 1:11; 3:1-6) and the seat of a high-ranking bishop until 1369. It also had a privileged Jewish community. Josephus, Antiq., 12.147-153; 14.235, 260), T h e city barely escaped capture by die Goths in 399, may have been raided and partly sacked by the Sassanian Persians in 616, was taken by the Arabs in 716, and was in Turkish hands intermittently from the eleventh century, permanently from the beginning of the fifteenth century. Topography, M o n u m e n t s , Culture. Sardis grew up around the high acropolis, mainly at tlie edge of the Hermus plain on the north side, also in the Pactolus Valley on the west side. Some settlement regularly existed on the acropolis summit. Cemeteries were located at the periphery of settle ment, mainly in hilly terrain of the Pactolus Valley and also 8 km (5 mi.) away to the north on a low limestone ridge (Bin Tepe) located between die Hermus plain and the Gygaean Lake or the Lake of Koloe (Marmara Gold). Of satellite communities—villages, hamlets, farms, military outposts— in the surrounding plain and mountains, some are named in ancient texts (e.g., Kombdilipia and Tbalmoura in a Hel lenistic inscription on the temple of Artemis; and Metallon, in Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13.464-478), and some are known from sites and their archaeological remains (e.g., Dedemezari and Karadut). Little is known about the nature and extent of settlement in the Late Bronze Age and early centuries of the first mil-
486
SARDIS
lennium BCE. The Lydian city of the sixth century probably covered at least 115 hectares (285 acres), over which exca vated occupation remains are disttibuted). As topography and later settlement patterns suggest, the city may have spread over twice as much land. (Herodotus, 3.4.2, judged Kadytis [Gaza] in Palestine comparable to Sardis in size.) The lower city was partly surrounded by a fortification wall, and the acropolis had its own triple-walled fortifications (Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, 1.17.5; Lucian, Charon, 9). A few segments of them survive. Residences (some associated with small glass industry), perhaps a market, a quarter near the Pactolus stream where gold and silver were separated from placer (waterborne or glacial deposits) electrum, and a mod est altar (probably associated with the goddess Cybele), are known from excavation. Also attested by archaeological work is a chthonic cult attested by ritual offerings in the form of dinners. Immature dogs are the main course. Each offer ing included a pitcher, cup, dish, iron knife, and cooking pot with dog skeleton buried near houses. A temple of Cybele and palace or palaces of the Lydian kings are cited in liter ature (for the temple, see Herodotus, 5.102; Plutarch, Themistocles, 31; for the palace[s], see Xanthus of Lydia cited by Nicolaus of Damascus; see Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen
Historiker
[Berlin and Leiden, 1923-1958],
90.44[7]; Vitruvius, 2.8.9-10; Arrian, 1.17.6).
Anabasis
Alexandri,
Ordinary houses were built with walls of mud-brick on fieldstone socles and roofs of reed construction. Grander buildings had terra-cotta roof and revetment tiles with molded and painted decoration (figural, floral, and pattern motifs in red, black, and white), and precisely cut ashlar (dressed) masonry in white limestone and marble. T h e physical size and conceptual grandeur of several monu ments testify to the wealth and power of tire Lydian capital: tire massive 20 m (65.5 ft.)-thick fortification wall of the lower city; the terracing in white, crisp, ashlar masonry that regularized and redefined natural slopes of the acropolis; the huge tumuli (two with diameters exceeding 350 m [1148 ft.]) and dramatic landscape created by them in the cemetery at Bin Tepe. Lydian culture of Sardis attested in the archaeological rec ord combines Anatolian and Greek traditions. Anatolian are the tumulus and rock-cut chamber tombs, some pottery shapes (notably the lydion unguent container) and decora tive conventions (distinctive varieties of Anatolian bichrome and black-on-red wares, and the highly distinctive "mar bling"). Greek are the architectural ornament, including the terra-cotta roof and revetment tiles and their motifs, as well as the Ionic repertory (column design, moldings, pattern, individual motifs) in stone; sculptaral motifs, design, and style (e.g., kouroi, kourai, lions), many vessel forms, mainly attested in pottery (column crater, skyphos); and the alpha betic writing system (adapted with certain changes). Con ceivably Greek cultural components may have been more
prominent at Sardis than at other settlements of Lydia (tire Lydian archaeological record of which is still little known) because of greater foreign contacts at the capital. If so, how ever, it was well entrenched, as is shown by the use of Greek design for plain and ordinary pottery of the seventh and sixth centuries, and by close similarities to Greek forms in the shapes and decoration of earlier Sardis pottery, about 1300-700. Anatolian and Greek motifs can be originally combined, as in die highly decorative painted pottery called Ephesian ware, probably made at Sardis and elsewhere in western Anatolia in the seventir and early sixth centuries. Some design features are at home in both western Anatolia and Greece and probably reflect a shared cultural heritage. There is little evidence for cultural interchange with Mes opotamia or Iran (although Lydian contact widi Assyrians, Babylonians, and Medes is reported by tire Assyrian records of Ashurbanipal and by Herodotus (1.16, 73-74, 77). T h e "nomadic" animal style of some objects probably reflects the presence at Sardis of Cimmerians or Scytirians. Persian conquest initially had little effect on the material culture of Sardis, except in lavish art forms (plate, jewelry, glyptic). Cults of Sardis during the Persian era include those of Artemis of Sardis, attested by Lydian grave epitaphs and by a monumental altar in the Pactolus Valley (perhaps the one cited by Xenophon, Anabasis, 1.6.7); Artemis of Koloe, whose sanctuary by the Gygaean Lake is reported by Strabo, 13.4.5/626, and is attested by Lydian grave epitaphs; and Zeus Baradates (perhaps Ahuramazda of the Zoroastrian religion), known from a Greek inscription of Roman im perial times that refers to his statue and adyton in die time of King Artaxerxes. Gardens and hunting parks (paradeisoi) of the satraps Tissaphernes and Cyrus the Younger are re ported in literature (Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 4.20-24; Diodorus, 14.80.2). Early in Hellenistic times the altar of Artemis of Sardis in the Pactolus Valley was greatiy enlarged and a huge temple built to the east of it. T h e temple faced west, like the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which may have been die model. A metroon of more modest size (perhaps a successor of the Temple of Cybele reported by Herodotus, 5.102, and the same or the successor of one cited by Plutarch, Themistocles, 31) is attested by marble blocks inscribed with correspon dence between the Seleucid King Antiochus III; his queen, Laodike; and the Sardians. A gymnasium is cited in one of the same inscriptions; and a theater, city walls and gates, hippodrome, and temple of Zeus Olympius (vowed by Alexander the Great) are cited in the literature (Polybius, 7 . 1 5 - 1 8 ; Arrian, Anabasis
Alexandri,
1.17.3-6).
City institutions, cults, and monuments of Roman times are documented in greater number than for any other era. Most major Roman archaeological features postdate the earthquake of 17 CE. A series of vast terraces on the lower slopes and skirt of the acropolis supported many buildings. Two or three gymnasium-bath complexes (one of them pos-
SARDIS sibly a basilica), a theater, stadium, and large pseudodipteral temple are known from archaeological remains, as are ad ditions to the temple of Artemis of Sardis (pseudodipteral peristyle, cella-partition wall, perhaps designed to create separate halls for cults of Artemis and Zeus Polieus). A mud-brick building reportedly once the palace of Croesus served for the gerousia, council of elders (Vitruvius, 2.8.910). An agora, nearly twenty fountains, an odeion, and many cults with sanctuaries and temples, including those of Hera, Demeter, Men, and Augustus and Gaius, are attested in in scriptions. A goddess called Kore, represented in Roman sculpture and on coins of Sardis as a semi-aniconic image (analagous to the Ephesian Artemis type) may belong to a pre-Roman cult. In late Roman times (fourth-seventh centuries C E ) , the urban traditions of a great metropolis were maintained but with increasing strain, Major buildings, colonnaded thor oughfares (one with a tetrapylon or four-sided arch), and commodious, multfroom private residences were repaired, rebuilt, or freshly created, often substantially constructed and decorated with lavish expanses of mosaic paving. T h e tomb of an arms-factory director (Chrysanthius) is one of many painted tombs of barrel-vaulted, subterranean type (hypogaeum) in the city cemeteries. Increasing reuse of build ing materials, however, suggests significant abandonment or ruin in the city as well as economic recession; one colon naded street and its sidewalks were never paved. Sardis was refortified: the lower city in the late fourth century, with a circuit wall that enclosed a space of about 150 hectares (350 acres); the acropolis in the seventli-ninth centuries, with massive, well-designed fortifications at strategic places. Three churches, two of them substantial in size, and an un usually large synagogue about 80 m (262 ft.) long were built and nourished in the fifth and sixth centuries. From the seventh century onward, Sardis steadily dimin ished in size. Over foundations of one of the larger churches a modest-size, ornately decorated church of multidome type (like the church of the Holy Apostles in Salonica) was built in the thirteenth century. T h e city was apparently a com munity of villages, one on tire acropolis and several in the lower city and Artemis of Sardis sanctuary, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. R e s e a r c h a n d Excavation. Antiquarian research began in the fifteenth century with Cyriacus of Ancona, who vis ited Sardis in 1446, explored the site, and recorded inscrip tions on stone. From the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, many British and European travelers recorded to pography and architecture, notably Thomas Smith in 1670, Edmund Chishull in 1699, Robert Wood and Charles de Peysonnel in 1750, Richard Chandler in 1765, Charles Cockerell in 1812, and Anton von Prokesch (Anton Prokesch von Osten) in 1825. Their records are valuable for references to then-existing conditions and for monuments that disappeared after their visits. Tumuli at Bin Tepe were
487
explored and excavated (without discovery of intact burial chambers) by Ludwig Spiegelthal (who excavated the tu mulus of Alyattes) in 1853, George Dennis beginning in 1868 and again in 1882, and Auguste Choisy in 1875. Ex cavations at the temple of Artemis in the Pactolus Valley were also conducted by Dennis in 1882 and by Gustave Mendel on behalf of the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Con stantinople in 1904. Systematic long-term excavations were undertaken by the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis, founded and directed by Howard Crosby Butler, in 1910-1914 and 1922. T h e temple of Artemis and graves in the Pactolus Valley were the focus of Butler's excavations, but exploration and test excavation in other parts of the city site and at Bin Tepe also were undertaken. [See the biography of Butler.] Since 1959, excavation and other archaeological research in many parts of tire city site and at Bin Tepe have been conducted by tire Archaeological Exploration of Sar dis, a project begun by George M. A. Hanfmann and jointly sponsored by the Harvard University Art Museums, Cornell University, the American Schools of Oriental Research, and the Corning Museum of Glass. BIBLIOGRAPHY Buckler, William H , and David M . Robinson. Greek and Ijilin Inscrip tions. Publications of the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis, vol. 7 . 1 . Leiden, 1 9 3 2 . T e x t s , translations, and commentary on Greek and Latin inscriptions smdied u p t o 1 9 2 2 . Buder, H o w a r d Crosby. Sardis: The Excavations, 1910-1014. Publica tions of the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis, vol. 1 . 1 . Leiden, 1 9 2 2 . S u m m a r y of excavations between 1 9 1 0 and 1 9 1 4 , pri marily concerned with the T e m p l e of Artemis of Sardis and graves and including a general introduction to topography, city history, and rite history of scholarly research at Sardis, Foss, Clive. Byzantine and Turkish Sardis. Sardis M o n o g r a p h , 4. C a m bridge, Mass., 1 9 7 6 . Political, military, and cultural history, with ar chaeological interpretation a n d key sources. Gauthier, Philippe. Nouvelles inscriptions de Sardes. Vol. 2 . Centre d e Recherche d'Histoire et d e Philologie de la IVe Section de l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes E t u d e s , 3 ; Hautes Etudes du M o n d e G r e c o Romain, 1 5 . Geneva, 1 9 8 9 . Hellenistic inscriptions from the M e troon, recording correspondence between K i n g Antiochus I I , Queen Laodike, and the Sardians. Greenewalt, Crawford H., Jr. " W h e n a Mighty Empire Was Destroyed: T h e C o m m o n M a n at the Fall of Sardis, ca. 5 4 6 B . C . " Proceedings of the American
Philosophical
Society
1 3 6 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 2 4 7 - 2 7 2 . Covers
Lydian defenses of die lower city a n d evidence for die siege and capture b y Cyrus die Great. H a n f m a n n , G e o r g e M . A. Prom Western
Asia
Minor
and Their
Croesus Arts
to Constantine:
in Greek
and Roman
The Cities Times.
of
Ann
Arbor, 1 9 7 5 . U r b a n history of Sardis in Anatolian context. H a n f m a n n , George M . A., a n d N . H . Ramage. Sculpture from Sardis: The Finds through 197s- Sardis Report, 2 . Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 7 8 . Primarily concerned with Lydian, Hellenistic, a n d R o m a n sculpture. H a n f m a n n , G e o r g e M . A. Sardis
from
Prehistoric
to Roman
Times.
Cam
bridge, M a s s . , 1 9 8 3 . C o m p r e h e n s i v e account of Sardis. Pedley, John G. Ancient Literary Sources on Sardis. Sardis M o n o g r a p h , 2. Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 7 2 . T e x t s with translations a n d c o m m e n tary, organized chonrologically a n d thematically. Yegiil, Fikret K. The Bath-Gymnasium Complex at Sardis. Sardis R e -
488
SAREPTA
port, 3 . Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 8 6 . Comprehensive report on one of the Roman bath-gymnasium complexes. CRAWFORD H . GREENEWALT, JR.
SAREPTA (modern Sarafand), a low mound on die shore of die Mediterranean Sea in soutii Lebanon, 50 1cm (31 mi.) south of Beirut (33°27' N , 35°i8' E). The name Sarepta stems from a Semitic root, saraph or sarapu, mean ing "to refine" or "to color red," a connection enhanced after numerous pottery kilns were recovered at Sarepta (see below). Sarepta's long and varied history can be traced tiirough more than fifty references in ancient sources, namely the fourteenth-century B C E Ugaritic texts, thirteenth-century BCE Egyptian papyri, and eighth-century BCE Assyrian sources. The Bible mentions the visit of tlie prophet Elijah to Sarepta (Zarephath) in 1 Kings 17:8-28, in about tlie ninth century BCE, where he performed two of his miracles. This story was given prominence in Christian writings (Lk. 4:24-26) and is kept alive as a legend in Islamic tradition, where a shrine for the Wely el-Khudr still stands today be side the modern motor road between Sidon and Tyre, about 2 1cm southwest of the site where Elijah's story took place. The Greek sources Pseudo-Scylax in the fourth century B C E and Lycophron, a third-century poet, mention Sarepta. T h e Latin poet Sidonius Apollinaris was quoted about the area's famous wines. The "holy god of Sarepta" appears in three Greek inscriptions (Pritchard, 1978). Arab geogra phers and historians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries knew Sarafand: al-Idrisi and Yaqut speak of a beautiful town surrounded by gardens. Exploration a n d Excavation. When the explorer and historian George Sandys visited Sarepta in 1611, he noted its mosque, the new town on the hills, and Roman period tombs. T h e pilgrim and traveler Chevalier Laurent d'Arvieux in 1659 and pilgrim and explorer Richard Pococke in 1738 noted the modern town, the sepulchers, and various ruins. In 1838 the American biblical geographer Edward Robinson saw the Wely el-Khudr and mentioned "Zare phath" (see above). The first archaeologist to visit was Ernest Renan, in 1861. He wrote a scientific account of Sarepta, describing the ne cropolis and two rooms cut into the rock at the seashore. In 1929 Sarafand villagers found a burial cave, from which the Museum of the American University of Beirut purchased sixty-seven pots. In 1932 Harold Inghold and Ejnar Fugmann studied the collection (mostly Late Bronze Age pot tery, including Mycenaean imports), which was published by Dimitri Baramki in 1959. [See the biographies of Renan and Baramki] In 1968 Roger Saidah explored forty rockcut tombs to tlie east of the coastal road north of Sarafand. Three were intact and date to about the sixth and fifth cen turies BCE (Saidah, 1969).
Between 1969 and 1974, with a study season in 1978, James B. Pritchard, then assistant director at die University Museum of die University of Pennsylvania, directed exca vations at Sarepta whose main goal was to obtain a record of the successive periods of Phoenician cultural history there. While the early and late periods had been fairly well documented, information about the Iron Age was limited, often coming from Phoenician colonies in tlie western Med iterranean. In tlie first season of excavations, a Roman port was un covered and designated area I. Subsequent excavations took place on top of the tell, designated area II, and two sound ings were made: sounding X, in an area of 875 sq m, and sounding Y, in an area of 100 sq m. T h e excavations produced the Roman-Byzantine port. A rectangular quay (14.50 X 12.60 m) had been constructed on a natural promontory in order to make the city accessible from the sea on three of its sides. A mooring ring was dis covered, in addition to four rock-cut basins to hold fresh water brought from the hills by a conduit. An L-shaped nat ural reef, 1 m below the surface, acted as a natural mole to provide shelter from the open sea and to keep the harbor from silting up. T o judge from the frequency of datable coins, the harbor was opened in the first cenmry C E . T W O major periods of expansion could be attested in the fourth and the sixth centuries: a bath and the foundation of a church were uncovered from the Byzantine period. After that, die datable coins become scarce. It seems that, by the seventh cenmry, the harbor was almost deserted (see Prit chard, 1975). Phoenician S e t t l e m e n t . T h e search for Phoenician re mains was conducted on the tell, in area II, in soundings X and Y. Based on the stratigraphic sequence, the soundings exhibited essential differences in die uses to which each area had been put: sounding X revealed an industrial sector (Khalifeh, 1988) and sounding Y had been mainly residen tial and thus was less disturbed (Anderson, 1988). Table 1 correlates the different periods in both soundings with a sounding dug at the neighboring city of Tyre. [See Tyre.] These correlations are based on the development of ar-
T A B L E 1.
Comparison
Sounding X Periods I I-II III-IV V VI VII Vllla-VIIIb VIIIb-IX? X?
of Soundings
Sounding Y Strata
at Sarepta
and
Tyre
Tyre Strata
Approximate Date
K J-H
XVI XVI-XV
G
xv-xrv
F
XIV XIV-XIII XIII-VIII VII-I
1 5 5 0 - 1 4 5 0 BCE 1450-1350 1350-1275 1275-1150 1150-1025 1025-800 800-350 350-100?
E D C-B B-A2 Al
— —
100(?)BCE-(?)CE
SAREPTA chitectural plans and on the fluctuations of statistically stud ied frequencies for pottery-type series and related modes of surface finish and decoration. T h e results show that LB Sar epta was a peaceful settlement. T h e LB transition to the Iron Age was smooth, with no evidence of destruction. Iron Age Sarepta continued to be the center of a pottery industry, with an increase in the frequency of storage jars as an indictor of an increase in trade. T h e major change was the introduction of new ceramic forms—red-slipped burnished bowls and jugs—and a new building technique called pier and rubble construction. Pottery production center. Twenty-two kilns with re lated facilities were uncovered in sounding X. T h e kilns were constructed according to a plan that remained standard for centuries, with only slight changes in shape and dimen sion. They are oval chambers divided into two kidneyshaped lobes by a wall that projects from the side opposite the doorway (see figure t ) . Kiln G, recovered in sounding X, is well preserved, with a complete firing chamber, a roof with flues, and a doorway leading to a stoking room, from which it had been fired. Next to lain G is room 74, which served as a work area. Kiln G can be dated within the thir teenth century B C E . Purple dye industry. In the Roman port, a square tank cut into the rock, with four openings in the walls to allow
SAREPTA.
F i g u r e I . Aerial view of the industrial
kilns. ( C o u r t e s y J. B. Pritchard)
489
the circulation of water, is thought to have been used to grow Murex shells, the source of purple dye. Similar tanks were attested on the north coast of Crete for the same purpose (Pritchard, 1975, 1978). Additional evidence came from a deposit of crushed Murex shells near the kiln G complex. Three sherds were unearthed whose interior was covered with a purple accumulation of the purple dye. Spectroscopic and chemical investigations proved it to be the original pur ple dye. This is the earliest chemical confirmation of the ancient "royal purple" dye. It was produced locally and the industry can be dated to the end of the Late Bronze Age/ Early Iron Age. (The production of the purple dye, for which the Phoenicians were famous, played a major role in the dyeing industry and in promoting the textile industry in general.) Metallurgy. Amorphous pieces of metal and bits of slag were found, along with a rim sherd from a crucible whose inside surface was coated with slag. A mold for jewelry ev idenced both the method employed in casting and the forms of the pieces produced. T h e various objects cast included an elongated bead, a pendant or an earring, and a finger ring. Oil press. A complete oil press was found in the south eastern corner of sounding X that had been in use during the Hellenistic and Roman period. T h e main elements un covered were a crushing basin, a large circular stone with a
quarter from a tethered balloon. N o t e t h e circular
490
SAREPTA
low rim (for collecting the olive pulp produced in the crush ing process), an oil vat hewn from a solid stone column drum, and a large column drum. [See Olives.] Inscriptions. Twenty-one inscriptions in Phoenician script were found in sounding X that vary in length from a single letter to a complete text of thirty-two Phoenician let ters dedicated to the goddess Tannit (see below). [See Phoe nician-Punic] They are mostiy notations incised or painted on jars and bowls. (Greek and Latin scripts appeared in the later periods, also in sounding X.) Most of the Phoenician inscriptions denote ownership by a god or a person, for ex ample, "belonging to Eshmunyaton," or "client of Melqart." Among the small finds is a greenish-brown stone inscribed with the name Sarepta that was used as a seal stamp. [See Seals.] An ivory plaque ( 3 . 3 X 5 cm) incised widi a complete thirty-two-letter Phoenician inscription is a dedication to Tannit and Ashtart (see figure 2), both of whom were served at the same time—probably in the seventii century B C E (see below). The sign of Tannit also appears on a molded glass disk a centimeter in diameter that may have fit the bezel of a ring (see figure 3 ) . The large ribbed handle of an amphora is incised with an inscription in Ugaritic script. [See Uga ritic] Its text, dated approximately to the thirteenth century B C E , reads: ( T h i s ) ewer, t h e w o r k of m y h a n d s , ' O b a l m a d e for (the festival ? of) t h e n e w m o o n . Shrines. In the eighth century B C E , evidenced by an ivory carving of a woman's head, a shrine was built at the edge of the mound, north of sounding X, whose walls were con structed with well-cut sandstone blocks set in the headerand-stretcher technique. T h e ivory plaque dedicates the shrine to Tannit-Ashtart. An adjacent room uncovered north of the shrine included votive objects of the same type as those found within the shrine, T h e shrine is characterized
SAREPTA.
F i g u r e 3 . Sign
of Tannit.
( C o u r t e s y J. B . P r i t c h a r d )
by three distinctive features: benches located along each of the room's four walls; a table built against the west wall, probably used as an alter on which worshipers placed gifts for the deity (two hundred votive objects were found nearby); and a socket for a pillar firmly set in the cement floor immediately in front of die offering table. Among the votive objects were figurines, pieces of carved ivory, amulets in human and animal form and the Egyptian "Eye of Ho nrs," cosmetic equipment, beads, a cult mask, gaming pieces, and lamps. An Egyptian influence is obvious. A later shrine with a different plan was built over die ear lier one, also dedicated to Tannit-Ashtart. Stones from the north wall of the earlier shrine were robbed to built it. Most of the figurines came from the debris that filled the later shrine. Terra-cotta figurines from the earlier shrine vary from a woman holding a stylized bird in her arms to a seated woman playing a hand drum or tambourine, while figurines of the later shrine are mostiy of the type known as the seated pregnant woman figurine (see Pritchard, 1978). T h e pres ence of the figurines suggests a date for the later shrine be tween die fifth and the fourth centuries B C E , a span of use for the shrines of some four centuries. [See also Phoenicia; Phoenicians.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A n d e r s o n , William P . Sarepta, Strata
SAREPTA. F i g u r e 2 . Incised ivory plaque. (Courtesy J. B . Pritchard)
sylvania
vol. 1 , The Late
of Area II, Y. The University Excavations
at Sarafand,
Museum Lebanon.
Bronze
and Iron
of the University
of
Age Penn
Beirut, 1 9 8 8 . T h e b e s t
SASANIANS source on the development of the site's pottery-type series a n d res idential area. Baramki, Dimitri C . " A L a t e B r o n z e Age T o m b at Sarafend, Ancient S a r e p t a . " Berytus
12 (1956-1958):
1 2 9 - 1 4 2 . Early explorations at
Sarepta. Khalifeh, Issam Ali. Sarepta, of Area
vol. 2 , The Late Bronze
II, X. 'The University
Museum
andlronAge
of the University
of
Periods Pennsylvania
Excavations at Sarafand, Lebanon. Beirut, 1 9 8 8 . T h e industrial q u a r ter a n d the correlations between soundings X a n d Y and T y r e . K o e h l , R o b e r t . Sarepta, from vania
Area
vol. 3 , The Imported
II, X. The University
Excavations
at Sarafand,
Museum Lebanon.
Bronze
and Iron Age
of the University
of
Wares Pennsyl
1921 he presented die museum with a large part of his pri vate collection of Islamic arts and crafts. In die German-speaking world, Sarre is considered one of the founders of Islamic art history. His study of Islamic art followed the style-critical method, always viewing tlie various genres of arts and crafts in conjunction with overall developments in Islamic art. Flis interests in art extended beyond his subject matter, which allowed him to recognize its East Asian and Western influences.
Beirut, 1 9 8 5 . T r a c e s i m p o r t s
BIBLIOGRAPHY
a n d trade in the Phoenician period. P r i t c h a r d , J a m e s B . Sarepta: cavations
of the University
A Preliminary Museum
Report
on the Iron Age. Ex
of the University
of
Pennsylvania,
1970-1972. Philadelphia, 1 9 7 5 . T h e pottery industry, shrines, a n d votive objects. P r i t c h a r d , J a m e s B . Recovering at Sarafand,
Lebanon,
University of Pennsylvania. nician civilization. P r i t c h a r d , J a m e s B . Sarepta, University
Museum
Sarepta,
1969-1974,
491
a Phoenician by the University
City:
Excavations
Museum
of the
P r i n c e t o n , 1 9 7 8 . G o o d source for P h o e
Herzfeld, Ernst. "Friedrich S a r r e . " Ars Islamica n - 1 2 ( 1 9 4 6 ) : 2 1 0 - 2 1 2 . Ktlhnel, Ernst. "Friedrich S a r r e . " Der Islam 2 9 ( 1 9 5 0 ) : 2 9 1 - 2 9 5 . S c h m i d t , J. Heinrich, Friedrich
Sarre
Schriften:
Zum 22,jfuni
193s. F o r -
schungen z u r Islamischen K u n s t , vol. 6 . Berlin, 1 9 3 5 . Volks, Margarete. "Bibliographic Friedrich Sarre nach 1 9 3 5 . " des Orients
Kunst
6 (1969): 184. VOLKMAR ENDERLEIN
vol. 4 , The Objects
of the University
from
of Pennsylvania
Area
II, X.
The
Excavations
al
Sarafand, Lebanon. Beirut, 1 9 8 8 . T h e only source to identify all the objects a n d to provide a full r e c o r d of the Phoenician material cul ture. Saidah, Roger. "Archaeology in t h e L e b a n o n , 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 6 9 . " Berytus 1 8 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 1 1 9 - 1 4 2 . Useful information o n early archaeological activi ties at Sarafand. ISSAM A L I K H A L I F E H
SARRE, FRIEDRICH (1865-1945), German art his torian specializing in Islamic and pre-Islamic Iranian art. Af ter earning his doctorate in art history in 1890, Sarre made several extended trips to Asia Minor, Iran, Turkestan, and Mesopotamia (1895-1908). In 1910 he published the pho tographs he had taken on those trips in two large volumes: Monuments of Persian Architecture, in which he gave special attention to the wall decoration in Islamic buildings, and (witii Ernst Herzfeld) Iranian Rock Reliefs, in which he fo cused on Sasanian rock reliefs and Achaemenid monu ments. An Archaeological Journey in the Area of the Tigris and Euphrates, 1011-1020, also published with Herzfeld, was of value to future archaeological research. As a direct result of his travels, Sarre organized the excavations in Samarra, which Herzfeld carried out from 1911 to 1913. In 1910, in Munich, in conjunction with colleagues, Sarre also orga nized the most comprehensive "Exhibition of Masterpieces of Muslim Art" that had ever been displayed; tlie most im portant aspects of the exhibition were published in 1912 in a work edited by Sarre and F . R. Martin. In conjunction with tlie Islamic Division of the KaiserFriedrich Museum in Berlin, which was founded in 1904 and which he directed from 1921 to 1931, Sarre published numerous monographs and essays on all areas of Islamic art. His examinations of miniature painting, metalworking, ce ramics, and carpets were a fundamental contribution. In
Translated from German by Susan I. Schiedel
SASANIANS. Traced to a legendary ruler named Sasan, the Sasanian regime (226-651 C E ) began with a revolt against Parthia. Coins, primarily silver dirhems, portray in dividual kings. T h e main chronology comes from Western accounts; Sasanian texts were written in the hard-to-deci pher Middle Persian (Pahlavi) script, and few are preserved. T h e archaeological record is very poor. T h e Dynasty. In 228 C E , Ardashir, the first monarch, was imperially titled shahanshah ("king of kings"), and a new capital was founded at Ctesiphon that started a pattern that became die state's trademark whereby victories were com memorated with the foundation of new cities. The capture of Hatra extended Sasanian control into the region of the Euphrates River, where struggles with the West were to re main a constant theme. Like Ardashir, Shapur I (241-272) was aggressive along the Sasanians' frontiers. H e adopted the title "King of Kings of Iran and non-Iran," referring to conquests beyond Iranian-speaking territory. In 244, Shapur's northeastern campaign tempted Philip the Arab to in vade from the West. Shapur's reaction was immediate; Philip withdrew, paying a ransom of 500,000 gold dinars for safe passage, and ceded suzerainty over Armenia. The assassination of the Armenian ldng in 252 became a pretext for aggression against Roman Syria. The Sasanians sacked Antioch and commemorated the event by founding a new city, Gundeshapur. T h e emperor Valerian's counterinvasion was a disaster, and Shapur's victory inscription at Naqsh-i Rustam celebrates the capture of seventy thousand Romans and thirty-six Roman cities plundered, [SeeNaqshi Rustam.] Yet, the Sasanians neglected the region, inter ested more in plunder than settlement. Internal power struggles are reflected in Narseh's (293302) anachronistic insertion of his name on his predecessor's
SASANIANS victory relief. Narseh's own Paikuli victory monument lists his backers, from which the rulers of central Iran and the Parthian feudal families were notably absent. Narseh largely had fringe support. With Rome officially Christian, as was Byzantium, Iran subjected believers to harsh taxes and often to persecution. Yet, Christian fortunes fluctuated wildly, for at the end of the fourth century, Yazdigird I earned the reputation amongst Zoroasttians of being "sinful," for his Christian tolerance. Christian issues were interwoven with the long standing Armenian problem. Under Yazdigird II (438-457), his minister, Mihr Narseh, tried to convert Armenia to Zo roastrianism with bloody violence. Only disasters against the Huns in the East, including King Peroz (457-484) losing his life fighting them, forced Sasanian concessions for religious freedom in Armenia. Internal disruptions followed Kavad IPs sympathizing with the revolutionary movement of Mazdakism, which touted social equality and women's rights. Khusrau I ( 5 3 1 579) restored the power of tire state. T h e revolutionary Mazdak and his followers were murdered treacherously while banqueting. Later, Khusrau was called Anushirvan ("of immortal soul") for fostering orthodox Zoroastrianism. His administrative reforms improved systems of taxation and created a professional army, rather than rely on levies from the nobles. Khusrau's most effective campaign started in 540, widi die sack of Antioch, Prisoners and spoil were taken, as usual, to a new city near die capital. Like Shapur I, however, Khusrau failed to master the Arab, and now Christian, reaches of the upper Euphrates. Like others, he had to face the East. Arranging a truce with Emperor Jus tinian, and allying with the new Turkish groups in Transoxiana, Khusrau won dramatically over die Huns. T h e truce with Justinian was supposed to last fifty years. Sa sanian aggression, however, was transferred to the Red Sea, where Byzantine rivalry for trade with India persuaded them to interfere in soutiiern Arabia. In about 575, the Sasanians took Yemen as a province. Military professionalism impacted upon state security, however. A jealous Hormizd IV (579-590) forced General Bahram Chubin to become a revolutionary who exiled the king, as well as Hormizd's successor, Khusrau II (591-628). Emperor Maurice received the fugitive Khusrau's overtures, and Bahrain Chubin was overwhelmed by two Byzantine forces sent against him. As Khusrau II, the new king upheld his promise and ceded territorial rights in the Caucasus. Khusrau earned his tide, parvez ("victorious"), tiirough subsequent victories. His spoils included the previously im pregnable Edessa, taken in 609. After taking Antioch, in 611, die Sasanians went on to Palestine and Lower Egypt: in 614, the Holy Cross was taken as part of the Jerusalem loot, and in 619 Alexandria fell. A Sasanian army reached the Bosphorus and threatened Byzantium itself. Only Heraclius, whose brilliant reforms involved rebuild
493
ing the army and realigning troop loyalties, rescued Byzan tium. In 622, with a superior navy, Heraclius moved quicldy into Armenia, twice defeating the Sasanians. Attempts to divide Byzantium in the Caucasus failed, and Heraclius's offensive penetrated deep into Iranian territory, moving to within reach of Ctesiphon, where only winter forced his withdrawal. In 628 Khusrau was executed by his own generals, and his son, Kavad II, expediently evacuated the newly con quered territories. Assassinations brought a series of rulers to the throne, including a female, about whom little is known. A grandson of Khusrau II became Yazdigird III (633-651). He faced the challenge of Islam, whose armies conquered Syria in 636, Mesopotamia in 639, and Egypt and Iran in 640 and 641. For all its professionalism, the Sasanian army failed to stem this novel tide of invaders, and the peo ple of Iran had no spirit to resist. Religious T h o u g h t a n d State Religion. During his reign Ardashir established Zoroastrianism as a state religion, and idolatry was abolished. Fire worship, introduced by the priesthood in Achaemenid times, became mainstream in the new orthodoxy. Coronation fires were consecrated in the ldng's name, and coins bore images of fire altars. Excava tions have exposed walls of simple domed pavilions recog nized as fire temples, whose altars are positioned centrally on the floor beneath the dome of the sanctuary. Discreet ceremonies would have been held inside the building, where the sacred fire was held pure. Altars located on hillsides served the need for public display. Ardashir proposed reforms to simplify the calendar. Their failure underlies the complexity of Iranian society, whose faiths were a millennium old. Zoroastrianism remained an oral tradition, its main texts archaic and obscure. People honored die new calendar but celebrated traditional festivals as well. Ironically, the now traditional March equinox new year (Naw Ruz) was introduced much later. T h e nature of god was intensely debated. One school maintained that Zurvan ("time") begot the twins Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda), who created the world, and Ahriman (Anru Mainyu) its evil. Some members of the royal family favored Zurvanism. Equalizing good with evil, the Zurvanites less ened Ohrmazd's stature, despite his responsibility for all subsequent creation. Orthodox Mazda worshipers believed in only one creator. Zurvanism was treated as a heresy in the sixth century, when Khusrau I initiated his program of state purges. Mysticism and the Eastern sects of Christianity made inroads, and the Eastern-rite Nestorians became freer in Iran after the 525 Council of Chalcedon (tiiey were seen as separate from Byzantium). In the tliird century the prophet Mani, influenced by a number of faiths and aware of die teachings of Buddha, preached worldly withdrawal. Zoroasttians considered him a dangerous heretic. Mani's fame is the result of the discovery of Manichaean texts un earthed from old monasteries in Chinese Turldstan, where
494
SASANIANS
Manichaeans fled from persecution after their prophet's death in 276. Architectural R e m a i n s . There have been virtually no modern surveys or setdement studies in the region and no scientific excavations. What is known mostly comes from texts. Of these, the majority are from Islamic times. Typical of what is known is how the colorful figure of Bahram V (420-438) became part of Persian literature through his skills as a hunter. He earned the epithet Gur ("wild ass"), being frequently portrayed in Islamic art performing virtu oso acts with his bow. His real exploits, particularly cam paigns in the East, are much less well known because written Sasanian sources are lacking. In Mesopotamia, canal networks supporting large-scale irrigation have been recorded through survey. Intended to increase revenues, as much as feed people, these networks remained viable after the dynasty's fall. Systems of com munication survived, but the newly founded cities were less enduring, lacking base support after the reign of the mon arch. Some sites have striking patterns visible from the air. At Gundeshapur, the rectangular city grid is seen as Roman work. However, it is uncertain whether this interpretation is sound. Darabgird, a round city, is also seen as a prototype for the first Sasanian capital, at Firuzabad. Others claim that Darabgird is post-Sasanian, underlining the primitive state of Sasanian archaeological studies. What is known comes from architectural, and mostiy freestanding, remains. Architectural innovations begun under the Parthians be came entrenched. Barrel-vaulted chambers surrounded by corridors serving as buttresses continued to appear. On the Iranian plateau, round domes in solid masonry over square chambers were erected, but these are rare in Mesopotamia. Their interpretation as fire sanctuaries is based mostly on the observation that they are standing structures and by drawing analogies from the religious ceremonies in the fire temples of die Zoroastrian Parsees of nineteenth-century Iran and India. In palaces, the use of piers allowed for the opening up of internal spaces, giving halls a Roman basilica look. Western decorative devices were popular, but indigenous building techniques continued, particularly the use of blind facades. At Kish, excavated structures, including palace courts with ornamental pools and throne halls reflect the nobility's growing pretensions. T h e stucco ornament at Kish, char acterized by the use of heraldic figures and human busts, is similar to that at the capital, Ctesiphon. Trade. Long-distance trade impacted on the quality of portable goods. Cosmas Indoplasticus, a sixth-century In dian navigator, reports Arab and Persian merchants trading as far as Ceylon. Controlling the maritime routes toward die Arabian and Red Seas, the Sasanians held a monopoly over eastern routes, exporting raw silk to Byzantium, Egypt, and Syria. When Justinian received live silkworms from China
in the sixteenth century, the West's own sericulture broke the Persian monopoly. In Centtal Asia, Soghdia's Iranian spealdng rulers, whose merchants visited China, encouraged trade. Monasteries in Soghdia provided havens for merchants and served as ex change points for goods and ideas. Nestorian missionary ac tivity brought Westerners into contact with China, where an Iranian presence is also described in texts and inscriptions such as the Xian monument dated 781. When the last Sa sanian king fled before the advancing Arab armies of Islam in 641, his descendants sought refuge in the Tang court. Remarkably, China imported from Iran fabrics made from Chinese silk, "Persian brocades" characterized by an imal and bird motifs carried within pearl-bordered medal lions. Although quite different from designs found in Chi nese art, they are comparable to Central Asian wall paintings and silver vessels from the Sasanian period. Sasanian silver and gold vessels are found in China, traded tiiere from as early as the fourth cenmry. Some may have been made by Iranians in China. Sasanian cut glass was pop ular. Many Sasanian artifacts were buried after tlie fall of the Chinese Tang dynasty, reflecting an influx of royal ref ugees. Thousands of coins, extending in date for more than three centuries, have also been unearthed, the earliest from the time of Shapur II. T h e largest group dates from Khusrau II, which is also true in Iran itself as a result of fiscal reforms. Mint marks reveal that the coins found in T a n g China were struck in both central and eastern Iran. Some bear a counterstrike mark of the Huns, for whom tiiere is otherwise little tangible evidence. Byzantine Empire; Ctesiphon; Kush; and Persia, Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam.]
[See also article
on
BIBLIOGRAPHY A d a m s , Robert M c C . , a n d H a n s J. Nissen. The Uruk Countryside: Natural
Setting
of Urban
Societies.
The
C h i c a g o , 1 9 7 2 . Historical inter
pretation of changes to canal systems in M e s o p o t a m i a . Frye, Richard N . The Heritage of Persia. Cleveland, 1 9 6 3 . Iranian his tory by a specialist in Iranian languages. G h i r s h m a n , R o m a n . Iran: Parthians and Sassanians. London, 1962. Colorful picture book with a personal viewpoint. Gobi, Robert. Sasanian Numismatics. Braunschweig, 1 9 7 1 . Basic cata log of the dynasty's coins, with details of all tlie variations. H a r p e r , P r u d e n c e Oliver. The Royal
Hunter:
Art of the Sasanian
Empire.
N e w York, 1 9 7 8 . Extensive commentary o n a wide range of objects shown at an Asia H o u s e (New York City) exhibition. Hayashi, Ryoichi. The Silk Road and the Shoso-in. N e w York, 1 9 7 5 . T r e a s u r y of Persian art found a n d h o u s e d in the F a r East. H e r r m a n n , Georgina. The Iranian Revival. Oxford, 1 9 7 7 . Picture essays with insightful c o m m e n t a r y . Lukonin, Vladimir G. Persia II. N e w York, 1 9 6 7 . Rich inventory of artifacts from Soviet collections. Millar, F e r g u s . The Roman
Near
East,
5 1 BC-AD
337.
Cambridge,
Mass., 1 9 9 3 . Historical background a n d tlie reign of S h a p u r . T r u m p e l m a n n , L e o . Zwischen
Persepolis
und Firuzabad.
Mainz, 1 9 9 2 .
Survey of ancient Iranian m o n u m e n t s a n d reliefs including aerial photographs.
SAUVAGET, JEAN Y a r s h a t e r , E h s a n , ed. The Cambridge
History
of Iran, vol. 3 , The
Seleucid,
Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, 2 vols. C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 8 3 . N u m e r o u s contributions o n political, numismatic, a n d social issues by special ists. E. J. K E A L L
monuments
de la Ville Sainte
Saulcy, Felicien d e . Voyage bibliques
execute
Tepoque juddique
des Croisades.
aulour
de decembre
T r a n s l a t e d as Narrative
SAUDI ARABIA.
depuis
Paris, 1 8 5 6 . Saulcy, Felicien de. Numismatique
of a Journey
nos
jours.
les
terres
Paris, 1 8 4 7 .
de la Mer Morte
1830 d avril
jusqu'd
495
et dans
1851. 3 vols. Paris, 1 8 5 3 .
around
the Dead
Sea and in the
Bible Lands in 1850 and 1851. 2 vols. Edited by E d w a r d de W a r r e n . London, 1853. See
Arabian Peninsula.
A N N I E CAUBET
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
SAULCY, FELICIEN DE, more fully, Louis Felicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy (1807-1880), French numisma tist and archaeologist. D e Saulcy studied at the Ecole P o lytechnique in Paris and chose a career in the military. Caught up in the romanticism of the 1820s in France, which involved looking at the nation's past, including its artistic heritage, de Saulcy became interested in some of the ar chaeology carried out in French territory of that period. H e published some numismatic discoveries and was among the first participants in the newly created Revue de numismatique. Fie might have continued this amateur work had not the death of his wife in 1850 led him to seek consolation through religion and travel by visiting the Holy Land. D e Saulcy was also drawn to the Holy Land through his study of Crusader coins. His two trips—from 1849 to 1851 and later in 18631864—and the results of his investigations greatly influenced emerging French Orientalism. D e Saulcy studied the prin cipal monuments in Jerusalem, analyzing the masonry of the wall surrounding the Haram esh-Sharif. H e excavated the Tombs of tire Kings, where he discovered the sarcophagus of Sadan, a queen of Adiabene who converted to Judaism with her family and is better known by her Greek name, Helen. D e Saulcy thought that these monuments dated to the time of the Israelite monarchy and therefore preceded classical Greek architecture. W e now know that they belong to the first century C E . De Saulcy was among the pioneers of Palestinian archae ology. H e explored the Dead Sea area and produced excel lent maps, which his military training had prepared him to draw, in what was the first scientific exploration of the re gion. H e also was the first to use photography as a tool in archaeological research. T o bolster his theories on the dating of Jerusalem's monuments, de Saulcy hired a painter, Auguste Salzmann, to photograph them. Salzmann's plates, made in 1854, were published in an album in Paris in 1856. They constitute the first collection of photographic images of Jerusalem.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[See also Jerusalem.] BIBLIOGRAPHY B a s s a n , F e r n a n d e . F, L. Caignart
l84$-i86g. Felix
de Saulcy
de Saulcy:
Carnets
de voyage
en
Orient,
Paris, 1 9 5 5 . et la Terre
SAUVAGET, JEAN (1901-1950), French historian of tire Islamic Near East. After completing classical studies in Arabic and history, Sauvaget went to Syria as secretary of the French Institute in Damascus (1924-1937). He then taught in Paris at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Col lege de France. He was a brilliant teacher who influenced, by the force of his personality and of his ideas, nearly two generations of scholars. Sauvaget never participated in field archaeology, but he developed, for the study of the medieval Near East, another type of archaeology: through it, a land or a space is illumi nated by the simultaneous consideration of literary texts, in scriptions, standing monuments, surface and other surveys, and the analytic techniques of geography, ethnography, ur ban and rurals studies, and sociology. He was aiming toward what was later called total history, a history from which no source would be omitted. Sauvaget was often critical of the lack of rigor in die works of historians of art, and he liked to show, sometimes playfully, the absurdity of many ac cepted conclusions. As a result of his concern about the physical character of the land on which people build and work, he was able to demonstrate the economic bases of early Islamic settlements; to propose novel and exciting in terpretations for the growth of Syrian cities (especially Aleppo, Damascus, and Latakia); and to oudine, based on texts, cultural history, and logic, the history of the early mosque in a book about the mosque in Medina in Arabia. A careful and critical observer of the world around him, Sauvaget transformed his experience of the present into an appraisal of the past. While his studies on ceramics are less useful for archaeological purposes than for understanding the functions of pottery and some of his conclusions and hypotheses have not stood the test of time, his rigorous method and constant questioning of all bits of evidence re main models for all scholarly enterprise.
Sainte.
N o t e s et D o c u m e n t s des M u s e e s d e
F r a n c e , 5 . Paris, 1 9 8 2 . S a l z m a n n , A u g u s t e . Jerusalem:
Etude
et reproduction
photographique
des
For a good introduction to Sauvaget's life and work the reader may consult Memorial Jean Sauvaget, published by the Institut Francais d e D a m a s ( D a m a s c u s , 1 9 5 4 ) , which contains a full bibliography, an e x cellent survey of Sauvaget's work by Louis Robert, a n d several notable articles. Sauvaget's contributions t o t h e field are well illustrated in two important articles, published p o s t h u m o u s l y in t h e Revue des Etudes Islarniques: "Introduction a l'etude d e la ceramique m u s u l m a n e , " R E / 3 3
496
SCHAEFFER, CLAUDE F.-A.
(1965): 1-67; and " C h a t e a u x Umayyades de Syrie," REI 35 (1967): 1-49. O L E G GRABAR
SCHAEFFER, CLAUDE F.-A. (1898-1982), pri mary excavator of Ras Shamra (Ugarit). Arguably the most renowned French archaeologist of his generation, Claude Frederic-Armand Schaeffer was a man of great energy who for many years simultaneously directed two major field proj ects while holding a university chair and important admin istrative positions in the government. Also a scholar with wide-ranging interests, he was responsible for novel and often controversial interpretations of archaeological mate rial. A native of Alsace, which had been annexed by Germany in 1871, Schaeffer was drafted into the Kriegsmarine as a cryptographer in World War I and learned skills that would serve him well both in his archaeological career and in the French navy during World War II. In the early 1920s he studied European prehistory at the University of Strasbourg, excavated in Alsace, and was soon offered a museum posi tion in Strasbourg. He married Odile Forrer, eldest daughter of the prominent archaeologist Robert Forrer. Odile became tire able camp manager of all his expeditions. Schaeffer's methodological approach to large assemblages of artifacts, such as those excavated in burial mounds, re sulted in several much acclaimed syntheses. Schaeffer's role in exposing the fraudulant nature of inscriptions vaguely Phoenician in character that were supposedly discovered at tire Neolithic site of Glozel in the Allier region caught tire eye of the prominent French scholar Rene Dussaud, who later sent him to investigate the peninsula of Minet-el-Beida, north of Latalda in Syria, where a rich Mycenaean tomb had been discovered in 1928. This work began an exceptionally successful field career spanning four decades in Syria and Cyprus. T h e very first campaigns at the ancient harbor of Minet el-Beida and nearby Ras Shamra—soon to be iden tified as the capital of the kingdom of Ugarit—established the importance of these sites in the history of die ancient Near East. Always a restiess, questioning spirit, Schaeffer was so in trigued by the evidence for Levantine trade with the West— notably with Cyprus—that he visited the island in 1932 to search for meaningful parallels. His excavations at the rich Early-Middle Bronze Age cemetery of Bellapais Vounous in 1933 yielded quantities of remarkable Red Polished pottery, though few eastern parallels were recognized. His subse quent discovery of a major Late Bronze Age urban center at Enkomi Ayios lakovos—a site hidierto viewed as a mere cemetery—convinced him that further investigation would supply useful comparative material for his work on die mainland. Schaeffer spent much of the Second World War in En
gland, serving as head of Charles de Gaulle's Free French Flistorical Service. Research in London and Oxford led to a major volume (Schaeffer, 1948), which heralded a new, sweeping vision of interdependent cultures stretching from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus and a fresh approach to archaeological enquiry. In 1946 Schaeffer directed the first of four field seasons at Arslantepe on the Euphrates and also began excavating at Enkomi Ayios lakovos, where he discovered many tombs as well as fine domestic and public buildings of ashlar ma sonry (dressed, square-cut stone), all rich in finds. Schaeffer was appointed general secretary and then vice president of the Committee on Excavations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1946-1949) and member of the French Academy 1953. In the following year a chair in Near Eastern archaeology was created for him at the College de France. His inaugural address closed with the enjoinder "to continue with courage, objectivity, and tenacity the pursuit of re search," and so Schaeffer himself did, until the very end of his long life. [See also Arslantepe; Enkomi; Ugarit; Vounos; and the bi ography
of
Dussaud.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Amiet, Pierre. " H o m m a g e a Claude Schaeffer." Archeologia, n o . 175 (February 1983): 14-16. Bergerhof, K u r t , Manfried Dietrich, a n d Oswald Loretz, eds. Festschrift fur Slaude F, A . Schaeffer. U g a r i t - F o r s c h u n g e n , vol. 11. Kevelaer, 1979. T h i s 900-page volume has contributions by eighty-eight schol ars covering the full range of Ugaritic studies, T h e publication i n cludes a perceptive review ( p p . vii-ix) of Schaeffer's life a n d achieve ments by his contemporary a n d colleague of equal r e n o w n , K u r t Bittel. Schaeffer, Claude F . - A . LAS tertres funeraires
prehistoriques
de la foret de
Haguenau (1926-1930), 2d ed. Brussels, 1979. T h e first two-volume edition earned Schaeffer the reputation as o n e of the best a n d most productive F r e n c h prehistorians of his generation. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Missions en Chypre, 1932 a 193s. Paris, 1936. Accounts of short visits t o explore C y p r u s a n d to u n d e r t a k e prelim inary excavations at several sites. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Ugaritica. 7 vols. Paris a n d L e i d e n , 1939-1978. Field reports a n d studies of material relating t o t h e excavations of Ras Shamra-Ugarit. T h e s e volumes are p a r t of the general Mission de Ras Shamra series. Schaeffer, C l a u d e F . - A . Stratigraphie
comparee
et chronologie
de VAsie
occidentale (Hie el lie millenaires). L o n d o n , 1948. Although o u t d a t e d , this was a major contribution to ancient N e a r Eastern studies at t h e time of its publication. Schaeffer, Claude F . - A . Enkomi-Alasia;
Nouvelles
missions
en
Chypre,
1946-1950. Paris, 1952. Contains six chapters dealing with different aspects of the site, some of t h e richer t o m b s , finer objects, a n d a major building. T h i s is n o t , however, a comprehensive excavation report, as none was ever published by Schaeffer. F o r such reports, see Porphyrios Dikaios, Enkomi: Excavations, 1948-1958, 3 vols. (Mainz, 1969). Schaeffer, Claude F.-A., et al. Alasia I. Mission Archeologique d'Alasia, vol. 4. Paris, 1971. Contains eighteen field reports a n d studies of material from E n k o m i Ayios lakovos by an international g r o u p of scholars in h o n o r of the twentieth season of excavations.
S CHLIEMANN, HEINRICH Vercoutter, Jean. " N o t i c e sur la vie et les travaux d e Claude SchaefferForrer, m e m b r e de r A c a d e m i e . " Compte-rendus de I'Acadimie des Inscriptions
et Belles-Leltres,
Paris
Exploration Fund; and the biographies
Warren,
and
Wilson.]
(1989): 178-188. STUART S W I N Y
SCHICK, CONRAD (1822-1901), missionary and ar chitect. Schick was born in the village of Bitz, Wupperthal, Germany, and educated in Kornthal, Germany, and at tire Pilgrim-Missions College of St. Chrischona, Switzerland. In 1845, at the age of twenty four, he was one of four mission aries sent to Jerusalem to teach mechanical trades to young men. When the program failed, Schick became an agent of the London Jews Society, entrusted with teaching carpentry and other trades to young Jews under die society's auspices at the School of Industty. Schick became the leading archi tect in Jerusalem in his day. Many of his buildings still stand, including his own home, on the Street of the Prophets. H e married in 1853. Early in his residency in Jerusalem, Schick became inter ested in the city's antiquities. When Charles Wilson of the British Royal Engineers arrived in Jerusalem in 1864 to carry out the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem for the Palestine Ex ploration Fund, he found a willing and able assistant in Schick, who frequently accompanied him on his explora tions of ancient cisterns and tunnels. When Wilson returned to Jerusalem in 1866, he made Schick responsible for ob serving all evidence of construction in Wilson's excavations and for drawing plans of all remains exposed as well as the level of any exposed bedrock. With this series of observa tions, Schick began his long association with the PEF, and subsequendy with the Deutscher Palastina-Verein. During the next thirty-one years, Schick produced a constant stream of articles for the PEF. Because not all of them were pub lished, some of his discoveries are known only from his pa pers in the fund's archives. Schick assisted many of the scholars and explorers who worked in Jerusalem and in Palestine generally, including Canon Tristram, Charles Warren, and Claude R. Conder. On his fiftieth year of residence in Jerusalem, Schick re ceived congratulations from the members of all of the ethnic and religious communities then living in the city, an ex pression of the universal regard and friendship in which he was held. Perhaps the greatest event of Schick's life was the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to Jerusalem in 1898. Schick remained active to the end of his long life. M u c h of the work of his contemporaries and their successors owes a great debt to his work. His contributions are only now beginning to be properly appreciated. Although not an ar chaeologist, but rather an antiquary in the great tradition, he was a careful and meticulous observer known for his hon esty, warm personality and his eagerness to share his knowl edge of Jerusalem. [See also
of Conder,
497
Deutscher Palastina-Verein; Jerusalem; Palestine
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Schick, C o n r a d . " D i e Wasserversorgung der Stadt Jerusalem in geschichtlichler u n d topographischer Darstellung mit Originalkarten u n d P l a n n e n . " Zeitschrift
des Deutschen
Paldstina-Vereins
I (1878):
132-176. Schick, C o n r a d . Beit el Makdas: itiie erjetzt
Schick, C o n r a d . Die Stiftshiiile, pelplatz
Oder der alte Templeplatz
zu
der jetztzeit.
der Tempel
in Jerusalem
und der Tem-
Berlin, 1 8 9 6 .
Wilson, C . W . "Obituary of D r . C o n r a d Schick." Palestine Fund
Jerusalem:
ist. J e r u s a l e m , 1 8 8 7 .
Quarterly
Statement
Exploration
( 1 9 0 2 ) : 1 3 9 - 1 4 2 . Includes a p h o t o g r a p h
portrait of the author of dozens of articles in this journal. RUPERT CHAPMAN
SCHLIEMANN, HEINRICH (1822-1890), Ger man businessman and archaeologist. A disrupted education gave Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann a sense of unfulfilled potential, which propelled him to extraordinary achievement. A clerk's position in Amsterdam (1844) and an aptitude for languages led to an agency ir St. Petersburg (1846) where he made his fortune as a commodities dealer. His wealth enabled him to travel widely. Looking for a more genteel activity, Schliemann settled on archaeology, which he pursued by moving just to Paris (1866).In i869hefraudulentiy obtained both American citizenship and an Ameri can divorce from his Russian wife, Katiiarina Lyschina. H e rapidly remarried a Greek girl, Sophia Kastromenos, and moved to Athens. Despite Schliemann's claims, Sophia seems to have taken very little part in his subsequent ar chaeological career. In a derivative archaeological travel book, Ithaka, der Peloponnes und Trofa (1869), he accepted the identification of the site of Hisarlik, in northwestern Tur key, with Homer's Troy. Excavations followed in 18701873, 1878-1879, 1882, and 1890 revealed an impressive lit tle citadel, which had been destroyed by fire and is dated to around 2500 BCE. Much of the metalwork from this citadel disappeared from the Berlin Museum in 1945 and is now in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae (1876), Orchomenos (1880) and Tiryns (18841885) unearthed Mycenaean-period remains (c.1600-1100 B C E ) . His final season at Troy produced Mycenaean pottery from overlying strata previously missed, and allowed a cor rect correlation with the other sites. Schliemann put archaeology in the public eye. Study of tire Aegean in the Bronze Age has grown up around the materials he excavated. H e resurrected belief in a historical kernel to the Homeric poems. It is now accepted that his Greek sites document the Fleroic Age, but it is not agreed that the Troy excavations prove the historicity of the Trojan War. A rough excavator, Schliemann was nevertheless keenly observant of strata and objects; and the complexity
498
SCHLUMBERGER, DANIEL
he discerned at Troy alerted other archaeologists to the need to attempt stratigraphic excavation. Wilhelm Dorpfeld, his assistant from 1882, introduced meticulous architectural re cording and analysis into his work. His encouragement of photography and ancillary scientific studies was ahead of its time. Schliemann's business ethics were questionable and his thinking was not always disciplined. Attempts to prove fraudulence in his archaeology, however, have largely failed. BIBLIOGRAPHY Calder, William M „ a n d Justus Cobet, eds. Heinrich Schliemann nach hundert Jaliren. Frankfurt am Main, 1 9 9 0 . Articles o n many aspects of Schliemann's background, character, and writings. Easton, D . F . " W a s Schliemann a Liar?" In Heinrich Schliemann: Grundlagen
und Ergebnisse
moderner
Archaologie
100 Jahre
nach
Schlie-
manns Tod, edited by Joachim H e r r m a n n , p p . 1 9 1 - 1 9 8 . Berlin, 1 9 9 2 . Easton, D . F . " T h e T r o y Treasures in Russia." Antiquity 6 9 . Forth coming. Hawkes, Jacquetta, ed. The World of the Past, vol. 2 . N e w York, 1 9 6 3 . Contains lively accounts b y Schliemann about his life a n d excava tions—including n o doubt some of his lies and inconsistencies. Ludwig, Emil. Schliemann: The Story of a Gold-Seeker. Boston, 1 9 3 1 . Classic biography. Schliemann, Heinrich. Ithaka, der Peloponnes und Troja. Leipzig, 1 8 6 9 . Schliemann, Heinrich. Troy audits Remains. L o n d o n , 1 8 7 5 . Schliemann, Heinrich. Mycenae. L o n d o n , 1 8 7 8 . Schliemann, Heinrich. Ilios. L o n d o n , 1 8 8 1 . Schliemann, Heinrich. Orchomenos. Leipzig, 1 8 8 1 . Schliemann, Heinrich. Troja. L o n d o n , 1 8 8 4 . Schliemann, Heinrich. Tiryns. N e w York, 1 8 8 5 . Traill, David A. Excavating
Schliemann:
Collected
Papers
on
Schliemann.
Illinois Classical Studies, Supplement 4 . Atlanta, 1 9 9 3 . Collection of republished articles containing useful biographical material and bib liography, b u t marred by a determination to prove Schliemann a liar at every turn. W o o d , Michael. In Search of the Trojan War. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 5 . Lively reexamination of tlie archaeological a n d historical ground first cov ered by Schliemann, based o n a successful television series. D. F. EASTON
chaeological delegation to Afghanistan, publishing (19461970) a series of articles on his excavations at Lashkari Bazar (1947-1952) and Surkh Kotal (1952-1963) and on his re search in Bacuia, which culminated with his discovery, in 1964, of a large Hellenistic city, Ai Khanum (Schlumberger, 1965). His publications on Bactria, the Kushan dynasty, Ghandaran art, and the Hellenistic East were summed up in UOrient
hellenise
(1970).
A dedicated professor at Strasbourg University beginning in 1955, Schlumberger became a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1958. H e succeeded Henri Seyrig in 1967 as director of the French Institute of Archaeology in Beirut, where he published additional arti cles on Palmyra and other sites in Syro-Phoenicia. H e died after a partial stroke while at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. His wife Agnes made pos sible the posthumous publication of his manuscript for Qasr el-Heir
el Gharbi
(1986).
[See also Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Ori ent; Palmyra; Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi; and the biography of Seyrig.] BIBLIOGRAPHY C h e h a b , M a u r i c e . Bulletin
du Musee
de Beyrouth
2 4 (1971): 1-2.
Frezouls, E d m o n d . "Allocution d'ouverture." In Palmyre, spective:
Colloque
C.R.P.O.G.A.
de Strasbourg
a la memoire
(18-20 octobre
de Daniel
Schlumberger
bilan et per
1973) organise
par le
et de Henri
Seyrig,
p p . 5 - 9 . Strasbourg, 1 9 7 6 . Schlumberger, Daniel. " L e s fouilles d e Qasr al-Heir a l - G h a r b i . "
Syria
20 (1939): 195-238, 324-373-
Schlumberger, Daniel. " L e temple d e M e r c u r e a Baalbek-Heliopolis." Bulletin
du Musee
de Beyrouth
3 (1939): 25-36.
Schlumberger, Daniel. " L e s origines antiques de l'art islamique a la lumiere des fouilles de Qasr el-Heir." In Bericht iiber den VI. Internationalen
Kongress
fiir Archaologie,
p p . 2 4 1 - 2 4 9 . Berlin, 1 9 4 0 .
Schlumberger, Daniel. " D e u x fresques o m a y y a d e s . " Syria
25 (1946-
1948): 86-102.
Schlumberger, Daniel. "Ai H a n o m , ville hellenistique d'Afghanistan." Comptes
SCHLUMBERGER, DANIEL (1904-1972), ar chaeologist and educator, born at Mulhouse, Alsace. Schlumberger studied history and archaeology at Stras bourg and Paris Universities. From 1929 to 1939 he was an inspector in the Department of Antiquities of Syria and Leb anon, then under the French Mandate. His research in Syria centered on the area of Palmyra. From 1936 to 1939, he excavated Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, uncovering the remains of an Umayyad palace complex (his excavation house is the stage of Agatha Christie's novel Murder in Mesopotamia). His preliminary reports—"Les fouilles de Qasr el-Heir elGharbi" (1939) and "Les origines antiques de Part islamique a la lumiere des fouilles de Qasr el-Heir" (1940) and his subsequent "Deux fresques omayyades" (1946-1948)— shed new light on the origins of Islamic art. He published "Le temple de Mercure a Baalbek-Heliopolis" in 1939. After World War II, Schlumberger headed the French ar
Rendus
de TAcademie
des Inscriptions
et Belles-Lettres
(1965):
36-46.
Schlumberger, Daniel. "Ai K h a n o u m . " Bulletin linique
de Conespondance
Hel-
89 (1965): 590-603.
Schlumberger, Daniel. L'Orient hellenise. Paris, 1 9 7 0 . Schlumberger, Daniel. Qasr el-Heir el Gharbi. Paris, 1 9 8 6 . Will, Ernest. "Daniel Schlumberger." Syria 5 0 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 6 7 - 2 7 6 . HAFEZ K . CHF.HAB
SCHRODER, PAUL G. A. (1844-1915), diplomat and linguist whose major contribution to the study of ancient oriental civilization is his grammar of the Phoenician lan guage (1869), which was in use until 1936. Schroder was born in Elsterwerda, Germany, and died in Jena. After studying oriental languages at the universities of Halle and Berlin, he received a Ph.D. from Halle in 1867. Schroder entered the diplomatic service and in 1869 was appointed a dragoman (translator) at the German consulate, later tlie
SCHUMACHER, GOTTLIEB German embassy, in Constantinople. From 1888 to 1909 he served as a consul general for Germany in Beirut. Schroder's grammar, an expanded version of his Ph.D. diesis, to a great extent used the traditions about Phoenician and Punic from classical sources, including the Punic passages in Plautus's comedy Poenulus. He also utilized newly discovered epi graphic material from Phoenicia and North Africa. He tried to establish a reliable text although he did not have access to the original inscriptions. T h e grammar thus also contains an appendix of the most important Phoenician and Punic inscriptions in facsimile available at the time. During the forty years of his diplomatic service in Constantinople and Beirut, Schroder published a series of articles about newly found Semitic inscriptions written in Phoenician, Palmy rene, and Nabatean and on topics pertaining to the history and geography of the Ottoman Empire. He also supported by his political influence the geographical survey of Gottlieb Schumacher in Transjordan. [See also Phoenician-Punic]
499
Vereins. Between 1903 and 1905 Schumacher di rected excavations at Megiddo, the first investigation of this important tell, on behalf of the Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palastinas. Even though field methods were in their infancy, he managed to establish eight levels of occupation. He published the results in 1908; a second volume, by Carl Watzinger, followed in 1929. An outstanding architect and scholar, Schumacher was given an honorary Ph.D. by die University of Halle in 1893 and the title Koniglicher Baurat by the king of Wiirttemberg in 1904. After World War I he did not return to Haifa until 1924, where he died in his house on the Carmel. [See also Ajlun; Golan; Megiddo; and the biography of Wat Palastina-
zinger.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Writings on Schumacher Carmel, Alex. "Christen u n d J u d e n in Israel." Die Neue
Ordnung
5
(1988): 375-387.
G u t h e , H e r m a n n . " Z u m Gediichtnis an Gottlieb Schumacher."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
schrift des Deutschen S c h r o d e r , Paul. Die phbnizischc Sprach-
und Schriflprobcn.
Sprache:
EntwurJeiner
Grammalik
Palastina-Vereins
Zeit
4 9 (1926): 218-221.
nebst
Writings by Schumacher
Halle, 1 8 6 9 . WOLFGANG
ROLLIG
Across
the Jordan:
andjaulan.
Being
an Exploration
Thejaulan.
of Part
of
Hauran
London, 1 8 8 8 .
SCHUMACHER, GOTTLIEB (1857-1925), archi
Pella. L o n d o n , 1 8 8 8 .
tect, engineer, and surveyor. Born in Zanesville, Ohio, Schumacher received his early education in Buffalo, N e w York. His fatiier, Jakob, had emigrated from Tubingen, Germany, to the United States, together with other mem bers of a religious sect called the Tempelgesellschaft. T h e family moved to Palestine in 1869 and settled in Flaifa, where Jakob Schumacher worked as an architect and engi neer. H e designed most of Haifa's German Colony, as well as many buildings for the Christian communities in the Gal ilee. Gottlieb Schumacher finished high school in Haifa and studied engineering in Stuttgart from 1876 to 1881. He then returned to Haifa, where he soon became the leading figure in house and road construction. T h e Ottoman government promoted him to chief engineer of the province of Akko. Among the many buildings he designed are die Scottish hostels in Safed and Tiberias, the bridge over the Kishon River, the Russian hostel in Nazareth, and the wine cellars in Rishon Lezion.
" D e r D s c h o l a n . " Zeitschrift
Schumacher also carried out a survey of the Golan in or der to determine the line for the railway to be built from Damascus to Haifa, and he constructed the extension of the mole in the port of Haifa. His surveys of the Golan, Hauran, and Ajlun stirred his interest in archaeological remains. H e subsequentiy not only drew the map of Transjordan, pub lished in ten sheets, but also recorded its ancient monuments and sites. Beginning in 1886 he published numerous articles about his discoveries, mainly in die Zeitschrift des Deutschen
and Survey
N e w York, 1 8 8 6 .
des Deutschen
Palastina-Vereins
9 (1886):
165-368. Abila
of the Decapolis.
London, 1889.
" D e r arabische P f l u g . " Zeitschrift (1889):
des Deutschen
Palastina-Vereins
12
157-166.
" G r a b k a m m e r n bei H a i f a . " Zeitschrift 13 (1890):
des Deutschen
Palastina-Vereins
175-180.
" D a s jetzige N a z a r e t h . " Zeitschrift
des Deutschen
Palastina-Vereins
13
(1890): 235-245. Northern
'Ajlun,
"within
the Decapolis."
London, 1890.
" V o n Tiberias z u m H u l e - S e e . " Zeitschrift
des Deutschen
Palastina-Ver
eins 1 3 ( 1 8 9 0 ) : 6 5 - 7 5 .
" D e r Hiobstein, Sachrat Eijub, i m H a u r a n . " Zeitschrift Palastina-Vereins
14 (1891):
des
Deutschen
142-147.
"Ergebnisse meiner Reise durch H a u r a n , 'Adschliin u n d Belka." schrift
des Deutschen
" E s - S a l t . " Zeitschrift
Palastina-Vereins des Deutchen
" M a d a b a . " Zeitschrift
1 6 (1893):
Palastina-Vereins
des Deutschen
Zeit
153-170. 1 8 (1895): 65-72.
Palastina-Vereins
1 8 (1895): 1 2 6 -
140. " D a s stidliche B a s a n . " Zeitschrift
des Deutschen
Palastina-Vereins
20
(1897): 65-227.
"Ergazungen zu meiner Karte des Dscholan u n d westlichen H a u r a n . " Zeitschrift
des Deutschen
" D s c h e r a s c h . " Zeitschrift
Palastina-Vereins des Deutschen
22 (1899): Palastina-Vereins
178-184. 2 5 (1902):
109-177.
Tell el-Mutesellim:
Bericht
iiber die 1903-1905.
2 vols. Leipzig, 1 9 0 8 -
1 9 2 9 . (vol. 2 by Carl Watzinger). " E l - M a k a r i n u n d d e r Tell ed-DschamTd." Zeitschrift lastina-Vereins
3 6 (1913):
"TJnsere Arbeiten i m Ostjordanland." Zeitschrift tina-Vereins (1915):
des Deutschen
Pa
114-123.
des Deutschen
Paliis-
3 6 (1913): 123-129; 3 7 (1914): 123-134, 260-266; 3 8
136-148.
500
SCRIBES AND SCRIBAL TECHNIQUES
" Z u r Verkehrsgeographie Palastinas." Zeitschrift tina-Vereins
des Deutschen
Palds
3 7 (1914): 55-58. VOLKMAR FRITZ
SCRIBES AND SCRIBAL TECHNIQUES. Widespread literacy is a phenomenon strictly of the modern world. In ancient times and long after, the chore of creating, maintaining, and interpreting written records fell to a small cadre of professionally trained scribes. What is known of their training and activities is perforce limited by accidents of preservation of written materials from antiquity and so is virtually restricted to those from Mesopotamia and Egypt. (See the extensive summaries on this subject by Jeremy A. Black and W. J. Tait, Edward Wente, and Laurie E. Pearce inSasson, 1995, pp. 2197-2209,2211-2221, and 2265-2278, respectively). James L. Crenshaw (1985) insists that far less can be asserted about biblical education than has been be lieved, and Paul S. Ash argues (necessarily from silence, primarily) that tenth-century B C E Palestine "held a society which knew of writing but had little or no use for it" (Ash, 1995= P- 72). Craft. Mesopotamian scribes wrote with light touches of the corner of a reed stylus of triangular cross section, im pressing wedges into the smoothed surfaces of a shaped mass of clay, usually of a size to be comfortably held in the palm of a hand. There are on average more wedges in a cuneiform sign than there are strokes in a letter of an alpha bet, but since a sign represents a whole syllable or a whole word, the speed and efficiency of writing are probably com parable in tire two systems. Cuneiform is more economical in the use of materials: in mundane documents, virtually no space is left between signs or between lines of signs; scribes were good at using the right amount of clay to accommodate approximately the length of the text to be written. When monumental inscriptions were incised on walls, the stonecarvers were not necessarily themselves literate, but imitated a text prepared on a clay tablet. [See Cuneiform.] Egyptian scribes wrote with a reed pen on papyrus; the hieroglyph for scribe represents the tool-kit, including pen, water-jar, and palette with cakes of dried ink. A scribe would usually work in a cross-legged seated position, with the pa pyrus sheet or the exposed portion of the papyrus roll resting on the lap. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on walls would be roughed out initially by a literate scribe, and subsequently painted with color and decorative detail. West Semitic writing was primarily with pen and ink on receptive surfaces—papyrus, skins, or potsherds. T h e na ture of tire writing instrument and the physical process of writing can be determined by careful examination of some original documents (Daniels, 1984). Scribes writing in Ak kadian and in Aramaic are depicted in Assyrian reliefs stand ing side by side (Driver, 1976, fig. 4 and pis. 23-24), with the latter rather awkwardly, it seems, holding a sheet of flex
ible papyrus or leather draped over his outstretched left hand. Kurt Galling (1971, p. 212) states that when the free end of the material hangs free, it is papyrus, and when it is rolled, it is leather. At Ugarit, one of doubtless many places where Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture mingled, the pen-written West Semitic script was successfully adapted to the clay medium by imitating tire letter/forms with impressed wedges, rather than trying to incise the shapes with a pointed tool (as most West Semitic monumental inscriptions were done) or by writing with pen and ink on the surface of pliable clay as a supplement to a cuneiform text (as was done later on in the so-called "Aramaic dockets" of Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid times). Duties. Mesopotamian scribes could work either in pri vate enterprise (even some merchants were literate) or for the temple or palace. [See Palace.] Scribes in tire first group drew up commercial and legal documents, saw to the pay ment of rents and wages, and overall kept the economy go ing. They could also do free-lance work (e.g., writing letters for ordinary people), and their offices were often at the city's gates. Temple scribes (distinct from the priesthood) were responsible for administering the considerable assets and operations of the temple complex. Palace scribes prepared diplomatic documents—letters and treaties—and main tained annals; it was also in connection with the palace that cuneiform scholars maintained their belletristic and scien tific traditions—both the poetry echoed in biblical and mod ern literature and the specialities of divination, astronomy, and astrology. Colophons at the close of literary and scien tific tablets attest to the care with which valued texts were preserved. (Elaborate colophons also characterize manu scripts from the Islamic world virtually to tire present day.) Owing to the fragility of papyrus, fewer ordinary docu ments have survived from Egypt than from Mesopotamia, where clay tablets were used. [See Papyrus; Tablet.] As a result, what is understood of the place of writing in everyday life in Egypt is limited to what was believed worthy of pres ervation in temples or in tombs, rather than the ephemera of commerce such as make up the great majority of extant cuneiform tablets. [See Tombs.] In Egypt, all scribes seem to have been government workers, engaged in surveying land and assessing the harvest, for tire purpose of levying taxes; they also supervised construction and kept the ac counts involved in maintaining workers and armies. Ordi nary persons in need of a legal document would go to a government clerk to have it drawn up. Scribes also produced and maintained Egypt's literary heritage, although there seems to have been little antiquarian sense: wisdom was val ued for itself, not for its lineage. From the Levant, climate prohibits all but the scarcest survival of documents from antiquity; the clay tablets from Ugarit suggest that scribes there engaged in essentially the same activities as their Mesopotamian counterparts. [See Ugarit.] T h e nearness of script on most surviving ostraca
SCRIBES AND SCRIBAL TECHNIQUES indicates that care was taken in the education of scribes dur ing the first millennium B C E , but little can be said about tiieir everyday business. [See Ostracon.] Most surviving inscrip tions are royal assertions of dominion, probably not typical of written output. Archives. From Mesopotamia, three main kinds of col lections of tablets have survived: accidental conglomera tions, private archives, and palace archives. (Temples do not seem to have been in the business of collecting documents, and tablets found there pertain to their own mundane ad ministrative activities.) Much the most common sort of grouping is the first, and tablets recovered from chance ac cumulations represent tlie discards of the scribal trade: tab lets would not usually be saved for more than a few decades. Private archives could represent the records of a business covering a couple of generations; also counting as a private archive are the libraries of individual scholar-scribes, who might own a fine collection of literary and scientific works. Palaces would need to preserve records of diplomacy and of the glorious deeds of rulers—and could bear on their walls monumental illustrated accounts of the same. Several kings, notably Ashurbanipal, are renowned for their activities in preserving the Mesopotamian literary heritage. Egyptians distinguished "libraries" from "archives." Mundane documents had no particular value, and the pa pyrus on which they were written could be routinely reused. T h e fourteenth-century B C E Amarna tablets represent an ar chive that survived presumably because it was simply aban doned along with the city of Akhetaten. [See Amarna T a b lets; Amarna, Tell el-.] Libraries, however, are mentioned as early as the Old Kingdom, and in Egypt temples did serve as repositories for valued literary works: Ptolemaic temples include rooms whose inscriptions include catalogs of the books to be kept there. Private libraries could be interred in chests in their owners' tombs. Some of the earliest texts of Egyptian literature, the Pyramid texts, continued to be cop ied down to the Roman period. Biblical attestation of the storage of documents is found in the naming of works including the Book of the Wars of the Lord (some five such titles are found in tlie Hebrew Bible)— no trace of which has survived—and in the incorporation of supposed verbatim texts of letters and decrees in the histor ical books. Some theories of the composition of the pro phetic books would seem to require that records were kept of prophets' utterances, which were subsequently arranged and transcribed. Most forms of the Documentary Hypoth esis would require extensive compositions (J, P, E, etc.) to have been written down, collated, copied, and subsequently lost or destroyed. Again, no physical evidence of such texts survives. [See Libraries and Archives; Biblical Literature.] E d u c a t i o n . From earliest times, there is evidence that scribes in Sumer were trained in schools. Mesopotamian children intended for the scribal life (some of tiieir copy books survive) had to learn to shape tablets and to make the
501
various wedges that comprise cuneiform characters, to write the signs, and to read Sumerian (their native language being Akkadian or Amorite). [See Sumerian; Akkadian.] They learned Sumerian by copying out, and thus incidentally pre serving, literary compositions. The standard formulary of letters and contracts was also mastered. Besides language and literature, the students learned mathematics and music. Education in Old Kingdom Egypt seems to have been on an individual apprenticeship basis, with officials training their successors. Schools appear in the First Intermediate period, with decentralization of the government. Children began their studies at about die age of ten. Writing lessons involved well-known literary works in hieratic script; the lan guage remained that of the Middle Kingdom, during which the works were composed, although tlie spoken language eventually diverged greatly. After some years, the young scribes chose whether to enter administration, the priest hood, or the military. Only late in the educational process would a student learn hieroglyphs. [See Hieroglyphs.] Textbooks. Among the very earliest documents known (from Uruk IV, c. 3200 BCE) are prototypes of the lexical lists that dominated Mesopotamian scholarship for thousands of years, serving as both textbooks and reference works. [See Uruk-Warka.] Philological lists include sign lists, vocabularies, syllabaries, and grammatical lists; eventually, lists were maintained of everything under the sun and served both advanced students and mature scholars. Egyptian study materials began witii the Satire on the Trades, which mocks professions other than that of the scribe; portions of other literary works found on cheap os traca (rather than carefully prepared papyrus), replete with errors, show that these too were studied in school. There were also, as in Mesopotamia, lists of signs and of vocabu lary organized by topic. It is often suggested that the wisdom literature of tlie He brew Bible comprises instructional texts, but nothing in tlie nature of school materials has survived beyond a handful of sloppily written abecedaries. Multilingualism. Mesopotamian scribes, who spoke Ak kadian or Amorite and in the first millennium BCE probably Aramaic, studied Sumerian long after it had passed out of use. Scribes in outlying lands, such as Urartu or die Aramean kingdoms, presumably had to learn a form of Akka dian, since bilingual monuments exist with native and As syrian versions of their inscriptions. In Hittite-speaking Anatolia, Hattic and primarily Hurrian served a purpose an alogous to that of Sumerian in Semitic-speaking Meso potamia. [See Hittite; Flurrian.] From Ugarit, along with ordinary Sumerian-Akkadian vocabularies, a few quadrilingual ones include Ugaritic and Hurrian translations. In the Mesopotamian heartland, however, there seems to have been little interest in the languages of the "barbarians" of other countries. A select handful of New Kingdom Egyptian scribes
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learned Akkadian, Canaanite, Hittite, and one or another Aegean language for use in international relations. Scattered anecdotes in the Bible (e.g., 2 Kgs. 18:26), as well as the presence of extended passages in Aramaic within the Hebrew context, show that, from at least die early first millennium B C E , scribes (though not die common people) could converse in the lingua franca, Aramaic. T h e scholars of Rabbinic Judaism (beginning in the early first millennium CE) were fully at home in both Hebrew and Aramaic, but by some point toward the middle of the first millennium, at the latest, Hebrew was no longer spoken. T h e scriptures were translated into Greek (die Septuagint) for the Jewish com munity in Alexandria, Egypt, by the second century B C E , and into Aramaic (the Targums) beginning at about the same time (Aramaic versions of several books are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls). [See Hebrew Language and Litera ture; Greek; Dead Sea Scrolls.] [See also Literacy; Writing and Writing Systems; and Writing Materials.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Ash, Paul S. "Solomon's? District? List." Journal Old Testament
for the Study
Atiyeh, G e o r g e N . , ed. The Book in the Islamic and Communication
in the Middle
World:
The Written
Word
East. Albany, N . Y . , 1 9 9 5 .
Crenshaw, James L . " E d u c a t i o n in Ancient Israel." Journal Literature
of the
67 (1995): 67-86.
of
Biblical
104 (1985): 601-615.
Daniels, Peter T . " A Calligraphic Approach to Aramaic Paleography." Journal
of Near
Eastern
Driver, G . R . Semitic
Studies
Writing:
43 (1984): 55-68.
From
Pictograph
to Alphabet.
vised edition edited by S. A. Hopkins. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 6 . Galling, Kurt. "Tafel, B u c h u n d Blatt." In Near Eastern Honor
of William
Foxwell
Albright,
Newly re
Studies
in
edited by Plans G o e d i c k e , p p .
2 0 7 - 2 2 3 . Baltimore, 1 9 7 1 . L e m a i r e , A n d r e . Les ecoles et la formation
de la Bible
dans I'ancien
Israel.
Fribourg, 1 9 8 1 . T h e standard treatment, though criticized for ex cessive speculation. Pedersen, Johannes. The Arabic Book (orig. Danish ed., 1 9 4 6 . ) . T r a n s lated b y Geoffrey French. Princeton, 1 9 8 4 . Sasson, Jack M . , ed. Civilizations
of the Ancient
Near East.
4 vols. N e w
York, 1 9 9 5 . See J. A. Black and W . J. Tait, "Archives a n d Libraries in the Ancient N e a r East"; Edward F . Wente, " T h e Scribes of An cient Egypt"; a n d Laurie E. Pearce, " T h e Scribes a n d Scholars of Ancient M e s o p o t a m i a . " Williams, Ronald J. "Scribal Training in Ancient Egypt." Journal of the American
Oriental
Society
terial aspects of this pervasive and influential bibliographic form. Given the factors of a climate favorable to both the cul tivation and the preservation of papyrus, and the particular funerary practices (i.e., entombment) of the ancient Egyp tians, it is no surprise that the oldest and most numerous discoveries of ancient scrolls are from Egypt. T h e oldest extant writing on papyrus dates from the fifth dynasty (c. 2750-2625 B C E ) . Although papyrus was by far the most commonly used scroll material, Egyptian documents of equal antiquity written on parchment are also attested. Ow ing to its capacity to contain lengthy texts, the scroll was the primary vehicle of Egyptian literature, the most commonly preserved example being the collection of funerary texts re ferred to as the Book of the Dead. T h e Aramaic papyri from Elephantine in southern Egypt also illustrate the suitability of the scroll for transmitting literary texts. Most of the texts from the archives of the Jewish military colony at Elephan tine were letters or legal documents consisting of single sheets of papyrus folded from bottom to top and then sealed. Two of the texts, however, T h e Sayings of Aliiqar and a copy of the Persian emperor Darius's Behistun inscription, were written in multiple columns on lengths of papyrus rolled from left to right into scrolls (Bezalel Porten, "Ara maic Papyri and Parchments: A New Look," Biblical Ar chaeologist 42 [1979]: 74-104). Numerous Greco-Roman papyri have been recovered from excavations of rubbish dumps in ancient Egyptian towns, further demonstrating the historical persistence of this writing device. [See Elephan tine.] The features of compactness and portability that afforded convenience and economy of use for ancient writers also made the scroll the most vulnerable to decay. T h e use of die scroll outside of Egypt is therefore attested primarily from literary sources rather than archaeological remains. T h e ear liest references to the use of scrolls in Mesopotamia date to the Neo-Assyrian period (mid-eighth-mid-seventh centu ries B C E ) . T h e archaeological evidence is limited primarily to depictions in Assyrian reliefs of two scribes, one writing in cuneiform script on a tablet and the other writing in Ar amaic on rolled material (James B. Pritchard, ed., The An cient Near
92 (1972): 214-221. PETER T . DANIELS
SCROLL. In antiquity the exercise of writing employed lengths of pliable material, generally papyrus or parchment, stored by rolling from end to end and known as a scroll. The advantages of the scroll for recording and storing lengthy texts in a relatively compact form made it a widely used and enduring device in the ancient Near East from earliest times until the medieval period. Although the literary contents of ancient scrolls remain the interest of all students of antiquity, archaeologists are also concerned with the technical and ma
East
in Pictures
Relating
to the Old Testament,
2d
ed. Princeton, 1969, nos. 235, 236). Although the earliest references to written documents in biblical literature are to tablets or stones, die historical influence of Egypt over the southern Levant suggests the use of the scroll there by at least the mid-second millennium B C E . Archaeological evi dence of the use of papyrus scrolls in ancient Israel includes impressions of papyrus fibers on die reverse side of clay seals and bullae, such as the one bearing the name of Baruch, son of Neriah, the seventh-century BCE scribe described in Jer emiah 36:4 as writing a scroll of the prophet's utterances (Nahman Avigad, Hebrew Bullae From the Time of Jeremiah, Jerusalem, 1986).
SCYTHIANS T h e Dead Sea Scrolls provide the best example of ancient scrolls from an identifiable, though secondary, archaeolog ical context. Beyond the wealth of information contained within the texts themselves, they reveal many technical de tails regarding the manufacture, use, storage, and repair of parchment scrolls in antiquity. Common scribal techniques such as ruled lines and margins and a columnar arrangement of the text are readily observable from these scrolls. Other technical aspects of manuscript preparation are observable as well, such as the fastening of parchment sheets by sewing or gluing, the mixing of the carbon-based ink, and the stor age of the scrolls in linen wrappers and clay jars. Studying the material and technical aspects of ancient scrolls yields a greater understanding of the material and economic prerequisites for writing in antiquity, such as the manufacture or acquisition of papj'rus, parchment, ink, and implements; it also reveals the technical skills, daily func tions, and the social, political, and religious roles of scribes in the cultural systems of the ancient Near East. [See also Codex; Papyrus; Parchment; Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing Materials.] BIBLIOGRAPHY C e r n y , Jaroslav. Paper
and Books
in Ancient
Egypt.
London, 1952.
Davies, Philip R. Qumran. G r a n d R a p i d s , M i c h . , 1 9 8 2 . S u m m a r y of die discovery, archaeology, a n d contents of t h e D e a d Sea Scrolls, with judicious criticisms of previous conclusions. H a r a n , M e n a h e m . "Book Scrolls in Israel in Pre-Exilic T i m e s . " of Jewish
Studies
Journal
3 3 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 1 6 1 - 1 7 3 . S u r v e y s t h e available a r c h a e
ological evidence in conjunction with literary analyses of biblical a n d extrabiblical sources. H a r a n , M e n a h e m . "Book-Scrolls at die Beginning of the Second T e m ple Period: T h e Transition from P a p y r u s t o Skins." Hebrew Union College Annual
5 4 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : m - 1 2 2 . Includes a discussion of the (lim
ited) evidence for the use of scrolls in M e s o p o t a m i a and the influence of Babylonian a n d Persian bibliographic traditions o n the transmis sion of biblical literature. R e e d , R o n a l d . Ancient
Skins,
Parchments,
and Leathers.
London, 1972.
Introduction to ancient technologies of the preparation of skins, writ ten by a materials scientist for students of archaeology a n d t h e h u manities. Roberts, C . H . , and T . C . Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. L o n d o n , 1 9 8 3 . L u c i d treatment of t h e transition from scroll to codex in Western letters that demonstrates t h e persistence of t h e u s e of the scroll in late antiquity. T u r n e r , Eric G . Greek Papyri: An Introduction. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1 9 8 0 . Includes a s u m m a r y of the history a n d manufacture of p a p y r u s scrolls a n d also a treatment of die archaeology of the G r e c o - R o m a n papyri discovered in Egypt in die twentieth century. Vaux, R o l a n d de. Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. L o n d o n , 1 9 7 3 . S u m m a t i o n of de Vaux's definitive reports o n t h e excavations at Khirbet Q u m r a n a n d 'Ain F e s h k h a a n d tiieir illumination of t h e Q u m r a n m a n u s c r i p t discoveries. BARRY A . JONES
SCYTHIANS. T h e earliest mention of the Scythians is in Assyrian records dating to the reign of Sargon II (prior
503
to 713 B C E ) . They were called Ashkuzi by the Assyrians; a similar name is known from the Hebrew Bible in the pedi gree of Noah's descendency (Gn. 10:1-3): Askeneze was the son of Gomer (i.e., Cimmerians). According to Herodotus (4.11) the Scythians came from the steppes east of the Araxes River (modern Syr Darya) and were pushed westward by the drying up of the steppe and by their wilder eastern neighbors, the Massagetes (cf. also Diodorus Sicarus 2,4337). T h e language of the Scythians belongs to the Iranian group. Herodotus (1.5-10) gives two legends of their origin. T h e first describes Skythes as the youngest son of the first man, Targitaos (son of Zeus and the daughter of the Borystenes River, now the D o n ) . H e had two elder brothers, but only Skythes was able to touch the four gold objects that had fallen from the sky: plow, yoke, axe, and bowl. In the second version, the mother of the three sons is a goddess whose upper body is human and whose lower body is in the shape of a snake; their father is Herakles. Because Skythes was the only one who could successfully handle their father's bow, he became the ancestor of die Royal Scythians. A gold vessel from the Kul'-Oba kurgan displays this myth: two men hurt themselves while trying to handle the bow, and only the diird is successful. Though the first mythological story speaks in favor of an agricultural ancestry, the Scyth ians were true nomads, with mounted archers as their main military force. The earliest Scythian finds from tire Kelermes kurgans (discovered in 1903-1904 and dated to the mid-seventh cen tury BCE) suggest that their earliest material culture strongly resembles that of the late Cimmerians (known from the N o vocherkassk hoard), but their own artistic expression ini tially combined the traditional Animal Style of northern Eur asia with the arts of Media and neighboring areas in the Near East, where the Scythians carried out their military activities. [See Cimmerians.] According to Herodotus (4.1) Scythian military supremacy there lasted twenty-eight years, but their actual presence in the Near East extended for more than a century. Their center north of the Caucasus Mountains re mained in the Kuban area (there are only a few early rich Scythian tumuli in the Ukraine); in the Near East, their king dom had its core in the area of Lake Urmia. In tire 670s B C E , the Scythians became dangerous neighbors for Urartu and also for the Assyrians. [See Urartu; Assyrians.] In 673 B C E Esarhaddon gave his daughter in marriage to the Scythian long Parthatua (Protothyes in Greek sources), apparently seeking an alliance against Urartu and the Medes. [See Medes.] Protothyes' son Madyas later helped the Assyrians when the Medes attacked Nineveh (Herodotus 1.103). [See Nineveh.] Scythian power apparendy grew after the middle of the century, but the peak of their military raids in the Near East falls between 630 and 625 B C E . Using the opportunity cre ated by the Assyrian loss of power, Scythian cavalry plun dered Syria and Palestine. They were only stopped at the
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Egyptian frontier by Psammetichus, who had to pay the Scythians richly to spare his country. The impact of the mil itary success of the Scythian cavalry and its savagery and cruelty made a strong impression: the Hebrew prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah) used these campaigns in their imagery to describe their terrifying visions. At the end of die seventh century BCE, the time of the final collapse of the Assyrian Empire (609-605 BCE) and then of Urartu in the sixth cen tury (between 590 and 585 B C E ) , the Scydiians experienced problems with tlie rising power of the Medes. Herodotus (1.106) describes the killing of Scythian leaders during a feast given by the Median king Cyaxares. In the early sixth cenmry B C E , the core of tlie Scythian Empire returned, slowly, from the Kuban region to the northern Pontic steppes. Characteristic Scythian art appeared in the late seventh century BCE, during the period of their military campaigns. It joined Iranian traditions witii the Eurasian Animal Style to create a new style that owes much to tlie artistic mastery of tlie Ionians. The best works of early Scythian art found in Asia Minor (at Sardis and Ephesus), in the Kuban region, the northern Pontic area, and in Hungary may well have been executed by Ionian artists, who also served the Persians (see R. Stucky, "Kleinplastiken, Anatolisches Zaumzeug aus Ost und West," Archaologie Mittelungen am Iran 18 [1985]: 119-124; 20 [1987]: 161-165). [SeeSardis;Ephesus.] One of the earliest complexes of Scythian art is found in the treasure associated with the site of Ziweye, in Iranian Kurd istan, and in several of the Kelermes kurgans (see Schiltz, 1994). The Royal Scythians inhabited the Pontic steppes. They were nomads in the full sense of the word, moving with their herds across that vast pastureland. Their families lived in wagons, and horses served not only for riding and transport but as a food source. Herodotus (4.110-117) reports Scyth ian farmers, plowmen and other inhabitants of the Pontic area between die Danube and Don Rivers (east of the latter was the territory of the Sauromatae). Archaeological inves tigations have uncovered cultures with settled population and forts in the forest-steppe zone north of the Royal Scyth ians, to whom their neighbors paid some kind of tribute. T h e Scythians, also in die sixth century BCE, attacked their west ern neighbors, and their military raids reached as far west as present-day Austria and the Polish western frontier. In the latter area, a hoard was found at Witaszkowo (Vettersfelde) with Scythian parade armor: pieces of Ionian manu facture dated to about 540 BCE (see Schiltz, 1994). Scythian military supremacy reached its peak there, and the peoples affected by their raids learned their technique of horseman ship. Herodotus (4.118-143) describes the Scythian cam paign of Darius in 512 B C E , from which the great king of Persia had to retreat, when his army became exhausted from chasing the Scythians across the steppe. As with other nomadic cultures without characteristic
traces of dwellings, die main archaeological source for Scythian culture is their monumental tombs under barrows of extraordinary dimensions. The one at Tolstaja mogila (see Mozolevs'ldj, 1979) was 8.5 m high and consisted of 1,500 cu m of earth: the preserved lateral chamber (the cen tral burial was partially destroyed by tomb robbers) was 7 m under the present ground level—more than 15 m under the top of the tumulus. Horses and even servants were sac rificed to the noble dead, and the body of a woman, depos ited later in the undisturbed chamber, was buried with a small boy and several servants. Her body and funeral bed were lavishly equipped with precious objects: gold jewelry, toilet equipment, glass vessels, and fine Greek pottery. Hid den in a special pit, near the main chamber, was a sword in a gold sheath and a gold pectoral weighing 1,150 gr. There are more than twenty truly royal barrows; the more numer ous graves of middle-class Scythians are less well equipped and lack gold objects. The bow and arrow were die main weapons used by the Scythians. T h e gorytus was a sheatii protecting them, while a short sword called an akinakes was protected by a sheatii. In the burials of tlie wealthy, both were covered by sheet gold decorated in relief. Most of the known examples are Greek works depicting animal fights or scenes from Greek mythology. Horse harnesses included many decorated or namental parts for covering the animal's forehead, nose, and chest. Scythian noblewomen wore a high tiara; the dress in which they were buried was covered with sheet gold orna ments decorated in relief. Poles topped with bells and other objects were paraphernalia used in shamanistic rituals; the Animal Style was the art of shamanistic religion. The Scythians rejected the Greek way of life, but their aristocracy frequently used jewelry and toreutics made by the Greeks especially for them and adapted to their taste. The best works of Scythian art were made by Greek crafts men, first by tlie Ionians and then, in the late fifth century B C E , by those from the Athenian confederacy (e.g., the Solokha comb). T h e golden age of Scythian art in the fourth cenmry BCE was created by masters who stemmed from both Athenian and Macedonian schools. Representations of Scythians beginning in the latter part of the fifth century B C E show them in distinctive clothing, including trousers; fourth-century iconography shows a turn from warlike scenes to amicable negotiations and myths propagating the legitimacy of the dynastic rule. T h e simpler objects in the Animal Style, mainly showing predators at tacking herbivores, were made by local craftsmen in a style reminiscent of woodcarvings. Early Animal Style Scythian art in the represents organic forms, while the later works dissolve the bodies into individual parts. In the fifth century B C E , the Scythians were a fairly strong military power respected by both the Greek Pontic cities (Olbia was a Scythian protectorate) and their more barbar ian neighbors—the Getae and other Thracians living in the
SEAFARING eastern Balkans and the Sauromatae (later called Sarmatians) east of Don—tiiough the last mentioned slowly moved westward. A second peak of Scythian power and the golden age of their art were reached toward die middle of the fourth century B C E under King Ateas. Ateas subdued Dobrodgea (since called Scytiiia Minor), south of the Danube River, and fought battles against the Triballoi in the central Balkans and against Philip II of Macedon. T o Ateas's reign date the best-known Scythian tumuli, with royal jewelry and toreutics (as at Tolstaya mogila, KuP-Oba, and Great Bliznitsa), and the introduction of Scythian coinage. In his last battle against Philip, in 339 B C E , Ateas (then ninety years old) was killed and his army defeated. Philip II took twenty thousand women and children as part of the booty, in addition to an equal number of horses. In 331 B C E , Olbia, with the help of the Scythians, resisted an attack of the Macedonian general Zopyrion, sent by Alexander die Great; during die third century B C E , however, the Scythians lost most of the Pontic steppe to the Sarmatians, and their kingdom became con fined to the inner Crimea and to a coastal strip between Crimea and Olbia. T h e Scythian ldngdom in the Crimea, with its capital at Scydiian Neapolis, fought, with more or less success, its Greek neighbors and the mountainous Taurae in the south ern Crimea. In 110 B C E , the Scythians were severely defeated by Diofantes, a general of Mithridates VI of Pontus, but they maintained some of tiieir positions until the diird century C E , when they finally disappeared from history. [See also Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY A r t a m o n o v , Mikhail I., a n d W e r n e r F o r m a n . The Splendor of Scythian Art. L o n d o n , 1 9 6 9 . From the Land of the Scythians. N e w York, 1 9 8 0 . Exhibition catalog, Metropolitan M u s e u m of Art. Mozolevs'kij, B. M . Tvosta Mogila. Kiev, 1 9 7 9 . Piotrovsky, Boris B., a n d N o n n a G r a c h . Scythian Art: The legacy of the Scythian
World,
Mid-Seventh
to Third
Century
B. C. L e n i n g r a d , 1 9 8 6 .
Piotrovsky, Boris B „ a n d Klaus Vierneisel. L'or des Scythes. Brussels, 1 9 9 1 . Exhibition catalogue, M u s e e R o y a u x d'Art et d'Histoire, Polosmak, N . V., and Francis v a n N o t e n . " L e s Scythes de l'Alta'i." La Recherche
2 6 (1995): 524-530.
Rolle, R e n a t e , et al., eds. Gold
der Steppe:
Archaologie
el les nomades
des steppes,
der
Ukraine.
Schlesswig, 1 9 9 1 . Schiltz, V e r o n i q u e . Les Scythes C.-ier
siecle apresJ.-C.
8e siecle av. J.-
Paris, 1 9 9 4 . JAN BOUZEK
SCYTHOPOLIS. See Beth-Shean.
SEAFARING. By learning to build vessels that could travel over open water and by attaining die knowledge nec essary to operate and guide them, sailors in antiquity trans formed watery frontiers from insurmountable barriers to su
505
perhighways. Over those routes, cultures were able to communicate in the widest sense of the term, facilitating the process of human development. T h e earliest evidence for Mediterranean seafaring are flakes of obsidian found on die Greek mainland in Franchthi cave in Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic strata (c. eleventh-fourth millennia) that origi nated on the Aegean island of Melos. This material could only have reached the mainland by means of water trans port, as Melos was never connected to the mainland. It is not known how Paleolithic seafarers learned of the existence of obsidian on Melos, but it seems likely that Melos was only one of many islands visited by them without their leaving any evidence of their visits. There are no known depictions of the vessels employed by these early seafarers. Perhaps they voyaged on primitive reed rafts, similar in consttuction to the papirella built until recentiy on Corfu. In an archaeological experiment, a mod ern 6-meter-long papirella was paddled successfully from Lavrion on the southwest coast of Attica to Melos, indicat ing that such voyages were at least theoretically possible. Skin craft are another, although less likely, possibility. Later, Neolithic tools would have permitted the construction of dugouts (monoxylons). In antiquity, hulls were built in a method quite different from that used today. After raising the keel and posts, a modern shipwright attaches the frames to the keel and then builds up the hull's shell around the framing system, known as frame-first, or frame-based, construction. T h e ship wright's ancient counterpart, however, after preparing die vessel's keel and posts, built the shell of die hull's planking before inserting the frames into it. This method is known as shell-first, or shell-based, construction. The hulls of all seagoing ships built before the end of the Roman period that have been excavated in eastern Medi terranean waters were edge-joined with closely spaced mortise-and-tenon joints. T h e joints were locked in place with wooden pegs, usually driven from inside the hull. No caulk ing was required, as die wooden planks swelled upon contact with water, effectively sealing the planking seams. Other forms of hull construction existed simultaneously. Pharaonic Egyptians went to sea in hulls tiiat apparently were held together primarily with longitudinal lashings. Un pegged mortise-and-tenon joints served to seat the planking. This construction method was used on the (nonseagoing) Cheops ship found at Giza. [See Giza.] Lashed hulls were particularly useful for ships on the Red Sea run to Punt. For those v e i T t u r e s , ships were built on the Nile River and then dismanded to permit them to be carried overland to the Red Sea coast, where they were reassembled for the voyage. Until fairly recentiy, blue-water sailors had only tiiree op tions for propelling their vessels: paddling, rowing and sail ing. Paddlers sit facing the vessel's bow, usually in a kneeling position. Energy is transferred through the bodies of die paddlers to the vessel because the paddles are used as levers.
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SEAFARING
SEAFARING.
Painted vase showing a ship and animals.
Egypt, Pre-
dynastic p e r i o d (c. 3 4 0 0 - 3 0 0 0 BCE). Inv. E O 3 0 4 . (ErichLessing/Art Resource, N Y )
The earliest-known depictions of Aegean ships (third mil lennium) illustrate what appears to be a type of vessel that is long and narrow with rows of lines on either side. The lines probably represent paddles rather than oars. Paddling requires significantly less inboard space than rowing, as paddlers must sit next to the sides of a vessel; therefore, narrow boats would have been paddled rather than rowed. Aegean ships were still being paddled in waterborne cultic races/ processions as late as the seventeenth century B C E , even though this mode of propulsion was no longer suited to the contemporary craft used in the celebrations. Paddling thus appears to have had a long tradition in the Aegean. In rowing, the oar is held in an oarlock or rope grommet attached to the vessel's caprails, which transfers energy di rectly to the vessel. Normally, the oarsman sits facing the vessel's stern and pulled tire oar toward his chest while lean ing backward. As rowing requires the use of lower-body muscles during the stroke, it is a far more energy-efficient manner of propulsion than paddling. The Neolithic colonization of Crete, during the latter part of the eighth millennium or the early seventh, appears to have been a result of an organized migration. In order to establish themselves on Crete, those early colonists must have transported at least 15 tons of breeding-stock grain and
personal items in a single sailing season. Moving such masses of material would have been virtually impossible if the vessels were paddled. This consideration suggests that rowing, and/or the sail, was known by the Neolithic period in the Aegean. A ship painted on a Gerzean-period jar carries the earliest known depiction of a sail; it is roughly square in shape and spread on a mast stepped in the ship's bow. Throughoutthe Bronze Age, the boom-footed sail, in a variety of shapes and variations, remained the only sail in use. In this sail system, the boom was lashed to the mast and the sail was set and lowered by raising the yard to tire masthead by means of halyards. Such a rig did not permit reducing the sail. T o take the sail in, the crew had to lower and remove it and then replace it with another, smaller sail. The boom prevented the use of shrouds—the lines run ning from the mastiread to the sides of a ship that normally supply lateral support. In place of shrouds, at least on Bronze Age Egyptian, Syro-Canaanite, and Cypriot ships, seagoing ships employed lateral cables attached to the bot tom of the mast, about the height of the boom. Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, a new and in novative form of sail came into use. This rig, termed fire brailed sail, did away with the boom. Instead, a system of lines (brails) attached to the foot of the sail was carried through vertical rows of rings sewn to the sail and carried over the yard back toward the stern. The brails acted like modern Venetian blinds. The sail could be more easily con trolled by hauling on—or releasing—the brails. This appar ently permitted greater ability in sailing to windward. In deed, the enhanced seafaring abilities that mark tire beginning of the Iron Age are probably to be attributed pri marily to the appearance of the brailed sail. The origins of the brailed sail are unclear. Some New
S E A F A R I N G . Earliest known depiction of a sail, painted jar. (After Frankfort, 1 9 2 4 , pi. XIII)
on a
Gerzean
SEAFARING Kingdom depictions show ships carrying a prototype sail that was raised to the yard, yet still carries a boom. It is unlikely, however, that the brailed sail was an Egyptian in vention. T h e brailed rig seems to have come into general use in the eastern Mediterranean in about 1200 B C E . It ap pears prominently on both the ships of the attacking Sea Peoples as well as those of the defending Egyptians in the scene of Rameses Ill's naval battle at Medinet Habu (see below). All depictions of Aegean ships, down to the end of the thirteenth century BCE (Late Helladic IIIB), in which the type of rig can be identified, show them carrying boomfooted rigs; those dating to the twelfth century B C E (and later) are all depicted carrying brailed rigs. Sails were woven primarily of linen. N o remains of sails have been found on any ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks; however, part of a sail, with a wooden fairlead still attached, was found among the wrappings of a second-century B C E mummy. T h e square sail was intended primarily for sailing before tlie wind. Crews either took to their oars or bided their time when winds were contrary. T h e ability of a ship mounting a square sail to sail into the wind depends on a variety of considerations, including the specific type of rig and the de sign of the hull and its ability to prevent drift to leeward. T h e Kyrenia II, a replica of a fourth-century B C E merchant man, employing a brailed sail, was able to sail 50-60 degrees (4-5 points) off windward. A boom-footed sail would have severely hampered these abilities. T h e lack of shrouds, and the curious consideration tiiat seagoing ships were built with their keel (or keel planks) rising upward, inside tire hull, instead of protruding below it (where it would have served to prevent leeward drift), both suggest that the Bronze Age seafarers who employed the boom-footed square sail were not unduly concerned with utilizing winds from far off the stern. From tlie lines used to control ships' sails to the hawsers, which allowed ships to anchor, ropes were an integral part of ships' equipment, used for a variety of purposes. In an tiquity, a variety of fibers were used in rope making. Models of Middle and New Kingdom ships that have been preserved with tiieir rigging have a number of recog nizable knots, primarily hitches and lashings. While the use on models of such knots does not necessarily prove their use at sea, it does indicate tiiat such knots were known. T h e ability to navigate to a destination after crossing an expanse of water, often out of sight of land and seemingly lacking in directional signs, is a prerequisite of seafaring. In antiquity the sailing season was relegated primarily, al though not exclusively, to the summer months. During those months the predominant wind in the eastern Medi terranean is northwesterly. This had a profound influence on sea routes. With a square sail it was relatively easy to reach Africa from Europe. Returning was, however, another
507
matter. A return nip required a counterclockwise voyage around the entire Levantine coastiine. Although there is little archaeological evidence for it, ancient Mediterranean sea farers must have had access to a broad body of knowledge relating to navigational techniques and meteorology. At the same time, a lack of navigational tools need not reflect a lack of navigational knowledge. It is possible to have a remark ably developed navigational system that would leave no trace in the archaeological record, beyond evidence that voyages were indeed being made. Ancient navigation was an art, rather than a science, and was based on an broad knowledge of position-locating fac tors committed entirely to memory, as studies of Polynesian navigational techniques have demonstrated. In Oceania, no position-determining instruments were ever carried on board ships, despite remarkable feats of navigational skill. Theoretically at least, a similar situation may have existed in the Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron Ages. There are two methods for determining the direction of land lying beyond the horizon with birds. In one, land birds that were unable to land on water—ravens, crows, doves, and swallows—were carried on board ship and released when needed. Upon gaining height, if the bird saw land it would invariably make a beeline toward it, and freedom, indicating the direction of die nearest landfall. If, however, it did not sight land, the bird had no choice but to return to the ship. This land-finding technique is of high antiquity; Noah {Gn. 8:6-12), as well as his Mesopotamian counter part Utnapishtim, are reported to have used this land-find ing method. Seabirds have also been utilized as a naviga tional aid. By acquiring an intimate knowledge of die habits of seabirds that nest on rookeries on shore yet feed far out to sea, it is possible to determine landfall by taking careful note of the direction in which flocks of seabirds fly in the morning or during die late afternoon. As has been shown by Oceanic navigators, winds can be significant indicators of direction. Before the introduction of the magnetic compass there was the wind rose. By noting the "signature" characteristics of each wind, it was possible to determine the direction from which it blew. The Phoe nicians are credited with introducing tlie wind rose into the Mediterranean. [See Phoenicians.] Homer knew of four winds. Later Greeks developed this wind rose into tlie eightwind system portrayed on the first-century BCE Athenian Tower of the Winds (horologium or water clock). Winds, however, are directional indicators of a secondary nature that must be compared with more reliable directional phenomena. When in sight of land, landmarks were valuable navigational aids. In classical times, seafarers could avail themselves of periploi, "handbooks" containing information on anchorages, landmarks, and other details valuable to sea farers. The sun could also be used as a navigational aid, although its points of rising and setting vary throughout the
508
SEAFARING
year. However, only stellar navigation—a sidereal com pass—can supply fixed points in open water. As demonsttated by Oceanic navigators, stellar navigation is based on an intimate knowledge of the rising and setting points on the horizon of numerous stars. Ships are at the mercy of the weather, and therefore sea farers, no doubt from earliest times, developed an intimate knowledge of weather lore. T h e biblical writers considered the east wind particularly dangerous and repeatedly describe it as destroying the large seagoing merchantmen called Tarshish ships (Ps. 48:7; Ez. 27:26). Josephus describes the "black norther" that destroyed the Jewish rebel fleet at Jaffa in 67 CE, as well as the destructive tendencies of the south west wind (War 1.409; 3.421-426; Antiq. 15.333). T h e bestknown weather lore from antiquity appears in the New Tes tament (Mt. 16:2-3; Lk. 12:54). International and local trade were carried out by ships that were able to move heavy and bulky cargoes for great dis tances at appreciably lower rates than land-based transport. Shipwrecks, like those uncovered at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya in Turkey and off Kyrenia on Cyprus, have pro vided intimate, and often surprising, information about the types of cargoes carried. [See Uluburun.] Ships, as well as timber for their construction, were in themselves also an im portant trade item. Ugaritic texts and tire Tale of Wenamun indicate that by the end of the Late Bronze Age a code of maritime laws
existed along Levantine shores. This was a prerequisite for maintaining seaborne commerce and diplomacy. Ship-based warfare played a predominant role in seafar ing. By the sixth dynasty, and probably earlier, Egyptian oared ships were employed as rapid military transports for attacks along the Syro-Canaanite coast and for transporting the resultant spoils back to Egypt. Unas (Wenis), an officer who served under Pepi I, describes in his cenotaph at Aby dos how he used ships to transport forces, landing them behind a prominent landmark he calls the Antelope's Nose, perhaps an early name for the Carmel Mountains in the region of Haifa, Israel. Throughout the Bronze Age, the pur pose of ships in military ventures was the rapid transport of forces to their destination. In sea battles, ships were used as floating platforms on which soldiers fought. Suppiluliuma II, the last king of the Hittite Empire, refers to three sea battles in which he fought against "the ships of Alashiya," perhaps an allusion to contingents of ship-based Sea Peoples who used Cyprus as their base of operations. Rameses II mentions doing battle against ships of the Shardanu, one of the groups of Sea Peoples, on a stela from Tanis. [See Hittites.] The earliest-known depiction of a naval battle is carved in relief on the outer wall of Rameses Ill's mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. T h e scene graphically describes a suc cessful surprise attack by Rameses' forces against an invad ing fleet of Sea Peoples. T h e engagement apparently took
SEAFARING. Naval battle depicted at Medinet Habu. (After N e l s o n et al., 1 9 3 0 , pi. 3 7 )
SEALS place in the Nile Delta region. In the first phase of the en gagement, Egyptian archers, located on ships and on shore, used composite bows to pick off die invading warriors at long range. Against this, the Sea Peoples, armed only with medium-range dirowing javelins and swords, were defense less. Once the enemy was neutralized, the invading ships were capsized by tossing four-armed grapnels into their rig ging. T h e grapnel is the only strictiy nautical weapon de picted in the relief. T h e naval weapon par excellence of antiquity was the waterline ram, which is believed to have evolved first in Greece during the Geomeuic period. A badly damaged Assyrian wall painting dating to about 700 B C E is the earliest pictorial representation of one war galley ramming another ship. T h e first battle known to have taken place after the introduction of the ram transpired off Alalia on the eastern coast of Cor sica in 535 B C E . From then until the Battie of Actium (31 B C E ) , some sixty naval battles of varying size and intensity are recorded. T h e ram went tiirough four distinct evolutionary phases. Between about 900-600 B C E , it was a metal-sheathed point, apparently a development of the protruding bow structures that appear on Mycenaean galleys. In the sixth century B C E , a blunt ram in the form of a boar's snout replaced the point. T h e boar's head ram was popular for the next two centuries. Then, toward the end of the fifth century B C E , a three-finned ram came into widespread use. It was this device, typified by the 'Adit ram, that destroyed Anthony's fleet at Actium— and it may have been used earlier, in the waning years of the Peloponnesian wars. [See 'Adit Ram,] T h e fins apparendy were intended to prevent the ram from piercing the enemy's hull, which would have endangered the attacking ship by locking her into a deadly embrace while otiier ships could ram her. The three-finned ram was employed to open the planking seams by breaking the mortise-and-tenon joints holding them together, tiius permitting seawater to enter the hull and render it inoperable. T o use the ram effectively, galleys had to be heavy: the weight contributed the momen tum necessary to damage the enemy's hull. T h e ship itself was the weapon; the ram was only the "warhead" by means of which the attacking ship's momentum was imparted to its victim. In about 100 C E , the three-finned ram fell out of use. T h e last phase of the ram was during the Byzantine period. [See also Anchors; Fishing; and Ships and Boats.] BIBLIOGRAPHY B a s c h , L u c i e n . Le musee
imaginaire
de la marine
antique,
Athens,
1987.
A comprehensive collection of ancient M e d i t e r r a n e a n ship depic tions, Broodbank, Cyprian, a n d T h o m a s F . Strasser. " M i g r a n t Farmers a n d the Neolithic Colonization of C r e t e . " Antiquity 65 (1991): 233-245. Discussion of Crete's earliest settlement. C a s s o n , Lionel. Ships
and Seamanship
in the Ancient
World.
2d ed.
509
Princeton, 1986. T e x t b o o k for ancient Mediterranean seafaring, with a focus o n the classical period. Casson, Lionel, and J. Richard Steffy, eds. The 'Athlit Ram. College Station, T e x . , 1990. R e p o r t o n the only waterline ram known from antiquity. Frankfort, H e n r i . Mesopatamia,
Syria,
and Egypt
and Their Earliest
In
terrelations. Studies in Early Pottery in the N e a r East, I . L o n d o n , 1924. Haldane, Cheryl W a r d . "Ancient Egyptian Hull Construction." P h . D . diss., T e x a s A & M University, 1993. M o n o g r a p h o n ancient Egyptian shipbuilding. Hornell, James. " T h e Role of Birds in Early Navigation," Antiquity 20 (1946): 142-149. Lewis, D a v i d . We, the Navigators:
The Ancient
Art of Landfinding
in the
Pacific. Honolulu, 1975. S t u d y of Polynesian navigational tech niques. Steffy, J. R i c h a r d . Wooden
Ship
Building
and the Interpretation
of
Ship
wrecks. College Station, T e x . , 1994. Textbook o n ancient hull con struction. W a c h s m a n n , Shelley. " T h e Ships of the Sea Peoples." International Journal
of Nautical
Archaeology
and
Underwater
Exploration
10
(1981): 187-220. W a c h s m a n n , Shelley. Seagoing
Ships
and Seamanship
in the Bronze
Age
Levant. College Station, T e x . , 1996. Textbook on Bronze Age east ern Mediterranean seafaring. SHELLEY WACHSMANN
SEALS. Small stones (5-10 cm) whose flat or cylindrical surfaces are carved in intaglio with a design or inscription have been used as seals since the Late Neolithic period (7600-6000 BCE) in Syria (Wickede, 1990). The engraved surface was designed to be read in the impression left on receptive materials (clay, wax, soft metal). Through the im pression a seal could convey a message of ownership, au thorization, or responsibility (Gibson and Biggs, 1977). An inscription most commonly contains die owner's name, pat ronymic, and office, although prayers and religious dedi cations are not uncommon. As Dominique Collon demon strates in First Impressions (1988), the inscription and the design offer information on onomastics, political hierarchy, myth, rimal, and activities of daily life. Not all engraved stones were used as seals: some were amulets and others were used as personal ornaments. Seal impressions them selves also may have had an apotropaic, magical, or purely decorative function. Seal stones often were pierced to be worn as rings, pendents, or bracelets. Fired clay, wood, bone, ivory, and metal are used for seals as well, but these more fragile materials have not survived in the quantities stone seals have. Flat-surfaced stamp seals appear before cylinder seals in the Near East and were the preferred form of seal in Anatolia, Egypt, and the Levant. Stamp seals are divided into typological classes according to the presence or absence of a handle and according to shape. Cylinder seals were the preferred form of seal in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Syria-Palestine, areas that used cuneiform script during the Bronze Age. Cylinder seals are characterized by place of manufacture, historical phase, and design.
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SEALS
T h e earliest recorded seals and seal impressions, from the Late Aceramic Neolithic period in Syria, are impressions made on the plaster vessels (white ware) that preceded true ceramics (Wickede, 1990). In die Pottery Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic periods, seals continued to be used on vessels in Iraq and coastal Syria and Cilicia. Pyramidal and conoid stamps were common. Their designs, simple crosshatching, zigzags, and other linear motifs, probably had dec orative or apotropaic value. During the Halaf period (55005000 B C E ) , seal impressions occur for the first time on fired ceramic vessels and on soft clay nodules (bullae) used to seal containers. More elaborate in shape and in their en graved design, the Halaf-period seals continue the tradition of primarily geometric, linear, or hatched designs, crosses, and dots but add animal motifs to the repertoire. The Ubaid period (5000-4000 BCE) sees a widening use of seals to con trol access to objects and rooms, as well as an expansion of motifs to include complex designs and human figures. Tepe Gawra strata XII and XI have some of the best examples of complex seal impressions; they illustrate an early use of seal ings to conttol access to rooms and other containers, prob ably in an administrative context (Rothman and Blackman, 1990). [See Tepe Gawra.] The use of seals to control access, as well as the particular style associated with them, spread to Anatolia and can be found in examples from Degirmentepe. Although stamp seals were used throughout the Uruk pe riod (4000-3300 BCE) in southern Mesopotamia, cylinder seals gradually took over their function. The development of the cylinder seal accompanied the increasing sophistica tion of the recordkeeping and writing system that began with small tokens contained in clay balls. The earliest use of a cylinder seal was to impress tlie surface of the clay ball, thereby verifying or securing its contents. These have been found at Susa in Iran, but also occur at Uruk in Mesopo tamia, in contemporary contexts. [See Susa; Uruk-Warka.]
Uruk cylinder seals are large and made of soft limestone and often have a knob at one end. The incised motifs were adapted to the cylindrical surface and designed to repeat indefinitely on rolling. The number and quality of designs expanded considerably to include scenes of hunting, boat ing, grain storage, and fighting. Mark A. Brandes (1979) suggests that these were used in state/temple administration. A male figure is possibly the "priest-king," often depicted as taking part in rituals and in scenes with prisoners. Seals from Jemdet Nasr are contemporary with Uruk-style seals but probably were used by individuals rather than admin istrators. Small, harder, and more common, the Jemdet Nasr seals either show women at work spinning, weaving, and making pottery (Asher-Greve, 1985) or files of animals and geometric patterns. [See Jemdet Nasr.] Cylinder seals of this period are found throughout the Near East, from Susa to Egypt. Collon (1987, pp. 20-24) divides the cylinders seals from tlie Early Dynastic Period (3200-2600 BCE) into two broad chronological groups: Early Dynastic A and Early Dynastic B. T h e Early Dynastic A group was produced at the end of the fourth millennium and consists of material from the sites along the ttade route between Susa, northern Mesopotamia, and Syria. The tall thin steatite seals have very elaborate, almost brocade, designs that use hatched lines, lozenges, circles, and chevrons. T h e Early Dynastic B group dates to tlie middle of die third millennium and is more closely associated witii southern Mesopotamian types. Geometric designs based on herringbone patterns and arches in registers are common. More figural designs occur on the cylinder seals created in southern Mesopotamia: animals in human posture, the bull-man, and humanheaded bulls may relate to the myths of Mesopotamia. The two major themes, however, are the contest scene between lion and bull or bull-man and the banquet scene at which two seated figures drink through straws from the same vessel or share a meal at the table placed between them. Although cylinder seals and impressions are found as early as Early Bronze I (3500-3100 BCE) in Byblos on die coast of Syria, die majority of seals and impressions in Palestine date to the EB II-EB III period contemporary with the Early Dy nastic B group in Mesopotamia. Unlike Mesopotamia— where seals were rolled on tablets and the unfired clay was used to close doors, bags, boxes, and other containers—in Palestine seals were rolled only on fired-clay vessels as dec oration. The material of the seals used for malting impres sions was probably wood or bone. Designs include the her ringbone pattern, concentric circles, lozenges, spirals, and ladders, as well as animals, strucmres, and a few very sche matic human figures (Ben-Tor, 1978).
SEALS.
Clay bulla from Habuba Kabira South.
T h i s bulla is d a t e d
to a b o u t 3500-3000 BCE. (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
Beginning in about 2350 B C E , Sargon and his successors in the Akkadian Empire sponsored craftsmen who devel oped a new, more naturalistic style of seal carving and who
SEALS
511
added new themes and motifs to the repertoire derived from the Early Dynastic period. One new scene was the presen tation scene, in which a supplicant is introduced to an en throned god or goddess by a minor deity. Deities in general are more prevalent on Akkadian seals than on Early Dynas tic seals, and for the first time appear in postures or with attributes that allow their identification with members of the Mesopotamian pantheon (Frankfort, 1939). While contem porary with the Akkadian period, the impressions found at Ebla in Syria are related more to developed Early Dynastic styles, even though they also show some knowledge of Ak kadian iconography (Collon, 1988, p. 39). Ur III seals con tinue to use and to standardize the themes from earlier pe riods: die banquet, contest, and presentation scenes. An innovation in the latter is the use of the deified ldng receiving a supplicant in place of the seated god or goddess (Winter, 1986). [See Akkadians; Ebla; Ebla Texts.] Assyrian seals of the Colony period in Anatolia (19501750 BCE) are known from the business letters and houses of the merchants stationed at Karum Kanes in eastern An atolia. [See Ktiltepe Texts.] T h e Assyrian seals contain pre sentation scenes, deities, lines of animals, or figures that were present in the Ur III period but are more crudely ex ecuted in two basic styles: one with flat, linear figures and the other with more stylized, elongated, but deeply cut fig ures (Collon, 1988, p . 41). T h e local Anatolian group of seals is very finely cut and takes some inspiration from As syrian seals. In design, however, the spaces on local seals are filled widi a jumble of objects, animals, and human figures, all extremely detailed and finely hatched and rehatched. The iconography of the local seals is a good source of informa tion on local Anatolian deities and ritual. T h e Old Babylonian Period (1800-1600 BCE) was, like the Akkadian period, a high point in the development of cylin der seals. Returning to the Early Dynastic and Akkadian prototypes, Old Babylonian seal cutters produced very care fully cut hematite seals using a few standardized versions of old tiiemes. T h e presentation scene, for example, was re duced to two standing figures, the king and the goddess. Old Babylonian seals appear almost mass produced, except for the inscription of tire owner's name. Peripheral sites such as Mari in Syria were heavily influenced by the new style, par ticularly for royal seals. Syrian seals are, however, much more elaborate and naturalistic, with an iconography that includes elements of Egyptian, Hittite, and Minoan design. In Iran, Elamite seals are often indistinguishable from Old Babylonian examples, except for certain isolated elements of coiffure or gesture (ibid., p. 55). New cutting techniques were introduced shortly after Hammurabi's death in 1750 B C E . The use of the drill and the unmasked use of the cutting wheel resulted in a much more schematic treatment of the human and animal elements in the design. T h e Late Bronze Age saw many regional developments
SEALS.
Hebrew seal depicting a sailing ship. T h e inscription r e a d s
" B e l o n g i n g t o A m i y a h u , s o n of M a r a b . " D a t e d to d i e e i g h t h - s e v e n t h c e n t u r y BCE. (Courtesy A S O R Archives)
in seal materials, use, and design. Mitanni craftsman in northern Mesopotamia developed sintered quartz (known also as faience, paste, or frit) to manufacture seals. Easy to cut or drill and fire, masses of Common Style Mitanni seals were produced all over the Near East, primarily as jewelry and amulets. Designs were often split into a major and mi nor scene, and abstract geometric forms were used for ani mals and figures (Porada, 1985, p. 99). Elaborate Style cyl inder seals were made of hard stone, were more carefully cut, were inscribed, and are more often found impressed on government and legal documents. [See Mitanni.] In the Levant and coastal Syria, only scarab seals rival Mitannian seals in popularity. These stamp seals, shaped like scarab beetles, appear first in Egypt at the end of tire Old Kingdom and are found in the Levant throughout the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. As Egyptian political power spread to die southern Levant, so did the popularity of scarab seals. Usually found in burials, scarabs are only oc casionally used to impress objects, and then only under die influence of the Egyptian administrative system (Buchanan and Moorey, 1988, p. xii). During the Late Bronze Age, the Hittite Empire expanded from the Anatolian plateau to in clude much of Syria. In their homeland, die Hittites stopped using cylinder seals after the Colony period and returned to die use of button-shaped stamp seals for personal and offi cial use. Many seals are inscribed with its owner's name and title in Hittite hieroglyphic, and others have a simple heraldic design. Only in the Syrian vassal states did the Hittite offi cials use cylinder seals to impress official documents (Gtiterbock, 1980). After the beginning of the first millennium B C E , only the Assyrians continued to use the cylinder seal because only in
512
SEA PEOPLES
Mesopotamia did cuneiform continue to be the preferred form for inscribing records. The increase in literacy and tire shift to new writing materials, languages, and scripts in Syria and the Levant are reflected in the replacement of the stamp seal with the cylinder seal there. Pyramidal, conical, or scaraboid, the stamp seal had little room for elaborate design, but it was more suited to impressing the small nodules of clay affixed to string around papyrus and leather docu ments. Iron Age stamp seals usually have a single figure or more often a simple inscription of the owner's name and patronymic, or title. In use, however, stamp seals parallel cylinder seals as means of validating legal documents or pre venting access to documents or containers (Hestrin and Dayagi-Mendels, 1979). Northwest Semitic Seal Inscriptions.]
[See also
BIBLIOGRAPHY Asher-Greve, Julia M . Frauen in altsumerischer B e n - T o r , A m n o n . Cylinder
Zeit. Malibu, 1 9 8 5 .
Seals of Third-Millennium
Palestine.
Bulletin
of tlie American Schools of Oriental Research, Supplement, no. 2 2 . Cambridge, 1 9 7 8 . B r a n d e s , M a r k A. Siegelabrollungen
Uruk-Warka.
aus den archaischen
Bauschichten
in
Wiesbaden, 1 9 7 9 .
B u c h a n a n , Briggs, a n d P . R. S. M o o r e y . Catalogue em Seals in the Ashmolean
Museum,
of Ancient
Near
vol. 3 , The Iron Age Stamp
EastSeals.
Oxford, 1 9 8 8 . Collon, D o m i n i q u e . First Impressions:
Cylinder
Seals in the Ancient
Near
East. Chicago, 1 9 8 8 . G o o d introduction to periods a n d styles of seals, with a comprehensive bibliography. Frankfort, Henri. Cylinder Religion
of the Ancient
Seals: A Documentary Near
Essay
on the Art and
East. L o n d o n , 1 9 3 9 . Basic reference o n
the style and iconography of Mesopotamian cylinder seals, s o m e what out of date b u t still useful. Gibson, M c G u i r e , a n d Robert D . Biggs, eds. Seals and Sealing in the Ancient Near East. Malibu, 1 9 7 7 . Covers t h e function of cylinder seals in a series of contributions. Giiterbock, Hans. "Seals and Sealing in Hittite L a n d s . " In From Athens to Gordion, edited by Keith DeVries, p p . 5 1 - 5 7 . Philadelphia, 1 9 8 0 . Hestrin, Ruth, and Michal Dayagi-Mendels. Inscribed Seals. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 9 . G o o d introduction to and catalog of t h e Iron Age seals of ancient Palestine. M a t t h e w s , D o n a l d M . Principles of the Later
Second
Millennium
of Composition B.C.
in Near Eastern
Glyptic
F r e i b u r g , 1 9 9 0 . Art historical
study of Mitannian seals. Excellent discussion and bibliography. Porada, Edith. "Syrian Seals from tlie Late Fourth to the Late Second Millennium." In Ebla to Damascus, edited by Harvey Weiss, p p . 9 0 1 0 4 . Washington, D . C . , 1 9 8 5 . R o t h m a n , M . , a n d M . James Blackman. "Monitoring Administrative Spheres of Action in L a t e Prehistoric N o r t h e r n M e s o p o t a m i a with the Aid of Chemical Characterization (INAA) of Sealing Clays." In Economy
and Settlement
in the Near East, edited by N a o m i F. Miller,
p p . 1 9 - 4 6 . Philadelphia, 1 9 9 0 . Wickede, Alwo von. Prahistorische
Stempelglyptik
in Vorderasien.
Mu
nich, 1 9 9 0 . T h e most recent comprehensive treatment of the shape, design, a n d function of early stamp seals. Winter, Irene J. " T h e King a n d t h e C u p : Iconography of the Royal Presentation Scene on U r III Seals." In Insight through Images:
in Honor
of Edith
Porada,
Studies
edited by Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, p p .
2 5 3 - 2 6 8 . Malibu, 1 9 8 6 . BONNIE MAGNESS-GARDINER
SEA PEOPLES. See Philistines. SECTION.
See
Balk.
SEFIRE ARAMAIC INSCRIPTIONS. T h e tiiree Aramaic inscriptions on basalt stelae from Sefire, in Syria, constitute one of the most important sources for our knowl edge of Aramaic in the first half of the first millennium B C E . The stelae were discovered at Sefire, 25 1cm (16 mi.) soutiieast of Aleppo, in the late 1920s. Stelae I and II were ac quired by the Damascus Museum in 1948, and stela III by the Beirut Museum in 1956. Stela I was first called the Sujin stela because Sebastien Ronzevalle, a French Jesuit and professor at Universite St. Joseph, Beirut, had been misled about its findspot by tlie natives who claimed to have discovered it at Sujin. T h e stela is inscribed on three sides of a rectangular basalt stone. Be cause die stone was cut after it was engraved, not only was the text on the left side of face A lost, but also the beginnings of the upper lines on face A and the ends of the upper lines on face B. T h e stone had also been broken in the center, so tiiat at least tiiree lines are missing from the middle of the text extant on three sides. As reconstructed, stela I stands 131 cm high. Face A originally had forty-two lines; face B, forty-five lines; and face C, twenty-five lines. Stela II, re constructed from a dozen fragments, must have resembled stela I. Its face A today has only fourteen fragmentary lines; face B, twenty-one lines; and face C, seventeen lines. Stela III was pieced together from nine fragments, forming a broad slab 102 cm wide and 72 cm high; it is inscribed only on the reverse, with twenty-nine fragmentary lines. Stela III also is of basalt and has die same kind of writing, absence of word dividers, and the same mention of "kings of Arpad." Flence, it is certainly related to stelae I and II, and all three probably form the text of one and the same treaty, although this is presently debated. The stelae are inscribed in Aramaic script dated to the middle of the eighth centtiry B C E . They preserve tlie text of a treaty/treaties made by the north-Syrian ruler, Matfel, son of'Attarsamak, vassal-king of Arpad, with his overlord, BarGa'yah, king of K T K . T h e terminus ante quern for the stelae is 740 B C E , when Tiglath-Pileser III conquered Arpad, mak ing it part of die Assyrian Empire. T h e inscriptions presup pose tlie political autonomy of Arpad. As king of Arpad, Mati'el had concluded a pact with Ashurnirari V in 754 B C E . He was also an ally of Sardur III of Urartu, prior to the resurgence of Neo-Assyrian might. These stelae, then, were important factors in the history of Syria in the time of Jer oboam II (786-747 BCE) of Israel and of Uzziah (783-742 BCE) of Judah. The stelae record a suzerainty treaty, a pact concluded between a vassal and his overload. Their text identifies the
SELEUCIA ON THE TIGRIS contracting parties, sets forth the stipulations of the pact, mentions the curses invoked against Mati'el if he is not faith ful to them, and lists the gods, Canaanite and Babylonian, who are witnesses to the treaty. T h e main problem in the interpretation is the identification of the overlord BarGa'yah, possibly Shamshi-Ilu, and of the country, K T K , over which he ruled, possibly the Kittakka of some Assyrian texts. [See also Aramaic Language and Literature.] BIBLIOGRAPHY D u p o n t - S o m m e r , Andr6. " U n e inscription a r a m e e n n e inedite de Sfire." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 13 (1956): 23-41, pis. 1-6. Editio
princeps
of stela III.
D u p o n t - S o m m e r , Andre. " L e s inscriptions arameennes d e Sfire (steles I et I I ) . " Memoires
prisenties
par divers
savants
a I'Academie
des In
scriptions et Belles-lMtres 15 (i960) 195-351, pis. 1-29. N e w edition of stela I a n d editio princeps of stela II. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Aramaic Inscriptions of Sefire. Biblica et Orien talia, 19. R o m e , 1967. Extensive c o m m e n t a r y on the Aramaic text of the stelae, with a study of its g r a m m a r a n d a glossary. Lemaire, A n d r e , a n d Jean-Marie D u r a n d . Les inscriptions aramisennes de Sfire et I'Assyrie de Shamshi-Ilu, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 2. Hautes Etudes Orientales, 20. Geneva a n d Paris, 1984. G o o d sta tus quaeslionis a n d up-to-date bibliography. Ronzevalle, Sebastien. " F r a g m e n t s d e s c r i p t i o n s arameennes des e n virons d'Alep." Melanges de I'Universiti Saint-Joseph 15 (1930-1931): 237-260. Editio princeps of stela I. Rooy, H . F . van. " T h e Structure of t h e Aramaic Treaties of Sefire." Journal of Semitics 1 (1989): 133-139. J O S E P H A . F I T Z M Y E R , S.J.
SELEUCIA ON T H E TIGRIS, site located approx imately 601cm (37 mi.) northwest of Babylon and 35 km (22 mi.) south of Baghdad. Seleucia was founded in the late fourth century B C E by Seleukos Nikator ( L a t , Seleucus Nicator), one of the generals of Alexander the Great. Accord ing to Greek and Latin writers, the Greek colony was placed near the earlier site of Opis. Pliny (Nat. Hist. 6.30.i2iff.) records that Seleucia was founded for the purpose of draw ing away the population of Babylon. T h e Parthians captured the city in 141 B C E . Its inhabitants rebelled between 35 and 42 C E , after which die Parthians may have transferred the seat of government across die river to Ctesiphon. Seleucia's continued importance during the period of Parthian rule is shown, inter alia, by the recent find, unfortunately not in an archaeological context, of a bronze statue of Heracles. Ac cording to an inscription in Greek and Pahlavi, the statue was brought from Messene in 150/51 CE by die Parthian ldng Vologeses IV after a victory over his challenger, Mithridates, and erected at Seleucia in the Temple of Apollo. T h e Ro mans took the city tiiree times: under Trajan, in 116 CE; by Avidius Cassius in 165/66; and by Septimius Severus in 198/ 99. Abundant traces of fire mark the Trajanic destruction, and its capture by Septimius Severus is represented on that emperor's arch in die Roman Forum. T h e city fell to the
513
Sasanians in the middle of the third century CE, and they moved the capital to the neighboring site of Coche. Excavations at Seleucia were conducted by the University of Michigan from 1927 through 1937 d by the University of Torino from 1964 through 1976 and from 1986 through 1989. T h e catalyst for die University of Michigan excava tions was a topographical study by Leroy Waterman that attempted to locate the Babylonian city of Opis. Arguing that the area of approximately 100 sq km (62 mi.) covered by die mounds surrounding the prominent artificial mound called Tell TJmar was too large for a Babylonian city, he identified the site as Seleucia, whose population Pliny gave as 600,000. The Michigan excavations were the first delib erately to target a Greek city in Mesopotamia. The excavators established the general outline of the city plan by a contour survey and air photography, showing that die city was laid out on a grid plan of Hippodamean type. T h e blocks are the largest used in the Hellenistic world (144.70 X 72.35 m). A canal running through the center of the city seems to have divided a largely public northern sec tor from a primarily residential southern area. One large square in die northern sector is bounded on die west by a long, narrow mud-brick building housing official Seleucid archives and on die north by Tell TJmar. A second square enclosed die two structures the American expedition iden tified as temples. T h e Hellenistic remains, heavily overlaid by those of the Parthian city, are extremely fragmentary. It is nonetheless striking that essentially no typically Greek structures have been identified. T h e locations of an agora and theater remain uncertain. It seems unlikely that Seleu cia, founded as die capital of a Greek ldngdom, should have lacked a theater, as one was built in nearby Babylon. The Michigan excavator Clark Hopldns's identification of re mains in the southern part of the city as those of a tiieater have not been confirmed, and the suggestion made by the Italian excavator Antonio Invernizzi that Tell 'Umar was originally the theater of die Greek city, tiiough probable, remains hypotiietical. T h e early history of Tell 'Umar has been obscured by Parthian rebuilding and the Sasanian con struction of a defensive tower surrounded by a wall. T h e two structures tentatively identified as temples are square enclosures tiiat are formally related to temples in both Iran and Syria and may date to the Parthian period. a n
The American excavations were concentrated in three ar eas: On Tell 'Umar, in a nearby block that held a building of uncertain function, and in a residential block in the south ern part of the city. T h e Italians have worked primarily in the Archives building, with some soundings in the southern part of the city. The plan of only the latest phase of the building excavated by Michigan near Tell 'Umar can be established with any degree of certainty; it shows a series of rooms around an open court, with elaborate provisions for drainage in one section. T h e architect considered it a Partitian villa. An in-
514
SELEUCIDS
scription of an uncertain Seleucid ruler reused in the later phase of the structure seems to show the existence of a Seleucid hereon (i.e., a shrine to a heroized founder of the city); Hopkins argued that the building should be identified as that heroon. It differs, however, from known Hellenistic heroa.
During the Seleucid period, the building excavated by Michigan in the southern part of the city housed private and official archives. T h e block contained one or more large res idences with shops on the street facades and a number of small rooms arranged around larger rooms and courts. Col umns are still used in level III; built during the period of Parthian rule (142 E C E - 4 3 C E ) , but disappear thereafter. The next phase is characterized by the presence of iwam (large rooms open to one side), an architectural form probably developed in Mesopotamia in the first century B C E that fig ures prominently in Parthian and Sasanian architecture. Ar chitectural decoration in stucco, such as figured capitals and coverings for walls and vaults with abstract patterns, is re lated to drat known at Uruk and Assur. That the inhabitants of this block were not entirely Greek, or at least did not adhere to Greek customs, is shown by the presence of burials in walls and under the floors of the res idential area, a continuation of a Babylonian practice. T h e method of burial varies. Some bodies were simply interred in walls and under floors, but most were placed in jars or coffins of pottery or baked brick. Vaulted family tombs oc cur thorough level II (approximately 43-118 CE) but dis appear entirely in the latest phase. At least initially, the Greek settlers must have been buried outside the city. In any case, the number of burials found in block G6 does not seem large enough for its presumed population, suggesting that people of Greek extraction continued to be interred out side the city. Both archives end in 154-152 B C E . The documents, pre sumably written on papyrus, are lost, but tire clay bullae that sealed them survive, burnt in the fire that destroyed the buildings, a fire probably associated with the Parthian in vasion. The bullae provide valuable evidence about Seleucid administration and the economic life of the city: they give the titles of administrators and show, for example, the im portance of a tax on salt. During the Parthian period the archive building near Tell 'Umar was converted into a com mercial quarter that was used largely for the production and sale of terra-cotta figurines. Litde monumental art has been found at Seleucia, but large numbers of terra-cotta figurines and the images on the bullae give some indication of its creative vitality in the Hel lenistic period. It is of interest that figurines that are Greek in style and subject appear alongside Near Eastern types throughout the Parthian period. Seleucia was a major force in establishing Hellenism in Mesopotamia, and it remained a creative center in the Parthian period. [See also Ctesiphon; Parthians; Ptolemies; and Seleucids.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Downey,
Susan
B . Mesopotamian
Religious
Architecture:
Alexander
through the Parthians. Princeton, 1 9 8 8 . Survey a n d analysis of N e a r Eastern religious architecture dating after t h e Greek conquest a n d utilizing M e s o p o t a m i a n forms; includes a chapter o n Seleucia. Invernizzi, A n t o n i o , et al. In Ijz terra tra i duefiumi,
pp. 8 7 - 1 4 1 . Turin,
1 9 8 5 . Well-illustrated exhibition catalog providing recent informa tion about Italian excavations at Seleucia a n d other cities in Iraq; includes a bibliography. M c D o w e l l , R o b e r t H a r b o l d . Stamped
and Inscribed
Objects from
Seleucia
on the Tigris. University of Michigan Studies, H u m a n i s t i c Series, vol. 3 6 . A n n Arbor, 1 9 3 5 . Includes the seals a n d bullae found in die Michigan excavations, a n d provides useful information o n t h e his tory and economy of die city. McDowell, Robert Harbold. Coins from Seleucia on the Tigris. Univer sity of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series, vol. 3 7 . A n n Arbor, 1935-
Mesopotamia. T u r i n , 1 9 6 6 - . Journal containing reports of d i e Italian excavations at Seleucia o n the Tigris, as well as specialized articles on t h e finds (most in English). V a n Ingen, Wilhelmina. Figurines
from
Seleucia
on the Tigris.
University
of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series, vol. 4 5 . A n n Arbor, 1 9 3 9 . W a t e r m a n , L e r o y . Preliminary
Report
upon the Excavations
at Tel
Umar,
Iraq. A n n Arbor, 1 9 3 1 . W a t e r m a n , L e r o y . Second Tel Umar,
Preliminary
Report
upon
the Excavations
al
Iraq. A n n A r b o r , 1 9 3 1 . SUSAN B . D O W N E Y
SELEUCIDS. T h e Seleucid kingdom was founded by Seleucus Nicator ( G k , Seleukos Nikator), a general of Alex ander the Great. Seleucus was allotted part of the territories that had been under Alexander's control and then parti tioned. In 305 B C E , Seleucus I was crowned king of the Se leucid Empire. H e founded a dynasty that was to become very powerful in the eastern Mediterranean, ruling over the largest kingdom in the ancient Near East for most of the Hellenistic period. Whereas the Seleucid Empire was heterogeneous in its ethnic makeup, its Greek cities were populated mainly by their Greek colonizers, who preserved their Greek way of life. T h e Greek sttatum coexisted with the various ethne ("indigenous peoples"), who continued to worship their lo cal gods, kept their traditional languages, and maintained other specifically ethnic traits. Local coinage, for instance, was minted under the auspices of the Seleucid kings, but it expressed a great deal of the native heritage, as may be seen in local coins from Tyre and Sidon. Between Greeks and natives, a stratum of hellenists emerged. These people were syncretistic in all aspects of life. During most of the Hellenistic era, the Seleucids com peted with the Ptolemies of Egypt, especially over CoeleSyria. The two powers fought five wars between the end of the fourth and the third centuries B C E for the domination of Palestine, the so-called Syrian Wars. Toward the end of the third century, the Seleucids, as well as other powers in the
SELEUCIDS Near East, became more and more preoccupied with Rome, which had begun to intervene in the region's affairs. In 204/203 B C E , Antiochus III, one of tlie great Seleucid kings, made a pact with Philip V of Macedon to divide Egyptian possessions overseas between them. This evinced a Roman reaction that resulted in tlie Second Macedonian War, which ended in a Macedonian defeat in 197 B C E . Rome subsequently defeated die Seleucids. Antiochus III invaded Greece but was defeated at Magnesia in 189 B C E . The treaty of Apamea, which marked the end of that war, and that ceded most of Asia Minor west of the Taurus mountains to Rome, signified a deeper involvement by the Romans in the affairs of the East. T h e defeat also signified the beginning of the decline of the Seleucid Empire. In 200 B C E , the Seleucids, under Antiochus III, managed to take Palestine from the Ptolemies in the battle at Panion. As a result, many concessions were granted to the Jews in Jerusalem, which led essentially to comprehensive religious autonomy. During tlie reign of Seleucus IV (c. 187-175 B C E ) , relations between the Seleucids and the Jews in Jeru salem worsened. This occurred primarily because the Hel lenistic high priests of Jerusalem convinced the Seleucids that the Jews should be hellenized. Severe restrictions on the religious autonomy of the Jews followed, initiated by Anti ochus IV Epiphanes in 167 B C E . T h e result was a revolt by the indigenous Jewish population against the Seleucids. By 170-169 B C E , Antiochus IV aspired to conquer Egypt, but during his second invasion he was forced by a Roman ulti matum to return to Syria. Antiochus IV died in 164 B C E , and his young son, Antiochus V, was subsequently murdered, in 162, in the midst of terrible intrigues at the Seleucid court. In 162 B C E , Demetrius, die son of Seleucus IV, escaped from Rome, where he had been kept as a hostage, and crowned himself Demettius I, ldng of the Seleucid Empire. Many struggles ensued, and he was finally killed in 150 B C E by another claimant to the Seleucid throne, Alexander Balas, who claimed to be the son of Antiochus IV. These struggles further weakened the Seleucid kingdom. Rome threw its support to Egypt and Alexander Balas in tiieir struggle against Demetrius I's son, Demetrius II. T h e Jews in Pal estine profited from these developments and, with tlie sup port of Rome, the Ptolemies, and Pergamon, succeeded in 143/42 B C E in declaring their independence from the Seleu cids. T h e last impressive figure in die Seleucid court was An tiochus VII Sidetes, son of Demetrius I. In one attempt to renew die grandeur of the Seleucid Empire, he invaded Pal estine, in 134 B C E . After laying siege to Jerusalem, he left, however, in 130, to fight die more important Partiiians in the East. Like most Hellenistic monarchs and princes, the Seleucids were tolerant of the indigenous cultures in lands they con quered and usually did not interfere in native cultures and religions. When they did, the result was disastrous (e.g., the
515
Maccabean revolt). During the Seleucid period, there is ev idence for the continuity of local religions and of writing in Neo-Babylonian as well as in Aramaic and Hebrew and other Eastern languages. T h e Seleucids also supported their Greek population and encouraged the foundation of Greek cities throughout their realm. One such example was ± e founding of their new capital, Seleucia, on the Tigris River, which they erected just 37 km (60 mi.) from the old tradi tional capital, Babylon. For the Greek population, the Se leucids posed as Greek deities, while for the natives they were local gods. T h e Seleucids supported literary activities that praised and legitimized their own deeds through a reinterpretation of the past. Authors like Megasthenes and Berossus flourished in the culuiral centers of the Seleucid kingdom. Berossus's Babyloniaca, apparently written at the beginning of the third cenmry B C E , is a typical Seleucid in terpretation of Babylonian history. Seleucid administration was based on the old Persian di vision into satrapies. T h e chief administrator of the satrapy was a strategos (at first called a satrap). The stralegoi were at times also "high priests" (cf. the Hefzibah inscription from 199/98 B C E ) . This gave them authority over the temples and priesthoods in their domains. There are cases of a local leader being placed at the head of the satrapy. T h e strategos was assisted by an oikonomos, who was responsible for the satrapy's financial activities and for the king's property. T h e Seleucid king was the head of state and was assisted by a council of philoi ("friends"). T h e highest offical was the epi ton pragmaton,
who was assisted by the dioiketes,
a
financial administrator. T h e latter function could be found in both the central and local governments. An oikonomos at the court was responsible for the king's treasury. Instead of the oikonomos, we later find a magistrate called epi ton prosodon (the one responsible for the income of the ldng). T h e Seleucids usually chose their philoi and other administrators from among the Greek (i.e., Macedonian) stratum of soci ety. Because the Seleucid Empire was so vast, the Seleucids had, in addition to their new capital in Seleucia on the Tigris, other centers, such as Antioch on Orontes and Sardis. The end of the Seleucid kingdom came witii Rome's con quest of the East in the 60s B C E . [See also Antioch on Orontes; Ptolomies; Sardis; and Se leucia on the Tigris.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Astin, A. E., et al., eds. The Cambridge Hellenistic
World;
Ancient
vol. 7.2, The Rise of Rome
and the Mediterranean
History,
vol. 7.1, The
to 220 B.C.; vol. 8,
Rome
to 133 B.C. 2d ed. C a m b r i d g e , 1989.
Bilde, P e r , et al., eds. Religion
and Religious
Practice
in the Seleucid
King
dom. Aarhus, 1 9 9 0 . K u h r t , Amelie, a n d Susan Sherwin-White, eds. Hellenism in the East. Berkeley, 1987. Sherwin-White, Susan, and Amelie K u h r t . From Samarkhand to Sardis. London, 1 9 9 3 . DORON MENDELS
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SELLIN, ERNST
SELLIN, ERNST (1867-1946), German scholar of Old Testament studies and biblical archaeologist. Born in Altschwerin, Mecklenburg, Sellin studied Protestant theology and then worked as a high school teacher in Parchim, a city close to his birthplace, from 1892 until 1894. After qualifying as a lecturer in 1894, he taught Old Testament in Erlangen. He was appointed an associate professor of Old Testament in Vienna in 1897 and became a full professor there in 1899. Between 1908 and 1921, he held chairs in Rostock, Kiel, and finally in Berlin, his last post until he retired in 1935. He died in Epichnellen near Eisenach. Sellin published numerous works on topics relating to the religion of ancient Israel (1896-1897), on Job (1919) and on "Second Isaiah" (1908). He also wrote monographs on Zerubbabel (1898), Gilgal (1917), Shechem (1922), and Moses (1922), a commentary on the minor prophets (1922), and a two-volume history of Israel (1924 and 1932). His most famous work is an introduction to Old Testament lit erature (Einleitung in das Alte Testament), which saw many editions after its first appearance in 1910. This handbook was later republished by L. Rost (1959) and G. Fohrer (1965). The only scholar of Old Testament studies of his gener ation to do fieldwork in biblical archaeology, Sellin directed the German excavations at Ta'anach (1901-1904) and at Jericho (1907-1909). In 1913-1914 he worked at Shechem, to which he returned in 1926-1927 and 1934. His work there was interrupted not only by World War I but also by an intrigue against him and was eventually halted because of the political situation in Germany. While his first excava tions were well published for the standards of the time, the results of the Shechem project were never properly pre sented: the manuscript of the final publication was burned in an allied air raid over Berlin in fall 1943. Sellin's prelim inary reports on Shechem in die Zeitschrift des Deutschen Pa ldstina-Vereins between 1926 and 1941 are, however, of great value, His fieldwork and his publications made Sellin the leading German scholar in the field of biblical archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century. [See also
Jericho; Shechem;
Ta'anach.]
and
BIBLIOGRAPHY Writings by Sellin Beitrdge
sur
israelitischen
und jiidischen
Religionsgeschichte.
Leipzig,
1896-1897. Senibbabel:
Ein Beitrag
der Entstehung Tell Ta'annek. Das Rdtsel Einleitung Jericho:
zur Geschichte
des Judentums.
der messianischen
Erwarlung
und
Leipzig, 1 8 9 8 .
Vienna, 1 9 0 4 .
des Deuterojesajanischen in das Alte
Die Ergebnisse
Testament.
Bitches.
Leipzig, 1 9 0 8 .
Leipzig, 1 9 1 0 .
derAusgrabungen
(with Carl W a t z i n g e r ) . Leipzig,
1913. Gilgal: Ein Beitrag
sur Geschichte
der Einwanderung
Leipzig, 1 9 1 7 . Das Problem
des Hiobbuches.
Leipzig, 1 9 1 9 .
Israels in
Palastina.
Mose
und seine Bedeulung
fur die israelitisch-jiidische
Religionsgeschichte.
Leipzig, 1 9 2 2 . Wie wurde
Sichem
cine israelitische
Das Zwolfprophetenbuch. Geschichte
Stadt.
Leipzig, 1 9 2 2 .
Leipzig, 1 9 2 2 .
des israelitisch-jiidischen
Volkes,
" D i e A u s g r a b u n g v o n S i c h e m . " Zeitschrift
2 vols. L e i p z i g , 1 9 2 4 - 1 9 3 2 . des Deutschen
Palastina-
Ver-
eins 4 9 ( 1 9 2 6 ) : 2 2 9 - 2 3 6 , 3 0 4 - 3 2 0 ; 5 0 ( 1 9 2 7 ) : 2 0 5 - 2 1 1 , 2 6 5 - 2 7 4 . " D i e M a s s e b e n des El-Berit in S i c h e m . " Zeitschrift ldstina-Vereins
des Deutschen
Pa
51 (1928): 119-123.
" D r e i u m strittene Stellen des A m o s b u c h e s . " Zeitschrift Paldstina-Vereins
des
Deutschen
5 2 (1929): 141-148.
" Z u r L a g e von E z i o n - G e b e r . " Zeitschrift
des Deutschen
Paldstina-Ver
eins 5 9 ( 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 2 3 - 1 2 8 . " K u r z e r vorlaufiger Bericht iiber die A u s g r a b u n g e n in baldta im
Herbst
1934."
Zeitschrift
des Deutschen
(Sichem)
Paldstina-Vereins
64
(1941): 1-20. " D i e palastinischen K r u g h e n k e l mit d e n K o n i g s s t e m p e l n . " des Deutschen
Paldstina-Vereins
" Z u d e m G o l d s c h m u c k f u n d v o n S i c h e m . " Zeitschrift ldstina-Vereins
Zeitschrift
66 (1943): 216-232. des Deutschen
Pa
6 6 (1943): 20-24. VOLKMAR FRITZ
SEMITIC LANGUAGES. Since at least the fourth millennium BCE, the Semitic languages, which constitute a relatively close-knit linguistic family, have occupied core ar eas of western Asia (Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and tire Arabian Peninsula). They extended their presence at some point into coastal and highland Ethiopia and, more recently, into substantial parts of northern Africa. As is becoming increasingly evident, the Semitic language family in turn is related to a much more widespread, highly differentiated Afro-Asiatic superfamily whose members, beside Semitic, are Egyptian (the Nile valley, from the Delta to the first cataract); Berber (North Africa, from Libya to Morocco, and, at least since the domestication of the camel, south into the deep Sahara); Cushitic (more than fifty languages from the Red Sea hills and the Horn of Africa, down the Rift Valley into Tanzania); Omotic (several dozen languages in southwest Ethiopia, perhaps to be counted as Western Cushitic); and Chadic (Hausa in northern Nigeria and more than two hundred other languages roughly in the Lake Chad watershed). The close resemblance of the Semitic languages is obvious on casual inspection of cognate lexical, phonological, and grammatical data. For lexical resemblance note, for exam ple, the word for dog in Akkadian kalbum, Hebrew keleb, Aramaic kalba, Arabic kalbun, and Ge ez (Ethiopic) kalb— to give just a sample. (For more detailed phonological and grammatical resemblances, see below.) It had long been speculated (since the Jewish grammarians of the Middle Ages at least) that the special resemblances such as exist among the Semitic languages could only be explained as the result of a long process of historical development, whereby an ancestral speech community gradually broke u p into communities with similar, but increasingly distinct lan guages. Lexical evidence for the relatedness of Afro-Asiatic c
SEMITIC LANGUAGES is much sparser, but over the last century there has been a slow accumulation of cognates, such as the word for "die": Akkadian mut-, Egyptian m(w)t, Berber emmdt, Hausa mutu. Even more striking have been a number of grammatical cor respondences. Compare, for example, with the Akkadian pronouns given in table 6 below, the following pronominal forms of Cushitic Oromo: ani " I , " ati "you" (sg.), isa "him," is.ee "her," mi "we," isin "you" (pi.), isaani "they." Semitic languages already hold a unique position in their own right within the smdy of language evolution because their early development, differentiation, and often palimp sestlike diffusion pattern (one Semitic language frequently replaced an earlier member of the same family) coincided in period and area with the elaboration of the earliest writing systems. As a result, the Semitic languages offer a unique record of textual attestation of the process of language di versification. Beyond this—on die level of Afro-Asiatic— Egyptian, although it remains relatively uniform at any given period, has a history of written attestation that goes back at least as far as that of Semitic. T h e other Afro-Asiatic lan guages are attested only in modern times, but their differ entiation and spread guarantee a time depth that places Se mitic into a perspective of recorded and reconstructable history stretching far back into the Near Eastern and East African Neolithic. This survey will offer first a broad overview of the tem poral and geographic distribution of the historically attested Semitic languages. It will then characterize in outline form some of the major phonological and grammatical features of Semitic. Finally, one possible scenario, or model, will be sketched for die family's origin, initial differentiation, and spread. T h e Evidence. A mass of material widely disttibuted ge ographically and chronologically over the ancient and mod ern Near East provides the evidence for the evolution and diversification of the Semitic language family. The main clusters follow. Akkadian. Texts in Akkadian are abundantiy attested in Mesopotamia and peripheral regions from the mid-third millennium onward. They are written on thousands of clay tablets in the cuneiform logographic-syllabic system the speakers of Old Akkadian adapted from the Sumerians. Even before the first real Akkadian texts, Akkadian proper names and Akkadian loanwords in early Sumerian texts show tiiat Akkadians were present in Mesopotamia almost from die beginnings of Sumerian writing early in the tliird millennium. Akkadian in its Northern and Southern dialect forms, Assyrian and Babylonian, continued as a living, evolving language (through stages conventionally schema tized as Old, Middle, and Neo-) down into the first millen nium B C E . In the second millennium B C E , Akkadian was widely used throughout western Asia as an international lan guage of scholarship and correspondence. In the course of the first millennium B C E , Akkadian was gradually replaced
517
by Aramaic as a spoken language, but some texts continued to be written in Akkadian into the first century CE. [See Ak kadian.] Eblaite. A couple of centuries after the first Old Akkadian texts in Mesopotamia, for a period of about two centuries, another Semitic language used a related, but distinct adap tation of the cuneiform writing system in the nordiern Syr ian city of Ebla. Although most of the many tablets recentiy discovered at this site are in Sumerian, a variety of text genres are written in die local language, which is Semitic and certainly not identical with any known variety of Ak kadian. A better understanding of the language will be nec essary to determine exactly its genetic relationship to Ak kadian. [See Ebla Texts.] Amorite. No texts are preserved in Amorite, a variety of Semitic. Its existence is inferred from a large, recognizably distinct corpus of proper names in texts (about six thou sand) tiiat are otherwise Akkadian or Sumerian, from the late third through the first half of die second millennium. Appearing first as foreigners, bearers of these names come to represent a widespread, stable segment of the population in Akkadian-using Mesopotamia and Syria. Indeed, several ruling dynasties in the Mesopotamian heartland in the early second millennium B C E , including tiiat of Hammurabi, bear names of this kind. Because the bearers of tiiese names, when they are ethnically identified, are sometimes referred to as Sumerian mar-tu (Akk., amurru, "westerners"), the language (or group of languages) represented by these names is called generically Amorite (from die related biblical term). [See Amorites.] Old Canaanite. T h e label Old Canaanite is used here as a cover term for a heterogeneous set of materials yielding evidence for the linguistic situation in Palestine, for the most part in the second and third quarters of the second millen nium BCE. Linguistically, some of diis material may overlap widi what is referred to above as Amorite. Most of the ma terial is scattered through Akkadian and, to a lesser extent, Egyptian texts originating in or referring to the Syro-Pal estinian area. It takes the form of personal names, place names, glosses, loanwords, morphological forms, and syn tactic caiques. The most important corpus of Akkadian texts, preserved at el-Amarna in Egypt, is the archive of mid-second millennium diplomatic correspondence with the Egyptian court from local rulers in Syria-Palestine. T o be assigned provisionally to this group also are the earliest alphabetic inscriptions, approximately contemporary with die Akkadian and Egyptian texts just mentioned and only partially interpretable, found in Palestine and in the Sinai Desert. [See Amarna Tablets; Canaanites; Proto-Canaanite; and Proto-Sinaitic] Ugaritic. The North Syrian site of Ras-Shamra has yielded a corpus of more titan a thousand texts, dating from just after the middle of the second millennium B C E and writ ten in a locally developed writing system that is cuneiform
518
SEMITIC LANGUAGES
in shape but genuinely alphabetic in design and function. Given the uncertainties surrounding Eblaite, and the very sketchy nature of the Amorite and Old Canaanite material, Ugaritic gives the first clear view of a Western Semitic lan guage. The relationship of Ugaritic to Canaanite proper has been intensively discussed but cannot be considered settled. [See Ugaritic; Ugarit Inscriptions.] Hebrew. The main evidence for Hebrew here is of course die text of the Hebrew Bible, to which can be added a small corpus of epigraphic materials in Hebrew and some limited inscriptional materials in the closely related Moabite, Am monite, and Edomite languages. Together with Phoenician, these languages are the linguistic continuation of Old Ca naanite. Even after the homogenization of the text by later editors, die Hebrew Bible shows a succession of stages of development of Palestinian Semitic from the very end of the second millennium up to the last centuries of the first mil lennium. By the time of the latest biblical Plebrew texts, Plebrew had already been, for a century or more, in the process of being replaced as a spoken language in Palestine by Ar amaic—a process that had surely gone to completion by the beginning of the second century CE. A standardized form of a final stage of Hebrew remained as a liturgical and scho lastic language through Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and on into modern times. Finally, in a unique development in language history, Hebrew, revived for general use in the nineteenth cenmry, has once more entered the list of spoken languages—with all the unforeseeable linguistic results that that entails. [See Hebrew Language and Literature.] Phoenician. Because of the abundance and widespread distribution of its inscriptions and the influence of its writing system, special notice must be taken of a close northern rel ative of Hebrew. Phoenician began to be attested in what is now coastal Lebanon late in the second millennium B C E and continued there and in various Mediterranean sites until Ro man times. Punic is a variety of Phoenician attested in in scriptions from the North African colony of Carthage from its founding in the fifth century BCE to its destruction by Rome in the second century BCE. Punic continued to be writ ten in various locations in North Africa up until tlie fifth century CE. [See Phoenician-Punic] Old/Official Aramaic. A very large number of closely related languages is grouped under tlie heading of Aramaic. T h e group's literary and epigraphic output constitutes, after Arabic, the largest corpus of writing in Semitic. Old Aramaic inscriptions are first attested in North Syria and Mesopo tamia in die ninth century B C E , and die beginning of a grad ual aramaicization of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine can be dated from this period. A standardized form of Aramaic became an official language of the Persian Empire and was used for written communication all over the Near East— including parts of some late additions to the Hebrew Bible (Ezra).
Middle Aramaic. During the Seleucid and Roman pe riods, Aramaic continued to be used for inscriptional pur poses in a number of localities, including some where the language and ethnic affiliation of the local population was probably Northern Arabic (Nabatean, Palmyrene). A cor pus of religious literature in Aramaic continued to be de veloped in Palestine: Bible translations (targums) and the Aramaic texts from Qumran. [See Nabatean Inscriptions; Palmyrene Inscriptions; Qumran.] Late Aramaic. Apart from the evidence of the continued use of Aramaic in Mesopotamia ("magic bowls," texts of the Gnostic baptist sect of the Mandaeans [see Mandaic]), the period from the third to the seventh centuries C E saw a massive development of religious writing in Western and Eastern varieties of Aramaic, first in a Jewish milieu (the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and related writings), and then in a Christian one (Christian Palestinian and, es pecially, Syriac literamre). Although Aramaic remained a spoken language in some of these communities after the sev enth cenmry, a standard form of Late Aramaic continued a more general existence in its own right in Christian and Jew ish contexts as a language of liturgy and religious scholar ship, much as was the case for Hebrew. Neo-Aramaic. Although Aramaic was gradually replaced by Arabic throughout much of its former territory, in those areas where the dominant Islamic groups were Kurdish speaking (in what is now northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey), Aramaic was often retained as the primary spoken language by urban and village Jewish and Christian communities. In addition, a couple of moun tain villages not far from Damascus, Syria, also retained a unique Western form of Neo-Aramaic. From the point of view of morphology and syntax, the Neo-Aramaic dialects have to be counted as the most thoroughly transformed Se mitic languages ever attested—more so, for example, tiian any modern Ethiopian Semitic language. It can be shown, however, that many, if not most, of the deviations from the Semitic "norm" are continuations of tendencies observable in some of the earliest forms of Aramaic. [See Aramaic Lan guage and Literature,] Old Northern Arabic. Thousands of short graffiti writ ten in a Southern variant of the general ancestral West Se mitic alphabet have been found scattered over the Syrian and, especially, northern Arabian desert, generally dated be tween the sixth century B C E and the fourth century C E . Fre quentiy little more than apersonal name or pronoun and a nominal or verbal predicate, they are sufficient to show that tiiese are the earliest attestation of what was to become Classical Arabic. The most general type of the script is called Thamudic and was probably used to write a vari ety of dialects. Special local varieties, Dedanite and Lihy anite, arose in the Hijaz oasis of al-TJla. A subtype of Old Northern Arabic inscription known as Safaitic is espe-
SEMITIC LANGUAGES daily abundant in the southern Syrian desert in the latter half of this period. [See Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions; Dedan.] Classical Arabic. A few inscriptions from the fourth century B C E in a modified Nabatean Aramaic script, plus a body of oral poetry that had its origins in the same period are the precursors of Classical Arabic, which received its definitive form in the seventh century CE in the Qur'an. A written standard, purged of some of the more marked dialect forms of the Qur'an, was quickly elaborated, codified by grammarians and lexicographers, and spread as the official medium of communication of the new Arabic-Islamic ad ministrative structures. This written standard, which has produced a voluminous literature over the centuries, re mains the official language of literacy, public life, literate oral communication, and mass media in the Arabic-speaking world up to the present day. Modern Arabic. Spoken Arabic continued developing alongside the standard languages, in a well-studied relation ship called diglossia. Certain phonological, morphological, and syntactic simplifications and/or innovations are com mon to many varieties of Modern Arabic, but there has been enough differentiation that mutual intelligibility between spoken varieties at the geographic extremes can be quite limited. There are glimpses of these changes in process in some medieval texts (sometimes referred to as Middle Ar abic), especially those coming from Christian and Jewish Arabic-spealdng milieus less constrained by the norms of the Classical standard. [See Arabic] Old South Arabian. A large body of monumental texts from what is now Yemen reveals a subfamily of Semitic completely distinct from anything considered up to now. Written in an elegant monumental development of the South Semitic alphabet tiiat also appears in Old North Ar abic, the oldest inscriptions may be as early as the first third of the first millennium B C E . They testify to the political power and cultural achievements of the city-states along the spice route from south to north between the Yemeni high lands and the Arabian desert. There are marked differences between the languages (or dialects—it is difficult to tell) of the principal city-states: Ma'in, Saba', Qataban, Hadhramaut. T h e inscriptions continue into die sixth century C E , by which time Yemen had been politically unified, the center of power had moved to the highlands, and the Sabaean va riety of Old Soudi Arabian (perhaps no longer a spoken language) had replaced otiier varieties. [See South Arabian; Qataban; Hadhramaut.] Modern South Arabian. After a thirteen-hundred-year hiatus barely touched upon by scattered notices in Arab ge ographers, historians, and lexicographers, nineteenth-cen tury travelers and scholars discovered in die southern ex tremity of die Arabian Peninsula (eastern Yemen, western Oman, and some offshore islands) a half-dozen languages
519
and dialects of the South Arabian type. The most important languages are Mehri (widi the dialect Harsusi), Jibbali, and Soqotri—together they have fewer than one hundred thou sand speakers. Although they are clearly closely related to Old South Arabian (as well as to Ethiopian Semitic), it is not certain that the Modern South Arabian languages are linear descendants of any member of the older group. Re liable lexical and grammatical information about these lan guages is only now becoming available, and much work needs to be done before the historical development behind them becomes clear. Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez). Old South Arabian inscrip tions of the Sabaean type found in Ethiopia and dating from the fifth-century BCE trading colony show that there was a long-standing cultural and economic relationship between southern Arabia and Ethiopia. Accordingly, it is not sur prising to find in the Ethiopian highlands fourth-century C E inscriptions in a new variety of Semitic—written in a South Semitic script that seems in some respects closer to that of the Thamudic graffiti than the Old South Arabian monu mental inscriptions. Like Modern Soutii Arabian, Ethiopic (native designation, gdfoz, "Ge'ez") is related to, but not derivable from, any known variety of Old South Arabian. Shortly after the first unvocalized inscriptions, a unique sys tem of vocalization was introduced, and at the same time the Ethiopian court was converted to Christianity. A stan dard literary language was elaborated in the next couple of centuries (e.g., with a Bible translation, liturgical texts, and patristic excerpts); this language remains the official church and court language and was the only written language well up into the nineteenth century. Modern Ethiopic Semitic. The members of the group of Modern Semitic language—about a dozen, of them—dif fer at least as much from one another as do the members of the Romance family of languages. Two of these languages constitute a Northern group (Tigre and Tigrinya, one of the official languages of Eritrea); the rest form a fairly coherent Soutiiern group (Amharic, until recently the only official language of Ethiopia, Harari, Gaffat, Argobba; and a cluster of languages and dialects referred to as Gurage). Of all diese languages, only Tigrinya can be plausibly derived from Ge'ez, which thus cannot be identified with Proto-Ethiopic Semitic. [See Ethiopic] The very approximate time chart in figure I gives a rough summary of the distribution in time of attestation of the ma jor languages or groups of languages of the Semitic family. Figure i of course does not try to fix the point in time at which different varieties of Semitic come into existence, but only the period over which actual texts attest to die existence of a language or group of languages. In addition, the chart tries to delimit for some languages two additional types, or stages, of attestation. In a preliminary type of attestation (light stipple in figure i ) even though there is not a usable
520
SEMITIC LANGUAGES -3000
-2500 I
-2000 _l
-1500 I
Akkadian Ebla Amorite Ugaritic Old Canaanite Hebrew Phoenician/Punic Old Aramaic Middle Aramaic Late Aramaic Neo-Aramaic Old N. Arabic Classical Arabic Modern Arabic Old S. Arabian Modern S. Arabian Ge'ez
-1000 I
-500
500 I
1000 I
1500 I
2000 I
SUM
m m
Modern Etiriopic SEMITIC LANGUAGES.
Figure
i.
Chronological
corpus of texts, tiiere may still be evidence for the existence of the speech community in the form of personal names, references to the language or the ethnic group that speaks it in texts in other languages, and even sporadic and isolated attempts to write the language. In addition, as a kind of postexistence, it can be useful to distinguish a period when the language in question was su perceded as a living, spoken language by other languages but continued to be understood in a community, and per haps used as a (or even the only) medium of written com munication to generate new texts (dark stipple in figure i ) . It is of course difficult or impossible to determine at what point a community's spoken language no longer corre sponds to the written language: by definition there is no writ ten attestation of die former—thus, the location of the point of transition in figure i is somewhat arbitrary. Given the nature of written language, it is probable that a certain gap between written and spoken varieties of a language develops early on in most speech communities. In any case, there is clear evidence that in the absence of a relatively sudden re placement or notable transformation of the vernacular, the gap can become very wide indeed before speakers are willing or able to perceive a traditional vehicle of written commu nication as "not the same language as" tlie spoken one (cf. Latin in European Romania, Greek in Byzantium, or Arabic in the Near East). Phonological a n d G r a m m a t i c a l Features. Compara tive Semitic linguistics has been engaged for more tiian a century in the twin tasks of gathering data about the range of phonological, lexical, and grammatical phenomena in the
distribution
of the Semitic
languages.
attested Semitic languages and inferring from this evidence the corresponding features of Proto-Semitic, the language of the parent Semitic speech community. Phonological features. In the realm of phonology, the relevant primary data are cognate sets—that is, sets of lexical items whose resemblance in meaning and form is of such a kind that it is highly unlikely that it could have arisen either by chance or by borrowing; die sets are much more likely to represent material inherited from an ancestral speech community. (Historical linguistics can only deal with prob abilistic judgments, although this probability can sometimes be very high.) Finding such cognate sets in Semitic is a much simpler process than in many other domains of historical linguistics, given die relatively close relationships of the member languages. One such particularly obvious set is the one already alluded to: Akkadian kalbum "dog," Flebrew keleb "dog," Aramaic kalba "dog," Arabic kalbun "dog," and Ge'ez kalb "dog." From the pattern of occurrence of phonemes in this and interlocking cognate sets like the Ar abic kullun = Hebrew hoi "all," or tlie Akkadian libbum and Ge'ez fobb "heart," general correspondence sets can be in ferred: Akkadian /k/ = Hebrew /k/ = Aramaic /k/ = Arabic /k/ = Ge'ez /k/, Akkadian /l/ = Hebrew /l/ = Aramaic /l/ = Arabic /l/ = Ge'ez /l/, Akkadian /b/ = Hebrew /b/ = Aramaic Pol = Arabic /b/ = Ge'ez /b/, Akkadian /a/ = Hebrew /e/ = Aramaic /a/ = Arabic /a/ = Ge'ez /a/. T h e cognate sets and correspondence sets together then permit a number of con clusions: that Proto-Semitic had the four phonemes /*k/, /*1/, /*b/ /*a/; that Proto-Semitic had the stems *kalb-, "dog"; *kull- "all," *libb- "heart," and so forth. (The asterisk
SEMITIC LANGUAGES T A B L E 1. Stop Consonants
of Semitic
Akk.
Ugr.
Heb.
Syr.
Ar.
OSA
Jib.
Gez.
PSem.
Labial
P b
P b
P b
P b
f b
f b
f b
f b
*P *b
Alveolar
t d t
t d t
t d t
t d t
t d t
t d t
t d t
t d t
*t *d *t
Velar
k
k
k
k
k
k
k
k
*k
g q
g q
g q
g q
g q
g q
g q
g q
*g *q
On the other hand, the situation becomes much more complex with the spirants—a part of the phonology where the Semitic languages show a larger number of distinctions than is common in the world's languages. As can be seen from table 3 , there is also evidence of a great deal of diver gent and independent phonological change. Parenthesized symbols in quotes in table 3 indicate that a language's or thography has a distinct symbol for a segment (and, hence, presumably had a distinct phoneme at one point) whose pronunciation has since merged with that of another seg ment; " s " , " s " , and " s " are the conventional transcription symbols for the "s-like" phonemes of Old South Arabian (die superscripts correspond roughly to order of frequency); " 6 " and " 8 " are like " t h " in the English "thin" and "then," respectively; " i " is a voiceless [1]. Note that because of the interlocking correspondence sets, even without the Southern Arabian material the reconstruction of nine Proto-Semitic spirants would be obligatory, even tiiough no one language makes more tiian eight distinctions (Ugaritic, Syriac, and Arabic—versus five for Ge'ez and Hebrew and four for Ak kadian). However, all nine distinctions are present in the most conservative branch of Semitic, Southern Arabian— graphically in Old South Arabian and pronounced in Middle Soutii Arabian. With some reservations the pronunciation of one variety of Middle South Arabian is assigned to ProtoSemitic. It is beginning to look increasingly possible, how ever, that the pronunciation of the segment noted /*s/, far and away the most common of the " s " sounds, might in fact have been [s] (as in Arabic), and the series noted /*s *z *s/ might be the affricates [ts dz tsi]. 1
means that the form is not directly attested but is recon structed.) Of course not all correspondence sets are identity sets like the consonantal ones just used. Without going through the cognate sets that justify them, tables 1 - 4 give the major cor respondence sets denning the Proto-Semitic (PSem) con sonant system, using the languages Akkadian (Akk.), Uga ritic (Ugr.), Hebrew (Heb.), Syriac (Syr.), Arabic (Ar.), Old South Arabian (OSA), Jibbali G i b . , Modern South Ara bian), and Ge'ez (Gez.). T h e stop consonants are given in table 1 , in the order voiceless, voiced, and emphatic. The latter feature is realized as pharyngealized in Arabic (i.e., produced with a simulta neous constriction of the throat in the velar-pharynx region), but glottalized in Modern South Arabian and Ethiopian Se mitic (i.e., produced with a coarticulated glottal stop)—for the other pronunciation traditions the situation is not cer tain. Scholars are increasingly of the opinion that pharyngealization is a special development in Arabic, and that the general Semitic pronunciation of emphatics was with glottalization. With the exception of tire voiceless labial, die cor respondence sets are of the identity kind, and the recon struction in Proto-Semitic poses no problems. It is noteworthy that a "southern tier" of languages has /f/ in place of the more northern /p/. T h e sonorants (see table 2 ) give an equally homogeneous and unproblematic picture. Here note that Ugaritic, Hebrew and other Canaanite lan guages, and Aramaic (and also Amorite) have /y/ in the ini tial position where the other languages have /w/—a feature sometimes adduced as a Nortiiwest Semitic isogloss (a shared feature among a group of languages).
2
Akk.
Ugr.
Heb.
Nasal
m n
m n
n
n
Liquid
1 r
1 r
1 r
1 r
w
y, w
Glide
y y
m
m
y, w y
Syr.
T A B L E 3.
Dental Arb.
OSA
m n
m n
1
1 r
y, w y
w y
Jib.
PSem.
n
n
*m *n
1 r
1
m
r w y
Gez, m
r
w y
* w
y
Spirants of Semitic
Alveolar
Ugr. H e b .
S y r . A r . O S A Jib. G e z .
s
1
s
s
s d
2
i
s("5")
t
?
s
z
s s
s
?
d
s
s
s
s
z
z
z
z
s
s
s
s
s
s
§
s("s") s
s
*s
s z s
s
s s
s z s
6
e
Lateral
s z s
z
s
t d t
Palataf
3
e s
z
*w
6
e s
s
8
s
*0
8
e
z
PSem.
s z s
0
s
*1 r
*y
3
Semitic languages tend also to have an unusually large inventory of consonantal distinctions in the postvelar or la ryngeal region. T h e most plausible reconsttuction assigns to Proto-Semitic the same set of laryngeals as in Ugaritic, Ar abic, Old South Arabian, and Middle South Arabian (see table 4 ) . Noteworthy here is the almost complete disap pearance of these characteristically "Semitic" consonants in Akkadian—presumably die result of language contact with laryngeal-poor Sumerian (the same phenomenon can be ob-
Akk. T A B L E 2. Sonorants of Semitic
521
s
*S *t)
?
*s?
("d")
522
SEMITIC LANGUAGES
T A B L E 4.
Laryngeah
of
Semitic
Akk. U g r . H e b . Syr. Ar. O S A Jib. G e z . velar/ uvular pharyngeal glottal
PSem.
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h("h")
9 0 0 9
y
t
y
r
7
T
h •j
h Y
h T
h ?
h T
h i
h l
*h
h ?
h ?
h ?
h ?
h ?
h ?
h ?
*h *?
*h
*
served in other Semitic languages in situations of language contact, such as Amharic within Ethiopic). Of the writing systems used to represent Semitic lan guages, only those used for Akkadian and Ethiopic have a built-in system of vowel representation. For the others, vowel representation is either virtually nonexistent (Old South Arabian, Phoenician), relatively limited (Ugaritic), optional (the other Western Semitic writing systems), or rel atively recent (almost a thousand years lapse between the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language and the fixing of the standard Masoretic vowel notation). Although there is much that is not known about the history of the vowel sys tems in some individual branches, the Proto-Semitic vowel system from which the attested systems derive seems to have been the following rather simple one: i
u a
T
u a
with three long and three short vowels, plus diphthongs /ay, aw/. This vowel system is preserved virtually intact in Clas sical Arabic, and with only slight modification in Akkadian. Where it interacts with stress and syllabic structure, as in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Modern South Arabian, tire result can be a relatively complex vowel system and set of vocalic alternations. No detailed history of the phonological development of the Semitic languages is possible without taking into account a good deal of additional evidence. However, an important general conclusion can already be pointed out on the basis of the data in tables 1 - 4 . Altirough there is a large number of parallel developments (/G/ ends up as /s7 in both Akkadian and Hebrew; /h h/ end up merging in Canaanite, Aramaic, and Ethiopic; and /i s7 merge in Akkadian, Arabic, and Uga ritic), the more evidence there is, the more it seems likely that each of the major branches of Semitic began its exis tence as a separate speech community with the Proto-Se mitic phoneme inventory virtually intact. It seems that they developed toward their historically attested forms as distinct (but perhaps mutually interacting) entities. On the level of phonology, thus, very little content can be given to such
traditional labels such as Northwest Semitic (for Canaanite and Aramaic) and South Semitic (for Arabic, South Ara bian, and Ethiopic) as designations for hypothetical inter mediate unified speech communities—however useful these terms may be for zones of greater mutual influence and in teraction. Grammatical features. In principle, grammatical fea tures should cover both morphological and syntactic fea tures. Comparative Semitic syntax, however, is an area of study that barely exists. Indeed, basic data collections can be hard to find even for the syntax of major stages of wellattested individual languages. Apart from an occasional dis cussion of so-called polarity switches in agreement patterns (e.g., the tendency for numerals agreeing with masculine nouns to have typically feminine morphology, and vice versa), the one topic regularly touched on in the literature is word order. T h e frequently repeated observation is that "verb, subject, object" seems to be the preferred sentencelevel word order in the earliest stages of Semitic. T h e two major exceptions seem to confirm tire rule: the "subject, ob ject, verb" order of Akkadian and Modern Ethiopic Semitic can be attributed to substtatum influences—Sumerian and Cushitic, respectively. Even in Akkadian, tire oldest onomastic evidence suggests an earlier "verb, subject, object" stage. The Semitic languages are, however, characterized by a rich inflectional and derivational morphology, and a framework for comparative Semitic morphology has been steadily built up over the last century. Noun. T h e inflectional categories of the noun are illus trated in table 5 , which gives tire nominal paradigms for the two languages with the best-preserved systems, Akkadian (sarruml'sarratum "king/queen") and Arabic {ffalim(at)un "wise man/woman"). As for the other languages, the data on nominal inflection are obscured by the writing system, partially in Ugaritic and almost totally in Old South Arabian, whereas the system has undergone considerable simplifica tion in Canaanite, Aramaic, Middle South Arabian, and Ge'ez. As can be seen from the table, Semitic has two gram matical genders, with the feminine frequently marked by a suffix -(a)t (in addition to a number of less common ones). The core of the case system for Proto-Semitic seems clear: nominative *-w; genitive *-?; and accusative *-a in the sin gular, and nominative *-«, and oblique *-ily in the dual and plural. T h e Proto-Semitic status of some other cases mar ginally attested in some of the individual languages is less certain. In its fullest form Semitic distinguishes three num ber categories, altirough the dual, marked basically by -a, either becomes reduced in scope (with fewer case distinc tions and limited to a small number of nouns) or disappears altogether in the course of the history of each of the branches. The basic mark of the plural in Semitic, when it is formed by suffixation, is a lengthening of the first suffix vowel (the
SEMITIC LANGUAGES T A B L E 5.
Akkadian
and Arabic
Noun
523
Inflection
Akkadian
Arabic
Sg.
Du.
PI.
Sg.
Du.
PI.
Norn.
sarrum
sarrdn
sarru
ialimun
lalimani
Idlimuna
Gen.
sarrim
sarrin
sarri
'ialimin
lalimayni
'xalimina
Acc.
sarram
Masc.
tollman
Fem. Nom.
sarratum
Sarratdn
sarratum
Ialimatun
lalimatani
ialimatun
Gen.
sarratim
sarratin
sarratim
lalimatin
lalimatayni
idlimdtin
Acc.
sarratam
case vowel u or i for masculines; the vowel of the feminine suffix -at for feminines). In Arabic (and probably ProtoSemitic) there is an added suffix, -nV, in the nonsingular, where V is high (/ni/) after a low vowel (/a/) and low (/na/) after a high vowel (/ui/). This suffix shows up as -n in the Akkadian dual, as -n in Aramaic and as -m(V) in Canaanite and Ugaritic. In addition to suffix plurals, Semitic could also form plurals by changing the vowel pattern of a noun (with or without additional affixes). This is an inflectional process abundantly attested in the Soutiiern Semitic languages (Ar abic kilab and Ge'ez Sakbbt "dogs"), but also marginally in Hebrew, where it cooccurs with the usual plural suffix -Tm (klabvm).
Lastly, the singular nouns of table 5 show also one final suffix that has the shape -m in Akkadian (also in Old South Arabian) and -n in Arabic. This suffix eventually disappears in all the branches—it is no longer present in Modern Ara bic, Modern Southern Arabian, or the most recent dialects of Akkadian. Its function is not certain. It is not present, however, in Classical Arabic when the noun occurs with tire definite article prefix a/-, and it is not present in any lan guage when a noun is followed by a "possessor" noun (i.e., a noun in the genitive, if the language has preserved case): Arabic baytu "house," and malikun "king," but baytu al~ maliku "house of the king." Note that nouns in this position are said to be in the construct state. This construction exists in all branches of Semitic and is characterized by a gram matically (e.g., fewer case distinctions) and sometimes phonologically reduced version of the "possessed," or "gov erned," noun, which often forms some sort of accentual unit with tlie "governing" noun: Akkadian bitum "house," sar rum "ldng," but bit sarrim "house of the ldng"; and Hebrew bayit "house," melek "ldng," but bet melek "(a) king's house." Pronoun. Table 6 gives the principal pronomina para digms for two representative Semitic languages, Akkadian and Arabic. T h e independent pronouns are used in em phatic subject and predicate nominal function. T h e suffix pronouns are interpreted as possessives when attached to nouns and as objects when attached to verbs. In every
lalimatan
branch of Semitic only the first-person singular has a dif ferent form in these two functions (-f when possessive and -ni when object). The one major distinction between the two languages in table 6 is in the pronominal base for the thirdperson forms, masculine and feminine, singular and plural: s- versus h- (which sometimes becomes '-). This turns out to be a major isogloss in Semitic generally. All Old South Arabian languages except Sabean agree witii Akkadian in having s-; Sabean and the rest of the Semitic languages fol low Arabic—except for Middle Soutii Arabian, which has a mixture of both (sometimes h - in masculine and s- in fem inine forms). It is difficult to determine whether this alter nation is fundamentally morphological or phonological: that is, whether two different pronominal bases coexisted in Proto-Semitic, of which different branches generalized one or the other, or whether a mysteriously conditioned sound change s > h occurred. T h e latter possibility has certainly come to be the case in the branch that leads to Middle South Arabian, in which various languages show sporadic h < s correspondences in nonpronominal general vocabulary (cf. Soqotri hema?"hear" versus the common Semitic *sama'i-). Finally, the Semitic languages tend to use the same conso-
T A B L E 6.
Akkadian
and Arabic
Pronouns
Akkadian
Arabic PI.
Sg.
PI.
Sg.
anaku
nlnu
lana
nahnu
Independent 1 2 masc.
atta
attunu
lanta
lantum
2 fem.
atti
attina
'land
lantimna
3 masc.
su
sunu
huwa
hum
si
Una
hiya
hunna
3 fem. Suffix 1
-1,
-ni
-i,
2 masc.
-ka
-kunu
-ka
-hum
2 fem.
-ki
-kina
-ki
-kunna
3 masc.
-Su
-sunu
-hit
-hum
3 fem,
~si
-Una
-ha
-hunna
-ni
-ni
-na
524
SEMITIC LANGUAGES
nant both as third-person pronominal base and as prefix for the causative form of tire verb: Akkadian hi " h e " -salbas "cause to dress," Arabic huwa, Salbas (cf. Old North Arabic hlbs). Ugaritic, with hw " h e " sM "cause to dress," seems to show a transitional stage (but in which direction?). Verb. Although each Semitic language has its own system of verbal inflection, there is a common core of categories and formal processes visible in the different systems. It per mits a fairly accurate approximation of the essential features of the protosystem. In all Semitic languages, finite verb par adigms can be analyzed into two subparadigms: one subparadigm marks the subject affixes; the other subparadigm accounts for the stem form and marks the combination of root, derived stem, and tense mode. The subject subparadigms divide the verb forms into two inflectional classes: those marking tire verbal subject with prefixes (plus supplemental suffixes for distinctions of gen der and number), and those marking the verbal subject with suffixes only. Table 7 gives these subject-marking subpar adigms for three languages that among them cover most of the range of forms resconstructable for Proto-Semitic sub ject marking: Ugaritic, Canaanite, and Aramaic in general follow the Arabic pattern; Middle South Arabian follows the Ge'ez—Old South Arabian, with its huge corpus of inscrip tions formulated solely in the third person (singular, dual, and plural), cannot be classified. In Akkadian, the prefixing subparadigm is used with different stems for the past tense (ta-lbas "she wore"), the present tense (ta-labbas "she wears"), and the jussive (ta-lbas "may she wear"). T h e suf fixing subparadigm is used only with a form generally termed stative (labs-at "she is dressed"). In Arabic and Ge'ez the prefixing form is also used with the present tense and
the jussive (Ar.
ta-lbas-u,
ta-lbas;
Gez.
td-labbds-i,
differ very little from one another, and presumably all con tinue fairly directly an ancestral Proto-Semitic system. T h e suffixing subparadigms, however, seem to be subject to a certain amount of transformation. In the first place, the firstand second-person suffix forms, especially in the Akkadian, look very much like reduced enclitic forms of the indepen dent pronouns given in table 6, with the -a- perhaps as some Uniting element. T h e third-person forms, on tire other hand, look like elements from the nominal inflection—as a matter of fact, the Akkadian stative can be formed on the basis of any noun or adjective (e.g., damq-at "she is good," sarr-aku "I am king"). The major difference in the Arabiclike lan guages (Canaanite, Aramaic) is that the -k 1- alterna tions in the paradigm have been leveled out in favor of -r-, whereas in Ge'ez and Middle South Arabian they have been leveled out in favor of -k-. As was pointed out by Robert Hetzron (1976), this is important evidence in favor of the temporal priority of an Akkadianlike system over the other two. It is now widely supposed therefore that tire ProtoSemitic system resembled the Akkadian one, and that the Western Semitic past tense evolved out of something like a verbal adjective with enclitic reduced pronouns. The second set of subparadigms governs the shape of the stem to which the subject affixes are attached. T h e essential features of this system are shown in table 8, where Akkadian and Ge'ez illustrate eastern and southern varieties of Se mitic, and where Arabic illustrates the state of affairs in a central group including Canaanite and Aramaic. In table 8 it can be seen that all branches have a jussive at some point (this becomes marginal in Canaanite and disappears in Ar amaic). The verbal form of the jussive is, as far as is known, homophonous with the past tense in Akkadian. Each of the branches also has a specialized past tense, however (called Past_2 in table 8), which has the form of the jussive. In Arabic the jussive with lam, "not," is the ordinary negative past tense: talbas, "may she wear"; lam talbas, "she did not wear." In Hebrew this is the so-called waw-consecutive
t&-
"she wears," "may she wear"), but the suffixing form is used with an innovated past tense, homologous with the Akkadian stative (Ar. labis-at, Gez. lab(d)s-at "she wore"). Ibas-i
As can be seen from table 7, the prefixing subparadigms
T A B L E 7. Akkadian,
Arabic, and Ge'ez Verb Subject Akkadian
Arabic
Ge'ez
Sg.
PL
Sg.
PI.
atata- . . . -T ita-
nita- . . . -a ta- . . . - a i- . . . -u -a
atata- . . . -T yata-
natatayata-
-dku -ata -dti
-anu -atunu -atina -u -a
-tu -ta -ti -a -at
-nci -turn -timna -u -na
Sg.
PI.
t3ts- . . . -i y3ts-
not3- . . . -u ts- . . . -a ya- • • . -u ya- . . . -a
-ka -ka -ki -a -at
-na -ksmmu -kan -u -a
Prefixing/Suffixing
1 2 2 3 3
masc. fem. masc. fem.
. . . . . . .
. -u . -na .. -u . -na
Suffixing
1 2 2 3 3
masc. fem. masc. fem.
-9 -at
SEMITIC LANGUAGES T A B L E 8.
Strong
Base-Form
Tense
Stems
in Akkadian,
Arabic,
and
Ge'ez.
525
All forms are feminine
third-person singular. Arabic
Akkadian Function
Form
1
Present
ta-labbas
2
(Cf. S u b j u n c t i v e ta-lbas-u)
3
Jussive
4
Past
5
Stative
flu)
Function
Ar.
ta-lbas
Jussive
ta-lbas
ta-lbas
Past_2
lab(i)s-at
Past
Verb Forms
in Akkadian,
Arabic,
Jussive
t9-lbas
ta-lbas
(Past_2)
(ta-bel-)
labis-at
Past
lab(a)s-at
Scenario for Semitic Prehistory. T h e picture of the "dawn of Semitic" tiiat emerges from a consideration of the Semitic and parallel Afro-Asiatic evidence is tiiat of a group
and
Ge'ez
Arabic
Past
Present
Ge'ez Past
Present
3 Sg. m a s c .
i-muat
i-mut
ya-miit-u
mat-a
yo-mawm
2 Sg. masc.
ta-muat
ta-mut
ta-mutu
mut-ta
t3-maww
3 PI. masc.
i-mutt-u
i-mut-u
ya-milt-u-na
mdt-u
ys-maww
-
ta-labbgs
the fact that Semitic inflection and derivation typically in volve a triconsonantal strong root, such as lbs, "wear," for Arabic, into which are inserted different vowel patterns (combined with different prefixes, suffixes, and infixes): labisa, "he wore"; lubs, "wearing"; labs, "tangle"; libs, "cloth ing"; lubus, "articles of clothing"; libsa, "style of dressing"; libas, "clothes"; albisa, "clothes [pi]"; labTs, "worn"; talbTs, "dressing". A number of words, however, do not have three true consonants, and the place of the "missing" consonant is occupied by a glide /w/ or /y/ (sometimes also /n/ and /?/), yielding weak roots of the form wCC, yCC, CwC, CyC, CCw, CCy, and so on. Because some of the oldest and most widespread Semitic vocabulary items (wld "bear," qwm "stand," bky "cry") are of diis form, it has been suggested that the unique phonological organization involved in tri consonantal strong roots is a tendency (already incipient in Afro-Asiatic) tiiat only gradually overtook large portions of Semitic morphology and lexicon. In it die weak roots are an attempt to fit older, nontriconsonantal lexical items onto the innovative triconsonantal patterns. Semitic languages differ in the extent to which weak verbs are assimilated to die strong patterns—in general Akkadian tends to be the most conservative (i.e., the least assimilating), whereas Ge'ez is the most assimilating; Arabic is somewhere in the middle; and Hebrew is somewhat more conservative than Arabic. Table 9 gives an idea of how diis works out for selected tense-person forms of the very archaic weak root *mwt, "die."
Akkadian Present
Form
Present
labbas-).
Weak
Function
ta-lbas-u
T h e distinction between strong versus weak root involves
T A B L E 9.
Form
Present
form: tilbas "may she wear," "she wears," wattilbas "and she wore." In Ge'ez this form exists with only one lexical item, the verb W ' s a y , " whose ordinary past tense is formed with subject prefixes: wbe "she said," yabela "they [fem] said," (vs tdbdl "she says"—note tire form of the jussive tdbal "may she say"). T h e normal past tense in all of the Western languages, however, is a suffixing form, homologous with the Akkadian stative. Finally, the present-tense form, which in the Soutiiern languages is the same as in Akkadian, has a new base in the central languages, which is akin to the Ak kadian past/jussive, and may, with its -u suffix, be related to a subjunctive form in Akkadian. Two characteristic aspects of Semitic verbal inflection are not touched upon in table 8: die derived (as opposed to the base) stem form, and the so-called weak (as opposed to the strong) verbal root. T h e stem system illustrated involves only the basic (nonderived) form of the stem. T h e essential features of die stem system hold also for each language's inventory of so-called derived stems. Some of the principal common derived stems can be illustrated in Akkadian, H e brew, and Arabic using, for die sake of illustration, the root *lb$ (which does not actually occur in each derived stem form in each language). T h e derived stem form will be given in the stative for Akkadian and in the past tense for Hebrew and Arabic: causative, with the prefix s/h/9 (Akk. sulbus-, Heb. hilbis-, Ar. Talbas-); passive, with the prefix n (Akk. nalbus-, Heb. nilbal-, Ar. inlabas-); reflexive, with die prefix or infix t (Aide liibus-, Heb. hitlabbes-, Ar. iltabas-); factative, with the geminated middle root consonant (Aide, lubbus-, Heb. libbes-,
Ge'ez
Past t
mot-a
t-u
mot-u
t
mot-ka
526
SEMITIC LANGUAGES
of languages distributed over what may have been a rela tively restricted range in Northeast Africa, with one sub group occupying the African-Asian (hence, "Afro-Asiatic") bridge and gateway into western Asia that is Palestine (with adjacent parts of Syria and northern and western Arabia). It is impossible to fix a definite time of origin for this distri bution, but a terminus ante quern is clearly provided by the fact that an Afro-Asiatic-speaking group, the Egyptians, is present at, and apparently responsible for, the construction of irrigation-based urban civilization in the Nile valley at the end of the fourth millennium. Slightly later, representatives of the Western Asian Afro-Asiatic branch arrive on the scene in the early stages (but not as originators) of the par allel development in Mesopotamia. Given the language dis tributions, the center of dispersion of this group would seem more likely to be Northeast Africa than Western Asia—but a lot of linguistic and archeological work will have to be done before this can be taken as certain. Apart from the group that settled in the Nile valley, a common cultural profile of important segments of the other Afro-Asiatic groups—Se mitic, Cushitic, and Berber—would, in any case, seem to be that of a mobile, if not nomadic, society with a special ad aptation to food production and animal raising in arid en vironments. Research into the nature of the language of this group is barely at a beginning stage. However, evidence from Berber and Cushitic may indicate that the language possessed a pre fixing present and past tense distinguished by a variety of vowel patterns and syllabic structures: Berber i-kwz, t-kraz, "he/she plowed," versus i-kamz, t-kamz, "he/she is plow ing"; Bedja (Cushitic) ?a-dbil, fi-dbil, "I/he collected," ver sus Sa-danbiil, danbiil, "I/he collect(s)." On the other hand, Egyptian shows that a verbal form with encliticlike pronom inal suffixes could also have been part of the inflectional repertoire. Compare the Akkadian stative suffixes in table 7 with Egyptian: sdm.kim, sdm.ti, sdm.wyn, sdm.tiwny, "1/ you[sg], we/you[pl] heard." In other words, in these and other respects, a picture emerges of a Proto-Afro-Asiatic as
it begins to differentiate, whose essential features are not all that different from what might be conjectured of an older stage of Akkadian. Assuming an area in and around Palestine as the region of most intense contact between the Proto-Semitic speech communities, where innovations are most likely to be spread and shared, one scenario for the differentiation of the major branches of Semitic might run as follows: an eastern part of the Proto-Semitic speech community, including, or consist ing exclusively of, a forerunner of Akkadian, moving toward North Syria and the Euphrates River, might have become isolated from the other dialects at some point before a ten dency spread in the rest of the speech community to replace the (honrophonous?; cf. Table 8) past-tense form with a new past tense based on the perfective stative (a development with many parallels in language history—including, e.g., that of the modern Romance languages). There was evidently a simultaneous tendency to level out the shape of the suffixed pronouns, now part of the core verbal inflexional system. In the southern extremity of the contact area, dialects tended to replaced the t forms with a k. In the north, the leveling took place in the opposite direction. Subsequently, the southern dialects in turn lost contact with the rest of the community (perhaps they crossed the highland barrier that roughly corresponds to the southwestern border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen) before they were reached by a new reinterpretation of the verbal system coming out of the central dialects. T h e reinterpretation would have ended up replacing the bisyllabic present-tense form preserved in Ak kadian and Ge'ez with a monosyllabic form (and in Middle South Arabian; the nature of the written evidence does not permit including Old South Arabian with any certainty). T h e present state of knowledge only allows speculation on the nature of this reinterpretation. One possibility is that Proto-Semitic already possessed both forms, and that one of them tended to drop out at the periphery and take over in the center. Another possibility is that an older main-clause form was replaced by a (clefted?, more emphatic?) version,
Proto-Semitic East
Akkadian Old South Arabian
Ugaritic SEMITIC LANGUAGES.
Figure 2 .
Middle South Arabian
Relations and subgrouping of Early Semitic speech
Ethiopic
communities.
SEPPHORIS in which "she wears" is replaced with a quasi-subordinate form ("it is that she wore," or the like). Whether or not this scenario turns out to be tenable, it is generally admitted today that the the data summarized in tables 7-9 dictate a primary major differentiation of Semitic into an Eastern, Central, and Southern group, in which Ar abic belongs to the Central, and not the Southern group. This picture still leaves open the possibility for tire spread of phonological (/f/ instead of/p/) and grammatical (internal plural patterns) preferences among dialects in the southern range of Semitic. It also leaves open tire question of whether or to what extent Aramaic and Canaanite may have consti tuted an independent regional speech community, or a com municating group of dialects—thus justifying the old term Northwest Semitic. In any case, the essential features of this view are captured in figure 2, where the status of Ugaritic as a Canaanite language, and tlie relationship between Old and Middle South Arabian are left open. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bergstrasser, Gotthelf. Introduction to the Semitic Languages. Translated with notes, bibliography, a n d an a p p e n d i x on t h e scripts b y Peter Daniels. W i n o n a Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 3 . Translation, with u p d a t e d notes, of a classic work from 1 9 2 8 . B r o c k e l m a n n , Carl. Gnmdriss
dei' vergleichenden
Grammatik
der
semi-
tischen Sprachen. 2 vols. Berlin, 1 9 0 8 - 1 9 1 3 . Terribly o u t of date in many respects, b u t at the s a m e t i m e the only attempt ever m a d e to survey tlie entire field in detail. Brockelmann,
Carl. Kurzgefasste
vergleichende
Grammatik
der
semitique
et Texpression
du temps.
Paris,
1 9 2 4 . Surveys basic morphosyntactic data. Diakonoff, Igor M . Afrasian Languages. M o s c o w , 1 9 8 8 . T h e m o s t c o m plete s u m m a r y available of general Afro-Asiatic morphological data. Diakonoff, Igor M . Proto-Afrasian
and Old Akkadian:
A Study
in
His
torical Phonetics. Journal of Afroasiatic L a n g u a g e s , vol. 4 . 1 - 2 . Prince ton, 1 9 9 2 . Radical, reconstruction-based proposals a p r o p o s of some long-held assumptions. Faber, Alice. "Akkadian Evidence for Proto-Semitic Affricates." Jour nal of Cuneiform
Studies
3 7 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 0 1 - 1 0 7 . R e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of p a r t
of a c o m m o n l y reconstructed sibilant series. Fieisch, H e n r i . Les verbes
a allongement
vocalique
interne
en
semitique.
Paris, 1 9 4 4 . Study of one of the classes of the derived stem in Semitic. Garr, W . Randall. Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E. Philadelphia, 1 9 8 5 . Organization of the available data o n Ca naanite. Greenberg, Joseph H . " T h e Patterning of Root M o r p h e m e s in S e mitic." Word 6 ( 1 9 5 0 ) : 1 6 2 - 1 8 1 . Basic and very influential study on Semitic root structure. Greenberg, Joseph H . 'Hie Languages of Africa. Bloomington, 1 9 6 3 , R e vised edition of a work that l a u n c h e d the t e r m Afro-Asiatic a n d set its scope, proposing cognate sets for family. H e t z r o n , R o b e r t . Ethiopian
Semitic:
Studies
in Classification.
3 8 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 8 9 - 1 0 8 . Proposes principles tiiat have been influential in all recent attempts to draw a Semitic family tree. Hetzron, Robert. "Afroasiatic L a n g u a g e s " a n d "Semitic L a n g u a g e s . " In The World's Major Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie, p p . 6 4 7 6 5 3 , 6 5 4 - 6 6 3 . N e w York, 1 9 9 0 . Very concise b u t useful surveys of tlie principal features of families. H u e h n e r g a r d , John. " R e m a r k s o n the Classification of the N o r t h w e s t Semitic L a n g u a g e s . " In The Balaam
Text from
Deir 'Alia
Reevaluated,
edited b y Jacob Hoftijzer a n d Gerrit van der Kooij, p p . 2 8 2 - 2 9 3 , Leiden, 1 9 9 1 . Reviews t h e state of tlie question about the relationship of Central to Northwest Semitic. K u r y l o w i c z , Jerzy. Studies
in Semitic
Grammar
and Metrics.
Warsaw,
1 9 7 3 - Adventurous reconstructions of Semitic by an eminent linguist and Indo-Europeanist. M o s c a t i , S a b a t i n o , et al. Introduction
to the Comparative
Grammar
of the
Semitic languages. W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 6 4 . Cautious, committee-based a p proach to the basic features of c o m m o n Semitic. Noldeke, T h e o d o r . "Semitic L a n g u a g e s . " In Encyclopaedia Britannica, n t h ed., vol. 2 4 , p p . 6 1 7 - 6 3 0 . L o n d o n , 1 9 1 1 . Still classic statement of tlie basic facts about Semitic. Sola-Sole, Jose M . L'infinitif semitique. Paris, 1 9 6 1 . F o r m and function of verbal nouns in tlie various Semitic languages. Steiner, Richard. The Case for Fricative-Laterals in Proto-Semitic. Amer ican Oriental Series, vol. 5 9 . N e w Haven, 1 9 7 7 . Synthesis of data o n lateral series in Semitic. Steiner, R i c h a r d . Affricated
Sade
in the Semitic
Languages.
N e w York,
1 9 8 2 . Explores evidence for affricates in Semitic. Voigt, R a i n e r M . Die infirmen
Verbaltypen
des Arabischen
und das Bir-
adikalismus-Problem. W i e s b a d e n , 1 9 8 8 . Relationship between weak verbs a n d Semitic triconsonantal root structure. G E N E B. GRAGG
semi-
tischen Sprachen. Berlin, 1 9 0 8 . Based on t h e same data as his t w o volume work (see above), b u t m u c h m o r e concise a n d easier to c o n sult. Cantineau, Jean. " L e consonantisme d u semitique." Semitieai, (1952): 7 8 - 9 4 . T h e still classic statement of the Proto-Semitic consonant inventory. C o h e n , M a r c e l . Le sysl'eme verbal
527
Manches
ter, 1 9 7 2 . Classification of Ethiopic within the context of Semitic. Hetzron, Robert. " T w o Principles of G e n e t i c Reconstruction." Lingua
S E P P H O R I S (Heb., Zippori), site located in the heart of Lower Galilee in northern Israel (map reference 176 X 239), along the ancient east-west trans-Galilean roadway that linked the Mediterranean Sea, some 29 km (18 mi.) to the west, with the city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, some 29 Ion to tlie east. T h e site is approximately 6 km (4 mi.) northwest of Nazareth and sits on a hill that rises about 300 m above the surrounding valleys: to the north lies the BethNetofa Valley and to the south, the Nazareth basin. T h e ancient site of Sepphoris was occupied from early modern times until 1948 by inhabitants of the Arab village of Safuriyye and subsequently by Jewish settlers at Moshav Zippori, located just south of tlie ancient city. Sepphoris consisted of an upper city (summit, or acropolis) and a large lower city surrounding the summit (see figure i a - b ) . T h e medieval citadel, which crowns the summit, was the focal point of the early modern settlement, for which it served as a school until 1948; it was renovated in the mid-eighteenth century by Zahir al-'Umar al-Zaydani, the bedouin gover nor of Galilee, and again in about 1889 by the Turkish sultan Abdtilhamid II (1876-1909), when a second story was added. Archaeological E x c a v a t i o n s . T h e first excavations at Sepphoris were carried out in tlie early 1900s by Prosper Viaud in the ruins of the Church of St. Anne, a Crusader structure just north of the summit (see figure 2). Acquired
528
SEPPHORIS
SEPPHORIS.
F i g u r e i a . Plan of the upper city, (a) T h e a t e r ; (b) R o m a n villa of D i o n y s u s ; (c) citadel; (d)
w e s t e r n s u m m i t . (Courtesy Joint Sepphoris Project)
S E P P H O R I S . F i g u r e i b . Plan of the lower city, (a) Festival b u i l d i n g ; (b) Byzantine c h u r c h ; (c) R o m a n - p e r i o d p u b l i c b u i l d i n g . (Based on the excavation m a p of Z. Weiss and E . Netzer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
by the Franciscans in 1870, the church still belongs to the Custody of tire Holy Land, although it is now administered through the orphanage of the Sisters of St. Anne, founded in 1924. The limited work in tire church produced no evi dence of a pre-Crusader building. However, mosaic frag ments were found just north of die church. One large frag ment, probably dating to the Late Roman period, has an Aramaic text: "Be remembered for good, Rabbi Yudan son of Tanhum, son of. . . who gave one [dinar]. . . . " Another Late Roman or perhaps Byzantine inscription on a stone lintel uncovered in this general area by W. Ewing (1895) is in Greek and refers to several apparentiy well-known lead ers, including die archisynagogus ("head of the synagogue") of Sidon and also of Tyre. This inscription ends widi a chirho symbol, which has caused some scholars to identify it as a Jewish-Christian synagogue inscription. T h e first major archaeological excavations at Sepphoris were carried out in 1931 under die direction of Leroy Wa terman of the University of Michigan. This expedition dis covered the theater on the northeastern summit and exca vated a large building, identified as a Christian basilica, on the northwestern summit (Waterman, 1937). Michael AviYonah (1978) argued tiiat the so-called church was in fact in a large house with a peristyle courtyard. In 1976 Eric M. Meyers and James F. Strange conducted a preliminary site survey under the rubric of the Meiron Excavation Project; in 1982 and 1984, Strange (1982) conducted a systematic survey of the site—its buildings, cisterns, and burial caves— under the sponsorship of the University of South Florida. In 1983 and 1984, the South Florida team, under Strange's direction, began excavations on die western summit, along-
SEPPHORIS
.*".
^ 'r
4
«a"Ss.
A l a s *;- -•."'"Swew-
;V.,.'-
side die citadel, and on die western side of die theater; in 1986, the team reopened die areas around Waterman's "church." In later seasons the South Florida expedition fo cused its energies on a large public building in the eastern lower city. In 1985 tlie Joint Sepphoris Project was launched, bring ing togetiier Duke University and die Hebrew University of Jerusalem for five seasons under the direction of Meyers, Ehud Netzer, and Carol L. Meyers. This project concen trated on the domestic areas on the western summit, the theater, and a large Roman villa witii a Dionysus mosaic on the eastern summit. T h e Hebrew University team continued under Netzer and Zeev Weiss until 1995, when Weiss took over the directorship. Their work on the summit since 1990 continued work on the theater and also uncovered a storage building east of the citadel. In addition, they opened exten sive areas of the eastern lower city and excavated a Byzan tine synagogue in the northeast. T h e Duke University team reorganized in 1993, adding Kenneth G, Floglund to tlie
529
directorship and renaming its project the Sepphoris Re gional Project. Work at Sepphoris in 1993 and 1994 con centrated exclusively on domestic areas of the western sum mit; tlie team also began excavation of a small tell nearby, Tel 'Ein-Zippori. [See 'Ein-Zippori, Tel.] Between 1975 and 1985, Tsvika Tsuk carried out systematic surveys of the wa ter systems in the site's environs. From 1992 to 1995, under the sponsorship of the National Parks Authority and Tel Aviv University, he directed the excavation and preservation of the aqueducts, reservoir, and associated structures. In October 1992, Zippori National Park was opened to the public; in 1993, a permanent structure to house the Ro man villa and mosaic was constructed; and in 1995, the cit adel was converted into a museum and information center. Restoration of selected buildings in the residential area of the western summit and in the public areas of the lower city is underway. History. Reconstructing tlie history of Sepphoris from tlie abundance of literary sources and archaeological mate rials is a complicated task. T h e Joint Sepphoris Project and the Sepphoris Regional Project identified a large amount of pottery from the Iron Age (Iron I and especially Iron II), mostiy on bedrock and in fills on the summit, but without accompanying structural or stratified remains. The Mishnah's apparent awareness of an "old" settlement going back to the time of Joshua ('Arakh. 9.6) should not be dismissed. After several seasons of excavations at nearby Tel 'Ein-Zip pori, however, it now appears that the Late Bronze-Iron Age settlement in the area was located more to the southeast. It is still too soon to determine whether there was a gap be tween the eighth century B C E and the Persian period in the sixth. T h e presence of black Attic ware sherds and the chance discovery of a beautiful Attic animal-shaped rhyton from die fifth cenmry B C E indicate that the site was occupied by that time. Whether it was a military garrison serving tlie Persian authorities or another sort of settlement cannot be established. Similarly, the presence of large amounts of late Persian and Early Hellenistic pottery on the western summit suggests tiiat tiiere was a settlement of some kind (its nature also remains unclear) during the early Second Temple pe riod. The name Sepphoris does not appear in the Bible. The first literary reference to it is in Josephus in connection with the Flasmonean king, Alexander Jannaeus, who successfully repelled the attack of Ptolemy Ladiyrus of Egypt at the be ginning of his reign (Antiq. 13.338). Although few stratified remains of tlie Hellenistic period have been found on the western summit, many coins of Jannaeus have been recov ered. T h e settlement of this period was substantial enough to warrant an attack by Ptolemy, in which he lost many sol diers (Antiq. 3.337). In the Hasmonean era, Sepphoris was probably the administrative capital of Galilee because by about 57 BCE Gabinius, Pompey's legate to Syria, assigned a synechia, or "council," to Sepphoris (Antiq. 14.91; War
530
SEPPHORIS
1.170), making it officially the capital of the Galilee. The city was captured by Herod the Great in a snowstorm, in about 37 BCE, which prevented it from going over to Mattathias Antigonus and the Parthians (Antiq. 17.271). [See Parthians.] The city presumably remained Herod's northern command post for the rest of his reign. Upon his death in 4 BCE, a rebellion broke out at the site—the so-called War of Varus—that sought to remove Sepphoris from Herodian rule. The rebellion was crushed, and the city was supposedly burned and many of its inhabitants taken as slaves (War 2.68; Antiq. 17.289). Archaeological evidence of only scat tered burning suggests that Josephus's report of destruction may be somewhat exaggerated. Sepphoris was inherited by Herod's son Antipas as part of the tetrarchy of Galilee and Peraea (Transjordan). An tipas no doubt did much to contribute to the site's recovery: he "fortified Sepphoris to be tire ornament of all Galilee, and called it Autocratoris" (Antiq. 18.27). Josephus's use of the term ornament (proschema) is to be understood in the sense of an impregnable nature and fortification, and "Au tocratoris" refers to the fact that it enjoyed autonomous rule and also honored Augustus. The precise nature of dre ren ovations and rebuilding Antipas undertook before he moved the capital of Galilee to Tiberias is not known. T h e theater, parts of which have been excavated by four expeditions, seems to date to a period later than Antipas, though there is no unanimity of opinion about the date, and no known pub lic buildings of any great size have been recovered from the period of his rule. [See Theaters.] However, other kinds of first-century remains, including partially preserved sections of a large villa and several ritual baths, have been recovered on the summit, giving support to the considerable literature that mentions the presence of priests at Sepphoris during this period. [See Ritual Baths.] The fragmentary nature of the Early Roman deposits on the site certainly is a result of extensive building and rebuilding in later periods. The role of Sepphoris during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome was clearly pro-Roman, the residents having "displayed pacific sentiments" (War 2.30—31); coins minted in 66-67 commemorate the surrender of the city to Ves pasian by naming it Eirenopolis, "City of Peace" (Meshorer, 1985, p. 36). [See First Jewish Revolt] Josephus, how ever, is inconsistent about the city's pro-Roman stance during tire war. Coins minted during the reign of Nero read: "Sepphoris Neronias, the city of peace named after tire Cae sar Nero." After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C E , many Jews fled north; some, including the priestly clan of Jedaiah, apparently set tled in Sepphoris. This demographic shift influenced the ci ty's character: it became the foremost Jewish city in Galilee. The city coins minted in Trajan's reign (98-117 CE) all bear Jewish symbols on the reverse: wreath, palm tree, caduceus, and ears of grain. A Capitoline temple, however, was ap C E
parently erected during or shortly after the reign of Hadrian (117-138 C E ) , who appointed a gentile administration in the city. It was at the end of his reign, or at the beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius (138-161 C E ) , that tire city became known as Diocaesarea, in honor of Caesar and Zeus. It was at this time, too, that Roman soldiers of tire Sixth Legion were stationed at nearby Leggio (modern Lejjun), testifying to a dramatic change in the population at Sepphoris and in the region as a whole. T h e impact of the Second Revolt against Rome (132-135 CE) on Sepphoris and nearby areas is unclear in both tire archaeological record and the literary sources. [See Second Jewish Revolt.] During die reign of Caracalla (198-217 C E ) , for some sev enteen years, Sepphoris was the seat of the Sanhedrin under the leadership of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch (ha-Nasi). T h e municipal government apparently reverted to Jewish con trol, judging from a coin of the early third century C E that commemorates an accord between the boule ("council") of Sepphoris and the Roman senate: "Covenant of friendship and mutual aid between the holy council and the senate of the Roman people" (Meshorer, 1985, p. 37). This coin pro vides a unique glimpse into the city of Rabbi Judah, well known as the redactor of the Mishnah and presumed to be a friend of the emperor Caracalla, who was well disposed toward the Jews, perhaps as part of his policy of developing the eastern empire. Sepphoris remained a major Jewish center of learning even after the publication of the Mishnah and the removal of the Sanhedrin to Tiberias during the time of Judah's grandson, Rabbi Judah Nesiah. The so-called Gallus Revolt, against Gallus Caesar, is reported to have broken out in Sep phoris in 351 CE led by Patricius; the extent of the damage done when the revolt was quelled by the Roman commander Ursicinus is unclear. In any case the city was badly damaged by tire earthquake of 363, one of the strongest of antiquity and is specifically mentioned in a letter to Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem. T h e archaeological evidence indicates that Sep phoris was extensively rebuilt fairly soon after the earth quake. By the sixth century there was a Christian commu nity headed by a bishop; the bishops of Sepphoris at this time participated in synods in Jerusalem. By late Byzantine times there is some indication that Sepphoris had a connec tion to the Umayyad dynasty: Umayya, a great grandfather of three caliphs and a businessman in Mecca, is reported to have been given a Jewish slavegirl from Sepphoris when he lived in Palestine. During this period, Sepphoris is referred to as Saffuriyya, not Diocaesarea. Sepphoris may have been conquered by a general named Shurahbil during the caliphate of 'Umar ibn al-Khattab (af ter 634) and is included on a short list of cities that also mentions Akko and Tyre—indicating that Sepphoris was a city of considerable size and power. Islamic coinage was in troduced at Saffuriyya in 697 for a short time. At present,
SEPPHORIS
531
only limited archaeological remains of this period have been recovered. During the Crusades, Sepphoris was captured by die Franks, who called it Le Saphorie and (re)fortified its citadel. Benjamin of Tudela visited the city in about 1160 and noted only that it was in Crusader hands, mentioning no Jewish families. In 1 1 8 7 , Crusaders gathered at the site for war widi Salah edh-Din (Saladin), who retook the city. Saladin himself visited the site en route to Akko on die fif teenth of Rajab, the seventh month of the Muslim year. U p p e r City. T h e earliest occupation of the site was ap parently on die highest part, or acropolis, of the Sepphoris hill. The major expeditions to Sepphoris all began their proj ects on this upper city. Western residential area. Although no clear strati graphic remains have yet been discovered, numerous Black Attic ware sherds and quantities of Late Hellenistic pottery, small finds, and coins indicate that occupation began on the summit in die Hasmonean era, if not earlier (in the Late
SEPPHORIS.
F i g u r e 4. Metal
figurine
of Prometheus.
F o u n d in a
R o m a n - p e r i o d h o u s e on t h e w e s t e r n s u m m i t (Courtesy Joint S e p phoris Project)
SEPPHORIS.
F i g u r e 3.
Small street in western residential
area, look
ing east. N o t e t h e citadel in t h e b a c k g r o u n d (Courtesy Joint Sep phoris Project)
Persian period). At the extreme west of the summit, rockcut quarries testify to building activities during the Helle nistic and the Early Roman periods. T h e best-preserved Late Hellenistic remains are close to the citadel. In the Roman period, a 2.20-meter-wide east-west street connected the summit with areas to the west; because of die rising slope, the street is not preserved at its eastern end (see figure 3 ) . Two large residential buildings of this period have been identified along die southern side of the s&eet in units II and IV; another one probably stood in unit III, though Byzantine remains dominate in this area. Unit VIII appears to be mainly agricultural, although several well-preserved miqva'ot (ritual batiis) there suggest domestic use or, pos sibly, public space. Four ritual baths appear in unit II and at least four in unit IV; numerous others were also uncov ered in the western residence area.
532
SEPPHORIS
The residential area on the western summit is character ized by a large number of underground chambers cut from bedrock. Some are cisterns; many others, including ones converted from cisterns, are silos, storage rooms, and olive presses, judging from their configuration and from tire num ber of storage vessels found in them. [See Cisterns; Grana ries and Silos.] Some of the cavities were ultimately used as garbage pits, primarily for broken pottery vessels. An un usually large variety of vessels, including a unique assem blage of ceramic incense shovels and decorated discus lamps, have been recovered from such cavities. T h e abundance of miqva'ot and'the presence of two lamps decorated with menorahs and one with a Torah shrine sug gest the presence of a Jewish population on the western sum mit during the Roman period. At the same time, the recov ery of two exceptionally fine bronze statuettes, one of Pan and the other of Prometheus (see figure 4), from an under ground cavity points to a Hellenistic or cosmopolitan aes thetic for the population. Like the rest of the site, the western summit was almost totally destroyed by the 363 earthquake at the end of the Late Roman period. A major reconfiguration of the area, which may be the result of a demographic change, occurred in the subsequent Byzantine period. New structures, which included some workshops, notably one for glass, were built. [See Glass.] The late fourth- and fifth-century remains, best preserved in units III and V, are replete with pig bones, and units II and IV have pig bones in post-363 fills; such was not the case in the Roman period. [See Pigs.] The faunal re
mains, along with several ostraca with Christian names and prayers and several late red-ware stamped crosses, suggest that the Byzantine inhabitants of dre western summit were Christian. Citadel and storehouse. Crowning the upper city is a massive, fortresslike structure known as the citadel (see fig ure 5). As already indicated, its present form, reaching 10.5 m above ground level, is the result of eighteenth- and nine teenth-century renovations. The rounded corners below the uppermost story of this square building ^ 4 . 9 5 m to a side) suggest that it may have been built as a watchtower in the Crusader period. Like many Crusader buildings in Pales tine, the ashlar stones used to construct its walls were ap parently taken from earlier structures; the cornerstones, for example, are rubble-filled Roman sarcophagi. Excavations of its foundations indicate that the citadel was first erected early in the Byzantine period, near the end of the fourth or early in the fifth century. Just south of the citadel the remains of a large building feature a centtal rectangular room (9.4 X 6.2 m). Two col umns and two rectangular pilasters set into each of its long walls supported the ceiling, and a white mosaic floor covers it. Because of the many large storage jars discovered in the central room, as well as in two adjacent ones, the building has been tentatively identified as a storehouse. T h e jars, typ ical Byzantine wares, were found on the floor, crushed by the building's ashy collapse in tire seventh century, the result of either dre Persian (614) or Arab (640) conquest. One of the jars was decorated with menorahs, providing some evi-
SEPPHORIS dence of a continued Jewish presence in the eastern part of the summit in the Byzantine period—in contrast to the ap parent shift then to a Christian population on the western summit. Theater. Set into tire steep northern scarp of the summit and offering a panoramic view of the Beth Netofa Valley, the theater at Sepphoris occupies a prominent position in the upper city. It nearly abuts the Roman villa to its south— only a narrow path separates the two monumental structtires. With a diameter of about 74 m, the theater probably could seat some forty-five hundred people. Like contem porary theaters in Roman Palestine, the plan of this building places the semicircular cavea (auditorium) opposite the stage. T h e natural slope of tire summit together with a series of vaults provided the necessary gradient for the cavea's tiered seating. Three of these 2.2-meter-wide vaults served as exists and and entrances, or vomitoria. In addition, two side entrances (paradoi), 3.2 m wide, lead to the semicircular area, or orchestra, in front of the cavea and to the stage. Built of stone and probably featuring a wooden floor, the stage 31 X 6 m stretched across the northern edge of the building. No trace of the scaenaefrons, or backdrop, survives. Although it was first assumed that the theater was con structed early in the first centttry by Herod Antipas, exten sive soundings under its foundations indicate a later date, perhaps as late as the early to mid-second century, when the city underwent extensive rebuilding after the First Jewish Revolt. T h e theater probably remained in use until die end of tire Late Roman period. Whether it still functioned early in the Byzantine period is questionable. Clearly, it was aban doned by die Late Byzantine period, when its ruins were used as a limestone quarry and most of its architectural members were destroyed. Roman villa. Just south of the theater, at the eastern end of the acropolis, is a palatial residential building (about 40 m long and 23 m wide). Some of its 6-meter-wide walls, built mainly of large, plaster-covered ashlars, are preserved to a height of 2 m. Fragments of colored floral and geometric frescoes indicate that tire plastered ceilings or walls, or both, were decorated. [See Wall Paintings.] This two-storied structure consists of a peristyle courtyard and a series of living and service rooms, many of whose floors are covered with geometric mosaics or plain buff-colored or white tes serae. [See Mosaics.] In one of these rooms, a small trape zoidal chamber, die Greek word hygei ("health") is set in black tiles into the tesselated floor; along with the room's water channels; die inscription is compatible with the room's use as a restroom. Built early in the third century, as attested by the latest material under its floors as well as by stylistic elements of its architecture and decoration, diis building collapsed in the earthquake of 363. Its Roman period of usage, of about 120150 years, was extended into the Byzantine period in its southern portion, where domestic remains, including two
533
ritual baths and a stable, were found that had been built into the remnants of die Roman villa. The villa's most noteworthy feature is its splendid tticlinium, or reception and banquet hall, located just to the north of the courtyard. T h e room (7 X 5.5 m) is covered with a mosaic carpet. One part of the floor, consisting of white tesserae, forms a U shape around the rest, which features an elaborate T-shaped colored mosaic utilizing twenty-eight colors; die mosaic is composed of three major elements, each adorned with elaborate geometric and figural borders. The central part of the colored portion is a large rectangle composed of fifteen panels tiiat depict aspects of the life story of Dionysus and the rituals that celebrated him. T h e largest (1.35 X .78 m) of these panels, in the center, depicts the Symposium, or Drinking Contest of Dionysus and Herakles. Several of the other fourteen panels, only three of which are damaged beyond recognition, reflect similar as pects of Dionysus's role as a god of feasting, fertility, drunk enness, ecstasy, and revelry. Greek inscriptions on each of the panels, all of which have a white background, assist in interpreting them; the word M E 9 H ("drunkenness"), for example, accompanies a scene in which the bearded hero Heraldes, apparentiy in a drunken stupor, is attended by two devotees. Surrounding the fifteen Dionysos panels is a frame con sisting of twenty-two circular acandius-leaf medallions against a background of black tesserae. The leafy wreaths contain hunting scenes featuring various wild animals as well as naked erotes, or putti ("cupids"), holding weapons such as die bow and arrow. In the central medallion of the north ern and soutiiern sides of the frame are female portraits. T h e one on the north is damaged, but the southern portrait de picts the bust of a strikingly beautiful woman (see figure 6). So exquisite is this portrait of an unknown woman tiiat this masterpiece of ancient art has been nicknamed "MonaLisa of the Galilee." The third component of the colored carpet is a set of three border panels—one across the southern end of the floor and die other two extending partway along each of the eastern and western sides, giving the decorated mosaic the T-shape typical of triclinium mosaics. T h e eastern and western pan els depict processions of people carrying items (flowers, fruit, ducks, roosters) tiiat were probably offerings. These panels were apparentiy once part of one long procession scene surrounding the southern end of the carpet; damage to the scene along the south side led to its replacement with a Nilotic scene, lively and charming in its own right, but quite different from the Dionysiac character of the other elements of the tticlinium floor. T h e themes from Roman art, centering on mytiiological figures, may indicate that a Roman official with his family and servitors lived in this villa. Yet, the cosmopolitan nature of Sepphoris and die fact that even ancient synagogues were adorned widi mosaics using non-Jewish motifs allows for the
534
SEPPHORIS
SEPPHORIS.
Dionysos.
Figurefi.
"Mona
Lisa"
of the Galilee from
the House
of
T h i r d c e n t u r y CE. (Courtesy Joint Sepphoris Project)
possibility that the villa and its superb mosaic floor reflect the Hellenistic aesthetics of Jewish occupants. [See Villas.] Lower City. Excavations at Sepphoris, especially since 1990, have uncovered extensive areas of a relatively flat area or plateau extending along the eastern and southeastern sides of the summit. Eastern insulae. As early as the second century CE, the original settlement on the summit had spread to the east, on the adjacent plateau. Two broad streets—an east-west decumanus and a north-south cardo—and several smaller streets parallel and perpendicular to these main thorough fares created spacious ortirogonal grid with blocks, or in sulae, of buildings. The cardo (13.7 m wide) is paved with hard white limestone blocks set in diagonal rows. The orig inal Roman pavers, with deep wheel ruts testifying to cen turies of wagon traffic, lasted well into the Byzantine period. Both the cardo and decumanus are flanked by colonnaded sidewalks, or stoas. These roofed walkways were initially paved with mosaics. Unlike the streets, they were repaved with mosaics at least once—near the intersection of the two
major streets, geometric mosaics covered earlier ones. Three inscriptions set into the later mosaics give tribute to a Bishop Eutropius, whose exact dates are not known but who apparentiy held office near the end of the Byzantine period. These inscriptions, one of which reads "Under our most saintly father Eutropius the episcopus, the whole city in the time of the fourteenth interdiction," are part of the evidence for a flourishing Christian community at Sepphoris in the Byzantine period. At the same time, a menorah carved into one of the paving stones of the cardo is one of several indi cations of a continued Jewish presence in the fourth-seventh centuries. Along the streets of tire lower city a series of small shops, in use for centuries, contribute to the sense that this part of Sepphoris was the commercial center of the city during the Roman and Byzantine periods. A rabbinic tradition about the "lower marketplace" of Zippori may well refer to this area. Similarly, a lead market weight discovered in the upper city depicts a colonnaded street, perhaps the market of the lower city. A large building in the insula northeast of the intersection of the decumanus and cardo was built as early as the Early or Middle Roman period and then rebuilt in Byz antine times. It was paved with colorful mosaics and a Greek inscription reading "Good Fortune" and may have been the site's central marketplace, or agora. T h e public character of the eastern insulae is further sup ported by the presence of a Roman-style bathhouse in the western insula—the one west of the cardo and south of the decumanus. Although not yet fully excavated, its two caladaria (hot rooms), one of them octagonally shaped, have been revealed. With renovation, the bathhouse continued to be used in the Byzantine period. Fragmentary remains of a building with a triclinium, probably dating to the Middle Roman period, were also found in this area beneath Byz antine construction. Byzantine church. Also in tire insula west of the cardo are the remains of a church, probably constructed under the direction of Bishop Eutropius along with one Marianus, a physician and leading citizen of the community, also men tioned in one of the mosaic inscriptions described above. Thus far, only the width (18 m) of this long building has been established. The basilical plan—a nave and two aisles—of its main room is clear, as is its orientation to the east. [See Basilicas.] Additional rooms that may have served as chapels are found on its northern and southern sides; a narthex and atrium may be located at its western end. Nile festival building. In the central insula, opposite the bathhouse, is another building with Roman foundations that was extensively expanded and renovated in the Byzantine period. An eight-line inscription in the mosaic sidewalk of the cardo in front of its main entrance mentions two artists, Patricius and his father-in-law Procopius, presumably the artisans responsible for the stunning mosaics discovered in
SEPPHORIS the building. T h e building itself (roughly 35 X 50 m) con sists of eastern and western sections connected by corridors. A courtyard surrounded by variously sized rooms comprises the eastern section. T h e western section consists of two large rooms and sev eral subsidiary ones, with mosaic flooring in nearly every room. The largest of the rooms is a basilical hall (about 13.5 X 10.5 m). T h e existence of this hall, in addition to the building's size and central location, suggests that this struc ture was a public building. Its basilica is not a religious hall but, rather, a large room of the sort referred to in Byzantine texts: a place for public meetings, discussions, and even lec tures. An inscription discovered at Sepphoris in die late 1950s refers to tire renovation of a "basilica." At the time it was thought that the restoration of a church was at issue, but it now seems that it was work on a civic building. Among the many mosaics in this building, the tesselated floor of the second largest room (7.6 X 6.2 m) in the western section is a nearly intact figural mosaic with scenes cele brating the Nile River—hence the name given to the entire building. Surrounded by elaborate geometric bands and fea turing a row of birds across the top with a Greek inscription reading "Have Success," the floor contains various features of a Nile River festival and associated Nilotic hunting scenes. T h e Nile River runs across the center of the floor. Rising above its banks a "nilometer" is depicted: a slender tower, marked with numbers (in cubits) used to measure the height of the Nile during its flood stage; the higher the water, the more fertile the surrounding land—and, tints, the higher the taxes. On either side of the nilometer are reclining figures: on the left the female personification of Egypt (labeled AIGY[PTOS]) holds a cornucopia; on the right is the god of the Nile. Below die river several hunting scenes are com posed of a wide array of animals and plants, as well as a representation of the gate, flanked by two round towers, to the city of Alexandria. A flame shooting up from one of the towers probably depicts that city's famous lighthouse, known as tire Pharos and said to be one of the seven wonders of die ancient world. Other mosaic floors found in this building were once equally spectacular but survive in less complete form. T h e corridors of the building include figural panels within overall geometric designs. One of those panels depicts a rearing centaur; his uplifted arms hold a Greek inscription, " G o d is [our] Helper." Near the entrance to tire basilical hall a panel features two armed Amazons on horseback; in another panel in the eastern wing, tiiree bare-breasted Amazons are shown dancing. The several Amazon scenes, like the Nile River floor, seem to represent festivities; the water installations and special drainage channels in the building suggest that a har vest water festival, known as die Maiuma, may have been celebrated in this building in the Byzantine period. Despite
535
the mythological figures in the mosaics, the building could have been used by either the Byzantine city's Jewish or Christian groups, or both—although no motifs or symbols associated with either group have been found. Synagogue. Rabbinic sources indicate that a large num ber of synagogues—eighteen or more—functioned in Sep phoris in the Roman period, during tire time of Rabbi Judah's sojourn in die city. Excavations and chance discoveries, however, had recovered only the fragments of the synagogue inscriptions mentioned above. Evidence of synagogue building finally emerged in 1993 when land was being cleared for a parldng area north of the summit. A large rectangular structure, probably built in the sixth century, the synagogue is situated near a north-south street running west of an parallel to the cardo. Although it has several subsidiary rooms, the main hall is outstanding because of its narrow ness (16 X 6.5 m) and unusual floor plan. Unlike most an cient synagogues, the hall has only one row of columns: the internal space thus consists of die nave and only a single aisle, on the north. Yet it shares with the synagogues north of Jerusalem the placement of its entry on the southern, Je rusalem-oriented wall. T h e hall is also significant for its mosaic carpet: the floor is covered with a rich variety of biblical and ritual scenes and symbols, as well as geometric forms. Its repertoire of designs includes a magnificent zodiac, at whose four corners the four seasons of the year are represented by attractive females dressed in seasonally appropriate garb. Its centerpiece is the chariot of the sun god Helios, accompanied by the moon and a star; unlike similar zodiacs at Beth Alpha and Ham madi Tiberias, the god himself is not depicted. [See Beth Alpha; Hammadi Tiberias.] The biblical scenes, not all of which have survived, ap parentiy present several aspects of the Abraham story. De pictions of various temple furnishings, such as the table for the bread of the Presence (Ex. 25:23-30), and renderings of musical instruments and of sacrifices preserve aspects of temple ritual. T h e high priest was also pictured, although only the inscription "Aaron" remains intact. In addition to such captions, longer dedicatory inscriptions, in Greek and in Aramaic, appear in profusion: in the geometric panels that fill the single aisle, adjacent to many of the scenes of the figural mosaics, and even surrounding die central area of die zodiac. [See Synagogues.] Water system. T h e elaborate and complex water system of Sepphoris, especially the aqueducts and reservoirs to the east of the site, has been thoroughly investigated (see above). [See Aqueducts; Reservoirs.] A freshwater spring, located just to the west of Tel 'Ein-Zippori in the Nazareth basin and some 2 km south of Sepphoris, still supplies water to the region and was no doubt a perennial source of water in antiquity. Because the spring is lower in elevation than the city, water had to be transported to the site by pack
536
SEPPHORIS
animals. This water supply was probably supplemented by stored rainwater collected in cisterns in many of dre domes tic units. By about 100 C E , when the city's population began to ex pand, the nearby spring proved inadequate. T h e residents of Sepphoris began to exploit the springs to the east, at Raineh and Mashad, by constructing a series of gravity-drawn aqueducts that led westward to the site. Large quantities of water were stored in an enormous underground reservoir some i .5 km east of tire city. Nearly 200 m long, tire reservoir could hold more than 10,000 cu m of water. When water was needed for drinking, bathing, agriculture, or other pur poses, it was released through a lead pipe fitted with a valve for regulating water flow; pressure then apparently forced tire water through a series of channels and aqueducts to the site for distribution. This system of water storage and trans fer has a close parallel at the site of Gapitolias (Irbid) of tire Decapolis in Transjordan. [See Irbid; Decapolis.] Tombs, The cemetery at ancient Sepphoris was situated on the hills surrounding the site on the southwest, southeast, and east. Although only a few tombs have been explored or excavated, it seems certain that the cemetery was as exten sive as the one at Beth-She'arinr. [See Tombs; BethShe'arim.] The first tomb excavations were conducted by the Hebrew University in 1930, when Eleazar L. Sukenik (1932) identified a large complex of rooms with loculi and several inscriptions, one referring to a Rabbi Yudan. [See the biography of Sukenik.] Another group of rock-cut caves, which contained several bilingual (Greek and Hebrew) in scriptions, was excavated by Adam Druks for the Israel De partment of Antiquities in 1980. Both groups date to the Roman period (second-third centuries). Northwest of the site lies a tomb traditionally identified as the burial place of Rabbi Judah Nesiah, the grandson of Rabbi Judah the Pa triarch. A mausoleum known as the T o m b of Jacob's Daughters was excavated by Nahman Avigad. Its interior walls are constructed of unmortared ashlars, and the ceiling is barrel vaulted. The mausoleum is a loculus tomb and may date to the Roman period. Several small Byzantine-period burial caves on the western spur of Sepphoris may be part of a Christian cemetery, for a cross was found carved on the wall of one of them. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Avi-Yonah, Michael. " A Sixth-Century Inscription from Sepphoris." Israel Exploration Journal xi (1961): 184-187. Avi-Yonah, Michael. " S e p p h o r i s . " In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, p p . 1051-1055. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., t975-. Folda, Jaroslav. " T h e Church of Saint A n n e . " Biblical Archaeologist 54 (1991): 88-96. Frey, Jean-Baptiste. Corpus inscriptionum iudaicarum, vol. 2, Asie-Afrique. R o m e , 1952. See inscriptions 989-992.
Meshorer, Ya'acov. City-Coins of Eretz-Israel and the Decapolis in the Roman Period. Jerusalem, 1985. Meyers, Eric M . , E h u d Netzer, a n d Carol L . Meyers. " S e p p h o r i s , ' O r nament of All Galilee."' Biblical Archaeologist 49 (1986): 4-19. Meyers, Eric M . , E h u d Netzer, a n d Carol L . Meyers. "Artistry in Stone: T h e Mosaics of Ancient S e p p h o r i s . " Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987): 223-231. Meyers, Eric M . , E h u d Netzer, a n d Carol L . M e y e r s . " A M a n s i o n in the Sepphoris Acropolis a n d Its Splendid M o s a i c " (in H e b r e w ) . Qadmoniol 21 (1988): 87-92. Meyers, Eric M . , Carol L . Meyers, and E h u d Netzer. Sepphoris. W i nona Lake, Ind., 1992. Short account, lavishly illustrated, of die work of the Joint Sepphoris Project from 1985-1989. Meyers, Eric M . "Aspects of R o m a n Sepphoris in t h e Light of Recent Archaeology." In Early Christianity in Context, edited by Frederic M a n n s and Eugenio Alliata, p p . 29-36. Jerusalem, 1993. Meyers, Eric M . , Carol L . Meyers, and K e n n e t h G . H o g l u n d . " S e p phoris (Sippori)." Israel Exploration Journal 44 (1994): 247-250; 45 (1995): 68-71. Miller, Stuart S. Studies in the History and Traditions of Sepphoris. Stud ies in Judaism and Late Antiquity, vol. 37. Leiden, 1984. Major study of die literary traditions regarding Sepphoris, primarily in rabbinic literature. N e ' e m a n , Yehuda. Sepphoris in the Period of the Second Temple, the Mishna, and the Talmud (in H ebr ew ) . Jerusalem, 1993. C o m p r e h e n sive but not always reliable treatment of archaeological a n d literary sources. Netzer, Ehud, a n d Zeev Weiss. " N e w Mosaic A r t from S e p p h o r i s . " Biblical. Archaeology Review 18.6 (1992): 36-43. Netzer, Ehud, a n d Zeev "Weiss. Zippori. Jerusalem, 1994. Popular s u m mary of the work of the Joint Sepphoris Project plus the additional work of the Hebrew University in the lower city o n die east (includ ing the Nile Festival building) a n d the synagogue with the zodiac in the north. Netzer, Ehud, a n d Zeev Weiss. " N e w Evidence for L a t e - R o m a n a n d Byzantine S e p p h o r i s . " In The Roman and Byzantine Near East: Some Recent Archaeological Research, edited by John H . H u m p h r e y , p p . 164-176. Journal of R o m a n Archaeology, Supplementary Series, n o . 14. N e w York, 1995. Strange, James F . , et al. "Sepphoris (Sippori)." Israel Exploration Jour nal 34 (1984): 269-270; 35 (1985): 297-299; 37 (1987): 278-280; 38 (1988): 188-190; 39 (1989): 104-106. Strange, James F . " S e p p h o r i s . " In The.Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5, p p . 1090-1093. N e w York, 1992. Sukenik, Eleazar L . " S o m e Remains of S e p p h o r i s " (in H e b r e w ) . Tarbiz 3 (1932): 107-109. Tsuk, Tsvika. "Sippori: T h e A q u e d u c t s . " Excavations and Surveys in Israel 1 (1982): 105-107; 9 (1989-1990): 20. Tsuk, Tsvika. " T h e Aqueducts of S e p p h o r i s " (in H e b r e w ) . In The Aqueducts of Ancient Palestine, edited b y David 'Amit et al., p p . 101108. Jerusalem, 1989. W a r d , Sedi. "Sepphoris in the Arab P e r i o d . " In Sepphoris in the Galilee: Crosscurrents of Culture, edited by Rebecca M . N a g y , Eric M . M e y ers, Carol L . Meyers, a n d Zeev Weiss. Raleigh, N . C . , 1996. W a t e r m a n , Leroy, et al. Preliminary Report of the University of Michigan Excavations at Sepphoris, Palestine in 1931. A n n Arbor, Mich., 1937. T h e only publication of the Michigan excavations. Weiss, Zeev. " S e p p h o r i s . " In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, p p . 1324-1328. Jerusalem a n d N e w York, 1993. CAROL L. MEYERS and
ERIC M.
MEYERS
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ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS
ACOR AD
AH
AIA AIAR AJA
American Center of Oriental Research
BSAJ
anno Domini, in the year of the (our) Lord
B.T.
anno Hegirae, in the year of the Hijrah Archaeological Institute of America
CAARI
(W. F.) Albright Institute of Archaeological Research American Journal of Archaeology
Akk.
Akkadian
Am.
Amos
c.
CAD CAORC CE
cf. chap., chaps.
ANEP
J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near East in Pictures
ANET
J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts
GIG
American Oriental Society
CIS
AOS APES Ar. 'Arakh.
American Palestine Exploration Society Arabic
American Schools of Oriental
Assyr.
Research Assyrian
b.
cm
col., cols.
ASOR
A.Z.
2 Chr.
'Arakhin Aramaic
'Avodah
Babylonian Talmud circa, about, approximately Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute
Col.
Zarah
CTA
born
of tire common era confer, compare chapter, chapters
BC BGE
Bekh.
before Christ
DOG before the common era Behhorot
Ber.
Berakhot
Bik.
Bikkuritn
BP
BSAE BSAI
Dn.
before the present British School of Archaeology in Egypt British School of Archaeology in Iraq
D.Sc. Dt. EB Eccl. ed., eds. ED
exp. Ez.
et sequens, and the following Exodus expanded Ezekicl
Ezr.
Ezra
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum
fascicle
fern.
feminine
Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum centimeters Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique column, columns Colossians 2 Corinthians A. Herdner, Corpus des tablettes en cuneiformes alphabetiques
died
diss.
Ex.
fasc.
d.
1
et seq.
especially et alii, and others
2 Chronicles
Babylonian
Batra
enlarged
Ethiopic
Bab.
Bava'
enl.
et cetera, and so forth
cubic
B.B.
English
etc.
cu DAI
Enoch
Eng.
Eth.
Bachelor of Arts
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
Elamite
En.
Council of American Overseas Research Centers
B.A.
BASOR
Egyptian
computer-aided design/drafting
I Cor. I Corinthians 2 Cor.
Egyp. Elam.
esp. et al.
i Chr. I Chronicles
CNRS
Aram.
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem
ff.
ft. frag., frags. gal., gals. Geog. Ger.
feet fragment, fragments gallon, gallons Ptolemy, Geographica
GIS
German Geographic Information Systems
Gk.
Greek
Gn.
Deutsches Archaologisches Institut dissertation
and following
fig- figure fl. floruit, flourished
Genesis
ha
hectares
Heb.
Hebrew
Hg.
Haggai
Daniel
Hist.
Herodotus, History
Deutche Orient-Gesellschaft
Hitt.
Hittite Hosea
Doctor of Science
Hos.
Deuteronomy
Hur.
Hurrian
Early Bronze
IAA
Israel Antiquities Authority
Ecclesiasles
ibid.
ibidem, in the same place (as the one immediately preceding)
editor, editors; edition
EEF
Early Dynastic Egyptian Exploration Fund
e.g.
exempli gratia, for example V
IDA(M) i.e.
Israel Department of Antiquities (and Museums) id est, that is
ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS IEJ
Israel Exploration Journal
IES
Israel Exploration Society Institut Francais d'Arch6ologie du Proche-Orient
IFAPO Is.
Isaiah Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente
IsMEO
Job
Jb. Jer.
Jeremiah
Jgs.
Judges
Jn.
John Jonah
Jon.
Joshua
Jos.
Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society
JPOS JRA
Journal of Roman Archaeology
J.T.
Jerusalem Talmud
KAI
H. Donner and W. Rollig, Kanaanaische und aram'dische Inschriften
Kel.
Kclim
Meg.
Megillah
mi.
miles
Mk.
Mark
mm mod. Mt. Mi. n. NAA Nat. Hist. n.b. n.d. Nm. no., nos.
millimeter modern Mount Matthew note Neutron Activation Analysis Pliny, Naturalis Historia (Natural History) nota bene, note well no date Numbers number, numbers
n.p.
no place
n.s.
new series
O.P.
Ordo Praedicatorum, Order of Preachers (Dominicans)
p., pp.
page, pages
Ketubbot
para.
paragraph
kilogram
PEF
Palestine Exploration Fund
i Kgs. I Kings
Pers.
Persian
2 Kings
Ph.D.
Kel. kg 2 Kgs. km
kilometers M. Dietrich and O. Lorentz, Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit
KTU
1 liter 1., 11. line, lines Lat. lb. LB
Latin pounds Late Bronze
lit.
literally
Lk.
Luke
LM Lv. m
Late Minoan Leviticus
Phil. pi. ppm
parts per million
PPN
Pre-Pottery Neolithic
Prv. Ps. p t , pts.
i Peter
r. RCEA Rev. rev.
Malachi
Ru.
M.Div.
Master of Divinity
SBF SBL
Supplementum Graecum series
sg-
singular
*.
Song of Songs
S.J.
Societas Jesu, Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
Shab.
Shabbath
i Sm.
i Samuel
2 Sm.
2 Samuel
sq St., Sts.
square Saint, Saints
Sum.
Sumerian
supp.
supplement
Syr.
Syriac
Ta'an.
Ta anil
Th.D.
Theologicae Doctor, Doctor of Theology
Ti. Tk.
Titus Turkish
i Tm. i Timothy 2 Tm.
2 Timothy
trans.
translated by
Ugar.
Ugaritic
v. viz. vol., vols. vs. Yad.
verse videlicet, namely volume, volumes versus Yadayim Zeilschrift des Dculschen Palastina- Vereins
ZDPV Zee. *
Zechariah hypothetical; in bibliographic citations, English language pages in Hebrew journals
?
uncertain; possibly; perhaps
0
degrees
reigned, ruled Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie arabe
Epigraphicum
ser.
part, parts
2 Peter
masculine
Maccabees
Psalms
i Pt.
masc.
Mc.
Proverbs
2 Pt.
Master of Arts
Middle Bronze
plate; plural Pottery Neolithic
meters
MB
Philippians
PN
M.A. Mai.
Philosophiae Doctor, Doctor of Philosophy
SEG
minutes; feet
"
seconds; inches
Revelations
+
plus
revised
-
minus
Ruth
±
plus or minus
Studium Biblicum Franciscanum
=
equals; is equivalent to
X
by
Society of Biblical Literature
—>
yields
s CONTINUED
C
SERA , TEL (Ar., Tell esh-Shari'a), site located in the western Negev desert, on the north bank of Nahal Gerar (3i°24' N 34°4i' E ) . This horseshoe-shaped mound is 4-5 acres in size and rises some 14 m above its surroundings; its occupational debris is about 10 m thick. Identification with biblical Ziklag (1 Sm. 27:6-7) seems to find support from historical and geographic considerations as well as by the archaeological record. Explorations at Tel Sera', conducted by Eliezer D. Oren on behalf of Ben Gurion University (1972-1979), yielded settlement sttata (I-XIII) from the Chalcolithic to the Mamluk periods. Excavations in area A, above the remains of an ephemeral occupation from the Chalcolithic and EB IV pe riods (stratum XIII), exposed, in what seem to have been the elite zone, the uninterrupted sequence of public struc tures from the M B III-LB III periods. The earliest public structures (MB III-LB I, stratum XII), is extensive. It is a mud-brick structure of the "courtyard palace" type, erected on an artificial platform. During M B III, Tel Sera' may have been surrounded by a defense system of earthen ramparts. In successive strata (LB II—III, strata X I - I X ) , area A was occupied by administrative and cult structures, including a temple (?) building with plastered benches, installations for libations, and favissae, or "pits," in which animal bones and cult objects had been deposited; a granary; and an Egyptianstyle governor's residency (see figure 1 ) . [See Granaries and Silos.] The latter is represented by a large collection of Egyptian finds, including a group of bowls inscribed in Egyptian hieratic that reflect the tax system in southern Ca naan. One of the texts probably refers to a regnal year of Rameses III. The last Canaanite settlement (stratum IX) ended in a great conflagration in the mid-twelfth century
stratigraphic considerations imply an eighth-century B C E date for this stratum and its destruction by fire toward the end of the century. Stratum V (seventh century B C E ) in area D is represented by a citadel building enclosed by a wall 4 m thick with long, brick-floored basement halls and a spa cious courtyard. The large collection of finds from under the collapsed and burned walls included Assyrian-style metal objects such as a bronze crescent-shaped standard and a spearhead, Assyrian palace ware, a faience statuette of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, and Hebrew and Aramaic ostraca. A section of another fortified structure enclosed by a 5-meter thick wall was also unearthed in area A. The de struction of stratum V is assigned to the late seventh century B C E and attributed to a military expedition of the Saite dy nasty from Egypt to the coast of Palestine.
3
The remains of the Persian period (sttatum III) in the fifth-fourth centuries B C E comprised a courtyard-style cita del and numerous built silos and grain pits, notably a large brick-lined granary, 5 m in diameter. In area D the expe dition unearthed the remains of a villa (stratum II) from the first century C E , including a large rectangular hall and small compartments enclosed by a stone wall and a massive stone watchtower. The floors were heaped with fragments of highquality decorated plaster resembling frescoes from the pe riod also found in Jerusalem and on Masada. [See Wall Paintings; Jerusalem; Masada.] The last sizable settlement at Tel Sera' belonged to the Byzantine period (I) in die fifthsixth centuries C E , when the settlement moved down the mound to the bank of Nahal Gerar, where a spacious bath house was explored. [See Baths.] The summit of the mound was occupied by a church or monastery with a fragmentary mosaic floor and certain water-collecting installations.
BCE.
Stratum VIII (Iron I) included early examples of the fourroom houses associated with Philistine ceramics. [See Fourroom House.] The well-organized town plan of stratum VII (tenth-ninth centuries B C E ) in area A comprised a residential section with characteristic four-room buildings. Excavations in area D yielded an impressive complex of buildings (stra tum VT), that integrated mud-brick walls with ashlar masonry, probably under the inspiration of Phoenician architectural traditions. [See Phoenicians.] Ceramic and
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Albright, William Foxwell. "The Fall Trip of the School in Jerusalem to Gaza and Back." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 1 7 (1925): 4-9. Goldwasser, Orly. "Hieratic Inscriptions from Tel Sera' in Southern Canaan." Tel Aviv I I (1984): 77-93. Oren, Eliezer D. "Tel Sera' (Tell esh-Shari'a)." Israel Exploration Jour nal 22 (1972): 1 6 7 - 1 6 9 ; 23 (1973): 2 5 1 - Z 5 4 ; 24 (1974)- 264-266. Oren, Eliezer D. "Tel Sera (Tell esh-Shari'a)." Revue Biblique 80 (1973)1401-405. 1
1
2
SER£E LIMANI
C
SERA , TEL.
Figure
I.
Governor's residency (X-IX),
Oren, Eliezer D. "Ziqlaq, a Biblical City on the Edge of the Negev." Biblical Archaeologist 45 (1982): 1 5 5 - 1 6 6 . Oren, Eliezer D. "Governors* Residencies in Canaan under the New Kingdom: A Case Study of Egyptian Administration." Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 1 4 (1984): 37-56. Oren, Eliezer D. "Ashlar Masonry in the Western Negev in the Iron Age" (in Hebrew). Eretz-Israel23 (1992): 94-105. Oren, Eliezer D, "Sera', Tel." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, pp. 1 3 2 9 - 1 3 3 5 . Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Wright, G. Ernest. "Fresh Evidence for the Philistine Story." Biblical Archaeologist 29 (1966): 70-86. ELIEZER D .
OREN
SERGE LIMANI (Tk„ "sparrow harbor"), a small, protected bay (36°34'25" N , 28°03'o8" E) with a deep, nar row entrance on tire southwest coast of Turkey, opposite the island of Rhodes and just northeast of the better-known bay of Loryma (modern Bozukkale), with its excellently pre served Hellenistic fortification Serge Limani was almost cer tainly the Portus Cressa of Pliny (Natural History 5.29) and the Rresa of Ptolemy (5.2); it served the town of Kasara, probably a deme center attached to Kamiros on Rhodes. Underwater surveys show that the seeming tranquility of Serce Limam attracted ships to an anchorage at the north eastern end of its entrance passage from the Early Bronze Age until modern times. Its busiest period, as might be ex pected, was during the Hellenistic heyday of Rhodes. Ships
looking west. (Courtesy E. D. Oren)
that did not quite reach the safety of the harbor have left their remains outside it. These include a steamboat, perhaps from the nineteenth century C E , and a sixth-century B C E wreck that has not been located, although it has yielded strap-handled amphoras to sponge draggers' nets. Ships that did find shelter in this natural harbor still faced peril, for sudden winds channeled from different directions by valleys at the bay's ends make Serce Limani more dan gerous than it seems. Two ships sank along the eastern side of its entrance passage, and two others just beyond these where the bay widens. One of these, just inside the harbor mouth, about 30 m deep, is a Roman amphora carrier of the first century B C E or C E . Farther inside the harbor, at a depth °f 3 5 3 7 rn, are the remains of a Hellenistic wine carrier. Already looted of almost all the amphoras that had been visible when archaeologists from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) discovered it in 1973, it was partially excavated by the INA and Texas A&M University in 19781980. The excavation was interrupted when it was discov ered that much of the site had been covered by tons of boul ders from a rockslide that took place at an unknown date after the ship sank, making the excavation more difficult and dangerous than anticipated. Nevertheless, they uncovered about six hundred Knidian-type amphoras, in two sizes, some with Zenon Group stamps that date the wreck, with its glazed and plain wares, to the middle of the first half of the third century B C E . Other finds include the two compo-
SERCE LIMANI nents of a stone hopper mill, and the lower grinding platform of a quern. The ship itself was at least partly lead sheathed, in the custom of the day, and yielded a lead pipe that may be the earliest evidence of a bilge pump. Next inside the harbor, approximately 150 m north of the third-century B C E wreck, is the eleventh-century C E wreck described in detail below. East of it, closer to shore, appear to be the remains of another Hellenistic wreck, badly broken and scattered in shallow water. The wreck for which Senpe Limam is best known is that of an eleventh-century C E merchant ship with a cargo of Islamic glass excavated by the INA between 1977 and 1979. The ship was about 15 m long with a beam of about 5.2 m. Its pine hull and elm keel, now reassembled in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Turkey, provides the earliest dated example of a seagoing vessel built in the modern, frame-first manner. Although only a few of its frames (ribs) were erected before the planks were installed, this framework was now the primary structure; the ship wright, however, was still essentially shaping the hull with planks. The ship's fiat-bottomed, boxlike shape would have allowed it to navigate in shallow waters, including rivers. It carried two metric tons of ballast in the form of just over one hundred boulders, with an additional half ton of cob bles. Its eight iron, Y-shaped anchors, with removable wooden stocks, were forged from short iron rods; three were bowers—two to port and one to starboard—with the re maining five stowed just forward of midships. [See An chors.] A surviving halyard block and the hull design suggest that the ship sported two lateen-rigged masts. There appear to have been three living areas: one at the bow (probably covered by a deck), an open space on the midships deck, and a stern cabin. The ship probably sailed from the Black Sea or some where around Constantinople in about 1025 with Bulgar merchants carrying in the hold about one hundred of their own individual amphoras that had been fired in kilns around the Sea of Marmara. The voyage took the ship to the neigh borhood of Caesarea, in modern Israel, where it took on its cargos of Islamic glass and glazed bowls, and perhaps jew elry and copper and bronze vessels of Islamic origin; the glazed bowls and an earring of delicate filigreed gold find their closest archaeological parallels at Caesarea, where ap parently similar glass is also found. [See Caesarea; Glass.] Although much that the ship carried was of Islamic origin, it seems that many or most of the crew and merchants on board were Christian. Three of four Byzantine seals recov ered have Christian scenes impressed in their lead: the Vir gin Mary with the Christ child, tire ecstatic meeting of Peter and Paul, and a warrior saint. One of tire seals protected the writing of someone named Peter; the fourth had not yet been used. The Christianity of those on board is also indicated by the pig legs found among the food remains, less likely to have been eaten by Jews or Muslims, and the crosses (and
3
in one instance the name Jesus) inscribed or molded inside some of the nine hundred-odd lead fishnet sinkers used dur ing the voyage. In the forward part of the ship's hold there must have been a cargo like soda because it left no archaeological clue as to its nature. The wine amphoras were stowed in the center and aftermost parts of the hold. In the after third of the hold three tons of glass cullet included two tons of raw glass and one ton of broken glass. The broken glass was largely waste from an Islamic glassworks that has not been identified. Cul let is needed not only for making glass vessels in places that do not produce their own glass, but also for making new batches of glass from its basic ingredients. Mending the glass cargo from between half a million and a million shards dur ing a ten-year period revealed more than two hundred shapes, some unique, including varieties of cups, bowls, bot tles, plates, lamps, beakers, jars, jugs, and ewers. It is esti mated that these are the remains of between ten thousand and twenty thousand vessels, many of which had engraved or molded designs. Altogether they form by far the largest and best-dated collection of medieval Islamic glass known. The colors are mostly various shades of green and purple, but dense greens and blues also occur. Above the cullet, the ship carried cargos of raisins and sumac, the latter believed to have been exported through Caesarea at about the time the ship sank. Eighty intact Islamic glass vessels were also on board, per haps once in bundles of merchants' goods; these were, with out exception, in the bow and stern living quarters (see fig ure 1). The living quarters were identified by cooldng and eating wares as well as by die bones of sheep or goat and pig; other food remains included almonds, apricots, plums, and olives, although which of these were for shipboard use and which for trade has not been determined. In the stern living area were eighteen Islamic glass weights that date the wreck to about 1025 C E , a date supported by the Fatimid gold coins and Byzantine copper coins of Basil II recovered; this has allowed the closest dating of some of the types of Islamic glazed bowls on board. Weighing instruments in cluded sets of both Byzantine and Islamic weights, three pan-balance scales, and a small Byzantine steelyard. Also at the stern were the ship's carpenter's tools, including bow drills, hammers, axes, adzes, saw, files, and the earliest known caulking tools. Those who shared this stern area played chess, some of whose wooden pieces survive, whereas what may well be a backgammon counter found amidships suggests a less intellectual game for the common sailors on board. Lastly, those in the stern were the only ones on board who had pork and fish for food at the time the ship sank. It seems that three fishing nets, each about 40 m long, based on the numbers, size, and distribution of more than nine hundred lead net sinkers, were being mended on deck with net needles on the final voyage; eight bone spindle
4
SERGILLA
SERCE L I M A N I .
Figure
I.
Collection of Islamic glass vessels. (Courtesy G. F. Bass)
whorls of probable Syrian origin found near the net sinkers suggest that the sailors spun their own cords for this task. There was also a smaller casting net. The ship was heavily armed, with fifty-two javelins, eleven spears, and at least one sword (with a feathered bird on its bronze hilt, inside a wooden scabbard); the weapons were issued in sets of one spear and five javelins wrapped in bur laplike cloth. Personal possessions on board included a grooming kit comprising a wooden delousing comb, a razor, and scissors; found nearby, near another comb, were piles of orpiment, a substance still used with quicklime as a de pilatory. The ship's ultimate destination is not known, but it may have been returning to Byzantium with its Levantine cargo. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bass, George F. "The Shipwreck at Serce Liman, Turkey." Archaeology 32.1 (1979): 36-43. Bass, George F. "Archaeologists in Wet Suits." In Science Year 1982: The World Book Science Annual, pp, 9 6 - 1 1 1 , Chicago, 1981. Bass, George F. "The Million Piece Glass Puzzle." Archaeology 37.4 (1984): 42-47. Bass, George F. "The Nature of die Serce Limani Glass." Journal of Glass Studies 26 (1984): 64-69.
Bass, George F., et al. "Excavation of an Elevendi-Century Shipwreck at Serce Liman, Turkey." National Geographic Society Research Re ports 17 (1984): 1 6 1 - 1 8 2 . Jenkins, Marilyn. "Early Medieval Islamic Pottery: The Eleventh Cen tury Reconsidered." Muqamas 9 (1992): 56-66. Describes how the excavation revolutionized accepted views of early medieval Islamic art. Koehler, Carolyn G., and Malcolm B. Wallace. "The Transport Am phoras: Description and Capacities." American Journal of Archae ology 91 (1987): 49-57. To accompany Pulak and Townsend (be low). Pulak, Cemal, and Rhys F. Townsend. "The Hellenistic Shipwreck at Serce Limani, Turkey: Preliminary Report." American Journal of'Ar chaeology gi (1987): 3 1 - 4 9 . T 0 be accompanied by Koehler and Wal lace (above). Steffy, J. Richard. "The Reconstruction of the Eleventh-Century Serce Liman Vessel: A Preliminary Report." International Journal ofNau tical Archaeology I I (1982): 1 3 - 3 4 . G E O R G E F. B A S S
SERGILLA, site located in the Jebel Zawiye (the lime stone massif in northern Syria), one of a group of fifteen deserted villages, approximately 3 km (2 mi.) apart, from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. The modern
SERGILLA name Sergilla is Aramaic in origin; the ancient name is not known, but it was probably close or identical. The village was explored by Melchior de Vogue and then more thoroughly by the American Howard Crosby Butler in the course of his expeditions in Syria in 1899-1909. [See the biographies of Vogue and Butler.] Extensively discussed in the second volume (architecture and other arts) of the pub lication of the American expedition of 1899-1900, the ruins of Sergilla were also part of a systematic description of a great number of monuments in Princeton University's pub lication of its expeditions to Syria in 1904, 1905, and 1909. Georges Tchalenko mentioned the baths and briefly noted the evolution of the village (Tchalenko, 1953-1958). Be tween 1978 and 1984, Georges Tate studied but did not excavate the village for his research on social and economic history (Tate, 1992). Since 1989 the village has been tire subject of an excavation, architectural abstracts, and me thodical decoration by a multidisciplinary French team in cluding Tate, A. Naccache (archaeologist) and G. Charpentier (architect). Butler described the sloping site as a vast theater facing south in which the tiers of seats were terraces determined by the walls, expressing, on the whole, a voluntary allocation of space. The research now being done in the courtyards at the site tends to show that Sergilla was, morphologically, a village in which houses and other buildings were randomly placed and assembled in islets separated by empty spaces rather than by streets or public spaces. The houses all reflect a tripartite plan: a multistory building whose ground floor is reserved for production or storage, a living floor, and a courtyard, all surrounded by an enclosure wall. Historically, three phases of settlement can be distin guished. The first probably begins at the end of the second century C E or the beginning of the third; it ended in about 380-390. The village then contained only peasant houses (no vestige of a sanctuary has been found). Groups of very small buildings, with one to three very small rooms on the ground floor, converge on each other. Their walls are coarsely constructed of quarry stone with two dressed faces connected by bonding stones. The houses are clustered at the bottom of the wadi at the north-south slope, which forms the central axis of the village. The discovery of a bill hook (a hand tool for pruning) in one of the buildings sug gests the cultivation of cereals. The inhabitants were doubt less colonists from the neighboring plain in search of land to cultivate, although the soil is rocky and would have re quired a substantial investment of labor. In sum, it was a population of pioneering colonists of very modest means. The second phase lasted from 380 or 390 to the middle of the sixth century. From the end of the fourth century onward there was a complete change in building methods: the quarry-stone walls gave way to the use of rectangular perpend stones (45-55 cm high) arranged in more or less regular courses. The door- and window frames are adorned
5
with moldings and are abundantly decorated. The houses vary in size—one to nine rooms—and follow the ground plan of the preceding period. They would have been occu pied by large family groups, natural or contractual. The houses often survive to the rooftop, sometimes with a ped iment that shows that the roof sloped in two directions. The houses were placed east and west of the wadi, enclosing and dominating the ancient quarter. The evidence suggests that these houses belonged to rich peasants with a surplus suf ficient to pay the salaries and buy the materials necessary to construct these once-spectacular buildings. They would have acquired their wealth from producing and selling olive oil, whose importance steadily increased, especially in the sixth century: industrial-sized oil presses were excavated to the north of house VIII and, in 1992, from house XVIII; botii are dated to tire sixth century. It is also in that period that the great monuments at the site were built: the church, baths, and cafe (see below). All have been excavated. The church had three successive architectural stages: as a building with a single nave, from the end of the fourth cen tury to the beginning of the fifth century; as a three-naved building with columns topped by arches (a new apse was constructed farther north in the second third of the fifth cen tury); and finally with an addition on the north of a room whose function is unknown. In each stage the floor was a mosaic. This church belongs, as Butler noted, to a group of buildings that included a courtyard and a second, smaller church with three naves and outbuildings set among sar cophagi and a passage giving on the northeast. [See Churches.] The baths excavated by Charpentier had their entrance on the northeast. The principal room was the disrobing room in which Butler had discovered a mosaic laid in 473 (that has since disappeared), and not the frigidarium typical of a Roman bath; elsewhere, the system was traditionally Roman, with four rooms aligned southwest-northeast: the fire room, caldarium with hypocausts, tepidarium, and fri gidarium. [See Baths.] The cafe, so named with irony by Butler, could not be an "andron," as Tchalenko thought, but is, rather, an inn with a stable on the ground floor and a dormitory above. The tombs are currently being studied. The third settlement phase, from the middle of the sixth century until about the beginning of the eighth, left no mon umental remains. The Islamic conquest in the seventh cen tury did not affect the size of the village or the life of its population. This phase is widely represented, and often the only one represented, in excavation. There is a common ceramic tradition for which it is difficult to determine a ter minus ante quern. The principal difficulty in interpreting the phase's material culture is that, for the stone houses, the level of the threshold has been preserved, which implies the dis appearance of stratigraphy. In contrast, the last phase of oc cupation, under the Umayyads, is well preserved. Two other indications of the permanence of the village
6
SETTLEMENT PATTERNS
population, of its progressive arabization and islamization, are given by an Arabic inscription engraved next to a Syriac inscription on the lintel of the entrance to house IX and by the mihrab built of reused stones in the southwest wall of the small church. The date of the inscriptions and mihrab are in doubt. They may belong to the Ayyubid reoccupation, but no indication at Sergilla has yet been found to support the possibility. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the village was completely abandoned. Its inhabitants began a slow redescent to the more fertile plain below. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Tate, Georges. Les campagnes de la Syrie du Nord du He au Vile siecle. Vol. I . Eibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 3 3 . Paris, 1992. Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: he massif du Belus a I'epoque romaine. 3 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et His torique, vol. 50. Paris, 1953-1958. GEORGES T A T E
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
SETTLEMENT PATTERNS. The configurations and settings of archaeological sites and their distribution across the landscape often reflect settlement patterns. The study of settlement patterns goes beyond description to learning what the patterns imply about the societies that constructed and occupied sites. Research shows that settle ment distribution reveals environmental, cultural, social, historical, demographic, and political relationships. It also shows that societal patterning can be discerned in arrange ments within individual settlements and structures. To study settlement patterns the spatial unit of analysis must be identified. That unit may be an individual room or structure within a site, the site itself, or all the sites in a region. Chronological parameters must also be clarified: should the patterns represent a single archaeological period or trace changes in settlement patterns over time? Data re covery follows. Although some projects require the collection of com pletely new data sets, settlement-pattern analyses often rely on the manipulation of information already available in ex cavation and survey reports. However, existing data, col lected for other purposes, may be inappropriate. For ex ample, data from a survey designed to identify sites endangered by highway consttuction could not be used to characterize the distribution of sites across a region. The data must meet the requirements and goals of settlementpattern analysis. Methodological sophistication cannot over come weak or inappropriate data that may produce mis leading results. A settlement-pattern study may often require that existing data be supplemented with new research. For example, an archaeological survey may have revealed the locations of nu
merous ancient settlements in a region without obtaining data about their environmental situation—for example, the surrounding topography, rainfall patterns, water supply. At a minimum, any study investigating their environmental re lationships must look at their distribution in relation to ex isting information, such as that found on geological, hydrological, and meteorological maps. Plotting the location of known sites on such maps can make their relationships more apparent. It may also be necessary to visit each site to collect environmental data. In either case, current environmental conditions may not accurately reflect those in antiquity, re quiring the recovery of relevant paleoenvironmental data. [See Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.] Finally, some projects may require collecting completely new data. The recovery of settlement-pattern data is often associated with systematic archaeological survey. This is true of most studies in Near Eastern archaeology. However, settlement patterns also include the spatial patterning of ac tivities within a single room or larger structure, as well as the arrangement of structures and activities across a site. Clearly, such analyses require systematic excavation and full data recovery. Even in the case of regional settlement-pat tern studies, the successful identification of key site param eters (population size, date, and function), requires more information than is normally collected during a survey. Estimating population size and density, for example, re quires the calculation of the area of the site in question. This means that ascertaining boundaries is often a difficult task. Once site size has been determined, population size and density can be estimated in at least two ways. Based on eth nographic studies of living communities in the region, the number of households can be multiplied by a coefficient representing the average number of people per household. Determining the number of households at a site requires the recovery of a representative sample of structures, however, something only a broadly excavated exposure can provide. As an alternative, based on the relationship between popu lation and settlement size in living communities, the site area can be multiplied by a fixed coefficient representing the mean population size per unit area. Using either method, population size and density for each settlement in a region or for tlie region itself can be estimated. Such estimates can be compared across regions and across time within a single region. The ultimate goal is to provide regional demographic history as a basis for understanding historical, political, so cial, and economic processes. [See Ethnoarchaeology; De mography.] Identifying site function also requires special attention. A site's location in its unique environment can provide evi dence of specialized activities. Distinctive artifact types and variations in artifact distribution also provide clues, as does evidence of functionally specialized constructed features: walls and other architecture ovens, grape and olive presses. As with population size, ethnographic analogy provides an
SETTLEMENT PATTERNS important source of evidence for recovering and interpretating archaeological settiement patterns. In data recovery, then, the data must truly represent the phenomenon of interest. For example, a project investigat ing the internal organization of residential structures within a settlement must collect data that represent the full range of such structures, including both elite and lower class res idences and those occupied by newly established as opposed to mature households. It must also establish that the struc tures analyzed were occupied simultaneously. Regional set tlement-pattern studies similarly require that the data reflect the full extent of variability (spatial, demographic, func tional, temporal, environmental) among sites in the region. Unfortunately, time and expense often preclude full-cov erage survey and excavation. Archaeologists must therefore make every effort to collect a representative sample. The most successful and cost-effective way to do so is through sampling based on the laws of probability—although this may be impossible when the study is based on existing data or for other reasons. In such cases, archaeologists should explore other methods for verifying and perhaps enhancing die representativeness of tiieir data, such as reinvestigating selected sites, opening exploratory probes, and surveying in adequately covered territory. Some archaeologists use ethnoarchaeological materials as a source of information to increase the reliability of settle ment-pattern analyses. Data from existing communities al low many of the basic assumptions of archaeological setdement-pattern analysis to be tested. Does each room or structure in the community have a dominant function, and is that function reflected in its form, location, and content? Does the community's overall spatial organization reflect its social organization? Does each family occupy its own house? How are domestic configurations reflected in the organiza tion and architectural history of the houses? Are individual and family social status reflected in the size of dwellings? Do people in one community tend to interact most often with inhabitants of the closest neighboring settlement? Are setdements located in a position that allows them to exploit efficiently the region's resources? How have historical and political circumstances impacted die form and distribution of settlements in the region? The answers to these and other questions is determine the fit between present-day settle ment patterns and human behavior and, in turn, the inter pretation of ancient settlement patterns. Once data are recovered and their representativeness con firmed, the next step is pattern recognition. This may be as simple as visually examining site distributions on a map or as complex as performing sophisticated statistical analysis using such tools as geographic information systems (GIS). The goal, to identify potentially meaningful patterns in the distribution of the archaeological phenomenon of interest, can be implemented by developing methods using statistical analyses and associated graphics as heuristic tools. In that
7
way, pattern recognition is achieved by the analyst rather than by the computer. The final step in any settlement-pattern analysis involves interpretation: what do the identified patterns say about the past? At the risk of oversimplification, three main interpre tive approaches can be identified: environmental, historical, and regional. However, each project may tend to focus on a narrow range of factors thought to influence the spatial patterns of human settlement. Representatives of the environmental approach focus on human/environmental relationships as the primary deter minants of settlement patterns. For example, Donald Henry (From Foraging to Agriculture: The Levant at the End of the Ice Age, Philadelphia, 1989) interprets the distribution of Epipaleolithic sites in ancient Palestine as directly influenced by resource distribution, topography, rainfall, temperature, and altitude. Another environmental approach, known as site-catchment analysis, is based on the assumption that subsistence-based societies without animal or motorized transport will most intensively exploit those resources within a day's round trip of their community. Based on ethno graphic analogy, this limit is normally placed at 5 km (3 mi.). After drawing circles with a diameter of 5 km centered on each of the sites of interest, the distribution of resources within each of these "site catchments" is examined. Differ ences in resource distribution among the sites in a region may provide evidence to suggest a different mix of subsis tence strategies for each location. Although there has been much criticism of this approach, the importance it places on examining resource distribution within a site's immediate vicinity makes it an extremely valuable tool for studying hu man/environmental relationships in subsistence-based so cieties. Although geographers point out that environmental fac tors play an important role in settlement patterns even in the industrialized world, most Near Eastern archaeologists as sume that the impact of human/environmental relationships declined rapidly as societies adopted agriculture and became more complex. For these scholars, human/human relation ships become the primary determinants of settlement pat terns. Two groups exist among those that emphasize such relationships: some emphasize historical and political factors (the historical approach), while others focus on economic and social factors (the regional-analysis approach). Long before the term settlement patterns became common in archaeological discourse, Near Eastern archaeologists were interested in the historical implications of site distri butions. In their pioneering explorations of the Holy Land, Edward Robinson and Eli Smith sought to identify places named in the Bible. To do so, they followed geographic clues in die Bible on the existing landscape (see discussion in Silberman, 1982). [See the biography of Robinson.] While not setdement-pattern archaeology in the contemporary sense, their work does display recognition of the historical
8
SETTLEMENT PATTERNS
importance of settlement patterns. This recognition is even more apparent in the work of the German scholar Albrecht Alt and his students during the first half of the twentieth century. Their research focused on the historical and polit ical implications of site distributions, especially as they relate to the territorial boundaries of historically documented po litical units. The historical approach to settlement patterns is today epitomized in the field of historical geography as championed by the late Israeli scholar Yohanan Aharoni and his students. [See Historical Geography; and the biographies of Alt and Aharoni.] Interest in die historical implications of settlement pat terns is also apparent in the history of research in ancient Mesopotamia. Although not much more than treasure hunt ers, die earliest excavators in that region were concerned with die historical implications of site locations, especially as they related to historical identification. More recentiy, some specialists have sought to correlate the distribution of archaeological sites with geographic evidence derived from textual sources, especially as they relate to political and eco nomic history. This interest in site distributions also led, during the 1960s and 1970s, to the development of what is referred to here as the regional-analysis approach. No longer satisfied with their predecessor's focus on history, several scholars (in cluding Robert McC. Adams and Gregory T. Johnson) sought to identify the social, political, and economic pro cesses involved in the development of urban society. For theoretical inspiration tiiey turned to the subdiscipline of ge ography known as regional analysis. This was a fortuitous development in that the goals of regional analysis in geog raphy are virtually identical to those of archaeological set tlement-pattern analysis. The elements of geographic re gional analysis most often applied to Near Eastern data are gravity-based interaction models, central-place theory, and the analysis of rank-size distributions. Gravity-based interaction models explore the spatial im plications of interaction among the inhabitants of the settle ments within a region. They are based on die assumption that the intensity of such interaction is subject to regularities similar to those governing the intensity of the gravitational field between two objects. Specifically, it is assumed that the intensity of interaction between two places is directiy pro portional to the product of their populations and inversely proportional to the distance between them. In archaeology, this provides a simple method for quantifying intraregional interaction; it supplements artifact distribution and histori cal records. Its application to archaeology, however, de pends on finding reliable means for estimating a site's pop ulation and using appropriate methods to measure the distance between settlements. In contrast to gravity-based interaction models, which ap ply to all types of settlement, central-place theory focuses on the distribution of urban centers across the landscape. It
predicts that, under ideal conditions, a region's urban cen ters will be located at the apexes of equilateral triangles, each center serving a surrounding hexagonal region. These ideal conditions include a region characterized by an even distri bution of population and purchasing power; a region in which local topography does not impede travel in any di rection; and a society in which economic behavior is geared to the minimization of effort. Under tiiese conditions, setdements that provide goods and services for a surrounding region (i.e., urban centers) will tend to develop at the center of their trade area. Economies of scale, derived from the agglomeration of tertiary activities and equal accessibility from all directions, drive this phenomenon. In the case of a single central place, the most efficient shape for such a sup porting region would be a circle; however, when a number of such centers are found in a region, die most efficient shape proves to be a hexagon. The size of the supporting region depends on the threshold of demand, which refers to die distance individuals are willing to travel to obtain a cer tain good or service. Even though this tiireshold will differ for each good and service, a hierarchy of centers will de velop, with centers at each level offering a range of goods and services with similar thresholds. By comparing this ideal pattern to die distribution of settlements in a region, ar chaeologists can identify variations from the ideal that re quire explanation. It is these variations and their interpre tation, not the ideal conditions postulated by the model, that provide archaeologists with evidence to interpret statements about the past. For example, variations from the ideal hex agonal shape may indicate the impact of uneven regional topography on intersite interactions. Exploring this impact may reveal geopolitical processes of profound importance that otherwise might escape detection. Another approach to urban settlement patterns borrowed by Near Eastern archaeologists from geographic regional analysis is the comparative study of rank-size distributions. Geographers have noted that urban centers in modern in dustrialized nations, when ranked according to their popu lations, are distributed such that the largest city has twice the population of the second-ranked city, three times the population of the third-ranked, and so on. The rank and population of urban centers that follow this pattern, when plotted on double log paper, describe a log-normal distri bution that is manifested in a straight line with a negative slope of 45 degrees. This log-normal distribution is thought to reflect a highly integrated urban system in which tiiere is a balance between each urban center and its rural periphery. Even more interesting in archaeological terms are the ob served deviations from this ideal. When a rank-size plot is concave, meaning tiiat lower ranking settlements are smaller than expected, a condition of urban primacy is indicated. In such situations, an extraordinary concentration of urban functions might be postulated for the highest-ranking cen ter. Primacy might also result from a special role that the
SETTLEMENT PATTERNS highest-ranking center plays beyond the border of die urban system under study, however. In contrast, a convex distri bution, where lower-ranking settlements are larger than ex pected, is usually interpreted as representing a poorly inte grated urban system. Convexity may also result when centers belonging to two separate urban systems are mistak enly combined for analysis; this is an especially serious prob lem for archaeological analyses. One strengtii of these methods is that the ideal conditions postulated in each case have specific, easy-to-recognize spa tial consequences. This dependence on ideal conditions could also be viewed as a fatal weakness: it can be argued that no region can possibly satisfy the ideal conditions of central-place theory, making the theory's use questionable. If the goal of these models were to provide automatic ex planations, the criticism would be valid. However, their goal is heuristic, not explanatory; it is the deviations from the ideal that are of primary interest. By calling attention to these deviations and suggesting how they may be explained, die potential of tiiese approaches in helping to interpret archae ological settlement patterns is considerable. Archaeologists working in die Near East generally agree that settlement pat terns are among the best data they have about the past. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1981. Summarizes nearly three decades of archaeological survey and settlement-pattern analysis in southern Mesopotamia. Notable for its successful combination of rank-size analysis, ecological consid erations, and historical interpretation. Aharoni, Yohanan. The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Translated and edited by Anson F. Rainey. 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1979. Classic application of the historical approach to settlementpattern analysis. Includes a description and critique of the work of Albrecht Alt and his students. Algaze, Guillermo. The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Early Me sopotamian Civilisation. Chicago, 1993. Uses regional settlementpattern data and world systems theory to explain the phenomenon of the Uruk expansion. Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua. The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century. Jerusalem, 1979. Excellent account of the historical ap proach to settlement patterns as practiced by such explorers as Ed ward Robinson and Eli Smith. Broshi, Magen, and Ram Gophna. "The Settlements and Population of Palestine during the Early Bronze Age II—III." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 253 (Winter 1984): 4 1 - 5 3 . De scribes the distribution of sites across the region and produces a regional population estimate. The conclusions should be considered provisional as they are based on uneven data derived from a mixture of systematic survey, chance discovery, and scientific excavation. Broshi, Magen, and Ram Gophna. "Middle Bronze Age II Palestine: Its Settlements and Population." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 261 (February 19S6): 73-90. See annotation above. Campbell, Edward F. Shechem II: Portrait of a Hill Country Vale, the Shechem Regional Survey. Atlanta, 1991. An excellent example of the historical approach, with a good discussion of the relationship be tween settlement patterns and regional topography.
9
Esse, Douglas. Subsistence, Trade, and Social Change in Early Bronze Age Palestine. Chicago, 1 9 9 1 . An excellent discussion of EB settle ment patterns in northern Palestine that successfully combines key elements of the environmental and historical approaches. Hole, Frank, ed. The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and Society from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest. Washington, D.C., 1987. An important collection that combines settlement-pattern data and ex cavation results in definitive summaries of recent research in the region. Especially valuable for the sophisticated analysis of rank-size distributions by several contributors. Home, Lee. Village Spaces: Settlement and Society in Northeastern Iran, Washington, D.C., 1994. Thorough ethnoarchaeological analysis of local and regional settlement patterns, explaining the proper role of ethnographic analogy and examining thefitbetween spatial behavior and the archaeological record. Johnson, Gregory A. "Aspects of Regional Analysis in Archaeology." Annual Review of Anthropology 6 (1977): 479-508. Literature review addressing the application of gravity-based interaction models, cen tral-place theory, and rank-size analysis to archaeological data; sev eral case studies from work in southern Mesopotamia. Johnson, Gregory A. Local Exchange and Early State Development in Southwestern Iran. University of Michigan, Museum of Anthropol ogy, Anthropological Papers, no. 5 1 . Ann Arbor, 1973. Pioneering application of the regional analysis approach. Kent, Susan, ed. Method and Theory for Activity Area Research. New York, 1987. Recent work that link patterns of social behavior to spa tial patterns within enclosed areas such as rooms and courtyards. Kramer, Carol. Village Ethnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in Archaeological Perspective. New York, 1982. Examines living communities from a local and a regional perspective, providing numerous insights into the interpretation of the archaeological record. Lawrence, Denise L., and Setha M. Low. "The Built Environment and Spatial Form." Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 453-505. Comprehensive literature review focusing on the analysis and inter pretation of the various products of human building activity, with special emphasis given to recent work on domestic structures. Miller, J. Maxwell, ed. Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau: Con ducted during 1978--1982 under the Direction ofJ . Maxwell Miller and Jack M. Pinkerton. American Schools of Oriental Research, Archae ological Reports, 1. Atlanta, 1991. Another fine example of the ef fectiveness of combining environmental considerations with the his torical approach. Parsons, Jeffrey R. "Archaeological Settlement Patterns." Annual Re view of Anthropology 1 (1972): 1 2 7 - 1 5 0 . Bibliographic essay covering the literature on settlement patterns through 1970, including several detailed case studies. Rainey, Anson F. "Historical Geography." In Benchmarks in Time and Culture: An Introduction to Palestinian Archaeology Dedicated to Joseph A. Callaway, edited by Joel F. Drinkard et al„ pp. 353-368. Adanta, 1988. Excellent summary of the historical approach as applied to Palestine, with a useful bibliography. Roper, Donna C. "The Method and Theory of Site Catchment Anal ysis: A Review." Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 2 (1979): 1 1 9 - 1 4 0 . Thorough critique with an extensive bibliography. Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country. New York, 1982. Survey of die history of exploration up to 1918. Includes an excellent summary of the work of Edward Robinson and Eli Smith. Trigger, Bruce G. "The Determinants of Settlement Patterns." In Set tlement Archaeology, edited by Kvvang-chih Chang, pp. 53-78. Palo Alto, Calif., 1968. Masterly synthesis of the settlement-pattern ap proach; Trigger identifies the various factors thought to influence spatial behavior in human societies. Ucko, Peter, et al., eds. Man, Settlement, and Urbanism. Cambridge, Mass., 1972. Seminal collection of articles focusing on the theory
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SEWERS
and method of settiement-pattern archaeology; includes several case studies from Near Eastern archaeology. Weiss, Harvey, ed. The Origins of Cities in Dry-Farming Syria and Mes opotamia in the Third Millennium B.C.. Guilford, Conn., 1986. Sev eral articles in this collection address settlement-pattern data from historical and environmental perspectives. WADE R . KOTTER
SEWERS. The development of elaborate drainage sys tems is an important landmark in the cultural process. Al though procedures for evacuating water can be found in the Near East at Byblos as early as the sixth-fifth millennia and in other settiements in the fourth millennium (Tepe Gawra in northern Assyria, Habuba Kabira in nordiern Mesopo tamia, Uruk in southern Babylonia), the initial impetus for constructing sewers was die emergence of urbanism and die development of monumental buildings. The elaboration of an organized drainage system with a main channel, tributary conduits, and a large variety of evacuation devices implies both a complex and hierarchical social organization and cen tralized power. The complexity of the society is to be seen in the various levels of concern for domestic hygiene (the development of bauirooms and toilets in third-millennium Egypt and Mesopotamia) and/or in the concern for clean liness in public life (e.g., channels under streets, sealed sink holes) . A central government was needed to create a hierarchized network in which private owners and state properties had to be connected and, probably, had to pro vide construction costs. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the most spec tacular drainage systems were built in palaces and temples. Examples of the latter include die temple quarters at the Assyrian capital of Assur (covered channels on the edges of rooms running under ground and sewers tall enough to stand in, all made of brick, in the early diird millennium), the Oval temple at Khafajeh in Babylonia, and the Ishtar temple at Mari in Syria (also in the early third millennium). Most sacred places in the ancient Near East show remains of evacuation devices, which are largely related to such cultic activities as ablutions, libations, the washing of the deity's statue, and animal sacrifices. Among Mesopotamian and Syrian palaces, the drainage systems at Assur and Mari (out of brick, third millennium), Tell Halaf, Til Barsip, and Arslan Tash (stone, third and second millennia) are notewordiy; some were found in Anatolia as well, at Alaca Hoyuk, for example. A complex and coherent system, exclusively connected to the palace, was discovered at Ugarit in Syria (second millennium B C E ) : an underground sewer made of stone and connected by gutters, stone pipes, and other means of evacuating waste materials from the rooms (see figure 1). The necessity of sewage probably came about as a result of a more hygienic life in the palace, from public receptions and celebrations, and also from cult perfor-
S E W E R S . Figure 1. Ras ShamralUgarit. T h e main collector in the palace area, from the south. (Courtesy Mission Archeologique Fran chise de Ras Shamra-Ougarit)
mances in the royal place (Kingship, funerary, and domestic rituals). In the second and first millennia B C E , these systems be came widespread in most large cities (e.g., Bogazkoy in An atolia, Fara in Mesopotamia, Gibeon in Palestine, among many others), draining residential quarters as well as public buildings. During the Hellensistic and Roman periods, die construction of urban sewer systems was widespread; mon umental remains can be found at Kition on Cyprus, Apamea in Syria, Jerusalem, and in many other places. It is not always easy to determine outiets for sewers. In most cases, they emptied into deep sinkholes (such as the wells built of pottery rings at several Mesopotamian sites). Most houses in the Near East poured their waste water into sinkholes dug in the streets or in the houses themselves. At Mari, Ugarit, and some otiier cities, the sewer system may have emptied into a stream outside the city walls. A major function of sewer systems was not only to evacuate waste
SEYTANDERESI water from temples, palaces, and houses, but also to collect runoff from rainwater into cisterns. [See also Cisterns; Hydraulics; Hydrology; and Water Tunnels. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the sub ject of independent entries.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Calvet, Yves. "La maitrise de l'eau a Ougarit." Comptes rendus de VAcademic des Inscriptions etBelles-Lettres (1989): 308-326. Important supplement to Hernker (below), covering Syria. Crouch, Dora P. Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities. New York, 1993. Although limited to Greek archaeology, this volume includes interesting developments on the management of water. Hemker, Christiane. Altorientalische Kanatisation. Miinster, 1993. De tailed catalog with pertinent analysis of most of the finds in die Near East (excluding Egypt, Palestine, and Iran) to die Hellenistic period. Basic reference. Shiloh, Yigal. "Underground Water Systems in the Land of Israel in the Iron Age." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods: In Memory of Immanuel (Munya) Dunayevsky, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 275-293. Jeru salem, 1992. Covers Palestine. JEAN-FRANCOIS SALLES
SEYRIG, HENRI
(1895-1973), epigrapher and nu
mismatist. Born in France and at home in four European languages and cultures, Henri Seyrig studied classical ar chaeology after World War I. In 1922 he entered the Ecole d'Athenes, whose general secretary he became in 1928. In 1929 he was appointed director of antiquities of Syria and Lebanon under the French Mandate. Together with Rene Dussaud he formulated the antiquities law issued by the French High Commission in 1933 that is still in force in Lebanon. Syrian and Lebanese scholars agree tiiat Henri Seyrig had their heritage at heart. He donated his valuable coin collection to the Lebanese Department of Antiquities. Seyrig had a comprehensive vision of cultural resource protection and management in situ, as well as of the neces sity to document all types of heritage from settlements and buildings to antiquities. He was critical of the destructive nature of excavation and defended the rigorous methods de veloped by figures such as Mortimer Wheeler. The need for a research center in the region made him reorganize die Institut Francais de Damas, which he di rected from 1938-1941. In 1946 he created the Institut Fran cais d'Archeologie de Beyrouth. His generosity, scholarship, and all-embracing approaches to archaeology drew talented and dedicated architects, philologists, and archaeologists into his orbit. The result was die recording, restoration, and publication of much of Syria/Lebanon's architectural and cultural heritage. His own contributions on cults in die Ori ent, particularly at Baalbek and Palmyra, are fundamental and unsurpassed (Seyrig, 1929, 1934-1971). In France he was instrumental in establishing the Service of Ancient Architecture of the Centre National de Re
11
cherche Scientifique, the Center of Documentary Analysis for Archaeology, and die Center for Classical Archaeology. His farsighted views on integrating technological innova tions into research prefigured archaeology in the informa tion age. Resident in Beirut for nearly forty years, Seyrig was an expert epigrapher and numismatist, a brilliant scholar of an cient religions and societies of the Orient and Occident, and a connoisseur of modern and edinographic art. Fie pre served and explained cultural resources, considering ar chaeology a science of the past but for the future. [See also Baalbek; Instiuit Francais d'Archeologie de Proche Orient; Palmyra; and the biographies of Dussaud and Wheeler.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Le Rider, Georges. Revue Suisse de Numismalique 53 (1973): 1 6 7 - 1 7 1 . Seyrig, Henri. "La Triade Heliopolitaine et les temples de Baalbek." Syria 10 (1929): 3 1 4 - 3 5 6 . Seyrig, Henri. Anliquiles syriennes. 6 vols. Paris, 1 9 3 4 - Articles pub lished in the periodical Syria between 1934 and 1971 (102 titles), dealing mostiy with classical and Oriental religion, art, and architec ture, but ranging from the Bronze Age to the Islamic period. Seyrig, Henri. "Antiquites Syriennes 95. Le culte du Soleil en Syrie a l'epoque romaine." Syria 48 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 3 3 7 - 3 7 3 . Seyrig, Henri. Tresors monetaires sileucides, vol. 2, Tresors du Levant ancients et nouveaux. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 94. Paris, 1973. His last and comprehensive work on Seleucid coins. Seyrig, Henri. Scripta varia: Melanges d'archeologie et d'hisloire. Biblio theque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 125. Paris, 1985. Articles on Near Eastern archaeology and history, not published in Syria. Seyrig, Henri. Scripta numismatica. Bibliotheque Archeologique et His torique, vol. 126. Paris, 1986. Collection of articles on numismatics. Will, Ernest. "Henri Seyrig, 10 novembre 1895-21 Janvier 1973." Syria SO (1973): 259-265. HELGA SEEDEN
SEYTAN DERESI (Tk., "devil creek"; 36°59'45" N , 27°4i'4o" E ) , waterway emptying into an open cove near the village of Mazi on the northern shore of Gokova Korfezi, the large bay south of Turkey's Flalikarnassos (now Bodrum) peninsula. In 1973 sponge diver Cumhur Ihk led ar chaeologists from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology to a place about 100 m southwest of the southernmost point on the east side of die bay, to raise two intact jars he had noticed seven years earlier at a depth of 33 m: one was a large krater (mixing bowl) and the other a two-handled pithos (large storage jar). They also raised fragments of other pots at the time, including part of a jar that vaguely resembled a Minoan amphora. The pottery's seemingly early date led the institute to ex cavate in 1975, but the site remains an enigma. Although the depth of sand was deep enough to have covered and pro tected any wooden hull remnants from marine borers, and a large area was cleared of sand down to bare bedrock, only pottery was discovered (except for a lead fishing sinker of
12
SHA'AR HA-GOLAN
perhaps later date). Furthermore, one of the six pitiioi re covered (three with handles, and three without) lay about 30 m from the others, at a depth of only 27 m, so deeply buried in sand it could not have been moved there in modern times; found inside it was a sherd that joined a fragmentary pot found on the main part of the site. The excavators con cluded that some land of watercraft must have capsized, causing some of the jars in its cargo to drift apart as diey sank (the pitiios sherds found close to shore strengthen this conclusion). The individual sherds, however, were probably moved by the octopods that make tiieir home in jars. The pottery is of a uniformly coarse brown fabric, except for several clearly intrusive sherds of later date; the collection comprises the six large storage jars, parts of three belly-han dled amphoras similar to examples from Beycesultan stra tum IVb, two one-handled jugs like some from Troy stratum VI, and parts of tiiree amphoras drat find their closest par allels on Middle Minoan III Crete. All these point to a ten tative date of about 1600 B C E , altiiough scholarly acceptance of the Minoan parallels and this early date is not universal. Unfortunately, the pottery was raised and cleaned of mud before the institute had learned to identify the original con tents of jars by carefully sieving the sediments found inside them. After the excavation, a Turkish sponge dragger presented to the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology a twohandled pithos, similar to those excavated at Seytan Deresi, that he had netted in Gokova Korfezi. Later, Cemal Pulak, one of the excavators at the site, noted, in a storeroom at the Bodrum museum, a sea-encrusted amphora identical in size and fabric to those from the excavation; its label indi cated that it had been given to the museum by a sponge diver many years earlier, at a time when the museum was simply a depot without records. These discoveries suggest that there may be a main site still undiscovered by archae ologists, or tiiat more than one wreck of die same unknown and probably local culture lies in Gokova Korfezi. The mix ture of Anatolian and Aegean traits in the pottery may reflect the time when the Minoans, who were arriving at Miletus, not far up the western coast of Anatolia from Seytan Deresi, had contacts with inland Beycesultan. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bass, George F. Archaeology Beneath the Sea. New York, 1975. Popular account of the discovery (see pp. 2 0 7 - 2 2 1 ) . Bass, George F. "Sheytan Deresi: Preliminary Report." International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 5 (1976): 293-303. Bass, George F. "The Wreck at Sheytan Deresi." Oceans 1 0 . 1 (1977): 34-39. Popular account of the excavation. G E O R G E F.
BASS
(1949-1952) and more recently by Yosef Garfinkel. The up per levels of the site contain the remains of houses from die Middle Bronze I. Below a sterile alluvial deposit a layer with occupational remains dated to the Pottery Neolithic was ex cavated. The study of the material culture from this level led to the definition of the "Yarmukian" culture. In the Yarmukian layer, Stekelis's excavations uncovered two semisubterranean huts. One contained a fireplace cov ered by a small conical cairn that in turn covered a flexed human burial. The second exposed a workshop apparentiy used for chipping flint cores and preparing large numbers of blades. In both locations, schematically incised pebbles were found. The lithic industty was produced from large flint pebbles and cobbles collected on the terraces and alluvial fan of the Yarmuk River. Production involved unidirectional and bi directional core-reduction strategies. Common tool forms were axes/adzes, picks and chisels, a few arrowheads (often of either Byblos or 'Amuq types), denticulated sickle blades, end scrapers, some burins, and numerous perforators. A special find enabled the reconstruction of the siclde: five denticulated blades were uncovered still lying in a row in their original hafted positions. Ground-stone tools include querns, hand stones, mortars, and pesties. Although plant remains were not preserved, it is assumed tiiat agriculture was practiced. Faunal remains consist ba sically of domesticated species, including goat/sheep and pig, and indicate both herding and hunting. The pottery of Sha'ar ha-Golan, made from local clay, consists of holemouth jars and jars with flaring necks. The pottery is mainly decorated with an incised herringbone pat tern, generally enclosed within parallel lines, and some red paint. The site is best known for its large collection of human figurines. Considered one of die defining characteristics of the Yarmukian culture, these figurines were either shaped of clay or engraved on basalt and limestone pebbles. The clay figurines depict females sitting with their hands under their breasts. They wear conical headgear and what appar entiy is a special dress. Their faces are characterized by "coffee-bean" eyes and the general absence of a mouth. Representations similar to the clay figurines appear on peb bles, although most have only schematic representations of the eyes, mouth, or genitalia. Similar figurines have been found in other Pre-Pottery Neolithic contexts at Munhata, Tel Aviv and Meggido in Israel; Byblos in Lebanon; and Jebel Abu Thawwab in Jordan. The engraved pebbles in clude otiier patterns, such as series of parallel lines and net like arrangements. Radiocarbon dates are not available for the site, but on the basis of the chronostratigraphy at Ain Ghazal, in Jordan, where Yarmukian remains have also been found, occupation at the site can be placed at about 5500-5000 B C E (uncalibrated). c
SHA'AR HA-GOLAN, site located at die outlet of the Yarmuk River into the Jordan Valley at about 206 m below sea level. The site was first excavated by Moshe Stekelis
SHABWA Emmanuel Eisenberg exposed the remains of a large Early Bronze IV site (20 hectares, or 50 acres) at Sha'ar ha-Golan, considered to be a large village of farmer-herders who also hunted from time to time. Stone foundations indicate the presence of blocks of rectangular houses. Domestic struc tures containing fireplaces, storage bins, and pottery were also found. Pottery from this site was handmade, except for the rims. Common pottery types were jars with ledge rims or loop handles. Other forms include globular cooking pots and bowls of various types, some decorated with red paint. On the whole, this assemblage resembles those of the EB IV shaft tombs in the Jordan Valley. Stone tools from Sha'ar ha-Golan include numerous grinding querns and mortars, as well as Canaanean blades. Animal remains are mainly of ovicaprids. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cauvin, Jacques. Les religions neolithiques de Syro-Palestine. Paris, 1972. Garfinkel, Yosef. The Pottery Assemblages of the Sha'ar Hagolan and Rabah Stages of Munhata (Israel). Cahiers du Centre de Recherche Francais de Jerusalem, no. 6. Paris, 1992. Gopher, Avi, and Ram Gophna. "Cultures of the Eighth and Seventh Millennium BP in Southern Levant: A Review for the 1990's." Jour nal of World Prehistory q.-i (1993): 2 9 7 - 3 5 1 . Stekelis, Moshe. The Yarmukian Culture of the Neolithic Period. Jeru salem, 1972. OFER BAR-YOSEF
SHABWA, one of the most important urban centers at the edge of the Sayhad desert, situated at the mouth of Wadi Hadhramaut, facing the Ramlat as-Sab'atayn. Placing the site so far to die west and away from the well-watered wadi may, apart from its important salt mines, be explained by its strategic significance: it is located in the center of the caravan route oriented northwest (Najran) and southwest (Timna'). [SeeMarib; Timna' (Arabia); Najran.] Shabwa is the third-largest ancient capital in South Arabia after Marib and Timna'; it has an impressive defense system and many monuments. The site covers an area of 60 ha (148 acres), which consists of a city of about 15 ha (530 X 340 m; 37 acres) built within the walls, a fortress on the southern Hajr hill, and the central zone of al-Sabkha, which has never built upon. Like many cities on the edge of the desert, Shabwa is mainly an agricultural center. Its several thousand hectares of irrigated land were used primarily by die local population but also to provide for caravans. The name Shabwa designates the city alone, and not the tribe, as is die case with other cities, such as Mai'n. This name appears in five different South Arabic inscriptions found at the site as hgr sbwt ("the city of Shabwa"). Classical authors refer to Shabwa as Sabota, capital of the Hadhramaut. According to the French epigraphist Jacque line Pirenne (1978), South Arabic texts of the region dating back to the fourtii century B C E refer to Shabwa as the resi
13
dence of the kings of Hadhramaut. In the early twentieth century C E , Shabwa was die capital of a large kingdom that included the main wadis of the Hadhramaut—'Amd, Dawan, and Idim. The areas of al-Mashriq, including Wadi Jirdan, 'Amaqin, Habban, and Abbadan, were also under Hadhramite control until the second half of the third century CE. Farther east, some 800 km (496 mi.) from Shabwa, king Tl'azz Yalut founded the city of Smhrm (Khor Rori) at the end of the first century B C E , thus demarking the kingdom's eastern borders. The Hadhramaut kingdom extended soutiiwest as far as the territory of Qataban in about the mid-second century CE. However, a sudden change in the political situation oc curred in about 217-228, when 'IFazz Yalut, son of 'Ammdahar long of Hadhramaut, was defeated by the Sabaean army in Qataban and again in the heart of Shabwa. By the end of the third century, the kings of Saba' (Sheba) and Du-Raydan had completely conquered die Hadhramaut. [See Qataban; Sheba.] In 1936 H. St. J. B . Phillby visited Shabwa and al-'Uqla and described the former as small and insignificant. In 1938 Major Hamilton reached Shabwa on a mission to pacify the tribes; he too was unconvinced that it was a great capital. In 1971 Pirenne led the first archaeological expedition into Shabwa on behalf of the French. Two excavation campaigns took place under her directorship (1976-1977), under aus pices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1980 the site was placed under the directorship of Jean-Francois Breton. In 1976 Marie-Helene Pottier and Yves Calvet began a major stratigraphic sounding later completed by Leila Badre. The sounding, dug to bedrock, reached a depth of about 12 m. Fourteen occupational levels were discovered from about the sixteenth to the thirteenth centuries B C E , cor responding to the first tiiree levels of die city (Badre, 1991, p. 281), to the second-fourdi centuries C E , the date that marks the end of the Shabwa's settlement history. Shabwa's dual system of defense has been added to in different periods of its history. It is 4,200 m long. The city wall (1,500 m long), interrupted at regular intervals by rec tangular stone towers sometimes covered with mud brick. The second line of defense is the surrounding hill, which encloses the site on the west, north, and northeast. The city's trapezoidal shape is divided into two unequal parts by a major axis oriented northwest-southeast. This axis opens at one of its extremities onto the main gate of the city; at the other end the remains of die city's temple were located. The city has about 1 1 0 structures, of which only the stone substructures remain. The most important building is the royal castie near the city gate. It consists of two struc tures (A, B) built around a large paved court built on an artificial terrace 5 m above the level of the main city street. Structure A is built on the southern part of die court and originally consisted of several stories, although only the
14
SHAFT TOMBS
ground floor remains. The second structure, B, was U shaped and closed off the court on the east, nortii, and west sides with porticoes. Large octagonal stone columns, deco rated with a scroll pattern and with griffons on their capitals, belonged to the facade of the upper floor. This palace is identified with the fortified palace "sqr" mentioned in the Marib and 'Uqla inscriptions that describe the siege of sqr by the Sabaean king Sa'r Awtar in about 225 CE. The palace was rebuilt a few years later, only to be de stroyed for the last time by an earthquake in about the sec ond half of the third century (Breton, 1991, p. 216). [See also Hadhramaut.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Audouin, Remy, et al. "FouiUes de Shabwa, II. Rapports preliminaires." Syria 68 ( 1 9 9 1 ) . Badre, Leila. "Le sondage stratigraphique de Shabwa 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 8 1 . " Syria 68 (1991): 229-314. Breton, Jean-Francois, et al. "Rapport preliminaire sur la fouille du 'Chateau Royal' de Sabwa, 1 9 8 0 - 8 1 . " Raydan 4 (1981): 1 6 3 - 1 9 0 . Breton, Jean-Francois. "Le site et la ville de Shabwa"; and "Le chateau royal de Shabwa: Notes d'histoire." Syria 68 (1991): 59, 209. Pirenne, Jacqueline. "Ce que trois campagnes de fouilles nous ont deja appris sur Shabwa, capitale du Hadramout antique." Raydan 1 (1978): 1 2 5 - 1 4 2 . LEILA BADRE
SHAFT TOMBS. In ancient Palestine, as elsewhere in the Middle East, shaft tombs have a long history. Because most burials are underground, rocky terrain or areas with diin topsoil require that a chamber be cut into bedrock; this, in turn, necessitates a vertical or sloping shaft for access. If in antiquity the tomb was conceived of as a "house for the dead," which seems likely, the shaft may also take on a sym bolic meaning, as an entrance hall or doorway. Where family tombs were visited or reused for generations, as was often the case, the shaft certainly continued to function beyond die construction stage. Neolithic and Chalcolithic burials were often in simple shallow pits, or in above-ground stone circles, or tholoi. The more elaborate "architectural" tradition that shaft tombs represent begins with the Early Bronze Age in Palestine (c. 3300-2000 B C E ) , but there are few examples until the end of tiiat era. Deep, rock-cut vertical shafts leading to chamber tombs are found in the EB I (c. 3300-3100 BCE) only at Bab edh-Dhra' in Transjordan, where disarticulated secondary burials may represent the region's seminomadic, preurban population. Such shaft tombs continue sporadically into die urban EB II—III periods (c. 3100-2300 B C E ) but, again, are not found elsewhere in Palestine, cave burials being the rule. Shaft tombs suddenly proliferate in the EB IV (c. 2300-2000 B C E ) , not only in Palestine, where pastoral nomadism pre vailed and resulted in large, isolated cemeteries with sec
ondary disarticulated burials, but also in urban Syria. Doz ens of shaft-tomb cemeteries are known in Palestine, many with hundreds of burials, mostly individual. The rock-cut shaft may be round, elliptical, or square, and up to approx imately 1 m (6 ft.) or more deep. A lateral dome-shaped chamber (occasionally two) is reached through a small door way blocked by a stone. The effort made by people who were predominantly pastoral nomads in cutting these shaft tombs is astonishing. At Jericho, Kathleen M . Kenyon es timated that in one such tomb several tons of rock were removed through a doorway barely 71 sq. cm (18 sq. in.). EB II shaft tombs were often reused in the urban Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1500 B C E ) . Burial customs then varied considerably and included the use of extramural caves, in tramural stone-lined cists and shallow pits, and jar burials of both children and adults under courtyards or near houses. At a few sites, however, such as Tell el-Far ah (South), shaft tombs predominate, mostly steplike openings into die bed rock reaching down into a lower alcove (occasionally bilobate). Similar tombs are found elsewhere in Palestine, on Cyprus, and even in the Aegean and Greece, but they are probably indigenous to Palestine. In the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1200 B C E ) , many types of burials are found, both local and foreign, reflecting that era's cosmopolitan character. True shaft tombs are rare, however, if we eliminate from consideration the enlarged entrances to natural caves. Only a few structural tombs, such as the Mycenaean-style corbeled tomb at Tel Dan in Pal estine, actually have a deliberately cut shaft leading to the entrance. A few other cist or pit tombs have a shallow dromos, or stepped shaft, leading to the chamber. Toward the very end of the period, in about 1250-1200 B C E , a few soutiiern Palestinian sites, such as Tell el-Far'ah (South) and Tell el-'Ajjul, exhibit deeper, steeped dromos tombs with several benches surrounding the chamber walls. These burials, some with Philistine pottery, have been identified with the Aegean background of the Sea Peoples. The Iron I—II period (c. 1200-600 B C E ) witnesses the con tinuation of the shaft and bench-tomb tradition introduced at die end of the Late Bronze Age. By the Iron II period (c. 900-600 B C E ) , this becomes the standard Israelite tomb, es pecially in Judah. Most feature a stepped shaft (or dromos); a narrow doorway leading to a central chamber, or arcosolium; and two or three lateral chambers with waist-high benches around the walls, on which the deceased were laid out. In the Persian period (sixth-fourth centuries B C E ) , several types of burials are in evidence, including tombs with both vertical shafts and stepped dromoi. Hellenistic burials (fourth-first centuries B C E ) continue the Persian types, with the addition of large chamber-tombs with many loculi (rec tangular, shelflike burial niches) reached by either a vertical shaft or a dromos; the dromoi in these examples may be 1
SHANIDAR CAVE horizontal and of monumental proportions. Loculus tombs are also a feature in the Roman period (late first century BCE-fourth century C E ) , as are much more monumental above-ground tombs. [See also 'Ajjul, Tell el-; Burial Techniques; Dan; and Far'ah, Tell el- (South).] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Sheffield, 1992. Dever, William G. "Funerary Practices in Syria-Palestine in EB IV (MB I): A Study in Cultural Discontinuity." In Love and Death in the Ancient Near East, edited by John Marks, pp. 9 - 1 9 . Guilford, Conn., 1987. Gonen, Rivka. Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Kuhnen, Hans-Peter. Paldstina in griechisch-romischer Zeil. Munich, 1990. Price-Williams, David. The Tombs of the Middle Bronze Age II Period from the "500" Cemetery at Tell Fara (South). London, 1977. Schaub, R. Thomas, and Walter E. Rast. Bab edh-Dhra': Excavations in the Cemetery Directed by Paul W. Lapp, 1965-67. Winona Lake, Ind., 1989. Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. Warminster, 1982. WILLIAM G . DEVER
SHANIDAR CAVE, major Stone Age archaeological site in northeastern Kurdistan (Iraq), about 400 km (248 mi.) north of Baghdad, near the Greater Zab River, a trib utary of the Tigris River. The cave was discovered and ex cavated by a team directed by Ralph S. Solecki (1963,1971) in 1951, 1953, 1956-1957, and i960. Friction between the resident Kurds of northern Iraq and the Iraqi government halted the investigations. Shanidar cave is a very large erosional and solution limestone cave in the Baradost Mountain of the Zagros Mountain chain at an elevation of about 746 m (2,450 ft.) above sea level (35°5o' N , 44°i3' E). The cave was a major base camp for early roving hunters and gath erers. It later served as a seasonal home for its residents just prior to the advent of die domestication of plants and ani mals. In the four seasons of work, the team excavated a little over a tenth of die cave's approximately 1,200 sq m of area. A series of four major layers was found down to bedrock, nearly 14 m deep, and named from top to bottom A - D . There are cultural, stratigraphic, and chronologic breaks be tween each layer in the area excavated. Layer A includes remains from the modern, historic, and Neolithic periods. Layer B is a thinner soil horizon, marked by preceramic human occupations that are divisible into two layers, B i and B2. Layer B i , the Shanidar Proto-Neolithic (Rose Solecki, 1981), was C - 1 4 dated (uncalibrated) to about 8,650 B C E . At its base a burial area was found containing twenty-nine
15
individuals, in a range of ages. Denise Ferembach (1970) and Anagnostis Agelarakis (1989) studied the skeletal re mains. Douglas Campana (1989) studied the worked-bone tools from layer B. Layer B i is related to the nearby village site of Zawi Chemi Shanidar, of about the same age, exca vated by Rose L . Solecki (1981). Layer B2, the Mesolithic, or Epipaleolithic, cultural ho rizon, is dated to about 10,000 B C E . It is culturally related to the occupation at Zarzi cave, farther to the southeast in Iraq. The artifacts from layers B i and B2 resemble those of the Levantine Natufian and Kebaran cultures, respectively, in Israel. [See Carmel Caves.] The next Shanidar cave cultural horizon, layer C, which is much thicker, is called the Baradostian, after the name of the mountain in which the cave is located. This layer is bracketed by C-14 dating between about 28,000 and 35,000 B P . It contains flint implements of Upper Paleolithic type that resemble the Aurignacian period in France and the Levant. The cave's bottommost deposit is die Middle Paleolithic horizon, layer D, which is also stratigraphically divisible into subunits. From two C-14 dates, the upper unit is estimated to be about forty thousand years old. The lower unit, as yet undated, is estimated to be about 80,000-100,000 years old. This layer appears to have a relatively uniform Mousteriantype culture that is associated with early hominids called Neanderthals (Solecki, 1963; Solecki and Solecki, 1993). Shanidar cave is so far the only site in Southwest Asia, east of Palestine, that has produced recognized Neanderthal skeletal remains (Stewart, 1977; Trinkaus, 1983). A total of nine Neandertiials was recovered. Four of them, Shanidar Neanderthals I—III and V were apparentiy killed under rockfalls, when the cave's ceiling collapsed. The remains of Shanidar IV and VI-VIII were apparently interred sepa rately, in a kind of natural rock crypt (Solecki, 1971). The ninth individual, a young child, was found on die occupation floor (Senyiirek, 1957). Several of the Neanderthal finds are notable. Shanidar I, a mature male adult (dated to about 46,000 B P ) , had his right arm amputated above the elbow. Because of this and other handicaps, he was presumably unable to engage fully in out door activities. Shanidar III, also a male adult, had been wounded in the rib cage, probably by a spear. He was re covering when he died under a rockfall. According to Arlette Leroi-Gourhan (1975), a French palynologist, Shanidar IV was interred with some eight bouquets of local field flowers. Solecki (1977) has shown that the flowers are known in Kurdistan for their medicinal properties. Jan Lietava (1992), a Czechoslovakian medical researcher, has observed tiiat the flowers were known in antiquity as well for their curative values. Goats were the primary animals forming the meat diet in Shanidar cave during the Paleolithic periods (Evins, 1982; Perldns, 1964). There was a change in diet with the proto-
16
SHAVEI-ZION: Land Site
Neolithic period (Perkins, 1964), suggesting a dramatic change in the economy from an ages-old hunting-gathering economy to one more dependent on domesticable animals (sheep). In modern times, Kurdish herders have used die cave as a winter habitat. [See also Medicine; Paleobotany; and Sheep and Goats.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Agelarakis, Anagnostis. "The Paleopathological Evidence, Indicators of Stress of the Shanidar Proto-Neolidiic, and the Ganj-Dareh Early Neolithic Human Skeletal Collections." Ph.D. diss., Columbia Uni versity, 1989. Campana, Douglas V. Nalujian and Proloneolithic Bone Tools. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 494. Oxford, 1989. Evins, Mary. "The Fauna from Shanidar Cave: Mousterian Wild Goat Exploitation in Northeastern Iraq." Palearient 8.1 (1982): 37-58. Ferembach, Denise. "Etude andiropologique des ossenients humains proto-neolithiques de Zawi Chemi Shanidar." Sumer26.1-2 (1970): 21-64. Leroi-Gourhan, Arlette. "The Flowers Found with Shanidar IV, a Neandertiial Burial in Iraq." Science 190 (1975): 562-564. Lietava, Jan. "Medicinal Plants in a Middle Paleolithic Grave Shanidar IV?" Journal of Ethnopharmacology 35 (1992): 263-266. Perkins, Dexter, Jr. "Prehistoric Fauna from Shanidar." Science 144 (1964): 1565-1566. Senyiirek, M. S . "The Skeleton of the Fossil Infant Found in Shanidar Cave, Northern Iraq." Anatolia 2 (1957): 49-55. Solecki, Ralph S. "Prehistory in Shanidar Valley, Northern Iraq." Sci ence 139 (1963): 1 7 9 - 1 9 3 . Solecki, Ralph S . Shanidar, the First Flower People. New York, 1 9 7 1 . Solecki, Ralph S. "The Implications of the Shanidar Cave Neanderthal Flower Burial." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 293 (1977): 1 1 4 - 1 2 4 . Solecki, Ralph S . , and Rose L. Solecki. "The Pointed Tools from the Mousterian Occupations of Shanidar Cave, Northern Iraq." In The Paleolithic Prehistory of the Zagros-Taurus, edited by Deborah I. Ol szewski and Harold L. Dibble. University Museum Symposium Se ries, vol. 5, University Monograph, no. 83. Philadelphia, 1993. Solecki, Rose L. An Early Village Site at Zawi Chemi Shanidar. Bibliotheca Mesopotamia, 1 3 . Malibu, 1981. Stewart, T. Dale. "The Neanderthal Skeletal Remains from Shanidar Cave, Iraq: A Summary of Findings to Date." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1 2 1 . 2 (1977): 1 2 1 - 1 6 5 . Trinkaus, Erik. The Shanidar Neanderthals. New York, 1983. R A L P H S.
SOLECKI
SHAVEI-ZION. [To treat the separate excavations on land and off the coast of this site, this entry comprises two ar ticles: Land Site and Underwater Site.]
Land Site Shavei-Zion lies 71cm (4 mi.) north of Akko on Israel's Med iterranean coast, where the Beth-ha-'Emeq estuary forms a natural anchorage (32°59' N , 35°05' E; map reference 158 X 265). There is an artesian freshwater spring at the center of the modern fishing village, which was once probably known as Nea Come, mentioned on a stone slab commem
orating the construction, in 56 C E , of a stretch of the highway between Akko (Ptolemais) and Antioch. In 1971, storage jars and hundreds of hollow, molded terra-cotta figurines of the Phoenician goddess Tannit, dated to the sixth-early fifth centuries B C E , washed ashore at Shavei-Zion, encouraging Haifa University marine archaeologists, headed by Elisha Linder, to excavate under water (see below). The terra cotta, according to the results of neutron activation analysis, is of clay available between Sidon and Achziv. An African elephant tusk and amphorae were also recovered from the ship's hold, demonstrating that in antiquity cargoes came to the immediate area from all over the Mediterranean. Excavations on land, on behalf of the University of Rome and the Israel Department of Antiquities (IDA) in 1964, directed by Moshe W. Prausnitz, examined a third-secondcentury B C E cemetery on die southern bank of die Beth ha'Emeq River. Erected on top of the mhumations were the sculpted heads, carved out of local limestone, of those in terred. Because gravestones depicting human images are unknown in the archaeology of the Holy Land, these ex amples point to the hellenization of the population that set tled north of Akko. Ancient iconoclasts had smashed the images, so that only a few small fragments were recovered. The IDA undertook four seasons of rescue excavations (1955, 1957, i960, 1963), as well, directed by Moshe W. Prausnitz, that revealed a triapsidal basilica (27 X 16 m). [See Basilicas.] The domus is divided into a central nave and two side aisles. Three building phases were distinguished, all dated to the fifth century CE. The first phase included tire domus, die northeast chapel, and a large forecourt west of the western church facade. The church was built on a ter race 1.5 m above the atrium and 6.5 m above the sea. The basilica was dated to the end of the fourth century. The earliest mosaic floors could be dated to approximately 415, contemporary with the nearby 'Evron church. [See Mosa ics.] A medallion in the center of die mosaic floor of the northern aisle consists of a wreath surrounding a cross, pomegranates, chevrons, and stylized fish arranged below the cross to form a "cross tree" or "tree of life." Excluding the cross, all the symbols had previously belonged to Jewish and Phoenician iconography. The fusion of the elements under die cross represents the sources of early ecclesiastic art. The imperial decree in 427 C E not to step on the image of the cross and a ruling at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C E relating to liturgical procedures necessitated spatial alter ations in churches—of floor sockets for the chancel col umns, mensae, and/or pulpits tiiat were to be placed in front of the altar. At Shavei-Zion a new mosaic floor covered in tact the northeast chapel's earlier mosaic floor. In the third phase, the second major building period, die western fore court was divided into an outer nartiiex (enlarged to the north) and given a wide flight of monumental stairs that descended to the atrium. A bathouse also belongs to the
SHAVEI-ZION: Underwater Site third phase. The donor's inscription on the outer narthex is dated 486 C E . The church was destroyed at the beginning of the seventh century. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Linder, Elisha. "A Cargo of Phoenicio-Punic Figurines." Archaeology 26 (1973): 1 8 2 - 1 8 7 . Prausnitz, M. W., et al. Excavations at Shavei Zion. Rome, 1967. M.
W.
PRAUSNITZ
Underwater Site In spring 1971, a fisherman hauled a group of terra-cotta female figurines from the sea off the coast at Shavei-Zion. Subsequently, members of the Undersea Exploration Soci ety of Israel conducted a preliminary survey in the area in which the figurines had been found. The survey located more figurines along a sandstone ridge, many which were covered with a heavy layer of calcareous encrustation that hid their features. The discoveries justified organizing a fullscale expedition die following fall, under the direction of Elisha Linder of the Department of Maritime Civilizations, University of Haifa. The artifacts were scattered over an area 1 km (0.5 mi.) long and 300 m wide. Chisels and hammers, as well as pneu matic drills, were necessary to detach the figurines from the sandstone bottom in which they were embedded. The long and tedious process culminated in the cleaning of more than four hundred terra-cotta figurines, many of them complete and with the details of their features well preserved. All the figurines are hollow and were cast from molds. They are erect female figures, set on a base, each of whose right arm is lifted in a gesture of benediction and whose left arm is bent against the breast, some holding an infant. On some of them, either a dolphin or a sign composed of a triangle topped by a horizontal bar with a disk above its center ap pears in relief. This latter feature, known as the sign of Tan nit (or, following die Greek vocalization, Tinit), was die key to identifying them. The sign of Tannit appears in various forms all over the Phoenician (Punic) world and is named after the principal goddess of Carthage. Its geometric style, in which it resembles the Egyptian anldi, the symbol of life, appears on the figurines. In other examples, Tannit appears as a schematized female figure witii outstretched arms in a gesture of prayer. First, it has been suggested that Tannit is of Libyan origin, was adopted by Phoenician settlers, and that her name derived from the Egyptian ta-neith ("land of Neitii," goddess of the western Delta). A Semitic etymology from tbnl or tnn has also been suggested. In recent years there has been renewed interest in the origin of Tannit be cause of sporadic finds in the eastern Mediterranean, both of inscriptions explicitly mentioning her name and of arti facts bearing her sign. The latest and most convincing in scription comes from Sarepta in Lebanon, north of Tyre,
17
which reads: "The statue of Sim son of Mp'l son of 'Zy made for Tnt Astrt." In archaeological contexts the sign was the symbol of the goddess, evidence of her presence in local cults. Her sign has been found in Israel on a lead weight from Ashdod-Yam and on an amphora excavated at Akko and on a glass stamp from the Phoenician level at Sarepta—all sites located along the eastern Mediterranean coast. The discovery of the cargo of Tannit figurines at Shavei-Zion strengthens the position that the origins of Tannit are in the eastern Mediterranean. The ship carrying the votive figurines sailed along the southern Phoenician coast at some time in the fifth century B C E . This date was established by several storage jars, iden tified as Persian, found embedded in the figurine conglom erate. The wide scattering of the figurines along the sand stone ridge suggests that they were jettisoned during a storm. The ship's immediate destination may have been
Underwater Site. Tannit figurines. Both figurines are from the same mold. Note the sign of Tannit appears most clearly on the base of the figure to the right. (Courtesy E. Linder) SHAVEI-ZION:
18
SHEBA
Achziv, Shavei-Zion, or Akko, all Phoenician localities with sanctuaries and burial grounds, where the figurines would have been in demand by worshipers of the goddess. No comparative assemblages of votive terra-cotta figu rines representing the goddess from land excavations—nei ther identical nor even similar—exist, either from the eastern or western Mediterranean. Only one other group of figu rines, almost identical to this one, was discovered by Robert Marx, years ago, at a depth of 40 m, in the sea near the Phoenician city of Tyre in modern Lebanon. They too were part of a cargo from a shipwreck and were discovered ac cidentally, but their find spot was never systematically ex plored. Questions remain about the cult of Tannit, her attributes, and the spheres of Tannit worship. The cargo of votive fig urines from Shavei-Zion raises other questions as well, such as the relationship between the Phoenician homeland and its colony, Carthage, centuries after the latter was estab lished. [See also Carthage; Cult; Phoenicia; Phoenicians; Sarepta; Tyre; Underwater Archaeology; and Undersea Exploration Society of Israel] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benigni, G. "II 'segno di Tank' in Oriente." Rivista di Storia delta Filosqfia^ (1975): 1 7 - 1 8 . Bisi, Anna M. Le Stele Puniche. Rome, 1967. Dothan, Moshe. "A Sign of Tank from Tel 'Akko." Israel Exploration Journal 24 (1974): 44~49Linder, Elisha. "A Cargo of Phoenicio-Punic Figurines." Archaeology 26 (1973): 1 8 2 - 1 8 7 . Moscati, Sabatino. "Tank in Fenicia." Rivista di Storia delta Filosofia 7 (1979): 1 4 3 - 1 4 4 . Pritchard, James B. "The Tanit Inscription from Sarepta." In Phoenizier im Westen, edited by H. G. Neimeier, pp. 83-92. Mainz, 1982. Yadin, Yigael. "Symbols of Deities at Zinjirli, Carthage, and Hazor." In Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, edited by James A. Sanders, pp. 199-224. Garden City, N.Y., 1970. ELISHA
LINDER
SHEBA (Old South Arabian, Saba'), pre-Islamic king dom in the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, bounded geographically on the nortii by Nejran, in the west by the Red Sea, and in the south by the Gulf of Aden. Its area roughly corresponded to that of northern Yemen. The capital of the kingdom was Marib. Sheba is mentioned many times in the Hebrew Bible. The Table of Nations (Gn. 10) describes Sheba as descending from Noah dirough the line of Ham, Cush, Ra'amah, and as the brother of Dedan, suggesting a home in northern Ara bia; descending from the line of Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber, Yaqtan, and as the brother of Hazermavet (Hadhramaut), suggesting a location in southern Arabia; and descending from Abraham and Qeturah as the son of Yaqshan and again as the brother of Dedan (Gn. 25). In the c
Table of Nations, Sheba also descends from Ham and Cush and is a brother of Ra'amah. Whetiier there were two Shebas, or one Sheba in the south whose domination extended northward is not clear, although the latter seems more prob able. A single, powerful Sheba would explain its success in die caravan trade, where it moved vast quantities of incense and other products safely over 2,413 km (1,500 mi.) of de sert to northern consumers. It is likely that by the tenth cen tury B C E colonists from Sheba had already established trad ing colonies in Tigre, Ethiopia, where South Arabian culture flourished for centuries. Sheba may be the biblical name given to these colonists, who considered themselves Sabaeans with allegiance to the homeland in Arabia. Other biblical references noting the participation of Sheba in international commerce include the visit of the unnamed Queen of Sheba (in Islamic tradition, her name is Bilqis and in the Ethiopian tradition, Makeda) to the court of King Solomon, which was more of an economic mission than a quest to test Solomon's wisdom (1 Kgs. 1 0 : 1 - 1 3 ; Chr. 9 : 1 12); caravans laden with frankincense and gold (Is. 60:6; Jer. 6:20; Ez. 27:22), precious stones (Ez. 27:22); and Sabaeans being regarded as brigands (Jb. 1:15); Ez. 38:13). Classical authors such as Pliny the Elder (Natural History 6.26.104; 3 2 . 1 5 3 - 1 5 5 , 1 6 0 - 1 6 2 ; 12.30-35,41) andDiodorus Siculus (2.49.2; 3.46.1-3, 47.5-8) stated that trade in myrrh and frankincense made the Sabaeans the wealthiest people in the world, and Diodorus added descriptions of the rich ness of Sabaean homes and furnishings. The anonymous ship captain who authored the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (para. 2 1 - 3 2 ) , in listing exports and imports at each port, states that alabaster was exported from the Red Sea port of Muza (modern Mocha), and that only small quantities of grain and wine were imported, indicating that local agricul ture provided agricultural self-sufficiency. [See Mocha.] The first excavations in Sheba were undertaken at Huqqa by Carl Rathjens and Hermann von Wissmann in 1928; they excavated a temple consisting of a square open court sur rounded on three sides by a peristyle hall (Rathjens and Wissmann, 1932). Such Egyptian scholars as Mohammed Tawfik (1944-1945) and especially Ahmed Fakhry (1947) published notes, photographs, and sketches of several sites and many inscriptions. In 1951-1952, the American Foun dation for the Study of Man, led by Wendell Phillips and Frank P. Albright, conducted a short season of excavation at Marib. [See Marib; and the biography of Phillips.] From the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age, indigeneous peo ples occupied the region, gradually increasing their tech nological capabilities. Between the sixteenth and thirteenth centuries B C E , immigrants, probably from the Levant, moved into the area and became known as the Sabaeans. This is suggested by their dialect, which alone among the other South Arabic dialects used the h to express the caus ative in verbal forms and for third-person pronouns, a char acteristic of the Northwest Semitic dialects of the Levant. 2
SHECHEM [See Qataban.] These immigrants brought more advanced and complex institutions: centralized government, urban liv ing, economies based on agriculture and commerce, a Se mitic alphabetic script of twenty-nine consonants, elaborate cults with deities representing aspects of nature, a tradition of art and architecture, and an advanced metallurgy. In the course of time, tiiis culture absorbed the Bronze Age peoples and many of their cultural traits and gained others from for eign lands through commerce, thus creating a unique polit ical, economic, and cultural system. By the tenth century B C E , Sheba had become a kingdom ruled by a monarch, as indicated by the Queen of Sheba account in the Hebrew Bible, and this form of government continued throughout its history. Possibly the title mukarrib, perhaps meaning "priest-king," was already used by the ruler, since rulers of the late eighth century B C E bore this title in inscriptions. By the fifth century B C E , mukarrib was re placed by "king." Sheba was the preeminent state in south ern Arabia until die fourth century B C E , when it declined. Qataban and Ma'in then dominated the west, continuing this role until the second century B C E , when Qataban exer cised suzerainty over Ma'in. Qataban lost a substantial part of its western kingdom with the rise of Himyar and the be ginning of the Sabaean era, in about 1 1 5 B C E . Later, Sheba joined with Himyar to form the kingdom of Saba' and DhuRaydan. In 24 B C E , Aelius Gallus and his Roman legions invaded Sheba; Gallus abandoned the attempt because of illness among his soldiers and treachery by his Nabatean guide. Following the fall of Qataban, the kingdoms of Hadhramaut, Saba', and Dhu-Raydan prevailed in southern Arabia. In the third century C E , Shammar Yuhar'ish added Hadhramaut and Yamnat to the kingdom of Saba' and DhuRaydan. However, the kingdom declined rapidly in the fourth century C E , after Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire: the Romans had practiced cremation, sprinkling frankincense on the pyres, but the pyres were abandoned because Christians believe in the res urrection of the body and bury tiieir dead, which led to the collapse of the frankincense market and to economic decline in southern Arabia. A Christian dynasty followed by a Jewish dynasty marked the decline of the former traditional religion and values. An Ethiopian dynasty destroyed Jewish rule and was followed by a Persian dynasty; the Muslims ended the kingdom of Saba' in the seventh century C E . Thereafter the region became known as Yemen under successive dynasties. [See also Hadhramaut; Qataban; Yemen; and Zafar.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hansen, Thorkild. Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767. London, 1964. Fascinating account of a failed expedition's mistakes and hardships by its sole survivor. Rathjens, Carl, and Hermann von Wissmann. VorislamischeAltertilmer. Hamburg, 1932. Schmidt, Jiirgen, et al. Antike Technologie: Die sabdische Wasserwirtschaft
19
bon Marib. 2 vols. Archaologische Berichte aus dem Yemen, vols. 5 6. Mainz am Rhein, 1 9 9 1 . Van Beek, Gus W. "The Rise and Fall of Arabia Felix." Scientific Amer ican 221.6 (1969): 36-46. Semipopular account of the major char acteristics of pre-Islamic South Arabian civilization. Van Beek, Gus W. "Prolegomenon" to reprinted edition of James A. Montgomery, Arabia and the Bible. New York, 1969. Updating of developments in what is known of the relationship between Arabia and the Hebrew Bible as described by Montgomery in the Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College in 1930. Gus
W.
VAN BEEK
SHECHEM (Ar., Tell Balatah), a 6-acre mound located in die hill country of north-central Israel (32°I3' N , 35°i6' E; map reference 1755 X 1805), just 2 km (1.2 mi.) east of modern Nablus (Roman Neapolis) and 10 km (6 mi.) south east of Samaria/Sebaste. Now partly covered by the Arab village of Balatah, the site is strategically located at the east ern end of a transverse pass between die high mountains of Gerizim to the south and Ebal to the north (see figure 1 ) . T o the east it overlooks the Plain of 'Askar and commands traffic in all directions through the area. Identification. Jerome, in the fifth century C E , identified biblical Shechem with Roman Neapolis, which Vespasian founded in the Ebal-Gerizim pass in 72 C E . This opinion prevailed into modern times and was accepted by Edward Robinson in the mid-eighteenth century. Other early sources, however, including the fourth-century Onomasticon of Eusebius and die notes of the Bordeaux Pilgrim and the sixth-century mosaic map from Madaba, placed Shechem east of Neapolis, between Jacob's well and Sychar (a New Testament site), and near the traditional location of the tomb of Joseph. In the nineteenth century C E , the Arab vil lage of Balatah was established here. In 1903, during a tour of Palestine on horseback, Her mann Thiersch, a professor of Bible from Gottingen, and a party of German scholars camped at Balatah and examined the mound. Based on its proximity to 'Askar, just to the northeast, and on their having observed 37 m of a cyclopean stone wall on the northwest side of the tell (now called wall A; see figure 2), Thiersch reported in his diary that the site was ancient Shechem. Further attention was drawn to the site when F. W. Frieherr von Bissing, a professor from Mu nich, purchased a hoard of bronze weapons from a Balatah family in 1908. Subsequent excavation fully confirmed the identification of Tell Balatah with biblical Shechem. Exploration. The first formal excavations at the site were conducted under Austrian auspices by the German biblical scholar Ernst Sellin in two campaigns during 1913 and 1914. Sellin traced the line of the cyclopean wall Thiersch noticed (wall A) for more than 75 m along the northwest side of the site; about midway along its length he discovered a large three-entryway gate (the Nortiiwest Gate) as well. Search ing for the continuation of the fortification lines, he also cut
20
SHECHEM
Figure 2. Outer city wall. Wall A, dated to the Middle Bronze III period. (Courtesy ASOR Archives) SHECHEM.
a 52-meter-long north-south probe trench on the north side of die mound. There Sellin distinguished four occupation levels: Greek, Jewish/Samaritan, Israelite, and Canaanite. After an interruption of more than a decade caused by World War I, work was resumed for another five campaign seasons between 1926 and 1928. Additional features of the Northwest Gate were cleared, along with several adjoining, so-called, palace structures. At some distance to die soutii, a large temple, with hugh 5-meter-wide foundation walls, was found. Based on die presence of a large massebd ("standing stone") and of what were perceived as podia, or altar bases, in the forecourt area, Sellin assumed that this was the El-Berit temple mentioned in Judges 9. Other deep and more extensive clearance was done in areas lying east and soudi of the temple, and work was conducted on the mound's eastern perimeter. There, a different type of wall (wall B), with offsets and insets, was found, along with an associated two-entryway gate (the East Gate) (see figure 3). Two additional east-west trenches were cut to probe into adjacent intramural levels. Sellin dated wall A and die tem ple on the west to the earliest part of die Late Bronze Age and placed the wall-B system later within the same period. In the spring 1926 season, Sellin was joined by Gabriel Welter, an architect witii experience at classical sites; in summer 1928 the Deutsches Evangelisches Institute ftir Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes replaced Sellin with Welter as director. Although Welter conducted sum mer work in 1928 and 1929, few new results were reported. He did, however, produce excellent plans relating to previ ous work. Sellin was reinstated as director in 1933, but, with
SHECHEM architect Hans Steckeweh, he excavated again only in sum mer 1934. Tragically, all of the field records and final report manuscripts of the German work were destroyed during World War II by Allied bombing. [See Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes; and the biography of Sellin.] In. 1956, sponsored by Drew University and McCormick Theological Seminary (and later also Harvard University), and in cooperation with the American Schools of Oriental Research, new American work was begun at the site under the direction of G. Ernest Wright. Employing newer meth ods of stratigraphic and ceramic analysis, the American ex cavation sought to reevaluate and to supplement the results of the German expedition. Six-week excavation seasons were conducted during the summers of 1956, 1957, i960, 1962, 1964, 1966, and 1968. Supplementary work included a regional survey directed by Edward F. Campbell (19641972) and several shorter, follow-up excavations (1969, 1972,1973). Overall, fourteen excavationfieldswere opened both on the mound and in the immediate environs. The most significant of these included field I, at the East Gate; field III, across the wall-B fortifications on the northeast; field V, at the "El-Berith" temple; field VI, in the area of the temple forecourt; field VII, a new area of domestic levels in the north-central part of the tell; and field IX, a new area to the southeast, at the edge of the Balatah village. On the tell, occupation was identified from the Chalcolithic period (fourth millennium B C E ) and, subsequently, with only minor gaps, from the Middle Bronze I (c. 1900 B C E ) down to Late Hellenistic times (c. 107 B C E ) . Survey work extended this
SHECHEM.
21
history into the Roman, Byzantine, and later Arab periods. [See American Schools of Oriental Research; and the biog raphy of Wright.]
Settlement History. The Drew-McCormick excavation identified twenty-four occupation strata on the main tell. The two earliest of these (strata XXIV-XXIII) represent die Chalcolitiiic period (c. 3500 B C E ) . Remains include circular mud-brick hut sttuctures, with cobbled floors from levels just above bedrock in field IX, and beaten-earth occupation surfaces at basal levels below the temple forecourt in field VI. Following this, during the Early Bronze Age (third mil lennium B C E ) , the site was apparently not settled. However, in the M B I (after c. 1900 B C E ) , occupation was resumed. Remains were found of two building phases of substantial houses in field VI (strata XII-XXI) and, adjacent to diem, a large earthen platform, presumed to be a podium for a public building. No fortification walls belonging to this M B I settlement phase were found, and Shechem may have been an open site then. This occupation provides a probable terminus ante quern for dating the biblical traditions relating to the pattiarch Abraham and his passage through Shechem (Gn. 12:6.) The city of this period is also named in the Ex ecration texts of the Egyptian twelfth dynasty; a campaign against "Sekmem" (presumably Shechem) is mentioned on die stele of Khu-Sebek from the reign of Pharoah Sesostris (Senwosret) III (c. 1880-1840 B C E . ) Four architectural phases (strata XX-XVLT) mark the de velopment of the city in the succeeding M B II (c. 1750-1650 B C E ) . In strattim X X the city was enclosed by a 2.5-meterwide wall (wall D ) , which was ttaced for 43 m along the
Figure 3. East. gate. Excavations in progress, 1 9 6 2 . (Photograph by J. D. Seger)
22
SHECHEM
northwest side, through fields V, VI, and XIII. At the same time, an area of public buildings was isolated by a second perimeter wall (wall 900) running roughly parallel about 20 m to the east. A cobbled street ran along the inner, west face of this wall, beyond which lay two blocks of courtyard-type buildings. Although Wright initially proposed that these structures were a courtyard-temple complex, architectural modifications during the four phases of the M B II period provide a picture of domestic and industrial uses more ap propriate to an administrative or palace unit. During stratum X I X the city's fortifications were dra matically augmented by a massive earth and marl embank ment. In field V, on the west, this consisted of a high mound, 30 m wide at its base, footed inside by wall D and on die outer perimeter by the addition of a battered stone retaining structure (wall C). The preserved outer slope rose at an approximate 40-degree angle, creating a formative defensive rampart. Another major expansion of the city was undertaken dur ing the MB III period (c. 1650-1550 B C E ) . At that time (strata XVt-XV) die northwest side of the city was enlarged with cyclopean wall A and the Northwest Gate complex, including palace 7200 and temple 7200. Wall A was built outside of wall C, some 8 m farther west. Against its inner face a massive fill, derived mainly from leveling the M B II embankment, was deposited. The platform thus created was the base upon which the field-V temple was constructed. It was 26.3 m long by 21.2 m wide and its foundation walls were more than 5 m thick. It is identified as one of the migdal or "fortress"-type temples mentioned in Joshua 19:38 and Judges 8:17. Later in this period, the extension of the wall-A system on the east was again supplemented by the addition of the 3.5-meter-wide wall B and the two-entryway East Gate. Wall B formed a secondary defense line 1 1 m inside and above wall A. The slope between was paved with a com pacted limestone marl glacis. This intense building program included the development of substantial intramural domes tic and public architecture and testifies to the peak of pros perity reached at Shechem in the Late Middle Bronze Age. However, this elaboration of city fortifications also forecast its subsequent fiery demise. In the mid-sixteenth century B C E , in the wake of the eighteenth-dynasty Egyptian drives to expel and expunge the Asiatic Hyksos from their land, Shechem was assaulted, burned, and totally laid to waste. Following this destruction, the site lay abandoned for at least a century before settlement was resumed in the Late Bronze IA (strata XIV-XII). In about 1450 B C E , L B IB en gineers rebuilt the city on roughly its earlier lines, reusing wall A and setting a new wall into the debris above the wallB system. The East Gate was reused, and new guardrooms were added. These structures were modified further in each of the strata XIII and XII phases. On the west, the Northwest Gate was probably also re
used. Successive strata of L B domestic occupation were identified just to its northeast, in field XIII. In field V, to the south, a smaller, but still substantial, temple was built di rectly on the stone foundations of the earlier migdal struc ture. It is this L B temple, which continues to be used into the Early Iron I period, that now appears to be the better candidate for identification with the "Baal/El-Berith" shrine traditions in Judges 9:4 and 9:46. A bronze figurine of the Canaanite god Baal, found in stratum XII levels in field VII, strengthens the identification. The L B IIA city of strattim XIII was that ruled by Lab'ayu, the opportunistic ldng mentioned in the Amarna cor respondence. A layer of destruction debris all across die site marks the demise of his family's control. A fragment of an Amarna age cuneiform tablet was recovered from post-stra tum XII debris in field XIII. A time at die end of Stratum XII or within the early part of Stratum X I is the most rea sonable context for the covenant-making ceremony between the arriving Israelites and the people of Shechem described in Joshua 24. No major disruption marks the transition to die stratum XI occupation of the early twelfth century B C E . The main walls, East Gate, and temple structure remain in use at this time, but the quality of die rebuilding is poor and the local ized destruction of buildings in fields VII and I X suggests general economic decline and political instability. The per iod's end (c. 1125 B C E ) is well documented by heaps of de struction debris. This eclipse of the early Iron I occupation was probably the result of the vengeance taken on the city by the self-appointed King Abimelech, reported in Judges 9:42-49. Stratum X represents the subsequent resettlement of the city as it revives in the tenth century B C E under die stability provided by the reigns of David and Solomon. At this time it was included in the new Solomonic district of Mt. Ephraim (1 Kgs. 4:8). Although remains are scant, it appears that the East Gate towers were once again rebuilt, and traces of a casemate fortification wall have been detected. During this period the slope leading down to the East Gate from the western acropolis was terraced to support domestic build ings. A destruction, probably related to the Egyptian inva sion of Shishak (c. 918 B C E ) , or otherwise to conflicts in volved in the breakup of the United Monarchy (1 Kgs. 12), marks the transition to stratum IX. According to 1 Kings 12:25, Jeroboam I rebuilt Shechem and for a time made it his capital. In the late ninth century B C E the stratum I X city was also destroyed. In stratum VILI, during the Iron LIB period, domestic buildings on the eastern terrace in field VII show several phases of rebuilding and repair. At this time, with the mov ing of the northern capital first to Tirzah and then to Sa maria, Shechem's political role was somewhat reduced. However, the construction of a large (18 X 16 m) storage building above the temple ruins in field V, and the mention
SHEEP AND GOATS of Shechem on one of the ostraca from Samaria, suggest that it remained a center for tax collections in the Mt. Ephraim district. The destruction of stratum VIII doubtiess illustrates the local and international uncertainties that afflicted the north ern kingdom under Assyrian pressures through the mideighth century B C E . Rebuilding in Stratum VII is best doc umented in the remains of a fine courtyard house, with well-preserved evidence of domestic and industrial instal lations, on the middle terrace in field VII. The subsequent destruction of this house, and the end of the stratum VII city, date to the final Assyrian invasions of 724-722 B C E , which concluded with the capture of nearby Samaria. Reoccupation during the seventh and sixth centuries B C E is documented in the strata VI and V remains in fields I, VII, and IX; however, all evidence indicates that the town throughout this time existed in an impoverished state. A del egation from the city of the early sixth century B C E is men tioned in Jeremiah 4:4-10 as being among those from the north visiting Jerusalem to mourn the destruction of the Temple. From about 475 B C E until sometime after 331 B C E , the site was abandoned. Shechem regained prominence in the Hellenistic period, following Alexander the Great's punitive expulsion of citi zens from Samaria during his campaign in 331 B C E . The Samaritan refugees resettled in Shechem, at the foot of Mt. Gerizim. They built their temple on top of the mountain, at Tell er-Ras, thus entering into a rivalry with the Jewish or thodoxy in Jerusalem. [See Ras, Tell er-.] The Samaritan occupation survived through four building phases (strata IV-I). The stratum IV city represents ambitious construc tion. The passage through the East Gate was cleared for reuse down to its original M B levels, and a new wall with an oudying chalk glacis was built to form the defenses. The quality of intramural house construction is good, with dressed-stone foundations, and the city is well planned, with blocks of houses separated by broad streets. Soon, however, in the third century B C E , die city was caught up in the conflicts between the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. [See Ptolemies; Seleucids.] In termittent disruptions marked by phases of destruction characterize its troubled history. Under Seleucid rule, in the second century B C E , its decline continued. The reestablishment of Jewish authority in Jerusalem by die Maccabees sig naled its end: in 126 B C E John Hyrcanus destroyed the tem ple on Tell er-Ras, and in 107 B C E he made a final assault on the city, burying its defenses and destroying it beyond recovery. Roman Neapolis, built by Vespasian a few miles to the west in the Shechem pass, replaced it. [See also Samaria; and Samaritans.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bull, Robert J. "A Re-Examination of the Shechem Temple." Biblical Archaeologist 23 (i960): 1 1 0 - 1 1 9 .
23
Bull, Robert J., et al. "The Fifth Campaign at Balatah (Shechem)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 180 (1965): 7-41. Campbell, Edward F., and James F. Ross. "The Excavation of Shechem and the Biblical Tradition." Biblical Archaeologist 26 (1963): 2-27. Campbell, Edward F„ et al. "The Eighth Campaign at Balatah (Shechem)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 204 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 2 - 1 7 . Campbell, Edward F. Shechem II: Portrait of a Hill Country Vale. At lanta, 1991. Cole, Dan P. Shechem I: The Middle Bronze IIB Pottery. Winona Lake, Ind., 1984. Dever, William G. "The MB IIC Stratification in the Northwest Gate Area at Shechem." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 2 1 6 (1974): 3 1 - 5 2 . Ross, James F., and Lawrence E. Toombs. "Six Campaigns at Biblical Shechem." In Archaeological Discoveries in the Holy Land, pp. 119— 128. New York, 1967. Seger, Joe D. "Shechem Field XIII, 1969." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 205 (1972): 20-35. Seger, Joe D. "The Middle Bronze IIC Date of the East Gate at Shechem." Levant 6 (1974): 1 1 7 - 1 3 0 , Seger, Joe D. "The MB II Fortifications at Shechem and Gezer: A Hyksos Retrospective." Eretz-Israel 12 (1975): 34-45, Sellin, Ernst, and Hans Steckeweh. "Sichem." Zeitschrifl des Deulschen Paliistina-Vereins 64 ( 1 9 4 1 ) : 1 - 2 0 . Toombs, Lawrence E., and G. Ernest Wright. "The Third Campaign at Balatah (Shechem)." Btdletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 1 6 1 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 1 1 - 6 4 . Toombs, Lawrence E. "The Stratigraphy of Tell Balatah (Ancient Shechem)." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities, Jordan 1 7 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 99-110. Toombs, Lawrence E. "The Stratification of Tell Balatah (Shechem)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 223 (1976): 57-59. Wright, G. Ernest. "The First Campaign at Tell Balatah (Shechem)." Btdletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 144 (1956): 9-20. Wright, G. Ernest. "The Second Campaign at Tell Balatah (Shechem)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 148 (1957): n - 2 8 . Wright, G. Ernest. "The Samaritans at Shechem." Howard Theological Review 55 (1962): 357-366. Wright, G. Ernest. Shechem: The Biography of a Biblical City. New York, 1965. Wright, G. Ernest. "Shechem." In Archaeology and Old Testament Study, edited by D. Winton Thomas, pp. 355-370. Oxford, 1967. Wright, G. R. H. "Temples at Shechem." Zeitschrift. fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 80 (1968): 1 - 3 5 . JOE D . SEGER
SHEEP AND GOATS. More than ten diousand years ago, in the rolling uplands that flank the Fertile Crescent, humans began a long-term partnership with two animal spe cies, tire red sheep (Ovis orientalis) and the Bezoar goat (Capra aegargus), that continues to shape both the natural and cultural landscape of southwest Asia to the present day. With the final retreat of the great northern ice sheets at the end of die Pleistocene era, this region experienced a shift to a milder climate tiiat brought with it the replacement of tree-
24
SHEEP AND GOATS
less steppe with deciduous oak forests. An accompanying expansion of grasslands, comprised largely of wild varieties of wheat and barley, encouraged, in turn, the proliferation of smaller hoofed species of animals, such as wild sheep and goats, as well as gazelle and deer. Found throughout the entire arc of the Fertile Crescent, wild goat were especially well represented in its eastern half, particularly in the Zagros Mountains. Although wild sheep were also quite common in lower elevations of the Zagros, they seem to have been more abundant at the apex of the Fertile Crescent, in north ern Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia. They may have been absent altogether, or at least very rare, in tire Le vant. It is in these central and eastern portions of the region that the shift can be traced from an initial heavy dependence on wild sheep and goats as primary prey species (as evi denced at such late Paleolithic sites as Yafteh cave, Palegawra, and Shanidar in Iran) to the management of these ani mals as primary domestic resources (at such Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic sites as Ganj Dareh in Iran, Ali Kosh, Cafer Hoyiik, Cayonii, and Tell Abu Hureyra). Goats were probably first domesticated in the Zagros Mountains in about 7,500-7,000 B C E and sheep, apparently sometime later, in the more lowland areas to the north and west. Human control over breeding effectively eliminated pres sures that in the wild selected for larger, horned, aggressive males. It also restricted the size and diversity of the breeding population, which, along with changes in nutrition, resulted in marked change in the bodies and behavior of these ani mals. Reduction in size and changes in horn shape (and in sheep a remarkable replacement of the stiff hairy outercoat by the wooly undercoat) distinguish domestic forms of sheep (Ovis aries) and goat (Capra hircus) from their wild progenitors. As a result, these new species expanded in number and range beyond what was possible in the wild, vastly increasing their genetic fitness over that of their an cestors, who were progressively forced into more remote, marginal territories. When coupled with the cultivation of cereal grasses (which probably had its origin in the Levant), the herding of domestic sheep and goats afforded these new food-pro ducing economies a high level of security and predictability. [See Cereals.] By the mid-seventh millennium B C E , seden tary village communities throughout the Fertile Crescent were growing wheat and barley and herding flocks of sheep and goat. This new economic focus was likely accompanied by a significant restructuring of social organization, gender relations, notions of property, as well as belief systems needed to mediate relationships between members of larger permanent communities reliant on fixed territories for the supply of essential subsistence resources. The clearing of natural vegetation to create new cropland, the overgrazing of areas that once supported wild herds, and the use of irreplaceable forest resources for fuel had a pro found impact on local landscapes. In the area around the
Neolithic site of 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan, in the southern Le vant, the sudden collapse of an initially highly successful agricultural system offers an early object lesson on the con sequences of farming and herding in fragile arid environ ments. On the other hand, new evidence from the middle Khabur in present-day northeastern Syria suggests that the decimation of indigenous herds of wild gazelle, equids, and cattle did not begin until some time after the expansion of urban-based agricultural economies, more than three thou sand years after the introduction of domesticates into the region. Sheep and goat continued to play a central role in the highly specialized economies of the urban societies tiiat dominated southwest Asia from the mid-fourth millennium onward. Conttol over the distribution of sheep and goat products, especially to city dwellers far removed from rural food production, has been shown, in textual sources and in archaeological faunal assemblages, to have been of major concern to urban administrators. Textile production and the management of special breeds of wool-bearing sheep were primarily pillars of state-level economies in otiierwise re source-poor lowland Mesopotamia. The growth of special ized economies encouraged the development of specialist pastoralists who supplied meat, wool, and dairy products in exchange for agricultural products and craft goods. Al though they were an essential component of these expand ing regional economies, specialist pastoralists needed to maintain a high degree of mobility to assure optimal pas turage for flocks, often venturing great distances from the seats of urban authority. This mobility afforded pastoralists a greater degree of independence from urban control than experienced by other sedentary, more centrally located farmers and craft specialists. By at least the mid-second mil lennium, as evidenced by the Mari archives, pastoral no mads had become an important and frequentiy disruptive force in the political stability of urban society in southwest Asia. Indeed, much of the subsequent history of this region is marked by cycles of centralization and collapse in which pastoralists and their flocks play an ongoing and enduring role. [See also Animal Husbandry; Paleozoology.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Flannery, Kent V. "The Animal Remains." In Prehistory and Human Ecology on the Deh Luran Plain: An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran, edited by Frank A. Hole et al., pp. 2 6 2 - 3 3 1 . University of Michigan, Memoirs of die Museum of Anthropology, no. 1. Ann Arbor, 1969. With Hesse (1978), one of the few complete final re ports on an early Neolithic faunal assemblage in southwest Asia; lacks the finds of the last two decades but remains a blueprint for publishing data of archaeological animal bones and their interpre tation. Hesse, Brian. "Evidence for Husbandry from the Early Neolithic Site of Ganj Dareh in Western Iran." Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1978. Comprehensive and innovative study of the large faunal as semblage from an Epipaleolifhic/Early Neolithic site in highland Iran,
SHEIKH HAMAD, TELL documenting the transition from hunting to herding goats. Available from Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Jacobsen, Thorkild. "On the Textile Industry at Ur under Ibbi-Sin." In Studia Orientalia: Ioanni Pedersen septuagenario, pp. 1 2 - 1 8 7 . Hel sinki, 1953. Classic work on the organization of the textile industry in second-millennium southern Mesopotamia. Jones, Tom B., and J. W. Snyder. Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty: A Catalogue and Discussion of Documents from Var ious Collections. Minneapolis, 1 9 6 1 . Landmark presentation of tex tual information from die state-run animal distribution center at Tell Drehem (ancient Puzrish Dagan) in southern Mesopotamia, which includes a detailed and insightful reconstruction of the center's bu reaucratic structure, highlighting the importance of animal resources in the Ur III economy. Kohler-Rollefson, Use. "A Model for the Development of Nomadic Pastoralism on the Transjordanian Plateau." In Pastoralism in the Levant: Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anatoly Khazanov, pp. 1 1 - 1 8 . Madison, Wis., 1992. Provocative parable about the consequences of herding and farming in arid environments that makes a strong argument for the role of farming and grazing, and ensuing environmental degra dation, in the collapse of Late Neolithic societies in the eastern Le vant. Matdiews, Victor H. Pastoral Nomadism in the Man Kingdom, ca. 18301760 B.C. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Se ries, 3. Cambridge, Mass., 1978. Careful consideration of die place pastoral nomads held in the Mari kingdom in northern Mesopota mia, weaving textual sources with modern ethnographic literature. Smith, B. D. The Emergence of Agriculture. New York, 1994. The most up-to-date summary on agricultural origins worldwide currently available. Chapter on Fertile Crescent presents a cogent and com prehensive account of die domestication of sheep and goats and their place in die emerging agricultural communities of the ancient Near East. Wright, H. E. "Climatic Change in the Zagros Mountains—Revisited." In Prehistoric Archeology along the Zagros Flanks, edited by Linda S. Braidwood et al., pp. 5 0 5 - 5 1 0 . University of Chicago, Oriental In stitute, Publications, vol. 105. Chicago, 1983. Review of more than twenty years of paleoclimatic research in die Zagros Mountains. Zeder, Melinda A. Feeding Cities: Specialized Animal Economy in the Ancient Near East. Washington, D. C., 1 9 9 1 . Examination of the large corpus of animal remains from Bronze Age Tal-e Malyan (ancient Anshan), documenting the controlled distribution of meat resources to urban dwellers no longer producing food for their own consump tion. Zeder, Melinda A. "After the Revolution: Post-Neolithic Subsistence in Northern Mesopotamia." American Anthropologist 96 (1994): 9 7 126. Presents new data on post-Neolitiiic subsistence in the middle Khabur drainage in northeastern Syria, demonstrating the persis tence of hunting as a major element in die subsistence economy of marginal environmental zones from the sixth millennium until the period of urban origins in die mid-third millennium BCE, M E L I N D A A.
ZEDER
SHEIKH HAMAD, TELL (Dur Katlimmu), site lo cated in northeast Syria, 70 km (43 mi.) north-northeast of Deir ez-Zor, on die east bank of the Khabur, the largest tributary of the Euphrates River (35°37' N , 40°45' E ) . The site was first investigated by Hormuzd Rassam in 1879, who discovered the fragmentary stela of Adad-Nirari III now in the British Museum. Surveyed by Hartmut Kuhne and
25
Wolfgang Rollig in 1975 and 1977, systematic excavations began, under Kiihne's direction in 1978 under the auspices of the Free University of Berlin. The most ancient settlement dates to the late fourth mil lennium, but the site was apparently continuously occupied throughout the Early Bronze and Middle Bronze Ages (3000-1500 B C E ) . Originally a small village, the first expan sion noted took place in the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 B C E ) , during the Old Babylonian period, with the construc tion of a citadel and a lower town, covering about 15 ha (37 acres). During the Late Bronze Age (1500-1000 B C E ) , the town was first under the control of die Mitanni Empire and then under the Middle-As Syrian Empire. [See Mitanni; As syrians.] In the thirteenth century B C E , probably under the rule of die Assyrian king Shalmaneser I, the site became the seat of a governor. An archive of about five hundred cune iform tablets found on die western slope of the citadel, in a wing of the governor's palace, ascertains that the site is to be identified with the Assyrian city of DurKatiimmu, known from other Assyrian cuneiform sources of the second and first millennia B C E , but not anticipated in the region of Tell Sheikh Hamad. [See Cuneiform; Palace.] In the Iron Age (1000-330 B C E ) , Dur Katlimmu returned to Assyrian rule (nintii century B C E ) . It may have been con trolled by the Arameans in the eleventh and tenth centuries B C E . [See Arameans.] At the end of the eighth century B C E , die settlement was considerably enlarged when almost 40 ha (99 acres) were added to the lower town. A new town wall 4 km long enclosed the settlement, whose intramural occu pation then covered 55 ha (156 acres). With the suburban areas in the north and in the east, the settlement had dou bled. The excavated buildings consist of a palace and several residences of high officials. Broad streets and large open spaces dominated the new part of the lower town. At least two gates gave access from the north and the east, and a small harbor may have existed along the riverbank in the west. The city then served as an administrative and eco nomic center, as the central place of a four-tiered settlement pattern. The population grew to about seven thousand. Considering its present geoclimatic situation, south of the dry-farming belt, such a large population could only have been supported by special means; these consisted mainly of a regional irrigation system, traces of which were discovered 2.5 km (1.5 mi.) east of Dur Katiimmu and along die east and west banks of die Khabur River. [See Irrigation.] After the downfall of the Assyrian Empire (612/10 B C E ) , the Babylonians, under their king Nabopolassar and Nebuchadrezzer II, stepped in and founded the short-lived Neo-Babylonian Empire (610-535 B C E ) . Recent excavation results demonstrate that Dur Katiimmu was captured, looted, and partly burned. The provincial center of Dur Katiimmu—then perhaps under another name—carried on. A palacelike building was erected, possibly the seat of the Babylonian governor. Other former Assyrian buildings were
26
SHELL
reused. Four unique cuneiform tablets, written in Assyrian with Aramaic postscripts, but dated according to the regnal years of the Babylonian king, ascertain that die population remained Assyrian and Aramaic, and that Assyrian law was still followed, twelve years after the breakdown of the As syrian Empire. [See Aramaic Language and Literature.] During the period of the Persian Empire (535-333 B C E ) , the extended lower town was only sporadically occupied. Gradually, the settlement was reduced to its former size of about 15 ha (37 acres). In the Hellenistic and Roman periods (333 BCE-300 C E ) , the lower town was used as a burial ground. The old citadel and the original lower town were densely settled, the lower town being turned eventually into a castrum. During the Parthian-Roman wars in the second century C E , the settlement seems to have achieved some mil itary significance as a fortress. In the Late Roman and Byz antine periods (300-700 C E ) , the settlement continuously lost significance; by the dawn of the Islamic period it had dwindled to a small village again. It has been reoccupied only in the most recent past. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kuhne, Hartmut, ed. Die Rezente Umwelt von Tall Seh Hamad und Daten zur Umweltrekonstruktion der assyrischen Stadt Dur-katlimmu. Berichte der Ausgrabung Tall Seh Hamad/Dur-kadimmu, vol. 1 . Berlin, 1 9 9 1 . Kuhne, Hartmut, et al. "Vier Spatbabylonische Tontafeln aus Tall Seh Hamad." State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 7 (1993): 7 5 - 1 5 0 . Millard, A. R., and Hayim Tadmor, "Adad-Nirari III in Syria: Another Stele Fragment and the Dates of His Campaigns." Iraq 35 (1973): 57-64. Rollig, Wolfgang. "Dur-kadimmu." Orientalia 47 (1978): 419-430.
funded by the Smithsonian Institution and a consortium of universities, and directed by Eric M . Meyers. A final report of the expedition was published in 1976. The joint expedi tion was among the first excavations in the 1970s to engage scientific collaborators in geology, paleozoology, and envi ronmental studies and to undertake conservation work from the outset. Excavations were conducted in parts of the cemetery, in an industtial/agricultural area, and in the synagogue com plex. While there was considerable debris dating to medieval times or to the Early Arab period, the bulk of the stratified material recovered dated to the Roman and Early Byzantine periods. In addition, limited finds from the Late Hellenistic period, mainly coins, suggest that the site was first occupied in the first century B C E . Soundings in the cemetery produced evidence for the practice of secondary burials (ossilegium) in kokhim and other repositories, as well as of primary inhumation. The tombs under the large mausoleum identified with Shammai were all disturbed. Indeed, most of the tombs had been robbed in antiquity. The closest parallels are to be found at Beth-She'arim in western Galilee, which date roughly to the same periods. Numerous olive presses and several ritual baths (miqva'ot) were excavated in other areas, all dating to Roman times. [See Burial Sites; Tombs; Burial Techniques; Beth-She'arim; Ritual Baths.] Much of the scholarly attention devoted to the site has focused on the unusual broadhouse synagogue(s) excava tion revealed and on their location not on the actual height
HARTMUT KUHNE
SHELL. See Bone, Ivory, and Shell.
SHEMA', KHLRBET, also known as Galilean Tekoa, site located in the Upper Galilee on a high ridge of the Meiron massif, at 760 m above sea level (approx. 25° N , 34 E; map reference 1914 X 2647). It is approximately 10 km (6 mi.) west of Safed, Barely accessible from the south and west, and on its eastern and northern sides only after a long, steep climb, "the ruin of Shammai" has been a Jewish pil grim site since the Middle Ages (it is not mentioned in the sources before the eleventh century). A large mausoleum with an underground tomb chamber marks die traditional spot of die grave of Shammai, the noted sage from the time of King Herod. The 'ayin in the name Shemd), however, may refer to another megalithic monument, on the western ascent, that local Arabs call candle (Shemd) and Jews call the seat of Elijah. The site was excavated between 1970 and 1972 as a field project through the American Schools of Oriental Research, 0
C
SHEMA ,
Meyers)
KHIRBET.
Mausoleum,
looking
west, (Courtesy E. M.
SHFIFONIM but somewhat down the incline of the slope. Building upon older elements on the site—including a miqveh and possibly a tomb or simple underground chamber—the earliest syn agogue, despite its basilical form (when viewed from eastwest) and two rows of columns of four each and a central aisle, was orientated on its long, southern wall. It can thus be described as a broadhouse building. There, in the center of the soutiiern, Jerusalem-oriented wall, was a Torah shrine. Thus, in the synagogue's earliest phase (284-306 C E ) , worshippers faced the long wall that was oriented south, to ward Jerusalem. The first building apparendy was toppled during die earthquake of 306. Many of its architectural el ements were used for the rubble fill laid down to repair the stylobate and the eastern declivity over bedrock that had to be completely shored up after the collapse. Numismatic evidence indicates that the building was re paired almost at once. The second building (306-419) was less elaborate than the first: the external walls used mostiy fieldstones, whereas the earlier walls incorporated many ash lars; capitals were repaired and reused, as were columns and pedestals—and with not always pleasing results. It is note worthy that only die capitals on the south side of die central aisle were decorated, emphasizing once again that worship was focused on the long, southern wall, where there clearly had been a bema (bama), or raised platform. A large menorah with seven branches crowns the main entrance from the north, obviously the work of a local artisan, given its rather crude execution. The second entrance, from the west, opens to a stairway descending into the synagogue, a feature quite rare, though clearly the result of die topography; the entrance also has a small eagle incised on its northern doorjamb. Of special interest is a small frescoed room on the west, probably intended for storing scrolls, above which there was a small gallery for additional seating and not des ignated for women only. The benches in the synagogue are only partially preserved. An adjoining room to the north, reached via a common alley, may have been a belt midrash, or "house of study." Its proximity to and connection with the synagogue, as well as its interior benches and space, strongly suggest some use appropriate to die synagogue context. It may also have housed die family of a community leader. Publication of the joint expedition's ceramic data and finds enabled additional refinements in the typology of Ro man and Byzantine pottery. Its stratigraphic methods, mod ified after the Wheeler-Kenyan-Wright system, were further modified in subsequent digs of the Meiron Excavation Pro ject. As a result, the expedition was able successfully to pro pose a chronology that challenged hitherto dominant views of the development of the synagogue that were based either on architectural typology and/or an assessment of the an cient literature, or both. Discovering a broadhouse syna gogue with internal columniation and indisputable evidence for its orientation along the long, southern wall resulted in
27
the readjustment of many popular theories about die devel opment of the ancient synagogue and how diverse it was architecturally. Its unusual internal arrangement also dem onstrates the fluidity of sacred architecture in relation to the emergence and use of the bema and Torah shrine. The joint expedition was the first to note the commonality in ceramics and architecture in the Golan and Upper Gali lee. The proximity of Khirbet Shema' to Meiron, just 3 Ion to the north, suggests that die two sites were interdependent in many ways beyond sharing the spring located in the wadi between them. [See Meiron.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Meyers, Eric M. "Archaeology and Rabbinic Tradition at Khirbet Shema', 1970 and 1971 Campaigns." Biblical Archaeologist 35 (1972): 2-31. Meyers, Eric M . , et al. Ancient Synagogue Excavations at Khirbet Shema Upper Galilee, Israel, 1970-1972. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 42. Durham, N.C., 1976. Meyers, Eric M . "Shema", Khirbet." In The Ne7v Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, pp. 1 3 5 9 - 1 3 6 1 . Je rusalem and New York, 1993. Tsafrir, Yoram, et al. Tabula imperii romani: Iudaea-Palaestina. Jeru salem, 1994. See page 248. E R I C M.
MEYERS
SHEPHELAH. 5 j d a h . ee
u
SHFIFONIM. Early Bronze Age anchorlike stone ob jects, termed shfifonim, are found in Israel in the region of the southern half of the Sea of Galilee. Shfifonim normally have a single large (about 18 cm [7 in.] in diameter) biconical hole at their apex. The term shfifon (Heb., "pit viper") derives its name from a Yiddish anecdote; die name was given by pioneering Israeli archaeologist Pessah Bar-Adon when he found the first example at Beth Yerah. The term has since been expanded in Israeli archaeological parlance to include any undefmable artifact. More than thirty-five shfifonim are known to date. Most of them were found, either in groups or singly, in definable archaeological contexts during agricultural work in the fields soutii of the Sea of Galilee. Only four were found in ar chaeological excavations. Many specimens now grace the gardens and museums of local kibbutzim. There are several categories of shfifonim. The best-made ones have a well-cut upper area and an unworked lower portion. In some cases, the original form of the monolith is preserved, although the base is differentiated from the top. In a second group, there is no noticeable difference between the top and bottom. Three specimens have "blind" hawser holes in which die piercing was never completed. In one example, a second hole was drilled after the stone's original hole was ruined.
28
SHILOH
The similarity of shfifonim in shape to stone anchors found in and around the Mediterranean and Red Seas and the con sideration that they are found only in the immediate vicinity of the Sea of Galilee support the conclusion that shfifonim "represent" stone anchors but were not intended for use as anchors. [See Anchors.] Several factors suggest that shfifonim may have had a cul tic significance. The unworked bases of some suggest that they were meant to be placed in the ground. Stone anchors are commonly found in Syro-Canaanite and Cypriot Bronze Age temples. Additionally, the huge size and weight of these monolitiis preclude their use on the fishing boats that existed on the Sea of Galilee. In classical times, the largest boats on the lake were about 7-9 m long. [See Galilee Boat.] It is unlikely tiiat Early Bronze Age boats on die lake were larger. Only the smallest shfifonim could have conceivably been used on diose vessels. No actual anchors with the large biconical hawser hole diagnostic of shfifonim have been found in the Sea of Galilee. Thus, the local prototype for the shfifonim is still missing. Stone anchors recovered from die lake are relatively small and have narrow hawser holes. The roof and walls of a Middle Bronze Age I tomb at Kibbutz Degania A near Tel Betli-Yerah are constructed from two shfifonim and four unpierced monoliths. A cultic basin was used for die tomb's floor. All seven pieces may originally have belonged to a single cultic installation that was dismantled and reused as building material. The group may have originated at adjacent Tel Beth-Yerah, where two other shfifonim were found in situ. Shfifonim were made and used no later that the Early Bronze Age II. To judge by the cavalier manner in which they were employed in the Middle Bronze Age I, they no longer had a cultic significance. A large shfifon, which served as a reliquary, was found beneath the offering table of the monastery/church on Mt. Bernice. This building was consttucted in the Byzantine period and continued in use into the Crusader period. Thus, both the earliest and the latest evidence for the cultic use of stone anchors/dummy anchors in the Levant is along the shores of die Sea of Galilee. [See also Ships and Boats.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hirschfeld, Yizhar, "The Anchor Church at die Summit of Mt. Bere nice, Tiberias." Biblical Archaeologist 57.3 (1994): 1 2 2 - 1 3 3 . Report on the Mount Bernice shfifon and the church in which it was discov ered. Kochavi, M. "A Built Shaft-Tomb of the Middle Bronze Age I at De gania A" (in Hebrew). Qadmoniot 6.2 (1973): 50-53. Report on the built tomb at Degania A. Nun, Mendel. The Kinneret: Monograph of a Lake (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv, 1977. General description of shfifonim. Wachsmann, Shelley. "Shfifons: Early Bronze Age Anchor-Shaped Cult Stones from the Sea of Galilee Region." Thracia Pontica III: Troisihne symposium international, edited by Alexandre Fol et al., pp.
395-403. Sofia, 1986. The most detailed study of shfifonim to date, but in need of updating. SHELLEY WACHSMANN
SHILOH (Ar., Khirbet Seilun), site of an Early Israelite religious center, simated 2.5 km (1.5 mi.) east of the Jerusalem-Nablus road, at the northern end of a fertile valley (map reference 1775 X 1626). The mound, about 7.5 acres in area, was naturally protected on the east and west but was vulnerable on the soutii and, to a certain extent, on the nordi. Rock-hewn cisterns were scattered over the mound, but the site's permanent water source was 'Ain Seilun, a fairly large spring located about 900 m to die northeast. These three factors—a wide fertile valley to the south, a pe rennial water supply, and an easily defensible topographic position—no doubt influenced the choice of the site. The key ancient sources for the location of Shiloh are Judges 21:19, the early church historian Eusebms's Onomasticon, and the Madaba mosaic map. [See Madaba.] Shiloh's location was still known in the fourteenth century C E , when the Jewish traveler Eshtori ha-Parchi found it in ruins. Its ancient name was preserved in the name of the small medieval village mentioned in Ottoman tax records from the beginning of the sixteentii century C E and in the name of the adjacent spring. The modern identification of Khirbet Sei lun as ancient Shiloh was made without difficulty on lin guistic grounds by the American philologist Edward Rob inson during his trip to Palestine in 1838. [See the biography of Robinson.] A. Schmidt undertook the first archaeological investiga tion of die site in 1922. This was followed from 1926 to 1932 by a Danish expedition led by H. Kjaer, with William Foxwell Albright serving as adviser, and a short season of ex cavation in 1963 by Svend Holm-Nielsen. [See the biography of Albright] Four seasons of excavations were conducted from 1981 to 1984 by the Land of Israel Studies of Bar-Ilan University under the direction of Israel Finkelstein, with Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman acting as assistant directors. Remains from every historical period from the Middle Bronze Age to the Byzantine era and beyond were uncovered. Excavation efforts were concentrated on the edges of the mound, particularly its northern sector, where there were fewer later remains, as it had not been damaged by erosion or later construction. Pottery finds date the earliest settlement to M B II, when the site apparentiy was small and unwalled. By M B III, how ever, Shiloh had become a large, fortified center. The site, then a little more than 4 acres in area, was surrounded by a continuous periphery wall and an earthen glacis. The wall, from 3 to 5.5 m thick and preserved up to 8 m, was built of large fieldstones tiiat were used for secondary consttuction, in all periods. Rooms built against the wall's inner face were found in one area. A solid, rectangular tower protruded 0.6
SHILOH, YIGAL m from both sides of die wall on the north; in another area, where the wall was built in a "sawtooth" technique, a large offset projected toward die slope of the mound. Like the periphery wall, the eartiien glacis was not uni form in diickness or shape. Along the steep eastern slope— where construction was concentrated and the glacis was most complex—an internal wall helped to anchor it to die slope. Near this part of the wall the glacis was about 6.3 m thick and extended for about 25 m from the wall to its end on die slope. There the glacis consisted of four main layers of both hard and friable soils and rocks, the variety serving to stabilize the glacis and prevent erosion. The M B II pot tery used to date die earliest settlement was uncovered in the bottom layer; few sherds were found in the upper three levels. Leaning along a section of the periphery wall for about 1 1 5 m was a row of rooms, fourteen of which appear to have served primarily as cellars. Fills about one meter thick had been laid between the floors of these rooms and die bedrock. Like the bottom layer of the glacis, they contained a large quantity of MB II pottery. That these rooms were used for storage is suggested by the dozens of large storage jars found in them, though some silver jewelry and a few bronze weap ons were found as well. Also uncovered were two cultic stands, votive bowls, and a large bull-shaped zoomorphic vessel; given the absence of any residential structures, they suggest that the M B site served a cultic function before it was destroyed, in a conflagration, at the end of the sixteenth century B C E . Late Bronze Age remains were uncovered in only one area at the site, the steep eastern slope. In an area of about 200 sq m, near the M B periphery wall, a large quantity of bones and L B I pottery—including flat bowls, lamps, juglets, chal ices, and fragments of Cypriot ware—was dug out of a thick layer (1.5 m) of stones and light-colored ash. This material, probably die buried remains of votive offerings, suggests cultic activity. Because the L B stratum was limited to one area of the site, and considering tiiat no masonry were un covered, Shiloh apparendy was not actually settled in the Late Bronze but was an isolated cultic place. It is possible that settlers from die surrounding area took votive offerings to the top of this hill because tradition held that it had been the site of a temple. Significant Iron Age remains were uncovered over virtu ally the entire area of excavation, though it is difficult to establish their temporal relationship. The area of the Iron I site has been estimated at between 2.5 and 3 acres. Among the material remains were bones and Iron I pottery, includ ing fragments of vessels decorated with animals in relief, parts of a cultic stand with applied animal decoration, and the rim of a collar-rim jar bearing tiiree rosette-shaped im pressions. Other finds included a black stone seal bearing two crossed figures of galloping horned animals; installa tions; and numerous silos, each about 1.5 m in diameter,
29
built into debris from botii the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. [See Seals.] Among the many Iron I structural remains were two houses on the western side of the site. The M B periphery wall served as a rear wall for these two structures, which were built into a portion of the M B glacis. The slope on the west was so steep that construction had to proceed on two levels. Considering that empty space was available on the northern part of the mound, the concentra tion of building in this area in spite of its logistical problems is especially noteworthy. Two buildings were uncovered on die upper level and a hall on the lower level. The southern building on the upper level was divided into four aisles by tiiree rows of columns. The hall on the lower level, which was connected to the upper level by steps or a ladder leading to the corridor between the two upper buildings, probably served as a basement for the southern building. The upper, northern building had two side rooms (each paved with stone slabs) and a courtyard; between the side rooms and the courtyard were two rows of columns (up to 1 m and higher) with low partitions between them. The orientation of the walls of these buildings indicates that they were part of a large complex on the summit, but the internal remains indicate that they were not residences. Many pottery types were found here, including more than forty vessels and numerous large fragments. The most com mon pottery types were collar-rim jars, which were situated in rows along the walls of the upper northern building as well as in the lower hall—an indication that these buildings were used, at least in part, for storage. The charred remains of the conflagration in which these buildings were de stroyed—perhaps by the Philistines in the eleventh century BCE—were visible everywhere. [See Philistines, article on Early Philistines.] Activity at the site was soon renewed, in Iron II, but remains from this period, found in various areas of die mound, were poor. Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and medieval remains were unearthed at different parts of the site, but especially at die summit of die mound and on its soutiiern slope. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Andersen, Flemming G. Shiloh: The Danish Excavations al TallSailun, Palestine in 1026,1929, 1032, and 1963, vol. 2, The Remains from the Hellenistic to the Mamluk Periods. Copenhagen, 1985. Buhl, Marie-Louise, and Svend Holm-Nielsen. Shiloh: The Danish Ex cavations at Tall Sailun, Palestine in 1926,1929, 1932, and 1963. Co penhagen, 1969. Finkelstein, Israel, et al. Shiloh: The Archaeology of a Biblical Site. Tel Aviv, 1993. LESLIE WATKINS
Based on material submitted by Israel Finkelstein
SHILOH, YIGAL (i937-1987), Israeli archaeologist under whose direction the City of David excavations in Je rusalem (1978-1985) attracted worldwide attention. Shiloh
30
SHIPS AND BOATS
studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning both his B A . and M A . degrees summa cum laude. His Ph.D. dissertation was on the foreign influences on masonry in Palestine in the Iron Age. He subsequently concentrated his research on town planning, urbanization, and architecture. As a student Shiloh participated on many of Israel's most important excavations: in the expedition to the caves in the Judean Desert and at Ramat Rahel, Arad, Tel Nagila, the Citadel in Jerusalem, Masada, Megiddo, and Hazor. At Hazor he was responsible for area L , the site's underground water system. The experience was particularly useful in the City of David excavations,, when he made a priority the clearing of Warren's Shaft, one of the components of the site's water system that in antiquity accessed the water of the Gihon Spring. His understanding of the scope of a city's functional needs—its water system and fortifications—and of the topological influences on its architecture was the out growth of his early research. Shiloh's experience at large sites was critical to undertak ing the multidisciplinary Jerusalem project, where compli cated stratigraphy, created by building directly on bedrock and the reuse of earlier walls, had daunted archaeologists since the nineteenth century. Excavation and Shiloh's reas sessment of the work of previous expeditions resulted in a clearer picture of the 586 B C E destruction by Nebuchadrez zar and of early postexilic Jerusalem than ever before avail able. In addition to his duties as professor of biblical archae ology at the Hebrew University, Shiloh served as director of die university's Institute of Archaeology (1983-1986) and was a visiting professor abroad. He published more than sixty articles and books on various subjects relating to the Bronze and Iron Ages in the ancient Near East and the land of Israel. In 1984 he published an interim assessment of the results from the City of David excavations. Staff members followed his example by completing publication of almost all oftirefieldworkand small finds within a decade of leaving the field. An almost complete bibliography of Shiloh's writ ings was published in volume 3 of the City of David publi cation (Qedem 33, Jerusalem, 1992). Yigal Shiloh received the prestigious Jerusalem Prize in 1987, just one week before his death. He had distinguished himself in the City of David, as an excavator, administrator, and negotiator at a scientifically and politically sensitive site. [See also Jerusalem.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dever, William G. "In Memoriam—Yigal Shiloh." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 274 (1989): 1 - 2 . Shiloh, Yigal. The Proto-Aeolic Capital and Israelite Ashlar Masonry. Qedem, vol. 1 1 . Jerusalem, 1979. Shiloh, Yigal, et al. Excavations at the City of David, 1978-85. 3 vols, to date. Qedem, vols. 1 9 , 30, 33. Jerusalem, 1984-1992. See volume 2 for Shiloh's "Stratigraphical Introduction to Parts I and II" (pp. 1 -
1 2 ) , and a near complete bibliography of his publications (pp. xviixx). Shiloh, Yigal. "Review of F. Braemer, L'architecture domestique du Le vant a I'dge du fer." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 264 (1989): 92-94. Shiloh, Yigal. "Underground Water Systems in the Land of Israel in the Iron Age." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods: In Memory of Immanuel (Munya) Dunayevsky, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 275-293. Jeru salem, 1992. Shiloh, Yigal. "Jerusalem." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 7 0 1 - 7 1 2 . Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Shiloh, Yigal. "Megiddo." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 1 0 1 6 - 1 0 2 3 . Jerusalem and New York, 1993. TAMAR SHILOH
SHIPS AND BOATS. In the ancient Near East, ships and boats were major conveyors of people and goods along inland rivers and over the seas that connected land masses. The earliest riverine craft in Egypt and Mesopotamia were presumably propelled solely by paddles and/or punting poles or were towed by humans or beasts from the riverbanks. These craft included boat-shaped floats made of bundles of lashed reeds. In Mesopotamia, round baskets of wicker covered with hides, the modern Arab quffa (Akk., quppu), served as coracles; and rafts supported by from four to a thousand inflated skins, the modern kelek (Akk., kalakku), were floated downriver and, after their cargoes were unloaded, dismantled and then carried back upstream on donkeys. Keleks probably evolved from single skins used to buoy individual swimmers across rivers. Models of Mesopotamian canoes are so like modern marsh canoes in the region it is assumed that they also were built of wood; however, exactly when plank-built boats were introduced is unknown. The earliest Sumerian documents describing boat construction can be interpreted to show that the planks were fastened edge to edge by mortise-and-tenon joints rather than fastened to a previously constructed in terior framework, as are most modern boats. There is some contemporary evidence in Egypt of predynastic boats with planks fastened with ropes rather than mortise-and-tenon joints. It is certain that such boats existed in the Early Dynastic period, for the 43.6-meter vessel bur ied next to the pyramid of Cheops at Giza was built of mas sive cedar planks joined not only with pegs, but also with ropes lashed through V-shaped mortises. The Cheops boat lacked a keel and a mast and had only a dozen paddles, suggesting that it was towed. Additionally, in pharaonic planked-ship construction, as on the Cheops boat and the disassembled planks dating to the Middle Kingdom found at Lisht, the strakes were often "joggled," to prevent lon gitudinal movement between the planks. The use of wind power for propulsion in predynastic
SHIPS AND BOATS Egypt is known from depictions of sails on Gerzean pottery. From more detailed depictions from the Old Kingdom, it is known that by then masts were usually bipods, with tall, narrow sails stretched between a yard at the top and a boom at the foot. The masts were held in place by stays running forward and aft during upstream trips; the stays were low ered for downstream nips, when paddlers (facing forward) or rowers (facing aft) moved the vessels against the pre vailing nordi wind. For seagoing vessels, known especially from reliefs from the time of Sahure and unas (Wenis), rope hogging trusses running from stem to stern kept the ends of the ship from sagging dangerously when the center of the hull was raised by waves passing below; this was a necessity before devel opment of the keel. Each of the depicted vessels was steered by multiple paddles on either side of its stern. The sizes of these ships can only be guessed, but a cedar ship of the fourth dynasty is described as being 100 cubits, or 52 m, long (Bass, 1972). Little is known about Egyptian seagoing ships in tire Mid dle Kingdom, but the fictional Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor describes his Red Sea vessel as being 55 m long, about the size of the fourth-dynasty ship mentioned above. What may be a rare fragment of a contemporary ship, a cedar plank cut with mortises, was found at Mersa Gawasis on the Red Sea coast. Middle Kingdom riverboats, on the other hand, are well known. Models in the tomb of Mekette at Thebes show that by tiien a single steering oar or paddle sometimes passed directly over the stern, with the added mechanical advantage of a tiller. Sails were no longer much taller than they were
SHIPS AND BOATS.
31
wide. Cabins of cloth- or hide-covered wicker provided vaultlike protection for passengers. Half a dozen funerary boats from the Middle Kingdom, intentionally buried at Dahshur near the pyramid of Sesostris (Senwosret) III, had planks held together with unpegged mortise-and-tenon joints; dovetailed joints may well be un recorded additions of the restorers who worked on the hulls after their discovery in 1894. The boats were about 10 m long, with a beam of 2.5 m, and still lacked keels. Farther east, contemporary sailing ships are known in the Persian Gulf from depictions on seals found on the island of Failaka. [See Failaka.] However, models and seal engrav ings from the Old Babylonian period are too crude to pro vide many details. By tire time of the New Kingdom in Egypt, sails were often broader than they were tall and were carried on single masts. Seagoing hulls, as depicted in the Deir el-Bahari reliefs of Queen Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt, were still strengthened by great hogging trusses and still steered by large steering oars, or quarter rudders, at the stern. The Deir el-Bahari reliefs also depict the queen's barge, built for transporting two enormous obelisks that weighed about 350 tons apiece; everything about die barge is gigantic, from the eight hogging trusses, to the eight steer ing oars estimated to have weighed 4 or 5 tons each, to the 810 oarsmen towing the barge with 27 boats. Syro-Canaanite ships are also depicted in New Kingdom art. Those in the tombs of Nebamun and Kenamun at Thebes (fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, respectively) are tubby merchantmen whose broad sails have yards and booms supported by single masts; the latter provides the earliest evidence of a crow's nest. Both vessels have wicker
Egyptian funerary boat model. Dated to 2000
BCE.
(Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
32
SHIPS AND BOATS
• cgaa;- •-
SHIPS AND BOATS.
Model of an Egyptian cargo boat. Fifteenth century B C E . (Courtesy Pictorial Archive)
fencing running along the sides, presumably to keep spray from the deck. By the reign of Rameses II, the Egyptians had adopted this type of Syro-Canaanite vessel for their own use and termed it a mns ship. This adoption of foreign ship building traditions may have been influenced by the absorp tion of Levantine shipwrights into Egypt; a document dating to the reign of Thutmosis III mentions Syro-Canaanite ship wrights responsible for the building or repair of ships in the Egyptian dockyard of Prw-nfr—apparently located at or near Memphis. Actual evidence of a possible Syro-Canaanite ship of this period comes from the excavation of a fourteenth-century B C E merchant vessel at Uluburun, near Kas, Turkey. [See Uluburun.] The preserved portions of the ship's fir hull re veal planks fastened edge to edge with mortise-and-tenon joints, with oak pegs running through the top and bottom of each joint to prevent its coming apart. The ship lacks a true keel, having a keel plank instead; no traces of frames (ribs) were found. Carrying at least 15 tons of cargo, much of it on dunnage of thorny burnet, the ship is estimated to have been about 15 m long. From the end of die Bronze Age (c. 1200 B C E ) the wreck age of another ship, almost certainly Syro-Canaanite or Cypriot, was excavated off Cape Gelidonya, Turkey. Un fortunately, little of its wood is preserved. The 1994 discov ery of one of the ship's large stone anchors (Syro-Canaanite or Cypriot in type) suggests that an original estimate of 10 m for the length of the ship, based on the distribution of a ton of preserved cargo on the seabed, may have been low. [See Cape Gelidonya.] Shortly after the ship sank at Cape Gelidonya, Rameses
III recorded the Egyptian naval defeat of the Sea Peoples in reliefs at Medinet Habu (c. 1176 B C E ) . The ships depicted are all double-ended, or symmettical. The Egyptian ships have lion heads for the prows, whereas those of the Sea Peo ples have bird heads. For the first time, sails are shown with out booms at their feet, and they seem to be furled by lines known as brails. Splashboards rather than wicker fencing protected the decks, and crow's nests were common. During the Iron Age, the Phoenicians—heirs to the rich tradition of Syro-Canaanite seagoing merchants—became the most renowned traders in the ancient world. [See Phoe nicians.] Phoenician sites have supplied scant evidence for their ships, however. The main iconographic source of in formation is Assyrian art, for upon subjugating the Phoe nician coast in the ninth century B C E , the Assyrians em ployed Phoenician ships in their military strategy and to transport tribute and plunder. [See Assyrians.] Shalmaneser Ill's bronze gate covers from Balawat depict the receipt of tribute from the Phoenician cities of Sidon and Tyre. [See Balawat.] The vessels transporting the tribute have devices shaped like a horse's head on top of the stem and sternposts facing outboard. This same device appears commonly on later depictions of Phoenician ships, at the bow facing outward. One type of Phoenician ship was termed a hippos ("horse"), perhaps after those decorative devices. Another type, gauloi ("tubs"), denotes a broad mer chantman. By the eighth-century B C E warships were no longer simple troop transports, but were true weapons in themselves. What may be the first depiction of a waterline ram attached to the bow of a warship used in the course of a battle was
SHIPS AND BOATS depicted in a now badly destroyed wall painting dating to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III (745-727 B C E ) , uncovered at Til Barsip. [See Til Barsip.] The ram is painted yellow, ap parently to indicate that it was covered widi a bronze sheath. The rowers were protected inside the hull, working their oars through small ports. In a relief from the southwest palace at Kuyunjik/Nineveh, Lulli, the ldng of Sidon, and his entourage are depicted es caping to Cyprus in a fleet of oared ships before Sennach erib's advance. [See Nineveh.] Some of Lulli's ships are war galleys, complete widi waterline rams and recurving sterns but lacking bow decorations. The second type of ship de picted in the relief has a distinctly tubby appearance in pro file and must represent either a transport or merchant ship. The stem and sternpost of the transports lengthen at their tops, although the two-dimensional manner of representa•tion makes it unclear if these extensions are circular or linear. Both types of ship are biremes—that is, the rowers sat on two levels on either side of the vessel in order to increase die power behind each ship's propulsion. The upper row of oars is worked from the caprails, while the lower row of oarsmen was positioned inside the hull. The ships in this relief also portray another feature characteristic of Phoenician ships: a row of shields on either side of the hull.
Timber was an important element of the Phoenician trib ute to their Assyrian overlords. In Sargon's palace at Khorsabad, ships are shown carrying cargoes of logs whose length approximates that of the ships. [See Khorsabad.] Additional logs are towed behind the ships. This is reminiscent of the rafts (Heb., dovrot, rapsodot) by means of which Hiram I, King of Tyre, delivered cypress and cedar logs via the port of Jaffa to King Solomon for his building activities (r Kgs. 5:9; 2 Chr. 2:16). [See Jaffa.] The oarsmen in these ships face the bows, as if they were paddling rather than rowing. This is almost certainly the artists' error, as it would have been virtually impossible to paddle such heavily laden ves sels. Moreover, the men grip the oars' looms in the manner of rowers rather than of paddlers. The masts of these ships are retractable. A Phoenician galley depicted on an orthostat from Karatepe bears a bird's-head device facing inboard on its sternpost, an element of Aegean origin. In the fifth and fourth centuries B C E , war galleys appear prominently on the Phoe nician city coins of Sidon, Arwad, and Byblos. [See Sidon; Arwad; Byblos.] Given their diminutive size, some of these depictions are remarkably detailed. From the story of Noah's ark to Jonah's attempted escape from die Lord, the Hebrew Bible contains numerous ref-
r
mi
Phoenician-Canaanite merchant ship. Reconstruction based on an Egyp tian painting. Thirteenth century BCE. (Courtesy ASOR Archives) SHIPS AND BOATS.
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34
SHIQMIM
erences to ships and the purposes for which tiiey were em ployed. The most detailed account of shipping is Ezekiel's dirge for the fall of Tyre, in which he compares that city to a large seagoing merchantman (Ez. 27). This includes a de tailed description of the ship's cargo and trading partners. Psalm 107 vividly describes the sea and the sailor's contact with its deep psychological mysteries. A unique Judean seal dating to the eighth or seventh century B C E depicts a fully rigged ship under sail with a horse-head bow ornament and a row of shields along the length of the hull. Rivers, lakes, and swamps also required watercraft. In ad dition to inflated skins, pontoon bridges are depicted in As syrian reliefs. King David's escape with his household across die Jordan River from the revolt led by Absalom was slowed by the need to transport them by a ferry (2 Sm. 19:18). Such a ferry consisted of a floating platform or boat that could be pulled across a river by a rope attached to either bank. Two such ferries are depicted on the Jordan River in the sixthcentury C E Madaba Map. [See Madaba.] It is likely that the "Jordan boat" mentioned in the Talmud refers to this type of vessel (B.T., Shab. 83b). Solomon built a fleet of ships at Ezion Geber on the Red Sea coast and carried out joint maritime endeavors with Hiram of Tyre. Together with knowledgeable Phoenician seamen sent by Hiram, the ships sailed to the land of Ophir, returning with large quantities of gold (/ Kgs. 9:26-28; 2 Chr. 8:17). While the location of the land of Ophir remains unknown, its existence is proven by an inscription found on a sherd from Tell Qasile in Israel that mentions the "gold of Ophir." [See Qasile, Tell.] Solomon and Hiram also carried out a flourishing mari time trade in other commodities: "gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks," in a joint fleet that would return every three years (r Kgs. 10:22; 2 Chr. 9:21). The Bible mentions seagoing "Tarshish ships" (Is. 60:9). There are two possible reasons for the inclusion of a geo graphic term in the name of type of ship. When a ship was borrowed from a specific location or people, as was the case of the Roman Liburnian, the term refers to the vessel's place of origin. Alternately, it can indicate that this was the type of vessel normally employed in trading with a specific lo cale—as was the case, for example, with the Boston packets or the East Indiamen of the recent past. In the Bible, "Tar shish ships" and "ships going to Tarshish" are used inter changeably (see particularly 2 Chr. 9:21). Thus, this type of vessel was apparently a large seagoing merchantman com monly used on the run to Tarshish (presumably Tartessos in Spain). [See also Anchors; Fishing; and Seafaring.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Basch, Lucien. Le musee imaginaire de la marine antique. Athens, 1987. Bass, George F. Cape Gelidonya: A Bronze Age S/«prorec&. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 57.8. Philadelphia, 1967.
Bass, George F„ ed. A History of Seafaring Based on Underwater Ar chaeology. New York, 1972. Bass, George F., et al. "The Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun: 1986 Campaign." American Journal of Archaeology 93 (1989): 1-29. Boreux, Charles. Eludes de nautique egyptienne: Van de la navigation en Egypte jusqu'd la fin de Tancien empire. Memoires de l'lnstitut Francaise d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire, 50. Cairo, 1925. Casson, Lionel. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. 2d ed. Princeton, 1986. Davies, Norman de Garis, and Raymond O. Faulkner. "A Syrian Trad ing Venture to Egypt." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 33 (1947): 40-46, pi. 8. De Graeve, Marie-Christine. TheShips of the Ancient Near East, c. 2000500 B.C. Louvain, 1981. Gianfrotta, Piero A„ and Patrice Pomey. Archeologia subacquea: Storia, techniche, scoperte e relitti. Milan, 1980. Flaldane, Cheryl Ward. "The Lisht Timbers: A Report on Their Sig nificance." In The Pyramid Complex of Senwosret I, by Dieter Arnold et al., pp. 1 0 2 - 1 1 2 , pis. 1 1 5 - 1 3 3 . Metropolitan Museum of Art, Egyptian Expedition, South Cemeteries of Lisht, vol. 3. New York, 1992. Hornell, James. Water Transport: Origins and Early Evolution. Cam bridge, 1946. Naville, Edouard. The Temple of Deir el Bahari, vol. 3, End of Northern Half and Southern Half of the Middle Platform. London, 1898. Nelson, Harold H. "The Naval Battle Pictured at Medinet Habu." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2 (1943): 40-45 Nour, Mohammad Zaki, et al. The Cheops Boats. Cairo, i960. Patch, Diana C , and Cheryl Ward Haldane. The Pharaoh's Boat at the Carnegie. Pittsburgh, 1990. Wachsmann, Shelley. "The Ships of the Sea Peoples." International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 1 0 (1981): 187-220. Wachsmann, Shelley. Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant. College Station, Texas, 1996. Winlock, Herbert E. Models of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. Cambridge, 1955G E O R G E F. B A S S and
SHELLEY WACHSMANN
SHIQMIM, a Chalcolithic village and cemetery complex located in the northern Negev desert, along the northern bank of Nahal Beersheba (map reference n 47 X 0675). Sit uated about 16 km (10 mi.) west of modern Beersheba, Shiqmim is one of several Chalcolithic village sites in the Beersheba valley, among them Bir Abu-Matar, Bir es-Safadi, and Horvat Beter. At about 9.5 ha (24 acres), of which more than 4,500 sq m were excavated, Shiqmim is the larg est of these sites. It is distinguished also by the formal cem etery complex, of which about 2,000 sq m were excavated, associated with but physically separate from the village. Ex cavation of the site's deep Chalcolithic strata confirmed metalworking activities as well as planned settlement. Those findings and Shiqmim's geographic position between the arid inland foothills and the semiarid Negev coastal plain offer important clues in retracing social development in the region. Shiqmim was discovered by David Alon in the early 1950s, during the course of his surveys of the northern Ne gev. The findings of an extended survey of Nahal Beersheba
SHIQMIM and lower Nahal Besor conducted from 1977 to 1980 byThomas E. Levy and Alon led to two phases of excavation work at Shiqmim. This fieldwork, codirected by Levy and Alon, was affiliated with the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). Phase I was conducted in 1979 and from 1982 through 1984 by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Negev Museum; phase II was conducted from 1987 to 1989 and in 1993 by the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem and the University of California, San Diego. [See American Schools of Oriental Research; Nelson Glueck School of Bib lical Archaeology.] Occupational Phases. Excavators have distinguished four primary phases of occupation at Shiqmim that begin in about the mid-fifth millennium, extend into the early fourth millennium, and coincide and/or overlap with several predynastic Egyptian cultures in the Faiyum. [See Faiyum.] Temporal correlations between these cultures and Chalcol ithic Shiqmim are valuable in understanding the evolution of Beersheba culture. The earliest phase, stratum IV (c. 4659-4360 B C E ) , was dated by averaging two radiocarbon dates that are contem porary with the Early Neolithic in the Faiyum. Exposure at this level was very limited, however, making anything but a broad discussion of occupation impossible. Radiocarbon measurements taken from remains repre senting the site's earliest settlement phases were averaged in order to date the more widespread early occupation, in stra tum III (c. 4520-4400 B C E ) . These locales included a floor from one of the many subterranean rooms, an occupation surface in the village, an altar, the earliest stratigraphically documented rectilinear building established on a paleogravel deposit, and the deepest ash-filled pit excavated at the site. Various architectural features were used in radiocarbon dating the next level, stratum II (c. 4240-3990 B C E ) , in which planned settlement was most extensive. The final Chalco lithic phase, stratum I (c. 3940-3700 B C E ) , is less firmly es tablished, as only two radiocarbon measures—one from a village burial, the other from the floor remains of a build ing—were used to determine its beginning and end points. Settlement Remains. The climate of the Beersheba val ley was comparatively damp during stratum III, as indicated by the concentration of human settlement on hilltops along the borders of the valley rather than alongside Nahal Beer sheba. Subterranean living spaces hewn into die hard sedi ment of these hills were connected by separate systems of underground tunnels and rooms. One of these underground systems has been thoroughly excavated. Its oval-shaped rooms were 2.5-4.5 m in diameter and had ceilings more than 2 m high. These rooms were built inside a terrace (more than 3 m high and 40 m long) that was created by attempts to carve out additional living space in the hills. Two open-air altars and various cult objects were uncovered on the outside edge of this terrace. These remains reflect the
35
earliest communal living practices and cultic activities at Shiqmim. Occupants of stratum II did not live in the subterranean housing complex but in an outside village made up of rec tilinear structures, twenty-nine of which have been exca vated. The few subterranean structures at this level were used as storage rooms. Foundation walls for what seems to have been a planned settlement were constructed out of boulders taken from Nahal Beersheba. The architectural re mains that characterize this phase include broadroom struc tures with enclosed courtyards, apparently for domestic use; larger broadroom structures in which few domestic objects were found; storage bins; and open, plaza-type areas. Less than 30 percent of the architecture survived the destruction of this occupational phase, after which the site was aban doned. Resettlement in stratum I seems to have been a scaleddown version of the stratum II occupation, with far fewer rectilinear structures scattered across the site. Little use was made of subterranean structures. Architectural remains in dicate that this phase also was destroyed. Shiqmim and other Chalcolithic settlements in the Beersheba valley were not resettled for several millennia, until the Iron Age and the Byzantine periods. Cemetery Complex. Shiqmim's unique cemetery com plex spreads out for more than one kilometer over eight hill tops rising above Nahal Beersheba. From one to two dozen burial structures were found grouped on top of each hill. Among the numerous finds were grave circles (0.90-3.5 m in diameter) containing secondary burials and associated pottery and jewelry. Twelve cist graves also were found. These structures did not hold human remains, but V-shaped bowls were found inside them. Significant also were the nu merous burial cairns. The wide variety of offerings uncov ered in the cemetery complex indicates social stratification at Chalcolithic Shiqmim. [See Burial Sites; Burial Tech niques; Grave Goods.] Metalworking. Evidence of significant metalworking ac tivity was uncovered in the two latest occupational strata. Analyses of copper ore found on site indicate that it came from Wadi Punon, in Transjordan, opposite tire Arabah valley, and was transported to Shiqmim—and other Beer sheba valley sites—where it was used to make tools. Nu merous and varied copper tools were recovered, as were ex amples of more elaborate metalwork using the lost-wax technique: copper standards, mace heads, and band frag ments—pieces resembling those found at Nahal Mishmar near the Dead Sea. Because initially there was no evidence that these cult pieces were cast on site, it was thought that they had been brought to Shiqmim from Anatolia or Ar menia. It has since been determined, however, that the stone from inside one of the mace heads originated in the Arabah valley, confirming that the more sophisticated pieces were produced locally. c
c
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SHIQMONA B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gilad, Isaac, and Yuval Goren. "Petrographic Analyses of Fourth Mil lennium B.C. Pottery and Stone Vessels from the Northern Negev, Israel." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 275 (1989): 5 - 1 4 . Levy, Thomas E. "The Chalcolithic Period: Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine." Biblical Archaeologist 49 (1986): 8 2 108. Levy, Thomas E. "How Ancient Man First Utilized the Rivers in the Desert." Biblical Archaeology Review 16.6 (November-December 1990): 2 0 - 3 1 . Levy, Thomas E. "Radiocarbon Chronology of the Beersheva Culture and Predynastic Egypt." In The Nile Delta in Transition, edited by E. C. M. van den Brink, pp. 345-56. Tel Aviv, 1992. Levy, Thomas E., and David Alon. "The Chalcolithic Mortuary Site near Mezad Aluf, Northern Negev Desert: A Preliminary Survey." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 248 (1982): 37-59Levy, Thomas E., and David Alon. "Shiqmim." Israel Exploration Jour nal 33 (1983): 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 . 272-274; 35 (1985): 74-76; 38 (1988): 9 0 92; 39 (1989): 1 1 5 - 1 1 7 ; 40 (1990): 226-228. Levy, Thomas E., and David Alon. "An Anthropomorphic Statuette from Shiqmim." 'Atiqot 17 (1985): 187-189. Levy, Thomas E„ and David Alon. "Shiqmim: A Chalcolithic Village and Mortuary Centre in the Northern Negev," Paleorient 1 1 . 1 (1985): 7 1 - 8 3 . Levy, Thomas E., et al. Shiqmim I: Studies Concerning Chalcolithic So cieties in the Northern Negev Desert, Israel (1082-1984). British Ar chaeology Reports, International Series, no. 256. 2 vols. Oxford, 1987. Levy, Thomas E., et al. Protohistoric Investigations at the Shiqmim Chal colithic Village and Cemetery: Interim Report on the 1987 Season. Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Supplement 27 (1991): 29-46. Levy, Thomas E., et al. "Protohistoric Investigations at the Shiqmim Chalcolidlic Village and Cemetery." In Preliminary Excavation Re ports: Sardis, Caesarea Maritima, Shiqmim, Ain Ghazal, edited by William G. Dever. Annual of the American School of Oriental Re search 5 1 , pp. 87-106. Ann Arbor, 1994. THOMAS E . LEVY
SHIQMONA (Ar., Tell es-Samak), a 2-acre mound on die Mediterranean coast of Israel, about 1.3 km (1 mi.) south of the promontory of Mt. Carmel, within the boundaries of the modern city of Haifa (map reference 2478 X 1462). Shi qmona is the closest settlement to the sacred precincts on Mt. Carmel. In Antiquities (13.12) Josephus mentions Sukaminon in relation to the siege of Akko by the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus in 102 B C E . [See Akko.] The site's bib lical name is unknown. A jar from the fourth century B C E found in situ bears a tax inscription that mentions Gath Car mel, a place also named in the Amarna tablets. [See Amarna Tablets.] The Pilgrim of Bordeaux states that Sycaminum is a stopover near Mt. Carmel. It appears in Talmudic lit erature as Shiqmona. The site was excavated from 1963 to 1979 by Joseph El gavish on behalf of the Haifa Museum. Settlement there be
gan in the Late Bronze Age I and continued almost without interruption until the Arab conquest in 638 C E . Some sev enteen strata were observed. A solitary tomb of a Middle Bronze Age warrior was discovered in the cemetery on the rocky slopes of the mountain to the east of the mound. Among the finds in the tomb were a scarab seal bearing die name of Ya'aqub-har, which corresponds to the name of the biblical Jacob. A building from the thirteenth century B C E , no doubt with a public function, was partly excavated. It contained an Egyptian faience goblet and an ivory plaque, a Mycenaean vessel in the shape of a hedgehog, and scarab and cylinder seals. A small blade made of iron is one of the earliest of its kind in Israel. A town whose plan can be reconstructed along general lines was fortified by a casemate wall in the tenth century B C E . There was one city gate. The casemate rooms con tained large groups of vessels, among them cooking pots with curious incised marking on the rims and a jar with the Hebrew inscription Imlk'l ("belonging to Malkiel" or "in tended for Malkiel") on it. That town extended over an area of no more than an acre and included twenty or more houses of different sizes. A large residential structure from the sec ond half of the ninth century B C E was entirely cleared. It consisted of a long courtyard separated by two rows of col umns from side rooms, with four storage rooms at the far end. An olive press was located in the courtyard. In the first half of the eighth century B C E , the entire area excavated had been occupied by three large olive-pressing installations. Typical of this stratum were clay female figu rines holding musical instruments (tambourines) and horseand-rider figurines. [See Olives; Musical Instruments.] The settlement in the period of the Assyrian satrapy (seventh century BCE) was smaller than earlier ones. Basket-handle storage jars designed for sea transportation, make their first appearance. Greek pottery and Hebrew inscriptions were found in all strata belonging to the Iron Age II. A small weaving workshop from die middle of the sixth century B C E was cleared. At the beginning of the fifth cen tury a well-planned town had probably been constructed by the Phoenicians of Tyre. [See Phoenicians; Tyre.] Two in tersecting stone-paved streets were uncovered, along with tiiree houses situated along them. The houses consisted of a court and three rooms, with the room nearest the court serving as a kitchen. An impressive Persian sword is a unique find from this period. The town was destroyed in the first third of the fifth century B C E , possibly by an earthquake; subsequent towns were built not on the mound but on the flat fields surrounding it. The tell itself was later occupied by three fortresses: a late Persian period fortress from which tiiree Phoenician tax inscriptions and part of an abecedary were recovered; a Hellenistic period fortress destroyed in 132 B C E ; and a Roman fortress abandoned in the third cen tury CE.
SHU'EIB, WADI Some sources, Jewish as well as Early Christian (Antoni nus of Piacenza, c. 570), mention Byzantine Shiqmona as a Jewish town. It expanded over an area of about 27 acres, occupying all of the surrounding plain. A number of sec tions, covering an area of about an acre, were completely cleared. The town's commercial area was on the beach to the north of the mound; workshops and warehouses were located mainly to the east. Upper stories in these two quar ters were used for residences. On the south and along the beach were lavishly built houses, some of which had elab orate nymphaea. Most of the houses are from tire sixth cen tury C E . More than forty colored mosaic floors were uncov ered. Prominent among the buildings was a large industrial plant (13 X 24 m) that contained a series of plastered pools. The use of tills plant is still unclear. A very large Byzantine monastery was discovered on the southern outsldrts of die town that must have existed after the town was destroyed. The foundation period of it is still unknown. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abel, Felix-Marie. Geographic de la Palestine. Vol. 2. Paris, 1938. See page 472. Elgavish, Joseph. Archaeological Excavations at Shikrnona: The levels of the Persian Period, Seasons 1063-1965 (in Hebrew). Haifa, 1968. Elgavish, Joseph. Archaeological Excavations al Shikrnona: The Level of the Hellenistic Period, Seasons 1963-1970 (in Hebrew). Haifa, 1974. Elgavish, Joseph. Archaeological Excavations at Shikrnona: The Pottery of the Roman Period (in Hebrew). Haifa, 1977. Elgavish, Joseph. Shiqmona, on the Seacoast of Mount Carmel (in He brew). Tel Aviv, 1994. Karmon, Nira, and Ehud Spanier. "Remains of a Purple Dye Industry Found at Tel Shiqmona." Israel Exploration Journal 38 (1988): 1 8 4 186. Lemaire, Andre. "Les inscriptions pheniciennes de Palestine." Revisla di Sludi Penici 3.1 (1979): 1 7 - 3 2 . Spycket, Agnes. "Nouveaux documents pour le cult Dieu-lune." Revue Biblique&i ( 1 9 7 4 ) 1 2 5 8 - 2 5 9 . JOSEPH ELGAVISH
SHIVTAH. See Subeita.
SHRINES. See Temples, article on Syro-Palestinian Temples.
SHU'EIB, WADI (Wadi Nimrin), valley located in western Jordan. A brief survey of Wadi Shu'eib was carried out in 1988 in order to assess the archaeological potential of the entire wadi for future systematic survey and excavation (Wright et al„ 1989). Most previous archaeological studies of die wadi had focused on the Salt region (de Vaux, 1938; Hadidi, 1979) and the area close to the Jordan Valley, where Wadi Shu'eib is known as Wadi Nimrin (Glueck, 1951; Mel-
37
laart, 1956, 1962; Ibrahim et al., 1988). In the central portion of the valley, a survey by Robert Raikes (1965) recorded one Epipaleolithic and two Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) sites; recent test excavations at one of the latter revealed a large PPNB site (Simmons, et al. 1989), comparable in size to 'Ain Ghazal (Rollefson and Simmons, 1988). The survey area consisted of 150 sq Ion (93 sq. mi.) be tween the towns of es-Salt and Tell esh-Shuna (South). T o complement previous explorations near Salt and Shuna, the survey emphasized coverage of the centtal valley, where the wadi crosscuts Mediterranean woodlands in the east, and steppe areas where the foothills descend toward the Jordan Rift Valley. Transects 3 km (2 mi.) long within each of these two zones were chosen randomly for initial exploration. Sec tions from road and wadi cuts were examined for sites hid den by overburden, and the surface survey was extended to about 50 m from the wadi on each side. For each site, details of size, surface materials, local environment, and modern land use were documented. Surface collections were mostly very small nonrandom samples of diagnostic artifacts. In several cases, systematic collections were made within small areas. The survey documented twenty-one sites diat included flint scatters possibly of Paleolithic or Neolitiiic date (sites 13 and 20); large tells of Late Bronze Age and later occu pation (site 1, Tell Bleibil); Roman tombs and underground chambers (sites 8 and 9); Ottoman water mills (sites 7 and 10); and abandoned herders' camps of interest to ethnoarchaeologists (site 18). Two large Roman/Byzantine sites (16 and 19) with surface traces of architecture and dense artifact scatters are of special significance. Of the two large Roman/Byzantine sites, one (site 16) was known from earlier research (Hadidi, 1979). It consists of rock-cut tombs, an olive press, and a dressed-masonry structure apparently dismanded so that its stones could be reused in terrace walls. One tomb is exceptionally elaborate, with carved limestone sarcophagi and a sculpture set in a niche in one of its walls. Less elaborate rock-cut chambers and tombs were found elsewhere on the site. The dressed stones reused in the terrace walls are associated with a stone column fragment found lying adjacent to the road. Surface ceramics (one plain ledge handle [cf. Amiran, 1970, pi. 8:6] and one LB/Iron loop handle tiiat is ovoid in section) suggest Early and Late Bronze Age occupations. Four Early and Late Roman diagnostic sherds include one loop handle from a jar and one possible Early Roman jar stand (?). Six Byz antine diagnostic sherds include four Early Byzantine strap handles from jars and one cream-slipped, ridged handle from a large pithos. A second Roman/Byzantine site (site 19, Umm Rushayda) lies on a hill south of die wadi. Surface ceramics suggest Roman/Byzantine occupations. Large numbers of chippedstone artifacts imply occupation in much earlier periods.
38
SIDON
Two masonry structures were visible on the surface. Surface ceramics include possible L B or Iron Age sherds, along with more numerous sherds indicating Roman and Byzantine oc cupations (one LB/Iron IA jar rim in a pale beige ware with a cream slip; one Early Roman terra sigillata sherd; three pinched, grooved handles [cf. Sauer, 1973, fig. 2:82]; three notched bowl rims [cf. Sauer, 1973, fig. 2:65]; three rim sherds from Late Roman juglets; and two Early Byzantine jug handles). In conclusion, it appears that the central Wadi Shu'eib has been a focus of substantial settlement since Epipaleolithic and Neolithic times. It is of special interest in investi gating PPN transitions to the Pottery Neolithic and Chal colithic periods, in light of the Wadi Shu'eib PPNB site in the central valley and the location of three other relevant sites near the confluence of the wadi with die Jordan Valley: Jericho (Kenyon, 1957), Ghrubba (Mellaart, 1956), and Teleilat el-Ghassul (Hennessy, 1977). The presence of large sites of later periods also suggests that the wadi has a long history of occupation by substantial settled populations, but the history of settlement in the valley is as yet largely unex plored. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Amiran, Ruth. Ancient Pottery of the Holy Ijxnd (1963). New Brunswick, N.J., 1970. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 3. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 18/19. New Haven, 1939. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. New Haven, 1 9 5 1 . Hadidi, Adnan. "A Roman Family Tomb at es-Salt." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 23 (1979): 1 2 9 - 1 3 7 . Hennessy, J. Basil. Teleilat Ghassul. Sydney, 1977. Ibrahim, Mo'awiyah, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1 9 7 5 . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 222 (1976): 41-66. Ibrahim, Mo'awiyah, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1976." In Archaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports, edited by Khair Yassine, pp. 189-207. Amman, 1988. Kenyon, Kadtleen M. Archaeology in the Holy lxmd, 3d ed. New York, 1970. Mellaart, James. "The Neolithic Site of Ghrubba." Annual of the De partment of Antiquities of Jordan 3 (1956): 24-40. Mellaart, James. "Preliminary Report of the Archaeological Survey of the Yarmouk and Jordan Valley." Annual of the Department of Antiq uities of Jordan 6-7 (1962): 1 2 6 - 1 5 7 . Raikes, Robert. "Sites in Wadi Shu'eib and Kafrein, Jordan." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 97 (May-December 1965): 1 6 1 - 1 6 8 . Rollefson, Gary O., and Alan H. Simmons. "The Neolithic Settlement of 'Ain Ghazal." In The Prehistory of Jordan: The State of Research in 1986, vol. 2, edited by Andrew N. Garrard and Hans G. Gebel, pp. 393-421. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 396. Oxford, 1988. Sauer, James A. Heshbon Pottery, 1971: A Preliminary Report on the Pot tery from the 1971 Excavations at TellHesban. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1973. Simmons, Alan H., et al. "Test Excavations at Wadi Shu'eib, a Major Neolithic Settlement in Central Jordan." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of'Jordan 33 (1989): 27-42.
Vaux, Roland de. "Exploration de la region de Salt." Revue Biblique 47 (1938): 398-425Wright, Katherine I., et al. "Report on the 1988 Preliminary Survey of the Wadi Shu'eib, Jordan." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 (1989): 345-35°KATHERINE I. WRIGHT
SIDON (Ar., Saida), site located 43 km (27 mi.) south of Beirut, Lebanon (33°33' N , 35°22' E). Its historical name is probably derived from sayd, Semitic for "fishing." Because each successive occupation of this ancient city was rebuilt over the same site, systematic excavation has not been pos sible. However, Sidon's history, including the glorious Phoe nician period, Assyrian and Persian domination, and Greek and Roman rule, is fairly well known from written sources, local finds, and archaeological work in Sidon and neighbor ing areas. hi A H 375/985 C E the geographer al-Muqaddasi described Sidon as a fortified city. In A H 439/1047 C E the traveler Nasr-i-Khusraw reported tiiat Sidon had a well-built stone wall and four gates and that there was a fine Friday mosque. In A H 560/1165 C E the geographer al-Idrisi visited Sidon and witnessed its stone fortifications. It was not until the seventeenth century C E that the first Western visitors appeared at Sidon, among them the ex plorer and historian George Sandys. Half a century later, the pilgrims and travelers Chevalier Laurent d'Arvieux and then Henry Moundrell arrived (Jidejian, 1971). When Bishop Richard Pococke visited in the early part of the eigh teenth century, he noticed several sepulchral rock-cut grot toes in the foothills. Toward the end of the eighteenth cen tury Constantin Volney noted that the city was unfortified on its sea side, but leeward was protected by a wall. Early in the nineteenth century, the American philologist Edward Robinson, while traveling through the Holy Land, recorded his observations of Sidon and other locales in a diary. [See the biography of Robinson.] In 1855, the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar, ldng of Sidon, son of Tabnit, was accidentally discovered at Magharat Ablun, southeast of Sidon. Acquired by die French consu late general, it remains in die Louvre Museum. [See Esh munazar Inscription.] Ernest Renan was the first archaeologist to work in the area. He was commissioned by Napoleon III to conduct a survey of Phoenicia. In 1861 he initiated excavations at Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Aradus. [See Tyre; Byblos; and the biography of Renan] In the grotto of Magharat Ablun, Renan uncovered a ne cropolis that yielded a series of sarcophagi of various types, including an anthropoid sarcophagus, some with threeedged lid type (Gk., thecae) and some of lead or clay. The tombs are dated from the fourth century B C E to the Late Roman and Early Christian periods. [See Sarcophagus; Tombs.]
SIDON In 1877, at Aya'a, on the eastern outskirts of Sidon, a se ries of sculptured sarcophagi were uncovered, and the cu rator of the Imperial Ottoman Museum at that time was commissioned to carry out a salvage operation there. Al though some sarcophagi had been stolen at an unknown date, the grandest of those remaining were the Sarcophagus of Alexander, the Sarcophagus of the Weepers, and an an thropoid sarcophagus of King Tabnit of Sidon. They were safely excavated and extracted and are now on display in the Topkapi Sarayi Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. In 1901 another necropolis was unearthed at Ain elHelwi, southeast of Sidon, when the American School in Jerusalem explored die area. White marble anthropoid sar cophagi were found in a series of shaft tombs. The collection was donated to the Beirut National Museum. [See American Schools of Oriental Research.] In 1913 Georges Contenau, director of the Department of Oriental Antiquities of the Louvre Museum, uncovered a series of Roman sarcophagi at Magharat Ablun, of which the Sarcophage au Navire is the most important. On it a sculptured relief of a Roman ship is depicted. In die eastern footiiills of Sidon, near Kafar Jarra, Contenau discovered a series of rock-cut tombs that held piriform jugs with button bases and scarabs dating to the sixteenth century B C E . Con tenau excavated more tombs near the village of Helalieh, northeast of Sidon, recovering several Greek and Roman sarcophagi. Contenau then shifted the focus of his excava tions to die Temple of Eshmun (see figure 1 ) , 4 km (2.5 mi.) north of Sidon, on die left bank of the el-Awali River, whose waters had been venerated. The temple was first ex cavated by Maqridi Bey in 1901-1902 in his capacity as head of tire Ottoman archaeological mission, and then by Con tenau between 1914 and 1920. Contenau uncovered a fu nerary grotto, a stone sarcophagus, a mosaic stela with a Greek inscription, large foundation stones, and three Phoe nician inscriptions. The inscriptions say that Bodashtart, king of Sidon, built the temple for the god Eshmun. At Sidon, Contenau excavated, near the western slope of the Crusader castle of St. Louis, an artificial mound of crushed Murex shells and potsherds of local ware and im ported red-figured and black-figured Attic ware. The hill is probably the place where the ancient "royal purple" dye manufacturers disposed of their crushed Murex shells. Mo saic tiling at the top of the mound suggests that Roman buildings were erected there when the area was no longer being used as a dumping ground (Contenau, 1920, 1923, 1924). In 1924 Maurice Dunand, under the auspices of the An tiquities and Fine Arts Service of the Beirut High Commis sion, located the Sidonian temple of Mitlira, to which belong a series of marble statues now on display at the Louvre. He then excavated a trench at tire foot of the wall that had pro tected the medieval city. In addition to the surface material, Roman and Hellenistic deposits were unearthed and sherds c
39
of red and black ware collected. He dug an extensive trial trench on die soutiiern slope of the tell, uncovering strati fication from the Arab, Byzantine, Roman, Hellenistic, and Persian periods. Dunand concluded that the trench repre sented Sidon's expansion in the Achaemenid period. Dunand also excavated the Temple of Eshmun. Early on he unearthed a Roman geometric mosaic floor and white marble statuettes of children. [See Mosaics.] These ap peared to be ex-votos to the god of healing, Eshmun, later identified with the Greek god Asclepius. The remains indi cated a temple area of 37 X 57 m. A series of terraces and a dense succession of structures were exposed, representing the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods. A Phoenician inscription to Bodashtart and a fragment of a bull protome capital of Achaemenid type found in the temple indicate a date in about the fifth century B C E . Between 1963 and 1965, Dunand, commissioned by the Institut Francais d'Archeologie de Beyrouth, extended his excavations around the sanctuary. Among the finds were eleven statues of crouching infants, all broken and thrown into a canal. Also unearthed was a marble pedestal found at the foot of a cult podium. It is adorned with four winged lions back to back and is dated to about the second century B C E . Dunand uncovered a chapel (10.5 X 1 1 . 5 m) consttucted of large blocks in regular rows. The only piece of furniture in this chapel was a large stone throne flanked with winged lions (see figure 2). By 1968, when Dunand left Si don, only one-fourth of die site had been excavated. No
SIDON.
Figure 1. The Temple of Eshmun. (Courtesy I . A. Khalifeh)
40
SIDON a channel, as at other Phoenician ports such as Tyre and Arwad). The ingenuity of the architects of Sidon prevented sand from filling the port. It was maintained by placing two openings at the extremities of the western breakwaters: waves entered this double water gate, which closed the northern flow, and were dispersed. Poidebard had no ma terial evidence for dating, but comparisons of building tech niques and dimensions led him to attribute construction of the port to the Roman period. However, the pentagonal tower alongside the pass of the interior port, which is a closed natural basin, is Hellenistic (Poidebard and Lauffray, 195 !)• [See the biography of Poidebard.] From 1966 to 1969, Roger Saidah, from the Lebanese De partment of Antiquities, excavated a cemetery south of Si don along the Sidon-Tyre road. The burials ranged in date from the fourteenth century B C E to the Early Roman period. Late Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery were found in them, together with local wares and Egyptian objects. The ne cropolis was built on top of a Late Chalcolithic settlement that consisted of oval huts with walls up to one meter high. It is the oldest necropolis in Sidon and second only to Byblos in importance. [See Necropolis.]
Figure 2. The Throne of Astarte in the Temple of (Courtesy I. A. Khalifeh)
SIDON.
Eshmun.
further excavation has taken place. Dunand believed, based on his findings, that further work would uncover a complex that existed from the sixth century B C E to the fifth century C E (Dunand, 1969). [See the biography of Dunand.] In 1937 P. E. Guigues excavated a series of tombs at Leba'a, Kafar Jarra, and Qrayeh. Leba'a and Kfar Jarra are located in the foothills north of Sidon. He opened a series of tombs in which painted red ware and scarabs dating to the middle of the second millennium B C E were found. In the tombs at Qrayeh, in the foothills southeast of Sidon, pottery decorated with red ocher on a light background and scarabs were found. The tombs are dated according to the pottery and scarabs to between die end of die Middle Bronze and beginning of die Late Bronze Ages (Guigues, 1938, 1939). In 1940 Maurice Chehab, director general of the Lebanese Antiquities Service, excavated a series of tombs at Majdaluna, southeast of Sidon, tiiat contained carinated bowls, goblets, pottery decorated with red ocher on a light back ground, and scarabs of the eighteenth dynasty. The material is dated to the period between the eighteenth and fourteenth centuries B C E . Between 1946 and 1950, Antoine Poidebard, under aus pices of the Institut Francais d'Archeologie de Beyrouth, worked in the port area of Sidon. He discovered that it was not a double port (a northern and a southern port linked by
The Temple of Eshmun continued to be revered as a place of healing until the Early Christian period, evidenced by the finds of a chapel, Byzantine mosaics, and coins, which permitted Dunand to ascertain that the use of the complex continued to the fifth century C E . In 570 Sidon was described as partly in ruins as the result of the 551 earth quake. An Arabic inscription found in Sidon mentions the building of a tower during the Fatimid period in A H 491/ 1097 CE. The current Great Mosque in Sidon was originally a church built by the Knights Templar. It may be the site where Nasr-i-Khusrau observed the Friday mosque (see above). In addition, the Maronite Christian church may have been die site of a Roman temple, following the practice in die Near East of the continuity of sacred places. [See also Phoenicia; Phoenicians.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Chehab, Maurice. "Tombs pheniciennes Majdalouna." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 4 (1940): 3 7 - 5 3 . Phoenician tombs and their con tents in the environs of Sidon. Contenau, Georges. "Mission Archeologique a Sidon, 1 9 1 4 . " Syria 1 (1920): 198-229, 2 8 7 - 3 1 7 . Still a good reference as the first attempt to excavate in Sidon. Contenau, Georges. "Deuxieme Mission Archeologique a Sidon, 1920," Syria 4 (1923): 2 6 1 - 2 8 1 ; 5 (1924): 9-23, 1 2 3 - 1 3 4 . Dunand, Maurice. "Rapport preliminaire sur les fouilles de Sidon." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 19 (1966): 1 0 3 - 1 0 5 ; 20 (1967): 27-44; 22 (1969): 1 0 1 - 1 0 7 , The primary sources for archaeology atthe site. Guigues, P, E. "Lebe'a, Kafer-Garra, Qraye: Necropoles de la region sidonienne." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 1 (1937): 35-76; 2 (1938): 27-72; 3 (1939): 53-63. Useful reference for excavations in the en virons of Sidon. Jidejian, Nina. Sidon through the Ages. Beirut, 1 9 7 1 . The history of Si don.
SINAI Poidebard, Antoine, and Jean Lauffray. Sidon: Amenagements antiques du Port de Saida. Beirut, 1951. The only useful source on the port excavations. Renan, Ernest. Mission de Phenicie. Paris, 1864. Pioneering work at the necropolei of Sidon. Saidah, Roger. "Chronique fouilles de Sidon." Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 20 (1967): 1 6 2 - 1 6 5 . Saidah, Roger. "Archaeology in the Lebanon, 1968-1969." Berytus 18 (1969): 1 1 9 - 1 4 2 . Covers the archaeological activities in the city itself, the Temple of Eshmun, the necropolei, and the Chalcolithic settle ment. ISSAM A L I K H A L I F E H
SILOAM TUNNEL INSCRIPTION. In 1880 a Hebrew inscription was discovered that describes the cut ting of a water tunnel through the eastern hill of Jerusalem. The inscription was carved in die wall of the tunnel itself, some 6 ms from its southern end (cf. Sayce, 1881, pp. 1 4 1 142; Conder, 1882). A decade after its discovery, the entire inscription was removed from tire wall and eventually taken to Istanbul, where it remains (cf. S. H. Horn, Biblical Ar chaeology Review 10.5 [1984]: 74). The first two signs of the text have disappeared, and even more serious damage has occurred at the end of that line and near the ends of lines 2 and 3. Hand copies and pho tographs of squeezes done before the removal of the inscrip tion from the tunnel show that most of these lacunae had already occurred when these reproductions were made (cf. Puech, 1974: 197). With plausible, if uncertain, restorations of these lacunae, the text may be translated as follows: "[This] is the tunnel and this is how the tunnel was cut. While [die workmen were carving] their way toward each other and yet 3 cubits remained to be cu[t], the voices of the workmen could be heard from either side, for there was a zdh in the rock, [from lef]t to right. On the day when the cutting was completed, the workmen met, pick to pick, and the water flowed from the spring to the pool, a distance of 1,200 cubits. The hill stood a hundred cubits above the workmen's heads (at the highest spot)." Exploration has shown that the tunnel was indeed cut by two crews who worked from opposite ends and met in the middle. Some still unexplained detours resulted in an overall S-shaped path and a total length of more than 500 m. The term zdh in the inscription, meant to explain how it was that the workmen could hear each other through a meter and a half of rock, is still, despite many attempts, not fully under stood. The tunnel ran from die Gihon Spring, on the eastern side of the ancient City of David, to a pool constructed at the southern end of the hill and within the city walls. It was only the latest of a series of projects making the water from the abundant spring more available for usage and enabling the inhabitants to have access to die waters of die spring when under attack. The text itself mentions no historical circum stances, but these are commonly identified with the allusions
41
in 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30 to such a project in Hezekiah's time (generally placed at the time of Senna cherib's invasion in 701 B C E ) . [See also Jerusalem; Water Tunnels.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Conder, Claude R. "The Siloam Tunnel." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1882): 1 2 2 - 1 3 1 . An early account of personal explorations of the tunnel by the author, comparing these observa tions with the statements in the inscription. Gufhe, Hermann. "Die Siloahinschrift." Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenldndische Gesellschaft 36 (1882): 725-750. Perhaps the best of the very early studies of the text. Puech, Emile. "L'inscription du tunnel de Siloe." Revue Biblique 81 (1974): 1 9 6 - 2 1 4 . New epigraphic and philological study, with an extensive bibliography but some dubious restitutions. Sasson, Victor. "The Siloam Tunnel Inscription." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 4 (1982): 1 1 1 — 1 1 7 . Literary considerations. Sayce, A. H. "The Inscription of the Pool of Siloam." Palestine Explo ration Fund Quarterly Statement ( 1 8 8 1 ) : 69-73. Presents a text very different from the body of readings generally agreed upon just a year later (i.e., Guthe, 1882). Sayce, A. H. "The Ancient Hebrew Inscription Discovered at the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly State ment (1881): 141—154. Early account of discovery of the inscription and a not-so-successful attempt at interpretation. Shiloh, Yigal, and Mendel Kaplan. "Digging in the City of David." Biblical Archaeology Review 5.4 (1979): 36-49. This and the following entry constitute popular accounts of the excavations that have elu cidated the relationships among the various water systems centering on die Gihon Spring. Shiloh, Yigal. "The Rediscovery of Warren's Shaft." Biblical Archae ology Review 7.4 (1981): 24-39. D E N N I S PARDEE
SILOS. See Granaries and Silos.
SILVER. See Coins; Jewelry; Metals.
SINAI. The Mediterranean coast of North Sinai, between the Suez Canal and Gaza, served as a land bridge connecting Egypt and Asia. Its early history is documented in some Egyptian and Assyrian sources, but particularly in GrecoRoman, Byzantine, and Islamic records. Between 1910 and 1924 Jean Cledat investigated a few sites in northern Sinai, almost all of them dating to the Roman-Byzantine periods (Cledat, 1910, 1912, 1 9 1 3 , 1 9 1 5 , 1916,1923). From 1972 to 1982 the North Sinai Expedition of Ben Gurion University, under the direction of Eliezer D. Oren, conducted a system atic survey and excavations in an area of approximately 2,000 sq km (1,240 sq, mi.). The expedition recorded some thirteen hundred settlement sites, ranging in date from the Paleolithic to the Ottoman periods. As a result it, is possible to reconstruct in detail the history of settlement in northern Sinai and its role as the principal corridor between Egypt and Asia (Oren, 1993).
42
SINAI
Prehistoric assemblages along the coastal strip between elArish and Gaza indicate human activity (mainly seasonal campsites) in Sinai as early as the Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic periods. The expedition recorded about 190 settle ments from the Pottery Neolithic (PN) and Chalcolithic pe riods in northeastern Sinai and as far afield as the region of the Suez Canal. Its excavations at site Y - 3 , of terminal PN date, unearthed various installations and a child burial in a jar. Faunal evidence, including many pig bones (32 per cent), implies that this was a settlement of agro-pastoralists. [See Pigs; Agriculture; Pastoral Nomadism]. Some Chalcol ithic sites (R-48, Y-2) yielded stratified occupational remains, including mud-brick structures and diagnostic vi olin-shaped figurines, that exhibit close affinities with the material culture of the western Negev desert. A few exam ples of imported Naqada I ceramics indicate the earliest trade contacts with late predynastic Egypt (Oren and Gilead, 1981). The North Sinai expedition investigated more than 250 settlement sites between Qantara and Raphia with material remains from the Canaanite Early Bronze I and Egyptian Naqada II—III periods. [See Canaanites.] The site clusters were organized in a two- or three-tiered settlement hierarchy of seasonal encampments alongside core sites and way sta tions. The rich and diverse ceramic assemblages included both EB I A - C and Naqada H-III/dynasty 0 wares. The lat ter comprised nearly 80 percent of the entire ensemble and represents the full spectrum of domestic classes, including "wavy-handled" ttansport jars incised with a serekh (a rec tangular frame containing the Pharaoh's name surmounted by a hawk representing the god Horus). The results of the North Sinai survey provide the key to understanding the early history and mechanism of the political and economic interaction between Egypt and Canaan (Oren, 1973,1986). The sites in northern Sinai represent the eastward extension of the Egyptian state-organized sphere of interest into Sinai and Canaan. Of the terminal EB IV period, nearly three hundred sites, both base settlements and seasonal encamp ments, were recorded in the surveyed area. Significantly, alongside the bulk of characteristic Canaanite EB IV ceram ics, the assemblages are also represented by late "Meidum ware," a diagnostic feature of the late Old Kingdom—early First Intermediate horizon. The clusters of EB IV sites be longed to pastoralist groups that maintained limited ex changes with the farming villages in the Egyptian Delta. [See Delta.] The Middle Bronze Age in northern Sinai is represented by some three hundred localities, mostly small seasonal en campments, with material remains evidencing a mixed pas toral-agricultural subsistence system alongside limited trad ing activity. In contrast, in the vicinity of the Suez Canal area, the expedition recorded the remains of extensive built settlements from the Middle Kingdom and Second Inter mediate period.
The collection of ceramics from die campsites exhibits a rich variety of Egyptian Middle Kingdom-Second Inter mediate Period (35 percent) and Canaanite M B I—III (32 percent) wares. The rural aspect of the ceramic inventory is best manifested (32 percent) in the crude, handmade cook ing vessels. The Sinai assemblages clearly reflect close so cioeconomic interaction, albeit on a low level, with both ter minal regions—southern Canaan and the eastern Delta. The effectiveness of Egypt's administration along die Ways of Horus—the principal artery of communication with Asia—is demonstrated by the rich archaeological record of 231 or so New Kingdom settlement sites in northern Sinai (Oren, 1973, 1987, 1989). The distribution pattern is char acterized by site clusters, 15-20 km (9-12 mi.) apart, of base sites, usually forts or way stations, surrounded by campsites and seasonal encampments. The results of the explorations by the Ben Gurion University expedition are summarized in two type-sites that represent Egypt's manifold activities (military, administrative, economic) in the Ways-of-Horus network. Additional Late Bronze/New Kingdom base sites were excavated between Raphia and Gaza: Tell Abu-Salima by William Flinders Petrie, Tel Ridan by Fanny Vitto, and Deir el-Balah by Trude Dothan. [See Deir el-Balah.] The 4-5 sq km (2-3 sq. mi.) cluster at Haruba in nortiieastern Sinai is represented by twenty or so sites, including one fort (A-289) and an administrative center (A-345). For tress A-289 is about 2,500 sq m in area and comprises a 4meter-wide enclosure wall, a massive (13 X 20 m) gate house, and a complex of rooms for storage and various domestic activities. A number of child and adult burials were found under the floors and brick debris. [See Burial Sites; Burial Techniques.] One chamber in phase III contained two huge Egyptian pititoi bearing cartouches of Seti II. Floor and refuse deposits include Canaanite L B II, Egyptian dy nastic (nineteenth and twentieth), and considerable Myce naean and Cypriot wares, seals and scarabs, terra-cotta uraeus heads, and stone vessels. [See Seals.] Stratigraphic and artifactual considerations advocate an early nineteentiidynasty date for the building of the fort (phase III), likely as part of the reorganization of the Ways of Horus by Seti I. Fragmentary remains of walls from under tire floors of the fort (phase IV) belong to earlier, perhaps unfortified, struc tures of the eighteenth dynasty. Phase II marks the extensive repair of the original structure, probably after it no longer served as a fortress. Following the destruction by fire of phase II sometime in the late twelfth century B C E , parts of the fort were reoccupied (phase I) as a campsite in Late Iron Age I (c. 1050-1000 B C E ) . North of the fort the expedition investigated a section (2,000 sq m) of an extensive admin istrative complex from the eighteenth dynasty (A-345). The center of the site had been occupied by a spacious magazine unit with long, brick-floored halls that opened onto a central courtyard and were enclosed by a wall. T o the east of the magazine the expedition excavated a large industrial quar-
SINAI
43
that it served as a reservoir, designed to collect and store water for the nearby fortress. [See Reservoirs.] By Iron Age II, northern Sinai resumed its role as a vital link between Egypt and Canaan. The survey map is repre sented by 233 Iron II—III settlement sites from the late elev enth to the late sixth centuries B C E . A cluster of some thirty Iron Age sites between Wadi el-Arish and Wadi Gaza pro vided evidence of Assyrian control in this region during the eighth-seventh centuries B C E [See Assyrians.] The largest site, Tell Ruqeish, near Khan Yunis, yielded evidence of a well-organized town enclosed by a massive defense wall. Earlier excavations outside the walled area had revealed a cemetery with Phoenician-type cremation burials. [See Phoenicians.] Tell Ruqeish, probably the "sealed Karu(m) of Egypt" of the annals of Sargon IT, served as a major As syrian commercial headquarters, figured prominently in maritime traffic, and coordinated international trade with Egypt. Petrie recovered additional evidence of Assyrianstyle architecture at Sheikh Zuweid, extending Assyrianadministered territory in die eighth-seventh centuries B C E as far as the "Brook of Egypt" (Wadi el-Arish).
S I N A I . Egyptian jar with cartouche of Seti I, from Haritba, (Courtesy E. D. Oren)
ter, including a potter's workshop tiiat manufactured a spe cific line of Egyptian-type vessels. The site was abandoned peacefully, and sand accumulated on the floors before the decayed walls collapsed. The central site (BEA-io) in the cluster at Bir el-'Abd, is represented by the badly eroded remains of a fortress with a section of a 4-meter-wide enclosure wall and a variety of rooms and domestic installations. South of it the expedition recorded a magazine with parallel long halls fronted by an enclosed courtyard. Near the magazine a very well-pre served granary was excavated consisting of four cylindrical silos, each about 4 m m diameter, that could have held up to 40 tons of grain or legumes. Following the collapse of the granary's domed roof, the granary became the refuse in stallation for the adjacent fortress; it was found to contain a large quantity of eighteenth-dynasty pottery, alabaster, fa ience, and animal and fish bones. About 200 m northwest of the fortress, the expedition surveyed the remains of an artificial rectangular depression (about 10 X 15 m) bordered by a kind of clay-plastered embankment. The thick layer of silt that lined the sides and bottom of the depression suggests
Of die numerous sites from the Sake period (sixth century B C E ) , the larger cluster was explored in the canal zone—a region occupied, according to written sources, by border garrisons and inhabited by foreign merchants and merce naries. A sizable garrison site (T-21), probably Migdol of the ancient sources, was investigated. It was enclosed by a wall 15-20 m long, and its center was occupied by a massive fortified compound measuring 200 X 200 m (Oren, 1984). Small cellular compartments were consttucted at fixed in tervals inside the wall, and the central area was densely cov ered by structures and installations. Its large ceramic corpus is represented by Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, and Cypriot classes, as well as by many metal objects and copper ores and slags. The fortress was subsequently destroyed by fire in the late sixth century B C E , apparently as a direct result of the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses in 525 B C E . The conquest of Egypt by the Persian Empire heralded the establishment of a well-organized road system along the coast of nortiiern Sinai, which included die building of forts, way stations, and landing facilities. [See Roads.] These be came nuclei for die network of towns and stations that sub sequently characterized the Sinai coast in the Roman-Byz antine periods. The North Sinai Expedition recorded 235 settlement sites from the Persian period (c. fifth-fourth cen turies B C E ) . The expedition's distribution map indicates large concentrations in northwestern Sinai, on the shores of the Bardawil lagoon and along the coast between el-Arish and Gaza. Of special consequence is the considerable vol ume of Greek pottery recorded at almost every site, testi fying to the major role tiiat Greek trade played in die econ omy of North Sinai. Impressive remains from the Persian period were ex plored at the coastal site of Tell Ruqeish, perhaps one of
44
SINAI
Herodotus's coastal emporia south of Gaza. Nearby, at Tell Qatif, a massive mud-brick fort enclosed by a 5-meter-wide wall and a tower overlooking the sea was investigated, as well as a well-preserved cylindrical brick silo, 2 m in diameter. The fort belonged to a network of military installations con structed by the Persian administration along the coastal highway between Gaza and Pelusium. Remains of such forts were encountered near Sheikh Zuweid, Mt. Casius, Rumani, and Tell el-Her. Petrie uncovered stratified remains of a large settlement at Sheikh Zuweid; excavations nearby in 1976 uncovered a large fortified structure of the "court yard fort" type. Settlement strata from die Persian period were found at Tell Raphia, while some 1,000 m west of the tell the expedition uncovered the badly damaged remains of a small cult site with a two-room structure and courtyards. The larger of the courtyards had a plastered basin and favissae full of ash, animal bones, and many fragments of terra cotta and faience figurines in Greek, Phoenician, Cypriot, and Egyptian styles. At Katib el-Gals, in the center of the
SINAI. Persian-period E. D. Oren)
gypsum mask from North Sinai.
(Courtesy
Bardawil sandbar, identified as the site of Kasion, twentytwo of the forty-three surveyed sites included material re mains from the Persian period. Limited soundings at Ras Qasrun (M-36), traditionally equated with Mons Kasius and the location of the Phoenician Ba'al Zaphon, yielded scanty domestic remains from the Persian period at the earliest. The settlement at Kasion and the cult site of Zeus Kasion/ Ba'al Zaphon are probably buried somewhere under the elGals sand-duned ridge. The principal concentration of Persian-period settlements was identified in northwestern Sinai, on the edge of the east ern Delta and at the Mediterranean terminus of the Pelusian branch of the Nile River. Exploration at die large site of Tell el-Her revealed, beneath the rich settlement strata of the Roman and Hellenistic periods, extensive occupational de bris from the Persian period: a section of a fortified structure erected on an artificial clay platform and large amounts of imported Greek ceramics. Recent excavations by Domi nique Valbelle uncovered a buttressed fortress widi a small shrine inside it. The North Sinai Expedition explored ex tensive cemeteries from the Persian and Hellenistic-Roman periods in the vicinity of Tell el-Her. Many badly preserved burials complete with plaster funerary masks were recorded, perhaps belonging to the population of Greeks and Cypriots in the eastern Delta. Finally, the coastal strip between Pe lusium—Egypt's chief port of entry from Asia—and Tell Mahmadiya, is represented by a dense cluster of more titan thirty sites dating to the fifth-fourth centuries B C E that yielded unusually large deposits of imported Greek ampho rae and black-glazed fine wares, as well as Phoenician-type transport jars. These sites may represent trading depots for consigments of wine and oil for redistribution and con sumption by the foreign population in the eastern Nile Delta. In the Hellenistic-Byzantine periods northern Sinai be came a highly administered artery of communication from Egypt to Palestine and Syria. The history of the region is documented in detail in the writings of historians and ge ographers (e.g., Strabo, Pliny, Josephus Flavius) and church fathers and church councils, as well as on maps (e.g., Notitia Dignitatun, Tabula Peutihgeriana, Madaba map). [See Madaba.] Major towns, way stations, and ports were estab lished along the coast between Gaza and the eastern Delta— Rhinocolura (el-Arish), Ostrakine (el-Felusiyat), Kasion (el-Gals), Gerrha (Tell Mahmadiya), Pelusium (Tell Farama), Magdolum (Tell el-Her), and Sile (Tell Abu Seifeh). The North Sinai Expedition documented more than five hundred settlement sites from the Plellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods, as well as large-scale excavations at al-Arish, Ostrakine, and Qasrawet and more limited inves tigations at some twenty-five other sites, including Tell Fa rama and Tell el-Her. Some of these settlements were pre viously explored by Cledat from 1909 to 1914. Excavations were resumed in 1986 at Tell Farama by the Egypt Antiq-
SINAI
SINAI.
Nabatean
45
Central temple at Qasrawet. (Courtesy E. D. Oren)
uities Service and at Tell el-Her by a Franco-Egyptian ex pedition. Architectural remains scattered over the surface of Pelu sium indicate die economic status of this 300-hectare (741 acre) metropolis, with its strategic location at the Mediter ranean outlet of the Pelusian River. Monumental remains included quays, a citadel, colonnaded streets, bathhouses, a theater, a large church, and extensive cemeteries. [SeeBaths; Theaters; Churches.] At nearby Tell el-Her, the HellenisticRoman city occupied an area of 80 ha (198 acres), which included citadels, a stadium, a bathhouse, and cemeteries with cist graves, family tombs, and many barrel-shape clay coffins. A systematic survey and some excavations at elArish explored an area of about 5 ha (12 acres), which consitutes at least 50 percent of the original settlement. Rhinicolura was a well-planned town surrounded by a 3.5-meter wide wall and organized by insulae. Remains of its harbor were identified on the coast and under the mosque of enNebi Yasser. [See Mosque.] The North Sinai Expedition revealed tire extent and na ture of Nabatean activity along the coastal highway from Wadi Gaza to the Suez Canal and as far afield as the Egyp tian markets in the eastern Nile Delta. [See Nabateans.] Del icate Nabatean pottery was collected at dozens of sites in
northern Sinai. However, die main network of Nabatean sites was recorded between Wadi Gaza and Wadi el-Arish and included caravanserais, warehouses, and probably also die remains of a temple. The main phase of occupation dates to the first-second centuries C E , diough earlier remains from die second-first centuries B C E may represent an earlier phase of Nabatean activity in northern Sinai. The most impressive remains were explored at Qasrawet, apparentiy the Nabateans' principal administrative and re ligious center in North Sinai. The 30-hectare (74 acre) set tlement at Qasrawet was first explored by Cledat in 1 9 1 1 . Systematic excavations in 1975-1976 by the Ben Gurion University expedition uncovered two monumental temples and auxiliary storehouses, cemeteries with cist tombs and elaborate family tombs from the Nabatean settlement during the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods (c. second century BCE-third century C E ; see Oren, 1982). In the Late Roman period (fourth century C E ) an extensive, uniquely well-pre served and well-organized fortified settlement was built over the remains of the Nabatean town. The expedition traced a defense wall 2.5 m thick, with watchtowers at fixed intervals, for 120 ni, suggesting that the settlement extended over an area of 3 ha (74 acres). The plastered and whitewashed mud-brick wall, occasionally widi painted designs, was
46
SINAI
standing to its full height. A rich store was recorded of intact objects from the floors, niches, and ldtchen installations, ev idence of a sudden abandonment of the settlement at the end of the fourth century C E . In the fourth century, Christian centers with monasteries and churches were established at major towns in northern Sinai, marldng tire period of the region's most intensive set tlement. [See Monasteries.] In 1913 Cledat investigated church buildings at Tell Makhzan-Pelusium's eastern ex tension, and in 1914 at Ostrakine. Excavations in the 1980s at Tell Farama and Tell el-Her uncovered the remains of massive citadel structures (Maksoud, 1986), and the Ben Gurion University expedition explored Byzantine-period public and domestic architectural remains at many North Sinai settlement sites. The important way station of Ostrakine at the eastern edge of the Bardawil lagoon is strategically located on the coastal highway and is mentioned in written sources from the Roman—Byzantine periods. Ostrakine became one of the largest cities in the Provincia Augustamnica and the seat of bishops. In 1914 Cledat uncovered the remains there of two large basilical churches and sections of a pentagonal building, perhaps a monastery. [See Basilicas.] Explorations by the North Sinai Expedition in 1976-1967 indicated that Ostrakine extended over an area of about 2 sq km. The ex cavations exposed rich remains of a Late Roman industrial
complex for the manufacture of metal and glass objects, as well as a section of a commercial center with a paved street flanked by small chambers or shops. [See Glass.] Near die large basilica Cledat recorded, the expedition excavated an impressive and excellentiy preserved church, including mar ble altars and carved screens, columns and capitals, and a stone reliquary. [See Altars.] The building was destroyed by fire in the 680s, leaving a rich collection of ceramics and metal and glass objects under charred beams and roof tiles. The period between the Arab conquest (638) and the be ginning of the Ottoman period (1516) is represented by more than 250 sites, mostly seasonal encampments. The large cluster of sites in northwest Sinai included fine ex amples of forts like Tell Farama, Qal'at Umm Mefarih, Tell el-Fadda, and Tell el-Luli. Excavations at Qal'at et-Tina, near Tell Farama, revealed sections of an exceptionally wellpreserved octagonal fortress, 55 m in diameter. Extensive remains of a walled settlement, apparently the largest town along the principal caravan route to Egypt, occupied an area of about 2 sq km in the Qatya oasis. B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cledat, Jean. "Notes sur l'isthme de Suez." Annales du Service des Antiquiles de TEgyple 1 0 ( 1 9 1 0 ) : 209-237; 1 3 ( 1 9 1 3 ) : 1 1 5 - 1 2 4 . Cledat, Jean. "Fouilles a Qasr Gheit, mai 1 9 1 1 . " Annales du Service des Antiquites de I'Egypte 1 2 ( 1 9 1 2 ) : 1 4 5 - 1 6 8 .
SINAI. Church at Ostrakine, looking east. (Courtesy E. D. Oren)
SIPPAR Cledat, Jean. "Fouilles a Cheik Zouede, janvier-fevrier 1 9 1 3 . " Annales du Service des Antiquites de TEgyple 15 ( 1 9 1 5 ) : 15-48. Cledat, Jean. "Fouilles a Khirbet el-Flousiyeh, janvier-mars 1914." An nales du Service des Antiquites de TEgyple 16 ( 1 9 1 6 ) : 6-32. Cledat, Jean. "Notes sur l'isthme de Suez." Bulletin de Tinslitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale 2 1 (1923): 7 7 - 7 9 , 1 6 0 - 1 6 3 . Gardiner, Alan H. "The Ancient Military Road between Egypt and Palestine." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 6 (1920): 9 9 - 1 1 6 . Louis, Etienne, and Dominique Valbelle. "Les trois dernieres forteresses de Tell el-Herr," Cahiers de Recherches de TInstitut de Papyrologie et d'Egyptologie de Lille 10 (1988): 6 1 - 7 1 . Maksoud, Mohammed Abd el-. "Fouilles recentes au Nord-Sina'i, sur le site de Tell el-Herr: Premiere saison, 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 8 5 . " Cahiers de Re cherches de TInstitut de Papyrologie el d'Egyptologie de Lille 8 (1986): 15-16. Maksoud, Mohammed Abd el-. "Une nouvelle forteresse sur la route d'Horus: Tel Heboua 1986 (Nord Sinai)." Cahiers de Recherches de I'Institui de Papyrologie et d'Egyptologie de Lille 9 (1987): 1 3 - 1 6 . Oren, Eliezer D. "Bir el-'Abd (Northern Sinai)." Israel Exploration JournalTS (1973): 1 1 2 - 1 1 3 . Oren, Eliezer D. "The Overland Route between Egypt and Canaan in tire Early Bronze Age." Israel Exploration Journal 23 (1973): 1 9 8 205. Oren, Eliezer D. In Sinai: Pharaohs, Miners, Pilgrims, and Soldiers, ed ited by Benno Rothenberg, pp. 1 8 1 - 1 9 1 . Washington, D.C., 1979. Oren, Eliezer D., and Isaac Gilead. "Chalcolithic Sites in Northeastern Sinai." Tel Aviv 8 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 25-44. Oren, Eliezer D. "Excavations at Qasrawet in North-Western Sinai: Preliminary Report." Israel Exploration Journal 32 (1982): 2 0 3 - 2 1 1 . Oren, Eliezer D., et al. "Le Nord-Sina'i." Le Monde de la Bible 24 (1982): 3-47. Oren, Eliezer D. "Migdol: A New Fortress on die Edge of die Eastern Nile Delta." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 256 (1984): 7-44Oren, Eliezer D. "The 'Ways of Horus' in North Sinai." In Egypt, Israel, Sinai: Archaeological and Historical Relationships in the Biblical Period, edited by Anson F. Rainey, pp. 6 9 - 1 1 9 . Tel Aviv, 1987. Oren, Eliezer D. "Early Bronze Age Settlement in Northern Sinai: A Model for Egypto-Canaanite Interconnections." In L'urbanisation de la Palestine a I'dge du Bronze ancien: Bilan et perspectives des recherches actuelles; Actcs du Colloque d'Emmaiis, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, pp. 389-405. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 527. Oxford, 1989. Oren, Eliezer D. "Military Architecture along the 'Ways of Horus': Egyptian Reliefs and Archaeological Evidence" (in Hebrew). EretzIsrael 20 (1989): 8-22; 21 (1990): 6-22. Oren, Eliezer D. "Sinai, Northern." In The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, pp. 1 3 8 6 - 1 3 9 6 . Je rusalem and New York, 1993. ELIEZER D .
OREN
SIPPAR (modern Abu Habbah, "father of seeds"), site nearly 100 ha (247 acres) in area situated along die banks of the ancient Euphrates River (33°4' N , 44°i5' E ) . One of die most important centers in northern Babylonia, the city held a key position on the alluvial floodplain of Mesopotamia. City of the god Shamash, Sippar became legendary very early in its existence. The Sumerian king list characterizes it, along with Eridu, Bad tibira, Larak, and Shuruppak/Fara as one of the cities divinely chosen to rule over all of south ern Mesopotamia before the Flood. Its Shamash Temple,
47
the Ebabbar ("White Temple"), like its counterpart in die southern Mesopotamian city of Larsa, was a u-aditional and prestigious religious center, [See Eridu; Fara; Larsa.] The equation of Abu Habbah with ancient Sippar was first established in 1885 by Theophilus G. Pinches. In cu neiform sources, however, the name Sippar is sometimes followed by specifications that originally led to confusion as to the number of sites involved. Dominique Charpin (1988, 1992) has established that Abu Habbah is designated in the sources as Sippar or Sippar-Yahrurum, whereas some texts refer to the same site as Sippar-sa-§amas, Sippar-serim and Sippar-U4.ul.li.a. In addition, not only Sippar but also its "twin city," Sippar-Amnanum (Tell ed-Der), a few kilo meters to the northeast, is sometimes referred to in short as Sippar. According to surface finds collected by Robert McC. Ad ams (1972, p. 192), the earliest occupation dates to the Uruk period, but excavations have never reached those deep lay ers. Recent investigations, however, show clearly that Sippar became important during the third millennium and was a flourishing center in northern Babylonia during the second and first millennia B C E . The most recent traces, of the later Partiiian period (first-second century C E ) , have only been found in a small area near the northeast side of the levee surrounding the site. On die other hand, cuneiform docu ments attest the name of Sippar (ud.kib.nun' ') as early as the Early Dynastic and Akkadian periods. It is worth noting that, from the same time onward, the name of the Euphrates River is written ud.kib.nun'", "the Sippar River." The ruins consist of two contiguous tells protected by a prominent rectangular levee, three sides of which are still visible. The southwestern mound contains the religious quarter with its ziggurat and temples, while the northeastern mound comprises the city proper. Unfortunately, Sippar suffered at the hands of nineteenth-century excavators, whose digging techniques were little better than those of the clandestine diggers who shared in the plunder of the site. Their combined booty, which includes tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets, is now entrusted in the care of the British Museum, where specialists are still studying this invaluable resource. As far as is known, the first plan and a short description of the site were prepared by W. B. Selby and J. B. Bewsher in about i860. Some twenty years later, Hormuzd Rassam, for the British Museum, concentrated his research on the temple area, around and mainly to the east of the ziggurat, where no fewer than one hundred and fifty rooms and sev eral large courtyards were uncovered (De Meyer, ed., 1980, map 3). To the northeast of the ziggurat, Rassam excavated part of the Shamash Temple and part of an adjacent build ing later considered by Walter Andrae and Julius Jordan to be the temple of Shamash's spouse, Aya. Among the travelers who visited the site were W. H. Ward (1885), die first to dissociate Sippar from Sippar-of-Annun1
ld
48
SIPPAR
itum, which he wrongly thought to be ancient Agade; and E. A. W. Budge, in search of new tablets dug up by clan destine diggers. In the same period, the Ottoman antiquities service excavated at Sippar, but the results of their work remain unknown. Between January and April 1894, Vincent Scheil started digging, in cooperation with Bedry Bey of the Museum of Constantinople, and "attacked all the points of the city," as the excavator himself expressed it (Scheil, 1902, p. 6). To the north of the ziggurat, Scheil excavated several houses, in one of which he found a text mentioning a priest ess (nadftum) of Shamash named Narubta, daughter of Abuwaqar (see below). It is in this area tiiat Iraqi archaeologists, almost a century later, exposed a building with a distinctive architectural organization that, in all probability, is to be identified as the cloister (al-Jadir, 1986, p. 54; about the cloister and their nadTtums, see also Harris, 1975, p. 188). Scheil, judging the results of his excavations in the temple area to be meager, moved his activities outside of the reli gious quarter to the city proper, where he mainly found houses from the Old Babylonian period. Some thirty years later Andrae and Jordan visited the site and completed Ras sam's plan of the sacred area around the ziggurat. In 1972-1973, the Belgian Archaeological Expedition in Iraq made a sounding at the northeastern side of the sur rounding levee. Previously, excavations in the nearby city of Tell ed-Der had revealed that its levee consisted of an old mud-brick wall later covered by large earth consttuctions. The trench at Sippar revealed a very similar earth construc tion. Because of the water table, the mud-brick wall under neath could not be reached. However, Scheil, who could go deeper than is possible today, describes how underneath this eardi consttuction he found a mud-brick wall (Scheil, 1902, p. 13). The earliest components of this structure—if not the very earliest—can probably be ascribed to Hammurabi who, in the forty-second year of his reign, raised the wall of Sippar with an earth construction: "as for Sippar, die eternal city of Shamash, he constructed its wall with huge earth masses (year date of Hammurabi 43)." The same fact is referred to in a clay nail inscription: " I , Hammurabi (. . .) truly raised the summit of die foundations of the wall of Sippar with earth like a great mountain." It must therefore be taken into account that, at Sippar as well as at Tell ed-Der, the remnants of an older city wall have been covered by a large dike built to protect the city against increasing floodings by the Euphrates. Observations made at Tell ed-Der indicate that flooding occurred chiefly during the second half of the eighteenth century B C E (Gas che, 1989, pp. 140-143). Both the stratigraphic position of the different elements of the dike and die objects found in it confirm this date. Since 1978 a team from the University of Baghdad under the direction of Walid al-Jadir has been regularly excavating the site. At the outset, its research focused on excavating an
area on the northeastern part of the mound. Using the pot tery and some texts, the excavated houses in the four upper layers can be dated to between the nineteenth and seven teenth centuries B C E . A deep stratigraphic excavation in the same area uncovered remains from the Akkadian and Early Dynastic periods. Because of the high water table, the nat ural soil level of the plain could not be reached. In 1985 activities shifted to die religious quarter, to a mon ument previously uncovered by Rassam (see above). This building, which Andrae and Jordan believed to be the Tem ple of Aya, was gradually excavated. It is in this building that al-Jadir discovered a library in which hundreds of tablets were still arranged in the pigeonholes in which they had been filed twenty-five centuries ago (see figure 1 ) . The library consisted mainly of Neo-Babylonian tablets, mostiy literary texts such as a Standard Babylonian version of Atrahasis, but also, for example, some prayers, a historical inscription of Manishtushu (ldng of Akkad, 2269-2255 B C E ) , a copy of die prologue of the Hammurabi law code, and another Hammurabi text relating to the walls of Sippar (see above). Some of these tablets explicitly state that they were copies of originals from centers such as Babylon, Nippur, Agade (Akkade), and Sippar itself. The oldest date on the texts, from the year seven of Adad-apla-iddina (1061 B C E ) , is found on a list of temple property from the Nippur region. The most recent tablet in the collection dates from the first year of the reign of the Persian king Cambyses (529 B C E ) . Not long after this date, at about the beginning of the fifth century B C E , all activities in the Sippar temples seem to have ceased (Joannes, 1992). In the Old Babylonian period, Sippar was famous for its gagum ("cloister") where nadTtums (chaste women dedi cated to the god Shamash) were housed. The Hammurabi code mentions nadTtums living both inside the cloister com pound and outside. After die twenty-ninth year of the reign of Samsuiluna, the documentary texts stop mentioning sales of houses in the cloister, though nadTtums are still attested later. Some of die best-attested nadTtums belonged to wealthy families. Several genealogies reflect a tendency of wealthy families to dedicate one of their daughters to the god Shamash. Kings of the Old Babylonian dynasty are known to have had encloistered daughters (Harris, 1962), which clearly accounts for the prestige of the Sippar cloister. Northwest of the ziggurat, near where Scheil found the text of the nadTtum Narubta (see above), die Iraqi excavators have uncovered a very distinctive arrangement of narrow, parallel streets that may have been covered. The streets pro vided access to rows of small, juxtaposed houses, usually consisting of only two rooms each. This spatial organization of the ground plan suggests that they should be identified with the cloister of the nadTtums. [See also Babylon; Babylonians; Der, Tell ed-; Cuneiform; Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; Nippur; Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples; and Ziggurat.]
SITE SURVEY
mmsmsmmmamm
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SIPPAR. Figure i . Library. tesy H. Gasche)
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.
49
:i
View of the southeastern pigeonholes containing the tablets. (Cour
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adams, Robert McC. "Settlement and Irrigation Patterns in Ancient Akkad." Appendix 5 in McGuire Gibson's The City and Area ofKish, pp. 182-20S. Miami, 1972. Archaeological survey of the northern Mesopotamian alluvial plain. Charpin, Dominique. "Sippar: Deux villes jumelles." Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientate 82 (1988): 1 3 - 3 2 . Essential study of the toponyms in the area of Sippar in the Old Babylonian period. Charpin, Dominique. "Le point sur les deux Sippar." Nouvelles Assyriologiques Breves et Utilitaires, no. 1 1 4 (1992): 84-85. Supplement to the aforementioned study. De Meyer, Leon, ed. Tell ed-Der. Vol. 3 Louvain, 1980. Progress re ports on die Belgian excavation at Sippar in 1 9 7 2 - 1 9 7 3 , including studies on regional geomorphology and fauna remains, and a prelim inary inventory of Hormuzd Rassam's finds and plans stored in the British Museum. Gasche, Hermann. La Babylonie au iye siecle avant notre ire: Approche archeologique, problemes et perspectives. Ghent, 1989. The house of UrUtu, gala.mah of AnnunTtum, followed by a study of the declining Old Babylonian period. Harris, Rivkah. "Biographical Notes on the naditu Women of Sippar." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 1 6 (1962): 1 - 1 2 . Prosopographical and biographical study concerning well-attested naditum women from the Sippar Cloister, based on Old Babylonian texts. Harris, Rivkah. Ancient Sippar: A Demographic Study of an Old Baby lonian City, 1804-159$ B.C. Leiden, 1975. Survey of the history and administrative and religious structures of Old Babylonian Sippar, based on cuneiform sources (including both Sippar-Yahrurum and Sippar-Amnanum). Jadir, Walid al-. "Sippar: Ville du dieu soleil." Dossiers Histoire et Archeologie 103 (1986): 52-54. Survey of the Sippar excavations con ducted by die University of Baghdad. Jadir, Walid al-. "Une bibliotheque et ses tablettes," Archeologia 224 (1987): 1 8 - 2 7 . Report on die discovery of the temple library. Joannes, Francis. "Les temples de Sippar et leurs tresors a l'epoque
neo-babylonienne." Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientate 86 (1992): 1 5 9 - 1 8 4 . Study of the history and inventory of the Sippar temples, based on cuneiform texts from die Neo-Babylonian period. Rassam, Hormuzd. "Recent Discoveries of Ancient Babylonian Cit ies." Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 8 (1883): 1 7 2 197. Article in which the identification of Abu Habbah as Sippar is established. Rassam, Hormuzd. Asshur and the Land of Nimrod. Cincinnati, 1897. Description of Rassam's archaeological activities in Iraq. Scheil, Vincent. Une saison de fouilles d Sippar (Abou Habba), janvieravril 1894. Cairo, 1902. Description and catalogue of the most im portant objects and tablets found in Sippar by the author. H E R M A N N G A S C H E and
SITE SURVEY.
CAROLINE JANSSEN
Theoretical, methodological, and
technological innovations have altered archaeological field methodology during die last two centuries. How the disci pline has mapped, surveyed, and visually portrayed individ ual sites reflects those innovations. While the tools and tech niques necessary for site survey remain essentially the same, their increasing precision has been achieved largely through more comprehensive implementation. The repercussions of the technological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s have not yet been fully understood in the field. Site Location. One goal of the first historical geographers who visited the Levant was to locate ancient sites and to place them on maps with their modern and ancient identi fications. (Arabic names were the conduit connecting bib lical names to us.) In 1838 Edward Robinson did this in Palestine using a ttansit, two pocket compasses, and a tele scope to triangulate site location based on the known posi-
50
SITE SURVEY
tions of coastal cities. In the 1870s the British Royal Engi neers established a true measured baseline and a triangulation grid in Palestine using surveyor's theodolites to locate all sites with increased precision. Subsequent map ping based on aerial photography and then satellite images, along with ttaditional surveys, provided precise contour lines, allowing site positions and their true extent to be lo cated with far greater accuracy. In the late 1980s and 1990s, portable GPS (Global Positioning System) units, which cal culate location based on satellite signals and that can quickly locate a site's position with an accuracy of up to five meters, came into use. Site Topography. In the 1830 and 1840s, Robinson de scribed structures on the sites he visited using elementary tools and words; David Roberts and William Henry Bartlett, the best among many; drew exquisite sketches of these same structures. In die 1870s, the Royal Engineers accurately mapped structures and provided basic data on topographi cal relief at selected major sites using transits and measuring tapes. By the 1880s people like William Matthew Flinders Petrie were drawing contoured site plans showing both structures and excavation areas. By the early twentieth century, topographic site plans were being mapped with transits and measuring tapes and were tied both to permanent datum points on a site and into the geodetic control network (a national system of survey ors' benchmarks). Precise site shapes and contours were re corded in the field with increasing care and later drawn in a studio setting. A variation of this methodology was to use a plane table and an alidade on a known baseline with which the surveyor could create final drawings directly in the field. Aerial photographs were first used photogrammetrically in die early 1920s by William Frederic Bade to assist in both mapping and excavation strategy. Throughout the 1960s topographic mapping continued to be carried out using transits, tapes, plane tables, and occa sionally aerial photographs. By the 1970s the E D M (Elec tronic Distance Measuring device) was measuring greater distances far more rapidly titan by tape, but the data were still manually transmitted. The late 1980s saw the introduc tion of the Total Station, a greatly enhanced theodolite tiiat could measure distances and angles (X, Y , and Z coordi nates) very precisely. The recorded data, kept in an electtonic format by the machine, could then be loaded direcdy into computers and be manipulated by CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) software. Highly complex site landforms could then be portrayed using computer graphics in many formats and at multiple scales. The full impact of the Total Station and CAD graphics on archaeology has yet to be re alized. Grid Systems and Excavation. Following World War I, arbitrary grid systems imposed on top of site contours gained favor as standard nomenclature to describe location for everything from artifact findspots to excavation units;
thus, the grid system became a recording tool. Quadrants were established (e.g., northwest), allowing an infinite set of standardized subdivisions to be defined radiating outward from each quadrant, for example, 2 1 N 17W or AB23. (In one system letters went east-west and numbers north-south; thus AB23 would be die twenty-eighth square east-west and the twenty-third square north-south. By putting letters one way and numbers the other an attempt was made to remove confusion.) This quadrant system standardized the locational description of the excavated unit. As excavation re covered things—walls, floors, installations, artifacts, and soil layers—they could be mapped at the required scale and pre cision and added to the site's cartographic record by unit. Extrapolation and correlation of pieces of walls, floors, or layers yield possible conclusions that can be tested or sim ply presented in graphic form. The layers of data created, which formerly had been hand drawn and colored on maps, can now be best handled by a variety of computer databases. Geographic Information Systems. Individual sites, as imagined by Robinson and his successors, can no longer be viewed as discrete static entities, polygons, on an otherwise blank map. Occupation sites are dynamic; they are the prod uct of their environs without a hard and fast border (not even a city wall) separating them. A site's immediate envi ronment, its neighboring sites, and its distant ttade partners are all integral to site definition. Viewed this way, very little of a site is excavated; the goal of a site survey becomes the ability to collect many types of spatial data from various sources. Whether multispectral satellite imagery is collected and used to identify road systems connecting sites, groundpenetrating radar is used to search for underground cavities and walls, or a small habitation site is mapped for contours before excavation, die goal of die site survey is still to de scribe and locate a site, but now within each of its many environments. Moving farther into the world of the computer has made it clear that handling wide-ranging data types is best done in computer format. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer databases that can process geographi cally linked information in both graphic and tabular form to describe inter- and intrasite correlations and their relation ship to their environs. Proper use of such systems requires clearly defined research questions, so tiiat appropriate and relevant data can be collected. Thus, what once was a site survey designed to produce static maps and plans, using transits, measuring tapes, and notebooks, is now just a part of a larger dynamic, interactive, and descriptive program utilizing satellites, computer chips, and electronic note books. Where this new technology may lead site survey, even within a few years, can hardly be imagined. [See also Computer Mapping; Excavation Strategy; Grid Plan; Historical Geography; Quadrant Plan; and the biog raphies of Bade, Petrie, and Robinson.]
SKELETAL ANALYSIS BIBLIOGRAPHY From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present Detweiler, A. Henry. Manual of Archaeological Surveying. New Haven, 1948. Description of surveying as practiced in the Middle East in die 1930s and 1940s, useful for understanding reports from the period. Dever, William G„ and H. Darrell Lance, eds. A Manual of Field Ex cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. See in particular Dever's essay, "Field Surveying and Drafting for the Ar chaeologist" (pp. 1 4 0 - 1 7 4 ) , which describes site surveys and equip ment use in the 1960s and 1970s; now dated. Joukowsky, Martha Sharp. A Complete Manual of Field Archaeology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980. Concise summary of surveying as it was practiced in the 1970s (see pp. 6 5 - 1 3 1 ) . Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Methods and Aims in Archaeology. London, 1904. Surveying as practiced by a master surveyor and archaeologist in the late nineteenth century. New Technologies and Techniques Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 548-. Oxford, 1989-. Annual appearing under various editors that promises to be the most authoritative series on new developments regarding GIS, remote sensing, and survey. Hogg, Alexander H. A. Surveying for Archaeologists and Other Fieldworkers. New York, 1980. Modern description of basic surveying in an archaeological context, which does not include developments of the 1980S-1990S. Scollar, Irwin. Archaeological Prospecting and Remote Sensing. New York, 1990. Modern textbook covering many aspects of photogrammetry, maps, remote sensing, and GIS. JEFFREY A . BLAKELY
SKELETAL ANALYSIS. Constituting a major area of research in physical anthropology, skeletal analysis aims at reconstructing the life history and biological affinities of individuals and populations from an examination of their bones and teeth. Occasionally, this information is used for forensic identification of victims of recent crimes and even of historic persons. Most frequentiy, however, skeletal anal yses are carried out on human remains recovered from ar chaeological contexts. The immediate objective is then to determine die origins, affinities, nutrition, and health status (paleopathology) characterizing peoples of different periods and cultures. [See Paleopathology.] When analyzed in rela tion to burial practices (mortuary studies), skeletal analyses can also yield information about the extent to which social status is linked to age, gender, and lineage. [See Burial Tech niques.] In a wider context, skeletal analyses of past popu lations provide the basic data for examining the nature and effect of selective pressures on human evolution. Examination of human remains begins with the identifi cation of burial type, position, age, and sex and continues through analyses of pathology, diet, and genetic affinities. Age and sex distribution are used to estimate life expectancy (paleodemography), which, together with disease experi ence (paleopathology), provides an estimate of the quality
51
of life associated with different adaptations. Variations be tween subgroups in these attributes indicate differences in social status or occupation. Evaluation of genetic affinities is usually based on die phenotype expressed in size, shape, and discrete traits of the bones and teeth. Recent develop ments in molecular genetics also make it possible to compare these ancient populations directly at the level of die genome. These data are used to trace kinship within populations and the origin and affinities of different populations and cul tures. Techniques used in analyzing skeletal remains range from very simple methods to extremely expensive, time-consum ing, and sophisticated approaches. They draw on methods developed in medicine, epidemiology, and anthropological studies of living populations. Age, sex, gross pathology, and phenotype can be assessed visually, supplemented by mea surements made with calipers and tapes. However, the level of accuracy achieved, especially for determining age and pa thology, may be greatly increased by more sophisticated studies using radiographs, C - T scans, and optical and scan ning electron microscopy. [See Microscopy.] Dietary infor mation can be obtained by biochemical analyses of trace elements (e.g., calcium/sttontium ratios) and isotopes such as C / C and N / N . The recent application of DNA and mitochondrial DNA stadies to the analysis of bones, teeth, and mummified tissues opens up a completely new field in skeletal analysis—one that enables the anthropologist to compare directly the genotypes of past and present popu lations. 1 3
1 2
15
14
Regardless of the technique employed, the reliability of the information derived depends ultimately on the number of specimens available for analysis and their state of pres ervation. Analysis begins in the field as soon as bones are uncovered, with the determination of their burial type, po sition, and condition. If the bones are poorly preserved, it may be necessary to carry out preliminary observations and measurements in situ. If preservatives are used to harden die bones, samples for biochemical analyses must be col lected before the preservatives are applied, as they may con taminate the samples. Burial Type. There are three main burial types: primary, secondary, and cremations. Either type may comprise one or more individuals—tiiat is, may occur as individual or multiple burials. Primary burial is recognized by die pres ence of bones in anatomical articulation. This indicates bur ial soon after death, widi the bones still held in position by die soft tissues. However, bones may be displaced after bur ial by human or other agencies. In the case of human agen cies this may be intentional, to make room for new burials when tombs are reused. Alternately, the skull or other bones may be removed for ritual purposes. Inadvertent distur bance of burials occurs in all periods, through later building or grave construction. Nonhuman agencies such as earth tremors and soil subsidence and the scavenging of carni-
52
SKELETAL ANALYSIS
vores and burrowing of rodents also contribute to the re moval or displacement of individual bones. For all these rea sons, it is necessary to examine bones in situ carefully, in order to distinguish between disturbed primary burials and secondary burials. Secondary burials are best defined as those in which bones have been collected from primary contexts and placed in a secondary context. In such cases the bones are not in ana tomical articulation. Secondary burial may take place after natural decomposition of the soft tissues connecting the bones or after active disarticulation and defleshing. Natural versus intentional skeletonization can be distinguished by examining the bone surface: defieshed bones usually show signs of scraping or cutting. Secondary burial may entail the collection and burial of selected bones or tire entire skeleton. It may involve tire removal of the bones to a completely new location and their intentional rearrangement within a tomb—by stacking them in piles or placing them in special containers such as urns or ossuaries. In all these instances tire number of individuals placed in such locations varies. [See Ossuary.] Cremation is the intentional burning of the body of the deceased. It results in the reduction of die body to fragments of charred and burnt bone that are then collected and placed in special containers or simply buried. Cremated bones show distortion, shrinkage, and spiral fractures as well as color change, in contrast to the charring of dry bones. The burial position may be supine (on the back), prone (face down), on the right or left side, extended, flexed, or semiflexed. In semiflexed burials the knees are bent and are at right angles to die trunk. In flexed burials the arms and legs are drawn up against the chest, so that the body assumes a fetal position. Often these skeletons are so tightly flexed as to suggest that the deceased were tied or wrapped in position before burial. Prone burial is usually interpreted as a sign of disrespect to the deceased. Population Biology. The three methods used to analyze for genetic affinities in skeletal remains include morphom etry, discrete trait analysis, and DNA and mDNA studies (Saunders and Katzenberg, 1992). Morphometric analysis is die most common and involves obtaining estimates of the size and shape of bones and teeth from measurements. Body size and shape are genetically determined but are influenced to some degree by environmental stress during growth. Stat ure is the most extreme example of this, with variation of as much as 7 cm in height between two generations, observed in studies of secular trends. Skull form, however, is much less affected by environmental factors during growth, and tooth size is affected even less. Consequently, measurements of the skull and teeth have long been used to define and compare the phenotype of different populations. The skull, mandible, and teeth are usually classified in terms of length/ height/breadth measurements and ratios, although three-di mensional analyses are gradually being introduced.
Microevolutionary trends within Homo sapiens show a very characteristic pattern of change that includes head shortening and rounding, reduction of the jaws and teeth, and general gracilization of the entire skeleton. These changes reflect new adaptations, in terms of both general function and diet. They are especially rapid during the tran sition to agriculture, reflecting the multifactorial impact of occupation, diet, disease, climate, and altitude on the gene pool as small groups of hunter-foragers are replaced by large sedentary communities. Against this background of unidi rectional diachronic microevolutionary trends, large-scale gene flow can be detected by the presence of dissonances because each population has its own particular characteris tics. There characteristics are expressed, for example, in height, breadth, and depth proportions of the skull relative to the jaws and teetii. Paleodemography. Paleodemography deals with esti mates of past population size. While the skeletal record is usually far too incomplete for population estimates, the age, sex, and life history of individuals (in terms of function, dis ease, trauma, and nutrition) are used to provide estimates of life expectancy and fecundity, as well as for mortuary studies. For age and sex determination, bones and teeth are gently cleaned and, if necessary, restored and strengthened. Measurements and radiographs are taken and compared against standards derived from populations of known age and sex. Age determination. Age determination in children and adolescents is most accurately estimated by dental-devel opment status as determined by radiographs of the teeth. Visual examination of die teeth in the jaws to assess the state of dental eruption is slightly less accurate but also less ex pensive and faster to carry out. For isolated teetii, dental development can be directly assessed visually. If the jaws and teetii are missing, long bone length and degree of epiph yseal fusion are used to estimate age in subadults. Age as sessment in adults is more problematic because of individual differences in the aging process. Changes in joint surfaces, especially of the pubic symphysis, cranial suture fusion, and dental attrition are the main criteria used. Additional meth ods are microscopic and radiographic studies of the extent of bone remodeling and resorption. In the teeth, attrition rates are highly correlated with age but are modified by diet and methods of processing food, such as die use of milling stones. Methods for assessing attrition rates within popula tions have been developed by extrapolating age estimates from regressions derived from the attrition scores of juve niles of known age. The relationship between attrition rates and diet has also been used to assess foods utilized by a particular group. The accuracy of age determination in skel etal remains is of the same order as that in the living. It is several weeks in infants, several months in children, and one to two years in juveniles. In adults, once tooth formation is completed and epiphyses have closed, the accuracy of age
SKELETAL ANALYSIS assessment is even lower. It is accurate to within five years for young adults and ten years in old adults. This is the result of individual variation in physiological age, as opposed to chronological age, and is determined in part by genetic fac tors and in part by environmental factors. Inconsistencies between different measures of aging in and between individuals in the same society reflect different life histories. These may be related to socioeconomic and occupational differences within the society or to random dif ferences in disease load. Their association with other signs of rank exemplified by architecture, burial offerings, and tomb type and location are helpful in discriminating be tween the two. [See Grave Goods.] The morphometric and genetic data can then be used to determines if status differ ences are family or group related. Sex determination. The most accurate determinations of sex are based on the examination of the entire skeleton, but this is not usually possible in Near Eastern contexts. This is partly the result of the differential preservation of different bones and partly of burial customs. Thus, when dealing with multiple secondary burials, the anthropologist is usually comparing bones ratiier than individuals. The pel vis is the most dimorphic bone, followed by die skull, sa crum, and femur. However, in addition to shape differences, most adult male bones are thicker than those of females. Even when similar in length, male bones are more robust, with relatively larger joint areas and thicker cortical bone. Because most of the distinctive sex differences of the skel eton are created by differential growth at puberty, morpho metric estimates of sex in infants and children have only a low degree of reliability. Sex determination in old adults may also prove difficult because of changes in hormonal balance and or activity patterns that affect bone remodeling. A new possibility for accurate sexing in all age groups is the use of DNA analysis to look for X - and Y-linked genes. Cause of death. In most cases the cause of death is un known. In rare cases, sword cuts or other traumatic lesions are present and can be identified. Individual skeletons are occasionally found beneath rubble, posing the question of intentional interment or accidental death following the col lapse or destruction of a sttucture. The position of the bones of the body—orderly or sprawled—is an important diag nostic consideration. Burial Types and Practices in the Southern Levant. Burial practices increase in complexity over time. The ear liest burials in the Near East are individual, primary burials from the Mousterian sites of Qafzeh and Skhul cave in Is rael, dated to earlier than 90,000 B P . [See Carmel Caves.] These burials are usually semiflexed and lying on their side or back and are at living sites. There does not appear to be an age or sex preference in burial treatment, and grave goods are rare. At Qafzeh, an eleven-year-old child was bur ied with deer antiers next to the body and at 'Amud, also in Israel and dated to about 60,000 B P , a Neandertiial infant
53
was buried with a deer mandible, suggesting ritual activities. At the Mousterian site of Shanidar in Iraq, the large amount of flower pollen associated with a Neanderthal burial dated to about 60,000 B P has been interpreted as evidence of fu neral rites in which the body was covered with wildflowers. [See Shanidar Cave.] (It has also been suggested that wind blew the pollen onto the grave.) Individual primary burials at living sites remain the norm until the Natufian period, 12,500-10,300 B P (Belfer-Cohen and Hovers, 1992; Perrot and Ladiray, 1988). In the Middle and Late Natufian, primary and secondary burials, in both individual and mass graves, are found. Grave goods such as stone tools and animal bones and antlers are occasionally present. At two Natufian sites ('Einan and Hayonim) indi vidual, semiflexed burials were found together with dog skel etons. [See 'Einan; Hayonim.] At most Natufian sites some of the adults and children were buried with ornaments: headdresses, bracelets, and belts made of shells, animal teeth, and bone. In the Late Natufian, graves at Nahal Oren and on die terrace at Hayonim, hollowed-out stone "pipes," resembling pierced stone mortars, were used as grave mark ers, while several primary burials were found in which die skull was missing. Removal of skulls was common in the Prepottery Neolithic period. [See Nahal Oren.] In the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN), extramural burials are found in southeast Anatolia, at Hacilar and at Catal H6yiik. At the latter, secondary burials of more than four hun dred individuals were found beneath a platform in a large building; the skulls had been collected in one area. [See Hacilar; Catal HSyiik.] In the southern Levant, PPN burials occur singly or in small groups and are still located within the settlement area, either in houses or in courtyards, often beneath house floors. Removal of die skulls of adults and children and their reburial in caches was common. Some of die skulls were plastered, facial features delineated, and shells inserted for eyes. Examples are known from Jericho, Beisamoun, Kefar Hahoresh, 'Ain Ghazal, and Tel Ramad. Most were adult males, but some, from Tel Ramad and Be isamoun, were female. [See Jericho; 'Ain Ghazal.] In addi tion, one eight-year-old child's skull from 'Ain Ghazal ap pears to have been decorated with black paint. A different type of decoration was found at Nahal Hemar, where the top and back of male skulls were decorated with bitumen in criss-cross patterns. Toward the end of the PPN, secondary burial became more common in die southern Levant. In the Pottery Ne olithic (PN) period, burials took place in cemeteries located outside of the settlements, sometimes in large, constructed tombs such as dolmens and tumuli. One example is Eilat in Israel, where twenty tumuli were found with secondary bur ials attributed to the end of the PN and Early Chalcolithic periods. The P N period marks the advent of differential treatment of infant burials. Infants are commonly buried intramurally, rather than in die main cemetery, and are in-
54
SKELETAL ANALYSIS
terred in ceramic vessels or covered by potsherds. This practice continued in subsequent periods and has been re corded as late as the Ottoman period. [See Dolmen; Tu mulus.] In the Chalcolithic period in Israel burial practices were extremely varied, both within and between sites, and burial offerings, in the form of ceramic vessels and ornaments, are common. There are many large cemeteries with monumen tal tumuli tombs (Shiqmim) as well as rock-hewn burial caves (Azor, Ben-Shemen). At Kissufim, in the Negev de sert, a mud-brick charnel house was found containing sec ondary burials, some in stone ossuaries. At many sites the position of tire bones suggests reuse of the burial caves and tumuli, with earlier burials displaced to make room for later ones. However, secondary burial, of piles of bones or bones in ossuaries, also occurs and some of tire bones from sec ondary burials show cut marks attributed to defleshing (Ben-Shemen). Pottery as well as stone ossuaries were used, the former often shaped in tire form of a house, the latter usually box shaped. However, primary burial also occurred. At Byblos in Lebanon, a large cemetery was found with pri mary burials in large jars or pifhoi, sometimes containing the remains of an adult and a child. At sites such as Tel Teo and Gilat in Israel, primary flexed burials were found intramurally, while in the semisubterranean villages around Beer sheba (Shiqmim, Abu Matar, Bir Safadi), both primary and secondary burials were found, usually in storage pits. The intramural burials contained a high proportion of infants, often in ceramic vessels or covered by sherds, whereas burial in the cemeteries seems to have been reserved for adults and children over the age of three. [See Shiqmim; Negev; Byblos; Gilat; Beersheba.] In the Bronze and Iron Ages, die tradition of monumental tombs as well as the use of burial caves continued, together with shaft tombs, cist tombs, and simple inhumations, the latter often intramural. From the end of the Early Bronze Age onward, animal offerings were common, in addition to personal ornaments and ceramic vessels as grave goods. Intersite and intrasite variation in burial type and associated grave goods are maintained and reflect the cultural diversity of this region in each period. Cremation may have occurred from the PN onward, but it appears on a regular basis only in the Late Bronze Age. Burnt human bones were found at the Epipaleolithic site of Kebara in Israel, but they have occurred in several Neolithic sites as well, such as Bouqras in eastern Syria and Cayonu in Anatolia, and in Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age sites from die southern Levant. [See Bouqras; CayoniL] The lat ter include Gezer and Jericho, the charnel houses at Bab edh-Dhra', and die urn burials at Azor. [See Gezer; Bab edhDhra',] Few of these early examples show the warping and shrinking associated with the burning of fresh bone tiiat characterizes cremations in later periods. Because of this it has been suggested tiiat these early examples were the result
of accidental fires. However, in the Early Bronze Age tombs at Gezer and Jericho, several levels of burnt bones have been found, in addition to piles of bones. Either fires broke out frequently at these sites—possibly because of overturned lamps—or the tombs were periodically "cleaned out" by fires. Cremations were common in the Late Bronze Age in Iron Age Phoenician cemeteries and in Roman cemeteries, as, for example, the Roman cremations from Ketef Hinnom. [See Ketef Hinnom.] Only the bones from Phoenician and Roman cremations have been analyzed in detail. They are invariably the remains of adults or juveniles. No tophets with cremated infant bones have yet been found at any Phoeni cian site in the southern Levant, with the possible exception of Megiddo (Gottlieb Schumacher, Tell el-Muiesellim, Leip zig, 1908; Elizabeth Bloch Smith, 1992, p. 1 7 1 ) . Thus, de spite biblical references to infant sacrifice through fire (Lv. 18:21; 2 Kgs. 23:10; Jer. 19:5; 32:35), there is no evidence of infant cremations in the Phoenican homeland. All the ex amples so far known come from tophets in North Africa and Italy. [See Carthage.] In the early periods, primary burials are extended or sem iflexed, either on their back or side. In the Natufian, tightly flexed burials also appear and continue in the Chalcolithic. In later periods, individual burials are usually extended and on their back. Of the hundreds of burials recorded for the Natufian and Neolithic periods in the southern Levant, only two instances of prone burials have been recorded. One is from the Natufian site of 'Einan/Mallaha (Perrot and Ladiray, 1988) and one from the PPNB site of Basta. [See 'Ei nan; Basta.] In both cases, the individual was an adult and was buried face down in a kneeling position. In addition, one skeleton at the Natufian site of Hayonim was found bur ied in a squatting position. Examples from later periods in the southern Levant include the mass grave from the Chal colithic site of Gilat, where two of seven individuals found in a pit were prone, and the Phoenican sites of Khaldeh and Achziv. At Khaldeh, 28 of 178 burials were prone, whereas at nearby Achziv, only one of more than 100 burials was prone. [See Khaldeh; Achziv.] Population Biology in the Southern Levant. Skeletal remains from Near Eastern sites fall into two main periods: an early period represented by Middle Paleolithic hominids, including archaic hominids, Neanderthals, and Early Homo sapiens sapiens, that predates 58,000 B P , and a later period from about 20,000 B P to the present. For the southern L e vant, tlie earliest well-dated human remains, which may be from about 350,000 B P , are those from the Zuttiyeh cave in Wadi 'Amud. The presence of earlier fossils has been claimed from 'Ubeidiya and Hazorea but they appear to be of disputed provenience. [See 'Ubeidiya.] The earliest ex amples known of Homo sapiens sapiens in this region are the specimens found at die Skhul and Qafzeh caves dated to around 90,000 B P . Neanderthals have been found at Tabun, Kebara, 'Amud, and Hayonim, and also at Shanidar in Iraq.
SKELETAL ANALYSIS The Tabun specimens may be 150,000 years old, the other Neanderthals are grouped at about 60,000 B P . [See Tabun.] For the last twenty thousand years, there has been an al most continuous diachronic series of skeletal remains recov ered from good archaeological contexts. These provide ev idence of the changes in physical makeup and pathology of the different cultural and ethnic populations identified in the archaeological record. Those for die soutiiern Levant (pri marily from Israel and Jordan) are especially well known. They include samples from the Kebaran, Natufian, PPN, and P N periods; die Chalcolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages (the latter with distinctive Phoenician, Israelite, and Philis tine populations); and the Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byz antine, Ottomon, and recent periods. The transition from generalized hunting and gathering to specialized foraging, specifically for cereals, occurred between the Kebaran and Natufian periods. The inttoduction of plant and animal do mestication and the establishment of large sedentary com munities developed during tire Neolithic period; and was accompanied by the introduction of pottery toward the end of the Neolithic. The impact of the drastic change in food staples and methods of food preparation that ensued was magnified in the Chalcolithic period when herding became a major economic factor. By the end of the Chalcolithic the traditional Near Eastern diet, which has a high cereal com ponent and low meat intake, appears to have been estab lished. The skeletal record reflects these changing adaptations very precisely, both in terms of microevolutionary change and in terms of changes in disease patterns. Stature was at its maximum in early Homo sapiens sapiens from Skhul and Qafzeh, averaging 180 cm in males; from the Kebaran to recent periods, it has averaged 168 cm in males, with only slight fluctuations. In females, stature was some 10—14 shorter than in males. However, in Israel, as in most Western countries, a marked secular trend occurred in the twentieth century, in both the indigenous population and in the off spring of immigrants. This suggests tiiat most of die ob served variation in stature in the past was environmentally mediated. There is some support for this hypothesis in the changing frequency of stress-related conditions observed in the skeletal remains. While there are some similarities between early Homo sa piens sapiens and Kebaran and Natufian samples in tooth morphology, the virtual absence of skeletal remains in the eighty thousand years separating them precludes any de tailed discussion of a possible ancestral role for these early humans. There is some reduction in overall robusticity of the skel eton between the Kebaran and Natufian, and this trend con tinues in later periods. It is associated with a slight reduction in both circumference and cortical bone thickness of the long bones, and with reduction in head length and volume. In the face, this is seen first in the reduced amount of bone c
m
55
thickness around the orbit and malar processes and later in the lengthening and narrowing of the face and reduction of the jaws and teeth. The most common head form in the Kebaran and Na tufian periods is long, relative to breadth (dolichocephalic). This remains the dominant pattern until the Middle Bronze Age, when population characteristics show a sudden change. From the Middle Bronze II to recent periods, tiiere is a considerable fluctuation in skeletal parameters. Between the Natufian and the M B II it is possible to trace unidirec tional microevolutionary trends in the skull, mandible, and teeth. From the M B II onward, there are numerous fluctu ations in all measurements, suggesting greater heterogeneity and masking—to a greater or lesser extent evidence of mi croevolutionary trends in the skull and mandible—although tooth size continues to reduce. The Middle Bronze populations are characterized by a short and broad calvarium with a high, rounded skull and shorter, broader face and nose than any of the earlier or most of the later populations inhabiting the region. Discriminant function analysis distinguishes males at these sites with 100 percent accuracy on calvarial, facial, and mandibular char acteristics. These changes are inconsistent with microevo lutionary trends or environmental factors affecting growth and development. The M B II samples then provide the first definite evidence for population change in the Holocene of the southern Levant; however, samples from later periods suggest a return, at least in some regions, to the indigenous long-headed, long-faced type. Sample sizes from die Late Bronze Age are small but ap pear to resemble the M B II populations. There are no wellpreserved remains of Philistines from Israel available for ex amination, but Iron Age Phoenicians, First Temple Israelites from Jerusalem and the large Iron Age sample from Lachish that have been studied show some differences. The Phoe nicians from Achziv are very heterogeneous, with head length ranging from 200 to 178 mm in males and broad, short faces. They resemble the Late Bronze and M B II peo ples in these characteristics. The Iron Age sample from La chish more closely resembles the "core" population repre sented both by the pre-MB II populations and by the more recent Arab population. The First Temple period popula tion of Jerusalem appears to lie between the two, but the sample is too small for rigorous statistical analysis. In later periods cultural and genetic boundaries are more blurred. The Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine popula tions of die Holy Land included Jews, Romans, and Samar itans. The combined Jewish Hellenistic-Byzantine group is, like the M B II sample, an outlier group, characterized by relatively short, broad skulls and faces. In contrast, the Sa maritans have remarkably small, narrow heads and most closely resemble the local Arab population, which has rela tively narrow heads and long faces. All these types are rep resented in the present population of Israel. Their ancestry,
56
SMITH, GEORGE ADAM
and the selective pressures that have produced them , are the focus of current research. BIBLIOGRAPHY Akazawa, Takeru, et al., eds. The Evolution and Dispersal of Modern Humans in Asia, Tokyo, 1992. A discussion of the culture, behavior, dating, and morphology of Near East Mousterian hominids by such specialists as Bar-Yosef, Jelinek, Tillier, Trinkaus, and Vandermeersch. Arensburg, Baruch. "New Upper Paleolithic Human Remains from Israel" (in Hebrew). In Moshe Stekelis Memorial Volume, edited by Baruch Arensburg and Ofer Bar-Yosef, pp. 208-215. Eretz-Israel, vol. 13. Jerusalem, 1977. Arensburg, Baruch, et al. "Skeletal Remains of Jews from Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods in Israel. I: Metric Analysis." Bulletin et Memoires de la Societe d'Anthropologic (Paris) 7 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 7 5 - 1 8 6 . Arensburg, Baruch, and Yoel Rak. "Jewish Skeletal Remains from the Period of die Kings of Judaea." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 7 (1985): 30-34. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "The Role of Western Asia in Modern Human Or igins." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 337 (1992): 193-200. Bass, William M. Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual. 3d ed. Columbia, Mo., 1987. Standard manual for bone identification and measurement. Belfer-Cohen, Anna, et al. "New Biological Data for the Natufian Pop ulations in Israel." In The Natufian Culture in the Levant, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Francois R. Valla, pp. 4 1 1 - 4 2 4 . Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991. Bclfer-Cohen, Anna, and Erella Hovers. "In the Eye of the Beholder: Mousterian and Natufian Burials in the Levant." Current Anthro pology 33 (1992): 463-471. Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of die Old Testament, Supplement 1 2 3 . Sheffield, 1992. Bones and Spirits: Prehistoric Burial Customs in Israel. Haifa, 1992. Beau tifully illustrated catalog of the M. Stekelis Museum of Prehistory, with a description of prehistoric burial customs in Israel and an at tempt at interpretation by reference to modern burial patterns. Gonen, Rivka. Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan. American Schools of Oriental Research, Dissertation Se ries, 7. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Hanbury-Tenison, J. W. The Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze I Tran sition in Palestine and Transjordan. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 3 1 1 . Oxford, 1986. Hershkovitz, Israel, and Avi Gopher. "Paleodemography, Burial Cus toms, and Food-Producing Economy at the Beginning of the Holocene: A Perspective from the Southern Levant." Mitekufat Haeven 23 (1990): 9-47Lechevallier, Monique, ed. Abau Gosh et Beisamoun. Memoires et Travaux du Centre de Recherches Prehistoriques Francaise de Jerusa lem, no. 2. Paris, 1978. Articles by Ferembach, Soliveres, Arensburg, Smith, and Yakar on Neolithic human remains; see especially pages 179-181. Molleson, Theya I., and Karen Jones. "Dental Evidence for Dietary Change at Abu Huvsym." Journal ofArchaeological Science 18 (r99i): 525-539. Ozbek, Metin. "Culte des cranes humains a Cayonii." Anatolica 1 5 (1988): 1 2 7 - 1 3 7 . The skull cache found at C y°iu—remains of more than seven hundred individuals, including children from the age of two-and-a-half; fewer than 1 0 percent are over forty. Most bones show signs of burning, some when fresh, others when dry. The site is dated to the ninth millennium BP. a
Perrotjean, and Daniel Ladiray. Les hommes deMallaha, Eynan, Israel, part 1 , Les sepultures. M6moires et Travaux du Centre du Centre Recherches Prehistoriques Francaise de Jerusalem, no. 7. Paris, 1988. The most detailed study yet published of any Natufian site, describing burial customs and die physical anthropology of die peo ple represented there and at otiier Natufian sites. Part 2, Etude anthropologique, is by Odile Soliveres-Masselis. Saunders, Shelly R., and M. Anne Katzenberg, eds. Skeletal Biology of Past Peoples: Research Methods. New York, 1992. Contributions from different scientists describing methods used in paleopathology and life-history estimations. Smith, Patricia, et al. "Archaeological and Skeletal Evidence for Dietary Change during the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene in the Levant." In Paleopathology of the Origins of Agriculture, edited by Mark Nathan Cohen and George J. Armelagos, pp. 1 0 1 - 1 3 6 . New York, 1984. Diachronic changes in skeletal morphology and disease patterns in past populations of Israel. Smitii, Patricia. "The Dental Evidence for Nutritional Status in the Natufians." In The Natufian Culture in the Levant, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Francois R. Valla, pp. 425-432. Ann Arbor, Mich,, 1991. Smith, Patricia. "Changing Human Populations in the Holyland: The Physical Anthropological Evidence from Prehistory to the Recent Past." In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, edited by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 58-74. New York, 1995. Past inhabitants of Israel, from the earliest hominids to the present. PATRICIA SMITH
SMITH, GEORGE ADAM (1856-1942), prominent Hebrew Bible scholar and theologian, born in Calcutta, In dia. Smith studied arts and theology at Edinburgh Univer sity and pursued further studies at the universities of T u bingen and Leipzig. In 1878 he traveled to Cairo, where he learned Arabic; he made his first trip, on foot, through Pal estine and Syria in 1880. Smith's earliest publication was a commentary on the Book of Isaiah (Expositor's Bible Series, 2 vols., 1888-1890). In 1891, during his second trip to Palestine, he expanded his knowledge of the region's geography (of Palestine, Syria, and Transjordan), gathering much of the information for his great work, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894; 25th ed., 1 9 3 1 ) , and earning for himself die title "fa ther of biblical historical geography." Smith gathered climatological readings and recorded information about the geology, topography, and possible location of biblical sites. With his knowledge of Arabic, he was able to glean useful information from local inhabitants. He revised and updated his magnum opus in 1 9 3 1 , based on return ttips he had made to Palestine in 1901 and 1904. He saw his work as a collection of evidence above the ground that prepared the way for archaeological excavations, as noted in his preface to the work: "We have run most of the questions to earth: it remains only to dig them up." Smith's work is still useful because he recorded what existed prior to modern construc tion. He had an ability not only to capture details, but also to describe them vividly. In 1899, while professor of Old Testament at the Free
SOHAR Church College, Glasgow (i892-1909), Scotland, he deliv ered his Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University and published diem as Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament (New York, 1901). He was threatened widi a trial for heresy in Scotiand for this application of new crit icism to biblical studies. He then published The Twelve Prophets (Expositor's Bible Series, 2 vols., 1896-1897) and later another work on historical geography, Jerusalem (2 vols., 1907). During his tenure as principal of Aberdeen University (1909-193 5), he published The Early Poetry of Israel in Its Physical and Social Origins, his Schweich lectures (London, 1912) and commentaries on Deuteronomy (Cam bridge Bible, 1918) and Jeremiah (1923). [See also Historical Geography.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Butlin, Robin. "George Adam Smith and the Historical Geography of die Holy Land: Contents, Contexts, and Connections." Journal of Historical, Geography 14.4 (1988): 381-404. The most up-to-date analysis of SmiuYs work from a geographer's perspective; useful bib liography. Cairns, David. "Sir George Adam Smith." Religion in Life 1 1 . 4 (1942): 529-538. Account of Smith's life and work by a close friend and colleague; contains personal recollections. Manson, W . "Sir George Adam Smith." In Dictionary of National Bi ography, 1941-1050, pp. 792-794. Oxford, 1959. Official and thor ough summary of Smith's life. Smith, Lillian Adam. George Adam Smith: A Personal Memoir and Fam ily Chronicle. London, 1943. Personal account by Smith's wife. JOHN D . WINELAND
SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE. The Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis was founded in 1880. In 1962, it became the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). It is the world's largest professional society devoted to the academic study of the Bible and its cultural environ ment. The S B L grew in its first century from an initial mem bership of thirty-five to a total of nearly five thousand in 1980, with continual substantial additions. Most of its mem bers are teachers and researchers based in colleges and uni versities in Nordi America and, increasingly, elsewhere throughout the world. Its annual plenary meeting, widely attended by members, is supplemented with numerous other meetings at regional and international levels. The Journal of Biblical Literature (JBL) has been the society's flag ship publication since it was launched in 1881. In addition, a major publication program has flourished since the society, together with the American Academy of Religion, founded Scholars Press in 1974. The society also supports numerous collaborative research projects, with members convening at the annual meetings to advance their work. Interest in die material culture of the Near East expressed itself early in the history of the society, and articles dealing with archaeological matters appeared in JBL from the start. The impetus to start an American school of Oriental studies
57
in Palestine came in 1895 from Joseph Henry Thayer, pres ident of the society, after the Archaeological Institute of America established the American School of Classical Stud ies in Athens (1882) and die School of Classical Studies in Rome (1895). The SBL, joined by the AIA and die Amer ican Oriental Society, instituted the procedures that even tuated in the founding of the American School for Oriental Study and Research in Palestine in 1900 (incorporated in 1921 as the American Schools of Oriental Research [ASOR]). According to ASOR's charter, these tiiree soci eties continue to hold one seat each on the ASOR board of trustees. There has always been considerable overlap in the membership and interests of the SBL and ASOR, although in terms of historical scope the S B L is focused on biblical antiquity and ASOR encompasses the range from prehis toric to modern times. The two societies hold a joint annual meeting, thus affording members easy access to the latest research in the respective fields. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; Archae ological Institute of America; and the biography of Thayer.] BIBLIOGRAPHY King, Philip J . American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1983. Elaborates ASOR's growth in terms of its affiliations, key members, projects, and sociopolitical contexts. Saunders, Ernest W . Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical Literature, 1880-1980. Society of Biblical Literature, Biblical Scholarship in North America, vol. 8. Chico, Calif., 1982. Draws on archives, anecdotes, and appraisals for its succinct and interesting account of the SBL's first century. DOUGLAS A . K N I G H T
SOHAR (Suhar), coastal town located on die Gulf of Oman, today located in the Sultanate of Oman. The seaport is renowned for its Early Islamic heyday, reputed to have been the home of "Sinbad" the sailor. The town occupies a strategic position on the Arab Batinah coast leading to the Straits of Hormuz and connects through minor wadis to the Wadi al-Jizzi and the Omani interior. Archaeological work approximately 4.5 km (3 mi.) south of Sohar revealed an Early Iron Age town, Ghayl Shabul (which has the site designation SH 1 1 ) (Humphries, 1974, fig. 1; Kervran and Hiebert, 1991, p. 337; Yule and Kervran, 1993, pp. 84-89, 94-95; Potts, 1990, pp. 374-375; for other Iron Age sites in the Sohar region, see Costa and Wilkinson, 1987, figs. 87-91; Potts, 1990, p. 272, n. 28). The ceramics, soft-stone vessels, and metal suggest afirst-millenniumB C E date. The town of Sohar is an occupation tell some 2 km long and 500 m wide. It was investigated in 1958 (Cleveland, i959)j 1975 (Peter F. Farries in Kervran, 1984), and 19841986 (Kervran, 1984; Kervran and Hiebert, 1991). Sound ings in various locations along the tell, inside the fort, and along the moat walls outside the fort yielded artifactual re-
58
SOHAR
mains belonging to pre-Islamic periods. The most compre hensive sections were excavated just outside die moat area (Kervran and Hiebert, 1991, fig. 3) and yielded evidence of four phases of pre-Islamic occupation ranging from Early Parthian to Late Sasanian (c. 100-600 C E ) . [See Parthians; Sasanians.] Scattered remains of temporary buildings were first found at die lowest levels, succeeded by Parthian struc tures of fired and baked brick. Ceramics included red-pol ished wares known from western India (modern Dhofar) (Kervran and Hiebert, 1991, p. 341); for similar material found earlier by Ray L . Cleveland, see Yule and Kervran, !993> P- 9 ° fig- ; Potts, 1990, pp. 292-293). Sasanian ce ramics include a similar repertoire found at Siraf, as well as stoneware imported from China and datable to the fiftii cen tury C E . The Persian and Early Islamic Arab historical traditions (al-Hamdani, Ma'sudi) diat tie die Persian presence to the Batinah coast—Mzw(n) andMazun) (Wilkinson, 1979, pp. 888-889; Potts, 1990, pp. 328-340)—and specifically to Sohar, are now confirmed. These include die establishment of Christianity in the town and along the coast (Kervran and Hiebert, 1991, p. 343; Potts, 1990, pp. 330-340; for more recent discoveries of die Christian presence in the region, see Zarins et al., 1984, pp. 42-43, pi. 37.8; Langfeldt, 1994; Potts, 1990, vol. 2, p. 296, n. 103; 1994). The question of whether Sohar is Omana in the classical sources, while de bated, is strengthened by the Parthian levels recently found there (Potts, 1990, pp. 306-307; Groom, 1994, pp. 202203). The survey work conducted in the Sohar hinterland defining the extensive fields and irrigation channels called qanatlfalaj (T. J . Wilkinson, 1975, 1976, 1977) can now be confidently seen as having originated in the Parthian-Sasanian periods or earlier and be regarded as a Persian inven tion (Wilkinson, 1977, 1979, p. 890; Potts, 1990, pp. 390392). I 0
;
Excavations at Sohar also clearly show that there was no break in occupation with the Early Islamic periods succeed ing the Sasanian period (Umayyad/'Abbasid) until the thir teenth century, when the present fort was built (Kervran and Hiebert, 1991, p. 339). The fluorescence of the Early Islamic town is well documented by both historical sources (Grohmann, 1934; J. C. Wilkinson, 1979) and archaeology (Cleve land, 1959; Williamson, 1973; Costa and Wilkinson, 1987; Costa 1984, pp. 285-289). By the eighth century, with the strong expansion of Islam, Sohar grew as a town to cover a area of more than 74 ha (180 acres). Agricultural fields ex tended for more than 6000 ha, or 14,800 acres (T. J . Wil kinson, 1979, fig. 1 ) , and numerous commercial activities took place, including copper smithing Q. C. Wilkinson, 1979, p. 892), brick making, and glass production. [See Glass.] Sea trade with China and India is well attested (Wil liamson, 1974) and the site has yielded numerous celadon and stoneware vessels (Cleveland, 1959, p. 15; Whitehouse,
l
979> PP- 874-875). By 1225 the focus of Islamic political power had shifted to Egypt and the Red Sea, and Sohar declined in importance. The top levels at the tell yielded remains of medieval Islamic date (thirteenth century) to the present (Kervran and Hiebert, 1991, p. 339). The fortress visible in the town today has its origins in the thirteenth cen tury. [See also Oman.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cleveland, Ray L. "Preliminary Report on Archaeological Soundings at Sohar ("Oman)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, no. 1 5 3 (1959): 1 1 - 1 9 . Costa, Paolo M. "Aspetti dell'insediamento urbano antico nella penisola araba." In Studi in onore di Francesco Gabrieli nel suo ottantesimo compleanno, vol. 1, edited by Renato Traini, pp. 285-287. Rome, 1984. Valuable summaries. Costa, Paolo M., and T. J. Wilkinson. "The Hinterland of Sohar: Ar chaeological Surveys and Excavations within the Region of an Omani Seafaring City." Journal of Oman Studies 9 (1987). Grohmann, Adolf. "Suhar." In The Encyclopaedia of Islam, pp. 544547. Leiden, 1934. Groom, Nigel. "Oman and the Emirates in Ptolemy's Map." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994): 198-214. Humphries, J. H. "Harvard Archaeological Survey in Oman: II. Some Later Prehistoric Sites in die Sultanate of Oman." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 4 (1974): 49-76. Kervran, Monik. "A la recherche du Suhar: Etat de la question." In Arabic orientate: Mesopotamie el Iran meridional, de I'Age du Per au debut de la periode islamique, edited by Remy Boucharlat and JeanFrancois Salles. Paris, 1984. Kervran, Monik, and Frederik T. Hiebert. "Sohar pre-islamique: Note stratigraphique." Internationale Archaologie 6 (1991): 337-348. Langfeldt, J. "Recentiy Discovered Early Christian Monuments in Northeastern Arabia." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994): 32-60.
Potts, Daniel T . The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1990. Important summaries. Potts, Daniel T . "Nestorian Crosses from Jebel Berri." Arabian Ar chaeology and Epigraphy 5 (1994): 6 1 - 6 5 . Whitehouse, David. "Maritime Trade in the Arabian Sea: The Ninth and Tenth Centuries AD." In South Asian Archaeology 1977, edited by Maurizio Taddei, pp. 865-885. Naples, 1979. Wilkinson, John. Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia. Ox ford, 1977. Wilkinson, John. "Suhar in the Early Islamic Period and the Written Evidence." In South Asian Archaeology 1977, edited by Maurizio Taddei, pp. 887-907. Naples, 1979. Wilkinson, T. J. "Sohar Ancient Fields Project." Journal of Oman Stud ies 1 (1975): 1 5 9 - 1 6 6 ; 2 (1976): 75-80; 3 (1977): 1 3 - 1 6 .
Williamson, A. Sohar and Omani Seafaring in the Indian Ocean. Muscat, 1973-
Williamson, A. "Sohar and the Sea Trade of Oman in the Tenth Cen tury A.D." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 4 (1974). Yule, Paul, and Monik Kervran. "More Than Samad in Oman: Iron Age Pottery from Suhar and Khor Rori." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 4 (1993): 69-106. Zarins, Juris, et al. "Excavations at Dhaharan South—The Tumuli Field (208-92) 1403 A.H. 1983: A Preliminary Report." Atlal 8 (1984): 2 5 - 5 4 . JURIS ZARINS
SOUNDINGS SOLOI, site of ancient copper mines on Cyprus. Built on the flank and in front of a hill overlooking die sea in the northwestern part of Cyprus, ancient Soloi lies on the west ern side of the Bay of Morphou, 8 km (5 mi.) east of the city of Vouni (35°o8'io"N, 32°47'4S"E). The copper mines to which it owed its wealth are located to the soutii, in the mountains. The earliest archaeological finds consist of elev enth-century B C E (Iron Age) pottery. According to Plutarch, die foundation of Soloi went back to mythological times and was attributed to Theseus's son Demophon. Plutarch writes tiiat the town, replacing a first city called Aipeia, found its present location under ldng Philokypros, when his visitor and friend, die Athenian Solon, advised him to move it closer to the sea. It was then given its new name in honor of Solon. According to Herodotus, Soloi, a well-fortified city, was able to resist a five-month siege by the Persians at the very beginning of the fifth cen tury B C E , before being conquered and perhaps ransacked. Because of its copper mines, it most probably regained some prosperity in the fifth and fourth centuries, although this period of its history is not known. Not until the coming of Alexander the Great did Soloi shake off the Persian yoke. After its liberation, Soloi became part of the Ptolemaic king dom. Its last king was Eunostos, who married Eirene, daugh ter of Ptolemy I Soter and Thai's, the renowned courtesan. The city reached its acme in Roman times, under the Antonines and the Severi. We read in Galen that its mines were in full operation during the second part of die second cen tury C E ; they were probably still very active in the third cen tury. Soloi was christianized early by St. Auxibius, a Roman converted by St. Mark, companion of the Apostle Barnabas. Auxibius, who landed in Cyprus soon after the middle of the first century C E , was the first bishop of Soloi: he died in 102/103. The history of Byzantine Soloi is poorly known. The exploitation of its mines seems to have diminished dur ing the fourth century when the city's harbor was left to silt down. Christian Soloi, however, must have preserved some financial resources because it was able to build one of the most impressive basilicas on the island. Its prolonged pros perity seems to have been put to a definitive halt by the Arab raids of the seventh century from which it never recovered. In medieval times it was reduced to a miserable hamlet called Casal Solia. When the British traveler Richard Pococke visited die site in 1745, he was impressed by die extent of its ruins. In 1870, the diplomat and collector Luigi di Cesnola identified a wall as that of the Roman theater and "excavated" some Roman tombs. In 1917, under the direction of the archaeologist Einar Gjerstad, members of a Swedish expedition excavated the theater (later extensively restored) and, after some ex ploration mainly at the top of the hill, chose to concentrate their work outside the city itself, on the neighboring hills of
59
Cholades where they excavated an important complex of Hellenistic and Roman temples. Excavations on the site of Soloi resumed in 1964 with a team from Laval University (Quebec) under the direction of Jean des Gagniers. Laval archaeologists dug for ten sea sons until their work was disrupted by the turkish occupa tion of the site in 1974. In the lower part of the town, Rene Ginouves excavated an industrial and residential area in cluding a fullonica or dye shop. Below the Byzantine and Roman levels, he found die corner of a carefully built Cypro-Classical monument, below which he observed the foundations of archaic houses (perhaps destroyed after the Persian siege). In the same area, Ginouves cleared a wide paved street crossing the town east-west and leading to the stone paved Roman agora, on the southern side of which he excavated an elegant marble Roman nymphaeum built in the second quarter of the third century. On the top of the hill, Lilly Kahil found the walls of an important building of the fourth century B C E ; these walls may belong to the royal palace. Kahil also excavated several tombs in the necropolis behind the hill. Besides gold, bronze, iron, and glass objects, some of these tombs contained ninthcentury pottery, already indicating that the city did exist long before Solon's visit to Cyprus. Not far from the city's eastern gate, Tran Tarn Tinh ex cavated a large Christian basilica, which underwent two main phases. Erected on a Constantinian Plan, the first ba silica had one apse and two naves. Its remarkably well-pre served mosaic floor (with figures and inscriptions) was not destroyed when, in the second phase, a new and larger ba silica was built over it. Prior to 550 C E , this basilica had three naves separated by two rows of twelve columns. It was 53.76 m (176 ft.) long (excluding the atrium) and 31.40 m (103 ft.) wide. It seems to have been destroyed by fire, perhaps by the arab invaders of 653-654. After these raids, die wretched city could erect only a small and very humble church over the ruins of the basilica. [See also the biographies of di Cesnola and Gjerstad.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gjerstad, Einar, et al. 'The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus, 1 0 2 7 - 1 0 3 1 . Vol. 3. Stockholm, 1937. Ginouves, Rene. Soloi, dix campagnes de fouilles, vol. 2, La ville basse. Sainte-Foy, Quebec, 1989. Tinh, Tran Tarn, and Jean des Gagniers. Soloi, dix campagnes de fouilles, 1064-1074, vol. 1, Introduction historique; La basilique. Sainte-Foy, Quebec, 1985. J E A N DES G A G N I E R S
SOUNDINGS. Two basic excavation strategies, vertical and horizontal, are regularly used on archaeological sites. It is usually, not possible to excavate an entire site; even if this were possible it would not be desirable because something
60
SOUTH ARABIAN
must be left for future excavators with the benefit of even more advanced tools and techniques. The goals of the ex cavation and the physical configuration of the site determine which strategy will be followed. Traditionally in the Near East, the use of a vertical strategy is referred to as a sounding (Fr., sondage). Recently the term sounding has become syn onymous with test pit, trench, or deep probe. A sounding is cut into the site from the top and extends vertically through the archaeological strata. Soundings are frequently used across a large site in order to probe different areas or to cut through enough of it to produce a full strati graphic view. In the Near East sites with an accumulated depth of de posit are characterized as tells, or mounds. Initially, Near Eastern sites were excavated primarily to understand issues of chronology and relative cultural sequences. The earliest identified tell sites in Mesopotamia, Syria-Palestine, and An atolia were usually very large. Their size and the tremendous depth of their cultural deposits made excavating even a modest percentage of their area impossible. Soundings were carried out instead, to establish stratigraphy and chronolog ical parameters. Soundings address a variety of diachronic issues. A sounding can help to establish a site's occupational history, determine broad absolute dates, examine the depth and na ture of occupational debris, assess site formation and the degree of preservation, test the potential of future excavation areas, and sample subsurface artifacts and ecofacts. A site's depth and the complexity of its stratigraphy enable a direc tor to plan properly an excavation's pace and scope. If an understanding of particular periods is sought, it is addition ally necessary to pinpoint their stratigraphic location. T o do this, a sounding offers speed in die search for answers to basic questions. Because it is, however, an exploratory strat egy, its limitations must be taken into account. One of the main drawbacks of a sounding is the limited horizontal scope of the exposure. A sounding provides al most no context for the artifacts uncovered during the ex cavation and will provide only a partial and potentially mis leading picture of the site. In order to complete a sounding, architectural elements may have to be dismantled before they can be fully understood. However, by removing ar chaeological components in small pieces, the contextual in tegrity of the deposits can be greatiy compromised. A sec ond drawback is the sounding's narrow focus: a sounding may miss entirely important cultural deposits or strati graphic relationships. Additionally, a sounding will not usu ally produce an adequately large sample of artifacts for anal ysis beyond the purpose of chronology. Much of the information garnered from a sounding is found in die balk or section. The vertical section, which holds the more important stratigraphic information, is un available in horizontal excavation strategies. The combina tion of soundings and a more open, or horizontal, excavation
strategy can provide a balanced approach to excavation. A sounding, first used to check stratigraphy and occupational history, can be used to preview different or distant areas of sites to assess which may be the most promising for exca vation. Once these types of data are retrieved, horizontal exposure can provide fuller archaeological context and se quence. [See also Balk; Excavation Strategy; Excavation Tools; and Tell.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Barker, Philip A. Understanding Archaeological Excavation. New York, 1986. Very good treatment of archaeological field techniques prac ticed in England; especially important regarding open-field excava tion. Greene, Kevin. Archaeology: An Introduction. Totowa, N.J., 1983. Clear and concise volume for the beginner. Joukowsky, Mardia Sharp. A Complete Manual of Field Archaeology: Tools and Techniques of Field Work for Archaeologists. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980. Excellent how-to guide for fieldwork, useful for anyone involved in die field, from the experienced volunteer to rite excavation director. Details fieldwork techniques used throughout the world. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. New York, 1991. Valuable, up-to-date sourcebook on all aspects of archaeology as it is practiced throughout the world. Sharer, Robert J., and Wendy Ashmore. Archaeology: Discovering Our Past. Palo Alto, Calif., 1987. Useful textbook for introductory-level classes in archaeology. J. P.
DESSEL
SOUTH ARABIAN. The South Arabian languages and dialects are divided into two groups: Old South Arabian (sometimes termed Epigraphic South Arabian) and Modern South Arabian, widely separated in time and attested in dis tinct but adjoining geographic areas on die south and south western edges of the Arabian Peninsula. These two, together with Ethiopic Semitic, can be viewed as constituting a south ern group within the Semitic language family. Northern Ar abic, usually referred to simply as Arabic, is a completely distinct linguistic entity. The exact historical relationship be tween Old Soutii Arabian and Middle South Arabian, and between tiiese two and Ethiopic Semitic, is not entirely clear. In any case, there is at this point no sure indication that any of the attested groups within South Semitic stand in direct linear descent to any of the others. Old South Arabian is attested from the first half of the first millennium B C E , on thousands of monumental inscrip tions, mostly dedicatory; some, however, are annalistic, rit ual, or legal in content. The oldest inscriptions come prin cipally from a series of city-states stretching southward, roughly from the modern Saudi-Yemen border, along the region where the eastern side of the Red Sea coastal moun tain chain reaches die desert. This route is, presumably, thus, along die southern part of the first-millennium Spice
SOUTH ARABIAN Route from the Indian Ocean to the northern Red Sea and the Mediterranean. The principal sites along this route, from north to south, are the city-states of mn (Ma'in), sb' (Saba'), qtbn (Qataban), and, to die southeast, hdrrnwt (Hadhra maut). From the striking linguistic differences among the texts from each of these centers it is clear that we are dealing with at least four quite distinct dialects, if not languages. Toward the end of the first millennium, the center of polit ical power moves to the Yemeni highland (the predomi nance of the Himyars), and the Sabaic dialect gradually re places tlie others. From the last century B C E onwards, monumental inscriptions, which continue to be written in great number up through the sixth century C E , are only in the Sabaic dialect. The Middle South Arabian languages are spoken by rel atively inaccessible, small population groups (probably of fewer than a total of thirty thousand native speakers for all languages), mainly in western Oman and on the island of Socotra. There are at present three main languages, Mehri (with a dialect, Harsusi), Jibbali, and Socotri. These un written languages are exttemely important for what they can reveal to us about the history and development of South Semitic, they have been studied sporadically since the end of the nineteenth century but have only recentiy been sys tematically described. The Old South Arabian writing system represents a spe cial southern development of die West Semitic alphabet. It has signs for consonants that had disappeared in the North west Semitic languages by the time they became involved in the invention or adoption of the alphabet. Particularly note worthy is the existence of three " s - " signs: s (value /§/, cor responds to the Hebrew letter shin); s (value /!/, perhaps a lateralized sibilant, corresponds to the Hebrew letter sin); and s (value /s/, corresponds to the Hebrew letter samech). South Arabian, Old and Modern, is the only part of Semitic that preserves all three of these consonants, commonly re constructed for Proto-Semitic. The study of Old South Arabian grammar suffers from two special handicaps. The first difficulty is that its orthog raphy is the most relentlessly devoid of vowels of the Semitic writing systems. No vocalization system was ever developed for it, and die consonantal writing system gives few or no hints about vocalization (e.g., by the more-or-less systematic use of w, y, h, and aleph, as in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Ara bic). Consequentiy, there are many aspects of the phonol ogy, morphology, and lexicon of Old South Arabian—some of them crucial for an exact historical classification—that are completely opaque to us. For example, the third-person sin gular masculine imperfective, written yqtl, could have been pronounced /yaqtulu/ (as in Arabic), or /yaqlul/, or lyiqattil/ (as in Ethiopic; cf. the Middle South Arabian Socotri yakotdb and also the Akkadian ipaqqid), or lyaqattilu/, or any of a number of other possibilities—each of which would have important implications for the history of Soutii Semitic 1
2
3
61
and the development and differentiation of the Semitic lan guage family generally. The second difficulty arises from a unique stylistic peculiarity of Old South Arabian: although there are many thousands of texts, they are all confined to discourse in the third person, making virtually no use of any first- or second-person forms, pronominal or verbal. Con sequentiy, although we know that the third-person singular forms, masculine and feminine, of the perfective tense are qtl and qtlt (cf. Arabic and Ethiopic qatala and qatalai), we do not know whether the first and second person would have been with a t, as in Arabic (qataltu and qatalta; Hebrew and Aramaic are similar), or with a k, as in Ethiopic (qatalku and qatalka; cf. Socotri katabk, kdtdbk). In spite of these uncertainties the independent, and ar chaic, nature of Old (and Modern) Soutii Arabian is amply indicated in its pronominal system (and in the causative pre fix for the verb). Many South Arabian languages use an element s (also attested in Akkadian), as opposed to the hi' found in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic (also Ethiopic and Sabaic; Ugaritic uses a mixed system). Compare the ele ment his in die following centers and languages: Ma'in, Qa taban, and Hadhramaut s (ww); Jibbali s; Socotri s/h; Mehri h; Sabaic hw; Ethiopic hu; and Akkadian su. [See also Ethiopic; Hadhramaut; Semitic Languages.] 1
BIBLIOGRAPHY Beeston, A. F. L. A Descriptive Grammar of Epigraphic South Arabian. London, 1962. Basic grammar covering all the dialects. Beeston, A. F. L., et al. Sabaic Dictionary: English-French-Arabic. Louvain-la-Neuve, 1982. Authoritative dictionary for the Sabaic dialect. Beeston, A. F. L. Sabaic Grammar. Journal of Semitic Studies Mono graph, no. 6. Manchester, 1984. Contains more detailed information than Beeston (1962), but only for the Sabaic dialect. Biellajoan C. Dictionary of Old South Arabic: Sabaean Dialect. Harvard Semitic Studies, no. 25. Chico, Calif., 1982. Provides a range of tex tual citations for each word, but meanings should be cross-checked with Beeston et al. (1982). Corpus des inscriptions et antiquites sud-arabes. Louvain, 1977-. Author itative editions, copies, photographs, and translations (usually in French or English) of more recently discovered texts. Continues sev eral earlier series of text publications, in particular the Corpus In scriptionum Semiticamm, part 4 (Paris, 1889-1929), and the Reper toire d'epigraphie simitique, vols. 5-8 (Paris, 1928-1968). Johnstone, Thomas M. The Modern South Arabian Languages. Afroasiatic Linguistics, 1/5. Malibu, 1975. Identifies and provides outline grammars of tire major surviving South Arabian languages. Johnstone, Thomas M. Harsusi Lexicon and English-Harsusi Word-List. London, 1977. Introduction gives phonological notes on this Mehri dialect. Johnstone, Thomas M. Jibbali lexicon. New York, 1981. Provides more comprehensive grammatical information on this language titan was available in 1975. Johnstone, Thomas M. Mehri Lexicon and English-Mchri Word-List. London, 1987. Includes a long grammatical introduction and index of English definitions in die Jibbali lexicon. Ricks, Stephan D. Lexicon of Inscriptional Qatabanian. Studia Pohl, no. 14. Rome, 1989. The only dictionary to date tiiat provides lexical coverage of a non-Sabaic Old South Arabian dialect. GENE GRAGG
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SOUTHEAST DEAD SEA PLAIN
SOUTHEAST DEAD SEA PLAIN. In the Hebrew Scriptures the plain to the southeast of the Dead Sea is often described as devastated and unlivable, the probable location of the destroyed Cities of the Plain (Gn. 19:25, 29; Dt. 29:22). From Hellenistic times through the medieval Islamic period, the remnant site of Zoar (Gn. 19:22; Byzantine Zoara; Lat. Segor; Ar., Zughar) was located there. Recent archaeological surveys and excavations have traced a long occupational history for the region, beginning with the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, with extensive and flourish ing cultures during tire Early Bronze, Nabatean-Roman, Byzantine, and Mamluk periods. The northern limit of the habitable region is opposite the tip of the Lisan peninsula, slightly to the north of Wadi Jarra, where a steep ridge of hills descends only 250 m from the shoreline. A semicircle of high limestone cliffs 50 km (31 mi.) to the south, at the entrance to the Arabah defines tire lower boundary. Between these limits, beginning at about —300 m mean sea level (m.s.l.), a series of ghors (valley floors), many with alluvial cones, are fed by perennial streams in wadis descending from the 1,200-meter-high mountains of the Jordanian plateau. Settlement has concen trated on the bordering hills or broad plains in and above the ghors. From north to south the major wadis are IbnHamid, Kerak (including the Wadi edh-Dhra' in its lower reaches), 'Isal, Numeira, Hasa, Feifa, and Khanazir. Unusual physical features have contributed to the lore and legend associated with this region. Salt-encrusted mud flats; rock-strewn plains; a desolate peninsula of sterile marl, clay, and thin layers of sulphur; constant mind-dulling, searing heat for most of the year, and an annual rainfall averaging 70 mm have led commentators to describe the region as a veritable hell, condemned by nature, and even by God (cf. the Hebrew prophets). Yet, during the winter months, with moderate temperatures and the wadis fed by the winter rains in the mountains above, it turns into a paradise—certainly a location pleasant enough to have allowed for major cultural occupation over lengthy periods. Knowledge of the area's occupational history has emerged only gradually. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ex plorers and geographers often described ruins such as Sheikh Issa, Qasr at-Tuba, and Tawahin es-Sukkar in the Safi area, but diey lacked chronological clues. A 1924 survey by William Foxwell Albright, Alexis Mallon, and M. G. Kyle was the first to date some of the sites, including the major site of Bab edh-Dhra', with reliable ceramic evidence. [See Bab edh-Dhra'; and the biographies of Albright and Mallon.] Subsequent visits to the area by F. M. Abel (1929), F. Frank (1932), and Nelson Glueck (1934) drew attention to addi tional sites on the Lisan, at Wadi es-Safi, and near Feifa. [See the biographies of Abel and Glueck] Since 1973, more intensive and extensive surveys have built up an impressive list of sites. Walter Rast and R. Thomas Schaub (1973) have highlighted die Early Bronze Age and G. R. D. King (1982) c
the Byzantine and later periods. Others have focused on subregions, such as David McCreery (1977), Vincent Clark (1977), and Mark McConaughy (1977) on the Sahl edhDhra' region; Siegfried Mittmann (1979) and Linda Jacobs (1981) on Wadi Isal; Frank Koucky (1983) on the Ghor enNumeira; Udo Worschech (1983-1986) on the Ard el-Kerak (mostly on the slopes to the east, but sites to the north and east of edh-Dhra' in the Ghor were included); and Burton MacDonald (1985-1986) on the Southern Ghors, south of Safi. Excavated sites include Bab edh-Dhra' (Lapp, 1 9 6 5 1967); Bab edh-Dhra' and Numeira (Expedition to the Southeast Dead Sea Plain [EDSP], 1975-1983); Feifa and Khanazir (EDSP, 1989-1990); Waidha, near Dhra' (Koerber, 1992); the Chalcolithic cemetery at Bab edh-Dhra' (Clark, 1977); Neolithic Dhra' (Bennett, 1979) and 'Ain Abata (Politis, 1989-1992). [See Dhra'.] Paul W. Lapp's excavations (see above) and diose of the EDSP have made the Early Bronze Age the best-known pe riod in the Ghor. Two towns, Bab edh-Dhra' and Numeira, were excavated over four seasons. Bab edh-Dhra' grew from an open village at the end of the fourth millennium to a 1 2 acre town with massive fortifications, an impressive sanc tuary, and well-defined industrial and domestic areas. After a desttuction in EB III it was again settled as a sprawling village in EB IV. The walled town of Numeira, which has many features in common with Bab edh-Dhra', also flour ished in EB III. In die large cemetery at Bab edh-Dhra' changing burial practices (multichambered shaft tombs, large burial houses, and single stone-lined shaft tombs) cor respond to the major phases of the Early Bronze Age. Other cemeteries are at Feifa and Safi, where Late Chalcolithic/EB I cist tombs are the basic type; the Khanazir cemetery has stone-lined E B IV shaft tombs marked on the surface by rectangular structures. [See Burial Techniques.] Other periods explored by soundings and excavations are the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Iron II, and Byzantine. Dhra' is a pit-dwelling and flint factory site in the Sahl edh-Dhra' belonging to Pottery Neolithic (PN) A. The EDSP also ex posed similar PNA levels during its 1989 excavations in the plateau area east of Tell Feifa. In the Sahl edh-Dhra', sev enteen tombs, constructed of concentric stone circles with monolithic stones in the center, were excavated and assigned to the Early Chalcolithic period. Soundings at Feifa by the EDSP in 1989-1990 revealed a walled town built in Iron II over E B I tombs. Five seasons of work at die Byzantine site of Deir 'Ain Abata, north of Safi, revealed an impressive reservoir with a water catchment and distribution system and a three-apse basilica built next to a cave. Three mosaic pavements were uncovered that include Greek inscriptions, one of which mentions Lot (Politis, 1993). Although surveys have listed more than two hundred sites, the majority of sites are small flint or sherd scatters. If the list is restricted to sites with excavated occupational levels
SOUTHEAST DEAD SEA PLAIN or visible architectural remains, it is possible to define basic elements in the settlement patterns. Large to medium Mamluk occupational sites are most numerous (ten), followed by Early Bronze (five), Byzantine (five), Chalcolithic (four), Nabatean (four), Roman (two), Iron II (two), and PNA (two). The sites are consistently associated with the major wadis. During the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages, set tlement appears to have been confined to the north (Wadis Kerak and Numeira), although there are also large ceme teries in the south at Safi (Wadi el-Hasa), Feifa, and Khanazir. In the Iron Age, settlements are found only in the south (Khanazir, Feifa, and possibly Safi). Nabatean-Roman and Byzantine sites are found associated with the Wadis Kerak, Hasa, Numeira, and Feifa. Mamluk sites are found in all of those wadis, as well as in Wadi Ibn-Hamid and 'Isal in the north. One of the largest later sites is the Late Roman site of Umm et-Tawabin. It is a walled site (2.5 Ion [1.5 mi.] in circumference) built on a high ledge on the south bank of Wadi el-Hasa. A large tower at the southeast corner and many structures, large and small, are visible within the en closure wall. Later periods represented include Byzantine to Mamluk. The need to locate near perennial streams in order to have access to water for irrigating fields and running mills is ob vious. Evidence from EB cultures shows that irrigation was extensively practiced then, as it has been in all of the periods in which the Ghor flourished. Other water-management practices include aqueducts (either Byzantine or Islamic), remnants of which are found in Wadis Khanazir and Kerak, and large reservoirs (Byzantine) in the Safi area and Wadi Isal (Byzantine) and even on the Lisan peninsula (Islamic). [See Aqueducts; Reservoirs.] Another reason for locating towns and villages near wadis was to guard the access routes to the highlands. Ottoman Turkish police posts and modern military emplacements follow the same reasoning. Attempts to record ancient trade routes have been most successful in the north: Linda Jacobs has traced a road down Wadi Isal and across the Lisan whose period of use is either Roman or Byzantine; Mittmann argues that the same track was used in the Iron Age; and Worschech has traced remnants of road systems in Wadi Kerak. The walled ruins of er-Rishi (one is Early Bronze and a second is Nabatean), located where Wadi Kerak enters the Sahl edh-Dhra', suggest the use of this route during those periods. One striking feature of the settlements, first noted by Al bright, is the lack of true tells. E B , Iron II, and Nabatean sites are usually surface ruins widi no later occupations. Later settlements appear to have been built on earlier sites only since Byzantine times. Recent geological studies offer one explanation of these changing settlement patterns: anal ysis of measurements taken over the last 150 years shows a dependence of the Dead Sea levels on rainfall patterns in
63
the mountains to the east and west. Further studies drawing on geological and archaeological evidence, together with an cient literature and maps, provide convincing arguments for major past fluctuations of the Dead Sea. The current low level of —400 m m.s.l., which has produced a dry south basin and a ford across the Lisan from west to east, has occurred many times in the past. There have also been several high points within the last three thousand years, during which the level of the sea rose 25-30 m, with one estimate of a rise of 70 m to a level of - 3 3 0 m during the first cenmry B C E . The most recent appraisal is for a Dead Sea level of - 2 9 5 m m.s.l. from the mid-fourth to mid-third millennia. These proposed fluctuating levels of the Dead Sea correlate well with the known elevations of archeological sites during his torical times. The primary early sites (Neolithic, Chalcol ithic, and Early Bronze) are all above —300 m m.s.l. The latest Mamluk sites range in elevation from - 2 9 0 to —366 m, with most in the —320 to —360 m range. Attempts to identify archaeological sites with place names mentioned in literary sources have met with varying degrees of success. The biblical Cities of the Plain (Gn. 13:12, 19:29), Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Seboiim, andZoar (Gn. 14:2, 8) have been located in the soutii by most commen tators, although some have argued for a location north of the Dead Sea. Others have tried to place the ruins of these cities below the southern basin of the Dead Sea (generally rejected today). Recently, several efforts have linked the cit ies with the EB ruins at Bab edh-Dhra' and Numeira. Others continue to stress the mythical, ahistorical quality of the an cient traditions. In oracles about Moab, Zoar is mentioned in connection with the ascent of Luhith, the road to Horonaim and the waters of Nimrin (7s. 1 5 - 1 6 ; Jer. 48). [See Moab.] The first two have been placed at die head of Wadi 'Isal by Mittmann, and Nimrin has been identified by some with Wadi Numeira. Zoar is the most frequently mentioned site in die litera ture. Josephus lists it among die cities of Moab (Antiq. 13.15.4; 14.1.4) and Ptolemy as a town in Arabia Pettea. Under Diocletian it is part of the southern region (Palaestina Tertia). Zoora is mentioned frequently in the Onomasticon of Eusebius and on the Madaba map it is shown as a threetowered fort under the name of Balak (Septuagint) and Zoora. [See Madaba.] A Hebrew document from the Cairo geniza mentions Zoar. T o die Crusaders the place was known as Segor (Vulgate) and the Place of Palms (Palmaria). During the Middle Ages, Arab geographers describe the prosperity of Sugar or (Zughar). As a major commercial center it exported dates, indigo, sugar, and balm. Although some have identified the Byzantine Zoara with the mound of Sheikh Issa, recent surveys have interpreted this site as dominantiy Mamluk. It seems likely that Zoar was located in different areas of the Safi region throughout its history, with placement probably influenced by the changing shoreline of the Dead Sea and erosional patterns
64
SOUTHERN GHORS AND NORTHEAST 'ARABAH
in Wadi el-Hasa. Umm et-Tawabin is the most likely iden tification for Zoar of the Nabatean-Roman period, and Qasr et-Tuba may offer a remnant of the Byzantine Zoar. The monastic complex at 'Ain Abata with the Lot inscription may be identified with the building on the Madaba map with the notation "Agios L(ot)." Tawahin es-Sukkar, and per haps the mound of Sheikh Issa, represents the flourishing Zughar of the Mamluk period. Other sites mentioned in the literature include Naarsafari, a Roman fort, probably Buleida near Wadi Kerak, and Beth Nimrin, a road station, probably the Rujm en-Numeira. [See also Hasa, Wadi el-; Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Madaba Mosaic Map. Jerusalem, 1954. Color reproductions of the map with comments and bibliography on the place names. See plates 3 and 4 for the southeast Dead Sea region. Bennett, Crystal-M. "Soundings at Dhra', Jordan." Levant 1 2 (1980): 30-39.
King, G. R. D., et al. "Survey of Byzantine and Islamic Sites in Jordan: Third Season Preliminary Report (1982), the Southern Ghor." An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 31 (1987): 439-459. Le Strange, Guy, trans. Palestine under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1 $00 (1890). Beirut, 1965. See pages 286-292 for translated passages of references to Zughar and the cities of Lot. MacDonald, Burton, The Southern Ghors and Northeast. 'Arabah Ar chaeological Survey. Sheffield Archaeological Monographs, 5. Shef field, 1992. Results of the most recent survey in the Safi, Feifa, and Khanazir areas. Rast, Walter E., and R. Thomas Schaub, eds. The Southeastern Dead Sea Plain Expedition: An Interim Report of the 1977 Season. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 46. Cambridge, Mass., 1981. The articles by Ortner, Donahue, Harlan, McCreery, Adovasio and Andrews, and Finnegan provide necessary background for interpreting the Bronze Age settlement patterns. Schaub, R. Thomas, and Walter E. Rast. Bab edh-Dhrd': Excavations in the Cemetery Directed by Paul W. Lapp, 1965-67. Reports of the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain, Jordan, vol. 1. Winona Lake, Ind., 1989. Final report of Lapp's cemetery excavations. Includes analyt ical and synthetic studies of all the artifacts and interpretation of the cultural and historical significance of the cemetery; a summary of previous work in the southeast Dead Sea region (chap. 1 ) ; and a complete bibliography on the Early Bronze Age of the Southeast Dead Sea Plain. Secondary Sources Gubser, Peter. Politics and Change in Al-Karak, Jordan. London, 1973. Sociopolitical study of the Kerak district (including the Southern Ghors) focused on the fabric and dynamics of traditional and con temporary political society. Offers interesting insights for under standing the relationship between settlements in the highlands and the Lower Ghors. Harland, J. Penrose. "Sodom and Gomorrah. Part I. The Location of the Cities of the Plain" and "Part II. The Destruction of the Cities of the Plain." In Biblical Archaeologist Reader, edited by G. Ernest Wright and David Noel Freedman, pp. 4 1 - 7 5 . Garden City, N.Y.,
1961. Outdated on the archaeological and geological sections but helpful in bringing together summaries and many of the texts of ancient writers on the Dead Sea and the Sodom tradition. Howard, David M., Jr. "Sodom and Gomorrah Revisited." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 27 (1984): 385-400. Offers a con servative interpretation of the biblical texts, with summaries of ref erences to Zoar in the literature. The assessment of archaeological evidence needs to be supplemented with the article by Rast (below). Khouri, Rami G. The Antiquities of the Jordan Rift Valley. Amman, 1988. Popular, detailed, readable summary of the most recent archaeolog ical surveys in the Southern Ghors, based on published accounts, interviews with the archaeologists, and extensive trips to die area. Krieger, Barbara. Living Waters: Myth, History, and Politics of the Dead Sea. New York, 1988. Balanced account of ancient stories, current theories, present exploitation, and future possibilities of the Dead Sea region. Politis, Konstantinos D. '"Ain 'Abata." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1 , pp. 336-338. Je rusalem and New York, 1993. Rast, Walter E. "Bab edh-Dhra and the Origin of the Sodom Saga." In Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Memory of D. Glenn Rose, edited by Leo G. Perdue et al., pp. 1 8 5 - 2 0 1 . Atlanta, 1987. Examines the Sodom tradition, integrating research on its or igins with recent archaeological evidence. Excellent bibliography. Schaub, R. Thomas. "Bab edh-Dhra'." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, pp. 1 3 0 - 1 3 6 . Je rusalem and New York, 1993. Convenient, up-to-date summary of the archaeological results in the site and cemetery. R. T H O M A S S C H A U B
SOUTHERN
GHORS AND NORTHEAST
'ARABAH. Jordan's southern Ghors and northeast 'Ara bah are part of the Great African Rift Valley that extends from Turkey in the north to Mozambique in the soutii. The southern Ghors includes die area along the east side of the Dead Sea, from Wadi Ibn Hammad, at the northern edge of the Lisan Peninsula, to Ghor Khuneizir, where there is a major east-west escarpment. (Ghors refers to the land areas or alluvial fans at the mouths of wadis entering die Rift Val ley from the east.) Wadi 'Arabah extends from this point to 'Aqaba on die Red Sea. Elevations in the southern Ghors range from about 390 to about 300 m below sea level in a north-south direction. The escarpment is characterized by a very sharp rise in elevation, from 300 to 200 m below sea level, over a very short distance. The terrain at die soutiiern end of the escarpment is heavily eroded and dissected. In the 'Arabah, elevations rise toward the south to above sea level and then drop down to the Red Sea. The terrain to the east and west of the southern Ghors and northeast 'Arabah rises to more than 1,000 m above sea level. Burton MacDonald carried out extensive archaeological work, namely, the Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Archaeological Survey ( S G N A S ) , in a portion of the abovedescribed territory in 1985-1986. He published a final report in 1992 (see below). S G N A S surveyed 240 sites, from just north of es-Safi southward to Wadi Fidan. The distance sur-
SOUTHERN GHORS AND NORTHEAST ARABAH veyed from north-south is about 40 km (25 mi.); tire width is considerably less because of the international border to the west and an increasingly rugged terrain to the east. The Early Bronze Age sites of Bab edh-Dhra' and Numeira, as well as the Pottery Neolithic-EB site of Dhra are located in the Southern Ghors. However, they are located to the north of the S G N A S survey territory. [See Bab edh-Dhra'; Dhra'.] The work of S G N A S indicates that the earliest occupa tional evidence (recovered at only one site) is to be attrib uted to the Lower/Middle Paleolithic period. Middle Pale olithic sites are also few in number and limited in site. Sites from both periods are restricted to the southern segment of the territory, which is understandable, given the high levels of Lake Lisan during the Paleolithic periods. S G N A S found neither Upper Paleolithic nor Epipaleolithic sites in the sur vey territory. Both Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic sites are present. The Chalcolithic period is represented by both lithics and ceramics. Occupation appears to intensify during the Chalcolithic/EB period. Not only is there evidence of occupation throughout the territory, but the number of sites increases as well. It is possible that copper mining and smelt ing began in the area at this time. The Early Bronze is also represented by both lithics and ceramics throughout the area. These artifacts are mostly found in association with human skeletal remains, however. There are EB I cemeteries at both es-Safi and Feifa and E B IV cemeteries in the central segment of the area in particular. S G N A S did not identify either Middle Bronze or Late Bronze occupational evidence. An Iron I presence is associated especially with mining and smelting sites in the southern extremity. The number of sherds and sites indicates increased occupation and activity in the region during Iron II. Natural resources, such as cop per-manganese ores, were probably extensively exploited at this time. Although S G N A S found Hellenistic sherds only in the central segment, there are major Late HellenisticEarly Roman and/or Nabatean sites in the area. There is evidence of copper mining and smelting during the firstfourth centuries C E in the region, immediately south of the survey territory. Byzantine period sites are the most numer ous of any period sites. The entire area of the southern Ghors appears to have been fertile for growing and pro cessing sugar cane and indigo during the Early Islamic pe riod. There is ceramic evidence for occupation during die Late Islamic/Ottoman period. Moreover, there are eye-wit ness accounts of a village in the neighborhood of es-Safi during the nineteenth century. 1
Prior to the work done by S G N A S , William Foxwell Al bright (1924) made soundings at Khirbet Sheikh 'Isa, south west of modern es-Safi. In addition, Fritz Frank (1934), Nel son Glueck (1934), Walter E . Rast and R. Thomas Schaub (1974), Thomas D . Raikes (1980,1985), and G. R. D. King (1987, 1989) surveyed parts of die S G N A S territory. Since 1986 archaeologists, primarily under the auspices of the
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American Schools of Oriental Research and the British In stitute at Amman for Archaeology and History, have exca vated a number of the S G N A S sites. Their results have tended to support the findings of S G N A S . Between 1988 and 1992, Konstantinos D. Politis (1989, 1990) excavated Deir 'Ain 'Abata, a Byzantine monastery/ church complex located halfway up a high mountain north of the Wadi el-Hasa gorge. [See Hasa, Wadi el-.] Excava tions uncovered a seven-arched reservoir, a church with mo saics and inscriptions, and an associated cave. The site could be die Sanctuary of St. Lot depicted on the Madaba map (see Gn. 19:30). The excavator dates the main occupation of the site from the fourth to the beginning of the seventh century C E . Rast and Schaub excavated at Feifa and Khirbet Khuneizir in 1989-1990. Excavated materials at Feifa include Pottery Neolithic occupation levels; E B IA (or slightly ear lier) and E B IB tombs; and a fortress consisting of a tower surrounded (perhaps a fortress) by a wall dating to the eighth century B C E . The latter structure is built over EB I tombs. The structures excavated at Khirbet Khuneizir are EB IV tombs. Russell B. Adams (1991) mapped tire visible architectural remains and excavated four sites in Wadi Fidan between 1989 and 1992. His work uncovered Pre-pottery Neolithic B, Late Chalcolithic, and E B I remains. The Late Chalcol ithic and EB I remains appear to be associated with metal lurgy. Andreas Plauptmann and Gerd Weisgerber (1992) of the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Bochum, Germany, investi gated ore exploitation and metal production in Wadi Fidan and in die territory immediately to the south, especially in Wadi Feinan. [See Feinan.] [See also Southeast Dead Sea Plain.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Russell B. "The Wadi Fidan Project, Jordan, 1989." levant 23 (1991): 1 8 1 - 1 8 3 . An investigation of several Neolitliic-Chalcolithic sites. Albright, William Foxwell. "The Archaeological Results of an Expe dition to Moab and die Dead Sea." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 14 (1924): 2 - 1 2 . A brief account of Al bright's work at Khirbet Sheikh 'Isa. Frank, Fritz. "Aus der 'Araba I: Reiseberichte." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 57 (1934): 191-280. Ought to be compared with Nelson Glueck's explorations in the area. Glueck, Nelson, Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 2. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1 5 . New Haven, 1934. Im portant for early exploration of the area. Hauptmann, Andreas, and Gerd Weisgerber. "Periods of Ore Exploi tation and Metal Production in the Area of Feinan, Wadi 'Arabah, Jordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, pp. 61-66. Amman, 1992. Breaks new ground for mining-archaeological studies in Jordan. King, G. R. D., et al. "Survey of Byzantine and Islamic Sites in Jordan:
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SOUTHERN SAMARIA, SURVEY OF
Third Season Preliminary Report (1982), the Southern Ghor." An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 31 (1987): 439~459King, G. R. D., et al. "Survey of Byzantine and Islamic Sites in Jordan: Third Preliminary Report (1982), the Wadi 'Arabah (Part 2 ) . " An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 (1989): 1 9 9 - 2 1 5 . King's interests relate to the Byzantine and Islamic periods. MacDonald, Burton. The Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Ar chaeological Survey. Sheffield Archaeological Monographs, 5. Shef field, 1992. The most up-to-date study of the area's archaeological remains. Politis, Konstantinos D. "Excavations at Deir 'Ain 'Abata, 1988." An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 (1989): 227-233. The site could be the Byzantine sanctuary of St. Lot. Politis, Konstantinos D. "Excavations at Deir 'Ain 'Abata, 1990." An nual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 34 (1990): 377-388. Raikes, Thomas D. "Notes on Some Neolithic and Later Sites in the Wadi Araba and the Dead Sea Valley." levant 12 (1980): 40-60. Raikes, Thomas D. "The Character of the Wadi Araba." In Studies in the History and Archaeology ofJordan, vol. 2, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 9 5 - 1 0 1 . Amman, 1985. Work carried out to a large extent in conjunction with the building of the modern highway from es-Safi to 'Aqaba. Rast, Walter E., and R. Thomas Schaub. "Survey of the Southeastern Plain of the Dead Sea, 1973." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities of Jordan 19 (1974): 5-53. Survey followed upon the work of Paul Lapp at Bab edh-Dhra'. BURTON
MACDONALD
SOUTHERN SAMARIA, SURVEY OF. The area referred to in the Bible as the land of Ephraim is today designated the southern Samarian hills. Situated at the cen ter of the central hill country of western Palestine, between Ramallah in the south and Shechem in the north, and be tween the outermost permanent settlements of the desert fringe in the east to Israel's pre-1967 border in the west, the region is characterized by a rugged topography and gener ally harsh settlement conditions. About 1,050 sq km (651 sq. mi.) of the southern Samarian hills were surveyed between 1980 and 1987 by a team di rected by Israel Finkelstein on behalf of the Department of the Land of Israel Studies at Bar-Ilan University, with the assistance of the Archaeological Survey of Israel and the ar chaeology staff officer for Judea and Samaria. Some sites in the region had already been surveyed as part of the emer gency survey conducted in 1967-1968 and by a team from the American Shechem Expedition, but it was not until the 19 80-1987 survey that the region's settlement history and the environmental conditions that influenced it were inves tigated. About 85 percent of the area under investigation was fully tracked on foot. Up to 98 percent of previously mapped ruins and 92 percent of the 1 1 3 Arab villages in the area were surveyed. Some 550 settlements were recorded and examined, about 350 of them for the first time. Only a few sites were larger than 4-5 acres. The region was divided into six topographical units based on the geographic features and economic resources of each.
1. Eastern desert fringe. Within the long, narrow strip of desert fringe in the east are tracts of land suitable for grain cultivation as well as pastoralism, especially sheep raising. [See Sheep and Goats.] 2. Northern central range. Small interior valleys character ize the northern central range, which had the best settlement conditions in the region. Its economy was based on grain cultivation, especially in the valleys, and, in the eastern part, on grazing. [See Cereals.] 3. Southern central range. The area known as the southern central range consists of the Bethel plateau. Subsistence was based on an equal division between dry farming and horti culture. 4. Northern slopes. The northern slopes of the western hill country are characterized by moderate ridges and broad wa dis but no permanent water sources. Land use there was balanced between grain cultivation and horticulture. 5. Southern slopes. Also part of the western hill country, the southern slopes consist of long spurs and deep wadis. Their harsh topography and rugged lithology are not natu rally suited to human habitation, but terracing the land made it suitable for horticulture. 6. Foothills. Parts of the foothills are rocky, but the area generally has a relatively moderate terrain. Its economy was based on grain crops and grazing in the rocky areas. The most distinctive element of the setdement history of southern Samaria is oscillation: periods of prosperity and settlement expansion alternating with intervals of settlement decline. Periods of prosperity were characterized by expan sion into the western slopes, intensive production of oil and wine, and the emergence of settlement and political com plexity. Periods of decline were characterized by settlement withdrawal to the eastern, more fertile part of the region and a shift, by at least part of the population, to the pastoral side of the sedentary-pastoral continuum. These cylical pro cesses are especially evident in sites dating to the third and second millennia B C E .
Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages. Only a few Chalcolhhic sites were found. One of them, the Bidya cave, is located in the northwestern part of the region. The first wave of set tlement took place in the Early Bronze Age: forty sites from this period, constituting an estimated 60 acres of develop ment, were examined. Again, these settlements were rather small; only one, Ai, was a large fortified city. [See AL] The environment greatly influenced the settlement pattern of this period. Because most of the land of Ephraim was covered with forests, settlers were directed away from the interior valleys of the central range and from the western slopes and toward outlying areas of the central range, the desert fringe, and the footiiills. Only six EB IV settlements, covering about 25 built-up acres, were surveyed. The only important finds from this period were cemeteries, most located along the desert fringe and on the central range. The discovery of main burial
SOUTHERN SAMARIA, SURVEY OF grounds around 'Ain es-Samiyeh and the central site of Dhahr Mirzbaneh indicates diat much of the population subsisted on a seasonal pastoralism that took them to the eastern desert fringe in winter and the central range in sum mer. [See 'Ain es-Samiyeh; Burial Sites; Pastoral Nomad ism.] The number of settlements decreased substantially in Middle Bronze I, and the inhabitants continued to use die shaft tombs of the previous period. This was followed, how ever, by an impressive wave of settlement in M B II—III: eighty-six sites were recorded in a built-up area of more than 60 acres. Settlements were concentrated in every area except tire soutiiern slopes and the footiiills. The concentration of sites on the northern slopes indicates that settlement was not adversely affected by the lack of a permanent water source or the necessity of clearing forests. Small, unfortified sites seem to have been established throughout southern Samaria in M B II; many were subsequentiy abandoned in M B III, but some—Bethel, Khirbet el-Marjameh, Shiloh, Sheikh Abu Zarad (biblical Tappuah), and Khirbet el-'Urma (bib lical 'Amman)—became large, fortified settlements. E B I I III seasonal sites provide evidence of a continuing pastoral component in the economy. [See Shiloh; Bethel.] The fortified E B in centers constituted virtually the entire settlement pattern in soutiiern Samaria during the Late Bronze Age, when the region experienced a dramatic pop ulation decrease. That this was a period of settlement crisis is further demonstrated by the results of excavations at Shi loh, which show tiiat most of the large E B III sites shrank in size during the Late Bronze. The entire area of development in this period was 20 acres, and the population subsisted primarily on pastoralism. Iron and Persian Periods. In sharp contrast to the Late Bronze Age, southern Samaria experienced a new wave of settlement at the beginning of the Iron Age (c. 1200 B C E ) . Of the 1 1 5 Iron I sites recorded, 26 were classified as large villages (one or more acres), 32 as small villages (slightly less than an acre), and the remaining 57 as isolated structures or seasonal sites. The entire area of development was about 95 acres. At die beginning of Iron I, settlement was concen trated along the desert fringe, around die small valleys of the northern central range, on the Bethel plateau, and in die northern part of the western slopes, an indication tiiat the economy was based on grain cultivation and animal grazing; in the later phase of Iron I, however, settlement moved into the horticultural niches of the western slopes. This westward expansion, coupled with a rise in horticul tural specialization, is believed to have contributed to the development of a more complex society in Iron II. The region's greatest increase in settlement to that time took place during Iron II: 190 sites—most of them occupied in the eighth century BCE—were recorded. Fifteen were me dium-sized (2.5 or more acres), and the rest were small vil lages. More than 300 acres were built up, and the entire
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region was reclaimed for cultivation. For the first time in the region's history, settlement tilted toward its western part. Several sites with large concentrations of Iron II olive presses were discovered on the western slopes and in the foothills, evidence perhaps that the Israelite government sponsored an oil and wine industry from produce grown in the region's orchards. [See Olives.] Only on the Bethel plateau did set tlement decrease, primarily because of political upheavals that took place near there, on the border separating the king doms of Judah and Israel. A sharp decrease in the number of settlements was evident in the Persian period, when occupants of the region were dispersed as a result of both the destruction of the ldngdom of Israel in 722 B C E and die conquest of Judah in 586 B C E . Ninety settlements from this period were recorded in a builtup area of about 65 acres. The bulk of settlement activity shifted west, probably as a result of the development on the coastal plain. Hellenistic through Ottoman Periods. Settlement in the Hellenistic period was characterized by renewed pros perity, a trend that would continue for several centuries. More than two hundred Hellenistic and Roman sites were recorded within an area of about 260 acres. Of the Roman sites, which were scattered across the entire region, fortyfive were classified as large (2.5 acres or more). Settlement activity in the southern parts of the region increased dra matically in the Hellenistic-Roman periods, probably be cause of their proximity to Jerusalem. As in northern Samaria, settlement in the land of Ephraim peaked during the Byzantine period, when more than 65 percent of the population lived in its western area. About 260 sites were recorded widiin a built-up area of more than 300 ha (750 acres). Settlement around Shechem declined, however, probably as a result of the political suppression of the Samaritans. A prominent settlement feature in the southwestern part of the region was a concentration of mon asteries, where oil and wine probably were produced. [See Monasteries.] Settlement oscillations continued in the Islamic periods: 174 sites were occupied in the Byzantine/Early Umayyad period, whereas only fifty-five were inhabited in the Umay yad/'Abbasid period. Prosperity was renewed in the Crusader/Ayyubid and in the Mamluk periods (163 and 174 sites, respectively). Survey findings indicate that more sites were occupied in the Early Ottoman period dian in recent generations. [See also Northern Samaria, Survey of; Samaria; and Sa maritans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, Edward F. Shechem II: Portrait of a Hill Country Vale. At lanta, 1991. Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, 1988.
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SPECTROSCOPY
Finkelstein, Israel. "The Land of Ephraim Survey, 1980-1987: Prelim plasma optical emission spectrometry (abbreviated vari inary Report." Tel Aviv 1 5 - 1 6 (1988—1989): 1 1 7 - 1 8 3 . ously as ICPOES, ICPAES, ICPES, and ICPS) was intro Finkelstein, Israel. "The Emergence of the Monarchy in Israel: The duced for elemental analysis of archaeological materials, in Environmental and Socio-Economic Aspects." Journal for the Study cluding pottery, metals, and glass. In ICPOES, the atoms in of ike Old Testament 44 (1989): 43-74. the sample are excited in a plasma at a temperature of 6000Finkelstein, Israel. "The Central Hill Country in the Intermediate Bronze Age." Israel Exploration Journal 41.1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 19-45. 9000 degrees K . The multielement capability, absence of Finkelstein, Israel, and Ram Gophna. "Settlement, Demographic, and matrix effects, enhanced limits of detections and precision, Economic Patterns in the Highlands of Palestine in the Chalcolithic ease of operation, and large sample throughput make it an and Early Bronze Periods and the Beginning of Urbanism." Bulletin attractive alternative to NAA. Results can be enhanced by of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 289 (1993): 1 - 2 2 . directing the ions formed in the plasma into a quadrupole Finkelstein, Israel. "The Emergence of Israel: A Phase in the Cyclic mass spectrometer (inductively-coupled plasma mass spec History of Canaan in the Third and Second Millennia B C E . " In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early trometry, abbreviated I C P - M S ) . Samples need to be intro Israel, edited by Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na'aman, pp. 1 5 0 - 1 7 8 . duced in solution form, which may be tedious and costly in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., 1994. comparison to NAA. This problem can be alleviated by us Finkelstein, ]. Cohen. "Pottery Distribution, Settlement Patterns, and ing a N d - Y A G laser coupled to the I C P - M S , whereby di Demographic Oscillations in Southern Samaria in the Islamic Peri rect solids analysis can be performed on discrete parts of the ods." Master's thesis, Hebrew University, 1991. Kochavi, Moshe, sd.Judea, Samaria, andthe Golan: Archaeological Sur sample (less than 20 p.m). A problem that remains to be vey, 1967-1968 (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1972. addressed is the compatibility of results derived by ICPOES LESLIE WATKINS
Based on material submitted by Israel Finkelstein
SPECTROSCOPY. Light quanta produced by the ex citation of ions and atoms can be measured by chemical (elemental) analysis, or spectroscopy. This polychromatic radiation consists of wavelengths specific to the emitting el ement. The emitted light is dispersed and the intensities of emission at the relevant wavelengths are measured. The in tensity of emission is directiy proportional to the concentra tion of the element concerned. The measurements are pre sented as a printout of elemental abundances in the sample. The goal of the analysis is to ascertain the elemental com position of the sample, which, depending on the technique employed and the material sampled, may establish its prov enance. The most common technique employed in the 1960s and 1970s for analyzing archaeological materials was optical emission spectroscopy (OES). In OES, the atoms are ex cited by means of an electric discharge between two carbon electrodes. The success of the analysis depended on the type of material sampled. An analysis of Near Eastern obsidian tools, for example, clearly distinguished sources within the central and eastern Mediterranean basin (from Sardinia to Lake Van). OES successfully analyzed metal artifacts to de termine alloying techniques (e.g., arsenical copper vs. tin copper vs. pure copper). Ceramic provenance studies em ploying OES produced more positive, but less successful, results than those using the techniques described below. In die early 1980s, most laboratories replaced OES as an analytical tool with atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), and neutron activation analysis (NAA), all of which deliver a higher level of accuracy and precision than OES. In the late 1980s, inductively coupled
and I C P - M S with the huge NAA databank that already ex ists. Initial analyses suggest that the results obtained by I C POES are compatible with those by NAA, but only a rela tively small number of elements can be accurately determined by each method. [See also Analytical Techniques; Neutron Activation Analysis; and X-Ray Diffraction Analysis.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Hart, F. A., and S. J. Adams. "The Chemical Analysis of RomanoBritish Pottery from the Alice Holt Forest, Hampshire, by Means of Inductively-Coupled Plasma Emission Spectrometry." Archaeometry 25 (1983): 1 7 9 - 1 8 5 . Describes the method and procedure of IC POES. Hatcher, H., M. S. Tite, and J. N. Walsh. "A Comparison of Induc tively-Coupled Plasma Emission Spectroscopy and Atomic Absorp tion Spectrometry Analysis on Standard Reference Silicate Materials and Ceramics." Archaeometry 37 (1995): 83-94. Jones, Richard E. Greek and Cypriot Pottery: A Review of Scientific Stud ies. Atliens, 1986. Review of procedures and results of analyses on Greek and Cypriot pottery from Aegean and Levantine sites (preICPOES). Porat, Naomi, et al. "Correlation between Petrography, NAA, and ICP Analyses: Application to Early Bronze Egyptian Pottery from Ca naan." Geoarchaeology 6 (1991): 1 3 3 - 1 4 9 . Determination that some of the Egyptianlike pottery samples from the southern Palestinian sites of 'Ein-Besor and Tel 'Erani were imported from Egypt while others were manufactured locally, implying that Egyptian potters were resident in southern Canaan. Also addresses the question of the comparability of ICPOES and NAA. SAMUEL R . WOLFF
SPEISER, EPHRAIM AVIGDOR (1902-1965), archaeologist, Assyriologist, and biblical scholar. Speiser was born in Skalat, Poland (now tire Ukraine), and was a graduate of the College of Lemberg (now Lvov). He emi grated to the United States in 1920 and received his M.A.
STABLES degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1923 and his Ph.D. from Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learn ing in 1924. In 1926 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellow ship, which enabled him to spend two years in die Near East. The following year, he was appointed Annual Professor at the American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad. Upon his return to the United States, Speiser taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became a full profes sor in 1 9 3 1 , and University Professor in 1963. From 1947 until his death, he chaired Penn's Department of Oriental Studies. He also served as the editor of the Journal of the American Oriental Society and of the Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Speiser's early research was in the field of Semitic philol ogy and biblical text criticism. His prolific scholarly output, however, which includes seven books and more than 150 articles, attests to his broad interest in all aspects of the an cient civilizations of Western Asia: language, literature, his tory, religion, law, and archaeology. The leitmotif running through his work is the quest to recover Human civilization. In collaboration with Edward Chiera, Speiser studied the Nuzi tablets and discovered the Hurrians as an ethnic factor in the history of the ancient Near East. His efforts to un derstand Hurrian texts culminated in his pioneering work, Introduction to Hurrian (1941). Speiser's early archaeological activities focused on sites he hoped would reveal the ethnic composition and cultural de velopment of prehistoric northern Mesopotamia and in that way provide information about the Hurrians. During two years of survey work in the Kurdish and Turkoman areas of modern Iraq, Speiser conducted preliminary excavations at Tepe Gawra (1927); in 1930 he began excavating Tell Billah, a few miles east of it. In 1931 he continued excava tions at Tepe Gawra, under the joint auspices of the Uni versity of Pennsylvania, the American Schools of Oriental Research, and Dropsie College. The work continued for five seasons, through 1938. Speiser also participated in the ex cavations at Khafajeh, in central Iraq, from 1936 to 1938. [See Khafajeh.] During World War II, as a member of the Office of Stra tegic Services, Speiser utilized his intimate knowledge of Iraq to produce numerous reports for the government per taining to the modern Near East. After the war, he published The United States and the Near East, which describes the region's historical background and illuminates the major ethnic and cultural factors impacting on the area. In the last decades of his life, Speiser again turned to bib lical scholarship. He served on the committee preparing a new Torah translation for the Jewish Publication Society. He also wrote the Genesis volume (1964) for the Anchor Bible Series, in which he attempted to demonstrate a Hur rian impact on the sociolegal customs of the biblical patri archs. He also served as editor of the first volume of the
69
prestigious series World History of the Jewish People, entitled At the Dawn of Civilization. [See also American School of Oriental Research in Bagh dad; Hurrians; and Nuzi.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. Introduction to Human. New Haven, 1941. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. The United States and the Near East. Cam bridge, Mass., 1950. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor, ed. At the Dawn of Civilization: A Back ground of Biblical History. The World History of Jewish People, First Series, vol. 1. New Brunswick, N.J., 1964. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. Genesis. Anchor Bible, 1, Garden City, N.Y., 1964. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. Oriental and Biblical Studies: Collected Writ ings. Edited by J. J. Finkelstein and M. Greenberg. Philadelphia, 1967. Contains a full bibliography of Speiser's writings (pp. 587— 603). BARKY L . EICHLEE
S T A B L E S . A building or building unit in which animals, especially horses, are housed and fed, a stable should, archaeologically, be characterized by the presence of elevated mangers, suitable floor surfaces, appropriate proportions (especially stall depths and widths, entrance widths and heights), strength of construction, and an open design fa cilitating cleaning and maximizing ventilation while avoiding drafts and direct sun. Appropriate storage space for barley, fodder, and bedding straw, together with facilities for cook ing gruel and mash, should be nearby. Essentials of Design. The constant and distinctive fea tures of stables grow out of requirements for housing and maintaining large animals—in particular, bringing expensive and highly strung stallions into the highest possible levels of training and conditioning (Wilson, 1969, p. 244;Kammenhuber, 1961). Such horses could no more be maintained in corrals (contra Pritchard, 1970, p. 274) than could the mod ern highly conditioned thoroughbred racer or Standardbred trotter (Wrensch, 1948, pp. 58-77), the nearest modern equivalent to the ancient chariot horse. [See Chariots.] From an architect's perspective, horses are "square pegs," with the design of any stable being dictated by horses' sizes and needs. Thus, the plan of a twenty-horse stable is little more than ten horse-sized modules (stalls) arranged along each side of a service corridor. The skeleton of such a plan, with stalls 1.81 X 3.27 m in size arrayed along a corridor 2.36 m wide, is given in figure ia, in which the dimensions are averaged from eight modern authorities from about 1850 to 1973 C E (Holladay, 1986, fig. 2). A comparison of this mandatory stall plan with the plans of a representative mod ern stable and with ancient Israelite, Judean, Syrian, and Urartian tripartite pillared buildings (cf. figure ia with fig-
70
STABLES
0
1
2
1
t
5m
Figure i . Ground plan and function, (a) Skeletal plan of a stable conforming to modern dimensional specifications (Holladay, 1986; figs. 2, 5 ) ; (b) towered stable 1 0 3 9 from stratum II at Tel Masos. Standings are reconstructed with bails. One method for removing an inner horse is illustrated. T h e standings nearest the doorway are too small for horses and must have served for donkeys (after Fritz and Kempinski, 1 9 8 3 ) . (Courtesy J. S. Holladay) STABLES.
ures 2a, c-g) leaves little room for debating the function of these ancient buildings (see also table 1 ) . Other than properly organized space (see table 1 ) , ele ments of good stable design (Holladay, 1986; 1992b) include a preference for "head-in" arrangements, with horses facing their handlers; some rear walkway space; proper mangers; wide and high doorways and high ceilings; some means of keeping horses on their ground; hardened standings (see be low) with proper drainage; strong construction; nearby stor age space; and cooking facilities (see above). Within the lim itations of archaeological recovery and the extent of excavation, most of the preceding can be demonstrated for most of the stables listed below. In military stables, bails, suspended poles, or boards (see figures 3; ia-b), were the standard method of keeping horses on their ground, saving space, and affording easier cleaning—and inspection—than permanent stall dividers, which "exist as a rule only where stalls and loose boxes join" (War Office, 1908, p. 55). Only a few instances of permanent stall dividers are known to date—for example, at Beersheba stable 270 (see figure 2f) and at Tel Masos stable 1039 (see figure ib). [See Beer sheba; Masos, Tel.] Standings were surfaced with hard, durable materials. In
the ancient world, cobbles were preferred (Xenophon, On Equitation, w . 3-5), and such surfaces are characteristic of Syro-Palestinian stables throughout history, including most domestic (donkey and cow) stables. Drainage of liquid waste (urine) was achieved by bedding the cobbles in an easily renewed substrate of ashy soil (Holladay, 1986, pp. 135-140; Aliaroni, 1973, p. 14; Itzhaki and Shinar, 1973, pp. 19-22; cf. Taylor, 1973, pp. 461-466) or sandy soil. Over the years this drainage should have produced elevated phos phorus (and potassium) levels directiy under the standings, but not under the center aisle (Holladay, 1986, pp. 1 5 4 155). Precisely such a pattern was observed at Bastam (see below), with phosphorus and potassium levels five to six times that of unaltered local soils found beneath the side aisles, together with insignificant elevations beneath the cen tral aisle (Kroll 1988, pp. 82-83; cf. Kroll, 1979, p. 1 1 1 ) . Strongly pillared construction provided secure means of tethering and allowed for a clerestory design to provide abundant indirect lighting and ventilation. Typically, the straw bedding would have been recycled, with the day-to day replenishment only of soiled material. A low allowance for troop stables is eight pounds of new straw per horse per day (Fitzwygram, 1901, p. 94)—29.2 tons per year for a
STABLES
71
bly originated in an area where chariotry was more common titan in the highlands of Canaan. Formal Stables. The horse first appears in the archae ological record of the ancient Levant in about 1675-1660 B C E (Bietak, 1991, p. 41; Weinstein, 1995), butthe first iden tifiable stables seem to be from Tell el-Amarna (see below). [See Amarna, Tell el-.] Many more large-scale stables are known for Iron Age Palestine than for any other region or time period in the ancient near East. This does not indicate a specialized type of "Israelite" public building (cf. Herzog, !973J P- 3°> d 1992, pp. 223-228 for them as uniquely Israelite "storehouses") but follows from the fact that ex tensive excavations have been carried out in Iron Age Pal estine, while the archaeology of L B Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, together with Iron Age Egypt and Syria, is barely known. Recent excavations in what was southern Syria have, however, already recovered four stables: two at Tel Hadar (Kochavi et al., 1992; Kochavi, 1993a) and a double unit at Ein-Gev (Kochavi, 1993b, fig. 3). [See Hadar, Tel; 'EinGev.] The published Tel Hadar exemplar (see figure 2d) is said to be Late Iron I, earlier than any presently known from Palestine, although its conjoined granary-plus-stable plan suggests closer contemporaneity with the similarly con joined stable from Hazor stratum VIII, (see figure 2e), dated to the second quarter of the ninth century B C E . [See Gra naries and Silos; Hazor.] The terminal date of the Ein-Gev double building is given by its excavator as "probably 733/ 32" B C E (Kochavi, 1993b). The three published Syrian ex amples have significantly lower intercolumnar spacings (stall widths) than any of the other examples shown in table 1. a n
e
c
Figure 2. Plans, (a) Fitzwygram's "Plan E . . . until re cent years the ordinary barrack construction," extended to a twenty-stall size ( 1 9 0 1 ) ; (b) military and police stable unit at Tell el-Amarna (Pendlebury, 1 9 5 1 ) ; (c) Megiddo northern stable 3 5 1 (Lamon and Shipton, 1 9 3 9 ) ; (d) Tel Hadar stable with attached granary (Kochavi ct al., 1 9 9 2 ) ; (e) Hazor stable 7 1 a , with attached granary 1 2 9 b (Yadin, i960); (f) Beersheba stable 2 7 0 (Aharoni, !973); (g) Bastam Halknbau, with doubled stalls (KJeiss, 1 9 7 9 , 1988). (Courtesy J. S. Holladay) STABLES.
twenty-horse stable. Covered facilities would have been needed for drying bedding in rainy weather (one function for the central aisle). Government Stables and Private House Plans. Alone among ancient Near Eastern house structures witnessed to date, including Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Palestinian houses (Daviau, 1993), the four-and three-roomed houses and their Syrian prototypes featured stables as a constant, essential, and integral part of the core plan (Holladay, 1992a; 995)- [See Four-room House; House, article on Syro-Palesunian Houses.] Except for smaller stall depths and widths, the homologies between military stables and the domestic stables of typical Israelite Iron Age four- and three-room houses are virtually complete. As with its military stables (see below), Israel's characteristic house form most proba J
Ancient Near Eastern buildings meeting the specifications listed above include, for the Late Bronze Age, the military and police stables at Tell el-Amarna (see figure 2b, midfourteenth century B C E ) , and possibly the small stable(?) at Qantir (Pusch, 1993, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 2 9 , 1 3 1 ) . Claude Schaeffer's "royal stables" at Ugarit (1962, pp. 3-20) seem to be a mis taken interpretation (Yon, 1992, p. 702). [See Ugarit.] For the Late Iron I and Iron II periods in Israel and southern Syria mere are single units at Tell Qasile (Mazar, 1967) and Tell Abu Hawam (Hamilton, 1935), both from the third quarter of die tenth century BCE—the former possibly being Israelite (Holladay, 1995, p. 397, n. 48); the Megiddo stra tum IVA stables dating to the reigns of Omri and Ahab, (see figure 2c), preceded by at least one unit exhibiting a closely similar structure that is presumably Solomonic (Davies, 1988); and a single unit at Tel Kinneret (Fritz, 1990). [See Qasile, Tell; Abu Hawam, Tell; Megiddo.] The four Syrian stables are discussed above. In Judah there is a small towered stable from the Solomonic period at Tel Masos (Fritz and Kempinski, 1983: building 1039, stratum II; see figure ib); at least four, and maybe six, stable units associated with phase A (late tenth-early ninth centuries B C E ) of the palacefort atLachish (Ussishkin, 1983, p. 152); a single unit, pos-
72
STABLES
1. Key Dimensions of Stable Design (modified after Holladay, 1986, p. 148). The wide soutiiern entrance at Tell el-Amarna appears to be an outlier, or from a completely different tradition, and was not included in the door-width statistics. TABLE
STALLS DEPTH
WIDTH
(meters)
SOURCE
Fitzwygram, 1 9 0 1
1.68
DOORWAY WIDTH
MANGER HEIGHT
(meters)
(meters) 0.60
3-35
1.37
—
Fitzwygram, 1 9 0 1 : Plan E
1.83
2.90
1.07
Great Britain, War Office, 1908
1.68
3-35
1.22
1.07
Gunn, 1935
1.83
2-74
1.22
1.07
National Research Council, 1 9 7 0
1-53
3.05
—
—
i-5
N = 3.3 S = 3.6
N = 1.9
Tell el-Amarna (Pendlebury, 1 9 5 1 )
S =
?
3.6
Megiddo S., 1621 (Lamon and Shipton, 1939)
1.52
3-45
1.82?
0.98 (median)
Megiddo S., 351 (Lamon and Shipton, 1939)
1.65 1-54
3.22
1.9
0.85 (median)
Hazor (Yadin et a l , i960)
1-75
3-50 3.10
1.45
>o.38
Beersheba 270 (Herzog, 1 9 7 3 )
1-55
3-05
145
0.70?
3.58 (2 * 1-79)
3.22
1.04
Bastam Ostbau (Kleiss, 1988)
—
2.92
—
Bastam Siidtor (ibid.)
—
2.75
0.99
2 * 1,48
3.05
1.12
1.37 (est.)
3.6 (est.)
—
— — —
±1.34
±2.60
—
—
Bastam Hallenbau (double stalls) (Kleiss, 1979, 1988)
Bastam Bldg. N N E of Siidtor (ibid.) Syrian Tel Hadar (Kochavi et al., 1992) Syrian 'Ein-Gev (Kochavi, 1993b)
>o.8o? ( 1 9 8 8 , Abb. 9)
s
Mean of modern authors above:
1.75 n = 5
1.22 n = 3
0.91 n = 3
Standard Deviation mod. auth.:
±0.13
±0.27
±0.12
±0.27
Mean of Holladay, 1986, fig. 2 :
1.81 n = 1 0
3.27 n = 9
1.20 n = 6
—
±0.26
±0.35
±0.12
—
1.55 n = 1 0
3.18 n = 1 3
1.46 n = 8
0.84 n = 3
±0.15
±0.31
±0.38
±0.14
Std. Dev. Holladay, 1986,fig.2: Mean of ancient means/medians above Std. Dev. of anc. means/medians
S T A B L E S . Figure 3. Keeping horses on their ground using bails, the accepted norm for military stables. (Holladay, 1986, fig. 3 )
3.08 n =
—
sibly early nindi century B C E at Beth-Shemesh (Grant and Wright, 1939); three units of indeterminate date in Tell elHesi city V (Bliss, 1894, p. 91)—which must, however, be dated to die Iron II period and not to die L B II or Iron I date assigned Bliss's city V (Fargo, 1992, p. 186). [See Judah; Lachish; Befh-Shemesh.] From the late eightii century BCE—assuming a date of 701 B C E for the Lachish stratum III destruction—there is a triple unit at Beersheba (Aharoni, 1973; see figure 21) and two successive structures at Tel Malhata (Kochavi, 1977). A closely similar form, with, how ever, double-widdi stalls, also appears in four buildings at Bastam in eighth-sevendi century B C E Urartu (Kleis, 1979; 1988; see figure 2g). [See Urartu.] A second-century B C E cave stable with about one hundred hewn rock mangers ap pears at 'Iraq el-Amir in Transjordan (Conder, 1889, pp.
STABLES 65-87); and there are two Late Nabatean stables at Kurnub (Negev, 1977). [See'Iraqel-Amir;Nabateans;Kurnub.] R o man-period stables existed as well in the Hauran and Syria (Negev, 1988, pp. 104-107). The Hellenistic and Roman exemplars probably housed riding horses, while all the ear lier units probably were for chariotry (contta Ussishkin, 1992, with respect to Megiddo's northern stable complex).
Location, Numbers, and Functionality. It is significant that all the L B and Iron Age stables cited above are located in regions suitable for chariot maneuvers. It seems equally clear that those in Syria-Palestine are located advanta geously with respect to major trade/caravan routes and/or militarily important highways. T o date, unlike at Tel Hadar and 'Ein-Gev, no Israelite and Judean stables are yet dem onstrated in border settings, unless the Negev is taken as such. [See Negev.] It may be inferred that those presently known served both the annual requirements of government for policing the trade corridors and tire periodic require ments of military action. It can hardly be accidental that uieir greatest known concentration, about 450 stalls, is at Megiddo: precisely where the Asiatic princes gathered to resist Thutmosis III (Wilson, 1969, p. 244), and where the eastwest trade corridors linking Tyre to the Jordan Valley, Transjordan, and South Arabia cross the north-south coastal route. [See Tyre; Jordan Valley.] Given the relatively limited excavation of potential locations, it is clear that many more stables remain to be found. If the "chariot cities" Care hdrekeb: 1 Kgs. 9:19, 10:26 = 2 Chr. 1:14, 8:6, 9:25; 'are haparasim, 1 Kgs. 9:19 = 2 Chr. 8:6) more closely resembled the small, specialized site of Tel Hadar than either Hazor or Megiddo, it seems reasonable that Israel and Judah to gether—possibly with tire assistance of clients—could have mustered the four thousand to six thousand stalls required to field two thousand chariots at the battle of Qarqar in 853 B G E , and that Israelite and Judean chariot sites may yet be found in border regions. All told, some 780 stalls are already counted—not including successive buildings at sites like Megiddo and Tel Malhata—adding up to 19.5 percent of four thousand horses (at two horses per team), or 13 percent of six thousand horses (at three horses per team). These statistics are available before anything like 10 percent of the nucleated Iron II occupation of Israel and Judah has even been excavated (cf. Lapp, 1963). BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan, ed. Beer-Shcba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons. Tel Aviv, 1973. Bietak, Manfred. "Egypt and Canaan during the Middle Bronze Age." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 281 (1991):
73
Age Palestine: Domestic Activity Areas and Artefact Distribution in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Sheffield, 1993. Davies, Graham I. "Solomonic Stables at Megiddo after All?" Palestine Exploration Quarterly 120 (1988): 13c—141. Fargo, Valerie M. "Hesi, Tell el-." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, pp. 184-187. New York, 1992. Fitzwygram, Frederick "W. J. Horses and Stables. 5th ed. London, 1901. Fritz, Volkmar, and Aharon Kempinski. Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf der Hirbet el-Msas (Tel Masos), 1972-7$. 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 1983. Fritz, Volkmar. Kinneret: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf dem Tell el'Oreme am See Gennesaret, 1982-1988. Wiesbaden, 1990. Grant, Elihu, and G. Ernest Wright. Ain Shems Excavations. Part 5. Haverford, 1939. Great Britain, War Office, Veterinary Department. Animal Manage ment. London, 1908. Gunn, Edwin. Farm Buildings New and Applied. Surrey, 1935. Hamilton, Robert William. "Excavations at Tell Abu Hawam." Quar terly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 4 (1935): 1-69. Herzog, Ze'ev. "The Storehouses." In Beer-Sheba I, edited by Yohanan Aharoni, pp. 23-30. Tel Aviv, 1973. Herzog, Ze'ev. "Administrative Structures in the Iron Age." In The Architecture ofAncient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 223-230. Jeru salem, 1992. Holladay, John S. "The Stables of Ancient Israel: Functional Deter minants of Stable Construction and the Interpretation of Pillared Building Remains of the Palestinian Iron Age." In The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited by Lawrence T. Geraty and Larry G. Herr, pp. 1 0 3 - 1 6 5 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1986. Holladay, John S. "House, Israelite." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, pp. 308-318. New York, 1992a. Holladay,John S. "Stable, Stables." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 1 7 8 - 1 8 3 . New York, 1992b. Holladay, John S. "The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic Centralization in the Iron IIA-B (ca. 1000-750 DCE)." In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy iMnd, edited by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 368-398. New York, 1994. Itzhaki, Yeshoshua, and Mira Shinar. '"Dust and Ashes' as Floor Sta bilizers in Iron Age Beer-Sheba." In Beer-Sheba I, edited by Yohanan Aharoni, pp. 19-22. Tel Aviv, 1973. Kammenhuber, Annelies. Hippohgia Hethitica, Wiesbaden, 1961. Kempinski, Aharon, and Ronny Reich, eds. The Architecture ofAncient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. Jerusalem, 1992. Kleiss, Wolfram. "Die Architektur." In Bastarn I: Ausgrabungen in den Urartaischen Anlagen, 1972-1975, edited by Wolfram Kleiss, pp. 1 1 98. Teheraner Forschungen, vol. 4. Berlin, 1979. Kleiss, Wolfram. "Die Architektur." In Bastarn II: Ausgrabungen in den Urartaischen Anlagen, 1977-1978, edited by Wolfram Kleiss, pp. 1 3 74. Teheraner Forschungen, vol. 5. Berlin, 1988. Kochavi, Moshe. "Malhata, Tel." In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Ex cavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 7 7 1 - 7 7 5 . Jerusalem, 1977. Kochavi, Moshe, et al. "Rediscovered! The Land of Geshur." Biblical Archaeology Review 18.4 (1992): 30-44, 84-85. Kochavi, Moshe. "Tel Hadar." Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993a): 186-188.
Kochavi, Moshe. "Tel 'En Gev." Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993b): 188-190.
Kroll, Stephan. "Grabungsbericht." In Bastarn I: Ausgrabungen in den Urartaischen Anlagen, 1972-197$, edited by Wolfram Kleiss, pp. 99Bliss, Frederick Jones. A Mound of Many Cities, or, Tell el Hesy Exca 1 1 3 . Teheraner Forschungen, vol. 4. Berlin, 1979. vated. London, 1894. Conder, Claude R. The Survey of Eastern Palestine: Memoirs of the To Kroll, Stephan. "Grabungsbericht." In Bastarn II: Ausgrabungen in den Urartaischen Anlagen, 1977-1978, edited by Wolfram Kleiss, pp. 7 5 pography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archaeology. London, 1889. 106. Teheraner Forschungen, vol. 5. Berlin, 1988. Daviau, Paulette M. Michele. Houses and Their Furnishings in Bronze 27-72,
74
STADIUMS
Lamon, Robert S., and Geoffrey Shipton. Megiddo I: Seasons of 1925what was originally called the theatron, and the name stadion 34. Oriental Institute Publications, 42. Chicago, 1939. (Roman stadium) then came to be applied to the whole com Lapp, Paul W. "Palestine: Known but Mostly Unknown." Biblical Ar plex. chaeologist 26 (1963): 1 2 1 - 1 3 4 . Although the Olympic games began in 776 B C E , and the Mazar, Benjamin. The Philistines and the Rise of Israel and Tyre. Pro ceedings of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities, vol. 1.7. Je Panhellenic cycle of games (see below) was established by rusalem, 1967. 573 B C E , the earliest extant stadium dates from the middle National Research Council of Canada. Associate Committee on the of the fifth century B C E . Located at Isthmia, it featured an National Building Code. Canadian Code for Farm Buildings (Farm intricate starting mechanism with gates at each lane and no Building Standards), NRC 11065. Ottawa, 1970. Negev, Avraham. "Kurnub." In Encyclopedia of Archaeological Exca permanent seats. This starting mechanism was short-lived vations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, pp. 722-735. Jerusalem, 1977. and appears not to have been successful. By about 300 B C E Negev, Avraham. Architecture ofMampsis: Final Report, vol. 1, The Mid the standard form of the stadium had evolved. It had stone dle and Late Nabatean Periods. Qedem, vol. 26. Jerusalem, 1988. starting lines (Gk., balbis; pi., balbides) across both ends of Pendlebury, John D. S. City of Akhenaten III: The Central City and the the tracks (all races ended at the same line in a stadium, but Official Quarters. London, 1 9 5 1 . some began at the end line and returned there, whereas oth Pritchard, James B. "The Megiddo Stables: A Reassessment." In Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nel ers began at the opposite line). These stone lines were em son Glueck, edited by James A. Sanders, pp. 268-276. Garden City, bedded in the earthern track. Their upper surfaces con N.Y., 1970. tained double grooves for the runners' feet and posts that Pusch, Edgar B. "Pi-Ramesse-geliebt-von-Amun, Hauptquartier Demarked individual lanes. The hysplex, the mechanism that iner Streitwagen-truppen: Agypter und Hethiter in der Delta-Resistarted the race, has been understood recently as a devel denz der Ramessiden." In Anlike Well im Pelizaeus-Museum: Die Agyptische Sammlung, edited by Arne Eggebrecht and Matthias Sei- opment from the technology of the ancient catapult; a ver del, pp. 126-143. Mainz, 1993. tical post like the arm of the catapult that carried with it the Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. "Fouilles et decouvertes des XVIIIe et XLXe barriers that held the runners back and then, by its fall, re campagnes, 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 5 . " In Ugaritica IV, edited by Claude F.-A. leased them, was hurled to the ground by a torsion spring. Schaeffer, pp. 1 - 1 5 0 . Paris, 1962. The long sides of the track were delineated by stone chan Taylor, Louis. Harper's Encyclopedia for Horsemen. New York, 1973. United States War Department, Office of the Adjutant-General. Man nels that brought fresh water into the stadium. By this time, ual for Stable Sergeants: Document no. 611. Washington, D.C., 1 9 1 7 . stadiums were typically equipped with vaulted entrances for Ussishkin, David. "Excavations at Tel Lachish, 1978-1983: Second use by the judges and athletes; the far end of such tunnels Preliminary Report." Tel Aviv 10 (1983): 97-185. Ussishkin, David. "Megiddo." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, connected with a dressing room for the athletes. The thea tron evolved from simple grassy slopes (c. 350 B C E ) to a pp. 666-679. New York, 1992. Vigneron, Paul. Le chevaldans Vantiquiti greco-romaine. 2 vols. Annales combination of such slopes with some stone seats (c. 300 de l'Est, Memoire 35. Nancy, 1968, B C E ) to a track completely surrounded by stone seats for Weinstein, James M. "Reflections on the Chronology of Tell el-Dab'a." In Egypt, the Aegean, and the Levant: Interconnections in the Second spectators (in the Roman period). Millennium BC, edited by W. Vivian Davies and Louise Schofleld, pp. 84-90. London, 1995. Wilson, John A. "Egyptian Historical Texts." In Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, edited by James B. Pritchard, pp. 227-264. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. Wrensch, Frank A. Harness Horse Racing in the United States and Can ada. New York, 1948. Yadin, Yigael, et al. Hazor II: An Account of the Second of Excavations, 1956. Jerusalem, i960. Yon, Marguerite. "Ugarit." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 695-706. New York, 1992. J O H N S. H O L L A D A Y , J R .
STADIUMS. The stadium (Gk., stadion), a thoroughly Greek institution, was a unit of measure, 600 ancient feet in length (between 177 and 192 meters depending on the length of the local foot at each site), that gave its name to a footrace of that length. According to ancient tradition, the first footrace was held at Olympia, where the winner of the stadion race gave his name to the full four years, or Olym piad, of his victory. The track itself, originally called the dromos, gradually acquired seats for spectators, forming
The stadium was used for athletic competition, the gymnikos agon, that included footraces of various lengths, box ing, wrestling, the pankration, and the pentathlon. It is to be distinguished from other facilities that hosted their own competitions: the theater for the mousikos agon and the hip podrome (Roman circus) for the hippikos agon. The for mer's semicircular shape and the latter's much greater size and tire central barrier in the track are the simplest means of differentiating them from the stadium. The stadium came to the Near East with Alexander the Great, whose generals carried athletic gear with them wher ever they went. Indeed, it was Alexander's custom to stage athletic competitions at resting points on his march. We are told specifically by Arrian (Anabasis) of games at, for ex ample, Soli (2.5.8), Tyre (2.24.6 and 3.6.1), Memphis (3.1.4 and 3.5.2), Susa (3.16.9 and, apparently, 8.42.6-8), Zadracarta (3.24.1), Alexandria Ultima (4.4.1), Taxila (5.3.6 and 5.8.3), and on the banks of both the Hydaspes (5.20.1) and the Hyphasis Rivers (5.29.2). In every competition men tioned by Arrian, Alexander staged a gymnikos agon, some times accompanied by a mousikos agon, and sometimes by a
STANHOPE, HESTER LUCY hippikos agon, but never by both. Although each competition implies the existence of a stadium—however temporary—it is only at Ecbatana that one is expressly mentioned (7.14.1). These competitions also imply the presence in Alexander's train of professional athletes, musicians, and charioteers; the funeral games for Hephaistion included three thousand such competitors. The spread of Hellenism and of Greek athletics in the Near East continued after Alexander, and many new com petitions were established in the Hellenistic and Roman pe riods, some modeled expressly on the old Panhellenic fes tivals at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and Isthmia. The terms isolympic, isopythian, and isonemean are frequently used to describe the age categories and victory prizes for these new games. It is then natural to find that stadiums are extant throughout die Near East, at sites like Adana, Cibyra, and Marathos, and at Salamis on Cyprus. It is also natural that these stadiums are concentrated in areas where there was a relatively strong Hellenic influence. For some sites, such as Alexandria in Egypt and Tiberias in ancient Palestine, al though the existence of a stadium is stated in the literary sources, one has not been identified on the ground. Archaeological investigation has been sufficient at some sites to suggest that no stadium ever existed. Thus, for ex ample, the Sebasteia games established by King Herod at Caesarea in 10/9 B C E demand die existence of a stadium, but no traces of it have ever been identified. This and similar examples have led to die assumption tiiat at such sites the hippodrome, or circus, might have hosted both the hippikos and the gymnikos agon. This theory has led to confusion: today the word stadium is sometimes casually applied to hip podromes, as if the two words were interchangeable, as at Gerasa and Samaria. The confusion is not ancient. Alternatively it has been suggested that the gymnikos agon of the Augustan/Claudian Olympic games at Antioch on the Orontes might actually have been hosted in a stadium at nearby Daphne because no trace of a stadium has been dis covered at Antioch itself. This may also have been the case elsewhere: Josephus consistently and uniquely refers to a sta dium at Tiberias (War 2.618; Life 92.2 and 331.2), but equally consistentiy to a hippodrome at Tarichaeae (War 2.599; Life 3 d 138) some 5 Ion (3 mi.) to the north. These two structures could easily have served as parts of a single competition complex. Once established, a stadium might be used for popular assemblies, frequently of a disruptive type. For example, Jo sephus was attacked by the crowd in the stadium at Tiberias (loc. cit.), and the stadium at Alexandria was the site of vi olent anti-Agathoclean demonstrations (Polybius 15.30-33). Such use of the stadium apparentiy was unusual, however. According to ancient sources, the stadium was never used for physical exercise. Such a function belonged in the palaestta-gymnasium, where education in general—physical I
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and intellectual—and die ephebic training that led to citi zenship in the Greek polis took place. It is that training for Greek citizenship to which Maccabees ( 1 . 1 . 1 4 ; 2.4.9-14) re fers, and not to any connection with the stadium. Maccabees is clear on this point (as is Josephus, Antiq. 12.241), even though modern translations have sometimes confused die gymnasium with the stadium. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aupert, Pierre. Fouilles de Delphes, vol. 2, Le stade. Paris, 1979. Detailed presentation of the stadium at Delphi, with an appended extensive, but incomplete, list of stadiums in the whole of the ancient world including the Near East. Humphrey, John H. Roman Circuses. London, 1986. Thorough study of the form and function of the circus, and of its places of appearance throughout the Roman world. Romano, David Gilman, and Stephen G. Miller. Nemea, vol. 2, The Stadium. Berkeley, 1996. Detailed presentation of the remains of the stadium at Nemea compared to other extant examples with a dis cussion of the significance of the addition of stone seats, vaulted entrance, and locker room for understanding the role of athletics against the background of ancient societies. Valavanis, Panos D. Hysplex, The Starting Mechanism in Ancient Stadia. Athens, 1996. Study of the origins and development of the starting device used in Greek stadia in Greece and the Near East during the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. S T E P H E N G.
MILLER
STANHOPE, HESTER LUCY (1776-1839), Eng lish adventurer and antiquarian. Though often maligned as an eccentric, Lady Hester Stanhope was, arguably, the first modern archaeological excavator in Palestine. Her brief sounding at Ashkelon in 1815 may have revealed only one significant structure, but her implicit understanding of ar chitectural stratigraphy represented a significant advance over the previous attempts of European ttavelers and pil grims to uncover isolated artifacts and monuments. Born in Chevening, Kent, the granddaughter of the Earl of Chatham, William Pitt the Elder, Stanhope was educated at home and spent three years (1803-1806) as the official hostess and confidante of her uncle, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. With Pitt's death, she set off for a life of travel and adventure in the Mediterranean region. In the era of the Grand Tour, Lady Hester's entourage was among the grandest. Accompanied by her personal physician Charles Meryon and a coterie of friends and proteges, she and her companions survived a shipwreck off the island of Rhodes to reach Jerusalem and eventually travel to the isolated ruins of Palmyra, where she was received with great ceremony by the sheikhs of the local bedouin tribes. In 1814, she estab lished residence in the Lebanese village of Junieh, where she lived for the rest of her life. Stanhope's archaeological career began mysteriously widi her acquisition of a medieval document that reportedly de scribed the location of a great treasure in the ruins of an
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ancient mosque at Ashkelon. Believing the document's de scription to be authentic, Stanhope contacted the Ottoman authorities and, together with Meryon and an Ottoman of ficial dispatched from Istanbul, proceeded southward at the head of an expedition to retrieve the treasure. The site of ancient Ashkelon, Tell el-Khadra, had been severely dis turbed since medieval times by stone robbing, yet Stanhope and Meryon identified a ruined building on the summit as a mosque—basing their identification on the apsidal mihrab, or prayer niche, on its southern end. In their subsequent excavations of this structure, Stan hope and Meryon distinguished several stratigraphic levels. While European excavators in other parts of the Mediter ranean were, in this period, principally concerned with the quantity and artistic quality of the statuary and architecairal elements they uncovered, Stanhope and Meryon noted the apparent transformation of the structure from pagan, to Christian, to Muslim use. In the course of her excavations, Stanhope's workers un covered a larger-than-life-sized Roman imperial statue. Yet, she insisted that they destroy it, lest they be accused by the accompanying Ottoman official of merely seeking the treas ure or works of art for themselves. It was this apparent act of archaeological destruction that has traditionally (and neg atively) colored the scholarly estimation of Stanhope's ac tivities at Ashkelon. With no sign of the reported treasure, Stanhope returned with her expedition northward along the Mediterranean coast. Stopping briefly at the Yarkon River (where Meryon noted the antiquarian importance of the site of Tell Qasile), Stanhope returned to Junieh. In later years, she was fre quently visited by European explorers, but it would be dec ades before the precocious stratigraphic insights of the 1815 expedition to Ashkelon would be applied at other sites. [See also Ashkelon.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Hamel, Frank. Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope: A New Light on Her Life and Love Affairs. London, 1 9 1 3 . Silberman, Neil Asher. "Restoring the Reputation of Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope." Biblical Archaeology Review 10.4 (1984): 68-75. Stanhope, Hester Lucy, and Charles Lewis Meryon. The Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope. London, 1846. N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN
as fellow at the Institut Francais d'Archeologie de Beyrouth (1946-1949). In 1949 he became associated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; he ended his career there as director of research in 1978. Urged by Henri Seyrig, then director of the institute, to study Palmyrene epigraphy, Starcky contributed the article "Palmyre" to the Supplement du Dictionnaire de la Bible (Paris, 1964, cols. 1066-1103). In addition to his work in archaeology, he maintained an inter est in biblical studies: he participated in the translation and commentary of 1 and 2 Maccabees (Paris, 1948) and on a more extensive separate publication with Felix-Marie Abel (Paris, 1961), and was a member of the publication team for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Much of his time in Jerusalem was devoted to studying Nabatean epigraphy. He became the leading specialist in this field, and the publication of "Petra etla Nabatene" (Paris, 1964, cols. 886-1017) contributed to his authority in the field. He collaborated with Andre Dupont-Sommer in studying Aramaic inscriptions (Paris, 1958). His participation in the establishment of the Musee Biblique de l'lnstitut Catholique, of Bible et Terre Sainte (later Le Monde de la Bible), and of numerous public con ferences allowed him to reconcile his scholarly pursuits with his desire for conversation with the wider world. He viewed the latter as an essential facet of his pastoral vocation. [See also Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise; Na batean Inscriptions; Palmyrene Inscriptions; and the biog raphies of Abel and Seyrig.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Felix-Marie, and Jean Starcky. Les livres des Maccabees. 3d ed. Paris, 1961. Israel, Felice. "In memoriam: L'Abbe Jean Starcky." Orientalia 58 (1989): 333-334-
Puech, Emile. "L'Abbe Jean Starcky, 1909-1988." Revue de Qumran 15 ( I 9 9 ) : 1-20. Includes a bibliography of Starcky's works (pp. 1 1 1
20).
Starcky, Jean. La Sainte Bible de Jerusalem. Paris, 1948. Starcky, Jean, ed. Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre. Beirut, 1949. Starcky, Jean, and Andre Dupont-Sommer. Les inscriptions arameennes de Sfire, steles I et II. Paris, 1958. Starcky, Jean. "Palmyre." In Supplement du Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 7, cols. 1 0 6 6 - 1 1 0 3 . Paris, 1964. Starcky, Jean. "Petra et la Nabatene." In Supplement du Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 7, cols. 886-1017. Paris, 1964. Zayadine, Fawzi. "In Memoriam: Father Jean Starcky, 1909-1988," Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 32 (1988): 9—11. See also "A Selected Bibliography of Jean Starcky" (pp. 1 2 - 1 4 ) . PIERRE BORDREUIL
STARCKY, JEAN (1909-1988), French priest and
Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian
epigrapher. Following his studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the Institut Catholique de Paris, the Pontificium Institutum Biblicum in Rome, and the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem, Starcky taught at the Universite Saint Joseph in Beirut. From 1941 to 1945, he served as chaplain in the Free French Forces under Charles de Gaulle. After the war he took up residence
born in London, whose interest in archaeology was initially aroused by his working, at the age of fifteen for an antiquities dealer. During World War I Starkey served in the Royal Naval Air Service; during a lengthy posting in a lighthouse
STARKEY, JAMES L. (1895-1938), archaeologist
STATISTICAL APPLICATIONS off the English coast, he studied archaeological textbooks. After the war he attended Margaret Murray's evening classes in Egyptology at University College in London, where he met Sir Flinders Petrie. Soon after, he went to Egypt to work with Petrie and Guy Brunton on their exca vations in the Qau-Badari disttict. He later became field di rector of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) excava tions at Kom Washim in the Faiyum area. In 1926, Starkey followed Petrie to soutiiern Palestine and worked with him for a number of years excavating at Tell Jemmeh, Tell elFar'ah (North), and Tell el- 'Ajjul. [See Jemmeh, Tell; Far'ah, Tell el- (North); 'Ajjul, Tell el-; and the biography of Petrie] In 1932, following personal rifts with Petrie's wife, who had an active role in administering her husband's expedi tions, Starkey decided to initiate his own excavation. T o gether with other members of Petrie's staff, primarily Olga Tufnell and G. Lankester Harding, he left the Tell el-'Ajjul dig and began excavating at Tel Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir). [See Lachish; and the biographies of Tufnell and Harding] Generous support from two British donors, Charles Marston and Henry Wellcome, who were interested in the bib lical context of Lachish, enabled Starkey to develop one of the most ambitious and best-organized archaeological ex peditions of the period in Palestine. The excavations at L a chish continued annually for six years. They abruptly ter minated when Starkey was murdered by Arab bandits on 10 January 1938, as he travelled to Jerusalem for the opening ceremonies of the Palestine Archaeological Museum (today the Rockefeller Museum). Starkey had been Peft-ie's student, after all, and at Lachish he followed his methods and concepts: the digging was done on a large scale but with insufficient attention paid to details and their recording. Starkey followed the "horizontal" or "architectural" method of excavation in order to uncover complete architectural units or horizontal layers but paid little attention to the site's vertical dimension. He was, how ever, a skilled administrator, and die expedition, with its small staff and large work force of hired Arab laborers, re mained in the field for about half of each year. Important remains of the ancient city and nearby ceme teries were uncovered. Starkey's best-known discovery is the corpus of Hebrew ostraca known as the Lachish letters. [See Lachish Inscriptions.] Testimony to the sound work carried out by Starkey and his team at Lachish is the fact that few of their stratigraphic conclusions and observations have been altered as a result of subsequent excavations at die site. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tufnell, Olga. "James Leslie Starkey: An Appreciation." Palestine Ex ploration Quarterly 36 (1938): 80-83. Tufnell, Olga. "Reminiscences of a 'Petrie Pup.' " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 4 (1982): 81-86. DAVID USSISHKIN
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STATISTICAL APPLICATIONS. Statistics is a discipline concerned with inferential processes, with the drawing of conclusions from a set of observations or from something otherwise known or assumed. These processes arise both when going from empirical data to formulate propositions and theories, and when examining the validity of theories and propositions. Inference arises, explicitly or implicitly, when dealing with the analysis of observations and the recognition of underlying patterns, the efficient summarization of sets of data, the nature of observational error and sources of variability, the planning of experiments and observations, the testing of hypotheses, and so forth. All of these are situations for which statistics is relevant and for which the discipline has developed a body of procedures, formulas, tables, and the like also called statistics. Statistics, as a discipline or as a body of statistical meth ods, uses a formal language, mostly mathematics-based, to deal with inference. Because most statistical considerations involve randomness, populations (i.e., groups of entities), a single event embodied in a large group of events, and other factors, statistics frequently employs probability, as a math ematical language, to allow the inference to be expressed and its reliability evaluated. Inference is a part of general scien tific reasoning and activity, and as a result, statistics has many applications in most scientific disciplines. The appli cation of statistics requires not only knowledge of statistics, but also a substantial knowledge of the specificfieldto which it is to be applied. The ability of computers to handle formal languages with ease, as well as to analyze large sets of data, and the devel opment and proliferation of computers have had a signifi cant impact on the application of statistics, both positive and negative. On die one hand, statistics is being applied to more and more fields, enriching them and statistics. On the other hand, the arbitrary use of statistical procedures—of analysis and inference—can be misguided, producing erroneous re sults and creating mistrust of statistical analyses. Archaeology and Statistics. In archaeology, inference is a constant challenge, as archaeologists use material evidence to construct theories about past populations and cultures and then test those theories by looking back at the archae ological record. The range of that record, of the evidence, is very broad: objects, monuments, documents, soils, bio logical remains, and so forth as well as the relationships in which artifacts and ecofacts are found. In addition, studies of archaeological remains produce a variety of data (nu merical, visual, etc.) that also have to be evaluated and in corporated into theories or interpretations. As modern archaeology has become more and more ori ented toward a systematic accumulation of data, their gen eration in increasing amounts and die necessity to store and evaluate them have together created a need for methods (tools and techniques) of analysis. The combination of sta tistical methods and computer technology has met that chal-
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lenge, making analysis of large and complex sets of archae ological data possible. In general, applying a statistical method to an archaeolog ical problem involves several steps. First, data are usually coded into a standardized language (often numerical) to produce an initial data set. The set is tested for its validity and quality and then screened to determine if there is any underlying structure (e.g., distribution properties). On the basis of this information, and considering the type of prob lem that is of archaeological interest and being addressed, a particular statistical method (procedure) is chosen to yield a general model against which the data are examined. The data set is examined in an iterative, or repetitious, manner. It allows for a refinement of the description of the behavior of the data and the extraction of additional, as well as new, information from the data (including a rejection of the proposed behavior). The success of a statistical analysis in explaining archaeological phenomena depends on how well the design of the archaeological study, the accumulation of data, and the method chosen to analyze the assembled data fit the archaeological reality. It is necessary, therefore, that statistical methods be defined and incorporated at the design stage of a study and that substantial knowledge of statistics and archaeology exists that can be applied simul taneously. The application of statistical methods to archaeology is criticized as being ill-suited to the nature of archaeology, principally because statistics often relies on numerical in formation; because it imposes a relatively rigid, mathemat ical structure on the analysis; and because it is general. In response to some of these reservations, recent work has shown that as long as non-numerical descriptors can be un ambiguously defined, their coding and subsequent use do not represent problems in applying statistical procedures. Nevertheless, the inability of statistical methods to handle certain types of information, such as the description of structures, remains. As well, more and more methods use nonparametric approaches, which do not require assump tions about the distribution properties of the data set under investigation. The fact that statistical methods are gen eral, rather than domain specific, can also represent an ad vantage when the task is to examine methods or compare studies. Applying Statistics to Archaeological Studies. A va riety of statistical methods have been used in archaeological studies. The choice of appropriate statistical techniques de pends on the nature of the archaeological question and on the data available; it cannot be made in advance. Listed be low are certain types of archaeological problems to which statistical techniques have been successfully applied. It should be noted that statistical methods constantly evolve and are being developed. The listed bibliography gives only general references and examples of archaeological applica tions.
1. Sampling. Statistical sampling theory and design of ex periments methods have been applied to organizing the sampling and collecting processes for archaeological evi dence, whether on a regional, site, or assemblage scale. More specifically, randomized block and various factorial designs have had their applications to these problems in archaeology (i.e., sampling and collection problems). 2. Distribution patterns. Studies of various distribution patterns have relied, to a large extent, on various statistical methods for their detection. The distribution of artifact as semblages has been investigated, for instance, using regres sion, or trend surface, analysis to interpret patterns of an export trade from a particular center of production. Distri bution patterns on a single site have been examined using nearest-neighbor analysis or local density analysis to pro duce a functional interpretation of the found artifacts. The distribution of settlement patterns has been studied, using nearest-neighbor analysis, to reveal tendencies toward reg ularity or aggregation. 3. Stratigraphy. Site stratigraphy and its implications for dating have been investigated using various seriation tech niques, multidimensional scaling, and correspondence anal ysis. 4. Material culture. The study of material culture, in par ticular the classification and development of typologies, has considerable statistical application. Various clustering, prin cipal component, discriminant, multidimensional scaling, and correspondence analyses have been applied to the study of artifact assemblages. This field also includes the mathe matical description of the shapes and forms of objects, which is then used to develop classification and typology. 5. Analysis of artifacts. The technical analysis of artifacts, such as the granulometric or chemical analyses of soils, trace-element analyses of ceramics, lead-isotope analyses of metals, and Carbon-14 dating of organic materials, may all involve the use of statistics that are specific to the technical analysis employed in the analysis of artifacts. 6. Statistical modeling. The statistical modeling of various processes that took place in the past, such as demographic or economic activities, has been conducted using regression analysis. 7. Testing hypotheses. Hypotheses are tested in archae ology utilizing statistical techniques, such as the chi-square test or the sign test, to assess the validity of proposed inter pretations. Statistical methods represent powerful tools for archae ologists, particularly in identifying and interpreting patterns or investigating complex systemic relationships. These methods represent often unique tools for the solution of ar chaeological problems. Their continuing application to ar chaeological investigations will not only result in new ar chaeological knowledge, but will also enrich statistics itself. [See also Computer Mapping; and Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpretation.]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
From 1951 to 1965 he dug in the Kebara cave on Mt. Carmel, exposing Upper and Middle Paleolithic layers and Djindjian, Francois. Methodes pour I'archeologie. Paris, 1991. The most uncovering a burial of a Neanderthal baby. Between 1954 comprehensive presentation of statistical applications in archae ology, organized according to archaeological problems rather titan and i960, he worked with Tamar Noy at Nahal Oren, un statistical techniques. Provides many examples of actual applica covering Pre-pottery Neolithic B and A hamlets, a Natufian tions. settlement with a large cemetery, and thick Kebaran depos Doron, J. E., and F. R. Hodson. Mathematics and Computers in Ar its. chaeology. Cambridge, 1975. Essential reference, now a classic, for From i960 until his death, Stekelis concentrated on the understanding statistical applications in archaeology. Orton, Clive. Mathematics in Archaeology. London, 1980. Good, acces excavations, under the auspices of the Israel Academy of sible text organized according to archaeological questions. Most ex Sciences and Humanities and the Institute of Archaeology amples refer to applications in British archaeology. of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at 'Ubeidiya, a Shennan, Stephen. Quantifying Archaeology. Edinburgh, 1988. Tradi Lower Paleolithic site in the Jordan Valley that dates to 1.0tional survey of statistical methods designed for archaeology stu 1.4 million years ago and is the oldest in the Levant. dents, including a number of case studies and exercises. [See also Jordan Valley; Nahal Oren; Sha'ar ha-Golan; and Vitali, Vanda, and U. M. Franklin. "An Approach to the Use of Pack aged Statistical Programs for Cluster, Classification, and Discrimi the biography of Turville-Petre.] nant Analysis of Trace Element Data." Geoarchaeology 1.2 (1986): 195-201. BIBLIOGRAPHY VANDA VITALI
STEKELIS, MOSHE (1898-1967), prehistorian and archaeologist. Stekelis was born in Kamenetz-Podolsk in Ukraine. Upon completing his studies in archaeology and history at the University of Odessa, he served as director of its library and archaeological museum. In 1924 he was ar rested for Zionist activities and exiled to Siberia. There, de spite his required daily labor, he was able to carry out an extensive study of nomadic tribes, which he left behind when he was allowed to emigrate to Palestine in 1928. While working in Palestine in the marshes near Kebara, at the foot of the Carmel range, Stekelis discovered a cave subsequendy excavated by Francis Turville-Petre in 1 9 3 1 . During his early years in Jerusalem, Stekelis surveyed meg aliths in Transjordan. Under the auspices of the Institut de Paleontologie Humaine (Paris), he excavated with Rene Neuville at Erq el-Ahmar, Baq ah-Rephaim, and Qafzeh cave (1933-1935). Concurrently, he surveyed Mt. Carmel and Epipaleolithic sites on the coastal plain. From 1934 to 1936 he participated in the excavations at L a Quina (France) and completed his thesis on the dolmens he had dug near Adeimah in Transjordan. In 1937 he uncovered several Acheulean assemblages at Gesher Benot Ya'aqob (Ar., Jisr Banat Yacub), the oldest of which was almost en tirely of lava. c
Writings on Stekelis Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "Moshe Stekelis: In Memoriam." In Moshe Stekelis Memorial Volume, edited by Baruch Arensburg and Ofer Bar-Yosef, pp. xi-xii. Eretz-Israel, vol. 1 3 . Jerusalem, 1977. Part of a special volume devoted to Stekelis. Writings by Stekelis Les monuments migalithiques de Palestine. Archives de l'Institut de Pa leontologie Humaine, Memoire 1 5 . Paris, 1935. The Abu Usba Cave (Mount Carmel) (with Georg Haas). Jerusalem, 1952.
The Lower Pleistocene of the Central Jordan Valley: The Excavations at 'Ubeidiya, 1960-1963. Jerusalem, 1966. Ma'ayan Barukh: A Lower Paleolithic Site in Upper Galilee (with David Gilead). Jerusalem, 1966. Archaeological Excavations at 'Ubeidiya, 1964-1966 (with Ofer BarYosef and Tamar Schick). Jerusalem, 1969. The Yarmukian Culture of the Neolithic Period. Jerusalem, 1972. OFER BAR-YOSEF
c
In 1936 Stekelis joined the faculty of the Hebrew Univer sity of Jerusalem. In 1940 he completed the excavations of the Lower Pleistocene site at Bethlehem and spent 1941 sur veying caves on Mt. Carmel and in the Jtidean hills. He re turned to Transjordan in 1942-1943 to excavate dolmens at 'Ala Safat. Stekelis discovered the site of Sha'ar ha-Golan in Israel, in the central Jordan Valley, which he excavated from 1949 to 1952. It became the type-site for the Yarmukian culture.
S T E L A E . The term stela is a Greek word, used in its archaeological sense, to mean "upright or standing stone." It is related to stylos, "column." The single upright stone constituted an autonomous monument with symbolic mean ing (religious, magical, funerary, commemorative); its nearly universal use goes back to the most distant prehistory. The terms megalith, menhir, obelisk, massebd, baetyl, sikkanou (Akk.), skn (Ugar.) represent equivalents in various cultural contexts. In the ancient Near East, the intrinsic significance of the upright stone is made clear by descriptive or symbolic imagery (relief, painting, engraving) and/or by a text in scribed on it. Certain areas of the Near East made wide use of the stela, notably the civilizations of the Levant (second-first millen nium B C E ) , where both Mesopotamian and Egyptian char acteristics are known. Reciprocal influences persisted over time among the neighboring cultural areas. In the middle of the first millennium B C E , classical Greece made the stela one
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of die mainstays of its civic and political life, while the use of the stela as a funerary monument was developing. [See Funerary Monuments, article on Monuments of the Helle nistic and Roman Periods.] The spectacular diffusion of the stela in the Mediterranean world made it a commonplace object in the Roman and Punic eras. Mesopotamia (Third-First Millennia BCE). Very early (in the Uruk period), rulers began using stelae as a means of communicating, first through imagery alone and then, after the development of writing, by the addition of text. They used hard and relatively rare stones, imported from the farthest points of their own region (hard limestone, ba salt) and even from beyond their borders (e.g., diorite from Oman or the Indus River Valley), as stone was almost totally lacking in Mesopotamia. In the third millennium, stelae were generally elongated blocks, with one face or sometimes two smoothed to receive a text and representation (e.g., the Vulture stela from Tello, c. 2400 B C E or the Stela of Naram-Sin, c. 2250; see figure 1 ) . These monuments, which are often more than 2 m high, were set up to celebrate royal victories. They represented the king facing the god and the texts praised the magnifi cence of the victorious king (e.g., the stela of Naram-Sin, 2250 B C E , Babylon). A royal monument such as the code of Hammurabi (eigh teenth century B C E , found at Susa, but originally erected in Babylon), evolved from the category of the stela. In the Kassite period (sixteenth-twelfth centuries B C E ) , the series of the kudumi, preserved in temples, constituted a specific variety: they served as a form of boundary marker made of stones 50-80 cm high, bearing the documentation of a land grant. [See Kassites.] Little by lime a consistent shape evolved: a flat slab, with a rounded upper part. This shape prevailed in the Neo-Assyrian period, for which there are numerous examples. Egypt (Third-Second Millennia). The Egyptians, mas ters of the art of stone carving from the third millennium onward, developed, in the second millennium B C E , a type of monument whose central theme was royal triumph and that generally included a representation of the deity. Pharaohs of the eighteenth-twentieth dynasties erected stelae in their name in the territories they controlled in the Levant. These were often large-scale monuments (e.g., the stela of Rameses II at Beth-Shean, more than 2 m high). More modest stelae were produced for individuals of middle rank, such as royal functionaries (e.g., the Egyptian stela of Mami at Ugarit). The mortuary stela was a constitutive el ement of tomb furnishings, both round-topped stelae and, in the first millennium B C E , stelae representing the facade of a temple. Levant. No text or representation appears on the upright stones in the Temple of Obelisks at Byblos, but niches for statuettes do sometimes occur. [See Byblos.] These stelae provide a characteristic illustration of the symbolism of this
STELAE.
Figure 1 . Stela of Naram-Sin.
(Courtesy Mus6e du
Louvre)
type of monument at the beginning of the second millen nium B C E . In the Late Bronze Age (second half of the second millennium B C E ) , die stelae of the Levantine coast found in temples show features derived from both Egypt and Mes opotamia. The ordinary type was the flat slab with the curved top, of variable dimensions (e.g., the series from Ugarit ranges in height from approximately 0.20 to 1.50 m). Their representations are of an essentially religious nature: votive stelae representing a deity (e.g., the Baal with the Lightning Bolt at Ugarit); or a symbolic motif (e.g., the as tral motif at Hazor); or bearing an inscription tied to the cult of a god (e.g., the stelae of Dagan at Ugarit). When the representation concerned human activity, it conveyed a re ligious value to the act by introducing it into a religious con text (e.g., the Stela of tire Oath at Ugarit). [See Hazor; Uga rit.]
STELAE In the ist millennium B C E , stelae of the same type prolif erated in a zone including North Syria, Cilicia, and the L e vant. Examples such as the stela found in the mountains above Tartus (at Qadmus) demonstrate continuity from the Bronze Age in the Levant, but the type evolves locally, no tably during the Persian period (e.g., the Stela of Yehawmilk, king of Byblos, fifth century B C E , or the Stela of Amrit from the same period; see figure 2). This type continued in the Phoenician world in the West, where the presence of stelae is considered an indication of the existence of Punic c
STELAE.
Figure 2. Stela of'Amrit. (Courtesy Musee du Louvre)
81
colonies or occupation in Sicily, North Africa, Spain, and Sardinia (e.g., the Stela of Nora, ninth century B C E ) . [See Phoenicians.] The Neo-Hittite kingdoms popularized this means of ar tistic expression with a great number of stelae in a range of dimensions (from 0.35 to more that 1.20 m high), bearing the representations of deities, especially the storm god with his attributes (e.g., Tell Ahmar/Til Barsip), or funerary mo tifs. [See Til Barsip.] These monuments remained funda mentally religious and were often erected in temples. [See Temples, article on Mesopotamia Temples.] Elsewhere, the stela retained its autonomy and sometimes itself became a motif for representation: for example, the reliefs carved in the shape of stelae in the cliff of the Nahr el-Kalb on the Lebanese coast by various conquerors (Egyp tians of the twelfth dynasty, Assyrians, and others up to the present day). Greece (First Millennium). The Mycenaean world made use of stelae as funerary monuments (grave circles A and B, Mycenae, sixteenth century BCE) . Greece, however, made the use of the stela common in the first millennium B C E , and classical Greek urban civilization experienced a considerable development in this type of monument. The stela retained its religious significance, but religious reality was perceived in a new way and entailed a diversification in the types of the stelae produced. Civic religion (which replaced the principal Oriental theme of royal victories) made the inscribed stela the me dium for the official acts of public life; decrees of the city, inventories of die holdings of the sanctuaries or cities, jurid ical contracts, political treaties). Religious concern for the dead maintained its place: the commemoration of the dead residing in the underworld inspired the development of the funerary stela, on which die message is conveyed both by a figural representation (sculpted or painted) and an inscribed text. Hellenized Levant (Second Half of the First Millen nium B C E ) . Greek cultural influence in the Levant, already visible in the fifth century B C E and of major importance from the Seleucid period onward, led to the mass production of stelae, stereotyped for various purposes, as they were throughout the Greek world: religious monuments, bearers of political documents, funerary monuments. Greek models proliferated, notably in Phoenicia (e.g., Sidon) and on Cy prus (e.g., Kition): flat stelae with a sculpted pediment, de picting the facade of a temple with small columns and dec orated with palmettes and rosettes. At the same time, the pillar stela in pyramidal form continued, often made of mar ble imported from Greece. [See Phoenicia; Cyprus.] Western Inheritance (End of the First Millennium). The use of funerary stelae was adopted in the Punic world, notably at Carthage, where specific types developed (such as stelae with the Tanit sign). On die other hand, with the Roman world as intermediary, the varied architectural mo-
82
STEWART, JAMES RIVERS BARRINGTON
tifs, stylistic characteristics, and functions of stelae have en dured into the modern period. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bertrandy, Francois, and Maurice Sznycer. Les steles pnniques de Constantine. Paris, 1987. Borker-Kliihn, Jutta. "Altvorderasiatische Bildstelen und vergleichbare Felsreliefs." Baghdader Forschungen4 (1982): 238-242. Hrouda, Barthel. L'Orienl ancient Histoire et civilisations. Paris, 1991. Moscati, Sabatino. "Le stele." In 1Fenici, edited by Sabatino Moscati, pp. 304-327. Milan, 1988. Yon, Marguerite. "Les steles de pierre." In Arts et industries de la pierre, edited by Marguerite Yon, pp. 273-344. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 6. Paris, 1991. Ziegler, Christiane. Catalogue des steles, peintures et reliefs egyptiens I'ancien empire et de la premiere periode intermediare. Paris, 1990. MARGUERITE Y O N
Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
STEWART, JAMES RIVERS BARRINGTON (1913-1962), Australian archaeologist born in Sydney and educated at die King's School, Parramatta; Leys School, Cambridge; and Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and anthropology, graduating in 1934. Pie was awarded the Wilkin Studentship to Asia Minor in 1935-1936. Stewart excavated with William Flin ders Pettie at Tell el-'Ajjul in Palestine in 1933; at Baba Koy, Turkey, with Kurt Bittel in 1935; with Winifred Lamb at Kusura, Turkey, in 1936; and he directed excavations at Vounous, Cyprus in 1937-1938. He enlisted in the Cyprus Regiment in 1940, was taken prisoner on Crete in 1941, and spent the following years at Ofiag VIIB in Germany, where he was able to continue his archaeological research and con duct classes in Near Eastern archaeology for his fellow in mates. In 1946 he accepted a teaching fellowship in ancient history at the University of Sydney and in 1948 joined the newly formed Department of Archaeology as senior lec turer. In i960 he was appointed the first Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the Uni versity. Stewart was a recognized world authority on tire archae ology of Cyprus, and his interest ranged over the entire pe riod of its history. He produced the definitive statement on the island's Early Bronze Age (Stewart, 1962, pp. 205--391) and a complete corpus of its Early Bronze Age ceramics. At the time of his last, fatal illness he was worldng on a definitive study of the Lusignan coinage of Cyprus. Stewart had an encyclopedic knowledge of the archaeology of the entire Near East, and his chapters on Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia in the Handbook to the Nicholson Museum (1948) are still among the best surveys of the archaeology of the area. His detailed analysis of Petrie's excavations at Tell el'Ajjul is a worthwhile account and a brilliant analysis of the material from this very important site (Stewart, 1974). Stewart was an excellent lecturer and much beloved by
the student body at the University of Sydney. He was a man of considerable means, with a superb private library he made available to his students. After his appointment to the Uni versity, Stewart conducted excavations on Cyprus at the cemeteries of Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia (1955) and at L a patsa and Palealona on the north coast of the island (i9601961). Stewart's major contributions to the archaeology of the Near East are in his publications and in the enhancing he did of the exhibitions and archaeology teaching collec tions at the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney. Perhaps his greatest contribution, however, was the enthu siasm and loyalty he inspired in his students. de [See also Cyprus; and Vounous.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bittel, Kurt, and James R. Stewart. "Ein Graberfeld der Yortan-Kultur bei Babakoy." Archiv fiir Orientforschung 13 (1940): 1-28. Stewart, Eleanor. Vounous 1937-38: Field-Report on the Excavations Sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Athens. Skrifter Utgivna av Svenska Institutet i Rom, 14. Lund, 1950. Stewart, James R. "The Ancient Near and Middle East" and "The Greek Mainland and the Aegean. I. Cyprus." In Handbook to the Nicholson Museum, pp. 7-199. 2d ed. Sydney, 1948. Stewart, James R. "The Early Cypriote Bronze Age." In The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, vol. 4.1 A, The Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus, edited by Porphyrios Dikaios and James R. Stewart, pp. 205-391. Lund, 1962. Stewart, James R. Tell el-'Ajjul: The Middle Bronze Age Remains. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, 38. Goteborg, 1974. Stewart, James R. Corpus of Cypriot Artifacts of the Early Bronze Age. 1 vols. Goteborg, 1988-1992. J. B A S I L H E N N E S S Y
STONE. See Lithics.
STRATIGRAPHY. That branch of archaeology which treats of the formation, composition, sequence, and corre lation of stratified materials as parts of the archaeological record is known as stratigraphy (after American Geological Institute, 1962, modified). Stray finds aside, virtually every archaeological context is stratified. Even a one-period site may have foundation trenches sealed under, and therefore earlier than, multilaminated floor and street deposits; those deposits may, in turn, lie under wall and roof collapse, with water- and/or windborne deposits accumulating in low-lying parts of the site, other parts being deflated, eroded, pitted, or bulldozed out. Casual rubbish accumulation, also strati fied over the centuries, is a certainty, and the bioturbation (disturbance by plants and/or animals) of shallow deposits is virtually assured. Each of these and other processes has made an important contribution to the archaeological record the excavator encounters. To die degree that one or all are ignored, the resulting archaeological interpretation is com promised. From a technical perspective, the magisterial
STRATIGRAPHY treatment of the subject of stratigraphy is that of Edward C. Harris (1979)Broadly speaking, apart from the physical and chemical aspects of the objects of study, there are two basic require ments in archaeology: to locate objects in space and to locate them in time (Albert Spaulding as quoted in Binford, 1972). Time cannot be observed directly but is inferred from physiochemical and spatial attributes. At a stratified site, the rel ative location of objects in time is inferred by reference to their place in the stratigraphic sequence. If particular key points in the stratigraphic sequence can be dated more or less absolutely, whether through assessing historical proba bilities, carbon-14 or other physio-chemical determinations, or cross dating with better dated materials, approximate dates can be assigned to intervening strata (see below).
Site Formation and Composition. Apart from techni cal inferences based upon detailed analyses of particular ar tifacts, past human activity is most often inferred from the study of spatial relationships between artifacts (broadly de fined, e.g., a foundation trench or intentional fill is as much an artifact as a projectile point). A potter's workshop may be inferred from a particular constellation of related artifacts found in a particular location (Wood, 1990, pp. 33-38). The ability accurately to observe contextual location in space, particularly of associated material correlates of patterned ac tivity (e.g., pottery making, metallurgy, weaving, food prep aration) is vitally dependent upon the accurate recognition, separation, and interpretation of discrete stratigraphic com ponents. Consider, for example, the stratigraphic context created by the collapse of bricks (containing older material culture items, particularly potsherds) upon in situ groundfloor materials (reflective of various patterned activities) ac companied by a shower of domestic items (e.g., loom weights and a cosmetic palette) from a second-story col lapse. It would be incorrect to infer ground-floor weaving or grooming activities or the curating of old sherds, on the basis of this evidence. Crude "filtering" techniques such as focusing solely upon restorable pottery forms—by way of eliminating "fossil" sherds—can only be an admission of professional failure to comprehend and disentangle what is, after all, a fairly common archaeological phenomenon—and one bearing upon yet unresolved problems (the nature and range of variability of second-story material culture assem blages). Ideally, the formation and composition of various strati graphic components (see below) should be worked out by the archaeologist in consultation with a knowledgable surficial geologist (Bullard, 1970, 1985; Holladay, 1978). The sequencing and local correlation of these materials involves a complex series of analyses (now computerized as a Harris Matrix program in the Bonn Archaeological Statistics pack age) proceeding from direct stratigraphic analysis, or, in postexcavation analysis, from drawn profiles of the stratig raphy (see below, figures 1, 3-4), together with the "over,"
83
"under," "contiguous with," and/or "contemporary with" descriptions of all individual loci (strata, features, etc., see below). Ideally, this analysis should be done on a daily basis in the field, so that conflicting evidence can be reassessed, a task considerably lightened by the Bonn package and its suc cessors. The typical product of this exercise is a graph, the Harris Matrix. Resembling a complex organization chart, this matrix represents, in two dimensions, the stratigraphy of tire excavation area under study (see figure ia-b; Harris, 1979; Paice, 1991). Correlating stratigraphic sequences between various ex cavation areas and from site to site largely hinges upon cross-dating techniques, with similar sets of small finds sug gesting similar dates. For periods or contexts lacking coins, pottery is the usual focus because of its abundance and everchanging characteristics. As with other comparisons, these should be made in some statistical sense rather than by the de facto standard of simply citing a few general similarities (differently: Orten et a l , 1993, pp. 182-196; Holladay, 1990, 1993)The stratigraphic record is demonstrated, examined, and recorded by excavating sections (vertical profiles, generally, but far from invariably [Barker, 1983], of standing balks) and by producing section drawings, supplemented by pho tographs. These are as vital to stratigraphic exposure, anal ysis, and reporting as horizontal exposure, plans, and pho tographs are to spatial exposure, analysis, and reporting. Syro-Palestinian Stratigraphy. Ancient Syro-Palestinian cities were large, complex social entities, often involving complex fortifications and generally having a combination of religious, governmental, military, and elite quarters, to gether with more generalized housing quarters, spread over an area of anywhere between 5-200 acres, 15-20 being close to the norm. The relationship of these elements to one an other—for example, fortifications to occupational hori zons—is one of the primary goals of stratigraphic analysis. Over the course of time, many occupation sites had as many as twenty or more discrete occupational horizons, or "cap ital S" Strata, with literally tens of thousands of "small s" strata (discrete stratigraphic increments (cf. figure 2 with figures 1, 3-4). Some investigators, conveniently termed ar chitecture-to-stratum archaeologists, tend to analyze tlieir data only, or primarily, in terms of architecturally defined "Strata." Almost invariably, they center on just the terminal destruction/desertion/leveled-for-rebuilding phases of their sites and ignore (or lump in) material from intervening stratigraphic accumulations. Others, often termed strati graphic archaeologists, prefer to work with the entire range of data, dealing with each stratum or feature (a locus, in the Gezer method; see Dever and Lance, 1978, p. 76)—as an entity demanding its own place in the puzzle. It is usually possible to categorize archaeologists by seeing how they in troduce their materials: do they feature a set of phased plans or some sort of reasonably complex stratigraphic chart or
84
STRATIGRAPHY
STRATIGRAPHY.
Figure i a. A section between two walls at Tell el-Maskhuta. (Courtesy Wadi Tumilat
Project)
|IZ039|
I— -8061
I -8067 8058A
1 -8076 |8JO0j -8099
-8103
Figure l b . A Harris Matrix of the above section. Note the modifications used to signify pits/trenches and walls, which may function through several phases. (After Paice, 1 9 9 1 ) STRATIGRAPHY.
section drawing? These "small s" strata and various features (such as pits, trenches, ovens, ash heaps, imported fills) each relate in some demonstrable way to the various architectural features (also loci) in their immediate vicinity. Each encap sulates small objects such as bones, shells, and seeds, and, almost invariably pottery. All of these artifacts and ecofacts were current in one fashion or another (often complexly) at die time of deposition. Each stratigraphic element is thus a sort of sealed time capsule or "envelope" of materials, var iously relating to each other, dating up to the time of de position. As already noted, the time of deposition can be related to some activity area or areas of some subphase of the larger architectural phase to which it relates. Taken to gether with other "small s" strata in a particular activity area, these define the material culture database for that particular subphase of that particular activity area. The gradual rise in level, averaging perhaps 0.5-1 m per century, of typical tell formations is primarily a function of
the disposable/reusable building materials employed (mud and stone), assisted in most cases by the fact that building walls and massive encircling city walls mitigated die effects of downslope erosion through sheetwash and gullying. Be cause most bioturbation (by ants, beetles, burrowing ani mals, worms, roots) occurs in the top 0.5-1 m of the soil profile, and because dense human occupation has an inhib iting effect upon animal and plant activity, active growth rates of this magnitude generally allow for little or no deg radation of the stratigraphic profile (see figure 3). Most an cient Syro-Palestinian settlements were constructed of mud brick, with packed earth and clay roofs, often multilaminated, and, where available, stone foundations to discourage rising damp. Mud-mortared stone was more extensively used in parts of the hill country and Transjordan. East of die Jordan River, in particular, and during periods when wall lines were only one stone thick (e.g., Iron Age I and Early Iron II), it is possible to hypothesize, on archaeoethnographic grounds, that half-timber construction may have been utilized for second and third (?) story construction over full-stone ground floors (which were only about 2 m high), although fully stone-built buildings are a possibility. Careful quantitative analysis of the proportions—and physical char acteristics—of soil (presumably mostly derivative of mudbrick or half-timbered construction) to building stone in ar eas of building collapse should provide the data for arbitrating between alternate hypotiieses. Later in Iron II, two-row stone foundations only one or two courses high— possibly dry laid to serve better as a barrier against ris ing damp—became the norm (cf. Tell el-Far'ah [North] Vlla-b widi Vlld; Chambon, 1984). [See Far ah, Tell el(North).] c
Ethnographic studies of modern populations that employ the same building technology suggest that yearly applica tions of chopped straw (chaff) and mud plaster were re quired to seal the surface of the brickwork and die mud mortar of the stonework against erosion by summer winds and winter rains. This material also was used—often over small stones and sherds—to construct small installations such as mangers, bread ovens, curbs around grinding loci,
STRATIGRAPHY
SECTION
THROUGH
ACE.AU
Figure 2 . An early section drawing from Albright's 1934 excavations at Bethel. Illus trates relative levels of walls isolated from their associated stratigraphy. (After Kelso, 1968, pi. 1 0 b ) STRATIGRAPHY.
9.00 Figure 3. A partial section of the E balk at Tell el-Maskhuta, area R.7. Note the multilaminated character of many surfaces. (Courtesy Wadi Tumilat Project) STRATIGRAPHY.
STRATIGRAPHY.
Figure 4. Part of Kenyan's section through the MB and EB fortifications at Jericho.
(After Kenyon, 1 9 5 6 , fig. 2)
85
86
STRATIGRAPHY
and pens for baby animals. Yearly decay of the mud plaster, periodically augmented in a major fashion by building col lapse (however it was accomplished), probably contributed most to the gradual rise of the tell. Narrow, irregular streets and building walls broke the force of winds, creating a more human environment. They also, however, precipitated a steady accumulation of loess, which could become a signif icant stratigraphic component in low-lying areas in late spring and early summer sandstorms. Areas of differing uses had distinctive compositions and surface characteristics. Street levels, which were hardened against winter rains with rocks and potsherds, received reg ular increments of eroding mud plaster, sheep and goat dung, and rubbish, and thus rose more quickly than interior house floors. Unless hardened, exterior surfaces quickly be came irregular and littered with rubbish and displayed damp patches. Interior earthen surfaces (including the misnamed "courts" of Iron Age houses, and probably Middle and Late Bronze Age houses as well) were characteristically com posed of well-tended, fine-grained laminae with occasional flat-lying sherds and bone fragments. In some cases floors were eroded by sweeping or the trampling during overnight quartering of the household's small sheep and goat herds into shallow, bowl-shaped contours. A layer of imported fill, either field soil or earth mined elsewhere in the townsite, may have been used to level them before they were refloored with packed eartii or mud plaster. In rare cases, tiiese floors might be covered with a thin layer of chalky marl or packed chalky limestone. In house 1727 at Shechem, the secondstory floor, probably laid on mats (not observed) supported by split floor joists (observed), was composed of calcite crys tals in a clayey mud matrix topping a gritty mud base layer. The finished floor was ground with an upper millstone to resemble terrazzo. [See Shechem.] Iron Age stable sur faces—both domestic and military—characteristically were cobbled and often laid over ashy fill. Food preparation areas might be partially flagged. Ethnographically documented living rooms often have whitewashed walls and floors, and storerooms generally have mud-plaster floors. Kitchen floors, and those of baking areas, are characteristically cov ered with a layer of ashes, while nonhardened stable floors are a treacherous mixture of wet droppings, fodder, and mud (Kramer, 1982, p. 106). Mud-brick buildings have a finite use-life, depending upon local materials and conditions. Fifty years was consid ered old for a house in the village at Tell el-Maskhuta in the Egyptian Nile Delta, which saw relatively little rainfall but had considerable rising damp. [See Maskhuta, Tell el-.] Over the course of a major stratigraphic phase, various buildings would have been torn down and rebuilt (either partially or wholly), each in its own season, creating local conditions archaeologists often term spiral stratigraphy. Given available resources, such operations might have in volved major quantities of new materials and a consequent
rise in elevation. Those changes in architecture and/or ele vation might have little to do with the building next door or across the lane, however. Massive destructions ranged from operations capable of burning huge boulders to quicklime and mud bricks to a point where they flowed like lava to little more than a hap hazard razing of houses and defense walls. In either case, upon reoccupation, tire remains were leveled, places where known valuables might have been buried were probed and mined, and stone monoliths and visible foundation lines were often robbed for reuse, wrealdng havoc on the archaeo logist's ability to reconstruct building plans. Suitable depos its of mud-brick material were mined to make new bricks (most, but not all, bricks were made of tell materials; fired materials were unusable), creating spoil pits of varying sizes, and a new townsite was constructed on the ruins of the old one. All this probably took place over a number of years and may have involved the construction of temporary huts and hovels pending the careful rebuilding of significant homes, public buildings, and the city wall (Hg, 1.2-14; Neh. passim). Some towns, like stratum III at Beersheba, seem to have been planned and built as a unit, with major government assistance indicated not only by the scale of work involved in the fortification, but also by the use of Cedar from Leb anon, presumably upon a largely deserted tell. [See Beer sheba.] Over the course of centuries of occupation and desertion, all these activities built a complexly stratified mound. In turn, the mound was sculpted by the forces of nature, prin cipally wind and rain (Rosen, 1986), to create the entity known in Arabic as a tell, in Turkish as tepe, and in Hebrew as tel. Informed excavation—allowing intelligible publica tion—of such a large and complex layer cake is not easy, particularly if the walls of the uppermost or sociopolitically most important Stratum must be preserved as a public park or monument. [See Conservation Archaeology; Restoration and Conservation.] Any excavation that ignores analyzing and planning the vertical component (section drawings) as meticulously as the plan view, however, is headed for trou ble. Alternatively, deep trenches, such as those at Jericho (Kenyon 1956,1957b), have the virtue of demonstrating the stratigraphic succession, and die composition, of complex earthworks (see figure 4), but lack the expanse to allow for significant architectural, social, or socioeconomic analysis. They are like a transverse dorsal-ventral section of a biolog ical specimen: the anatomy from spine to navel is under stood, but little of the organization of the skeleton, muscu lature, blood supply, or inner organs. Rapid, broad-scale excavations, such as those at Beersheba (Aharoni, 1973), often lack adequate technical control and/or proper record ing procedures except in restricted areas. Such excavators quickly run into trouble trying to work in progressively smaller-sized excavation areas as they probe below court yards and in rooms, again leaving lower walls in place while
STRATIGRAPHY
87
probing deeper. This is like studying the anatomy of an el ephant by cutting a few small inward-stepping pits in its hide. If the holes are to be large enough to be useful, a great many of the walls will have to be taken out. Even then, none of the earlier strata can be studied with the same compre hensiveness as the uppermost strata. The deficiencies of the Megiddo and Alalakh publica tions, both of which combined broad-scale excavations with deep penetration, were created by the difficulties of main taining control, recording adequately, and conducting a se rious publication effort involving such a large excavation area. [See Megiddo; Alalakh.] One way out of this dilemma may be to concentrate more attention on small one-period (single component) sites, or sites where the final decently preserved strata are the ones wanting investigation. At the same time, materials can be ordered and a time-series de veloped with reference to carefully controlled sttatigraphic trenches at large, more continuously occupied multicomponent sites. Implications for Excavation Techniques. Given that actual stratigraphy is made up of a complex series of hori zontally disposed layers frequently interrupted by pits and spoil pits of varying sizes, it is vastly more expedient to ex cavate on the basis of a known stratigraphic profile than either to "dig blind" (the usual practice in architecture-tosttatum excavations) or to perforate future excavation areas with small probes—which are largely useless because they are small and limited in depth. This profile can most easily be maintained first by digging two 1.5-X-io-meter trenches, end on end, down to a depth of about 2 m or so. Relatively little time and wasted earth is involved. (The trench is, of course, excavated stratigraphically, but roughly.) The eight balks provide as much or more stratigraphic detail than that obtained at season's end from studying the corresponding remnant balks of two adjacent 10-X-io-meter excavation areas. The latter is little more than an autopsy. The signif icant difference is that, once the stratigraphy is known and securely analyzed, known layers, pits, and robber trenches can be confidently peeled back in proper stratigraphic order. In effect, the balks can be dug first, then tire squares exca vated.
the archaeological record in extremely variable ways: lengthy site decay processes following desertion; looting and sudden violent destruction by enemy action; sudden violent destruction by earthquake with subsequent attempts to re cover lost goods and/or bodies for reburial; deliberate lev eling of areas preparatory to urban renewal; sudden or lengthy colluviation or alluviation—each creating a uniquely biased archaeological record and progressively modifying it in equally variable ways (e.g., bioturbation, cryoturbation, long-term wasting processes, compaction, slumping, whole sale site relocation through downslope slippage, relocation and destruction of the associative contexts of archaeological materials through brick making or the use of fills [Wright, 1962], digging of graves or silos, creation of spoil pits for the making of mud bricks or other activities, subsequent vari eties and combinations of mass wasting and backfilling, pothunting and other treasure-seeking activities, modern build ing activity).
Stratigraphic and Site-Formation Processes. Despite their centrality to questions of archaeological interpretation, the twin processes of stratigraphy and site formation have received less attention from Syro-Palestinian archaeologists than might be expected (but cf. Kenyon, 1957a, b; Wright, 1962, 1969; Bullard, 1970; Holladay, 1978). That gap, with respect to stratigraphic and sedimentary processes, is largely filled by the British archaeologist Edward Pyddoke (1961) and by William C. Krumbein and Laurence L . Sloss (1951), among others. The Americanist Michael Schiffer (1987) has focused, more recently, on formation processes. The im portance of these processes lies in the fact that they create
Aharoni, Yohanan, ed. Beer-Sheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons. Tel Aviv, 1973. American Geological Institute. Dictionary of Geological Terms. Garden City, N.Y., 1962. Barker, Philip A. Techniques of Archaeological Excavation. 2d ed. New York, 1983. Binford, Lewis R. "A Consideration of Archaeological Research De sign." American Antiquity 29 (1972): 425-441. Biran, Avraham, and Joseph Aviram, eds. Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Ar chaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990. Jerusalem, 1993. Bullard, Reuben G. "Geological Studies in Field Archaeology." Biblical
Given that it is the archaeologist's job to study and to seek to explain tire archaeological record in terms of the material culture complex (including associated ecofacts) and its role in systemic activities of past societies, "sound procedures of inference must explicitly recognize and take into account the entire range of relevant processes that form the archaeolog ical and historical records" (Schiffer, 1987, p. 5). Such "in ferences," generally based on statistical analyses, are more common in Syro-Palestinian prehistorical investigations titan they presently are for the archaeology of the second and first millennia B C E or for the first centuries C E . A S SyroPalestinian archaeology moves away from simple descrip tion into areas already actively being pursued in the Amer icas, Great Britain, and Europe, these matters will quickly become of much more significance than they are at present. In the interim, inadequate attention to detailed stratigraphy, inadequate recognition of the workings of formation pro cesses, and inadequate recording and publication procedu res will inevitably limit the usefulness of many present ex cavations for future research. [See also Excavation Strategy; Excavation Tools; Locus; and Recording Techniques.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archaeologist 33 ( i 9 7 ° ) : 9 8 - 1 3 2 .
Bullard, Reuben G. "Sedimentary Environments and Lithologic Ma terials at Two Archaeological Sites." In Archaeological Geology, edited
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STRATUM
by George Rapp, Jr., and John A. Gifford, pp. 1 0 3 - 1 3 3 . New Haven,
sent a major architectural phase. Often, only the terminal portion of an architectural phase—ended by a clearly de Callaway, Joseph A., and James M. Weinstein. "Radiocarbon Dating fined destruction, desertion, or wholesale architectural re of Palestine in the Early Bronze Age." Bulletin of the American Schools placement—gets published. Thus it can be said that Lachish of Oriental Research, no. 225 (1977): I—16. has only three publishable (in terms of material cultural ef Chambon, Alain. Tell el-Far'ah I: L'Age du Per. Paris, 1984. Dever, William G., and H. Darrell Lance, eds. A Manual of Field Ex fects) Iron II Strata: Levels V, III, and II from the late tenth, cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. late eighth, and early sixth centuries B C E , respectively—with Harris, Edward C. Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy. London, Level IV "mark[ing] the construction of a large fortified 1979. city . . . [that] cannot be dated on the basis of archaeological Holladay, John S. "Balks: Their Care and Reading." In A Manual of Field Excavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists, edited by William data" (Ussishkin, 1992, p. 120b). [See Lachish.] The de G. Dever and H. Darrell Lance, pp. 46-72. Cincinnati, 1978. struction of the Level IV city is anomalously dealt with as Holladay, John S. "Red Slip, Burnish, and the Solomonic Gateway at Level III, in obvious recognition that a late tenth-century Gezer." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 7 7 - building phase cannot adequately be characterized by late 278 (1990): 23-70. eighth-century destruction materials. For the most part, Holladay, John S. "The Use of Pottery and Other Diagnostic Criteria, however, materials intermediate to clear or massive inter from the Solomonic Era to the Divided Kingdom." In Biblical Ar chaeology Today, 1090: Proceedings of the Second International Congressfaces are either ignored in post-excavation analysis and pub on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by Avra lication, or lumped in with tire terminal materials. Thus, de ham Biran and Joseph Aviram, pp. 8 6 - 1 0 1 . Jerusalem, 1993. spite being continuously occupied, with the possible Kelso, James L. The Excavation of Bethel, 1934-1960. Annual of the exception of the early part of the sixth century, Iron II L a American Schools of Oriental Research, 39. Cambridge, Mass., chish is taken as yielding significant stratified data for only 1968. three widely spaced dates: one of material from a destruction Kenyon, Kathleen M. "Excavations at Jericho, 1956," Palestine Explo ration Quarterly (1956): 67-82. about 925 B C E (Level V ) , another in 701 B C E (Level III), Kenyon, Kathleen M. Beginning in Archaeology. 2d ed., rev. New York, and another in 587 B C E (Level II). This perspective char 1957a. acterizes not only "architecture-to-stratum" archaeologists, Kenyon, Kathleen M. Digging Up Jericho. London, 1957b. following the lead of Frederick J. Bliss (1894), who used the Kramer, Carol. Village Ethnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in Archaeological term "Cities," Clarence S. Fisher, and others, but also the Perspective. New York, 1982. published work of many contemporary "stratigraphic" Krumbein, William C , and Laurence L. Sloss. Stratigraphy and Sedi mentation. San Francisco, 1 9 5 1 . archaeologists. Orton, Clive, et al. Pottery in Archaeology. Cambridge, 1993. The Gezer publications use the term General Strata Paice, Patricia. "Extensions to the Harris Matrix System to Illustrate (Dever et a l , 1986, vol. 1, pp. 8-9, fig. 2). [See Gezer.] In Stratigraphic Discussion of an Archaeological Site." Journal of Field Archaeology 18 (1991): 1 7 - 2 8 . this case, however, the exact stratigraphy of the "small s" Pyddoke, Edward. Stratification for the Archaeologist. London, 1961. stratum, or locus, can be determined from the locus indices Rapp, George, Jr., and John A. Gifford, eds. Archaeological Geology. and, in many cases, in the section drawings. Most publica New Haven, 1985. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and tions lack such precision, however, and the simplistic model of publishable "capital S " Strata impedes further refinement Practice. New York, 1991. Rosen, Arlene Miller. Cities of Clay: The Geoarchaeology of Tells. Chi in Syro-Palestinian archaeology. cago, 1986. In her work at Jericho and Jerusalem, Kathleen M . Ken Schiffer, Michael B. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. yon focused on individual stratigraphic elements. [See Jeri Albuquerque, 1987. cho; Jerusalem.] Paul W. Lapp (1961) also argued for the Weinstein, James M. "Radiocarbon Dating in the Southern Levant." more restricted sense (the "small s" strata), but to little ef Radiocarbon 26 (1984): 297-366. Wood, Bryant G. The Sociology of Pottery in Ancient Palestine. Sheffield, fect—except that the Ta'anach publications employ the 1990. term Period instead of Stratum (Rast, 1978). [See Ta'anach.] Wright, G. Ernest. "Archaeological Fills and Strata." Biblical Archae William G. Dever and H. Darrell Lance define a layer or ologist 25 (1962): 34-40. locus as "the smallest coherent unit of stratigraphy. In prac Wright, G. Ernest. "Archaeological Method in Palestine: An American tice . . . any [three-dimensional] stratigraphic unit which can Interpretation." Erelz-Israel9 (1969): 1 2 0 - 1 3 3 . be meaningfully isolated from those adjacent to it—e.g., a J O H N S. H O L L A D A Y , J R . layer of earth with a uniform character, a surface, the de struction debris or fill resting on the surface, the makeup under the surface, . . . each phase of a multiphase wall, the STRATUM. In geology, a stratum is "a single sedimen stone lining of a pit, the contents of a pit [discrete layers in tary bed or layer" or a section of "a formation that consists the contents of a pit], etc." (Dever and Lance, 1978, p. 76, throughout of approximately the same kind of rock mate brackets added). rial" (American Geological Institute, 1976, p. 410). In SyroPalestinian archaeology, the term Stratum, with a capital 5 Yohanan Aharoni employed a broader definition: "Lo (or Level, Phase, City, Period), is generally used to repre cus—Any defined area of the excavation from which finds 1985.
SUBEITA are recorded; i.e., usually rooms. Installations or pits inside a locus may or may not receive special loci numbers, de pending on the considerations of die area supervisor re garding finds, importance, etc. The locus number must be changed with the removal of any floor, especially if it had contained vessels for restoration. . . . Start immediately with a locus number in any fresh square. With the appearance of walls, this number may be kept for one of the rooms" (Ahar oni, 1973; pp. 1 1 9 - 1 2 0 ) . In this instance, loci clearly relate to the "capital S " Strata. To reduce the loss of information caused by focusing on the termination of each major architectural phase, Holladay (1976) proposes using the terms horizon and period to dis tinguish between material deriving from synchronic wide spread destructions (e.g., the 587 B C E campaign of Nebu chadrezzar) and diachronic materials deriving from multiple-occupancy tombs, midden heaps, stratified fills, and layers of accumulation. Though the proposal provides the language to use in distinguishing among differing sorts of evidence, it did not bear directly on standards of exca vation, workup, or publication. T o bridge the gap between traditional publishing by Strata and the radically different locus-by-locus mode exemplified in the Jericho materials (Kenyon et al., 1960-1983)—which still uses only an arbi trarily selected subset of the excavated data—Holladay more recently proposed analyzing, on a "small s" basis, the sherdage and other materials from selected columns (e.g., one or more 5-meter squares per excavation area) of close strati graphic units, coupled with a more traditional approach elsewhere in the excavation. This method would help to move evaluation and reporting from the excessive period icity of inherited practice toward the reconstruction of the small finds and ceramic corpora of individual short periods in intra-Stratum stratigraphy. (For a test case from Gezer, see Holladay, 1993). New methods, not limited by reference to massive de struction layers, will enable a fuller comparison of typologies of diagnostic sherds. Typological analysis of the formal characteristics of sherds is the most useful form of intersite comparison—particularly to determine subcultures within a given culture/region (e.g., Dan to Beersheba, in biblical terms). Such analysis can be complemented by the publi cation of most of the recorded diagnostic sherds. If the vol ume of materials is too overwhelming, it would still be pos sible to employ a statistically valid sampling procedure as a means of selecting materials for workup. An alternative ap proach offers hope for nonstatistical comparative seriation through the use of "presence" data. Still under develop ment, this approach is based on concepts derived from graph theory as applied to geological stratification, and works directiy with closely defined "types," either of rim form or of whole vessel forms. [See also Locus; Recording Techniques; Stratigraphy; and the biographies of Aharoni, Bliss, Fisher, Kenyon, and Lapp-]
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aharoni, Yohanan, ed. Beer-Sheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969-1971 Seasons. Tel Aviv, 1973. American Geological Institute. Dictionary of Geological Terms. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y., 1976. Bliss, Frederick Jones. A Mound of Many Cities, or, Tell el Hesy Exca vated. London, 1894. Dever, William G., and H. Darrell Lance, eds. A Manual of Field Ex cavation: Handbook for Field Archaeologists. Cincinnati, 1978. Dever, William G., et al. Gezer IV: The 1969-71 Seasons in Field VI, the "Acropolis."2 vols. Jerusalem, 1986. Holladay, John S. "Of Sherds and Strata." In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God; Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank Moore Cross et al., pp. 253-293. Garden City, N.Y., 1976. Holladay, John S. "The Use of Pottery and Other Diagnostic Criteria, from the Solomonic Era to the Divided Kingdom." In Biblical Ar chaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, edited by Avraham Biran and Joseph Aviram, pp. 86-101. Jerusalem, 1993. Kenyon, Kathleen M., et al. Excavations at. Jericho. 5 vols. London, 1960-1983.
Lapp, Paul W. Palestinian Ceramic Chronology, 200 B.C.-A.D. 70. New Haven, 1961. Rast, Walter E. Taanach I: Studies in the Iron Age Pottery. Cambridge, Mass., 1978. Ussishkin, David. "Lachish." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, pp. 1 1 4 - 1 2 6 . New York, 1992. J O H N S. H O L L A D A Y , J R .
STUDIUM BIBLICUM FRANCIS CANUM. See Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.
SUBEITA (mod. Ar., A-Sbaita/Isbeita), northern Negev site located 43 km (27 mi.) southwest of Beersheba, in region 1 of the Beersheba basin, on the north slope of Wadi Zeitan, which drains Subeita's water into the Lavan valley (Gutwein, 1981, pp. 75 (best map), 89). Subeita has been iden tified with Sobata in die Nessana papyri (nos. 75, 79) and Suka (corrected to "Soubeita" by a medieval Jewish codex) in the fifth-century C E Nilus narrative, a combination martyr document and desert adventure story (Mayerson, 1994). Its present name derives from a modern Arabic designation, but the site is referred to by widely varying names in the modern literature: Shivta (Heb.), Sbeijta, S'baita, Esbeita, Sbaita, Sbeita (Segal, 1983, p. 25, n. 4). Avraham Negev proposes a tentative derivation of the site's name from the Nabatean Shibitu (Negev, 1993, p. 1134)Beginning in 1870 and continuing throughout the twen tieth century, at least five plans of the city have been drawn, the last of which, by Baruch Brimmer, is the basis for recent studies of the city by both Arthur Segal (1983) and Joseph Shereshevski (1986). Portions of the site were excavated, cleared, and restored by the Colt Expedition in 1934-1936 and again by Israel's National Parks Authority in 1958-1960; however, no stratigraphic results have ever been published.
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SUKAS, TELL
The earlier reported occupational history of the site as Na batean, during the reign of Aretas IV (9 B C E - 4 0 C E ) , and Byzantine (founded in the late fifth century, with a floruit in the sixth and sevendi centuries) is based entirely on in scriptions found on site, on coin finds, and on unstratified pottery published by G. M . Crowfoot. Crowfoot's report was based on pottery and forty-four coins given to her by H, D. Colt from the 1935 Colt Expedition excavations in two trenches laid in a dump on the slope of the hill. Early estimates placing the size of the ancient town at 29 acres have been reduced to 20 acres in recent scholarship, resi dents' housing being now confined entirely to the unwalled site itself. The town itself sits in the midst of an agricultural hinter land with visible surface remains of enclosures, farm walls, and agricultural structures (see Gutwein, 1981, p. 241, table 9). Located neither on a major trade route nor road, with cisterns being the only source of water, the city appears to have functioned as a service center and place of residence for the populace of the self-contained hinterland. It was also a market town for the region's pastoral nomads (see the Nilus narrative). Shereshevski (1986) has demonstrated that the dense insulae that constituted the city's housing primar ily constituted one-story buildings. The partially planned, partially unplanned Byzantine city divides structurally into three areas, each of which contains its own Byzantine Christian church integrated into its de sign. The architecture of the three Byzantine churches fol lows the Negev's regional and liturgical preferences, unin fluenced by trends and reforms in either Constantinople or Jerusalem as George Kalantzis (1994) has shown. Early scholarly contentions that the southern part of the city is the oldest, based on the reuse of a Nabatean inscrip tion in the south church, have been challenged by Sheresh evski. The south church, a triapsidal structure equipped with a baptistery and side buildings, was decorated with wall paintings and is dated by inscriptions to the beginning of the fifth century to some time after 649. [See Baptisteries; Wall Paintings.] Little is known about the central church, except its plan and the fact that it was built over an earlier building. The north church, or Church of St. George, demonstrates a complicated history from its founding in the early sixth century to its last inscriptional date (648). St. George's lav ish size and decoration have been reconstructed by Avraham Negev (1989, pp. 129-142). [See also Churches; Nabateans; and Nessana.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Crowfoot, G. M. "The Nabatean Ware of Sbaita." Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1936): 14-27, pis. 1-4. Gutwein, Kenneth C. Third Palestine: A Regional Study in Byzantine Urbanization. Washington, D.C., 1981. Kalantzis, George. "A Comparison of the Architectural Elements of the Fifth and Sixth Century Byzantine Churches in the Negev and
Constantinople." Master's thesis, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 1994. Mayerson, Philip. "The Desert of Southern Palestine According to Byzantine Sources." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963): 1 6 0 - 1 7 2 .
Mayerson, Philip. "Observations on the 'Nilus' Narrationes: Evidence for an Unknown Christian Sect?" In Monks, Martyrs, Soldiers and Saracens: Papers on the Near East in Late Antiquity (1062-1993), pp. 105-128. Jerusalem, 1994. Negev, Avraham. "The Cathedral of Elusa and the New Typology and Chronology of the Byzantine Churches in the Negev." Studium Biblicum Franciscanum/Liber Annuus 39 (1989): 1 2 9 - 1 4 2 . Negev, Avraham. "Negev: The Persian to the Byzantine Periods." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by Ephraim Stern, vol. 3, pp. 1 1 3 3 - 1 1 3 5 . Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Negev, Avraham. "Sobata." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by Ephraim Stern, vol. 4, pp. 1404-1410. Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Ovadiah, Asher. Corpus of the Byzantine Churches in the Holy Land. Theophaneia, 22. Bonn, 1970. See pages 1 6 6 - 1 7 3 . Segal, Arthur. The Byzantine City of Shivta (Esbeita), Negev Desert, Is rael British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 179. Oxford, 1983. Shereshevski, Joseph. "Urban Settlements in the Negev in the Byzan tine Period." Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986. In Flebrew with English summary. DENNIS E . GROH
SUKAS, TELL, site located on the coast of Syria, about 26 km (16 mi.) from Latakia and 6 km (4 mi.) south of Gabla (35°2o' N , 35°55' E). It lies on a fertile plain bordered by coastal mountains on the north, east, and south. Tell Sukas has a nortiiern and a southern harbor, indicating tiiat the site was an important port in antiquity. The ancient name of Sukas is known: it is Su-uk-su (Suksa), a town at the southern frontier of Ugarit and is mentioned in Egyptian, Ugaritic, and Hittite documents. No inscription with the name was found on the tell. In 1934 Emil O. Forrer, on behalf of the Bryn Mawr College Expedition to Cilicia, made two soundings at Tell Sukas that demonstrated the site's long history. The Danish archaeologist P. J. Riis ex cavated at Tell Sukas under the auspices of the Carlsberg Foundation in five campaigns (1958-1963). The excavators' period A belongs to die late Middle Ages up to the present, B to the Crusader period, C to the Byz antine period, and D to the Roman period. In die publica tion of the excavations at Sukas (Riis et a l , 1970-1986), periods A - D are not discussed in any detail. It is briefly stated that two phases of a medieval fortification existed, one, perhaps from the twelfth century C E , represented by a larger tower than the other. The structures from period E , die Hellenistic period, suffered greatly from later intrusive building activities. The evidence suggests tiiat this was not a period of decline, however. Two phases were identified: E i (Late Hellenistic II, c. 117-68 B C E ) , which was destroyed by the earthquake of 68 B C E , and E2 (Late Hellenistic I, c.
SUKENIK, ELEAZAR LIPA 1 4 0 - 1 1 7 B C E ) , also destroyed by an earthquake, probably the one that occurred in 1 1 7 . Period F (Neo-Phoenician) lasted from about 380 to 140 B C E . Period G (mosdy Persian) was divided in three phases: G i (c. 552-498 B C E ) , G2 (c. 588-552 B C E ) , G3 (c. 675-588 B C E ) . For almost one hundred years after its destruction at the end of the period G i , Tell Sukas was nearly desolate. When the tell was reoccupied, the new town was character ized by a completely different plan and building types and techniques. The setders, who were Phoenicians rather than Greeks, did not follow the Hippodamian plan. Stone objects (statues of house gods) were recovered from many houses. Pottery, coins, and tombs belonging to the period were also excavated. Following the site's destruction in 677 or 671 B C E by the Assyrians under King Esarhaddon, Greeks settled there, forming the majority of tire population. The newcomers erected new buildings and in some cases rebuilt ruins. Pri vate houses, temples (phase G 2 ) , and pottery (east Greek and Cypriot) were unearthed. The setders were primarily peasants, but also fisherman. An iron siclde and basalt grind ing stones illustrate the importance of agriculture; oxen, sheep, goat, and in one case deer (or gazelle) bones are fur ther evidence for the population's diet. A fish hook, fish bones, a fragment of a tortoise shell, and mollusk remains were also recorded. Pig bones were represented only in phases G3 and G 2 . The excavators did not note any break in the phases of settlement by the Greek newcomers and Cypriot settlers. The Greek population may have lived on the central part of the mound and the Cypriots near the sea. To this period belong Greco-Phoenician graves to the south of the southern harbor. Period H (Iron Age, c. 1170-675 B C E ) is divided into two phases: Phoenician II (c. 850—675 B C E ) and Phoenician I (c. x 170-850 B C E ) . The architectural remains of this period are poor and it was difficult to determine the house types. In complex V, the excavators were able to describe parts of a room, but no cult buildings were unearthed. A storage area had contained agriculture products and olives, oil, grain, oxen, sheep, goats, fish, and mollusks were identified as the settlement's most important foodstuffs. In this period the relationship between Sukas and Cyprus and the Aegean was good, as indicated by die imported Greek and Cypriot pot tery. Sukas was partially destroyed in the Assyrian invasion of the Syrian coast in about 850 B C E . This destruction marked the transition between periods H i and Ha. About two hundred years later, Esarhaddon destroyed die town. Periods K and J belong to the Middle (c. 2000-1600 B C E ) and Late Bronze (c. 1 6 0 0 - 1 1 7 0 B C E ) Ages, respectively. Later building activity, especially the construction of a new town in period F, seriously disturbed many phases of die Bronze Age layers. Its remains were found in G 1 2 , F8 (north, northwest) and F 1 1 (nortiiwesf). Architectural re mains are represented by the foundations of private houses.
91
The most remarkable find from the period was the collective pit grave in G i l (southwest) placed inside the settlement. At die end of its period of use—for a number of years by the same people—the pit was filled with earth and covered with stones. The excavators distinguished three levels of burials and unearthed typical M B metal, bone, and stone objects (pins, dagger, arrowheads), in addition to pottery. [See Grave Goods.] The presence of querns and the bones of oxen and sheep among the finds in the houses hints at the sustenance of the M B and L B inhabitants of Sukas. Evi dently, Sukas was partially destroyed by fire at the end of the Late Bronze Age. However, the devastation there was not as widespread as at Ugarit. [See Ugarit] Period L (Early Bronze Age) and period M (Chalcolithic) are not represented in tire publications of Tell Sukas vol umes 1-8. Period N , the Neolithic (c. 6550-4800 B C E ) , is separated from tire Chalcolithic level by a hiatus and is di vided into three phases: Early, Middle, and Late local Ne olithic. From the beginning of the Early local Neolithic to the end of the Late Neolithic, there seems to have been a continuous and gradual development. The Neolithic finds are comparable with those from Ras Shamra VA-BIV; Byblos Early Neolithic (Lower, Middle and Upper); and Tell Ard Tbaili (Lower and Upper). Some pottery sherds are comparable with sherds from 'Amuq phase B (dark-faced burnished ware). [See Ugarit; 'Amuq.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Riis, P. J . , et al. Sukas: Publications of the Carlsberg Expedition to Phoe nicia. 8 vols. Copenhagen, 1970-1986. A L I ABOU ASSAI'
SUKENIK, ELEAZAR LIPA (1889-1953), early Is raeli archaeologist, epigrapher, and educator, best remem bered as the first scholar to recognize the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Born in Bialystok, Lithuania, Sukenik im migrated to Palestine in 1913 and became a high school in structor in mathematics and geography. After World War I, with financial support from the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, he studied archaeology at the University of Berlin (1922-1923). He later devoted himself to research on He brew epigraphy and the archaeology of ancient synagogues. In 1926, Sukenik received a Ph.D. from Dropsie College in Philadelphia and was appointed staff archaeologist for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the following year. Among the most important of Sukenik's early projects was the excavation of the so-called Third Wall of Jerusalem, in cooperation with L . A. Mayer (1925-1927); die finds there became the focus of debate on the urban topography of the city in the first century C E . With the assistance of Nahman Avigad, Sukenik excavated the ancient synagogue of Beth Alpha (1929). Its elaborate mosaic pavement became a
92
SUMERIAN
of more than one morpheme, but with clear-cut morpheme boundaries. From the beginning of historical times, Sumerian was in contact with languages of the Semitic family. It appears, in fact, that the early texts, largely logographic, could be read either as Sumerian or as Semitic. After 2,000 B C E , Akkadian, a Semitic language, became dominant and Sumerian was relegated to the status of a literary language. [See Akkadian.] Phonology. The phonology of Sumerian can be recon structed up to a point with the help of native syllabary tab lets. The tablets provide a phonological definition of a word in terms of a set of basic syllabograms, as shown in the ex amples provided in figure 1. The basic syllabograms in the left subcolumn are the same ones used to write Akkadian, a Sukenik's familiarity with Hebrew scripts of the Hellenis Semitic language whose phonetic structure is better known. tic and Roman periods enabled him to recognize the early This allows an approximate reconstruction of the Sumerian date and immense historical significance of the Dead Sea words, although some phonological details are undoubtedly Scrolls, three of which he purchased for the Hebrew Uni lost in the process. The resulting phonological inventory of versity in November-December 1947. His translation of and Sumerian consonants is provided in table 1. There are some commentaries on the Thanksgiving Hymns, the Isaiah B uncertain points, such as the exact nature of /h/ (glottal?), Scroll, and the War Scroll were completed after his death and /s/ (interdental?). This Akkadian interpretation of the by his son Yigael Yadin and Avigad. Sumerian phonological system quite possibly involves some [See also Beth Alpha; Dead Sea Scrolls; Samaria; and the degree of underdifferentiation. In its earlier stages, the writ biographies of Avigad, Crowfoot, and Yadin.} ing system did not distinguish between voiceless and voiced stops. It is not known whether this type of simplification BIBLIOGRAPHY extended to other phonological features. There is also a ten Silberman, Neil Asher. A Prophet from Amongst You: The Life of Yigael dency to simplify consonantic clusters in writing. The ex Yadin—Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker of Modern Israel. New York, istence of glides or semivowels *y) is suggested by in 1993. direct orthographic evidence. Sukenik, Eleazar L. "Twenty-Five Years of Archaeology." In Hebrew
source of scholarly interest as well as an evocative political symbol for Palestine's Jewish community. Sukenik served as associated director of the excavations of Samaria/Sebaste under J . W. Crowfoot (1931-1935), but his greatest contributions to his discipline came in his work at the Hebrew University: appointed lecturer in Palestinian Archaeology in 1935, he helped establish the basic course of study and in 1936 established a National Museum of Jewish Antiquities there. Sukenik supervised numerous excavations (most of them conducted by Avigad) at sites including Hammath-Gader (1932), Tell Jerishe (1927-1950), Afula (1926-1937), and Hadera (1934). At Hadera, Sukenik made the first identification of the characteristic ceramic ossuaries of the Chalcolithic period.
University Garland: A Silver Jubilee Symposium, edited by Norman D. Bentwich, pp. 43-57. London, 1952. Yadin, Yigael. "E. L. Sukenik: Qavim Biografiim." Eretz-Israel 8 (1967): xii-xx. E. L. Sukenik Memorial Volume (in Hebrew). N E I L ASHER SILBERMAN
SUMERIAN. A linguistically isolated, extinct language, Sumerian is preserved only on clay tablets, in a considerable corpus of texts, written in cuneiform. The tablets, dating from about 2,800 to 100 B C E , have been found in excavations in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, in other areas of the Near East, most notably northern Syria, but also as far as Susa in Elam, Bogazkoy in Anatolia, Palestine, and el-Amarna in Egypt. Linguistic and Historical Background. The native name of Sumerian is eme-gir (Akk., lisan sumeri, "language of the Sumerians"). A dialect used by women is called emesal (Aide, luru, "woman's language"). All attempts to con nect Sumerian to known linguistic families have so far failed. Typologically, it belongs to the languages with a subjectobject-verb order, postpositions instead of prepositions, and adjectives following the noun. The roots tend to be mono syllabic, but the language can be considered to have an ag glutinative morphology—one in which a word may consist
Structural conditions limit the coexistence of some con sonants in the same root. For instance, in a root of the form C(onsonant)!-V(owel)-C(onsonant)2, the two consonants cannot be labial; if Cj is /h/, C cannot be a velar; if C is Ihj, Cj cannot be nasal or velar. The consonant /r/ is almost never found as word initial. The writing shows four vowels—a, e, i, and u—but there 2
sa-ar
<
2
sataru
"to write"
si-ig
mahasu
"to strike"
mu-ul
kakkabu
"star"
za-la-ag
namaru
"to shine"
di-gi-ir
"god" I
lu-gu-ud SUMERIAN.
1
kurit
"short"
Figure 1 . Sumerian syllabograms.
SUMERIAN TABLE I.
Sumerian Consonants Labial
Voiceless stops Voiced stops
P b
Velar
t
k
d s
S h
Voiceless fricatives
s z m
Liquids Glides
n
-e -r(a) -a -da -ta -1(e) -gin?
"g
I, r *w
are indications that die system was more complex. BoLind morphemes and compound words exhibit vowel harmony. There is no indication in the writing of dynamic stress or tone; given die structure (mostly monosyllabic) of the roots, the presence of a tonal system is a reasonable, but unprov able, hypothesis. Syntax. The discussion of Sumerian syntax may be di vided into nominal phrases, verbal phrases, and clause syn tax. Nominal phrases. A simple nominal phrase consists of a stem optionally followed by a possessive suffix, and/or a plu ral suffix, and obligatorily by a postposition. The distinction between verbal and nominal stems is functional, with no phonological or morphological marks. There is no gender distinction either in the form of die stem or by affixation. If the gender needs to be stressed, this is done by adding the appropriate adjective (nita, "male"; or munus, "female"). The nominal stems are animate (humans, deities, personi fied beings) or inanimate; this feature governs die choice of certain affixes. There is no general system to express num ber. In nouns of the animate class, the plural can be ex pressed optionally by die suffix -e-ne. Nouns, regardless of class, and adjectives can be reduplicated, often with a nu ance of totality (with nouns), or intensity (with adjectives). Nouns, with no plural marker, can function as collectives, taldng plural markers in the verb. The personal pronouns and possessive suffixes are shown in table 2. The postpositions are -zero
Palatal
Alveopalatal
Dental
Voiced fricatives Nasals
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subject of intransitive verbs, direct object of tran sitive ones subject (agentive) of transitive verbs, second ob ject with verbs that take two objects dative locative comitative ("with") ablative ("from"), instrumental terminative ("to") equative ("like")
The genitive is marked by the suffix -ak (written simply -a, unless followed by a vowel). A genitival relationship can
also be expressed by moving the head of the genitive con struction to second position and adding a possessive: gis-hur e-a(k), "die plans of the house," can be expressed also by e-a(k) gis-hur-bi, "of the house its plans." Verbal phrases. A stem in a verbal function is preceded and followed by several classes of affixes, as shown in table 3. Not shown in the table are a postradical infix, -d-, indi cating obligation, and pronominal infixes (-e- -n-, -b-) that can be inserted before the comitative, the directive, and the stem. There are two tenses: a past/complete action and a present-future/incomplete. They are marked by affixation of -e, reduplication, or, in the case of some common verbs, different stems (suppletive paradigm). Some verbs have dif ferent stems for the singular and plural. The imperative is formed by moving the verbal stem to initial position: muna-ab-sum ("he gave to him"), sum-mu-na-ab ("give to him!"). Clause syntax. The verbal agreement is of the ergative type. Subordinate clauses (completive or adverbial) have, as a rule, a nominalizing suffix, -a, followed by a postt>osition, and are thus treated as any nominal phrase. Subordinate clauses precede the main clause. Relative clauses may have an explicit head (lu, "the one, the man"; or nig, "the tiling") or an unmarked head noun and also have the suffix -a. Literature. A very large number of the preserved Su merian texts, probably about 90 percent, are practical texts: administrative accounts, letters, and contracts and other le gal documents, public or private. The rest are "scientific" texts (mostly in the form of lexical word lists and other in ventories of knowledge) and literary texts. 3
TABLE
2. Sumerian Personal Pronouns and Possessive Suffixes INDEPENDENT
SUFFIX
Sg.
PI.
Sg.
PI.
1 st person
"ga-e
me-en-de-en
-"gu
-me
2d person
za-e
me-en-ze-en
-zu
-zu-ne-ne
3d person animate
e-ne
e-ne-ne
-a-ni
-e-ne-ne
-bi
-bi
3d person inanimate
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SUMERIAN TABLE 3
Sumerian Verb Forms
Modal Conjunctive
Conjugation
Dative Comitative Directive Locative -si-
-ni-
-ta-
*I
-a-
ha-
mu-
-ra-
ga-
ba-
-na-
1 1 1 1
_e
na-
imma-
-me-
|
|
-en-de-en
_>
|
|
-en-ze-en
-ne-
|
|
-e-ne
inga
nusa-
al-
u-
Lexical lists. Among the oldest texts, Uruk III-IV (c. 2900 B C E ) , a large number of word lists is already found, and these are still found among the latest tablets, almost at tire beginning of the Christian era. Besides their didactic value in training scribes, and their linguistic contents, these texts are remarkable for their preoccupation with classifying and making an inventory of human knowledge. Lexical texts as sume standard, traditional forms that are kept unchanged for centuries over large geographic areas. They thus played an important role in the shaping and transmission of Mesopotamian culture. The oldest lists are unilingual, but there indications that they could be read either in Sumerian or in Semitic. Later lists tend to be bilingual—Sumerian and Akkadian. Some of them include a subcolumn with the pronunciation, as in the example above. There are even a few lists in several lan guages: Sumerian-Aldcadian-Hittite, or Sumerian-Akkadian-Ugaritic-Hurrian. [See Hittite; Ugaritic; Hurrian.] The lexical lists can be classified into two major types: lists or dered by signs and thematic lists. As an example of the first, the collection d — A = naqu gives, in forty-two tablets, the pronunciation and Akkadian translation of about fourteen thousand entries. The most remarkable of the thematic lists is the collection HAR-ra = hubullu. Twenty-four tablets list the terms designating, for instance, n-ees and wooden im plements, stones, metal objects, fish, and birds. The com plete collection has about 9,700 entries. Literary texts. Tablets with texts of an undeniably lit erary character already appear in the Fara period (c. 2500 BCE) . They are written in an extremely abbreviated form and can be only partly understood—except in a few cases in which later recensions are preserved. Some better-under stood literary compositions date to the Sargonic period, and the lengthy commemorative inscriptions of Gudea, ruler of Lagash, shortly after the Sargonic period, show a fullfledged literary language and style. The Ur III Empire seems to have been a period of intense literary creativity, but few tablets from this period are preserved. Its literary works are known principally from tablets from two or three centuries later, possibly in an updated and revised form. The majority
|
|
Pronominal
V (i-j e-, a-)
zero
-da-
STEM
1 1
zero - e n
_ e
s
of literary works are known from tablets dating to the eigh teenth century B C E , mostly from Ur, Nippur, and Babylon. No major works were created after this time. Copies of older texts, sometimes with a corrupt text, recompilations of li turgical chants, and a few royal inscriptions are all that were produced in later periods. The average Sumerian literary composition is between one hundred and three hundred lines long. There are ex ceptions: short texts and exceptionally long stories like The Deeds of God Ninurta, with 728 lines. Some compositions are preserved in a single copy and may be only partially recovered; others are attested in eighty or more duplicates and their text may be complete. The main reason for the high number of duplicates is the use of literary texts for school practice; a well-educated scribe was apparently ex pected to memorize the main works of literature. Some cat alogs give the titles (i.e., the opening lines) of the compo sitions in the order in which they were studied. The written, preserved works seem to be only a part of a more extensive oral literature, now lost. [See Scribes and Scribal Tech niques; Writing and Writing Systems.] The literary style often reflects this oral origin. Some texts are known in different recensions, which write down diver gent oral forms of what is essentially the same composition. The main features of style are parallelism of various sorts and simple, direct similes of the type "like a cloud drifting in the sky." Many are taken from a traditional stock and appear again and again in different works. Verbatim repe titions of speeches and event descriptions are common in narrative texts. Some texts show an evident strophic structtire and even indications of some sort of meter. The im perfect knowledge of Sumerian phonology makes almost impossible any prosodic reconstruction. Major literary genres Myths. About two dozen narrative texts describe events with divine protagonists that take place in a supernatural world. They revolve around the gods Enid, Enlil, Inanna (and Dumuzi), Ninurta, and other deities. Epics. Two cycles of narrative texts with superhuman pro tagonists have been preserved: one deals with Gilgamesh
SUMERIANS (five compositions) and the other with Lugalbanda and Enmerkar (four compositions). Both cycles originated in Uruk. Historical texts. There is a very large number of commem orative royal inscriptions, from all places and dynasties. Some of them can be quite extensive, such as Gudea's cyl inders commemorating the building of Ningirsu's temple. In addition, there is a dynastic list and more literary texts centered around historical events, such as an explanation of why the city of Agade was destroyed, and laments about the destruction of other cities. Under this rubric is a huge num ber of more or less poetic texts in praise (sometimes selfpraise) of the rulers and prayers of, or for, the rulers to var ious deities. Letters. Besides business letters—which are almost always very terse, factual messages—about seventy-five more-ex tensive letters, used as school exercises, are preserved. They include royal letters and letters of prayers to the gods. Divine hymns. About 125 texts praise various deities or make petitions to them. A collection of forty-two brief songs celebrates the most famous shrines at Sumer, and an archaic composition commemorates the holy city of Kesh. Didactic texts. The Instructions of Shuruppak, perhaps dating as far back as 2400 B C E , is a collection of aphorisms giving ethical advice. Man and His God is a series of reflec tions on how God allows evil and misfortune to befall a faitiiful man. On a mundane level, the Instructions of a Farmer explains the proper way to cultivate barley. Also included in the category of didactic texts are collections of medical pre scriptions and hemerologies (lists of unfavorable events on given days). Debates. Half a dozen texts are literary contests between personifications of natural entities (Summer and Winter, Bird and Fish, Tree and Reed, Grain and Sheep, Silver and Copper) or crafted implements (Hoe and Plow). They con clude with a verdict, given by a deity, explaining the reasons for the superiority of one above the other. School literature. Although practically all literary texts are preserved in copies used for didactic purposes, one group deals specifically with school activities. Half a dozen texts describe life in school directly or indirectly, give advice to students, and describe the conflict between a fatiier and his son, an unsatisfactory pupil. Dialogues. The preceding school texts make frequent use of dialogue, but five compositions consist of nothing but dialogue: two between students, one between apprentice musicians, and two between women. Tales, fables, and proverbs. Popular tales, such as The Three Men from Adab, are very rare, and there are a few fables (The Crane and die Raven, The Heron and the Turtle), but many hundreds of proverbs were used as rel atively elementary exercises in school. About thirty riddles are preserved. Varia. Many texts are not easily adscribed to die preced
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ing genres: two elegies of a scribe lamenting the death of his parents, a message of an exiled scribe to his mother, a song in praise of the hoe, and the songs used by the king in the ritual opening of the agricultural season. Liturgical texts. Compositions sung on ritual occasions are the most common form of literary text between the sixteenth and second centuries B C E . They are mainly laments over the destruction of ancient shrines and prayers for their recon struction. [See also Amarna Tablets; Babylonians; Bogazkoy; Cu neiform; Girsu and Lagash; Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; Nippur; Sumerians; Susa; Tablet; Ur; UrukWarka.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Civil, Miguel. "Lexicography." In Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobscn on His Seventieth Birthday, June 7,1974, edited by Steven J, Lieberman, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 5 7 . Chicago, 1976. Introductory re view of the native lexical works and of modern Sumerian lexicog raphy. Edzard, Dietz O. "Literatur." In Reallcxikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiaiischen Archaologie, vol. 7, pp. 35-48. Berlin and New York, 1987. Detailed list of literary works, with bibliography. Hallo, William W. "Toward a History of Sumerian Literature." In Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on His Seventieth Birthday, June 7, 1974, edited by Steven J. Lieberman, pp. 181-204. Chicago, 1976. Historical overview. Romer, W. H. P. Die Sumerologie: Versuch einer Einfuhrung in den Forschungsstand nebst einer Bibliographic in Auszuahl. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 238. Neukirchen-VTuyn, 1994. Useful for an extensive bibliography, which updates and completes the other items listed here. Thomsen, Marie-Louise. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction 10 Its History and Grammatical Structure. Copenhagen, 1984. Balanced, eclectic exposition of modern grammatical studies. MIGUEL CIVIL
SUMERIANS. The term Sumerians is a conventional designation for the people who lived in southern Mesopo tamia (Sumer) during the third and early second millennia B C E . The English word is derived from the Akkadian term for southern Mesopotamia, Shumer, which is of unknown origin. The native Sumerian for their land was written with three cuneiform signs, ki-en-gi, which had the phonetic value ki-ngir, "land-native" or simply "homeland" in Su merian. Although scholars often write and speak of a Su merian "people" or "culture," it appears that this reference is an anachronism because the native terminology recog nized only a Sumerian area and a Sumerian language. Here the discussion of the history and inhabitants of die land of Sumer will refrain from imposing modern notions of race and etiinicity upon these peoples. The areas of concern will be the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, which falls within the bor ders of modern southern Iraq.
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SUMERIANS
Rediscovery. European awareness of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations began in the north, in Assyria. The most important early find for the recovery of the written record occurred when the nineteenth-century British expedition of Sir Austen Henry Layard unearthed the remains of the mas sive libraries in Nineveh belonging to the last great king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal (668-627). [See the biography of Lay ard.] Among the tens of thousands of clay tablets written in the Semitic Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) language, there were some texts that were clearly bilingual, in which the Akkadian lines were translations of some other unknown language. This language turned out to be Sumerian, and although one scholar spent a lifetime denying its existence, claiming that it was but a secret code of the Babylonian priests, others began work on the decipherment of the more ancient tongue. Work on the language continues to this day, and the first real dictionary of Sumerian began publication only in 1984 (Sj0berg et al., 1984-). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, British, French, and German as well as American archae ologists and adventurers conducted massive excavations at the Assyrian and Babylonian cities that until then were just names—such as Nineveh, Babylon, and Assur—in the He brew Bible and in Greek historical writings. [See Nineveh; Assur; Babylon.] The discovery of the Sumerian language brought new interest in the earlier cities that were buried in the mounds of southern Mesopotamia. Although excava tions had been conducted at Ur in the middle of the nine teenth century, the first real digs in the south of Mesopo tamia were conducted by the French consul in Basra, Ernest de Sarzec, at the mound of Telloh, which hid the ancient city of Girsu, capital of the city-state of Lagash. The local inhabitants were not idle and tens of thousands of tablets from Girsu appeared on the antiquities market and made their way into European museums. In 1889 the first Amer ican expedition to Mesopotamia began its work at the site of ancient Nippur, staging four campaigns until the end of the century. A few years later the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago excavated early Sumerian materials at Bismaya (ancient Adab) and the Germans worked at Shuruppak, which, according to later Mesopotamian tradition, was the place in which buried tablets preserved knowledge from before the "great flood." After the turn of the century, the Germans began a long series of yearly campaigns at Uruk. [See Girsu and Lagash; Nippur; Adab; and UrukWarka.] Until the middle of the century, archaeologists were in terested primarily in the central parts of large urban areas, although there had been excavations of prehistoric sites in the north. After World War II, American scholars, who had broader interdisciplinary perspectives, brought with them techniques developed in other archaeological traditions. They were interested more in cultural patterns than in col lecting objects. As a result, they initiated the study of smaller
settlements and introduced regional surveys into the ar chaeology of Mesopotamia. The mapping of ancient settle ments allowed archaeologists and historians to reconstruct shifting patterns of settlements and to follow population shifts that accompanied the growth of large cities in the south of Mesopotamia. This activity, together with the re sults of actual excavations of cities as well as smaller habi tations, has provided much historical information that could stand side by side with the limited written sources from early times, and could be used to analyze the history of areas and periods that have not yielded written records. Origins. The origins of the "Sumerians" have been widely debated, and there is litde consensus on the issue. Much depends on how one phrases the question. Although evidence for human presence exists in western Asia far back into paleolithic times, the first such evidence in southern Iraq is relatively late for there are no archaeological remains preceding the sixth millennium. There are several reasons. Permanent settlement was dependent on the domestication of agriculture that occurred in the north and transferred to the south. Small alluviated or deflated sites are difficult to recover, although some scholars claim that the Tigris-Eu phrates Valley was uninhabitable prior to this time. The earliest-known settlement in Sumer has been exca vated at the small site Tell el-'Oueili. The lowest levels of this hamlet are earlier than the hitherto attested phases of the Ubaid culture, which is attested in northern Mesopota mia, in Sumer, and on the shores of the Persian Gulf. The earliest excavated level was termed Ubaid o because it an tedated the earliest previously known period of this culture, conventionally called Ubaid 1. The excavator of 'Oueili has called attention to similarities between the architecture of this level and at points farther north, but those resemblances do not mean that these people migrated from other areas. Although the earliest level at 'Oueili is unique, the later ar chaeological levels can be linked to developments at other southern sites such as Eridu and Ur and from this time on there is an unbroken series of related archaeological cultures in southern Mesopotamia. Archaeological cultures are mod ern constructs and cannot be easily linked with ethnic, lin guistic, or political units; nonetheless, for almost a century scholars have attempted to find a break in this development attributable to a possible invasion of a new people—the Su merians. This search has largely been abandoned in recent times. [See 'Oueili, Tell el-.] Although in the past many have sought to identify the Sumerians as an ethnic group with specific racial features and to search for their putative homeland, they were most probably of disparate origins, and their ancestors had very likely lived in the Near East for a long time. It is therefore unlikely that a great historical migration brought them en masse from some other land. Attempts to identify physical characteristics of the occupants of Sumer have not been suc cessful because few skeletal remains of the early inhabitants
SUMERIANS have been found and subjected to modern morphological analysis. Even if such remains were found, we would learn litde about the identity of these people as the very notion of race in the physical sense is an imaginary category. Language. The earliest real writing system in the world appeared in Sumer around 3200. The inventor or inventors of the system used two common elements from their envi ronment, clay for the writing surface and reeds for the stylus, as the medium to register administrative transactions. The language of the first written documents—the protocuneiform clay tablets from Uruk—is a controversial matter. Some experts claim that it is impossible to identify, while many think there is enough evidence to suggest that it was indeed Sumerian. This script was to have a long and com plicated life. More than half a century later the cuneiform writing system was adapted to Semitic languages, including Akkadian, and eventually it was used for a wide variety of tongues including Elamite, Hurrian, and Urartian, as well as Hittite. The last-known dated cuneiform tablet is from 7 6 C E , and there are reasons to believe that cuneiform was read at least into the second or even third century. The early history of cuneiform is still poorly documented, but by the time of the Early Dynastic cuneiform texts from Ur, the written language and die personal names of most people was surely Sumerian. This does not mean that Sumer was a lin guistically homogeneous area, only tiiat the evidence we have is for the dominance of Sumerian in official discourse. Because many old place names in Sumer cannot be linked to any known language, some scholars have posited that they are the linguistic remnants of previous, otherwise unidenti fied populations. These phantom "substrate" peoples have sometimes been designated as "Proto-Tigridians" or "Proto-Euphrateans." Certain loan words, toponyms, and personal names indicate contact with speakers of Semitic languages prior to or at the time of the Early Dynastic pe riod. In fact, among the earliest literary texts there is one written in a Semitic language; all the others are written in Sumerian. The Sumerian language has not been successfully con nected with any other known tongue. Typologically, it was an agglutinative language. Roots and morphological ele ments, primarily monosyllabic, were strung together into chains in an established order. Because there are no known cognate languages, it is difficult to establish how much of Sumerian has been modified under the influence of otiier languages in the area. It is also difficult to determine the percentage of the population that spoke Sumerian, what di alect distinctions existed in Mesopotamian society, and the date of the demise of the Sumerian language. The written language did not directiy reflect the language of the streets but was a literary tongue, probably based on upper-class dialects. Although Sumerian was used as a scribal language down to the first century C E , if not later, there are reasons to believe that by the beginning of the second millennium
97
B C E , if not much earlier, it was no longer an everyday lan guage. [See Sumerian.] Environment and Economy. The economy of Sumer was based on agriculture. The land had few natural re sources apart from earth, water, reeds, brush, limestone, bi tumen, and a few types of trees, among them willow, date palm, apple, Euphrates poplar, ash, and tamarisk. Every thing else had to be obtained through trade, gift exchange, or military conquest. Through the middle of the fourth mil lennium the water table was high, and there were many nat ural lakes. As the climate changed, water had to be brought to fields by irrigation canals that were connected to the Ti gris and Euphrates Rivers and to natural and engineered channels from tiiose main water courses. Some have seen this need for water as the impetus for centralization of po litical power, claiming that water management requires high-level organization, but this view is no longer widely held. Agriculture and animal husbandry formed the basis of the economy. The primary domestic animals were sheep and goat; the products of these animals were fully exploited. Up to the fifth millennium these animals were raised primarily for their meat and skins. From that time on the use of meat declined; sheep and goat were raised for their hides, wool, cheese, and dung (used as fuel). Fishing was an important part of die economy, particularly in the soutii. Smoldng and drying preserved the catch, which could then be eaten year round or traded for other goods. The main agricultural products were barley, wheat, fruit (apples, dates, figs, capers), onions, garlic, sesame, reeds, and scrub brushes. The exploitation of natural resources was a complex affair and the organization of agricultural production in early Mesopotamia is still a matter of much debate. There is little doubt that major portions of exploit able land were in the hands of the larger organizations, tra ditionally defined as "temple" and "palace." Families and individuals worked for these organizations in exchange for rations, protection, and community status. The status of pri vate land is more difficult to define. Some have claimed that die earliest evidence points to the communal ownership of private land and that individual ownership developed grad ually. Others would argue tiiat there is little distinction to be made between the two categories and that the earliest doc umented transactions of real estate indicate that some pro portion of exploitable land was in the hands of individuals or nuclear families. Political History. The main organizational form of early Sumer was the city-state, that is, a polity centered on a single major urban center. The early cities, such as Uruk, were relatively large for antiquity and were surrounded by mas sive walls for protection and to symbolize their autonomy. Archaeologists have recovered large building complexes within cities that controlled large resources; these have often been termed "palaces," and it is assumed that they were the
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SUMERIANS
seat of secular power. Thus, from early times there were various large economic entities that had extensive land hold ings, controlled various manufacturing centers, and held economic and spiritual authority. What little we know of early Mesopotamian political history comes from royal vo tive and building inscriptions, from economic documents, and from later historical fictions. Archaeological surveys of settlement patterns indicate that during the Early Dynastic I period people moved into the cities from the countryside; many smaller settlements are abandoned and the population is clearly centered in the urban areas. The spheres of control of the cities overlapped in the limited area of the TigrisEuphrates Valley, and warfare often erupted over territorial disputes. We have vivid accounts of one such long conflict or at least one side's view of the issues involved. For at least three generations the city-states of Lagash and Umma clashed over the definition of their common border. The Lagash rulers commissioned public inscriptions detailing their version of events. If we are to believe them, Lagash was victorious in numerous border clashes, and at one point the dispute was mediated by an outsider, the king of the central Mesopotamian city-state of Kish. This has led some scholars to speculate that the city of Kish had a form of hegemony over tire southern cities. [See Kish.] Umma even tually got the upper hand and its armies sacked the Lagashite capital. Ironically, our reconstructions of these events are based solely on the information provided by the loser be cause Umma has never been officially excavated and thus has not provided information on its side of the story. The use of a common set of symbolic devices, Sumerian writing, area-wide artistic conventions, and similarities in ar chitecture and material culture push the modern observer to view Sumer as a cultural entity. There can be no doubt, however, that there was as much diversity between the var ious city-states as there was surface similarity. They were the breeding ground for similar new regional elites and local hierarchies of power, differing symbolic representations of these relationships, and new categories of people—primarily scribes and priests—who owed their own status to the con trol over such symbols. Such groups and individuals had a strong interest in the status quo and the resulting separatist forces of Sumerian cities resisted attempts at unification into a territorial state. From laconic royal titles we know that cer tain kings claimed rule over more than one city; but, as far as we know, the first ruler to succeed in bringing all of Sumer under one banner was Lugalzagesi of Uruk. He began as king of Umma and within a short period of time he managed to gain control over the northern borders of Sumer, finally conquering the powerful state of Lagash, and then overtak ing the southern cities of Uruk, Ur, and Eridu. [See Eridu.] His victory was short-lived; he was defeated and stripped of his lands by a newcomer from the north named Sargon or "True King" in Akkadian. We know nothing about his rise to power, and the standard descriptions of his ascent are
based on suspect sources. According to later Mesopotamian legends, Sargon served die ldng of Kish and eventually took his throne. He then moved the capital of his state to a new city named Agade (Akkad/Akkade) and from there suc ceeded in conquering all of northern and southern Babylo nia. Sargon and his successor ruled the first Mesopotamian territorial state for almost two centuries (conventionally 2334-2154). Their rule was characterized by almost con stant warfare; die Sumerian cities revolted at every oppor tunity and the Akkad rulers apparentiy campaigned in all of die surrounding lands, searching for booty and for control of foreign resources and trade routes. Their armies ventured to the mountains of Iran, to the shores of the Persian Gulf, and into Syria, as far as the Mediterranean, and even into Anatolia. They established military and commercial out posts in the border regions, although it is difficult to deter mine just how far their true control reached. They cele brated their deeds in public inscriptions and in pictorial depictions of their might, carved on stone monuments and on open rock faces in foreign lands. With the new notion of empire came a new form of charismatic kingship. The pro paganda efforts of the new bureaucracy reached new highs when Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin, was proclaimed a god. The language of the inscriptions leaves no doubt that in their attempts to counter the old city-centered notions of polity, the Akkad kings used a variety of propaganda tech niques. The writing system was reformed and central schooling was instituted to influence die opinions of future officials. Akkadian was introduced as a written language in the south, where it was now used in addition to Sumerian. Local officials were left in charge next to supervisors from Akkad, and their fates were linked with the destiny of the central state. [See Akkad.] These developments lasted for three or four generations and then simply collapsed. The last years of die dynasty are devoid of documentation, and one can only speculate about the internal weaknesses that led to the end of the first Me sopotamian territorial state. Native tradition blamed it on excessive hubris of the rulers and on outsiders, primarily a people from the eastern mountains named the Gutians. Modern scholars see the collapse as a function of the inef ficiency of over-extended centralized power, and on exces sive reliance on warfare as a political tool. The Sumerian cities resumed their local rule, although some of them clearly acknowledged some form of Gutian hegemony. The text known as the Sumerian King List provides us witii a litany of almost a hundred names of Gutian rulers in as many years, but it is now acknowledged diat tiiis period lasted for no more than two generations. The Gutians, whoever they may have been, were quicldy mythologized and came to rep resent conventional barbarian outsiders. Akkad never rose again. Indeed, it was abandoned and has not been found, although later inhabitants of Mesopo tamia knew its location. A ruler of the city of Uruk named
SUMERIANS Utuhegal left behind a description of his battles with the Gutians and claimed to have restored kingship to Sumer, but he did not enjoy it for long and disappeared from the stage after a short reign. Ur-Namma (also cited as UrNammu), who was his military governor at Ur, possibly his brother, took over the kingship and in a few years united most of Sumer. This consolidation began the hundred-year reign of the third dynasty of Ur, often mistakenly termed the "(Neo-) Sumerian Renaissance" or the "Neo-Sumerian period" (2112-2004). It was neither particularly "Sume rian," nor was it a renaissance; indeed, the new dynasty took many of its cues from its Sargonic predecessors. The Akkad kings had used both Sumerian and Akkadian as official lan guages, but the new dynasty imposed Sumerian as the pri mary language of bureaucracy and literature, at least in the southern part of the country, from which most of our doc umentation originates. This action was not a patriotic move, but part of an efficient reorganization of all forms of public life. The new kingdom was even more centralized than the Akkad state, and the Ur rulers reorganized everything: the official language and die writing system, weights and mea sures, taxation, as well as the military and religious sectors of society. The second lung of the dynasty, Shulgi (20942047), borrowed a concept from his Akkad predecessors and proclaimed himself a god, thus allowing the crown to exploit the religious aspects of charisma and to subordinate the tem ple estates to the central government. The ldngs of Ur mar ried many women, botii daughters of foreign princes and of local dignitaries; they sired many children, and these in turn were married off in similar fashion or were appointed to important offices. As a result, the extended royal family and their allies controlled the kingdom. The core of the state, which was located in tire TigrisEuphrates basin, was buffered to the east and northeast by a zone of military settlements. The lands bordering on tiiese defensive areas were die targets of a vigorous diplomacy and many of tiiese states were allied to the Ur III royal family through dynastic unions. The rulers of Ur learned sometliing from their Akkad predecessors and limited their power to a more manageable area comprising Sumer, Akkad, and die bordering regions to die east and northeast. They did not venture into Syria and, as far as we know, never at tempted to reach die Levant or Anatolia, although we have evidence of diplomatic or possibly trade contacts with these areas. Nevertheless, the Ur III period was a time of constant warfare as the central government defended the trade routes to Iran and rebellions in neighboring vassal states. History repeated itself, and die Ur kingdom fell after barely a century of hegemony. The immediate and long-term causes of this collapse are barely documented and are primarily a matter of speculation: It does appear, however, that an overex tended bureaucracy and a weakening of central control caused the whole state edifice to collapse in a relatively short time. This collapse, which was finislied'by an invasion from
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Iran, demonstrates the weak hold that such highly central ized states had on local populations. As soon as the center weakened, the economic dependencies, symbolic ties, and reflected status of families and individuals no longer held. Local traditions were powerful enough to take their place and life continued without the kings at Akkad or Ur. [See Ur.] This survey ends with the fall of Ur. The termination is somewhat arbitrary, but just as it is difficult to define what we mean by Sumerians, it is equally difficult to establish die temporal borders of Sumerian culture. The immediate his tory of Sumer after the end of the dynasty founded by UrNamma is somewhat different. Power was once again cen tered around regional city-states and the new masters seem to come from Semitic Amorite ttibes. Some of the new rul ers made conscious efforts to present themselves as rightful successors of die Ur III kings. Indeed, one such Amorite, a certain Ishbi-Erra, who began his career as an officer of die last ldng of Ur and who managed to contribute to his defeat by establishing a new kingdom at nearby Isin, used all the royal symbolic attributes of his old employer. He even com missioned royal hymns, written in Sumerian, which pre sented his version of the fall of Ur. Not surprisingly, his scribes blamed barbarians from the east. Literature. Sumerian literature can be defined only as literature in the Sumerian language. It would be more proper to refer to "early Mesopotamian literature" because the ear liest texts from the Near East include at least one compo sition in a Semitic language. Soon thereafter evidence exists for Akkadian, "Eblaite," and other Semitic-language texts. The first written documents are economic records and lists of words that were used in the teaching of writing. Literature was first written around 2300 during the Early Dynastic pe riod. The earliest such texts are extremely difficult to un derstand because they were written in abbreviated fashion without many grammatical elements, and the written sym bols were randomly inscribed, often not in the order in which they were read. Scribes knew the texts by heart and the tablets functioned only as mnemonic devices. Later texts, which were written out in full in the proper order, are better understood. The largest group of Sumerian literary compositions dates from the latter half of the second mil lennium, when the language was no longer a living tongue but was used as for didactic and cultic purposes. The Old Babylonian school curriculum was based on older compo sitions; a small portion of it originated far back in Early Dy nastic times, but much of it came from the court, temples, and propaganda of the Ur III ldngs and their immediate successors. Although by this time most contemporary texts were written in Akkadian, schooling required that a student study die word lists, royal and divine hymns, myths, prov erbs, literary letters, royal inscriptions, cultic texts, lamen tations, and various other poetic compositions of earlier days. There is only sporadic evidence of instruction in Ak-
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kadian for it seems that practical scribal knowledge was learned on the job. [See Akkadian.] Religion. The central location and architectural domi nance of the ceremonial complexes in early cities testify to the social importance of the temple as an ideological and economic institution in Sumerian society. Although writing was undoubtedly invented for administrative purposes, the first literary texts, from the cities of Fara (ancient Shuruppak), Abu Salabikh, Adab, and Nippur, are almost exclu sively religious. [See Fara; Abu Salabikh; Nippur.] Despite our incomplete understanding of these texts, we can state with confidence that the early cities of Sumer shared ele ments of a common religious tradition. Each city had a ma jor deity and these deities were organized in family group ings that were, in turn, hierarchically ordered along kinship lines. By means of a spatial metaphor the top deity in this hierarchy was An, the sky god; in practical terms it was Enlil (Mil), god of the city of Nippur. Enlil, whose name is prob ably Semitic in origin, is but one example of the strong syncretistic tendencies that are in evidence already in the earliest textual evidence. For example, Semitic deities such as Su'en and Shamash, the moon and sun respectively, became iden tified with Sumerian Nanna and Utu. The Sumerian gods were both male, but in Semitic religions the sun and moon were sister and brother. In some Akkadian personal names the original feminine sun goddess can still be traced. Religious spectacles were conducted in large open spaces connected with the temple complexes and in various public spaces within and outside the city walls. It does not seem that individuals had much access to the interiors of the tem ples, which were reserved for priests and state dignitaries. Because religion was part of state ideology, public ritual was also political celebration and served to build and reinforce communal bonds. Private worship was practiced at home. The more elaborate households included chapels; in certain periods people were buried under the floors of houses. Therefore, dwellings were also the locations for ancestor worship. Some ceremonies that required the participation of specialists, such as healing and other rite of passage rituals, were performed either in private houses or in liminal sites such as riverbanks or in the steppe. Kingship and Political Power. The public expression of political power was centered around the person of the king. Although notions of kingship, as well as the scope of royal power, differed by place and time, the institution was surely central to Mesopotamian government throughout the historical periods. We know very little about the early king ship, and most of what is written on the subject is pure spec ulation. Much confusion has been caused by a lack of un derstanding of native terminology. The main Sumerian word for "king" was lugal, a term of unknown origin that was sometimes falsely etymologized in antiquity as well as in modern times as "grand man" (gal + lu). Another word,
which was used in certain places, primarily at Uruk, was en. Some scholars have seen a difference between the institu tions designated by these words, which are probably only local terms for the same general concept. During the Uruk period, one finds representations of an important person, often wearing a characteristic skullcap, in scenes of sacrifice and worship. This person is usually described as a "priestking" with the implication that we have a phase in the tran sition from sacred to secular rule. There are two primary reasons for this assertion. Large religious ceremonial clus ters dominated the center of the cities, and artistic represen tations of a priest or king in the act of making offerings are characteristic of the art of the early urban period. The priestking, however, is a figment of our imagination. All we have is a series of images of a "ruler" performing a sacred act, and it is impossible to specify how such an individual would be different from earlier or later rulers. Archaeological remains of large building complexes, which seem to be different from the ceremonial sacred buildings that dominated tire centers of most cities, indicate that there were a variety of economic and political forces at work in early Mesopotamia. The nature of these forces can only be defined from later written sources. The first royal inscriptions, from the latter part of the Early Dynastic pe riod, indicate the centrality of the notion of kingship in Su mer. The person of tire king embodied political power in each city-state, and while there were earlier attempts at larger hegemony, it was only with the rise of territorial states such as Akkad and then Ur that concepts of supreme king ship were fully developed. Kings were the focal point of public representations of power, and therefore much evidence on the representation of this institution has survived. We know little, however, about the actual distribution of power and decision making in early Mesopotamian states. Scholars have used later lit erary texts to reconstruct notions of primitive democracy and the functioning of assemblies, but there is little support for these reconstructions. Later evidence from letters and other more modest documents, as well as ethnographic anal ogy, suggest that local elites as well as organized extended families were important in local affairs and that the central authorities had to work with, and manipulate, these centers of authority. Historiography. Sumerian views of history are known to us primarily from texts written in various periods that have survived in copies made during the middle of the second millennium. It is often impossible to recover their original context and therefore difficult to discern differences in time. For many scholars, the primary historiographical document is the Sumerian King List, although opinions differ as to its date of composition. The list begins "when kingship de scended from heaven" or, in some copies, "after the (great) flood swept over the land," and proceeds to present a list of
SURVEY, ARCHAEOLOGICAL rulers, who are ordered as if Sumer had always been under die rule of one city. Hence, it served as a legitimation doc ument for whatever group of rulers claimed such hegemony, be it the kings of Ur or their Isin successors. Fate seems to have ruled here, and kingship moves from city to city with out explanation. In other texts that share this ideology, par ticularly in poetic laments that describe the fall of the Akkad and Ur III states, the mechanism of history is equally ran dom and is credited to die caprice of the gods. It was not the mechanism of dynastic change, but the reality of con temporary power that was of concern to the writers. It is not surprising, then, that the main tiirust of what we may con sider historical writing was a consideration of die present and the legitimation of the status quo. It is impossible to make a strict delimitation of Sumerian culture; the living language may have died as early as the latter part of the third millennium, but the written legacy lived on,'and eventually spread throughout the Near East. Every scribe who learned to write cuneiform had to start with tiiis classical language. Sumerian literature continued to be taught alongside Babylonian until the first centuries of the common era. [See also Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; Euphrates; and Tigris.]
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of the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1984-. Only two vol umes have appeared to date. PIOTR MICHALOWSKI
SURVEY, ARCHAEOLOGICAL. The search for ancient sites in their natural setting, or archaeological sur veying, is a critical component in problem-oriented archae ological research. A regional perspective is necessary for ex amining changes in settlement patterns and subsistence methods used by societies. The most efficient and cost-ef fective way to achieve tiiis is by carrying out archaeological reconnaissance on the ground, to search out the remains of ancient sites in a selected geographic region. Surface con centrations of flint tools and debitage; pottery sherds; frag ments of architectural remains, such as foundation stones and mud bricks; inscriptions; and ash and other humandeposited sediments identify an ancient site. This method has been used by prehistorians and archaeologists worldng in the southern Levant since the nineteenth century. While the basic techniques have remained constant since the early 1800s, research questions and technological advances have changed immensely the way sites are discovered, recorded, and analyzed.
Early Exploration. Ground reconnaissance was first BIBLIOGRAPHY
conducted in the southern Levant in 1802, when Ulrich J . Cooper, Jerrold S. Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The Seetzen, a German scholar, discovered die ancient cities of Gerasa (Jerash) and Philadelphia (Amman) in Transjordan. Lagash-Umma Border Conflict. Malibu, 1983. Informative recon struction of the Umma-Lagash border dispute, with translations of In 1809, the Swiss researcher Johann L . Burckhardt "redis the original sources. covered" die Nabatean desert city of Petra, which had not Crawford, Harriet, Sumer and the Sumerians. Cambridge, 1991. Survey been visited by Europeans for more than five hundred years. of Sumerian culture based primarily on archaeological sources. Gibson, McGuire, and Robert D. Biggs, eds. The Organization of It was, however, the American team of Edward Robinson Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East. Chicago, 1987. and Eli Smith that, in 1838, pioneered systematic archaeo Collection of essays including a number of important discussions of logical field surveying, a combined study of the physiogra Sumerian administration and bureaucracy. phy and historical geography of Palestine. [See Historical Jacobsen, Thorkild, ed. and trans. The Harps That Once . . .: Sumerian Geography.] Robinson's command of philology and lin Poetry in Translation. New Haven, 1987. The only modern collection guistics and Smith's knowledge of Arabic enabled them to of reliable translations of selected pieces of Sumerian literature. Lieberman, Steven J., ed. Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild identify hundreds of ancient archaeological mound sites Jacobsen on His Seventieth Birthday, June 7, 1974. Chicago, 1976. (Ar., tells Heb.j tel). Many of these sites had Arab villages Collection of survey articles on various aspects of Sumerian culture. on or near diem whose names retained the ancient place Michalowski, Piotr. "Sumerian" In International Encyclopedia of Lin names mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Robinson and Smith guistics, edited by William Bright, vol. 4, pp. 94-97. New York and ventured off the beaten pilgrimage trails and opened up the Oxford, 1992. full geography of Palestine to the growing disciplines of ar Michalowski, Piotr. "Sumerian Literature: An Overview." In Civili chaeology and biblical studies. Their work was published in zations of the Ancient Near East, edited by Jack M. Sasson et al„ pp. 2277-2289. New York, 1995. Robinson's Biblical Researchers in Palestine (Boston, 1865) Nissen, Hans J. The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 some three years after their first field trip. B.C. Chicago, 1988. Synthetic, organized summary of current views British colonial interests in Palestine in the latter part of on ancient Near Eastern history, with particular emphasis on the early periods in Sumer. The original German version is available in the nineteendi century led to the systematic topographic a revised edition: Grundziige einer Geschichte derFriihzeit des Vorderen mapping of the Holy Land by die Palestine Exploration Orients (Darmstadt, 1990). Fund. [See Palestine Exploration Fund.] From 1872 until Postgate, J. N. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of 1878, Claude R. Conder and Horatio H. Kitchener and oth History. Rev. ed. London, 1994. Broad survey of early Mesopota ers mapped more than 9,600 km (6,000 sq. mi.) of die region mian cultural, economic, social, and political history. Sjaberg, Ake, et al. The Sumerian Dictionary of the University Museum and recorded more than ten tiiousand sites. These maps
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provided die first accurate topographic system of reference to examine ancient sites in their geographic setting and be came the foundadon for all subsequent mapping projects by the British and subsequent Israeli and Jordanian govern ments. Source-Driven Surveys. The Hebrew Bible has been the central most important documentary source for archae ologists working in the southern Levant. It is a rich source of data for identifying the many ancient towns and villages that span the Bronze and Iron Ages. Extrabiblical docu mentary evidence has also been instrumental in identifying important ancient centers. Chief among the written sources are the Amarna letters, found in Egypt in 1887, which date to die Late Bronze Age. [See Amarna Tablets.] Written in cuneiform Akkadian, they include correspondence between the Egyptian court and many kings in Syria-Palestine. Archaeological surveying, aimed at elucidating the histor ical geography of the Holy Land, was especially advanced by the American archaeologist Nelson Glueck. Glueck car ried out a series of surveys in Transjordan from 1932 through 1947 and in the Negev desert from 1952 to 1964. A student of the great Orientalist William Foxwell Albright, Glueck was one of the first archaeological surveyors to mas ter the complex nature of ceramic chronology and apply it to sites he discovered. Glueck was able to date thousands of sites on both sides of the Jordan River by using Albright's revolutionary ceramic sequence, which linked static archae ological remains to the dynamic biblical record. More exact methods of dating and advanced recording techniques have pointed to some errors in Glueck's work, but the broad set tlement trends he defined in Rivers in the Desert (New York, 1968), for example, have stood the test of time. Problem-Oriented Surveys. During the 1940s and 1950s, multidisciplinary approaches became the mainstay of Near Eastern archaeological research, particularly through the efforts of Robert J. Braidwood in Iraqi Kurdistan, where his team was interested in identifying the origins of agricul ture. [See Agriculture.] The importance of taking a broad regional view of settlement patterns based on intensive field surveys, especially those associated with the rise of agricul turally based Mesopotamian civilization, was developed by Robert McC. Adams (1981) on the alluvial plains to die south. Field surveys in Palestine at that time were still deeply linked to historical geography. However, pioneering survey work by Yohanan Aharoni in the Upper Galilee moved be yond site identification to issues of historical process. Aharoni's field surveys in the Galilee showed numerous unwalled settlements dating to the earliest phases of the Iron Age and a lack of inhabited sites from the very end of the Late Bronze Age. These observations, combined with the lack of evi dence for L B destructions at excavated sites, led Aharoni to support Albrecht Alt's theory of a peaceful infiltration of the Early Israelites into Canaan. The survey results had argued
against the literal interpretation of an Israelite conquest of Canaan as portrayed in the Book of Joshua. Politics and Surveys. Following the Six-Day War in 1967, the incorporation of new territories under Israeli ad ministration led to a burst of survey activity on the West Bank and in Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. The changing political stams in tiiese areas from initial capture to the re linquishing of Israeli control affected the pace of survey and excavation there and in Israel proper. A large number of preliminary surveys were carried out on the West Bank im mediately following die war. A series of long-term regional surveys followed in the regions of Manasseh, the Galilee, Benjamin, and other areas by Israel Finkelstein (1988), Adam Zertal, Zvi Gal, and others. The results of these sur veys dramatically increased the archaeological database for investigating such historical issues as the emergence of Israel in the hill country of Canaan, as well as more anthropolog ical issues, such as long-term human adaptation to different environmental zones. [See Northern Samaria, Survey of; Southern Samaria, Survey of; Survey of Israel] In 1978, following the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace agreement, the Israel Department of Antiquities (now the Israel Antiquities Authority, or IAA) established die Negev Emergency Survey. [See Israel Antiquities Authority.] The evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula by the Israel Defense Forces, and their redeployment in die Negev desert, posed a tremendous threat to the Negev's archaeological record. Working with all die educational institutions in Israel, the Negev Archaeological Survey, under the direction of Ru dolph Cohen, spearheaded a meter-by-meter survey of all those areas potentially impacted by the redeployment. The Israeli government allocated considerable funds for this work, which included a systematic and comprehensive sur veys of sites spanning all archaeological periods; a monitor ing system to prevent damage to sites during the redeploy ment period; and salvage excavations at sites that would be destroyed. The Negev was divided into thirty-eight maps based on a scale of 1:20,000, in which each map included an area of 100 sq km. (62 sq. mi.). Each map region was investigated by a team. The results are published in mono graph form with selected site plans, photographs, and arti fact drawings. Like the surveys carried out on the West Bank, the Negev Emergency Survey and die resulting pub lications provide a greatiy expanded database for examining culture change in the southern Levant. New Technologies. While no computer-based technol ogy will ever replace on-the-ground surveying, some new technologies have already helped in mapping the sites found in surveys. The relatively new Global Positioning System (GPS), first used by pilots to locate their aircraft in flight, allows archaeologists to mark and map sites within ten min utes, with a degree of error of less than 1 meter. GPS is a network of satellites that orbit die earth twice a day and
SURVEY, ARCHAEOLOGICAL transmit precise time and position (latitude, longitude, alti tude) information. GPS measures the time interval between the transmission and reception of satellite signals and then calculates the distance between the user attinearchaeological site and each satellite. The distance measurements are then used in an algorithm and the GPS receiver gives an accurate position location. With a G P S receiver, there is no need to use traditional survey instruments to triangulate a site's po sition in the landscape. Thus, archaeologists working in die heavily forested areas of the Galilee or in the vast expanse of the Negev desert now have a tool that enables them quickly and accurately to locate their sites witii a degree of accuracy undreamed of just a few years ago. The G P S is hand held, and efforts are now being made to increase its accuracy so that site architecture can be mapped with the "click of a button." For mapping sites, new survey tools such as E D M (elec tronic distance measurer) combine traditional survey instru ments with electronics, enabling measurements to be re corded quickly and later used in computer-generated maps. IAA surveyors were among the first in the Near East to use E D M technologies. This basic measurement data can later be used to create three-dimensional reconstructions of buildings and otiier ancient structures. For example, Har rison Eitelgeorg II and Andrew Cohen of Bryn Mawr Col lege in Pennsylvania have used the architectural computer program called AutoCAD (CAD = computer assisted drawing), to reconstruct in three dimensions a portion of the Chalcolithic sanctuary at Gilat in Israel. AutoCAD en ables the researcher to rotate the model in 360 , at any angle, and at any height. It is an invaluable tool for helping to un derstand the use of space in antiquity. Geophysics and Survey Archaeology. Time and money are perhaps die main limiting factors for archaeolog ical research. T o obtain relatively quick and inexpensive an swers to specific research questions, archaeologists have in creasingly employed remote-sensing metiiods to learn more about sites prior to excavation. Geophysical remote-sensing devices involve either passing energy of various kinds through die soil in order to "read" what lies below the sur face from the anomalies encountered by die energy, or mea suring the intensity of die earth's magnetic field. The two basic metiiods employ seismic devices and acoustics or radio waves and electrical impulses. The choice of these methods depends on the local soil environment. Metiiods based on radio waves and electrical impulses include ground-pene trating radar and electrical resistivity. Magnetic survey methods include magnetometers, gradiometers, and metal detectors. [See Resistivity.] 0
Geophysical diffraction tomography ( G D T ) is one of the most recent geophysical techniques to be applied in archae ology. Its first archaeological application was made at the Chalcolithic subterranean village complex at Shiqmim, a
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large (about 24 acres) site in the northern Negev. G D T was developed by Alan Witten of the School of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma. G D T works similarly to C T scanners, but instead of X-rays, uses sound waves to identify subsurface anomalies. Using mathematical algorithms based on holographic imaging, Witten has been able to produce complete images of subsurface features on the computer. [See Shiqmim.] At Shiqmim, G D T was used to make tomographic cross sections of vertical slices through the site. This technology successfully identified tens of unsuspected subterranean room and tunnel complexes dating to the late fifth-fourth millennia. Using a Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) work station, it is possible to produce three-dimensional color images of GDT-discovered subterranean features. When the geo physical field survey was completed, G D T produced a full three-dimensional image of a honeycomb of subterranean Chalcolithic architecture on a remote hilltop at Shiqmim. Following the G D T application, a "ground truth" test was made that revealed a surface-access tunnel leading to a room, as predicted by the G D T imaging (Witten et al., 1995)Geographical Information Systems. T o identify the environmental variables most important to ancient settle ment systems, archaeologists have employed a number of metiiods, including site catchment analysis of the soils and other resources around ancient village sites. In the 1970s, to estimate the percentage of the various soils around a site meant photocopying die soil map, cutting out the soil dis tribution with scissors, coloring it black, and feeding it through a leaf-area-size analyzer then used by botanists to estimate the area of those resources. In the early 1990s a technology known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was introduced that removes the cut-and-paste work of the past and enables researchers to analyze a wealth of archaeological and environmental variables at once. GIS are basically spatially referenced databases that allow archaeologists and other researchers to control for the dis tribution of form (die shape of environmental distributions such as soil) through time. Gary Christopherson of die Uni versity of Arizona has pioneered the use of GIS in die Madaba Plains Project in Jordan. GIS—which are digital da tabases—store, manipulate, capture, analyze, create, and display spatially referenced data. They are especially useful for analyzing setdement-pattern data. Most archaeological and environmental data are recorded in three-dimensions, all of them spatially referenced and stored on maps. GIS stores information in a series of digital layers. Each map theme (e.g., soil type, artifact type, setdement type) is stored in its own layer. GIS can then provide electronic overlays according to the questions asked by the archaeologist. By placing sites such as Tell Jalul in Jordan in the context of a wide range of environmental variables, it is possible to dis-
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cover what Christophers on refers to as the environmental signature of a site. In this way, archaeologists can determine what the environmental factors were in the selection of a site location in antiquity. [See Computer Mapping.] Coupled with traditional on-the-ground reconnaissance, these emerging technologies are providing archaeologists with new and more powerful tools for interpreting ancient settle ment patterns. [See also the biographies of Aharoni, Albright, Alt, Conder, Gluech, Kitchener, and Robinson.]
sert, in the area of Kibbutz Sede Boqer, headed by Cohen; and a third unit, based in Jerusalem and headed by Yeivin, was engaged in publication of the scientific data. In 1991, the ASI was incorporated into the IAA, which assumed re sponsibility for continuing fieldwork along ASI guidelines and for publishing the material recovered.
Northern District. Surveying began in the north in 1964,
in the Haifa area. Two survey teams operated—one in the bay (Ronen) and the other in the hills (Olami). The survey of the map of Haifa (East, map 23) was completed in 1965. Remains included architectural elements, tombs, quarries, BIBLIOGRAPHY and agricultural and industrial installations (e.g., wine Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement presses and lime kilns) and provided evidence for an and fjand Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, efflorescence in the Byzantine period in that part of the 1981. country. Included on this map are Tell Abu Hawam, an Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem, ancient port city with Late Bronze Age-Byzantine period 1988. King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the remains; the prehistoric Geula cave, with Middle Paleolithic-Mousterian period remains; and Khirbet Rushmiya, American Schools of Oriental Research. Winona Lake, Ind., 1983. Levy, Thomas E., and David Alon. "Settlement Patterns along the the site of a Crusader-Ottoman citadel (Ronen and Olami, Nahal Beersheva-Lower Nahal Besor: Models of Subsistence in the 1983). Northern Negev." In Shiqmim, vol, I , Studies Concerning Chalcolithic Surveying for the Nahalal map (map 28) began in 1973 Societies in the Northern Negev Desert, Israel, 1982-1984, edited by under the direction of Avner Raban (1982). This part of Thomas E. Levy, pp. 45-138. British Archaeological Reports, Inter national Series, no. 356. Oxford, 1987. northern Israel saw significant settlement expansion during Moorey, P. R. S. A Century of Biblical Archaeology. Cambridge, 1991. the Iron Age and again in the Roman and Byzantine periods. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Important sites include Tel Qashish, with Chalcolithic Practice. New York, 1991. through Arab period remains; Tel Yoqne'am, a fortified city Witten, A. J., et al. "Geophysical Diffraction Tomography: New Views with an acropolis and remains dating from the Early Bronze on the Shiqmim Prehistoric Subterranean Village (Israel)." GeoarAge to the Ottoman period; and Sha'ar ha-'Amaqim, the chaeology 10 (1995): 9 7 - 1 1 8 . site of a Persian period farm. THOMAS E . LEVY The 'Atlit map (map 26) was surveyed by Ronen and Olami in 1964-1965. They surveyed a total of 145 sites, both on land and underwater, including the prehistoric Mt. CarSURVEY OF ISRAEL. The Israel Department of mel caves. Settlement in this region began in the Lower Pa Antiquities (now the Israel Antiquities Authority, IAA) cre leolithic Age, Included on this map are the Mousterian ated the Association for the Archaeological Survey of Israel workshop at Tirat ha-Carmel; 'Atlit, the site of a Crusader (AASI) in 1964 on the recommendation of the department's harbor, fortress, and cemetery; and the large site of MegaArchaeological Council. Its main task was to oversee and dim, with remains from the Early Bronze Age and Persian promote the work of the Archaeological Survey of Israel. and Roman periods (Ronen and Olami, 1978). Benjamin Mazar, Avraham Biran, Yohanan Aharoni, Moshe Dothan, Ruth Amiran, and Zeev Yeivin were the The Daliya map (map 31) was also surveyed by Olami in association's founders and its first executive committee. 1964-1965. The area showed tire greatest development in Biran (1964-1973), Yeivin (1974-1984), and Rudolph Co the Roman and Byzantine periods. The large Crusader site hen (1985-1991) were its first three chairmen. of Horvat Hermesh and the Byzantine site of Me'arat Elyaqim, where twenty-six burial caves were exposed, appear on The country's map is divided into areas on a scale of it (Olami, 1981). 1:20,000 (i.e., a distance of 20 cm on any given map equals 1 Ion in the field) and archaeological fieldwork is carried out The Gazit map (map 46) was surveyed by Zvi Gal in within those divisions. Each new site surveyed is described 1975-1976. Periods of significant settlement growth appear (with a detailed map reference) and photographed, and a on it for the Middle Bronze Age lib and for the Hellenistic, plan is prepared of sites at which architectural remains have Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods. Included on this been noted on the surface and for which pottery samples map are Tel Rekhesh, the regional center, identified with have been collected, described, and dated. biblical Anaharath, with Neolithic-Byzantine period re mains; and Kokhav ha-Yarden (Belvoir), site of a large Cru Field operations were begun in 1964 with two survey sader fortress (Gal, 1986). A recent local survey in the north units: one in the north, in the area of the city of Haifa, includes the 'Ami'ad Junction and the area east of the Yis'or headed by an archaeologist, Avraham Ronen, and an engi Junction. neer, Yaacov Olami; the second unit was in the Negev de
SURVEY OF ISRAEL Central District. Surveys in the central district include those published on die maps of Ma'anit and Lachish. Sur veying for the Map of Ma'anit (map 54) was begun in 1974 by the north Sharon survey team, under the direction of Yehuda Ne'eman. Remains from sixty-nine sites repre sented cairns, burial sites, installations, olive and wine presses, cisterns, and wells. A period of dense settlement began in this area in the Iron Age I, with a later settlement efflorescence apparent in the Roman and Byzantine periods. This map includes the sites of Tel Esur, settled from the Chalcolithic through the Ottoman periods; Tel Ze'evim with its Iron I fortress; and Tel Gat (Gat Carmel, Jatt), with Chal colithic through Ottoman period remains (Ne'eman, 1990). The map of Lachish (map 98) was surveyed from 1979 to 1983 by Yehudah Dagan. More than three hundred sites, including settlements, farmsteads, cemeteries, roads, or chards, agricultural plots and installations, lime kilns, cis terns, and caves were surveyed. Settlement flourished there in the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods, as it did in all of the Judean Shephelah. A segment of the main artery of the Damascus-Jerusalem-Gaza-Egypt road is included on this map, as is Tell ed-Duweir, identified with biblical Lachish, the principal city in the region, which has been extensively excavated. Lachish was inhabited from the Chalcolithic through the Persian periods (Dagan, 1992). Local regional surveys have been conducted recently in the areas of Modi'in and Harish-Qasir. Jerusalem District. The survey of the Jerusalem district was conducted from 1981 to 1986 by Gaby Mazor. Recent local surveys in the area have been carried out at Rekhes Shuafat (Samuel Wolff), Pisgat Ze'ev (Rina Avner, Jon Seligmann, Yonatan Nadelman, and Eli Shukron), and the area of Beth-Shemesh (Dagan). Judea (Judah) and Samaria. The first major survey of Judea and Samaria by AASI teams was carried out in 19671968 by Moshe Kochavi (Judea), Pessah Bar-Adon (Judean Desert and Jericho basin), and Zecharia Kallai, Ram Go phna and Yosef Poratii (Samaria). (See Kochavi, 1972.) Kochavi (1972) surveyed 250 sites. Settlement density was apparent in the Iron Age, as well as in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. The map includes biblical Betar and surrounding defensive settiements and fortresses; Beit Sur, where the western wall of one structure was pre served for more than thirty courses of irregularly shaped stones; Tell Rumeida, biblical Hebron; and Khirbet Susiya, a site where later excavations uncovered beautiful mosaic floors and decorated architectural elements. The 209 sites surveyed by Bar-Adon (see Kochavi, 1972, pp. 92-149) provided evidence of a system of Iron Age for tresses and forts, each within sight of its neighbor and each responsible for guarding shepherds, their flocks and grazing areas, agricultural plots, pools and cisterns, and the com mercial caravans tiiat traversed this area on their way inland from the 'Arabah and the other side of the Dead Sea. This
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network was chiefly responsible for guarding the region's freshwater springs. The Roman and Byzantine periods were a time of floruit in the area, in which the locations of for tresses and roads followed those of the Iron Age. This area is also characterized by the hundreds of caves in the cliffs that dominate the region. Sites of note include Nahal Mishmar, where a very large coin hoard from the Chalcolithic period was uncovered, and the Chalcolithic temple at 'EinGedi. Nearly four hundred sites were surveyed by two teams headed by Kallai, Gophna, and Porath (see Kochavi, 1972, PP. 153—241). Remains include massive structures (for tresses, Khans, towers, and mausoleums), water-collection installations, oil presses, churches and other public build ings, and roads. Byzantine period remains are often the up permost level at these sites and usually reflect the most in tense building activity. Sites in the area of Samaria include the cult site of Mt. Ebal; Khirbet el-Marjameh, where die altar and support walls of a Byzantine church were uncov ered along with a colorful mosaic floor; Khirbet Samilyeh, where architectural fragments include columns and column bases; Khirbet Sakariya, a well-planned village of both large and small structures, straight roads, and a large casemate fortress; and the Byzantine settlement at Khirbet Umm erRihan. A large-scale archaeological survey was conducted be tween 1981 and 1986, covering more than five hundred sites (some had been represented in earlier surveys) in the hill country of Benjamin, directed by Yitzhak Magen, staff of ficer for archaeology in Judea and Samaria. Many important sites were surveyed for the first time; some had been pre viously excavated, such as Khirbet el-Hadatha, where a Byz antine church with mosaic floors was found along with a tomb, cave, wine press, and cisterns; and el-'Aleiliyat, with a monastery, church, cisterns, drainage channels, and caves. Inscriptions found at the two sites date to the Second Tem ple and Byzantine periods (see Finkelstein and Magen, 1993)Southern District. Numerous surveys have been con ducted in the southern district. Pleaded by Cohen, the southern unit worked for several years, through 1971, com pleting the surveying for two maps of Sede Boqer (maps 168, 167). The unit surveyed diirty-six sites for the two maps, most of diem previously unknown. Excavation fol lowed these surveys, at several important Middle Bronze I sites (e.g., at 'Atar Nahal Boqer); at Iron Age sites (including the fortresses at 'Atar ha-Ro'a, Horvat Haluqim, and Horvat Mesora); and at the Hellenistic-Roman site at Horvat Ma'agora. Because of local limitations imposed by die army, the survey of adjoining maps 1 7 1 , 172, 174, and 173 was only partially completed (Cohen, 1981, 1985). The Negev Emergency Survey Project was initiated in 1978 following the signing of the Camp David peace ac cords. The redeployment of the Israeli army from the Sinai
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Desert to the Negev desert threatened the Negev's ancient ruins and necessitated an accelerated and far-reaching res cue operation. Avraham Eitan, director of the Israel De partment of Antiquities at the time, Mazar, and the Archae ological Council created the emergency project, which Cohen directed. Most of Israel's archaeological institutions participated in the program. The survey's three main goals were to conduct a systematic and comprehensive archaeo logical survey of the Negev; to carry out salvage excavations as needed; and to maintain constant field surveillance. T o achieve these aims, field survey teams and a central coor dinating staff were set up operating out of Jerusalem. In ten years of operation (1978-1988), the project surveyed 4,300 sq Ion (2,666 sq. mi.), discovered nearly eleven thousand sites, and completed the surveying for twenty-eight maps of the Negev, of which eight have been published, and began work on twenty-five more. [See also Israel Antiquities Authority; Site Survey; and Survey, Archaeological. In addition, many of the sites and regions mentioned are the subject of independent entries^
Ne'eman, Yehuda. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Ma'anit ($4) 15-20. Jerusalem, 1990. Olami, Yaacov. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Daliya Map (31) 15-22. Jerusalem, 1981. Raban, Avner. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map ofNahalal (28) 1 6 23. Jerusalem, 1982. Ronen, Avraham, and Yaacov Olami. Archaeological Survey of Israel: 'Atlit Map (14-23). Jerusalem, 1978. Ronen, Avraham, and Yaacov Olami. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Haifa—East (23) 15.-24. Jerusalem, 1983. RUDOLPH COHEN
SUSA, site located on the northwestern edge of the allu vial plain of Khuzistan in southeastern Iran (32°o' N , 48°5o' E). The site is a large mound situated on the left bank of the Shaur River, a stteam that runs parallel to the larger and more torrential Kharkheh River. The site, now called Shush, is southwest of the modern city of Dizful. Susa was occupied virtually continuously from about 4200 B C E until the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century C E , after which it was per manently abandoned. Geologically, Khuzistan is the eastern extension of the Mesopotamian plain. The climate of Khu BIBLIOGRAPHY zistan is dry and hot, regularly reaching more than 40°C in The IAA is involved in the computer processing of all the data these the summer. The rich alluvial soil is extremely productive surveys produced. Scholars interested in studying the data will be able when irrigated. The plain is drained by three major rivers: to apply to the IAA for access to its database when the work is com the Karun, flowing out of the Bakhtiari Mountains to the pleted. The following is a list of the ASI publications currently available through the IAA (P.O. Box 586, Jerusalem 91004, Israel). All titles are east, and the Diz and the Kharkheh Rivers, both of which in Hebrew. flow south from the Zagros Mountains. All three flow into Avni, Gideon. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Har Saggi—North the Shatt al-Arab before debouching into the Persian Gulf. east (22;). Jerusalem, 1991. The lozenge-shaped site is more than 550 ha and rises Cohen, Rudolph. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Sede Boger— more than 35 m above tire modern level of the plain. The East (168) 13-03, Jerusalem, 1981. entire mound (1,500 m north-south) was apparently never Cohen, Rudolph. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Sede Boger— completely surrounded by a fortification wall, although the West {167) 12-03. Jerusalem, 1985. Dagan, Yehudah. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Lakhish (98). Achaemenid Persian king Darius fortified the northern sec Jerusalem, 1992. tor. There are five large areas of occupation, named by the Finkelstein, Israel, and Yitzhak Magen, eds. Archaeological Survey of the nineteenth-century French excavators of the site (see be Hill Country of Benjamin. Jerusalem, 1993. low) . The Acropole, flanked by the Tomb of Daniel, lies to Gal, Zvi. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Gazii (46) 19—22. Je the west; to the north is the apadana, dominated by Darius rusalem, 1986. Govrin, Yehuda. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Nahal Yattir I's official quarter; the center of the mound is the Place (iS9)- Jerusalem, 1991. d'Armes; to the east is the Ville Royale, occupied from the Hairnan, Mordechai. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Har beginning of the third millennium onward—its southern tip Hamran—Southwest (198) 10-00. Jerusalem, 1986. is dubbed the donjon. Also to the east are smaller mounds, Haiman, Mordechai. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Mizpe Ra including the so-called Achaemenid village and the Ville des mon—Southwest (200). Jerusalem, 1 9 9 1 . Artisans (Morgan, 1900-1912). Haiman, Mordechai. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Har Hamran—Southeast (199). Jerusalem, 1993. Archaeological Exploration. The identity of Shush as Hirschfeld, Yizhar. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Herodium the ancient site of Susa was established with certainty in the (108I2) 17-11. Jerusalem, 1985. Kochavi, Moshe, ed. Judea, Samaria, and the Golan: Archaeological Sur nineteenth century: in 1850 a British border mission ob served its impressive size; in the following year a member vey, 1967-1968 (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1 9 7 2 . Kochavi, Moshe, and Itzhaq Beit-Arieh. Archaeological Suivey of Israel: of that team, William Loftus, who was a geologist and an Map of Rosh Ha-'Ayin (78). Jerusalem, 1994. archaeologist, began to investigate tire mound. He made Kuris, Y., and Lori Lender. Archaeological Survey ofIsrael: Ancient Rock soundings on the apadana near the inscribed columns and Inscriptions. Supplement to Map of Har Naffia (196) 12-01. Jerusalem, bases of tire Persian palace. By the 1880s, France had se 1990. Lender, Yeshayahu. Archaeological Survey of Israel: Map of Har Nafha cured, through treaties, the exclusive rights to investigate Susa. Beginning in 1884 the French excavated there with (196) 12-01. Jerusalem, 1990.
SUSA
little interruption until the Iranian revolution in 1979. From 1884 to 1886, a French architectural historian, Marcel Dieulafoy, and his wife Jane, explored die Achaemenid city wall and the apadana. The French Archaeological Mission under Jacques de Morgan began work on die site in 1897, focusing primarily on the Acropole, where he laid down several enor mous trenches. De Morgan cleared vast areas by tunneling, in 5-meter-wide swaths, tiirough the center of die Acropole.
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He uncovered vast numbers of artifacts without even the most general stratigraphic context. Roland de Mecquenem followed Morgan in 1908. He continued the work on the Acropole, excavated the courtyards of die palace of Darius I on the apadana, opened chantier I and II on the Ville Royale, and explored die donjon. In the Ville Royale he uncov ered numerous Elamite graves, but widi the crude metiiods of excavations used then, he was unable to detect any mud-
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brick architecture. From 1946 to 1967, Roman Ghirshman directed the French mission. Under his leadership, with im proved excavation methods, mud-brick architecture and ar chaeological deposition were observed and recorded. Ghirshman focused his efforts on the extensive second-mil lennium B C E occupation in the Ville Royale. Most of the objects retrieved from eighty years of French excavation went into the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris. These include not only great works of Elamite and Persian art, but also art from Mesopotamia that the Elamites had carried off as spoils of war at the height of their power in the twelfth century B C E . Among the most important of these appropriated monuments are the stela of the Old Ak kadian ruler Naram-Sin and the law code of Hammurabi. In 1957 a French scholar, Louis Le Breton, published a seriation analysis of the early periods at Susa, from the Chal colithic painted-pottery culture of the fifth millennium through the late third millennium. His important work es tablished periodization at the site for the early periods that was used until closely stratified material was retrieved in the 1970s.
stepped platform, more than 12 m high and 80 m along its southern face. These architectural finds make it clear that, during its first phase of occupation, Susa was the regional center of the valley. Protoliterate Susa: Susa II and III (3500-2700 B C E ) . The transition between Susa I and Susa II (Le Breton's Susa B) in the Acropole I sounding is unclear. The buff and redburnished wares diminished in quantity and were replaced by pottery having close parallels to the Uruk types of south ern Mesopotamia. Administrative materials, including to kens, bullae, and cylinder seals, are identical to those found at Uruk. [See Uruk-Warka.] At Susa tiiey were retrieved from domestic contexts. Susa II is equated to Acropole I, levels 22-17, d Acropole II, levels 6 - 1 . The large platform begun in Susa I shows several phases of destruction, aban donment, and rebuilding. Late in Susa II the platform was abandoned. During period II, Susa ceased to be the only major town in Susiana. Chogha Mish and Abu Fanduweh became rival local centers of administration and exchange. The population of each has been estimated to be under 3,000 individuals.
The last French expedition to Susa was led by Jean Perrot in 1968. His team worked there until the Islamic Revolution of 1979 ended all foreign archaeological activity in Iran. Perrot's primary goal was to establish a precise stratigraphic sequence for the site and the surrounding region of Susiana. He focused the operation on Acropole I and II and Ville Royale I and II. Through systematically retrieved sequences, the team defined and refined a ceramic, artifactual, and ar chitectural sequence beginning with the founding of tire site in the late fifth millennium. The second-millennium B C E se quence was based largely on Ghirshman's work in Ville Roy ale A and B ; the first-millennium B C E sequence was never completed. The sequence defined by Perrot's team is used here.
During Susa III (Le Breton's Susa C, 3100-2700 B C E ) the occupation of Susa appears to have been reduced. In addi tion, die strong affiliation to the Mesopotamian lowland re flected in the material culture was replaced by a strong con nection, seen in the ceramics and glyptic art, to the eastern highlands. Following a brief hiatus in the sequence in level 17, Acropole I was reoccupied. Susa III comprised Acropole I, levels 1 6 - 1 3 . The sequence is continued in Ville Royale, levels 1 8 - 1 3 . The ceramics of Susa III include coarse-ware goblets, trays, and pinched-rim bowls. Grit-tempered wares covered with a red slip and bands of white paint on redslipped wares appear for the first time. Elaborate poly chrome wares are found exclusively in burials. For the first time, tablets inscribed with Proto-Elamite A are found on the Acropole, level 16. Cylinder seals carved with distinctive scenes depicting animals acting as humans are found im pressed on the tablets. Also appearing for the first time are glazed steatite seals. Susa is the only major settlement on the alluvial plain: the highland-lowland union characteristic of the historical Elamite period were first established there.
Prehistoric Occupation: Susa I (4200-3500 B C E ) . The region of Susiana has been occupied continuously since the eight millennium. During the sixth and fifth millennia (Su siana I, II), the plain was dominated by the site of Chogha Mish on the Karun River, about 27 Ion (17 mi.) east of Susa, in about 4200 B C E Susa apparently was first occupied at the end of some major regional upheaval that left Chogha Mish abandoned. Susa I (Le Breton's Susa A) remains were iden tified in two soundings: Acropole I, levels 27-23, and Ac ropole II, levels 1 1 - 7 . Susa I ceramics are dark-painted buff wares and red and buff plain wares. Stamp seals and their impressions on clay jar and door sealings were found with both geometric and figural scenes. Both the ceramics and glyptic art show clear similarities to the material culture of the Iranian highlands to the southeast and north. During tire Susa I period, the Acropole was dominated by a mud-brick massif against which an estimated two thousand adults were buried with pottery vessels and other grave goods. [See Bur ial Sites; Grave Goods.] Next to die massif was an enormous
a n
Susa IV (c. 2700-2000 B C E ) . The Susa III period ended in about 2700 B C E , at the same time that the Proto-Elamite sites in the southeastern highlands disappeared. During die following Susa IV period (Le Breton's Susa D, c. 2700-2000 B C E ) , the site was occupied continuously. The period is doc umented stratigraphically in botii the Ville Royale I and on the Acropole. Early in the period new ceramic traits, includ ing painted geometric and figurative patterns, suggest a close connection to the mountain valleys of Luristan. These traits may reflect earlier alliances strengthened in response to the imperialistic threat posed by the Mesopotamian citystates. Susa lost her independence to die Old Akkadian kings. [See Akkadians.] The material culture, including seals,
SUSA wall plaques carved widi low relief imagery, and sculp tures—as well as writing and administtative systems— adopted Old Akkadian forms. Mesopotamian historical rec ords report tiiat King Rimush controlled the city of Susa as well as places farther east. Early Second Millennium (c. 2100-1600 B C E ) . After the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, a contemporary of UrNammu (2112-2095 B C E ) , Puzur Inshushinak, a powerful king of Awan in Luristan, reconquered Susa. During his reign, the linear Proto-Elamite B script was used to inscribe religious monuments. The Awanites held Susa until it was retaken by Shulgi, the powerful Ur III king. [See Ur.] After the fall of the Ur III Empire, the Shimashkian kings, argu ably located in Luristan, established hegemony over Susa and held it for several generations. They were replaced by the dynasty of the Sukkalmahs, whose home territory was at Anshan in Fars, some 515 km (320 mi.) to the southeast, in the Zagros Mountains. The Sukkalmah had a scheme of shared kingship, designed to unite formally the highlands and the lowlands. The economic strength of the Sukkalmah was based 011 control of the highlands and successful agri culture on file plain and in the Kur River basin. Susa ex panded to become an independent regional center and an international city with a population of more than 20,000 in dividuals. The sequence at Susa for the second millennium B C E is based on Ghirshman's excavations in Ville Royale A and B. Intramural burials were common. Frequently, the body was enclosed in a ceramic bathtub sarcophagus. [See Burial Techniques; Sarcophagus.] Other distinctive objects ap pearing at this time are vessels sculpted in bitumen or bi tuminous limestone. During the Sukkalmah phase, burials were placed in a vaulted tomb used for multiple interments. [See Tombs.] On the acropolis and in the apadana, admin istrative and religious structures were erected of which few remains have been identified. Transitional and Middle Elamite Phases (1600-1000 B C E ) . In about 1500 B C E both the written and material-cul ture documentation from Susa virtually ceased. Occupation on the plain diminished and apparentiy became seminomadic. Archaeological remains have been found in Ville Royale A and Ville Royale II. The site of ancient Kabnak (modern Haft Tepe), 32 km (19 mi.) to the soutiieast, re placed Susa. [See Haft Tepe.] A new capital was constructed by Untash-Napirisha (c. 1340-1300 B C E ) , called AlUntashNapirisha (modern Chogha Zanbil), 40 km (25 mi.) south east of Susa. [See Chogha Zanbil.] In about 1200 B C E , Susa regained prominence under die rule of the Shutrukid ldngs. King Shutruk Nahhunte I ( 1 1 9 0 - 1 1 5 5 B C E ) and his two sons, Kutir Nahhunte and Shilhak-Inshushinak, defeated the Kassites, who ruled Mesopotamia. [See Kassites.] Under the Shutrukid dynasty, the ldngs of Susa and Anshan reached the peak of their political supremacy. They built and rebuilt administrative and religious structures on the
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Acropole, replacing mud with baked and glazed bricks. They adorned the sanctuary of Inshushinak with Mesopo tamian trophies of war, including the Naram-Sin stela, the code of Hammurabi, and Kassite kudurru (boundary stones). The Temple of Ninursag on the Acropole, first ded icated by Shulgi in the late third millennium, remained im portant throughout die Middle Elamite period. In it was found a massive cast-bronze statue of Napir Asu, wife of Untash-Naprisha, and the Sit Shamski, a bronze sculpture showing a ritual scene inscribed by Shilhak-Inshushinak. On the western edge of die Acropole the temple dedicated to Inshushinak, chief god at Susa, was also founded in the time of Shulgi. By the Middle Elamite period it was elevated above other sttuctures on the Acropole. The majority of the inscribed bricks in the renovated walls and floors date to the reigns of Untash-Naprisha and Shilhak-Inshushinak. Neo-Elamite Period (900-600 B C E ) . At the end of the second millennium B C E , Susa fell from prominence and into a decline until about 700 B C E . There was a long period of political unrest and economic disaster. Archaeological and historical records document Susa's return to prominence late in the eighth century B C E , as part of the resurgence of Elamite power. Susa, together with the Babylonians and Elamites, fought the Assyrians repeatedly. [See Babylonians; Assyrians.] On die Acropole mound a small temple to In shushinak, decorated with panels of glazed brick and glazed architectural ornamentation, dates to this period, as do large burial vaults containing gold jewelry. Thus, Susa seems to have been a ceremonial and cultural rather than a political or an economic center. Achaemenid Period (559-330 B C E ) . In 646 B C E , Susa fell to the Assyrians. By 550 B C E the Elamites had come under the rule of the Persians, whose powerful Achaemenid dy nasty had conquered a vast territory. Darius I (522-486 B C E ) fortified Susa and made it his lowland capital. Susa became a vital cosmopolitan city and a locus of interchange. In Jan uary 330 B C E , with the approach of Alexander the Great, Susa surrendered to the Greeks. The Achaemenid remains at Susa are primarily from the reigns of Darius I and his great-great-grandson Artaxerxes II (404-359 B C E ) . Darius I's remains are on the apadana mound. On a gravel platform some 20 m high and 13 ha (32 acres) in area, he built an architectural complex widi a residential palace in the soutii and apadana, or official complex, in the north. Both were oriented north-south. A monumental gate to the east of the palace led into the compound. In die eastern Ville Royale he built a propylaeum and gate. Susa in the Later Periods. Alexander's destruction of the Persian Empire marked the end of Susa as a capital city. At the close of the fourth century B C E , under the Macedo nian rulers, Susa lost its identity and was renamed Selucius of the Eulaeos. Although never colonized, the Susian elite adopted Greek culture. Achaemenid relief sculpture on the donjon was reused on a Greek administrative building.
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SUSIYA
Dieulafoy identified a settlement from this period near the apadana; Ghirshman found Hellenistic architectural deco ration on the apadana. Susa's prosperity during this period is reflected in its expansion to the north and east into the Ville des Artisans. While the people of Susiana were under Macedonian rule, a political entity called Elymaidei coa lesced in the valleys of the Bakhtiari Mountains. These mountain people became so wealthy through their control of the trade routes that they financed Antiochus III in his disastrous attempt to ward off the Romans in 187 B C E . Fol lowing their Elamite predecessors, the Elymeens rebuilt Susa as an anchor in a short-lived highland-lowland union. It was under tire Parthian ruler Mithridates I that a true Ira nian empire was reconstituted. [See Parthians.] During the forty years of Parthian rule, Susa retook her ancient name. The city flourished and the Parthians, with their immense building projects, obliterated many of the earlier remains on the Ville Royale. During the Sasanian domination from the third to seventh century C E , Susa again lost its status as a regional center. [See Sasanians.] The Christian community became suspect following die conversion of Constantine. Ghirshman found traces in the Ville Royale of the violent destruction of tire city by Shapur II. On the apadana there is evidence of both a Christian and Jewish presence at the end of the Sasanian period. The Arab conquest took place in the seventh century without a major destruction of the city. Zoroastrian, Chris tian, and Jewish communities have been identified in the Ville Royale, while the Muslims were established at the Ville des Artisans. From the eighth to the tenth centuries, imports from Samarkand, China, and the Byzantine world suggest tiiat Susa may have been a pilgrimage center marked by the Tomb of Daniel. By the eleventh century, the site was com pletely Islamic. In the thirteenth century, the city was aban doned. [See also Elamites; Persians; and the biographies of Ghirsh man and Penot.} BIBLIOGRAPHY The excavations at Susa from 1900 to 1967 are published in the series established by Jacques de Morgan, Memoires de la Delegation en Perse, vols. 1—13 (Paris, 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 1 2 ) . The series, designated under the rubric MDP, was renamed several times: Memoires de la Mission Archeologique de Susiane, vol. 14 (Paris, 1 9 1 3 ) ; Memoires de la Mission Archeologique de Perse, Mission en Susiane, vols. 16-28 (Paris, 1 9 2 1 - 1 9 3 9 ) ; Mimoires de la Mission Archeologique en Iran, Mission de Susiane, vols. 29-38 (Paris, 1943-1965); and Memoires de la Delegation Archeologique en Iran, Mission de Susiane, vols. 39 and following (Paris, 1966-). Beginning in 1971 a new series, Cahiers de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Iran (DAFI), was initiated to publish the new excavations under the direction of Jean Perrot. Fifteen volumes were published from 1971 to 1987 under the auspices of the Centre du Recherche Scientifique, Paris. The results of the early excavations continue to be published in the MDP series. Amiet, Pierre. Elam. Auvers-sur-Oise, 1966. Comprehensive (prehis
toric-Persian periods) publication of works of art from Susa housed in the Louvre. Amiet, Pierre. L'dge des echanges inter-iraniens, 3500-1700 avantJ.-C. Paris, 1986. Monumental analysis of Iran's Bronze Age cultures. Amiet, Pierre. Suse: 6,000 ans d'histoire, Paris, 1988. Summary of Susa and its place in ancient Near Eastern history. Carter, Elizabeth, and Matthew W. Stolper. Elam: Surveys of Political History and Archaeology. Berkeley, 1984. Comprehensive and sys tematic presentation of the political and archaeological evidence for Elam from the seventh millennium through the Neo-Elamite period. A vital guide tiirough the many and varied publications of the Susa excavations and a reliable source interpreting difficult textual and archaeological evidence. Dyson, Robert H., Jr. "Early Work on the Acropolis at Susa: The Be ginning of Prehistory in Iraq and Iran." Expedition 10.4 (1968): 2 1 34. The only report of a small sounding on the Acropole. Harper, Prudence Oliver, et al., eds. The Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre. New York, 1992. Exhibition catalog with superb photos, interpretive essays, and a comprehensive bibliography. Hole, Frank, ed. The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and Society from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest. Washington, D.C., 1987. De tailed consideration of demographic patterns over eight millennia. Le Breton, Louis. "The Early Periods at Susa: Mesopotamian Rela tions." Iraq 19 (1957): 79-124. Seminal article ordering through seriation the unstratified results of more than six decades of French excavation. Porada, Edith. Alt-Iran: Die Kunst in vorislarnischer Zeit. Baden-Baden, 1962. Translated as The Art ofAncient Iran: Pre-Islamic Cultures.~Nevi York, 1965. Sets Susa's artistic production into the larger context of the ancient Iranian world. See as well Porada's essay, "Iranische Kunst," in Der alte Orient, edited by Winfried Orthmann, pp. 3 6 3 398. (Berlin, 1975). Steve, M. J., et al. "La Susiane au deuxieme millenaire: A propos d'une interpretation des fouilles de Suse." Iranica Antiqua 1 5 (1980): 4 9 154. Extensive reanalysis of the second millennium BCE in Ghirshman's excavations. Tallon, Framboise. Melallurgie susienne I: De la fondation de Suse au XVIIIe avant J.-C. 2 vols. Paris, 1987. Presents several diousand fourth- and third-millennium metal objects recovered from Susa, with technical analyses. Voigt, Mary M., and Robert H. Dyson Jr. "The Chronology of Iran, ca. 8000-2000 B.C." In Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vol. 1, edited by Robert W. Ehrich, pp. 1 2 2 - 1 2 5 . 3d ed. Chicago, 1992. The latest evaluation of the chronological correlations among sites in Iran. (Susa is a linchpin in any chronological scheme of Bronze Age Iran.) HOLLY
POTMAN
SUSIYA (Ar., Khirbet Susiya), a Jewish village in tire He bron area of southern Judea (Judah), 14 km (9 mi.) south of Hebron, in an area called daroma (Heb., "the south") in rabbinic sources and in Eusebius's Onomasticon (map ref erence 1598 X 0905). Its Arabic name is of more recent derivation. The name of the site in antiquity is unknown and it is not mentioned in ancient literature. Susiya was founded in the second or third century C E and prospered into the Early Arab periods. The ruins at Susiya attracted the attention of numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century researchers, including
SUWEIDA Victor Guerin in 1869; the Survey of Western Palestine in 1874; A. E. Mader in 1918; and Leo A. Meyer and Adolf Reifenberg in 1937. The synagogue was excavated by Shmaryahu Gutman, Ehud Netzer, and Zeev Yeivin from 1969 to 1972. In 1978 Yizhar Hirschfeld excavated a build ing on the western hill. In 1984 and 1985 Avraham Negev excavated dwelling caves and buildings on the eastern side of the town, and from 1985 to 1987, Yeivin excavated in the same area. The synagogue is of the broadhouse type, built on an eastwest axis. It is one of a regional type that includes the syn agogues at Eshtemoa and Horvat Rimmon 1. [See Syna gogues.] The meeting-room building is approached via a courtyard that was paved with rectangular flagstones and surrounded on the east, north, and south by a portico. The hall was approached through an exedra. A second room ad joins the meeting room on tire south, which has three en trances on its short eastern wall. The southern and western walls, and the western end of the northern wall, were each lined with three tiers of benches. Two bemas stood on the synagogue's long northern (Jerusalem-aligned) wall. A large bema slightly west of center was surrounded by a decorated chancel screen. It was approached via three steps that led to a niche that apparently served as the Torah shrine. This niche was flanked by two smaller niches, which Zeev Yeivin believes held menorahs (Yeivin, "Khirbet Susiya, the Bema and Synagogue Ornamentation," in Ancient Synagogues in Israel, edited by Rachel Hachlili, pp. 93-100, London, 1989). Fragments of a stone menorah were discovered inside the synagogue. The three niches were enclosed with a dec orative frame bearing Hebrew dedicatory inscriptions. T o the east of this bema was a smaller bema. A single bench, perhaps seating for community leaders, was situated on the northern wall between tire bemas. A carpet mosaic in this synagogue underwent consider able alterations throughout its life. In its first stage the mo saic was executed in white tesserae; in the second it was replaced with a polychrome mosaic. [See Mosaics.] The western end of the mosaic was divided into three sections, two of which contained a scene of a hunt and perhaps Daniel in the lion's den. In the center was a zodiac wheel of the sort known from Hammath Tiberias, Sepphoris, Yafia, and Beth Alpha. [See Hammath Tiberias; Sepphoris; Beth Alpha.] Only a small section of the zodiac is preserved, as it was subsequently covered with a geometric pattern, which itself is preserved on its eastern end. Before the small bema is the mosaic image of a Torah shrine flanked by two menorahs enclosed by a peristyle. The peristyle was flanked by ani mals. A similar image appears in the Church of St. John on Mt. Nebo. [See Nebo, Mount.] In the second-third centuries a defensive system was con structed along the town's eastern and southern fringes. A fortified tower (6 X 1 1 m) was built at the northern end of the site's eastern arm, and a defensive encircling building
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was constructed. Housing units, tombs, facilities for the pro duction of olive oil, and a wine cellar have also been recov ered. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chiat, Marilyn Joyce Segal. Handbook of Synagogue Literature. Chico, Calif., 1982. Surveys the architectural history of the Susiya syna gogue. Gutman, Shmaryahu, et al. "Excavations in the Synagogue of Horvat Susiya." In Ancient Synagogues Revealed, edited by Lee I. Levine, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 2 8 . Jerusalem, 1981. Main publication of the synagogue ex cavations. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. Discusses the art and architecture of this synagogue within the context of Jewish art in Late Antiquity (see the index under Susiya). Negev, Avraham, and Zeev Yeivin. "Susiya, Khirbet." In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, pp. 1 4 1 5 - 1 4 2 1 . Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Survey of the ar chaeological history of Susiya. STEVEN F I N E
SUWEIDA (Soada, Dionysias), site located on the west ern, rainy slopes of the volcanic Jebel al- Arab Qebel adDruz, Jebel Hauran) in Syria, the Asalmanos Mountains of Ptolemy (5.15.26), in well-watered countryside where green orchards and age-old terraced vineyards are in contest to the rugged basalt rock (32°'42' N , 36°35' E ) . Information about the four millennia prior to the Helle nistic period is scarce for lack of archaeological excavations. Surveys have made possible the dating of sedentary settle ments from the second half of the fourth millennium on ward. Lithic and ceramic production, although with strong local characteristics, shares in the traditions common to the northern Jordan Valley and the Damascus plain. [See Jordan Valley.] Tell Debbeh, some 20 km (12 mi.) north of Su weida, is an important Middle Bronze fortified site on a ma jor east-west caravan road. Tell Zheir, to the south, reveals the earliest known urban development, with large rectan gular houses (15-20 X 3.50-5 m) linked chainlike in recti linear or right-angled alignments. The area's dams are dated to the Chalcolithic period (mid-fourth millennium), and wa ter catchment systems and subterranean channeling to the Early Bronze Age. c
In the Iron Age, the Suweida region, with its many sur rounding villages near areas of rich soil, was part of the Ar amaic kingdom of Bashan, with its capital at Damascus. Af ter Tiglath-Pileser Ill's conquest in 732 B C E , it was part of the Assyrian province of Haurina. The Nabatean-Arab presence at Suweida dates from be fore the Nabatean kingdom that lasted from the late fourth century B C E to 106 C E , the year of the creation of the Roman Provincia Arabia. This part of the Nabatean kingdom was probably governed by indigenous, autonomous sovereigns. After the Roman conquest in 64 B C E , Herod the Great was
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entrusted with governing this zone (in 23 B C E ) . In 92/93 C E , it was annexed to the Roman province of Syria. Nabatean and Safaitic are die main languages of the local ancient epigraphy, together with Greek, which became the official language in the first century B C E . With only one in scription (the bilingual on the nefesh stela at Hamrat) Suweida (with Qanawat/Canatha and Seia, with a dozen in scriptions, including the dedication to Ba'al Shamen from its main temple) is at the northernmost fringes of the extent of Nabatean Aramaic inscriptions. Safaitic petrographs can be found outside urban settlements, on funerary and com memorative tumuli, scattered in fields, or concentrated in cairns. [See Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] Extensive ge nealogies and references to historic personalities and events, dating at the earliest to about 500 B C E to the second half of the first century C E , characterize these open-air archives, which display an extraordinary ability to write among die population. The area is, as well, among the Near East's rich est in Greek and Latin inscriptions. The local deities were the great Ba'al Shamen, Allat/ Athena, the morning and evening stars Azizos and Monimos, the protecting "Gad," and Dushara/Dionysos, in whose honor Suweida/Soada was renamed Dionysias. Until this change (under the reign of Emperor Commodus, c. 180-185 C E ) , Soada, like a series of other wealthy villages (Gk., komai, and a few "mother villages," or metrokdmiai), each functioning as an autonomous community with its own peculiar local institutions (an assembly of bouleutes, "local magistrates" elected from the different tribes or "communal houses"), was subordinated to the Decapolis city of Canatha. [See Decapolis.] This neighbor had been a Greek polis since 55 B C E . They remained the only cities of the district, until Philip the Arab founded die colony of Philippopolis/ Shahba, probably his native village, in about 244 C E , fol lowed by Maximianopolis/Shaqqa in the last years of die third century. The romanization of the region was secure enough in the second century for an imperial road to be built across the plateau from Damascus to Dionysias and Bostra/ Bosra. [SeeBosra.] Basalt stone, in black, gray, or rarer red hues, is the mark of the landscape and of all its buildings. This stone is difficult to work, so that, once carved, the blocks, roof slabs (their maximum span is nearly 4 m), corbels, and arch stones were continually reused. The main features of the school of the Hauran, characterized by its temple architecture and its richly carved decoration, appear during the pre-Provincial period. The best example of the local temple type is the Seeia pilgrimage complex dedicated to Ba'al Shamen: the almost square plan has a corridor around all or three sides of the cella. The fiat facade has heavily molded frames, even along the threshold, underlining the large centeal door and two flanking niches; all three are set back, inside a central col
umned porch; the column bases carry an unusual crown of falling leaves; the capitals are of the heterodox Corinthian type, with one flat, squat row of acanthus leaves under a central bust or vegetal motif that projects between two large corner scrolls; strongly protruding entablatures carry ornate bands of stylized reinterpretations of Oriental and Greek motifs or undulating vine and fruit branches. The bases and tops of walls flare, and the acroteria are eagles. Two vast walled courtyards, botii with secondary temples, and the socalled theatron (Enno Littmann in Butler, 1921, no. 100), a peristyle court sldrted with steps on three sides, precede the temple, which is dated from 280 to 3 1 1 of the Seleucid era, or 33/32 to 2/1 B C E . The very similar peripteral temple at Suweida had an interior colonnade replacing the corridor. The 'Atil temple (151 C E , built under Antoninus Pius) and the Qanawat Helios temple (a peripteros with a large vaulted crypt under the podium) and destroyed Zeus temple fol lowed the same richly ornate tradition. A local type of building is die "sacred Kalybe" (inscription at Umm ez-Zeitan, also in Shaqqa, al-Hayat, and Shahba), essentially a large, vaulted exedra with two side wings, standing on a high podium, and dominating an open area. Domestic architecture in this grape- and cereal-producing caravan country uses ground floors for storage and stables, with rows of well-dressed stone troughs for a variety of an imals; stone stairs against the courtyard walls led to mostly residential upper floors. The funerary architecture starts with huge, sometimes towerlike, cairns with either an inner megalith-type chamber with a central column supporting a stone-slab roof or just a slightly sunken tomb under a pile of stones. Numerous or nate and inscribed lintels indicate more built tombs tiian stelae. The Nabatean mausoleum of Hamrat, now destroyed (see Briinnow and Domaszewski, 1909, pp. 97-99), was a solid stone cube, adorned with an applied Doric order al ternating with trophies. Hypogeum tombs are reached by short ramps or steps, and their central aisle is lined with one or two tiers of large loculi. Some have chimneylike air-cir culation systems and an ossuarium. They are crowned with stepped pyramids or pavilionlike structures. Dovecotes, epigraphically identified, are built over a series of square tombs from the fourth century C E onward (Celeistinos's tomb at Rimet el-Lof, at 'Atil, Sleim, Shaqqa), while square, multistoried tower tombs are mostiy Byzantine (Qanawat, Majadil). [See Tombs; Ossuary.] In sculpture, die hard, dark-gray basalt generated figures whose anatomy is geometrically stylized, with strongly graphic surface details. The repertoire prior to the Provincia Arabia is of griffins, snake-footed monsters, and winged sphinxes, together with eagles, lions, and horses. Figures wear remarkable costumes: loinclotiis, short tunics and scarves, plumed headpieces, leafy crowns with a central gemstone, and high, closed footwear. The introduction of
SUWEIDA
SUWIITLIA.
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Figure 2.
Plan of the (ireut Basilica.
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SYNAGOGUE INSCRIPTIONS
Roman formulas after 106 C E accounts for more complex sculptural contours, though the earlier symmetrical frontality and stocky proportions remain. The new types that ap peared were busts together with Athena/Allat, Herakles, and innumerable Nike/Victory figures. The luxuriously polychrome mosaic floors with grand mythological scenes and personifications were produced for peristyle houses in Philippopolis/Shahba from the mid-third century C E (see figure i ) . Christian pavements innovate widr complex and delicate overall designs of interlace and regu larly set rosebuds in scale patterns, as in Suweida's Great Basilica. Christian Dionysias, which has been noted for its bishops since 325, has the largest standing church in the area (see figure 2): a fifth-century, five-aisled pilgrimage basilica with galleries, high exterior porticoes, two four-storied front tow ers, four lofty front doors that open onto an esplanade that reaches the city wall, and with a series of annex chapels, courtyards, and halls. [See Churches.; Basilicas.] [See also Nabateans; Syria, article on Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods; and Temples, article on Syro-Pal estinian Temples.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Annales Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 41 (1995): Collection of essays from the 1990 colloquium on the history and archaeology of the Suweida Mohafazat. Brunnow, Rudolf-Ernst, and Alfred von Domaszewski. Die Provincia Arabia. Vol. 3. Strassburg, 1909. Butler, Howard Crosby, et al. Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to Syria in 1004-190$ and 1909. Division III, Section A: Southern Syria. Leiden, 1 9 2 1 . Dentzer, Jean-Marie, ed. Hauran I: Recherches archeologiques sur la Syrie du Sud d I'ipoque hellenistique et romaine. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Arch&ologique et Historique, vol. 124. Paris, 1985-1986, Excellent studies and summaries, with illustrations and maps, of all archaeo logical information on the region and sites around Suweida by some thirty scholars of the Mission Francaise de Syrie du Sud, which has been working for more than fifteen years in the region. he Djebel al-Arab: Hisioire el patrimoine au Musee de Suweida'. Paris, 1991. Comprehensive, illustrated archaeological guide. Donceel-Voute, P a u l i r . " A propos de la grande basilique de SoueidaDionysias et de scs eveques." Le Museon 100 (1987): 89-100. McAdam, Henry I. Studies in the History of the Roman Province of Ara bia: The Northern Sector. Oxford, 1986. PAULINE DONCEEL-VOUTE
SYNAGOGUE INSCRIPTIONS. Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, and Middle Iranian inscriptions have been recovered from the ruins of synagogues that served Jewish communities throughout the Roman world. These inscrip tions date between the third century B C E and the eighth cen tury CE. Inscriptions provide important sources for both the history of the synagogue and the Jewish community in the Greco-Roman period.
Inscriptions from Palestinian Synagogues. A large number of inscriptions have been recovered from Palestin ian synagogues. Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions from syn agogues in the land of Israel have been assembled and edited by Joseph Naveh (1978, 1989); the Greek inscriptions have been edited by Baruch Lifshitz (1967) and Lea Roth-Gerson (1987). Of tire approximately 1 5 1 synagogue inscriptions from Israel collected by these authors, approximately 97 are in Aramaic, 16 are in Hebrew, and 38 are in Greek. The vast majority are dedicatory inscriptions, and the remaining fif teen either feature literary sources or function as short labels for visual images (fifteen of the total). Only one inscription dates to the Late Second Temple period, the remainder de riving from synagogues dating to between the fourth and the eighth centuries. The earliest synagogue inscription from Israel is in Greek and dates to the first century B C E or the first century C E . It was discovered by Raymond Weill just south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem: Theodotos, son of Vettenos the priest and synagogue leader [archisynagogos], son of a synagogue leader and grandson of a syn agogue leader, built die synagogue for the reading of the Torah and studying of the commandments, and as a hostel and the chambers and the water installations for the accommodation of those who, coming from abroad, have need of it, of which syn agogue the foundations were laid by his fathers and by the elders and by Simonides. This inscription parallels contemporaneous literary sources in its presentation of this Jerusalem synagogue. Dedicatory inscriptions within Palestinian synagogues are attested in tannaitic (early rabbinic) sources, which date to the second and third centuries C E . (Tosefta Meg. 2:14, 16) and in amoraic sources, which date to the third and fourth centuries (J.T., Meg. 3:2, 74a). Extant inscriptions generally include mention of the donor(s), the gift, and some sort of blessing or laudatory formula. Jewish use of public dedica tory inscriptions was part of a general cultural trend in the Greco-Roman period—polytheists, Christians, and Jews all marked their communal benefaction in this manner. As in Christian contexts, dedicatory inscriptions appear on archi tectural members such as columns and lintels and were painted on walls, set within mosaic pavements, and in scribed on ritual objects. [See Wall Paintings; Mosaics.] Epigraphic remains parallel rabbinic sources in suggesting that, like churches, elements of synagogue buildings were do nated by community members on a subscription basis, and that no individual donated an entire synagogue building. [See Churches; Church Inscriptions.] Synagogue dedicatory inscriptions can be divided into two distinct linguistic groups. The first includes those com posed in Aramaic, Hebrew, or in Greek with many Semitic features that often utilize similar literary formulae. The sec ond group was composed in a non-Semiticized Koine Greek
SYNAGOGUE INSCRIPTIONS and are most closely related to Christian inscriptions. The use of Aramaic, Greek with Semitic elements, or standard Koine Greek seems to have been determined by the spoken language of the synagogue community. It is not clear whether this was die case with Hebrew, which often appears because of its liturgical use in the synagogue. Aramaic, Greek with Semitic elements, and Hebrew appear most fre quently in regions with a heavy Jewish population: the Gal ilee, the Golan, the Jordan Rift Valley, and the southern Ju dean hills, while purely Greek formulae appear mainly in areas with a non-Jewish or mixed population, on the coastal plain and in the Decapolis cities of Scythopolis (BethShean) and Gerasa (Jerash). Aramaic, Hebrew, and semiticized Greek dedicatory in scriptions are characterized by their close relationship with extant liairgical texts and amulets. Such biblical phrases as "amen sela" and "peace unto Israel" appear at numerous sites. A parade example of the close relationship between synagogue inscriptions and liturgy is the dedicatory inscrip tion of the Jericho synagogue. Remembered for good, may their memory be for good, all of the holy community, the elders and the youths, whom the King of the Universe helped and who donated and made the mosaic. He who knows their names and the names of their sons and tire people of their households will write them in the book of life [with all] the righteous [ones]. All of Israel is interconnected (Mberim). Peace [Amen] (Naveh, r978, 1989, no. 69).
This text parallels the Kaddish prayer preserved in two lit urgies that were related to the Palestinian rite in the Byz antine period. The Kaddish of the Jewish community of Kaffa (Feodosiya) in Crimea reads Remembered for good and may their memory be for good . . . All of this holy community, the elders and the youths. He who knows their names will write them in the book of life with the righteous [ o n e s ] . . . .
Similarly, toward the close of die Kaddish from Cochin, In dia, another parallel to the Jericho inscription is found: "All of die house of Israelis interconnected (haberim), amen. . . ." Aramaic, Hebrew, and semiticized Greek inscriptions are generally composed in the second person, which parallels liturgical forms. Nonsemiticized Greek inscriptions closely parallel Chris tian inscriptions, as well as dedicatory inscriptions from di aspora synagogues. Like diese inscriptions, Palestinian syn agogue exempla are often composed in the first person and commonly list a motive for the act of benefaction. A number of synagogue inscriptions are literary in char acter, drawing from texts known from biblical and rabbinic sources. All are in Hebrew, the language of Scripture and of much of the liturgy, and date to die sixth century or later. The most important of these is a twenty-nine-line inscrip
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tion in a mosaic discovered in the narthex of the synagogue at Rehov (sixth century). This text directiy parallels sources in the Jerusalem Talmud (Dem., ch. 2; Shev., ch. 6), and includes some materials that appear in no other version. It is the earliest extant text of rabbinic literature, predating ex tant manuscripts by centuries. Fragments of lists of the twenty-four priestly courses (/ Chr. 24) appear at a number of sites, including Caesarea Maritima, Ashkelon, Rehov and apparently Nazareth. The priestly courses figure promi nently in contemporary liturgical poetry (piyyut). Deuteron omy 28:6, "Blessed are you in your coming and blessed are you in your going" appears on a lintel at the Merot syna gogue in Upper Galilee. This use of Deuteronomy 28:6 par allels Midrash Tanhuma', ki-tavo, "blessed are you when you come"—on the condition that you come to synagogues and study houses—"and blessed are you when you depart"— from synagogues and study houses. This Hebrew inscrip tion also parallels Christian usage of this verse. In general, Christian and Samaritan inscriptions make greater use of biblical texts than do their Jewish counterparts. An inscription that is unique in its complexity was uncov ered in the narthex of the sixth-century synagogue at EinGedi. This inscription opens with a list in Hebrew of the generations from Adam through Jafet that appears in 1 Chronicles 1:1-4. It is followed (11. 7-8) by a list of the signs of tile zodiac; the Hebrew months; and a passage tiiat reads "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob peace; Hananyah, Misha'el, and Azriah (the companions of Daniel), peace upon Israel" (Ps. 128:6). This inscription is followed by a dedicatory in scription in Aramaic and a curse against anyone who in forms to the gentiles on his comrade or "reveals the secret of the town to the gentiles." The inscription concludes with a second dedicatory inscription in Aramaic. Numerous scholars have attempted to identify the "secret of die town" in this inscription. Saul Lieberman suggests that the "secret of the town" involves trade secrets of die local balsam in dustry; the inscription concludes with a second dedicatory text ("A Preliminary Remark to die Inscription of Ein Gedi," Tarbiz 40 [1971]: 24-26 [in Hebrew]). Short labels to identify images in the carpet mosaics of a number of synagogues. These generally reflect a literary source. Flebrew texts from Genesis 22, for example, appear as labels for the image of the Binding of Isaac at Beth Alpha, and other verses label biblical scenes at Merot and Sepphoris. Zodiac wheels are also labeled to identify the seasons and the signs of the zodiac. In the recently discovered mo saic from Sepphoris both the names of the zodiac signs and the names of the Hebrew months appear. The use of He brew in these inscriptions is noteworthy, particularly in syn agogues like Beth Alpha, where the dedicatory inscriptions appear in Aramaic and Greek. This follows the preference for the Hebrew language for biblical reading and the syna gogue liturgy, as opposed to die spoken Aramaic and Greek of the congregants. In the so-called House of Leontis in c
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"Betula"—Virgo from the zodiac panel of the Na'aran synagogue mosaic. Dated to the sixth century CE. Iconoclasts disfigured the mosaic at a later date. (From E. L. Sukenik, The Ancient Synagogue of Beth Alpha, Jerusalem, 1932) SYNAGOGUE INSCRIPTIONS.
Beth-Shean, the city of Alexandria is so labeled in Greek in a Nilotic scene. Diaspora Inscriptions. Inscriptions have survived from synagogues throughout the Greco-Roman diaspora, though none have come to light from Babylonia (modern Iraq). In many cases, epigraphic evidence is the only source of infor mation for the existence of synagogues and Jewish com munities. This evidence has not been assembled systemati cally in its entirety, but significant corpora exist (Frey, 1936; Lifshitz, 1967; Horbury and Noy, 1992; Noy, 1993). The earliest sources for the history of the synagogue are inscriptions from Ptolemaic Egypt that date from the third century B C E onward. The proseuche (lit, "prayer place") ap pears in these Greek inscriptions. Virtually nothing is known about this institution in its early stages other than tiiat it shows great similarity to contemporaneous pagan temples and associations in Egypt. Like non-Jewish religious insti tutions, at least one Jewish "prayer place" in Ptolemaic Egypt was built on "holy land" (hiera ge) and another was built within a "holy compound." A dedicatory inscription
from a ^roseuc/wF in Xenephyris (Kom el-Akhdar) commem orates the benefaction of "the pylon (ton pulona) of the pro seuche." This "pylon" seems to represent a particularly Egyptian element, drawn from the architecture of native temples. Like contemporaneous temples, the Egyptian prayer place was often dedicated to the Ptolemaic ruler. Like Egyptian sanctuaries, for example, at least one prayer place in Ptolemaic Egypt was a place of asylum. In addition, syn agogue officials sometimes bore titles that were very similar to those held by their pagan counterparts. A structure on Delos of the late second century B C E to mid-first century C E has been identified as a synagogue based primarily on its dedicatory inscriptions, although the evidence is not conclu sive. The largest concentrations of diaspora synagogue inscrip tions from Late Antiquity in the Near East were uncovered in flie synagogues of Dura-Europos in Syria and Sardis in Asia Minor. The refurbishing and enlargement of the syn agogue at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates River in 244/45 is commemorated in Aramaic and Greek inscriptions. T o gether with these texts, labels in Aramaic and Greek accom pany selected scenes in the wall paintings, and graffiti in Greek, Aramaic, and Middle Iranian are scratched into the paintings. The language of the Aramaic texts is closely re lated to Palestinian Jewish Aramaic texts. Two papyri, one of which seems to be Hebrew liturgical texts were discovered in proximity to the synagogue at Dura. The practice of in scribing graffiti on the walls of religious shrines was common in non-Jewish contexts, though this is the only evidence for graffiti witiiin a Late Antique synagogue. These inscriptions provide important information regarding the life of the syn agogue between its rededication in 244/45 and its destruc tion eleven or twelve years later. Considerable inscriptional evidence has been uncovered from the monumental fourth-seventli-century synagogue at Sardis in Lydia in Asia Minor. Most inscriptions from this synagogue are in Greek. A number of inscriptions are char acterized by their religious content. An inscription found within the hall refers to the nomophylakion, "the place tiiat protects die Law [or, Torah]." A second inscription de mands pious religious behavior toward die Scriptures: "Find, open, read, observe." It has been suggested tiiat this inscription, on marble, might have been attached to die base of die Torah shrine. All die Hebrew inscriptions were dis covered next to the soutiiern shrine. In an inscription dis covered near the bema of the synagogue near die center of the hall "a priest [heurori] and sophodidaskalos" ("teacher of wisdom," or "wise teacher") is mentioned. A fragment of a large marble menorah, whose branches once spanned more than a meter and that was inscribed with a dedicatory in scription and an inscription recording the donation of a heptamyxion, a "seven branched lamp," have been discovered. An inscription from Side in Pamphylia that probably dates
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the holy place the buildings as well as the triclinium with the tetrastoon out of my own funds without touching in any way the sacred [funds]. But [I declare that] I Claudios Tiberios Poly charmos and my heirs keep for our lifetime all power and own ership over the upper chambers. Whosoever wishes to make changes beyond these decisions of mine will give the patriarch 250,000 denarii.
"Who gives bread to allflesh,for His mercy endures forever" (Ps. 13S(6):2$). Dated from the fourth to sev enth century CE, from Iznik (ancient Nicaea). T h e inscription was reused in a Byzantine tower by King Michael in 857-858 (inscrip tion to the right) and later in a baptismal pool. (Photograph by Taylan Sevil; courtesy S. Fine) SYNAGOGUE INSCRIPTIONS.
to the fourth century is of particular interest when read against the backdrop of the details of the Sardis synagogue: [I, Is]aac, administrator of the most holy first synagogue, made successful construction. I both filled in the marble [floor] from die raised stage to the simma and polished the seven branched lamps and the two chief capitals (or columns). The fifteenth year of the indiction, the fourth month.
This "most holy" synagogue was constructed with a raised stage, a simma (perhaps an apse), and was paved with an expensive marble floor. While it is unclear what is meant by the "two chief columns," the synagogue apparently had metal menorahs in need of polishing. While no physical ev idence of this synagogue has been preserved, many of its attributes appear in the contemporaneous synagogue at Sar dis. Bernadette J . Brooton (1982) has argued that in the Greco-Roman diaspora women served as synagogue lead ers. This is based upon funerary inscriptions that refer to women as "mother of the synagogue" and as "elder." Tessa Rajak and Leonard V. Rutgers have recently independendy disputed this reading of epigraphic sources. A number of inscriptions reflect a particularly close rela tionship between diaspora communities and Palestine. This includes the uses of the term holy place to denote synagogues as far afield as Stobi in Macedonia (hagios topos); Naro (Hamman Lif) in Tunisia (sancta synagoga); and Hammath Tiberias (atra qedisha, hagios topos). Particularly striking is the requirement of the benefactor of the Stobi inscription, an inscription dated to 280-281: (The year) 3 1 1 . (I Claudios) Tiberios Polycharmos, also called Achrios, father of the community of Stobi, having lived all [my] life in accord with Judaism [have] because of a vow [added] to
This "patriarch" here is generally understood to be the pa triarch in Palestine, considered to have been the Jewish ethnarch throughout the Roman Empire. An inscription listing the twenty-four priestly courses was discovered in Beit alHasr in Yemen, which parallels those uncovered in Israel. Synagogue functionaries are often mentioned in synagogue and funerary inscriptions. One particularly widespread title for tire synagogue leader is archisynagogos. This term, known in Palestine as well, seems to be a translation of the Hebrew rosh ha-kenesset, "head of the assembly" (as, for example, in Tosefta Meg. 3:21). Synagogue inscriptions from Palestine and the Greco-Ro man diaspora provide important evidence for the religious and social history of Judaism in Late Antiquity. Often, they represent the only literary evidence for long-forgotten Jewish communities, as well as keys for interpreting architectural and artistic evidence. These inscriptions form a continuum with Late Antique Jewish literature from the land of Israel and with pagan and Christian dedicatory inscriptions. Epi graphic sources are important evidence for both the Judaism shared by Jews in the land of Israel and the Greco-Roman diaspora and for the Judaism unique to each. [See also Aramaic Language and Literature; Greek; He brew Language and Literature; Inscriptions, article on In scriptions of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods; Latin; and Synagogues. In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooton, Bernadette J. Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue. Chico, Calif., 1982. Argues that women served in powerful positions in the Late Antique diaspora synagogue, based on dedicatory inscriptions. Fine, Steven. "This Holy Place": On the Sanctity of Synagogues during the Greco-Roman Period, Forthcoming. Discusses in detail most of the inscriptions described in this entry. Foerster, Gideon. "Synagogue Inscriptions and Their Relation to Li turgical Versions" (in Hebrew). Cathedra 17 (1981): 12-40. Surveys the relationships between Jewish liturgical texts and synagogue in scriptions. Frey, Jean-Baptiste. Corpus inscriptionum iudaicarum. The Vatican, 1936. Revised by Baruch Lifshitz. New York, 1975. Frey's work, read with Lifshitz's prolegomenon, is still basic for die study of Jewish epigraphic evidence from the western Mediterranean region. Horbury, William, and David Noy. Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Cambridge, 1992. Reedition of all known inscriptions from Egypt. Kant, Lawrence H. "Jewish Inscriptions in Greek and Latin," In Aufslieg undNiedergangderromischen Welt, vol. II.20, pp. 6 7 1 - 7 1 3 . Berlin and New York, 1987. Surveys synagogue inscriptions in Greek and
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classifies them according to genre; includes a particularly useful bib Meg. 2:12). Literary sources are virtually unanimous in pre liography. senting first-century synagogues as places where Jews gath Lifshitz, Baruch. Donateurs etfondateurs dans les synagogues juives. Paris, ered to read and study scripture (for example, Josephus, 1967. Corpus of synagogue Greek inscriptions from Israel and the Against Apion 2.175; Lk. 4:16-22; Acts 1 3 : 1 3 - 1 6 ) . Commu diaspora. Meyers, Eric M. "Galilean Regionalism: A Reappraisal." In Approaches nal prayer is not presented as a function of synagogues be to Ancient Judaism, vol. 5, Studies in Judaism and Its Greco-Roman fore 70 C E . A Greek inscription discovered by Raymond Context, edited by William Scott Green, pp. 1 1 5 — 1 3 1 . Brown Judaic Weill just south of die Temple Mount in Jerusalem, called Studies, 32. Atlanta, 1985. Naveh, Joseph. On Stone and Mosaic: The Aramaic and Hebrew Inscrip the Theodotos Inscription after its donor, confirms this sit tions from Ancient Synagogues (in Hebrew). Yerushalayim, 1978. Col uation. According to this inscription, this synagogue was to lection and analysis of all synagogue inscriptions known through the be used for "reciting the Torah (nomas) and studying the date of publication. Updated by the author in Eretz-Israel 20 (1989): commandments, and as a hostel with chambers and water 302-310 (in Hebrew). installations to provide for die needs of itinerants from Noy, David. Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe. Vol. 1. Cambridge, abroad" (Lea Roth-Gerson, The Greek Inscriptions from the 1993. Assembles inscriptions from Italy (excluding Rome), Spain, Synagogues in Eretz-Israel, Jerusalem, 1987, pp. 76-86). and Gaul. Rajak, Tessa. "The Jewish Community and Its Boundaries." In The Buildings at Masada, Gamla, and Herodium have been Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, edited by identified as synagogues. All are characterized by rows of Judith Lieu et al., pp. 9-28. London, 1992. Rajak questions Brooton's benches lining their walls. The building at Gamla is a large argument for the existence of women synagogue leaders in the late freestanding structure. A ritual bath, or miqveh, is located antique diaspora. Roth-Gerson, Lea. Greek Inscriptions from the Synagogues in EretzIsrael adjacent to it. [See Ritual Batiis.] The Masada meeting room (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1987. Extensive analysis of all Greek-lan is located in the casemate wall on the northwest side of the guage synagogue inscriptions uncovered in Israel up to the date of hill; it was completely renovated by the rebels during their publication. Rutgers, Leonard V. The Jews of Late Ancient Rome: An Archaeological occupation of Masada during the first Jewish Revolt against and Historical Study on the Interaction of Jews and Non-Jews in the Rome (66-74 ) - [See First Jewish Revolt.] Its entrance on Roman-Diaspora. Leiden, 1995. Questions Brooton's argument for the southeast, opposite a small room in die northwest corner the existence of women synagogue leaders in the Late Antique di that was apparently used to store biblical scrolls. Fragments aspora. of biblical texts were discovered buried beneath tiiis small Yahalom, Joseph. "Synagogue Inscriptions in Palestine: A Stylistic room. The location of the small room on the northeast wall Classification." Immanuel 1 0 (1980): 47-57. Compares synagogue suggests an internal alignment within the synagogue and inscriptions to contemporaneous Jewish literature, in particular, li turgical poetry (piyyutj. perhaps an alignment toward Jerusalem. A room at Hero STEVEN F I N E dium was also fitted with benches during the First Jewish Revolt. On the basis of the similarities between these benches and those at Masada, some scholars identify this room as a synagogue. SYNAGOGUES. The word synagogue, from the Archaeological remains that pertain to synagogues from Greek sunagoge, a place of "coming together" is equivalent the late first or second centuries C E are rare. The excavators to the Rabbinic Hebrew beit kenesset and die Palestinian Jew report the discovery of a second-century synagogue in the ish Aramaic kenishta or beit. kenishta, "house of assembly." first phase of the synagogue at Nabratein in the Upper Gal Synagogues are known to have served Jewish communities ilee (see figure 1 ) . The building has four columns, a possible throughout the Mediterranean basin and the Near East dur reader's lectern, suggested by an imprint in the plaster floor, ing the Greco-Roman period. Much archaeological evi and is aligned toward the south, in the direction of Jerusalem dence for this institution has been uncovered, the largest (Meyers et a l , 1981). concentration having been discovered in the land of Israel. Tannaitic literature provides ample information about Read together with extant literary sources, archaeological synagogues within communities influenced by the rabbinic sources provide important evidence for the development of sages. Torah reading and study are portrayed in this litera the synagogue during its formative centuries. ture as the primary functions of the synagogue. Tannaitic Palestinian Synagogues. By the first century C E syna sources also present new functions that took place within gogues existed throughout the land of Israel. They are men synagogues, the most significant of these being the devel tioned in the writings of Josephus and of Philo of Alexandria opment of communal liturgy. Some synagogue buildings in and in New Testament and rabbinic literature. Philo pre late firstand second-century Palestine were apparently pri sents the Essene community as having come together on the vate buildings converted into public synagogues (Mishnah Sabbath in "sacred spots (Gk., hierous topous) which they Ned. 9:2). Tosefta Megillah 3:21-23 presents instructions for call synagogues" (Every Good Man is Free, 11. 81-82). Rab the construction of an ideal synagogue based upon biblical binic and New Testament sources mention synagogues in exegesis. Like die Tabernacle/Temple, tiiis text suggests various locales. In Jerusalem they are said to have served that synagogues were to be built "at the high point of the specific expatriate diaspora communities (Acts 6:9; Tosefta C E
SYNAGOGUES town," their doors open to die east. The Tosefta presents a plan for die internal arrangement of the synagogue: How do die elders sit? Facing the people, their backs to the qodesh [Jerusalem]. When they set down the [scroll] chest—its front is toward the people, its back to die qodesh. The hazan ha-kenesset (community leader) faces die qodesh. All the people face die qodesh. Some synagogues seem to have been illuminated with sevenbranched lampstands (menorot) during this period. Amoraic literature dating to the fourth and fifth centuries and postamoraic literature, dating from the fifth century through the close of antiquity, present synagogue buildings as having been a common feature on the Palestinian land scape by the third and fourth centuries. This phenomenon is also noted by Jerome (Commentary to Is. 57:12). Syna gogues also served as primary schools (J.T., Meg. 3:3, 74a; Pesiqta' de-Rav Kahana', pp. 255, 381,422). Synagogue lit urgy developed gready during Late Antiquity, as is reflected in the rich liturgical poetry (piyyut) that has survived. Tem ple imagery was increasingly transformed by synagogues
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during this period, die Torah shrine being conceptualized in terms of the biblical Ark of the Covenant. This relation ship is made clear in the Jerusalem Talmud (Totan. 21,65a), a tradition attributed to Rabbi Huna the Great of Sepphoris. This sage is said to have lamented on the occasion of a pub lic fast that "Our fathers covered it [the Ark of the Cove nant] with gold, and we cover it [the Torah ark] with ashes." The Torah shrine was the focal point of the synagogue (see figure 2), the "sanctity of the ark" being greater than the "sanctity of the synagogue" building as a whole (J.T., Meg. 3:1, 73d). Remains of more than one hundred synagogues dating from the late third through the eighth centuries have been identified in Palestine. This large corpus provides a welldeveloped image of the synagogue during the period, re flecting a rich religious culture through a limited repertoire of architectural, artistic, and epigraphic forms. Synagogues conforming to three main architectural types were constructed by Jews in Late Antiquity in Palestine: the broadhouse, the "Galilean-type," and the longhouse basil ica. [See Basilicas.] From die fifth century onward, longhouse basilicas were often apsidal. While a regional and
mm
s y n a g o g u e s . Figure 1 . Reconstructed interior south wall, synagogue at Nabratein. Late Roman pe riod. Bemas and Ark are depicted. (Courtesy Meiron Excavation Project)
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SYNAGOGUES chronological distribution of synagogue types is apparent, these "types" in no way reflect a strict geographic or chron ologic typology. Often, synagogues of different types existed in close proximity to one another, as is the case of the broadhouse synagogue at Khirbet Shema' and the nearby Gali lean-type basilica at Meiron. The basilica form was adapted by both Jews and Christians during the fourth century, al though Tosefta Sukkah 4:6 and the third-century synagogue at Gush Halav suggest that Jews had built basilica-type syn agogues earlier (see figure 3). Variety in architectural pat terning and ornamentation is accompanied by the rather common placement of the Torah shrine on the wall facing Jerusalem.
s y n a g o g u e s . Figure z. General representation of the ark. Features of an ark include the bema (raised platform), two columns, the two lions of Judah, and the tier tamid (eternal light). (Courtesy Meiron Excavation Project)
The principle of sacred orientation can be seen in each of the architectural types. In the Galilean basilica (Capernaum, Chorazin, Meiron, Nabratein and Bar'am, Umm el-Qanatir and Arbel), tire side aisles on the western, northern, and eastern sides, though not on the southern wall within the synagogue stresses the importance of this Jerusalem-aligned wall. Typical of this group is the structure uncovered at Mei ron, where the triple facade faces south toward Jerusalem. It is likely that the Torah shrine was placed between the portals of this structure, as at Merot in Upper Galilee and as has been conjectured at Capernaum and Chorazin. Some scholars have posited the existence of portable Torah chests that were brought into the synagogue for communal Scrip ture reading, arguing that the image of a wheeled carriage at Capernaum represents one. There is no corroborating literary evidence for this suggestion. Both the orientation of the basilica and the suggested location of the ark necessitated
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SYNAGOGUES. Figure 4. Mosaic, Beth-Shean synagogue. The Ark of Law is depicted in the center. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
that the worshiper enter the synagogue through one of its three main portals and turn to face the Torah shrine and Jerusalem to the south. In the broadhouse synagogue, the wall of orientation is one of die longer, or broader, walls. The Torah shrine is located in the long wall aligned with Jerusalem. Broadhouses have been discovered at Nabratein, phase 1, and at Shema in Upper Galilee, and at Susiya and Eshtemoa in the Mt. Hebron region of Judea (Judah). In longhouse and apsidal basilica synagogues die visitor generally crossed die expanse of an atrium, sometimes a narthex, and the nave to reach the Jerusalem-aligned wall. At the center of this wall, the building's focal point, the Torah shrine, often stood on a raised platform and seems to have been flanked by seven-branched menorahs. This imagery is reflected, for example, in the synagogue mosaic atHammath Tiberias B , level 2a. Synagogues of the sixth century and later, including those at Na'aran and Beth Alpha, often in cluded an apse in die Jerusalem wall that housed the Torah shrine, a feature borrowed from contemporary churches. [See Churches.] The apse and bema were sometimes sepa rated from the nave by a chancel screen. Also borrowed from Christian architecture, the screen served to emphasize 5
and distance the area of the Torah shrine from the assem bled community. An ornate chancel screen also appears in a broadhouse synagogue at Susiya. The chancel screen is in Hebrew called a geder la-bama, "partition for the podium," in a recently identified source from die Cairo Genizah. The naves of longhouse and apsidal basilicas were often paved widi highly intricate mosaics that, in a number of cases, included images of die zodiac wheel, the Torah shrine area, and numerous dedicatory inscriptions in Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew (see figure 4). The zodiac wheel clearly represents the course of the Jewish calendar, which is prin cipally lunar, as is made clear by a newly discovered fifthsixth-century mosaic from Sepphoris. Biblical scenes also appear, including the Binding of Isaac at Beth Alpha, Noah's Ark at Jerash, Daniel in the Lion's Den at Na'aran, and David playing his Harp in Gaza. Each of these biblical images parallels common themes in Jewish liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity. Particularly significant is a mosaic pavement from the narthex of the sixtii-century synagogue at Rehov. This twenty-nine-line inscription directly parallels texts that appear in rabbinic literature. [See Mosaics,] Objects of ceremonial use witiiin the synagogue discov ered at a number of sites have shed important light on the
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religious lives of synagogue communities. These include el ements of seven-branched menorahs from Ma'on (Judea) and Hammath Tiberias A; an incense burner from BethShean A; a chalice from 'Ein-Gedi; a polycandelon from Kefar Hananyah; and perhaps plates from Na'anah and Beth-She'arim. Also of interest are amulets discovered at Merot, Horvat Kanaf, and Ma on (Nirim). All of these ob jects parallel discussions of synagogue appurtenances that appear in rabbinic and Karaite sources. Diaspora Synagogues. Most scholars posit that syna gogues first appeared in the diaspora. The existence of Jew ish "prayer places" (Gk., sg., proseuche) is recorded as early as the third century BCE in Egypt. Little is known about these places of meeting, except that Jews came together in them to "pray." In function as well as form, the proseuche had much in common with contemporaneous Egyptian temples. During the first century, Philo emphasizes the importance of scriptural study within the proseuche (Embassy to Gains 156; On Dreams 2.156; The Life of Moses 2.216). Synagogues (both sunagoge and proseuche) are recorded as having existed throughout the Near East during the Late Second Temple period. A synagogue in the Seleucid capitol of Antioch on Orontes is of particular note because bronze treasures taken from the Jerusalem Temple by Antiochus IV were deposited there by his successors (Josephus, War 7.44-45). 1
Sources for the history of the Greco-Roman diaspora syn agogue after 70 CE are limited to the writings of pagan and Christian authors and archaeological remains. By contrast, synagogues in the Sasanian Empire are known almost ex clusively from traditions preserved in the Babylonian Tal mud. As in Palestine, the Torah shrine became the focal point of diaspora synagogues that were generally aligned to ward Jerusalem. The liturgical reading and exposition of Scripture and communal prayer seem to have been the main religious functions of these synagogues. Temple imagery was particularly important within Greco-Roman diaspora synagogues. Seven-branched menorahs were used both as symbols of Jewish identity and to illuminate some synagogue interiors. The Torah shrine was often called an ark (Heb. 'ardn, or Gk., kiebotos), reminiscent of the biblical Ark of the Covenant. Two synagogues in Babylonia, Shaf ve-Yateb in Nehardea and the synagogue of Hutsal, were invested with additional significance and served as national religious cen ters for Babylonian Jewry (Meg. 29a). Archaeological evidence for synagogues in the Near East includes five extant buildings: Dura-Europos and Apamea in Syria; Priene and Sardis in Asia Minor; and perhaps Delos in the Aegean. In addition, numerous inscriptions have survived that shed light on synagogue life during Late An tiquity. The Jewish community of Dura-Europos (a caravan city on the Euphrates River) procured a private dwelling and transformed it into a synagogue some time before 244-245 CE, when the building was enlarged and renovated. It was destroyed in 256, during the Sasanian invasion. The earlier
synagogue was made up of a series of rooms grouped around a central courtyard. Its assembly hall, which is gen erally rectangular in shape, in the range of 10.65-10.85 by 4.60-5.30 m. Benches were constructed on all four walls, and an aedicule was placed in the western (Jerusalemaligned) wall. Seating capacity was for approximately forty people. During the second phase, the forecourt was enlarged and covered with a peristyle leading to the main assembly room (14 X 8.7 m.). This room was surrounded by benches, with a seating capacity of 120. All four walls were decorated with biblical scenes portraying elements of Jewish sacred his tory. The paintings reflect a high degree of familiarity with stories that also appear in rabbinic literature and a clear sty listic continuity with the pagan and Christian wall paintings at Dura (Kraeling, 1956). [See Wall Paintings.] Beneath ex tensions of the hinge sockets of each of the two doors leading to the synagogue remains of human finger bones were dis covered. Similar foundation deposits have been found in Pa gan temples at Dura. The remains of a synagogue were discovered beneath those of a church at Apamea on the Orontes River in Syria. The plan of the building has never been published, but its mosaic pavement and numerous dedicatory inscriptions have been discussed. The synagogue is dated to the late fourth century on the basis of dedicatory inscriptions. A building from Misis (ancient Mopsuestia) in Cilicia in Asia Minor has been identified as a synagogue on the basis of numerous illustrations from the Hebrew Scriptures that ap pear in its mosaics. The evidence is, however, inconclusive, and this fourth-fifth-century basilical building may well have been a church. The synagogue at Priene was constructed within a trans formed private dwelling. It has been dated by its excavators to die fourth or fifth century. Benches were constructed along the walls of the assembly room (19 X 14 m.) On the eastern (Jerusalem) wall of the assembly room was a Torah niche that served as a focal point. To the right of the shrine a laver was discovered for ablutions. Three reliefs bearing seven-branched menorahs decorated the room. On one, the menorah is flanked by two birds; on another it is flanked by a lulav, an etrog, and a shofar, with volutes identified as Torah scrolls to either side of the menorah's stalk. Similar volutes were discovered on a relief from Sardis and on im ages of menorahs that have recently been identified in Iznik (ancient Nicaea) and in an American private collection. These volutes seem to represent a regional type distinctive to Asia Minor. The first-century BCE building identified as a synagogue on Delos is situated in the residential area. Its main hall is rectangular (16.9 X 14.4 m.) but was divided at a later stage with an east-west wall. Marble benches along the west wall are interrupted by a white marble throne that some have identified with the "seat of Moses" mentioned in Matthew 23:2. A series of small rooms was discovered south of this room, and a roofed portico runs north-south on the east.
SYRIA Four ex-voto inscriptions containing the term theos hypsistos ("highest god") were discovered in the hall, which are the basis of the building's identification as a synagogue. Epigraphic remains attesting to the presence of Samaritans have been found elsewhere on Delos. The largest synagogue to survive from antiquity is located in Sardis in Lydia. The building was constructed as part of a gymnasium-bath complex, and was apparently refur bished by the Jewish community during the fourth century. The synagogue's peristyle forecourt, at whose center was a fountain, was entered from the east. Three entrances lead to tire assembly hall (54 X 18 m). A stepped apse was at the western end of tire hall, and two aedicules, at least one of which was a Torah shrine, were constructed between the doors on the hall's eastern wall. This parallels the placement of die fourth-century Torah shrine in the Ostia synagogue outside Rome and in some Galilean-type synagogues. A raised bema was apparently constructed in the middle of the hall, and a large table flanked by lions stood close to the apse. The floor was paved with a geometric and floral mosaic, and the lower portions of the walls were inlayed with small pieces of colored marble within an architectural frame. According to a dedicatory inscription, the upper portion of the walls or tlie ceiling was decorated with paintings. Numerous inscrip tions were found, mainly dedicatory, in Greek. Of particular interest is a fragmentary marble seven-branched menorah inscribed with a Greek dedicatory inscription. Further al terations and modifications were made periodically, until the synagogue was destroyed with the rest of the city in 616. Following the lead of Erwin R. Goodenough (see Goodenough, 1953-1968), scholars during die latter half of the twentieth century frequentiy interpreted synagogue remains as reflecting a broad chasm separating the rabbinic sages and other Jewish communities in Palestine and the Greco-Ro man diaspora. Owing to the large quantity of literary and archaeological sources now available, nuanced differences rather than divisions can be seen to characterize those Late Antique synagogue communities. Theirs was a shared reli gion expressed in the centrality of scripture in the syna gogue, in die alignment of the synagogue or Torah shrine toward Jerusalem, and in the use of Temple forms and mo tifs (such as the menorah) in synagogues. Within this reli gious continuum, which stretched from the western Medi terranean to the Tigris River, divergent approaches to Jewish belief and practice coexisted. [See also Synagogue Inscriptions. In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Chiat, Marilyn Joyce Segal. Handbook of Synagogue Literature. Chico, Calif., 1982. Catalogs the evidence for synagogues in Israel through the late 1970s; a useful collection best used as a synopsis of the schol arly literature on each site. Fine, Steven. "This Holy Place": On the Sanctity of Synagogues during the Greco-Roman Period. Forthcoming. Detailed discussion of the lit
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erary and archaeological sources described above, tracing the ideo logical development of the synagogue in Late Antiquity. Goodenough, Erwin R. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. 1 3 vols. New York, 1953-1968. Goodenough collects and analyzes all examples of ancient Jewish art known to his time, although his in terpretations (which have had a profound effect on the study of an cient Judaism) are not generally accepted. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel. Leiden, 1988. Classification of synagogue art and architecture through 1988, with historical discussions that should be read in con junction with the standard histories of the period. Kraabel, A. Thomas. "The Diaspora Synagogue: Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence since Sukenik." In Aufslieg und Niedergang der rbmischen Welt, vol. II. 1 9 . 1 , edited by Wolfgang Haase, pp. 477-510. Berlin, 1979. Particularly important for its survey of scholarly liter ature in a number of languages. Kraeling, Carl H. The Synagogue. The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report 8, part 1. New Haven, 1956. Final report on the syn agogue at Dura-Europos, with extensive citation of literary sources and parallels from non-Jewish contexts. Levine, Lee I., ed. Ancient Synagogues Revealed. Jerusalem, 1981. Essays by archaeologists reflecting the state of synagogue discoveries in Is rael and the Diaspora dirough the late 1970s. Levine, Lee I., ed. The Synagogue in lata Antiquity. Philadelphia, 1987. Articles in all areas of synagogue studies by leading scholars in the fields of history, archaeology, art history, and Jewish liturgy. Each article contains an extensive bibliography. Meyers, Eric M . "The Cultural Setting of Galilee: The Case of Re gionalism and Early Judaism." In Aufslieg und Niedergang der romischen Well, vol. II.19.1, edited by Wolfgang Haase, pp. 686-702. Berlin, 1979. Places synagogues and other material remains of the Jews in the Galilee in regional context. Meyers, Eric M. "Ancient Synagogues in Galilee: Their Cultural and Religious Setting." Biblical Archaeologist 43 (1980): 9 7 - 1 0 1 . Over view of the field of Palestinian synagogue archaeology. See also Mey ers (1993).
Meyers, Eric M„ et al. "The Ark of Nabratein: A First Glance." Biblical Archaeologist 44.4 (1981): 237-243. Preliminary treatment of the site. Meyers, Eric M., and A. Thomas Kraabel. "Archaeology, Iconography, and Non-Literary Written Remains." In Early Judaism and Its Mod ern Interpreters, edited by Robert A. Kraft and George W. E. Nickelsburg, pp. 1 7 5 - 2 1 0 . Atlanta, 1986. Useful summary of the archae ology of early Judaism in Israel and the Diaspora. Meyers, Eric M. "Synagogue." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 251-260. Garden City, N.Y., 1993. Sukenik, Eleazar L. Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece. London, 1934. Assembles and analyzes all evidence for ancient synagogues through the early 1930s. STEVEN FINE and ERIC M. MEYERS
SYRIA. [This entry provides a broad survey of the history of Syria as known primarily from archaeological discoveries. It is chronologically divided into six articles: Prehistoric Syria Syria in the Bronze Age Syria in the Iron Age Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods Syria in the Byzantine Period Syria in the Islamic Period In addition to the related articles on specific subregions and sites referred to in this entry, see also History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Syria.]
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SYRIA: Prehistoric Syria
than one million years ago. The earlier evidence for human settlement in Syria comes from a surface site, Sitt Markho, Syria lies at the heart of Southwest Asia. It is bordered on in the northwest, situated on an old river terrace high above the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on the north by the the Nahr al-Kabir. Among the very worn flints found at the high Anatolian plateau, while it opens eastward to the plains site were a number of handaxes. These general-purpose cut of Mesopotamia and southward to Arabia. Syria bestrides ting and digging tools are characteristic of the Acheulean, the land route that connects Africa with Europe and Asia the most widespread culture of the Lower Paleolithic. and so has experienced every major episode of human dis A number of Acheulean sites have been found throughout persal from Africa in prehistory. Syria has been an impor Syria, indicating that early populations of humans occupied tant center for economic and cultural innovations, of which much of the country. The details of the way of life of most the most significant was the development of agriculture and of those early hunter-gatherers are lost because so little has village society. It participated fully in the development of survived from that remote period. An exception is the site towns and cities and was a major source for the diffusion of of Latamne in the Orontes Valley (Clark, 1967), occupied those new modes of life to the adjacent continents. by Middle Acheulean hunter-gatherers about 250,000 year A range of mountains, the Jebel Ansariye, separates the ago. [See Latamne.] This campsite was composed of stone narrow coastal plain from the interior plateau. The great blocks that had once anchored a brushwood shelter. It con expanse of open country that is inner Syria slopes gradually tained handaxes, other flint tools, and bones of some of the down to the east. The Euphrates River, which rises in east animals hunted or scavenged by the inhabitants. ern Anatolia, flows across the Syrian plateau, and on During the Middle Paleolithic (c. 100,000-35,000 years through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. Those physical ago), Syria was inhabited by Neanderthal peoples. Their features have strongly influenced climate, vegetation, and characteristic flint points, made with a distinctive technol patterns of human settlement. ogy, have been found at sites and in geomorphological de The coastal plain of Syria enjoys a Mediterranean climate. posits across the country. Evidently, human occupation of In contrast, the interior beyond the coastal mountains is Syria was more comprehensive and persistent than during semiarid with typical continental extremes of temperature. the Acheulean. The long sequences of occupation found at The natural vegetation of the coast and western slopes of rock-shelters like Yabrud and Douara testify to repeated the mountains is a Mediterranean forest of evergreen and seasonal use of favored sites by Neanderthal groups of deciduous oak, pine, and plane trees that extends in a band hunter-gatherers. The animal bones found at Douara indi across northern Syria to tire Tigris River. Eastward and cate that these people preferred to hunt wild sheep, goats, southward of the forest is a wide zone of open parkland that, horses, and other medium-sized animals. [See Douara.] in its natural state, would have consisted of abundant grass Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, occupied Syria lands with scattered terebinth and oak trees. Today, this about thirty-five thousand years ago. Upper Paleolithic sites zone contains the richest farmland in Syria and is heavily are few, indicating that population density declined, perhaps cultivated. The rest of tire interior consists of steppe that because of the cooler conditions that prevailed for much of becomes desert in the southeast as rainfall diminishes. this period. The climate began to improve about fifteen Those lands are the home of pastoralists, the several tribes thousand years ago, as the temperature rose. Sites of this of bedouin that range over the Syrian interior. There are final hunter-gatherer stage of human prehistory, the Epiwide variations in rainfall from year to year and over longer paleolithic, have been found quite widely across Syria, sug periods that can cause catastrophic crop failure in the short gesting that the population increased in response to the ame term and bring about major shifts in settlement when dry lioration in climate and the consequent expansion of the spells persist for decades or more. forest and grassland that were the most favorable zones for During the Pleistocene there were repeated major cycles human settlement. of cool and warm climate for a duration of one hundred A number of Epipaleolithic sites are known in the Antithousand years. The cool episodes were the Ice Ages. Their Lebanon Mountains northwest of Damascus, in the hills effects were less drastic in Southwest Asia than in higher north of Palmyra, in the Jezireh, and on the Euphrates. The latitudes, but they did have a substantial impact on the land most intriguing is Abu Hureyra 1, found at the base of the scape and, thus, on human settlement. In each major cycle great prehistoric settlement mound of that name in the Eu there were numerous briefer episodes of fluctuating climate. phrates Valley. This site was inhabited by more than a score Therefore, the prehistoric inhabitants of Syria, like their of families of hunter-gatherers who lived first in multicontemporaries elsewhere in the region, had continually to roomed pit dwellings and then in huts built aboveground. adapt to a changing environment, a process that has contin The site was located on a gazelle migration route across the ued to the present. steppe, so the inhabitants obtained most of their meat by Initial Human Settlement. Populations of Homo erectus killing large numbers of these animals as the herds passed by each spring (Legge and Rowley-Conwy, 1987). In confirst moved out of Africa to settle Asia and Europe more
Prehistoric Syria
SYRIA: Prehistoric Syria trast to this specialized hunting, die people of Abu Hureyra i gathered a great number of plants for food and other pur poses, more than one hundred and fifty species in all. The environment was so rich that it enabled die inhabitants to stay in their village year round, and so to form the first permanentiy inhabited village anywhere in Southwest Asia. In deed, their way of life was so well adapted to their environs that they occupied the village for fifteen hundred years, from 11,500 to 10,000 BP (Moore, 1992). The one serious prob lem they encountered was the onset of a cold episode, die Younger Dryas, that interrupted die warming climatic trend. This caused the forest zone to retreat westward, depriving the inhabitants of some of the species of plants on which they had depended, notably wild cereal grains and pulses, and obliging them to modify their gathering. The ecological disruption caused by the Younger Dryas was one of the reasons the people of the region developed farming.
Inception of Agriculture. The domestication of plants and animals made it possible to produce increasing amounts of food from a small area of land and so to feed more people. Thus, the development of farming supported a marked in crease in the population and the spread of the village way of life. That led to die formation of towns and cities and provided the essential economic base for civilization itself. The advent of agriculture was truly a revolution in human affairs, and Southwest Asia was one of the major centers of agricultural genesis worldwide (Moore, 1985). [See Agri culture; Cities, overview article,] Syria was an important area of agricultural development within Southwest Asia, where the wild ancestors of several of the first plants and animals to be domesticated flourished, notably einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, rye, lentils, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. [See Cereals; Sheep and Goats; Cattle and Oxen; Pigs.] It is thus likely that some of these species were first domesticated there. Furthermore, Syria was linked geographically with the other regions of Southwest Asia, where farming and herding developed early, and was thus a focus for the diffusion of the new way of life. The earliest evidence for domesticated plants comes from Tell Aswad (Contenson, 1983), an early Neolithic village near Lake Ateibe in the Damascus basin. The inhabitants grew domesticated emmer wheat, lentils, and peas as early as 9700 BP, to which they added einkorn, bread wheat, bar ley, and linseed a few centuries later. The next step in the development of an agricultural way of life is best illuminated at Abu Hureyra. There, after an episode of intermittent occupation, a second village, Abu Hureyra 2 (c. 9400-7000 BP), was established. It was to be come the largest Neolithic village in Syria, with an estimated inhabited area of 16 ha (40 acres). Abu Hureyra 2 was com posed of individual rectilinear, mud-brick houses, each of which contained several small rooms with plaster floors and painted walls. The houses were built close together with
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small courts and narrow lanes between them. Crafts flour ished at Abu Hureyra and, although largely self-sufficient, the inhabitants were in touch with other regions of South west Asia through the exchange of scarce materials such as obsidian, marine shells, and turquoise. The villagers of Abu Hureyra 2 cultivated einkorn, bread wheat, barley, and rye as well as vetches, chick-peas, and horse beans. They kept a few domesticated sheep and goats but still obtained most of their meat from the migrating herds of gazelle, killing the animals with flint-tipped arrows. The people of early Abu Hureyra 2 were farmer-hunters until about 8200 BP, when the herds of gazelle sharply di minished through overhunting. The inhabitants rapidly re placed this source of meat by increasing their existing small flocks of domesticated sheep and goats and began herding cattle and pigs. They became full-time farmers and herders during the eighth millennium BP. The inhabitants of Abu Flureyra, like many of their con temporaries in the Levant and Anatolia, buried some of their dead under the floors of their houses. After death, a corpse was deposited in a charnel house for the flesh to decay. Later, the bones were collected and givenfinalburial. Often, the skulls were removed and given special treatment. This elaborate set of burial rituals attests to a belief in the afterlife and a reverence for ancestors. This mode of delayed burial began in the late Epipaleolitiiic and continued until the later Neolithic when burial outside the village became more com mon. [See Tombs; Burial Sites; Burial Techniques.] The large quantity of human skeletal remains recovered from Abu Flureyra has provided rich evidence concerning the activities of the inhabitants. All the women in the village spent many hours of die day on their knees grinding grain, an activity that caused considerable pain and damaged their spines, knees, and toes. Some of the men suffered in the same way. Everyone engaged in heavy labor connected with agriculture and construction that enlarged their muscles. Some carried heavy loads on their heads, while others dam aged their teeth chewing rushes to make mats. Although ag riculture and herding provided them with a well-balanced diet, they paid a heavy physical price for adopting farming (Molleson, 1994). During the eighth millennium BP the climate became warmer and more arid, placing the dry-farming economy of the villages of the interior under considerable strain. The problem was exacerbated by the farmers themselves, who were damaging the soil and vegetation around their sites through tillage, overgrazing, and the cutting of trees and shrubs for fuel. Eventually, the inhabitants of sites like Abu Hureyra and Bouqras, another early village in the Euphrates Valley, left. [See Bouqras.] New settlements, such as Hama and Ras Shamra (Ugarit), were founded in the better-wa tered lands to the west and north that were to endure into much later times, and farming became more intensive. [See Hama; Ugarit.]
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SYRIA: Syria in the Bronze Age
This shift in population coincided widi die development of the new craft of potting. The new technology provided containers for carrying water, storing foodstuffs, and cook ing. It brought about a revolution in cuisine because it en abled people to cook a much wider range of dishes than before. Pastoralism developed as a distinct way of life during these final centuries of the Neolithic. Henceforth, people could raise flocks of sheep and goats on the drier steppe lands that were otherwise unsuitable for more intensive farming. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] Emergence of Town Life. The transition to the Chal colithic (c. 7000 BP) was followed by an expansion of settle ment into the steppe to the limits of dry farming, a process encouraged by a slight amelioration in climate. Most people continued to live in villages and to practice mixed farming, but a hierarchy of sites began to emerge. Some settlements, such as Tell Halaf, Tell Brak, Hama, and Ras Shamra grew much larger and became production centers for the manu facture and distribution of pottery, as well as foci for long distance trade. Several of tiiese sites can be counted among the first towns. [See Halaf, Tell; Brak, Tell] The two main cultures of this era were the Halaf (c. 70006500/6000 BP) and the Ubaid (c. 6500-5500 BP). [See Ubaid.] Recent research has demonstrated that the Halaf had its roots in the later Neolithic of the Jezireh (Akkermans, 1990). Halaf sites sttetched across northern Syria and Mes opotamia from the Mediterranean Sea to the Zagros Moun tains. In Halaf times pottery was produced on a larger scale and on a more systematic basis than in the Neolithic. The vessels were made in a greater variety of shapes, and the fine wares were painted in delicate designs tiiat combined nat uralistic and geometric motifs. The more delicate vessels were among the finest prehistoric pottery produced any where and were widely traded. The Ubaid culture originated in southern Mesopotamia but expanded northward and westward until it extended throughout the old Halaf area. For the only time in late pre history, the lands from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf were united in one cultural province. The hallmark of the culture was its pottery: the wares became much more standardized, with less variation in decoration, as produc tion techniques improved. [See Ceramics, article on Meso potamian Ceramics of the Neolithic through Neo-Babylonian Periods.] During Ubaid times, life in the Syrian countryside continued little changed from the Neolithic, de spite the quickening of long-distance contacts. Growing populations, technological advances, and the beginnings of urbanism, however, presaged die new world of the Bronze Age. BIBLIOGRAPHY Akkermans, P. M. M. G. Villages in the Steppe. Amsterdam, 1 9 9 0 . Ac count of the audior's recent excavations at Neolithic and Halaf sites
in the Balikh valley in North Syria. Provides important new infor mation on die later Neolithic and the transition to die Chalcolithic in that region. Cauvin, Jacques, and Paul Sanlaville, eds. Prehisloire du Levant: Chronologie et organisation de I'espace depuis les origines jusqu'au Vie millenaire. Paris, 1 9 8 1 . Series of essays, from a conference on the prehistory of the Levant, written in English and French. The best source of information for the Paleolithic in Syria. Clark, J. D. "The Middle Acheulian Occupation Site at Latamnc, Northern Syria (First Paper)." Qualernaria 9 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 - 6 8 . Main account of the archaeological investigations at Latamne, widi an as sessment of the site's significance. Contenson, Henri de. "Early Agriculture in Western Asia." In The Hilly Flanks and Beyond: Essays on the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia, ed ited by T. Cuyler Young, Jr., et al., pp. 5 7 - 7 4 . Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 3 6 . Chicago, 1 9 8 3 . Summary account of the author's excavations at the Neolithic sites of Tell Aswad, Ghoraife, and Tell Ramad. Legge, A. J., and P. A. Rowley-Conwy. "Gazelle Killing in Stone Age Syria." Scientific American 2 5 7 . 2 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 8 8 - 9 5 . Description of the gazelle-based hunting economy of Abu Hureyra, the methods used to kill the animals, and the transformation of this way of life with the introduction of domesticated animals. Molleson, Theya I. "The Eloquent Bones of Abu Hureyra." Scientific American 2 7 1 . 2 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 7 0 - 7 5 . Vivid account of the daily activities of the people of Abu Hureyra reconstructed from imprints found on their skeletons. Moore, A. M. T. "The Development of Neolithic Societies in the Near East." Advances in World Archaeology 4 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 - 6 9 . General de scription, with reference to relevant theories, of the development of farming and village life throughout Southwest Asia; detailed refer ences to archaeological data. Moore, A. M. T. "The Impact of Accelerator Dating at the Early Vil lage of Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates." Radiocarbon 3 4 . 3 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 8 5 0 - 8 5 8 . Succinct discussion of the results of the excavation at Abu Hureyra; references to related studies. Thuesen, Ingolf. The Pre- and Protohistoric Periods. Hama: Fouilles et Recherches de la Fondation Carlsberg, 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 8 , vol. 1 . Copen hagen, 1 9 8 8 . Definitive account of the investigation of the prehistoric deposits conducted by a Danish team under Harald Ingholt's direc tion at Hama before World War II. A. M. T . MOORE
Syria in the Bronze Age There are only three known foci of literate civilization in the Bronze Age, all three of which are in the Fertile Crescent: the southeast (Sumer, Akkad, Elam); the north (Syria); and the southwest (Egypt). Nowhere else is there such sizable and consistent evidence of the use of writing as the basic pillar of social intercourse and of urban growth as early as the tiiird millennium. The study of Bronze Age Syria intro duces some marked peculiarities into this moment of his tory: while southern (Mesopotamian) models dominate in the early periods, new patterns soon emerge. The configu rations of Syrian topography, specifically of the stepped re gion, favored the development of both a new type of terri torial organism, the macroregional state, and an altogether different type of political construct that is not even territorial in nature, the ttibe. In the Late Bronze Age, Syria presented
SYRIA: Syria in the Bronze Age a systematic application of the formula of vassal states that served as the backbone for the provincial consolidation of the later Assyrian Empire; out of this, there developed what appears to be the first steppe kingdom. It is significant in that it begins the process of urbanization for the heart of the steppe, reclaiming for urban life one of the last frontiers still available. There are important correlations between these develop ments and tire nature of material culture, on the one hand, and die social and ethnic base of the people involved, on the other. At the dawn of the Bronze Age, the Sumerian pres ence is evidenced by a break in the local sequence of material culture: southern assemblages are present in northeastern Syria practically without adaptations. Soon, within the Early Bronze Age, however, two distinctive traditions begin to be identifiable. They have correlations with both artifactual and linguistic evidence: a Semitic urban area in the basins of the Euphrates and Orontes Rivers, and a Hurrian area on the Khabur plain. [See Sumerians.] A major shift occurs between the Middle and the Late Bronze Ages that, in terms of political development, appears to be of even greater significance than the shift to the Iron Age, some five hundred years later. Prior to about 1500 BCE, there is, among the various urban areas of Syria and the south, a substantial cultural integration, in spite of the dif ferences in material culture and ethnic affiliation. This is a very coherent international order within the outer bounda ries of what is properly called Syro-Mesopotamia, of which only the Syrian component will be discussed here. This world comes to an end in the Late Bronze Age. What emerges is the first sharp break between east and west, more or less along the line of the Middle Euphrates; correlative to it is the first sharp break between northern and soutiiern Mesopotamia (Mitanni first and then Assyria in the north and Babylonia in the south). While the epicenter of Mitanni is still in Syria, in the Khabur basin, the east-west split be comes stronger with the advent of Assyria and the shift of the epicenter to the area of the Tigris River. [See Mitanni; Assyrians.] Core Territorial States. The end of the prehistoric age witnessed a hiatus in the unfolding of an indigenous Syrian tradition of material culture. Following the earlier Halaf pe riod, which is strongly marked as North Syrian, especially in its distribution of ceramic types, there was a vacuum, possibly the result of volcanic eruptions of some magnitude of that seems to have left traces in both the geological and the archaeological record (Chaghar Bazar, Ziyada). [See Halaf, Tell] The Sumerians entered this vacuum and, to ward the beginning of the Bronze Age, settled in large urban enclaves. Their ethnic identification rests almost exclusively on elements of material culture that associate, with ex tremely close correlations, the Syrian sites with Uruk and other cities of the Mesopotamian south. [See Uruk-Warka.]
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The motivation for this expansion, and the administrative mechanisms that characterized it, are still under discussion (Algaze, 1993); however, what appears certain is that the first cities, such as Tell Brak and Habuba Kabira, owed their initial momentum to a southern impulse. [See Brak, Tell; Habuba Kabira.] Sumerian influence waned rapidly, and a vigorous indig enous tradition was resumed, as evidenced by EB material culture. The type of ceramic known as metallic ware is the most obvious indicator of such stylistic autonomy, but a va riety of other elements confirm the conclusion—whether it be the absence of plano-convex bricks or the development of an independent figurative style. This autonomy is asso ciated with two distinct ethnic groups. The first is Semitic and is closely linked to the Akkadian cities of the south. It is referred to in the literature as the Kish civilization (Gelb, 1981) because its earliest documents come from that city; however, its most distinguished (i.e., archaeologically pro ductive) representatives are Ebla and Mari. [See Kish; Ebla; Marl] The second urban tradition is characterized by a Hurrian ethnic component—although this is still at the level of a working hypothesis. It is predicated on a number of considerations: the importance of the landscape of the Kha bur plain in Hurrian mythology (known from later Hittite archives but reflecting an E B context), especially the urban center of Urkes, now identified with Tell Mozan; the pres ence, however limited for now, of Hurrian texts and onomastics from the latter part of the third millennium; and the distinctiveness of material culture traits in the great urban centers of the Khabur plain. [See Hurrians; Mozan, Tell.] Other major cities on the northern plains illustrate an ex ceptional urban growth toward die middle of the third mil lennium (Tell Chuera, Tell Brak, Tell Leilan), which may be followed by a temporary period of decline at the end of the same millennium. [See Chuera, Tell; Leilan, Tell.] What is known of the political configuration of the EB Syrian states is still very limited. The term core territorial state, suggests that these were city-states on their way to a limited territorial expansion. The critical issue is to know the extent to which cities that had been politically independent at an earlier stage of their development did, or did not, come under die political control of other dominant city-states. That any city-state would have included a hinterland seems obvious; however, in terms of political structure, the ques tion is whether this hinterland was in turn urban or purely rural, There are no answers yet to this question for the Early Bronze Age. There is another important dimension to the question of the hinterland. Besides the hinterland directly adjacent to the urban center, tiiere were remote hinterlands that retained a great degree of autonomy but were nevertheless within the purview of certain specific urban areas. Of particular sig nificance are the range of the Tur 'Abdin and, farther north,
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SYRIA: Syria in the Bronze Age
the Anatolian plateau (tire "Outer Fertile Crescent"). They did not develop urban centers proper in the Early Bronze Age but were in close commercial contact with the great urban centers in the presumed Hurrian area, for which they served as purveyors of raw materials, especially copper and perhaps tin. The second remote hinterland was the steppe, on either side of the Middle Euphrates. All indications are that it remained very sparsely populated throughout the Bronze Age, although it came to be exploited more and more effectively as a vast range land by the rural classes at home in the narrow river oasis. Alternative Political Structures. The nature of the steppe hinterland was such that the peasants of the Middle Euphrates developed a considerable degree of autonomy from the city (i.e., from Mari). Their pastureland in the steppe was too broadly scattered and generally too unim portant (except, precisely, as pasture land) to be closely con trolled by the urban power structures. Thus, they developed a degree of political leverage not enjoyed by their counter parts in the rest of the Near East. In this perspective, it is easier to understand two phenomena that mark a profound structural innovation in the general political development of the ancient Near East and that are specifically Syrian in or igin. The first is the tribe viewed as a political organism, evi dence of which is connected with the Amorites. [See Amorites.] In political terms, the tribe is the equivalent of the city in that it provides a mechanism for sociopolitical integration; however, it differs from it because in the tribe there is no presumption of territorial contiguity but, rather, a fictitious kinship system that replaces it. The result is analogous: large human groups develop a strong sense of solidarity and, in spite of the greater simplicity of the details of its institutional manifestations, there is an analogous articulation of power throughout the entire group. This also developed to a higher degree the phenomenon of ethnic self-identity, which be came increasingly apparent in the texts. The second major innovation in terms of political con structs is what may be called the macroregional state. Most of the EB and M B territorial states are generally lumped together into two vague categories, city-states and empires, depending on a generic perception of relative size. Terri torial accretion does not, however, in and of itself, say much about the internal structure of the political entity. Some clues emerge if the differential nature of the territories and of the populations is considered. In this sense, a macrore gional state subsumes geographically heterogeneous terri tories, so that regional identity has to be achieved through administrative means. The first clear instance of such a state is the one that includes the river oasis of tire Middle Eu phrates, the steppe on either bank of the river, and the plains of the Khabur triangle. The political center of this macroregion was traditionally in the Middle Euphrates, at Mari; a
reduced version continued after the fall of Mari, possibly centered at Terqa. [See Terqa.] The titulary of the king in cludes the term khana, which refers precisely to the broader geographical horizon. Of particular significance is the kingdom established in the same macroregion by Shamshi-Adad I, who was of Amorite origin and had come as an outsider to Assur, where he suc ceeded in ousting the local dynasty. [See Assur.] In his effort to reopen the western frontier, he eventually moved the cap ital of the state from Assur to Shubat-Enlil, one of the splen did recent discoveries of Syrian archaeology (modern Tell Leilan), and conquered Mari, where he installed his son Yasmakh-Addu as governor. He thus achieved control, to an even larger degree, of the macroregion that had been Mari's special purview. In the east, he left his other son, Ishme-Dagan, as governor, residing in Ekallatum, just south of Assur. There, the capital followed the state, rather than the other way around, as had been the case with the earlier city-states. The administrative triangle implemented by Shamshi-Adad I is revealing of the new administrative and political pattern identifiable as macroregional: the state is conceived as an entity in itself, not as an outgrowth of a citystate, which retains priority even when it is no longer in the center of action. The case of Ur, some two centuries earlier, may have served as a lesson: located in the extreme southern region of a unified Mesopotamian territory, but maintained as capital in spite of its locational disadvantage, Ur lost out to Ishbi-Erra when he took over the area of Nippur—at the same time the geographic, economic, and religious center of the state. [See Ur.] The triangle established by ShamshiAdad broke forcibly with tradition: the original city-state, Assur, was replaced by three centers placed strategically at the extreme north-center (Shubat-Enlil), the extreme southeast (Ekallatum), and the extreme southwest (Mari). It is a formula that reveals a high degree of political and administrative awareness, particularly because the first two of these cities were essentially new foundations—a formula that would have illustrious parallels in later times, all the way to the tetrarchy of the Roman Empire. In spite of all this, the state founded by Shamshi-Adad did not survive much beyond his death, and the centrality of the Khabur plains (Jezireh) was not to be found again until some three cen turies later by the kingdom of Mitanni. There is another mechanism of political expansion that is not specifically Syrian but finds its major implementation in Syria: the development of a relationship between suzerain and vassal states. In the political terminology of the times, vassal kings "follow" their respective suzerains—where fol lowing presumably implied payment of tribute, preferential trade agreements, and dependence in foreign policy; auton omy was probably guaranteed in most internal matters, as well as in the transmission of power from father to son. Aleppo was the most important suzerain state in the whole
SYRIA: Syria in the Bronze Age of Syro-Mesopotamia, which makes it especially regrettable that excavations in the levels dating to this period are wellnigh impossible. [See Aleppo.] Cosmopolitan Age. Toward the middle of the second millennium BCE, some radical transformations took place in the Near East that marked a sharp break between two eras. The cultural fracture witnessed in about 1500 BCE appears to have been of greater consequence than the one that took place some five hundred years later. The latter is normally considered the most significant because, with the introduc tion of iron, the "Bronze Age" came to an end; however, die impact on terminology was perhaps greater than on his tory. In about 1500 BCE, politically, the world of the Syro-Mesopotamian territorial states came to an end. In its stead, large macroregional states extended beyond the borders of Syro-Mesopotamia and developed further the premises laid by the earlier formula implemented at Mari and ShubatEnlil. In Mesopotamia there was, for the first time, the clear regional breakup into Babylonia (in the s o u t i i ) and Assyria (in die north). For the first time Egypt become directly in volved in a policy of territorial expansion and military (if not quite administrative) control in Southwest Asia. The Hittites brought Anatolia into close contact with Syria, where yet another kingdom completed the new configuration of tiiese new major world powers: it was the kingdom of Mitanni, which controlled the entire region from the Tigris to the Mediterranean. [See Hittites.] Unlike the Amorite states of Syro-Mesopotamia, these new macroregional states were all quite different from each other, beginning with their ethnic and linguistic back grounds. Mitanni is centered at the Upper Khabur and is heavily imbued widi Human and Indo-European elements. The question as to the location of its capital has been re newed: it would seem to have been either Wassukanni, pre sumably to be found on the mound of Tell Fakhariyah or Taidu (presumably Tell Hamidiya). Recent excavations suggest that the entire citadel at Hamidiya may correspond to die royal palace, which would then be of extraordinary proportions for that place and time. The ldngs of Mitanni were on a par with the great powers: their letters have been found in the archives of the Egyptian pharaohs, with whom they intermarried. Like the other documents exchanged among the new regional kingdoms, these letters were written for the most part in Akkadian which, except for Assyria and Babylonia, was not the language of the parties involved. These ldngdoms were so foreign to each other they needed a common lingua franca of diplomacy—die first such case in history. [See Akkadian.] Mitanni was the last world power of the Bronze Age to be centered in Syria. Following its demise in the fifteenth cen tury BCE, Syria was broken up into a number of vassal states. Those states recognized their allegiance to the Hittites, fol
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lowing the pattern of suzerain/vassal relationships first de fined in the Middle Bronze Age. The internal, institutional history of these ldngdoms is of great interest and well doc umented—particularly Alalakh and Ugarit. [See Alalakh; Ugarit.] They were essentially city-states and expanded ter ritorial states, of the type already known from earlier periods throughout Syro-Mesopotamia. The best documentation of a type of imperial control, known also from other areas and periods, but not otherwise well documented, regards die for eign relations these states had with the great external powers, Egypt and Hatti. Both Egyptians and Hittites ruled as su zerains vis-a-vis vassals. Because political stability was in the interest of the overlords, as long as the vassals remained loyal, the local ldngs came in fact to rely on their suzerains as guarantors of their own position. Two details distinguish tlie Egyptian from the Hittite system. The pharaohs main tained garrison cities manned by Egyptians (e.g., BetliShean in Canaan): the high officials in these towns were not really regional governors, but rather contact points in a com munication network linking the Syrian ldngs with the pharaoh. The Hittites, on the other hand, placed a Hittite prince as ruler of a Syrian city (especially Carchemish) almost in the function of a viceroy over Syria. [See Beth-Shean; Car chemish.] One of the L B kingdoms in Syria deserves special men tion: Amurru. It is known primarily from complaints lodged against its kings by the rulers of neighboring states and from texts from Ugarit that vividly describe events affecting both kingdoms. There are reasons to suggest, however, that the kingdom of Amurru developed structural particularities tiiat set it apart from die other Syrian vassal states. Its political epicenter was in the inland parts of die steppe, and the cities it occupied, which became the hub of new political activity (such as Sumura, most probably Tell al-Kazel), do not ap pear properly as capitals: in this respect, Amurru may be regarded as the first state formation properly based in die steppe, possibly without a fully established urban center, un less Palmyra was already beginning to develop then. [See Kazel, Tell al-; Palmyra.] Because it reached from the steppe across the coastal ranges all the way to the Mediter ranean, it appears as a macroregional state in its own right. It presumably served as a buffer state for the Hittite suzerain kingdom at die border against Egypt, in much die same way that Carchemish functioned against Assyria to the East. The political system of the "cosmopolitan age" was a total system, in the sense that it did not allow any individual or groups to operate apart from the system. Within the state, everyone had to pay allegiance to the political system, as a subject of the ruler. Refusal to do so could only result in armed conflict or escape. Both patterns are attested. Armed conflict is normally at the level of die ruling class, especially when one dynasty is replaced by another: however, in such cases there is simply a violent transmission of power within
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the same type of political system, not an institutional revo lution aimed against the regime. Escape of single individu als, or small groups, from one state to another is instead attested more frequently throughout the second millennium BCE. The common term used to refer to them is hapiru: fu gitives, stateless individuals, and social outcasts uprooted from their original homeland and unable to find full legal status in the country to which they have fled. As such they are first attested in M B Syro-Mesopotamia, and then es pecially in L B Syria, where they became a constant object of international legislation in the numerous treaties of the period. They disappeared in the first millennium BCE, when the empire precluded any effective possibility of escaping from one state to another, as in the earlier periods. Their appearance in the second millennium BCE, then, underscores a specific political dimension of the state organization as it was becoming consolidated: the political will to impose the same political status on all members of the state allowed no exceptions. The self-identity of the state was so well defined and exclusive that escape into exile became a pattern of the evolving world of urban civilization. Technology for a New Age. In about 1500 BCE, a whole series of new technological advances took place specifically identified with Syria that have not yet been properly assessed for what they mean when taken together. The best known is the domestication of the horse: what is remarkable is that this process entailed not just the taming of the animal (as it had been with earlier species), but its specific training to respond to specific commands and to perform specific tasks in close collaboration with its human rider or driver, as in the case of the chariot. The use of such technology was re served for the military. [See Chariots.] What is even more remarkable is that the whole process was written down in a "how-to" manual, one of the first such manuals. Although its extant version comes from Hittite archives outside of Syria, both its cultural and linguistic origins were in the king dom of Mitanni in northeast Syria. The second great technological innovation, the manufac ture of a new chemical substance—glass—reflects greater human control over the forces of nature. [See Glass.] It ap peared at about the same time as the domestication of tire horse, in about the same area. A technical instructional man ual describes the process of manufacturing; here, too, the actual manual is found in later versions from outside the area (southern Mesopotamia in this case). The innovations from the western littoral are well docu mented from direct Syrian evidence. The first is a system of musical notation, a musical score. The earliest-known ex ample comes from Ugarit. It was originally thought to be a mathematical text, but the numbers turned out to be refer ences to the strings of a musical instrument—hence, "notes"—written in conjunction with a lyric, presumably re ligious in content. The people of Ugarit may have written this down because tire song originated in a linguistic context
(Human) no longer well understood. [See Hurrian.] They may have wanted to retain the text and music in their pure form, for which the oral tradition was deemed insufficient. Modern decoding of the score is still tentative, but several interpretations (and corresponding musical renderings) of the text have been produced by scholars (see, for example, Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit, Malibu, 1985). The last innovation is the best known. What the microchip did for the computer industry, the alphabet did for writing— and its introduction and first general use is attested from the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit. So much so, in fact, that the first full-fledged alphabetic script ever is called Ugaritic. [See Ugaritic] As with the preceding "inventions" of this period, a technical document is extant: a tablet that records, with the utter majesty of simplicity, nothing but the alphabet it self. Infrastructure of Empire: The Arameans. The polit ical structures that followed the great cosmopolitan age of the Late Bronze period were on a much larger scale than anything known. They were ttuly "empires," in the sense of a universal state that imposed uniform administrative structures over people of different backgrounds and cul tures. In its early form, the empire was dominated by the Assyrians, at home in northeastern Mesopotamia and thus outside Syria. What Syria contributed to the empire was its ethnic infrastructure, and this began to take shape in the Late Bronze with the origins of the Arameans. They were at home in the Syrian steppe, which had already served as the pastureland of the Amorites in the early periods: there and in the adjacent river valleys they gave rise to a series of territorial states with their own characteristic art. As their states came to be subsumed more and more under the everencroaching political arm of Assyria, the Arameans spread as a people beyond their original enclave. Their language came to be used beyond the limits of Syria. They eventually achieved what the Amorites had not succeeded in doing in the earlier periods: Aramaic came to be the common lan guage of the empire, a lingua franca that was no longer that of the ruling chancery at the top, but that of an originally rural people at the base. [See Aramaic Language and Lit erature; Arameans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahlstrom, Gosta W. The History ofAncient. Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander's Conquest. Sheffield, 1 9 9 3 . The most recent over all presentation of Palestine in biblical times; covers the Bronze Age in considerable detail. Algaze, Guillermo. The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Early Me sopotamian Civilization. Chicago, 1 9 9 3 . Well-documented, interpre tive study of the transition to the Bronze Age. Buccellati, Giorgio. Cities and Nations of Ancient Syria. Studi Semitici, 2 6 . Rome, 1 9 6 7 . Analysis of LB political institutions. Buccellati, Giorgio. "From Khana to Laqe: The End of Syro-Meso potamia." In De la Babylonie a la Syrie, en passant par Mari: Melanges
SYRIA: Syria in the Iron Age qfferts a Monsieur J.-1Z. Kupper a I'occasion de son yoe anniversaire, edited by Onhan Tunca, pp. 2 2 9 - 2 5 3 . Liege, 1 9 9 0 . Development of MB-LB tribal institutions and instiaitional transformations. Gelb, Ignace J. "Ebla and the Kish Civilization." In La lingua di Ebla, edited by Luigi Cagni, pp. 9 - 7 3 . Istituto Universitario Orientale Seminario di Studi Asiatici, Series Minor, 1 4 . Naples, 1 9 8 1 . Classic formulation of historical and linguistic components. Klengel, Horst. Gesehiehte Syriens im 2. Jahrlausend v.u.Z. 3 vols. Berlin,
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Icings used this language with those of their subjects for whom it was a native tongue. It seems that the immigrants from Asia Minor were integrated with the Arameans and even with the area's older population. Arameans. The original homeland of the Arameans and their first appearance in Mesopotamian documents are mat ters of dispute. Some scholars have suggested that the Syrian 1965-1970. desert was their homeland. The first Arameans whose ex Liverani, Mario. Anlico Orienle: Sioria, societa, econoinia. Rome, 1 9 8 8 . istence is documented lived on the fringes of the desert in The best overall history of the ancient Near East, from interpretive the area of the Upper and Middle Euphrates River and in and documentary perspectives. Weiss, Harvey, ed. Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient the area between Jebel Bishri and the oasis of Palmyra. [See Syria; An Exhibition from the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Palmyra.] Museums of the Syrian Arab Republic, Washington, D.C., 1 9 8 5 . The name Aram or the adjective Aramean occurred in the Weiss, Harvey, ed. The Origins of Cities in Dry-Farming Syria and Mes late third and in the first half of the second millennia BCE. opotamia in the Third Millennium B.C. Guilford, Conn., 1 9 8 6 . However, it is uncertain whether the name Aram is con GIORGIO BUCCELLATI nected to the later tribes by that name. The earliest possible reference to the Arameans is found in the topographic lists Syria in the Iron Age of Amenophis III ( 1 4 1 3 - 1 3 7 7 BCE). Among the places listed on statue D, which was found in this pharaoh's funerary The beginning of the Iron Age in Syria is marked by a wide temple, is tire name pirmw, meaning "the people Aram," or movement of peoples, sometimes barbarians, coming from the Arameans. The first incontestable mention of the Ara the sea and inland, as well as by the establishment of nu means comes from the reign of the Assyrian long Tiglathmerous kingdoms. The invaders from the sea swarmed into Pileser I ( 1 1 1 7 - 1 0 7 8 BCE). In the first Assyrian annal they Asia Minor. are called Ahlamu-Aram. A little later the name Ahlamu dis Sea Peoples. Invaders from the sea, known as the Sea appeared. It must be noted that the name Aram in the He Peoples, attacked Egypt by land and sea and were thrown brew Bible was once written with the word paddan, as Padback by Pharaoh Rameses III. He did, however, allow them dan Aram. It is possible that they used the double name to to settle on the Palestinian and Syrian coast. Contemporary distinguish one group from the other. with the advance of the Sea Peoples in Egypt, a number of It seems that the Aramean tribes were the enemy, and a noted Syrian Cities, such as Carchemish, Alalakh, Ugarit, dangerous one, of Assyria from the time of Tiglath-Pileser and Summurru, were overrun and destroyed. [See Carche I. This king said "Twenty-eight times I have crossed die mish; Alalakh; Ugarit.] Euphrates after the Aramean Ahlamu, twice in one year." Egyptian records make it clear that the Sea Peoples were They were spread into the settled areas of Syria and north a composite group drawn from a number of tribes. Rameses ern Mesopotamia during the eleventh century BCE and es III mentions six tribes, the Peleset (Philistines), Sherden, tablished many kingdoms; the Syrian coast, however, re Dannu, Shekelsh, Tjeker, and Weshesh, while other Egyp mained free of Aramean migrations. There existed a tian lists add some eight more names. [See Philistines, article number of small Canaanite states: Siyanu/Ushnato, Arwad, on Early Philistines.] The Philistines occupied the land Sumur, Gubla/Byblos, Sidon, and Tyros ('Iraq el-Amir). named after them, while tire Danunians occupied the land [See Arwad; Byblos;. Sidon; 'Iraq el-Amir.] T o the east there around Adana in Cilicia. [See Cilicia.] In Syria there is little were numerous Aramean states, in the Euphrates and Kha in the archaeological record to attest to the Sea Peoples. bur valleys and to the north of the sources of the Balikh and There is, however, one example of the material culture that Khabur Rivers: Aram Zobah (later Aram Damascus), Hamay reasonably be associated with the newcomers. This is math, Bit-Agusi, Bit-Adini, Sam'al, Bit-Bahiani, Nisibis, Gia type of pottery decorated witir elaborate patterns, char dara, Hozirani, Bit-Zamani, Laqe, Hindanu, Bit-Halupe, acteristic of which are metopes enclosing stylized birds. and Suhi. For two hundred years the Assyrian kings fought the Aramean states, defeated them, deported their kings and The invasion of the Sea Peoples into Asia Minor induced leaders to Assyria, and captured their capital cities and its populations to go in search of new lands. They migrated transformed them into Assyrian provinces. [See Assyrians.] to North. Syria, where they established the so-called NeoThe annals of the Assyrian kings report the Assyrian military Hittite kingdoms. Other groups established themselves with campaigns in Syria. These Assyrian documents are the prin the Arameans in Hadatu (Arslan Tash), Til Barsip (Tell cipal sources for writing Aramean history because Aramaic Ahmar), Aleppo, and Hama. [See Arameans; Til Barsip; inscriptions are poorly represented. This discussion of the Aleppo; Hama.] In all these places archaeologists have dis history of the main and best-known Aramean kingdoms is covered a number of inscriptions written in Luwian/hieroguided by the Assyrian annals. glyph Hittite. [See Hittite.] It is assumed that the Aramean
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Bit-Bahiani. Located in the Khabur triangle, BitBahiani, with its capital at Guzana, modern Tell Halaf, is first mentioned by Adad-Nirari (912-891). [SeeHalaf, Tell] In 894 BCE he had received tribute from Prince Abisalamu. During the reign of the Ashurnasirpal II and his son Shalmaneser III (858-824), Guzana was, to all appearances, a vassal-state of Assyria. After the revolution against Shalmaneser in Assyria in 827, and until 808, Guzana was an independent state. In 808 Adad-Nirari occupied the city and placed Mannu-ld-Ashur as a governor of Guzana. During the reign of Ashur-Dan III (772-754), in 759, a second re bellion was organized against Assyrian domination in Gu zana that he crushed in 758. After die decline of the Assyrian Empire, Guzana became a part of the Neo-Babylonian Em pire. Abisalamu is the only name mentioned in the Assyrian documents. From the Guzana inscriptions the following names are known: Kapara son of Hidiani, Zident, and Shamash-Nuri and his son Hdys'y. The kingdom of Guzana was called Bit-Bahiani after the sheikhs of the Bahiani tribe. The sequence of these kings is not clear, but it is assumed to be Bahiani, Hidiani, Kapara, Abisalamu, Shamashnuri, Hdys'y, and Zidnet. Anodrer ldngdom existed to the east of Bit-Bahiani, south of the Tur 'Abdin, in the vicinity of Nasibina (Nisibis). Hadad-Nirari II ordered a series of campaigns against rulers in this region, called Temanites, and mentioned that Gidara, one of its cities, had been held by the Arameans since the reign of Tiglath-Pileser II (699-935). Bit-Halupe is situated on the lower Khabur, with Sum, modern Suwar, as a prin ciple center. It is first mentioned by Adad-Nirari II. Ashur nasirpal II suppressed its rebellious ruler Ahi-Yababa and placed an Aramean governor loyal to the Assyrians on its throne. Laqe was located on the Middle Euphrates and Hindanu was downstream from it. According to Ashurnasirpal II, Aramean military power was operative at Bit-Zamani, in the Tur 'Abdin region, by at least the late eleventh century BCE. During die reign of Tukulti-Ninurta II (890-884 BCE), Amme-Ba'ala was king of Bit-Zamani. Bit-Adini. Originally under the control of rulers with Neo-Hittite names, Bit-Adini was taken over by Aramean rulers. In fact, it was the most powerful kingdom in western Upper Mesopotamia and in northern Syria. With its center, Til Barsip, it controlled most of the Euphrates in Syria be tween Carchemish and Deir ez-Zor. From it, the state watched over the roads from Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Mediterranean Sea across North Syria. Bit-Adini and Assyria had been in conflict with each other as early as the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (884-858 BCE). His son Shalmaneser III (858-824) destroyed the city, captured its king, Ahuni, and called it Kar-Shulmanu-Asherd. Afterward, the city played an important role in the provincial administra tion of the Assyrian Empire. From a strategic point of view, Bit-Adini was the key to northern Syria; therefore, Shal-
maneser III occupied its territory early in his reign (856 BCE) from the Assyrian sources and a local hieroglyphic inscrip tion, two kings of Bit-Adini, Adini and Ahuri, are known. Bit-Agusi. Scholars have suggested that the land of BitAgusi was known as the land of Yahan, which was under the control of Neo-Hittite rulers until the ninth century BCE. At that time the Aramean Agusi established a new ldngdom, whose capital was Arpad instead of Arne. Arpad is located at Tell Rifa'at, about 35 Ion (22 mi.) northwest of Aleppo. [See Rifa'at, Tell.] It is first mentioned by Ashurnasirpal II (884-858), who received tribute from its king in 870 BCE. This kingdom was not involved in the conflict between Shalmaneser III and die coalition of central and southern Syria states under the leadership of Hadad-idri (Hadadezer), ldng of Damascus. [See Damascus.] The battle between the two forces took place at Qarqar, which indicates that Bit-Agusi was under Assyrian control. After the murder of Shalmaneser III in 824 BCE, rebellions similar to those at Bit-Bahiani began to occur in this state but were suppressed by Adad-Nirari III ( 8 1 1 - 7 8 1 ) . The ldng of Bit-Agusi was AttarSamak (Atar-sumki). According to the Sefire inscription, Mati-ilu, son of Attar-Samak, had a treaty with an unknown King Bar-Ga yah of an unknown land, Ktk. [See Sefire Ar amaic Inscriptions.] c
The son of Attar-Samak, on the other hand, had a treaty with the Assyrian ldng Ashurnirari V (754-745). Mati-ilu broke this treaty and organized many North Syrian states against Assyria, which angered Tiglath-Pileser HI (745727), who in 743 marched to Arpad and besieged that wellfortified city for three years. Finally, in 74.0, the city fell and Tiglath-Pileser placed his own officials in the town. From Assyrian sources and die Sefire inscription, the names of four kings are known: Gusi, Aram, Attar-Samak, and Matiilu. They reigned from about 870 to 740 BCE. Sam'al. Anotiier supposed Neo-Hittite state that aramized sometime between the tenth and eighth centuries BCE, the city of Sam'al, was tire capital of the ldngdom of the same name. Sam'al, or Ya'udi (modern Zincirli) whose name means "north," is situated on die east slope of the Amanus Mountains. It was a small but significant state in northern Bilad esh-Sham. Many Aramaic inscriptions were found there that comprise about one-half of all known Old Ara maic inscriptions. In comparison with other Aramean states, this ldngdom is the least mentioned in Assyrian documents. Gabbar founded this kingdom at the beginning of the ninth century BCE. The following kings left inscriptions after Gabbar: Bmh, Hayanu, Shal, Kilamuwa, Qrl, Panammuwa I, Brsr, Panammuwa II, and Bar-Rakib. After the death of Bar-Rakib, Shalmaneser V (727-722) transformed Sam'al into an Assyrian province. Hama. The powerful kingdom of Hama in Middle Syria had good relations with the Aramean tribe of Bit-Halupe. A king of Hama reigned in tiiis land. In contrast to Bit-Halupe, Hama was involved in a conflict with Aram Zobah. How-
SYRIA: Syria in the Iron Age ever, following the reign of Jehoram/Hadoram and Parates, Irhuleni stood by Hadad-idri (Hadad Erer) of Damascus against the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in 853 BCE, in the battie of Qarqar, the royal city of Irhuleni. Following the battle of Qarqar, Shalmaneser attacked most of Hama's land, destroying a number of important towns. The ruler over Hamath, after Uratamis, was Zakkur the king of Hama and L'ash, who may have been a usurper. He created a large, new power in Syria important enough to threaten the surrounding major states, especially Damascus and Bit-Agusi. According to the Zakkur stela, Zakkur was attacked by the lung of Damascus, Bar-Hadad, the king of Bit Agusi, Que, Unqi, Gurgum, Sam'ai, and Milid. [See Zakkur Inscription.] All these kings besieged Zakkur in the city of Hzrak, but without success. The Assyrian annals speak of military campaigns against Hatarikka in 772, 765, and 755 BCE. During the time of Tiglath-Pileser III (745727), in 738, Eni-ilu the Icing of Hama paid tribute to this king. Hama was definitively transformed into an Assyrian province in 720 by Sargon II, who crushed a rebellion led by Youbi'di, the usurper of the throne of Hama. The name of its kings are Aramaic, not Semitic—Neo-Hittite kings may have ruled the kingdom. Aramean states in southern Syria. The Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian annals are the sources for Aramean history in southern Syria, in a number of small states south and southwest of Damascus: Maacah/Bit Maacah, south of Mt. Flermon and the east of the Jordan River Geshur, between the Yarmuk River in the south and Maa cah, northeast of Lake Tiberias (Sea of Galilee) Zobah, the most significant state in southern Syria, placed in the northern Biqa' with its domain extending east of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains to the north of Damas cus, into the plain of Horns and eastward into the desert Damascus, which had become an Aramean state by the eleventh century BCE and had close relations with Zobah Beth Rehob, whose location is a point of controversy: some scholars place it in the southern Biqa' north of Dan. Others believe that Rehob was located between the Yarmuk River in the north and Zarqa in the south and that its center was near the modern town Irbid or Deir 'Alia Tob, located east of Bit-Rehob
Political Situation. Aram Zobah was undoubtedly the most powerful state in southern Syria at the end of tire sec ond millennium BCE and during the first century of the first millennium BCE. Its king, Hadadezer, had transformed Zo bah into a substantial power in the Near East, with numer ous vassal states as far north as the Euphrates. According to the Hebrew Bible (2 Sm. 10), Hadadezer fought with Am nion against David's army. In fact there were many battles between David and Hadadezer (2 Sm. io). However, during
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Solomon's reign there was a period of peace. According to / Kings 11:23-24, Rezon, the son of Elyada, and a servant of Hadadezer, seized Damascus. Under the powerful Hadadezer (c. 865-842 BCE), Da mascus became the leading state in a broad coalition of west ern and southern Syrian states that opposed Assyrian mili tary expansion (853-845 BCE). Shalmaneser met the military forces of the coalition at Qarqar, with no indication who was tire winner. According to 2 Kings 8:7-15, Hazael, an official in the court of Ben-Hadad (Hadadezer), murdered the king and seized the throne. Hazael had to fight Assyria, Jehoram, Jehu, and Joahaz of Israel. When he died, he left Damascus to his son Bar-Hadad III; it was the capital of a state encom passing a sizable area, including most of southern Syria. The biblical information about Bar-Hadad III is that he had to light against Israel many times during the reign of Joash. According to the Zakkur stela, Bar Hadad brought a coalition of sixteen or seventeen kings against Zakkur, king of Hama and L'ash. In the eighth century BCE, Hadianu and Radyan reigned in Damascus. During the latter's reign, in 732 BCE, Tiglath-Pileser brought Damascus to its knees and incorporated it into the Assyrian provincial system, thus concluding the Aramean problem. Aram Damascus, which had symbolized the anti-Assyrian movement, disappeared from the field. Israel and Judah, formerly in constant conflict with Aram, proposed an alliance against Assyria with the Arab tribes to the south of Damascus. Israel and Judah faced the Assyrian army but were conquered by Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II, bringing the land under direct Assyrian domination. Tiglath-Pileser III divided Syria and Palestine into numerous administrative districts ruled by Assyrian governors, each protected by a garrison. The Assyrian kings from Sargon II (722-705 BCE) to Ashurbanipal II (669-629 BCE) retained this administrative system. Many groups of peoples were deported to Assyria.
Material Culture. The Arameans appear on the scene as nomadic tribes pressing into Syria. They established nu merous states, founding their capitals outside the wellknown centers of tire older kingdoms. Most of them, such as Gozan, Til-Barsip, Arpad, Sam'al/Zincirli and Hama have been excavated. Monumental Architecture. The distinguishing archi tectural feature of the period is the bit-hilani, which con sisted of a portico with one-three columns approached by a flight of steps. The portico is flanked by towers (with a guardroom on one side and staircase on the other); behind it is a wide but shallow hall. Sometimes the throne room has rooms on one or two of its sides. Buildings of this type ap pear at Tell Halaf, Sam'al, and Tell Ta'yinat. Temples have been excavated only rarely for this period. The best preserved is the temple at 'Am Dara', which is similar to a bit-hilani, except for its corridor. [See 'Ain Dara'.] The most complete example of an Aramean town is
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Sam'al/Zincirli. It is roughly circular and surrounded by a double wall with towers. It was entered through three gates, of which the soutiiern, the most strongly fortified, led to the citadel. All of the Aramean towns excavated were sur rounded by a wall. Most consisted of a citadel and a lower city (Tell Halaf, 'Ain Dara'). Sculpture. A large number of sculptures enhanced the architecture in the Iron Age. Orthostats were used as a dado to adorn die lower part of a wall face, while lions and sphinxes were used to guard the gates and entrances to tem ples and palaces (Tell Halaf, 'Ain Dara', Sam'al/Zincirli). Sculptures in the round were not so numerous as bas-reliefs. Most of the repertoire of the sculptures is derived from Mes opotamia or Syrian originals. Cult and Social Organization. The Arameans wor shipped the god Hadad. At Sam'al they worshiped Ba'al Shamin and at Hama Iluwer. A number of statues (Tell Halaf) and reliefs with a banquet scene (Sam'al) found in tombs were associated with the cult of the dead. Only the Kilamuwa inscription reveals anything about so cial classes and conditions in the kingdom of Sam'al. In it there are muskabim and baririm, meaning "opprobrium" and "oppressor," respectively. There was friction between these two classes in Sam'al, created by their economic dif ferences.
turn of the Jews to Jerusalem, where, as sympathizers of Per sian rule, their presence in Palestine was likely intended to balance power in a district that was mostly pro-Egyptian. The Babylonian texts of Nerab suggest that deported Syri ans also were sent back to the Aleppo region then, or soon after, for a similar purpose. [See Nerab Inscriptions.] Cyrus IPs son, Cambyses II (529-522 BCE), occupied Egypt with the help of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon. [SeeEshmunazar Inscription.] Cambyses probably died in Damas cus (Josephus, Antiq. 1 1 . 2 ) , then the most important city in Syria (Strabo 16.2.20) and tire center of the Persian forces. Darius III stored his treasures and furniture there before his battle with Alexander (Arrianus 2.6.3). [See Damascus.] Darius I (521-486 BCE) divided the extensive Persian Em pire into satrapies (the Greek form of tire Persian khshathrapan—"king'' in ancient Persian). At his death there were twenty satrapies. Syria constituted one satrapy with Baby lonia. Later, Syria alone became the fifth satrapy under the name Ebimari in Babylonian, or 'Abr Nahra in Aramaic, which means "beyond the river [Euphrates]." The province extended from the Amanus to Sinai and included Cyprus. The administrative divisions of the Syrian province were likely the same as during Neo-Babylonian rule (e.g., Da mascus, Hama, Hauran) and the capital was probably Da mascus or Sidon. Arwad served as a royal residence as well. [See Hama; Sidon; Arwad.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Syria's geographic location, its forests, and its navy were of great importance for the Persians' Mediterranean proj ects, even though its annual tribute was only 350 talents, a relatively moderate sum compared with Egypt's tribute of 700 talents. Under Persian rule, local Syrian dynasties continued to govern in different coastal cities (mainly Arwad, Byblos, Si don, Tyre), treated as allies, not vassals. [See Byblos; Tyre.] These cities continued to practice their own religions, car rying out their own commercial activities, and establish col onies along the Mediterranean coast. These small Canaanite kingdoms (universally known as Phoenician) refused to help Cambyses, who, while in Egypt, planned to attack Carthage, their ancient colony. [See Phoenicians.] However, they sided with tire Persians against the Greeks in the Median wars (490-449 BCE), which were, from the Syrian point of view, a precious occasion for getting rid of the Greek presence in the Mediterranean. Phoenician possessions had extended to the Palestinan coast since the beginning of the fifth century BCE. In the fourth century BCE, Arwad, Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre constituted a federation, with Tripolis as the center of the federation.
Albright, William Foxwell. "Syria, the Philistines, and Phoenicia." In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 2 . 2 , edited by I. E. S. Edwards et al., pp. 5 0 7 - 5 3 6 . Cambridge, 1 9 7 5 . Donner, Herbert, and Wolfgang RSllig. Kanaandische und aramaische Inschriften. 3 vols. 3d ed. Wiesbaden, 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 7 1 . Dupont-Sommer, Andre. Les Aramcens. Paris, 1 9 4 9 . Pitard, Wayne T. Ancient Damascus. Winona Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 7 . Sader, Helene. Les etats arameens de Syrie depuis lew fondation jusqu'a lew transformation en provinces assyriennes. Beirut, 1 9 8 7 . A L I ABOU ASSAF
Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods Syria's fall to the Persians ended two thousand years of Se mitic dynasties that are relatively well documented. The his tory of Syria during the Persian Achaemenid Empire is, however, relatively poorly documented. The lack of epi graphic documentation is the result, probably, of the fact that Persian and local administrations wrote, in Aramaic, mostly on perishable materials. In addition, the refounding of Syrian urban centers in the Greco-Roman periods caused additional destruction. It is only recently that archaeological research has been able to contribute to a better understand ing of Syria under the Persians. Persian Period (538-331 B C E ) . In 538 BCE, Cyrus II be came master of Babylon and Syria. The annexation of SyriaPalestine was peaceful, except for Gaza, which submitted only through force (Polybius 16.40). Cyrus allowed the re
When Xerxes I (486-465 BCE) planned to attack Greece, the Phoenicians built a bridge for him on the Bosporos that enabled the Persian armies to reach the interior. Arwad, then a maritime power, put its fleet at his disposal. He was thus the victor at Thermopilae, but he lost his fleet at Salamis (480 BCE) and withdrew. Artaxerxes I (465-424 BCE) also
SYRIA: Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods failed in Greece and Egypt, but permitted the return of a second wave of Jews to Jerusalem for the same reason Cyrus had (see above). In the time of Xerxes II (404-359 BCE), his brother, Cyrus the Younger, satrap of Asia Minor, at tempted a revolt. Cyrus mobilized an army and ten thou sand Greek mercenaries to attack his brother. The merce naries crossed nortiiern Syria and the Euphrates River, but after Cyrus's death in battle returned to Greece under the command of Xenophon, whose travelogue Anabasis docu ments the history and the historical topography of northern Syria during this period. During the reign of Xerxes II, the Egyptian pharaoh Tachos occupied Syria (361-360 BCE), aided by the Spartan Icing Aegesilaus; however, he evacuated the country when a revolution began in Egypt. Artaxerxes III (358-338 BCE) repressed the revolutions in Sidon, the most powerful Phoenician maritime city in the Persian period. Prom die beginning of the fourth century BCE, the iconography of Sidon's coinage showed its redoubt able towering rampart and its navy. Sidon allied with Egypt and with eleven Phoenician cities and, encouraged by the agitation in the empire, moved against the Persian Icing but was defeated. Diodorus of Sicily reports that Sidon was de stroyed and burned with its inhabitants. Egypt also was re stored to Persian rule. Artaxerxes III and his son were poi soned, and one of their relatives, Darius III Codomannus, took the throne from 338 to 331 BCE. He would have been able to restore Persian rule if he had not been defeated by Alexander at Issus, on Syrian territory, in 333 BCE. The satrap of Syria resided at Damascus, Sidon, or Tripolis in the fourth century BCE. Gubaru, a companion of Cy rus II, was the first Persian satrap of Syria and Babylonia, before their separation. The last satrap was Mazdai, satrap of Cilicia, to which Syria was added after the revolution of 345 BCE. [See Cilicia.] In Arwad. Tripolis, and Akko the for tifications were defended by Persian officers. [See Akko.] Persian tolerance was a necessity because their numerical presence in the province of Syria was very weak. Tolerance was a matter of strategic and commercial interest, as well: the Persian rulers built imperial roads connecting the empire across the Euphrates with the Syrian coastal cities and for tified the coastline. The Persians also created a unique and rapid postal system and an emergency force of about three hundred Phoenician military boats. In the Persian period, Syrians spoke mostly Aramaic, but Canaanite was used in the coastal cities. Aramaic was also dominant in southern Syria. Hebrew, a Canaanite dialect, was limited to religious use after the fourth century BCE. The northern Arabic dialect was the language of desertic Syria but was not yet written. The Persian administration used Aramaic as an official language in the western provinces and Aramaic script was used to transcribe Persian. [See Aramaic Language and Literature.] Under Persian rule Syria's ancient local cultures were al lowed to develop; the administration oriented its efforts
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mostly toward the duration and the integrity of die regime— that is, the Achaemenid state was a power of conquest, ad ministration, and military organization, not very concerned with culture. Zoroastrian and Persian cults in general found few sympathizers among the Syrians, while Judaism and Christianity adopted some fundamental elements of Persian religious doctrine. Persian paganism was represented in die Syrian pantheon by only two deities, Anahita and Mithra. Persian onomastica and toponyms are rare. Religious ban quets (Gk., thiases) may be of Persian origin. Persian rule encouraged agriculture in Syria. Official and private projects existed in different places: a renowned or chard was located near Sidon and cedar was exploited near Tripolis. A vast agricultural domain was created in the northern Biqa' and one belonging to die wife of Darius II existed between the Qweiq River in Aleppo and the Eu phrates. A species of grape was introduced to Damascus and the pistachio but to Aleppo by the Persians. During die two centuries of Persian rule, Persian influ ence on material culture was slight. The predominant ar chitecture and arts were Syro-Babylonian in inner Syria. A Greco-Egyptian impact was, however, clear on die coast and in the south. Along the eastern Mediterranean coast, at nearly every site or level of the Persian period, Attic ceramics dominate, witii Canaannite jars and some East Greek and Cypriot pottery. The Cypriot style was also often adopted for sculpture. In modern Lebanon, vestiges of apadanas have been found at Sidon and at Umm el- Amad, but none have yet been excavated at sites in Syria—nor have fire towers or any glazed bricks. Almost the only examples of characteristic Persian architecture are a Persian column base at Tell Denit and at Tell al-Kazel, a merlon at Ras Ibn Hani, and a Persian capital found in ancient Damascus. [See Ras Ibn Hani.] At Tell Mardikh/Ebla (level VIA 1-3) a building in a settlement from the Persian period, which served a military and com mercial function, may resemble contemporary buildings in Palestine, but all lack a typical Persian architectural plan and decoration. The rocky temple at 'Amrit, south of Tortosa, is also dated to this period, but both as a whole and in detail it has a Canaanite (Phoenician), egyptianized style with little Persian influence. In the domain of art, the Achaemenid in fluence is limited mostly to terra-cotta figurines representing horsemen. Metal weapons and bowls have been found in cemeteries at Nerab, Sarepta, and Kamid el-Loz. Some scholars find a probable relationships between the tower tombs at Palmyra, Zenobia, and 'Amrit and the monumental altar with stairs in Syrian temples (e.g., Palmyra, Baalbek) and the fire towers of Persia, however. [See Sarepta; Kamid el-Loz; 'Amrit; Baalbek.] c
Hellenistic Period (331-64/63 B C E ) . During the Greek (Hellenistic) period, the ex-province of 'Abr Nahra was called Syria (probably from the Persian Athura = Assur). Geographically, it kept the same territories as before, but
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with many variations in the south. Some Syrian regions took such names as High Syria and Coele Syria, in addition to the ancient names, such as Phoenicia and Palestine. The victory at Issus opened Syria to Alexander the Macedonian, but Tyre's seven-month-long resistance and Gaza's two months were a sign of the attachment of the Phoenician cities to their autonomy. Some populations, like the Nabateans, were able to keep their independence under the new rule and extended their presence to Damascus itself in the first century BCE. [See Nabateans.] The Macedonian occupation was a true break in the history of Syria because, after it, for many cenmries, Syria remained under western control. Alexander's ideal, to combine Orient and Occident, failed in the years following his death in 323 BCE. His diadochs, or generals, not only divided his great empire into three ldng doms (Seleucid, Lagid, and Macedonian), but also gener ated forty years of bloody wars. During that struggle, for about twenty years, Syria was ruled by Antigonus Mono phthalmus (the one-eyed), one of Alexander's generals. Seleucus Nicator ("the victorious") took the land between the Euphrates and the Indus Rivers, along with Anatolia, and declared his Seleucid kingdom on 1 October 312 BCE. This date became the principal era used in Syria until the end of the Byzantine period. Seleucid rule in Syria began only after the battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE and after a short occupation by Ptolemy Soter, anodier of Alexander's generals. This was the cause of many subsequent clashes between Seleucids and Ptolemies. Seleucus I, from among all of Alexander's generals, was the most convinced of the idea of a universal state, but po litical realities and administrative needs soon found him or ganizing a new, immense empire of his own. He appointed his son to rule the eastern territories from Seleucia on the Tigris while he concentrated on Syria, to control the Lagids, and on political developments in Ionia and Greece. [See Se leucia on the Tigris; Seleucids.] Seleucus was killed in 280 BCE, while trying to take Macedonia, and his son abandoned the project. The wars of Alexander's generals ceased one year later, when Lysimachos, followed by Ptolemy, died. During the next two centuries, eighteen lungs ruled Syria. The period was marked by five wars with the Lagids, who never abandoned tiieir original intention to occupy Syria— and more particularly to dominate its strategic harbors, which allowed domination of the eastern Mediterranean. During these wars, southern Syria was often under Lagid occupation. Political difficulties began in Syria under Seleucus's suc cessor, Antiochus I (280-261 BCE). This cultivated and cityfounding monarch was fighting in Anatolia, while Ptolemy II occupied southern Syria and entered Damascus in 276 BCE. A victorious Seleucid counteroffensive obliged him to evacuate tire city, however. Antiochus II planned to liberate soutiiern Syria, which was the motive for the Second Syrian War. The war ended in 253 BCE with a peace treaty and a
dynastic alliance: Antiochus IPs marriage to Berenice, a daughter of Ptolemy II. Laodice, his first wife, was repudi ated, and her sons were deprived of their right to the throne. She organized a plot in which Antiochus was poisoned, along with Berenice and her son. Ptolemy III (Evergetes), Antiochus's brother, conquered Syria under the pretext of taking vengeance, thus starting the Third Syrian War. Dur ing these events he founded the city on the Syrian coast north of Latakia excavated at Ras Ibn Hani. Mercenaries from all over the eastern Mediterranean were stationed there, at tire ready for further expansion. Upon the accession of the Parthian dynasty (250 BCE), die Seleucids lost Persia and the remote eastern provinces. L o cal Arab principalities confirmed their independence: the Abgars of Edessa, the Samsigerams of Homs/Emesa and Rastan/Aretusa, the sheikhs of Palmyra, and the Itureans in the Biqa'. [See Horns; Palmyra.] Antiochus III (223-187 BCE), benefiting from the advice of the Carthaginian Hannibal and using elephants, achieved a brilliant victory against Ptolemy. However, he failed against the Romans in Greece at Thermopylae and at Mag nesia and was obliged to abandon all of his possessions north of the Taurus Mountains. [See Taurus Mountains.] This constituted a very bad blow to Syrian trade along the land routes to the west. At the same time, the sea route was being threatened as a result of the Punic wars and by pirates. An tiochus IV (175-164 BCE) attacked Egypt and laid siege to Alexandria, but the Romans intervened and forced die con queror to withdraw and to kill his elephants. A revolution took place in die capital, Antioch, under An tiochus IX (112-96 BCE), who resided in Damascus for some time. Soon after, in about 85 BCE, Damascus submitted to the Nabateans. Two years later, it was taken by Tigran, king of Armenia, who also occupied Syria. The situation wors ened with the struggle for the throne and the serious Roman threat. Roman Period (64/63 BCE-3 CE). Pompey, after exter minating the pirates in the Mediterranean, occupied Syria (64-63 BCE). Tigran allied with him against the Parthians, their common enemy, and Syria was declared a Roman province. [See Parthians.] In the south, the wars between the Nabateans and the Jews continued. In 63 BCE Pompey en tered Damascus, occupied Jerusalem, and ended the Jewish monarchy, but abandoned his plans to conquer the Naba tean kingdom. He also tolerated the independence of the Itureans. Arqa, Tripolis, Sidon, and Ashkelon became free cities directed by their own boules. [See Ashkelon.] The De capolis also was founded at this time. [See Decapolis.] The names of more than one hundred Roman governors of Syria are now known. In order, the first three were Aemilius Scaurus; A. Gabinus (57 BCE), who had broad ad ministrative and military power; and Crassus, the very rich triumvir who was defeated by the Parthians at Carrhes (35 BCE).
SYRIA: Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods Pompey, some years earlier, had reorganized the fortifi cations on the Euphrates to protect the eastern frontiers; he turned over the defense of the north to his Armenian ally. In war and peace Pompey showed remarkable qualities, but he lost the battle at Phrasal, his last foray against Julius Cae sar and died tragically on the Egyptian coast. Meanwhile, Caesar, while trying to settle the succession disputes be tween Cleopatra and her brother, risked serious danger. He received reinforcements from an army of Arabs from Syria, commanded by Iamlichos, prince of Emesa/Homs. Soemos, ethnarch of the Itureans; Nabatean officers; and Antipater the Idumean also participated. During his stay at Antioch in 47 BCE, Caesar rewarded his Syrian allies with titles and gifts. On this occasion he nominated Antipater governor of Jerusalem and confirmed John Hyrcanus as high priest. The Parthian victory at Carrhes created instability in Syria. Parthia tried to incite Syrian princes and the ethnarch against the Romans. Marcus Antonius probably raided Pal myra in 41 BCE, to discourage Parthian conspiracies in Syria. Between Pompey's creation of tire Syrian province and the rule of tire Flavian dynasty in 49 CE, Rome eliminated civil wars and coups d'etat by creating an imperial regime headed by a princips imperalor of divine character (divus). Vespasian, proclaimed emperor by tire Roman legions stationed in Syria, was able to put an end to the political anarchy of 68 CE. His son Titus ended a Jewish revolt, took Jerusalem, and burned the Jerusalem Temple. [See First Jewish Revolt; Je rusalem.] For Syria, a period of peace and romanization followed, with three or four legions stationed on its eastern frontier. In that period Trajan's father was governor of Syria (73-79 CE) and Trajan himself had a military function in the prov ince. When he became emperor in 106, he annexed the Na batean ldngdom and created the Provincia Arabia in its place, with Bosra (Trajana Bostra Metropolis) as its capital. [See Bosra.] His friend, the Syrian architect Apollodorus of Damascus, built a forum, a column, a market, and baths for him in Rome—and perhaps a pantheon as well. Syria knew great prosperity during the rule of Trajan's successor, Hadrian ( 1 1 7 - 1 3 8 ) , who visited tire country and gave advantages to Damascus, Palmyra, and other cities. Following the Bar Kokhba Revolt and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, that city was called Aelia Capitolina. [See Bar Kokhba Revolt.] Under Marcus Aurelius, the prov ince of Syrian was extended to the Jezireh. The Severan dynasty (193-235), founded by Septimius Severus, inaugurated a period of exceptional prosperity for Syria. Archaeology has demonstrated die urban renovation of most of the Syrian cities during this period. Caracalla (211—217) gave the Syrians, like the other subjects of the empire, Roman citizenship. A victorious campaign against the Parthians moved the frontier of the Syrian province to Mesopotamia itself. After the assassination of Caracalla, two
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Syrian emperors occupied the imperial throne: Elagabalus (218-222) and his cousin Alexander Severus (222-235). During the Severan period, the role of the Syrian empresses was preponderant. In 244 Philip the Arab, a citizen of Chahba (Philippopolis) became emperor and organized the celebration of Rome's millenary. In 227-228 the Sasanians entered the Syrian po litical scene, stationing themselves on the Euphrates and the Gulf and blocking Syrian, and especially Palmyrene, trade with die east. Several Sasanian raids followed. In 239 DuraEuropos was attacked. [See Dura-Europos.] Twenty years later Antioch was plundered and the Roman emperor Va lerian was defeated, taken captive, and, with most of his army, deported to the east. Odainat, prince of Palmyra and governor of the province of Syria, drove the Sasanians out of Syria and twice chased them to their capital at Ctesiphon (262 and 267 CE). [See Ctesiphon.] After Odainat was assassinated in 267 or 268, his widow, Zenobia, and her son Wahballat took the imperial titles. The Palmyrene armies soon occupied Egypt and Anatolia. In 272 Aurelian redressed the situation and took Zenobia as his prisoner. The tetrarch Diocletian concluded peace with the Sasanians at the treaty of Nisibis (297), which moved the border of the Roman Empire to the Khabur River. It was Diocletian who fortified the limes and rebuilt Syria's stra tegic roads. Christianity had flourished in Syria since the end of the second century, and a massive conversion took place in the third century, along with the development of sectarianism. Emperor Constantine, with Licinius, permitted religious freedom. In 325 he presided over the Council of Nicaea, held to ensure the unity of Christian doctrine. By the time of Emperor Theodosius, at the end of tire fourth century, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Greco-Roman Civilization. Greek language and culture found a favorable reception in Syria as early as the eighth century BCE and the first Greek settlement there. Greek my thology preserves traces of that ancient exchange between Syria and Greece (e.g., Europa, Cadmus). The ex-voto of fered by Hazael, the Aramean king of Damascus to the tem ple on Samos is an example of these ancient politicoreligious contacts. Hellenization in Syria was strongly colored by multimillenary Oriental tradition. Together they created a Hel lenistic culture that lasted until the Early Islamic period and penetrated deeply into Islamic art and architecture. Under Roman rule, Syrian Flellenistic culture prevailed. Greek was the official language, widely used in die newly founded or refounded cities, but it could not supplant Ar amaic. Aramaic was spoken by a wide spectrum of the pop ulation, especially in the ancient cities and die countryside; Roman-period toponymy and onomastica provide eloquent evidence for its widespread use. Arabic was spoken in south ern and eastern Syria, but the Arabs of those regions wrote
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in Aramaic (e.g., Palmyra, Nabatean kingdom). Many Arab tribes wrote in a South Arabian script (e.g., Thamudis, Safaites). [See Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] Latin was lim ited to the redaction of military and other official texts, for the Roman administration used Greek for all other pur poses. During the Greco-Roman period official art principally followed Hellenistic canons; local art held to such Oriental traditions as frontality and stylization on funerary and reli gious stelae and in mosaics and frescoes (e.g., at Palmyra, Manbij, Hauran). [.See Mosaics.] During this period, religious syncretism took place be tween local and classical deities: Zeus with Baal, Hadad with Ba'al Shamin, Apollo with Nabu, Atiiena with Allat, and Heracles with Melqart. The traditional temples were sys tematically renewed, particularly in Late Seleucid and Ro man times. They mostly kept their Syrian characteristics, however (propylon, large courtyards, monumental alters, and colossal sanctuaries with a thalamos/adytun). The most renown examples are the temples at Baalbek, Damascus, Palmyra, and Betocece. The founding and refounding of cities was the most im portant accomplishment in both Hellenistic and Roman times and constituted an urban revolution. Appian mentions about sixty of them (2.9.213-215). The cities of the Tetrapolis (Antioch, Seleucia/Sweidiya, Laodicea/Latakia, and Apamea) are the best known. The motives for creating these poleis were commercial, military, and administrative. They are all fortified cities, some with doubled ramparts (a main wall and proteikesmd). They have a regular plan of insulae with parallel cross streets and, invariably an agora, theater, gymnasium, baths, and temples. Many of the older cities, like Palmyra, were merely adapted more or less to this urbanism. Antioch, the capital of Seleucid and Roman Syria, became one of the three largest and richest cities in the an cient world, and Apamea was its principal military center, with a stable of forty thousand horses and four hundred el ephants. [See Antioch on Orontes; Apamea.] The Seleucid foundation that replaced the Lagid city at Ras Ibn Hani, north of Latakia, is 1,000 m long and 600 m wide; the city possessed two harbors, a large necropolis, a developed hy draulic system, and a strong rampart with proteikesma. Hellenistic and Roman civilization developed in these cit ies and in them the cult rendered to the Seleucid monarch was born that later developed into the Roman imperial cult. These were also dynamic urban centers of commercial ex change, most of which struck their own coinage. The Syrian economy, however, was integrated into that of the Roman Empire. For this reason, the country received new roads, bridges, irrigation systems, and a cadastre and was exploited agriculturally. The limestone plateau in northwestern Syria, with its hundreds of agglomerations (i.e., small towns and villages), gives some idea of the extraordinary development of the countryside in that period.
Cultural advances accompanied economic prosperity in die Hellenistic-Roman periods. Syrian philosophers, schol ars, and poets were universally appreciated: Zenon, the founder of the stoicism was born in Sidon; Antiochus of Ashkelon created academies in Syria, Egypt, and Greece; and among the pioneer Neoplatonists were Numenios of Apamea, Plotin of Tyre, Porphyros of Gaza, and Yambliches of Chalcis. Syrian historians and geographers were also renowned: Posidonios of Apamea in the first century BCE, Ammianus Marcellinus (born in Antioch); the rhetor Longinus of Emesa/Homs; the counselor to Queen Zenobia; Libanus of Sidon; and Meleager of Gadara/Umm Qeis. Syr ian jurists played an important role in Roman administra tion, and the law school in Beirut had an international reputation. In the Roman period, Syrian men and women took the imperial throne and occupied important central posts, con trolling dynamic colonies in different Roman provinces and in Rome itself. The Roman poet Juvenal remarked, with some bitterness, that the Syrian Orontes had been pouring its language and manners into the Tiber for some time {Sat ires, 3.62-63). Finally, the poet Meleager of Gadara once answered a question by saying, "The island of Tyre edu cated me, but the land in which I was born is Gadara, the new Attica of the Syrians. If I am Syrian what is the wonder? . . . only one chaos produced all the mortals. . . ." BIBLIOGRAPHY Ball, Warwick. Syria: a Historical and Architectural Guide. Essex, Eng., 1994-
Bounni, Adnan. "Palmyre et les Palmyreniens." In Dentzer and Orthmann, eds., 1 9 8 9 , pp. 2 5 1 - 2 6 6 (see below). Bounni, Adnan. "La Syrie a l'epoque hellfenistique et romaine." Syrie: memoire et civilisation, pp. 2 6 8 - 2 7 5 . Paris, 1 9 9 3 . Bowersock, Glen W. Roman Arabia. London, 1 9 8 3 . Bowersock, Glen W. "Social and Economique History of Syria under the Roman Empire." In Dentzer and Orthmann, eds., 1 9 8 9 , pp. 6 3 8 0 (see below). Brunnow, Rudolf-Ernst, and Alfred von Domaszewski. Provincia Ara bia, vol. 3. Strasbourg, 1 9 0 9 . Burus, Ross. Monuments of Syria: an Historical Guide. London, 1 9 9 4 . Buder, Howard C , et al., eds. Princeton University Archaeological Ex peditions to Syria in 1004-100; and 1907. Leyden, 1 9 3 0 . Bybee, Howard C. Bibliography of Syrian Archaeological Sites to 1980. Lewiston, N.Y., 1 9 9 4 . Chapot, V. Lafrontiere de I'Euphrate de Pompee a la conquete arabe. Paris, 1907.
Dentzer, Jean-Marie, ed. Hauran I: Recherches archeologiques sur la Syrie du Slid a l'epoque hellenistique et romaine. 2 vols. Paris, 1 9 8 5 - 1 9 8 6 . Dentzer, Jean-Marie, and Winifried Orthmann, eds. Archeologie et Histoire de la Syrie II: IJX Syrie de l'epoque achemenide a I'avenement de I'Islam. Saarbriicken, 1 9 8 9 . Several essays in this volume beyond those listed elsewhere in this bibliography are also pertinent. Dobias, J. Histoire de la Province romaine de Syrie. Paris, 1 9 2 9 . Dussaud, Rene. Topographic historique de la Syrie antique et medievale. Paris, 1 9 2 7 . Dussaud, Rene. La Syrie antique et medievale illustree. Bibliodieque ar cheologique et historique 1 7 . Paris, 1 9 3 1 .
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Dussaud, Rene. La penetration des Arabes en Syrie avant ITslam. Paris, own properties. Other taxes, the chrysargyre in particular, 1955affected the cities' businessmen and artisans. Hitti, Philip K. History of Syria, including Lebanon and Palestine. Lon The closer integration of Syria with the empire also don, 1 9 5 7 . Jones, A. H. M. The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces. Oxford, 1 9 7 1 . opened brilliant administrative careers to the Syrian elite. In Klengel, Horst. Syria antiqua; vorislamische Denkmdler der Syrischen Ar- the Roman era, the wealthiest citizens populated the curia, abischen Republik. Leipzig, 1 9 7 1 . forming the "order of the curials" or the bouleules. They Klengel, Horst. Syrien zwischen Alexander und Mohammed: Denkmale rivaled each other in undertaking public services, such as aus Antike undfruhen Christenturn. Leipzig, 1 9 8 6 . organizing public performances. In the Byzantine era, many Klengel, Horst. Syria: 2000 to 300 B.C. Berlin, 1 9 9 2 . wealthy citizens advanced into the direct service of the gov "Newsletter: Archaeology in Syria." An annual report of excavations, ernmental authority and formed the influential group of the grouped by time periods, in American Journal of Archaeology. (See also the French journal Syria for current excavation reports.) hanorati. At the same time, they dispensed public services Rey-Coquais, Jean-Paul. "Syrie romaine, de Pompee a Diocletien." that had become oppressive responsibilities for the curials, Journal of Roman Studies 6 8 ( 1 9 8 7 ) . who sought to escape them. These new influential individ Rey-Coquais, Jean-Paul. "La Syrie, de Pompee a Diocletien: histoire uals were less cultivated than the municipal bougeoisie. politique et administrative." In Dentzer and Orthmann, eds., 1 9 8 9 , They abandoned classical culture and rhetoric in favor of pp. 4 5 - 6 1 (see above). the law, to the great indignation of Libanios, Antioch's great Ruprechtsberger, Erwin M., ed. Syrien: von den Apasteln zu den Kalifen. Linzer archaologischen Forschungen 2 1 . Mainz, 1 9 9 3 . professor of rhetoric, who deplored the desertion of die cur Sartre, Maurice. "La Syrie sous la domination achemenise." In Dentzer ias. and Orthmann, eds., 1 9 8 9 , pp. 9 - 1 8 (sec above). The Byzantine epoch was a prosperous one for Syria. Its Sartre, Maurice. "La Syrie a l'epoque hellenistique." In Dentzer and cities were numerous, and the capital, Antioch, was the larg Orthmann, eds., 1 9 8 9 , pp. 3 : - 4 4 (see above). Schlumberger, Daniel. I'Orient n llenise. Paris, 1 9 7 0 . est city in the eastern part of the empire, after Constanti Syrie: memoire el civilisation. Paris, 1 9 9 3 . Exhibition catalog. nople and Alexandria. [See Antioch on Orontes; Constan Tate, Georges. Les campagnes de la Syrie du Nord du He au Vile siecle. tinople; Alexandria.] In die fourth century, Antioch Bibliotheque archeologique et historique, 1 3 3 . Paris, 1 9 9 2 . expanded beyond its walls. The city was laid out on either ADNAN BOUNNI side of a great axial road, which was oriented north-south and lined with porticoes. The porticoes are represented in Syria in the Byzantine Period the mosaic at Yakto; tire activities conducted within them were celebrated by Libanios. [See Mosaics.] The people of From Roman to Byzantine times, constant developments Antioch were argumentative, pleasure loving, and careless; were taldng place in Syria, certain of them the result of Syr they reproached Julian for laying the blame on wealthy cit ia's proximity to Constantinople, the new capital of the Byz izens when he prosecuted speculators in food products and antine Empire, founded in 330. Constantinople became the for not sharing the people's taste for spectacles. They did sole capital of the empire in 476, when the last emperor of not forgive him for his paganism, either—the ostentatious the West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed. The first sacrifices of animals. Libanios claimed that the city was il change was the closer integration of Syria with the empire, luminated every night and that its inhabitants ordinarily which developed in the following two ways. nourished themselves with meat, but that die richest ate fish The imperial power strengthened its authority by increas from the Orontes River or nearby lake. Numerous other cit ing the number of officials, by tightening the network of ies also prospered: Apamea, whose population exceeded one administrative districts, and then by subdividing the districts hundred thousand; Seleucia, at the mouth of the Orontes, to increase their number. The imperial authority also raised which is the port of Antioch; Laodicea, Berytus/Beirut, and its fiscal demands and, from die time of Diocletian, was bet especially Tyre on the Mediterranean coast; and in the in ter able to collect taxes through a general census of people, terior, Chalcis of Belus, Aleppo, Epiphania, Emesa/Homs, animals, and property. In Syria, that vast and seemingly bru and Damascus. All of these cities preserved a monumental tal operation was carried out between 293 and 305 under the plan inherited from the Roman period; its central element was a broad street (cardo) with porticoes that crossed the city direction of the censor Julius Sabinus. An abstract fiscal unit from north-south. [See Apamea; Beirut; Tyre; Aleppo; called caput orjugum corresponded to a man, animals, or an Horns; Damascus.] area of land (which varied, depending on the quality of die soil and the nature and yield of the crop). T o cover its in Contrary to some early scholarly opinion, the prosperity creasing expenses, the imperial authority could adjust the of the cities was not based on tire exploitation and suffering amount of the tax by the fiscal unit, regardless of the realities of the rural population. The textual sources that derive from of production and rural revenues. The collection of the tax, city dwellers, for whom the country constituted a dreaded like the conducting of other public services, devolved upon and generally barbarian world, are, however, of less value the members of the municipal councils (boule or curia) of for understanding rural conditions than the archaeological the large cities, which were responsible for the tax on their data, which provide material evidence. In two regions, the
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limestone plateau in North Syria (in the territories of Antioch and Apamea) and in the south (Hauran and Jebel al'Arab), abundant traces remain of a rural civilization that attained its peak in the fourth and fifth centuries. The limestone plateau of North Syria is a marginal zone without extensive or deep soils. Nevertheless, it experienced an expansion beginning in the years 330-350 that resulted in doubling or even tripling the region's population in fewer than two centuries. The expansion on the limestone plateau was associated with improved cultivation of the difficult soils by people whom the population pressures on the plains had displaced. From the fifth century onward, expansion was also tied to the increased cultivation of the vine and olive and fruit trees. The peasants could sell oil and wine in the city, realizing substantial profits. The farmers on the marginal lands had a liberty and ease that those on the plains, where the great landowners of the cities had their estates, did not always have. Libanios explains in his discourse against patronage, that the landowning peasants, presumably including the population on the limestone plateau, were capable of defy ing the tax collectors and s ending them off with blows—even the curials. The relationship between the city and the countryside, although conflictual when it came to taxes, were comple mentary in other circumstances. Libanios traces the catalog of prosperous villages bustling with activity that maintained regular exchanges with one or several cities: the villagers came to sell their produce in the city and returned in the evening with silver or manufactured goods. They brought back societal models as well: in the village of Sergilla, a wealthy peasant had baths constructed for his kome, exer cising a sort of rustic munificence, to benefit his fellow cit izens with a thoroughly urban luxury. In the context of the growth of population and wealth, Syria also experienced a profound cultural change as a result of the progress of Christianity. Even before it was officially recognized, Christianity held a strong position in Syria, but only in the large cities, particularly Antioch. During the fourth century, Christianity strengthened in other cities and especially in rural areas. The increased number of churches in the villages of the limestone plateau of northern Syria, in the second third of the fourth century, offers striking archi tectural evidence. Peaceful preaching was used to spread Christianity, but often also violence. At Apamea, St. Marcel roused the population against the sanctuary of Zeus, which was destroyed to the point that no stone remains. In the countryside, fanatical monks incited the villagers against the pagan sanctuaries known as "dens of demons"; the villagers purified the sanctuaries by constructing Christian ones in their places. The triumph of Christianity in the fifth century did not entail a complete rejection of classical culture. Chris tianity was generally assumed by the population, but without conviction, and tire educational system never underwent
radical change. St. John Chrysostom counseled only that the Christian education of children be entrusted to their fami lies. In contrast, the monks, whose number increased at the beginning of the fourth century, advanced a different ideal. Without systematically refusing intellectual or manual work, they offered a model of the ascetic life, individual or collec tive, that was distinct from the ideals of classical culture. [See Monasteries.] They accorded no particular value to either Greek culture or language. Some monks, who knew only Syriac, experienced extraordinary notoriety as a result of their ascetic exploits. Along with the rise of Christianity and especially of monasticism, the Syriac language and culture rose again next to the Greek, and henceforth played no less of a role. Hellenism thus lost its cultural dominance. With out conflict, but inexorably, the Semitic cultures experi enced a renaissance, particularly in the cities of the east— Edesa/Homs, Hierapolis, and Nisibe—where Greek had never completely taken over. Conflict, and even competition, between Greek and Christian culture was not the source of tire dogmatic divi sions that eventually rended the church, however. The op position between the doctrine of Nicaea and Arianism did not continue beyond the fourth century. In contrast, the Christological quarrels that opposed the Nestorians, Chalcedonians, and Monophysit.es, persisted. They not only di vided tire theologians and ecclesiastical hierarchy, but gave rise to popular disturbances, principally in the cities. These conflicts were the result of the influence of Greek philosophy on theological thought and to the diversity and indepen dence of the churches; they were aggravated by differences of language and culture. Until the first third of the sixth century, these were the causes of divisions in Syria but not ruptures. From 527 onward, the situation in Syria changed. First, war succeeded peace. Certainly Byzantium had fought Per sia in the fourth and fifth centuries, but those wars were brief and took place on foreign territory. From 527 until the Arab conquest in 634, Syria was exposed to repeated attack. In vasion, destruction, siege, the imposition of tribute, and the capture of towns occurred—with pillage, massacre, and even deportation being common. In 573, the sack of Apa mea resulted in the deportation of 292,000 people. In 602, Syria passed under Persian rule and remained that way until 627. Disaster extended to the natural world. Beginning in 530, earthquakes, famine, and epidemics, particularly the plague, followed a ten-year cycle. On the limestone plateau, people stopped building or enlarging houses for the decade from 540 to 550. In the sixth century, Syria attained its peak of prosperity, and building activity did not stop in the big cities. Building was attested at Apamea, and also farther east in towns that developed later, such as Sergiopolis/Rusafa, Zenobia, and Androna. [See Rusafa.] Even in villages, people
SYRIA: Syria in the Islamic Period still constructed large, sumptuous churches, but these rep resent small bursts of prosperity in a deteriorated economic context. The population remained dense, but when produc tion could increase no more and as disasters proliferated in the land, the size of the population fluctuated, as did the wealth of the cities and the rural areas. The accumulation of these troubles and tire incompetent administration of imperial authority from the reign of Jus tinian onward, brought the conflicts in dogma to the break ing point. Concerned about the West, which he planned to recover, Justinian supported the Chalcedonian doctrine and persecuted Monophysite bishops and priests. A Syriacspeaking Monophysite priest, who was originally from Mes opotamia, Jacob Baradaeus, "the ragged," founded a dissi dent Monophysite church. He ordained thirty bishops and thousands of priests and deacons. In 557-558, he even con secrated a new patriarch of Antioch. The Ghassanian Arabs allied with the empire, settled at the edge of the steppe, con verted to Christianity, and adopted the Monophysite faith. Syria was thus divided into two churches, one of which uti lized the Syriac language. The same split cut through poli tics, religion, and culture. Under Persian rule, the Syriac hierarchy was favored. When the Byzantines returned, be tween 527 and 534, the Monophysite church became strong enough to refuse the compromises proposed by the emperor Heraclius.
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liquile. Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 1 3 3 . Paris, 1992.
Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: Le massif du Belus a I'epoque romaine, 3 vols. Paris, 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 5 8 . Vryonis, Speros, Jr. "Aspects of Byzantine Society in Syro-Palestinc." In Byzantine Studies in Honor of Milton V. Anastos, edited by Speros Vryonis, Jr., pp. 4 3 - 6 3 . Malibu, 1 9 8 5 . Weiss, Harvey. "Archaeology in Syria." American Journal of Archae ology 9 8 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 0 1 - 1 5 8 . One of a series of articles which includes excavation summaries, grouped by time periods. (For a journal de voted entirely to Syrian archaeology, see the French journal Syria.) GEORGES T A T E
Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
Syria in the Islamic Period
The Muslim conquest of Syria in the seventh century CE was momentous in the history of the region. The Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, ancient and proud as it was, faced a challenge not only in the field of battle but also in the realm of faith and self-identity. The present-day image of Islam's political, social, cultural, and ideological history was formed by Western Orientalists who drew many misconceptions from what they observed. In fact, Muhammad and the first Muslims were not inhabitants of the desert but citizens of Mecca, Medina, and other cities. The Muslim conquerors did not only bring with them the Arabic language and a new religion, but a material culture as well. They did not, as By the time Arabs the arrived in 634, the Syrians had "be Westerners reported, merely adopt and adapt the material trayed" the cause of Byzantium. The Chalcedonians com culture of conquered territories. The traditional view among promised, while the Monophysites resisted. In fact, after all historians and archaeologists, that the Islamic conquest dis the wars and political changes, a great weariness prevailed. rupted the urban forms that had passed from Rome to Syria In any case, the Arabs were not complete strangers. The and other parts of the Near East, is being challenged by historian al-Baladhuri reports that the inhabitants of Maarmodern scholars such as Harvey Weiss, who are encour rat an-Naiman advanced to meet the conquerors, dancing aging a new perspective, based on archaeological and epi to the sound of the fife and tambourine. graphic evidence (Weiss, 1985, p. 42). [See also Byzantine Empire.] Present-day Syria, with a surface area of 184,000 sq Ion and a population of twelve million, comprises an important BIBLIOGRAPHY part of cultural Greater Syria, or Bilad ash-Sham, which Brock, Sebastian P. "From Antagonism to Assimilation." In East of includes northern Upper Mesopotamia (the Jezireh) and the Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, edited by Nin a Syrian steppe (Badiat ash-Sham). [See Badiat ash-Sham.] G. Garsoian et al., pp. 1 7 - 3 4 . Washington, D.C., 1 9 8 2 . The first contact between Islam and Syria took place when Brock, Sebastian P. Studies in Syriac Christianity: History, Literature, the young Muhammad accompanied his uncle to Bosra in and Theology. Hampshire, England, 1 9 9 2 . Dussaud, Rene. Topographic hislorique de la Syrie antique et mediivale. Syria. There they met the monk Bahira, who recognized in Paris, 1 9 2 7 . Muhammad the prophet to come. Before the revelation of Jalabert, Louis, and Rene Mouterde. Inscriptions grecques et latines de la God, Muhammad, as a young man, frequented Syria (e.g., Syrie. 5 vols. Paris, 1 9 2 9 - 1 9 5 9 . Bosra), working as a merchant on behalf of Khadija, his wife Poidebard, Antoine, and Rene Mouterde. Le limes de Chalcis. Paris, to be. The second contact was by correspondence, when 1945Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to Syria Muhammad had a revelation and sent a letter to tire Byz antine emperor Heraclius urging him to submit immediately in 1904-$ and 1909. 7 vols. Leiden, 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 4 9 . Ruprechtsberger, Erwin M., ed. Syrien: Von den Aposteln zu den Kalifen. to Islam. The third and decisive contact was the Muslim Linzer Archaologische Forschungen, 2 1 . Linz, Austria, 1 9 9 3 . Large, conquest of Syria between 634 and 637. well-illustrated collection of essays, which includes an exhibition cat In the decade following the death of the prophet Muham alogue. mad in 632, Muslim armies continued the policies he had Tate, Georges. Les campagnes de la Syrie du Nord du lie au Vile siecle: Un exemple d'expansion demographique et cconomique d, la fin de Van-established by bringing more and more territory under Mus-
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lim political and military control. The caliphs, successors to Muhammad for the leadership of die community, directed these first military activities from western Arabia, in partic ular, from the city of Medina. The armies, primarily com posed of Arab cavalry, demonsttated brilliant military qual ities as they defeated much larger forces. During the reign of the second caliph, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, Greater Syria fell definitively to Muslim forces on 20 July 636 in the battle of Yarmuk, when Heraclius is reported to have said, "Fare well, O Syria . . ." (see Foster, in Weiss, ed., 1985, pp. 457460). In 639, the third caliph, 'Uthman, appointed Mu'awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan ibn Umayya governor of Greater Syria, with a residence in Damascus. By 656, Mu'awiyah was engaged in a power snuggle with 'Ali, the fourth caliph, who was also the Prophet's first cousin and son-in-law. To symbolize Mu'awiyah's victory in 661, following the death of 'Ali, Da mascus was established as the political and military capital of die Islamic world. Thus, Damascus became the center of an empire that was to stretch from southern France and tire Iberian peninsula to the Indus River in India and die region of Transoxiana. The dynasty was called Umayyad, named after Mu'awiyah's grandfather, Umayya; it lasted until 750. For nearly a century, Greater Syria, with its capital at Da mascus, enjoyed the status of an empire for the first time in its history. [See Umayyad Caliphate.] Islamic Syria has witnessed die following major political developments in its history: tire Umayyad period (660-750); the Early 'Abbasid period (eighth-ninth centuries), during which the capital of the Islamic Empire (the caliphate) shifted to Baghdad and the whole of Syria became a prov ince of no particular importance; die disintegration of the 'Abbasid Empire (tenth-twelfth centuries); the Zangid/ Ayyubid period (twelfth-thirteenth centuries); the Mamluk period (thirteenth-sixteenth centuries); and the Ottoman period (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries). [See 'Abbasid Ca liphate; Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties.] The Muslim conquerors ethnically belonged to the same family as the majority of the peoples in Syria. Byzantine Syria was linguistically bilingual: Greek was the language of die official administration and the official Chalcedonian church, and Late Aramaic, or Syriac, was the language of the masses. Arabic, the language of the Qur'an and the Mus lim conquerors who came to Syria belonged to the same family as Syriac. As a result, it was easy for Syrians to switch from Syriac to Arabic in bodi private and official life. The first step toward a self-identified Muslim administra tion had been attained during the conquest of Syria and Iraq, when the second caliph, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, ordered the creation of an Islamic dTwan, a "civil register," in 641. The first Islamic Empire under the dynasty of the Umayyads de pended upon Greek-speaking native Syrian experts to run administrative affairs for more than a generation. It was a necessary period of transition in which to develop a new
islamicized and arabized generation of administrators and a new monetary system. It might have been disastrous for both conquerors and conquered to overturn a centuries-old administration and introduce a new currency without a tran sition process. A self-identity in administration and currency was completed under the fifth Umayyad caliph, 'Abd alMalik ibn Marwan (685-705). Islamic tolerance for human rights, in modern terminol ogy, is rooted first of all in die Qur'an, chapter (sura) 49, verse 13: "O mankind. We created you from a single (pair) of a female and male, and made you into nations and tribes that you may know each other (and not that you may despise one another). Verily the most honored of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you. . . . " Second, there is a saying of the prophet Muhammad: "Only right eousness may distinguish an Arab and a non Arab." The Muslim conquerors did not only not force the pop ulace to convert, it is even doubtful that they encouraged it Qere Bacharach, in Weiss, ed., 1985). In 680, the Gallic bishop Arculph passing through Syria on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, observed tiiat the Christians were still the major ity by far in those lands and that relations with the Muslims were harmonious. Archaeological and epigraphic investi gation in Syria, Jordan, and Israel refer to continuous res toration and maintenance work on churches in Syria during the Umayyad period. On the economic level, the Muslim conquerors imposed a land tax (kharaj) on the community and a poll tax (jizyah) on its individual members; these were roughly the same ob ligations that former subjects of the Byzantine emperor and those of the Sasanian shah had toward their sovereigns. The Muslims followed the principle of economic liberalism. Is lamic law did not forsee any intervention by the state in the domain of production and commercial exchanges (Bianquis, in Canivet and Rey-Coquais, 1992, p. 286). Syria was die main area for the completion of Islam's world message, which had been launched by the prophet Muhammad's letters to the emperors and sovereigns of his time. The Umayyads continued die conquest, which reached its peak under the caliph al-Walid ibn 'Abd al-Malik (r. 705-715). Regarding the urbanization process, Muslims brought their "cities" with them during the conquest itself and shordy afterward. They founded habitational nuclei that were later to become major urban centers, such as Bosra and Kufah in Iraq and Fustat in Egypt. They were built near former urban centers to demonstrate their new Muslim identification. [See Bosra.] The impact of this process in Syria took different directions, which were more challeng ing. The Umayyads urbanized Syria's unurbanizable areas, bringing the city to the desert (Oleg Grabar, in Weiss, 1985). Between 685 and 750, die Umayyads founded more than fifty properties in the steppes of Greater Syria. Because most of them resemble palaces, they are known as the desert pal-
SYRIA: Syria in the Islamic Period aces. Their excavation has revealed that they were not just private residences but connected with such public facilities as a mosque, bath, caravanserai, and small agricultural set tlements. Water was supplied by means of consttucted ca nals that brought water from distant natural sources or dams. These were not oasis cities like Palmyra but were ar tificial, built oases. The palace settlements demonstrated the caliph's power and his hospitality in an inhospitable area. They also served passing caravans, which promoted trade between city and steppe, and assured subsistence (agricul tural products) to settlers and travelers. Among these arti ficial nuclei of cities are Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi, Jabal Usays, and Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi. [See Palmyra; Qasr alHayr ash-Sharqi; Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi.] In the field of art and architecture, the Muslims soon es tablished a visual vocabulary for their religious and public buildings drat stressed geometric design, floral and vine pat terns, and calligraphy. This tradition rejected the use of hu man, animal, and realistic representation. The main char acteristics of Muslim art, which distinguish it from all previous arts, are the endless rapport in geometric and floral designs, a horror of leaving foreground or background space unfilled, the bidimensionality of features and patterns, and the inttoduction of Arabic calligraphy as an essential ele ment of any artistic composition, a previously unused tech nique in the art of any culture. The Muslims of Arabia brought their own architectural concepts to the countries they conquered, in which Roman, Byzantine, and Sasanian architecture challenged them ev
mi
erywhere. The mosque, for example, challenged the church and the temple with its horizontality, its multifunctionality, and its harmonious combination of different volumes of space (the open space is the courtyard, the closed space is die prayer hall, the half-open space is represented by the porticoes surrounding the courtyard). These features had not been combined in this way prior to Islam. Syria played an important role in this formative process of Islamic art and architecture. Representative but significant examples are the so-called desert palaces (see above) and the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. [See Damascus; Mosque.] By 656, Mu'awiyah, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, was engaged in a power struggle with 'Ali, the fourth caliph, who was also the Prophet's first cousin and son-in-law. The results of this first civil war were momentous, creating a permanent split in the Muslim community. One group, the minority who believed that 'Ali and Iris family should have been the immediate successors of Muhammad, were to be known as the Shi'is. The majority, the Sunnis (orthodoxy), accepted the historical development as it took place. The struggle ended with the victory of the Umayyads and ortho doxy. The victory of the 'Abbasids in 750 led to a shift in tire administrative center of the Islamic world to Iraq, and in particular to Baghdad. They were not of course Alids (Shi'is, the partisans of 'All), except by self-designation. Ab bas was an uncle of the prophet Muhammad and of 'Ali as well. The 'Abbasids used the support of the Shi'is, whom they discarded as soon as they succeeded in overthrowing
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SYRIA: Syria in the Islamic Period
the last Umayyads. Whatever hopes the descendants of 'Ali may have harbored that an 'Abbasid victory against die Umayyads would lead to an Alid (Shi'i) caliphate must have yielded to despair. The 'Abbasids never intended to rule from Damascus, as their Umayyad predecessors had done. The first 'Abbasid calpih, 'Abu al-'Abbas as-Saffah, was proclaimed caliph in Kufah (Iraq). His successor, al-Mansur (754-775), put down the foundations for his new capital, madTnat al-salam, the "city of peace." The site is more generally known from die village diat it replaced, Baghdad, which was located on the west bank of the Tigris River, in the network of canals that connected diat river with the Euphrates River. Intellec tually, commercially, and circumstancially, Baghdad inher ited die role played by Alexandria in the old Hellenic oikoumene. It became the unrivaled center of arts and letters and the seat of religious and secular power in Islam. [See Bagh dad.] Syria had lost its central position and was reduced to the status of a province. Yet, it retained some importance pri marily because of its geographic location, which placed it a juncture between Iraq and the other western provinces of the Islamic caliphate. Its long borders also made it a con frontational field with the Byzantine Empire. Greater Syria comprised seven administrative divisions under die 'Abbasids: Palestine, Jordan, Damascus, Horns, Qinnishrin, Jezireh, and Mosul. [See Horns; Qinnishrin.] The Syrian Jezireh (Upper Mesopotamia) gained special importance under the 'Abbasids. The second 'Abbasid ca liph, al-Mansur, had chosen ar-Raqqa as the second place
for new city foundations after the capital of Baghdad. The fifth 'Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid, made ar-Raqqa his residence for twelve years. He built a victory monument named Heraqla near ar-Raqqa to document his decisive vic tory against Byzantium. [See Raqqa, ar-.] Aside from the Jezireh, the 'Abbasids did not leave re markable monuments in Greater Syria. An important achievement accomplished during 'Abbasid times was made by a group of astronomers who conducted a series of ob servations in Damascus during the time of the caliph alMa 'mun (813—833)3 the successor of Harun al-Rashid. Sev eral instruments were constructed for solar and lunar observations made from Mt. Qasiyun, overlooking Damas cus. This observatory was demolished in the ninth century and never rebuilt. After almost a century of stability (from the mid-eighth to the mid-ninth centuries), both the Islamic state and the faith faced crucial challenges. Under the reign of the 'Ab basid caliph, al-Mu'tamid (870-892), a certain 'Ali ibn Mu hammad enflamed the Zanj (pagan black slaves from East Africa) into open revolt in the name of an egalitarian Islam. The Zanj had been forced to work in labor gangs for years in the salt mines of Bosra. Their complaints were social and economic rather than theological. The repression of the re volt took many years of hard fighting. It was not until 883 that the capital of the "slave republic" in southern Iraq fell. The caliph al-Muktafi (902-908) inherited, on one hand, a strengthened caliphate and, on the other, the shattering problem of the Qarmatians. These latter were revolutionary anarchists who had a foothold in Bahrain. [See Bahrain.]
SYRIA: Islamic Period. Umayyad mosque. (Courtesy K. Toueir)
SYRIAC Despite efforts at rooting them out, they had grown to such a pit of strength that in 900-901, they were threatening Bosra and attacking cities along the whole length and breadth of Syria. A caliphal army that set out in 903 was successful and the Qarmatians never quite regained dieir strength in Syria. In 877, the caliph al-Muwaffaq demanded increased pay ment from his dependent, the governor of Egypt, Ibn Tulun. However, the latter had evicted the caliph's finance officer from the province, and so, with die exception of a small sum forwarded to Baghdad, Egyptian tax revenues were remain ing within the borders of Egypt. In 878, a legate was sent to Egypt at the head of a caliphal army with orders to remove tire fractions amir (governor). He failed, and Ibn Tulun re sponded by sending his own army into the caliph's domains in Palestine and Syria. It met little resistance, and the new territories were added to die growing Egyptian estates. In 935, the Tulunids were followed by the Ikshids, and Egypt once again exercised control over Palestine and much of Syria. In 941, 'Ali, surnamed Sayf ad-Dawla, who was the brother of the Hamdanid amir of Mosul in northern Iraq, drove the Ikshids from Aleppo and Hims (Horns) and es tablished a new principality that ruled northern Syria for the next half century. The political dismemberment of the 'Abbasid caliphate was accompanied by a challenge to the Islamic faith. Both Sunni and Shi'ah faced a massive infiltration of Greek phi losophy. This led to the rise of Islamic theologians known as Mu'taziliyah. Despite tire support they enjoyed from four 'Abbasid caliphs, the Mu'taziliyah ended by being regarded as heretics. The Sunnis detested diem and the theologians who came to represent orthodoxy disavowed them. Their works disappeared and their opinions were memorialized chiefly in the unflattering remarks of the heresiographers. The influence of Greek philosophy on die Shi'ah was, how ever, effective. It resulted in die appearance of the Ismailiyah, known as the Assassins. One of the founders of this extteme doctrine situated within the Shi'ah was Maymun al-Qaddah (died c. 796) and his son 'Abd Allah (d. 825). Between 850 and 875, Ismaili missionaries ("summoners") spread all over the 'Abbasid Empire. They were particularly strong in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. One of their main centers of propaganda was located in Salamiyya, a town east of Hama in Syria. In 892, one of their summoners, Abu Abd Allah, began his missionary endeavors by accompanying a group of North African Berber pilgrims on their way home to North Africa, preaching the Ismaili messagetirelessly.Be tween 906 and 909, city after city fell to the Ismailis. A cer tain 'Ubayd Allah in Salamiyya, who claimed to be a de scendant of 'Ali and Fatimah, daughter of the Prophet, joined his summoner, Abu 'Abd Allah, in North Africa. Fa timah became the name of the Fatimid dynasty, which the Ismailis succeeded in setting up in North Africa and whose culmination was the conquest of Egypt in 969. The Fatimids established the city of Cairo, which became a real rival of c
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Baghdad for more than two centuries (969-1171). [SeeFatimid Dynasty.] A new Shi'i power had arisen in die northwest corner of Iran, the Buyids of Daylam. In 945, the Daylami infantry, along with Turldsh Buyid horsemen, entered Baghdad. The Buyids remained Shi'is while the caliph remained Sunni, continuing to enjoy the immense prestige of that office. Un der these circumstances, during which the state was being dismembered, local dynasties fought one another, and there was a strong rivalry between Cairo and Baghdad. During this period, Syria experienced instability and became an arena for the parties' conflicts. Neither the Fatimids of Cairo nor the shi'atized local dynasties (the Hamdanids, Uqaylids, or Merdasids) in nortii and northeastern Syria have left any significant material culture of their own. Syria, and Damascus in particular, remained intellectually a stronghold of Islamic orthodoxy (Sunni) and was produc tive in the scientific field. In the tenth century, a Damascene mathematician, Abu al-Hasan al-Uqlidisi, wrote the first ac count of decimal fractions in arithmetic. Muhammad ibn Jabir al-Battani from ar-Raqqa was one of the most famous Muslim astronomers. In the middle of the eleventii century, the Turkish Seljuks arrived in Baghdad, along with their suc cessors. They began a new chapter in Islamic history by bringing about the collapse of the Fatimid state and the local dynasties in northeastern Syria, reestablishing orthodoxy, persecuting the Assassins, and confronting two major in vasions: the European Crusaders and the Central Asian Mongols. Syria regained its importance then, becoming cen tral to events. BIBLIOGRAPHY Carnivet, Pierre, and Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais, eds. La Syrie de Byzance A I'Islatn Vlle-VIIIe siecles. Damas, 1 9 9 2 . See H. J. W. Drijvers, "Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Nordiern Mesopotamia in Early Islamic Times"; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, "La situazione religiasa a Basra in eta Umayyade"; Ignace Dick, "Retombees de la conquete arabe sur la Chretienite dc Syrie"; Louis Pouzet, "Le Hadith de Heraclius, une caution Byzantine a la prophetie de Mohammad"; Sidney H. Griffith, "Image, Islam, and Christian Icons"; and Th. Bianquis, "L'Islam entre Byzance et le Sasanides." Peters, F. E. Allah's Commonwealth: A History of Islam in the Near East, 600-1100 AD. New York, 1 9 7 3 . Weiss, Harvey, ed. Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Syria. Washington, D.C., 1 9 8 5 . See Benjamin R. Foster, "Syria be tween Byzantium and Islam"; Jere L. Bacharach, "Islamic Damascus and Aleppo"; David A. King, "Science in Medieval Syria"; and Oleg Grabar, "Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi." KASSEM TOUEIR
SYRIAC. Three post-Achaemenid Aramaic dialects achieved the status of major literary languages: Syriac, Jew ish Aramaic, and Mandaic. [See Aramaic Language and Lit erature; Mandaic] After die collapse of the Achaemenid Empire, the widely used "Imperial" Aramaic failed to act as
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a unifying political force and local areas developed their own dialectal forms and scripts. [See Imperial Aramaic] Syriac was originally die dialect of the Edessa area (Urfa in modern Turkey, and in antiquity known as Osrhoene), but its im portance increased with the spread of Christianity in the region after about 200 CE. By the thirteenth century it had declined in literary importance, giving way to Arabic. Although Syriac may be fairly characterized as a Christian language, the earliest inscriptions from the Edessa region which show distinctively Syriac characteristics in language and script are pagan. The earliest is dated to 6 CE (from Birecik), and they extend to the middle of the second cen tury CE (especially inscriptions from Sumatar Harabesi near Harran). Several features distinguish Syriac from earlier forms of Aramaic. The Proto-Semitic Is/, which in earlier Aramaic was represented by die letter sin, came to be written with the Syriac sign for /s/ (semkat). The early inscriptions give evidence of this transition. The construct ceased to be a pro ductive form, even though it was retained in numerous fixed expressions. Instead, the particle cf is used in an analytical possessive construction: siisya tfmalka, "the horse of the ldng." It is also characteristic of Syriac to add an anticipatory pronoun to the first noun in such expressions: susyeh tfmalka, literally "his horse of the king." The Aramaic sub stantival ending -a (originally marldng definiteness) ceased to have any significance in contrast with the nonsuffixed form. The imperfect of the third-person masculine singular and plural has a n(e)- prefix, in contrast with the earlier y(l- in some Aramaic dialects). The causative stem is formed with 'a- (except in a few archaic fossilized cases). The def inite direct object of the verb is regularly marked with the particle /-. The earliest inscriptions use a recognizable form of what became the estrangela (from Gk., strongiile, "rounded, com pact, carved") script derived from die earlier Aramaic tra dition. As with die other early West Semitic writing systems, this script was essentially consonantal. The earliest examples of the script on soft materials are found on legal parchments from the area of the Middle Euphrates River, dated to 240243 CE. Literary manuscripts were already in existence by that date, although die earliest dated literary manuscript (British Library Add. M S . 12150) comes from 4 1 1 CE. This manuscript already displays a mature and elegant calligra phy. Syriac-speaking Christians became divided during the centuries of christological debate, and as a result the script forms developed separately. Estrangela remained the tradi tional and most formal script, but alongside it there devel oped Western (sometimes called Jacobite, or serto, "char acter") and Eastern (Nestorian) scripts. The confessional titles are ttaditional but not really appropriate. Unlike pre vious scripts, the Eastern and Western scripts each de veloped methods of indicating vowels for die first time.
The Eastern system consists of dots; the Western adapted Greek vowel letters for die purpose. As in Hebrew and Ar abic, the new marks were placed above and below die con sonants. Dialectal differences also developed which were at first slight, consisting of little more tiian variations in vowel pro nunciation. Thus, the original a of Aramaic came to be ar ticulated as o/o in Western Syriac, while its original value was retained in the East. Western Syriac also effectively merged 0 with u. Syriac survives as a spoken language in the area where modern Turkey, Syria, and Iraq meet. Its religious heartland is the Tur Abdin in Turkey, and the modern language is marked by considerable phonological innovation and heavy interference from Turkish and Arabic. Syriac literature is too vast to be outlined here. The main collections are in the Patrologia Orientalis (Paris, 1907-) and Corpus Scriptorum Christianonim Orientalium (Paris, 1903-) series and in Baumstark (1968) is found the most compre hensive survey. Note should be taken, however, of the out standing early writer, Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373 C E ) . Ephrem was a great poet, although he has not always been fully appreciated because of the complexity of his poetty. Syriac literature gradually came more and more under Greek influence, and it may be fairly said that few of its later theologians could be described as original thinkers. How ever, another branch of Syriac literature became more im portant and remains invaluable to modern scholarship: chronicles. At first tiiese seem to have been little more than city archives recounting series of events, but historiography developed and culminated in the major works of writers such as Michael the Syrian (d. 1199 CE) and Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286 C E ) . BIBLIOGRAPHY Baumstark, Anton. Gcschichte der syrischen Literatur (1922). Berlin, 1968. The fundamental history of Syriac literature (there is no sat isfactory English equivalent). Brock, Sebastian P. "An Introduction to Syriac Studies." In Horizons in Semitic Studies, edited by J. H. Eaton, pp. 1 - 3 3 . Birmingham, 1980. Invaluable survey article covering the whole wealth of Syriac studies in a brief compass. Brockelmann, Carl. lexicon Syriacum, 2d ed. Halle, 1928. The best portable dictionary, though its translations are into Latin; contains references to particular Syriac texts. McCullough, William S. A Short History of Syriac Christianity to the Rise of Islam, Chico, Calif., 1982. Good, clear introduction to die subject. Noldeke, Theodor. Compendious Syriac Grammar. London, 1904. The standard reference grammar of the language, essential to all serious study. The English is a translation of the second German edition, Kurzgefasste Syrische Grammatik (Leipzig, 1898; reprint, Darmstadt, 1977). All teaching grammars depend to a large extent on Noldeke; note should be taken of widely used teaching grammars by Theodore H. Robinson, Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1962), and John F. Healey, Pirst Studies in Syriac (Bir mingham, 1980).
SYRIA-PALESTINE Payne Smith, Jessie. A Compendious Syriac Dictionary. Oxford, 1 9 0 3 . Based on die more extensive treatment by Robert Payne Smith, The saurus Syriacus (Oxford, 1 8 7 9 - 1 9 0 1 ) , this work is an English equiv alent to Brockelmann, (above) though its information is generally more sparse. Segal, Judah B. Ede.ssa, "The Blessed City." Oxford, 1 9 7 0 . Primarily concerned with the history of Edessa, but in effect a history of the cultural background of Syriac. JOHN F . HEALEY
SYRIA-PALESTINE. Often used in archaeological and historical studies, the term Syria-Palestine designates ancient Canaan, aldiough die correspondence is inexact be cause its geographic and political boundaries varied from period to period. In practical usage, the term is usually em ployed archaeologically to designate central and southern Canaan (not "Greater Canaan") or to incorporate die mod ern boundaries of coastal and south-central Syria (south of the bend of the Orontes River), Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and part of Egypt's Sinai Desert. The adjective Syro-Palestinian to describe the archaeology of the above region seems to have been first popularized by William Foxwell Albright in the 1920S-193OS, often as an alternative to biblical archaeology. It has recently been revived as the preferred, if not exclusive, term for this branch of Levantine archaeology in the West by William G. Dever and others. Israeli archaeologists refer to the discipline in He brew as the archaeology of Eretz Israel ("the Land of Is rael"), or in English as biblical archaeology (although not in the American theological sense). Jordanian archaeologists, often refer to their region in terms of die archaeology of bilad ash-Sham ("southern Syria"). Finally, beyond die question of modern Middle Eastern and Western sensibilities, there is the question of historical and cultural suitability. Southcentral Syria and Palestine did indeed constitute a relatively homogeneous cultural entity in certain periods, such as die Middle and Late Bronze Ages—the zenith of the Canaanite era—and the classical (Greco-Roman and Byzantine) pe riod, but not during the floruit of the petty states that divided up the area in the Iron Age. Even in periods of cultural unity, Palestine was largely a province of Syria and less sophisti cated culturally. Nevertheless, the term Syria-Palestine does commend itself, not only for being the most neutral with regard to contemporary ideology and politics, but also for comparative purposes and for placing discussions in broader perspective. No alternative constructions—"Lev antine archaeology" or "the archaeology of the southern Le vant"—have any currency at present. Certainly "biblical archaeology," as a pars pro tolo designation, is passe; "SyroPalestinian archaeology" has better credentials by far. The name Syria is sometimes derived from the Semitic Sirion, used in parallel in the Hebrew Bible for Mt. Hermon in southern Syria. The term—more properly, however—is Greek (Suria). It probably first occurs in 472 BCE, in Aes-
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chylus's Persae, and again in Herodotus's Histories (c. 440 BCE). In the Hellenistic period, Coele Syria comes to refer to die area between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River. This region later becomes the Roman province of Syria—"Syria" in New Testament usage. The name Syria does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, except in the Septuagint, which naturally uses the Greek Suria. The English ren dering "Syria" in various translations is in fact a mistransla tion of the Hebrew 'dram (Akk., Aramu). This was the only portion of Syria known to the biblical writers—the contem porary Iron Age Aramean kingdoms in the Damascus area and southern Syria around the fringes of the desert. Even in the Bronze Age, Syria was not unified, and therefore its bor ders cannot be precisely fixed. The term Canaan seems to be first attested in die fifteenth-fourteenth centuries BCE, in both cuneiform and Egyptian sources. The Egyptians, how ever, more often referred to the general area in Late Bronze Age/New Kingdom times as kharu, "die Land of die Hur rians," or Upper Retenu, including northern Palestine and Syria. In the Middle Bronze Age, the common Egyptian term for southern Syria and Palestine was "the Land of the Sasu ("sand dwellers"); in Mesopotamian texts it is "the Land of the Amurru [Amorites]." It is an instance of historical irony that the term Palestine derives transparentiy from the Philistines (Heb., pilistim; Egyp., plst), latecomers who inhabited the coast of Canaan only after about 1200 BCE and never displaced the Israelites inland. The term enters the literature when Greek sailors and geographers encountered the descendants of the Phil istines (recently identified archaeologically as Neo-Philistines) along die southern Phoenician coast. The first known such reference is in Herodotus (fifth century BCE), who speaks of the inhabitants from die Carmel coast to Gaza as "Syrians, called Palestinoi." The Romans adopted the term for southern Syria, formerly called Judea, after the revolt of 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 CE. In the fourth century they divided the area into Palaestina prima, secunda, and tenia. The name Palestine was perpetuated by Byzantine Christians, as an alternative to Terra Sancta or the Holy Land; after the Muslim conquest the name was arabized to Filastin (eastern Palestine becom ing known as Urdunn). Throughout the Turkish period and the subsequent British Mandate, the name Palestine per sisted for the region, until the partition of the area in 1948 as the modern states of Israel and Jordan. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aharoni, Yohanan. The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography. Phil adelphia, 1 9 6 7 . Dever, William G. Archaeology and Biblical Studies: Retrospects and Pros pects. Evanston, 111., 1 9 7 4 . Noth, Martin. The Old Testament World. Translated by Victor I. Gruhn. Philadelphia, 1 9 6 6 . Pitard, Wayne T. Ancient Damascus. Winona Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 7 . WILLIAM G . DEVER
TA'ANACH) site located on the southwest flank of the Jezreel plain about 8 km (5 mi.) southeast of Megiddo. Al though springs are common along die fault line, none flowed near the site; in about 1700 BCE, cisterns were commonly used at the site. Ta'anach was first excavated by Ernst Sellin for the University of Vienna (1902-1904), who worked largely on the northern half of the tell. The later expedition, a joint venture of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, led by Paul W. Lapp (1963-1968), focused on its southwest quadrant. Lapp's work contributed to what is known about the site's fortification history and about die site in the Early Bronze period, both of which had eluded the earlier excavation. Of the seven biblical references to Ta'anach, die best known is Judges 5:19, in which Deborah and Barak are said to have fought the Canaanites "at Ta'anach, by the waters of Me giddo." Though Ta'anach was assigned to Manasseh (Jos. 17:12), that tribe was unable to conquer it (Jg. 1:27). In the tenth century the town was said to be in the fifth adminis trative district of Solomon (1 Kgs. 4:12). Additional biblical references are found in Joshua 12:21, 17:2, 21:25; Judges 1:28; and 1 Chronicles 7:29. The archaeology of the site shows that it has been in ex istence since about 2700 BCE, although with significant gaps in its history. The heavily fortified E B town, which existed until about 2300 BCE, experienced a major rebuilding of its defenses on die southern slope. Modesdy reoccupied in the eighteenth century BCE, Ta'anach developed into an impor tant service center. This is reflected in archaeological evi dence for a metallurgical industry, which is also alluded to in an Akkadian cuneiform tablet found on die site (Glock, 1971, letter 2:8, 19). Ta'anach may have suffered at die hands of Thutmosis III in 1468 BCE, but it seems to have survived into the fourteenth century. An eighteenth-dynasty Egyptian document refers to Ta'anach as a source of maryanu (warriors) provided for the Egyptian court. The name lists of several tablets indicate that at that time the Ta'anach community was polyethnic. The possible reference to Ta'anach in Amarna tablet 248 remains a debated restora tion. A small alphabetic cuneiform tablet, interpreted by Delbert L . Hillers (1964) as a receipt for grain, suggests that
the site was reoccupied in the twelfth century. On the basis of the 8 percent of the site Lapp excavated, its Iron Age occupation was sparse but continued into the fifth century BCE. A substantial cult stand recovered from a tenth-century context reflects older Canaanite religious traditions. Ta'anach is listed among the towns conquered by Shishak, founder of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty, in 918 BCE. The interpretation of a sttucture as cultic that produced a cache of artifacts in situ, including a figurine mold, has been challenged but seems sound. Little of the Roman-Byzantine town has been excavated, but the site then is described as a "very large village" in the fourth-century CE Onomasticon of Eusebius. It appears that the mosque in the modern village rests on Byzantine foundations. Archaeological evidence documents limited occupation during the tenth and twelfththirteendi centuries CE. In the latter period, "Tannoch" was indentured to the Monastery of St. Mary in Jerusalem. Sellin excavated a twenty-five-room compound dating to this pe riod on the tell. Ottoman tax records of die late sixteenth century reveal a small setdement tiiat was recently (19851987) partially excavated by Albert E, Glock on the tell's northeast slope. The site was abandoned in the early eigh teenth-century; the modern village was established in the mid-nineteenth century. [See also the biographies of Lapp and Sellin.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Glock, Albert E. "A New Ta'annek Tablet." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 204 (1971): 17-30. Hillers, Delbert R, "An Alphabetic Cuneiform Tablet from Ta'anach (TT 433)." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 173 (i9
Lapp, Paul. "The 1963 Excavations at Ta'annek." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 173 (1964): 4-44. Lapp, Paul. "The 1966 Excavations at Ta'annek." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 185 (1967): 2-39. Lapp, Paul. "The 1968 Excavations at Ta'annek." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 195 (1969): 2-49. Rast, Walter E. Ta'anach I: Studies in the Iron Age Pottery. Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 7 8 . Sellin, Ernst. Tell Ta'annek. Vienna, 1904. Sellin, Ernst. Bine Nachlese auf dem Tell Ta'annek in Paldslina. 2 vols. Vienna, 1905. ALBERT E. GLOCK
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TABGHA
TABGHA (Ar., et-Tabgha, a version of tlie Greek name Heptapegon, "seven springs"), site located on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, 3 km (2 mi.) west of Capernaum (32°52' N , 30°32' E; map reference 2017 X 2532). The an cient remains and an impressive modern reconsttuction of the church that commemorates die miracle of the loaves and fishes (Mt. 14:14 and parallels) and two other small chapels are found at Tabgha. The one to the north, probably dedi cated to the Sermon on the Mount (Ml. 5), was excavated by Bellarmino Bagatti and includes a chapel with several rooms around it, dated to the Byzantine period. T o the south, on die rocky lake shore, are die remains of a very small chapel excavated by Bagatti and Stanislao Loffreda (1981), dated to the Byzantine and Crusader periods. The chapel probably memorializes the postresurrection appear ance of Jesus to Simon Peter (Jn. 2 1 ) . The most important building at Tabgha was the Church of the Loaves and Fishes. The site was excavated in 1 9 1 1 by Karge and then in 1932 by Mader and A. M. Schneider (1934). In 1936 Schneider uncovered the earlier chapel and in 1979-1980 Renate Rosenthal and Malka Hershkovitz, for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, carried out some probes in the eastern part of the church (Rosenthal and Hershkovitz, 1980). The first chapel was built in the midfourth century and is one of the earliest churches in the Gal ilee, It is a single-apsed, one-room structure (15.5 X 9.5 m) with tiiree pilasters on each side. It is possible that this is the site mentioned by the fourth-century Christian pilgrim Egeria as the place of the miracle of the "loaves and fishes." She describes only an altar without mentioning a large church, however. At the end of the fiftii century a large basilical church was erected, surrounded by rows of rooms on the south, north, and west. The entire complex is 56 m long and 33 m wide. The church itself (25 X 19 m) has a transept hall. The chan cel screen not only separated the bema from the rest of the church, but also the entrances to the pastophoria on botii sides of the apse. In die center of the bema, in front of the altar, a mosaic depicts a basket of bread, stamped with a cross, symbolizing the "loaves." A large stone, once part of the earlier phase of the apse, was considered a relic, probably believed to be the mensa Christi ("altar used by Christ"). Two Greek inscriptions were found, one on die bema and the other at the door to the prothesis, that give the name of the mosaic maker and probably die name of Martyrius, the patriarch of Jerusalem from 478 to 486. In one of the rooms to the north, parts of olive presses were found. The southern wing of the complex was badly ruined, but it is possible tiiat it contained more rooms. This wing and the existence of an oil press might identify this part of the complex as a mon astery, rather than just a pilgrims' church. [See also Basilica; Churches; Monasteries; Mosaics; and the biography of Bagatti]
BIBLIOGRAPHY Loffreda, Stanislao. Scavi di et-Tabgha: Relazionefinaledella campagna di scavi 2$ marzc—20 giugno 1060. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Minor, 7. Jerusalem, 1970. Loffreda, Stanislao. The Sanctuaries of Tabgha. 2d ed. Jerusalem, 1981. Less technical presentation than the above volume. Pixner, Bargil. "The Miracles Church at Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee." Biblical Archaeologist 48 (1985): 196-206. Good illustrations of the ancient and modern churches. Rosendial, Renate, and Malka Hershkovitz. "Tabgha." Israel Explora tion Journal 30 (1980): 207. Schneider, A. M. The Church of the Multiplying of the leaves and Pishes at Tabgha on the Sea of Gennesaret and Its Mosaics. London, 1937. Translation of the original German edition (Paderborn, 1934). Shenhav, Dodo J. "Loaves and Fishes Mosaic near Sea of Galilee Re stored." Biblical Archaeology Review 10.3 (1984): 2 2 - 3 1 . MORDECHAI AVIAM
TABLET. The clay tablet was in use for three millennia (although in different chronological distributions), the car rier par excellence for cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, Elam and southeastern Iran, Syria, Asia Minor, and Arme nia. More tablets by far have been recovered than other in cised or stamped clay objects such as cones, cylinders, prisms, terra cottas, sealings on vessels, or bricks; or in scribed objects in other materials, such as stone or metal. Tablet is a catch-all term used to refer to quite divergent forms: in longitudinal section, the tablet may be dislike, plano-convex, or lenticular. Viewed from above, it may be rectangular or square, with more or less rounded corners or, more rarely, oval or circular. Formats vary diachronically, but sometimes complement the type of text. School "exer cise" tablets from the first half of the second millennium BCE frequently are round, as is a special kind of field survey tablet dating to the third dynasty at Ur (twenty-first century BCE). Tablets stored on shelves, like modern books, as is attested in the Ebla archives in northern Syria (twenty-fourth cen tury BCE), of course required flat edges. From earliest times, botii sides of a tablet could be in scribed. When switching from the obverse to the reverse, the tablet was turned longitudinally—not like the pages of a book. From the Akkad period (twenty-fourtii-twenty-third centuries BCE) onward, scribes, after filling the obverse, sometimes, to save space, used its lower edge and then con tinued onto its back. After filling the reverse, they sometimes inscribed the upper edge and, finally, the space still available on the tablet's left edge. The right edge received the ends of lines (eitiier of the obverse or of the reverse) the scribe had been unable to include for lack of space. Indenting a line was common practice, but the enjambment (hyphenation) of part of a word or of a phrase was quite unusual. Clay tablets come in a great variety of sizes. Tiny "mem oranda" measure only 1.6 X 1.6 cm; the largest administra tive tablet found at Ebla measures 36 X 33 cm. The height
TABLET
'"Vi'-'t'
LlJj^_-iL^JL_i_j 5 C M TABLET. Cuneiform tablet, Tell Hadidi. A Late Bronze Age record of the sale of a house. (Courtesy Rudolph Dornemann)
of the individual signs, too, varied. The average height for Old Babylonian letters is 4-5 mm, but there are specimens of microscopic tablets: the "library on a postcard" from Old Babylonian Isin is a postcard-sized tablet containing five col umns on its obverse and six on its reverse and about 770 lines of literary text; the average height of a sign is only 1.7 mm. [See Ebla; Isin.] In the earliest examples, die surface of a clay tablet was divided into rectangular "cases" (rectangles marked off in the clay with a stylus). From die end of die tiiird millennium onward, die use of cases was gradually abandoned and texts became linear, often set off by ruled lines. Normally, a case or line contained a text sense unit (a phrase or a whole sen tence). Larger tablets were divided into as many columns as were necessary to adapt the text to die format of die tablet. The "classical" version of the Gilgamesh epic, for example, consists of tablets with three columns each on die obverse and reverse. Apart from die usual clay tablet, wood or ivory boards covered with a layer of wax are attested from die second half of the second millennium BCE onward. Original wax tablets have been recovered at Nimrud (ancient Calah), dating to the Neo-Assyrian period. Wax, as a receiver of incised cu neiform script, being similar to wet clay, may have been used far more frequently than can be proven. Because wax is so
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perishable, few traces can be expected to have survived, whereas clay tablets, even unbaked tablets, are nearly indestructable as long as they are not exposed to humidity leading to salinity. Toward die end of the third millennium BCE tablets—usu ally of legal content, but also of letters—were provided with a "case," or an "envelope," also of clay, on which the text of the "inner" tablet was repeated or resumed. This device prevented falsification of the wording and, especially, of number signs involving amounts of silver or other commod ities relative to a transaction. A document could then only be opened by brealdng the case in the presence of judges and/or witnesses. Apart from receiving cuneiform writing, clay tablets were also a suitable surface on which to apply stamp seals or to roll cylinder seals in developing testimony in a legal or an administrative transaction. Many specimens of Mesopota mian glyptic art are in fact known not from the original seal ing instruments, but from their "first impressions" on clay. The long use of cuneiform tablets was certainly the result of the interdependence of the type of writing and the ma terial, in addition to the fact that clay was both inexpensive and ubiquitous. There are rare and very late examples of clay tablets used for Greek script (the so-called Greco-Babyloniaca) during the first century BCE and/or CE. When in Mesopotamia the Akkadian language was gradually replaced by Aramaic, which was normally written on ostraca and pa pyrus, the practice of writing on clay tablets fell into disuse. The last dated cuneiform tablet is from die year 78 CE. In the context of the Near East, writing on tablets is best known for the primary Mesopotamian languages and those of neighboring areas: Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hur rian, and Hittite, However, the medium was also used for other languages of Asia Minor and for Urartian as well as, in different script, for languages farther removed (e.g., Ugaritic, Linear A and B)—some still essentially undeciphered (e.g., Linear A, Cypro-Minoan). Whereas Ugaritic and Old Persian each created a cuneiform script imitating SumeroAkkadian syllabograms, the Aegean scripts were linear, as was Aramaic, which occasionally appears as glosses to Ak kadian (Neo-Assyrian) cuneiform. [See also Cuneiform; Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing and Writing Systems; and Writing Materials. In ad dition, the languages discussed above are the subject of indepen dent entries (e.g., Akkadian, Sumerian).] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Edzard, Dietz 0 . "Keilschrift (Parts 1 2 - 1 4 ) . " In Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 5 , pp. 5 6 5 - 5 6 8 . Berlin, 1 9 7 6 - . Maul, Stefan. "Neues zu den Graeco-Babyloniaca." Zeitschrifl fiirAssyriologie und VorderasialischeArchdologie 8 1 (1991): 8 7 - 1 0 7 . Payton, Robert. "The Ulu Burun Writing-Board Set." Anatolian Stud ies 4 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 9 9 - 1 0 6 .
Sollberger, Edmond. "Graeco-Babyloniaca." Iraq 2 4 ( 1 9 6 2 ) : 6 3 - 7 2 . Symington, D. "Late Bronze Age Writing Boards and Their Uses: Tex-
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Rial Evidence from Anatolia and Syria." Anatolian Studies 4 1
(1991):
111-123.
Warnok, P., and Pendleton, M. "The Wood of the Ulu Burun Dip tych." Anatolian Studies 4 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 0 0 - 1 1 0 . Wilke, Clans. "Schrift und Literaair." In Der Alle Orient: Geschichte und Kultur des alien Vorderasien, edited by Barthel Hrouda, pp. 2 7 2 2 9 7 . Munich, 1 9 9 1 . Includes excellent illustrations of tablets. DlETZ O. EDZARD
TABOR, MOUNT, peak rising 588 m above sea level in the midst of the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel (map reference 186 X 232). It is the scene of some of the most dramatic events in the Bible, such as the clash on the border of diree Israelite tribes (Jos. 19), the battle between Deborah and Siserah (Jgs. 4), and the Transfiguration of Jesus (Mt. 1 7 : 1 - 1 3 and parallels). At the crest of the mountain, above early remains, a mon umental church was erected in the early twentieth century, on the same plan as a former Crusader church, whose ex cavation was never properly published. The earliest remains are the walls surrounding the summit, which enclose an area of about 75 acres. A survey and a small probe carried out by Mordechai Aviam in 1984 for the Society for the Protec tion of Nature in Israel revealed Hellenistic sherds at the foundations of the walls. The walls may be tire remains of the Hellenistic fortifications mentioned as Ataburion by Polybius (Hist. 5.70.6.12) during the Syrian Wars, in the reign of Antiochus II, in 218 BCE. It is unclear whether there was a town on the summit then or only a large fortress. There is no doubt, however, that the same wall was referred to by Josephus Flavius when he wrote about "fortifying" the mountain in forty days ( War 4.1.8). The fort was conquered by Roman ttoops after a brief battle at die end of the war in Galilee in 67 CE. [See First Jewish Revolt.] At the beginning of the Byzantine period the mountain became a holy place associated with the ttadition of die Transfiguration of Jesus. Literary sources attest to three churches built on the summit to commemorate the three tabernacles mentioned in the New Testament (for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus). Remains of Byzantine construction have been found under the Crusader buildings. Evidence of mo nastic life was found by Bagatti in underground chambers, including a cross and Greek letters in red paint on white plaster. According to a ninth-century monk, Epiphanius, 4,340 steps cut into the rock led to the top of the mountain; some of these were unearthed during construction of the modern church (Wilkinson, 1977, P)I 2 1
In n o i a church and a Benedictine monastery were built on top of Mt. Tabor by die order of Tancred, the prince of Galilee, beside the Greek church that had probably been there since the Byzantine period. The monastery built in 1888 and the church built in 1919 covered the remains of the Crusader and Byzantine structures.
Under the Ayyubids a large fortress was built, in opposi tion to the Crusader capital in the coastal city of Akko. [See Akko.] The work started in 1209 and ended about five years later. In 1 2 1 7 the Crusaders failed to take the fortress; it was ruined by the Arabs themselves in the same year. The re mains of tiiis fortress are the most substantial on the moun tain today. [See also Churches; Crusader Period; and Monasteries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bagatti, Bellarmino. "Una grotta bizantina sul Monte Tabor." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiberAnnuus 2 7 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 1 1 9 - 1 2 2 . Loffreda, Stanislao. "Una tomba romana al Monte Tabor." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 2 8 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 2 4 1 - 2 4 6 . Wilkinson, John. Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades. Warminster, 1 9 7 7 . Contains a translation of the itinerary of the monk Epiphanius. MORDECHAI AVIAM
TABUN, cave formed in the limestone of the western face of the Mt. Carmel promontory, approximately 18 km ( 1 1 mi.) south of Haifa, Israel, about 53 m above modern sea level (32°4o' N , 34°59' E). The cave overlooks a narrow coastal plain and the mouth of Wadi el-Mughara (Nahal Me'arot). The Mediterranean shore lies some 4 km (2.5 mi.) to die west. Mediterranean woodlands, largely composed of pine and scrub oaks, dominate the surrounding uplands; grasses and marsh plants formed the pristine vegetation of the coastal plain prior to modern agricultural activities. Ex cavations at Mugharat et-Tabun (Ar., "cave of the oven") have revealed one of the most extensive Lower and Middle Paleolithic industrial successions in die Near East. Because of its scope and detail, the Tabun stratigraphic column has come to serve as the principal reference for comparing early Upper Pleistocene artifactual, paleoclimatic, and chronometric sequences in the region. The recovery of Neander thal remains from the cave's Mousterian horizon, coupled with die presence of anatomically modern human remains in Mousterian layers at nearby sites, further contributes to Tabun's importance as a key to understanding human biocultural evolution during the Upper Pleistocene. The initial excavations were carried out between 1929 and 1934 by a joint expedition of the British School of Archae ology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research under the direction of Dorothy A. E . Garrod. Ex cavations were resumed at the cave in 1967 and continued through 1973 by the University of Arizona under the direc tion of Arthur J . Jelinek. Since 1973, work at Tabun has continued through the University of Haifa under the super vision of Avraham Ronen. The plan of the cave consists of a large, exposed outer chamber and a smaller, enclosed inner chamber. The roofs of both chambers collapsed in antiquity. A high arch in the
TANNUR, KHIRBET ETcliff face is a remnant of the outer chamber; a roof fall in the inner chamber left a large chimney that opens in the hill above the cave. Within a deposit some 25 m thick, Garrod's excavations exposed six Paleolithic layers: basal Tayacian, layer G; Late Acheulean, layer F; Acheulo-Yabrudian, layer E; Lower Levalloiso-Mousterian, layers D and C; and Upper Levalloiso-Mousterian, layer B (Garrod and Bate, 1937). Jelinek's investigation, confined to a lo-meter-section corresponding to Garrod's strata B - E and F, defined more than eighty-five geological beds in fourteen stratigraphic units. In following the natural stratigraphy of die deposit rather than arbitrary horizontal levels, Jelinek and his colleagues were able to trace episodes of accumulation, nondeposition, and collapse of sediments into underlying solution cavities (Jelinek et a l , 1973). In recovering more than forty-four thousand artifacts from the approximately 90 cu m of excavated sediment, Je linek was able to trace in detail the artifact succession within the Tabun deposit. Within units XIV (Garrod's layer G ) and XIII-XI (Garrod's layer E ) , he defined the Mugharan tradition, composed of three facies: Yabrudian, Acheulean, and Amudian. These are distinguished artifactually by rel atively high frequencies of scrapers (Yabrudian), bifaces (Acheulean), and Upper Paleolithic elements, especially prismatic blades (Amudian). The Mugharan tradition shows a smooth transition into the overlying Levantine Mousterian horizon, as defined from upper unit Xl-unit I. Following Garrod's initial cultural-stratigraphic partitions, the Levantine Mousterian succession consists of a D-type industry characterized by elongated Levallois points and blades; a G-type indusu-y largely based on broad-oval Lev allois flakes; and a B-type industry containing broad-based, "chapeau de gendarme," points. Since Garrod's initial research, evidence from the thick deposit at Tabun has been used for paleoclimatic recon structions. Although the climatic implications of the classic Dama-Gazella curve developed by Garrod's colleague, Do rothea M. A. Bate, has been largely discredited, it undoubt edly inspired subsequent work. Based primarily on the geostratigraphy and sediment analysis of tire cave's deposit in conjunction with palynological results, Jelinek's team traced a sequence of events thought to correspond to the global temperature oscillations and attendant fluctuations in sea level that sttetched from oxygen isotope stages 5e~3. Such a sequence suggests that the basal unit XIV was deposited within the last interglacial, some 1 2 0 - 1 3 0 years ago. [See Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.] Considerable controversy surrounds the absolute dating of Tabun, however. If accurate, the recent electron spin res onance (ESR) dates on teeth would push much of the se quence (layers D - G ) back beyond interglacial times. Aside from substantial internal variability in the dates, they fail to
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fit the traditionally held chronology for Mediterranean ma rine transgressions, or that developed for micro vertebrates. Clearly, more dates are needed to resolve the problem. In the initial excavation, Garrod recovered a partial skel eton of a female Neanderthal from either layer C or B, along with a damaged mandible of indeterminate taxonomic affin ity from layer C. The presence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens remains from the nearby sites of Skhul and Qafzeh, in association with Mousterian industries similar to those at Tabun, suggests that the two hominid taxa may have been partially coeval within the Levant. The recent chronometry of the deposits even suggests that anatomically modern populations were indigenous to the region prior to a Neanderthal immigration from southeastern Europe some sixty thousand-ninety thousand years ago. [See also Carmel Caves; and the biography of Garrod.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Garrod, Dorothy A. E., and Dorothea M. A. Bate. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: Excavations at the Wady al-Mughara. Oxford, 1 9 3 7 . Initial report of the Tabun excavation, artifact, and faunal analyses. Jelinek, Artiiur J., et al. "New Excavations at the Tabun Cave, Mount Carmel, Israel, 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 2 : A Preliminary Report." Paleoricnt 1 . 2 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 1 5 1 - 1 8 3 . Interim report on the findings of the new excava tions, with sections on archaeology, geostratigraphy and sediments, and pollen. Jelinek, Arthur J. "The Middle Paleolithic in the Southern Levant from the Perspective of Tabun Cave." In Prihistoire du ljtvant: Chronologic et organisation de I'espace depuis las origines jusqu'au Vie millenaire, edited by Jacques Cauvin and Paul Sanlaville, pp. 2 6 5 - 2 8 0 . Paris, 1981.
Jelinek, Arthur J, "The Tabun Cave and Paleolithic Man in the Le vant." Science 2 1 6 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 1 3 6 9 - 1 3 7 5 . Summarizes many of the re sults of the new excavations at Tabun, focusing on the correlations between trends in artifacts and paleoclimatic oscillations. Jelinek, Arthur J. "The Amudian in the Context of the Mugharan Tra dition at the Tabun Cave (Mount Carmel), Israel." In The Emergence of Modern Humans, edited by Paul Mellars, pp. 8 1 - 9 0 . Edinburgh, 1990.
Jelinek, Arthur J. "Problems in the Chronology of the Middle Paleolithic and the First Appearance of Early Modern Homo sapiens in South west Asia." In The Evolution and Dispersal ofModern Humans in Asia, edited by Takeru Akazawa et al„ pp. 2 5 3 - 2 7 5 . Tokyo, 1 9 9 2 . Review of the chronometry of Middle Paleolithic deposits in the Levant. McCown, Theodore D., and Arthur Keith. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, vol. 2 , The Fossil Human Remains from the Levalloiso-Mous terian. Oxford, 1 9 3 9 . Original description of the fossil hominids re covered from Tabun and Skhul. DONALD O . HENRY
TANNUR, KHIRBET ET-, Nabatean temple lo cated in southern Transjordan on a desolated summit, 704 m above sea level (map reference 2175 X 0421). The site overlooks Wadi el-Hasa, about 400 m below, southeast of the Dead Sea; it is close to the King's Highway and is 7 km (4 mi.) north of another temple, Khirbet edh-Dharih, in
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Wadi La'ban. Shordy after he carried out a preliminary sur vey there, Nelson Glueck directed an excavation in 1937 for the American Schools of Oriental Research and the De partment of Antiquities of Transjordan. The architect Clar ence S. Fisher drew its plan and reconstruction (see figure 1 ) . Most of the sculpture from the temple is exhibited in the Jordan Archaeological Museum and at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Since its excavation the site has been vandalized. The temple (40 X 48 m) occupies all of the flat summit, accessed on the east by a steep path. Its eastern facade was decorated with four engaged columns with Nabatean capi tals. The eastern, or outer, court is almost square (15.68 X 15.47 ) - The temple's paved floor slopes to the southeast, where shallow channels open to the outside. An altar stood in the northeast corner, and porticoes on the north and south sides, built on a two-step-high podium, opened onto one long triclinium on the south and to two square ones on die north, with an additional one on the northern exterior—all used for banquets by pilgrims. There are unspecified rooms on both sides on the western half of the paved court. There, a temenos, entered on the east via a monumental gate, is enclosed by walls decorated with four pilasters; a small door opened on the south. On the top of the walls Glueck recon structed a series of busts of Greco-Roman divinities and of Nikes (Victories), and above the gate a semicircular relief of a vegetation goddess among leaves and fruit, topped by an eagle (Glueck, 1965). Inside the temenos a square, monu mental altar in the form of a small shrine (3.5 X 3.5 m in its last stage) was erected; its three phases give the temple's relative chronological sequence (see below). Two small of m
fering boxes containing burnt remains of sacrifices were hid den under the pavement in front of the altar. There are no remains of the supposed earlier Edomite high place. Phase I consisted of a square construction (1.5 X 1.5 m and 1.75 m high) with Nabatean tooling on the outside; it was found filled with layers of ash and plaster. A low wall surrounded the sacred space. Not long before phase II, a pavement was laid over a stepped surface tiiat produced sherds of find Nabatean ware. The phase II altar was erected around the original one, but a false door decorated with friezes of rosettes and thunderbolts now adorned the east face; the two cult statues were placed inside this narrow space, according to the excavator's reconstruction. A stair way springing from the north side led to the top of the mon umental altar. During phase III, a new enclosing altar was built around the one from phase II; its pilasters were deco rated on each side with six busts of veiled goddesses emerg ing from a conchlike rosette; among them were a grain god dess and a fish goddess; vine and acantiius leaves decorated die doorjambs. A new staircase was added on the west side. The Russian doll structure of this monumental altar was probably the result of reconstructions after earthquake dam age. Glueck attributed the sanctuary to Hadad and his consort Atargatis on grounds of the iconography (symbols of power and fertility). Jean Starcky (1968), however, pointed outthat the only divine name found in the inscriptions was Qos, the Edomite god, and suggested a cultic relationship with the volcanic summit across Wadi el-Hasa. It may be that in the Nabatean period the old Edomite divinities were depicted
Figure I . Plan of the site. (Courtesy ASOR/Nelson Glueck Archive—Semitic Museum, Harvard University)
TANNUR, KHIRBET ET-.
TAURUS MOUNTAINS in the form of the popular divine couple of Hierapolis, Hadad and Atargatis. The sanctuary was an important pil grimage center, as evidenced by several offering altars and incense burners, sherds of Nabatean cups, offering debris, as well as by the triclinia. [See Incense.] According to Glueck, phase I lasted from about 100 BCE to approximately 25 or 10 BCE. He dated phase II by a Na batean inscription to shortiy before 7 BCE and attributed to tiiis period most of die temple building, as well as a hypo thetical temenos facade with Nabatean pilasters. He dated phase III to the first quarter of the second century CE, and attributed to it all of die decor on the temenos facade (Glueck, 1965). These dates have been contested. Michael Avi-Yonah assigned the sculptures from Tannur to the reign of Aretas IV (Avi-Yonah, 1981). Starcky, reexamining the dating of the temple and some of its reconstruction, attrib uted the entire building to phase II, at the turn of the cen tury—except for the central altar shrine; he suggested the possibility of a cella radier than a central altar. Judith McKenzie attributed phase II to the end of die first century CE and distinguished a phase IIA. Fawzi Zayadine distin guished a Greco-Syrian and a Hellenistic-Parthian style that differs from McKenzie's classification. The fine Nabatean sherds under the pavement of the temenos do suggest a pe riod II date of the end of the first century, and thus a later chronology: phase I could be contemporary with the dated inscription (7 BCE). Successive building programs probably lasted for decades, with some overlapping, and involved dif ferent workshops; consequently, stylistic variations should be used cautiously for dating. Sculptures of similar styles to tiiat of Tannur are found at Khirbet edh-Dharih and at Petra. An earthquake destroyed the temple, probably in 363, and the site was abandoned. It was reoccupied by Byzantine squatters, probably looking for reusable materials. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; Hasa, Wadi el-; Nabateans; Temples, article on Syro-Palestihian Temples; and the biography of Fisher.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Avi-Yonah, Michael. "Oriental Art in Roman Palestine." In Avi-Yonah's Art in Ancient Palestine: Selected Studies, pp. 1 1 9 - 2 1 1 , pis. 2 3 3 0 . Jerusalem, 1 9 8 1 . Landmark study on Nabatean art, originally published in 1 9 6 1 , which develops die concept of "orientalizing" art, Glueck, Nelson. Deities and Dolphins: The Story of the Nabataeans. New York, 1 9 6 5 . Synthesis of Nabatean civilization focused on Khirbet et-Tannur; replaces the final report, aldiough the preliminary reports provide useful additional information. Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 7 0 . General presentation of Glueck's survey in Transjor dan, widi a concise description of the temple of Khirbet et-Tannur. McKenzie, Judith. "The Development of Nabataean Sculpture at Petra and Khirbet Tannur." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 2 0 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 8 1 - 1 0 7 , ug 5 . Recent work on Nabatean sculpture critiquing Glueck's three phases of the temple building; based on a detailed stylistic analysis. Starcky, Jean. "Le temple nabateen de Khirbet Tannur: A propos d'un s
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livre recent." Revue Biblique 7 5 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 2 0 6 - 2 3 5 , pis. 1 5 - 2 0 . Pene trating critique of Glueck's Deities and Dolphins, challenging many of his conclusions. Zayadine, Fawzi. "Sculpture in Ancient Jordan," In The Art of Jordan: Treasures from an Ancient iMnd, edited by Piotr Bienkowski, pp. 5 1 5 7 . Liverpool, 1 9 9 1 . Includes a short classification of Khirbet etTannur's sculptural styles. MARIE-JEANNE ROCHE
TAURUS MOUNTAINS. A major mountain range running east-west along the southern coast of Turkey, the Taurus mountains integrate with and continue as die AntiTaurus in the eastern part of Turkey, The mountains were the arena for some of the most important transformations in history, including plant and animal domestication. Wild forms of wheat and domesticable fauna are plentiful in the foothills even today. The Taurus Mountains are also an area in which innovative technology in metals took place. Long assumed to be the "silver mountains" of Hittite and Akka dian legends, the range abounds with extensive cedar forests and polymetallic ore deposits. This area is particularly ore rich because it is a tectonic zone of plate contact between the Arabian and Asian blocks. Silver, lead, copper, gold, iron, and tin are among some of the mineralizations within these mountains and are ascertained to have been mined as far back as the Chalcolidiic period. Native copper and mal achite beads found at Aceramic Neolithic sites such as Cayonu and Asikh also indicate that these minerals were rec ognized and exploited as far back as the eighth millennium BCE.
The mountains also provided the natural barrier through which major trade routes (and at times armies) passed from the lowland agriculturally rich settlements. The Taurus highlands have abundant raw materials, some of which are lacking in the neighboring Levant and Mesopotamia. The earliest procurement of vital raw materials, such as flint, and decorative items, such as shells, pigments, and colored stones, began in the Paleolitiiic period. Upper Paleolithic sites such as the Karain cave near Antalya in die Taurus range have yielded stone tools from materials ttansported over great distances. A later (Neolitiiic and Chalcolithic pe riods, c. 7000-3000 BCE), but similar, situation is evident with reciprocal exchange (i.e., barter), which dispersed ob sidian, obtained in the volcanic zone just north of the Tau rus, over long distances. In die ensuing millennia, a highly complex form of trade established the early second-millen nium BCE Assyrian trading colonies. [See Assyrians.] In later periods a flow of goods connected Anatolian highland and lowland resource areas as well as neighboring regions. Trade has often been singled out as an overriding cause of cultural change or social developments. In this view the evolution of complex, large-scale trading networks stimu lated the growth of urban society. Areas lacking such raw materials as metal, timber, and building stones established
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methods of obtaining them. In time, this exchange became so large-scale, it necessitated an administrative organization to control the provisioning, production, and distribution of goods. Those in managerial positions thereby had access to a major source of wealth in the community and their power extended to other aspects of society. Whether trade was a prime mover or a consequence of developmental processes, it assuredly played a major role in the region of tire Taurus Mountains. K. Aslihan Yener and Hadi Ozbal (1986) have conducted several surveys in the central Taurus mountains in conjunc tion with a series of ore-sampling regimes for lead isotope analysis aimed at defining the social and economic organi zation of metal exchange in Southwestern Asia. The survey aimed to disclose broad regional and interregional patterns of trade and settlement. From 1983 to 1986, archaeological surveys located more than forty-one sites dating from the Paleolithic through the Turkish Republican period (1925-). A majority of the sites are found on the summits of hills or terraced off the slopes leading into the valley proper. Middle Paleolithic flint tools and implements of ground-stone, ob sidian, and greenstone celts, which mark aceramic settle ments, were found in the valley. In the flatter, intermontane valleys, large settlements were found on mound formations such as Porsuk, which dates to the second millennium BCE and later. Several important mines were located at Bolkardag, in a valley 15 km (9 mi.) long (approximately 40 km [25 mi.] from the strategic Cilician Gates) that passes through the Taurus mountains. The ores are polymetallic and a number of dikes are visible. Natural processes and mining activities have created many very irregular caves, cavities, and tunnels in the mountain range, some of which penetrate the moun tain for up to 4 km (2.5 mi.). The range is known as an important source of silver and gold; recent analyses taken from high-altitude veins also revealed high trace levels of tin in a galena-sphalerite ore. Because this form of tin was rel atively rare, the more common form, cassiterite, was searched for in the Taurus area and located by the Turkish Geological Survey (MTA) near Camardi, 40 km (25 mi.) to the north, at Kestel mine. The major evidence that Bolkardag ores were used from the Chalcolithic period through the Iron Age stems from lead isotope data. Isotope ratios of lead can be used to char acterize sources and objects because lead ores differ from one another in their isotopic compositions from mining re gion to mining region. They are "fingerprints" with which to compare isotopic ratios derived from artifact samples. The Early Bronze Age correlations are especially informa tive. Silver jewelry from Troy and silver- and copper-based artifacts from Tell Selenkahiyeh, Hassek, Tell Leilan, and Mahmatlar in Syria and Anatolia are a few examples of crafts and sites using Taurus ores. [See Leilan, Tell] Late Bronze Age artifacts such as a silver stag from Mycenae,
lead net sinkers from the Kas-Uluburun shipwreck [SeeUluburun], and correlations to Cypriot lead indicate that mar itime trade connected Bolkardag with coastal settlements. [See also Cayontu Goltepe; and Kestel] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dixon, J. E., et al. "Obsidian and the Origins of Trade." In Old World Archaeology: Foundations of Civilization, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, pp. 8 0 - 8 8 . San Francisco, 1 9 7 2 . Yener, K. Aslihan. "A Review of Interregional Exchange in Southwest Asia: The Neolithic Obsidian Network, the Assyrian Trading Col onies, and a Case for Third Millennium B. C. Trade." Anatolica 9 (1982): 33-75.
Yener, K. Aslihan. "The Production, Exchange, and Utilization of Sil ver and Lead Metals in Ancient Anatolia: A Source Identification Project." Anatolica 1 0 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 1 - 1 5 . Yener, K. Aslihan. "The Archaeometry of Silver in Anatolia: The Bol kardag Mining District." American Journal of Archaeology 9 0 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 469-472.
Yener, K. Aslihan, and Hadi Ozbal. "The Bolkardag Mining District Survey of Silver and Lead Metals in Ancient Anatolia." In Proceed ings of the 24th International Archaeometry Symposium, edited by Jacqueline S. Olin and M. James Blackman, pp. 3 0 9 - 3 2 0 . Washing ton, D.C., 1 9 8 6 . K . ASLIHAN YENER
TAWILAN, site, primarily Iron II (Edomite), located just north of Petra, in the hills of southern Jordan (30°2o' N , 35°29' E; map reference 196 X 972). The ancient site, whose name is unknown, covers a terrace overlooking the village of el-Ji, an intensely cultivated area close to 'Ain Musa, a perennial spring. Several other Iron II sites have been dis covered in the vicinity of Petra: Umm el-Biyara, Umm elAla, Ba'ja III, and Jebal al-Kser. Survey and Excavation. Tawilan was surveyed in 1933 by Nelson Glueck, who concluded that between the thir teenth and sixth centuries BCE it had been an important Edomite town. The site was excavated by Crystal Bennett from 1968 to 1970 and again in 1982, under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and then of the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History. Glueck had first identified the site with biblical Bozrah, the probable capital of Edom ("Explorations in Eastern Pales tine and the Negeb," Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research 55 [1934]: 14). He subsequently agreed to the equation that modern Buseirah was Bozrah and alternatively proposed identifying Tawilan with biblical Teman (Explo rations in Eastern Palestine II, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 15 [1935]: 83). Thirty years later, Ro land de Vaux showed that the term Teman does not refer to a town but is to be equated with Edom or a part of Edom ("Teman, ville ou region d'Edom?" Revue Biblique 76 [1969]: 379-385)Based on the remains he found during his survey, Glueck postulated two defensive walls that ended in "towers" on
TAWILAN
Trench Vr-.
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Trench VI
TAWILAN. P/arc of the site. (Courtesy P. Bienkowksi)
the northwest and on the south, Bennett excavated three main areas (I—III), and three small test trenches (IV-VI). Her excavations failed to validate Glueck's identifications: they instead revealed an unfortified, essentially agricultural Edomite town, whose occupation can be divided into eight stages. The first five, based on their pottery, date to Iron II, probably the seventh-sixth centuries BCE. In the first settlement stage Bennett discovered a series of pits dug into the natural clay that were unrelated to surfaces or structures. In the second stage foundation walls had been built on a stone and clay fill used to level the ground. All three areas consisted of rectangular buildings with dry-stone walls that had been built on a northeast-southwest axis. Ar eas II and III revealed well-built structures with solid walls, stone paving, and pillars. In the third stage walls were added between the pillars in areas LT and III. Major architectural additions followed, including steps to higher ground in the area III buildings. In area II were remains of a building of inferior construction whose plan could not be determined. In the fifth stage, all three main areas were destroyed, some by fire, followed by a limited occupation by squatters in area III. The other areas were destroyed and abandoned. In the sixth stage (c. first or second century CE), area II became a cemetery and areas I and III were abandoned. In the seventh stage (Mamluk period) a rough wall to mark a field bound ary or a terrace wall was constructed in area II. In the final stage of occupation at the site (Mamluk period or later), a
square structure (one of Glueck's towers) was built in area II.
Material Culture. In her 1982 season, in fill deposits in area II, Bennett recovered the first cuneiform tablet ever found in Jordan, a legal document from Harran in Syria. In the tablet testimony is given regarding the sale of two rams. The name and patronymic of the man responsible for the testimony are Edomite—tiiey are compounded with the name of the Edomite god Qos. The tablet has been dated to the accession year of one of the Achaemenid kings named Darius: Darius I (521 BCE), Darius II (423 BCE), or Darius III (335 BCE), although certain attribution is impossible for an isolated text. In 1982 Bennett also recovered the first large hoard of gold jewelry in Jordan, eighteen gold rings and earrings (along with 334 carnelian beads). The pieces were discovered in side a badly encrusted bronze bowl attached to a thick coarse-ware sherd. The bowl had been set into the sterile clay close to a burial pit, but it was not possible to prove conclusively any association between the hoard and the bur ial. It was originally suggested diat the jewelry was of various dates between the ninth and fifth centuries BCE. However, more recent study indicates alltirejewelry dates to die nintheighth centuries BCE. Dating the occupation at Tawilan and at all Edomite sites is problematic and subject to revision by future discoveries. [See Umm el-Biyara.] The Iron II pottery, presentiy dated
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to the seventh-sixth centuries BCE, may be earlier. The cu neiform tablet from Tawilan, though not from an occupa tion level, nevertheless indicates some activity there during the Persian period. Future excavation may prove that oc cupation continued through the Persian period. [See also Edom; and the biographies of Bennett and Glueck.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Bennett, Crystal-M. "Excavations at Tawilan in Southern Jordan, 1 9 8 2 . " Levant 1 6 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 1 - 2 3 . Basic preliminary excavation report; should be read in conjunction with Bienkowski's reappraisals (be low). Bienkowski, Piotr. "The Chronology of Tawilan and the 'Dark Age' of Edom." Aram 2 . 1 - 2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 3 5 - 4 4 . Assesses the archaeological evi dence for continuity of occupation beyond Iron II at Tawilan. Bienkowski, Piotr, "Umm cl-Biyara, Tawilan, and Buseirah in Retro spect." Levant 2 2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 9 1 - 1 0 9 . Reevaluates the excavations and suggests refinements to the excavator's phasing and dates (see pp. 95-101).
PIOTR BIENKOWSKI
TAYA, TELL, site located in nordiern Iraq (36°n' N , 42°43' E). The modern Arabic name, Tell (Tall) Tayah, applies properly only to the central mound of the site but has been extended to cover the entire ancient settlement. The name has no meaning to local Arabs; it may be con nected with the Tai ttibe. The spelling Tall Teir used by Seton Lloyd (1938, p. 137) is a mistake. Local Turkoman describe Taya as an encampment of Timur Lang, to whom they ascribe a natural formation resembling a hollow road through nearby foothills. Taya probably had four ancient names. About 2500-2000 BC it developed into a substantial town with most likely a Hurrian population and then de clined and was abandoned. About 1900-1800 it was reoccupied and became a large village likely to have been called Samiatum or Zamiatum, an apt name to describe the exten sive ruin it then was, because the word means wall founda tions in Akkadian. The name is attested in contemporary administrative records found at tire regional center of Qatara (Dalley, Walker, and Hawkins 1976, p. 178) and is the only toponym on an official document found at Taya (J. N. Postgate, in Reade, 1973, p. I 7 4 f f . ) . About 850-600 Taya was a small castle, and there was a village on the site about AD 1000-1250; its names in these periods are unknown. Taya lies on the lower southwestern slope of a range of limestone hills, outliers of the Zagros Mountains, overlook ing the Sinjar-Tell 'Afar plain. It is one of a complex of four major sites, among many smaller ones, in the plain's north eastern corner. This area is bordered by hills to the north and northeast with passes through them, by tire smaller Muhallabiya complex of sites to the southeast, by steppe coun try with fewer sites to the south, and by the extensive Sinjar complex of sites to tire west. Taya itself was the most im portant regional center in the mid- to late third millennium,
equivalent centers at other dates being Karatepe/Tell el-Jol 6 km (3.7 mi.) to the west (Hassuna through Ninevite 5, Hellenistic), Tell er-Rimah 12 km (7.4 mi.) to tire southsouthwest (Old Babylonian Qatara; Neo-Assyrian Zamahu), and modern Tell 'Afar 4 km to the northwest (Umayyad Qal'ah Merwan, 'Abbasid, Ottoman). [See Has suna; Rimah, Tell er-.] Various calculations suggest that these centers with de pendent villages could have held populations in the range of fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand persons, supported by at least 300 sq km ( 1 1 5 sq. mi.) of agricultural land, ex tensive grazing land in the hills and steppe, and small irri gated gardens. Annual rainfall in this area is usually over 20 cm (50.8 in.), suitable for dry farming of cereals; the soil is good, and die flora and fauna were originally much richer than they are today. Food remains from third-millennium levels at Taya (J. G. Waines, in Reade, 1973, pp. 185-187) include carbonized seeds of barley (hordeum vulgare), wheat (triticum aestivum), some emmer wheat (triticum dicoccum) possibly as a weed, varieties of pea, lentil, grape, a cucurbital species, and apparently olive stones, although it has since been suggested that tire last may be animal droppings. An imal bones (S. Bokonyi, in Reade, 1973, pp. 184-185) mainly derive from sheep or goat, pig, and gazelle, also from onager and cattle or aurochs. It is an open question whether gazelle were domesticated. Fallow deer, wild pig, and badger are also attested, and incised drawings on third-millennium pottery show fish, large birds (ostrich or bustard?) and large ruminants. The site spreads across some 155 ha (383 acres), of land, on either side of Wadi Taya, a seasonal stream feeding Wadi 'Abdan and Wadi Tharthar, and today has access to peren nial waterholes and bitter water. Modern cultivation en croaches from the southwest. An all-weather track along the foothills traverses the site from northwest to southeast, as one did in the third millennium, and there are possible traces of an ancient direct track northeast over the hills toward Abu Maria (ancient Apku) and the Tigris Valley. About 1 km (.6 mi.) downstream of the central mound of Taya is the pre historic site of Tepe Mahmud Agha, whose inhabitants pre sumably utilized the same resources as those of Taya did subsequently. Taya was first recorded by Lloyd (1938, p. 137), among possibly Islamic sites, and described as "probably Roman." This dating, sensible at the time, was probably based on the abundance of visible stone wall-footings and on numerous large incised third-millennium sherds then regarded as Partho-Sasanian, a mistake that has probably resulted in many false datings of northern Iraqi sites. Taya was identified as mainly tliird-millennium by J. E. Reade on a visit in 1964, and excavated under his direction in three seasons, 1967, 1968-1969, and 1972-1973; in 1980 G. Farrant completed the plan of surface remains begun by him in 1972. The 1967 season concentrated on the central mound, where substan-
TAYA, TELL rial Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian levels were found to overlie the third-millennium remains; this area was also dug in 1972-1973. The 1968-1969 season investigated parts of the third-millennium town witiiin and without the walls. Preliminary reports on the first three seasons have been pub lished (Reade, 1968; 1971; 1973) and subsequently a short overview of the whole site (Reade, 1982). The dating of Taya depends partiy on stratigraphy and partly on surface pottery. Evidence for prehistoric occupa tion consists of a few sherds: Ubaid from the northwestern fringe of the site and from later levels in the walled town, and handmade flat-based bowls or trays and Ninevite 5 gray ware from the soutiieastern fringe. The main occupation dates within 2500-2000 and broadly represents one cultural ttadition. The sequence was originally divided on the central mound (Site C, or citadel), with greatest depth of stratifi cation, into levels 9-6, but the range and quantity of level 9 material in tiiis area was limited, probably compressing many phases that may be provisionally reconstructed across the whole site as follows. An original unwalled settlement became the Inner Town, with a roughly oval town-wall enclosing some 5 ha (12.4 acres) on either side of Wadi Taya and an additional 2 ha (5 acres) within a rectangular extension to die southwest. The town expanded outside the walls to occupy some 65 densely settled ha (160.5 acres) of Outer Town, with an additional 90 ha (222 acres) of lighter settlement beyond. The buildings in die Outer Town, defined now by the visible presence of stone wall-footings surviving after erosion of mud-brick superstructures, are sited around main streets running north-west, north-east and south-west. Courtyard houses of many sizes, chapels, and industrial establishments can be distinguished, with internal structural developments, also kilns and a flint-knapping area on the outskirts. Some wall lines suggest successive perimeters during development of die town, with organic rather than regularly planned growth. In one excavated house (S 1) a single significant period of occupation was preserved, with successive burial of three adults in an underground vault. Material on die floors of this house suggested an abrupt abandonment, cor responding to surface pottery on eroding floors elsewhere. Within tile Inner Town an elaborate circular citadel of 50 m (164 ft.) diameter was constructed on cleared ground. The defensive wall consisted of stonework 1.6 m (5.25 ft.) thick and 3 m (9.8 ft.) high with at least 2 m (6.6 ft.) of mud brick above; casemates, presumably roofed, will have increased the width of the chemin de ronde (walkway along the top of a hill) to about 3 m (9.8 ft.). This area was to become die central mound. No sttatigraphic link has been established between die Outer Town and the citadel; the latter is likely to have been a relatively late development within the level 9 occupation of Taya as a whole. A pit dug into bedrock in the citadel mound produced a seal impression with Early Dynastic III' affinities, about
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2500-2400. The distinctive Taya 9 pottery is wheel made, the ware coarse or fine, usually pale green, often with incised decoration of triangles, comb slashes, wavy lines, and her ringbone patterns. Terra-cotta figurines are common: they include many animals, wheels, chariots, a naked male char ioteer, and a harnessed horse head (Bokonyi, 1972). Reli gious beliefs are suggested by terra-cotta figurines of naked women with prominent hips and by pedestal vessels deco rated with snakes and scorpions. Glazed quartz-frit faience is attested, notably an incised blue-green beaker in a stan dard pottery shape. Bronze and lead were used. Bitumen was available as an impermeable wash and adhesive. The Inner Town was reestablished on much the same lines in Taya 8, with more limited occupation in the Outer Town. The tiiickness of the citadel wall was increased to a width of 5 m (16.4 ft.) including the casemates. A corbeled stone gateway on the northeast incorporated stairs leading upward. The area included a bent-axis shrine, another large building, and probably a brewery and other small structures around a central courtyard. Among the finds were an Ak kadian cylinder seal (c. 2300-2250), an incised shell lamp, faience vessels and beads, copper or bronze tools, and two hoards of silver rings and jewelry. The pottery is wheelmade: tlie fabric of the coarse pottery is generally reddish, with incised decoration much like that of Taya 9, and fine vessels include highly fired jars and bowls with decorative slips. Some black pottery has incised patterns with white infill. Further study is needed to determine whether gray stone ware beakers, of a type attested at Akkadian sites in die Kha bur region, should be assigned to Taya 8 or to a late phase of Taya 9. Much Taya 8 pottery derives from a thick layer that underlay, in the citadel, foundations of Taya 7 walls. Taya levels 7-6 incorporate several phases. The two main structures within the citadel were reused, with new smaller buildings around them. The Inner Town was occupied, at least in part, and finds included an inscribed amulet. The pottery largely resembles that of Taya 8, but there is less fine ware. Taya 6 represents the last third-millennium occupa tion of the citadel, with broken pottery indicating a hurried abandonment, probably during 2100-2000. A crater devel oped within the walls of the centtal mound, gradually filling with soil (Taya 5). The central mound was resettled about 1900 (Taya 4). A few wall traces precede die formal construction of a rectan gular house or shrine, and there are smaller adjoining build ings. The pottery is an early version of Khabur Ware, often painted with various simple patterns and sometimes incised; there are a few highly fired small vessels. This settlement was superseded by another (Taya 3), on a different plan, in which buildings including another large shrine or house ad joined a stone-paved courtyard. There was a succession of ovens. Barley and wheat are attested. Two cuneiform tablets were found, both sealed by or on behalf of Hasidanum, an official under Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria (c. 1810-1777); at
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least one of them was dated by the eponym Idna-Assur, probably before 1795; of two personal names of probable Taya residents, one was Hurrian, die other may be. The pottery was typical Khabur ware; there was much plain ware, and jars with painted stripes. Finds included a fine cylinder seal. This was apparendy a large farming village. About 850-750 the summit of the central mound was ringed by a massive stone terrace and probably fortified (Taya 2). There were well-built oblong rooms on the inner face of the terrace and a succession of untidy structures in the enclosed area. Pottery was typically Neo-Assyrian. A glass stamp-seal may be dated to die seventh century. Taya 1 consists of subsequent remains on die site. There may have been a Parthian building; Sasanian graves, with some jewelry including etched carnelian beads, were dug into die summit of die central mound. Other graves may have been later. The northern wall of the old citadel, and later levels that it had supported, collapsed into Wadi Taya, probably between 600 BG and AD 1000. There was a village on and east of the central mound about AD 1000-1250. In modern times, about 1940 a house was built on the exposed stonework of the Neo-Assyrian terrace but was abandoned after the owner's death. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bokonyi, Sandor. "An Early Representation of Domesticated Horse in North Mesopotamia." Sumer 2 8 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 3 5 - 3 8 . Dalley, Stephanie, etal. The Old Babylonian Tablets from Tell al Rimah. London, 1 9 7 6 . Lloyd, Seton. "Some Ancient Sites in the Sinjar District." Iraq 5 ( 1 9 3 8 ) :
a permanendy occupied walled town—a conclusion that may be based on a misunderstanding of the archaeological evidence. The issue is controversial and has been most re cently discussed by Peter Parr ("The Early History of the Hejaz: A Response to Garth Bawden," Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 4 [1993]: 48-58). Tayma' is mentioned in die Hebrew Bible (e.g., Is. 21:14) in connection with events in the sixth century BCE, by which time it had become sufficiendy important for the last NeoBabylonian ruler, Nabonidus, to move his official residence there between about 552 and 542 BCE. He may have done this because it was a center of the moon god, Sin, of whom Nabonidus was a devotee; although it was most likely that he wished to control more effectively the lucrative Arabian trade. It was Nabonidus who, according to inscriptions, em bellished and fortified the oasis, perhaps for the first time. During the Achaemenid period (539-331 BCE) the town flourished, probably under indirect rule from Persia and perhaps in competition with Dedan, but it was overshad owed in die Nabatean period (first century BCE-second cen tury CE) by Hegra. [See Dedan; Meda'in Saleh.] Judging from the writings of such Muslim authors as al-Istakhri and al-Mukaddasi, it continued to be renowned as a market town during the medieval period; however, it declined thereafter and was largely ignored by the earliest Western visitors to Arabia in the early nineteenth century.
The first description of Tayma' was given to the Western world by Charles Doughty (Travels in Arabia Deserta, Cam bridge, 1888), whose visit in 1877 was followed by those of Charles Huber in 1880 and by Huber and Julius Euting three 123-142. years later. On this latter occasion the Tayma' stone, an Ar Reade, Julian E. "Tell Taya." Iraq 3 0 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 2 3 4 - 2 6 4 ; 3 3 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 8 7 amaic stela recording the introduction of a religious cult into 100; 35 (1973): 1 5 5 - 1 8 7 . Reade, Julian E. "Tell Taya." In Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery: Tayma' and generally dated to the fifth century BCE, was The Work of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1932-1982, ed removed and sent to the Louvre, where it still resides. The ited by John E. Curds, pp. 7 2 - 7 8 . London, 1 9 8 2 . site was also investigated by Antonin Jaussen and Raphael JULIAN E. READE Savignac, who recorded many inscriptions (Mission archeo logique en Arable, 2 vols., Paris, 1909-1914); by H. St. John Philby (The Land of Midian, London, 1957); and by Fred TAYMA', site located in northwestern Saudi Arabia, in erick V. Winnett and William L . Reed, whose publication a vast inland drainage basin where, in an otherwise desolate (Ancient Records from North Arabia, Toronto, 1970) provides landscape, an ample supply of groundwater provides a nat the most authoritative brief history of the site. Since 1979 ural stopping place on the main north-south "incense the Saudi Arabian Antiquities Department has been con route" along the western side of the peninsula (27°38' N , ducting limited excavations there. 38°3o' E). The earliest evidence for occupation at the site The most impressive remains of ancient Tayma' are long consists of pottery of the type known as Qurayyah painted lines of stone walling, mostly covered with debris and blown ware dated to the late second millennium BCE. [See Quray sand, enclosing an irregular area of about 8 sq 1cm (5 sq. yah.] Tayma' is first mentioned in Akkadian texts of die mi.). It is unlikely that this area was ever entirely built over, reign of Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria, who, in about 733 BCE, and it is misleading to call the wall a town wall; it primarily defeated the Arab tribes of the region, under Queen Samsi, protected the fields and irrigation systems, of unknown date, and received tribute from them. These and other sources of which are plainly visible. The original setdement is probably the period indicate diat the inhabitants of northern Arabia represented by a small artificial mound, or tell, near the were nomadic pastoralists who had become wealthy and modern Tabuk-Medina highway; other adjacent walled ar eas, called compounds by some scholars Garth Bawden et powerful through their control of the trade routes. It has al, "Preliminary Archaeological Investigations at Tayma'," been suggested, however, that Tayma' at least, was already
TELEILAT EL-GHASSUL Atlal4 [1980]: 69-106), may represent successive additions to the settlement. At various localities within die enclosed area, ruined buildings are visible. The Department of An tiquities has partially excavated three groups of these, the most important so far being that known as Qasr al-Hamra, where a complex of rooms, perhaps a palace, has been re vealed. One of the rooms, clearly a shrine, contained stone offering tables, a cuboid stone carved with religious motifs, and an Aramaic stela similar to die Tayma' stone. Although originally attributed to the Neo-Babylonian period, it now seems more likely that-tile shrine dates to Achaemenid times. The dating of other structures, including a number of burial mounds of various types, remains uncertain, although pot tery of the Nabatean and medieval periods has been found in various parts of the site.
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midst of slow-moving fresh water. It was surrounded by a rich growth of reeds, mosses, alder, and sedge. Excavations and a series of radiocarbon dates give evi dence of a thriving Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic agricul tural community on the site for approximately one thousand years (between 4500 and 3500 BCE). The settlement was a large one, and at its most extensive occupation, in the Chal colithic period, probably covered 20-25 hectares (49-62 acres; Hennessy, 1989). Its location was advantageous, at the junction of major north-south and east-west routes. The site's importance was first recognized by Alexis Mallon in 1929. Since then, the settlement has been the subject of a number of large-scale excavations by the Pontifical Bib lical Institute (PBI) of Rome: from 1929 to 1938 under the direction of Mallon and Robert Koeppel, and in i960 under the direction of Robert North. The site was more recently BIBLIOGRAPHY excavated by J. Basil Hennessy for the British School of Ar Abu-Duruk, Hamid Ibrahim. Introduction to the Archaeology of Tayma'. chaeology in Jerusalem (1967) and the University of Sydney {.^IS-^l^)[See the biography of Mallon.] Riyadh, 1 9 8 6 . Account of the recent Saudi excavations. Bawden, Garth, and Christopher Edens. "Tayma' Painted Ware and Ghassul has given its name to the Chalcolithic period in the I-Iejaz Iron Age Ceramic Tradition." Levant 2 0 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 1 9 7 - 2 1 3 . Israel and Jordan. However, since the original discussions Presents tine case for the continuous occupation of Tayma' through about periodization at the site by William Foxwell Albright out the first millennium BCE. and Mallon in the 1930s, it has become increasingly evident Edens, Christopher, and Garth Bawden. "History of Tayma' and Hejazi Trade during the First Millennium B.C." Journal of the Economic that a considerable span of the site's history more properly and Social History of the Orient 3 2 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 4 8 - 1 0 3 . Useful, compre belongs to the classification Late Neolithic or Early Chal hensive account, somewhat marred by an overly theoretical ap colithic. In addition, the Ghassulian Chalcolithic should be proach and an uncritical interpretation of the archaeological data. confined to the site's upper levels, which are but one regional Lambert, W. G. "Nabonidus in Arabia." Proceedings of the Seminar for variant of a series of widespread, related Chalcolithic com Arabian Studies 5 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 5 3 - 6 4 . Masterly summary of the evidence munities. which, however, pays too little attention to economic motives. Parr, Peter J. "Pottery of the Late Second Millennium B.C. from North The initial Late Neolithic settlement was made up of West Arabia and Its Historical Implications." In Araby the Blest: large, circular, half-sunk houses and pit dwellings. All suc Studies in Arabian Archaeology, edited by Daniel T. Potts, pp. 7 2 - 8 9 . ceeding occupations were in large rectangular mud-brick Copenhagen, 1 9 8 8 . This and the article below provide a critical re buildings often constructed on a foundation of large river appraisal of the recent work at Tayma'. stones. Most houses consisted of a single long room (up to Parr, Peter J. ' 'Aspects of the Archaeology of North-West Arabia in the First Millennium BC." In L'Arabie preislamique el son environnemenl 12 X 3.50-5 m) with an occasional internal subdivision. The historique et culture!: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, edited by Toufic single doorway was in die long wall. Floors were of beaten Fahd, pp. 3 9 - 6 6 . Leiden, 1 9 8 9 . earth, but sometimes the pebble foundations were covered PETER J . PARR with mud and lime plaster to give a more even surface. Walls were often finished with the same type of plaster and painted. More than twenty replasterings and repaintings TEL, T E L L For toponyms beginning with these have been counted on some walls (see figure 1 ) . Scenes ap elements, see under latter part of name. For a general description pear to be religious and are concerned with processions, ar of tells, see Tell. chitectural features, and naturalistic and symbolic (geomet ric) patterns. In the later stages of occupation, one area of the village seems to have been set aside for cult practice and separated from the domestic quarters by a circumference TELEILAT EL-GHASSUL, site located at the wall. The enclosure contained two large, well-constructed southern end of the Jordan Valley, approximately 6 1cm (4 rectangular buildings with axes at right angles to each other mi.) east of the Jordan River and 5 km (3 mi.) from the and a wealth of cult paraphernalia. A similar Chalcolithic northeast corner of the Dead Sea (3i°48' N , 35°36' E). It enclosure was discovered at Ein-Gedi. [See Ein-Gedi.] lies 290-300 m below sea level; its climate today is hot and dry, although water is available locally, about 40 m below Apart from the architectural differences, there is a notable Neolithic content in the few material remains from the ear ground level, and from the irrigation system of Jordan's East liest levels. The pottery is very well made, both in buff and Ghor Canal. When the site was founded, the area was dark-faced wares, the shapes are simple, and decoration is swampy and settlement was made on a sand bank in the c
f
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TELEILAT EL-GHASSUL
TELEILAT EL-GHASSUL. Figure i. Wall painting. Three masked figures in ceremonial dress approach a walled enclosure. T h e leader carries a sickle-shaped object in his right hand. T h e painting is poly chrome in a rich variety of red, green, yellow, white, and black. From the Lower Chalcolithic levels, area III, this work ( 3 X 1 . 5 m) is c a r b o n - 1 4 dated to approximately 4 2 0 0 BCE. (Courtesy J. B. Hennessy)
comparatively rare. Apart from a thin red band of paint around the rims of a few simple subhemispherical bowls, the only other decoration was the occasional use of mattered slips or incised or punctated marks (on a small percentage of enclosed shapes). Burnished surfaces are very rare. In the flaked-stone industry, blades with broad denticulation and notched and serial flaked blades have their best parallels in the Neolithic B levels at nearby Jericho or the Yarmukian culture of the Jordan Valley. [See Jericho; Jordan Valley.] Many of the forms which originate in tiiese early levels continue into the succeeding building phases of the large rectangular houses. However, it is not until the uppermost two building levels that the full range of forms and decora tions normally designated Ghassulian is common. By the end of the occupation, painted wares and an elaborate rep ertoire of sophisticated shapes mark the end of a lengthy internal development. It is at this stage of material culture that relations with the Beersheba and coastal and Jordan Val
ley Chalcolithic settlements are most evident. [See Beer sheba.] Throughout die life of the settlement, the faunal and floral evidence suggests a mixed pastoral, agricultural, and hunt ing economy, widi the cultivation of wheat, barley, peas, and olives and abundant evidence of pig, goat, sheep, deer, and cattle. Another industry of some significance is suggested by the first appearance of metal in the uppermost levels of the original PBI excavations. It was to have its full development in the succeeding Beersheba Chalcolithic, with the metal ore readily available in the nearby Wadi Feinan, just to the south of the Dead Sea. [See Feinan.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Elliott, Carolyn. "The Ghassulian Culture in Palestine: Origins, Influ ences, and Abandonment." Levant 1 0 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 3 7 - 5 4 . Good, broad coverage of the archaeological and historical importance of die Ghas sulian culture.
TEMPLE SCROLL Hennessy, J. Basil. "Preliminary Report on a First Season of Excava tions at Teleilat Ghassul." Levant i ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 - 2 4 . Hennessy, J. Basil. "Ghassul." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2 , Field Reports, edited by Denys Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 2 3 0 - 2 4 1 . Louvain, 1 9 8 9 . Brief coverage of the stratigraphic po sition of the site's various assemblages. Hennessy, J. Basil. "Teleilat Ghassul: Its Place in die Archaeology of Jordan." In Studies in the Hisloiy and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1 , edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 5 5 - 5 8 . Amman, 1 9 8 2 . Argues for Late Neolithic origins for the settlement. Mallon, Alexis, and Robert Koeppel. Teleilat Ghassul. 2 vols. Rome, 1934-1940.
North, Robert. Ghassul i960 Excavation Report. Rome, 1 9 6 1 . Along with Koeppel and Mallon, the final excavation report of the PBI's campaigns at Teleilat el-Ghassul. J . BASIL HENNESSY
TELL. The term tell comes from the Arabic word for mound, or low hill (transliterated from Hebrew as tel). Tells form as successive levels of cities and towns are built over the ruins of their predecessors. They are die architectural manifestations of complex civilizations and may include im posing defensive features, the trappings of institutionalized religion in the form of temple complexes, and the symbols of power displayed by elaborate palaces. Many tells began as cities or towns circumscribed by walls, a factor that encouraged a settlement's upward growth, rather than outward spread. The basic backbone, or structure, of a tell forms during the occupation of a site. The inhabitants construct architectural features of varying mass—city walls, terraces, ramparts, large public buildings and smaller domestic quarters. At the same time, depres sions are excavated for midden deposits, storage facilities, and extracting sediment for mud brick. On the whole, these features impart an uneven topography, or cityscape, to any particular occupation phase. This variable relief is the source of immense stratigraphic complexity following aban donment and the overlay of subsequent city levels. Thus, archaeological structures and features from die same tem poral strata may be at widely varying vertical levels. Another complicating factor occurs because some structures fall into disuse decades before otiiers, creating further difficulties for modern stratigraphic correlations. After a site is abandoned, natural erosional forces come into play on mud-brick walls, such as rainfall and burrowing animals. The brick walls collapse and become the source of a thick matrix of decayed and reworked bricky material that appears archaeologically as deep monolithic sections of sed iment. They provide most of a tell's bulk. Through time, erosion and runoff smooth a site's upper layers. The slopes of the tell undergo variable forces of erosion depending upon their orientation, the amount and direction of rainfall, sediment composition, and the density of vegetation. Even
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tually, these erosional processes lead to the mound's dune like shape. Tells are a common feature in Near Eastern landscape. It has long been recognized that they contained the remains of past civilizations. Each generation of archaeologists working on tells has its own unique philosophical orientation: early excavators, such as Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud and Paul-Ernile Botta at Khorsabad, were typically interested in retrieving curiosities and art objects from tells, using exca vation techniques that appear uncontrolled by modern stan dards. It was only late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries that stratigraphic control and die pres ervation of a wide variety of artifacts were perceived as man datory in excavating a tell. A foremost pioneer of modern Near Eastern tell excavation was Flinders Petrie, who enun ciated the concepts of preservation of monuments; describ ing and collecting all artifacts; mapping all architectural fea tures; and fully publishing all aspects of an excavation. It was Petrie's development of the technique of dating pottery by seriation that led to modern controlled stratigraphic ex cavations of Near Eastern tells. [See also the biographies of Botta, Layard, and Petrie.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Butzer, Karl W. Archaeology as Human Ecology: Method and Theory for a Contextual Approach. Cambridge, 1 9 8 2 . Seethe chapter, "Site For mation" (pp. 8 7 - 9 7 ) . Davidson, Donald A. "Processes of Tel Formation and Erosion." In Geoarchaeology: Earth Science and the Past, edited by Donald A. Da vidson and Myra L. Shackley, pp. 2 5 5 - 2 6 6 . London, 1 9 7 6 , Lloyd, Seton. Mounds of the Near East. Edinburgh, 1 9 6 3 . Rosen, Arlene Miller. Cities of Clay: The Geoarchaeology of Tells. Chi cago, 1 9 8 6 . ARLENE MILLER ROSEN
TELL, KHIRBET ET-. See Ai.
TEMPLE SCROLL. The Israeli general and archae ologist Yigael Yadin acquired the Temple Scroll in June 1967 from a dealer in antiquities in Jerusalem's Old City. Yadin believed that die ultimate provenance of the scroll was Qumran Cave 1 1 , and scholars have accepted that idea as plau sible. Yadin never explained his conclusion, but it is likely diat he knew more about it than he felt free to say. Subse quently, a second, very fragmentary copy of the scroll was identified that was unquestionably from Cave 1 1 . The offi cial designations of the copies are 1 1 Q 1 9 (riQTemple") for the main scroll and 11Q20 (nQTemple ) for the fragments of the second scroll. It was once believed that a text from Cave 4 was a third exemplar of the Temple Scroll; tiiose por tions are now assigned to the Pentateuchal Paraphrase b
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(4Q364-365), a work that may have been a source for tire Temple Scroll. 1 1 Q 1 9 is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even longer than the Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1. Unrolled, it measures more than 92 m, comprising sixty-six columns. The text begins with a general exhortation derived from Exodus 34, Deuteronomy 7, and perhaps Deuteronomy 1 2 . The opening columns of the main copy are badly broken, but enough remains to determine drat this exhortation did not exceed one or one and one-half columns in length. There follows a lengthy program for the construction of a temple complex surrounded by three "concentric" square courtyards. This description occupies virtually all of columns 3-46, apart from a break in columns 13-29 for the insertion of a festival calendar. Beginning in column 45—thus overlapping the building instructions—is a series of purity laws, derived by Midrashic techniques from portions of Numbers and Levit icus. From columns 51-66, the redactor of the Temple Scroll presents a form of the laws of Deuteronomy 12-26, with some interesting additions and omissions, the pattern of which is a key to the scroll's purpose. The preserved portions end abruptly in the middle of a discussion on incestuous mar riage; how much is missing following that portion is debated. A striking aspect of the Temple Scroll is diat its author or redactor has eliminated the name of Moses where it should appear in his biblical excerpts. This omission has the effect of rendering the biblical portions as direct communication between the scroll's author and God. The work is thus one form or another of pseudepigraphy. The author may be claiming to have found long-lost writing from the hands of Moses, the patriarch's notes, as it were, that Moses later used to write the Bible—and containing things that Moses chose not to reveal to his general readership. Or, the author may be even more audacious. He may be suggesting that Moses' prophetic mantel has fallen to him. He would thus become the "prophet like Moses" (Dt. 18:15) whom certain elements of society in the late Second Temple period ex pected as a herald of the eschaton. The redactional phenom ena of the scroll favor this second option. The Temple Scroll is intended as a new Deuteronomy, a new "law for tire land," as the first version had been, but modified to govern life in an ideal eschaton. In addition to its obvious importance for understanding the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy among Jews in the pe riod 200 BCE-135 CE, the Temple Scroll is an invaluable source on questions involving legal or halakhic develop ments in those years. Together with other Dead Sea Scrolls, such as the text from Cave 4 at Qumran known as M M T and the Toharot texts, the Temple Scroll represents another approach (or, perhaps, other approaches) to many of the legal questions considered in rabbinic literature. Compari son of these materials is opening up entirely new perspec tives on life and on contemporary ideas about how to live in
the Palestine, from which both Christianity and rabbinic Ju daism emerged. Research on the Temple Scroll has focused on four very basic and interrelated questions: who composed the scroll; for what purpose; and how and when was it done? The an swers, naturally, have varied. Most students of the text have connected it with a community thought to have inhabited the site of Qumran, but a sizable minority of scholarship argues that the Temple Scroll was not sectarian. Yadin, the scroll's original editor, thought it was intended as a tool in the context of contemporary legal polemics. The text was thus a sort of "crib sheet" to aid halakhic study. More re cently, the question of the scroll's purpose has focused, as noted, on the definition of its relationship to the Bible, to Deuteronomy in particular. Some scholars have argued that the work is a reprise and supplement to the Book of Deuter onomy, but it seems more likely that the author actually in tended it to replace the biblical book altogether. Suggested dates for the Temple Scroll vary significantly. Hartmut Stegemann has argued for the earliest option. He sees the arrival of Ezra in Jerusalem with a Persian-backed official law as a catalyst for gathering traditional materials that had been outlawed. The Temple Scroll would be one such collection, which would date it to the fifth or fourth century BCE. Most scholars prefer a date somewhere in tire range of 150-80 BCE, an assignment that appears most likely. The text itself contains very little, if anything, that can be dated: neither the language nor its contents lend themselves to such analysis. If, as many scholars think likely, the Temple Scroll was composed by the Teacher of Righteousness, its date would belong to his period of activity. That connection points to the favored period noted above, but the dating then depends on elements external to the text itself. Whichever way future scholarship will turn on the four basic questions regarding this scroll, the most promising approaches are clearly source criticism and redaction criticism. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls; and Qumran.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooke, George, ed. Temple Scroll Studies. Journal for the Study of the Pseudipigrapha, Supplemental Series 7 . Sheffield, 1 9 8 9 . Collection of papers presented at a conference held in Manchester, December 1 9 8 7 ; contains many useful discussions dealing with virtually every major aspect of research on the scroll. Wacholder, Ben Zion. The Dawn of Qumran: The Sectarian Torah and the Teacher of Righteousness. Cincinnati, 1 9 8 3 . Stimulating analysis of the Temple Scroll and its relation to other Dead Sea Scrolls. Although the basic interpretations have not convinced most scholars, the work contains many brilliant insights and should be given credit for turn ing interpretation of the scroll in the right direction, toward an eschatological understanding. Wacholder, Ben Zion, with Martin G. Abegg. "The Fragmentary Re mains of nQTorah (Temple Scroll)." Hebrew Union College Annual 6 2 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 - 1 1 6 . Collation of the readings of nQTemple , a text Wacholder calls nQTorah', and 4Q364-365 with the main scroll. h
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Some of the placements are not convincing, but many new readings are proposed and merit serious consideration. Wise, Michael O. A Critical Study of the Temple Scroll from Qumran Cave II. Chicago, 1 9 9 0 . Source and critical-redaction study of the scroll, containing full analysis of the extensive bibliography on the Temple Scroll through April 1 9 9 0 , and a line-by-line comparison with the biblical texts it appropriates. Yadin, Yigael, ed. The Temple Scroll, 3 vols, in 4. Jerusalem, 1 9 8 3 . En glish editio major; includes photographs, transcriptions and transla tion, extensive annotation, and topical discussions. The original edi tion was published in 1 9 7 7 in modern Hebrew; this magnificent work incorporates many improvements and thus supersedes the earlier volumes.
yon at Jericho, end of the eighth-beginning of the seventh millennium) or the presence of wall decoration (James Mellaart at Catal Hoytik, seventh millennium) or the presence of statuettes (Benham Abu al-Soof at Tell es-Sawwan, sixth millennium). [SeeJericho; Catal Hoytik.] In reality, none of these criteria is in itself conclusive. Only a cluster of con vergent indices can signify a sanctuary within a given edifice. In the absence of texts, the criteria for identification usually applied includes the form of die building and the nature of its installations and furnishings. Nevertheless, the same ar chitectural form can have very varied applications: the meMICHAEL O. W I S E garon served as a temple and as a house or palace; a small masonry support is, thus, not necessarily an altar but may be a simple base with a secular function. It is indeed rare T E M P L E S . [ This entry surveys the historical development, that the furnintre carries on it an indication of a sacred na forms and functions of the religious architecture known as tem ture. Thus, a temple can be identified only when at least two ples. It comprises three articles on specific regions: of the stated criteria are tiiere to permit it. Within these lim Mesopotamian Temples its, it is impossible to recognize a temple earlier than level Syro-Palestinian Temples VIII at Eridu (with the great probability that the buildings Egyptian Temples of levels X I - I X share its identity), at the end of the Ubaid For discussion of the history and architecture of the Jerusalem period, when the first tendencies toward urbanization ap Temple, see Biblical Temple. For Jewish houses of worship, see pear. [See Eridu.] Of course, that is not to say that there Synagogues.] were no earlier places dedicated to cult, either in a different or even in a similar form. It signifies only that die identifi cation of a temple cannot be made with a sufficient degree Mesopotamian Temples of certainty before that date. Whether the convergence of the certain recognition of the first temples and the appear The ancient Near Eastern temple is, strictly speaking, the ance of the first cities is an accidental fact is also a subject house of a god, the place where he has chosen to dwell, and to consider. A compelling link between the two develop where hLtmanity serves him, as it is obliged to do, and for ments can be established with certainty. which reason it was created. In his house, the god is present in the form of his statue or symbols; it is to these material Constituent Parts. At first, the mass of the evidence, by forms that the rituals are addressed that are carried out scru its diversity, seems to reflect a complex and varied situation. pulously each day, every hour of die day, by a priesthood A general analysis permits the recognition that the same with very specialized functions. This basic function of the three elements and an identical organizing principle unify daily ritual, which includes all the others, meant that the all the temples that can be recognized as such: inner sanc temple was not the site for worship or for the gathering of tuary, outer sanctuary, and vestibule, to which a court or the congregation to express its faith; rather, it was the place annexes may be added as accessories. where the tasks of daily life were carried out, no different Inner sanctuary, or holy of holies. The main seat of from those of humans, except that they concerned a god sacredness of the temple is designated the inner sanctuary, and as a result were based on the sacred. This anthropo in accordance with the Jerusalem Temple, which presents morphism implies that the temple is in fact a house—that is, the same general order. It is the place where the deity lives, a shelter—and that it is necessary from the first to conceive even if it is a statue found tiiere rather than an individual; it of it in that way. However, it was not just any house; pos is flie point most charged with transcendence because it is sessed by a god, it was sacred ground and could never return at this precise place that the tie is established between die to die human domain. Furthermore, its function as a place divine presence and the world of humanity. The space may of daily offering determined a spatial organization adopted be confined to a podium set against a wall of the main room, as the normal formula from a very early period onward. or it may occupy a space more or less clearly separated from First Temples. How far back in time do the first Meso potamian temples date? T o answer this question is to estab lish the moment when the religion of the Land of the Two Rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, was established defin itively in its most visible forms. Some archaeologists believe that they have found temples from the Neolithic period, based on either the form of the building (Kathleen M . Ken
the main room. The important point is diat this place ap pears, almost always it seems, at the end of the progression that orders the temple. Outer sanctuary. The room where the daily rituals, es pecially the food offerings, were carried out is called the outer sanctuary or, somewhat generally, but inadequately, die cella. The installations that permit the conducting of the
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daily service appear there. It might include the inner sanc tuary in the form of a podium set against the wall, as well as precede a separate space (see below). Vestibule. The vestibule secures the transition between the exterior world and the outer sanctuary and is thus a very important place: on one side is the exterior world, often cha otic and hostile, and on the other, the sacred site par excel lence, where the god stands among mortals. The temple, like die house, formed a solid envelope, isolating a closed space from an infinite space. It is natural that the vestibule, as the point where the only relationship between the profane world and the sacredness is established, could be the place of all dangers. It is also clear tiiat the priest could not pass from the profane universe into the sacred world without under going a transformation of being, most often generated by one or several transition rituals. These three parts form the abstract basis of the organi zation of Near Eastern temples. The architectural form of the three components may vary, with regard to the greater or lesser complexity of the envelope, but the fundamental relationship unifying them is always the same: the succes sion of vestibule, outer sanctuary, and inner sanctuary. Thus, the meeting of humanity and its god is brought about in terms of a progression in space, regular and immutable. Materially, this encounter was put in solid form by the po dium set against a wall (it marks the placement of the throne of the god) and by the offering table installed to face the podium, a short distance from it. The first of these two in stallations located the precise point of contact between god and earth; the second located the spot where the offering services of those closest to the god were maintained. This dyad generates the temple: the architectural form itself only adorns the arrangement according to the diverse forms that reflect regional and historical habits between the fourth and the first millennium. Finally, the system of access, either bent or axial in relation to the structure as a whole, has been in the past the starting point to define the types of temples. In reality the mode of access in relation to the podium/of fering table group is what is important, not its relationship to the architecture, even if the architectural access often ac cords with the form resulting from the position of the two elements in the basic group. Court. Contrary to common opinion, and according to well-founded documentation, the court does not occur as an essential or permanent part of the organization of religious establishments; the temple exists independently of the court. Nevertheless, archaeological exploration has not always ex tended far enough to uncover the relationship between built space and open space; it is likely that esplanades, like that of the great sanctuary at Emar, existed more often than cur rent documentation seems to show. [See Emar.] The pres ence of an open-air space is indispensable for carrying out
blood sacrifices, but it is possible that a single sacrificial space served several temples within a single city, as the ex ample of Mari seems to suggest. At Mari, this role was prob ably held by the High Terrace called the red mound (Fr., massif rouge), and later the High Terrace of the Temple of the Lions. [See Mari.] Subsidiary rooms. A number of sanctuaries present a degree of complexity that does not seem to correspond to the simple scheme of the group vestibule, outer sanctuary, inner sanctuary (to which it is reasonable to add an openair space in certain cases and for modalities as yet undeter mined; see below). More or less closely associated with the outer sanctuary or grouped in adjoining clusters with varied functions, subsidiary rooms came to attach tiiemselves to the initial group. Most often no morphological feature permits definition of the function of these rooms, and the furnishings are only rarely significant; in most cases die annexes were designed for storage or for the daily life of the priests who lived in the temple. Sumerian Temple. The first temples were recognized in Sumerian territory, at Eridu. Dated to the end of the fifth millennium or to the beginning of the fourth, they had the natural tripartite form of the house of the Ubaid period: one large, elongated room with a series of dependent rooms dis tributed regularly on each side. The entrance was located in the middle of one of die long sides. A podium and offering table comprised the cultic installations. This is practically the same scheme that appears in about 3000 BCE at the White Temple at Uruk (see figure 1 ) , perched on its high terrace. [See Uruk-Warka.] A large number of die buildings found in the different levels of die fourth-millennium E-anna precinct at Uruk are often considered to be temples: they offer the same type of organization, and their identification as religious architec ture seems natural. Nevertheless, the absence of cultic in stallations should suggest caution. It is just as reasonable to see diese buildings as palaces or administrative centers than as temples. This plan as a model of the temple clearly ex perienced diffusion because it is found at Tell 'Uqair and, in the Jemdet Nasr period, in the Temple of Sin at Khafajeh (levels I-IV), and in die north, with several unusual traits, in the Eye Temple at Tell Brak. [See Khafajeh; Brak, Tell.] Based on present evidence, this formula did not have true continuity, however. After the historical period (Early Dy nastic), the plan was no longer utilized for an isolated tem ple, but only in the interior of a building complex (Temple of Shara, Tell Agrab). Northern Temple. The northern temple is also an elon gated temple. It is structurally simpler than die Sumerian temple, however, because it takes the form of a megaron. The megaron is an elongated room with a doorway on one of its short sides; its long sides are enclosed from the door way by antae, to form a vestibule. It differs from the Su-
TEMPLES: Mesopotamian Temples merian type of temple in the location of the doorway and the absence of surrounding structures. The megaron is an ancient architectural form used for domestic purposes in Anatolia from the Neolithic period onward. It is not until Early Dynastic (third millennium) Tell Chuera, however, that it is utilized as a temple. [See Chuera, Tell.] In Assyria, however, at Assur (Ishtar temple, level H), as well as at Nuzi (levels G - F ) and Tell Taya, that temples are found that, while taking the elongated form, belong neither to the me garon nor the Sumerian model: their entrances are lateral and do not follow the central axis. [See Assur; Nuzi; Taya, Tell] However, this Assyrian formula seems to have been progressively phased out in favor of the megaron, which, subsequently characterizes the temple exclusively in all the northern region of the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, from the Assyrian territory to the Mediterranean Sea (where it was to enjoy a surprising posterity). It is with the temples at Tell Leilan and Mari (Temple of the Lions), in about 2000 BCE, that the first stages in the expansion of the megaron form appear. [See Leilan, Tell.] In the second and first millennia BCE they spread to Assyria, with several specific characteristics, and especially to tire west, where Ebla, Emar (see figure 2), Tell Fray, and Munbaqa/Ekalte demonstrate significant examples in tire second millennium BCE and, later, Tell Ta'yinat in the first millen
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nium. In Jerusalem, Solomon in choosing the western Se mitic form of temple noted at this time that culturally Pal estine belonged with the world of western and nordiern Syria. [See Ebla; Jerusalem.] Babylonian Temple. In the Babylonian temple die po dium is set in the middle of the long side of a narrow room (inner sanctttary) and not, as in the two other cases, on one of the short sides. This long, narrow room is reached by a door cut facing the podium, so that there is a direct view of the podium from it; this unit, called a broad room, is some times preceded by a similar room, which is an intermediary to the court. Offerings were certainly made in the second room. The new arrangement of the temple appears at the turn of the third-second millennium BCE, long after die first two temple types, but it did not experience the same develop ment. It took the place of the Sumerian model in southern Mesopotamia simply because that region fell definitively un der the sway of Babylonia at the time of Hammurabi's em pire. In the north, the expansion of the model collided with the tradition of the northern temple and only rare evidence for it is found. Moreover, an evolution tied to the develop ment of the architectural organization of the temple emerged: in the earliest-known examples (Temple of ShuSin, associated with the palace at Tell Asmar), the broad
TEMPLES: Mesopotamian. Figure 1. Examples of temple plans. Left: Babylonian-type temple, first millennium BCE. Babylon, temple 2. Right: Syrian type temple. White Temple, Uruk. (Courtesy J.-C. Margueron)
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TEMPLES: Mesopotamian Temples
TEMPLES: Mesopotamian. Figure 2 . The double sanctuary at Emar. T o the left is the temple of Baal, to the right the temple of Ashtart. Behind the temples is an esplanade with a sacrificial altar. Models of the enlongated Syrian temple. (Courtesy J.-C. Margueron)
room opened directiy onto a covered central space; when tiiat central space was open, a second room was inserted between it and the first room, demonstrating that die offer ing place had to be sheltered from the weather. This ar rangement continued in the great Babylonian temples at Ur, Uruk, Babylon (see figure 1 ) , Borsippa, and Nippur, up un til the Seleucid period. However, even in the time of the greatest expansion of the empire, under Nebuchadrezzar, this temple type did not expand beyond the limits of Bab ylonia and soutiiern Mesopotamia. Temple-tower. Of western origin, the temple-tower made only a timid appearance in the Mesopotamian world. In fact, it occurs only at Mari in the third millennium (Tem ple of the Red Mound, Temple of Ninhursag). Mari thus marks well an important meeting point between Syria and Mesopotamia. It is fair to speculate whether the restriction of the expansion of such a specialized architectural form resulted from die existence of the ziggurat in Mesopotamia and Assyria, an architectural monument that implies a cult of the high, perhaps in the image of the temple-tower.
High Terraces and Ziggurats. The raised terrace on which the temple rests appeared in the fourth millennium at Eridu. Its origin remains difficult to establish, but the exis tence of the simple accumulation of archaeological strata must have contributed importantiy to its development. The raised terrace became an essential part of the monument at the White Temple at Uruk, at Tell 'Uqair, at the Eye Tem ple at Tell Brak, and, in the historical period, at Tell al'Ubaid and the Oval Temple at Khafajeh. With all these monuments, it was only a matter of raising the foundation level to install the temple. In contrast, from die third dynasty of Ur (twenty-first century BCE), staged terraces (with three or fewer stages) appeared in the principal cities of Meso potamia. These terraces would have been surmounted by a temple reached by long staircases. The monuments, called ziggurats, are characteristic of Mesopotamian cities of the second millennium BCE such as Ur, Assur, and Uruk, and of the first-millennium cities of Babylon and Nippur; they are centrally located and are dedicated to die cult of die god of the city. [See Babylon; Nippur; Ziggurat.]
TEMPLES: Syro-Palestinian Temples Great Complexes. Religious architecture in Mesopota mia witnessed a progressive enlargement, beginning with the (assumed) Sumerian style of die sanctuary of about 3000 BCE (e.g., the White Temple): a large room with several lat eral subsidiary rooms that did not exceed 20 m in length and occupied an area of 300-400 sq m. In die first millennium BCE, large, often gigantic complexes appeared. They in cluded temples, chapels, a ziggurat, and multiple associated structures organized around one or several large courts, more than 300-400 m to a side ( 1 2 - 1 5 > or 30-37 acres) at sites such as Uruk, Nippur, Sippar, and Babylon. [See Sippar.] Basically, however, it does not seem that the fun damental principal of die temple was modified. The temple was always the dwelling of the god, generally the god of the city, associated with a ziggurat, a grouping to which other dwellings of gods of less importance might be added. Such ensembles occur elsewhere, but more modestly, from the third millennium (e.g., Oval Temple at Khafajeh, Temple of Shara at Tell Agrab). Certain examples, such as the Giparu at Ur (c. 2000 BCE), sheltered a community. Palace of the God. As the residence of the god and the place of the daily offerings, the temple was the object of great care from kings: they often dedicated their energy and resources to embellishing the house of the god with gold, silver, the best and rarest wood, the most costly perfumes; nothing was too good for the divine house. The ex-votos as well as the statuettes dedicated by die faithful to their master were also deposited there. Because the wealth accumulated in these temples was the natural prey of enemy armies, it is often only fragments of that wealth that archaeologists re cover. However, those fragments are sufficient to demon strate the exceptional quality of Mesopotamian craftsman ship. They furnish, as well, indications about the cultic organization and ritual practices upon which the community believed the survival of the country depended.
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A typology, different from that of Heinrich (above), that leads to conclusions about the diverse modalities for the encounter between mortals and god reflected in architecture. Naumann, Rudolf. Archilektur Kleinasiens. 2d ed. Tubingen, 1971. Syn thesis of the architecture of the region that corresponds to presentday Turkey, from its origins to the eighth century BCE. Tunca, Onhan. L'archilecture religieuse protodynastique en Mesopotamie. 2 vols. Louvain, 1984. The limits of archaeological documentation. JEAN-CLAUDE MARGUERON
Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
n a
Syro-Palestinian T e m p l e s In the nomenclature followed in this discussion, the term temple refers to large, sacred structures and sanctuary and shrine refer to ±eir smaller counterparts in both North and South Canaan, the modern countries of Syria, Lebanon, Is rael, and Jordan. Canaanite Religion. Throughout the Bronze Age Canaanite religious practice was typified by a multiplicity of places of worship. Different types of sacred structures have been excavated at urban centers and isolated countryside locations throughout North and South Canaan. Textual and archaeological evidence supports the existence of priestiy groups that controlled many of the forms and sites of wor ship. Access to some temples and shrines, or to specific areas within them, was available to the public at large, but else where worship was restricted to priestly groups and royal families or to tribal or other kin groups.
Domestic worship was also a significant component of Canaanite religion, with the home an additional venue for ritual celebration. Finally, Canaanite religion included the veneration of ancestors, so that some worship took place at funerary sites. As the house was home to the average family and the pal ace was home to die Idng and queen, so the temple was considered die home of the gods and goddesses of ancient Canaan. This domestic metaphor, however, yields fewer BIBLIOGRAPHY clues to the physical layout of Canaanite temples than to the Aurenche, Olivier, ed. Diclionnaire illustre multilingue de ['architecture du types of rituals that took place in them: the care and feeding Proche-Orient ancien. Lyon, 1977. Reference work completed by ar of the gods is the central motif of West Semitic religious chaeologists and architects specializing in the ancient Near East; con rituals. In consequence, the presentation of sacrificial offer cerned primarily with clarifying technical questions; equivalent terms ings was the sacred rite par excellence, and the remains of are given in eight languages. Heinrich, Ernst. Die Tempel und I-Ieiligtiimer im alten Mewpotamien: Ty- offerings and the paraphernalia with which they were pre pologie, Morphologic und Geschichte. 2 vols. Denkmaler Antiker Ar- pared and offered are the most common furnishings and chitektur, 14. Berlin, 1982. artifacts found in excavated Canaanite temples and shrines. Margueron, Jean-Claude. "A propos des temples de Syrie du Nord." Nonmovable altars and built-in offering benches, for ex In Sanctuaires et clerges, by Jean-Claude Margueron et a l , pp. 1 1 ample, reflect the centrality of the presentation of offerings. 38. Etudes d'Histoire des Religions, 4. Paris, 1985. Sacrificial offerings of livestock, agricultural goods, and lux Margueron, Jean-Claude. "L'espace sacrificiel dans le Proche-Orient ury items are all attested both in texts, particularly those ancien." In L'espace sacrificiel dans les civilizations meditcrraneennes de I'antiquite, edited by Roland Etienne and Marie-Therese Le Dinahet, from Ugarit, and through archaeological excavation. PP- 235-242. Publications de la Bibliotheque Salomon-Reinach, 5. Often, Canaanite temples and shrines did not stand in Lyon, 1991. isolation. A sacred complex might include a major building, Margueron, Jean-Claude. "Sanctuaires semitiques." In Supplement au smaller auxiliary structures, and one or more courtyards, all Diclionnaire de la Bible, fascs. 64B-65, cols. 1 1 0 4 - 1 2 5 8 . Paris, 1 9 9 1 .
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surrounded by an enclosure, or temenos, wall. Some Ca naanite temples were single rooms, but odiers were bipartite or tripartite structures. A cella, or holy of holies, frequently blocked from public view, was often set into the rear wall of the innermost chamber. Other rooms were larger and used for the enactment of rituals, for storage, and as guardrooms and treasuries. On occasion, foundation deposits (jars filled with statues of gods, goddesses, and worshipers and with other precious objects) were deposited under temples to consecrate their construction or rededication. Courtyards provided the venue for the sacrifice of ani mals, for the public presentation of offerings, for the im molation of offerings, and for the consumption of sacral meals. Therefore, large stone altars are often found in cen tral courtyard locations. Standing stones (obelisks, massebot, or stelae) were also erected in courtyards and occasionally in tire temples themselves. Auxiliary structures for the pro duction of cultic objects and paraphernalia (particularly ce ramic, metal, and textile workshops) are sometimes found in courtyards, as well. In some instances, courtyards contain favissae, pits used in ritually discarding sacred objects. Middle Bronze Age IIA (2000/1950-1800 BCE). Tem ples and shrines of this period may be treated geographi cally, dividing the region into North Canaan (Lebanon and Syria) and South Canaan (Jordan and Israel). North Canaan. In North Canaan, monumental, and at times multiple, temples stood in a number of important cit ies, including Ebla, Mari, Alalakh, Byblos, and Ugarit. The location of these buildings suggests that at least some were royal temples; others were used by kin groups residing in the cities' various neighborhoods. Ebla. The Middle Bronze Age IIA-B temples attire inland Syrian site of Ebla, which preserved much of the earlier, Early Bronze Age IV construction, were found in two areas of the city, on the Acropolis and in the Lower City. Temple D, a massivettipartite,fortress-style (tower or Heb., migdal) temple, was located on the Acropolis alongside Royal Palace E and various administrative buildings. The Acropolis was girded by at least six Lower City temples, constructed among the city's residential neighborhoods: Fortress Tem ples N and B i , Temples B2, and C; Building Q (?); and a sacred building northeast of the acropolis. Temples B i and B2 were linked by subterranean tunnels associated with a funerary cult. [See Ebla.] Mari. The Temple of Dagan at Mari, on the Euphrates River, was constructed on a traditionally sacred spot west of the vast royal palace. Built by Ishtup-ilum, the temple was originally dedicated to a god called King of the Land and later rededicated to Dagan. [See Mari.] Alalakh. In North Syrian Alalakh, a sequence of temples, first constructed in M B IIA, was located on virtually the same spot throughout the second millennium BCE. Of tiiese sacred buildings, that of the M B IIC, located next to the palace of Yarimlim, is the best known. [See Alalakh.]
Ugarit. It has long been assumed that the Late Bronze Age Temples of Baal and Dagan in Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, were originally constructed at the beginning of the second millennium BCE. [See Ugarit.] Byblos. The sequence of temples at Byblos, on die Leb anese coast, continued unbroken for some three millennia. Sacred M B IIA architecture was characterized by unroofed buildings and courtyards filled with Egyptian-style obelisks. The four MB temples located on the eastern side of the city were grouped around the public area created out of the Early Bronze Age Sacred Lake. They include the Obelisk temple, dedicated to the god Resheph, the tripartite Syrian temple (Batiment II), dedicated to die goddess Baalat Gubla, the temple tiiat covered the E B Champs des Offrandes, and a small temple on die tell's southeast slope. [See Byblos.] South Canaan. In South Canaan, the M B IIA was typ ified by small settlements that would only later develop into true cities. Attestations to religious life are therefore limited to regional or village shrines at Megiddo, Nahariya, and Tell el-Hayyat, as well as at several lesser known sites (Kefar Shemaryahu, Bat-Yam). Megiddo. Cultic installations were constructed in M B IIA in die village of Megiddo, in Israel's Jezreel Valley. These include the small Cult Room 4040c and High Place D . An altar, obelisks, and artifactual remains suggest an Egyptian influence similar to that at the Byblos Obelisk temple. [See Megiddo.] Nahariya. In M B IIA, Nahariya, on Israel's northern Mediterranean coast, was a specialized sacred site located at some distance from any contemporary settlement. Origi nally, a circular stone altar stood outside a small square building. Later, the shrine was incorporated into a large cir cular platform. The cultic assemblage at Nahariya was sim ilar to those at Byblos and Megiddo. Tell el-Hayyat. A sequence of temples was in use at the eastern Jordan Valley site of Tell el-Hayyat from M B IIA to MB IIC. The original sanctuary, a small, square building, was expanded over the years. It ultimately attained the plan of a typical fortress-style temple, known elsewhere from contemporary Ebla (see above). Houses located outside the walled sacred precinct eventually transformed the isolated rural sanctuary into a small village. [See Hayyat, Tell el-.] Middle Bronze Age IIB (1800/1750-1650 BCE). Tradi tional M B IIA sanctuaries were used into M B IIB at die North Canaanite sites of Ebla, Alalakh, and elsewhere. In South Canaan, M B IIB was an era of continuing and im pressive urbanization. The regional cult centers at Nahariya and Tell el-Hayyat were enlarged, as was the sacred area at Megiddo. At the same time, new shrines or religious instal lations were built at such sites as Gr/at-Sharret and Tell Kitan. At Megiddo and Nahariya, an Egypto-Canaanite cult continued to be celebrated. Fortress-style temples, known earlier from inland Syria, were used at such Jordan Valley
TEMPLES: Syro-Palestinian Temples sites as Tell el-Hayyat, Tel Kitan, and, perhaps, Kefar Rupin. Nahariya, Hayyat, and Kitan were regional cult centers, presumably staffed by religious professionals and used pri marily by local tribal groups. Giv'at-Sharett illuminates re ligious life in a small Canaanite village. Canaanite religion spread to the southwest, with the establishment of "Hyksos," or Canaanite-style, temples at Tell ed-Dab a in the Egyptian Delta. Giv'at-Sharett. A small, two-room shrine was located at the top of die hill on which die small village of Giv'at-Shar ett, near Bedi-Shemesh, is located. Benches lined the walls of die larger room, and an altar stood against the back wall of die smaller one. A typical assemblage of cultic vessels and sacred objects was found in the shrine. Tel Kitan. Several rows of stone stelae, including one carved to represent a nude goddess, stood in front of die M B IIB sanctuary at Tel Kitan. Located on a strategic hill top on the west bank of the Jordan River, die fortress-style sanctuary served as a regional cultic center. [See Kitan, Tel.] Tell ed-Dab'a. Two Canaanite-style temples were built in this Nile Delta city. Temple III was tripartite, with very thick walls; less is known about Temple V. A mud-brick altar stood in the courtyard in front of these two sacred structures. [See Dab'a, Tell ed-.] Middle Bronze Age IIC (1650-1500 BCE). In South Ca naan, M B IIC was an era of internal development typified by die proliferation of large, walled cities. International re lations were complicated by the dominant role played by the Canaanites, or Hyksos, in Second Intermediate period Egypt. Reflecting the dangers of the era and its many polit ical and social changes, fortress-style temples were built at die walled cities of Hazor, Megiddo, and Shechem. Smaller shrines were constructed at Tel Mor and in the gateway areas at Ashkelon and Tell el-Far'ah North (?). The regional sanctuaries at Nahariya, Tell el-Hayyat, and Tel Kitan re mained in use. The Gezer high place, a new open-air cult place inside die M B IIC city, remains an anomaly. Intriguingly, the architectural forms of M B temples and shrines cannot always be correlated with their locations (see below). For example, fortress-style temples were found at urban sites ranging from Ebla in the north to Tell ed-Dab'a in Egypt and in a cluster of urban (Shechem, Hazor, Me giddo) and rural (Tell el-Hayyat, Kefar Rupin, Tel Kitan) sites in and near the Jordan Valley. At the same time, ar chitectonic elements of the temples found at northern sites (Ebla, Mari, Byblos, Alalakh) were also found employed at southern sites (Hazor, Megiddo, Shechem). c
Hazor. The Galilean site of Hazor was home to multiple sacred sites in M B IIC. The Area A Long temple was lo cated north of the palace in the Upper City. The fortressstyle Bipartite temple, with a cult niche in its rear wall and a mud-brick altar in the front courtyard, was located in Area H in the Lower City.
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Megiddo. Temple 2048 at Megiddo was first constructed in M B IIC, over the remains of earlier sacred structures. The two small chambers at the front of the building were even tually modified into towers flanking its entrance, creating a classic fortress-style temple. This sacred building remained in use well into the Early Iron Age. Shechem. Several sacred structures coexisted in and around M B IIC Shechem, located north of Jerusalem in Is rael's hill country. Two large towers containing interior staircases flanked the entrance to Fortress temple 1, just in side the city gate. A small royal chapel was constructed as part of the palace complex. The Square temple, a building with rooms arranged around a central chamber or court yard, was located outside the city, some 300 m down the slope of Mt. Gerizim. [See Shechem.] Gezer. At Gezer, on the border between Israel's Shephelah and coastal plain, the High Place, an anomalous sacred installation, consisted of ten large stone massebot in a northsouth alignment, near a partially hollowed stone block. The surface in front of the line of stelae was plastered and the complex was surrounded by a low wall. [See Gezer.] Ashkelon. A small, silver-plated bronze calf placed in a ceramic shrine model was found in a storeroom associated with a sanctuary at Ashkelon, on the coast south of Tel Aviv. Constructed in M B IIC, this small sanctuary stood just out side the city wall, at the base of the massive rampart sur rounding the city. [See Ashkelon.] Tell el-Far'ah North. A Gateway Shrine was con structed just inside the gateway at the western entry to Tell el-Far'ah (North), northeast of Shechem. It consisted of a small slab-lined installation, thought to have been a cultic basin or hearth. [See Far'ah, Tell el- (North).] Late Bronze Age. Despite the political instability and devastating destructions of the Late Bronze Age, the prac tice of Canaanite religion continued along traditional lines throughout L B IA. As South Canaan began its process of recovery from Egyptian military intervention in L B I B - L B IIA, new temples and shrines were built along trade routes and, even more commonly, in cities. Later, in L B IIB, Egypt consolidated its control over South Canaan. In the process, it usurped indigenous religious ttaditions—and commanded royal and priestly complicity—in support of its own imperial demands. Late Bronze Age IA (1500-1450 BCE). Many sacred M B IIC sites remained in use throughout L B IA—die temples at Megiddo (Temple 2048) and Hazor (Long temple), the sanctuaries at Tel Mor, Tel Kitan, and Shiloh, and the openair shrines at Gezer and Nahariya. New construction took place, as well, at Beth-Shean and Tell Deir 'Alia. Beth-Shean. At Beth-Shean, strategically located between die Jezreel and Jordan Valleys, a new temple was constructed on the Acropolis. The Phase R3 sanctuary was a small bench-lined structure with an unusual asymmetrical plan. [See Beth-Shean.]
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Tell Deir 'Alia, A regional sanctuary at Tell Deir 'Alia, in the eastern Jordan Valley, incorporated an elongated cella into its plan. Across a small courtyard, three tablets, written in an as-yet undeciphered script, were found in a "tteasury." Over time, the Deir 'Alia sanctuary bore an increasing re semblance to the later Egypto-Canaanite temples at Lachish and Beth-Shean. [See Deir 'Alia, Tell.] Hazor. During L B IA, significant changes were made in the Hazor MB IIC temples. In the Upper City, the entrance of the Area A Long temple was lined with ordiostats. With its thick walls and rectangular plan, the temple resembled those at Megiddo and Shechem, also located near palaces. The courtyard of the Area H Bipartite temple in the Lower City was enlarged and enhanced with special cultic instal lations, including stone altars and drainage channels for an imal sacrifice. Benches were added to the main hall in the temple, and the cella was closed off from public view. Late Bronze Age IB (1450-1400 BCE) . Worship in South Canaan in L B IB reflected the new mood of consolidation and renewal, as relations between Canaan and Egypt sta bilized. Megiddo Temple 2048 and the Hazor Long and Bipartite temples were modified and reused, and the Shechem Fortress temple was rebuilt. Nearby Shiloh re mained a pilgrimage center. New temples were built at La chish (Fosse temple) and Tel Mevorakh. Lachish. Fosse temple I was the first in a sequence of three strategically located temples constructed at Lachish, in Is rael's Shephelah, in the Late Bronze Age. Over time, the form and content of the Fosse temple was changed little, even though the building was enlarged. The floor plan con sisted of a main hall and auxiliary and storage rooms. Fur nishings included offering benches, storage niches, and al tars. Favissae and storage pits were found in the courtyards surrounding the building. Auxiliary structures for tire pro duction of pottery and metal objects, for storage, and for domestic purposes were constructed nearby. [See Lachish.] Beth-Shean. The then-permanent Egyptian presence at Beth-Shean was reflected in its new temple, Building 10. It had a rambling and complex plan of courtyards, altars, and subsidiary chambers, all situated around a fortress-style structure. Shechem. As part of the L B IB reoccupation of Shechem, a new fortress-style temple was built over Fortress temple 1. Massebot from the earlier structure and a mud-brick altar were placed in the courtyard of Fortress temple 2a. Tell Abu Hawam. Temple 50, on the eastern side of the port city at Tell Abu Hawam, near Haifa, was in use from L B IB to die end of the Late Bronze Age. It was a small, rectangular building with exterior buttressing and an en trance room on its eastern end. Temple 50 was filled with a wide range of small finds from places throughout the eastern Mediterranean. [See Abu Hawam, Tell.] Tel Mevorakh. A small regional temple complex was con structed at Tel Mevorakh, several kilometers south of Tel
Dor, in L B IB. Its main hall was lined with offering benches, and a stepped altar was positioned along its rear wall. Evi dence suggests that cultic paraphernalia, including votive vessels and metal objects, were produced in the courtyards surrounding the sanctuary. The entire complex (sanctuary and courtyards) was surrounded by a temenos wall. Of the three successively enlarged sanctuaries at Tel Mevorakh, the one dated to L B IIB was the best preserved. Late Bronze Age IIA (1400-1300 B C E ) . In L B IIA, Soutii Canaan experienced relative peace and prosperity, as a re sult of less oppressive Egyptian policies. This allowed for the enlarging of temples and shrines at some sites and die construction of others. During this period, renovations were undertaken in the temples at Megiddo, Beth-Shean, Tel Mevorakh, Lachish (Fosse temple), and Shechem. How ever, the most extensive changes took place at Hazor. The Long temple, the sacred seat of the Canaanite aris tocracy at Hazor since M B IIC, went out of use and was supplanted as the city's primary sanctuary by the Area H Orthostat temple. The old Bipartite temple was recon structed there, and the addition of a room in the front of the building transformed it into a tripartite structure. Lion or diostats lined the doorway, and other orthostats, possibly from the earlier temple, lined its walls. This newly formatted Orthostat temple reflected northern, Syro-Hittite elements. [See Hittites.] The new Area C Stelae temple was a small shrine nestled in the M B rampart surrounding the Lower City. First con structed in L B IIA, it is better known in its L B IIB state. During L B IIA, it was a very small, bench-lined building with a cult niche set into its rear wall. Other new sacred buildings and installations, including Shrine 6211 in Area C, the outdoor altar in Area F, and open-air shrines near the gateways of Areas P and K , were also constructed in L B IIA. These multiple religious sites attest to the multiplicity of worship experiences at L B II Hazor. Late Bronze Age IIB (1300-1200 B C E ) . One character istic of L B IIB Canaanite religion was the doubling of the number of sacred sites over that in the previous period. In L B IIB, many Canaanite religious institutions were ex ploited to further Egyptian imperial goals. Egypto-Canaan ite temples, at least some of which were used to facilitate grain collection, were constructed at Lachish, Beth-Shean, Jerusalem, Tell Abu Hawam, Aphek, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza. Even Temple 2048 at Megiddo came under die authority of Egyptian administrators; at the same time, a private chapel was constructed in the royal palace. Lachish. Following its thirteenth-century BCE destruction, Lachish fell under the jurisdiction of nineteenth-dynasty Egypt. At this time, a new sanctuary, the Summit temple, was constructed on the western side of die city. This new temple, which blended Canaanite and Egyptian architec-
TEMPLES: Syro-Palestinian Temples rural forms, consisted of a large main hall, at the rear of which a cella was reached by a monumental stone staircase. In plan it resembled the strata VII-VI temples at contem porary Beth-Shean, another major Egyptian administrative center. Beth-Shean. The founding of a new sanctuary at BethShean in L B LIB is attributed to the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I. Access to the strata VII-VI sanctuary was through several entrance rooms. Its main hall was bench lined and the cella on its rear wall was reached via a seven-step staircase. Aux iliary rooms served as a treasury and for the preparation of sacred meals. An altar in the courtyard was used for animal sacrifices. Megiddo. The increase in contacts with Egypt at Megiddo is reflected in the important changes made to Temple 2048 in L B IIB. These include tire sealing of the cult niche in its rear wall and the construction of an offering bench in which Middle Kingdom Egyptian statues were buried. At the same time, the palace underwent alterations. Room 3013, a small royal chapel with an elevated platform reached by stairs, was included in its plan. Hazor. Throughout L B IIB, tire Area H Orthostat temple retained its Syro-Hittite elements. Botii die temple and its courtyards were full of altars, religious statuary, cultic ves sels, and sacred objects. In Area C, the cult niche in the Stelae temple was altered to form a raised platform. Ten basalt stelae, one of which was decorated with uplifted hands under an upturned crescent, were erected in the rear of the niche, togetiier with a basalt statue of a seated man. Shechem. At Shechem, Building 5988 was constructed in a residential neighborhood in Field IX. A mud-brick plat form ran along die rear wall of this small and simple sanc tuary, and a 250-kilogram stone masseba was found lying on the floor. Ugarit. The port city of Ugarit, with its remarkable col lection of tablets illuminating Canaanite religion, politics, administration, and social organization and its vast collec tion of architectural and artifactual data, is one of the richest L B Canaanite sites. Its temples and shrines are best known from L B IIB, the period just prior to its final desttuction. The Temples of Baal and Dagan, situated at the highest point of the city's Acropolis, were in use from early in the Middle Bronze Age through the end of die Late Bronze Age. The two-roomed Temple of Baal, including its courtyard and the large altar in it, was surrounded by a temenos wall. Stelae attest to the sanctuary's dedication to the Canaanite god Baal and stone anchors to die maritime orientation of at least one religious element of L B Ugarit. [See Anchors.] The nearby Temple of Dagan was similar in form to the Temple of Baal but was more massive in its construction. The two-roomed Hurrian sanctuary, or Sanctuary of the Mitanni Ax, part of a large royal complex, resembled the two acropolis temples in plan. The Rhyton sanctuary, lo
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cated in a residential district in the center of the city, was a small, bench-lined sanctuary with a tiiree-tiered altar on its rear wall. Amman. The so-called Amman Airport temple was an un usual square, stone building filled with luxurious imported items. It is commonly designated a temple, but it was, rather, a mortuary installation. [See Amman Airport Temple.] Iron Age (1200-586 BCE). Ironically, the most renowned temple of the Israelite Iron Age, the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem, exists only in the ancient biblical texts that pur port to describe it. Although elements of its foundation may well be ensconced among the massive remains of the Tem ple Mount, die foundation platform of its late first-millen nium BCE successor, no remains of the building itself have been found. Prior to the construction of the Solomonic sanctuary, Is raelites worshiped at numerous open-air shrines, as attested in biblical passages and through excavation. Worship also took place in small sanctuaries at Shiloh (/ Sm. 1:1-20) and elsewhere (see, e.g., Hazor Room 3283, a small, bench-lined shrine of the mid-eleventii century BCE). Subsequent to assuming the crown, Solomon, the third king of Israel, constructed a magnificent tripartite temple on a mountaintop in Jerusalem (1 Kgs. 5-7). Although the He brew Bible emphatically declared the Jerusalem Temple to be the sole legitimate site for Israelite worship during die monarchical era, other temples and shrines are known through textual and architectural remains. [See Biblical Temple.] Along with the Jerusalem Temple, Israelite wor ship in the United Monarchy (1020-922 BCE) took place at Building 338 and Shrine 2081, two tenth-century BCE sanc tuaries constructed as part of die massive Solomonic build ing project at Megiddo. The architectural features of these two buildings are not fully clear, but both seem to have been venues for public worship. A better-known sanctuary, also dated to the Solomonic era, was excavated at Lachish. Cult Room 49 was a small, bench-lined room, its bench elevated in one corner to form an altar. Other contemporary shrines were in use at Ta'anach (stratum IIB), Betii-Shean (stratum lower V), Tel Qasile Temple 118 (strata IX-VII), and Tel Amal (stratum III). Worship continued as well at open-air shrines, known from excavation and biblical passages. [See Ta'anach; Qasile, Tel.] At the beginning of the Divided Monarchy (922-587 BCE), Jeroboam, king of the northern kingdom of Israel, con structed two temples, one at Bethel and one at Dan (1 Kgs. 12:25-31). Other than its foundation platform, no remains of the Bethel temple have been found. At Dan, excavation revealed a temenos area near the spring at the northern edge of the mound. The sacred enclosure consisted of three parts: a large ashlar platform, an open area that contained the main sacrificial altar, and an installation for preparing die olive oil used rituaHy. [See Bethel; Dan.] Perhaps in order to preserve the sanctity of a pre-Israelite
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shrine, a sanctuary was consmicted in die northwestern cor ner of the Judaean royal fortress at Arad, in the northern Negev. In the center of its courtyard a large altar of unhewn stones was topped by a flint slab. Two shallow bowls in scribed with the Hebrew letters qoph and kaph, an abbrevi ation for qodes kohanim ("set apart for [or, holy to] the priests") were found at the foot of the altar. The courtyard opened into a narrow chamber with benches lining its back wall. Behind this entrance chamber was an elevated cella containing incense altars and stelae. [See Arad, article on Iron Age Period.] At nearby Beersheba, a large ashlar altar is all that remains of another sanctuary from the era of the Divided Monarchy. Other sanctuaries of the Divided Monarchy have been found at Tel Qedesh and Tell es-Sa'idiyeh. Finally, a midninth-mid-eighth-century BCE caravanserai was excavated at Kuntillet 'Ajrud, about 50 km (31 mi.) south of QadeshBarnea. At the enttance to this hostel/religious center was a small two-roomed, bench-lined sanctuary. Its plastered walls were decorated with religious motifs and it contained a number of inscribed vessels. The religious expression at tested to in these drawings and inscriptions is marked by its syncretistic nature, which included worship of Yahweh, Baal, and Asherah. [See Sa'idiyeh, Tell ess Kuntillet 'Ajrud.]
tresslike building compounds that included a central shrine housing a cult image—the terrestrial incarnation of the god. These compounds were regarded as enclaves of the other world and secluded by high enclosure walls; only the king and specially prepared priests could communicate with the divinity. Public cult congregations were unknown, altiiough laypersons could address minor deities in rural cult places or worship special statues erected at temple gates. Priests also provided services such as the reading of oracles. For the cult images the clergy performed daily services consisting of purification with natron and incense, a change of clothes, animation (made possible through a ritual known as the "opening of the mouth"), and food offerings. In ad dition, the festival calendar included numerous celebrations during which the gods left die temples in procession and traveled over land and water to the capital or to temples of affiliated divinities. Egyptian cult buildings were characterized by distinct ar chitectural forms and elements, which once developed were repeated throughout Egyptian history. Minor changes were dictated by religious requirements and period styles. B e cause sacral buildings reproduced the dwellings of the gods and represented a microcosm of the universe, architecture required a clearly calculated order, axial orientation, sym metry, dimensions, and proportions.
Origin and Development. Although temples appear as BIBLIOGRAPHY
early as the fifth millennium BCE elsewhere in the ancient Near East (Syria-Palestine, Anatolia, Malta), evidence for monumental sacral buildings in Egypt exists only from the first dynasty (3100 BCE). The oldest Egyptian structures are the huge, fortresslike brick "palaces" associated with the royal tombs in the cemetery of Abydos in die province of This. As earthly sacred buildings for use in the afterlife, these burials have their prototypes in the "fortresses of the gods." Early inscriptions suggest that they were palace en closures used for celebrating the sed festival and other royal ceremonies. Other templelike buildings are preserved in fullscale limestone "models" in the third-dynasty precinct of King Djoser at Saqqara. The shapes of early gods' shrines are also preserved in hieroglyphs illustrating primitive Up per and Lower Egyptian reed shelters diat may have stood on artificially heaped-up mounds in imitation of mytholog ical primeval sand hills.
Biran, Avraham, ed. Temples and High Places in Biblical Times: Proceed ings of the Colloquium in Honor of the Centennial of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem, 14-16 March 1977. Je rusalem, 1 9 8 1 . The essays in this volume discuss a wide range of sacred sites in the biblical world. Each essay is enhanced through the addition of comments by leading scholars in the field. Dever, William G. "The Contribution of Archaeology to the Study of Canaanite and Early Israelite Religion." In Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, edited by Patrick D. Miller, Jr., et al., pp. 2 0 9 - 2 4 7 . Philadelphia, 1 9 8 7 . Presents up-to-date ar chaeological date that challenge many preconceptions and elucidate our understanding of religion in Canaan and Israel. Mazar, Amihai. "Temples of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages and the Iron Age." In The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehis toric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 1 6 1 - 1 8 7 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . Comprehensive survey of sec ond- and first-millennium BCE sacred sites that classifies the major temples of Canaan and Israel according to their physical type. Ottosson, Magnus. Temples and Cult Places in Palestine. Uppsala, 1 9 8 0 . At the beginning of the fourth dynasty, chapels for die Although somewhat outdated, this book presents extensive infor royal statue cult emerge at the pyramids of Sneferu at Meimation about a number of significant temples and cult places in the Bronze and Iron Ages. dum and Dahshur and later develop into the huge statue BETH ALPERT NAKHAI temples found at the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren at Giza. Augmented by funerary chapels at the beginning of the fifth dynasty, the typical royal pyramid temple emerges Egyptian Temples under King Sahure at Abu Sir, creating a standard cult com plex that would endure until the beginning of the twelfth The dissimilarities between the ancient Egyptian and tire dynasty. modern understanding of culture and religion means that sacral Egyptian architecture is poorly defined by a term such The scarcity of early temples for the gods is perhaps ex as "temple." Many of these installations were palace- or for plained by later destruction, the preeminence of divine king-
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TEMPLES: Egyptian. Plan of the Temple of Khonsu at Karnak. Twentietli-twenty-first dynasty. (Courtesy D. Arnold)
ship in the Old Kingdom, and the enormous investments made for the construction of the pyramid complexes. From the twelfth dynasty onward, modest stone temples for the gods appear throughout Egypt from the Sinai to Upper Nu bia. In the eighteenth dynasty, the woman pharaoh Hatshepsut initiated a period of monumental temple building with her mortuary complex at Deir el-Bahari, conceived by an ingenious architect, who followed the prototype of the neighboring eleventh-dynasty temple of King Mentuhotep Nebhepetre. Both the Mentuhotep and Ffatshepsut sanc tuaries were built into die mountain range on the western side of the Nile. Rising on high terraces, Flatshepsut's tem ple is adorned with pillared porticoes and frontal so-called Osirid pillars. Unique reliefs, including scenes of Flatshep sut's fleet of ships carrying an obelisk and her expedition to the land of Punt (southeast of Egypt) decorate the walls. Under die Thutmosid kings, the temple to Amun-Re at Karnak emerged and gradually became one of the largest temple complexes in the ancient Near East. The smaller per istyle temples of Buhen and Amada are brilliant examples of Upper Egyptian architecture. The Luxor temple of Amenhotep III, die king's mortuary temple at Qurna, and his temple at Soleb in Upper Nubia are outstanding exam ples of New Kingdom architecture for the cult of the divine king. The structures are characterized by huge dimensions, wide festival courts surrounded by colonnades of tall pa pyrus-cluster columns, and colossal statues of the king (the so-called Memnon statues). The interlude of the Amarna Period, which produced spe
cial types of solar temples (see below), was too short to in fluence effectively the course of sacral architecture. The more compact and austere temples of the Ramessid period (nineteenth and twentieth dynasties) lost the splendor of those of Amenhotep III; interior courts were constrained be tween pylons and porticoes of heavily proportioned col umns. Colossal hypostyle halls were the great achievement of the period (Rameses II at Karnak, in the Ramesseum, and in Memphis; Rameses III at Medinet Habu). Their cen tral aisles, which towered over the side aisles, created huge clerestory openings that were closed with ornamental stone windows. Rameses II is renowned for his vast temple build ing program, not only in Egypt but also at frontier outposts and along the Nile valley as far south as the Third Cataract (Gerf Hussein, Wadi es-Sebua, Abu Simbel). Altiiough most of the temples built from die twenty-first through the thirtieth dynasties were erected in Lower Egypt (the region of the Nile's delta), not one remains intact. A few examples have survived in Upper (southern) Egypt (Kliargah, Hibeh, Hermopolis). During this time, Egypt suffered several confrontations with various foreigners such as the Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, and Persians. The cha otic times required that gigantic enclosure walls surround sanctuaries and that the stone temple houses have few doors and openings. The desire to preserve a threatened culture and religion led to the use of more durable materials such as granite and quartzite at the ruined Lower Egyptian tem ples at Bubastis, Iseum, Mendes, and Tanis. The Ptolemies usurped and enlarged some temples that had been left unfinished because of the Persian invasions
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(twenty-seventh and thirty-first dynasties) and pacified pharaonic traditionalists with numerous splendid temples, mainly in Upper Egypt (Philae, Kom Ombo, Edfu). A major innovation was the replacement of the n-aditional hypostyle (many-columned) hall with a monumental open-fronted pronaos (also a hall with many columns abutting the front of the temple) and the wide distribution of columns with opulent composite capitals. Newly founded cities were filled with temples honoring locally important deities, for exam ple, Serapis in Alexandria and the crocodile cults in the Fai yum. At sites such as Karanis, Dime, Qasr Qarun, and Abu kir, these temple buildings were an exotic mixture of Hellenistic and pharaonic styles. Under the Roman emperors, the Ptolemaic and pharaonic temple building traditions were renewed in numerous places (Dendur, Kalabsha, Esna, Dendera. Isis was particularly venerated at Philae as well as at sites outside Egypt (Rome, Benevent, Pergamon). Temples in newly established cities such as Antinoupolis were built in the Roman style. In 391 CE Theodosius I outiawed pagan cults, and the temples were closed, transformed into churches, or used as quarries. Typology. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, sacral architecture was of different types. The most important cat egories were the temples for the gods, king, or the solar cult and the sanctuaries that served as barque stations or birth houses. Temples for the gods. From the beginning, the main purpose of the Egyptian temple was to protect the divine cult image. The brick and stone sanctuaries for cult images developed from primitive reed tents built to shelter idols and soon included a covered offering or cult chamber. When the customary cult assembly of a trinity or divine family became dominant, three parallel sanctuaries opening into a common offering hall were required. The offering hall provided the stage for the daily ritual and was an important place for the display of the statues of temple sharing gods and privileged commoners, who were allowed to join in die rites performed for the lord of the house. In larger temples, the chamber for the cult image was extended to the front of the temple by means of an elongated room, where the god's traveling barque entered as at the temple of Seti I at Abydos. Increasingly monumental pretensions led to the addition of more frontal hypostyle halls. As the dynasties advanced, these halls were mostly large, have high roofs, and are car ried by papyrus columns with open (campaniform) capitals. The hypostyle "halls of appearances" were the first resting places for the barque after it left its sanctuary. The halls opened into the "festival court," another stage for more elaborate ceremonies, such as barque processions. Col umned halls surrounded two, three, or four sides of the court. As of the Middle Kingdom, the front of the court was shielded by the two-towered pylon, a symbolic representa tion of the temple. Attached to the pylon were poles 30 to
40 meters high with colorful flags that formed die sign for god and proclaimed the divine character of the building. Whereas royal-cult installations were built in stone in the third dynasty, most temples for deities were not made of stone until the Middle Kingdom. These stone buildings could be surrounded by large numbers of offices, work shops, storehouses, and priests' dwellings, generally built in mudbrick and encircled by huge brick enclosure walls, for example, at Karnak, temples of Seti I at Qurna and Abydos, the Ramesseum, and Medinet Habu. In front of the temple, a processional road passed the birth house and barque sta tions (see below) before reaching an affiliated sanctuary, a barque resting place at the banks of the Nile, or a canal from where the god's journey continued on a boat, as at Philae and Karnak. The roads were secluded by side walls and pro tected on both sides by long series of sphinxes, such as the great avenue from the Luxor to the Karnak temples. Temples for the king. The divinity of the Egyptian king was not inherent but was bestowed after the coronation, when the divine ka (essential character) entered die king. This ceremony may have occurred in the Luxor temple as of the New Kingdom in connection with the celebration of the opet feast. The divine powers of the ldng were periodically invigor ated by the sed festival, which occasionally occurred in thirty-year intervals. These complex and enigmatic cere monies required immense architectural installations attached to die royal palaces. Built of bricldike residential buildings, these buildings have been either destroyed or ne glected by archaeologists. The serf-festival complexes con sisted of large courts for processions and assemblies of of ficials and priests, throne kiosks, coronation halls and many chapels for the gods brought from all parts of Egypt to take part in the rites. A full-scale stone model of a serf-festival complex is preserved in the Djoser precinct at Saqqara. Another means of assuring the survival of the king's ka was the cult of a statue enacted in chapels attached to major temples of the gods (ka houses). This practice occurred from die late Old Kingdom to the end of the Middle King dom. The few identified steuctures, such as those built by Pepi I and Teti at Bubastis consist of relatively simple shrines inside an enclosure. The final perpetuation of the king's powers and divinity after death was accomplished in the royal tomb and the pyr amid complexes during the Old and Middle Kingdoms. The "mansions of millions of years," which first appear in the twelfth dynasty and are generally known as "mortuary tem ples" during the New Kingdom, continue this transforma tion. Beginning with the eleventh-dynasty complex of Nebhepetre Mentuhotep at Deir el-Bahari, the meaning and shape of royal mortuary temples was gradually transformed into die "mansions of millions of years." The continuation of the
TEMPLES: Egyptian Temples king's power in the afterlife was now achieved through the king's union with divinities, who had sanctuaries in the king's temple. In the chambers corresponding to the Old Kingdom offering hall and central statue shrines, the king was now venerated as Osiris and united with Amun-Re. A solar sanctuary accommodated the king's incarnation as Re, and die sanctuary of Hathor may have reflected a kind of sacred marriage. Life-size Osirid statues occupied the front of the temples from the twelfth to the eighteenth dynasties and were later placed in tire inner temple court (Ramesseum, Medinet Habu), an evocation of the royal statue cult. During the nineteenth dynasty, this development product the formal architectural assimilation of the king's temple with the god's temple. Solar temples. Temples of the omnipresent solar reli gion are only occasionally encountered in Egyptian history. The earliest example, the Harmachis temple of Chephren, is a monumental, granite-cased building in front of the Sphinx at Giza. Here the solar god may have been identified with the king in the shape of a royal sphinx. Significant are the solar temples of die fifth dynasty, built in geographic, cultic, and administrative association with the pyramid complexes of Abu Sir and Saqqara. Two of eight recorded temples have been excavated (Userkaf, Neuserre); drey may reflect the form of die unexcavated main Egyptian solar temple at Heliopolis. The sun temples consisted of an enormous open court for slaughtering animals with a sun altar in front of a huge, stout obelisk on a high pedestal. Formal resemblances to the royal pyramid complexes indi cate a close functional connection and die great importance of the solar temple for the king's status. Under Akhenaten, a vital association between the king and the sun god Aten led to the construction of huge solar tem ples at Karnak and Tell el-Amarna. These structures com bine features of an eighteenth dynasty god's temple with elements specific to the sun cult. Typical are open courts, the absence of roofs and ceilings, great numbers of altars, some raised on high platibrms, and pylons serving as sun gates. A new type of decorative program in the form of abundant natural growth stresses Akhenaten's devotion to Aten and the god's blessings. Barque stations. The statues of Egyptian gods fre quently left their protected palaces and traveled by land or water to visit sanctuaries of related divinities and the king. Journeys in ceremonies such as the Theban "Luxor festival" and die "Valley feast" became especially spectacular from the New Kingdom through the Roman period. During the journey several stations were used as rest houses for die barques, which were raised on platforms and placed in shrines surrounded by pillars or columns. These ldosks often developed into small sanctuaries, such as the Kamutef Tem ple and the temple of Rameses III at Karnak, and the temple of the eighteenth dynasty at Medinet Habu.
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Birth houses. Often described by their modern Arabic designation mammisi, the birth houses were originally barque stations placed along the processional roads in front of the main temple and used for the celebration of the young god's birth. In Ptolemaic and Roman temples, the rites de veloped into elaborate mysteries or sacred dramas. The young god seems to have been a symbol for the young ldng. The mammisi united the cult of die king to that of the mis tress or lord of the main temple. As a result, die chapels grew into templelike buildings (Philae, Edfu, Armant, Dendera) consisting of three parallel sanctuaries for the young god and his parent deities; a land of columned kiosk protects the shrine. The decoration depicts the rituals of the sacred marriage of the parent gods, and the birth and youdi of the young god.
Decorative Program. The walls of Egyptian temples are decorated with reliefs and inscriptions relating to the func tion of the building and the ceremonies that were carried out inside it. A perfect relationship between the gods and the ldng as a representative of his people was depicted in these scenes. The images of living beings could transform the temple into an ideal universe in which the gods enjoyed the ldng's attention and rewarded him with eternal life; the in tervention of priests was unnecessary. An unwritten "grammar" closely connected the wall re liefs to die function of the individual parts of the temple and to die outside world. For example, Upper Egyptian gods, symbols, crowns appear in the southern half of the temple, and Lower Egyptian elements are found in the northern half. Scenes of processions, boating, or wars follow the same geo graphical direction as tiieir actual prototypes. Asian enemies are attacldng from die north of the temple entrance, African enemies from the south. Offering bearers move from the entrance to the sanctuary, the divine barque is carried from inside to the court. Outside walls were often used for public statements, such as offering and festival lists and royal im munity edicts. Magical protection of the entrance was pro vided by purification or apotropaic (protective) scenes, in cluding die victorious lung smiting enemies, who assumed human or animal shape. At times of intense military activity, historical scenes were depicted both outside and deep inside die temple, for example, the battle of Qadesh and the war against the Sea Peoples). Barque processions and feasts for the gods, such as the Luxor festival in the Luxor temple, appear properly oriented in the courts and hypostyle halls. Representations of offering bearers marching from the tem ple gate into the sanctuary supply the altars with offerings. Scenes of die daily maintenance of the cult image surround the walls of the statue sanctuary. Symbolism. Egyptian sacral architecture has multiple levels of meaning. For example, all temples can be seen as seats of die primeval gods or hills or islands rising out of die primeval waters at the "first time." The concept of primeval
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TEMPLES: Egyptian. Court of the Temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habit. Twentieth dynasty. (Cour tesy D. Arnold)
elevation may be reflected in the naturally terraced structure of die many temples built against desert slopes, where die sanctuary at die back of the building always occupies the highest level of the complex. Hypostyle halls can represent an image of the world. Pri meval swamps are depicted by the decoration of the lower parts of the walls and by the dark color of column bases. The shape of die columns (papyrus, palm, lotus) create a world of flowers and trees tiiat seem to grow towards the sky/ceiling of painted yellow stars on a blue ground. The temple walls represent life between the watery grounds and the sky; doors mark the transition between regions of the world. The sunbeams falling through light openings magi cally rejuvenate the statues. Building materials can also as sume symbolic properties: the use of stone itself signals eter nity, while white sand used for foundations and alabaster utilized for floors and shrines create sacral purity; gilded doors, shrines, and statues indicate divinity. Egyptian sacral architecture is enriched by symbolic properties that occa
sionally substitute for "real" functions so completely that full-scale model buildings can fulfill their ritual purpose without any interior rooms or cult activities, for example, the Djoser complex. Some temples were completely designed to represent symbolically a certain aspect of the "world." For example, the architectural layout of the twenty-fifth dynasty Taharqa temple at Karnak permitted the priests to recreate in dra matic form the daily cycle of the sun in its four life phases— Khepre at sunrise, Re at noon, Arum at sunset, and the ba of Re at night. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Dieter. "Vom Pyramidenbezirk zum Haus fur Millionen Jahre." Mitleilungen des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo 3 4 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 - 8 . Arnold, Dieter. Building in Egypt: Pharaonic Stone Masonry. New York and Oxford, 1 9 9 1 . Arnold, Dieter. Die Tempel Agyptens. Zurich, 1 9 9 2 . Arnold, Dieter. Lexikon der dgyptischen Baukunst. Zurich, 1 9 9 4 .
TENTS Badawy, Alexander. A History of Egyptian Architecture. Vols. 2 and 3 . Berkeley, 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 6 8 . Badawy, Alexander. Le dessin architectural chez les anciens Egyptiens. Cairo, 1 9 4 8 . Barguet, Paul. Le temple d'Amon-Re a Karnak. Cairo, 1 9 6 2 . Borchardt, Ludwig. Agyptischc Tempelmit Umgang. Cairo, 1 9 3 8 . Borchardt, Ludwig. Das Re-Lleiliglum des Konigs Nc-zvoser-Re (Rathure). Berlin, 1 9 0 5 . Daumas, Francois. Les mammisis des temples egyptiens. Annales de l'Universite de Lyon, Third Series, Letters, fasc. 3 2 . Paris, 1 9 5 8 . Golvin, Jean-Claude, and Jean-Claude Goyon. Les Bdtisseurs de Kar nak. Paris, 1 9 8 7 . Haeny, Gerhard. Basilikale Anlagen in der agyptischen Baukunst des Neuen Reiches. Wiesbaden, 1 9 7 0 . Jequier, Gustave. L'architecture et la decoration dans Vancienne Egypte, vol. 1 , Les temples memphites et thibains des origines a la XVIIIe dy nastic; vol. 2 , Les temples Ramessides el Suites de la XIXc d la XXXe dynastic; vol. 3 , Les temples pwlemaiques et romains. Paris, 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 2 4 . Reymond, Eve A. E. The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple. Man chester, 1 9 6 9 . Ricke, Herbert. Bemerkungen zur agyptischen Baukunst des Alien Reiches. 2 vols. Beitrage zur Agyptischen Bauforschung und Altertumskunde, vols. 4 - 5 . Zurich and Cairo, 1 9 4 4 - 1 9 5 0 . Ricke, Flerbert. Das Sonncnheiligtum des Konigs Userkqf. 2 vols. Beitrage zur Agyptischen Bauforschung und Altertumskunde, vol. 7 . Cairo,
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ities of summer herding) with their standard diet of grains, lentils, and vetches. The tent makes it possible to sow, to keep die flocks away from young crops, to be there when crops ripen and need harvesting, to bring the flocks back to graze the stubble and fertilize the fields with their droppings, and to sustain the family or tribe in this mobile system. Some dwell in tents year-round and others only during dry months. They roll up their tents and store them in the house or cave in which they spend the cold, rainy period from approximately November to April. Fully pastoral people who must purchase their grain are a rarity in the Near East today. In the past, when the region was forested and col lected rainwater more intensively, personal food production was significantly greater and it would have been even rarer for existence to be fully pastoral. [See Pastoral Nomadism; Sheep and Goats; Agriculture; Cereals.] The inhabitants of tents were often keepers of vineyards and orchards. People who lived in houses in towns and vil lages owned and tilled the land surrounding the town, living in tents seasonally (or, as the Hebrew Bible reports, in small huts of branches—sukkoth, sometimes translated as 1965-1969. "booths") in order to monitor the ripening of their grapes Ricke, Herbert. Der Harmachistempcl des Chefren in Gisch. Beitrage zur and other fruit and to carry out traditional chores involving Agyptischen Bauforschung und Altertumskunde, vol. 1 0 . Wiesba summer dairy and grain production. den, 1 9 7 0 . Sauneron, Serge, and Henri Stierlin. Die lelzlen Tempel Agyptens. Zu The temporary labor required for this seasonally laborrich, 1 9 7 5 . intensive work attracts landless workers, both male and fe Smith, E. Baldwin. Egyptian Architecture as Cultural Expression. New male, from among the seasonal and year-round nomads. York, 1 9 3 8 . Spencer, Patricia. The Egyptian Temple: A Lexicographical Study. Lon They move their tents close to the fields because they then share the food raised by the landowner, while renting graz don, 1 9 8 4 . ing rights for their own flocks. "Sedentary" food production Stadelmann, Rainer. "Tempelpalast und Erscheinungsfenster in den Thebanischen Totentempeln." Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaolo- thus depends on tents and tent dwellers. gischen Insiituls Abteilung Kairo 2 9 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 2 1 — 2 4 2 . Different types of tents have been ttsed throughout his Teichmann, Frank. Der Mensch und scin Tempel; Agyplcn. Stuttgart, tory. For example, the military tents used by Sennacherib in 1978. Vandier, Jacques. Manuel d'archeologie egyptienne, vol. 2 , Les grands his siege of Lachish (ANET 374) had an unusual shape (cf. other military tents, ANET 170, 1 7 1 ) . The design of die epoques: LJarchitecture funeraire. Paris, 1 9 5 5 . traditional goat-hair tent, widely used by year-round no DIETER ARNOLD mads, as well as for partial pastoral and agricultural pur poses, was probably developed millennia ago for comfort in a wide range of weather conditions (see figure 1 ) . It is a long T E N T S . In the Near East die tent has been an integral rectangle, often running east-west, so that its rooms open part of life since antiquity. While the tent's social signifi to the south. These rooms are formed by interior divider cance in tribal organization and its economic importance to panels hung across the width of the tent; exterior panels on pastoral nomads are known, it is less widely recognized that the south can be opened and closed individually. The "living the tent is almost equally indispensable to agriculture, be room," where guests are received, is usually open on one or yond its appearance alongside kitchen gardens (see below). two sides, while the panels of the more private rooms are In the Near East, sheep and goat pastoralism is intertwined frequently kept closed. with die food-production systems of sedentary people— grain and lentil culture, vines, and fruit and olive orchards— The goat-hair tent is waterproof, making it habitable yearand the tent is significant to both. roLind, including in the rainy season. (However, full-time nomads generally move to warm areas in the winter in order Altiiough pastoralism and agriculture are typologically to protect their flocks from the cold.) The simplicity of its discrete in some ways, people derive foodstuffs from both sewn construction from woven panels of goat hair, generally sources where possible. This motivates the integrated pro about 100-130 cm wide and of any length needed, means duction of food from both. When people and their tents that living space can be expanded or contracted on demand. follow their flocks, they are in reality integrating the suste Upkeep is inexpensive because single panels can be replaced nance provided by their animals (including the dairy activ
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TEXTILES: Textiles of the Neolithic through Iron Ages
when they are worn simply by sewing in a new one—obvi ating the expense of replacing the entire tent. New panels of spun goat hair are woven in late summer, when women have some free time after the milking has ended and before the rains begin. The panels are woven on a ground loom outdoors. [See Textiles.] The roof of the tent slopes slightiy but is level enough to serve as a clean area (out of reach of animals) for drying yoghurt balls, a method of processing milk for later use, in the absence of refrigeration. Near the tent, small shelters, much like the tent itself, may be constructed out of panels, poles, and ropes to screen domestic animals from the sun. The tent has two sets of ropes, one outside and one inside the hanging side panels. The outside ropes are weight bear ing and are used to pitch die tent. T o counter strong winds, they are very long, sketching perhaps 6-8 m (18 to 25 ft.) from a 3-meter-high tent before being pegged. Their al most-horizontal position makes them convenient clothes lines for hanging out the family laundry, boiled-cheese cloths, washed wool, and dyed, spun, and plyed wool. The ropes are traditionally made of sheep's wool, spun and plyed: a number of strands of plyed wool are plyed together in die opposite direction, to form a rope that does not ravel easily. Today, this homemade rope is generally giving way to nylon rope, but because it costs nothing it is still used for many pastoral purposes: tethering animals, temporarily ty
ing sheep together for milking, and for halters and leading ropes. The ropes inside the panels are lighter and serve to control the position of die panels. In cold weather the panels hang sttaight down and rocks are placed on their lower, outside edge to keep cold wind from entering the tent. In warmer weather the light ropes are pegged outside to hold the panels up and out, allowing air to enter. In very warm weather, the panel can be pinned up against the roof, so that the entire side, usually the shade side, of the tent is open and a cool breeze moves through. In oppressive sunlight a panel can screen an area from direct rays. The panels are altered sev eral times in any 24-hour period to maintain comfort. Divider panels are fastened across the width of the tent between the poles to form rooms, usually three or more, tiiat are generally about 4-5 m square, providing privacy and screening the work area from the social area. The divider panels and tire reinforcing strips may be decoratively woven, in geometric designs in black goat hair contrasted with white or brown wool. Reinforcing strips are sewn to the roof pan els, where the supporting poles meet the roof, to keep the poles from piercing the tent fabric. At die ends of die rein forcing strips, connectors for the guy ropes (metal rings or less expensive Y-shaped pieces of wood from the fork of a small tree) are attached. The designation "women's quarters" found in the ac-
TENTS. Handspun and hand-woven goat hair panels are sewn together in long strips. Reception room for guests is often open. Further rooms have sides closed for privacy, but ropes under side panels are raised to cool interior. U m m es-Sumaq, Jordan, 1992. (Courtesy Dorothy Irvin)
TEPE FARUKHABAD counts of early travelers is not entirely accurate. Rooms are assigned not by gender but by purpose; family relationship is a secondary factor and gender a tertiary one. All-male gatherings, especially if the men are not relatives or not well known, take place in the "living room"—the room set aside for receiving visitors—which is furnished with seating mats and elbow cushions. Women may stay out of the living room when male guests are present, especially if they are busy with other things or may enter only to serve. The cooking is done elsewhere. All-female and mixed, but predominantly female, groups may also meet in the living room. Men do not enter the private rooms unless they are closely related to the in habitants. Women who are not well known to die group are received in the living room but may be invited into the pri vate quarters when the acquaintanceship is of long duration. For large gatherings, such as family reunions, two living rooms are set up, one for men and one for women.
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mains are virtually nonexistent (tent poles, e.g., were of wood). Today, their pegs are bent scraps of rebar and the pins are of metal, made by the local blacksmith; in antiquity, both were generally made of wood, although an iron tent pin may turn up in an excavation. The pegs are driven into the ground using any available rock. With its goat-hair panels and sheep's-wool ropes, the tent has scarcely any pieces tiiat would survive to attest to this most enduring form of dwell ing. BIBLIOGRAPHY The above information either originates in or is confirmed by this author's as yet unpublished work in Jordan in conjunction with the Madaba Plains Project. It represents extensive interviews with tent dwellers, both seasonal and year-round, in field seasons from 1 9 8 7 1 9 9 4 , correlated with archaeological evidence. For published works see the following. Dalman, Gustaf. Arbeit und Sitte in Paldstina. Vol. 6. Gutersloh, 1 9 3 9 . Invaluable, meticulous collection of information in great part prior to modernization in the Near East (see pp. 1 - 1 4 5 ) . Marx, Emmanuel. The Bedouin of the Negev, New York, 1 9 6 7 . Study of bedouin after 1 9 4 8 . Pritchard, James B. The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton, 1 9 5 4 . Weir, Shelagh. The Bedouin, London, 1 9 9 0 . Brief but valuable infor mation from southern Jordan, with accompanying photographs.
The system of pinning together the long, heavy roof snip, back and side strips, and divider panels makes it possible to dismande the tent into pieces for moving, which would be virtually impossible if the 225 kg (500 lb.) or so that the tent weighs had to be moved as one piece. In earlier times, sec tions of die tent would be loaded on several camels for trans port; today, the entire tent is usually transported by truck. Tents have never indicated a low level of subsistence or a temporary life-style. They are aesthetically pleasing dwell ings tiiat provide even the poorest family witii space, ele gance, and dignity. They offer adequate privacy, easy ex pandability for increasing numbers of family members, a range of comfortable work areas—indoors and outdoors, shaded and unshaded—for food production, as well as con siderable waterproof storage space for farm and dairy equip ment, household implements, family clothing and belong ings, water containers, and food supplies: hundredweight bags of wheat, barley, lentils, and vetches; skins holding milk products and woven bags of dried yoghurt balls; and bags of shorn sheep's wool and goat hair. The tent is not only a dwelling but also a highly efficient center for producing, pro cessing, and storing the family's range of food, and, in an tiquity, clothing. Its spare efficiency and the fact that work is usually carried on in the private areas can conceal the full scope of its activities from the casual observer.
T E P E FARUKHABAD, ancient town site located on the Deh Luran plain, in the footiiills of the Zagros Moun tains, about 110 km west-nordiwest of Susa, in what is now southwestern Iran, near a traditional route connecting Susiana to Babylonia and points beyond (32°35' N , 47°i4' E). The central mound is 25 m high and was once about 200 m in diameter. Its ancient name is not lot own. In recent years, rainfall has been inadequate for agriculture two years out of three, and most of the plain is used for pasture. However, nearby ft-aces of ancient canals and samples of crop weeds and microfauna from tire site indicate irrigation witii the wa ter of the seasonally variable and brackish Mehmeh River. The Mehmeh has cut away about two-thirds of the site, leav ing a near-vertical face that facilitated deep stratigraphic ex cavations.
In summer, tents are far more comfortable and pleasant to live in than are houses. Their mobility is a significant economic advantage, as well. When the rains have ended, the family moves from the house or cave into the tent witii anticipation, for tents are almost always pitched with regard to securing a good view. There is considerable folklore sur rounding this life, and tents have given rise to poetry and song. For these reasons their use has persisted with little change through periods of significant urbanization, includ ing the present. Tents are an archaeological blind spot because their re
The site was noted by J.-E. Gautier and Georges Lampre of the Delegation Archeologique Francaise during their sea son of work at die larger central town of Mussian (Musiyan) in 1903, but it was not studied. [See Tepe Mussian.] During 1968, die site was the focus of an excavation designed to study trade, craft, and town growth, undertaken by the Uni versity of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, Ann Arbor, in collaboration with the Iranian Archaeological Service. It was supported by die U.S. National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Two 5-meter-wide excavations (A, B) were placed 50 m apart in the southwestern river-cut face,
DOROTHY IRVIN
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revealing portions of the center of tire site. A one-meterwide test trench (C) ttanssected the original northeast edge of the central mound. T h e lowest layers at Farukhabad are unexcavated, but ex trusive sherds indicate that occupation began during the early sixth millennium, during the Chogha Mami Transi tional phase. The earliest layers revealed at Farukhabad had Bayat-phase structures (c. 4600 BCE), the latest phase de fined in the 1963 excavations by Frank Hole, Kent Flannery, and James A. Neely at nearby Tepe Sabz (Hole et a l , eds., 1969). During the subsequent Farukh phase (c. 4400 BCE), tire population on the plain was about 2,200 inhabitants; Fa rukhabad was subsidiary to the larger center of Mussian. Emmer wheat and some six-row barley were cultivated, and sheep, goats, and cows were herded. [See Cereals; Sheep and Goats; Cattle and Oxen.] Ceramics were painted in the Late Susiana tradition characteristic of southwestern Iran. There were successions of well-maintained structures on mudbrick platforms and storehouses in excavation A, and of modest housing in B. Similar quantities of food debris and by-products from small quantities of local bitumen and chert production were found in both areas. However, social differentiation is indicated by concentrations of drinking cups, imported cherts, and bones from hunted gazelles around the more elaborate structures. Late in the fifth mil lennium, Farukhabad and most other sites on tire plain were abandoned. T h e site was pardy reoccupied during die Early Uruk phase, perhaps by seasonal transhumants. Both excavations revealed modest housing by the Middle Uruk phase (c. 3500 BCE). Plain ceramics were made in a tradition local to Deh Luran and the nearby Zagros valleys. Barley predominated over wheat and goats over sheep. Bitumen, chert cores, and possibly goat-hair fabrics were prepared for export, and metal tools, high-quality cherts, and decorative items of ma rine shells and semiprecious stone were imported. Although Farukhabad was the largest among the occupied sites on the plain, and one spherical bulla with cylinder and stamp seal impressions (suggesting the administration of economic ac tivity) was found, the small exposures did not reveal traces of public areas or elaborate residences. The Late Uruk phase at Farukhabad (c. 3300 BCE) shows striking organizational changes: the subsistance economy was broadly the same, but die crafts were reorganized. Local wares were used only for cooking jars, and most of the ceramics were mass pro duced in the tradition of southern Mesopotamia—wellknown from Uruk, Nippur, and Susa. [See Uruk-Warka; Nippur; Susa.] Statistical studies of industrial debris indicate increases in the production of local chert cores and bitumen for export, particularly around an area of nonresidential buildings sampled in excavation B, but there is little indi cation of import. Excavation A revealed only very modest housing, with some evidence of pottery production. Sealings and tokens indicate some administrative activity. During this
period, Deh Luran may have been controlled by one of the states centered elsewhere in southwestern Asia. Post-Uruk occupation at Farukhabad continued uninter rupted. The major change in plant and animal husbandry was the addition of the domesticated pig. [See Pigs.] T h e disappearance of Late Uruk ceramic features and the de velopment of local forms of both fast-wheel-thrown and handmade ceramics and of polychrome painted decoration mark the transitions to the Jemdet Nasi- phase (c. 3100 BCE; called Early Jemdet Nasr in the site report) and subsequently to the Early Dynastic I—II phase (c. 2900 BCE; called Late Jemdet Nasr in the site report). [See Jemdet Nasr.] T h e cen tral town of Mussian was reinhabited in the latter phase and Farukhabad again became a subsidiary settlement. T h e pop ulation on the plain approached five thousand inhabitants. The architecture exposed in the soundings at Farukhabad is entirely domestic. T h e debris in and around the more sub stantial residences manifests evidence that their inhabitants had more varied diets and used more imported items than did the inhabitants of the modest residences. T h e exporting of bitumen, chert, and perhaps cloth and the importing of metal and decorative items greatiy expanded. Unfortu nately, there is no evidence of administrative technology, and no direct way to evaluate the possibility that Deh Luran itself was a state center. Tepe Farukhabad was abandoned during the mid-tiiird millennium; the later Early Dynastic layers were badly eroded. The limited area on the summit of the high mound was reoccupied by modest domestic architecture after 2100 BCE, during the Third Dynasty of Ur and the time of the Shimasld rulers of southwestern Iran. T h e ceramics show generalized parallels with both Mesopotamia proper and Su siana. In about 1900 BCE, die site was rebuilt as a small fort. The ceramics show close parallels with those of Susa. T h e food remains show exceptional proportions of cow bones, and the remains of a domestic horse were found. It is rea sonable to interpret the site as a military outpost guarding a crossing of the Mehmeh River during the periods of conflict between the Sukkalmah rulers of Susa and the Old Baby lonian rulers of Mesopotamia. This fort fell into disrepair, and the hamlet on the summit of the mound was abandoned by 1300 BCE. A brief reoccupation in Late Parthian or Early Sasanian times left a stone footing on the summit of the mound and at least 2 m of occupational debris on a low terrace east of it. [See also Deh Luran; and Persia, article on Ancient Persia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hole, Frank, et al., eds. Prehistory and Human Ecology on the Deh Luran Plain; An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran. University of Michigan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, no. 1. Ann Arbor, 1 9 6 9 . Detailed report on soundings at Tepe Ali Kosh and Tepe Sabz. on the Deh Luran plain, an early example of the ecolog ical approach in Near Eastern archaeology. Neely, James A., and Henry T. Wright. Early Settlement Patterns on the
TEPE GAWRA Deh Luran Plain: Village and Early Slate Societies in Southwestern Iran. University of Michigan, Technical Report of the Museum of An thropology, no. 26. Ann Arbor, 1994. Complete reanalysis of the settlement survey data, including an innovative approach to the eval uation of ancient population by Robert Dewar. Wright, Henry T., ed. An Early Town on the Deh Luran Plain: Exca vations at Tepe Fanikhabad. University of Michigan, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, no. 1 3 . Ann Arbor, 1981. Detailed report on the excavations; die first use of statistical manipulation of bone and artifact density data to evaluate past activity organization. HENRY T . WRIGHT I I I
T E P E GAWRA (Kurdish, "great m o u n d " ) , site located within the Greater Mesopotamian region on the piedmont of northeastern Iraq 24 km (15 mi.) north-northeast of the Tigris River at Mosul and north of the Greater Zab River (36°43' N , 40°33' E). It is on a tributary of the Khosr River, a branch of the Tigris, near one of die few natural passes through Jebel Maqlub into the hills of the northern Zagros Mountains in modern Iran. A natural spring emerges from the hills close by. This is a zone of rainfall and irrigation agriculture and of ample pasture for sheep and goats. Other sites near Gawra in die piedmont include Nineveh; Tell Arpachiyah, a Halafian site; Khorsabad, the capital city of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II; and Tell Shenshi, a small Halafian, Ninevite 5, and Early Dynastic III Akkadian site. South-southeast of Gawra lies Tell Billa, a third-firstmillennium BCE site excavated by the same team that worked at Gawra (see below). T h e mound was noticed early on by Western travelers because it stood a full 20 m above tire plain. T h e main part of the mound is no more than 1.5 ha (4 acres) at its base. There may have been a lower town, but apparently only early and late in its history. T h e only excavation off the mound occurred at the northeast base and in area A. T h e former contained a very thin layer of Halafian material over virgin soil. Area A yielded 3-6 m of strata witii Halafian pottery types earlier than those of level XX, but no evidence of architecture was found. Virgin soil was found at 5.22 m below the plain in this area. At the other end of the time spectrum, a small mound, Khirbet Na'aman, was found 600 m from the main mound with Early Dynastic III and Ak kadian material identical to Gawra level VI. Virgin soil was never reached on the main mound. Excavation History. Ephraim A. Speiser investigated Gawra in 1927 during a survey of the northern third of Iraq under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania M u seum, ASOR, the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, and Dropsie College. Based on the discovery of prehistoric painted pottery at Susa and other Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites, Speiser believed that at Gawra he had found die oldest stratified site in northern Mesopotamia. [See Susa.] He and an architect, E. Wilenski, spent fifteen working days exca vating a 5-meter-wide test trench.
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In fall 1930, while overseeing excavations at nearby Tell Billa, Speiser decided to excavate the mound at Gawra as well. He designed a strategy to dig die mound by slicing off layer after layer, taking no account of natural stratigraphy. In January 1931, the first of two seasons began. Speiser dug all of levels I-VIII. In the second season Charles Bache of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, who would direct the third-fifth and seventh seasons, joined the crew. Speiser returned to direct the sixth season. Levels I-X were com pletely excavated. As the area of the mound increased below level X, the percentage of the area excavated declined. From levels XI/XA-XII about 50 percent of the mound's surface was exposed, from levels XIIA-XX less than 30 percent. The sample size of all Halaf and Ubaid period levels was considerably smaller than levels of the fourth millennium BCE.
The quality of recording and publication was uneven. During the course of removal, no balks were kept between excavation squares to draw stratigraphic sections. Because the numbering system for squares was changed five times in the seven seasons, many provenance assignments were incorrect, especially for the first and second seasons in the excavation report published by Speiser in 1935 (see bibli ography). Bache oversaw a much more controlled excava tion, with precise information on provenance and natural stratigraphy. Of the artifacts recovered, a small, arbitrary sample of whole vessels, spectacular sherds, flint and obsid ian objects, seals and seal impressions, spindle whorls, metal tools, figurines, and other objects were recorded. Of that sample, perhaps 75 percent were sent to die Iraq Museum or the University Museum for storage and future study. T h e rest were discarded in die field. Archaeological S e q u e n c e . Tepe Gawra is an important site because it gives an almost continuous sequence of oc cupations from the late Halafian period through the end of die Late Chalcolithic/Uruk period. By tire time Gawra was first settled, the agricultural revolution had probably spread across virtually die entire Near East. T h e Hassuna period, which typified small village farming communities in north ern Mesopotamia, was followed by the Halaf period. T h e earliest level excavated at T e p e Gawra, XX, is marked by one of the architectural hallmarks of the Halafian period, the round mud-brick tiiolos. T h e functions of tiiese buildings may be religious or residential or they may have been used as granaries. The other hallmark of the period is its pottery, witii strikingly painted geometric designs. Halafians proba bly do not represent a new "people" (ethnic group, linguistic group, occupationally specialized group) but, rather, social changes marked by new pottery styles. All indications in this still little-studied period are that some ranking had begun within the society of former Hassuna groups, based on con trol of communal grain storage or centralized production of fine Halafian ceramics (the evidence for the latter is ques tionable).
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The following level, XIX, saw another significant change. Influences of the next great period in Mesopotamia, the Ubaid, became prominent, signified by a new style in pot tery and architecture. Halaf styles continued until level XVII, however, which had a tholos structure. (Throughout its occupation, Tepe Gawra demonstrates considerable con servatism in artifact design. The same conservatism would cause the continuity of Ubaid styles into the Uruk period.) During the Ubaid period deep social changes were in progress. Ubaid styles seem to signify widening spheres of contact and the continuing movement toward a ranked so ciety with centralizing tendencies in religion and gover nance. In level XIX, a well-planned, large-scale (relative to level XX and Halaf levels at other sites) building with a po dium was found. This "temple" (the podium is typical of temples, although Speiser and Arthur Tobler applied the term to buildings that did not function as temples also) and a similar one in level XVIII mirror developments in the southern alluvium of Iraq. The first of a series of temples with a layout very much like Gawra's was built in the south at Eridu in Ubaid 2 (parallel to the latest Halaf period in the north). From Gawra XIX to XV, an amazing sameness is noticeable, which marks the whole of the Early Ubaid across almost all of Greater Mesopotamia. [See Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples.] An unresolved question is how Ubaid societies were or ganized. Some have tried to use a model of Polynesian or Amerindian chiefdoms, but evidence from Gawra and else where lacks the hallmarks of those societies: warfare, very distinct ranking differences in burial practice, long-distance trade, production of goods specifically for elite members of society. Also, beneath the symbolic and probably social structural changes of the Halaf and Ubaid 3 periods, the subsistence base appears to have remained strikingly similar, emphasizing rainfall agriculture and small-animal herding. One theory—that these were simple chiefdoms based on tire collection of staples—fits the data from Gawra XIX-XV (see Stein, 1994). Level XIV yielded only the foundations of a very large, well-planned building. However, it appears to signal the be ginning at Gawra of the Ubaid 4 period, when many of the markers of complex chiefdoms of a Polynesian type do begin to appear. The culmination of this change is seen in level XIII, signified by three large formal temple buildings (i.e., they have some hallmarks of temples, such as orientation to cardinal points, niching, and buttressing but no preserved platforms). These buildings, according to Bache's archi tect's notes, did not stand simultaneously. However, their monumentality shows a new role for the leaders of Gawra— evidenced by Gawra's role as a transshipper of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and the first use of seals as control mech anisms in governance at Gawra. Although many scholars see level XIJI as evidence of a southern Ubaid intrusion, Ga wra's long tradition makes it as likely that it was emulating
regional patterns rather than being taken over by its southern neighbors. The social trends set in level XIII continued and were elaborated throughout the following fourth millennium. Fol lowing a last Ubaid 4 level, XIIA (often erroneously asso ciated with XII), the beginnings of the Uruk period are found in Gawra XII. A number of scholars see XII as a retarn to an agricultural village, but there is little evidence for that. T h e White Room complex of XII has all the ear marks of a leader's (chiefs) house. In addition, the numbers of specialized craft areas are considerable: 118 seals and sealings were recovered in a pattern indicating administrative control. There may also have been a temple in the unexcavated half of the mound. From Gawra XI/XA to X and from IX to VIII, the position of the temples on the mound changed radically. The same can be said of XIA/B, which has little evidence of a formal temple. Another trait of com plex chiefly society applies to Gawra XII, which ended in a conflagration, complete with evidence of skeletons on tire main street. The next level is usually denoted XIA. However, a reanalysis of the stratigraphy of XII-VIII by Mitchell S. Rothman demonstrates that XIA is actually two phases: XIB, prior to die building of the massive Round House, and XIA, when the Round House existed. T h e Round House seems to be a food-storage, defensive, and social center that was destroyed in a fire. The fire may or may not have been set in battle. Some scholars point to a sealing, field register no. 5-1243 as evidence of warfare, but the sealing does not show prisoners, but bearers. All Early Uruk (Early Gawran) levels—XII, XIA/B, XI/XA—are densely populated and economically complex. From XII to VIIIA, Tepe Gawra was probably the center of a small polity, encompassing the eastern part of the plain and the first of the Zagros foothills. T h e polity appears in dependent of Nineveh, the largest nearby site, and of south ern Uruk people. [See Nineveh.] That complexity is no where as evident as in XI/XA. In phase XI, specialized textile and woodworking shops mix with large ceramic kilns, a tem ple, administrative center (chiefs house?), and private houses. Evidence from the chemical characterization of a sample of sealings shows diat sealed (locked) goods were moving around the immediate area of Gawra. Evidence of seal design seems to indicates a bifurcation in authority, one group overseeing religion and governance, tire other man ufacturing. Level X, probably parallel in time to the Middle Uruk period, intressed religion in the form of a large temple, which took center stage, functionally and physically. T h e special ized shops are absent, but the presence of a large, formal leader's house (and perhaps town hall, like the Arab mudhif), as well as the earliest spectacularly fitted burial tombs, in dicates that its centrality endured. Level IX (Middle-Late Uruk) continued the pattern set in level X.
TEPE GAWRA Level VIII is the most controversial in terms of chronol ogy. What is apparent from the field notes is that a large terrace from level VI along the southern flank of the mound at the elevation of level VIII has confused the issue. Once artifacts from drat terrace are removed from the sample, level VIII appears to be Late Uruk in date. In fact, when the fire tiiat consumed the latest VIIIA phased burned, the Uruk period was probably far from over in the north. What is known about tire tiiree phases of level VIII is that there were craft shops, a temple, a shrine in a leader's house, and, for die first time, a formal central warehouse for manufactured goods. Based on their contents, neither the western nor cen ttal temples were temples at all. T h e central building was a domicile and craft shop for carving bone and stone, prob ably into seals and beads. T h e west temple was another mudhiftiks. building with large stores of grain and ration bowls piled in the grain bins. Based again on the chemical char acterization of sealings and seal design, the contacts outside the "Gawran polity" appear more extensive in this period tiian before. T h e knapping and transport of obsidian blades may be part of the reason. Level VII actually appears to be a series of levels destroyed during the building of Gawra VI. T h e only building that remained was on the far northeastern edge of the mound. T h e contents of tiiat building and the rest of the level (s) indicate a Ninevite V period date. This long period saw the reintegration of the societies of the northern steppe without much southern influence. Level VI represents a significant change in the role played by Gawrans compared to the fourth millennium. Gawra appears to have been one of a number of way stations or fortified villages in the Early Dy nastic III and Akkadian system. One of the major goals of Akkadian foreign policy was to guarantee the flow of raw materials, especially metal ores from the mountainous north and east. Sargon I of Agade's grandson, Naram-Sin, had large emplacements at Tell Brak and Nineveh. [See Brak, T e l l ] Gawra, then a very tall and narrow-topped mound, was a good location for a way station or outpost. T h e ma terial remains paint a picture of Gawra as an agricultural village with some secondary strategic importance. T h e fol lowing levels, V and IV, have a few buildings that seem to be heavily fortified homes or storehouses. T h e level is co terminous with die Ur III dynasty in the south. [See Ur.] T h e period may be best represented by the fact that all three of its levels (VI-IV) were fortified and were ended by fire. T h e final three levels at Gawra contained small, unfortified homesteads from the period when the Hurrian-speakingMitannian rulers controlled the whole northern tier of Meso potamia. [See also the biography of Speiser.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Forest, Jean-Daniel. Les pratiques funeraires en Misopotamie du $e milUnaire au debut du 3e: Etude de cas. Paris, 1 9 8 3 . Based only on the
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Tobler book (see below) and consequendy incomplete and with many errors. Will be replaced by Appendix A by Brian Peasnall in Rothman (forthcoming). Kubba, Shamil A. A. Mesopotamian Architecture and Town Planning from the Mesolithic to the End of the Proto-Historic Period. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 3 6 7 . Oxford, 1 9 8 7 . Good discussions and references on architectural studies of Ubaidand Uruk-period architecture and town planning, including Tepe Gawra. Rothman, Mitchell S. "Centralization, Administration, and Function at Fourth Millennium B.C. Tepe Gawra, Northern Iraq." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1 9 8 8 . Covers levels XI/XA-VIII without grave materials and with less-complete catalogs than Roth man (forthcoming). Rothman, Mitchell S. "Sealings as a Control Mechanism in Prehistory: Tepe Gawra XI, X, and VIII." In Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East, edited by Gil Stein and Mitchell S. Rothman, pp. 1 0 3 1 2 0 . Madison, Wis., 1 9 9 4 . Rothman, Mitchell S. Fourth Millennium B.C. Tepe Gawra. (widi Burial Appendix by Brian Peasnall). Forthcoming. Reanalysis of levels XIIVIII based on the original field records and the artifacts stored at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Stratigraphic sections are re constructed, site plans revised, and artifact provenance reassigned. A catalog of 2 , 9 5 0 artifacts is included with many new illustrations. Site and architectural functions are interpreted. The appendix pro vides a full catalog of grave goods, reassesses the assignment of in ternments to levels, and interprets social-change evidence in burial practices. Rothman, Mitchell S. "Tepe Gawra." In The Mesopotamian Metals Pro ject, edited by Stuart Fleming and Tamara Stech. Philadelphia, in press. Introduction to Gawra levels I-XII. Details the correct system for assigning artifacts to excavation squares for the first two seasons, especially levels VI-IV. Contains artifact distribution map for levels IV-VII. Rothman, Mitchell S., and M. James Blackman. "Monitoring Admin istrative Spheres of Action in Late Prehistoric Northern Mesopota mia with the Aid of Chemical Characterization (INAA) of Sealing Clays." In Economy and Settlement in the Near East: Analysis of An cient Sites and Materials. Supplement to vol. 7 , MASCA Journal, edited by Naomi Miller, pp. 1 9 - 4 5 . Philadelphia, 1 9 9 0 . Contains first publication of new town plans for Tepe Gawra XII-VIII and analysis of clay sealings from Tepe Gawra, Nineveh, and Arpechiyah. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. "Preliminary Excavations at Tepe Gawra." Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 9 ( 1 9 2 9 ) : 1 7 - 9 4 . Publication of the 1 9 2 7 trial trench. More useful for its description of why Speiser chose to excavate Tepe Gawra than for the data collected, although there is some information the 1 9 3 5 publication lacks. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. Excavations in Tepe Gawra. Vol. 1 . Phila delphia, 1 9 3 5 . Basic site report for levels I-VIII, comparable to others of its time. Includes an incomplete catalog, with many errors in square designations for the first two seasons, plates, and description. Stein, Gil J. "Exonomy, Ritual, and Power in Ubaid Mesopotamia." In Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East, edited by Gil Stein and Mitchell S. Rothman, pp. 3 5 - 4 6 . Madison, Wis., 1 9 9 4 . Insightful summary of old and new views of social organization of Ubaid so cieties. Tobler, Arthur. Excavations al Tepe Gawra. Vol. 2 . Philadelphia, 1 9 5 0 . Basic site report for levels IX-XX. Although based on the more thor oughly recorded excavations directed by Bache (who died before this report was written) and containing greater detail, than volume 1, the cataloging is incomplete, little sense of stratigraphy or of sampling is given. Bache's accurate provenance data is not used. Wickede, Alwo von. Prahistorische Stempelglyptik in Vorderasien. Mu-
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nich, 1 9 9 0 . Good descriptive and comparative material on HalafUruk period seals and sealings from Gawra and related sites. MITCHELL S . ROTHMAN
TEPE MUSSIAN, site located at the foot of the Zagros Mountains, midway between Babylonia and Susiana, to the southeast of the Deh Luran plain, some 90 km (56 mi.) northwest of Susa (32°3o' N , 47°2o' E). The name applies to an area grouping several sites: Tepe Mussian proper, Tepe Khazineh, and Tepe Ali Abad. These sites were ex cavated in 1902-1903 by Joseph E. Gautier and Georges Lampre on behalf of a French delegation (Gautier and Lampre, 1905). More recently, Elizabeth Carter and James Neely reexamined them in the course of an extensive survey of die Deh Luran plain. Tepe Mussian (about 450 X 300 X 18 m; approximately 14 ha, or 35 acres) is the largest site on die Deh Luran plain. It might have been fortified during the Early Dynastic pe riod, although the excavators found no rampart and only a few building remains of third- and early second-millennium date. The finds published consist mainly of Archaic and third-millennium painted pottery (Gautier and Lampre, 1905). About 1.5 1cm from Tepe Mussian, Tepe Aliabad (about 50 X 50 X 2.5 m) was used only as a cemetery in the third millennium. The tombs are rectangular pits lined with mud bricks; the pits are either unroofed or have an ogive (or pointed)-shaped vault and were used for single or double burials. The tombs yielded many polychrome painted jars, sometimes associated with alabaster vessels and metal weap ons of Early Dynastic III types. Located 3 km (about 2 mi.) to the east of Tepe Mussian, Tepe Khazineh (50 X 50 X 9 m) has a sequence of occu pation parallel to that at Tepe Mussian, although the thirdmillennium occupation may only be a cemetery. The excavators, Gautier and Lampre, published an im portant large corpus of pottery that they divided into two stylistic groups: a prehistoric painted pottery they labeled style Ibis and a diird-millennium polychrome pottery related to Susa's painted wares and called style II. Prehistoric Sequence. The excavators lumped together the various Archaic painted wares and labeled them style Ibis because they considered diem to be later than the ear liest painted pottery of Susa (then called style I—i.e., Susa A or period I) but antecedent to the third-millennium painted ware (then called style II—i.e., Susa D or period IIIB-IV). It was only after the excavations at Tepe Giyan in 1931-1932 that the anteriority of the so-called style Ibis over style I was recognized. Frank Hole's (1987) work has shown diat these Archaic painted wares correspond to the greater part of the Deh Luran prehistoric sequence, from the so-called Sabz phase
to the Susa A phase, between about 5100 and 3500 BCE, when Tepe Mussian was a village of some importance. Third-Millennium Sequence. Tepe Mussian may have been abandoned during the Uruk and early Proto-Elamite periods. It was reoccupied in about 2800 BCE and experi enced a period of rapid growth. During the Early Dynastic period, and until about the twentieth century BCE, it was by far the major settlement on the Deh Luran plain, at first perhaps as large as Susa itself. To this period date the painted polychrome pottery found at Tepe Mussian and the nearby cemeteries, ascribed, de spite their original features, to Susa's style II. It is mainly represented by small jars painted in black and red on a yel low-buff ground with geometric, vegetal, or animal motifs distributed onto one or more horizontal bands. T h e abun dance and variety of tiiis ware in the Mussian area suggest that the Deh Luran plain may have been the center of its development. These wares were used during a time span beginning in Early Dynastic I at the earliest (Susa period IIIB?-IIIC; LeBreton's Susa D a - b , c. 2800-2600 BCE) and continuing well into the Early Dynastic III period (Susa period IVA; LeBreton's Susa Dc-d, c. 2600-2400 BCE; see LeBreton, 1957)Despite a distinctly local appearance, the earlier wares (Early Dynastic I—II) suggest ties with the Hamrin basin and die Diyala valley, but few relationships with Susiana. T h e later wares (Early Dynastic III), either polychrome or monochrome, testify to a shift in cultural connections as they indicate close contacts with Susa and the Zagros u p lands, where Mussian-style painted wares first appear. In the latter half of the third millennium, the population began to decline on the Deh Luran plain. It affected M u s sian in the Old Elamite (Sukkalmah) period and led even tually to its abandonment sometime before the middle of die second millennium. Elizabeth Carter (1971) has pointed out that T e p e Mus sian is the most likely candidate for an identification with Urua/Arawa, an Elamite city known from Early Dynastic, Old Akkadian, and Ur III texts and located, according to Piotr Steinkeller, "in northwestern Khuzistan, in a strategic point controlling the passage from Southern Babylonia onto the Susiana Plain" (1982, p. 246). [See also Deh Luran; Elamites; and Susa.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Carter, Elizabeth. "Elam in the Second Millennium B.C.: The Ar chaeological Evidence." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1 9 7 1 . Contains essential data on die Deh Luran archaeological survey. Carter, Elizabeth. "The Piedmont and the Pusht-i Kuh in the Early Third Millennium B.C." In Prehistoire de la M&sopotamie: La Meso-
potamie prehistoire et I'exploralion recente du djebel Hamrin, Paris 1 7 19 decembre 1984, edited by Jean-Louis Huot, pp. 7 3 - 8 3 . Paris, 1 9 8 7 . Up-to-date comparative archaeology of the third-millennium Mus sian painted ware.
TEPE YAHYA Dittmann, Reinhard. "Susa in the Proto-Elamite Period and Annota tions on the Painted Pottery of Proto-Elamite Khuzestan." In Gamdat Nasr: Period or Regional Style?, edited by Uwe Finkbeiner and Wolfgang RSllig, pp. 1 7 1 - 1 9 8 . Beihefte zum Tubinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B, vol. 6 2 . Wiesbaden, 1 9 8 6 . Includes a comparative analysis of early third-millennium painted wares in southwest Iran. Gautier, Joseph, and Georges Lampre. "Fouilles de Tepe Moussian." Memoires de la Delegation en Perse 8 ( 1 9 0 5 ) : 5 9 - 1 4 9 . Original publi cation of the 1 9 0 3 excavations. Hole, Frank. "Archaeology of the Village Period." In The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and Society from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest, edited by Frank Hole, pp. 2 9 - 7 8 . Washington, D.C., 1 9 8 7 . Includes an up-to-date presentation of the Deh Luran prehistoric sequence. LeBreton, Louis "The Early Periods at Susa: Mesopotamian Rela tions." Iraq 1 9 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 7 9 - 1 2 4 . Classical study of fourth- and thirdmillennium Susa, with a classification of style II painted wares. Nagel, Wolfram. "Djamdat Nasr-Kulturen und Friihdynastische Buntkcramiker." Berliner Beitrdge zur Vor- and l'riihgeschichle 8 ( 1 9 6 4 ) . Partly outdated comparative archaeology of the third-millennium Mussian painted wares, Steinkeller, Piotr. "The Question of Marhasi: A Contribution to the Historical Geography of Iran in the Third Millennium B.C." Zeitschrift filr Assyriologie 7 2 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 2 3 7 - 2 6 5 . Includes data on ancient Urua. PIERRE DE MIROSGHEDJI
T E P E YAHYA, site located in southeastern Iran, about 220 km (136 mi.) direcdy south of the city of Kerman and 130 km (80 mi.) north of the Strait of Hormuz (28°2o' N , 56°52' E). T h e mound of T e p e Yahya rises to a height of 19.8 meters and covers an area of approximately 3 hectares (7 acres) at its base. The site was discovered in 1967 by the joint archaeological expedition of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and the Archaeological Service of Iran, under the direction of C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky. Excava tions at tire site were undertaken in summer 1967-1971 and also in 1973 and 1975. Tepe Yahya has a long, but not unbroken, sequence of occupation: archaeological excavations have identified ten major phases of occupation based on a series of radiocarbon dates and comparative sttatigraphy. In addition to the ex cavations at Tepe Yahya a regional survey, with limited ex cavation, was undertaken by Martha Prickett within the Soghun Valley, in which T e p e Yahya is located, and the Shah Maran-Daulatabad basin to the west. T h e results of this sur vey offer tire fullest understanding of the shifting settlement regime in this region of southeastern Iran. At Tepe Yahya, of particular importance was tire recovery of a series of Late Neolitiiic villages (periods VI-VII) datable to 3900-4900 BCE. Excavation uncovered a considerable number of domestic dwellings and successfully documented the subsistence pattern of the inhabitants and their material inventory. Archaeological survey indicated that sites in this period could reach a size of 10 hectares (25 acres), altiiough most were 2-3 hectares (5-7 acres). A limited repertoire of
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metals was found associated with a stone tool and bowl in dustry and a distinctive ceramic inventory of coarse chafftempered wares. T h e wares were in later levels comple mented by black-on-buff and black-on-red painted wares. The site was also occupied in the Chalcolithic period (33003900 BCE), period V A - C . In the last century of the fourth millennium, Tepe Yahya was the site of a Proto-Elamite "colony." Excavations un covered a single building complex, in excess of 500 square meters, referred to as period IVC (3100-2800 BCE). From this building twenty-five inscribed Proto-Elamite tablets, numerous cylinder sealings, and beveled-rim bowls, and other ceramic types were recovered that can be readily par alleled at Susa and Tal-i Malyan. Following the abandon ment of the Proto-Elamite colony, there is a gap in the se quence until the second half of the third millennium. With the reestablishment of settlement in period IVB (2400-1700 BCE), the community is distinguished by two features: the manufacture of chlorite bowls decorated in die distinctive Intercultural Style of geometric, architectural, and animal styles and the presence of a local style of cylinder seal. T h e materials recovered from this settiement, which include sev eral phases of architecture, can be readily paralleled at Shahdad. T h e recovery of die period's material inventory has led a number of scholars to identify tiiis region of southeastern Iran as comprising the kingdom of Marhasi, a kingdom frequently referred to in Ur III period texts in Mesopotamia. Period IVB is followed by the settlement called IVA (1800-1500 BCE), whose ceramic assemblage and orientation of its architecture and other material differ fundamentally from that of the preceding period. Recent analysis of these materials suggest parallels to tiiose recentiy recovered in Centtal Asia, namely in Margiana and Bactria. Following die IVA occupation there is a chronological gap of at least half a millennium. T h e Iron Age at Tepe Yahya (period III) is established between 700 and 525 BCE and is distinguished by an architectural complex consisting of large houses sealed by two large mud-brick platforms witiiout ar chitecture consu-ucted on their surface. Period II (475-275 BCE) consists of large houses containing a ceramic inventory with parallels to Achaemenean ceramic types. T h e final oc cupation at Yahya (period I, 200-300 CE) consists of very poorly preserved architecture, typical Parthian-Sasanian ce ramics, and limited material remains. BIBLIOGRAPHY Damerow, Peter, and Robert K. Englund. The Proto-Elamite Texts from Tepe Yahya. Peabody Museum, Harvard University, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 3 9 . Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967-1969. Peabody Museum, Harvard University, American School of Prehis toric Research, Bulletin 2 7 . Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 7 0 . Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. "Urban Interaction on the Iranian Plateau:
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Excavations at Tepe Yahya, 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 3 . " Proceedings of the British Academy 5 9 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 8 2 - 3 1 9 . Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C , and Maurizio Tosi. "Shahr-i Sokhta and Tepe Yahya: Tracks on the Earliest History of the Iranian Plateau." East and West 2 3 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 1 - 5 7 . Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C , and Thomas Wight Beale. Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967-197$: The Early Periods. Peabody Museum, Harvard University, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bul letin 3 8 . Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 8 6 . C. C.
LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY
TERQA, modern Ashara, site located directly on the banks of the Euphrates River (34°55' N , 40°34' E). The identification of the tell was one of the very first proposed in Syrian archaeology: it was established in 1910 when Ernst Herzfeld found on the surface of the site a cuneiform tablet that related die consttuction of the Temple of Dagan in Terqa (E. Herzfeld, "Hana et Mari," Revue d'Assyriologie II [1910]: 1 3 1 - 1 3 9 ) . The tell itself is no more titan 10 ha (25 acres); it seems certain that part of the ancient city has been lost to river erosion, possibly as much as half, though there is no way of determining this with precision. While no trace of an outer city has been found, it is likely that it existed and that it was swept away by flooding and/or covered by the alluvium. It has been traditionally assumed that die name of the region (Khana) was used in tire titulary of the kings who ruled from Terqa. While this may still be the case (e.g., as it had been for the kings of Mari), it has been shown by A. H. Podany (i99i-i993a) that the term occurs in texts tiiat were not excavated at Terqa: accordingly, the connection between the so-called Khana texts and Terqa cannot be taken for granted. The site is largely covered by a modern settlement, so that only about one fourth of the tell is available for excavation. The modern site has become the center of a large and pop ulous nakiya (township), so that current references to it tend to omit the qualification of "tell," which is found regularly in the early literature. T h e site is a few kilometers south of the confluence of the Khabur River with die Euphrates, and as such it controlled the traffic on the waterways, including the canals that flowed southward toward Mari in the narrow agricultural corridor called ah Purattim in antiquity and zor today. It is also likely tiiat Terqa was the starting point for caravans to Tadmor (Palmyra) and the Orontes River basin. An intensive survey conducted around Terqa by Kay Simpson (1983) has produced evidence of only a handful of Bronze Age sites, although it is known from ancient texts that many existed. The likely explanation is that these set tlements were abandoned before they could develop any siz able depositional accumulation. As a result, they came to be covered by the alluvium (probably 3 m deep in historical times) and are thus altogether invisible to a regular surface survey.
History of Excavations. T h e first published cuneiform document originating from Syria was a text mentioning Ter qa, and it had probably been found tiiere. Because several other tablets of die same type had come to light, and because their provenance could be linked to the site of Tell Ashara, two French philologists, Francois Thureau-Dangin and Paul Dhorme decided to start a trial excavation there in 1923. No tablets were found during these excavations. In 1974, Theresa Howard-Garter secured a permit from the Syrian government on behalf of Johns Hopkins Univer sity to conduct some preliminary work at the site, which was followed by a ten-day season in 1975 under die direction of Delbert Hillers. This is considered the first season. In 1976 Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati assumed die direction of the excavations on behalf of die Interna tional Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies and the Uni versity of California and California State University at Los Angeles. This was the second season and die beginning of the Joint Expedition to Terqa (which other institutions later joined). They directed die project until the tenth season, in 1984, when die field director was Daniela Buia. Beginning with the eleventh season, in 1985, Olivier Rouault became field director, and in 1989, the permit for the excavations was turned over to him; five more seasons of excavations followed. The initial long-term research strategy was to identify as many levels of the Khana period as possible and to study their relationship to earlier strata. Occupational History. Because settlement in the lower levels of the zor did not begin until die dawn of historical periods, it is not surprising that there should be no prehis toric levels at Terqa. T h e nearby site of Qraya, some 5 Ion (3 mi.) to the north, was settled in the late Proto-literate period and then abandoned for some time: this suggests that there was a shift in settlement from Qraya to Terqa at the beginning of the third millennium. T h e best evidence of early third-millennium occupation comes from the con struction of the first phase of the defensive system, die inner wall, which dates to about 2900 BCE; the subsequent two phases were built about one century after each other. T h e city walls remained in use until the middle of die second millennium BCE, with evidence of local repairs in later peri ods. In areas B and J, evidence was found dating to late Early Dynastic III and even the Sargonic period. A sounding in area K proved to be the most promising for the late third millennium. T h e end of the third millennium (known in the terminol ogy of Mari as the period of the Shakkanakkus) is attested primarily from the lower strata in area F, where an extensive administtative complex has been uncovered. [See Mari.] The building shows a stratigraphic continuity with the pe riod of the Amorite dynasties of Mari, which is otherwise known also from several finds from later contexts. [See Amorites.] It seems likely tiiat Terqa was never independent but was always a provincial capital subject to the kingdom of
TERQA Mari. After the fall of Mari, it is generally assumed that Ter qa became the capital of the kingdom of Khana—and if not then still one of its major urban centers (Podany, 1 9 9 1 1993). T h e major strata from this period are in area C, where excavations have revealed a city quarter that includes die Temple of Ninkarrak and a domestic residential area, including what has been called the house of Puzurum from the individual most prominent in die tablets stored in one of the rooms. In area E, remains of a large structure were found that may correspond to a public building (the pal ace?). Possible architectural remains dating to die early Mitanni period were found at the top of area E, but tiiey are very limited at best. [See Mitanni.] (Rouault [1992] seems to date all of area E to tiiis period, but from personal observations it appears that the level in which the Mitanni tablets were found is higher in elevation and farther south than most of the structures excavated earlier.) A good case has been made by Podany (1991-19933) for stretching the period of "Khana" kings into the sixteenth century BCE and beyond (thus bridging the so-called dark ages), though their main center was in all probability no longer at Terqa. It still seems that, with the virtual abandonment of Terqa, an effective deurbanization took place in the region of the Middle Eu phrates. There is limited evidence of a first-millennium BCE oc cupation—graves (especially in die trenches of area MP) and meager sherd scatters embedded in wind-blown depos its (area E). There is, however, die mention of Sirqu (a later form of tire name Terqa) in the Assyrian annals and a Middle Assyrian stela of Tukulti-Ninurta found on the surface in 1948. However, any sizable occupation of the site seems un likely in these later periods either at Terqa or in the region (in spite of Podany's remarks): die few pertinent sites on the Middle Euphrates and die Khabur appear to be Middle As syrian, and the Assyrian annals do not describe any real ur ban presence in the area. After a long period of abandon ment, the site was reoccupied in medieval times as a specialized craft center for tire manufacture of ceramics and glass objects. [See Glass.] Major Architectural Remains. T h e city's defensive sys tem consisted of three solid mud-brick walls, for a total width of about 20 m. Horizontal exposure was obtained only in area B, but several sections cut through the wall in the trenches of area M P indicate drat the construction found there was most probably generalized throughout tire site; die projected perimeter is estimated to have been some 1,800 m long. The inner wall (chronologically the first) is 5-6 m wide, witii an apron of limestone boulders along die outer face: it must have served as a complete system, against botii enemies and river flooding. T h e second wall (9-10 m wide) was built against the first one and had a girdle of limestone boulders embedded at its base. T h e diird wall was 4-6.5 m wide and included an open space about 2 m wide, possibly
189
a walkway within the defensive system. A wide moat encir cled the outer wall. An interesting feature of the administrative building in area F was a scribal installation—a place where it is pre sumed that a scribe would carry out his task. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] A platform of baked bricks pro vided a clean surface on which to crouch; a jar placed next to the platform provided the supply of clay for making tab lets; behind the platform was a bin that was probably used to store reference material; and baskets (like one found just outside the doorway) would have held tablets in current use. [See Writing Materials; Tablet.] T h e Temple of Ninkarrak exhibits the same plan and di mensions as a temple of Kahat known from a cuneiform text. T h e layout of the temple follows a characteristic Me sopotamian plan, with a bent-axis approach, engaged col umns, and rabbeted doorjambs. Only the base of the altar is preserved. A large service area (die circulation patterns are not well understood) was accessed through a small door way from the long side of the large hall. The residential area on the other side of a street across from the temple shows no architectural particularities. [See Temples, article on Me sopotamian Temples.] Epigraphy and Glyptics. Twenty-three tablets not found during regular excavations but generally known as Khana texts, and probably originating, in great part at least, at Terqa, are mostly legal contracts of various types (see Podany et a l , 1991-1993). They share many characteristics of form and content (e.g., a punishment clause tiiat calls for asphalt to be poured on the head of the transgressor). About two hundred tablets and fragments have been found in ex cavations. The best-known group is the small archive from Puzurum. Its stratigraphic setting is recorded in great detail: the texts had been scattered (ratiier than properly deposited) in a storage room with a mixture of household items. While the tablets were, for the most part, complete, their envelopes were mostly shattered into dozens of small pieces. The con dition of the envelopes indicates that they had been broken before being placed in die room and thus the documents had lost any current value. Dated to about 1720 BCE, the texts are mosdy contracts for die sale of land. Of die un published texts, die most interesting are those dated to the later periods because tiiey expand what is known of the in teraction between Terqa and outside controls, on tire part of Babylon first and then the early kings of Mitanni. [See Babylon.] T h e tablets found in the house of Puzurum were sealed by a number of witnesses, providing a well-dated collection of private seals in use by individuals at Terqa in about 1720 BCE. T h e style of the seals is characterized by the promi nence of circular drill holes left as part of the pattern, the design of staffs, hats, and rosettes, in particular. T h e divinity is often shown seated on the left, witii die resulting reversal of the action of the other figures who are shown as ap-
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proaching the divinity. An Old Babylonian cylinder seal ex cavated in a tomb in area F identifies die seal owner as Belum. Artifacts and Other Finds. Significant results have been drawn from botanical and zoological analysis. [See Paleo botany; Paleozoology.] Some cloves were found in a vessel resting on die floor of a pantry next to tire storage room holding Puzurum's archive. Because cloves were grown only in die Far East, this is the first evidence for ttade with that remote area. The study of animal bone remains has shown that culling patterns were not in keeping with what would be expected of full-time, specialized pastoralists, leading to the suggestion that herding practices were those of local farmers who doubled as herders, as is still the case in the area (Galvin, 1981). [Sea Pastoral Nomadism; Paleopathol ogy.] Next to the altar in the Temple of Ninkarrak, a small dog was excavated; a dog is the animal associated with this god dess, who represents good heahfi. In a corner of this same cella, 6,637 beads were clustered tightly in what must have been a cloth bag that had completely disintegrated. T h e beads were of semiprecious stones, including lapis, carnelian, agate, and chalcedony. Seven Egyptian scarabs were part of this hoard.
Terqa Evidence." In Techniques el pratiques hydro-agricoles traditionelles en domaine irrigue: Approche pluridisciplinaire des modes de cul ture avant la molorisation en Syrie; Actes du Colloque de Damas, 27 juin-ler juillet 1987, vol. 1 , edited by Bernard Geyer, pp. 1 5 5 - 1 6 9 . Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 136. Paris, 1990. Ter minology of land use based on contemporary geography and ancient texts. Buia, Daniela. "Historical Implications Derived from a Descriptive Study of the Excavated Structures and Ceramics of a Second Mil lennium B.C. Near Eastern Site, Ancient Terqa." Ph.D. diss., Uni versity of California, Los Angeles, 1993. Thorough study of die area F ceramics. Galvin, Kathleen F. "Early State Economic Organization and die Role of Specialized Pastoralism: Terqa in the Middle Euphrates Region, Syria." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1981. Im portant analysis of faunal remains from die early fieldwork. Kelly-Buccellati, Marilyn. "Miniature Art from Terqa, 1700 B.C.: New Sources for Mid-Second Millennium Art in Mesopotamia." In The Shape of the Past: Studies in Honor of Franklin D. Murphy, edited by Giorgio Bucceliati and Charles Speroni, pp. 44-53. Los Angeles, 1981.
Kelly-Buccellati, Marilyn. "Figurines and Plaques from Terqa." An nates Archeobgiques Arabes Syriennes 35 (1985): 1 4 9 - 1 5 4 . Kelly-Buccellati, Marilyn. "Sealing Practices at Terqa." In Insight through Images: Studies in Honor of Edith Porada, edited by Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, pp. 1 3 3 - 1 4 2 . Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 2 1 . Mal ibu, 1986. Interpretive analysis of newly published seals and other artifacts. Podany, Amanda H. "A Middle Babylonian Date for the Hana King The ceramics from tire house of Puzurum and the Temple dom." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 43-45 ( i 9 9 i - i 9 9 3 a ) : 53-62. Pro posed late date into the Middle Babylonian period for die later of Ninkarrak are dated by the tablets found on associated Khana kings. floors in the Khana period (as opposed to a proposed rePodany, Amanda H., Gary M. Beckman, and Gudrun Colbow. "An dating by T u b b [1980]). The stratified ceramic sequence Adoption and Inheritance Contract from the Reign of Iggid-Lim of from the Mari period to the Khana period in area F has been Hana." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 43-45 (t99i-i993b): 3 9 - 5 1 . studied by Buia (1993). A clay plaque from area F came The latest publication of an unexcavated text of the Khana type. Rouault, Olivier, with a contribution by Giorgio Bucceliati. Terqa Final from the same mold as a plaque found at Mari. Reports 1: L'Archive de Puzurum. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 1 6 . Malibu, 1984. Stratigraphic presentation of a private house and full BIBLIOGRAPHY edition of the small archive found in it. Bucceliati, Giorgio, and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. "Terqa Preliminary Rouault, Olivier. "Terqa." American Journal of Archaeology 95 (1991): Report No. 1: Report on the Second Season of Excavations with a 727-729. Preliminary report. Review of Earlier Work at the Site." Syro-Mesopotamian Studies 1.2 Rouault, Olivier. "Cultures locales et influences exterieures: Le cas de (1977): 1-47. Terqa." Studi Micinei ed Egeo-Anatolici, no. 30 (1992): 247-256. Pre Bucceliati, Giorgio, and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. "Terqa Preliminary liminary report on die cuneiform texts fovind after the fifth season Report No. 6: The Third Season—Introduction and the Strati of excavation. graphic Record." Syro-Mesopolamian Studies 2,6 (1978): 1-36, pi. Rouault, Olivier. "Ashara-Terqa." American Journal of Archaeology 98 14(1994): 1 4 2 - 1 4 3 . Preliminary report. Bucceliati, Giorgio, Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, and James E. Knudstad. Simpson, Kay. "Settlement Patterns on the Margins of Mesopotamia: Terqa Preliminary Report No. 10: The Fourth Season—Introduction and Stability and Change along die Middle Euphrates, Syria." Ph.D. the Stratigraphic Record. Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, 10. Malibu, diss., University of Arizona, 1983. 1979, Detailed publication of the city's defensive system. Tubb, Jonadtan N. "A Reconsideration of the Date of the Second Mil Bucceliati, Giorgio, and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. "Terqa: The First lennium Pottery from the Recent Excavations at Terqa." Ijcvanl 1 2 Eight Seasons." Annates Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes 33 (1983): (1980): 6 1 - 6 8 . 47-67. Extensive reports on the early seasons of excavation. GIORGIO BUCCELLATI Bucceliati, Giorgio. "The Kingdom and Period of Khana." Bulletin of and MARILYN KELLY-BUCCELLATI the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 270 (1988): 4 3 - 6 1 . His torical considerations, with a chronological reconstruction of the king sequence. Bucceliati, Giorgio. "From Khana to Laqe: The End of Syro-MesoT E X T I L E S . [This entry surveys textile remains and the potamia." In De la Babylonie a la Syrie, en passant par Mari: Melanges development of the technologies used to produce them. It is chron offerts a Monsieur J.-R. Kupper a Voccasion de son ?oe anniversaire, ologically divided into two articles: Textiles of the Neolithic edited by Onhan Tunca, pp. 229-253. Liege, 1990. Historical con through Iron Ages and Textiles in the Classical Period. For sequences of the end of Terqa. a related discussion, see also Clothing.] Bucceliati, Giorgio. "The Rural Landscape of the Ancient Zor: The
TEXTILES: Textiles of the Neolithic through Iron Ages Textiles of the Neolithic through Iron Ages The production of cloth and clothing came to occupy a large portion of women's labor during the Neolithic period, an amount sustained until machine-made cloth became avail able in die late eighteenth century. Between 6000 and 2000 BCE, textile technology developed largely independently in southeast Europe and the Near East. Egypt went its own way after 4500 BCE. During the second millennium BCE, ttade began to move both cloth and technology around in great volume, and men became weavers also, for profit or prestige. The traditions become more difficult to separate after that. T h e earliest proof of weaving in die Old World consists of a plain-weave fragment from Cayonti, Turkey, and cloth impressions on two clay balls from Jarmo in northeast Iraq, both dated about 7000 BCE. [See Cayonti; Jarmo.] One im pression shows a balanced plain weave, the other a 2/2 bas ket weave (over 2, under 2, each way)—indicating tiiat va riety in techniques was already used by weavers. T h e variety, fineness, and evenness apparent in tiiese impres sions reveal extreme skill: weaving is clearly older than these
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TEXTILES: Neolithic through Iron Ages. Child's tunic from firstdynasty Egypt. This is the earliest preserved garment from Egypt. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
191
examples. (European evidence for twisted fiber thread comes from representations of Venus figures (Lespugne, France, and Gagarino, Russia) of the Gravettian culture, before 20,000 BCE; and the Lascaux caves in France have preserved a complex Magdalenian fiber cord from 15,000 BCE.) The first woven matting is also from Jarmo, although mat weaving is technically simpler tiian textile weaving. The latter requires a tension device (a loom) to compensate for the lack of stiffness in the component materials. T w o Early Neolithic groups of cloth are known, in addi tion to more and more impressions on clay once pottery comes into use. In about 6500 BCE, several linen textiles were left in a cave in the Judean Desert at Nahal Hemar (Schick, 1986). [See Judean Desert Caves.] None are in "true" weave, although the twining and netting techniques display skill and variety. Most remarkable is a bag-shaped ornamental net hung from a band decorated with a stone bead—apparently a hat (if so, it is the earliest preserved garment). At Catal Hoytik in Turkey, from about 6000 BCE, several textiles, now carbonized, were placed beneatir a house floor (Burnham, 1965). They include plain weave and two kinds of twining; three types of selvedge, a fringe, and a rolled and whipped edge; wide cloth and narrow tapes; and coarse, fine, and very open textures. T h e evenness and the preponderance of true weave over twining suggest that heddles (which mechani cally separate the warp for each pass of die weft) had already been invented. Laboratory analysis showed the samples to be flax—probably collected wild because no evidence of do mestic flax was found at the site. [See Catal Ffoyiik.]
Fibers. All analyzed fibers earlier than the Late Neolidiic period are of plant bast—in the Near East, generally flax (linen). Flax is native to the shores of the Mediterranean and specifically to the Near East where there is sufficient water. It was probably domesticated soon after 6000 BCE, reaching Egypt by 4500 BCE, when the first crude linen cloth is found there. Although sheep were domesticated much earlier for their meat, zoological evidence suggests they had little or no us able wool at first, the wild coat being more like that of a deer (Barber, 1991, pp. 20-30). By 4000 BCE, domestic breeding had produced woolier coats, suggested by a clay figurine from Tepe Sarab in die Zagros and a shift in slaughter pat terns to maintain flocks for wool. This wool molted and was pulled rather than clipped. By early Sumerian times, texts indicate several varieties of woolly and nonwoolly sheep. T h e Egyptians, however, continued until classical times to raise hairy, not woolly, sheep and to manufacture linen chiefly. Clipped goat hair was used in both regions for coarse cloth like sacking. [See Sheep and Goats.] Hemp (Cannabis Sativa), used in nordiern and central Eurasia since at least 5000 BCE, and cotton, domesticated in India before 3000 BCE, seem not to have reached Mesopo tamia until just after 1000 BCE and the Aegean in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. Silk, domesticated in China in the
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third millennium, is known to have reached Europe by about 650 BCE and may have filtered into the Near East at about the same time. Spinning. Mesopotamians spun with the whorl upper most on the spindle, as can be seen on cylinder-seal im pressions and a few preserved spindles. Short fibers could be flicked into the thread from a pile on the ground, but long flax requires a distaff. Possible distaffs were found with spin dles at Kish (late third millennium). [See Kish.] Spindles sometimes have two whorls. Egyptian women dropped their spindle whorl uppermost after rolling it down the right thigh, giving the thread an Stwist that reinforced the natural twist in die linen. Fibers stripped manually from flax stalks were first spliced end to end; the resulting thread was run through a loop in the bot tom of a special wetting bowl to soften it. Spinners (who merely added twist) thus pulled already formed thread to their spindles and could manage two spindles and two to four threads at once. Europeans and Anatolians flicked and dropped their spin dle whorl downward, paying out fibers into the (Z-twisted) thread with the other hand. Wool could be held in the hand, but long flax required either a distaff or preformed yarn. Bowls with internal loops have been found at several Mi noan sites (e.g., Myrtos, Drakones; See Barber, 1991, pp. 73-76). Gold, silver, and copper spindles have turned up in the tombs of wealthy women at Alaca Hoyiik and other midthird-millennium sites in Anatolia. Many wooden ones are known from Egypt, including one from a woman's grave at Abu Gurob: its whorl is at the bottom and its thread groove is in a " Z " instead of an " S " slant; it was locally made, but for a European wool spinner. Looms. The horizontal ground loom was developed in Mesopotamia and the Levant: two parallel warp beams pegged out at any desired distance on the ground to stretch the warp. Bedouin and others still use this loom, which is depicted on a late fourth-millennium seal from Susa. On the seal a weaver squats at each side to pass the weft bobbin back and forth; blocks on both sides undoubtedly supported the heddle bar. A third person is apparently making a warp on a warp stand, seen in better perspective on another early seal. An early fourth-millennium Egyptian dish from Badari shows clearly the four pegs holding the warp beams, as well as three bars across the warp (shed, heddle, and beater bars?). Many Middle Kingdom depictions of textile work exist, invariably showing women weaving white linen on this loom. (Men wove mats, however.) What seem to be the major pieces of a narrow ground loom conle from a fourtlimillennium Judean cave, Nahal Mishmar, along with a con siderable quantity of linen cloth. This loom type spread south from Mesopotamia to Egypt and eventually India.
outdoors. A few clay lumps that may have been loom weights were found at Catal Hoyiik; but the craft quarters at the site have yet to be excavated. In about 5500 BCE, weights with all the earmarks of loom weights turn up in many Neolithic houses in what is modern Hungary; they then spread to the Aegean, to Switzerland (where elegantly patterned Neolithic cloth is preserved), and finally to Ana tolia in the early third millennium (Early Bronze Age). A third loom, the two-beam vertical loom, or tapestry loom, may have developed in the Caucasus and spread to Syria by the mid-third millennium. T h e Egyptians received it from the Syrians during either Hyksos times or Thutmosis Ill's Syrian campaigns (early fifteenth century BCE), when it is clearly depicted in Thutnofer's tomb at Thebes (with male weavers). This versatile loom was eventually taken to Rome during the empire and from there to other parts of Europe. Card weaving, in which thin tablets with pierced corners replace heddles, also seems to have originated in the Cau casus. Impressions of tablet-woven fabric at Nalchik, north of the Caucasus, date to the early third millennium. Very small ivory tablets found at Susa (late third millennium) may have served this purpose. If the girdle of Rameses III, now in Liverpool, is indeed tablet woven, Egyptian weavers had become highly skilled in this method by the close of the Bronze Age. Finally, the sprang technique uses a special plaiting frame. The technique reached Egypt from Europe sometime in the first millennium BCE. Dyes. Evidence for dyes begins before 3000 BCE in Eu rope, Egypt, and perhaps the Levant. The simplest dyeing involves immersing the finished cloth or garment in a dye bath. Linen mummy wrappings from the first dynasty at Tarkhan were dyed brown, those from the fourth dynasty at Meidum were dyed red, and those from the twelfth dy nasty were dyed yellow. To create patterning, die thread must be dyed before it is woven (or embroidered). T o re main contrastive, however, die color must be relatively im pervious to light and water. Only a few dyes are self-fixing, such as sea-snail purple (e.g., from Murex snails), indigo blue (obtained in Europe and the Near East from woad, a plant that was widespread but difficult to use), and kermes red (from a tiny lac insect related to the New World cochi neal insect). These three dyes were in great demand, but they were also very difficult and/or costly to prepare. Murex and purpura snails were harvested off the coast of eastern Crete and the Levant, where shell heaps attest to their use from 2000 BCE onward. The Phoenicians were particularly famous for the "Tyrian" purple dye they produced. Vari eties of kermes lived on the oak trees of southern Europe and a grass of Armenia. (Sargon II records looting much red cloth from Armenia in 714 BCE.)
Anatolia and southeast Europe, developed a very different loom, however, that spread northwest, the vertical warpweighted loom, which was set up indoors rather than pegged
Mordants (dye fixatives) seem to have been discovered in the early second millennium, perhaps by the Egyptians. That step opened the way to many other Near Eastern plant
TEXTILES: Textiles of the Neolithic through Iron Ages dyes, such as reds from madder, henna, and saffiower. An Assyrian "chemist's manual" contains a number of compli cated recipes for dyes. T h e favorite mordant was (and is) alum, which die Mycenaeans seem to have imported from Cyprus, an important geological source. Eighth-century BCE dye works at Tell Beit Mirsim in Israel contained large vats of lime and potash for such purposes. [See Beit Mirsim, Tell.] Felt. Mashing together the scaly surfaces of animal fibers like wool until they interlock inextricably produce felt. (Plant fibers and silk will not felt.) T h e first evidence of felting comes from third-millennium Anatolia (a rug) and Meso potamia (pads and covers, mentioned in texts). Felt's real home, however, is the Eurasian steppes, where among no madic herders it is still the main source of housing, clothing, bedding, and many utensils. It was probably invented on the steppes in the fourth or third millennium. P a t t e r n e d Cloth. Because cloth is so much better pre served in Egypt than anywhere else, Egypt must serve as the benchmark against which all other textile industries are mea sured—even though it was far from the leader in textile in novations. Its forte was fine white plain-weave linen—some times as fine as 200 threads per inch. Linen was a measure
TEXTILES: Neolithic through Iron Ages. Linen dress from a fifthdynasty Egyptian tomb. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
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of wealth and was used for baiter; it accompanied the dead to the next world in quantity, both as flat sheets and as cloth ing. A complete shirt from a first-dynasty tomb at Tarkhan—hemmed, fringed, and finely pleated for a close fit— was found inside out and had clearly been worn. T h e same weft-inlay technique used for fringes was used for weaver marks ("logos") and for white-on-white patterns of looped weft in the Middle Kingdom. (Bead nets worn over clothing account for the colored patterns seen in paintings.) In the New Kingdom, the Egyptians finally learned to use the tap estry technique (and the tapestry loom) from perhaps Syria. Heirloom tapestties from Thutmosis III and Amenhotep II in the tomb of Thutmosis IV show die initial stages in learn ing the techniqcie. Tutankhamun's tapestry tunics and gloves a century later were produced with a highly sophis ticated technique. An embroidered tunic with Tutankha mun's name is clearly Syrian work; perhaps a royal gift or made by resident aliens in the palace. Early Mesopotamian textiles are now scarce. An axe blade from Susa preserves a piece of fourth-millennium cloth wo ven with broad stripes of thick thread within a thinner ground weave. In the Death Pit at Ur (mid-tiiird millen nium), Leonard Woolley (1934, pp. 238-239) found some evanescent evidence of red cloth (especially on the bodices of tlie ladies in waiting), diagonally ribbed cloth (twill, or a tightly faced plain weave?), and cloth with long threads hanging down (the technique is unknown but reminiscent of tufted Sumerian skirts). In the early second millennium, Assyrian women wove fancy cloth for profit, as we learn from their letters. Their husbands ttaded metals and textiles in Anatolia, and the women received the profits from the considerable variety of textiles they wore for the men to sell. Captive women, or ganized in palace workshops throughout Mesopotamia and Syria, wove fancy textiles for royal use and gift exchanges. In the late third millennium, extremely expensive textiles from Ebla in Syria were renowned as far away as Ur, Kish, and Megiddo. T h e weft-faced weaves typical of Mesopo tamian and Levantine finds had apparently led to true tap estry—a conclusion supported by the importation of tap estry technology into Egypt from Syria centuries later. Two fourteenth-century BCE finds (in Tutankhamun's tomb) of embroidery—otherwise unknown in Egypt—both with Syr ian motifs, indicate that patterned embroidery also devel oped in Syria. Greek and Roman authors remark on Near Eastern embroidery. Another expensively time-consuming textile, pile carpet, was in production before 2000 BCE in the Sumbar Valley, just east of the southern Caspian Sea, where women took to their graves several lcnives uniquely shaped for cutting pile. Representational and textual evidence for pile carpets in the second millennium also points toward this time and area for their origin. The earliest preserved pile carpets come from frozen tombs at Pazyryk and Bash Adar in the Altai Moun-
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tains, in the mid-first millennium BCE. They are as sophis ticated as any modern rug. Anatolia presents the first twill cloth (the most easily me chanizable pattern): at Alisar in die late fourdi millennium. The second comes from Georgia (Martkopi), in the third millennium. Meanwhile, the fire that destroyed Troy II in about 2600 BCE incinerated a palace loom. It was set up for weaving twill, to judge from the number, size, and positions of the loom weights, while numerous tiny gold beads in the fill indicate beaded decoration as well. Beading was popular in Anatolia and the Aegean: examples were found at Acemhoyiik (Turkey) and Dendra (Greece) in the next millen nium. The scanty obtainable evidence shows the Caucasus area to have been highly innovative. Twill and tablet weaving began by the early third millennium, as did plaid (known from a site on the Fars River)—three textile techniques that turn up together in central Europe two thousand years later. Aegean weavers worked in the European tradition of the warp-weigh ted loom and its technique of supplementary weft-float patterns, adding twill to the roster in the third millennium. After Troy II, shifts can be seen in Minoan loom-weight configurations, implying twill weaving. The late third-millennium village at Myrtos, in southern Crete, had a considerable amount of spinning, weaving, and dyeing equipment. A couple of centuries later, Egyptian nobles be gan copying in their tombs Minoan textile designs of such complexity and sophistication that the Myrtos weavers must already have been worldng toward this level. The exporta tion of ornate Aegean textiles to Egypt continued through the second millennium until about 1200 BCE. A S with Me sopotamian and Syrian textiles, only a careful analysis of the available representational art in terms of what is known of the technology of weaving reveals what the typical patterns were. Except for rare examples no cloth has survived from earlier than the Roman period. Later Developments. Accelerated trade in the East Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age allowed fiberartisans of one country (such as those who produced the wide array of textiles in Tutankhamun's tomb) to learn something of techniques developed elsewhere. But during die great migrations of 1200 BCE, whole populations moved, including the women who typically produced the cloth. Thus ill-fired, donut-shaped loom weights, a type associated in the Late Bronze Age with central Europe, turn up in Early Iron Age Palestine, for example, at Gezer and Tell Beit Mirsim, where entire shops equipped for weaving and dyeing have been excavated, and in Anatolia, at Gordion (see Sheffer, 1981; Albright, 1941-1943). The fair preservation of textiles placed in Midas's tomb at Gordion and of a few pieces from the city itself (sacked a year or two year before in 690 BCE) shows us that Near Eastern cloth-making was by then quite sophisticated. The
remains include felted woven and nonwoven wool, striping, weft-looping, weft-wrapping (soumak), warp-faced pat terned bands (using complementary warps), and slit tapes try (Ellis, 1981). Of the famous Phrygian embroidery noth ing had survived. This array of ornate textiles corresponds well to the clothing of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian royalty sculpted on Iron Age monuments of Mesopotamia, where cloth itself has not survived. (The palace at Nineveh also contained stone thresholds, now in the British Museum, carved to look exactly like typical pile rugs, which we know were already being produced to the east; see above.) East of Mesopotamia, the Persians too enjoyed fancy tex tiles, as can be seen on representations at Persepolis, but cloth itself has not survived (Petzel, 1987). Impressions on pottery from the Ferghana valley show that twill technique was known in that eastern Iranian outpost between 1100 and 400 BCE, while new finds in the Tarim basin from this same era indicate a Caucasian population using plaids, twills, slit tapestry, pile, and oblique plaiting. What of these were made locally and what imported from the west is not yet known. Both Herodotus (1.203) and archaeologists agree that north and east of the Black Sea an entirely different tech nique was used to decorate fabric: painting designs onto it with color-fast dyes. Such a cloth was found in a tumulus at Kertch, in the Crimea, draped over a sarcophgus (Gertsiger, 1975). It consisted of at least six friezes of red and black mythological figures painted on buff ground, looking much like a Greek vase; die Greek lettering dates it to the fourth century BCE. Other cloths from the Crimean colonies include elaborate pictorial embroidery and pattern-woven bands. Records and remarks concerning the woolen peplos or dress traditionally made each year by Athenian women for Athena suggest that die peplos looked much like the friezed cloth from Kertch. Using purple figures on a saffron ground, it depicted Athena and Zeus in the mythical battle of the gods and giants. After the Persian Wars, the city hired pro fessional male tapestry weavers from the Near East to make a second, larger peplos every fourth year, in addition to the one woven yearly in older techniques by the women (Barber, 1992). T h e earliest patterned cloths to survive on Greek soil are a weft-looped linen tunic and its belt (with a supple mentary warp pick-up pattern of lozenges and chevrons in colored wool on a white linen ground) from die Hereon at Lefkandi (Boeotia), about 1000 BCE (Barber, 1991); frag ments of purple and white silks from the tomb of a relative of Alcibiades, about4oo BCE (Flundt, 1969); and a linen frag ment embroidered in wrapped metallic thread showing lions inside a diaper pattern, from Koropi (Attica), about 420350 BCE (Beckwith, 1954). This last piece foreshadows the metallic splendor of the Hellenistic textiles preserved in the royal Macedonian tomb at Vergina. [See also Clothing.]
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Hundt, H.-J. "TJber vorgeschichtliche Seidenfunde." Jahrbuch des romisch-germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 16 (1969): 5 9 - 7 1 . Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Reese, D. S. "Industrial Exploitation of Murex Shells. . . ." Libyan Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. Prince Studies 1 1 (1980): 79-93. ton, 1991. Detailed survey of the archaeological evidence for textiles Rudenko, Sergei I. Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazytyk Burials of Iron from Iran to Britain, 25,000-400 BCE. Deals with fibers, spinning, Age Horsemen. Translated and updated by M. W. Thompson. Berke weaving, felting, and dyeing, plus a number of specific problems to ley, 1970. do with origins, economy, trade, and linguistic evidence. Copiously Ryder, M. L. "Report of Textiles from Catal Hiiyiik." Anatolian Studies illustrated. 15 (1965): 1 7 5 - 1 7 6 . Crowfoot, Grace M. Methods of Hand Spinning in Egypt and the Sudan. Schick, Tamar. "Perishable Remains from the Nahal Hemar Cave." Bankheld Museum Notes, ser. 2, no. 1 2 . Halifax, N.S., 1 9 3 1 . Fully Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society 19 (1986): 84-86, 95*-97*. illustrated ethnographic description of spinning metiiods and tools, Sheffer, Avigail. "The Use of Perforated Clay Balls on the Warpwith many comparisons with what can be seen in ancient Egyptian weighted Loom." Tel Aviv 8 (1981): 8 1 - 8 3 . representations of the craft. Woollcy, Leonard. Ur Excavations 2. London, 1934. Hall, Rosalind. Egyptian Textiles. Aylesbury, Bucks, 1986. Illustrated E. J. W. B A R B E R discussion of Egyptian techniques of spinning, weaving, dyeing, sew ing, and laundering, as well as of Egyptian uses of clodt and clothing in life and death. Textiles in the Classical Period Laufer, Bcrthold. "The Early History of Felt." American Anthropologist 32 (1930): 1—18. Careful discussion of the evidence for felt, to which Textile production occupied a central part of the work ac little can be added despite die passage of more than sixty years. tivity and consumer needs of people in all regions of the Petzel, Florence Eloise. Textiles of Ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, and ancient Mediterranean basin. At the same time, images of Egypt. Corvallis, Ore., 1987. Discussion of Near Eastern textile ma the production of textiles were used commonly to represent terials, tools, and products, including an extensive compilation of various social relations, including "class" and gender. typical textile patterns from Mesopotamia and Persia, with emphasis on the later periods. No illustrations. Technologies of Production. T h e production of gar Riefstahl, Elizabeth. Patterned Textiles in Pharaonic Egypt. Brooklyn, ments and other textiles from wool and flax required mul 1944. Well-illustrated discussion of all the patterned textiles known tiple steps. A passage from a third-century rabbinic text from ancient Egypt until 1944 CE. from Palestine describes this process with some accuracy: Rotii, Henry Ling. Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms ( 1 9 1 3 ) . Bankfield "How long did the first m a n labor and he could don one Museum Notes, ser. 2, no. 2. 2d ed. Halifax, N.S., 1 9 5 1 . Compre simple garment? Until he sheared and cleaned and combed hensively illustrated discussion of ancient Egyptian looms, with some attention to weaving practices. and dyed and spun and wove and sewed. And after this he Veenhof, Klaas R. Aspects of Old Assyrian. Trade and Its Terminology. could wear the garment." (Tosefta Ber. 7.5). T h e process Leiden, 1972. Analysis and selective translation of the cuneiform for wool production depended of course on die availability archives found at an Assyrian trading colony in central Turkey. of wool. T h e shearing of wool from sheep was followed by Many of the texts are letters from Assyrian women involved in textile a lengthy process during which thorns, thistles, mud, ma manufacture and trade. Waetzoldt, Hartmut. Untersuchungen zur neusumerischen Textilinditstrie. nure, and other dirt were removed from the knotted and Rome, 1972. Comprehensive discussion of the cuneiform texts and tangled fleece. T h e fleece was then cleaned by hand, by other materials concerning Mesopotamian textile manufacture in the washing it in warm water and cleansers and/or by beating it. late third millennium. The clean wool was then combed to separate its long and The following short articles discuss textile-related finds of particular short fibers, to fluff them, and to arrange the wool, using a importance and interest mentioned in the text: stationary or hand-held comb, into parallel strands in prep Adovasio, J. M. "The Textile and Basketry Impressions fromjarmo." aration for spinning. Wool was dyed either while it was still Paleorient 3 (1975-1977): 223-230. on the fleece or, more likely, after it was cleaned and Albright, William Foxwell. "The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim." An combed. (The manufacture of dye was an industry in its nual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 2 1 - 2 2 ( 1 9 4 1 - 1 9 4 3 ) . own right.) Each of these steps might be performed by a Barber, E. J. W. "The Peplos of Athena." In Goddess and Polls, edited separate artisan, worker, or shop. Wool was bought and sold by Jennifer Neils, pp. 1 0 3 - 1 1 7 . Princeton, 1992. at each of these various steps of production. Beckwith, John. "Textile Fragments from Classical Antiquity." Illus trated Ixmdon News 224 (23 Jan. 1954): 1 1 4 — 1 1 5 . T h e preparation of flax also involved a lengthy process Burnham, Harold B. "Catal Huytik: The Textiles and Twined Fab (see Pliny, Natural Histoty, 1 9 . 1 6 - 1 8 ) . Ripe flax stalks were rics." Anatolian Studies 1 5 (1965): 1 6 9 - 1 7 4 . picked and tied into bundles to dry, or they were dried in an Crowfoot, Grace M„ and Norman de Garis Davies. "The Tunic of oven. Once dry, the seeds were removed with a rippling Tut'ankhamun." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 27 ( 1 9 4 1 ) : 1 1 3 130. comb. T h e retting process was begun by plunging the flax Ellis, Richard. "Appendix V: [Gordion] Textiles." In Gordion Exca stalks into warm, stagnant water; the stalks were kept sub vations: Pinal Reports I, edited by Rodney S. Young, pp. 294-310. merged by weights for several weeks, or until the stalks were Philadelphia, 1 9 8 1 . fully soaked. T h e plant was then removed from the water Gertsiger, Dora. "Eine Decke aus dem sechsten Grab der 'Sieben Bruand its inner fibers loosened from its outer bark and core by den.' " Antike Kunst 18 (1975): 5 1 - 5 5 B I B L I O G R A P H Y
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pounding and beating the stalks with various types of mal lets, blades, and combs. When the inner fibers were re moved, they were divided into various qualities of softness, coarseness, and color and then combed in preparation for spinning. Most textile products require fibers to be spun, although the felting of wool requires only that unspun fibers be meshed. Spinning in the classical period (Hellenistic, Ro man, and Byzantine) was done primarily with a drop spin dle, which is mentioned in the literature of the period. Spin dles and spindle whorls have been discovered at most archaeological sites. As the most popular and most techno logically advanced form of thread production in the Roman period, drop spinning works by drawing out and twisting a mass of raw fiber into a slender, strong thread. Schemati cally, the spinner begins by holding, at shoulder length, tire spindle and whorl, which are attached to a mass of raw fiber. The spinner drops the spindle, which, as it twirls to die ground, pulls strands from the fiber mass to be twisted into thread. When the spindle hits the ground, the spinner pulls it up and winds the new thread around the rod. With the spindle at shoulder height, the process is repeated, and thread is produced that is roughly the length measured from the spinner's shoulders to the ground. T h e spindle whorl facilitates this process by adding weight and momentum to the spindle, thus producing a better tension and twist in the yarn or thread. T h e production of thread was slow and te dious and constituted the most labor intensive of the man ufacturing phases of textiles. Thread and yarn were spun into various weights and thicknesses for use in rope making, braiding, crocheting, netting, and weaving (warp and weft threads). Weaving was done on one of several types of loom in die Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. T h e warpweighted loom was constructed of two parallel sidebars con nected at the top by a crossbeam. From this beam were hung vertical warp threads affixed to loom weights. T h e loom weights provided the tension that held the warp threads steady as die heddle was moved back and forth and the weft threads inserted. The evidence for warp-weighted looms in the archaeological record is these weights, made in sets of clay or stone. T h e slow reduction in number and then dis appearance of warp weights from certain excavation levels allows the dating of the development of the new technology, the two-beam loom, to the mid-first century-late second century CE, depending on the region. Although invisible archaeologically, the new two-beam loom is depicted artisti cally. This new technology eliminated warp weights and stretched the warp from a top crossbeam to a bottom cross beam. By most accounts, this loom produced better cloth more efficiently and widi greater comfort for the weaver. Its web was worked from the bottom up, hence the weaver(s) could sit rather than stand through the long hours required
to produce most woven items. Another development in weaving technology, dated to third-century Syria, was a hor izontal loom that enabled the weaver to produce more in tricate kinds of cloth. Once woven, the cloth might be finished by fulling or bleaching it. This process involved additional washing in a detergent (such as soapwort) to remove the grease and dirt that had adhered during spinning and weaving. T h e cloth could be brushed and teased to raise die nap; linen might be bleached with sulphur; and wool cloth might be rubbed with fuller's clay to bring out the dye's color. (Cloth might be dyed or redyed even after it was worn to refresh and restore faded color. Linen and cotton fabrics were dyed after spinning and less regularly than woolen ones.) As a final gesture of care, cloth could be smoothed on a cloth-pressing mechanism, as depicted in the painting of Hypsaeus at Pom peii. Cloth could also be smootiied with stones, rods, or wooden blocks. Both archaeological excavation and the literary sources indicate that wool and linen were die most popular types of cloth. In smaller quantities, silk, cotton, metallic threads, and even asbestos and hemp were manufactured into garments and household goods. Social Organization and Textile Distribution. Al though the technologies of production are fairly straightfor ward, reconstructing the social organization of production is less reliable. Most accounts of textile production in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods rely on die con clusions of A. H. M. Jones (i960), but with many modifi cations. Several issues must be considered: the gender di vision of labor in textile production; the organization of the "industty" throughout the social strata of free workers and slaves, wage laborers, and nonwage laborers; and how tex tiles and garments were sold and bought, in terms of local and long-distance trade networks. Because die organization of textile production awaits a major reassessment, this dis cussion reflects current uncertainties and will necessarily ef face regional differences. Traditionally, the various steps in the production of tex tiles were assigned specifically by gender, enforcing a cul turally desirable division of labor. According to Jones (i960) women did spinning in their spare time, while men per formed most of the other related tasks. In other accounts, however, both the spinning and weaving of wool were seen as female occupations. In part, these assessments are com plicated by the range of social meanings (see below) as signed to textile work and the ensuing difficulty of using certain pieces of evidence to reconstruct history. Newer re search indicates that many of the steps in textile production were carried out by men and women (Moeller, 1976; Peskowitz, 1993). This reflects tendencies for entire families to engage in the same trade. Inscriptions and literary references suggest, however, that, despite the participation of both men
THAJ and women in certain trades, gender divisions existed with regard to the libers worked on (highly valued flax was as signed to men, while wool, with its lower value, was assigned to women workers) and the types of looms with which male and female weavers were associated. This gender division in weaving technology assigned the newer and better twobeam loom to men, and the older and less efficient warpweighted loom to women. In Rome and elsewhere, ideological written sources ex press a preference that clothing be produced at home by tire female family members (see Suetonius, De Vita Caesarium 2). More generally, the production of textiles was considered to be an "industry" without a high degree of organization or centralization—that is, one that relied on home produc tion. This view has been challenged Walter O. Moeller (1976), who argues for a highly organized textile industry at Pompeii. The debate continues. Recent studies of towns in Roman Egypt suggest that roughly 25 percent of the work ing population engaged in the production of textiles. Fur thermore, evidence from many regions suggests that most ordinary clothing was purchased ready-made, by people at all levels of society. Another consumer of textiles and gar ments was armies, and in the fourth century Diocletian or ganized slaves to produce military requisitions. T h e long-distance trade of textiles seems to have been restricted largely to high-value items produced at specific well-known centers. There is some evidence, however, to support the possibility of long-distance trade in nonluxury products and even in roughly made "work" clothing. While many questions remain, the stereotype of household selfsufficiency in which women and girls produced family cloth ing has been replaced by a scenario of local or regional selfsufficiency in which all the stages in textile production and the trade of textiles were part of the money economy. Social Significance. Spinners and weavers appear in lit erary and legal texts and burial dedications and iconographically on funerary monuments. T h e references and images reflect sexual differences in ancient societies and convey a multitude of often contradictory meanings: referring to lit erary figures, such as Lucretia, spinners and weavers sym bolized tire sexual chastity, marital loyalty, domesticity, and industriousness expected of elite matrons (Livy, History [Ad Urbe Conditio] 1.57; see also Mishnah Ket. 5.5; and letter 107, Jerome to Laeta, "Instruction for Rearing a Virgin Christian Daughter"); when referring to lower-class women, they were accusations of promiscuity and sexual transgression. Male spinners and weavers were described as men whose masculinity was not normative; ancient authors such as Clement of Alexandria accused male textile workers of effeminacy (Paedagogus 2 . 1 1 - 1 2 ) . More broadly, images of spinning and weaving were associated in the Roman Em pire with the battle against cultural decadence (Suetonius, De Vita Caesarium, Divus Augustus 64). Irnperial artwork
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such as die frieze of Minerva on Domitian's Forum Transitorium deploys symbols of textile production as metaphors and exempla of imperial values and morality (D'Ambra, 1993)BIBLIOGRAPHY Carroll, Diane L. Looms and Textiles of the Copts. Seattle, 1988. D'Ambra, Eve. Private Lives, Imperial Virtues: The Frieze of the Forum Transitorium in Rome. Princeton, 1993. Forbes, R. J. Studies in Ancient Technology. Vol. 4. Leiden, 1956. Jones, A. H. M . "The Clotii Industry under the Roman Empire." Eco nomic History Review 13 (i960): 1 8 3 - 1 9 2 . Kampen, Natalie. Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia. Berlin, 1981. Minnen, P. van. "Urban Craftsmen in Roman Egypt." Miinsterische Beitrage zur Antiken Handelsgeschichte 6 (1987): 31-88. Moeller, Walter 0 . The Wool Trade of Ancient Pompeii. Leiden, 1976. Peskowitz, Miriam. "The Work of Her Hands: Gendering Everyday Life in Roman-Period Judaism in Palestine (70-250 CE) , Using Tex tile Production as a Case Study." Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1993. Pflster, R., and Louisa Bellinger. The Textiles. The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report 4, part 2. New Haven, 1945. Pfister, R. Textiles de Halabiyeh (Zenobiaj: Decouverts par le Service des Antiquites de la Syrie dans la Necropole de Halabiyeh sur TEuphrate. Paris, 1951. White, Kenneth D. Greek and Roman Technology. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984. Wild, J. P. "The Roman Horizontal Loom." American Journal of Ar chaeology 91 (1987): 4 5 9 - 4 7 1 .
Wipszycka, Ewa. L'industrie textile dans I'Egypte romaine. Wroclaw, 1965.
Yadin, Yigael. The Finds from the Bar Kokhha Period in the Cave of Letters. Jerusalem, 1963. M I R I A M PESKOWITZ
THAJ, the largest archaeological site of the Hellenistic, Parthian, and early Sasanian period in northeastern Arabia, located at 26°52.5' N , 48°42.9' E in Wadi al-Miyah, about 90 km (56 mi.) from the Saudi Arabian port of Jubayl. Al though knowledge of the site's existence dates to the midnineteenth century CE, Thaj was not visited by a European until 1 9 1 1 , when W. PI. I. Shakespear, a military officer serv ing in the diplomatic post of political agent in Kuwait for the Government of India, copied two inscribed grave stelae he found on the surface of the site. In 1942, H. R. P. Dickson and V. P. Dickson visited Thaj, but it was only during the early 1960s that a number of surface finds made by ARA M C O (Arabian American Oil Company) oilmen and their families were communicated to scholars in Europe and America, arousing serious interest in the site. In particular, several dozen inscriptions in epigraphic South Arabian script, but written in a local, North Arabian language (the so-called Hasaitic inscriptions, after the name al-Hasa, a tra ditional Arabic designation for this region), were published at this time. Visits by members of the Danish expeditions working in Kuwait and Bahrain led ultimately to a limited sounding in 1968. In 1977 the site was visited by a survey
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team directed by D. T . Potts and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky from Harvard University working together with the De partment of Antiquities in Riyadh, and in 1982 and 1983 a small team directed by Potts from the Freie Universitat Ber lin carried out a survey and soundings at the site, again in cooperation with a team from Riyadh. A Saudi Arabian team continued this work in 1984. Thaj is located to the south of a large sabkha, or salt flat. It consists of a walled area as well as an extramural area of occupation and is ringed on three sides by more than five hundred burial mounds. The city wall of Thaj is shaped like an irregular parallelogram. It is built entirely of cut stone bonded with gray gypsum plaster. On average, the city wall is 4.5 m thick, and extends for no fewer than 2,535 m. A series of projecting turrets and buttresses is preserved on the eastern and southern sides of the enclosure. Within this area lanes and streets separate a dense concentration of domestic houses. German excavations in one large building in 1983 revealed a sequence of four periods of occupation. Periods I and II predate the construction of the city wall. Both the period II and III levels contained Mesopotamian eggshell ware, a fineware produced during tire Seleucid and Parthian periods (e.g., at Seleucia on the Tigris). Period III contained sherds of Greek black-glazed bowls witii rouletting and stamped palmettes on the interior, probably of a third-cen tury BCE date. Identical sherds were recovered in association with the foundations of the southwestern corner tower of the city wall, where a separate excavation took place; they suggest that period III in the city is contemporary with the construction of the city wall. Period IV was represented by the remains of a massive building and contained, apart from the local wares that ran throughout die entire sequence at the site, a number of bowl shapes in apparent imitation of Roman terra sigillata that probably do not predate the first century CE. The fact that a large number of coins, typical of Thaj and other northeast Arabian sites (debased imitation Alexanders), has been found at the largely first century CE site of ed-Dur in the United Arab Emirates also suggests that Thaj was still inhabited at this time. Moreover, the dis covery of three fourth-century CE Roman coins on the sur face of Thaj suggests that the site was occupied into die Early Sasanian period. This would be confirmed, moreover, by the recent identification on the site of a stone ashlar with several crosses cut into it, almost certainly from a Nestorian church or grave. In die context of the history of Nestorian Christianity in the Gulf, the find can hardly predate the fourth century CE. As the largest Seleucid period site in eastern Arabia, Thaj was certainly a town of importance. The massive scale of its fortification wall suggests a prosperous community, and many scholars have tended to identify Thaj with the Arabian emporium of Gerrha, whose inhabitants, according to Strabo (16.4.19) were among Arabia's richest citizens. Agatliarchides' reference to Gerrhaeans at Petra receives some
slight confirmation by die 1968 discovery in the Danish sounding of a diagnostic piece of painted Nabatean fineware datable to about 75 B C E - O CE. Two copper coins of Aretas IV, dating to 5/4 BCE and 38/39 CE, have also been found on the surface at Thaj. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bibby, Geoffrey. Preliminary Survey in East Arabia, 1968. Copenhagen, 1 9 7 3 . An account of the Danish sounding at Thaj in 1 9 6 8 . Potts, Daniel T. "Thaj and the Location of Gerrha." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 1 4 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 8 7 - 9 1 . States the case for the identification of Thaj with the ancient Arabian emporium of Gerrha. Potts, Daniel T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2 , From Alexander the Great to the Coming of Islam. Oxford, 1 9 9 0 . Surveys the history of scholarship on Thaj, incorporating the results of the Freie Univ ersitat Berlin excavations of 1 9 8 3 . Potts, Daniel T. "Nabatean Finds from Thaj and Qatif." Arabian Ar chaeology and Epigraphy 2 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 3 8 - 1 4 4 . Publishes for the first time a painted Nabatean sherd from the 1 9 6 8 Danish sounding, as well as two Nabatean coins found on the surface of the site. Potts, Daniel T. The Pre-Islamic Coinage of Eastern Arabia. Copenha gen, 1 9 9 1 . The first in-depth analysis of the coinage of the region, much of which derives from surface collections made at Thaj. D . T . POTTS
THAYER, J O S E P H HENRY (1828-1901), leading scholar of New Testament and Greek who actively pro moted American involvement in Syro-Palestinian archae ology. Thayer was a staunch supporter of the short-lived American Palestine Exploration Society. In 1895, as presi dent of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) he chal lenged it to work to establish an American center for oriental studies in Palestine. Five years later, through his labors with a committee of four other scholars, the American School of Oriental Research was founded, to be based in Jerusalem. Thayer served as die organization's first chairman until his death. He secured the support of twenty-one colleges, uni versities, and seminaries for the fledgling institution, which was also endorsed by die SBL, the American Oriental So ciety, and the American Institute of Archaeology. Thayer held memberships in the first two, as well as in the Archae ological Institute of America. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1887. Thayer is perhaps best known for his work in the field of New Testament studies and philology. He translated, ed ited, and revised Carl L. W. Grimm's A Greek-English Lex icon of the New Testament (New York, 1887), translated two Greek grammars into English, and wrote extensively on bib lical literature and language. Thayer was also on the trans-, lation committee for die Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. He studied at Harvard College and Andover Theological Seminary, and received from Harvard, Yale, and Dublin universities a Master of Arts, Doctor of Sacred Theology, and Litt. D , respectively. Thayer was Professor of Sacred Scripture at Andover Theological Sem-
THEATERS inary from 1864 to 1882 and was appointed Bussey Profes sor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation in 1884, a position he held until his retirement in 1900, the year be fore his death. [See also American Schools of Oriental Research; and So ciety of Biblical Literature.]
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Typology and architecture: Hellenistic period. T h e first theaters in Anatolia (at Miletus, Ephesus, Pergamon, and Priene) were erected in die latter part of the fourth and over the course of the third centuries BCE. Those at Miletus and Ephesus were expanded and altered most significantly during the Roman period, whereas the theater at Priene was preserved exceptionally well without Roman additions. It represents the definitive, final stage in the process of Greek BIBLIOGRAPHY theater design, and hence its great importance. King, Philip J. American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the T h e Priene theater is built of local stone on a natural slope American Schools of Oriental Research. Philadelphia, 1 9 8 3 . In addition at the center of the city, extending over an area of two into being the standard book on the history of ASOR and its major sulae. Its auditorium (the koilori) extends over half the or figures, this work contains valuable information on other significant chestra; topographic restraints determined its U-shaped research organizations related to ASOR. Thayer, Joseph Henry, trans. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Tes ground plan. The two paradoi (sg., parados, an open passage tament, Being Grimm's Willie's Clavis Novi Testamenti. New York, between die koilon and the stage structure [skene] in the 1 8 8 7 . The standard work in English until the translation of Walter Greek theater) that run between the auditorium's support Bauer's A Greek-English Lexicon of the Nezu Testament and Other Early ing walls (analemmata) and the skene lead to the round or Christian Literature, revised and augmented by William F. Arndt and chestra. T h e skene is two floors high. Its facade faces die F. Wilbur Gingrich (Chicago, 1 9 5 7 ) . Toy, C. H. "Joseph Henry Thayer." Proceedings of the American Acad auditorium. T h e stage (the logeion) rests on a row of pillars emy of Arts and Sciences 3 7 ( 1 9 0 1 - 1 9 0 2 ) : 6 6 1 - 6 6 4 . Brief but concise arranged parallel to the wall of the skene. assessment of Thayer's life and contributions. Typology and architecture: Roman period. Theaters CHARLES E . CARTER in Anatolia in the Roman period can be subdivided into three distinct types: Hellenistic theaters enlarged and signif icantly altered in the first centuries CE; new theaters erected in the first and second centuries CE with Roman construction T H E A T E R S . T w o separate areas can be distinguished metiiods but with plans that imitate those of Hellenistic the in the history of the eastern Mediterranean basin during the aters; and theaters whose architecture is clearly Roman. The classical period: Asia Minor (western Anatolia) and Egypt; first group is characterized by additional construction in the and Syria-Palestine and Arabia. Asia Minor and Egypt were auditorium (the cavea) area. In the theaters at Milems and exposed to Greek culture for several hundred years and the Ephesus die auditorium was doubled and even tripled. The first theaters there were erected as early as the fourth to third expansion at Ephesus, for example, made it the largest the centuries BCE. However, in the area of Syria-Palestine and ater in the ancient world, with more than twenty-four thou Arabia the process of hellenization was not so well devel sand seats. Additional changes advanced the stage area to oped and the earliest theaters were erected only at die end ward the auditorium by reducing the size of the orchestra. of die first century BCE. The facade of the skene facing the orchestra was decorated T h e a t e r s in Anatolia. Western Anatolia and especially widi a set of columns and an entablature, and statues were the region of Ionia, was already a target for Greek settlement placed in the niches (the future scaena from characteristic of in die twelfth and eleventii centuries BCE. T h e first cities Roman theaters). In the course of the second and third cen established there, as early as the sixth century BCE, became turies CE, the orchestra in many theaters was adapted to centers of Greek creativity. serve as the arena of an amphitheater. T h e bottom rows of It was the meeting between Greek culture and the diverse seats were removed and a high protective wall was erected local cultures that created Hellenistic culture. T h e process around the orchestra, making it possible to hold gladitorial preceded the success of Alexander die Great, but the farcombats there. reaching changes that followed him in Anatolia in the fourth T h e second group is exceptional and especially interesting and third centuries BCE hastened the process. Rome's dom because it is unparalleled in other regions of the Roman Em ination of Anatolia in the second century BCE did not cul pire. In cities such as Side or Perge (Pamphylia) or Myra turally change its image. Under conditions of peace and eco (Lycia), theaters were erected in the second century CE nomic prosperity, Hellenistic culture continued to flower whose plan copied that of Hellenistic theaters—the audito and flourish in die first centuries CE as well. rium occupied more than half of the orchestra circle. T h e T h e tens of theaters known in Anatolia were erected over latter was round, and the skene structure was separated from a long period, from the latter part of the fourth century BCE the auditorium. These hallmarks of Hellenistic theaters were, however, constructed using engineering-architectural to the second century CE. Their ground plans, designs, and solutions that are undeniably Roman. Most prominent are methods of construction provide evidence of the region's the artificial slopes created to hold the auditorium. T h e rich and eclectic culture.
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slopes were created by a complex system of radial passage ways built of sloping barrel vaults (vomitoria) and contin uous corridors, semicircular in shape, covered with barrel vaults (ambulacra). Only a few clearly Roman theaters were erected in Ana tolia, all in the second century CE. The best known is the theater at Aspendos in Pamphylia, erected between 161 and 180 CE and planned by the architect Zeno, son of Theodo ras. It is the most complete and best-preserved Roman the ater in the roman world. It was located in die eastern sector of the city, at the foot of the acropolis; the wings of its stage (versurae) joined its semicircular auditorium to the stage structure (the scaena) (see figure 1 ) . There were staircases and rooms in the versurae. Above die two passageways lead ing out of the theater, directly to the orchestra (aditus maximi), were the seats of honor (the tribunalid). Parallel to these, two additional passageways (itinera versurarum) led from the wings of the stage to the stage itself (pulpitum). This latter component is the only one that did not survive. T h e stage structure's facade (the scaenae frons) is preserved to its original height and, with die upper end of the auditorium,
forms one continuous horizontal line. Around the top of the auditorium, at its upper level, a covered passageway (the porticus) is also completely preserved, (see figure 2). Few of the original decorations belonging to die scaenae frons have survived (five entrances, and not the usual three, led to die stage itself). T h e Aspendos tiieater is the only one in the ancient world whose corbels are preserved in their full circumference—from the stage to the length of the audito rium's semicircular wall. Theaters in Syria-Palestine and the Provincia Ara bia. Although die region had been exposed to classical cul ture as early as the latter part of die fifth century BCE, and it had been directly ruled by the Hellenistic kingdoms from the beginning of the fourth century BCE, the first theater in the region, at Caesarea, was not erected until 20-10 BCE. Thus far, twelve theaters have been found west of the Jordan River: at Sepphoris, Dor, Legio, Beth-Shean (two theaters), Shumi (Shuni), Caesarea, Sebaste, Shechem, Antipatris, Jericho, and Elusa; east of the river, eighteen theaters have been found at Sahr, Gadara/Umm Qeis (two), Philippopolis, Qanawat/Canatha, Abila, Adraa, Bosra, Pella,
THEATERS. Figure I. Theater at Aspendos, Pamphylia. General view toward the scaenae frons and the two versurae. The pulpitum is missing. Second half of the second century CE. (Photograph by M. Luz; courtesy A. Segal)
THEATERS
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THEATERS. Figure 2 . Theater at Aspendos, Pamphylia. Partial view of the orchestra, the cavea, the portions, and the aditus maximus. Note one of tire tribunalia (seats of honor) located above the aditus maximus. (Photograph by M. Luz; courtesy A. Segal)
Hammath-Gader, Birketein, Gerasa/Jerash (two), Philadel phia/Amman (two), and Petra (two) and in Wadi Sabra. Chronological/geographical framework. Three thea ters were erected in Herod the Great's kingdom (37-4 BCE): at Caesarea, in Jerusalem, and in Jericho. A fourtii was pre sumably initiated by his son Antipas at Sepphoris. T h e the ater at Caesarea was part of a very impressive urban com plex intended to symbolize the Hellenistic character and spirit of Plerod's kingdom. T h e theater in Jerusalem has not yet been located, but the theater in Jericho was built near the winter palace and was part of a complex that also included a hippodrome and, apparentiy, a gymnasium. T h e Herodian theaters were not intended to disseminate die culture of the classical theater to a new audience. T h e content and lan guage of die Greek theater at that time were foreign to most of the Judean ldngdom's population. Between the latter part of the first century BCE and the first century CE, five theaters were erected in the Nabatean
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realm: at Sahr (Trachonitis), Elusa (the Negev), two at Pe tra (Edom), and in Wadi Sabra, near Petra. The theater at Sahr is part of a sanctuary, as is the theater in Wadi Sabra, whereas at Elusa it is in an urban context. T h e large theater at Petra lies at the very heart of the necropolis, while the small one is in the city itself. There is no knowing what the specific functions of the Nabatean theaters were. It may be that, like the Herodian examples, they were built to dem onstrate a political-cultural imperative; however, it is also possible that, at least in part, they served the need to worship in general and to worship the dead in particular. T h e first theaters in the hellenized cities were erected in the latter part of the first century CE and the beginning of the second—one hundred years after the Herodian theater was built at Caesarea. Most of these dieaters were erected on the initiative of cities and funded by them. T h e first built in this period is the South Theater at Gerasa (92 CE), erected near the Temple of Zeus and part of the city's early sanc tuary. T h e theaters at Pella and Bosra were erected subse quently, the latter at about the time it became the capital of the Provincia Arabia (106 CE). Hence, it may be that the initiative for its construction was not municipal-local but governmental or provincial. At the beginning of the second century CE, the cities of Judea (Judah) and the Provincia Arabia began to flourish. In the days of the Antonine emperors theaters were erected on municipal initiative for local audiences: two in Philadel phia, the North Theater in Gerasa, and a theater each at Canatiia and Shechem. Most of the theaters in Palestine and in the Provincia Ara bia were constructed in the latter part of the second century CE and the first half of the third. T h e region's cities reached the height of their prosperity during the Severan dynasty (193-235). In this span of time, dieaters were erected at Beth-Shean (two) and at Sebaste, Dor, Hammath-Gader, and Shumi (Shuni) and in Transjordan at Gadara (two), Abila, and Birketein, near Gerasa (see figure 3). The Herodian theaters did not reflect the true cultural needs of most of Judea's population and were a foreign im plant on its landscape. This also seems to have been the case in the Nabatean realm, where the theaters served as die ar chitectural framework for mass gatherings for purposes of worship, and apparentiy for necrolatey. On the other hand, the dieaters erected by the Hellenistic cities were mass-amusement installations that provided en tertainment of the simplest sort. A check of the historical and literary sources, including Talmudic ones, verifies tiiat theaters, first and foremost, served an audience of a hellen ized Oriental cultural complexion that was satisfied with presentations of mime and the like. It is reasonable to as sume that it never saw a tragedy or comedy. Typology and architecture. T h e thirty theaters known in the region can be divided into two distinct groups: urban and extraurban (located in sancturaries) dieaters. Urban
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THEATERS. Figure 3. Theater at Beth-Shean. General view from the pulpitum toward the or chestra and the cavea. (Photograph by S. Hashman; courtesy A. Segal) theaters were built for the citizenry, whereas those built out side the cities were intended to serve the pilgrims visiting the various worship compounds. Most of the urban theaters were erected without considering the city's street network— the site was generally selected for topographic reasons, for example, at Beth-Shean, Sepphoris, Sebaste, and Gadara. On the other hand, tire North Theater at Gerasa is a fine example of a theater carefully integrated into die city's street network. In plan the theaters in the region are Roman and not Hellenistic. Hence, their orchestra is a semicircle rather than a circle and their seating, which partially rests on an artificial slope, does not extend beyond die orchestra semi circle. At the same time, almost all the region's theaters were erected on the slopes of hills in order to avoid having to build artificial slopes. Hence, in most instances, the lower seating complex (ima cavea) is set on a natural slope and the upper one (summa cavea) rests on an artificial slope. In keeping with the topography and constraints of a site, the upper sections of the cavea were erected in various ways. In most cases, they were sloped, radial, barrel-vaulted passages (vomitoria) that intersected with a semicircular corridor roofed by a con tinuous barrel vault (ambulacrum). Sometimes the summa cavea rests on an artificial sloped mound of earth supported by two semicircular monocentric parallel walls covered by a continuous barrel vault or the entire seating complex rests on an artificial slope of pressed earth supported by two semi circular monocentric parallel walls whose interior space is filled with earth. As was customary in Roman dieaters, stage structure (scaena) and seating complex (cavea) were turned into a unit by means of the versurae, or "wings." Typically there were
three entrances in the stage's facade. The stage (pulpitum) extended to the foot of the scaenae frons, which was sepa rated from the orchestra by the proscaenium. T h e region's dieaters were built of local stone and only the scaenae frons decorations, including its three-dimensional sculpture, were marble. The construction and original ar chitectural solutions of die thirty theaters thus far discovered are outstanding. The largest theater in Syria-Palestine, at Philadelphia, could hold about seven thousand spectators; the smallest (Sahr in Trachonitis) held about four hundred. On the average, this region's theaters held about forty-five hundred people. Compared to theaters in Anatolia and North Africa, tiiese are small. Yet, their construction, loca tion, and distribution confirm the cities' ability to meet the considerable cost and engineering and architectural chal lenges entailed in erecting such complex installations. Most theaters continued to serve their original purpose until the latter days of the Byzantine period, which attests to their having truly expressed the cultural needs of most of the ur ban population in this region of the Roman world. [Most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Akurgal, Ekrem. Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey. 2d ed. Is tanbul, 1970. Bernardi Ferrero, Daria de. Teatri classici in Asia Minore. 4 vols. Rome, 1974.
Bieber, Margarete. The History of the Greek and Roman Theater. 2d ed. Princeton, 1961. Comprehensive and intensive study of all topics related to the theater's architectural development and process of de sign in the classical world.
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203
Frezouls, Edmond. "Recherches sur les theatres de l'Orient Syrien." translated, and established the grammatical rules of all the Syria 36 (1959): 202-227; Syria 38 (1961): 54-86. History of the known royal inscriptions from the Archaic Sumerian era to theater in Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. the dynasty of Larsa at die start of the second millennium Frezouls, Edmond. "Aspects de l'histoire architecturale du theatre roBCE. This seminal work, the first written synthesis of the main." In Aufslieg und Niedergang der rbmischen Well, vol. II. 1 2 . 1 , Sumerian language, was immediately translated into Ger edited by Hildegard Temporini, pp. 343-441. Berlin, 1982. Frezouls, Edmond. "Les edifices des spectacles en Syrie." In Archeoman. logie el hisloire de la Syrie, vol. 2, La Syrie de I'ipoque achemenide a Thureau-Dangin enhanced the collection at the Louvre I'avenement de t'lslam, edited by Jean-Marie Dentzer and Winfried with numerous texts that were published, beginning in 1910, Orthmann, pp. 385-406. Saarbriicken, 1989. Concise, updated ver in a series entitied Textes Cimeifonnes du Ijntvre. His auto sion of the author's earlier studies on the history of the theater in Syria. graphs are unsurpassed. As good a historian as he was a Schede, Martin. Die Ruinen von Priene. 2d ed. Berlin, 1964. See pages philologist, he published the contents of the documents in 70-79. his many articles, mainly in the Revue d'Assyriologie et Sear, Frank B. "Vitruvius and the Roman Theater Design." American d'Archeologie Orientale, of which he was coeditor. Journal of Archaeology 94 (1990): 249-258. Analysis of the various Thureau-Dangin was also a field archaeologist. He con theater plans in the Western and Eastern Roman Empire in an at tempt to determine the extent to which Vitruvius's directives to Ro ducted several surveys in 1924 at Tell Ashara (ancient T e man dieater builders in the first centuries CE were utilized. rqa), on the east bank of the Euphrates River. In 1927-1928 Segal, Arthur. Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia Arabica. Lei he excavated Tell Ahmar (ancient Til Barsip), on the west den, 1995. Historical analysis of the theater phenomenon in tiiis part bank of the river, a mission that uncovered a ninth-century of the classical world, emphasizing the region's unique chronologi BCE provincial Assyrian palace. He simultaneously exca cal-geographic framework and analyzing the various sources that vated at die neighboring site of Arslan Tash. shed light on the essence of the theater in a region with no roots in classical culture. [See also Akkadian; Sumerian; Sumerians; andTil Barsip.] ARTHUR SEGAL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THUREAU-DANGIN, FRANCOIS (1872-1944), French Assyriologist. Born in Paris, Thureau-Dangin joined staff of the Louvre museum in 1895, was nominated to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1917, and was curator of the Louvre's Near Eastern Antiquities Depart ment from 1925 to 1928. His research constitutes the groundwork of what is currendy known about the character of the cuneiform writing system and the deciphering of the Sumerian language. He published numerous Sumerian and Akkadian texts and interpretive monographs that still form the basis of scholarship on ancient Mesopotamian history, religion, and science. A brilliant student of Jules Oppert (one of the pioneers of cuneiform decipherment), Thureau-Dangin was entrusted, in 1895, with studying the enormous quantity of literary, royal, and administrative inscriptions unearthed at the M e sopotamian site of Telloh by Ernest de Sarzec, who, by 1877, had established the existence of the Sumerians. T h u reau-Dangin's first concern was to trace the evolution of cvmeiform writing. In Recherches sur I'origine de I'ecriture cuneiforme (Paris, 1898), he published a list of six hundred signs comprising their most recent and most ancient forms. His classification of signs, adopted by all Assyriologists and still in use, allows for a single mode of transcription for both Sumerian and Akkadian. This work led to two publications: Le syllabaire accadien (Paris, 1926), and Les homophones sumeriens (Paris, 1929). T h e publication of his book Les inscriptions de Sumer et d'Akkad (Paris, 1905) constituted a decisive step in the de ciphering of the Sumerian language. In it he transcribed,
Dhorme, Edouard. Hmnrnage a la memoire de I'eminenl assyriologue Francois Thureau-Dangin, 1872-1944. Leiden, 1946. Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Recherches sur I'origine de I'ecriture cun&ifonne. Paris, 1898. Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Recueil de tableites chaldeennes. Paris, 1903. Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Ixs inscriptions de Sumer ct d'Akkad. Paris, 1905.
Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Lettres el controls de I'epoquc de la pretniere dynastic habylonienne. Textes Cuneiformes du Louvre, 1. Paris, 1910. Thureau-Dangin, Francois, Vne relation de la huitihne campagne de Sar gon (714 av.J.-C). Textes Cuneiformes du Louvre, 3. Paris, 1 9 1 2 . Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Riiuels accadiens. Paris, 1 9 2 1 . Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Le syllabaire accadien. Paris, 1926. Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Les homophones sumeriens. Paris, 1929. Thureau-Dangin, Francois, and Maurice Dunand. Til-Barsib. Paris, 1936.
Thureau-Dangin, Francois. Textes inathematiqnes babylonicns. Leiden, 1938. BEATRICE ANDRE-SALVINI
TIBERIAS, city located on the western shore of tire Sea of Galilee, north of die hot springs known as Hammath Ti berias and bounded on the west by Mt. Berenice (200 m above sea level). History. Named for the Roman emperor Tiberius, the city was founded in 20 CE during the reign of Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. In 61 CE the city was annexed to the kingdom of Agrippa II and remained a part of it until Agrippa's death in 96 C E . In 100 CE Tiberias came under Roman rule and, like the rest of the empire, began to pros per. It became a Roman colony in the reign of Emperor Elagabalus (218-222 CE). T h e institutions of Jewish leader ship—first tire Sanhedrin and then the patriarchate—both
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were transferred from Sepphoris at this time, and Tiberias became the political and spiritual capital of the Jews. In the early third century, Rabbi Yohanan (d. 270), leader of the Sanhedrin, established the Great Beth Midrash ("acad emy"), possibly at the foot of Mt. Berenice. According to ft-adition, die greater part of the Jerusalem Talmud was cod ified there (see below). The city's prosperity continued—and even improved— after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. Tiberias became the capital of the Jund Urdun ("Jordan district"), whose boundaries roughly corresponded to those of tire for mer Byzantine Palaestina Secunda (with its capital at BethShean). Jews continued to constitute tire majority of the population, followed by a sizable Christian community and a smaller number of Muslims. Tiberias was the capital of Galilee until the Crusaders captured it in 1099. T h e city was made the capital of the Galilee principality, which roughly corresponded to tire Jund Urdun. T h e city wall was restored, and a large fortress was built to the north of the RomanByzantine city. The inhabitants then clustered around this fortress, from which the modern city of Tiberias would de velop. In 1 1 8 7 , at the battle of Hattin, the city fell to Salah edh-Din (Saladin) and remained under Ayyubid rule until 1240, when the whole of Galilee once again came under Crusader control. Christian rule was short lived, however. In 1247 die city fell to Mamluk forces and remained under Muslim rule until the arrival of the British in 1 9 1 7 - 1 9 1 8 . Excavation Results. T h e first systematic excavation at Tiberias, of the southern gate and its environs, was con
ducted in 1973-1974 by the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Israel Exploration Society, under the direction of Gideon Foerster. T h e gate, built in 20 CE, apparently marked tire bounds of die city with a com memorative arch. When the Byzantine city wall was built in the sixth century, it was integrated into the gate, which then became part of the city's fortification system. A long colonnaded street (cardo) that ran parallel to the Sea of Galilee extended nortii from the southern gate several hundred meters to the site's municipal area. In this area Bezalel Rabani, during die largest salvage excavation at the site under auspices of the Israel Department of Antiquities (1954-1956), uncovered the remains of die central cardo as well as the bathhouse and marketplace. T h e bathhouse abuts the cardo to the east. It is probably the bathhouse frequently mentioned in Talmudic sources. Built in the fourth century, it was used continuously until the city was destroyed in the eleventh century. Although its plan changed very little throughout tiiis period, the structure itself underwent nu merous alterations and restorations. Its length (east-west) was 42 m and its width (north-south), 3 1 m , for a total area of approximately 1,300 sq m. Some of the walls survived to a height of 2.5 m. North of the bathhouse and adjoining die cardo, Rabani uncovered three rows of column bases cov ering an area of more than 800 sq m. He dated tiiese remains to the sixtii century and interpreted them as a vaulted mar ketplace. At die eastern end of each two stood a huge square pillar, probably part of a tetrapylon, which had apparently
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TIBERIAS. Figure 1 . General view of the basilical hall of the urban villa, looking east, (Photograph by Sando Mondrein; courtesy Y. Hirschfeld)
TIBERIAS
205
TIBERIAS. Figure 2 . General view of the church atop Mt. Berenice, looking east. (Photograph by Zev Radovan; courtesy Y. Flirschfeld)
supported an arch that spanned an adjoining street—the re mains of similar pillars were found on the other side of the street. About 80 m northeast of the bathhouse the remains of an urban villa complex (1,400 sq m) was cleared first by Adam Druks in 1964 and recently by Yizhar Hirschfeld (1993). T h e villa was built widi a basilical hall and large courtyard according to symmetrical well planning (see figure 1). T w o construction stages were discerned: the first dated to the fourth century CE, the second to the fifth-sixth centuries CE. The villa is situated in die center of the complex; it contin ued in use until the end of the Early Arab period. In 1976 Fanny Vitto, on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities, uncovered a two-chambered, aboveground Roman tomb (8 X 10 m) in the Qiryat Shmuel neighbor hood of the city. Numerous human skeletons were found in botii chambers. While leading a salvage expedition for the Israel Antiq uities Authorities at the foot of Mt. Berenice in 1989-1990, Hirschfeld discovered a Roman (second-third centuries CE)
theater to the west of the cardo about 130 m south of the baths. In 1990-1994 he excavated a 35-meter stretch of its wall built out of large basalt blocks that probably constituted its northeast corner. Preserved to a height of about 5,5 m, the wall helped support the spectator seats. A small portion of the stage, which faced north, also was uncovered. The theater's seating capacity has been estimated at about five thousand, comparable to that of the Roman theater uncov ered at Beth-Shean. [See Beth-Shean.] Also at the foot of Mt. Berenice, about 250 m from the shore, Hirschfeld excavated a Roman public building be neath the remains of private houses. This large (about 200 sq m) rectangular structure was built in die early third cen tury CE and continued in use until the middle of the Byz antine period, during which it underwent few changes. T h e building's most impressive remnant was its mosaic pave ment: a geometric design, devoid of human or animal im ages, with a white background decorated with three square black frames, each enclosing a series of triangular red frames. [See Mosaics.] A stepped bathing pool, possibly a
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miqveh, or ritual bath, was uncovered on the east side of the pavement. [See Ritual Baths.] It has been conjectured that this building was the great academy where most of the Je rusalem Talmud was redacted. The neighboring caves in the cliffs of Mt. Berenice were referred to by Jewish scholars in antiquity as the caves of the Great Beth Midrash, substan tiating the possibility. From 1990 to 1992, while excavating on the summit of Mt. Berenice, Hirschfeld uncovered a church and monas tery just inside the city wall (see figure 2). [See Churches.] According to Procopius the city-wall was constructed dur ing the reign of Justinian in 527-565 (Procopius, Buildings 5,9.21). The site is on a peak overlooking die Sea of Galilee and was likely chosen because from it the area where Jesus conducted his Galilean ministry is visible. The large basilical sttucture (48 m X 28 m), was built of basalt stones; its floors were paved in polychrome mosaics and fine marble tiles. Fronting the structure was a courtyard with a huge square cistern; three entranceways led from this courtyard to the church. A large central apse in the eastern wall was flanked by two smaller apses. Two rows of columns supported the roof, which probably was made of wooden beams and clay roof tiles. A smooth stone block with a hole (18 m in diameter) at its center was found underneatir the altar in the central apse. The block resembles anchors found in and along the shore of the Sea of Galilee; however, its weight—nearly half a ton—is ten times that of the average ancient stone anchor. [See Anchors.] Considering its findspot, the stone may have had a religious significance, as in early Christianity the anchor was a symbol of security and hope (e.g., Heb. 6:19). Not long after this church was de stroyed in the devastating earthquake of 749, it was rebuilt; the newer structure continued in use until the end of the thirteenth century. The remains of one of the "thirteen synagogues" of Ti berias referred to in the Talmud was uncovered at die north ern edge of the site in 1978-1979 by an excavation team led by Ariel Berman. The style of the mosaics in the floors in dicates that the synagogue was built in the sixth century; it remained in use during Muslim rule in Palestine and was repaired after the earthquake of 749. In the twelfth century, when Tiberias was a Crusader city, a broad vault was built over it. South of the city, at Hammath Tiberias, the site of hot springs famous for their healing qualities, two synagogues were uncovered during two seasons of excavations ( 1 9 6 1 1963) conducted by the Israel Department of Antiquities under the direction of Moshe Dothan, assisted by Immanuel Dunayevsky and Shlomo Moskowitz. [See also Galilee; Hammath Tiberias.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ben Arieh, R. "A Wall Painting of a Saint's Face in the church of Mt. Berenice." Biblical Archaeologist 5 7 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 3 4 - 1 3 7 .
Hirschfeld, Yizhar. A Guide to Antiquity Sites in Tiberias. Jerusalem, 1992.
Hirschfeld, Yizhar. "The Anchor Church at the Summit of Mt. Bere nice, Tiberias." Biblical Archaeologist. 5 7 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 1 2 2 - 1 3 1 . Hirschfeld, Yizhar, and Gideon Foerster. "Tiberias." In The New En cyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Ijxnd, edited by Ephraim Stern, vol. 4 , pp. 1 4 6 4 - 1 4 7 3 . Jerusalem and New York, I993YIZHAR HIRSCHFELD
T I G R I S . T h e Tigris River (Ar., Dijlah; Tk., Dicle; Akk., Adiglat; Sum., Adigima) originates in the southern slopes of the Taurus-Zagros mountains of eastern Anatolia, a range that rises to 2,000-2,500 m (6,600-8,200 ft.) above sea level, and separates the Tigris catchment from the Euphrates drainage and from the lake basins of Van and Urmia. T h e Tigris winds in a southeasterly direction through upland ba sins and narrow valleys of Turkey, where the river has a 1:500 average gradient as it drops from Ergani (1,000 m [3,300 ft.]) to Cizre (350 m [1,150 ft.]). Once in Iraq, the river moves through a rolling piedmont plain and drops with a gentler 1:1,500 gradient, passing Mosul at 2 1 0 m [690 ft.] In northern Iraq, the river cuts deeply into the surrounding plain, forming a narrow alluvial zone bounded by cliffs and hills. South of Samarra (65 m [210 ft.]), the river enters the extensive Mesopotamian alluvial plain, where it forms first a meandering single channel and then a braided channel shortly before joining the Euphrates River to form the Shatt al-Arab and emptying into the Persian Gulf. In this section, the river has the extremely low gradient of 1:15,000 south of Baghdad and 1:30,ooo as it approaches the Shatt al-Arab. Along its approximately 1,900 km (1,200 mi.) length, the river receives water from left-bank ttibutaries that drain dif ferent sections of the Taurus-Zagros ranges. T h e most im portant of these tributaries are the Batman Su and the Bohtan Su in Turkey, and tire Upper Zab, tire Lower Zab, the Adhaim, and die Diyala in Iraq. The flow of water through the Tigris system is extremely variable through the year, in response to the predominantiy winter rainfall and spring meltwaters in the uplands. T h e average peak flow occurs in March, April, and May, die flow in the different subdrainages peaking at slightly different times (the Lower Zab and the Diyala peaking in March, the Upper Zab in May, and the Tigris north of Mosul in April). The flow is also extremely variable from year to year, mod ern records at Mosul showing annual averages ranging from about 200 cu m/sec. (7,000 cu. ft./sec.) to 900 cu m/sec. (32,000 cu. ft./sec). Moreover, locally heavy winter rains in the Taurus and Zagros make the river subject to disastrous flooding, and living and farming on the Tigris floodplain is notoriously risky. T h e winter rainfall is adequate in amount and regularity for dry farming along the northern sections of the Tigris, down to the confluence of the Upper Zab, and in the upper
TIGRIS reaches of all its major tributaries. But south of the Upper Zab, the Tigris flows through areas in which dry farming is unreliable or impossible, although the average rainfall does support pasture land east of the Tigris and south of the U p per Zab, maldng this Transtigridian area important for an imal herding. Unlike die Euphrates, the Tigris is ill suited to irrigation because of its tendency to destructive floods and to its deeper incision into the alluvial plain. Accordingly, population traditionally has concentrated in the piedmont zone of northeastern Iraq (dry farming) and along the Eu phrates River (irrigation). Farther north in the Taurus-Zagros foothills, arable land, not rainfall, is the limiting factor, and cities like Diyarbakir occur only in the larger plains of the upper Tigris drainage. T h e higher rainfall does maintain lush pasturage and forest cover, and animal herding is an important component to economic life. The Tigris drainage offered several additional attractions. T h e Diyala penettates die western folds of the Zagros Mountains and ultimately gives access to the Iranian plateau and the Khorassan road tiiat runs toward Central Asia. Other routes lead to the Van and Urmia basins, mountain valleys farther north, and ultimately to the Iranian plateau. T h e Tigris itself offers access to eastern Anatolia and a di rect route to the rich Malatya, Elazig, and Mus plains of the Euphrates drainage. Rich sources of copper occur in the Taurus range at the headwaters of die Tigris, die ErganiMaden area being only the best known; silver and other met als also exist. The uplands also contain various useful rocks, like limestone for building and flint for chipped stone tools. Furthermore, bitumen seeps exist in many places between the Tigris and the Taurus-Zagros high country. Archaeological investigation of piedmont and mountain basins in die Tigris drainage has revealed a long succession of prehistoric cultures. Shanidar Cave, near the Upper Zab, contains Neanderthal burials in Middle Palaeolithic levels, and the other Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic sites also lie in the Zagros valleys. The Taurus-Zagros foothills are an im portant part of Robert Braidwood's "hilly flanks" hypothesis about the beginnings of food production, and important pre-pottery and ceramic Neolithic sites occur in this zone (e.g., the aceramic sites of Hallan C m i and Cayonii, with permanent architecture and early use of copper). The middle Tigris area was home to several late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic cultures, characterized by a succes sion of incised and painted pottery styles during die sixth and fifth millennia BCE. T h e Hassuna and Halaf cultures flourished in the piedmont zone where dry farming was the basis of life, and farther soutii the Samarran and Ubaid cul tures relied on irrigation. T h e Halaf culture achieved an enormous distribution along the southern fringe of the Tau rus Mountains, and is present through the upper Tigris drainage and into the Lake Van basin. During the fifth mil lennium, the Ubaid style of pottery replaced the Halaf styles e
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in the north, as reflected in the archaeological sequences at Tepe Gawra and elsewhere in the middle Tigris drainage. T h e settlement history of southern Mesopotamia ex presses the disadvantages of the Tigris for settled, agricul tural life. T h e cities of Sumer and Akkad relied mainly, if not exclusively, on the Euphrates River system for irrigation, and the principal southern Mesopotamian cities were lo cated on the Euphrates channels. T h e Diyala River, on the other hand, supported cities like Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), T u t u b (Khafajeh), Ishchali, and others, the excavations at which have provided rich archaeological and textual infor mation about early Babylonia. Moreover, the northern edge of the alluvium and the Transtigridian areas were important for animal husbandry. During Kassite and Isin II times, for example, the Transtigridian area held tribal groups, often only nominally under state authority, whose social structure was based on extended families (lineages). Similarly, the Ar ameans who started arriving during the eleventh century most commonly inhabited die Tigris portions of the Baby lonian alluvium, and maintained a kinship-based social or ganization. T h e secondary role of the Tigris changed late in the first millennium. The Macedonian Greeks founded a capital city at Seleucia on die right bank of the river. The Parthians and Sassanians moved die capital across the river to Ctesiphon, a site most famous for the enormous arch that survives from a palace of Khusrau I. T h e 'Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad in the 760s, and the later caliphs alMu'tasim and al-Mu'tawakkil built an enormous city at Samarra during the ninth century CE. These places enjoyed access to surrounding regions in all directions: by canal to the Euphrates and Syria, the Tigris into eastern Anatolia, the Diyala onto the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, and down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf. Use of the Tigris for irrigation expanded during the same periods, as the Seleu cids increasingly tapped into die Tigris, and the Parthians constructed increasingly complex irrigation systems. These developments reached a peak with the construction of the Nahrawan irrigation system, the main feeder of which left fhe Tigris in the area of Samarra, crossed and absorbed both the Adhaim and the Diyala, and watered fields east of die Tigris. The civil strife and the Mongol invasion led to the decline of tiiese cities and the regional irrigation works. Cities appeared in northern Mesopotamia by the midthird millennium BCE, exemplified by Tell Taya in the Jebel Sinjar region and other urban areas in the Khabur drainage farther west. On the Tigris, the early phases of the Ishtar Temple at Assur (Qal'at Sherqat) belong to this period, and Nineveh had been occupied since Hassuna times. T h e cre ation of cities and their wealth in the dry-farming zone laid the foundation for Assyria's subsequent imperial history, both as the prize of other kingdoms, and as the source of the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian empires. T h e ge ography of northern Mesopotamia also contributed to this
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role, by offering trade routes. Indeed, the Cappadocian trade of the early second millennium, when Assyrian mer cantile communities lived in Anatolian cities, is tire best known period of Assur's early history. Although Assur (associated with the national god of the same name) and Nineveh were the traditional centers of As syria, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian kings repeatedly established new royal cities. The new foundations included Kar Tukulti-Ninurta, just upstream from Assur, but the greatest concentration of Assyrian cities lay in the dry-farm ing area north of the Upper Zab and east of the Tigris. These places, including Nimrud (Kalhu), Kar-Shalmaneser, Khorsabad (Dur Sharrukin), and Balawat (Imgur-Bel), have provided the best-known examples of Assyrian art and culture, including palace and temple architecture, wall re liefs, and enormous apotropaic (protective) winged-bull fig ures, obelisks and altars, the Nimrud ivories, the Balawat bronze-door reliefs, and the libraries of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. The Semitic-speaking Assyrians were not the only lin guistic or ethnic community to occupy the middle Tigris during historic times. T h e Hurrians, known primarily by their personal and place names, first appeared during the third millennium, when they were most common east of the Tigris and in the Khabur area. By the mid-second millen nium, Hurrians had spread across large areas of Syro-Palestine, forming local dynasties and then the Mitanni feder ation, centered on the Khabur triangle, that subordinated Assur and played a key role in fourteenth-century BCE in ternational politics. At this time Arrapha (modern Kirkuk) and Nuzi, both in the upper Adhaim drainage, were impor tant Mitanni centers. The Mitanni federation fell apart in the fourteenth century, under the pressure of a resurgent Assyrian state. The smaller plains and valleys of the upper Tigris offer less scope for urban growth and powerful states. The ar chaeological evidence indicates that the upper Tigris drain age contained relatively few Bronze Age settlements (the nature of which are poorly known) but that Iron Age sites are more common. The Middle and Neo-Assyrian royal in scriptions provide the basic knowledge of the petty king doms and tribal chiefdoms that occupied the small plains in upper Tigris and Upper Zab drainages. Hurrians continued to rule petty kingdoms in the upper Tigris hill country after die Mitanni collapse. Middle Assyrian kings campaigned against the forty kings of Na'iri, Musri, and Uruatri, in the region between the upper Tigris drainage and Lakes Van and Urmia, and against the Hurrian kingdoms (Shubari lands) along die Tigris itself; for a brief time during the thir teenth-century Assyria controlled much of the upper Tigris (Katmuhki). The ninth-century Assyrian kings campaigned regularly in the upper Tigris, including Musasir (with its shrines to the Hurrian gods Teiseba and Khaldi, in the up per Great Zab), Amed, and Katmukhi, briefly establishing a Nairi province. Several Assyrian kings left reliefs and in
scriptions at the source of the Tigris, to commemorate their passage through the region. New groups like the Muski, probably speaking an IndoEuropean language and related to die Phrygians, began ar riving in the eastern Anatolian uplands in the twelfth century BCE and moved into the upper Tigris from where they briefly threatened Assyria. An Aramean dynasty (Bit-Zamani) came to rule Amed (die classical Amida, modern Diyarbakir) by the tenth century, and Arameans were sn-ongly present in the Shubari and Katmukhi districts of the upper Tigris drainage. However, the major development was the emergence, despite the obstacles of geography, of the Urartian state from the multitude of petty Hurrian kingdoms during the first centuries of the first millennium BCE. T h e Urartians soon expanded tiieir control over neighboring regions in the nintii and eighth centuries, and by the early eighth century they confronted Assyria around the upper Tigris. Both Assyria and Urartu disappeared during die rapid changes of the mid-first millennium, with Cimmerian and Scythian incursions and the rise to regional domination by the Neo-Babylonians and Medes, soon followed by the world empires of the Achaemenids, Seleucids, Romans, Parthians, Sasanians, and Byzantines. T h e upper Tigris re mained a pivotal zone of imperial confrontation, as illus trated by the bloody history of Amida. [See also Assyrians; Diyala; Euphrates; Hurrians; Khabur; Mitanni; and Taurus Mountains. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert McC. Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains. Chicago, 1 9 6 5 . Settlement history of the Diyala drainage, which must now be supplemented with information from salvage excavations for the Hamrin Dam project (see the annual summary of archaeological excavations in Iraq). Adams, Robert McC. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. Chicago, 1 9 8 1 . Final installment of Adam's settlement survey archaeology in southern Mesopotamia, with an emphasis on the Euphrates and im portant information for die Tigris River. Briant, Pierre. EtatetpasteursauMoyen-orientancien. Cambridge, 1 9 8 2 . Valuable review of issues pertaining to die relationships between no madic herders and central governments in ancient western Asia, witii emphasis on later periods. Clawson, Marion, et al. The Agricultural Potential of the Middle East. New York, 1 9 7 1 . Planner's document, with useful information on the hydrology, climate, soils, and agricultural practices in western Asia. Diakonoff, Igor M. The Pre-History of the Armenian People. Rev. ed. Translated by Lori Jennings. Delmar, N.Y., 1 9 8 4 . Summary of the archaeological and textual information on the hill peoples of eastern Anatolia in the Bronze and Iron ages. Kessler, Karlheinz. Untersuchungen zur historischen Topographic Nordmesopotamiens. Wiesbaden, 1 9 8 0 . Review of the political geography of northern Syro-Mesopotamia and the upper Tigris drainage, par ticularly during Neo-Assyrian times. Mallowan, Max. "The Early Dynastic Period in Mesopotamia." In The Cambridge Ancient History, edited by I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, and N. G. L. Hammond, pp. 2 3 8 - 3 1 4 . Cambridge, 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 5 . Now outdated by recent work, especially in the north, this essay still pro-
TIL BARSIP vides a useful summary of third-millennium Mesopotamian cities, including those of the Diyala. Mellaart, James. The Neolithic of the Near East. London, 1 9 7 5 . Some what dated but still valuable survey of the aceramic and ceramic Neolithic of the Near East. Naval Intelligence Division, British Admiralty. Iraq and the Persian Gulf. B. R. 5 2 4 , Geographical Handbook Series. Oxford, 1 9 4 4 . Includes an extremely useful summary of die natural and cultural landscape of Iraq before significant economic development. Redman, Charles. The Rise of Civilization, from Early Farmers to Urban Society in the Ancient Near East. San Francisco, 1 9 7 8 . Written from the perspective of "processual archaeology" and presenting both data and interpretation, this textbook most successfully deals with the origins of farming societies in western Asia. Rowton, M. B. "Dimorphic Structure and Topology." Oriens Antiquus 1 5 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 1 7 - 3 1 . One of a series of papers (see citations in this paper) about the relationships between nomads and urban states in the ancient and ethnographic Near East. Weiss, Harvey, ed. The Origins of Cities in Dry-Farming Syria and Mes opotamia in the Third Millennium B.C.. Guilford, Conn., 1 9 8 6 . Col lection of papers addressing various aspects of urbanization, trade, contacts with southern Mesopotamia, and other issues in the late fourth and third millennium BCE history of Syro-Mesopotamia. Zimansky, Paul E. Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 4 1 . Chicago, 1 9 8 5 . Interpretation of the growth and organization of the Urartian empire, with special attention to the topographic conditions of eastern An atolia. CHRISTOPHER EDENS
TIL BARSIP, impressive ancient site of Tell Ahmar, Syria, located on the east bank of die Euphrates River, about 20 km (12 mi.) south of modern Jerablus (a large town 3 km, or 2 mi., south of the ancient city of Carchemish on the other side of the Syrian-Turldsh border), about 1001cm (62 mi.) nordieast of Aleppo, and 140 km (87 mi.) north of T a bqa, roughly following die Euphrates, where the dam that creates Lake Assad is located (36°3Q' N , 38°07' E). Tell Ah mar was the location of Til Barsip, the capital city of the Aramean kingdom of Bit-Adini, possibly called Masuwari as a Hittite city (Hawkins, 1983). [See Arameans; Hittites.] It was renamed Kar-Shalmaneser immediately after its con quest by Shalmaneser III in 856 BCE. A French expedition directed by Francois Thureau-Dangin excavated the site in three seasons (1929-1931) after initial soundings in 1928. Thureau-Dangin published the results in 1936, A salvage project tiiere has been directed by Guy Bunnens of the Uni versity of Melbourne since 1988, following a survey of the site and surrounding area in 1987. T h e site is situated at the edge of a terrace overlooking the alluvial plain of the Euphrates, about 1.5 1cm upstream from the confluence with the Sajur River. It is configured into three distinct areas: the acropolis (250 X 150 m) which originally stood 25 m above the surrounding plain; a second section extending 350 m to the west of the acropolis that is 1 0 - 1 5 m higher than the surrounding plain; and a very large semicircle (diameter, 1,200 m) centered on the acropolis that marks the third area and barely rises above the level of
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the surrounding plain. Excavation has documented the fol lowing periods of occupation: Ubaid, Early Bronze, Iron Age I and II, Persian, Hellenistic, Islamic, and modern. The best-known material from the early sequence at Tell Ahmar comes from the hypogeum tomb excavated by Thu reau-Dangin (Thureau-Dangin and Dunand, 1936, pp. 961 1 9 ) . This rich assemblage of 1,045 complete vessels in cludes cups, chalices, a variety of plain bowls, chalice bowls, tripod bowls and jars, plain jars, "teapots," and a variety of exotic vessels in common wares and metallic wares with var iants in black and with delicate red-line decoration. Bronze tools and weapons include shaft-hole axes, daggers, pins, spearpoints, and a decorated rein guide. This tomb group has for decades been a primary point of comparison in the middle of the third millennium for die archaeological assem blage of northwestern Syria. Recent salvage excavations along the Euphrates now place it in a broader EB context with an abundance of material from places like Tell Halawa (Orthmann, 1981) and Tell Fladidi (Dornemann, 1988) to the south and Jerablus/Tahtani (Peltenburg, i994),Kurban Hoytik (Algaze, 1990), and Norsuntepe (Hauptmann, 1982) to the north. [See Grave Goods.] Only sherds indicate earlier occupation in the Ubaid and possibly Uruk periods, but a larger ceramic corpus from the beginning of the Bronze Age (early third millennium) is now available and is best represented by reserved slip wares (Bunnens, 1990, pp. 25-44, 46-99). There seems to be a break in the occupation sequence until an Aramaic or Neo-Hittite occupation is established on the acropolis in Iron Age I. Little is published of the Iron Age pottery, but several large, possibly palatial buildings were excavated in an area more than 70 X 55 m on the acropolis. It is still unclear whether this complex is in some way associated with Ahuni, the ruler of Bit-Adini mentioned by Shalmaneser III in an 858 BCE inscription. Luwian in scriptions in Hittite hieroglyphic script, probably dating pri marily to the ninth century BCE, were found on the second level of the tell, on the west. [See Luwians.] After the conquest of Til Barship by Shalmaneser III, an Assyrian palace covered the entire area of the acropolis. [See Palace.] More than 132 X 88 m was excavated; the building originally was larger, but had been eroded away. T h e palace was very elaborate, with stone door sockets and sills, floors paved with burned bricks and complex pebble mosaics, and a well-constructed drainage system. It was also decorated throughout with murals. [See Wall Paintings,] Excellent ex amples of Assyrian art are preserved here in multicolor dec oration that adds a unique aspect to an otiierwise limited color palette for the art of the period. In addition to a large variety of standard Assyrian geometric decorations are ex tended scenes of the Assyrian Icing hunting lions, holding audiences, and receiving tribute; processions with horses, chariots, soldiers, and prisoners; scenes of executions; rep resentations of fish men, bull men, and genii; and scenes of rituals. All of these are well known from the palace reliefs at
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Nineveh, Khorsabad, and Nimrud. [See Nineveh; Khorsabad; Nimrud.] Assyrian occupation continued tiirough the Neo-Assyrian period (to 612 BCE) and covered tire lower tell as well as the acropolis. One of the gates of the defensive wall that ran along tire edge of the lower tell was excavated. The gate was decorated with monumental lion orfhostats. The inscription on the lions identifies them as dedications by tire tartan (As syrian military governor) Shamshi-Ilu, who apparentiy served Shalmaneser IV, Ashur-dan III, and Ashurnirari VI during the first half of the eighth century BCE. A number of other Assyrian inscriptions were found on the lower tell, in cluding two stelae of Esarhaddon (680-669 BCE) and a stela dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. Many fragments decorated in relief in Assyrian and local art styles were also recovered. Recent excavations have contributed a rich collection of objects from large private dwellings in several areas on the lower tell (Bunnens, 1993-1994). Black-and-white pebble mosaics were used as flooring in several of tiiese buildings. One building shows remains of decorated wall plaster and another yielded a fragment of a cuneiform tablet. [See Cu neiform.] Cylinder and scarab seals, decorated ivories, bronze fibulae, armor scales, horse trappings, and an iron dagger and iron blades were among the many objects found. [See Seals; Jewelry; Weapons and Warfare.] Thin palace ware and fine gray and red-slipped wares are represented among the large quantities of pottery excavated. The later occupations at Tell Ahmar were not extensive. There are remains of Persian-period tombs with typical grave goods, including scarabs, bronze bowls decorated in repousse, bronze bracelets, and other bronze vessels. The Hellenistic occupation was the most extensive of the later occupations but was still very limited. Dressed stones were found in this level that may have been part of the socle be longing to a small sanctuary. Coins of Antiochus VII, De metrius II, Antiochus VIII, and Antiochus IX bracket a pe riod between about 138 and 95 BCE for this occupation. A selection of typical Hellenistic mold-made figurines was also associated with this level. Very little of the site's Islamic and modern remains has been published.
Dornemann, Rudolph H. "Tell Hadidi: One Bronze Age Site among Many in the Tabqa Dam Salvage Area." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 270 (1988): 1 3 - 4 2 . Site on the Eu phrates with important comparative materials for the early sequence at Tell Ahmar. Hauptmann, Harald. "Die Grabungen auf dem Norsun-Tepe, 1974." In Keban Project, 1974-1975 Activities, pp. 4 1 - 7 0 . Ankara, 1982. Site on the Euphrates with important comparative materials for die early sequence at Tell Ahmar. Hawkins, J. D. "The Hittite Name of Til Barsib: Evidence from a New Hieroglyphic Fragment from Tell Ahmar." Anatolian Studies 33 (1983): 1 3 1 - 1 3 6 . Important study of the ancient names of Tell Ah mar. Orthmann, Winfried. Halawa 1977 bis 1979. Saarbriicker Beitriige zur Altertumskunde, vol. 3 1 . Bonn, 1 9 8 1 . Site on the Euphrates with important comparative materials for die early sequence at Tell Ah mar. Peltenburg, Edgar. "Rescue Excavations at Jerablus-Tahtani, Syria, 1994." Orient Express, no. 3 (1994): 73-76. Material found in salvage excavations that is similar to and even richer than from the hypogeum at Tell Ahmar. Thureau-Dangin, Francois, and Maurice Dunand. Title Barsib. Bib liotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 23. Paris, 1936. Primary publication of the finds of the French excavations at Tell Ahmar. RUDOLPH H . DORNEMANN
TILE. [This entry comprises two articles: Building Tile and Decorative Tile.]
Building Tile
Baked clay roof tiles were invented in Greece in the first half of die seventh century BCE. At first simply a means of wa terproofing a roof, tiles soon became vehicles for decoration, and as such were a distinctive characteristic of Archaic Greek architecture, primarily on temples. T h e technology and taste for tiles spread over much of the Mediterranean in die second half of die seventh century, reaching Anatolia by about 600 BCE. The tradition there, flourishing for the next hundred years, was characterized by elaborate, often figural decoration, the use of relief-molded friezes, and the application of tiles to both sacral and nonsacral architecture. Evidence for Anatolian tiles is concentrated in western coastal areas (e.g., at Miletus and Didyma in Ionia; Neandria and Larissa in Aeolis). [See Miletus.] Ionian coloniza BIBLIOGRAPHY tion in the Black Sea area brought tiles to Sinope and Akalan Algaze, Guillermo, ed. Town and Country in South-Eastern Anatolia, on the Pontic coast. Overland trade routes funneled the vol. 2, The Stratigraphic Sequence at Kurban Hoyiik. Oriental Institute technology to inland sites (e.g., Sardis on the Hermus River; Publications, vol. n o . Chicago, 1990. Site on the Euphrates with Gordion on the plateau). [See Sardis; Gordion.] T h e exact important comparative materials for the early sequence at Tell Ah mode of transport is uncertain, although itinerant coroplasts mar. equipped with tools, molds, and pattern books are likely. Bunnens, Guy, ed. Tell Ahmar: 1988 Season. Supplement of Abr-Nahrain, 2. Louvain, 1990. Report on renewed excavations by an Aus Tiles have not been found farther east than Bogazkoy and tralian expedition from the University of Melbourne, as part of a Pazarh, within the bend of the Halys River. [See Bogazkoy.] salvage project related to the construction of a dam at el-Qitar on The principal roofing system in Anatolia was a hybrid the Euphrates. ization of the Greek Corinthian and Laconian styles, com Bunnens, Guy. "Tell Ahmar/Til Barsip, 1988-1992." Archiv fur Orbining flat pan tiles with rounded cover tiles. T h e regular ientforschung 50-51 (1993-1994): 2 2 1 - 2 2 5 . Summary of recent ex cavations. Corinthian style was also used. Roofs were often bichro-
TILE: Building Tile matic—the individual tiles slipped black, white, or red. Some tiles carried more elaborate decoration: a large lozenge at Miletus, Sardis, and Gordion (see figure i ) ; chevrons at Sar dis. A predilection for patterned roofs characterized tire An atolian tradition. T h e method of draining water over the eaves, as well as the sorts of decoration applied at the roofs edge, varied from region to region. Southern Ionian coroplasts adhered largely to mainland Greek practice, employing simple eaves tiles and antefixes. A characteristic roof, datable to the third quarter of tire sixth century BCE, was recovered in a temenos along the Sacred Way between Miletus and Didyma. T h e eaves tiles are dec orated in relief with a guilloche, die pentagonal antefixes with a gorgoneion. Lotus blossoms or lion protomes deco rate antefixes at neighboring sites. Also typically Greek is the use of a raldng sima (a vertical gutter along the raking eaves of a double-pitched roof). One example from Didyma is painted with the so-called Doric leaf pattern, in close im itation of Greek types from die second quarter of the sixth century. [See Didyma.] Coroplasts in northern Ionia, Aeolis, and Lydia made use of the lateral sima (a tall gutter pierced by spouts along the horizontal eaves). Such simas were rare in Archaic Greece but were a defining feature in these regions. Raking simas were also employed. Both types of gutter were richly deco rated in relief with motifs inspired from the repertoire of Greek metalwork and pottery painting. Figural scenes such
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as chariot racing were prominent, as were Greek egg-anddart moldings. Tile types such as the disk acroterion show influence from Greek Laconia. Lateral and raking simas were also used inland at Akalan, Dtiver, and Gordion. More typical of the region, though, as at Dtiver, Gordion, and Pazarh, was a type of roof that em ployed spouted eaves tiles and antefixes that clamped over their front edge. In contrast to western Anatolian practice, antefixes and raking simas at inland sites frequently carried geometric patterns such as checkerboards, lozenges, or frets—ornaments derived from die traditional Phrygian dec orative vocabulary. There is an intriguing similarity between Phrygian tiles and the decoration of rock-cut facade mon uments in the Phrygian highlands, although the relationship between the two media remains unclear. The hallmark of the Anatolian tile U'adition was the dec orative frieze, made up of revetment plaques molded in re lief and brilliantiy painted. Such friezes sheathed the hori zontal and raldng geison, or wooden beams in half-timbered constructions. At western sites, decorative motifs take on an obviously Greek flavor—either abstract, such as the lotus and palmette, or figural, such as Herakles battling centaurs. Inland, at Dtiver, a series of revetments decorated with a horseman and griffin displays a more "Anatolian" style. On the plateau, at Gordion and Pazarh, motifs have a distinctly Near Eastern bias: bow hunting from a chariot or heraldic lions, bulls, and goats. T h e taste for decorative friezes may
0 TILE: Building Tile. Figure I . Reconstructed roof, Gordion. (Courtesy M. R. Glendinning)
0.5m
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TILE: Decorative Tile
have derived from the Near East, as represented by Assyrian or Syro-Hittite relief sculpture, although the exact mecha nism and extent of such influence is in question. [See As syrians; Hittites.] The tile friezes possibly bore some rela tionship to the genesis of the Greek Ionic frieze, ahhough the former were no more titan repetitive bands of decoration and were never narrative. In Anatolia the tradition of using decorated roof tiles peaked during the second and third quarters of the sixth century BCE. Although tiles remained in use throughout the rest of antiquity and into the Byzantine era, later examples were greatly simplified and far less decorated. Finds such as a public tile standard at Assos suggest that economical, stan dardized production became more important than orna mentation. Hellenistic and Roman roofs (e.g., at Assos, Priene, Sardis, and Gordion) consist of flat pans and pitched or rounded covers, with decoration limited to the antefixes (e.g., palmette and scrolls), the front edge of the eaves tiles (e.g., meander), or an occasional lateral sima (e.g., tendrils and palmettes). In Byzantine times expedient use was made of identical curved tiles for both the pan and cover elements. A separate architectural tradition in the Roman and Byz antine periods involved the use of tiles (bricks, essentially) to form decorative patterns of masonry.
Decorative Tile T h e art of tile production for architectural decoration, which flourished in Mesopotamia and Achaemenid Iran during the first millennium BCE and persisted through the Parthian pe riod, seemingly ceased in the seventh century CE with the Sasanian Empire of Persia. It was revived in the Islamic Em pire of 'Abbasid Iraq in the ninth century C E and spread rapidly throughout the Islamic world: technical perfection was achieved in the later imperial tradition of Spain, M o rocco, Iran, and Turkey. While Byzantium incorporated some of the utilitarian ceramic ware and decorative vocab ulary developed by the 'Abbasids and succeeding Muslim dynasties, tiles for wall decoration were never a favored me dium in tire non-Islamic Near East.
The monumental architecture of the Assyrian capital of Babylon under Nebudchadrezzar II (604-562 BCE) exem plifies the mastery of the art of tile production for architec tural decoration. Sixty mighty lions measuring three meters high with glazed yellow or red manes are cast in relief and set in a blue glazed ground and appear along the proces sional way leading to the Ishtar Gate. T h e Ishtar Gate, the 10.5-meter-high double gate that affords entry to the mas sive royal palace and urban complex of the Assyrian capital and holy city, dated to 580 BCE, also includes these regal lions greeting and impressing visitors to Babylon. Dragons sym BIBLIOGRAPHY bolizing the generative force of new life, and bulls, serving AkerstrSm, Alee. Die Architektonischen Terrakollen Kleinasiens. Lund, as the chief of the gods, appear in alternating rows on the 1966. Standard reference work on architectural tiles in Anatolia, es walls of the south palace complex. In all, 575 animals pecially important for discussion of artistic motifs. The chronology, adorned the palace walls and massive entrance gate, 152 of however, is low tiiroughout, and the reader should consult revisions which survive. Each glazed brick was produced as a unit and in Glendinning, Ramage, Ratte, and Winter (below). fitted later into the composition and formed the facing of Cummer, W. Wilson. "Phrygian Roof Tiles in the Burdur Museum." the mud-brick constmction of the city. City walls were cov Anatolia 14.4 (1970): 29-54. The only publication of some important ered with yellow, palaces with red, and temples with white tiles from Dtiver, which includes a theoretical roof reconstruction glazed bricks, a gleaming urban polychromy declaring the and good technical illustrations. Isik, Fahri. "Zur Entstehung der toneren Verkleidungsplatten in Anapower of the Assyrians. [See Assyrians; Babylon.] tolien." Anatolian Studies 41 (1991): 63-86. Proposes strong con nections between Phrygian tile decoration and Near Eastern glyptic art, and seventh-century stylistic dates for revetment plaques from Pazarh and Gordion. The high dates are controversial. Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. 3 vols. New York and Oxford, 1991. See the articles "Ceramic Architectural Decoration" (vol. 1 , pp. 398-399) and "Tiles" (vol. 3, pp. 2084-
After the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, the Per sian Achaemenid capital of Susa at Elam inherited the glazed tile tradition of Babylonian fame. Glazed gryphons, bulls, archers of the royal bodyguard, and large rosettes are the typical iconographic motifs proclaiming the Babylonian conquest and Achaemenid dominion from the walls of Susa. 2085). While ceramic production continued tiirough die Parthian Ramage, Andrew. Lydian Houses and Architectural Terracottas. Cam and Sasanian periods, tiles are not the favored medium for bridge, Mass., 1978. Catalog of representative tiles recovered by wall decoration again until the early Islamic period. [See Per American excavations since 1958. The proposed chronology, based sians; Susa.] on inadequately documented stratigraphic evidence, should be used cautiously. T h e earliest surviving examples of 'Abbasid wall tiles are Ratte, Christopher. "Archaic Architectural Terracottas from Sector located in the mid-ninth-century architecture of the 'Ab ByzFort at Sardis." Hesperia 63 (1994): 361-390. Catalog and dis basid capital at Samarra, Iraq. [See Samarra, article on Is cussion of tiles recovered in the 1980s at Sardis, with stratigraphic lamic Period.] T h e technique is metallic luster, an Islamic evidence for dates. innovation in the eighth century, in which a metallic pigment Winter, Nancy A. Greek Architectural Terracottas from the Prehistoric to is applied in patterns over a white tin glaze and then fired a the End of the Archaic Period. Oxford, 1993. The most up-to-date second time in a reducing atmosphere. T h e original intent survey of Greek terracottas, including a section on Anatolia. Many sound emendations to Akerstrom's chronology are suggested. of using luster was to imitate the forms and designs of the more prestigious art of metalwork. After 850 CE, luster was MATTHEW R, GLENDINNING
TILE: Decorative Tile first used in wall tiles for architectural decoration, with the center of the industry in Baghdad. [See Baghdad.] T h e slightiy later (860 CE) incorporation of 150 luster tiles stylis tically similar to the Samarra tiles as part of the mihrab (prayer niche) decoration of the Great Mosque of Kairouan (Qayrawan, in present-day Tunisia) indicates that the method of production and usage had spread extensively in the Islamic world of the period. Some of the tiles were brought from Baghdad and others made on site by a crafts man from Baghdad, suggesting that there were itinerant craftsmen moving from site to site. Iran, Twelfth-Thirteenth Century. From 1100 CE in Iran, the principles of polychrome tile production evolved slowly, culminating, at the beginning of the thirteenth cen tury, in a grand tradition of wall decoration that altered the course and the aesthetics of Iranian architecture. Colorful tiles covered large expanses of the sand-colored walls of buildings, focusing attention on the decoration of both the exterior and interior of monumental architecture, including private mansions, mosques and mausolea. [See Mosque; Mausoleum.] T h e type of building dictated the decorative repertoire. For example, religious buildings excluded figural motifs, favoring the Word of the Qur'an, and floral and geo metric motifs. T h e palaces, unrestricted by the avoidance in Islam of figural imagery in religious buildings, freely ex plored princely leisurely iconography, such as narrative de pictions of epic literature and classical poetry and of heroic exploits. There was growing technical refinement in tile pro duction methods and decoration and the inclusion of arti sans signatures suggest the elevated status of tire art of ce ramics. Tiles no longer imitated metalwork but were themselves imitated in other media. The center of Iranian industry was in Qashan and the fame of Qashan tiles and ware spread far and wide in the Islamic world, after the thirteenth century. The Persian and Turkish word for tile was kdshi; in Arabic, qashani (from Qashan). T h e period witnesses the experimentation with and the perfection of techniques of underglaze polychromy emphasizing brilliant blues and lustre with its more subdued palette of browns and dark blue for tile decoration. As early as the end of the twelfth century, tombs in the northwest Iranian town of Maragha demonstrate the pro gressive introduction of polychrome underglaze tile mosaic for exterior decoration. T h e emphasis is on brilliantly col ored turquoise and dark blue mosaic—purportedly possess ing protective magical qualities—in geometric patterns set in sand-colored stucco ground, and also used for Qur'anic inscriptions circumscribing the circular or polygonal brick mausolea. [See Inscriptions, article on Inscriptions of the Is lamic Period.] In luster technique, there was an emphasis on bold design rather than on precision. Because luster did not survive weathering, the technique lent itself only to in terior decoration. Whole walls of secular and religious build ings were covered with luster tiles grouped togetiier in com
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binations of eight-pointed stars with cross tiles. Large luster-tile slab mihrabs employing conservative Qur'anic quotations and floral arabesque also were popular. Anatolia, Twelfm-Thh-teenth Century. The Seljuq Turks introduced tile production to Anatolia (Asian Tur key) from Iran and achieved perfection of it in the thirteenth century. T h e usage of tile decoration in Anatolia rejected tile for exterior decoration and restricted its use to the in terior of buildings. T h e Karatay Medrese (Ar., madrasah; theological school) in Konya in central Anatolia of 1252 monumentally deploys tile mosaic in the large Qur'anic in scription that circumscribes the dome and in the floral ara besque and Kufic style inscriptions of the Turkish triangles supporting the dome (see figure 1). T h e favored colors in
TILE: Decorative. Figure 1 . Karatay Medrese (theological school) in Konya, Turkey. Interior view showing the transition zone to the dome of Turkish triangles with Kufic inscriptions in black, tur quoise tile mosaic, and also polychromy tile mosaic. Qur'anic in scription in elaborate foliated Kufic script circumscribes the base of the dome above which is the complex geometric strapwork of the dome interior. Built in 1258 by the Seljuk Turks. (Courtesy B. St. Laurent)
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Anatolia are black, turquoise, and dark blue on a white stucco field. F o u r t e e n t h - S e v e n t e e n t h Century. Tile for architec tural decoration flourished in fourteenth-seventeenth-cen tury Ilkhanid (Mongol), Timurid, and Safavid Iran; and in the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The princely art of decorated tiles developed in Iran in tire previous two centuries evolved to a major royal art form. In Iran, there was a continuity of development from the Seljuq tradition in the Ilkhanid period to more profuse and elabo rate usage of tile decoration in the tomb of the Ilkhanid ruler Oljeitu in northwest Iran. The Timurids in Iran expanded the vocabulary, palette, and extent of usage, with entire buildings sheathed both inside and out with a revetment of tiles and tile mosaic, culminating in the grander scale of the royal Safavid tradition and exemplified in the seventeenthcentury Masjid-i Shah or Royal Mosque of Isfahan. [See Isfahan.] The early Ottoman Empire, rather than continue with the method of die Seljuq Turks, rediscovered the Persian tra dition of tile revetment for the interior of monumental build ings. In 1420, Sultan Mehmet I brought Persian craftsman to his capital Bursa to decorate his royal mosque and tomb complex called the Green Mosque. The fifteen foot mihrab in cuerda seca and tile mosaic techniques, the green and gilt
tile dadoes, bordered by delicate inscription bands (see fig ure 2) and foliate arabesque in blues, greens, and yellow with a touch of white of the mosque interior, and the royal pa vilion testify to the highest quality of Persian craftsmanship and include the signatures of Persian artisans. In exception to the Turkish proclivity for interior tile decoration, the ex terior of his tomb is also covered with turquoise tiles. In the sixteenth century, tire workshops of the town of Iznik crys tallized the distinct and grand Ottoman imperial style ap parent in die decoration of the mosque of Rustem Pasha and the Siileymaniye Mosque in Istanbul. Tile mosaic is abandoned to the exclusive use of porcelainlike square tiles, an innovation of this period, and large rectangular tile pan els. Carnations and tulips in red, purple, green, and yellow proliferate on a white ground surrounded by die graceful calligraphic leaves tiiat define the Iznik style. Thus, an Islamic imperial tile tradition tiiat originates from the ancient Near East witnesses an initial revival in ninth-century Iraq, with a subsequent effloresence as a princely art in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Iran and An atolia. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Ilkhanid and Ti murid Iran, tile becomes a popular medium for royal mon umental architectural decoration displaying regional technical and stylistic distinctions. T h e royal workshops of the Safavids and the Ottomans produced the grand imperial
TILE: Decorative. Figure 2. The Given Mosque (Ye$il Cami) in Bursa, Turkey. Interior view of the royal mosque of the early Ottoman Sultan Mehmet I built in 1420, showing the top of a tile dado in one of the iwans. This detail shows the double inscriptions, one in Kuflc script in yellow above the larger cursive selection in white surrounded by floral arabesque and a polychrome floral border of rosettes and floral motifs. All surmount the dado in blue tiles seen at the bottom of the illustration. (Courtesy B. St. Laurent)
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traditions and monuments whose tile revetments distinctly identify and proclaim their imperial dominion. [See also Architectural Decoration; and Building Materials and Techniques.]
assisted in drawing plans of the South Gate and cemetery areas. South Gate. Only die uppermost stratum of an area mea suring about 61.5 m N N W - S S E X 48.0 m WSW-ENE was excavated. This area contained the remains of the South BIBLIOGRAPHY Gate, a small plaza, two streets, and several large buildings. Atil, E. Ceramics from the World of Islam. Washington, 1 9 7 3 . Exhibition T h e gate consisted of two towers flanking a flagstone-paved catalog including many good illustrations of ceramic types and styles. passage. Both towers were constructed of enormous coursed Atil, E., ed. Islamic Art. and Patronage: Treasures from Kuwait. Wash blocks, and tiieir outer wall faces were covered with South ington, 1 9 9 0 . Catalog of the al-Sabah collection containing good il Arabic inscriptions. In the east tower, a stairway led to an lustrations of many of the ceramic techniques cited in the article. Atasoy, N„ and J. Raby. Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey. London, upper story. Two stone benches—each one built against one of the towers—faced each other across the passage. 19S9. Deluxe edition examining the history of imperial Ottoman ce ramics. The gateway gave access to the open plaza, from which Bloom, Jonathan M., and Sheila S. Blair. The Art and Architecture of two parallel streets led northwestward separated by Building Islam 1250-1800. New Haven, 1 9 9 4 . Grabar, Oleg, and Richard Ettinghausen. The Art and Architecture of B (Yafash House), at the base of which two magnificent bronze sculptures, each featuring a lion ridden by an infant Islam 650-1250. New York and London, 1 9 8 7 . Bloom and Blair male child, were found. Fronting the westernmost street was (above) and this volume are a comprehensive survey that provides summary information on all periods. Building A (Yafa'am House). Across the easternmost street Lane, A. Early Islamic Pottety. London, 1 9 4 7 . Building D (Hadath House) consisted of two or more sto Lane, A. Later Islamic Pottery. London, 1 9 7 1 . Both Lane volumes ex ries. These names are known from inscriptions on die build amine in detail the history of ceramics of the periods discussed in ings themselves, a relatively common feature in pre-Islamic this article. South Arabia. Farther along and neighboring Building D, Oates, Joan. Babylon. Rev. ed. New York, 1 9 8 6 . A good general work discussing and illustrating Babylon's history. Building C, as yet nameless, was constructed of the finest Seherr-Thoss, S., and H. Seherr-Thoss. Design and Color in Islamic ashlar masonry found at Timna'. Above die ashlar courses Architecture: Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey. Washington, 1 9 6 8 . This wellof the first floor, Buildings D and perhaps C may have fea illustrated volume includes many of the monuments discussed. tured post-and-beam construction, utilizing a framework of BEATRICE S T . LAURENT heavy wooden beams enclosed with curtain walls, judging from die many burned and broken beams in the debris. Re mains of roughly contemporary buildings at Shabwa with TIMNA C (modern Hajar Kohlan), site in Arabia located fragments of charred wooden beams still in place suggest about 15 km (9 mi.) north of Hajar Bin Humeid beyond the that this type of construction was well known in the region. town of Nuqub (i5°02'02" N , 45°48'4" E). It was the capital [See Shabwa.] of the Kingdom of Qataban, one of tire five kingdoms in T e m p l e . The Temple structure (about 49.0 X 41.5 m) is pre-Islamic South Arabia, which included Saba' (biblical oriented on an east-west axis and consisted of three sections: Sheba), Hadhramaut, Ausan, and Ma'in. It occupies the die Temple itself, a court, and possible storerooms. The west bank of tire Wadi Beihan, which flows northward, Temple is the major and oldest section on the east end and draining runoff water from die nortiiern slopes of the soutiiis built of massive blocks, larger than those of the South Gate ern mountains. T h e mound is oval, with perhaps 10 m of towers. In its walls was a series of huge recessed niches. The stratified occupation debris, and covers an area of about Temple was ascended through a marble-paved court via a 19.48 ha (52 acres), with its long axis oriented northeastmarble staircase (about 6.5 m wide) with four steps. The soutirwest. T h e Timna' cemetery occupies the western slope main entrance to the court was also via a marble staircase, of a small rocky hill some 500 m north-northeast of Timna' but of nine steps, on its north side, and a marble pavement known locally as Heid Bin 'Aqil. T h e site's identification as extending at least another 7.7 m. Adjacent to the court and Timna' was established in 1924 by Nikolaus Rhodokanakis, against the north wall of the Temple stood a large stone while assembling all known Qatabanian inscriptions. water tank. Several of the paving blocks in die court were In 1950 tire American Foundation for the Study of M a n (Wendell Phillips, president, and William Foxwell Albright, archaeological director) began an excavation of the site, as sisted by Albert Jamme, Alexander M. Honeyman, Friso Heybroek, Charles Inge, and Richard LeB. Bowen, Jr. Dur ing the 1951 season, E. Burcaw supervised digging in the South Gate area; James Swauger, assisted by John Simpson, supervised work at the Temple site; and Robert Shalkop was in charge of excavating the Timna' cemetery. Gus Van Beek
inscribed, each with a South Arabic letter; the arrangement of the letters, similar to that of die Ethiopic alphabet, prob ably preserves the earliest known order of die South Arabic alphabet. A series of probable storerooms surrounding the court on the south, west, and north sides was represented by a series of parallel crosswalls. A deep sounding disclosed the walls of an earlier structure below the massive blocks of the Temple. The earlier structure had been built of much smaller blocks and its wall had buckled outward slightly
216
TIMNA' vidual's personal and family names. T h e stone box was closed by one- or two-leaf doors and securely fastened by a vertical peg that pierces the roof and is held in place by a horizontal pin. T h e finest alabaster head yet discovered came from such a tomb (see figure 1 ) ; from that same tomb came a gold necldace in the form of a crescent curving below a solar disk and bearing the name Hagarlat 'Alay Fan at (see figure 2); it had probably been attached to the alabaster head through two holes between the line where the neck and hair meet. All the tombs excavated had been plundered; although few human bones were found, some of tire tombs contained ashes, indicating the practice of cremation. Objects such as highly stylized ibexes, bulls, and diverse architectural frag ments provide a view of a wealthy culture that stressed the arts of sculpture, architecture, and writing. T h e many ob jects that were imported illustrate a range of origins: Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Ethiopia. By 1991, little remained of these structures because Timna' was largely robbed of all visible building stone to build houses, except for the massive blocks of the Gate Towers and the Temple.
TIMNA' (ARABIA). Figure I. Calcite alabaster head from the Timnd cemetery. Hair is styled by an overlay of plaster. The holes on either side of the neck probably carried the necklace shown in figure 2 , from the same tomb. (Courtesy G. W. Van Beek)
from the weight of the later structure. It has been suggested that the earlier structure was a palace radier than a temple, but the evidence is inconclusive. Cemetery. On Heid Bin 'Aqil, a rock hill about 0.5 km north of Timna', Honeyman and Shalkop excavated the Timna' cemetery in 1950 and 1951, respectively, covering an area of about 2,550 sq m. In area A, on the lower slopes, three successive mortuary chapels ascended the hill, the ear liest built of mud and the later ones of stone. A large mau soleum complex occupied area B, about three times larger in area than the chapels. The mausolea share a common plan, featuring square burial structures of rubble, fronted on a central aisle, each structure consisting of four or five par allel partition walls divided into two or three vertical cham bers (about 2.0 X 0.75 m) to accommodate individual bur ials. Burials of prominent individuals seem to have been accompanied by a stone box eitiier with an alabaster head portraying the deceased or a relief inscribed with the indi
TIMNA'(ARABIA). Figure 2 . Gold necklace bearing the female name "Hagarlat 'Alay Fan'at." (Courtesy G. W . Van Beek)
TIMNA' [See also Hadhramaut; Hajar Bin Humeid; Sheba; and South Arabian.]
Qataban;
BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "The Chronology of Ancient South Arabia in the Light of the First Campaign of Excavation in Qataban." Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 1 1 9 ( 1 9 5 0 ) : 5 1 5 . Balanced, conservative chronology of tire kings of Qataban. Bowen, Richard Le Baron. "Archaeological Survey of Beihan." In Ar chaeological Discoveries in South Arabia, edited by Richard Le Baron Bowen and Frank P. Albright, pp. 3 - 3 3 . Publications of the Amer ican Foundation for the Study of Man, 2 . Baltimore, 1 9 5 8 . Survey including settlement sites and irrigation installations. Cleveland, Ray L. An Ancient South Arabian Necropolis: Objects from the 1 Second Campaign (19s )
1
(1956):
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TIMNA' (Ar., Wadi Mene'iyeh), valley in the Negev, part of the 'Arabah, located about 30 km (18.5 mi.) north of the Gulf of Eilat/'Aqaba. T h e area has been exploited over the centuries for its deposits of copper ore. Much investigated by nineteenth and twentieth-century explorers, Timna' was extensively surveyed and excavated between 1959 and 1990 by Benno Rothenberg, joined after 1964 by an interdisci plinary team of scientists and sponsored chiefly by the Haaretz Museum in Tel Aviv. Nearly a dozen mining camps and at least one smelting site have been investigated. They date from die Late Chal colithic to the Roman and Islamic periods, but especially to the Late Bronze Age, when Egyptian (nineteenth-twentieth dynasties) expeditions and garrisons were maintained there. T h e Timna' mines themselves comprise deep vertical shafts extending as deep as 35 m—narrow, horizontal gal leries driven deep into the rock, sometimes branched, and saucerlike depressions in the hillsides. Such sophisticated shaft-and-gallery mining techniques as those discovered at LB Timna' had hitherto been unknown before the Roman period in Europe. One Egyptian New Kingdom mining site (site 30) was a very large smelter, with tiiree phases of use, surrounded by
165-170.
Segall, Berta. "Sculpture from Arabia Felix: The Earliest Phase." Ars Orientalis 2 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 3 5 - 4 2 . Segall, Berta. "The Lion-Riders from Timna'." In Archaeological Dis coveries in South Arabia, edited by Richard Le Baron Bowen and Frank P. Albright, pp. 1 5 5 - 1 7 8 . Publications of the American Foun dation for the Study of Man, 2 . Baltimore, 1 9 5 8 . Van Beek, Gus W. "The Rise and Fall of Arabia Felix." Scientific Amer ican 2 2 1 . 6 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 3 6 - 4 6 . Semipopular account of the major char acteristics of pre-Islamic South Arabian civilization. Van Beek, Gus W. "The Land of Sheba." In Solomon and Sheba, edited by James B. Pritchard, pp. 4 0 - 6 3 . London, 1 9 7 4 . Overview of preIslamic South Arabian civilization that expands on the material pre sented in the Scientific American. Gus W . V A N BEEK
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Copper mine shaft. One of many such shafts hewn into tire soft sandstone walls of die Timna' cliffs. Located at site 2 4 . (Courtesy Jay Lininger, MATRIX Publishing Co.) TIMNA' (NEGEV).
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TOMBS
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TIMNA' (NEGEV). Copper slag. The dark-colored slag is randomly scattered at the base of the Timna cliffs at site 2 . Note the mined out copper pockets in the sandstone cliff, to the left. (Courtesy Jay Lininger, MATRIX Publishing Co.) 1
a defensive wall. It was in use into the Early Iron Age, with a brief reuse in the tenth century BCE. There, as elsewhere at die site, the painted so-called Midianite and handmade Negebite wares were found alongside local pottery. The most spectacular discovery was an Egyptian temple at the base of the sandstone massif long known as Solomon's Pillars. Its major phases date to tire time of Setil (1318-1304 BCE) and Rameses II (1304-1237 BCE); it apparentiy was desttoyed by an earthquake (site 200). The original shrine (stratum III) was rectangular in plan, with a small raised naos and a niche on tire back wall. Later additions were a side chamber, a row of monoliths, and stone elements, such as a Hatiior pillar and various altar fragments that were in secondary use (stratum II). A tented sanctuary (stratum I), perhaps used by Midianites after the Egyptian abandonment (c. mid-twelfth century BCE, was attested by fragments of heavy red and yellow textiles and a gilded copper serpent. The earlier Egyptian deposits included large quantities of pottery; votives in stone, alabaster, faience, terra cotta, bronze, and gold; and animal and Hathor figurines, plaques, jewelry, scarabs and seals, and a small sphinx. Nelson Glueck's explorations in Wadi Timna' in the 1950s and his excavations in the late 1930s at die site of Tell el-Kheleifeh (which he identified as a Solomonic period
smelter and seaport) connected the Timna' mines popularly with the fabled "King Solomon's mine." [SeeKheleifeh, Tell el-.] For the most part, however, mining activity at Timna' was Egyptian-sponsored and mostly Late Bronze Age in date. [See also Metals, article on Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages; and Temples, article on Egyptian Temples.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Pratico, Gary. Nelson Glueck's 1038-1040 Excavations at Tell cl-Kheleifeh: A Reappraisal. Atlanta, 1 9 9 3 . Rothenberg, Benno. God's Wilderness: Discoveries in Sinai. London, 1961.
Rothenberg, Benno. Timna': Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines. Lon don, 1 9 7 2 . Rothenberg, Benno. The Egyptian Mining Temple of Timna'. London, 1988.
W I L L I A M G . DEVER
TOMBS. In the ancient Near East tombs took on a num ber of different forms that reflected the nature of building materials, topography, social status, ethnic or tribal affilia tion, and spiritual beliefs. In broad, symbolic terms, tombs
TOMBS were apparently perceived as simulations of either the womb (implying the expectation of rebirdi) or a dwelling (with an cestors) or both. From the meager prehistoric evidence (from the Paleolitiiic to the Neolithic Ages) tombs consisted of simple pit burials inserted under die living surfaces of caves (in the Paleolithic) and huts (in the Epipaleolitiiic and Neolithic). By die Pottery Neolithic, infants were being interred in ce ramic jars (Tel Dan, Tel Teo in the Hula Valley of Israel, Tel Qatif in the Gaza Strip) and adults in tumulus or cairn tombs (Eilat). The Chalcolithic period saw the crystallization of several new tomb types and burial practices. Communal burial grounds were separated from settlements, though the tra dition of intramural infant inhumation continued. T h e rockcarved or natural cave tomb became the standard type and remained so until the Islamic period. Constructed tombs in the form of tumuli (at Eilat, Sha'ar ha-Golan, Neveh Yam), and grave circles (the nawamis in the Sinai Desert and in the Shiqmin cemetery) became more commonplace. T h e pottery or stone ossuary came into vogue as the preferred receptacle for secondary interment of selected bones. [See Ossuary.] Stone-lined and capped cist tombs are found in some places, the most prominent example being Adeimeh, across the Jordan River from Jericho. In die Bronze Age Levant the rock-carved or cave tomb
was by far the most common type for adults and juveniles. This type reached its classic form in die shaft tombs at sites such as Bab edh-Dhra , Jericho, and Jebel Qa'aqir. In the steppe and desert regions, dominated by nomadic or seminomadic pastoralists, tumuli tombs were the standard prac tice, while the dolmen tomb ttadition developed along die Syro-African Rift Valley, in tandem with the tumulus and rock-carved tomb. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] At Bab edhDhra , early Early Bronze I shaft tombs were gradually sup planted by above-surface, round burial structures (EB I B EB II) and finally by large rectangular "charnel houses" (EB III). In the EB IV, the shaft-tomb tradition was resumed. However, the Bab edh-Dhra above-surface burial struc tures and the length of the burial sequence are unique thus far for the Early Bronze Age. c
c
T h e tomb forms of the Early and Intermediate Bronze Ages carried through into the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, but with several innovations. The constructed, corbeled tomb (at Tel Dan, Tel Kabri, Megiddo, Jericho, Tell edDab'a) and the subfloor burial of infants in jars were im ported (or reintroduced in die latter case) into the southern Levant from Syria/Mesopotamia, T h e bilobate cave or shaft tomb made its appearance toward die middle of the Middle Bronze Age, particularly along the coast at sites such as Tell el-Far'ah (South). In the Late Bronze Age, multiple burials in cave and shaft tombs continued as before in the high-
Cut-away drawing of a rock-cut tomb with shaft. (From T. E. Levy, Society in the Holy Land, New York, 1995) TOMBS.
219
ed.,
The Archaeology of
220
TOMBS
latter two types appear within the Persian period itself—cist tombs being a more eastern u-adition (Persia, Mesopotamia, inland Syria) and shaft tombs being a western, littoral tra dition (Cyprus, coastal Syria-Palestine). T h e eastern cist tradition may also include burial in metal or ceramic chests or jars, while the western shaft tradition occasionally incor porates the use of anthropoid sarcophagi, in tire Egyptian and Phoenician style. In the Hellenistic period the loculi ("burial niche," or kokh in Hebrew) tomb appeared in northern Egypt and became the dominant type in the southern Levant. Some of the ear liest examples are found in the Mareshah (Marisa) necrop olis (second century BCE) and in Jerusalem (die tomb of Ja son). T h e other significant class of sepulcher in this period—one that appeared toward the end of the Second Temple period and remained current into the Byzantine pe TOMBS. Stone chamber tomb. (From T. E . Levy, ed., The Archaeology riod—was the arcosolia tomb, defined by its arched recesses oj Society in the Holy Land, New York, 1995) containing burial troughs or benches. Loculi and arcosolia often occur in tire same tomb. T h e dead were placed in coffins or on biers in die loculi, or in troughs or benches lands, but along the coastal zone individual cist tombs and under arcosolia. Following a period of at least one year, the pit burials became the norm. At the same time, rectangular fleshless bones were collected and deposited in a charnel chamber tombs with introductory passages (dromos), room (until the reign of Herod beginning c. 40 BCE) or in benches, and the occasional supplementary room appeared ossuaries (from the time of Herod until the third or fourth (at Tell el-Far'ah [South], Tell el-'Ajjul, Beth-Shean, and century CE), made of stone or clay (the latter was more com on Cyprus), as did clay coffin burials (larnakes and anthro mon in the later Roman period). In some cases the dead pomorphic coffins)—all of which have been interpreted as were interred in stone sarcophagi, but this technique was exhibiting various degrees of foreign influence (Syrian, An apparentiy reserved for the very rich. [See Sarcophagus.] atolian, Mycenaean, Cypriot, Egyptian). Tombs of this period also had benches (for the preparation In the Early Iron Age (1200-1000 BCE), tomb types and of cadavers and the placement of ossuaries) and forecourts. burial practices seem to have continued LB traditions on the They were often sealed by a round, rolling stone (Heb., gocoastal plain and in lowland valleys. The highlands are lal). Some, like Herod's family tomb in Jerusalem and die strangely devoid of evidence for mortuary behavior, unless LB cave tombs were still in use. For the Iron Age II, most of what is known about tomb forms comes from Judah, es pecially Jerusalem. T h e classic Judahite tomb resembles the rectangular LB chamber tombs of the coast (see above), with forecourts and raised benches or troughs to support or contain the cadaver, Hathor wig-shaped headrests, and sub sidiary repositories for the secondary collection of bones moved to make room for more recent inhumation. This con figuration is also reminiscent of the typical quadripartite dwelling plan typical of the period throughout Israel. [See Four-room House.] Some of these tombs include architec tural details carved into the rock and identifying, warning, or incantory inscriptions. The northern part of the inland Levant is somewhat lacking in tombs. Tombs on the Phoe nician coast (e.g., Achziv) are mainly shaft tombs and cist burials, continuing Bronze Age traditions that lasted into the Persian period. Kraters containing cremations are also char acteristic. Three general tomb types have been discerned for the Persian period: (1) rock-hewn chamber tombs containing benches or troughs that continue Iron Age traditions; (2) built, dug, or hewn cist tombs; and (3) shaft tombs. T h e
TOMBS. Stone-faced cist tomb. (From T. E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, New York, 1 9 9 5 )
TOMBS Horvat Midras tomb in T h e Shephelah of Judah, were pan eled with ashlar masonry. T h e great necropolis at Palmyra included very large and ornate tomb structures of three lands: subterranean "hypogea" with loculi (the most fre quent), tower tombs (originally perhaps serving as monu ments for hypogea), and the least common, atrium tombs. [See Necropolis.] The monumental tombs of the Hellenistic and Roman pe riods were characterized by the elaborate ornamentation of their facades. Monumental Jewish tombs (the best examples can still be seen in Jerusalem and Beth-She'arim) were carved in nonfigural, vegetal, and geometric motifs and in cluded a prominent marker, often in pyramidal or tholos form, called tire nefesh. T h e same features, but including figural depiction, can be observed in the tombs at Palmyra and in the Nabatean necropolis at Petra. [See Petra.] An important source of information concerning tomb decora tion and structure is the ornamentation of stone ossuaries. T h e remains of tomb paintings are quite rare in tombs of this period; tire best (and perhaps only) examples come from tire Jericho cemetery excavated by Rachel Hachlili and Ann Killebrew. In the Late Roman period, two new phenomenon entered the tomb repertoire of Palestine. Alongside tire consanguin eous loculi and arcosolia tombs, tire catacomb necropoli at Beth-She'arim and Beth-Guvrin came into being, com prised of large burial halls and corridors carved in die bed rock and containing die remains of various unrelated fami lies. While many features were retained from the Early Roman period (arcosolia, loculi, sarcophagi, decorative techniques and motifs) other aspects changed: ossuaries were no longer used and burial was primary, unless it con cerned bones transported from afar for interment in die Holy Land. Figural motifs, including human ones, became
TOMBS. Jar burial. (From T. E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, New York, 1 9 9 5 )
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acceptable—even adorning the tombs of rabbis. The use of frescoes became more common as well (at Lohamei ha-Getaot, Abilah, Ashkelon). [See Wall Paintings.] T h e second development of the Roman period was the mausoleum: generally a square or rectangular planned, above-ground, closed structure containing sarcophagi. These often served as access to subterranean loculi or ar cosolia tombs via doorways in their interiors. [See Mauso leum.] For most periods it is usually assumed that extant tombs represent only a portion of the original population. T h e sim ple pit burials of the Dead Sea sect as revealed at Qumran, lacking any burial goods, and the cist burials in the Byzan tine cemetery at Rehovot in the Negev testify to the sim plicity with which some parts of society may have buried their dead—generally the impecunious or otherwise ideo logically inclined. In poorly drained environments that al ternate between damp and dry, this type of interment may have virtually disappeared from the archaeological record. [See also Burial Sites; Burial Techniques; Catacombs; and Cave Tombs. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch-Smidi, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 1 2 3 . Sheffield, 1 9 9 2 . Comprehensive study of Iron Age burial practices, tomb form, and mortuary ideology in Judah, with a strong biblical emphasis. Campbell, S„ and A. Green, eds. The Archaeology of Death in the Ancient Near East. Oxford, 1 9 9 4 . Collection of articles dealing with mortuary practices from prehistory to the modern era, including a trove of new data. Gonen, Rivka. "Structural Tombs in the Second Millennium B.C." In The Architecture oj Ancient Israel: Prom the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods, edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, pp. 1 5 1 1 6 0 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 2 . A concise description of selected tomb types in the Middle and Late Bronze Age Levant. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Ijind ofIsrael. Leiden, 1 9 8 8 . See chapter 4 , "Funerary Customs and Art," for a good synopsis of late Second Temple period burial practices; weak on Jewish mortuary behavior of the later Roman and Byzantine pe riod. Rahmani, L. Y. "Ancient Jerusalem's Funerary Customs and Tombs." Biblical Archaeologist 4 4 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 1 7 1 - 1 7 7 , 2 2 9 - 2 3 5 ; 4 5 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 4 3 - 5 3 , 1 0 9 - 1 1 9 . Delves into religious beliefs and die social and psycholog ical setting of burial, in addition to illuminating the evolution of die Jerusalem necropolis archaeologically. Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538-332 B.C. Warminster, 1 9 8 2 . Chapter 3 is the only syn desis of Perian-period burial practices in the Levant as of this writ ing. Zohar, Mattanyah. "Megalithic Cemeteries in the Levant." In Pastor alism in the Levant: Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Per spectives, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anatoly Khazanov, pp. 4 3 63. Madison, Wis., 1 9 9 2 . The most up-to-date syndiesis of mega lithic tombs in nonsedentary contexts in the Levant widi an attempt at socioecological explanation. DAVID ILAN
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TOOLS
TOOLS. See Lithics; Metals. TOURISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY. In the Near East archaeology and tourism are made for each other, or so they seem. They spring from a common root and share a common past. In die case of antiquities tourism, they pur sue a common goal: archaeological remains. Outwardly die two appear highly compatible, even perfectly complemen tary. Upon closer examination, however, their relationship is highly ambiguous, even problematic. This ambiguity arises from a host of complex issues—political, economic, religious, intellectual—bearing on the relationship of ar chaeology and tourism and their relevance to society at large (Ucko, 1988,1989b, 1990). An understanding of this begins with an account of their shared origin and common history. Origins and History. In the nineteenth century an abid ing Western curiosity in the Near East gave rise both to archaeology and to tourism. This curiosity, fed by a mixture of religious enthusiasm and intellectual inquisitiveness, eco nomic cupidity, and political design, generated an over whelming interest in the antiquities of the Near East. In previous centuries ancient ruins, the objective of nine teenth-century tourists and archaeologists alike, had exerted a powerful attraction on travelers in the region. Herodotus is die best-known though certainly not the first Westerner to visit the pyramids (Histories 2.124-128). T o label that fifth-century Greek a "tourist," however, would be anach ronistic. Tourists and tourism, like archaeology, are uniquely modern. Tourism is travel for diversion, a modern enterprise made possible by the global reach of rapid, inexpensive transpor tation and the increasing numbers of people willing to pay handsomely to be diverted. These diversions are of necessity safe and not too strenuous, for tourists dislike unmade roads and civil insecurity. Tourism is not pilgrimage, nor is it ex ploration, although religious pilgrims and early explorers in the Near East were forerunners of later tourists and archae ologists (Ben-Arieh, 1983). Explorers like Napoleon's savants, Ulrich J. Seetzen, Johann Burckhardt, Edward Robinson, and others were all se rious travelers bent on discovery, not diversion. In their ar duous and often dangerous travels, tiiey located ancient places and described standing ruins, some of which, like Baalbek, Palmyra, and Petra, were recognizable offshoots of a classical civilization already well known in Italy and Greece. Their discoveries set the stage for what followed. Throughout the nineteenth century, in a mostly pacific, if not always tranquil, Ottoman Near East, tourism and ar chaeology flourished side by side. By 1900, Egypt, already extensively explored archaeologically, had become a wellestablished tourist destination, a transformation wrought by an amenable colonial administration and a flotilla of tourist steamers plying the Nile. Until World War I, the Nile Valley
and the Holy Land attracted the majority of Western tourists and most of the archaeologists (Silberman, 1982,1995; Vercoutter, 1992). After 1918 the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the assumption of mandatory powers by Britain and France opened the rest of the Near East to archaeolo gists and to tourists. The years between die world wars were halcyon. In Eu rope and America, museums and learned societies devoted to study of the ancient Near East proliferated, as did uni versity departments that trained students to conduct re search on behalf of such institutions. By filling western mu seums with Near Eastern artifacts, academic archaeologists made the ancient world accessible to the modern. Spectac ular discoveries, like the tomb of Tutankhamun, and pop ularized accounts, like the Chicago Oriental Institute's doc umentary film The Human Adventure shown across the United States in die 1930s, widened the general public's knowledge of the ancient Near East, knowledge diat trans lated into a penchant for travel. While tiiere remained re mote corners like highland Yemen and interior Arabia, large portions of the Near East lay open to travelers and scholars alike. For both, curiosity prompted access and access piqued further curiosity. During the late 1930s and 1940s, civil unrest and the global disruptions of World War II, followed by the regional conflicts and population displacements provoked by die founding of the state of Israel, effectively curtailed access to the region but did not check the motivating curiosity. In the more pacific 1950s and early 1960s, despite regional epi sodes of insecurity and bouts of xenophobia, tourism re bounded and archaeology thrived once again. Continuing discoveries, such as die Dead Sea Scrolls, had the same pop ular impact as the excavation of Tutankliamun's tomb dec ades before. Events after World War II shaped archaeology and tour ism in the Near East. T h e emergence of postcolonial nationstates in the region fomented a new relationship between the two. Foreign archaeologists ceased to be the informal agents of resident colonial administrations and became instead the formal guests, admitted under sufferance and not by right, of sovereign states, which claimed full ownership of the an tiquities within their boundaries (ironically a situation aldn to the Ottoman period). Tourism came to be regarded as a source of much-sought foreign currency income and some thing to be promoted as a matter of state policy. Ministries of tourism discerned that antiquities attracted tourists and that antiquities fitted naturally into official schemes to boost tourism and thereby state revenues. A N a t u r a l Fit. T h e Western experience with the Near East during the previous 150 years prepared the way. Tour ism in the Near East was unquestionably regarded as inter national tourism from the developed West to the developing Near East. Tacitly this recognized economic reality because only travelers from die developed world had disposable in-
TOURISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY come to pay for expensive diversions abroad. (Left aside temporarily was the nearby, potentially large market for local and regional tourism, which could only develop in the af termath of permanent regional peace.) International economic development agencies, such as the World Bank, were inclined to see the same natural fit be tween international tourism and antiquities. International cultural organizations such as U N E S C O reinforced this by designating selected archaeological sites as elements of a "world cultural heritage" (UNESCO, 1991). Such desig nations served to authenticate individual government's claims for tire distinctiveness of their cultural heritages and to enhance their country's status as a tourist destination. Such designations also influenced decisions by international donors about funding for programs of archaeological site preservation and promotion and affected how local depart ments of antiquity planned for preservation (e.g., Wigg, 1994). Recently donor policies have shifted in favor of pri vate over the public sector investment for tourism devel opment, a trend that has enlarged the direct role of private entrepreneurship in antiquities-based tourism in the Near East. This perception of "natural fit" is the prevailing view on the relationship between archaeology and tourism. Primafacie, this opinion is valid. Archaeology discovers and explains significant remains lying unsuspected beneath the surface. Tourism connects these remains with the traveling public's knowledge and imagination in ways that make them at once interesting, intelligible, and diverting. This perception is re inforced by die indisputable fact the ancient remains do at tract tourists and tourism does makes money. Aldiough the fit between tourism and archaeology seems natural enough, however, tire two are in fact independent, even divergent, phenomena. Disjunction of Tourism and Archaeology. Tourism is hardly indispensable for archaeology. For most archaeolo gists, tourism is something tiiat happens after they leave a site. Typically archaeologists, whether foreign or local aca demic researchers or antiquities department personnel, play a minimal role in preparing sites for tourism and none at all in the economic decisions leading to such preparations. Ar chaeologists, moreover, do not go to ancient sites as tourists seeking diversion but as professionals seeking information. With the exception of sites actively under excavation, die information tiiey seek is not to be found in situ on over grown, eroded mounds, but rather in published excavation reports, field records, drawings, photographs, and museum collections. Archaeology is not indispensable to tourism. Ancient monuments were known and enjoyed, if not properly un derstood, long before the advent of archaeology. For millen nia before they were investigated scientifically, the pyramids were cloaked in a mystery that detracted not at all from their allure. For tourists, the perceived role of archaeology is to
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expose sites wortii seeing. What qualifies as "worth seeing" are usually monumental or otherwise visually spectacular ruins. Tourists (and their guides) are singularly uninterested in ruined farmsteads or abandoned nomad camps; although, as archaeologists rightly insist, these too are important parts of the archaeological record. T h e problem is that research agendas and tourist itineraries do not necessarily coincide. The touristic appeal of a site may be completely contrary to its archaeological significance. Prehistoric sites present a particular problem in this re gard. They are rarely well preserved (though some exist, e.g., Khirokitia in Cyprus, Catal Hoyiik in Turkey) and so require a great deal of interpretation to make them compre hensible to the interested nonspecialist. T w o of the largest and most important Neolithic settlements in the southern Levant, Jericho in the Jordan valley and 'Ain Ghazal east of Amman, are decidedly not tourist attractions. Neolithic Jer icho, exposed only at the bottom of Kathleen Kenyon's nar row u-enches, is mostiy buried under meters of later accu mulation. 'Ain Ghazal, although unburdened by later occupation, lies in an industrial suburb of the modern Jor danian capital at the intersection of two expressways and opposite a sewerage treatment plant—a decidedly unap pealing location. Neither prehistoric site invites more than a cursory notice, if that, from any but the most determined tourist. Sites in the Near East chosen for touristic promotion al most exclusively have some monumental aspect. They are usually Roman in date (e.g., Beth-Shean, Caesarea, Jerash), or possess some significant connection witii particular na tional histories (e.g., Babylon, Giza, and Masada). Such sites already are part of popular cultural knowledge and in effect sell themselves. Such archaeological sites are readymade tourist infrastructure, needing only some on-site amenities and adequate advertisement to make them attrac tions. These attributes are expressly cited in economic ar guments for antiquities-based tourism. Economics of Antiquities-Based Tourism. The con tention that antiquities, tiirough tourism, can be made to "pay their own way" sway skeptical economists, who resist altruistic appeals for site protection grounded in abstract principles of cultural-resource management. The logic runs dius: ancient monuments are like natural resources; they are in place and already paid for. T h e only capital expense re quired is that of making tiiem accessible and intelligible to tourists. (This effort frequently consists simply of erecting a sign at die site and marking its location on a map.) Antiq uities attract foreign tourists and foreign tourists spend hard currency, not just on admission fees, guides, and souvenirs, but also on food, lodging, transportation, and a range of other related services. There are dangers however, in "digging for tourism." Be cause investments in touristic development must return a profit, economics may dictate criteria for site preservation
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at odds with academic archaeological research. The di lemma is how to balance the rival demands of site preser vation and touristic promotion. Site preservation, properly done, serves very long term goals with no immediate (or even eventual) payoff in public attention or financial benefit. Tourism, on the other hand, can excite wide popular interest and earn hard cash. This imbalance means that excavations of sites being developed for tourism are vulnerable to charges that archaeological rigor will be sacrificed for eco nomic gain, not only in unearthing remains but also in postexcavation site restoration. All excavated sites, whether developed for tourism, re quire post-excavation protection. The simplest and most ec onomical means is backfilling, although this does not leave much worth seeing on the surface. Consolidation of exca vated remains is a minimal measure intended to prevent fur ther deterioration of ruins exposed to the elements. Resto ration designed to recreate ruins as they appeared in antiquity is the ultimate and most costly step. Because res toration can bring about profound changes in archaeological remains, questions of whetiier, how, and how much to re store are fraught with controversy. There are issues of ap propriate technical applications, such as what materials are strongest and least obtrusive for structural reinforcement or the most effective way to shelter delicate mosaics. There are philosophical and aesthetic debates over how much to re store and how much to leave to visitors' imaginations. There are economic arguments about the costs of post-excavation treatments in relation to calculated returns on investments for increasingly elaborate restorations. The thorniest ques tion of all is who finally determines the extent of site resto ration. This decision is rarely made by archaeologists but often by architects, landscape planners, tourist consultants, and ministry officials with varied, even conflicting aims and ideas. Political or religious forces may also play a role, as when religious proponents insist that ancient houses of wor ship be reconsecrated for modern use (as occurred at Ma sada) or politicians decree that excavated structures be re furbished as modern national symbols (as the Iraqis intend for the ziggurat at Babylon). Ultimately, whoever pays for site restoration may dictate not only its shape and scope but also its technical and aesthetic detail (Ucko, 1989c; Killebrew and Hachlili, forthcoming). Even if the preservation versus restoration dilemma can be resolved, antiquities tourism is not without its drawbacks. Ancient sites, despite their apparent solidity, are actually quite fragile. The mere presence of visitors at an archaeo logical site, no matter how well conserved, can cause dam age; and the more visitors, the more severe the damage. This is evident already in Egypt, where pharaonic-period tombs and temples are suffering from the accumulated effects of the exhaled breath and sweating bodies of the thousands of tourists who tiiread their way through the ruins annually.
The impact of increased tourism can extend beyond the site itself into tire surrounding environment. At Petra in Jordan, the Sik, the spectacular natural gorge leading into the site, is threatened by clouds of dust churned up by increased motor traffic tiirough it. Efforts are underway to control this situation, but some irreparable harm has already occurred. Archaeological sites that attract too many tourists can fall victim to their own success. M u s e u m s . Museums seem to offer a benign alternative to touristic promotion of sites. Archaeological museums, the distilled essence of archaeological research, constitute a complementary focus for the attentions of both tourists and archaeologists. Moreover, in museums it is possible to pres ent antiquities in protected, interpretive contexts unachiev able at archaeological sites. The complex and ambiguous relationship between archaeology and tourism, however, ex tends even to museums. Understanding that relationship be gins again with past history. National archaeological museums were established in every colonial capital in the Near East—Cairo (1902), Da mascus (1919), Beirut (1920), Baghdad (1926), Jerusalem (1929), and Amman (1951). At their founding, they con formed in architecture and arrangement to prevailing met ropolitan notions of the preservation and display of antiq uities. At independence, they were bequeathed to their respective emergent nation-states along with firmly fixed western notions of what museums should be. With few ex ceptions, tiiese museums and the ideas behind them have changed little in the intervening years. Today tiiey face man ifold challenges: aging physical structures, outdated exhi bition galleries, cramped storage facilities overflowing with new finds, chronic understaffing, and persistent underfunding. Despite these problems, national museums in the Near East continue to attract tourists and archaeologists because they remain the repositories of their countries' most signifi cant archaeological discoveries. Archaeological museums established since nationhood, notably in Israel and in die Gulf Arab states, have followed more modernizing ttajectories. This situation is also true of smaller local museums and site museums created through out the region, both those developed by departments of an tiquity, such as the Idlib Museum in Syria (which serves as a regional museum and as the Ebla site museum), and those founded by various universities, like the National Maritime Museum at Haifa University and the Museum of Jordanian Heritage at the Yarmouk University Institute of Archae ology and Anthropology. National archaeological museums (or their parent de partments of antiquity) have also originated exhibitions that have traveled outside the region, attracting and informing both tourists and archaeologists. A partial list includes The Treasures of Tutankhamun (Egypt, 1976-1979), The King's Highway (Jordan, 1986-1987) and Ebla to Damascus (Syria,
TOURISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY 1985-1987), and King Herod's Dream (Israel, 1988-1990). T h e newly instituted practice of long-term loans of archae ological artifacts to Western museums, such as the Chal colithic materials lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by the Israel Antiquities Authority in 1994, promises to have a similar popularizing and educational ef fect. Archaeology, Tourism, and Nationalism. National museums of archaeology and the collections they hold rep resent the cultural heritage of tiieir respective nations. Cul tural heritage is a useful thing for nation-states, providing a sense of national identity and a focus for political solidarity. It is also a commodity that can be sold to foreigners, not as artifacts (though this practice occurs) but as something to be experienced through tourism. T h e questions remain, which cultural heritage to market and whose national story to tell? In a region as politically, ethnically, religiously frag mented as the contemporary Near East, competing nation alisms can and do make incompatible demands on tire cus todians of archaeological sites. T h e presentation of sites, selecting some for preservation and promotion and omitting others, can be politically, religiously or ethnically expressive (Silberman, 1990, Ucko, 1989a). This extends as well to mu seums, where arrangement and emphasis (as well as omis sion) in the display of artifacts can be equally significant (Anderson, 1983; chapter 10). Archaeological monuments are tangible symbols of the past, but as archaeologists know, monuments do not speak for themselves, they must be interpreted. T h e main aim of archaeological research therefore is to unearth, interpret, and understand the past through its relict material culture. Archaeologists realize that this endeavor is a complex pro cess involving many tentative interpretations. Such tentativeness is difficult to convey appropriately to nonspecialists, who visit archaeological sites or museums in search of sim ple messages from these tangible symbols of the past. Future Prospects. Because the success of tourism de pends not only on interest and access but also on civil se curity, it is vulnerable to disruptions that create insecurity. In a region still striving toward peace and stability, tourist clienteles and public images painstakingly built up can be shattered in an instant by violence. That violence need not erupt into war, as it did in 1990-1991 in Iraq and Kuwait. A single savage act is sufficient. Political extremists know this and have in some cases (as in Egypt and Turkey) de liberately targeted tourist facilities or tourists themselves in calculated efforts to topple sitting governments. No tourist seeks such risks, so the effects of violence can be chilling for tourism. In the mid-1990s, the prospects for peace are promising. Recent moves toward reconciliation in tire region will re shape the relationship of archaeology and tourism once more. T h e opening of once-closed frontiers will eliminate
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existing artificial limitations to travel and research. Barriers to local and regional tourism, as those that once existed be tween Jordan and Israel, are already coming down. A stable peace will also make the region a more attractive destination for international tourists. Increasing tourism will contribute to foreign currency earnings, in m m helping spur economic growth, which in its turn will help solidify the peace. There remains the danger, however, that the haste to foster such growth will overwhelm attempts to restrain development for the protection of antiquities. Unregulated development threatens serious impacts on the very antiquities that are objects of archaeological research and touristic interest. [See also Development and Archaeology; Museums and Museology; Nationalism and Archaeology; and Restoration and Conservation.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, 1983. Chapter 10, "Map, Cen sus, Museum," is of primary importance for understanding the re lationship between nationalism and cultural heritage. Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua. The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed. Jerusalem, 1983. Complete and very useful chronicle of early exploration, copiously illustrated with reproductions of con temporary prints. Fagan, Brian. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archae ologists in Egypt. "Wakefield, R.I. 1992. Killebrew, Ann, and Rachel Hachlili, eds. Interpreting the Past: Present ing Archaeological Sites to the Public. Haifa, forthcoming. Publication of an international symposium held in 1993, the first of its kind to treat issues of site preservation in die Near East, ranging from the minutely technical to the broadly philosophical. Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Ar chaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917, New York, 1 9 8 2 . History of early archaeological work in Palestine, at tempting more syndiesis than Ben-Arieh (above). Silberman, Neil Asher. Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modem Middle East. New York, 1990. Series of case studies on the relationship of archaeology and nationalism from die Balkans to the Levant. Silberman, Neil Asher. "Power, Politics, and the Past: The Social Con struction of Antiquity in the Floly Land," In The Archaeology of So ciety in the Holy Land, edited by Thomas E. Levy, pp. 9-23. New York, 1995. Compact summary of the argument in Silberman (1990), focused on Palestine. Ucko, Peter, series ed. One World Archaeology. London, 1988-. Series of works on the political, economic, and social relevance of archae ology worldwide to the larger society, which includes the following volumes: Robert Layton, ed., Who Needs the Past: Lndigcnous Values and Archaeology (1988); Stephen Shennan, ed., Archaeological Ap proaches to Cultural Identity (1989a); Robert Layton, ed., Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions (1989b); Henry F. Cleere, ed., Archaeological Heritage Management in the Modern World (1989c); and Peter Gathercole and David Lowentiial, eds., The Politics of the Past (1990). UNESCO. The World Heritage: Reference Map and List of Recorded Sites. Madrid, 1991. Map and list only, precisely as described in the title. Vercoutter, Jean. The Search for Ancient Egypt. Translated by Ruth Sharman. New York, 1992. Thought-provoking and richly illus trated essay on early Western exploration in Egypt.
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Wigg, David. Of Mosaics and Mosques: A Ijook at the Campaign to Pre serve Cultural Heritage. Washington, D.C., 1 9 9 4 . Journalistic essay mat draws out the implications of the complex relationship between cultural heritage and tourism.
botanical information is scantiest for the Lower Paleolithic period, although geological evidence from the Azraq area indicates periods of stable ground cover fluctuating witii ep isodes of erosion and deposits of windblown silts and sand JOSEPH A . GREENE (Besancon et a l , 1989; Hunt, 1989), a cyclic phenomenon mat has been partially corroborated by undated pollen pro files (Kelso and Rollefson, 1989). [See Dating Techniques; TRANSJ ORD AN. [ This entry provides a broad survey of Paleobotany.] the history of Transjordan as known primarily from archaeo The earlier part of the Middle Paleolithic appears to have logical discoveries. It is chronologically divided into five articles: been a cool period with considerably higher rainfall than at Prehistoric Transjordan present, although a period of desiccation began about 60,000 Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages years ago, increasing in intensity through the Upper Paleo Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods lithic with an interlude of amelioration from about 35,000 to Transjordan in the Byzantine Period 25,000 years ago. T h e Epipaleolithic began under mild con Transjordan in the Islamic Period ditions, but wet and dry intervals fluctuated every two thou In addition to the related articles on specific subregions and sand-three thousand years, culminating in the moist cir sites referred to in this entry, see also History of the Field, article cumstances for the Natufian period (Henry, 1986, pp. 8on Archaeology in Jordan.] 12). T h e situation for the Neolithic is franldy confusing, de spite the intensity of research in Transjordan and the sur Prehistoric Transjordan rounding region. Claims for increasing regional aridity at about 6000 BCE (e.g., Kenyon, 1979; Horowitz, 1979) seem Except for a few unsystematic surveys and excavations ear unfounded on the basis of excavations at 'Ain Ghazal (Rol lier in die twentietii century (e.g., Field, i960; Rhotert, 1938; lefson and Kohler-Rollefson, 1989), aldiough modern con Waechter et al., 1938; Zeuner, 1957), interest in the prehis ditions may have been attained sometime in the fiftii millen tory of Transjordan remained relatively casual until die nium. [See 'Ain Ghazal.] 1960s, when Diana Kirkbride's excavations at Neolithic Cultural Developments. T h e earlier phases of the Beidha (Kirkbride, 1966), near Petra, demonstrated the at Lower Paleolithic period are poorly known in Transjordan. tractions that this underexplored landscape held in store. The only candidate for an Early Acheulean ascription is Abu Research accelerated in the 1970s (Garrard and Price, 1 9 7 5 Khas, near Pella in the Jordan Valley (Villiers, 1983), where 1977; Henry et al., 1981), and since the onset of the 1980s artifacts show technological and typological similarities to Transjordan has become a principal focus of prehistoric in 'Ubeidiya in Palestine. [See Pella; 'Ubeidiya.] However, vestigations in the Levant. since die artifacts were redeposited from their original lo Ecological Setting. T h e ecological diversity that char cation by erosion, the age is uncertain. T h e same problems acterizes Transjordan's varied terrain can be classified into apply to the late Middle Paleolithic collection from Wadi four major north-south trending environmental corridors 'Uweinid in eastern Jordan (Rollefson, 1984). (Madany, 1978; Henry, 1986). From west to east, these in By contrast, Late Acheulean sites are numerous, although clude: the Rift Valley system, including the Jordan Valley, only two have been excavated, both in the Azraq basin the Dead Sea basin, and the Wadi 'Arabah. [See Jordan Val (Hunt and Garrard, 1989; Copeland, 1991). Results of these ley.] This region is hot and, for die last two areas, dry; the excavations and surface collections from throughout the western highlands and adjacent slopes, which receive the country indicate the existence of three principal Late Acheu highest precipitation (200-600 mm per year) and enjoy rel lean traditions based on variations in tool types and tech atively moderate temperature ranges; the steppe region, nology: the western Levantine Late Acheulean (cf. Rollef which, with 100-200 mm of annual precipitation is unarable son, 1981), the desert wadi Acheulean, and the Azraq facies but which provides considerable pasturage for animals; and (Copeland and Hours, 1988). the eastern and southern deserts, with less than 100 mm of In general, it appears that the Late Acheulean inhabitants precipitation and seasonal but sparse vegetation. Much of of Transjordan roamed the countryside in small bands of the northeastern part of this area is covered with basalt perhaps ten-fifteen people. One exception to this is the site flows. Underground aquifers drain a vast region of eastern complex at Fjaje in southern Transjordan, where the distri Transjordan, southern Syria, western Iraq, and northern bution of artifacts indicates a seasonal concentration of au Saudi Arabia, resulting in the oasis springs and pools of the tonomous groups to "harvest" herds of animals migrating otherwise arid Azraq basin. [See Azraq.] from the Wadi 'Arabah to die Jordanian plateau (Rollefson, 1985). Changes in climate during the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs strongly influenced the distribution of vegetation in Middle Paleolithic sites are absolutely abundant through out Transjordan, accounting for 60 percent or more of the the countryside of Transjordan. Paleoclimatic and paleo-
TRANSJORDAN: Prehistoric Transjordan sites discovered in recent surveys (e.g., MacDonald et al., 1983; Rollefson, 1987a). All of die assemblages conform to the Levantine Mousterian; earlier claims for a Yabrudian presence in northeastern Transjordan have not been borne out by recent investigations (Copeland and Hours, 1988). Two phases of die Middle Paleolithic are evident: an early phase dominated by blades and elongated Levallois points followed by a younger phase, characterized by smaller Lev allois flakes and Mousterian points (Copeland and Hours, 1988). Examples from the earlier stage are the excavated deposits from 'Ain Difla in west-central Transjordan, dated by tiiermoluminescence to 120,000 BP (Clark, 1991), and the assemblages dug from T o r Sabiha and Tor Faraj, south of Ras en-Naqb. [See Ras en-Naqb.] T h e younger phase is re flected by the artifacts from Wadi Enoqiyya just north of Azraq. T h e n-ansitional (Middle-Upper Paleolithic) Emireh industry is known from several surface exposures in the Wadi el-Hasa (MacDonald et a l , 1982; 1983). [See Hasa, Wadi el-.] Despite a decrease in the number of Upper Paleolithic sites, the rate of assemblages per thousand years is compa rable to that of the Middle Paleolithic (Rollefson, 1987a, p. 772). T h e Levantine Aurignacian tradition, based heavily on the production of endscrapers and burins, has been identi fied in the Ras en-Naqb area, and examples of the bladebladelet Ahmarian tradition are known from Wadi el-Hasa and the Azraq basin (Byrd and Garrard, 1990). Tools made on bladelets ("microliths") dominate the in ventories of Epipaleolifhic sites, although larger tools con tinue to be important. Chipped-stone assemblages show considerable local diversity in the use of specific techniques and particular configurations of tool types (Henry, 1988; Byrd, 1988), although in general they conform to the Kebaran-Geometric, Kebaran-Natufian sequence of the rest of the Levant. [See Carmel Caves.] Settlement diversity is also pronounced during the Epipaleolithic, ranging from small, ephemeral campsites to extensive and deep occupation ho rizons. T h e Geometric Kebaran sites Jilat 6 and Kharaneh IV extended over 2 ha (5 acres). Jilat 6 included several dwelling floors, two coated with red ocher, and Kharaneh IV has produced Transjordan's oldest human burials (Rolston, 1982). Natufian hunter-gatherers ranged from the northeastern deserts (Betts, 1982) to the southern exttemes of Transjor dan (Henry et al., 1985). Sites vary from small, temporary camps (Byrd, 1989; Gebel, 1988) to large, semipermanent or perhaps permanent settlements (MacDonald et a l , 1983; Edwards et a l , 1988). T h e substantial settlement at Wadi Hammeh 27 in the Jordan Valley includes an impressive ar ray of ground-stone artifacts, dwellings, and artwork, as well as several human burials with grave goods. Azraq 18 in east ern Transjordan produced at least eleven burials (Byrd and Garrard, 1990). Although the initial steps leading to agri culture are probably to be found in the Natufian (Gebel,
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1984, pp. 7-8), it is not until the Neolithic tiiat definite ev idence of human control over plants and animals is found. [See Agriculture.] Two small Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) sites have been identifed on the basis of the presence of Khiamian points: Sabra 1 near Petra and Jebel Queisa, south of Ras en-Naqb. In northern Transjordan, the cave of 'Iraq edDubb in Wadi Yabis has produced a broad range of infor mation, including an oval structure, human burials, well-preserved plant and animal remains, and a chippedstone industry with Khiamian points, all associated with a C-14 date of 8000 BCE; it is not yet clear if the plants include domesticated varieties. [See Yabis, Wadi el-.] The PPNB period witnessed a considerable series of de velopments, including rectangular architecture (Banning and Byrd, 1987); the domestication of animals (Kohler-Rollefson, 1988; 1989a); local and regional population growth (Rollefson, 1987b; 1989); and an elaboration of ritual prac tices (Rollefson, 1983a; 1986; T u b b , 1985). The early P P N B is poorly known in Transjordan, al though the phase is signaled by the presence of Helwan pro jectile points at Jilat 7 in the Azraq area and ad-Daman near Petra. Surface indications of curvilinear architecture and Helwan points at Abu Hudhud in Wadi el-Hasa hold con siderable promise for future excavations (Rollefson, n.d.). The middle PPNB and late P P N B constitute the "classic" Levantine Neolitiiic period, which can be described in great detail for Transjordan as a consequence of the work con ducted at Beidha and 'Ain Ghazal. [See Beidha.] The smallto medium-sized middle P P N B farming villages relied on cereal and pulse agriculture and hunting supplemented by goat herding (Kohler-RoUefson et a l , 1988). [See Cereals.] This mixed-subsistence base was lucrative, at least in the short term (Kohler-Rollefson, 1988), leading to the growth of late P P N B "megasites" such as 'Ain Ghazal, Wadi Shu'eib, and perhaps Basta, all of which extended over more than 12 ha (30 acres). [See Shu'eib, Wadi; Basta.] T h e strain on the delicate ecological systems forced the abandonment of several middle PPNB settlements, however, such as Jer icho and Beidha (Rollefson and Kohler-Rollefson, 1989), [See Jericho.] The degradation of local environments was exacerbated by demands on forests for fuel to manufacture the lime plaster that was typically used for house floors and walls (Rollefson, 1990b). T h e removal of trees and brush also eliminated numerous wild-animal habitats, so tiiat by the end of the late P P N B cattle, pigs, and perhaps sheep had been domesticated to replace the variety of disappearing wild species. [See Cattle and Oxen; Pigs; Sheep and Goats.] There is a wealth of evidence pertaining to ritual and re ligion from middle and late PPNB sites, best typified by the materials from 'Ain Ghazal. Three principal types of human burials occurred, including a subfloor or courtyard, flexed, and decapitated style for most people over die age of a year or so; "trash-pit" burials for about a fourth of the adult pop-
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ulation, with skulls left intact with the body; and infant "dis posal," with skulls left intact, sometimes occurring as foun dation deposits. The first style is probably a family ritual that, along with several plastered skulls, was associated with ancestor veneration (Rollefson, 1983a; Simmons et al., 1990). The second style suggests at least an incipient social hierarchy within the community. The treatment of infants may indicate an absence of "social value" for babies, a pos sible psychological accommodation for a society that expe rienced a 30 percent infant mortality rate (Rollefson et al., 1984). [See Burial Techniques.] Human figurines of baked or unbaked clay figured prom inently in the lives of the people, and at least one type is clearly identifiable with human fertility. With only one ex ception, human figurines were broken at or near the neck, a "ritual decapitation" that paralleled tire normal burial style. Clay animal figurines were also numerous, and cattle overwhelmingly dominated the identifiable pieces. Several specimens bore cord impressions behind the heads, as if they were haltered, and two cattle figurines were ritually "killed" and buried beneath a house floor (Rollefson, 1986). The most stunning ritual objects are lime-plaster statues and busts found in three caches at 'Ain Ghazal. One cache has been stratigraphically dated to before 7100 BCE; another produced two C-14 dates of about 6700 BCE; and the third cache can be assigned to about 6500 BCE. It seems probable that the smaller busts (about 45 cm high) represent mythical lineage or clan members, and the taller statues (about 90 cm high) might represent mythical village founders. The effects of the growing population of Transjordan during the late PPNB, and the sustained degradation of local environments, are reflected in the establishment of hamlets, hunting camps, and specialized "burin sites" in tire eastern steppe and deserts. Jilat 7, for example, included several round structures and domesticated barley and wheat but no domesticated animals. T h e camp at Azraq 31 produced do mesticated cereals, probably domesticated sheep or goats, and the remains of numerous wild animals (Garrard et al., 1988). Dhuweila is only one of a large number of late PPNB hunting camps in the Basalt, or Black, Desert, some of which appear to be associated with hunting traps called kites (Betts, 1988b; 1989). Burin sites are known from much of Transjordan (Rollefson et al., 1982; MacDonald et a l , 1983), but drey are especially concentrated in the arid parts of eastern Transjordan. The function of burin sites remains enigmatic, although they may be associated with pastoral camps (Betts, 1988a). By the beginning of the sixth millennium, all known farm ing villages in the southern Levant were abandoned with die exception of 'Ain Ghazal, Wadi Shu'eib, and perhaps Basta. These P P N C sites, not far from the steppe, continued to thrive as agricultural settlements, but changes in chippedstone tool production, architecture, subsistence economy, and ritual all indicate major departures from late PPNB
norms (Rollefson, 1990a; Rollefson and Kohler-Rollefson, 1993). It appears that some of the village people spent con siderable time with their herds in the unfarmable steppe and desert, beginning a process that would eventually lead to fully segregated farming and pastoral economies (KohlerRollefson, 1989b). P P N C burials were normally subfloor or courtyard interments, but the skull invariably remained in tact with the rest of the body. Most burials also included "offerings" of pig bones (Rollefson et al., 1991). Animal figurines were relatively sparse, and the few P P N C human figurines do not show ritual decapitation, suggesting a major shift away from the religious beliefs of the PPNB period. With the emergence of the Pottery Neolithic (PN) period, Transjordan witnessed the founding of numerous new farming hamlets in areas not damaged by P P N B ancestors (Kafafi, 1988; Gordon and Knauf, 1987), in addition to maintained occupations at 'Ain Ghazal and Wadi Shu'eib. It is now clear that pottery manufacture was a locally de veloped technology and not imported from the northern Le vant (Rollefson et a l , 1991), although trends within the P N period in Transjordan and Palestine are admittedly difficult to trace. Yarmukian pottery is characteristic of northern Transjordan and differs considerably from the PNA wares and decorative styles found in the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea basin, and Wadi el-Hasa (Kafafi, 1990; Kenyon, 1979; Bennett, 1980; MacDonald et al., 1983). The pottery from the upper layers at 'Ain Ghazal is entirely Yarmukian, but at Wadi Shu'eib there are occasional lenses of PNA sherds within the greater Yarmukian stratigraphic sequence (Sim mons et al., 1989). [See Ceramics, article on Typology and Technology.] The transition from the P P N C to the Yarmukian is well documented at 'Ain Ghazal, and the initial phases of the Yarmukian at the village maintained the agricultural and herding scheme of the preceding aceramic antecedents. Near the end of the sequence at 'Ain Ghazal, however, sub stantial architecture was replaced by flimsy, hutlike struc tures, signaling die end of 'Ain Ghazal as a permanent set tlement; it was visited instead on a temporary basis, probably in die late summer or autumn, by full-time sheep/goat pastoralists. Contemporaneous sites in die steppe and desert flourished in number (Betts, 1986; Rollefson, 1988). P N ritual practices are poorly known. Although a number of clay animal and human figurines (including "coffeebean" fertility examples from 'Ain Ghazal and Tell Abu Thawwab), have been recovered, not a single Yarmukian burial has, implying that off-site cemeteries may have been the rule. A small apsidal structure at 'Ain Ghazal may have served some public function in view of its unique shape and die presence of exclusively fine-ware ceramics (Rollefson et al, 1991), but to what end could not be determined. A late P N site in Wadi Ziqlab, perhaps ascribable to the P N B of the fifth millennium (Banning et al., 1989), yielded several slab-lined burials with accompanying pottery vessels; so far,
TRANSJORDAN: Prehistoric Transjordan however, there have been no comparable examples from elsewhere in Transjordan. [See Ziqlab, Wadi.] Surveys have identified numerous Chalcolithic sites throughout Transjordan's Rift Valley and western high lands, but so far only a few have been excavated. The most productive research has focused on Teleilat el-Ghassul and Abu Hamid. It now appears that the Chalcolithic derived from local late Neolithic roots (Hennessey, 1982, pp. 5 7 58). Covering about 6.5 ha (16 acres), Abu Hamid's small houses (about 25 sq m) and associated storage and pro cessing facilities reflect a rural agricultural village that was probably typical for the Jordan Valley and adjacent slopes. Crops included olives, figs, flax, cereals, and legumes. [See Olives.] Domesticated animals consisted of cattle, sheep/ goat, pigs, dogs, and ass; hunting and fishing were rarely pursued. [See Dogs.] The artifact inventory was generally mundane, characterized by pottery, baskets, and chippedstone and ground-stone pieces. Clay animal figurines were rare, and only a few violin-shaped human figurines were recovered. T o date no human burials have been found at the site, indicating that separate cemeteries were the rule. [See Abu Hamid, Tell.] Teleilat el-Ghassul was a huge settlement, extending over more tiian 20 ha (49 acres). T h e houses were large (about 35-60 sq m) and regularly situated, suggesting that some central planning authority may have existed (Levy, 1986, p. 88). Not enough information has been assembled to deter mine if die Trans Jordanian Chalcolithic settlements were arranged in a hierarchical political system analogous to chiefdoms, but if this was the case, then Ghassul was undoubtedly a chiefly center. One area of the site revealed a walled sanctuary area con taining two buildings with painted walls from which cultic vessels and clay figurines were recovered. T h e only human burials found were infants; adults were evidently buried out side the settlement, perhaps in a formal cemetery. Evidence of the subsistence economy parallels that of Abu Hamid. Teleilat el-Ghassul may have served as a regional cere monial center in view of the remarkable murals recovered from several of the buildings (Cameron, 1981). Depicted in vivid primary colors (red, green yellow, black, brown, and white), clusters of geometric shapes, processions of masked humans, and occasional animal designs combine to suggest a magico-religious system under the control of a full-time priesthood diat oversaw common rituals and a calendar of special rites. [See Teleilat el-Ghassul; Wall Paintings.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Russell B. "The Wadi Fidan Project, Jordan, 1989." Levant 23 (1991): 1 8 1 - 1 8 3 . Banning, E. B., and Brian F. Byrd. "Houses and the Changing Resi dential Unit: Domestic Architecture at PPNB 'Ain Ghazal, Jordan." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53 (1987): 309-325.
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Banning, E. B., et al. "Wadi Ziqlab Project 1987: A Preliminary Re port." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan (ADAJJ 33 (1989): 43-58. Bennett, Crystal-M. "Soundings at Dhra', Jordan." Levant 12 (1980): 30-39Besancon, Jacques, et al. "Contribution to die Study of the Geomorphology of the Azraq Basin." In The Hammer on the Rock, edited by Lorraine Copeland and Francis Hours, pp. 7-63. British Archaeo logical Reports, International Series, no. 540. Oxford, 1989. Betts, Alison V. G. "A Natufian Site in the Black Desert, Eastern Jor dan." Paleorient S .2 (1982): 79-82. Betts, Alison V. G. "The Prehistory of die Basalt Desert, Transjordan: An Analysis." Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1986. Betts, Alison V. G. "The Black Desen Survey: Prehistoric Sites and Subsistence Strategies in Eastern Jordan." In The Prehistory of Jor dan, edited by Andrew N. Garrard and Hans G. Gebel, pp. 369391. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 396. Oxford, 1988a. Betts, Alison V. G. "1986 Excavations at Dhuweila, Eastern Jordan: A Preliminary Report." Levant 20 (1988b): 7 - 2 1 . Betts, Alison V. G. "The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Period in Eastern Jordan." Pal&orient 15.1 (1989): 1 4 7 - 1 5 3 . Byrd, Brian F„ and Gary O. Rollefson. "Natufian Occupation in the Wadi el Flasa, Soudiern Jordan." ADAJ 28 (1984): 1 4 3 - 1 5 0 . Byrd, Brian F. "Late Pleistocene Settlement Diversity in the Azraq Basin." F'aleorient 14.2 (1988): 257-264. Byrd, Brian F. The Natufian Encampment at Beidha: Late Pleistocene Adaptation in the Southern Levant, Jutland Archaeological Society Publications, vol. 23.1. Aarhus, 1989. Byrd, Brian F., and Andrew N. Garrard. "The Last Glacial Maximum in die Jordanian Desert." In The World at. 18 000 BP, vol. 2, Low Latitudes, edited by Clive Gamble and Olga Soffer, pp. 78-96. Bos ton, 1990. Cameron, D. O. The Ghassulian Wall Paintings. London, 1981. Clark, Geoffrey, et al. "Excavations at Middle, Upper, and Epipaleolithic Sites in the Wadi Hasa, West-Central Jordan." In The Prehis tory of Jordan, pp. 209-285. Oxford, 1988. Clark, Geoffrey. "Wadi el-Hasa." American Journal ofArchaeology 95.2 (1991): 253-280. Copeland, Lorraine, and Francis Flours. "The Paleolithic in NorthCentral Jordan: An Overview of Survey Results from the Upper Zarqa and Azraq, 1982-1986." In The Prehistory ofJordan, pp. 2 8 7 309. Oxford, 1988. Copeland, Lorraine. "The Late Acheulian Knapping-Floor at CSpring, Azraq Oasis, Jordan." Levant 23 (1991): 1-6. Dollfus, Genevieve, ed. Abu Hamid: Village du 4c millenaire de la vallee dujourdain. Amman, 1988. Edwards, Philip C , et al, "Late Pleistocene Prehistory in die Wadi alHammeh, Jordan Valley." In The Prehistory of Jordan, pp. 525-565. Oxford, 1988. Edwards, Philip C. "Natufian Settlement in Wadi al-Hammeh." Paleorient 14.2 (1988): 3 0 9 - 3 1 5 . Field, Henry. "North Arabian Desert Archaeological Survey, 1 9 2 5 1950." Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 45.2 (i960): 1-24. Garrard, Andrew, and Nicholas Price. "A Survey of Prehistoric Sites in the Azraq Basin, Eastern Jordan." Paleorient?, (1975-1977): 1 0 9 126. Garrard, Andrew N., et al. "Prehistoric Environment and Settlement in die Azraq Basin: An Interim Report on die 1984 Season." Levant 18 (1986): 5-24. Garrard, Andrew N., et al. "Summary of Paleoenvironmental and Pre historic Investigations in the Azraq Basin." In The Prehistory of Jor dan, pp. 3 1 1 - 3 3 7 . Oxford, 1988.
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Gebel, Hans G. Das akaramische Neulithihum Vorderasiens. Beihefte zum Tubinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B, no. 52. Wies baden, 1984. Gebel, Hans G. "Late Epipaleolifhic-Aceramic Neolithic Sites in the Petra Area." In The Prehistory ofJordan, pp. 67-100. Oxford, 1988. Gordon, Robin, and E. Axel Knauf. "Er-Rumman Survey, 1985." ADAJii (1987): 289-298. Gustavson-Gaube, Carrie. "Tell esh-Shuna North, 1985: A Prelimi nary Report." ADAJ 10 (1986): 6 9 - 1 1 3 . Helms, S. W., and Alison V. G. Betts. "The Desert 'Kites' of the Badiyat esh-Sham and Nortii Arabia." Paleorient 13.1 (1987): 4 1 - 6 7 . Hennessy, J. Basil. "Preliminary Report on a First Season of Excava tions at Teleilat Ghassul." Ijivant 1 (1967)1 1-24. Hennessy, J. Basil. "Preliminary Report on a First Season of Excava tions at Teleilat Ghassul." Levant 1 (1969): 1-24. Hennessy, J. Basil. "Teleilat Ghassul: Its Place in the Archaeology of Jordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol, 1, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 55-58. Amman, 1982. Henry, Donald, Fekri Hassan, Marcia Jones, and K. Henry. "The In vestigation of the Prehistory and Paleoenvironments of Soutiiern Jor dan." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 25 (1981): 113-146. Henry, Donald O. "The Prehistory of Southern Jordan and Relation ships with the Levant." Journal of Field Archaeology 9 (1982): 4 1 7 444. Henry, Donald O., et al. "Archaeological and Faunal Evidence from Natufian and Timnian Sites in Southern Jordan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 257 (1985): 45-64. Henry, Donald O. "The Prehistory and Paleoenvironments of Jordan: An Overview." Paleorient 12.2 (1986): 5-26. Henry, Donald O. "The Epipaleolithic Sequence within die Ras En Naqb-El Quweira Area, Soutiiern Jordan." Paleorient 14.2 (1988): 245-256. Horowitz, Aharon. The Quaternary of Israel. New York, 1979. Hours, Francis. "The Paleolithic Industries of Wadi Enoqiyya, Azraq." In The Hammer on the Rock, pp. 403-450. Oxford, 1989. Hunt, Christopher. "Notes on the Sediments and Paleolithic Sites at Azraq." In The Hammer on the Rock, pp. 469-479. Oxford, 1989. Hunt, Christopher, and Andrew N. Garrard. "The 1985 Excavation at C Spring." In The Hammer on the Rock, pp. 3 1 9 - 3 2 3 . Oxford, 1989. Ibrahim, Mo'awiyah. "Grabungsberichte: Sahab." Archvv fur Orientforsclmng 29-30 (1983-1984): 256-260. Kafafi, Zeidan A. "Jebel Abu Thawwab: A Pottery Neolithic Village in North Jordan." In The Prehistory of Jordan, pp. 4 5 1 - 4 7 1 . Oxford, 1988. Kafafi, Zeidan A. "Early Pottery Contexts from 'Ain Ghazal, Jordan." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 280 (1990): 15-30. Kelso, G., and Gary O. Rollefson. "Two Late Quaternary Pollen Pro files from 'Ain el-Assad (Lion's Spring), Azraq." In The Hammer on the Rock, pp. 259-275. Oxford, 1989. Kenyon, Kathleen M. Archaeology in the Holy Ixind. 4th ed. New York, 1979. Kirkbride, Diana. "Five Seasons at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Village of Beidha in Jordan." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 98 (1966): 8-72. Kirkbride, Diana. "Beidha 1983: An Interim Report." ADAJ 2% (1984): 9-12, Kohler-Rollefson, Use. "The Aftermath of the Levantine Neolithic Revolution in the Light of Ecological and Ethnographic Evidence." Paleorient 14.1 (1988): 87-93. Kohler-Rollefson, Use, et al. "The Fauna from Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal." In The Prehistory ofJordan, pp. 423-430. Oxford, 1988. Kohler-Rollefson, Use. "Changes in Goat Exploitation at 'Ain Ghazal between Early and Late Neolithic: A Metrical Analysis." Paleorient 15.1 (1989a): 1 4 1 - 1 4 6 .
Kohler-Rollefson, Use. "Resolving the Revolution: Late Neolithic Re finements of Economic Strategies in the Eastern Levant." Zooarchaeologica 3 . 1 - 2 (1989b): 201-208. Kuijt, I., et al. "Early Neolithic Use of Upland Areas of Wadi el-Yabis: Preliminary Evidence from the Excavations of 'Iraq ed-Dubb, Jor dan." Paleorient 17.1 (1991): 99-108. Levy, Thomas E. "The Chalcolitiiic Period: Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine." Biblical Archaeologist 49.2 (1986): 8 2 108. Lindly, John, and Geoffrey Clark. "A Preliminary Lithic Analysis of the Mousterian Site of 'Ain Difla (WHS Site 634) in the Wadi Ali, West-Central Jordan." Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53 (1987): 279-292. MacDonald, Burton, et al. "The Wadi el-Hasa Survey 1981: A Prelim inary Report.'M£)4?26 (1982): 1 1 7 - 1 3 2 . MacDonald, Burton, et al. "The Wadi el-Hasa Survey 1982: A Prelim inary Report." ADAJ 27 (1983): 3 1 1 - 3 2 3 . Madany, M. "An Ecological Framework for a Nature Preserve System in Jordan." Unpub. ms., University of Illinois, Urbana, 1978. Muheisen, Mujahed S. "Le gisement du Kharaneh IV: Note sommaire sur la phase D." Paliorient 14.2 (1988): 265-269. Nissen, Hans J., et al. "Report on the First Two Seasons of Excavations at Basta, 1986-1987." ADAJ 31 (1987): 7 9 - 1 1 9 . Rhotert, H. Transjordanien: Vorgeschichtliche Porschungen. Stuttgart, 1938. Rollefson, Gary O. "The Late Acheulean Site at Fjaje, Wadi el-Bustan, Southern Jordan." Paleorient 7.1 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 5 - 2 1 . Rollefson, Gary O., et al. "A Burin Site in the Umm Utheina Disu-ict, Jebel Amman." ADAJ 2d (1982): 243-247. Rollefson, Gary O. "Ritual and Ceremony at Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan)." Paleorient 9.2 (1983a): 29-38. Rollefson, Gary O. "Two Seasons of Excavations at 'Ain el-Assad, Near Azraq, Eastern Jordan, 1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 1 . " Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 252 (1983b): 25-34. Rollefson, Gary O., et al. "Excavations at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Village of 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan): Preliminary Report of the 1982 Ex cavation Season." Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 1 1 6 (1984): 1 3 9 - 1 8 3 . Rollefson, Gary O. "A Middle Acheulian Surface Site from Wadi Uweinid, Eastern Jordan." Paleorient 10.1 (1984): 1 2 7 - 1 3 3 . Rollefson, Gary O., and Zeidan A. Kafafi. "Khirbet Hammam: A PPNB Village in the WadT el-Hasa, Southern Jordan," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 258 (1985): 63-69. Rollefson, Gary O. "Late Pleistocene Environments and Seasonal Hunting Strategies: A Case Study from Fjaje, Near Shobak, Soutiiern Jordan," In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 1 0 3 - 1 0 7 . Amman, 1985. Rollefson, Gary O. "Neolithic "Ain Ghazal (Jordan): Ritual and Cer emony II," Paliorient 1 2 . 1 (1986): 45-52. Rollefson, Gary O. "Chipped Stone Artifacts from the Limes Arabicus Surveys." In The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan, edited by S. Thomas Parker, pp. 759-792. British Archaeological Reports, Inter national Series, no. 340. Oxford, 1987a. Rollefson, Gary O. "Local and External Relations in the Levantine PPN Period: 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan) as a Regional Center." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol, 3, edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 29-32. Amman, 1987b. Rollefson, Gary O. "Stratified Burin Classes from 'Ain Ghazal: Impli cations for the Desert Neolithic of Jordan." In The Prehistory of Jor dan, pp. 437-449. Oxford, 1988. Rollefson, Gary O. "The Aceramic Neolithic of the Soutiiern Levant: The View from 'Ain Ghazal." Paleorient 15.1 (1989): 1 3 5 - 1 4 0 . Rollefson, Gary O., and Use Kohler-Rollefson. "The Collapse of Early Neolithic Settlements in the Southern Levant." In People and Culture m Change, part r, edited by Israel Hershkovitz, pp. 73-89. British
TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 508.1. Oxford, 1989.
Rollefson, Gary O. "Neolithic Chipped Stone Technology at 'Ain Gha zal, Jordan: The Status of the PPNC Phase." Paleorient 16.1 (1990a): 119-125.
Rollefson, Gary O. "The Uses of Plaster at Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal, Jor dan." Archeomalerials 4 (1990b): 33-54. Rollefson, Gary O., et al. "The Neolithic Village of'Ain Ghazal, Jordan: Preliminary Report on the 1988 Season." In Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1982-89, edited by Walter K. Rast, pp. 9 5 - 1 1 6 . Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Sup plement no. 27. Baltimore, 1991. Rollefson, Gary O., et al. "Neolithic Cultures at 'Ain Ghazal, Jordan." Journal of Field Archaeology 19 (1992): 443-470. Rollefson, Gary O., and Use Kohler-Rollefson. "PPNC Adaptations in the First Half of the 6th Millennium B.C." Paleorient 19.1 (1993): 33-42.
Rollefson, Gary O. "Abu Hudhud (WHS 1008): An EPPNB Settle ment in the Wadi el-Hasa, Southern Jordan." In Proceedings of the PPN Workshop, Warsaw, edited by Hans-Georg Gebel and Stefan Kowzlowski. Berlin, in press. Rolston, Scott. "Two Prehistoric Burials from Qasr Kharaneh." ADAJ 26 (1982): 2 2 1 - 2 2 9 .
Simmons, Alan H., et al. "Test Excavations at Wadi Shu'eib, a Major Neolithic Settlement in Central Jordan." ADAJ 33 (1989): 27-42. Simmons, Alan H., et al. "A Plastered Human Skull from Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal, Jordan." Journal of Field Archaeology 17.1 (1990): 1 0 7 110.
Tubb, Katherine. "Preliminary Report on tire 'Ain Ghazal Statues." Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 1 1 7 (1985): 1 1 7 - 1 3 4 . Villiers, Linda. "Final Report on Paleolithic Sampling at Abu el Khas, North Jordan." ADAJ'27 (1983): 27-44. Waechter, J„ and V. Seton-Williams. "The Excavations at Wadi Dhobai 1937-1938 and the Dhobaian Industry." Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 18 (1938): 1 7 2 - 1 8 6 . Zeuner, Frederick. "Stone Age Exploration in Jordan, I." Palestine Ex ploration Quarterly (1957): 7-54. G A R Y O. ROLLEFSON
Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages T h e archaeology of the region east of die centtal point of die Great Rift Valley is, in many ways, still in its infancy. Biblical connections encouraged early archaeologists to fo cus on the central territories of ancient Israel, while social and political difficulties in Transjordan discouraged early archaeological exploration. In the 1930s Nelson Glueck pi oneered the work in Transjordan by surveying most of the region, discovering many sites unknown before his time and showing that it was possible to do archaeological work there (Glueck, 1970). Only since die 1960s has excavation work on Bronze and Iron Age sites in Transjordan been begun in earnest. Since the last synthesis on Transjordan (Sauer, 1986), considerable new evidence for the Bronze and Iron Ages has been published, both from surveys and excavations (e.g., Homes-Fredericq and Hennessy, 1986-1989; Ibach, 1987; Miller, 1991). Although closely related to very well-docu mented archaeological syntheses west of the Jordan River, many of the new finds emphasize signiiicant differences be
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tween Transjordan and Cisjordan. T h e archaeology of Cisjordan can no longer be used as a paradigm for the events east of the Jordan. Transjordan has three geographic zones running northsoutii: the east bank of the Rift Valley, including the Jordan River, Dead Sea, and Arabah; the arable plateau, which, because of its relatively high altitude, receives enough rain for dry farming, narrowing as it proceeds south; and the eastern desert, which cannot support agriculture without springs and irrigation. Settlement patterns in these three regions are often strikingly different. The Jordan Valley, for instance, tends to have closer connections to the west than it does to the Transjordanian plateau. [See Jordan Valley; Judah.] E a r l y Bronze I—III P e r i o d s . T h e Early Bronze Age be gins after the Chalcolithic period (c. 3300 BCE). It is char acterized by the growth of urban centers, primarily in die northern part of the country. Although many of the sites are in or very near the river valleys (where water sources could support irrigation agriculture), other sites, including some of die largest ones (e.g., Jalul and Madaba, soutii of Amman; Tell el-Husn, near Irbid), controlled large dry-farming ter ritories on the plateau. This and die presence of the large EB I site of Jawa (North) in the northeastern desert, with its complex system of water management, confirms new evi dence from pollen that die climate was most likely wetter tiian today (Sauer, 1994). [See Jawa.] Climate was probably one of the reasons why this period was the most populated in Transjordan until near the end of Iron II (eighth-seventh centuries BCE). Jawa (North) was one of die most remarkable EB I sites. It was surrounded by a well-preserved city wall and a large gate tiirough which access was gained to a large setdement; outside die walls, in the valleys surrounding the city, a com plex series of waterworks included dams, embankments, sluices, and reservoirs. [See Reservoirs.] A megalithic tomb, probably a dolmen, from EB IB Tell el-TJmeiri near Am man, that contained twenty burials, twenty complete ce ramic vessels, and a few beads has helped to solve die mys tery of the chronology and function of similar undated tombs diroughout the southern Levant. [See Tombs; 'Umeiri, Tell el-; Grave Goods.] Another site, Bab edhDhra' at die entrance to the Lisan peninsula of the Dead Sea, has produced one of die largest EB I cemeteries so far uncovered in die Levant containing shaft tombs. It is the type-site for EB I in Transjordan. [See Bab edh-Dhra .] EB II—III saw the floruit of urbanization. The inhabitants of Bab edh-Dhra built a strong fortification wall and large buildings on the high points inside the city and expanded the cemetery in EB III with charnel houses (small buildings in which bodies were burned and buried). A neighboring site, Numeira, was a small town preserved by a fire that left more dian a meter of burned debris. T h e most significant EB site in Transjordan, however, is Zeraqun, northeast of 1
c
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TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages
Irbid. [See Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-.] It contains a holy precinct with twin temples and a round sacrificial altar with stairs similar to the complex of temples at Megiddo in modern Israel. [See Altars; Megiddo.] There is also a large building complex (possibly a palace), a stepped water shaft descend ing for more than 100 m from a scenic cliff face overlooking the Yarmuk River valley, and strong defenses surrounding an extensive domestic settlement. The EB material culture was similar to that west of the Jordan, suggesting close cultural and possibly ethnic con nections. Within the ceramic assemblage, several forms are widespread, such as holemouth jars and cooking pots, large pitlioi with flaring rims and rope molding around the upper shoulder, high-handled juglets, hemispherical bowls, and band painting (in EB IB). Among the weapons, mace heads were frequent. [See Weapons.] After pottery, die objects found most frequently are stone grinders for food produc tion. The period's monumental architecture resembles that appearing east and west of the Jordan River in die temples and altars at Megiddo and Zeraqun. T h e region's domestic architecture, however, is not uniform except that, at most EB sites, such as Tell el-'Umeiri, houses are conceived as compounds with living, storage, stable, and courtyard spaces combined into a single housing complex. Such com pounds reflect the integration of dispersed agricultural set tlements into large urban sites, perhaps for security reasons. Artistically, seal impressions in Transjordan are similar to those found in Cisjordan with geometric designs rolled over pottery by a cylinder seal. Early Bronze IV (or Middle Bronze I) Period. Toward the end of the third millennium (c. 2300 BCE), urbanism decreased in favor of nomadism. [See Pastoral Nomadism.] Large cemeteries at sites with no settlements, but near pe rennial water (e.g., Bab edh-Dhra', Pella, Tiwal esh-Sharqi, Amman), attest to die nomadic element. [See Pella; Am man.] Settled sites in the Jordan Valley and the southern part of the region are primarily not large urban centers, but small agricultural villages and towns. The conversion from the so phisticated urbanism of EB II—III to that of pastoral nomad ism in EB IV was probably caused in considerable part by a drying of the climate—drier even than today. T h e largest site from this period in all of the southern Levant is Khirbet Iskander in Wadi el-Wala, north of Wadi el-Mujib. [See Iskander, Khirbet.] It is the only ttuly fortified site with a city wall, defensive tower, and gate so far exca vated. Tell Abu Niaj, in the northern Jordan Valley, was one of tire small villages. Its neighbor and similar site, Tell elHayyat, produced an uninterrupted transition to the Middle Bronze Age. [See Hayyat, Tell el-.] Other small settlements include Tell Iktanu in the southern Jordan Valley; 'Umeiri; Lehun and 'Aro'er, on the north rim of Wadi el-Mujib; and Ader and Khirbet Habaj, near Kerak. [See Iktanu, Tell; L e hun; 'Aro'er.] Both Iskander and 'Umeiri also included nearby cemeteries.
Altiiough the EB IV lifestyle was drastically different from that during the period's earlier stages, the material culture still retained primarily EB traits. T h e pottery was hand made, with forms that naturally arose out of earlier ones. Unlike the universalism of the EB I—III ceramic forms, tiiis period saw the rise of families of pottery that can be isolated to regions (for the Amman region, cf. Palumbo and Peterman, 1993). Many of the tombs contained copper weapons, such as daggers, along with pottery; most of the burials were secondary. [See Burial Techniques.] Middle Bronze Age. Urbanism began to develop again in about 2000 BCE, heralding the Middle Bronze Age. How ever, Transjordan did not experience the same growth pat terns as Cisjordan. Glueck (1970) postulated that there was a significant gap in occupation on the southern Transjordanian plateau during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Altiiough the length of the " g a p " Glueck proposed is no longer argued, there certainly was a reduction, compared to the flourishing Early Bronze Age. A wetter climate allowed the growth of new urban centers, often on top of EB sites, especially in the Jordan Valley and on the northern and cen tral plateaus, but tiiere was still very little occupation in the southern regions. Urban centers on the plateau were similar to those in Cisjordan, but there tended to be more space between them. The major excavated sites are primarily in the Jordan Val ley, where there was closer communication with the pros perous west. Pella, in the north, contained an often-rebuilt brick city wall and burials within the city as well as outside, in large cemeteries. A temple with thick walls and small houses were found at Hayyat. At Tell Deir 'Alia, in the cen tral Jordan Valley, walls were preserved for more than 2 m in height, with a possible rampart against the city wall; at Tell Nimrin, in the southern part of the valley, there is a very deep, bricky deposit with several phases visible in a road cut. [See Nimrin, Tell.] On the plateau, the Amman citadel and 'Umeiri have pro duced ramparts similar to those in the west; 'Umeiri's ram part includes a dry moat at the bottom. T h e fact that M B pottery has been found in quantity at many other excavated sites (Abu Snesleh, Abila, Jerash, Deir 'Ain 'Abata, the Baq'ah Valley, Mekhayyaf) and in surveys tiiroughout northern Transjordan, including die eastern desert, suggests this period will become much better known. [See Abila; Jer ash; Baq'ah Valley.] Jawa (North) contains a fortress above the EB ruins that still preserves corbeled roofing stones. It may be that M B urbanization only slowly reached the plateau. T h e best-documented plateau site is 'Umeiri, but its remains are from the very end of the period. At several locations, EB IV shaft tombs have been found reused early in the period by M B IIA burials. It may be that the pastoral lifestyle of EB IV continued into the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age on the plateau. Elements of M B material culture resemble those in Cisjordan, including finely made pottery,
TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages often with white or cream slips and a reddish-brown painted design called chocolate-on-white ware that begins near the end of die period. Late Bronze Age. In Cisjordan die Late Bronze Age be gan in about 1550 BCE. There is so litde excavated material from this period in Transjordan that tiiere is no way to sup port or reject this date. Along with an apparently drier cli mate, the number and quality of sites diminish in the Late Bronze Age and remain virtually absent from the southern part of Transjordan. In many respects, the period is a con tinuation of the Middle Bronze Age. Ceramic forms con tinue but in degenerated wares and painted patterns. T h e international trade represented by imported items in Cisjor dan and die Jordan Valley is only wealdy apparent on the plateau. T h e major excavated sites are in the Jordan Valley. Pella produced finds primarily from tombs, but the site is well known from the Amarna letters, and Deir 'Alia contained a small shrine from late in the period. [See Amarna Tablets; Deir 'Alia Inscriptions.] Other deposits occur at Tell esSa'idiyeh and Abu Kliaraz. [See Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-.] Tombs were excavated at Kataret es-Samra in the soutii. On the plateau, U m m ed-Dananir in the Baq'ah Valley included burial caves and possibly a square temple. T h e old Amman airport held a small square sanctuary (possibly similar to tiiat at U m m ed-Dananir) that may have been used for human sacrifice or funerary functions, including cremation; this site contained most of the imported pottery and objects so far found on die plateau. [See Amman Airport Temple.] Other materials in secondary context have come from Abila and Qwelbeh, near Irbid, and Jerash. In the region east of the Dead Sea, ancient Moab of the Bible, surveys have found considerable evidence for L B occupation, perhaps even heavier than in die Amman region. [See Moab.] However, soutii of Wadi el-Hasa virtually nothing has appeared either in excavations or surveys. [See Hasa, Wadi el-.] Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, a fresh wave of settlements began that continued into the following Iron I period. Excavated sites include Irbid, Tell el-Fukhar (near Irbid), the Baq'ah Valley, 'Umeiri, Hesban, and possibly Madaba (based on tombs). [See Hesban; Madaba.] These sites are not continuations of the M B and earlier LB sites, but include, along with late L B pottery and objects, pottery tiiat is also akin to the Iron I, such as large quantities of collared pitlioi. It is likely that tiiese sites represent die set tlement processes of the nomadic groups that eventually be came the national groups of Transjordan known from the Bible and other literary sources: Gileadites, Ammonites, Moabites, and Israelites. Iron Age I. Beginning in about 1200 BCE or slightiy ear lier, die Iron I period is characterized by a rapid rise in the number of settlements throughout the plateau, except soutii of Wadi el-Hasa, as the climate seems to have become slightly wetter. T h e settlements that began toward the end
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of the Late Bronze Age continued. Edom probably existed as a nomadic tribal group, and parts of Midian may have come into the southern portions of Transjordan from the Hijaz. [See Edom; Midian.] T h e Philistines and Canaanites most likely shared a large part of the Jordan Valley, where die major urban centers were located. [See Philistines; Canaanites,] Tell es-Sa'idiyeh included a large courtyard building that may have been a governor's residence; and the covered staircase that de scended to the water table on the north slope of that site was an important public feature. At Tell el-Mazar, in the central valley, vessels from the Phoenician coast and a few from Egypt were imported in the eleventh century BCE; a large courtyard building from the tenth century BCE that con tained cultic ceramics (chalices, a cult stand) was also found tiiere. [See Mazar, Tell el-; Phoenicia.] At Deir 'Alia, exten sive remains from twelve phases were found, including Phi listine pottery, metallurgical tools for bronze production, and possible city walls with a gate. There was also evidence of an earthquake in about 1200 BCE. [See Deir 'Alia, Tell.] On the northern plateau is the ancient mound of Irbid, with a cemetery and a possible city wall. [See Irbid.] Recent excavations at Fuldiar have produced domestic dwellings with large quantities of collared pithoi and the only Philistine potsherd so far found on the plateau. T h e sites in the Am man area include the Baq'ah Valley, witii its cave burials; Sahab, with domestic dwellings and collared pithoi; Hesban, with a cistern and a rock-cut water or defensive installation; and 'Umeiri. [See Sahab; Cisterns.] T h e latter has the most coherent fortification system from this time in the soutiiern Levant, including a dry moat, a rampart, and a casemate wall; houses inside the wall were preserved up to 2.5 m high. At 'Umeiri more evidence was found for the 1200 BCE earth quake (see above). Altiiough 'Umeiri was larger than most highland villages, and certainly much better fortified, its ma terial culture represents tiiat of the earliest highland villages in Cisjordan, including about ninety reconstructable col lared pithoi. In Moab, small-scale excavations have unearthed village sites at Lehun and 'Aro'er along the north rim of Wadi Mujib. Balu', Medeinet el-Mu'arrajeh, and Medeinet el-'Aliya on the soutii rim were more major sites, but botii seem to belong to near the end of Iron I. [See Balu'.] Medeinet elMu'arrajeh may have copied the idea of a dry moat from 'Umeiri. Only soundings at very small, shallow sites have produced Iron I pottery in Edom, south of Wadi el-Hasa at Ba'ja and Sela. It is likely, however, that other sites will pro duce Iron I remains in the future. Other excavated sites with secondary or small deposits include Nimrin, Abu el-Kharaz, Abila, Jerash, and Feinan. [See Feinan.] Cemeteries were found at Sa'idiyeh, Mafraq, and Madaba. Surveys through out Transjordan have shown Iron I sites frequently, in all regions but on the southern plateau,
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TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages
Two assemblages of material culture can be discerned re lated to geographic regions and lifestyle. The sites in the Jordan Valley contain finds related to die major Canaanite and Philistine urban cultures of the coastal plain and large valleys in Cisjordan. They tend to contain imported pottery and objects and public buildings. The sites on the plateau are much poorer, with a limited assemblage of finds similar to the highland village settlements in Cisjordan. Several scholars have suggested tentative related tribal backgrounds for die groups inhabiting those sites in both Cisjordan and Transjordan, noting the similarity of finds at 'Umeiri and the villages of the hills north of Jerusalem. [See Jerusalem.] Iron Age II. Although early archaeologists placed the be ginning of the Iron II period after the invasion of Shishak (Sheshonq) in about 921 BCE, most Israeli scholars now be gin it in about 1000 BCE, with the commencement of the Israelite monarchy and the new millennium. There is not enough evidence from tenth-century BCE Transjordan to confirm this new periodization or not. Indeed, the evidence from well-documented excavations for sites before the eighth century BCE is not strong. This does not mean that occupation at that time was weak, but rather that the exca vation of that material has not yet taken place. The Iron II period is characterized by the rise of die mon archies of the small national groups on the plateau: Aramean Damascus, Ammon, Moab, and Edom. [See Damascus.] They enabled a gradual but steady rise in prosperity, ex emplified by a much richer and finer material culture toward the end of the period. There was also a rising national aware ness. During Iron I, the social structure of the plateau was probably tribal in nature, with loyalties expressed to local families and clans before any larger entity. By die last cen tury of Iron II, however, die copious finds illustrate regional developments in language dialects, writing, and pottery, which more or less correspond to the national boundaries known from the literary evidence. This could only have hap pened with national unity imposed from strong central gov ernments. A slightly wetter climate may have abetted these processes. The sites in the Jordan Valley probably belonged to Israel or Judah for the most part. Pella, curiously not mentioned in the Bible, may have been an exception; it may have be longed to Damascus, as did Tel Hadar to the north. [See Hadar, Tel.] The best sites for studying the early stages of Iron II were there—such as the walled city of ninth- and eighth-century BCE Sa'idiyeh that contained a small house shrine; a block of relatively poor houses was excavated from the eighth century BCE tiiere, as well. At Deir 'Alia the in scription of a vision received by the prophet Balaam (Nu. 22-24) was found in a layer dated to about 800 BCE. Tell Nimrin has so far produced only a few potsherds from the Early Iron II. On the plateau, excavations have produced very little from the Early Iron II, except for collared pitiioi at U m m
el-Hedamus (near Irbid). Surveys, however, have found many sites, including one of the largest tells in Jordan, at Husn and Irbid. Even in the Amman region, sites are few. The Amman citadel has produced potsherds, tire ninth-cen tury Amman Citadel Inscription, and a few fragmentary ar chitectural remains have been published, but nothing very coherent has yet emerged. The same is true at Sahab, 'Umeiri, and Jawa (South). Jalul (east of Madaba) has, how ever, produced a monumental flagstone street approaching a gate complex and a tripartite pillared building or a fourroom house. T h e large reservoir at Hesban, possibly to be identified with one of the "pools in Heshbon" (Sg. 7:4), seems to have been built in this period. East of the Dead Sea, in Moab, excavations at Dhiban (Dibon), although re covering much pottery from Early Iron II, were unable to form a coherent picture of any building. [See Dibon.] At Balu', recent excavations have located extremely well-pre served remains from possibly as early as die ninth century BCE, and tombs have been excavated at Madaba and Irbid. There is much more information for the Late Iron II pe riod, but most of it comes from the plateau, where the num ber of excavated sites is burgeoning, primarily in die central and southern regions. The Jordan Valley has not been as productive as it was for the earlier periods: its fortunes may have fallen with those of northern Israel near the end of tire eighth century BCE. At Sa'idiyeh the domestic quarter witii its block of houses continued into the seventh century BCE, but at Deir 'Alia only a series of pits has been uncovered, and very little beyond a cemetery has been found at Mazar. In the northern plateau, only small deposits with potsherds and fragmentary architecture have appeared at Abila, Fukhar, and Jerash. In the Amman region many sites are giving a good picture of die late Ammonite Idngdom. In the Baq'ah Valley small sites that include towers or agricultural buildings, such as Rujm al-Henu, are scattered across the valley. Overlooking the Baq'ah Valley at Safut, domestic buildings and a large corpus of typical Ammonite pottery has been found. On the Amman citadel many small finds have enriched the period, but the most dramatic remains come from the many tombs and towers/agricultural buildings in the immediate area. South of Amman, at Jawa (South), a structure with two stairways has been excavated within a city fortified with a casemate wall. 'Umeiri produced a large administtative compound with domestic structures to accommodate the bureaucrats who were administering a royal wine-produc tion facility. Otiier sites witii significant deposits, but less coherent architecture, include Hesban, Sahab, Jalul, 'Iraq elAmir, and Mt. Nebo. [See 'Iraq el-Amir; Nebo, Mount.] In Moab, Balu' has extremely well-preserved houses (sev eral witii their corbeled stone roofs still intact). Otiier ex cavations have found less coherent remains at Dhiban (Di bon), U m m er-Rasas, Lehun, 'Aro'er, and Udruh, however. [See U m m er-Rasas.]
TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods Excavation in Edom has been far more productive than in Moab, primarily because it received more attention from Crystal-M. Bennett's series of early excavations. She un covered domestic sites on top of U m m el-Biyara in Petra and at Tawilan outside Petra. [See U m m el-Biyara; Petra; Tawilan.] She also excavated part of an Assyrian fortress and Edomite structures at Buseirah, the capital of Edom. [See Buseirah.] At tire head of the Gulf of 'Aqaba Glueck's excavations at Tell el-Kheleifeh uncovered a trading depot probably associated with Red Sea shipping. [See Kheleifeh, Tell el-.] Less significant finds have been made at Petra., Ba'ja, Khirbet Dor, Sadeh, Abu Kharaz, Feifa, and Feinan.
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But tiiis era also witnessed the rise of the Nabateans, one of the most brilliant indigenous civilizations in the history of Transjordan. P e r s i a n P e r i o d (539-332 B C E ) . Little is known aboutthe history of Transjordan in the Persian period. Written evi dence is extremely scarce and few excavated sites have yielded material evidence of the period. A few scraps of ev idence may be gleaned from the Hebrew Bible, although none can be dated after the mid-fifth century BCE. Transjordan, Palestine, Syria, and Phoenicia all fell within the Persian province, or satrapy, called "Beyond the River" (i.e., the Euphrates River), possibly based on earlier Assyr ian and Babylonian terminology (Olmstead, 1944). T h e T h e end of the Iron II period is difficult to establish in province was governed by a Persian satrap, who in turn su Transjordan. In the Amman region there is no clear break. pervised territorial subdivisions administered by lesser Per Sites like 'Umeiri, where it has been clearly shown, and sian officials or local notables. Although the names of several Safut, Hesban, the Amman citadel, and others seem to ex such administrative districts are known for Palestine, there tend through tire Babylonian period and into the Persian is less evidence that the Persians organized Transjordan in period with no breaks. such a fashion. They may have installed die Jewish Tobiads [See also Cities, article on Cities of the Bronze and Iron to govern Ammon from 'Iraq el-Amir, where two Aramaic Ages; and the biographies of Bennett and Glueck.] inscriptions dated to the fifth or fourth century BCE refer to B I B L I O G R A P H Y a member of the Tobiad family. [See 'Iraq el-Amir.] Dornemann, Rudolph H. The Archaeology of the Transjordan in the The paucity of written evidence is paralleled by limited Bronze and Iron Ages. Milwaukee, 1 9 8 3 . material remains from Transjordan. All the regional archae Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan. Rev. ed. Cambridge, ological surveys report little or no Persian period pottery or Mass., 1 9 7 0 . any other artifactual evidence from this period. This paucity Homes-Fredericq, Denyse, and J. Basil Hennessy, eds. Archaeology of Jordan, vol, 1 , Bibliography; vol. 2 . 1 - 2 , Field Reports. Louvain, 1 9 8 6 - is in sharp contrast to the preceding Iron II period, which is characterized by numerous occupied sites throughout the 1989. Ibach, Robert D., Jr. Hesban, vol. 5, Archaeological Survey of the Hesban region. Some Persian period occupation is attested at a few Region: Catalogue of Sites and Characterizations of Periods. Berrien sites, such as Tell Deir 'Alia, Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, and Tell elSprings, Mich., 1 9 8 7 . Mazar in the Jordan Valley. [See Deir 'Alia, Tell; Sa'idiyeh, Ibrahim, Moawiyah, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1 9 7 5 . " Bul letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 2 2 ( 1 9 7 6 ) : 4 1 - Tell es-; and Mazar, Tell el-.] Copper mining seems to cease in the Wadi 'Arabah in tiiis period (c. 400 BCE). In addition, 66. MacDonald, Burton. The Wadi el Hasa Archaeological Survey, 1979the dense concentrations of Iron II sites farther south, in 1983, West-Central Jordan. Waterloo, Ont., 1 9 8 8 . Edom, also were abandoned by about 400 BCE. Thus, it ap Miller, J. Maxwell, ed. Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau. Amer pears that in the Persian period the sedentary population in ican Schools of Oriental Research, Archaeological Reports, 1 . At Transjordan underwent widespread decline and most of the lanta, 1 9 9 1 . region was outside direct Persian administration. Palumbo, Gaetano, and Glen L. Peterman. "Early Bronze Age IV Ce ramic Regionalism in Central Jordan." Bulletin of the American Certainly the collapse of the Iron Age kingdoms in the Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 8 9 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 2 3 - 3 2 . sixth century BCE opened the eastern desert frontier to no Sauer, James A. "Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages: A Critique madic Arab encroachment. Flerodotus (3.88,91) states that of Glueck's Synthesis." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental the Arabs were independent of Persian authority, although Research, no. 2 6 3 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 1 - 2 6 . they did provide logistical support or military contingents to Sauer, James A. "A New Climatic and Archaeological View of the Early Biblical Traditions." In Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the the Persians on occasion, such as for the invasion of Egypt Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J . King, edited by Michael by Cambyses in 525 BCE (Herodotus 2.7-9). David Coogan et al., pp. 3 6 6 - 3 9 8 . Louisville, 1 9 9 4 . John R. Bartlett (1979) argued for continuity in southern JAMES A. SAUER and LARRY G. HERR Transjordan from the Iron II Edomites to the Nabateans of the Hellenistic period. However, recent soundings at several Iron II sites failed to demonstrate any continuity of occu Transjordan in the Persian pation. In Edom, continuity from Iron II into the Persian through Roman Periods period has been asserted for such sites as Tawilan and Buseirah. Yet, Piotr Bienkowski's (1990) reappraisal of this Transjordan continued under foreign domination through evidence, including an analysis of the stratigraphic context out much of the Persian through Roman periods, as the Per of a cuneiform tablet that mentions a "King Darius" and a sians, Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Romans ruled in succession.
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TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods
hoard of Persian jewelry from Tawilan, concludes that this case is unproven. Bienkowski notes that all tiiree of the Edomite sites that have been extensively excavated (Tawi lan, Buseirah, Umm el-Biyara) were abandoned after fire and/or destruction. [See Tawilan; Buseirah; Umm el-Bi yara.] Whether or not continuity of occupation into the Persian period is accepted, all these sites seem to have been abandoned before the beginning of the Hellenistic period. Finally, Tell el-Kheleifeh, an Iron II stronghold near 'Aqaba, on the Red Sea, also seems to have been permanently aban doned in the Persian period. [See Kheleifeh, Tell el-.] Bartlett, modifying his views, now suggests that the Edomites evolved from a sedentary agricultural people to a more pas toral folk (Bartlett, 1990). These people mixed with the newly arrived Nabateans, who were then pastoral nomads who eventually dominated the descendants of the Edomites. (The origins of the Nabateans are shrouded in mystery, but they were present in southern Transjordan by the late fourth century BCE.) It is possible to speculate that the Persian pe riod in Moab evolved in a similar fashion, with the ascen dancy of an intrusive nomadic Arab population over the sed entary descendants of the Moabites. These groups probably mingled as the nomads sedentarized. [See Edom; Moab.] Hellenistic Period. Persian rule ended abruptly in 332 BCE, with the conquest of the entire region by Alexander the Great. Alexander, or his immediate successors, such as Perdiccas, may have founded several Macedonian or Greek col onies in the region, although the later sources that assert tiiese foundations may be suspect. After the breakup of Al exander's empire, Transjordan fell to the Ptolemies of Egypt, who ruled until the end of the third century BCE. Little is known of Ptolemaic rule in Transjordan. Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282-246 BCE) refounded Rabbat Ammon (mod ern Amman) as Philadelphia, but there is only limited ar chaeological evidence elsewhere of this century, such as at Pella in the Jordan Valley. [See Ptolemies.] The Nabateans were firmly established in southern Transjordan by the end of the fourth century BCE. Stories of their wealth were sufficient to entice a plundering raid by Antigonus the One-Eyed, one of Alexander's former gen erals, in 312 BCE (Diodorus 19.95). Diodorus, relying on the eyewitness account of Hieronymous of Cardia, describes the Nabateans as completely nomadic and dominating the car avan trade in incense and other luxury products between the Arabian Peninsula and Palestine. The Zenon papyri suggest that the Nabateans were present in northern Transjordan by the mid-third century BCE. By the early second century BCE, if not earlier, the Nabateans were ruled by a monarchy. Their first attested ldng is Aretas I (c. 170-160 BCE). [See Nabateans.] T h e conquest of the region by the Seleucids under Anti ochus III (200 BCE) seems to have inaugurated a new period of prosperity for Transjordan. Antiochus and his successors
fostered the development of several major cities in the north, whether preexisting settlements or new urban foundations. This is suggested by late coins of Pella, Gerasa, Gadara, Abila, and Esbus, which reflect Seleucid dynastic toponyms such as Antioch and Seleucia. Artifactual evidence from these cities suggests commercial contact with major centers of the Hellenistic world, such as Egypt, the Aegean, and Asia Minor. The cultural life of these Greek cities in northern Transjordan must also have been vigorous, as suggested by the several intellectual figures who hailed from them—the satirist Mennipus (third century BCE) and the poet Meleager (c. 140-70 BCE) were both from Gadara. T h e construction of the Tobiad castle known as Qasr el-'Abd within an arti ficial lake at 'Iraq el-Amir is dated to the early second cen tury BCE. [See Seleucids.] The decline and eventual collapse of the Seleucid Empire in the late second and early first centuries BCE brought re newed political turmoil to the region. T h e resulting power vacuum encouraged the expansion of the Nabateans north ward and the Jewish Hasmonean state eastward across die Jordan. Some Greek cities in the north, such as Pella, were destroyed. Most of the others fell under the control of the local dynasts—the Hasmonean or Nabatean. Evidence from Strabo (16.4.21, 26) suggests that the Nabateans had evolved into a largely sedentary people by the first century BCE. This roughly coincides with the earliest evidence for Nabatean sedentary occupation of their capital at Petra, in Edom, which has been dated to the late second or early first century BCE. Caravans hauling frankincense and myrrh trav eled north from die Arabian Peninsula, converged on Petra, and then moved west across the Negev desert to Gaza on the Mediterranean or north to Damascus and Syria. A num ber of Nabatean towns and road stations emerged to service this traffic. R o m a n P e r i o d (63 B C E - 3 2 4 C E ) . The chaos and warfare that plagued much of Transjordan in the Late Hellenistic period ended with the arrival of the Roman general Pompey in 63 BCE. Pompey, who had extinguished the Seleucid dy nasty and annexed much of Syria as a Roman province, was content to rule the remainder of Syria, Palestine, and much of Transjordan through a system of native client rulers. Pompey established die Greek cities as efficient instru ments of local Roman administration. Thus, he liberated the ones in northern Transjordan from Jewish and Nabatean control and began their reconstruction. T h e gratitude of these cities to their liberator is illustrated by their adoption of a new Pompeian era in 64/63 BCE, reflected in their later civic coinage. The Greek cities retained local autonomy but were administratively attached to the Roman province of Syria. There is no evidence that Pompey organized die Greek cities of northern Transjordan and southern Syria into a league or federation called die Decapolis. This Greek term, meaning "ten cities," appears only in first century CE
TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods sources (Mk. 5:20, 7:31; Pliny, Nat. Hist. 5.74) and refers to an administrative region under a Roman prefect supervised by the governor of Syria (Isaac, 1981). [See Decapolis.] The cities within Transjordan included Gadara (Umm Qeis), Abila (Qweilbeh), Capitolias (BeitRas), Dium (mod ern site uncertain), Gerasa (Jerash), Pella (Tabaqat Fahl), Philadelphia (Amman), Esbus (Tell Hesban), and Madaba. Each of these cities administered an extensive rural hinter land that formed a largely contiguous territory. T h e cities formed a distinct Greek cultural unit that distinguished them from the surrounding Semitic regions. T h e cities developed Greek civic and religious institutions and were laid out on a rectangular grid of streets. All were fortified and acquired many of the accoutrements of typical Roman provincial cit ies, such as colonnaded streets, classical-style temples, baths, theaters, nymphaeums (fountain houses), and hip podromes (racetracks). [With the exception of Dium, all of the sites mentioned above are the subject of independent entries.] All this public building, most of which was paid for by local benefactors, implies considerable economic prosperity in the Roman period. T h e basis of much of this prosperity must have been the fertile agricultural hinterland. However, the cities also benefited from the commercial traffic that passed through their territories and from local industries. Hundreds of inscriptions, mostly in Greek, suggest drat the urban elite was largely composed of hellenized Semites. T h e degree to which Hellenism spread to tire lower urban classes or to tire rural population of their municipal territories is difficult to gauge, but presumably these remained largely Semitic in language and culture. T h e largely Jewish district of Peraea, located on the east bank of the lower Jordan River north of the Dead Sea, remained part of tire client kingdom of Judea (Judah). T h e remainder of central and southern Transjordan com prised the heart of the Nabatean kingdom. Recent archae ological surveys have revealed dense Nabatean settlement of the regions east and southeast of die Dead Sea. Many sites are located along the major commercial arteries and presum ably benefited from die caravan traffic. A series of small, but splendid Nabatean sanctuaries, such as Khirbet et-Tannur, appeared along these routes. [See Tannur, Khirbet et-.] T h e density of settlement is so great, however, including mar ginal sites along the eastern desert fringe, that the bulk of the population must have been engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry. Strabo (16.4.24) in fact indicates tiiat by die early first century CE much of the Arabian luxury traffic had already shifted to an alternate route via the Red Sea ports of Egypt, bypassing Nabatea. Hence, some scholars have suggested that the Nabateans were forced by these cir cumstances to rely increasingly on indigenous resources, such agriculture, animal husbandry, and the mineral re sources of the Wadi 'Arabah and the Dead Sea. T h e N a bateans developed sophisticated hydrological installations at
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such sites as Avara (Humeima), just nortii of 'Aqaba, to exploit limited water resources. T h e sophistication of Na batean technology is perhaps best reflected in tiieir fine painted pottery. Petra itself apparently reached its peak dur ing the reign of Aretas IV (9 BCE-40 CE) . A number of major monuments in die city date to this period, such as the main theater and the temple known as Qasr el-Bint. [See Humeima; Petra.] Apart from the various sedentary peoples of Transjordan in the Roman period, there is also exceptional evidence for nomads in the eastern desert, the Safaitic and Thamudic tribes. These Arab nomads were very literate people who left thousands of inscriptions and drawings in the eastern desert. T h e inscriptions are laconic and difficult to date but suggest that the tribes were camel bedouin who practiced regular patterns of transhumance across the desert frontier. [See Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] T h e existence of a system of Nabatean fortifications along the desert edge sug gests that relations between the then sedentary Nabateans and the nomadic tribes were not always peaceful. In 106 CE, die Nabatean kingdom was annexed by the Roman emperor Trajan and incorporated into die new province of Arabia, which also included several soutiiern Decapolis cities. The Roman annexation appears to have been peaceful, with little or no resistance from the Naba teans. Bostra (Bosra), a city in southern Syria just north of die modern Jordanian border, became the capital of the new province, which was governed by a senatorial legate ap pointed by the emperor. T h e Babatha papyri from caves near the Dead Sea, reveal some details of the Roman ad ministrative organization (Naphtali, 1989). Trajan built a major highway, the Via Nova Traiana ("Trajan's new road") that extended from Bostra in the north to Aila ('Aq aba) on the Red Sea in the south. The Nabatean army was incorporated into the Roman army and transferred out of die province. It was replaced by a sizable Roman force, led by the Third Cyrenaica Legion based at Bostra, and a num ber of auxiliary units. Latin inscriptions on milestones attest the consttuction and periodic repair of both Trajan's road and several other provincial roads throughout the Roman period. [See Bosra; 'Aqaba.] T h e economic prosperity enjoyed by Transjordan contin ued under Roman rule through the second and into die third centuries CE. A number of cities embarked on major public works programs, most funded by local elites but others by imperial patronage. An example of die latter is the emperor Hadrian, who spent the winter of 129-130 at Gerasa, Most of the cities began to mint their own bronze coinage and some received honorific titles, such as colonia. Transjordan did not escape die general turmoil that struck the Roman Empire in die mid-third century. T h e great Sas anian Persian invasions of the Roman East (c. 260 CE) did not reach this far south, but die meteoric rise of Palmyra, in
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TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Byzantine Period
Syria, resulted in the defeat of tire provincial Roman army and the Palmyrene occupation of Arabia. Nomadic Arab tribes apparendy exploited Roman weakness and increased their pressure on die desert frontier. The emperor Diocletian (284-305) reunified the empire and began a massive military buildup along the desert fron tier in Transjordan. He constructed many new fortifications, deployed new military forces, and systematically repaired die provincial road system to facilitate military traffic. T h e most important Diocletianic military foundation was the le gionary fortress at Betthorus (el-Lejjun), east of the Dead Sea, which housed the Fourth Mars Legion. This fortified frontier, known as the limes Arabicus, was intended to control the raids of nomadic Arab tribes. [See Lejjun; Limes Ara bicus.] Diocletian also reorganized the provincial adminis tration by partitioning the old Trajanic province of Arabia. Transjordan south of the Dead Sea and east of Wadi 'Arabah was transferred to the province of Palestine. T h e region east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea remained a trun cated province of Arabia. T h e success of Diocletian's poli cies in restoring a large measure of security and prosperity to the region is reflected in the dense pattern of settlement revealed by various regional surveys and by programs of church construction in the succeeding Byzantine period.
Hammond, Philip C. The Nabataeans: Their History, Culture, and Ar chaeology. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, 37. Gothenburg, 1973-
Isaac, Benjamin. "The Decapolis in Syria: A Neglected Inscription." Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 44 (1981): 67-74. Argues convincingly that the Decapolis was an administrative district at tached to Syria and under the supervision of a Roman official. Jones, A. H. M. The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces. 2d ed. Ox ford, 1 9 7 1 . See pages 258-259, 279-280. Lapp, Nancy L., and Ernest Will. "'Iraq el Amir." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denys Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 280-297. Louvain, 1989. Lewis, Naphtali, et al. The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters. Jerusalem, 1989. Lindner, Manfred, ed. Petra: Neue Ausgrabungen und Entdeckungen. Munich, 1986. Thirteen articles on recent research on Petra, its en virons, and the Nabateans. Olmstead, A. T. "Tattenai, Governor of 'Across the River.'" Journal of Near Eastern Studies 3 (1944): 46. Parker, S. Thomas. "The Decapolis Reviewed." Journal ofBiblical Lit erature 94 (1975): 437-441. Rejects the long-held view that the De capolis ever formed a league or confederation. Parker, S. Thomas. Romans and Saracens: A History of the Arabian Fron tier. Winona Lake, Ind., 1986. Historical and archaeological survey of the limes Arabicus. Parker, S. Thomas, ed. The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Interim Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980-1085. 2 vols. British Ar chaeological Reports, International Series, no. 340. Oxford, 1987. Excavations and surveys of the Roman military frontier east of die [See also Jordan Valley.] Dead Sea. Pratico, Gary D. "Nelson Glueck's 1938-1940 Excavations at Tell elBIBLIOGRAPHY Kheleifeh: A Reappraisal." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 259 (1985): 1 - 3 2 . Aram 2.1-2 (1990): First International Conference: The Nabataeans. Pro Sartre, Maurice. Trois etudes sur I'Arabie romaine et byzantine. Collection ceedings of a conference held in Oxford in 1989; thirty articles on Latomus, vol. 178. Brussels, 1982. Studies on the borders, governors, various aspects of die Nabateans. and nomadic tribes of the Roman province. Barghoud, Asem N. "Urbanization of Palestine and Jordan in Helle nistic and Roman Times." In Studies in the History and Archaeology Yassine, Khair, ed. Archaeology ofJordan: Essays and Reports. Amman, 1988. Several articles on evidence from the Persian period, including of Jordan, vol. 1 , edited by Adnan Hadidi, pp. 209-229, Amman, the excavation of Tell el-Mazar in the Jordan Valley. 1982. Bardett, John R. "From Edomitcs to Nabateans: A Study in Continu ity." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 1 (1979): 53-66. Bardett, John R. "From Edomites to Nabataeans: The Problem of Con tinuity."/4?'am 2 (1990): 25-34. Bienkowski, Piotr. "The Chronology of Tawilan and the 'Dark Age' of Edom." Aram 2 (1990): 35-44. Bietenhard, Hans. "Die syrische Dekapolis von Pompeius bis Trajan." In Aufslieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt, edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, vol. II.8, pp. 220-261. Berlin, 1977. Accepts the traditional view of die Decapolis as a league. Bowersock, Glen W. Roman Arabia. Cambridge, Mass., 1983. The standard history of Transjordan in the Hellenistic and Roman peri ods. Browning, Iain. Petra. 2d ed. London, 1973. Fully illusttated popular account of the site and its environs. Browning, Iain. Jerash and the Decapolis. London, 1982. Useful and well-illustrated popular description. Brunnow, Rudolf-Ernst, and Alfred von Domaszewski. Die Provincia Arabia. 3 vols. Strassburg, 1904-1909. Still indispensable survey of the history and architectural monuments of Transjordan in the clas sical periods. Glueck, Nelson. The Other Side of the Jordan. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Popular version of Glueck's pioneering surveys of Transjor dan. Some of his conclusions about "gaps in occupation" have be come subjects of intense debate.
S. THOMAS PARKER
Transjordan in the Byzantine Period The period between the reign of the emperor Constantine (332 CE) and the Muslim conquest in the mid-seventh cen tury CE is identified in the history of the Near East as Byz antine, and as Late Roman in other geographic regions. T h e nomenclature Byzantine derives from the capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium/Constantinople (mod ern Istanbul), which exerted control over all of the eastern Mediterranean basin. Because the initial impetus for ar chaeological research throughout the Near East was the ex plication of the biblical milieu, the Byzantine period was ne glected by early archaeologists. T h e study of the period fell within the purview of scholars dealing with religious or art history, whose primary concern was monumental remains. Within the last thirty years, the continuity of human occu pation from the Roman to the Islamic period has been re searched stratigraphically and with a growing emphasis on social history.
TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Byzantine Period As early as the 1920s, the perspective of archaeological research in Jordan was broad: excavations were being con ducted on the Amman citadel (Roman/Byzantine Philadel phia; modern Amman) and at Gerasa/modern Jerash. Nei ther site has been continuously excavated, however, because they have been continuously inhabited. In Jordan, it is al most axiomatic that "some Byzantine" will be found in ex cavation. A further impetus to understanding the period came with the research conducted on the material culture from Pella (Smith, 1973) and Hesban (Sauer, 1973). Sites. Byzantine-period sites have been identified in every topographic and environmental zone, although site types are diverse: encampments and farmsteads, particularly along fertile wudyan ("valleys"); industrial areas, including wine and olive presses, located between urban areas); fortiike in stallations, often reused from earlier periods, such as those surrounding Amman (see below); military installations, such as those along the limes Arabicus; villages; towns; cit ies; and monastic complexes. As archaeological techniques have developed, so has the ability to identify sites and inter pret their interrelationships. Modern surveys, as well as the contributions from nineteenth- and early twentietli-century explorers, travelers, and archaeologists, indicate a landscape with a flourishing Byzantine settlement pattern in which the cities were interdependent with the hinterland in a local and regional network. Among the most significant Byzantine sites are those identified as the Decapolis cities, although the Hellenistic and Early Roman administrative understanding of the iden tification did not have the same meaning. Six of the Deca polis cities were located on the border of northwestern Transjordan, in the Byzantine province of Palaestina Secunda: Amman/Philadelphia and Beit Ras/Capitolias (at various times within the boundaries of the Provincia Ara bia); U m m Qeis/Gadara, Wadi Qweilbeh/Abila, Tabaqat Fahl/Pella, and Jerash/Gerasa. These cities, excluding Beit Ras/Captiolias, were all earlier tell sites. All of these sites have been excavated to varying degrees. [See Decapolis.] During the Roman period, earlier aspects of cities were incorporated into a stone-built urban environment, modi fied and expanded from the Hellenistic concept. The con figuration of the cities included gates, walls, cardini, and decumanii, forming insulae delineating public and private spaces. Public space consisted of a forum, theater, odeum, nymphaeum, temple, hippodrome, or bath, with the largest of the cities having multiple facilities. Outside of the city limits, tiiere were extensive necropoli. T h e urban environ ment required intricate water and sewage systems, as seen in the remnants of aqueduct systems at Gadara, Capitolias, Abila and other sites throughout the country. [See Aque ducts; Baths; Odeum; Theaters.] The population reused this architectural environment by modifying it. T h e dieaters and odea, at Tabaqat Fahl/Pella, for example, were altered to meet other needs. As die pop
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ulation converted to Christianity, earlier temples and syna gogues were reconfigured into churches, such as at Gerasa. The replacement of the central Roman authority of the polis system and the divisions within the Christian community contributed to the transformation of the cities: as authority rested with church hierarchies, public space was used to ac commodate die construction of churches and to provide market space. It is the tessellated (mosaic) pavements witiiin several ex cavated churches that have so interested Byzantine art and religious historians. T h e most famous is the Madaba mosaic map, dated to about 560 CE, which depicts holy sites from the Bible and the area's major geographic features, among them the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the Nile Delta. The map is located in the modern Church of St. George in Madaba, only one of several Byzantine-period tessellated pavements found in the town. These pavements and those from surrounding sites—Ma in, Umm er-Rasas (ancient Kastton Mefaa), Mt. Nebo (the place identified by the Byz antines as where Moses is purported to have looked across the Jordan River), Mukhayyat, and 'Ain Mousa—indicate the wealtii of parts of the Byzantine community, give the names of officials (ecclesiastical and municipal), and attest to die continuance of the community following Muslim he gemony. Although Madaba-region pavements are the best known, tiiere are others of equal importance from other cit ies—from Petra and such outlying areas as Rihab, Khirbet el-Burz, and Khirbet es-Samra. [See Mosaics; Madaba.] c
The Jordanian "hauran," or steppic sites (Umm el-Jimal, Umm as-Surab, Dayr al-Qaf, Dayr al-Qinn) experienced extensive Byzantine occupation. They differ from the inland urban areas in the following ways: architectural style (their affinities are more to southern Arabia); building techniques (which varied widi the use of the indigenous basalt); a lack of a systematic insulae system of spatial arrangement; and a waste system that was not the intricate, below-the-street, stone sewage system of other sites. As at the inland sites, churches proliferated. At some desert sites (e.g., Azraq, Qasr al-Hallabat) there are indications of occupation earlier than the Islamic period. They, as well as sites to die south and along the Dead Sea (e.g., the Byzantine monastic com plex at Deir 'Ain 'Abata, the Church of St. Lot), show in tricate water systems both within the inhabited areas (cis terns) and in the surrounding fields (irrigation channels). [See Irrigation.] M a t e r i a l Culture. During the approximately three hun dred years of the Byzantine period, its material culture ex hibits only gradual changes. Regional studies—tiiat is, com parisons of corpora from two provinces or from linked cities (e.g., the trichora cities, Jerash/Gerasa, Tabaqat Fahl/Pella, and Beth-Shean/Scythopolis)—are of recent design, as are studies of particular types of material culture as indicators of custom, trade networks, manufacturing, and social strat ification.
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Architectural innovation in the period was related to the development of the church and its decoration. This inno vation appears in arches, apses, domes, and roofing tech niques. It appears that the Byzantines altered their building techniques to strengdren them to meet natural disasters, such as earthquakes. They used different-sized ashlar blocks, shortened the spans of arches, and used a mortar tension-reducing system. Churches, public buildings, elite private residences, and tombs were decorated with pat terned tessellated pavements in which classical themes or the natural world were recreated both on floors and walls; in tricately carved and inscribed stone (imported marble and local stone) with floral or religious motifs; and painted plas ter and frescoes. The painted tombs at Abila attest to the wealth of some in the Byzantine community there, as well as to a commonality in the use of artistic themes and ico nography witii otiier parts of die Byzantine world. As a re sult of protection by the government of Jordan, the emphasis in research at these sites has been on their monumental re mains, except at Pella and Gerasa, where the researchers have investigated the two cities' domestic sectors (see Smitii, 1973; Zayadine, 1986). The pottery from Byzantine sites both varies from site to site and is consistent with types from other regions. T h e consistency has permitted detailed studies of trade patterns, once clay sources and manufacturing centers have been identified (Sauer, 1973). All methods of manufacture were employed: hand, slab, coil, slow-wheel, fast-wheel, and molding, as well as in combination. The pottery is generally kiln fired rather than reduction fired. Surface treatments vary: incising, combing, painting, washes, slips, ribbing, or ridges. Frequent imports are die so-called Late Roman slipped fine wares, "Late Roman C " apparently being the most frequent. There is evidence of local imitations of the forms; however, no local Wins have yet been excavated. Decoration reflected the population's new religious affilia tion: crosses and otiier images associated with Christianity (fish) are represented. Fine-ware bowl forms identified in the Galilee region are also found in northern Transjordan. Amphorae were shortened and took on a more squat ap pearance throughout the empire. Forms from the coastal area of Palaestina Prima (the Gaza jar) are found infrequentiy. Ubiquitious in northwestern Transjordan and in the Hauran, but less frequent south of Amman, is the biansulate red- or dark-ware amphora/jar first published by Smith (1973). It was reduction fired and the body was painted with circular loop designs. The form is an excellent chronological indicator, for most sites in Palestina Prima, when associated witii clear stratigraphic layers—particularly because it has been shown that die form continues well into the Islamic period (Walmsley, 1987). Lamps were molded and are consistent with corpora to die west, with the "can dlestick" form being the most frequent. A unique lamp form is die "Jerash lamp," identified as originating from Jerash by
inscriptions from Early Umayyad examples, not by kiln ev idence. Although "slipper" shaped, it has a high, pinched handle in a stylized zoomorphic form. Basin forms of vary ing sizes, lanterns, and types of candelabra have been re ported from other areas, but infrequently. Metal and glass are less often found preserved at archae ological excavations. Researchers have reported finding iron tools (blacksmith and carpenter), several types of iron nails used on roof and coffin construction, decorative metal, other metal implements (the latter are the least numerous), and copper basins and bowls. Glass remains consist of tesserae, cups, beakers, bowls, and bowl lamps from chandeliers. Numismatic data have not been collated by site and mint for recent archaeological excavations. (The best data for these remains are to be found in individual site reports.) Because of the continuity of habitation at several ancient urban sites to the present, hoards and/or in situ coin corpora are uncommon. Conclusion. During the Byzantine period, Jordan was in tensely settled. By syntiiesizing the data from nineteenth- to early twentieth-century researchers with the results of recent work, it is possible to describe the nature of settlement in detail. It was the advent of Christianity, the gradual conver sion of the population, and the alterations to the adminis trative structure of the region that precipitated changes in the material culture, in architecture, pottery, glass, and coins. Despite the fact that there has been a marked increase in archaeological research for the Byzantine period in Transjordan, it is only within the last decade that social his tory—witii all its concommitant refinements of interpreta tion—has become a priority. It will take several years, how ever, before new synthetic analyses that include the church/ monastic hierarchy, and all associated materials can be formulated and compared witii those belonging to the urban and hinterland settlements. When such studies take place, Byzantine studies in Transjordan will have come of age. [See also Abila; Amman; Azraq; Beit Ras; Beth-Shean; Hesban; Jerash; Limes Arabicus; Pella; Qasr al-Hallabat; U m m el-Jimal; U m m er-Rasas; and U m m Qeis.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avi-Yonah, Michael. The Madaba Mosaic Map. Jerusalem, 1 9 5 4 . Bottini, Giovanni Claudio, et al, eds. Christian Archaeology in the Holy Ijxnd, New Discoveries: Essays in Honour ofVirgilio C, Corbo. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 3 6 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 0 . Cov ers Khirbet es-Samra. Hadidi, Adnan, et al., eds. Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan. 4 vols, to date. Amman, 1 9 8 2 - . Conference publications, Lenzen, C. J., and E. Axel Knauf. "Beit Ras-Capitolias: A Preliminary Evaluation of the Archaeological and Textual Evidence." Syria 6 4 (1987): 21-46.
Lenzen, C. J. "Beit Ras Excavations,
1988
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474-476.
Piccirillo, Michele. The Mosaics ofJordan. Amman, 1 9 9 3 . Sauer, James A. Heshbon Pottery, 1971: A Preliminary Report on the Pot-
TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Islamic Period tery from the 1971 Excavations at Tell Hesban. Berrien Springs, Mich.,
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new mosques were built to meet the needs of the Muslim community. [See Churches; Mosques; Umm el-Jimal; Jer Smith, Robert Houston. The 1967 Season of the College of Wooster Ex ash.] pedition to Pella. Pella of the Decapolis, vol. 1. Wooster, Ohio, 1 9 7 3 . T h e tribes of Transjordan and Syria were a mainstay of Walmsley, Alan. "The Administrative Structure and Urban Geography of the Und Filastin and the Jund al-Urdunn." Ph.D. diss., University the Umayyad regime, providing military forces that helped of Sydney, 1 9 8 7 . sustain the vast territory of the Umayyad caliphate. Zayadine, Fawzi, ed. Jerash Archaeological Project, 1981-1983, vol. 1 , Mu'awiyah had already resorted to the desert margins near The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Amman, 1 9 8 6 . Amman and, in time, the Umayyads' prediction for the C. J. LENZEN region and their reliance on tribal support from those eastern areas of Transjordan were reflected in their intensive build ing in the region, witii major palatial structures at Qastal, Transjordan in the Islamic Period Qusayr 'Amra, Qasr al-Hallabat, Qasr al-Meshatta and Qasr al-Tuba. [See Qusayr 'Amra; Qasr al-Hallabat; Qasr al-Me Islam and the Byzantine world first confronted each other shatta.] direcdy in Transjordan in a skirmish at Mu'ta, south of Kerak (al-Karak), in 629, during the lifetime of the prophet Routes from Damascus, Jerusalem and Egypt to Medina Muhammad. Over the next decade, Muslim raids deep into and Mecca all pass through Transjordan, following the an Transjordan and Palestine led to repeated defeats of the cient Arabian caravan road that was adopted by the Islamic Byzantines, already exhausted by a disastrous war with Sas hajj ("pilgrimage"). T h e roads to the Hijaz from Egypt and anian Iran that had only ended in 628. Muslim victories at southern Palestine also passed through al-'Aqaba, a major Ajnadayn, al-Fihl (Pella), and Yarmuk overwhelmed the site founded in the Early Islamic period. [See 'Aqaba.] Byzantines, leading to the fall of Damascus in 635, of Jeru With the overthrow of the Umayyads in 750 by the 'Ab salem in 638, and the withdrawal of the Byzantine army basids, Greater Syria became a backwater. Instead, die 'Ab from Syria. [See Sasanians; Pella.] basids' new capital, Baghdad (founded in 762), attracted In 638, the second caliph, Umar al-Khattab, traveled population and wealth; the 'Abbasids tended to avoid from Medina through Transjordan to accept the surrender Transjordan and Syria, marked as they were by pro-Umayof Jerusalem from its patriarch, Sophronius. Umar also yad sympathies. The Umayyads' palatial foundations in the traveled to al-Jabiya in the Jawlan to organize the govern marginal lands of Transjordan fell into disuse, and only old, ment of Greater Syria, creating the system of junds ("mili established settlements farther west (e.g., Amman, Pella, tary districts") that survived as administrative units until the Jerash) seem to have continued to be settled. T h e continuity Crusades in the eleventh century. Much of Transjordan and of town and village life in western Transjordan and Palestine northern Palestine henceforth constituted the jund of al-Ur emerges in the descriptions provided by the tenth-century dunn. geographer al-Maqdisi. In 661 Mu'awiyah became the first Umayyad caliph, and In the course of the ninth century, the 'Abbasids' grip on with his accession, Damascus became the capital of the Is central government deteriorated and the southern regions of lamic state. Amman (Byzantine Philadelphia) became Syria passed under the Tulunids, the 'Abbasids' governors Transjordan's main administrative town, with its governor's in Egypt. However, by the late ninth century, the authority palace within tire walls of the Roman citadel overlooking the of the Tulunids became more tenuous. Transjordan suf city. [See Amman.] Although built in the local stone tradi fered raids by the North Arabian Bani Tayy', who pushed tion, the palace's four iwans and their decoration reflect Sas the established local tribes westward, depriving them of land anian models, part of the eclectic character of Early Islamic they had held since Byzantine times. T h e Tayy' so disrupted art and architecture. Transjordan that the later Tulunids were no longer able to guarantee the annual Damascus pilgrimage caravan. Transjordanian villages in the Balqa' and the Hauran, which generally had been occupied since at least Nabatean The Jarrahid clan emerged as the dominant tribal group and Roman times, continued to be settled under the Umay among the Bani Tayyi', briefly ruling from Ramla—al yads with little if any sign of disruption or destruction. [See though they were an unstable political presence. [See Nabateans.] This continuity is especially marked in ceram Ramla.] After the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in ics, with late Byzantine pottery indistinguishable from the Egypt in 969, the Jarrahids attempted to maintain relations earliest Islamic pottery until a distinctive Umayyad pottery with both Cairo and the Byzantines in northern Syria. In the emerged. Many places settled before the advent of Islam end, however, southern Syria came under Fatimid domi remained settled throughout die Early Islamic period. Much nation. of the population probably remained Christian, but the pres The tenth-eleventh centuries lack clarity in Syria in gen ence of Muslims in this period is marked by the conversion eral, although excavations at Amman show that the citadel of churches into mosques (e.g., U m m el-Jimal)—although remained occupied. T h e Byzantines threatened northern at some places, such as U m m al-Walid, Qastal, and Jerash, and central Syria, while the Fatimids dominated the south. 1973.
c
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TRANSJORDAN: Transjordan in the Islamic Period
In the latter decades of the eleventh century, the westward advances of die Seljuk Turks and Turkoman tribes led to the diminution of Fatimid power in Syria; the Byzantine presence collapsed after their defeat at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia in 1071. The coming of the Crusades in 1099 created an entirely different political framework, and new states were carved out on the coast. T h e southernmost Crusader state, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, bordered an isolated Fatimid Egypt in the south, with its eastern border on or beyond the Jordan River. Among the effects of the Crusades was the rapid de velopment of military architecture, well demonstrated in Transjordan at Shawbak and Kerak. In the Islamic world the military emerged as the leading group in society, re flected in die rise of the mamluks (military slaves), who emerged as patrons of the luxury crafts. From the first, the Crusaders pursued an aggressive policy in Transjordan. In 1 1 1 0 they raided Petra, where they en countered a community of Christian monks, and in 1 1 2 1 they attacked Jawlan, took Jerash, and carried off Arab herdsmen's flocks in the Hauran. [See Petra.] Perceiving a vacuum southeast of the Dead Sea, in about n 15 tiiey built the fortress of Krak de Montreal at Shawbak to protect the southern approaches to Palestine. Other fortresses were built at 'Aqaba and on the offshore island of Graye Qazirat al-Fara'un). In line with the same strategy, fortresses were built at Wu'aira in the Petra valley and at al-Kerak (Petra Deserti), the old Byzantine Charachmoba. T h e latter was the greatest of tiiese, built in 1142 by Pagan the Butler; it was the lynchpin of the Crusader presence in Transjordan. [See Kerak.] After the initial blow of the Crusader invasion of the Near East, the Muslim counterattack took time to develop; how ever, the Zangid rulers of Mosul fought back, taking Edessa in 1144. In 1154 the Zangid sultan Nur al-Din took Da mascus, creating a unified Islamic state that ran along the Crusaders' eastern frontier. Nur al-Din then projected his power southward, through Transjordan to the Hijaz and to ward die rich prize of Egypt, then weakly ruled by the Fa timids. A Zangid expedition finally brought the Fatimid ca liphate to an end in 1 1 7 1 . N u r al-Din's officer, Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), emerged first as the dominant figure in Egypt and dien, with Nur al-Din's death in 1 1 7 4 , as Nur alDin's successor in Syria as well, founding the Ayyubid re gime. With Egypt and Syria eventually unified under him, Salah ad-Din prosecuted the war with the Crusaders. How ever, in die early years of his rule, the Crusader presence in Transjordan, especially at al-Kerak, severely threatened Ayyubid communication among Egypt, Syria, and die Hi jaz. Muslim caravans from Syria to the Hijaz were forced east ward for security reasons, passing through Transjordan via Burqu' and Azraq along Wadi es-Sirhan into northern Ara bia. [See Azraq,] N u r al-Din's general, Shirkuh, went on
pilgrimage along this easterly route in AH 555/1160 CE, rather than risk Crusader attack. In the south, the route from Cairo through Sinai to 'Aqaba was similarly imperiled. [See Cairo; Sinai.] As to the land route between Damascus and Cairo, only heavily armed bands could risk marching to Egypt through the Transjordanian desert, using remote wells like those at Jafr. Under the imaginative and unscrupulous Reginald de Chatillon, al-Karak became a base for raids deep into north ern Arabia; he built boats on die Dead Sea that were carried to 'Aqaba in order to raid Islamic ships and towns along the Red Sea. Those sorties threatened not only the holy cities, but the Egyptian economy as well. The situation was completely transformed in 1 1 8 7 , when Salah ad-Din's army defeated the Crusader army at Hattin in northern Palestine, capturing the king of Jerusalem and most of the Crusader leadership. After this massive victory, Jerusalem and most of Palestine were at last regained by the Muslims. T h e Crusaders were confined to the Mediterra nean coast, having lost Kerak and the rest of the fortification system in Transjordan and Syria to the Ayyubids. Although the Crusaders had been driven out of Transjordan, military considerations remained paramount. T h e Ayyubid sultan of Damascus, al-Malik al 'Adil ( 1 1 9 6 - 1 2 1 8 ) , built a new for tress at 'Ajlun; in 1237, 'Izz al-Din Aybak, on behalf of the Ayyubid sultan of Damascus, al-Malik al-Mu'azzam, rebuilt the Roman fort at Azraq, the main fortress controlling traffic from Wadi es-Sirhan to Transjordan. [See 'Ajlun.] After the death of Salah ad-Din in 1 1 9 3 , the Ayyubid territories began to be divided among his family—although the family retained a degree of unity. In 1250, the last Ayyu bid sultan in Egypt was overthrown by mamluks, while in dependent Ayyubid princes continued to rule in Syria and Transjordan. In 1260, a pagan Mongol army invaded Syria after sacldng Baghdad and killing the 'Abbasid caliph. [See Baghdad.] They reached as far as northern Palestine, where the Egyptian mamluks defeated them near Nazareth. [See Nazareth.] In the aftermath of the battle, a mamluk general, Baybars I, emerged as sultan, ruling both Egypt and the ravaged territories of Syria. Al-Karak remained under an Ayyubid prince, al-Mughith 'Umar, until he was taken and killed by Baybars in 1263. Kerak became one of the "ldngdoms" of Syria, ruling much of Transjordan; however, it was the second city of the sul tanate and lower in status than Damascus. The remoteness of Kerak made it a useful retreat for the insecure, the dissident, and the rebellious. Thus, Sultan N a sir Muhammad ibn Qala'un abandoned Cairo in 1309 to evade the growing power of his great amirs. Ostensibly, he was to make the pilgrimage, but instead he stopped in Transjordan, establishing himself at al-Karak with his own mamluks. He recruited an Arab tribal army, with which he returned to Cairo. H e executed his overbearing amirs and regained the sultanate. In 1389, Sultan Barquq did much the
TRANSPORTATION same: he went from Cairo into exile in Kerak in 1389, where he found support and subsequently recovered the throne in Cairo. Palestine and Transjordan were spared the Mongol at tacks of the late thirteenth century, while on the Mediter ranean coast, tire Mamluks took the last Crusader strong holds by 1291. Many areas of Transjordan saw a revival for the first time since the Umayyad period. In the Hauran, Balqa', Moab, and Edom, archaeological evidence suggests a revival of settled life. [See Moab; Edom.] In the Jordan Val ley and southern Ghor there also is evidence of a sugar in dustry in Ottoman times whose origins may go back to the Mamluk period. [See Jordan Valley.] In the remote moun tains flanking Wadi 'Arabah, the ancient copper mines were reworked under the Mamluks. In the early sixteenth Century, the threat by the Portu guese to Red Sea shipping led the Mamluks to cooperate witii the rising Ottoman power in Istanbul/Constantinople. [See Constantinople.] Coastal defenses were improved and a new fort was built at 'Aqaba by the Mamluk sultan alGhawri. However, in 1 5 1 6 al-Ghawri was defeated by the Ottomans in northern Syria; die following year, Cairo fell, the Mamluk sultanate ended, and the Ottomans emerged as rulers of the entire Near East. In Transjordan under the Ottomans, the traditional inter est of Muslim rulers in secure passage for pilgrimage con tinued. A series of fortifications was constructed along the pilgrim road from Damascus to the Hijaz on the orders of Suleiman II and his successors: at al-Qutrana, Dhat al-Iiajj (1554), and Qal'at el-Hasa. They remained a means of ex ercising control over these more remote areas until the Hijaz Railway made diem redundant. [See also 'Abbasid Caliphate; Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynas ties; Crusader Period; and Fatimid Dynasty.]
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by Lawrence T. Geraty and Larry G. Herr, pp. 3 0 1 - 3 3 0 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 8 6 . Tell, Safwan K. "Early Islamic Architecture in Jordan." In Studies in the History and Archaeology ofJordan, vol. 1, edited by Adnan Hadidi, PP- 3 2 3 - 3 2 8 . Amman, 1 9 8 2 . G.
R. D.
KING
TRANSPORTATION. From the earliest periods of
recorded history in the ancient Near East, land transporta tion is well attested. It appears to have played a major role both in die region's history and in its sociological and tech nological development. T h e frequency of travel and trans portation is recorded in all periods in written records. It is generally motivated by the same activities that involve peo ple everywhere: commuting to work, visiting friends and rel atives, attending religious festivals; buying and selling goods; and attending weddings, funerals, banquets, and the like. Three categories of travel were especially significant in the ancient Near East. T h e first is that of traders. T h e need to transport goods and materials from region to region influ enced, more than any otiier single factor, the development of an intricate system of roads and highways spanning the Fertile Crescent. Trade was also responsible for the region's cultural cross-pollination, a phenomenon of great social and historical import. A second significant category of travel is that of the mes sengers who functioned as the postal service. Messengers linked die various cultures of the Fertile Crescent in active communication, profoundly influencing the region's history. From die early Sumerian period onward, royal, civil, and private messenger services flourished. The widespread ac tivity of messengers is attested, for example, by die 379 Amarna tablets of the second millennium BCE, which rep resent vigorous correspondence between Egypt and die rest of the Near East. Later, imperial Persian messengers cov BIBLIOGRAPHY ered the Royal Road from Persepolis to Sardis (about 2510 km, or 306 mi.) in nine days, averaging about 275 km (171 Hamilton, R. W. Khirbat al Ma/jar: An Arabian Mansion in the Jordan mi.) a day. This efficient postal service was set up somewhat Valley. Oxford, 1 9 5 9 . Harding, G. Lankester. The Antiquities ofJordan. London, 1 9 6 7 . like the Pony Express in frontier and colonial America Helms, Svend W. Early Islamic Architecture of the Desert: a Bedouin Sta whose posting stations were about 24 km (15 mi.) apart and tion in Eastern Jordan. Edinburgh, 1 9 9 0 . supplied fresh horses and riders. During the Roman period Holt, P. M., et al. The Cambridge History of Islam I: The Central Lands. the extensive cursus publicus, the state postal and messenger Cambridge, 1 9 7 0 . service, included regular stops along the main highways Homes-Fredericq, Dominique, and J. Basil Hennessy. Archaeology of Jordan. Akkadica Supplement, 7 - 8 . Louvain, 1 9 8 6 . where horses could be changed; larger stations and inns Kliair, Yassine. Archaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports. Amman, were established about one day's journey (37 km, or 23 mi.) 1988. apart. Khouri, Rami. The Antiquities of the Jordan Rift Valley, Amman, 1 9 8 8 . T h e movement of armies constitutes die third significant Northedge, Alastair. Studies on Roman and Islamic Amman: The Exca vations of Mrs. C.-M. Bennett and Other Investigations, British Acad category of travel and transportation, accounting for a large emy Monographs in Archaeology, 3 . Oxford, 1 9 9 2 . percentage of the activity along the thoroughfares of the an Sauer, James A. "The Pottery of Jordan in the Early Islamic Periods." cient world. Those armies of course also accounted for In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 1, edited by many notable historical developments in the region. Adnan Hadidi, pp. 3 2 9 - 3 3 7 . Amman, 1 9 8 2 . T h e primary mode of travel throughout the ancient NeatSauer, James A. "Umayyad Pottery from Sites in Jordan." In Archae ology ofJordan and Other Studies Presented to Siegfried H. Horn, edited East was by foot. Even government officials normally trav-
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eled that way. Travel by donkey was generally reserved for women, children, and the infirm. Riding the mule, horse, and camel is almost unattested until the first millennium BCE, and even then it remained relatively uncommon. The light horse-drawn chariot appeared early in the sec ond millennium BCE as a means of transportation and quickly became an invaluable military vehicle. The chariot continued in use during the Roman period, when die car riage became more popular. One type of the latter, the verreda, was drawn by four mules and could transport two or three people. A two-wheeled birota, on the other hand, had three mules and carried one or two passengers. The transportation of goods and materials of considerable size and weight was generally by means of donkeys, carts, and wagons. The most common means of land transporta tion, attested as early as the fourdi millennium BCE, was the donkey, an animal able to move easily along steep and stony mountain paths difficult for wheeled vehicles and uncom fortable or dangerous for camels. Caravans of donkeys are frequently mentioned in the Old Assyrian and Old Babylo nian periods and throughout the second and first millennia BCE. The use of other animals—the mule, ox, and camel— in transporting goods was far less common. The camel, which came into more general use at the very end of the second millennium BCE, had the advantage of being able to carry about five times the capacity of the donkey and could travel for extended periods of time without water, making it especially valuable for desert transportation. Wheeled vehicles apparently originated in Sumer during the early third millennium BCE. The earliest type was a heavy four-wheeled, ox-drawn wagon, from which the twowheeled cart developed—a lighter vehicle that could be drawn by horses or mules. Clay models of covered wagons have been found in Sumerian sites from as early as 2500 BCE, and wagons and carts frequently appear in both the written records and the art of the entire region. Carts and wagons were especially useful for transporting heavy loads, such as large quantities of metal, timber, and military sup plies. During the Roman period the most common means of land transportation was the ox-drawn wagon, normally pulled by eight oxen or horses in the summer and ten in the winter. Heavy goods, such as army supplies, were all trans ported by even larger wagons, called clabulariae, which could carry as much as 1,500 Roman pounds. Express goods were carried by the swifter cursus velox, which employed several types of lighter carriages. [See also Camels; Carts; Chariots; Equids; Roads; and Wheel] BIBLIOGRAPHY Casson, Lionel. Travel in the Ancient World. New ed. Baldmore, 1994. Helpful survey of travel and transportation throughout die ancient world, with an emphasis on the Roman period; useful footnotes. Cole, S. M. "Land Transport without Wheels." In A History of Tech
nology, vol. I, From Early Times to the Fall of Ancient Empires, edited by Charles Singer et al., pp. 704-712. London, 1954. General survey focusing on the classical world. Dorsey, David A. "Travel, Transportation." In The International Stan dard Bible Encyclopedia, rev. ed., vol. 4, pp. 891-897. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1988. Thorough and useful overview of die subject, covering transportation in the ancient Near East from the early periods dirough die Roman era, with a focus on Iron Age Israel. Dorsey, David A. The Roads and Highways ofAncient Israel. Baltimore, 1991. Up-to-date discussion of travel and transportation in ancient Israel and the Near East, covering means of transporting goods, modes of travel, average traveling speeds, and traveling conditions. See especially pages 1 - 5 1 . Forbes, R. J. "Land Transport and Road-Building." In Studies in An cient Technology, vol. 2, pp. 1 3 1 - 1 9 2 . 2d rev. ed. Leiden, 1965. Rel atively well-documented study, with an emphasis on the Greco-Ro man period. Leemans, W. F. Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period. Leiden, i960. Discussion of trade during the early second millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. Littauer, M. A., and J. H. Crouwel. Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East. Leiden, 1979. Excellent study of die subject. DAVID A. DORSEY
TUFNELL, OLGA (1904-1985), English archaeolo gist. In 1922 Tufnell worked as a secretary in London for W. M. Flinders Petrie. In 1927 she joined Petrie's team in Egypt and then his expedition in southern Palestine, first at Tell el-Far'ah (South) and then at Tell el-'Ajjul. Not having studied archaeology formally, she gained experience, knowl edge, and training at those excavations, working with Pettie and his assistants, principally James L. Starkey. [See Far'ah, Tell el- (South); 'Ajjul, Tell el-; and the biographies of Petrie and Starkey.] In 1932, following a rift with Petrie's wife, who had an active role in the management of the Tell el-'Ajjul expedi tion, Starkey decided to open his own large-scale excava tions at Tel Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir). A number of Petrie's assistants, primarily G. Lankester Harding and Tufnell, went with him. The excavation at Lachish lasted for six sea sons, coming to an abrupt end when Starkey was murdered by Arab bandits in January 1938. [See Lachish; and the bi ography of Harding.] Tufnell returned to England, where she dedicated herself to the monumental task of publishing the results of the La chish excavations, a project that took about twenty years (with an interval during World War II). Lachish II, on the Canaanite fosse temple, appeared in 1940; Lachish III, which reported on the Iron Age remains, appeared in 1953; and iMchish IV, the Bronze Age finds, appeared in 1958. Tufnell also wrote a number of papers on other subjects. In 1984, shortly before her death, she published a detailed book on the scarabs of the early second millennium BCE. Tufnell's main contribution to the Lachish excavations was the registration, classification, and study of die finds. Her publication of the Lachish pottery and her typological
TUMULUS divisions are excellent and most useful in modern terms. She made penetrating observations, especially remarkable be cause she lacked formal training in ceramics. Her most im portant observations regarding Lachish, were not accepted at the time by the scholarly world but have since been proved correct by subsequent excavations at the site. Her assessment that the last Canaanite city (level VI) was not destroyed until after the reign of Pharaoh Rameses III (twelfth century BCE) and that level III was destroyed in 701 BCE by Sennacherib, king of Assyria, has been confirmed. In addition to her devotion to archaeology, Tufnell is re membered as a modest and ldnd person. During her stay at various excavations, she served both as archaeologist and nurse, providing medical help from an expedition's dispen sary to local Arab villagers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Henry, R. "Olga Tufnell: A Biography." In Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages: Papers in Honour of Olga Tufnell, edited by Jonathan N. Tubb, pp. 1 - 9 . London, 1 9 8 5 . Tufnell, Olga. "Reminiscences of a 'Petrie Pup.' " Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1 1 4 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 8 1 - 8 6 . Tufnell, Olga. " 'Reminiscences of Excavations at Lachish': An Ad dress Delivered by Olga Tufnell at Lachish on July 6 , 1 9 8 3 . " Tel Aviv 1 2 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 3 - 8 . D A V I D USSISHKIN
TUMULUS. An artificial mound of stones and/or earth (the term cairn is sometimes used interchangeably), a tu mulus (Ar., rujm; Heb., rogem) most often covers a burial cist or chamber. Tumuli are found throughout the Near East and beyond. They tend to be located in ecological zones (steppe, hilly maquis, and desert) more amenable to pastoralism than field-crop agriculture, such as in the Negev
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desert, on the Transjordan plateau, in the central and Carmel highlands of Israel, and on the Syrian steppe. Tumuli are variously constructed: the most common form is a stone circumference filled with stone and earth to form either a conical mound or a flat-topped, drum-shaped sttucture. A burial chamber constructed with upright slabs or stone courses or sunk as a cist, usually occupies the center. The chamber's roof—generally of slabs—can be either cov ered by the tumulus or flush with its top. Dolmens were always covered by tumuli. [See Dolmen.] Monumental tu muli, such as the mysterious Iron Age group in the Jerusalem area and Rujm el-Hiri on the Golan Heights, comprise an other type. Tumuli are often associated with otiier features, such as enigmatic, single or double rows of stones, and cupmarks and altars, all of which imply symbolic/cultic behav ior. Like the dolmens, the floruit of the tumulus phenomenon in the Levant seems to occur in the Early Bronze and Inter mediate Bronze Ages, although earlier origins are possible and later use is documented. T h e Baghouz tumuli near Mari in Syria date to the Middle Bronze Age, and the great tu mulus fields of Bahrain (ancient Dilmun) appeared in the third millennium and remained in use until the Early Islamic period (seventh-eighth centuries CE). Of all the tumuli in the ancient Near East, those of Phrygia, in Asia Minor, dated to the Archaic period (first half of the second millen nium BCE), were the wealthiest and the most monumental. [See Gordion.] Tumuli functioned primarily as burial structures. Most tumuli fields include at least a few tiiat contain human skel etal material. Mordechai Haiman (1992) has suggested that fields containing larger tumuli not closely associated with settlements are also the locus of a mortuary cult. Like dol mens, tumuli fields may also mark territorial boundaries.
imp llllilP
•Jig
TUMULUS. One of the great tumuli in the Jerusalem area. Dated to the Iron Age II period, c. eighth century BCE. (Courtesy D. Ilan)
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Particularly large tumuli, such as Rujm el-Hiri, the Iron Age tumuli around Jerusalem, and those of Phrygia most cer tainly functioned as symbols of power and the sites of an elite mortuary cult. [See also Burial sites; Burial Techniques; Dilmun; and Rujm el-Hiri.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
which is one of the earliest human fossil remains ever found in the region, brought him instant fame. Later testing con firmed that the skull is related to the Acheuleo-Yabrudian culture, currendy dated as more than 250,000 years old. Turville-Pette spent 1929-1930 in Berlin for medical treatment. In 1930, he conducted a survey and excavation of a field of dolmens east of Korazim, near 'Ami'ad in the eastern Galilee. In 1 9 3 1 , following an invitation from Garrod, he excavated in the Kebara cave in the Carmel range, where he uncovered Natufian, Kebaran, and Levantine Aurignacian layers. He described the finds from the first two in a preliminary report (the last was studied by Garrod). He also tested tire Mousterian deposits but did not report his results. From 1 9 3 3 to 1 9 4 1 , Turville-Petre lived mainly in Berlin; he later settled in Greece, on St. Nicholas Island. In the wake of the 1 9 4 1 German invasion of Greece, TurvillePette was evacuated to Cairo, where he died the following year.
Amiran, Ruth. "The Tumuli West of Jerusalem, Survey and Excava tions, 1 9 5 3 . " Israel Exploration Journal 8 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 2 0 5 - 2 2 7 . Greenberg, Rafael. "The Ramat ha-Nadiv Tumulus Field L Prelimi nary Report." Israel Exploration Journal 4 2 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 2 9 - 1 5 2 . Exem plary, straightforward report of a tumulus group with some inter esting social observations in the conclusions. Haiman, Mordechai. "Cairn Burials and Cairn Fields in the Negev." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 2 8 7 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 2 5 - 4 5 . Description of various tumulus forms and associations found in an arid zone, with comments on their cultural significance. Soweileh, Abdul-Aziz. "A Typology of Dilmun Burial Mounds." In The Archaeology of Death in the Ancient Near East, edited by Stuart [See also Carmel Caves; and the biography of Garrod.} Campbell and Anthony Green. Oxford, 1 9 9 5 . Up-to-date account of one of the world's great and long-lived tumulus assemblages. B I B L I O G R A P H Y Young, Rodney S. Three Great Early Tumuli: Gordion Excavations, Fi nal Report, vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1 9 8 1 . Garrod, D. A. E. "The Mugharet el-Emireh in Lower Galilee: TypeZohar, Mattanyah. "Rogem Hiri: A Megalidiic Monument in the Go Station of the Emiran Industry." Journal of the Royal Anthropological lan." Israel Exploration Journal 3 9 . 1 - 2 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 8 - 3 1 . Description Institute's ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 1 4 1 - 1 6 2 . and analysis of one of die most mysterious and fascinating phenom Turville-Petre, Francis. Researches in Prehistoric Galilee, 1925-1926. London, 1 9 2 7 . ena in Levantine archaeology. Turville-Petre, Francis. "Excavations in the Mugharet el-Kebarah." D A V I D ILAN Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 2 ( 1 9 3 2 ) : 2 7 1 - 2 7 6 . OFER B A R - Y O S E F
TUNISIA. See Carthage; North Africa. TURKEY. See Anatolia. TURVILLE-PETRE, FRANCIS ( i o i - i 4 2 ) , p r e 9
9
historian and archaeologist. Born in Great Britain and ed ucated at Oxford University under the supervision of R. R. Marett, Turville-Petre joined the British School of Archae ology in Jerusalem after graduating from Oxford, arriving in Palestine in 1923. He surveyed along Nahal 'Amud in the eastern Galilee and in 1925-1926 excavated the Emireh and Zuttiyeh caves under the auspices of the British School. He published a full account of his excavations in 1927. His con clusions concerning the transitional character of the lithic industry from the main layer of the Emireh cave were later confirmed when Dorothy A. E. Garrod identified the Emi reh assemblage, which she named Emiran, as the industry marldng the transition from die Mousterian to the Upper Paleolithic. The assemblage contained few blades, numer ous flakes including Levallois points, and among the re touched points were end-scrapers and some burins. T u r ville-Petre's discovery of a fragmentary skull at Zuttiyeh,
TYANA, classical city located on the southeastern Ana tolian plateau, and its surrounding region, die Tyanilis, on the north side of the Toros-Bolkar Mountains and to die west of the Ala Mountains. Tyana controlled the north end of the Cilician Gates, which open the way between tiiese mountains down into Cilicia. T h e ancient city was located beneath die modern town of Kemerhisar, some 20 km (12 mi.) southwest of Nigde, following the discovery of classical inscriptions on die hoyiik, or city mound. T h e area was sur veyed by a Turkish archaeological team in the 1980s but has not been excavated. T h e Roman aqueducts that led to the site are still visible. Iron Age sites (principally Zeyve Hoyiik and Tepebaglari, and Golliidag) probably belonging to the ldngdom have been excavated but are poorly reported. An earlier form of the name Tyana is identified in that of the city of Tuwanuwa, attested in the cuneiform Hittite texts of the Hattusa archives (c. 1650-1200 BCE). A bridge be tween the two names is provided by a stela with a hiero glyphic Luwian inscription found at Bor, near Kemerhisar, that names Warpalawa (c. 740-705 BCE), a local king of the city Tuwana, in the Neo-Hittite period (see below). T h e cuneiform Plitdte references show that the city of Tuwanuwa was incorporated into die Hittite kingdom at its
TYRE inception (Edict of Telipinu, 4; Keilschrifttexte aus Bogazkoy [KBo] vol. 3, text I , col. I , 1. 10; Kielschrift urkunden aus Bogazkoy [KUB], vol. 1 1 , text 1, col. 1, 1. 9; KBo, vol. 3, text 67, col. 1 , 1 . 9), but that it frequently fell into enemy hands (Decree concerning hekur Pirwa, KBo, vol. 6, text 28 ob verse 1. 9; Deeds of Suppiluliuma, KBo, vol. 14, text 3, col. 4,11. 2 1 , 40, 42, and KUB, vol. 1 9 , text 18, col. 1,11. 1 6 , 1 7 ; see Hans Giiterbock, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 10 (1956), 76 ff.). Some towns of Tuwanuwa were included in the Sahurunuwa Donation (KUB, vol. 26, text 43 obverse 1. 38). T h e town and its gods remained important in the Hittite cult: they are mentioned in the Mursili Plague Prayer (KUB, vol. 6, text 45, col. 2, 1. 18 ff.; text 46, col. 2,1. 58 ff.); the K I . L A M festival (KBo, vol. 1 0 , text 24, col. 5, 11. 1, 8); the nuntariyasha festival (KUB, vol. 10, text 48, col. 2,1. 7); and on the AGRIG list (KUB, vol. 26, text 2, reverse 1. 4).
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ology, summarizing excavations at Porsuk, Golludag, and (Nigde-) Tepebaglari, with bibliography. Mellink, Machteld J . "Midas in Tyana." In FlorilegiumAnalolicum: Me langes offerts a Emmanuel Laroche, pp. 2 4 9 - 2 5 7 . Paris, 1 9 7 9 . Exami nation of archaeological evidence for the presence of Phrygians in Neo-Hittite Tyana. Parpola, Simo, ed. The Correspondence of Sargon II: Letters from Assyria and the West. State Archives of Assyria, 1 Helsinki, 1987. Ruge, W. "Tyana." In Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Altenumswissenschaft, vol. 8 . 2 , pp. 1 6 3 0 - 1 6 4 2 . Stuttgart, 1 9 4 8 . Comprehensive encyclopedia entry for classical sources. J . D.
HAWKINS
TYRE, site located on one of two sandstone reefs about
2 km off the coast of southern Lebanon (32°i6' N, 35°I3' E). Classical tradition states that King Hiram (969-936 BCE) joined the two reefs with landfill, enlarging the city to about In the Iron Age, the kingdom is known only through at 40 acres. In succeeding reigns, further enlargement allowed testations of its ldng, Warpalawa, who is referred to in in die creation of ports on the northern and southern sides of scriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III, to whom he paid tribute in tire island. This island stronghold was joined to tire mainland about 740, 738, and 732 BCE (Hawldns and Postgate, 1988: by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, who constructed a cause 3 1 - 4 0 as Urballa the Tuhanean (i.e., Tu'aneari). His father's way from the mainland in order to subjugate the city. By name was Muwaharani (I) (IVRIZ 4 inscription) and clearly Roman times sand from sea currents quickly built up against controlled the sites of Ivriz, Zeyve Hoytik (alias Porsuk), and this causeway, forming the present isthmus. Tyre was es Bulgarmaden, as may be seen from the inscriptions of IVRIZ sentially an administrative and religious center dependent 1 and B U L G A R M A D E N . Golludag may also have belonged to on food and water supplies from its "sister town," Ushu, on his kingdom. He was still on the throne as late as 710 to 709 the coast, which stood amid rich and well-watered agricul BCE, when he is attested in a letter of Sargon II that identifies tural land. Ushu is known only from literary references as it his kingdom as squeezed between that of Mita of Muski lies beneath the modern city. (Midas of Phrygia) and that of the Assyrian governor of Excavations at Tyre, undertaken since the 1830s, have Cilicia (seeParpola, 1987, no. 1 ) . T h e Old Phrygian inscrip concentrated on the Roman and Byzantine remains on or tions found at Kemerhisar are connected with Muski/Midas just below the surface, with little attention given to pre-clasand doubtless belong to this period. Warpalawa was suc sical times. This omission was partially addressed by a lim ceeded by his son Muwaharani II, whose stela was found at ited excavation on the site of the original city by Patricia Nigde (NIGDE 2). Bikai in 1973-1974, working under tire auspices of the Leb In the classical period, the fortified mound of Tyana (at anese Department of Antiquities. Her excavation extended Kemerhisar) was attributed by Strabo to Semiramis (Geog. to bedrock and produced a general building and pottery se - S 3 7 ) - T h e occasional Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine quence for most of the period from about 2700 to 700 BCE. historical references to Tyana are supplemented by inscrip This excavation remains the basis for the archaeological his tions found in the province. tory of Tyre before Hellenistic times (see below). A large [See also Hittites.] gap in this sequence occurs in about 2000-1600 BCE, during which time the city may have been abandoned. BIBLIOGRAPHY In 1990 the appearance of quantities of burial urns, fu Del Monte, Giuseppe F„ and Johann Tischler. Die Orts- und Gewdssernamen der hethitischen Texte. Repertoire Geographique des Textes nerary pottery, inscribed Phoenician stelae, and jewelry on Cuneiformes, vol. 6. Wiesbaden, 1 9 7 8 . Geographical index of the die local antiquities market signaled a major discovery found cuneiform archives of Hattusa, giving all references. by clandestine digging. T h e artifacts were traced to a site on Hawkins, J. D., and J. N. Postgate. "Tribute from Tabal." Bulletin of the mainland close to the Roman hippodrome. While most the State Archives of Assyria 2 . 1 ( 1 9 8 8 ) . Hawkins, J. D. Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luioian Inscriptions. [ X . 3 9 - 4 7 Ta of the material illegally discovered has been sold, scientific excavations are underway to recover what may be an im bal, Soudiern (Tyana) group.] Berlin and New York, forthcoming. Translations of all the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Tyana, with his portant cemetery dating from the end of the Late Bronze torical and philological commentary. Age into the Iron Age, about 1300 to 500 BCE. Mellink, Machteld J. "Archaeology in Asia Minor." American Journal Bronze Age. Literary references to Tyre are alleged in of Archaeology 7 4 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 1 5 7 - 1 7 8 ; 7 5 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 6 1 - 1 8 1 ; 7 6 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : the Ebla texts (third millennium) and in the Egyptian Exe1 6 5 - 1 8 8 ; 7 7 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 1 6 9 - 1 9 3 . Annual reports on Anatolian archae I2
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cration texts (c. 1800 BCE); however, the first is incorrect, the second uncertain. [See Ebla Texts.] T h e earliest reliable occurrences are in the Ugaritic texts and the Tell el-Amarna letters (Late Bronze Age). [See Ugarit Inscriptions; Amarna Tablets.] From tiiat time onward, Tyre regularly appears in Egyptian, Assyro-Babylonian, Persian, and other contem porary texts, attesting to its importance as a major trade stronghold on the Mediterranean coast. Herodotus, who visited Tyre in the mid-fourth century BCE, reports, on the authority of local priests, that the city had been founded some 2,300 years previously—that is, in about 2750 BCE (Hist. 2.44). Whether by coincidence or be cause of actual records maintained in the city archives, this date corresponds closely to the earliest known archaeological material. Little is known of the city in this early period, but in Bikai's limited sounding, which reached the lowest strata, remains of large stone walls and other occupational evidence were found (Bikai, 1978). Tyre was therefore already a per manent town in the Early Bronze Age II and there is clear evidence for houses and occupation in the following EB III. There is as yet no explanation for the apparent abandon ment of the site during the entire Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1600 BCE). A sterile layer of sand a meter and more thick separating the Early and Late Bronze Age levels indi cates that the site probably remained unoccupied during this time. In the earlier Late Bronze Age, the site was used for bur ials and storage pits, but the city was not rebuilt until the late fifteenth century BCE. A century later, the correspon dence of its ruler Abimilki to the Egyptian Akhenaten (in cluded in die Amarna letters) shows that Tyre was then a client state of the Egyptian Empire. Abimilki was most con cerned with the advance of Sidonian forces into his territory, their capture of the mainland town Ushu, and the resulting lack of water and food normally supplied to Tyre by that town. Once Egyptian rule was restored in Canaan, Tyre re sumed its vassal status through the rest of the Late Bronze Age. There is some disagreement in the literature over the fate of Tyre and other Phoenician cities during the critical twelfth century BCE, when the LB palace economies col lapsed and the new socioeconomic sttucture of the Iron Age was being formed. This was the result, largely, of growing populations, overtaxation, and die like, but newcomers from the Aegean world, the so-called Sea Peoples, also played their part. They invaded Anatolia, destroyed major coastal cities such as Ugarit on the North Syrian coast, took over Cyprus, and may even have attempted an invasion of Egypt. On the other hand, the archaeological record at Tyre, Sar epta, and other Phoenician sites shows no destruction, and literary works of about 1100 BCE indicate that four of the primary coastal cities—Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Aradus— were then thriving trade centers. [See Sarepta; Phoenicia;
Sidon; Byblos.] Trade between Cyprus and Tyre is well in evidence in the period; it is possible that the founding of die Tyrian colony at Kition (Larnaca) took place this early. [See Cyprus; Kition.] Iron Age. During the early part of the Iron Age (c. 1 1 5 0 900 BCE), the Phoenician cities were free to develop their own economies: die older empires were gone, and die em pires that would arise in die east had not yet been formed. Tyre and the other Phoenician cities were thus untroubled by foreign intervention. T h e strong port cities that devel oped during this period embarked on a westward expansion into the Mediterranean, certainly led by Tyrian merchant fleets. While many reasons are suggested for this, the most important was die search for new sources of metal to sup port a growing Phoenician industrial complex in the man ufacture of bowls, jewelry, and other metal objects. A wel come by-product of the search for metal was the creation of a trading empire that provided new customers for Phoeni cian products. Cyprus, with its rich sources of copper was the logical first step; evidence of a Phoenician commercial presence on Cyprus exists in the eleventh century BCE. By the eighth century BCE, Phoenician merchants had reached the silver, tin, and copper mines of Spain, a route main tained by Tyre that established small trading and way sta tions along die coast of North Africa. [See North Africa.] Among tiiese was Carthage, later to become a large and in dependent urban center challenging Rome for domination in the western Mediterranean. [See Carthage.] At this time, Tyre also engaged in commercial expansion to the east under King Hiram I (969-936 BCE), to whom Herodotus (Hist. 2.44) ascribes the enlargement of the city by the joining of the two original islands and the rebuilding of harbors and temples. Tyrian expertise in architecture and crafts was thus already well-known when Pliram contracted with the new Hebrew monarchy in the Canaanite hill coun try to help construct King David's palace and Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. [See Jerusalem.] In addition, Hiram and Solomon entered into a joint maritime venture between the Red Sea port of Eilat (Ezion-Geber) and Ophir (prob ably on die Somali coast). It is difficult to assess the extent of Tyre's political influence then and in the succeeding cen turies. It certainly appears to have been the leading Phoe nician commercial center and had treaty relationships with neighboring states—the best known being tiiat of the mar riage of the Tyrian princess Jezebel to King Ahab of Israel (1 Kgs. 16:31-32). However, there is no real proof of Tyrian hegemony over other Levantine cities or Tyrian rule over eastern Cyprus, as is sometimes suggested. T h e question has been obscured by the metonymic use of Sidonian to refer to Phoenicians in general. A Phoenician text from Cyprus, for example, refers to a Tyrian ruler as "king of the Sidonians" and the Hebrew Bible (1 Kgs. 5:6) calls the inhabitants of Tyre "Sidonians."
TYRE During the period of Assyrian domination (883-612 BCE), Tyre, like the other Phoenician coastal cities, was not sub jected to outright conquest and occupation. [See Assyrians.] T h e Assyrians, rather, imposed tribute and taxes; as long as those were forthcoming, there was no need for military ac tion. T h e Levantine cities presented no real threat to As syrian security, and it was in land-locked Assyria's interest to maintain firm but limited control over the Phoenicians' rich Mediterranean commercial empire tiiat produced their annual tribute. A ninth-century BCE engraved bronze band from an Assyrian palace gate now in die British Museum portrays the island fortress of Tyre and Assyrian ships row ing Tyrian tribute to the mainland. Revolt against this mild Assyrian rule was swift and merciless. The first recorded siege and destruction of a Phoenician city is that by Sen nacherib (704-681 BCE), who punished Sidon and other towns, including Ushu and the northern Canaanite cities of Achziv and Akko, for their refusal to pay the annual tribute. [See Achziv; Akko.] Sidon was again destroyed under Esarhaddon (680-669 BCE), who also put down die revolt of a coalition led by King Baal of Tyre. A treaty between Esarhaddon and Baal re stored Tyre's dependencies stretching soutii into Philistine territory but gave an Assyrian official resident in the city farreaching authority over its commerce. T h e final Assyrian assault in Phoenicia was by Ashurbanipal (668-627 BCE), again against Baal of Tyre, who once more had refused to acquiesce to foreign domination. Tyre was forced to submit through the simple expedient of cutting off its mainland food supply. Toward the end of the seventh century BCE, Assyria was conquered by Babylon; during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar (604-562 BCE), the former Assyrian vassals in the west were absorbed into the new, but short-lived, Babylonian Empire. Josephus (Against Apion 1.56) records a long siege of Tyre; although the city was not taken, Tyre became a vassal under resident Babylonian officials, one of whom is named in a series of letters from Tyre to die Babylonian court. Shortiy thereafter, tire Persians, under Cyrus II, incorporated all the western provinces into their own empire. P e r s i a n Period. Throughout the long period of Assyrian and Babylonian domination in Phoenicia, Egypt played a passive role in Levantine affairs. There is solid evidence of trade connections, especially in southern Canaan and with the coastal cities, including Tyre. Egypt sent contingents of troops to join northern coalitions against Assyria, but these were always defeated. At about the time of the fall of Nin eveh in 612 BCE, Pharaoh Psammetichus I, founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty, claimed suzerainty over the Phoeni cian cities; his successor, Necho II, is generally credited with a short period of rule in southern Canaan, although there is little evidence to support this. Herodotus notes that Pharaoh Apries (589-570 BCE) sent an army against Sidon and fought a naval battle with Tyre, a reference that'may reflect Egyp
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tian aid to Tyre during Nebuchadrezzar's siege of that city. In general, Egyptian political influence in Canaan was in termittent and without any real lasting effect. With the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE, Phoenicia came under Persian dominance and, along with Cyprus and Egypt, con stituted the fifth satrapy of the Persian Empire, with Sidon as the seat of the Persian governor and his administration. T h e Persians had a vested interest in both the western com mercial ties of die coastal cities and their fleets, which be came part of the Persian military forces in their unsuccessful attempt to conquer Greece. Persian dominance gave Phoe nicia a period of relative peace and prosperity, situated as it was in the center of a trade network su-etching from Gib raltar to Persia, from die Caucasus to Nubia. The introduc tion of coinage, first at Sidon, in about 450 BCE, greatly fa cilitated this international commerce; Tyre, Aradus, and Byblos began minting coins soon thereafter. The prosperous and peaceful life of the Phoenician cities was interrupted by revolts from time to time, especially in the fourtii century BCE, encouraged by both Greeks and Egyptians. Several cities saw this as an opportunity to rid themselves of Persian influence in local affairs, although the population was divided between its Greek and Persian sym pathies. In 392 BCE, Tyre either joined with or submitted to Evagorus I of Salamis, who was aided by Athens and Egypt, during his war to unite Cyprus and free the island. [See Sa lamis.] This failed and, although Evagorus retained his throne, Tyre reverted to Persian authority. Otiier rebellions by Sidon in 362 and 347 BCE were also put down, in the latter case with die destruction of the city. T h e role of Tyre in these revolts is obscure. Persia was tiius able to maintain control over Phoenicia, but rising pro-Greek sentiments, Egyptian interference, and the desire to escape Persian rule helped pave die way for the Macedonian conquest. Hellenistic-Roman P e r i o d s . In 332 BCE, after a sevenmonth siege by Alexander the Great, who consttucted a mole to the island (see above), Tyre capitulated to yet an other empire. Under Alexander's successors, the Seleucids, Tyre prospered; by Roman times it had become a major commercial center in the east. It is essentially the Roman city that is visible today, along with later Byzantine remains. A paved road with extensive necropoleis on either side led from die mainland through a monumental archway into the city proper. [See Necropolis.] Inside the archway, the city's central colonnaded street witii shops along either side has been largely reconstructed by the Lebanese Department of Antiquities. An aqueduct ran beside this street bringing wa ter from a mainland spring. [See Aqueducts.] The major features of the Roman city are a huge Roman batii and a hippodrome, one of the largest in the Roman world, that could seat some sixty tiiousand spectators. Later structures include a fourth-century basilica and a Crusader cathedral. [See also Phoenicians.]
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TYRE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bikai, Patricia M. The Pottery of Tyre. Warminster, 1978. Archaeolog ical report on the only excavation undertaken at Tyre to examine the pre-Hellenistic city. Chehab, Maurice. Fouilles de Tyr: Ija Necropole. Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth, vols. 33-36. Paris, 1983-1986. Final reports on excava tions by die Lebanese Department of Antiquities in the Roman and Byzantine cemeteries. A summary and critical analysis is given by Hassan Salame-Sarkis, "La Necropole de Tyr: A propos de publi cations recentes," Beiyius Archaeological Studies 34 (1986): 193-205. Jidejian, Nina. Tyre through the Ages. Beirut, 1969. Especially valuable for the Persian and Hellenistic periods, with extensive photographic documentation and bibliographies of bodi ancient and modern sources. Joukowsky, Martha Sharp, ed. The Heritage of Tyre: Essays on the His tory, Archaeology, and Preservation of Tyre. Dubuque, Iowa, 1992. Up-to-date examination, widi a complete bibliography and copious illustrations.
Katzenstein, H. Jacob. The Plistory of Tyre: From the Beginning of the Second Millennium B. CE. until the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in $38 B.C.E. Jerusalem, 1973. Depends perhaps too much on clas sical and biblical sources. Katzenstein, H. Jacob, and Douglas Edwards. "Tyre." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 686-692. New York, 1992. Basically an updated, shorter version of Katzenstein (1973). Sader, Helene. "Phoenician Stelae from Tyre." Berytus Archaeological Studies 39 (1991): 1 0 1 - 1 2 6 . Initial publication of some of the new funerary stelae from Tyre. See also Sader (1992). Sader, Helene. "Phoenician Stelae from Tyre (Continued)." StudiEpigrafici e Linguistici 9 (1992): 53-79. Seeden, Helga. "A tophet in Tyre?" Berytus Archaeological Studies 39 (1991); 39-82. Analysis of the cemetery material discovered by illegal digging in a hitherto unknown Iron Age cemetery. W I L L I A M A. WARD
u UBAID (Ar„ Tell al-'Ubaid), site located 6 km west of
straw matting layered with pise—essentially reed hut, plas tered witii mud that did not preclude the use of pivot stones. The material recovered did not permit distinguishing be tween an Ubaid 4 or 5 dating, but it certainly indicated a very late Ubaid date: the finds consisted of painted and es pecially monochrome pottery, sometimes incised; sicldes and pesdes of baked clay; grooved balls of clay; fragments of sickles with large flint teeth; limestone hoes; small pol ished axes; and terra-cotta figurines. T h e lightiy constructed huts at Tell al-'Ubaid, which must date to 4000-3800 BCE, demonsttate the fact, also observed at Ur, tiiat in lower Mes opotamia, at the end of the Ubaid period, housing was made of light materials. T h e only important constructions were probably die large family or clan reception rooms (as at Er idu VII-VI) or the granaries (as at 'Oueili). [See Granaries and Silos.]
Ur, on the right bank of the Euphrates River in Iraq (30°58' N, 46°05' E) tiiat has given its name to the last period of the prehistory of Mesopotamia. This small mound, 350 m long and 6-7 m high, was explored on behalf of the British Mu seum in 1919 by Harry R. Hall (1922), who recovered painted sherds, now known to be similar to those from Eridu tiiat, at the time, he could compare only witii those collected at Susa, in the Iranian province of Khuzistan. He also dis covered several later objects—fragments of columns inlaid with stone mosaic and copper animals. In 1923-1924, C. Leonard Woolley, responsible for the exploration of the large neighboring site of Ur, carried out a productive exca vation at Ubaid, resuming Hall's work. Woolley explored the historical as well as the prehistoric strata. He initiated the use of tiie name Ubaid for the long period witii painted ce ramics whose traces he also explored in soundings at Ur. This terminology, accepted by all, is still in use. Finally, in I937J Pinhas Delougaz (1938) and SetonLloyd (i960), who were working at the time on behalf of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago at Khafajeh, in the valley of the Diyala River in cenu-al Iraq, worked at Tell al-'Ubaid. In only four days at the site they discovered tiiat the great tem ple excavated by Hall and Woolley was the same type as that at Khafajeh, but witii an oval circuit wall. T h e site has not been excavated since. [See Khafajeh.]
A short distance south of the trench, a vast cemetery was surveyed. The site's British excavators covered the area rap idly because of the apparent poverty of die remains. They uncovered ninety-four tombs that represent a vast period of time (Ubaid 3-4, 5000-4300 BCE)—only three of which seemed on the basis of the pottery found there to belong to the final phase of Ubaid. T o the nortii of the cemetery and sounding, excavation uncovered a single structure, a large temple whose foundation date is not known. In fact, the only stage of the building excavated was a reconstruction, ac cording to the text of a stone foundation tablet, by "A-anepada, king of Ur, son of Mesannipadda, king of Ur, for Ninhursag." T h e king Mesannipadda, of the first dynasty of Ur, reigned in about 2500 BCE. This great sanctuary strongly resembles the Oval Temple at Khafajeh and one found at Lagash, present-day al-Hiba, not far from Telloh. [See Girsu and Lagash.] These vast structures set in an oval enclosure wall and identified by inscription, are clearly sep arate from the surrounding habitation areas, which is espe cially evident at Khafajeh. They are very isolated, not only by their enclosure wall, which fits poorly into the urban de sign, perhaps on purpose, but also by die terrace on which they are set. At Tell al-'Ubaid, the great oval enclosure wall (85 X 65 m) was probably doubled in the interior by a con centric, smaller enclosure (as at Khafajeh). A rectangular terrace 33 X 26 m was constructed in the center of the en-
The periodization of the prehistoric occupation of Ubaid was definitively set in i960 by Joan Oates, based on analysis of the ceramics from Eridu, which was occupied during nearly die entire Ubaid period. [See Eridu.] Two new phases have been added to her subdivisions (Ubaid 1-4, early-late): Ubaid 0, the earliest (recognized at Tell el-'Oueili and sev eral sites surveyed but not excavated), and Ubaid 5, die lat est (attested at 'Oueili, Ur, Tell Madhhur, and several sites in die Arabian Gulf). [See 'Oueili, Tell el-; Ur.] In terms of absolute chronology, according to the most recent carbon14 datings obtained at 'Oueili, the Ubaid began in about 6200 BCE, Ubaid 4 lasted from about 4800 to 4300 BCE, and Ubaid 5 from about 4300 to 3800 BCE. At Tell al-'Ubaid, the habitation area, investigated in a trench 3 0 x 2 . 1 m opened in die center of the mound, seems to have consisted of houses of light construction—wattle or
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closure of unbaked plano-convex bricks on a stone socle. Perpendicular to its southeast facade, a staircase with several stone treads gave access to the summit of die terrace. In addition, a small lateral stair, also of stone, was arranged parallel to the southwest facade, which was later incorpo rated in an annex. T h e sanctuary itself, which has since dis appeared entirely, probably stood on this terrace. At the foot of the terrace, on either side of the principle stair, Hall and Woolley retrieved numerous decorative ele ments fallen from the facade, or perhaps from the doors. Some scholars think that the decoration was located next to the main staircase leading to die terrace. All tire objects are presently housed in the British Museum. The finds include eight copper bulls with a wood and bitumen core, the small heads of birds and of a lion; die heads of leopards; a large copper plaque (2.38 X 1.07 m) representing an eagle, per haps lion-headed, grasping two stags; numerous clay nails whose heads are in the form of a flower; stone birds; and copper columns ornamented with stone mosaics. Also found were the elements of a decorative panel out of shells, set into bitumen, that represents a rare milking scene (see Gouin, 1993); and some fragments of statuary in the round. These sparse and scattered vestiges demonstrate the extraordinary wealth of ornamentation in this sanctuary, which continued to be maintained, in particular by Shulgi, king of the third dynasty of Ur, in about 2100 BCE. They are the most beau tiful examples known of the decoration of a great Sumerian sanctuary in the middle of the third millennium BCE. [See also Ceramics, article on Mesopotamian Ceramics of the Neolithic through Neo-Babylonian Ages; Mesopotamia, article on Prehistoric Mesopotamia; and the biography of Woolley.} BIBLIOGRAPHY Delougaz, Pinhas. "A Short Investigation of the Temple at Al-'Ubaid." Iraq 5 (1938): 1 - 1 1 . Gouin, Ph. "Bovins et laitages en Mesopotamie meridionale au troisieme millenaire: Quelques commentaires sur la 'frise a la laiterie' de el-'Obeid." Iraq 55 (1993): 1 3 5 - 1 4 5 . Hall, Harry R. "The Discoveries at Tell el-"Obeid in Southern Baby lonia, and Some Egyptian Comparisons." Journal of Egyptian Ar chaeology 8 (1922): 241-257. Hall, Harry R., and C. Leonard Woolley. Ur Excavations, vol. 1, Al'Ubaid. Oxford, 1927. Lloyd, Seton. "Ur—Al 'Ubaid, 'Uqair, and Eridu: An Interpretation of Some Evidence from the Flood Pit." Iraq 22 (i960): 2 3 - 3 1 . Oates, Joan. "Ur and Eridu, the Prehistory." Iraq 22 (1960): 32-50. Sollberger, Edmond. "Notes on the Early Inscriptions from Ur and el'Obed." Iraq 22 (i960): 69-89. JEAN-LOUIS HUOT
Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand
UBAR (alternately Wabar/Aubar), a region/city in the proximity of the Rub al-Khali sand desert of soutiiern Ara bia or a location to the soutii of it somewhere near eastern
Yemen or western Oman ( i 8 ° i 5 ' 3 i " N , 53°39'05" E). M e dieval Arabic sources point to Ubar as a land in eastern Ye men. Early Islamic Arab historians suggest that the region was connected to the land of the Mahra, near al-Shihr, and al-Akhaf (Tkach 1897, pp. 1832-1837; 1913a, pp. 1 0 7 3 1074). Originally, the region reportedly was well irrigated, forested, and had many fortresses and palaces. In die local tradition, destruction was brought down on the people by their wickedness, and the ruins became choked with sand from great winds or drought. Eventually, the area was aban doned. Several autiiors tie the Ubar area to botii the Mahra and the long-lost people of Ad. The assumption that Ubar was a single city comes from the more fanciful embroideries of die Thousand and One Arabian Nights, particularly the stories "The Keys of Destiny" and the "City of Brass." Other than St. John Philby in the early 1930s (1933, pp. 157-180), few Westerners have searched for UbarAv'abar. A key to the mystery is in the term Iobaritae used by Ptolemy (6.7.24) to define a tribal group living inland of the region known as Sachalitai (Stevenson, 1932, pp. 137-140). Both terms appear in modern Dhofar on copies of Ptolemy's map and in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, among other ter minology consistent with a locality in the northern Indian Ocean (Casson, 1989, pp. 170-173). Centtal to the matter is identifying the Iobaritae with the Islamic term Ubar. J. Tkach thought the people of Ubar lived in deep antiquity and had disappeared prior to the coming of Islam (1913a, p. 1074). In die nineteenth century, Western scholars argued that the Iobaritae were the later Ubars (Tkach, 1897, p. 1836). Scholars are divided today on the connection. With the first investigations at Dhofar in the late 1950s, the site of Klior Rori (long identified with Moscha of the Periplus account), was confirmed to be ancient S M H R M (Albright, 1982, cf. the arguments on pp. 3-10; Doe, 1983, pp. 147-150). Its gateway inscription in Epigraphic South
UBAR Arabic specifically mentions the S'KLHN frankincense dis trict (Albert Jamme in Albright 1982, pp. 42-45; Pirenne, 1975; Beeston, 1976) and supports the term Sachalitai used by both die Periplus and Ptolemy. Based on the archaeolog ical survey on die Salalah plain (1992-1995), it is debatable, however, if the term Moscha Limen used by the Periplus is to be identified with the Khor R o n location (see Doe, 1983, p. 21) because S M H R M = Moscha is largely conjectural. Ptolemy's harbors and settlements on the Salalah plain can now be more readily identified, based on the current ar chaeological survey of this region carried out by Juris Zarins. At least seven major sites from Khor Rori to Raysut (and perhaps Mughsayl) must be considered in reference to Pto lemy's locations. It appears that Ptolemy's placement of the Iobaritai in die hinterlands behind die Sakalan region is also accurate {con tra Groom 1994, pp. 207-208). T h e three localities (Iula, Marimatha, Thabane) identified witii the Iobaritae may be tied into the Mahra occupation of the region. These iden tifications are contingent on solving problems of scale and on the distortion inherent in all copies of Ptolemy. (For the contemporary distribution of the Mahra, see Dostal, 1967, and Lonnet, 1985; as a contemporary term in the classical period, see Mtiller, 1991.) Bertram Thomas's observation that the road to Ubar (1932, p. 1 6 1 ; see also Groom, 1994, p. 208) headed into the Rub al-Khali was the basis for the recent investigations by Zarins and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Scientists Ron Blom and Robert Crippen into the location of Ubar. L A N D S A T / S P O T / T H E M A T I C MAPPER remote-sens ing images supplied by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of die area Thomas noted recorded a long route beginning near Wadi Mitan through the southern Rub al-Khali. Projecting the route northward, the destination would have been either Ayun/Layla in the central Tuwaiq Mountains or the oasis of Jabrin on the northern edge of the Rub al-Khali (Philby, 1933, pp. 86-106). Archaeological work in the Rub al-Khali discredited the theory that large, permanent settlements be longing to the Ubar region would have been located in die sands (Edens, 1988). Tracing the tracks Thomas discovered back to the nearest ancient permanent source of water led to the discovery of Shisur (Ar., "cleft," or "fissure"). Known to explorers since Thomas (1932, p. 136) and Wil fred Thesiger (1984, p. 100), and even visited by archeologists in 1973 (Pullar, 1974, p. 4 1 ; 1975, pp. 49, 71-73) the site and region were not systematically investigated until 1990-1992. A brief surface examination of the Shisur promontory led to a detailed study of the site and region by Zarins in 1 9 9 1 1992 as director of the Transarabian Expedition. Data from this study and the excavations (1992-1994) now confirm that the site is most likely Marimatha, the largest settlement on Ptolemy's map, in the territory of the Iobaritae. T h e Shi sur site, apparently a collapsed limestone cavern, is now a
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large sinkhole. Earthquake activity ruptured the aquifer beds (Umm ar-Radhuma A-B) and water flows to the surface in several springs. Fracturing and sink-hole collapse have been seen at Shisur and in the surrounding area. The events shap ing the region's current geomorphology are dated to the last phases of the Pleistocene. Wadi Ghadun, 2 km (1 mi.) west of Shisur, represents the region's other major geomorphological feature. T h e now dry stream was a major feature during the Pleistocene and Early Holocene, flowing past Shisur and skirting the Rub al-Khali, 25 km (16 mi.) to the north. A preliminary assessment of the site's history is based on the excavation of 3-meter squares laid in a large grid. The earliest human activity belongs to the Neolithic period (phase III, c. 3500-2500 BCE), although more than twentyfive sites of the period are known around Shisur that extend occupation back to about 6000 BCE (phase I). Possible Up per Paleolithic (100,000-40,000 BP) materials may be lo cated to the east. Nondescript stone tools at Shisur may be long to the Bronze Age (2500-1000 BCE), but any formal buildings date to the Iron Age (c. 1000-0 CE). Ceramics only appeared in the region, at Dhofar (Tkach, 1913b), in the Iron Age—in contrast to Yemen (2500 BCE) and northern Oman (4500 BCE), SO that investigations are focusing on the structural and material culture sequences of the Iron Age and later. [See Yemen; Oman.] The earliest fortress at Shisur may be Early Iron Age. A small enclosure protecting the springs was built with semidressed stone walls with interior partitions. Both detailed stratification and the material culture suggest that the for tress was enlarged in the Iron Age and that occupation peaked in the early first centuries CE. The walls of the for tress were then enlarged, more interior rooms were added, and a proper gate and additional towers were built. The ma terial culture resembles that of both Yemen (imported raw chlorite schist, sandstone, and basalt, which were crafted into finished products) and northern Oman (Parthian red wares connected to Sohar). [See Sohar.] T h e distinctive redburnished wares with dot-and-circle/rouletting motifs have yet to be identified outside Dhofar. Other Hellenistic wares with applique point to connections with eastern Saudi Ara bia, specifically the Jabrin, Thaj, and Dammam regions. [See Thaj.] After a four-century hiatus (c. 400-800 CE), probably caused by earthquake activity that destroyed a large portion of the site, or economic collapse the complex was formally reoccupied in the 'Abbasid period and finally abandoned by 1400. Excavation at the bottom of the sinkhole revealed more than 5 m of occupation, all attributable to bedouin use since 1400. The region surrounding Shisur parallels the focus of the central formal complex. Especially to die east, campsites and small-scale satellite occupation can be seen for more than 10 km (6 mi.) along an arc of small hills. At Hailat Araka, 40 km (25 mi.) away, a similar occupation pattern may be
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present: limited examination yielded principally large-scale Neolithic and possible Bronze Age occupations. Irrigation channels and fields reported at Shisur are now obscured by modern oasis and farm activity (Thomas, 1932, p. 1 3 1 ) . This situation may parallel the 'Ain Humran complex on the Salalah plain, where irrigation channels and field walls can still be seen. As a whole, the Shisur region, because of its perennial water supply, was the focal point of commerce and agricul ture. Based on Ptolemy's observations, it appears that the Iobaritae were the ancestors of the Mahra peoples inhabiting this plain and conducting incense trade across the Rub alKhali and elsewhere. T h e smaller satellite sites with peren nial water dot the backslope of the Nejd. Ptolemy's sites of Iula and Thabane may be Andhur and Mudai (or Habarut), respectively, in Dhofar. Following the collapse of the in cense trade and possible topographical changes in the region caused by climate and/or earthquake, the Mahra retreated to the mountains to the south sometime after the tenth cen tury (Dostal, 1967, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 3 5 , esp. fig. 19). T h e medieval Arab trade network through die region was destroyed by the Portugese in die fifteenth century (Guest, 1935, pp. 407408). BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert M c C , et al. "Saudi Arabian Archaeological Recon naissance 1976." Atal 1 (1977): 21-40. For the route beginning near Wadi Mitan through the southern Rub al-Khali, see pp. 28-30 and Pl.3. Albright, Frank P. The American Archaeological Expedition in Dhofar, Oman, 1952-1953. Publications of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, vol. 6. Washington, D.C., 1982. Beeston, A. F. L. "The Settlement at Khor Rod." Journal of Oman Studies 2 (1976): 39-42. Bibby, Geoffrey. Preliminary Survey in East Arabia, 1968. Copenhagen, 1973. For the archaeology of the route beginning near Wadi Mitan through the southern Rub al-Khali see pp. 48-59. Casson, Lionel, ed. and trans. 77K "Periplus Maris Erythraei": Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton, 1989. Doe, Brian. Monuments of South Arabia. New York, 1983. Dostal, Walter. Die Beduinen in Siidarabien. Vienna, 1967. For the con temporary distribution of the Mahra in the classical period. See also Lonnet (below). Edens, Christopher. "The Rub al-Khali 'Neolithic' Revisited: The View from Nadqan." In Araby the Blest: Studies in Arabian Archae ology, edited by Daniel T. Potts, pp. 1 5 - 4 3 . Carsten Niebuhr Insti tute Publication, 7. Copenhagen, 1988. Groom, Nigel. "Oman and the Emirates in Ptolemy's Map." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy $ (1994): 198-214. Guest, A. R. "Zufar in the Middle Ages." Islamic Culture 9 (1935): 402-410. Discusses the medieval Islamic evidence for the route be ginning near Wadi Mitan through the southern Rub al-Khali, p. 408. Lonnet, Antoine. "The Modern South Arabian Languages in the P.D.R. of Yemen." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 1 5 (1985): 49-55. For die contemporary distribution of the Mahra in the classical period. See also Lonnet (below). Miiller, W. W. "Nahra." In The Encyclopedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 6 pp. 80—84. Leiden, 1991. See this for Mehra as a contemporary term in the classical period.
Philby, H. St. John. 77;<; Empty Quarter. London, 1933. Piesinger, Constance M. "Legacy of Dilmun: The Roots of Ancient Maritime Trade in Eastern Coastal Arabia in the Fourth/Third Mil lennium B.C." Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1983. For the route from Wadi Mitan through the southern Rub al-Khali, see pp. 191-206. Pirenne, Jacqueline. "The Incense Port of Moscha (Khor Rori) in Dho far." Journal of Oman Studies 1 (1975): 81-96. Pullar, Judith. "Harvard Archaeological Survey in Oman, 1973,1: Flint Sites in Oman." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 4 (1974): 33-48. For Shizur, see p. 4 1 . Pullar, Judith. "A Selection of Aceramic Sites in the Sultanate of Oman." Journal of Oman Studies 1 (1975): 48-88. For Shisur, see pp. 49, 7 1 - 7 3 . Stevenson, Edward Luther. Claudius Ptolemy: The Geography. New York, 1932. Thesiger, Wilfred. Arabian Sands (1959). London, 1984. For the dis covery of Shisur, see p. too. Thomas, Bertram. Arabia Felix. New York, 1932. For the discovery of Shisur, see p. 136. Tkach, J. "Iobaritai." In Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Allertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart, 1897. Tkach, J. "Wabar." In The Encyclopaedia of Islam, pp. 1 0 7 3 - 1 0 7 4 . Lei den, 1 9 1 3 a Tkach, J. "Zafar." In 'The Encyclopaedia of Islam, pp. 1 1 8 7 - 1 1 9 0 . Lei den, 1 9 1 3 b - . Zarins, Juris, et al. "Saudi Arabian Archaeological Reconnaissance 1978" Allal 3 (1979): 9-42. For classical-period settlements on the route beginning near Wadi Mitan through tire southern Rub alKhali, see pp. 26-29, 3 1 - 3 5 and pis. 1 4 - 1 8 . JURIS ZARINS
'UBEIDIYA, hilltop site about 0.5 km east of Tell 'Ubeidiya and west of the Jordan River, on a mound whose slopes range from 160 to 205 m below sea level. Geologically, this formation was originally named Melanopsis stuffe (Picard, 1943) and later as the 'Ubeidiya Formation (Picard and Baida, 1966). Excavation of the prehistoric site of'Ubeidiya was sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences, under the direction of Moshe Stekelis (1960-1966) Ofer Bar-Yosef and Eitan Tchernov (1967-1974), and more recently witii Claude Guerin of the University of Lyon (1988-1994). The site's numerous angled and folded layers, excavated with heavy machinery, contained animal bones and worked stone artifacts. T h e formation reflects the depositional his tory of a Lower Pleistocene freshwater lake and its imme diate environment. The lake occupied the area now covered by die Sea of Galilee and an additional 30 lan (18 mi.) to its south. More winter rain was experienced then, so that oak forests at times covered the valley slopes of the central Jor dan Valley. Stratigraphically, the excavations exposed a se quence of expansion and retreat for the 'Ubeidiya lake. Its final regression, caused by tectonic movement, may also have been responsible for its disappearance (Picard and Baida, 1966). [See Jordan Valley.] A series of trenches revealed more than sixty layers on both sides of a small anticline. Many of the archaeological horizons exposed may have been continuous on the other
UGARIT side of the anticline before the top was completely eroded. Numerous artifacts were recovered from the different lay ers, including core-choppers, polyhedrons, spheroids and subspheroids, handaxes, picks, and abundant retouched and unretouched flakes. Those artifacts that had originated in the gravelly beach contexts tended to be abraded, whereas the least frequently abraded items were recovered from clayey layers. T h e site's main tool groups can be grouped according to the raw materials used: core choppers, polyhedrons, and many flakes were made of flint; spheroids from limestone; and handaxes from basalt, with a few from limestone and flint. T h e size of the desired shape probably dictated the choice of the raw material. T h e site's lithic assemblages re semble those of the lithic industries of the Developed Oldowan and Early Acheulean in East Africa's Olduvai Gorge, specifically Upper Bed II (Bar-Yosef and Goren-Inbar, 1993)Faunal correlations and the paleomagnetic reversed po sition of most of its sequence provide a date for 'Ubeidiya of i.0—1.4 million years ago. T h e extensive faunal collection is primarily Eurasian in origin, with only a few species from Africa. It includes more than one hundred species of mam mals, reptiles, and birds, among them hippopotamus, horse, deer hedgehog, leopard, wild camel, lemming, bear, fox, rhi noceros, elephant, gazelle, oryx, and hamster. Those fauna originating in Africa include giraffe, a few species of rats, hippopotamus, warthog, and a species of wild sheep. These varied fauna would have encouraged scavenging, and die Mediterranean flora made available leaves, fruit, and seeds to supplement the diet of early hominids. Although no human remains were found in situ, the worked-stone arti facts are presumably the work of Homo erectus. T h e rich archaeological and zoological information from 'Ubeidiya for the early Lower Paleolithic constitutes the best evidence for the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa. [See also Paleobotany; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruc tion; and Paleozoology.]
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du Jourdain a Oubeidiyeh. Memoires et Travaux du Centre de Re cherche Prehistoriques Francais de Jerusalem, no. 5. Paris, 1 9 8 6 . Tchernov, Eitan. "The Age of the 'Ubeidiya Formation: An Early Pleis tocene Hominid Site in the Jordan Valley, Israel." Israel Journal of Earth Sciences 3 6 . 1 - 2 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 3 - 3 0 . OFER B A R - Y O S E F
UGARIT, an ancient kingdom on die Mediterranean coast of Syria, whose capital of the same name was estab lished on the mound of Ras Shamra, located 10 km (6 mi.) north of Latakia (35°36' N , 35°47' E). T h e mound of Ras Shamra is encircled by two small seasonal streams (Nahr Chbayyeb to the north and Nahr ed-Delbeh to die south) that join (Nahr el-Fidd) to flow into the bay of Minet elBeida, about 800 m away; its broad agricultural plain divides the plateau of Bahluliyah, and the Alaouite Mountains from the sea. Five km (3 mi.) to the south lies the promontory of Ras Ibn Hani, where an Ugaritic settlement of the Late Bronze Age is located. The ldngdom extended for about 2,000 sq km (1,240 sq. mi.). It was bounded by the Mediterranean Sea (to the west); the Bayer and Bassit Mountains (to the north); the Alaouite Mountains (the so-called coastal chain of the Jebel Ansariyah), which are 1,567 m high (to the east); and the area of the Jableh and Nahr as-Sinn (to the south). A per manent river, die Nahr al-Kabir, drains the waters of the mountains to the north; its valley (to die northeast) opens the route to central Syria. O n the northern horizon, die Jebel al-Aqra (1,780 m high) is ancient Mt. Sapanu (Mt. Zaphon; the Romans' Mt. Casius), where Baal, the storm god, re sided. The city visible on the surface of the mound is that of the Late Bronze Age (see figure 1 ) . In its present state, it is defined by the surface area of the mound (more than 20 ha, or 49 acres), which does not correspond to the area of the LB town: to the northeast, more than 50 m were under mined by the meandering of tire Nahr Chbayyeb; to the east, and especially die south, modern farming prevents exami BIBLIOGRAPHY nation of the extent of the ancient habitation. In 1929, texts were recovered from the mound of Ras Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Eitan Tchernov. On the Paleo-Ecological History Shamra that were written in several languages. Among them of the Site of'Ubeidiya. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 2 . Bar-Yosef, Ofer. "The Excavations in 'Ubeidiya in Retrospect." In In was an otherwise unknown language, that of Ugaritic, in vestigations in South Ixvantinc Prehistory, edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef scribed in cuneiform writing according to a new alphabetic and Bernard Vandermeersch, pp. 1 0 1 - 1 1 1 . Oxford, 1 9 8 9 . system. T h e texts revealed a new world of cultural, religious, Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Na'ama Goren-Inbar. The Lithic Assemblages of 'Ubeidiya: A Lower Palaeolithic Site in the Jordan Valley. Qedem, vol. and mythological traditions, essentially of the fourteenththirteenth centuries BCE, that further demonstrated the first3 4 . Jerusalem, 1 9 9 3 . Haas, Georg. On the Vertebrate Fauna of the Ijower Pleistocene Site of rank importance of Ugarit in the history of the Near East. 'Ubeidiya. Jerusalem, 1 9 6 6 . The interpretation of the texts discovered since 1929 at Picard, Leo, and U, Baida. Geological Report on the Lower Pleistocene Ras Shamra led to the identification of the site as ancient Deposits of the 'Ubeidiya Excavations. Jerusalem, 1 9 6 6 . Ugarit, mentioned in second-millennium BCE texts from Stekelis, Moshe, Ofer Bar-Yosef, and Tamar Schick. Archaeological Ex Mari, Bogazkoy, and Tell Amarna. Texts from Ebla have cavations at 'Ubeidiya, 1964-1966. Jerusalem, 1 9 6 9 . Tchernov, Eitan, ed, Les mammifires du pleistocene inferieur de la Vallee perhaps furnished the earliest mention of the name (2400
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A
BCE) but it is questionable. [See Mari Texts; Bogazkoy; Amarna Tablets; Ebla Texts.] The port of Minet el-Beida is probably ancient Ma'hadu (Leukos Limen of the Greeks, the White Port of the Cru saders). There is some doubt about the ancient designation of the site of Ras Ibn Hani (Appu? Biruti? Resu?). T h e sin gle large river, the Nahr al-Kabir, is designated as Rahbanu. The Ugarit texts in Akkadian and Ugaritic from the four teenth to the beginning of the twelfth centuries BCE enabled
B
progress in localizing the ancient toponyms of the realm, sometimes identified by comparing them with present-day names. [See Ugarit Inscriptions.] Archaeological Investigation. After the accidental dis covery in 1928 of a funerary vault at Minet el-Beida, the Mission Archeologique Francaise, directed by Claude F.-A. Schaeffer explored the harbor foundation and then the mound of Ras Shamra 800 m from tire shore (1929-1970). T h e mission was subsequently directed by Henri de Con-
UGARIT tenson (1971-1974), Jean Margueron (1975-1977), and Marguerite Yon (since 1978). [See the biography ofSchaeffer.] T h e first campaigns concentrated on Minet el-Beida's harbor settlement and tombs (1929-1935) and on excavat ing die mound of Ras Shamra. Urban areas were excavated on the Acropolis (1929-1937), including two temples and the House of the High Priest, with its mythological tablets and inscribed bronze tools that permitted the decipherment of Ugaritic in 1930 by Hans Bauer, Edouard Dhorme, and Charles Virolleaud. [See the biography of Virolleaud] From 1932 to 1937, residential areas in the Lower City, East and West, and below the Acropolis (north and northeast) were explored. Exploration of the nortiieastern part of the mound began in 1937-1939. Buildings were uncovered tiiat are known as the Palace of the Queen Mother, the Building with Four Pillars, and the so-called Hurrian Temple. Excavation of the Royal Palace, with its fortification on the west, was begun at that time (see figure 2). It was resumed, after the discov ery of die main archives, following World War II (1948!955)- The excavation of the once-inhabited areas to die east of the palace, the houses in the Residential Quarter, with their deposits of archives and rich furnishings, was contin ued between 1953 and 1974. Included in the monumental complexes sometimes recognized as palaces are the vast NorthPalace (excavated in 1968-1971), perhaps a royal pal ace that preceded the last royal palace; and the South Palace (the "Little Palace," or "House of Yabninu," excavated in
1 9 6 4 - 1 9 6 5 ) , with its archives. Between 1959 and 1964, large north-south trenches revealed other habitation areas in the South City ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 0 ) and on the South Acropolis ( 1 9 6 1 1964) that included important tablets. A post-Ugaritic in stallation in the middle of the mound (Persian and Helle nistic period) was excavated in 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 3 . Deep soundings were undertaken to explore periods ear lier than the Late Bronze Age to the west of the Temple of Baal ( 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 6 0 ) and in the Garden of the Royal Palace, or court III (I9S4-I95S) • T h e most important of them, sound ing H ( 1 9 6 2 - 1 9 7 4 ) , on the west slope of the Acropolis, re vealed 1 5 m of occupation and gave the most complete stra tigraphy of the site (seventh-second millennia). In 1 9 7 5 - 1 9 7 6 , a large LB dwelling was excavated north west of the mound. Since 1 9 7 8 , the project has focused on urbanism and architecture, including excavation of die area at the center of the city and an architectural study of the Soutii City Trench (excavated in 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 0 ) . A square opened in the southern area (South Center) produced new batches of tablets in an archaeological context, the "house of Urtenu" ( 1 9 8 6 - 1 9 9 4 ) . A study of die urban topography led to the opening (since 1992) of a square on the Main Street, the principal access route in the city, on the axis of the bridge-dam (excavated 1988) that crossed the Nahr edDelbeh to the south. T h e emergency excavation of a small mound next to the sea at Ras Ibn Hani (about 5 km, or 3 mi., from Ras Shamra) uncovered a new Ugaritic settlement widi a palace, fortifi-
Hurrian Temple
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Figure 2. Plan of the Royal Palace. (Courtesy M. Yon)
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cations, and texts (thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE) and a Hellenistic fortress. T h e site was explored by a Syro-French expedition directed by Adnan Bounni and Jacques Lagarce. [See Ras Ibn Hani.]
Stratigraphy and Chronology. The best-known period on the mound of Ras Shamra in terms of texts and archae ological remains is the Late Bronze Age, in particular the fifteentii-twelfth centuries BCE). It is the apex of a history five millennia long. Neolithic period. Human occupation by farmers, hunt ers, and fishermen began in the period of sedentarism in Syria-Palestine (level VC, seventh millennium). Subsequendy (levels VB, 6000-5750 BCE; VA, 5750-5250 BCE), new technologies appeared: the breeding of domesticated animals, houses built of stone according to a rectilinear plan, and the manufacture of containers (the "white ware" of plaster and baked ceramic). Chalcolithic period. In the Chalcolithic period (level IV), new influence from tire East led to a profound trans formation and reduction in the size of the inhabited area. T h e site's Halaf phase (5250-4300 BCE) is characterized by painted pottery, diversified architecture, the development of crafts, and the breeding of small livestock. Its Ubaid phase (level III C-B, end of the fifth-fourth millennia) witnessed the appearance of copper. [See Halaf, Tell; Ubaid.] Early Bronze Age. After about 3000 BCE (level III A), occupation of the site evolved considerably. T h e Early Bronze stratum presented urban characteristics (alleys, a city wall). T h e site's architecture, formerly of unbaked brick (phase 1), utilized stone more and more. Tools, mainly of stone, now also included metal objects (copper, bronze). Pottery demonstrated relationships with the contemporary sites of Cilicia, North Syria, and Palestine. Phase 3 showed a rapid development of bronze metallurgy (weapons, tools). In about 2200 BCE, the mound was abandoned, like other sites in the Levant, for a period of about a century (or two?). Middle Bronze Age. In about 2000 BCE (level II), the site began a new life, with tire arrival of nomadic populations that settled in Syria (cf. Amorites). Certain groups (porteurs de torques) seemed expert in metallurgy (molds for jewelry and weapons were recovered). T h e architecture of phase 1 is not known, only its large collective tombs. In phases 2 and 3 (c. 1900-1650 BCE), a new urban civilization united the Syrian coastal traditions and the new influences. T h e town, which gradually covered the entire surface of the mound, was protected by a strong wall. [See Amorites.] Two temples on the Acropolis and the Hurrian Temple northeast of the mound may have their origin in the Middle Bronze Age. Excavation has produced many objects from the Middle Bronze period, notably Egyptian, with hiero glyphic inscriptions. Some scholars have proposed the po litical domination by pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty. T h e name Ugarit is also mentioned in the Mari texts (royal visits, the trade in tin), which attests to continued relations be
tween northern Mesopotamia and the coastal realm (Courtois, 1979; Saade, 1979). Late Bronze Age. T h e end of the M B period (c. 1650 BCE) and the phase that followed (until the Amarna period, fifteenth century BCE) remains an obscure period in the Le vant. T h e building called the North Palace was probably constructed at die beginning of the Late Bronze Age. T h e Late Bronze level I at Ugarit experienced a new expansion of urban development, spectacular prosperity, and the growing importance of royal power (fifteenth-thirteenth centuries BCE). T h e succession of kings and tiieir relations with foreign powers are known from the texts found in the archives of Ugarit and elsewhere (e.g., Amarna) and by the seals that mark official documents. [See Seals.] T h e written documents give evidence for die use of several languages, mainly Akkadian and Ugaritic. The history of the kingdom of Ugarit is tied to the powers that surrounded it and on which it depended (Mitanni, Egyptian, Hatti) and to neighboring realms—friendly or hostile, according to die circumstance or period (Carche mish, Amurru, Siyannu, Qadesh, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Berytus/Beirut). In about 1400-1350 BCE, Ugarit fell under Egyptian conttol. After 1350 BCE, the expedition of the ldng of Hatti, Suppiluliuma made the Mitanni submit to Hittite domination. Ugarit, Amurru, Qadesh, and other small ldngdoms also passed into the Iiittite sphere of influence. [See Mitanni; Carchemish; Tyre; Sidon; Byblos; Beirut; Hittites.] In the latter half of the thirteenth century BCE, the royal authority monopolized tire wealth of Ugarit. T h e kingdom was founded on a flourishing economy, but its weak military capacity continued to fail. Ugarit was probably destroyed at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE, in raids by the Sea Peoples, who plundered and set fire to it and numerous other sites. [See Philistines, article on Early Philistines.] T h e annihilation of Ugaritic civilization necessarily had other causes as well—economic, social, and political—that explain the total and final abandonment of the town by its inhabi tants in about 1180 BCE. Evidence of occupation in the later Persian and Hellenistic periods only appeared in a small por tion of the site south of the Acropolis (Stucky, 1983). Fortifications. T h e M B city was surrounded by ram parts (see figure 3) for most of that period. T o the north, erosion caused their disappearance, except to the north of the Acropolis, where portions were found in a sounding (1934). Soundings revealed the remains of a wall to the east, as well. T o the south, here and tiiere below earthen em bankments, traces of a Main Street appeared tiiat ran from the south toward die center of the city. T o the east, an imposing fortification protected the access to the Royal Palace: a stone glacis (a 45-degree slope), a square tower (14 m on a side) protecting a pincer gate and hidden access by a ramp (now disappeared), and a postern leading behind the tower. This area was profoundly trans formed in the Late Bronze Age with the construction of the
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UGARIT. Figure 3. City rampart, with rear gate and tower above, (Courtesy Mission Francaise de Ras Shamra-Ougarit)
Royal Palace. Successive enlargements were also carried out on die fortified gate that protected the palace on the west. T h e fortified gate leading only to the royal area did not provide access to the town for its inhabitants or its mer chants transporting merchandise from die port. Exploration of a wide depression on the south slope confirmed (1992) the hypothesis of a Main Street that crossed the Nahr edDelbeh by way of the bridge-dam (still being excavated). This would have been the principal route leading from the roads on the plain into the interior of the city. Other routes of access were probably used: another bridge was probably located to the north, and to the east, relatively gentle slopes lead toward the terrain cultivated for agriculture. City Plan. T h e space delimited by the contour of the mound allowed several occupation zones. About 6 ha (15 acres) were explored on die surface, less than one-third of the tell. One part of the urban area was reserved as the royal domain (the palace zone); it was spread over 10,000 sq m and was isolated architecturally from the rest of the city. T h e area of the Acropolis revealed two large temples. T h e re mainder of the site consisted of residential areas. Palace area. T h e Royal Palace, constructed in several phases (fourteenth-thirteenth centuries BCE), is a spectacu lar monument in terms of its size (at its maximum 120 m east-west and 90 m north-south; it covers close to 1 ha, or 3 acres) and the quality of its construction (cut stone, rubble, wood, terre pise). Its successive enlargement corresponded to the expansion of royal power and its administration. A dozen stone staircases and a number of walls preserved to the floor of the upper level attest to the existence of at least
one upper story. In its final stage, its elaborate floor plan reveals the differentiation of space on several levels: admin istrative (regulation of the affairs of the realm mingled with those of the palace), public and official, and private. On the northwest the palace was entered from a paved square that opened onto the fortified gate, entry was through a vestibule with two columns; a vast court (I) then led to the "throne room." Various smaller rooms (guardrooms, ad ministrative offices), with stairways leading to upper floors, yielded deposits of administrative documents and corre spondence (the West Archives, Annex Office of Archives). T o the south and east of tiiis official zone, groups of rooms were organized around other courts and rooms (II, IV, VI). T h e royal tombs were found to the north of court II. Numerous private houses were also found to include a family tomb. T h e area of court IV and room VI held the Central Archives (juridical texts and royal contracts; from which 135 impressions of dynastic seals permit the recon struction of the succession of the kings of the fourteenthtwelfth centuries BCE) . T h e grouping around court V, to the south, with its rectangular basin, constituted one of the most recent building efforts; in tiiis area the very important South and Southwest Archives were found that may have fallen from an upper story. The eastern part of the palace included a large garden (III), onto which private apartments opened: one room (northwest of the garden) yielded luxurious furniture inlaid with ivory (bed panels, a small round table). The rooms to the northeast of the garden yielded the East Archives (eco nomic texts). Several groups of rooms to the north of the
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palace were connected to the area: the Arsenal; the Resi dence of the Military Governor; the Building with Pillars (once wrongly designated by Schaeffer as Stables); and the Hurrian Temple. The palace area carefully bounded and protected from die city by continuous walls and well-de fended gates, also boasted elaborate arrangements, resmicted to it, for personal hygiene, such as drainage pipes and sewer mains. [See Personal Hygiene.] The administrative and financial texts and lists of villages and crafts lead scholars to believe that royal power was ex panded in the course of the thirteenth century BCE (see above). T h e physical extension of the royal area in relation to the rest of the town and the concentration of the archives found in the palace confirm this conclusion. Acropolis. The temples on the Acropolis were designated the Temple of Baal (it housed a stela of Baal with a thun derbolt and an Egyptian stela with a dedication to "Baal Saphon") and the Temple of Dagan (its stelae are inscribed in Ugaritic). The Temple of Baal was built in an enclosure. Strong foundations supported a platform upon which the building stood. It was composed of a vestibule reached by a stair on its facade and a larger rectangular room. A monu mental interior stairway wound around three sides of the structure, which permits an approximation of its total height at about 18 m. T h e temple, in the form of a tower, supported a platform on its roof on which certain rituals took place (cf. the mythological text found in 1930 [CTA 6; TO 1 , 480574], where die king Keret offers a sacrifice "at the top of the tower"). The height of this tower, on an acropolis 20 m above the plain, made it a characteristic element of the land scape and a landmark visible from far at sea. T h e seventeen stone anchors counted in this temple demonstrate its ven eration by sailors. [See Anchors.] The quality of the offerings (e.g., gold vessels) indicate the importance of the cult. T h e Temple of Dagan, of which only the enormous foundations remain, took the same tower form. Close to the temples isolated in their enclosures, blocks of houses were reached by narrow streets. This quarter was not only a simple middle-level habitation area, for the house known as the House of die Grand Priest or (the Library) is located between the two temples. From 1929 onward it yielded an important collection of bronze weapons and utensils bearing dedications to the "chief of the priests." The inscriptions furnished one of the keys to the decipherment of Ugaritic, and the most important mythological texts were discovered there (TO 1 ) . Residential areas. Ugarit's city plan for the southern part of the mound reveals no regularity. As a result of ex cavation since 1992, a central axis has begun to appear, com ing from die south (Main Street). From the Residential Quarter to the South Acropolis Trench, roughly parallel streets follow the curves of the site's east-west contour ap proximately; they are connected by short, narrow transverse alleys. These define blocks of varied shapes tiiat lack both
an orthogonal pattern and any regularity. This circulation network overlies an older network, created over the course of centuries by the disorderly evolution of a living habitat. Ugarit's residential areas appeared in various parts of the city: in the Lower City, in housing on the acropolis, in the South Acropolis Trench, and in the Residential Quarter. How the residential areas were organized and their domestic architecture (materials, plans, construction techniques) have been studied recently in several quarters: the South City (RSO 10), City center (RSO 3), South Center, and Main Street. In spite of the observations of former excavators, specific districts reserved for craftsmen and a population of elevated rank could not be confirmed. Clear social overlapping ap peared: the large houses of the rich, small, simple habita tions; and urban craft activities coexisted in die same blocks. T h e social rank or function of the owners (wealthy mer chants, royal officials, representatives of foreign powers) can be deduced from the presence of archives, as in the Resi dential Quarter (in the Houses of Rasapabu, the Scholar, and Rap'anu, the bronze armorer), South City (House of the Literary Tablets), South Acropolis (House of the PriestMagician), and South Center (House of Urtenu). Cult places are identified across the city's habitation areas (religious activities were omnipresent). These sanctuaries integrated into the insulae opened directly onto the public streets or belong to blocks otherwise occupied by residential buildings. Their sacral character is recognizable in their ar chitectural organization (the Rhyton Temple in the City Center) and/or, when the plan of an area is poorly preserved or difficult to interpret, in the furnishings discovered: cere monial rhytons, cultic furniture, incense burners, statuettes and stelae), and objects tied to the practice of divination such as inscribed liver and lung models. Domestic cults, which are a manifestation of die popular religion, are at tested by the number and dispersion across the inhabited areas of small idols (pendants in precious metal, terra-cotta figurines). It is difficult to estimate the population of the town of Ugarit in the last phase of its history. Texts (financial, mainly) and the size of the houses and their supposed den sity suggest six thousand to eight thousand inhabitants for the thirteenth-century BCE city, out of twenty-five thousand inhabitants for the whole kingdom. Archaeological indices lead to the belief that the population increased in the course of the thirteenth century; the increase in die density of hab itation agrees with what can be inferred from the texts. Material Culture. Numerous objects, attesting to the technical competence of the craftsmen of Ugarit, reveal strong technical specialization and artistic skill. Craftsmen worked in all sorts of materials: ceramic, stone, ivory, metal, faience. Pottery was mainly of local manufacture. Myce naean, Cypriot, and Minoan imports constitute statistically a small part of die ceramic repertoire, but the evidence they
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provide for international exchanges, the population's tastes, and the transfer of techniques is significant. Sculpture is represented by several stelae (see figure 4) and stone statues (see figure 5); technical and stylistic anal yses demonstrate the existence of local workshops. In the minor arts—molded figurine manufacture, vessel decorat ing, engraving, ivory carving and glyptic—the artists of Uga rit produced objects for the gods and ldngs that count among the most accomplished in the LB Levant, including ivory furniture from the Royal Palace and gold cups found on the Acropolis. [See Furniture and Furnishings, article on Fur nishings of the Bronze and Iron Ages; Stelae.] Artistic and
UGARIT. Figures. Statue of the god El. (Courtesy Mission Francaise de Ras Shamra-Ougarit) intellectual activities, strongly tied to religious concerns, are known from the texts moreso than from archaeology. The musical instruments discovered in die excavations (bronze cymbals, ivory rattles, and a horn) evoke the ceremonies that once produced the ritual texts and mytiiological recitations. [See Musical Instruments.] Literature was supported by a scribal profession. No precise arrangement for a school has yet been recognized, but several abecedaries, lexicographical documents, and student copies prove that students learned to write and that a fraction of the population learned tech nical vocabulary and foreign languages according to peda gogical techniques. [See also Palace; Ugaritic.] BIBLIOGRAPHY UGARIT. Figure 4. Stela of Baal preparing to. strike. (Courtesy Mis sion Francaise de Ras Shamra-Ougarit)
For excavation reports since 1 9 2 9 under the direction of successive directors, see Syria (Paris), Annales Archealogiques Arabes Syriennes
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(Damascus), and Compies Rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-script was essentially deciphered within a year by scholars Lettres (Paris). For specialized studies, see Ugarit-Forschung (Miinster) working independently, although subsequent refinements and Newsletter far Ugaritic Studies (Calgary). The reader may also con were necessary and minor corrections continue to be made. sult the following studies: Amiet, Pierre. Corpus des cylindres-sceaux, vol. 2, Sccaux cylindres en Texts in the Ugaritic language are presentiy attested only in hematite et pierrcs diverses. Ras Shamra-Ougarit (RSO), 9. Paris, 1 9 9 2 . the area of Ugarit, but brief and/or fragmentary texts using Bordreuil, Pierre, and Dennis Pardee. La trouvaille epigraphique de the Ugaritic writing system are attested from Kamid el-Loz I'Ougarit, vol. 1, Concordance. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 5 A . Paris, 1 9 8 9 . in Phoenicia to Beth-Shemesh in Canaan (Dietrich and LorBordreuil, Pierre, et al. Une biblioth'eque au sud de la ville: Les texts de la etz 1988: 205-296). 34c campagne. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 7. Paris, 1 9 9 1 . Callot, Olivier. Une maison a Ougarit: Etudes d'architecture domestique. A vigorous debate was originally waged over the proper assignment of the language within the Semitic language Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 1. Paris, 1 9 8 3 . Callot, Olivier. Ixi tranchee ville sud. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 1 0 . Paris, group, witii no real consensus ever reached. T h e historical 1994. and linguistic links with the peoples grouped under the gen Caquot, Andre, et al. Texles ougaritiques (TO), vol. 1 , Mythes et legendes. eral heading "Amorites" makes the description given above Paris, 1 9 7 4 . Caquot, Andre, et al. Textes ougaritiques, vol. 2, Textes religieux, rituels,plausible, although much more Amorite data is required to demonstrate the link. Paucity of data also impedes the de correspondance. Paris, 1 9 8 9 . Contenson, Henri de. Prehistoire de Ras Shamra: Les sondages strati- scription of relationships witii the later West Semitic lan grapliiques de :95s d 1976. 2 vols. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 8. Paris, guages. At this stage it is only possible to say that linguisti 1992. cally the best parallels are with the Arabic and Arabian Courtois, Jacques-Claude, et al. "Ras Shamra." In Supplement au Diefamilies of languages, while literally the closest ties are with tionnaire de la Bible (SDB), fasc. 5 2 , cols. 1 1 2 4 - 1 4 6 6 . Paris, 1 9 7 9 . Cunchillos, Jesus-Luis. La trouvaille epigraphique de I'Ougarit, vol. 2 , Hebrew. Bibliographic Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 5 B . Paris, 1 9 8 9 . T h e basic writing system, like all the later Northwest Se Herdner, Andree. Corpus des tablettes en cuneiformes alphabetiques de-mitic alphabetic systems, is consonantal, with no provision couvertes a Ras Shamra-Ugaril de 1929 a 1939 (CTA). Paris, 1 9 6 3 . for noting vowels. The reconstruction of the vocalic aspect Le Monde de la Bible (MdB), no. 4 8 (March-April 1 9 8 7 ) . Special issue of the language must rely, therefore, on four types of data: entitled "Ougarit," edited by Marguerite Yon. (1) the existence of three 'aleph signs, a distinctive feature Nougayrol, Jean. Palais royald'Ougarit (PRU). Vols. 3, 4 , 6 . Paris, 1 9 3 9 1979. of the Ugaritic alphabet (see below); (2) Ugaritic words in Pardee, Dennis. Les textes hippiatriques. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 2. Paris, polyglot vocabularies ("dictionaries" written in syllabic 1985. script with columns for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Pardee, Dennis. Les texts paramylhologiques de la 24c campagne (1961). Ugaritic); (3) Ugaritic words appearing in Akkadian texts, Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 4. Paris, 1 9 8 8 . either alone or as glosses to an Akkadian word; and (4) com Saade, Gabriel. Ougarit, metropole cananeene. Beirut, 1 9 7 9 . parative Semitics. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A., ed. Ugarhica. 7 vols. Paris, 1 9 3 9 - 1 9 7 9 . Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Corpus des cylindres-sceaux da Ras ShamraT h e language is characterized by a conservative phonol Ugarit et d'Enkomi-Alasia. Paris, 1 9 8 3 . ogy and morphology. T h e basic alphabet consists of twentyStucky, Rolf A. Ras Shamra-Leukos Limen: Die Nach-Ugarilische Beseven signs (as compared with twenty-two in Phoenician/ seidlung vom Ras Shamra. Paris, 1 9 8 3 . Hebrew), at the end of which three signs have been added: Virolleaud, Charles. Le palais royal d'Ougarit. Vols. 2 and 5. Edited by one sibilant ({s} = no. 30) and two supplementary 'aleph Claude F.-A. Schaeffer. Paris, 1 9 5 7 - 1 9 6 5 . Yon, Marguerite, et al. Le centre de la ville (38-446 campagnes). Ras signs ({a} = no. 1, {1} = no. 28, and {u} = no. 29). AlShamra-Ougarit, 3. Paris, 1 9 8 7 . diough the two 'aleph signs were apparently added in order Yon, Marguerite, ed. Arts et industries de lapierre. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, to give three signs that could be used in the writing of lan 6. Paris, 1 9 9 1 . guages that permitted vowel-initial syllables (e.g., Hurrian MARGUERITE Y O N and Akkadian), the three signs are used in Ugaritic texts in Translated from French by Nancy Leinwand a quasi-syllabic fashion to represent consonant + vowel: {a} = /'a/ or /'a/; {!} = /'i/, 1 % or /'e/; {«} = /'u/, /'u/, or /'6/). The Ugaritic alphabet has signs for all of the conso UGARITIC. The Ugaritic language belongs to the West nantal phonemes known from Arabic, with the exception of Semitic language group and is probably a late manifestation /d/, which has shifted to /s/; usage of certain signs, in partic of one of the Amorite dialects.; its phonetic inventory is clos ular {d} and {z}, however, shows tiiat there is not a perfect est to that of the Old Arabic and Arabian languages. It is the match between graphs and phonemes. only West Semitic language written in a cuneiform script, alphabetic in character rather than syllabic and apparently Nominal morphology is characterized by a full case sys invented in the first half of the second millennium BCE, in tem, the productive use of three grammatical numbers (sin imitation of alphabetic linear scripts. The language has only gular, dual, and plural), the retention of the feminine sin been known since 1929, when the first texts were discovered gular ending -t, and the absence of a definite article. T h e at the site of Ras-Shamra on the north Syrian coast. The most striking features of morphosyntax are the retention of
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UGARITIC. Thito showing the Ugaritic alphabet. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
the case vowel in the construct state (e.g., ksii tbth ~ /kussa'u tibtihu, "the throne of his dwelling") and die inconsistent use of "chiastic concord" with the numbers 3 through 10 (i.e., a masculine noun is modified by what appears to be a feminine form of the number and vice versa). The verb system is similar to die other West Semitic sys tems. Striking characteristics are the use of a S-causative stem, of which only remnants are found in die later West Semitic languages; infixed- or prefixed-i variants, with mid dle/passive functions, of each of the major transitive stems; the probable existence of an internal passive voice for each of the transitive stems; and a complete set of mood distinc tions marked by suffixation in tire imperfective system (-0 = jussive, ~u = indicative, -a = volitive, and -an(na) = "energic"). The poetic texts preserve the archaic use of a 0ending yqtl preterite. Because the language is still relatively poorly attested, it is difficult to describe the lexicon in comparative Semitic terms and give proper weight to word classes. Three primary facts are clear: (1) the most basic terms are common Semitic (family terms, geographic terms, and names, etc.); (2) tiiere are many lexical isoglosses with Arabic (though the number would certainly be reduced if there were more Hebrew and Phoenician texts); and (3) die primary verbs of movement (e.g., "walk," "ascend," "descend") are closer to the Phoe nician/Hebrew camp than to Aramaic or Arabic—although, as would be expected, Ugaritic has its own peculiarities (e.g., tb' as die primary verb for "to depart"). For purposes of grammatical and literary analysis, the Ugaritic corpus must be divided into two classes, poetry and prose. Poetry is characterized by an archaic form of die lan guage, particularly in verbal morphosyntax, and is attested only for religious texts. Most of these are major mythological
texts dealing with divine society and politics and with rela tionships between humans and gods. In addition, diere are several minor mythological texts, sometimes with a practical application; incantations; a prayer embedded in a prose text; and a funerary ritual—all in poetic form. Prose is used for letters; administtative texts of all types, including contracts; and for religious texts reflecting ritual practice. [See also Ugarit; Ugaritic Inscriptions.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnaud, D., et al. "Ras Shamra." In Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement, vol. 9 , cols. 1 1 2 4 - 1 4 6 6 . Paris, 1 9 7 9 . Though becoming outdated, still the most complete overview of things Ugaritic, from archaeology to history to literature, compiled by multiple authors. Bordreuil, Pierre, and Dennis Pardee. La trouvaille epigraphique de I'Ougaril, vol. 1 , Concordance. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 5. Paris, 1 9 8 9 . Nearly complete listing of all inscriptions found at Ugarit from 1 9 2 9 to 1 9 8 8 and at Ras Ibn Hani from 1 9 7 7 to 1 9 8 7 , and of inscriptions thought to have come from Ugarit or that are in Ugaritic script. The body is arranged in order of field number and indicates find spot, physical description, and editio prineeps. There are indices of mu seum numbers, of first and primary editions, of major text collec tions, and of find spots. The work's comprehensiveness makes it the simplest means of gaining access to a Ugaritic text and its primary publications; secondary bibliography, however, is not indicated. Caquot, Andre, et al. Textes ougaritiques, vol. 1, Mythes et legendes: In troduction, traduction, commentaire. Litteratures Anciennes du Proche-Orient, 7 . Paris, 1 9 7 4 . Generally reliable translation of major myths and legends, with introductions and brief commentary in the form of footnotes. Caquot, Andre, et al. Textes ougaritiques, vol. 2 , Textes religieux, rituels, correspondance: Introduction, traduction, commentaire. Litteratures An ciennes du Proche-Orient, 1 4 . Paris, 1 9 8 9 . Translations of die prose ritual texts, letters, and minor texts with mythological motifs. Same format as the preceding entry. Cunchillos, Jesus-Luis, and Juan-Pablo Vita. Banco de daws filoldgicos semiticos noroccidentales, part 1 , Dalos ugariticos I: Textos ugarlticos. Madrid, 1 9 9 3 . The most complete collection of Ugaritic texts to date,
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in transcription, with citations of published collations where such and Hittite (TEO 422; Laroche, 1968, p p . 769-784). Hier exist. oglyphic Hittite, which is a different language from classical Dietrich, Manfried, and Oswald Loretz. Die Keilalphabete: Die phoniHittite, is attested by some seven seal inscriptions, including zisch-kanaanaischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit. Abhanone that is bilingual with Akkadian (TEO 418, 422). Ap dlungcn zur Literatur Alt-Syrien-Palastinas, vol. I. Minister, 1 9 8 8 . proximately one hundred Egyptian inscriptions are men The most complete study of abecedaries, of texts written in Ugaritic scripts containing fewer signs than the standard alphabet, and of tioned in the excavation inventories (TEO 418). Those dis texts in Ugaritic script from other sites. The conclusions drawn from covered in the early years received a good deal of publicity, connections widi the South Arabian alphabet are dubious. but a comprehensive collection has never been published. Gordon, Cyrus H. Ugaritic Textbook: Grammar, Texts in Transliteration, They are mostly short dedicatory texts or inscribed scarabs; Cuneiform Selections, Glossary, Indices. Analecta Orientalia, 3 8 . several consist of only a cartouche. Rome, 1 9 6 5 . Although now outdated, this is die classic work on Uga ritic; the grammar and lexicon are still useful. The 1 9 6 7 reprint in Hurrian inscriptions were apparently quite numerous at cludes a consecutively paginated eight-page supplement. the site, although only fragments remain of many of them Herdner, Andree. Corpus des tablettes en cuneiformcs alphabetiques de(Laroche, 1968, p p . 447-544). Peculiar to Hurrian is that couverls a Ras Shamra-Ugarit de 1920 a 1939. Mission de Ras both syllabic writing and the Ugaritic alphabetic system were Shamra, vol. 1 0 . Paris, 1 9 6 3 . Definitive edition, with photographs, used to represent it (TEO 418, 422). Equally unusual is the hand copies, transliterations, and bibliographies, of the texts discov ered during the pre-World War II campaigns at Ras-Shamra. mixing of Hurrian and Ugaritic in ritual texts (TEO 418), a Segert, Stanislav. A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language with Selected very different phenomenon from polyglot vocabularies or Texts and Glossary. Berkeley, 1 9 8 4 . Not so complete a tool as Gordon bilinguals, where one text is the more or less literal transla ( 1 9 6 5 ) , but the grammatical analysis is more up to date. tion of the other. Although Sumerian was clearly part of the Tropper, Josef. "Auf dem Weg zu einer ugaritischen Grammatik." In Mesopolamia-Ugaritica-Biblica: Festschrift fur Kurt Bergerhof zur Vol- curriculum of a Levantine scribe in the Late Bronze Age, lendung seines 70. Lebensjahres am 7. Mai 1992, edited by Manfried most of this erudition appears at Ugarit in conjunction with Dietrich and Oswald Loretz, pp. 4 7 1 - 4 8 0 . Alter Orient und Altes another language, either as the source text of a bilingual— Testament, vol, 2 3 2 . Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1 9 9 3 . Over the target language normally being Akkadian—or as one col view, with personal views expressed, of important recent research umn in multilanguage vocabularies (some monolingual— on Ugaritic grammar. Whitaker, Richard E. A Concordance of the Ugaritic Literature. Cam i.e., Sumerian-only vocabularies exist). T h e Mesopotamian lexicographic tradition was well known at Ugarit (van Soldt, bridge, Mass., 1 9 7 2 . Complete listing of all words attested in Ugaritic texts published though 1 9 6 9 . 1991, 747-753), where a major contribution to the genre was made—namely, the four-language vocabulary list, with col DENNIS PARDEE umns for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Ugaritic words, all written in syllabic script (Huehnergard, 1987).
UGARIT INSCRIPTIONS. Inscriptions in nine lan guages and/or writing systems have been found at the site of Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit. The inscriptions are in Uga ritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hurrian, Egyptian, hieroglyphic Hittite, Hittite, Cypro-Minoan, and Phoenician. With the exception of some of the Egyptian inscriptions and the one in Phoenician, most date to the last two centuries of primary occupation at the site (c. 1400-1186 BCE). In addition to tiiese writings from the site's floruit, a number of coins, dat ing from Alexander to the present, have been found there or in the area (Ugaritica, vol. 7, Paris, 1978, pp. 1 8 1 - 1 8 5 ) . Of tiiese languages/scripts die largest corpora belong to Akkadian and Ugaritic. Because the site was abandoned at die end of the Late Bronze Age, with only relatively ephem eral occupations thereafter, one would not expect to find Phoenician inscriptions. Indeed, only one is known, asso ciated with a later occupation, perhaps imported from else where (TEO 414 [TEO = Bordreuil and Pardee, 1989; see bibliography]). Six objects inscribed with "Cypro-Minoan" characters, in an essentially undeciphered script, were found at the site and a seventh is from the area (TEO 418). A single tablet bears an entirely Hittite inscription; another is a trilin gual—a Sumerian literary text with Akkadian and Hittite versions; and a third is a bilingual wisdom text in Akkadian
T h e two major languages in everyday use at Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age were the local language, known to modern scholars as Ugaritic, and Akkadian, the international lingua franca of the time. Hundreds of tablets and fragments in scribed in one or the other of these two languages exist. Occasionally, both languages appear on the same text, al though this usage is largely limited to Ugaritic administrative texts, where a total may be expressed in syllabic script. This entry will focus on the fact that the form of the Akkadian language in use at Ugarit was peripheral (compared with its attestation in Mesopotamia) and on die distribution of texts written in Akkadian as compared with Ugaritic. [For fuller general treatments of the two languages, see Akkadian; Uga ritic] Two principal studies have been done in recent years of the Akkadian as written at Ugarit (Huehnergard 1989; van Soldt 1991). These must be used in conjunction with studies of texts in peripheral Akkadian originating from the same general time and area (Alalakh, Tell el-Amarna, and Emar; cf. Mari earlier, and, even earlier, the similar, though lin guistically different, situation at Ebla). T o date, only die elAmarna texts have been the object of publications of the same quality as those on Ugarit Akkadian. The dialectic features of Akkadian can be organized under
UGARIT INSCRIPTIONS two main headings, orthography and grammar. T h e first has to do with the Sumero-Akkadian syllabic writing, wherein the signs are polyvalent, permitting multiple writings of a given syllable. Local usages developed that can be described and quantified. Grammatical features, on the other hand, may reflect either outside origins and subsequent influ ences—for example, a Babylonian origin with Assyrian in fluences—or the effect of tire local language on the lingua franca. T h e last influence is of particular interest, for it can reveal features of the substrate language that the alphabetic writing system does not reveal. In general, die Akkadian texts from Ugarit are not so se verely marked by the local language as is the case with many of the Amarna texts. [See Amarna Texts.] Were it not for the polyglot vocabularies, we would have relatively few Uga ritic words attested as glosses in Akkadian texts. Moreover, with the exception of a few lexical usages, the non-norma tive Akkadian features are for the most part attested in the otiier western peripheral corpora (Huehnergard, 1 9 8 9 , pp. 283-284).
The use of Ugaritic or Akkadian was decided, broadly speaking, by the intended reader/audience and by the func tion of the document. T h u s , most international correspon dence would be in Akkadian, whereas letters between Ugaritians would be in Ugaritic. Nearly one hundred documents are attested in Ugaritic, twice the number in Akkadian, pro viding a unique opportunity to compare the epistolary genre couched in a local language and in a lingua franca. It is true, of course, that a greater proportion of the Akkadian letters will represent usages of other areas because the tablets would have been sent to Ugarit from abroad (many of the texts edited by Jean Nougayrol in Palais Royal d'Ugarit, vol. 4, Paris, 1 9 5 6 , represent international correspondence). T h e question is open as to whether documents representing in ternational correspondence in Ugaritic are translations or originals (whether the document actually carried to Ugarit was inscribed with one language or the other) and whether a scribe capable of writing Ugaritic would have been, for example, in the Hittite or Tyrian court. All that can be said for certain is that, to date, no doublets have been found— that is, an Akkadian original and a corresponding Ugaritic translation. Akkadian was preferred for legal texts, not only for those of an international character, such as treaties or tribute lists, but also for those establishing a legally binding situation or marking a change of ownership between parties at Ugarit. Fewer than ten legal texts written in Ugaritic are known to exist, only a fraction of the total existing in Akkadian (much of Palais Royal d'Ugarit, vol. 3 , published by Nougayrol in 9 5 5 J was devoted to land transfers in Akkadian). Most of these legal situations involved the king, either as a party to international agreements or as die highest legal authority at Ugarit—land transfers are usually expressed, fictitiously or not, as having been effected by the king himself ("on this x
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day, King so-and-so has taken the property of Partyi and given it to Party ")Administrative documents are primarily in Ugaritic, but not exclusively so: nearly nine hundred such documents are known in Ugaritic (including fragments whose classification is not absolutely certain), about a hundred in Akkadian (many of the texts edited by Charles Virolleaud, [vols. 2 and 5] J 9 5 7 and 1 9 6 5 , respectively, are administrative texts in Ugaritic, while many of the texts edited by Nougayrol, vol. 6 , 1 9 7 0 , are administrative and in Akkadian). T h e reason for the choice of one language over the other is usually not clear, in no small part because of the laconicity characterizing the genre in both languages. Many of the administrative docu ments are simple lists, of personal or place names, organized according to various criteria (e.g., personal names organized by occupation or place of origin). Frequently, each name on the list is followed by a number, indicating receipt or do nation by this person or place of a certain commodity. T h e purpose of the document would usually, although not al ways, have been indicated in the heading of the text itself; unfortunately, the heading is often damaged or missing en tirely, with the result that the entities designated by the num bers may be unknown or uncertain. 2
T h e distribution of religious and literary texts stands in contrast with the genres previously mentioned by being much more clearly demarcated: all texts reflecting local practice and belief are in Ugaritic; Aldcadian is used only for literary texts of Mesopotamian origin (Nougayrol, 1 9 6 8 , pp. 2 6 5 - 3 1 9 ) . Thus, the eighty-odd texts of a ritual, divinatory, or incantatory nature are all in Ugaritic, as are the mytho logical texts dealing with West Semitic deities and heros. Among the Ugaritic texts are several—such as those dealing with misformed births—that might be expected to have a Mesopotamian origin. N o immediate source has been found for any of these, however, and die purity of the Ugaritic language, with virtually no trace of translational elements, argues for a long history of the genre in the local language. T h e one area where local religious concerns overlap with Mesopotamian erudition is in that of identification of the divinities occurring in die two areas. Two kinds of texts exist in which local deities are identified with divinities known to Mesopotamian religious science. One is the polyglot vocab ulary lists, written in syllabic script, where divine names are included alongside common nouns (Nougayrol, 1 9 6 8 , 2 4 6 2 4 9 ) . T h e other is the so-called pantheon texts, which con sist of simple lists of divine names. T w o different such lists are known, each attested in more than one exemplar: they are monolingual, in Ugaritic or syllabic script, arranged in identical order in each language/writing system. One of these lists is attested twice in Ugaritic (RS [Ras Shamra] 1 . 0 1 7 , 2 4 . 2 6 4 ) and once in syllabic script (RS 2 0 . 0 2 4 ) . T h e
otiier list is found in two exemplars but only in syllabic script (RS 2 6 . 1 4 2 , 1 9 9 2 . 2 0 0 4 ) . T h e ritual character of the lists is proven by an Ugaritic text containing, among other things,
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two lists of sacrifices to deities arranged in the same order as that of the two "pantheons." Though the ritual function of the two lists is clear, and though their importance is proven by the multiple exemplars in different writing sys tems, the meaning of the groupings and of the associated rituals remains unclear. [See also Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; Ugarit.]
and to the keel plank, it was about 1 5 m long. A fence of wicker is reminiscent of fencing seen on Egyptian depictions of contemporary Syrian ships and of the wicker fence Odys seus constructed to keep the waves out of his vessel (Odyssey 5.526). The cargo consisted mostly of raw materials, items of trade already known to the excavators primarily, and in some instances only, from ancient cuneiform texts or Egyp tian tomb paintings. T h e major cargo was ten tons of Cyp BIBLIOGRAPHY riot copper in the form of 318 flat ingots comprising the typical four-handled ingots weighing about 24 kg apiece; Arnaud, D . , et al. "Ras Shamra." In Dictionnaire de la Bible, supp. 9, nearly identical two-handled ingots (which disprove the cols. 1 1 2 4 - 1 4 6 6 . Paris, 1 9 7 9 . See s.v. "Ugaritic." Bordreuil, Pierre, and Dennis Pardee. La trouvaille epigraphique de questionable notion that four-handled ingots were cast in I'Ougarit [TEO], vol. I , Concordance. Ras Shamra-Ougarit, 5. Paris, imitation of dried ox hides); flat, pillow-shaped ingots; and 1 9 8 9 . See s.v. "Ugaritic." References to tliis publication in the pres planoconvex discoid " b u n " ingots. Nearly a ton of virtually ent entry are to lists of texts of the type being described; consultation pure tin ingots (the earliest known) in both the four-handled of the primary entry for each text number will provide essential data, and bun shapes represent die correct ratio, if mixed with the including edilio princeps. Huehnergard, John. Ugaritic Vocabulary in Syllabic Transcription, Har copper, to have formed eleven tons of bronze; the source of vard Semitic Studies, no. 3 2 . Atlanta, 1 9 8 7 . the tin is not known. Huehnergard, John. The Akkadian of Ugarit. Harvard Semitic Studies, More than 150 diskoid glass ingots, in cobalt blue, tur no. 34. Atlanta, 1 9 8 9 . quoise, and lavender, are likely the mekku and ehlipakku Laroche, Emmanuel. "Documents et langue hourrite provenant de Ras listed in tablets from Ugarit and el-Amarna as items traded Shamra." In Ugaritica, edited by Claude F.-A. Schaeffer, vol. 5, pp. from the Syro-Palestinian coast, and the cakes of "lapis laz 4 4 7 - 5 4 4 . Mission de Ras Shamra, vol. 1 6 . Paris, 1 9 6 8 . Laroche, Emmanuel. "Textes de Ras Shamra en langue hittite." In uli" and "turquoise" (as opposed to "genuine lapis lazuli" Ugaritica, edited by Claude F.-A. Schaeffer, vol. 5 , pp. 7 6 9 - 7 8 4 . and "genuine turquoise") shown as tribute from Syria in a Mission de Ras Shamra, vol. 1 6 . Paris, 1 9 6 8 . relief of Thutmosis III at Karnak, Egypt. [See Ugarit In Nougayrol, Jean. "Textes sumero-accadiens des archives et biblioscriptions; Amarna Tablets.] They are the earliest intact theques privees d'Ugarit." In Ugaritica, edited by Claude F.-A. glass ingots known. Those of cobalt blue are chemically Schaeffer, vol. 5 , pp. 1 - 4 4 6 . Mission de Ras Shamra, vol. 1 6 . Paris, identical to the blue glass in eighteenth-dynasty Egyptian 1968. Pardee, Dennis. I^es textesrituels.Forthcoming. Full study of the ritual vases and in Mycenaean pendants, suggesting a common texts from Ugarit, including the pantheons and the primary ritual source for all. [See Glass.] text related tiiere unto (RS 2 4 . 6 4 3 ) . Logs of what the Egyptians called ebony, now known as Soldt, W. H. van. Studies in the Akkadian of Ugarit: Dating and Gram blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon) from tropical Africa, and mar. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 40. Neukirchen-Vluyn, of cedar are also unique archaeological finds. A ton of ter1991Virolleaud, Charles. Le palais royal d'Ugarit. Vols. 2 , 5 , 6. Edited by ebinth resin from die Pislacia atlantica or Pistacia terebinthus Claude F.-A. Schaeffer. Paris, 1 9 5 7 - 1 9 7 0 . tree, known to have grown in the Near East and on the is D E N N I S PARDEE lands of Cyprus and Chios, was carried on the ship in more than one hundred Canaanite amphoras. This is the first sci entifically identified find of this substance, which may be the 'ULA, AL-. See Dedan. Egyptian sntr brought in Canaanite jars from the Near East to the pharaoh to burn as incense in religious rituals. Other raw materials include ivory in the form of whole ULUBURUN, or Great Cape, cape located 8.5 km and partial elephant tusks and more than a dozen hippo (about 5 mi.) southeast of Kas, Turkey (36°o8' N , 29°4i'i5" potamus teeth; murex opercula, a possible ingredient for in E). In 1982 a Late Bronze Age shipwreck was discovered cense; tortoise carapaces, possibly intended as sound boxes only 60 m off the east face of Uluburun, 400 m from its tip, for musical instruments; and ostrich eggshells tiiat were by sponge diver Mehmet Cakir. Excavations by the Institute probably intended to be embellished with faience or metal of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, in spouts to create exotic canteens. 22,413 dives between 1984 and 1994, revealed a unique Manufactured goods were also on board. At least two of cargo lost in the late fourteenth century BCE. ten large pithoi (storage jars) contained Cypriot export pot The ship lay on a steep slope with its stern at a depth of tery, including base-ring II, white slip II, and white-shaved 44 m and its bow at 52 m, with artifacts tumbled down to and bucchero wares; lamps; and probably "wall brackets" 61 m. Built of cedar in the ancient shell-first tradition, with of unknown purpose. Several faience drinking cups were crafted as die heads of rams or, in one case, a woman. Capegged mortise-and-tenon joints holding its planks together
ULUBURUN
,
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1L
ULUBURUN. Archaeologist Faith Hentschel measures the precise location of a copper oxhide ingot. (Copy right Frey/INA)
naanite jewelry includes silver bracelets, or anklets, and gold pendants, one widi a nude goddess in relief holding gazelles and another with a falcon grasping hooded cobras. A gold goblet is of uncertain origin. Assorted beads are of agate, gold, faience, glass, and Baltic amber. Other artifacts include two duck-shaped ivory cosmetics boxes with hinged-wing lids, copper caldrons and bowls, a trumpet carved from a hippopotamus tooth, and more tin vessels tiian had previ ously been found throughout the Bronze Age Near East and Aegean. A stone ceremonial scepter-axe or mace is of a type otherwise known only in die nordiern Balkans. Bronze weapons on board include arrowheads, spear heads, daggers, and Canaanite, Mycenaean, and probably Italian swords. Bronze tools include awls, drill bits, a saw, chisels, axes, and adzes. T h e largest collection of Bronze Age zoomorphic weights includes a sphinx, cows and bulls, lions, ducks, frogs, and a housefly, with one ornate weight bearing the figure of a cowherd kneeling before tiiree of his calves. Foodstuffs, whether as cargo or for shipboard use, include almonds, figs, olives, grapes (or raisins or wine), black cumin, sumac, coriander, and whole pomegranates, with a
few grains of wheat and barley. Lead net sinkers, netting needles, fishhooks, and a bronze trident are evidence of fish ing from the ship. A tentative date of around 1316 BCE for the ship's sinking has been obtained by ttee-ring analysis of a log (perhaps cargo, perhaps firewood) tiiat presumably had been freshly cut when the vessel last sailed. This matches die fourteenth century BCE date of the Mycenaean pottery, and the date of a unique gold scarab of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti that could not have been put on board before her time in the middle of that century. T h e scarab was found near a jeweler's hoard of scrap gold (Canaanite medallions), silver (Canaanite bracelets), and electrum (an Egyptian ring); if it was part of this hoard, the suggestion is tiiat the ship sank after the reign of Nefertiti, at a time when her scarab would have been worthless except for its gold value. Ascertaining the nationality of the ship is also problematic. Assyrian, Syrian, and Kassite cylinder seals were recovered but do not necessarily mean that there were merchants on board from those lands because collections of seals were commonly sent as tribute or gifts from Near Eastern rulers to bodi Egyptian and Aegean rulers. Most of the cargo could
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have come from the Syro-Palestinian coast and Cyprus, but cargos do not identify the nationality of the ships that carried them either. Stronger evidence of nationality comes from the ship's twenty-four stone anchors. They are of a type virtually unknown in the Aegean but often found in the sea off tire coast of Israel. Also found reused as building blocks in temples and tombs in Ugarit, Byblos, and Kition, this type of anchor seems to have been manufactured at Tell Abu Hawam and Tel Nami in Israel. [See Abu Hawam, Tell, Nami, Tel; Anchors.] An ivory-hinged boxwood diptych whose interior would have held wax writing surfaces (now missing) was found in a jar of whole pomegranates; parts of other diptychs appeared elsewhere on the site. Although they are of the type mentioned by Homer in his only refer ence to writing (Iliad 6.169), these diptychs are most likely of Near Eastern origin. A partly gold-clad bronze statuette of a female, perhaps tire ship's protective deity, is Canaanite. On tire other hand, the Mycenaean glass relief beads, bronze pin, spears and knives, tools, eating ware (cups, dipper, flasks, and a pitcher), and a pair of swords and merchant's seals suggest the presence of at least two Mycenaeans on board.
Textual Evidence from Anatolia and Syria." Anatolian Studies 4 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 1 1 - 1 2 3 . Discusses written evidence for the use of diptychs like those from Uluburun. Warnock, Peter, and Michael Pendleton. "The Wood of the Ulu Burun Diptych." Anatolian Studies 4 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 0 7 - 1 1 0 . CEMAL PULAK and
GEORGE F. B A S S
UMAYYAD CALIPHATE. In 661 CE political power
shifted away from family of the prophet Muhammad and passed to die descendants of one of the old Quraysh elite families of pre-Islamic Mecca, the Bani Umayya. T h e first Umayyad caliph, Mu'awiyah, was the son of Abi Sufyan, the pagan leader of Mecca at its submission to Islam in 630. After Byzantine Syria had been conquered by the Muslims, Mu'awiyah, now converted to Islam, was appointed as its governor around 640 with Damascus as his seat, replacing the old Byzantine administrative centers at Caesarea and Bosra. Mu'awiyah inherited the Greek-based bureaucracy of Syria and Palestine and the Syrian Arab tribal forces, which had formerly defended the old Byzantine desert frontier. These tribes were either Christian or partly converted to BIBLIOGRAPHY Islam initially and they became the military mainstay of the Bass, George F., et al. "A Late Bronze Age Shipwreck at Kas, Turkey." Umayyad regime. In essence, the Umayyads inherited in International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Explo Syria something of the old Arab Ghassanid federate king ration 1 3 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 2 7 1 - 2 7 9 . dom that had guarded the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Bass, George F. "A Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun (Kas): 1 9 8 4 Empire in the sixth century. In his turn, Mu'awiyah pro Campaign." American Journal of Archaeology 9 0 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 2 6 9 - 2 9 6 . Bass, George F. "Oldest Known Shipwreck Reveals Splendors of the tected the interests of the Syrian tribes by deflecting Arab Bronze Age," National Geographic Magazine 172 (December 1 9 8 7 ) : immigrants from the Arabian Peninsula away from Syria to 692-733. other territories like Iraq or Egypt. Bass, George F., et al. "The Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun: 1 9 8 6 When the third caliph, 'Uthman ibn 'Affan, was murdered Campaign." American Journal of Archaeology 9 3 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 - 2 9 . Gale, N. H. "Copper Oxhide Ingots: Their Origin and Their Place in in 656, the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, 'Ali ibn Abi the Bronze Age Metals Trade in the Mediterranean." In Bronze Age Talib became caliph. Mu'awiyah, as a senior relative of Trade in the Mediterranean, edited by N. H. Gale, pp. 1 9 7 - 2 3 9 . Stud 'Uthman, emerged as the leading protagonist of those seek ies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 90. Jonsered, 1 9 9 1 . Dem ing retribution for tire murdered 'Uthman, opposing 'Ali's onstration of the Cypriot origin of the Ulu Burun copper. caliphate for his failure to bring the killers to justice. Haldane, Cheryl Ward. "Direct Evidence for Organic Cargoes in the Late Bronze Age." World Archaeology 2 4 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 3 4 8 - 3 6 0 . Discusses Mu'awiyah's Syrian forces fought 'Ali at Siffin on the Eu the seeds from the wreck. phrates in north Syria in 657, where it was eventually de Haldane, Cheryl Ward. "Shipwrecked Plant Remains." Biblical Ar cided to submit the question of the caliphal succession to chaeologist 5 3 . 1 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 5 5 - 6 0 . Discusses the seeds from the wreck. arbitration. The negotiations were overtaken when 'Ali was Mills, J. S., and R. White. "The Identity of the Resins from the Late Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun (Kas)." Archaeometry 3 1 murdered by a discontented Khawarijite in 661 and (1989): 37-44Mu'awiyah emerged as the only figure able to exercise Payton, Robert. "The Ulu Burun Writing-Board Set." Anatolian Stud power, and to establish a caliphate. As a result, political ies 4 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 9 9 - 1 0 6 . A description of the first wooden Diptych power definitively shifted to Damascus and away from M e found at Uluburun. dina. Pulak, Cemal, and Donald A. Frey. "The Search for a Bronze Age Among tiiose who opposed this outcome were the Shi'at Shipwreck." Archaeology 3 8 . 4 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 8 - 2 4 . Pulak, Cemal. "The Bronze Age Shipwreck at Uluburun, Turkey: 1 9 8 5 'Ali, the party of 'Ali, who were strongly represented in alCampaign." American Journal of Archaeology 9 2 ( 1 9 8 8 ) : 1 - 3 7 . Kufa. They held that the Imamate or Islamic leadership Pulak, Cemal. "The Shipwreck at Uluburun: 1 9 9 3 Excavation Cam rightfully belonged in the family of the Prophet and that it paign." The INA Quarterly 2 0 . 4 (Winter 1 9 9 3 ) : 4 - 1 2 . should have passed from 'Ali to his son al-Husayn. With the Pulak, Cemal. " 1 9 9 4 Excavation at Uluburun: The Final Campaign." killing by Umayyad forces of al-Husayn at Karbala in 680, The INA Quarterly 21,4 (Winter 1 9 9 4 ) : 8 - 1 6 . Symington, Dorit. "Late Bronze Age Writing-Boards and Their Uses: an intense sense of wrong was engendered among the Shi'a,
UMAYYAD CALIPHATE enhancing their already deep-seated opposition to the Umayyad regime. At Mu'awiyah's succession in 661, the caliphate reached from the western frontier of Libya to the eastern borders of Iran. During 'Ali's caliphate, the conquests had languished, but they now resumed. T h e final conquest of North Africa was initiated after the foundation of Qayrawan in 670, which allowed the Muslims to resume their westward advance into the Berber territories of modern Algeria to arrive at the At lantic by 700. From North Africa, they initiated the conquest of Spain in 7 1 0 - 7 1 1 , which ended with a deep raid as far as Poitiers near Paris in 732. Meanwhile, tire Umayyads also resumed raids into Byzantine Asia Minor, which culminated in the unsuccessful siege of Constantinople in 674-680. Little remains of monuments built by Mu'awiyah: a dam at al-Ta'if in the Hijaz has an inscription in his name dated AH 58/677-678 CE, presaging the interest of later Umayyads in irrigation. A description dated to 670 CE of the mosque of al-Aqsa at Jerusalem—a rough building of reused columns able to accommodate a congregation of three thousand— probably records Mu'awiyah's work. Nothing remains of Mu'awiyah's palace at Damascus, the Qubbat al-Khadhra, altiiough it presumably related in some degree to excavated Umayyad urban palaces at al-Kufah, Jerusalem and Am man. T h e excavations of the palace at al-Kufah, possibly built by the Umayyad governor Ziyad ibn Abihi, show a plan derived from Sasanian forms, with emphasis on the hierar chical position of the governor in formal audience in the palace. This eastern formula found its way thereafter into later Umayyad palaces and eventually into the 'Abbasid pal aces of Baghdad and Samarra. After the death of Mu'awiyah in 680, the succession of his son Yazid was not recognized by 'Ali's son al-FIusayn or by 'Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr. T h e latter was descended from tine 'Abd al-'Uzza branch of Quraysh and his mother was the daughter of Abu Bakr, the first caliph: his aunt was 'A'isha, the Prophet's favorite wife. When Husayn was mur dered at Karbala by Umayyad forces, Ibn al-Zubayr an nounced himself as caliph at Mecca, feeling secure in his strong connections with the Prophet's family. Flis rebellion was initially successful, and al-Kufah, Egypt, and parts of Arabia and Syria all adhered to his cause. Meanwhile, the Umayyad succession passed to 'Abd al-Malik of the Marwanid branch of the family, and for over a decade there were two claimants to the caliphate, tlie one based in Mecca, and the Umayyad candidate in Syria. In the end, die military strength of the Umayyads won out and their hegemony was restored after besieging Mecca and killing Ibn al-Zubayr. T h e victory of 'Abd al-Malik over Ibn al-Zubayr marks the reunification of the caliphate and the beginning of the reconsolidation of the state: in about 695, the administrative system was reformed. Arabic became the official language of the administration, replacing Greek and Pahlavi. T h e coinage was also reformed, and a purely Islamic coinage was
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instituted. It was so successful that it set the basic formula of Islamic coinage for centuries thereafter. Even before the defeat of Ibn al-Zubayr, 'Abd al-Malik had begun to develop the Haram esh-Sharif enclosure at Jerusalem, the major holy site under his jurisdiction during the civil war. The only Islamic monument in Jerusalem be fore his day was the rough al-Aqsa structure already de scribed. North of it, 'Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock, a great octagon constructed over a natural rocky out crop, and surmounted by a gold dome. Its formal origins lay in commemorative and celebratory buildings of the Byzan tine period, including the Anastasis (327-335), the Church of the Ascension (c. 378), and the T o m b of the Virgin (fifth century), all at Jerusalem. [See Jerusalem.] The Dome of the Rock was decorated on the exterior and interior with mosaics showing Qur'anic inscriptions with fo liage and Sasanian-style crowns. It has been interpreted var iously as a monument to the victory of Islam over the other monotheistic religions, and a reference to die Islamic para dise. T h e decoration would be more readily understandable had Palestinian churches of the Byzantine period survived intact, but even without them, it seems clear that the Dome of the Rock is a product of the islamization of the iconog raphy and architecture of the eastern Mediterranean that had already been the common source of both Christian and Judaic decoration in die Near East. In the early years of the 8th century, the Umayyads em barked on a series of territorial expansions. As Muslim power was being projected westward to Spain, raids across the Byzantine frontier culminated in the last great Umayyad siege of Constantinople in 7 1 6 - 7 1 7 . Al-FIajjaj, their vigorous governor in the east (al-Mashriq), founded al-Wasit in Iraq in 702-705 as an administrative town from which he gov erned Iran and Khurasan. When the Muslim forces resumed dieir eastward conquests, they advanced beyond the old Sasanian borders towards the Iranian and Turkic lands of Transoxiana (Ma wara nahr) in Central Asia. At the same time the Muslims carried their advance as far as Sind (mod ern Pakistan) in India where a mosque has been excavated at Banbhore, dated to in 727-728. T h e wealth deriving from these conquests coincides with the foundation by the first Marwanids of a series of major new Islamic buildings, almost all mosques. These provided the community with monuments comparable with the great imperial Byzantine monuments in the Near East. Al-Walid I completed al-Aqsa at Jerusalem as well as the palace at Jerusalem in a program of extravagant grandeur that had been initiated by his father, 'Abd al-Malik. This included the Haram Mosque at Mecca; the Great Mosque of San'a in Yemen with materials from the sixth century cathedral, and die Mosque of 'Amr at al-Fustat, which was covered with mosaics. T h e Prophet's mosque at Medina (707-709) was also ex panded to incorporate the tombs of the Prophet and the first
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two caliphs. The walls were clad widi marble paneling and wall mosaics showing trees and buildings, akhough nothing of this scheme, survives. The only indications of the quality of these lost decorations is preserved in tire contemporary mosaics of tire Great Mosque of Damascus which al-Walid I also enlarged and lavishly decorated with marble, gold leaf, and glass wall mosaics, with a river, trees and architecture. The architectural motif that is so significant in the Medina and Damascus mosaics was an inheritance from Late An tique imagery in which it was used in geographical contexts and as a general honorific frame for aposties, saints, and books of the Gospels. Adapted to an Islamic context, the same element of honor persists, so that a Qur'an of Uma yyad date found at San'a also has an architectural frontis piece. Likewise, a series of stylized columns and arches ap pear in chapter headings of an Umayyad Qur'an found in the mosque of Amr ibn al-'As at al-Fustat: the process at work in all these cases is that of adapting pre-Islamic subject matter to Islamic purposes. The Arabic sources vary as to the audiors of the Umayyad mosaics. It is said that Byzantine craftsmen participated in the decoration of die Prophet's mosque at Medina although it is also suggested that the craftsmen were Syrian and Egyp tian craftsmen from within the caliphate. T h e wall mosaics of the churches of the pre-Islamic Near East are almost en tirely lost, and very little pre-Islamic painting survives ehher, although both must have been more influential on Umayyad art than we can ever know. However, the discovery of so phisticated pre-Islamic paintings at Qaryat al-Fau in Saudi Arabia and at Shabwa in Yemen suggests that tiiere may have been an Arabian antecedent for the Umayyads' taste for mural decoration. [See Qaryat al-Fau; Shabwa.] The mosaics at the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus are the earliest surviving Umayyad religious decorations. Their carefully selected content sug gests the existence of some element in Islamic society selfconscious of Islam's need to present its credo visually and to be able to select motifs that conveyed die religious beliefs of the Muslims. They relentlessly excluded representations of living beings, relying on nonfigurative motifs drawn from Byzantine and Sasanian traditions, and Qur'anic inscrip tions in Kufic script. This formative process created an Is lamic artistic vocabulary, appropriate to the most important religious monuments of the caliphate. However, no true syn thesis can be said to have been achieved at this stage, and there is no coherent Umayyad "style" as there was a century or more later under the 'Abbasids. c
Knowledge of Umayyad urban settlements has greatiy in creased since die 1980s. Umayyad secular architecture was once most familiar from the palatial buildings in the coun tryside and on the desert margins ofJordan and Syria. These must still be regarded as a very important part of the Uma yyad architectural record, reflecting taste, self-image and the interests of the Umayyad aristocratic elite, and a major
means for understanding Umayyad society, but they should also be seen in context of a far broader pattern of settlement and building in the towns and villages of the region. A distortion in our understanding of the evidence also de serves comment. Jordan is exceptionally well documented archaeologically for this period when richer areas like Pal estine, Syria, and Iraq are less well-understood. T h e same is still more true of Arabia. This distortion may thus give overly great emphasis to Jordan and its monuments. Towns like Caesarea, Jerash, Beisan (Beth-Shean) and Umm el-Jimal have been excavated, and they show that set tlement continued unbroken from Roman and Byzantine times into the early Islamic period, although particular buildings often underwent a change of use, were adapted, or were built anew. This pattern was probably common in many of the old established towns of Palestine and Syria. Faced with a vital economy, the Umayyads seem to have been careful to avoid disrupting the existing settlements in Syria and Palestine. [See Caesarea; Jerash; Beth-Shean; and U m m el-Jimal.] Umayyad palaces in die major urban centers are better known today since the excavations at the Qala at Amman, the palace at Jerusalem adjacent to al-Aqsa, and die palace at al-Kufa. Of these sites, the Amman citadel is the best understood: it stands within the old Roman fortifications of Jebal al-Qal'a, overlooking Amman. It has a formal recep tion hall that reveals a strong Sasanian element in its deco ration and design, conforming to a general tendency to adopt Sasanian imperial forms which is marked in the later Umayyad period. Apart from these buildings, major lost Umayyad urban palaces include Mu'awiyah's Qubbat al-Khadra' at Damas cus, and the palaces at al-Wasit, al-Fustat, and Ramla, founded as the local government center in Palestine by Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik around 7 1 5 , when Umayyad at tention to Jerusalem was waning: it is still largely unstudied. No single explanation accounts for the numerous Umay yad rural sites, and many of them probably served a variety of purposes. Some were probably related to the need to re tain contact with important tribal leaders who were die mainstay of the military forces holding together the vast Umayyad Empire. Some sites seem to have presaged the caravanserais of later Islamic times. Qasr al-Kharana (ca 710) and Qasr al-Tuba (743-744) in the Jordanian desert seem to have fulfilled this role, and there are buildings at Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi and Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi, which have also been described as khans or caravanserais. [See Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi; Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi.] Some of these rural buildings suggest a peripatetic Umay yad monarchy, as the princes of the ruling house moved from residence to residence according to season and need. Some places like Khirbat al-Minya and Khirbat al-Mafjar in Palestine were too hot to live in comfortably in summer but would have been clement in winter. T h e peripatetic nature c
c
UMAYYAD CALIPHATE of the Umayyads also shows itself in the shifting seat of the caliphate. Although Damascus was Mu'awiyah's seat, and he seems to have built nothing in die desert, he would camp in die bddi ya where die later Umayyad palaces of alMuwaqqar, Qastal, and al-Meshatta were eventually built. Later, Sulayman developed Ramla in Palestine, Yazid II lived at Muwaqqar and Beit Ras in Jordan, and Hisham lived on me Euphrates at Rusafa. T h e last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, chose to live at Harran (now in southern Turkey). [See Mafjar, Khirbat al-; Qasr al-Meshatta; Ramla; Beit Ras; and Rusafa.] T h e finest of the late Umayyad palaces are marked by lavish extravagance, especially those associated with Hisham and al-Walid II. After the assassination of al-Walid II in 744, his successor was forced to abjure extravagant building proj ects and the failure to complete al-Meshatta and al-Tuba has been taken as a consequence of al-Walid's fall. There is a marked concentration of these palatial build ings in the countryside of Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, re flecting the Umayyads' attachment to these districts. T h e distribution of many of their rural foundations suggests tiiat they were sited in relation to particular roads: Qasr Burqu', Khirbet al-Bayda', and Qasr Jabal Usays are located along a desert road from north Arabia through the Wadi es-Sirhan to central Syria. Qasr al-Tuba of al-Walid II in eastern Jor dan lies on a route from Tayma' and the Sirhan. Al-Qastal, al-Muwaqqar, and al-Meshatta are located on the more westerly route between Amman and the Hijaz, the preferred pilgrim road from Syria throughout the Islamic period. Khirbat al-Minya near Tiberias is close to the road from Damascus to Ramla and Minya, which was still a halt on the official postal route (barid) in the thirteenth century, and Khirbat al-Mafjar (c. 735) near Jericho is close to the road from Amman to Jerusalem. Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi, and Khirbat al-Mafjar preserve evidence of large-scale irrigation systems installed to serve their surrounding agricultural es tates and these palaces have been compared to Roman latifundia. At botii Khirbat al-Mafjar and Qasr al-Hayr alGharbi, there is decorative imagery tiiat reflects the agricultural character of tile estates amidst which these pal aces stood. T h u s , al-Mafjar, the floor mosaics of the vast bath-hall include a representation of an ethrog and a lulab, Jewish symbols of die harvest that are found in Palestinian synagogue mosaics. At Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, one of the great floor paintings shows a Greek earth goddess, Gaia, holding a cloth full of fruit, abundance appropriate to an agricultural estate. At otiier sites, the agricultural element is less pronounced or absent altogether. Qasr al-Hallabat in northern Jordan is attributed to Hisham and was one of several buildings which were formerly Roman limes (border) fortresses. Hallabat was reconstructed as a palace, witii a limited area of field terracing. However, numerous representations of prey in its
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floor mosaics suggest that a major activity of its residents was hunting. Hallabat is also an interesting example of the way in which the old Roman defense line on the desert was made redundant by Islam's creation of a border-free terri tory from the Indian Ocean to north Syria, for the first time since the fall of the Nabateans in the second century CE. As the decorative scheme of the Hallabat mosaics imply, hunting was a favored pastime of the aristocracy, just as it had been with the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Sasanians. It was also a significant aspect of life and art in preIslamic Arabia where hunting may have had a sacred char acter. T h e chase is also represented in the desert bathhouse of Qusayr 'Amra and at Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, the latter in a style derived from Sasanian imagery. It is a clear enough indication of the importance of the chase to the Umayyads. [See Qasr al-Hallabat; Qusayr 'Amra.] Umayyad paintings, sculptures and mosaics show a re markable diversity and it is clear that the Umayyads had no reluctance to include representations of living beings as long as the context was not religious in character. There is also a persistent desire to show Umayyad princes in the context of the standard royal imagery of the period—die six kings of the world at Qusayr 'Amra, in a standard Byzantine formula; or the plaster sculptures of Hisham in Sasanian garb that stood over the exterior doorways at al-Mafjar and Qasr alHayr al-Gharbi. Hisham's concern with the appearance of Sasanian royalty was also demonsu-ated in his interest in a volume of representations of past Sasanian princes and their dress, reflecting growing preference for Sasanian models in the later Umayyad period. The deatii of Hisham in 743 marks the beginning of a period of turbulence that finally culminated in die collapse of the Umayyad regime in 750. As tensions between Uma yyad factions undermined the strength of the regime from within, die effort of ruling the caliphate through the over stretched Syrian tribal forces at their disposal finally became too much. Those excluded from power by the regime and its supporters increasingly showed their resentment in Is lam-inspired insurrection against the government. The Shi'a especially had never been reconciled to Umayyad rule, and others felt excluded from power by an Umayyad monopoly. A series of rebellions gave expression to these sentiments, culminating in an uprising in Khurasan in the name of the 'Abbasid family, whose claim to rule was rooted in their de scent from the Prophet's uncle, al-'Abbas. Leading a coali tion of anti-Umayyad forces, the 'Abbasids defeated the Umayyad armies in Khurasan and advanced on northern Syria and Egypt, where die last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, was lulled in die Faiyum. The Umayyad clan was mas sacred and replaced by an 'Abbasid caliphate that avoided Syria and its hostility toward them. Instead, they made Iraq their seat of government, where the center of gravity in terms of the economy and population had already shifted, and this was reflected in die foundation of Baghdad in 762.
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du Sud a l'epoque hellenistique et romaine. 2 vols. Bibliotheque Ar cheologique et Historique, vol. 124. Paris, 1985-1986. Donner, Fred McGraw. The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton, 1981. Ettinghausen, Richard. From Byzantium to Sasanian Iran and the Islamic World. Leiden, 1972. Gaube, Heinz. Bin arabischer Palast in Siidsyrien, Hirbat el-Baida. Bei rut, 1974. Gaube, Heinz. "An Examinadon of die Ruins at Qasr Burqu'." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 19 (1974): 9 3 - 1 0 0 . Gaube, Heinz. "Die syrischen Wiistenschlosser: Einige wirtschafdiche und politische Gesichtspunkte zu in ihrer Entstehung." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vercins 95 (1979): 182-209. Grabar, Oleg. "The Painting of the Six Kings at Qusayr 'Amrah." Ars Orientalis 8 (1954): 1 8 5 - 1 8 7 . Grabar, Oleg, et al. "Sondages a Khirbet el-Minyeh." Israel Exploration After their fall, sympathy for Umayyad claimants per Journal 10 (i960): 226-243. sisted in Syria but the country itself became a backwater, Grabar, Oleg. 'The Formation of Islamic Art. New Haven, 1973. Grabar, Oleg, et al. City in the Desert: Qasr al-Hayr East. Cambridge, eclipsed by Iraq and Egypt, and it only reemerged to prom Mass., 1978. inence in the twelfth century under the Zangids and AyyuHamilton, Robert William. Khirbat al-Mafjar: An Arabian Mansion in bids. However, in Spain an Umayyad regime continued, rethe Jordan Valley. Oxford, 1959. founded with emigre Syrian support in 7 5 5 at Cordoba by Hamilton, Robert William. "Pastimes of a Caliph: Another Glimpse." 'Abd al-Rahman I (a grandson of Hisham), who had es Levant 4 (1972): 1 5 5 - 1 5 6 . Hamilton, Robert William. "Khirbat al Mafjar: The Bath Hall Recon caped the massacre of his relations. Secure in their Spanish sidered." Levant 1 0 (1978): 1 2 6 - 1 3 8 . exile, the Umayyads were to enjoy a quite extraordinary ef Hillenbrand, Robert. "Islamic Art at the Crossroads: East versus West florescence, which endured until the early eleventh century. at Mshatta." In Essays in Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of [See also 'Abbasid Caliphate; Damascus; Fustat; Mecca; Katharina Otto-Dom, edited by Abbas Daneshvari, pp. 63-86. Malibu, 1981. Medina; Mosque; and San'a.] Kennedy, Hugh. The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: 'The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century. London, 1986. BIBLIOGRAPHY King, G. R, D., et al. "Survey of Byzantine and Islamic Sites in Jordan: Almagro Basch, Martin, et al. Qusayr' Amra: Residenciay Bafws Omeyas Second Season Report, 1 9 8 1 . " Annual of the Department ofAntiquities en el Desieno de Jordania. Madrid, 1975. of Jordan 27 (1983): 385-436. Almagro Gorbea, Antonio. El Palacio Omeya de Amman, vol. 1 , La King, G. R. D. "The Distribution of Sites and Routes in the Jordanian arqititectura. Madrid, 1983. and Syrian Deserts in the Early Islamic Period." Proceedings of the Baer, Eva. "Khirbat al-Mafdjar." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., Seminar for Arabian Studies 1 7 (1987): 9 1 - 1 0 5 . vol. s, pp. 1 0 - 1 7 . Leiden, i960-. King, G. R. D. "Settlement Patterns in Islamic Jordan: The Umayyads Baer, Eva. "Khirbat al-Minya." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. and Their Use of the Land." In Studies in the History and Archaeology 5, p. 17. Leiden, i960-. of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, pp. 369-375. Amman, Bisheh, Ghazi. "Excavations at Qasr al-Hallabat, 1979." Annual of the 1992. Department of Antiquities ofJordan 24 (1980): 69-77. Mazar, Benjamin. The Excavations in the Old City ofJerusalem near die Bisheh, Ghazi. "The Second Season of Excavations atHallabat, 1980." Temple Mount: Preliminary Report of the Second and Third. Seasons, Annual of the Department ofAntiquities ofJordan 26 (1982): 1 3 3 - 1 4 3 . 1969-1970. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 1 . Brisch, Klaus. "Das omayyadische Schlofi in Usais." Mitteilungen des Musil, Alois. Kusejr 'Antra. Vienna, 1907. Deutschen Archdologischen Institut, Ableihmg Kairo 19 (1963): 1 4 1 - Musil, Alois. Arabia Deserta: A Topographical Itinerary. New York, 1927. 187; 20 (1965): 1 3 8 - 1 7 7 . Musil, Alois. Palmyrena: A Topographical Itinerary. New York, 1928. Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity. New York, 1 9 7 1 . Northedge, Alastair. Studies on Roman and Islamic 'Amman I: History, Butler, Howard Crosby, et al. Publications of the Princeton University Site, Architecture. Oxford, 1992. Archaeological Expeditions to Syria in 1004-1905 and 1909. 4 vols, in Poidebard, Antoine. La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie. Paris, 1934. 9. Princeton, 1907-1949. Sartre, Maurice. Bostra: Nos. 9001 a 9472. Inscriptions Grecques et Carlier, Patricia, and Frederic Morin. "Recherches archeologiques au Latines de la Syrie, vol. 1 3 . 1 . Paris, 1982. Chateau de Qastal O danie)." Annual of the Department of Antiq Sartre, Maurice. Bostra des origines a I'lslam. Paris, 1985. uities of Jordan 28 (1984): 343-383. Sauvaget, Jean. "Chateaux umayyades de Syrie." Revue des Etudes IsCarswell, J. "Kharana." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 4, p. lamiquesZS (1967): 1-39. 1060. Leiden, i960-. Schlumberger, Daniel. "Deux fresques omayyades." Syria 25 (1946Chehab, Maurice. "The Ummayad Palace at 'Anjar." Ars Orientalis 5 1948): 86-102. (1963): 1 7 - 2 5 . Schlumberger, Daniel. Qasr el-Heir el Gharbi. Paris, 1986. Conrad, Lawrence I. "The qusur of Medieval Islam." Al-Abhath 29 Tchalenko, Georges. Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: Le massif du Belus d l'epoque romaine. 3 vols. Bibliotheque Archeologique et His (1981): 7-23. torique, vol. 50. Paris, 1953—1958. Crone, Patricia. Plagarism. Cambridge, 1977. Crone, Patricia. Slaves on Horses. London, 1980. Urice, Stephen K. Qasr Kharana in the Transjordan. Durham, N.C., Dentzer, Jean-Marie, ed. Hauran I: Recherches archeologiques sur la Syrie 1987.
T h e 'Abbasids' caliphate was a far more centralized state than that of the Umayyads. The 'Abbasids emphasized tiieir religious claims to hold die office of caliph, where the Umay yads had emphasized their family's prestige and lineage in terms more tribal than Islamic. However, caution must al ways be exercised in any interpretation of the Umayyads' intentions, as the historical sources for the period are pro vided principally by authors worldng under die hostile 'Ab basids, ensuring that the Umayyads were presented in the worst of irreligious lights. The Umayyad monuments are thus especially important as sources which generally eluded the 'Abbasid interpolation of the record.
or
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Whitcomb, Donald S. Aqaba: Port, of Palestine on the China Sea. Am man, 1 9 8 8 . Whitcomb, Donald S. "Evidence of the Umayyad Period from the Aq aba Excavations." In The History of Bilad al-Sham during the Umay yad Period: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference, edited by Muhammad Adnan al-Bakhit and Robert Schick, pp. 1 6 4 - 1 8 4 . Amman, 1 9 8 9 . G. R. D.
KING
'UMEIRI, T E L L E L - , site located near the southern extent of die hilly region surrounding Amman, Jordan (about 15 km, or 9 mi., soutii of it), on die northern bound ary of the Madaba plain, between the Amman National Park and the Queen Alia International Airport Highway (just to its west), 12 Ion (7 mi.) northeast of Tell Hesban (map ref erence 1420 X 2324). Across the highway to the east is Tell el- Umeiri East and just to its north, Tell el-'Umeiri North. T h e three tells grew up around a perennial spring. In the nineteenth century, among the explorers who vis ited the region of Tell el-'Umeiri was Charles Warren, for the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), in 1867. He noted ihntAmary was the name of the district, as well as three ruins in it. Claude R. Conder (also for the P E F ) , while unable to locate the spring, also referred to the three tells in connection with "el-Ameireh." Most explorers, however, bypassed the region, probably because it was not (until recently) near a main thoroughfare and because the other hills surrounding 'Umeiri obscured its importance. Motivated by a desire to discover the ancient borders of Ammon, four German scholars explored the region to the west (Gese in 1958), southwest (Hentschke in i960; Fohrer in 1961), and south (Reventlow in 1963) of Amman in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among their discoveries was a series of boundary forts they believed represented ancient Ammon's western border. [See Ammon.] Typically, these forts consisted of a rectangular building with an adjacent watchtower; most of these sites are now thought to be farmsteads rather than defense installations. [See Farmsteads.] c
The first substantive description of the site resulted from the Hesban hinterland survey of 1976 (Ibach, 1987). Tell el'Umeiri West, site 149, was noted as a major site of 16 acres with a spring, considerable evidence of architecture, and huge quantities of sherds. T h e sherds ranged from the Chal colithic through Iron Age II periods, with most intervening periods represented. Tell el-'Umeiri East, site 150, was de scribed as a medium site with even more visible architecture, caves, and cisterns; its pottery ranged from the Iron Age through the Umayyad period and included the Roman and Byzantine periods. A third site was noted to the north that contained mainly Mamluk ruins. K. Von Rabenau (1978) appears only to have been concerned with site 150. During a two-month survey in 1979, Franken, with four others, completed the most thorough investigation to that date.
UMEIRI, TELL EL-
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Franken concluded that the tell and the surrounding area appeared to reflect almost all of the country's cultural history (Franken and Abujaber, 1989, p. 1 ) . Dividing his findings into four "cycles" (Neolithic-Early Bronze, Middle BronzeIron Age, Roman-Islamic, 1850-the present), he advocated urgent investigation. Finally, Abujaber (1984), one of 'Umeiri's landowners, completed his own research on the development of agriculture in the region during the nine teenth century CE, a development to which his own forebears had contributed substantially. After 'Umeiri's rediscovery by the Hesban survey, but be fore its excavation, Donald Redford visited the 'Umeiri re gion in 1981 for a three-week survey of sites in Transjordan in which he sought to identify nos. 89-101 of Thutmosis Ill's list of Asiatic toponyms. After sherding Tell el-'Umeiri West and studying its topography, he concluded that it ful filled the criteria for nos. 95-96 on the list: its perennial spring was the largest in the vicinity, it had been occupied in the Middle/Late Bronze Age, and it was sttategically lo cated. " T h e evidence thus seems strong 'ynlkrmn, or the Abel Keramim of the Bible (Jgs. 1 1 : 3 3 ) , is indeed to be sought at die site of 'Umeiri West" (Redford, 1982, pp. 6970). 'Umeiri West was excavated by Larry G. Herr as part of the ongoing Madaba Plains Project, directed by Lawrence T. Geraty for a consortium of institutions (Andrews Uni versity, together with Canadian Union College, La Sierra University, and Walla Walla College), for five seasons to date (1984-1994). 'Umeiri West is the best-preserved Early Iron I city (c, 1200 BCE) SO far uncovered in Jordan. It was fortified by a dry moat cut out of the bedrock at the bottom of the site's western slope. A retaining wall held back a mas sive rampart running up the slope to the fortification wall. This wall comprised two parallel walls with cross walls in a casemate plan. This is the largest, most coherent defensive system in Palestine from the Early Iron I period. These de fenses were built on top of those of the MB IIC period, which also produced a rampart. That city has not yet been reached. An earthquake at the beginning of Iron I split the bedrock underlying the rampart and causing the MB ram part to erode. T h e Iron I inhabitants rapidly rebuilt the ram part. In the casemate rooms, beneath 1.5 m of fallen and burned mud bricks, storerooms with flagstone floors con tained the fragments of approximately forty collared pitiioi: some were lined against the walls, others had fallen from the building's second story. Mixed with the vessel fragments were the charred bones of at least two humans, an old man (based on worn teeth and large bone structure) and a young person. An enemy had apparently thrown spears (five bronze lance and spearpoints were found in one of the rooms) and slingstones into the city and then set fire to it, killing the old man and his younger compatriot who had
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been on the upper floor of the house. In the same area frag ments of an alabaster vessel were found. Some archaeolo gists suggest that the city may have been destroyed by die arrival of the Ammonites, whose kingdom gave its name to die modern city, Amman. [See Amman.] Many of the walls of neighboring sttuctures are preserved to a height of more than 2 m by destruction debris, which hid them from sight for more than three thousand years. East of one of the casemate rooms and connected to it by a doorway was a large pillared room. Six pillar bases have so far been uncovered, on top of which wooden posts probably held up the roof. A substantial doorway led through a thick wall separating the structures to other rooms on the east. Beneath this door were the remains of an earlier phase. U n fortunately, the stones in the walls were burned so severely that many are cracked and some of the walls are in danger of collapse (altiiough one stands about 3 m high). Most of the floors are paved with flagstones, but very few objects were found on them. A cultic standing stone was found in 1992 by the Madaba Plains Project. They also removed a plastered pool used by die site's Jewish inhabitants as a ritual cleansing pool in the Roman period (many parallels for the pool can be found from this same period in Jerusalem sur rounding tire Temple and elsewhere in Israel). [.See Ritual Baths.] The excavation exposed the top of the Iron I destruction layer but did not proceed farther. N o less significant for the history of Jordan are the thick walls of the imperial Persian administrative center on die soutiiwest of the site. Although the main floors were destroyed by erosion and the basement floors have not yet been reached, the finds—many figurines and approximately forty seals and seal impressions bearing the names and identity symbols of official bureaucrats—in dicate the building's importance. (The most dramatic find is the so-called Baalis seal impression, found in 1984; cf. Jer. 40:14.) [See Seals.] Most of the impressions are of poor qual ity, with only scratches on their sandstone faces, but several preserve the names and titles of officials of die Late Am monite monarchy and the treasurers or governors of the Per sian province of Amnion (c. 500 BCE). T h e bureaucrats working in tiiese buildings, and living in the houses imme diately to the north, administered and supported a series of agricultural estates surrounding Tell el-'Umeiri, from Jawa in die east to Na'ur in the west. [See Jawa.] They seem to have produced wine to export in lieu of taxes to their Bab ylonian and Persian overlords. The Hesban survey (within a 5-km, or 3-mi., radius of 'Umeiri) discovered more than one hundred sites, ranging from roads and winepresses to limekilns, farmsteads, watchtowers and forts, and towns. A picture of complex farming systems is emerging from this study that seems to emphasize grain and fruit (especially grape) cultivation. Agricultural technologies included the use of dams and embankments along the valley bottoms to retard erosion and maintain
groundwater for successful dry farming. T h e discovery of cave dwellings with animal corrals from the last few centu ries assisted in understanding die way nomadic populations lived in the region during periods of urban growth and de cline. [See Viticulture; Irrigation; Pastoral Nomadism.] Ex cavation has taken place as well at Rujm Selim, a large ag ricultural complex; Al Dreijat, an Iron Age fortress; Khirbet Rufeisah, with unusual Early Arabic inscriptions in a cave/ cistern; a nearby Late Iron II rural complex; and, on the slopes of 'Umeiri, an EB IB megalithic burial (dolmen), an EB IV "cemetery," and an MB IIC cave-tomb. Surveys were also conducted of 'Umeiri East and 'Umeiri North, and a random square survey was begun in the territory around Jalul. [See also the biographies of Conder and Warren.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Franken, H. J., and Raouf Sa'd Abujaber, "Yadoudeh: The History of a Land." In Madaba Plains Project 1: The 1984 Season at Tell elUmeiri and Vicinity and Subsequent Studies, edited by Lawrence T. Geraty et al., pp. 4 0 7 - 4 3 6 . Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 8 9 . Geraty, Lawrence T., et al. "The Andrews University Madaba Plains Project: A Preliminary Report on the First Season at Tell el'Umeiri." Andreios University Seminary Studies 2 3 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 8 5 - 1 1 0 . Geraty, Lawrence T., et al. "Madaba Plains Project: A Preliminary Report on the 1 9 8 4 Season at Tell el-'Umeiri and Vicinity." In Pre liminary Reports ofASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1980-84, edited by Walter E. Rast, pp. 1 1 7 - 1 4 4 . Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Supplement no. 2 4 . Winona Lake, Ind., 1 9 8 6 . Geraty, Lawrence T., et al. "A Preliminary Report on the First Season at Tell el-'Umeiri and Vicinity." Annual of the Department of Antiq uities of'Jordan 3 1 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 1 8 7 - 1 9 9 . Geraty, Lawrence T., et al. Madaba Plains Project: The 1984 Season at Tell el-'Umeiri and Vicinity and Subsequent Studies. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 8 9 . The first "final" seasonal report. Similar reports in this and die same three publications above have been published or are in press for the 1 9 8 7 , 1 9 8 9 , 1 9 9 2 , and 1 9 9 4 seasons, in team efforts under Lawrence T . Geraty, Larry G. Herr, Oystein LaBianca, or Randy W. Younker as lead editor. Herr, Larry G. "The Servant of Baalis." Biblical Archaeologist 4 8 (1985):
169-172.
Ibach, Robert D., Jr., Hesban Archaeological Survey of the Hesban Region—Catalogue of Sites and Characterization of Periods, edited by Oystein S. LaBianca. Berrien Springs, Mich., 1 9 8 7 . Redford, Donald B. "A Bronze Age Itinerary in Transjordan." Journal for the Society for the Study of Egyptian Archaeology 12 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 5 5 - 7 4 . Von Rabenau, K. "Ammonitische Verteidigungsanlagen Zwishen Hirbet el-Bisara und el-Yadude," Zeitschrift des Deutschen PalastinaVereins 9 4 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 4 6 - 5 5 . Younker, Randy W. "Israel, Judah, and Amnion and the Motifs 011 the Baalis Seal from Tell el-'Umeiri." Biblical Archaeologist 4 8 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 173-180. LAWRENCE T .
GERATY
UMM EL-BIYARA, mountain at the center of the city of Petra, in Jordan (3o°2i' N , 35°25' E; map reference 191 X 970), rising 300 m from the valley floor. T h e ancient site is on the mountain's flat, trapezoidal summit, approximately
UMM EL-BIYARA 5.5 hectares (14 acres) in area. Occupation has been dated to the Iron II (Edomite) and Nabatean periods. Other Iron II mountaintop sites in the vicinity are U m m el-Ala, Ba ja III, and Jebal al-Kser; the Iron II site of Tawilan is also nearby. [See Tawilan.] Iron Age pottery associated with walls and foundations was first collected on the surface of U m m el-Biyara by George Horsfield and Agnes Conway in 1929 ("Sela-Petra, the Rock, of Edom and Nabatene," Quarterly of the Depart ment of Antiquities of Palestine 7 [1938]: 1-42; 9 [1941]: 1 0 5 204). Nelson Glueck was the first to undertake soundings there (1933-1934), collaborating with Horsfield in 1933 (Nelson Glueck, "Further Explorations in Eastern Pales tine," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 51 [1933]: 1 3 - 1 4 ) . As a result of his work, Glueck equated U m m el-Biyara with biblical Sela in the time of Amaziah of Judah (c. 796-781 BCE). In 1955, William H. Morton carried out additional soundings. He found "Edomite" pottery as sociated with jumbles of stone blocks but no evidence of walls ("Umm el-Biyara," Biblical Archaeologist 19 [1956]: 26-36). Crystal-M. Bennett excavated at U m m el-Biyara in i960, 1963, and 1965, revealing less than one-tirird of the site. She found an unfortified Iron Age settlement consisting of a group of houses with long corridor rooms from which small square rooms projected. T h e houses were built of sandstone, which breaks naturally into flat slabs. In the main part of the excavation the houses were built against a single long wall that ran the length of the excavated area. Similar longhouses are known at the contemporary nearby mountaintop site of c
U m m el-Ala and may reflect tire paucity of timber for roof ing. Settlement at Umm el-Biyara was evidently domestic, judging from the quantity of loom weights and spindle whorls recovered. Buildings were mostly constructed di rectly on the bedrock. A large number of deep cisterns were found cut into the summit, presumably die water supply, but it is not clear whether they are Edomite or Nabatean. T h e pottery shows characteristic Iron II shapes, altiiough, unlike assemblages at other Edomite sites, such as Buseirah, Tawilan, and Ghrareh, it was unpainted. [See Buseirah.] T h e difference may be related to chronological factors, with unpainted pottery probably dating earlier, or to site location, with remote mountaintop sites not influenced by the painted ceramic traditions of Edom. T h e settlement's main area was destroyed by a fire. Altiiough Bennett found sherds in postoccupation levels that may be Hellenistic, it is likely that settlement took place only in the Iron Age (seventh-sixth centuries BCE). Bennett's two main objectives were to verify or disprove the identification of U m m el-Biyara with biblical Sela and to obtain a group of stratified "Edomite" pottery. In fact, neither was fulfilled. U m m el-Biyara is essentially a oneperiod site whose sequence of occupation, destruction (and a final occupation in one area), abandonment, and collapse lacks sufficient stratification to enable the development of a pottery sequence. An absolute date was provided by a clay seal impression discovered in one of the rooms. Its inscription has been re stored as "Qos-Gabr, King of Edom," who is mentioned
I B M B M
UMM EL-BIYARA.
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View of the mountain from the Petra valley floor. (Courtesy P. Bienkowski)
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twice in Assyrian inscriptions of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, in contexts dated between 673 and 667 BCE. This seventh-century date is the only absolute date available for Edom, and the dating of all Edomite sites and their associ ated material is still largely dependent on this seal impres sion. There was no occupation that could be dated to the period of Amaziah (early eighth century BCE). It is now gen erally accepted that Umm el-Biyara should not be identified with biblical Sela. Another possible candidate is modern Sela, near Buseirah in northern Edom, an isolated promi nence with evidence of Edomite and Nabatean occupations (Stephen Hart, "Sela': T h e Rock of Edom?" Palestine Ex ploration Quarterly 1 1 8 [1986]: 91-95; Manfred Lindner, "Edom Outside the Famous Excavations: Evidence from Surveys in tire Greater Petta Area," in Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan, ed ited by Piotr Bienkowski, Sheffield, 1992, pp. 143-144). Bennett's excavations deliberately did not extend to the Nabatean remains on U m m el-Biyara. There is a Nabatean temple on the edge of the plateau, perhaps file reason for the consttuction of the (ceremonial?) stairway leading to the summit, including a massive ramp that turns through 180 degrees on its way up the slope. At the base of the mountain characteristic Nabatean facades are carved into die rock. None of the Nabatean remains on Umm el-Biyara have been excavated, so their precise date is unknown. [See also the biography of Bennett] BIBLIOGRAPHY Bennett, Crystal-M. "Fouilles d'Umm el-Biyara: Rapport preliminaire." Revue Biblique 7 3 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : 3 7 2 - 4 0 3 . Basic preliminary report on the excavations, which should be read in conjunction with Bienkowski's reassessment (below). Bennett, Crystal-M. "A Graeco-Nabatean Sanctuary on Umm el-Bi yara." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 2 4 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 2 0 9 - 2 1 2 . Short report with drawings of the Nabatean remains on die Umm el-Biyara summit. Bienkowski, Piotr. "Umm el-Biyara, Tawilan, and Buseirah in Retro spect." I^vanl 2 2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) : 9 1 - 1 0 9 . Critical reassessment of the ex cavations twenty-five years after the final season (see pp. 9 1 - 9 5 ) . PIOTR BIENKOWSKI
UMM EL-JIMAL, an extensive rural settlement con structed of black basalt in the lava lands east of Mafraq, a seventy-minute drive northeast of Amman, Jordan (39°i9' N , 36°22' E). One of die largest and most spectacular ar chaeological sites in Jordan, Umm el-Jimal is located on tire edge of a series of volcanically formed basalt flows that slope down from the Jebel al-Druze, a mountain 50 Ion (31 mi.) to the northeast. This sloping black bedrock provided an cient Umm el-Jimal with two basic resources: stone for con structing sturdy houses and water for drinking and agricul ture. The ancient name of the site is not known. David L.
Kennedy has argued convincingly tiiat Thantia, Howard C. Butler's suggested name (see below), is better located to the west on the Via Nova (Kennedy and Riley, 1982, pp. 1 4 8 152). Flenry I. MacAdam (1986) has put forward Surattha, from Ptolemy's Geography, as an alternative. What survives aboveground is an amazingly well-pre served Byzantine/Early Islamic town nearly a kilometer long and a half-kilometer wide, with 150 buildings standing one to three stories high and several towers up to five and six stories. The site's dramatic skyline of somber stone at first gives the impression of a bombed-out modern town. Only close up does it become apparent that this is not a modern war casualty, but an agglomerate of fifteen-hundred-yearold ruins. Inside, the visitor is plunged into a scene of eerie beauty. Walls run in every direction, without apparent plan or order. Neatly stacked courses of stone protrude from a mad confusion of tumbled upper stories. T h e blue-gray ba salt everywhere gives a somber and cool sense of shadow that belies the blaze of bright desert sun. Here and there pinnacles of wall extend their fingers of cantilevered roofing beams to create gravity-defying silhouettes against the cloudless sky. Doorways and alleys lead from room to room and building to building. Large private houses predominate, but there are also fifteen churches from the sixth and seventh centuries, a praetorium, a barrack, gates, and numerous res ervoirs. Umm el-Jimal became known to travelers in die midnineteenth century, but the first major work there was done by die Princeton University Expedition to Soutiiern Syria in 1905 and 1909, directed by Butler. Butler (1913) published a list of early visitors to the site who had recorded tiieir im pressions. It was first reached in 1857 by Cyril Graham, who published a brief description of the ruins the following year. In 1861-1862 William H. Waddington copied several in scriptions and, more than a decade later, Charles Doughty passed through the ruined city. At about the same time Selah Merrill, then the American consul in Jerusalem, visited it. Gottlieb Schumacher published die first architectural plans, of a church and the city gates, in 1894. In 1901 Rene Dus saud and Frederic Macler copied several inscriptions. [See the biographies of Butler, Merrill, Schumacher, and Dussaud,] In winter 1904-1905, Butler's team made die first site map, which included public buildings: the praetorium, bar racks, 15 churches, reservoirs, gates, 20 houses, and mon umental tombs. He published it with an excellent text and restored plans of typical buildings (Butier, 1913). EnnoLittmann cataloged numerous Greek, Latin, Nabatean, Safaitic, and Arabic inscriptions (Littmann et a l , 1 9 1 3 ) . George Horsfield published early aerial photographs (Horsfield, 937)J and Nelson Glueck included U m m el-Jimal in his assessment of Nabatean influences on soutiiern Syria (Glueck, 1951). In 1956, G. U. S. Corbett did exploratory j
UMM EL-JIMAL excavations of the Julianos church, from which he deter mined that Butler's founding date (fourth century) was er roneously based on a reused funerary text (Corbett, 1957). [See the biographies of Horsfield and Glueck.] T h e U m m el-Jimal Project (1972-1995) excavated for eight field seasons over twenty-two years, under the direc tion of Bert de Vries, for Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. T h e first phase of the project consisted of five campaigns that ended in 1984. There is a current phase of excavation that is a series of summer field seasons. The pro ject's overarching purpose has been to understand rural life on the Arabian desert frontier during the succession of Ro man, Byzantine, and Early Islamic hegemonies. This began with the study of what was visible aboveground—tire Late Antique town already described—but two major discoveries forced a backward expansion of historical horizons. The first was a fourth-century Roman fort (castellum) within the town's perimeter wall tiiat was ruined and abandoned as the town grew around it. T h e second was a totally ruined village,
about half the size of the town and 200 m to its east, dated to the heyday of Nabatean and Roman expansion in the Hauran (first-third centuries CE) . [See Nabateans.] The 1972-1973 season was devoted to mapping die site, to fill in details omitted from Butler's selective architectural survey. In 1974 preliminary soundings were dug as a rep resentative sampling, which determined that the basic strati graphic profile ranged from Late Roman to Umayyad. In 1977 die focus was on four major sttuctures: the barrack, praetorium, house XVIII, and the perimeter wall. It was concluded that the town was continuously inhabited from the Late Roman tiirough the Umayyad periods; no Early Nabatean Roman occupation levels were found. Fall 1977 was devoted to consolidating the barrack perimeter walls with force-pumped aerated cement. In 1981 new work included the excavation of the northeast church, tire Numerianos church, various water channels, and the Via Nova Traiana (6 km, or 4 mi., to the west). This work confirmed that the standing buildings are mainly the
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UJ.84
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modem road
east gate ER-LFt VILLAGE
V - 3 I
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ER tomb T.1 LR cemetery W. 2
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wadi ez-za'atari
UMM EL-JIMAL. Plan showing relationship between the Late Antique town and the Nabatean-Roman village. Areas labeled O, R, T , and W are 1984 excavation areas. (Drawing by Bert de Vries)
cemetery
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product of a rural agrarian culture that flourished in die Hauran from the fourth to eighth centuries CE, A major dis covery was die identification of die ruined area (100 X 100 m) between the Roman reservoir and the east church as a castellum built in about 300 and used as part of the Roman frontier defenses in the fourth century. In January 1983, the gate of house XVIII was cleared and its walls consolidated. In 1 9 8 4 further work was done on the churches and the castellum, while the focus shifted to activities outside the walls of the Byzantine-Umayyad town. These included completing a walking survey of terrain within 1 0 km (6 mi.) of the town and excavating cemeteries and reservoirs east of it. The major discovery in that season was the Nabatean/ Roman village (called al-Herri) buried under the rubble field adjacent to the reservoirs. The village began in the late first century CE, at the time of the last Nabatean expansion into southern Syria, flourished in the second and third centuries, and was destroyed during the turmoil of the late third cen tury. The presence of this Nabatean/Roman site does much to explain the lack of earlier occupation layers under the Byzantine town. T h e numerous reused Nabatean and Greek inscribed tombstones must have been robbed from the cem eteries of this earlier village. In 1992 architectural studies of four Late Roman and Early Byzantine structures (houses 3 5 , 4 9 , 1 1 9 , and the praetorium) and detailed mapping of the castellum and the Na batean/Roman village were carried out, including low-alti tude aerial photography by Wilson and Ellie Myers. These
survey data have been used to develop Geographic Infor mation System (GIS) computer images and maps of the site. The 1993 season focused on consolidation and site devel opment, including stabilizing the high walls of die praetorium and excavating house 119 in preparation for its adap tation as a museum and visitor center. House 1 1 9 proved to be a completely Umayyad construction on a cleared Byz antine domestic site. Field research in the 1994 season con centrated on the systematic excavation of the Nabatean-Roman village and smdying the sixth-century burials outside the later town. In summary, from die first to die third centuries CE, a small Arab village with both Nabatean and Roman features flourished at al-Herri. A praetorium and a few other imperial Roman sttuctures were erected 200 m to the west. In about 300, the castellum was built; it lost its military function late in the fourth century. T h e much smaller barrack that re placed it was constructed early in the fifth century. As the imperial military presence diminished, the Early Byzantine town (fifth-sixth centuries), consisting of 129 houses and 15 churches, prospered, a product of a self-sufficient economy and political security. This town survived in somewhat di minished form through the Umayyad period. Following plague and earthquake in the mid-eighth century, the only human presence at the site for the next century was squatters in the ruins. Then, after centuries of inactivity, the town enjoyed a brief revival when Druze resettled it between 1910 and 1935.
UMM EL-JIMAL. Double windows of House XVIII, viewed from the northwest. (Photograph by Bert de Vries)
UMM ER-RASAS BIBLIOGRAPHY Butler, Howard Crosby. Ancient Architecture in Syria. Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, 1 9 0 4 1 9 0 5 and 1 9 0 9 , Division II. Leiden, 1 9 1 3 . See Sectiun A (Southern Syria), part 3: "Umm Idj-Djimal." Corbett, G. U. S. "Investigations at 'Julianos' Church' at Umm elJimal." Papers of the British School at Rome 2 5 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 3 9 - 6 5 . de Vries, Bert. "The Umm el-Jimal Project, 1 9 7 2 - 7 7 . " Annual of the Department ofAntiquities ofJordan 2 6 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 9 7 - 1 1 6 . Also published in Bulletin of the American Schoots of Oriental Research, no. 2 4 4 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 53-72.
de Vries, Bert. "Umm el-Jimal in the First Three Centuries A.D." In The Defence of the Roman and Byzantine East, edited by Philip Free man and David L. Kennedy, pp. 2 2 7 - 2 4 1 . British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 2 9 7 . Oxford, 1 9 8 6 . de Vries, Bert. "The Umm el-Jimal Project, 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 9 2 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 3 7 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 4 3 3 - 4 6 0 . de Vries, Bert. "What's in a Name? The Anonymity of Ancient Umm el-Jimal." Biblical Archaeologist 5 7 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 2 1 5 - 2 1 9 . de Vries, Bert. Umm el-Jimal: A Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic Town in Northern Jordan. Ann Arbor, 1 9 9 5 . de Vries, Bert. "The Umm el-Jimal Project, 1 9 9 3 and 1 9 9 4 Field Sea sons." Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 3 9 ( 1 9 9 5 ) . Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2 5 . New Haven, 1 9 5 1 . See "Eastern Syria and die Southern Hauran" (part 1 , pp. 1 - 3 4 ) . Horsfield, George. "Umm el-Jamal." Antiquity 11 ( 1 9 3 7 ) : 4 5 6 - 4 6 0 , pis. 1-4.
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Moab plateau (Jos. 13:18, 21:37; 1 Chr. 6:79, and Jcr. 48:21). It was one of the Levitical towns that belonged to the tribe of Reuben. Eusebius, in his Onomasticon (128.21), and the Notitia Dignitatum list a Roman military camp in Mefaa. T h e biographies of the prophet Muhammad also record Mayfa'a as the village whose inhabitants killed Zayd ibn 'Amr, a pre-Islamic monotheist, on his way to Mecca to convert to Islam. A team from the Franciscan Archaeological Institute in Jerusalem, led by Michele Piccirillo, has been conducting annual excavation seasons at the site since 1986, in collab oration with the Jordan Department of Antiquities. Their work has focused on a cluster of churches, rooms, and courtyards in an enclosed area in the northeast part of the site nortii of the castrum. They have named the cluster the St. Stephen complex, after the main church of the group (see figure 1 ) . T h e Church of St. Stephen, identified as such by its mo saic dedicatory inscription, is of exceptional importance. Its lovely nave mosaic depicts a number of cities in Transjordan and Palestine: Kastron Mefaa itself (including an enigmatic image of an isolated standing column), Amman, Madaba, Hesban, Ma'in, Rabba and Kerak in Transjordan; and Je rusalem, Nablus, Samaria/Sebaste, Caesarea, Lod, BethGuvrin, Ashkelon, and Gaza in Palestine. Representations of ten cities in tire Egyptian Delta are also included as part of a Nilotic motif. The dedicatory inscription in the nave mosaic was damaged and repaired in antiquity; thus, the date as it now reads, 787 CE, is questionable and may be restorable as 718 CE. T h e apse mosaic has an intricate geo metric design with a dedicatory inscription dated to 756 CE. These floors are among just a very few church mosaics in Jordan datable after the Muslim conquest. The many images of people and animals in die nave mosaic suffered deliberate damage that was carefully repaired. Limited probes below the eighth-century mosaics have revealed evidence of an earlier phase of the church.
Kennedy, David L., and Derrick N. Riley. Archaeological Explorations on the Roman Frontier in North-East Jordan. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 1 3 4 . Oxford, 1 9 8 2 . Littmann, Enno, et al. "Greek and Latin Inscriptions." In Syria: Pub lications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, Division III, Section A, Part 3 , Umm Idj-Djimdl, pp. 1 3 1 - 2 2 3 . Lei den, 1 9 1 3 . Littmann, Enno. "Nabatean Inscriptions." In Syria: Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, Division IV, Section A, Umm Idj-Djimdl, pp. 3 4 - 5 6 . Leiden, 1 9 1 4 . Littmann, Enno. "Safaitic Inscription." In Syria: Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, Division IV, Section C, Part 3 , Umm Idj-Djimal, pp. 2 7 8 - 2 8 1 . Leiden, 1 9 4 3 . Littmann, Enno. "Arabic Inscriptions." In Syria: Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria, Division IV, Section D, Umm Idj-Djimal, pp. 1 - 3 . Leiden, 1 9 4 9 . Adjoining the Church of St. Stephen on the north is die MacAdam, Henry I. Studies in the History of the Roman Province of Church of Bishop Sergius, which has a mosaic floor dedi Arabia: The Northern Sector. British Archaeological Reports, Inter national Series, no. 2 9 5 . Oxford, 1 9 8 6 . cated in 587 CE. The images in this mosaic floor suffered BERT DE V R I E S deliberate damage as well. T o the west are a baptistery and funerary chapel. T o the west of the Church of St. Stephen is a courtyard that was later converted into a chapel. T o its west is the so-called Church of the Aedicula, with a flagstone UMM ER-RASAS, site located 301cm (18 mi.) south pavement, the oldest church in the complex (sixth century east of Madaba in Jordan (3i°3o' N , 35°55' E; map reference CE). A series of rooms is to its south. Also part of the com 2374 X 1010). T h e extensive and well-preserved ruins con plex are rooms surrounding a courtyard to die east of the sist of a rectangular fortified camp, or castrum (158 X 139 Church of St. Stephen and a courtyard serving as an atrium, m). An open quarter of about the same size was found out along with another chapel to the south. Many burials have side the castrum to the north. also been found throughout die complex. The ancient names of U m m er-Rasas were Mephaath/ The second area tiiat has been under excavation by the Mefaa/Kastron Meffaa/Mayfa a, as attested tiiree times in Franciscans since 1989 is die Church of die Lions in the die inscriptions in the mosaic floors of the site's excavated southeast part of the site, nortii of the castrum. It is a large churches. Mephaath is listed as one of the places on the c
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church surrounded by a series of rooms, forming a large ecclesiastical complex. Its mosaic is only partially preserved and does not have a surviving dedicatory inscription. The images in tire mosaic floor were deliberately damaged. The mosaic also includes a second depiction of Kastron Mefaa with an isolated standing column. The church has an ex ceptionally well-preserved ambo (pulpit). The church of the priest Wall, excavated in 1990 by Taysir Attiyat for tire Department of Antiquities, is a small, single-apsed church in the northwest part of the site. It's mosaic floor is somewhat damaged. The inscription in the nave mo saic mentioning the priest Wa'il provides a dedication date of 586 CE for the church. The images were deliberately dam aged. Another prominent monument at tire site is a well-pre served tower located about 1.3 km to the north of the castrum. It is 15 m high with a small, single-apsed basilica on its east side. This church, excavated by the Franciscans in 1987, and datable to the sixth century CE, has a plaster floor. Immediately to the north of the tower are large buildings, partially restored by the Department of Antiquities in the 1970s, near some covered water reservoirs. Since 1988, the Mission Archeologique Suisse (Fondation Max van Berchem) under the direction of Jacques Bujard has been excavating inside the castrum in a complex of two side-by-side churches in the southeast corner. The con struction of the two churches postdates the construction of
the castrum wall. The north church is the earlier of the two. It is a single-apsed basilica with a heavily damaged mosaic floor belonging to a second phase. T h e images were delib erately damaged. An inscription provides a dedication date of either 578-579 or 593-594 for tire mosaic. T h e south church is also a single-apsed basilica. Its mosaic floor is very badly damaged, and no dedicatory inscription is preserved. T h e Swiss team has also cleared portions of the large court yard to the south of the two churches and a portion of the exterior face of the east castrum wall. T h e town as a whole appears to have been largely aban doned by the late eighth or early ninth century. Because excavation has focused on the churches from the Byzantine and early Islamic periods, the nature of any Iron Age or Nabatean settlement remains unexplored. Iron Age sherds were found in one deep sounding in tire St. Stephen com plex, however. [See also Churches; Mosaics.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brief notices of the Franciscan excavations have been prepared each year since 1 9 8 6 by Michele Piccirillo and published in Liber Annuus. Several lengthier articles in Italian have appeared in the same journal. Those about the Church of Saint Stephen have been superseded by the final report (Piccirillo and Alliata, 1 9 9 4 ) , but for the other excavadon areas, they remain fundamental. Bujard, Jacques, et al. "Les eglises Geminees d'Umm er-Rasas." An nual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 3 6 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 2 9 1 - 3 0 6 .
UMM QEIS The most substantial report to date of the work of the Mission Archeologique Suisse. Piccirillo, Michele, and Taysir Attiyat. "The Complex of Saint Stephen at Umm er-Rasas-Kastron Mefaa: First Campaign, August 1 9 8 6 . " Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 3 0 ( 1 9 8 6 ) : 3 4 1 - 3 5 1 . The most substantial English-language treatment to date. Piccirillo, Michele. "The Mosaics at Urn er-Rasas in Jordan." Biblical Archaeologist 5 1 . 4 (December 1 9 8 8 ) : 2 0 8 - 2 1 3 , 2 2 7 - 2 3 1 . Brief over view with color photographs. Piccirillo, Michele, and Eugenio Alliata. "Ceramica e piccoli oggetti dallo scavo della Chiesa dei Leoni a Umm al-Rasas." Liber Annuus 4 2 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 2 2 7 - 2 5 0 . Along with Piccirillo ( 1 9 9 2 ) , the two basic re ports published to date on the excavation of the Church of the Lions. Piccirillo, Michele. "La Chiesa dei Leoni a Umm al-Rasas-Kastron Mefaa." Liber Annuus 4 2 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 9 9 - 2 2 5 . Piccirillo, Michele. "La chiesa del Prete Wa'il a Umm al-Rasas-Kastron Mefaa in Giordania." In Early Christianity in Context: Monuments and Documents, edited by Frederic Manns and Eugenio Alliata, pp. 3 1 3 - 3 3 4 . Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 3 8 . Je rusalem, 1 9 9 3 . The basic report on the excavation of the church of Priest Wa'il. Piccirillo, Michele. The Mosaics ofJordan. Amman, 1 9 9 3 . Includes good color photographs of the mosaics. Piccirillo, Michele, and Eugenio Alliata. Umm al-Rasas Mayfa'ah I: Gli scavi del complesso di Santo Slefano. Studium Biblicum Francis canum, Collectio Maior, 28. Jerusalem, 1 9 9 4 . Final report of the ex cavations of the complex around the Church of Saint Stephen. ROBERT SCHICK
UMM QEIS (ancient Gadara), site located on the north ern Transjordanian tableland east of the Jordan Rift Valley (32°37' N , 35°4i' E). T h e layout and size of the ancient city were apparendy adapted to the topography of a flat lime stone plateau that drops steeply on die north, south, and west from an altitude of 364 m above sea level. This plateau commands a panoramic view across die great plain of die Jordan Valley, tire Lake of Tiberias (biblical Lake Gennesar), the Yarmuk Valley, the Golan Heights, and Mt. Hermon. T h e identification of Gadara with die site of the ruins of present-day U m m Qeis was determined by Ulrich J. Seetzen as early as 1806 (Reisen durch Syrien, ed. Friedrich Kruse et a l , vol. 1, Stuttgart, 1854, p. 368) and has long been re garded as settled. T h e main evidence is provided by the hot springs at el-Hamma (Emmatiia) in the Yarmuk Valley, for which nearby Gadara (situated 553 m above el-Hamma) was famous, that are still found there. First mentioned by die first-century BCE Roman geographer Strabo (16.2.29), they have been praised ever since for their medicinal qual ities. According to Siegfried Mittniann (Beitrdge zur Siedlungsund Territorialgeschichte des Nordlichen Ostjordanlandes, Wiesbaden, 1970, p. 130) Gadara lay 16 Roman miles from both Capitolias/Beit Ras and Scythopolis/Beth-Shean; Ro man milestones remain from both roads, as well as from that leading from Gadara to Tiberias. T h e springs, also named
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Termae Haelia are at the third milestone on the road be tween Capitolias and Tiberias. Claudius Ptolemaeus (Geographia 14.22), a second-cen tury CE Roman writer, includes Gadara on his list of eighteen cities belonging to Coele-Syria and the Decapolis. Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. 18.74) noted that historians differed in list ing the Decapolis cities; his own list of ten, which included Gadara, dates to tire first century CE. [See Decapolis.] Of the cities of the Decapolis, Gadara is most renowned as the birthplace of illustrious men, among them Philodemus the Epicurian, a contemporary of Cicero, and the great poet Meleager. Gadara was first visited by Seetzen in 1806 and surveyed by Gottlieb Schumacher in 1886. This was followed by spo radic fieldwork that recovered a Late Antique bath in the northwest section of the site with a mosaic floor and a mo saic inscription (1959), a subterranean mausoleum (1968), and a Late Roman tomb (1969), which was cleaned. [See the biography of Schumacher.] Since 1974, the German Evangelical Instimte for the Ar cheology of the Holy Land has undertaken systematic sur vey, excavation, and restoration work at Umm Qeis. [See Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenshaft des I-Ieiligen Landes.] A 1974 survey yielded evidence for an occupation at least as early as tire seventh century BCE. Flowever, in considering the history of U m m Qeis/Gadara, it is tire literary tradition that is relied on primarily Polybius (Hist. 5.54-85) described the region of Gadara as one of several locations under Ptolemaic control before the con quest of Antiochus III in 2 1 8 - 2 1 7 BCE. During the final con quest of Transjordan and Palestine by this Antiochus in 198 BCE, Gadara was incorporated into the Seleucid kingdom— an important event in the city's history. According to Stephan of Byzantium (Ethnika 128.30), the city was called Antiochia and Seleucia, and it minted coins bearing the title "Antiochia" to commemorate the heritage of Seleucid con trol. [See Seleucids.] Josephus, die first-century CE Roman historian (Antiq. 1 3 . 1 3 . 3 ; Wars 1.4.2), mentions that Gadara was freed from the control of tire Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus by die Roman general Pompey during Pompey's campaign in Syria in 63 BCE. It was part of die reorganization that resulted from the formation of the Provincia Arabia after the Romans annexed the Nabatean kingdom and its capital city, Petra, early in the second century CE. [See Nabateans.] Additional reorganization took place in the Roman Empire with the creation of the Provincia Palaestinae. By about 429 CE, Pal estine and Transjordan were subdivided into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Tertia. George Adam Smith has pointed out (Historical Geography of the Holy fjxnd, 25th ed., rev. London, 1931) that Gadara was listed as one of the cities in Palaestina Secunda. During the New Testament era, a visit by Jesus to the region of Gadara is attested (Mt. 8:28). The city is best re-
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membered in connection with die story of the Gadarene swine. By the beginning of the fourth century CE, Gadara had a bishop who attended the Council of Nicaea (325 CE). As a result of the discovery of its magnificent basilica by the German Evangelical Institute for the Archaeology of the Holy Land under the direction of Ute Wagner-Lux (19761980), Gadara is among die major Christian centers in Transjordan, which include Jerash/Gerasa, Madaba, and Petra. [See Jerash; Madaba; Petra.] T h e remains of other monuments in the city include two temples, two theaters, a fortified acropolis, paved colonnaded streets, a monumental gateway, a necropolis, a nymphaeum, two mausolea, a sta dium, and two public baths along the south side of the decumanus maximus. The excavation of the bath building in 1977-1983 by a Danish team headed by Svend Holm-Nielsen discerned three main periods in its history. T h e first was terminated by a destruction possibly caused by an earthquake in about 400 CE. In the second, the building continued as a bath but on a much reduced scale, the gradual change indicating an economic decline at Gadara. At some time in the first half of the seventh century, the use of the building as a bath came to an end. In tire third period of its history, the bath was used for habitation and workshops. A section of the building seems to have been used as an Islamic prayer place in the Umayyad period. Al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century Arab his torian says (Kitab futuh al-buldan [Book of the Conquest of the Countries], ed. M . J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1866, p. 126) tiiat in the middle of the seventh century Gadara was cap-
•i
tured by the Muslims and became one of the cities of the new Arab administrative district of Falastin (Palestine). Little is known of Gadara's history in 'Abbasid and later periods. Neither Christian nor Muslim writers provide any indication of whether Gadara was settled during the Ayyubid-Mamluk period. T h e frequency and distribution of sherds from this period (elevenfh-diirteentii centuries CE) at Gadara probably reflect the existence of a few farms in the immediate vicinity. Accounts of Arab travelers and geog raphers indicate tiiat tiiere was a sharp decline in the city's wealth and population and that gradually Gadara passed from a Greco-Roman town of considerable importance, even boasting a university in its heyday, to a field of ruins. BIBLIOGRAPHY Glueck., Nelson. The River Jordan. Philadelphia, 1946. Interesting his tory and description of die site, somewhat limited by its traditional approach. Holm-Nielsen, Svend, et al. "Umm Qeis (Gadara)." In Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 2 , Field Reports, edited by Denyse Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 5 9 7 - 6 1 1 . Louvain, 1 9 8 9 . The most up-to-date and concise presentation of field reports on recent excavations at Umm Qeis and its surroundings. Schumacher, Gottlieb, Northern 'Ajlun, "Wilkin the Decapolis." Lon don, 1 8 9 0 . Accurate description of the ruins at Umm Qeis, with plan and map of the surrounding area. Schiirer, Emil. The Histoiy of the Jewish People in the Age ofJesus Christ, 175 B.C.-A.D. 135. Vol. 2. Revised and edited by Geza Vermes et al. Edinburgh, 1 9 7 9 . New English version revised and edited by bib lical scholars and specialists, including accurate and comprehensive literary accounts of the cities of the Decapolis. Spijkerman, Augusto. The Coins of the Decapolis and Provincia Arabia. Jerusalem, 1 9 7 8 . Essential for learning about the role of city coins in the historical synthesis attempted up to 1 9 7 8 , with special attention given to die cities of the Decapolis. Well documented with historical and geographic introductions, indices, and bibliographies. Weber, Thomas. Umm Qeis, Gadara of the Decapolis. Amman, 1 9 8 9 . The most recent and auflioritative guide to the antiquities of the site, with an up-to-date city plan, drawings, and other illustrations. ADNAN HADIDI
UNDERSEA EXPLORATION SOCIETY O F ISRAEL. In 1959, hundreds of amphorae were hauled up
UMM QEIS. Ruins of the central portion of the basilica. (Courtesy A . Hadidi)
from the sea bottom by trawler fishermen from Kibbutz Ma'agan Mikha'el. T h e investigation of that rich collection of archaeological finds was the impetus for the establishment of the Undersea Exploration Society of Israel (UESI). T h e following year, the American explorer and diver Edwin Link arrived in Israel to explore the Herodian harbor at Caesarea, providing die Israeli group of navy-trained divers and the ldbbutz's Elisha Linder, who had traced the provenance of the amphorae on the sea floor, with an opportunity to par ticipate in an underwater excavation. Soon after, pioneer American archaeological diver Peter Throckmorton was in vited to serve as guide and mentor in conducting underwater surveys for the growing number of enthusiastic UESI vol-
UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY unteers. This component of learning by experience ex tended to include the application of advanced technology for searching and surveying the sea floor, like the sonar de veloped by H. Edgerton. Members of the UESI have participated in marine ar chaeological excavations elsewhere in the Mediterranean re gion as well: at the Yassiada wreck in Turkey; at Kyrenia in Cyprus; and in die Straits of Messina and the Lake of Bolsena in Italy, among them. T h e knowledge obtained while training abroad and diving at home raised the society's pro fessional standards and its reputation among archaeologists. During UESI's first decade, its members participated in the major harbor excavations at Akko, 'Atlit, and Caesarea. Its local branches at various coastal settlements, while mon itoring assigned stretches of the coastline, were recording and rescuing important finds, such as the Shavei-Zion T a n nit figurine wreck. [See Shavei-Zion, article on Underwater Site.] T h e UESI also works in the Sea of Galilee and the Red Sea. T h e society was instrumental in the creation of the National Divers Federation and participates with oceanographers in interdisciplinary maritime study projects. In 1972, Elisha Linder, joined later by Avner Raban and Ya'acov Nir of the UESI, initiated a program of graduate study at the University of Haifa in the history of maritime civilizations. Although, gradually, volunteer divers have given way to pro fessionally trained marine archaeologists on excavations, the divers on many expeditions continue to be drawn from UESI's rank and file. c
[See also Akko; Atlit-Ram; Caesarea; Ma'agan Mikha'el; Underwater Archaeology; and Yassiada Wrecks.] ELISHA LINDER
UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY. The field of underwater archaeology offers unique information about the past because artifacts found under water are often better preserved, and in larger quantities, than those found on land, where in the past ceramics and glass eventually were broken through use, metal objects were melted down and recast, and raw materials were ttansformed into manufactured goods after tiiey were unloaded from the ships that trans ported them. Organic material often simply disappears. Fur thermore, if artifacts are from a shipwreck that can be dated precisely, as is often the case, they can be equally well dated, connibuting to the establishment of precise chronologies. The archaeology of ships, sometimes called nautical ar chaeology, also reveals design and construction details of various types of watercraft—of merchant vessels, such as those found at Serce Limam, Uluburun, and Yassiada in Turkey; warships, a ram at 'Atlit in Israel; and fishing boats, such as the Galilee Boat recovered from the Sea of Galilee. Underwater archaeology, however, also embraces the study of ancient harbors, as at Caesarea in Israel, and inundated settlements, such as several Neolithic sites in the sea south
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of the port of Haifa. [All of the sites mentioned above are the subject of independent entries.} Underwater archaeology in the Near East began, as else where, with chance finds made by fishermen, sponge divers, and, after the invention of self-contained underwater breath ing apparatus (SCUBA), both sport and scientific divers. Ancient wrecks have been reported off the coasts of every country washed by the Mediterranean or Red Seas. It was a discovery by sponge divers near Cape Gelidonya, Turkey, that led in i960 to the first complete excavation on the floor of the Mediterranean. The approach to that ex cavation was to adapt, as much as was practical, standard land techniques to the underwater environment. The site was mapped by triangulation with meter tapes (details were added to plans from pencil drawings made under water on plastic paper) and from site photographs taken witii cameras in watertight housings. Instead of shovels and wheelbarrows, excavators used air lifts, or nearly vertical suction pipes, to remove overburden. Because sunken objects often become encased in layers of calcium carbonate over time, it was nec essary to chisel free from the seabed large clusters of solidly concreted artifacts. These were raised with balloons filled with air after being attached to the clusters and were then dismantled on land. [See Cape Gelidonya.] T h e Cape Gelidonya excavators learned that the major problem in working under water is lack of time, for in order to avoid decompression sickness, each excavator could work for only about an hour a day in two dives. Thus, in the 1960s, the excavation of Late Roman and Byzantine ship wrecks at Yassiada, Turkey, led to the development of de vices to improve efficiency, especially in mapping. These included metal grids placed over a site to break it into squares 2 meters on a side; a scaffolding to support movable photographic towers; underwater plane tables; and ulti mately a system of mapping stereophotogrammetrically by moving a camera along a horizontal bar floated over the site. Later, the stereophotographs were taken from a research submersible that glided above the seabed as an airplane flies over land. An air-filled Plexiglas hemisphere on legs (called an underwater telephone booth) allowed divers to talk to one another or, via a cable, to the surface; and a submersible decompression chamber allowed excavators to make longer dives by decompressing longer. It was also in the 1960s that the first ancient wreck was located by side-scan sonar, near Yalikavak, Turkey. In the late 1970s, at Serge Limani, ceramic containers were sieved for seeds and other organic remains for the first time, with excellent results, and excavators gained more div ing time by decompressing on pure oxygen. By the 1980s, the new techniques for underwater mapping were aban doned at Uluburun, because of the rugged seabed terrain, and mapping was again done with hand-held meter tapes and plumb bobs, altiiough a newly invented acoustic map ping system (SHARPS) was also used.
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in Ras al-Khaimah. In 1973-1974 an Iraqi team worked at a number of important sites, and a series of French missions under Serge Cleuziou and Remy Boucharlat was inaugu rated in 1977 to investigate Hili 8, Rumeilah, and Mleiha. Meanwhile, numerous other foreign teams began projects in the mid- and late 1980s at sites ranging from prehistoric shell middens to the medieval port of Julfar. Many of these are still underway. The UAE occupies an important area at the base of the Arabian Gulf and consists of four environmental zones. T h e flat, sandy desert foreland on the coast, which extends from the bottom of the Qatar to the beginning of Ras Musandam, is backed by a strip of fertile, well-watered gravel plains. T o the east and north of these rises the massive Hajar mountain Waterlogged wood will quickly shrink and warp out of range, which runs like a backbone down the center of the recognition in air as its cells collapse, unless it is bulked with Oman peninsula. T o the south, the desert begins, punctu something before the water in them evaporates. Excavators ated only occasionally by oases like Liwa, and gradually of the fourth-century BCE Greek shipwreck near Kyrenia, merges into the great Rub al-Khali sand sea. T h e so-called Cyprus, using polyethylene glycol, were the first to conserve east coast of the UAE is that portion of Ras al-Khaimah, the fragmentary timbers of a Mediterranean ship, which Sharjah, and Fujairah that represents a continuation of the they reassembled in the early 1970s from thousands of frag Batinah coastal plain of Oman and fronts the Arabian Sea. ments of wood held together with stainless steel wire. This There, a series of historically important harbors, such as process was repeated in the 1980s and 1990s on the elev Dibba, Khor Fakkan, Fujairah, and Kalba, look eastward enth-century Serce Limani ship. toward the Indian subcontinent; traditionally, the Gulf ports [See also Anchors; Ships and Boats.] of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, U m m al-Qaiwain, BIBLIOGRAPHY and Ras al-Khaimah have been more oriented culturally to ward Iran, Bahrain, and Iraq. Bass, George F. Archaeology under Water. 2d ed. Harmondsworth, 1970. Summarizes the history and techniques of underwater archaeology. Sites belonging to the late prehistoric Arabian bifacial lith The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Explo ics tradition (c. 4500-2800 BCE) are found at many points ration. London, 1972-. Information on projects and technical devel along the Gulf coast of the UAE, from Abu Dhabi in the opments around the world. Muckelroy, Keith. Maritime Archaeology. Cambridge, 1978. The first south to Ras al-Khairnah in the nortii, and inland around Khatt and Jabal Hafit. T h e coastal sites exploited the rich attempt to develop a tiieory of underwater archaeology; for the spe cialist. marine resources available, particularly shellfish, and prob Muckelroy, Keith, ed. Archeology under Water; An Atlas of the World's ably represent seasonal encampments of pastoralists who Submerged Sites. New York, 1980. Solid introduction to the field. spent the winter in the interior with their herds and their Throckmorton, Peter, ed. The Sea Remembers: Shipwrecks and Archae ology from Homer's Greece to the Rediscovery of the Titanic. New York summers on the coast. By about 3100 BCE, a large sedentary settlement with mud-brick architecture had been established and London, 1987. The most comprehensive overview of under water archaeology from its inception. at Hili 8, in the Abu Dhabi part of the Buraimi oasis. A full GEORGE F . BASS range of domesticated cereals, including emmer; bread wheat; two-row, six-row hulled, and six-row naked barley; and sorghum (?), as well as dates and melons, were being grown tiiere, and domesticated sheep, goat, and cattle were UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. In 1971, the former kept. Wild camel and equids were also being hunted. T h e Trucial States of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, U m m site is contemporary with a series of stone burial cairns of al-Qaiwain, and Fujairah formed a federation called the the so-called Hafit type containing individual inhumations. United Arab Emirates (UAE). In this they were soon joined T h e burials have yielded imported Mesopotamian ceramics by the northernmost emirate. In the Oman peninsula, Ras and beads of the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic type. By al-Khaimah. Archaeological exploration in the former Tru the middle of the third millennium BCE, a distinctive culture cial States began in the late 1950s with a Danish expedition complex known as U m m an-Nar (c. 2700-2000 BCE) had from the University of Aarhus (1959-1965) working on a emerged, characterized by well-made black-on-red/orange series of large collective burials and on an associated settle painted pottery (see figure 1 ) ; soft-stone vessels decorated ment from the mid- to late third millennium BCE on U m m with a simple dotted double circle; large circular communal an-Nar island in Abu Dhabi. In 1968, Karen Frifelt took up graves faced with well-cut ashlar masonry; and large circular the expedition's work in the Hili district of the Buraimi oasis fortifications built of m u d brick and/or stone (about 20-40 and Beatrice de Cardi undertook the first of several surveys
Except for limitations on time, the major difference be tween underwater archaeology and land archaeology has to do with conservation. When an iron artifact falls into tire sea, for example, it can be completely covered by calcium carbonate within a year. This thickens over the ages as the iron disintegrates through corrosion, leaving a perfect mold inside. Hundreds of amorphous lumps of concretion are plotted on wreck plans and are then X-rayed to see the out lines of what once was inside. The natural molds of concre tion are next broken into pieces, the slight remains of rust are removed, and the cavities are filled with epoxy. Once the epoxy hardens, die concretion is removed with pneumatic chisels, leaving exact replicas of the original implements.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
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UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. Figure I . Ceramics from a late Umm an-Nar tomb. At Tell Abraq, c. 2100-
2000 BCE. (Courtesy D. T. Potts)
m in diameter). Historically, this culture, which was in touch with the Indus Valley, eastern Iran, and Mesopotamia, prob ably represents tire land known in cuneiform sources as Su merian Magan (Aide, Makkan). Copper mining and refin ing was a major industry in the interior, where substantial areas of Bronze Age slag have been identified (e.g., near Maysar in the Wadi Samad). During the Wadi Suq period (c. 2000-1200 BCE) fewer settlements seem to have existed, perhaps as a result of slightly more arid conditions. Tell Abraq, however, was oc cupied continuously from the U m m an-Nar period through the Iron Age, demonstrating tiiat the abandonment of sites was not a universal phenomenon. At Shimal, in Ras al-Khaimah; Qidfa, in Fujairah; and Qattarah, in al-'Ain, large graves constructed of local stone have been found (c. 20001700 BCE) containing the characteristic fineware beakers and spouted jars of this period, as well as an impressive amount of bronze weaponry (e.g., swords and socketed spearheads). Contact with Bahrain in the early second millennium BCE is indicated by a sizable amount of Barbar red-ridged pottery at Tell Abraq; later contacts with Mesopotamian and Elam
are suggested by Kassite and Middle Elamite ceramics. The camel was probably domesticated by about 1500 BCE, ac cording to die latest evidence from Tell Abraq. The Iron Age (c. 1200-300 BCE) can be divided into at least three distinct phases, based on die evolution of the ce ramic assemblage, This was a period of expanded settlement throughout the region, possibly as a result of die introduc tion of a new form of irrigation in which groundwater was tapped via subterranean surface channels (Pers., qanat; Ar,, falag [sg.], aflag [pi.]). Key settlements include Tell Abraq, Rumeilah, and Rafaq. There are few Hellenistic period sites, but an important settlement existed at Mleiha in the interior of Sharjah, where monumental graves; workshop areas for bone, stone, and metal; domestic houses; and part of a square fortress witii square corner towers have been exca vated. Mleiha was also the site of a mint. The first century CE is best represented at ed-Dur, on the coast of U m m alQaiwain. Imported goods such as terra sigillata, Indian red polished ware, glazed Parthian pottery, Roman glass, south east Iranian black-on-red Namord pottery, Mesopotamian eggshell ware, and Characene coins attest to the site's cos-
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mopolitan nature. A third—fourth-century CE phase is also represented in area F at ed-Dur, where examples of early Sasanian glass have been found in a group of burnt offerings and shallow inhumations. A Late Sasanian/Early Islamic ho rizon is known at Jumeirah, in Dubai, where several large buildings, possibly a caravanserai and market, have been found. The most important medieval site investigated to date is the port of Julfar, on the coast of Ras al-Khaimah, where the abundance of Far Eastern ceramics and coins at tests to the far-flung nature of the site's international trade during die fourteenth-early sixteenth centuries CE. T h e Por tuguese are also known to have built a fort there during their brief period of supremacy in the region.
vided into three parts: southern Upper Egypt, from Aswan to Thebes; northern Upper Egypt, from Nag el-Medamud to Qaw el-Kebir; and Middle Egypt, from Asyut to Lisht. The textual and archaeological records from Upper Egypt are much more extensive than from Lower Egypt. T h e rec ord is biased by the fact that modern excavation focused more on the monumental art and architecture of the south, and because of better preservation on the dry margins of the upper Nile Valley than in the low lying and wetter Nile Delta. The Upper Egyptian sequence of predynastic cultures be gins in the fourth millennium BCE. T h e earliest is the Badarian followed by the Naqada I and II periods (consisting of the Amratian and Gerzean cultures) that was to develop into the dominant "great tradition" of early pharaonic civiliza BIBLIOGRAPHY tion, and to overtake the Delta to effect a unified ldngdom. Boucharlat, Remy, and Jean-Francois Salles, eds. Arabie orientals: MeAlready at the end of the Amratian period (Naqada I) the sopotamie et Iran meridional, de I'age du for au debut de la periode is- site of Hierakonpolis, ancient Nekhen, modern K o m el-Ahlamique. Paris, 1 9 8 4 . Contains a number of individual papers dis mar, was developing into a major urban center with spe cussing die Iron Age through Early Islamic periods in the region. cialized ceramic and beer production known from the ar Boucharlat, Remy, et al. "The European Archaeological Expedition to chaeological record. By late Gerzean and Protodynastic ed-Dur, Umm al-Qaiwayn (UAE): An Interim Report on the 1987 (Naqada III) times, Hierakonpolis was one of several pos and 1988 Seasons." Mesopotamia 24 (1989): 5-72. A good introduc tion to the archaeology of ed-Dur, the principal site of the firstsible "mini-states" in the area of the Qena bend, where the fourth centuries CE in the UAE. course of the Nile swings east toward the Red Sea and then Cleuziou, Serge. "The Chronology of Protohistoric Oman as Seen back westward. Hierakonpolis, situated just below the bend, from Hili." In Oman Studies, edited by Paolo M. Costa and Maurizio must have been a virtual late Predynastic capital; other im Tosi, pp. 47-78. Serie Orientale Roma, vol. 63. Rome, 1989. An portant settlements of the time include Coptos and Naqada, oudine of the sequence of a principal third-millennium settlement in die interior of the UAE. near the entrance of the Wadi Hammamat connecting the Frifelt, Karen. The Island of Umm an-Nar, vol. I, Third Millennium valley to the Red Sea coast. According to later tradition, the Graves. Aarhus, 1991. Final report on the Uiird-millennium BCE kings of the first dynasty hailed from This, capital of graves excavated on Umm an-Nar by the Danish mission. Hansman, John. Julfar, an Arabian Port: Its Settlement and Far Eastern the eighth nome (province), just north of the Qena bend. Ceramic Trade from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. Lon The first-dynasty royal tombs are found at Abydos on the don, 1985. Account of the work of a British team at Julfar in the late desert edge to the southwest of This. Abydos became 1970s. the cult center of Osiris at the end of the Old Kingdom Potts, Daniel T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols. Oxford, 1990. (c. 2150). Covers the archaeology of all periods in the UAE from prehistory to These centers became somewhat provincialized with the die Islamic conquest. Potts, Daniel T. The Pre-Islamic Coinage of Eastern Arabia. Copenha great move to the north during the third and fourth dynasties gen, 1991. The first extensive publication of the indigenous coinage in the early Old Kingdom (c. 2650-2465). T h e pyramid of ed-Dur and Mleiha. clusters of Abu Roash, Giza, Abu Sir, Saqqara, and Dah Schippmann, Klaus, et al., eds. Golf-Archdologie: Mesopotamien, Iran, shur all properly belong to Memphis, the new capital, situ Kuwait, Bahrain, Vereinigte Arabische Emirate und Oman. Buch am ated in the first nome of Lower Egypt. Toward the end of Erlbach, 1991. Proceedings of a conference on Gulf archaeology held the Old Kingdom, the Upper Egyptian provinces reasserted in Gottingen, Germany, in 1987; contains many papers on Shimal and other sites in the UAE. themselves as important centers in their own right with ma D . T . POTTS jor cemeteries containing the tombs of local administrators at sites like Gebelein, Deir el-Gabrawi, Meir, and Deshasha. At Aswan are the tombs of sixth-dynasty nomarchs (pro U P P E R EGYPT. T h e southern portion of Egypt, vincial governors) and caravan leaders whose tomb biog known as Upper Egypt, was divided into twenty-two nomes raphies—a genre just developing at this time—inform us based upon the Karnak list from the reign of the twelfthabout the political situation between Egypt and Nubia to dynasty king Senwosret (Sesostris) I (1971-1926 BCE). T h e ward the end of the Old Kingdom. About the same time, traditional southern border was Aswan at the First Cataract the tomb of Inti at Deshasha appears to portray the Old of the Nile. The northern border was between Lisht and Kingdom seige of a fortified center in Palestine. Dahshur just north of the entrance to the Faiyum. T h e nar When the Old Kingdom collapsed shortly after the reign row ribbon of the Nile Valley within Egypt lies in Upper of Pepi II, penultimate ruler of the sixth-dynasty. Upper Egypt. The territory included in Upper Egypt can be di Egypt broke up into its constituent nomes. There is evidence
UPPER EGYPT of extremely low Nile flood levels and famine in Upper Egypt during the ensuing First Intermediate Period (sev enth-mid-eleventh dynasties, c. 2150-2040). As large poli ties coalesced toward the end of this period, those in Upper Egypt formed again in the area of the Qena bend under the control of the Intefs from Thebes, modern Luxor. T h e cen ter of power in the north was tire first nome of Lower Egypt ruled by the dynasty of obscure rulers, some of whom were named Khety, at Herakleopolis, modern Ihnasya el-Medina. T h e tombs at Asyut from this period tell us in very frag mentary texts about the armed conflict between the two powers. T h e southerners were once again victorious and the Mid dle Kingdom (late eleventh-twelfth dynasties, c. 2040-1780) was inaugurated by a descendant of the Intefs, Nebhepetre Mentuhotep, who built die great terraced temple at Deir elBahari that Hatshepsut copied and superseded generations later. The founder of the twelfth dynasty, Amenemhat I, moved back to tire north and established his capital of Itjtawy ("seizing die two lands") near Lisht where he revived pyramid-building. T h e succeeding kings of the twelfth dy nasty built their pyramids at Lisht (Senwosret I), Dahshur (Amenemhat II, Amenemhat III, Senwosret III) and near the Hawara channel that gives access from the Nile valley to the Faiyum (another by Amenemhat III, Senwosret II). Kings Senwosret I and III built a string of great mud-brick fortifications in lower Nubia, particularly around the Second Cataract where die Semna and Kumma forts became check points for Nubian trade passing nortiiward. T h e forts signify Egypt's concern with its southern border, probably because of the Kerma culture growing toward statehood below the Third Cataract. T h e twelfth-dynasty rulers were also con cerned with die northeast, more for commerce than coer cion, although some texts give evidence of a campaign of Amenemhat II in Palestine (Nicholas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, Cambridge, 1992). Egypt's fears were appar ently well founded, for when the Egyptian kingdom began to disintegrate in tire thirteenth dynasty (after c. 1780), the strong secondary state of the Flyksos filled the power vac uum in the northeast Delta, and the Nubian Nile Valley came under die domination of the Kerma rulers. When the Egyptian kingdom reasserted itself by attacking and defeating the kingdoms of Kerma and of the Hyksos, it was, once again, from the area of the Qena bend under sev enteenth-dynasty kings. T h e final expulsion of the Hyksos under Ahmose (c. 1550-1525) initiated die eighteenth dy nasty. Thebes and Upper Egypt experienced a golden age. Pyramids were abandoned for royal tombs to be replaced by rock-cut corridor tombs in the Valley of the Kings (see below). Thebes became a southern capital in counterpart to a revived Memphis in the north. T h e east bank was given over to settlement, probably palaces and temples of the state god, Amun-Re, his consort, Mut, and their child, Khonsu. The west bank became a vast necropolis, botii royal and
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private, with the tombs of the nobles scattered across the elQuma hill, the Valley of the Queens to the south, and the Valley of the Kings to the north. The eastern base of the pyramidal hill that towered above these communal ceme teries supported a string of mortuary temples that grew dur ing the course of the eighteenth through the twentieth dy nasties (1550-1070). For more than four hundred years the west bank of Waset (ancient Luxor), known as the Valley of the Kings, was the burial ground for royalty and all important government of ficials. T h e chapels of private individuals continued to be decorated with lively scenes of everyday life. The kings' tombs, however, bore scenes of die magical-religious texts known as the Book of the Dead, the Book of Gates, and the Book of What is in the Underworld. In these texts, the de ceased ldngs joined the sun-god in his nightly journey through the underworld to be reborn widi him in the morn ing on the eastern horizon. Funerary temples were built on the west bank. On the east bank, the importance of the royal cult was being eroded by that of the state gods, especially that of Amun-Re at Karnak. All the great temples such as the temple at Luxor were decorated with sculpted and painted relief scenes on all available space. Recently the tomb of the sons of Rameses II was redis covered in the Valley of die Kings. It was used for the burial of fifty-two sons of the king and may also have a second level. It is the largest tomb in the valley. The construction of the tomb changed during this time. The simple oval or rectangular graves of the predynastic period were expanded to include a building above the ground with a superstructure consisting of a flat roof and vertical mud-brick walls. At die beginning of the Old King dom the ldngs built their tombs as pyramids. There are about ninety-seven pyramids dated from the third dynasty until the end of the Middle Kingdom. Every pyramid com plex consisted of the pyramid, a surrounding courtyard and enclosure wall, a temple at the pyramid's eastern base, a causeway to the valley floor, and a valley temple. The influence of Thebes and Upper Egypt diminished toward the end of the New Kingdom in favor of cities in the Delta that had been established already in the eighteenth dynasty. Kingship was weakened in the south by the grow ing power of the priestiiood of Amun, until Upper Egypt came to be under its administration, and twenty-first-dy nasty pharaohs ruled from the north. T h e sequence of royal burials in the Valley of the Kings came to an end. Thebes and Upper Egypt were never to regain the dominant posi tion they held in the New Kingdom as Egyptian power be came increasingly concerned with international relations to the northeast and northwest. T h e Delta grew in importance as Egypt faced and was subjugated by the empires of As syrians, Persians, Macedonians, and Romans. [See also Abydos; Asyut; Faiyum; Giza; Lower Egypt; Naqada; Nile; Pyramids; and Saqqara.]
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from the Ubaid (fifth millennium) to die Neo-Babylonian (mid-first millennium BCE) periods. However, as is invari Aldred, Cyril. Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt: A New Study. London, ably the case on large, deeply stratified Near Eastern 1968. mounds, the earlier phases of occupation have been far less Bierbrier, M. L. The Late New Kingdom in Egypt, e. 1300-664 B.C.: A Genealogical and Chronological Investigation. Warminster, 1 9 7 5 . extensively investigated because of their inaccessibility. Ur's Breasted, James H. Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from long history has also played a role in limiting access to its the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. 5 vols. Chicago, 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 0 7 . past. T h e city reached its zenith in the Ur III period (c. Cerny, Jaroslav. Ancient Egyptian Religion. London, 1 9 5 2 . Cerny, Jaroslav. A Community of Workmen at Thebes in the Ramesside 2100-2000 BCE), when it was the capital of an empire and its kings undertook extensive building programs, obscuring Period. Cairo, 1 9 7 3 . earlier structures. Woolley's predilection for excavating in Edgerton, William F. "The Government and the Governed in the Egyptian Empire." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 6 ( 1 9 4 7 ) : 1 5 2 the so-called Temenos area of the site—the location, since 160, very early in Ur's history, of major temples and other elab Gardiner, Alan H., ed. The Wilbour Papyrus. 4 vols. London, 1 9 4 1 . orate buildings—also contributes to a picture of life at Ur Hayes, William C, The Scepter of Egypt: A Background for the Study of that is heavily, albeit not exclusively, centered around the the Egyptian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2 . community's religious and civic core. New York, 1 9 5 9 . Hoffman, Michael A. Egypt before the Pharaohs. New York, 1 9 7 9 . T o explore the early occupations of Ur, Woolley in Redford, Donald B. History and Chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty structed his workmen to sink several deep test pits. Under of Egypt. Toronto, 1 9 6 7 . the fourth-millennium occupational layers (see below) they ZAI-II FIAWASS encountered a thick, culturally sterile layer thought to have been deposited by the action of water. This was quickly dubbed the "Flood Stratum" and interpreted as the rem UR (Ar., Tell el-Muqayyar), site located in southern Mes nants of the biblical flood. In fact, the deposit may be a opotamia (modern Iraq) along a former branch of the Eu wind-borne dune or, if water-borne, a product of just one phrates River (30°56' N , 46°o8' E). T h e site was identified of many floods that were common occurrences in Meso as Ur in the 1850s by the British consul atBasra, J. E. Taylor, potamia prior to modern damming of the rivers. who was employed by the British Museum to investigate a Below the sterile "Flood" deposit were die remains of number of southern Mesopotamian sites, about which al Ubaid occupation. Ur may have reached a size of 10 ha (25 most nothing was known at the time. He dug at the corners acres) in the Ubaid period, making it one of a number of of the ziggurat mound at the site, uncovering a number of larger towns amid a landscape of predominantiy small vil baked clay cylinders inscribed in cuneiform. The inscrip lages. However, the remains tiiat Woolley excavated reveal tions detail the history of the building of the ziggurat and a picture of ordinary domestic life. No intact architecture named tire city as Ur, which for many people implied an was recognized, but bits of mud brick and remnants of reedidentification with the biblical city of Ur of the Chaldees, the and-mud constructions were recovered, mixed with domes birthplace of Abraham (Gn. 1 1 : 2 8 - 3 1 ) . tic debris including pottery with simple painted designs; Following Taylor's work, the site was left untouched until stone tools for a variety of cutting, pounding, and grinding nearly the end of the century, when a team from the Uni tasks; sicldes made of highly fired clay; and spindle whorls. versity of Pennsylvania excavated there briefly. Immediately In addition to the domestic remains, the excavations en following World War I, R. Campbell Thompson and H. R. countered a small number of Ubaid graves. Individuals were Hall tried their luck. It is C. Leonard Woolley, however, interred on their back, accompanied by a few pots, occa director of twelve field seasons at the site (1922-1934), who sionally clay figurines, and more rarely beads or animal is credited with most of the archaeological work at Ur. bones. There are few differences in the ways these individ The Woolley expedition was jointly sponsored by the uals were treated at death, apart from distinctions attribut University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania and able to age and sex. the British Museum. It was a model for its time in terms of T h e scanty excavated remains from the Uruk and Jemdet the quality of much of the fieldwork and die timeliness and Nasr periods (c. 3900-2900 BCE) are nevertheless sufficient thoroughness widi which the work was published. Woolley's to suggest that Ur remained a town of some importance. engaging and prolific popular prose, his flair for publicity, Excavations around the later ziggurat revealed an Uruk-pethe spectacular nature of some of his finds, and the connec riod temple platform, consisting of a terrace wall built of tions he drew between Ur and the Bible all combined to characteristically Uruk Riemchen bricks (square in cross sec produce strong public interest in his work, rivaling that elic tion) and a floor strewn with thousands of the clay cones ited by King Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt. Since 1934, favored for decorating the facades of public buildings of this work at the site has been limited to that associated with the period. Elsewhere on the site pottery kilns accompanied by restoration of die ziggurat by Iraqi archaeologists. masses of pottery were uncovered. A portion of an extensive cemetery was also excavated. Woolley attributed the graves Ur was occupied for approximately four thousand years, BIBLIOGRAPHY
UR to the Jemdet Nasr period, but recent reevaluations assign them to the Uruk through Early Dynastic II periods. Bodies lay on their side in a crouched position, frequently accom panied by clay pots, stone vessels, and beads, and less often by metal (copper or lead) vessels or other small copper items. In the succeeding Early Dynastic period (c. 2900-2350 BCE), the temple platform, already prominent in the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, was rebuilt at least twice. Kitch ens, storerooms, and a series of rooms interpreted by Woolley as shrines were found on top of it. T h e temple that was presumably die principal building on this platform is not direcdy attested, having been buried beneath the massive ziggurat built by the Ur III king Ur-Nammu. Not far from the temple platform was a rubbish dump, known as the seal-impression strata (SIS). T h e dump in cluded burnt mud-brick debris, pottery, clay tablets, and tire many clay sealings from which the strata take tiieir name. Based on its location as well as its contents, the rubbish probably derives from temple or civic buildings of the Early Dynastic period. T h e seal impressions include those known as the city seal impressions because of their protocuneiform symbols, which are thought to stand for city names. T h e sealings had been used to close doors, presumably of store rooms, as well as jars and other containers. T h e relative fre quency with which certain city names co-occur may relate to the strength of economic connections between cities. Dug into this rubbish dump were die graves of the Royal Cemetery. T h e cemetery was used as a burial place from the Early Dynastic III through the Post-Akkadian periods (c. 2600—2100 BCE) and contained approximately two thou sand graves (although many badly disturbed ones were un reported). T h e cemetery derives its name from sixteen of the graves, all of which date to the earliest portion of its use. Unlike die hundreds of other graves, these sixteen, known as the Royal Tombs, contained brick and/or stone chambers in which the dead were placed. All of the tombs contained multiple burials of individuals apparentiy placed in the grave to accompany die principal deceased person ("human sac rifice") . Where subsequent disturbance did not remove the evidence, the tombs included great riches of precious metal and semiprecious stone jewelry, containers, weaponry, mu sical instruments, seals, and furniture. However, as Woolley himself pointed out, a number of the so-called private graves also contained similar types and quantities of riches. What best distinguished the "royal" tombs were their construction and seeming evidence of human sacrifice. On the basis of the treatment of the deceased and die discovery in several of the tombs of inscribed artifacts nam ing a person as "ldng" or "queen," Woolley argued that these were the tombs of royalty. However, none of the in scribed artifacts were found directly associated with the principal deceased individual, and they may have been gifts from others, rather than possessions of the dead person. Al
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though it cannot be stated with certainty who was buried in the Royal Cemetery graves, a consideration of the full range of interments and comparison with burial practices at con temporary sites suggest that the Royal Cemetery includes personnel from both religious and civic institutions. Apart from the continuing use of the Royal Cemetery for burial, there is little direct evidence of the Akkadian period at Ur, although contemporary texts indicate that it remained an important city. An alabaster disk showing a ritual act of libation has an inscribed dedication from Enheduanna, who was a daughter of Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian dy nasty. Enheduanna served as e»-priestess (high priestess) of Nanna, the patron god of Ur. Enheduanna's installation in the post of e«-priestess at Ur may represent one means by which Sargon sought to cloak his rule of the many city-states of Sumer and Akkad in a mantle of traditional legitimacy. For approximately a century, from about 2100 to 2000 BCE, Ur was the capital of an empire known today as Ur III. During this time, as well as during the subsequent two cen turies, Ur was an important port of trade linking Mesopo tamia with the lands along the Gulf and beyond. The empire is also well known for its elaborate bureaucracy, as attested by the large number of tablets dealing with accounting mat ters that have been recovered from sites of this period. T h e city itself attained a size of at least 50 ha (124 acres). The first king of the dynasty, Ur-Nammu, began an am bitious program of building at Ur; what is known of this construction is confined primarily to the central religious area. Many of the buildings were finished or elaborated by King Shulgi, Ur-Nammu's son. Although the destruction of Ur by die Elamites at the end of the Ur III dynasty resulted in the razing of most of these buildings, the foundations pro vide an idea of the layout of the core of die city. A large raised area, dubbed the Temenos by Woolley, was dedicated to die moon god, Nanna, and his wife, Ningal, as indicated by inscribed foundation deposits. Prominent within the Temenos was the ziggurat built by Ur-Nammu, on top of which the main temple probably stood, although no trace of it remains. T h e other buildings on the ziggurat terrace were badly destroyed at the end of the Ur III period but are thought to have served similar functions to those of the Early Dynastic period. The use of the Great Court of Nanna, a sunken court immediately in front of the ziggurat terrace, is unclear: Woolley's interpretation of it as a storage building for offerings brought to die temples has been chal lenged; it may have served as a place where the people of the city could approach the deities and die sacred symbols of them. Other buildings within the Temenos include the Ehursag, possibly a palace; die Ganunmah (called Enunmakh by Woolley), which included a bank of storage cham bers; and the Giparu, built over Early Dynastic remains of a similar building and serving as the dwelling of the enpriestesses as well as their burial place. Aldiough there is little archaeological evidence for the Ur III city outside the
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Temenos, there are indications that it was enclosed by a wall and surrounded by river channels or canals on all but its southern side. The carved monument known as the stela of Ur-Nammu was found in pieces scattered around the ziggurat terrace (see figure i). Large portions of it were not recovered, but the remaining fragments show scenes of Ur-Nammu receiv ing orders to build Nanna's temple and illustrations of ani mal sacrifice and musicians that may represent a celebration following the completion of the building project. The in scriptions on the stela include a list of canals built by order of Ur-Nammu. Although much at least of the city's central area was de-
UR. Figure i. Stele erected by Ur-Nammu. Dated to the third dy nasty. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
stroyed in about 2000 BCE, presumably by invading Elamites, the city was soon rebuilt by the ldngs of the nearby city of Isin, who claimed to be the legitimate heirs of tire Ur III state. Although Ur no longer served as the political cap ital, it functioned as an important religious and commercial center during the Isin-Larsa period (c. 2000-1760 BCE) . T h e city reached its maximum areal extent of at least 60 ha (148 acres), and settlement in the immediately surrounding re gion seems to have peaked. Excavations in the Temenos area provide testimony to tire rebuilding of many structures within it. In various excava tions around the city outside the Temenos, Woolley's work revealed residential quarters. Extensive exposures of do mestic buildings were made in two central locations: the area known as E M , close to the southwestern edge of the T e menos, and the A H area, somewhat farther to the southeast. Numerous clay tablets found in the houses have been inter preted as indicating that the E M area was inhabited pri marily by temple officials, whereas the occupants of the AH houses were more diverse. Both residential areas are com posed of densely packed buildings separated by narrow, winding stteets. T h e houses are typically built around an open central courtyard onto which most of the remaining rooms opened. Woolley argued that the houses contained two stories, a contention that has been challenged. Nearly half of the houses contain a room that appears, on the basis of its internal features, to have been used as a chapel. T h e functions of other rooms are more difficult to specify be cause of the infrequency of features or lack of information on where in the buildings artifacts were found. Nonetiieless, the size, shape, and positioning of rooms shows considerable consistency among houses. Interestingly, fewer than 10 per cent of the houses contain a clearly identifiable kitchen, in dicating that cooking and baldng must often have taken place outside the home. Individuals of all ages were buried beneath the floors of the houses, in simple pits, clay coffins, pots, or brick tombs, accompanied by a range of pottery and jewelry, including beads, bracelets, finger rings, and earrings. Some individuals received greater wealth in grave offerings than others. With the rise of Babylon in the eighteenth century BCE and continuing environmental degradation in southern Sumer, Ur's fortunes, as well as those of the other southern cities, began to decline. T h e city wall of Ur and many of the major public buildings were once again razed, this time following a major rebellion by the southern cities against Babylon's overlordship in about 1740 BCE. Nonetheless, the city re mained occupied, and there is no indication of substantial destruction in the residential areas excavated. During die next few centuries people repaired and reused standing houses, rather than build new ones, and continued the prac tice of burying their dead beneath house floors. In about 1400 BCE, the Kassite king Kurigalzu restored many of the religious buildings in the Temenos area. Accompanying the
URARTU renewed building in the city was a proliferation of rural set tlement. Although the city remained occupied for another millen nium, it seems not to have regained its earlier glory. A sev enth-century BCE governor undertook restoration and some new building activities in the Temenos area, and the N e o Babylonian Icings Nebuchadrezzar (604-562 BCE) and N a bonidus (555-539 BCE) had die ziggurat, Temenos wall, and some residential areas rebuilt. However, not long after, in about 400 B C E , tire city was abandoned. [See also Isin; Larsa; Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia; Ubaid; and Uruk-Warka.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Brinkman, John A. "Ur: 'The Kassite Period and the Period of the Assyrian Kings."' Orientalia 3 8 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 3 1 0 - 3 4 8 . Although meant as a book review, this piece remains an important discussion of the late second- and first-millennium BCE remains at Ur. Charpin, Dominique. Le clerge d'Ur au siecle d'Hammurabi. Geneva, 1 9 8 6 , Examination of the clergy at Ur in the early second millennium BCE, based on the analysis of texts found in die residential quarters, in combination with archaeological evidence. Charpin also traces life histories of individuals and households. Kolbus, Suzanne. "Zur Chronologie des sog. Gamat Nasr-Friedhofs in Ur." Iraq 4 5 . 1 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 7 - 1 7 . Reexamination of the so-called Jemdet Nasr cemetery at Ur, showing that its use spans a greater time period than Woolley initially thought. Luby, Edward. "Social Variation in Ancient Mesopotamia: An Archi tectural and Mortuary Analysis of Ur in die Early Second Millen nium B.C." Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1 9 9 0 . Systematic examination of die early second millennium BCE residential quarters at Ur, including analysis of the architectural pat terns and graves. Luby also includes previously unpublished data on die houses, retrieved from an examination of Woolley's field notes. Matthews, R.J. Cities, Seals, and Writing: Archaic Seal Impressions from Jcmdet Nasr and Ur, Materialien zu den frtlhen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients, vol. 2 . Berlin, 1 9 9 3 . A reconsideration of die use and meaning of die city sealings, taldng account of recent reanalyses of the earliest cuneiform writing system. Moorey, P. R. S. "What Do We Know About the People Buried in the Royal Cemetery?" Expedition 2 0 . 1 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 2 4 - 4 0 . Succinct and highly readable examination of the Royal Tombs, in which Moorey shows that Woolley's argument that they represent the burial places of royalty can be challenged. Moorey, P. R. S. "Where Did They Bury the Kings of the Bird Dy nasty of Ur?" Iraq 4 6 . 1 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 1 - 1 8 . Addresses the question of the uses of die mausolea usually attributed to the kings of the Ur III dynasty. Moorey shows that although these must have been the tombs of important people, tiiey were not necessarily the places where rulers were interred. Nissen, Hans J. Zur Datierung des Konigsfriedhofes von Ur. Bonn, 1 9 6 6 . Major reanalysis of the Royal Cemetery graves in an attempt to refine and reassess their chronological ascriptions. Pollock, Susan. "Chronology of the Royal Cemetery of Ur." Iraq 4 7 ( 1 9 8 5 ) : 1 2 9 - 1 5 8 . A more recent reassessment of the chronology of the Royal Cemetery graves, employing a different set of methods than those used by Nissen (above). Pollock, Susan. "Of Priestesses, Princes, and Poor Relations: The Dead in the Royal Cemetery of Ur." Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 7 1 - 1 8 9 . Recent attempt at identifying die people buried in
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the Royal Cemetery, using a different approach than Moorey's (above). Van de Mieroop, Marc. Society and Enterprise in Old Babylonian Ur. Berliner Beitrage zum Vorderen Orient, vol. 1 2 . Berlin, 1 9 9 2 . Major reexamination of the economic organization of early second millen nium Ur, using evidence provided by the texts. Van de Mieroop's study differs from Charpin's (above) in its focus on the economy. Weadock, Penelope. "The Giparu at Ur." Iraq 3 7 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 1 0 1 - 1 2 8 . A functional analysis of die early second-millennium Giparu, offering an example of the insights gained from a detailed examination of one building. Winter, Irene J . "Women in Public: The Disk of Enheduanna, the Be ginning of the Office of En-Priestess, and the Weight of Visual Ev idence." In la femme dans le Proche-Orient. antique, edited by JeanMarie Durand, pp. 1 8 9 - 2 0 1 . Paris, 1 9 8 7 . Through a detailed analysis of the carved disk of Enheduanna found at Ur, Winter argues for a tradition of priestesshood that extends back at least to the Early Dy nastic period. Woolley, C. Leonard, et al. Ur Excavations and Ur Excavation Texts. 1 9 vols. London and Philadelpha, 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 7 6 . Definitive site reports on Woolley's fieldwork, as well as publication of the tablets and odter inscribed materials recovered from his work. Woolley, C. Leonard. Ur of the Chaldces. Revised by P . R. S. Moorey. Ithaca, N.Y., 1 9 8 2 . A revised version of Woolley's original work ( 1 9 2 9 ) , presenting an overview of his twelve seasons at Ur, in a style accessible to nonspecialists. Moorey has judiciously updated the book to reflect recent consensus on such topics as chronology and the reading of Sumerian and Akkadian names, Wright, Henry T. "The Southern Margins of Sumer: Archaeological Survey of die Area of Eridu and Ur." In Heartland of Cities, by Rob ert McC. Adams, pp. 2 9 5 - 3 4 5 . Chicago, 1 9 8 1 . Wright presents the results of his settlement survey of die area around Ur, placing Ur in its larger regional context. SUSAN POLLOCK
URARTU.
T h e highland state of Urartu stretched from the eastern bank of the upper Euphrates River to the western shores of Lake Urmia, and from the mountain passes of northern Iraq to the Caucasus Mountains. The kingdom dominated eastern Anatolia in the eighth and seventh cen turies BCE. It is noteworthy historically for its rivalry with Assyria and archaeologically for its massive fortress archi tecture and sophisticated metalwork. For a time, Urartu was the strongest state in the Near East. Its distinctive and rel atively uniform culture, much of it imposed from above, to judge from the royal focus of the surviving documentary and archaeological evidence, permeated this realm. Urartu's glo ries, however, were relatively short lived and were forgotten soon after the kingdom fell victim to a violent destruction in the late seventh or early sixth century BCE. Even the name of Urartu faded from view: it was ttansformed into Ararat by later vocalizations imposed on the Hebrew Bible. Origins. T h e word Urartu is taken from Assyrian records, not from those of die Urartian people themselves, who called their kingdom Bianili. When it first appears in texts in the tliirteenth-century BCE in the variant form Uruatri, the term has geographic rather than political connotations. It desig nates a land divided among petty kingdoms in the vicinity
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of Lake Van. Neither archaeology nor textual records shed much light on the situation there until about the middle of the ninth century BCE, when evidence of increasing political consolidation appears concurrentiy with more regular As syrian intrusions. By the late ninth century, Urartu was a single polity on the north and east shores of Lake Van, gov erned from a capital at Tuspa (modern Van) by a native dynasty that left cuneiform inscriptions of building and mil itary activities in its own language. The population over which this emerging monarchy ex tended its authority appears, on linguistic grounds, to have been autochthonous. The Urartian language is neither Se mitic nor Indo-European; it is related to Hurrian, which it self is thought to have migrated from the very areas in which the Urartians later came to power into the northern fringes of Mesopotamia in the third millennium. T h e genetic rela tionship of Hurrian and Urartian is close, and most scholars now favor the theory that they are sister branches widi a common parent. In recent years, a relationship with living northeastern Caucasian languages has been posited, al though this remains controversial. History. The debt that the creators of the kingdom of Van owed their Assyrian antagonists is exemplified by the in scriptions of the first of the royal line, Sarduri I (c. 830-c. 820 BCE): they are not only written in Akkadian but are vir tually plagiarized from display inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal II. This cultural dependency diminished as Urartu entered a phase of rapid conquest under Sarduri's successors, IIpuini (c. 820-c. 790 BCE) and Menua (c. 790-775 BCE), who appear to have established the template for the empire. T h e frontiers were quickly moved outward to the banks of the Araxes River, to the western bend of the Euphrates near Malatya, and to the southern and western shores of Lake Urmia. Menua in particular was a prodigious builder. His surviving inscriptions dedicating temples, storehouses, and forttesses outnumber those of all other Urartian rulers put together. From bronze plaques, belts, helmets, vessels, and horse trappings (most found in illicit excavations but attrib utable to specific kings thanks to the cuneiform notations they bear), it is clear that the basic canons of Urartian art were already formed by this time. The trajectory of Urartian expansion continued for most of the eighth century BCE under three rulers: Argisti I (c. 770-c. 750), Sarduri II (c. 750-c, 720), and Rusa I (c. 720c. 713). The first two have left lengthy inscriptions in the form of annals, demonstrating that they, like Assyrian kings of the same era, campaigned annually, and sometimes even more often, harvesting booty that was presumably an im portant source of revenue in the royal economy. The terri tory the two added appears for the most part to have been in the nortii, in what is now the Republic of Armenia. In the second half of the eighth century BCE, Assyria, which had been in eclipse for decades, revived in time to thwart Ur artian ambitions south of the Taurus Mountains. T h e most celebrated confrontation between the two powers, however,
took place in 714 BCE, when Sargon II of Assyria launched a campaign into the northern Zagros Mountains and, after defeating Rusa in battle, invaded a portion of Urartu itself. Sargon's depredations were not fatal to the kingdom, but the reign of Rusa I does appear to be a turning point in several respects. Intelligence reports to die Assyrian king re veal that Urartu was in turmoil: at least one revolt against Rusa had broken out, and Cimmerians, mounted warriors who were to wreak havoc among the more sedentary peoples of Anatolia for a generation, made their first appearance in history by inflicting a major defeat on Urartian forces. It may merely be a coincidence, but from this time onward, Urar tian royal inscriptions become much less abundant. Nevertheless, Rusa's successor, Argisti II, recorded con quests farther east than any of his predecessors; Rusa II, a contemporary of Esarhaddon of Assyria (680-669 BCE), cre ated massive fortress-cities atKarmir Blur, Bastam, and T o prakkale—sites tiiat are today the primary sources of infor mation on Urartian material culture. During the seventh century BCE, Urartu and Assyria appear to have coexisted more harmoniously than previously. The end of the kingdom is obscure. Virtually every site that has been excavated had been put to the torch, but nei ther agents nor the dates of the destructions have been un ambiguously identified. T h e thread of Urartian chronology breaks after Rusa II because there are insufficient native documents to establish either the order or the number of kings. In the sixth century BCE, political control of the area passed first to the Medes and then to the Persians; the Ar menians, linguistically unrelated to the Urartians, became the dominant ethnic group. Aspects of the Civilization. T h e Urartian state exploited and reinforced the defensive potential of its mountainous territory by creating fortresses on the edges of alluvial plains. Although some settlements associated with tiiese forttesses have been investigated, the archaeology of Urartu has largely been focused on defensive and administrative networks, not settlement systems. It may well be that considerable cultural diversity existed below this state-created level, which was, after all, quite rapidly imposed. Urartian fortresses, however, were a major part of the economy. They contained massive storage facilities, attested by large pithos magazines and dedicatory inscriptions of storehouses whose capacities are given in impressive quan tities of either dry or liquid measure. Some sort of redisttibutive system is implied by their prevalence. The spread of the Urartian state also appears to have co incided widi the introduction of irrigation agriculture in eastern Anatolia. T h e amount of land available for this was severely restricted by the terrain, and the kingdom was ul timately composed of approximately twenty isolated pockets in which population and agricultural production were con centrated. Some of the territory between these was exploited by pastoralists, but evidence for Urartian culture itself is concentrated in the alluvial pockets.
URARTU Urartian kings appear to have been almost perpetually en gaged in construction activities, and the scale of their enter prise is astonishing, given tire presumably limited resources of manpower at their disposal in this mountainous environ ment. T h e normal practice was to construct citadels on el evated ground, carving footings walls directly into bedrock. T h e basic construction material was mud brick, supported by stone socles. Both the thickness of the walls and repre sentations of fortresses in art indicate that the structures were several stories high, capped by crenellated battlements. Ashlar masonry was employed in special structures, most conspicuously in a distinctive type of tower temple that had a square, single-room ground plan with reinforced corners. Every one of the eight archaeologically known examples of these towers is located on high ground within a fortress, and was thus the product of royal architectural planning. T h e testimony of texts confirms tirat building temples and per forming sacrifices at them was a royal prerogative and ob ligation, and with an emphasis that suggests a form of state religion. Although the Urartian pantheon consisted of hun dreds of deities, including such venerables as the storm god Teiseba and tire sun god Siwini (important gods of tire Hurrians), royal inscriptions and building projects focus over whelming on a supreme god named Haldi, who is prominent only in Urartian culture. T h e Urartian's stoneworking abilities are also manifest in rock-cut chambers. Cult niches, false gates as places of wor ship, and subterranean chambers and staircases were hewn out of living rock in all parts of tire kingdom. The largest of these projects were royal tombs at Van, consisting of mul tiple rooms and numerous niches. Among the majority of tire population, the dead were laid to rest in more modest surroundings. There is some evi dence of cremation, with remains placed in urn fields, as well as of simple interment. Illicit excavations of cemeteries have flooded the antiquities market with unprovenienced bronze objects, including horse ttappings, weapons, plaques, and decorated bronze belts. On these, and on the modest number of objects of art tiiat have been found in association witii citadels, a fondness can be seen for animal motifs, floral decoration, and die anthropomorphic repre sentation of deities astride lions and bulls. Urartian art lacks the narrative character of Assyrian palace art. While some reliefs of quite high quality are known, this does not seem to have been as favored a form of artistic expression and architectural decoration as it was south of the Taurus Mountains. [See also Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia; Assyrians; Hurrian; and Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopota mia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Azarpay, Guitty. Urartian Art and Artifacts: A Chronological Study. Berkeley, 1968. Investigation of stylistic change in Urartian art, with
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much useful background information on Urartian civilization gen erally. Diakonoff, IgorM. Hurrisch und Urart&isch. Translated by Karl Sdrernbek. Mtinchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, Beiheft n.F. 6. Munich, 1 9 7 1 . Translation and modification of material that ap peared in Jazyki drevneiPerednei Asii (1967). Comparative grammar of the two languages, representing a departure from the earlier con vention of treating Urartian grammar alone. Although somewhat ob solete, this is the most up-to-date overview generally available. Diakonoff, Igor M., and S. M. Kashkai. Geographical Names according to Urartian Texts. Repertoire Geographique des Textes Cuneiformes, vol. 9. Wiesbaden, 1981. Place names listed alphabetically, with citations of references in Urartian texts and suggested identifications, often based on cognates in other languages. Diakonoff, Igor M. The Pre-Nisloty of the Armenian People. Rev. ed. Translated by Lori Jennings. Delmar, N.Y., 1984. Translation of Predystoria armjanskogo naroda (1968), with revisions by the author. The most recent overview of Urartian history. Diakonoff, Igor M., and S. A. Starostin. Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian Language. Mtinchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, Beiheft 1 2 . Munich, 1986. Advances the theory that Hurrian and Urartian are related to surviving languages in the Caucasus. Haas, Volkert, ed. Das Reich Urartu: Ein altorientalischer Slaal im 1. fahrtausend v. Chr. Xenia: Konstanzer Althistorische Vortrage und Forschungen, Heft 1 7 . Konstanz, 1986. General overview of Urar tian civilization presented through essays by several audiors, with emphasis on historical and textual evidence. Kleiss, Wolfram, et al. TopographischeKarlevon Urartu. Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Erganzungsband, 3. Berlin, 1976. Useful bib liographic resource listing all Urartian sites known at the time and references to the literature on each, including even the most obscure and brief comments. Concludes with a ten-page general bibliography for literature other than site reports; contains two maps in the end jacket, one locating sites by numbers keyed to the site list and the other classifying sites by type (fortress, cemetery, rock carving, etc.). Kiln ig, Friedrich W. Handbuch der chaldischen Inschriften. 2 vols. Archiv fiir Orientforschung, Beiheft 8. Osnabriick, 1955-1957. Dated and not entirely reliable, this remains the only comprehensive collection of copies, transliterations, and translations of Urartian texts in a Western language. Kroll, Stephan. Keramik urartdischer Festungen in Iran. Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Erganzungsband, 2. Berlin, 1976. Definitive study of Urartian pottery. Kroll, Stephan. "Urartus Untergang in anderer Sicht." Istanbuler Mit teilungen 34 (1984): 1 5 1 - 1 7 0 . Argues that the Urartian kingdom was largely destroyed in tire mid-seventh century BCE rather than at the traditional date of about 590 BCE. Melikisvili, Georgii A. Urartskie klinoobraznye nadpisi. Moscow, i960. The most complete of transliterations and translations (into Russian) of Urartian inscriptions. Somewhat more reliable than Konig's col lection (above), but increasingly dated. Merhav, Rivkah, ed. Urartu: A Melalworking Center in the First Millen nium B.C.E. Jerusalem, 1 9 9 1 . Beautifully illustrated catalog of an exhibition of Urartian metal objects, with essays on various aspects of Urartian civilization. Piotrovsky, Boris B. The Ancient Civilization of Urartu. Translated by James Hogarth. New York, 1969. Good introduction to Urartian civ ilization, with a focus on the results of excavations at Karmir Blur. van Loon, Maurits N. Urartian Art: Its Distinctive Traits in the Light of Neio Excavations, Istanbul, 1966. The most comprehensive study of Urartian art. Wartke, Ralf-Bernhard. Urartu: Das Reich am Ararat. Mainz, 1993. Upto-date, well-illustrated, general treatment of this civilization. Zimansky, Paul E. Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 4 1 . Chicago, 1985.
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URBANIZATION
Review of historical and archaeological evidence for the organization of die kingdom. PAUL E . ZIMANSKY
URBANIZATION. See Cities. URKES. See Mozan, Tell.
URUK-WARKA, ruined ancient city in soutiiern Iraq, situated about 35 km (22 mi.) east of a main course of the Euphrates River, which flows dirough die provincial capital of Samawa (coordinates of ziggurat at Uruk: 3 i ° i 9 ' i 8 . 5 " N , 45°38'25.6" E). T h e name Uruk is the Akkadian rendering of a pre-Sumerian toponym U N U G , Erech of die Hebrew Bible (Gn. 10:10; Ez. 4:9). The modern name of Uruk is Warka. T h e first excavator of Uruk was the Englishman William K. Loftus, in 1849 and 1853. About half a century later, the site was visited by Robert Koldewey, the excavator of Bab ylon (1899-1917). In 1912 Koldewey, acting for the Deut sche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG), entrusted the direction of an archaeological expedition to Uruk to Julius Jordan, who had previously worked with him at Babylon and at Assur with Walter Andrae. [See the biographies of Koldewey and An drae.] Only one campaign could be conducted before the out break of World War I. Work recommenced in 1928: eleven campaigns were carried out under the direction of Jordan, A. Noldeke, E. Heinrich, and H. J. Lenzen. Excavation was once again halted by World War II. Work was resumed in 1953, under Lenzen's direction, through 1967, and then, until 1977, under H. J. Schmidt. R. M. Boehmer has directed excavations since 1980. At the time Uruk was founded, the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers had not yet joined to form what is now the Shaft al-Arab. [See Euphrates; Tigris.] The coast of the Per sian Gulf was situated about 80 km (50 mi.) farther to the northwest than at present. Uruk lay in well-watered, marshy alluvial land, covered by a network of river tributaries. For thousands of years, reed and mud thus constituted the most important building materials at the site, to which every stone had to be imported. Uruk was founded in the fifth millennium, specifically during the last (the fourth) phase of the so-called Ubaid period. Ubaid levels were reached in deep soundings in the middle of Uruk, in Eanna (Sum., "house of heaven"), as well as in the western part of the city, in the area of the Anu Ziggurat; the deepest layers are today under groundwater. [See Ubaid; Ziggurat.] Remains of a Late chalcolithic culture were found tiiere, of which the remnants of monumental btiildings are significant. They appear to be so-called Mit-
telsaal ("middle hall") houses, which probably served as cult buildings, and are situated at the base of the ziggurat that had existed in the building's earliest phases. T h e pottery, of which numerous sherds have been found, is often painted and, occasionally, is of very fine quality. Clay figurines of cattle and numerous fragments of sicldes indicate a farming culture. [See Agriculture.] Uruk first consisted of two cities—Uruk and Kullab. Adam Falkenstein (1941) proposed that Kullab was situated in the precinct of the ziggurat of Anu (die great god of heaven), Uruk farther to the east, in the area later called Eanna. During the Uruk period, at the latest, both areas were united to form the city Uruk. The Uruk period, which followed the Ubaid 4 period, was first identified as such in Uruk. In this phase die city was so important an entire phase of Early Mesopotamian culture was named after it. The excavations in Eanna uncovered the remains of an advanced civilization that was the oldest altogether. Rem nants were found of numerous buildings of monumental scale, which have been interpreted as cult or administrative buildings. One of the most ancient is the so-called Lime stone (Kalkstein) Temple. Its foundation layers consist of slabs of limestone that had been quarried west of the Eu phrates, some 80 km (50 mi.) from Uruk, at the western edge of the Arabian shelf. The temple belongs to Uruk level V (c. 3600 BCE). Among the other buildings probably be longing to this level are the so-called Stone Building (Steingebaude) and the Stone Cone Temple (Steinstifttempel). T h e former consists of two surrounding passages and one middle room with a central platform. It was situated at the base of the extended ziggurat of Anu (phases F - B ) ; its function re mains unknown. The latter is so far the oldest known water sanctuary of any city in Mesopotamia. All three of tiiese buildings share the use of limestone; in the case of the Lime stone Temple, very hard cast-lime masonry was employed. The lower part of the outer walls of this building, situated inside a temenos, were decorated with gray-black, white, and red stone cones, after which it was named. Temple buildings of the Mittelsaal type were erected on the ziggurat and repeatedly renovated. T h e latest bLiilding phase is rep resented in part by the White Temple, in some sections still 2.5 m high, its walls covered widi white plaster. Construction activities flourished during the period of Uruk level IV, which was also characterized by numerous monumental buildings. In addition to small and large Mit telsaal buildings (e.g., buildings A, B [22 X 3.6 m], and C [54.25 X 22.5 m]) and Hallenbauten with occasional elabo rate cone mosaics (Pfeilerhalle, or "hall of pillars"; Rundpfeilerhalle, or hall of round pillars", Hallenbau), there are unique building designs: buildings D and E; the subterra nean Riemchen building (Riemchen are compact small bricks with a square section), which may have been laid out as a cenotaph and that was filled with a great number of CLiltural goods; and the Great Court (Grosser Hof), which
URUK-WARKA may once have been a garden. Carbon-14 dates from beams from temple C suggest a date of about 3500 BCE for the beginning of level IV, a finding supported by certain ar chaeological finds of Mesopotamian origin in Egypt at the time of Naqada Hc/d—III. Beyond this grand architecture, there will have been pri vate houses and a first city wall in this period at Uruk; their existence, however, has not yet been proven because of the city's enormous size (about 10 1cm, or 6 mi., in circumfer ence), the depth of die archaeological layers (occasionally greater than 20 m), and because die excavators have con centrated their work in tire city center. An indication for the existence of the city wall can be seen in a cylinder seal im pression on a jar stopper from Uruk, excavated in Habuba Kabira. [See Seals; Habuba Kabira.] This seal impression demonstrates knowledge of the cylinder seal, which at the time probably developed from cylindrical beads decorated with incised geometric motifs and tiiat, in its representa tions, immediately achieved high artistic quality. Glyptic in this period consists, among other subjects, of heraldic scenes witii mythical animals that are represented somewhat later in Egypt also: buildings (temples), die feed ing of the temple herds, animal fights, lion hunts, and war scenes in which prisoners are taken. Fine art also developed in other media: stone masons pro duced stone vessels decorated for the first time witii basreliefs or with nearly three-dimensional figures; artisans even dared to use hard basalt (imported from northern Syria), for which figurative decoration for the most part had to be ground out, because copper and bronze tools were too soft for such work. Metal casting, already well known in the
URUK-WARKA. Decorated yellow sandstone ewer. Proto-literate pe riod; height, 8 in, Iraq Museum, Baghdad. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
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Ubaid 4 period, was employed not only to produce weapons and tools, but also small statues, using the lost-wax tech nique. [See Weapons, and Warfare.] Producing objects out of more than one element was particularly popular: for ex ample, a limestone bull sculpture witii silver legs and horns; stone vessels in which multicolored stone was used as dec oration; and black-white-red or yellowish-gray mosaics covering the surface of clay or stone cones in patterns re flecting those of colorful reed mats. [See Mosaics.] Pictorial representations are, in contrast to the Ubaid 4 period, no longer found on pottery. Mass-produced ware developed in the Early and Middle Uruk periods. The beveled-rim bowl, produced in molds and probably used as a rationing vessel or baldng mold, was found in such numbers as to constitute a diagnostic ware of the Uruk period. T h e development during die Uruk IV period of the socalled protocuneiform pictographic script represents per haps the greatest achievement in early intellectual history. [See Cuneiform; Writing and Writing Systems.] It offers modern research a rich view of developments during the Archaic period. Precursors of writing were small clay and stone symbols, so-called tokens—a number of which were apparently transferred from three- to two-dimensional rep resentation on clay tablets. [See Tablet.] Excavations at Uruk discovered far and away the greatest number of such tablets—indeed, die only known examples of texts from the earliest phase of writing came from this site. Uruk thus rep resents a unique center of early cultural development. In the earliest script there is a sign—the pictographic rep resentation—of a reed bundle, which later represented the goddess of love and war, Inanna (Sum., "lady of heaven"; Aide, Ishtar). She was, and remained until the end of Bab ylonian culture, the main goddess of Uruk. [See Babyloni ans.] Late Uruk culture ends during the Jemdet Nasr period; it is represented at Uruk by level III. The following, so-called Early Dynastic period is, in its first phase (ED I), a time of radical change. Uruk was, as evidenced by numerous sur face finds of pottery, even more intensively settled then than during the Uruk period. A mud-brick fortification wall (ap proximately 10 km long) that was, according to references in cuneiform literature, erected by Gilgamesh, enclosed the city. Remains of this wall are still visible. Little has been unearthed of the other construction works—merely houses and scant remains of monumental buildings. A high terrace was erected in Eanna. T h e population seems to have de creased in the ED II period. Scattered evidence points to settlement in only the western section of Uruk. The follow ing E D III period left traces in the entire city, including in Eanna, where the terrace constructions were continued. At die end of the E D III period, die sovereign of Uruk, Lugalzagesi, achieved rule over all of southern Iraq. This afforded him the power and means to commence an ag gressive building program. The immense, so-called Stamp/-
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lehmgebaude ("pise building") in Eanna—of which so far only foundations in an area of about 10,000 sq m have been excavated—and a large terrace in the northern part of Uruk are to be credited to his reign. It seems that both projects remained uncompleted, probably because the ruler was van quished in a battle against Sargon of Akkad sometime around 2340 BCE. [See Akkade.] After his victory, Sargon had the city walls of Uruk razed. He built his own Ishtar sanctuary, the Ulmash, in his city, Akkade. As a result, tire cult of Ishtar in Uruk lost so much of its earlier significance it was merely administered parttime by the daughter of Sargon, Enheduanna. [See Cult.] Her main function was that of high priestess of the moon god Nanna in Ur. Lugalzagesi's monumental constructions were certainly also abandoned for this reason. Meager sur face finds in Uruk suggest that tiiere was a painful decline in the size of the population, which apparently only inhab ited the northern half of the city. The Akkadian rulers paid tribute to Ishtar of Uruk just the same, as the fragment of a high-quality statue of a seated figure demonstrates. It is to be dated on stylistic grounds to the end of the reign of Sar gon or to the reign of one of his sons—Manishtushu or Rimush. The statue may have been one of their sister Enheduanna's offerings in her priestly function. T h e northern part of the city remained residential during the following Neo-Sumerian period. [See Sumerians.] After a short interlude, during which King Utuhegal of Uruk ruled Sumer, southern Iraq came under the rule of the ldngs of Ur. The first ruler of this dynasty, the so-called Third Dy nasty of Ur, was Ur-Nammu. He pursued intensive building activities in Uruk (in Eanna the holy precinct of Inanna/ Ishtar), in the course of which a ziggurat was erected over the Early Dynastic terraces. Up until the Seleucid period the precinct was repeatedly the object of more or less intensive construction. [See Seleucids.] This empire collapsed in about 2000 BCE. Following a pe riod of decline of some one hundred years, city rulers as sumed control of Uruk in the early Old Babylonian period. One of these, Sinkashid, had a palace built for himself in the western part of the city that contained a peristyle court, one of the earliest known in the Near East. According to the number and range of distribution of the surface finds in Uruk, the population was once again in de cline; the primary residential area stretched from west to northeast. At the end of the eighteenth century BCE, settle ment seems to have ceased altogether (no finds have been recovered from the second half of the Old Babylonian and the beginning of the Kassite periods). [See Kassites.] T h e reasons for this development are unclear; there was, in any case, no life-threatening change in climate because in neigh boring Larsa the periods are well documented. [See Larsa.] Settlement can be established only 250-300 years later in Uruk (c. 1450 BCE). The Kassite ruler Karaindash erected a small long-axis temple, dedicated to Inanna, in the eastern
part of the ziggurat, that displays nearly life-sized mountain gods and water goddesses with vessels from which the water of life flows. This was a clear recollection of the original home of the Kassites, in the wet northeastern highland. T h e divinities, standing in niches in the outer facade, are made of molded bricks, a technique simultaneously employed in the eastern highland known as Elam. [See Elamites.] The selection of the settlement area also speaks for a new begin ning at Uruk. It leaves the older areas in the northwest, north, and northeast untouched, stretching instead from the west through the southwest to the south. It can only be sus pected that the primary temple precinct of that time is to be found below the Seleucid monumental structures Bit Resh and Irigal. T h e population of Uruk in the period of the following Second Dynasty of Isin seems to have wididrawn to the con fines of Eanna; clear evidence of settlement beyond this area is not known from that period. T h e Neo- and Late Baby lonian periods once again witnessed more intensive con struction work in Eanna—above all by the Assyrian kings Sargon II (710-705 BCE) and Esarhaddon in their function as rulers of Babylonia. Sargon built a new temenos wall around the ziggurat district (the first had been erected by Ur-Nammu), and the ziggurat was also renovated. Earlier, the Neo-Babylonian ruler Marduk-apla-iddina II (722-710 BCE) had erected, for Ningishzida, god of the nether world, a small temple east of the ziggurat, next to the Karaindash consttuction. Outside of the temenos were the houses of wealthy families. From the sixth and fifth centuries BCE of the Late Babylonian period the business associations of these families reached as far as Babylon. Settlement remains were found, moreover, in the southwest section of Uruk. T h e Achaemenid period saw the steady continuation of Late Babylonian culture, which, in the Seleucid era, flour ished again, despite Hellenistic influence, before it finally ceased to exist in the course of the Early Parthian period. [See Parthians.] There were, it appears, three rulers during the Seleucid period. T h e name of the first is unknown, and the second and the third bore a Babylonian name, to which they added a Greek name: Anuuballit Nikarchos and Anuuballit Kephalon. T h e casing of the ziggurat in Eanna, with mud bricks and a thin exteriors surface of baked bricks is, in all likelihood, to be credited to the first ruler, as is the reconstruction of an enormous mud-brick terrace (210 X 200 m) in the west, adjoining, on the southeast, additional terracing (90 X 80 m) and serving as substructure for a zig gurat. The two following rulers then erected two enormous temple complexes, one for Ishtar of Uruk (205 X 198 m) at Irigal and the other for Anu, who, with his wife Anmm, was worshiped in the Bit Resh (213 X 167 m). This latter build ing lies close to the old Anu ziggurat, which then was con nected to the terrace constructions (see above). That this building was a sanctuary of Anu is, failing any contradictory evidence, the very probable conclusion reached by Falken-
URUK-WARKA stein (1941). It is based on the spatial proximity of the build ing to tire Bit Resh and on the idea of cultic continuity. [See Cult.] The type of consttuction (baked bricks) of this cultic building was very costly. It is not Greek, but rather repre sents the survival of the broadroom temple, known for al most two millennia in Mesopotamia. [See Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples.] Greek influence may, on the other hand, be found in the minor arts—above all in the numerous terra cottas, in which Greek motifs replaced Late Babylonian ones, as was true as well of Babylonian glyptic. Two tumuli about 1.8 1cm north of Uruk contain Hellenistic furnishings; their opulence suggests that they contain the graves of the rulers of Uruk mentioned above. A third hill, about 2 1cm nortii of Uruk, which, because of its size, has not been examined, may also contain a tumulus—possibly that of the first of the three builders of the Seleucid period (see above). T h e clay-tablet archive of a priest found in Par thian houses in die southeastern part of Uruk contained, on the other hand, exclusively Babylonian, rather than Greek, cultic and prophetic texts, together with numerous admin istrative documents. [See Libraries and Archives.] Con structing these buildings certainly consumed enormous sums: the city's opulence can only be explained as a con sequence of its position on a trade route going from India through the Persian Gulf to Greece. After the Parthians conquered Mesopotamia, trade was blocked by an "Iron Curtain," and Uruk sank into oblivion despite die evidence of the presence of some wealthy citizens with richly furnished villas. [See Villas.] Babylonian culture died a slow death. The last known cuneiform tablet in the Babylonian language found in Uruk is from 108 BCE. T h e great temples of the Seleucid period fell into decay, and smaller buildings were constructed within them; a temple, whose ground plan corresponds to that of a temple erected in i n CE in the southern part of Uruk, was built much later in the Bit Resh. Its type of construction is rooted in Roman architecture, and the inscriptions found in it are no longer Babylonian but Greek. T h e temple seems to have been built by merchants from the region of Mosul and dedicated to the otherwise unknown Gareus. Sea griffins are found as dec orations on its capitals. T h e existence of this sanctuary may be understood as an indication of trade relations between die northern Mesopotamia/Mediterranean and Persian Gulf regions—the latter represented by apotropaic sea monsters. Beyond the temple precinct were workshops that produced glass and ceramics. [See Glass.] Following the Parthian period, the Sasanians can be traced, above all in the southern part of Uruk, through finds of coins. [See Sasanians.] Such finds cease in the beginning of the fourth century CE. Activity in the workshops (see above) would have continued, but the Sasanian residential area lay to the southeast, outside of the city wall, well into the Late Sasanian period. A shift of an arm of die Euphrates in the eastern part of the city, farther to the east, may have
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forced the last inhabitants to abandon Uruk; they probably moved to a chain of hills, along a now no-longer visible wa tercourse (approximately 4 1cm, or 2.5 mi., east of the city), whose surface bore Sasanian material. T h e Sasanians at tempted in vain to defend "al-Warka" in 634 CE against the assaulting Arabs; according to the archaeological record, alWarka then did not designate Uruk itself, but presumably a tell about 41cm east of Uruk. [See also Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, Andrea. Kleinfunde I: Stein. Ausgrabungen in Uruk-Warka: Endberichte (AUWE), 6. Mainz, 1 9 9 2 . Birkemeier, Arnulf. Das Riemchengebaude AUWE, 2 1 . Mainz, 1 9 9 6 . Boehmer, and Rainer Michael. Uruk Kampagne 38, 1985: Grabungen in JKI23 und.Hl24-25. AUWE, 1 . Mainz, 1 9 8 7 . Boehmer, Rainer Michael. "Uruk 1 9 8 0 - 1 9 9 0 : A Progress Report." An tiquity 65 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 4 6 5 - 4 7 8 . Boehmer, Rainer Michael, Friedhelm Pedde, and Beate Salje. Die Graber. AUWE, 1 0 . Mainz, 1 9 9 5 . Boehmer, Rainer Michael. Chronologie der archaischen Glyptik. AUWE, 24. Mainz, 1 9 9 5 . Boehmer, Rainer Michael, Margarete van Ess, Uwe Finkbeiner, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, and Beate Salje. Die Keramik, ein Typenkalalog. AUWE, 2 2 . Mainz, 1 9 9 6 . Cavigneaux, Antoine. Altbabylonische Texte nach Kopien Adam Falkensteins. AUWE, 2 3 . Mainz, 1 9 9 6 . Eichmann, Ricardo. Die Siratigraphie: Grabungen 1912-1977 in den Bereichen "Eanna" und "Anu-Ziqqurrat." 2 vols. AUWE, 3 . Mainz, 1989-1990.
Eichmann, Ricardo. Architektur h Von den Anfdngen bis zum Ende der friihdynastischen Zeit. AUWE, 1 4 . Mainz, 1 9 9 4 . Englund, Robert K., and Hans J. Nissen. Die lexikalischen Listen der archaischen Texte aus Uruk. Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft in Uruk-Warka (ADFU), 1 3 . Berlin, 1 9 9 3 . Englund, Robert K. Archaic Administative Texts from Uruk. The Early Campaigns. ATU, 5 . Berlin, 1 9 9 4 . Ess, Margarete van, et al. Kleinfunde IE Metall und Asphalt, Farbreste, FrittejFayence, Glas, Hobs, KnochenlElfenbein, Lcder, MuschellPetimuttjSchnecken, Schilf, Textilien. AUWE, 7 . Mainz, 1 9 9 2 . Ess, Margarete van. Architektur II: Von der Akkad- bis zur allbabylonischenZeh. AUWE, 1 5 . Mainz, 1 9 9 4 . Ess, Margarete van, Arno Kose. Architektur III. Von der Kassiten- bis zur spatbabylonisch-lachdmenidischen Zeit. AUWE, 1 6 . Mainz, 1 9 9 7 Falkenstein, Adam. Archaische Texte aus Uruk. ADFU, 2. Leipzig, 1 9 3 6 . Falkenstcin, Adam. Topographic von Uruk. ADFU, 3 . Leipzig, 1 9 4 1 . Finkbeiner, Uwe, et al. Uruk Kampagne 35-37,1982-1984: Die archdologische Oberjldchenuntersuchung (Survey). AUWE, 4 . Mainz, 1 9 9 1 . Gehlken, Erlend. Uruk: Spdtbabylonischc Wirtschaftstexle aus dan Eanna-Archiv I. AUWE, 5 . Mainz, 1 9 9 0 . Gehlken, Erlend. Uruk: Spdlbabylonische Texte aus dem Eanna-Archiv II. AUWE, 1 1 . Mainz, 1 9 9 6 . Green, Margaret Whitney, and Hans J. Nissen. Zeichenliste der arch aischen Texte aus Uruk. ADFU, n . Berlin, 1 9 8 7 . Heinz, Marlies, and Friedhelm Pedde. Kleinfunde V: Kleinfunde im Vorderasiatischen Museum zu Berlin: Metall und Stein. AUWE, 2 0 . Mainz, 1 9 9 6 . Hunger, Hermann. Spatbabylonische Texte aus Uruk I. ADFU, 9. Berlin, 1976.
Kessler, Karlheinz. Urkunden aus Privathausern: Die Wohnhauser westlich des Eanna-Tempelbereichs I. AUWE, 8. Mainz, 1 9 9 1 . Kohlmeyer, Kay. Kleinfunde IV: Ton. AUWE, 1 3 . Mainz, 1 9 9 7 .
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Kose, A. Architektur III: Van der seleukidischen bis zur sasanidischen Zeit. Weiher, Egbert von. Spdtbabylonische Texle aus Uruk II. ADFU, 1 0 . Berlin, 1 9 8 3 . AUWE, 1 7 . Mainz, 1 9 9 5 . Lenzen, Heinrich J. Die Enlzoicklung der Zikurmt von ihren Anfdngen bis Weiher, Egbert von. Spdtbabylonische Texte aus Uruk III. ADFU, 1 2 . Berlin, 1 9 8 8 . zur Zeit der III. Dynastie von Ur. ADFU, 4. Leipzig, 1 9 4 2 . Weiher, Egbert von. Spdtbabylonische Texte aus Uruk IV. AUWE, 1 2 . Limper, Klaudia. Perlen, Ketten, Anhdnger: Grabungen, 1912-198$. Mainz, 1 9 9 3 . AUWE, 2. Mainz, 1 9 8 8 . Weiher, Egbert von. Spdtbabylonische Texte aus Uruk V. AUWE, 2 5 . Lindemeyer, Elke, and Lutz Martin. Klein/wide III: Kleinfunde im VorMainz, 1 9 9 6 . derasiatischen Museum zu Berlin. AUWE, 9. Mainz, 1 9 9 2 . Lindstroem, Gundvor. Seleukidische Siegelabdriicke im Vorderasiatischen Wrede, N. Die Terrakotlen. AUWE, 1 8 . Mainz, 1 9 9 7 . Ziegler, Charlotte. Die Keramik von der Qal'a des Haggi Mohammed. Museum zu Berlin. AUWE, 26. Mainz, 1 9 9 7 . ADFU, 5 . Berlin, 1 9 5 3 . Wallenfels, Ronald. Seal Impressions from Hellenistic Uruk in the Yale Baylonian Collection. AUWE, 1 9 . Mainz, 1 9 9 4 . RAINER M I C H A E L BOEHMER
v VAUX, ROLAND DE (1903-1971), professor of his tory and archaeology (1935-1971) and director (1945-1965) of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jeru salem. Roland de Vaux earned a Licence es-Lettres from the Sorbonne and was ordained a priest before entering the Dominican Order in 1929. His first book (1934) revealed his talent for medieval research, but it was a 1933 article on the relationship between Adonis and Osiris that alerted his superiors to his potential as an orientalist. He was sent to Jerusalem in 1933 and lived there until his death. One of the last of a generation of scholars whose mastery of excavation techniques was matched by a sophisticated understanding of ancient documents, he made significant contributions to both biblical studies and Near Eastern archaeology. De Vaux was one of die moving spirits behind the cele brated Jerusalem Bible, to which he contributed the anno tated translations of Genesis, Samuel, and Kings; he also wrote the two-volume Les institutions de I'Ancien Testament (1958-1960), which has been translated into many lan guages. Its originality of conception was reinforced by the author's sure grasp of the evolution oflsraelite religious and civic structures. De Vaux did not live to see tire publication of the first volume of his life's work, Histoire ancienne dTsrael (1971). A second volume was extracted from his notes by Francois Langlamet. Unhappy both with tire optimism of William Foxwell Albright, who, he believed, failed to rec ognize the complexities of the biblical text, and with the skepticism of Martin Notii, who, he thought, did not do justice to tire archaeological data, de Vaux sought to find a middle ground by critically assembling all pertinent data. Remarkable for its control of primary and secondary sources, his history reflected the state of research at die time of its publication. Scholars have since become more cautious about tire possibility of writing a history of the patriarchs or of the Israelite conquest. De Vaux's first excavation (1944), the ninth-century Arab caravanserai at Abu Ghosh, was published as Fouilles a Qaryet el-Enab, Abu Gosh, Palestine (1950). From this appren ticeship he went on to excavate for nine seasons (19461960) at Tell el-Far'ah (North), which he identified as Tir-
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zah, tire first capital of the northern kingdom. [See Far'ah, Tell el- (North).] An able practitioner of the Wheeler-Kenyon method of excavation, his annual provisional reports in the Revue Biblique were models of description and judgment. He died before publishing a final report. His mastery of the field is, however, evident in his surveys of ancient Palestine in the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze Ages (1970, 1971). Many of his articles were collected under the title Bible et Orient (1967). Work at Tell el-Far'ah was interrupted by the discovery in 1947 of the Dead Sea Scrolls. G. Lankester Harding, then director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, en trusted de Vaux with the excavation of Khirbet Qumran. [See Qumran.] He completed the project in five seasons ( 1 9 5 1 , 1 9 5 3 - 1 9 5 6 ) . In 1952 he excavated the caves in Wadi Murabba'at and directed die exploration of the caves in the cliffs north and south of Qumran. [See Murabba'at.] In 1958 he excavated at Khirbet Feshkha, a farm on the outskirts of Qumran. Preliminary reports of these excavations, which were indispensable in establishing the historical context of the scrolls, appeared regularly in the Revue Biblique. T h e nearest to a final report that de Vaux produced was his 1959 Schweich Lectures at the British Academy, London. First published in French (1961), a thoroughly revised and ex panded text was eventually translated as Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1973). Once the quantity of textual material coming out of the Qumran area was recognized, de Vaux was invited to or ganize an international and interconfessional team to publish the documents. Fie solicited nominations from professional organizations and eminent scholars in Europe, England, and the United States and brought together a group as balanced as political circumstances permitted, both with respect to religion (four Catholics, three Protestants, and one Agnos tic) and nationality (two French, two English, two Ameri can, one Pole, and one German). He contributed the ar chaeological section to each of the five volumes of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, tiiat appeared under his general editorship. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls; Ecole Biblique et Archeolo gique Francais.]
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VILLA BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baillet, Maurice, J . T. Milik, and Roland de Vaux. Le "petiles groltes" de Qumran. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, vol. 3 . Ox ford, 1 9 6 2 . Barthelemy, Dominique, and J. T. Milik. Qumran Cave 1. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 1. Oxford, 1 9 5 5 . Contains a contribution by de Vaux. Benoit, Pierre, J . T. Milik, and Roland de Vaux. Les grottes de Murabba'ai. 2 vols. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 2 Oxford, 1961.
Benoit, Pierre. "Le Pere Roland de Vaux." Lettre de Jerusalem 3 7 (1971): 1-7.
Sanders, James A., ed. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (nQPsa). Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol, 4. Oxford, 1 9 6 5 . Contains a contribution by dc Vaux. Vaux, Roland de. "Sur quelques Rapports entre Adonis et Osiris." Revue Biblique 4 2 ( 1 9 3 3 ) : 3 1 - 5 6 . Vaux, Roland de. Notes el lextes sur I'avicennisme latin aux confins des XIIe-XHIe siecles. Paris, 1 9 3 4 . Vaux, Roland de. Fouilles a Qaryet el-Enab, Abu Gosh, Palestine. Paris, 1950.
Vaux, Roland de. Les institutions de I'Ancien Testament. 2 vols. Paris, 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 6 0 . Translated as Ancient Israel. 2 vols. New York, 1 9 6 1 . Vaux, Roland de. L'archeologie et les manuscripts de la MerMorte. Lon don, 1 9 6 1 . Translated as Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Lon don, 1 9 7 3 . Vaux, Roland de. Bible et Orient. Paris, 1 9 6 7 . Vaux, Roland de. "Palestine during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Pe riods." In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 1 . 1 , Prolegomena and Prehistory, edited by I. E. S. Edwards et al., pp. 4 9 9 - 5 3 8 . Cambridge, 1970.
Vaux, Roland de. "Palestine in the Early Bronze Age." In The Cam bridge Ancient History, vol. 1 . 2 , Early History of the Middle East, edited by I. E. S. Edwards et al., pp. 2 0 8 - 2 3 7 . Cambridge, 1 9 7 1 . Vaux, Roland de, et al. Qumran grotte 4, vol. 2, Archeologie. Discoveries in die Judaean Desert, vol. 6. Oxford, 1 9 7 7 . Vaux, Roland de. Histoire ancienne d'lsrael, vol. 1, Des origines a I'installation en Canaan; vol. 2 , La periode des Juges (edited by F. Langlamet). Paris, 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 3 . Translated as The Early History of Israel. VILLA. Plan of a Roman villa. Sepphoris, Israel. (Courtesy Joint Philadelphia, 1 9 7 8 . Sepphoris Project) J E R O M E M U R P H Y - O ' C O N N O R , O.P.
VILLA. In the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, the development of villas of distinctly Roman type—witii mosaics, baths, and other luxury features—was less com mon dian in die west. Throughout most of the Roman east the nucleated village (Gk., kome), not the villa, formed the principal unit of rural settlement. The building of Roman villas, where it did occur, was restricted mainly to suburban areas on the outskirts of major towns. Greek writers refer to these villas as proasteia or kepoi (lit., "gardens"), usually im plying tiieir association with small landholdings, especially vineyards and orchards. The influence of Roman villa building can be seen at an early date in the Herodian palaces at Jericho and Herodium. Here Roman construction technology was used to create magnificent royal residences that included baths, colon nades, and halls decorated with imported marble and other luxury building materials (see Netzer, 1975, 1990). During the first centuries of Roman rule in the east, however, such
an imitation of Roman villa architecture is rare. Few of the villas excavated in the eastern provinces have been dated earlier than the fourth century CE. Examples include secondcentury villas found near Ephesus and Antioch, and the re cently excavated third-century villa at 'Ein-Ya'el near Jeru salem (for a discussion of the mosaics, see Roussin, 1993, compare the fine third-century mosaics from the "Roman Villa" at Sepphoris, for which see Meyers et a l , 1992). Compared with many western villas these were not partic ularly luxurious buildings, but their marble columns, bath ing installations, and mosaics reflect a growing taste for Ro man technology and sophistication. In contrast to these romanized suburban villas, most rural buildings in the eastern provinces preserved a strong re gional character. On the Syrian plateau and in the hill coun try of Judea (Judah) survey and excavation have revealed the remains of numerous stone-built village houses and farms (villae rusticae) that belong to a distinctive, non-Ro man architectural tradition. The recent excavation of two
VILLAGES utilitarian farm buildings (containing wine presses, stables, and storerooms) atMansur el-'Aqeb near Caesarea provides further illustration of enduring local building practices in the countryside of the Roman east (for these excavations, see Hirschfeld and Birger-Calderon, 1991). In the Late Roman period, following the transfer of Ro man imperial power to Constantinople in the early fourth century CE, the evidence for Roman villas in the eastern provinces increases significantly. Written sources contain frequent reference to rich villas the imperial family built or acquired in tire region of the new capital. These included several villas along die Bithynian coastline, as well as tire great suburban palace at the Hebdomon on the Sea of Mar mara. Built originally as a seaside villa by the emperor T h e odosius, this celebrated imperial residence was extensively rebuilt by Justinian in the sixth century, with the addition of a new audience chamber and banqueting hall (see Thibaut, 1922). The example set by the imperial family was emulated by tire wealthy urban aristocracies. Late Roman sources tell of many senatorial families with elegant villas on the outskirts of Constantinople. Most of these villas included bathhouses and otiier luxury features; in one case a private hippodrome is attested. In his treatise the Antiochikos (Or. 11.234-239), the fourth-century orator Libanius talks admiringly of the many rich villas and gardens tiiat existed at Daphne, a hill top suburb of Antioch. A contemporary suburban villa of typical Greco-Roman design is described in a letter by Gregory of Nyssa. This villa, located in the Roman province of Galatia, combined an elegant colonnaded interior with a strongly built and turreted exterior designed primarily for security purposes. T h e evident Late Roman boom in villa building in the east hinted at in the written sources is supported by a growing amount of archaeological evidence. At Antioch, excavation has revealed several fine Late Roman villas in suburban lo cations, including the richly decorated villa at Yakto (see Lassus, 1938). Traces of luxury villas have also been noted in the suburban zone around Roman Beirut. A more rudi mentary type of villa is represented by recent discoveries at Jalame near Haifa. There the remains of a fourth-century rural building include hypocausted floors and a mosaic-lined wine press. T h e site also produced considerable evidence for glass making, suggesting an important additional com ponent of the local villa economy (see Weinberg, 1988). [See also Baths; Building Materials and Techniques, article on Materials and Techniques of die Persian through Roman Periods; House; Mosaics; and Peristyle House.]
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in Roman Syria (by Jean-Pierre Sodini and Georges Tate) and on villas and houses at Antioch (by Jean Lassus). Festugiere, A.-J. Antiacne paienne et chretienne. Paris, 1 9 5 9 . Useful for the translation of and commentary on Libanius's Antiochikos. Hirschfeld, Yizhar, and R . Birger-Calderon. "Early Roman and Byz antine Estates Near Caesarea." Israel Exploration Journal 4 1 ( 1 9 9 1 ) : 81-111.
Janin, Raymond. "Le banlieue asiatique de Constantinople." Echos d'Orient 2 1 ( 1 9 2 2 ) : 3 3 5 - 3 8 6 . Despite its date, the only good discus sion in any language of Roman village sites around Istanbul. Lassus, Jean. "Une villa de plaisance a Yakto." In Antioch-on-the-Orontes, vol. 2 , The Excavations, 1933-1936, edited by Richard Stillwell, pp. 9 5 - 1 4 7 . Princeton, 1 9 3 8 . Meyers, Eric M., Carol L. Meyers, and Ehud Netzer. Sepphoris. Wi nona Lake, Ind., 1 9 9 2 . Netzer, Ehud. "The Hasmonean and Herodian Winter Palaces at Jer icho." Israel Exploration Journal 2 5 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 8 9 - 1 0 0 . Netzer, Ehud. "Architecture in Palaestina Prior to and During the Days of Herod the Great." Akten des XIII internalionalen Kongresses fiir klassiche Archdologie, pp. 3 7 - 5 0 . Mainz, 1 9 9 0 . A concise summary of fifteen years of excavation by the author at Herod's palaces at Jericho and Herodium. Rossiter, J. J. "Roman Villas of the Greek East and the Villa in Gregory of Nyssa Ep. 2 0 . " Journal of Roman Archaeology 2 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : t o i - i 1 0 . Comparison of the literary and archaeological evidence for Late Ro man villas in the East. Roussin, Lucille A. "East Meets West: The Mosaics of the Villa of Ein Yael (Jerusalem)." In Fifth International Colloquium on Ancient. Mo saics. Part 2, edited by P. Johnson, R . Ling, and D. Smith. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series, no. 9.2, 1 9 9 5 . Thibaut, J.-B. "L'Hebdomon de Constantinople." Echos d'Orient 2 1 (1922): 31-44.
Weinberg, Gladys Davidson, ed. Excavations al Jalame: Site of a Glass Factory in Late Roman Palestine. Columbia, Mo., 1 9 8 8 . J. J. ROSSITER
VILLAGES. T h e most characteristic form of rural set tlement across Western Asia from the beginning of settled life down to die present day has been the village. It has formed, with towns and cities, an essential part of the set tlement hierarchy. Many of the fundamental aspects of vil lage life were first established by die people of ancient West ern Asia and persisted there over a very long period of time. Geographers define villages as clusters of five or more households, whose inhabitants are primarily engaged in ag riculture and related pursuits. Villages usually contain a few workshops run by specialist artisans, and some of their in habitants may conduct a little commerce. There are some modest distinctions of wealth and class among the inhabi tants. Provision for religious needs often takes the form of a building constructed especially to accommodate rituals and ceremonies. Villages are located adjacent to good arable land with access to a regular supply of water. T h e villages of ancient Western Asia possessed several of these features, BIBLIOGRAPHY though not all were present at the beginning. Applebaum, Shimon. Judaea in Hellenistic and Roman Times. Leiden, Villages across Western Asia had a characteristic form and 1 9 8 9 . Includes a useful chapter on Roman villas and problems of structure that took shape at the inception of settled life more identification. than ten thousand years ago. They were always nucleated— Baity, Janine. Apamie de Syrie: Bilan des recherches archeologiques, 1973consisting of a tight cluster of houses with only narrow lanes 1979. Brussels, 1 9 8 4 . Excellent up-to-date surveys on rural housing
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between them and with few open public spaces. Nucleated villages are typically found in regions with few water sources, which obliged groups of people to build their houses close together near a spring or well. Such villages were relatively easy to defend, even without the protection of a circuit wall. Few villages in Western Asia had walls, but many needed the protection against marauding pastoral no mads such the dense agglomerations of buildings afforded. Some farming activities—preparing the soil for planting, an imal herding, and constructing irrigation works—historically were performed by the community as a whole; and the vil lage itself held some of die land adjacent to it in common. In such communities authority over access to land, water, and grazing rights was vested in a governing body or an individual. These villages were essentially self-sufficient in the necessities of life, but also participated in a larger world through their relations with nearby towns. They provided the towns with their surplus of food and their craft products, receiving in return goods not made in the village. At times of strong government, they were subject to a central political authority and owed it tribute. Traditional village houses were built of locally available materials—stone in the uplands and mud brick on the plains. T h e rooms were often quite small because they were used mainly for sleeping and eating. T h e warm climate encour aged people to conduct most of their other activities such as food preparation, cooking, and crafts out-of-doors, in walled yards alongside their houses. It was there, too, that they kept their livestock and stored their crops. There was a sharp distinction between the private activities of the household within its walls and the public life of the village beyond. Traditionally, the household was the women's domain, while the men worked die fields and tended die livestock, with help from the women and children in labor-intensive times such as the harvest. The basic social and labor unit was the household, but lineage affinities were also an essen tial feature of traditional village societies in Western Asia. The origins of these villages and their distinctive way of life lay in the first sedentary settlements formed by Epipaleolithic hunters and gatherers toward the end of the Pleis tocene epoch. One of the oldest of these was a hut for a single household built at 'Ein-Gev on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee by people of the Kebaran culture, about six teen thousand years ago. [See 'Ein-Gev.] The first true vil lages were established during the twelfth millennium BP (based on uncalibrated C-14 determinations), At 'Ain Mallaha, a site of the Natufian culture, in die Upper Jordan Val ley, and at Abu Hureyra on the Middle Euphrates River. At 'Ain Mallaha a series of circular huts was set close together on a hillside near a spring. The Epipaleolithic village of Abu Hureyra 1 was composed of a series of multiroomed pit dwellings roofed with timber, branches, and reeds, later re placed by aboveground huts. Inhabited for one thousand five hundred years, this site was one of the first permanent
villages established in Southwest Asia. Both settlements were inhabited by hunters and gatherers, demonstrating that village life began before the inception of farming. The development of agriculture based on cultivated crops and herds of domesticated animals about 10,000 BP provided a firm economic basis for settled life. New villages were founded all across Western Asia, and they remained tire pre dominant form of settlement for three thousand years. These Neolithic villages were much larger than those of the Epipaleolithic era, an indication of the growth in population that took place following the adoption of farming. The houses in the earliest Neolithic villages were round or oval, with one or more rooms. These structures, archi tecturally similar to the huts found on Epipaleolithic sites, have been found in villages from Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Jericho in the west to Mefa'at on the eastern fringe of Mes opotamia. [See Jericho.] They seem to have been lived in by extended families. Later, the round houses were replaced by rectilinear ones with multiple rooms. It was a relatively easy task to extend such a structure, so the house could be ex panded to accommodate a growing family. Diana Kirkbride (1966) and Brian Byrd (1994) have documented the change from round to rectilinear houses at Beidha in about 9000 BP and identified a large building in the center of the village that the community used for meetings and other events. [See Beidha.] The people of Jericho constructed a large stonewall around the village, in part for defense, and a stone tower inside, the earliest monumental architecture in the world. T h e society of these early villages was largely egalitarian, with no individual enjoying significantly greater wealth than another. Burials under the floors of houses and special treatment of skulls suggest that people throughout the Levant and in Asia Minor revered their ancestors and believed in an afterlife. Special buildings for the dismemberment of the dead found at Cayonu and Nevah C i in southeast Asia Minor provide the earliest evidence for the construction of ritual buildings. [See Cayonu; Nevalt Qori.] The inhabitants of these early villages engaged in some minor exchange of exotic goods, mainly obsidian from Asia Minor, other stones, and marine shells. Once pottery began to be made, in about 8000 BP, it too was exchanged. Such traffic, albeit on a modest scale, enabled tiiese communities to maintain social contacts with each other that facilitated, for example, obtaining marriage partners. These contacts became more regular once the first towns developed after 7000 BP. The foundation of ttue urban settlements in the Halaf and Ubaid cultures (e.g., at Tell Halaf in die northern Jezireh and Eridu and Tell 'Uqair in southern Mesopotamia) marked the emergence of a settlement hierarchy that per sisted into modern times. [See Halaf, Tell; Ubaid; Eridu.] Trade in pottery, obsidian, and, doubtiess, perishable goods increased between the villages and these new towns; how ever, each village continued to be self-sufficient in food. o r
During the historical periods, the density of rural settle-
VINCENT, LOUIS-HUGUES merit waxed and waned according to political circumstances and fluctuations in rainfall. In times of political stability vil lage life could prosper, but when order broke down it might be severely disrupted. Similarly, a series of dry years could lead to a sharp regression of villages along the extensive mar gins of the dry farming zone. Thus, numerous villages on the Middle Euphrates River were inhabited during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, but settlement sharply declined during the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age; it seems that during the episodes of Mitannian and Hittite supremacy, rural settlement faltered. Numerous villages were founded in Roman and Byzantine times—two of the high points of rural settlement during the lengdiy period of human occu pation being considered here; many of those villages were abandoned during the decline of village life that took place as the Byzantine hold on Western Asia weakend. The advent of urbanism created conditions in which in stitutions and individuals could acquire extensive estates farmed by a dependent peasantry, for example in Meso potamia during die Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, on the 'Amuq plain during the eighteenth century BCE, and in die extensive later domains of the Sasanian kings. T h e vil lages that housed those farmers were relatively impover ished, with little in the way of community facilities. Villages that controlled their own lands, especially in the more fertile regions, were more likely to enjoy a degree of prosperity. One of the more distinctive features of Western Asia to day is its mosaic of peoples: villages adjacent to each other may be inhabited by different etimic groups with noticeably different material goods. Given the movements of peoples recorded in historical documents from earlier periods, it is likely that this pattern has ancient roots and may account for die differences in artifacts sometimes noted between contemporary sites. T h e most striking element of village life in Western Asia is, however, its extraordinary continuity. The houses exca vated in the Neolithic village of Abu Hureyra 2 on the Eu phrates (c. 8000 BP) are similar in external shape and in many details of construction to those found in the region today. Similarly, the large, multiroomed dwellings found at the Ubaid site of Tell Madhhur in the Hamrin basin in east ern Mesopotamia inaugurated a type of house plan that was to remain typical of villages there into modern times. T h e farming economy on which die villagers themselves de pended almost from the beginning—the cultivation of wheat, barley, and legumes and the raising of domestic an imals (notably sheep, goats, and cattle)—has remained die basis of rural life. [See also Cities.]
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ancien des origines au milieu du qualrieme millenaire. 3 vols. Paris, 1981. Exhaustive and definitive account of every aspect of house construc tion and use in prestate times, with a discussion of the development of village organization. Amply illustrated. Byrd, Brian F. "Public and Private, Domestic and Corporate: The Emergence of the Southwest Indian Village." American Antiquity 5 9 4 (!994): 636-666. Analysis of the structural development of the Neolithic village of Beidha in Jordan, with an interpretation of its social significance. Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Francois R. Valla, eds. The Natufian Culture in the Levant. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991. Series of essays in English and French presenting die results of the latest research on the Natufian and contemporary cultures in the Levant. Chisholm, Michael. Rural Settlement and Ixmd Use. 2d cd. London, 1968. Basic account by a geographer of the principles underlying die location and functions of rural settlements today, some of which may usefully be applied to understanding the past. Flannery, Kent V. "The Origins of the Village as a Settlement Type in Mesoamerica and the Near East: A Comparative Study." In Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, edited by Peter Ucko et al., pp. 23-53. Cambridge, Mass., 1972. Pioneering study of the development of early villages, mainly in Western Asia. Several of the social interpre tations should now be revised in the light of more recent research. Henrickson, Elizabeth F., and Ingolf Thuesen, eds. Upon This Foun dation: The' Ubaid Reconsidered. Carsten Nicbuhr Institute of Ancient Near East Studies, 1 0 . Copenhagen, 1989. Recent research on the Ubaid culture, particularly useful for its analysis of buildings and discussion of cultural development. Kirkbride, Diana. "Five Seasons at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Village of Beidha in Jordan." Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1966): 8-72. Comprehensive Summary of the principal campaign of excavations. Moore, A. M . T. "The Development of Neolithic Societies in the Near East." Advances in World Archaeology 4 (1985): 1-69. General de scription, with reference to relevant theories, of the development of farming and village life throughout Southwest Asia, with detailed reference to archaeological data. Moore, A. M . T. "The Impact of Accelerator Dating at the Early Vil lage of Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates." Radiocarbon 34.3 (1992): 850-858. Succinct discussion of excavation results, with references to related studies. Postgate, J. N. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Baton of Histoiy. Rev. ed. London, 1994. Brilliant synthesis of early historical economy and society (c. 3000-1500 BCE), full of original insights. Postgate's account, based on the combined record of ancient texts and archaeology, has much to say about the relations between cities and their rural hinterlands. Schirmer, Wulf. "Some Aspects of Building at the 'Aceramic-Neolithic' Settlement of Cayonu Tcpesi." World Archaeology 21 (1990): 3 6 3 387. Well-illustrated account of the various types of structures at Cayonii, including the skull building. Schwartz, Glenn M . , and Steven E. Falconer, eds. Archaeological Views from the Countryside: Village Communities in Early Complex Societies. Washington, D.C., 1994. Recent archaeological and archival studies of ancient villages in Western Asia and Mesoamerica. One of the few comparative examinations of this little-studied subject. A. M . T .
MOORE
VINCENT, LOUIS-HUGUES (1872-1960), profes
sor of archaeology at die Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem (1895-1960), characterized by Wil Amiry, Suad, and Vera Tamari. The Palestinian Village Home, London, liam Foxwell Albright (1961) as "the unrivalled master of 1989. Succinct, well-illustrated account of traditional village life. Aurenche, Olivier. La maison arientale: Varchitecture du Proche Orient Palestinian archaeology." Vincent entered the Dominican BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Order in 1890. The following year he was sent to Jerusalem, where he remained until his death. Born with an artist's eye for architectural features., quick to appreciate the significance of the ceramic typology for mulated by Sir William Flinders Petrie in his excavation of Tell el-Hesi in 1890, and assiduous about visiting every type of excavation, Vincent was admirably equipped to write die first scientific synthesis of the results of Palestinian archae ology (1907). Thereafter, in more than two hundred articles in the Revue Biblique, he reported and critically evaluated every new excavation. Such mastery made Vincent "tutor of all" (Albright) the new archaeologists who came to Palestine after World War I. In 1922, John Garstang, director of the Mandatory D e partment of Antiquities, invited him to be a member of the committee that officially fixed the division and names of the archaeological periods for ancient Palestine. Vincent recorded the incidental finds of Montague Par ker's hunt in 1909-1910 for the Temple treasures on the Ophel ridge ( 1 9 1 1 ) as well as the discoveries made beneath the Ecce Homo Convent in Jerusalem (1933). His own ex cavations at 'Ain Douq (1920) and Emmaus (Amwas)/Nicopolis (1932) were no more than salvage operations be cause of lack of funds. His enduring achievement is the series of massive studies of monumental complexes in Beth lehem (1914), Hebron (1923), and Jerusalem (1912-1926, 1954-1956). Though subsequent investigations have inevi tably imposed corrections, these volumes remain indispensable because of the quantity of data they assemble, their record of what has since disappeared, and the integra tion of textual data supplied by F.-M. Abel. [See also Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
VIROLLEAUD, CHARLES (1879-1968), French epigrapher of cuneiform. After studying history, geography, and Semitic languages in Paris at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes from 1897 to 1900, Virolleaud set out to copy cuneiform tablets from Nineveh in the British Museum's collection and, later, in Istanbul, Sumerian tablets from Lagash. While teaching at the Universite de Lyons, he published his work on Chaldean as trology (1905-1912). He visited Anatolia in 1909 and spent 1913 in Persia. From 1920 on, he was in charge of the an tiquities department France had organized in Lebanon and Syria. In 1928 the discovery of a tomb at Minet el-Beida, which led to the identification of Ras Shamra with Ugarit, gave an unforeseen direction to his scientific activity: in 1929, Claude F.-A. Schaeffer entrusted him with a number of tablets written in an unknown cuneiform writing. Without waiting until he had deciphered the writing, and with the language the writing recorded also unknown, he put the texts at the disposal of specialists (Virolleaud, 1929, pp. 304310). After examining the texts he arrived at several conclu sions: he observed that tire small number of symbols indi cated an alphabetic system; that words so brief did not include vowels; and that the first sign of inscriptions on bronze objects might indicate that they were votive in na ture. Influenced by his observations and also by the tomb's Mycenaean affinities, he at first thought he was working with an Aegean language. On 1 and 5 of October and on 8 De cember 1930, the identifications contributed by Hans Bauer, Virolleaud, and Edouard Dhorme, covering the entire al phabet, resulted in the full decipherment of the Ugaritic al phabet. Virolleaud became director of studies of the fifth section (religious sciences) of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where his courses were based on newly dis covered texts until the end of his career.
[See also Chaldeans; Ugaritic; Ugarit Inscriptions; and the Albright, William Foxwell. "In Memory of Louis Hugues Vincent." biography of Schaeffer.] Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 1 6 4 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 2-4.
Parrot, Andre. "Le R. P. L.-H. Vincent." Syria 3 8 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 2 1 7 - 2 1 9 . Sellers, Ovid R. "Louis Hughes Vincent." Biblical Archaeologist 2 4 (1961): 62-64.
Vincent, Louis-Hughes. Canaan d'apres I'exploration recente. Paris, 1907.
Vincent, Louis-Hugues. Jerusalem sous tone. Paris, 1 9 1 1 . Vincent, Louis-Hugues. "L'Antonia et le pretoire." Revue Biblique 4 2 (1933): 8 3 - 1 1 3 .
BIBLIOGRAPHY Dupont-Sommer, Andre. "Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Charles Virolleaud." Comptes rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Leltres ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 5 8 8 - 6 0 6 . Gran-Aymerich, Evelyne, and Jean Gran-Aymerich. "Charles Virol leaud: Premier directeur des antiquit.es de Syrie." Archeologia 2 2 6 (1987): 71-75-
Virolleaud, Charles. L'astrologie chaldeenne: Le livre intitule "Enuma Vincent, Louis-Hugues, and Felix-Marie Abel. Jerusalem: Recherches de (Anu) ilu Bel." 3 vols. Paris, 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 1 2 . topographie, d'archeologie et d'histoirc, vol. 1, Jerusalem antique; vol. 2Virolleaud, , Charles. "Les inscriptions cuneiformes de Ras Shamra." Jerusalem nouvelle. Paris, 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 2 6 . Syria 1 0 ( 1 9 2 9 ) : 3 0 4 - 3 1 0 . Vincent, Louis-Hugues, and Felix-Marie Abel. Bethleem, le sancluaire Weidner, Ernst. "Charles Virolleaud 2 . Juli 1879-bis 1 7 . Dezember de la nativile. Paris, 1 9 1 4 . 1 9 6 8 . " Archivfur Orienlforschung 2 4 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 2 4 5 - 2 4 6 . Vincent, Louis-Hugues, and Felix-Marie Abel. Hebron: Le Haram elPIERRE BORDREUIL Khalil, sepulture des patriarches. Paris, 1 9 2 3 . Translated from French by Melissa Kaprelian Vincent, Louis-Hugues, and Felix-Marie Abel. Emmaus, so basilique et son histoire. Paris, 1 9 3 2 . Vincent, Louis-Hugues, and Felix-Marie Abel. Jerusalem de I'Ancien Testament. 3 vols. Paris, 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 6 . VITICULTURE. Archaeobotanists have sought the JEROME M U R P H Y - O ' C O N N O R , O.P. earliest evidence for cultivation of the grape vine (Vitis vini-
VITICULTURE fera L.) within the zone where its wild ancestor (Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris) occurs naturally: southern Europe, along the northeastern Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, in land across northern Syria and southern Anatolia, and into the Caucasus and Central Asia (Zohary and Hopf, 1993). Although die wild vine would have grown primarily in rel atively moist riparian environments, vineyards, irrigated and not, have extended its range. Through cultivation, grape seeds tend to become thinner, but the wild and domestic types (Vitis vinifera subsp. vini fera) cannot be definitively distinguished on morphological grounds alone. Archaeobotanical evidence for cultivation therefore also includes occurrence on archaeological sites of grape seeds in substantial quantities and of the charred wood of the vine (the latter more likely to reflect discarded pruned branches than firewood collected from the wild). Applying these criteria, the earliest archaeological exam ples of grape were most probably collected from the wild. Few in number, they date to the Aceramic Neolithic, more than nine thousand years ago (e.g., from Cayonti, Aswad, and Jericho). [See Cayonu; Jericho.] Cultivation of the vine seems to have begun during the fourth millennium in Soutiiwest Asia (Zohary and Hopf, 1993). Grape-growing and wine-producing sites dating to the end of that millennium are found in Egypt. By the mid-third millennium, viticulture had spread throughout Southwest Asia and beyond. It is in archaeological deposits from that time that concentrations of seeds are found from the Mediterranean to eastern Iran: for example, in burial offerings at Bab edh-Dhra', Jordan, and Shahr-i Soldita, Iran. [See Bab edh-Dhra'.] Evidence of the growing importance of the vine appears in the high fre quency of grape seeds in archaeobotanical samples from third-millennium deposits at Kurban Hoyiik, Turkey. Also at that site was a large pit containing many charred seeds, stems, and fruit remains of die grape. A high concentration of mineralized grape seeds in a cess deposit at Malyan (c. 2000 BCE), in southern Iran, is probably the best direct evi dence that the fruit was eaten (Miller, 1991). [See Malyan.] The earliest evidence for wine comes unexpectedly from Godin, in western Iran (late fourtii millennium), where res idues of tartaric acid were identified from distinctive jars (McGovern and Michel, 1994). [See Godin Tepe.] It is known from later texts tiiat where the vine was an important cultigen, its primary use was for wine production. However, viticulture was even practiced by the irrigation civilizations of lower Mesopotamia, where the grape and its products (like syrup) seem to have remained specialty items (Powell, 1994). In addition to die archaeobotanical, chemical, and textual evidence for viticulture, the vine is depicted in the art of ancient Southwest Asia, appearing, for example, on a few Elamite (c. 2000 BCE) sealings from southwestern Iran. By Assyrian times, images of vineyards around besieged cities were used symbolically to distinguish landscape from wil derness.
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The products of the vine have many culinary uses whose cultural significance extends beyond their immediate dietary value. Grapes, raisins, and grape syrup should not be un derestimated as sources of sweeteners for peoples who did not have many ways of getting quick and tasty calories (Powell, 1994). In addition, wine vinegar can be used in preserving food. The vine was (and continues to be) most important in wine making, however. It is difficult to identify the technology associated with small-scale wine production. T h e stoppered jars in which wine residues were found at Godin were particularly suited to their storage task: clay " r o p e " designs applied to the out side of 30- and 60-liter vessels would have prevented rolling, which suggests that they may have been stored horizontally (Badler, 1994). N o grapes were found in the archaeobotan ical samples, however, and no wine-pressing installation was excavated. Grape cultivation on a large scale, at least in the Levant, seems to be associated with wine production as early as die third millennium (Early Bronze Age), when grape presses are carved into bedrock (Stager, 1985). Wine became die primary drink in the eastern Mediter ranean region for social as well as religious occasions. As grapevines take several years to mature, die development of viticulture on a large scale requires social stability. Lawrence Stager (1985) suggests that in the Levant widespread adop tion of viticulture and wine production are associated with that development as early as the Early Bronze Age. By Late Antiquity, it had become a major trade item as well in those areas with access to relatively cheap sea transport (McGov ern et al., 1994). In contrast, wine is scarcely mentioned in Mesopotamian texts until the Middle Bronze Age, when those societies came increasingly in contact with the Levant. In Mesopotamia, therefore, wine seems to have been re stricted to luxury or religious contexts (Powell, 1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY Badler, Virginia R. "The Archaeological Evidence for Winemaking, Distribution, and Consumption at Proto-Historic Godin Tepe, Iran." In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, edited by Patrick E. McGovern et al. Newark, 1 9 9 4 . McGovern, Patrick E., et al., eds. The Origins and Ancient History of Wine. Newark, 1 9 9 4 . Comprehensive treatment of the subject, in cluding more general aspects of the prehistory of grape growing, with chapters by Daniel Zohary, Richard L. Zettler and Naomi F. Miller, and Marvin A. Powell covering die botany, archaeology, and Me sopotamian epigraphy of grapes and wine. McGovern, Patrick E., and Rudolph H. Michel. "The Analytical and Archaeological Challenge of Detecting Ancient Wine: Two Case Studies from the Ancient Near East." In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, edited by Patrick E. McGovern et al. Newark, 1 9 9 4 . Miller, Naomi F. "The Near East." In Progress in Old World Palaeoethnobotany, edited by Willem van Zeist et al., pp. 1 3 3 - 1 6 0 . Rotterdam, 1 9 9 1 . Overview including a discussion of the archaeobotanical evi dence for viticulture (p. 1 5 0 ) in the context of agriculture and land use in Southwest Asia from the Epipaleolithic (c. 1 1 , 0 0 0 BCE) to the medieval period. Powell, Marvin A. "Wine and die Vine in Ancient Mesopotamia: The
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Cuneiform Evidence." In The Origin and Ancient History of Wine, edited by Patrick E. McGovern et al. Newark, 1994. Rivera Nunez, Diego, and Michael J. Walker. "A Review of Palaeobotanical Findings of Early Vitis in die Mediterranean and of the Origins of Cultivated Grape-Vines, with Special Reference to New Pointers to Prehistoric Exploitation in the Western Mediterranean." Review of Palaeobotany andPalynology 61 (1989): 205-237. Concen trates on the western Mediterranean but includes a thorough review of the botany of the vine and the archaeobotany of viticulture in Southwest Asia. Stager, Lawrence E. "The First Fruits of Civilization." In Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages: Papers in Honour of Olga Tufnell, edited by Jonathan N. Tubb, pp. 1 7 2 - 1 8 7 . University of London, Institute of Archaeology, Occasional Publication, no. 1 1 . London, 1985. Dis cussion of the social implications of viticulture and olive growing on a commercial scale. Zohary, Daniel, and Maria Hopf. The Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 2d ed. Oxford, 1993. The section on grapes and viticulture (pp. 1 4 3 - 1 5 0 ) , as well as the general chapter on the development of agriculture in Southwest Asia and Europe (pp. 202-227) present basic information from an archaeobotanical perspective.
structure which may hide the nature of the core and often turquoise or blue in color—there has been confusion be tween the various frits and faience, with blue minerals such as azurite, and with glazed and fired clay bodies. T h e prob lem is compounded by weathering, which may dramatically modify color and morphology, as well as remove glaze lay ers, completely eliminating the original characteristics. Re course to scientific techniques such as microscopy and X-ray diffraction may be necessary if an accurate and un ambiguous identification is to be made. [See Microscopy; X-Ray Diffraction Analysis.] Terminology. Because the application of some terms contradicts modern technological practice, the terminology of early vitreous materials has been found to be wanting. However, terms such as frit, faience, and glassy faience are used in numerous important publications, and to abandon them now would only add confusion to an already troubled area. T h e current consensus of understanding, follows. N A O M I F. M I L L E R Glass. A glass is a material which was formed in the mol ten state and cooled sufficiently rapidly so as to retain the disordered structure of a liquid. While modern glass is com VITREOUS MATERIALS. [This entry surveys the monly colorless and transparent, early glass was commonly history of vitreous materials with reference to the technologies colored and often opaque; it was intended to imitate pre used to create them, the uses to which they were put, and their cious and semiprecious stones such as turquoise and lapis overall role in the cultures and societies in which they figure. It lazuli. These effects were achieved by the solution of col comprises four articles: orant metal ions in the glass and the addition of an opacifier, Typology and Technology which by producing a dispersion of fine particles, inhibits Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages tire transmission of light. Artifacts of die Persian through Roman Periods Glaze. A layer of glass which coats another material is a Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods glaze. In an early Near Eastern context, glazes may be found The first serves as a general overview, while the remaining ar on stones, particularly steatite (talc) or quartz, on frits and ticles treat the artifacts of specific periods and regions. For related on clay-based pottery, brick, or tile. [See Tile.] discussion, see also Glass.] Frit. A frit is a polycrystalline body (i.e., it is composed of many crystalline grains) which has been heated so tiiat it sintered (the constituent grains adhered as a result of local Typology and Technology ized melting at their points of contact). Such frits are com T h e term vitreous materials encompasses a range of artificial monly porous and relatively weak and friable because of the glassy and glazed materials. In addition to glass in the gen low degree of melting. Two types of frit, faience and Egyp erally accepted sense, it includes materials as diverse as pot tian Blue, are commonly encountered. tery glazes and Egyptian Blue, a synthetic pigment that may Faience. A composite material, faience is composed of a contain a negligible proportion of glass. These materials are sintered quartz body with an overlying glaze. A sintered grouped on the basis of a number of rather loose criteria. quartz body without glaze can be found and may not, snictly First, they are silicates, the products of high temperature speaking, be termed faience. Flowever, faience glazes are processes, or pyrotechnologies, which cause tire production thin and readily removed by weathering; it may be extremely of a certain amount of glass in the material. Second, tiiey difficult to determine if an object now of sintered quartz was are typically not clay based, although they may be associated originally faience in the strict sense of the term. Closely re with fired clay material, as in the case of pottery glaze. Fi lated to faience in composition and sttucture is stonepaste, nally, in Near Eastern archaeology, early vitreous materials a quartz-rich frit body developed by Islamic potters late in tend to be based on the chemical system soda-lime-silica the first millennium C E . Other, less common categories of ( N a 0 - C a O - S i 0 ) . Some vitreous materials based on vitreous material include glassy faience, essentially a glassier mixtures of lead oxide and silica were introduced but, before variety of faience body, but with a distinctive composition. Islam, their importance tends to have been peripheral. Egyptian Blue. A synthetic copper calcium silicate Among the particular difficulties in dealing with vitreous ( C u C a S i O , equivalent to die natural mineral cuprorimaterials is the problem of identification. Typically highvaite), Egyptian Blue commonly occurs intimately mixed fired, fine-grained, and glassy—commonly with a layered with quartz (a raw material which has not completely re2
2
4
10
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Typology and Technology acted), sometimes along with a certain amount of glass formed in firing. Also distinguishable are pale-blue and green frits, high-lime/low-copper relatives of Egyptian Blue which are glassy or have crystalized a pale calcium silicate rather than the deep-blue copper calcium silicate character istic of Egyptian Blue itself. However, unambiguous iden tification of these depends on physicochemical methods. In view of the difficulties in identification, P. R. S. Moorey (1994) points to the benefits of a purely descriptive termi nology based on macroscopic features: glazed composition for faience and faiencelike materials and unglazed compo sition for fritlike materials where a glaze may not be un ambiguously identified. Such an approach is to be prefered to guesswork, where it is not possible accurately to charac terize the materials concerned. Raw Materials. Silica, the major constituent of glass, is found almost everywhere in the form of quartz sand or peb bles of quartz or chert; however, the melting point of the pure material, at around I700°C, is substantially above the temperatures that were attainable in preindusteial kilns and furnaces. T h e production of vitreous materials depends on the dramatic fluxing effect of alkalis and lime on this high melting temperature. T h e admixture of a few percent alkali will allow a substantial amount of melting at temperatures well below iooo°C; about 20 percent will allow complete melting and the formation of a glass at these relatively mod erate temperatures. Two sources of alkaline flux appear to have been used by early Near Eastern craftsmen. T h e most widely available was the ash produced by the burning of plants that grew in saline (desert) environments. In addition to soda, these plant ashes contain substantial amounts of potash, lime, and mag nesia. T h e alternative source of alkali was natron, a naturally occuring mineral soda (the trona of geologists). T h e only major natron deposit currently recognized as a source for the ancient Near East is in Wadi Natrun in Egypt. Natron is a relatively pure form of soda and lacks the impurities characteristic of plant ash. Chemical analyses may therefore provide an indication of die alkali source used—natronbased materials having low potash and magnesia relative to soda. Pure alkali silicate glasses are soluble in water; a glass or glaze must contain some lime (calcium oxide) as well, to render it stable. It is believed that lime was not usually de liberately added to early vitreous materials as a separate in gredient; instead, it was included incidentally, as a compo nent of either the flux or the sand. In order to make a successful glass or glaze using a pure natron, a calcite-bearing sand was introduced as a source of both silica and lime; die use of a plant ash provided sufficient lime with the alkali to allow the use of a relatively pure silica source such as crushed quartz pebbles. Manufacture and Fabrication. Archaeological evidence for the manufacture of faience, frit, and glass from their raw materials is rare; where reported, it has, on the whole,
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proved less enlightening than might have been hoped. Most of what is understood depends on ethnographic observa tions of traditional crafts, analysis of the materials them selves, experimentation, and the interpretation of limited textual evidence. A faience body was prepared from very fine crushed quartz or sand bound by water, probably with a small amount of gum. It could be modeled using simple tools and by tire New Kingdom period in Egypt was being pressed into open-face molds. While a pure quartz body lacked the plasticity to allow it to be thrown on a potter's wheel, it has been suggested by Pamela B. Vandiver (in Kaczmarczyk and Hedges, 1983) that in Ptolemaic times a small amount of clay was introduced to allow vessels to be thrown. Three methods of glaze application were possible: (1) by mixing alkali with the body when wet, which migrated or effloresced to the surface as the body dried (on firing, tire alkali-quartz mixture at the surface reacted to form a glaze); (2) by bury ing tire shaped faience object in an alkaline glazing mixture which, on firing, reacted with the body to produce a surface glaze layer by a process termed cementation; and (3) by applying a raw glaze mixture or already fritted glaze to the surface. Evidence for all three approaches—efflorescence, cementation, and application—has been reported from the examination of faience artifacts. Colorants were added to the glaze mixture or to tire body itself, as finely divided pig ment particles or as colored frit or glass. Some of these moved to the surface as the object dried, producing a strongly colored layer. Surface coats or slurries of colored body material could also be added and polychrome effects achieved by die inlay of colored body material. T h e system atic study of the decorative techniques used in faience pro duction is in its infancy, however. Egyptian Blue appears to have been formed from a mix ture of calcite-quartz sand, copper oxide, and a small amount of alkali. T h e presence of small amounts of tin or arsenic in some of the material suggests tiiat the copper source was scale formed by heating copper-metal scrap. Upon firing, the calcium and copper oxides, witii a propor tion of the quartz, reacted to form the Egyptian Blue com pound. The alkali formed small amounts of a melt phase which helped die reaction proceed faster and at lower tem peratures. The color of die Egyptian Blue depended on the grain size of the crystals formed and their concentration. In turn, tiiis depended on controlling the proportions of raw materials, die degree of grinding, and any repeated grinding and refiring of previously fired material. Like faience, Egyp tian Blue could be molded or worked into shape in an unfired state; alternatively, it could be worked after firing. In addition, it was crushed and used as a pigment in mural painting and pottery decoration. [See Wall Paintings.] Experimental replication suggests that the firing temper atures of frits such as Egyptian Blue and faience were sim ilar—in the range of 850-iooo°C. Durations were probably of the order of hours, as opposed to days or minutes. Firing
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atmospheres were generally oxidizing, as copper is almost invariably in an oxidized, blue state. These conditions are typical of those that were used to fire pottery kilns through out the Near East. T h e development and production of frits and faience did not depend on special or extreme kiln or furnace regimes, but rather on the skilled manipulation of the materials used. The glazing of pottery or stone required temperatures similar to those used in firing faience, frits, and pottery itself. The examination of glazed steatite has shown that the glaze was applied by both the cementation and ap plication approaches; on clay-based pottery, brick, and tile, the raw glaze mixture or a glaze frit would have been ap plied. The production technology of glass is considerably more demanding. Although based again on a mixture of alkali and silica, the production of a fully molten, homogeneous melt which could be cooled to a glass would have required higher temperatures and longer melting times. A multistage pro cess, involving preliminary fritting of the raw materials and intermediate crushing and grinding, may have been used. Manipulation of molten glass in the hot, plastic state, and the need repeatedly to reheat an object during the fabrica tion process (so that it could be continually worked), would have required specially designed furnaces with different characteristics from those used in pottery or metalwork. Glassmaking itself, when fully developed, is likely to have involved skills, procedures, and equipment considerably more sophisticated than those involved in the production of other vitreous materials. Origins and Early Development. Early experiments with glazed stones are likely to have stemmed from obser vations of glazing which accidentally occurred when alkaline fuel ash reacted with pebbles or small worked-stone objects in a strong fire. By tire mid-fifth millennium, small faience objects, with a core of crushed quartz, were widespread. Many early glazes are turquoise or blue, from dissolved cop per; tiiis association with copper has prompted speculation of a relationship between the development of the early vit reous materials industries and copper metallurgy. Direct ev idence for such an association early in the Bronze Age is yet to be presented, although in the Late Bronze Age workshops producing vitreous materials were sometimes located close to those of metallurgical and other industries (e.g., Qantir, Egypt). Small objects of a glass-rich material, typically colored blue and without a distinctive glaze layer, are known from a number of sites dating to the late third millennium. Although the results of detailed physical examinations of these objects have not been published, they appear to represent the ear liest glass in the strictest sense. They were finished using cold-working lapidary techniques and are generally consid ered to have developed from the background of faience and glazing technology, where overfiring or poor compositional control are likely to have resulted in the accidental formation
of glass from time to time. Egyptian Blue appears as a pig ment in Egyptian wall paintings in the late third millennium, itself a product of the same technological background and consisting of similar raw materials combined in different proportions. The appearance of the first glass vessels in western Asia in about the sixteenth century B C E marks a revolution in the fabrication of the material. These vessels were produced on cores of sand or clay. T h e core was coated by dipping it in a crucible of molten glass or by trailing molten glass onto it. Decoration was added by trailing molten glasses of various colors onto the surface of the vessel; it was made smooth by rotating it on a fiat stone. T h e innovative element of tiiis approach is in the manipulation of the glass in the molten state and the application of its plastic properties. Higher temperatures and novel furnace designs are likely to have been required. T h e color palette of glass was extended to include reds, greens, yellows, and whites, as well as blues, based on a range of metal oxides, including those of copper, cobalt, manganese, antimony, and lead. These colors were also applied to objects made of faience. Glazed pottery ves sels appear at about the same time as the earliest glass ves sels; the two developments are considered by many author ities to have been related. Later Developments in Glass. T h e reemergence from the dark age at the end of the second millenium B C E saw the continuation of technologies for vitreous materials, but the major advances of the first millennium were in the field of glassmaking, rather than in faience or frit production. [See Glass.] Foremost are the changes which eventually allowed the development of the Roman glass industry on an un precedented scale. One of the most important of these was a change in the formulation of glass which occured in the seventh or sixth century B C E . Up to that time, most glass had been based on a mixture of plant ash and crushed quartz— materials which had to be collected by foraging and which required labor-intensive preparation. T h e new approach in volved the preparation of glass from a mixture of natron and sand. These were materials which could be quarried from virtually inexhaustible deposits and, furthermore, required minimal processing before use in the glass batch. This al lowed a major increase in capacity, which fed the growth of the Hellenistic and Roman industries. T h e major source of natron appears to have been Egypt, altiiough Pliny (Nat. Hist. 36.190) indicates that glass sand was obtained from near the mouth of the Belus River, near Haifa, in modern Israel. Recent excavations (Gorin-Rosen, 1995) indicate that, by the end of the Byzantine period, and perhaps con siderably earlier, glass was being melted in large tank fur naces with a capacity of 8-10 tons on the Syro-Palestinian coast. From tiiere it could be transported in broken or "chunk" form to wherever it was required. A further development was in the ability to control the natural color of glass. After about the seventh century B C E ,
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Bronze and Iron Ages it was found that adding small amounts of antimony to glass counteracted the green or blue coloration caused by iron oxides; from the second century B C E onward, manganese was used for this purpose. A further impetus to the industry was the development of glassblowing in Syria-Palestine late in the second half of the first century B C E . This development allowed substantial increases in the rate of vessel production. Furthermore, blowing allowed the production of very thinwalled vessels, which increased the number which could be produced from a given glass batch. Along with the earlier changes in glass composition, the introduction of blowing encouraged the production of large quantities of inexpen sive, thin-walled, transparent tablewares and revolutionized the role of glass in society. Although in the eighth-ninth centuries C E in Syria and Egypt, glass production reverted to the traditional plant-ash alkali formulation, the techniques of blowing and decoloration by the addition of manganese continued through to the modern period. Islamic Glaze and Ceramic Technology. From the Late Bronze Age through to the Islamic period, pottery glazes were soda-lime-silica compositions. Lead-oxidebased glazes were introduced in the Roman period, but they were not widely used and their potential was not developed. However, in the eighth or ninth century C E , in response to the fine ceramics being imported from China, Islamic pot ters in Iraq developed die technique of adding tin oxide to die pottery glaze, to make it white and opaque. T h e tin was commonly added with a certain amount of lead to an alkali glaze—or alternatively a lead-tin-silica-glaze formulation was used. At about the same time, Iraqi potters began to add glass and additional quartz to their pottery bodies. This new pottery body evolved into the so-called stonepaste or quartzfrit body, composed predominantiy of quartz with some glass and clay. It is very similar to the faience bodies of ear lier periods, although it appears to have developed sepa rately. These innovations were taken up and developed by potters in other centers—in Egypt and Syria. They resulted in the production of nearly white ceramics, which were well suited for painted decoration in oxide colors and with luster, a fine metallic coat of silver or copper. T h e tin-glaze and luster techniques were the foundations of later medieval pot tery industries in the West—in Spain and in Italy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bimson, Mavis, and Ian C. Freestone, eds. Early Vitreous Materials. British Museum Occasional Publications, 5 6 . London, 1 9 8 7 . Collec tion of essays on faience, Egyptian Blue, and glass from the Near East. Gorin-Rosen, Y. "Hadera, Bet Eli'ezer." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 1 3 ( 1 9 9 5 ) : 4 2 - 4 3 . Preliminary report of industrial-scale glass production in tank furnaces on die coast of Israel. Kaczmarczyk, Alexander, and Robert Hedges. Ancient Egyptian Fa ience: An Analytical Survey of Egyptian Faience from Predynastic to Roman Times. Warminster, 1 9 8 3 . Primarily an account of die com
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position of glaze colorants, with an extensive appendix by Pamela Vandiver on fabrication methods. Lilyquist, Christine. "Granulation and Glass: Chronological and Sty listic Investigadons at Selected Sites, ca. 2 5 0 0 - 1 4 0 0 B.C.E." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, nos. 2 9 0 - 2 9 1 ( 1 9 9 3 ) : 2 7 92.
Lilyquist, Christine, and Robert H. Brill. Studies in Early Egyptian Glass. New York, 1 9 9 3 . Analysis of New Kingdom faience and glass, with a discussion of the structure of vitreous materials. Mason, Robert B., and Michael S. Tite. "The Beginnings of Islamic Stonepaste Technology." Archaeometry 3 6 ( 1 9 9 4 ) : 7 7 - 9 2 . Moorey, P. R. S. Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries; The Archaeological Evidence. Oxford, 1 9 9 4 . Authoritative and detailed ac count of the archaeology of the early materials. Indispensable. Nicholson, Paul. Egyptian Faience and Glass. Princes Risborough, 1 9 9 3 . Useful introduction to materials and objects. Oppenheim, A. Leo, et al. Glass and Glassmaking in Ancient Mesopo tamia. Corning, N.Y., 1 9 7 0 . Includes a translation uf cuneiform texts with instructions for glassmakers, a catalog of surviving objects, and a most enlightening scientific commentary by Robert Brill. Tite, Michael S. "Characterisation of Early Vitreous Materials." Ar chaeometry 2 9 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 2 1 - 3 4 . Short, technical account outiining the differences between faience, frit, Egyptian Blue, glassy faience, etc. Represents the results of what is essentially the only systematic com parison of the microstructures and chemistries of these materials so far undertaken. Tite, Michael S., and Mavis Bimson. "Glazed Steatite: An Investigation of die Methods of Glazing Used in Ancient Egypt." World Archae ology 2 1 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 8 7 - 1 0 0 . The only modern study of the technology of glazed steatite. Vandiver, Pamela B., and W. D. Kingery. "Egyptian Faience: The First High-Tech Ceramic." In High-Technology Ceramics, edited by W. D. Kingery, pp. 1 9 - 3 4 . Ceramics and Civilization, vol. 3 . Columbus, Ohio, 1 9 8 6 . Concise and stimulating account of the origins, tech nology, and development of ceramics. Weinberg, Gladys Davidson, ed. Excavations aljalamc; Site of a Glass Factory in Late Roman Palestine. Columbia, Mo., 1 9 8 8 . Report on an important glassmaking site. The chapter by Robert Brill on scientific investigations is of exceptional value. IAN C . FREESTONE
Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages T h e versatility of silicate technology made possible the de velopment of many types of frits, glasses, and glazes with different carriers in the Bronze and Iron Ages. T h e most common were faience, glass, glazed pottery, glazed steatite, and blue composition ("Egyptian Blue"). Faience. Invented in die fifth millennium, probably in northern Mesopotamia, faience was one of the first synthetic materials. It consists of a crushed and moulded quartz (cf. silica sand) composition core with an alkaline glaze gener ated by efflorescence, cementation, or application tech niques. Because simple alkaline glazes adhered so well to this carrier and ubiquitous quartz could be readily modeled, fa ience was die most popular vitreous material of the Bronze and Iron Ages. P. B. Vandiver and W. D . Kingery refer to it as "the first high-tech ceramic" (Vandiver and Kingery, 19863 p. 1 9 ) . "Glazed frit," possibly to be equated with fa ience, is reported from seventh millennium B C E Jericho, but
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VITREOUS MATERIALS:
Kition, Cyprus, Dated osia, Cyprus)
Bronze and Iron Ages. Polychrome faience rhyton. International style from 1 3 0 0 - 1 2 0 0 B C E , height 26.8 cm. (Courtesy Department of Antiquities, Nic
this seems inherently unlikely and requires scientific verifi cation. Tell Brak in northern Mesopotamia provides the clearest evidence for state-of-the-art faience production in the fourth millennium. Beads were incorporated into temple bricks, and zoomorphic seals or amulets—molded bears, ducks, hares, and monkeys—are extensions of a previously plain repertoire. In Egypt at that time, copper-colored blue glaze imitating semiprecious stone was sometimes decorated with black or brown glaze. Although vessel formation existed in Mesopotamia and Egypt in tite fourth millennium, regular production of these luxury products only began in the third millennium, when it also expanded to Elam. Vessels in Sumer were elaborated with incised and sculpted decoration. The repertoire also included seals, tiles, rods, figurines, mace-heads, and beards,
tite last two probably belonging to temple statues. New glaze colors—red, white, green, and possibly yellow—are attested for the first time in the north. A wagon model from a grave at Tell Bi'a in Syria also demonstrates precocious innova tions in the north. While small beads became common, larger faiences remained prestigious: a cylinder on a metal rod figured in Mesannipadda's gifts to the king of Mari, and wall inlays may have been inserted in King Shulgi's mau soleum at Ur. It is not certain if production existed in Syro-Palestine in the Early Bronze Age. Small disc beads, while fairly com mon, may have come from prolific centers in Egypt. T h e advent of faience on Cyprus and Crete, where industries subsequently excelled, may be historically correlated with a notable expansion of Egypt's maritime links with Byblos in the fourth dynasty (c. 2575-2465 B C E ) . In Mesopotamia,
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Bronze and Iron Ages during the Ur III period (c. 2 1 1 2 - 2 0 0 4 E C U ) , Akkadian terms sometimes identified with vitreous materials appear. How ever, their exact meaning and significance are controversial. Centers of bichrome vessel production were established in the Levant and probably in Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2 0 0 0 - 1 5 5 0 B C E ) . Northern workshops supplying vases in native and egyptianized styles were probably at tached to the royal courts, based on die evidence of both types of vessels in palaces and royal tombs. Faienceworkers, probably from Egypt, flourished at Byblos, where they equipped temples and royal tombs; another derivative in dustry in ancient Palestine created specialized cosmetic con tainers. T h e zenith of western Asiatic faience production was in the later part of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1 4 0 0 - 1 2 0 0 ) . Pro duction is attested at Tyre, Beth-Shean, and probably Bab ylon, but workshops proliferated, some, perhaps, beyond the management of palaces and temples. Mass production of personal ornaments, cylinder seals, and vessels ensued. Polychromy, a belated adaptation of technological innova tions made by glassworkers in the sixteenth century B C E , was widespread. Previously, faience imitated semiprecious stone, now inlaid metalwork. It was executed by direct glaz ing and overglazing, and so was a development independent of Egypt, where polychromy was effected by inlaying and outlining glazes. Carefully selected metal colorants yielded variants of blue, green, brown, yellow, white, gray, black, red, purple, silver, and, probably, transparent glazes. An other characteristic of this florescence is that, because a sty listic "koine" was established, it is difficult to pinpoint tire sources of widespread faience artifacts. For example, dis tinctive female-face pendants with bitumen inlays, probably souvenirs from temples, are found from Cyprus to Susa. Faience was used especially in temples and as funerary offerings. In the Ishtar Temple at Assur, it was used for votive figurines and body parts, furniture inlays, and deco ration such as amulets, bracteates sewn on robes, statue in lays, plain and figurative wall tiles and knobs, elaborate ves sels, and other objects. Tassels may have belonged to equesttian harnesses, for which there are identical examples at el-Kurru in Nubia. Vessels found in the cemetery at Mari, in Syria, are typical of the Late Bronze Age. Their small size, narrow necks, and lids suggest that most had contained precious ointments or the like. Of all the major regions in the Near East, only ancient Palestine, and perhaps Anatolia, does not seem to have had a vessel-production industry. Egyptian domination pre cluded local patronage of gifted faienceworkers, Canaanite rulers therefore looked mainly to Egypt for such luxuries. In addition, colorful faiences in the Fosse Temple at Lachish and the Hathor shrine at T i m n a ' may have been sent directly from there as votives. Canaanite faience assemblages reflect the Egyptian popularity of bowls with Nilotic scenes. These also reached coastal Syria and Cyprus, where copies may
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have been produced. In tiiat region, eclectic craftsmen fash ioned some of the choicest Near Eastern faiences by blend ing Egyptian, Asiatic, and Aegean styles and techniques. As shown by head goblets in the Uluburun shipwreck off of southwest Turkey, their products were sent abroad, prob ably to the west, where a derivative center may have been established in Late Mycenaean Greece. In the Iron Age, following destructions associated with the Sea Peoples, faience production in the Near East waned considerably. Only in the highlands of Iran and Elam, in the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth dynasties in Egypt, on Rhodes, and probably in Phoenicia were there innovating centers of production. Monochrome, mass-produced Egyp tian and egyptianized amulets, beads, and scarabs increase throughout the Levant, but tenth-century B C E Phoenician expertise is most clearly evident in a set of vessels and fig urines from Lefkandi in Euboea. Iranian production is noted for its polychromy; Egyptian for its delicate openwork beads, plain lotiform chalices, and chalices with scenic com positions; and Rhodian for a variety of small egyptianized cosmetic containers. T h e marked decline of faienceworking in Mesopotamia was the result of the impact of polychrome pottery.
V I T R E O U S M A T E R I A L S : Bronze and Iron Ages. Monochromefaience pilgrim flask. Depicted is an image of Bes. From Gurob, c. 1 3 0 0 1 2 0 0 BCE, height 1 6 cm. (Courtesy Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
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Glass. Isolated finds of pre-sixteenth-century B C E glass are reported from Troy to Iran and Egypt, but the dates and composition of many are suspect. Safely stratified examples in graves, like a pinhead from Nuzi, a bead from Tel Dan, and several beads in composite necldaces from Dinkha Tepe, indicate the occasional use of glass, much of it as a by-product from faience and metalworking. Raw glass from Akkadian-Ur III deposits at Eridu, Tell Asmar, and Tell Brak is significant because it demonstrates intentional pro duction (whatever the glass may have been used for even tually) and its relative frequency in Mesopotamia at that time. This phase in the history, of glassmaking constitutes stage i, a preadaptive phase in which the distinctive prop erties of glass were not exploited and its occurrence was infrequent and irregular. An Egyptian royal pectoral with blue glass inlays and purple ones fused to a plaster substrate and inlays from the tomb of King Ahotep (c. 1550 B C E ) may also belong to this stage. Profound technical innovations in vitreous materials oc curred in about the sixteenth century B C E in northern Mes opotamia and northern Syria. Polychrome core-formed glass vessels, together with glazed pottery, appear then. T h e former exhibit new pyrotechnological skills distinctive of glass: fusing, coiling, trailing, and marvering. Multicolored bottles were made on a removable core of clay and dung in a manner recalling lost-wax casting in metal. T h a t metal workers were closely associated with this innovation, no doubt in conjunction with faienceworkers, is also indicated by die associated use of a range of metal oxides to achieve contrasting colors on the same vessels. This formative junc ture in the history of vitreous materials, which equates with the start of stage 2 (working glass industries), took place at a time of political upheaval in northern Mesopotamia, a time when working practices of diverse craftsmen be longing to the earlier Amorite palaces were being reorgan ized. Their vessels are found in northern Mesopotamia and their cast nude-female plaques and spacer plates for separating strands of beads in necklaces as far afield as Greece. Asiatic glassmaking innovations were probably trans ferred to Egypt during the expansionist reign of Thutmosis III. Soon, an independent tradition of elegant core-formed glass vessels was established tiiere under royal authority. The Egyptologist W. F. Petrie retrieved detailed information on glass workshops at Amarna, whereas in western Asia the only evidence is indirect—cullet from Assur and ingots from Alalakh and Tell Brak. T h e Brak ingots are from a Mitannian palace, so that there, too, glass production was under royal patronage. That it was internationally esteemed is clear from royal requests for specific colors, from its rank im mediately below gold and silver in the representation of Thutmosis Ill's dedication of Syrian booty on a limestone relief from the Amun-Re temple at Karnak, and from the gold foil that liberally frames a glass pyxis found on Cyprus.
Bead manufactories were far more numerous and perhaps differently organized. During the fourteenth-thirteenth centuries B C E , mosaic and marbled glass, which facilitated the incorporation of hu man, animal, and plant motifs, became popular in Meso potamia. Stylistic considerations indicate the existence of in dependent glass-vessel production in northern Syria and perhaps on Cyprus, but Canaan made do with Egyptian im ports. As in the rest of western Asia, glass vessels are mostly associated with palaces, temples, and the graves of the wealthy. They were used to hold costly liquids. Glassmakers fashioned a wide variety of opaque, colorful objects. T h e properties of glass, unlike those of faience (which remained essentially an imitative industry), were worked in the hot state and led to the production of highly distinctive vessels. As with other industries, the continuity of glass produc tion was beset by the problem of scarcity of material from the twelfth to the ninth centuries B C E . Crude tenth-century B C E glass vessels indicate a desultory continuity in Egypt. Compositional details of products from a factory atFrattesina in Italy suggests diat some Near Eastern glassworkers may have been dispersed there in the collapse of Bronze Age palatial society. When vessel making revived in the eighth century B C E , rather mediocre core- and rod-formed exam ples are complemented by an important innovation: cast and cut translucent glass. These predecessors of clear blown glass were fit for royalty (examples are an alabastron from the North West Palace at Nimrud with an inscription of Sargon and a petaled bowl from a royal tomb at Gordion in Turkey). Phoenician glassworkers imitating crystal were probably responsible for the development, but they may have accomplished it in Assyria, where so many examples have been found, rather than in Phoenicia itself. By the sev enth century B C E , both types of glass production were car ried out in the Mediterranean region.
Glazed Pottery. T h e difficulty in effectively binding ex isting alkaline glazes to ceramic bodies was overcome in northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia during the six teenth century B C E , as part of the same pyrotechnological revolution that brought about working glass industries. Glazers and glassworkers produced identical bottle shapes for northern Mesopotamian patrons, but glazers were re stricted to monochrome blue. A derivative monochrome glazed-vessel industry was established in fourteenth—thir teenth-century B C E coastal northern Syria. Egypt did not produce glazed pottery in the Bronze and Iron Ages. By the fourteenth century B C E , Mesopotamian glazers took steps to realize a major potential of glazed pottery: ar chitectural decoration. At the provincial site of Nuzi, nu merous glazed wall knobs were fixed to the walls of the Ishtar Temple. Glazers were employed for similar works on a monumental scale in Elam, and less so in Babylonia. Once glazers prevented different colors from mixing on pottery bodies, they could produce bricks with polychrome
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Bronze and Iron Ages
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terranean region. After the sixth century B C E , polychromy declined and utilitarian monochrome production became the norm. [See also Glass. In addition, many of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY
V I T R E O U S M A T E R I A L S : Bronze and Iron Ages. Polychrome glazed pottery jar. In Neo-Assyrian style. From Ziwiye, c. 8 0 0 BCE, height 1 3 . 5 inches. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1 9 5 1 [ 5 1 . 2 9 . 1 ] )
designs on a monumental scale. This was achieved in As syria at the end of the second millennium or in die ninth century B C E by installing slender ribs between the colors, a variation on goldworkers' cloisonne techniques. From the time of Ashurnasirpal II, Assyrian palace, temple, and fort facades were embellished with shimmering geometric and representational designs. It was a development destined to have many successors, from Neo-Babylonian to Islamic times. Assyrian glazers applied die same polychromy techniques to pottery vessels by the ninth century B C E . In metropolitan Assyria, standardized polychrome bottles appeared com monly in tombs. A derivative industry prospered in nortiiwestern Iran, while others began in Elam and Babylonia. In the late eighth century B C E , another center of production started in northern Syria, b u t its products are technically and stylistically related to die Babylonian industry, perhaps as a result of Assyrian deportations of Babylonian craftsmen. T h e importance of the center in northern Syrian is that it led to the foundation of secondary industties in the Medi
Andrae, Walter. Coloured Ceramics from Ashur. London, 1 9 2 5 . Unique but rare typological study of Neo-Assyrian polychrome glazed pot tery, in need of revision in the light of subsequent discoveries and chronological refinements. Barag, Dan. Catalogue of Western Asiatic Glass in the British Museum. Vol. 1 . London, 1 9 8 5 . Far more than a catalog, this work provides a definitive, nontechnical survey of Bronze and Iron Age western Asi atic glass, with an informed and measured treatment of major issues. Bimson, Mavis, and Ian Freestone, eds. Early Vitreous Materials. British Museum Occasional Publications, 5 6 . London, 1 9 8 7 . Authoritative historical, typological, and analytical papers on faience, glazed pot tery, and Egyptian Blue from the Near East and eastern Mediter ranean. Brill, Robert H. "Chemical Analyses of Some Glasses fromFrattesina." Journal of Glass Studies 3 4 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 1 1 - 2 2 . Important study of glass finds from a tenth- to ninth-century BCE site in northeastern Italy. Foster, Karen. Aegean Faience in the Bronze Age. New Haven, 1 9 7 9 . Comprehensive treatment of Aegean faience, with ample consider ation of Near Eastern developments; however, its hyperdiffusionist approach and omission of Near Eastern faience in the thirteenthcentury BCE Aegean are controversial. Fukai, Shinji. Ceramics of Ancient Persia. New York, 1 9 8 1 . Virtually all entries in this catalog are vitreous Iron Age materials from north western Iran, unfortunately not from scientifically controlled exca vations. Should be supplemented by material from Hasanlu and Elam (see references in Moorey below) for a balanced view of Ira nian vitreous materials. Harden, Donald B. Catalogue of Greek and Roman Glass in the British Museum, vol. 1 , Core- and Rod-Formed Vessels and Pendants and My cenaean Cast Objects. London, 1 9 8 1 . Several aspects of this work complement Barag's review (above), especially on Levantine glass. Kaczmarczyk, Alexander, and Robert Hedges. Ancient Egyptian Fa ience: An Analytical Survey of Egyptian Faience from Predynaslic to Roman Times. Warminster, 1 9 8 3 . Hard-going analytical reference book based on surface X-ray fluorescence analysis of some 3 2 5 fa iences of all periods. P. B. Vandiver's appendix on faience technol ogy is now the standard appraisal. Lilyquist, C , and R. H. Brill. Studies in Early Egyptian Glass. New York, 1 9 9 3 . Stylistic and chemical analyses directly related to the beginnings of glass in Egypt. Lucas, Alfred. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries. 4th ed., rev. and enl. by J. R. Harris. London, 1 9 8 9 . Although many of Lucas's conclusions on faience have been modified by Kaczmarczyk and Hedges, this remains a basic treatment of Egyptian vitreous mate rials. Moorey, P. R. S. Materials and Manufacture in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Evidence ofArchaeology and Art in Metals and Metalwork, Glazed Materials, and Glass. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 2 3 7 . Oxford, 1 9 8 5 . Comprehensive, standard work on the development of Mesopotamian vitreous materials, with an excellent bibliography but no illustrations. Oppenheim, A. Leo, et al. Glass and Glassmaking in Ancient Mesopo tamia. Corning, N.Y., 1988. Scholarly attempt to write a history of western Asiatic glassmaking from so-called glass recipes, with very useful analytic and typological studies, although its metiiodology and conclusions have been criticized.
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Peltenburg, Edgar, "Al Mina Glazed Pottery and Its Relations." Levant I (1969): 73-96. Basic study of the chronology and historical context of Iron Age glazed pottery in Syria and its role in the western ori entalizing movement. Riefstahl, Elizabeth. Ancient Egyptian Glass and Glazes in the Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn, 1968. Schlick-Nolte, Birgit. Die Glasgefasse im Alien Agyplen. Miinchner Agyptologische Studien, vol. 14. Berlin, 1968. Essential, well-illus trated volume on Egyptian New Kingdom glass. Vandiver, P. B., and W. D. Kingery. "Egyptian Faience: The First High-Tech Ceramic." In High-Technology Ceramics, edited by W. D. Kingery, pp. 19-34. Ceramics and Civilization, vol. 3. Columbus, Ohio, 1986. Webb, Virginia. Archaic Greek Faience: Miniature Scent Bottles and Re lated Objects from East Greece, 650-500 B.C. Warminster, 1978. In the absence of a survey of Iron Age Levantine faience, this work provides a useful but incomplete and indirect treatment of the later Iron Age.
v.;;
EDGAR PELTENBURG
Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods Before the invention of glassblowing in die first century B C E , vin-eous artifacts were produced by the labor- and energyintensive techniques of cast molding, rod forming, and core forming. As a consequence, glass in the pre-Roman periods was limited to a restricted number of forms: simple beads, furniture inlays, and luxury vessels used for cosmetics and in the dining room. The glassblowing and mold-blowing techniques developed during die Roman period, however, allowed glass to become as inexpensive and ubiquitous a commodity as it is today. At the end of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600-1100 B C E ) there appears to have been a rapid decline in the production of glass artifacts in Egypt and western Asia (Barag, 1985). Altiiough it seems from the dearth of evidence that few, if any, glass vessels were made in the early first millennium B C E , the appearance of glass beads in tenth- and ninth-cen tury B C E contexts suggests that the art of glassworking did not entirely disappear in the Early Iron Age. Neo-Assyrian texts that record glass recipes have antecedents in secondmillennium B C E Middle Babylonian and Hittite texts (Oppenheim et al., 1970). Two unusual mosaic glass beakers with figural decoration from a late ninth-century B C E level at Hasanlu may represent heirlooms from the thirteenth cen tury B C E . In Egypt, the New Kingdom ttadition of using cast, opaque glass in inlays seems to have revived in the Saite period, though the production of core-formed vessels stopped after the twenty-first dynasty (Grose, 1989). Cast monochrome and mosaic glass inlays for ivory and wooden furniture were produced by Phoenician craftsmen in the ninth and eighth centuries B C E , preserved examples of which have been found at Nimrud, Arslan Tash, Megiddo, and Samaria. Glass vessels were once again produced in some numbers in Mesopotamia during the eighth and seventh centuries
"•" V.. J <",'•,
1
V I T R E O U S M A T E R I A L S : Persian tiirough R o m a n Periods. Western Asiatic unguent bottle (alabastron) probably from Mesopotamia. Late eighth or seventh century BCE. Height 8.6 cm. (Courtesy The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1961.39)
B C E . Mesopotamian-produced core-formed glass alabastra and juglets have been found in Assyria, Bablyonia, Elam, Urartu, and Palestine, as well as in eastern and central Med iterranean contexts of the eighth and seventh centuries B C E (Barag, 1985). In addition to reviving the earlier techniques of core forming, glassworkers of this period discovered how to create monochrome glass in shades ranging from natural light green to intentionally decolorized or, more rarely, pur ple, blue, and blue-green. Monochrome cast-and-ground glass bowls and other vessels were foiind in great numbers in eighth- and seventh-century B C E contexts at Nimrud, in cluding a thick vase inscribed with the name of Sargon II, and are also known from Khorsabad and Kuyunjik (Barag, 1985). An unusual late eighth-century B C E cast-and-ground mesomphalos phiale (shallow drinking vessel) from tumulus P at Gordion probably belongs to the same tradition (Grose, 1989). Stylistic similarities with Phoenician metal and ivory objects and the presence of cast monochrome vessels from early seventh-century B C E contexts on Crete and in Italy sug gest tiiat the discovery of this type of glass may well have been made by Phoenician artisans. [See Phoenicians.] By the seventh century B C E , Phoenician glassworkers were produc ing inlays of transparent painted glass and monochrome glass beads. By the sixth century B C E , glass technology had spread from the Near East and had become established at Greek, Punic, and Ettuscan centers.
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Persian through Roman Periods P e r s i a n Period. There is some limited evidence drat the production of cast monochrome and core-formed vessels continued in the Neo-Babylonian and Early Achaemenid periods, though not on the same scale as in the previous eighdi and seventh centuries (Moorey, 1994). During tire Late Achaemenid period, a different type of cast mono chrome vessel was produced in a lost-wax technique that employed a high-quality, intentionally decolorized glass par ticularly resistant to weathering. T h e earliest dated example of an Achaemenid cast monochrome vessel was found in a Cyrenaican tomb with Attic pottery from the third quarter of die fifth century B C E (Michael Vickers, "An Achaemenid Glass Bowl in a Dated Context," Journal of Glass Studies 14 [1972]: 1 5 - 1 6 ) . In Aristophanes' Achamians (11. 73-75),first produced in 425 B C E , an Athenian ambassador returning from Persepolis boasts of having drunk from luxurious Per sian gold and glass vessels, indicating the high esteem in which Achaemenid glass was held in antiquity. A related, but distinct, group of Achaemenid cast monochrome glass bowls has been found in fourth-century B C E contexts at Per sepolis and at Ephesus (Oliver, 1970). T h e glass decorative elements used by some Greek sculptors and architects seem to have been made from raw monochrome glass imported from die Near East. T h e production of core-formed vessels in Mesopotamia may have died out at the end of the sixtii century B C E , when glass perfume containers made in East Greece began to be imported into the Near East (Grose, 1989). Greek coreformed glass alabaster, aryballoi, amphoriskoi, and oenochoae have been found in Syria, Jordan, and Israel in con texts ranging from the late sixth century B C E through the Hellenistic period. A related series of tall, narrow kohl tubes, formed on a rod without a core, were produced in both the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East during the sixthfourth centuries B C E . [See Cosmetics.] Workshops active in northwest Iran and in Mesopotamia during tire late fifth and fourdi centuries B C E seem to have been responsible for two groups of rod-formed kohl tubes tiiat are square in section and made of a dark ttanslucent glass decorated witii opaque glass threads combed into tight zigzag designs (Barag, 1975; Grose, 1989). T h e rod-forming technique had been used to make col ored glass beads in Mediterranean and Near Eastern work shops from at least as early as the ninth century B C E . Rodformed polychrome opaque glass beads and pendants in die shape of human or demonic heads and animals have been found in large quantities in Syro-Palestinian, eastern Med iterranean, and Punic contexts from the early sixth-the third centuries B C E . [See Jewelry.] While the origin of diese beads has been variously ascribed to Phoenician, Punic, or East Greek centers, it is likely that they were produced in a num ber of different workshops over a period of several centuries (Barag, 1985). Monochrome glass was also extensively used
315
V I T R E O U S M A T E R I A L S : Persian through Roman Periods. Eastern Mediterranean head pendant, probably from Phoenicia or Carthage.
Late seventh through fifth centuries BCE. Length 3.0 cm. (Courtesy The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Lihbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1976.57)
to produce seals and scarabs in the Persian Empire, and examples have been found at sites from Cyprus to Meso potamia. [See Seals.] Hellenistic Period. T h e evidence indicates a sharp de cline in die production of luxury glass vessels in the Near East during the century following the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid Empire. Achaemenid-style cast bowls may have continued to be produced in eastern Mediterra nean workshops into the third century B C E , but the East Greek core-formed industry probably died out by 300 B C E . Few products from the new glass houses established in Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean in the third century B C E have been found in die Near East. One notable exception is a fragment of a gold-glass pyxis lid recovered in Babylon (Barag, 1985). The second century B C E witnessed a dramatic renaissance in Near Eastern glass production. Monochrome, colorless, and intentionally colorized hemispherical bowls with simple molded or pinched ribs or with lathe-cut grooves around the rim were manufactured in large numbers at several different centers, including some located along the Phoenician coast, perhaps at Sidon. These hemispherical bowls were made witii a simplified molding technique tiiat involved sagging a heated disc over a convex mold. Hundreds of examples of hemispherical bowls have been found at sites on Cyprus and in Israel, and more than six thousand have been recovered from the small settlement at Tel Anafa (Israel) in levels dated to between 125 and 80 B C E (Grose, 1989). Simple plano-convex gaming pieces made out of die same type of monochrome glass have been found throughout the Near
316
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Persian through Roman Periods r -
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Persian through Roman Periods. Eastern Mediterranean footed bowl (krater) possibly from Egypt, but reported to have been found in Italy. Mid-late third century BCE. Height 17.7 VITREOUS MATERIALS:
cm. (Courtesy The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased widi funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1980.1000)
East and the Mediterranean, including a deposit of thirty thousand from the temple of Eshmun near Sidon (Maurice Dunand, "Verroteries d'enfants dans le temple d'Echmoun a Sidon," Bulletin du Musee de Beyrouth 30 [1977]: 47-50). [See Games.] By die end of die tirird century B C E , glassworkers had re discovered how to manipulate preformed canes or cane sec tions to produce a wide variety of polychrome mosaic glass vessels. It has been proposed that this discovery was made in Alexandria, where Egyptian glass artisans had a long tra dition of working with glass canes. However, the distribution of the earliest examples of mosaic glass vessels suggests that they are products of southern Italian centers. In any case, mosaic glass vessels have been discovered at a number of Anatolian, Cypriot, and Near Eastern sites, including Nim rud, where Austen Henry Layard recovered a mosaic net work-pattern bowl. Core-formed vessels reappear in the Syro-Palestinian re gion in the late second and first centuries B C E . These Late Hellenistic core-formed types are easily distinguished from the earlier Mediterranean examples by shape and fabric. Pir iform alabaster and globular amphoriskoi with looped han dles of transparent glass are especially common on Cyprus and the Syro-Palestinian coast, where they were presumably made. R o m a n Period. The most momentous development in the history of glassmaking—the invention of glassblowing— seems to have been made on the southern Levantine coast in about the middle of the first century B C E . Finds of glass tubes, partially blown bulbs, and wasters from a pre-40 B C E deposit in Jerusalem suggest that the first steps toward glassblowing involved the inflation of heated, preformed glass
tubes (Yael Israeli, " T h e Invention of Blowing," in Newby and Painter, 1991, pp. 46-55). Glass artisans soon realized the advantages of using a metal blowpipe to manipulate heated globs of glass, and by the end of the first century B C E the art of glassblowing had spread to many centers through out the Roman Empire. During the first four cenmries of the common era, work shops from western Europe to Mesopotamia took advantage of the glassblower's ability to fashion quicldy and inexpen sively a wide variety of utilitarian vessel shapes; glass became as commonplace, and probably as inexpensive, a commod ity as ceramics. Assemblages of Roman glass display a re markable consistency throughout this vast region, no doubt reflecting a high degree of interaction among Roman-period glass houses. Nearly every excavated Roman site has yielded glass dishes, plates, bowls, beakers, drinking cups, flasks, and perfume containers as well as glass bracelets, beads, gaming pieces, bezels, and other objects. Because individual glass workshops probably used glass from a number of dif ferent sources, including primary producing centers and re cycled glass, attempts to define chemically regional groups most likely will continue to be inconclusive. Nonetheless, given the inuinsic difficulties of transporting fragile glass vessels, it can be assumed that most Roman sites were largely supplied by local glass workshops. Detailed studies of some glass corpora, such as those from Cyprus, Karanis, and Dura-Europos, have isolated some regional traits— Cypriot painted beaker lids, tooled pad bases characteristic of Egyptian products, and crude imitations of Syro-Pales tinian forms at Mesopotamian sites. Literary and epigraphic references attest to the vitality of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Jewish glass workshops. The proliferation of inexpensive blown glass did not, how ever, result in an immediate cessation in tire production of handmade luxury wares. The mosaic glass tradition sur vived to die middle of the first century C E and cast mono chrome ribbed bowls continued to be produced until the end of that centtiry. In the second quarter of the first century C E , glass artisans discovered how to create decorated vessels by blowing glass into multipieced molds. It has long been as sumed that the mold-blowing technique was developed at Sidon, though recently Italy has been suggested as a place of origin (Grose, 1989). From the third quarter of the first century through the fourth century C E , workshops through out Europe and the eastern Mediterranean mass produced mold-blown vessels decorated with a wide variety of vegetal and figural scenes. During the same period, both eastern and western glass workshops produced colorless blown vessels decorated with wheel-cut designs, some of the finest of which are masterpieces of the intaglio technique. There was no sharp change in the patterns of glass man ufacture or use after the establishment of Constantinople in 330 C E . The basic categories of Late Roman glass types con tinued into the seventh century C E , when, with the rise of
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Persian through Roman Periods
317
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Persian through R o m a n Periods. Fragment of an eastern Mediterranean bowl with a shallow, wheel-cut intaglio hunting scene on the exterior. Third-fourth century CE. Preserved height 5 . 3 cm, estimated diameter 1 7 . 5 cm. (Courtesy The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1 9 2 3 . 1 8 8 8 ) VITREOUS MATERIALS:
Isings, Clasina. Roman Glass from hated Finds. Groningen, 1 9 5 7 . Though dated and weak on eastern material, still an essential study of Roman glass typology and chronology. [See also Glass. In addition, most, of the sites mentioned are Newby, Martine, and Kenneth Painter, eds. Roman Glass: Two Cen the subject of independent entries] turies of An and Invention. Society of Antiquaries of London, Oc casional Papers, vol. 1 3 . London, 1 9 9 1 . A festshrift for Donald B I B L I O G R A P H Y Harden, this collection contains important essays on the origin of glassblowing (Yael Israeli) and early mold-blown vessels (Jennifer Barag, Dan. "Rod-Formed Kohl-Tubes of the Mid-First Millennium Price). BC." Journal of Glass Studies 1 7 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 2 3 - 3 6 . Presents the basic typology of kohl-tubes produced in northern Mesopotamia and east Moorey, P. R. S. Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The ern Anatolia. Archaeological Evidence. Oxford, 1 9 9 4 . Contains an excellent survey Barag, Dan. "Flanita, Tomb: A Tomb of the Third and Early Fourth of Bronze Age and Iron Age Mesopotamian glass, with sections on Century CE." 'Aliqot 1 3 ( 1 9 7 8 ) : 1 0 - 3 4 . Includes a study of seventymanufacturing techniques and chemical analyses. two vessels found at Hanita, Israel. Oliver, Andrew. "Persian Export Glass." Journal of Glass Studies 12 Barag, Dan. Catalogue of Western Asiatic Glass in the British Museum. ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 9 - 1 6 . Important study of Achaemenid cast monochrome Vol. 1. London, 1 9 8 5 . Includes an appendix by Veronica Tattonvessels from the West. Brown, who discusses the problem of rod-formed pendants. Oppenheim, A. Leo, et al. Glass and Glassmaking in Ancient Mesopo Clairmont, Christoph W. The Excavations at Dura-Europa, Final Report tamia. Corning, N.Y., 1 9 7 0 . Oppenheim's study of Neo-Assyrian IV, Part V: The Glass Vessels. New Haven, 1 9 6 3 . Major study of glass glass-recipe texts is augmented by chapters on Mesopotamian corein use at this northwestern Mesopotamian site from the first through formed vessels (Dan Barag), on other Mesopotamian glass (Axel von the mid-third centuries CE. Saldern), and scientific analyses (Robert Brill). Grose, David F. "The Origins and Early History of Glass." In The Seefried, Monique. Les pendentifs en verre sur noyau des pays de la meHistory of Glass, edited by Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd, pp. 9 - 3 7 . diterranee antique. Rome, 1 9 8 2 . Major study of rod-formed zoomorLondon, 1 9 8 4 . Excellent introduction to ancient glass. phic and human-headed pendants. Seefried's assertion that these Grose, David F. Early Ancient Glass: Core-Formed, Rod-Formed, and were Punic products has been challenged by Dan Barag and Veron Cast Vessels and Objects from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Roman ica Tatton-Brown (see Barag, 1 9 8 5 ) . Empire, 1600 B.C. 10A.D. $0. New York, 1 9 8 9 . Publication of the Vessberg, Olof, and Alfred Westholm. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, large collection in the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio; an essential vol. 4 . 3 , The Hellenistic and Roman Periods in Cyprus. Stockholm, reference book, it is the most definitive study to date of pre-Roman 1 9 5 6 . Includes Vessberg's monumental study of Cypriot glass which, and Early Roman glass. Contains excellent glossaries of glass and though dated, is still useful. glass-making terminology. Weinberg, Gladys Davidson, ed. Excavations at Jalame: Site of a Glass Harden, Donald B. Roman Glass from Karanis Found by the University Factoty in I-ate Roman Palestine. Columbia, Mo., 1 9 8 8 . Thoroughly of Michigan Archaeological Expedition in Egypt, 1924.-29. University documented excavation of a kiln and glass dump dated to 3 5 1 - 3 8 3 of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series, vol. 4 1 Ann Arbor, 1 9 3 6 . CE. Pioneering and still fundamental study of Roman and Early Byz antine Egyptian glass, with a useful glossary. MURRAY C . MCCLELLAN Islam, a new era in the history of glass in the Near East began.
318
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Byzantine and Islamic Periods
Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Glass was a ubiquitous commodity in the Near East during the Byzantine and Islamic periods. It was fashioned into util itarian vessels, windowpanes, and inexpensive jewelry. It also was used to create luxurious mosaic decorations and ritual vessels for churches, synagoges, and mosques. In Late Antiquity, as today, glass was a part of the lives of the rich and the poor alike. Byzantine Glass. From the fourth to mid-seventh cen tury C E , the glass industry differed little from that in tite preceding three hundred years. Since the invention of glassblowing in the first century B C E and the development of the mold-blown technique in the following century, glass arti sans had been able to make large numbers of vessels both quicldy and inexpensively. Because it was relatively easy to manufacture glass objects but difficult to transport them, glass workshops were likely to be established near urban centers throughout the Byzantine Empire. There were two distinct stages in the ancient glass indus try: tite initial production of raw glass, or cullet, and its sub sequent crushing, retiring, and shaping. This two-step pro cess was necessary because ancient kilns could not reach temperatures sufficiently high to fuse tite basic soda-limesilica components of ancient glass in a single firing. While it is probable that some glass factories undertook both activi ties, it is clear that there were centers dedicated to the largescale manufacture of raw glass for sale to smaller workshops. These centers were no doubt located close to sources of good sands, such as the deposits at tite moutit of the Belus River (the Na'aman River, north of Haifa), as well as in areas where an ample supply of wood for charcoal could be obtained. At one such center in Israel, Beth-She'arim, on the Kishon River, an 9.7-metric-ton (8.8-ton) slab of devitrified glass was uncovered in a fourth-century C E context (Brill, 1967). Because the poorly fused Beth-She'arim slab was unusable, it had been abandoned. A similar large slab, now in the Museum ha-Aretz in Tel Aviv was found at Rishpon, nortii of that city, on Israel's Mediterranean coast (Weinberg, 1988). That these large slabs were intended to be broken up and taken to smaller workshops is suggested by a third-century C E reference in the Babylonian Talmud {Shab. 154b) that mentions the transport of glass lumps on donkeys. Glass cullet from Beth-She'arim may have been sent to a glass workshop located a few kilometers to the east, at Jalame. The Jalame glass factory, dated by its excavators to 35 ~383 C E , was situated in an isolated complex that had been a functioning agricultural villa earlier in tite century (Weinberg, 1988). The Jalame complex, the only early Byz antine glass-manufacturing factory excavated to date, in cluded a furnace room, a glass-sorting area, and a massive dump of broken glass. No ceramic crucible fragments were found at the site, and it appears that the glassworkers at r
Jalame used small, rectangular limestone crucibles that would have been used for only a single melting of a relatively small amount of glass. Large numbers of broken vessels, manufacturing waste, and fragments of cullet were uncov ered in the sorting and dump area to the soutii and west of die furnace, indicating that at Jalame, at least, little or no care was taken to save broken glass for reuse. The wide range of utilitarian vessels produced at Jalame include the most typical shapes in use during the early Byz antine period: bowls, cups, jugs, bottles, jars, and conical beakers with sharp rims formed by cracking the vessel off from the blowpipe; the latter could have served as either drinking vessels or as lamps. These early Byzantine vessels tended to be decorated only minimally. Some jugs, bottles, and jars have simple mold-blown or pattern-blown ribbing, whereas tall flasks frequently were adorned with added trails. Conical beakers and bowls could be decorated with applied dots of a dark-blue glass. Rarely, simple designs were cut with a wheel on bottles and bowls. In addition to these vessels types, windowpanes, bracelets, glass weights and stamps, and tesserae cut for mosaics were produced in the early Byzantine period. Windowpanes, which were either flat or crowned, tended to be made from a deeply tinted greenish or bluish glass that would not have admitted a great deal of light. Bracelets were frequently made of a very dark blue or green translucent glass and were occasionally decorated with tooling. Tesserae for mosaics, usually cut from thin cast slabs, appear in a range of colors, including some with thin gold foil sandwiched between col orless glass. Some small glass disks with stamped inscrip tions were used as weights, while others seem to have been used as tokens. In conttast to glass vessels, the more portable bracelets, tesserae, and weights and tokens were often traded great distances from their place of manufacture. In the Late Byzantine period, the proliferation of new churches and synagogues stimulated the glass industry. In addition to windowpanes and glass tesserae, lamps and gob lets for limrgical uses were often supplied by glass work shops, which thrived (van Saldern, 1980). T h e period also saw the production of elaborately decorated vessels, such as the engraved chalice found in the cathedral at Jerash, or die group of late sixth-early seventh century C E mold-blown hexagonal bottles with Christian and Jewish religious sym bols (Barag, 1970, 1971). Quantities of three-handled hang ing lamps and stemmed lamps for polycandela have been discovered in synagogues at Beth-Shean in Israel and Sardis in Anatolia and in churches at el-Lejjun, Khirbet al-Kerak, Jerash, and Pella in Jordan, at Samaria in Israel, and else where (Meyer, 1988). Stemmed glass vessels, which, during tite sixth century C E replaced the conical beaker as the dom inant form used for lamps and drinking vessels, are also fre quently found in settlement contexts, such as at Caesarea in Israel, where a hoard was recently discovered near the Byz antine city wall (Michael Peleg and Ronny Reich, " T h e
VITREOUS MATERIALS: Byzantine and Islamic Periods
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and Persian glass from the eighth and ninth centuries C E includes such luxury vessels as square bottles with faceted designs, elegant ewers with wheel-cut patterns of running animals and stylized flowers, and short flasks with moldblown and relief-cut designs. Finds from Samarra on the Tigris River and Antioch in Syria testify to the reemergence at this time of the mosaic, or millefiori, technique, in which cane sections of colored, opaque rods are fused to form open bowls and plaques (Pinder-Wilson, 1991). A major glass center developed at Fustat (Old Cairo) in the eighth century C E that produced glass for more than two hundred years. As the excavation of this area has revealed, quantities of simple blown vessels as well as more luxurious wheel-cut pieces were produced (Pinder-Wilson and ScanIon, 1973). Most early Islamic glass was composed of col orless or slightly tinted fabrics; however, intentionally col ored glass was also used, such as the opaque blue-green glass of the engraved bowl, likely a product of Fustat, in the Trea sury of San Marco in Venice. Syrian and Egyptian glassworkers in the eighth century C E were also responsible
Byzantine and Islamic Periods. Palestin ian hexagonal jar with Jewish symbols, probably made near Jerusalem. Dated around 578-629 CE. Height 8.0 cm. (Courtesy The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased widi funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1923.1358) VITREOUS MATERIALS:
Byzantine City Wall of Caesarea Maritima," 'Atiqot, Eng. ser., 2 1 [ 1 9 9 2 ] , p. 1 5 5 ) -
While the Jewish glass industry is particularly well docu mented in the textual and archaeological record, it is appar ent that glass workshops were located throughout the Late Roman Empire. Even Cyprus, an island with no natural sil icon sands, seems to have had a thriving glass industry in the Byzantine period, apparently supplied with raw cullet shipped from the mainland. Glass factories no doubt played an important role in their regional economies, though the location of the Jalame workshop and references to laws pro hibiting the establishment of glassworks within city walls suggest that glass artisans did not fully participate in the urbanitas of the empire. Islamic Glass. The Arab conquest of die Byzantine provinces of Syria and Egypt in the seventh century C E ini tially brought little change to the production of glass in the Near East. Glass workshops under the early Umayyad dy nasty continued to produce simple flasks, lamps, and goblets of light greenish or bluish transparent glass. With the rise of the Abbasid caliphate in the eight century C E , however, Is lamic glassworkers encountered the rich tradition of the Sas anian glass industry, which specialized in elaborate wheelcut, faceted bottles, bowls, and ewers. While glass production in the remnants of the Byzantine Empire stag nated in the last two centuries of the millennium, Islamic glass production underwent a renaissance. Mesopotamian c
Byzantine and Islamic Periods. Bottle with wheel-cut ornament, probably Iranian. Ninth-tenth century. Height 15.0 cm. (Courtesy The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1947.5) VITREOUS MATERIALS:
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VITREOUS MATERIALS: Byzantine and Islamic Periods
for developing two new decorative techniques: applying stamped designs and inscriptions using carved metal tongs, and lustre painting. T h e latter technique, in which metal oxides are applied to a vessel with sulphur and vinegar and fired in a reducing kiln, was used to produce vessels with elaborate polychrome Kufic inscriptions, such as one from Fustat that was dedicated to the governor of Egypt in 772 C E (Pinder-Wilson, 1991). A spectacular collection of Fatimid glass has been recov ered from a ship wreck off the coast of Turkey, near Serce Limani, in about 1036 C E (Bass, 1984). [See Serce Limani.] In addition to a cargo of ceramic cooking vessels, Byzantine transport amphoras, intact glass vessels, arsenic ore, and rai sins, the ship was carrying a ballast of nearly three tons of glass cullet. Two-thirds of this ballast was in the form of broken chunks of raw cullet; the remainder was composed of approximately one million glass fragments. It is estimated that the fragments represent die remains of some ten thou sand to twenty thousand vessels, in addition to waste-glass trails and glass pads cracked off from pontils. More than two hundred vessel types have been identified, including beakers, handleless and one-handled cups, dishes, bowls, jugs, bottles, flasks, jars, and lamps. A large number of tiiese vessels were decorated witii mold-blown and pattern-blown designs, including diamond, honeycomb, and vegetal pat terns, or with wheel-cut designs of geometric, floral, and animal motifs. T h e Serce Limani ship, evidently plying the waters between Fatimid Syria and the Byzantine coast dur ing a period of quietude after the peace treaty of 1027 C E , was clearly supplying a number of small glass workshops with raw material; the evidence suggests that, in the Medi terranean at least, there was little long-distance trade for fin ished glass vessels. The Seljuk conquests and the collapse of the Fatimid dy nasty in 1 1 7 1 severely disrupted the established Islamic glass industry. It has been hypothesized that glassworkers fleeing Cairo set up a new production center in Corinth, Greece, during the late twelfth century, although a recent redating of the Corinthian material suggests that the glassworks there may date to after the Norman conquest in die early thir teenth century. In any case, it is clear that the late twelfth century was a period of cross-fertilization between Islamic and European glass-manufacturing traditions. T h e so-called Hedwig glasses, bucket-shaped vessels decorated with elab orate relief-cut heraldic lions, griffins, and eagles, may have been made by Islamic workers in Norman Sicily and traded to northern Europe (Pinder-Wilson, 1991). A class of tall, dark-blue translucent bottles found in Greece and on Cy prus was. decorated with enamel and gold-paint techniques apparentiy developed in Egypt and Syria. Conversely, the Western tradition of prunted, or fused, decoration appears on Islamic glass in the early thirteenth century. During the thirteenth century, the cities of Aleppo and Damascus in Syria were renowned as major centers of glass
V I T R E O U S M A T E R I A L S : Byzantine and Islamic Periods. Flagon, probably Syrian. Dated to about 1300 CE. Height 13.6 cm. (Courtesy
The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey
Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1927.317)
production. Both produced elaborate enameled vessels, al though it is not clear whether the stylistic differences tradi tionally attributed to each center are valid. Also during this century, tall sprinkler bottles and small flasks with multicol ored marvered decoration became popular. Vessels of these types have been uncovered at the thirteenth- and four teenth-century Red Sea port of Quseir el-Qadim and have been interpreted by their excavators as export goods des tined for India and east Africa (Whitcomb, 1982). In the fourteenth century, the Syrian centers produced a series of magnificent enameled hanging lamps, often with painted in scriptions recording the commissioning of the lamp, that were distributed throughout the Mamluk territories. It is unlikely that the Aleppo glass industry survived the Mongol sack of 1260, whereas the Damascus workshops continued until their workers were carried off by Tamer lane's troops to Samarkand in 1400, ending a long tradition of glassworking. After this event, luxury glass vessels used in die Mamluk sultanate were supplied by Venetians or Per sians. [See also Glass. In addition, most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent, entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barag, Dan. "Glass Pilgrim Vessels from Jerusalem." Journal of Glass Studies 12 (1970): 35-63; 13 (1971): 45-63. Definitive publication of the series of Byzantine mold-blown vessels produced for the tourist trade.
VOUNI Bass, George F. "The Nature of die Serce Limani Glass." Journal oj Glass Studies 26 (1984): 64-69. This preliminary report must serve until the final publication of this eleventh-century CE glass cullet wreck. Brill, Robert H. "A Great Glass Slab from Ancient Galilee." Archae ology 20 (1967): 88-95. Popular account of a massive slab of raw glass found in a fourth-century CE context at Beth-She'arim. Crowfoot, G. M . "Glass." In The Objects from Samaria, by J. M . Crow foot et a l , pp. 403-422. Samaria-Sebaste: Report of the Work of the Joint Expedition in 1931-1933 and of the Work of the British Ex pedition in 1935, no. 3. London, 1957. Includes vessels from burials and ecclesiastical contexts dating to the fourth-sixth centuries CE. Harden, Donald B. Roman Glass from Karanis Found by the University of Michigan Archaeological Expedition in Egypt, 1924-29. University of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series, vol. 41. Ann Arbor, 1936. Pioneering and still fundamental study of Roman and Early Byz antine Egyptian glass, including a useful glossary of glass terms. Hayes, John W. Excavations at Sarachane in Istanbul, vol. 2, The Pottery. Princeton, 1992. The chapter on Roman and Byzantine glass pro vides the most recent discussion of the types of glass vessels in use in Constantinople. Jones, Janet. "The Glass." In The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Final Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980-1989, edited by S. Thomas Parker. Washington, D.C., forthcoming. Large collection of Late Roman and Byzantine glass from a church and from the barracks at Lejjun. Meyer, Carol. "Glass from the North Theater Byzantine Church, and Soundings at Jerash, Jordan, 1982-1983." In Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Sponsored Excavations, 1982-85, edited by Walter E. Rast,pp. 175-222. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Supplement no. 25. Baltimore, 1988. The most recent study of Byz antine and Umayyad glass from Jerash. Pinder-Wilson, Ralph H., and George T . Scanlon. "Glass Finds from Fustat, 196 4-7'i." Journal of Glass Studies 15 (1973): 12-30. An im portant collection of Islamic glass from excavations in Old Cairo. Pinder-Wilson, Ralph H. "Islamic Lands and China." In Glass: Five Thousand Years, edited by Hugh Tait, pp. 1 1 2 - 1 3 9 . New York, 1991. The best introduction to Islamic glass. Spaer, Maud. "The Islamic Glass Bracelets of Palestine: Preliminary Findings." Journal of Glass Studies 34 (1992): 44-62. The most com prehensive study of Islamic glass bracelets. von Saldern, Axel. Ancient and Byzantine Glass from Sardis. Cambridge, Mass., 1980. Publication of excavated glass from Sardis, including an important collection dating to the fifth and sixth centuries CE. Weinberg, Gladys Davidson, ed. Excavations at Jalame: Site of a Glass Factoty in Late Roman Palestine. Columbia, Mo., 1988. Thoroughly documented excavation of a kiln and glass dump dated to 351-383
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Hauran. Early in 1862, with the epigraphist W. Waddington and the architect E. Duthoit, Vogue made a brief but im portant survey of Cyprus (in the place of Ernest Renan) and then returned to Syria. A second book appeared in 1864, Le Temple de Jerusalem. His most important work, Syrie centrale, in two volumes (Paris, 1865-1877) included a study of the region's architecture; a third volume (in two parts, 18681877) reported on Aramean and Sabean inscriptions, for by then de Vogue had mastered Semitic epigraphy. After the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, Vogue again served as a diplomat, as ambassador to Constantinople (be ginning in 1871) and to Vienna (beginning in 1875). After Renan's death (1892), de Vogue became president of tire commission for the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS) at tire French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (of which he had become a member in 1868). De Vogue was in charge of volume 2 of the CIS, for Aramean inscrip tions (1889-1907). A member of many learned societies, he was greatly renowned for his mastery of several fields in Oriental studies, especially those dealing with archaeology, inscriptions, and ancient coins. Some of his numerous ar ticles were republished in Melanges d'archeologie orientate (Paris, 1868) and in 1909 he received, in Paris, as a tribute, the book Florilegium, ou Recueil de travaux d'erudition dedies a Mr le marquis Melchior de Vogue. T h e marquis was an impressive figure in terms of science and in probity. [See also the biography of Renan.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cagnat, R. Article in Comptes Rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belle-Lettres (1918): 443-473. Portrait of de Vogue. Florilegium, on Recueil de travaux d'erudition dedies d Mr le marquis Mel chior de Vogue. Paris, 1909. Vogue, Melchior de. Les eglises de la Tene Sainte. Paris, i860. Vogue, Melchior de. Le Temple de Jerusalem. Paris, 1864. Vogue, Melchior de. Syrie centrale: Architecture civile et religieuse. 2 vols. Paris, 1865-1877. Vogiie, Melchior de. Syrie centrale: Inscriptions similiques. Paris, 18681877. Vogiie, Melchior de. Melanges d'archeologie orientale. Paris, 1868. OLIVIER MASSON
CE.
Whitcomb, Donald S. "Islamic Glass." In Quseir al-Qadim, 1980: Pre liminary Report, edited by Donald S. Whitcomb and Janet H. John son, pp. 233-241. Malibu, 1982. Important assemblage of Islamic glass from a trading post on the Red Sea. M U R R A Y C. M C C L E L L A N
VOGUE, MELCHIOR DE
(1829-1916), French
Orientalist, first a count and then a marquis, born to a very old family of the Vivarais (central France) and educated in Paris. Following a diplomatic internship, de Vogue became attracted to Oriental studies. His first trip to the Near East, in 1853, resulted in his first book Les eglises de la Terre Sainte (Paris, i860). In 1860-1861, he explored Palmyra and the
VOUNI, site of the only excavated classical palace on Cy prus (35°09' N , 32°47' E). T h e Vouni complex was built on a promontory 268 m (879 ft.) above die sea, 6.5 km (4 mi.) southwest of Soloi, at the beginning of the fifth century B C E . T h e initial construction phase of the palace and its associ ated town was probably undertaken by a Cypriot king who needed headquarters for a garrison. T h e palace was essen tially Near Eastern in plan (Muller, 1932; Maier, 1985), its main apartments were arranged around a colonnaded court, one side of which was reached by a monumental staircase. According to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition excavators (Gjerstad et al., 1937), the two building periods belonging
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to this first phase of the palace are dated from about 500 to 450. There was a temenos complex associated with the pal ace of die first period. Deposits of votive sculptures were found along the staircase leading to the altar court of die temenos. Along the northeast side were ranged rows of lime stone figures, and on the soudiwest side there were only terra-cotta statuettes. Similarly arranged but smaller groups of sculpture were found in other rooms of die temenos. T h e entire complex was defended by a massive fortification wall whose rampart was traced around the entire perimeter of the plateau atop die mountain, and then downward toward the sea, enclosing the settlement within. The ruler of Vouni in the mid-fifth century rearranged the royal apartments. The "second" palace consisted of state apartments (with bathrooms) reached by a monumen tal staircase and large storerooms all constructed around two separate courtyards. The dates of this second phase are be lieved to be around 450-440 to about 380. A temple of Athena was built on the upper terrace of the plateau at the time of the reorganization of the palace. The platform on which the temple stands was cut into the limestone bedrock of the mountain; where there was a dip in the surface it was filled in with limestone chips. This is the same leveling tech nique used at the Lady sanctuary at Aradhippou and in die temenos of the Young Lord at Idalion. The settlement area at Vouni extended down the slopes of the hill toward the sea, with roads traceable to Marion on the west via Limnitis and Soloi to the east. Between the set tlement and the palace, on die northern slopes of the hill, between about 225 and 190 m (738-623 ft.) above sea level, rock-cut tombs contemporary with the second palace period were found. The enhances of these tombs gave directiy onto the slope, maldng the use of a dromos unnecessary. All the tombs were emptied by the time modern excavators came to investigate. Thus the town at Vouni was built in topographic zones. At the lowest level lay the houses, well built of cut stone. Above them was a snip of tombs, and above those was the palace surrounded by small chapels and secondary temenoi. At the top was the sanctuary of Athena. At the beginning of the fourth century the palace was destroyed by fire and not rebuilt, and the settlement went out of existence. BIBLIOGRAPHY Gaber, Pamela. "The Limestone Sculpture of Vouni Region." Medelhavsmuseet Bulletin 16 (1981): 39-46. Gjerstad, Einar. "Further Remarks on die Palace of Vouni." American Journal ofArchaeology-si (i933) 589-598. See die exchange between Mliller and Gjerstad in the same volume (pp. 599-601, 658-659). Gjerstad, Einar, et al. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus, 1927-1931. 4 vols. Stockholm, 19341948. See. volumes 3 (text) and 4.2 (esp. pp. 426ff). Gjerstad, Einar. Ages and Days in Cyprus. Goteborg, 1980. See pages 86-105. :
Hill, George F. A History of Cyprus, vol. 1, To the Conquest by Richard Lion Heart. London, 1940. Karageorghis, Vassos. Cyprus. Geneva, 1968. See pages 170ft. Maier, Franz G. "Factoids in Ancient History: The Case of Fifth-Cen tury Cyprus." Journal, of Hellenic Studies 105 (1985): 32-39. Maier, Franz G. "Palaces of Cypriot Kings." In Cyprus and the East Mediterranean in the Iron Age, edited by Veronica Tatton-Brown, pp. 16-27. London, 1989. Mliller, Valentin. "The Palace of Vouni in Cyprus." American Journal of Archaeology 36 (1932): 408-417. PAMELA GABEK
VOUNOUS, Early Bronze Age site on Cyprus. Standing proud of die coastal plain that runs gently down to the sea from die steep north slopes of the Kyrenia range, Vounous, more accurately, Vounoi, is a hillock in nortiicenttal Cyprus (35°i8'54" N , 33°22'26" E). T h e top of the hill forms a small limestone plateau bounded to the south, east, and west by deep ravines leaving the naturally defined northern slope as a choice burial ground. The reasons for this decision were clearly determined by die soft, homogeneous, easily exca vated quality of the rock and perhaps also die moderate in cline, which ensured proper drainage. Bellapais, with its fine fourteentii-century abbey, is the nearest village, 2 km (1 mi.) to the southwest; hence the site's full name is Bellapais Vounous. The presence of Early Bronze Age burial chambers in the area was first mentioned in 1926 by Einar Gjerstad, who called the site Kasafani Keranienkomi. Extensive looting in this locality was reported to the Department of Antiquities in 1931, and the ensuing excavation of thirty-one tombs that year and another seventeen the following was conducted by Porphyrios Dikaios, curator of the Cyprus Museum. These rock-cut tomb chambers, which are approached via an open-air passage (dromos), were numbered consecutively 1 48 and subsequentiy published by Dikaios in 1940. T h e quantity, quality, and variety (shape and decoration) of pot tery, as well as the copper-base tools, weapons, and orna ments accompanying the single or multiple burials were im pressive. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures applied to pots, in addition to clay models, provided valuable insight into the material culture and customs of the Early and Mid dle Bronze Age. In 1933 Claude F.-A. Schaeffer, representing the National Museums of France, collaborated with Dikaios in the ex cavation of a further thirty tombs, numbered consecutively 49-79, which, apart from a preliminary report in 1936 by Schaeffer, remain unpublished. T h e final excavations at Vounous were sponsored by the British School of Archae ology at Athens and directed by James R, Stewart in 1937. He investigated a further eighty-four tombs, numbered con secutively 80-164, located in Cemeteries A and B, the latter previously dug by Dikaios and Schaeffer. Stewart's report
VOUNOUS published in 1950, was followed in 1962 by a detailed anal ysis of all his finds from Vounous, classified according to the most complex typology ever devised for archaeological ma terial. Since 1974 this seemingly inexhaustible burial ground has suffered from repeated bouts of looting. T o date the greatest number of excavated Cypriot Early Bronze Age tombs with the most varied ceramic assemblage comes from die Vounous cemetery. It has played a central, often controversial, and ambiguous role in any discussion dealing with the development of the period, a situation ex acerbated by the absence of any excavations at the contem porary but elusive settiement(s) expected to exist in the vi cinity. Nevertheless, the cultural material certainly belongs near the beginning of a vigorous artistic tradition that lasted seven hundred years, starting around 2400 B C E . The economic basis for such a conspicuously wealthy community remains obscure. T h e site is not near copper mines or an obvious ttade route for the export of metal and other products, yet the presence of several Levantine and Aegean objects suggests contacts beyond the island's shores. [See also the biographies ofDikaios, Gjerstad, Schaeffer, and Stewart.]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Dikaios, Porphyrios. "The Excavations at Vounous-Bellapais in Cy prus, 1931-1932." Archaeologia 88 (1940): 1 - 1 7 4 . Gjerstad, Einar. Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus. Uppsala, 1926. Merrillees, R. S. "C. F. A. Schaeffer's Excavations at Bellapais-Foimows in 1933." Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus (1988): 6369. Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Missions en Chypre, 1032 a 193s- Paris, 1936. Chapter 3 covers the excavations at Bellapais Vounous. Stewart, Eleanor, and James Stewart. Vounous 1937-38: Field-Report, on the Excavations Sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Ath ens. Skrifter Utgivna av Svenska Institutet i Rom, 14. Lund, 1950. Stewart, James R. "The Early Cypriote Bronze Age." In The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, vol. 4.1 A, The Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus, edited by Porphyrios Dikaios and James R. Stewart, pp. 205-391. Lund, 1962. T o be used in conjunction with the field report published in 1950. Detailed analysis and classification of Stewart's finds from Vounous and all other Early Bronze Age material to which he had access. Swiny, Stuart. "From Round House to Duplex: A Re-Assessment of Prehistoric Cypriot Bronze Age Society." In Early Society in Cyprus, edited by Edgar Peltenburg, pp. 14-31. Edinburgh, 1989. Recent discussion of the role of Bellapais Vounous in tire development of the Cypriot Early and Middle Bronze Age. STUART
SWINY
w WADI For toponyms beginning with this element, see under latter part of name.
WALL PAINTINGS. In the ancient Near East, wall painting was one of the most widespread and important ar tistic media. Although less able to withstand the ravages of time than other art forms, it is widely attested among the sedentary cultures of western Asia in many periods and con texts—as private domestic decoration, on official religious and palatial buildings, and eventually in tombs as well. Es sentially as old as architecture itself, die popularity of wall painting depended not only on its inherent potential for rich, colorful effect on any scale, but also on the tractable and relatively inexpensive nature of the technique. Generally, the paint consisted of earthen pigments suspended in a wa ter medium and applied to a dry plastered (mud, lime, or gypsum) surface. As such it could easily reproduce the scale and effect of other, more costiy media, such as monumental relief or textiles. During the Neolithic period (ninth-sixth millennia), wall painting emerged initially as monochrome embellishment at sites across the Levant, Anatolia, and Iran; it remained cur rent in the Near East for millennia. T h e first polychrome wall paintings were simple zigzags patterns, although more elaborate geometric compositions evolved fairly rapidly in the later Neolithic in the centuries before and after 6000 B C E . The wall paintings from Catal Hoyiik in Anatolia include multicolored compositions of triangles and lozenges orga nized as larger panels; they have been dubbed the Kilim style because of their similarity to die patterns in the woven rugs and wall hangings still produced in modern Turkey. By die early sixth millennium, the painters of C a l Hoyiik had de veloped fairly complex figural compositions: hunting scenes, large birds of prey in flight above schematic headless hu mans (see figure 1 ) , and the first known landscape, with a volcano. While the imagery of tiiese paintings seems to have focused on the natural environment and die role of hunting in die protourban economy, their significance and the func tion of the buildings they decorated (possibly religious) re main uncertain. [See Catal Hoyiik.] T h e wall paintings in the Late Neolithic houses at Tell Bouqras and U m m Daa t
baghiyeh in Syria suggest that the animal and geometric rep ertory at Catal Hoyuk was current over a broader area of the Near East tiien. [See Bouqras.] In the ensuing Chalco lithic and Early Bronze Ages (fifth-fourth millennia), geo metric ornament became the dominant mode of painted wall decoration in Anatolia, Iran, the Levant, and Syria (see fig ure 2). Notable exceptions are the mid-fourth-millennium enigmatic paintings from Teleilat el-Ghassul in Jordan: in one highly stylized, masklike human faces and animals grouped around a large starlike emblem and in others, a leaping tiger and a group of standing and seated human fig ures. [See Teleilat el-Ghassul.] What is known of wall painting in Mesopotamia begins with Sumerian culture in the fourth millennium, primarily in the Protoliterate period (3500-3000 B C E ) , in which the development of monumental religious architecture stimu lated the production of large-scale programs of wall paint ing. T h e Late Protoliterate temple at Tell 'Uqair continued the monochrome treatment and rectilinear ornament that had long been current in wall painting across western Asia. At 'Uqair, however, the geometric repertoire was enriched by files or pairs of human figures (divinities?) and animals that would soon come to typify Sumerian, or Mesopota mian, glyptic art and sculpture. T h e private domestic wall painting of this and later periods retained die simpler mono chrome or geometric format. T h e wall painting of the suc ceeding Early Dynastic era, and indeed of the entire third millennium, is poorly documented. T h e only surviving ex amples are the fragments of bulls and human figures from die Temple of Inanna at Nippur, and the related imagery in the Temple of Ninhursag at Mari (Tell Hariri). Because the architecture of the Akkadian period is virtually unknown, no wall paintings of this era have yet been discovered. Even the well-attested Neo-Sumerian monuments of the late third millennium have so far failed to produce any remains of wall painting. The rich array of paintings from the Amorite palace at Mari (Tell Hariri), datable to the Old Babylonian period in the nineteenth or eighteenth century B C E , constitutes the ear liest known Near Eastern program of painted decoration from a royal residence. T h e Mari paintings display various scenes of ceremonial (especially worship or presentation)
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imagery, asserting the ruler's privileged claim to divine guid ance and support, along with images of abundant water and vegetation, symbolizing agricultural prosperity (see figure 3). Since diey conform only generally to the iconographic traditions of earlier Akkadian or Sumerian and contempo rary Old Babylonian sculpture, the Mari paintings help to form some notion of the corresponding Mesopotamian wall painting of the later third millennium. [See Mari.] While the Mari paintings demonstrate the impact of Sumero-Babylonian art on the Semitic cultures at the periph ery of Mesopotamia, tire landscape in the wall paintings of the level VII palace at Alalakh (Tell 'Atchana, eighteenth century B C E ) , near the North Syrian coast, reflects the pic torial themes and sinuous dynamism of Minoan art. Also of Minoan inspiration are the painted imitations of stone wall orthostats and timber lacing in the level VII palace and the later second-millennium house 39/A of level IV at Alalakh, and in the palace at Qatna, somewhat farther south. [See Alalakh; Minoans.] T h e presence of Minoan ornamental motifs and Active stonework in some of the Mari paintings also shows that the Syrian interior was not immune to such influence from the west at an early time. In the same way, the paintings of the Mitannian governor's palace at Nuzi betray the impact of Levantine traditions farther into Mes opotamia later, in the fifteenth century B C E . [See Nuzi.] There, the stylized, voluted sacred trees inserted amid a tex tilelike geometric polychrome framework reflect the fertility imagery of contemporary Syrian, or Canaanite, art; at the
same time, die stylized bull heads and Hatiior masks reflect tire impact of Egypt on tire Levant. T h e wall paintings of the Middle Assyrian ldng Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208 B C E ) at his palace in Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta (Tulul al-'Aqir) near Assur, adapt, in their turn, the sort of stylized trees and framework of the Nuzi paintings; they document further the assimilation of Levantine precedent that provided the basis for the sacred tree imagery of Neo-Assyrian art during tire first millennium B C E . In contrast, the Late Kassite period paintings (twelfth century B C E ) from tire Babylonian palace at Dur Kurigalzu fAqar Quf) represent a more local, M e sopotamian tradition; these consist of files of male figures, possibly officials, painted along the dados of deep doorways. Although the style is closely related to contemporary Kassite relief sculpture, the processional imagery also prefigures one of tlie major themes of later Assyrian and Persian art. Wall painting continued to play a leading role in Near Eastern palatial decoration of the first millennium B C E . The finds from Nimrud (Kalah), Khorsabad, and Til Barsip in dicate that such decoration was a standard feature of NeoAssyrian palaces. T h e painting from residence K at Khor sabad (Dur Sharrukin, 722-705 B C E ) , where the king and an attendant reverently confront a standing deity, recalls the imagery of the Mari paintings a millennium earlier. T h e As syrian taste for multiple, superimposed rows of stylized lo tuses, palmettes, and otiier plants in the paintings from Khorsabad, Til Barsip, Nimrud, and Tell Sheikh Hamad also recalls the Middle Assyrian paintings of Tukulti-Nin-
WALL PAINTINGS urta I or those from Mitannian Nuzi. T h e extensive series of paintings from the provincial Assyrian palace at Til Bar sip in Syria, datable to the ninth and eighth centuries B C E , closely parallels the kingly themes of court ceremony, mili tary conquest, and hunting current in the monumental wall relief of Neo-Assyrian royal palaces (see figure 4). T h e Til Barsip paintings also provide important evidence for the polychromy of the corresponding wall reliefs that were orig inally painted. Above all, they suggest the significant role that monumental wall painting may have played in the de velopment of such pictorial architectual relief in Near East ern art of die first millennium B C E . T h e paintings at Tell Sheikh Hamad demonstrate die impact of palatial decora tion on the houses of the wealthy elite. What is known of
the painted embellishment of religious buildings at this time is unfortunately only fragmentary. [See Nimrud; Khorsabad; Til Barsip; Sheikh Hamad, Tell.] In contrast to die rather slim and isolated evidence for die second millennium B C E in Anatolia, first-millennium B C E sites in the area are relatively rich in remains of wall paint ings, especially to the east, in the Urartian kingdom of the Van region during the eighth and seventh centuries B C E . De spite their distinctive, local style, the paintings of divinities from the temple at Arin-Berd and the stylized floral frieze from the palace at Altintepe reveal the impact of Neo-As syrian wall painting on that of Urartu. [See Urartu.] Egyptianizing features in the hunt scene from the palace at ArinBerd, however, suggest connections with contemporary
Figure 2. Paintings, building IV, Arslantepe. End of the fourth millennium (Courtesy M. Frangipane)
WALL PAINTINGS.
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North Syrian, or Phoenician, art. A strong egyptianizing tendency is also evident in the fragmentary wall painting of a seated female figure at Horvat Teiman in southern Israel, the only early first-millennium site in the Levant tiiat has so far produced any wall painting. The style reflects not only proximity to Egypt, but the Egyptian orientation of the Ca naanite and Phoenician art that exerted a formative impact on the art of the Israelite kingdom. The first millennium B C E also witnessed a marked up swing in the currency of glazed ceramic brick and tile, which provided a more durable form of wall painting. Some were small-scale, with one or more figures or ornamental motives depicted per tile, but the technique could also be used for large-scale compositions consisting of many bricks. Even tually, the process was applied to brick relief sculpture as well. The Assyrians of the first millennium preferred the more painterly flat glazed tiles, but in Babylonia, and farther east, in neighboring Elam in southwest Iran, the flat variety was often used alongside polychrome glazed ceramic relief. The best-known monuments of this type are the monumen tal floral and animal compositions on the Ishtar Gate and
the facade of the throne room at Babylon, constructed by Nebuchadrezzar II in the early sixth century B C E . In keeping with local Elamite tradition, the Persians of the Achaemenid period (559-332 BCE) retained the use of both flat and relief polychrome glazed brick. Decoration of this type figured especially prominently in the royal palace at Susa, the Per sian capital, where the technique was used to depict the types of imagery executed in stone relief at the palace of Persepolis: figures of the ldng, composite animal guardians, and processions of soldiers and attendants. Remains of true wall painting, however, are exceedingly rare in Achaemenid Persia. Fragmentary remains from die palace of Artaxerxes II at Susa nevertheless indicate that like the Assyrians before them, die Persians too had an official tradition of wall paint ing that closely paralleled the themes and composition of contemporary architectural sculpture. T h e late sixth and early fifth-century B C E tomb paintings discovered in Lycia in Anatolia, at the western extreme of the Persian Empire, are essentially Greek in style or workmanship and local in function, although the ones at Karaburun depict Persian rit ual and costume. [See Babylon; Lycia; Persepolis; Susa.]
WALL PAINTINGS The conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great (332-323 B C E ) and the consequent imposition of Greek political, religious, and material cultural standards greatly altered artistic development in the Near East for cen turies to come. T h e peoples of the more westerly and coastal regions of Anatolia had long before adopted die outward forms of Greek art, and during the Hellenistic period a sim ilar situation developed under the Seleucid monarchy in much of Syria and the Levant. Even in Mesopotamia and Iran, which eventually shook off Greek political control with the advent of the new Iranian dynasty of tire Parthians (171 BCE-249 C E ) , native Asiatic artistic traditions continued to coexist in fluid interaction with imported Greek concep tions. Although the evidence is fragmentary, wall painting figured prominently in the official buildings and wealthy vil las of die Seleucid period. T h e remains of paintings from Assur, tire palace at Hatra, and central Asiatic sites such as Toprak-Kala and Kaltchayan demonstrate that the Parthi ans too made ample use of this medium. In the first- or second-century C E paintings at Kuh-i-Khwaja in eastern Iran, Greek themes and styles were mixed with poses and costume derived from central Asiatic art. Farther west, among the Semitic peoples at the frontier of tire Roman Em pire, the already synthetic Parthian artistic traditions inter acted with Greco-Roman artistic concepts, a process per haps best exemplified in the various wall paintings from tire Roman caravan town of Dura-Europos. T h e votive paint ings from the temples of Bel and Zeus Theos, and the tem ple of the Palmyrene gods, combine a strong emphasis on frontal pose, costume, and stylistic abstraction associated with Parthian art, alongside details of dress, military regalia, and winged victories of Greco-Roman derivation. A similar syncretism of Greco-Roman and hellenized Iranian artistic alternatives typifies the most famous of the Dura wall paint ings—an extensive assortment of scenes from the Hebrew Bible produced for die synagogue shortly before the town was destroyed in 256 C E . These paintings constitute a rare exception to the ban on images customary for Jewish reli
gious art, and they attest to the greater artistic flexibility that Jewish communities may have assumed in the mixed cul tural environment of this region. Nevertheless, at times, the cultural balance could tilt decidedly: the New Testament imagery of die paintings from the Christian baptistery at Dura seem to relate more directiy to Greco-Roman proto types from the West, while the equestrian hunting and ban queting scenes in the mithraeum and house M7 reflect a more Parthian, or Iranian, taste. Farther west, in the wall paintings in the tomb at Tyre, the style, format, and mytho logical subject matter were entirely Roman. The winged vic tories and mythic subjects painted in the T o m b of tire Three Brothers at Palmyra also attests to a more overtly GrecoRoman taste sometimes adopted among the local Syrian peoples. [See Dura-Europos; Palmyra; Parthians; Tyre.] This situation continued to obtain down to the end of antiquity. Classical standards prevailed in the Roman or Early Byzantine provinces of Asia Minor and the Levant, but tailed off toward Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia. Across the Euphrates River, under the rule of the Sasanian Persian dynasty that succeeded the Parthians (249-651 C E ) , a hellenized Iranian art remained broadly current across much of the Near East and was stimulated periodically by contacts with central Asiatic art, and even from the hellen ized art of northern India. Sasanian wall painting has only rarely been preserved, but Roman literary sources attest to its importance in palatial decoration. [See Sasanians.] The third-fourth-century examples from Susa are still stylisti cally related to those from Kuh-i-Khwaja, just as they recall the Parthian hunting imagery of paintings at Dura-Europos. With the emergence of die Arab Empire and die end of Late Roman or Byzantine political authority in Syria and the Le vant during the seventh century C E , tire Asiatic transfor mation of Greco-Roman themes and styles also assumed a new momentum and vitality in tire nascent art of Islam. De spite the Islamic ban, figural wall painting remained a sig nificant medium for the secular sphere in wealthy private residences like die early Umayyad pleasure villas at Qusayr
Figure 4. Painting, room 27, Assyrian palace, TilBarsip. (After F . Thureau-Dangin and M. Durand, Til-Barsib, Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, vol. 23, 1956, pi. 530) WALL PAINTINGS.
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service was spent in Soutii Africa, where he took part in the relief of Ladysmith. Pie served briefly as chief commissioner of tite London Metropolitan Police (1886-1888) and at the time of his retirement was colonel commandant of the Brit ish Royal Engineers (1905). In 1867 Warren was commissioned by the Palestine Ex ploration Fund (PEF) to study the features of Jerusalem's historic structures. Although his excavations of the south and southeastern walls of the Old City have been dismissed by some (Roger Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology, Cambridge, 1991) because they failed to resolve the area's BIBLIOGRAPHY formidable topographical questions, this is to ignore the Astrid Nunn, Die Wandmalerei und dergtasierte Wandschmuck im Al wider significance of Warren's work. His investigations, ien Orient (Leiden and New York, 1988), is now the most thorough which preceded the development of stratigraphic excava and inclusive treatment of wall painting and glazed brick in the ancient tion, are still noteworthy because of the careful plans and Near East preceding Alexander's conquest, with complete references diagrams he provided, achieved by exploring, under ex to die earlier literature. This now supersedes Anton Moortgat, Alt-vortraordinarily arduous and dangerous physical conditions, derasiatische Malerei (Berlin, 1959), which is in any case difficult to much of underground Jerusalem. These were published obtain. For Anatolian wall painting of the Neolithic period, see Brinna Otto, Geometrische Ornamente auf anatolischer Keramik: Symmetrienfru-with the Jerusalem volume (London, 1 8 8 4 ) he edited with hester Schnmckformen in Nahen Osten und inAgdis (Mainz, 1976), which Claude R. Conder. is not cited in Nunn. By mapping rock contours, Warren was able to establish, For Greco-Roman painting, see Machteld Mellink, "Local Phrygian for the first time, tite relationship of tite walls of tite Haram and Greek Traits in Northern Lycia," Revue archeologique (1976), pt. 1, pp. 21-34. The Roman painting of the eastern provinces is treated esh-Sharif on the Temple Mount to the rock surface. Pie in Roger Ling, Roman Painting, pp. 178-183 (Cambridge and New also examined the waterworks deriving from the Gihon York, 1991). For the Early Islamic paintings, see Oleg Grabar, The Spring and was the first to go through the Siloam Tunnel Formation of Islamic Art, pp. 75-103, 139-187, rev. and enl. ed. (New on tite city's southeastern hill. Haven, 1987); and Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting (Geneva, Before leaving Palestine in 1870, Warren explored the 1977). No overall synthetic study is available for the Near Eastern wall painting of the Hellenistic, Parthian, and Sasanian periods. See the rel southern part of tite country and the area east of the Jordan evant sections of the following works: River. His major publications include Recovery of Jerusalem (with Charles W. Wilson, London, 1 8 7 1 ) , Underground Je Colledge, Malcolm A. R. Parthian Art. Ithaca, N.Y., 1977. See pages 80-121, 128-144. rusalem (London, 1876), and The Temple and the Tomb Colledge, Malcolm A. R. The Parthian Period. Leiden, 1986. See pages (London, 1880), in which he refuted the theories of the ar 31, 42-45. chitectural writer James Fergusson ( 1 8 0 8 - 1 8 8 6 ) , author of Ghirshman, Roman. Persian Art, 249 B.C.-A.D. 651: The Parthian and a contentious pamphlet on tite Holy Sepulcher and other Sassanian Dynasties. New York, 1962. See pages 41-50, 141-147, works about Jerusalem. Warren was distinguished as a 182-183. Knight Grand Cross of St. Michael and St. George, a Gutmann, Joseph. "The Dura-Europos Synagogue Paintings: The State of Research." In The Synagogue in Late Antiquity, edited by Knight Commander of Order of the Bath, and a fellow of Lee I. Levine, pp. 61-72. Philadelphia, 1987. the Royal Society. His involvement in Palestine continued Gutmann, Joseph. The Dura-Europos Synagogue: A Re-Evaluation, for sixty years. He joined the committee of the P E F in 1 8 7 1 1032-1992. Atlanta, 1992. and remained a member until his death. Perkins, Ann. The Art of Dura-Europos. Oxford, 1973. See pages 3 3 -
'Amra in Jordan and Qasr al-Hayr West in Syria. [See Qusayr 'Antra; Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi.] T h e paintings adapted the courtly imagery and bathing scenes popular in Late Roman and Sasanian art. Such painting was still cur rent in the ninth century 'Abbasid palace at Samarra in Iraq. However, it was in the domain of arabesque and geometric ornament, in the more durable medium of glazed tile, that the old Near Eastern tradition of wall painting found its full est expression under Islam. [See Samaria, article on Islamic Period.]
69, 114-126. [See also Jerusalem; Palestine Exploration Fund; and the Schlumberger, Daniel. L'Orient hellenise. L'Art grce et ses heritiers dans biography of Conder.] I'Asie non medilerraneenne. Paris, 1970. See pages 56-59, 69, 88, 103III. BIBLIOGRAPHY Weitzmann, Kurt, and Flerbert O. Kessler. The Frescoes of the Dura No recent biography of Warren has been written. A brief resume of Synagogue and Christian Art. Washington, D.C., 1990. his life is given in The Concise National Dictionary of Biography, vol. 2, D A V I D CASTRIOTA pp. 701-702 (Oxford, 1975). Information on Warren is also available in the Archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund, London.
WARFARE. See Weapons and Warfare.
WARREN, CHARLES (1840-1927), renowned ex cavator of Jerusalem's Temple Mount and southeastern hill (1867-1870). Most of General Sir Charles Warren's military
Conder, Claude R., and Charles Warren. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar chaeology, vol. 5, Jerusalem. London, 1884. Kenyon, Kathleen M. Digging Up Jerusalem. London, 1974. See pages 6-19. "Sir Charles Warren," Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund (April 1927): 64-66.
WATER TUNNELS Warren, Charles, and Charles W. Wilson. Recovery oj Jerusalem. Lon don, 1871. Warren, Charles. Underground Jerusalem. London, 1876. Warren, Charles. The Temple and the Tomb. London, 1880. Williams, Watkin W. The Life of General Sir Charles Warren. Oxford, 1941. YOLANDE HODSON
WAR SCROLL. One of several scrolls found in Cave 1 at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, die War Scroll ( i Q M ) was acquired by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and first published (postiiumously) by Eliezer D . Sukenik in 1955; two rather small and inconsequential fragments appeared in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (vol. 1, pp. 1 3 5 - 1 3 6 ) . T h e fullest edition to date is that of Yigael Yadin, which includes an extensive inttoduction. It contains nineteen columns that describe a war sometimes defined as taldng place between die "children of light" and the "children of darkness" (aided by the "Kittim") but sometimes between Israel and the Gentiles. This and otiier variations in language and ideology suggest a composite document", whose sources have never theless been organized in a fairly coherent way. Column 1 summarizes the entire war, opening with a bat tle between the children of light and the children of dark ness—the latter being nations living in Palestine or on its borders (the traditional biblical enemies of Israel—Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Philistia) and in league with the Kittim, who are present in Syria and Egypt and whose "domina tion" is tiiereby ended. Columns 2-9 deal in more detail with subsequent battles between the twelve tribes of Israel and die nations of the world (based on Gn. 10). They involve six-year campaigns interspersed with sabbatical years, mak ing a total of forty years of combat, including the initial bat tle. Column 2 opens with the restoration of the Temple cult in Jerusalem (in the seventh year of the war, after the defeat of die Kittim?). Columns 3-9 describe the inscriptions on trumpets and banners, the lengths of banners, battle arrays and weaponry, the ages of participants, and, finally, military maneuvers. Columns 1 0 - 1 4 comprise a variegated collec tion of liturgical pieces. Columns 1 5 - 1 9 describe in detail a seven-stage battle between the children of light and the chil dren of darkness, directed by priests, assisted by heavenly hosts, and finally won by direct divine intervention (prob ably the one also described in col. 1 ) . T h e scroll thus combines a nationalistic scheme of world conquest by Israel with a seven-stage dualistic confrontation between the forces of light and darkness. T h e balance be tween fantasy and reality is precarious: the dualistic battle proceeds as if minutely choreographed; the nationalistic sec tions (cols. 2-9) contain some realistic data, such as the use of guerrilla tactics and lightly armed troops. Its genre has recently been compared with Hellenistic and Roman mili tary manuals. It is certainly not an apocalypse. Its descrip tions of the weaponry and tactics led Yigael Yadin to posit
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an imperial Roman date for it—and certainly most scholars see die Kittim in i Q M as the Romans. T h e scroll might be seeldng to converge both dualistic and nationalistic eschatological schemes in a struggle against Roman domination. The manuscript probably dates to the late first century B C E or tlie first half of the first century C E . Fragments found in Cave 4 at Qumran contain material similar to i Q M , which has led to attempts to construct an "original" War Scroll or to see 4QM as an abbreviated edi tion. Given the evidence of die sources in i Q M , it may be more likely that a variety of materials was in circulation con cerning a possible future war, an idea rooted perhaps in the independent army constituted under the Hasmoneans. [See also Dead Sea Scrolls.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Baillet, Maurice. Qumran grolte 4, vol. 3, 4Q482-4Q52Q. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 7. Oxford, 1982. See pages 45-54 and 6972 for, according to Baillet, fragments of a shorter recension of the War Scroll (4QM"^ ). Barthelemy, Dominique, and J. T . Milik. Qumran Cave 1. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 1. Oxford, 1955. Davies, Philip R. iQM, the War Scroll from Qumran: lis Structure and History. Rome, 1977. Detailed study of the sources and composition of iQM. Duhaime, Jean. "The War Scroll from Qumran and the Greco-Roman Tactical Treatises." Revue de Qumran 13.1-4 (1988): 133-151. Full est treatment of the genre of tQM. Yadin, Yigael, ed. The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. Translated by Batya Rabin and Chaim Rabin. Ox ford, 1962. Excellent introduction, translation, and commentary. [?I
PHILIP R. DAVIES
WATER TUNNELS. In the arid climate of die ancient Near East, the need for water was always fundamental and its proximity dictated the location of early settlement sites. Eventually, surface waters along rivers and lakes were ma nipulated into complex irrigation systems, rainwater was husbanded in storage reservoirs and cisterns, and under ground sources, marked by oases and springs, were tapped by wells. Water sources for agrarian use—crop irrigation and ani mal husbandry—were normally on the outskirts of a settle ment site. However, as large population centers developed, their walled defenses made external access not only incon venient, but a fatal weakness when under siege. Access via closed tunnel systems became an adaptation to the need for an intramural water supply. Since die late nineteenth century, archaeologists working in Palestine have identified and explored such systems, most notably at Jerusalem, Gibeon, Megiddo, Gezer, and Hazor. At the first three, the systems exploited natural springs lo cated on the slopes of their lower tell. These springs were created by natural karst-forming processes: the migration of groundwater through joints and bedding planes dissolves
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and forms channels in the limestone bedrock. Interruptions in the bedding planes at fault lines or erosion at valley lo cations produces exposures at which water flows freely or settles into pools, or catchments. T h e caves and pools at the Gihon Spring at the foot of Mt. Ophel in Jerusalem are clas sic expressions of this process. The various initiatives taken to secure springs and to ac cess their waters from within a city are best illustrated at Megiddo, where three historical stages are evident. The first, prior to the tenth century B C E , involved only protecting the spring chamber by covering it and constructing a stairway access that could be blocked and masked under siege. A more ambitious second stage, consttucted during the reign of King Solomon in the tenth century B C E , included a cam ouflaged gallery running through and below the city wall, connected to a long, covered stairway that lead downslope to meet the earlier entry to the spring chamber. In the ninth century B C E , a third-stage adaptation was engineered: a wide shaft, 35 m ( 1 1 5 ft.) deep, was sunk inside the city; from its base, a lateral tunnel 61 m (200 ft.) long was hewn to the spring chamber. The tunnel was pitched slightly downward, so that the water from the spring flowed to a storage sump at the base of the shaft. Water could be drawn from there by descending a long staircase that spiraled down the outer walls of the shaft opening. A slightly earlier (twelfth century B C E ) example of the sec ond-stage, covered-stairway type is found at Tell esSa'idiyeh (biblical Zarethan), and intramural shafts and tun nels similar to the Megiddo stage-three constructions are found at Gezer and Hazor. However, at the latter two sites, tire systems lead to internal subterranean pools, not to ex ternal springs. Their builders tapped waters deep in bed rock, a significant innovation. The ambitious scale of these shaft-and-tunnel excavations suggests that the engineers did not proceed by chance. A key to their confidence in finding subterranean water may be seen at Gibeon (Ar., el-Jib). Gibeon's systems offer additional parallels to each of the three Megiddo stages, but with a significant difference in the third stage. Although, as at Megiddo, a tunnel was cut from the spring some 33.5 m ( 1 1 0 ft.) in the direction of the in ternal shaft, it ended some 4.6 m (15 ft.) away from the shaft base. The connection most likely was not completed be cause a feeding aquifer had already been tapped at the bot tom of tire shaft. If Gibeon's third-stage shaft system is in deed the "Pool of Gibeon" in 2 Samuel 1 3 - 1 7 , it would have been built before about 990 B C E and would thus be the ear liest of the known and datable open-shaft/tunnel structures. The most elaborate and complex of these early systems is on ancient Jerusalem's southeastern hill below the City of David. Its main elements were identified by explorers in tire nineteenth century. In 1838 Edward Robinson discovered the 533 m (1,750 ft) long Siloam Tunnel (Hezeldah's T u n nel) that carries water from the Gihon Spring on the east to the Siloam Pool on the southwest; in 1867 Sir Charles War
ren investigated a vertical shaft (Warren's Shaft) leading up from one of the lower spring and tunnel chambers to a more horizontal ramp tunnel that enters the city; and in 1886 Con rad Schick explored an irrigation tunnel in the bedrock (the Siloam Channel) that leads south from the spring and has windowlike openings all along die eastern ridge. In the 1980s, the geological study carried out by Yigal Shiloh and his team showed that the development of each of these systems involved exploitation of natural karst fea tures in the bedrock. Thus, the vertical shaft and the ramp tunnel above it were originally parts of a natural dissolution channel that was further shaped and expanded to provide access to the Gihon's waters from within the city walls. Based on its identification with the sinnor ("gutter" or "pipe") mentioned the story of David's conquest of the city in 2 Samuel 5:6-10, early explorers referred to it as the Jebusite Shaft. It was accordingly dated pre-Davidic, before 1000 B C E . Although it is reasonable to assume tiiat elements of the natural shaft and channel were present in David's time, the construction date for the more developed system cannot be ascertained on present evidence. However, the paleography of an inscription found in the Siloam Tunnel dates its construction securely to about 705 B C E , in the reign of Hezeldah. [See Siloam Tunnel Inscriptions.] Moreover, if the Siloam Channel is the "upper outlet of the waters of Gihon" that Hezeldah closed to direct waters west, as re corded in 2 Chronicles 32:30, a pro quern date for the con struction and use of tiiat feature is also established. [See also Cisterns; Gezer; Gibeon; Hazor; Jerusalem; M e giddo; and Pools.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cole, Dan P. "How Water Tunnels Worked." Biblical Archaeology Re view 6.2 (March-April 1980): 8-29. Gill, Dan. "Subterranean Waterworks of Biblical Jerusalem: Adapta tion of a Karst System." Science 254 (1991): 1467-1471. Issar, Arie. "The Evolution of the Ancient Water Supply System in die Region of Jerusalem." Israel Exploration Journal 26.2-3 (1976): 130136. Lamon, Robert S. The Megiddo Water System. Chicago, 1935. Pritchard, James B. The Water System of Gibeon. Philadelphia, 1961. Shiloh, Yigal. "The Rediscovery of Warren's Shaft." Biblical Archae ology Review 7.4 (July-August 1981): 24-39. Wilkinson, John. "Ancient Jerusalem: Its Water Supply and Popula tion." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 106 (January-June 1974): 3 3 5i. JOE D .
SEGER
WATZINGER, CARL (1877-1948), art historian and archaeologist, whose main research interest was in Greek art in the ancient Near East. Watzinger was born in Darmstadt, Germany. As a student he was awarded a fellowship (1901) to study at the German Institute in Athens. In 1903 the Ger man Oriental Society commissioned him to publish wooden sarcophagi that had been excavated at Abu Sir in Egypt. T h e
WAWIYAT, TELL ELproduct of his research was Griechische Holzsarkophage aus der Zeit Alexanders des Grossen (1905). He became a lecturer at Humbolt University in Berlin (1904-1905) and was a pro fessor at die universities of Rostock (1906-1909), Giessen (1909-1916), and Tubingen (1916-1948). Watzinger's archaeological work in die Near East began during World War I. He and Karl Wulzinger, the Byzantinist, worked with Theodor Wiegand, who had been ap pointed to lead extensive expeditions to Turkey, Syria, and Palestine. During this period, Watzinger worked at Jericho and Megiddo, two of the key sites in Palestine. T h e archae ological results of tiiese expeditions were published as Jeri cho: Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen ( 1 9 1 3 ) , by Ernst Sellin and Watzinger, and Tell el-Mutesellim, by Gottlieb Schu macher and Watzinger (1908-1929). Although excavation techniques were not fully developed at the time, the results of Watzinger's work were well published and remain useful research tools. Perhaps the best overview of Watzinger's many accomplishments in the fields of art history and ar chaeology appears in his biography of Wiegand (1944).
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sel, and Bonnie L. Wisthoff. T h e project was sponsored by the University of Arizona, in conjunction with the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and the American Schools of Oriental Research. William G. Dever was archaeological adviser to the excavation. Thir teen 6 X 6 squares, revealing six strata of occupation, were excavated, twelve of them in the eastern sector of the tel. Archaeological remains dating to the Iron Age were found 20 cm below the surface. Middle B r o n z e Age II—III. The earliest period uncov ered at die site, discounting several sherds from the Chal colithic and Early Bronze Ages, was the Middle Bronze Age II—III (seventeenth-sixteenth centuries B C E ) . The remains of stratum VI were limited to two child jar burials dated to MB III. One contained the bodies of two children, aged five and tiiree, while die other contained an infant who died before reaching six months of age. T h e pottery placed within these two burial jars was most elegant in form. L a t e B r o n z e Age. No architectural remains from straU i m V, the Late Bronze Age I (fifteenth century B C E ) , have been uncovered at Tell el-Wawiyat. T h e limited ceramic [See also Jericho; Megiddo; and the biographies of Schu repertoire associated with the stratum is best seen as reflect macher and Sellin.] ing the end of the Middle Bronze Age ttadition. BIBLIOGRAPHY T h e most common find attributed to stratum IV, the Late Bronze Age II (fourteenth-thirteentii centuries B C E ) , was ce Schumacher, Gottlieb, and Carl Watzinger. Tell el-Mutesellim: Bericht uber die 1003-190$. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1908-1929. ramic vessels. Unexpectedly, there was a great deal of im Sellin, Ernst, and Carl Watzinger. Jericho: Die Ergebnisse der Ausgra ported pottery, attesting to Tell el-Wawiyat's wealth and its bungen. Leipzig, 1913. cosmopolitan character during this period: most was Cyp Watzinger, Carl. Griechische Holzsarkophage aus der Zeit Alexanders des riot, including White-Slip milk bowls and vessels in BaseGrossen. Leipzig, 1905. ring I and II, and Monochrome, White-Painted, and WhiteWatzinger, Carl, and Heinrich Kohl. Antike Synagogen in Galilaea. Shaved wares. A limited amount of Mycenaean pottery and Leipzig, 1916. Watzinger, Carl, and Karl Wulzinger. Damaskus: Die antike Sladt. Ber one Minoan sherd were also found. Included among the ves lin and Leipzig, 1921. sels produced locally for domestic use was the typical range Watzinger, Carl, and Karl Wulzinger. Damaskus: Die islamische Stadt. of cooking pots, storejars, and bichrome kraters. Berlin, 1924. A simple ceramic figurine showing a mother embracing Watzinger, Carl. Denkmdler Palastinas. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1933-1935. her child was among die artifactual remains of the period. Watzinger, Carl. Theodor Weigand: Ein deutscher Archaologe, 1864-1936. Munich, 1944. One building, originally constructed in LB II, but better THOMAS A. HOLLAND known from the Iron Age IA, provides almost the full extent of the architectural evidence from this period. The proximity of Tell el-Wawiyat to several other settle WAWIYAT, TELL EL-, site located in the Bethments, including the large city of Hinnatuni (modern Tel Netofa Valley in Israel's Lower Galilee, some 12 Ion (7 mi.) Hannaton) and the smaller Tel Qarnei-Hittin, as well as its north of Nazareth (map reference 178 X 244). T h e mound, wide range of imported wares, elucidates the nature of the one acre in diameter, rises above the valley floor to a max LB II settlement. This hamlet was likely a way station under imum height of 3.75 m. T h e settlement's original name is the control of Hinnatuni, supplying food and lodging to unknown. On the basis of a biblical passage (Jos. 1 9 : 1 3 - 1 4 ) , travelers and traders crossing the Lower Galilee. F.-M. Abel (Geographie de la Palestine, Chicago, 1938) sug I r o n Age. Two stratum III (Iron Age IA, late thirteenthgested tiiat die original name of Tell el-Wawiyat was Neah, twelfth, centuries B C E ) buildings separated by spacious open a settlement within die territory of the tribe of Zebulon. U n areas have been excavated. A large building in squares M fortunately, the modern name of the site (Ar., Tell el-Wa N in the northwestern quadrant of the excavated area was wiyat; Heb.j Tel Vavit), provides no assistance in securing comprised of two main rooms and several smaller chambers. this identification. That this building was used for domestic activities is attested to by its assemblage of storejars, cooking pots, baking trays, In 1986 and 1987 two seasons of excavation took place at and stands found with flint blades, basalt and limestone the site under the direction of Beth Alpert Nakliai, J. P. Des-
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mortars, grinding stones and pestles, and worked-bone awls and needles. The building complex in squares K - L in the southeastern quadrant of the excavated area was originally consttucted in LB II and remained in use in Iron IA. Its main room con tained an unusual assemblage: a basalt and limestone jar stand, a stone column base, a ceramic oven, and hewn and plastered stone blocks. The partially articulated bones of a cow lay on the floor in a corner alcove. In another room a very large stone bin set into tire floor was surrounded by a double wall. Among the artifactual remains were a spear head, a steatite jewelry mold, a delicate basalt tripod, a bro ken Astarte figurine, and remnants of gold leaf. T h e K - L building complex, with these unusual objects suggestive of elite status, had a specialized, possibly cultic function. That the Iron IA site evolved from its LB II predecessor is apparent in the ceramic and architectural continuity be tween the two periods. While Iron IA Tell el-Wawiyat was a farming hamlet, those living there led socially and econom ically complex lives. In stratum II (Iron Age IB, eleventh century B C E ) , both stratum III buildings were modified: numerous small walls subdivided their spacious rooms. It seems, then, that in Iron IB, squatters, possibly early Israelites, reoccupied the aban doned Iron IA Canaanite village.
stone wall preserved to a height of 7 m which boasted an internal tower preserved to a height of 9 m. [See Jericho.] Fortifications, which may be taken as evidence for the practice of warfare, appeared as early as about 4300 B C E at Mersin, in Cilicia, where a solid wall with projecting sections and simple interval towers was integrated into a ring of houses constructed on the wall's interior face. [See Cilicia.] T h e system featured a simple straight gate passage, flanked by towers. By 3000 B C E , the city of Uruk in southern Mes opotamia was surrounded by a fortification wall about 9.5 km (6 mi.) long, built, according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, by Gilgamesh himself. [See Uruk-Warka.] Excavations have not as yet revealed details of this monumental system. By 3000 B C E the cities of Egypt were fortified with massive, solid walls strengthened by equally massive solid interval towers, sometimes rectilinear and sometimes semicircular. Although there are no excavated examples, Egyptian gateways in later periods were always of die simple straight type, and it is likely that they were so in this period also. It appears tiiat the Egyptians had not developed very sophisticated tactics in field warfare. They had, however, clearly made great ad vances in siege warfare, as tomb paintings show the use of siege ladders and an early version of the battering ram to create breaches in walls.
The first period for which there is extensive evidence of fortifications in the Levant is Early Bronze II, in which a BIBLIOGRAPHY number of towns were surrounded by single curtain walls, often witii solid rectilinear straddle towers and external Alpeit Nakhai, Beth, et al. "Tell el-Wawiyat." Israel Exploration Journal 37.2-3 (1987): 181—185. Summary of the results of the 1986 exca semicircular interval towers (e.g., at Arad, Ai, and Jericho). vation season. [See Arad; Ai.] T h e interval towers would have enabled the Alpert Nakhai, Beth, et al. "Tell el-Wawiyat." Excavations and Surveys defenders to use enfilading fire against any attacking force, in Israel 6 (1988): 100-102. Summary of the results of the 1986 ex a major technological advance and necessary to the suc cavation season. cessful defense of a curtain wall. In EB III the fortifications Alpert Nakhai, Beth, et al. "Wawiyat, Tell el."In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, pp. 1500-1501. of the towns of the Levant were strengthened and elabo Jerusalem and New York, 1993. Description and analysis of the 1986 rated, to an astonishing degree, with the introduction of and 1987 architectural and artifactual remains at Tell el-Wawiyat. sloping ramparts (glacis) at the outer foot of fortifications Dessel, J. P., et al. "Tell el-Wawiyat." Israel Exploration Journal 39.1and the use of covering walls in advance of the main curtain. 2 (1989): 102-104. Summary of the results of the 1987 season. Gates developed from the simple opening in die EB II cur Dessel, J. P., et al. "Tell el-Wawiyat (Bet Netofa Valley), 1987." Ex cavations and Surveys in Israeli-?, (1990): 183-184. Summary of the tain wall into straight and bent-axis external towers, some results of the 1987 excavation season. times witii sloping access ramps angled so tiiat an attacker Gal, Zvi. Ijtwer Galilee during the Iron Age. American Schools of Ori approached the gate with the right (sword) hand nearest the ental Research, Dissertation Series, 8. Winona Lake, Ind,, 1992. Im curtain wall, leaving him unshielded against the fire from the portant discussion of the Lower Galilee in the Bronze and especially defenders on the walls. the Iron ages, based on extensive surveying and excavation in the 1970s and 1980s. In about 2000 B C E , a sequence of events began which ul BETH ALPERT NAKHAI
WEAPONS AND WARFARE. T h e earliest weap ons found in die Near East are microlithic projectile points from the Mesolithic period, some, at least, of which were used as arrowheads. There is no evidence tiiat these weap ons were used for any purpose otiier than for hunting. The earliest evidence of fortifications is found in die Pre-Pottery Neolithic A settlement at Jericho. It was surrounded by a
timately led to the revival of state-organized society in the Levant. Among die most important of these events were the collapse of the empire of the third dynasty of Ur (c. 2000 B C E ) and the reunification of Egypt by Mentuhotep II (c. 1900 B C E ) . T h e first excavated evidence of fortifications in Egypt, the twelfdi-dynasty fortress at Buhen, is from this period. It was a menacing highly sophisticated construction, witii a multiple trace, straddle towers at the corners, interval towers along both the curtain and die covering wall, a scarp, and a counterscarp. T h e covering wall is fitted witii arrow
WEAPONS AND WARFARE slits. It is curious that in a fortress otherwise so sophisticated the gate is a simple straight passage, though flanked with massive solid towers. With the revival of Egypt came die revival of trade in the eastern Mediterranean and the revival of fortified towns. Middle Bronze II A culture initially appeared in coastal Syria/Lebanon, from which it later spread southward to Pal estine. Fortifications reappear in M B II A, with simple single trace-curtain walls. Little is known of the fortifications of this period. M B II B, however, saw the construction of die most impressive fortifications in the history of the Levant. The essential element of the system consisted of a dramat ically enlarged version of the sloping ramparts first seen in the Early Bronze Age and now frequently faced with plaster, which sometimes extended into the matrix of the rampart as part of its construction. T h e plaster facing served two functions: in peacetime it protected the artificially steep slope from erosion, while in time of war it would have served to make the slope too slick to climb, especially if water were poured down it. T h e transition between M B I I A and B is generally agreed to be linked to a major political event—tire fall of the Egyp tian Middle Kingdom—although the exact nature of the link is still disputed. If tire inscriptions of the New Kingdom pharaohs are taken at face value, Egypt was attacked and conquered by the armies of the ldngs of Syria-Palestine; however, these accounts were written hundreds of years later and are highly propagandist^ justifications of the con quests by the New Kingdom pharaohs. At any rate, it is clear from both textual and archaeological evidence that SyroPalestinian rulers took over Lower Egypt and ruled it for a period of at least a century. In this position they controlled Egypt's trade and wealth and their homeland prospered ac cordingly. This prosperity led to an increase in population unparalleled in the ancient Levant. As settlements grew in size it became necessary to extend fortifications beyond the ancient tells. At sites such as Hazor, the largest settlement in the southern Levant, enormous ar tificial ramparts were constructed enclosing large areas of level ground which were then built up as part of the settle ment. [See Hazor.] Because of erosion at the tops of the ramparts it is not clear whether the ramparts were crowned with walls in every case; however, in those cases where the top of the rampart is preserved, as at Jericho, there is evi dence of a fortification wall on top of the rampart. At Gezer there is evidence of the use of a multiple trace, with a cov ering wall in advance of the curtain, as well as of the use of massive rectilinear straddle towers and a massive projecting solid tower gate with three internal piers. [See Gezer.] Else where, the towers are chambered, but tire use of diree in ternal piers is general. The transition from the Middle Bronze Age to tire Late Bronze Age was also connected to a series of major political events. Once again, however, the precise nature of the con
335
nection is disputed. In about 1600 B C E the first dynasty of Babylon was brought to an end by conquest by die Hittite king Mursili I, and in about 1550 B C E Ahmose I, first ldng of tlie eighteenth dynasty of" Egypt, expelled the Syro-Palestinian dynasts, known through an error of translation as the Hyksos, from Egypt. [See Babylon; Hittites; Hyksos.] Mursili I was assassinated on his return to Hattusa/Bogazkoy, but Ahmose's successors, most notably Thutmose III, went on to conquer Palestine and Syria as far as the Eu phrates River. [See Bogazkoy; Euphrates.] T h e Levant thus fell within the Egyptian empire and became subject to Egyp tian imperial policy. Archaeologically, tiiese historical events are to be linked to the cultural shift from the Middle to Late Bronze Ages, although die dating of the archaeological shift in historical terms is still in question. In weapons and warfare, as in most other cultural aspects, the Late Bronze was a continuation of the Middle Bronze Age. However, some very significant changes took place: at virtually every site in Palestine the massive MB fortification systems were abandoned, although at a number of the ex cavated sites (e.g., Lachish and Megiddo) imposing new gateways were constructed. [See Lachish; Megiddo.] These gateways do not appear to have had any defensive walls and would appear to have functioned ceremonially primarily. From the Amarna letters it is learned that order was main tained by small contingents of Egyptian troops; other Egyp tian texts tell of an administrative system linked by messen gers in chariots. [See Amarna Tablets, Chariots.] The absence of fortifications would appear to have been a delib erate Egyptian policy to prevent the rise of overly mighty subjects. One of the few exceptions was Hazor, where the M B fortifications continued in use throughout the Late Bronze Age. This has been taken by at least one scholar to indicate tiiat Hazor lay outside the area of Egyptian control/ interest. Another important exception is Ugarit, the great ttading center on the Syrian coast, where a portion of the fortifications in front of the great royal palace has been ex cavated. [See Ugarit; Palace.] There the excavators found a massive solid tower with a gate tunnel whose consttuctibn owes nothing to the Levantine tradition of construction. It most closely resembles the postern tunnels in the fortifica tion system of the Hittite capital Hattusa in centtal Anato lia—a simple, straight passage with a section consisting of a pointed, corbeled arch. This reflects both the importance of the Hittites in the Late Bronze and their dominance of northern Syria in the latter part of this period. T h e fortifi cations at Hattusa are among the most impressive in the ancient world, widi a massive multiple u-ace, generally set at the top of a ridge, to give maximum advantage to the de fenders. The main curtain is a casemate wall with massive chambered interval towers. T h e covering wall is solid, with smaller chambered interval towers set between die interval towers of the curtain. T h e gate passage is flanked by pro jecting massive chambered towers, with two internal piers,
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and is approached from the right by a sloping ramp, to put attackers at a maximum disadvantage. By the fourth millennium, two types of bow are known to have been in use. Mesopotamian pictorial depictions show a simple self-bow; Egyptians show themselves using a dou ble-convex self-bow, possibly widi the tips strengthened with horn. It is unlikely that these bows were compound. Curiously, there is little evidence for the bow and arrow in the EB Levant. The main weapons appear to have been the mace and the battle-ax, indicating hand-to-hand combat, rather tihan longer-range fighting. The existence of deep sys tems of fortifications, however, indicates that the bow must have been in use, along, probably, with the sling, which has a deadly accuracy to a range of at least 1 0 0 m. T h e heads of the arrows must have been of hardened wood. It is debatable whether anything which could properly be called a sword was in use in the Early Bronze Age, although there were long, straight, double-sided stabbing daggers. The reason for the lack of swords is that these require a hard metal, at least bronze, and the only metal in use in the Lev antine EB was copper. Thrusting spears and possibly jave lins were also used in this period for massed infantry as saults. T h e most important weapons for hand-to-hand combat were the semicircular battle-ax and the mace: both were mounted on long, slender hafts, whose flexibility would have added to the force of tire blow; both also were for use against soldiers unprotected by metal armor. Little is known of the conduct of armies in the field in Egypt, and nothing at all in the Levant, in this period. In Mesopotamia, how ever, it is clear that field armies were highly organized and used sophisticated tactics. The Stela of the Vultures, erected by King Eanatum of Lagash (c. 2500 BCE) shows his Su merian infantrymen advancing in a ttue phalanx, protected by shields and armed with long thrusting spears. [See Girsu and Lagash; Sumerians.] This formation made the Sume rian armies a formidable fighting force in the absence of powerful long-range weapons. T h e phalanx of infantry was accompanied by mobile spearmen mounted in four-wheeled war carts drawn by teams of onagers. [See Carts.] These war carts lacked steerable front wheels and were slow and cum bersome, not to be confused with the chariots of the Late Bronze Age (see above). Their primary use was probably to break up opposing infantry formations in advance of an as sault by the infantry. In Mesopotamia, the period beginning in about 2 2 0 0 B C E saw the introduction of a revolutionary new weapon, the composite bow, which is first seen in the hands of NaramSin, King of Agade. His armies, like those of his grandfather, Sargon the Great, reached as far as the Mediterranean Sea. Yigael Yadin (1963) suggests that tiiis weapon, with its un precedented range and power, was a major factor in these conquests. The collapse of state-organized society in the Le vant at the end of EB III brought an end to fortifications, which were beyond the means of the agricultural villages
which remained the sole form of human settlement. Nev ertheless, there is clear evidence of conflict between these communities, in the form of an abundance of personal weaponry. Most male burials in Middle Bronze I/EB-MB/ EB IV (as the period is variously known in the Levant) are accompanied by a distinctive form of dagger—long, slender, double edged, and wealdy attached to the hilt by rivets. A more formidable weapon was the battle-ax, which was cres cent shaped, with a cylindrical socket for the haft. In addi tion, numerous javelin heads and some stabbing spears have been recovered. A development which has recently been shown to have occurred in this period is the invention of die long slashing sword, of which only one example is known, currently preserved in the British Museum. This is an im pressive weapon, nearly a meter long and double edged, with a sharp, piercing point. It is curious that this develop ment appears to have had little or no influence, as such swords are nowhere depicted artistically. While most of these weapons could have had peaceful uses in hunting, the evidence currentiy available indicates that hunting played a very minor role in the economy of these communities. [See Hunting.] Weapons underwent a certain degree of development in M B II. The crescentic battle-ax became heavier and gen erally had a socket for the haft. The advent of bronze body armor and helmets led to developments in the battle-ax, which became elongated and slender. Ultimately, it was re duced to a heavy armor-piercing spike, rather than the cut ting edge it had been in the Early Bronze period. T h e wide spread use of bronze also led to the development of the first swords, which were sickle shaped, with the cutting edge on the outside of die curved portion of the blade. This type of sword was also probably a development from the crescentic ax of the Early Bronze Age; like the ax, as distinct from the straight sword which supplanted it at the end of the Bronze Age, it could not be carried in a sheath, which made it less convenient than the latter form proved to be. T h e daggers of this period were distinctive, having a broad, veined blade attached to the hilt by rivets in a short tang. These daggers frequently had a crescentic pommel, often of stone. T h e type originated in Mesopotamia in the Early Bronze Age and in the Middle Bronze Age spread throughout the Near East and into Europe (those carved on the sarsen stones of Stonehenge, England, are the most far-flung examples). Javelins and socketed thrusting spears were also in widespread use, as were slings, known primarily through artistic depictions. Although the compound bow had long been in use in Mesopotamia, surviving bows from Middle Kingdom Egypt, like the artistic depictions of bows, are all of the sim ple self-bow type, altiiough some of them are slightly double convex. At some point, probably late in M B IIC/MB III, a weapon was introduced into the Levant which was to change the shape of warfare in the ancient Near East and become the most important tactical factor until the end of the Bronze
WEAPONS AND WARFARE Age. This formidable weapon was tire horse-drawn, twowheeled war chariot. Lightweight and highly maneuverable, the chariot served both as an assault weapon to break up infantry formations and as a mobile firing platform. As the infantry had no answer to the onslaught of chariots, partic ularly when they were used en masse, they quickly came to dominate warfare. In the form in which they were intro duced into die Near East they came from the steppes of Central Asia. The manual used for training horses through out the region tiien is known for its Indo-European technical terms, including the equivalent of the medieval knight: the maryanu warrior, or charioteer. Yadin (1963) suggests tiiat tire deep fortifications which appeared at the beginning of MB II were the response to the introduction of this weapon. The view is not supported by the evidence from the Levant, however, which suggests that in this period society was feu dal, dominated by a warrior aristocracy in which the most prestigious element was the charioteers. This is reflected even in the Egyptian New Kingdom, where the king was depicted as a charioteer, altiiough the form of the society was very different. What is clear from the universality of massive and deep fortifications is tiiat warfare was wide spread in the MB Levant and tiiat the wealth and power evident in the cities required the defense implied by their fortifications (although the identity of the enemy against whom the defenses were raised is not clear). T h e Late Bronze Age saw only one significant develop ment in Levanto-Egyptian small arms: the introduction of the compound bow from Mesopotamia. This was a formi dable weapon, with a far greater power, range, and accuracy than any bow hitherto available to soldiers in the region. Amenhotep II is recorded as having shot at a copper target about 6 cm thick from his chariot, the arrows sttiking with such force tiiat they went through the target and out the other side. Even allowing a certain degree of exaggeration to glorify the king, this is a significant demonstration of the power of this weapon. In addition, die compound bow had the advantage of being much shorter than the simple selfbows which had preceded it, making it the ideal weapon for use in chariots and by massed bowmen against infantry. When combined with units of slingers, units of bowmen greatly increased the fighting power of the infantry, although they still were no match for the power of die chariotry. The end of the Late Bronze Age came shortly after 1200 B C E and was marked by one of the greatest political upheav als in world history: the collapse of botii the Mycenaean and Hittite civilizations within the space of a few years. In the ensuing chaos there was a substantial invasion of the Levant by both a land army and a fleet of warships—the whole col lectively known as die Sea Peoples, who very nearly suc ceeded in conquering Egypt and who took over the coastal plain of Palestine. These invaders brought with them a new series of weapons developed in western Europe in the course of die previous centuries: a new type of body armor con
337
sisting of overlapping bands of bronze and a new type of long, straight, double-edged slashing sword, stronger than the earlier Near Eastern model because of its single-piece (bilt and blade) cast construction. These weapons were not generally adopted by the armies of the region, however. After an interval of a century (c. 1000 B C E ) new, indepen dent ldngdoms began to emerge from the ruins of the Egyp tian empire in the Levant. In coastal Syria and Lebanon the Canaanites, now becoming known as Phoenicians through their Greek contacts, began to establish a network of sea borne trading colonies, first on Cyprus and then farther west. [See Canaanites; Phoenicians.] For the first time since at least the mid-fifteenth century B C E , the cities of the Levant began to be fortified. T h e new fortifications were to some extent a revival of the ancient Canaanite tradition, but with innovations which arose from its redevelopment. Within the area which was to emerge as the Israelite ldngdoms, a clear development sequence can be seen, beginning witii villages in which the houses, built in a continuous ring around a central space, presented a blank external wall which formed a sufficient defense against small-scale attacks. [See House, article on Syro-Palestinian Houses.] As the size of the settlements grew more significant, for tifications were required. These developed rapidly, possibly influenced by those of the Phoenician cities to the north. In detail, however, the fortifications of the Israelite cities were very different. From the beginning they involved the use of a multiple trace, with a curtain wall and an advanced cov ering wall. Interval towers provided enfilading fire; later, As syrian bas-reliefs demonstrate tiiat in time of war the cov erage from the tops of walls and towers was increased by the addition of projecting wooden platforms. [See Assyri ans.] Gateways became more formidable, witii the addition of a fourth internal pier, and the gate tower itself was changed from a projecting bastion to an internal tower— with the advantage that it could not be surrounded by enemy attackers. T h e gate approach became much more of a de fense in depdi, with a series of towers and gates along the passage leading up to die main city gate at the top of the city mound. This approach was almost invariably from the right, tiius exposing die sword side of die attacking sol diers to the flanking fire of the defenders on the walls. Cur tain walls could be of either casemate or solid construction, as circumstances demanded. T h e use of ramparts witii pre pared surfaces also continued, sometimes with a plaster fac ing and sometimes with a stone facing. A major technological development in this period, which had a profound effect on weapons and warfare, was die in troduction of iron. T h e advantage of iron lay not so much in its hardness, which was no greater than that of bronze, as in its cheapness. Iron ore is found in most areas of the Near East, and, while die process of smelting iron is more com plex than that required for copper, iron is far more abundant than the tin required to turn copper into weapons-grade
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bronze. Iron arrowheads quicldy become abundant, as did iron daggers and swords, enabling the arming of larger num bers of soldiers tiian ever before. Initially, warfare was little different than it had been throughout the Late Bronze Age, with large numbers of chariots supported by massed infan try, as can be seen in the account of the battle of Qarqar in 853 B C E , between Shalmaneser III of Assyria and a grand alliance of Syro-Palestinian kings (including Ahab of Israel, whose chariot contingent is recorded as having been the largest on the Syro-Palestinian side). This battle, however, can be seen as a turning point: it is the last major chariot battle recorded. Shortly thereafter, the Assyrians pioneered a new type of warfare which rendered the chariot-based ar mies obsolete. The Assyrian infantry was organized into three types of unit: spearmen, bowmen, and slingers. The spearmen were the shock troops and earned a thrusting spear considerably longer than they were tall. The significance of this weapon is that it was the forerunner of the spears carried by the Greek phalanx and, when presented by the first two ranks of an infantry formation, made that formation invulnerable to a chariot charge—which would simply impale itself on the massed spears. Behind the spearmen came the bowmen and slingers, who, with their massed fire, could break up chariot attacks at long range before they came within range of the spearmen. These innovations were not the only, and not necessarily the most important, made by the Assyrians, however. From the beginning of the Bronze Age the towns of the Levant had been built on hilltops because of the de fensive advantages of this elevation. It greatly increased die normal 2:1 ratio of attackers to defenders required for bat tlefield success. The Assyrians were the first to develop sophisticated siege machinery with which to attack the for tified cities of the Near East. Two weapons in particular are significant, the siege tower and the mobile battering ram. The siege tower enabled the attackers to return defensive fire from a level as high as, or even higher than, that of the defenders. While this could not have suppressed the defen sive fire generally, it could have suppressed it along a short stretch of the wall, which would have made the work of those attacking the wall itself much easier. The mobile battering ram consisted of a wheeled vehicle with a body covered in copper or leather armor in which the soldiers operating the ram could work secure from the fire of the defenders. [See Leather.] The ram itself was suspended from the frame of the body and consisted of a long beam with a metal head. The early models had an ax-shaped head, but the later mod els, following an experiment with boar's-head rams, con sisted of a large spearhead. Regardless of the type of head, the method of operation was the same: the head of the ram was forced into the stone or brickwork of the wall and then used as a lever to pry the wall apart, causing it to collapse, a breach was thus created through which tire infantry could
attack. Israeli excavations at Lachish revealed the method of defense against these engines, which was to build a massive mound of earth and stone against the inner face of the wall in the sector being attacked by the rams. This countertactic did not succeed in saving Lachish, however, whose conquest Sennacherib appears to have considered his greatest victory. The results of the Assyrian innovations were far-reaching. Perhaps the most noticeable result is that after the fall of the kingdom of Judah in 586 B C E , hardly any of the city mounds in the Levant were ever reoccupied by a major city. With the defensive advantages of elevation removed by the new siege machinery, the disadvantages of living on the top of the hills were all that remained. Henceforth, all cities were built on the level ground at the foot of the ancient tells. The Babylonians, who succeeded the Assyrians in 612 B C E , and the Persians, who conquered Babylon in 539 B C E , made few changes in the military armamentarium, organi zation, and tactics laid down by the Assyrians. [See Baby lonians; Persians.] T h e beginning of the use of mounted archers came in this period, but their initial impact was slight because two key technical developments—the invention of the saddle and the invention of the stirrup—had not yet taken place. T h e major innovation by the Persians was drat, as a result of the vast extent of their empire, they were able to field huge armies, which enabled them to overwhelm any potential foe by sheer force of numbers. In their operations against Greece the Persians did, however, carry out com bined operations—coordinated operations of the Persian army and the Phoenician fleet. The Persian armies were routed in the second half of the fourth cenmry B C E by Alexander of Macedon, who brought against them tire new combination of the Greek phalanx, with its formidably disciplined ttoops armed with very long lances and protected by heavier armor and shields than any previous troops. T h e use of shields by the troops inside the phalanx to protect the front ranks (which deployed their lances against the enemy) from the missiles of the slingers and bowmen made this the most impressive fighting for mation the world had yet seem. T h e additional use of cav alry to attack the flanks of tire enemy gave Alexander a tac tical advantage the Persians were never able to counter. It is significant that most of the battles fought by Alexander were in the field. His siege operations, as at Tyre and Gaza, were demonstrations of the superiority of the offensive over the defensive in fortifications in this period and account for the abandonment of the tells. [See Tyre.] T h e Greeks developed very sophisticated methods of naval warfare based on the bireme, trireme, and quinquereme, with, respectively, two, three, and five banks of oars. These ultimately enabled them to dominate the eastern Mediterranean in their competition with the Phoenicians. [See Seafaring.] After Alexander's brilliant tactical innovations, the Hel lenistic commanders, like the Babylonians and Persians who
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES followed the Assyrians, settied into an increasingly rigid tac tical routine, based on the phalanx and flanking cavalry units. It was this increasing tactical rigidity which left the Hellenistic armies of the east vulnerable to the more tacti cally flexible and maneuverable Roman legion, a weakness demonsuated by the campaign of Pompey the Great in 63 B C E . Where the Hellenistic infantry had relied on its long stabbing spears, the Roman infantry relied instead on a short, straight, double-sided stabbing sword and a short, heavy stabbing spear which could also be thrown with ac curacy up to 25 m. When the two types of formation first faced one another at the battle of Pydna, the legions allowed the phalanx to pass through their ranks and then closed in on it from all sides. Individual Roman soldiers slipped be tween die spears of the phalanx to attack the relatively de fenseless Macedonian soldiers. T o the battering rams and siege towers of the Assyrians the Hellenistic generals added catapultae, ballistae, onagri, and scorpiones. T h e first was a very large crossbow, capable of firing, dependent on die size of tire engine—anything from a large arrow to a spear in a flat trajectory with great force and considerable range. T h e second was based on the same principle as the first but could throw much heavier weights in the form of large stones or beams. T h e onager used a long lever arm, powered, like the first tow engines, by twisted cords. T h e arm was wound down by means of a windlass, and when the trigger was released the slingstones, larger stones, or containers of burn ing oil or naphtha ("Greek fire") was hurled in an arc over the enemy fortifications. T h e scorpion could be either a kind of catapult or a miniature onager. In addition, the Romans used battering rams of the same type as those developed by the Assyrians; they used them to attack fortifications by means of mines which sought to bring down the overlying wall by creating a cave-in. T h e defenders of cities quickly developed the technique of countermining beneath the at tackers' mine, to collapse tile latter before it could collapse die overlying wall. T h e Byzantine military largely repre sented a continuation of the Roman military tradition, with its reliance on heavy infantry and limited use of cavalry. In the seventh century C E , the armies of Islam burst out of Arabia and began a series of conquests which would take them to the gates of Constantinople, India, and, in the west, to southern France. These armies were, at least initially, both lightly armed and lightly armored, and their success was based largely on those factors. T h e Arab armies were superbly mounted as well, which gave them a mobility their Byzantine and Persian opponents could not match and with which they could not cope. In the course of the following centuries the Arab armies acquired an infantry arm. Influ enced by die Byzantine fortifications they captured, they de veloped their own school of sophisticated fortifications, which were built by Salah edh-Din and his successors to counter the Crusader castles in the Holy Land. [See also Fortifications; Lithics; and Metals.]
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bishop, M. C. Roman Military Equipment: From the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome. London, 1993. Chalian, Gerard, ed. The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age. Berkeley, 1994. Chapman, Rupert L., III. "The Defences of Tell es-Seba (Beersheba): A Stratigraphic Analysis." levant 27 (1995): 127-143. Currier, Richard L. Weapons and Warfare in Ancient Times. Minneap olis, 1977. Dabrowa, Edward, ed. The Roman and Byzantine Army in the East. Krakow, 1944. Gabriel, Richard A. From Sumer to Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies. New York, 1991. Goetze, Albrecht. "Warfare in Asia Minor." Iraq 25 (1963): 124-130. Gonen, Rivkah. Weapons of the Ancient World. London, 1975. Grimal, Pierre. The Civilization of Rome, translated by W. S. Maguinness, chap. 5, "The Conquerors," pp. 162-185. London, 1963. Hackett,]ohn W., ed. Warfare in the Ancient World. New York, 1989. Harmand, Jacques. La guerra anligua: De Sumer a Roma. Madrid, 1976. Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies. Annual, 1990-. Kempinski, Aharon, and Ronny Reich, eds. The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods. Jerusalem, 1992. Lawrence, Arnold W. Greek Aims in Fortifications. Oxford, 1979. Lawrence, T. E. Crusader Castles, edited by Denys Pringle. Oxford, 1988. Maxwell-Hyslop, Rachel. "Daggers and Swords in Western Asia: A Study from Prehistoric Times to 600 B . C . " Iraq 8 (1946): 1-65. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. 'Tools and Weapons Illustrated by the Egyptian Collection in University College, Ijondon, and 2,000 Outlines from Other Sources. London, 1917. Shaw, Ian. Egyptian Warfare and Weapons. Princes Risborough, Bucks., 1991. Smail, R. C . Crusading Warfare (1007-1103). Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, n.s. 3. Cambridge, 1956. Warry, John G. Warfare in the Classical World: An Illustrated Encyclo pedia of Weapons, Warriors, and Warfare in the Ancient Civilizations of Greece and Rome. Norman, Okla., 1995. Yadin, Yigael. The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. London, 1962. Yadin, Yigael. The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands in the Light of Ar chaeological Study. London, 1963. RUPERT CHAPMAN
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. Insofar as it per tains to the ancient past, metrology (the investigation and theory of measurement) has two primary purposes: ( 1 ) to describe systems of measurement, and (2) to determine the absolute values of the various units of measure. This article describes how these two goals are accomplished and pro vides a brief historical overview of measurement in the Near East; references to works that describe systems and discuss absolute values are provided in the bibliography. For the ancient Near East full systems of measure can be described only for Babylonia and to a lesser extent for Egypt. Where adequate written documentation exists, one can de scribe the relative ratios of components in a system of mea surement, as, for example, 80 chains = 1 mile or 8 quarts = 1 peck. This kind of relationship can usually be inferred
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from accounts that contain individual entries followed by totals and is best documented for Mesopotamia, from which we also have surviving tables of weights and measures. Link age of one type of measurement with another, for example, i (wine) gallon = 231 cubic inches, is usually discernible only in textual sources. Mathematical texts sometimes utilize such linkages, and ancient authors occasionally mention these linkages. The extant mathematical texts from Meso potamia and Egypt begin with the Middle Bronze Age, and linkages between types of measurement, for example, be tween length and capacity, are encoded in the number co efficients used in Babylonian mathematics. However, spe cific statements about the relationship of one type of measurement to another do not antedate discursive-narra tive literature, of which the oldest surviving example of a complete work is that of the fifth-century B C E Greek histo rian Herodotus. Determining absolute values for ancient measures means the process by which ancient units are equated with modern units. In stating modern equivalents the metric system is preferred because of its lack of ambiguity (there are, for example, still three measures in tire range of 1 liter that are all referred to by the English term quart). Like all measure ment, so-called absolute values are approximations, and the nature of the evidence at our disposal means that many of these approximations are rather imprecise. In using modern approximations of ancient units it is always advisable to reckon with the possibility of a ±5 percent margin of error;
in some cases the margin of error will be smaller, but in other cases even greater. There are three major types of evidence upon which these modern approximations rest. First, there are objects that represent ancient standards. Weights constitute the only unequivocal evidence of this type. Stone was preferred as the medium for weight stan dards in the Bronze Age. In the first millennium B C E a grad ual shift to metals is evidenced by specimens, mostly of bronze and lead, and also by the noticeable diminution of stone weights. In the Byzantine and Islamic periods, glass was used for precision standards, but metal must have continued in use for making ordinary weights. For the Near East, the shift from stone to metal mediums has had the same ironic result as the shift from cuneiform to al phabetic writing: like clay, stone was relatively cheap and not easily re-formed, whereas most metal was probably mel ted down and recycled. This has led to disproportionately better representation for the Bronze Age than for later periods. A small number of surviving weights are inscribed with their unit values and sometimes the name of the "owner" (usually a god or ruler), and some of these are preserved intact. By weighing these perfectly preserved, inscribed ob jects, tire weight norms tiiat they imply can be deduced. Sets of inscribed weights incorporating multiples or fractions of a single standard are not extant, and, in fact, the vast ma jority of all surviving weights are entirely without mark of any kind. Thus, die "units" represented by these various
mm
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.
Series of marked shekel weights from Lachish. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES objects have to be inferred from their masses alone. If the relative ratios of the underlying system are well known from written documentation, as in Mesopotamia, and if the mass of the object is in tite io-gram range or larger, it is usually possible to deduce the implied "unit" incorporated in an ancient weight specimen. Smaller units, however, are much more difficult to sort out, and these constitute a large portion of surviving weights. A few extant objects of wood, stone, and metal represent ancient standard of length. Most of tiiese are cubits (fore arms) or portions of cubits, with divisions into palms of four or five fingers, and sometimes into fingers and smaller sub divisions. T h e three oldest datable examples are from Mes opotamia: two graduated rules showing a palm of five fingers and fingers divided into smaller subdivisions engraved on statues B (fragmentary) and F of Gudea (twenty-second century) implying the use of a cubit in die 50 cm (20 in.) range and a notched bronze bar found at Nippur, which is probably earlier tiian Gudea's reign (the cubit standard it seems to imply—518 mm (20.4 in.)—suggests a date prior to Naram-Sin of Akkad). For the Middle Kingdom tiirough the Roman period (c. 2000 B C E - 3 9 5 CE) in Egypt tiiere are a few wooden and stone examples and, for the early Islamic period, there remains a gauge that measured the level of the Nile engraved on the rock wall of the island ar-Rauda/Roda (dated by inscription to 861 CE) . T h e cubits implied by these objects fall in the 50-54 cm range. It should be noted, however, that none of the extant items incorporating stan dards of length possess the official character of the in scribed weights. Although some weights are inscribed with the unit and are said to be "true weight" or the weight of a god or ruler, nothing comparable exists for measures of length. The situation for capacity measures is similar to that for length but is fraught with more uncertainties. Only wood and metal are likely to have been used for standard measur ing vessels. Baskets may have been used for actual mea surement but only after comparing them with true stan dards. However, no measuring receptacles of wood have survived, and none of the bronze vessels is inscribed with the unit it is supposed to represent. Another category of evidence compensates in part for the dearth of measuring vessels: tiiese are jars or bowls of stone or pottery inscribed with a statement of die capacity. Absolute values for ancient capacity units rest primarily upon this type of evidence. However, an element of uncertainty always remains when using marked jars for metrological purposes. Because they were not intended to be actual standard measuring vessels, the "full" mark is never indicated. An added uncertainty is the level of accuracy in measuring, both by the ancient peo ple who filled the jar and inscribed its contents and by the modern scholars who measured and reported them. The second type of evidence that can be used, with cau
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tion, to establish absolute measures consists of uninscribed objects that incorporate repetitions of the same magnitude of measure and tell us tiiat this magnitude had some met rological significance. This type of evidence is best exem plified by unmarked weight specimens, bricks for length measures, and pots of a more or less standard size for ca pacity measures. Such evidence, however, has never been systematically utilized, because many examples from spe cific locations and specific times have to be measured. With a sufficientiy large sample, statistical analysis can be applied to the data, and the "inductive metrology" advocated long ago by W. M. F. Petrie can be practiced. Perhaps because of the prodigious amount of painstaking and tedious work, the potential of this evidence has never been realized. It seems likely that "inductive metrology" will continue for a long time in its current inchoate state. T h e third type of evidence, which assumes importance from the fifth century B C E onward (and is especially impor tant for the Islamic period), consists of statements by au thors equating Near Eastern measures with Greek, Roman, Venetian, or some other better-known (at the time of the reference) measure. T h e value of this evidence depends upon die following: (1) die precision of the original approx imation; (2) the degree of precision with which the "known" measure can be interpreted; and (3) the reliability of the manuscript tradition. Even where we can be relatively cer tain that the manuscript tradition is sound, the first two fac tors entail a margin of error that may vary significantly. These approximations are frequently accorded more value by modern scholars tiian they actually possess. It remains to summarize the history of weights and mea sures in the Near East. This can be divided broadly into tiiree periods: prior to the invention of writing around 3000, between about 3000 and Alexander the Great (c. 330 B C E ) , and after Alexander. For the first period, clay counters or tokens and the ear liest Mesopotamian script imply measurement of some type. It seems probable that systems of length measures based on body parts like the forearm and the hand and on related time-distance measures like a day's journey as well as on locally accepted units of capacity were widespread in the Near East in the late fourth millennium, though nothing cer tain can be said. The many local standards that appear in later eras may well reflect survivals of "prehistoric" mea sures. However, given the difficulties of describing even textually documented standards, it is unlikely tiiat any of the "prehistoric" metrological systems can be accurately recon structed. T h e second period is characterized by a few dominant systems reflected in relatively abundant records written in Mesopotamian cuneiform (and its relatives) and in Egyptian hieroglyphs and hieratic, as well as by a limited amount of material ("monumental") evidence. These dominant sys-
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terns are best known for Babylonia in the era from the Akkad Empire through Old Babylonian (c. 2300-1600) and, to a lesser extent, for Egypt from the twelfth through the twen tieth dynasties (c. 2000—1100). These systems owed their dominance to the following two factors: (1) they were em bedded in the system of writing and were passed along as a part of the scribal craft; and (2) centralized administrations (temple and palace) had a vested interest in recordkeeping. These forces tended to foster standardized systems of mea surement, and these systems clearly had considerable effect upon measurement even beyond the economic world of the temple and palace. Despite occasionally expressed opinions to die contrary, there is, however, no evidence for any at tempt to enforce universal men-ological standards. Of these two systems, the influence of the Babylonian was more widespread, coinciding approximately with the use of cu neiform. The precise nature of this "influence" remains un clear. A common theme of older (and occasionally of newer) works on ancient metrology was the "migration" of "stan dards" from one place to another, for which Babylonia was a favorite source of derivation. These theories were spun largely in the absence of written evidence. When we have both written and material evidence, as in northern Meso potamia, Elam, Syria, and Anatolia, however, it is clear that die Babylonian system was adapted rather than wholly adopted. It is not even clear that the numerous "mina" norms in the range of 450 to 525 grams were derived from Babylonia. The third era begins with the Macedonian Greek con quest of the Near East and continues up until relatively re cent times. Greek conquest of the Near East had three im portant results for the history of metrology. First, it accelerated die tendency to abandon the traditional Bronze Age scripts of Mesopotamia and Egypt for the more prac tical alphabet. Second, the metrological systems of the ruling Greeks, and later of the Romans who followed them, grad ually spread widely in the Near East. Third, the spread of coinage led to the development of metal monies of nominal value. All three factors have affected our ability to describe the metrology of this era. The widespread adoption of the alphabet over the first millennium B C E radically reduced the survival of ancient economic records (upon which we pri marily depend for reconsmiction of metrological systems) because alphabetic writing was primarily used on perishable materials and has survived only in exceptional climatic con ditions like those of Egypt. Whereas coinage provides an additional type of evidence for weight metrology, the de velopment of nominal-value coinage, where the name of the coin bears no relationship to its actual weight (a significant break with earlier tradition), greatly complicates the study of weight standards. It was this complex metrological world that die Arabs inherited when they conquered the Near East in the seventh century C E . When Arabic literary sources be gin to become fairly abundant in the ninth century, they
indicate the existence of many local standards and systems of measurement, and this undoubtedly reflects realities that are simply not recorded in the extant ancient written evi dence. [See also Coins; and Metals.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Helck, Wolfgang. "Masse und Gewichte (pharaonische Zt.)." In Ixxikon der Agyptologie, vol. 3, cols. 1199-1209. Wiesbaden, 1980. Suc cinct overview of Egyptian measures of the pharaonic period, with documentation and bibliography. Hinz, Walther. Islarnische Masse und Gewichte umgerechnet ins melrische System. Handbuch der Orientalistik, 1.1. Leiden, 1955. Valuable col lection of evidence from original sources and modern literature in tended as a tool for economic history; not primarily a work of me trology, many of the "absolute" values are less precise dian the work indicates. For supplementary information in English on Islamic me trology, one may consult George Carpenter Miles, "Dinar" and "Dirham"; Eliyahu Ashtor and J. Burton-Page, "Makayil"; and J. Burton-Page and Patricia A. Andrews, "Misaha," all in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, i960-). Hout, Th. P. J. van den. "Masse und Gewichte: Bei den Hethitern." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischcn ArchiXalagie, vol. 7, pp. 517-527. Berlin, 1990. The only attempt to describe Hittite measures as a whole. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. "Weights and Measures. II. Ancient Histori cal." In The Encyclopaedia Britannica, n d i ed., vol. 28, pp. 480-488. New York, 1911. Valuable introduction to the older literature which must be read because many of its assumptions underlie more modern works. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Ancient Weights and Measures Illustrated by the Egyptian Collection in University College, London. London, 1926. This and the preceding work give a good idea of the "inductive" meth odology advocated by Petrie in opposition to the continental school of "comparative" metrology; both, however, contain many unsub stantiated assumptions. Powell, Marvin A. "Ancient Mesopotamian Weight Metrology: Meth ods, Problems, and Perspectives." In Studies in Honor of Tom B. Jones, edited by Marvin A. Powell and Ronald H. Sack, pp. 71-109. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 203. Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1979. Contains a discussion of metrological methodology, including so-called comparative metrology, and basic bibliography. Powell, Marvin A. "Masse und Gewichte." In Reallexikon der Assyriol ogie und Vorderasiatischcn Archaologie, vol. 7, pp. 457-517. Berlin, 1990. The only systematic account of Mesopotamian measures and weights, with discussion of systems, absolute values, documentation, and bibliographical references. In English, despite the German title. Powell, Marvin A. "Weights and Measures." In The Anchor Bible Dic tionary, vol. 6, pp. 897-908. New York, 1992. Overview of Near Eastern weights and measures, with bibliography and discussion of measures in die Bible. Vleming, Sven. "Masse und Gewichte in den demotischen Texten (insb. aus der ptol. Zeit)." In Lexikon der Agyptologie, vol. 3, cols. 1209-1214. Wiesbaden, 1980. Overview of Egyptian measures in the post-pharaonic period, with bibliography. M A R V I N A.
POWELL
WEILL, RAYMOND (1874-1950), French Egyptol ogist and archaeologist who headed a scientic expedition sponsored by Baron Eduard de Rothschild to the southern
WHEEL part of the Ophel hill (City of David, Jerusalem), in 1 9 1 3 1914 and 1923-1924. Weill was born in Elbeuf, France. He was an officer in the Corps of Engineers, after which he studied history and philology, at the age of thirty, and earned a Ph.D. from the Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes. He worked with Flinders Petrie in the Sinai Desert as well as at other sites in Egypt and was co-founder of die French Egyp tological Society. Weill was the first in Jerusalem to expose a wide excava tion area rather than dig tunnels, as earlier explorers in the city had done. Fie uncovered Roman quarries that had dam aged earlier remains, among them two long, vaulted hori zontal rock cuttings, reached via shafts. Weill identified the hewn areas as the tombs of die Judean kings. T h e assertion generated serious differences among scholars, but the cut tings are not considered to have been tombs. Weill's most significant discovery was a Greek inscription mentioning two synagogue leaders, Theodotus and his fadier, Vettenos. Assigned paleographically to the Second Temple period, die inscription is important evidence that synagogues coexisted witii the Jerusalem Temple. Following his first campaign in the City of David, Weill returned to France to take part in World War I. He was severely wounded in battle, for which he was awarded the Legion of Honor. [See also Jerusalem.]
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c Figure 1. Wheel types, (a) reconstruction of a wheel type from graves in Kish, Ur, and Susa, mid-third millennium BCE; (b) depiction of a wheel on a stela of Gudea, late third millennium BCE; (c) drawing of a six-spoked wheel surviving from eighteenut-dynasty Egypt. (After Littauer and Crouwel, 1979) WHEEL.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Clere, J. J. "Bibliographic de Raymond Weill." Revue d'Egyptologie 8 (1951): vii-xvi. Vandier, Jacques. "Raymond Weill (1874-1950)." Revue d'Egyptologie 8 (1951): i-vi. Weill, Raymond. La cite de David, I-II: Gomple rendu des fouilles executees a Jerusalem, sur les site de la ville primitive. 2 vols. Paris, 19201947RONNY REICH
WHEEL. Archaeological evidence for the wheel appears in the Near East as early as the Early Dynastic II period (c. 2750-2650 B C E ) . Earlier pictographs from Uruk level IVa (c. 3100 B C E ) show sledges raised over what are either two cap tive rollers or four disk wheels. Remains of actual wheels were found in graves at Kish, Ur (Early Dynastic III), and Susa (figure la) in the mid-third millennium. These were all tripartite: made of tiiree planks cut vertically from a tree trunk and held togetiier by external battens as well as by rawhide, with wooden or metal tires (from 0.50 to 0.83 m. in diameter) that were sometimes hobnailed. This construc tion is considered a response to a shortage of wide boards of local timber. T h e wheels appear to revolve on fixed axles. A variation of this wheel first appears on a stela of Gudea in the Ur III period (figure i b ) , in the late third millennium. It shows what seems to be a relatively small solid wheel rimmed by two metal half tires with hobnail tread, secured
by clamps at their ends. Actual metal tires in six or seven segments, with a clamp at either end and one in the middle, indicate disk wheels with diameters of 0.67-0.97 m. These come from early second-millennium Susa, Assur, and else where. Of lasting significance were attempts to lighten the disk wheels, as first seen on a third-millennium seal from Hissar IIIB (figure 2). On it, the central plank, through which the axle passes, is narrowed to a diametral bar; the flanking planks of the tripartite wheel are eliminated, and the former bonding slats are turned into sturdy transverse bars between the diametral bar and the felloe. This crossbar wheel is also clearly illustrated in the second millennium B C E , fixed on a revolving axle; it has remained in use with simple carts in various parts of die world. [See Carts.] By far the most important innovation was the spoked wheel, which first appeared with four to eight spokes, in Anatolian and Syrian glyptics and other graphic remains from the early second millennium B C E . Actual four- and sixspoked wheels (figure ic) survive from eighteenth-dynasty Egypt. These have composite spokes made from single rods, half oval in section, and heat bent in the middle to form an
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W H E E L . Figure 2. Depiction of a wheel on a seal from Hissar MB. Third millennium BCE. (After Littauer and Crouwel, 1979)
angle (of 60 degrees for a six-spoked wheel and 90 degrees for a four-spoked one). The "legs" are glued back to back to the "legs" of the adjacent spoke, the resultant whole spoke being fully oval in section. T h e wider diameter of the spoke is set at right angles to the felloe, which is composed of two lengths of heat-bent wood, overlapping at the ends. Raw hide, applied wet, constricted and solidified the naves and felloes. This construction, based on tension and without metal parts tiiat could be jolted loose, required great skill to make and was vulnerable to dampness. It is attested in Egypt, the Levant, and the Aegean. A spoked wheel based on a different principle is illustrated in Assyrian reliefs of the early first millennium B C E . [See un der Chariots.] Its six or eight spokes are simply set in a cy lindrical or barrel nave, which may be a metal case, with short tubular projections to receive the spoke ends. T h e deep felloes are made of butt-ended sections of plank, their inner edges lying in a metal channel. Such a wheel is the ancestor of all later wooden spoked wheels. Practically nothing is known of die impact of the earliest wheels in Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium B C E . From Early Dynastic II and III remains at Kish and Ur it is clear that die shortage of timber of adequate girth imposed the tripartite disk construction and, that, lacking iron for tires and battens to consolidate them, the wheels cannot have been very strong. Because wood axles were also limited in the weight they could bear, it is unlikely that wheeled vehicles were used to transport heavy goods. What pack an imals could not carry would have been transported by sledge, for which there is ample evidence from fourth-mil lennium tablets from Uruk to seventh-century B C E reliefs of Sennacherib, and from actual finds and tomb paintings in Egypt from the twelfth dynasty to the twenty-first dynasty. Third-millennium representations in Mesopotamia show disk-wheeled vehicles in military, hunting, cult, and travel contexts only. Evidence for their use in warfare, for which
they were clearly unsuitable, fades rapidly after the middle of the millennium. That wheeled vehicles were considered prestigious is clear from tiieir burial in richly furnished graves (Kish, Ur, Susa). Their economic and political im pact seems to have been negligible, but because possessing them demonstrated conspicuous expenditure, it could re inforce social ranking.The appearance, in about 2000 B C E , of the spoked wheel and horse draft—both essential for the true chariot—did not produce a suitable military vehicle im mediately: the team's harness and its control had to be im proved first. Evidence for this appears initially on early Syr ian seals of the eighteenth century B C E . The use of the chariot in warfare undoubtedly affected military strategy, but its impact may have been less than first appears, for several reasons. Because infantry always ac companied chariotry, campaigning speed could hardly change. Analysis has also shown that chariot tallies were of ten inflated. Furthermore, much of Near Eastern terrain is mountainous, rocky, marshy, or sandy—unnegotiable for chariots yet, the prestige of the chariot—costly to make and maintain—was enormous, enhancing the standing of all chariot owners. Economically, it stimulated the growth of several occupations: wheelwright, carriage maker, armorer (charioteers wore more body armor), and horse breeders and ttainers. [See also Transportation.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Littauer,M. A.,andJ. H. Crouwel. Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East. Leiden, 1979. Littauer, M. A., and J. H. Crouwel. Chariots and Related Equipment from the Tomb of Tut'ankhamun. Tut'ankhamun Tomb Series, 3. Ox ford, 1985. Piggott, Stuart. The Earliest Wheeled Transport: From the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea. London, 1983. Schulman, A. R. "Chariot, Chariotry, and the Hyksos." Journal of the Society of the Study of Egyptian Antiquity 10 (1979): 105-153. Yadin, Yigael. The Art of Warfare in Biblical Ijxnds in the Light of Ar chaeological Discovery. New York, 1963. J . H.
C R O U W E L and
M A R Y AIKEN LITTAUER
WHEELER, MORTIMER (1890-1976), one of the legends of archaeology in die twentieth century. Born in Glasgow, Scotiand, to a journalist and his wife, Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler was called Eric in his youth. His first wife, Tessa Verney, with whom he had one son, called him Rik, or Rikky, by which he was known for the rest of his life. There are two Wheeler autobiographies, Still Digging (London, 1955) and My Archaeological Mission to India and Pakistan (London, 1976), both of which reflect many of the strengths and weaknesses of the genre, and one biography, Jacquetta Hawks's Adventurer in Archaeology: Biography of Sir Mortimer Wheeler (New York, 1982).
WILSON, CHARLES WILLIAM Wheeler focused his early scholarship on the remains of Roman Britain. In 1907 he entered University College Lon don, where he earned an M.A. and D. Litt. After World War I he went to the National Museum of Wales as keeper; he became director in 1924. In 1926 Wheeler became direc tor of die London Museum. His two most famous excava tions of this period were at Verulamium (1930-1933) and Maiden Castle (1934-1939), where he perfected his field methodology and trained students. From this post he played a major role in establishing tire Institute of Archaeology at London University. In 1943, while on military service in World War II, he was posted to India as tite director general of the Archaeological Survey, where he served until 1948. T h e government of India gave Wheeler a broad mandate, and he undertook the complete reform of its archaeological enterprise. This involved more training of students and es tablishing a school of archaeology, which remains active to day as the Institute of Archaeology, New Delhi. He also carried out four training excavations: in the early historic city of Taxila (1944-1945); atthe Roman trading emporium of Arikamedu (1945); in the Indus city of Harappa (1946); and of megaliths and Early Historic remains at BrahmagiriChandravalli (1947). Wheeler returned to the subcontinent to excavate Mohenjo-Daro (1950), another Indus city, and Early Historic Charsada (1958), both in Paldstan. He was an innovative digger and his writings on field metiiodology, especially Archaeology from the Earth (Oxford, 1954), are im portant contributions to excavation metiiodology. After India, Wheeler became a public figure, although he still lectured at die university level. A brilliant participant on the BBC game show "Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral," he became Britain's television personality of the year in 1954. He also served effectively as a tour leader, bringing groups to ancient sites in the classical world, the Near East, India, and Pakistan. Plis base for many years was the British Acad emy, where he was a long-time honorary secretary (19491968). Wheeler's personality was flamboyant, even theatrical. Pie was a leader, a man given to command, but quick to anger, and he could be insensitive and difficult with those around him. The honors he received in his lifetime were many: com mander of the Indian Empire (1947), a knightiiood (1958), and honorary degrees from a number of British universities. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wheeler, Mortimer. Verulamium; A Belgic and Two Roman Cities. So ciety of Antiquaries of London Research Committee Report, no. n . Oxford, 1936. Wheeler, Mortimer. Maiden Castle, Dorset. Society of Antiquaries of London Research Committee Report, no. 12. Oxford, 1943. Wheeler, Mortimer. "Harappa, 1946: The Defences and Cemetery R 37." Ancient India 3 (1947): 58-130. Wheeler, Mortimer. Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers. London, 1955.
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Wheeler, Mortimer. Charsada: A Metropolis of the North-West Frontier. London, 1962. Wheeler, Mortimer. The Indus Civilization. 3d ed. Cambridge, 1968. G R E G O R Y L. P O S S E H L
WILSON, CHARLES WILLIAM
(1836-1905),
British Royal Engineer (1855) whose meticulous surface survey of Jerusalem (Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, 18641865) provided the basis for all subsequent studies of die city. Wilson served as secretary to the North American Boundary Commission (1858-1862), during which time he gained invaluable survey experience. In the course of his military career as a major-general, he held many prestigious appointments, among them director of the Topographical Department of the War Office (1870-1876), British consul general in Anatolia (1879-1882), chief of the Intelligence Department in Garnet Wolseley's force in Egypt (18821885), and director general of die Ordnance Survey of Great Britain (1886-1894). He was a Knight of the Garter, Knight Commander of Order of St. Michael and St. George, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He earned honorary Doctor of Civil Law (Oxford, 1883) and Doctor of Laws (Edinburgh, 1886) degrees. Wilson's survey work led to the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in 1865, T h e £500 contributed by Baroness Burdett-Coutts to the cost of this project did not include the pay of the officer in charge, but Wilson accepted die appointment for die War Office, even though he be lieved it to be a fool's errand. Jerusalem was surveyed ac cording to standard Ordnance Survey practice, at scales of 1:500,1:2,500, and 1:10,000. T h e resulting plans, not just of the whole city, but also of important buildings, together widi ninety diagrams and eighty-tiiree photographs, were pub lished by the Ordnance Survey in 1866. It was the first time that the topography of Jerusalem had been so accurately re corded. In 1865-1866 Wilson, widi Samuel Anderson, un dertook a reconnaissance survey of Palestine, during which Wilson was the first to identify the synagogue at Chorazin. His other archaeological forays, such as to Capernaum, Mt. Gerizim, and Kefar Bir'am, were superficial investigations; however, die plans he made of these places remain a valu able record of the sites as they were in the nineteenth cen tury. Wilson went on to carry out the survey of Sinai (18681869), concluding that Jebel Musa was the true Mt. Sinai. In 1871 he prepared the guidelines for the Survey of West ern Palestine (1871-1877), commissioned by the PEF. In the last six years of his life he turned his attention to resolving the controversy surrounding the identification of the sites of Golgotha and die Holy Sepulcher. His findings, published in several papers in die PEF's Quarterly Statement, were published separately by the PEF in London in 1906, under
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attempt to deal with the materials as a unified tradition. D e spite its hostile reception by the reigning adherents of the Documentary Hypothesis, Winnett was to revisit this hy pothesis in his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature in 1964 (see Winnett, 1965). In 1950-1951 Winnett returned to the American School BIBLIOGRAPHY in Jerusalem as director, continued the excavations begun by James L. Kelso at Tulul Abu el-'Alaiq (Kelso, 1955) and Information on Wilson's life and work is available in the Archives of die Palestine Exploration Fund, London. For a full-length biography, initiated soundings, followed by full-scale excavations the see Watson (below). The reader may also consult the more accessible following spring, at Dhiban, biblical Dibon (1964). [See Di and brief resume of Wilson's life in The Concise Dictionary of National bon.] Winnett also undertook two expeditions witii G. LanBiography, vol. 2, p. 727 (Oxford, 1982). kester Harding, then director of the Jordan Department of Crace, J . D. "Memoir: Major-General Sir Charles William Wilson." Antiquities, to northern and soutiiern Jordan in search of Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund (January 1906): inscriptions. These resulted in Safaitic Inscriptions from Jor 10-13. Watson, Charles M. Life of Major-General Sir Charles William Wilson. dan (1957) and "An Arabian Miscellany" (1971). [See the biography of Harding.] London, 1909. Wilson, Charles W. Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre. London, 1906. In 1957 Winnett assisted James B. Pritchard in clearing Y O L A N D E HODSON the lower portions of the great circular water system at ElJib, biblical Gibeon. [See Gibeon.] Returning again as direc tor of the American School in Jerusalem in 1958-1959, he and Harding made two expeditions to nortii Jordan, where WINNETT, FREDERICK VICTOR (1903-1989), they recorded some four thousand Safaitic inscriptions, Canadian philologist, archaeologist, biblical scholar, and ed some of which were published in Inscriptions from Fifty Sa ucator. Born in Oil Springs, Ontario, Winnett studied under faitic Cairns (1978). Subsequently, Winnett and William L. W. R. Taylor and Theophile Meek at the University of T o Reed (who again served successive directorships), accom ronto. H e was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1927, panied by Aramco's anthropologist, F. S. Vidal, engaged in and a year later completed his Ph.D. dissertation, the trans an adventurous month's expedition locating ancient mon lation of and commentary on a manuscript copy of the thir uments, recording inscriptions (Winnett) and collecting teenth-century Nestorian Abdiso bar Berka's Paradise of pottery (Reed) in the wilds of North Arabia. T h e highly Eden (published in 1929). A postdoctoral fellowship at Hart impressive results together witii a gripping journal of their ford Theological College enabled him to continue advanced adventures, were published in Ancient Records from North studies in Arabic, Akkadian, and Hebrew. He married Mar Arabia (1970). In 1962 Winnett again joined Reed for ex garet J. Taylor and in 1929 was appointed lecturer in Semitic ploratory soundings at El-'Al in the Transjordan. A second languages at University College, the University of Toronto. major expedition to Saudi Arabia was mounted in 1967 Winnett's career took a decisive turn when he was shown (Winnett, 1970). a black basalt stone with a Thamudic inscription (now in the Royal Ontario Museum). His systematic and insightful From 1952 to 1969 Winnett was chairman of the Depart study of the hundreds of inscriptions in pre-Islamic scripts ment of Oriental Languages of University College, Univer already published was the pivotal A Study of the Lihyanite sity of Toronto. Under his leadership that small department and Thamudic Inscriptions (1937; see also Albright, 1937). In became a world-class university Department of Near East 1938 he held the post of honorary lecturer at the American ern Studies. Later the Department of Middle Eastern and School in Jerusalem. A difficult and dangerous field expe Islamic Studies was separately organized. From 1966 until dition with the school's director, Nelson Glueck, to collect his retirement in 1969 Winnett also served as vice-principal sherds in the Wadi Zerqa marked his introduction to ar of University College. During tiiis period he was active in chaeology and die Transjordan, both of which, with one facilitating the publication of Lankester Harding's An Index exception, were to be his principle foci for die coming dec and Concordance of Pre-Islamic Arabian Names (1971). His ades. [See the biography of Glueck] latest publications were "Studies in Ancient North Arabian" (1987) and a contribution to the Festschrift of Mahmoud Following World War II (during which he served in the Ghul (1989). It is a measure of the man tiiat much of his Canadian army as a drill instructor, with the rank of 2d lieu active retirement was spent caring for his beloved wife. tenant), Winnett wrote a series of articles on Himyaritic in
the title Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre, a book still highly regarded. Wilson was chairman of the PEF at the time of his death. [See also Jerusalem; Palestine Exploration Fund; Sinai; and the biography of Kitchener.]
scriptions for the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, together with articles relating these texts to biblical interpretation. Under Meek's influence his major interest during this period, however, was the formation of the Pen tateuch. This eventuated in The Mosaic Tradition (1949), an
Winnett was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Can ada in 1959. He was active at many levels in the American Schools of Oriental Research, including a brief stint as editor of its annual. He was president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1963-1964 and a member of the editorial
WOOD board, a member of the American Oriental Society, the Ar chaeological Institute of America, and a charter member of the Toronto Oriental Club. Following his death, his family and friends initiated an American Schools of Oriental Re search fellowship in his name. As good at administtation as he was in the desert or at his scholar's desk, Winnett was an honest, warm-hearted, and courageous human being who inspired and enabled others to do their best. [See also Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Winnett A Study of the Lihyanite and Tharnudic Inscriptions. Toronto, 1937. "Notes on the Lihyanite and Tharnudic Inscriptions." I^e Museon 51 (1938): 299-310. "The Place of the Minaeans in the History of Pre-Islamic Arabia." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 73 (1939): 3-9-
The Mosaic Tradition. Toronto, 1949. "Why the West Should Stop Supporting Israel." Macleans' (18 Jan. 1957): 47-48. Safaitic Inscriptions from Jordan. Toronto, 1957. "Tharnudic Inscriptions from the Negev." 'Atiqot 2 (1959): 146-149. "A Fragment of an Early Moabite Inscription from Kerak" (with Wil liam L. Reed). Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 172 (1963): 1-9. The Excavations al Dibon (Dhiban) in Moab, Part 1. The First Campaign, 1950-51 (by Winnett) and Part 2. The Second Campaign, 1952 (by William L. Reed). Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Re search, 36-37. New Haven, 1964. "Re-examining the Foundations." Journal of Biblical Literature 84 (1965): 1-19. Ancient Records from North Arabia (with William L. Reed). Toronto, 1970. "An Arabian Miscellany." Annali degli Istituto Orientale di Napoli 21 (1971): 443-454"An Archaeological-Epigraphical Survey of the Ha'il Area of Nordtern Sa'udi Arabia." Beiytus 22 (1973): 51—113. Inscriptions from Fifty Safaitic Cairns (with G. Lankester Harding). To ronto, 1978. "A Reconsideration of Some Inscriptions from the Tayma Area." Pro ceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 10 (1980): 133-140. "Studies in Ancient North Arabian." Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 (1987): 239-244. "The Early Lihyanite Inscription Jaussen-Savignac 49." In Arabian Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Ghul: Symposium at Yarmouk Uni versity, December 8 - 1 1 , 1984. Wiesbaden, 1989.
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WOOD. Forests were exploited from the very beginnings of Near Eastern civilization. Enough hints exist from such Aceramic Neolithic sites as Jericho in Israel and Cayonu, Asikli Hoyiik, Nevah Cori, and Hallan Cemi in Turkey to indicate that extensive forest use has a history in this region of at least ten thousand years. These sites provide ample burned evidence for architectural timbers used as building foundations, headers and stretchers in walls, roof posts, roofs themselves, ladders, and furniture. Although the evi dence is sometimes to be assessed only by counting empty beam holes, enough burned beams survive at Middle Bronze Age palatial sites such as Kultepe (Kanes) or Acemhoyiik in Turkey so that a reasonable estimate for wood use is in excess of 2,000 trees per 150-room building. The archaeo logical evidence includes cedar, pine, fir, juniper, oak, spruce, cypress, box, chestnut, walnut, maple, and ash. F o r e s t s . T h e Lebanon, Anti-Lebanon, Amanus, Taurus, Anti-Taurus, Pontus, and Zagros Mountains probably pro vided the bulk of quality timber for construction and fine furniture, especially after local wood supplies were ex hausted. There is reason to believe, however, that some local supplies—for example, from the Anatolian plateau—were sufficient for most needs, at least until Hellenistic times. At all times lesser-quality woods—poplar, willow, plane, tam arisk, sycamore, elm, beech, and acacia—or wood for spe cialized uses, such as terebinth, and assorted fruit and nut trees must also have been exploited for ordinary carpentry, fuel, and pottery production. Wood products such as resins were used in treating illness, in mummification, and for caulking boats. [See Jericho; C y6nii; Nevah C h Taurus Mountains; Kanes.] a
or
Wood P r o d u c t i o n . T h e surviving architecture at many sites shows considerable use of wood in a wide range of quantities and quality. Much of the wood was probably lo cal, especially for sites on die Anatolian plateau, along the Levantine coast, and in the forested areas mentioned above, where it could be dragged to a site by ox cart. At Gordion in Turkey, cuttings exist in tite logs that form the tomb chamber of the Midas M o u n d Tumulus that reflect pre cisely this form of timber transport. [See Gordion.] In Egypt and Mesopotamia, however, good wood had to be imported by water. As far back as Old Kingdom Egypt, timber was transported from Lebanon to Egypt in multiple shiploads. Works on Winnett and Other References At all times, timber must have been floated down die Tigris Albright, William Foxwell. "Some New Archaeological Books." Bul and the Euphrates Rivers to Mesopotamian cities. The oc letin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 66 (1937): 28cupations or crafts of woodcutter, timber transporter, tim 32. See especially pages 30-31. Grayson, A. Kirk. "Frederick V. Winnett 1903-1989." Transactions of ber merchant, and carpenter must have been established from the very beginnings of civilization. Cuneiform texts the Royal Society of Canada series V, vol, 4 (1989): 439-440. Tushingham, A. Douglas. "In Memoriam—Frederick Victor Winnett." indicate that royal autiiorities were concerned about regu Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 279 (1990): lating timber cutting, setting timber prices, and imposing 1-4. taxes on timber. Wevers, John W., and W. Stewart McCullough. Studies on the Ancient T i m b e r T r a d e . T h e oldest surviving written evidence for Palestinian World Presented to P. V. Winnett on the Occasion of His Retirement, 1 July, 1971. Toronto, 1972. an international timber trade is the Palermo stone, in which Snefru, the first pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, tells of imJOHN S. HOLLADAY, JR.
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porting cedar from Lebanon: "Bringing forty ships filled [with] cedar logs. Shipbuilding [of] cedar wood, one . . . ship, ioo cubits [long] [= 45.73 m], and of meru wood, two ships, 100 cubits [long]. Making the doors of the royal palace [of] cedarwood." T h e text does not specify a place of origin, but Byblos is likely. It is worth noting that the actual word translated here as cedar is ash wood or '/ wood in the texts; there is less than total agreement among Egyptologists that the word does indeed mean "cedar." Meru may mean cy press or juniper. One school of thought proposes that the Egyptians did not make a distinction between cedar and ju niper, and that ash refers to better-quality conifers and meru refers to some kind of second-quality timber. At any rate both ash and meru, whatever they may mean, are foreign (imported), usually sold in long lengths, and thus readily distinguished from the local acacia or sycamore. This wood was put to refined uses: shipbuilding and making palace doors. Philologists may argue about the meaning of the words ash and meru, but archaeologists do have large quan tities of identifiable cedar and some juniper in the Egyptian collections of the world's museums. In dockyard accounts from tire time of Thutmosis III (c. 1450 B C E ) , a fragmentary papyrus in the British Museum records the issuing of timbers to the workers. The parts of the ship for which the timbers were intended (which ought to help identify them) are also given; however, the meaning of all the maritime terms is not known. Four times as many ash timbers as meru timbers are required, suggesting that whatever ash really is, it is straight, pliable, and free of knots—and thus suitable for shipbuilding. The longest tim ber specified was of ash, 30 cubits long (13.72 m), and in tended for the mast. Ash is required for masts in other documents, and again the lengths are quite long: 40 cubits (18.29 m) and 42 cubits (19.21 m). No doubt the import and export of high-quality wood goes back even further than these Old and New Kingdom references. That international timber production and mar keting were not occasional adventures is attested by the much later report of Wenamun. That the king of Byblos in Wenamun's tale could produce three hundred woodcutters upon demand, as well as sufficient animals and drivers to drag the timbers down to the port, suggests that both he and his woodsmen were accustomed to the practical require ments of the timber business and to fulfilling large foreign orders. A tour through any Egyptian gallery in a Western museum corroborates the texts, revealing a mixture of both local and imported wood on the more elegant of their sar cophagi, furniture likely to be cedar, and domestic objects likely to be riverine wood, such as sycamore, tamarisk, and acacia. The earliest Mesopotamian reference to cedar is from Sargon of Akkad (c. twenty-third century B C E ) , who claims that the god Dagan gave him the Upper Country (i.e., Mari), Iarmuti, and Ebla as far as the Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountain. One of his successors, Naram-Sin, has the
god Nergal give him Arman and Ebla, and also the Amanus, the Cedar Mountain, and the Upper Sea. [See Akkade; Mari; Ebla.] In a military campaign into Syria and Cilicia Shalmaneser III (ninth century B C E ) demands as tribute from one prince one talent of silver, two talents of purple wool, and two hun dred cedar logs. Another prince in the Amanus, somewhat poorer, must send metal, cattle, two hundred cedar logs, and two measures of cedar resin at once, and annually thereafter one hundred cedar logs and one measure of cedar resin. A third prince has to include three hundred cedar logs an nually. Sargon II (late eighth century B C E ) not only uses the timber for taxes, but also places an embargo on sale of it to the Egyptians and other inhabitants of the Levant. Depic tions on Assyrian royal reliefs confirm the textual account, with men hauling and floating large logs down from the mountains to Assur. [See Assur; Assyrians.] Ashurnasirpal (883-859) has left the most detailed records of the logging activities of the Assyrian kings. His men cut four lands of trees: erenu, surmenu, and dapranu in the Leb anon and Amanus, and burasu in the Amanus only. T h e information regarding Assyrian names for wood is not much better than for Egyptian names. It is believed that erenu is Cedrus libani, although the arguments are complicated; dap ranu is a kind of juniper, as is burasu, although the latter has also been identified as cypress; and surmenu is probably cy press (see essay by Postgate in Postgate and Powell, eds., 1992). It is known that the words refer to wood because they are preceded by a Sumerian logogram, GlS, meaning "wood." GIS.ERIN.MES (= cedar) seems more certain than the others, however, particularly because of the Wadi Brisa inscription of Nebuchadrezzar: in it he claims to have built a road and a canal to carry "mighty cedars, high and strong, of precious beauty and of excellent dark quality (?), the abundant yield of the Lebanon, as [if they be] reed stalks [carried by] the river" (Wadi Brisa inscription of Nebu chadrezzar in Brown, 1969, p. 199). On die other hand, if it were not for the immediate prox imity of Wadi Brisa to the cedar forest, the text could refer to Juniperus excelsa, which also has red or "dark" wood, as well as to cedar. T h e Assyrian inscription in Wadi Brisa is of additional interest because only 50 m away, on the wall of the wadi, a Roman inscription (one of about two hundred that encircle the remaining cedar forest but now about 1.5 km downhill from the forest edge) from near the end of the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian, (c. 134 CE) delimits the forest boundary. Hadrian's procurators had marked this off as a very special forest, and the public was officially in formed that four genera were not to be cut. Whether these are the same four genera mentioned in the Assyrian text only 50 m away is not known. At any rate, the cedar forest bound ary did not change significantly, at least in Wadi Brisa, for more than seven hundred years. T h e present deforestation is a post-Roman phenomenon. A scrap of evidence from the western edge of the Near Eastern world, and from a much
WOOLLEY, C. LEONARD later time, is that the cedar for the treasury doors at Eleusis (in central Greece) was supplied, at vast expense (seventy days' wages for a 2" X 4" X 1 2 ' board), by an emporos, an overseas trader and merchant from Knidos, in Caria. Wood Use. Although evidence for constructional timbers of all classes is the most commonly found demonstration of the use of wood in antiquity, furniture is an obvious but lesscommon use. Fine furniture, indeed, is rare, except for the remarkably well-preserved inlaid wooden furniture at Gordion. Stone furniture, such as funeral beds, can be presumed to be copies of wooden furniture. Enough furniture inlay exists elsewhere—of ivory or bone or metal—at Assur, for example, to show that elaborately carved and decorated fur niture was more common than the archaeological record might otiierwise suggest. Almost every Urartian site has pro duced elaborate metal furniture fittings—bronze animal feet and terminals, silver or gold medallions, plaques, and other attachments both practical or ornamental—and the lists of booty taken by the Assyrian ldngs include furniture of box wood and ebony embellished with gold, silver, and ivory. Painted furniture representations on Greek pottery are an other important indirect source of information. Shipbuilding as an activity speaks for itself (see above). Every ship lost at sea, whether accidentally or in a naval engagement and then replaced, must have represented a drain on forest resources. Cedar timbers with up to four hundred annual rings from a twelfth-dynasty Egyptian ship, the so-called Dahshur boat now in die Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of five funerary vessels found near the pyramid of Senwosret III, and therefore presumed to belong to the time of Senwosret (c. i860 B C E ) at Dahshur, are clearly cut from enormous trees—some centuries old and probably the size of standing ttees found today in the Lebanon and die Taurus ranges. In what was an extremely wasteful woodcutting practice, the timbers were carved or sculpted to shape, not bent, as can be seen on a represen tation of boat builders at work on a relief in the tomb of T i (fifth dynasty) at Saqqara, Egypt. At least half the wood was thereby lost. [See Ships and Boats.] C a r p e n t r y . Almost every tool—from tire crude to the so phisticated—known to modern carpenters was used by the ancients: axes, adzes, hammers, mallets, wedges, chisels, drills, lathes, right-angles (or T-squares), plumb bobs, com passes, planes, rasps, and polishing agents of various kinds. Evidence exists for the use of almost every modern tech nique as well: mortising, tenoning, treenailing, beveling, glu ing, and intricate joining and inlaying. A glance at the more elegant pieces of the Gordion furniture (eighth century B C E ) should remove any doubt about the skill and sophistication of the ancient carpenter, not only in the craftsmanship thereby demonstrated, but also in the selection of a halfdozen species of wood for their contrasting colors and tex tures and the assemblage of thousands of such fragments into an agreeable whole.
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[See also Building Materials and Techniques; Furniture and Furnishings.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Dieter. Building in Egypt: Pharaonic Stone Masonry. New York, I99I-
Brown, John Pairman. The Lebanon and Phoenicia: Ancient Texts Illus trating Their Physical Geography and Native Industries, vol. I , The Physical Setting and the Forest. Beirut, 1969. Davis, P. H. Flora of Turkey and the East Aegean Islands. 10 vols. Ed inburgh, 1965-. The standard flora for the region. Glanville, S. R. K. "Records of a Royal Dockyard of the Time of Tuthmosis III." Zeitschrij't fur agyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 66 (1931): 105-121; 67 (1932): 7-41Lucas, Alfred. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries. 4th ed., rev. and enl. by J. R. Harris. London, 1962. See chapter 18, "Wood" (pp. 429-456). Meiggs, Russell. Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Oxford, 1982. Magisterial overview of the western fringes of the an cient Near Eastern world, with a thorough commentary on both Egyptian and Assyrian timber. Merhav, Rivkah, ed. Urartu: A Metalworking Center in the First Millen nium B.C.E. Jerusalem, 1991. Presents hundreds of artifacts that en cased or were enclosed in wood. Mikesell, Marvin W. "The Deforestation of Mount Lebanon." Geo graphical Journal 59.1 (1969): 1-28. Naumann, Rudolf. Architektur Kleinasiens von ihren Anfdngen bis sum Ende der Hethitischen Zeit. 2d ed. Tubingen, 1971. The standard ar chitectural handbook for Anatolia. Note his drawings of wood use. Orlandos, Anastasios K. Les materiaux de construction et la technique architecturale des anciens Grecs. Vol. 1. Paris, 1966. See "Le Bois" (pp. 1-49). Postgate, J . N., and Marvin A. Powell, eds. Trees and Timber in Meso potamia. Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture, vol. 6. Cambridge, 1992. The most up-to-date summary of trees, timber, and species identi fications, including ancient names, wood products, trade, prices, and wood use, from texts and archaeological excavation. Pritchard, James B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Tes tament (ANET). 3d ed. Princeton, 1969. Rowton, M. B. "The Woodlands of Ancient Western Asia." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 26 (1967): 261-277. Shaw, J. W. Minoan Architecture: Materials and Techniques. Annuario della Scuola Archaeologica di Atene e delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente, vol. 49. Rome, 1973. See pages 135-185 for wood use in con struction. Simpson, Elizabeth, et al. Gordion: Wooden Furniture. Ankara, 1992. Extraordinarily well-preserved set of ancient furniture illustrative of the best of the carpenter's craft. Complements Young's reports (be low). Thirgood, J. V. Man and the Medilenanean Forest: A History of Resource Depletion. London, 1981. Westerdorf, Wolfhart, and Wolfgang Helck, eds. Lexikon der Agyptologie. Wiesbaden, 1972-. See the entries for baum and zeder. Young, Rodney S. Gordion I: Three Great Early Tumuli. Gordion Ex cavations Final Reports, vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1981. Zohary, Michael. Geobotanical Foundations of the Middle East. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1973. P E T E R IAN K U N I H O L M
WOOLLEY, C. LEONARD (1880-1960), British ar chaeologist, excavator of Ur in Mesopotamia. Educated at St. John's School, Leatherhead, and at New College, Ox-
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ford, Charles Leonard Woolley was appointed in 1 9 0 5 to be assistant in the Department of Antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum under Arthur Evans. His life's occupation was set in 1907, however, when he joined the Ecldey B. Coxe Ex pedition of die University of Pennsylvania Museum in Phil adelphia (now die University Museum) to excavate at Karanog, Nubia, a Meroitic (Hellenistic) cemetery, and at Buhen, a second-millennium fortress, under David RandallMaclver. He remained with the Coxe expedition until 1 9 1 1 and joined an Oxford University expedition to Nubia in 1912. Woolley was then chosen to succeed D. G. Hogarth as director of the British Museum's excavations at the im portant Syro-Hittite site of Carchemish in north Syria. Apart from a six-week survey between seasons on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund in Sinai conducted together with his Carchemish colleague T . E. Lawrence in 1914 and an interruption for war service, Woolley continued at Carche mish until 1919. During the war he served as an intelligence officer in the Near East, but from i 9 i 6 t o 1918 was a pris oner of war in Turkey. After Carchemish, Woolley excavated on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Society at Amarna in Egypt from 1921 to 1922 and was then invited by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum to lead a joint ex pedition to the site of al-Muqayyar (ancient Ur) in southern Mesopotamia. Woolley is probably best known for the Ur excavations, carried out between 1922 and 1934, particularly for the rich treasures of the Sumerian Early Dynastic period found in the so-called royal cemetery. Woolley also completed the excavations begun by H. R. H. Hall of the British Museum at the small neighboring Sumerian site of Ubaid. Woolley conscientiously prepared ten volumes of his final report on the Ur excavations, but apart from volumes 1 (al-Ubaid), 2 (royal cemetery), 3 (seals), and 5 (ziggurat), these lay in typescript in the British Museum (7-9) and the University Museum (4, 6, 10) throughout the war, and were only pub lished when funds became available from the 1950s through the 1970s. After his knighthood in 1935, Woolley began excavations at Tell 'Atchana in north Syria, the site of ancient Alalakh, in 1937. Once again he was interrupted by war. Although he was too old for active service, he served during 1 9 4 3 1946, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, as archaeological adviser to the Civil Affairs Directorate. On Woolley's advice the Allied supreme commander-general, Dwight D . Eisen hower, issued an order prohibiting the looting or damaging of buildings in liberated territories. After his war service, Woolley resumed his work at Ala lakh, completing the uncovering of second-millennium pal aces and archives of cuneiform tablets, and, at the neigh boring coastal site of al-Mina, he revealed evidence of early Greek settlement. Nearly seventy years old when he closed the Alalakh excavations in 1949, Woolley published a full
report on the work there in 1955 and a popular account, A Forgotten Kingdom, in 1953. Woolley remained an influential figure in the world of archaeology. Plis last work, Mesopo tamia and the Middle East (1961) was published posthu mously. [See also Alalakh, Amarna, Tell el-, Carchemish; Ubaid; Ur; and the biographies of Hogarth and Lawrence] BIBLIOGRAPHY Dawson, Warren R., and Eric P. Uphill. Wlw Was Who in Egyptology. 2d ed. London, 1972. See pages 310-311. Mallowan, M. E. L. "Woolley, Sir (Charles) Leonard." In Dictionary of National Biography, 1951-1960, pp. 1082-1084. Oxford, 1971. Winestone, H. V. F. Woolley of Ur: The Life of Sir Leonard Woolley. London, 1990. Woolley, C. Leonard, et al. Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis on Behalf of the British Museum, vol. 2, 'The Town Defences. London, 1921. Woolley, C. Leonard, et al. Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the University of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia; Ur Excavations. 10 vols. London, 1927-. Woolley, C. Leonard. Dead Towns and Living Men (1920). London, 1932. Woolley, C. Leonard. A Forgotten Kingdom. London, 1953. Woolley, C. Leonard. Spadework: Adventures in Archaeology. London, 1953Woolley, C. Leonard. Alalakh: An Account of the Excavations at Tell Atchana in the Llatay, 1939-1949. Oxford, 1955. Woolley, C. Leonard. Mesopotamia and the Middle East. London, 1961. Woolley, C. Leonard. As I Seem to Remember. London, 1962. T . C . MITCHELL
WRIGHT, G E O R G E ERNEST (1909-1974), field archaeologist; architect of American "biblical archaeology"; president (1966-1974) of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR); articulator of biblical theology as the re cital of God's mighty acts in history; and mentor to two generations of archaeologists and interpreters. Ernest Wright combined archaeological theory and prac tice with the bearing of archaeological results on biblical in terpretation. The product of a Presbyterian ministerial fam ily in Ohio, his education at the College of Wooster (B.A., 1931) and at McCormick Theological Seminary (B.D., 1934) nurtured a warm but critical Calvinist perspective and a love of Bible and history. His curiosity about the hard and social sciences led him to study with William Foxwell Al bright at Johns Hopkins University, where he focused on die ceramic materials of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze periods. His dissertation on these materials updated by him and modified by his students and colleagues, remains a basic resource: he published it (New Haven, 1937) and an article on eisegesis and exegesis in the same year. For Wright, this combination of endeavors always made sense. Wright had his first field experience in 1934 at Bethel, with Albright; during breaks, he roamed the land to gain a sense of its topography. In 1937 he worked with Elihu Grant at
WRIGHT, GEORGE ERNEST Haverford College bringing order to the ceramic record of 'Ain Shems/Beth-Shemesh. [See Beth-Shemesh.] In 1938 he became field secretary of ASOR. T h a t year he launched The Biblical Archaeologist, aimed at interpreting archaeological findings for amateurs. For years he and his wife, Emily DeNyse Wright, prepared it out of their home. As its editor for twenty-five years, he contributed thirty-six articles and innumerable short notes and reviews. From 1939 to 1959, Wright taught Hebrew Bible at M c Cormick Seminary in Chicago. Early in that period he par ticipated in Henri Frankfort's prehistoric seminar at the Ori ental Institute of the University of Chicago; motivated by his appreciation for Robert Braidwood and others in that seminar, his interest in the "lower" tiers of historical study germinated: social history and environmental history. Meanwhile, he wrote three biblical monographs: The Chal lenge of Israel's Faith (Chicago, 1944), The Old Testament against Its Environment (Chicago, 1950), and God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London, 1952). In each, he in terfaced archaeologically informed historical interpretation with theological claims. Following up his topographic inter est, he produced, with his New Testament colleague Floyd V. Filson, the durable Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible (Philadelphia, 1945). In 1957 he published Biblical Archae ology, his portrayal of archaeology as a resource for biblical history and religion; included was a chapter on archaeology and everyday life—an expression of archaeology in tire ser vice of social history. In 1956 Wright joined Bernhard W. Anderson in inau gurating tire Drew-McCormick Expedition to Tell Balatah/ Shechem in the Central Hill Country 64 km (40 mi.) north of Jerusalem. Their aims were to recover data from an ear lier, ill-published expedition by Ernst Sellin under AustroGerman sponsorship; to train and forge a network among a new generation of field archaeologists; and to practice the soil-deposition field method. Strong on practice, developing its theory as it worked, die Shechem team provided field experience to tire future directorships of the Gezer, Tell elHesi, Ta'anach, Heshbon (Hesban), Caesarea, and Ai ex peditions. [See the independent entries on each of these sites.] In 1959 Wright accepted the Parkman Chair of Divinity at Harvard University, where his graduate seminars nurtured budding archaeologists as well as a host of biblical special ists. His undergraduate courses introduced a multitude of inquisitive students to how biblical studies interacts with ar chaeology and the social sciences. In 1964 he yielded Shechem to his colleagues, took a sab batical in Israel, and launched, with Nelson Glueck, the Gezer Expedition, staffed by his Harvard proteges. There he began to bring hard and social scientists onto the staff, a vision fulfilled at Idalion, on Cyprus, in his most ambitious endeavor (1971-1974). [See Idalion.] With his acceptance of the presidency of ASOR in 1966, Wright came to influence
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all American archaeology in Southwest Asia; his students currentiy fill many of the offices of ASOR. Wright's synthesis of biblical archaeology and biblical the ology made for controversy among his students and his col leagues. His positivistic historical stance was vulnerable to attack by literary critics. T h e way he wedded history to di vine manifestation was cogentiy challenged by theologians (see Gilkey, 1961). His archaeological expertise was ac cepted and esteemed by all, but some of his efforts at inter pretation, notably of the Shechem results in relation to the patriarchal stories in Genesis, were questioned by those who found him deficient in interpretive theory. By his expertise and by the sheer force of his personality, G. Ernest Wright pioneered one era, led in the transition to another, and left an unquestioned legacy of inquisitiveness and adaptable encounter with new insights and methods. Usually one jump ahead of his students, he never abandoned his efforts to make archaeology interdisciplinary and both available and accountable to all. [See also Biblical Archaeology; Shechem; and the biogra phies of Albright and Noth.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Cross, Frank Moore, et al., eds. Magnolia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God; Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright. Garden City, N.Y., 1976. See "Appendix: The Bibliography of G. Ernest Wright" (pp. 577-593). Dever, William G. "Biblical Theology and Biblical Archaeology: An Appreciation of G. Ernest Wright." Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980): 1—15. Assessment and critique of the interplay of Wright's two great areas of concern by his most articulate protege in archae ology. Gilkey, Langdon. "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language." Journal of Religion 41 (1961): 194-205. Thoughtful cri tique of Wright's category "the mighty acts of God" from an epistemological perspective, questioning Wright's consistency. King, Philip J . "The Influence of G. Ernest Wright on the Archaeology of Palestine." In Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Memory ofD. Glenn Rose, edited by Leo G. Perdue et al., pp. 15-29. Atlanta, 1987. Meyers, Eric M., et al. "Fiftiedi Anniversary Salute to the Founder of BA." Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987): 5-21. Includes an interview with Wright's wife, a description of Wright's curatorship of the Har vard Semitic Museum, a remembrance of his Winslow lecture at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, and two me morial statements given in Jerusalem (1974), al! presented as an appreciation in the fiftieth anniversary issue of his journal. Wright, G. Ernest. "Eisegesis and Exegesis in the Interpretation of Scripture." Expository Times 48 (1937): 353-357Wright, G. Ernest. The Pottery of Palestine from the Earliest Times to the End of the Early Bronze Age. New Haven, 1937. Wright, G. Ernest. The Challenge of Israel's Faith. Chicago, 1944. Wright, G. Ernest. The Old Testament against. Its Environment. Chicago, 1950. Wright, G. Ernest. God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital. London, 1952. Wright, G. Ernest. Biblical Archaeology. Philadelphia, 1957. Rev. ed. Philadelphia, 1962. Wright's primary articulation of the role of ar-
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chaeology in biblical understanding and interpretation. Widely trans in taldng Vinca script as underlying either Sumerian cune lated. iform or the Aegean family of scripts: altiiough its partisans Wright, G. Ernest. "The Archaeology of Palestine." In The Bible and refer to its marks as "writing," there are apparently no re the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William- Foxwell Albright, curring sequences of signs, which indicates that if the marks edited by G. Ernest Wright, pp. 73-112. Garden City, N.Y., 1961. are indeed representational, at most they represent tilings or Wright's outline of the sweep of Palestinian archaeology, to be up dated from subsequent articles and reviews of final excavation re "thoughts," rather than words; evidence of connections with ports. the later and/or distant civilizations of the Aegean and M e Wright, G. Ernest. Shechem: The Biography of a Biblical City. New York, sopotamian regions has not yet been established; and there 1965. Account of the Shechem expedition through its 1962 season, is little hope of determining, let alone reconstructing, the with augmentation made in the field in 1964. Includes Wright's ap language(s) that might have been spoken by the marks' cre plication of archaeological results to Abraham, Genesis 34, Joshua 24, Judges 9, and Josephus on the Samaritans. ators. Wright, G. Ernest. "What Archaeology Can and Cannot Do." Biblical Great attention was accorded in the 1980s to the claim by Archaeologist 34 (1971): 70-75. Denise Schmandt-Besserat (in a series of articles published Wright, G. Ernest. "The 'New' Archaeology." Biblical Archaeologist 38 between 1977 and 1988, many collected in Schmandt-Bes (1975): 104-115. Posthumously published "fireside chat" prepared serat, 1992) that the hundreds of "small clay objects," or for delivery to staff at Idalion in the summer of 1974, in which Wright emerges as a "steadfast humanist." tokens, excavated throughout the Near East, and which in EDWARD F . C A M P B E L L some ways resembled the impressions found on the earliest clay tablets from Uruk, were in fact an early recording sys tem: the tokens that looked like the later sign for sheep in fact represented sheep; some number of them enclosed in a lump WRITING AND WRITING SYSTEMS. Writing of clay (a bulla) represented a flock of drat number of sheep; is a system of more or less permanent marks representing a as a security measure, each token was pressed into the clay, set of utterances in such a way that the utterances can be leaving a mark, before it was sealed into the bulla; finally, recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the impressed marks took the place of the enclosed tokens, the utterer. This definition is worded to exclude such "fore and writing had been invented. Schmandt-Besserat identi runners" of writing as petroglyphs and the "tokens" found fied dozens of token shapes witii proto-cuneiform signs. [See in excavations throughout the ancient Near East. Intuitively Tablet; Uruk-Warka; Cuneiform.] Her theories were pro those are qualitatively different from the earliest systems that vocative and suggestive, but upon publication of her data are indubitably writing, such as Mesopotamian cuneiform base (1992, vol. 2), Paul E. Zimansky (1993) was able to and Egyptian hieroglyphs—that is, a written message rep determine that the actual attestation of tokens does not resents language, not thought. A necessary (though not suf square witii die meanings imputed to them: from samples ficient) condition for the/an invention of writing is civiliza covering some seven thousand years, only eight "sheep" tion, including urbanism; writing is prerequisite to history. have been found, and from the fourth millennium only And the first things to be written within any civilization tend twenty-seven "textiles" of eleven kinds. These quantities do to be things that cannot be expressed orally—accounts, cal not make sense in the context of the economy revealed in endars, and divine messages. later true cuneiform documents. Zimansky summarizes, N a t u r e a n d Origin. A forerunner, which perhaps ex "There is no reason to assume that tokens stood for specific presses "thought," becomes a writing system (or script) commodities in ways tiiat remained constant over the mil when it has incorporated a means of recording the phonol lennia in all parts of the Near East. It is less strained to sug ogy of the language witii which it is associated: a large pro gest that various people at various times exploited the few portion of the lexicon of any language comprises elements geometric shapes that are relatively easy to make in clay and that cannot be represented by "thought pictures" of con used them as counters or for whatever other purposes the}', crete objects, such as abstracts, function morphemes (e.g., as individuals, chose" (p. 516). inflections, prepositions), and—perhaps primarily—proper names, especially foreign names (native names are generally not meaningless, like Jones, but stretches of text, like Car penter, Farmer, or Smith). Two varieties of marks have recently been suggested as forerunners of true writing in the ancient Near East: the Vinca script and the Mesopotamian token. The former comprises markings incised on votive objects—figurines, models, vessels—excavated originally at sites in Transylva nia and subsequently elsewhere in the Balkan region. T w o hundred and ten different designs have been cataloged (Gimbutas, 1991, pp. 308-321). There are three difficulties
An origin of writing that derives from the nature of the languages recorded has been suggested (Daniels, 1992b) that applies to the three societies in which writing emerged: Sumerian, Chinese, and Mayan. In each case, the language spoken was largely monosyllabic—that is, morphemes (meaningful units) were generally only one syllable long. This is significant for two reasons. It is commonplace for preliterate societies to make pictographic records, in which a picture stands for an idea, an event, or even a word; and psycholinguistic investigation shows that the basic unit of perception of speech is not the phoneme (roLtghly equivalent
WRITING AND WRITING SYSTEMS to the sound represented by a letter of the alphabet), but the syllable. In a monosyllabic language, drawing a pictogram of a word is the same as maldng a sign for a syllable. Many of the abstracts, function morphemes, and proper names (see above) will also be monosyllabic, homophonous with picturable content words. T h e pictograms of the latter can thus easily be taken to represent the former as well. If words were more than a syllable long, the likelihood of homophony would be much reduced, and the unpicturable sttetches of language would remain unrecorded. An early example is the Sumerian sign for ti, "arrow," which also stands for ti, "life." [See Sumerian.] It is noteworthy tiiat every time someone not previously literate in any language has invented a script for his own language (the best-known example from more than a dozen cases is Sequoyah's Cherokee), the result is a syllabary. Typology. Orthodoxy has it that there are just tiiree types of writing systems: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic. This typology seems to have been devised by Isaac Taylor (1829-1901); it achieved apotheosis in the work of Ignace J. Gelb (1907-1985), who asserted that the three types rep resent an immutable evolutionary sequence in the order named. That is, an alphabet can only develop from a sylla bary, and a syllabary can only develop from a logography (Gelb, 1963, p. 201). Inasmuch as an alphabet has only been invented once in all the world, this is a rather incautious claim. It required Gelb to insist that the Northwest Semitic script, traditionally called an alphabet, is actually an "unvocalized syllabary" because die Ethiopic (and Indian) script that developed from it by altering the forms of the letters to denote vowels, is a hybrid that could not have de veloped from an alphabet. These convolutions disappear when it is recognized that tiiere are not tiiree script types, but six: logosyllabary (purely logographic notation is not yet writing); syllabary; abjad (consonantary); alphabet; abugida (Ethiopic type); and hangul (feature based). (Abjad is an Arabic word; abugida is Ge'ez; and hangul is Korean.) Logosyllabaries include Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Anato lian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, and Mayan glyphs. [See Egyptian.] Syllabaries include die Cypriot script and, par excellence, the Japanese kana. There is historically but one abjad, represented by its modern developments Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac script. Again, only one alphabet has been devised, the Greek, ancestor of the diverse scripts of Europe. T h e abugida principle remains in use throughout South and Southeast Asia (seen in Sanskrit and Hindi D e vanagari, and Thai, and all the other scripts derived from ancient Indian Brahmi) and in Ethiopia. T h e hangul type appears in Korean, in varieties of shorthand, and in general in scripts devised by scholars familiar with practical pho netics. In a logosyllabary, several hundred to several tiiousand different characters each represent a morpheme, and a re
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stricted subset of these are used purely for their phonetic value. In Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian, phonetic com plements are written alongside logograms to assist in inter preting signs tiiat may have acquired more than one related meaning. In Chinese, on the other hand, a sign that provides phonetic information is incorporated into an individual character along with one that provides semantic information (so that the full inventory of Chinese characters is much larger than that of Mesopotamian cuneiform). In bodi Su merian and Egyptian, further disambiguation is provided by semantic determinatives—characters that label the associ ated word as designating a member of a general class, such as textile, cattle, or city (e.g., in the Akkadian DINGIR. U T U = as: DINGIR = the determinative for detities, U T U = the logogram for "sun," as = the phonetic indicator for the pronunciation samas, "sun deity"). In a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, almost always of the shape consonant + vowel (CV), or vowel alone. (Mesopotamian cuneiform, in fact, seems unique in allowing VC and CVC characters as well.) The number of characters is on the order of one hundred, being about die number of consonants in the language times the number of vowels. Owing to their derivation from logograms, signs that are phonetically similar generally show no graphic similarity. Where a syllabary has evolved from a logosyllabary, it may retain a limited number of logograms, as in Linear B, but the primary burden of communication is carried by the pho netic signs. T h e evolution of writing systems thus far follows a fairly natural course, based in the nature of language and the na ture of speech. It is the step to the consonantary that rep resents the greatest achievement in the analysis of language. Some lone genius had to recognize botii that syllables do not differ unsystematic ally from one another—they could be classed into a small number of groups based on the similarity of their more prominent portions, their vowels—and that the portions of syllables that distinguish those with the same vowels from each other in turn bear some kind of similarity. This similarity is not acoustic, it is articulatory; it character izes what are called consonants. It is possible tiiat this rec ognition was the work of a Semitic-speaker because in the Semitic languages the consonants and vowels that make up words vary independently—the vowels are largely condi tioned by the grammar. In Sumerian, however, a root always involved the same combination of consonants and vowels. In Akkadian, such a recognition is found only rudimentarily in the ta-ti-tu list of signs. [See Akkadian.] The consonantsonly recording of Semitic was no impediment to reading, given the common assessment that redundancy in language is about 50 percent. Eventually, however, Semitic languages came to be invaded by foreign loanwords that did not re spect the division of labor between consonants and vowels. T h e term abjad is offered in complementarity to alphabet, acronymically formed from the first letters of the Arabic
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script in their ancestral order. (Abjad is the Arabic name for that sequence, which is still used when the letters serve as numbers.) The developmental path of writing systems then branched when scholars speaking languages from two Indo-European families attempted to write them using forms of the abjad. The earlier result had been the alphabet, devised for Greek on tire basis of a Phoenician or Aramaic model. [See Greek; Phoenician-Punic; Aramaic Language and Literature.] Given the paucity of both early Greek writing and Semitic texts, it is not possible to decide exactly when, where, or how the first attempts to write Greek took place (Pierre Swiggers in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 2 1 ) . A compro mise date is about 800 B C E . Likely sites are trading posts, either Semitic-speaking in a Greek area or Greek-speaking in a Semitic area. (The suggestion of al-Mina, Cilicia, seems to rely on excavational accident rather than positive evi dence, since it was merely the most prominent site that hap pened to be found at the right place and time.) The "how," is that, by a happy coincidence, the Semitic languages em ploy a number of consonants ("laryngeals") not found in Greek. Some of them apparently were heard by Greeks to color a-vowels in the direction of the e and o of their lan guage: h and h were used for short and long e,' for 0, and the inaudible ' for a. T h e letters w and y became u and z, suggesting an Aramaic influence (there, but not in Phoeni cian, tiiose letters could stand for vowels even if they did not result from historical alteration of diphthongs). An alphabet is thus a script in which each consonant and vowel has its own symbol. This is the ideal state of affairs, and it tends to exist only when an alphabet is first devised: speech is fluid, continually though gradually changing as it is passed from generation to generation and as language communities drift apart; whereas script is fixed, because of the existence of writings from earlier generations and because the craft of writing is passed on in the normative setting of schools. [See Scribes and Scribal Techniques.] In India, the Brahmi script is attested from the fourth cen tury B C E , but in a fully worked-out form, suggesting tiiat it had been devised some centuries before—most likely on the basis of a Semitic abjad. In Brahmi (and also in Kharoshthi, found in the northwest of the subcontinent and clearly based on the local Aramaic variety of abjad), which seems first to have recorded Prakrit and gave rise to the scripts of India and Southeast Asia, the vowels of the Indo-Aryan languages are denoted by appendages to the basic form of the letters. [See Indo-European Languages.] T h e base form does not, as in die underlying abjad, denote just the consonant; rather, it denotes the consonant plus the vowel a. A diacritic is avail able to cancel the vowel and indicate that the letter is used for the bare consonant (Richard Salomon, in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 30). T h e same method of denoting vowels is found in Ethiopic script, except that a vowelless consonant is denoted by the same symbol as denotes the consonantplus shwa. Continuing the pattern of abjad and alphabet, a suit
able name for this type is abugida, again taken from the na tive name for the characters when taken in their traditional order. (The available English names all incorporate the term syllable, misleadingly suggesting a similarity between this type and the syllabary.) The sixth type of script is first seen in the Korean writing system, hangul. There, letters for phonetically similar phones receive graphically similar shapes, so that it is pho netic features rather than segments that are recorded. Only sophisticated linguistic scholars have created such scripts, which tend to serve special purposes, such as shorthand or phonetic notation. By the middle of the first millennium C E , scholars of lan guages using abjads found it advisable to explicitiy notate vowels in their texts. The first to do so, writing Syriac, were familiar with the Greek alphabet, but they chose not to add vowel letters to the sequence of consonants for two reasons: in all three abjad languages, the texts—Hebrew Bible, Syriac Peshitta, Arabic Qur'an—were sacred in their physical in stantiations (not just in their content), and it would be sac rilegious to alter the received texts by interjecting additional letters. The seventh-century Syriac scholar Jacob of Edessa did in fact propose a full set of vowel letters to be written within words, but they found no favor because they would render all existing literature unreadable. Instead of full let ters, textual scholars devised various systems of notating vowels (and other information) tiiat involved placing sym bols above, below, between, and even within the inherited letters. T h e Syriac traditions came first, then the Arabic, and finally, and most elaborately, the Hebrew. [See Syriac; Ar abic; Hebrew Language and Literature.] History. T h e historical development of writing systems largely follows die typological sequence described above. Logosyllabaries. The first true writing of which speci mens have survived is Sumerian cuneiform in its early stages (c. 3200 B C E ) . Piotr Michalowski (1993) offers evidence tiiat its invention can be localized in Uruk: in the earliest city lists, the name Uruk is represented by the sign for "city" itself— that is, Uruk is the city par excellence. T h e earliest surviving documents are various lands of lists and then what have come to be known as economic documents—die ephemera of running a temple, farm, or catde ranch. At first only full words are recorded, then grammatical affixes (taking ad vantage of the phonetic properties of die signs). By early in the third millennium, cuneiform could record ordinary prose and poetry. With full phonetic capacity came the pos sibility of its use or adaptation for languages other than, even unrelated to that for which the script was devised. By the middle of the tiiird millennium, the "Sumerian" script was in current use for writing Akkadian and Eblaite. [See Ebla Texts.] Akkadian became the regional vernacular, while Sumerian was maintained as a language of religion and scholarship. With die adaptation of a script to a new language, as hap pened when cuneiform moved to Akkadian, the signs could
WRITING AND WRITING SYSTEMS take on a whole new set of phonetic values derived from the new words associated with the same semantics; the inven tory of logograms was reduced, and phonetic writing be came more prevalent. Eventually, some genres of text es chewed logograms almost entirely, while writers on more arcane topics preferred to render their records confidential by writing in almost nothing but logograms—which required years of study to master. With the further spread of cunei form (to Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian), logogram use became ever more sparse, so tiiat some cuneiform languages were written almost purely syllabically. [See Hurrian.] In Hittite and Hurrian, the practice arose of duplicating the vowel of a CV syllable with die sign for the matching V (even for phonologically short vowels), so that a syllable de noting a consonant followed by a vowel might in practice be designating the consonant only (Piotr Michalowski, Jerrold Cooper, and Gene Gragg in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 3). From Egypt, almost simultaneously with the earliest writ ing in Mesopotamia, appear the earliest surviving traces of (proto-)hieroglyphic writing, most notably the Narmer pal ette. T h e general similarity between hieroglyphic and cu neiform writing (logography, phonetic complements, se mantic determinatives) leads most scholars to recognize influence from the latter on the former. Direct borrowing seems ruled out by the nature of the Egyptian script: die phonetic signs denote only consonants, never syllables. T h e signs represent three, two, or one consonant, and there is no indication whatsoever of the accompanying vowels. (The uniconsonantal signs, eventually numbering twenty-four, are often called an alphabet, but this group was never—until some late experiments in imitation of Greek writing—used as a system to die exclusion of bi- or triconsonantal signs.) T h e principles of writing Egyptian did not change for more than tiiree thousand years; the hieratic and demotic scripts are cursive and extremely cursive versions of hieroglyphic, which continued to be used and elaborated in formal con texts until the end of the Egyptian civilization (Robert Ritner in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 4). In eastern Anatolia, perhaps influenced by the Linear A or B scripts of the Aegean, or perhaps by Egyptian hiero glyphics, a pictographic script was used for the Luwian lan guage, a close relative of Hittite. It incorporates a limited number of logograms and is primarily syllabic (Craig Melchert in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 6). [See Luwians.] Abjad. Some time, probably in the second quarter of the second millennium B C E , some scribe, somewhere in die Le vant, made the momentous discovery that words could be represented not for their meaning alone, nor according to their syllables, but that the syllables could be further broken down into a vocalic portion and a consonantal portion, and that the words could be represented by their consonants alone. As with Egyptian, this may have been practical be cause of the structure of the Afro-Asiatic languages (among them Semitic and Egyptian), where much grammatical der
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ivation and inflection is accomplished by varying vowels ac companying consonantal roots (though it is incorrect to claim that all semantic information is in the consonants and all grammatical information is in the vowels). The fallacy must be avoided, however, of insisting on an Egyptian back ground or origin for the Canaanite abjad on the grounds that among the thousands of hieroglyphs it is possible to find a handful tiiat look like the posited earliest forms found in the abjad: only when both the form and the function (i.e., sound value) of signs match—consistently across the system—can a relationship be claimed. At most, as with cuneiform influ ence on hieroglyphics, it can be said that the idea of writing consonants rather than syllables could have come from Egypt. T h e popular claim that the Proto-Sinaitic inscrip tions underlie the abjad/alphabet, as codified by William Foxwell Albright (1966), depends on fotir unproven as sumptions: die script is alphabetic, the signs have Egyptian prototypes, the letters are pictographic and acrophonic (i.e., they picture an object whose name begins with the sound denoted by the sign), and the language is Semitic (Sznycer, 1975). Moreover, its advocates do not explain why a group of putative Semitic-speaking miners at work or enslaved in the Sinai desert would have devised a script of their own— or how it could have reached or found general acceptance in Palestine. [See Proto-Sinaitic] Wherever and however the abjad originated, it found widespread adoption for recording a variety of dialects of the West Semitic language groups: Canaanite, Aramaic, and South Semitic. This last group used a script tiiat diverged early on and is found in difficult-to-date graffiti in Nortii Arabic languages ancestral to Classical Arabic and in beau tiful, monumental inscriptions in Old South Arabian dia lects. (This script was eventually taken across the Bab elMandeb to form the basis of Ethiopic writing.) T h e Northern Linear, or Canaanite, script (sparsely attested) de veloped into the Phoenician, which traveled all around the Mediterranean and beyond; it gave rise to the Punic script of Carthage and environs; appeared as an archaic, sacred script in the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Tetragrammaton in some texts was written in these archaic characters within a text otherwise in Square Hebrew script); and survives as the dis tinctive Samaritan script. [See Dead Sea Scrolls; Samari tans.] T h e script for Aramaic texts diverged somewhat and then followed two paths of development: one maintained the original separation of the letters (adopted, probably during die Babylonian Exile, for Hebrew and still in use) and die other, as a result of increasingly speedy writing, manifests increasingly cursive features. Its descendants include the surviving Arabic, Syriac, and Mandaic scripts, in all of which nearly all the letters of each word are joined (M. O'Connor in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 5). [See Man daic] In those languages tiiat used the Aramaic abjad (but also in Hebrew inscriptions prior to the change of script), a means of denoting some vowels emerged gradually. At first,
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word-final vowels were indicated with the letter for the homorganic consonant (i.e., (y) for [i], (w) for [u], (') or (h) for [a]); subsequentiy, word-medial vowels could be so indi cated. These optional consonant letters are known by tire Latin term matres lectionis, "mothers of reading." The first script known to have been invented rather than developed from an earlier one is Old Persian cuneiform, de vised specifically to record the exploits of Darius the Great. The characters are composed of wedges, in imitation of cu neiform writing, but the script has been found only incised on building stone and cliff faces, never written on clay. Some characters render CV syllables, others plain consonants, showing the influence of both the Akkadian syllabary and the Aramaic abjad (David Testen in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 8). T h e earliest sizable corpus written with a form of the Lev antine abjad is the Ugaritic texts, which survived because they were written on clay tablets with a reed stylus in imi tation of Mesopotamian practice. T h e shapes of the letters appear to be cuneiform adaptations of the linear forms seen in the handful of contemporary or earlier inked or incised texts. However, they bear no relationship whatsoever to the signs of Mesopotamian cuneiform, which was in use at Uga rit for Akkadian, Hurrian, and, rarely, Sumerian (for the early epigraphic material, see Cross 1979, 1989). T h e Uga ritic documents include both ephemera and belletristic com positions. These two categories are also found in the rare surviving abjad-written items not impressed on clay tablets: ostraca, seals, and sealings. [See Seals.] Fifth-century B C E (and later) papyri from Egypt represent the more quotidian scribal output, while monumental inscriptions found from Dan to Beersheba (and well beyond) record, usually, die conquests and border claims of local rulers, and, especially in South Arabia, achievements in public works projects (such as irrigation systems) as well. T h e literary records of the Levant have not survived in contemporary manuscripts; the earliest biblical texts are among tire Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Bible mentions a number of works that have van ished completely. From the first millennium C E , Syriac, Mandaic, and Jewish Aramaic incantations written on apotropaic bowls and on a handful of other items are preserved from Mesopotamia; the Cairo Geniza, from the end of that millennium, has yielded thousands of fragments of texts (both sacred and mundane) relating to tire Jewish commu nity there. As Christianity spread to the north and east, scripture translations and a great literature were produced in Syriac. In the seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad dictated the Qur'an. Not long after, the Jewish Masoretes recognized the need to fix exactly the pronunciation of the Bible. For each language, a means was required to denote all the vowels in the sacred texts; in each case, the practical reason was different, but the solutions devised were similar. T h e re sulting vowel pointings (not called matres lectionis) remain
in use, yet optionally, to this day; theoretically, they change the abjads to alphabets, but their absence in the great ma jority of written materials shows that the supposed advan tage of full explicitness of the alphabet is illusory. Alphabet. The adoption of writing by the Greeks, with the accidental invention of the alphabet, has fallaciously been taken to mark the onset of "true literacy" in history; but this position derives more from ignorance of Near East ern materials than from any facts of classical civilization (Pe ter T . Daniels in Daniels and Bright, 1996, sec. 2). It suffices here to outline the descent of the alphabets of Europe. T h e Greeks brought their script to their colonies, where it flour ished and developed varieties (it was standardized in Athens in 401 B C E ) . A variety planted in Italy was taken up by the Etruscans, whose improvements were passed on to die Ro mans, resulting in the alphabet used throughout Western Europe and by its cultural descendants. Nonliterate peoples converted by missionaries from the western branch of Christianity tended to adopt the Roman alphabet, while those taught by Greek-speaking missionaries preferred to devise new scripts for their languages on the Greek model, notably Armenian, Georgian, and Glagolitic/Cyrillic (Dan iels and Bright, 1996, pt. V). Abugida. A handful of monumental inscriptions from early in the fourth cenmry C E attest to the introduction, probably several centuries earlier, of consonantal writing from South Arabia to the kingdom of Axum, in present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. Simultaneously with the conversion of the kingdom to Christianity in the year 348, the script be came provided with vowel indications, in tire form of ap pendages and modifications to the consonant letters. This technique cannot have come from Syrian missionaries be cause Syriac script then represented vowels only with ma tres; nor from Greek or Coptic missionaries, or vowels would presumably have been indicated with separate letters. Rather, there must have been some awareness, however ephemeral, of the scripts of India, perhaps mediated by the Martomite Christian community around Madras (Daniels, 1992a). Paleography. While the use of a writing system (the principles of orthography) remain quite stable throughout its existence, it is readily apparent that handwriting changes across generations. T h e scribes of a particular time and place tend to form their characters in a similar way, if only so that each can read what the others write. Fashions in handwriting can often be correlated with aesthetic aspects of the surrounding culture—for example, the angular hand writing used where Gothic architecture included pointed arches, compared with the rounded writing popular along with Romanesque rounded arches. T h e variation is usually not so spectacular. Subtle differ ences in handwriting between regions and generations make possible the craft of paleography. Given enough precisely dated and placed manuscripts, and intimate familiarity with
WRITING AND WRITING SYSTEMS as large a corpus of materials as possible, a scholar can assign a given undated document to a limited area and a range of half a century or so. A particular scribe's handwriting is not likely to change over his or her career (Daniels, 1984), so tiiat during any particular decade, or year, documents may be produced representing three or four generations of scribal training and fashion. Hundreds of thousands of documents in cuneiform have been excavated from several millennia and throughout the Near East. Early in the course of Assyriology, massive col lections of the data needed to establish cuneiform paleog raphy were compiled, but no study has ever been completed of the handwriting practice of even a single scribal com munity. However, Rene Labat (1948) includes a wide selec tion of normalized forms of each sign used in Akkadian, and Robert D . Biggs (1973) begins to point the way to what is needed for every region and period before a useful cunei form paleography can be produced. Because the West Semitic materials are by comparison limited, it has been possible to draw up handbooks of pa leography in several areas. Frank M . Cross (1961) deals with the scripts of the fourth century B C E to the first century C E , mainly as a help in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Bea trice Gruendler (1993) gathers the materials relevant to the history of the Arabic script; Jacqueline Pirenne's 1963 study is the fullest of the Syriac; Alexander Klugkist (1986) covers Mandaic; and Solomon A. Birnbaum (1954-1971) deals with Hebrew to the twentieth century C E . There are so few epigraphic monuments (Semitology, un like classical studies, does not distinguish epigraphy, study ing incised texts, from paleography, studying inked texts) from the first half of the first millennium B C E , and a little earlier, tiiat every scholar can be expected to be familiar with the full range. As new texts are discovered, they are thor oughly analyzed, and incompatible conclusions regarding their place in the history of writing inevitably arise. T h e most notable recent example is die Aramaic-Assyrian bilingual from Fakhariyah, which comes from a place and time that makes it relevant to die discussion not just of West Semitic script history, but to the origin of die Greek alphabet as well. [See Fakhariyah Aramaic Inscription.] [See also Codex; Libraries and Archives; Literacy; Papy rus; Parchment; Scroll; and Writing Materials.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and Their De cipherment. Harvard Theological Studies, 22. Cambridge, Mass., 1966. Biggs, Robert D. "On Regional Cuneiform Handwritings in Third Mil lennium Mesopotamia." Orientalia 42 (1973): 39-46. Birnbaum, Solomon A. The Hebrew Scripts. 2 vols. Leiden and London, 1954-1971. Cross, Frank Moore, and David Noel Freedman. Early Hebrew Or thography: A Study of the Epigraphic Evidence. American Oriental Se ries, 36. New Haven, 1952.
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Cross, Frank Moore. "The Development of die Jewish Scripts." In The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, edited by G. Ernest Wright, pp. 133-202. Garden City, N.Y., 1961. Cross, Frank Moore. "Early Alphabetic Scripts." In Symposia Cele brating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 7900-7975, edited by Frank Moore Cross, pp. 97-123. Cambridge, Mass., 1979. Cross, Frank Moore. "The Invention and Development of the Alpha bet." In The Origins of Writing, edited by Wayne M. Senner, pp. 7790. Lincoln, Neb., 1989. Daniels, Peter T. "A Calligraphic Approach to Aramaic Paleography." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 43 (1984): 55-68. Daniels, Peter T. "Contacts between Semitic and Indie Scripts." In Contacts between Cultures: Selected Papers from the 33rd International Congress of Asian and North African Studies, Toronto, August 75-25, 7990, vol. 1, West Asia and North Africa, edited by Amir Harrak, pp. 146-152,. Lewiston, N.Y., 1992a. Daniels, Peter T. "The Syllabic Origin of Writing and the Segmental Origin of the Alphabet." In Linguistics and Literacy, edited by Pamela Downing et al., pp. 8 3 - 1 1 0 . Amsterdam, 1992b. Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. The World's Writing Sys tems. New York, 1996. For a bibliography of general works on writ ing, see section 1. Dormer, Herbert, and Wolfgang Rollig. Kanaandische und aratnaische Inschriften. 3 vols. 2d ed. Wiesbaden, 1969. One of the standard col lections of Semitic epigraphic texts (see Gibson, below). Driver, Godfrey R. Semitic Writing: From Piclograph to Alphabet. 3d ed. London, 1976. Includes cuneiform as well, and many illustrations, but is badly organized. Gelb, Ignace J. A Study of Writing. 2d ed. Chicago, 1963. Gibson, John C. L. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions. 3 vols. Ox ford, 1971-1987. One of die standard collections, along with Donner and Rollig (see above), of Semitic epigraphic texts. Gimbutas, Marija. Civilization of the Goddess. San Francisco, 1991. Gruendler, Beatrice. The Development of the Arabic Scripts. Flarvard Se mitic Series, 43. Atlanta, 1993. Klugkist, Alexander. "The Origin of the Mandaic Script." In Scripta signa vocis: Studies about Scripts, Scriptures, Scribes, and languages in the Near East, Presented to J. H. Hospers by His Pupils, Colleagues, and Friends, edited by H. L. J. Vanstiphout et al., pp. 1 1 1 - 1 2 0 . Groningen, 1986. Labat, Rene. Manuel d'&pigraphie akkadienne. Paris, 1948. 6th ed., rev. by Florence Malbran-Labat, 1988. Lidzbarski, Mark. Handbuch der nordsemitischen Epigraphik nebst ausgewahlten Inschriften. 2 vols. Weimar, 1898. Pride of place still goes to this work in Semitic epigraphy for its unusually wide scope, sen sitivity to paleographic matters, fine illustrations, and exhaustive bib liography. Michalowski, Piotr. "On the Early Toponymy of Sumer: A Contribu tion to the Study of Early Mesopotamian Writing." In Kinattutu sa dardti: Raphael Kutscher Memorial Volume, edited by Anson F. Rai ney, pp. 1 1 9 - 1 3 3 . Tel Aviv, 1993. Naveh, Joseph. Early History of the Alphabet. 2d ed. Jerusalem and Lei den, 1987. Provides a concise and comprehensive survey of West Semitic writing. Pirenne, Jacqueline. "Aux origines de la graphie syriaque." Syria 40 (1963): 1 0 1 - 1 3 7 . Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. Before Writing. 2 vols. Austin, 1992. Segert, Stanislav. "Writing." In International Standard Bible Encyclo pedia, vol. 4, pp. 1138—1160. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1988. A full, wellarranged survey of all aspects of writing in the biblical world, Senner, Wayne M„ ed. The Origins of Writing. Lincoln, Neb., 1989. Excellent collection on the earliest stages of writing throughout the world.
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Sznycer, Maurice. "Les inscriptions protosina'itiques." In Le dechiffrement des ecrilures et des langues, edited by Jean Leclanr, pp. 85-93. Paris, 1975. World Archaeology 17.3 (1986). Special issue entitled "Early Writing Systems," edited by Joan Oates. Zevit, Ziony. Matres leclionis in Ancient Hebrew Epigraphs. American Schools of Oriental Research, Monograph 2. Cambridge, Mass., 1980. Zimansky, Paul E. Review of Schmandt-Besserat 1992. Journal of Field Archaeology 20 (1993): 513-517. PETER T . DANIELS
WRITING MATERIALS. If Paleolithic cave paint ings are taken as the earliest records of human communi cation, it can be seen that notation began with mineral sub stances: cavern walls and ground-earth pigments. Vegetal and animal substances successively came into use. Mineral Substances. The oldest surviving documents, die proto-cuneiform corpus from Uruk, are written on clay, "a natural, earthy, fine-grained material that develops plas ticity when mixed with a limited amount of water" (Grim, 1979, p. 700), "formed by the decomposition of. . . rockforming minerals, notably the feldspars"; they are "hydrated aluminium silicates with subordinate amounts of alkalis, al kaline earths, iron oxides, etc." (Scott, 1954, p. 379). [See Cuneiform; Uruk-Warka.] Clay used for cuneiform tablets (as opposed to pottery clay) has apparently never been physically analyzed; Denise Schmandt-Besserat (1992, p. 29) reports that the tokens used in preliterate accounting are most commonly made of a clay called montmorillonite (not mentioned by Grim, 1979). Lindsay Scott (1954, pp. 379380) distinguishes primary from secondary clays. The for mer (bedded where they form, in marshes or bogs) include the kaolins or china clays; the latter (transported by water, wind, or ice from their primary source, acquiring additional impurities) are virtually ubiquitous, and it is these tiiat seem to be used in cuneiform tablets. Mixed with an appropriate amount of water, clay is plastic; a mass of it suitable to ac commodate the length of the text to be written would be modeled by a scribe into a shape dictated by tradition or convenience (usually a rectangular parallelepiped—called a tablet—for most uses; a disk for a practice text; or a hex agonal prism for annalistic texts). [See Tablet.] T h e obverse surface—the first to be inscribed—was flattened (Jerrold S. Cooper [1996, p. 38] claims that the flattening occurred when the tablet was set down on a flat surface for drying after the obverse was written, but is this not precluded by the high viscosity of the material?), the reverse being some what convex. Air drying was the normal way for inscribed objects to harden; very exceptionally, they could be baked, like pottery. Charles E. Jones (personal communication) ob serves that far fewer, if any, tablets were intentionally baked (as opposed to being accidentally cooked in conflagrations) in antiquity than is generally thought. Jones has also noted
that at least some tablets have a mud core witii a clay veneer to receive an inscription; and that when such a veneer chips off, pieces can be mistaken for fragments of clay envelopes. The India House Inscription (a very large slab inscribed on five sides recovered from Babylon at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of the key documents used in the decipherment of cuneiform) seems to be hollow. [See Bab ylon.] T h e wedge-shaped impressions that comprise cuneiform characters were made by lightly touching the surface of the clay tablet with a stylus (see below), or by stamping a com plete commemorative inscription onto the faces of building bricks; clay is, thus, the primary medium in the Mesopota mian sphere. Mycenaean texts, in Linear A and Linear B, were also written on small clay tablets, but the characters were formed of incised lines rather than impressed wedges. Cuneiform (and other) writing could be imitated on nonyielding surfaces, including cliffsides, quarried or freestand ing stones, or portable objects. Stone could be incised using mallet and chisel; the gypsum of which Mesopotamian pal ace reliefs were often fashioned is a very soft stone and easily worked, whereas boundary stones and other objects for un sheltered display needed to be more durable and must have presented a greater challenge to the engraver. T h e limestone of statues and otiier objects is of intermediate hardness. T h e Hammurabi stela, on which the wedges of the characters are outlined rather than hollowed out, is said to be of diorite. T h e Rosetta stone, originally described as basalt, is identi fied in a not-yet-published analysis as a form of granite. In Egypt, hieroglyphic inscriptions (originally written with a pen or brush, see below) could be carved at great length into limestone walls. [See Hieroglyphs.] Some monuments in various peripheral areas—among them some Luwian hier oglyphic and Aramaic and South Arabian consonantal in scriptions—exhibit characters tiiat are not incised but are in relief, with the background cut away. [See Luwians; Ara maic; South Arabian.] Another material on which writing is sometimes incised is metal: a gold tablet of Ashurbanipal, bronze plates both at Byblos and in early Italy, a copper scroll from Qumran, strips of lead witii Gnostic Mandaic inscriptions. [See Byblos; Copper Scroll; Mandaic] Naphtali Lewis's statement " T h e need to adapt the cu neiform script of die Fertile Crescent to the pen-and-ink technique of papyrus undoubtedly was a factor in the Phoe nicians' development of the world's first alphabet" (1974, pp. 84-85) cannot be defended. [See Papyrus.] Assyrian scribes had no difficulty in imitating impressed wedges on a flat surface (see Baer, i960). Conversely, the Northwest Semitic linear consonantary was successfully adapted to cu neiform technique at Ugarit. [See Ugarit.] Writing also appears on pottery (baked clay): when a ves sel shatters, no longer serving its original purpose, the sherds can be written on with ink—they are then called ostraca. Ostraca are often the only kind of ink inscription that man-
WRITING MATERIALS ages to survive the stresses of the physical environment; they have been found throughout the Fertile Crescent, from As sur to Aswan. [See Ostracon; Assur.] Examples of pottery created especially for the purpose of being written on are the apotropaic bowls of Jewish, pagan, and Mandaean tra dition. They bear incantations written in a spiral on the bowl's inner surface and were buried upside down under the floors of houses to ward off demons, such as Lilith. Such ink from tire ancient world that has been analyzed generally proves to consist of carbon. Lampblack or incense soot was mixed with water and a small amount of gum arabic to produce a nonfading writing liquid. Iron-based black is not found until about the seventh century C E , and ink made from plant sources (e.g., oak galls) found later, in Europe, is not reported from tire Near East. Rubrication could be done in red ink made with ocher, an iron-containing earth (Lucas, 1962, pp. 362-364). Vegetal Substances. A blank roll of papyrus has been found in an Egyptian tomb at Saqqara dated to 3100 B C E (Cerny, 1952, p. 1 1 ) . [See Saqqara.] T h e Egyptians wrote on papyrus as long as their civilization endured; the earliest testimony to papyrus elsewhere in the ancient Near East comes from the Tale of Wenamun (c. 1100 B C E ) , but it must have been in use well before that. Only the exceptional des iccation of the Egyptian and Transjordanian deserts allowed the survival of papyrus over the millennia.) Papyrus was ubiquitous in classical Greece and Rome and spread with the expansion of the Roman Empire. T h e Merovingian chancery ceased using it in 677 C E , but elsewhere in France
WRITING MATERIALS.
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it continued for at least another century. Dated papyri come from Ravenna in 967, Spain in 1017, and the papal chancery in 1057; not until the twelfth century was papyrus com pletely superseded in Europe (Lewis, 1974, pp. 84-94). Papyrus "paper" is formed from layers of the pith of Cyperus papyrus, a sedge that formerly grew to 3 meters high in marshy ground throughout die Nile Valley from the Delta as far south as Lake Tana in Kenya, as far west as Morocco, and north into Palestine. [See Delta.] In the Seleucid era it was introduced to Babylonia, and by the tenth century C E to Sicily (Lewis, 1974, pp. 3-20). [See Seleucids.] The chief, if not completely reliable, source for the preparation of the writing material is Pliny the Elder's Natural Histoty (13.7482). Fresh strips of pith were laid side by side 011 a flat sur face, with their edges touching; more strips were laid on top of them, perpendicularly, again with their edges touching. They were then pressed together (and perhaps pounded with a mallet), and the plants' sap bonded them into a very smooth, white, flexible sheet that could be inscribed on both sides. Usually, the sheets were glued into rolls of twenty, with the horizontal fibers on the inside. T h e joins were nearly imperceptible, and when a scroll was written in col umns, the column breaks did not need to correspond to the joins. [See Scroll.] True paper is "a matted or felted sheet of fibres formed on a fine screen from a water suspension" (Tsien, 1985, p. 35). It was invented in China, perhaps around die beginning of the common era (rather than in die second century C E by Tshai Lun, the traditional account). T h e earliest such fibers
Three inkwells from Qumran. (Courtesy ASOR Archives)
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seem to have been silk, though paper-mulberry bark was used later. Only textile fibers were used outside China (not bark, and not, until the nineteenth century, wood pulp). The manufacture of paper was not a closely held secret monop oly of China, as is often stated. It was made in neighboring areas as soon as they came into contact with tire Middle Kingdom. (The Qur'anic word qirtas is believed to be a Chi nese loanword in Arabic.) Paper was manufactured in Mus lim Samarkand from 751 onward, and in Baghdad by the end of the eighth century. [See Baghdad.] From there it spread to Damascus and across Africa in the ninth century; it was introduced from Africa separately to Spain and Italy in the twelfth and tiiirteenth centuries, and then spread across Europe (Tsien, 1985, pp. 296-303, citing and cor recting Hunter, 1947). T h e oldest dated paper book in the West is a fragment of the Thousand and One Nights reused by a legal scribe in 879 (Oriental Institute, 1982, p. 130). Writing implements fall under the heading of vegetal sub stances. Not surprisingly—because it is assumed that the stylus was made of wood or reed—no stylus used for im pressing wedges on clay has ever been identified in exca vations in Mesopotamia. T h e literature unanimously as sumed that the stylus had to be cut to some angle in orderto produce wedge-shaped impressions (Driver, 1976). H. W. F. Saggs (1981) plausibly suggests that a sedge wide spread in Iraq, with a stem that is triangular in cross section (like the related papyrus plant), could be used to produce the needed shapes without modification beyond stripping off its leaves. (Unfortunately, he does not supply the botan ical identification of the species.) This account also explains why the impressions are wedges rather than dots, rectangles, stars, or anything else—the script did not go through stages of experimentation as to suitable shapes of the components of the characters. Robert M. Whiting (personal communication) has ob served that wall paintings from Tell Barsip show the stylus held palm downward, passing under the palm at a low angle to the clay [See Til Barsip]; he has determined by micro scopic observation that the stylus was rotated through 90 degrees to make horizontal and vertical wedges, noting that the stylus leaves a mark with one smooth side and one side tiiat shows the grain. Horizontal wedges have the grain on the bottom, whereas vertical wedges have the grain on the left side. Thus, the stylus was held in the direction of the writing to make a horizontal wedge and perpendicular to the direction of writing to make a vertical wedge; in po sitioning the stylus to make wedges of different orientations, the scribe could rotate both the stylus and the medium (which was held in the otiier hand), to make them meet in the proper relative position. The notion that the pens used to write Egyptian hiero glyphs were flat-tipped reeds chewed into brushes apparently goes no further back than an unsupported assertion by James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago in 1916. Rather, the sharpness of line even in very early papyri in
dicates that the pen differed little from that discernible in fifth-century B C E Aramaic papyri or that in current use: it was likely a hollow reed trimmed so that a shallow arch was what made contact witii the writing surface, split for a cen timeter or so to facilitate the flow of ink (Daniels, 1984). Animal Substances. T h e transition to the category of animal substances is represented by wood tablets covered with beeswax tiiat takes the wedge impression of the stylus. They are known from contemporary accounts, but very few have survived (Driver, 1976, pp. 225-226). T h e three terms for prepared animal skins used as a writ ing ground—leather, parchment, and vellum—are not clearly differentiated. Driver (1957, pp. 1-3) apparentiy uses the word leather for any writing on skin, including parchment; Alfred Lucas and J. R. Harris discuss leather and parchment in separate sections (1962, pp. 33-37, 38-39); Dard Hunter (1947, pp. 1 3 - 1 6 ) distinguishes parchment and vellum by both animal of origin and technique of man ufacture; and David Diringer (1953, p. 170) agrees with cur rent usage in calling vellum merely "the finer quality" of parchment, "finer in grain, whiter, and smootiier." Egyptian leather was prepared by treating hides and skins with a number of different substances; true tanning (i.e., witii substances containing tannin derived from acacia pods or oak bark) was known in Egypt in the predynastic period. Other materials used include ocherous earth, salt, fat, urine, dung, brain substance, and alum. For Lucas and Harris (1962), parchment is prepared merely by "first removing the hair and then rubbing the skin smooth with some abrasive material, such as pumice stone." Other authorities insist that the preparation of parchment involves baths in lime (details in Saxl, 1956). For Hunter (1947), parchment is made from the inner layer of a split skin (the outer layer is used for leather), while vellum is made from the unsplit skin of a calf only. T h u s , the two sides of the product differ—one being the hair and the other the flesh side. In gathering folded sheets into signatures for codices, care is taken to face hair side to hair side and flesh side to flesh side, to preserve the uniformity of appearance of each opening. [See Codex.] It is difficult to date die earliest use of skin for writing. T h e "Driver letters" (1954, rev. ed., 1957), from the fifth century B C E , are the earliest surviving corpus, but scribes writing on flexible material—either papyrus or leather—are depicted in eighth-century B C E Assyrian reliefs, [See Assyr ians.] The Akkadian textual evidence for leather and parch ment is even later (Driver, 1976, pis. 23/2, 24; pp. 1 6 - 1 7 , 228). By the time of the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it seems that the preferred material for biblical texts was leather (as continues to be the case to this day for sacred Torah scrolls). [See Dead Sea Scrolls.] It is 'often said that parchment replaced papyrus because papyrus is inferior in various ways (e.g., Diringer, 1953, p. 165). Lewis refutes this notion, attributing the gradual su persession of papyrus by parchment in the West (and by
WRITING MATERIALS paper in the East) to the diminution of the supply from Egypt, which was the result not of manipulation of the mar ket or of withholding of the supply, but of the gradual drain ing of papyrus marshes for agriculture (Lewis, 1974, pp. 5 7 61; 1989, pp. 27-28). An advantage of both papyrus and parchment over paper is that they can be reused by washing or scraping off existing writing. Fortunately for later schol arship, the underwriting does not entirely disappear from such palimpsests. Many an otherwise lost ancient text has been partially preserved beneath a later text that to modern eyes is of less value. [See also Libraries and Archives; Literacy; Scribes and Scribal Techniques; and Writing and Writing Systems.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Baer, A. "Un cylindre d'offrande a Sennacherib." Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientate 54 (i960): 155-158. Cerny, Jaroslav. Paper and Books in Ancient Egypt (1952). R p t , Chi cago, 1985. Cooper, Jerrold S. "Mesopotamian Cuneiform: Sumerian and Akka dian." In The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, pp. 37-57. New York, 1996. Daniels, Peter T. "A Calligraphic Approach to Aramaic Paleography." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 43 (1984): 55-68. Diringer, David. The Hand-Produced Book. London, 1953. Reprinted as The Book before Printing: Ancient, Medieval, and Oriental. New York, 1982. Driver, Godfrey R. Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century B.C. (1954). Abr. and rev. ed. Oxford, 1957.
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Driver, Godfrey R. Semitic Writing: From Pictograph to Alphabet. 3d ed., rev. by S. A. Hopkins. London, 1976. Grim, Ralph E. "Clay Minerals." In Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, vol. 4, pp. 700-706. Chicago, 1979. Hunter, Dard. Papemiaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. 2d ed. New York, 1947. Lewis, Naphtali. Papyrus in Classical Antiquity. Oxford, 1974. Lewis, Naphtali. Papyrus in Classical Antiquity: A Supplement. Papyrological Bruxellensia, 23. Brussels, 1989. Lucas, Alfred, and J . R. Harris. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Indus tries. 4th ed. London, 1962. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. A Guide to the Oriental Insti tute Museum. Chicago, 1982. Saggs, H. W. F. "The Reed Stylus." Sumer 37 (1981): 127-128. Saxl, H. "A Note on Parchment." In A History of Technology, vol. 2, The Mediterranean Civilizations and the Middle Ages, c. 700 B.C. to c. 1500 A.D., edited by Charles Singer et al., pp. 187-190. London, 1956. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. Before Writing, vol. 1, From Counting to Cuneiform. Austin, 1992. Scott, Lindsay. "Pottery." In A History of Technology, vol. I , From Early Times to the Fall of Ancient Empires, edited by Charles Singer et al., pp. 376-412. London, 1954. Singer, Charles, et al., eds. A History of Technology. 5 vols. London, 1954-1958. Tsien Tsuen-hsuin. Paper and Printing. (Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, part 1.) Cambridge, 1985. Waterer, John W. "Leather." In A History of Technology, vol. 2, The Mediterranean Civilizations and the Middle Ages, c. 700 B. C. to c. 7500 A.D., edited by Charles Singer et al., pp. 147-187. London, 1956. P E T E R T.
DANIELS
x X-RAY DIFFRACTION ANALYSIS. The first step in identifying an unknown piece of matter is normally chemical analysis. However, this will mainly provide infor mation on the elements present and not on how they are combined. If die material is crystalline (and almost all solids are, widi the exception of glass), X-ray diffraction can sup plement the information given by chemical analysis and in dicate which compounds are present. For X-ray diffraction measurements, the specimen is ex posed to a beam of monochromatic X-rays (i.e., X-rays with a narrowly defined wavelength) and the intensity of die scat tered radiation is monitored at various angles. Because the interatomic spacings in crystals are of the same order of magnitude as the wavelengths of X-rays, crystal structures behave as three-dimensional diffraction gratings for X-rays. A special property of such gratings is that die scattered ra diation is reinforced at certain angles while it is extinguished at all others. Therefore, for a given wavelength (X.), appre ciable scattered (or diffraction) intensities are only observed when the angle (6) satisfies the so-called Bragg condition, which is given by rih = 2d sinQ, where d is die spacing be tween the crystal lattice planes and n is an integer (i.e., 1,2, 3, etc.). T h e simplest technique for obtaining X-ray diffraction patterns is the powder method, which is the one most useful for archaeological specimens. A small sample, which can be less than 1 mg, is pulverized and inserted into a thin-walled glass capillary or deposited on a glass fiber. It is then mounted 011 the axis, which can be rotated, of a cylindrical X-ray camera, around whose interior a photographic film is wrapped. Because in a finely powdered and rotating sample the respective lattice planes exist at all orientations with re spect to the incident beam, the Bragg condition is satisfied along die surface of a cone with a semiangle of 20.
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T h e spacings between crystal planes in a certain crystal system are characteristic parameters of each crystalline sub stance; it therefore follows tiiat the diffraction pattern (i.e., the observed X-ray intensities at various angles) is also char acteristic and can be used as a fingerprint to identify mineral phases by comparing them with cataloged patterns of pure substances. Mineral mixtures, of course, give mixed pat terns, but mineral components of less than 10 percent are usually not detected. T h u s , minerals can be identified even in mixtures; moreover, their relative amounts in the mixture can be estimated from the X-ray intensities. Only glass does not give any refraction pattern. T h e major fields of application for X-ray diffraction anal ysis in archaeology are pottery analysis, to determine con stituent minerals (clay, temper, decoration)—information often required to determine production techniques and provenance; identifying pigments in wall paintings and pot tery decoration after firing; identifying corrosion products on the surface of metal objects for purposes of authentica tion; and identifying die microcrystalline structure of worked metals, which may reveal their mechanical and ther mal pretreatment (e.g., if a wire has been drawn or rolled and hammered) as well as information concerning the de velopment of metallurgy in ancient societies. BIBLIOGRAPHY Lipson, Henry S. Crystals and X-Rays. London and Winchester, 1970. Well-written and accessible introduction to the application of X-rays to the investigation of crystalline phases. Noll, Walter. Alte Keramiken und ihre Pigmente: Studien zu Material und Technologic. Stuttgart, 1991. The most comprehensive text to date on the scientific investigation of archaeological pottery and pigments. Zussman, J. "X-Ray Diffraction." In Physical Methods in Determinative Mineralogy, edited by J . Zussman, pp. 391-473. 2d ed, London, 1977. An authoritative review of the subject. E R N S T PHRNICKA
Y YABIS, WADI EL- (Ar., "dry valley"), perennial wadi located in nortiiern Jordan, with a total catchment of almost 200 sq km (124 sq. mi.). T h e wadi descends westward a distance of 18 km ( 1 1 mi.) from die hills of Jebel 'Ajlun at 1,200 m above sea level, to die central Jordan Valley, which is 300 m below sea level. T h e great topographic and climatic range within this short distance results in a steep environ mental gradient, with remnants of dense pine, oak, and pis tachio forest at the highest elevations yielding to open scrub oak forest in the middle reaches and then to steppic grasses, weeds, and Acacia st. arboreal species in the valley. Tamarisk and oleander grow thickly along the banks of the wadi and the Jordan River. Terra rossa soils mantie the limestone high lands, while colluvial and alluvial soils accumulate on hill slopes and in wadi bottoms. Permanent springs are common along the eastern escarpment of the Jordan Valley, at tire confluences of small tributaries, and at the headwaters of the Wadi el-Yabis catchment. [See Jordan Valley.] The first Westerners to explore the antiquities of the re gion were early twentietii-century biblical geographers and classical art historian (Steuernagel, 1925, 1926; Augustinovic and Bagatti, 1952). In the 1940s, and again in the 1960s, the area was included in extensive surveys of north ern Transjordan that identified the most prominent ancient tells (Glueck, 1951; Mittmann, 1970). T h e central Jordan Valley has been surveyed several times (Glueck, 1951; Mellaart, 1962; de Contenson, 1964; Ibrahim, Saner, and Yassine, 1976; Muheisen, 1988). Since the 1950s, limited ex cavations have been conducted at several valley sites near the wadi mouth, dating variously to tire Lower Paleolithic (Huckriede, 1966; Muheisen, 1988), the Neolithic (Kirkbride, 1956), the Chalcolithic (de Contenson, i960; Leon ard, 1992), the Early Bronze Age (Fischer, 1991), and tire Middle Bronze Age (Falconer and Magness-Gardiner, 1989). Between 1987 and 1992, a series of intensive archae ological surveys and test excavations was conducted throughout the wadi catchment (Mabry and Palumbo, 1988, 1992; Palumbo, Mabry, and Kuijt, 1990; Kuijt, Mabry, and Palumbo, 1991; Palumbo, 1992; Palumbo and Mabry, 1993). Almost 250 sites dating from Lower Paleolithic through Ottoman times were recorded within this area by
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1992, and soundings had been excavated at six sites dating from die Kebaran period to the Iron Age. T h e oldest clues of human use of the wadi are Lower Paleolithic handaxes, at least 100,000 years old, found at the edge of the Jordan Valley buried in wadi banks, cemented in limestone outcrops, and on the surface at flint quarries on the first ridges above die valley floor. Open-air and bur ied Middle Paleolithic sites are found at all elevations, but particularly on ridges near the valley, at the former margin of a lake that filled die central Jordan Rift during the late Pleistocene. Upper Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic sites are rare, but tiieir presence attests to continued use of the wadi during the dramatic climatic fluctuations of the final Pleis tocene. In a cliff above the wadi, about halfway to the valley, a cave was inhabited by about 9200 B C , the beginning of both die Holocene and the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNA) period. A large (6 ha; 15 acres) village developed nearby between 8200 and 7000 B C , die late Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNB) period. Pottery Neolithic camps and villages were restricted to the valley. In addition to smaller settlements in the valley, large villages (up to 20 ha, or 49 acres) were oc cupied in the lower highlands during the Late Chalcolithic period (c. 4500-3500 B C ) . Extensive fields of piled stone tu muli and megalithic dolmens, both interpreted as tombs, are found in their vicinity and may date to that time. At the beginning of the Early Bronze Age (c. 3500 B C ) , villages were established throughout the wadi highlands, im plying extensive forest clearance for dry farming and herd ing. After 3000 B C many of tiiese open villages developed into fortified towns, evenly spaced throughout the watershed to command roughly equal territories. Most of tiiese were abandoned in the mid-third millennium and settlement dis persed into smaller villages and seasonal camps. Only the largest villages in die valley may have had protective enclo sures during die Early Bronze IV (EB-MB) period (24002000 B C ) , a transitional interval between urban phases. A cemetery of rock-hewn EB shaft tombs covers an isolated ridge above the valley. A new pattern again developed at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000 B C ) , die start of die historic
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record in this region, when settlements were reestablished at a number of abandoned protohistoric tells. Sedentary settiement in the wadi declined, however, during tire later Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Rural villages flourished again throughout the region during the Iron Age (1200-586 B C ) , when the hillsides were first terraced for agriculture. A large fortified town developed at Tell Maqlub, which has been identified by some scholars as biblical Jabesh Gilead. Only a few sites dating to the Persian and Hellenistic pe riods have yet been recognized, but this may be because of gaps in the ceramic chronology. Rural settlement greatly ex panded during the Roman period though, when this region became a hinterland between the large urban centers at Pella in the Jordan Valley and Gerasa on the plateau. A road with mile markers was built to connect Pella, 'Ajlun, and Gerasa, crossing tire Wadi el-Yabis near Tell Maqlub, and a second road was constructed along the eastern floor of the valley. Expansion of the areas of agricultural and pastoral produc tion and timber harvesting for these urban centers led to rapid deforestation of tire 'Ajlun highlands, and the resulting erosion led to the abandonment of some villages. This ero sion was controlled by the intensive terracing of hillsides during the Byzantine period, when population and rural settlement in the area reached an all-time peak. On isolated hills, early Christian churches and monasteries were sur rounded by their own terraced fields. In several still-occu pied villages in the wadi, elaborate Byzantine mosaics are preserved in buildings that were once churches. The Islamic conquest of Palestine was completed in AD 636 with the Arab defeat of the Byzantine army at the Yarmuk River, and the balanced relationships between urban, rural, and nomadic populations in the region were dis rupted. A large number of settlements were abandoned dur ing the period of Umayyad rule from Damascus. This de cline accelerated after the 'Abbasids moved tire capital of the Arab Empire to Baghdad in A D 762, and the region be came peripheral to major trade routes. Economic stagnation and village abandonment led to the neglect of agricultural terraces, resulting in another phase of soil erosion in the hills of Jebel 'Ajlun. During the twelfth century, the Jordan Valley was the frontier between areas controlled by European Christians and Arab Muslims, but the highlands of northern Jordan were protected by the Islamic fortress built at 'Ajlun. After the Ayyubid general Salah edh-Din defeated the Crusaders at Hittin, near Lake Tiberias, in AD 1 1 8 7 , the re gion prospered as a result of its position between a united Egypt and Syria under the control of the Mamluks, a Turk ish-Circassian military class. Many new settlements were es tablished in the southern Levant, and the rural population of northern Jordan increased almost to the peak level of the Byzantine period. Along with the other major streams en tering the Jordan Valley, Wadi el-Yabis was used to irrigate sugarcane plantations and to power mills processing the sugar for export.
After the beginning of Ottoman rule in 1 5 1 6 , repeated nomadic incursions into the cultivated lands of northern Jor dan, along with the heavy taxation of the peasants, led to the abandonment of many villages. Only pockets of settlement remained in the highlands by the early nineteenth century, when the regions briefly returned to Egyptian control under the Balkan prince Muhammad 'Ali. Most of these remaining villages continued to be occupied into the twentieth century. Today, rapid population growth, intensifying land use, and illicit digging for antiquities increasingly impact the region's rich archaeological heritage. [Most of the sites mentioned are the subject of independent entries] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Felix-Marie. Giographie de la Palestine. Vol. 2. Paris, 1938. Augustinovic, Augostino, and Bellarmino Bagatti. "Escursioni nei dintorni di Aglun (Nord di Transgiordiana)." Studium Biblicum FranciscanumlLiber Annuus 2 (1952): 227-314. Contenson, Henri de. "Three Soundings in die Jordan Valley." Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 4-5 (i960): 12-98. Contenson, Henri de. "The 1953 Survey of the Yarmouk and Jordan Valleys." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities of Jordan 8-9 (1964): 30-46. Falconer, Steven E., and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner. "Tell el-Hayyat." In Archaeology ofJordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denyse Homes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 254-261. Louvain, 1989. Fischer, Peter M. "Tell Abu al-Kharaz: The Swedish Jordan Expedi tion 1989, First Season Preliminary Report from Trial Soundings." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 35 (1991): 67-104. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. New Haven, 1951. Huckriede, R. "Das Quartaer des arabischen Jordan-Thales und Beobachtungen fiber 'Pebble Culture und 'Pra-Aurignac.'" Eiszeitalter und Gegenwarl 17 (1966): 2 1 1 - 2 1 2 . Ibrahim, Mo'awiyah, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1975." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 222 (1976): 41-66. Kirkbride, Diana. "A Neolithic Site at Wadi el-Yabis." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 3 (1956): 56-60. Kuijt, I., et al. "Early Neolithic Use of Upland Areas of Wadi el-Yabis: Preliminary Evidence from the Excavations of 'Iraq ed-Dubb, Jor dan." Paleorient 17.1 (1991): 99-108. Leonard, Albert, Jr., ed. The Jordan Valley Survey: Some Unpublished Soundings Conducted by James Mellaart. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 50. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Mabry, Jonathan, and Gaetano Palumbo. "The 1987 Wadi el-Yabis Survey." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities ofJordan 32 (1988): 275-305. Mabry, Jonathan, and Gaetano Palumbo. "Environmental, Economic, and Political Constraints on Ancient Settiement Patterns in the Wadi el-Yabis Region." In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, vol. 4, edited by Ghazi Bisheh, pp. 67-72. Amman, 1992. McCown, Chester C. "Spring Field Trip, 1930." Bulletin of the Amer ican Schools of Oriental Research, no. 39 (1930): 10-27. Mellaart, James. "Preliminary Report of the Archaeological Survey in the Yarmouk and Jordan Valley for the Point Four Irrigation Scheme." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 6-7 (1962): 126-157. Mittmann, Siegfried. Beitrage zur Siedlungs- und Territorialgeschichte des nbrdlichen Ostjordanlandes. Wiesbaden, 1970. 1
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Muheisen, Mujahed S. "A Survey of Prehistoric Sites in the Jordan evsky, developed a system of architectural stratigraphy that Valley, 1985." In The Prehistory of Jordan: The State of Research in wound long characterize the Israeli field approach. With re 1986, vol. 2, edited by Andrew N . Garrard and Hans G. Gebel, pp. gard to Hazor's biblical history, Yadin believed that the Late 503-523. British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. Bronze Age destruction levels provided conclusive evidence 396. Oxford, 1988. for a unified Israelite conquest of Canaan in about 1250 B C E . Palumbo, Gaetano, et al. "The Wadi el-Yabis Survey: Report on the 1989 Field Season." Annual of the Department ofAntiquities of Jordan Later scholars would, however, question both the date and 34 (1990): 95-118. circumstances of that city's fall. [See Hazor; and the biogra Palumbo, Gaetano. "The 1990 Wadi el-Yabis Survey Project and phy of Dunayevsky.] Soundings at Khirbet Um el-Hedamus." Annual of the Department Yadin's scholarly interests were wide ranging. In 1959 and of Antiquities of Jordan 36 (1992): 13-23. i960, he directed stratigraphic probes at Megiddo to test his Palumbo, Gaetano, et al. "The Wadi el-Yabis Survey and Excavation Project: Report on the 1992 Season." Annual of the Department of hypothesis that the so-called Solomonic gates and later Is Antiquities of Jordan 37 (1993): 307-324. raelite fortification systems were built according to uniform Steuernagel, D. C. "Der 'Adschlun." Zeilschrift des Deutschen Paldstinaplans. He also devoted considerable attention to a study of Vereins 48 (1925): 1-144, 201-392; 49 (1926): 1-167. the earthen ramparts of Middle Bronze Age Canaan, which J O N A T H A N B . M A B R Y and G A E T A N O P A L U M B O he dated to the Middle Bronze IIB period (1850-1750 B C E ) and attributed to the introduction of the battering ram by supposed Hyksos invaders. Yadin's great corpus of military YADIN, YIGAEL (1917-1984), Israeli military leader, artifacts and monuments, The Art of Warfare in Biblical archaeologist, and Dead Sea Scroll scholar. As an interna Lands in the Light of Archaeology, was published in 1963. tional figure and gifted public speaker, Yadin played a cen In i960, in response to reports of illegal digging in the tral role in creating the enormous popularity of and world caves in the Judean Wilderness, Yadin joined a large-scale wide interest in the archaeology of Israel. He was also able expedition sponsored by the Israel Department of Antiqui to draw upon international sources of funding to undertake ties, the Hebrew University, and the Israel Exploration So ambitious archaeological excavations and help establish ciety. Yadin's sector included Nahal Hever, where, in a large such important archaeological institutions as the Shrine of cave on the northern cliff face, he and his team uncovered the Book, which houses tire seven complete scrolls from a large collection of artifacts (including contemporary mil Qumran Cave 1 and the "Bar Kokhba Letters" at die Israel itary dispatches and legal documents) left by refugees dur Museum, and the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew ing die Bar Kokhba Revolt ( 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 C E ) , [See Jiidean Desert University of Jerusalem. Caves; Bar Kokhba Revolt.] Born in Jerusalem in 1 9 1 7 , the eldest of three sons of EleaYadin's best-known excavation was at the mountain for zar L. Sukenik, one of Palestine's first Jewish archaeologists, tress of Masada (1963-1965), In addition to uncovering im Yadin (known during his youth as Yigael Sukenik) studied pressive Herodian palaces and administrative buildings, Ya archaeology at the Hebrew University. Although he spent din's team also retrieved written material, including most of the 1930s and 1940s in active service in the Zionist hundreds of ostraca and several documents resembling underground, the Haganah (in which he was given the bib those found at Qumran. Yadin gained great scholarly and lical codename "Yadin" ("he will judge," from Gn. 49:16), popular attention widi his assertion that the excavated hu which he later adopted as his surname), Yadin completed man remains were those of Masada's last Jewish defenders, his master's degree in 1944 with a thesis on medieval Arabic who, according to Josephus Flavius, had committed suicide inscriptions. He planned to write a doctoral dissertation on in 74 C E rather than fall into Roman captivity. [See Masada.] biblical weapons and warfare, but his full-time service in the In the midst of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Yadin, then 1948 Arab-Israeli war intervened. Named chief of opera serving as security adviser to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, tions of the Haganah (and, with the establishment of the obtained IDF assistance in confiscating and ultimately pur State of Israel, of the Israel Defense Forces [IDF]), Yadin chasing an important ancient scroll, discovered by bedouin later served as I D F chief of staff (1949-1952). in die Qumran region some years before, that had come into Yadin resumed his archaeological career after retiring the hands of a Bedilehem antiquities dealer. Yadin's careful from military service and in 1955 completed his Ph.D. dis transcription of and exhaustive commentary on this docu sertation on the Qumran "Scroll of the War of the Sons of ment, which he named die Temple Scroll, focused the at Light Against the Sons of Darkness." Almost immediately tention of scholars on the Qumran sect's religious law, or thereafter he joined the Hebrew University faculty and be halakhah. gan excavations at Hazor, which continued until 1958. YaYadin entered public life after die 1973 Arab-Israeli war, din's directorship of the James A. de Rothschild Expedition serving first as a member of the Agranat Commission in to Hazor inaugurated a new era in Israeli archaeology. In vestigating Israel's military preparedness for that war and uncovering vast expanses of Bronze and Iron Age Hazor, later as die head of a new parliamentary list called the Dem the expedition staff, guided by architect Immanuel Dunayocratic Movement for Change (DASH, its Hebrew aero-
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tensively looted and destroyed over the centuries. Human activity at the site in the third millennium BCE is indicated by some stone vessels, and scattered, unstratified objects (e.g., scarabs) and possibly some graves suggest occupation during the early second millennium. The largest surviving structure at Tell el-Yahudiyeh—a roughly square earthwork rampart about 460 m (1,500 ft.) long on each outer face and having an external plastered glacis and rounded corners—may relate to the Hyksos pe riod. Many archaeologists believe that this structure was a BIBLIOGRAPHY fortification erected by the Asiatic Hyksos rulers who con trolled part of northern Egypt. Petrie specifically identified Dever, William G. "Yigael Yadin: Prototypical Biblical Archaeologist." the enclosure as a "Hyksos camp," primarily because of its Eretz-Israel 20 (1989): 44*-5i*. Silberman, Neil Asher. A Prophet from Amongst You: The Life of Yigael similarity to a number of Middle Bronze II—III enclosures in Yadin—Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker of Modern Israel. New York, the Levant. He discovered a similar enclosure (undated and 1993. now destroyed) at Heliopolis. T h e interpretation of the Tell Yadin, Yigael. "Hyksos Fortifications and the Battering Ram." Bulletin el-Yahudiyeh rampart as a defensive system is not assured, of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 137 (1955): 23-32. however, nor is its dating. Petrie reports that a building com Yadin, Yigael. The Message of the Scrolls. London, 1957. plex of Rameses III (c. 1 1 8 4 - 1 1 5 3 ) cut into it; if true, that Yadin, Yigael. "Solomon's City Wall and Gate at Gezer." Israel Explo would make the enclosure earlier than the reign of tire twen ration Journal & (1958): 80-86. Yadin, Yigael. The An of Warfare in Biblical Lands in the Light of Ar tieth-dynasty king.) Some scholars view the enclosure as the chaeological Discovety. New York, 1963. temenos wall of a temple complex, citing as a parallel a wall Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots'Last Stand. New of the twenty-sixth dynasty at the Delta site of Mendes. York, 1966. A series of generally poor, secondary burials inside and Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kohhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt against Imperial Rome. London, 1971. outside the enclosure probably belonged to Levantine pasYadin, Yigael. Hazor: With a Chapter on Israelite Megiddo. London, toralists of the late thirteenth and fifteenth dynasties. Pot 1972. tery, scarabs, and otiier finds from the graves link this ma Yadin, Yigael. "The Transition from Semi-Nomadic to a Sedentary terial to Asiatic burials from such contemporaneous eastern Society in the Twelfth Century B.C.E." In Symposia Celebrating the Delta sites as Tell ed-Dab'a and Tell el-Maskhuta. [See Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1900-1975, edited by Frank Moore Cross, pp.57- Dab'a, Tell ed-; Maskhuta, Tell el-.] T h e ceramics include 68. Cambridge, Mass., 1979. a distinctive type of pottery now known as Tell el-Yahudi Yadin, Yigael, ed. The Temple Scroll. 3 vols, in 4. Jerusalem, 1983. yeh ware (see figure 1 ) . This pottery, which occurs most NEIL ASHER SILBERMAN commonly in the form of juglets decorated with incised and punctate geometric patterns containing a white chalky fill ing, appeared in Nubia, Egypt, Syria-Palestine, and Cyprus YAHUDIYEH, TELL EL-, site lying about 321cm (20 during the Second Intermediate period. Its initial region of mi.) northeast of Cairo in Egypt's eastern Delta (30°i7' N , production probably was northern Palestine; it later was 3i°2o' E), in pharaonic times Tell el-Yahudiyeh was in tire manufactured in several areas around the eastern Mediter thirteenth Lower Egyptian nome. Its Arabic name means ranean. T h e widespread distribution of this pottery reflects "mound of the Jews"; this term alludes to the town and tem extensive commercial relations. ple established at the site in the Ptolemaic period by the Knowledge of the site's history during the New Kingdom Jewish priest Onias. Its ancient Egyptian name was Nay-tais uneven. Little is known about the place in the early New hut or Natho, and its Greek name was Leontopolis. Tell elKingdom: eighteenth dynasty (1550-1295) excavated re Yahudiyeh has been investigated half a dozen times over mains include little more than some burials. More plentiful more than a century: the most important excavations were are finds of the nineteenth dynasty (1295-1186). These in those conducted by Edouard Naville and Francis Llewellyn clude the quartzite base of a unique temple gateway model Griffith in 1887, and by W. M . Flinders Petrie in 1906. T h e inscribed with the name of Seti I, some large statues of Ram site's archaeological fame derives from die discovery here of eses II from a destroyed temple of that king, and a granite important Levantine remains of the Hyksos period (Manecolumn inscribed with the name of Merneptah. T h e twen tho's fifteenth dynasty, 1648-1540 BCE). tieth dynasty (1186-1069) has left the remains of a Little is known about the early history of Tell el-Yahu temple and associated palace complex of Rameses III as well as some graves. Probably deriving from the temple diyeh. As with many Delta sites, most of the ancient settle palace are a large number of polychrome, glazed faience ment today lies beneath the high water table and therefore tiles showing foreigners, plant and animal motifs, and the cannot be excavated, and the surface remains have been ex nym). After serving as deputy prime minister in the govern ment of Menachem Begin (1977-1981), Yadin returned to academic life. His last archaeological projects were a brief excavation at Tel Beth-Shean and plans to resume excava tion at Hazor. With his death in 1984, traditional biblical archaeology, already under intellectual attack, lost one of its most eloquent spokesmen and influential practioners. [See also Biblical Archaeology; Dead Sea Scrolls; and the biography of Sukenik]
YARMUT, TEL
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king's name; these tiles are now scattered around a number of museums. The history of Tell el-Yahudiyeh is again poorly docu mented for die first half of the first millennium BCE. Several inscribed fragmentary stone monuments as well as some burials attest to activity of indeterminate extent during the Third Intermediate period (1069-656). T h e site is men tioned (as Natiiu) in the Annals of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-627). About 160 the Ptolemaic ruler Ptolemy VI Philometor granted permission to the Jewish priest Onias to build a tem ple and town at die site. T h e precise location of the temple, which is mentioned by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his work Jewish Antiquities, is uncertain: it was Petrie's opinion that the temple lay outside the northeast wall of the so-called Hyksos camp. From the period of the temple come a series of tombs containing burial stelae inscribed with Greek and Semitic names. T h e temple apparently stood for slightly more than two centuries, eventually being closed by the Roman prefect, Lupus, in 71 CE. [See also Delta; Hyksos; and the biography of Petrie.] B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adam, Shehata. "Recent Discoveries in tire Eastern Delta, December 1 9 5 0 - M a y 1 9 5 5 . " Annates du Service des Antiquites de I'Egyptc 5 5 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 3 0 1 - 3 2 4 . Includes a brief report on die author's excavations at die site in 1 9 5 1 and 1 9 5 2 , and claims (though widiout supporting data) that among his discoveries were tombs of the Middle Kingdom. Badawy, Alexander. "A Monumental Gateway for a Temple of King Sety I: An Ancient Model Restored." Miscellanea Wilbouriana 1
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( 1 9 7 2 ) : 1 - 2 0 . Provides full publication and a reconstruction of the nineteenth-dynasty model sanctuary gateway found at Tell el-Ya hudiyeh and now in the Brooklyn Museum. An appendix (pp. 2 0 2 3 ) by Elizabeth Riefstahl discusses the modern history of tliis mon ument and provides a full bibliography. Gardiner, Alan H. Ancient Egyptian Onomastica. 3 vols. London, 1 9 4 7 . Contains a detailed discussion of die various ancient names associ ated with Tell el-Yahudiyeh (see vol. 2 , pp. 1 4 6 - 1 4 9 ) . Helck, Wolfgang. "Natho." In I^xikon der Agyptologie, vol. 4, cols. 3 5 4 3 5 5 . Wiesbaden, 1 9 8 2 . Provides up-to-date discussion of the two Egyptian Delta sites named Natho (die other being Tell el-Muqdam). Kaplan, Maureen F. The Origin and Distribution of Tell el YahUdiyeh Ware. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 6 2 . Goteborg, 1 9 8 0 . Provides a comprehensive study of the geographical distribu tion, origin, typology, and chronology of this pottery. Naville, Edouard. The Mound of the Jew and the City of Onias: Belheis, Samanood, Abusir, Tukh el Karmus, 1887. Francis Llewellyn Griffith. The Antiquities of Tell el Yahudiyeh. Egypt Exploration Fund, Mem oir 7 . London, 1 8 9 0 . Early excavation report on the site, still a basic source for the archaeological history of Tell el-Yahudiyeh. Petrie, W. M. Flinders. Hyksos and Israelite Cities. Publications of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt and Egyptian Research Ac count, 1 2 . London, 1 9 0 6 . Describes the excavation of the great en closure and a series of New Kingdom and later graves, as well as the structures outside the enclosure which the excavator identified as die remains of the Onias temple and town. Tufnell, Olga. "Graves at Tell el-Yehudiyeh: Reviewed after a Life time." In Archaeology in the Ijivant: Essays for Kathleen Kenyon, ed ited by P. R. S. Moorey and Peter J . Parr, pp. 7 6 - i o r . Warminster, 1 9 7 8 . Detailed republication of a dozen Asiatic graves of the Second Intermediate period. Wright, G. R. H. "Tell el-Yehudiyah and the Glacis." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldslina-Vereins 8 4 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 1 - 1 7 . Offers a vigorous ar gument against the identification of die Tell el-Yahudiyeh enclosure as a fortification wall.
JAMES M. WEINSTEIN
YARMUT, TEL (Ar., Khirbet el-Yarmuk), site located in die central Shephelah, 25 km (15 mi.) southwest of Je rusalem (3i°43' N , 34°s8' E; map reference 147 X 124). T h e site is comprised of a small acropolis (about 1.5 ha, or 3.75 acres) and a large lower city (about 14.5 ha, or 36 acres), both of which were fortified in the Early Bronze Age (see figure 1). T h e site is about 640 m long and 420 m wide (about 16 ha, or 40 acres). T h e site is located on the slope of a hill, with the lowest point at 295 m above sea level and the highest point at 405 m above sea level. T h e site may correspond to the "city of Yaramu" men tioned in a mid-fourteenth century BCE letter discovered at Tell el-I Iesi (see die article by W. F. Albright in BASOR 87 [1942], p. 33). It is identified widi the biblical city of Yarmut (Jos. 10:3-5, 2 3 , 1 2 : 1 1 , is:3$;Neh. 11:29), based on location, settlement history, and the continuity of its toponym: its Ar abic name derives from Iermochos/Jermucha, a Byzantine village mentioned as being in this area by Eusebius of Cae sarea (Onomasticon 106.24), who equated it with Iermous of the Septuagint, that is, biblical Yarmut. Tel Yarmut was first settled in the EB I (second half of :
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YARMUT, TEL. Figure i. Plan of the site. (Courtesy P. de Miroschedji)
the fourth millennium) and was inhabited until about 2300 BCE. It was not reoccupied until the Late Bronze II (c. 1400— 1200 BCE) . The resettlement took place only on the acropolis and in its immediate environs and lasted until the Early Byz antine period (fourth century CE). The major period of oc cupation (and the only one in the lower city) is thus the Early Bronze Age, when Tel Yarmut was one of the major fortified cities in Palestine. Victor Guerin first described and identified the site in 1869, it was tested in 1970 by Amnon Ben-Tor on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and since 1980 it has been excavated by Pierre de Miroschedji for the Centre du Recherche Francais de Jerusalem and the Hebrew Univer
sity of Jerusalem, mostiy in the west corner of the lower city. Excavation has revealed a remarkable EB fortified city, with monumental architecture on a scale unmatched at contem porary sites. Early B r o n z e City. No remains of the earliest (EB I) occupation at the site have yet been found in situ in tire lower city. By the end of the period, however, die settlement reached its west corner, presumably its full and maximum extent. By the beginning of the EB II, this area contained some large buildings, and, along the edge of the site, the first defenses appeared in the form of an earthen glacis. T h e con struction of the first EB II city wall, which inaugurated a long sequence of fortifications, soon obliterated the glacis.
YARMUT, TEL Fortifications. Three major EB phases and several subphases could be distinguished. T h e first EB II fortifications included a 5-6-meter-thick stone rampart and, in the corner of the city, a massive stone bastion (25 X 1 3 m ) . Two large rectangular buttresses were placed at equal distances from the bastion. At tire end of EB II, a second city wall (3-3.6 m thick) was built with cyclopean stones. This additional wall made the city's defenses 40 m deep. T h e wall is pre served to almost 7 m in height in some places and can be traced all around the site for about 1.8 km (1 mi.). In the EB III, a series of very large defensive stone platforms (3040 X 1 0 - 1 2 m), whose superstructure probably was brick, filled the west corner of the city. Near the west corner a monumental offset gate was the single entryway into the second (outer) city wall. Preserved to a height of 7 m, access to it from outside the city was via an ascending U-shaped ramp flanked by retaining walls. At the end of EB III, the approach to the offset enu-yway was protected by a small rectangular "bastion." Early Bronze II. Inside the city, only limited EB II ar chitectural remains were excavated. A massive platformlike construction, earlier than the first city wall and apparently infrastructure, may have been the foundation of a civic building. A large strucnire, associated with the first city wall, and domestic buildings were also noted. Early Bronze III. Most of the building remains exca vated to date belong to the large EB III city, whose popu lation may have reached three thousand. T h e inhabitants were mainly farmers who raised grains, vegetables, and grapes, and olives in abundance. They also practiced animal husbandry (sheep and goats primarily, but also cattle, which were used in tire fields and for transport). T h e site's topog raphy is characterized by a succession of large terraces with retaining walls that are several meters high. Its appearance may have resembled that of traditional villages seen in the region today. Architecture. T h e city contained several public buildings. T h e so-called White Building was probably a sanctuary. It is a plastered, rectangular broadroom hall (13.5 X 6.75 m) with a central row of four columns and a main ennance centered in the southern facade. A chamber at its southeast corner, a courtyard in front of it, and two adjacent rooms to the south formed a complex interpreted as a sanctuary. Its plan resembles that of buildings of a cultic nature that belong to the Chalcolithic and EB I—III periods. Even more impressive is a palatial complex in area B dated to EB IIIB (twenty-fiftli-twenty-fourtl-i centuries BCE) . Mea suring 84 X 72 m (about 6,000 sq m ) , it is by far the largest building complex known for the period in the Levant. It is demarcated by a thick wall with deep foundation trenches that is enhanced, for part of its length, with square inner buttresses placed at regular intervals. While the southwestern half of the palace complex is oc cupied by a large courtyard, most of the northeast is covered
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with built-up areas. T h e complex comprises scores of cor ridors, small courtyards, and interconnected rooms, includ ing several storerooms. Its construction techniques and quality, overall planning, and room layouts are strikingly dif ferent from contemporary buildings discovered so far at Tel Yarmut and elsewhere. Noteworthy is the systematic use of a cubit of about 52 cm, comparable to the Egyptian "royal" cubit. T h e complex's monumentality, together with the abundance of storage vessels recovered, clearly indicates its palatial function. Although this complex is reminiscent of building 3 1 7 7 of Megiddo stratum XVI, it is still unique in the archaeology of third-millennium Palestine. EB III domestic structures were extensively cleared in three areas of the lower city. Most interesting is area G, located on the northeastern side of the palatial complex, from which it is separated by a street. There, the private houses of stratum II were built on a series of small terraces and grouped in an insula bordered by a street. T h e typical dwelling was composed of one or two rooms (often with a central row of stone pillar bases), a courtyard with several domestic installations, and sometimes small storerooms. On the other side of the lower city, an area was identified in which nondomestic activities took place. Finds and instal lations (e.g., pithoi, large mortars, and ceramic vats in the floors) in a contiguous series of six small rooms and court yards suggest that olive oil was processed in the area from the crop raised at the site. Artifacts. Because it has the largest exposure of EB III remains in tire region, Tel Yarmut is a type-site for this ma terial culture in southern Palestine. It exhibits a complete corpus of the contemporary pottery, a large collection of human and animal figurines, and a variety of other objects in stone, bone, and terra cotta. There is evidence of "for eign" trade, with Egypt (stone palettes and fragments of vessels carved out of alabaster and diorite), as well as trade with northern and southern Palestine: sherds of rare Khirbet Kerak (Beth-Yerah) ware, worked basalt from the Golan, bitumen from tire Dead Sea, and flint fan scrapers from the Negev desert. L a t e r Periods. By the twenty-fiftii-twenty-fourth cen turies BCE, Yarmut had reached the peak of its prosperity. Soon afterward the city was peacefully abandoned and re mained deserted for about a millennium. Post-EB settlement was limited to the small acropolis. Excavations there have revealed traces of nearly continuous occupation from LB II to Early Byzantine times. T h e uppermost of the three Iron I strata appears to have been destroyed in a conflagration. It is dated to tire mid-eleventh century BCE by its pottery, which resembles that found at Beth-Shemesh sttatum III and Tell Qasile strata X I - X . On the northeast side of the acropolis the remains of a small Early Byzantine (c. fourth century CE) village that is to be identified with Iermochos in the Onomasticon (see above). Southwest of tire acropolis and
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Throckmorton led die University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania to excavate one of them between 1961 and 1964. A seventh-century Byzantine ship, lying at a depth of 3 2 BIBLIOGRAPHY 39 m, approximately 75 m south of the island, it is dated to Ben-Tor, Amnon. "The First Season of Excavations at Tell-Yarmuth: about 626 CE by fifty-four copper and sixteen gold coins August 1970." Qedern 1 (1975): 55-87. found in its wreckage. Of 60 tons burden, about 20.5 m long, Miroschedji, Pierre de. "Un objet en ceramique du Bronze ancien a representation humaine." Israel Exploration Journal 32 (1982): 190- with a beam of 5.2 m, die ship was built in the ancient shellfirst manner below the waterline; its pine planks are held Miroschedji, Pierre de. "Donnees nouvelles sur le Bronze ancien de together by loosely fitting and widely spaced mortise-andPalestine: Les fouilles recentes de Tel Yarmouth." Comptes rendus tenon joints. Above the waterline, however, it was built in de I'Academie des Inscriptions el Belles-Lettres (January-February the modern frame-first manner, its planks nailed to the 1988): 186-211. The results of the first-sixth seasons of excavation, ship's elm frames (ribs) with iron nails. This provided the with a bibliography of interim reports. Miroschedji, Pierre de, et al. Yarmouth 1: Rapport sur les trois premieres excavators with the first evidence that modern ship con campagncs de fouilles a Tel Yarmouth (Israel), 1980-1982. Paris, 1988. struction evolved, and was not an overnight invention. T h e Detailed preliminary report of the first three seasons of excavation, keel, sternpost, and probably the stem were of cypress. A including all earlier bibliography. pair of iron bower anchors rested on either side of the bow, Miroschedji, Pierre de. "The Early Bronze Age Fortifications at Tel ready for use, with an additional seven iron anchors stacked Yarmuth: An Interim Statement." Eretz-Israel 21 (1990): 48*~6i* just forward of the mast. The ship probably carried a single (Ruth Amiran Volume). Synthetic presentation of the fortifications sail and seems to have been steered by sweeps that extended as excavated up to the seventh season. Miroschedji, Pierre de. "Fouilles recentes a Tel Yarmouth, Israel between through-beam extensions on either quarter of the (1989-1993)." Comptes rendus de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles- hull. It carried in its hold a cargo of about one thousand Lettres (November-December 1993): 823-847. The results of the wine amphoras in two basic shapes, globular and hourglass; sixth-tenth seasons of excavation, with full bibliography of interim they lack the knobs on their bottoms that had proved helpful reports. in earlier periods for pouring. The disappearance of die Miroschedji, Pierre de. "Tel Jarmuth." In The New Encyclopedia of Ar chaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, pp. 661-665. Jeru knobs may have been the result of the invention of the "wine salem and New York, 1993. Short presentation with extensive bib thief," a kind of pipette found on the wreck, which could liography, up to the ninth season. draw liquid from a container without tipping it; the oldest Miroschedji, Pierre de. "Tel Yarmut 1993." Israel Exploration Journal known wine thief is from a wreck near Marzamemi, Sicily, 44 (1994): 145-151. Major results of the tenth season. from the sixth century. PIERRE DE MIROSCHEDJI The ship's stern galley, separated from the hold by a bulk head, was roofed with terra-cotta tiles, one with a smoke hole over a tiled firebox that supported an iron grill. Virtually all YASSIADA WRECKS. Yassiada (Tk., "flat island") of the personal possessions of those on board were stored is an island located between Turgut Reis, Turkey, and the here. In addition to the table and cooking wares, which com Greek island of Pserimo; it is sometimes called Lodo prise the largest well-dated collection of seventh-century ce (36°59'3o" N , 27°II'4S" E ) . The island is small, only 200 X ramics, including the earliest-known Byzantine glazed pot 150 m, with a maximum elevation of 1 1 m. A reef that ex tery, were twenty-four terra-cotta lamps and various copper tends 200 m southwest from its southwest corner is espe vessels. T h e ship's captain, owner, or merchant—or, per cially treacherous, for it rises to within 2-3 m of the surface, haps, all three—was one Georgios Presbyteros Naulderos, about 125 m offshore. An unknown number of ships have whose name was inscribed on one of the ship's steelyards, run onto this reef and sunk, including a Lebanese freighter the largest known from antiquity. It was he who must have in 1993; cannonballs are mixed with amphoras on the carried a complete set of Byzantine weights, marked one reef top, with more coherent cargos of Roman-period am pound, six ounces, three ounces, two ounces, and one phoras and plates lying deeper on its sloping sides. Turkish ounce. T h e ship's carpenter stored his tools, the largest col sponge divers reported raising a ton of glass cullet from the lection known from the seventh century, forward in the gal northwest side of the reef in the 1950s, but other than a ley, whereas the boatswain's tools for gathering firewood scatter of glass on tiiat slope, there are no clues to its where and digging for water were in a separate storage area at die very stern, along with a grapnel for the ship's boat and net abouts. needles for mending fishing nets; that the crew fished is also At least three ships ripped tiieir bottoms open on the reef, indicated by lead sinkers. The finds suggest tiiat the ship presumably while sailing before the northwest summer was sailing southward from a port on the Black Sea, or wind, and crossed over it to sink close to one another in somewhere in the vicinity of Constantinople, on her last voy deeper water off the island's south side. Reports of two of age. the wrecks by Turkish sponge diver Kemal Aras to Peter
on its slope, cisterns and rock-cut tombs were found drat belonged either to the Byzantine or earlier periods.
YASSIADA WRECKS
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YASSIADA WRECKS. Drawing of the reconstructed Byzantine ship. (Copyright INA)
Lying slightly deeper (36-42 m), about 100 m south of Yassiada, is a Late Roman wreck of tire late fourth or early fifth century. It was partially excavated by tire University Museum in 1967 and 1969. A later excavation in 1974, by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, was halted by the out break of hostilities on Cyprus (Van Doorninck, 1976). T h e ship was 19 m long, with a length-to-beam ratio of 3:1. Its hull, mostly of cypress, but witii a keel of white oak, was built in the shell-first Greco-Roman manner. Its pegged mortise-and-tenon joints were weaker and farther apart than those of most earlier vessels, however, although not so widely spaced as the unpegged joints of the later seventhcentury ship (see above). These factors, and evidence for the early erection of half frames amidships to help the ship wright shape the hull, provide further proof of a slow evo lution toward modern, frame-first construction. T h e ship's anchors have not been found. It carried about eleven hun dred amphoras in its hold. T h e stern yielded Late Roman plates, a dish, a bowl, pitchers, a cup, cooking pots, and two large storage vessels; four terra-cotta lamps found there, of types made in the late fourth through early fifth centuries, one with the impressed signature of a known Athenian work shop tiiat flourished at die time, provide the approximate date for the ship's sinking. Excavation deeper into the slop ing seabed would surely reveal other artifacts that tumbled downslope as the ship disintegrated. During the excavation of the second wreck, a previously unknown Ottoman hull that overlay part of it and nearly reached die seventh-century wreck was partiy uncovered. T h e Institute of Nautical Archaeology, now affiliated with Texas A&M University, subsequently excavated it, under
the direction of Cemal Pulak, in 1983. T h e ship was about 20 m long and built of oak. It was initially dated by a coin of Philip II to tlie sixteenth century. Its construction is now dated more precisely, by the dendrochronology of its keel, to sometime after 1572. It was almost barren of artifacts save for tools, glazed bowls like some from Canakkale on die Asian side of the Dardanelles, lead shot, and both stone and cast-iron cannonballs (die last suggesting tiiat this was a na val vessel, perhaps a supply ship, that was salvaged before being abandoned). A Roman helmet of a type dated to the late third or second century BCE, found close to shore on the same side of the island, is matched by a helmet in Turkey's Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology. A sponge diver brought the museum's helmet from an unknown location, very likely Yassiada, which is a site commonly worked by sponge divers. T h e two helmets suggest that a warship is hidden under the sand. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bass, George F. "Underwater Archaeology: Key to History's Ware house." National Geographic 124 (July 1963): 138-156. Popular ac count of the excavation of the seventh-century wreck. Bass, George F. "New Tools for Undersea Archaeology." National Ge ographic 134 (September 1968): 402-423. Popular account of the excavation of die fourth-century wreck. Bass, George F., and Frederick H. van Doorninck, Jr. "A Fourth-Cen tury Shipwreck at Yassi Ada." American Journal of Archaeology 75 (1971)1 27-37. Bass, George F. Archaeology Beneath the Sea. New York, 1975. Popular account of the excavations of the fourth- and seventh-century wrecks, (see pp. 61-205). Bass, George F„ and Frederick H. van Doorninck, Jr. Yassi Ada, vol.
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i, A Seventh-Century Byzantine Shipwreck. College Station, Texas, 1982. Definitive excavation report. Throckmorton, Peter. History from the Sea: Shipwrecks and Archaeology. London, 1987. (Published in the United States as The Sea Remem bers: Shipwrecks and Archaeology [New York, 1991].) Describes and illustrates some of the finds from die seventh-century and Ottoman shipwrecks at Yassiada. van Doorninck, Frederick H„ Jr. "The Fourth-Century Wreck at Yassi Ada: An Interim Report on the Hull." International Journal of Nau tical Archaeology 5 (1976): 1 1 5 - 1 3 1 . GEORGE F. BASS
YAVNEH-YAM (Ar., Minet Rubin), coastal site lo cated 16 km (9 mi.) south of Tel Aviv-Jaffa (3i°5o' N, 34°35' E; map reference 1 2 1 2 X 1479). T h e site was exca vated for three seasons by Jacob Kaplan from 1967 to 1969, under the auspices of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipal Mu seum. The Israel Antiquities Authority undertook a series of rescue excavations under the direction of Fanny Vitro (1980) and Yosef Levy (1987) in order to save a building complex from being eroded by the sea. Moshe Dothan (1952) suggests that Yavneh-Yam may be ancient M hoz, mentioned in the geographic lists of Thutmosis III and AluMuhazi in the Amarna letter no. 298. [See Amarna Tablets.] From Hellenistic times onward it is referred to as Jamnia (Iamnia). Arab geographers referred to it as Mahu Yubna. According to older views, a council of Jewish scholars com pleted the canon of the Hebrew Bible at Jamnia in 90 CE. The site consists primarily of a square enclosure (approx imately 800 sq m) bounded by a freestanding rampart. Based on the configuration of the ramparts at nearby Ashkelon, Is rael Finkelstein (1992) suggests that the site may not have been enclosed on its western, seaward side. This would greatly reduce Kaplan's estimate of the site's size as 64 ha (160 acres). Kaplan was primarily interested in the rampart's construction and in fact found little evidence of occupation within the enclosure. He excavated two trenches, areas A and H, which cut across the rampart. T h e site dates to the begin ning of the Middle Bronze LIA and continued in use inter mittently through the Late Bronze I, when it was abandoned. It is possible that the site served as a harborage for the site of Yavneh 8 Ion (5 mi.) to the southeast. In order to understand the rampart's construction, area A was cut from the top of the rampart down to its base. T h e sterile sand at the base of the rampart was leveled and cov ered with a tiiick layer of red clayey soil (Ar., hamra). T h e core of the rampart was a light-brown packed earth entirely covered with hamra. A glacis, composed of a layer of clayey soil covered by a layer of crushed kurkar, was then added to the rampart's exterior. In a later phase, this glacis was capped with stone to form a 30 angle. A series of three superimposed gates was found in area H, near the southeast corner of the rampart. The two earliest gates of strata III and II (MB II) were constructed of sun-dried mud bricks e
0
and flanked by towers. T h e LB stratum I gate was con structed of stone rubble. A second gate system was also de tected along the eastern wall. Nine occupational layers on the inner rampart slope were excavated in area A. T h e ear liest layer's ceramic horizon dates to M B IIA. Layers 8-3 date to MB IIB-C. LB I material, including Bichrome Ware, was found in layers 2 and 1. In area H , an M B IIA hearth was found on sterile soil in front of the stratum III gate. Fragments of ivory plaques were also associated with tiiis hearth. The site was reoccupied in the Persian period when it was probably a key administrative center. Based on the sherd scatter, the site expanded in the Persian and Hellenistic pe riods and was a large port in the Roman-Byzantine period. Judas Maccabaeus (Judah Maccabee) attacked Jamnia in or der to destroy the Seleucid fleet (see Isaac, 1991, p. 140). A fragmentary Greek inscription on a limestone block, ap proximately dated to the reign of Antiochus V (164-162 BCE), is important for understanding die Phoenician influ ence on Jamnia. It appears that there was a strong Sidonian presence at the site beginning in the second century BCE. Vitto excavated the remains of a well-made polychromatic mosaic floor with a geometric decoration. [See Mosaics.] T h e floor was probably part of a large building complex that is dated to the Byzantine period. Levy excavated in this same area and found three Mamluk rooms with white mosaic floors and evidence of a wine press. Underneath die Byz antine and Mamluk mosaics earlier levels (Herodian, Hel lenistic, and Persian) were found from which a Rhodian handle and a Hasmonean coin were recovered. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ayalon, Etan "Yavneh Yam." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 2 (1983): 1 0 9 - 1 1 0 . Important update of the evidence for Byzantine and Early Arab irrigation efforts on the south slope of the rampart. Bunimovitz, Shlomo. "The Middle Bronze Age Fortifications in Pal estine as a Social Phenomenon." Tel Aviv 19.2 (1992): 2 2 1 - 2 3 4 . Very important discussion of MB fortification systems and elites. Dothan, Moshe, "An Archaeological Survey of the Lower Rubin River." Israel Exploration Journal 2 (1952): 1 0 4 - 1 1 7 . Eldar, Iris, and I. Nir. "Yavne-Yam, Well." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 4 (1985): 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 . Important for the later material at the site. Finkelstein, Israel. "Middle Bronze Age Fortifications: A Reflection of Social Organization and Political Formations." Tel Aviv 19.2 (1992): 201-220.
Isaac, Benjamin. "A Seleucid Inscription from Jamnia-on-die-Sea: An tiochus V Eupator and die Sidonians." Israel Exploration Journal 41 (1991): 1 3 2 - 1 4 4 . Excellent historical overview of Yavneh-Yam from the Hellenistic period, with an important discussion of the role of the Phoenicians in Judea (Judah) in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Kaplan, Jacob. "Further Aspects of die Middle Bronze Age II Fortifi cations in Palestine."Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 9 1 (1975): 1 - 1 7 . Good synthesis of MB fortification systems, including the ramparts at Yavneh-Yam. Levy, Yosef. "Yavneh-Yam." Excavations and Surveys in Israel 7 - 8 (1988-1989): 188, 202. Important for the later material at the site. Vitto, Fanny. "Yavneh Yam, 1980." Israel Exploration Journal 3 3 (1983): 268-269. Site report of a salvage excavation of a Byzantine
YEMEN mosaic floor, with important information on the later periods at Yavneh-Yam. J . P. DESSEL
YEB.
See Elephantine.
YEIVIN, SHMUEL (1896-1982), archaeologist, phi lologist, and first director of the Israel Department of An tiquities and Museums (1948). Born in Odessa (Ukraine) Yeivin immigrated to Palestine as a child and was educated in Tel Aviv. He served in the Turldsh army in World War I and afterward studied Egyptology, Semitic philology, and Arabic at the University of London. During that period he had the unique opportunity to acquire considerable field ex perience on excavations in Palestine as well as in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Because of his philological expertise he was appointed chief translator for the British mandatory govern ment in Palestine from 1944 to 1948. Following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the country and Jerusalem, its capital, were divided. T h e Jewish state was suddenly detached from all Palestinian archaeo logical organizations, collections, and records libraries, in cluding the Palestine Museum (now the Rockefeller M u seum), which remained in the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem. Yeivin was assigned the task of creating a new archaeological service to deal with excavation and antiquities. He did so by creating the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (ID AM). Upon his retirement from the ID AM, Yeivin, with Yohanan Aharoni, founded the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. Of die several excavations Yeivin con ducted, the most important was at Tel Erani, which he identified with Gath of the Philistines, an identification no longer accepted. His work at Tirani revealed an Early Bronze Age city, one of the major cities of the third millen nium in the cenu-al part of the country. Unfortunately, he published only preliminary reports of that excavation. [See also Erani, Tel.] c
c
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YEMEN. An age-old cultural entity, Yemen potentially derived from the ancient designation YMNT, meaning the southern coastal region of present-day Yemen, which lay soutii of the ancient incense kingdoms ringing the Arabian desert during the first millennium BCE. In Islamic times the name signified a vaguely defined soutiiern part of the Ara bian Peninsula. A small group of Arab, European, and Nortii American archaeologists and philologists have con tributed to what is known of the history of Arabia Felix, as Yemen was called in antiquity. Strategically located between Africa and Asia and geo graphically protected by both sea and desert frontiers, ports on the coasts of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean comple mented desert trade routes, giving direct access to the sources of frankincense (e.g., Boswettia sacra, from Dhofar and the eastern Hadhramaut) and myrrh (e.g., Commiphora myrrha, found as far west as Shabwa today) required for religious services throughout the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean. Volcanic glass, carnelian, and agate are found in Yemen, other stones and aromatics were imported (for reexport) from Africa and India. Although trade con nections with the rest of the Near East have not been dem onstrated before the tenth century BCE, the Egyptians may have regarded the land of Punt (a source of semiprecious stones and aromatics, with which they had been trading since the third millennium) as lying on both sides of the Red Sea; the land called Meluhha in ancient Mesopotamia may, at times, have included Yemen. Camel caravans from the interior mountains crossed the edge of the desert, moving northward along the Red Sea coast to Petra, Gaza, and Al exandria, while seafarers traded with India and Africa. The Queen of Sheba (1 Kgs. 1 0 : 1 - 1 3 ) reputedly brought such objects, albeit incense is not specifically mentioned, to Je rusalem during the reign of King Solomon, but the signifi cance of the text is controversial. Geographic isolation and excellent communications allowed a near monopoly on the aromatics trade, generating wealth through the first centu ries CE, when Roman seaborne competition emerged. A de cline in the demand for incense in die Mediterranean swiftly followed the advent of Christianity and the fall of Rome.
Geography. Tectonic crumpling on the southwestern edge of the Arabian shield produced the mountain ranges Abramsky, Shmuel, ed. Sefer Shemu'el Yevin: Mehkarim ba-Mikra, ardominating the area between the desert and the sea. Vol khe'ologyah, lashon ve-toldot Yisra'el, mugashim lo be-hagi'o la-sevah. canic activity on the desert rim ceased several millennia ago, Jerusalem, 1970. Aharoni, Yohanan, ed. Hafirot u-mehkarim; Mugash le-Profesor Shemu'el but not in the central highlands, where a late first-millen Yeivin)'Excavations and Studies, Publications of the Institute of Ar nium BCE site has been covered with lava. T h e monsoons break the mountains down, cutting gullies and passes, en chaeology, no. 1. Tel Aviv, 1973. See pages 9 - 1 1 . "Bibliography of Shmuel Yeivin." Bulletin of the Israel Exploration So abling communication, and rendering the land fertile, while ciety 13 (1947): 67-73filling the sails of trading vessels (the southwestern monsoon Yeivin, Shmuel. A Decade of Archaeology in Israel, 1948-1958. Istanbul, in fall, and the northeastern in spring). Wadis bring the wa i960. ter to both the sea and die desert; the erosion of the high Yeivin, Shmuel. Preliminary Report on the Excavations at Tel Gat (Tell western mountains (including the highest point on the Ara Sheykh 'Ahmed el 'Areyny), Jerusalem, 1961. bian Peninsula) creates the broad plains of the western TiYeivin, Shmuel. The Israelite Conquest of Canaan. Istanbul, 1971. hama (and covers historical-period archaeological sites unRONNY REICH BIBLIOGRAPHY
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der meters of debris), and the lower southern ranges occasionally descend straight into the sea. Those wadis lead ing inland empty into the Ramlah al-Saba'tayn, a lobe of the Empty Quarter (die vast sea of sand dominating the south ern center of the Arabian Peninsula, roughly between Naj ran and the United Arab Emirates). Part of Wadi Jawf, which flows into tire Ramlah alSaba'tayn on the northeast, was the Minaean ldngdom whose capital was at Q R N W (modern Ma'in). Y T L (mod ern Baraqish) is on a plateau separating the Jawf from Wadi Dhanah with tire Sabaean capital at Maryab (modern Marib). T o the southeast lay the Qatabanian ldngdom with its capital Timna' (modern Hayd Kuhlan) at the mouth of Wadi Bayhan. T h e roads to Marib led over the mountains across die virtually inaccessible Mablaqah Pass, or farther nortii on the edge of the desert through the Najd Marqad. Mountain ranges cut the Wadi Markha 'Awsan kingdom from Wadi Bayhan to the west and from die desert to the nortii. Unlike the other kingdoms, Wadis Markha and Jawf each have several large mounds, and the capital of 'Awsan, MSWR, remains to be identified at one of the mounds in Markha. In the early Holocene period, a river valley may have joined the Jawf across die Ramlah al-Saba'tayn with Wadi Hadhramaut to the east. In historical times, the capital of the Hadhramaut kingdom at ancient Shabwa was on the soutiiern edge of the mouth. Wadi Masilah is the tail end of the wadi leading south to the Arabian Sea, but the main route joining the Hadhramaut with the sea follows Wadi D u 'an (with the site of Raybun) up to the high plateau (the southern Jol) and down to the coast. T h e island of Socotra is 350 km off (217 mi.) the coast. Prehistory a n d History. Artifacts show that parts of Ye men have been inhabited since the earliest Lower Paleo lithic. Developed Oldowan material near the Bab al-Mandeb and in the Hadhramaut suggests that the Red Sea was crossed more than a million years ago, and that Yemen was first settled directly from Africa. Acheulean material is found sparsely throughout the confines of modern Yemen. Levallois and Mousterian of the Acheulean tradition are more common, using botii locally available flint and quartzite. U p per Paleolithic blade cultures have so far been confirmed only in Wadi Du'an and on the northern edge of the Hadhramaut. Epipaleolithic artifacts are conspicuously ab sent. Desert Neolithic (c. 6000-3000 BCE?) traditions using unifacially and bifacially retouched projectile points, as well as Rub al-Khali Neolithic tanged arrowheads, are found in the mountains and desert. Points indicate that hunter-gatherer economies corresponding to the Epipaleolithic continued to dominate in the desert, but in the Upland Neolithic tradition similar, albeit crudely executed, foliates are associated with circular and oval huts and incipient ovicaprid pastoralism. The Bronze Age (c. 3000-1000 BCE) brought the expan sion of animal husbandry and the introduction of pottery,
polished stone tools, and the cultivation of cereals. Settle ments (circular and oval huts and hearths) grew exponen tially, so that the largest are more than 10,000 sq m, while others, fewer than 1000 sq m, became more numerous. Ar chaeological evidence of the earliest direct connections with northeast Africa, Mesopotamia, and India has not yet been found, but contacts must have existed, as indicated by the site of Subr (just south of Lahej), with pottery similar to late third-early second-millennium BCE material from the north and east. Toward the close of the Bronze Age, the South Arabian kingdoms (c. 1000 BCE-600 CE) arose on the desert fringe, each kingdom associated widi an urban capital in each of the major wadis opening into the Ramlah al-Saba'tayn, just on the edge of die area where myrrh trees grow. In com petition with one another, die ldngdoms vied for political, economic, and military control of the trade routes. T h e chronology of the ancient incense ldngdoms depends on some tenuous correlations, the most important identifying Karibll-Watar of Saba' (Sheba) who conquered the king dom of 'Awsan as Karabilu the Sabaean who rendered ttibute to Sennacherib of Assyria in about 685 BCE. An inscription referring to a war between Persia and Egypt can not be placed later than the fourth century BCE. After conquering 'Awsan (c. 700 BCE?) Saba' was domi nant until Ma'in and Qataban became independent (c. 400 BCE). Competitive coexistence continued until Saba' and Hadhramaut swallowed them (first centuries CE). However, the Himyarite mountain ldngdom, with its capital at Zafar, progressively conquered Saba' and die Hadhramaut (third century CE) before the Ethiopians (with support from By zantium) swept in (c. 525 CE). T h e Himyarites subsequently brought in the Persians, who stayed put. Yemen was still under Persian rule at the adoption of Islam. T h e coastal ports changed their allegiances, as in the case of Qana' (Bir 'Ali), the port of the Hadhramaut, which must have replaced another port in the first century BCE and yet continued to flourish after Shabwa fell, until just before Islam, The emergence of Islam coincided with the demise of die ancient kingdoms. T h e tribal components of the ancient ldngdoms reasserted themselves, fragmenting the country's apparent unity. By the end of the tenth century CE, Yemen had become a theater in the confrontation between the var ious streams of Islam. Fatimid generals vied with insubor dinate 'Abbasid vassals and rebellious Zaydi tribesmen for control of the mountainous highlands, while the Ayyubids finally imposed their rule before being eclipsed. Ancient S o u t h Arabia. T h e people inhabiting tiiese de sert, mountain, and coastal regions seem to have identified themselves as a single cultural group, using the same system of writing and worshipping the same gods since the dawn of history. It would appear that die politic oreligious title mu karrib was only borne by one person in all of the Soutii Ara bian area at any one time, indicating a common identity despite political differences. T h e primary members of the
YEMEN South Arabian pantheon were probably Venus (Athtar, a male: cf. Ishtar), the Moon, and the Sun, assigned different roles (and names) in the various ldngdoms. Stone temple dedicatory inscriptions in monumental characters are among the most important South Arabic texts. Commercial transactions were recorded in a cursive script on palm sticks. From the seventh century BCE, ancient South Arabian cit ies were generally surrounded by defensive walls, more commonly identified in the western than the eastern part of the country. Within the walls stood tall tower houses with rock foundations and superstructures of mud brick rein forced with wood (e.g., at Shabwa and T i m n a ) . South Ara bian coins, bronze objects, stone incense burners, and pot tery are the usual small finds. Most urban and town sites are laid out around large open areas, and with prominent sanc tuaries, both intra- and extramural. Prehistoric sanctuaries and cemeteries were frequently placed outside the associated setdement or along nomadic routes. The rectangular peristyle temples typical of Ma'in and Saba' reflect a more sophisticated form of the imme diately preceding rectangular prehistoric temples and are found both intra- and extramuralfy. Some sanctuaries at Marib and Sirwah are oval, while temples at Timna', Shabwa, and Raybun are rectangular hypostyle halls. Mon umental temple porticoes are common throughout South Arabia. Prehistoric cairns, dolmens, and stone alignments similar to monuments on the northern part of the peninsula are found frequently in the east but rarely in the west. In the historical periods, the rural dead were buried under cairns in a ttadition going back to the Neolithic. T h e urban dead were also buried in silt accumulations (Saba' and Qataban) c
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or in small chambers hewn into mountain rock (Qataban and Hadhramauf). Statues or stylized heads in stone boxes accompanied the weapons, jewelry, and other articles of daily use placed in the tombs. Ritual camel burials dating to the historical periods have been found in the south. The wealth of the tomb offerings was the result of trade. Constantly at odds, each of the desert kingdoms was nevertheless dependent on trade with its neighbors, as frankincense had to pass from Dhofar to the Hadhramaut, across die Ramlah al-Saba'tayn and on to Ma'in and tire north, with the myrrh being passed on from Qataban and Saba'. The trading ldng doms were probably initially dependent on the camel, which requires little water, but much fodder, rendering agriculture the dominant activity in the historical periods. T h e irrigation systems designed to catch and distribute the monsoon rains are among the most impressive South Arabian monuments. T h e original (second or third millen nium BCE?) distributor structures in Marib were progres sively updated and placed at more suitable locations until the ultimate dam (c. 500 BCE-600 CE) was built there, a mas terpiece of engineering designed to contain the maximum amount of floodwater for distribution to more than 10,000 ha (24,700 acres) of cultivated land. Throughout Yemen ancient fields can be recognized by silt accumulations up to 30 meters high. [See also Hadhramaut; Himyar; Incense; Marib; Qataban; Shabwa; Sheba; Timna' (Arabia); and Zaiar.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amirkhanov, Khizri A. Paleolit Iuga Aravii. Moscow, 1991. Summary of Soviet research on the Paleolithic, mainly in Wadi Du'an, essential for information about the Paleolithic in South Arabia. Includes an inadequate English summary.
m YEMEN. General view of the site of Sirwah. (Courtesy D. A. Warburton)
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Bowen, Richard Le Baron, and Frank P. Albright, eds. Archaeological by Eliot Braun for the Department of Antiquities and M u Discoveries in South Arabia, Baltimore, 1958. seums of Israel. Bowen, Robert, and Ulrich Lux. Afro-Arabian Geology: A Kinematic Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) Levels. Evidence of View, London, 1987. Breton, Jean-Francois, ed. Fouilles de Shabwa II: Rapports preliminaires. the earliest period of occupation at the site was confined to about 400 sq. m. in which a number of successive occupa Institut Francais de'Archeologie du Proche-Orient, Publications, no. 19. Paris, 1992. A series of articles from Syria 68 (1991), presenting tions were preserved. The major remains include rectan part of the results of the French excavations. gular, multiroomed dwellings, one of which had a central Cleuziou, Serge, et al. "Le peuplement pre- et protohistorique du sysroom flanked by two smaller chambers, sometimes inter teme fluviatile fossile du Jawf-Hadramawt au Yemen." Paleorient preted as courtyards. Notable in this period are extremely 18.2 (1992): 5-29. Damn, Werner, ed. Yemen: Three Thousand Years ofArt and Civilization well-preserved lime-plaster floors with rounded corners where tiiey met the stone and mud-brick walls. A number in Arabia Felix. Innsbruck, 1988. Articles by foremost experts de tailing the state of research circa 1985, with bibliographies. of primary flexed inhumations were discovered beneath the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut San'a'. Archdologische Berichte aus floors of several houses. dem Yemen. 8 vols, to date. Mainz, 1982-. Enormous quantities of flints, cores, debitage, and tools Etudes Sud-Arabes: Recueil offert a Jacques Ryckmans. Publications de indicate the association of these earliest occupants of the site l'lnstitut Orientaliste de Louvain, 39. Louvain, 1991. Articles on South Arabia by leading experts. with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (Neolithic 2) culture of the Groom, Nigel. Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense southern Levant. A quantity of ground-stone tools, beads, Trade. London, I98r. bone tools, and some imported obsidian was also associated Inizan, Marie-Louise, et al. "L'artisanat de la cornaline au Yemen: Pre with these levels. mieres donnees." Techniques et Culture 20 (1992): 1 5 5 - 1 7 4 . Charred horsebeans (Viciafaba) and lentils (Lens culinaris Maigret, Alessandro de, ed. The Bronze Age Culture ofHawlan at-Tiyal Medik) suggest a partially agriculturally based economy and al-Hada. Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, Centro Studi e Scavi Archeologici, Reports and Memoirs, vol. 24. combined with hunting, especially of gazelle with some boar Rome, 1990. Fundamental work on the Bronze Age. and wild goat. Although it is unusual for this period, tiiere Raydan: Journal of Ancient Yemeni Antiquities and Epigraphy. Aden, was no evidence of cereal farming or of sheep and goat hus 1978-. The main journal devoted to Yemeni epigraphy. bandry as is often associated with contemporary occupa Retso, Jan. "The Domestication of the Camel and the Establishment tions. of the Frankincense Road from Soudi Arabia." Orienlalia Suecana 40 (1991): 187-219. Well-argued iconoclastic view of camels and Stratum IV. Above the early PPNB levels and to the incense, with an excellent bibliography. south, an occupation layer consisted of a number of long, Robin, Christian, ed. L'Arabie antique de Karib'il a Mahomet: Nouvelles meandering curvilinear or irregular fieldstone walls under donnees sur I'histoire des Arabes graces aux inscriptions. La Calade, stood as segments of enclosures. Blocked doorways and su 1991. The most recent comprehensive work on the significance of perimposed, pebbled and earthen surfaces indicate internal epigraphic discoveries in Arabia, with tentative interpretations of fered for virtually every aspect of the information gleaned from the phasing in this stratum. The associated flint-tool kit places inscriptions. it within die P P N B horizon. A large number of groundSedov, A. V. "New Archaeological and Epigraphical Material from stone bowls, some fragmentary and built into the fabric of Qana (South Arabia)." Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 3 (1992): the walls, marks the layer's relationship to the succeeding 1 1 0 - 1 3 7 . Report on die Soviet excavations at the port on the south stratum III occupation. ern coast. Toplyn, Michael R, et al. The Wadi al-Jubah Archaeological Project. 5 Stratum III. Extensively excavated, stratum III is notable vols, to date. Washington, D.C., 1984-. for five rectangular fieldstone structures that share a northDAVID A . WARBURTON south orientation, giving the overall impression of a wellordered village. T h e most complete structure is a house with a porch and three rooms. The house is bisected by doorways YIFTAHEL, site located within a narrow valley, the along a single central axis. It belongs to a Neolithic tradition soudrwestern extension of the Beth-Netofa valley in Lower of pier houses that are typical of the P P N B in the southern Galilee (map reference 7086 X 6263). The site is sometimes Levant. identified with the biblical valley ofYiftahel (Jos. 1 9 : 1 4 , 2 7 ) , Superimposed floors, indicating several occupational in references to the border between the territories of the phases, were primarily earthen or pebbled, but there was tribes of Zebulon and Asher, This identification was recently some evidence for the limited use of lime plaster. Several extended to a small mound, Horvat Yiftahel (Ar., Khirbet secondary inhumations were noted below the floors of Khalladiyah). T h e designation is problematic, however, as houses and within the precincts of the adjacent courtyards. the biblical account indicates a geographic feature rather T o this stratum is attributed a large number of limestone titan a settlement. The mound, located on the valley floor bowls, hollowed from small and large stones from streams. near a small perennial spring, was systematically excavated, These bowls are similar to those found in stratum IV. This but about 2400 sq. m. of late prehistoric occupation was levels' flint-tool kit also belongs to the P P N B period and can exposed on the nearby east slope in salvage work directed be characterized as a flake industry. Some of its typical prod-
YIN'AM, T E L ucts are naviform cores, ridge blades, adzes, axes, hammerstones, and arrowheads. Below Stratum II. Evidence for the sporadic utilization of the site during the Late Neolithic (Neolithic 3-4) and Chalcolithic periods was recovered in fills and on occasional patches of surfaces encountered beneatii die stratum II buildings. An identifiable small collection of artifacts in cludes typical Late Neolithic flint tools, pottery sherds of the Jericho IX and Wadi Rabbah horizons, and a basalt bowl decorated with incised triangles and vessels similar in shape to Neolithic pottery types but fashioned of lime, apparently a late manifestation of the vaisselles blanches tradition. A very schematic minuscule ceramic figurine, with enlarged pro boscis, conical head, and ears only, either anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, apparently belongs to this horizon. Stratum II. Remains of a densely occupied village of more than a score of curvilinear houses, may indicate a break witii the rectilinear tradition that dominated domestic architecture from P P N B times to the end of die Chalcolithic period. These houses were found often directly on top of the stratum IV sdructures. Their stone foundations, varying greatly in size, were either circular (e.g., 4.5 m in diameter), oval (5-8 m long), or sausage-shaped (i.e., two parallel walls ( 1 2 - 1 6 m long) ended in an apse at both ends. Occasionally, the curved ends were paved with flat stones; the larger struc tures had curvilinear internal walls. These buildings are part of a short-lived but strong curvilinear architectural tradition that can be traced from Byblos in the north to Ashkelon in the soutii in the Byblian Chalcolithic and local Early Bronze I period (fourth millennium BCE). At Yiftahel, some slight evidence suggests as many as three phases within this pe riod, but most of the haphazardly arranged buildings appear to have been contemporary. This occupation's early EB I date is indicated by numer ous examples of Gray Burnished ("Esdraelon") ware, as well as some typical vessels that continued Chalcolithic ce ramic traditions but with such distinctive EB I features as indented ledge handles. T h e lack of grain-wash or band-slip decoration bolsters die argument for an early date within the EB I. T h e flint-tool ldt was primarily ad hoc, with Canaanean blades being extremely rare. T h e ground-stone assemblage included some typical finely worked EB I basalt bowls and a number of loaf-shaped basalt grinding stones. T w o axheads and a delicate needle are die only copper finds. Faunal remains suggest that sheep, goat, cattle, and swine were herded. T h e economy appears to have been somewhat mixed, with die addition of cereal production suggested by a number of flint blades bearing distinctive traces of sickle sheen. Stratum I. A conglomeration of structures that were probably not all contemporary appears in stratum I. T w o multichambered rectangular buildings with cobble pave ments were devoid of finds and of uncertain date. Another
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enigmatic structure, a wide strip of fieldstones of varying widths, was found directly above several stratum II houses. Several poorly preserved walls and adjacent earthen surfaces were assignable, on the basis of typical pottery finds, to the Early Bronze IV and the Middle Bronze II—III horizons. BIBLIOGRAPHY Braun, Eliot. "Of Megarons and Ovals: New Aspects of Late Prehistory in Israel." Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 6 (19851986): 17-26. Brief, preliminary report on the excavations at Yif tahel. Braun, Eliot. "The Problem of the Apsidal House: New Aspects of Early Bronze I Domestic Architecture in Israel, Jordan, and Leba non." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 21 (1989): 1-43. Summary of all the available evidence up to 1989, but now somewhat dated. Braun, Eliot. "Basalt Bowls of the EB I Horizon in the Southern Le vant." Paleorient 16.1 (1990): 87-96. Typological study. Garfinkel, Yosef. "Yiftahel: A Neolithic Village from die Seventh Mil lennium B.C. in Lower Galilee, Israel." Journal of Field Archaeology 14 (1987): 199-212. Preliminary report on the excavations of the small sounding in the early PPNB levels. Garfinkel, Yosef, and Liora K. Horwitz. "The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Bone Industry from Yiftahel, Israel." Paleorient 14.1 (1988): 73-86. Includes preliminary results of the faunal assemblage. Ronen, Avraham, et al. "A Plastered Floor from the Neolithic Village, Yiftahel (Israel)." Paleorient 17.2 (1991): 149-155. The most recent technical study of Yiftahel's lime plasters. Rosen, Steven A. "The Analysis of Early Bronze Age Chipped Stone Industries: A Summary Statement." In L'urbanisalion de la Palestine a I'age du Bronze ancien: Bilan el perspectives des recherches acluellcs; Acles du Colloque d'Emmaus, 20-24 octobre 1986, edited by Pierre de Miroschedji, vol. 1, pp. 199-222. British Archaeological Reports, In ternational Series, no. 527.1. Oxford, 1989. Excellent summary of the subject. Wright, G. Ernest. "The Problem of the Transition between the Chal colithic and Bronze Ages." Erets-Israel5 (1958): 37*-45*. Somewhat dated but still useful introduction to the Chalcolithic and EB I tran sition, with valuable observations on the ceramic evidence for the northern region of the southern Levant. ELIOT BRAUN
YIN'AM, TEL (Ar., Tell en-Na'am), an open-air site astride the Darb el-Hawarneh, the ancient road used as an international highway for trade and cultural difiiision from the Late Bronze Age until die early twentieth century CE to connect the Hauran in Syria witii Akko in Palestine (32°43' N , 35°3 E; map reference 198 X 235). One of thirteen ar chaeological sites in a nortiiwest-southeast-trending valley in the eastern Lower Galilee, Tel Yin'am is adjacent to Wadi Fajjas, near an inland branch of the Via Maris, at die eastern edge of an alluvial fan of basaltic soils that slopes from the Yavne'el scarp on the west side of the Yavne'el Valley. T h e site was occupied from tile Yarmukian Neolithic until the Late Roman period. Although it is frequentiy identified with biblical Yavne'el/Jabneel (Jos. 19:33), it is not the only Iron Age site in the vicinity. Beth-Gan, which yielded transitional LB/Iron and Iron I material, is another candidate. [See BethGan.] In the Jerusalem Talmud (Meg. 1 : 1 , 70A) biblical ;
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Yavne'el, a town at the southern border of the tribe of Naphtali, is identified with Khirbet Yamma, but no Iron Age ma terial has been recovered from that nearby settlement. Early efforts to identify Tel Yin'am with Yeno'am in New King dom Egyptian sources are now generally disregarded. How ever, because the site yielded a significant LB II occupation and ended in a fiery destruction, its identification with Yeno'am, which some scholars believe to have been in the Bashan (Na'aman, 1977), may not be out of the question. The site's rich alluvial soils and ample water supply from springs and wadis fostered an agriculturally based economy, but its inhabitants also engaged in trade and ironworldng at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The site's location accounts for its trade connections and the variety and quality of its material culture. The earliest exploration of the site was conducted by the Palestine Exploration Fund during the survey in western Palestine in 1873. Aape Saarisalo subsequently surveyed the site and carried out a sondage (which the present excavation identified by loose fill and a metal can in square K i o in the 1920s). He believed Tel Yin'am to be the key archaeological site in die valley and claimed that it had been occupied dur ing die Bronze and Iron Ages and the Hellenistic, Roman, and Arab periods (Saarisalo, 1927). The site was later sur veyed by Yohanan Aharoni and again by Ruth Amiran (Aharoni, 1957). The most recent survey, prior to system atic excavations, was conducted by Zvi Gal. His report (1992, p. 33) relied on the assessment of the site, as of 1981, by the University of Texas, which excavated there, under the direction of Harold Liebowitz, from 1976 to 1981 and 1983 to 1989. In preparation for those excavations, Liebowitz con ducted a sondage on the north side of the mound in 1975. Work was focused on the north and west sides of the mound (areas A and B). Area C, on the south side, which was badly eroded, was excavated for only one season. In 1978 a brief salvage dig was carried out 50 m west of the foot of the mound in area D, a terrace. The final seasons on excavation revised tire site's occupational history. It is now known to have had fewer gaps in occupation than originally assumed. Its broad repertoire of pottery and small finds (see below) have helped to define the eastern lower Galilee as a distinct region in the Late Bronze Age, heretofore considered to have been basically unoccupied in that period. Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods. While the material evidence attests to die occupation of the site in tire Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, these levels were not reached in excavation because of the compaction of the soil below the EB I layers. The Neolithic pottery closely parallels assem blages from other Yarmukian sites (Stekelis, 1972), and the serrated flint blades recall sickle blades known from numer ous Neolithic sites. T h e Chalcolithic period is attested pri marily by large basalt hammers.
B r o n z e Age. T h e Early Bronze Age IA is best repre sented in area D (10 X i o s q m ) , excavated on the terrace settlement (see above). There, a circular platform identified as a bamii was found in association with partially preserved walls. The surface of die area was 10 cm thick and produced a rich, densely packed assemblage of EB IA pottery paral leled at Khirbet Kerak (and some Neolithic pottery), a min iature basalt bowl, a rare ceramic bull protome, and a pro fusion of animal bones. A less significant EB layer was excavated on the west side of the mound. T h e Middle Bronze Age is represented by the southwest corner of an MB fortress temple in a poorly preserved area immediately below the earliest phase of an LB II building in area B. T h e surface patch yielded an almost intact electrum figurine of a standing goddess that has parallels in silver from a temple at Nahariyah in Israel and at Syrian sites; and a flat, copper/bronze standing figurine with parallels at Byb los. These figurines from Tel Yin'am were found in asso ciation with an M B II cooking pot and die upper part of a large, unusual jar with plastic and incised decoration. T h e northern part of the structure had been bulldozed by a local farmer prior to excavation; its southeastern part remains unexcavated. Other MB II sherds were found in fills else where in area B. The tell was abandoned until the latter part of the Late Bronze Age. A ten-room central building (building 1) that served as the residence of the local ruler existed tiiroughout the LB occupation and yielded finds including cylinder seals, a stamp seal, a necklace with a chalcedony lion pen dant, and beads (including two gray-and-white barrelshaped beads), two Egyptian heart amulets, a bronze plow point, an "Egyptian Blue" shallow bowl, basalt bowls, and millstones. [See Seals.] Additional thirteenth-century buildings abutted building 1; all experienced two phases of occupation. On tire cobbled floor of die storeroom of building 2 from the later phase, a dense concentration of sherds was found from which un usually large biconical jugs, store jars, and an unparalleled Mycenaean stirrup jar were restored, substantiating, along with the small finds (see above), the extent of foreign trade in the Late Bronze Age. The floor of building 7 was paved with meter-long flagstones. A 50-cm deep layer of ash, charred wood, fire-cracked rock, and burnt and disinte grated mud brick found on the floors of the major LB build ings was evidence of their violent end. In die final LB phase, room 1 of building 1 was turned into an industrial installa tion that apparentiy was a primitive iron smelter, heralding the coming of the Iron Age (see below). Iron Age. T h e reuse in some places of LB walls in the Iron I settlements and floors laid directly above the LB de struction debris suggest that a relatively short period elapsed between destruction and resettlement, T h e Iron I buildings were sturdily built, and the pottery was of consistentiy high
YOQNE'AM quality. Though much of the western slope of the mound is eroded, and a significant portion of die Iron I levels was destroyed, die preserved remains attest that the site was con tinuously occupied throughout the Iron I and into Iron I I A (the tenth century BCE) . T h e courtyard of one of two tenth-century (Iron IIA) do mestic buildings in area B yielded an oil press, an olivecracking installation, stone weights, and olive pits, suggest ing the existence of a home industry. [See Olives.] A long room north of the courtyard yielded forty-five loom weights. Unusual small finds include a rare bimetallic knife and a cone-shaped seal that features two rampant longhorns, each with a human figure seated on its back. Only two loci pro duced rich assemblages of Iron IIC ceramic remains in situ on the mound, although large quantities of sherds were found scattered throughout the area. A homogeneous as semblages of Iron IIC cooking pots, jugs, and store jars was restored from a courtyard and a partially excavated building in area B. Building activity in die Persian period had con siderably disrupted remains in that level. P e r s i a n - R o m a n P e r i o d s . Evidence of a Persian period occupation at the site was found in two phases in areas A and B. T h e ceramic assemblages reflect local and imported wares, including bowls, jugs, juglets, store jars, cooking pots, and a large pilgrim flask; among the imports were an East Greek painted jug and Attic sherds. T h e period's most sub stantial remains were recovered in area B on the tell: a par tially excavated building with walls one meter wide and a large stepped podium with a flagsone walkway leading to it. In area A a building with ovens and grain silos, whose di mensions suggest domestic use, was excavated. T h e site yielded no evidence of occupation in the Hellenistic period but was reoccupied in die Roman period. T h e domestic sttuctures were comprised of two rooms and appear to have been small. T h e one exception is a building in area A, on the north. It was partially excavated along with Roman-pe riod buildings in area B. There, because the mound sloped sharply, the western continuation of the walls and floors of several rooms was eroded. Unique to area C are the lime stone ashlars used in the building tiiat housed a six-stepped, plaster-lined miqveh, [See Ritual Baths.] Though carbon-14 tests conducted on the plaster from the miqveh's walls suggest a sixth-century date, the pottery is Late Roman. T h e absence of Byzantine and Arab pottery either in Gal's survey or in excavation leads to the conclusion that the site was abandoned at some time prior to the fourth century.
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Gal, Zvi. Lower Galilee during the Iron Age. Winona Lake, Ind., 1992. Liebowitz, Harold. "Tel Yin'am." Hadashot Arkheologiyot 59 (1976): 29; 63-64 (1977): 29; 79 (1979): 20; 78 (1982): 17; 93 (1984): 24; 94 (1990): n o . Liebowitz, Harold. "Ivory." Israel Exploration Journal 27 (1977): 5 3 54; 28 (1978): 193-194; 29 (1979): 229-230; 32 (1982): 64-66. Liebowitz, Harold, and Robert L. Folk. "Archaeological Geology of Tel Yin'am, Galilee, Israel." Journal of Field Archaeology 7 (1980): 23-42. Liebowitz, Harold. "Excavations at Tel Yin'am: The 1976 and 1977 Seasons, Preliminary Report." Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori ental Research, no. 243 (1981): 79-94. Liebowitz, Harold, and Robert Folk. "The Dawn of Iron Smelting in Palestine: The Late Bronze Age Smelter at Tel Yin'am, Preliminary Report." Journal of Field Archaeology 11 (1984): 265-280. Liebowitz, Harold. "Tel Yin'am." Qadmoniot 19 (1984): 12-15. Liebowitz, Harold. "Yin'am, Tel." In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, pp. 584-587. New York, 1992. Na'aman, Nadav. "Yenoam." Tel Aviv 4 (1977): 168-177. Saarisalo, Aape. The Boundary between Issachar and Naphtali: An Ar chaeological and Literary Study of Israel's Settlement in Canaan. Hel sinki, 1927. See pages 44-45. HAROLD A. LIEBOWITZ
YODEFAT. Seejotapata.
YO QNE'AM, site situated at the northern outlet of Wadi
el-Malih into the Jezreel Valley, at the eastern foot of Mt. Carmel (map reference 1604 X 2289). T h e site covers an area of 10 acres. Rising steeply above the surrounding valley, Yoqne'am's location commands the vital junction of the route dirough the Malih Valley that connects the Via Maris of the coastal plain with die route across the Jezreel Valley that leads to the Plain of Akko and beyond, to Phoenicia. Its strategic position accounts for its long occupational history, from the Early Bronze Age to the Mamluk period. Egyptian, biblical, Byzantine, and medieval references to the site, in cluding topographical data, and the resemblance of its Ar abic name, Tell-Qeimun, to ancient Yoqne'am, made its identification certain. Yoqne'am enjoys exceptionally favor able environmental conditions: moderate climate, fertile soil, and an abundance of water. Exploration. T h e site was first surveyed by the Palestine Exploration Fund in the late nineteenth century. In the early 1970s it was resurveyed by the Israel Survey. Excavations began in 1977 as part of the Yoqne'am Regional Project, carried out on behalf of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the direction of Amnon Ben-Tor, and continued for ten seasons until 1988. BIBLIOGRAPHY History. T h e earliest reference to Yoqne'am is on an in Aharoni, Yohanan. The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in the Upper scription at Karnak in Egypt tiiat records a military cam Galilee (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1957. See pages 79, 125, 129. paign into Canaan by Thutmosis III (c. 1468 BCE). Conder, Claude R., and H. H. Kitchener. The Survey of Western Pal estine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Ar Yoqne'am (the Egyptian rendering is 'nqn'am, probably re ferring to the springs at the foot of the site) is site number chaeology, vol. 1, Galilee, London, 1881. See page 417.
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1 1 3 on that list. T h e site is mentioned three times in the Book of Joshua: its king is listed as one of the thirty-one ldngs Joshua defeated (12:22); "the river that is before Jokneam" is die border of the territory of the tribe of Zebulon ( 1 9 : 1 1 ) ; and as a Levitical city within Zebulon's territory (21:34). Kamrnuna, in Eusebius's Onomasticon ( 1 1 6 , 2 1 ) , six miles from Legio, on the road to Ptolemais (Akko), is probably to be identified with Yoqne'am. The most frequent references to the site, under the name Caymont, or Mons Cain (both deriving from a tradition identifying it with the place where Cain was killed by Lamech) are to be found in Crusader documents. After die conquest of Baldwin I, it became first a royal castle and somewhat later the center of a small lord ship. After their victory in the battle of Hattin (1187), the Muslims held the site for a short time, during which it ap pears in sources as al-Qaimun (Yaqut 4.218). During the next century it changed hands several times. T h e site is last mentioned in a Frankish-Mamluk treaty dated 1268, in which al-Qaimun is listed among the possessions of the sul tan Qalawun. T h e monumental structure covering the site's entire acropolis has been identified with the caravanserai built in the mid-eighteenth century CE by Dahir al-Omar, ruler of the Galilee. Whether it is indeed, or whether the remains belong to the site's Crusader fortress, will be de cided by die brief rescue excavation currently in progress by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Excavation. Five areas (A-E) were opened at the site and twenty-three occupation levels identified. Early Bronze-Middle Bronze I (strata XXVII-XXIV). No in situ remains were found of any periods because in the areas excavated, subsequent builders, by founding their structures on bedrock, removed all previous architectural remains. However, sherds from all the site's occupational periods, including Gray-Burnished, Abydos, and Khirbet Kerak wares, as well as reserve-slipped Syrian sherds, were found, and stratum numbers were assigned for future ref erence. Middle Bronze Age IIA-B (strata XXIIIA-C, XXII). Three interconnected rock-cut, bell-shaped burial caves constitute the earliest and only in situ remains at Yoqne'am. In one of them were two skeletons placed in arcosolia. T h e pottery associated with tiiese burials dates them to M B IIA. The entrance to one of the caves was sealed by the site's earliest defense system: a solid mud-brick wall and a glacis. T h e two phases of these fortifications are dated witiiin MB IIA. Another wall, not as wide as the former, and an asso ciated tower, built on top of the fortifications, are dated to M B IIB. Little is known about the settlement's interior. Transitional Middle Bronze IIC-Late Bronze I (stra tum XXIA-B). T h e remains of dwellings built over the MB IIA-B defenses indicate an unfortified settlement. It is char acterized by a large number of infant jar burials dated to the seventeenth-sixteenth centuries BCE.
Late Bronze Age II (strata XXA-B, XIXA-B). Four phases of an unfortified LB II settlement were discerned. The last of these had been violently destroyed, as indicated by a level of burnt debris more than 1 m thick covering all the remains. T h e date of that destruction should be placed somewhere in the late tiiirteentii-early twelfth centuries BCE. Iron Age I (strata XVIIIA-B, XVII). After an apparently short occupational gap, the site was resettled in the Iron Age. Three architectural phases could be clearly discerned. T h e main architectural feature of the last phase is a house con taining installations for the production of olive oil. Large amounts of pottery, both local and Phoenician or Philistine related, characterize this phase. T h e final destruction of the Iron I settlement may be related to the conquest of the Jezreel Valley by King David. Iron Age II-III (strata XVI-XI). After a brief transitional phase, Yoqne'am was once again fortified. In the mid-tenth century BCE the city was surrounded by a massive casemate wall. A shaft cut into bedrock, whose excavation was not completed, probably led to the spring at the foot of the tell. T h e casemate wall was replaced in the ninth century by a defensive system consisting of two parallel walls. A periph eral street ran along the inner wall, separating the defenses from the city's residential buildings. These defenses went out of use in the late eighth century BCE, probably as a result of the Assyrian conquest of northern Israel. Persian period (strata X-VIII). Three phases of an unwalled settlement from die Persian period were unearthed.
YOQNE'AM. Iron Age double city walls. Ninth century BCE. (Cour tesy A. Ben-Tor)
YOQNE'AM
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dated by finds whose origins are local as well as Syrian and Egyptian and belong to the eighth-mid-tenth centuries CE. Crusader period (stratum IIIA-B). After an occupa tional gap of about two centuries, Yoqne'am was rebuilt by the Crusaders. A residential quarter, a defensive wall, and a church are the main architectural features uncovered. There are clear indications of a massive fort having been con structed on the acropolis in this period, however. Mamluk period (stratum II). Sporadic settlement oc curred in the ruined Crusader city in the fourteenth cenmry. It was confined mainly to the southern part of the site. Ottoman period (stratum I). A few sherds and one tomb represent occupation during the Ottoman period (six teenth-twentieth centuries). Some building activity may have taken place in the ruined Crusader fort on the acrop olis. BIBLIOGRAPHY YOQNE'AM. Iron Age faience head. Ninth-eighth century BCE. (Courtesy A. Ben-Tor) A strong Phoenician influence is clearly indicated in tire ar chitecture and tire ceramic finds. Hellenistic, Late Roman, and Byzantine periods (strata VII-V). A watchtower from the Hellenistic period and a mausoleum from the Late Roman period are all that remain of the later periods of occupation on the tell. T h e main settlement appears to have moved to the hill imme diately to the south. This may have been the case also in the Byzantine period. However, remnants of a church located immediately under the Crusader church on the eastern slope of the acropolis indicate a Byzantine presence at Yoqne'am. Early Arab period (stratum IVA-C). A well-planned settlement was found that apparently extended over the en tire surface of the site during the Early Arab period. It is
Ben-Tor, Amnon. "An Egyptian Stone Vessel from Tel Yoqneam." 'Atiqot6 (1970): g*-io*. Ben-Tor, Amnon, and Renate Rosenthal. "The First Season of Exca vation at Tel-Yoqne'am, 1977." Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978): 57-82. Ben-Tor, Amnon. "Yokneam et environs (projet d'etude regionale)." Revue Biblique &5 (1978): 96-100. Ben-Tor, Amnon, and Renate Rosenthal. "The Second Season of Ex cavation at Tel-Yoqne'am, 1978." Israel Exploration Journal 29 (1979): 65-83. Ben-Tor, Amnon. "Yoqne'am Regional Project Looks Beyond the Tell." Biblical Archaeology Review 6.2 (1980): 30-44. Ben-Tor, Amnon, and Renate Rosenthal. "The Third and Fourth Sea sons of Excavation at Tel-Yoqne'am, 1979 and 1981." Israel Explo ration Journal 33 (1983): 30-54. Hunt, Melvin L. "The Iron Age Pottery of the Yoqne'am Regional Project." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1985. Poulin, Joan. "Du nouveau sur les Pheniciens." Le Monde de la Bible 61 (1989): 58-61. AMNON BEN-TOR
ZABID, site located centrally across the 50-km wide coastal plain of the Tihama, in the Republic of Yemen (i4°i2' N , 43°i9' E). Founded in 820 CE (AH 203) and now a seat of local government, Zabid's medieval prosperity was the result of irrigable land watered by seasonal floods, good ground water, access to die Red Sea, and ease of ground communication along the pilgrimmage routes to Mecca. Mention of the city's walls and four gates appears in the commentaries of 'Umarah al-Yamani (twelfth century) and al-KhazrajT (fifteenth century). T h e walls also are empha sized in Ibn al-Mujawir's thirteenth-century map of the city: it shows a concentric wall system, with varying dimensions attributed to different dynasties. Curiously, the city wall with largest circumference is ascribed to the little-known and rather weak eleventii-century Najahid dynasty of Yemen. There has been a tendency for modern commentators to assume that Zabid's standing gates reflect the medieval con figuration of the city (see Chelhod, 1978). Surveys by the Canadian Archaeological Mission of the Royal Ontario M u seum, directed by E. J. Keall, indicate tiiat the modern gates have no great antiquity (Keall, 1984). In his unpublished diary Glaser located the pre-Islamic city on a map at a point 10 km (6 mi.) north of modern Zabid (see map reproduced in Pauly-Wissova, 1968, p. 1 3 1 5 ) . From the study of sherds found on a large site north of Zabid, the mission's finds lend credence to Glaser's otherwise unsubstantiated observation (see Keall, 1983). This site may date back to die second millennium BCE. Beginning in 1982, the Canadian mission, guided by 1:50,000 maps, surveyed Zabid and its surrounding area. All of die sites found were Islamic, with the exception of the one north of Zabid and another found in a range of dunes close to die coast. Imported Chinese wares furnish vital dates from the tenth to nineteenth centuries. Apart from them, almost all of the pottery is unique to the project: it appears to have little in common with the ceramic finds from the Saudi littoral or the Egyptian Red Sea coast. Petrographic analysis has characterized local production and con firmed the identity of the Islamic imports (mostly from Iraq and Iran). In 1987, the Canadian mission designed an excavation program to define the development of the city (see Keall,
1989, 1991). The strata were found to have been badly dis turbed by intrusive pits. Extensive damage had been caused by brick robbers who had trenched along wall lines to re move baked bricks. Traces of the original walls were posi tively revealed by the cobblestone footings that, lacking re cyclable value for the robbers, had been left. It has been possible to identify occupation from the ninth century CE to the present. The perimeter wall of the Zabid citadel is a makeshift arrangement from around 1904. A fort was first built there during the sixteenth-century Ottoman occupa tion. Outside the citadel, traces of copperworking have been tentatively associated with coin production. T h e implication is that the area was always a government quarter. At a site farther south, the remnants of fourteenth-fifteenth-century domestic buildings were buried beneath the berm of a moat—a clear indication that the last surviving city wall was a moderately recent one. East of Zabid, a ninth-tenth-cen tury workshop produced pottery greatly influenced by con temporaneous Iraqi styles. T h e clay source was wadi allu vium, which the potter had collected by diverting flood water onto die site in settling ponds. North of the city, excavations unearthed a sequence of buildings, though only sparse floors and foundation trenches survived the brick robbers. Fragments of carved and painted plaster reflect the quality of the structures, which may have been suburban villas set among watered gardens. The sandy conditions prevalent at all stages reflect an environment little different from today's. Provisions for watering the gardens are indicated by the kind of underground pipes the project unearthed. Two sets of glazed earthenware pipes were found outside of Zabid, as well as a covered conduit that comes from the direction of the mountains (see Hehmeyer, 1995)BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chelhod,Joseph. "Introduction al'histoire sociale et urbainedeZabTd." Arabica 25.1 (1978): 48-88. Reliable use of the main medieval sources but undue emphasis on possible cultural influence from Ethiopia. Hehmeyer, I. "Physical Evidence of Engineered Water Systems in Me dieval Zabid." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 25 (1995):
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Keall, E. J. "The Dynamics of Zabid and Its Hinterland: The Survey of a Town on the Tihamah Plain of North Yemen." World Archae ology 14 (1983): 378-392. Keall, E. J. "A Preliminary Report on the Architecture of Zabid." Pro ceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 14 (1984): 51-65. Keall, E.J. "A Few Facts about Zabid." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 19 (1989): 61-69. Keall, E.J. "Drastic Changes in Sixteenth-Century Zabid." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 21 (1991): 79-96. This, along with Keall, 1983 and 1989, represent the only systematic archaeological investigations of Zabid, sponsored by the Canadian Archaeological Mission. The 1983 report provides the best project overview, though the ceramic typology given has now been modified as a result of the excavations. Mason, Robert B., and E. J. Keall. "Provenance of Local Ceramic In dustry and the Characterization of Imports: Petrography of Pottery from Medieval Yemen." Antiquity 62 (1988): 452-463. Interesting insights into Yemeni ceramic production. Sadek, Noha. "Rasulid Women: Power and Patronage." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 19 (1989): 121-136. Discussion of the royal monuments of Yemen, which appear in more modest form in Zabid. Wissmann, Hermann von. "Zabida." In Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Allerlwnswissenschaft, Supplement 1 1 , cols. 1312-1322. Stuttgart, 1968. The geography of Zabid, based on literary refer ences, by a distinguished Arabist. E. J. KEALL
ZAFAR, capital of the South Arabian kingdom of Himyar, located approximately 8 1cm (5 mi.) south-south east of the modern Yemeni town of Yarim and approxi mately 8 1cm east of the San a-Taiz-Aden highway (i4°i3' N , 44°24' E). It sits at the eastern edge of an extensive intermontane valley near the head of Wadi Bana. Its identity has been known locally since antiquity and is confirmed by Himyarite inscriptions found at tire site. Zafar, the Sapphar or Tapharon of classical authors, may have been founded as early as about 1 1 5 BCE, the beginning of the Himyarite dating system. It was certainly in existence by die mid-first century CE, when it was mentioned by Pliny (Nat. Hist. 6.26.104 and by the unknown author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (22-23). The earliest inscriptional evidence for Zafar consists of the Himyarite royal titulary, "ldng of Saba and lord of Raydan," which occurs as early as the mid-first century. Raydan is generally understood to be the royal palace at Zafar. c
Early explorers of the area include the Carsten Niebuhr expedition, which passed nearby in 1763, and Ulrich J. Seetzen, in about 1810. The Austrian South Arabist Eduard Glaser visited the site in the late nineteenth century. Interest in the site increased again in the 1960s and 1970s, with re search surveys by Giovanni Garbini, Wolfgang Radt, Walter W. Muller, Paolo Costa, and Raymond Tindel. Today the site of Zafar is a ruin. No major Himyarite features survive. Its condition is the result of war, earth quake, and the heavy reuse of its building stones. The site is situated on a somewhat elongated hilltop whose lower,
broader, southern end is occupied by a small village and a museum. A rubble-strewn acropolis rises above tire village. Foundations and retaining walls can be traced at some points, and various chambers and tunnels have been cut into the soft rock of the hillside. The valley to die west of Zafar is fertile and receives sufficient rainfall to support agricul ture. Remains of Himyarite dams, aqueducts, and terrace walls are found throughout the vicinity. The most comprehensive description of the site is pre served in the Al-Iklil by the tenth-century Yemeni historian al-Hamdani. He listed three palaces: Raydan, Shawhatan, and Kawkaban, and named nine city gates. Raydan, the old est known Himyarite royal palace, probably occupied the acropolis; it is often attested in Himyarite inscriptions and the acropolis at Zafar is still known locally by that name. Shawhatan, which is also mentioned in an inscription (RES 3383), probably occupied the northernmost extension of the acropolis, which was still known in the nineteenth century as the Fortress Shawhat. A dedicatory inscription (ZM [Zafar Museum] 1; published by Garbini, 1969) mentions a fourth palace, HRGB (vocalization uncertain). A church was built at Zafar as the result of the mission of Theophilus Indus, in about 350; three other churches may have been built there during an Ethiopian intervention in the sixth cen tury. The names of otiier, nonroyal buildings are also known from various dedicatory inscriptions. In one instance the dedicant was clearly Jewish and included a brief Hebrew for mulary in his otherwise South Arabic inscription. Nothing survives of the churches at Zafar except, perhaps, for a small cross in relief built into a house in a nearby village. It is die anonymous building rubble covering the site that provides the best cultural profile of Himyarite Zafar: frag mentary architectural elements, bas-reliefs, inscriptions, and sculpture. Stylistically, its motifs can be grouped into two broad categories. T h e first is the geometric style indigenous to South Arabia. Its elements include rectilinear stepped re cess panels and polygonal columns with layered rectilinear capitals. It includes only a few naturalistic motifs such as ibex and bull heads. T h e motifs of the second are drawn from the orientalized Hellenism of Late Antiquity. Its elab orate vine scrolls, staring frontal busts, winged Victories, griffons, sphinxes, and fantastic hybrid creatures are well attested at Zafar, A considerable range of skill both in com position and execution is found in this second category. There is very little mingling of elements from the two cat egories. These remains probably date primarily from the fourth and fifth centuries, during the period that Zafar was the undispute capital of Himyar, and Himyar the overlord of all of South Arabia. Unfortunately, historical sources for this pe riod are very sparse. T h e less scrupulous execution of the few inscriptions that survive from this period suggest a gen eral cultural decline. Sectarian rivalry between Christians and Jews exploded into violence during the early sixth cen-
ZAKKUR INSCRIPTION tury, leading to intervention by both Ethiopia and Persia. Zafar, the scene of sieges and massacres, was abandoned as a capital. South Arabia ended die pre-Islamic period as a Persian dependency with a Sasanian governor ruling from San'a. Zafar gradually declined to the small village it is to day. [See also Himyar.] BIBLIOGRAPHY Costa, Paolo M. "Antiquities from Zafar (Yemen)." AnnaliIstituto Orientali di Napoli 33 (1973): 185-206; 36 (1976): 445-456. Doe, Brian. Monuments of South Arabia. New York, 1983. Garbini, Giovanni. "Note e discussioni: Una nuova iscrizione di Sarahbi'il Ya'fur." Annali Istituto Orientali di Napoli 29 [nos. 19] (1969): 559-566. HamdanT, al-. Al-IklTl: The Antiquities of South Arabia, Being a Trans lation from the Arabic of the Eighth Book of al-HamddnT's Al-Iklil. Translated and edited by Nabih A. Paris. Princeton, 1940. ShahTd, Man. "Byzantium in South Arabia." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 33 (1979): 25-94Tindel, Raymond D. "Zafar: Archaeology in the Land of Frankincense and Myrrh." Archaeology 37.2 (1984): 40-45. RAYMOND D. TINDEL
ZAKKUR INSCRIPTION. The ZKR inscription oc cupies the front (A. 1 - 1 7 ) , right (B. 1-28), and left sides (C. 1-2) of a fragmentary basalt stela discovered in 1903 by H. Pognon at Afis, 40 Ion (25 mi.) southwest of Aleppo, Syria, and published by him in 1908. It contains lacunae through out, especially from A. 1 5 onward; however, tite surviving text is legible, allowing a reasonably clear reconstruction of its contents. T h e stela, honoring a littie-known deity, 'LWR ('Iluwer?), is dedicated by Zakkur, king of Hamath and L'S (probably Lu'ath, ancient Nuhasse). T h e body of the inscription com memorates the invasion of a coalition of perhaps sixteen rul ers, led by Bar-Hadad, king of Damascus, that besieged tite city of H Z R K (assumed to be the capital of Lu'ath; cf. tite Akkadian Hatarikka and Hadrak in Zee. 9:1). Zakkur ap pealed to the Syro-Palestinian sky god Baal-Shamayn (Ba'al Shamem), who promised deliverance through prophetic functionaries (A. 2-B. 3)—a deliverance apparently de scribed in the missing and fragmentary lines following A. 17. Zakkur then describes his subsequent building program (B. 4 - 1 5 ) , including a probable reference to Afis itself (B. 1 1 , 'P§), A typical invocation of curses and blessings con cludes the inscription (B. 1 6 - C . 2; cf. the Sefire and Nerab inscriptions). [See Sefire Aramic Inscriptions; Nerab In scriptions.] Such a combination of dedicatory offering with historical commemoration finds parallels in other Northwest Semitic inscriptions (e.g., from Karatepe and Mesha). [See Karatepe Phoenician Inscriptions; Moabite Stone.] Bar-Hadad's identification as the son of Hazael (A. 4) as sociates this inscription with one phase of Israel's perennial wars against the Arameans (cf. 2 Kgs. 8-14). [See Arame
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ans.] Bar-Hadad III (or II) succeeded his father in about 800 BCE, after which point the fortunes of Damascus de clined (see 2 Kgs. 13:22-25, 14:23-28). This decline was undoubtedly hastened by the western campaigns of the As syrian ruler Adad-Nirari III (810—783 BCE) in 805-803/802 and 796; undated inscriptions referring to tite defeat of Da mascus and payment of tribute by Joash of Israel would be long to one of these campaigns (most plausibly 796). [See Assyrians.] Damascus—and Hatarikka—were again the ob ject of an Assyrian expedition in 773/72. T h e motives and precise historical background of Bar-Hadad's campaign are not clear. One interpretation views Zakkur as an Assyrian loyalist attacked by an anti-Assyrian coalition and rescued by Adad-Nirari in 796 (cf. 2 Kgs. 16:5-18). Alternatively, Zakkur may have threatened the local balance of power by uniting Hamath and Lu'ath and so prompted retaliation. T h e inscription would have been composed in approxi mately 800-775 BCE. Apart from its historical significance, the inscription sheds light 011 the religion of the area (A. 2 - 4 , 1 1 - 1 7 ) . Many details find parallels in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Is. 36-38; 2 Chr. 20:1-23): die lifting of hands in prayer to avert a crisis; the deity's answer titrough seers and messengers (?, 'ddn, A. 1 2 ) ; and the assurance of deliverance based on divine election of the king. (cf. the Ugaritic prayers in KTU 1.40 and 1 . 1 1 9 . 2 6 36 and the role of prophetic intermediaries at Mari, Emar, Byblos, Deir 'Alia and—implicitly—in the Moabite Stone, 11. 14 and 32.) [See Ugaritic Inscriptions; Mari Texts; Emar Texts; Byblos; Deir 'Alia Inscriptions.] Of linguistic signif icance are the form and poetic content of the text, and three apparent tuayyiqtol forms that are almost unique in Aramaic (A. 1 1 , 1 5 ; cf. Deir 'Alia inscriptions). BIBLIOGRAPHY Fitzmyer, Joseph A., and Stephen A. Kaufman. An Aramaic Bibliogra phy, part 1, Old, Official, and Biblical Aramaic. Baltimore and Lon don, 1992. Extensive and invaluable resource for Early Aramaic studies, with specific treatment of the ZKR inscription (pp. 14-15) and general bibliography concerning the history, language, and lit erature of the period (pp. 5-10). Gibson, John C. L. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 2, Ara maic Inscriptions, Including Inscriptions in the Dialect of Zenjirli. Ox ford, 1975. The most recent text edition, with introduction, trans lation, and commentary (see pp. 6-17; map, p. 185). Klengel, Horst. Syria, 3000 to 300 B.C.: A Handbook of Political History. Berlin, 1992. An authority on Syrian history, Klengel deals with die period of about 1000-745 BCE (pp. 187-218), and specifically with the Zakkur inscription (pp. 188, 210-215); see, as well, synchronisms (pp. 265-271) and maps (pp. 272-275). Millard, A. R. "Israelite and Aramean History in die Light of Inscrip tions." Tyndale Bulletin 41.2 (1990): 261-275. Lucid, albeit rather generalized, overview of the subject, with particular reference to the Zakkur and Kilamuwa inscriptions. Pitard, Wayne T. Ancient Damascus: A Historical Study of the Syrian City-State from Earliest Times until Its Fall to the Assyrians in 732 B.C.E. Winona Lake, Ind., 1987. Detailed monograph derived from die author's dissertation. Reference is made to the Zakkur inscription
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throughout chapter 6 (see esp. pp. 170-174, with maps, pp. 147 and 157)Ross, James F. "Prophecy in Hamath, Israel, and Mari." Harvard Theo logical Review 63.r (1970): 1-28. Parallels to Zakkur's oracle, from Israel and Mari; the theory of Zakkur's origin from Hana has found no acceptance. Compare more recendy K. van derToorn, "L'oracle de victoire comme expression prophetique au Proche-Orient an cient," Revue Biblique 94.1 (1987): 63-97, covering prophecy in Is rael and die ancient Near East, with brief references to Zakkur; and Jean-Georges Heintz, Bibliographic de Mari: Archeologie et textes, 1933-1988 (Wiesbaden, 1990), with entries concerning Mari proph ecy and the Hebrew Bible throughout. DAVID M. CLEMENS
ZERAQUN, KHIRBET EZ-, site located about 13 km (8 mi.) northeast of Irbid, Jordan, about 2 Ion southeast of el-Mughayyir (both the village and die ancient mound). T h e site was first identified by Siegfried Mittmann in 1970. Joint excavations were carried out by Moawiyah Ibrahim for the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology of Yarmouk University, Jordan, and Mittmann for the Biblisch Archaologisches Institute of the University of Tubingen. Fieldwork was conducted in cooperation with the Department of An tiquities of Jordan. In five seasons of excavation (1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1991) and one survey season (1989) sites located in the tri angle of Wadi esh-Shallalah and Wadi Rahub were investi gated and Tell el-Mughayyir and Khirbet ez-Zeraqun were excavated. In the 1987 season, with surveyors from the Uni versity of Karlsruhe under the direction of Boser, a photogrammetric survey of the Roman bridge spanning Wadi eshShallalah, just southeast of Zeraqun, was completed. T h e bridge, built in two-story arches, is evidence of the Roman road link between Umm Qeis (Gadara) andDar'a (Adraat). [See Umm Qeis.] The site covers the remains of an Early Bronze occupation and has an area of about 400 X 300 m. It is one of the largest EB towns in Jordan or even southern Bilad ash-Sham ("greater Syria"). Khirbet ez-Zeraqun has a very similar oc cupational history to EB Bab edh-Dhra' in southern Jordan's Rift Valley. [See Bab edh Dhra'.] Excavations were concennated in two major areas, in the upper and the lower town, adjacent to the town wall on its west and south sides. T h e earliest occupational phase seems to date to the Late Chalcolithic/EB I period (beginning of the third millen nium), represented by some domestic remains founded on bedrock that underlie the level of the walled town and the EB II—III public buildings and major domestic quarters. T h e second major phase dates to the EB II, when the site's major buildings were constructed: a 7-meter-wide defensive wall surrounding the town with projecting towers and bastions, a city gateway, a temple complex, and an administration building, all in the upper town. Other buildings belonging to this period were large to small rooms in the lower town, some of which were for domestic use. T h e third major phase of occupation (EB III) was represented by significant
changes and additions to the main architectural complexes (the gateway, town wall, and houses in the lower town). From the EB IV toward the end of the third millennium the fourth and latest occupation is represented by fragmentary disturbed structures close to the surface and a few silos lined with stones dug into earlier deposits. There are scattered sherds from the Roman-Byzantine period on the surface and in disturbed areas, but they are not associated with structures. Other remains of a later use of the site are a large number of nineteenth-century burials dug into the EB layers. There are also several modern ditches and disturbances. T h e site was used until recently for agriculture. It is barren of ttees and modern houses. T o w n Gate. During the last two seasons of excavations, the town's main gate was excavated close to the highest point on the west side of the site. T h e gate showed four major changes during different EB periods. T h e earliest stage rep resents the widest opening (about 1 5 m ) . During the follow ing phases it became progressively narrower, until it was reduced to a small, zigzag passageway. Its exterior features two curving, towerlike additions, while the inner part of the wall is connected to two square towers. T h e inner towers, with other, adjacent rooms, surround a road that leads di rectly to the temple area and the industrial quarter. T h e floor of the gate and the passageway consists of beaten earth and areas paved with small stones. T h e gate is easily accessible from the gradual slope to the west of die site. T e m p l e C o m p l e x . T h e main cultic area dominates the town and surrounding areas. It is accessible from the site's northwest side via the road coming from the gate's passage way, and from the east via a long street (about 1.5 m wide) on the south side of the administration building (see below). On the west side there seems to be a small gap between the town wall and the temple. T h e complex consists mainly of a circular altar with a staircase on the east side and large square and rectangular rooms, all surrounding a large open courtyard. With the exception of the large rectangular cult room, all the buildings are oriented east-west, toward the circular altar. A row of storage rooms, designated as the industrial quarter, on the northeast side of the complex have been uncovered. A d m i n i s t r a t i o n Building. An administrative architec tural complex was exposed on the north side of the eastwest street. It is separated from the temple area by a narrow, irregular corridor. This unit consists of rectangular rooms surrounding a large outstanding room, all built of stone with bricks probably used in their upper parts. T h e arrangement of the rooms in this unit and their connections to the temple and to the rooms in the industrial area indicate that the unit served administrative purposes. Confirmation of this inter pretation awaits further excavations and analysis of the ma terial found in the complex. Lower Town. Excavations in five seasons exposed sec tions of the city wall and a residential area on the south side of the site. The architectural remains in this area represent
ZEROR, TEL two and possibly three major occupational phases (EB I/IIIII). T h e earlier phase, founded on bedrock, revealed planned architecture oriented east-west around a main street, with subsidiary streets creating separate residential units. The phase could be subdivided into two parts because of changes in the architecture and additional floors. The sec ond major architectural phase is less organized in plan and reveals a new street arrangement. A semicircular tower was found outside the city wall. T o the east of the tower, and along the exterior face of the city wall, several horizontal stone slabs were uncovered. They are believed to have been used as steps leading to a higher part of the fortification system. Excavations also revealed a tower on the interior that probably supported tire town wall. At the lowest part of the tower, a water channel was discovered. This channel was built to draw off die water running down from the upper town toward the fortification and may have limited the dam age caused by runoff.
389
ZEROR, TEL (Ar., Khirbet et-Tell Dhurur), site lo cated on the northern Sharon plain, near an ancient crossing of the Hadera River, on the western branch of the Via Maris (32°28' N , 35°oi' E; map reference 1476 X 2038). The 6ha (15 acres) mound is composed of two spurs connected by a lower saddle. The mound's cemetery (Late Bronze I I Iron I periods) extends over a low hill 150 m west of the mound. T h e site was excavated by Kiyoshi Ohata on behalf of die Japanese Society for Near Eastern Research in 19641966 and in 1974; Moshe Kochavi was field director during the 1964-1966 seasons, and Koichito Goto was field director in 1974. Benjamin Mazar and Nadav Na'aman suggested the site's identification witii DRR, number 1 1 5 in Thutmose Ill's topographical lists; Yohanan Aharoni proposed M K T R on the same list ( M G D L YN in the Annals of Amenhotep II).
The first occupation of Tel Zeror took place at the begin ning of the Middle Bronze Age and the last was in the Early Water System. The town's highly developed hydrologRoman period, but remains of not all these periods were ical system must have governed life there for almost a thou found uniformly across the mound. Four strata were as sand years. In addition to the springs of Wadi esh-Shallalah, signed to MB I, the only M B phase during which the city the inhabitants of Zeraqun dug three stepped shafts down existed. T w o superimposed city walls were excavated in var to the water table. One of these shafts measures some 100 ious areas, which made it possible to follow most of their m and leads to the base of the wadi. It is probable that the course. T h e walls had stone foundations laid on an earthen water of this shaft system was used during enemy attack and rampart. A wide moat and a two-chambered tower were when spring water in the surrounding area dried out. At the found on the western side of the mound. The early city was steep slope toward the wadi closable water outlets were deserted before the transitional MB I—II phase, and there found connected to the shafts tiiat were probably used to was an occupation gap in M B II—III. water the fields in the wadi. [See Hydraulics; Irrigation; Wa The Late Bronze settlement had no fortifications, but a ter Tunnels.] major public building was constructed on the mound's southern spur, on whose slope coppersmiths' quarter existed Small Finds. Among the important objects excavated at throughout the period. Smelting furnaces, crucibles, clay Zeragun was a large number (about 120) of seal impressions bellows pipes, and copper slags were found there in abun on pottery, which makes die town the richest site for glyptic dance. The high percentage of Cypriot pottery found in the in third-millennium. Transjordan and Palestine. [See Seals.] coppersmiths' quarter may point to Cyprus as the source of T h e impressions show geometric, floral, animal, and figural the raw material used there. Burials from the fourteenth to designs. T h e seal impressions, the large variety of pottery thirteenth centuries BCE were uncovered in the cemetery. types, and clay figurines reveal close parallels and contacts These were individual graves cut in the soil, sometimes lined with Palestine, Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and North with small stones. The bodies were placed with their heads Syria. Together with otiier discoveries, tiiey also show Khir facing west. [See Burial Techniques.] bet ez-Zeraqun to have been a flourishing EB city. T w o different types of settlement were observed for the BIBLIOGRAPHY Iron Age I. T h e earliest dated to the twelfth century BCE, and from it only refuse pits containing pottery sherds and Ibrahim, Moawiyah, and Siegfried Mittmann. "H. az-Ziraqun." Archiv fur Orienlforschung 33 (1986): 167-171. animal bones were found. Several burials in collar-rim jars, Ibrahim, Moawiyah, and Siegfried Mittmann. "Tell el-Mughayyir and exposed in the cemetery, were also attributed to this phase. Khirbet Zeiraqoun." News-Letter of the Institute of Archaeology and In the later phase (eleventh century BCE) a brick fort with a Anthropology (YarmoukUniversity), no. 4 (1987): 3-6; no. 6 (1987): casemate wall was built on the northern spur. T h e tombs in 7-9. the cemetery were family graves in stone-lined cists. They Ibrahim, Moawiyah, and Siegfried Mittmann. "Zeiraqun (Khirbet el)." In Archaeology ofJordan, vol. 2, Field Reports, edited by Denyse Ho- contained many weapons, some copper bowls, and a unique mes-Fredericq and J. Basil Hennessy, pp. 641-646. Louvain, 1989. pinched type of oil lamp. A rhyton in the shape of a lioness Ibrahim, Moawiyah, and Siegfried Mittmann. "Excavations at Khirbet and a plaque figurine of a naked female were also among ez-Zeraqoun, 1991." News-lMter of the Institute of Archaeology and the rich finds from these tombs. [See Tombs; Grave Goods; Anthropology (Yarmouk University), no. 12 (1991): 3-5. Mittmann, Siegfried. Beitrage zur Siedlungs- und Territorialgeschichte des Lamps.] During Iron II the settlement continued to be con centrated on the soutiiern spur. Storehouses and pillared nordlichen Ostjordanlandes. Wiesbaden, 1970. four-room houses were exposed, protected by a thin wall MOAWIYAH IBRAHIM and SIEGFRIED MITTMANN
390
ZIGGURAT
strengthened on its interior with half-meter-wide piers set at 2-m intervals. [See Four-room House.] The village well was also unearthed, on the low ground soutii of the northern spur. Among the finds from this period are an Aramaic in scription on a bowl that reads L'LSMK ("belonging to Elsamakh"); a "Resheph" bronze figurine; a steatite bowl with a hand carved on its base; and storage jars with the letter mem inscribed on their bodies. Pits dug in the Persian period were found on the northern spur, where a farmhouse was erected in the third-second centuries BCE. The last occu pation on die northern spur was an Early Roman watchtower. The remains of the village of Khirbet et-Tell Dhurur, on the southern spur, dated to the Mamluk period.
from the late third millennium onward, virtually all major cities had ziggurats. T h e existence of some ziggurats, no tably those at Susa and Nineveh, however, is known from textual evidence only. [See Susa; Nineveh.] Although the distribution of well-understood ziggurats over time and space is very uneven, they appear to have come in two va rieties: the generally earlier and Babylonian one had a rec tangular base with stairs providing access to the top; the later one, more often found in Assyria, is square in plan and had more variable access, sometimes including a ramp that spi rals up the building.
The archaeological evidence is much better for the Bab ylonian ziggurats than for the Assyrian variety. Excavations have been carried out on die former at Eridu, Ur, Uruk, BIBLIOGRAPHY Nippur, Sippar, and Aqar Quf; die ziggurats at Kish, Borsippa, and perhaps even Babylon and Larsa probably also Aharoni, Yohanan. "Zepath of Thutmose." Israel Exploration Journal fall into this category. [See Nippur; Sippar; 'Aqar Quf; Kish; 9 (1959): 110-122. Identifies Zerorwifh Migdol. Kochavi, Moshe, et al. "Aphek-Antipatris, Tel Poleg, Tel Zeror, and Babylon; Larsa.] All these buildings have their corners ori Tel Burga: Four Fortified Sites of the Middle Bronze IIA in the ented to the cardinal points and were generally located, to Sharon Plain." Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 95 (1979): gether with a lower temple, within a courtyard with a 121-165. More data on MB IIA Tel Zeror. Kochavi, Moshe. "Zeror, Tel." In The New Encyclopedia ofArchaeolog separate forecourt. The shrine at the top was reached by means of staircases often with a triple stair—one perpendic ical Excavations in the Holy Ixmd, vol. 4, pp. 1524-1526. Jerusalem ular to the wall face and the other two running along the and New York, 1993. Concise report on die excavadon of the site and the historical and archaeological implications. wall from the two corners—leading up to the first stage of Maisler [Mazar], Benjamin. "Die westliche Linie des Meerweges." tlie ziggurat and meeting at a gateway. Only at Ur is the Zeitschrift des Deutschen Paldstina-Vereins 58 (1935): 78-84. Descrip second stage sufficiently preserved for it to be clear that only tion of the ancient road and die identification of Zeror with DRR a single stair provided access to its top. (Thutmosis). c
Ohata, Kiyoshi, ed. Tel Zeror. 3 vols. Tokyo, 1966-1970. Report of the first tiiree seasons of excavation, 1964-1966. MOSHE KOCHAVI
ZIGGURAT. Like modern skyscrapers or medieval ca thedrals, Mesopotamian ziggurats served as the visual foci of Mesopotamian cities, providing a symbol of the power of die city and its god visible for miles around. A true ziggurat is a stepped pyramid, square or rectangular in plan, with a temple on top, but this form was not arrived at immediately: the earliest Mesopotamian shrines were built flush with the ground. The sacredness of the shrine structure led to new temples being built on platforms, within which earlier ver sions were entombed. This development is seen especially clearly at Eridu, where a very small early Ubaid shrine de veloped over time, first into a standard Mesopotamian tem ple built on a platform and eventually into a ttue ziggurat. [See Eridu.] Moreover, from a very early period, as with the so-called Anu Ziggurat that supported the fourth-millen nium White Temple at Uruk, attempts were made to raise major religious buildings above the rest of the city. [See Uruk-Warka.] Temple platforms of varying degrees of complexity were built throughout the third millennium, but true ziggurats are not clearly attested until the Third Dynasty of Ur. [SeeUr.] Both archaeological data and textual sources indicate that
These ziggurats all had a core of mud bricks, within which earlier buildings were often encompassed. The exterior was generally of baked brick, often several meters thick and sometimes mortared with bitumen. These outer walls were decorated with buttresses, some of which were quite com plex. Most of these ziggurats included some form of drain age—either in the form of reed mats interlayered with the mud brick, of reed ropes running from one side of the struc ture to the other, or of holes, sometimes filled with broken potsherds, also running from one side of the ziggurat to the other. The later and northern ziggurats are typified by those at Khorsabad, Assur, Nimrud, Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, and Tell er-Rimah (see figure 1 ) ; some scholars argue tiiat the ziggttrat at Larsa resembled them. [See Khorsabad; Assur; Nimrud; Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta; Rimah; Tell er-.] T h e Khor sabad example preserves clear evidence of a ramp, which spiraled up its height, and of some of the different colors widi which the different stages were painted: from bottom to top, black, white, orange, blue, red, silver, and gold—each color representing one of the planets or, in the case of silver and gold, the moon and the sun. Seven stages, reflecting these astronomical associations, seems to have been quite typical of later ziggurats, whether found in Assyria or Bab ylonia. T h e siting of the Assyrian ziggurats was also different. All were built into temple complexes, and at Assur, Kar-Tu-
ZIQLAB, WADI
391
New York, 1990. Includes a map showing the distribution of differ ent types of ziggurats. ELIZABETH C . STONE
ZIGGURAT. Figure I. Reconstructed drawing, temple and ziggurat at Tell er-Rimah. Perhaps built c. 1800 BCii, around die time ot'Shamshi-Adad I. T h e ziggurat was part of the temple building and die upper shrine was probably reached from die roof of the courtyard temple. (Courtesy Andromeda Oxford, Ltd.)
kulti-Ninurta, and Tell er-Rimah, they represented no more than die highest of three platforms: the first acted as a fore court, die second bore the temple, and the third consisted of die ziggurat or, in die case of ASsur, ziggurats. In general, these Assyrian ziggurats were more variable in dieir orien tation, in the type of access—by stair, ramp, or even bridge—and in the degree to which they were incorporated into larger building complexes than their Babylonian fore bears; however, they were quite consistent in their square form and perhaps in die number of stages. In spite of the variability both within and between types, the function of Mesopotamian ziggurats—to support the temple of the city god—remained constant. Ziggurats rep resent an enduring monument to the important role of re ligion in defining the political importance of Mesopotamian cities. It was the ziggurat at Babylon, for example, dedicated to Marduk and known as Entemenanki ("the temple of die foundation of heaven and earth") that inspired the later bib lical legend of the Tower of Babel (Gn. 1:4-9). [See also Assyrians; Babylonians; and Mesopotamia, article on Ancient Mesopotamia.]
ZIQLAB, WADI, stream that drains an area in modern Jordan of 1 1 5 sq km (21 sq. mi.) north of the Wadi Yabis drainage basin and immediately south of Wadi Taiyiba. Its eastern watershed is on the Irbid plateau and its mouth is in the Jordan Valley. The drainage occupies the greater part of the al-Kura administrative disnict, whose center is at Dayr Abu Sa'id. Although several nineteenth-century travelers mentioned antiquities in this district, tire first systematic archaeological surveys to include it were by Gottlieb Schumacher (1890; D. C. Steuernagel 1925, 1926), and Nelson Glueck (1951). One by Siegfried Mittmann (1970) followed, and die west ernmost part of Wadi Ziqlab fell within the East Jordan Val ley Survey (Ibrahim et a l , 1976). T h e 1981 Wadi Ziqlab Project (Banning and Fawcett, 1983; Banning, 1985) was the first archaeological survey to focus specifically on the Ziqlab basin, sampling about 20 percent of its surface area as the target of a medium-intensity survey by transects 1 kilometer long. Test excavations at several, mainly small, Early Bronze-Ottoman-period sites followed in 1986 and 1987 (Banning et al., 1987; Banning et al., 1989). Excava tions at Tabaqat al-Buma, with occupations in the Kebaran and Late Neolithic periods, took place in 1987, 1990, and 1992 (Banning et a l , 1992). T h e prehistoric periods in Wadi Ziqlab are represented by large numbers of deflated lithic scatters, mainly from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods, by Kebaran deposits at Tabaqat al-Buma (WZ 200, YA547996*); and by at least four Neolithic sites. 'Am Sabha (WZ 120, YB496012) has 4 m of cultural deposits from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) and the Late Neolithic and EB Ages. The Wadi Summayl site (WZ 1 1 9 , YA559969) is probably Late Neo lithic. Tabaqat al-Buma (WZ 200) has more than a meter of deposits, with stone architecture belonging to three dis tinct Late Neolithic strata. Site W Z 310 (YB542000) shows occupation from the Late Neolithic through EB I. A small sample of Iithics in secondary deposition at locality WZ 308 (YB536002) suggests that tiiere may be another Neolithic site in the vicinity.
T h e principal EB sites in the catchment are Khirbet Mahrama (WZ 60, YA620905), sounded in 1986, and Tell al-Arba'in (YB433011), near the wadi's mouth. At Mahrama, at least 1.5 m of deposit belong to EB I—II. The site is capped by relatively shallow Roman-Byzantine de BIBLIOGRAPHY posits and Mamluk and Early Ottoman ruins. Glueck (1951) Lenzen, Heinrich J. Die Enlwicklung der Zikurrat von ihren Anfangen bis and Ibrahim et al. (1976) report EB I material at Arba'in; zur Zeit der III. Dynastic veil Ur. Ausgrabungen der Deutschen ForGlueck also notes some EB I—II material at Tell Abu alschungsgemeinschaft in Uruk-Warka, 4. Leipzig, 1942. Fokhkhar (WZ 43, YB487014) and Khirbet Sibya Parrot, Andre. Ziggurats et Tour de Babil. Paris, 1949. Roaf, Michael. Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia arid the Ancient Near East. (YB530021).
392
ZIQLAB, WADI
No survey of Wadi Ziqlab to date has found more than slight evidence for occupation from EB III through to the end of die Late Bronze Age (notably MB II at Tell alArba'in), and that mainly at lower elevations. However, there is abundant evidence for Iron I and II occupation throughout the basin. Some of this consists of towers (e.g., W Z 9, YA555975 [Banning et al., 1989]), Ras Birqish, W Z 10, YA566927), but mainly there are scatters of pottery and ruined architectural traces of Iron Age villages, such as Sibya and Jebatun (WZ 70, YA579980). Iron Age expansion prob ably involved clearing forests and terracing hillsides. Khanzira (Ashrafiya, YA544957), near Ziqlab's southeast watershed, appears to have been the main center for a sparse Hellenistic occupation of the region, followed by extremely intensive use of the basin during the Roman, Byzantine, and Umayyad periods. In the later periods, villages, hamlets, and probably farmsteads or villas dot the landscape, and nu merous terraces, wine presses, cisterns, and olive presses attest to thriving agriculture, viticulture, and arboriculture. Tell Abu al-Fokhkhar (WZ 43, YB487014) and Marhaba (WZ 106, YB 514004) appear to have been important sites then, the former witii a temple or church on its citadel, the latter with a church and a mosaic. The next major occupation of the basin was during the Mamluk period, when many of the modern villages were already occupied, and occupation was resumed at Khirbet Mahrama. During the last century of Ottoman rule, many of these villages were abandoned, and Tubna (YA 546967)
became the preeminent village of al-Kura, with its eigh teenth-century Zaydani castle and mosque and nineteenthcentury ruling Shrayda family. BIBLIOGRAPHY Banning, E. B., and Clare Fawcett. "Man-Land Relationships in the Ancient Wadi Ziqlab: Report of the 1981 Survey." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 27 (1983): 291-309. Banning, E. B. "Pastoral and Agricultural Land Use in the Wadi Ziqlab, Jordan: An Archaeological and Ecological Survey." Ph.D. diss., Uni versity of Toronto, 1985. Banning, E. B., et al. "Report on the Wadi Ziqlab Project 1986 Season of Excavations." Annual of the Department of Antiquities ofJordan 31 (1987): 321-342. Banning, E. B., et al. "Wadi Ziqlab Project 1987: A Preliminary Re port." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 (1989): 43-58. Banning, E. B., et al. "Tabaqat al-Buma: 1990 Excavations at a Kebaran and Late Neolithic Site in Wadi Ziqlab." Annual, of the De partment of Antiquities of Jordan 36 (1992): 43-69. Glueck, Nelson. Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Vol. 4. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 25/28. New Haven, 1951. Ibrahim, Mo'awiyah, et al. "The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1975." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 222 (1976): 41-66. Mittmann, Siegfried. Beitrdge zur Siedlungs- und Territorialgeschichle des nbrdlichen Ostjordanlandes. Wiesbaden, 1970. Schumacher, Gottlieb. Northern 'Ajlun, "Within the Decapolis." Lon don, 1890. Steuernagel,D.C."Der' Adschlun.'' Zeitschrifl des Deu tschen PalastinaVereins 48 (1925): 1-144, 201-392; 49 (1926): 1-167. E. B . BANNING
APPENDIX
1: E G Y P T I A N
ARAMAIC
TEXTS
T h e tables on the following pages, compiled by Bezalel Porten, are supplements to his article "Egyptian Aramaic Texts," which appears in volume 2, pages 213-219. T h e ab breviations below are used in the tables; some shortened forms of bibliographic data are also provided in full in the bibliography of Porten's article. Krug. = Lidzbarski, M., Phonizische und aramaische Krugaufschriften aus Elephantine. Berlin,
AM = Agyptisches Museum, Berlin Aime-Giron = Aime-Giron, N., Textes arameens d'Egypte. Cairo, 1931
1912
London = British Museum, London
ASAE = Annales du Service des Antiquites de I'Egypte
MAI = Memoires presenters par divers savants a I'Acadimie des Inscriptions et Belles-lMtres MDAIK = Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts, Ableilung Kairo.
AQAW = Anzeiger der osteireichischenAkademie der Wissenschaften Berlin = Staatliche Museen, Berlin BIFAO = Bulletin de ITnstitut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale du Caire
NESE = R. Degen, W. W. Muller, and W. Rollig, Neue Ephemeris fur semitische Epigraphik. Weisbaden, 1972-1978.
BM = British Museum, London
OLP = Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica
BSOAS = Btdletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
OLZ = Orientalistische Literaturzeitung Oxford = Bodleian Library, Oxford
Cairo = Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Paris = Academie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, Paris
CdE = Chronique d'Egypte CG = Clermont-Ganneau collection, Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris
PSBA = Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology
CRAI = Comptes rendus des seances de I'Academic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres CIS = Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum
RA = Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale RAO = Recueil d'Archeologie Orientale
EVO = Egitto e Vicino Oriente
REJ = Revue des Etudes Juives
ESE = Lidzbarski, M., Ephemeris fiir semitische Epigraphik. 3 vols. Giessen, 1902-1915
RES = Repertoire d'Epigraphie Semitique RHR = Revue de I'Histoire des Religions
Gibson = Gibson, J. C. L., Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions. Vol. 2. Oxford, 1975
RSO = Rivista degli Studi Orientali RT = Recueil de Travaux Relatifs a la Philologie et a I'Archeologie Egyptiennes et Assyriennes
Grelot = Grelot, P., Documents arameens d'Egypte. Paris, 1972.
Sachau = Sachau, E., Aramaische Papyrus und Ostraka aus einer jildischen Militarkolonie zu Elephantine. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1 9 1 1 .
Flerr = Herr, L., The Scripts of Ancient Northwest Semitic Seals. Missoula, 1978 IEJ = Israel Exploration Journal
Sayce-Cowley = Sayce, A. H., and Cowley, A. E., Aramaic Papyri Discovred al Assuan. London, 1906.
JAOS = Journal of the American Oriental Society
TAD A,B,C,D= Porten, B., and Yardeni, A., Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, Newly Copied, Edited, and Translated into Hebrew and English. Vols. 1-3, Jerusalem, 1986-1993; vol. 4, in preparation.
JE = Journal d'Entree, Egyptian Museum, Cairo JRAS = Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society KAI = Donner, H. and Rollig, W., Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften. Wiesbaden,
WZKM — Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes
1966
393
394
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE I. Chronological List of the Discovery of Papyri and Parchments. Forty-one separate finds or acquisitions between 1 8 1 5 and 1988 Discovery (Publication)
Item
Site
Discoverer/Acquirer
Museum/Library
Editio Princeps
TAD A-D
I.
1815-1819 (i960)
2 fragmentary letters
Elephantine
Giovanni Battista Bel2oni
Museo Civico, Padua
Edda Bresciani
A3.3-4
2.
1824 (1889)
Fragmentary letter
Unknown
Bernardino Drovetti
Museo Egizio, Turin
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 144
A5.3
3-
1825 (1889)
Tale of Hor b. Punesh
Unknown
Due de Blacas
British Library, London
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 145
C1.2
4-
1826 (1889)
Disbursement of wine
Unknown
Drovetti
Louvre, Paris
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 146
C3.12
5.
1827 (1889)
Fragmentary list
Unknown
Stefano Borgia
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 148
C4.9
6.
1827 (1889)
Treasury account
Unknown
Henry Salt
Musei Vaticani, Vatican City
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 147
C3.19
7-
1842-1845 (1893)
Court record
Unknown
Karl Richard Lepsius
Staatliche Museen, Berlin
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 149
B8.5
8.
pre-1862 (1893)
Fragmentary letter
Serapeum, Memphis
F. Auguste Mariette
Egyptian Museum, Cairo
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 1 5 1
A5.4
9-
pre-1862 (1893)
Fragmentary letter
Serapeum, Memphis
Mariette
Cairo
CIS, vol. 2 , 1 , 152 (Cowley N o . 77)
D1.16
10.
pre-1862 (1893)
Fragmentary land registry
Serapeum, Memphis
Mariette
Cairo
CIS, vol. 2.i, 150
C3.21
11.
pre-1884 (1974)
Fragmentary account
Unknown
Wllhelm Frohner
Universitatsbibliotiiek, Gottingen
Rainer Degen
C3.2
12.
prc-1887 O923)
Fragmentary account
Unknown
John Gardner Wilkinson
Harrow School Museum, London
Cowley No. 83
C3.27
13-
1888 (1906)
Abu Sir
Cairo
RES 1789 = ESE, vol. 3, 127
D5.25
14.
1888 (1906)
Abu Sir
Cairo
RES 1790 = ESE, vol. 3, 127-128
D5.11
IS-
(1893)
Fragmentary account
Unknown
Cairo
C I S I I / i 153
C3.25
16.
pre-1903 (1915)
Fragmentary account
Saqqara
Wilhelm Spiegelberg
Cairo
Mark Lidzbarski
C3.1
17-
1893 (1953)
Anani(ah) Elephantine family archive (13), 2 letters, 1 fragmentary list
Charles Edwin Wilbour
Brooklyn Museum
Emil G. Rraeling
A3.9 B3.2-13 B6.1 C3.16
18.
1898 (1903)
Fragmentary letter
Elephantine
Spiegelberg
Bibliotheque Nationale, Sttasbourg
Julius Euting
A4.5
19.
1901 (1903)
Loan contract
Elephantine
Archibald Henry Sayce
Bodleian Library, Oxford
Arthur Ernest Cowley
B4.2
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
395
TABLE I . Chronological List of the Discovery of Papyri and Parchments (Continued) Discovery (Publication)
Item
Site
Discoverer/Acquirer
Museum/Library
Edido Princeps
TAD A-D
20.
1902 (1902)
Fragmentary list
Elephantine
Gaston Maspero
Acadamie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, Paris
Melchior de Vogiie (Cowley No. 79)
D3.24
21.
1902 (1905, 1917. 1 9 7 1 . 1983)
Fragmentary letter
Saqqara
Maspero
Paris
Charles ClermontGanneau, Maurice Sznycer, Bezalel Porten
As. 1
22.
1902 (1902, 1986)
Fragmentary letter
Elephantine
Maspero
Paris
de Vogiie, Porten
A5.5
23.
1904 (1906)
Mibtahiah family archive (10 texts)
Elephantine
Lady William Cecil, Robert M o n d
Oxford ( 1 ) , Cairo (9)
Sayce, Cowley
B2.1-4, 6 - 1 1
24.
1904 (1988)
Fragmentary contract
Elephantine
Collection of Mrs. Raden Ajoe Jodjana
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden
Jacob Hoftijzer
D2.I2
25-
1906 (1907)
Scroll of accounts
Edfu? (acquired at Luxor)
Sayce
Oxford
Sayce, Cowley
C3.28
26.
1906 (1915)
Fragmentary letter
Edfu? (acquired at Luxor)
Sayce
Oxford
Cowley (Cowley 82)
Dl.17
27.
1906-1908 ( 1 9 1 1 , 1970, 1974= 1978) 1988)
20 letters, 18 contracts, 9 lists/accounts, Bisitun, Ahiqar (with erased Customs Account), fragments
Elephantine
Otto Rubensohn, Friedrich Zucker
Berlin, Cairo
Eduard Sachau, Zuhair Shunnar, Degen, Porten
A 3 . 1 - 2 , 5-8, 10; 4.1-4, 610; 5.2; 6 . 1 2; B 3 . 1 ; 4.1, 3-6; 5 . 1 - 2 , 4-5; 6.2-4; 7.1-4; 8.5; C 1 . 1 ; 2.1; 3-3-4> 7> % 1 3 - 1 5 ; 44-8
28.
1913 (1921)
Fragmentary list
Saqqara
James Edward Quibell
Cairo
Noel Aime-Giron
C4.1
29.
1924-1925 (1931)
Fragmentary account
South Saqqara
Gustave Jequier
Cairo
Aime-Giron
C3.26
30.
1926 (1931)
Memphis Shipyard Journal; fragmentary list; fragments
South Saqqara
Cecil Mallaby Firth
Cairo
Aime-Giron
partly in C3.8; 4.2
31.
(1931)
Fragments
Unknown
Cairo
Aime-Giron
partly in C3.17; 4.2
32.
1930s (1962)
Consignment of oil
Edfu?
Given by Giulio Farina to Giorgio Levi Delia Vida
Istituto di Studi del Vicino Oriente, University of Rome
Bresciani
C3.29
33-
1933 (1954)
13 parchment letters; 1 2 plates of fragments
Unknown
Ludwig Borchardt
Oxford
Godfrey R. Driver
A6.1-16
396
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE I. Chronological List of the Discovery of Papyri and Parchments (Continued) Discovery (Publication)
Item
Site
Discoverer/Acquirer
Museum/Library
Editio Princeps
TAD A-D
34-
1934-1935 (1959)
Fragmentary letter
El-Hibeh
Evaristo Breccia
Museo Archeologico, Florence
Bresciani
A3.11
35-
pre-1936 (1936)
Joint venture agreement
El-Hibeh
Bruno Meissner
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
Hans Bauer, Meissner
B1.1
36.
1940 (i97i)
Fragmentary account
Saqqara
Zaki Saad
Cairo
Bresciani
C3.10
37-
1942 (1948)
Letter of Adon King of Ekron
Saqqara
Saad
Cairo
Andre DupontSommer
A1.1
38.
1945 (1966)
8 private letters
Hermopolis (for Luxor and Syene)
Sami Gabra
Faculty of Archaeology, University of Cairo
Bresciani, Murad Kamil
A2.1-7
39-
1966-1967, I97I-I973 (1983)
202 papyrus fragments
North Saqqara
Walter B. Emery, Geoffrey T . Martin
Cairo
Judah Benzion Segal
partly in B4-7; 5-6; 8.1-4, 6 - 1 2 ; C3.6, 1 1 , 18, 20, 22-24; 43
40.
c. 19651970
24ine epistolary formula on back of demotic papyrus
Unknown
Don Jose Palau-Ribes CasamitJana
Seminari di Papirologia, Barcelona (Sant Cugat del Valles)
Unpublished
D1.34
41.
1988
2 lists + fragments
Elephantine
German Archaeological Institute
Cairo
Wolfgang Rollig
D3.I5-I7
TABLES 2 - 1 3 .
Alphabetic Museum List of Inscriptions on Pottery, Wood, and Stone
TABLE 2. Ninety Ostraca (Letters, Accounts, Lists, Abecedary) Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Place and Date of Discovery/Acquisition
Initial Publications
Fitzmyer/Kaufman Aramaic Bibliography
1. Berlin P. 1 1 3 7 ; Adolf Erman
Elephantine; 1886
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 137 = Sachau 78 (PI. 65,3) = KAI270 = Gibson 123
B.3.C.47
2. Berlin P. 8763; Ludwig Borchardt
Elephantine; 1897
Sayce-Cowley P = RES 496, 1804
B.3.C.42/48 APO 77/1
3. Berlin P. 10678; Carl Schmidt
Edfu; 1905
Sachau 75 (PI. 62,1) = RES 1794
B.3.f.33-i
4. Berlin P. 10679; Otto Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1905
Sachau 77 (PI. 64,2) = RES 1792
B.3.C.21
5. Berlin P. 10680; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1905
Sachau 78 (PI. 65,2) = RES 1795
B.3.C.23
6. Berlin P. 10852; Schmidt
Edfu
Sachau 75 (PI. 62,2)
B.3X33.2
7. Berlin P. 10964; Schmidt
Edfu; 1906
Sachau 81 (PI. 68,1)
B.3-f.33-3
8. Berlin P. 10974; Schmidt
Edfu; 1906
Sachau 81 (PI. 68,2)
B.3.f.33-4
9. Berlin P. 11363; Friedrich Zucker
Elephantine; 1908
Sachau 77 (PI. 64,3)
B.3.C.48 A P O 79/3
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
397
TABLE 2. Ninety Ostracu (Continued) Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Place and Date of Discovery/Acquisition
Initial Publications
Fitzmyer/Kaufman Aramaic Bibliography
m. Berlin P. H36s;Zucker
Elephantine; 1908
Sachau 80 (PI. 67,5)
n . Berlin P. ii366;Zucker
Elephantine; 1908
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,1 +2)
12. Berlin P. ii368;Zucker
Elephantine; 1908
Sachau 80 (PI. 67,7)
B.3.C.48 APO 80/7
13. Berlin P. 11369; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 76 (PI. 63,3)
B.3.C.48 APO 76/3
14. Berlin P. 11370; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 80 (PI. 67,4)
15. Berlin P. 1 1 3 7 1 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PI. 66,1)
16. Berlin P. 11372; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
unpublished
17. Berlin P. 1 1 3 7 3 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PI. 66,3)
18. Berlin P. 11374; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PI. 66,5)
B.3.C.48 APO 79/5
19. Berlin P. 1 1 3 7 5 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 80 (PI. 67,2)
B.3.C.48 APO 80/2
20. Berlin P. 11376; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,5)
B.3.C.48 APO 84/5
2 1 . Berlin P. 11377; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 76 (PI. 63,5)
B.3.C.48 APO 76/5
22. Berlin P. 11378; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau So (PI. 67,3)
B.3.C.48 APO 80/3
23. Berlin P. 11379; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,7)
B.3.C.43
24. Berlin P. 11380; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 78 (PI. 65,1)
B.3.C.48 APO 78/1
25. Berlin P. n 3 8 1 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,3)
26. Berlin P. 11382; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 80 (PI. 67,1)
B.3.C.48 APO 80/1
27. Berlin P. 11453; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PI. 66,4)
B.3.C.48 APO 79/4
28. Berlin P. 12800 ( = 17800)
Elephantine?
unpublished
29. Berlin P. 17801
Elephantine?
unpublished
30. Berlin P. 17802
Elephantine?
unpublished
3 1 . Berlin P. 17818
Elephantine?
unpublished
32. Berlin P. 17819
Elephantine?
unpublished
33. Berlin P. 17820
Elephantine?
unpublished
34. Berlin P. 17821
Elephantine?
unpublished
35. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Aramaic Inscription (lost) 1; Archibald Henry Sayce
Elephantine; 1901
Sayce-Cowley M = RES 492, 1800
B.3.C.36
36. Bodleian Aramaic Inscription 2; Sayce
Elephantine; 1901
Sayce-Cowley N = RES 493, 1801
B.3.C.37
37. Bodleian Aramaic Inscription 3; Sayce
Elephantine; 1901
Sayce-Cowley O = RES 494, 1802
B.3.C.48 APE 93
38. Bodleian Aramaic Inscription 4; Sayce
Elephantine?
Sayce-Cowley Q = RES 497, 1805
B.3.C.29
39. Bodleian Aramaic Inscription 6; Sayce
Unknown, 1914
unpublished
40. Bodleian Aramaic Inscription 7; Sayce
Elephantine; p r e - 1 9 1 1
RES 1793
41. British Museum 14219; Grevillejohn Chester
Elephantine; 1875
CIS, vol. 2.1, 138 = RES 495, 1803 = KAl2 i
B.3.C.20
7
B.3.C28
398
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE 2. Ninety Ostraca
(Continued)
Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Place and Date of Discovery/Acquisition
Initial Publications
Fitzmyer/Kaufman Aramaic Bibliography
42. BM 14220; Chester
Elephantine; 1876
CIS, vol. 2.1, 139
B.3.C.48 APE 95
43. BM 45035; auction
Unknown; 1906
Porten and Yardeni, Maarav 7 (1991): 207-217
44. BM 45036; auction
Unknown; 1906
Porten and Yardeni, Maarav 7 (1991): 217-219
45. BM 133028
Unknown; 1906
Segal, Iraq 31 (1969): 173-174
B.3-C-35
46. Cairo JE 35468A
Elephantine; 1902
RES 1295 = Sayce, PSBA 31 (i909):i54
B.3.C.30
47. Cairo JE 35468B
Elephantine; 1902
RES 1296 = ESE, vol. 3, I2if = Aime-Giron 3
B.3.C.31
48. Cairo JE35468C
Elephantine; 1902
RES 1297 = ESE, vol. 3, I22f = Aime-Giron 4
B.3.C.32
49. Cairo JE 43464A; Zucker
Elephantine; 1908
Sachau 76 (PL 63,2)
B.3.C. 41
50. Cairo JE 43464B; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 76 (PI. 63,1)
B.3.C.22
51. Cairo JE 43464C; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 76 (PI. 63,4)
B.3.C.48 APO 76/4
52. Cairo JE 43464D; Zucker
Elephantine; 1908
Sachau 80 (PI. 67,6)
B.3.C.48 APO 80/6
53. Cairo JE 49624
Elephantine; 1925
Aime-Giron, ASAE
26 (1926): 27-29
B.3.C.28
54. Cairo JE 49625
Elephantine; unknown
Aime-Giron, ASAE
26 (1926): 29-31
B.3.C.48 Aime-Giron
55. Cairo JE 49635
Elephantine; 1924
Aime-Giron, ASAE
26 (1926): 23-27
B.3.C.27
56. Cairo JE 64738; Lacau
Edfu; 1933
Aime-Giron 1 1 3 = BIFAO 38-40
38 (1939):
B.3.f.33.6
57. Cairo JE 67040; French-Polish excavations
Edfu; 1937
Aime-Giron 120 = BIFAO 57-63
38 (1939):
B.3-f.33.7
58. Cambridge 1 3 1 - 1 3 3 ; Henry Thompson
Elephantine; pre-1929
Cowley, JRAS
59. Clermont-Ganneau 16
Elephantine; 1907
Dupont-Sommer, ASAE 109-116
60. Clermont-Ganneau 44; Jean Cledat
Elephantine; 1907
Dupont-Sommer, Studies Presented to G. R. Driver (1963), pp. 53-58
B.3.C.33
61. Clermont-Ganneau 70; Cledat
Elephantine; 1907
Dupont-Sommer, RHR 130 (1945): 17-28 (no photo)
B.3.C.33
62. Clermont-Ganneau 125?; Cledat?
Elephantine; 1907
Lozachmeur, Semitica 39 (1989): 2936; Porten and Yardeni, JAOS 1 1 3 (1993): 451-455
B.3.C.33
63. Clermont-Ganneau 152
Elephantine; 1908
Dupont-Sommer, Semitica 2 (i949):29-39
B.3X.33
64. Clermont-Ganneau 167
Elephantine; 1908
Dupont-Sommer, CR/IT (1947): 17980 (no photo)
B.3.C.33
65. Clermont-Ganneau 169
Elephantine; 1908
Dupont-Sommer, Revue des Etudes Semitiques etBabybniaca (1942-1945); 65-75
B.3.C.33
(1929): 1 0 7 - 1 1 1
48 (1948):
B.3.C.34
B.3.C.33
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS TABLE 2.
Ninety Ostraca
399
(Continued)
Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Place and Date of Discovery/Acquisition
66. Clermont-Ganneau 175
Elephantine; 1908
Dupont-Sommer, CR/Ei" (1947): 1 8 1 185 (no photo)
B.3.C.33
67. Clermont-Ganneau 186
Elephantine; 1908
Dupont-Sommer, RSO 32 (1957): 403-409
B.3.C.33
68. Clermont-Ganneau 204
Elephantine
Dupont-Sommer, MAI 75 (i960); 68-71 (no photo)
B.3.C33
69. Clermont-Ganneau 228; Gautier
Elephantine; 1908-1909
Lozachmeur, Semitica 21 (1971): 8 1 93
B.3.C.33
70. Clermont-Ganneau 277; Gautier
Elephantine; 1908-1909
Dupont-Sommer, RHR 128 (1944): 28-39
B.3.C.33
71. Columbia University Ostracon 97.4.18
Oxyrhynchus, 1897
unpublished
72. Elephantine Storeroom 1424
Elephantine; 1978
unpublished
73. Elephantine Storeroom 1661
Elephantine; 1979
Maraqten, MDAIK43 170-171
74. Elephantine Storeroom 2293
Elephantine; 1988
unpublished
75. Louvre E. 23566; Raymond Weill
Kom el-Ahmar; 1 9 1 2
RBj 65 ( 1 9 1 3 ) : 16-23
76. Munich, Staatiiche Sammlung Agyptischer Kunst, 898; Mook acquisition
Elephantine; pre-1880
RE'S 1298 = ESE, vol. 3, 19-20, 2r22
B.3.C.24
77. Munich AS 899; Mook acquisition
Elephantine; pre-1880
RES 1299 = ESE, vol. 3, 19-21
B.3.C.25
78. Pontifical Biblical Institute, Jerusalem
Elephantine?
Lemaire and Lozachmeur, Semitica 27 (1977): 99-103
B.3.C.26
79. Pushkin Museum, Moscow I.i.b 1029; Vladimir Golenischeff
Elephantine; 1888-1889
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 154
B.3.C.40
80. Pushkin I.i.b 1030; Golenischeff
Elephantine; 1888-1889
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 155
B.3.C.39
81. Saqqara Antiquities Service Register, 1525
North Saqqara
Segal, North Saqqara, N o . VII
82. Spiegelberg Ostracon (lost)
Unknown
Lidzbarski, OLZ 30 (1927): 10431044 (no photo)
B.3.f.32
83. Strasbourg Aramaic 2
Edfu?; pre-1908
RES 1301 = ESE, vol. 3, 25-26
B.3.C.45
84. Strasbourg Aramaic 3
Edfu?; pre-1908
RES 1300 = ESE, vol. 3, 22-25
B.3.C.44
85. Strasbourg Aramaic 6
Edfu?; pre-1908
ESE, vol. 3, 298-301
B.3.C.46
86. Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 1; Hermann Junker
Edfu?; 1 9 1 1
NESE,
vol. 3, pp. 39-43
B.3.f-40
87. Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 2; Junker
Elephantine?; 1 9 1 1
NESE,
vol. 3, pp. 34-39
B.3.C.19
88. Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 3; Junker
Edfu?; 1 9 1 1
NESE,
vol. 3, pp. 43-47
B.3.I.40
89. Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 4; Junker
Edfu?; 1 9 1 1
NESE,
vol. 3, PP- 48-57
B.3.f.40
90. Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 5; Wessely estate
Edfu?; 1933
Porten and Yardeni, Maarav 220-225
Fitzmyer/Kaufman Aramaic Bibliography
Initial Publications
(1987):
7 (1991):
400
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE 2a. Fifteen Lists (included in above) Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Fitzmyer/Kaufman Aramaic Bibliography
Place and Date of Discovery/Acquisition
Initial Publications
i. Berlin P. 1 1 3 7 3 ; Otto Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PI. 66,3)
2. Berlin P. 11374; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PI. 66,5)
B.3.C.48 APO 79/5
3. Berlin P. 1 1 3 7 5 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 80 (PI. 67,2)
B.3.C.48 APO 80/2
4. Berlin P. 11376; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,5)
B.3.C.48 APO 84/5
5. Berlin P. 1 1 3 8 1 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 84 (PI. 7 1 , 3 )
6. Berlin P. 11453; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PI. 66,4)
7. Berlin P. 17801
Elephantine?
unpublished
8. Berlin P. 17820
Elephantine?
unpublished
9. British Museum, London 45036; auction
Unknown; 1906
Porten and Yardeni, Maarav 217-219
Elephantine; 1902
RES
10. Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 35468C
1297
= ESE,
B.3.C.48 APO 79/4
7 (1991):
vol. 3, I 2 2 f =
B.3.C.32
Aime-Giron 4 1 1 . Cairo 64738; Pierre Lacau
Edfu; 1933
Aime-Giron 1 1 3 = BIFAO 38-40
38 (1939):
12. Elephantine Storeroom 1424
Elephantine; 1978
unpublished
13. Elephantine Storeroom 2293
Elephantine; 1988
unpublished
14. Pushkin Museum, Moscow I.i.b 1029; Vladimir Golenischeff
Elephantine; 1888-1889
CIS, vol. 2.1, 154
B.3.C.40
15. Pushkin I.i.b 1030; Golenischeff
Elephantine; 1888-1889
CIS, vol. 2.1, 155
B.3.C.39
B.3.1.33.6
TABLE 2b. Thirteen Accounts (included in above) 1. Berlin P. 10678; Carl Schmidt
Edfu; 1905
Sachau 75 (PI. 62,1) = RES 1794
8.3X33.1
2. Berlin P. 10852; Schmidt
Edfu
Sachau 75 (PI. 62,2)
B.3.L33.2
3. Berlin P. 10974; Schmidt
Edfu; 1906
Sachau 81 (PI. 68,2)
B.3.L33.4
4. Berlin P. 11363; Friedrich Zucker
Elephantine; 1908
Sachau 77 (PI. 64,3)
B.3.C.48 APO 79/3
5. Egyptian Museum, Cairo 67040; French-Polish excavations
Edfu; 1937
Aime-Giron 120 = BIFAO 57-63
6. Columbia University Ostracon
Oxyrhynchus, 1897
unpublished
7. Louvre E. 23566; Raymond Weill
Kom el-Ahmar; 1912
REJ 65 (1913): 16-23
8. Strasbourg Aramaic 2
Edfu?; pre-1908
RES 1301 = ESE, vol. 3,25-26
B.3.C.45
9. Strasbourg Aramaic 6
Edfu?; pre-1908
ESE, vol. 3, 298-301
B.3.C.46
10. Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 1; Hermann Junker
Edfu?; 1 9 1 1
NESE,
vol. 3, pp. 39-43
B.3.f,40
1 1 . Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 3; Junker
Edfu?; 1 9 1 1
NESE,
vol. 3, pp. 43-47
B. .f.40
12. Vienna Aramaic Ostracon 5; Wessely estate
Edfu?; 1933
Porten and Yardeni, Maarav 220-225
13. Spiegelberg Ostracon (lost)
Unknown
Lidzbarski, OLZ 30 (1927): 1 0 4 3 1044 (no photo)
38 (1939):
B.3i.33'7
3
7 (1991):
B.3.f.32
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS TABLE 3 . Twenty-six Jar
401
Ascriptions
Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Place and Date of Discovery/Acquisition
Initial Publications
1. Berlin P. 1 1 3 5 9 (= P. 17804); Ludwig Borchardt
Abu Sir; 1907
Sachau 85 (PI. 72, 1)
2. Berlin P. 11360 (= P. 17803 + 17805); Ludwig Borchardt
Abu Sir; 1907
Sachau 83 (PI. 70, 5)
3. Berlin P. 11388; Otto Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 84 (PI. 7 1 , 9) = Krug. 34
B.3.C.49
4. Berlin P. 1 1 4 1 2 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 83 (PI. 70,3) = Krug.
B.3.C.49
5. Berlin P. 1 1 4 1 6 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 86 (PI. 73,14) = Krug. 65
B.3.C.49
6. Berlin P. 1 1 4 2 2 ; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 86 (PI. 73,12)
B.3.C.49
7. Berlin P. 11430; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-190 8
Sachau 84 (PI. 7 1 , 1 1 ) = Krug. 36
B.3.C.49
8. Berlin P. 11442; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 82 (PI. 69,6) = Krug. 6
B.3.C.49
9. Berlin P. 11444; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 86 (PI. 73,10) = Krug. 55
B.3-C.49
10. Berlin P. 11453 bis; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,6) = Krug. 32
B.3.C.49
1 1 . Berlin P. 11459; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 85 (PI. 72,17)
B.3.C.49
12. Agyptisches Museum, Berlin P. 17807; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
unpublished
13. AM, Berlin 18429; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 82 (PI. 69,15), 87 (PI. 74,1) = Krug. 1 5
14. AM, Berlin 18432; Rubensohn
Elephantine
Sachau 82 (PL 69,14), 87 (PI. 74,2) = Krug. 14
15. Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 43198; Rubensohn
Saqqara; 1 9 1 1
Aime-Giron 2
B.3.e.i
16. Cairo JE 43464G; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,4) = Krug. 31
B.3.C.49
17. Cairo JE 43464H; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 84 (PI. 71,8) = Krug. 33
B.3.C.49
18 Cairo JE 434641"; Rubensohn
Elephantine; 1906-1908
Sachau 85 (PI. 72,19) = Krug. 53
B.3.C.49
19. Cairo JE 53040; Rubensohn
Edfu; 1929
Aime-Giron 461's
B.3.f.33.5
19a.Cairo JE 63378
South Saqqara
Aime-Giron 121 = BIFAO 38 (1939): 63 (omitted; not Aramaic)
20. Elephantine Storeroom 1596
Elephantine; 1979
M a r a q t e n , M D A I K 4 3 (1987): 170
21. Elephantine Storeroom 1597
Elephantine; 1979
Maraqten, MDAIK43
22. Saqqara Antiquities Service Register 725
North Saqqara
Segal, North Saqqara, No. I
23. Saqqara Antiquities Service Register 2189
Nortii Saqqara
Segal, North Saqqara, N o . XVI
24. Saqqara Antiquities Service Register 4371
Nortii Saqqara
Segal, North Saqqara, N o . XXVI
25. Saqqara Antiquities Service Register S557
Nortii Saqqara
Segal, North Saqqara, N o . XXII
26. Saqqara Antiquities Service Register (unknown number)
North Saqqara
Bresciani, EVO 3 (1980): 16
Fitzmyer/Kaufrnan Aramaic Bibliography
18
(1987): 170
B.3.L9
402
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE 4. Two Stone Plagues Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Item Description
Place and Date of Discovery
Initial Publications
Fitzmyer/ Kaufman
i. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Aramaic Ostracon I
Limestone plaque dated 19 Aug. 403 BCE
Memphis; pre1909
Cowley, in Petrie, Apries, pp. 1 2 - 1 3 ; Lemaire, Semitica 37 (1987): 52-55
B.3.e.n
2. Berlin P. 11385; Rubensohn
Opisthographic granite fragment with six names
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 79 (PL 66,2)
B.3.C.50
TABLE 5. Six Wooden Pieces (not including Mummy
Labels)
1. Agyptiscb.es Museum, Berlin 1 1 3 6 1 ; Friedrich Zucker
Opisthographic fragment with hole at top
Elephantine; 1907-1908
Sachau 83 (PL 70,15)
2. AM, Berlin 18468 (Sachau: incorrectly 18462); Otto Rubensohn
Mummy label with stting; name and title
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 84 (PL 71,12)
B.3.C.53
3. AM, Berlin 19435; Zucker
Palette fragment?; personal name
Elephantine; 1907-1908
Sachau 81 (PL 68,3) = Aime-Giron, BIPAO 34 (1934): 86-87
B.3.C.54
4. Brooklyn Museum 16.99; Charles E. Wilbour
Palette; obscure inscription
Elephantine; 1893
Aime-Giron 1 1 9 = BIPAO 47-57
5. Louvre AF 11016
Opisthographic palette; accounts
Provenance unknown
Lemaire, Semitica 37 (1987): 47-55
6. Medinet Maadi (Narmuti)
Handled stamp; name + verb
Medinet Maadi (Narmuti); 1966
Bresciani, Medinet Maadi,
38 (1939):
B.3.L35
30-32
TABLE 6. Six Seals and Bullae (not including Wooden Pieces) 1. Aime-Giron; personally acquired
Eight-sided cone
Provenance unknown
Aime-Giron 1 1 6 = BIPAO 43-45
38 (1939):
2. Aime-Giron; personally acquired
Light, striped, ellipsoidal agate cylinder
Provenance unknown; 1934
Aime-Giron 1 1 7 = BIPAO 45-47
38 (1939):
3. Bodleian Library, Oxford Sigill. aram. VIII., lap. insc. impr.
Bulla
Provenance unknown
Driver, Aramaic Documents, 4, n. 1
B.7.1.66
4. Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 25225
Quartz scaraboid seal
Saqqara?; 1882
CIS, vol. 2.1, 124 = Herr 1
B.7.1.157
5. Israel Museum, Jerusalem 71.46.91
Black agate scaraboid seal
Provenance unknown; pre1954
Reifenberg, IEJ 4 (1954): 139
6. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Seal N I, 2B 255; Vladimir Golenischeff
Chalcedony scaraboid seal
Provenance unknown; pre1868
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 140 = Herr 6
B.7.1.34
B.7.1.64
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
403
TABLE 7. Three Statuettes Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Item Description
Place and Date of Discovery
I. Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 3I9I9
Red granite headless statue with name
Provenance unknown; 1897
RES 965 = ESE, vol. 3, 1 1 7 - 1 8
2. Cairo JE 3 5 5 6 2 ; Archibald Henry Sayce
Sandstone statue with fragmentary name
Qubbet el-Hawa; 1889
Maspero, ASAE 3 ( 1 9 0 2 ) : 96; Daressy, ASAE 1 7 ( 1 9 1 7 ) : 8 1 - 8 5 ; Ronzevalle, ASAE 1 7 ( 1 9 1 7 ) : 2 7 0 - 2 7 1
3. Pisa; personally acquired
Clay statuette with lament
Provenance unknown
Bresciani, Hommages pp. 5-8
1. Brooklyn Museum 54.50.32; Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund
Silver bowl with dedication
Tell el-Maskhuta pre-1956
Rabinowitz, JNES Grelot 79
15 (1956): 4-5 =
B.3.1.12
2. Brooklyn Museum 54.50.34; Wilbour Fund
Silver bowl with dedication
Tell el-Maskhuta pre-1956
Rabinowitz, JNES 15 (1956): 5-9 = Grelot 78 = Gibson 25
B.3.f.i2
3. Brooklyn Museum 54.50.36; Wilbour Fund
Silver bowl with dedication
Tell el-Maskhuta pre-1956
Rabinowitz, JNES
15 (1956): 2-4
B.3.f.i2
4. Brooklyn Museum 5 7 . 1 2 1 ; Wilbour Fund
Silver bowl with dedication
Tell el-Maskhuta pre-1956
Rabinowitz, JNES Honeyman, JNES
18 (1959): 154-156; 19 (i960): 40-41
B.3.f.i2
5. Stockholm, Sweden; currently in Carl Kempe collection; Robert Erskine
Silver bowl with name
Provenance unknown; c. 1956
Bivar, BSOAS Hinz, 237
1. Agyptisches Museum, Berlin 18464; Otto Rubensohn
Wooden
Elephantine; 1906-1907
Sachau 84 (PI. 7 1 , 1 3 )
B.3.C.52
2. Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 5 4 1 5 7 ; Gustave Jequier
Ceramic; inscribed on convex
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 1 0 9
B.3.C27
3. Cairo JE 5 4 1 5 8 ; Jequier
Ceramic
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron n i b (see Aime-Giron 1 1 ia)
B.3X.27
4. Cairo JE 5 4 1 5 9 ; Jequier
Ceramic; inscribed on convex
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 1 0 5
B.3X.27
5. Cairo JE 5 4 1 6 0 ; Jequier
Ceramic
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 1 1 2 b (see Aime-Giron 112a)
B.3.e.27
6. Cairo JE 5 4 1 6 1 ; Jequier
Ceramic
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron n o b (see Aime-Giron 110a)
B.3.e,27
7. Cairo JE 5 5 ° 3 3 J Jequier
Limestone
South Saqqara; 1929-193°
Aime-Giron 1 0 2 (see Aime-Giron 96, 108)
B.3.C27
8. Lost; Jequier
Stone
South Saqqara; 1930
Aime-Giron 1 1 8 = BIFAO 46
B.3.3.20
9. Cairo JE 63379
Wooden
South Saqqara
unpublished
TABLE 8. Five Libation
TABLE 9. Nine Mummy
Fitzmyer/ Kaufman
Initial Publications
Dupont-Sommer,
B.3I.31 "possibly a forgery"
Bowls
24 (1961): 189-199;
B.3.1.38
Labels
38 ( 1 9 3 9 ) :
404
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE 1 0 . Twenty-two Inscribed
Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Sarcophagi
Item Description
Place and Date of Discovery
Fitzmyer/ Kaufman
Initial Publications
i. Aswan Museum 2605; ElHetta
Painted sandstone anthropoid sarcophagus; at base, engraved inscription
Aswan; 1963
Kornfeld, WZKM 13
61 (1967): 9-10, 1 2 -
B.3J.4
2. Aswan Museum 2606; ElHetta
Painted sandstone anthropoid sarcophagus; at base, engraved inscription
Aswan; 1963
Kornfeld, WZKM
61 (1967): 1 0 - n , 13
B.3T.4
3. Aswan Museum 2607; ElHetta
Painted sandstone female amhropoid sarcophagus; at base, engraved inscription
Aswan; 1963
Kornfeld, WZKM
61 (1967): 1 1 - 1 4
B.3T.4
4. Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 55213; Gustave Jequier
Ceramic coffin lid
Soutii Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 1 0 1
B.3.e.27
5. Cairo JE 55214a, b; Jequier
Ceramic coffin lid; left exterior
South Saqqara; 1928-1929
Aime-Giron 104a, c
B.3.e.27
6. Cairo JE 55215a, b; Jequier
Ceramic coffin lid; left exterior
Soutii Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 103a, c
B.3.C27
7. Cairo JE 55217; Jequier (same vessel as JE 55224)
Ceramic coffin lid
Soutii Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 97a
B.3.e.27
8. Cairo JE 5 5218; Jequier
Ceramic coffin left exterior
South Saqqara; 1928-1929
Aime-Giron 99 = Grelot 76
B.3.C27
9. Cairo JE 55219; Jequier
Ceramic coffin left exterior
Soutii Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron i n a (see Aime-Giron 11 lb)
B.3.e.27
10. Cairo JE 55220; Jequier
Ceramic coffin left exterior
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aim6-Giron 110a (see Aime-Giron nob)
B.3.C27
1 1 . Cairo JE 55221; Jequier (same vessel as JE 55222)
Ceramic coffin right exterior
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 100b
B.3.e.27
12. Cairo JE 55222; Jequier (same vessel as JE 55221)
Ceramic coffin lid
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 100a
B.3.C27
13. Cairo JE 55223; Jequier
Ceramic coffin right interior
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 1 1 2 a (see Aime-Giron 112b)
B.3.C27
14. Cairo JE 55224; Jequier (same vessel as JE 55217)
Ceramic coffin left exterior
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 97b
B.3.e.27
15. Cairo JE 55225; Jequier
Ceramic coffin exterior
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 106
B.3.e.27
16. Cairo JE 55226; Jequier (same vessel as JE 55227)
Foot of ceramic coffin
Soutii Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 96c
B.3.e,27
17. Cairo JE 55227; Jequier (same vessel as JE 55226)
Ceramic coffin lid
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 96a, b (see Aime-Giron 102)
B.3.e.27
18. Cairo JE 55228; Jequier
Ceramic coffin left exterior
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 98
B.3.C27
19. Cairo JE 55245; Jequier
Ceramic coffin lid
South Saqqara; 1928-1929
Aime-Giron 95
B.3.e.27
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS TABLE 1 0 . Twenty-two Inscribed Sarcophagi
(Continued)
Museum/library Number; Acquisition Source
Item Description
20. Cairo JE 55247; Jequier
Foot of ceramic coffin
21. Cairo JE 63 3 80; Jequier
22. Disintegrated; Jequier
TABLE 1 1 .
405
Place and Date of Discovery
Initial Publications
Fitzmyer/ Kaufman
South Saqqara; 1928-1929
Aime-Giron 108 (see Aime-Giron 102)
B.3.6.27
Wooden fragment
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 1 1 5 = BIFAO 43
B.3.3.21
Wooden lid
South Saqqara; 1929-1930
Aime-Giron 107
Fourteen Tombstones and One Memorial
38 (1939):
Stela
1. Agyptisches Museum, Berlin 18502
Limestone plaque with name
Abu Sir; 1907
Sachau 87 (pi. 74,4)
2. Greco-Roman Museum, Alexandria 5904; Evaristo Breccia
Limestone; painted inscription
El-Ibrahimiya (Alexandria); 1906
RES
798
B-3-f-39-3
3. Alexandria 18361; Breccia
Limestone; painted inscription
El-Ibrahimiya (Alexandria); 1906
RES
797
B.3.f.39.i
4. Alexandria, number not certain; Breccia
Tombstone; painted inscription
El-Ibrahimiya (Alexandria); 1906
RES
799
5. Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AO AW 110 (1973): 123-129; Kornfeld, Kairos 18 (1976): 58
B.3.1.41
6. Edfu Storeroom
Reused offering table; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AOAWito
B. .f. i
7. Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AOAW n o (1973): 1 3 1 ; NESE, vol. 3, pp. 64-65
B. i.4i
8. Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AOAW
n o (1973): 1 3 1 - 1 3 2
B.3.L41
9. Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AOAW
n o (1973): 132-133
B. i"4i
10. Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AOA W n o (1973): 1 3 3 ; Lipihski, OLP 6-7 (1975-1976): 382ff; NESE, vol. 3, pp. 63-64
B. .f.4i
1 1 . Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AOAW
B. .f.4i
12. Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, A OA W 110 (1973): 134-135
B. .f.4i
13. Edfu Storeroom
Tombstone; incised inscription
Edfu
Kornfeld, AOAW n o (1973): 135; AOAW 111 (1974): 376-378
B.3X41
14. Luxor Museum Storeroom (uncollated); Taher
Sandstone; incised inscription
Flagir Esna; 1971
Kornfeld, AOAW
15. Paris; personally acquired
Memorial stela?
Provenance unknown
Aime-Giron n o b i s = DupontSommer, Syria 33 (1956): 79-87 = Grelot 77
B.3.C.51
(1973): 129-130
n o (1973): 134
3
4
3
3
3
3
3
\ 1 1 (1974): 374"376
B.3.e.2
406
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE 12. Five Funerary Stelae, One Offering Table, One
Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
Item Description
Dedication
Place and Date of Discovery
Initial Publications
Fitzmyer/ Kaufman
i. Berlin (Gipsformerei 939); Travers; destroyed in World Warll
Stela; 1 register + hieroglyphic inscription + 2 registers + 4-line Aramaic inscription
Saqqara; pre1877
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 122 = KAI 267 = Grelot 85 = Gibson 23
B.3.3.22
2. Brussels (Musees Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire E.4716); Jean Capart and Franz Cumont
Stela
Provenance unknown; 1907
RES 1788; Lipiiiski, CdE 50 (1975): 93-104
B.3.e.29
3. Carpentras; Rigord
Stela; 2 registers + 4line inscription
Provenance unknown; 1704
CIS, vol. 2.1, 141 = KAI269 86 = Gibson 24
B.3.f.i8
4. Saqqara; Cecil M. Firth
Fragmentary stela; 1line inscription
Saqqara; 1926?
Aime-Giron 1 1 4 = BIFAO 40-43
5. Vatican XI.32.21; Charles Lenormant
Stela; register + i-line inscription + register
Provenance unknown; i860
CIS, vol. 2.1, 142 = KAI
6. Louvre AO 4824; F. Auguste Mariette
Offering table; 4-line inscription
Serapeum, Memphis; 1851
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 123 - Grelot 84 = KAI 268
B.3.e.8
7. Cairo JE 36448
Sandstone stela 6-line inscription
Aswan; pre-1903
RES 438, 1806 = Grelot 75
B. .f.3
= Grelot
38 (1939):
272
B.3.f,28
3
TABLE 13. Fifty-one Graffiti (arranged from north to south)
1. Giza; Imile Baraize; Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Temporary Register 29-12-28-1
1-line inscription
Sphinx column drum, 1928
Aime-Giron 90
B.3X19
2. Ma'sarah; Archibald Henry Sayce
Personal name, above demotic cartouche of Achoris
Quarry south of Tura, 1886
RES
1819
B.3.L37
3-5. Dahshur; Jacques J. M. de Morgan
3 graffiti: 1 fragment, 2 prenomina
Senwosret III pyramid
RES 1818; Aime-Giron, p. 97, n. 1
B.3X36
2-line proskynema
Large boulder near wadi entrance; 1886
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 134 = RES 1817; RAO 6 (1905): 267-270
B. .f,29
10 proskynemata to Osiris
Seti I temple; 1868-1915
ESE, ESE, ESE, ESE, ESE, ESE,
vol. 3, 103, N o . vol. 3, 107, No. vol. 3, 108, No. vol. 3, 108, N o . vol. 3, 109, No. vol. 3, 1 1 2 , No. = Grelot 80; ESE, vol. 3, 1 1 3 , No. Kornfeld, AOAW115 ESE, vol. 3, 1 1 3 , No. ESE, vol. 3, 1 1 4 , N o . ESE, vol. 3, 1 1 4 , N o .
B.3.L23
6. Wadi Sheikh Sheikhun; Gaston Maspero and Eugene Grebaut 7-16. Abydos
Ag = RES 1368; Al = RES 1364; Ap = RES 608; Aq = RES 1369; As = RES 1370; Bb = RES 1366 Bf = RES 1373; (1978): 199; Bi = RES 1375; Bk = RES 1376; Bl = RES 1377
3
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS TABLE 13. Fifty-one Graffiti Museum/Library Number; Acquisition Source
407
(Continued)
Item Description
Place and Date of Discovery
Fitzmyer/ Kaufman
Initial Publications
T w o 4-line proskynemata (Anatolians?) (perhaps tiiree distinct inscriptions)
Seti I temple; 1868-1915
4 personal names; 2 prenomina
Seti I temple; 1868-1915, 1993
ESE, vol. 3, 98, N o . J = RES 1 3 7 1 ; ESE, vol. 3, 107, No. Am = RES 1363; Kornfeld, AOAW115 (1978): 198; ESE, vol. 3, 109, N o . Ar = RES 1370; ESE, vol. 3, 1 1 3 , No. Bh = RES 1374; (unlocated; perhaps illusory) CIS, vol. 2.1, 133, contra Kornfeld, AOAW 115 (1978): 202; 1 unpublished
B.3.f,23
Abecedary
Black granite; 1946
Dupont-Sommer, PA 41 (1947): 105110
B.3.I10
26-32. Wadi Abu Qwei; Arthur Weigall, Luisa Bongrani-Fanfoni
5 proskynemata; 2 personal names
Wadi inside Wadi Hammamat; 1907, 1989
Weigall, Travels in the Upper Egyptian Deserts, PI. 7.15; Fanfoni-Israel, Transeuphratene 8 (1994): 81-93
33-36. Gebel Abu-Gurob; Sayce
4 personal names
Between Heshan (=Hosh?) and Wadi el-Shatt erRigal; 1907
Sayce, PSBA 30 (1908): 28-29 (readings uncertain)
37-41. Wadi el-Shatt er-Rigal; Petrie (2); Sayce (4)
4 proskynemata
Near large rock at northern entrance of wadi; 1887, c. 1890
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 135, 136 = RES 960, 961,962, 962 = Sayce, RT17 (1895): 164, Nos. 5-6
3 incisions of same word
Sandstone quarry
Sayce, PSBA 28 (1906): 174-75
43-48. Wadiel-Hudi, Ibrahim Effendi 'Abd el-'Al (Cairo JE 71901)
5 proskynemata; 1 personal name
Stela on hill at amethyst quarries; 1939
Aime-Giron 124 = ASAE 351-363
49-50. Tomas; Weigall
2 personal names
Sandstone; 19061907
Weigall, Report on the Antiquities of Lower Nubia, 1 1 3 + PI. 64.6; AimeGiron 92-93
B.3.f.i.23
Prenomen incised
Royal dedicatory stela; provenance unknown; pre1836
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 143 = RES 490
B.3I.17
17-18. Abydos
19-24. Abydos; Ada Yardeni
25. Wadi Hammamat; J.-C. Goyon
42. Aswan; Sayce
5 1 . Unknown; Henry Salt; bought by W.T. Ready, 20 June 1899
ESE, vol. 3, 103, N o . Aha = Grelot 81; ESE, vol. 3, 103, N o . Ahb = Grelot 82; Aime-Giron, Dupont-Sommer, Annuaire 1967)= 1 1 9
= RES 1367
B.3T.23
= RES 1372 p . 79; (1966--
39 (1939):
B.3X20
408
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS TABLES 1 4 - 1 5 .
Chronological List of the Discovery of Ostraca and Jar Inscriptions
TABLE 14. Ostraca. Thirty-four separate finds or acquisitions between 1875 and 1988 FitzmyerKaufman
Dates
Item
Site
Discoverer/Acquirer
Museum/Library
I.
1875 (1889)
Fragmentary letter
Elephantine
Greville Chester
British Museum, London CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 138
B.3.C.28
2.
1876 (1889)
Fragmentary letter
Elephantine
Chester
London
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 139
B.3.C.48 APE 95
Mark Udzbarski B.3.C.24-25
Editio Princeps
3- pre-1880 (1915)
2 fragmentary Elephantine letters
Friedrich Mook
Staatliche Sammlung Agyptische Kunst, Munich
4- 1886 (1887)
Dream letter
Elephantine
Adolf Erman
Staatliche Museen, Berlin Julius Euting
5'
1888-1889 (1889)
2 lists
Elephantine
Vladimir S. Golenischeff Pushkin Museum, Moscow
6.
1897 (1906)
Fragmentary letter
Elephantine
Ludwig Borchardt
7.
1897
Unknown
Oxyrhynclrus
8.
1900-1901 (1903)
4 letters
Elephantine
2 letters (barley, marzeah), 1 fragmentary list
Elephantine
Elephantine
9. 1902 (1909, 1915)
Sayce
CIS, vol. 2 . 1 , 154-155
B.3.C.47 B.3.C.39-40
Berlin
Archibald Henry B.3.C.42/48 Sayce, Arthur APO 77/1 Ernest Cowley
Columbia University
Unpublished
Bodleian Library, Oxford Cowley (on permanent loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
B.3.C.29, 36-37) 48 APE 93
Egyptian Museum, Cairo Sayce, Lidzbarsld
B.3.C.33-32
Otto Rubensohn
Berlin
Eduard Sachau
B.3.C.21, 23
Carl Schmidt
Berlin
Sachau
B3.f.33.i-4
London
Judah Benzion Segal
B3.C.35
10.
1905 (1911)
2 letters
11.
1905-1906 (1911)
1 fragmentary Edfu letter; 3 accounts
12.
1906 (1969)
1 fragmentary Elephantine? letter
13-
1906 (1991)
1 letter; 1 list
Elephantine?
Rustafjaell sale at Sotheby's auction
London
Bezalel Porten, Ada Yardeni
14.
1906-1908 (1911)
23 ostraca
Elephantine
Rubensohn, Friedrich Zucker
Berlin; Cairo
Sachau
Unknown
Berlin
Unpublished
Charles ClermontGanneau, Jean Cledat, Henri Gauthier
Academie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, Paris
Andre Dupont- B.3.C.33 Sommer, Helene Lozachmeur
15- Unknown 16.
1 list; 6 letters Elephantine
1907-1909 256? ostraca (1944) 1945) 1948) 1949) 1957. 19^3) 1971. 1989)
17- pre-1908 (1915)
2 accounts; 1 letter
Elephantine
Edfu?
Bibliotheque Nationale et Lidzbarski Universitaire, Strasbourg
B3.C.22, 4 1 , 43. 48
B.3.C.44-46
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
409
TABLE 1 4 . Ostraca {Continued)
Dates
FitzmyerKaufman
Item
Site
Discoverer/Acquirer
Museum/Library
Passover letter
Elephantine
Sayce
Bodleian Library, Oxford Sayce (on permanent loan to die Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
B.3.C.20
2 accounts; 2 letters
3 Edfu?; 1 Elephandne
Hermann Junker
Osterreichische Nauonalbibliodiek, Vienna
Rainer Degen
B.3.ci9f.40
20. 1912 (1913)
Account
K o m elAlrmar
Raymond Weil
Louvre
Raymond Weill
21.
1914
Fragmentary letter
Unknown
Sayce
Bodleian Library, Oxford Unpublished (on permanent loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
22.
1924 (1926)
Fragmentary letter
Elephantine
Cairo
Noel AimeGiron
B.3.C.27
23.
1925 (1926)
Tunic letter
Elephantine
Cairo
Aime-Giron
B.3.C.28
Fragmentary letter
Elephantine
Cairo
Aime-Giron
B.c.3.48. Aime-Giron
Tax receipt
Edfu?
Wilhelm Spiegelberg
Lost
Lidzbarski
B.3.f.32
26. pre-1929 (1929)
Letter to Kaviliah
Elephantine
Herbert Thompson
Cambridge University Library
Cowley
B.3.C.34
27.
1933 (1939)
Fragmentary account
Edfu
Pierre Lacau
Cairo
Aime-Giron
B.3.f.33-6
28.
1933 (1991)
Account
Edfu?
Carl Wessely estate
Osterreichische Na tional bibliodiek, Vienna
Porten and Yardeni
29.
1937 (1939)
Account
Edfu
French-Polish excavations
Cairo
Aime-Giron
B.3I.33.7
30.
1966-1973
Abecedary
North Saqqara
Egypt Exploration Society
Cairo?
Judah Benzion Segal
B.3.e.25
31-
pre-1977 (1977)
Abecedary
Elephantine?
Pontifical Biblical Institute, Jerusalem
Andre Lemaire, Helene Lozachmeur
B.3.C.26
32.
1978
List
Elephantine
German Archaeological Institute
Elephantine Storeroom, Aswan
unpublished
33-
1979
Letter
Elephantine
German Archaeological Institute
Elephantine Storeroom, Aswan
Mohammed Maraqten
34-
1988
List
Elephantine
German Archaeological Institute
Elephantine Storeroom, Aswan
unpublished
18. p r e - 1 9 1 1 (1911)
19-
1 9 1 1 (1978)
24. pre-1926 (1926) 25-
pre-1927
Editio Princeps
410
APPENDIX 1: EGYPTIAN ARAMAIC TEXTS
TABLE 1 5 . Jar Inscriptions. Nine separate finds or acquisitions between 1906 and 1979 I.
1906-1908 (1911)
2. Unknown
3-
1907 ( 1 9 1 1 )
4- 1 9 1 1 (1931) 4a. Unknown (1939)
14 jar inscriptions
Elephantine
Otto Rubensohn
Staadiche Museen, Berlin; Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Eduard Sachau
1 jar inscription
Elephantine
Unknown
Berlin
Unpublished
2 jar inscriptions
Abu Sir (Memphis)
Ludwig Borchardt
Berlin
Sachau
1 jar inscription
Saqqara
Unlaiown
Cairo
Noel AimeGiron
B.3.C.1
Potter's mark
South Saqqara
Cecil Mallaby Firth
Cairo
Aime-Giron
Omitted (not Aramaic)
Bresciani
B.3.f-9
B.3.C.49
5-
1978-1979
Potter's mark
Saqqara
Edda Bresciani
6.
1929 (1931)
1 jar inscription
Edfu
Pierre Lacau
Cairo
Aime-Giron
B.3.L33.5
7-
1966-1973
2 jar inscriptions; 2 potter's marks
North Saqqara
Egypt Exploration Society
Saqqara Storeroom
Judah Benzion Segal
B.3.6.25
8. pre-1987
2 jar inscriptions
Elephantine
German Archaeological Institute
Elephantine Storeroom
Mohammed Maraqten
1979
2 jar inscriptions
Elephantine
German Archaeological Institute
Elephantine Storeroom
Maraqten
9-
APPENDIX
2:
C H R O N O L O G I E S
The table below provides a general chronology based on material culture and, for die later periods, historical events. T h e dates listed do not necessarily apply in all regions. For further discussion of dating, see "Periodization" and the survey articles on major regions (e.g., "Egypt," "Mesopotamia," "Palestine"). Phase Upper Paleolithic Epipaleolithic Neolitiiic I Neolithic 2 Neolithic 3 Neolithic 4 Early Chalcolithic Late Chalcolithic Early Bronze IA-B Early Bronze II Early Bronze III Early Bronze IVA-C Middle Bronze I Middle Bronze II Middle Bronze III Late Bronze IA Late Bronze IB Late Bronze IIA Late Bronze IIB Iron IA Iron IB Iron IC Iron IIA Iron IIB Iron III Early Persian Late Persian Early Hellenistic Late Hellenistic Early Roman Middle Roman Late Roman Early Byzantine Late Byzantine Early Arab
Variants
Dates
Mesolithic Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Pre-Pottery Neolitiiic B Pottery Neolitiiic A Pottery Neolithic B Proto-Urban
Intermediate Early-Middle Bronze, Middle Bronze I Middle Bronze IIA Middle Bronze IIB Middle Bronze IIC
Iron IIA Iron IIB Iron IIC Neo-Babylonian
c. 43,000-18,000 BCE 18,000-8,500 8500-7200 7200-6000 6000-5000 5000-4500 4500-3800 3800-3400 3400-3100 3100-2650 2650-2300 2300-2000 2000-1800 1800-1650 1650-1500 1500-1450 1450-1400 1400-1300 1300-1200 1200-1125 1125-1000 1000-925 925-722 722-586 586-520 520-450 450-332 332-200 200-63 63 BCE-I35 CE 135-250 25O-363 363-460 460-638 638-IO99
Crusader and Ayyubid Late Arab Ottoman
I099-I29I I291-I516 1516-I9I7
411
APPENDIX
3:
MAPS
The maps that appear on the following pages are primarily intended to show the locations of the sites and regions covered in this encyclopedia. Sites tiiat are the subject of inde pendent entries are marked with solid dots; otiier important sites are marked with open circles. 1. Palestine and Transjordan 2. Northern Palestine and Transjordan (detail of map i) 3 . Southern Palestine and Transjordan (detail of map 1 ) 4 . Syria 5. Anatolia 6. Armenia 7. Mesopotamia and Persia 8. Lower Egypt 9. Northeast Africa and Soutii Arabia 10. Arabian Peninsula 11. North Africa and the Aegean Islands 12. Cyprus
The area of each map is indicated on the general map of die Near East on the following page.
417
Map 6, Armenia!
aspt an
,
y
Sea Map 7. Mesopotamia i and Persia "V2
Carthage
I Map 2. Northern Palestine
\ r» i* ** 5
k and Transjordan
v
i " j ^ - , ™ . ^ .
..
'Vg. >
s
Uap 3. Southern PalestinsJJ .DamaSCUS ' and Transjordan^ J jT • r iMap4.Syria!:
BabylqnTB
V
jPersepolis T Map 1. Palestine •i and Transjordan
Map 11.North Africa and the Aegean Islands (Area of map extends westward) . Map 8. J I Lower Egyjrt \ '
^*
)
•
;
| - •
• • ..
i ©Mecca
.
A'- X \
i
1/ -ir
A r a b i a n Sea Map! 10. Arabian Peninsula I r
s Map 9.Northeast Africa and South Arabia
APPENDIX 3: MAPS
PALESTINE A N D TRANSJORDAN
.^urneith
Megiddo. i
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For additional sites, see the detail maps for North and South Palestine that follow. Some sites in northern Palestine and Transjordan may be found on the map of Syria.
i ''Aqaba, 0
\
\
n
( W
25 25
50 miles 50
75 kilometers
419
420
APPENDIX 3: MAPS • 36°
N O R T H E R N PALESTINE AND TRANSJORDAN
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,
APPENDIX 3: MAPS
421
SOUTHERN PALESTINE A N D TRANSJORDAN Jaffa,**Tell Qasile % -38° . ••" Yavneh-Yamifx
^Ramla'*?'^
Mesad H a s h a v y a h u *
^ - < ' ~ -""-Bethel. ^ V_„/"'' •" m m a u s ^ - ^ a d a n n a h * \ *aT _ Khirb4t ,Telleh~-Nasbeh» V ' ^ al-Mafjkr ' XGibeon* .^ellel-Ful . H
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For some additional sites in'this region, see the general map of Palestine and Transjordan. 0 25 MILES
r
• Horvat Qitmit
7
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y
ARABAH
422
APPENDIX 3: MAPS
* ANATOLIA
s
-42°
APPENDIX 3: MAPS
425
-66° V
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>
Caspian ' Sea I
MESOPOTAMIA AND PERSIA
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;
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200 miles ' 200
300 kilometers
426
APPENDIX 3: MAPS
EOWER EGYPT
M
e
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i
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r
a
n e
a
n
S
e
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Alexandria
Niti iao
Merimde^y
S >
i
n
a
i
>Heliopolis
^^liCairo/Fustat Saqqara
Oxyrhynchijfs*
Tell el-Amarna
SO miles 0
25
50
76 kilometers
'"W
APPENDIX 3: MAPS 46"
AbydOS^. N a g H a m r n a ^
,J 1neDes
g
NORTHEAST AFRICA A N D S O U T H ARABIA
Hdmmaaut
Upper < Egyp t
\
;\
4
Elepharitineii Philae^
Nu b i a Abu Simbelw
A r a b
i
a n
P e n i n s u l a 120"
.ONapata
427
- .y
428
APPENDIX 3: MAPS
245
N O R T H A F R I C A AND T H E A E G E A N I S L A N D S I
, ._
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!
X
-32'
^—4—:
i bya
100 200, 300 kilometels
00
to
430
APPENDIX 3: MAPS
D I R E C T O R Y
OF
C O N T R I B U T O R S
Abadie-Reynal, Catherine Scientific Secretary, Institut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes Institut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes d'Istanbul
Anderson, J. K. Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology, University of California, Berkeley Hunting
Abou Assaf, Ali Professor Emeritus of Archaeology and West Semitic Languages, Damascus, Syria 'Ain Dara'; Fakhariyah, Tell; Horns; Mishrifeh; Rifa'at, Tell; Sukas, Tell; Syria, article on Syria in the Iron Age
Anderson-Stojanovic, Virginia R. Professor of Classics and Fine Arts, Wilson College Leather Andre-Salvini, Beatrice Chief Curator, Departement des Antiquites Orientates, Musee du Louvre, Paris Thureau-Dangin, Francois
Abusch, Tzvi Cohen Professor of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Religion, Brandeis University Jacobsen, Thorkild
Ansary, Abdul Rahman T . alProfessor of Pre-Islamic Archaeology and Epigraphy of the Arabian Peninsula, King Saud University Arabian Peninsula, article on The Arabian Peninsula in Islamic Times; Qaryat al-Fau
Adan-Bayewitz, David Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University Kefar Hananyah Aitken, Martin J. Professor Emeritus of Archaeometry, University of Oxford Dating Techniques
Arav, Rami Director, Belhsaida Excavations Project Bethsaida
Allen, James P. Associate Curator of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Heliopolis
Archi, Alfonso Professor of Hitlitology, Universitd di Roma "La Sapienza" Ebla Texts
Allen, Susan J. Research Associate, Department of Egyptian Art, 'The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale (Cairo)
Armstrong, James A. Assistant Curator of Collections, Semitic Museum, Harvard University Ceramics, article on Mesopotamian Ceramics of the Neolithic through Neo-Bablyonian Periods
Alpert Nakhai, Beth Lecturer in Judaic Studies and Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona Beth-Zur; Furniture and Furnishings, article on Furnishings of the Bronze and Iron Ages; Kitan, Tel; Locus; Temples, article on Syro-Palestinian Temples; Wawiyat, Tell el-
Arnold, Dieter Curator, Department of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Temples, article on Egyptian Temples Arnold, Felix Field Archaeologist and Independent Scholar, Karlsruhe, Germany House, article on Egyptian Houses
Amadasi Guzzo, Maria Giulia Professor of Semitic Epigraphy, UniversitA di Roma "La Sapicnza" Levi Delia Vida, Giorgio; Phoenician-Punic
Artzy, Michal Professor of Archaeology and Maritime Civilizations, University of Haifa Nami, Tel
Amiran, Ruth Field Archaeologist (retired). The Israel Museum Arad, article on Bronze Age Period
Astrom, Paul Professor Emeritus of Ancient Culture and Civilization, Goteborg University Hala Sultan Tekke
Amitai, Janet Independent Scholar, Jerusalem, Israel Israel Exploration Society
431
432
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Aubin, Melissa M. Doctoral candidate, Department of Religion, Duke University Jerash
Bardett, John R. Principal, Church of Ireland Theological College, Dublin Edom
Auerbach, Elise Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and the Humanities, Getty Grant Program Eshnunna
Bar-Yosef, Ofer McCurdy Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University Carmel Caves; 'Einan; Garrod, Dorothy Annie Elizabeth; Hayonin Munhata; Nahal Oren; Palestine, article on Prehistoric Palestine; Sha'ar ha-Golan; Stekelis, Moshe; Turville-Petre, Francis; 'Ubeidiya
Auld, Graeme Professor of Hebrew Bible, University of Edinburgh British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem Anne, David E. Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, Loyola University of Chicago Amulets; Chalcedon; Greek; Latin Avalos, Hector Ignacio Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Latino Studies, Iowa State University Medicine Aviam, Mordechai Western Galilee District Archaeologist, Israel Antiquities Authority Magdala; Tabgha; Tabor, Mount Bacharach, Jere L. Professor of History, University of Washington Middle East Studies Association Badre, Leila Curator, American University of Beirut Museum Arwad; Baalbek; Kamid el-Loz; Khaldeh; Shabwa Bahat, Dan Senior Lecturer in History and Archaeology of Jerusalem, Bar-IIlan University Jerusalem Baity, Jean Ch. Professor of Classical Archaeology, Universite Libre de Bruxelles; and Head, Department of Antiquities, Musies Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels Apamea; Odeum
Bass, George F. George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor of Nautical Archaeology and Yamini Family Professor of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University Cape Gelidonya; Serge Limani; §eytan Deresi; Ships and Boats; Uluburun; Underwater Archaeology; Yassiada Wrecks Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq Principal Research Associate, Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University 'Ira, Tel; Qitmit, Horvat Ben-Tor, Amnon Yigael Yadin Professor of the Archaeology of Eretz Israel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Hazor; Qiri, Tel; Yoqne'am Betancourt, Philip P. Laura H, Cornell Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Temple University Crete Betts, Alison V. G. Lecturer in Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Sydney Badiat ash-Sham; Jawa Bianchi, Robert Steven Independent Scholar, New York Carter, Howard; Champollion, Jean Francois; Egypt, article on Postdynastic Egypt Bienkowski, Piotr Curator of Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, Liverpool Bennett, Crystal-Margaret; Buseirah; Tawilan; Umm el-Biyara
Bammer, Anton Bietak, Manfred University Docenl for Ancient Architecture and Archaeology, University Professor of Egyptology, Institut filr Agyptologie, Univcrsilat Wien of Vienna Dab'a, Tell edEphesus Biran, Avraham Banning, E. B. Director, Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, Hebrew Union Professor of Archaeology, University of Toronto College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem Ziqlab, Wadi Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology Barag, Dan Bisheh, Ghazi Professor of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Director-General, Department of Antiquities of Jordan Jerusalem Qasr al-Hallabat; Qusayr 'Amra Marquet-Krause, Judith Bivar, A. D . H. Barber, E. J. W. Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies, School of Oriental and African Professor of Archaeology and Linguistics, Occidental College Studies, University of London Textiles, article on Textiles of the Neolithic through Iron Ages Coins Bar-Ilan, Meir Professor of Jewish History and Talmud, Bar-Ilan University Papyrus; Parchment
Blair, Sheila S. Independent Scholar, Richmond, New Hampshire Mosque Inscriptions
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS Blakely, Jeffrey A. Research Archaeologist, Archeological Assessments, Inc. Bliss, Frederick Jones; Jubah, Wadi al-; Khirbeh; Site Survey
Braun, Eliot Senior Research Archaeologist, Israel Antiquities Authority 'Ein-Shadud; Yiftahel
Blau, Joshua Schloessinger Professor Emeritus of Arabic Ijxnguage and Literature, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Hebrew Language and Literature
Braun, Joachim Professor of Musicology, Bar-Ilan University Musical Instruments
Bloch-Smifh, Elizabeth M . Field Archaeologist, Ashkelon Excavations; Independent scholar, Bala Cymoyd, Pennsylvania Cave. Tombs; Cist Graves; Foundation Trench; Jar Burials; Pit Graves Boehmer, Rainer Michael First Director, Deutsches Archdologisches Institut, Abteilung Baghdad; and Honorary Professor of Oriental Archaeology, Universitdt Heidelberg Uruk-Warka Bohrer, Frederick N . Associate Professor of Art, Hood College, Frederick, Maryland Layard, Austen Henry Bonine, Michael E, Professor of Geography and Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona Cities, article on Cities of the Islamic Period
433
Bron, Francois Researck Associate, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris (Institut d'Etudes Simitiques, College de France) Karatepe Phoenician Inscriptions Broshi, Magen Curator Emeritus, Dead Sea Scrolls, Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum Demography Brown, Ann C. Independanl Scholar, Oxford Myres,JohnL. Brown, S. Kent Professor of Ancient Scripture, Brigham Young University Oxyrhynchus Brown, Stuart C. Associate Professor of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland Ecbatana
Bordreuil, Pierre Directeur de Recherche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifiquc, Paris Fakhariyah Aramaic Inscription; Northwest Semitic Seal Inscriptions; Starcky, Jean; Virolleaud, Charles
Bryan, Betsy M. Badawy Professor of Egyptian Art and Archaeology, Johns Hopkins University
Borowski, Oded Associate Professor of Biblical Archaeology and Hebrew, Emory University
Bryce, Trevor R.
Food Storage; Granaries and Silos; Irrigation Bottini, Giovanni Claudio Professor of New Testament Studies, Editor of SBF Liber Annuus, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem Bagatti, Bellarmino; Corbo, Virgilio C. Bounni, Adnan Director, Archaeological Excavations Department, Member of the Antiquities Council, and Professor of Archaeology and History, Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, Ministry of Culture, Syria Kazel, Tell al-; Palmyra; Ras Ibn Hani; Syria, article on Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods Bouzek, Jan Professor of Classical Archaeology and Director, Institute for Classical Archaeology, Charles University, Prague Cimmerians; Scythians Bradford, Alfred S. John Saxon Professor of Ancient History, University of Oklahoma Inscriptions, article on Inscriptions of the Classical Period Brandl, Baruch Curator of the State Collection, Israel Antiquities Authority 'Erani, Tel
Amarna, Tell el-
Deputy Vice-Chancelhr, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand Luwians; Lycia Buccellati, Giorgio Professor Emeritus of the Ancient Near East and of History; Director; Mesopotamian Area Program, University of California, Los Angeles Amorites; Mozan, Tell; Syria, article on Syria in the Bronze Age; Terqa Bull, Robert J. Professor of History and Archaeology, Drew University Ras, Tell erBullard, Reuben G. Consultant and Professor of Archaeological Geology, Cincinnati Bible College and Seminary and University of Cincinnati Geology; Magnetic Archaeometry Butzer, Karl W. Dickson Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts, University of Texas, Austin Environmental Archaeology Byrd, Brian F . Senior Scientist, ASM Affiliates, Encinitas, California; and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of California, San Diego Beidha
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DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Campbell, Edward F. Francis A. McGaw Professor of Old Testament, McCormick Theological Seminary Wright, George Ernest
Collon, Dominique Assistant. Keeper, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, British Museum Lloyd, Seton Howard Frederick
Carboni, Stefano Assistant Curator, Department of Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Furniture and Furnishings, article on Furnishings of the Islamic Period
Conrad, Diethelm Professor of Hebrew, Historial Geography, and Archaeology of Palestine, Philipps-Universitat. Marburg Benzinger, Immanuel; Deutscher Palastina-Verein
Carter, Charles E. Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Seton Hall University Edinoarchaeology; Institute of Holy Land Studies; Montgomery, James Alan; Palestine Oriental Society; Thayer, Joseph Henry Castriota, David Assistant Professor of History of Art, Sarah Lawrence College Wall Paintings
Contadini, Anna Keeper of the Islamic Collection, The Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Bone, Ivory, and Shell, article on Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Cook, B. F. Retired Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum Newton, Charles Thomas
Cook, Edward M . Associate Research Scholar, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati Caubet, Annie Keeper, Departement des Antiquites Orientales, Musee du Louvre, Paris Aramaic Language and Literature Saulcy, Felicien de Cooley, Robert E. Chapman, Rupert Executive Secretary, Palestine Exploration Fund Garstang, John; Lawrence, Thomas Edward; Palestine Exploration Fund; Palmer, Edward Henry; Schick, Conrad; Weapons and Warfare
Chehab, Flafez Associate Professor of Art History, State University of New York, Brockport 'Anjar; Montet, Pierre; Renan, Joseph Ernest; Schlumberger, Daniel Christopherson, Gary L. Field Director, Madaba Plains Project Computer Mapping Civil, Miguel Professor of Oriental Studies, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Sumerian Clemens, David M . Independent Scholar, Cambridge, Ontario Zakkur Inscription Close, Angela E. Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington Egypt, article on Prehistoric Egypt Codella, Kim Doctoral Candidate in Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley British Institute of Persian Studies; Nineveh; Persepolis
President and Professor of Biblical Studies and Archaeology, GordonConwell Theological Seminary Ai; Dothan; Radannah Cooper, Jerrold S. Professor of Assyriology, The Johns Hopkins University American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad Cormack, Sarah H. Assistant Professor of Art History and Classics, Duke University Funerary Monuments, article on Monuments of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Coulson, William D . E. Director, American School of Classical Studies, Athens Naukratis Courbin, Paul Professor of Archaeology, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (deceased) Bassit Crawford, Harriet Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of West Asia, Institute of Archaeology, University College London Adab Cross, Toni M. Director, Ankara Branch, American Research Institute in Turkey American Research Institute in Turkey Crouwel, J. H. Professor of Aegean Archaeology, Universiteit van Amsterdam Chariots; Wheel
Cohen, Rudolph Deputy Director, Israel Antiquities Authority Israel Antiquities Authority; Negev; Qadesh-Barnea; Salvage Excavation, article on Salvage Excvation in Israel; Survey of Israel
Crowfoot, Elisabeth Consultant in Archaeology (Textiles), Ancient Monuments Laboratory, English Heritage Crowfoot, John Winter
Cole, Dan P. Professor Emeritus of Religion, Lake Forest College Excavation Tools
Curtis, John Keeper, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, British Museum Nimrud
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS Curtis, Vesta Sarkhosh Curator of Oriental Coins, Department of Coins and Medals, British Museum Persia, article on Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Dalley, Stephanie Shillito Fellow is Assyriology, Oriental Institute; and Senior Research Fellow, Somerville College, University of Oxford Rimah, Tell erDaniels, Peter T . Doctoral candidate, University of Chicago Decipherment; Scribes and Scribal Techniques; Writing and Writing Systems; Writing Materials Danti, Michael D . Doctoral candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Eridu; Hassuna Davies, Philip R. Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield, England Damascus Document; War Scroll Davis, Jack L. Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology, University of Cincinnati Blegen, Carl William; Furtwiingler, Adolf Dayagi-Mendels, Michal Curator, Israelite and Persian Periods, The Israel Museum Cosmetics; Personal Hygiene D e Meyer, Leon Professor Emeritus of Assyriology, Universite de Gand Der, Tell edDemsky, Aaron Associate Professor of Biblical History, Bar Ilan University Literacy Dentzer, Jean-Marie Professor of Archaeology, Universite de Paris I Bosra Dessel, J. P. Independent scholar, Havertown, Pennsylvania 'Ajjul, Tell el-; 'Ein-Zippori, Tel; Excavation Strategy; Jaffa; Ketef Hinnom; Ramat Rahel; Soundings; Yavneh-Yam
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Dittmann, Reinhard Professor of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near and Middle East, Altorientalisches Seminar, Universitdt Milnster Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta Dollfus, Genevieve Paris, France Abu Hamid, Tell Donceel, Robert Professor of Ancient and Roman Archaeology of the Near East, Universite Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) Qumran Donceel- Voute, Pauline Professor of Eastern Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic Archaeology, Universite Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) Suweida Donner, Fred M . Associate Professor of Islamic History, University of Chicago Middle East Medievalists Dornemann, Rudolph H. Executive Director, American Schools of Oriental Research Amman; 'Amuq; Hadidi, Tell; Halaf, Tell; Hama; Qarqur, Tell; Til Barsip Dorsey, David A. Professor of Old Testament, Evangelical School of Theology Carts; Roads; Transportation Dothan, T r u d e Elcazar L. Sukenik Professor of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Deir el-Balah; Miqne, Tel; Philistines, article on Early Philistines Downey, Susan B. Professor of An History, University of California, Los Angeles Seleucia on the Tigris Drijvers, Han J. W. Professor of Semitic languages and Archaeology of the Near East, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Inscriptions, article on Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Dyson, Robert PL, Jr. Charles K. Williams II Director Emeritus, UniversilyMuseum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Hasanlu; History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Persia; Rowe, Alan
Dever, William G. Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson Abu Hawam, Tell; 'Ain es-Samiyeh; Akko; Ashdod; Be'er Resisim; Bethel; Beth-Shemesh; Biblical Archaeology; Ceramics, article on Syro-Palestinian Ceramics of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages; Coele-Syria; Daliyeh, Wadi ed-; Gezer; Hermon, Mount; Jebel Qa'aqir; Kabri, Tel; Keisan, Tell; Levant; Macalister, Robert Alexander Stewart; Mor, Tel; Qpm, Khirbet el-; Shaft Tombs; Syria-Palestine; Timna' (Negev)
Edelstein, Gershon Research Archaeologist, Israel Antiquities Authority 'Bin-Ya'el
de Vries, Bert Professor of History, Calvin College Arches; Architectural Drafting and Drawing; Conservation Archaeology; Umm el-Jimal
Edens, Christopher Research Associate, Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Harvard University Colonization; Tigris
Easton, D. F . Independent scholar, London Schliemann, Heinrich
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DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Edwards, Douglas R. Associate Professor of Religion, University of Puget Sound Cappadocia; Jotapata; Miletus Edzard, Dietz O. Professor of Assyriology, Institut fur Assyriologie und Hethitologie, Universitdl Miinchen Cuneiform; Tablet Eichler, Barry L. Associate Professor of Assyriology, University of Pennsylvania Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor Elgavish, Joseph Field Archaeologist, Atlil, Israel Shiqmona Enderlein, Volkmar Director, Museum fur Islamische Kunst, Slaatliche Museen zu Berlin Sarre, Friedrich Fagan, Brian M. Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara Koldewey, Robert; Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke Falconer, Steven E. Associate Professor of Anthropology, Arizona State University Hayyat, Tell elFargo, Valerie M. Independant scholar, Midland, Michigan Hesi, Tell elFentress, Elizabedi Andrew W. Mellon Professor in charge of the School of Classical Studies, American Academy in Rome Jerba Figueras, Pau Senior Lecturer in Christian Archaeology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev Church Inscriptions Fine, Steven Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literature and History, Baltimore Hebrew University Bar'am; Chorazin; Gamla; Masada; Susiya; Synagogue Inscriptions; Synagogues Finkelstein, Israel Professor of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University 'Izbet Sartah; Shiloh; Soudiern Samaria, Survey of Finney, Paul Corby Associate Professor of History and the History of Art, University of Missouri, St, Imiis Churches; Martyrion Fitzmyer, Joseph A., s.j. Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Catholic University of America Sefire Aramaic Inscriptions Flanagan, James W. Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan Professor of Catholic Studies, Case Western Reserve University Nimrin, Tell
Folda, Jaroslav Professor of the History of Art, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Crusader Period Fontan, Elisabeth Chief Curator, Departement des Antiquites Orientales, Musee du Louvre, Paris Botta, Paul-Emile Foster, Benjamin R. Professor of Assyriology, Yale University Akkadians Frame, Grant Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies, University of Toronto Balawat; Chaldeans; Khorsabad Frangipane, Marcella Researcher and Instructor in Prehistory of the Near East, Universita di Roma "La Sapienza"; and Director, Italian Excavations at Arslantepe Arslantepe Frankel, Rafael Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Haifa Olives Franken, H. J. Professor of Archaeology, Rijksuniversiteil Leiden Deir "Alia, Tell Freedman, David Noel Professor, Endowed Chair of Hebrew Biblical Studies, University of California, San Diego Albright, William Foxwell Freestone, Ian C. Materials Scientist, Department of Scientific Research, British Museum Vitreous Materials, article on Typology and Technology French, David H. Independent scholar, University of Cambridge British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara Freyne, Sean Professor of Theology, Trinity College, Dublin Cities, article on Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods; Galilee, article on Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods Frick, Frank S. Professor of Religious Studies, Albion College Cities, overview article Friend, Glenda W. Graduate student, in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Civilization, Baltimore Hebrew University Masada Fritz, Volkmar Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Archaeology, Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes Alt, Albrecht; Cities, article on Cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages; Dalman, Gustaf; Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft; Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes; Galling, Kurt; Israelites; Masos, Tel; Schumacher, Gottlieb; Sellin, Ernst
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS Gaber, Pamela Adjunct Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona Idalion; Vouni Gagniers, Jean des Professor of Classical Archaeology, Universite Laval, Quebec; and Director of Excavations, Soloi (retired) Soloi Gal, Zvi North Region Archaeologist, Israel Antiquities Authority Galilee, article on Galilee in the Bronze and Iron Ages Garrard, Andrew N . Lecturer in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University College London Azraq; Jilat, Wadi elGarsoi'an, Nina G. Gevork M. Avedissian Professor Emerita of Armenian History and Civilization, Columbia University Armenia Gasche, Hermann Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Universite de Gand Sippar Gascou, Jean Professor of Greek Papyrology, Universite des Sciences Humaines, Strasbourg Codex Gaube, Heinz Professor of Oriental Studies, Eberhard-Karls-Universitdt Tubingen Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties Gebel, Hans Georg Research Assistant, Basta Joint Archaeological Project, Freie Universtitat Berlin Basta Georgiades, Andreas Conservator of Antiquities, Cyprus Ministry of Communications and Works; and Head of the Conservation laboratory, Cyprus Museum Field Conservation Geraty, Lawrence T . President and Professor of Archaeology, La Sierra University Hesban; 'Umeiri, Tell elGichon, Mordechai Professor Emeritus of Roman Archaeology, Tel Aviv University 'Ein-Boqeq; Emmaus Gitin, Seymour Dorot Director and Professor of Archaeology, W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem Albright Institute of Archaeological Research; Glueck, Nelson; Miqne, Tel; Philistines, article on Late Philistines Gitden, Barry M . Professor of Biblical and Archaeological Studies, Baltimore Hebrew University Balk
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Gleason, Kathryn L. Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Cornell University; and Consulting Scholar, University of Pennsyvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Gardens, articles on Gardens in Preclassical Times and Gardens of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Glendinning, Matthew R. Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia Tile, article on Building Tile Glock, Albert E. Professor of Archaeology, Bir Zeit University (deceased) Ta'anach Gnoli, Gherardo Professor of Religious History of Iran and Central Asia, Universitd di Roma "La Sapienzia"; and President, Isliluto Italiuno per TAfrica e I'Oriente (Is.I.A.O.) Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente Gografe, Rudiger Field Archaeologist, Deutsches Archeologisches Instilut, Damascus Qinnishrin; Said Naya Gophna, Ram Associate Professor of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University 'Ein-Besor Goranson, Stephen Independanl scholar, Durham, North Carolina Essenes Gordon, Douglas L. Independent scholar, Lander, Wyoming Hammath Tiberias Gorny, Ronald L. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Anatolia, article on Prehistoric Anatolia Grabar, Oleg Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study; and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Islamic Art, Harvard University Mafjar, Khirbat al-; Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi; Sauvaget, Jean Graf, David F . Professor of Histoty, University of Miami, Coral Gables Idumeans; Nabateans; Palestine, article on Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods; Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions Gragg, Gene Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago Ethiopic; Hurrian; Semitic Languages; Soutii Arabian Grayson, A. Kirk Professor of Assyriology, University of Toronto Assyrians Greenberg, Raphael Senior Editor, Israel Antiquities Authority Beit Mirsim, Tell
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DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Greene, Joseph A. Assistant Director, Semitic Museum, Harvard University American Institute for Maghreb Studies; Kafranja, Wadi; Libya; Necropolis; Nordi Africa; Tourism and Archaeology Greenewalt, Crawford, Jr. Professor of Classics, University of California, Berkeley Sardis Greenstein, Edward L. Professor of Bible, Tel Aviv University Alalakh Texts Groh, Dennis E. Professor of Humanities and Archaeology, Illinois Wesleyan University Palestine, article on Palestine in the Byzantine Period; Rehovot; Subeita Gropp, Douglas M. Asssociale Professor of Semilics, The Catholic University of America Imperial Aramaic; Nerab Inscriptions Guerin, Alexandrine Field Archaeologist, Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes de Damas Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes Guichard, Michael Universite de Paris I (Sorbonne) Mari Texts Gunter, Ann C. Associate Curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Anatolia, article on Ancient Anatolia Giiterbock, Hans G. Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Hittitology, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Bogazkoy Gutmann, Joseph Professor Emeritus of Art History, Wayne State University Beth Alpha
Haldane, Douglas Co-director, Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Egypt Anchors Hallote, Rachel S. Visiting Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University Gibeon Hammond, Philip C. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Utah Hebron; Petra, article on History of Excavation Hansen, Donald P. Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Khafajeh; Kish; Samarra, article on Chalcolithic Period Hansen, Julie Associate Professor of Archaeology, Boston University Ethnobotany; Paleobotany Harrak, Amir Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies, University of Toronto Mitanni Hauptmann, Andreas Director, Institute of Archaeometallurgy, Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Bochum, Germany Feinan Hauptmann, Harald Director, Deutches Archdologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul Nevah Cori Hawass, Zahi Director General of Antiquities of the Giza Pyramids and Saqqara, Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egypt Cairo; Lower Egypt; Nubia; Saqqara; Upper Egypt Hawkins, J. D. Professor of Ancient Anatolian Languages, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Carchemish; Neo-Hittites; Tyana
Hayes, John L. Haak, Robert D. Associate Professor of Religion, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois Lecturer in Arabic, University of California, Berkeley Arabic Altars; Noth, Martin Hachlili, Rachel Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Haifa Herodian Jericho Hackett, Jo Ann Professor of the Practice of Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy, Harvard University Canaan; Canaanites Hadidi, Adnan Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology, Amman Private University
Hayes, John W. Independent archaeologist, Oxford; Former Curator, Greek and Roman Department, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto Ceramics, articles on Ceramics of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods and Ceramics of the Byzantine Period Healey, John F. Reader in Semitic Studies, University of Manchester Syriac
Qasr al-Meshatta; Umm Qeis
Heldman, Marilyn E. Independent Scholar, St. Louis, Missouri Adulis; Axum; Matara
Haldane, Cheryl W. Co-director, Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Egypt Mataria Boat
Helms, S. W. Research Associate in Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Sydney Qasr Burqu'
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS Hennessy, J. Basil Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern Archaeology, School of Archaeology, Classics, and Ancient History, University of Sydney Pella; Stewart, James Rivers Barrington; Teleilat el-Ghassul Henrickson, Robert C. Independent scholar, Takoma Park, Maryland Elamites Henry, Donald O. Professor of Anthropology, University of Tulsa Ras en-Naqb; Tabun Herbert, Sharon Professor of Classics, University of Michigan Anafa, Tel Herniary, Antoine Professor of Greek Archaeology, Universite de Provence (Aix-Marseille I) Amathus Herr, Larry G. Professor of Religious Studies, Canadian Union College Amman Airport Temple; Ammon; Periodization; Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages Herscher, Ellen Independent scholar, Washington, D. C. Lapithos Herzog, Ze'ev Associate Professor of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University Arad, article on Iron Age Period; Beersheba; Building Materials and Techniques, overview article; Fortifications, overview article and article on Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages; Gerisa, Tel; Michal, Tel; Public Buildings Hesse, Brian Professor of Anthropology, University of Alabama at Birmingham Animal Husbandry; Cattle and Oxen; Dogs; Equids; Paleozoology; Pigs Hirschfeld, Yizhar Field Archaeologist; and Ijeciurer in Classical Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University ofJerusalem Hammath-Gader; Tiberias Hodson, Yolande Honorary Secretary, Palestine Exploration Fund, London Conder, Claude Reignier; Kitchener, Horatio Herbert; Warren, Charles; Wilson, Charles William Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. Professor of Hittitology, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Hittite; Hittites Hoglund, Kenneth G. Associate Professor of Religion and Director of Graduate Studies in Religion, Wake Forest University Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Persian Period; Grid Plan; Recording Techniques Hole, Frank Professor of Anthropology, Yale University Ali Kosh; Deh Luran; Persia, article on Prehistoric Persia
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Holladay, John S., Jr. Professor of the Archaeology of Syria-Palestine, University of Toronto Four-Room House; House, article on Syro-Palestinian Houses; Maskhuta, Tell el-; Stables; Stratigraphy; Stratum; Winnett, Frederick Vincent Holland, Thomas A. Research Associate of Archaeology, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Jericho; Watzinger, Carl Holt, Frank L. Associate Professor of History, University of Houston Alexandrian Empire Holum, Kenneth G. Associate Professor of Histoty, University of Maryland, College Park Caesarea Homes-Fredericq, Denyse Head of Section, Musics Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels Lehun Hopkins, David C. Professor of Hebrew Scripture, Wesley Theological Seminary Agriculture; Cereals; Farmsteads Howard-Carter, Theresa Consulting Scholar for Mesopotamia and the Gulf, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Failaka; Kuwait Howe, T h o m a s Noble Associate Professor of Art Histoiy and Architecture, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas Architectural Orders Hrouda, Barthel Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Archaeology, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften Milnchen Andrae, Walter; Isin Hiibner, Ulrich Professor of Biblical Archaeology and Old Testament Studies, Inslitul fur Altes Testament und Biblische Archaologie, Universitdt Kiel Games Huehnergard, John Professor of Semitic Philology, Harvard University Akkadian; Emar Texts Huot, Jean-Louis Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Universite de Paris I (PantheonSorbonne) 'Oueili, Tell el-; Ubaid Ibrahim, Moawiyah Professor of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology and Muscology, Yarmouk University Jordan Valley; Sahab; Zeraqun, Khirbet ezIIan, David G. E. Wright Scholar, Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion 'Aro'er; Burial Sites; Dan; Dolmen; Grave Goods; Tombs; Tumulus
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DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Ilan, Ornit Curator, Rockefeller Museum Arad, article on Bronze Age Period Irvin, Dorothy Independent scholar, Durham, North Carolina Clothing; Tents Isaac, Ephraim Director, Institute of Semitic Studies, Princeton, New Jersey Ethiopia Israel, Felice University lecturer, Dipartimento de Scienze Glotto-Etnologiche, Universitd degli Studi di Genova Ammonite Inscriptions Izre'el, Shlomo Associate Professor of Semitic Linguistics, Tel Aviv University Amarna Tablets Jamieson-Drake, David W. Director, Institutional Research, Duke University Historical Archaeology Janssen, Caroline Ghent, Belgium Sippar Joel, Emile C. Research Chemist, Lead Isotope Program, Smithsonian Institution Lead Isotope Analysis Joffe, Alexander H. Lecturer in Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University Beth-Yerah; Far'ah, Tell el- (North); New Archaeology; Palestine, article on Palestine in the Bronze Age Johanson, Donald C. President and Pounder, Institute of Human Origins, Berkeley Hadar Johns, Jeremy University Lecturer in Islamic Archaeology, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford 'Ajlun; Faris, Khirbet; Kerak Jones, Barry A. Independent Scholar, Durham, North Carolina Scroll Jones, G. D. B. Professor of Archaeology, University of Manchester Leptis Magna Jorgensen, John S. Doctoral candidate and Graduate Instructor, Department of Religion, Duke University Inscription Sites Joukowsky, Martha Sharp Associate Professor, Center for Old World Art and Archaeology and Department of Anthropology, Brown University Archaeological Institute of America; Byblos; Dunand, Maurice; Dussaud, Rene; Petra, article on Recent Finds
Kaegi, Walter E. Professor of History, University of Chicago Historiography, article on Historiography of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Kafafi, Zeidan A. Director, Institute of Archeology and Anthropology, Yarmouk University Abu Hamid, Tell; Dhra'; Ghrubba Kaiser, Werner Former Director, Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Kairo Elephantine Kaufman, Ivan T . Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Hebrew, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts Samaria Ostraca Keall, E. J. Curator, West Asian Department, Royal Ontario Museum Mocha; Parthians; Sasanians; Zabid Kelly-Buccellati, Marilyn Professor of Art History, California State University, Los Angeles History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Syria; Mozan, Tell; Terqa Kennedy, David L. Associate Professor of Roman History and Roman Archaeology, University of Western Australia Roman Empire Khalifeh, Issam Ali Assistant Professor of Syro-Palestinian Archaeology, King Saud University Beirut; Sarepta; Sidon Killebrew, Ann Doctoral candidate, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Baths; Development and Archaeology; Furniture and Furnishings, article on Furnishings of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods; Qasrin King, G. R. D. Senior lecturer in Islamic Art and Archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Caravanserais; Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Islamic Period; Umayyad Caliphate Klengel-Brandt, Evelyn Director, Vorderasiatisches Museum der Slaatlichen Museen zu Berlin Prcussischer Kulturbesitz Babylon; Babylonians Kling, Barbara Adjunct Instructor of Classics, Montclair State University Apliki Kloner, Amos Professor of Archaeology, Bar Ilan University; and Israel Antiquities Authority Mareshah Knapp, A. Bernard Reader in Archaeology, University of Glasgow Aegean Islands
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS Knight, Douglas A. Professor of Hebrew Bible, Vanderbilt University Society of Biblical Literature Kochavi, Moshe Professor of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University Aphek; 'Ein-Gev; Esdar, Tel; Hadar, Tel; Rabud, Khirbet; Zeror, Tel Koenigs, Wolf Professor of Architectural History, Technische Universilal Miinchen Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul Kohlmeyer, Kay Professor of Field Archaeology, Fachhochschule fiir Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin Habuba Kabira Kondoleon, Christine Curator of Ancient. An, The Worcester Art Museum Mosaics Kotter, Wade R. Assistant Professor of Library Science, Weber State University Settlement Patterns
441
Lapp, Eric C. Research fellow, W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem DCP Spectrometry; Metals, article on Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods Lapp, Nancy L. Curator of Bible Lands Museum and Lecturer in Archaeology and Hebrew, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Ful, Tell el-; Lapp, Paul Wilbert; Rumeith, Tell erLassner, Jacob Phillip M. and Ethel Klutznick Professor ofJewish Civilization, Northwestern University Baghdad Lemaire, Andre Professor of Hebrew and Aramean Studies, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Histoire et Philologie, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne Arad Inscriptions; Deir 'Alia Inscriptions; Ostracon Lenzen, C. J. USAID, Amman, Jordan Beit Ras; Irbid; Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Byzantine Period
Krentz, Edgar Professor of New Testament, Lutheran School of Theology Basilicas
Leonard, Albert, Jr. Professor of Classics and Clasical Archaeology and of Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona Naukratis
Kuhne, Hartmut Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Freie Universitdt Berlin 'Aqar Quf; Sheikh Hamad, Tell
Lerner, Judith Independent scholar, New York Isfahan
Kuniholm, Peter Ian Professor of the History of Art and Archaeology, Cornell University Climatology; Wood LaBianca, 0ystein S. Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director, Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University Pastoral Nomadism Lacovara, Peter Assistant Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Egypt, article on Predynastic Egypt Lagarce, Jacques Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scienlifique, Paris Enkomi; Ras Ibn Hani Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. Stephen Philips Professor of Archaeology, Harvard University Persia, article on Ancient Persia; Tepe Yahya Lamprichs, Roland W. Lecturer in Near Eastern Archaeology, Orientalisches Seminar, AlbertLudwigs-Universtitdt Frieburg Assur Langhade, Jacques Professor of Arabic Language and Civilization, Universite de Bordeaux III; and Director, Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes de Damas Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes
Lesko, Barbara Switalski Administrative Research Assistant in Egyptology, Brown University Denon, Dominique Vivant; Mariette, Auguste; Maspero, Gaston; Murray, Margaret Alice; Naville, Edouard Levine, Lee I. Professor of Jewish History and Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Beth-She'arim Levy, Thomas E. Professor of Anthropology and Judaic Studies, University of California, San Diego Gilat; Mallon, Alexis; Shiqmim; Survey, Archaeological Liebowitz, Harold A. Associate Professor of Archaeology and Biblical History, University of Texas, Austin Beth-Gan; Bone, Ivory, and Shell, article on Artifacts of die Bronze and Iron Ages; Furniture and Furnishings, overview article; Yin'am, Tel Linder, Elisha Senior Lecturer in Maritime History and Archaeology, University of Haifa Ma'agan Mikha'el; Shavei-Zion, article on Underwater Site; Undersea Exploration Society of Israel Lindner, Rudi Paul Professor of History, University of Michigan Anatolia, article on Anatolia in the Islamic Period
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DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Littauer, Mary Aiken Independent scholar, Syosset, New York Chariots; Wheel
Maier, Franz Georg Professor of Ancient History, University of Zurich Paphos
Loffreda, Stanislao Faculty of Biblical Theology, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem Capernaum
Maigret, Alessandro de Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, University Oriental Institute, Naples Khawlan at-Tiyal
London, Gloria Anne Research Associate, Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum, Seattle Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology; Ceramics, article on Typology and Technology; Experimental Archaeology
Mandaville, Jon Professor of History and Director, Middle East Studies Center, Portland State University American Institute for Yemeni Studies
Long, Gary Alan Assistant Professor of Semitic Languages and Chair, Department of Hebrew Language, Jerusalem University College Eshmunazar Inscription Longstaff, Thomas R. W. Crawford Family Professor of Religious Studies, Colby College Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpretation Loprieno, Antonio Professor of Egyptology, University of California, Los Angeles Egyptian; Hieroglyphs Lundquist, John M. Susan and Douglas Dillon Chief Librarian of the Oriental Division, New York Public Library Biblical Temple Lynd-Porter, Adam L. Doctoral candidate in Religious Studies, Duke University Nessana Mabry, Jonathan B. Research Archaeologist, The Center for Desert Archaeology, Tucson Yabis, Wadi elMacDonald, Burton Professor of Theology, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Canada Hasa, Wadi el-; Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Macdonald, M . C. A. Leverhulme Research Associate, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History MacGillivray, J. Alexander Associate Professor of Archaeology, Columbia University Evans, Arthur; Minoans Macuch, Rudolf Seminar fur Semilistik und Arabistik, lnstitut fur Indogermanistik und Orientalistik, Freie Universitdt Berlin (deceased) Mandaic Magness, Jodi Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, Tufts University Ceramics, article on Ceramics of the Islamic Period; Herodium; Mausoleum; Peristyle House Magness-Gardiner, Bonnie Research Associate, Natural History Museum, Smithsonian Institution Cilicia; Goldman, Hetty; Hayyat, Tell el-; Seals
Manor, Dale W. Independent scholar, Prescott, Arizona Bethlehem; Judeideh, Tell el-; Munsell Chart Ma'oz, Zvi Uri Director of Excavations and Research, Sanctuary of Pan, Banias, for the Israel Antiquities Authority Golan Mare, W. Harold Professor of New Testament and Director, Archaeological Institute, Covenant Theological Seminary; and Director, Abila of the Decapolis Excavation Abila Margueron, Jean-Claude Director of Studies, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, IVe section, Paris Emar; Larsa; Mari; Palace; Parrot, Andre; Temples, article on Mesopotamian Temples Markoe, Glenn Curator of Classical and Near Eastern Art, Cincinnati Art Museum Phoenicians Martin, Geoffrey T . Edwards Professor Emeritus of Egyptology, University College London British School of Archaeology in Egypt Martin, Harriet P. Independent scholar, Birmingham, U.K. Fara Mas son, Olivier Professor Emeritus of Greek, Universite de Paris X Vogiie, Melchior de Matthews, R. J. Director, British School of Archaeology in Iraq; Acting Director, British School of Archaeology at Ankara; and Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge Girsu and Lagash; History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Mesopotamia; Jemdet Nasr Matthews, Victor H. Professor of Religious Studies, Southwest Missouri State University Historical Geography; Kraeling, Carl Hermann; Periodical Literature; Reference Works Matthiae, Paolo Director, Missione Archeologica Ilaliania a Ebla, Siria, Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche Archeologiche e Antropologiche dell'Antichitd, Universita degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" Ebla
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Mattingly, Gerald L. Professor of Biblical Studies, Johnson Bible College, Knoxville, Tennesee Callaway, Joseph Atlee
Michaelides, Demetrios Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Cyprus Dikaios, Porphyrios; Nicolaou, Kyriakos; Ohnefalsch-Richter, Max
Mazar, Amihai Professor of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Batash, Tel; Beth-Shean; Bull Site; Giloh; Hartuv; History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Israel; Mazar, Benjamin; Palestine, article on Palestine in the Iron Age; Qasile, Tell
Michalowski, Piott George C, Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern languages and Civilizations, University of Michigan Sumerians
McCane, Byron R. Assistant Professor of Religion, Converse College, Spartanburg Burial Techniques; Ossuary; Sarcophagus McClellan, Murray C. Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Boston University Vitreous Materials, articles on Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods and Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods McClellan, Thomas L. Independent Scholar, Aleppo, Syria Euphrates Dams, Survey of; Khabur; Mureybet; Qitar, ElMcCreery, David W. Professor of Religion, Willamette University American Center of Oriental Research; Harding, Gerald Lankester; Mazar, Tell el-; Nimrin, Tell McGovern, Patrick E. Research Scientist in Archaeological Ceramics and Chemistry, Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Baq'ah Valley
Miller, J. Maxwell Professor of Old Testament Studies, Etnoty University Central Moab; Moab Miller, Naomi F. Research Specialist in Archaeobotany, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Viticulture Miller, Stephen G. Professor of Classics, University of California, Berkeley Stadiums Miroschedji, Pierre de Directeur de Recherche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris Barrois, Augustin Georges; Chogha Zanbil; Guerin, Victor Honore; Hartuv; Tepe Mussian; Yarmut, Tel Mitchell, T . C. Former Keeper of Western Asiatic Antiquities, The British Museum (retired) Woolley, C. Leonard Mittmann, Siegfried
McQuitty, Alison Director, British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History Horsfield, George
Professor of Biblical Archaeology, Eberhard-Karls-Universitdt Tubingen Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-
Meinecke, Michael Professor of History of Islamic Art; Director, Museum fur Islamsiche Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (deceased) Manbij; Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi
Momigliano, Nicoletta Research Fellow in Aegean Archaeology, Balliol College, University of Oxford; and Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Bradford Mackenzie, Duncan
Mendels, Doron Professor of Ancient History, Hebrew University ofJerusalem Bar Kokhba Revolt; First Jewish Revolt; Hasmoneans; Historiography, article on Historiography of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods; Ptolemies; Seleucids
Moore, A. M. T . Associate Dean, Graduate School, Yale University Bouqras; Douara; Ksar 'Akil; Latamne; Syria, article on PrehistoricSyria; Villages
Mizrachi, Yonathan McRay, John Department of Near Eastern Language and Civilizations, 'Tel Aviv Professor of New Testament and Archaeology, Wheaton College, Illinois University Quadrant Plan Rujm el-Hiri
Meshel, Ze'ev Senior lecturer in Archaeology, Tel Aviv University Kuntillet 'Ajrud
Moyer, James C. Professor of Religious Studies, Southwest Missouri State University Periodical Literature; Reference Works
Meyers, Carol L. Professor of Biblical Studies and Archaeology, Duke University Gush Halav; Sepphoris
Muheisen, Mujahed Lecturer in Prehistory, Yarmouk University Basta
Meyers, Eric M. Professor of Religion and Archaeology, Duke University American Schools of Oriental Research; Avigad, Nahman; Catacombs; Council of American Overseas Research Centers; History of the Field, overview article; Meiron; Nabratein; Sepphoris; Shema', Khirbet; Synagogues
MuhlyJ. D. Professor of Ancient History, University of Pennsylvania; and Directorelect, American School of Classical Studies, Athens Cyprus; History of the Field, article on Archaeology in the Aegean Islands; Metals, articles on Typology and Technology and Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages
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Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome, o.p. Professor of New Testament, Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, Jerusalem Abel, Felix-Marie; Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise; Lagrange, Marie-Joseph; Rule of the Community; Vaux, Roland de; Vincent, Louis-FIugues Nagel, Wolfram University Professor for Near Eastern Archaeology, Archaologisches Institut, Universitat zu Koln Moortgat, Anton Negahban, Ezat O. Professor of Archaeology, University of Tehran Haft Tepe; Marlik Negev, Avraham Professor of Classical Archaeology, Hebrew University ofJerusalem Avdat; Halusa; Kurnub; Nabatean Inscriptions Nielsen, Kjeld Independent scholar, Elsinore, Denmark Incense Nissen, Hans J. Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Freie Universitat Berlin Mesopotamia, articles on Prehistoric Mesopotamia and Ancient Mesopotamia Nitzan, Bilhah Professor of Biblical Studies, Tel Aviv University Habakkuk Commentary Northedge, Alastair Maitre de Conferences (Lecturer), Islamic Art and Archaeology, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) 'Abbasid Caliphate; Mesopotamia, article on Mesopotamia in the Islamic Period; Samarra, article on Islamic Period Nun, Mendel Founder and Director, Sea of Galilee Fishing Museum, Bin Gev, Israel Fishing Nylander, Carl Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology and Director, Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome Ostcn, Hans Henning Erimar von der O'Brien, Julia M. Associate Professor of Religion, Meredith College, Raleigh, North Carolina Biblical Literature, article on Hebrew Scriptures O'Connor, David Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Abu Simbel; Meroe Ofer, Avi Judean Highland Project, Kibbutz Ma'anit, Israel Aharoni, Yohanan; Judah O'Kane, Bernard Professor of Islamic Art, American University in Cairo Mosque Olavarri, Emilio Professor of Old Testament, Seminario Metropolitano, Oviedo, Spain 'Ara'ir; Medeineh, Khirbet el-
Oleson, John Peter Professor of Classics and Archaeology, University of Victoria Humeima Olyan, Saul M . Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies, Brown University Cult Omura, Sachihiro Research Director, The Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan Oren, Eliezer D. Canada Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev Haror, Tel; Sera', Tel; Sinai Orthmann, Winfried Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Marlin-Luther-Universital Halle Chuera, Tell Ottosson, Magnus Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Studies, University of Uppsala Gilead Overstreet, William C. Research Geologist, United States Geological Survey (retired) Field, Henry Ozdogan, Mehmet Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Istanbul Cayonti Ozgiic, Tahsin Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Ankara Kanes Padgett, J. Michael Associate Curator of Ancient An, Art Museum, Princeton University Buder, Howard Crosby Palumbo, Gaetano Program Coordinator, Documentation, The Getty Conservation Institute Yabis, Wadi elPardee, Dennis Professor of Northwest Semitic Philology, University of Chicago Alphabet; Gezer Calendar; Inscriptions, article on Ancient Inscriptions; Lachish Inscriptions; Mesad Hashavyahu Texts; Moabite Stone; Proto-Canaanite; Proto-Sinaitic; Siloam Tunnel Inscription; Ugaritic; Ugarit Inscriptions Parker, S. Thomas Professor of History, North Carolina State University 'Aqaba; Decapolis; Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods; Limes Arabicus; Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods Parr, Peter J . Formerly Senior Lecturer, Archaeology of Western Asia, Institute of Archaeology, University College London Arabian Peninsula, article on The Arabian Peninsula before the Time of Islam; Dedan; Meda'in Saleh; Midian; Nebi Mend, Tell; Qurayyah; Tayma'
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS Patch, Diana Craig Independent scholar, East Rockaway, New York Abydos; American Research Center in Egypt; Asyut; Breasted, James Henry; Memphis; Merimde; Nile Patrich, Joseph Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Haifa Architectural Decoration; Monasteries Pearson, Birger A. Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara Alexandria Pedersen, Poul Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Odense Halikarnassos Peltenburg, Edgar Professor of Archaeology, University of Edinburgh History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Cyprus; Vitreous Materials, article on Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages Pernicka, Ernst Senior Researcher in Analytical Geochemistry and Archaeometry, MaxPlanck-Inslitut fur Kernphysik, Heidelberg; and Professor of Analytical Geochemistry, Universitdt Heidelberg Analytical Techniques; Microscopy; X-Ray Diffraction Analysis Peskowitz, Miriam Assistant Professor of Religion, University of Florida Textiles, article on Textiles in the Classical Period Piccirillo, Michele Professor of Biblical History and Geography and Director, Archaeological Mission in Jordan, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land; Machaerus; Madaba; Nebo, Mount Pitard, Wayne T . Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign Aleppo; Arameans; Damascus Pittman, Holly Associate Professor of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania Susa PodzorskL Patricia V. Research Associate, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley Naqada; Reisner, George Andrew Pollock, Susan Asssociate Professor of Anthropology, Slate University of New York at Binghamton Ur Pope, Marvin H. Louis M. Rabinowitz Professor Emeritus of Semitic Ixmguages and Literatures, Yale University Burrows, Millar Porat, Naomi Geologist and Head of the Luminescence Dating Tjiboralory, Geological Survey of Israel Petrography
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Porten, Bezalel Associate Professor of Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Egyptian Aramaic Texts Possehl, Gregory L. Curator, Asia Collections, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Wheeler, Mortimer Postgate, J. N . Professor of Assyriology, University of Cambridge Abu Salabikh Potts, D . T . Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology, University of Sydney Arabian Peninsula, article on The Arabian Peninsula in Prehistoric Times; Bahrain; Dilmun; History of the Field, article on Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula; Qal'at al-Bahrain; Qatar; Salt; Thaj; United Arab Emirates Powell, Marvin A. Distinguished Research Professor of History, Northern Illinois University Weights and Measures Prag, Kay Director, Ancient Jerusalem Project, British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem Iktanu, Tell Pratico, Gary D. Associate Professor of Old Testament, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Artifact Drafting and Drawing; Dothan; Kheleifeh, Tell elPrausnitz, Moshe W. Chief Inspector of Antiquities, Israel Department of Antiquities (retired) Achziv; Shavei-Zion, article on Land Site Pulak, Cemal Director of Research, Turkey, Institute of Nautical Archaeology al Texas A&M University Uluburun Pummer, Reinhard Professor of Religious Studies, University of Ottawa Samaritans Rashid, Sa'ad Abdul Aziz, alProfessor of Islamic Archaeology and Chairman, Department, of Archaeology and Muscology, King Said University, Riyadh Darb Zubaydah; Inscriptions, article on Inscriptions of the Islamic Period; Mecca; Medina Ratte, Christopher Assistant Professor, Department of Classics and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Pergamon; Priene Reade, Julian E. Assistant Keeper, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, British Museum Ra's al-Hadd; Taya, Tell Reich, Ronny Professor of Archaeology, University of Haifa; and Israel Antiquities Authority Avi-Yonah, Michael; Dunayevsky, Immanuel; Mesad Hashavyahu; Ritual Baths; Weill, Raymond; Yeivin, Shmuel
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Rends burg, Gary A. Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University Eblaites
Running, Leona Glidden Professor Emerita of Biblical Languages, Andrews University Albright, William Foxwell
Richard, Suzanne Drew University Iskander, Khirbet
Rupp, David W. Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology and Art, Brock University Salamis
Roaf, Michael Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Institut fur Vorderasialische Archdologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit'dtMiinchen British School of Archaeology in Iraq; Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project; Hamrin Dam Salvage Project
Rutgers, Leonard Victor Research Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Utrecht Catacombs; Nederlands Historisch-Archeologisch Instituut te Istanbul
Roche, Marie-Jeanne Lecturer in Ancient History, Universite de Paris VII Tannur, Khirbet et-
St. Laurent, Beatrice Affiliate, Center for Middle East Studies, Harvard University Tile, article on Decorative Tile
Rollefson, Gary O. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, San Diego State University; and Research Associate, Peabody Museum, Howard University 'Ain Ghazal; Transjordan, article on Prehistoric Transjordan
Saliby, Nassib Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, Damascus 'Amrit
Rollig, Wolfgang Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Culture, Altorientalisches Seminar, Eberhard-Karls- Universital Tubingen Schroder, Paul G. A. Rosen, Arlene Miller Adjunct Lecturer in Archaeology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev Paleoenvironmental Reconsttuction; Tell Rosen, Steven A. Professor of Archaeology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev Lithics, articles on Typology and Technology and Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam Leo A. Mayer Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology, Hebrew University ofJerusalem Nishapur; Palestine, article on Palestine in the Islamic Period; Persia, article on Persia in the Islamic Period; Ramla Rossiter, J. J. Associate Professor of Classics, University of Alberta Villa
Salles, Jean-Francois Director, Maison de VOrient Mediterrancen, Universite Lumiere, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon Sewers Sanders, Donald H. President, Learning Sites, Inc., Williamstown, Massachusetts Nemrud Dagi Saradi, Helen Associate Professor of Classical and Byzantine Studies, University of Guelph Byzantine Empire; Constantinople Sass, Benjamin Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Haifa Jewelry Sauer, James A. Research Associate, Semitic Museum, Harvard University Caton-Thompson, Gertrude; Ceramics, article on Ceramics of the Islamic Period; History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Jordan; Phillips, Wendell; Transjordan, article on Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages
Rothman, Mitchell S. Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Widener University, Chester, Pennsylvania Tepe Gawra
Scanlon, George T . Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, American University in Cairo Egypt, article on Islamic Egypt; Fatimid Dynasty; Fustat
Roussin, Lucille A. Independent scholar, New York Art Sites; Mosaics
Schaub, R. Thomas Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Bab edh-Dhra'; Soutiieast Dead Sea Plain
Rowan, Yorke M. Doctoral candidate in Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin Lithics, article on Artifacts of the Chalcolithic Period
Schick, Robert Professor of Islamic Archaeology, Al-Quds University, Jerusalem Umm er-Rasas
Rowland, Robert J., Jr. Professor of History and Dean of Arts and Sciences, Loyola University Sardinia
Schloen, David Assistant Professor of Syro-Palestinian Archaeology, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Ashkelon
Ruggles, D. Fairchild Visiting Scholar in Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University Building Materials and Techniques, article on Materials and Techniques of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods; Fortifications, article on Fortifications of the Islamic Period
Schwartz, Glenn M . Associate Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Johns Hopkins University Brak, Tell; Salvage Excavation, overview article
DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS Scott, Jane Ayer Research Curator and Head of Sardis Publications, Harvard University Art Museums Anatolia, article on Anatolia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Sease, Catherine Head, Division of Conservation, Field Museum, Chicago Artifact Conservation Seeden, Helga Professor of Archaeology, American University of Beirut Baramki, Dimitri Constantine; Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient; Seyrig, Henri Segal, Arthur Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Haifa Theaters Seger, Joe D . Director, Cobb Institute of Archaeology; and Professor of Religion and Anthropology, Mississippi State University 'Azekah; Lahav; Resistivity; Shechem; Water Tunnels
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Smith, Patricia Professor of Morphological Sciences, Hadassah Faculty of Dental Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Skeletal Analysis Smitit, Robert Houston Fox Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, The College of Wooster Lamps; Pella Smith, R. R. R. Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art, University of Oxford; and Director, New York University Excavations al Aphrodisias Aphrodisias Smith, Robert Wayne Associate Professor of History, Florida Christian College Funerary Monuments, article on Monuments of the Late Roman through Islamic Periods Solecki, Ralph S. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Columbia University; and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Texas AGfM University Shanidar Cave
Seidl, Ursula Independent scholar, Munich Izeh; Naqsh-i Rustam
Soren, David Professor of Classics, University of Arizona Kourion
Shiloh, Tamar Chief Superintendent of Biblical Studies in the Israel School System, Ministiy of Education, Culture, and Sport, Israel Shiloh, Yigal
Soutii, Alison K. Field Director, Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimilrios Excavations, Kalavasos, Larnaca, Cyprus Kalavasos
Shore, A. F. Ormskirk, Lancashire, England (deceased) Nitria
Spencer, Patricia Secretary, The Egypt Exploration Society, London Egypt Exploration Society
Sigrist, Marcel Director and Professor of Assyriology, Ecole Biblique et Archiologique Francaise Emar Silberman, Neil Asher Independent scholar, Branford, Connecticut American Palestine Exploration Society; Clermont-Ganneau, Charles; Eugenics Movement; Fisher, Clarence Stanley; Guy, Philip Langstaffe Orde; Ideology and Archaeology; Merrill, Selah; Nationalism and Archaeology; Petrie, William Matthew Flinders; Robinson, Edward; Stanhope, Hester Lucy; Sukenik, Eleazar Lipa; Yadin, Yigael Silverman, David Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Curator, Egyptian Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Erman, Adolf Simpson, St. John Curator, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, British Museum Bone, Ivory, and Shell, article on Artifacts of the Persian uhrough Roman Periods; Ctesiphon; Mesopotamia, article an Mesopotamia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Slanski, Kathryn E. Doctoral candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University Hogarth, David George
Spycket, Agnes Field Archaeologist, Departement des Antiquites Oricntales, Musee du I-jMvre, Paris Ghirshman, Roman Steffy, J. Richard Sara W. and George O. Yamini Professor Emeritus of Nautical Archaeology, Institute of Nautical Archaeology and Texas A&M University 'Atlit Ram Stein, Diana L. lecturer in Western Asiatic Archaeology, Centre for Extra-mitral Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London Alalakh; Heinrich, Ernst; Hurrians; Kassites; Nuzi Stern, Ephraim Bernard M. Lauterman Professor of Biblical Archaeology, Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Biblical Archaeology, Hebrew Unviersity ofJerusalem Ceramics, article on Ceramics of the Persian Period; Cities, article on Cities of the Persian Period; Dor; 'Ein-Gedi; Furniture and Furnishings, article on Furnishings of the Persian Period Stone, Elizabeur C. Associate Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York at Stony Brook House, article on Mesopotamian Houses; Mashkan-shapir; Ziggurat Strange, James F . Professor of Religious Studies, University of South Florida Nazareth
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DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Stronach, David Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of California, Berkeley Bisitun; Mallowan, Max Edgar Lucien; Nineveh; Pasargadae; Persepolis Styrenius, Cari-Gustaf Former Director, Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet), Stockholm Gjerstad, Einar Sumner, William M . Director, The Oriental Institute, and Professor of Archaeology, University of Chicago American Institute of Iranian Studies; Malyan Swiny, Stuart Institute of Cypriot Studies, State University of New York, Albany; and Past Director, Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute; Di Cesnola, Luigi Palma; McFadden, George; Schaeffer, Claude F.-A.; Vounous Tappy, Ron Assistant Professor of the Archaeology and Literature of Ancient Israel, Westmont College, Santa Barbara Samaria Tate, Georges Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology, Universite de Versailles; Former Director, Institut Francaise dArcheologie du Proche Orient; and Director, Mission Francaise de la Syrie du Nord Antioch on Orontes; Ma'lula; Poidebard, R. P. Antoine; Qal'at Sim'an; Samosata; Sergilla; Syria, article on Syria in the Byzantine Period Teixidor, Javier Professor of Semitic Studies, College de France, Paris Ahiram Inscription; Hatra Inscriptions; Palmyrene Inscriptions Terian, Abraham Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Sterling College Armenian Thuesen, Ingolf Associate Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Carsten Niebuhr Institute, University of Copenhagen Diyala Tindel, Raymond D . Registrar and Associate Curator, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Himyar; Zafar Todd, Ian A. Director, Vasilikos Valley Project, Kalavasos, Larnaca, Cyprus Catal Hoytik; Kalavasos; Sanidha Toueir, Kassem Directorate General, Antiquities and Museums, Syrian National Museum, Damascus
Tsuk, Tsvika Lndependent scholar, Ramat Gan, Israel Aqueducts; Cisterns; Flydraulics; Hydrology; Pools; Reservoirs T u b b , Jonathan N . Curator, Syria-Palestine, Department of Western Asian Antiquities, British Museum Museums and Museology; Sa'idiyeh, Tell esTuchelt, Klaus Chief Director and Professor, Deutsches Archaologisches Institut Didyma Tushingham, A. D . Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies, University of Toronto; Head, Art and Archaeology Division and Chief Archaeologist, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto Dibon; Kenyon, Kathleen Mary Tzaferis, Vassilios Director of Excavations and Surveys, Israel Antiquities Authority Banias; Kursi Ulbert, Tilo Professor of Archaeology and Director, Instituto Arqueoldgico Alemdn, Madrid Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Damaskus; Rusafa Ussishkin, David Professor of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University Jezreel, Tel; Lachish; Megiddo; Starkey, James L.; Tufnell, Olga Valla, Francois R. Research Associate, Laboratoire d'Ethnologie Prehistorique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris Neuville, Rene Van Beek, Gus W. Curator, Old World Archaeology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Hadhramaut; Hajar Bin Humeid; Hureidha; Jemmeh, Tell; Marib; Qataban; Sheba; Timna' (Arabia) Van Elderen, Bastiaan Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies, Vrije Universiteil, Amsterdam Nag Hammadi Veenhof, Klaas R. Professor of Assyriology, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden Kiiltepe Texts; Libraries and Archives Vitali, Vanda Assistant Professor of Materials Science, University of Toronto Statistical Applications Viviano, Benedict T . Professor of Nezv Testament, Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise de Jerusalem
Raqqa, ar-; Syria, article on Syria in the Islamic Period Sailer, Sylvester John T r u m p , D . H. Staff Tutor in Archaeology, Board of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge Malta
Voigt, Mary M. Associate Professor of Anthropology, College of William and Mary Gordion; Hajji Firuz
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Wachsmann, Shelley Meadows Assistant Professor of Biblical Archaeology, Nautical Archaeology Program, Texas A&M University Anchors; Galilee Boat; Seafaring; Shfifonim; Ships and Boats
Whitcomb, Donald Research Associate (Associate Professor), The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago 'Aqaba
Wapnish, Paula Research Associate in Anthropology, University of Alabama at Birmingham Bone, Ivory, and Shell, article on Typology and Technology; Camels; Cats; Dogs; Equids; Edinozoology; Lions; Paleozoology
White, Donald Chief Curator, Mediterranean Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Professor of Greek and Roman Archaeology Cyrene; Ptolemais
Warburton, David A. Lecturer in Near Eastern Archaeology, Universildt Bern Aden; San'a; Yemen
White, L. Michael Professor of Religion, Obertin College Baptisteries; Biblical Literature, article on New Testament; DuraEuropos; Hatra; House Churches
Ward, William A. Professor of Egyptology and Director, Program in Ancient Studies, Brown University Phoenicia; Tyre Watson, Patty Jo Edward Mallinckrodl Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis Jarmo Weeks, Kent R. Professor of Egyptology, American University in Cairo History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Egypt Weinstein, James M . Visiting Scholar, Cornell University; Co-Editor, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Delta; Egypt, article on Dynastic Egypt; Far'ah, Tell el- (South); Hyksos; Pyramids; Yahudiyeh, Tell el-
Whitehouse, David Director, The Coming Museum of Glass Glass Wilfong, Terry G. Assistant. Curator of Fieldwork, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan Coptic; Oxyrhynchus Papyri Willis, Lloyd A. Professor of Religion, Southwestern Adventist College History of the Field, article on Archaeology in Jordan Wilson, Karen L. Curator, The Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago Frankfort, Henri
Weiss, Harvey Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Yale University Akkade; Leilan, Tell
Wimmer, Donald H. Professor of Religious Studies and Director, Archaeology Studies Program, Seton Hall University Safut, Tell
Welch, Anthony Professor of PEsUny in Art and Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria
Windfuhr, Gemot L. Professor of Iranian Studies, University of Michigan Indo-European Languages; Persian
Gardens, article on Gardens of the Islamic Period Wells, Colin M . T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of Classical Studies, and Chair, Department of Classical Studies, Trinity University, San Antonio Carthage Wendorf, Fred Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory, Southern Methodist University Egypt, article on Prehistoric Egypt Wenke, Robert J. Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington Faiyum Werr, Lamia al-Gailani London, England Safar, Fuad Wescoat, Bonna D . Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University Assos
Wineland, John D . Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Hsitory, Roanoke Bible College Creswell, Keppel Archibald Cameron; Smith, George Adam Wise, Michael O. Independent scholar, Des Plaines, Illinois Dead Sea Scrolls; Genesis Apocryphon; Murabba'at; Palestinian Aramaic; Temple Scroll Wolff, Samuel R. Field Archaeologist and Researcher, Israel Antiquities Authority Spectroscopy Wolters, Al Professor of Religion and Theology, Redeemer College Copper Scroll Worschech, Udo Professor of Old Testament Studies, Thcologisches Hochschule Friedensau Balu'
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DIRECTORY OF CONTRIBUTORS
Wright, G. R. H. Consultant in Monument Restoration; and Research Associate, Archaeological Center, Universitdt Leiden Building Materials and Techniques, articles on Materials and Techniques of the Bronze and Iron Ages and Materials and Techniques of the Persian through Roman Periods; Restoration and Conservation Wright, Henry T., Ill Curator of Archaeology, Museum of Anthropology, and Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan Tepe Farukhabad Wright, J. Edward Assistant Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, University of Arizona Judean Desert Caves Wright, Katherine I. Lecturer in Archaeology, Institute of Archeology, University College Ixmdon Shu'eib, Wadi Wright, Robert B. Professor of Hebrew Bible and Post-Biblical Literature, Temple University Photography, article on Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts Xella, Paolo Researcher in Chief, C.N.R. Istituto perla Civiltd Fenicia e Punica, Rome; and Adjunct Professor of Oriental Studies, Eberhard-KarlsUniversitdt Tubingen Marseille Tariff Yakar, Jak Professor of Anatolian Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University Hacilar; History of the Field, article on Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau; Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr Yassine, Khair Chairman, Department of Histoiy and Archaeology, United Arab Emirates University Mazar, Tell elYellin, Joseph Associate Professor of Archaeometry and Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Neutron Activation Analysis Yener, K. Aslihan Assistant Professor of Anatolian Archaeology, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Gdltepe; Kestel; Taurus Mountains Yon, Marguerite Professor and Directeur de Recherche in Oriental Archaeology, Maison de I'Orienl (Universite Lumiere Lyon 2-CNRS) French Archaeological Missions; Kition; Stelae; Ugarit Young, T . Cuyler, Jr. Curator, West Asian Department, Royal Ontario Museum Godin Tepe; Medes; Persians
Zadok, Ran Professor of Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Judaic Studies, Tel Aviv University Names and Naming Zarins, Juris Professor of Anthropology, Southwest Missouri State University Euphrates; Najran; Oman; Sohar; Ubar Zayadine, Fawzi Deputy Director, Department of Antiquities, Jordan 'Iraq cl-Amir Zeder, Melinda A. Associate Curator of Archaeology, National Museum of Natural Histoiy, Smithsonian Institution Sheep and Goats Zertal, Adam Professor of Archaeology, University of Haifa Ebal, Mount; Nordiern Samaria, Survey of Zetder, Richard L. Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Eridu; Hilprecht, Hermann Vollrat; Nippur; Peters, John Punnett Zevit, Ziony Professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures, University of Judaism Greenfield, Jonas Carl Zias, Joseph Curator of Anthropology and Archaeology, Israel Antiquities Authority Paleopathology Zimansky, Paul E. Associate Professor of Archaeology, Boston University Urartu Zimmerman, Larry J. Distinguished Regents Professor of Anthropology, University of South Dakota Ethics and Archaeology Zivie-Coche, Cristiane Directeur d'Eludes, Religion de I'Egypte Ancienne, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences Religieuses, Paris Giza Zorn, Jeffrey R. Independent scholar, San Jacinto, California Bade, William Frederic; Nasbeh, Tell enZournatzi, Antigoni Associate Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology, Inslilut d'Archeologie et d'Histoire Anciennes, Maison de I'Orient Mediterraneen et Universite Lumiere Lyon-2 Bisitun Zuckerman, Bruce Associate Professor of Religion, University of Southern California Photography, article on Photography of Manuscripts Zuckerman, Kenneth Partner, West Semitic Research, California Photography, article on Photography of Manuscripts
S Y N O P T I C
OUTLINE OF
C O N T E N T S
T h e outline presented on die following pages is intended to provide a general view of the conceptual scheme of this encyclopedia. Entries are arranged in the conceptual categories listed below. Because the headings for these categories are not necessarily mutually exclu sive, some entries in die encyclopedia are listed more than once. Lands and Peoples Syria-Palestine Mesopotamia Anatolia Cyprus and the Aegean Persia Arabian Peninsula Egypt North Africa Semitic East Africa Major Empires Writing, Language, Texts Language Families and Languages Inscriptions and Texts Writing and Literacy Writing Materials and Technologies Material Culture Subsistence, Trade, and Society Built Structures Artifacts and Technologies Archaeological Methods Types of Archaeology Site Typology Artifact Analysis Dating Techniques Provenience Studies Field Methods Allied Sciences and Disciplines History of Archaeology Theory and Practice Narrative Histories Organizations and Institutions Biographies
451
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SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF CONTENTS
LANDS AND P E O P L E S Syria-Palestine Overviews Palestine Prehistoric Palestine Palestine in the Bronze Age Palestine in the Iron Age Palestine in the Persian through Roman Periods Palestine in the Byzantine Period Palestine in the Islamic Period Phoenicia Syria Prehistoric Syria Syria in the Bronze Age Syria in the Iron Age Syria in the Persian through Roman Periods Syria in die Byzantine Period Syria in the Islamic Period
Transjordan Prehistoric Transjordan Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages Transjordan in the Persian through Roman Periods Transjordan in die Byzantine Period Transjordan in the Islamic Period
Regional Definitions Coele-Syria Levant Syria-Palestine Peoples, Polities, and Events Amnion Arameans Bar Kokhba Revolt Canaan Canaanites Central Moab Eblaites Edom Essenes First Jewish Revolt Gilead Hasmoneans Idumeans Israelites Mitanni Moab Nabateans Neo-Hittites Philistines
Early Philistines Late Philistines Phoenicians Samaritans Subregions and Sites in Palestine Abu Hawam, Tell Achziv Ai Ain es-Samiyeh Ajjul, Tell elAkko Anafa, Tel Aphek Arad Bronze Age Period Iron Age Period 'Aro'er Ashdod Ashkelon Adit Ram Avdat 'Azekah Banias Bar'am Batash, Tel Be'er Resisim Beersheba Beit Mirsim, Tell Beth Alpha Bethel Beth-Gan Bethlehem Bethsaida Beth-Shean Beth-She'arim Beth-Shemesh Beth-Yerah Beth-Zur ' Bull Site Caesarea Capernaum Carmel Caves Chorazin Daliyeh, Wadi edDan Decapolis Deir el-Balah Dor Doth an Ebal, Mount 'Einan 'Ein-Besor 'Ein-Boqeq 'Ein-Gedi 'Ein-Gev 'Ein-Shadud 'Ein-Ya'el
'Ein-Zippori, Tel Emmaus 'Erani, Tel Esdar, Tel Far'ah, Tell el- (North) Far'ah, Tell el- (Soutii) Ful, Tell elGalilee Galilee in the Bronze and Iron Ages Galilee in the Hellenistic through Byzantine Periods
Galilee Boat Gamla Gerisa, Tel Gezer Gibeon Gilat Giloh Golan Gush Halav Hadar,'Tel Halusa Hammath-Gader Hammath Tiberias Haror, Tel Hartuv Hatra Hayonim Hazor Hebron Hermon, Mount Herodian lericho Herodium Hesi, Tell el'Ira, Tel Izbet Sartah Jaffa Jebel Qa'aqir Jemmeh, Tell Jericho Jerusalem Jezreel, Tel Jotapata Judah Judean Desert Caves Judeideh, Tell elKabri, Tel Kefar Hananyah Keisan, Tell Ketef Hinnom Kitan, Tel Kuntillet 'Ajrud Kumub Kursi Lachish Lahav Ma'agan Mikha'el Magdala
SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF CONTENTS Mareshah Masada Masos, Tel Megiddo Meiron Mesad Hashavyahu Michal, Tel Miqne, Tel Mor, Tel Munhata Nabratein Nahal Oren Nami, Tel Nasbeh, Tell enNazareth Negev Nessana Northern Samaria, Survey of Qadesh-Barnea Qasile, Tell Qasrin Qiri, Tel Qitmit, Horvat Qom, Khirbet elQumran Rabud, Khirbet Radannah Ramat Rahel Ramla Ras, Tell erRehovot Rujm el-Hiri Samaria Sepphoris Sera , Tel Sha'ar ha-Golan Shavei-Zion Land Site Underwater Site Shechem Shema', Khirbet Shiloh Shiqmim Shiqmona Soudiern Samaria, Survey of Subeita Susiya Ta'anach Tabgha Tabor, Mount Tabun Tiberias Timna' (Negev) 'Ubeidiya Wawiyat, Tell elYarmut, Tel Yavneh-Yam Yiftahel 1
Yin'am, Tel Yoqne'am Zeror, Tel Subregions and Sites in Syria 'Ain Dara' Alalakh Aleppo 'Amrit 'Anjar Antioch on Orontes Apamea Arwad Baalbek Bassit Beirut Bosra Bouqras Brak, Tell Byblos Chuera, Tell Damascus Douara Dura-Europos Ebla Emar Euphrates Dams, Survey of Fakhariyah, Tell Golan Habuba Kabira Hadidi, Tell Halaf, Tell Hama Horns Kamid el-Loz Kazel, Tell elKhabur Khaldeh Ksar 'Akil Latamne Leilan, Tell Ma'lula Manbij Mari Mishrifeh Mozan, Tell Mureybet Nebi Mend, Tell Palmyra Qal'at Sim'an Qarqur, Tell Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi Qinnishrin Qitar, elRaqqa, arRas Ibn Hani Rifa'at, Tell
Rusafa Said Naya Sarepta Sergilla Sheikh Hamad, Tell Sidon Sukas, Tell Suweida Terqa Til Barsip Tyre Ugarit Subregions and Sites in Transjordan Abila Abu Hamid, Tell 'Ain Ghazal 'Ajlun Amman Amman Airport Temple 'Aqaba 'Ara'ir Azraq Bab edh-Dhra' Badiat ash-Sham Balu' Baq'ah Valley Basta Beidha Beit Ras Buseirah Decapolis Deir 'Alia, Tell Dhra' Dibon Faris, Khirbet Feinan Ghrubba Hasa, Wadi elHayyat, Tell elHesban Humeima Iktanu, Tell 'Iraq el-Amir Irbid Iskander, Khirbet Jawa Jerash Jilat, Wadi elJordan Valley Kafranja, Wadi Kerak Kheleifeh, Tell elLehun Limes Arabicus Machaerus Madaba
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SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF.CONTENTS
Mafjar, Khirbat alMazar, Tell elMedeineh, Khirbet elNebo, Mount Nimrin, Tell Pella Petra History of Excavation Recent Finds
Qasr al-Hallabat Qasr al-Meshatta Qasr Burqu' Qusayr 'Amra Ras en-Naqb Rumeith, Tell erSafut, Tell Sahab Sa'idiyeh, Tell esSamosata Shu'eib, Wadi Southeast Dead Sea Plain Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Tannur, Khirbet etTawilan Teleilat el-Ghassul 'Umeiri, Tell elUmm el-Biyara Umm el-Jimal U m m er-Rasas Umm Qeis Yabis, Wadi elZeraqun, Khirbet ezZiqlab, Wadi
Mesopotamia Overviews Mesopotamia Prehistoric Mesopotamia Ancient Mesopotamia Mesopotamia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Mesopotamia in the Islamic Period
Peoples and Polities Akkadians Amorites Assyrians Babylonians Chaldeans Kassites Sumerians Subregions and Sites Abu Salabikh Adab Akkade
'Aqar Quf Assur Babylon Baghdad Balawat Der, Tell edDiyala Eridu Eshnunna Eski Mosul D a m Salvage Project Euphrates Fara Girsu and Lagash Hamrin Dam Salvage Project Hassuna
Isin Jarmo Jemdet Nasr Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta Khafajeh Khorsabad Kish Larsa Mashkan-shapir Nimrud Nineveh Nippur Nuzi 'Oueili, Tell elRimah, Tell erSamarra Chalcolithic Period Islamic Period Seleucia on the Tigris
Shanidar Cave Sippar Taya, Tell Tepe Gawra Tigris Ubaid Ur Uruk-Warka
Scythians Urartu Subregions and Sites 'Amuq Aphrodisias Armenia Arslantepe Assos Bogazkoy Cape Gelidonya Cappadocia Carchemish Catal Hoyiik Cayonu Chalcedon Cilicia Constantinople Didyma Ephesus Goltepe Gordion Hacilar Halikarnassos Kanes Kestel Lycia Miletus Nemrud Dagi Nevah Cori Pergamon Priene Sardis Serce Limani Seytan Deresi Taurus Mountains Tyana Uluburun Yassiada Wrecks
Cyprus and the Aegean Overviews
Anatolia Overviews Anatolia Prehistoric Anatolia Ancient Anatolia Anatolia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Anatolia in die Islamic Period
Peoples and Polities Cimmerians Hittites Hurrians Luwians
Aegean Islands Crete Cyprus Peoples and Polities Minoans Subregions and Sites Amatlius Apliki Enkomi Hala Sultan Tekke Idalion Kalavasos Kition
SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF CONTENTS Kourion Lapithos Paphos Salamis Sanidha Soloi Vouni Vounous
Persia Overviews Persia Prehistoric Persia Ancient Persia Persia from Alexander to the Rise of Islam Persia in die Islamic Period
The Arabian Peninsula before the Time of Islam The Arabian Peninsula in Islamic Times
Peoples and Polities Bahrain Dilmun Hadhramaut Himyar Kuwait Midian Oman Qataban Qatar Sheba United Arab Emirates Yemen
Peoples and Polities
Subregions and Sites
Elamites Medes Pardrians Persians Sasanians Scydiians
Aden Darb Zubaydah Dedan Failaka Hajar Bin Humeid Hureidha Jubah, Wadi alKhawlan at-Tiyal Marib Mecca Meda'in Saleh Medina Mocha Najran Qal'at al-Bahrain Qaryat al-Fau Qurayyah Ra's al-Hadd San'a Shabwa Sohar Tayma' Thaj Timna' (Arabia) Ubar Zabid Zafar
Subregions and Sites Ali Kosh Bisitun Chogha Zanbil Ctesiphon Deh Luran Ecbatana Godin Tepe Haft Tepe Hajji Firuz Hasanlu Isfahan Izeh Malyan Marlik Naqsh-i Rustam Nishapur Pasargadae Persepolis Susa Tepe Farukhabad Tepe Mussian Tepe Yahya
Arabian Peninsula Overviews Arabian Peninsula T h e Arabian Peninsula in Prehistoric Times
Egypt Overviews Prehistoric Egypt Predynastic Egypt Dynastic Egypt Postdynastic Egypt Islamic Egypt
Peoples and Polities Hyksos Subregions and Sites Abu Simbel Abydos Alexandria Amarna, Tell elAsyut Cairo Cyrene Dab'a, Tell edDelta Elephandne Faiyum Fustat Giza Heliopolis Lower Egypt Maskhuta, Tell elMataria Boat Memphis Merimde Nag Hammadi Naqada Naukratis Nile Nitria Oxyrhynchus Ptolemais Saqqara Sinai Upper Egypt Yahudiyeh, Tell el-
North Africa Overviews North Africa Peoples and Polities Libya Malta Sardinia Subregions and Sites Carthage Jerba Leptis Magna
Semitic East Africa Peoples and Polities Axum Ediiopia Nubia
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SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF CONTENTS
Subregions and Sites Adulis Hadar Matara Meroe Major Empires "Abbasid Caliphate Alexandrian Empire Ayyubid-Mamluk Dynasties Byzantine Empire Crusader Period Fatimid Dynasty Hyksos Ptolemies Roman Empire Seleucids Umayyad Caliphate WRITING, LANGUAGE, T E X T S Language Families and Languages Akkadian Arabic Aramaic Language and Literature Armenian Coptic Egyptian Ethiopic Greek Hebrew Language and Literature Hittite Hurrian Imperial Aramaic Indo-European Languages Latin Mandaic Palestinian Aramaic Persian Phoenician-Punic Proto-Canaanite Proto-Sinaitic Semitic Languages Soutii Arabian Sumerian Syriac Ugaritic Inscriptions and Texts Principal
Articles
Biblical Literature Hebrew Scriptures New Testament
Historiography Historiography of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Historiography of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Inscriptions Ancient Inscriptions Inscriptions of the Classical Period Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Inscriptions of the Islamic Period Supporting
Articles
Ahiram Inscription Alalakh Texts Amarna Tablets Ammonite Inscriptions Arad Inscriptions Church Inscriptions Copper Scroll Damascus Document Dead Sea Scrolls Deir 'Alia Inscriptions Ebla Texts Egyptian Aramaic Texts Emar Texts Eshmunazar Inscription Fakhariyah Aramaic Inscription Genesis Apocryphon Gezer Calendar Habakkuk Commentary Hatra Inscriptions Karatepe Phoenician Inscriptions Kiiltepe Texts Lachish Inscriptions Mari Texts Marseille Tariff Mesad Hashavyahu Texts Moabite Stone Mosque Inscriptions Murabba'at Nabatean Inscriptions Nerab Inscriptions Northwest Semitic Seal Inscriptions Oxyrhynchus Papyri Palmyrene Inscriptions Rule of the Community Safaitic-Thamudic Inscriptions Samaria Ostraca Sefire Aramaic Inscriptions Siloam Tunnel Inscription Synagogue Inscriptions Temple Scroll Ugarit Inscriptions War Scroll Zakkur Inscription
Writing and Literacy Alphabet Cuneiform Decipherment Hieroglyphs Literacy Names and Naming Scribes and Scribal Techniques Writing and Writing Systems Writing Materials and Technologies Codex Ostracon Papyrus Parchment Scroll Stelae Tablet Writing Materials
MATERIAL CULTURE Subsistence, Trade, and Society Agriculture Animal Husbandry Building Materials and Techniques An Overview Materials and Techniques of the Bronze and Iron Ages Materials and Techniques of the Persian through Roman Periods Materials and Techniques of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Burial Techniques Camels Caravanserais Cats Cattle and Oxen Cereals Cities An Overview Cities of tire Bronze and Iron Ages Cities of the Persian Period Cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Cities of the Islamic Period Clothing Colonization Cult Dogs
SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF CONTENTS Equids Farmsteads Fishing Food Storage Hunting Hydraulics Irrigation Lions Medicine Olives Pastoral Nomadism Personal Flygiene Pigs Salt Seafaring Settlement Patterns Sheep and Goats Tents Transportation Villages Viticulture Weights and Measures
Built Structures Altars Aqueducts Arches Architectural Orders Baptisteries Basilicas Baths Biblical Temple Burial Sites Catacombs Cave Tombs Churches Cisterns Cist Graves Dolmen Fortifications An Overview Fortifications of the Bronze and Iron Ages Fortifications of the Persian Period Fortifications of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods Fortifications of die Islamic Period Four-room House Funerary Monuments Monuments of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Monuments of the Late Roman through Islamic Periods Gardens Gardens in Preclassical Times
Gardens of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Gardens of the Islamic Period Granaries and Silos Grave Goods House Mesopotamian Houses Syro-Palestinian Houses Egyptian Houses House Churches Jar Burials Libraries and Archives Martyrion Mausoleum Monasteries Mosque Necropolis Odeum Ossuary Palace Peristyle House Pit Graves Pools Public Buildings Pyramids Reservoirs Rimal Baths Roads Sarcophagus Sewers Shaft Tombs Stables Stadiums Synagogues Temples Mesopotamian Temples Syro-Palestinian Temples Egyptian Temples Theaters Tombs Tumulus Villa Water Tunnels Ziggurat
Artifacts and Technologies Amulets Anchors Architectural Decoration Bone, Ivory, and Shell Typology and Technology Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods
457
Carts Ceramics Typology and Technology Mesopotamian Ceramics of the Neolithic through Neo-Bablyonian Periods Syro-Palestinian Ceramics of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages Ceramics of the Persian Period Ceramics of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods Ceramics of the Byzantine Period Ceramics of the Islamic Period Chariots
Coins Cosmetics Furniture and Furnishings An Overview Furnishings of the Bronze and Iron Ages Furnishings of die Persian Period Furnishings of die Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Periods Furnishings of the Islamic Period Games Glass Incense Jewelry Lamps Leather Lithics Typology and Technology Artifacts of the Chalcolithic Period Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages Metals Typology and Technology Artifacts of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods Mosaics Musical Insttuments Seals Shfifonim Ships and Boats Textiles Textiles of the Neolithic through Iron Ages Textiles in the Classical Period Tile Building Tile Decorative Tile Vitreous Materials Typology and Technology
458
SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF CONTENTS Artifacts of the Bronze and Iron Ages
Artifacts of the Persian through Roman Periods Artifacts of the Byzantine and Islamic Periods Wall Paintings Weapons and Warfare Wheel Wood
ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHODS Types of Archaeology Conservation Archaeology Experimental Archaeology Salvage Excavation An Overview Salvage Excavation in Israel Soundings Survey, Archaeological Survey of Israel Underwater Archaeology Site Typology Art Sites Inscription Sites Artifact Analysis Analytical Techniques Artifact Conservation D C P Spectrometry Microscopy Munsell Chart Photography Photography of Manuscripts Restorations and Conservation Spectroscopy X-Ray Diffraction Analysis Dating Techniques Dating Techniques Provenience Studies Lead Isotope Analysis Neutron Activation Analysis Petrography Statistical Applications Field Methods Architectural Drafting and Drawing Artifact Drafting and Drawing Balk Computer Recording, Analysis, and Interpretation
Excavation Strategy Excavation Tools Field Conservation Foundation Trench Grid Plan Khirbeh Locus Magnetic Archaeometry Photography Photography of Fieldwork and Artifacts Quadrant Plan Recording Techniques Resistivity Site Survey Stratigraphy Stratum Tell Allied Sciences and Disciplines Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology Climatology Computer Mapping Demography Environmental Archaeology Ethnoarchaeology Ethnobotany Ethnozoology Geology Hydrology Paleobotany Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction Paleopathology Paleozoology Skeletal Analysis
HISTORY OF A R C H A E O L O G Y
Theory and Practice Biblical Archaeology Development and Archaeology Ethics and Archaeology Eugenics Movement Historical Archaeology Historical Geography Ideology and Archaeology Museums and Museology Nationalism and Archaeology New Archaeology Periodical Literature Periodization Reference Works Restoration and Conservation Tourism and Archaeology
Narrative Histories History of die Field An Overview Archaeology in Syria Archaeology in Israel Archaeology in Jordan Archaeology in Mesopotamia Archaeology in Persia Archaeology in the Anatolian Plateau Archaeology in Egypt Archaeology in Cyprus Archaeology in the Aegean Islands Archaeology in the Arabian Peninsula
Organizations and Institutions Albright Institute of Archaeological Research American Center of Oriental Research American Institute for Maghreb Studies American Institute for Yemeni Studies American Institute of Iranian Studies American Palestine Exploration Society American Research Center in Egypt American Research Institute in Turkey American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad American Schools of Oriental Research Archaeological Institute of America British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara British Institute of Persian Smdies British School of Archaeology in Egypt British School of Archaeology in Iraq British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem Council of American Overseas Research Centers Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft Deutscher Palastina-Verein Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Damasktts Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise
SYNOPTIC OUTLINE OF CONTENTS Egypt Exploration Society Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land French Archaeological Missions Institute of Holy Land Studies Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale Institut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes d'Istanbul Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes Israel Antiquities Authority Israel Exploration Society Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Esttemo Oriente Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan Middle East Medievalists Middle East Studies Association Nederlands Historisch-Archeologisch Instituut te Istanbul Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology Palestine Exploration Fund Palestine Oriental Society Society of Biblical Literature Undersea Exploration Society of Israel
Biographies Abel, Felix-Marie Aharoni, Yohanan Albright, William Foxwell Alt, Albrecht Andrae, Walter Avigad, Nahman Avi-Yonah, Michael Bade, William Frederic Bagatti, Bellarmino Baramki, Dimitri Constantine Barrois, Augustin Georges Bennett, Crystal-Margaret Benzinger, Immanuel Blegen, Carl William Bliss, Frederick Jones Botta, Paul-Emile Breasted, James Henry Burrows, Millar Butler, Howard Crosby Callaway, Joseph Atlee Carter, Howard Caton-Thompson, Gertrude Champollion, Jean Francois Clermont-Ganneau, Charles Conder, Claude Reignier Corbo, Virgilio C. Creswell, Keppel Archibald Cameron
Crowfoot, John Winter Dalman, Gustaf Denon, Dominique Vivant Di Cesnola, Luigi Palma Dikaios, Porphyrios Dunand, Maurice Dunayevsky, Immanuel Dussaud, Rene Erman, Adolf Evans, Arthur Field, Henry Fisher, Clarence Stanley Frankfort, Henri Furtwangler, Adolf Galling, Kurt Garrod, Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garstang, John Ghirshman, Roman Gjerstad, Einar Glueck, Nelson Goldman, Hetty Greenfield, Jonas Carl Guerin, Victor Honore Guy, Philip Langstaffe Orde Harding, Gerald Lankester Heinrich, Ernst Hilprecht, Hermann Vollrat Hogarth, David George Horsfield, George Jacobsen, Thorkild Kenyon, Kathleen Mary Kitchener, Horatio Herbert Koldewey, Robert Kosay, Hamit Ziibeyr Kraeling, Carl Hermann Lagrange, Marie-Joseph Lapp, Paul Wilbert Lawrence, Thomas Edward Layard, Austen Henry Levi Delia Vida, Giorgio Lloyd, Seton Howard Frederick Macalister, Robert Alexander Stewart Mackenzie, Duncan Mallon, Alexis Mallowan, Max Edgar Lucien Mariette, Auguste Marquet-Krause, Judith Maspero, Gaston Mazar, Benjamin McFadden, George Merrill, Selah Montet, Pierre Montgomery, James Alan Moortgat, Anton Murray, Margaret Alice Myres, John L. Naville, Edouard
459
Neuville, Rene Newton, Charles Thomas Nicolaou, Kyriakos Noth, Martin Ohnefalsch-Richter, Max Osten, Hans Henning Erimar von der Palmer, Edward Henry Parrot, Andre Peters, John Punnett Petrie, William Matthew Flinders Phillips, Wendell Poidebard, R. P. Antoine Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke Reisner, George Andrew Renan, Joseph Ernest Robinson, Edward Rowe, Alan Safar, Fuad Sailer, Sylvester John Sarre, Friedrich Saulcy, Felicien de Sauvaget, Jean Schaeffer, Claude F.-A. Schick, Conrad Schliemann, Heinrich Schlumberger, Daniel Schroder, Paul G. A. Schumacher, Gottlieb Sellin, Ernst Seyrig, Henri Shiloh, Yigal Smith, George Adam Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor Stanhope, Hester Lucy Starcky, Jean Starkey, James L. Stekelis, Moshe Stewart, James Rivers Barrington Sukenik, Eleazar Lipa Thayer, Joseph Henry Thureau-Dangin, Francois Tufnell, Olga Turville-Petre, Francis Vaux, Roland de Vincent, Louis-Hugues Virolleaud, Charles Vogue, Melchior de Warren, Charles Watzinger, Carl Weill, Raymond Wheeler, Mortimer Wilson, Charles William Winnett, Frederick Vincent Woolley, C. Leonard Wright, George Ernest Yadin, Yigael Yeivin, Shmuel
INDEX
Note: Volume numbers are printed in boldface type, followed by a colon and relevant page numbers. Page numbers printed in boldface indicate a major discussion; those in italics refer to illustrations. A Aarhus, University of. See University of Aarhus AAS. See Atomic absorption spectrometry AASI. See Association for the Archaeological Survey of Israel Ababa, 1:53 Abad, Khirbet, 1:243 Abada, Tell, 2:164, 472; 3:92, 478 Abadie-Reynal, Catherine, as contributor, 3:174 Abarim Mount, 4:115 Abat, 4:372 Abban (Abba-'Il), 1:60 'Abbas, al-, 1:143 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1-5; 3:488; 5:271-272 Amman, 1:101 'Aqaba reorganization, 1:154, 155 Arabian rule, 1:165, 166 architectural policies, 2:35-36 Baalbek, 1:247 Baghdad, 1:264-265; 2:336 coinage, 2:50 Fatimid dynasty, 2:307, 308, 309 gardens, 2:388-389 glassmaking, 2:415 inscriptions, 3:170 map of holdings, 1:2 mosques, 1:3; 2:36; 4:56-58 Palestine, 4:234 Samarra as capital, 1:1, 3, 265; 4:473 Shi'ism, 5:143-144 Sunnism, 2:207 Abbott Tomb Robbery Papyrus, 4:363 'Abdah. See Avdat Abd al-Faraj al-'Ush, 3:174 'Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, 5:269 'Abd al-Malik, 1:165; 5:269 'Abd al-Rahman I, 2:388; 5:272 'Abd al-Samad ibn 'Ali, 2:367 'Abdan, Wadi, 5:158 Abdil'ti, 1:218 Abdulfattah, Kamal, 3:262 Abdul-Hak, Selim, 4:242 Abdullah (prince of Jordan), 1:99 Abel, Felix-Marie, 1:5, 314; 2:187; 5:304 Church of the Nativity, 2:188 Far'ah, Tell el- (North), 2:303 'Ira, Tel, identification, 3:175 Judeideh, Tell el-, identification, 3:259 Lahav identification, 3:325 Mizpah identification, 4:102
Nerab excavations, 1:277 Wawiyat, Tell el-, identification, 5:333 Abil, Tell, 1:5; 2:420 Abila, 1:5-7, 158 Abjad, 5:353-354, 355-356 Abou Assaf, Ali 'Ain Dara' excavation, 1:34 as contributor, 1:33-35; 2:300-301; 3:89-90; 4:35-36, 427-428; 5:90-91, 131-134 'Abr, Tell, 2:290 Abraha (Ethiopian viceroy), 2:275 Abraham, 1:299; 3:13; 4:246 Abraq, Tell, 5:285 'Abr Nahra, 5:135 Abr-Nahrain (journal), 4:264 Absalom's Tomb, 1:192; 2:347-348 Abu, Eshnunna temple, 2:262 Abu "Abd Allah, 5:145 Abu al-'Abbas, 1:165 Abu al-Fida', 1:144, 241 Abu al-Fokhkhar, Tell, 5:391, 392 Abu al-Naml, Wadi, 4:115 AbuBakr, 1:165 Abu Dhabi, 1:159, 161; 5:284 Abu Dhahir, Tell, 2:266 Abu Dulaf Mosque (Samarra), 4:56 Abu Duwari, Tell. See Mashkan-shapir Abu Fandovva (Fanduweh), 2:457; 5:108 Abu Ghosh, 2:188; 4:234 Abu Ghrab. See Hammam, Khirbet Abu I-Iabbah, Sec Sippar Abu Hamid, Tell, 1:7-9; 5:229 Abu Hawam, Tell, 1:9; 2:25 Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:104 fortifications, 2:27, 324-325 temple, 5:172 Abu Hureyra. See Haror, Tel Abuja'ber, Raouf Sa'd, 5:273 Abu-Karib Asad, 3:27 Abu Rujmein, Jebel, 2:172 Abu Salabikh, 1:9-10, 93; 3:94 Abusch, Tzvi, as contributor, 3:205 Abu Shahrain. See Eridu Abu Shi'afeh, 2:473 Abu Simbel, 1:10-11 Rameses II temple, 1:10, 11; 2:199 reconstruction of, 2:151-152, 271-272 Abu Sinan Muhammad al-Fadl Abdullah, 1:166 Abu Sir jar inscriptions, 2:215 pyramids, 4:362-363 AbuThawwab, 1:8 Abu Ubayda, 4:386
461
Abu-Uqsa, Hana Gush Halav excavations, 4:462 Magdala excavations, 3:399 Abu Zeitun, Tell, 2:27, 420 Abyad.Tell al-, 1:156; 3:274 Abydos, 1:11-13 Aramaic texts, 1:182 ceramics, 1:25, 464 furniture, 2:353 Osiris cult, 5:286 pyramid, 4:363 tombs, 1:12; 2:197 Abyssinia, 1:162, 164 Acacius, St., 2:61 Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 2:346 Academy of Finland, 4:308 Academy of Sciences (Israel), 5:254 Academy of Science (Vienna), 3:471 Academy of the Hebrew Language, 3:12 Academy of Vienna, 4:397 Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), 2:114 Accipu. See Achziv Achaemenid dynasty. See Persia; Persians Achaiwa, 1:21 Acheulean culture, 4:269 Berekal Ram, 2:418 Latamne, 3:333 lithics, 3:371-372; 4:207-208 Syria, 5:124 Transjordan, 5:226 Achilles, 1:392; 4:52 Achmetha. Sec Ecbatana Acholla (Ras Botria), 4:161 Achshaph, 3:278 Achtemeier, Paul J., 4:417 Achyraous, 1:136 Achziv, 1:13-14 ACOR. See American Center of Oriental Research Acoustic mapping systems, 5:283 Acre. See Akko Acropole (Susa), 2:231, 233; 4:281; 5:108, 109 Acropolis, 2:31 Amathus, 1:88 Assos, 1:224 Leilan, Tell, 3:343, 344, 345, 346 Ugarit, 5:260 Acrunis, 1:210 Acta Archaeologica (journal), 4:264 Acta Orientalia (journal), 4:264 Acta Sumerologica (journal), 4:264 Aclium, battle of (31 BCE), 2:202, 203
462
INDEX
Acts of Paul, 3:119 Acts of the Apostles, 1:323, 324 house (private) congregations, 2:1; 3:118 Adaarmanes, 1:147 Adab, 1:14-15 Adad, 1:53, 488 ASsur temple, 1:226, 227 Assyrian worship of, 1:231 Babylonian temple, 1:254 Adada. See "Aro'er Adadnadinahe, 2:408 Adad-Nirari I, 1:227 Adad-Nirari II, 2:460 Adad-Nirari III, 4:429; 5:387 Adam, Shehata, 2:99 Adams, Ansel, 4:334 Adams, Robert McCormick, 1:93, 95; 2:144; 5:102 Diyala excavations, 2:164, 471; 3:488 Mashkan-shapir survey, 3:431 New Archaeology methods, 4:135 Sippar excavation, 5:47 Adams, Russell B., 5:65 Adams, S. J., 2:117 Adams, William Y., 3:69 Adana, 2:9 Adan-Bayewitz, David as contributor, 3:276-278 Galilean pottery project, 2:373; 3:277 Jotapata excavations, 3:251 Adapa, 2:317 Adar. See 'Ataroth Adbi-Asirta, 1:86 Adda-guppi', 4:128 Adeimah cemeteries, 2:13 Aden, 1:15-16 Ader, 1:447; 3:53 Adonis, 1:393; 2:174; 3:138 Adon letter, 1:182; 2:213 Adora, 3:142 Adrados, Francisco, 3:152-153 Adriani, Achille, 1:66 Adulis, 1 : 1 6 - 1 7 ; 2:2, 275 Aegean Islands, 1 : 1 7 - 2 2 agriculture, 1:25, 28 Alalakh, 1:55 "Amuq, 1:116-117 maritime trade, 1:25, 28 under Ottoman Empire, 3 : 7 3 See also Alexandrian Empire; Greece; History of thefield,archaeology in Aegean Islands Aegyptus: Rivisla italiana di egittologia e di papirologia (journal), 4:265 Aelia Capitolina, 1:275, 276 Aemilia, Basilica, 1:277 Aeolic (Greek dialect), 2:435; 3:150 Aerial photography, 1:199; 3:42, 210, 286; 4:333, 335, 405 Aerobindus, 1:348 Aerophones, 4:74-76 Aesculapius, symbol of, 4:16 Aetokremnos, 2:90; 3:72 Afamiya. See Apamea 'Afar, Tell, 5:158 Afar Depression (Ethiopia), 2:449-450 Afghanistan. See Bactria Afis, Tell, 2:468; 3:44; 5:387 Africa ceramics, 1:472 fauna, 2:450 ivory trade, 1:349-350 See also Carthage; Ethiopia; North Africa
African Archaeological Review, 4:267 African Expedition (University of Califorinia), 4:313 Afrin, 1:35 Afrin River, 1:115 Afrit, Wadi, 4:117 Afro-Asiatic languages features of, 2:208 members of, 4:516 numerals, 2:211 AFSM. See American Foundation for die Study of Man Agade. See Akkade AgaKhan, 4:313 Agathangelos, 1:209 Agbatana. See Ecbatana Agelarakis, Anagnostis, 5:15 Agency for International Development. See United States Agency for International Development Aggide. See Akkade Aghlabid dynasty, 1:1 Aghts, 3:426 'Aglibol, 4:243 Agora. See Forum Agrab, Tell, 2:164, 165 Agriculture, 1:22-30 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1, 3, 4 Akkadians, 1:42, 50 Anatolia, 1:122-123, 124, 132, 133, 134 Arabian Peninsula, 1:159, 160 Asia (western), 2:245-246 Assyrians, 1:231; 5:207-208 Babylonians, 1:258 Basta, 1:279-280 Beersheba, 1:288 Bouqras, 1:354 calendars, 1:26; 2:400-401; 3:6 Canaanites, 1:411 crises of, 2:247-248 dairying, 1:443 data, 1:29-30 demography and, 2:143-144 dry-farming, 2:248-249; 5:206-208 'Ein-Ya'el, 2:225 ethnoarchaeological studies, 2:282-283; 4:136 farmsteads, 1:104; 2:306-307; 5:273 Hajar Bin Humeid, 2:457 herding practices, 5:190 Israelites, 4:387-388 Levant, 1:354 Mediterranean mixed economy, 1:25-28 Mesopotamia, 1:24-25 Neolithic, 1:446; 4:278 Nile, 2:246-247; 4:139 origins of, 1:23-24, 122-123, 124, 159 Palestine, 1:33, 172 pastoral nomadism, 1:22, 24, 28, 29-30, 37-38; 5:179 under Roman Empire, 4:438-439 spread of (from Anatolia), 3:155 storage facilities, 4:360 Sumerians, 5:97 Syria, 1:23; 5:124-126 urbanization process and, 2:15-16 See also Animal husbandry; Cereals; Food storage; Granaries and silos; Irrigation; Paleobotany; specific crops Agrippa. See Herod Agrippa I; Herod Agrippa II Agrippa, L. Julius, 1:146 Alia, 4:98 Ahab, 1:167; 2:420; 3:4; 4:465
Aharoni, Yohanan, 1 : 3 0 - 3 1 , 296; 3:48 Arad excavations, 1:174, 176 Tel Beersheba excavations, 1:288, 289, 290 'Ein-Gedi excavations, 2:222 Galilean surveys, 5:102 historical geography, 3:30 'Ira, Tel, identification, 3:175 Judeideh, Tell el-, identification, 3:259 Lachish excavations, 3:317, 319 Lachish Residency, 2:27 locus definition, 5:88-89 Masos, Tel, 3:437 Megiddo, 3:464 Radannah identification, 4:402 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 Samaria Ostraca, 4:468 on Samaria's architectural and ceramic periods, 4:464 Yin'am, Tel, survey, 5:380 Zeror, Tel, identification, 5:389 Ahaz (king), 1:325 Ahhijawa, 1:21 Ahhotep, 2:100 Ahiqar, 1:182; 2:214 Ahiram (king of Byblos), 1:31; 4:481 Ahiram inscription, 1 : 3 1 - 3 2 , 77; 4:323 Ahlamu, 1:185 AhlstrSm, Gbsta W., 2:180 Ahmad an. See Ecbatana Ahmad ibnTulun, 2:206, 366; 5:145 Ahmar, Tell. See Til Barsip Ahmarian industry, 3:373; 4:208, 209 Ahmatan. See Ecbatana Ahmed al-Hattu cemetery, 2:472 Ahmose, 1:40; 2:100, 101, 199; 3:135; 4:363 Ahriman (Anru Mainyu), 4:101, 493 Ahuni, 1:186 Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd), 1:331; 4:100, 101, 299, 493 Ahuzat Hazan, 2:318 Ahwaz, 3:411 Ai, 1 : 3 2 - 3 3 , 303; 3:255
fortifications, 1:32, 33; 2:322, 323 market involvement, 4:207 pool, 4:350 size, 2:20 AIA. See Archaeological Institute of America AIAR. See Albright Institute of Archaeological Research Aigai, 1:132, 133 Aigina, 3:74 Aila. See 'Aqaba Aime-Giron, Noel, 2:217 AIMS. See American Institute for Maghreb Studies 'Ain, al- (Buraimi), 3:80 'Ain al-Hayat, 1:194 'Ain al-Jarr. See 'Anjar 'Ain al-Kanisah, Wadi, 4:118 'AinDara', 1 : 3 3 - 3 5 , 115, 117; 3:443 'Ain Difla, 2:478 'AinDouq, 5:304 'Ain el-Buheira, 2:478 'Ain el-Helwi, 5:39 'Ain es-Samiyeh, 1 : 3 5 - 3 6 'Ain Feshkha, 4:393, 394 'Ain Garnam, 1:279 'Ain Ghazal, 1 : 3 6 - 3 8 , 98, 99, 279; 4:211; 5:53 agricultural life, 1:23, 37; 4:201 sculpture, 5:228 tourism, 5:223 'Ain Lejouj, 1:247
INDEX 'Ain Mallaha. See 'Einan 'Ain Musa,'2:343; 4:117-118, 303 'Ain Quailibah, 1:7 'Ain Rahub, 1:8 'Ain Seilun, 5:28 'Ain Shems. See Beth-Shemesh Ainsworth, William F., 4:123, 476 'Ain Yalu. See 'Ein-Ya'el Aitken, Martin J., as contributor, 2 : 1 1 3 - 1 1 7 AIYS. Sec American Institute for Yemeni Studies 'Ajjul, Tell el- (Sharuhen), 1 : 3 8 - 4 0 ; 2:100, 305; 3:135 bathrooms, 1:283-284 Haror, Tel, 2:474 jewelry, 3:241 tombs, dromos, 5:14 'Ajlun, 1 : 4 1 ; 5:242, 366 Ajman, 5:284 Altaian, 5:211 Akashi, Yoshihako, 4:384 Akazawa, Taken.], 2:172 Akhenaten (Amenhotep; Amenophis IV) Amarna, Tell el-, 1:82, 83, 85, 86; 2:199 Aten devotion, 2:199; 5:177 Akhetaten (city). See Amarna, Tell elAkhmimic (dialect), 2:66 Akhzib. See Achziv Akkad. See Akkade; Akkadians; Babylonians Akkade, 1 : 4 1 - 4 4 , 49, 50, 52, 53 Euphrates, 2:289 fall of, 5:98-99 local dynasty, 1:53 propaganda techniques, 5:98 See also Akkadians Akkadian (language), 1 : 4 4 - 4 9 , 49-50; 4:517 Alalakh Texts, 1:59-60 Amarna tablets, 1:86 Amorite language compared with, 1:108 Amorite term derivation, 1:107 Anatolians, 1:128 Aphek cuneiform finds, 1:150 Aramaic links, 1:181 Assyrian dialect, 1:228, 232 as Babylonian source language, 1:258 cuneiform, 1:45-46, 128, 232, 258, 412; 2:86, 87, 89; 5:354-355 Eblaitcs, 2:181, 183 Emar texts, 2:239, 240 Fakhariyah inscription, 2:301 grammatical summary, 1:46-49; 4:522-525 Hurrian, 3:126 onomastica, 4:93-95 as prestige language, 3:159-160 scribal interest in, 3:83, 363 Sumerian and, 3:159; 5:92, 94, 99-100 Ugaritic and, 5:262 written, 1:44-45, 128, 258; 5:98 Sec also Inscriptions, Akkadian Akkadians, 1 : 4 9 - 5 4 Abu Salabikh, 1:10 Akkade as capital city, 1:41-44; 2:17 art of, 3:481 ASsur under, 1:226 Babylon conquest by, 1:254, 256, 259, 260, 261 Brak, Tell, 1:355 flow chart of agro-imperialism, 1:43 Gutians, 1:53; 5:98-99 Leilan, Tell, 1:52, 53; 3:343-345 map of empire, 1:51
seals, 4:61-62,510-511 silver, 4:9-10 Sumerians, 1:50, 52, 53, 54; 5:98-99 Susa, 4:283 Taya, Tell, 1:53; 5:159 Akkadica (journal), 4:265 Akkermans, P. A., 1:354 Akkermans, Peter M. M. G., 3:43 Akko (Acre; Tell el-Fukhar), 1:54-55 Achziv, 1:13 Crusader period, 2:76 fortifications, 2:323, 405 harbor excavations, 5:283 Kefar Hananyah ware, 2:373 open-court buildings, 2:27 renovation project (modern), 2:154 size of, 2:22 waterworks, 1:157, 158; 3:131, 132; 4:423 See also Ptolemais Akok, Mahmut, 3:65, 66 Akrotiri, 1:20; 2:90; 3:74, 76 Aksaray. See Archelais A1-. For anthroponyms and loponyms beginning with this clement, see under latter part of name Alabastar Tomb (Alexandria), 1:68 Alaca Hoyiik, 1:127-128; 3:65 'Ala ed-Din mosque (Konya), 1:136 Alalakh (Tell 'Atchana), 1 : 5 5 - 5 9 , 115, 116, 117, 144 excavation publications, 5:87 fortifications, 2:324 houses, 3:/06 temples, 5:170 wall paintings, 5:326 Woolley excavations, 5:350 Alalakh texts, 1:55, 56, 59-61 Akkadian texts, 1:45 'Amuq documentation, 1:116 Ebla documentation, 2:180 Alans, 4:293 Alashiya, 2:92-93 Amarna tablets, 1:86 copper trade, 4:11 Enkomi, 2:242 Albanian (language), 3:152 Albert, Honore d,' 3:137 Albright, Frank P., 3:417 Albright, William Foxwell, 1:61-62, 459 Ader excavations, 1:447; 3:53 'Ain es-Samiych, 1:35 'Ajjul, Tell el-, dating, 1:38 American Schools of Oriental Research, 1:62-63, 95, 96 Aphek location, 1:147 Bab edh-Dhra' survey, 1:249 Beit Mirsim identification, 4:401 Beit Mirsim storage jars, 4:451 Bethel excavations, 1:300; 5:55 Beth-Yerah surveys, 1:312 Beth-Zur excavations, 1:61, 314 biblical archaeology, 1:30-31, 62, 315-316 cisterns, 2:13 Debir identification, 1:295 dromedary domestication, 1:408 excavations methods, 1:296 Far'ah, Tell el- (South), 2:305 Ful, Tell el-, excavations, 2:346 on Glueck, Nelson, 2:416 Hajar Bin Humeid excavations, 2:457; 4:383 Hesi, Tell el-, 3:22 historical geography, 3:30
463
Iktanu, Tell, 3:143 Irbid, 3:181 Jotapala identification, 3:251 Lachish identification, 3:317 Mallon's Teleilat el-Ghassu) excavations, 3:401 Megiddo, 3:464, 466 Miqne, Tel, identification, 4:30 Mizpah identification, 4:102 Nippur identification, 4:148 Pella, 4:257 periodization terminology, 4:268 Samaria's architectural and ceramic periods, 4:464 Tirzafi identification, 2:303 on Vincent, Louis-Hugues, 5:304 "Albright-Glueck-Yadin school" of biblical archaeology, 1:30-31 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (Jerusalem), 1 : 6 2 - 6 3 , 96, 317; 5:333. See also American Schools of Oriental Research Alden, John R., 4:280 'Aleiliyat, el-, 5:105 Aleppo, 1 : 6 3 - 6 5 ; 5:128-129 Alalakh, 1:55,56, 58, 60, 1 1 6 Ayyubid-Mamluk architecture, 1:242 glass production, 5:320 Salah ad-Din's conquest of, 1:241 Aletri, 2:92 Alexander III (the Great), 1:65, 66, 67-68, 72, 73, 74, 111,205,219 Alexandria founding, 1:70; 2:30, 201 Anatolian conquests, 1:130, 131 Asia invasion, 4:298 athletics, 5:74-75 Babylon conquest, 1:255, 258; 3:484 coinage, 2:46 Cyprus, 2:95 Greek language, 2:436 military tactics, 5:338 Persia after death of, 4:286 Tyre, 5:247 See also Alexandrian Empire Alexander IV, 1:70 Alexander Balas, 4:356, 515 Alexander Jannaeus, 1 : 1 1 7 , 314; 2:482 Abila conquest, 1:5 Gaza conquest, 1:237 Qumran commentaries, 2:121, 123 as Wicked Priest, 2:269 Alexander Severus, 1:146-147, 192, 352 Alexandria, 1 : 6 5 - 6 9 architectural decoration and orders, 1:192, 193, 200-201 building materials and techniques, 1:374-376 churches, 2:2 founding of, 1:70; 2:30, 201 furnishings, 2:363 Islamic conquest of, 2:205, 365 ivory trade in, 1:348 library, 2:203, 204 Ptolemiac, 1:72 Sasanian Persian conquest of, 1:134 stadium, 5:75 tombs, 2:349 Alexandrian Empire, 1:70-74 Aleppo settlement, 1:64 Amman, 1:100 Anatolia, 1:130, 1 3 1 - 1 3 3 Aphek, 1:151 Arabian Peninsula, 1:160, 163
464
INDEX
Alexandrian Empire, continued Aramaic script usage, 1:178 architectural decoration, 1:190, 192-194 architecmral orders, 1:200-202 Ashkelon, 1:220, 223 Baalbek, 1:247 Babylon, 1:255, 258 Egypt, 2:201 map of holdings, 1:71 See also Ptolemies; Seleucids Alexios Komnenos, 1:136 Alexiou, Stylianos, 3:75 Alfa. See Beth Alpha Algaze, Guillermo, 2:291 Ali, Mohammed, 4:88 Aliabad. See Tepe Aliabad "Alids, 1:165 'Ali ibn Abu Talib (son-in-law of Muhammad), 1:165; 4:60; 5:143, 268, 269 Ali Kosh, 1:75, 140; 2:135; 4:279-280 Alinda, 1:132 Aline, Marie, 3:234 Alisar Hoyiik, 1:125, 128; 3:64; 4:189 Alkalis, 5:307-308 All the Animals of the Bible Lands (Cansdale),
4:418 Allaqi, Wadi, 2:308 Mat, 4:239, 304 Allegro, John M. ancient name of Qumran, 4:392 Copper Scroll, 2:64
Qumran soundings, 4:393 Allen, James P., as contributor, 3:15 Allen, Susan J., as contributor, 3:173-174 'Almi, Khirbet el-, 1:243 Alon, A., 3:428 Alon, David, 1:297 Gilat excavations, 2:404 'Ira, Tel, survey, 3:175 Shiqmim excavations, 5:34-35 Alp Arslan, 1:135 Alpert Nakhai, Beth, as contributor, 1:314; 2:354-356; 3:300, 383-384; 5:169-174, 333-334 Alphabet, 1:75-79 Anatolian kingdoms, 1:130 Arabic, 1:77, 78, 181; 3:365 Aramaic, 1:76, 77, 78, 178 Armenian, 1:78, 208 Canaanite, 1:76, 77, 412; 3:364-365, 367 Egyptian, 1:75-76 Etruscan, 3:334 Greek, 1:75, 77-78; 2:435, 436, 438; 3:159; 5:356 Hebrew, 1:76, 77, 78; 3:6, 7 Latin, 1:78; 3:334; 5:356 literacy, 3:364-365 Mandaic, 3:410 Northwest Semitic, 5:262 origins of, 3:158-159, 364-365 Phoenician-Punic, 1:76, 77, 178; 3:367; 4:315 Semitic languages, 1:77; 2:438-439; 3:159 Syriac, 1:78 Ugaritic, 1:76-77; 3:6, 365; 5:130, 262, 264, 304 West Semitic, 1:76, 77, 78; 4:352-353, 354 See also Writing and writing systems Alt, Albrecht, 1:30, 79-80; 2:148
Aphek location, 1:147 Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes directorship, 2:150
Far'ah, Tell el- (North), 2:303 Galilee, 2:371 on Israelite infiltration into Canaan, 5:102 Megiddo, 3:464 Mizpah identification, 4:102 peaceful infiltration theory, 2:282 settlement-pattern studies, 5:8 Altars, 1 : 8 0 - 8 1 Amarna, Tell el-, 1:84, 85 Arad, 1:175 architectural decoration, 1:193, 194 Assur, 1:227 Beersheba, 1:290 First Temple, 1:325-326 horned, 1:290 Pergamon, 4:260, 261 Altertum, Das (journal), 4:266 Althusser, Louis, 3:139 Altyn Depe (Altin Tepe), 4:282; 5:327 Aiwa, 4:171 Amadasi Guzzo, Maria Giulia, as contributor, 3:351; 4:317-324 Amanus Mountains, 1 : 1 1 5 Amarna, Tell el-, 1 : 8 1 - 8 6 Akhenaten's move to, 2:199 Ashkelon, 1:220 bathrooms, 1:283 Deir el-Balah, 2:141 diet, 4:207 Egypt Exploration Society, 2:207 gardens, 2:384 houses, 1:283; 3:116, 117, 118 Hurrian texts, 3:125 palace (representational), 3:118 road system, 4:432, 433 solar temples, 5:177 stables, 5:71-72 Amarna letters. See Amarna tablets Amarna tablets, 1:83, 8 6 - 8 7 ; 2:199; 3:161 Akkadian texts, 1:45, 107; 3:363 Arwad, 1:218 Damascus, 2:103 on Egyptian gold, 4:13 Golan, 2:419 Hazor, 3:1 Megiddo, 3:463 Shechem fragment, 5:22 site identification, 5:102 Arnar-Suen (Amar-Sin), 1:226; 2:409 Amasis, 4:112 Amasya, 1:136 Amathus, 1 : 8 7 - 8 8 ; 2:152 Amaury, 2:74 Amaziah, 3:320 Amazons, statues of (Ephesus), 2:255 Ambassador University (Texas), 3:1 Ambelliri hill (Idalion), 3:137 'Amd, Wadi, 5:13 Amelineau, Emile, 1:12 Amenemhetl, 2:99, 198, 299; 4:363; 5:287 Amenemhetll, 2:198 Amenemhet III, 1:40; 2:299; 4:363 Amenemhet IV, 1:294 Amenemopet, 1:55 Amenhotep II and III. See Amenophis Amenhotep IV. See Akhenaten Amenope, onomasticon of, 4:310 Amenophis (Amenhotep) II, 1:147, 243 Amenophis (Amenhotep) III, 1 : 2 1 , 86, 283; 2:199 Amenophis IV. See Akhenaten American Academy (Rome), 1:188
American Academy of Religion, 1:96 American Anthropologist
(journal), 4:267
American Center of Oriental Research (Amman), 1 : 8 8 - 9 0 , 96, 317; 3:54 Ghrubba surveys, 2:402 Jordan Cultural Resource Management Project, 2:152 newsletter of, 4:262 Petra excavations, 4:304, 308 American Expedition to Hebron, 3:13 American Exploration Society, 3:143 American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM), 1:90 Hajar Bin Humeid excavations, 2:457; 4:383 Jubah, Wadi al-, 3:252-253 Marib excavations, 3:417; 5:18 Qataban excavations, 4:383, 384 Timna' excavations, 5:215 American Institute for Maghreb Studies, 1 : 9 0 American Institute for Yemeni Studies, 1 : 9 0 - 9 1 American Institute of Iranian Studies, 1 : 9 1 , 188 American Institute of Nautical Archaeology, 1:188 American Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima, 1:402-403 American Journal
of Archaeology
(AJA), 1:187;
4:266 American Oriental Society, 1:94; 3:40; 4:264 American Palestine Exploration Society, 1 : 9 1 ; 3:40 American Research Center in Egypt, 1 : 9 1 - 9 2 , 188; 2:366 American Research Institute in Turkey, 1 : 9 2 , 188 American School of Classical Studies in Athens, 1:63, 94, 188; 3:74 American School of Oriental Research Jerusalem). See Albright Institute of Archaeological Research American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad, 1 : 9 2 - 9 3 ; 4:149 American Schools of Oriental Research, 1:10, 9 4 - 9 8 , 315; 2:69; 3:40
Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, 1:62-63, 96 American Center of Oriental Research, 1:88-90, 96 American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad, 1:92-93 Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, 4:487 Bethel excavations, 1:300 Beth-Zur excavations, 1:314 Callaway, Joseph Atlee, 1:406, 407 Copper Scroll, 2:64
Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, 2:96, 97 Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Herodian Jericho excavations, 3:16 'Iraq el-Amir excavations, 3:177 Iraq (northern) survey, 5:183 Iskander, Khirbet, excavations, 3:188 Jerash excavations, 3:215 Jericho excavations, 3:221 Khafajeh excavations, 3:288 Kheleifeh, Tell el-, excavations, 3:293 Limes Arabicus Survey, 3:359 Meiron excavations, 3:469 Nabratein excavations, 4:85 publications, 4:262, 263 Punic Project, 4:158-159 Qarqur, Tell, excavations, 4:370 Rumeith, Tell er-, excavations, 4:444-445
INDEX Shechem excavations, 5:21 Shema', Khirbet, excavations, 5:26 Shiqmim excavations, 5:35 Ta'anach excavations, 5:149 Tannur, Khirbet et-, excavations, 5:154 Tell Beit Mirsim excavations, 1:295 Wawiyat, Tell el-, excavations, 5:333 American Society for the Excavations of Sardis, 4:487 American Society of Papyrologists, 4:265 American University of Beirut, 1:275 Bosra excavations, 1:351 Kazel, Tell al-, excavations, 3:276 Sarepta, 4:488 American University in Cairo, 1:405 Amharic, 2:278 Amherst demotic papyrus, 1:182 'Ami'ad Junction, 5:104 Amiet, Pierre, 3:200 Amin, al-, 1:265 Amino-acid racernization, 2:116 Amiran, Ruth, 1:452, 460 Arad excavations, 4:120 as contributor, 1:169-174 Israel Antiquities Authority, 3:189 Megiddo ponery, 3:462 on open-court buildings, 2:26 on Samaria's architectural and ceramic periods, 4:464 Yin'am, Tel, survey, 5:380 Amitai, Janet, as contributor, 3:190-192 Amman (Philadelphia), 1 : 9 8 - 1 0 2 , 244 'Ain Ghazal, 1:36-38 American Center of Oriental Research, 1:88-90, 96 Ammonite settlements, 1:103, 104, 105, 106 architectural decoration, 1:191 British Institute, 1:298, 357 citadel, 5:270 excavations, 3:53; 5:234 rock painting, 1:218 theater, 5:202 Sec also Ammonite inscriptions Amman Airport Temple, 1 : 9 9 , 1 0 2 - 1 0 3 , 347; 5:173, 233 Amman Citadel inscription, 1:104, 106 Amman Theater inscription, 1:106 Ammianus Marcelinus, 3:35 'Ammi-Nadab I, 1:100, 104 'Ammi-Nadab II, 1:104 Ammitaqum, 1:60 'Amnion, See Amman Ammon, 1 : 1 0 3 - 1 0 5 ; 2:81 Ammonite inscriptions, 1 : 1 0 0 , 1 0 5 - 1 0 7 , 273; 2:140 onomastica, 4:94 ostraca, 4:190 seals, 4:168 Ammonites. See Ammon Ammurrum (Ammurrium). See Amorites Amon, 1:62 Amorion, 1:135 Amorite (language), 1:108; 4:93, 517 Amorites, 1 : 1 0 7 - 1 1 1 , 111; 3:186; 5:128 Akkadians, 1:52, 53 Arameans as descendants of, 1:185 Assyrian assimilation with, 1:228, 229 Babylon, 1:254, 256 Byblos invasion, 1:391 Leilan, Tell, 3:345 Mari, 1:108, 110, 256; 3:415-416; 5:188 Mishor, 3:19-20
socio-political categories, table of, 1:109 Sumer, 5:99 Amos, Book of, 1:388 Amos, Hosea, Micah: An Archaeological Commentary (King), 4:415 Amphorae, commercial, 1:474-475 'Amr, Khairieh, 4:306 Amram (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 Amran ibn Ali mound, 1:252, 254 'Amr ibn al-'As, 2:205, 365, 367; 4:355, 420 'Amrit (Maratiius), 1 : 1 1 1 - 1 1 3 architectural decoration, 1:192, 194; 4:329 AMS. See Accelerator mass spectrometry 'Amud, 5:53 Amudian industry, 4:208 Amulets, 1 : 1 1 3 - 1 1 5 Armenia, 1:205 Basta, 1:280 Egypt, 1:114 Amun, 1:112:142, 199 Meroe temple, 3:472 Tanis temple, 2:200 'Amuq, 1 : 1 1 5 - 1 1 7 , 124, 144, 280 ceramics, 2:9; 4:371 Amurru, 1:86, 107, 218; 5:129 Amurrum. See Amorites 'Amusa Hornedjhenotef, 2:99 Amy, Robert, 4:242 An, 5:100 Anaba. See Hippo Regius Anactoria. See Miletus Anadolu Burnu. See Cape Gelidonya Anadolu Kavagli, 1:482 Anafa, Tel, 1 : 1 1 7 - 1 1 8 , 193; 2:373 Anaharath (Tel Rekhesh), 5:104 Anahita, 1:206; 4:299 Analytical techniques, 1 : 1 1 8 - 1 2 2 . See also Dating techniques; Microscopy; Neutron activation analysis; Spectroscopy; X-ray diffraction analysis Anania Sirakac'i, 1:210 Anastasis (Jerusalem), 5:269 Anastasius I Byzantine defense system, 1:394; 2:61 Caesarea, 1:401 'Anat, 1:413; 2:80 'Anat-Bethel, 1:413 Anatha, 4:386 Anati, Emanuel, 1:9 Anatolia, 1 : 1 2 2 - 1 3 7 Aegean Islands, 1:18, 21 agriculture, 3:155 Akkadians, 1:52 Akkadian texts, 1:45 Alexandrian toriseoflslam, 1:70, 73, 131-135
American Research Institute in Turkey, 1:92 ancient, 1 : 1 2 7 - 1 3 1 animal husbandry, 1:140, 141 aqueducts, 1:157 architectural decorations and orders, 1:200, 201 Arslantepe contacts, 1:215 Assur trade, 1:226, 228; 3:308-309 Assyrian rule, 1:230 building materials and techniques, 1:132, 133, 368, 371-372 churches, 2:2 Cyprus, 2:91, 92 fortified cities, 1:3 furnishings, 2:363 Hittites, 2:199
465
houses, 1:123, 133; 2:449 Indo-European languages, 1:128; 3:149, 155-156 Islamic, 1 : 1 3 5 - 1 3 7 Luwians, 3:385-386 martyrial buildings, 3:426 metalwork, 4:3, 7 , 11 palaces, 1:132; 4:198 pottery, 2:426 prehistoric, 1 : 1 2 2 - 1 2 7 Roman rule, 1:132-134 textiles, 1:133; 5:191, 192, 193, 194 theaters, 1:132, 133; 5:199-200 tile production, 5:210-211, 212, 213-214 wall paintings, 1:124, 132; 5:325, 328-329 See also Armenia; History of die field, archaeology in Anatolian Plateau; specific sites and subregions Anatolian (language), 3:152-153, 154 Anatolian metallic ware, 2:426 Anatolian Studies (journal), 1:358; 4:265 Anatolica (journal), 4:264 Anba Hadra monastery, 4:43 Anbar, Moshe, 2:180 'Anbay, 4:384 Ancestor cult, 2:84; 4:210; 5:302 Anchor Bible, 1)61; 4:415 Anchor Bible Dictionary (Freedman), 4:417 Anchorites. See Monasteries Anchors, 1 : 1 3 7 - 1 4 0 ; 4:18 Sea of Galilee, 2:317 Serce Limani harbor, 5:3 shfifonim, 5:27 Tiberias stone, 5:206 Ugarit, 1:137; 5:260 Uluburun merchantman, 1:137; 5:268 Ancient and Medieval Jewish History (Baron), 2:143 Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings (Lichtheim), 4:415 Ancient History: Resources for Teachers (journal), 4:263 Ancient Jewish Coinage (Mesliorer), 4:420 Ancient Jordan (newsletter), 3:55 Ancient Monuments Commission (Britain), 4:426 Ancient Near Eastern Society (Columbia University), 4:265 Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Pritchard), 4:415 Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land (Amiran), 1:452,460 Ancient Records of Egypt (Breasted), 1:356-357 Ancient Society (journal), 4:266 Ancyra, 1:134. See also Ankara. Andarig, 3:345 Anderson, Bernhard, 3:19 Anderson, J. K., as contributor, 3:122-124 Anderson, Robert, 3:42 Anderson, Samuel, 5:345 Anderson-Stojanovic, Virginia R., as contributor, 3:339-340 Andhur, 5:254 'Andjar. See 'Anjar Andrae, Ernst Walter, 1 : 1 4 0 ; 2:146; 3:14 Assur excavations, 1:225, 226, 231; 3:58 Babylon excavations, 1:252 Larsa, 3:331 Sippar, 5:47, 48 Andre-Salvini, Beatrice, as contributor, 5:203 Andrews University, 3:19, 20 Androkles, 1:88 Andronicus II, 1:396
466
INDEX
Andronicus III, 1:396 architectural decoration, 1:194, 195, 200, 201 Anemospilia, 3:75 churches, 2:2 Anfray, Francis, 1:16; 3:440 as Crusader state, 2:73, 76 Anglican Church, 4:426 excavations, 1:115 Anglo-American Colt expedition, 2:465 fortifications, 2:330 Anglo Israel Exploration Society, 3:1 monasticism, 4:45-46 Anhkwenenef'er, 2:202 mosaics, 4:51, 52, 54 Persian defeat near, 1:70, 130, 131 'Anim, Horvat, 4:463 rise and fall of, 1:117 Animal cemeteries, 1:12, 437, 441 Animal depictions, Assyrian, 1:231 Sasanian Persian conquest of, 1:134, 145 Animal husbandly, 1:140-143 as Seleucid capital, 1:72, 205 agricultural development and, 1:23, 25, 122, villas, 5:300, 301 123, 124 Antiochus I, 4:287 Armenia, 1:204 hierothesion, 4:123, 125 Assyria, 1:231 Nemrud Dagi stelae, 4:124-125 Babylonia, 1:258-259 tomb of, 4:476 Beersheba, 1:288 Antiochus II Epiphanes, 1:132; 2:468; 5:136 boneworking industry and, 1:338 Antiochus III, 3:178; 5:136 camels, 1:407-408 Abila conquest, 1:5 carts and, 1:433^134 Anatolia, 1:134 cats, 1:441-442 Decapolis, 2:129 cattle and oxen, 1:442-443 Palestine conquest, 4:515 disease, 3:450 Second Macedonian War, 4:356 dogs, 2:167 Antiochus IV Epiphanes equids, 2:255—256 Antioch's growth under, 1:144 Golan, 2:418; 4:383 Belevi tomb, 1:132 Hittite, 3:86 Egyptian second invasion, 4:356; 5:136 pigs, 4:347-348 Hyrcanus, 3:180 Shanidar, 1:141; 5:15-16 Judean hellenization, 1:74; 4:515 sheep and goats, 5:24 Antiochus V Eupator, 4:225 Sumeria, 5:97 Antiochus VII Sidetes, 4:515 See also Leather; Paleozoology Antiochus IX, 5:136 Animal sacrifice, 2:83-84; 4:159-160 Antiparos, 3:73 Baq'ah Valley, 1:273 Antipas (Christian martyr), 3:425 dogs, 2:166, 475 Antipas, Herod. See Herod Antipas Ephesus, 2:253 Antipater, 1:70, 149 equids, 2:256, 475 Antipater of Idumea, 4:225 Haror, Tel, 2:474-475 Antipatris. See Aphek pigs, 2:253 Antiquaries Journal, 4:263 Animal Style (shamanistic art), 4:504 Antiquitates Antiochenae (Miiller), 1:144 Anitta, 1:334; 3:268 Antiquities Act (1906), 2:270 'Anjar, 1:143-144 Antiquities and Fine Arts Service (Beirut), 5:39 Ankara, 1:134, 135, 358 Antiquity (journal), 4:267 Ankhkhaef, bust of, 2:411 Antirrhodos island, 1:66, 67 Annali dellTstiluto universilario orientate di Antit, 1:308 hlapoli (journal), 4:266 Antler, 1:336 Annie phihlogique, L': Bibliographic critique et Antonius, Marcus Aurelius (Caracalla), 1:65 analytiquc de Vantiquile greco-latine, 4:419 Amman, 1:101 Annual Egyptological Bibliography, 4:418 Apamea, 1:145, 146 Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, Cappadocia, 1:420 2:474; 4:264 Dura-Europos, 2:175 Annual Review of the Royal Inscriptions of Media attacked by, 4:289 Mesopotamia Project, 4:265 Antony, Mark (Marcus Antonius), 1:66, 67, Annunitum, 1:53 100, 247; 2:202 Anru Mainyu. See Ahriman Anu Ansari, al-, 1:63 Assur temple of, 1:226, 227 Ansary, Abdul Rahman T. al-, 3:80; 4:372 Uruk-Warka ziggurat, 5:294 as contributor, 1:164-166; 4:371-373 Anubanini, 1:331 Anshan. See Malyan Anubis, 2:216 Antakya. See Antioch on Orontes amulets, 1:114 Antakya Museum (Turkey), 1:59 Asyut cult, 1:233 Antalya, 1:136 Anum, 1:260 Antarados, 1:218 Anuuballit Kephalon, 5:296 Antelias, Wadi, 3:306, 307 Anuuballit Nikarchos, 5:296 Anthemius of Tralles, 2:63 Apa Jeremias monastery (Saqqara), 4:43 Anthes, Rudolph, 3:471 Apamea, 1:145-147 Antigonia, 1:144 architectural decoration, 1:191 Antigonus I (the One-Eyed), 1:70, 144; 2:46, decorative art, 1:194 95 monasticism, 4:45-46 Antioch on Orontes, 1:144-145 mosaics, 4:51-52, 54 Aleppo in shadow of, 1:64 synagogue, 4:54; 5:122 Apamea, 1:146 Zeus sanctuary, 5:140 aqueduct, 1:158
Apameia. See Apamea Apasa, 2:252 Apedemak, 3:473 Aperia (Aper-El), 4:480 APES. See American Palestine Exploration Society Aphek, 1:147-151 cist graves, 2:13 fortifications, 1:151; 2:322, 323 plan of, 1:148 size of, 2:20 Aphlad, 2:174 Aphrodisias, 1:151-152 Euro-Anatolian settlement, 1:125 marble exports and sculpture, 1:151, 152, 190, 191 sculpture, 1:133, 151, 152 temple complex, 1:133 temple conversion to churches, 1:134 Aphrodite (Magna Mater; Venus), 1:53, 276 Amathus sanctuary, 1:88 Aphrodisias sancutary, 1:151, 152 Baalat-Gubla associated with, 4:316 Baalbek temple, 1:248 in Hellenistic period, 2:34 Idalion cult, 3:137-138 Madaba mosaic, 3:395 Paphian cult, 4:245 Apliki, 1:152-153; 2:93 Aplomata, 3:76 Apocalypse ofJohn. See Revelation, Book of Apocalypse of Peter, 1:324 Apocrypha, 1:325; 2:124 Apodakos, 2:48 Apollo, 1:145; 2:46, 161; 3:142, 386 bronze head of, 2:95 Didyma temple, 1:132; 2:159, 160 illness blamed on, 3:451 Kalymnos temple, 3:74 Kourion sanctuary, 3:305 Sminthian, 4:16-17 Apollonia. See Assos Apophis, 2:100 Appian of Alexandria, 3:34 Apries, 5:249 'Aqaba (Aila; Eilat; Ezion-Geber), 1:153-156 as Avdat trade site, 1:236 plan of site, 1:155 site restoration, 2:60; 4:463 Solomon'sfleet,5:34 'Aqabe, el-, 1:64-65 'Aqar Quf (Dur Kurigalzu), 1:156-157; 3:273-274 Tower of Babel, 1:251 wall paintings, 5:326 ziggurat, 1:261 Aqra, Jebel al-, 5:255 Aqsa, al- (Jerusalem), 5:269 Aqueducts, 1:157-158; 3:131-132 Abila, 1:7 'Ain es-Samiyeh, 1:35 Akko, 1:157, 158; 3:131, 132 Anatolia, 1:133 Auara, 3:121-122 Babylonian, 1:258 Beit Ras, 1:298 Cartilage, 1:431 Constantinople, 2:61 Emmaus, 2:241 Fustat, 2:367 Jerusalem, 1:157, 158; 3:132; 4:423 Nabatean, 3:121-122
INDEX Nineveh, 1:157; 3:131 Roman hydraulic engineering, 2:31; 3:183-184 Roman raised arches, 1:189; 3:184 Tiberias, 1:158; 3:132 See also Baths; Cisterns; Dams; Hydrology; Pools; Reservoir's; Sewers; Water tunnels Aquileia, 1:272 Ar. See Abu Salabikh A'ra, 1:352 'Arab, Jebel al-, 5:111 'Arabah, Wadi. See Souuiern Ghors and northeast Arabah Arabia Felix, 5:375 Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), 5:197 Arabian
Archaeology
& Epigraphy
(journal),
3:80 Arabian frontier. See Limes Arabicus Arabian Peninsula, 1:158-166 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1-5 Arabic language, 1:166-168 building materials and techniques, 1:374 incense trade, 1:163; 3:147, 148; 4:82, 91; 5:236, 377 inscription sites, 3:169-170 Islamic period, 1:164-166 Nabatean language, 1:182 prehistoric, 1:158-160 pre-Islamic, 1:160-164; 4:383-384, 385 South Arabian languages, 4:519; 5:60-61, 215 See also Department of Antiquities (Saudi Arabia); History of the field, archaeology in Arabian Peninsula; specific
countries,
sites, and subregions
Arabia Petraea, 1:447 Arabic (language), 1:166-169; 4:518-519 alphabet, 1:77, 78, 181; 3:365 Aramaic exchanges, 1:181, 184; 3:168 colloquial versus classical, 1:168 in Egypt (Islamic period), 2:205-206 graffiti, 3:460 grammatical features, 4:522-525 mosque inscriptions, 4:58 Nabatean and, 4:83-84 onomastica, 4:94 poetry, 2:387-388 script, 1:178, 182 Ugaritic alphabet and, 5:262 See also Inscriptions, Arabic Arab-Israel War (1967), 1:95, 96 Arad, 1:169-176, 173, 243; 3:255 biblical archaeology, 1:30 Bronze Age, 1:169-174 enclosed altar, 1:80, 175 expansion of, 4:120 fortifications, 1:170, 174-175; 2:320, 321, 322; 4:121 houses, 1:171, 172, 175; 3:98, 99, 100 Iron Age, 1:174-176 letters, 3:324. See also Arad inscriptions ostraca, 2:438 palace, 4:359 pool, 4:350 sanctuary, 5:174 size of, 2:20 Arad House, 1:171 Arad inscriptions, 1:175,176-177; 3:324 Aharoni and, 1:31 food rationing, 2:318; 4:182 Arados (Aradus; Ruad). See Arwad
Aragac, Mount, 1:203, 204 "Ara'ir (Aro'er), 1:177-178; 3:54 Araj, Tell, 1:303 Afak'el Balisec'i, 1:210 Aramaic language and literature, 1:178-184, 186-187;2:79-80 abjad, 5:355-356 Achaemenid Empire, 1:130 alphabet, 1:76, 77, 78, 178 Ammonite script, 1:104, 106 Arabic displacement of, 1:168; 3:168 Armenia, 1:206 Assyrian use of 1:233 Babylonian use of, 1:252, 256, 258, 261 Bar Kokhba letters, 4:237 biblical references, 1:483 biblical vocabulary, 3 : 1 1 Canaanite alphabet, 1:412 Chaldean use of, 1:483 Fakhariyah inscriptions, 1:181; 2:301, 461 Galilee, 2:375 Genesis Apocryphon,
2:391
graffiti,2:217 Greek and, 1:181; 2:436, 438; 3:165; 4:247-248 Imperial Aramaic, 1:182, 258; 3:144-146, 366-367, 410; 4:237 Ma'lula, 3:405 A-iandaic, 3:410-411 modern Aramaic, 1:184 morphology, 3:146 Nabatean and, 1:182; 4:83-84 Nerab inscriptions, 4:127-129 Old Aramaic dialect, 4:128, 518 onomastica, 4:94 ostraca, 4:190 Palestinian Aramaic, 1:182-183, 184, 186; 2:119; 4:237-238 Palmyrene texts, 4:242 phonology, 3:145-146 Qumran texts, 2:124-125; 4:237 syntax, 3:146 Syria, 1:181; 5:135, 137-138 Syriac and, 5:145-146 See also Egyptian Aramaic texts; Inscriptions, Aramaic ARAMCO. See Arabian American Oil Company Arameans, 1:184-187; 5:130, 131-134 Anatolia, 1:129 Arwad, 1:218 Assyrians, 1:129, 185, 186, 230; 5:131 Babylonian culture contacts, 1:256 Chaldeans, 1:483 'Ein-Gev, 2:223 Isin, 3:187 map of city states, 1:185 religion, 5:134 Tigris, 5:207, 208 See also Aramaic language and literature Aram Zobah, 5:133 'Araq en-Na'asaneh (Cave II), 2:101-102 Ar'arah. See 'Aro'er Ararat. See Urartu Aras, Kemal, 5:372 Aratta, 4:283 Arav, Rami as contributor, 1:302-305 Jesus and His World, 4:419
Arawa (Urua), 2:134; 5:186 Arbad. See Irbid Arba'in, Tell al-, 5:391
467
Arbela. See Irbid ARCE. See American Research Center in Egypt Archaeological Council of Israel, 3:50; 5:104 Archaeological
Encyclopedia
of the Holy
Land
(Negev), 4:417 Archaeological Exploration of Sardis (project), 4:487 Archaeological Institute of America, 1:92-93, 94, 95, 98, 187-188; 3:40 Assos excavations, 1:224 Tarsus excavations, 2:424 Archaeological Museum of Herakleion, 3:74 Archaeological Museum of Sanh Urfa, 4:131 Archaeological
Reports, 4:266
Archaeological Resources Protection Act (1979), 2:270 Archaeological Service of Iran, 5:187 Archaeological Survey of Israel. See Survey of Israel Archaeology:
A Bibliographical
Guide to the Basic
Literature (Heizer), 4:418 Archaeology
and Biblical Research (journal),
4:263 Archaeology
and the Dead Sea Scrolls (de Vaux),
2:188 Archaeology
and the New Testament (McRay),
4:419 "Archaeology as Anthropology" (Binford), 4:134 Archaeology
in the Biblical
World (journal),
4:263 Archaeology (magazine), 1:187-188; 4:263 Archaeology Archaeology
of Ancient Israel (Ben-Tor), 4:416 of the Land of the Bible (Mazar),
4:417 Archaeology
of the New Testament (Finegan),
4:419 Archaeology Service of Iran, 2:480 Archaeomagnetic dating. See Dating techniques Archaeomalerials (journal), 4:267 Archaeometry. See Magnetic archaeometry Archaeozoologia (journal), 4:267 Archelais (site), 1:420 Archelaus (king), 1:420; 4:226 Arches, 1:188-190 Anatolia, 1:132, 133, 225 Beth-She'arim, 1:309-310 Nabatean, 1:352 Archi, Alfonso, as contributor, 2:184-186 Architectural decoration, 1:190-196 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:3; 5:212-213 'Ain Dara', 1:54, 35 Alexandrian Empire, 1:72, 132, 200-202 Anatolia, 1:132, 133, 136, 439-440; 5:213-214 Arad, 1:171-172, 175 Armenia, 1:206 Assyrian Empire, 1:193, 231; 5:209-210 Ayyubid dynasty, 1:242 Babylon, 1:253, 254-255, 260-261; 5:212 baptisteries, 1:271 basilicas, 1:277-278; 2:1, 3 Beth-She'arim, 1:310 Byzantine Empire, 1:190, 191-192, 195-196, 201-202; 5:240 Catal Hoyuk, 1:439-440 Egypt, 1:192; 5:177-178 Fatimid period, 2:308 figural representation, 1:311; 4:86-87; 5:329 Halaf, Tell, 2:461-462 Hittite and Neo-Hittite, 1:129 Islamic-influenced, 1:166, 242, 382; 2:35-36; 5:143
468
INDEX
Architectural decoration, continued Kassite, 3:273-274 Mamluk, 1:242 Meda'in Saleh, 3:446-447 Media, 3:449-450 Nabateans, 1:352 Nuzi, 4:173-174 Palmyra, 1:190, 191, 194-195; 4:243 Persia, 4:299-300; 5:212, 213, 214, 328 Qal'at Sim'an, 1:191, 195-196; 4:369, 370 Roman Empire, 2:31, 32 stucco, 2:361 Suweida, 5:112-114 tile, 5:212-215 Ubaid, Tell al-, 4:4; 5:252 Umayyad caliphate, 4:378 ziggurat, 5:390-391 See also Arches; Architectural orders; Building materials and techniques; Islamic architecture; Mosaics; Sculpture; Stelae; Wall paintings; specific types of buildings
Architectural drafting and drawing, 1:197-200, 217-218; 4:414 Architectural orders, 1:190, 191, 192-194, 195, 196, 200-202 Anatolian cities, 1:132, 224 See also specific types
Architecture. See Architectural decoration; Architectural drafting and drawing; Architectural orders; Building materials and techniques; Churches; House; Islamic architecture; Mosque; Public buildings; Synagogues; Temples; Terraced architecture Archive of die 'Ein-Gedites, 2:119; 4:65 Archives. See Libraries and archives Archiv fur Orientforschung, 4:265 Archivi Reali di Ebla, 2:186 Archiv orieritdlni, 4:265
Ardashir I, 2:78,79 Naqsh-i Rustam relief, 4:101 Zoroastrianism, 2:48; 4:289, 493 Ardua, 1:277 'Areini. See 'Erani, Tel 'Areini, Ahmed el-, 2:256 Arensburg, Baruch, 2:486 Ares, temple of, 2:464 Aretas II, 4:81 Aretas III, 4:82 Aretas IV, 1:237; 4:81,82 Argisti I, 5:292 Argisti II, 5:292 Argistihinili. See Armawir Ariadne, 1:348 Arin-Berd, 5:327-328 Arish, Wadi el-, 5:43, 44, 45 Aristakes Lastiverc'i, 1:210 Aristobulus, 2:123, 482 Aristotle Assos residence, 1:224 coin (definition of), 2:41 ARIT. See American Research Institute in Turkey Arkadia, 2:94 Ark of the Covenant, 1:327; 2:422-423; 5:120 Axum church, 2:275 decoration of, 1:342 'Ein-Gedi, 2:222-223 First Temple, 1:525, 327 Hammath Tiberias, 2:470 Nabratein synagogue, 4:85-86 placement of, 4:85-86; 5:120-121, 123 Qasrin, 4:382
Shema', Khirbet, 5:27 Torah shrine and, 5:119, 120-121, 122 Ark of the Law. See Ark of the Covenant Armanum, 1:52 Armawir (Argistihinili), 1:205 'Armeini, Tell esh-Sheikh Ahmed el-, 2:20 Armenia, 1:202-207 historians, 1:209-210 martyrial buildings, 3:426 under Sasanians, 1:206, 209, 210; 4:491, 493 See also specific sites
Armenian (language), 1:78, 207-211; 3:152 Armenian Church, 1:208-209 Armenian Garden (Jerusalem), 3:238 Armstrong, James A., as contributor, 1:453-459 Army. See Military; Weapons and warfare Arnaud, Thomas Joseph, 3:78 Arnold, Dieter, as contributor, 5:174-179 Arnold, Felix, as contributor, 3:114-118 Anion River, 1:100, 177 'Aro'er (Judea), 1 : 2 1 1 - 2 1 2 ; 4:121 'Aro'er (Transjordan). See 'Ara'ir. Aromatic gums. See Frankincense and myrrh Arpad, 4:428 'Arqa, Tell, 3:172-173 Ar-Rabadhah. See Rabadhah, arArrian, 3:34 Arrowheads, 2:379; 4:18, 353; 5:267 Ar-Rusafah. See Rusafah, arArsaces, 2:46; 4:287 Arsacid dynasty, 1:208; 4:287 Arsam, 1:207 Arsameia, 4:476 Arsamosata, 1:205 Ars grammatica (Dionysius Thrax), 1:210 Arsham, 1:182 Arsinoe III, 1:67 Arsinoe of Coele-Syria, 1:117-118 Arsinoeia. See Ephesus Arslan, Tell, 1:293 Arslan Tash (Hadatu), 1:186, 277; 3:42 drainage system, 5:10 palace, 2:27 Arslantepe (Melid), 1 : 2 1 2 - 2 1 5 excavations, 4:126 plan of site, 1:213 Uruk settlement, 1:125 wall paintings, 5:327 Art. See Architectural decoration; Art sites; Mosaics; Sculpture; Wall paintings Artabanus I, 4:288 Artabanus IV, 4:289 Artabanus V, 4:101 Artabazos, 2:48 Art Art
and Archaeology Newsletter, 4:262 and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, The
(Frankfort), 2:344 ArtaSat. See Artaxata Arrases I, 1:206, 208 Artaxata (Artasat), 1:205, 206 Artaxerxes II, 1:255; 4:297-298 Artaxerxes III, 4:277; 5:135 Artaxiad dynasty, 1:207-208 Artemis, 2:297; 3:451 Didyma sancmary, 2:160-161 Ephesus temple, 1:132; 2:252-254, 255 Jerash temple, 1:146; 3:215, 217 Artemis-Azzanathkona, 2:174 Artemision (Ephesus), 1:132; 2:252-254, 255 Artemis of Koloe, 4:486 Artemis of Sardis, 4:486, 487 Artifact conservation, 1:215-217; 4:69 Artifact drafting and drawing, 1:217-218
Artik, 1:205 Art
Index, 4:418
Art sites, 1 : 2 1 8 Bisitun, 1:330-331; 3 : 1 7 1 - 1 7 2 Carthage, 1:430 Izeh, 1:218; 3:199-202 Persepolis, 4:276 Sepphoris, 2:359; 4:533-535 Til Barsip, 5:209-210 Artzy, Michal as contributor, 4:96-97
Land and Sea Project, 4:97 'Aruda, Jebel, 2:53, 290-291 Arwad (Aradus), 1 : 1 1 1 , 113, 2 1 8 - 2 1 9 Aryan languages. See Indo-Iranian languages Arzawa, kingdom of, 1:129; 3:385. See also Luwians As'ad, Khaled, 4:242 Asaro, Frank, 3:277 A-Sbaita. See Subeita Ascalon. See Ashkelon Asclepius, 1:430 as god of healing, 3:451-452 Pergamon sanctuary, 4:260, 261 Ash, Paul S„ 4:500 Ashahebsed, 1:10 Ashara. See Terqa Ashari, Tell el-, 2:128 Ashdod, 1 : 2 1 9 - 2 2 0 Ashdod-Yam, 4:49, 50 fortifications, 1:219; 2:325, 327 houses, 3 : / 0 6 Iron Age expansion, 4:220 Philistine settlement, 1:219, 220; 4:310, 312 Ashdoda, 1:151 Ashdod-Yam, 4:49, 50 Asher, tribe of, 1:13 Asherah, 1:413; 2:99 child sacrifice to, 2:84 as creator, 2:80 Yahweh and, 2:80, 83; 4:391-392 Ashkelon, 1:63, 219, 2 2 0 - 2 2 3 boneworking industry, 1:337-339 dog interments, 2:166 new archaeological methodologies, 4:136 Philistine setdement, 1:220, 222; 4:312 salvage excavations, 4:462 sanctuary, 5:171 size of, 2:22 Ashkur-Addu, 4:429 Ashkuzi. See Scytiiians Ashlar, 1:362, 380; 2:422; 3:465; 5:293 Ashm inscriptions, 3:169 Ashmolean Museum (Oxford University), 1:56 Evans, Arthur, 2:292 Kish excavations, 3:298 Salamis excavations, 4:457 AshrafKhalil, al-, 2:76 Ashraf Qait Bey, 1:67 Ashtar. See Ishtar 'Ashtart. See Astarte Ashtartyaton, 2:80 Ashur (city). See Assur Ashur (god), 1:226, 230, 231; 3:482 Ashurbanipal, 1:104, 2 3 2 Ashkelon tribute to, 1:220 Assur as administrative capital, 1:228 Babylon building project, 1:254 on incense, 3:148 libraries of, 1:233; 3:356; 4:145 literacy of, 3:363-364 Nineveh constructions, 4:146 royal annals of, 4:312
INDEX 469 Susa plundered by, 4:285 Ashurnasirpal II, 1:227 Balawat inscription, 1:268 Chaldea and, 1:482-483 as hunter, 3:123 logging records, 5:348 military successes, 1:229 Nimrud palace, 3:338 Nimrud under, 4:141, 143-144 park of, 2:383 Ashurnirari I, 1:226 Ashur-Rabi II, 1:227 Ashur-resh-ishi I, 1:227 Ashur-Uballit I, 1:227; 4:13 Asia (Roman province of Anatolia), 1:132 Asiatics in eastern Delta, 3:133-135 Egyptian cultural influence on, 2:198 Asikli Hoyuk, 1:123-124; 4:5 Asir, 1:160; 3:170 Askar, al-, 1:405; 2:188,206 Askar al-Mahdi. See Rusafah, arAslah inscription, 4:81 Asmar, Tell. See Eshnunna ASOR. See American Schools of Oriental Research ASP. See Associated Schools Project Aspendos theater, 1:133; 5:200, 201 Aspis (Kelibia), 4:161 Assad. See Lake Assad Assaliyye synagogue, 2:422 Assassins. Sec Isma'ilism As-Sirrayn. See Sirrayn, asAssociated Schools Project (ASP), 2:271 Association for the Archaeological Survey of Israel (AASI), 3:48, 271-272; 4:391; 5:104 Assos, 1:131, 132, 2 2 3 - 2 2 5 ; 5:212 Assur, 1 : 2 2 5 - 2 2 8 Anatolian trade, 1:126, 128; 3:308-309 Andrae excavations, 1:140, 225, 226, 231; 3:58 Aramaic texts, 1:182, 184 under Assyrian Empire, 1:228, 229, 230 drainage system, 5:10 Khabur region, 3:287 palace, 1:53; 2:383; 4:198 royal inscriptions, 1:44 temples, 1:140, 226, 227-228, 230; 3:270; 5:167, 311 under Shamshi-Adad I, 5:128 ziggurat, 1:226, 227, 228; 3:270 Assur-Seruna Temple, 1:226, 228 Assyr. See Achziv Assyrian (language) inscriptions, 1:232-233; 2:461; 5:210, 348 Kiiltepe texts, 3:308-310 Assyrian Excavation Fund Larsa soundings, 3:331 Nimrud excavations, 3:338; 4:141 Assyrian king list, 1:110, 227 Assyrians, 1 : 2 2 8 - 2 3 3 Abu Hawam, Tell, 1:9 Akkadian language, 1:44-49 Akkadians, 1:41, 52 Amarna tablets, 1:86 Amman, 1:100 Ammonite culture, 1:103, 104 Anatolia commerce, 1:128 aqueducts, 1:157 Arabian cultural parallels, 1:163 Aramaic language use by, 1:182, 186
Arameans and Neo-Hittites, 1:129, 185, 186, 230; 5:131 architectural decoration, 1:193, 231; 5:209-210 art, 3:123; 5:209-210, 326-328 Ashdon's destruction by, 1:219-220 Ashkelon rebellion against, 1:220 Assur as administrative capital, 1:225, 226, 227, 229; 2:17 Babylonians under, 1:228, 229, 230, 256, 261 Carchemish conquest by, 1:424 ceramics, 1:465, 466; 5:313 Chaldeans, 1:483, 484 chariotry, 1:485-486 Damascus conquest by, 2:103 Dan under, 2 : 1 1 1 dry-farming zones, 5:207-208 Ekron under, 4:32-33 Elamite conflicts, 2:233 at Hama, 2:467-468 Haror, Tel, citadel, 2:476 houses, 1:270; 3:110, 111 Hurrians, 3:127 infantry, 5:338 ivory and, 1:343 karum trade system, 2:52-53 Khorsabad as administrative capital, 1:227 Lachish's destruction by, 3:320-321; 4:221 lamps, 3:328 Layard studies of, 3:338 map of empire, 1:229 Mediterranean trade, 1:28 Megiddo under, 3:467-468; 4:221 metalwork, 4:4, 11 Neo-Hittites, 4:127 Nimrud as administrative capital, 1:227 Nineveh as administrative capital, 1:227, 230 open-court buildings, 2:26 palaces, 1:231; 4:198-199, 360 Palestine under, 4:221 Phoenicia under, 4:314, 326; 5:32 political history of, 3:481-483 Samaria occupied by, 4:465 seals, 1:231; 3:309-310; 4:511-512 textiles, 1:231; 5:193 Til Barsip occupied by, 5:209-210 Timnah (Tel Batash), 1:281 tribute collection, 1:28-29, 220, 230, 231 Tyrian tribute to, 5:249 Urartians, 5:292 warfare deification, 3:482 Assyriology, 3:338 Astarak, 1:206 Astarte (Ashtart), 1:105, 276, 413, 430; 4:328 Emar temple, 2:237 pantiieons, 2:81; 4:316 Sarepta, 4:490 Sidon, 4:316 Astragali, 2:380 Astrdm, Paul as contributor, 2:462-463
Hala Sultan Tekke excavations, 2:463 Astyages, 3:448 Asvan, 2:339 Aswad,Tell, 1:23; 5:125 Aswan. See Syene Aswan High Dam, 2:151-152, 271-272; 3:69 Asyut, 1:234-235 Alalia, 4:143 Atal-sen, 3:127 Atargatis, 2:174 'Ataroth (Adar), 4:102, 402
Atatiirk dam and reservoir. See Euphrates dams, survey of Atchana, Tell. See Alalakh Ateas, 4:505 Aten, 1 : 8 1 , 83, 84; 2:199; 5:177 Atflh Aqueduct (Fustat), 2:367 Athanasius, St., 1:68, 324; 4:88, 89 Adianasius Yeshue Samuel (Syrian Metropolitan), 2:390-391 Athena, 2:46 Pergamon sanctuary, 4:260 Priene temple, 1:200; 4:351-352 Vouni temple, 5:322 Athenaeus, 1:192 Athena Kythnia, 3:76 Athens ceramics, 1:467 Chalcedon, 1:482 sack of, 1:70 'Athtar, 3:27 Ath-Thayyflah, Wadi. See Thayyilah, Wadi athAtij, Tell, 3:44, 287 'Atiqot (journal), 3:51; 4:264 Atique, al- (mosque), 1:405 Atkinson, R. J. C , 4:423 Atlal (journal), 3:80 Atlas of Ancient Egypt (Baines and Malek),
4:416 Atlas of Mesopotamia (Beek), 4:416 Atlas of the Bible (Rogerson), 4:416 Atlas of the Early Christian World (Meer and
Mohrmann), 4:419 Atlas of the Greek World (Levi), 4:419 Atlas of the Roman World (Cornell and
Matthews), 4:419 Adit Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:104 harbor excavations, 5:283 well, 3:130 'Atlit ram, 1 : 2 3 4 - 2 3 6 ; 5:283 Atomic absorption spectrometry, 1:119, 120-121; 5:68. See also Neutron activation analysis Atrium church (Apamea), 1:147 Attalid dynasty, 4:260 Attalus I , 1 : 1 3 1 Attalus III, 4:260 Attunu-Purlianni, 2:82, 85 'Attara, 4:102 Attic (Greek dialect), 2:434, 435, 436-437; 3:150 "vulgar," 2:440 Attic Ware (ceramics), 1:467; 2:257 Attiyat, Taysir, 5:280 Amra, 1 : 1 1 4 ; 3:15 Auara. See Humeima Aubin, Melissa M., as contributor, 3:215-219 Auerbach, Elise, as contributor, 2:261-265 Augustan Temple of Dushara (Si), 1:201 Augusta Raurica, 1:277 Auguste, Mariette, 3 : 4 1 9 Augustcum (Samaria), 4:466, 467 Augustinovic, Augosdno, 3:261 Augustus (Octavian) Actium, battle of, 2:202 Alexandria, 1:66 Anatolia, 1:132, 133 Antioch, 1:144 Aphrodisias, 1:152 Caesarea, 1:399 Caesarea Philippi, 1:270 Carthage colonization, 1:430
470
INDEX
Augustus (Octavian), continued Decapolis, 2:129 Egyptian policy, 2:203 temples dedicated to, 1:270 Auja, Wadi, 1:35, 158 Auja al-Hafir. See Nessana Auld, Graeme, as contributor, 1:359-360 Aune, David E., as contributor, 1:113-115, 481-482; 2:434-440; 3:333-337 Aurelian, 1:65 Aurignacian culture, 4:269 Carmel, Mount, 1:426 lithics, 2:487; 3:373; 4:208-209 Aurochs. See Cattle and oxen Australopithecus afarensis, 2:450 AutoCAD, 5:103 Autophradates, 2:48 Avalos, Hector Ignacio, as contributor, 3:450-459 Avaris. See Dab'a, Tell edAvdat (Oboda), 1:236-238; 2:7; 4:81 Avestan (language), 4:293 Aviam, Mordechai, 2:372 as contributor, 3:399-400; 5:150, 152 Galilean settlements, 2:372, 373; 4:462 Jotapata excavations, 3:251 Tabor, Mount, survey, 5:152 Avigad, Nahman, 1:238 Beth-She'arim excavations, 1:309 'Ein-Gedi survey, 2:222 Genesis Apocryphon, 1:182, 238; 2:391 Gerisa, Tel, excavations, 2:394 inscribed seals, 4:166 Jerusalem excavations, 3:227, 230, 234; 4:430 Michal, Tel, 4:20 Nabratein inscripdon, 4:85-86 Rule of the Community, 4:443 Aviram, Joseph, 3:50, 191 Avi-Yonah, Michael, 1:238-239; 2:33 Avdat excavation, 1:236 Caesarea, 1:402 Galilean-type basilical synagogues, 1:274 historical geography, 3:30 Israel Antiquities Authority, 3:189 Sepphoris house, 4:528 Tannur, Khirbet et-, 5:155 Avner, Rina, 5:105 Avner, Uzi, 4:463 Avni, Gideon, 4:229 Awal. See Bahrain Awali River, el-, 5:39 Awan, 4:283 'Awsan, 1:15 'Awwam Temple (Marib), 3:417-418 Axes, 4:3-4, 9; 5:336, 365 Axiothea, 2:95 Axomites, 1:16 Axum, 1:239-241; 2:2, 273-274 church,2:275 coinage, 2:276-277 Matara, 3:440 Ay (king of Egypt), 1:82 Aya, Sippar temple to, 5:47, 48 Aya'a, 5:39 Ayasoluk, hill of (Ephesus), 2:252 Aybak, 1:241 Aybak b. 'Abd Allah, 1:41 Ayia Irini, 3:76 Ayia Triadha, 3:74 Ayios Dhimitrios, 2:93; 3:263, 264-265 Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi, 3:72 Ayios Epiphanios, 4:457
Ayia. See 'Aqaba 'Ayn al-Kanisah, 2:343 Ayrton, E. R., 1:12 Ayun, Khirbet el-, 2:420 Ayyub ibn Yahya ath-Thaqafi, 1:166 Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties, 1:241-243 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1 'Ajlun mosque, 1:41 Baalbek under, 1:247-248 Cairo, 1:405-406 Crusader period, 2:76 Fatimids, 2:207 Kerak under, 1:447; 3:281-282 Palestine under, 4:234 Salah ad-Din founding of, 5:242 Transjordan under, 1:241-242; 5:242-243 Azarnoush, Massoud, 2:187; 3:60 Azatiwada, 3:268-269 A-za-za (Ha-za-za), 1:35 'Azekah (Israelite), 1:243 Azhar, al- (Cairo mosque) Fatimid building of, 2:206, 308 inscriptions, 4:59 as Shi'i center, 4:105 Aziru, 1:86 Azor, 3:207 Azraq, 1:243-245, 262, 263 Azraq 18, 5:227 Azraq 31, 5:228 Azzeddin Aybak, 1:244 B Baal, 1:31,87, 247,384 Azatiwada, 3:268-269 Baal cycle, 2:81-82 as chief Phoenician god, 4:316 Emar temple, 2:237 high places of, 2:138 Kuntillet 'Ajrud inscription, 3:311 rains of, 2:80 syncretization with Seth of Avaris, 2:100 Baal-Addir, 4:316 Baalat-Gubal (Baalat-Gubla), 4:316, 327-328 Baalbek, 1:247-248 'Anjar excavation, 1:143 architectural decoration, 1:190, 192, 194, 195 Institut Francais excavations, 3:172 temples, 4:438 Baal-Gad, 3:16 Ba'al Hadad, 1:413; 2:80, 81. See also Hadad Ba'al Hammon, 1:430; 4:159-160 Ba'al Hazor, 1:35 Baal-Hermon, 3:16 Ba'alis (Ba'alyasha), 1:104 Baal Saphon, 3:424 Baal Shalisha, 1:35 Ba'al Shamayn. See Ba'al Shamin Ba'al Shamem, See Ba'al Shamin Ba'al Shamin, 1:413; 2:85; 4:316; 5:387 Aramean worship of, 5:134 Palmyra temple, 1:194; 4:239, 242 Palmyrene pantheon, 4:243 Seeia temple, 4:81 Si temple, 1:194 Ba'alyasha' (Ba'alis), 1:104 Ba'al Zaphon, 5:44 Baasha, 2:420 Bab al-Farag, 1:404 Bab al-Lun. See Babylon
Bab al-Masdud, 3:90 Babatha archive, 2:119; 3:258; 4:65 Bab at-Taq (Baghdad), 1:265 Bab Barquyah, 1:405 Bab-Ea, 1:42-43 Bab edh-Dhra", 1:248-251; 2:405; 5:231 agriculture, 1:25 burial techniques, 1:384; 5:219 excavations, 3:55; 5:62 new archaeological methodologies, 4:136 Babel. See Tower of Babel Bab el-Futuh, 1:404-405; 2:336 Bab el-Hawa, 2:421; 4:462 Bab el-Metwalli, 1:405 Babel mound, 1:251, 252, 253 Bab el-Nasir, 2:336 Bab el-Qarratin, 1:405 Bab esh-Sharqi, 2:104 Bab Tadmur, 3:90 Babylas, St., 1:278; 2:4; 3:426 Babylon, 1:251-256 as administrative center, 3:481 Akkad, 1:42 Alalakh, 1:55, 56, 59 Alexandrian Empire, 1:70, 72-73; 3:484 Amorites, 1:256 'Ara'ir destruction by, 1:177 architectural history, 1:254-255, 258, 261 coinage, 2:43 excavations, 1:252-254, 258; 3:39 fortifications, 2:327, 365 Fustat, 2:365 Hittite conquest of, 1:256 streets, 4:431-432 tile production, 5:212 ziggurat, 5:391 See also Babylonians Babylonian Chronicles, 3:483; 4:147, 312 Babylonians, 1:256-262 Akkade, 1:41, 256 Akkadian dialects, 1:44-49, 232, 258 Amarna tablets, 1:86 Amman, 1:100 Ammon, 1:104 Aramaic language use by, 1:186, 252, 258, 261 Arameans and, 1:186 Assyrian conquest of, 1:228, 229, 230, 256, 261 Assyrians conquered by, 1:230 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 1:296 Chaldeans and, 1:483-484 cosmetic use, 2:68 Elamite conflicts with, 1:256; 2:232, 233 excavations, 1:258-261 legal texts, 4:298 map of empire, 1:257 metalwork, 4:12 political history of, 3:479-483 seals, 1:251,260; 4:511 temples, 1:254, 260, 261; 5:167-168 textiles, 1:259 See also Akkadians; Babylon; Inscriptions, Babylonian; Neo-Babylonian Empire Bab Zuwayla, 1:404, 405; 2:336 Bacchides, 1:314 Bacchus. See Dionysus Bacharach, Jere L„ as contributor, 4:24-25 Bache, Charles, 5:183, 184 Bachmann, Walter B. Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, 3:269, 270 Petra, 4:306
INDEX Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Ferguson), 4:419-420 Bacon, Francis Henry, 1:224 Bactria, 1:70, 72; 4:9 Bactrian (language), 3:150; 4:294 Badarian (Neolithic phase), Upper Egypt, 2:193-194 Bade, William Frederic, 1 : 2 6 2 , 452; 4:102, 332 Badger, G. P., 4:141 Badiat ash-Sham, 1 : 2 6 2 - 2 6 3 Badre, Leila as contributor, 1:218-219, 247-248; 3:265-266, 290-291; 5:13-14 Kazel, Tell al-, excavations, 3:276 Shabwa sounding, 5:13 Baduraya district (Baghdad), 1:264 Baedeker, Karl, 1:299 Baetyls, Achziv, 1 : 1 3 - 1 4 Bagadata, 2:48 Bagara (al-Hiba), 2:409 Bagatti, Bellarmino, 1 : 2 6 3 - 2 6 4 ; 3:261 Nazareth excavations, 1:263; 2:343; 4 : 1 1 3 Nebo, Mount, excavations, 1:263; 3:53; 4:117 Tabgha excavations, 5:150 Tabor, Mount, excavations, 5:152 Baghdad, 1 : 2 6 4 - 2 6 6 as 'Abbasid capital, 1 : 1 , 3, 165; 2:35; 5:144 American Schools of Oriental Research, 1:92-93, 95-96 architecture, 1:3; 2:35 Darb Zubaydah, 1:4 fortifications, 2:336 gardens, 2:388 siege of (811-813), 1:1 tile production, 5:213 Baghdader Mitteilungen (journal), 4:264 Baghdad, University of, 2:471; 5:48 Bagistanon, Mount. See Bisitun Bagratid dynasty, 1:210 Bahat, Dan as contributor, 3:224-238 Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem, 4:416 Bahgal, Ali Bey, 1:405; 2:366, 367 Bahnasa, al-. See Oxyrhynchus Bahrain, 1 : 2 6 6 - 2 6 8 Department of Antiquities, 4:367 Dilmun culture, 1:161; 2:162-163, 297 as international trade center, 1:266 Sumerianffade,1:160, 161 Umayyad period, 1:165, 166 Bahrain II, 4:98-99, 101 Bahrain IV, 4:101 Bahrain V, 4:289, 494 Bahri dynasty, 1:241 Bahr Yusuf (Nile branch), 1:233 Bai'lan Pass, 1 : 1 1 5 Baillet, Maurice, 2:189 Baines,John, 3:363; 4:416 Baker, H. Wright, 2:64 Bakhtiari Mountains, 5:110 Bakka. See Mecca Balaam (son of Beor), 1:182; 2:138, 139 Balak, 4:38 Balat. See Miletus Balatah, Tell. See Shechem Balawat, 1:231; 5:32 Baldacchino,]. G„ 3:404 Baldwin I (of Boulogne), 2:73; 3:13 Baldwin II (of Le Bourg), 2:73 Balensi, Jacqueline, 1:9 Balis, 2:292 Balk, 1 : 2 6 8 - 2 6 9
Balkans Anatolian prehistoric contact, 1:125 dialects, 3:152 Balkuwara Palace (Samarra), 2:388; 4:475 Ball, Robert, 2:295 Ballas, 4:97 Ballistae, 5:339 Baltic languages, 3:151 Baity, Jean Ch., as contributor, 1:145-147; 4:177-178 Balu', 1 : 2 6 9 - 2 7 0 , 447; 5:234 Baluchi (language), 3:150 Baluchistan, 4:280 Baly, Denis, 3:30 Bamboula, 3:301, 302 Bammer, Anton, as contributor, 2:252-255 Banat, Tell, 2:291 Bandar Tawahi, 1:15 Bangani, 3:152 Bani, Tell. See Hammath-Gader Banias (Caesarea Philippi), 1:118, 2 7 0 - 2 7 1 ; 2:421 aqueduct, 1:158 prosperity of, 2:422 Bani Tayy', 5:241 Baniti, 4:143 Bankes, William John, 3:52 Banks, Edgar James, 1:14; 3:59 Banning, E. B„ as contributor, 5:391-392 Banti, Luisa, 3:74 Baptism. See Baptisteries Baptist Bible College (Clark Summit, Pennsylvania), 3:20 Baptisteries, 1 : 2 7 1 - 2 7 2 ; 2:2, 177 Baq'ah Valley, 1:103, 2 7 2 - 2 7 4 Baqaq, Tell, 2:267 Baqaq stream, 2:265 Baqir, Taha, 2:146 Baradan, Tell, 2:473 Bar-Adon, Pessah Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:105 Beth-Yerali excavations, 1:312, 313 shfifonim, 5:27 Baradost Mountain, 5:15 Barag, Dan as contributor, 3:424 'Ein-Gedi excavations, 2:222 Baraitot, 3:11 Bar'am, 1:274 Barama, 2:186 Baramki, Dimitri Constantinc, 1:274-275 Jericho excavations, 3:16 Jerusalem excavations, 3:226 Mefjerware, 1:477 Sarepta pottery, 4:488 Barbalissos, 2:237 Barbar, 1:161, 266 Barber, E. J. W., as contributor, 5:191-195 Bard, Kadiryn A., 1:241 Bardtke, Hans, 4:443 Bar-Hadad, 1:181; 5:387 Bar-Hadad III, 5:133, 387 Bar-Ilan, Meir, as contributor, 4:246-247, 247-248 Bar-Ilan University Beth-Shemesh excavations, 1:311 Galilean pottery project, 3:277 'Izbet Sartah excavations, 3:198 Barisha, jebel, 1:195 Barkay, Gabriel Jerusalem excavations, 3:227, 235 Ketef Hinnom excavations, 3:285
471
Lachish excavations, 3:317 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 Barki Naphshi, 2:123 Bar Kokhba (bar Koseba), Shim'on, 1:183, 275-276 Murabba'at texts, 4:65 titles of, 3:258 Bar Kokhba letters, 2:438; 3:11, 258 Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 ci;), 1:183, 2 7 5 - 2 7 6 ; 2:124; 3:258 Herodium, 3:19 Murabba'at texts, 4:65 repercussions, 4:226, 227 Bar-Lev, S,, 3:314 Barley, 1:480-481 agricultural development of, 1:23, 24, 25 Assyrian cultivation of, 1:231 Bab edh-Dhra' cultivation of, 1:250 Barlow, J. A., 2:92 Barnett, Richard D., 1:343 Barnum, P. T., 3:40 Baron, Salo W., 2:143 Baroque architecture, 1:192, 200 Barque stations, 5:177 Barquq (sultan), 5:242-243 Bar-Rakkab, 1:181 Barrattarna, 1:60 Barri, Tell. See Kakliat Barrois, Augustin Georges, 1 : 2 7 6 - 2 7 7 ; 2:188 Barsip. See Til Barsip Bardielemy, Dominique Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:188-189 Rule of the Community, 4:443 Barthelemy, Jean-Jacques, 2:130, 131, 132 Bartlett, John R., 5:235, 236 as contributor, 2:189-191 Bardett, William Henry, 5:50 Bartoccini, Renato, 3:53 Barton, George Aaron, 1:92-93 Baruda, Tell, 2:78 Bar-Yosef, Ofer us contributor, 1:424-428; 2:219, 389-390, 486-487; 4:63-64, 89-90, 207-212; 5:12-13, 79, 246, 254-255 Carmel, Mount, excavations, 1:424, 425, 426 Hayonim excavations, 2:486 on Jericho wall, 3:221 'Ubeidiya excavations, 5:254 Bar-Ziv, Hayini, 4:462 Basal. See Hadur Formation Basalt bas-relief, 'Ain Dara', 1:54 Basaltic vessels, 3:376, 380 Base Ring (ceramics) 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, 2:228 'Erani, Tel, 2:257 Basic Bibliography for the Study cf the Semitic Ixmguagcs (Hospers), 4:418 Basilicas, 1 : 2 7 7 - 2 7 8 ; 2 : 1 , 3 Antonine, 1 : 4 3 0 arches, 1:188 architectural decoration, 1:191, 196 Armenia, 1:206, 208 Ashkelon, 1:223 Baalbek, 1:248 bathing establishments, 1:272 Beth-Yerah, 1:313 Church of'the Nativity, 1:277, 278, 302 civil, 1:277 Constantinople, 2:63 Halusa, 2:466 Pabau, 4:87-88 Parentium, 3:121 Shavei-Zion, 5:16
472
INDEX
Basilicas, continued synagogues, 1:274, 277, 299, 418; 2:443, 470; 5:119-120, 121 Syria, 4:369-370 Tiberias, 5:206 Umm el-Jimal, 2:1 Basra, 1:4; 2:35 Bass, George F., as contributor, 1:414-416; 5:2-4, 11-12, 30-34, 266-268, 283-284, 372-374 Bassetki, 1:52 Bassit, 1 : 2 7 8 - 2 7 9 , 471 Bast, 1:441 Basta, 1 : 2 7 9 - 2 8 0 ; 3:384 Basta Joint Archaeological Project, 1:279 Bastam, 5:292 stables, 5:77, 72 Bastet, 2:142; 3:384 Bastions. See Fortifications Batash, Tel (Timnah), 1 : 2 8 1 - 2 8 3 houses, 3:706, 107, 110 Philistine settlement, 4:312 Bate, Dorothea M. A., 2:389; 5:153 Bathrooms, 4:301-302 Beth-Shean, 1:283-284 Mesopotamian, 3:93 Syro-Palestinian, 4:454-455 toilet articles, 4:17 Baths, 1:283-285 Anatolia, 1:133 Antonine, 1:431 Apamea, 1:146 Aphrodisias, 1:152 Avdat, 1:238 Beth-Yerah, 1:313 Egypt, 1:283 Emmaus, 2:240-241 historical geography, 3:32 Jordan, 4:397-398; 5:281, 282 Roman, 1:284-285; 4:302 Aquileia, 1:271-272 'Ein-Ya'el, 2:226 Ephesus, 2:254 Hammath-Gader, 2:468-469 Sepphoris, 4:534 Tiberias, 5:204 See also Ritual baths Batin, Wadi. See Rimah, Wadi Bauer, Hans, 2:132 on Biblical Hebrew, 3:9 Ugaritic tablets, 5:257, 304 Baumann, Eberhard, 4:102 Bavarian Academy of Science, 3:186 Bawden, Garth, 2:133; 5:160 Baybars, 1:41, 220; 2:76 Caesarea, 1:401 Mamluk administration and buildings, 1:241, 242 Bayhan, Wadi, 5:376 Baynes, C. A., 1:426 Bayt al-Faqih, 4:41 Beads faience, 5:310 glass, 5:315 quadruple spiral, 4:10-11 Terqafinds,5:190 Beall, Todd S., 2:125 Bean, George E., 2:463-464 Beauchamp, Abbe de, 1:251, 255 Be'ayan, Jonathan bar, 1:275 Becker, JUrgen, 4:443 Becking, Bob, 1:106 Bedewe, See Meroe
Bedouin, 4:254-255, 381 Beebe, H. Keith, 4:88 Beekeeping, 1:143 Beek, Martinus A., 4:416 Be'erot,4:102 Be'er Resisim, 1 : 2 8 5 - 2 8 7 ; 3:101, 188; 4:120, 136 Beersheba, 1 : 2 8 7 - 2 9 1 biblical archaeology, 1:30 farmhouse, 4:462 fortifications, 2:320, 321 grain-storage pits, 2:432 irrigation, 3:130; 4:422 pastoralism, 1:24 pit graves, 4:349 rebuilding processes, 5:86 sanctuary, 5:174 settlement, 4:120, 121 stables, 5:71, 72 Beersheba Edict, 3:121 Beher, 1:240 Behistun. See Bisitun Behram (Behramkale). See Assos Behyo, 1:278 Beidha, 1:141, 2 9 1 - 2 9 2 ; 2:15; 5:302 Beihan, Wadi, 5:215 Beirut, 1 : 2 9 2 - 2 9 5 ; 2:153 Beirut High Commission, Sidon excavations, 5:39 Beisan. See Beth-Shean Beit al-Hasr, 5:117 Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq, 3:99-100 as contributor, 3:175-177; 4:390-391 Beit Gan. See Beth-Gan Beit Ufa. See Beth Alpha Beitin. See Bethel BeitMery, 1:294 Beit Mirsim, Tell (Beth-Mirsham), 1:262, 295-297
Albright excavations, 1:61, 62, 452 fortifications, 2:320; 3:110 Glueck excavations, 1:96 houses, 3:102, 103 identification of, 4:401 olive vat, 4:180 Beit Ras (Capitolias), 1 : 2 9 7 - 2 9 8 ; 4:422 Beit Sur, 5:105 Beitzel, Barry J . , 4:416 Bekaa Valley. See Coele-Syria Bel, 4:240 Palmyra temple, 1:194-195 Palmyrene pantheon, 4:243 Belevi architectural orders, 1:200 tomb, 1:132; 2:347; 3:441-442 Belgian Archaeological Expedition in Iraq, 5:48 Belgian Committee of Excavations in Jordan, 3:340 Belgian Luristan Expedition, 4:14 Belitnipha, Assur temple for, 1:227 Bell, Gertrude, 1:93, 359; 3:59, 409 Bellapais, 5:322 Bellina Citadel, 1:271 Bells, 4:73 Belos Temple (Apamea), 1:146 Belus River, 5:318 Belvedere Gardens (Rome), 4:67 Belzoni, Giovanni, 1 : 1 1 ; 3:38 Belzoni, Jean-Baptiste, 2:270 Bemeselis, 4:392 Ben-Ari, Muni, 4:381 Ben-Arieh, Sarah, 3:232
Ben-Dor, Immanuel, 2:358; 3:189 Ben-Dov, Meir, 1:277 Bene 'amnion (sons of Ammon), 1:104 Bene Amran, Till. See Amarna, Tell elBen Gurion, David, 2:153 Ben Gurion, Joseph, 2:314 Ben Gurion University Halusa, 2:465 Haror, Tel, excavations, 2:474 North Sinai Expedition, 5:41-46 Sera', Tel, 5:1 specialization at, 3:50 Ben-Hadad. See Bir-Hadad I; Bir-Hadad III Beni Hasan, 2:40 mural, 1:411 Benjamin, 3:254, 255, 256; 5:105 Benjamin, D. C„ 4:415 Benjaminites, 2:346; 3:186. See also Judah Benjamin of Tudela, 1:251 Ben Mose Ha-Parchi, Esthori, 3:51 Bennett, Crystal-Margaret, 1:298 British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History, 1:357 Buseirah excavations, 1:388-389 Dhra' soundings, 2:156 Edom excavations, 2:190; 3:55; 5:235 Petra excavations, 4:304 Tawilan excavations, 5:156, 157 Umm el-Biyara excavations, 5:275, 276 Benoit, Pierre, 2:187-188, 189 Benson, E. F., 1:66 Bent, (James) Theodore, 2:275, 452; 3:73 Ben-Tor, Amnon Archaeology of Ancient Israel, 4:416 as contributor, 3:1-5; 4:387-389; 5:381-383 Hazor excavation, 3:1 Qiri, Tel, excavations, 4:387 Yarmut,Tel, 5:370 Yoqne'am excavations, 5:381 Bent Pyramid (Dahshur), 4:362 Ben Yehudah, Eliezer, 4:236 Ben Zakkai, Rabban Johanan, 2:314 Benzinger, Immanuel, 1:299 Beor, 1:182 Berakhot, 2:123 Berbers, 2:307, 309; 4:156 Berchem, M. van, 4:368 BerekatRam, 2:418 Berenice (wife of Agrippa II), 1:309 Berenice, Mount, 5:205-206 Bergama, 4:259, 260 Berghe, Louis Vanden, 2:229; 3:202; 4:14 Bergman, Christopher, 3:307 Bergstrasser, Gotthelt, 3:9 Bergy, Auguste, 1:293 Berit, el-, temple, 5:20 Berlin Museum Assur and Uruk reconstructions, 1:140 Elephantine excavations, 2:234 Pergamon excavations, 4:260 Priene excavations, 4:351 Berman, Ariel, 5:206 Bernal, Martin, 1:21 Beroea. See Aleppo Berossos, 1:73 Berthier, Sophie, 3:175 Berytus: Archaeological Studies (journal), 4:26' Bes, 3:311, 312 Besara. See Beth-She'arim Bessus, 1:70 Betancourt, Philip P. as contributor, 2:70-72 Pseira excavations, 3:75
INDEX Betar, 5:105 Beth Alpha, 1:194, 238, 277, 299-300 Bern Arbel. See Irbid Beth-Barah, 2:303 Bethel, 1:300-301 Ai as biblical site of, 1:32-33 Albright excavation, 1:61, 300; 5:55 temple, 5:173 Bethel (god), 1:413 Bethesda Pool. See Sheep Poo) Beth-Gan, 1:301-302; 5:379 Belh-Guvrin (Eleutheropolis), 3:257 aqueducts, 1:157, 158 catacombs, 1:385 Idumea administration by, 3:143 mosaic floor clearing, 2:188 Beth-ha-'Emeq, 1:157; 5:16 Beth-ha-Kerem, 2:373; 4:402 Bethlehem, 1:302 Abel-Vincent studies, 1:5; 5:304 Bagatti excavations, 1:263 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:118 Bedi-Merkabot, 2:474 Beth-Mirsham: See Beit Mirsim, Tell Bethnamaris, 4:140 Beth-Nimrah, 4:140 Beth-Pelet. See Far'ah, Tell el- (South) Bedi Rehob, 5:133 Bethsaida, 1:302-305; 2:373 Beth-Shean, 1:262, 277, 30S-309; 5:270 acreage, 4:213 aqueducts, 1:158 architectural decoration, 1:191 bathrooms, 1:283-284 as Egyptian administrative center, 4:218 monastery, 2:7 sanctuary, 5:173 temples, 1:306, 307-308; 5:171, 172 theater, 5:202 Beth-She'arim, 1:309-311 architectural decoration, 1:194 Avigad excavations, 1:238 catacombs, 1:310, 385, 434-438; 4:481 glass production, 5:318 inscriptions, 2:375 Beth She'arim III: the Catacombs (Avigad), 1:238 Beth-Shemesh ('Ain Shems; Tell er-Rumeilah), 1:243, 262, 311-312; 4:213 cisterns, 2:13; 4:422 cuneiform tablet, 1:77 fortifications, 2:324 Beth-Yerah (Khirbet Kerak), 1:312-314 acreage of, 4:213 bathhouse, 1:158 Building with Circles, 4:214 ceramics, 1:33, 464 fortifications, 1:313; 2:330 granary, 1:26; 2:431; 4:360 shfifonim, 5:28 Beth-Zur, 1:61, 314 Bettir church, 4:369-370 Betts, Alison V. G. as contributor, 1:262-263; 3:209-210 Azraq region surveys, 1:244 Bevan, E. R„ 1:66 Bewsher,J. B., 5:47 Bey, Bedry, 5:48 Bey, O.Hamdi, 3:58; 4:123 Bey, Theodore Makridi, 1:333; 5:39 Bey, Ziya, 1:335
Beydar, Tell, 3:46 Bcyliks (Turkish states), 1:136 Beysehir. See Lake Beysehir Ei'a, Tell. See Tuttul Biagi, Paolo, 4:184 Bianchi, Robert Steven, as contributor, 1:428-429, 484-485; 2:201-205 Bianili, 5:291 Biar aqueduct (Jerusalem), 1:158 Bibby, T. Geoffrey, 1:161; 2:163; 3:79; 4:367 Biberkraut, J„ 2:391 Bible. See Biblical literature; specific books Bible, Samaritan, 2:119-120; 4:469 Bible and Spade. See Archaeology and Biblical Research Bible atlases, 4:416 Bible de Jerusalem, La, 2:188; 5:299 Bible dictionaries, 4:417-418 Biblical Archaeologist (journal), 1:97; 4:263 Biblical archaeology, 1:315-319 archaeologists Aharoni, Yohanan, 1:30-31 Albright, William Foxwell, 1:61-62 Avigad, Nahman, 1:238 Avi-Yonah, Michael, 1:238-239 Bade, William Frederic, 1:262 Bagatti, Bellarmino, 1:263-264 Bliss, FrederickJones, 1:332-333 Burrows, Millar, 1:387 Callaway, Joseph Atlee, 1:406-407 Glueck, Nelson, 2:415-416 Merrill, Selah, 3:473-474 Petrie, Sir William Matthew Flinders, 4:308-309 Sailer, Sylvester John, 4:458 Sellin, Ernst, 4:516 Wright, George Ernest, 5:350-352 Yadin, Yigael, 5:367-368 British approaches, 1:317 centrality of, 3:40, 41 ethnoarchaeological studies, 2:281-283 French approaches, 1:317 German approaches, 1:317 Hebrew Scriptures as source, 1:319 institutions, 1:94-98 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, 1:62 American Palestine Exploration Society, 1:91 Institute of Holy Land Studies, 3:172 Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, 4:122-123 Israeli approaches, 1:317 trends affecting, 1:316-319; 4:107 See also Historical archaeology Biblical Archaeology Review, 4:263 Biblical Bibliography (Langevin), 4:418 Biblical Illustrator (journal), 4:263 Biblical literature, 1:319-324 amulet references, 1 : 1 1 4 Armenian commentary, 1:210 Hebrew Scriptures, 1:319-322 Achziv references, 1 : 1 3 altar references, 1:80 Alt scholarship, 1:79-80 on Ammonites, 1:103-104, 105, 110 Aramaic section, 1:182-183, 184 Armenian translation, 1:209, 210 Babylon references, 1:251 bathing references, 1:284; 3:454; 4:301 as biblical archaeological source, 1:319 camel references, 1:408
473
canonization of, 1:321 child sacrifice references, 1:414, 430; 4:330 cosmetics references, 2:68, 69 critical methodologies, 1:320-321 dietary laws and, 4:348 disease references, 3:454-455 Emar texts, 2:237 Essene interpretation of, 2:268-269 on First Temple and Second Temples, 1:324, 325-326 fishing references, 2:316, 317 food storage references, 2:319 Gibeon references, 2:403 Gilead references, 2:405 Hazor references, 3:1 Hebron references, 3:13 Hermon, Mount, references, 3:15-16 Heshbon references, 3:19-20 historical accuracy of, 1:321 Hittite references, 1:321; 3:84 incense references, 3:147, 148, 149 Jaffa references, 3:206 Jericho references, 3:220 Lachish references, 3:319, 320 Madaba references, 3:393 Megiddo references, 3:464-465 Midian references, 4:25 Moab references, 2:157; 4:38 names and naming in, 4:91, 92, 94 Near Eastern belletristic works and, 3:161 Nebo, Mount, references, 4:115 Nimrud (Calah) reference, 1:227 Nineveh references, 4:146-147 olives references, 4:182 papyrus, 4:246 on Persian rule, 4:222 on Philistines, 4:310, 312 on Phoenician cults, 4:328 on pools, 4:351 population numbers, 2:143 at Qumran, 2:119-120 road-building references, 4:433 on sacrifices to Yahweh, 2:84 Sheba references, 1:162; 5:18 Shechem references, 5:22, 23 ship references, 5:33-34 Ta'anach references, 5:149 See also Israelites inscriptions, church, 2:8 New Testament, 1:322-324 Aramaic words in, 1:183 Armenian translation, 1:208, 209, 210 canonization of, 1:324 cosmetics references, 2:68 Decapolis references, 2:128 disease references, 3:455 Emmaus reference, 2:240 fishing references, 2:316, 317 Gadara reference, 5:281-282 house church references, 2:1; 3:118-119 incense references, 3:148 Nineveh references, 4:147 as reference source, 4:419-120 Second Temple references, 1:325 Tabor, Mount, in, 5:152 weather lore in, 4:508 written in Koine, 1:73 Syro-Palestinian archaeology and, 1:318-319; 5:147 See also Pentateuch; specific books by key word Biblical temple, 1:324-330. See also First Temple; Second Temple; Temple Mount
474
INDEX
Biblical World: A Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology (Pfeiffer), 4:417 Bibliography of Ancient Ephesus (Oster), 4:419 "Bibliography of Holy Land Sites" (Vogel), 4:418-419 Bibliotheca orientalis (journal), 4:265 Bichrome Ware 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:40 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, 2:228 Bienkowski, Piotr, 5:235-236 as contributor, 1:298, 387-390; 5:156-158, 274-276 Bietak, Manfred, 3:384; 4:270 as contributor, 2:99-101 Dab'a, Tell ed-, excavations, 2:99 Biever, Don, 3:394 Biggs, Robert D., 1:10; 5:357 Bikai, Patricia, 5:247, 248 Bikai, Pierre, 1:89; 3:55; 4:306 Bilad ash-Sham (Greater Syria), 5:141, 147, 388. See also Syria-Palestine Bilal bi Rabah, 1:165 Billa, Tell, 1:93, 95 Bilqis. See Sheba, queen of Bimson, John J., 4:416 Binar Bashi, See Aphek Binbaal, 2:80 Bin Bir Kilisse, 2:4 Binford, Lewis R„ 1:461; 2:281; 4:134, 135 Bin Tepe, 4:486, 487 Biostratigraphy, 2:450 Biq'at Quneitra, 2:418 Biqa' Valley. See Coele-Syria Bir Abu-Sweira, 4:44 Bir 'Ali. See Qana' Biran, Avraham, 1:211 as contributor, 4:122-123 Dan excavations, 2:108 Esdar, Tel, 2:260 'Ira, Tel, expedition, 3:175 Israel Antiquities Authority, 3:189 Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology directorship, 4:122 Bird Fadhh 1:16 Bir el-'Abd, 2:431; 5:43 Bir es-Saba', 1:288 Bir es-Safadi, 1:143 Bir-Hadad I, 2:104, 420 Bir-HadadlJI, 2:103,421 Bir Nasser, 1:16 Birnbaum, Solomon A., 5:357 Bir Sahara East, 2:191 Birs Nimrud. See Borsippa Bir Tarfawi, 2:191 Birth houses, 5:177 Biruta. See Beirut Biscop, Jean-Luc, 4:368, 369 Bisheh, Ghazi, as contributor, 4:376-378, 397-399 Bisitun, 1 : 3 3 0 - 3 3 1 ; 3:171-172 inscription of Darius, 1:182, 330-331; 2:214; 3:162-163 Bism[a]ya. See Adab Bit-Adini, 1:186; 5:132 Bit-Agusi, 1:186; 5:132 Bit Ammanu. See Amman Bit-Amukani, 1:483 Bit-Bahiani, 1:186; 5:132 Bit-Dakkuri, 1:483 Bit-Halupe, 1:186; 5:132 Bithia, 4:484 Bithynia, 1:131, 132, 134, 135
Bithynia-Pontus, 1:482 Bit Maacah. See Maacah Bit Resh, 5:297 Bit-Sa'alli, 1:483, 484 Bit-Silani, 1:483, 484 Bittel, Kurt, 1:333-334; 3:65 Bit-Yakin, 1:483, 484 Bit-Zamani, 1:186; 5:132 Bivar, A. D. H., as contributor, 2:41-52 BJni, 1:206 Bjorkman, Judith K., 4:2 Black Sea, 2:61 Black Stone of the Ka'bah, 1:166 Blackwood, 5:266 Blade industries, 3:378-379 Blaiklock, Edward M., 4:416 Blair, Sheila S., as contributor, 4:58-60 Blakely, Jeffrey A. as contributor, 1:332-333; 3:252-253, 294-295;5:49-51 Caesarea excavations, 1:403 Jubah, Wadi al-, 3:253 Blanckenhorn, Max, 2:148 Blau, Joshua, as contributor, 3:5-12 Blegen, Carl William, 1 : 3 3 2 ; 3:65, 74-75 Bleibil, Tell, 4:140 Bliss, Daniel, 4:235 Bliss, Frederick Jones, 1:315, 3 3 2 - 3 3 3 'Azekah excavation, 1:243 ceramics, 1:459 Hesi, Tell el-, excavations, 2:27; 3:22 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225, 229, 235, 238; 4:235 Judeideh, Tell el-, excavations, 3:259 Madaba, 3:394 Mareshah excavations, 3:412 Moab plateau, 3:52 Bloch-Smidi, Elizabeth M., as contributor, 1:443-444; 2:13-14, 336-337; 3:207-208; 4:348-349 Blom, Ron, 5:253 Bloom, Jonathan, 4:55 Boardman, John, 3:75, 76 Boase, T. S. R., 2:76 Boats. See Ships and boats; Underwater archaeology Bodashtart, 5:39 Bodmer, Martin, 4:88 Bodmer papyri, 4:88 Bodrum. See Halikamassos Bodrum Museum, 2:464, 465 Underwater Archaeology, 5:12 Bodtannit, 2:80 Boehmer, Rainer Michael, S:294 as contributor, 5:294-298 BoermaJ,, 2:288 Bogazkale. See Bogazkoy Bogazkoy (Hattusa), 1 : 3 3 3 - 3 3 5 Akkadian texts, 1:45, 107, 128 Alalakh texts, 1:56 architecture, 1:129; 3:84-85 art symbolism, 1:35 destruction of, 1:129 excavations, 3:81 fortifications, 5:335-336 as Hittite capital, 1:128, 129; 3:39, 84 Flurrian texts, 3:125, 126 libraries, 3:84 Luwian inscriptions, 3:385-386 surveys, 3:64 Bohairic (dialect), 2:66 Bohemond of Otranto, 2:73 Bohrer, Frederick N., as contributor, 3:337-338
Boismard, Marie-Emile, 2:187-188 Bolkardag, 5:156 Bonaparte, Jerome, 4:421 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I Bone, ivory, and shell, 1 : 3 3 5 - 3 5 0 Adulis trade, 1:16 Alalakh trade, 1:58 antler, 1:336 Ashkelon, 1:337-339 Bronze and Iron Ages, 1 : 3 4 0 - 3 4 3 Be'er Resisim, 1:286 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 1:296 clothing fasteners, 2:39 Byzantine and Islamic periods, 1 : 3 4 8 - 3 5 0 cloisonne, 1:341 craftsmen associations, 1:339, 346 elephant presence as dating method, 1:143 Epipaleolithic, 1:426 horn, 1:336 jewelry, 1:343 mother-of-pearl, 1:347 Natufian, 1:426 Neolitiiic, 1:446 Nimrudfinds,1:231 Persian through Roman periods, 1:337, 343-348
tusks, 1:335, 340, 341, 344, 346, 349-350 typology and technology, 1 : 3 3 5 - 3 4 0 weaponry, 1:345, 346 Bones (skeletal remains) as animal domestication documentation, 1:140-141, 338, 354, 407, 442; 4:206 animal sacrifices, 1:273; 2:474-475 as cultic documentation, 2:180 lion, 3:361-362 taphonomy of, 4:206 See also Ossuary; Skeletal analysis Bonine, Michael E., as contributor, 2:35-36 Bonn Archaeological Statistics, 5:83 Bonu Ighinu culture, 4:482 Book of the Dead, on amulets, 1:114 Books of the Bible. Sec under key word Bor, 5:246 Boraas, Roger, 3:55, 188 Borchardt, Ludwig, 1:83 Bordreuil, Pierre, as contributor, 2:301; 4:166-169; 5:76, 304 Borj Ghazi Mustafa, 3:220 Borj Kastil, 3:220 Borowski, Oded, as contributor, 2:317-319, 431-433;3:181-184 Borsippa (Birs Nimrud) as Tower of Babel site, 1:251, 252 ziggurat, 4:413 Bosor. See Bosra Bosphorus University, 1:92 Bosra, 1 : 3 5 0 - 3 5 3 architectural decoration, 1:191, 352 martyrial buildings, 3:427 theaters, 5:201 Bossert, Helmuth T., 3:268 Bossut, Philippe, 2:478 Bostanesh-Sheikh, 4:329 Boston College, 3:307 Boston University, 1:98, 187 Botany. See Ethnobotany; Paleobotany Botta, Carlo, 1:353 Botta, Paul-Emile, 1:252, 3 5 3 - 3 5 4 ; 3:57 Khorsabad excavations, 1:231, 353-354; 2:345; 3:38, 295, 338; 5:163 Layard friendship, 3:39 Nineveh, 4:145
INDEX Botti, Giuseppe, 1:66, 67 Botlini, Giovanni Claudio, us contributor, 1:263-264; 2:67 Bouchard, Pierre, 1:484 Boucharlat, Remy, 5:284 Bouillon, Godefroy de, 2:73 Bounni, Adnan, 3:43, 276; 4:242 as contributor, 3:275-276; 4:238-244, 411-413; 5:134-139 Ras Ibn Hani excavations, 4:411; 5:258 Bouqras, 1 : 3 5 4 ; 5:325
Bouzek, Jan, as contributor, 2:11-12; 4:503505 Bovier-Lapierre, Father, 3:401 Bowen, Richard LeBaron, Jr, 'Ain Jawan, 3:79 Hajar Bin Humeid, 2:458 Timna' excavations, 5:215 Bowman, John, 3:206 Bows, 5:336, 337 Boyd Hawes, Harriet, 3:75 Bozrah, 1:388; 5:156 Brad, 1:195 Bradford, Alfred S., as contributor, 3:162-165 Brady, Matthew, 4:332 Braemer, Frank, 2:339 Bragg condidon, 5:363 Brahmi script, 5:354 Braidwood, Robert J„ 1:444; 2:245; 5:102 Ali Kosh excavation, 1:75 farming communities, 2:459 Jarmo expedition, 1:23; 3:208-209 Kazel, Tell al-, identification, 3:276 on New Archaeology, 4:135 Brak, Tell, 1 : 3 5 5 - 3 5 6 ; 3:45-46 Akkadians, 1:52, 53 faience production, 5:310 Mitanni remains, 3:287 palace, 2:52; 3:46; 4:37 Brandes, Mark A., 4:510 Brandl, Baruch, as contributor, 2:256-258 Braslavsky, Joseph, 3:277 Braun, Eliot, 1:297 as contributor, 2:224-225; 5:378-379 'Ein-Shadud excavations, 2:224 Haifa excavations, 4:462 Yiftahel excavations, 5:378 Braun, Joachim, as contributor, 4:70-79 Braun-Holzinger, Eva A., 4:3 Bread wheat, 1:480 Breasted, James Henry, 1 : 3 5 6 - 3 5 7 ; 5:360 Dura-Europos, 2:173-174 Breccia, Evaristo, 1:66, 68; 4:194 Brcij, 2:104 Breton (language), 3:151 Breton, Jean-Francois Qataban, 4:383 Shabwa excavations, 2:452; 5:13 Bricks Byzantine and Islamic architecture, 1:379-381 clay, 1:361; 2:251 Mesopotamian architecture, 1:368 Bridge, Hartford Jones, 1:251 Bridges, aqueduct, 1:157, 158 Briend, Jacques, 2:189 Brigham Young University, 4:20 Brimmer, Baruch, 5:89 Brink, Edwin C. M. van den, 2:256 Briquel, F„ 4:468 Brisa, Wadi, 5:348 Britain. See Great Britain
British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History, 1:357; 3:54, 144 Bennett, Crystal-Margaret, 1:298 Faris, Khirbet, excavations, 2:306 Tawilan excavations, 5:156 British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1:358; 2:448 British Institute of East Africa, 1:240, 241 British Institute of Persian Studies, 1:358; 4:251 British Kouklia Expedition (1950-1955), Paphos, 4:245 British Mandatory Department of Antiquities. See Department of Antiquities (British Mandate Palestine) British Museum (London) Alalakh excavation, 1:55, 56, 59 Artemision (Ephesus), 2:252 Babylon excavation and artifacts, 1:251, 252 Balawat excavation, 1:268 Carchemish excavations, 1:423 Egyptian collection, 1:234 Enkomi excavations, 2:241, 242 Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 2:266 as first real public museum, 4:67 Hala Sultan Tekke excavations, 2:463 Kouyunjik and Nimrud excavations, 3:338 Salamis excavations, 4:457 Ubaid, 5:251 Ur excavations, 5:288 British Palestine Exploration Fund. See Palestine Exploration Fund British Royal Engineers, site location mediodology, 5:50 British School of Archaeology in Athens, 5:322 British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1:358-359 British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1:359; 3:59 AbuSalibikh, 1:10 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:38 'Aqar Quf, 1:156 Baghdad surveys, 2:35 Balawat, 1:268 Brak, Tell, 1:355 Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 2:266 Nimrud, 4:142 Rimah, Tell er-, 4:428 Samarra soundings, 4:473 British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1:62, 359-360; 2:76 Bennett, Crystal-Margaret, 1:298 Carmel, Mount, excavations, 1:424; 5:152 Crowfoot, John Winter, 2:72, 73 Dor excavations, 2:169 Guy, Philip Langstafle Orde, 2:443 Iktanu, Tell, survey, 3:144 Jawa excavations, 3:210 Jerash excavations, 3:215 Jericho excavations, 3:221 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225 Jezreel, Tel, excavations, 3:246 Nessana excavations, 4:129 Tawilan excavations, 5:156 Teleilat el-Ghassul excavations, 5:161 British Society of Dilettanti to Ionia, 4:351 British Survey of Western Palestine (1871-1878), 1:274, 459 Brittonic, 3:151 Bromiley, Geoffrey W., 4:417 Bron, Francois, as contributor, 3:268-269 Bronze alloys, 2:424-425
475
bull calf statuette (Ashkelon), 1:227, 222 early usages, 4:8 first swords, 5:336 warship, 1:234-236 Brooton, Bernadette J., 5:117 Broshi, Magen as contributor, 2:142-144 Jerusalem excavations, 3:229, 230, 234; 4:234 Judeideh, Tell el-, 3:259 Ramla excavations, 4:404 Brown, Ann C , as contributor, 4:79-80 Brown, Eliot, 2:256 Brown, Frank E„ 1:277; 2:174 Brown, Raymond E., 4:415 Brown, Robin M., 1:447 Brown, S. Kent, as contributor, 4:194-195 Brown, Stuart C , us- contributor, 2:186-187 Brownlee, William H. Habakkuk Commentary, 2:445 Rule of the Community, 4:443 Bruce, Frederick F., 4:415 Bruce, James, 3:472 Briinnow, Rudolf-Ernst, 1:447; 3:359; 4:304 Bryan, Betsy M., as contributor, 1:81-86 Bryce, Trevor R., as contributor, 3:385-386, 386-387 Bryn Mawr College Sukas, Tell, soundings, 5:90 Tarsus excavations, 2:424 Brythonic. See Brittonic Bubastis, 2:100 cats, 1:441; 2:142 Bucceliati, Giorgio, 3:45, 46, 287 us contributor, 1:107-111; 4:60-63; 5:126-131, 188-190 Mozan, Tell, excavations, 4:60 Terqa excavations, 5:188 Buchholz, H.-G,, 2:94 Buchthal, H„ 2:76 Buckingham, James Silk, 1:252; 3:52 Beit Ras, 1:297 Capernaum, 1:417 Buddensieg, Georg, 1:252 Budge, E. A. WaBs, 1:252; 2:132, 146; 5:48 Budhan, 1:165 Budu'il, 1:104 Buff ware (ceramics), 1:477-478 Buhen Emery excavations, 4:170 fortifications, 5:334-335 military residences, 3:116-117 Buia, Daniela, 5:188 Building God's House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation among Pagans, Jems, and Christians (White), 4:420 Building materials and techniques, 1 : 3 6 0 - 3 8 3 Bronze and Iron Ages, 1 : 3 6 3 - 3 6 7 construction methods, 1:366-367; 2:109-110 four-room house, 2:337-342 metals, 1:363 monumental construction, 1:364-365 mud, 1:363 Philistines, 4:31-32 pre-urban, 1:363-364 public works engineering, 1:366 stone, 1:361-362,363 timber, 1:361, 363; 5:347-349 urban, 1:364 Byzantine and Islamic periods, 1 : 3 7 9 - 3 8 3 ; 2:35-36; 4:229-230; 5:240 brick, 1:379-381; 4:291
476
INDEX
Building materials and techniques, continued Bunnens, Guy, 2:292; 3:42; 5:209 glass, 1:380 Buraimi (al-Ain), 3:80 stone, 1:379 Burcaw, E., 5:215 stucco, 1:382; 4:291 Burchard of Mount Zion, 3:51 tile, 5:212-215 Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig (Jean Louis), 3:52; wood, 1:379 5:222;3:38 carpentry, 5:349 AbuSimbel, 1:11 clay, 1:361,449 Ajlun, 1:41 Egypt, 1:361, 363-366, 368, 370, 374-376; Anjar, 1:143 3:114 Apamea, 1:145 factors influencing choice of, 1:361 Moab, 1:447 Israelites, 1:361-362, 363-367 Petra, 4:303; 5:101 First Temple, 1:325-327 Burdajewicz, Mariusz, 3:206 Levant, 1:363-364, 368 Burgan Basin, 3:315 Mesopotamia, 1:355, 361, 363-364, 366, 368, Burgoyne, Michael Hamilton, 3:238 372-373; 5:294-295 Burial sites, 1 : 3 8 4 - 3 8 6 , 386-387 Nabateans, 1:352 Abydos, 1:11-12; 2:197 Neolithic, 1:444-446 Anatolia, 1:132, 134, 136; 2:347 Anatolia, 1:439 Arad, 1:170 NevahCori, 4:132-133 Armenia, 1:204, 205 'Oucili, Tell el-, 4:192-193 Bahrain, 1:266, 267 wood, 1:361 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 1:295, 297 overview, 1:361-363 Beth-She'arim, 1:309-311 Persian through Roman periods, 1:367-379; Byblos, 1:391 2:26, 31-32 Dab'a, Tell ed-, 1:222; 3:134 Achaemenids, 1:368-370 Dan, 2:108-109 Anatolia, 1:132, 133, 368, 371-372; El-Wad Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:426 5:210-211 Gibeon, 1:443; 2:403 Arabia, 1:374 Giza, 2:411,412 Babylonians, 1:260-261 Hadidi, Tell, 2:453, 454 brick, 1:368 Herodian Jericho, 3:17-18 Egypt, 1:368, 374-376 Jericho, 2:433 Greeks, 1:370-373; 4:273; 5:210-212 Jerusalem, 3:227, 233 Hauran, 5:112 Kebara Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:427 Hippodamic city planning, 2:25, 26 Ketef Hinnom, 3:285-286 Levant-Anatolia, 1:368 Marlik, 3:422-423 monumental construction, 1:368-378 Sahaba, Jebel, 2:192 open-court planning, 2:26-27 Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-, 2:13, 14; 4:452-453 Pharaonic Egyptian, 1:368 Timna', 5:216 Qumran, 4:394 Ur, 5:288-289, 290 Roman Empire, 1:376-378; 4:273 See also Catacombs; Cave tombs; Cist graves; stone, 1:368 Grave goods; Ossuary; Pit graves; Tombs; tile, 5:210-212 Tumulus Syria, 1:361, 362, 363-367, 373-374; 5:112 Burial techniques, 1:384-386, 3 8 6 - 3 8 7 ; See also Masonry 5:51-52, 53-54 Buildings. See Architectural decoradon; Public 'Amrit, 1:111 buildings; specific kinds Anatolia, 1:127, 132, 440 Buildings (Procopius), 2:63 Armenia, 1:205 Building with Circles (Bedi-Yerah), 4:214 Ashkelon, 1:222 Buisson, Robert du Mesnil du, 3:43; 4:35 Badarian phase, 2:194 Buitron, Diana, 3:305 Beth-She'arim, 1:309-311 Bujard, Jacques, 5:280 Catal Hoytik, 1:440 Bukhara, 2:35 cave tombs, 1:443-444 Bull, Robert J. Chogha Zanbil, 1:489 as contributor, 4:407-409 cist graves, 2:13-14 Caesarea excavations, 1:402 dog burial, 2:166 Ras, Tell er-, excavations, 4:407 Egypt, 2:206; 4:452-453 Bullard, Reuben G., as contributor, 2:391-394; Elamites, 2:231 3:400-401 equid burial, 2:256 Bulletin for Biblical Research, 4:265 gardens and, 2:389 Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Herodian Jericho, 3:17-18 Research (BASOR), 1:61, 95; 4:263 inscriptions, funerary, 2:6-7 Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrotogists, lamps and, 3:329-330 4:265 Natufian culture, 2:486; 4:349 Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, Parthians, 3:486 4:263 Philistines, 4:311 Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Phoenicians, 3:291; 4:329-330 Studies, 4:265 pit graves, 4:348-349 Bulletin of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Transjordan (prehistoric), 5:227-228, 229 Japan, 4:264 Ubaid, 5:288 Bulliet, Richard W., 4:255 Yemen, 5:377 Bull site, 1:383-384 See also Catacombs; Grave goods; Jar burials; Bunimovitz, Shlomo, 1:311; 5:28 Ossuary; Tumulus
Buried History (journal), 4:263 Burj al-Zahir (Kerak), 3:282 Burji dynasty, 1:241 Burna-Buriash I , 3:271 Buma-Buriash II, 3:271, 272; 4:13 Burney, Charles, 1:203; 2:458 Burnt House (Jerusalem), 1:238; 2:314 Burnt Palace (Nimrud), 4:141 Burrell, Barbara, 1:403 Burrows, Millar M., 1:95, 96, 3 8 7 ; 4:443 Burton, James, 1:82-83 Burton, Richard, 1:154; 4:396 Bury, G. Wyman, 4:383 Buschor, Ernst, 3:77 Buseirah, 1 : 3 8 7 - 3 9 0 ; 3:143 Bus Mordeh. See Ali Kosh Bustan, el-, 2:79 Buder, Charles H., 3:177 Buder, Howard Crosby, 1:99, 3 9 0 ; 3:52; 4:45 Pactolus Valley excavations, 4:487 Qal'at Sim'an, 4:368, 369 Qasr al-Hallabat, 4:376 Sergilla, 5:5 Umm el-Jimal, 5:276 Butler, Trent C , 4:417 Buto, 2:142; 3:384 Buttressing (architecture), 1:189 Buttrick, George A., 4:417 Butzer, Karl W., 2:38; 3:69; 4:202 as contributor, 2:244-252 Buyids 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1, 4, 265 of Daylam, 5:145 Buyukkale, 1:333, 334, 335 Buyukkaya, 1:334 Buzandaran Patmut'iwnk (Epic Histories), 1:209,210 Byatt, Antony, 2:144 Byblos, 1:280, 3 9 0 - 3 9 4 Ahiram inscription, 1:31, 77, 392 Amarna tablets, 1:86 anchors, 1:137, 13S Baal as chief god, 4:316 faience production, 5:311 maritime trade, 1:25 "Mistress" (Lady) of Byblos, 1:413; 4:316, 327-328 papyrus, 2:439 sarcophagi, 1:391-392; 4:481 stratigraphy of, 1:393 temples, 1:391-392, 393; 5:170 Yehawmilk inscription, 4:323 Byrd, Brian F . as contributor, 1:291-292 Beidha houses, 5:302 Tabaqa, 2:478 Byrsa (Carthage), 4:156 Byzacium, 4:161-162 Byzantine Empire, 1 : 3 9 4 - 3 9 8 Amman under, 1:101 Anatolia under, 1:135-136 Antioch under, 1:145 Apamea under, 1:147 architectural decoration and orders, 1:190, 191-192, 195-196, 201-202;5:240 art of, 1:396-397 Asbikelon under, 1:223 Assos under, 1:224 Avdat under, 1:237-238 Baalbek under, 1:247, 248 Babylonians under, 1:258 Badiat ash-Sham under, 1:263 ceramics, 1:471-475; 5:240
INDEX Chalcedon under, 1:481-482 economy of, 1:394-395 glassmaking, 2:414; 5:318-319 houses, 4:229-230 medieval character of, 1:395 mosaics, 1:397; 2:333 Palestine under, 4:228-232 public buildings, 4:534-535 See also as subhead under specific topics
C CAARI. Sec Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute CAARI News, 2:97 CAD. See Computer-aided design Cadir Hoyiik, 1:125 Cadiz. See Gadir Caesar, Julius, 1:66, 133, 152 Cleopatra and, 2:202 literary works of, 3:336 Caesarea, 1:277, 399-404; 5:270 aqueduct, 1:157, 158 architectural decoration, 1:191, 193 ASOR projects, 1:63 Dor as neighbor of, 2:168, 169 harbor excavations, 5:283 Islamic glass, 5:3 Latin inscriptions, 3:335 map of, 1:400 Old City, 1:401 sewer system, 2:31 dieaters, 1:402; 5:200, 201 Caesarea Ancient Harbour Excavation Project, 1:403 Caesarea Maritima. See Caesarea Caesarea Mazaca, 1:420 Caesarea Philippi. Sec Banias Caesarium (Alexandria), 1:66, 68 Caetani, Leone, 3:351 Cafer HSyiik, 1:446 Cagiano de Azevedo, Michelangelo, 3:403 Cagliari, 4:484 Caiaphas ossuary, 4:188 tomb, 4:461 Cairo, 1:404-406 architecture, 1:242 Fatimids, 2:206 fortifications, 2:336 gates, 1:404-405 mosque of al-Hakim, 1:206, 242; 2:308; 4:58, 59 See also Fustat Cairo Citadel, 1 : 1 , 242 Cairo Damascus manuscripts (CD). See Damascus Document Cairo Genizah, 2:364; 3 : 1 1 Cairo Museum, 2:271-272 Cairo University, 2:366 Cakir, Mehmet, 5:266 Calah. See Nimrud Calatrava la Vieja, 2:336 Caldwell, Joseph, 4:134 Calendars agricultural, 1:26; 2:400-401; 3:6 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:122-123 California, University of. See University of California California State University (Los Angeles), 5:188
Caligula, 1:346; 4:476 Caliphs, four Rightly Guided (632-661), 1:165. See also specific caliphates Callaway, Joseph Adee, 1:316, 406-407 Ai excavation, 1:32, 406-407 Radannah excavations, 4:402 Callinicos. See Raqqa, arCalneh, 4:148 Calvet, Yves, 2:298; 5:13 Calvin College, 5:277 Cambel, Halet, 1:444 Cambridge Ancient History (Charles worth), 1:430 Cambridge University, 1:439 Cambyses II, 4:297; 5:43, 134 Camels, 1:407-408 Arabian Peninsula, 1:161, 407-408 Babylonian use of, 1:258-259 Badiat ash-Sham herders, 1:263 domestication, 1:142, 407-408; 4:254 ritual burials, 5:377 as travel means, 5:244 Cameron, George G., 1:331 Campana, Douglas, 5:15 Campbell, Edward F., 1:86 as contributor, 5:350-352 Shechem survey, 5:21 Canaan, 1:408-409 Achziv, 1:13-14 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:38-40 Arad, 1:169-170, 173, 174 Ashkelon, 1:220, 222 batiis, 1:283-284 Bedi-Shean, 1:306, 307 cist graves, 2:13 etymology of name, 1:408 Hittites, 3:84 Sinai as link with Egypt, 5:42, 43 See also Canaanites; Syria-Palestine Canaanite (language), 1:412-413; 2:79-80 alphabet, 1:76, 77, 412; 3:364-365, 367 Old Canaanite, 4:517 onomastica, 4:93-94 ostraca, 4:190 phonemic system, 3:364 Proto-Canaanite, 1:150; 4:352-354 See also Inscriptions, Canaanite Canaanites, 1:409-414 agriculture, 1:411 Amarna tablets, 1:86, 411 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 1:296 ceramics, 1:464-465; 2:257 cultural continuity of, 4:218-219 "Erani, Tel, 2:257 faience assemblages, 5:311 fortifications, 1:410-411 furnishings, 2:354-356 Hayyat, Tell el-, 2:487-488 Hebron, 3:13 identification of, 1:409 Israelites and, 3:193-194 Kazel, Tell al-, 3:276 Lachish, 3:319 lamps, 3:327-328 Megiddo, 3:463, 464; 4:218 palaces, 4:359 Phoenicians and, 4:155, 324-325, 328 religion, 1:413-414; 2:81-82, 475; 3:319; 4:375; 5:169-170, 171 temples, 5:169-171 See also Canaan; Canaanite Canadian Archaeological Mission, 5:385
477
Canals. See Aqueducts; Irrigation Canatha, 2:128; 5:112 Candace (queen of the Nubians), 2:203 Canning, Sir Stratford, 3:57, 338; 4:141 Cansdale, George S., 4:418 Cantillation system, 3:7-8 Cantineau, Jean, 4:242, 304 Cantonments (Islamic), 4:475 Canustepe, 2:13 CAORC. See Council of American Overseas Research Centers Cap Bon, 4:160-161 Cape Gelidonya, 1 : 4 1 4 - 4 1 6 shipwreck, 1:137, 415-416; 5:32 underwater excavations, S:283 Cape Hermaios, 3:348 Capernaum, 1 : 4 1 6 - 4 1 9 Franciscan excavations, 2:343 House of St. Peter, 1:418-419; 2:4; 3:120 synagogue, 1:417, 418; 5:120 Capitals (architecture) Achaemenid, 4:252 Byzantine, 1:196, 201-202 classical, 1:201 Corinthian, 2:466; 5:112 first marble, 1:191 proto-Aeolic, 4:403 See also Columns; specific orders Capitolias. See Beit Ras; Decapolis Capitoline Hill (Rome), 4:67 Cappadocia, 1 : 1 3 1 , 132, 4 1 9 - 4 2 2 ; 2:332 churches and monasteries, 1 : 1 3 5 underground complexes, 1:422 Cappadocian texts. See Kiiltepe texts Caracalla. See Antonius, Marcus Aurelius Caravanserais, 1 : 4 2 2 - 4 2 3 ; 2:335; 5:174 Carbon dating. See Dating techniques Carboni, Stefano, as contributor, 2:362-365 Carchemish, 1 : 4 2 3 - 4 2 4 fortifications, 1:423-424; 2:324, 325 Uruk settlement, 1:125; 2:291 Carchemish, battle of (853 BCE), 1:167 Garia, 1 : 1 5 2 Carians, 2:463; 3:163 Carlsberg Foundation Hama excavations, 2:466 Sukas, Tell, excavations, 5:90 Carmel, Mount, 1:424 environment of, 4:89 excavations, 1:263 tombs, 1:9 Carmel caves, 1 : 4 2 4 - 4 2 8 Tabun cave, 1:424-425; 4:208; 5:152-153 Carnarvon, George Edward Stanhope (Lord Carnarvon), 1:428-429 Carpenter, Rhys, 2:435 Carpentry, 5:349 Carpets, Islamic period, 2:363 Carriere, P., 1:277 Carter, Charles E., as contributor, 2:280-284; 3:172; 4:48-49, 236-237; 5:198-199 Carter, Elizabeth, 2:228; 5:186 Carter, Henry John, 3:80 Carter, Howard, 1 : 4 2 8 - 4 2 9 Carthage, 1 : 4 2 9 - 4 3 3 ; 4:156-160 ASORfieldwork,1:97 child sacrifice, 2:84; 4:158, 159-160 as colonial enterprise, 4:327 foundation legends, 4:155, 156 port of, 4:157-158 public buildings, 1:430-431 religion, 1:430, 431
478
INDEX
Carthage, continued Roman Empire and, 1:429, 430-432 Sardinia and, 4:483-484 "Save Carthage" campaign, 1:432; 2:152; 4:156 tourism, 2:152 trading interests, 1:429 "Carthage of Cyprus." See Amathus Carthage Research Institute, 1:97 Carts, 1:433-434 chariotry, 1:485-486 Roman, 1:434 as travel means, 5:244 war, 5:336 wheels, 5:343 Cams, 2:78 Casal Urnberti, 1:13 Casa Santiago in Jerusalem, 3:447 Casemate walls, 2:320 Case Western Reserve University, 4:140 Caskets, ivory, 1:349 Caskey, Jack, 3:76 Casson, Lionel, 1:162 Cassuto, Milka, 3:189 Castella. See Fortifications Castellana, P., 4:45 Casde (Qasr al-Hallabat), 4:376-378 Casfle of St. Abraham (Hebron), 3:13 Castle of St. Peter (Halikarnassos), 2:463 Castriota, David, as contributor, 5:325-330 Catacombs, 1:434-438 animals in, 1:437 Beth-She'arim, 1:310, 385, 434-438 Near Eastern, 1:434-435 rock-cut graves, 1:435-437 Roman and Byzantine periods, 1:385-386, 434, 437 Catal Hoyiik, 1:122, 124, 438-440; 2:15, 19 burial techniques, 5:53 copper usage, 4:5 textiles, 5:191 wall paintings, 5:325 Catapultae, 5:339 Cathedral. See Churches Catherine, St., monastery, 4:44 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism Catholic University (Washington, D.C.), 3:252 Catling, H. W., 3:72 Caton-Thompson, Gertrude, 1:440-441 Faiyum and Khargah oases, 2:244-245, 299 Hureidha excavation, 2:452; 3:124, 125 Cats, 1:441-442 Cattle and oxen, 1:442-443 AbuHamid, Tell, 1:8 agricultural development and, 1:23, 26 Anatolia, 1:123, 141 Arabian Peninsula, 1:161 Beersheba, 1:288 domestication, 1:142-143 Habuba Kabira, 2:448 paleozoology, 1:29, 30 Palestine, 1:26, 172 Transjordan, 1:37, 280 as transportation means, 5:244 tuberculosis, 3:450 Caubet, Annie, as contributor, 4:495 Caucasus Anatolian culture contact, 1:125 textiles, 5:192, 194 Cauldrons, 4:14 Cauvin, Jacques, 2:290; 4:66 Cave I (Wadi ed-Daliyeh). See Muhgaret Abu Shinjeh
Cave II (Wadi ed-Daliyeh). See 'Araq enNa'asaneh Cave of Horror (Nahal Hever), 3:258 Cave of the Letters (Nahal Hever), 2:316; 3:258 Cave of Psychro (Diktaean cave), 3:75 Cave of the Seven Sleepers (Amman), 1:101 Cave of the Treasure (Nahal Mishmar), 1:24; 3:258 Caves. See Carmel caves; Cave tombs; Judean desert caves; specific caves Cave tombs, 1:443-444; 5:219-220 Ai, 1:32 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:39 Baq'ah Valley, 1:273 Canaan, 1:443 El-Wad Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:426 Gezer, 2:398 Kebara Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:427 KetefHinnom, 3:285 Cavro, L , 3:174 Caymont, 5:382 Cayanii, 1:122, 123, 124, 444-447 agricultural life, 1:23 copper artifacts, 4:5 plain-weave fragment, 5:191 ritual buildings, 5:302 terraced architecture, 1:279 wood products, 5:347 CCD. See Charged Coupled Device CD (Cairo Damascus manuscripts). See Damascus Document CD-ROMs, 4:335, 346, 347 Cell of Gabriel (hermitage), 4:46 Celtic languages, 3:151 CEMAT. See Centre d'Etudes Maghrebines a Tunis Cemeteries. See Animal cemeteries; Burial sites; Catacombs; Necropolis; Tombs Cemetery of die Seven Sleepers (Ephesus), 2:255 Cemetery U (Umm el-Qa'ab), 1:12 Cenacle (Mount Zion), 2:342 Cenobia, 4:41-42, 43, 44, 45 Cenotaphs, Abydos, 1:12 Center for Maghrebi Studies (Tunis), 1:90 Center for Maritime Studies. See under Haifa University Centtal Asian Iranians, as 'Abbasid mercenaries, 1:1,3 Central Moab, 1:447-448 Centre d'Etudes Maghrebines a Tunis, 1:90 Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique Abu Hamid international research project, 1:7 Bouqras excavations, 1:354 Qal'at al-Bahrain, 4:367 Qatar excavations, 4:385 Ceramic ethnoarchaeology, 1:448-450 Ceramics, 1:450-479 Anatolia Hacilar, 2:449 metallic ware, 2:426 Seytan Deresi, 5:12 Byzantine period, 1:471-475 Africa, 1:472-473 Cyprus, 1:472-475 Egypt, 1:472-474 Roman Empire, 1:472-475 Transjordan, 1:473; 5:240 Chalcolithic period, 1:463 Hassuna, 1:453-454; 2:483-484; 4:472 Samarra, 4:472-473
Crete, 2:71 Cyprus (modern), 1:449, 450 dating, 2:115, 117 Elamites, 2:233 ethnoarchaeology, 1:448-450 Hellenistic and Roman periods, 1:469-471 Arabia, 5:198 Cyprus, 1:469-471 Egypt, 1:471 Galilee, 2:373-374 Greece, 1:469-471 Kefar Hananyah, 3:277 Palestine, 1:470-471 Islamic period, 1:381, 475-479; 4:233-234 'Abbasid caliphate, 3:488 Byzantine Empire, 1:475-476 Copts, 1:476, 478 glazes, 5:309 Persia, 4:292 trade, 1:4 Jordan (modern), 1:449 Mesopotamian (Neolithic through NeoBabylonian periods), 1:453-459 Diyala, 2:165 glazes, 5:312-313 Halaf, 1:454-455 Jemdet Nasr, 1:456 Nineveh, 1:457 Nuzi, 1:457; 4:174 Taya, Tell, 5:159 Ubaid, 1:455-456 Umm an-Nar, 5:284, 285 Uruk, 1:456; 5:295 Persian period, 1:465-469 Achaemenids, 1:466, 468 Assyrians, 1:466 Cyprus, 1:468 Greece, 1:466-468 Palestine, 1:465-468 Phoenicians, 1:466-467 Syro-Palestinian (Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages), 1:459-465 agricultural uses, 1:25 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 1:296 Beth-Shean, 1:306 Cyprus, 2:419 Dhra', 2:156 Egypt, 2:54, 193, 194, 195 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, 2:227-228 Ghrubba, 2:402-403 Golan, 2:419 Halaf, Tell, 2:460 Israelites, 3:195 Philistines, 1:465; 3:464; 4:311, 312, 373 Transjordan, 5:228, 232-233 Yahudiyeh, Tell el-, 5:368, 369 typology and technology, 1:450-453, 460-461, 472-479 Ai, 1:32, 33 Alalakh, 1:57-58 Albright dating sequence, 1:62; 4:464 Amman, 1:99-100 Bahrain, 1:266-267 Ford, James, 2:458 glaze technology, 1:457-458, 478; 5:306-309 Ceramics and Man (Ehrich), 1:452 Ceramics for the Archaeologist (Shepard), 1:452 Cereals, 1:479^181 agricultural development, 1:23-27, 122, 123 Ammonite farmsteads, 1:104 Arabian Peninsula, 1:159, 161 Arad, 1:172
INDEX Assos, 1:224 Chiera, Edward, 1:95; 2:262 Bab edh-Dhra', 1:250 Khorsabad excavations, 3:295 Babylonian cultivation, 1:258 Nuzi excavations, 4:172; 5:69 dating of, 2:114 Childe, V. Gordon, 1:23, 26 Golan, 2:418 Akkadians, 1:42 Hittite cultivation, 3:86 Iron Age democratization, 4:13 Jericho, 3:223 Neolithic Revolution, 1:122 storage of, 2:317-318 Childs, W. A. P., 2:95 See also Granaries and silos; specific kinds China Ceyhan River, 2:8 metalwork, 4:13 Chaghar Bazar, 3:45; 4:60 paper, 4:247; 5:359-360 Chairs trade, 1:4; 4:494 Egyptian, 2:353 Chinese (language), 5:352-353 Roman period, 2:358-359 Chios, 3:76 Chalandriani cemetery, 3:76 Chittick, Neville, 1:240 Chalcedon, 1 : 4 8 1 - 4 8 2 Chna. See Phoenicia Chalcedon, Council of (451 CE), 1:394; 2:204; Chogha Mami 5:16 ceramics, 1:454; 4:473 aftermath, 5:141 grid plan, 2:472 Chalcidike, 4:386 houses, 3:92 Chalcis ad Belum. See Qinnishrin irrigation, 1:23-24; 2:135 Chalcis ad Libanum, 1:143; 4:386 Chogha Mish, 2:229; 5:108 Chaldeans, 1 : 4 8 2 - 4 8 4 Chogha Sefid settlement, 2:135 Chaldee. See Aramaic language and literature Chogha Zanbil (Untash-Napirisha), 1 : 4 8 7 - 4 9 0 Chambon, Alain, 2:304 construction projects, 2:232, 233 Champollion, Jean-Francois, 1 : 4 8 4 - 4 8 5 ; 3:25, ziggurat, 4:284 68. See also Rosetta Stone Choiseul-Gouffier, Marie-Gabriel-AugusteChandragupta Maurya, 1:74 Florent, 1:224 Chantre, Ernest, 1:333; 3:64, 266 Choisy, Auguste, 4:487 Chapel of Isis (Giza), 2:412 Cholades, 5:59 Chapel of the Martyr Theodore (Madaba), Chorazin, 1 : 4 9 0 - 4 9 1 ; 2:422 3:427 Chordophones, 4:76-78 Chapel of the Theotokos (Mount Nebo), 4:116 Chosroes 1,1:147 Chapels, 1:277 ChosroesII, 1:134, 147 Chapman, Rupert, as contributor, 2:390; 3:337; Christensen, Charles, 4:241 4:234-236, 238, 497; 5:334-339 Christian, P„ 4:457 Chapouthier, Fernand, 3:75 Christianity Characene, 1:72 Anatolia, 1:134, 136 Charged Coupled Device (CCD), 4:346 Apamea, 1:147 Charibael, 3:27 Aphrodisias, 1:152 Chariots, 1 : 4 8 5 - 4 8 7 ; 5:244 Aramaic as language of, 1:183 Assyrian use of, 1:229 Armenia, 1:206, 208-209 at Lachish, 3:320 Axum, 1:239 as weapons, 5:337 Baalbek, 1:247, 248 Charles, Robert H., 2:107 baptism, 1:271-272 Charlesworth, James H. basilicas, 1:277-278; 2 : 1 , 3 New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Byzantine Empire, 1:394-396 4:419 in Byzantine historiography, 3:35 Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 4:415 Byzantine-period communities, 4:231 Charlesworth, M. P., 1:430 Caesarea, 1:399, 401 Charms. See Amulets Capernaum, 1:418-419 Charpentier, G., 5 : 5 Cappadocia, 1 : 4 2 1 Charpin, Dominique Carthage, 1:431 Mari texts, 3:420 catacombs, 1:434, 435, 436 on Sippar identification, 2:145; 5:47 ceramics, 1:472, 473-474 Chassinat, Entile, 1:234; 3:173 churches, 2:1-5 Chatillon. See Reginald (Reynald) de Chatillon codices, 2:41 Chehab, Hafez K., as contributor, 1:143-144; controversies within, 1:394, 395-396 4:47-48, 421-422, 498 Coptic language, 2:65, 66 Chehab, Maurice, 1:143, 247; 5:40 cosmetics, 2:67 Chemosh. See Kamish Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:126 Chenoboskion (el-Kasr), 4:87, 88 Dura-Europos, 2:177 Cheops (Kufu), 2:411 Egypt, 2:204-206 Chephren (Kaphre/Kafre) Elephantine, 2:236 Giza pyramid, 2:411 Ethiopian conversion, 2:276, 277 Harmachis temple, 5:177 expansion, 3:168 Chernogorovka culture, 2 : 1 1 funerary monuments, 2:351 Cherubim Cloister (Said Naya), 4:456 Galilean settlements, 2:373 Chicago, University of. See University of Halusa, 2:465 Chicago healthcare systems, 3:455 Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, 3:205 Hebrew Scriptures, 1:320 Chicken raising, 1:143 Hellenistic urban life, 2:34 Himyar, 3:27
479
iconoclasm, 1:395 incense use, 3:148-149 inscriptions, 2:5-8 literacy, 3:368 Madaba, 3:394, 397 Ma'lula, 3:405 martyrial structures, 3:425-426 mosaics, 4:52-54; 5:16 Palestine as Holy Land, 4:228-229 Pella, 4:259 pilgrimages to holy sites, 4:104, 228 Said Naya settlement, 4:455-456 under Sasanians, 4:493 Serce Limant merchant ship, 5:3 Syriac language, 1:183; 5:140, 141, 146 Syrian pagan conflicts with, 5:140 women's roles, 2:7 See also Biblical archaeology; Biblical literature; Churches; Crusader period; Monasteries; specific churches, denominations, and sects Christian Palestinian Aramaic, 1:183 Christian Topography (Constantine of Antioch), 1:16 Christie, Agatha, 3:402; 4:60, 498 Christopherson, Gary L., 5:103-104 as contributor, 2:55-57 Christou, Demos, 2:95; 3:305 Chronicle of die Diadochoi, 4:286 Chronicles, Books of 'Ara'ir mention, 1:177 'Azekah mention, 1:243 on First Temple, 1:325, 326, 327 Lachish mention, 3:319, 320 Chronostratigraphy, 5:12 Chryse (Assos), 1:224 Chrysolakkos, 4:28-29 Chrysostom, John. See John Chrysostom Chuera, Tell (Harbe), 1:35, 4 9 1 - 4 9 2 excavations, 3:46 houses, 3:98-99 Mitanni remains, 3:287 Churches, 2 : 1 - 5 Adulis, 1:16, 17 Alexandria, 1 : 6 8 Anatolia, 1:134, 135 Armenia, 1:206, 307 Avdat, 1:236, 237 Baalbek, 1:247, 248 baptisteries, 1:271-272 Byzantine Empire, 1:380, 421; 2:90, 240; 4:306, 307-308; 5:90 Constantinople, 1:397; 2:61, 63 Dura-Europos, 2:176, 177 Jerusalem, 2:2, 3-4; 3:234, 235, 237-238 Kursi, 3:314-315 Madaba, 3:394-397 monastic, 4:43, 45 mosaics, 4:53-54 Syria, 1:274 Umm el-Jimal, 5:277-278 Umm er-Rasas, 5:279-280 See also Architectural decoration; Baptisteries; Basilicas; House churches; specific churches Church inscriptions, 2 : 5 - 8 Armenian, 1:208 dedicatory, 2:6 devotional, 2:7-8 funerary, 2:6-7 Greek, 2:5-8, 373 at Madaba, 3:394-395 at Sepphoris, 4:528 spread of Christianity and, 3:168
480
INDEX
Church of Amos and Casiseos (Mukhayyat, Khirbet el-), 4:117 Church of Axum, 2:275 Church of Bishop Sergius (Umm er-Rasas), 5:279, 280 Church of England. See Anglican Church Church of Holy Mary (Ephesus), 2:255 Church of Holy Zion (Jerusalem), 3:235 Church of Justinian (Sinai), 4:44 Church of Kaianos ("Ain Musa valley), 4:117 Church of Mar Sarkis (Ma'lula), 3:405 Church of Mary Theotokos (Mount Gerizim), 2:4; 3:427 Church of St. Anne (Jerusalem), 3:235 Church of St. Anne (Sepphoris), 4:527-528 Church of St. Clement (San Clemente), 3:120 Church of St. Genesius (Jerash), 3:219 Church of St. George (Mukhayyat, Khirbet el-), 4:117 Church of St. George (Subeita), 5:90 Church of St, Gregory (Zvart'nots), 3:426 Church of St. Helena (Horns), 3:89 Church of St. Hripsime (Vagharchapat), 3:426 Church of St. Irene (Constantinople), 2:61, 63 Church of St. John (Ephesus), 1:135; 2:255 Church of St. John (Jerash), 3:218 Church of St. John the Baptist (Damascus), 2:105 Church of St. John the Baptist ('Ein-Kerem), 2:342 Church of St. Paul (Philippi), 1:272 Church of St. Polyeuktos (Constantinople), 2:63 Church of St. Sergius (Rusafa), 3:427; 4:445, 446 Church of St. Sophia (Constantinople). See Hagia Sophia Church of St. Stephen (Jerusalem), 3:235 Church of St. Stephen (Umm er-Rasas), 2:8, 333, 343; 5:279 plan of, 5:280 Church of St. Thekla (Isauria), 3:426 Church of Sts. John and Paul (Rome), 3:120 Church of Sts. Lot and Procopius (Mukhayyat, Khirbet el-), 4:117 Church of the Aedicula (Umm er-Rasas), 5:279 Church of the Annunciation (Nazareth) Crusader period, 2:74 excavations, 4:113 Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, 2:343 Church of the Ascension (Jerusalem), 5:269 Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Jerusalem), 2:2, 3; 3:235 burning of, 2:309 Crusader period, 2:74 excavations, 3:234 Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, 2:342 graffiti, 2:7-8 Merrill, Selah, 3:474 restoration, 2:188; 4:426 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, The (Cotiasnon), 2:188 Church of the House of Peter (Capernaum), 1:418-419; 2:4 Church of the Lions (Umm er-Rasas), 5:279-280 Church of the Loaves and Fishes (Tabgha), 4:54; 5:150 Church of the Nativity (Bethlehem), 1:277, 278, 302; 2:3-4 Crusader period, 2:73, 74 Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, 2:342 Vincent, Louis-Hugues, 2:188
Church of die Resurrection (Jerusalem), 1:277 Church of the Virgin (Baalbek), 1:248 Chytroi (Kythrea), 2:95 Ciasca, Antonia, 2:256 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3:336 Cilicia, 2 : 8 - 1 1 Armenian inscriptions, 1:208 Armenian manuscripts, 1:210 inscriptions, 2:217 Luwians, 3:385, 386 prehistoric settlement sites, 1:124, 125 Roman era, 1:133; 2:95 temple, 1:132 textiles, 1:133 See also Tarsus Cilicia Aspera (Hilakku), 2:8, 10 Cilicia Campestris, 2:8, 10 Cilician Gates, 5:246 Cimmerians, 1:130; 2 : 1 1 - 1 2 ; 4:293; 5:292 Cintas, Pierre, 4:158, 161 Circular arch, 1:190 Cisterns, 2 : 1 2 - 1 3 , 31; 3:130, 132-133 Aden, 1:15-16 Ai, 1:33 Arad, 1:174-175 arches, 1:190 Assos, 1:224 Beersheba, 1:290 Constantinople, 2:61 engineering, 1:366 Hazor, 1:290; 2:13; 3:130; 4:422 Megiddo, 1:290 Nasbeh, Tell en-, 2:13; 3:131 Pergamon, 3:133 See also Reservoirs Cist graves, 2 : 1 3 - 1 4 Bronze Age, 2:108-109 Chalcolithic, 1:384; 5:219 Iron Age, 1:385 Persian period, 5:220 pit graves versus, 4:348 Citadel (Cairo), 1:406 Citadel (Carchemish), 1:423 Citadel (Hama), 2:467 Citadel gerusalem), 3:229, 230, 233 Citadel (Muqattam hills), 2:207 Citadel (Nimrud), 4:141, 143 Citadel (Tell ed-Dab'a), 2:100-101 Citadel Mound (Hasanlu), 2:480 Citadel Mound (Yassihoyiik), 2:426-430 Cities, 2 : 1 4 - 3 6 agricultural development and, 1:24-25, 26 Bronze and Iron Ages, 2 : 1 9 - 2 5 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:39-40 Arad, 1:170-173 Babylon, 1:252-255 city states, 2:20 economic foundations of, 2:19 fortifications, 2:20, 22, 24 gate structures, 2:22 Israelite, 3:195-196, 464-468; 4:220 Palestinian reurbanization, 4:214 South Arabian, 5:377 disappearance of, 2:18 empires within, 2:17 grid plan, 2:441-442; 4:392, 413; 5:50 Hellenistic and Roman periods, 2 : 2 9 - 3 5 Alexandrian, 1:72, 74 Anatolia, 1 : 1 3 1 - 1 3 2 , 133, 134, 224 architectural decorations, 1:191, 201, 225 Axum, 1:239-241 cultural systems, 2:33-34 economic systems, 2:33
Seleucid town planning, 1:146 Transjordan, 5:239 as interdependent systems, 2:14-15 Islamic period, 2:35-36 Anatolian decline, 1:135 garrison cities, 3:487-488 Syrian urbanization, 5:142-143 Mesopotamian housing, 3:92-94 Neolithic, 2:15 Paleolithic, 2:15 Persian period, 2:25-29 fortifications, 2:27—29 significance of, 2:18 urbanization process, 2:15-16 women's status in, 2:18 See also Fortifications; Villages Cities of the Plain, 1:249-250; 5:62, 63 City of David (Jerusalem) excavations, 3:225, 226 fortifications, 2:327 limits, 3:226-227 renewed excavations, 2:153 City of David Society, 3:225 Civil, Miguel, as contributor, 5:92-95 Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (Sasson), 4:417 Clamer, Christa, 3:317 Clark, Edward White, 4:302-303 Clark, Geoffrey A., 2:478 Clark, J. Desmond, 3:333 Clarke, David, 4:134 Clarke, Edward Daniel, 3:38 Clarke, Joseph Thatcher, 1:224 Classica et Mediaevalia: Revue danoise de philologie et d'histoire, 4:266 Classical Antiquity, 4:266 Classical Journal, 4:266 Classical Philology, 4:266 Classical Review, 4:266 Classical World, 4:266 Claudius, 1:133; 3:334 Clay. See Bricks; Tablets Clay, Albert T., 1:93; 3:186; 4:236 Cledat, Jean, 3:432; 5:41, 45, 46 Clemens, David M., as contributor, 5:387-388 Clement IV (pope), 2:342 Cleopatra I Syra, 3:178 Cleopatra VII, 1:66, 73, 247; 2:9, 10, 202 Cleopatra's Gate (Tarsus), 2:10 Clermont-Ganneau, Charles S., 2:37, 178 Gezer identification, 2:396 Gezer inscriptions, 2:37 Nerab inscriptions, 4:127 Northwest Semitic seals, 4:166 Cleuziou, Serge, 3:78; 5:284 Cleveland, Ray, 3:80 Climatology, 2:37-38 agricultural relationship, 1:26 climatic change, 2:247-248; 4:201; 5:226 dendroclimatology, 2:38 paleoclimatic reconstruction, 5:153, 226 Pleistocene, 4:201; 5:226 political collapse relationship, 2:244, 247, 248 pollen records, 2:37-38, 116-117, 247, 248; 4:203; 5:231 settlement patterns, 3:133, 345; 5:35 urbanization relationship, 2:18; 3:476 Cloisonne, 1:341 Cloister of St. Mary (Said Naya), 4:456 Cloister of Shamash (Sippar), 5:48 Close, Angela E., as contributor, 2:191-194 Close, Charles, 4:332-333
INDEX Clothing, 2:38-40 Egyptian, 2:39, 40; 5:193 helmets, 4:18; 5:373 Hittite kings, 3:86 Mesopotamian, 5:193 Scythian, 4:504 Syro-Palestinian, 2:39 See also Textiles Cloves, 5:190 Cnidus (Knidos), 1:470 Cockerell, Charles, 4:487 Code of Hammurabi, 1:15, 41, 259; 2:352 Akkadian text of, 1:44, 45, 46 Shamash cloister in, 5:48 Codella, Kim, as contributor, 1:358; 4:144-148, 273-277 Codex, 2:40-41 Mani Codex, 2:485 Codex Sinaiticus, 2:124 Codex Vaticanus, 2:240 Coele-Syria (Biqa' Valley), 1:72, 248; 2:41; 3:265 Coffins, 1:307. See also Sarcophagus Cohen, Andrew, 5:103 Cohen, Orna, 2:377 Cohen, Rudolph, 1:211, 236 as contributor, 3:189-190; 4:120-122, 365-367, 461-463; 5:104-106 Be'er Resisim excavations, 1:285; 4:120 'Ira, Tel, expedition, 3:175 Negev Archaeological Survey, 5:102, 106 Qadesh-Bamea excavations, 4:365 CoheylT, Salem, 3:411 Coins, 2 : 4 1 - 5 2 Alexandrian, 1:73, 131 Armenian, 1:205, 206, 207-208 Axumite, 1:239 Baalbekfinds,1:247 Babylonian, 2:43 Crusader, 2:73 Ethiopian, 2:276-277 Failakafinds,2:298 First Jewish Revolt and, 2:382 Galilean, 2:374 Greek culture and, 2:41, 42, 46 Hasmonean, 2:482 hoards, 2:43-44, 4 5 , 298 inscriptions, 2:43, 46, 48, 50, 276-277 Islamic, 1:165; 2:42-43, 48, 50; 4:233 Judean, 4:223 musical instrument depictions, 4:76 Persian, 2:44; 4:17 photography of, 4:342-343 Qumran, 4:393 Roman, 1:73; 2:43, 168-169; 4:17, 438, 471 Samaritan, 4:223-224, 471 Sasanian, 2:46, 47, 48, 49 Seljuk, 1:136 Tyrene, 2:374; 4:393 Coldstream, J. N., 3:75 Cole, Dan P., 1:459 as contributor, 2:294-295 Cole, Glen, 2:452 Coleman, John E., 2:92; 3:76 Collart, Paul, 4:242 Collon, Dominique, 4:142, 509, 510 as contributor, 3:382-383 Cologne Mani Codex, 2:485 Colonization, 1:430; 2 : 5 2 - 5 5 . See also Roman Empire Colonnaded street, 1:201 Colophon, 1:131 Color. .Sec Munsell chart
481
Colorimetry. See UV-VIS spectroscopy Sumerian, 5:92, 93, 353 Colossians, Book of, 1:322, 323 writing systems, 5:353, 354 Colossi of Rameses II (Abu Simbel), 1:10-11 Constantia. See Salamis Colt, H. Dunscombe, 4:129; 5:89-90 Constantine I, 1:145, 247 Columns, 1:364-365 basilicas, 1:277, 302; 2:2-4, 63 Halusa basilica, 2:466 Byzantine Empire, 1:394, 482; 2:30 See also Capitals Church of the Nativity, 1:302; 2:3-4 Combined Caesarea Expeditions, 1:403 Constantine of Antioch, 1:16 Combs, bone and ivory, 1:345, 346, 349 Constantinople (Istanbul), 2:61-64 Come Tell Me How You Live (Christie), 4:60 ceramics, 1:474 Commagene (Kummah), 1:72; 4:124, 126, 476 councils, 1:394 Commentaries, 4:415-416 diptychs, 1:348 Commercial economy. See Seafaring; Trade fall of, 1:396 Committee on Mesopotamian Civilization Fourth Crusade and, 2:75 newsletter, 4:262 origins of, 1:394 Comnena, Anna, 3:35 Constantius II, 2:61 Complutense University, 3:1 Consulting Commission for Foreign Comprehensive Archaeological Survey of Saudi Archaeological Research, 2:345 Arabia, 4:90 Contadini, Anna, as contributor, 1:348-350 Comprehensive Survey of the Kingdom of Contenau, Georges, 5:39 Saudi Arabia, 3:80 Contenson, Henri de Computer-aided design (CAD), 1:199; 2:57, Bouqras excavations, 1:354 58; 4:335; 5:50 Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-, soundings, 4:452 AutoCAD, 5:103 Ugarit excavations, 5:256-257 Computer Aided Research in Near Eastern Studies Convention for die Protection of Cultural (journal), 4:265 Property in the Event of Armed Conflict Computer mapping, 1:199; 2:55-57 (UN), 2:272 historical geography, 3:31 Conway, Agnes, 3:53, 90; 5:275 site surveys, 5:50, 103-104 Conway Tower (Petra), 3:90 Computer recording, analysis, and Conze, Alexander, 3:74; 4:332 interpretation, 2:57-59; 3:61; 4:414 Coogan, Michael David architectural drawing, 1:199 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 historical geography, 3:31 Stories from Ancient Canaan, 4:415 photography, 4:335, 344-347 Cook, B. F., as contributor, 4:138 statistical applications, 5:77 Cook, Edward M., as contributor, 1:178-184 See also Computer mapping Cook, John M., 2:463-464 Concordia Seminary (St. Louis, Missouri), Cooking wares, ceramic, 1:474 5:149 Cookson, Maurice B., 4:333 Conder, Claude Reignier, 1:99; 2:59-60, 256, Cooley, Robert E. 346 as contributor, 1:32-33; 2:171; 4:401-402 Caesarea, 1:402 Dothan excavations, 2:171 Herodium, 3:18 Radannah excavations, 4:402 Hesi, Tell el-, 3:22 Cooper, Jerrold S., as contributor, 1:92-94 Horvat Rimmon identification, 3:325 Copeland, Lorraine, 1:293 Iktanu, Tell, 3:143 Copenhagen University. See University of Jericho survey, 3:220 Copenhagen Jotapata identification, 3:251 Coppens, Yves, 2:450 Masada, 3:428 Copper Masos, Tel, survey, 3:437 Arad trade exchange, 1:173 Mukhayyat, Khirbet el-, 4:117 arsenical, 4:1, 8 Nabratein, 4:85 on Crete, 2:71 Palestine survey, 3:52; 4:235 as currency, 2:50 'Umeiri, Tell el-, 5:273 Cyprus industry, 2:92, 93; 4:11; 5:266 Conrad, Diethelm, as contributor, 1:299; Feinan industry, 2:190, 310; 4:7 2:147-149 first usages, 4:5-6 Conservation Analytical Laboratory glass production, 5:307-308 (Smithsonian Institution), 2:425 in Mesopotamian sculpture, 4:10 Conservation archaeology, 2:60-61 Oman mines, 1:4, 160, 161, 164 tools, 2:295 shipment through 'Aqaba, 1:153 See also Artifact conservation; Field in Shiqmim metatworking, 5:35 conservation; Restoration and Timna' mines, 5:217-218 conservation Copper Scroll, 2:64-65, 124 Conservation Department (Egyptian Museum), Coptic (language), 2:65-67, 204, 209 3:441 alphabet, 1:75, 78 Consonants Christianity and, 2:65, 66 alphabet, 1:78, 79 Greek and, 2:437 Aramaic, 1:178-179; 3:145 Nag Hammadi inscriptions, 4:87, 88 Egyptian, 2:210 Coptic Church, 2:204-205 Ethiopic, 2:279 architectural decoration, 1:192 Greek, 2:438-439 craftsmen, 1:349 Hebrew, 3:5, 6-8 Islam and, 2:205-206 Hittite, 3:81 as monophysite, 2:204-205 Phoenician-Punic, 4:318
482
INDEX
Coqueugniot, Eve, 2:290 Corbeling (architecture), 1:188 Corbett, G. U. S., 5:276-277 Corbo, Virgilio C„ 2:67 Capernaum excavations, 1:417; 2:343 Herodium excavations, 3:18 Machaerus excavations, 3:391 Magdala excavations, 3:399 Nebo, Mount, 4:116 Cordoba, 1:349; 2:35 gardens, 2:388-389 Corinth, 1:277, 322 American School of Classical Srudies in Athens, 3:74 glass production, 5:320 Corinthian order, 1:190-196, 201 Hatra, 2:485 inscriptions, 4:244 "Iraq el-Amir, 3:178 Jerash, 3:217 Corinthians II, Book of, 1:322 Cormack, Sarah H., as contributor, 2:347-350 Cornell, Tim, 4:419 Cornell University, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis project, 4:487 Corning Museum of Glass, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis project, 4:487 Cornish (language), 3:151 Cornwall, Peter Bruce, 3:79 Coroplasts, 5:211 Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, 2:5 Corpus of Dated Palestinian Pottery (Duncan), 1:452 "Corpus of Palestinian Pottery, A" (Fisher), 1:459 Cosa, 1:277 Cosmas, St., 1:147 Cosmetics, 2 : 6 7 - 6 9 ; 4:183 Costa, Paolo M„ 3:80; 5:386 Cotton, 5:191 Coiiasnon, Charles, 2:188 Couches, 2:359-360 Coulson, William D. E. as contributor, 4:112-113 Naukratis, 4:112 Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), 2 : 6 9 - 7 0 American Institute for Maghreb Studies, 1:90 Council of Chalcedon. See Chalcedon, Council of Council of Ephesus (431 CE), 1:394 Council of Jamnia, 1:321 Councils of Constantinople, 1:394 Councils of Nicaea. See Nicaea I, Council of; Nicaea II, Council of Courbin, Paul as contributor, 1:278-279 Bassit excavations, 1:278 Couroyer, Bernard, 2:187 Court of Audience (Ebla), 2:181 Court of Columns (Nippur), 4:150 Court oftireCisterns (Ptolemais), 4:355 Court of the Gentiles (Jerusalem temple), 1:329 Court of the Israelites (Jerusalem temple), 1:329 Court of the Priests (Jerusalem temple), 1:329 Court of die Women (Jerusalem temple), 1:329 Courtyards First Temple, 1:327 houses, 2:22; 3:92, 93 Mesopotamian temples, 5:166 Second Temple, 1:329 as venue for sacrifices, 5:170 Couyat,J., 4:47
Covel, John T., 1:224 Coxe expedition, 5:350 Crac des Chevaliers, 2:76; 3:172 Craftsmen associations of, 1:339, 346 Coptic, 1:349 Islamic, 1:349 See also Ceramics; Glass; Lithics; Textiles Crawford, Harriet, as contributor, 1 : 1 4 - 1 5 Crawford, Vaughn E., 1:10, 93 Cremation Amman Airport Temple, 1:103 Chogha Zanbil, 1:489 Phrygians, 1:130 skeletal analysis, 5:52, 54 Crenshaw, James L., 4:500 Creswell, Keppel Archibald Cameron, 1:143; 2:70
bent entrance gates, 2:336 Samarra, 4:473 Creswell Library of Islamic Art and Architecture, 2:70 Crete, 2 : 7 0 - 7 2 Aegean Islands and, 1:18-20, 21 anchors, 1:138 baths, 1:283 Evans, Arthur, 2:292-293 fishing, 2:317 furnishings, 2:94 Neolithic colonization of, 4:506 trade, 1:5, 28; 2:71, 72 See also Knossos; Minoans Crimea, 4:332; 5:194 Crippen, Robert, 5:253 CRM. See Cultural resource management Croesus, 1:130; 2:44, 159, 253 Crops. See Agriculture; Cereals; specific crop types Cros, Gaston, 2:407 Cross, Frank Moore, 1:95, 106; 2:102; 3:20; 5:357 Copper Savll, 2:65 Damascus Document, 2:107 Lachish Ewer inscription, 4:352 local textstiieory,2:120 Ride of the Community, 4:443 Samaria Ostraca, 4:468 Ugarit abecedary, 3:364 Cross, Toni M., as contributor, 1:92 Cross motif, 1:195 Crouwel, J . H., as contributor, 1:485-487; 5:343-344 Crowfoot, Elisabedi, as contributor, 2:72-73 Crowfoot, G. M., 5:90 Crowfoot, John Henchman, 2:72 Crowfoot, John Winter, 2 : 7 2 - 7 3 Balu' soundings, 1:269, 447 blades, 3:378 British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1:360 Jerash excavations, 3:215 Jerusalem excavations, 2:28; 3:225, 226 Samaria expedition, 4:463 Crucibles Dhiba'i, Tell edit-, 4:12 Goltepe, 2:425-426 \ Crucifixion, archaeological evidence for, 4:18 Crusader period, 2 : 7 3 - 7 7 Achziv fortress, 1:13 'Ajlun castle, 1:41 Anatolia, 1:136 Antioch, 1:145 Apamea, 1:147
'Aqaba, 1:154 arches, 1:189 architectural contributions, 4:272 Ashkelon, 1:220, 222, 223 Ayyubid-Mamluk conquests, 1:241 Banias occupation, 1:271 Byzantine Empire, 1:396 Caesarea, 1:401 Constantinople occupation, 2:62 Egypt, 1:241 Fatimid dynasty, 2:308, 309 First Crusade, 2:73 Fourth Crusade, 2:75 Holy Land pilgrimages, 3:51 Mausoleum (Halikarnassos), 2:347, 463-464 Second Crusade, 2:75 Third Crusade, 1:241; 2:75 Transjordan, 5:242 Cruttenden, Charles J., 3:78 Crystal Palace exhibition (London; 1851), 4:105 Crystal River (Gohar Rud), 3:422 C Spring (Azraq), 1:244 Ctesiphon, 2 : 7 7 - 7 9 as'Abbasid caliphate capital, 1 : 1 Hatra and, 2:484 Roman conquest of, 3:485 Cult, 2 : 7 9 - 8 6 acropolis and, 2:31 of Adonis, 1:393 Aegean, 2:243 Anatolia (Christian), 1:134 Anatolia (Hellenistic), 1:132 Anatolia (prehistoric), 1:123, 124 ancestor, 2:84; 4:210; 5:302 of Apollo, 2:159, 160, 161 Aramean, 5:134 Armenian, 1:205 of Artemis, 2:160-161; 4:486, 487 of Baal Hammon, 1:430 Babylonian sites, 1:260 Canaanite, 1:413-414; 2:475; 3:319; 4:375; 5:169-170,171 of Christian martyrs, 1:147; 3:425-426 chthonic, 4:486 Dan precinct, 2:110, 111 of deity panureons, 2:80-82 dog rituals, 2:166 Dura-Europos, 2:174 Ebla, Mount, 2:180, 186 Edomite, 2:81; 4:390-391 Egypt (dynastic), 2:197; 3:470; 5:174-177 Egypt (Roman period), 2:203; 5:176 in Elamite reliefs, 3:199-202 emperor worship, 2:160, 254 healing, 3:451 Hellenistic period, 2:34 hero, 2:347 Hittite, 1:129; 3:87 Hurrian, 3:127-128 Kassite, 3:273 lion, 3:361 Luwian, 3:385 of Mary, 4:456 Megiddo, 5:170 Memphite, 3:470 metal artifacts, 4:16 Nabatean, 4:84 Nerab, 4:128 Northwest Semitic cultural sphere, 2:79-80 Palmyrene, 4:243 Paphian, 4:245
INDEX of Pharaohs, 4:356 Phoenician, 2:81-82; 4:315-316, 327-328, 330 Phrygian, 1:130 Qatabanian, 4:384 Roman, 1:133; 2:160, 254; 4:27, 437-438 ruler (Hellenistic), 4:124-125 salt usage, 4:459 of Setli of Avaris, 2:100, 101 specialists of, 2:84-86; 3:87, 455 Sumerian, 5:100 Syria, 3:167 temples, 2:82-83 Urartian, 5:293 urbanism and, 2:19 vessels, 1:308; 4:388 Cultural resource management (CRM), 2:60 membership standards for archaeologists, 2:270 Cumont, Franz, 2:174 Cunaxa, battle of (401 BCE), 1:487 Cuneiform, 2 : 8 6 - 8 9 Adab tablets, 1 : 1 5 Akkadian, 1:45-46, 128, 232, 258, 412; 2:86, 87, 89; 5:354-355 Alalakh Texts, 1:59 alphabet, 1:75, 76-77 Amarna tablets, 1:81, 86; 2:199 Aphek tablets, 1:150 Assur, 1:225 Assyrian, 1:232-233; 3:308-310 Babylonian, 1:252, 260, 261 Beth-Shemesh, 1:77 Canaanite, 1:412 city states, 2:20 comparison of Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian signs, 1:46 Ebla texts, 2:184 Hittite, 1:128 Hurrian, 3:125 materials, 5:358 Mesopotamian, 1:76; 2:88, 131; 3:160; 5:295, 341-342 Old Persian, 5:356 origins, 3:362 paleography, 2:88; 5:357 scribal techniques, 4:500 sign types, 2:88-89 Sumerian, 1:45; 2:87, 89; 5:95, 354 tablet interdependence, 5:150, 151 Ugaritic, 1:412 Urarm, 1:129, 130; 3:63 Currelly, C. T „ 1 : 1 2 Currency. See Coins Curse of Akkade (Agade), 1:42 Curtains, Islamic period, 2:363 Curds, John, 4:142 as contributor, 4:141-144 Curtis, Vesta Sarkhosh, as contributor, 4:286-291 Curtius Rufus, 3:34 Curzon, George N., 4:251 Curzon, Robert, 4:154 Custodia Terra Sancta. Sec Franciscan Custody of tire Holy Land Customs Account, 2:214 Cyaxares, 3:448, 449, 483 Cybele. See Matar Cyclades. See Aegean Islands Cydnus River, 2:8 Cyma recta molding, 1:196 Cymbals, 4:73
Cyme, 1:131 Cyprus, 2 : 8 9 - 9 6 Aegean Islands, 1:18 agriculture, 1:25 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:40 Alexandrian mints, 1:73 anchors, 1:137-138 architectural decoration, 1:193 art, 2:159 ASORfieldwork,1:97 Bassit, 1:278, 279 baths, 1:283 bridge-supported aqueduct, 1:158 ceramics industry (ancient), 1:464, 468, 469-471 ceramics industry (Byzantine), 1:472-475 ceramics industry (modern), 1:449 chariotry, 1:486 churches, 2:2 Crete, 2:71 Crusader period, 2:75 economic development, 2:152 geologic histoiy, 2:90 Greek colonization, 2:90 Greek language, 2:437 maritime trade, 1:25, 28 martyrial buildings, 3:426-427 metalwork, 2:91, 92, 93; 4:3 mining industry, 2:92, 93; 4:11 Phoenician commercial presence, 5:248 Ras Ibn Hani, 4:412 reservoirs, 4:422 tourism, 2:90, 152 See also Department of Antiquities (Cyprus); History of thefield,archaeology in Cyprus; specific sites Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, 1:97; 2 : 9 6 - 9 7 ; 4:262 Cyprus Exploration Fund, 3:71 Paphos excavations, 4:245 Salamis excavations, 4:457 Cyprus Museum, 2:161-162; 3:330 Cyprus Museum Committee, 2:241 Cyrenaica, 2:97; 3:357-358 Cyrene, 2:97-98 Alexandrian Empire, 1:72 tombs, 2:349 Cyris, Marcianus, 1:278 Cyrus I, 2:95 Cyrus II (the Great), 4:297 Anatolia conquest, 1:130 Babylon conquest, 1:255, 258 First Temple, 1:326 gardens, 2:387; 4:252 Pasargadae constructions, 4:250-252 Syria annexation, 5:134 tolerance policy, 3:483 tomb, 4:250, 251 Cyras Cylinder, 2:473; 3:162-163 Cyrus the Younger, 5:135
D Dab'a, Tell ed- (Avaris), 2:99-101 Aegean Islands, 1:21 Alalakh excavation, 1:57 Asiatic occupation of, 3:134-135 burial vaults, 1:222; 3:134 excavations, 2:198 gardens, 2:384
483
Maskhuta, Tell el-, 3:433 temples, 5:171 Dabiye, 2:373 Dabura, 2:422 Dacio-Thracian, 3:152 Dagan, 1:53; 2:186 Mari temple, 5:170 Terqa temple, 5:188 Ugarit temple, 5:173 Dagan, Yehudah Lachish, 3:317; 5:105 Shephelah survey, 3:254 Daggers, 4:8; 5:267, 336 Dagon (Duk), 1:413; 4:422 Daguerre, Louis Jacque Mande, 4:332 Dahari, Uzi, 4:44 Dahshur boat, 5:31, 349 pyramids, 2:197; 4:362, 363 Dairying, 1:443 Dajani, Awni, 2:403 Dajani, Rafik, 4:451 Da'janiya, plan of, 3:559 Daliya (Israel), 5:104 Daliyeh, Wadi ed-, 1:62-63; 2 : 1 0 1 - 1 0 2 Dalley, Stephanie, 2:383 as contributor, 4:428-430 Dalman, Gustaf, 2 : 1 0 2 - 1 0 3 , 147, 148 Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes directorship, 2:150 Far'ah, Tell el- (North), 2:303 Mizpah identification, 4:102 Qumran community, 4:395 Damascus, 2 : 1 0 3 - 1 0 6 Arameans, 1:186 architectural decoration, 1:193 Ayyubid architecture, 1:242 coinage, Islamic, 2:50 decorative art, 1:194 gardens, 2:388 glass production, 5:320 as Islamic capital, 1:165; 5:142 mosaics, 5:270 under Roman Empire, 2:103, 104-105 Salah ad-Din's conquest of, 1:241; 2:35 in Zakkur inscription, 5:387 Damascus Document, 2 : 1 0 6 - 1 0 7 , 120 Damascus Gate (Jerusalem), 3:234, 237 Damati, Emanuel, 4:462 Damian, St., 1:147 Dams. See Irrigation; specific dams Dan,
Tel,
2:107-112
fortifications, 2:108, 110, 321 lion bone discovery, 3:361 size, 2:22 spring within, 3:130 stela discovery, 1:182 Syria, 2:369 temple, 5:173 tomb, corbeled, 5:14 Danaba, 4:455 Danby, Herbert, 4:236 Daniel (prophet), 2:121, 122 Daniel, Book of Aramaic sections, 1:183; 3:144, 145 Qumran texts, 2:121, 122 Daniel, J . F., 3:305 Daniel, St., 4:369 Daniels, PeterT., as contributor, 2:130-133; 4:500-502; 5:352-358, 358-361 Danish Halikarnassos Expedition, 2:464, 465
484
INDEX
Danishmendids, 1:136 Dannu, 5:131 Danli, Michael D., as contributor, 2:258-260, 483-484 Danunians, 5:131 Daphne (Antioch suburb), 1:145 royal sanctuary, 2:386 stadium, 5:75 Dar'a, Wadi, 3:45; 4:60 Darabgird, 4:494 Dar al-Khilafah, 1:265; 4:475 Darb al-Ma'asir (Fustat), 2:367 Darb el-Arba'in, 1:233 Darb el-Hawarneh, 1:301; 5:379 Darb Zubaydah, 1:4, 165, 422; 2:112-113; 4:57 Darih, Khirbet ed-, 2:478 Darius I (the Great), 1:130; 4:222, 297 Bisitun inscription, 1:182, 330-331; 2:214; 3:162-163 Didyma, 2:159 ivory trade, 1:346 monetary reforms, 2:44 Naqsh-i Rustam tombs, 4:99, 100, 101 Persepolis constructions, 4:273-277 religion, 4:299 Susa constructions, 5:109 Darius III, 1:70, 130, 131 Darwin, Charles R., 2:285 Dasianis. Sec Azraq Daskyleion, 1:130 Daszewski, W. A., 2:95 Database management, 2:57 Data Sets: Cuneiform Texts (journal), 4:265 Date palms Babylonian, 1:258 early cultivation, 1:24, 25 Mesopotamian, 1:25 Dating techniques, 2:113-117 archaeomagnetic, 2:116 biostratigraphy, 2:450 bones, 4:206 chronostratigraphy, 5:12 climatic indicators, 2:116-117 dendrochronology, 2:114-115,424; 4:269 electron spin resonance, 2:115; 4:208; 5:153 fission track, 2:116, 450 for Galilee boat, 2:377 historical documents, 3:28 limitations of, 4:268-269 luminescence, 2:115; 4:208 obsidian, 2:116 potassium-argon, 2:115-116 radioactive, 1:446 radiocarbon, 1:460; 2:113-114, 377, 487; 3:405, 476; 4:268-269, 396; 5:15, 35, 251 sequence, 1:452 typological (metal artifacts), 4:1-2, 10-11 uranium-series dating, 2:115 Daulah, 'Adud ad-, 2:389 Dauphin, Claudine, 2:7, 169 Davaras, Costis, 3:75 Davey, C. J„ 4:12 Daviau, Michele, 3:102 David (king), 1:104, 220; 3:196; 5:332 Absalom revolt, escape from, 5:34 Aphek, 1:147, 149 Aramaic reference to, 1:182 Ashdod, 1:210 'Azekah, 1:243 census, 2:143 Geshur, 2:420 Hebron, 3:13
David, City of. See City of David Davies, Philip R. as contributor, 2:106-107; 5:331 on Damascus Document, 2:107 Davis, Jack L., as contributor, 1:332; 2:365 Dawan, Wadi, 5:13 Dawit' ("Invincible"), 1:210 Dawit' Mamikonean, 1:209 Dawkins, James, 2:131 Dayagi-Mendels, Michal, as contributor, 2:67-69; 4:300-302 Daylam, 5:145 Day of Atonement, 1:328 Dayr Siyagha, 4:116 DCP spectrometry, 2:117-118 Deaconess, 2:7 Dead Sea. See Southeast Dead Sea Plain Dead Sea Rift, north-south boundary fault, 2:477 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:118-127 Albright, William Foxwell, 1:61 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and, 1:62 alphabet, 1:78 apocrypha, 2:124 Aramaic sections, 1:182-183 Avigad text, 1:238 biblical interpretation documents, 2:120-122 biblical texts, 2:119-120, 124 Burrows, Millar, 1:387 calendrical texts, 2:122-123 as Christian writings, 2:126 Copper Scroll, 2:64-65, 124 Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, 2:188-189 as Essene writings, 2:125-126, 268-269 Greek manuscripts, 2:124-125, 438 Habakkuk Commentary, 2:121, 445-446 Harding, Gerald Lankester, 2:474 Jerusalem hypothesis, 2:125-126 legal and regulatory texts, 2:120 liturgical texts, 2:123-124 as Sadducean writings, 2:126 technical aspects, 4:503 Temple Scroll, 1:325, 329; 2:120; 5:163-165 as wisdom literature, 2:123 as Zealot writings, 2:126 Death Pit (Ur), 5:193 Debbeh.Tell, 5:111 Debir, 1:61, 295; 4:401 Decapolis, 2:127-130; 3:216; 4:227, 258; 5:236-237 Abila, 1:5-7, 158 Amman, 1:100 Beit Ras (Capitolias), 1:297-298; 4:422 Canatha, 2:128; 5:112 culture of, 2:129 northwestern Transjordanian border cities, 5:239 De Cardi, Beatrice, 3:80; 4:280, 384; 5:284 Decipherment, 2:130-133. See also Cuneiform; Rosetta Stone Decius, 2:204 Declaration of Faith (Islam), 2:50 Decorative art. See Architectural decoratiqn; Mosaics; Sculpture; Wall paintings Decrees of the Sect (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:120 Dedan (al-Ula), 1:7, 163; 2:133-134; 4:447 Dedanite script, 4:447 Deeds of God Ninurta, 5:94 Deetz, James, 4:110 Degania, 5:28
Degirmentepe, 1:125 Deh Luran, 2:134-137; 5:182 Deh Luran plain, 1:75; 2:134, 136, 230; 5:186 Deichmann, F. W., 4:369 Deinokrates of Rhodes, 1:65 Deioces, 3:448 Deir 'Ain 'Abata, 5:62, 65 Deir al-Balaiza, 4:43 Deir 'Alia, Tell, 2:137-138; 4:311; 5:233, 234 clays, 1:453; 2:137 excavations, 3:55 Gilead uade, 2:137 sanctuary, 5:172 streets, 4:432 Deir 'Alia inscriptions, 1:106, 181; 2:138-140 Deir as-Suryan (Nittia), 4:154 Deir 'Aziz synagogue, 2:422 Deir Dibwan, 1:32-33 Deir ed Derb, 1:72 Deir el-Bahari Proto-Doric columns, 1:200 reliefs, 5:31 tombs, 2:316; 5:176-177 Deir el-Balah, 2:140-141; 3:49; 4:311 Deir el-Medineh, 3:116; 4:364 Deir Fakhoury, 4:43 Deir Koziba inscriptions, 2:7 ' Deir Mar Tuma, 4:456 Deir Sim'an (Telanissos), 4:368 Deir Situn, Tell, 2:267 Delaporte, Louis, 1:212-213; 3:65 Delbruck, Berthold, 3:153, 156 Delcor, Mathias, 4:443 Delegation Archeologique Francaise, 5:181 Delitzsch, Friedrich, 4:106 Delos excavations, 3:74, 76 synagogue, 4:471; 5:122-123 Delougaz, Pinhas, 1:452 Beth-Yerah excavations, 1:312, 313 ceramic mathematical analysis, 1:461 Chogha Mish excavations, 2:229 Iraq Expedition, 2:164 Khafajeh excavations, 3:288 Ubaid, 5:251 Delta, 2:141-142 architectural decoration, 1:192 Asiatics in, 2:198; 3:133-135 Demetrios I Poliorcete (the City-Sacker), 1:88, 70 Demetrius I Soter, 4:515 Demetrius III Eucaerus, 2:121 De Meyer, Leon, as contributor, 2:145-146 Demircihoyiik environmental studies, 3:66 Demise of Righteousness, The (Egyptian Aramaic text fragment), 2:214 Demography, 2:142-144 agricultural development, 2:16, 143-144 Baghdad, 1:266 burial sites, 1:385, 386 ethnoarchaeological studies, 2:282 Galilee, 2:371-372 Mesopotamia, 2:144 Palestine, 2:143-144 Roman Empire, 4:440 settlement-pattern studies, 5:6 skeletal analysis, 5:52 Ugarit, 5:260 urbanization, 2:24 De Morgan, Jean Jacques biblical record, 4:131 Ecbatana, 2:187
INDEX French delegation in Persia, 2:345 Haft Tepe, 2:454 Naqada, 4:97-98 Susa excavations, 2:229; 4:281; 5:107 Demotic, 2:65-66, 209; 3:24 Demsky, Aaron, as contributor, 3:362-369 Dendrochronology, 2 : 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 , 424; 4:269 Dendroclimatology, 2:38 Denen Dora. See Hadar Formation Dennis, George, 4:487 Denon, Dominique Vivant, 2:144-145; 3:38 Dentzer, Jean-Marie, 3:175 as contributor, 1:350-353 Qasr el-'Abd, 3:179-180 Department of Antiquities (Bahrain), 4:367 Department of Antiquities (British Mandate Palestine) Abu Hawam, Tell, salvage excavations, 1:9 Ai excavations, 1:32 Aphek rescue excavation, 1:249 Ashkelon excavation, 1:220 Baramki (Dimitri Constantine) association, 1:274 Bethlehem excavations, 1:302 Chorazin, 1:491 establishment of (1919), 1:315 Garstang (John) founding directorship and policies, 2:390 Department of Antiquities (Cyprus), 1:87, 152 annual (publication), 4:264 Hala Sultan Tekke excavations, 2:463 Idalion excavations, 3:137 Kadiari excavations, 3:301 Nea Paphos excavations, 2:95 Salamis excavations, 2:94; 4:457 Tenta excavations, 3:262-263 Department of Antiquities (Iraq), 1:156; 4:143 Department of Antiquities (Israel) Achziv excavations, 1 : 1 3 Aphek rescue excavation, 1:149 archaeological focus of, 2:153 Ashdod excavation, 1:219 Avdat excavation, 1:236 Avi-Yonah (Michael) association, 1:239 Chorazin surveys, 1:491 Dan excavations, 2:108 Dead Sea Scrolls expedition, 2:119 Dor excavations, 2:169 'Ein-Besor excavations, 2:219-220 'Ein-Gev excavations, 2:223 Esdar, Tel, excavations, 2:260 Giloh excavations, 2:406 Guy, Philip Langslaffe Orde, 2:444 Hammath-Gader excavations, 2:469, 470 Hammath Tiberias excavations, 2:470 'Ira, Tel, survey, 3:175 Israel Antiquities Authority, 3:50 Jaffa excavations, 3:206 Kabri, Tel, surveys, 3:261 Kuntillet 'Ajrud excavations, 3:310 Kursi excavations, 3:314 Masada survey, 3:428 Mor, Tel, excavations, 4:49 Qadesh-Barnea excavations, 4:365 Radannah excavations, 4:402 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 Ramla excavations, 4:404 Sepphoris excavations, 4:536 Shavei-Zion excavations, 5:16 Sunas, es-, excavations, 2:382 Tiberias excavations, 5:204, 205 Yiftahel excavations, 5:378
See also Israel Antiquities Authority; Israel Exploration Society Department of Antiquities Qordan), 1:7, 36, 4 1 , 89, 275; 3:54 annual (publication), 2:474; 4:264 Baq'ah Valley excavations, 1:272 Basta survey, 1:279 Beit Ras excavations, 1:297 Copper Scroll, 2:64 Feinan site, 2:310 Ghrubba surveys, 2:402 Harding, Gerald Lankester, 2:474; 3:53 Humeima excavations, 3:121 'Iraq el-Amir excavations, 3:177 Irbid excavations, 3:181 Jordan Cultural Resource Management Project, 2:152 Machaerus excavations, 3:391 Madaba excavations, 3:394 Petra excavations, 4:304 Qasr al-Hallabat excavations, 4:376 Qumran excavations, 2:118; 4:393 Qusayr 'Arnra frescoes, 4:397 Safut, Tell, excavations, 4:449 Tannur, Khirbet et-, excavations, 5:154 Umm er-Rasas excavations, 5:279, 280 Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-, 5:388 Sec also Jordanian Antiquities Database and Information System Department of Antiquities (Lebanon), 1:247; 2:272 Beirut soundings, 1:295 Khaldeh excavations, 3:291 Tyre excavations, 5:247, 249 Department of Antiquities (Libya), 4:355 Department of Antiquities (Saudi Arabia) Qaryat al-Fau, 4:371 Qurayyah soundings, 4:396 Tayma' excavations, 5:160, 161 Thaj surveys, 5:198 Department of Antiquities (Syria), 1:34, 491; 2:178; 3:172; 4:405. See also Directorate General of Antiquities Department of Antiquities (Transjordan). See Department of Antiquities (Jordan) Der, Tell ed-, 2 : 1 4 5 - 1 4 6 ; 5:47, 48 Derak, Khirbet, 2:266 Der el-Dik monastery, 4:42 Der Hall, 2:266 Der Turmanin, 1:278 Desch, Charles H„ 3:80 Description de I'Egypte Qomard), 1:82 Desert Research Institute, 1:36 Deshayes, Jean, 4:2 Desktop publishing, 2:57 Desribes, Raoul, 1:293 Dessau, Hermann, 3:336 Dessel, J. P. as contributor, 1:38-40; 2:227-228, 293-294; 3:206-207, 285-286; 4:402-404; 5:59-60, 374-375 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, excavations, 2:227 Wawiyat, Tell el-, excavations, 5:333 Detweiler, A. Henry, 1:95 Deuteronomy, Book of, 1:321; 2:80 Canaan reference, 1:409 illness explained by, 3:454 Jericho reference, 3:220 manuscript fragments of, 2:37 in Merot synagogue inscription, 5:115 Qumran texts, 2 : 1 2 1 , 122 Temple Scroll as supplement to, 5:164
485
Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft. See Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG), 1:83, 274; 2:146-147 Assur excavation, 1:225 Babylon excavations, 3:58 Bogazkoy excavations, 1:333 Chorazin excavations, 1:491 Fara excavations, 2:302 Habuba Kabira excavations, 2:446 Fleinrich, Ernst, 3:14 Jericho excavations, 3:220-221 Uruk-Warka, 5:294 Deutscher Palastina-Verein, 1:79; 2 : 1 4 7 - 1 4 9 ; 3:40, 461 Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palastinas. See Deutscher Palastina-Verein Deutsches Archaologisches Institut Bogazkoy surveys, 1:333 Elephantine, 2:234 Marib excavations, 3:417 Paphos excavations, 4:245 Rusafa excavations, 4:445 Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Cairo, 1 : 1 2 ; 3:471 Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Damaskus, 2 : 1 4 9 - 1 5 0 Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul, 2:150 Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Tehran, 1:331 Deutsches Bcrgbau-Museum (Bochum, Germany), 2:310 Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fiir Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes, 1:79; 2:102, 1 5 0 Shechem excavations, 5:20 Umm Qeis excavations, 5:281, 282 De Vaux, Roland. See Vaux, Roland de Development (economic) and archaeology, 2 : 1 5 1 - 1 5 6 . See also Tourism and archaeology Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient. Egypt (Breasted), 1:357 Dever, William G. 'Ain es-Samiyeh finds, 1:35 'Ajjul, Tell el-, dating, 1:38 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research directorship, 1:63 as contributor, 1:9, 35-36, 54-55, 219-220, 285-287, 300-301, 311-312, 315-319, 459-465; 2:41, 101-102, 396-400; 3:15-16, 210-211, 261, 278-279, 350-351, 390-391; 4:49-50, 391-392; 5:14-15, 147,217-218 Be'er Resisim excavations, 1:285-286; 4:120 Daliyeh, Wadi ed-, pottery, 2:102 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 Gezer excavations, 1:316; 2:396, 397 locus definition, 5:88 Megiddo pottery, 3:462 Qom, Khirbet el-, excavations, 4:391 Wawiyat, Tell el-, excavations, 5:333 Devil creek. See Seytan Deresi De Vogue, Melchior. See Vogue, Melchior de De Vries, Bert ACOR directorship, 1:89 as contributor, 1:189-190, 197-200; 2:60-61; 5:276-279 Umm el-Jimal excavations, 3:55; 5:277 DcWaal, Sidney, 3:172 Dhahab, Tell, 1 : 1 1 5
486
INDEX
Dhahr Mirzbaneh, 1:35, 36, 63 Dhalak Islands inscriptions, 3:169 Dhanah, Wadi, 3:418 Dhiba'i, Tell edh-, 4:12 Dhiban. See Dibon Dhofar, pre-Islamic culture, 1:160, 162; 5:253 D'Hont, Olivier, 3:175 Dhorme, Edouard Paul, 2:132, 187; 4:236; 5:188, 257, 304 Dhra', 2 : 1 5 6 Dhu Nuwas, 4:91 Dhu-Raydan, 4:384; 5:19 Dhurur, Khirbet et-Tell. See Zeror, Tel Dhushares, 4:304 Dhuweila, 5:228 Diadumenianus, 4:438 Diatessaron (Tatian), 2:177 Dibon (Dhiban), 2 : 1 5 6 - 1 5 8 'Ara'ir, 1:177-178 excavations, 3:54; 5:234 Mesha, 4:38, 39-40 Dice (gaming), 2:380 Di Cesnola, Alexander, 4:457 Di Cesnola, Luigi Palma, 1:87; 2:96, 1 5 8 - 1 5 9 ; 3:70 Idalion excavations, 3:137 Salamis, 4:457 Dickie, Archibald Campbell, 3:225, 229, 235, 238 Dickson, Harold Richard Patrick, 3:79; 5:197 Dickson, V, P., 5:197 Dictionaries, 4:416-418, 419 Didyma, 1:132; 2 : 1 5 9 - 1 6 1 Dietary laws, 4:348 Dietrich, Manfried, 1:59, 60 Dieulafoyjane, 5:107 Dieulafoy, Marcel, 2:345; 5:107, 110 Diggings (newsletter), 4:262 Dikaios, Porphyrios, 2:91, 92, 94, 1 6 1 - 1 6 2 ; 3:71,72 Enkomi excavations, 2:242 Salamis excavations, 4:457 Tenta excavations, 3:262-263 Vounous excavations, 5:322 Dikkeh, ed-, synagogue, 2:422 Diktaean cave, 3:75 Diligently Compared (Burrows), 1:387 Dilmun, 1:161; 2 : 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 Bahrain identified widi, 1:160; 2:297 Dilmun (journal), 3:80; 4:265 Dimai, 2:299 Dimick, John, 3:471 Dincol, Ali, 3:66 Dinitu, Assur shrine to, 1:227 Diniye, Khirbet-ed. See Haradum Diocaesarea, 4:530 Dio Cassius, 1:275, 276; 3:34-35 Diocletian, 1:65, 67, 134 ivory trade, 1:346 reforms of, 4:227 religious persecution by, 2:204 Transjordanian military buildup, 5:238 Diodorus Siculus, 3:34 Diodotos Tryphon, 4:386 Dionysias. See Suweida Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 3:34 Dionysius Thrax, 1:210 Dionysos, See Dionysus Dionysus (Bacchus), 1:276; 2:63, 226 Baalbek temple, 1:191, 195, 247, 248 Hellenistic period, 2:34 House of (Nea Paphos), 2:95
Roman mosaics, 4:51, 52 sarcophagi decorations, 4:481-482 Sepphoris mosaic, 2:359; 4:533 Suweida veneration, 5 : 1 1 2 Diorite, Akkadian use of, 1:52 Diptychs consular, 1:348 ivory-hinged boxwood, 5:268 Diraz Dilmun civilizationfinds,1:161 temples, 1:266 Direct current plasma. See DCP spectrometry Directorate General of Antiquities (Iraq), 1:156 Directorate General of Antiquities (Syria) Basra excavations, 1:352, 353 Kazel, Tell al-, excavations, 3:276 Ras Ibn Hani excavations, 4:411 Diringer, David, 4:166; 5:360 Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (publication), 2:189; 5:331 Discovering Jerusalem (Avigad), 1:238 Disease. See Medicine; Paleopadiology Dissertation Abstracts International, 4:418 Dittmann, Reinhard, 1:225; 3:269 as contributor, 3:269-271 Dium, 2:128 Divination Assyrian, 1:231 See also Cult, specialists of Divine names, 4:93. See also names of specific deities Di Vita, Antonino, 3:348 Diyala, 2 : 1 6 3 - 1 6 6 Akkadians, 1:43, 50, 53 irrigation, 3:183 urbanization of, 3:488 Diyala Basin Archaeological Project, 2:164, 262 Diyala River, 5:207 Hamrin Dam Salvage Project, 2:471 Diyarbakir, 1:42 Diz River, 5:106 Dja'de el-Mughara, Tell, 2:290 Djedkare Isesi, 4:479^(80 Djefahepil, 1:234 Djefahepi II, 1:234 Djefahepi III, 1:234 Djoser, 2:197; 4:362, 479 Dmeir temple, 1:194 DNA (in skeletal analysis), 5:52 Documentation, artifact, 1:216 Dodecanese. See Aegean Islands DOG. See Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft Dogs, 2 : 1 6 6 - 1 6 7 'Ain Ghazal, 1:37 Ashkelon burials, 1:222-223 Natufian burials, 2:486 Ninkarrak temple (Terqa), 5:190 Palegawra cave (Iraq), 2:166 sacrificial, 2:166, 475; 4:486 Doherty, Joseph G., 3:307 Doliche, 4:437 Dollfus, Genevieve, 2:478; 4:280 as contributor, 1:7-9 Dolmen, 2 : 1 6 7 - 1 6 8 Golan, 2:419 tombs, 1:385 tumuli, 2:168; 5:245 Domaszewski, Alfred von, 1:447 Arabian frontier survey, 3:359 Masada, 3:428 Moab plateau, 3:52 Petra, 4:304
Domat al-Jendal, 1:166 Dome of the Rock, 1:190; 3:237; 4:233 biblical temples, 1:325, 326 mosaics, 5:270 Umayyad building of, 5:269 See also Temple Mount Domes, Byzantine and Islamic, 1:382-383 Domestication of animals. See Animal husbandry; specific animals Domestication of plants. See Agriculture; specific plants Dominicans (religious order), 1:276; 2:346 Domitian, 2:254, 255 Donatist Christians, 1:431 Donceel, Robert, 4:395 as contributor, 4:392-396 Donceel-Voiite, Pauline as contributor, 5:111-114 Qumran excavations, 2:118-119 Donkeys. See Equids Donner, Fred M., as contributor, 4:24 Donner, Herbert, 1:79; 3:54, 394 Dor,
2:168-170
aqueducts, 1:158 excavations, 2:169 fortifications, 2:28-29, 330 Hippodamic city planning, 2:26 Dorians, 2:72 Doric (Greek dialect), 2:435, 437 Doric order, 1:190, 192, 193, 200, 201, 224 Jerusalem tombs, 2:348 Dornemann, Rudolph H. ACOR directorship, 1:89 as contributor, 1:98-102, 115-117; 2:453-454, 460-462, 466-468; 4:370-371; 5:209-210 Hadidi, Tell, excavations, 2:453 Nimrin, Tell, excavations, 4:140 Qarqur, Tell, excavations, 4:370 Qitar, el-, excavations, 4:389 Dorpfeld, Wilhelm, 3:75; 4:498 Dorrell, Peter, 4:331 Dorsey, David A., as contributor, 1:433-434; 4:431-434; 5:243-244 Dorylaion fortification, 1:136 Dositheans, 2:107 Dossin, Georges, 3:420 Dothan, 2 : 1 7 1 Dothan, Moshe, 1:54, 219, 467 Hammath Tiberias excavations, 2:470 Mor, Tel, excavations, 4:49 Qadesh-Barnea excavations, 4:365 Yavneh-Yam identification, 5:374 Dothan, Trade as contributor, 2:140-141; 4:30-35, 310-311 Deir el-Balah excavations, 2:140 Megiddo pottery, 3:464 Miqne, Tel, excavations, 4:30 Douara, 2 : 1 7 1 - 1 7 2 ; 4:200-201; 5:124 Double Gate (Jerusalem), 3:232 Dougga, 2:349 Doughty, Charles M., 1:447; 3:79, 446; 4:396; 5:160, 276 Douglas, James D., 4:417 Doumas, Christos, 3:76 Downey, Susan B., as contributor, 4:513-514 Dra'Abu 'n-Naga tombs, 4:364 Drafting and drawing. See Architectural drafting and drawing; Artifact drafting and drawing Dragoo, Don, 2:457 Dress. See Clotiiing Dressed stones, 1:362, 364
INDEX Drewes, A. J., 2:274 Drew University, 5:21 Drijvers, H. J. W„ as contributor, 3:165-168 Driver, Godfrey R., 2:126; 5:360 Driver letters, 5:360 Dropsie College, 5:183 Drori, Amir, 3:50, 189 Druks, Adam Kitan, Tel, 3:300 Sepphoris excavations, 4:536 Tiberias excavations, 5:205 Drums, 4:73-74 Druze, 2:309; 5:278 Druze, Jebel al-, 5:276 Dry-farming, 2:248-249; 5:206-208 Du'an, Wadi, 5:376 Dubai, 5:284 Dubertret, Louis, 1:293 Du Buit, R. F. M„ 4:394 Dudu, 1:53 Duin, 1:206 Duk (Dagon), 1:413; 4:422 Duke University 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, excavations, 2:227 Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Sepphoris excavations, 4:529 Dunand, Maurice, 2 : 1 7 2 - 1 7 3 'Ain Dara' excavation, 1:34 'Amrit excavation, 1 : 1 1 1 , 112 Byblos excavations, 1:391, 392; 2:172-173, 345 Kazel, Tell al-, excavations, 3:275, 276 Raqqa, ar-, excavations, 4:405 Sidon excavations, 5:39-40 Dunayevsky, Immanuel, 2 : 1 7 3 Hazor, 5:367 Megiddo, 3:461 open-court buildings, 2:26 Dunbabin, T. J„ 3:404 Duncan, J. Garrow, 1:452; 3:225, 226, 229 Dur, ed-, 5:285-286 Dura-Europos, 2 : 1 7 3 - 1 7 8 architectural decoration, 1:194 ceramics, 1:470 fortifications, 2:330, 331-332 house churches, 2 : 1 ; 3:119-120 Jewish frescoes, 1:194 plan of, 2:174, 175 under Roman Empire, 2:174-176; 4:437 synagogue, 2:176-177, 360; 4:437; 5:116, 122 wall paintings, 2:358, 359, 360; 4:437; 5:329 Durand, Jean-Marie, 3:45, 420 Duris of Samos, 3:33 Dur Katlimmu. See Sheikh Hamad, Tell Dur Kurigalzu. See 'Aqar Quf Dur Samsuiluna, 3:289, 290 Dur Sharrukin. See Khorsabad Duru, Raymond, 4:242, 405 Durum, 1:480 Dushares, 1:352; 4:84 Dussaud, Rene, 2 : 1 7 8 Baalbek excavation, 1:247 Byblos inscription, 1:390 Enkomi, 2:242 Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi, 4:379 Umm el-Jimal, 5:276 Duthoit, Edmond, 4:457 Driver, 5:211 Duweir, Tell ed-. See Lachish Dyes, 5:192-193
487
Dyson, Robert H., Jr., 1:91 Edens, Christopher, as contributor, 2:52-55; as contributor, 2:478-481; 3:60-63; 4:441-442 5:206-209 Hasanlu soundings, 2:458, 480 Edessa, 1:183; 2:73, 76 Edessene inscriptions, 1:183 Edfu E Aramaic texts, 2:215, 216 architectural decoration, 1:193 Edgerton, William F., 1:356 Ea, 1:254; 2:316 Edict of Milan (312 CE), 2:204 Hurrian pantheon, 3:128 Edinburgh, University of. See University of trade, 4:9 Edinburgh Eadie, John W„ 3:121 EDM. See Electtonic Distance Measuring Eanatum, 2:407; 3:182; 4:283 device Eanna, 3:14; 5:294, 295-296 Edom (Idumea), 2:189-191 EAO. See Egypt Antiquities Organization 'Aro'er, 1:212 Earl, Bryan, 3:283 cults, 2:81; 4:390-391 Early Muslim Architecture (Creswell), 2:70 excavations, 3:55; 5:235 East Africa. See Ethiopia; Nubia Glueck survey, 1:62, 153-154 East African slaves. .See Zanj revolt Judean conflict, 3:143; 4:391 East and West (journal), 4:266 language and material culture, 3:143 Eastern Orthodox Church, 1:395-396; 4:456 Teman, 5:156 East India Company, 1:251, 252 See also Idumeans East India House inscription, 1:251 Edomite (dialect), 3:143; 4:94, 190 East Jordan Valley Survey Edoni, 2:11 Iktanu, Tell, 3:144 Edun, 2:128 Ziqlab, Wadi, 5:391 Edwards, Amelia, 2:207 Eastman, George, 4:332 Edwards, Douglas R, Easton, D. F., as contributor, 4:497-498 as contributor, 1:419-422; 3:251-252; 4:26-28 East Talpiyot, 4:461 Jotapata excavations, 3:251 EBAF. See Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Edwards, G. Roger Francaise Gordion Project, 2:427-428 Ebal, Mount, 2 : 1 7 9 - 1 8 0 Kourion excavations, 3:305 Ebeling, Erich, 1:86 Edzard, Dietz O., as contributor, 2:86-89; Ebers, Georg, 2:260 5:150-152 Ebla (Tell Mardikh), 2 : 1 8 0 - 1 8 3 EEF. See Egyptian Exploration Fund Akkadians, 1:50, 52 Eerdmans Bible Dictionary (Myers), 4:417-418 Alalakh excavation, 1:57 Effendi, Osgan, 4:123 Amorites, 1:107 Effenterre, Henri van, 3:75 archives, 2:181, 184-185; 3:353; 5:150-151 Effenterre, Micheline van, 3:75 excavations, 3:43-44 Eglon, 2:256; 3:22; 4:38 fortifications, 2:323, 324 Egra. Sec Meda'in Salch palace, 4:197 Egypt, 2:191-207 temples, 1:35; 2:182; 5:170 'Abbasid caliphate, 1 : 1 ; 5:145 See also Eblaite; Eblaites; Ebla texts Aegean Islands, 1:18, 21 Eblaite (Eblaic; language), 1:44; 2:181, 183; agriculture, 1:4 4:93, 517. See also Ebla texts Alalakh, 1:55, 56, 58 Eblaites, 2 : 1 8 3 - 1 8 4 Alexandrian, 1:72, 73, 131 Ebla texts, 1:44; 2 : 1 8 4 - 1 8 6 Amarna letters, 1:83 Ecbatana (Hamadan), 2:46, 1 8 6 - 1 8 7 American Research Center, 1:91-92 excavations, 3:60 amulets, 1 : 1 1 4 gardens, 2:384 Anatolia, 1:131 Islamic period, 2:35, 36 anchors, 1:137 Ecbatams Partiorum. See Ecbatana animal burial, 1:437 Ecce Homo arch (Jerusalem), 3:234 animal husbandry, 1:142, 143, 441-442; Ecce Homo convent (Jerusalem), 5:304 4:348 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 1:321; 2:124 Aphek, 1:150 Ecochard, Michel, 4:242, 378 'Aqaba, 1:154, 155 Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise Arabian Peninsula, 1:160 (EBAF), 1:62; 2 : 1 8 7 - 1 8 9 Arabic language, 1:168, 169 Abel, Felix-Marie, 1:5 Arad, 1:169-170, 173 Copper Scroll, 2:64 Aramaic texts, 1:182, 186 fundingfor,2:346 architectural decoration, 1:192 Qumran excavations, 2:118, 188-189; Ashkelon under, 1:220 4:393-395 under Assyrian Empire, 1:230 Vincent, Louis-Hugues, 5:303-304 Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties, 1:239-240 Ecology. See Environmental archaeology; Beth-Shean, 1:305, 306-308 Paleoenvironmental reconstruction bilingualism, 3:160 Economic development. See Development British School of Archaeology, 1:358-359 (economic) and archaeology building materials and techniques, 1:361, Bd-Dikkeh. See Dikkeh, ed-, synagogue 363-366, 370, 374-376 Ed-Dur. See Dur, edByblos, 1 : 3 1 , 391-392 Edelstein, Gershon, as contributor, 2:225-227 Canaan, 1:411-412; 5:42, 43
488
INDEX
Egypt, continued ceramics, 1:471, 474, 476, 478 chariotry, 1:485 cist graves, 2:13 climate, 3:114 codices, 2:40 coin hoards, 2:43 cosmetics, 2:67, 68 Deir el-Balah, 2:140-141 Denon, Dominique Vivant, 2:144-145 economic development, 2:151-152 'Ein-Besor, 2:220 'Erani, Tel, 2:257 Eshmunazar inscription, 2:261 Ethiopia, 2:274-275 faience production, 5:311 Fatimid dynasty, 2:307-309 fortifications, 5:334-335 furnishings, 2:352, 353-354, 359, 360, 361 gardens, 2:384 glassmaking, 2:413, 414; 5:312, 316, 319-320 gold, 4:13 Greek soldier-settlers, 1:72 houses, 3:109, 114-118 Hyksos, expulsion of, 4:215, 216 incense trade, 3:147, 148 irrigation, 2:249-250 ivoryttade,1:348, 349 Lachish under, 3:319 lamps, 3:327 martyrial buildings, 3:427 medicine, 3:452 Midian, 4:25 monasteries, 4:42-44 Napoleonic invasion of, 1:65; 3:37-38, 68; 4:105 nationalism, archaeological, 4:107 natural defense barriers, 3:30 Nubia conquered by, 2:199, 235 ostraca, 4:189 Palestine, expansion into, 2:53-54 papyrus, 2:439; 4:246, 247, 248 Phoenicia and, 4:315 under Ptolemies, 4:356, 358 pyramids, 2:197; 4:361-364 religion, 1:441; 2:197 roads, 4:432, 433 under Roman Empire, 2:203-204; 3:67; 4:356 scribal schools, 3:363, 364 shipbuilding, 3:441 synagogues, 5:116 textiles, 5:191, 192, 193 tourism, 2:151-152; 5:222, 224 trade, 1:4; 2:137-138 wall paintings, 2:195, 354; 5:327-328 See also History of thefield,archaeology in Egypt; Lower Egypt; Upper Egypt; specific sites and subregions; under specific topics Egypt Antiquities Organization (EAO), 3:471 Egypt Exploration Fund. See Egypt Exploration Society Egypt Exploration Society, 1:66; 2 : 2 0 7 - 2 0 8 Abydos, 1:11-12 Amarna, Tell el-, 1 : 8 3 Frankfort, Henri, 2:344 Maskhuta, Tell el-, 3:432 Memphis, 3:471 Oxyrhynchus, 4:195 Egyptian (language), 2 : 2 0 8 - 2 1 3 Alexandrian Empire, 1:73 alphabet, 1:75-76
Champollion, Jean Francois, 1:484-485 Coptic language and, 2:65-66 Greek language and, 2:437-438 hieroglyphs, 3:23-25 Late Egyptian, 2:209 Middle Egyptian, 2:208 morphology, 2:210-212 Old Egyptian, 2:208 onomastica, 4:95 phonology, 2:209, 210 syntax, 2:212 writing system, 2:209-210; 5:355 See also Coptic; Demotic; Inscriptions, Egyptian Egyptian Antiquities Organization, 1:69; 2:152 Fustat excavations, 1:405; 2:366 Maskhuta, Tell el-, excavations, 3:432 Egyptian Antiquities Service, 4:97-98 Egyptian Aramaic texts, 2:213-219 accounts and lists, 2:214-215 graffiti, 2:217 inscriptions, 2:216-217; 3:164 legal documents, 2:213-214 letters, 2:213 literary and historical text, 2:214 ostraca and jar inscriptions, 2:215 papyri and parchments, 2:213 Egyptian Archaeology (magazine), 2:208 Egyptian Blue, 5:306-307, 308 Egyptian Exploration Fund (EEF), 1:12 Egyptian Museum (Berlin), 2:260 Egyptian Museum (Cairo), 3:441 Egyptian Research Account (ERA), 1:358 Eheholf, H., 1:59 Ehrich, Robert, 1:452, 459 Ehursag, 5:289 Eichler, Barry L., as contributor, 5:68-69 Eickhoff, Tilman, 3:269 Eilat. See 'Aqaba 'Einan, 2:219 dog domestication, 2:166, 219 round houses, 2:19, 219 'Ein-Besor, 2:54, 219-220; 4:213 'Ein-Boqeq, 1:157; 2:220-221 'Ein-'Evrona, 4:351 'Ein-Gedi, 1:275-276; 2:222-223 libation altar, 1:81 synagogue inscription, 5:115 'Ein-Gev, 2:223-224 'Ein-Haseva, 4:121 'Ein-Kerem, 2:342 Einkorn,1:480 'Ein Mallaha. See 'Einan 'Ein-Mishpat, 4:365 'Ein-Nashut, 2:373, 422 'Ein-Shadud, 2:224-225 'Ein-Ya'el ('Ain Yalu), 2:225-227 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, 2:227-228; 4:529 Eirenopolis, 4:530 Eisenberg, Emmanuel, 3:234, 300; 5:13 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 5:350 Eisenman, Robert, 2:126 Eitan, Avraham Aphek excavations, 1:149 Israel Antiquities Authority, 3:189 Mefier ware, 1:477 Megiddo excavations, 3:461 Negev Emergency Survey, 5:106 Ramla excavations, 4:404 Eitelgeorg II, Harrison, 5:103 Eiwanger, Josef, 3:471 Ekalte. See Munbaqa
Ekron. See Miqne, Tel Ekronites, 1:281 Ekziv/ez-Zib. See Achziv E1-. For anthroponyms and loponyms beginning with this element, see under latter part of name El (II), 1:186, 384, 413 Byblos, 1:391 child sacrifice, 2:84 as creator, 2:80 Ebla, 2:186 Kuntillet 'Ajrud inscription, 3:311 Ugarit statue, 5:267 Elah Valley, 1:243 Elam, See Susiana Elamite (language) early writing stages, 2:229 inscriptions, 1:330-331, 489 interpretation of, 2:133 onomastica, 4:96 See also Proto-Elamite Elamites, 2:228-234; 3:61 Akkadians and, 1:53; 2:230 art sites, 1:218; 3:199-202 Assyrian conflicts with, 2:233 Babylonian conflicts with, 1:256; 2:232, 233 geography, 2:228-229 at Haft Tepe, 2:455 inscriptions, 1:330-331, 489 at Malyan, 1:490; 2:229, 230, 232, 233; 3:408; 4:281, 282, 284 Mesopotamia, political relations with, 4:283, 284-285 Proto-Elamite expansion, 2:54, 230 tin trade, 4:11 Ur destroyed by, 5:289 See also Susiana 'Elat. See Asherah Elazig, 1:215 Elburz Mountains, 3:421-422 Elderen, Bastiaan van, 1:89 Eldred.John, 1:251 Eiea, 1:131 Eleazar, 1:276 Electronic Distance Measuring device (EDM), 5:50, 103 Electron spin resonance (ESR), 2:115; 4:208; 5:153 Electrum, 4:7 Elemental analysis. See Neutton activation analysis Elenchus Bibliographicus Biblicus, 4:418 Eleona, 3:77 Eleona church (Mount of Olives), 2:2; 3:235 Elephantine (Yeb), 2 : 2 3 4 - 2 3 6 Aramaic texts, 1:182; 2:213-217; 4:502 Elephants Alexandrian (Seleucid) use of, 1:74, 146 early evidence of, 1:143 Roman Empire and, 1:346 tusk ivory, 1:335, 341, 344, 346, 349-350 Eleutheropolis. See Betii-Guvrin Blgavish, Joseph, 5:36 as contributor, 5:36-37 Elgin Marbles, 2:272 Elianos, St., 1:101 Eliashib. See Elyashib ostraca Elibaal, 1:390 Elijah (prophet) prophets of Baal and, 4:465 at Sarepta, 4:488
INDEX Eliot, Henry W., 4:173 in New Archaeology, 1:316 Elise Vardapet, 1:209 resources, human use of, 2:248-250, 251 Elisha, 2:78 at tells, 2:250-251 Elisha Spring (Jericho), 3:130 Environmental reconstruction. See Elon Beth-Hanan, 1:282 Paleoenvironmental reconstruction Elto'lad, 3:175 Ephesians, Book of, 1:322, 323 Elusa. See Halusa Ephesus (Arsinoeta), 1 : 1 3 1 ; 2 : 2 5 2 - 2 5 5 Elyashib ostraca, 1:175, 176, 177 architectural decoration and orders, 1:201; Elymais, 2:48; 4:288; 5:110 2:255 Emar (Meskene), 2:236-239, 291; 3:44 Church of St. John, 1:135; 2:255 archive, 2:292 decline of, 1:135 houses, 3:108-109 housing, 1:133; 2:254 Hurrian texts, 3:125 library, 1:133; 2:255 language, 1:45 marble production, 1:191 temples, 1:35; 2:292 Paul, St., association, 1:322 Emar texts, 2:239-240 Roman era, 1:134; 2:254 Akkadian texts and, 1:45 Temple of Artemis, 1:132; 2:252-254, 255 Bible and, 2:237 dieaters, 5:199 Ematu. See Hama tombs, 1:132; 2:254 Emery, Walter, 4:170, 479 villa, 5:300 Emesa. See Homs wall paintings, 2:386 Emirates. See United Arab Emirates Ephesus, Council of (431 CE), 1:394 Emireh cave, 5:246 Ephraim, St., testament of, 3:148-149 Emmaus, 2:240-241 Ephraim, survey of. See Southern Samaria, Abel-Vincent studies of, 1:5; 5:304 survey of aqueducts, 1:157, 158 Ephradiah. See Bethlehem Bagatti excavations, 1:263 Ephrem the Syrian, 1:210; 5:146 baptisteries, 1:272 Epic Histories (Buzandaran PatmuTiwnk), Emmer, 1:480 1:209, 210 'Emori. See Amorites Epicureans, 1:146 Emperor worship, 2:160, 254 Epigraphy. See Inscriptions Emporio, 3:76 Epir-mupi, 1:53 Emporium (Alexandria), 1:66 Epstein, Claire, 2:167-168 Empty Quarter (Arabian Peninsula), 5:376 Equids, 2 : 2 5 5 - 2 5 6 Emre, Kudu, 3:308 Babylonian, 1:259 En. For toponyms beginning with this element, see burials, 2:433, 473; 3:134 under 'Ein carts and, 1:433-434 Enclosed altars, 1:80 chariots and, 1:229, 485-486 Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (Ferguson), Cimmerian use of, 2 : 1 1 4:419 domestication, 1:142 Enderlein, Volkmar, as contributor, 4:491 Habuba Kabira, 2:448 Enetarzi, 4:283 racecourses, 4:476 Engel, Carl, 4:71 sacrificial, 2:256, 475 Engel, Helmut, 3:192 stable design, 5:69-71 England. See Great Britain as travel means, 5:244 Enheduanna, 1:53; 5:289, 296 ERA. See Egyptian Research Account Enki, 1:161; 2:162 'Erani, Tel ("Areini; Tel Gath), 2:54, 2 5 6 - 2 5 8 Eridu temple, 2:258, 259 acreage of, 4:213 Enkomi, 2:92-93, 94, 241-244 fortifications, 2:322 Enlil, 1:53, 156, 268 in Philistine Pentapolis, 1:219 Babylonian worship and temple for, 1:254, Erbaba, 1:141 260 Erbil, 1:42, 157 Nippur temple for, 1:52, 53 Erebuni, 1:205 in Sumerian pantheon, 5:100 Ereruk, 1:206 ziggurat at Assur, 1:226, 228 Eresh. Sec Abu Salabikh En-Mebaragesi (king of Kish), 4:283 Erctz Israel (journal), 3:50; 4:264 Enmerkar, 5:95 Erevan, 1:203, 204, 205, 208 "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta," 4:283 Eriba-Adad I, 1:227 Enmetena, inscriptions of, 2:407 Eridu (Abu Shahrain), 2:19, 2 5 8 - 2 6 0 ; 3:477 Enna-Dagan, letter from, 2:185 ceramics, 1:455; 3:477 En-Nahas, Khirbet, 2:310 'Oueili, Tell el-, 4:194 Ennead, 3:15 temple, 5:165 Enoch, Book of, 1:183; 2:124 urban settlement, 5:302 Entemenak canal irrigation, 3:182 ziggurat, 5:390 Entemenanki (Babylon ziggurat), 5:391 Erim, Kenan T., 1:151 Entertainment. See Games; Stadiums; Theaters Erimi culture, 2:91 Enuma elish, 2:82; 3:367 Ermah, Tell. Sec Rimah, Tell erEnunmakh, 5:289 Erman, Adolf, 1:234, 356; 2 : 2 6 0 Environmental archaeology, 2:244-252 Eros, in Madaba mosaic, 3:395-396 Asia (western), 2:245-246 Erzurum, 1:136 climatic change, 2:247-248 Esagila temple precinct (Babylon), 1:254, 255, desert adaptations, 2:246-247 484
489
Esarhaddon, 1:104, 149, 218; 2:94; 4:503 Ashkelon tribute payments to, 1:220 ASsur building project, 1:228 Babylon building project, 1:254 Jemmeh, Tell, fortifications, 3:214 Nimrud under, 4:144 Sukas destroyed by, 5:91 Esau, Hittite wives of, 3:84 Esbus, 3:20, 21 Esdar, Tel, 2 : 2 6 0 - 2 6 1 Esdraelon houses, 3:97 Eshel, Ami, 3:389 Eshel, Hanan, 2:403 Eshiyahu, 1:176,177 Eshkol, Levi, 5:367 Eshmounadon, 2:95 Eshmun, 1 : 1 1 2 , 4 1 3 in Sidonian pantheon, 4:316 Sidon temple to, 5:39, 40 Eshmunazar II, 2:261 Eshmunazar inscription, 2 : 2 6 1 ; 5:38 Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), 2:164, 165, 2 6 1 - 2 6 5 Amorites, 1:256 Hamrin basin, 2:473 plan of, 2:263 Eshtemoa' jewelry, 3:243 Eski Malatya, 1:212 Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 1:232; 2:265-268
ESR. See Electron spin resonance Es-Sawwan. See Sawwan, Tell esEssays on Old Testament History and Religion (Alt), 1:80 Essenes, 2:107, 2 6 8 - 2 6 9 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:125-126, 268-269; 4:395 Hasmoneans and, 2:483 Esther, 2:186 Esur,Tel, 5:105 Elemenanki temple precinct (Babylon), 1:254 Ethics and archaeology, 2 : 2 6 9 - 2 7 3 accountability questions, 2:270 armed conflicts, 2:272 illegal excavations Iran, 4:291 Lebanon, 2:153 Marlik, 3:421 Telloh, 2:407 Urartu, 5:293 membership standards for archaeologists, 2:270 museum acquisitions policies, 4 : 7 0 preservation policy, 2:270-272 tomb disturbance, 2:154, 272-273 See also Nationalism and archaeology Ethiopia, 2 : 2 7 3 - 2 7 8 churches, 2 : 2 , 275 Himyar invasion, 3:27-28 origins of, 2:274 Ethiopian Rift valley, 2:274 Ethiopic (language), 2 : 2 7 8 - 2 8 0 ; 4:519 alphabet, 1:78 vowel notation, 2:279; 5:354 See also Ge'ez Ethnoarchaeology, 2 : 2 8 0 - 2 8 4 agricultural data, 1:29-30; 4:136 biblical world, 2:281-283 ceramic, 1:448-450 houses, 3:91, 95 methodology of, 2:280-281 population estimates, 2:143 settlement-pattern studies, 5:6-7 Ethnobotany, 1:479
490
INDEX
Ethnography Museum (Ankara), 3:304 Ethnozoology, 2 : 2 8 4 - 2 8 5 camels, 1:407-408 cattle and oxen, 1:442-443 onagers, 2:256 Etruscan alphabet, 3:334 Etruscans arches, 1:190 Sea Peoples, 2:435 Et-Tell. See Ai Etudes Bibliques,
2:187
Eudocia, 2:188; 3:235; 4:456 Eufrasiana, Basilica, 3:121 Eugenics movement, 2 : 2 8 5 - 2 8 7 Petrie, Sir William Matthew Flinders, 2:286; 3 : 4 1 ; 4:308 Eulmas Temple of Istar, 1 : 4 1 Eulogiae,
2:8
Eunostos (Alexandria), 1:66 Eupalinos, 1:157 Euphemia, St., 1:482 Euphrates, 2 : 2 8 7 - 2 9 0 Abu Salabikh site, 1:9 Akkadians and, 1:52; 2:289 Amorites and, 1:108, 110 as Anatolian provincial divider, 1:132 Anatolian settlements, 1:123, 125 'Aqar Quf site, 1:156 Aramean and Neo-Hittite states, 1:129 Babylon site, 1:251, 252, 254, 255 Christian (Early) remains near, 2:2 divisions of, 2:287 flooding, 5:48, 288 geologic history of, 2:288 and Gulf-Mediterranean trade route, 1:144 as irrigation source, 1:3, 24, 42, 108, 264; 2:250; 3:182; 5:207 recreation of, 2:383 as "Sippar River," 5:47 Euphrates dams, survey of, 1:123; 2 : 2 9 0 - 2 9 2 Ataturk Reservoir, 4:131 Eusebius, 1:5, 210, 490; 2:33, 3:35 canonization of New Testament, 1:324 Shim'on Bar Kokhba, 1:276 Eustolios, 2:95 Euthyme, St., 1:277 Euting, Julius, 5:160 Evagoras I of Salamis, 5:249 Evagoras II, 2:95 Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes. See Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes Evans, Arthur, 2:178, 2 9 2 - 2 9 3 Knossos, 2:60; 3:74 Mackenzie, Duncan, 3:75 Minoans, 4:28 Evans, Joan, 3:74 Evans, John D., 3:76, 403 'Evron Quary, 4:208 Ewing,J. Franklin, 3:307 Ewing, W., 4:528 Excavation
of Bethel, 1934-1960,
The (Kelso),
1:300 Excavations and Surveys in Israel, See Hadashot Arkheologiyot Excavations at Dura-Europos: Preliminary Reports, 2:174 Excavation strategy, 1:315; 2 : 2 9 3 - 2 9 4
architectural drawings, 1:199 balks, 1:268-269 British methods, 3:50
Israeli methods, 3:50 See also Grid plan; Recording techniques; Salvage excavation Excavation tools, 2 : 2 9 4 - 2 9 5 Execration texts, 2:198; 4:215 Ashkelon reference, 1:229 Hazor reference, 3:1 Ma'acha reference, 2:420 Exodus,
Book of, 1:327
bathing reference, 1:284 Canaan reference, 1:409 Expedition (journal), 4:263 Expedition to the Southeast Dead Sea Plain, 5:62 Experimental archaeology, 2 : 2 9 5 - 2 9 6 Exploring the Land Division (Kibbutz Movement), 3:310 Eye Temple (Tell Brak), 1:355 Ezana, 1:239, 240; 2:275-277 "Ezbet I-Ielmi, 3:134 'Ezbet Rushdi, 2:99 Ezekiel (prophet), 2:121 Ezekiel, Book of, 1:321
First Temple reference, 1:325 fishing reference, 2:317 Qumran texts, 2:121 shipping reference, 5:34 Ezion-Geber. See 'Aqaba Eznik of Kolb, 1:208 Ezra (scribe), 1:321 Ezra, Book of
Aramaic sections, 1:182; 3:144, 145 biblical temples, on, 1:326, 328 Ez-Zib. See Achziv Ez-Zor. See Zor, ez-
F Fabian, Peter, 4:463 Fabius Pictor, 3:33 Fabrics. See Textiles Fades, 1:425 Factory. See Officina Fagan, Brian, as contributor, 3:303; 4:413 Faience, 5:306-308, 309-311 Failaka (Ikaros), 2 : 2 9 7 - 2 9 9 ; 3:315 bronzeworking industry, 2:297 Dilmun culture, 1:161; 2:163, 297 seals, 5:31 Seleucid military settlement, 1:72 Faiyum, 2:192-193, 244-248, 250, 2 9 9 furnishings, 2:360 Faiyumic (dialect), 2:66 Faiyumi ware (ceramics), 1:478 Fakhariyah, Tell (Sikani), 2 : 3 0 0 - 3 0 1 , 460; 3:287 Fakhariyah Aramaic inscription, 1:181; 2 : 3 0 1 , 461
Fakhry, Ahmed, 3:417; 5:18 Falah, 1:166 Falconer, Steven E. as contributor, 2:487-488
Hayyat, Tell el-, excavations, 2:487 _ Faliscan (language), 3:150, 334 Falkenstein, Adam, Warka survey, 3:14; 5:294, 296-297 Famiya. See Apamea Fantar, M., 4:161 Faq'us, Tell, 2:237 Fara (Shuruppak), 1:10; 2 : 3 0 1 - 3 0 3 ; 5:96
Far'ah, Tell el- (North; Tirzah), 1:464; 2:303-304
excavations, 2:188 fortifications, 2:303, 320, 322 houses, 3:100 jar burials, 3:207 shrine, 5:171 Far'ah, Tell el- (South; Beth-Pelet), 2 : 3 0 4 - 3 0 5 , 305 fortifications, 2:324 furnishings, 2:356-357 jewelry, 3:243 tombs, dromos, 5:14 Far'ah, Wadi, 4:165 Farama, TeU, 5:44-45 Fargo, Valerie M., as contributor, 3:22 Farina, Giulio, 4:194 Faris, Khirbet (Khirbet Tadun), 2 : 3 0 6 Farming. See Agriculture; Animal husbandry; Cereals; Irrigation; specific crops
Farmsteads, 1:104; 2 : 3 0 6 - 3 0 7 ; 5:273 Farod, 2:369 Farrant, G , 5:158 Fars, 2:228-233 Farukhabad. See Tepe Farukhabad Fatimid dynasty, 2:206-207, 3 0 7 - 3 1 0 'Abbasid caliphate and, 1:4 Apamea under, 1:147 'Aqaba and, 1:154 Ashkelon under, 1:223 Ayyubid takeover, 1:241 Azhar, al-, mosque, 2:206, 308 Baalbek under, 1:247 Caesarea, 1:401 Cairo, 1:242, 404, 405; 2:206; 4:58 mosque of al-Hakim, 2:308; 4:58 mosque inscriptions, 4:59 Syria (southern) under, 5:241-242 Umayyad rivalry with, 1:165 Zangid expedition ending, 5:242 Fatio, E„ 4:368 Fattovich, Rodolfo, 1:241 Fau, al-, 4:371 Fauna. See Ethnozoology; Paleozoology Faw Qibli. See Pabau (Faw Qibli) monastic complex Faza, 4:41 Feger, Magdeleine, 4:421 Feifa, 5:65 Feig, Nurit, 4:461 Feinan, 1:153, 387-388; 2 : 3 1 0 - 3 1 1 copper industry, 2:190, 310; 4:7 Fejja, 1:151 Felix, Antonius, 1:273 Felt, 5:193 Femie. See Apamea Fenton, Roger, 4:332 Fentress, Elizabeth, as contributor, 3:219-220 Ferembach, Denise, 5:15 Ferguson, Everett, 4:419-420 Fergusson, James, 5:330 Ferlini, Giuseppe, 3:472 Fernandez, R., 4:45 Ferries. See Ships and boats Fertilityfigurines,1:36 Festival of New Wine, 2:122 Festival of Wood Offering, 2:122 Fewkes, J. W., 2:280 Fidan, Wadi, 5:65 Field, Henry, 2 : 3 1 1 - 3 1 2 Field conservation, 2 : 3 1 2 - 3 1 3 . See also Artifact conservation
INDEX Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago), 2:311; 3:298 Field Research Projects (Coconut Grove, Florida), 2:311 Fieldstones, 1:361-362 Fieldwork. See Architectural drafting and drawing; Artifact drafting and drawing; Computer mapping; Computer recording, analysis and interpretation; Excavation strategy; Excavation tools; Field conservation; History of the field; Photography; Site survey; specific archaeologists and sites Fieldwork Opportunities Bulletin, 1:187 Fiema, Zbigniew, 4:306 Fifth Satrapy, 4:314 Figs, 1:24, 25, 27 Figueras, Pau, as contributor, 2:5-8 Figural representation, 1 : 3 1 1 ; 4:86-87; 5:329 Figurines. See under Sculpture Filson, Floyd V., 5:351 Fine, Steven, as contributor, 1:274, 490-491; 2:382; 3:428-430; 5 : 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 , 114-118, 118-123 Fine Byzantine Ware (ceramics), 1:476 Finegan, Jack, 4:419 Finet, Andre, 2:446 Finkelstein, Israel, 1:35 archaeological data supplements, 2:282-283 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 Israelite settlement in Canaan, 4:255 'Izbet Sartah excavations, 3:198 Megiddo excavations, 3:461 Shiloh excavations, 5:28 Yavneh-Yam, 5:374 Finkenstaedt, Elizabeth, 2:195 Finney, Paul Corby, as contributor, 2:1-5; 3:425-428 Fiorina, Paolo, 4:142 Fire pits. See Hearths First Cataract region (Nile), 4:139 First Crusade. See Crusader period First Impressions (Collon), 4:509 First Jewish Revolt (66-70 cu), 1:65, 275; 2 : 3 1 3 - 3 1 5 ; 4:226 Aphek destruction from, 1:149 boats, 2:378-379 coins, 2:382 Decapolis, 2:129 demography, 2:143 Gerasa, 3:216 Golan, 2:421 Idumeans, 3:143 Magdala, 3:399 Sepphoris's pro-Roman stance, 4:530 See also Masada First Temple (953-587 HOE; Jerusalem), 1:80; 2:82-83; 5:173 floor plan and decoration, 1:324-328 First Wall (Jerusalem), 3:229 Firth, Cecil M., 4:479 Fisher, Clarence Stanley, 2 : 3 1 5 Befli-Shean excavations, 1:306; 2:315 ceramics, 1:459 Jerash excavations, 3:215 Megiddo excavations, 3:461, 466, 468 Memphis excavations, 3:470-471 Samaria expedition, 1:95; 2:315; 4:164, 463 Tannur, Khirbet et-, 5:154 Fishing, 2 : 3 1 5 - 3 1 7 Aphek, 1:150 Arabian Peninsula, 1:159, 161 Serine Limam merchant ship, 5:3-4
Fisna, Tell, 2:267 Fission track dating, 2:116, 450 FitzGerald, Gerald M., 1:306; 3:225 Fitzmyer, Joseph A., 1:178; 4:237 as contributor, 4:512-513 Genesis Apocryphon, 2:391 New Jerome Biblical Commentary, 4:415 FitzWilliam Museum (Cambridge, England), 4:457 Fjaje, 5:226 Flanagan, James W. as contributor, 4:140-141 Nimrin, Tell, excavations, 4:140 Flandin, Eugene-Napoleon, 1:354; 3:38, 295 Flandrian transgression, 1:266 Flannery, Kent V. Ali Kosh excavations, 1:75; 2:135 New Archaeology, 4:135 on round versus rectilinear houses, 3:97 Tepe Sabz excavations, 5:182 Flaubert, Gustave, 1:354 Flax agricultural cultivation, 1:23, 25 textiles, 5:191, 195-196 Fleisch, Henry, 1:293 Fleischer, H. L., 1:297 Flemming, N. C , 4:457 Flood (biblical), 3:39 Florilegium (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:121 Florus (governor of Palestine), 2:313 Flowers medicinal properties, 5:15 in Shanidar burial, 5:15, 53 Flutes, 4:74 Foerster, Gideon, 3:18; 5:204 Fogg Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 4:172 Fohrer, G., 4:516 Folda, Jaroslav, as contributor, 73-77 Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium), 1:146 Fontan, Elisabeth, as contributor, 1:353-354 Food storage, 1:28; 2:317-319 processing, 1:173 Syro-Palestinian houses, 2:355-356 See also Granaries and silos Food-systems concept (archaeological), 4:136. See also Madaba Plains Project Footwear, Hittite, 2:40 Foraging, 1:23 Ford, James, 2:458 Ford Foundation, 5:181 Fordham University, 3:307 Forest, Jean-Daniel, 1:295; 4:191 Forests, 5:266, 347 Forgotten Kingdom, A (Woolley), 5:350 Former Prophets (Hebrew Scripture), 1:319-320 Forrer, Emil O. Hittite texts, 4:26 Kazel, Tell al-, identification, 3:276 Sukas, Tell, soundings, 5:90 Forrer, Odile, 4:496 Forrer, Robert, 4:496 Fortifications, 2:319-336; 5:334-335 Anatolia, 1:133, 135, 136 Bronze and Iron Ages, 2:322-326 cities, 2:20, 22, 24 Egypt, 5:334-335 Golan, 2:418,419, 420 Hattusa, 5:335-336 Hazor, 2:320; 3:2-3, 4-5; 5:335
491
Hyksos period, 3:134 Jericho, 2:322-323; 3:223 Jerusalem, 2:27-28, 325, 327; 3:225-226 Lachish, 2:28, 325; 3:319, 320, 321; 5:338 Megiddo, 2:29, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325; 3:462 Qadesh-Barnea, 2:326; 4:365-366 Urartu, 5:292 Yarmut, Tel, 2:321, 322, 323; 4:214; 5:371 Yavneh-Yam, 2:323, 324; 5:374 Canaanite, 1:410-411; 2:325 caravanserais, 1:423 Chalcolidlic, 2:449 Dab'a, Tell ed-, 2:100 elements of, 2 : 3 1 9 - 3 2 1 circumferential defense systems, 2:319-320 gates, 2:22, 321 moats, 2:320-321 walls, 2:320 Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods, 2:329-334
Golan, 2:421 Jerusalem, 2:333; 3:234 Kurnub, 3:312-314 limes Arabicus, 3:358-361 Machaerus, 3:391-392 Masada, 2:330; 3:428 Palmyra, 2:332 Ras Ibn Hani, 4:412 Islamic period, 2 : 3 3 4 - 3 3 6 Baghdad, 1:264-265; 2:336 Cairo, 2:336, 365-366 Horns, 3:90 Merida Alcazaba, 2:336 Qasr al-Hayr, 2:335 Sousse Ribat, 2:335 Neolithic, 2:19, 322 Jericho, 3:221; 5:334 Mersin, 5:334 Persian period, 2 : 3 2 6 - 3 2 9 Babylon, 1:252-253, 255; 2:327 cities, 2:27-29 quadriburgium, 3:360 urbanization and, 2:17 water supply, 4:360 Fortin, Michel, 3:44 Fort of the Ram. Sec Ka'lat cl-Kabsh Fortresses. See Fortifications "Fort Sargon." See Khorsabad Forum Constantinople, 2:61 Roman period, 2:31-32 Forum Transitorium, 5:197 Forum Vetus (Leptis), 3:348 Fossey, Charles, 2:187 Foster, Benjamin R., as contributor, 1:49-54 Foucault, Michel, 3:139 Foundation trench, 2 : 3 3 6 - 3 3 7 Fountains Ephesus, 2:254 See also Nymphaeum Fouque, F., 3:73-74 Four iwan plan, Mesopotamian, 1:3 Four Kingdoms, 2:122 Four-room house, 2 : 3 3 7 - 3 4 2 ; 3:97 Aiiabad, 2:339 antecedents, 3:107 Aphek, 1:151 A§van, 2:339 Batash, Tel, 1:282-283 Beersheba, 1:288 Ebal, Mount,, 2:179 'Erani, Tel, 2:257
492
INDEX
Four-room house, continued Giloh, 2:406 ground-floor plan, 2:339 Hasanabad, 2:339 interior features, 2:338-339 Israelite, 3:194-195 'Izbet Sartah, 3:198, 199 Philisti'ne,'4:374 second story, 2:339-341 stables in, 5:71 Fourth Crusade. See Crusader period Fourth Ecumenical Council. See Chalcedon, Council of Fowler, Mervyn D„ 1:288 Frame, Grant, as contributor, 1:268, 482-484; 3:295-298 France. See French archaeological missions; specific archaeologists and institutions Franchthi cave, 4:505 Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, 1:263, 417; 2:67, 342-344 Machaerus excavations, 3:391 Madaba excavations, 3:394 Nazareth excavations, 4:113 Nebo, Mount, 4:116, 117-118 Umm er-Rasas excavations, 2:343; 5:279-280 Francis of Assisi, St., 2:342 Frangipane, Marcella, as contributor, 1:212-215 Frank, Fritz, 3:293 Frank, Harry Thomas, 4:416 Frankel, D., 2:92 Frankel, Rafael, 3:277 as contributor, 4:179-184 Franken, H. J„ 1:452-453 as contributor, 2:137-138 Deir 'Alia, Tell, excavations, 2:137, 139 Hadidi, Tell, excavations, 2:453 'Umeiri, Tell el-, 5:273 Frankfort, Henri, 1:83, 452; 2:344 Abydos, 1:12 Iraq Expedition, 2:164, 344 Frankfurt school of philosophy, 3:139 Frankincense and myrrh, 1:15, 160, 162; 3:147; 4:82; 5:236, 377 Franks, 1:145, 224; 2:414 Fratadara coinage series, 2:48 Frattesina, 5:312 Frederick II, 2:75 Free, Joseph P., 2:171 Freedman, David Noel, 1:321 Anchor Bible project, 1:61; 4:417 as contributor, 1:61-62 Freeman-Grenville, G. S. P., 4:416 Freestone, Ian C , as contributor, 5:306-309 Free University of Berlin, 1:225 Sheikh Hamad, Tell, excavations, 5:25 Thaj survey, 5:198 French, David H., as contributor, 1:358 French Academy of Inscriptions, 1:391; 2:174 French Antiquities Service of the Mandate in Lebanon,2:345 French Archaeological Institute of Cairo. See Institut Frangais d'Archeologie Orientale French archaeological missions, 2:344-346 Carmel, Mount, 1:426 competition for antiquities, 4:105, 106 Persian delegation, 2:345 Shabwa, 2:452 Susa, 5:106-108 Ugarit, 5:256-257 See also specific archaeologists and institutions
French Commission of Excavations, 2:236, 300, 345 French Geographical Institute, 4:405 French Hill (Jenisalem), 2:272 French Institute of Archaeology in Beirut. See Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient French Institute of Archaeology of the Near East. See Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient French Research Center (Jerusalem) Hartuv excavations, 2:476 Yarmut, Tel, excavations, 5:370 French School of Archaeology (Athens), 1:87, 88 French School of Archaeology (Jerusalem). See Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise Frescoes. See Wall paintings Fresnel, Fulgence, 1:252 Freyberger, Klaus S., 2:104 Freyne, Se&n, as contributor, 2:29-35, 370-376 Frick, Frank S., as contributor, 2:14-19 Friday Mosque (Nayriz), 4:58 Fried, Morton, 4:134 Friedrich, Johannes, 2:132 Frieherr von Bissing, F. W., 5:19 Friend, Glenda W., as contributor, 3:428-430 Friends of Archaeology, 3:55 Frifelt, Karen, 3:80; 5:284 Frit, 5:306-307 Fritz, Volkmar as contributor, 1:79-80; 2:19-25, 102-103, 146-147, 150, 379; 3:192-197, 437-439; 4:499-500, 516 Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes directorship, 2:150 Masos, Tel, excavations, 3:437 Frfisen, Jaakko, 4:308 Frova, Antonio, 1:402 Fruit trees domestication, 1:24 Mesopotamia, 1:25 Palestinian, 1:25, 27 terraced agriculture, 1:28 See also specific kinds Frye, Richard N., 1:91 Fugmann, Ejnar, 4:488 Fujairah, 5:284 Fuji, Hideo, 3:298 Fukhar, Tell el-. See Akko Fuks, G., 1:117-118 Ful, Tell el-, 1:61, 63; 2:346, 346-347 Fulk of Anjou, 2:73-74 Fuller, Michael, 3:44-45 Funerary monuments, 2:347-352 chapels, 1:277 coffins, 1:307 Egyptian, 2:216-217 Hellenistic and Roman periods, 2:347-350 Anatolian, 2:347 North African, 2:349-350; 5:81-82 Syro-Palestinian, 2:347-349; 5:112 Late Roman through Islamic periods, 2:350-352 Christian, 2:6-7, 351 Islamic, 2:351 Jewish, 2:350-351; 5:221 Pagan,2:350 See also Pyramids; Sarcophagus; Tombs Funerary practices. See Burial sites; Burial techniques; Cave tombs; Cremation;
Grave goods; Necropolis; Pit graves; Tombs Funk, Robert, 4:257 Furn ech-Chebbak, 1:293 Furniture and furnishings, 2:352-365; 5:349 Bronze and Iron Ages, 2:354-356 Cretan, 2:94 Eblaite, 2:181 Egyptian, 2:352, 353-354 ivory furnishings, 2:353 Mesopotamian, 2:352 shell furnishings, 1:343 Syro-Palestinian, 2:352-356 Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods, 2:358-362 Islamic period, 2:362-365 Persian period, 2:356-358 ivory and shell, 1:346-347 tools and techniques, 2:353-354 wood, 2:353; 5:349 See also Lamps Furtwangler, Adolf, 2:365 Furumark, Arne, 3:77 Fustat, 1:91, 405; 2:205, 365-368 as Arab garrison town, 2:35 Askar, al-, 2:206 glass production, 5:319 palaces, 5:270 See also Cairo Fustat Expedition/American Research Center (Egypt), 2:367 G Gaaton aqueduct tunnel, 1:157 Gabae. See Isfahan Gaber, Pamela, as contributor, 3:137-138; 5:321-322 Gabriel, Andre, 4:242, 379 Gachet, Jacqueline, 2:298 Gad, 3:20 Gadara. See Umm Qeis Gadir (Cadiz), 4:162 Gaelic (language), 3:151 Gagniers, Jean des, as contributor, 5:59 Gaia, 5:271 Gal, Zvi, 1:301; 2:382 as contributor, 2:369-370 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, excavations, 2:227 Galilee survey, 2:371 Gazitmap, 5:104 Horvat Rosh Zayit excavations, 2:341 Yin'am, Tel, survey, 5:380 Galatas, 3:76 Galatia. See Phrygia Galatians (Gauls) invasion of Anatolia, 1:131, 335 language, 3:151 soap, 4:302 Gale, N. H., 2:91 Galilean Tekoa. See Shema', Khirbet Galilee, 2:369-376 basaltic vessels, 3:376 biblical archaeology, 1:30 Bronze and Iron Ages, 2:369-370 Hellenistic through Byzantine periods, 2:370-376; 4:227 Anafa, Tel, 1:117-118 language, 2:374-375
INDEX population, 2:371-373 trade and commerce, 2:373-374 material culture, 4:230 Galilee, Sea of. See Lake Kinneret Galilee boat, 2:317, 3 7 7 - 3 7 9 ; 3:399; 4:18; 5:283 Galili, Ehud, 3:399 Galling, Kurt, 2:148, 3 7 9 inscribed seals, 4:166 Rabud, Khirbet, identification, 4:401 reliefs depicting scribes, 4:500 Gallus (prefect of Egypt), 2:203 Gallus Revolt (351 CE), 4:530 Galton, Francis, 2:285-286; 4:308 Games, 2 : 3 7 9 - 3 8 2 gaming pieces, 1:341, 346; 2:380-381; 5:315-316 in stadiums, 5:74-75 Gamla, 2 : 3 8 2 , 418 Ganj Dareh. See Tepe Ganj Dareh Gannanate, 2:473 Ganunmah (Enunmakh), 5:289 Garamantes, 4:154 Garbini, Giovanni, 5:386 Garden of Eden, 2:274; 3:67 Gardens, 2 : 3 8 2 - 3 8 9 Hellenistic and Roman periods, 2 : 3 8 5 - 3 8 7 Egyptian, 2:385; 3:183 Persian, 2:386-387 Syro-Palestinian, 2:385-386; 3:183 Islamic period, 2 : 3 8 7 - 3 8 9 'Abbasid dynasty, 2:388-389 pre-Islamic, 2:387-388 Preclassical times, 2 : 3 8 3 - 3 8 5 Egyptian, 2:384 Mesopotamian, 2:383 Persian, 2:383-384; 4:252 Gardiner, Alan H. Canaanite phonemic system, 3:364 Egyptian hieroglyphic system, 3:24 Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, 4:354 Gardner, Elinor A. Faiyum and Khargah oases, 2:244-245 Hureidha excavation, 2:452; 3:124-125 Naukratis excavations, 4:112 Gardner, Joseph, 4:416 Garfinkel, Yosef, 1:8; 4:63 Garments. See Clothing Garni, 1:205, 208 Garrard, Andrew N., 1:244 as contributor, 1:243-245; 3:247-248 Garrett Evangelical Seminary (Northwestern University), 2:443 Garrod, Dorothy Annie Elizabeth, 2 : 3 8 9 - 3 9 0 Carmel caves excavations, 1:424, 425, 426; 2:389; 5:152, 153 Emireh cave assemblage, 5:246 Garsaur. See Archelais Garso'ian, Nina G., as contributor, 1:202-207 Garstang, John, 2 : 3 9 0 ; 5:304 Abydos excavation, 1:12 Ai excavation, 1:32 Ashkelon excavation, 1:220, 223 British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1:358 British Mandatory Department of Antiquities directorship, 2:390 British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1:359, 360 Dor excavations, 2:169 Hazor soundings, 3:1 Hesban, 3:19
Horsfield, George, 3:90 Jericho excavations, 3:221, 222 Meroe identification, 3:472 Gartringen, Hiller von, 3:76 Gasche, Hermann, 1:204; 2:146 as contributor, 5:47-49 Gascou, Jean, as contributor, 2:40-41 Gasur. See Nuzi Gat, Tel, 5:105 Gate of All Lands (Persepolis), 4:275-276 Gate of Baghdad (Raqqa, ar-), 4:405 Gate of Cleopatra (Tarsus), 2:10 Gate of Genneth (Jerusalem), 3:230 Gates. See Fortifications Gath, 2:474 Gath, Tel. See 'Erani, Tel Gath Carmel, 5:36 Gathering. See Foraging Gathic Avestan, 3:150 Gat-Rimon, 2:394 Gaube, Heinz, as contributor, 1:241-243 Gaudin.Paul, 1:151 Gaugamela, battle of (331 BCE), 1:70, 487 Gaulanitis. See Golan Gaulish (language), 3:151 Gauls. See Galatians Gaumata (the magus; Smerdis), 1:330-331; 4:297 Gautier, Joseph E., 2:134-135; 5:181 Ali Kosh excavation, 1:75 Tepe Mussian excavations, 5:186 Gawlikowski, Michal, 4:242 Gawra. See Tepe Gawra Gay. SceJayy Gaza Alexandrian siege of, 1:70 Avdat, 1:236, 237 city planning, 2:25 in Philistine Pentapolis, 1:219 tombs, 2:357-358 See also 'Ajjul, Tell elGaza jar, 1:223 Gazit, 5:104 Gazit, Dan, 2:219-220 GDT. See Geophysical diffraction tomography Gebal. See Byblos Gebel, Hans Georg as contributor, 1:279-280 Basta soundings, 1:279 Nevah Cori, 4:131 Gebel Barkal, 4:364 Gebelein, 3:134 Gebelin tombs, 2:316 Gedeliah, 1:104 Geese, domestication of, 1:142 Ge'ez (language and script), 1:238-239; 2:278-280; 4:519 coin inscriptions, 2:276-277 grammatical features, 4:524-525 Gela shipwreck, 3:390 Gelb, IgnaceJ., 5:353 Gelidonya. See Cape Gelidonya Gelilot, 4:462-463 Gellens, Sam I., 4:24 Gelveri, 1:125 Genava (journal), 4:266-267 Genealogies, 4:91 stelae, 4:124-125 General Directorate of Cultural, Scientific, and Technical Relations (France), 2:345 General Directorate of Monuments and Museums (Turkey), 3:266
493
General Systems Theory, 4:134-135 Genesis, Book of, 2:80 Calah reference, 1:227 Canaan reference, 1:409 Cities of the Plain, 1:249-250; 5:62, 63 Edomite king list, 2:190 Flood story, 3:39 on herd morphology, 1:142 Hittites in, 3:84 Qumran texts, 2:121, 124 Table of Nations, 5:18 Genesis Apocryphon, 2:121, 3 9 0 - 3 9 1 Genesis Apocryphon, A (Avigad and Yadin), 1:182, 238; 2:391 Genetics. See Eugenics movement Geneva University, 4:153 Geniza documents, 2:367 Gennesaret, Lake of. See Lake Kinneret Genouillac, Henri de, 2:407; 3:298 Gentile, Giovanni, 3:197 Geoarchaeology. See Geology Geoarchaeology (journal), 4:267 Geographic information systems. See Computer mapping Geographic de la Palestine (Abel), 1:5 Geography. See Historical geography Geology, 2 : 3 9 1 - 3 9 4 paleoenvironmental reconstruction, 4:202-203 Geophysical diffraction tomography (GDT), 5:103 Georgia, 1:203, 204, 206, 207 Georgiades, Andreas, as contributor, 2:312-313 Gerar, 2:474 Gerasa. See Jerash Gerastratos, 1:219 Geraty, Lawrence T., 1:316; 5:273 as contributor, 3:19-22; 5:273-274 Qom, Khirbet el-, soundings, 4:392 Gerba. Seejerba Gergesa. See Kursi Gerisa, Tel, 2 : 3 9 4 - 3 9 6 fortifications, 2:323, 394-395 waterworks, 3:130 Gerizim, Mount (Jebel et-Tur), 2:4, 179; 4:407-408, 469-470 German Archaeological Expedition, 1:143 German Archaeological Institute. See Deutsches Archaologisches Institut German Archaeological Institute (Cairo). See Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Cairo German Archaeological Institute (Damascus). See Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Damaskus German Archaeological Institute (Istanbul). See Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul German Archaeological Institute (Tehran). See Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Tehran German Archaeological Mission, 1:247 Germanic languages, 3:151 German Oriental Society. See Deutsche OrientGesellschaft German Palestine Society. See Deutscher Palastina-Verein German Protestant Institute for Archaeology of the Holy Land. See Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes German Research Council, 3:186
494
INDEX
German Research Foundation, 3:269 Gibson, Shimon, 2:224 German Samarra Expedition (1911,1913), Gichon, Mordechai 4:473 as contributor, 2:220-221, 240-241 German School (Jerusalem). See Deutsches on Idumean militia, 3:143 Evangelisches Institut fur Gielly, Paul, 4:158 Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Gihon Spring, 5:332 Landes Gil'at, 2:404-405 German Society for the Exploration of cemetery, 2:166 Palestine. See Deutscher Verein zur sanctuary, computer-reconstructed, 5:103 Erforschung Palastinas Gilead, 1:273; 2:137, 405-406 Gilead, Isaac German}' Beersheba excavations, 4:462 competition for antiquities, 4:105, 106 See also specific archaeologists and institutions 'Erani, Tel, excavations, 2:256 Gilgamesh epic, 1:45, 233, 260, 261; 2:17; Gerrha. See Thaj 5:94-95 Gesenius, Wilhelm, 2:132; 4:434 Giloh, 2:406 Gesher Benot Ya'aqob, 4:208 Gimbutas, Marija, 3:156 Geshur, 2:420; 5:133 Gimilsin Temple (Eshnunna), 2:264 Getty Conservation Institute (California), 2:152 Ginnig, 1:454 Geula cave, 5:104 Ginosar, 2:377 Geva, Shulamit Ginouves, Rene, 5:59 Beth-Shean excavations, 1:306 Ginzberg, Louis, 2:107 Gerisa, Tel, excavations, 2:394 Giparu, 5:289 on Ramat Rahel painted sherd, 4:403 Gezer (Tell el-Jezer), 1:281; 2 : 3 9 6 - 4 0 0 Girsu (Telloh) and Lagash (al-Hiba), aerial photography of, 4:333 2:406-409 agricultural calendar, 1:26; 2:400-401; 3:6 canal irrigation, 3:182 Assyrian presence in, 4:221 excavations, 1:258; 2:345, 407; 3:58; 5:96 city gate type, 1:219 Umma border conflicts with, 5:98 Clermont-Ganneau, Charles, 2:37 Vulture stela, 2:407; 5:80 Dever excavations, 1:63, 316; 4:136 GIS. See Computer mapping fortifications, 2:324, 325, 399, 400; 5:335 Gischala. See Gush Halav Glueck excavations, 2:416; 4:122 Gitin, Seymour houses, 3:110 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research jewelry, 1:40 directorship, 1:63 libation altar, 1:80 as contributor, 1:62-63; 2:415-416; 4:30-35, new archaeological methodologies, 4:136 311-313 plan of, 2:397 Miqne, Tel, excavations, 4:30 sacred complex, 5:171 Giftlen, Barry, as contributor, 1:268-269 waterworks, 3:130; 5:332 Giv'at-Sharett shrine, 5:171 Gezer calendar, 1:26; 2:400-401; 3:6 Giza, 2:409-412 Ghab (Orontes Valley), 4:370 Aramaic texts, 1:182; 2:217 Ghabristan. See Tepe Ghabristan Cheops boat, 5:30 Ghadun, Wadi, 4:184; 5:253 houses, 3:116 Ghajn Qajjet, 3:404 plan of, 2:410 Ghara, Khirbet. See 'Ira, Tel pyramids, 2:411; 4:362 Ghassanids, 1:263 Gjerstad, Einar, 1:468; 2:412-413; 3:71 Ghassil, Tell el-, 1:275 Amathus excavations, 1:87, 88 Ghassulian culture, 2:402; 4:269; 5:161-162 Enkomi excavations, 2:241 Ghayl Shabul, 5:57 Idalion excavations, 3:137 Gheg (Albanian dialect), 3:152 Kition sounding, 3:301 Ghirshman, Roman, 2:401-402 Lapithos excavations, 3:330 Chogha Zanbil excavations, 1:487; 2:229, 402 Soloi excavations, 5:59 Hasanlu, 2:480 Vounous, 5:322 Kharg Island excavations, 2:402 Glacis, 2:320, 323 Susa excavations, 2:229, 402; 3:61; 5:108, Glaser, Eduard, 2:133, 275; 3:78; 5:385, 386 109, 110 Marib inscriptions, 3:417 Ghirshman, Tania, 2:402 Glass, 1:380; 2:413-415; 5:306 Ghor, al-, 3:248 Amarna period, 3:129 Ghors. See Southern Ghors and northeast blown glass, 2:414; 5:316 'Arabah Bronze and Iron Ages, 5:312, 314 Ghriba (synagogue), 3:220 Byzantine, 2:414; 5:318-319 Ghrubba, 2:402-403 color, 5:308-309 Ghumdan palace (San'a), 4:477-478 cut glass, 2:415 Ghurab, Wadi el-, 1:291 Egyptian, 2:413, 414; 5:312, 316, 319-320 Giauque, Robert D., 3:277 glaze technology, 1:457-458; 5:307-309 Gibeah, 2:346 Hellenistic period, 5:315-316 Gibelet. See Byblos ingots, 5:266 Gibelin of Aries, 2:73 Islamic, 2:414-415; 5:3, 4, 319-320 Gibeon, 1:443;2:403-404 Persian, 5:315, 319 olive oil and wine production, 1:29 production technology, 5:308 waterworks, 2:403; 3:130; 5:331-332 Roman, 2:414; 5:308, 316-317 Gibson, McGuire, 1:90, 95 Glaze. See Vitreous materials Nippur excavations, 4:148, 149, 151
Gleason, Kathryn L. as contribute; 2:383-385, 385-387 Caesarea, 1:403 Glendinning, Matthew R., as contributor, 5:210-212 Glob, Peter Vilhelm, 1:266; 2:163; 3:79 Qal'at al-Bahrain excavations, 4:367 Qatar excavations, 4:384 Global Positioning System (GPS), 5:50, 102-103 Glock, Albert E. as contributor, 5:149 Ta'anach excavations, 5:149 Glueck, Nelson, 1:30, 63, 95, 447; 2:415-416; 5:102 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research directorship, 1:62, 96 Baq'ah Valley survey, 1:272 Beit Ras and, 1:297 Buseirah survey, 1:388 Esdar, Tel, 2:260 fortress of al-Mashhad, 4:117 Gezer excavations, 2:416 Hammath-Gader excavations, 2:469 Hayyat, Tell el-, 2:487 Hesban, 3:19 Iktanu, Tell, 3:144 Jerash excavations, 3:215 Kafranja, Wadi, survey, 3:261 Kheleifeh, Tell el-, excavations, 1:153; 2:190, 416; 3:293; 5:218 Mazar, Tell el-, 3:443 Nimrin, Tell, survey, 4:140 Safut, Tell, survey, 4:449 Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-, survey, 4:452 Tannur, Khirbet et-, excavations, 2:477; 5:154, 155 Tawilan survey, 5:156-157 Transjordanian survey, 1:62, 99, 272; 2:416; 3:53; 5:231, 232 Umm el-Biyara soundings, 5:275 Ziqlab, Wadi, survey, 5:391 See also Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology Glume. See Emmer Glyptic materials. See Scarab seals; Seals Gnoli, Gherardo, 2:256; 3:197 as contributor, 3:197-198 Gnosticism Mandaeans, 3:409-411 Nag Hammadi, 4:87-88 Gnostic papyri. See Nag Hammadi papyri Goats. See Sheep and goats Godard, Andr6, 4:275 Goded, Tel. See Judeideh, Tell elGodin Tepe, 2:231, 416-417 excavations, 2:229, 416; 3:62; 4:284 Uruk settlement, 2:53 wine production, 5:305 Goell, Theresa, 4:123 Goetze, Albrecht, 1:10, 56, 93, 95; 2:441 Goff, Clare, 4:14 Gografe, Riidiger, as contributor, 4:386-387, 455-456 Gohar Rud (Crystal River), 3:422 Goidelic. See Gaelic Goitein, S. D., 2:367 Gokova Korfezi, 5:11, 12 Golan, 2:417-424 Anafa,TeI, 1:118 architectural decoration, 1:190 basaltic vessels, 3:376
INDEX biblical archaeology, 1:30 churches, 2:422 fortifications, 2:418, 419, 420, 421 Galilee, 2:370-374 olive cultivation, 1:24; 4:179 Qasrin, 2:154 routes crossing, 2:417-418 sub-unils of, 2:418 synagogues, 2:422-423 Golani, Amir, 4:462 Golb, Norman Copper Scroll, 2:65 Jerusalem hypothesis, 2:125-126 on Qumran's defensive features, 4:395 Golbasi-Trysa hero cult, 2:347 Gold as currency, 1:239; 2:44, 46, 50 Egyptian, 4:13 electrum and, 4:7 first artifactual appearance of, 4:6 jewelry, 4:9; 5:157 Golden Gate Qerusalem), 1:326; 3:237 Goldman, Hetty, 2:424 Golgotha, 2:8; 5:345-346 Goliath, 1:243; 4:310 Gollancz, Sir Israel, 1:359 Goltepe, 2:424-426; 3:283, 284 Golvin, Jean-Claude, 3:174 Gomorrha, 4:392 Gonen, Rivka, 1:39 Goodchild, Richard, 4:355 Goodenough, Erwin R., 2:359; 5:123 Goody, Jack R„ 3:367 Gopatata, 3:251 Gopher, Avi, 1:8 Gophna, Ram, 4:164; 5:105 as contributor, 2:219-220 Goranson, Stephen, as contributor, 2:268-269 Gordian III, 1:147 Gordion, 1:130, 131; 2:426-431 map of 2:427 plan of, 2:429 textiles, 5:194 tiles, 5:211 timber transport, 5:347 Gordon, Douglas L , as contributor, 2:470-471 Gbreme, 1:135 Goren, Tel, 2:222 Goren, Yuval, 4:463 Gorjani inscriptions, 3:169 Gorny, Ronald L., as contributor, 1:122-127 GOrsdorf, Jochen, 2:447 Gortyn, 3:74 Gortyn Law Code, 3:74 Gospel of the Infancy, 1:209 Gospels, 1:323-324, 387 Gotarzes, 4:288 Gotarzes II, 4:288 Goteborg University, 2:463 Goths, 1:133, 482; 3:151 Goto, Koichito, 5:389 Gotoh, Takeshi, 4:384 Gottschalk, Alfred, 4:122 Goughan, 2:135 Gould, Richard, 2:281 Gournia Project, 3:75 Government Collections Museum (Britain), 3:71 Government Committee for the Preservation of Landscape and Antiquities. See Israel National Parks Authority Governor's residency (Sera', Tel), 5:1, 2
Govrin, Yehudah, 4:462 Gozan. See Halaf, Tell Gozlii Kule. See Tarsus Gozo, 3:402, 403, 404 GPS. See Global Positioning System Grabar, Andre, 3:425-426 Grabar, Oleg as contributor, 3:397-399; 4:379-380, 495-496 Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi excavations, 4:379 on Qusayr 'Amra paintings, 4:398 Graces, in Madaba mosaic, 3:395-396 Graeve, Volkmar von, 4:26 Graf, David F. as contributor, 3:141-143; 4:82-85, 222-228, 447-448 Humeima survey, 3:121 Graffiti Arabic, 3:460 Aramaic, 2:217 devotional, 2:7-8 Dura-Europos synagogue, 5:116 Egyptian, 2:204, 217 Greek, 2:435, 440 on pilgrim routes, 3:172 Safaitic, 4:437 Gragg, Gene B., as contributor, 2:278-280; 3:125-126; 4:516-527; 5:60-61 Graham, Cyril, 5:276 Grains. See Cereals; Granaries and silos Grammaire du Grec biblique suivie d'un choic de Papyrus (Abel), 1 : 5 Granaries and silos, 1:481; 2:431-433; 4:360 agricultural development and, 1:26 Fara, 2:302 four-room house, 2:339 Hama, 2:467 Haror, Tel, 2:475 Megiddo, 2:341 Grand Colonnade (Palmyra), 4:239 Grand Mosque. See Great Mosque Granicus River, battle of (334 ncc), 1:70 Grant, Elihu, 1:311; 5:350-351 Grapes. Sec Viticulture Grave goods, 2:433-434 Abydos, 2:197 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:38, 39 Anatolia, 1:127-128 Armenia, 1:204 Ashkelon, 1:222 Bab edh Dhra', 1:249-250 Babylon, 1:255 Bahrain, 1:161 bone and shell, 1:345, 347 Cartilage, 4:159 Dan, 2:108-109 dating of, 4:1 El-Wad Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:426 Gibeon,2:403 Hawayah, Jebel al-, 1:273 Herodian Jericho, 3:17-18 Marlik, 3:422-423 Salamis, 2:94 Saqqara, 2:197 Til Barsip, 5:209 Yemen, 5:377 Zeror, Tel, 5:389 Graves. See Burial sites; Catacombs; Cave tombs; Pit graves; Tombs Grayson, A. Kirk, as contributor, 1:228-233 Great Britain biblical archaeology, 1:317
495
competition for antiquities by, 4:105, 106 excavation methods, 3:50 See also specific archaeologists, institutions, and museums Great Cape. See Uluburun Great Citadel (Muqattam hills), 2:207 Great Court of Nanna (Ur), 5:289 Greater Syria. See Bilad ash-Sham; SyriaPalestine Great Gate (Didyma), 2:160 Great Khorasan Road. See Silk Road Great Laura of St. Sabas (Mar Saba), 4:45 Great Library (Alexandria), 2:203, 204 Great Mosque (Aleppo), 1:64, 65, 242 Great Mosque (Baalbek), 1:248 Great Mosque (Cairo), 1:242 Great Mosque (Damascus), 2:103-104, 105-106; 4:55-56 inscriptions, 4:58-59 mosaics, 5:270 Great Mosque (Hama), 2:468 Great Mosque (Kairouan), 1:3; 5:213 Great Mosque (Medina), 4:55, 58; 5:269-270 Great Mosque (Raqqa, ar-), 4:405 Great Mosque (Samarra), 4:56 Great Mosque (San'a), 1:166; 4:478; 5:269 Great Mosque (Sidon), 5:40 Great Palace (Constantinople), 2:61-62 mosaic, 4:54 Great Synagogue (Aleppo), 1:65 Great Temenos (Naukratis), 4:112 Great Temple (Abu Simbel), 1:10-11 Greco-Roman Museum (Alexandria), 1:66, 192 Greece Aegean Islands, 1:18 amulets, 1:114 Anatolian cities and colonies, 1:130, 131-132, 224 anchors, 1:138 aqueduct technology, 1:157-158 architectural decoration, 1:191, 192 architectural orders, 1:200-202 Armenian culture contacts, 1:205-206, 208 Bassit, 1:278-279 baths, 1:283, 284 building materials and techniques, 1:370-373 ceramics, 1:466-468, 469-471 Cilicia, 2:10 coins, 2:41, 42, 46 cosmetics, 2:67 Cyprus colonization, 2:90 Decapolis (culture of) and, 2:129 Egypt (culture of) and, 2:202-203 Egypt under, 3:67 fortifications of, 2:31, 329-330 furnishings, 2:358-361 glassmaking, 2:413, 414 Gordion, 2:430 Hellenistic Age, 1:72-74 lamps, 3:328 medicine, 3:451-452 military tactics, 5:338-339 museums, 4:67 Ottoman Empire, 3:73 papyrus, 4:246 Romans, attitudes toward, 2:437 Seleucia on the Tigris, 4:513-514 See also Alexandrian Empire; Crete; Greek; Ionia; specific sites Greece and Rome (journal), 4:266 Greek (language), 2:434-440 alphabet, 1:75, 77-78; 2:435, 456, 438; 3:159
496
INDEX
Greek (language), continued Anatolian usage, 1:131, 132 Aramaic and, 1:181; 2:436, 438; 3:165 Armenian translations of philosophical works, 1:210 Coptic language and, 2:66 dialects, 2:435-436. See also Ionic Egyptian and, 2:437-438 Galilean usage, 2:373, 375 graffiti, 2:435, 440 Hebrew and, 2:438 as Hellenistic world dialect, 1:73; 2:33 hieroglyphs, 3:23 Latin and, 2:437; 3:334-336 Linear B syllabary, 2:434-435 literature, 2:439 Mycenaean, 2:72, 434-435, 437; 3:150 origins of, 5:354 Oxyrhynchus papyri, 4:195-196 Parthian usage, 4:249 Phoenician alphabet, 2:301 Qumran texts, 2:124-125, 438 terms for amulet, 1:114 writing system, 1:77-78; 2:438-439; 5:354 See also Inscriptions, Greek Greek Archaeological Service, 3:75 Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (journal), 4:267 Green, Margaret W., 2:89 Greenberg, Raphael, as contributor, 1:295-297 Greene, Joseph A., as contributor, 1:90; 3:261-262, 357-358; 4:118-119, 154-164;5:222-226 Greenewalt, Crawford H., Jr., as contributor, 4:484-488 Greenfield, Jonas Carl, 2:440-441 Genesis Apocryphon, 2:391 Greenhut, Zvi, 4:461 Green Mosque (Bursa), 5:214 Greenstein, Edward L. Alalakh texts re-editing, 1:59 as contributor, 1:59-61 Greenwood, D. J., 2:143 Grenfell, Bernard P., 4:194-195 Grennah. See Shahhat Grid plan, 2:441-442; 4:392, 413; 5:50 Griffith, Francis Llewellyn, 1:83, 234; 5:368 Grigor IV Pahlawuni, 1:210 Grigor Magistros, 1:210 Grigor Narekac'i, 1:210 Grigor tite Illuminator, St., 1:208, 209 Grimm, CarlL. W.„ 5:198 Grintz, A., 4:165 Gritille, 1:123 Groh, Dennis E., as contributor, 4:228-232, 420; 5:89-90 Grohmann, Adolf, 3:169 Groom, Nigel, 2:457; 4:383 Gropp, Douglas M., as contributor, 3:144-146; 4:127-129 Gros, Baron, 4:332 Grossmann, Peter, 4:87 Grotefend, Georg Friedrich, 2:86, 131; 3:39; 4:274-275 Grotta, 3:76 Grotto of die Annunciation (Nazareth), 2:342 Grove, George, 4:234 Gruendler, Beatrice, 5:357 Gryneum, 1:131 Gubba, Tell round buildings, 2:165, 472 tombs, 2:473
Gubla. See Byblos Gudea, 1:327; 2:408; 5:94, 341, 343 Gueranna. See Shahhat Guerin, Alexandrine, 3:175 as contributor, 3:174-175 Guerin, Claude, 5:254 Guerin, Victor Honore, 1:274; 2:442; 3:52 'Erani, Tel, 2:256 Susiya, 5:111 Yarmut, Tel, 5:370 Guichard, Michael, as contributor, 3:419-421 Guidi, Giacomo, 3:53 Guigues, P. E., 5:40 GuilaneJ., 2:92 Gula dog associated with, 2:166 as healing goddess, 3:452 Isin temple, 3:187 Nippur temple, 4:151 Gulf. See Persian Gulf Gulf of Aden, 1:15 Gulf of Adrmyttium, 1:224 Gulf of Zula, 1:16 Gulf War (1991), 1:96; 2:272 Gullini, Giorgio, 2:78 Gumurru. See Cimmerians Gundeshapur city grid, 4:494 foundation of, 4:491 Gungunum, canal construction, 3:182 Gunkel, Hermann, 1:320 Gunnis, Rupert, 2:241 Gunter, Ann C , as contributor, 1:127-131 Gurney, Oliver R„ 1:59 Gush Halav, 2:442-443 caves, 4:462 synagogue, 2:443 Giiterbock, Bruno, 2:146 Giiterbock, Hans G., 1:92 as contributor, 1:333-335 Guthe, A., 3:265 Guthe, Hermann, 2:147, 148, 256; 3:225 Gutians, 1:53; 5:98-99 Gutmann, Joseph, as contributor, 1:299300 Gutman, Shmaryahu Gamla, 2:382 Masada excavations, 3:428 Qasrin synagogue, 4:381 Susiya excavations, 5:111 Guy, Philip Langstaffe Orde, 2:443-444 Israel Antiquities Authority, 3:189 Jaffa excavations, 3:206 Megiddo excavations, 2:443; 3:461 Guys, Henn, 3:291 Guzana. See Halaf, Tell Gyges, 2:12 Gymnasia Ephesus, 2:254 Herodian Jericho, 3:16 H Haak, Robert D., as contributor, 1:80-81; 4:169-170 Ha-aretz Museum (Tel Aviv) Qasile, Tell, excavations, 4:373 Timna excavations, 5:217 Habachi, Labib, 2:99 Habakkuk Commentary, 2:121, 445-446 Habashat, 2:274 1
Habbun, Wadi, 4:355 Habis, el-, 4:304 Habuba Kabira, 2:446-448; 3:44 Alalakh excavation and, 1:57 fortifications, 2:322, 447, 448 houses, 3:92-93 lion bones, 3:361 Uruk settlement, 1:125; 2:53, 290-291, 446-448 Habur. See Khabur Hachlili, Rachel as contributor, 3:16-18 Jewish ossuaries, 4:188 Qasrin, 4:381 Hach'mann, Rolf, 1:295; 3:265 Hacilar, 2:448-449 ceramics, 1:124-126; 2:449 excavations, 3:66 Late Neolitiiic tradition, 1:122, 124; 2:449 Hacinebi Tepe, Uruk settlement, 1:125 Hackett, Jo Ann, as contributor, 1:408-409, 409-414 Hadad, 1:64; 2:174, 300; 5:134 Aramaic inscriptions, 1:181, 186; 2:301 See also Ba'al Hadad Hadadezer, 5:133 Hadad-idri, 1:186; 2:103 Hadad-Ramman, 2:103, 104 Hadad-Yis'i, 2:301 Iiadar, 2:449-450, 450 Hadar, Tel, 2:450-452 fortifications, 2:420, 450-451 granary, 2:431-432, 451 stables, 5:71, 73 Hadar Formation, 2:450 Hadas, Gideon, 2:222 Hadasliot Arkheologiyol (journal), 3:51; 4:263, 461 Hadatha, Khirbet el-, 5:105 Hadadi House (Timna"), 5:215 Hadatu. See Arslan Tash Hadda, 2:186 Haddad, Tell (Me-Turnat), 2:471 Haddu, 2:100 Hadhramaut, 2:452-453 'Aden, 1:15 pre-Islamic culture, 1:160, 162; 2:452-453; 5:376 Qataban, 4:384 Shabwa, 5:13 Hadi, al-, 1:265 Hadidi, Adnan, as contributor, 4:380; 5:281-282 Hadidi, Tell, 2:291, 453-454 Alalakh excavations, 1:56 houses, 3:/06 Haditha dam reservoir, 2:289 Pladrian aqueducts, 1:158 Bethlehem, 1:302 Ephesus temple, 2:254 First Jewish revolt, 1:275 Hebron, 3:13 Hadrumetum (Sousse), 4:161 Hafidh, al- (caliph), 2:309 Haft Tepe, 2:232, 454-457; 4:284 Haggai, Book of, 1:328 Hagia. See Ayia. Hagia Sophia (Constantinople), 1:278, 397; 2:4, 63 Hagmataneh, Tell, 2:186, 187 Hah martyrion, 3:426 Haifa Abu Hawam, Tell, 1:9
INDEX Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:104 salvage excavations, 4:462 underwater archaeology, 5:283 Haifa Museum, Shiqmona excavations, 5:36 Haifa, University of. See University of Haifa Hailat Araka, 5:253-254 Haiman, Mordechai, 5:245 Haines, Richard C. Beth-Yerah, 1:313 Nippur, 4:149 Haiyan, Khirbet, 1:32 Hajajah, Tell (Shadikanni), 3:45 Hajar, al- (Hajar ar-Rayhani), 3:253 Hajar bin Humeid, 1:347; 2:457-458; 4:383 Hajar Kohlan. See Timna Hajj, to Mecca, 1:4, 165; 2:112-113; 3:445 Hajjaj, al-, 5:269 Hajjar, el-, 1:99 Hajji Firuz, 2:458-460 Hajji Mohammed, 1:455; 3:477 Hake, G., 4:457 Hakim, al- (caliph), 2:309 ' mosque (Cairo), 1:242; 2:206, 308; 4:58. 4.59 mosque (Isfahan), 4:58 Halab, 2:186 Halaf, Tell (Guzana/Gozan), 1:186, 454; 2:460-462; 5:132 donkey domestication, 1:142 drainage system, 5:10 earliest Aramaic text find, 1:181, 182 houses, 3:92 political history, 5:132 urban settlement, 5:302 von Oppenheim excavations, 2:300 Halaf culture, 3:477 archaeological interest in, 3:43, 59 Chagar Bazar site as significant in, 3:45 Euphrates dams survey, 2:290 Hamrin basin, 2:472 Mozan, Tell, 4:60 origins of, 5:126 Samarra culture, 4:473 Tepe Gawra, 5:183-184 urban settlements, 5:302 Halam, See Aleppo Hala Sultan Tekke, 2:93, 462-463 Halawa, Tell, 2:291; 3:44 houses, 3:103 Halbherr, Federico, 3:74 Haldane, Cheryl W„ as contributor, 3:441 Haldane, Douglas, as contributor, 1:137-140 Haldi, 5:293 Halevy, Joseph, 2:132, 275; 3:78 Najran, 4:90 Thamudic texts, 4:447 Halif, Tel. See Lahav Halikarnassos (Bodrum), 1:130; 2:463—465 architectural orders, 1:200; 2:347, 464 mausoleum, 1:200; 2:347, 463-464; 3:441 Hall, Harry R., 2:259; 5:251, 252, 288, 350 Hallan Cemi as oldest Anatolian settlement, 1:123 pig domestication, 1:141; 4:348 Hall of Assembly (Dura-Europos), 2:176-177 Hall of Fountains (Hammath-Gader), 2:469 Hallote, Rachel S., as contributor, 2:403-404 Halpern, Baruch, 3:461 Halula, Tell, 2:290 Halusa (Elusa), 2:465-466; 4:81 Hama (Ernatu; Hamath), 2:466-468; 5:132-133 Apamea, 1:145, 146 1
Aramaic kings, 1:186 Bassit, 1:278 citadel, 2:467 as Neo-Hittite state, 4:131, 132-133 Zakkur inscription, 1:181; 2:85; 5:387 Hamadan. See Ecbatana Hamad Town, 1:266 Hamatan. See Ecbatana Hamath. See Hama Hamdani, al-, 5:386 Hamidiya, Tell, 3:46; 5:129 Hamilton, Major, 5:13 Hamilton, R. A. B., 2:452 Hamilton, Robert William, 1:9 on Crowfoot, John Winter, 2:73 Damascus Gate excavations, 3:230, 234 Mafjar, Khirbat al-, 3:399 Hamilton, William J., 3:64 Hammade, Hamidu, 2:290 Hammam, Khirbet (Abu Ghrab), 2:478 Hammamat, Wadi, inscriptions, 3:171 Hammam et-Turkman, Tell, 3:46 Hammath-Gader (Tell Bani), 1:238, 285; 2:468-470 Hammadi Tiberias, 2:470-471 frescoes, 1:194 synagogues, 1 : 3 1 1 ; 2:470-471; 5:206 Hammeh, Wadi, 4:257, 258; 5:227, 281 Hammond, N. G. L., 4:419 Hammond, Philip C. American Expedition to Hebron, 3:13 as contributor, 3:13-14; 4:303-306 Petra excavations, 3:55; 4:303-304 Hammurabi, 2:17 Adab rebuilding, 1:15 Alalakh chronology, 1:56 Amorites, 1:109 conquests, 1:256; 3:415-416, 431, 481 Mari capture, 3:415-416 Old Babylonian dialect, 1:44 Sippar constructions, 5:48 stela, 1:261; 5:80 See also Code of Hammurabi Flamra, Jebel, 4:410 Hamrath, 2:348 Hamrick, Emmett W., 3:230-231 Hamrinjebel, 2:163-164, 165-166 Hamrin Dam Salvage Project, 2:471-474; 4:460 Hamza ibn al-Muttalib, 1:165 Hanan (high priest), 2:314 Hananiah, 2:213 Handwriting, 5:356-357. See also Scribes and scribal techniques; Writing and writing systems Haneans, 1:109 Hanfmann, George M. A., 4:487 Hanging Gardens, 1:252; 2:383 location of, 1:255; 4:146 Hanihara, Kazuro, 2:172 Hanni, 1:218; 3:200, 202 Hansen, Donald P., 1:10 al-Hiba excavations, 2:409 as contributor, 3:288-290, 298-300; 4:472-473 Nippur Early Dynastic temples, 4:151 Hansen, Julie, as contributor, 2:284; 4:200-201 Hanun, 1:104 Hapy, 4:139 Hara', Jebel, 1:165 Haradum (Khirbet-ed Diniye), 3:94; 4:460-461 Hara Kebira, 3:220 Haram Bilqis. See 'Awwam Temple
497
Haram el-Khalil, 2:188 Haram esh-Sharif, 4:233; 5:269 Haram es-Shawaf, 4:479-480 Haram Mosque (Mecca), 5:269 Haran, Menahem, 3:366 Harappa, 2:54 Hara Sghrir, 3:220 Harba de Mosheh ("Sword of Moses"), 1:115 Harbe. See Chuera, Tell Harbiyah, al-, 1:3 Harden, Donald, 4:158-159 Harding, Gerald Lankester, 1:102; 2:188, 474 Amman salvage operations, 3:53 Beit Ras, 1:297 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:474 Hadhramaut, 2:452 Jawa, 3:210 Lachish excavations, 3:317 Qumran excavations, 4:393 Hardy-Guildbert, Claire, 4:385 Hare, domestication of, 1:143 Harifian culture, 3:373; 4:209-210, 210 Hariri, Tell. See Mari Harish-Qasir, 5:105 Harith ibn Jabala, al-, 4:378 Harmal, Tell (Saduppum), 1:261; 3:94 Haror, Tel (Abu Hureyra), 2:290, 474-476; 3:42-43 agricultural life, 1:23, 141; 2:288, 290; 5:124-125 Epipaleolithic village, 5:302 fortifications, 2:474, 475-476 Harper, William Rainey, 1:356 Harper Atlas of the Bible (Pritchard), 4:416 Harper's Bible Commentary (Mays), 4:415-416 Harper's Bible Dictionary (Achtemeier), 4:417 Harps, 4:76-77 Harrak, Amir, as contributor, 4:36-38 Harran, pantheon of, 4:128 Harris, Charles U., 2:96 Harris, Edward C , 5:82-83 Harris, J. R., 5:360 Harris Matrix, 5:83, 84 Harrison, R. K., 4:416 Hart.F. A., 2:117 Hartal, Moshe, 4:462 Hartuv (er-Rujum), 2:476 Hariiba, 5:42 Harun al-Rashid, 1:165; 2:367 'Abbasid caliphphate, 1 : 1 , 3, 4, 265 Darb Zubaydah, 2:112, 113 Raqqa, ar-, 4:405; 5:144 Harvard Semitic Museum Gezer excavations, 2:396 Nuzi excavations, 4:172 Harvard University Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, 4:487 Hayonim excavations, 2:486 Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi, 4:379 Samaria expeditions, 2:315, 357 Serabit el-Khadem expedition, 1:277 Tarsus excavations, 2:424 Tepe Yahya, 2:61; 5:187 Thaj survey, 5:198 Harvey, William, 1:302 HarYeroham, 3:101, 188 Hasa, Wadi el-, 2:190, 477-478; 5:154, 227 map of, 2:477 Hasaitic inscriptions, 5:197 Hasan, al-, 1:165 Hasanabad, 2:339 Hasani, Ja'far al-, 4:242
498
INDEX
Hasanlu, 2:478-481 Citadel Mound, 2:480 plan of, 2:479 soundings, 2:458 Hasanlu Project, 3:61 Hashemite Kingdom (Jordan), 4:108 Hasmoneans, 2:481-483 Decapolis, 2:129 'Ein-Boqeq, 2:221 gardens, 2:385 Herodian Jericho, 3:16 Maccabean Revolt, 3:142, 256 Masada, 3:428 See aba John Hyrcanus I; John Hyrcanus II; Maccabce, Judah; Maccabee, Mattahias; Maccabee, Simeon Hassan, Fekri, 3:69 Hassek Hoyiik, 2:53 Hassuna, 2:483-484 ceramics, 1:453-454; 2:483-484; 4:472 Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 2:266 houses, 3:92 size of, 2:19 Hatareh, Khirbet, 2:266 Hatarikka, 5:387 Hatay. See Antioch on Orontes Hatay Museum, 1:56 Hathor, 1:11, 88, 233, 391; 4:316 Hatiior of Ibshek, 1:11 Hatnu-rapi, 4:429 Hatra, 2:484-485; 4:249 Hatra inscriptions, 1:183; 2:485-486 Hatshepsut, 1:40 funerary complex, 2:197-198, 384; 5:175 gardens, 2:384 Hatti, 3:85 Alalakh, 1:55 Aleppo destruction, 1:64 Amarna tablets, 1:86 Hattian (Hattic; language), 1:128; 3:85 Hattin (Hittin), battle of (1187), 2:75; 5:204, 242 Hattusa. See Bogazkoy Hattusiii 1, 1:56, 334; 3:85 Hattusili III, 2:9; 3:85 Haufe, Ida, 3:26 Haupi, Paul, 1:61 Hauptmann, Andreas, 5:65 as contributor, 2:310-311 Hauptmann, Harald as contributor, 4:131-134 Nevah Qori excavations, 4:131 Hauran (region), 4:81 Hauron (deity), 2:412 Hauser, Stefan, 1:228 Haverford College, 1:311 Hawar, al-, 4:372 Hawara pyramid, 4:363 Hawass, Zahi, 4:480 as contributor, 1:404^-06; 3:384-385; 4:170-171, 478^181; 5:286-288 Hawata, El- (Amarna), 1:85 Hawayah, Jebel al-, 1:273 Hawes, Harriet Boyd, 3:75 Hawfi'amm Yuhan'im, 4:384 Hawilah, 2:274 Hawk, Jacquetta, 5:344 Hawkins, J. D., as contributor, 1:423-424; 4:126-127; 5:246-247 Hay, Robert, 1:82, 82-83 Haya, 1:150 Hayes, John L„ as contributor, 1:166-169
Hayes, John W., 1:278 as contributor, 1:469-471, 471-475 Hayonim, 1:23; 2:486-487 Hayyat, Tell el-, 2:487-488; 5:170, 171 Hazael, 1:182, 186; 2:103; 5:133 Ha-za-za (A-za-za), 1:35 Hazor, 3:1-5 biblical archaeology, 1:31 cisterns, 1:290; 2:13; 3:130 city gate type, 1:219; 2:324; 3:3 fortifications, 2:320; 3:2-3, 4-5; 5:335 houses, 2:27; 3:705, 104, 105, 106, 109-110 libation altar, 1:80 plan of, 3:2 size of, 2:22 stables, 5:71-73 Syria, 2:369; 3:2 temples, 1:35; 3:3; 5:171, 172, 173 tourism, 2:153 water tunnels, 5:332 Hazorea. See Qiri, Tel Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin, 3:1 Hazzidakis, Joseph, 3:75 Hdys'y, 2:300 Head, Reginald G„ 1:269, 447; 3:53 Healey,John F., as contributor, 5:145-147 Health. See Medicine Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 4:421 Hearths Bronze and Iron Age houses, 2:356 four-room house, 2:338-339 "Hebreux en Egypte, Les" (Mallon), 3:401 Hebrew Bible. See Biblical literature, Hebrew Scriptures; specific books Hebrew language and literature, 3:5-12, 195; 4:518 alphabet, 1:76, 77, 78; 3:6, 7 Aramaic influences on, 1:178, 181, 182, 186 Biblical Hebrew, 3:5-12 Canaanite alphabet, 1:412 clause formation, 3:10 Copper Scroll, 2:64, 65 Galilee, 2:375 gardens in,2:385 Gezer calendar, 2:400-401 Greek and, 2:438; 4:247-248 Modern Hebrew (Israeli), 3:12 numerals, 3:10 oslraca, 4:190, 468 phonetics, 3:7-8 pronouns, 3:8 Qumran texts, 2:120, 124-125; 3:11 Rabbinic Hebrew, 3:11-12 Second Temple period, 3:11-12 Spanish Hebrew, 3:12 synagogues, 5:118-119 syntax, 3:324 tense system, 3:8-9 terms for amulet, 1:114 Tiberian system, 3:7-8 verbal themes, 3:9-10 See also Biblical literature, Hebrew Scriptures; Inscriptions, Hebrew Hebrew Language Committee. See Academy of die Hebrew Language Hebrews, Book of, 1:324 Hebrew Union College. See Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1:62, 63; 2:119 Avdat excavations, 1:236
Batash, Tel, excavations, 1:281 bull site excavations, 1:383 Caesarea excavations, 1:403 Carmel excavations, 1:426 Deir el-Balah excavations, 2:140 Dor excavations, 2:169 'Ein-Gedi excavations, 2:222 faculty, 1:238 Galilean pottery project, 3:277 Gerisa, Tel, excavations, 2:394 Giloh excavations, 2:406 Greenfield, Jonas Carl, 2:441 Halusa survey, 2:465 Hammadi-Gader excavations, 2:468-469 Hartuv excavations, 2:476 Hayonim excavations, 2:486 Hazor excavations, 3:1 Herodian Jericho excavations, 3:16 'Ira, Tel, survey, 3:175 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225 Kurnub excavations, 3:313 Lachish excavations, 3:317 Masada survey, 3:428 Megiddo excavations, 3:461 publications, 3:51 Qasile, Tell, excavations, 4:373 Qiri, Tel, excavations, 4:387 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 Rehovot excavations, 4:420 Sepphoris excavations, 4:529, 536 Shiloh, Yigal, 5:30 Sukenik, EleazarLipa, 5:92 Ta'anach excavations, 5:150 Tiberias excavations, 5:204 Yarmut, Tel, excavations, 5:370 Yoqne'am excavations, 5:381 Hebron (el-Khalil), 1:443; 3:13-14, 255 Abel-Vincent studies of, 1:5; 5:304 Hecatomnid dynasty, 2:463 Hecatompylos (Shahr-i Qumis), 1:70 Hedwig glasses, 5:320 Hefzibah inscription, 4:225 Hegra. See Meda'in Saleh Held Bin 'Aqil, 5:215, 216 Heidelberg, University of, 4:131 Heinrich, Ernst, 2:147; 3:14 Habuba Kabira excavations, 2:446 Uruk-Warka excavations, 5:294 Heizer, Robert F„ 4:418 Hekanakht, 1:10 Helalieh, 5:39 Helbaek, Hans, 1:75 Helbon, 1:277 Heldman, Marilyn E., as contributor, 1:16-17, 239-241; 3:440 Helena, St., 1:302; 3:89 Heliopolis, 3:15; 4:438 Helios, 1:247, 299; 2:470-471 Hellenic, See Greece; subhead Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods under specific topics Hellenion, 4:112 Hellenistic Age, 1:72-74. See also Alexandrian Empire; subhead Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods under specific topics Hellespont, crossing of (336 BCE), 1:70 Helmets, 4:18; 5:373 Helms, Svend W. as contributor, 4:381 Jawa excavations, 3:210 Hemp, 5:191 Hempel, Carl, 4:134 Henchir Borgou, 3:219
INDEX Henderson, P., 1:423 Henneckc, Edgar, 4:419 Hcnnequin, Gilles, 3:174 Hennessy, J. Basil, 1:102, 103 as contributor, 4:256-259; 5:82, 161-163 Damascus Gate excavations, 3:237 Pella excavations, 4:257 Teleilat el-Ghassul excavations, 3:54; 5:161 Henrickson, Robert C., as contributor, 2:228-234 Henry, Donald O. as contributor, 4:409-411; 5:152-153 on distribution of EpipaleoliUiic sites, 5:7 Hayonim excavations, 2:486 Ras en-Naqb excavations, 4:410 Hepat, 1:129; 3:128 Hephthalites, 4:290 Heptastadion (Alexandria), 1:65, 66, 67 Heqaib, 2:235 Her, Tell el-, 5:44, 45 Hera, 3:77 Heracles. See Hercules Heraclfus (Byzantine emperor), 1:134; 2:50; 4:493 Herakleides, St., 3:427 Herakleopolis, 1:234; 2:200 Herakles. See Hercules Herald's Wall (Carchemish), 1:423 Herbert, Sharon Anafa, Tel, excavations, 1:117 as contributor, 1:117-118 Hercules (Herakles), 1:112, 133; 2:46 Amman temple, 1:101, 102, 105; 2:60 symbol of, 4:16 Herding, 1:142; 5:179. See also Pastoral nomadism Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences (Galton), 2:285 Herniary, Antoine, as contributor, 1:87-88 Hermel Alexandrian influences, 1:72 tomb, 2:348 Hermeneia, 4:415 Hermesh, Horvat, 5:104 Hermias, 1:224 Hermitage. See Monasteries Hermogenes, 1:200 Hermon, Mount, 3:15-16 Hermopolis letters, 1:182 Hermus River, 4:485 Heroa (hero cult burials), 2:347 Herod I (die Great) Antioch expansion, 1:144, 201 Aphek restoration, 1:149, 151 aqueduct building, 1:158 architectural decoration, 1:193, 201 Banias temple, 1:270 Caesarea, 1:399, 403 Coele-Syria, 2:41 Decapolis, 2:129 gardens, 2:385 Hebron refurbishments, 3:13 Herodian Jericho, 3:16-17 Herodium, 3:18, 19 Hesban, 3:20, 21 Idumeans, 3:142-143 Jewish aristocracy, 3:142 Palestinian expansion under, 4:225-226, 271 Roman support for, 4:225 Samaria constructions, 4:466, 467 Second Temple restoration and expansion, 1:193,276,324-325,329 Sepphoris captured by, 4:530
Herod Agrippa I, 4:226 Herod Agrippa II, 1:270-271; 2:313; 4:226 Herod Antipas, 4:226, 530 Herodian, 3:34 Herodian Jericho, 3:16-18 Herodian Quarter (Jerusalem), 1:238 Herodian Temple. See Second Temple Herodian Temple Platform (Caesarea), 1:402 Herodium, 3:18-19 architectural decoration, 1:193 fortifications, 2:330 synagogue, 5:118 water supply, 4:422 Herodotus Anatolia, 1:130 Babylon, 1:251, 252, 253, 255 iron anchors, 1:138 Median national history, 3:448 Hereon polis. See Maskhuta, Tell elHerr, Larry G. Amman Airport Temple project, 1:102, 103 as contributor, 1:102-103, 103-105; 4:267-273; 5:231-235 'Umeiri, Tell el-, excavations, 5:273 Herri, al-, 5:278 Herrmann, Siegried, 1:79 Herscher, Ellen, as contributor, 3:330-331 Hcrshkovitz, Israel, 4:463 Hershkovitz, Malka, 5:150 Herzfeld, Ernst Baghdad excavations, 2:35 carpet arrangement, 2:363 Ctesiphon, 2:78 Fratadara coinage, 2:48 Pasargadae excavations, 3:60; 4:251, 252 Persepolis excavations, 4:275 Raqqa, ar-, 4:405 Salihiyeh, as-, survey, 2:173 Samarra expedition, 4:472, 473, 475, 476 Terqa, 5:188 Tulul al-'Aqir identification, 3:269 Herzog, Ze'ev Arad excavation, 1:174 as contributor, 1:174-176, 287-291, 361-363; 2:319-321, 322-326, 394-396; 4:20-22, 358-361 Beersheba, Tel, excavation, 1:288 Gerisa, Tel, excavations, 2:394 Michal, Tel, excavations, 4:20 Hesban (Heshbon), 1:101; 3:19-22 Ammonite ostraca, 1:106; 3:21 Ammonite settlements, 1:103, 104, 105, 106; 3:21 fortifications, 2:28 lion bonefindings,3:361 research methodology, 4:136 survey, 5:274 Hesi, Tell el-, 1:315; 2:26; 3:22, 40 Bliss, Frederick Jones, 1:332 fortifications, 2:27, 323 new archaeological methodologies, 4:136 open-court buildings, 2:27 research methodology, 4:136 Hesiod of Boeotia, 2:439 Hesperia (journal), 4:266 Hesse, Brian as contributor, 1:140-143, 442-443; 2:166-167, 255-256; 4:206-207, 347-348 lion bonefindings,3:361 Hesychius of Jerusalem, 1:210 Hetepheres, 2:411 Hevesy, John, 1:221
499
Hexagonal Court (Baalbek), 1:248 Heybroek, Friso, 5:215 Hezekiah, 1:212; 5:332 cultic reforms, 1:175 Ekroii, 1:282 First Temple, 1:325 tribute and treasures, 1:28; 2:69 Hezekiah's Tunnel. See Siloam Tunnel Hezekiah's Wall (Jerusalem), 1:238 Hiba, al-. See Girsu (Telloh) and Lagash (alHiba) Hickmann, Hans, 4:71 Hierakonpolis, 2:195; 5:286 Hierapolis. See Manbij Hieratic ostraca, 4:190 Hieroglyphs, 3:22-26 alphabet development, 1:75 Egyptian, 2:198, 209; 3:23-25, 158; 4:354; 5:341-342 Hittite, 2:10; 3:25-26, 158; 4:127 Phoenician, 2:10 Rosetta Stone, 1:485 Hierokles, 1:5 Hierothesion (temple-tomb), 4:123-124, 125 Higgs, Eric Carmel, Mount, excavations, 1:424 Nahal Oren excavations, 4:89 High Dam rescue campaign. See Aswan High Dam High Road (Ecbatana), 2:186 Hijaz archaeological finds, 1:166 Safaitic-Thamudic texts, 4:447 Umayyad rule, 1:165 unpublished inscriptions, 3:170 Hijazi ware (ceramics), 1:478 Hilakku (Cilicia Aspera), 2:8, 10 Hilani, 2:237, 238 Hill, Beit Hodge, 3:305,330 Hill, Grey, 1:447 Hill, Harold D„ 2:300 Hitlers, DclbcrtL., S:149, 188 Hill of Ayasoluk (Ephesus), 2:252 Hill of Evil Counsel (Jerusalem), 3:226 Hilprecht, Hermann Vollrat, 2:302; 3:26-27 Nippur excavations, 4:149 Nuffar identification, 4:148 Peters ([ohn Punnett) dispute with, 3:26; 4:303 Himyar, 3:27-28 'Aden, 1:15 pre-Islamic culture, 1:162; 5:386 Sheba, 5:19 Zafar as capital, 5:386 Himyaritic (language), 2:132; 3:436; 5:386 Hincks, Edward, 2:131-132; 3:57; 4:413 Hinnaruni, 5:333 Hippodamus of Miletus, 1:131; 2:25, 26, 32 Hippodrome Antioch, 1:145 Constantinople, 2:62 Herodian Jericho, 3:17 Jerash, 3:217 Hippolytus, 3:395 Hippopotamus, ivory of, 1:340, 350 Hippo Regius (Anaba), 4:162 Hippos (Susita), 1:157, 158; 2:128, 373, 421; 4:422^123 Hira',Jabal, 3:445 Hiram of Tyre, 5:34, 247, 248 Hirschfeld, Yizhar, 2:241 as contributor, 2:468-470; 5:203-206
500
INDEX
Hirschfeld, Yizhar, continued cuneiform, 2:89; 3:81 Hammath-Gader excavations, 2:469 Emar texts, 2:239 Susiya excavations, 5:111 Hattusa inscription, 3:85 Tiberias excavations, 5:205 inflectional pattern, 3:153 Hisarlik (Troy) Karatepe inscription, 2:10 Alexander the Great, 1:131 literature, 3:82-83, 88 Blegen excavations, 1:332; 3:65 onomastica, 4:95 material culture of, 1:127 Sumerian logograms, 3:159 Hisham (caliph), 4:378, 379; 5:271 Ugarit inscription, 5:264 Hishmitik, 1:488 writing system, 3:81 Hispanic Society (New York City), 1:349 Hirtites, 3:84-88 Alalakh, 1:55, 58, 59 Hissal'il, 1:104 Aleppo, 1:64 Hissar. See Tepe Hissar Anatolia, 1:128-129; 2:199 Histoirc de la Palestine depuis la conquete d'Alexandre jusqu'd I'invasion arabe (Abel), Aphek, 1:150 Arslantepe, 1:212, 213, 215 1:5 Babylon conquered by, 1:256 Historical archaeology, 3:28-30. See also Biblical biblical literature, 1:321; 3:84 archaeology Bogazkoy, 1:333-335; 3:84 Historical Atlas of the Middle East (FreemanByblos, 1:392 Grenville), 4:416 Carchemish, 1:423^124 Historical geography, 3:30-33 chariots, 1:485 Alt, 1:79-80 Cilicia, 2:9-10 approaches to, 3:31-32 Robinson, Edward, 3:30, 38, 52; 4:434-435 Egypt, 2:199; 5:129 settlement-pattern studies, 5:7-8 Emar, 2:236, 237, 239 Historical Geography of the Holy Land (Smith), excavation sites, 3:64, 65 3:30 footwear, 2:40 Historic Preservation Acts (1966; 1974), 2:270 Gordion, 2:428 Historiography, 3:33-37 healthcare system, 3:451 Byzantine and Islamic periods, 3:35-37 hieroglyphs, 3:25-26 Hellenistic and Roman periods, 3:33-35 house form, 3:108-109 of Near Eastern nation-states, 4:108 Hurrians, 3:127 Sumerian, 5:100-101 religion and deities, 1:129; 3:87 See also Historical archaeology seals, 4:511 Hisloty of Egypt (Breasted), 1:356-357 See also Neo-Hittites History of Egypt (Manetho), 2:196 Hiyya (rabbi), 2:78 History o/Herakleios (Sebeos), 1:210 Hoards (metal), typology of, 4:2 Histoiy of the Armenians (Agathangelos), 1:209 Hodayot (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 History of the Armenians (Movses Zorenac'i), Hodder, Ian, 1:318 1:210 Hodges, Richard, 2:38 History of thefield,3:37-81 Hodson, Yolande, as contributor, 2:59-60; archaeology in Aegean Islands, 3:73-77 3:300-301; 5:330-331, 345-346 archaeology in Anatolian plateau, 3:63-67 Hoffman, Malvina, 2:311 archaeology in Arabian Peninsula, 3:77-81 Hoffman, Michael, 2:195 archaeology in Cyprus, 3:70-73 Hoffner, Harry A., Jr., as contributor, 3:81-84, archaeology in Egypt, 3:67-70 84-88 archaeology in Israel, 3:47-51 Hogarth, David George, 1:66, 67; 3:88-89 methodology, 3:50 Artemision (Ephesus), 2:252 survey, 4:391; 5:104-106 Asyut excavation, 1:234 See also Israel Antiquities Authority; Carchemish excavations, 1:423 Undersea Exploration Society of Israel on Cesnola, Luigi Palma di, 3:70 archaeology in Jordan, 3:51-56 Naukratis excavations, 4:112 excavations, 3:53-55 Salamis, 4:457 exploration and mapping, 3:52 Samosata, 4:476 future programs, 3:56 Zakros excavations, 3:75 archaeology in Mesopotamia, 3:56-60 Hoglund, Kenneth G. archaeology in Persia, 3:60-63 as contributor, 2:326-329, 441-442; Achaemenid, 3:60-61 4:413-415 Elamite, 3:61 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, excavations, 2:227 Iranian plateau, 3:61-62 Sepphoris excavations, 4:529 archaeology in Syria, 3:42-47 Hohlfelder, Robert M., 1:403 prehistoric sites, 3:42-43 Hole, Frank salvage projects, 3:44-45 Ali Kosh excavations, 1:75; 2:135 See also Department of Antiquities headings; Archaic painted wares, 5:186 specific archaeologists and schools of as contributor, 1:75; 2:134-137; 4:277-279 archaeology Khabur survey, 3:286 History of Vardan and the Armenian War (Elise), New Archaeology, 4:135 1:209 Tepe Sabz excavations, 5:182 Hitchcock, Roswell, 1:91 Holladay, John S., Jr. Hittin, barde of (1187). See Hattjn, battle of as contributor, 2:337-342; 3:94-114, 432-437; Hittite (language), 3:81-84, 149, 155 5:69-74, 82-88, 88-89, 346-347 Amarna tablet, 1:86 Maskhuta, Tell el-, excavations, 3:432
Qom, Khirbet el-, soundings, 4:392 stratigraphic analysis, 5:89 Holland, Thomas A., as contributor, 3:220-224; 5:332-333 Holman Bible Dictionary (Butler), 4:417 Holm-Nielsen, Svend, 5:28, 282 Holt, Frank L., as contributor, 1:70-74 Holum, Kenneth G. as contributor, 1:399-404 Caesarea, 1:403 Holy Garden (Jerusalem), 3:235 Holy Land. See Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land; Jerusalem; Palestine; Tourism and archaeology Homer, 1:127, 224; 2:439 Homera mound, 1:252 Homes-Fredericq, Denyse, 3:340 as contributor, 3:340-341 Horns (Emesa), 3:89-90 fortifications, 3:90 waterfront, 3:348 Honeyman, Alexander M., 5:215, 216 Hood, Grace Mary, 2:72 Hood, Sinclair, 3:75, 76 Hooijer.D. A., 3:307 Hopkins, Clark Dura-Europos excavations, 2:174 Seleucia on the Tigris excavations, 4:513, 514 Hopkins, David C , as contributor, 1:22-30, 479-481; 2:306-307 Hor, 2:214 Hor-Aha, 3:362 Horemheb, 2:101; 4:480 Hormah, 3:325, 437 HormizdII, 4:101 Hormizd IV, 4:493 Horn, 1:336 Horn, Siegfried H„ 1:89, 316 Hornbostel, Erich M. von, 4:71 Horn of Africa. See Ethiopia Horns of Hattin, 2:75 Horowitz, Aharon, 2:37 Horoztepe, 3:66 Horses. See Equids; Stables Horsficld, Agnes, 4:303 Horsfield, George, 3:90 Jerash excavations, 3:215 Nabatean ceramics, 4:304 Petra excavations, 3:53, 90; 4:303 Umm el-Biyara, 5:275 Horticulture. See Agriculture; Paleobotany; specific crops and crop types Honrs, 2:202 amulets, 1:114 in monumental text, 3:25 Honrs of Meh, 1:11 Horvat. Por toponyms beginning with this element, see under latter part of name Horwenenefer, 2:202 HospersJ. H., 4:418 Hospitaller order, 2:75 Houmt Souk, 3:220 House, 3:90-118 Anatolian, 1:123, 133; 2:449 Armenian, 1:203, 204 Assyrian, 1:270; 3:110, 111 basement, 1:290 belt, 2:320 Byzantine, 4:229-230 as church, 1:322; 2:1 courtyard, 2:22; 3:92, 93 Cypriot, 2:463
INDEX Egyptian, 3:109, 114-118 Amarna, 1:283; 3:116, 117, 118 Deir el-Medineh, 3:116 Giza, 3:116 Kahun, 3:115, 116 Lisht, 3: US Ethiopian, 1:240 Hajji Firuz, 2:459 Islamic, 2:362-364 Mesopotamian, 3:90-94 Arpachiyah, Tell, 3:92 bathrooms, 3:93 Chogha Mami, 3:92 Gubba, Tell, 2:165, 472; 3:94 Habuba Kabira, 3:92-93 Jarmo, 3:91-92 kitchens, 3:93 Madhhur, Tell, 2:164, 472; 3:94 Maghzaliyeh, Tell, 3:91-92 Nemrik, 3:91-92 Neolithic, 3:91-92 Qcrmez Dere, 3:91-92 Razuk, Tell, 2:165, 472; 3:94 round, 2:165, 472; 3:91, 92, 94; 4:197; 5:184 Sawwan, Tell es-, 3:92 Ur, 3:93, / / / ; 5:290 urban housing, 3:92-94 peristyle, 4:273 pit, 2:425 Syro-Palestinian, 2:337-342, 354-356; 3:94-114 'Ain Ghazal, 1:36-37 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:39 Aliabad, 3:95-96 Apamea, 1:146 Arad, 1:171, 172, 175; 3:98, 99, 100 Avdat, 1:237 Batash, Tel, 3:/06, 107, 110 bathrooms, 4:454-455 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 3:102, 103 Bi'a,Tell, 3 : 1 0 3 , 104
Bouqras, 1:354 Chuera, Tell, 3:98-99 'Einan, 2:19, 219 'Ein-Shadud, 2:224 Emar, 3:108-109 Gezer, 3:110 Hazor, 2:27; 3:103, 104, 105, 106, 109-110 Hittite, 3:108-109 Israelite, 3:194-195 Jericho, 3:102, 104 kitchens, 3:95-96 Masos, Tel, 3:109 Megiddo, 3:102, 103, 111 Miqne, Tel, 3:110 Munbaqat, Tell, 3:106 Philistine, 3:110 Phoenician, 3:109-110 Qasrin, 4:382-383 round, 2:19, 219; 3:97 Shechem, 3:96-97 Teleilat el-Ghassul, 5:161 Ugarit, 3:104, 106 Yiftahel, 5:378, 379 village, 5:302 See also Building materials and techniques; Four-room house; Furniture and furnishings; Palace; Tents; Villa House churches, 2:1; 3:118-121 Dura-Europos, 2:177 Paul, St., 1:322; 2:1; 3:118-119
House of Aion (Nea-Paphos), 4:52 House of God (Second Temple), 1:328 House of St. Peter (Capernaum), 1:418-419; 2:4; 3:120 House of die Grand Priest (Ugarit), 5:260 Howard-Carter, Theresa as contributor, 2:297-299; 3:315-316 Failaka excavations, 2:298 Rimah, Tell er-, excavations, 4:428 Terqa excavations, 5:188 Howe, Thomas Noble, as contributor, 1:200-202 Hoyiicek prehistoric site, 1:124 Hrazdan River, 1:203, 204 FIrouda, Barthel as contributor, 1:140; 3:186-187 A§§ur excavation, 1:225, 226 Hrozny, Bedfich, 2:133; 3:64 Kanes excavations, 3:266, 30S Rifa'at, Tell, excavations, 4:428 Huiile. See Huwaila, alHuber, Charles, 5:160 Hubner, Ulrich, 1:106 as contributor, 2:379-382 Hudi, Wadi el-, inscriptions, 3:171 Huehnergard, John, as contributor, 1:44-49; 2:239-240 Huff, Diettich, 4:101 Hukat, Wadi el-, 1:244 Hulah. See Lake Hulah Hulbert, Henry W., 1:94 Hulda Gates (Jerusalem), 1:193; 3:232 Hulegii, 1:1, 241, 265 Hull, Edward, 4:235 Human Adventure, The (film), 5:222 Humanities Index, 4:418 Humann, Carl Anatolian plateau exploration, 3:64 Nemrud Dagi, 4:123 Samosata, 4:476 Humbert, Jean-Baptiste, 2:189 Humboldt University, 2:379 Humeima (Auara), 3:121-122; 4:410 aqueduct, 1:158 arches over cisterns, 1:190 Humped Zebu cattle, 1:142 Humphrey, John, 1:402 Humphreys, R. Stephen, 4:24 Huna die Great of Sepphoris (rabbi), 5:119 Hung-i Azhdar. See Hung-i Nowruzi Hung-i Ramalvand, 3:202 Hung-i Nowruzi (Hung-i Azhdar), 3:200, 202 Hung-i Yar-i Alivand, 3:202 Hunt, Arthur S., 4:194-195 Hunter, Dard, 5:360 Hunting, 3:122-124 Anatolia, prehistoric, 1:124 animal husbandly in concurrence with, 1:142; 4:389 Arabian Peninsula, 1:159, 160 Bahram V, 4:494 Natufian, 2:219, 486-487 Nilotic, 4:535 parks, 4:476 Syria, prehistoric, 5:124-125 Transjordan, prehistoric, 5:228 Huntington, Ellsworth, 2:244, 249 Huot, Jean-Louis as contributor, 4:191-194; 5:251-252 Larsa excavations, 3:332 'Oueili, Tell el-, excavations, 4:191 Hupper, William G., 4:418 Huqqa, 5:18
501
Hureidha (Madabum), 1:347; 2:452; 3:124-125 Hurewitz, Jacob C , 1:91 Hurri. See Mitanni Hurrian (language), 3:125-126, 287 Akkadian, 3:126 Amarna tablet, 1:86 Anatolians, 1:128 Emar texts, 2:239 inscriptions, 5:264 interpretation of, 2:133 onomastica, 4:96 Urartian, 3:125, 126; 5:292 Hurrians, 3:126-130; 4:36; 5:127, 208 Alalakh, 1:55, 59, 60 assimilation by, 3:128 Assyrians, 3:127; 4:37 Brak, Tell, 1:355-356 Hittites, 3:127 Mozan, Tell, 4:60 Nuzi, 4:173-174 religion, 3:127-128; 4:173-174 See also Mitanni Husayn, al- (grandson of Muhammad), 5:269 Husifah frescoes, 1:194 Husn, Tell el-. Sec Beth-Shean Husn al-Qadisiyya, 4:475 Hussein, Saddam, 4:108 Hut Sounding (Eridu), 2:259 Hutteroth, Wolf Dieter, 3:262 Huwaila, al- (HuSle), 4:385 Huwassana, 3:385 Hydraulics, 3:130-132 Chogha Zanbil, 1:489 Roman, 2:31; 3:183-184 See also Irrigation Hydrology, 3:132-133 Bahrain, 1:266 Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-, 5:389 See also Aqueducts; Irrigation Hygeia, 1:392 Hygiene. See Baths; Medicine; Personal hygiene Hyksos, 3:133-136 "Ajjul, Tell el-„ 1:38, 40 burial tradition, 1:222; 3:134 Dab'a, Tell ed-„ 2:100; 3:134 Egyptian expulsion of, 4:215, 216 fortifications, 3:134 Hurrians, 3:127 Maskhuta, Tell el-, 3:432-434 Yahudiyeh, Tell el-, 5:368 Hypatia, 2:204 Hypogea, 2:291, 349; 5:209 Hyrcanus (Hasmonean). See John Hyrcanus I; John Hyrcanus II Hyrcanus (son of Joseph the Tobiad), 3:178, 179-180 Hyrkania water supply, 1:157, 158;4:422 Hyspaosines, 2:48 I IAA. See Israel Antiquities Authority Ialysos, 1:20, 21 Iamblichos (Malchos), 4:386 Iao amulet, 1:114 Iaubi'di, 2:468; 4:370 Pazaz, 1:35 Ibbi-Zikir, 2:186 Iberia, 4:162 Ibero-Celtic (language), 3:151
502
INDEX
Ibgal of Inanna (al-Hiba), 2:409 Ibi, pyramid of, 4:363, 480 Iblis, Tell-i-, 4:6 Ibn Hani, cape of. See Ras Ibn Hani Ibn Hawqal, 1:251 Ibn KhaldGn, 3:36 Ibn Tulun, 4:58, 59 Ibrahim, Moawiyah, 2:402; 3:443; 5:388 as contributor, 3:248-251; 4:450-452; 5:388-389 Ibrahim Awad, Tell, 2:141 Ibrahim Pasha, 1:41 Icard, Francois, 4:158 Ice Age, Pleistocene, 4:201 Iconium (Konya), 1:136 Icosium, 4 : 1 6 2 ICP. See Inductively coupled plasma spectrometry ICP-OES. See Inductively coupled plasmaoptical emission spectometry Idaean Cave, 3:74 Idalion, 1:97; 3 : 1 3 7 - 1 3 8 ; 4:136 Ideology and archaeology, 3 : 1 3 8 - 1 4 1 . See also Nationalism and archaeology Idim, Wadi, 5:13 Idiophones, 4:72-73 Idlib Museum (Syria), 5:224 Idrimi, 1:56, 58, 5 9 , 116 Idumea. See Edom Idumeans (Edomites), 1:298; 3 : 1 4 1 - 1 4 3 Buseirah, 1:388 under Hasmoneans, 2:482; 3:142 militia, 3:142-143 recent research, 4:221; 5:235-236 Seleucids, 3:142 site dating, 5:276 Tawilan settlement, 5:157-158 Umm el-Biyara, 4:304 IEjf. See Israel Exploration Journal Iermochos, 5:371 IFAO. See Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale IFAPO. See Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient IFEAD. See Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes de Damas Ijaba, al-, 1:165 Ikaros. See Failaka Ikshids, 5:145 lktanu, Tell, 3 : 1 4 3 - 1 4 4 II. See El Uaba, 1:53 Ilan, David, as contributor, 1:211-212, 384-386; 2:107-112, 167-168,433-434; 5:218-221, 245-246 Ilan, Ornit, as contributor, 1:169-174 Ilan, Zvi, 3:277 'U'azz Yalut, 5:13 Iliad (Homer), 1:127, 224; 2:439 IliffeJ.H., 2:357; 3:71-72 Ilik, Cumhur, 5:11 Ihpar, 1:125 Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem (Bahat and Rubenstein), 4:416 Iltani, 4:429 Hum, 1:53 'Ilumquh, 3:417 Iluvver, 1:181 Ilyas Bey mosque (Miletus), 4:27 'Imarat-i Khusrau (Qasr-i Shirin), 2:387 Imgur-Enlil, 1:268 Imhotep, 2:197
ImJeihiyeh, Tell, 2:473 Inscriptions, 3 : 1 5 8 - 1 7 1 Imperial Aramaic, 1:182, 258; 3 : 1 4 4 - 1 4 6 , Akkadian 366-367, 410 Fakhariyah, 2 : 3 0 1 Palestinian Aramaic, 4:237 Ugarit, 5:264-265 Imperial Ottoman Museum Ammonite, 1:100, 105-107, 273; 2:140; 4:94 Aya'a salvage operation, 5:39 190, 168 Bey, Hamdi, 3:58 Anatolia, 1:131, 132, 133 Hilprecht, Hermann Vollrat, 3:26 ancient, 3 : 1 5 8 - 1 6 2 Pactolus Valley excavations, 4:487 Arabian Peninsula, 1:162 Imwas, 2:188 Arabic, 1:167, 168; 3:168-169 INA. See Institute of Nautical Archaeology Arad, 1:177 Inanna, 1:53, 331; 5:295 coins, 2:48, 50 Nippur temple, 4:149, 150-151 Gorjani, 3:169 Incense, 3 : 1 4 7 - 1 4 9 mosques, 4:58 Arabian trade, 1:163; 3:147, 148; 4:82, 91; Qasr Burqu', 4:381 5:236, 377 Aramaic, 1:130, 181-183, 186; 2:48, burners, 2:364; 3:148 215-217; 3:163; 5 : 1 1 4 - 1 1 6 as medicine, 3:147, 454 Arad, 1:177 shovels, 3:148 Dan, 2:110, 111 Incense altars, 1:80, 81 Deir'Alia, Tell, 2:139-140 Amarna, Tell el-, 1:84 Fakhariyah, 1:181; 2:301, 461 Arad, 1:175 Gush Halav, 2:443 Index of Articles on Jewish Studies, 4:418 Halusa^ 2:465 Index to English Periodical Literature on the Old Hama, 2:468 Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies Hatra, 2:485-486 (Hupper), 4:418 Mird, Khirbet, 2:119 Indian Ocean trade, 1:4, 162, 163-164 Nerab, 4:127-129 Indie (language), 3:149-150 Palmyra, 3:165 Indo-Aryan languages, 3:155 seals, 4:166-168, 169 inscriptions, 3:159 Sefire, 4:512-513 onomastica, 4:95 Sepphoris, 4:528 Persian, 4:292-293 Armenian, 1:208 Indo-European languages, 3 : 1 4 9 - 1 5 8 , 159 Assyrian, 1:232-233 Anatolia, 1:128; 3:149 Brisa, Wadi, 5:348 case endings, 3:153-154 Halaf, Tell, 2:461 formative area, 3:154-155 Til Barsip, 5:210 Greek, 2:434 Babylonian, 1:251-256, 260, 331 kinship terminology, 3:156 Haft Tepe, 2:456 nouns, 3:153-154 Bisitun, 1:182, 330-331; 2:214; 3:162-163 numerals, 2:434, 435 Brak, Tell, 1:355 onomastica, 4:95 Canaanite, 1:448 reconstruction of, 3:156-157 Lachish, 3:323-324; 4:352-353 verb system, 3:154 Moabite Stone, 4:38, 39-40 See also specific languages Carian, 3:163 Indo-Iranian languages, 3:149-150 catacombs, 1:437-438 Indra, 4:36 Classical period, 3 : 1 6 2 - 1 6 5 Inductively coupled plasma-optical emission coinage, 2:43, 46, 48, 50, 276-277 spectrometry (ICP-OES), 1:119, 121 Coptic, Nag Hammadi, 4:87, 88 Inductively coupled plasma spectrometry (ICP), Egyptian, 2:198, 204; 3:160, 164, 171 2:117; 5:68 Ugarit, 5:264 Indus Valley, 1:142; 2:54 Elamite, 1:330-331,489 Infantry. See Military Greek, 2:5-8; 3:163-164, 165-168; Infrared radiation spectra, 1:119, 120, 121 5:114-116 Inge, Charles, 5:215 Arad, 1:177 Ingharra, Tell, 3:298, 299 Axum, 2:276 Ingholt, Harald Beth-She'arim, 1:310, 438 Hama excavations, 3:43 Chalcedon, 1:482 Palmyrene art, 4:243 Cyprus, 2:94 Sarepta pottery, 4:488 Dan, 2:111 Ingots, 4:17-18 Galilee, 2:373, 438 Crete, 2:71 Gezer, 2:400 as currency, 2:43-44 Hasmonean coins, 2:482 Cypriot copper, 2:93; 5:266 Jerusalem, 5:114 glass, 5:266 Kandahar, 3:165 gods, 2:243 Qasr al-Hallabat, 4:377 Ingrams, Doreen, 2:452 Hasaitic, 5:197 Ingrams, Harold, 2:452 Hebrew, 3:163; 5 : 1 1 4 - 1 1 6 Ink. See Writing materials Arad, 1:175, 176-177 Inkwells, 4:16 Beth Alpha, 1:299 Innocent III (pope), 2:75 Beth-She'arim, 1:438 "In Praise of Learned Scribes" (Egyptian text), biblical period, 3:6 3:363 Gezer, 2:400
INDEX Gezer calendar, 2:400-401 Kuntillet 'Ajrud, 3:310-312 Lachish, 3:323-324 Mesad Hashavyahu texts, 3:6, 474-475 Nabratein, 4:85 Qadesh-Barnea, 4:366 seals, 4:166-167 Siloam tunnel, 3:6; 5:41 Hellenistic and Roman periods, 3:165-168 Himyarite, 5:386 Hittite Hattusa, 3:85 Ugarit, 5:264 Hurrian, 5:264 Islamic period, 3:168-171 'Abbasid, 3:170 Kufic, 2:112, 130; 3:445; 5:320 Latin, 3:166 Caesarea, 3:335 Chalcedon, 1:482 Hatra, 2:485 Qasr al-Hallabat, 4:377 Luwi'an, 3:159, 171 Bogazkoy, 3:385-386 Bor, 5:246 Hama, 2:468 Lycian, 3:163 Lydian, 3:163 Northwest Semitic seals, 4:166-169 Persian, Old, 1:330-331; 3:162-163 Phoenician-Punic, 1:429; 2:84, 85; 3:163, 424-425; 4:317 of Ahiram, 1:31, 77; 4:323 Byblos, 4:323 Cyprus, 2:95 of Eshmunazar, 2:261; 5:38 Gezer calendar, 2:401 Karatepe, 2:10; 3:268-269 Sarepta, 4:490 seals, 4:166-167, 169 typology of, 4:321, 323-324 Ugarit, 5:264 Phrygian, 3:163 private versus public, 2:440 Proto-Canaanite, 1:76; 4:352, 353 Proto-Sinaitic, 1:76; 3:364; 4:352, 354 Rosetta Stone, 1:485 Sabaean, 4:372 Safaitic-Thamudic, 4:447-448; 5:237 graffiti, 4:437 Harding, Gerald Lankester, 2:474 Suweida, 5:112 Sumerian, 5:264 Syriac, 2:373; 3:166, 168; 5:146 texts (types of), 3:160-161 Ugarit, 1:45, 61, 107; 5:264-265, 304 Zakkur, 5:387-388 See also Church inscriptions; Graffiti; Moabite Stone; Mosque inscriptions; Nabatean inscriptions; Nerab inscriptions; Ostracon; Palmyrene inscriptions; Safaitic-Thamudic inscriptions; Siloam tunnel inscription; Synagogue inscriptions Inscription sites, 3:171-172 in Saudi Arabia, 3:169-170 Sinai rock, 1:218 See also Inscriptions; Mosque inscriptions; Synagogue inscriptions Inshushinak Chogha Zanbil temple, 1:487 Susa temple, 2:232; 5:109 Institute of Archaeology (Ethiopia), 3:440
Institute of Archaeology (Hebrew University). See Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology (University of London). See University of London Institute of Archaeology (Tehran University). See Tehran University Institute of Archaeology (Tel Aviv University). See Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (Jordan), 1:7 Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (Yarmuk University), 3:56 Institute of Fine Arts (New York University), 2:409 Institute of Holy Land Studies, 3:172 Institute of Islamic Archaeology, 1:62 Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) Ser<;e Limani remains, 5:2-3 Seytan Deresi, 5:11 Uluburun excavations, 5:266 Yassiada excavations, 5:373 Institut Francais d'Archeologie de Beyroutii, 5:39, 40 Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient (IFAPO), 2:345; 3:172-173 Abu Hamid, Tell, 1:7 Qal'at Sim'an, 4:368 Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale (IFAO), 2:367; 3:173-174; 4:153 Institut Francais d'Etudes Anatoliennes d'Istanbul, 3:174 Institut Francais d'Etudes Arabes de Damas (IFEAD), 3:174-175 Institut National d'Archeologie et d'Art, "Save Carthage" campaign, 2:152 Instructions of Shuruppak, 1:10 Instruments, musical. See Musical instruments International Afar Research Expedition, 2:450 International Bible Commentary (Bruce), 4:415 International Council on Monuments and Sites, 2:271 International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, 4:415 International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies, 5:188 International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 4:267 International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Bromiley), 4:417 Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (Buttrick), 4:417 Invernizzi, Antonio, 2:78; 4:513 Inzak, 2:297 Iobaritae, 5:252, 253, 254 Ionia classical Greek architecture, 1:370 coroplasts, 5:211 Ephesus, 2:252 Hebrews, 2:438 Ionian Revolt (499 BCE), 2:95; 3:305; 4:297 Ionic (Greek dialect), 2:435, 436; 3:150 graffiti, 2:440 literature, 2:439 Ionic order, 1:190, 191-192, 193, 194, 195, 201 Hatra, 2:485 Mausoleum (Halikarnassos), 1:200; 2:347, 464 Ios, 3:76 Ipsus, battle of (301 B e n ) , 1:70, 74 'Ira, Tel (Khirbet Ghara), 3:175-177; 4:121 plan of, 3:176
503
Iran. Sec Persia; History of the field, archaeology in Persia Iran Center for Archaeological Research, 2:480 Iranian Antiquities Service, 4:251 Iranian Archaeological Service Elburz Mountain foothills survey, 3:421-422 Persepolis excavations, 4:275 Tepe Farukhabad, 5:181 Iranian languages. See Persian; Median Iranian Prehistoric Project (University of Chicago), 3:61 Iranian Studies (journal), 1:91 Iraq. See Mesopotamia; History of die field, archaeology in Mesopotamia Iraq (journal), 4:265 'Iraq el-Amir (Tyros), 2:405; 3:177-181 Ammonite dynasty, 1:104 excavations, 1:62; 3:54 fortifications, 2:405 palace, 1:192; 3:177, 178-180 temple reconstruction, 3:55 Iraq Expedition (1930-1938), 2:164, 262 Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities, 2:483 Iraqi State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage, 2:266, 471 Iraq Museum (Baghdad), 1:232; 3:59 Iraq Prehistoric Project, 1:93 Irbid (Arbad; Arbela; Beth Arbel), 1:244; 3:54, 181 Assyrian population, 1:228 excavations, 3:54, 181 fortifications, 2:405 Irbid, battle of (331 B C E ) , 1:70 Irby, Charles Leonard, 1:447; 3:52, 177; 4:257 Irene, St., church of (Constantinople), 2:61, 63 Ir ha-Melah, 4:392 Irhuleni, 4:370 Irkab-Damu, 2:185-186 Iron anchors, 1:138-139 early usages, 4:13-14 weaponry, 5:337-338 Irrigation, 3:181-184 Achaemenid, 2:136 'Ain es-Samiyeli as source of, 1:35 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:39 Akkade decline and, 1:42 Arabian Peninsula, 1:161, 162 Azraq as source, 1:243-244 Baghdad, 1:265 Egypt, 1:4 Islamic period, 2:136; 5:143 Jericho, 3:223 Kharbaqa dam, 4:378-379 Marib dam, 3:418; 5:377 Mesopotamia, 1:23-25; 2:250; 3:480 Middle Euphrates, 1:108 modern, "rescue archaeology" in wake of, 1:232 Nile Valley, 2:249-250 Parthian, 2:136 Sasanian, 1:1, 3; 2:136; 3:488 Seleucid, 2:136 Sumerian, 5:97 See also Hydraulics; Hydrology IRS. See Infrared radiation spectra Irvin, Dorothy, as contributor, 2:38-40; 5:179-181 Isaac, 1:299 Isaac, Ephraim, us contributor, 2:273-278 Isaiah, Book of, 1:321 fishing reference, 2:317
504
INDEX
Isaiah, Book of, continued Qumran texts, 2:121 road building reference, 4:433 Isauria martyrion, 3:426 Isbeita. See Subeita Isfahan (Gabae), 3:184-186 gardens, 2:389 irrigation, 4:291 Islamic period, 2:35 mosque inscriptions, 4:58, 59, 60 mosque plan, 1:3 Ishan Mizyad, 1:42 Ishara, 2:186 Ishbi-Erra, 1:226; 3:186; 5:99 Ishchali, 2:164, 165 Ishmael, 1:104 Ishme-Dagan, 3:481-482 Ishnikarab, 1:487 Ishtar 'Ain Dara' motifs, 1:35 Akkade temple, 1:41 as Akkadian royalty's special deity, 1:53 Assur temple, 1:140, 226, 227, 228 Assyrian veneration, 1:231 Babylonian temple, 1:254 Ebla temple, 2:182 Ethiopian veneration, 1:240 lions, 4:173 Mari temple, 3:420 in South Arabian pantheon, 5:377 Ishtar-Ashuritu, 1:227 Ishtar Gate (Babylon), 1:253, 254; 5:212 Ishtar of Nineveh, 3:128 Ishtar-Sawuska, 1:3 Isi-Dagan of Mari, 1:226 Isidorus of Miletus, 2:63; 4:386 Isin, 3:186-187 Amorites, 1:256 Assur, 1:226 excavations, 1:258; 3:186 Larsa, 3:430, 481 temple, 2:166; 3:187 Isin-Larsa period, 2:473 Isis, 1:67, 88; 2:216 amulets, 1:114 chapel of (Giza), 2:412 Hellenistic period, 2:34 Roman period, 5:176 Iskandariya, el-. See Alexandria Iskander, Khirbet, 3:188-189 excavations, 3:54, 55, 188 fortifications, 2:323; 3:188; 5:232 Iskandemn, 2:9 Islam 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1 Anatolia, 1:135, 136 Arabian Peninsula, 1:164-166 Arabic as language of, 1:166 Armenia, 1:210 armies of, 5:339 art, 5:143, 270, 271, 329-330. See also Islamic architecture Bosran conquest, 1:353 Cairo, 1:405 caravanserais, 1:422-423 ceramics, 1:381, 475-479; 4:233-234, 292 coinages, 1:165; 2:42-43, 48, 50; 4:233 Declaration of Faith, 2:50 Dome of the Rock, 1:190, 325; 3:237; 4:233; 5:270, 269 economic policies, 5:142 Egypt, 2:205-207
expansion of, 2:35; 3:488 founding of, 1:154, 164-165, 166. See also Muhammad funerary monuments, 2:351 glassmaking, 2:414-415; 5:3, 4, 319-320 healdicare systems, 3:455, 457 historiography, 3:36 iconoclasm, 1:395 ivory craftsmenship, medieval, 1:349 literacy, 3:368 Maltese conquest, 3:404 martyrial structures, 3:426 Mecca pilgrimage, 1:165; 2:112-113; 3:445 Medina as center, 1:164, 165; 3:459-460 mosaics, 5:269, 270, 271 Palestine under, 4:233-234 Persia, 4:291-292 poetry, 2:387-388 Syrian conquest, 5:141-142 Temple Mount Qerusalem), 1:325; 2:154; 3:273; 4:233 tolerance of humanrights,5:142 See also Mosque; Mosque inscriptions; Qur'an; specific sects; subhead Islamic period under specific topics Islamic architecture, 1:166, 242, 382; 5:143 arch innovations, 1:190 cities, 2:35-36 houses, 2:362-364 See also Building materials and techniques; Mosque Isma'ilism, 2:307-309; 5:145 IsMEO. See Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente Iso'yahbUI, 1:267 Kpuhtahsu, 2:9 Israel, Felice, as contributor, 1:105-107 Israel, kingdom of. See Israelites Israel, state of American archaeologists, 1:316 antiquities traffic, 2:272 archaeological nationalism, 4:107, 108 archaeological survey of, 4:391; 5:104-106 biblical archaeology, 1:317 economic development, 2:153-154 excavation metiiods, 3:50 Hebrew language and literature, 3:12 Six-Day War (1967), 5:102 Undersea Exploration Society, 5:17, 282-283 War of Independence (1948), 1:96 See also History of the field, archaeology in Israel; Palestine; specific archaeologists, institutions, and sites Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), 1:62; 3:189-190 Antiquities Authority Law, 3:189-190 Archaeological Survey of Israel, 4:391; 5:104-106 Bc'er Resisim excavation, 1:285 Beit Mirsim, Tell, tombs, 1:295 Caesarea excavations, 1:403 establishment of, 2:154 Gilat excavations, 2:404 Golan survey, 2:371-372 Ketef Jericho excavations, 2:119 Magdala survey, 3:399 Mareshah excavations, 3:412 Mesad Hashavyahu excavations, 3:474 Negev Emergency Survey, 5:102, 105-106 Nessana excavations, 4:129 publications, 3:51 Shiqmim excavations, 5:35
Yavneh-Yam excavations, 5:374 Yoqne'am rescue excavation, 5:382 See also Department of Antiquities (Israel) Israel Defense Forces, 5:102, 105-106 Israel Exploration Journal (IEJ), 1:239; 3:50; 4:263 Israel Exploration Society, 2:119; 3:47, 50, 190-192 Deir el-Balah excavations, 2:140 Dor excavations, 2:169 Ebal, Mount, excavations, 2:179 Hammath-Gader excavations, 2:468-469 Masada survey, 3:428 nationalism of, 4:107 publications, 3:50, 191 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 Tiberias excavations, 5:204 Israelis. See Israel, state of Israelites, 3:192-197; 4:219-220 Amman, 1:100 Ammonites, 1:103, 104 Aphek, 1:151 Arad, 1:174 'Ara'ir, 1:177, 178 'Azekah, 1:243 Babylonian captivity, 1:251, 252, 259-260 biblical temple, 1:324-330 building materials and techniques, 1:361-362, 363-367 ceramics, 1:465, 466 cisterns, 2:13 cosmetics, 2:68, 69 dietary laws, 4:348 Exodus, 1:321 figural representation, 1:311 furnishings, 2:354-356 healthcare systems, 3:454-455, 458 houses, 3:194-195 incense, 3:147 literacy, 3:365-366 Manasseh, Mount, settlement, 4:165 military events, 4:220 names and naming, 4:91-92, 94 origins of, 3:192-194 pastoral nomadism, 2:281-282 Philistines as main antagonists, 4:312 sacrifices, animal, 2:83-84 settlements, Iron Age, 3:194 urbanization, 2:24; 3:195-196 See also Bar Kokhba Revolt; Biblical literature, Hebrew Scriptures; First Jewish Revolt; Hasmoneans; Judah; Judaism Israel National Parks Authority, 2:153; 3:18 Israel Prehistoric Society, 4:264 Isserlin, B. S. J„ 3:206 Issus, battle of (333 BCE), 1:70, 130, 131 Istablat, al-, 4:475 Istanbuler Mitteilungen (journal), 4:265 Istanbul. See Constantinople Istanbul University, 1:444 Isthmia, 5:74 Istituto de Vicino Oriente, 1:13 Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 3:197-198 Istrian bathing establishments, 1:271-272 Iswid, et-Tell e!-, 2:141 Italian Archaeological Expedition, 2:180 Italian Archaeological Mission, 3:292 Italian Archaeological School of Athens, 3:74 Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East. Sec Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente
INDEX Italian Mission to Crete. See Italian Archaeological School of Athens Italic languages, 3:150-151 Italy first basilicas in, 1:277 See also Roman Empire; specific archaeologists and institutions Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, The (Adler, ed.), 1:251 Itjtawy (Lisht), 2:299 houses, 3:1/5 pyramid, 4:363 Itdiobaal, 1:31 Itureans, 1:72, 247 in Galilee, 2:372 in Golan, 2:421 Ituriya, 2:264-265 Iula, 5:254 Iuny, 1:10 Ivory. See Bone, ivory, and shell Iwan plan, Mesopotamian, 1:3 'Izbet Sartah, 3:198-199 four-room house, 3:198, 199 ostracon, 3:195, 198; 4:353 Izeh (Malimar), 3:199-203 Elamite reliefs, 1:218; 3:199-202 Izre'el, Shlomo, as contributor, 1:86-87 'Izz ad-Din Usama, 1:41
505
Jamnia. See Yavneh-Yam Jeremiah: An Archaeological Companion (King), Janssen, Caroline, as contributor, 5:47-49 4:415 Japanese Expedition to 'Ein-Gev, 2:223 Jeremiah, Book of, 1:104, 321 Japanese Society for Near Eastern Research, 'Azekah mention, 1:243 5:389 literacy exercises, 3:367 Jar burials, 3:207-208 Jericho, 3:220-224 Anatolia, 1:127 agricultural life, 1:23, 141 Dan, 2:108-109 Anatolian obsidian, 1:124 for infants, 3:207; 5:382 animal husbandry, 1:141 Jar inscriptions, 2:215 architectural decoration, 1:193 Jars, storage, 2:318; 3:321 earliest monumental architecture, 5:302 Jarmo (Qal'at Jarmo), 2:19; 3:208-209 Elisha Spring, 3:130 agriculture, 1:23 excavation publications, 5:85, 89 animal husbandry, 1:142; 4:348 fortifications, 2:322-323; 3:221, 223; 5:334 cloth impressions, 5:191 furniture, 2:353, 355 houses, 3:91-92 grave goods, 2:433 Jasim, Sabah Abboud, 2:164 Herodian, 3:16-18 Jastrow, Morris, Jr., 1:93 houses, 3:102, 104 Jaussen, Antonin, 1:236; 2:133, 134 as Neolithic settiement, 2:15; 4:210 Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, pools, 4:351 2:187 synagogue inscription, 5:115 Meda'in Saleh, 3:446 theater, 5:201 Tayma', 5:160 tourism, 5:223 Jawa (North), 3:209-210; 5:231, 232 waterworks, 1:157, 158; 3:131 Ammonite settiements, 1:103, 104 wood products, 5:347 fortifications, 3:210 Jeroboam I, 5:22 houses, 3:98, 210 Jerome, 1:302 Jerusalem, 3:224-238 pools, 4:350-351 waterworks, 3:182, 210; 5:231 administrative center, 2:24 Jawa, Tell (Soutii), 1:99; 5:234 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jawatha, 1:165 1:62-63 J Jawf, Wadi, 5:376 Alexandrian, 1:72, 73 Jawsaq al-Khaqani palace, 2:388 altars, 1:80 Jabal. For toponyms beginning with this element, Jaya, Wadi el-, 1:32 American Schools of Oriental Research, see under latter part of name Jayy (Gay; Shahristan), 3:185, 186 1:94-95 Jabbok River, 1:100 Jean, C.-F., 3:420 aqueducts, 1:157, 158; 3:132; 4:423 Jabesh Gilead, 5:366 Jebail. See Byblos architectural decoration, 1:192, 193-194 Jacob (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 jebatun, 5:392 Avigad's archaeological association with, Jacob (patriarch), 3:192 1:238 Jebel. For toponyms beginning with this element, Jacobite Syriac Christians, 1:183 see under latter part of name Bar Kokhba revolt, 1:276 Jacobs, Linda IC, 1:447; 5:63 Jedaniah, letters of, 2:213 British School of Archaeology, 1:298, Jacobsen, Thorkild, 1:95; 3:205 Jeffers, James, 4:304 359-360 Diyala Basin Archaeological Project, 2:262 caravanserais, 1:423 Jeffrey, G. E., 4:457 Iraq Expedition, 2:164 Jeffreys, David, 3:471 churches, 2:2, 3-4; 3:234, 235, 237-238; Jacopi, Giulio, 1:151; 3:77 Jehoahaz, 1:176 5:269 JACT. See Joint Association of Classical Capper Scroll, 2:64 Jehoiachin, 1:176 Teachers Jehoshaphat, 1:153, 325 Crusader period, 1:241; 2:73, 76; 3:237 Jadir, Walid al-, 5:48 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:125-126 Jelinek, Arthur J., 1:424,425; 5:152, 153 JADIS. Sec Jordanian Antiquities Database and First Jewish Revolt, 2:313-314 Jemdet Nasr, 2:291; 3:211-213 Information System fortifications, 2:27-28, 325, 327, 333, 406; Fara, 2:302 Jaffa, 1:467; 2:26; 3:206-207 3:234 Hamrin basin, 2:472 First Jewish Revolt, 2:314 metals, 4:8 Haram esh-Sharif enclosure, 5:269 lion cult, 3:361 seals, 4:510 necropolis, 1:385 Jaffa Gate (Ashkelon), 1:223 plan of (Byzantine period), 3:236 Jemmeh, Tell (Yurza), 3:213-215 Jaghjagh, Wadi, 3:286 plan of (First Temple period), 3:228 granaries, 2:431; 3:214 Jagur, 3:175 plan of (Herodian period), 3:231 jewelry, 3:243 Jalame, 5:301, 318, 319 pools, 3:132; 4:350, 351 open-court buildings, 2:27 Jalawla, 2:473 restoration (modern), 2:153-154; 4:461-462 Jeppesen, Kristian, 2:464 Jalul, 5:234 Jerablus. Sec Carchemish Sasanian Persian conquest of, 1:134 Jamal Cave, 1:425 Jerash (Gerasa), 1:277; 2:128; 3:215-219; 4:81; Second Temple precinct, 1:329 Jamal ed-Din, 3:89 5:270 settlement patterns, 4:220 James (brother of Jesus), 2:126 theater, 5:201 arches, 1:189, 190; 3:217 James, Bpistle of, 1:323, 324 tourism, 5:222 architectural decoration, 1:191 Jami' al-Kabir, al- (Yemen), 1:166 fortifications, 2:332 Vincent studies of, 5:304 Jamieson-Drake, David W., as contributor, restorations, 2:60; 3:53 water tunnels, 3:131, 132, 226; 5:41, 331-332 3:28-30 temple of Artemis, 1:146; 3:215, 217 See also Biblical temple; First Temple; Hebrew Jamme, Albert University of Jerusalem; Second Temple; temple of Zeus, 1:190; 2:60; 3:215-216 Hadhramaut survey, 2:452 Temple Mount; other specific sites theater, 5:201 Jubah, Wadi al-, 3:252, 253 Jerusalem Bible, See Bible de Jerusalem, La Jerash Archaeological Project, 3:215 Marib excavations, 3:417 Jerusalem, the Holy City: A Bibliography "Jerash lamp," 5:240 Qaryat al-Fau, 4:371-372 Jerba (Gerba; Meninx), 3:219-220 (Purvis), 4:418 Timna' excavations, 5:215 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Jeremiah (prophet), 2:121
506
INDEX
Jesus and His World: An Archaeological and Cultural Dictionary (Rousseau and Arav), 4:419 Jesus in the First Three Gospels (Burrows), 1:387 Jesus of Nazareth Aramaic linked with, 1:183 baptism of, 1:271, 272 at Bethsaida, 1:302-303 birth of, 1:302 Capernaum and, 1:418-419 Council of Chalcedon on nature of, 1:482 Gospels and, 1:323-324 Melchizedek and, 2:121 transfiguration of, 5:152 women at the tomb of, 2:177 Jesus the Son (Nerses IV Snorhali), 1:210 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 5:253 Jewelry, 3:238-246 Anatolian, 1:127 Armenian, 1:204 Assyrian, 1:231; 3:243-244 beads, 4:10-11; 5:190,310, 315 Canaanite, 2:140; 5:266-267 decorative techniques, 4:16 Edomite, 5:157 Egyptian, 3:242 manufacturing techniques, 3:239 Miqne, Tel,finds,4:33 necklace, 5:216 Phoenician, 3:243-244 Punic, 1:430 shells as, 1:343 Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, 1:183 Jewish Palestine Exploration Society. See Israel Exploration Society Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, 1:183 Jewish Quarter (Jerusalem) excavations, 3:227; 4:430 furnishings, 2:360, 361 renovations (modern), 2:153-154 Roman period, 3:234 Jewish revolt (66-70 CE). See First Jewish Revolt Jewish revolt (132-135 CE). .See Bar Kokhba Revolt Jews. See Israelites; Judah; Judaism Jezebel, 4:465 Jezer, Tell el-. See Gezer Jezireh, 2:300,485; 5:144 Jczreel, Tel, 2:320; 3:246-247 Jibbali (language), 5:61 Judah (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 Jikan, Tell, 2:266, 267 Jilat, Wadi el-, 3:247-248 Jilat 6, 5:227 Jilat 7, 5:228 Jin, al-, 1:165 Jiphthahel, 3:251 Jirm el-Moz, Wadi, 4:257, 258 Jizzi, Wadi, 4:185 Joash (king), 2:421; 3:312 Job, Book of, 1:321 illness explained by, 3:454 Qumran texts, 2:120, 121 Jodin, A., 4:163 Joel, Emile C , as contributor, 3:338-339 Joffe, Alexander H., as contributor, 1:312-314; 2:303-304; 4:134-138, 212-217 Johanson, Donald C. as contributor, 2:449-450 Hadar, 2:450 John, Book of, 1:323 John, Gospel of, 1:323-324
Bethsaida location, 1:303 Mandaean faith, 3:410 John I Tzimiskes, 4:370 John V Palaeologos, 1:396 John VI Kantakouzenos, 1:396 John Chrysostom, 1:210; 2:63 John Hyrcanus I Hasmonean coins, 2:482 mercenaries, 4:225 Pharisees, 2:483 Ras, Tell er-, temple, 5:23 John Hyrcanus II in Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:123 high priest nomination, 2:483 Madaba, 3:393-394 John Lateran, St., baptistery (Rome), 1:272 John of Gischala, 2:314 Johns, C. N , 3:229 Johns, Jeremy, 1:447 as contributor, 1:41; 2:306; 3:280-283 Paris, Khirbet, excavations, 2:306 John S. Guggenheim Foundation, 5:183 Johns Hopkins University ASOR former home office, 1:97 Failaka excavations, 2:298 Oriental Seminary, 1:61 Terqa excavations, 5:188 Johnson, David, 4:304 Johnson, Gregory, 4:135, 281 John the Baptist, St., 1:271; 2:105, 343 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:126 proposed burial site, 4:467 Joint American Expedition to Idalion, 3:137 Joint Association of Classical Teachers QACT), 4:263 Joint Expedition to Samaria, 4:463 Joint Expedition to Terqa, 5:188 Joint Expedition with the Iraq Museum at Nuzi, The (Chiera), 1:95 Joint Prehistoric Project, 1:444 Joint Sepphoris Project, 4:529 Jomard, Edme, 1:82 Jonah, Book of, 4:147 Jonathan (Hasmonean king). See Alexander Jannaeus Jones, A. H. M., 5:196 Jones, Barry A., as contributor, 4:502-503 Jones, Charles E., 5:358 Jones, Felix, 4:141 Jones, G. D. B., as contributor, 3:347-350 Jones, William, 3:149 Jordan. See Transjordan; History of the field, archaeology in Jordan Jordan, Julius, 2:146; 5:47, 48, 294 Jordan Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Project, 2:152 Jordanian Antiquities Database and Information System (JADIS), 2:152; 3:56 Jordan River, 1:271; 2:138. See also Jordan Valley Jordan, University of. See University of Jordan Jordan Valley, 3:248-251 Abu Hamid, Tell, 1:7-9 agriculture, 1:27; 3:250 'Ajlun, 1:41 Amman, 1:98 Ammonite holdings, 1:103 animal husbandry, 1:141 excavations, 3:54 irrigation, 1:35 Jorgensen, John S., as contributor, 3:171-172 Joseph (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 Joseph (son of Jacob), 2:171
Joseph the Tobiad, 3:177-178 Josephus (historian and general) Bethsaida, 1:303 Essenes, 2:125 First Jewish Revolt, 2:313-314, 378-379; 4:530 histories by, 3:34 Masada, 3:428, 429 Royal Stoa, 1:277 Second Temple, 1:325, 326, 329; 2:314 Joshua, Book of 'Aro'er reference, 1:211 'Azekah reference, 1:243 Israelite conquest of Canaan, 1:147, 409; 3:1; 5:102 Jericho reference, 3:220 scholarship on historicity of, 1:79-80; 5:102 Yoqne'am references, 5:382 Joshua, Psalms of, 2:124 Josiah (king), 1:325, 327 Jotabe, 3:251 Jotapata (Khirbet Shifat; Yodefat), 2:314; 3:251-252 Joukowsky, Martha Sharp as contributor, 1:187-188, 390-394; 2:172-173, 178; 4:306-308 Petra excavations, 4:306 Journal ofAnthropological Archaeology, 4:267 Journal of Archaeological Science, 4:267 Journal of Coptic Studies, 4:265 Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 1:93, 95, 96; 4:265 Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 2:207-208; 4:264 Journal of Field Archaeology, 4:267 Journal of Hellenic Studies, 4:266 Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 4:266 Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 4:264 Journal of Oman Studies, 3:80 Journal of Roman Archaeology, 4:266 Journal of Roman Studies, 4:266 Journal of Semitic Studies, 4:265 Journal of the American Oriental Society, 4:264 Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 1:91; 4:263 Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University, 4:265 Journal of ike Economic and Social History of the Orient, 4:265 Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society, 4:264 Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, 4:236 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, 4:267 Journals. See Periodical literature; specific journals and sponsoring organizations Jubah, Wadi al-, 1:90; 3:252-253 Jubail (fubayl). See Byblos jWees, 2:124 Judah (Judea), 3:253-257 Alexandrian, 1:72, 74 Ammon, 1:104 Aphek, 1:149 Arad, 1:174, 176-177 Aramaic adaptations, 1:182, 186 Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:105 architectural decoration, 1:193 'Aro'er, 1:211-212 Ashdod trade, 1:220 Bar Kokhba revolt, 1:275-276 Batash, Tel, 1:283 baths, 1:285 biblical archaeology, 1:30, 31 coins, 4:223 Edomite conflict, 3:143; 4:391
INDEX Eilat ('Aqaba) site, 1:153 ethnic diversity, 4:223 fortifications, 2:27-28, 325-326 geography of, 3:253-254 Idumea incorporation into, 3:143 Israelites, 3:192, 196-197 olive oil production, 1:29 seal impressions, 4:223 Shephelah of, 3:254, 256 wine production, 1:29 Judah I (the Patriarch), 1:309, 310, 438; 4:530 Judah Nesiah, 4:536 Judah die Essene, 2:269 Judaism amulets, 1:114-115 Anatolia, 1:134 Aramaic language, 1:182-184 architectural decoration, 1:194 Babylonian Jewish communities, 1:251, 259-260 baths,ritual,1:271; 5:274 biblical temple, 1:324-330 burial laws, 2:154 burial techniques, 1:387 Byzantine-era communities, 4:231 catacombs, 1:435-438 Diaspora, 5:122-123 epigraphic sources for, 5:117 figural representation, 1:311; 4:86-87; 5:329 funerary monuments, 2:350-351; 5:221 healthcare systems, 3:454-455 hellenization of, 2:482-483 Himyar, 3:27 iconoclasm, 1:395 incense use, 3:148, 149 literacy, 3:367-368 liturgy, 2:123-124; 5:119 mosaics, 1:299-300; 4:54; 5:111, 115, 121 "prayer places," 5:116, 122 Rabbinic Hebrew, 3:11-12 ritual baths, 1:271; 5:274 Samaritanism, 4:469; 5:23 symbols of, 2:423 Talmud, 2:317; 3:12; 5:206 Tiberias as spiritual capital, 5:203-204 See also Biblical archaeology; Biblical literature, Hebrew Scriptures; Hebrew language and literature; Israelites; Judah; Synagogue inscriptions; Synagogues; specific sects Judaiyid, Wadi, 2:190; 4:411 Judas Maccabeus. See Maccabee, Judah Jude, Epistle of, 1:323 Judea. See Judah Judean Desert, 3:253-254 monasticism, 4:44 Judean Desert caves, 3:258-259 Aramaic texts, 1:183 botanical remains, 1:24 linen textiles, 5:191 See also Dead Sea Scrolls; Qumran Judean Desert Studies (journal), 4:264 Judean Mountains, 1:35 Judeideh, Tell el- (Tel Goded), 3:259-260 'Amuq, 1:115, 116 pig domestication, 4:348 Judges, Book of Ai and, 1:33 Arad and, 1:174 Israelite conquest of Canaan, 1:409; 3:1 Shiloh and, 5:28 Song of Deborah, 3:192, 195
Ta'anach and, 5:149 Juel-Jensen, Bent, 2:276 Julfar, 5:286 Julia basilica (Roman), 1:277 Juliana, Anicia, 2:63 Julianos basilica, 2:1 Julian the Apostate, 1:144, 145 Julianus, 1:195, 278 Julias, 1:303 Jumeirah, 5:286 Junds (military districts), 5:241 JundUrdun, 5:204 Junker, Hermann, 3:471 Jupiter, Baalbek temple for, 1:195, 247 Jupiter Dolichenus, 2:174, 175; 4:437 Justin (Roman emperor), 1:145, 302 Justinian I, 1:300, 394 Anatolian building programs, 1:134, 135 Antioch, 1:144, 145 architectural decoration under, 1:196 Chalcedonian doctrine support by, 5:141 churches, 1:278, 302; 2:4, 63 Jerusalem building program, 4:228 limes Arabicus fortifications, 3:358-359 K Ka'bah, 1:166; 3:445 Kabah-i Zardusht. See Naqsh-i Rustam Kabir, Tell, 2:291 Kabri, Tel, 3:261 size of, 2:22 spring witilin, 3:130 Kada Hadar. See Hadar Formation Kaddish, 5:115 Kade, 4:186 Kadikoy. See Chalcedon Kaegi, Walter E., as contributor, 3:35-37 Kafafi, Zeidan A. 'Ain Ghazal survey, 1:36 as contributor, 1:7-9; 2:156, 402-403 Hammam, Khirbet, 2:478 Kaffa, 5:115 Kafranja, Wadi, 1:41; 3:261-262 Kafre. See Chephren Kafr 'Inan. Sec Kefar Hananyah Kaftari culture, 2:232;'3:406, 407, 408 Kahane, Penuel, 3:189 Kahil, Lilly, 5:59 Kahira, al-. See Cairo Kahl, 4:373 Kahun houses, 3:115, 116 Kairouan (Qayrawan), 1:3; 5:213, 269 Kaiser, Werner, 2:194-195 as contributor, 2:234-236 Kaison, 5:44 Kakhat (TellBarri), 3:46 Kalantzis, George, 5:90 Ka'lat el-Kabsh, 1:405-406 Kalat Fakra Alexandrian influences, 1:72 tomb, 2:348 Kalaun, 1:241 Kalavasos, 2:93, 152; 3:262-265 Kalayan, Haroutine, 1:294 Kalb, John E., 2:450 Kalb, Nahr el-, 3:171 Kalbi, 4:381 Kaleb, 1:239 Kalhu. See Nimrud Kali", 1:413
507
Kallai, Zecharia, 1:35 Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:105 Judeideh, Tell el-, identification, 3:259 Manasseh, Mount, survey, 4:164 Kallixeino, 1:192 Kalokairinos, Minos, 3:74 Kaloriziki, 2:94 Kalsbeek, Jan, 1:452-453 Kalwadha district (Baghdad), 1:264 Kalymnos, 3:74 Kaman-KalehByilk, 3:66 Kamashaltu (Moabite king), 4:39 Kamid el-Loz (Kumidi), 1:77; 3:265-266 Kami), al-, 2:75 Kaminoudhia, 2:91-92 Kamish (Chemosh; Kamosh; Kemosh), 1:413; 2:157, 158, 183, 186 Moabite Stone, 4:39, 40 Kammuna, 5:382 Kammusunadbi (Moabite king), 4:39 Kamnaskires, 2:48 Kamose, 2:100; 3:135 Kamosh. See Kamish Kanaf, Horvat, 2:422 Kanaseki, Hiroshi, 2:223 Kane, John P., 4:416 Kanes (Kultepe; Nesa), 1:420; 2:484; 3:266-268 Assyrian traders, 2:53; 3:267 karum of, 3:266-268 merchant records, 1:129 mound of, 3:268 wood products, 5:347 See also Kultepe texts Kannas, Tell, 3:44 Kansas, University of. See University of Kansas Kantor, Helene, 2:194, 229 Kapara, inscriptions of, 2:460 Kapel, Holger, 4:384, 385 Kaphre. See Chephren Kaplan, Jacob Abu Zeitun, Tell, excavations, 2:27 Jaffa excavations, 3:206 Ramla excavations, 4:404 ramparts, 2:320 Yavneh-Yam excavations, 5:374 Kaplaru (Keftiu), 1:21 Karabagh, 1:203, 204 Karabilu the Sabaean, 5:376 Karageorghis, Vassos, 2:94, 95, 96; 3:72; 4:457 Kara-indash, 3:271-272; 5:296 Karak, al-. See Kerak Karamallos, 2:93 Karana, 4:429 Kara Su River, 1:115 Karatas-Semayiik, 1:127 Karatay Medrese (Konya), 5:213 Karatepe, 2:9, 10; 3:268; 5:33, 158 Karatepe Phoenician inscriptions, 2:10; 3:268-269 Karkara (Qarqar), 4:370, 371 Karkara, battle of (853 BCE), 5:338 Karkh, a!-, 1:3 Karlsruhe University. See University of Karlsruhe Karmir Blur, 5:292 Karnak inscription, 5:381-382 solar temples, 5:177 stelae, 3:135 Taharqa temple, 5:178 Karranch, Tell, 2:266
508
INDEX
Kar Shalmaneser. See Til Barsip Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta (Tulul al-'Aqir), 1:227; 3:269-271; 5:326 Karum Kanes, 3:266-267 Kariim trade, 1:226; 2:52-53 Karun River, 5:106 Kasaf'ani, 5:322 Kasara, 5:2 Kashkashuk, Tell, 2:484; 3:45 Kasion (Katib el-Gals), 5:44 Kasr, el-. See Chenoboskion Kassite (language), 3:272, 482 Kassites, 3:271-275 Akkade, 1:41 \Aqar Quf founding, 1:156-157 Babylon under, 1:254, 256, 259, 261; 3:271-272 ceramics, 1:457 Elamites and, 2:232 Hamrin basin, 2:473 Nippur, 4:151 Qal'at ai-Bahrain, 4:367 religion, 3:187, 273 sociopolitical structure, 3:272-273 Uruk-Warka settlement, 5:296 Kastri, 3:76 Kastromenos, Sophia, 4:497 Kastron Mefaa. See Umm er-Rasas Katar, al-, 3:248 Kathari, 3:301, 302 Katib el-Gals (Kasion), 5:44 Kato Paphos. See Nea Paphos Katpatuka. See Cappadocia Kaufman, Ivan T„ 4:468 as contributor, 4:468-469 Kautzsch, Emil, 2:147 Kavad I, 4:290 Kavad II, 4:493 Kavousi, 3:75 Kawami, Trudy S., 3:202 Kawatoko (Fustat excavations), 2:367 Kawkaban, 5:386 Kawkabani, Ibrahim, 1:295 Kayapinar, 3:66 Kaybar al-Qadim, 1:166 Kayseri. See Caesarea Mazaca Kazel, Tell al-, 3:43, 275-276, 276 Kbour er-Roumia, 2:349 Kea (Keos), 3:76 Keall, Edward J., 1:90 as contributor, 4:41, 249-250, 491-495; 5:385-386 Nippur, 4:151 Zabid surveys, 5:385 Keban, 3:66 Kebara Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:426-427 Kebaran culture lithics, 2:487; 4:89, 209 Ras en-Naqb, 4:410-411 Keel, Othmar, 1:325 Kefar Abil, 2:128 Kefar Bar'am. See Bar'am Kefar Hananyah (Kafr 'Inan), 2:373; 3J276-278, 277 Kefar Monash, 4:1, 8 Kefar Nahum, 1:417 Kefar Neburaya. See Nabratein Kefar Shemaryahu, 4:359 Kefar Yehoshu'a, 3:207 Keftiu (Kaptaru), 1:21 Keihckriftbibliographie, 4:418 Keisan, Tell, 2:189; 3:278-279
Kelibia (Aspis), 4:161 Kel-i Shin, 2:480 Kellia, 4:42-43, 153 Kelly-Buccellati, Marilyn, 3:45, 46, 287 as contributor, 3:42-47; 4:60-63; 5:188-190 Mozan, Tell, excavations, 4:60 Terqa excavations, 5:188 Kelm, George L., 1:281 Kelsey, Francis, 4:158 Kelsey Museum (University of Michigan), 1:117 Kelso, James L., 1:452, 461 Bethel excavations, 1:300 Herodian Jericho excavations, 3:16 Kemalists, 4:107 Kemerhisar, 5:246, 247 Kemosh. See Kamosh Kemp, Barry, 1:83, 84, 85; 3:69 Kempinski, Aharon 'Ajjul, Tell ei-, 1:38 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 'Erani, Tel, excavations, 2:256 Kabri, Tel, excavations, 3:261 Masos, Tel, excavations, 3:437 Megiddo, 3:461 Sharuhen identification, 2:305 Kenamun, tomb of, 5:31 Kenites, 1:174 Kennedy, David L„ 1:244; 4:376 as contributor,
4:435-441
Umm el-Jimal identification, 5:276 Kenyon, Sir Frederic, 1:359; 3:279; 4:235-236 Kenyon, Kathleen Mary, 1:289; 3:279-280 'Ajjul, Tell el-, excavation, 1:38-39 Bennett, Crystal-Margaret, 1:298 British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History, 1:357 British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1:360 on decline in Palestinian town life, 2:25 excavation method, 1:31; 2:294 Jericho excavations, 3:54, 221-223; S:85 on Jericho houses, 3:102 Jerusalem excavations, 2:27-28; 3:225, 229, 230, 234, 279 Megiddo, 3:461; 4:3 methodology, 1:317; 3:50, 279; 4:463-465 on photography, 4:334 Samaria expedition, 4:463-465, 468 on shaft tomb construction, 5:14 Keos (Kea), 3:76 Kephala, 3:76 Kerak (Karak), 1:41, 101; 3:280-283 under Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties, 1:447; 3:281-282; 5:242 castle, 3:281 Kerak, Khirbet. See Beth-Yerah Kerbschnitt bowls, 1:476 Kerdir (high priest), 4:101 Kerkouane, 4:161 Kerma culture, 4:170-171 Kerman, 2:229-231 Kershaw, Norma, 2:96 Kersten, Otto, 2:147 Kertch, 5:194 Kervran, Monik, 1:267; 4:367 Kesh. See Abu Salabikh Kesh Temple Hymn, 1:10 Kesib River, 1:13 Kestel, 2:424; 3:283-285 Ketef Hinnom, 1:114; 3:285-286 Ketef Jericho, 2:119 Kfar Jarra, 5:40
Khabur, 1:52, 53; 3:286-288 Khabur River, 2:247, 300; 3:413 Khadija, 5:141 Khaemwese, 3:67 Khafajeh (Tutub), 1:93; 3:288-290 excavations, 1:260; 2:164, 165 fishing accessories, 2:316 Khairy, Nabil, 4:303-304 Khaldeh (Kobbet Choueifat; Mutatio Heldua), 3:290-291 Khaled ibn al-Walid mosque (Horns), 3:90 Khalid, Jebel, 2:292 Khalifeh, Issam Ali, as contributor, 1:292-295; 4:488-491; 5:38-41 Khalil, el-. See Hebron Khalil, Lufti, 1:153 Khallawa, Tell, 2:473 Khamudy, 3:133 Khana, 5:189 Khan al-Zabib mosque, 4:56 Khana texts, 5:189 Khan ed-Dibs, 1:352 Khania, 3:76 Khans, 1:422-423 Khanzira, 5:392 Kharabeh Shattani, 2:265, 266 Kharabok, 2:267 Kharaneh, 5:227 Kharbaqa dam, 4:378 Kharem Shems, 1:278 Khargah, 2:244-245, 246-247 Kharg Island, 2:402 Kharijis (sect), 1:165 Kharkheh River, 5:106 Kharmuz. See Rhakotis Khasne. See Petra Khatuniyeh, 2:267 Khawlan at-Tiyal, 3:291-293 Khayan, 2:100 Khazineh. See Tepe Khazineh Khazneh, Tell. See Tepe Khazineh Kheit Qasim III, 2:472 Kheleifeh, Tell el-, 3:143, 293-294 abandonment of, 5:236 'Aqaba and, 1:153 fortifications, 3:293 Khelidonya. See Cape Gelidonya Khendjer, 4:480 Khentiamentiu, 1:11 Khentkaues, 2:411 Khepri, 1:114 Khety I, 1:234 Khety II, 1:234 Khiamian industry, 4:210 Khilda, 1:99 Khirbeh, 3:294-295 Khirbet. For toponyms beginning with this element, see under latter part of name. For general description, see Khirbeh Khiroldtia, 2:90-91; 3:72 Khnum, 2:235-236; 4:139 Khor, 4:385 Khorasan road, 2:471 Khorramshahr, 3:411 KhorRori, 4:186; 5:252-253 Khorsabad (Dur Sharrukin), 3:295-298 as Assyrian capital, 1:227 Botta excavation, 1:231, 353-354; 2:345; 3:38, 295, 338 palaces, 4:198 reliefs, 2:383; 3:296, 297; 5:33 wall paintings, 5:326 ziggurat, 5:390
INDEX KhoshTapa, 4:10 Khosr River, 5:183 Khroub, el-, 2:349 Khudriya, Khirbet, 1:32 Khueinat stelae, 2:6-7 Khufu, pyramid of, 4:362 Khuneizir, Khirbet, 5:65 Khurasan, 1:1, 3, 265 Khurasaniyah ('Abbasid army), 1:1, 3 Khuraybah. See Dedan Khu-Sebek, 5:21 Khusinan, Yahudiyya absorption of, 3:185 Khusrau I Anushirvan, 1:3, 36; 2:48, 79; 4:290, 493 Khusrau II Parvez, 2:48; 4:290, 493 Khusrau's City of Antioch (Veh-AntiokhKhusrau), 2:79 Khuweilifeh, Tell. See Lahav Khuzistan, 4:280-282; 5:106 Elamites, 2:228-233 geography of, 2:228-229 Mandaic, 3:411 Khwarazmian (language), 3:150; 4:294 Kibbutz Degania, 5:28 Kibbutz Ginosar, 2:377 Kibbutz Lahav. See Lahav Kibbutz Ma'agan Mikha'el. See Ma'agan Mikha'el Kibbutz Movement, 3:310 Kibbutz Sede Boqer, 5:104, 105 Kibotos (Alexandria), 1:66 Kiepert, Heinrich, 4:257 Kikilidis, Deacon Cleopas, 3:54 Kilij Arslan II, 1:136 Killebrew, Ann as contributor, 1:283-285; 2:151-156, 358-362; 4:381-383 Qasrin excavations, 4:381-382 Killic'k, Alistair, 3:360 Kimon, 2:95 Kinalua, 3:44 King, G. R. D„ as contributor, 1:422-423; 5:241-243, 268-273 King, Leonard W., 1:331 King, Philip J., 1:95; 2:96; 4:415 Kingery, W. D., 5:309 Kings, Books of, 1:321; 2:421 Aphek batde reference, 2:420 First Temple references, 1:325, 326 food storage reference, 2:319 furniture reference, 2:356 Hazor reference, 3:1 Lachish reference, 3:320 tophet reference, 4:158 Kings, valley of the. See Valley of the Kings King Saud University, 3:80 King's Gate (Carchemish), 1:423 King's Highway, 1:99, 177, 212 King's Peace (387-386 Ben), 4:297, 485 Kings Pool (Jerusalem), 3:226 Kinneret. See Lake Kinneret Kiririsha, Chogha Zanbil temple for, 1:487 Kirkbride, Diana Beidha excavations, 1:291; 5:226, 302 Beidha housing, 5:302 British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1:359 Petra excavations, 4:303-304 Kirkby, Michael, 2:135 Kirkuk Kassites at, 3:272 tablets, 4:171, 172 Kirovakan, 1:203, 204
Kirta, 2:80, 83 Kish, 3:298-300 Akkadians, 1:42, 50, 52 Assur, 1:226 hegemony of, 5:98 palaces, 4:494 Kishon River, 1:9; 5:318 Kisrin. .See Qasrin Kissufim burial techniques, 5:54 monastery, 2:7 Kitan, Tel, 3:300; 5:171 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 2:346; 3:300-301 Caesarea, 1:402; 2:256 Herodium, 3:18 Hotvat Rimmon identification, 3:325 Jericho survey, 3:220 Jotapata identification, 3:251 Masos, Tel, survey, 3:437 Nabratein, 4:85 Palestine survey, 4:235 Salamis excavations, 4:457 Kitchens, 3:93 Kition (Larnaka; Salines; Scala), 2:93; 3:72, 301-303 enclosed altar, 1:80 stone anchors, 1:137 Kizzuwatna. .See Cilicia Kjaer, H„ 5:28 Kleanthes, 1:224 Klein, E. M., 2:117 Klein, F. A., 3:52 Kleiner, Gerhard, 4:26 Klengel, Horst, 1:86 Klengel-Brandt, Evelyn, as contributor, 1:251-256, 256-262 Kleomenes of Naukratis, 1:65 Kling, Barbara, as contributor, 1:152-153 Kloner, Amos as contributor, 3:412-413 Jerusalem tombs, 3:227 on Jewish ossuaries, 4:188 Lahav identification, 3:325 Mareshah excavations, 3:412 Kluge, N. K„ 3:394 Klugkist, Alexander, 5:357 Knapp, A. Bernard, 2:91 as contributor, 1:17-22 Knidos (Cnidus), 1:470 Knight, Douglas A., as contributor, 5:57 Knights Templar, 2:75; 5:40 Knossos, 2:70, 72; 4:28, 29 anchorlike find, 1:138 Dab'a, Tell ed-, dynastic links, 2:100 excavations, 3:74 "Knossos controversy," 1:332 restoration of, 2:60 Knudstad, James, 4:149 Knudtzon, Jorgen A., 1:86, 333 Kobbet Choueifat. See Khaldeh Kochavi, Moshe Aphek-Antipatris expedition, 1:149 as contributor, 1:145-147; 2:223-224, 260-261, 450-452; 4:401; 5:389-390 on Debir identification, 1:295 Esdar, Tel, excavations, 2:260 Tzbet Sartah excavations, 3:198 Judah survey, 5:105 Rabud, Khirbet, excavations, 4:401 Rujm el-Hiri excavations, 2:419 Zeror, Tel, excavations, 5:389 Koenen, Ludwig, 4:308
509
Koenigs, Wolf, as contributor, 2:150 Koeppel, Robert, 5:161 Koerte, Alfred, 3:64 Koerte, Guslav, 3:64 Kohath (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 Kohl, Gunter, 2:447 Kohl, Heinrich, 1:274; 2:148 Capernaum excavations, 1:417 Chorazin excavations, 1:491 Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Meiron survey, 3:469 Kohl, Philip, 1:204 Kohlmeyer, Kay, 4:405, 407 as contributor, 2:446—'148 Koike, Yayoi, 2:290 Koine, 1:73, 167, 168; 2:436-437 Aramaic, 1:182 Egyptian, 2:437 Kokhav ha-Yarden, 5:104 Kokhe, 2:79 Kokushikan University Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 2:266 Kish excavations, 3:298 Koldewey, Robert, 3:303 Assos excavations, 1:224 Babylon excavations, 1:140, 252, 255; 3:39, 58 Hiba, al-, excavations, 2:409 Uruk-Warka, 5:294 Zurghul excavations, 2:409 Kollwitz, Johannes, 4:445 Koloe, 1:16 Kom el-Ahmar, 5:286 Kom el-Dik, 1:67 Kom el-Nana, 1:85 Kom el-Shogafa, 1:69 Kom es-Sultan. See Abydos Kom Ge'if. See Naukratis Kommos, 1:138; 3:76 Kondoleon, Christine, as contributor, 4:50-55 Konishi, Masatoshi A., 4:384 Kontoleon, Nikolaos, 3:76 Konya (Iconium), 1:136 Korakou, Carl William Blegen, 1:332 Koran. See Qur'an Kore, 4:487 Korean writing system, 5:353, 354 Korfmann, Manfred, 3:66 Koriwn, 1:208, 209,210 Koropi, 5:194 Korte, August, 2:426, 427 Kiirte, Gustav, 2:426,427 Korupedion, battle of (281 BCE), 1:131 Kos, 3:76-77 Kosay, Harnit Zilbeyr, 3:65, 66, 303-304 Rose Dagi, batde of (1243), 1:136 Kosk Hoyuk, 1:124 Kotel tunnel (Jerusalem), 3:232 Ratter, Wade R,, as contributor, 5:6-10 Koukounaries, 3:76 Kourion, 1:347; 2:94, 95; 3:304-306 Kouyunjik, 3:338 Kowm, el-, 1:262; 3:42 Koycegiz. See Lake Koycegiz Kraabel, A. Thomas, 4:26 Kraeling, Carl Hermann, 1:95; 3:306; 4:355 Kramer, Carol, 2:339 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 1:95 Krencker, Daniel M., 1:143; 4:368, 369 Krentz, Edgar, as contributor, 1:211-21% Krcsa, 5:2 Krumbein, William C , 5:87
510
INDEX
Kruse, F„ 1:297 Ksar 'Akil, 1:293; 3:306-308 Kubaba, temple for, 1:423 Kubadabad, 1:136 Kubadiya, 1:136 Kubbaniya, Wadi, 2:192 KugukHoyiik (fortress), 2:430 Kufah, al-, 1:264 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1 as Arab garrison town, 2:35 Darb Zubaydah to Mecca, 1:4, 165 as Islamic capital, 1:165 palace, 5:269 Kufu (Cheops), 2:411 Kuh-i-Khwaja, 5:329 Kuhn, Thomas S., 1:316 Ktihnc, Hartmut, 3:45 as contributor, 1:156-157; 5:25-26 Khabur survey, 3:286, 287 Sheikh Hamad, Tell, excavations, 5:25 Kiihnel, Ernst, 2:78 Kul-i Fatah, 1:218; 3:200-202 Kullab, 5:294 Ktiltepe. See Kanes Ktiltepe texts, 1:44, 129; 3:308-310 Kumarbi, 3:128; 4:60 Kumidi. See Kamid el-Loz Kumma fort (Nile valley), 5:287 Kummuh (Commagene), 1:72; 4:124, 126, 476 Kuniholm, Peter Ian as contributor, 2:37-38; 5:347-349 climatology, 2:38 Kuniyawanni, 3:385 Kumillet 'Ajrud (Horvat Teman), 1:413; 2:80; 3:310-312 caravanserai, 5:174 votive inscriptions, 3:6 Kura (god), 2:186 Kura, al- (Tubna), 5:392 Kurban HoyiikUruk setdement, 1:125 viticulture, 5:305 Kurdish (language), 3:150, 449 Kurdistan, 2:229; 5:15 Kurdu.Tell, 1:115 Kurigalzu, 1:15, 156; 5:290 Kurnub, 3:312-314 Kuro-Araxes culture, 1:203-204, 205 Kur River, 2:229 Kurru, el-, 4:364 Kursi (Gergesa), 3:314-315 Kuschke, Arnulf, 3:265 Kush. See Nubia Kutan, Tell, 2:265 Kutir Nahhunte, 5:109 Kutsch, Ernst, 3:261-262 Kuwait, 1:159; 3:315-316 Kuwait National Museum, Umm an-Nammal survey, 3:315-316 Kuyunjik. See Nineveh Kyle, M. G., 1:249 Kypros. See Cyprus Kyrenia, 3:390; 4:18; 5:284 Kythnos, Mount, 3:76 Kythrea (Chytroi), 2:95 L La'ban, Wadi, 2:478 Labarna, 3:85 Labat, Rene, 5:357
La-b'ayu, 5:22 LaBianca, 0ystein S. as contributor, 4:253-256 food-systems concept, 4:136 Labidi, Yusuf, 1:35 Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir), 1:243; 2:24; 3:49, 317-323 Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:105 Assyrian conquest of, 3:320-321 biblical archaeology, 1:30 chariotry, 3:320 destruction of, 3:319 fortifications, 2:28, 325; 3:319, 320, 321; 5:338 jewelry, 3:242 libation altar, 1:81 palace architecture, 1:39; 2:27 publishable Strata, 5:88 residency, 2:26, 27 temples, 5:172-173 Lachish inscriptions, 3:323-324; 4:352-353 Lacoste, H., 1:146 Lacovara, Peter, as contributor, 2:194-195 Lady of Byblos, 1:413 Laetoli, 2:450 Lagarce, Elisabeth, 4:411 Lagarce, Jacques as contributor, 2:241-244; 4:411-413 Ras Ibn Hani excavations, 4:411; 5:258 Lagash. See Girsu (Telloh) and Lagash (alHiba) Lagids, 1:247; 5:136 Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, 2:187, 188; 3:324-325 Lahav (Tel Halif; Tell Khuweilifeh), 1:63; 3:325-326; 4:136, 213 Lahav Research Project, 3:325 Lahun pyramid, 4:363 Laish. See Dan, Tel Lake Assad, 2:290-291 Lake Beysehir, 2:247 Lake Hulah, 2:219, 247 Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), 2:247 fishing, 2:316, 317, 373 See also Galilee boat Lake Koycegiz, 2:247 Lake Lisan, 4:257 Lake Mareotis, 1:65 Lake Nasser, 1:11 Lake Nemi, iron anchorfind,1:138-139 Lake of Tunis, 1:430 Lake Rudolf, 2:247 Lake Sevan, 1:203, 204 Lake Urmia, 2:247 Lake Van, 2:247; 5:292 Lake Zeribar, 2:247 Lakkous, 2:91 Lalibela, 2:276 La Maison de L'Orient Mediterraneen de Lyon, 4:376 Lamb, Winifred, 3:76 Lambdin, Thomas O., 3:364 Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C , 5:187 as contributor, 4:279-286; 5:187-188 Thaj survey, 5:198 Lambousa, 3:330 Lamellae (amulet), 1:113 Lamon, Robert S., 2:26; 3:466, 468 Lampre, Georges, 2:134-135 Ali Kosh excavation, 1:75 Tepe Farukhabad, 5:181 Tepe Mussian excavations, 5:186
Lamprichs, Roland W., as contributor, 1:225-228 Lamps, 3:326-330 Bronze and Iron Age houses, 2:356 glass industry and, 5:318 "Jerash lamp," 5:240 molded, 3:328, 329; 5:240 oil, 1:478-479; 2:8, 364; 3:326-327; 4:471 Samaritan, 4:471 saucer, 3:328, 330 wheelmade, 3:328, 329 Lampsacus, 1:131; 2:46 Lance, H. Darrell, 5:88 Land and Sea Project (University of Haifa), 4:97 Landberg, Carlo, 3:78 Land of Geshur Project, 2:223; 4:442 Land of Israel Studies. See Bar-Ilan University Land of the Hittites, The (Garstang), 2:390 Landsberger, Benno, 3:266 Lane, James C , 1:91; 3:473 Lang, Sir Robert Hamilton, 3:70, 137 Langadha, 3:77 Langdon, Stephen Isin excavations, 3:186, 187 Jemdet Nasr excavations, 3:212 Kish excavations, 3:298 Langevin, Paul-Emile, 4:418 Langhade, Jacques, as contributor, 3:174-175 Langlamet, Francois, 5:299 Language. See Indo-European languages; Semitic languages; specific languages Laodicea (Laodikeia), 1:136, 144, 146 Laperrousaz, Ernest M. Copper Scroll, 2:65 on Qumran's occupational phases, 4:393-394 Lapeyre, G. G„ 4:158 Lapis lazuli, 4:9 Lapithos, 3:330-331 Lapp, Eric C , 2:117 as contributor, 2:117-118; 4:15-20 Lapp, Nancy L., as contributor, 2:346-347; 3:331; 4:444-445 Lapp, Paul Wilbert, 1:316, 452, 459; 3:331 'Ain es-Samiyeh excavation, 1:35 Albright Institute of Archaeological Research directorship, 1:62-63 Bab edh-Dhra' excavations, 1:249, 447; 5:62 Daliyeh, Wadi ed-, excavations, 1:62-63; 2:101-102 Ful, Tell el-, excavations, 2:346 Idalionfieldwork,1:97 'Iraq el-Amir excavations, 3:54, 177 Rumeith, Tell er-, excavations, 1:62; 4:444-445 on strata, 5:88 Ta'anach excavations, 5:149 Laqu, 1:186 Larache (Lixus), 4:162 Larnaka. See Kition La Rosa, Vincenza, 3:74 Larsa (Tell Senkereh), 3:331-333 Amorites, 1:256 excavations, 1:258; 2:345 Isin, 3:430, 481 metal hoard, 4:12 palace, 4:198 Lartet, Louis, 4:201 Lassner, Jacob, as contributor, 1:264-266 Latamne, 3:333; 5:124 Late Egyptian dialect, 2:209 Latin (language), 1:132; 3:150, 333-337
INDEX alphabet, 1:78; 3:334; 5:356 Greek and, 2:437; 3:334-336 literature, 3:335-336 Oxyrhynchus papyri, 4:195-196 phonemic system, 3:333 Sardinian language and, 4:484 writing system, 3:334 See also Inscriptions, Latin Latin Convent of St. Savior, 2:342 Latium, 3:334 Latter Prophets (Hebrew Scripture), 1:320 Latvian (language), 3:151 Lauer, Jean-Philippe, 4:480 Lauffrayjean, 1:294, 491 Laurae, 4:42, 44, 45 Laval University (Quebec), 5:59 Law, See Legal documents Lawrence, Thomas Edward (T. E.; Lawrence of Arabia), 3:337 'Aqaba, 1:154 Avdat excavation, 1:236 Hogarth, David George, 3:88 Qadesh-Barnea, 4:365 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 3:277 Layard, Austen Henry, 3:337-338 Assur excavation, 1:225 Babylon excavations, 1:252 Botta, Paul-Emile, 3:39 British nationalism, 4:105 Nimrud excavations, 1:231; 2:399; 3:57, 338; 4:141; 5:163 Nineveh palace excavations, 3:321, 338, 356; 4:145; 5:96 Nippur excavations, 4:148, 149 Rimah, Tell er-, 4:428 Lazarew, S. A., 4:241 Lazar P'arpec'i, 1:209, 210 Lcasen, 1:203, 204, 205 LCTF. See Liquid crystal tunable filter Lead, 4:18-19 Lead-glazed wares (ceramics), 1:474 Lead isotope analysis, 3:338-339 Leaf, Walter, 1:224 League of Corinth, 1:70 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, 2:270 Leake, William Martin, 1:224 Leaney, Alfred R. C , 4:443 Leadier, 3:339-340 Babylonian, 1:259 as writing material, 5:360 Leba'a, 5:40 Lebanon. See Beirut; Phoenicia; Syria; SyriaPalestine Lebanon, Mount, 1:194, 195; 3:16 Lebda, Wadi, 3:348, 349 Lebeau, Marc, 3:46 Le Breton, Louis, 5:108 Le Brun, Alain, 2:91, 229; 3:61 Leclant, Jean, 4:480 Leda, 4:481,482 Lederman, Zvi Betii-Shemesh excavations, 1:311 Shiloh excavations, 5:28 Leeds, University of. See University of Leeds Lefkandi, 5:194 Legal documents Aramaic text, 2:213-214 Babylonian texts, 4:298 healthcare, 3:453 Hittite text, 3:86, 87 Khana texts, 5:189 Kultepe texts, 3:309-310
in private archives, 3:355 Temple Scroll, 5:164 Ugarit texts, 5:265 Legge, Anthony, 4:89 Legh, Thomas, 3:52 Legio aqueduct, 1:158 Legio II Parthica, 1:146-147 Legio III Cyrenaica, 3:358, 360 Legio IV Martia, 3:360 Legio VI Ferrata, 3:361 Legio X Fretensis, 1:154; 3:360 Lehun, 3:340-341 Leibowitz, J., 2:169 Leichty, Erie, 1:93 Leiden University. See University of Leiden Leilan, Tell (Shekhna; Shubat-Enlil), 3:341-347 acropolis, 3:343, 344, 345, 346 Akkadians, 1:52, 53; 3:343-345 climate, 2:38, 247, 248; 3:345 excavations, 3:46 Lejjun, el-, 1:347; 3:360; 5:238 Lemaire, Andre as contributor, 1:176-177; 2:138-140; 4:189-191 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 'Ira, Tel, identification, 3:175 on Israelite schools, 3:366 Lemnos, excavations, 3:76 Lemta (Lepti), 4:161 Lender, Yeshayahu, 4:463 Lenormant, Charles Francois, 2:258-259 Lenzen, C. J., as contributor, 1:297-298; 3:181; 5:238-241 Lenzen, Heinrich J., 5:294 Leonard, Albert, Jr, as contributor, 4:112-113 Naukratis, 4:112 Leone, Mark, 3:141 Leon Levy Expedition, 1:221 Leontopolis. See Raqqa, arLeprosaria, 3:455 Lepsius, Richard, 1:83; 2:260; 3:68 Lepti (Lemta), 4:161 Leplis (proper), 3:348 Leptis Magna, 1:277, 285; 3:347-350 Lemer, Judith, as contributor, 3:184-186 Leroi-Gourhan, Arlette, 5:15 Lesbos, Assos founding by, 1:224 Lesko, Barbara Switalski, as contributor, 2:144-145; 3:419, 439-440; 4:66-67, 113 Leto, 2:159, 359; 3:386 Letter of the Satirical Scribe, 4:432 Letters Adon letter, 1:182; 2:213 Aramaic text, 2:213 Driver letters, 5:360 Emar texts, 2:239 of Paul, St., 1:322-323, 324 See also Amarna tablets; Libraries and archives; Mari texts; Writing and writing systems Levallois culture Carmel, Mount, 1:425, 427 Hayonim, 2:487 lithics, 3:371-373; 4:208 Transjordan, 5:227 Levant, 3:350-351 agriculture, 1:23, 24, 25-28, 354 Amarna tablets, 1:83, 86 animal husbandry, 1:140; 4:348 arches, 1:189, 190 bilingualism, 3:160
511
building materials and techniques, 1:363-364, 368 burial sites, 1:384-385 ceramics, 1:461 Cilia, 1:124 Egyptian occupation of, 2:199 fortifications, 5:334-336 grave goods, 2:433 ivory carving, 1:342-343 lamps, 3:327, 328 shell jewelry, 1:343 writing materials, 3:159 Levant (journal), 1:357; 4:263 Levi (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 Levi, Doro, 3:74 Levi, Israel, 2:107 Levi, Peter, 4:419 Levi Delia Vida, Giorgio, 3:351 Levine, Lee I. as contributor, 1:309-311 Caesarea excavations, 1:403 Leviticus, Book of Canaan reference, 1:409 Qumran texts, 2:121 Levy, Leon, 1:221 Levy, Shalom, 2:256 Levy, Thomas E. as contributor, 2:404-405; 3:401-402; 5:34-36, 101-104 Chalcolithic belief system, 3:140 Gilat excavations, 2:404 Shiqmim excavations, 5:35 Levy, Yossi, 4:20, 462-463; 5:374 Lewis, Naphtali, 5:358, 360-361 Lewond, 1:210 L'Hote, Nestor, 1:82-83 Libanae, 1:228 Libanios, 1:144, 145; 5:139-140 Libation altars, 1:80-81 Libnah, 2:256 Libraries and archives, 3:351-357 administrative texts and letters, 3:161, 354 Alexandria, 2:203, 204 Ananiah, 2:214 Anatolia, 1:133 Assyrians, 1:233; 3:352, 356 Babylonians, 1:254; 3:356 Bogazkoy, 3:84 British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1:358 British Institute of Persian Studies, 1:358 of Creswell, Keppel Archibald Cameron, 2:70 Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, 2:96, 97 Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abteilung Damaskus, 2:149 Deutsches Archiiologisches Institut, Abteilung Istanbul, 2:150 Ebla, 2:181, 184-185; 3:353; 5:150-151 Egypt, 4:501 historical geography, 3:32 institutional, 3:354 Mesopotamia, 4:501 Mibtahiah, 2:214 Nag Hammadi, 2:204; 4:87, 88 Nineveh, 3:353, 356; 4:145; 5:96 Nuzi, 3:128, 272 palace, 3:356 private, 3:354-355 Puzurum, 5:189-190 Sippar temple, 5:48, 49 storage andfiling,3:353-354; 4:501
512
INDEX
Libraries and archives, continued Ugarit, 5:259 See also Inscriptions; specific inscriptions and texts Libya, 3:357-358 Phoenicians, 4:155, 163 as ruler of Lower Egypt, 3:384-385 Libyan (language), 3:334-335 Libyan Desert, 1:70 Libyan Valleys Survey, 3:358 Lichtheim, Miriam, 4:415 Lidar Hoyiiklion bones, 3:361-362 pig domestication, 4:348 Lieberman, Saul, 5:115 Liebowitz, Harold A. as contributor, 1:301-302, 340-343; 2:352-354; 5:379-381 Beth-Gan soundings, 1:301 Yin'am, Tel, excavations, 5:380 Liere, WillemJ. van, 1:354; 3:333 Life in Ancient Egypt (Erman), 2:260 Life of Jesus (Renan), 4:421 Life ofMastoc', The (Koriwn), 1:208, 209 Lifshitz, Baruch, 5:114 Lighthouse, Pharos, 1:67 Lighting, See Lamps Lihyanite dynasty, 2:133-134 Lihyanite script, 4:447 Limassol, 1:87, 88 Limes Arabicus, 1:263; 3:358-361 creation of, 4:227; 5:238 Limes Arabicus Survey, 3:359 Limes of Chalcis, 4:386 Limestone Temple (Eanna), 5:294 Linder, Elisha, 3:389; 5:16, 17, 282, 283 as contributor, 3:389-390; 5:17-18, 282-283 Lindner, Manfred, 3:55; 4:304 Lindner, Rudi Paul, as contributor, 1:135-137 Linen. See Flax; Textiles Link, Edwin A„ 1:402; 5:282 Linseed oil, 1:231 Lions, 3:361—362 Ishtar, 4:173 ordiostats, 5:210 Lion Spring (Azraq), 1:244 Lipit-Ishtar, literacy of, 3:363 Lippens, Philippe, 3:80; 4:371 Liquid crystal tunable filter (LCTF), 4:345 Lisan. See Lake Lisan Lisht. See Itjtawy Literacy, 3:362-369 invention of vowels linked with, 1:78 of nomads, 5:237 spread of, 3:366-368 Ugarit population, 5:261 See also Inscriptions; Writing and writing systems Literature. See Literacy; specific languages Lithics, 3:369-382 Bronze and Iron Ages, 3:378-382 anchors, 1:137-138 blades, 3:378-379 chipped stone industries, 3:378-380 dressed stones, 1:362, 364 fieldstones, 1:361-362 ground stone industries, 3:380-382 sickles, 3:378, 380 tabular scrapers, 3:379 vessels, 3:380-381 Byzantine and Islamic periods, 1:379 Carthaginian quarries, 1:431 tables, 2:360
Chalcolithic, 1:336; 3:374-378 blades, 3:375 chipped stone industries, 3:375-376 decorative items, 3:376-377 ground stone industries, 3:376-377 tabular scrapers, 3:376 vessels, 3:376 Epipaleolithic, 3:370-371, 373 Harifian, 3:373; 4:210 Kebaran, 2:487; 4:89, 209 Natufian, 2:219, 486; 4:89, 209 Neolithic, 1:446 chronological development, 3:373 Khiamian, 4:210 Pre-Pottery, 4:210-211 Sultanian, 4:210 Paleolithic Acheulean, 3:371-372; 4:207-208 Ahmarian, 3:373; 4:208, 209 Amudian, 4:208 Aurignacian, 2:487; 3:373; 4:208-209 Carmel, Mount, caves, 1:425, 426-427 chronological development, 3:371-373 Egyptian, 2:191, 192 Levallois, 3:371-373; 4:208 Mousterian, 3:372; 4:208 Pre-Aurignacian, 3:372 Yabrudian, 3:372; 4:208 Pliocene, 2:450 typology and technology, 1:336; 3:369-374 See also Marble; Masonry Lithuanian (language), 3:151 Litwuer, Mary Aiken, as contributor, 1:485-487; 5:343-344 Littmann, Enno, 2:275; 4:447; 5:276 Liturgy Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:123-124 Judaism, 2:123-124; 5:119 Livestock. See Animal husbandry; Catde and oxen; Equids; Pigs Livia-Julia, 1:303 Livy, 3:34, 336 Lixus (Larache) ,4:162 Lloyd, Seton Howard Frederick, 3:382-383 'Aqar Quf excavation, 1:156 Eridu excavations, 2:259 Hassuna excavations, 2:483 Iraq Expedition, 2:164 Rimah, Tell er-, survey, 4:428 Taya, Tell, 5:158 Ubaid, 5:251 Lochias promontory (Alexandria), 1:65, 66 Loculi burials, 1:39; 5:220 Locus, 3:383-384 Aharoni's definition of, 5:88-89 balk, 1:268-269 Dever's and Lance's definition of, 5:88 geology and, 2:391 See also Stratigraphy Lodo. See Yassiada (Lodo) wrecks Loeb Classical Library, The, 4:419 Loffreda, Stanislao as contributor, 1:416-419 Capernaum excavations, 1:417; 2:343 Tabgha excavations, 5:150 Loftus, William Kennett, 2:302; 3:57 Babylon excavations, 1:252 Larsa soundings, 3:331 Nimrud excavations, 3:338; 4:141 Sifr, Tell, excavations, 4:12 Susa soundings, 5:106 Uruk-Warka excavations, 5:294
Logosyllabaries, 5:353, 354-355 Lohmann, Paul, 4:102 Lombard, Pierre, 4:367 London, Gloria Anne, as contributor, 1:448-450, 450-453; 2:295-296 London, University of. See University of London Long, Gary Alan, as contributor, 2:261 Longstaff, Thomas R. W., as contributor, 2:57-59 Looms. See Weaving Lopadion fortification, 1:136 Loprieno, Antonio, as contributor, 2:208-213; 3:22-26 Loretz, Oswald, 1:59, 60 Lorey, Eustache de, 3:174 Loschcke, Georg, 2:365 Lot, 1:103 Lotan, 2:82 Loud, Gordon Iraq Expedition, 2:164 Khorsabad excavations, 3:295 Megiddo excavations, 3:462-463 Louis IX (king of France), 2:75 Louis-Philippe (king of France), 1:354 Louvre (Paris), 1:354 Parrot, Andre, 4:248 Thureau-Dangin, Francois, 5:203 Lowendial, David, 2:271 Lower City (Hazor) rampart, 2:320 Lower Egypt, 2:195; 3:384-385 Loytved, M. J., 4:241 Lu'ath, 5:387 Lucanus, Marcus Annaeus, 3:336 Lucas, Alfred, 5:360 Lucian of Samosata, 3:167 Lufan, Moshe, 2:377 LufamYuval, 2:377 Lugalanne-Munda, 1:14 Lugalbanda, 5:95 Lugal Da-udug, 1:14 Lugalzagesi, 1:50; 5:98, 295-296 Luke, John T., 1:108 Luke, Gospel of, 1:323, 324 Lukka (people), 3:385, 386 Lulli, 5:33 Lullingstone Villa, house church, 3:120 Lumber. See Wood Luminescence dating, 2:115; 4:208 Lunden, A. G„ 3:365 Lundquist, John M. as contributor, 1:324-330 Qarqur, Tell, excavations, 4:370 Lund University. See University of Lund Lunz, A. M., 3:47 Luria, B. Z., 2:65 Luristan (Tepe Guran) bronze production, 4:14 Elamites, 2:229-233 geography of, 2:229 Luschey, Heinz, 1:331 Lute, 4:77-78 Luwian (language), 1:128, 129, 185, 186; 3:149 Egyptian hieroglyphs and, 3:23 hieroglyphic system of, 3:25-26, 386; 5:355 Hittite language and, 3:85 Neo-Hittites, 4:126 onomastica, 4:95 See also Inscriptions, Luwian Luwians, 1:128, 129; 3:385-386 Lux, Ute, 2:150; 3:54, 394; 5:282
INDEX Luxor Aramaic texts, 2:213 furnishings, 2:360 Luynes, due de, 3:391; 4:116 Lycia, 3:386-387 Anatolian kingdoms, 1:130 church, 1:135; 3:387 inscriptions, 3:163 Luwians and, 3:385, 386 Ptolemy rule over, 1:131 rock-cut tombs, 1:132 wall paintings, 5:328 Lycopolis. See Asyut Lycopolitan (dialect), 2:66 Lydia gardens, 2:384 Gordion, 2:430 Jewish settlements, 1:134 Sardis as capital of, 1:130; 4:485, 486 wealth and kings of, 1:130 Lydian (language), 3:163; 4:485 Lygdamis (Tugdammu), 2:12 Lynch, William Francis, 3:40, 52 Lynd-Porter, Adam, as contributor, 4:129-130 Lyon, David G., 1:35, 95 Lyonnet, B., 3:286 Lyre, 4:77 Lyschina, Katharina, 4:497 Lysias, 1:314 Lysimachos, 1:131, 132; 4:260 Ephesus, 2:253 portrait of, 2:46 Lysippos, 2:95 M
Ma'abed ('Amrit), 1 : 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 , 194 Maacah (Bit Maacah) in Execration texts, 2:420 Hadadezer coalition, 2:420 location of, 5:133 Maadf, 2:142; 3:384 Ma'agan Mikha'el, 3:389-390; 4:18; 5:282 Maaibre, 2:305 Ma'an, 2:188 Ma'anit, 5:105 Ma'aridh, al-, 2:77-78 Ma'ayeh, Farah S., 4:449 Mabrak, el-, 1:99 Mabry, Jonadian B., as contributor, 5:365-367 MacAdam, Henry I., 5:276 Macalister, Robert Alexander Stewart, 3:41, 390-391 'Azekah excavation, 1:243 ceramics and, 1:459 Gezer excavations, 2:396-400; 3:391; 4:235 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225, 229, 391 Judeideh, Tell el-, excavations, 3:259 Mareshah excavations, 3:412 Maccabee, Judah, 1:314, 352; 2:482 Maccabee, Mattahias, 2:481-482 Maccabee, Simeon, 2:482 Maccabee Revolt (167-165 BCE), 3:142, 256 Maccabees. See Hasmoneans Maccabees, Books of, 1:5, 114, 325; 2:483; 3:1 MacDonald, Burton as contributor, 2:477-478; 5:64-66 Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Archaeological Survey, 5:64 Wadi el-Hasa Archaeological Survey, 2:477
Macdonald, Colin, 3:75 Macdonald, M. C. A., as contributor, 1:357 Mace, Arthur C , 1:12 Macedonian Legion, Fifth, 2:240; 4:226 Macedonians. See Alexandrian Empire Macedonian Wars (200-197, 172-168 BCE), 4:356 Maces, 5:336 MacGillivray, J. Alexander, as contributor, 2:292-293; 4:28-30 Machaerus (Mukawer), 3:391-393 Machicolation, 2:335 Machrames, 1:224 Mackay, Ernest H., 1:38; 3:298 Mackenzie, Duncan, 3:393 Ashkelon, 4:310 Beth-Shemesh excavations, 1:311, 312 Evans, Arthur, 3:75 Mackey, E. J. H., 2:188 Mackowski, Richard, 1:277 Macler, Frederic, 5:276 Macmillan Bible Atlas (Rainey), 4:416 Macquarie University (Australia), 4:20 Macqueen, James G., 4:26 Macuch, Rudolf, as contributor, 3:409-412 Madaba, 3:393-397 Ammonite settlements, 1:103, 104 Cadiedral Church, 3:427 inscriptions, 2:6 Madaba map mosaic, 2:8; 3:394, 395; 5:239 Madaba Plains Project, 3:55; 4:136; 5:103, 273, 274 Madabum. See Hureidha Mader, A. E„ 5:111 Madhhur, Tell, 2:267, 471 houses, 2:164, 472; 3:94; 5:303 tombs, 2:473 Madhloom, Tariq, 4:145 Madina al-Munawwara (Madinah). See Medina Madinat al-Salam. See Round City Madinat az-Zahra', 1:349 Madrash al-Adiliya (Damascus), 1:242 Madrash al-Firdaws (Aleppo), 1:242 Madrash az-Zahiriya (Damascus), 1:242 Madrash of Najmaddin (Cairo), 1:242 Maeir, Aren, 4:461 Mafjar, Khirbat a]-, 1:477; 3:397-399; 4:233 Baramki, Dimitri Constantine, 1:274 bath, 3:398 garden, 2:388 palace, 2:334; 3:250, 398 pcriodization of, 4:272 Magan (Makkan) Oman identified with, 1:160, 161 trade, 1:266 Magazines. See Periodical literature Magdala (Majdal; Migdal), 2:378; 3:399-400 Magen, Menahem, 3:234 Magen, Yitzhak, 4:408, 470; 5:105 Magganubba, 3:295 Magharat Ablun, 5:38, 39 Maghreb. See North Africa Maghzaliyeh, Tell grain-storage pits, 2:432 houses, 3:91-92 Magic Assyrian beliefs, 1:231 See also Amulets Magna Mater. See Aphrodite Magnesia ad Maeandrum, 1:200 Magness, Jodi, as contributor, 1:475-479; 3:18-19, 441-442; 4:273
513
Magness-Gardiner, Bonnie as contributor, 2:8-11, 424, 487-488; 4:509-512 Hayyat, Tell el-, excavations, 2:487 Magnetic archaeometry, 3:400-401; 4:424 Mahdi, al-, 1:3, 4, 265; 2:307 Mahdia, 4:161 Mahdiyah, al-, 2:307 Mahdiyya, 4:58 Mahesh ware (ceramics), 1:478 Mahfouz, Naguib, 1:168 Mahmadar, 3:66 Mahmoud, As'ad, 3:45 Mahmud Agha. See Tepe Mahmud Agha Mahmud Bey ("El-Falaki"), 1:66 Mahra, 5:253, 254 Mahram. See Assos Mahrama, Khirbet, 5:391, 392 Mahram Bilqis. See 'Awwam Temple Mahrem, 1:240 Mahu Yubna. See Yavneh-Yam Ma-ib Re Sheshi, 1:40 Maier, Franz Georg, as contributor, 4:245-246 Maigret, Alessandro de, as contributor, 3:291-293 Ma'in, 1:162; 4:384 Mainz University. See University of Mainz Maiuri, Amadeo, 2:463 Majali, Faris al-, 2:306 Majdal. S"ee Magdala Majdaluna, 5:40 Makeda. See Sheba, queen of Makedah, 2:256; 4:391 Makkah. See Mecca Makkan (Magan) Oman identified with, 1:160, 161 trade, 1:266 Makouria, 4:171 Makria Vounara, 3:77 Mal(i)dija. See Arslantepe Malachi, Book of, 4:433 Malalas, 1:144, 145 Malamir. See Izeh Malatya, 1:212,215 Malchos (Iamblichos), 4:386 Malek, Jaromir, 4:416 Malhata, Tel, 2:261; 4:121, 213, 390 Malichus I, 4:82 Maliehus II, 4:81 Malih, Wadi, 4:165 Malik, Hisham ibn 'Abd al-, 5:269 bedouin, 4:381 Khirbat al-Mafjar palace, 3:250 numismatics, 4:233 Malik al-Mu'azzam, al-, 1:41 Malimar. See Izeh Malkata, 3:118 Mallia anchorfinds,1:138 excavations, 3:75 palace, 4:28 Mallon, Alexis, 1:249; 3:401-402 Iktanu, Tell, 3:143-144 Neuville (Rene) influence upon, 4:130-131 Safut, Tell, survey, 4:449 Teleilat el-Ghassul excavations, 3:401-402; 5:161 Mallory, James, 3:155, 156 Mallowan, Max Edgar Lucien, 3:402 Balawat excavation, 1:268 Brak, Tell, excavations, 1:355; 3:45-46 British Institute of Persian Studies, 1:358 British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1:359
514
INDEX
Mallowan, Max Edgar Lucien, continued Khabur Triangle, 3:286 Mozan, Tell, 4:60 Nimrud, 4:141, 143 Nineveh sounding, 4:145 Malta, 3:402-405 Maltepe-Mut, 1:358 Ma'lula, 1:184; 3:405 Malyan (Anshan), 3:406-409 Elamites, 1:490; 2:229, 230, 232, 233; 3:408; 4:281,282 Kaftari period, 3:406, 407, 408 Sukkalmah period, 4:283-284 viticulture, 5:305 Mamluk dynasty. See Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties Mampsis. See Kurnub Mamu, 1:268 Ma'mun, al-, 1:3, 265 Man (journal), 4:267 Manasseh (king of Judah), 1:211, 324-325 Manasseh, Judah bar, 1:275 Manasseh, Mount, 4:164, 165-166 Manasseh, survey of. See Northern Samaria, survey of Manasseh, tribe of, 5:149 Manbij (Hierapolis; Nampigi; Nappigi), 3:409 Manchester, University of. See University of Manchester Mandaeans, 1:183; 3:409-411 Mandaic (language), 1:183; 3:409-412 alphabet, 3:410 phonetics, 3:411 vowel notation, 1:178; 3:410 Mandatory Department of Antiquities. See Department of Antiquities (British Mandate Palestine) MandaviUe, Jon, as contributor, 1:90-91 Mandeville, John, 3:67 Manetho, 1:73; 2:196 Manfredi, Giuseppi, 3:394 Mangers. Sec Stables Mangles, James, 3:52 'Iraq el-Amir, 3:177 Moab, 1:447 Pella, 4:257 Mani (Manichaean sect), 2:78, 485; 4:294, 493-494 Manishmshu, 1:52, 226; 4:283; 5:48 Manlius Vulso, 2:430 Mannai (Minni), 2:480 Manoah, sacrifice of, 1:80 Manor, Dale W., as contributor, 1:302; 3:259-260; 4:64 Mansur, Abu Ja'far al-, 1:1, 3, 264-265; 4:405 Mansur el-'Aqeb, 5:301 Mansuriyah, al-, gates at, 1:404 Manual of discipline. See Rule of the Community Manual of Excavation in the Near East, A, (Bade), 1:262 Manuel (Byzantine emperor), 2:74 Manuscripts Crusader, 2:76 Deuteronomy fragments, 2:37 See also under Photography Manzat (Nin-ali), 1:488 Manzikert, battle of (1071), 1:135 Ma'oz, Zvi Uri as contributor, 2:417-424 Banias excavations, 1:271 Qasrin excavations, 4:381
Ma'oz Hayyim, 1:194 Mapping. See Computer mapping; under History of the Field Maqdissi, Michel al-, 3:43 Maqlub, Tell, 5:366 Maqlti series, 4:459 Maquss, Tell, 1:153 Maragha, 5:213 Maras (Marqas), 4:126 Marathus. See 'Amrit Marble Adulis fragments, 1:16, 17 Aphrodisias quarries and sculpture, 1:151, 152, 190, 191 architectural decoration, 1:190-191, 201 Marburg University. See University of Marburg Marchellus (bishop), 1:146 Marcion, 1:324 Marcus, David, 1:59 Mardikh, Tell. See Ebla Marduk Babylonian worship of, 1:252, 254, 255, 261; 3:481 in Enuma elish, 2:82; 3:368 Marduk-apla-iddina II, 1:484; 5:296 Mare, W. Harold, as contributor, 1:5-7 Mareotis. See Lake Mareotis Mareshah (Marisa; Tell es-Sandahanna), 3:412-413 Alexandrian influences, 1:72 cisterns, 2:13 olive oil production, 4:180 Margueron, Jean-Claude as contributor, 2:236-239; 3:331-333, 413-417; 4:197-200, 248-249; 5:165-169 Larsa excavations, 3:332 Mari excavations, 3:413 Meskene excavations, 3:44, 108 Syro-Palestinian house form, 3:108 Ugarit excavations, 5:257 Marhaba, 5:392 Marhasi (Parahse), 1:52; 4:282; 5:187 Mari (Tell Hariri), 2:289; 3:413-417; 5:128 Aegean Islands, 1:21 Akkadians, 1:50 Alalakh, 1:55, 56 Amorites, 1:108, 110, 256; 3:415-416; 5:188 Assur and, 1:226 Assyrian conquests, 1:229 Badiat ash-Sham, 1:263 baths, 1:283 customs archive, 3:354 Dagan temple, 5:170 drainage system, 5:10 Emar, 2:236, 237 excavations, 1:261; 3:45, 413; 4:3 garden, 2:383 irrigation, 3:182-183 palaces, 4:197-198, 199 sacrificial temple space, 5:166 Shakkanakku dynasty, 3:415 temple-tower, 5:168 wall paintings, 5:325-326 See also Mari texts Marib (Maryab), 1:90, 162; 3:417-419 Arnaud, Thomas Joseph, 3:78 dam, 1:162; 2:275; 3:418; 5:377 Himyarites, 3:27 temples, 3:417-418 Mariette, Auguste, 1:12; 4:480 Marimadia, 5:253
Marinates, Spyridon, 3:74 Marisa. See Mareshah Maristan an-Nuri (Damascus), 1:242 Mari texts, 2:40; 3:161, 182-183, 419-421 Amorite references, 1:107, 110; 3:420 metals trade, 4:11-12 Maritime trade. See Seafaring; Trade Mari Tin Inventory, 4:11 Marjameh, Khirbet el-, 1:35; 5:105 Marj ibn Amir, 3:248 Mark, Gospel of, 1:323 Decapolis in, 2:128 Qumran fragment, 2:124 Marketou, T., 3:77 Markha, Wadi, 5:376 Markianos Kyris, 1:195 Markides, Menelaos, 2:241; 3:330 Markoe, Glenn, as contributor, 4:324-331 Marks, Andiony E., 3:307 Markwart, Joseph, 3:144 Marlik, 3:421-424 Marmara, Sea of, 5:3 Marmi monastery, 2:386-387 Maro, Publius Vergilius. See Vergil Maronite archaeological nationalism, 4:108 Marqab, castle of, 2:76 Marqas (Maras), 4:126 Marquet-Krause, Judith, 1:32; 3:424 Marquis, Philippe, 1:295 Marrou, Henri I„ 3:365 Marseille Tariff, 3:424-425 MarSipri (newsletter), 1:93; 4:262 Marston, Charles, 2:390; 5:77 Marston-Melchett Expedition, 3:221 Marthari, Marisa, 3:76 Martin, Geoffrey T., 4:480 as contributor, 1:358-359 Martin, Harriet P. as contributor, 2:301-303 Fara survey, 2:302 Martin, Flenri, 2:389 MAR.TU. See Amorites Martyrion, 2:2, 4; 3:425-428 of'Adrha, el- (Hah), 3:426 basilicas and, 1:278 of St. Babylas (Antioch), 1:278; 2:4; 3:426 of St. Herakleides (Politiko), 3:427 of St. Simeon Stylites (Qal'at Sim'an), 1:278 3:426, 427; 4:369 Maruaten (Amarna), 1:85 Marit yamina, meaning of term, 1:109 Marwan ibn Muhammad, 1:1 Marwanids, 5:269 Marx, Karl, 3:139 Marx, Robert, 5:18 Maryab. See Marib Maryland, University of. See University of Maryland Mary (mother of Jesus) Church of the Nativity, 2:3-4 Said Naya cloister, 4:456 Marzamemi, 1:397 Masada, 3:428-430 architectural decoration, 1:193, 194; 3:428-429 biblical archaeology, 1:31 fall of, 2:314; 3:429-430 fortifications, 2:330; 3:428 as national symbol, 2:272; 3:48; 4:108 synagogue, 5:118 texts found at, 2:119, 125, 126; 3:429
INDEX tourism, 2:153 water supply, 4:422 MASCA. See Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology Masetti-Rouault, Maria Grazia, 3:45 Mashkan-shapir (Tell Abu Duwari), 1:93; 3:430-432 Mashti, 3:200 Masilah, Wadi, 5:376 Masjid al-Haram (Mecca), 1:165 Masjid al-Juma, 1:165 Masjid al-Khamis (Bahrain), 1:166 Masjid at Qiblatain, 1:165 Masjid Quba (Medina), 1:165 Masjid 'Umaribn al-Khattab, 1:165, 166 Maskhuta, Tell el- (Heroon polis), 3:134, 432-437 houses, 5:86 plan of, 3:433 stratigraphic section drawings of, 5:84, 85 Masmahig. See Bahrain Masonry Achaemenid, 1:369 ashlar, 1:362; 2:422; 3:465; 5:293 Greek (classical), 1:370 monumental, 1:364-365 rubble, 1:366 synagogue plans, 2:422 Masorah, 2:119-120 Masos, Tel (Khirbet el-Meshash), 3:437-439 Esdar, Tel, and, 2:261 houses, 3:109, 438 plan of, 3:438 Maspero, Gaston, 1:234; 3:173, 439-440 Masry, Abdullah H., 3:79, 80 Masson, Olivier, as contributor, 5:321 Mastabat Fara'un (Saqqara), 4:362, 479 Mastoc', 1:208, 209 Mas'Udiye, mosaic, 4:50 Matanba'al, 1:218 Matara, 1:16; 2:2; 3:440 Marar (Cybele), 1:130; 2:429 Mataria boat, 3:441 Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 532-332 B.C. (Stern), 1:452 Mathiesen, Hans E., 3:202 Mathilde (princess), 4:421 Matf'elof Arpad, 1:181, 186 Matira, al-, 1:3 Matsas, Dimitris, 3:76 Matson, Frederick R., 1:452 Matt'eos Ufhayec'i, 1:210 MatternJ., 4:368 Matthew, Gospel of, 1:323; 2:128 Matdiews, John, 4:419 Matthews, Roger J. as contributor, 2:406-409; 3:56-60, 211-213 Brak, Tell, excavations, 1:355 Jemdet Nasr excavations, 3:212 Matthews, Victor H., as contributor, 3:30-33, 306; 4:262-267, 415-420 Matthiae, Paolo as contributor, 2:180-183 Ebla excavations, 2:180; 3:43-44 Mattingly, Gerald L., as contributor, 1:406-407 Maundrell, M., 1:111 Maures, 4:154 Mauretania, 4:154, 162 Mausoleum, 3:441-442; 5:221 Halikaraassos, 1:200; 2:347, 463^164; 3:441
in Kidron Valley, 2:347-348; 3:442 Marib, 3:418 Shema', Khirbet, 5:26 Mausolus, tomb of (Halikarnassos), 1:200; 2:347, 463-464; 3:441 Mauss, C , 1:447 Mawza', 4:41 Maxentius, basilica of, 1:277 Max von Oppcnheim Foundation, 1:491 Mayan (language), 5:352-353 Mayence, F., 1:146 Mayer, L. A., 3:230 Mayrhofer, Manfred, 3:153 Maysar, 1:161 Mays, James Luther, 4:415-416 Mazaca (Caesarea), 1:420 Mazar, Amihai 'Ain es-Samiyeh, 1:35 Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 4:417 as contributor, 1:281-283, 305-309, 383-384; 2:406, 476; 3:47-51, 442-443; 4:217-222, 373-376 Betii-Shean excavations, 1:306 bull site excavations, 1:383 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 Giloh excavations, 2:406 Hartuv excavations, 2:476 on Jaffa "temple," 3:206 Jerusalem tombs, 3:227 Qasile, Tell, excavations, 4:373 Tel Batash excavations, 1:281 Mazar, Benjamin, 3:47, 442-443 Arad, 1:174 Beth-She'arim excavations, 1:238, 309 Beth-Yerah excavations, 1:312, 313 'Ein-Gedi excavations, 2:222 'Ein-Gev excavations, 2:223 Gerisa, Tel, identification, 2:394 Geshur, 2:420 'Ira, Tel, identification, 3:175 Jerusalem excavations, 3:226-227, 232, 233, 234, 235; 4:430 Qasile, Tell, excavations, 3:48; 4:373 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 on Royal Stoa, 1:277 students of, 1:30 Zeror, Tel, identification, 5:389 Mazar, Elat, 3:227 Mazar, Tell el-, 3:443-444; 5:233 Ammonite inscriptions, 1:106 Mazdaism, See Zoroastrianism Mazdak, 4:493 Mazor, Gaby, 5:105 Mazum. See Sohar Mazzoni, Stefanie, 3:44 McAlpin, David, 2:133 McCane, Byron R., as contributor, 1:386-387; 4:187-188, 481-482 McCarter, P. Kyle, 1:95 McClellan, Murray C , as contributor, 5:314-317, 318-321 McClellan, Thomas L., 2:290 as contributor, 2:290-292; 3:286-288; 4:65-66, 389 Far'ah, Tell el- (North), 2:304 Qitar, el-, excavations, 4:389 McCormick Theological Seminary, 5:21 McCown, Chester C , 1:262 McCown, Donald E„ 4:149 McCredie, James, 3:76
515
McCreery, David W. ACOR directorship, 1:89 as contributor, 1:88-90; 2:474; 3:443-444; 4:140-141 Nimrin, Tell, excavations, 4:140 McDowell, Robert, 2:78 McEwan, Calvin W., 2:300 McFadden, George, 3:71, 444-445 Kourion excavations, 3:305, 444 McGovern, Patrick E. as contributor, 1:272-274 Baq'ah Valley excavations, 1:272 McKenzie, Judith, 4:304; 5:155 McNicoll, Andtony W., 4:257 McQuitty, Alison M., 1:447 as contributor, 3:90 Paris, Khirbet, excavations, 2:306 McRay, John Archaeology and the New Testament, 4:419 as contributor, 4:392 Me'arat Elyaqim, 5:104 Measures. See Weights and measures Measuring techniques, archaeological, 1:198-199 Meat animal husbandry as source of, 1:141 See also Hunting Mecamor, 1:204, 205 Mecca (Makkah; Umm al-Qura), 3:445-446 Darb Zubaydah, 1:4 Islamic conquest of, 1:164-165 mosque orientation to, 1:3, 154 pilgrimages to, 1:4, 165; 3:445 Salah ad-Din's conquest of, 1:241 waterworks, 3:445-446 Mechta el-Arbi (skeleton type), 2:192 Mecquenem, Roland de Chogha Zanbil excavations, 1:487 Susa excavations, 2:229, 345; 3:61; 5:107-108 Meda'in Saleh (Hegra), 1:163; 2:134; 3:446-447; 4:81 Medeibi, 1:448 Medeineh, IOrirbet el-, 1:447; 3:447-448 Meder, 1:240 Medes, 3:448-450; 4:293 architectural decoration, 3:449-450 Assur destroyed by, 1:228 Ecbatana, 2:186 Mithridates' conquest of, 4:287 Nineveh captured by, 1:230 Medewe. See Meroe Media. See Medes Median (language), 3:449 Medicine, 3:450-459 Egyptian, 3:452 flowers as, 5:15 Greek, 3:451-452, 457 Hittite, 3:451 incense as, 3:147, 454 Islamic, 3:455, 457 Mesopotamian, 3:452-453, 456 metal implements, 4:16-17 Persian, 3:453-454 Syro-Palestinian, 3:454-455, 458 See also Paleopathology Medina (Madinah; Taiba; Yathrib), 3:459-460 Great Mosque, 4:55, 58; 5:269-270 as Islamic center, 1:164, 165; 3:459-460 mining sites, 1:4 Salah ad-Din's conquest of, 1:241 Sasanian devastation of, 1:164
516
INDEX
Medina al-Zahira, 2:36 Medina al-Zahra, 2:36; 5:270 Medinet Habu inscriptions, 4:310 reliefs, 3:122-123; 4:508-509; 5:32 Mediterranean Historical Review, 4:267 Mediterranean Sea 'Atlit ram discovery, 1:234 first complete excavation of floor, 5:283 See also Seafaring; Trade Mediums. See Cult, specialists of Medracen, 2:349 Medusa, 2:225 Meek, Theophile, 5:346 Meer, Frederik van der, 4:419 Mefaa, Kastron. See Umm er-Rasas Mefjerware (ceramics), 1:477-478. See also Mafjar, Khirbat al-. Megadim, Tell, 2:25-26, 27 Megarians, 1:481 Megaron plan, 1:127 Megarons Gordion, 2:428-429 as Mesopotamian temples, 5:166-167 Megaw, A. H. S., 3:71, 305 Megiddo (Tell el-Mutesellim), 1:262, 277; 2:26; 3:460-469 administrative center, 2:24 Benzinger, Immanuel, 1:299 biblical archaeology, 1:31 city gate type, 1:219; 3:465, 467 cultic installations, 5:170 excavation publications, 5:87 fortifications, 2:29, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325; 3:462 Guy, Philip Langstaffe Orde, 2:443; 3:461 houses, 3:102, 103, 111 jewelry, 3:241, 242 open altar, 1:80 plan of, 2:21 silo, 2:341,432 size of, 2:20, 22 stables, 3:467; 5:71-73 temple, 5:171, 173 tourism, 2:153 waterworks, 1:290; 3:130, 467; 5:331-332 Mehcrdates, 4:288 Mehesti, 1:234 Mehmeh River, 5:181, 182 Mehmet 1, 5:214 Mehrez, Gamal, 2:366 Mehrgarh, copper artifacts, 4:5-6 Mehri (language), 5:61 Meidum, pyramid, 4:362 Meijer, Diederik J. W., 3:46, 286 Meilich, A. L., 4:397 Meinecke, Michael as contributor, 3:409; 4:378-379 Raqqa, ar-, excavations, 4:405 Meinel, Reudiger, 4:177 Meiron, 3:469-470 new archaeological methodologies, 4:136 Shema', Khirbet, and, 5:27 synagogue, 5:120 Meiron Excavation Project, 2:370, 371, 374; 3:469; 4:136, 528 Meisterwerken der griechischen Plastik (Furtwangler), 2:365 Mekataten, 1:85 Meketre, tomb of, 5:31 Melbourne, University of. See University of Melbourne
Melchett-Marson Expedition, 3:221 Melchizedek (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:121 Melid. See Arslantepe Melisende, 2:74 Melkite Christians, 1:183; 2:205 Mellaart, James Catal Hoytik, 1:438 Ghrubba soundings, 2:402; 3:54 Hactlar excavation, 2:448-449 Hayyat, Tell el-, 2:487 Mellink, Machteld J., 1:57, 92; 2:9 Anatolian metallic ware, 2:426 Gordion Project, 2:427-428 Melos, 2:70 seafarer visitations, 4:505 Venus di Milo, 3:74 Meloy,Jolm L., 1:154 Melqart, 1:112, 413, 430; 4:328 stela, 1:181 in Tyrian pantheon, 4:316 Meluhha, 1:266; 5:375 MEM. See Middle East Medievalists Membranophones, 4:73-74 Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon (Rich), 1:251 Memorial of Moses (Mount Nebo), 4:115-116 Memorial of St. Peter (Capernaum), 2:343 Memphis (Mennefer; Menophreos), 3:470-471 as administrative center, 2:197, 199 Aramaic texts, 1:182 Asiatics in, 2:198; 3:133 Giza and, 2:411 palace (representational), 3:118 Memphis Shipyard Journal, 2:215 Menant, Joachim, 2:258-259 Menas flasks, 1:474 Mendel, Gustave, 4:487 Mendels, Doron, as contributor, 1:275-276; 2:313-315, 481-483; 3:33-35; 4:356-358, 514-515 Menden, Wendelin von, 1:417 Mendenhall, George, 1:89, 107; 2:282 Mendes, 3:385 Mene'iyeh, Wadi. See Timna' (Negev) Menes, 2:196; 3:183; 4:479 Menherein. See Assos Meninx. See Jerba Menkaure (Mycerinus), 2:411; 4:88 Mennefer. See Memphis Menophreos. See Memphis Mentia, 1:157; 5:292 Mepha'at, 2:343 Mephaath. See Umm er-Rasas Meqabelein, 1:99 Merbal, 1:219 Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (Mills), 4:417 Mercianus, P.Julius Geminfus, 1:101 Merenre, 4:363 Meretaten, 1:85 Merida Alcazaba, 2:336 Meriggi, Piero, 1:213 Medicare, 3:364 Merimde (Merimde Beni Salame), 2:141, 193; 3:384, 471-472 Merkelbach, Reinhold, 1:482 Merkes (Babylon), 1:254 Merle (Crusader fortress), 2:169 Mermnad dynasty, 4:485 Merneptah, 1:220; 2:398; 3:192 Merodach-Baladan II, 2:383 Meroe (Bedewe; Medewe), 3:472-473; 4:171 pyramids, 3:473; 4:364 Merom, 2:370
Merot location of, 3:469 synagogue inscription, 5:115 Merrill, Selah, 3:473-474 American Palestine Exploration Society, 1:91 American Schools of Oriental Research, 1:94 Beit Ras, 1:297 Church of the Holy Sepulcher, 3:474 Iktanu, Tell, 3:143 Jordan expeditions, 3:52 Safut, Tell, 4:449 Umm el-Jimal, 5:276 Mersa Gawasis, 5:31 Mersa Madakh, 4:162 Mersin, 2:9 fortifications, 5:334 prehistoric settlement, 1:124, 125, 126 Mery-Sekhmet, 4:480 MES. See Mbssbauer effect spectroscopy Mesad Hashavyahu, 3:474-475 ostraca, 3:6, 474-475 Mesad Hasidin, 4:392 Mesaoria, 2:90 Mesar houses, 3:98 MESA. See Middle East Studies Association Mesha (Moabite king), 1:177, 178; 2:157; 4:38-40 inscription. See Moabite Stone Nebo conquered by, 4:115 Meshash, Khirbet el-. See Masos, Tel Meshel, Ze'ev as contributor, 3:310-312 Kuntillet 'Ajrud excavations, 3:310 Meshorer, Ya'acov, 4:420 Meshta, 2:480 Meshwesh, 3:384 Mesilla, 4:392 Meskene. See Emar MeSmahik. See Bahrain Mesopotamia, 3:476-489 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1-5 agriculture, 1:23-25 Akkadian language, 1:44-49 Akkadians, 1:50-54 Alexandrian, 1:70, 72, 73 Amarna letters, 1:83, 86 American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad, 1:92-94, 95-96 Amorites, 1:110 Anatolia, 1:124-126, 128, 129 animal husbandry, 1:140, 141, 142-143 Arabian Peninsula, 1:160, 165 Aramaic language, 1:186 Arameans, 1:184-187 architectural decoration, 1:194, 355 Assyrian culture and sites, 1:228-233 Babylon, 1:251-256 Babylonians, 1:256-262 baths, 1:283 biblical literary analyses, 1:321 British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1:355, 359 building materials and techniques, 1:355, 361, 363-364, 366, 368, 372-373 cereals, 1:480, 481 cuneiform, 1:76; 2:87 demography, 2:144 Elamite political relations, 4:283, 284-285 gardens, 2:383 glass production, 5:312, 314, 315, 319 glazed pottery, 5:312-313 healthcare system, 3:452-453, 456
INDEX irrigation, 2:250 lamps, 3:328, 329 metals trade, 4:9, 11 natural defense barriers, 3:30 ostraca, 4:190 palaces, 4:197 Roman annexation of, 1:144 Salah ad-Din's conquest of, 1:241 science, 3:161 streets, 4:431-432, 433 urbanization, 2:16-17 writing materials, 3:159 See also History of thefield,archaeology in Mesopotamia; specific sites and subregions; under specific topics Mesora, Horvat, 2:327; 4:121 Messenia, 1:332 Mesudat ha-Ro'a, 4:121 Metallurgy Aplild, 1:152 Armenia, 1:204 Enkomi, 2:244 Feinan, 2:310; 4:7 first evidence of, 4:6 Israelite, 3:195 large-scale, emergence of, 4:6-7 Shiqmim, 5:35 Metals, 4:1-20 artifacts of Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, 4:5-15 Anatolia, 1:127; 4:3,7 anchors, 1:138-139 Apliki, 1:153 Armenia, 1:204 Arslantepe, 1:214 axes, 4:3-4, 9 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 1:296 crucibles, 2:425-426 Cypriot, 2:91, 92 daggers, 4:8 Minoan, 2:71 pins, 2:39 pottery, 2:426 spearheads, 4:3 weights, 5:340 ardfacts of Persian through Roman periods, 4:15-20 Anatolia, 1:133 anchors, 4:18 'Adit ram, 1:234-236 Babylonian, 1:260 coins, 4:17 crucifixion nail, 4:18 helmets, 4:18 inkwells, 4:16 medical implements, 4:16-17 musical instruments, 4:16 slags, 4:19 slave collar, 4:18 toilet articles, 4:17 tools, 4:17 weights, 4:18 as building material, 1:363 in jewelry, 3:239; 4:9, 16; 5:157 trade, 4:9-10, 1 1 - 1 2 typology and technology, 4:1-5 bronze alloys, 2:424-425 hoards and, 4:1-2 as writing material, 5:358 See also Coins; Metallurgy; Mines and mining; specific kinds Metaxakis, Melezios, 3:394
Methyma, 1:224 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City) Cesnola, Luigi Palma di, 3:70 Hasanlu excavations, 2:480 Hiba, al-, excavations, 2:409 Nishapur excavations, 4:152 Me-Turan, 2:473 Me-Turnat (Tell Haddad), 2:471 Meuszy[a]nski, Janusz, 4:142 Mevorakh, Tel fortifications, 2:27 temple, 5:172 Meyer, Leo A., 5:111 Meyers, Carol L. as contributor, 2:442-443; 4:527-536 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, excavations, 2:227 Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Sepphoris excavations, 4:529 Meyers, Eric M. as contributor, 1:94-98, 238, 434-438; 2:69-70; 3:37-42, 469-470; 4:85-87, 527-536; 5:26-27, 118-123 ASOR presidency, 1:95 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, excavations, 2:227 Galilean material culture, 4:230 Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Jewish ossuaries, 4:188 Meiron excavations, 3:469 Nabratein excavations, 4:85 Sepphoris survey, 4:528 Shema', Khirbet, excavations, 5:26 Mezad Yehonatan, 2:420 Mezruah, 4:385 Meziizbt (doorpost amulet), 1:114-115 Miami, University of. See University of Miami Micah, Book of Moreshet-Gath, 3:259 sacrifices to Yahweh, 2:84 Michaelides, Demetrios, as contributor, 2:161-162; 4:138-139, 178-179 Michal, Tel, 4:20-22 fortifications, 2:329; 4:22 wine presses, 4:21, 22 Michalowski, Kazimierz, 1:67; 4:242 Michalowski, Piotr, 1:93; 5:354 as contributor, 5:95-101 Michel, Helen V., 3:277 Michigan, University of. See University of Michigan Michmanim (journal), 4:264 Microscopy, 4:22-24 tin processing, 2:425 vitreous materials identification, 5:306 Midas (king of Phrygia), 2:428, 430 Midas (Mita), 1:130 Midas Mound Tumulus (Gordion), 5:347 Middle Araxes River, 1:203 Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan, 4:24 Middle East Medievalists (MEM), 4:24 Middle East Studies Association (MESA), 4:24-25 American Institute for Maghreb Studies, 1:90 Middle Egyptian dialect, 2:208 Middot, l:325Midian, 1:163; 4:25, 397 Midrashim, 3:11, 12 Migdal. See Magdala Mignan, Robert, 1:252 Mihaic, Jerome, 4:117 Mikami, Tsugio, 3:66 Mikhal, Tel. See Michal, Tel Mikhmoret, Tel, 3:131 Mikro Vouni, 3:76
517
Miles, George C , 3:169 Miletus (Anactoria; Balat; Pituousa), 1:132; 2:160; 4:26-28 batiis, 1:285 provincial cult, 4:27 temple architecture, 1:200, 201 theaters, 5:199 Milik, Josef Tadeuz Copper Scroll, 2:64-65 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:189, 391 on Qumran's occupational phases, 4:393 Ride of the Community, 4:443 Militaty 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1, 3 Assyrian prowess and social structure, 1:229-230, 232; 3:482; 5:338 Greek soldier-setders, 1:72, 74 Macedonian system, 1:73-74 Mamluk governors, 1:242 Mirgissa residences, 3:116-117 Persian roads, 4:224; 5:43 Roman Legion, 2:313-314; 3:233, 335, 428; 4:226 seafaring, 4:508-509; 5:338 Seleucid Apamean headquarters, 1:145-147 warships, 2:378-379; 4:508-509; 5:32-33 See also Weapons and warfare Milk, 1:141, 142 Milkom, 1:104, 105, 106,413 Millard, Alan R., 3:365 Millawanda, 4:26 Miller, J. Maxwell, 1:447 as contributor, 1:447-448; 4:38-39 Paris, Khirbet, survey, 2:306 Miller, Naomi F„ as contributor, 5:304-306 Miller, Stephen G., as contributor, 5:74-75 Mills, Watson E„ 4:417 Milly, Maurice de, 3:281 Milly, Philip de, 3:281 Milwaukee Public Museum Hadidi, Tell, excavations, 2:453 Qitar, el-, excavations, 4:389 Mina, Tell alAlalakh excavations, 1:55, 115, 117 Greek colonization, 1:467; 5:350 Minatez-Zib, 1:13 Minerva, 5:197 Mines and mining Apliki, 1:152-153 Arabian Peninsula, 1:4, 161 Bolkardag, 5:156 Cyprus, 2:92, 93; 4:11 Feinan, 2:190, 310; 4:7 Kalavasos, 3:263-264 Kestel, 2:424; 3:283-284 Oman, 1:4, 160, 161, 164 Timna', 5:217-218 See also Metallurgy; Metals; specific ores mined Minet ed-Dhalieh, 1:293 Minet el-Beida, 5:256, 257 Minet Rubin. See Yavneh-Yam Minha, Horvat. See Munhata Ministry of Finance (Saudi Arabia), 3:79 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (France) Committee of Excavations, 2:345 French archaeological missions, 2:345-346; 5:13 Ministry of Information (Kuwait), 2:298 Ministry of Religious Affairs (Israel), 4:404 Ministry of Tourism (Lebanon), 2:272 Minnesota, University of. See University of Minnesota
518
INDEX
Mittmann, Siegfried, 1:447; 2:220; 3:262; 5:63, Minni (Mannai), 2:480 388 Minoans, 1:332; 4:28-30 as contributor, 5:388-389 Aegean Islands, 1:18, 19-20, 21 Beit Ras, 1:297 Greek language, 2:437 Gadara, 5:281 jewelry, 2:71 Ziqlab, Wadi, survey, 5:391 Miletus settlement, 4:26 Mizpah of Benjamin, 1:262 wall paindngs, 2:71, 100, 317 Nasbeh, Tell en-„ 4:101-102 Minshat Abu-Omar, 2:142 Mizrachi, Yonathan Mints. See Coins Minyeh, Khirbet al-, 1:417; 2:334; 4:233 as contributor, 4:442-443 Miqne, Tel (Ekron; Khirbet el-Muqanna'), Rujm el-Hiri excavations, 2:419; 4:442, 443 4:30-35 MMT (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:120 Albright Institute excavation, 1:63 Moab, 4:38-39 Aramaic text, 1:182 Amman, 1:100 Batash, Tel, 1:282-283 Ammonites, 1:104 houses, 3:110; 4:31-32 'Ara'ir annexation to, 1:177, 178 incense altar, 1:57 biblical references to, 2:157; 4:38 Iron Age expansion, 4:220 Central Moab, 1:447-448 new archaeological mediodologies, 4:136 cults, 2:81 olive oil production, 1:29; 4:33 fortifications, 4:38 in Philistine Pentapolis, 1:219, 220 Glueck survey, 1:62 Philistine settlement, 4:31-32, 310, 312 Medeineh, Khirbet el-, 3:447-448 Miqva'ol. See Ritual baths Moabite dialect Mird, Khirbet., texts found at, 2:119 onomastica, 4:94 Mirgissa, 3:116-117 seal inscriptions, 4:167, 168 Miroschedji, Pierre de Moabite Stone, 2:157; 3:52; 4:38-39, 39-41 as contributor, 1:276-277, 487-490; 2:442, 'Ara'ir, 1:177 476; 5:186-187, 369-372 Nebo, 4:115 Hartuv excavations, 2:476 Moats, 2:320-321 Yarmut, Tel, excavations, 5:370 Mocha (al-Mukha), 1:15; 4:41, 41 Mishmarol (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:122-123 Mochlos, 3:75 Mishnah,3:ll Mocius, St., 2:61 baths, 4:301, 430 Modderman, Pieter J., 3:333 oils in, 4:182-183 Modern Hebrew, 3:12 Mishor, 3:19-20 Modi'in, 5:105 Mishrifeh, Tell (Qatna), 2:266; 4:35-36 Moeller, Walter O., 5:197 fortifications, 2:324; 4:35 Mogador, 4:162-163 water source, 3:130 Mohammed Arab, Tell, 2:266, 267 Misis (Mopsuestia), 2:9; 5:122 Mohammed Diyab, Tell, 3:46, 343 Mission Archeologique de Perse, 1:75 Mohammed Jaffar. See Ali Kosh Mission Archeologique Suisse, 5:280 Mohl, Julius, 1:353 Mission de Haute Syrie, 3:172 Mohrmann, Christine, 4:419 Mission de Phenicie. See Phoenician Expedition Moh's Hardness Scale, 1:461 Missione Archeologica, 1:402 Molek, 1:105 Mississippi State University, 2:465 Molist, Miguel, 2:290 Missouri, University of. See University of Moltke, V., 4:476, 477 Missouri Momigliano, Amaldo, 3:180 Mita (Midas), 1:130 Momigliano, Nicoletta, as contributor, 3:393 Mitanni (Hum), 3:127, 287; 4:36-38; 5:129 Monaco, G„ 3:77 Alalakh, 1:55, 58, 59, 156 "Mona Lisa" of the Galilee (Sepphoris mosaic), Aleppo, 1:64 4:533, S34 Amarna tablets, 1:86 Monasteries, 2:30-31; 4:41-47, 228 Armenia, 1:205 Avdat, 1:237 Brak, Tell, 1:356; 4:37 Badiat ash-Sham, 1:263 Cilicia, 2:9 Cappadocian rock-cut, 1:135 Fakhariyah, Tell, 2:300 cenobia, 4:41-42, 43, 44, 45 kings of, 4:36-37 Constantinople, 2:63 seals, 4:511 Egypt, 4:42-44, 153-154 Tusratta letter, 3:125,126 gardens, 2:385, 386-387 Mitchell, T. C , as contributor, 5:349-350 Horns, 3:89 Mitford, T., 3:71-72 inscriptions, 2:7 Mithras (Mithra), 1:402; 3:119; 4:299 Kelliot, 4:42-43 Hellenistic period, 2:34; 4:124, 125 Kursi, 3:314-315 sanctuary at Dura-Europos, 2:176 laurae, 4:42, 44, 45 Sidon temple, 5:39 Nebo, Mount, 4:116, 117, 118 Mithridates I, 1:255; 4:287-288 Nitria, 4:153-154 Mithridates II, 4:288 Pachomius, 4:42, 43, 87-89 Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft su Palestine, 4:44-45 Berlin (journal), 4:264 Qartamin, 3:427 Mitteilungen des Deutschen Arehdologischen Sinai, 4:44; 5:46 Inslituts Romische Abteilung (journal), Syria, 4:45-46; 5:140 4:266 Monastery of Mar Maron (Horns), 3:89
Monastery of Mar Samuel, Mar Simeon, and Mar Gabriel (Qartamin), 3:427 Monastery of Mar Tommy (Horns), 3:89 Monastery of Martyrius (Khirbet el-Murasas), 4:44 Monastery of St. Catherine (Sinai), 4:44 Monastery of St. Mary ^Jerusalem), 5:149 Monastery of St. Savior, 2:343 Monastery of St. Simeon (Anba Hadra), 4:43 Monastery of Symeon Stylites the Younger (Mons Admirabilis), 4:46 Monastery of the Flagellation (Jerusalem), 2:343 Monastir (Rusapina), 4:161 Monchambert, J., 3:286 Moneija, Jebel, Nabatean inscriptions, 4:81-82 Money. See Coins Mongols 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1 Anatolia, 1:135, 136 Ayyubid kingdoms, 1:241 Baalbek sacked by, 1:247 Monks. See Monasteries Monk's Valley (Cappadocia), 1:421 Monophysitism Chalcedonians, 5:141 Coptic Church, 2:204-205 Council of Chalcedon, 2:204 Najran as center, 4:91 Mons Cain, 5:382 Mons Kasius, 5:44 Monte d'Accoddi-Sassari, 4:482 Montelius, Gustav Oscar, 4:2 Montet, Pierre, 1:391; 2:345; 4:47-48 Montgomery, James Alan, 1:95; 4:48-49 Monumcnta Asiae Minoris Anliqua, 1:131 Moody Atlas of Bible Lands (Beitzel), 4:416 Moore, A. M. T , 2:290 as contributor, 1:354; 2:171-172; 3:306-308, 333; 5:124-126, 301-303 on Ghrubba pottery, 2:403 Moorey, P. R. S., 5:307 Moortgat, Anton, 4:49 Chuera, Tell, excavations, 1:491; 3:46 Fakhariyah, Tell, excavations, 2:300 Moortgat-Correns, Ursula, 1:491; 3:46 Mopsuestia (Misis), 2:9; 5:122 Mor, Tel (Tell Mura), 4:49-50 Moran, William L., 1:86 Mordechai, 2:186 Moreshet-Gath, 3:259 Morgan, Jacques de Ecbatana, 2:187 French delegation in Persia, 2:345 Haft Tepe, 2:454 Susa excavations, 2:229 Moritz, Bernard, 4:396 Moritz, Heinrich, 3:405 Morphology Aramaic, 1:179-180 ceramic, 1:450-451,460 of cereals, 1:479-480 Egyptian, 2:210-212 Ethiopic, 2:279 in skeletal analysis, 5:52, 55 Morricone, Luigi, 3:77 Morris, William, 4:424 Morton, William H., 2:157; 5:275 Mortuary practices. See Burial sites; Burial techniques; Funerary monuments; Grave goods; Ossuary; Necropolis Mosaics, 4:50-55 Anatolia, 1:132, 133
INDEX Apamea, 1:146 Aphek, 1:141 as architectural decoration, 1:191 baptisteries, 1:272 Beth Alpha, 1:299-300 Beth-Guvrin, 2:188 boat documentation, 2:378 Byzantine, 1:397; 2:333 Christian, 4:52-54; 5:16 fortifications, 2:333 Gadara, 2:406 Hammath Tiberias, 2:470-471 Hellenistic, 4:50, 51 Islamic, 5:269, 270, 271 Jewish, 1:299-300; 4:54; 5:111, 115, 121 Madaba, 2:8; 3:394-397; 5:239 musical instrument documentation, 4:75 pebble, 4:50 Roman, 2:32, 225-226, 359; 4:51-52, 533-534 Sepphoris, 2:359; 4:533-535; 5:121 Syrian, 4:52-53; 5:113, 114 Umayyad, 5:269-270 Mosaics of Jordan,
The (ACOR publication),
1:89 Moscati, Sabatino, 3:197; 4:166 Moschou Vounara, 3:77 Moses, 1:174, 320 Ark of the Covenant, 2:275 Ebal, Mount, altar, 2:179 in Midian, 4:25, 397 Nebo, Mount, church, 4:115-116 at Qadesh-Barnea, 4:365 Tabernacle, 1:325 Temple Scroll, 5:164
Moshav Migdal, 2:377 Moskowitz, Shlomo, 5:206 Mosphilia, 2:91 Mosque, 4:55-58 'Abbasid, 1:3; 2:36; 4:56-58 'Ajlun, 1:41 Aleppo, 1:64, 65 Alexandria, 1:67, 68 Anatolia, 1:136 'Aqaba, 1:154 Arabian Peninsula, 1:165, 166 Ayyubid, 1:242 Baalbek, 1:248 Cairo, 1:405 congregational, 4:56-57, 475-476 Damascus, 2:103-104, 105-106 Fatimid, 4:58 Hama, 2:468 Horns, 3:89-90 Isfahan, 3:185, 186 Medina, 3:459-460 minarets, 4:55, 56 nine-bay plan, 4:57 Persia, 4:57-58, 291 Samarra, 1:3; 4:56-57, 475-476 tile decoration, 5:214 Umayyad, 4:56; 5:269-270 See also Great Mosque headings; Masjid headings; specific mosques below
Mosque inscriptions, 4:58-60 'Ajlun, 1:41 Cairo, 4:58, 59 Damascus, 4:58-59 Isfahan, 4:59, 60 Jerusalem, 5:269 Kerak, 3:282 Medina, 3:460
Mosque of al-Aqmar, 4:59 Mosque of 'Ali Qundi (Fahraj), 4:58 Mosque of 'Amr (al-Fustat), 5:269 Mosque of Hakim, al- (Cairo), 1:242; 2:206, 308; 4:58. 4.59 Mosque of Hakim, al- (Isfahan), 4:58 Mosque of Ibn Tulun (Cairo), 4:56, 57, 58, 59 Mosque of Ilyas Bey (Miletus), 4:27 Mosque of Mutawakkil, al- (Samarra), 4:475-476
Mosque of die Prophet (Medina), 1:165; 3:459-460; 5:269-270 Mossbauer effect spectroscopy, 1:120 Mostafavi, M. T., 4:275 Mosul. See Nineveh Mosul Museum, 1:232 Mosul, University of. See University of Mosul Mot, 1:413; 2:82 Mottra, M., 2:290 Mound, burial. See Tumulus Moundrell, Henry, 5:38 Mount. For toponyrns beginning with this element, see under latter part of name
Mourners, professional. See Cult, specialists of Mouseion (Alexandria), 1:66, 67 Mousterian culture, 4:269 Biq'at Quneitra, 2:418 Carmel, Mount, 1:425, 427 lithics, 3:372; 4:208 Mouterde, Rene, 4:350 Mouttes, 2:92 Movses Xorenac'i, 1:210 Moyer, James C , as contributor, 4:262-267, 415-420 Mozan, Tell (Urkes), 4:60-63 excavations, 3:46, 287; 4:60 plan of storehouse, 4:62 plan of temple, 4:61 Mseifneh, 2:267 Mu'awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, 1:165, 166; 5:268-269, 271 civil war witii 'Ali, 5:143, 268 in Damascus, 2:105 Umayyad dynasty founding, 1:247; 5:241, 268-269 Mudai, 5:254 Mudowarah, Tell el-, 2:419 Muclshelibe. See Babylon Mugharat Ablun, 2:261 Mugharat et-Tabun. See Tabun cave Mughara, Wadi el-, inscriptions, 3:171 Mughayyir, Tell el-, 5:388 Mughira, al-, 1:349 Muhammad (die Prophet), 1:154; 3:445, 459 founding of Islam by, 1:154, 164-165,166 on funerary monuments, 2:351 Hebron, 3:13 house of (Medina), 4:55 revelations of, 3:168-169 in Syria, 5:141 Muhammad 'Ali, 1:65 Muhammad ibn Jabir al-Battani, 5:145 Muheisen, Mujahed as contributor, 1:279-280
Basta Joint Archaeological Project, 1:279 Muheisen, Zeidoun, 2:478 Muhgaret Abu Shinjeh (Cave I), 2:101-102 Muhly, J. D„ as contributor, 2:89-96; 3:73-77; 4:1-5, 5-15 Muilenburg, James, 4:102 Mujib, Wadi al-, 1:100, 177, 269, 270; 5:233 Mukatteb, Wadi, inscriptions, 3:171; 4:83
519
Mukawer. See Machaerus Mukha, al-. See Mocha Mukharrim, al- (Baghdad), 1:265 Mukhayyat, Khirbet el-, 3:53; 4:116-117, 117 Mulissu-mukannisat-Ninua, 4:143 Miiller, Carl Otfried, 1:144 Miiller, David Heinrich, 2:275; 3:78 Miiller, Friedrich Max, 2:132 Miiller, Walter W., 5:386 Miiller-Karpe, Hermann, 4:2 Muller-Karpe, Michael, 4:3 Muller-Wiener, Wolfgang, 4:26 Mumbaqat, 1:56 Mummies (Egyptian), pathology of, 4:205 Munbaqa (Ekalte), 2:292 Munbaqat, Tell, 3:106 Mundhir the Lakhmidian, el-, 1:145 Mundus (quarterly review), 4:263 Munhata, 1:7, 8; 4:63-64 Munich, University of. See University of Munich Munro, J. A. R„ 4:457 Munro-Hay, Stuart, 2:276, 277 Munsell, Albert H., 4:64 Munsell chart, 1:461; 4:64 Munsell
Soil Color Charts. See Munsell chart
Muqanna', Khirbet el-. See Miqne, Tel Muqattam, 2:365, 366 Muqayyar, Tell el-. See Ur Muqtadir, 1:1 Mura, Tell. See Mor, Tel Murabba'at, Wadi, 4:64-65 textfindings,2:119; 3:6; 4:65 Mureybet, 1:23; 2:288; 4:65-66 Muristan Quarter (Jerusalem), 3:230 Murphy, Roland E., 4:415 Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome as contributor, 1:5; 2:187-189; 3:324-325; 4:443-444; 5:299-300, 303-304 on Damascus Document,
2:107
Rule of the Community, 4:443 Murray, A. S., 2:241; 4:457 Murray, Margaret Alice, 1:38; 3:53; 4:66-67 Mursili 1, 1:56, 64; 3:85, 128 Mursili Plague Prayer, 5:247 Murwab, 4:385 Musa, Wadi, 4:303 Musa Pool (Jericho), 4:351 Musasir, 2:480 Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA), 1:272 Museum of Anthropology (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 5:181 Museum of Antiquities (Tel Aviv-Jaffa), 3:206 Museum of Art and Archaeology (University of Missouri), 1:117 Museum of Natural History (Paris), 1:353 Museums and museology, 4:67-70 acquisitions policies, 4:70 artifact conservation, 1:215-217; 4:69 cataloging, 4:69-70 display and presentation, 4:67-68 ethics, 2:272 storage, 4:68 tourism, 5:224-225 See also specific museum
names
Musharralmt, al-, 4:476 Musical instruments, 4:70-79 metal artifacts, 4:16, 73 musical notation, 5:130 Ugarit excavations, 5:261
520
INDEX
Musi], Alois, 1:236 Arabian topography, 3:79 Faris, Khirbet, 2:306 Halusa, 2:465 Humeima, 3:121 Madaba, 3:394 Mukhayyat, Khirbet el-, 4:117 Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi, 4:379 Qusayr 'Amra, 4:397 Transjordanian geography, 1:447 Musiyan. See Tepe Mussian Muski, 5:208 Mussian. See Tepe Mussian Mustafa, Mohammad Ali, 2:146, 259 Mustafavi, T„ 3:60 Mustansir, al-, 2:308 Musuri (Moabite king), 4:39 Mu'tadid, al-, 1:1, 265 Mutah University, 3:56 Mu'tasim, al- (caliph), 1:1, 265; 4:473, 475 Mutatio Heldua. See Khaldeh MutawakkiLJa'far al-, 1:165; 4:473, 476 Mutawakkiliyah, al- (Mutawakkiliyya), 1:3; 4:476 Mu'taziliyah, 5:145 Mutesellim, Tell el-. See Megiddo Muwaffaq, al-, 1:1; 5:145 Muwaharani, 5:247 Muwatalli, relief of, 2:8-9 Muza, 1:15; 4:41 Mycenaean Greek (language), 2:72, 434-435, 437; 3:150 Mycenaeans, 1:18, 21, 332 Mycerinus (Menkaure), 2:411; 4:88 Myers, Allen C., 4:417-418 Myers, Wilson and Ellie, 1:199; 5:278 Mylouthkia, 2:91 Myra church, 1:135 Myres, Sir John L „ 4 : 7 9 - 8 0 Enkomi excavations, 2:241 Lapithos, 3:330 Salamis, 4:457 Myrina, 1:131 Myriocephalon, battle of (1176), 1:135 Myron (Greek sculptor), 2:95 Myrrh. See Frankincense and myrrh Myrtos, 5:194 N NAA. Sea Neutron activation analysis Na'am, Tell en-. See Yin'am, Tel Na'aman, Khirbet, 5:183 Na'aman, Nadav, 1:86, 289 Beersheba location, 1:288 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 'Ira, Tel, identification, 3:175 Lahav identification,3:325 Zeror, Tel, identification, 5:389 Na'aman River, 1:54 Na'aran, 5:121 Nabata. See Nabateans Nabatean inscriptions, 4 : 8 1 - 8 2 , 83-84 Aramaic influence on, 1:182; 4:83, 84 Avdat, 1:237; 4:81 Halusa, 2:465; 4:81 Petra', 4:304 Qumran texts, 2:124-125 Nabateans, 4 : 8 2 - 8 5 , 171; 5:236, 237 Aila, 1:154
under Alexandrian Empire, 1:72 Amman, 1:100 Arabic script, 1:168, 178 'Ara'ir occupation by, 1:178 art, 1:190, 193; 3:447 Avdat, 1:236-237 Beidha, 1:291 Bosra, 1:352 gardens, 2:385-386 Glueck surveys, 1:62, 96 Halusa, 2:465, 466 Hasa, Wadi el-, territory, 2:478 Kurnub, 3:312-314 Lehun, 3:340-341 Meda'in Saleh, 3:446-447 Moab and, 1:447 Nessana, 4:129 origins of, 4:82 Petra, 4:304-305 pre-Islamic culture, 1:163 religion, 4:84 settlement patterns, 4:83 in Sinai, 5:45-46 Tannur, Khirbet et-, 5:153-155 trade, 4:82, 84 Umm el-Biyara remains, 5:275-276 Nabeul. See Neapolis Nabi Salah houses, 3:100 Nablus. See Shechem Nabonidus, 1:41; 3:483; 4:128 inscriptions, 1:252 museums, 4:67 skin disease of, 2:121-122 Tayma', 5:160 Ur rebuilding, 5:291 Nabopolassar, 3:483 Babylon building project, 1:254 at Nineveh, 4:147 Nabratein (Kefar Neburaya), 4 : 8 5 - 8 7 synagogue, 4:85-86; 5:118, 119 trade, 2:374 Nabu Assur sanctuary, 1:228 Babylon temple, 1:254 Chogha Zanbil temple, 1:487 Khorsabad temple, 3:296-297, 298 Nimrud temple, 4:144 Palmyra temple, 4:239, 240 Palmyrene pantheon, 4:243 scribal profession, 3:367 Naccache, A., 4:369, 370; 5:5 Nadan, 1:182 Nadawiyah, 3:42 Nadelman, Yonatan, 5:105 Nagar. See Brak, Tell Nagel, Wolfram, as contributor, 4:49 Nag Hammadi, 1:323; 2:204; 4 : 8 7 - 8 9 Nag Hammadi Bibliography (Scholer), 4:419 Nag Hammadi Library in English (Robinson), 4:419 Nag Hammadi papyri, 4:87, 88 Nagila, Tell, houses, 3:104 Nahalal, 5:104 Nahal Beersheba, 5:35 Nahal Besor, 3:207, 213 Nahal Gerar, 5:1 Nahal Hemar, 5:53, 191 Nahal Hever, 2:39 Cave'of Horror, 3:258 Cave of the Letters, 2:316; 3:258; 4:65 texts found at, 2:119 Nahal Issaron, 1:279
Nahal Kissufim, 4:463 Nahal Kovshim, 4:462 Nahal Lachish, 2:247 Nahal Mamshit, 3:313 Nahal Me'arot, 4:97 Nahal Mishmar, 1:443 Cave of die Treasure, 1:24; 3:258 loom, 5:192 metal hoard, 2:230; 4:2, 6-7 Nahal Oren, 3:48; 4 : 8 9 - 9 0 , 349; 5:53 Nahal Samakh, 2:419; 3:314 Nahal Se'elim beadwork purse find, 3:240 textfinds,2:119; 4:65 Nahariya shrine, 5:170 Nahar Malcha, 3:484 Nahas. See En-Nahas, Khirbet Naliash, 1:104 Nahlat Ahim neighborhood (Jerusalem), 3:226 Nahr al-Kabir, 5:255, 256 Nahr al-Qa'im, 4:473 Nahr al-Qubleh, 1:111 Nahr al-Rasasi, 4:473 Nahr 'Amrit, 1:111 Nahrawan irrigation system, 1:3; 5:207 Nahr Buq district (Baghdad), 1:264 Nahshoni, Pirhiya, 4:462 Nahum, 1:176 Nahum, Book of, Qumran commentaries, 2:121 Najd, 1:165 Najran (Ra'ma; Uklidud, al-), 3:27; 4:90-91 Nakada. See Naqada Nakhti, 1:234 Names and naming, 4:91-96 divine, 4:93 historical geography, 3:32 onomastica Indo-European, 4:95 Semitic, 4:93-95 patronyms, 4:91 seal inscriptions, Northwest Semitic, 4:167-168 toponyms, 4:92-93 Nami, Tel, 4:96-97 Nammu waterworks, 3:182 Nampigi. See Manbij Namra, Horvat, 2:421 Nanna Babylonian temple for, 1:254 in Sumerian pantheon, 5:100 Ur, 5:289 Napata Nubian dynasty, 4:171 pyramids, 4:364 Naphtali (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:123 Napir-Asu, 1:490; 5:109 Napirisha, 1:487, 488 Naples, 1:390 Napoleon I Denon, Dominique Vivant, 2:144, 145 Egyptian invasion by, 1:65; 3:37-38, 68; 4:105 on ideologues, 3:139 See also Napoleonic scientific expedition Napoleon III, Phoenician Expedition, 2:345; 5:38 Napoleonic scientific expedition, 2:344; 3:37-38, 68; 4:105 Amarna, Tell el-, 1:82 Asyut, 1:234 Nappigi. See Manbij Napratep, 1:488
INDEX Naqada (Nakada; Negadah), 2:194; 4:97-98 Naqsh-i Rustam, 4:98-101 plan of, 4:99 rock tombs and reliefs, 1:218; 4:98-101 Naram-Sin, 1 : 1 5 , 420; 2:408 Akkade, 1:41,42, 44 deification of, 1:259; 5:98 palace (Tell Brak), 1:355 reign of, 1:52, 53, 54 stela of, 1:52, 261; 3:481; 5:80 Subir conquered by, 3:343 Narmer, 2:196 Narseh, 4:101, 491, 493 Narubta, 5:48 Nasatya, 4:36 Nasbeh, Tell en-, 1:452; 4 : 1 0 1 - 1 0 3 Bade excavation, 1:262 cisterns, 2:13; 3:131 fortifications, 2:28, 320 four-room house plan, 2:338 Nasir Dawud, al-, 3:281 Nasir-i Khusrau, 2:367 Nasiriyyah stela, 1:50 Nasir Muhammad, al-, 1:241; 3:282 Nasoraeans, 3:410, 411 Nasser. See Lake Nasser Naster, P., 3:340 National Divers Federation, 5:283 National Geographic Society, 4:136 Baq'ah Valley excavations, 1:272 Nationalism and archaeology, 1:317; 4 : 1 0 3 - 1 1 2 "counterhistories," 4:109-111 Cypriot, 2:90 European, 4:104-106 European versus American, 3:40 Near Eastern nation-states, 4:106-109 secularism's effect upon, 4:108 tourism, 5:225 National Maritime Museum (Plaifa), 1:234 National Museum of Lebanon, 2:272 National Museum of Madrid, 4:397 National Museums of France Larsa excavations, 3:331 Mari soundings, 3:413 Vounous excavations, 5:322 National Parks Audioriry (Israel), 5:89 National Register of Historic Places, 2:271 National Science Foundation (U.S.), 2:135; 4:136; 5:181 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), 2:273 Natrun, Wadi 'n-, 4:153 Natufian culture, 4:209 Beidha, 1:291-292 burial techniques, 5:53 Carmel caves, 1:426 Hayonim, 2:486-487 Jordan Valley, 3:249; 5:227 lidtics, 2:219, 486; 4:89, 209 Nahal Oren, 4:89 Ras en-Naqb, 4:411 Nau, Michel, 1:417 Naukleros, Georgios Presbyteros, 5:372 Naukratis (Kom Ge'if), 2:142; 4 : 1 1 2 - 1 1 3 architectural orders, 1:200 as Greek trading colony, 1:72; 4:112 Nautians, 1:244 Nautical archaeology. See Underwater archaeology Naveh, Joseph 'Ein-Gedi excavations, 2:222 inscription translation, 1:491
Mesad Hashavyahu excavations, 3:474 Mesad Hashavyahu texts, 3:475 Miqne, Tel, identification, 4:30 Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, 4:354 synagogue inscriptions, 5:114 Naville, Edouard, 4 : 1 1 3 Dab'a, Tell ed-, excavations, 2:99 Maskhuta, Tell el-, excavations, 3:432, 436 Yahudiyeh, Tell el-, excavations, 5:368 Navy. See Military; Weapons and warfare Nawar. See Brak, Tell Naxos, 3:76 Nazareth, 1:263; 2:343; 4 : 1 1 3 - 1 1 4 Nazaretii Fault, 4 : 1 1 3 Nea Church (Jerusalem), 1-278; 4:422 Nea Come (Shavei-Zion), 5:16 Neah, 5:333 Neanderthals 'Amud, 5:53 Douara, 2:172; 5:124 Kebara cave (Mount Carmel), 1:427; 4:208 luminescence dating, 2:115 Shanidar cave, 3:450; 5:15 Tabun cave (Mount Carmel), 5:153 Yabrud, 5:124 Nea Paphos (New Paphos), 2:95, 152; 4:52, 245, 246 Neapolis (Nabeul), 3:348 coins, 4:471 Roman destruction of, 4:161 Nearchus, 1:70 Nebamun, tomb of, 5:31 Nebhepetre Mentuhotep, 2:197 mortuary temple of, 5:176-177 Nebi Daniel mosque (Alexandria), 1:67 Nebi Is, 4:386, 387 Nebi Mend, Tell (Qadesh), 4 : 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 Nebi Samwil, identification of, 4:102 Nebi Yunus, Tell, 4:146, 147 Nebo (village), gravestones, 2:351 Nebo, Mount, 2:343; 4 : 1 1 5 - 1 1 8 Bagatti excavations, 1:263; 3:53 church, 3:427 Nebuchadrezzar II Arad inscriptions, 1:176, 177 Arwad, 1:219 Ashkelon destroyed by, 1:220 Babylon under, 1:251-256, 258-261; 3:483 Brisa, Wadi, inscription, 5:348 First Temple's destruction by, 1:328 Ur rebuilding, 5:291 Necho II, 2:159, 200; 3:434; 4:315; 5:249 Necropolis, 1:385; 4 : 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 Alexandria, 1:66, 68-69, 192 architectural decoration, 1:190, 192, 194 Arwad, 1:218 Axum, 1:240 Beth-She'arim, 1:309, 310 Byblos, 1:391, 393 Ebla, 2:182 Jerusalem, 1:385 Palmyra, 2:349; 5:221 Saqqara, 2:197, 207; 4:478-480 Nederlands Historisch-Archeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 4 : 1 1 9 - 1 2 0 Neely, James A. Tepe Mussian, 5:186 Tepe Sabz excavations, 2:135; 5:182 Ne'eman, Yehuda, 5:105 Neferhotep 1,1:40 Nefertari temples, 1:10, 11
521
tomb, 2:152 Nefertiti Amarna bust of, 1:82, 83 scarab of, 5:267 Negadah. See Naqada Negahban, Ezat O., as contributor, 2:454-457; 3:421-424 Negev, 4 : 1 2 0 - 1 2 2 Arad, 1:169-176; 4:120 arches, 1:190 'Aro'er, 1:211-212 Assyrian presence in, 4:221 Avdat, 1:236-238 Beersheba basin, 4:120, 121 Ben Gurion (David) and, 2:153 biblical archaeology, 1:31 blades, 3:378 Emergency Survey Project, 5:102, 105-106 inhabited area, 3:256 irrigation, 4:228-229 Israel Defense Forces redeployment in, 5:102, 105-106 olive oil production, 1:29 settlements, 4:120-121 Negev, Avraham Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy ljxnd, 4:417 as contributor, 1:236-238; 2:465-466; 3:312-314; 4:81-82 Avdat excavation, 1:236 Caesarea, 1:402 Halusa survey, 2:465 Kurnub excavations, 3:313 Nessana, 4:129 Subeita, 5:89, 90 Susiya excavations, 5:111 Negev Emergency Survey, 5:102, 105-106 Negev Museum, 5:35 Neghaban, Etat O., 2:229 Negre, Arlette, 3:175 Nehemiah (governor of Judea), 1:104; 3:177; 4:223 Nehemiah, Book of, 1:243 Nehemiah's wall (Jerusalem), 2:28 Neithhotep, 4:98 Neklien, 5:286 Nelson, Harold H., 1:356 Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, 1:62, 96, 211; 2:415-416; 4 : 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 Dan excavations, 2:108 Gezer excavations, 4:122 'Ira, Tel, expedition, 3:175 Qom, Khirbet el-, excavations, 4:391 Shiqmim excavations, 5:35 Skirball Museum, 4:123 Nemara, Arabic inscription, 1:168 Nemi. See Lake Nemi Nemi iron anchor, 1:138-139 Nemrik houses, 3:91 Nemrud Dagi, 4 : 1 2 3 - 1 2 6 "Neo-Assyrian Empire in die Seventh Century BC, The: A Study of the Interactions betwen Center and Periphery" (AIAR project), 1:63 Neo-Babylonian Empire Babylon city plan, 1:252-253 economic and social structure, 1:259 Nebuchadredzzar's conquests, 1:258 Neo-Hittites, 4 : 1 2 6 - 1 2 7 Aramean culture, 1:186 architecture, 1:129 Arslantepe as center for, 1:212-213
522
INDEX
New Testament. See Biblical literature, New archaeological expeditions, 1:231-232; Testament 3:57-58; 4:145 New Testament Abstracts, 4:263 as Assyrian capital, 1:227, 230 New Testament Apocrypha, 4:419 Assyrian population, 1:228 New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha: A bronze head, 1:52, 53 Guide to Publications with Excursuses on Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 2:266, 267 Apocalypses (Charlesworth), 4:419 Flood story tablet, 3:39 Newton, Charles Thomas, 4 : 1 3 8 as Hanging Gardens site, 1:255; 4:146 Halikarnassos, 2:463 Layard excavations, 3:321, 338, 356; 4:145; Kalymnos, 3:74 5:96 Salamis, 4:457 libraries, 3:353, 356; 4:145; 5:96 Newton, F. G., 4:235 palaces, 4:198 New York University, 1:151 plan of, 4:145 Hiba, al-, excavations, 2:409 reliefs, 5:33 Memphis excavations, 3:471 Ningal Nicaea I, Council of (325 CE), 1:133, 134, 135, Hurrian pantheon, 3:128 136, 394 Qatna temple, 4:35 Ningirsu, 2:407, 409 Nicaea II, Council of (787 CE), 1:394 Ningishzida, 5:296 Nicanor Gate (Jerusalem temple ), 1:329 Ninkarrak Nicephorion. See Raqqa, arNichol, Murray, 1:89 dogs associated with, 5:190 Nicocreon, 2:95 Terqa temple, 3:45; 5:189, 190 Ninmah Temple (Babylon), 1:254 Nicolaou, Kyriakos, 2:95; 3:72; 4 : 1 3 8 - 1 3 9 Ninos, 1:152 Nicomedes IV, 1:482 Ninsikilla, 2:297 Nicomedia, 1:133, 134 Niebuhr, Carsten, 1:145 Nintu temple (Khafajeh), 3:289, 290 Ninua. See Nineveh Arabian Gulf map, 4:385 Ninurta, 1:231; 3:187; 5:94 Babylon visit, 1:251 Nippur (Niffar; Nuffar), 2:19; 4:148-152 Zafar, 5:386 Abu Salabikh, 1:9 Nielsen, Inge, 2:385 Adab, 1:14 Nielsen, Kjeld, as contributor, 3:147-149 Akkadians, 1:49, 52, 53; 4:148-149 Niemeier, W. D., 4:26 excavations, 1:93, 258; 3:58; 4:3, 149-150 Niemeyer, Hans-Georg, 4:156 Jewish Babylonian Aramaic incantations, Nies, James B., 1:93 1:183 Nies, Jane Orr, 1:95 Niqmepa, 1:56, 60, 116 Niffar. See Nippur Nir, Ya'acov, 5:283 Nigde, 1:124 Nirou Khani, 3:75 Nigde Archaeological Museum, 2:424 Nisaba, 1:9; 3:367 Nikephoros II Phokas, 4:370 Nishapur, 2:364; 4:152-153, 292 Nikkal,2:80; 4:128 Nisibis, 1:183 4 : 1 3 0 ; 5:68 Nikopolis (Alexandria), 1:66 Nisibis, Treaty of (297 CE), 4:241; 5:137 petrography versus, 4:309 Nile, 4 : 1 3 9 - 1 4 0 Nissen, Hans J., 2:38 Neuville, Rene, 3:254-255, 378, 401; agriculture along, 2:246-247; 4:139 as contributor, 3:476-479, 479-484 4:130-131 Alexandria, 1:65, 66., 192 Basta Joint Archaeological Project, 279 Nevada, University of. See University of Nevada Amarna, Tell el-, 1:81, 83, 85 Nitos, Hananiah, 2:120 Nevah Cori, 1:446; 4 : 1 3 1 - 1 3 4 Asyut, 1:233 Nitria, 4:153-154 prehistoric settlement, 1:123, 124,446 climatic change, 2:247-248 Nitzan, Bilhah, as contributor, 2:445-446 ritual buildings, 5:302 flooding, 4:139, 535 Noah, 4:507 terraced architecture, 1:279 irrigation, 2:249-250; 3:182-183 Nobah, 4:449 wood products, 5:347 taxes associated with, 4:535 Noldeke, A. Neve, Peter, 1:334 See also Delta Herodian Jericho excavations, 3:16 New Archaeology, 4 : 1 3 4 - 1 3 8 Nile festival building (Sepphoris), 4:534-535 Uruk-Warka excavations, 5:294 excavation strategy, 2:293 Nilometers, 3:183; 4:535 Noldeke, Theodor, 3:411 Nimrin, Tell (Tell esh-Shuna), 4 : 1 4 0 - 1 4 1 , 213; impact of, 1:317-318; 3:41; 4:110 Nomadic Peoples (journal), 4:267 5:37 Patterson (Thomas) on, 3:141 Nomadism. See Pastoral nomadism Nimrin, Wadi. See Shu'eib, Wadi principal aspects of, 1:316 Nora, 4:484 Nimrud (Calah; Kalhu), 4 : 1 4 1 - 1 4 4 New Bible Atlas (Bimson and Kane), 4:416 Nor Baigirk' Haykazean Lezui (New Dictionary New Bible Dictionary (Douglas), 4:417 Ammonite inscriptions, 1:106 of the Armenian Language), 1:210 Newcombe, S. F„ 4:235 art works, 1:231; 4:143 Normans, 1:396; 5:320 Newell, Edward T., 2:46 as Assyrian capital city, 1:227 Norsuntepe, 1:125 New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations Assyrian populations, 1:228 North, Robert, 5:161 Layard excavation, 1:231; 2:399; 3:57, 338; in the Holy ljxnd, 4:417 Nortii Africa, 4:154-164 4:141; 5:163 New International Dictionary of Biblical 'Abbasid caliphate, 1 : 1 Archaeology (Blaiklock and Harrison), palaces, 4:198 American Institute for Maghreb Studies, 1:90 4:416 park, 2:383 ceramics, 1:472-473 New Jerome Biblical Commentary, 4:415 restoration work, 4:143 climate, 4:155 New Palace (Assur), 1:226 Nin-ali (Manzat), 1:488 funerary monuments, 2:349-350 New Paphos. See Nea Paphos Nina-Sirara (Zurghul), 2:406, 409 mosque plan, 1:3 Newsletter of the American Research Center in Nineveh (Kuyunjik; Mosul; Ninua), 4 : 1 4 4 - 1 4 8 topography, 4:154-155 Egypt, 4:262 agriculture, 1:42 Umayyad caliphate conquest of, 5:269 Newsletters. See Periodical literature; specific aqueduct, 1:157; 3:131 See also specific countries, sites, and subregions publications Aramaic texts, 1:182
Neolithic Revolution, three aspects of, 1:140 Neo-Platonists, 1:146 Nepheris, Roman destruction of, 4 : 1 6 1 Nephthys, 2:216 Neqrash, 4:112 Nerab, 1:277 Barrois, Augustin Georges, 2:188 excavations, 2:188 pantheon of, 4:128 Nerab inscriptions, 1:181, 277; 4 : 1 2 7 - 1 2 9 Nergal, 1:53; 2:301 Haddad, Tell, temple, 2:473 Hurrian pantheon, 3:128 Mashkan-shapir's dedication to, 3:432 Nergal-Eresh, 4:429 Nero, 1:205, 271 Neronias. See Banias Nerses IV Snorhali, 1:210 Nesa. See Kanes Neshite. See Hittite Nessana (Auja al-Hafir), 4 : 1 2 9 - 1 3 0 Nestor (journal), 4:266 Nestorian Christians, 1:183, 267; 4:290; 5:198 Nestorius, 1:394 Netherlands Historical-Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. See Nederlands HistorischArcheologisch Instituut te Istanbul Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, 4:119 Netjerikhet. See Djoser Netzer, Ehud Caesarea excavations, 1:403 Herodium excavations, 3:18, 19 Jericho excavations, 3:16, 17 Jerusalem excavations, 3:232 on Masada, 3:428, 429 Sepphoris excavations, 4:529 Susiya excavations, 5:111 Neujahrsfeslhaus (Assur), 1:227 Neutron activation analysis (NAA), 1:120, 121;
INDEX North Agora (Aphrodisias), 1:152 North American Historians of Islamic Art, 4:24-25 North Church (Huarte), 4:54 Northedge, Alastair, 4:473 as contributor, 1:1-5; 3:487-489; 4:473-476 Northern Cemetery (Beth-Shean), 1:307 Northern Palace (Eshnunna), 2:262, 264 Northern Palace (Masada), 1:193 Northern Samaria, survey of, 4:164-166 biblical archaeology, 1:30 Sec also Southern Samaria, survey of North Palace (Ugarit), 5:257, 258 North Sinai Expedition (1972-1982), 5:41-46 Northwestern University, Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Northwest Semitic, 2:79-80, 132 alphabetic systems, 5:262 Ebla archives, 2:181 Emar texts, 2:240 Northwest Semitic seal inscriptions, 4:166-169 Norton, Charles Eliot, 1:94, 187 Norton, R„ 2:97 Nosttatic studies, 3:155 Noth, Martin, 1:79, 319, 321; 4:169-170 on ancient name of Qumran, 4:392 Deutscher Paliistina-Verein, 2:147, 148, 149 Deutsches Evangelisches Institut fur Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes, 2:150; 4:169 Novocherkassk culture, 2:11 Noy, Tamar, 1:424 Nubia, 4:170-171 Abu Simbel, 1:10-11 ceramics, 1:472, 473 churches, 2:2 Egyptian occupation of, 2:199, 235 High Dam rescue campaign, 2:151-152, 271-272; 3:69 Nubt (Ombos), 4:98 Nuclear archaeological analytical techniques, 1:120-121 Nuffar. See Nippur Numbers, Book of, 1:182 Canaan reference, 1:409 Jericho reference, 3:220 priestly benediction in, 3:285 Numeira, 1:25; 3:55; 5:62, 231 Numenius, 1:146 Numidians, 4:154, 162 Numismatics. See Coins Nun, Mendel, as contributor, 2:315-317 Nuragic culture, 4:482-483 Nur al-Din, 1:242; 5:242 Apamea reconstruction by, 1:146 Fatimids and, 2:308 Nuri, 4:364 Nuristani languages, 3:149-150 Nush-i Jan. See Tepe Nush-i Jan Nusk, Nerab inscriptions, 4:128 Nusku, 1:489; 3:328 Nuzi (Gasur; Yorgan Tepe), 1:93, 95; 2:52; 4:171-175 agriculture, 1:42 Alalakh, 1:58, 60 architectural decoration, 4:173-174 archives, 3:128, 272; 4:172, 429 ceramics, 1:457; 4:174 Emar, 2:236, 237 excavations, 1:93, 95 seal impressions, 3:128, 129; 4:174
temple, 5:167 wall paintings, 5:326 Nylander, Carl, as contributor, 4:188-189 Nymphaeum Byblos, 1:392 Roman, 2:32 Nysa. See Beth-Shean
O Oak of Mamre, 3:13 Oates, David Brak, Tell, excavations, 1:355; 3:46 British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1:359 Nimrud excavations, 4:142 Rimah, Tell er-, excavations, 4:428 Oates, Joan Brak, Tell, excavations, 1:355; 3:46 Ubaid phases, 2:259; S:251 Obaishat tribe, 4:81 Obelisk of Manishtushu, 1:52 Obelisk of Sesostris I (Heliopolis), 3:15 Obelisks (Alexandria), 1:68 Obelisk temple (Byblos), 1:392 Oboda. See Avdat Oboda inscription, 4:81 Obodas I, 4:81 Obodas II, 1:236; 4:82 Oborzus, 2:48 O'Brien, Julia M., as contributor, 1:319-322 Obsidian, 2:9 Anatolian, 1:124 as dating aid, 2:116 O'Connor, David, as contributor, 1:10-11; 3:472-473 Octavian. See Augustus OD. See Optical dating Odainat, 4:241 Odenathus of Palmyra, 2:78 Odeum, 1:151; 2:381; 4:177-178 Odyssey (Homer), 2:439; 3:336 OES. See Optical emission spectrometry Ofer, Avi as contributor, 1:30-31; 3:253-257 Hebron excavations, 3:13 Judah survey, 3:254 Official Aramaic. See Imperial Aramaic Officina ('Ein-Boqeq), 2:221 Ogawa, Hideo, 2:223 Ohata, Kiyoshi, 5:389 Ohnefalsch-Richter, Max, 4:178-179 Idalion excavations, 3:137 Kition, 3:301 Myres,John L., 4:79 Salamis, 4:457 Ohrmazd. See Ahura Mazda Oil lamps. See under Lamps Oils. See sources, e.g. Olives Ojun, 1:206 O'Kane, Bernard, as contributor, 4:55-58 Olami, Yaacov, 1:9; 5:104 Olavarri, Emilio, 1:447 'Ara'ir ('Aro'er) excavation, 1:177; 3:54 as contributor, 1:177-178; 3:447-448 Medeineh, Khirbet el-, excavations, 3:447 Olba, 1:132 Olba-Diocaesarea tower tomb, 2:347, 348 Old Akkadian dialect, 2:181, 183 Old Aramaic dialect, 4:128, 518 Old Assyrian dialect, 3:308-310 Old Babylonian dialect, 1:44-46, 47
523
noun declension, 1:48 See also Mari; Mari texts Old Canaanite dialect, 4:517 Old City (Caesarea), 1:401 Old City (Jerusalem) Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, 2:343 furnishings, 2:360 Old Egyptian dialect, 2:208 Old Northwest Iranian. See Median Old Palace (Assur), 1:226, 227, 228 Old Paphos. See Paphos Old Persian dialect cuneiform, 5:356 inscriptions, 1:330-331; 3:162-163 Old Syriac, 4:455 Old Testament. See Biblical literature, Hebrew Scriptures Old Testament Abstracts, 4:262 Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East (Matthews and Benjamin), 4:415 Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Charlesworth), 4:415 Oleson, John Peter as contributor, 3:121-122 Caesarea, 1:403 Humeima excavations, 3:121, 360 Olives, 4:179-184 agricultural cultivation, 1:24, 27, 28; 4:179 Anatolia, 1:133 Bab edh-Dhra', 1:250 oil production technology, 4:180-181 Palestine, 1:29, 172; 4:33, 180 Snrepta oil press, 4:489-490 in written sources, 4:181-183 Olives, Mount of (Jerusalem), 1:435; 2:2; 3:226 Oiler, Gary H „ 1:59 Olyan, Saul M., as contributor, 2:79-86 Olympic games, 5:74, 75 Olynthos, 2:25 Oman, 4:184-187 copper mining, 1:4, 160, 161, 164 pre-Islamic cultures, 1:160; 4:184-186 Sasanian traders and colonists, 1:163-164 Umayyad period, 1:165, 166; 4:186 Umm en-Nar culture, 1:161 Oman, Giovanni, 3:169 Oman, Tell, 1:95 Ombos (Nubt), 4:98 Omo River, 2:247 Omride dynasty Jezreel under, 3:246-247 Moabite Stone, 4:40 Samaria under, 4:465 Omri of Israel, 2:157 Omura, Sachihiro, 3:66 as contributor, 4:24 Onagers. See Equids Onagri, 5:339 Onias, 5:369 Onias III, 2:482 Onn, Alexander, 4:461 Onomasticon (Eusebius), 2:33 Onomasticon of Amenope, 4:310 Onomastics. See Names and naming Open altars, 1:80 Ophel hill (Jerusalem) excavations, 3:225 Ophir, 5:34 Ophrah, 2:303 Opificius, Ruth, 4:172 Opis, 3:288 Opis mutiny (324 BCE), 1:70
524
INDEX
amulets, 1:114 Oppenheim, A. Leo, 3:364 Asyut cult, 1:233 Oppenheim, Max Frieherr von, 1:491 Egyptian kings venerated as, 5:177 Fakhariyah, Tell, 2:300 tomb site, 1:11-12 Halaf, Tell, 2:460 Osiris-Apis, 2:201, 203 Oppenheim Foundation, 2:300 OSL. See Optically stimulated luminescence Oppert, Jules, 1:252; 2:162; 4:413 Osorkon I, 1:390 AsSur cuneiform script, 3:57 Osroes, 4:288 Nippur identification, 4:148 Ossetic (language), 3:150; 4:294 Optical dating (OD), 2:115 Ossuary, 4:187-188 Optical emission spectroscopy, 1:119, 120; 5:68 as burial type, 5:52 Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), Chalcolithic, 1:443 2:115 grave goods, 2:433 Opuscula atheniensia (journal), 4:266 Herodian Jericho, 3:17 Orchard, Jeffrey, 4:142 Judaism and, 1:436 Ordinances (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:120 Neolithic, Hajji Firuz, 2:459 Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, 2:59 Orduzu, 1:212 Roman period, 1:387 Oren, Eliezer D. Osten, Hans Henning Erimar von der, 3:64; as contributor, 2:474-476; 5:1-2, 41-47 4:188-189, 189 Haror, Tel, excavations, 2:474 Oster, Richard E., 4:419 Sera", Tel, 5:1 Ostraca House (Samaria), 4:360 Sinai excavations, 5:41 Ostracon, 4:189-191; 5:358-359 Orfali, Gaudenzio, 1:417; 2:343 Ammonite inscriptions, 1:105, 106 Organizational Pattern and the Penal Code of the Arad inscriptions, 1:175, 176-177; 2:318 Qumran Sea, The (Weinfeld), 2:125 Aramaic inscriptions, 2:215-216, 420; 3:142; Oriens antiquus (journal), 4:265 4:392 Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel), 1:24 Hebrew inscriptions, 3:6, 474-475; 4:366 Orientalia (journal), 4:264 photography of, 4:341 Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica, 4:265 Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, 3:195, 198 Orientalia Succana (journal), 4:265 Ostrakine, 5:44, 46 Oriental Institute (University of Chicago), 1:90, Ostfich eggs, 1:347 93,444; 2:144 Ostrogoth migrations, 3:151 'Amuq excavations, 1:115 Otot (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:122 Betii-Yerah excavations, 1:312 Otto-Dorn, Katarina, 4:446 biblical archaeology, 1:315 Ottoman Empire Fakhariyah, Tell, excavations, 2:300 aqueduct building, 1:158 Goltepe excavations, 2:424 Assos under, 1:224 Human Adventure, The, 5:222 European partition of, 4:104-105, 106 Iranian Prehistoric Project, 3:61 Greece under, 3:73 Iraq Expedition, 2:164, 262 Mamluks conquered by, 1:241 Khafajeh excavations, 3:288 tile decoration, 5:214-215 Khorsabad excavations, 3:295, 296, 298 Ottosson, Magnus, as contributor, 2:405-406 Megiddo excavations, 3:461, 465 'Oueili, Tell el-, 1:455; 4:191-194; 5:96 Nippur excavations, 4:149 Oultrejourdain, 3:281 Persepolis excavations, 4:275 Overstreet, William C , as contributor, popularization of Near Eastern archaeology, 2:311-312 5:222 Oxen. See Cattle and oxen Prehistoric Project, 1:75 Oxford Classical Dictionary (Hammond and Ptolemais excavations, 4:355 Scullard), 4:419 Qitar, el-, excavations, 4:389 Oxford University. See University of Oxford Qustul excavations, 4:170 Oxford University-Field Museum (Chicago) "Orientalism," 1:94 Expedition, 3:212 Origen, 1:209, 302 Oxford University Press/British Academy Oristano, 4:484 publishing, 1:358 Orodes II, 4:288 Oxyrhynchus (al-Bahnasa), 2:217; 4:194-195 Orontes River Oxyrhynchus papyri, 4:194, 195-196 'Amuq site, 1:115 Ozbal, Hadi, 5:156 Antioch site, 1:144-145 Ozdogan, Mehmet, 1:444 as natural defense, 4:114 as contributor, 1:444-447 Orontes Valley, 4:370 Ozgtic, Nimet, 3:65, 66 Orpheus, 1:392 Ozgiic, Tahsin Orthmann, Winfried as contributor, 3:266-268 as contributor, 1:491-492 Kanes excavations, 3:266, 308 Chuera, Tell, excavations, 1:491; 3:46 Ozieri culture, 4:482 Halawa, Tell, excavations, 3:44 Orthodox Church. See Eastern Orthodox Church P Ory, Jacob, 1:147, 402 Ory, Solange, 1:143 Pabau (Faw Qibli) monastic complex, 4:87-88 Ory, Ya'aqov, 3:189 Pachomius, 4:42, 43, 87-89 Oscan (language), 3:150, 334, 336 Pacific School of Religion (Berkeley), 1:262 Osiris, 1:448; 2:216 Abydos cult, 5:286
Pack animals. See Animal husbandry; specific kinds Pacorus I, 2:78 Pactolus Valley, 4:487 Padgett, J. Michael, as contributor, 1:390 Paean for King Jonathan, 2:123-124 Pagan the Butler (Romain de Puy), 3:281 Paine, John A., 1:91 Painting. See Wall paintings Pakliet, 1:441 Palace, 4:197-200, 359-360 Akkadians, 1:53 Alexandria, 1:66, 67 Anatolia, 1:132; 4:198 Assur, 1:226, 227, 228 Assyrians, 1:231; 3:338; 4:198-199, 360; 5:209-210 Babylon, 1:251, 255 Baghdad, 1:3, 264-265 Bethsaida, 1:303-304 Bronze Age, 2:22-23; 4:197-198 Canaanites, 4:359 Chogha Zanbil, 1:488-490 Constantinople, 2:61-63 courtyards, 2:23 Crete, 1:19-20 drainage systems, 5:10 Ebla, 2:181, 184 fortifications, 2:334-335 gardens, 2:383, 388 FIalaf,Tell, 2:461-462 Hama, 2:467-468 Herodian Jericho, 3:16-17 'Iraq el-Amir, 1:192; 3:177, 178-180 Iron Age, 4:198-199 Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, 3:269-270 Khorsabad, 3:296 libraries, 3:356 Mari, 4:197-198, 199 Nimrud, 3:338 Nineveh, 3:321, 338, 356; 4:145; 5:96 Pasargadae, 4:251-252 representational (Egypt), 3:118 Ugarit, 4:411-412; 5:257, 258-260 Umayyad caliphate, 2:334-335; 5:270, 271 See also Architectural decoration Palace of Antiochus (Constantinople), 2:63 Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (Nimrud), 3:338 Palace of Lausus (Constantinople), 2:63 Palace of Minos (Knossos), 2:293; 3:74 Palace of Nur-Adad (Larsa), 3:332-333 Palace of Sennacherib (Nineveh), 3:338 Palace of the Eastern Game Park. See Qasr alHayr ash-Sharqi Palace'of the Rulers (Eshnunna), 2:264, 265 Palace of the Tree (Baghdad), 2:388 Palace of the Western Game Park. See Qasr alHayr al-Gharbi Palace of Zimrilim, Mari texts, 3:420 Palaestina Prima, 3:256-257; 5:240 Palaic (language), 1:128; 3:85 Palaikastro, 3:76 Palaipaphos, 3:72. See also Paphos Palanque, Charles, 1:234 Palaslina Jahrbuch (publication), 1:79 Palazzo delle Colonne (Ptolemais), 1:201; 4:355-356 Palegawra cave (Iraq), 2:166 Paleobotany, 2:248; 4:200-201 agricultural data, 1:29-30 'Ain Ghazal, 4:201 Aswad, Tell, 5:125
INDEX cereals, 1:479-481 cloves, 5:190 Douara cave, 4:200-201 environmenlal reconstruction, 4:203-204 Hama, 2:467 trees, 5:266 'Ubeidiya, 5:255 Paleoenvironmental reconstruction, 4 : 2 0 1 - 2 0 5 agricultural data, 1:29-30; 2:143-144, 245, 248-251 'Ain Ghazal, 1:38 Asia (western), 2:245-246 data supplements, 2:282-283 Faiyum, 2:244-245 Hajar Bin Humeid, 2:458 heakhcare systems, 3:450-451, 453-454, 455, 457 historical geography, 3:31-32 Khargah, 2:244-245 methods of, 4:202-204 setdement pattern studies, 5:6 Tabun cave, 5:153 zooarchaeology, 4:204 See also Climatology; Demography Paleography, 2:88; 5:356-357 Paleopadiology, 4 : 2 0 5 - 2 0 6 Basta burials, 1:280 culling patterns, 5:190 mummies, 4:205 plagues, 2:99; 3:454 prehistory, 3:450-451 X-ray photography, 4:334 See also Medicine
Paleozoology, 4 : 2 0 6 - 2 0 7 agricultural data, 1:29-30 camels, 1:407-408 cats, 1:441-442 cattle and oxen, 1:442-443 dogs, 2:166-167 in environmental reconstruction, 4:204 equids, 2:255-256 Hama, 2:467 pigs, 1:29, 30; 4:347-348 sheep and goats, 5:23-24 'Ubeidiya, 5:255 See also Animal husbandry Palestine, 4 : 2 0 7 - 2 3 4 agriculture, 1:25-28, 29 aqueducts, 1:157, 158 architectural decoration, 1:190, 192-194 Armenian inscriptions, 1:208 Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties, 1:241-242 Bronze Age, 2:20-23; 4 : 2 1 2 - 2 1 7 Byzantine period, 4 : 2 2 8 - 2 3 2 ceramics, 1:465-468, 470-471 as Christian Holy Land, 4:228-229 cosmetics, 2:69 demography, 2:143-144 Egypt in (early Bronze Age), 2:53-54 geographical survey of (1872-1878), 3:40 healthcare systems, 3:454-455 hellenization of, 2:438 Iron Age, 2:23-25; 4 : 2 1 7 - 2 2 2 chronologies of, 4:217, 218 Islamic period, 4 : 2 3 3 - 2 3 4 League of Nations mandate, 2:270 martyrial buildings, 3:427 Mediterranean mixed economy, 1:25-28 PersiantirroughRoman periods, 4 : 2 2 2 - 2 2 8 administrative divisions of, 4:222-223, 227 domestic architecture, 2:26 prehistoric, 4 : 2 0 7 - 2 1 2
roads, 4:432-433 synagogues, 5 : 1 1 4 - 1 1 6 , 1 1 8 - 1 2 2 textiles, 5:195 theaters, 5:200-202 tourism, 5:222 urbanization, 2 : 1 7 - 1 8 See also Biblical archaeology; Department of Antiquities (British Mandate Palestine); History of the field, archaeology in Israel; Israel, state of; Israelites; Survey of Israel; Syria-Palestine; specific sites and subregions
Palestine Archaeological Museum. See Rockefeller Museum Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), 1:315; 4:234-236
Beth-Shemcsh excavations, 1:311 Bliss, Frederick Jones, 1:332 Gezer excavations, 2:396 Gibeon survey, 2:403 Hesi, Tell el-, 1:315, 332; 3:22 Iktanu, Tell, 3:143 Jericho excavations, 3:220, 221 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225 Judeideh, Tell el-, excavations, 3:259 Mareshah excavations, 3:412 'Umeiri, Tell el-, 5:273 Palestine Exploration
Quarterly
Palestinian
Ceramic Chronology,
(PEQJ, 4:263
200
Paper, 4:247; 5:359-361. See also Parchment Paphos (Old Paphos; Palaipaphos), 2:95; 3:72; 4:245-246 Papyrus, 2:439-440; 4:246-247; 5:359, 360-361 Aramaic texts, 2:213 codices, 2:40-41 Elephantinefind,1:182; 2:213 Nag Hammadi, 4:87, 88 Old Hebrew, 3:6 Oxyrhynchus, 4:194, 195-196 Phoenician, 3:367 photography of, 4:338-341 as scroll material, 4:502 Papyrus Harris I, 4:310 Paradise
Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA), 3:1 Palestine Oriental Society, 4 : 2 3 6 - 2 3 7 Palestinian Aramaic, 1:182-183, 184, 186; 2:119; 4 : 2 3 7 - 2 3 8 B.C.-A.D,
70 (Lapp), 1:452 Pallas: revue d'etudes antiques, 4:267
Palma, Cornelius, 1:178 Palmer, Edward Henry, 1:236; 4 : 2 3 8 Palmer, Paul, 2:148 Palmieri, Alba, 1:213 Palmyra (Tadmor), 4 : 2 3 8 - 2 4 4 Anatolia, 1:133 aqueduct, 1:158 architectural decoration, 1:190, 191, 194-195; 4:243 Badiat ash-Sham, 1:262, 263 economy of, 4:242-243 fortifications, 2:332 Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient study, 3:172-173 necropolis, 2:349; 5:221 religion, 4:243 Roman period, 4:240-241; 5:237-238 wall paintings, 2:358 Palmyrene inscriptions, 2:131; 3:165, 166; 4:242, 2 4 4 - 2 4 5 Aramaic language, 1:183; 4:244 at Beth-She'arim, 1:438 Hatra inscriptions and, 2:485, 486 Palumbo, Gaetano, as contributor, 5:365-367 Palynology (pollen records), 2:37-38, 116-117, 247, 248; 4:203 Transjordanian climate, 5:231 Pamboules, 2:91; 3:263 Pamphylia Aspendos theater, 1:133; 5:200, 201 Ptolemy rule over, 1:131 Pan, Banias and, 1:270, 271; 2:421 Panammu II, 1:181 Panammu Aramaic inscriptions, 1:181 Paneas, See Banias Paneion, 1:270 Panichkina, M. Z., 1:203
525
or Garden of the Holy Fathers, The
(Budge), 2:385 Parahse (Marhasi), 1:52; 4:282; 5:187 Parchment, 4:247-248; 5:360-361 Aramaic texts, 2:213 photography of, 4:338-341 Pardee, Dennis, as contributor, 1:75-79; 2:400-401; 3:158-162, 323-324, 475; 4:39-41, 352-354, 354-355; 5:41, 262-264, 264-266 Parentium, 1:271; 3:121 Paribeni, Roberto, 1:16; 3:74 Paris Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 2:234 Parium, 1:131 Parker, Montague, 3:225; 5:304 Parker, S. Thomas, 1:447 'Aqaba excavation, 1:154 as contributor, 1:153-156; 2:127-130, 329-334; 3:358-361; 5:235-238 Limes Arabicus Survey, 3:359 Parks, 2:383; 4:476 Parni, 4:287 Paros, 3:76 Parpola, Simo, 3:352 Parr, Peter J., 2:133; 3:43 as contributor, 1:160-164; 2:133-134; 3:446-447; 4:25, 114-115, 396-397; 5:160-161 Iskander, Khirbet, excavations, 3:54 Nebi Mend, Tell, excavations, 4:114 Petra excavations, 4:303-304 Qurayyah survey, 4:396 ramparts, 2:320 Tayma', 5:160 Parrot, Andre, 2:407; 4:248-249 Larsa excavations, 2:345; 3:331-332 Mari excavations, 2:345; 3:45, 413, 419, 420; 4:3 Pardratua, 4:503 Parthava, 4:249 Parthia. See Parthians; Persia Parthian (language), 3:150; 4:249, 294 Parthian Palace (Assur), 1:226, 228 Pardiians, 3:485-486; 4:249-250 Alexandrian Empire, 1:72 Aramaic inscriptions, 1:183 Armenia, 1:206 art, 4:249 Assur, 1:226, 228 Babylonians under, 1:255, 258 bone working, 1:345 Ctesiphon, 2:77-78 excavation sites, 3:62 gardens, 2:386 Greek usage, 4:249 Hatra, 2:484; 4:249
526
INDEX
Parthians, continued ivory trade, 1:346 map of holdings, 4:492 rise and expansion of, 4:287-288 Roman conflicts with, 4:249, 288-289; 5:136-137 Seleucia on the Tigris under, 4:513 Seleucids and, 4:287-288 shell artifacts, 1:347 Pasargadae, 4:250-253 excavadons, 3:60; 4:251 fortifications, 2:327 gardens, 2:383, 387; 4:252 palaces, 4:251-252 tower, 4:101, 252 Paser, 1:10 Pashto (language), 3:150; 4:294 Pasicrates, 3:305 Pastoral nomadism, 4:253-256 agriculture and, 1:22, 24, 28, 29-30, 37-38; 5:179 'Ain Ghazal, 1:37-38 of Amorites, 1:107, 108, 110 Anatolia, 1:135 animal husbandry and, 1:141, 142; 4:254 Arabian Peninsula, 1:159 Badiat ash-Sham, 1:262 camel domestication, 4:254 of Canaanites, 1:411 of Chaldeans, 1:483 culling patterns, 5:190 desert visitations, 4:253-254 Golan, 2:419 inscriptions, 5:237 Israelites, 2:281-282 mounted, 2:11 research escalation on, 4:253, 255 specialized, 1:142 tents, 5:179-181 trade, 4:254-255 transhumance strategy, 4:410 Transjordan (Bronze Age), 5:232 water availability, 4:253 See also Sheep and goats Pataekos, statuette of, 1:303, 304 Patak. See Tepe Patak Patch, Diana Craig, as contributor, 1:11-13, 91-92, 233-234, 356-357; 3:470-471, 471-472; 4:139-140 Pathology. See Paleopathology Patriarchs (Hebrew), 1:287-288; 2:8 Palrich, Joseph, 1:403 as contributor, 1:190-197; 4:41-47 Patronyms, 4:91 Patterson, Thomas, 3:141 Patti-Enil canal, 1:156 Pattina (Unqi), 1:186 Paul, St., 1:134, 224 baptism, 1:271 house (private) congregations, 1:322; 2:1; 3:118-119 letters of, 1:322-323, 324 Tarsus, 2:10 Paula of Rome, 3:51 Paulouskji, A., 3:394 Pauly, August, 4:419 Paved Street (Petra), 4:304 Pax Assyriaca. See Assyrians PAZ. See Pollen assemblage zones Pazarh, 5:211 PBI. See Pontifical Biblical Institute
Peabody Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 2:61, 311; 5:187 Peace of Antalcidas. See King's Peace Peace of Callis (448 BCE), 4:297 Pearls, 1:347 Pearson, Birger A., as contributor, 1:65-69 Pecorella, Paolo Emilio, 3:46 Pedasos. See Assos Pedersen, Holger, 3:155 Pedersen, Poul, as contributor, 2:463-465 Pediaios River, 4:456 Peet, Thomas Eric, 1:12, 83; 4:235 PEF. See Palestine Exploration Fund Pegae. See Aphek Pelagius, crusade of, 2:75 Pelagonnesos, 1:397 Peleg, Michael, 1:403 Peleset. See Philistines Pella (Pihil; Tabaqat Fahl), 2:128; 4:256-259 as Christian refuge, 4:259 excavations, 3:54, 55; 4:257 Islamic period, 3:250; 4:259 Roman period, 4:258-259 See also Decapolis Pelly, Lewis, 3:78 Pelon, Olivier, 2:242 Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 2:29 Peltenburg, Edgar, 2:91 as contributor, 3:70-73; 5:309-314 Pelusium, 5:44, 45, 46 PeSa, Ignace, 4:45 Pendlebury, John D. S., 1:83, 84 Pennsylvania, University of. See University of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania-Yale Expedition, Abydos, 1:12 Pens, 5:360 Pentapolis, 2:97; 3:357-358 Pentateuch, 1:78, 319-320, 321 Aramaic translation, 1:183 Ezra and, 1:321; 3:367 Hall of Assembly (Dura-Europos) niche, 2:177 Samaritan, 2:119-120 Pentaleuchal Paraphrase, 2:122; 5:163-164 Penthesilea, 1:392 Pepi 1,1:391; 4:363, 480 PepiH, 1:391; 4:363 Perdiccas, 1:70 Perfume. See Cosmetics Pergamon, 4:259-262 architectural orders, 1:200 batiis, 1:285 cisterns, 3:133 furnishings, 2:359 Galatians defeated by, 1:131 gardens, 2:386 hillside site, 1:132 marble production, 1:191 pergamena preparation, 4:248 Roman era, 1:133 Seleucids and, 1:72 Periodical literature, 4:262-267 Periodization, 4:267-273 Periplus of the Erythraean [Red] Sea (trade handbook), 1:239; 2:276 Casson edition, 1:162 Peristyle house, 4:273 Perlman, Isadore, 3:277 Pernicka, Ernst, as contributor, 1:118-122; 4:22-24; 5:363 Pernier, Luigi, 3:74
Perowne, Stewart, 4:383 Peroz, 4:290 Perrot, Jean, 1:8, 221 Apadana survey, 3:61 'Einan excavations, 2:219 Munhata excavations, 4:63 Susa excavations, 2:229; 3:61; 4:280; 5:108 Persepolis, 4:273-277 Alexandrian Empire, 1:70, 73 'Amrit, 1:112 excavations, 3:60; 4:275 fortifications, 2:327 gardens, 2:383 reliefs, 4:276; 5:328 terrace, 4:274, 275, 276, 299, 300 texts, 1:182; 4:298 Perseus, 1:133 Pershitta, 1:183 Persia, 4:277-292 Alexandrian to Rise of Islam, 1:70, 72, 73, 130, 131; 4:286-291 American Institute of Iranian Studies, 1:91 Anatolia, 1:130 ancient, 4:279-286 animal husbandry, 1:140, 141, 143 Arabian Peninsula, 1:160, 163-164 Aramaic language use, 1:182, 186, 258 art, 1:218, 330-331; 3:123-124 Arwad, 1:219 Ashkelon under, 1:222-223 in Assyrian Empire, 1:239 Babylon conquered by, 1:255, 258 British Institute of Persian Studies, 1:358 building materials and techniques, 1:368-370, 372-373 ceramics, 1:466-468 Chalcedon, 1:482 cuneiform, Old Persian, 2:89 Cyprus conquered by, 2:95 fortifications, 2:327-329 gardens, 2:383-384 glass production, 5:315, 319 Gordion, 2:430 government, 4:298-299 healthcare systems, 3:453-454 Islamic period, 4:291-292 map of empire, 4:296 Palestine under, 4:222-224 Phoenicia under, 4:314-315, 326 prehistoric, 4:277-279 sheU artifacts, 1:346-347 Syria under, 5:134-135 See also History of the field, archaeology in Persia; Persians; specific sites and subregions Persian (language), 4:292-295 Indo-Aryan, 4:292-293 Indo-Iranian, 3:149-150 inscriptions, 1:330-331; 3:162-163 numerals, 2:454 Old Persian dialect, 1:330-331; 3:162-163; 5:356 onomastica, 4:95 Persian Gulf Akkadian hegemony, 1:52 trade, 1:4, 144 Persian Royal Road, 4:432 Persians, 4:295-300 Achaemenid dynasty, 3:60-61 Akkadians, 1:52 Amman, 1:100 Ammon, 1:105
INDEX 'Arnrit, 1 : 1 1 2 Anatolia, 1:133, 134, 135 Antioch sackings by, 1:145 Apamea conquest by, 1:147 art, 4:299-300 chariotry, 1:486-487 elephant use, 1:74 glassmaking, 2:413-414 military tactics, 5:338 in Naqsh-i Rustam reliefs, 4:100 religion, 4:299 textiles, 5:194 tiles, 5:212,213,214 "Umeiri, Tell el-, administrative center, 5:274 See also Sasanians Persis, coinage of, 2:48 Personal hygiene, 4 : 3 0 0 - 3 0 2 Babylonian, 4:301 Egyptian, 2:67; 4:301, 302 Greek, 4:301, 302 Israelite, 4:301 Roman, 4:302 See also Baths Pesharim (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:120-121 Pesher Habakkuk. See Habakkuk Commentary Peskowitz, Miriam, as contributor, 5:195-197 Peter, Book of, 1:323 Peter, St., 1:418-419; 2:4; 3:120, 176 Peters, John Punnett, 4 : 3 0 2 - 3 0 3 Adab excavation, 1:14 Hilprecht (Hermann Vollrat) dispute with, 3:26; 4:303 Mareshah excavations, 3:412 Nippur excavations, 4:149, 303 Peter the Iberian, 4:115 Petra, 3:52; 4 : 3 0 3 - 3 0 8 Alexandrian influences, 1:72 aqueducts, 1:158 architectural decoration and orders, 1:191, 192, 193, 200-201 Avdat, 1:236 church, 4:306, 307-308 Dalman, Gustaf, 2:102 excavation history, 3:53, 54; 4 : 3 0 3 - 3 0 6 gardens, 2:385-386 gorge, 5:224 Meda'in Saleh, 3:446-447 Nabatean inscriptions, 4:81 Nabatean language, 1:182 pre-Islamic culture, 1:163 recentfinds,1:89; 3:55; 4 : 3 0 6 - 3 0 8 religion, 4:84 tombs, 2:348 Winged Lions Temple, 1:193; 4:304, 305, 306-307 Petrie, Lady Hilda, 1:359; 4:308 Petrie, Sir William Matthew Flinders, 4:308-309
Abydos excavation, 1 : 1 2 "Ajjul, Tell el-, excavation, 1:38 Amarna, Tell el-, excavation, 1:83, 84 Bahnasa inscription, 2:217 British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1:358-359 British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1:359 Egyptian research, 3:41 eugenics, 2:286; 3:41; 4:308 Far'ah, Tell el- (South), 2:305 Harding (Gerald Lankester) as mentor of, 2:474
Hesi, Tell el-, excavations, 1:315, 452; 3:22; 4:235 Jemmeh, Tell, 2:26, 431; 3:213, 214 Memphis excavations, 3:470 methodology, 5:163 Naqada, 2:194; 4:97-98 Naukratis identification, 4:112 New Kingdom tombs, 4:310 photography, 4:332 pottery, 1:459; 4:268, 308 Serabit el-Khadem excavations, 4:354 Sheikh Zuweid, 2:27; 5:44 Yahudiyeh, Tell el-, excavations, 5:368 Petroglyphs, Armenia, 1:203, 204 Petrography, 4 : 3 0 9 - 3 1 0 Peutinger Table, 3:121 Pezard, Maurice, 4:114 Pfeiffer, Charles F„ 4:417 Pfeiffer, Robert H., 4:172 Phaedra, 3:395 Phaistos, 3:74; 4:28, 29 Pharisees, 2:107 Essenes, 2:269 John Hyrcanus I, 2:483 Pharos island, 1:65, 66, 67, 69 Philadelphia. See Amman Philarete, 1:145 Philby, Harry St. John, 3:79, 80 Najran, 4:90 Qaryat al-Fau, 4:371 Qurayyah, 4:396 Shabwa, 5:13 Tayma', 5:160 Philetaerus, 4:260 Philia culture, 2:91 Philinus of Acragas, 3:33 Philip (the Tetrarch; son of Herod die Great), 1:270, 302, 303 Philip II, 1:70; 2:436; 4:505 Philip III Arrhidaeus, 1:70 Philip V, 4:356 Philip, Graham, 4:3-4 Philippi bathing establishments, 1:272 Philippopolis (Shahba), 4:51; 5:112 Philip die Arab, 5 : 1 1 2 Philistia. See Syria-Palestine Philistine Pentapolis. See Ashdod; Ashkelon; 'Erani, Tel; Gaza; Miqne, Tel Philistines, 4:219, 3 1 0 - 3 1 3 ; 5:147 Aegean traits of, 4:310-311 Anatolian invasion by, 5:248 Aphek, 1:147, 149, 151 Ashdod, 1:219, 220; 4:310, 312 Ashkelon, 1:220, 222; 4:312 ceramics, 1:465; 3:464; 4:311, 312, 373 Ekron, 4:31-32,310, 312 "Erani, Tel, 2:257 Far'ah, Tell el- (South), 2:305 houses, 3:110 as Israelites' main antagonists, 4:312 language, 4:311 naval battles, 4:508-509; 5:32 origins of, 2:72 ostraca, 4:190 Phoenician city-state alliances, 1 : 2 1 8 pig domestication, 4:348 Sea Peoples grouped with, 2:199, 435; 5:131 technological expertise of, 4:310 Timnah (Tel Batash), 1:281 weapons, 5:337
527
Phillips, Wendell, 1:90; 4:313 Hajar Bin Humeid excavations, 2:457; 4:383 Yemen expedition, 4:313 Phillipson, David W., 1:241 Philo of Alexandria, 1:210, 325 Philosophic schools (Apamea), 1:146 Philoteria, 1:312 Phoenicia, 4 : 3 1 3 - 3 1 7 Alexandrian mints, 1:73 'Arnrit, 1 : 1 1 1 , 113 architectural decoration, 1:190, 194, 327; 4:328-329 Assyrian rule over, 4:314, 326 Bassit, 1:278, 279 Cartilage, 1:429 Chna, 1:409 faience production, 5:311 First Temple, 1:327 Galilee, 2:370 geography of, 4:325 hellenization of, 2:438; 4:327 houses, 3:109-110 ivories from, 1:343 mints, 2:44 Persian rule over, 4:314-315, 326 Philistine invasion of, 1:218 trade, 1:28; 3:435; 4:163, 315, 325-326 See also Phoenicians Phoenician Expedition, 2:345 Phoenician-Punic (language), 4 : 3 1 7 - 3 2 4 , 327, 518 alphabet, 1:76, 77, 178; 3:367; 4:315 Arameans, 1:129, 186 Gezer calendar, 2:401 morphology, 4:318-320 onomastica, 4:93-94 phases of, 4:317-318 phonology, 4:318 scripts, 1:186; 4:321, 322 syntax, 4:321 .See also Inscriptions, Phoenician-Punic Phoenicians, 4 : 3 2 4 - 3 3 1 Abu Hawam, Tell, 1:9 Amathus, 1:87-88 American Schools of Oriental Research, 1:97 amulet distribution by, 1:114 Anafa, Tel,, 1:118 art, 1:35; 4:221, 315 Ashkelon ruled by, 1:220 Babylonian trade contacts, 1:259 Canaanites, 4:155, 324-325, 328 ceramics, 1:466-467 city-state alliances, 1:218 on Crete, 2:72 on Cyprus, 2:95 funerary practices, 3:291; 4:329-330 glassmaking, 2:413; 5:314 Kition, 3:301, 302 Malta, occupation of, 3:403 Nordi African settlement, 4:154-155 religion, 2:81-82; 4:315-316, 327-328, 330 on Sardinia, 4:483 Sarepta, 4:329, 488-490 ships, 5:32-33 skeletal morphology, 5:55 Tyre, 5:248-249 Phoenix (journal), 4:264 Phonology Aramaic, 1:178-179 Egyptian, 2:209, 210 See also Consonants; Vowel notation
528
INDEX
Photography, 4:331-347 offieldworkand artifacts, 4:331-336, 414 aerial, 1:199; 3:42, 210, 286; 4:333, 335, 405 amateur, 3:300-301 architectural drawing, 1:198, 199; 4:414 artifact drafting and drawing, 1:217 digital, 2:58; 4:335 infrared, 4:334-335 techniques, 4:333-334 X-ray, 4:334-335 of manuscripts, 4:336-347 basic concepts, 4:336-338 digital, 4:344-347 hard media, 4:341-344 infrared, 4:334, 339-340, 341 soft media, 4:338-341 X-ray, 4:334 Photo multiplier tube (PMT), 4:346 Phourni, 3:75 Phraates I, 4:287 Phraortes, 3:448 Phrygia Anatolia, 1:130, 132, 134 Gaul setdements, 1:131 Gordion, 2:427-430 Jewish settlement, 1:134 tumuli, 1:130; 2:427, 429-430; 5:245, 246 Urartu, 1:130 Phrygian (language), 3:152, 163; 5:247 Phylactery, 1:114 Phylakopi, 3:75 Phylarcus, 3:33 Phythian-Adams, W.J., 1:220, 360; 3:213 Phytolith analysis, 4:203-204 PICA. See Palestine Jewish Colonization Association Piccirillo, Michele as contributor, 2:342-344; 3:391-393, 393-397;4:115-118 Madaba excavations, 3:394 Nebo, Mount, 4:116, 117 Umm er-Rasas excavations, 5:279 Pidray, 2:80 Piers, 1:365 Piesinger, Constance Maria, 3:79 Pigs, 4:347-348 Abu Hamid, Tell, 1:8 agricultural development and, 1:23, 123 'Ain Ghazal, 1:37 Anatolia, 1:123, 141 domestication of, 1:141; 4:347-348; 5:182 sacrificial, 2:253 Transjordan, 1:37, 280 Pihil. See Pella Pile carpets, 5:193-194 Pilgrimages Christian, 4:104, 228 Islamic, 1:165; 3:445 Pillet, Maurice, 2:174 Pilliya, 1:60 Pinches, Theophilus G., 5:47 Pinikir, 1:488 Pinkerfeld, Jacob, 3:189 Pins, 2:39 Piotrovski, Mikhail, 2:452 Pipes (musical), 4:74-75 Pirates, 2:10 Pirenne, Jacqueline, 5:13, 357 Pirhiya Beck, 1:149 PisgatZe'ev, 5:105 Pishon, 2:274
Pistelli, Ermenogildo, 4:194 Pitard, Wayne T., as contributor, 1:63-65, 184-187;2:103-106 Pit graves, 4:348-349 'Ajjul, Tell el-, 1:39 Levantine, 4:348-349 Pithoi. See Jar burials Pit house, 2:425 Pittman, Holly, as contributor, 5:106-110 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus L.-F., 4:106 Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 4:445 Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary, Herodian Jericho excavations, 3:16 Pituousa. See Miletus PIXE. See Proton-induced X-ray analysis Pixner, Bargil Copper Scroll, 2:65 Jerusalem excavations, 3:229 Piyassili, 1:424 Place, Victor Assur investigation, 1:225 Khorsabad excavations, 1:354; 3:57-58, 295, 296 Plagues Anatolia, 1:133-134, 135 paleopathological studies, 2:99; 3:454 Plain of Akko, 4:221 Plain wares (ceramics), 1:474 Plancy, Miles de, 3:281 Piano-Convex Building (Kish), 3:299 Plant domestication. See Agriculture; Ethnobotany; Flowers; Fruit trees; Paleobotany; specific plants Plants of the Bible (Zohary), 4:418 Plasma, direct current. See DCP spectrometry Platon, Eleftherios, 3:76 Platon, Nikolaos, 3:75-76 Pliny the Elder, 3:34, 336 Bahrain, 1:267 Egypt, 3:67 Essenes, 2:125 papyrus preparation, 5:359 perfumes, 2:69 Pliny the Younger, 3:336 Ploix de Rotrou, G , 1:64 Plow use, 1:24 Plutarch, 3:34 PMT. See Photo multiplier tube Pococke, Richard, 1 : 1 1 1 ; 3:18, 301; 4:456; 5:38 Podany, A. H., 5:188, 189 Podzorski, Patricia V., as contributor, 4:97-98, 421 Pognon, Henri, 2:262; 5:387 Poidebard, R. P. Antoine, 4:349-350 as aerial photography pioneer, 3:42, 210, 286 Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, 4:378 research methodology, 4:350 Sidon excavations, 5:40 underwater photography, 4:333 Poinsset, Bernard Roy Paule, 3:169 Pointed arch, 1:190 Poleg, Tel, 2:324 Poliorketes, Demetrios, 2:95 Polls (city), 1:74 Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology, 1:66-67 Polish Mission to Cyprus, 2:95 Political life archaeology as, 2:273 climatic change and, 2:244, 247, 248 Hellenistic and Roman periods, 2:32-33
in Syrian "cosmopolitan age," 5:129-130 See also Nationalism and archaeology Politics (Aristotle), 2:41 Politiko, martyrion, 3:427 Politis, Konstantinos D., 3:247; 5:65 Pollen assemblage zones (PAZ), 2:117 Pollen records. See Palynology Pollock, Susan M„ 1:10 as contributor, 5:288-291 Polybius, 1:5; 3:33 Polychromy, 5:311 Polyeuktos, St., 2:63 Pomegranates, 1:24 Pompeii, 1:277 textile industry, 5:197 wall paintings, 2:361 Pompeiopolis (Soli), 2:10 Pompeius Trogus, 3:34 Pompey (the Great) Amman, 1:100 Anatolia, 1:132 Baalbek, 1:247 Bithynia-Pontus, 1:482 Decapolis, 2:129; 5:236-237 pirates, 2:10 Syrian province created by, 5:136-137 Pompey's Pillar (Alexandria), 1:67, 68; 2:204 Pontic-Caspian region, 3:155, 156 Pontifical Biblical Institute (PBI), 3:401; 5:161 Pontius Pilate, 1:399 Pontus, 1 : 1 3 1 , 132, 419 Pool of the Phoenician Princess (Byblos), 1:391 Pools, 4:350-351 Ai, 4:350 Byblos, 1:391 Jawa, 4:350-351 Jerusalem, 3:132; 4:350, 351 Kurnub, 3:313 Pope, Marvin H., as contributor, 1:387 Popham, Mervyn, 3:75 Population. See Demography Poratli, Yosef, 1:403; 5:105 'Ein-Gedi excavations, 2:222 Manasseh, Mount, survey, 4:164 Porat, Naomi, as contributor, 4:309-310 Porcher, E. A., 2:97 Porcia, Basilica, 1:277 Porsuk, 5:156 Porten, Bezalel, as contributor, 2:213-219 Porter, J. L., 3:1 Porter, Robert Ker, 1:251-252; 3:60 Portico of Tiberius (Aphrodisias), 1:152 Ports. See Seafaring; specific sites Portus Cressa, 5:2 Poseidon, 1:66; 4:316 Poseidon Savior, 2:297 Posideion. See Bassit Posidonius of Apamea, 3:33 Possehl, Gregory L., as contributor, 5:344-345 Post and lintel (architecture), 1:188 Postgate, J, N. Abu Salabikh excavation, 1:10 as contributor, 1:9-10 British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1:359 Postprocessualist archaeology, 1:318 Potassium-argon dating, 2 : 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 Pottery. See Ceramics Pottery of Palestine from the Earliest Times to the End of the Early Bronze Age, The (Wright) 1:452 Pottier, Marie-Helene, 5:13
INDEX Potts, Daniel T. as contributor, 1:158-160, 266-268; 2:162-163; 3:77-81; 4:367-368, 384-386, 459; 5:197-198, 284-286 on Kade, 4:186 Thaj survey, 5:198 Potts, P. J., 2:117 Pouilly, Jean, 4:443 Powell, Marvin A., as contributor, 5:339-342 Praetorius, p., 4:447 Prag, Kay as contributor, 3:143-144 Iktanu, Tell, survey, 3:144 Prahistorischc Bronze/uncle (research project volumes series), 4:2-3 Pratico, Gary D. Aqaba, 1:153 as contributor, 1:217-218; 2:171; 3:293-294 Prausnitz, Moshe W. Abu Hawam excavation, 1:9 Achziv excavadon, 1:13 as contributor, 1:13-14; 5:16-17 Kabri, Tel, surveys, 3:261 Shavei-Zion excavations, 5:16 Prayer of Nabonidus, 2:121-122 Precinct of Tanit. See Tophet Predicting the Past (Thomas), 1:460 Preheram. See Assos Prehistoric Museum Moesgard, 4:367 Prehistory Department (Istanbul University), 1:444 Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 1:314 Presentation altars, 1:80 Preservation. See Conservation archaeology; Restoration and conservation Preusser, Conrad, 3:288 Priam's Treasure, 2:272 Prickett, Martha, 5:187 Priene, 1:131, 132; 4:351-352 synagogue, 5:122 temple architecture, 1:200; 4:351-352 theater, 5:199 Priestly code, 3:455 Priests. See Cult, specialists of Prignaud, Jean, 2:189 Prince Palace (Assur), 1:227 Princeton Archaeological Expeditions to Syria (1904, 1905, 1909) Qasr al-Hallabat, 4:376 Sergilla, 5:5 Umm el-Jimal, 5:276 Princeton Archaeological Survey Amman, 1:99 Antioch, 1:144 Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, 4:419 Prinias, 3:74 Prison of Solomon. See Zendan-i Suleiman Pritchard, James B., 1:316 Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 4:415 Gibeon excavations, 2:403 Harper Atlas of the Bible, 4:416 Herodian Jericho excavations, 3:16 Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-, excavations, 4:452 Sarepta excavations, 4:488 Processional Entry (Carchemish), 1:423 Processional Way (Babylon), 3:39 Processual archaeology. See New Archaeology Proconnesus, 1:190 Procopius, 1:482 Procopius Church (Jerash), 3:218 Prometheus, metalfigurineof, 4:557 Promontory Palace (Caesarea), 1:403
Prophecy ofHor, The (Egyptian Aramaic text fragment), 2:214 Prophesy of Neferti (Egyptian scroll), 3:364 Propheticfigures.See Cult, specialists of Prophets (Hebrew Scripture), 1:319-320, 321 Prophets, Tomb of the. See Tomb of the Prophets Protestantism Hebrew Scriptures, 1:320 pilgrimages to holy sites, 4:104 Proto-Canaanite (language), 4:352-354 Aphek cuneiform lexical tablets, 1:150 inscriptions, 1:76; 4:352, 353 Proto-Doric columns, 1:200 Proto-Elamite (language), 2:54, 230; 4:281-282; 5:108-109, 187 Proton-induced X-ray analysis (PIXE), 1:120 Proto-Sinaitic, 4:354-355 inscriptions, 1:76; 3:364; 4:352, 354 Proto-Canaanite and, 4:352 Proverbs, Book of, 1:321 Provincia Arabia, 1:352; 5:137 theaters, 5:201 Provincia Augustamnica, 5:46 Psalms, Book of, 1:321 First Temple references, 1:325 Nag Hammadi, 4:87 Qumran texts, 2:120, 121 Psalms ofJoshua, 2:124 Psammetichus I, 2:200; 4:504; 5:249 Psammetikll, 1:10 Pseira, 3:75 Pseudepigrapha, 1:325 Ptah, 1:11; 3:470 Ptolemais, 4:355-356 architectural decoration and orders, 1:201 See also Akko; Pentapolis Ptolemies, 2:201-202; 4:356-358 Alexandrian Empire, 1:72, 73, 131; 4:356 Amman, 1:100 architectural decoration, 1:190, 192 Atlitram (warship), 1:235-236 Befli-Zur, 1:314 glassmaking, 2:414 Lycia, 1:131 map of holdings, 4:357 Seleucids, 4:356, 514 temples, 5:175-176 Ptolemy (mathematician and geographer), 5:252-253 Ptolemy I Soter, 1:65, 67, 88; 4:356 Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 1:73, 98, 100 military colonies, 4:224 pavilion of, 1:192 Philoteria and, 1:312 Ptolemy III Euergetes, 1:68 Ptolemy IV Philopator, 1:67, 192 Ptolemy V Epiphanes, 1:73, 485 Ptolemy X Alexander, 2:202 Ptolemy XII Auletes, 2:202 Public buildings, 4:358-361 architectural decoration and orders, 1:190-197, 200-202 architectural features, 1:202 Assyrian, 4:360 Bronze and Iron Ages 'Ein-Gev, 2:223 Haror, Tel, 2:475 Hartuv, 2:476 Ugarit, 5:260 . Yarmut, Tel, 5:371 Byzantine, Sepphoris, 4:534-535
529
as elite structures, 4:358 Islamic period, 5:143 Neolithic, 1:445-446 Philistine, 4:374 Roman, 4:437; 5:205-206, 239 Carthage, 1:430-431 Ephesus, 2:254 water supply, 4:360-361 See also Building materials and techniques; specific types Public hygiene. See Medicine; Sewers Puchstein, Otto, 1:247 Bogazkoy surveys, 1:333; 3:64 Nemrud Dagi, 4:123 Samosata, 4:476 Puduhepa, 2:9 Puech, Emile, 2:189 Puglisi, Salvatore, 1:213 Pulak, Cemal, 5:12, 373 as contributor, 5:266-268 Pulcheria (empress), 2:63 Pullar, Judith, 4:184 Pulvar River, 4:299 Pummer, Reinhard, as contributor, 4:469-472 Punic language. See Phoenician-Punic Punic period Malta, 3:403 Phoenician history, distinction between, 4:155 Punic Project (American Schools of Oriental Research), 4:158-159 Punic Wars, 1:429; 4:156 Carthage harbor, 4:157-158 Sardinian role, 4:483 Punt. See Put Purvis, James D., 4:418 Put (Punt), 2:274 incensettade,3:147; 5:375 Puzur Inshushinak, 5:109 Puzurum, 5:189-190 Pyddoke, Edward, 5:87 Pydna, 5:339 Pylos, Carl William Blegen, 1:332 Pyramids, 1:192; 4:361-364; 5:287 Middle Kingdom, 4:363 Dahshur, 4:363 Hawara, 4:363 Lahun, 4:363 Saqqara, 4:363, 480 New Kingdom, 4:363-364 Meroe, 3:473; 4:364 Napata, 4:364 Old Kingdom, 2:197; 4:361-363 Abu Sir, 4:362-363 Dahshur, 2:197 Giza, 2:411; 4:362 Saqqara, 2:197; 4:362-363, 479-480 Pyramid Texts, 2:411; 4:363, 480 Pyramus River, 2:8 Pytheos, 1:200; 4:351 Pythian-Adams, W. Y„ 4:102
Q
Qa'aqir, Jebel, 3:210-211 Qabse'el, 3:175 Qadar Valley, 2:480 Qadesh. See Nebi Mend, Tell Qadesh, batde of (early 13th century BCE), 1:485; 2:199
530
INDEX
Qadesh-Barnea (Tell el-Qudeirat), 1:243; 4:365-367 fortifications, 2:326; 4:121, 365-366 Qadisiyah, 1:3 Qadtnoniol (journal), 3:50, 191; 4:264 Qafzeh, 5:53, 54, 55 Qahira, al-, 2:366 Qaimun, al-, 5:382 Qal'a, Jebel el-, 1:98, 99, 104; 5:270 Qal'at al-Bahrain, 1:161, 163, 266-267; 4:367-368 Qal'at al-Mishnaqa, 3:391 Qal'at al-Muazzam, 1:166 Qatat al-Rabad ('Ajlun castle), 1:41 Qal'at el-Husni 2:128, 421; 4:422 Qal'at er-Rabad, 3:261, 262 Qalatgah, 2:480 Qal'at Jarmo. See Jarmo Qal'at Najm, 2:292; 3:409 Qal'at Serqat. Sec Assur Qal'at Sim'an, 4:368-370 architectural decoration, 1:191, 195-196; 4:369, 370 martyrion, 1:278; 3:426, 427; 4:369 Qala'un, Muhammad ibn (sultan), 2:76; 4:404; 5:242 Qalbloze, basilica of, 4:369-370 QalbLuzeh, 1:196,278 Qalkhan industry, 4:410 Qalkha, Wadi, 4:410 Qana', 1:15 Qanat (water transport system), 3:183 Qanawat, 2:128 Qannas, Tell excavations, 2:446 Uruk settlement, 2:53, 291, 446, 447 Qantir, 2:101 Qara Qusaq,Tell, 2:291 Qarmatians, 1:166; 5:144-145 Qarnaw, 1:162 Qarqar. See Karkara Qarqur, Tell, 1:115, 117; 3:43; 4:370-371 Qartamin monastery, 3:427 Qart Hadasht. See Carthage Qartiliadasht, 1:87; 3:301 Qarunian Industry, 2:299 Qaryat al-Fau, 4:371-373 excavations, 3:80; 4:371-372 pre-Islamic painting, 5:270 Qaryat Dhat Kahl, 4:371 Qa Salab, 4:410-411 Qashan, 5:213 Qashish, Tel, 5:104 Qasile, Tell, 3:48, 206; 4:373-376 open-court buildings, 2:27; 4:374 Philistine settlement, 4:310, 312, 373 sherd inscription, 5:34 temple, 4:374,375 well, 3:131 Qasir, Jebel al-, 1:273 Qasiyun, Mount, 5:144 Qasr 'Ain es-Sol (Azraq), 1:244 Qasr al-Azraq, 1:244 Qasr al-Banat (Raqqa, ar-), 4:405, 406 Qasr al-Hallabat, 3:360; 4:376-378; 5:271 mosque, 4:56 plan of, 4:377 Qasr al-Hamra, 5:161 Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi (Western Game Park), 1:263;4:378-379 baths, 1:285 fortifications, 2:334, 335 mosques, 4:56
Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi (Eastern Game Park), 1:263, 270; 4:379-380 fortifications, 2:334, 335 mosques, 4:56 Qasr al-Kharana, 5:270 Qasr al-Meshatta, 2:334; 4:380 Qasr al-Tuba, 2:334; 5:270 Qasrawet, 5:44, 45 Qasr Bint Faraun (Petra), 1:193 Qasr Bshir, 2:332; 3:360 Qasr Burqu", 1:263; 4:56, 381 Qasr el-'Abd ('Iraq el-Amir), 1:192; 3:177, 178-180 Qasr el-Sagha (Faiyum), 2:299 Qasr el-'Uweinid, 1:244 Qasr esh-Shabib, 3:16 Qasr Faraoun, 4:355 Qasr Ibn Wardan, 1:196 Qasr Ibrim, 2:207 Qasrij, Khirbet, 2:267 Qasrin (Kisrin), 2:154; 4:381-383 synagogue, 2:422; 4:381-382, 383 Qasr-i Shirin ('Imarat-i Khusrau), 2:387 Qasr Muqatil, 4:56 Qaia'i, al-, 1:405; 2:206 Qataban, 4:383-384 Aden, 1:15 pantheon of, 4:384 pre-Islamic culture, 1:162; 4:384 Sheba, 5:19 Timna' as capital of, 5:215 Qatamat, Wadi, 4:390 Qatar, 1:159; 4:384-386, 385 Qatif, Tell-, 5:44 Qatna. See Mishrifeh, Tell Qatrabbul district (Baghdad), 1:264 Qattara, 4:429 Qatul al-Kisrawi, 4:473 Qatya oasis, 5:46 Qaws. See Qos Qayrawan (Kairouan), 1:3; 5:213, 269 Qazrin, 2:154 Qazvin Project, 3:62 QD (Qumran Damascus fragments). See Damascus Document Q document, 1:323 Qedarite Arabs, 4:223 Qedem (journal), 3:51; 4:264 Qedumim, 4:471 Qeimun, Tell. See Yoqne'am Qelt, Wadi, 1:158; 3:17 Qermez Dere, 3:91 Qimron, Elisha, 2:391 Qinnishrin (Chalcis ad Belum), 4:350, 386-387 Qiri, Tel (Hazorea), 4:387-389 Qirk Bize, 2:2 Qiryat Ata, 4:462 Qisri. See Caesarea Qitar, el- (Til-Abnu), 2:291, 292; 3:45; 4:389 Qitmit, Horvat, 4:390-391 Qpbetz (series), 3:191 Qom, Khirbet el-, 4:391-392 ostraca, 3:142; 4:392 QomHadid, 4:112 Qos (Qaws; Edomite god), 1:413; 2:190; 3:142, 143; 4:390; 5:154 Qoueiq River, 4:386 Qraya (settlement near Terqa), 3:44; 5:188 Qrayeh (Sidon tomb site), 5:40 Quadrant plan, 4:392 Quadriburgium, 3:360 Quailibah, 1:6
Quarries, Roman, 4:160 Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine (QDAP), l:239Qubbat alKliadra', 5:270 Qudeirat, Tell el-. See Qadesh-Barnea Qudshu. See Asherah Que. See Cilicia Campestris Quetta treasure, 4:10 Quibell, James E. Naqada excavations, 4:97, 98 Saqqara excavations, 4:479 Quietus, 1:275 Qumran, 4:392-396 alphabet, 1:78 Aramaic texts, 1:182, 183 calendar, 2:122 caves, 2:118 Damascus Document, 2:107 defensive systems, 4:395, 396 Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, 2:188-189 as Essene settlement, 2:125-126, 268 plan of, 4:393 Qumran Hebrew, 3:11 ritual baths, 1:271 site restoration, 2:60 tombs, 4:396 water system, 1:157; 4:394 See also Dead Sea Scrolls Qumran, Wadi, 4:392, 394 Qumran Damascus fragments (QD). See Damascus Document Qur'an Arabic as language of, 1:166, 167, 168 Bosra, 1:353 gardens in, 2:387; 3:418 Marib irrigation in, 3:418 Mecca, 3:445 mosque inscriptions, 4:58, 59; 5:269 as source of Islamic traditions, 1:165 Qurayyah, 1:163; 4:25, 396-397 Qusayr 'Amra, 1:285; 4:397-399 Qusbiyye, Khirbet, synagogue, 1:422 Quseir el-Qadim, 1:347; 5:320 Qustul, 4:170 Qusur, al-, 2:298 Quweira, el-, 4:410-411 Qweilbeh. See Abila R
Rabadhah, ar-, 1:4; 2:112-113 Rabah, Wadi, 1:8 Raban, Avner Caesarea, 1:403 Flaifa University maritime civilization history program, 5:283 Ma'agan Mikha'el, 3:389 Michal, Tel, survey, 4:20 Nahalal map, 5:104 Rabani, Bezalel, 5:204 Rabbat Ammon. See Amnion Rabbat Bene 'Ammon. See Amman Rabbits, domestication of, 1:143 Rabel 1,4:81 Rabelll, 1:237; 4:81,82 Raboisson, A., 4:102 Rabud, Khirbet, 1:61, 295; 4:401, 4 0 1 Rachgoun, 4:162 Racial concepts. See Eugenics movement Racial Photographs from the Egyptian Monuments (Petrie), 2:286; 4:308
INDEX Rad, Gerhard von, 1:79, 321 Radannah, 4 : 4 0 1 - 4 0 2 Radi, Selina al-, 2:290 Radiation spectra, 1:119, 120, 121 Radioactive dating, 1:446 Radiocarbon (journal), 4:267 Radiocarbon dating, 1:460; 2 : 1 1 3 - 1 1 4 , 377, 487; 3:405, 476; 4:268-269, 396; 5:15, 35, 251 Radt, Wolfgang, 5:386 Rafe, er-, 2:128 Rafhe-Linah, 1:166 Rafiqa, ar-. See Raqqa, arRahba-Mayadin, 3:174-175 Rahbanu, 5:256 Rahmani, L. Y., 3:18; 4:188 Raikes, Robert, 5:37 Raikes, Thomas D., 2:156 Rainey, Anson F. Amarna texts publication, 1:86 Beersheba location, 1:288 Ebla, Mount, 2:180 'Ira, Tel, identification of, 3:175 Maanillan Bible Adas, 4:416 Samaria Ostraca, 4:468 Sharuhen identification, 2:305 Raiya, ar-, 1:165 Rajak, Tessa, 5:117 Rajib, 1:101 Rajil, Wadi, 3:209, 210 Rakib-el, 1:186 Rakob, Friedrich, 4:156 Ralph of Bethlehem (bishop), 2:74 Ra'ma. See Najran Ramallah, 1:32, 35. See also Ai Ramat Negev, 3:175 Ramat Rahel, 1:30; 4 : 4 0 2 - 4 0 4 Rameses I,' 1:12; 2:199 Rameses II, 1:294; 5:368 Abu Simbel temple complex, 1:10, 11; 2:199 Abydos temple, 1:12 'Ajjul, Tel el-, 1:39, 40 Akko, 1:55 'Arnrit, 1 : 1 1 2 Dab'a, Tell ed-, stela, 2:101 Hittite threat to, 2:199 roads, 4:432 stela, 1:293 Rameses III girdle of, 5 : 1 9 2 as hunter, 3:122 Sea Peoples as threat to, 2:199 Yahudiyeh, Tell el-, temple, 5:368 Rameses Weser Khepesh, 1:307 Ramessides, 2:99, 100, 101, 199. See also specific rulers Ramla, 1:477; 4:233, 4 0 4 , 423; 5:270 Ramlah al-Saba'tayn, 5:376 Rams, 1:234-236; 4:509; 5:32-33, 338 Raoul I of Couzy, 4:446 Raoul-Rochette, Desire, 1:224 Raphana, 2:128. See also Decapolis Raphia, Tell, 5:44 Rappaport, U., 3:142 Raqai, Tell, 3:287 Raqqa, ar- (Callinicos; Leontopolis; Nicephorion; Rafiqa, ar-), 4 : 4 0 4 - 4 0 7 architecture, 1:3; 4:405, 406 fortifications, 2:336; 4:405 Harun al-Rashid, 4:405; 5:144 Ras, Khirbet er-, 1:29; 2:307
Ras, Tell er-, 4 : 4 0 7 - 4 0 9 ; 5:23 Ras al-'Ain, 1:247 Ra's al-Hadd, 4 : 4 0 9 Ras al-Hamra, 1:159 Ras al-Junayz, 2:54; 4:185 Ras al-Khaimah, 5:284 Rasal-Qal'at, 1:166 Ras Beirut, 1:293 Ras Botria. See Acholla Ras Dimass (Thapsus), 4:161 Ras ed-Drek, 4:161 Ras el-Ain, Tell. See Aphek Ras el-Bassit. See Bassit Ras en-Naqb, 4 : 4 0 9 - 4 1 1 ; 5:227 Rashap. See Resheph Rashid, Sa'ad Abdul Aziz al-, as contributor, 2:112-113; 3:168-171, 445-446, 459-460 Ras Ibn Hani, 2:93; 4 : 4 1 1 - 4 1 3 ; 5:255, 256, 257-258 Ras il-Wardija, 3:403 Ras ir-Raheb, 3:403 Rask Orsted Foundation, 4:241 Rasmussen, Carl G., 4:416 Ras Qasrun, 5:44 Rassam, Hormuzd Assur excavations, 1:225 Babylon excavations, 1:252; 3:58 Balawat excavations, 1:268; 3:58 Nimrud excavations, 3:338; 4:141, 142 Nineveh excavations, 3:57-58; 4:145 Sheikh Hamad, Tell, 5:25 Sippar excavations, 5:47 Telloh excavations, 2:407; 3:58 Ras Shamra. See Ugarit Rast, Walter E., 1:249; 3:55; 4:417; 5:65 Ras Uwainat Ali, 4:385 Rasyan, 2:103 Rathjens, Carl, 3:78; 5:18 Ratte, Christopher, as contributor, 4:259-262, 351-352 Rattles, 4:72-73 Rauda, 5:341 Rauwolff, Leonard, 1:251 Ravenna, 1:272 Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke, 4 : 4 1 3 'Aqar Quf identification, 1:156 Assur cuneiform script, 3:57 Babylon excavation project, 1:252 Bisitun inscriptions, 1:331; 2:131-132; 3:39, 60; 4:413 Borsippa excavations, 4:413 Khafajeh identification, 3:288 Nimrud, 4:141 Nippur identification, 4:148 Raybun, 2:452 Raydan, 5:386 Raydan (journal), 4:267 Raymond, Andre, 3:174 Razuk, Tell, 2:165, 472, 473; 3:94 Re, 1:247, 441 Reade, Julian E. as contributor, 4:409; 5:158-160 Ra's al-Hadd excavations, 4:409 Taya, Tell, excavations, 5:158 Reader's Digest Atlas of the Bible (Gardner and Frank), 4:416 Readings in Glass History (journal), 4:267 Real-Encyclopddie der classichen Altertumswissenschaft (Pauly and Wissowa), 4:419 Reconnaissance, archaeological. See Survey, archaeological
531
Recording techniques, 4 : 4 1 3 - 4 1 5 photography, 4:333, 335, 414 tools, 2:295 Redford, Donald B., 3:133; 5:273 Red Hall (Pergamon), 4:260 Red Monastery (Sohag), 4:43 Red-painted ware (ceramics), 1:476-477 Red-Slip Ware (ceramics), 1:472-473 Reed, William L., 2:133; 3:79 Dibon excavations, 2:157-158 Tayma', 5:160 Rees, L. W. B., 4:376 Reese, D. S„ 1:340 Reference works, 4 : 4 1 5 - 4 2 0 Reformation. See Protestantism Reform Judaism, 2:415 Refutation of the Sects (Enzik), 1:208 Reginald (Reynald) de Chatillon, 1:41; 3:281; 5:242 Regional analysis, geographic, 5:8-9 Re-Harakhti, 1:11; 3:15 Rehob, Kabri, Tel, association, 3:261 Relioboam, 1:243, 314; 3:319 Rehov frescoes, 1 : 1 9 4 synagogue inscription, 5:115 Rehovot (Ruheibe), 4:420 Reich, Ronny, 3:227 as contributor, 1:238-239; 2:173; 3:474-475; 4:430-431; 5:342-343, 375 Caesarea excavations, 1:403 Jemsalem excavations, 3:235; 4:461 Mesad Hashavyahu excavations, 3:474 ritual baths, 4:430 Reichsaramaisch. See Imperial Aramaic Reifenberg, Adolf, 5:111 Reifenberg, Benjamin, 1:402 Reinecke, Paul, 4:2 Reisner, George Andrew, 1:95, 315, 452; 4 : 4 2 1 Hetepheres' tomb, 2:411 Meroe excavations, 3:472 in Samaria, 2:315; 3:41; 4:164, 463, 468 Re'is, Piri, 1:224 Rekhesh, Tel (Anaharath), 5:104 Rekhes Shuafat, 5:105 Reliefs Achaemenid, 4:99-101, 276, 299-300 Bisitun, 1:330-331 chariotry documentation, 1:485-486 clothing documentation, 2:39-40 Egyptian, 1:336; 5:177 Elamite, 4:98-99 furnishings documentation, 2:358, 359, 360 hunting documentation, 3:122-123, 124 Izeh, 1:218; 3:199-202 Khorsabad, 2:383; 3:296, 297; 5:33 Lachish, 3:321, 322 musical instrument documentation, 4:75 parks documentation, 2:383 Roman, 4:437 Sasanian, 4:101 scribal documentation, 4:500 ship and boat documentation, 4:508-509; 5:31,32,33 Religion Index One, 4:418 Religion Index Two, 4:418 Religious and Theological Abstracts, 4:263 Religious Studies Review, 4:263, 418 Renan, Joseph Ernest, 1:274; 4:421-422 'Amrit excavation, 1 : 1 1 1 , 1 1 3 Byblos soundings, 1:391 Phoenician Expedition, 2:345; 4:421
532
INDEX
Renan, Joseph Ernest, continued Sarepta, 4:488 Sidon, 5:38 Renan, Philibert, 4:421 Rendsburg, Gary A., as contributor, 2:183-184 Renfrew, Colin on olive culdvadon, 4:179 Phylakopi excavations, 3:75 Saliagos excavations, 3:76 on spread of Indo-European languages, 3:155 Rephaim, 2:84 Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, 4:264 Reservoirs, 2:31; 4:422-423 Ai, 1:33 Arabian Peninsula, 1:166 Arad, 1:172 Auara, 3:122 Beit Ras, 1:298; 4:422 Beth-Shemesh, 2:13; 4:422 engineering, 1:366 Hazor, 1:290; 2:13; 3:130; 4:422 Kurnub, 3:313 Nabatean, 3:122, 313 Rabadhah, ar-, 2:113 Ramla, 4:423 See also Cisterns Resheph (Rashap), 1:186, 430; 2:183, 186; 3:268-269 Residency (Lachish palace), 3:322 Resistivity, 4:423-424 Resonance raman spectroscopy (RRS), 1:119-120 Restoration and conservation, 4:424-427 artifact, 1:216, 217 ASOR projects, 1:97 monument classification, 4:425-427 museums, 4:69 preservation policies, 2:270-272 underwater archaeology, 5:284 Sec also Conservation archaeology Retabah.Tell el-, 3:434 Rediemiotakis, George, 3:76 Reuben, 1:177; 3:20 Reuther, Oscar, 1:252; 2:78 Revelation, Book of, 1:323, 324; 3:460 Revista degli studi orientali (journal), 4:265 Revue archeologique, 4:266 Revue Biblique, 2:187, 188 Revue d'assyriologie et d'archeologie orientale, 4:264 Revue de Qumran, 4:265 Rey-Coquais, Jean-Paul, 1:143 Reynald de Chatillon. See Reginald (Reynald) de Chatillon Rezin. See Rasyan Rhakotis, 1:65, 67 Rheinisches Landes Museum (Bonn, Germany), 4:446 Rhinicolura, 5:45 Rhodes, 1:20-21 excavations, 3:76-77 faience production, 5:311 maritime trade, 1:73 Rhodokanakis, Nikolaus, 5:215 Ribat-i Malik, 1:422 Ribat-i Sharaf, 1:422 Ribats, 1:3 Rice, 1:479 Rice University, 1:75; 2:135 Rich, Claudius James, 1:251; 2:78; 3:38, 57 Nineveh, 4:145 Richard I (the Lionheart), 1:220; 2:75
Richard, Suzanne as contributor, 3:188-189 Iskander, Khirbet, excavations, 3:55, 188 Richardson, H. Neil, 1:314; 4:257 Richter, G. M. A., 2:360, 361 Riemchen, 1:355 Rifa'at, Tell, 1:33, 181, 186; 4:427-428 Rihan, Tell, 2:472 Rihaoui, Abdel Kader, 2:446 Riis, P. J., 1:278; 3:43; 5:90 Rimah, Tell er- (Tell Ermah), 4:428-430; 5:158 palace, 4:198 ziggurat, 5:390-391 Rimah, Wadi, 2:288 Rimmon, Horvat, 3:325 Rimush, 1:50, 52, 226; 2:408; 4:283 Ripamonti, Julius, 4:117 Risdon, D. L., 3:321 Rishpon, 5:318 Ritma, Horvat, 4:121 Ritter, Edith K , 3:452-453 Ritter, Karl, 4:434 Ritual batiis, 1:271; 4:430-431 as healing agents, 3:455 Jewish, 1:271; 5:274 Riyadh, 1:166 Rizza, Giovanni, 3:74 Road of the Monuments (Ptolemais), 4:355 Roads, 4:431-434 Amarna, Tell el-, 4:432, 433 Anatolia, 1:131, 133 Antioch, 1:145 Byzantine, 1:421 construction of, 4:432-433 dimensions of, 4:431-432 Egyptian, 4:432, 433 Galilean, 2:374 Golan, 2:421 Jerusalem, 3:234 Judean (Roman period), 4:226-227, 432 Khorasan road, 2:471 markings for, 4:433 Mecca pilgrimage, 1:4, 65 of Persian military, 4:224; 5:43 Roman, 2:32, 421; 4:226-227, 432-433, 439 Transjordan, 5:241 Umayyad rural foundations, 5:271 See also headings beginning with Via Roaf, Michael, as contributor, 1:359; 2:265-268, 471-474 Roberts, David, 5:50 Robinson, Edward, 1:274, 315; 3:38; 4:434-435; 5:222 'Anjar description, 1:143 'Aro'er identification, 1:211 Bethel identification, 1:300 Beth-Shemesh, 1:311 Capernaum, 1:417 Dan identification, 2:108 Ful, Tell el-, 2:346 Gibeon identification, 2:403 Halusa, 2:465 Herodian Jericho, 3:16 Herodium, 3:18 historical geography, 3:30, 38, 52; 4:434-435; 5:101 Jotapata identification, 3:251 Masada identification, 3:428 methodology, 5:49-50 Mizpah identification, 4:101-102 Nebo, 4:115 PeUa, 4:257
pottery, 1:459 Seilun, Khirbet, identification, 5:28 settlement-pattern studies, 5:7-8 Shechem, 5:19 Sidon, 5:38 Siloam Tunnel, 5:332 Robinson, George L., 3:52 Robinson, James M., 4:87 Robinson, Sallie Crozer, 3:26 Roche, Marie-Jeanne, as contributor, 5:153-155 Rochman-Halperin, Arieh, 2:256 Rock altars, 1:80 Rock-cut churches and monasteries, 1:135 Rock-cut temple tombs, 2:348 Rockefeller, John D„ Jr., 1:357 Rockefeller Museum, 1:62, 274 Qumran excavations, 2:118; 4:393 Rock of Foundation, 1:326, 328 Rock reliefs and tombs, 1:218 Rocks. See Lithics; Petrography; Stratigraphy; specific types Rodiger, Emil, 2:132; 4:434 Rogers, Michael, 2:358 Rogerson, Joseph W., 4:416 Rollefson, Gary O. as contributor, 1:36-38; 5:226-231 Azraq survey, 1:244 Hammam, Khirbet, 2:478 Rollig, Wolfgang, 3:45; 5:25 as contributor, 4:498-499 Romain de Puy, 3:281 Roman Catholicism, 1:276 Eastern Orthodox schism, 1:395-396 Franciscan Custody of die Holy Land, 2:343 Hebrew Scriptures and, 1:320 Modernist crisis, 3:325 pilgrimages to holy sites, 4:104 See also Crusader period Roman Empire, 4:435-441 Amman, 1:100-101 amulets, 1:114 Anatolia, 1:132-134 anchors, 1:138 Antioch, 1:144-145 Apamea, 1:146-147 Aphek, 1:141 Aphrodisias, 1 : 1 5 1 - 1 5 2 'Aqaba, 1:154 aqueducts, 1:158; 3:131, 183-184 Arabian Peninsula, 1:160 arches, 1:189-190 architectural decoration, 1:190-191, 192, 193, 194-195 Armenia, 1:206-206, 208 art, 2:32, 225-226, 358, 359; 4:51-52, 437, 533-534; 5:329-330 - Ashkelon, 1:220, 223 Avdat, 1:236, 237, 238 Baalbek, 1:247, 248 Babylon, 1:255, 258 Badiat ash-Sham, 1:263 basilicas, 1:277-278 baths, 1:271-272, 284-285; 2:226, 254, 468-469; 4:302 building materials and techniques, 1:376-378 Byblos, 1:392-393 Carthage, 1:429, 430-432 ceramics, 1:469-471, 472-475 codices, 2:40-41 colonization, 1:430 cosmetics, 2:67, 68, 69 craftsmen, 1:339
INDEX Damascus, 2:103, 104-105 Decapolis, 2:128 Dura-Europos, 2:174-176 Egypt, 2:203-204; 3:67; 4:356 fortifications, 2:31, 330-333 funerary practices, 4:438 furnishings, 2:358-361 glassmaking, 2:414; 5:308, 316-317 Gordion, 2:430 granary construction, 2:432 Greeks, attitudes toward, 2:434 in Greek-speaking provinces, 2:437 Hasmonean state, 2:482 Hatra, 2:485 Herod the Great, 1:270 ivoiy craft, 1:339, 348 Jewish revolts, 1:275-276; 2:313-314; 4:530 lamps, 3:328-329 map of holdings, 4:436 military tactics, 5:339 mining, 2:310 Nabateans, 4:83; 5:237 Palestine, 4:225-227 Parthian conflicts, 4:249, 288-289; 5:136-137 pirates, 2:10 religion, 1:133; 2:160, 254; 4:27, 437-438 roads, 2:32, 421; 4:226-227, 432-433, 439 Sasanian empire, 4:289 Second Temple destruction, 1:324 Seleucids, 1:72, 73 Sepphoris, 4:530 temple tombs, 2:347 textiles, 5:197 theaters, 2:381; 5:199-202 trade, 4:439 transportation, 4:439; 5:244 See also Byzantine Empire; subhead Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods under specific subjects Roman Legion at Caesarea, 3:335 First Jewish Revolt, 2:313-314 Jerusalem campsite, 3:233; 4:226 at Masada, 3:428 Rome, museums, 4:67 Rome, University of. See University of Rome Ronen, Avraham Carmel, Mount, excavations, 1:424; 5:152 Haifa survey, 5:104 Roodenberg, J. J., 1:354 Roofs, 5:210-211 Rope, tent, 5:180 Rosen, Arlene Miller, as contributor, 4:201-205; 5:163 Rosen, Baruch, 2:282-283 Rosen, Steven A. as contributor, 3:369-374, 378-382 Beersheba excavations, 4:462 nomad campsites, 4:229 Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam as contributor, 4:152-153, 233-234, 291-292, 404 Mefjer ware, 1:477 Ramla excavations, 4:404 Rosenthal, Renate, 5:150 Rosetta Stone, 1:73, 484-485; 3:25, 38, 68; 4:105 Rosh Zayit, Horvat, 2:341; 3:109, 4:180 Ross, Ludwig, Aegean Islands, 3:73 Rossini, Carlo Conti, 2:274 Rossiter, J. J., as contributor, 5:300-301 Rost.L,, 4:516
Rostovtzeff, Mikhail I., 2:174; 4:242 Roth, C , 2:126 Rothenberg, Benno, 4:397; 5:217 Rodr-Gerson, Lea, 5:114 Rothman, Mitchell S., 5:184 as contributor, 5:183-186 Rothschild, Edmond de, 1:32 Rothschild, Eduard de, 5:342 Rothschild, James A. de, 3:1 Rouault, Olivier, 3:45; 5:188 Round City (Baghdad), 1:3, 264-265 Round House (Tepe Gawra), 4:197; 5:184 Round houses, 2:165, 472; 3:91, 92, 94 Rousseau, John J., 4:419 Rousset, Marie-Odile, 3:175 Roussin, Lucille A., as contributor, 1:218; 4:50-55 Rouzavalle, Sebastien, 1:247 Rowan, Yorke M„ as contributor, 3:374-378 Rowe, Alan, 1:66, 67; 4:441-442 Beth-Shean excavations, 1:306; 4:441 Gezer excavations, 2:396; 4:236 Rowland, Robert J., Jr., as contributor, 4:482-484 Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, 4:267 Royal Cemetery (Marlik), 3:422-423 Royal Cemetery (Ur), 5:289 Royal city (Chogha Zanbil), 1:488-489 Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project, 4:265 Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), 1:90 Godin Tepe excavations, 2:416 Jericho excavations, 3:221 Zabid surveys, 5:385 Royal Palace (Ugarit), 5:257, 258-260 Royal Stoa, 1:277 RRS. See Resonance raman spectroscopy Ruad (Aradus; Arwad), 1:111, 113 Rub al-Khali, 1:159; 5:253 Ruba, Tell er-, 3:385 Rubensohn, Otto, 3:76 Rubenstein, ChaimT., 4:416 Rudolf. See Lake Rudolf Rufinus, 1:208 Ruggles, D. Fairchild, as contributor, 1:379-383; 2:334-336 Ruheibe. See Rehovot Ruhuratir, 1:488 Rujm al-Henu (West), 1:273 Rujm el-Hiri, 4:442-443 mmuli, 2:419; 5:245, 246 Rujm el-Malfuf, 1:99 Rujum, er-. See Hartuv Rule of the Community, 2:107, 120; 4:443-444 Ruler's Villa (Failaka), 2:297 Rum, 1:135 Rumeide, Jebel er-, 3:13 Rumeilah, Tell er-. See Beth-Shemesh Rumeith, Tell er-, 1:62; 4:444-445 Rumiya. See Veh-Antiokh-Khusrau Running, Leona Glidden, as contributor, 1:61-62 Rupp, David W., as contributor, 4:456-458 Ruqeish, Tell, 5:43-44 Rusa I, 5:292 Rusafa (Sergiopolis), 1:3; 4:445-446 church, 3:427; 4:445-446 Rusafah, ar- (Baghdad area), 1:265 Rusapina (Monastir), 4:161 Rushmiya, Khirbet, 5:104 Ruskin, John, 4:424 Russell, Kenneth W., 3:55; 4:306
533
Rutgers, Leonard Victor, 5:117 as contributor, 1:434-438; 4:119-120 Ryckmans, Gonzague, 3:80 Ryckmans, Jacques, 3:80; 4:90, 371 Rye, 1:479 S
Suade, George, 1:278; 4:411 Saarbrucken, University of. See University of Saarbrucken Saarisalo, Aapeli, 1:301; 5:380 Saba'. See Sheba Sabaean (language), 2:276; 5:18 Qaryat al-Fau inscriptions, 4:372 Sabaean culture, 5:18-19 Khawlan at-Tiyal, 3:292 San'a, 4:477-478 Sabi Abyad, Tell, 3:43 Sabiyah, 3:315, 316 Sabra, Wadi, 5:201 Sabratha, 2:349 Sabz. See Tepe Sabz Sachalitai, 5:252 Sachau, Eduard, 3:409 Sachs, Curt, 4:71 Sacred Way, 2:161 Sacrifices human, 2:253 child, 1:414, 430; 2:84; 4:158, 159-160, 330 temple space for, 5:166, 169, 170 See also Animal sacrifice Sa'dah, 1:4 Sadat, Anwar el-, 4:109 Saddam Dam Basin Salvage Project. See Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project Sadducees, 2:107, 126 Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, 2:78 Saduppum (Tell Harmal), 1:261; 3:94 Sadurska, Anna, 4:242 Safaitic-Thamudic inscriptions, 4:447-448; 5:237 graffiti, 4:437 Harding, Gerald Lankester, 2:474 Suweida, 5:112 Safar, Fuad, 4:448 Diyala excavations, 2:164 Eridu excavations, 2:259; 4:448 Hassuna, 2:483 Safavids, 5:214-215 Saffarin, 4:468 Saffuriyya, 4:530 Safsafa, Jebel, 4:44 Safin, Tell, 1:98, 99, 104; 4:448-450 Sagalassos, 1:133, 134 Saggs, H. W. F., 5:360 Sahab, 1:98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 106; 4:450-452 Saliaba, Jebel, 2:192 Sahak, 1:209 Sahara, 2:246-247 Sahasara, 3:385 Sahidic dialect, 2:66 Sahl edh-Dhra', 5:62 Sahr (Trachonitis) theater, 5:201, 202 Sahure, 3:357 Sahurunuwa Donation, 5:247 Saida. See Sidon Saidah, Roger, 1:293 Beirut excavation, 1:295
534
INDEX
Saidah, Roger, continued Khaldeh excavations, 3:291 Sarepta, 4:488 Sidon excavations, 5:40 Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-, 2:328-329; 4 : 4 5 2 - 4 5 5 ; 5:233 burials, 2:13, 14; 4:452-453 open-court buildings, 2:27 plan of fortifications, 2:327 Said Naya (Sardenay; Saydeneia), 4:455-456 Sails, 4:506-507; 5:30-31 St. Joseph University (Beirut). See Universite St.-Joseph St. Laurent, Beatrice, as contributor, 5:212-215 St. Mary's Cloister, legend of, 4:456 St. Peter's Basilica (Rome), 1:277 St. Theodore cathedral, 1:278 Sai's, 2:142, 200 Saka, 4:293, 294 Sakariya, Khirbet, 5:105 Sakellarakis, Yiannis, 3:74, 75 Sakkunyaton, 2:81-82, 84, 85 Sakon, 1:430 Saladin. See Salah ad-Din Salah ad-Din 'Ajlun castie construction, 1:41 Ashkelon's desttuction by, 1:220 Baalbek conquest, 1:247 Cairo, 1:242, 406 extent of conquests, 1:241; 5:242 Fatimids, 2:309 Fustat settlement, 2:366 at Horns of Hattin (Hittin), 2:75 Sunnism, 2:207 See also Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties Salakta (Sullecthum), 4:161 Salamanu (Moabite king), 4:39 Salamis (Constantia), 2:94; 4 : 4 5 6 - 4 5 8 baths, 1:285 cauldron, 4:14 necropolis, 2:94; 4:457 Salamiyya, 2:307; 5:145 Saleh, Khirbet, 2:267 Salem, 3:224 Saliagos, 3:76 Saliby, Nassib, 3:43; 4:242 as contributor, 1 : 1 1 1 - 1 1 3 Kazel, Tell al-, excavations, 3:275, 276 Raqqa, ar-, excavations, 4:405 Ras Ibn Hani excavations, 4:411 Salih, M„ 1:102 Salines. See Kition Sailer, Sylvester John, 4 : 4 5 8 - 4 5 9 Jerusalem excavations, 3:226 Nebo, Mount, excavations, 3:53; 4:116, 117 Salles, G., 3:174 Salles, Jean-Francois as contributor, 5:10-11 Failaka excavations, 2:298 Sallustius, 3:33-34 Salman Pak, 2:79 Salmon, Merrilee H., 4:134 Salome Alexandra, 2:482, 483 Salt (mineral), 4 : 4 5 9 Salt, es-, 1:101; 5:37 Salvage excavation, 4 : 4 5 9 - 4 6 3 dam projects, 1:232; 2:265-268, 471-474; 4:460 in Israel, 2:60, 153-154, 224; 4 : 4 6 1 - 4 6 3 overview, 4 : 4 5 9 - 4 6 1 Salzmann, Auguste, 4:495 Samak, Tell es~. See Shiqmona
Sam'al (Zincirli), 1:181, 186 bathrooms, 4:302 as Neo-Hittite state, 5:132, 133-134 Samanid dynasty, 1:4; 4:152 Samarat, Tel el-, 3:17 Samaria (Sebaste), 1:277; 4:463-467 administrative center, 2:24 aqueducts, 1:157, 158 Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:105 coins, 4:223-224, 471 excavations at, 4:164, 236, 463-465 Harvard University Expedition to, 1:95; 2:315,357; 4:463 as Israelite capital, 3:246; 4:465 periodization debate concerning, 4:463-465 round towers, 4:465, 466 shell artifacts, 1:347 See also Northern Samaria, survey of; Southern Samaria, survey of Samaria Ostraca, 2:318; 4:182, 468-469 Samaritan Aramaic, 1:183 Samaritans, 4:469-472 biblical texts, 2:119-120; 4:469 Church of the Nativity, 1:302 coins, 4:223-224 Daliyeh, Wadi ed-, 2:102 Gerizim, Mount, 4:469-470 under Hasmoneans, 2:482 language, 1:183; 4:470 Shechem settlement, 5:23 skeletal morphology of, 5:55 Samarkand, 1:1; 2:35 Samarra, 3:477; 4:472-476 Chalcolithic period, 4:472-473 ceramics, 4:472, 473 houses, 3:92 Islamic period, 4:473-476 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1,3, 265; 4:473 mosques, 1:3; 4:56-57, 475-476 plan of, 4:474 Sami, Ali, 3:60; 4:251,275 Samilyeh, Khirbet, 5:105 Samiyeh, Khirbet, 1:35 Samos, 1:157; 3:77 Samosata (Samsat; Sumaisat; Semisat), 4:437, 476-477 Samothrace, 3:74 Sams, G. Kenneth, 1:92; 2:428 Samsat Hdyiik, 1:125; 4:126 Samsat. See Samosata Samsigram dynasty, 3:89 Samson, 1:220 Samsuditana, 1:56 Samsuiluna, 2:146 Samuel, Book of 'Aro'er reference, 1:211 'Azekah reference, 1:243 bathing reference, 1:284 iron implement references, 4:4 on King David, 2:420 San'a, 1:165; 4:477-478 gold and marble church, 2:275 Great Mosque, 1:166; 4:478; 5:269 San'ap church, 2:275 San Crisogono church, 2:2 Sancta Sophia. See Hagia Sofia Sanctuary, Mesopotamian temples, 5:165-166, 169, 251-252 Sanctuary of Apollo (Didyma), 2:160 Sanctuary of Apollo (Kourion), 3:305 Sanctuary of Artemis (Didyma), 2:160-161 Sanctuary of Asclepius (Pergamon), 4:260, 261
Sanctuary of Athena (Pergamon), 4:260 Sanctuary of Demeter (Pergamon), 4:260 Sanctuary of Hera (Samos), 3:77 Sanctuary of Mithras (Dura-Europos), 2:176 Sanctuary of Nusku (Chogha Zanbil), 1:489 Sanctuary of St. Simeon. See Qal'at Sim'an Sanctuary of the Mitanni Ax (Ugarit), 5:173 Sanctuary of die Paphian Aphrodite (Paphos), 4:245, 246 Sanctuary of the Silver Calf (Ashkelon), 1:221-222 Sanctuary of Zeus (Apamea), 5:140 Sandahanna, Tell es-. See Mareshah Sanders, Donald H., as contributor, 4:123-126 San Diego State University, 1:36 Sandon (Santas), 3:385 Sang-i Shir, 2:186 Sangarius River, 1:135 Sanhedrin, 5:203-204 Sanidha, 4:478 Sanlaville, Paul, 1:293; 2:288 San Remo Conference (1920), 4:107 Sanskrit, 3:150 Santa Maria Maggiore, 1:278 Santa Sabina, 1:278 Santas (Sandon), 3:385 Saone casde, 2:76 Sapanu, Mount, 5:255 Sapor I, 4:386 Sapphar. See Zafar Saqiya, 2:250 Saqqara, 4:478-481 Aramaic texts, 1:182; 2:213, 215, 216 monastery, 4:43, 480 pyramids, 2:197; 4:362-363, 479-480 tombs, 2:197, 207; 4:478-480 Sar, 1:161 Sarab, 1:142 Saradi, Helen, as contributor, 1:394-398; 2:61-64 Sarafand. See Sarepta Sarapis, 1:67, 114 Sarat Canal, 1:264 Sa'r Awtar, 5:14 Sarcophagus, 4:481-482 Anatolia, 1:133 Beth-She'arim, 1:310; 4:481 bone decorations, 1:345 Byblos, 1:391-392; 4:481 Hellenistic decoration, 1:190; 4:481-482 hunting scene decorations, 3:123-124 lead, 4:18 Sidon, 1:190; 4:481; 5.-3S-39 Sarcophagus of Ahiram. See Ahiram inscription Sarcophagus of Alexander (Sidon), 5:39 Sarcophagus of the Weepers (Sidon), 5:39 Sardaryan, S. A., 1:203 Sardenay. See Said Naya Sardinia, 4:482-484 ingots, oxhide, 2:93 Phoenician settlements, 4:483 Sea Peoples, 2:435 trade, 1:28; 4:483 Sardis, 4:484-488 architectural decoration and orders, 1:201 decline of, 1:135 earthquake and rebuilding of, 1:133 garden, 2:384 Greco-Persian conflicts, 1:130; 4:485 Greek cultural components, 4:486 inscriptions, 2:386; 4:486, 487 as Lydian capital, 1:130; 4:485, 486 religion, 4:486, 487
INDEX Roman era, 1:134; 4:486-487 synagogue, 1:134; 4:54; 5:116, 123 terraced architecture, 1:132; 4:486 Sarduri II, 5:292 Sarepta (Sarafand; Zarephath), 4:488-491 as Phoenician setdement, 4:488-490 shrines, 4:329, 490 Ugaritic cuneiform system, 1:77 Sargon I Akkade, 1:15, 41, 42, 44, 50; 5:296 Babylon destroyed by, 1:254, 256 dynasty, 1:51-54; 2:17; 5:98, 289 Sargon II, 1:353; 2:94 Ashdod destroyed by, 1:219-220; 4:50 distinguished from Sargon, 1:50 Eanna constructions, 5:296 Khorsabad, 1:227; 3:296, 298 royal annals of, 4:312 Sargonic dynasty. See Sargon I Sargonid. See Sargon II Sargon's Fort (Carchemish), 1:423 Sarmatians, 4:293 Sarre, Friedrich, 4:491 Raqqa, ar-, 4:405 Salihiyeh, as-, survey, 2:173 Tulul al-'Aqir identification, 3:269 Sartaba, Jebel, 4:257 fortifications, 2:330 water supply, 1:158; 4:422 Saruneh, Wadi, 1:301 Sarus River, 2:8 Sarzec, Ernest de Telloh excavations, 2:345, 407; 3:58; 5:96 SAS. See Society for Archaeological Sciences Sasanians, 3:486-487; 4:289-290, 491-495 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1 Anatolia, 1:133, 134, 135 Arabian Peninsula, 1:162, 163-164 Armenian occupation by, 1:206, 209, 210; 4:491, 493 art sites, 1:218 Babylon under, 1:255 coins, 2:46, 47, 48, 49 excavation sites, 3:62 gardens, 2:386 glassmaking, 2:414, 415 Himyar conquest, 3:28 irrigation system, 1 : 1 , 3; 4:494 ivory use, 1:346 map of holdings, 4:492 reliefs, 4:101 religious thought of, 2:48; 4:289, 493-494 Roman Empire and, 4:289, 491, 493 Syrian raids by, 5:137 trade, 1:4; 3:486-487; 4:494 Uruk settlement, 5:297 Sass, Benjamin, 4:354 as contributor, 3:238-246 Sasson, Jack M., 4:417 Sasunc'i Dawil'i (Armenian national epic), 1:210 Satala, 2:332 Satani dar, 1:203 Satet, 2:234, 235, 236 Satire of the Artisans (Egytian papyrus), 2:315 Satraps, 1:74, 130; 4:314 Satrap Sarcophagus (Sidon), 4:481 Saturn, cult of, 4:162 Saudi Arabia. See Arabian Peninsula Saudi Arabian Oil Company, 4:371 Sauer, James A., 1:90, 95 ACOR directorship, 1:89
as contributor, 1:440-441, 475-479; 3:51-56; 4:313; 5:231-235 Ghrubba surveys, 2:402 Jubah, Wadi al-, 3:253 Mazar, Tell el-, 3:443 Saul, 1:61, 104, 307; 2:346 Saulcy, Felicien de, 1:447, 448; 2:306, 345; 4:495 on ancient name of Qumran, 4:392 Herodium, 3:18 'Iraq el-Amir, 3:177, 178-179 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225; 4:495 Masada excavations, 3:428 Saustatar, 1:56 Sauvaget, Jean, 1:143; 2:104; 4:379, 495-496 Sauvaire, Henri, 1:447 "Save Carthage" campaign, 1:432; 2:152; 4:156 Save-Soderbergh, Torgny, 4:87 Savignac, Antoine Raphael, 1:236; 2:187 Dedan description, 1:234; 2:133 Meda'in Saleh, 3:446 Tayma', 5:160 Sawl (Shala), 1:488; 2:301 Sawuska, 3:128 Sawwan, Tell es-, 2:19; 3:92; 4:473 Sayce, Archibald H, 2:133, 217 Saydeneia. See Said Naya Sayings of Ahiqar, 4:502 Says, Jabal, 2:335; 4:56 SBL. See Society of Biblical Literature Scala. See Kition Scanlon, George T. as contributor, 2:205-207, 307-310, 365-368 Fustat, 1:405 Scanners,film,4:346 Scarabs (as amulets), 1:114 Scarab seals Alalakh, 1:58 of Hyksos officials, 3:134 Miqne, Tel, 4:30-31 of Nefertiti, 5:267 popularity of, 4:511 Scerrato, Umberto, 3:61 Scetis (Shier), 4:42, 153 Schaeffer, Claude F.-A., 2:92; 3:71; 4:496-497 Arslantepe excavation, 1:213 earthquakes, 1:300 Enkomi excavations, 2:241, 242 Ugarit excavations, 2:345; 3:43; 5:256, 304 Vounous excavations, 5:322 Schaub, R. Thomas as contributor, 1:248-251; 5:62-64 Bab edh-Dhra' excavation, 1:249; 3:55 Feifa excavations, 5:65 Schechter, Solomon, 2:106-107 Scheil, Vincent, 2:146; 5:48 Schick, Conrad, 2:148, 403; 4:497 Herodium, 3:18 Palestine Exploration Fund, 4:235, 497 Siloam Channel, 5:332 Schick, Robert, 4:306 as contributor, 5:279-281 Schiffer, Michael, 5:87 Schiffman, Laurence, 2:126 Schilardi, Demetrius, 3:76 Schiparelli, Ernest, 1:234 Schliemann, Heinrich, 4:497-498 on Assos site, 1:223-224 on bronze usage, 4:1 Dorpfeld, Wilhelm, 3:75; 4:498 ethics of, 2:270; 4:498
535
Mycenae, 2:365 Troy excavations, 3:64; 4:235, 497-498 Schloen, David, as contributor, 1:220-223 Schlumberger, Daniel, 4:498 Baalbek excavation, 1:247 Greek coinage, 2:44 Palmyra, 4:242 Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, 4:378 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, 2:87, 229; 5:352, 358 Schmidt, A., 5:28 Schmidt, Erich F., 3:60 Alisar Hoyiik excavations, 4:189 Fara excavations, 2:302 Flasanlu, 2:480 Naqsh-i Rustam tombs, 4:99 Pasargadae, 4:251 Persepolis excavations, 4:275 Schmidt, H.J., 5:294 Schmidt, Jiirgen, 3:417 Schmidt-Korte, Karl, 4:304 Schneemelcher, Wilhelm, 4:419 Schneider, A. M., 5:150 Schneider, J., 4:477 Schneider, Madeleine, 3:169 Schneider, Thomas, 2:100 Schofield,John, 1:295 Scholer, David M., 4:419 School of American Archaeology (Santa Fe, New Mexico), 1:188 School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), 4:265 Schroder, Paul G. A., 4:498-499 Schulman, A. R., 2:220 Schuller, Adolf, 3:428 Schultz, E. G , 3:251 Schulz, Bruno, 1:247 Schulz, Friedrich E., 2:131; 3:63 Schumacher, Gottlieb, 1:95; 2:26, 148; 4:499-500 Abila, 1:5, 6 Beit Ras, 1:297 on Bedisaida location, 1:303 Gadara, 5:281 Irbid, 3:181 Kafranja, Wadi, survey, 3:261 Madaba, 3:394 Megiddo excavations, 3:461, 462, 464, 466, 467, 468; 4:499 Qasrin identification, 4:381 Samaria excavations, 4:463 Transjordan survey, 4:235, 499 Umm el-Jimal, 5:276 Ziqlab, Wadi, survey, 5:391 Schumacher, Jakob, 4:499 Schwartz, Glenn M., as contributor, 1:355-356; 4:459-461 Schwartz, Joseph, 1:243 Scientific and Artistic Commission (Napoleonic France), 4:105 Scorpiones, 5:339 Scott, Jane Ayer, as contributor, 1:131-135 Scott, Lindsay, 5:358 Scranton, Robert, 3:305 Screw presses, 4:181 Scribes and scribal techniques, 3:362-364; 4:247, 248, 500-502 Akkadian, 3:83, 363 Aramaic, 1:182 Armenian, 1:208 Canaanite, 3:363, 364-365 chambers for scribes, 4:360; 5:189
536
INDEX
Scribes and scribal techniques, continued cuneiform, 2:87-89 education, 4:501; 5:94 Egypdan, 3:363, 364; 4:500 Greek, 1:78 handwriting, 5:356-357 Hebrew, 3:6-7 Hittite, 3:83 libraries, 3:355-356; 4:501 Mesopotamian, 4:500-501 multilingualism, 4:501-502 ostraca, 4:189 Phoenician, 1:78 Sumerian, 3:83, 355, 363; 4:501 tablet inscription, 5:150 Ugaritic, 4:500 Script. See Writing and writing systems Scriptures. See Biblical literature Scroll, 4:502-503 codices, 2:40-41 Egyptian, 4:502 Petra, 4:308 Qumran, 1:329 See also Copper Scroll; Dead Sea Scrolls; Temple Scroll; War Scroll Scullard, H. H., 4:419 Sculpture 'Ain Ghazal, 1 : 3 6 Akkadians, 1:52-53 Alalakh, 1:58 Amarna, Tell el-, 1:82, 83, 84-85 Amman, 1:100, 104 of Ammonite deities, 1:105 'Arnrit, 1:112 Anatolia, 1:132, 133, 134; 2:161 Aphrodisias, 1:133, 151, 152 'Aqar Quf, 1:156 Arabia, 4:372 architectural decoration, 1:190-197; 2:461-462 art sites, 1:218 Ashkelon, 1:22/, 222 Assyrians, 1:231, 232 Babylonians, 1:260, 255 bone, 1:341, 345 bronze, 4:53i, 532 Byblos, 1:392 Cyprus, 4:246 Ebla, 2:182 Edomites, 4:5-90, 391 Egypt, 5:177 Elamites, 1:218 Ephesus, 2:255 Fakhariyah, 2:301 figurines bull, 1:383, 384 fertility, 1:36 mourning, 4:311 musical performer, 4:74, 75 Tannit, 5:17-18 Transjordan, prehistoric, 5:228 Yarmukian, 5:12 Yin'am, Tel, 5:380 glazed, 1:489 Greece, 2:161 ivoiy, 1:342 Kassites, 3:274 Mesopotamia, 4:10 Paphos, 4:246 Pataekos statuette, 1:303, 304 religious icons, 2:83
Roman Empire, 2:32, 255; 4:437 Syria, 5:112, 114, 134, 261 Transjordan, prehistoric, 5:228 Scythian (language), 3:150 Scythians (Ashkuzi), 4:293, 5 0 3 - 5 0 5 , 504 Scythopolis. See Beth-Shean; Decapolis Seafaring, 4 : 5 0 5 - 5 0 9 Aden port, 1:15-16 Aegean Islands, 1:25, 28; 4:506, 507 Anatolia, 1:127, 133 'Aqaba port, 1:153, 154 Arabian Peninsula, 1:160, 161, 162, 163-164 Arwad, 1:218 Ashdod port, 1:219 Ashkelon port, 1:220 Cyprus, 1:25, 28 Egypt, 4:505 Mclos, voyages to, 4:505 metal artifacts for, 4:18 military ventures, 4:508-509; 5:338 sails, 4:506-507 Sasanians, 1:163-164 Ser?e Limani harbor, 5:2-4 See also Anchors; Fishing; Ships and boats Seager, Richard Berry, 3:75 Sealand (Babylonia), 1:483 Seals, 4 : 5 0 9 - 5 1 2 Akkadian, 4:61-62, 510-511 Ammonite, 1:104, 105, 106; 4:168 amulets, 1 : 1 1 3 - 1 1 4 Anatolian, 1:128, 129; 3:267-268, 309-310 Arad, 1:176-177 Assyrian, 1:231; 3:309-310; 4:511-512 Baalis, 5:274 Babylonian, 1:251, 260; 4:511; 5:190 Byzantine, 5:3 chariots and, 1:485 Hittite, 4:511 Israelite, 3:467; 4:166-167 Judean, 4:223 Kassite, 3:274 Mesopotamian, 4:510, 511; 5:189-190 Mitanni, 4:511 Moabite, 4:167, 168 Nordiwest Semitic, 4:166-169 Nuzi, 3:128, 129 Persian, 5:274 Phoenician, 4:166-167, 169 photography of, 4:343-344 Qal'at al-Bahrain, 1:161 scarab, 1:58; 3:134; 4:30-31, 511 stamp versus cylinder, 4:509, 510 Uruk-style, 4:510; 5:295 Sea of Galilee. See Lake Kinneret Sea of Marmara, 5:3 Sea Peoples, 2:199, 435; 5:131. See also Philistines Sease, Catherine, as contributor, 1:215-217 Sebaste. See Samaria Sebasteia games, 5:75 Sebastcion, 1:152 Sebastos, 1:399, 403 Sebeos, 1:210 Secondary-ion mass spectrometry, 1:121 Second Crusade. See Crusader period Second Jewish Revolt. See Bar Kokhba Revolt Second Paphlagonian Cohort, 2:175 Second Style Pompeiian wall paintings, 1:193, 200 Second Temple (516 BCB-70 CE; Jerusalem), 1:193, 276
Copper Scroll, 2:65 First Jewish Revolt, 2:313, 314 Herodian restoration and expansion, (20 BCE), 1:324-325 size, layout, and decoration, 1:326, 328-330 Second Wall Jerusalem), 3:230 Section. See Balk Sede Boqer, 5:104, 105 Seeden, Helga, 2:290 as contributor, 1:274-275; 3:172-173; 5:11 on Bosra, 1:351 Seetzen, Ulrich Jasper, 2:306; 3:52; 5 : 2 2 2 Abila, 1:6 Gadara identification, 5:281 Machaerus, 3:391 Moab, 1:447 Zafar, 3:78; 5:386 Sefarad (journal), 4:265 Sefer ha Razim ("Book of Mysteries"), 1 : 1 1 5 Sefire Aramaic inscriptions, 1:181; 4 : 5 1 2 - 5 1 3 Segal, Arthur, 5:89 as contributor, 5:199-203 Seger, Joe D. as contributor, 1:243; 3:325-326; 4:423-424; 5 : 1 9 - 2 3 , 331-332 ASOR presidency, 1:95 Gezer excavations, 1:316; 2:396 Lahav Research Project, 3:325 Seher, Jtirgen, 1:334 Seh Qubba, 2:267 Seidl, Ursula, as contributor, 3:199-203; 4:98-101 Seilun, Khirbet. See Shiloh Seirafe, Feisal, 1:34 Seir. See Edom Sejourne, P.-M., 3:394 Sekaka, 4:392 Sekhemkhet (Egyptian ruler), 4:479 Sekhmet (deity), 1:441; 5:1 Sela, 4:304; 5:275, 276 Selal, Tell, 2:266, 267 Selby, W. B., 5:47 Selenkahiyeh, Tell, 3:44, 109, 111 Seleucia of Pieria, 1:144 Seleucia on the Tigris, 2:78-79; 3:484; 4:513-514
aerial photography of, 4:333 architecUiral decoration, 1:194; 4:514 Roman conquests of, 3:485; 4:513 Seleucids, 3:484-485; 4 : 5 1 4 - 5 1 5 Alexandrian Empire, 1:70; 3:484 Amman, 1:100 Anatolia, 1:131-132 Antioch, 1 : 1 1 7 , 144 Apamea founding by, 1:145-146 Arabian Peninsula, 1:163 architectural decoration, 1:193, 194, 195 Armenia, 1:205-206 Arwad, 1:219 Baalbek under, 1:247 Babylonians under, 1:255, 258 BedvZur, 1:314 Cilicia, 2:10 Decapolis, 2:129 excavation sites, 3:62 extent of kingdom, 1:144; 5:236 gardens, 2:386 Greek cities, 4:514, 515 Idumeans, 3:142 map of holdings, 4:357 mints, 2:46
INDEX Palestine under, 4:225 Parthians, 4:287-288 Ptolemies, 4:356, 514 See also Syria Seleucus I Nicator, 1:64, 72, 74; 3:484; 4:286-287 Anatolia, 1:131 Antioch, 1:117, 144 Apamea founding, 1:145 efforts to create universal state, 5:136 Seleucus II, 4:287 Seligmann, Jon, 5:105 Seljuk Turks 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1, 4 Anatolia, 1:135-136 Assos occupation, 1:224 Byzantine Empire, 1:396 caravanserais, 1:422 Fatimids, 2:206, 308 gardens, 2:389 Sellers, Ovid R., Beth-Zur, 1:314 Sellin, Ernst, 2:148; 4:516 Jericho excavations, 3:16, 220 Shechem excavations, 4:164, 516; 5:19-21 Ta'anach excavations, 5:149 Seltman, Charles, 3:404 Sema, 1:66, 67 Semana weights, 4:180 Semisat. See Samosata Semitica (journal), 4:265 Semitic languages, 4:516-527 Afro-Asiatic languages and, 4:516-517 alphabet, 1:77; 2:438-439; 3:159 chronological distribution of, 4:519-520 grammatical features, 4:522-525; 5:353 Greek writing system, 2:438-439 Indo-European languages and, 3:155 interpretation of, 2:132-133 members of, 4:517-519 onomastica, 4:93-95 origins of, 4:525-527 phonological features, 4:520-522 See also Northwest Semitic; specific languages Semna, 5:287 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 1:346; 3:336 Sengawit', 1:205, 204 Senir, 3:15 Senkereh, Tell. See Larsa Sennabris, 1:312 Sennacherib, 1:182, 218, 289, 297 Achziv, 1:13 Ammonites, 1:104 aqueduct inscriptions to, 1:157 Ashkelon rebellion, 1:220 Assur temple-building, 1:227-228 Babylon conquest, 1:254 Beth-Shemesh, 1:312 Chaldeans, 1:483 Lachish conquest, 3:320-321 Nineveh palace remains, 3:338 Nineveh under, 1:227; 4:146, 432 Senusert. See Senwosret Senwosret (Sesostris) I, 2:235; 3:15 Senwosret (Sesostris) II, 4:363 Senwosret (Sesostris) III, 2:198; 3:67; 5:349 Sepphoris (Zippori), 4:527-536 antiquities reconstruction, 2:60 badi, 4:431, 534 excavations, 1:63; 4:527-528 mosaics, 2:359; 4:533-535 Nazareth, 4:113
plans of, 4:528 pro-Roman stance of, 4:530 villa, 4:533-534 water supply, 1:157, 158; 2:31; 4:422, 535-536 Sepphoris Regional Project, 2:227; 4:529 Septimius Severus. See Severus Septuagint, 1:73, 209; 2:119-120 Seqenenre Tao, 3:135 Sequence dating, 1:452 Sera', Tel (Tell esh-Shari'a), 5:1-2 open-court buildings, 2:27 Philisitine settlement, 4:312 rock altar, 1:80 Serabit el-Khadem, 1:277 Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, 3:364; 4:354 Serapeum (Alexandria), 1:66, 67, 69 Serapis, 1:66, 88; 2:201, 203 Alexandrian temple, 2:204 Seripe Limani ("sparrow harbor"), 1:397; 5:2-4 Fatimid glass, 5:320 iron anchor, 1:139 underwater archaeology, 5:283 Serdaroglu, Umit, 1:224; 2:464 Sergilla, 5:4-6 Sergiopolis. See Rusafa Sergius, St., 2:63; 3:427; 4:445, 446 Seriramis, 1:152 Serqat. See Assur Service, Elman, 4:134 Sesame, 1:24-25 Sesostris. See Senwosret Sester, Charles, 4:123 Seta, Alessandro della, 3:76 Seters, John van, 1:320 Setli amulet, 1:114 Avaris cult, 2:100, 101 in monumental text, 3:25 Naqada temple, 4:98 Seti I, 1:12; 5:42, 368 Seton Hall University, 4:449 Seton-Williams, M. V., 4:428 Settlement patterns, 5:6-10 Arabia (southern), 4:384 Cappadocia, 1:421 Chuera, Tell, 1:491 climate, 3:133 Dab'a, Tell ed-, 2:100 environmental approach, 5:7 fortifications, 5:335 historical approach, 5:7-8 Jerusalem, 4:220 Nabateans, 4:83 regional-analysis approach, 5:8-9 Uruk-Warka, 5:295-297 Sevan. See Lake Sevan Seven Wonders of die World, 1:132 Severus (Septimius Severus) Babylon visit, 1:255 conquests, 3:485 Cypriot bronze statue, 2:95 Idumea, 3:143 Leptis Magna, 3:348-350 Seleucia on the Tigris, 4:513 Severus, Alexander. See Alexander Severus Seville, 2:35 Sewers, 2:31; 5:10-11 Sewing, 2:39 Sextus Julius Africanus, 3:35 Seyhan River. See Sarus River
537
Seyl Aqlat. See Beidha Seyrig, Henri, 1:144; 5:11 Baalbek excavation, 1:247 Institut Francais d'Archeologie du Proche Orient, 3:172 Palmyra excavations, 4:242 Seys, Jebel, 1:263 Seytan Deresi ("devil creek"), 5:11-12 SGI. See Silicon Graphics Inc. SGNAS. See Southern Ghors and Nortiieast 'Arabah Archaeological Survey Sha'ar ha-'Amaqim, 1:158; 5:104 Sha'ar ha-Golan, 3:207; 5:12-13 Shabwa, 1:90, 162; 5:13-14 architecture, 2:453 excavations, 2:452; 3:78 pre-Islamic painting, 5:270 Shaddad, garden of, 2:387 Shadikanni (Tell Hajajah), 3:45 Shadrapa, 1:430; 4:316 Shadufi 2:250; 3:183 Shaft tombs, 5:14-15, 219-220 Bronze Age, 1:384-385; 5:14 Bab edh-Dhra', 1:250; 5:14 Gibeon, 2:403 Hellenistic, 5:14-15 Iron Age, 1:385; 5:14 Shahal, Horvat, 2:369 Shahar. See Sin Shahba (Philippopolis), 4:51; 5:112 Shahbazi, Shapur, 4:100 Shahdad, 4:281 Shahhat, 2:97 Shahr-i Qumis (Hecatompylos), 1:70 Shahr-i Sokhta, 4:280, 281-282 Shahristan. SeeJayy Shah Savar, 3:199-200 Sha'ib, Wadi. See Shu'eib, Wadi Shakaf-i-Salman, 1:218 Shakespear, William Flenry Irvine, 3:79; 5:197 Shakkanakku dynasty, 3:415 Shala (Sawl), 1:488; 2:301 Shalem, Tell, fortifications, 2:322; 4:213 Shalkop, Robert, 5:215, 216 Shallalah, Wadi esh-, 5:388 ShalmaneseiT, 1:227 Shalmaneser II, 1:227 Shalmaneser III, 1:218; 2:103 Assur, 1:225, 227 Balawat inscription, 1:268 Bit-Adini occupation, 5:132 military successes, 1:229 Nimrud fort, 4:142, 144 Til Barsip conquest, 5:209 Shalmaneser, Fort (Nimrud), 4:142, 144 Shamash, 1:53, 186, 261, 355; 2:486 Assur temple, 1:226, 227 Assyrian worship of, 1:231 in Babylonian pandieon, 3:481 Babylonian temple, 1:254 Ebla temple, 2:182 Hatra temple, 2:484 Sippar cloister, 5:48 Sippar temple, 5:47 Utu and, 5:100 Shamash-nuri, 2:301 Shammai, 5:26 Shams, 4:372 Shams ed-Din Tannira, Tell, 2:290 Shamshi-Adad I, 1:64; 5:128 conquest of Assur, 1:226, 229; 3:481-482 Leilan, Tell, 3:345, 347
538
INDEX
Shamshi-Adad V, 4:144 Shamshi-Ilu, 5:210 Shanib, 1:104 Shanibu, 1:106 Shanidar cave, 5:15-16 Neanderthal remains, 3:450; 5:15 sheep and goat domestication, 1:141; 5:15-16 Shanks, Michael, 3:141 Shantur, Bakizah, 1:35 Shapira, Moses, 2:37 Sbapsb, 2;80 Shapurl, 4:289,491 Assur destroyed by, 1:228 Naqsh-i Rustam relief, 4:100, 101 Shapur II, 1:209; 2:78; 4:289 Shapur III, 1:209 Shaqqa, 1:277; 5:112 Shar'a, See Jordan River Shara (deity), 2:165 Shardanu, 4:508 Sh'ar ha-Golan, 1:8 Shari'a, Tell esh-. See Sera', Tel Sharjah, 1:166; 5:284 Sharkalisharri, 1:53, 54, 254 Sharon, Ilan, 2:28-29 Sharpe, P. H., 4:333 SHARPS (acoustic mapping system), 5:283 Sharrukin. See Sargon I Sharruma, 3:85 Sharuhen. See 'Ajjul, Tell elShasu, 1:448 Shatt en-Nil, 1:14; 4:148 Shaur River, 5:106 Shavei-Zion, 5:16-18 land site, 5:16-17 underwater site, 5:17-18, 283 Shaw, T, E. See Lawrence, Thomas Edward Shawhatan, 5:386 Sheba (Saba'), S: 1 8 - 1 9 Aden, 1:15 emergence of, 1:162; 5:18, 376 identification of, 1:288 Qataban and, 4:384 temples, 1:163 See also Sabaean culture Sheba, queen of (Bilqis; Makeda), 1:162; 3:417; 5:18 Shechem (Tell Balatah), 2:179; 3:331; 5:19-23 aqueduct, 1:158 excavations, 4:164 fortifications, 2:324 houses, 3:96-97; 5:86 sanctuary, 5:173 temples, 5:171, 172 Sheep and goats, 5:23-25 Abu Hamid, Tell, 1:8 achaeological evidence of, 1:141 agricultural development and, 1:23, 25; 5:24 Ai, 1:33 Arabian Peninsula, 1:159, 160 Assyrian herders, 1:231 Babylonian domestication, 1:258 Be'er Resisim, 1:286 Beersheba, 1:288 biogeographic range of, 4:411 coats of, 5:191 domestication of, 1:141, 142; 5:24 Golan, 2:418; 4:383 Habuba Kabira, 2:448 herding, 1:142; 5:179 paleozoology, 1:29-30 Shanidar domestication, 1:141; 5:15-16
Sumer, 5:97 tent materials obtained from, 5:179-180 Transjordan, 1:37, 280 Sheep Pool (Bethesda Pool; Jerusalem), 3:233 She'gabbar, 4:128 Sheikh, Jebel esh-, 3:16 Sheikh, Tell esh-, 1:115 Sheikh Ali, Wadi, 4:88 Sheikh Hamad, Tell (Dur Katlimmu), 3:287; 5:25-26, 327 Sheikh Hassan, Tell, 2:291 Sheikh Zuweid, 2:27; 5:43, 44 Shekelsh, 5:131 Shekhna. See Leilan, Tell Shell. See Bone, ivory, and shell Shema', Khirbet (Galilean Tekoa), 5:26-27 Shemeida, 4:468 Shenoute, 2:66 Shepard, Anna O., 1:452, 461 Shephelah. See Judah Shepseskaf, 4:362, 479 Sheqalim, 1:325 Sherden, 1:55; 5:131 Shereshevski, Joseph, 5:89, 90 Sheshonq. See Shishak Shfifonim, 1:137; 5:27-28 Shiet (Scetis), 4:42, 153 Shifat, Khirbet. See Jotapata Shihan, 1:269 Shi'ism 'Abbasid caliphate, 5:143-144 Azhar, al-, center (Cairo), 1:405; 2:206, 308 Isma'ili branch, 2:307-309 Umayyad caliphate and, 5:268-269 Shikaft-i Salman, 3:200 Shikhin, 2:373 Shilhak-Inshushinak, 5:109 Shillourokampos, 2:92 Shiloh (Khirbet Seilun), 5:28-29 Shiloh, Tamar, as contributor, 5:29-30 Shiloh, Yigal, 5:29-30 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225, 229; 5:30, 332 Shimashki dynasty, 2:231, 416; 4:283 Shim'on, Masabala bar, 1:275 Shimut, 1:488 Shinnie, Peter, 3:472 Shipping. See Seafaring; Trade Ships and boats, 5:30-34 Aegean, 4:506, 507 anchors, 1:137-140; 4:18; 5:206 Arwad shipbuilding, 1:218, 219 'Atlit ram, 1:234-236 Cape Gelidonya ship, 5:32 Cheops boat, 5:30 construction of, 4:505; 5:30, 31-32, 348, 349 Dahshur boat, 5:349 Egyptian, 5:30-32 ferries, 5:34 Galilee boat, 2:317, 377-379; 3:399; 4:18; 5:283 Gela ship, 3:390 Kyrenia merchantman, 3:390; 4:18 Ma'agan Mikha'el ship, 3:389-390; 4:18 Mataria boat, 3:441 Phoenician, 5:32-33 sails, 4:506-507; 5:30-31 Serce Limani remains, 5:2-4 Syro-Canaanite, 5:31-32 Uluburun merchantman, 5:32, 266-268 warships, 2:378-379; 4:508-509; 5:32-33 Yassiada wrecks, 5:283, 372-373 See also Seafaring; Underwater archaeology
Shipton, Geoffrey M., 2:26; 3:466, 468 Shipwrecks. See Ships and boats; Underwater archaeology Shiqmim, 2:310; 5:34-36 cemetery complex, 2:13; 5:35 new archaeological research methodologies, 4:136; 5:103 Shiqmona (Tell es-Samak), 2:25; 5:36-37 Shishak (Sheshonq), 1:289 Beth-Shean, 1:305 First Temple looting, 1:325 Megiddo destroyed by, 3:466-467 Shisur, 5:253-254 Shivtah. See Subeita Shore, A. F., as contributor, 4:153-154 Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, A (Creswell), 2:70 Shortugai, 2:54 Shrayda family, 5:392 Shrine of the Book, 5:367 Shrines. See Temples, Syro-Palestinian Shubat-Enlil. See Leilan, Tell Shu'eib, Wadi (Wadi Nimrin), 1:8, 279; 4:140; 5:37-38 Shukbah cave (Palestine), 2:389 Shukron,Eli, 5:105 Shulgi, 1:14, 109; 3:481 literacy of, 3:363 Ur building program, 5:289 Shuna, Tell esh-. See Nimrin, Tell Shuruppak. See Fara Shush. See Susa Shushan-Dukht, 2:186-187 Shu-Sin, 1:109 Eshnunna temple, 2:264-265 Shutruk-Nahhunte 1,1:490; 3:482; 5:109 Shutruru, 1:218 Sialk. See Tepe Sialic Sianu, Tell, 3:43 Sibya, Khirbet, 5:391, 392 Sicard, Claude, 1:82 Sicarii, 2:313 Sicily ivory artifacts, 1:349 Samaritan synagogue, 4:471 Sickles, 3:375, 378, 380 Sid, 1:430 Sidi Abdelsalem el Bahar, 4:162 Sidi Hakoma. See Hadar Formation Sidon (Saida), 5:38-41 Achziv, 1:13, 14 destructions of, 5:249 Eshmunazar inscription, 2:261; 5:38 pantheon of, 4:316 port area, 5:40 sarcophagi, 1:190; 4:481; 5:38-39 Sieglin, Ernst von, 1:66 Sifr.Tell, 4:12 Si-gabbar inscription, 1:181 Siga (Takembrit), 2:349; 4:162 Sigrist, Marcel, as contributor, 2:236-239 Sihon, 3:19-20 Sik, 5:224 Sikani. See Fakhariyah, Tell Silberman, Neil Asher, 2:272 as contributor, 1:91; 2:37, 285-287, 315, 443-444; 3:138-141, 473-474; 4:103-112, 308-309, 434-435; 5:75-76, 91-92, 367-368 Silentiarius, Paul, 2:63 Silica, 5:307
INDEX Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), 5:103 Silidonya Burnu. See Cape Gelidonya Silifke, 2:9 Silk, 5:191-192 Silk Route, 2:164, 471 Silli-Ishtar, archive of, 3:355 Siloam Pool (Jerusalem), 3:226, 234, 235; 5:332 Siloam Tunnel (Jerusalem), 1:157; 3:226; 5:332 Siloam Tunnel inscription, 3:6; 5:41 Silos. See Granaries and silos Silo Lombs, 1:111 Silsila. See Lochias promontory (Alexandria) Silver Akkadian period, 4:9-10 Anatolia, 1:136; 4:7 Bronze Age artifacts, 4:7-8 as currency, 2:44, 45 electrum and, 4:7 Silverman, David P., as contributor, 2:260 Silvia of Aquitaine, 3:51 Silwan necropolis, 3:285-286 Simalija, 3:273 Sim'an, Jebel, 1:195 Simeon (high priest), 1:314 Simeon, St., 1:278; 3:426, 427; 4:43, 46, 368, 369 Simmons, Alan H., 1:36; 2:90 Simon, James, 2:146 Simonsen, D., 4:241 Simpson, John, 5:215 Simpson, Kay, 5:188 Simpson, St. John, as contributor, 1:343-348; 2:77-79; 3:484-487 SIMS. See Secondary4on mass spectrometry Simyra, identification of, 3:275-276 Sin (Shahar) Akkadian veneration, 1:53 Arabian veneration, 2:452-453 Aramean veneration, 1:186 Assur temple, 1:226, 227 Assyrian veneration, 1:231 Hazor stela, 3:3 Hureidha temple, 3:124 Khafajeh temples, 2:165; 3:289 Nabonidus and, 5:160 Nerab inscriptions, 4:128 Qaryat al-Fau temple, 4:372 Sec also Naram-Sin; Shu-Sin Sinai, 5:41-47 Arad, 1:173 architectural decoration, 1:190; 5:45-46 as link between Egypt and Canaan, 5:42, 43 monasteries, 4:44; 5:46 Nabatean activity in, 5:45-46 Nabatean language, 1:182; 4:81 rock drawings and inscriptions, 1:218 Sin el-Fil, 1:294 Sin-iddinam, 3:430 Sinkashid, 5:296 Sinope, 1:136; 2:11-12 Sinos, Stefanos, 3:305 Sin-shar-ishkun, 1:228 Sinuhe, 4:215 Sin-zer-ibni inscription, 1:181; 4:127-128 Sion, Marie Aline de, 3:233 Siphnos, 2:44 Sippar (Abu Habbah), 2:52; 5:47-49 Akkadians, 1:49, 50 'Aqar Quf canal link with, 1:156 cloister, 5:48
divisions of, 2:289 excavations, 1:258; 5:47-48 Sippar-Amnanum, 2:145, 146; 5:47 Sippar-of-Annunitum, 5:47-48 Sira Bay, 1:15 Siraf, 1:4; 4:291 Siran, Tell, 1:99, 100, 104, 105, 106 Sirbal, Jebel, monasteries, 4:44 Sirhan, Wadi es-, 1:244; 3:358 Sirion, 3:15 Sirius (star), 4:139 Sirkili, 2:8 Sirrayn, as-, inscriptions, 3:169 Sirwah, 5:377 Sisiam' 1:205, 206 Sistan, 4:280 Site survey, 5:49-51 excavation strategy and, 2:293-294 See also Grid plan Sit Shamshi (votive object), 4:13 Sit Shamski (Susa), 5:109 SittMarkho, 5:124 Sivas, 1:136 Sivasa, 2:4 Siwah, 1:70 Siwini, S:293 Sixtus IV (pope), 4:67 Siyagha (Mount Nebo peak), 4:115-116 Sjoqvist, Erik, 2:241,412 Skaenites, 4:386 Skales, 2:94, 152 Skarkos, 3:76 Skeletal analysis, 5:51-56 age and sex determination, 5:52-53 burial types, 5:51-52, 53-54 disease, 3:450-451 Epipalcolithic Kebaran, 5:55 Natufian, 2:486; 5:53, 54, 55 of fauna, 4:206 genetic affinities analysis, 5:52, 55-56 prehistoric, 5:54-55 Egypt, 2:192 Etiiiopia, 2:274, 450 Mechta el-Arbi type, 2:192 Shanidar cave, 3:450; 5:15, 53 Tabun cave, 5:153 techniques, 5:51 See also Bones Skhul Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:425; 5:53, 54, 55 Skirball Museum, 4:123 Skunkha, 1:331 Slags, 4:19 Slanski, Kathryn E., as contributor, 3:88-89 Slaves, in Assyrian society, 1:230 Slavic languages, 3:151 Sloss, Laurence L., 5:87 Slouschz, Nahum Hammath Tiberias excavations, 2:470 Israel Exploration Society, 3:190, 191 Smar, Tell, 1:53 Smelik, K. A. D., 4:415 Smenkhkare, 1:82 Smerdis. See Gaumata Smith, A. H„ 4:457 Smith, Eli Robinson (Edward) travels with, 3:38, 52; 4:115, 434,435; 5:101 settlement-pattern studies, 5:7-8 Smith, George Adam, 1:252; 5:56-57 Carchemish, 1:423
539
Nimrud, 4:142 Nineveh expedition, 3:58; 4:145 Nineveh Flood story, 3:39 Smith, Harry S., 3:471 Smith, Patricia, 3:211 as contributor, 5:51-56 Smith, Robert Flouston as contributor, 3:326-330; 4:256-259 Pella excavations, 4:257 sarcophagi rims, 4:481 Smith, Robert Murdoch, 2:97; 4:138 Smith, Robert Wayne, as contributor, 2:350-352 Smith, R. R. R., as contributor, 1:151-152 Smith, Sidney, 1:56, 59 Smithsonian Institution crucible analyis, 2:425 Kheleifeh, Tell el-, excavations, 3:293 Shema', Khirbet, excavations, 5:26 Smyrna, 1:131 Smyth, Piazzi, 4:308 Snefru, 4:362 Soada. See Suweida Sobata. See Subeita Sobek, 2:299 Sobernhein, M„ 4:241 Societa per la Ricerca dei Papiri, 4:195 Society for Archaeological Sciences (SAS), 4:267 Society for Libyan Studies, 4:355 Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan, 4:264 Society for die Protection of Nature in Israel, 5:152 Society of Biblical Literature, 1:94, 95, 96; 3:40; 5:57 Society of Dilettanti, 3:37 Society of Jesus (Jesuits), 1:293; 2:346 Socin, Albert, 2:147 Socoh, Khirbet, 1:243 Socotti (language), 5:61 Socrates, 4:51-52 Soderstrom, Thomas R., 2:458 Sodini, Jean-Pierre, 4:368, 369, 370 Sodom. See Bab edh-Dhra' Soft Ware horizon (ceramics), 4:280 Sogdian (language), 3:150; 4:294 Sogdians, 4:293, 494 Sohar (Suhiir), 1:163; 4:186; 5:57-S8 Sokar, 4:479 Solar, Giora, 2:469 Solar Shrine (Lachish), 3:323 Solduz, 2:480 Solduz Valley, See Ushnu-Solduz Valley Solecki, Ralph S., 5:15 as contributor, 5:15-16 Solecki, Rose L., 5:15 Soles, Jeffrey, 3:75 Soli (Pompeiopolis),2:10 Soloi, 5:59 Solomon (king), 1:153 First Temple, 1:80, 324, 326, 327; 2:82-83; 5:173 fleet of, 5:34 and Queen of Sheba, 1:162; 5:18 Solomonic Temple (Jerusalem). See First Temple Solomon's Pillars (Timna'), 5:218 Solomon's Pools (Jerusalem), 3:132; 4:350, 35 Solon, 2:69 Song of Deborah, 3:192, 195, 464 Song of Songs, 1:321
540
INDEX
Songor A, Tell, 2:472 Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, 2:123 Soof, Behnara Abu al-, 3:295 Sopatros II, 1:146 Sophene, 1:207 Sophia, St., church of. See Hagia Sophia Soreg, Tel, 2:223, 419, 420 Soren, David as contributor, 3:304-306 Kourion excavations, 3:305-306 Sorghum, 1:479 Sotira culture, 2:91 Sotto, Tell, 2:484 Soundings, 5 : 5 9 - 6 0 Sourabitt, 3:177 Sousse (Hadrumetum), 4:161 Sousse Ribat, 2:335 South, Alison IC, as contributor, 3:262-265 South, Stanley, 4:110 South Arabian languages, 4:519; 5 : 6 0 - 6 1 , 215. See also Arabic Southeast Dead Sea Plain, 1:248-251; 5 : 6 2 - 6 4 Southern Cemetery (Cairo), 2:207 Southern Ghors and northeast 'Arabah, 1:8, 291; 2:190; 4:25; 5 : 6 4 - 6 6 copper shipments, 1:153 Iron Age sites, 4:121 Soutiiern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Archaeological Survey (SGNAS), 5:64-65 Southern Samaria, survey of, 1:30, 35; 5 : 6 6 - 6 8 Southern Temple (Petra), 1:193 South Florida, University of. See University of South Florida Soutii Kensington Museum. See Victoria and Albert Museum South Palace (Ugarit), 5:257 South Theater (Gerasa), 5:201 South Town (Naqada), 4:98 Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1:281 Spahan, 3:185 Spain gardens, 2:388-389 Islamic period, 2:35, 334 ivory trade, 1:349-350 Umayyad rule, 5:272 Spanish School of Archaeology, 1:62 Spark-source mass spectrometry, 1:121 Spears, 4:3; 5:267, 338 Spectrometry. See D CP spectrometry; Spectroscopy Specnoscopy, 1:118-121; 2:425; 5 : 6 8 Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor, 1:93, 95; 5 : 6 8 - 6 9 Hurrian analyses, 3:126; 5:69 Khafajeh excavations, 3:288 Tepe Gawra, S: 183 Spelt, 1:480 Spencer, Patricia, as contributor, 2:207-208 Sphinx (of Chephren; Giza), 1:35; 2:411, 412; 4:362 Spice trade, 1:4 Spiegelthal, Ludwig, 4:487 Spinning (textiles), 5:192, 196, 197 Sports. See Games; Hunting Spring Gate (Jerusalem), 3:225 Springs 'Ain es-Samiyeh, 1:35-36 Aphek, 1:147, 149 as aqueduct sources, 1:157; 3:130 of Azraq, 1:243-244 Baalbek, 1:247
Nazareth basin, 4:535-536 in Syria-Palestine region, 3:132 Spycket, Agnes, as contributor, 2:401-402 Square Temple (Eshnunna), 2:262 SSMS. See Spark-source mass spectrometry Stabl Antar, 2:366, 367 Stables, 5 : 6 9 - 7 4 design essentials, 5:69-71 in houses, 2:338, 339; 3:107; 5:71 interpretation of, 4:360 at Megiddo, 3:467; 5:71-73 Stadiasmus Maris Magni, 3:347-348 Stadiums, 5 : 7 4 - 7 5 Alexandria, 5:75 'Arnrit, 1:113 Anatolia, 1:132 Aphrodisias, 1:152 Stager, Lawrence E., 1:97, 221, 223; 5:305 Standard Average European, Modem Hebrew and, 3:12 Standard Oil of California, 3:79 Stanhope, Hester Lucy, 1:220, 223; 5 : 7 5 - 7 6 Starckyjean, 4:242; 5:76, 154, 155 Stark, Freya, 2:452; 3:124 Starkey, James L., 2:474; 5 : 7 6 - 7 7 Lachish excavations, 3:317, 321, 323; 5:77 Starr, Richard F. S„ 4:172 Statistical applications, 5 : 7 7 - 7 9 Statues. See Sculpture Steckeweh, Hans, 5:21 Steckoll, Solomon H„ 4:393 Steever, Edgar Z., 1:91 Stefanos, Klon, 3:76 Steffy, J. Richard as contributor, 1:234—236 Galilee boat, 2:377, 378 Stegemann, Hartmut, 5:164 Stein, Aurel, 2:458, 480; 4:251 Stein, Diana L., as contributor, 1:55-59; 3:14, 126-130, 271-275; 4:171-175 Steinherr, Franz, 3:268 Steinkeller, Piotr, 5:186 Stekelis, Moshe, 1:8; 5:79 Carmel, Mount, excavations, 1:424, 426, 427; 5:79 Nahal Oren excavations, 4:89 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 Sha'ar ha-Golan excavations, 5:12 'Ubeidiya excavations, 5:254 Stelae, 5:79-82 Abydos, 1 : 1 2 'Ain Dara', 1:35 of Akhenaten, 1:83 Akkadians, 1:50, 52, 53, 261 Amarna, Tell el-, 1:83, 84 Apamea, 1:146, 147 Arad, 1:172 Armenia, 1:206, 206 Assur, 1:227 Asyut, 1:234 Axum, 1:240 Betii-Shean, 1:306-307 Egypt, 2:216-217; 5:80 Failaka, 2:297 funerary, 2:6-7, 216-217 Greece, 5:81 of Hammurabi, 1:261; 5:80 Hazor, 3:3 Israelites, 2:83 Karnak, 3:135 Kitan,Tel, 5:171 of Merneptah, 3:192
Moabites, 1:448 Nahr el-Kalb, 1:293 Nemrud Dagi, 4:124-125 Neo-Hittites, 5:81 Nerab, 4:127-128 Sumerians, 2:407 Ugarit, 5:261 of Untash-Napirisha, 1:490 of Ur-Nammu, 5:290 Stela of Balu', 1:269 Stela of Naram-Sin, 1:52, 261; 3:481; 5:80 Stela of die Vultures (Telloh), 2:407; 5:80, 336 Stephani, E., 3:74 Stephen, St., 2:188; 3:425 Stern, Ephraim as contributor, 1:465-469; 2:25-29, 168-170, 222-223, 356-358 ceramic typology, 1:452 on destruction of Palestinian cities, 4:224 Dor excavations, 2 : 1 6 9 Jaffa, 3:206 Megiddo, 2:29 seals, 4:403 Stevenson, K., 3:186 Steward, Julian H., 4:134, 135 Stewart, James Rivers Barrington, 5 : 8 2 'Ajjul, Tell el-, excavation, 1:38 Vounous excavations, 5:322 Stewart, R. W., 4:235 Stillman, William J„ 3:74 Stobi, synagogue inscription, 5:117 Stolper, Matthew W„ 2:228; 3:202 Stolze, Frank, 3:60 Stone. See Dolmen; Lithics; Petrography; Stratigraphy; specific types Stone, Elizabeth C , 2:34 as contributor, 3:90-94, 430-432; 5:390-391 Mashkan-shapir excavations, 3:431 Stone Age of Mount Carmel, The (Garrod and Bate), 2:389 Stone Building (Uruk-Warka), 5:294 Stone Cone Temple (Uruk-Warka), 5:294 Stonehenge, 4:333 Stools. See Chairs Storehouses, 2:318; 4:360 Stories from Ancient Canaan (Coogan), 4:415 Storm God Temple (Carchemish), 1:423 Story Set at the Persian Court, 2:122 Strabo, 3:34 description of Alexandria, 1:65-66, 67, 68, 69 description of Bahrain, 1:267 Straight Street (Damascus), 2:104 Strange, James F. as contributor, 4:113-114 Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Qom, Khirbet el-, soundings, 4:392 Sepphoris excavations, 4:528-529 Stratigraphy, 5 : 8 2 - 8 8 biostratigraphy, 2:450 Dunayevsky method of, 2:173 See also Locus Straton's Tower. See Caesarea Stratum, 5 : 8 8 - 8 9 . See also Recording techniques; Stratigraphy Streets. See Roads Striker, Cecil L., 1:92 Strob.el, August, 2:150; 3:391 Strommenger, Eva, 2:446; 3:46; 4:407 Stronach, David as contributor, 1:330-331; 3:402; 4:144-148, 250-253, 273-277 British Institute of Persian Studies, 1:358
INDEX Nineveh excavations, 4:145 Ugarit inscriptions, 5:264 Pasargadae excavations, 3:60; 4:251 writing origins and, 5:352-353 Strube, Charles, 4:369 Sumerian King List Stuart, Moses, 4:434 Adab dynasty, 1:14 Stucco, 2:361 Awan dynasty, 4:283 Byzantine and Islamic architecture, 1:382 Gutian rulers, 5:98 decorative, 1:193, 194 Leilan, Tell, palace complex, 3:345 Studi epigrafici e linguistici sid Vicino Oriente Sargonic dynasty, 1:53 antico (journal), 4:265-266 Sumerian views of history in, 5:100-101 Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, Sumerians, 5 : 9 5 - 1 0 1 3:55 Adab, 1:14 Studium Biblicum Franciscanum. See agriculture, 1:42; 5:97 Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land Akkadians, 1:50, 52, S3, 54; 5:98-99 Stylus, 5:360 Arabian contacts, 1:160, 161 Styrenius, Carl-Gustaf, as contributor, Arwad's losses to, 1:218 2:412-413 Assyrians, 1:228 Subartu, 3:126, 342 Babylonians, 1:256 Subeita (A-Sbaita; Isbeita; Sobata; Suka), cosmetics used by, 2:68 5:89-90 faience production, 5:310 Suberde, 1:123 fishing, 2:316 Subir, 1:42; 3:342, 343 irrigation, 2:289; 5:97 Subr, 1:16 metals trade, 4:9, 10 Succoth. See Deir 'Alia, Tell origins of, 5:96-97 Sudain, Abdullah Said Osman al-, 2:300 political history, 5:97-99, 100-101 Sudan,1:10-11 religion, 5:100 Sudburg structure (HattuSa), 3:386 temples, 2:259; 5:166, 167 Su'en, 5:100 under Ur III dynasty, 5:99 Suetonius, 3:34 Sumhu'alay Watar, 4:384 Suhar. See Sohar Summayl, Wadi, 5:391 Suka. See Subeita Sumner, William M„ 2:229 Sukas, Tell (Suksa), 3:43; 5 : 9 0 - 9 1 as contributor, 1:91; 3:406-409 Greek colonization, 1:467 Kur River basin, 4:280 Phoenician shrine, 4:329 Malyan excavations, 3:406 Sukenik, Eleazar Lipa, 1:238; 3:47; 5 : 9 1 - 9 2 Sumur Beth Alpha excavations, 1:299 as capital of Amurru, 1:218 Essene hypothesis, 2:125 identification of, 3:275 Gerisa, Tel, excavations, 2:394, 396 Sunas, es-, 2:382 Hammath-Gader excavations, 2:469-470 Sunnism Jerusalem excavations, 3:230 Cairo, 1:405 Sepphoris excavations, 4:536 Fatimid dynasty and, 2:307, 308, 309 Sukkalmah dynasty, 2:231-232; 4:284; 5:109 origins of, 5:143 Suksa. See Sukas Salah ad-Din and, 2:207 Sulayman ibn 'Abd al-Malik (715), 5:270 in Syria, 5:145 Suleimeh, Tell Suppiluliuma I, 1:424; 2:9; 3:85 excavations, 2:471 Suppiluliuma II, 2:94; 3:386 round buildings, 2:472 Suqamuna, 3:273 temple, 2:473 Suratdia, 5:276 SUleyman (Ottoman pasha), 1:158 Surra Man Ra'a, 1:3 SulgiofUr, 1:254 Survey, archaeological, 5 : 1 0 1 - 1 0 4 Sulla, 1:152 historical geography, 3:32; 5:101-102 Sullecthum (Salakta), 4:161 new technologies, 5:50, 102-104 Sullivan, Donald George, 2:37 See also Resistivity; Site survey Sultan, Tell es- (Jericho), 2:19 Survey of Eastern Palestine (1874), 3:437 Sultanian industry, 4:210 Survey of Eastern Palestine (1939-1947), 4:452 Sultan's Pool (Jerusalem), 4:350 Survey of Israel, 4:391; 5 : 1 0 4 - 1 0 6 Sumaisat. See Samosata Association for die Archaeological Survey of Sumbar Valley, 5:193 Israel, 2:371-372; 3:48 Sumer. See Sumerians Survey of Western Palestine, 4:407 Sumer (journal), 4:266 Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs of the Sumerian (language), 5 : 9 2 - 9 5 , 97 Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Akkadian and, 3:159; 5:92, 94, 99-100 Archaeology (1881-1885), 2:59 Aphek cuneiform lexical tablets, 1:150 Susa (Shush), 1:490; 2:231-233, 327; as Babylonian source language, 1:258 4:280-281; 5 : 1 0 6 - 1 1 0 cuneiform, 1:45; 2:87, 89; 5:95, 354 agriculture, 1:42 Emar texts, 2:239 Akkade, 1:53, 54; 2:230; 4:283 interpretation of, 2:132-133 Alexandrian Empire, 1:70; 5:109-110 literature, 5:93-95, 96, 99-101 Ashurbanipal's destruction of, 4:285 onomastica, 4:95-96 excavations, 1:261; 2:229, 345, 402; 3:60-61; phonology, 5:92-93 4:280; 5:106-108 scribal interest in, 3:83, 355, 363; 4:501 fortifications, 2:327 syntax, 5:93 Late Village period, 4:278 term for Amorites, 1:107
541
metalwork, 4:8, 13 plan of, 5:107 tokens, 2:87 Susiana (Elam), 1:490; 2:53, 229-230; 4:281-282, 284 Akkadians, 1:52, 53 excavations, 4:280; 5:108 nomadic raids, 4:285 Susita (Hippos), 1:157, 158; 2:128, 373, 421; 4:422-423 Susiya, 5:105, 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 , 121 Sussmann, J., 2:126 Sutcans, 1:109 Suweida (Soada; Dionysias), 2:348; 5 : 1 1 1 - 1 1 4 Alexandrian influences, 1:72 architectural decoration, 5:112-114 mosaicfloors,5:113, 114 pantheon of, 5:112 Suzuki, Hisashi, 2:172 Swauger, James, 5:215 Swedish Cyprus Expedition Enkomi excavations, 2:241, 242 Idalion, 3:137 Lapithos excavations, 3:330 Vouni, 5:321-322 Swedish Instiuite (Rome), 2:412 Swiny, Stuart, 2:92 as contributor, 2:96-97, 158-159; 3:444-445; 4:496-497; 5:322-323 Ecbatana survey, 2:187 Swiss Institute for Architectural Research, 2:234 Swords, 5:267, 336 Sydney, University of. See University of Sydney Syene (Aswan) Aramaic texts, 2:213, 215-217 Elephantine, 2:235, 236 inscription, 2:217 Synagogue inscriptions, 3:165; 5 : 1 1 4 - 1 1 8 Diaspora synagogues, 5:116-117 Dura-Europos, 5:116 Sardis, 5:116-117 Palestinian synagogues, 5:114-116 Bar'am, 1:274 Chorazin, 1:491 Gush Halav, 2:443 Jerusalem, 5:114, 118 Nabratein, 4:85 Sepphoris, 4:535; 5:115 Synagogues, 5 : 1 1 8 - 1 2 3 architectural decoration, 1:194 basilical, 1:274, 277, 299, 418; 2:443, 470; 5:119-120, 121 broad-house, 5:119, 120, 121 Byzantine period, 2:422-423; 4:231 Diaspora synagogues, 5:122-123 Apamea, 4:54; 5:122 Delos, 4:471; 5:122-123 Dura-Europos, 2:176-177, 360; 4:437; 5:116, 122 Priene, 5:122 Sardis, 1:134; 4:54; 5:116, 123 Stobi, 5:117 Egyptian synagogues, 1:68; 5:116 Galilean-type, 1:491; 5:119, 120 long-house, 5:119-120, 121 mosaics, 1:299-300; 4:54; 5:111, 115, 121 Palestinian synagogues, 5:118-122 Bar'am, 1:274 Bet)) Alpha, 1:299-300; 5:121 Capernaum, 1:417, 418; 5:120 Chorazin, 1:491; 2:422
542
INDEX
Synagogues, continued 'Ein-Gecli, 2:222-223 Gamla, 2:382; 5:118 Golan, 2:422-423 Gush Halav, 2:443 Hammath-Gader, 2:469-470 Hammath Tiberias, 1 : 3 1 1 ; 2:470-471; 3:148; 5:121 Herodium, 5:118 Masada, 5:118 Meiron, 5:120 Na'aran, 5:121 Nabratein, 4:85-86; 5 : 1 1 8 , 1 1 9 Qasrin, 2:422; 4:381-382, 383 Sepphoris, 4 : 5 3 5 Shema', Khirbet, 5:26-27, 120 Susiya, 5:111, 121 Tiberias, 5:206 Samaritan synagogues, 4:471 Torah shrine, 5:119, 120-121, 122 Syntax Aramaic, 1:180-189 Egyptian, 2:212 Syria, 5:123-145 agriculture, 1:23; 5:124-126, 135 Alexandrian mints, 1:73 Amorites, 1:110 Anatolia, 1:124-126, 129 animal husbandry, 1:140, 143 aqueducts, 1:157 Arabic language, 1:168; 5:137 Aramaic language, 1:181; 5:135, 137-138 Aramean city states, 1:129, 184-187 archaeological nationalism of, 4:108 architectural decoration and orders, 1:190, 194-195,200, 201 Assyrian conquest of, 1:229 Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties, 1:241-242 basilicas, 1:278 baths, 1:285 Bronze Age, 5 : 1 2 6 - 1 3 1 building materials and techniques, 1:361, 362, 363-367, 373-374 Byzantine period, 5 : 1 3 9 - 1 4 1 ceramics, 1:464; 2:9; 5:312-313 churches, 2:2, 4 climatic change, 2:247 Ebla texts, 2:185 fortifications of, 2:332 glass production, 5:319-320 Greater Syria. See Syria-Palestine Hellenistic culture in, 5:137-138 Hittite kingdoms of, 3:84 Iron Age, 5 : 1 3 1 - 1 3 4 Islamic period, 1:165; 2:35; 5 : 1 4 1 - 1 4 5 ivories from, 1:343 language in, 5:142 martyrial buildings, 3:427 military (modern), 1:304-305 mosaic production in, 4:52-53 Palestinian reurbanization and, 4:214 Persian through Roman periods, 5 : 1 3 4 - 1 3 9 prehistoric, 5 : 1 2 4 - 1 2 6 religion, 5:134, 135, 138, 145 as Roman province, 5:136-137 Sasanian raids upon, 5:137 sculpture, 5:112, 114,134 Sumerian influence, 5:127 See also Department of Antiquities (Syria); History of the field, archaeology in Syria; Syria-Palestine; specific sites and subregions Syriac (language), 5 : 1 4 5 - 1 4 7
Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 3:34, 336 alphabet, 1:78 Tadmor. See Palmyra Central Aramaic similarity to, 1:183 Tadmor, Miriam, 2:357 as Christian language, 1:183; 5:140, 141, 146 Tadun, Khirbet. See Faris, Khirbet Eastern church use of, 1:186, 208 Taha, Obeid, 4:241 literature, 5:146 Tahirid dynasty, 1 : 1 ; 4:152 Old Syriac, 4:455 Taiba. See Medina Syrian cultural split, 5:141 Taieb, Maurice, 2:450 vowel notation, 1:178; 5:354 Tai tribe, 5:158 See also Inscriptions, Syriac Syria Palaestina. S'ee Syria-Palestine; Syrof akembrit (Siga), 2:349; 4:162 Palestinian archaeology Takht, Tall-i, 4:251, 252-253 Syria-Palestine (Philistia), 1.-276; 3:256-257; Takht-ijamshid, 4:274 4:312-313; 5:147 Takht-i Suleiman, 4:290 Amarna tablets as source material, 1:86 Takuhlinu, 1:150 Bilad ash-Sham (Greater Syria), 5:141, 147, Talbot, William Henry Fox, 3:57; 4:332 388 Tale oftireShipwrecked Sailor, 5:31 Iron Age cultures, 4:220-221 Talhum. See Capernaum See also House, Syro-Palestinian; SyroT'al'in, 1:206 Palestinian archaeology; Temples, SyroTall-i Malyan. See Malyan Palestine Tall-i Takht. See Takht, Tall-i Syria: Revue d'art oriental et d'archeologie, 4:266Talmon, Shemaryahu, 2:120 Syro-Palestinian archaeology, 5:147 Talmud, 2:317; 3:12; 5:206 biblical studies influencing, 1:318-319 Talpiyot (East), 4:461 emergence of, 1:316-317, 318; 5:147 Talpus-atili, 1:355; 3:127 New Archaeology's impact on, 4:135-137 Tamassos, 2:95 Syros, 3:76 Tancred, 2:73 Szemerenyi, Oswald, 3:153 Tangier (Tingis), 4:162 Tanis, 2:101, 142; 3:384 Tannit (Tanit), 1:413, 430; 4:159 Ashtart, 4:316, 490 T Carthaginian sacrifice, 4:159-160 figurines, 5:17-18 Ta'amireh bedouin, 2:101; 4:64 pantheons, 2:81 Ta'anach, 5 : 1 4 9 Tannur, Khirbet et-, 5 : 1 5 3 - 1 5 5 fortifications, 2:323 Glueck survey, 1:62; 2:477; 5:154, 155 Lapp excavations, 1:63 Tany, 2:100 Megiddo, 3:463 Tapharon. See Zafar Tabaqa, 2:478 Taphonomy, 4:206 Tabaqat al-Buma, 5:391 Tappy, Ron E., 4:464 Tabaqat Fahl. See Pella as contributor, 4:463-467 Tabara el-Akrad, 1 : 1 1 5 Taqba dam reservoir, 2:288 Tabaristan, 2:362 Taq-i Bustan Tabat el-Hammam, 1:467 garden, 2:386 Tabernacle of Moses, 1:525, 327. See also Ark reliefs, 4:290 of the Covenant Taq-i Kisra (Ctesiphon), 2:78, 79 Tabgha, 5 : 1 5 0 Tar'alah. See Deir 'Alia, Tell Table of Nations, 5:18 Taramelli, Antonio, 3:74 Tables (furniture), 2:360-361 Targumim (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:121 Tablet, 5 : 1 5 0 - 1 5 2 Targum Jonathan, 1:183-184 archival classification of, 3:353-354 Targum Neofiti, 1:183 Babylon, 1:252, 254 Targum Onkelos, 1:183 clay, 5:358 Tarhunt, 3:385 Elamite, 2:456 Tarichea, 1:312 Emar texts, 2:239 Tarif, Jebel et-, 4:87 Kultepe texts, 3:308-310 Tariff Bilingual Inscription, 1:183 Mari, 2:40; 3:161, 182-183 Tarkhalan, 1:95 Neo-Babylonian, 5:48 Tarshish, 5:34 Proto-Elamite, 2:229-230 Tarsus (Gbzlii Kule), 1:124, 125, 127, 133 in scribal libraries, 4:501 ceramics, 1:470 sizes, 5:150-151 Cleopatra's arrival in, 2:9, 10 Sumerian, 5:92, 96 Goldman excavation project, 2:424 Tablet Hill (Nippur), 4:148,149, 150 mints, 2:10 Tablet of Destiny, 3:367 Paul, St., 2:10 Tablets of the Law. See Ark of the Covenant Tarsus River. See Cydnus River Tabnit Tartus, 1 : 1 1 1 , 113 funerary inscription, 4:323 Tashntetu, 1:228 sarcophagus of, 5:39 Tash Tepe, 2:480 tomb of, 2:357 Ta Silg, 3:403-404 Tabor, Mount, 2:342; 5 : 1 5 2 Taslik Burun. See Cape Gelidonya Tabqa dam, 2:236; 3:44 Tate, Georges, 3:173; 5:5 Tabun cave (Mount Carmel), 1:424-425; as contributor, 1:144-145; 3:405; 4:349-350, 4:208;5:152-153 368-370, 476-477; 5:4-6, 139-141
INDEX Tatian, 2:177 Masos, Tel, excavations, 3:437 Tauchira, See also Pentapolis Michal, Tel, excavations, 4:20 Tauri, Forum (Constantinople), 2:61 publications, 3:51 Taurus Mountains, 1:115; 4:60; 5:155-156 Rabud, Khirbet, excavations, 4:401 as Anatolian dividing line, 1:131, 135 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 and Anatolian-Mesopotamian contact, 1:125; Rujm el-Hiri excavations, 2:419 5:155 Teleilat el-Ghassul, 2:405; 3:207; 5:161-163 mining activities, 5:156 excavations, 3:53, 54, 401-402; 5:161 wood products, 5:347 Mallon publication of new material on, Tavaloli, Feridun, 3:406 3:401-402 Taweret, 1:11 olive cultivation, 1:24; 4:179 Tawfik, Mohammed, 5:18 wall paintings, 5:229, 325 Tawfik, Sayed, 4:480 Tell, 2:250-251; 5:86, 163. See also latter part of Tawi, 2:291 name for specific sites Tawil, Flayim, 4:128 Tell, Khirbet et-. See Ai Tawilan, 1:388; 5:156-158 Telloh. See Girsu plan of, 5:157 Tellul eth-Thaladiat, 2:484 Tawila tanks (Aden), 1:15-16 Teman, Horvat. See Kuntillet 'Ajrud Tawosert, 2:138 Temenos Taya, Tell, 5:158-160 Adab, 1:14 Akkadians, 1:53; 5:159 Chogha Zanbil, 1:488 temple, 5:167 Ur, 5:289-291 Taya, Wadi, 5:158 Temizer, Raci, 3:66 Tayibeh, 1:5 Templar order, 2:75; 5:40 Ta'yinat, Tell, 1:115, 116, 117; 2:83; 4:126 Temple Mount (Jerusalem), 1:193, 194; Taylor, Isaac, 5:353 3:232-233 Taylor, J. E. archaeological unavailability of, 1:325 Eridu excavations, 2:259 architectural decoration, 1:193, 194 Ur excavations, 5:288 Bar Kokhba revolt, 1:275-276 Taylor, Joan duPlat, 1:152; 2:93; 4:457 Golden Gate, 1:326; 3:237 Taylor, Margaret J., 5:346 Hasmonean era, 2:483 Taylor, Walter W., 4:134 healing rituals, 3:455 Taylor, W. R„ 5:346 incense, 3:148 Tayma', 1:163; 5:160-161 Islamic period, 1:325; 2:154; 3:237; 4:233 Akkadian texts, 5:160 Israeli projects, 2:153, 154 Aramaic texts, 1:182 reservoirs, 4:422 Tazekend, 1:203, 204, 205 See also Biblical temple; Dome of the Rock; Tchalenko, Georges, 3:172; 4:45, 368, 369; 5:5 First Temple; Second Temple Tchernov, Eitan Temple of Mat (Palmyra), 4:239 Hayonim excavations, 2:486 Temple of Amun (Tanis), 2:200 'Ubeidiya excavations, 5:254 Temple of Anu and Adad (Assur), 1:226, 227 Teacher of Righteousness Temple of Aphaia (Aigina), 3:74 as author of Temple Scroll, 5:164 Temple of Aphrodite (Aphrodisias), 1:152 possible candidates, 2:269 Temple of Apollo (Didyma), 1:132; 2:159, 160 Teakwood trade, 1:4 Temple of Apollo (Kalymnos), 3:74 Tefnakht, 3:385 Temple of Ares (Halikarnassos), 2:464 Tehran, University of. See University of Tehran Temple of Artemis (Ephesus). See Artemision Teiseba, 5:293 Temple of Artemis (Jerash), 1:146; 3:215, 217 Teispes, 4:285 Temple of Artemis Leukophryne (Magnesia ad Teixidor, Javier, 4:242 Maeandrum), 1:200 as contributor, 1:31-32; 2:485-486; 4:244-245 Temple of Athena (Priene), 1:200; 4:351-352 Tekoa, Galilean. See Shema', Khirbet Temple of Adiena (Vouni), 5:322 Tekor basilica, Armenian inscription, 1:208 Temple of Baalat Gebal, 1:391, 392, 393 Tel, Tell. For toponyms beginning with these Temple of Baal Saphon (Carthage), 3:424 elements, see under latter part of name. For aTemple ofBa'alShamin (Palmyra), 1:194; general description, see Tell below 4:239, 242 Telanissos (Deir Sim'an), 4:368 Temple of Ba'al Shamin (Seeia), 4:81 Tel Aviv (journal), 3:51; 4:263-264 Temple of Ba'al Shamin (Si), 1:194 Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipal Museum, 5:374 Temple of Baal (Ugarit), 5:173, 260 Tel Aviv University Temple of Bacchus (Baalbek), 1:191, 195, 247, Ebal, Mount, excavations, 2:179 248 'Ein-Besor excavations, 2:219-220 Temple of Bar'an (Marib), 3:418 Gerisa, Tel, excavadons, 2:394 Temple of Bel (Palmyra), 1:194-195; 4:239, Hayonim excavadons, 2:486 243 Hebron excavations, 3:13 Temple of Croesus (Ephesus), 2:253 Institute of Archaeology, 1:31, 288 Temple of Dagan (Mari), 5:170 Jezreel, Tel, excavations, 3:246 Temple of Dagan (Terqa), 5:188 Kabri, Tel, excavations, 3:261 Temple of Dagan (Ugarit), 5:173, 260 Ketef Hinnom excavations, 3:285 Temple of Dmeir (Syria), 1:194 Kuntillet 'Ajrud excavations, 3:310 Temple of die E.babbar (Larsa), 3:332 Lachish excavations, 3:317 Temple of Enki (Eridu), 2:258, 259 Land of Geshur Project, 2:223; 4:442 Temple of Enlil (Nippur), 1:52, 53
543
Temple of Eshmun (Sidon), 5:39, 40 Temple of Gula (Isin), 3:187 Temple of Hadad (Fakhariyah, Tell), 2:300, 301 Temple of Hercules (Amman), 1:101, 102, 105 restoration of, 2:60 Temple of Inanna (Nippur), 4:149, 150-151 Temple of Inshushinak (Chogha Zanbil), 1:487 Temple of Inshushinak (Susa), 2:232; 5:109 Temple of Ishtar (Assur), 1:140, 226, 227, 228 Temple of Ishtar (Mari), Mari texts, 3:420 Temple of Jupiter (Baalbek), 1:195, 247 Temple of Jupiter (Damascus), 2:104 Temple of Khnum (Elephantine), 2:235-236 Temple of Khonsu (Karnak), plan of, 5:175 Temple of Kiririsha (Chogha Zanbil), 1:487 Temple of Kubaba, 1:423 Temple of Mithra (Sidon), 5:39 Temple of Nabu (Chogha Zanbil), 1:487 Temple of Nabu (Khorsabad), 3:296-297, 298 Temple of Nabu (Nimrud), 4:144 Temple of Nabu (Palmyra), 4:239, 240 Temple of Nergal (Tell Haddad), 2:473 Temple of Ninegal (Qatna), 4:35-36 Temple of Ninkarrak (Terqa), 3:45; 5:189 Temple of Ninursag (Susa), S:109 Temple of Obelisks (Byblos), 5:80 Temple of Pythian Apollo (Gortyn), 3:74 Temple of Satet (Elephantine), 2:235, 236 Temple of Serapis (Alexandria), 2:204 Temple of Seth (Naqada), 4:98 Temple of Shamash (Hatra), 2:484 Temple of Shamash (Sippar), 5:47 Temple of Sin (Khafajeh), 2:165; 3:289 Temple of Sin and Shamash (Assur), 1:226, 227 Temple of Solomon (Jerusalem). See First Temple Temple of the New Year Festival (ASSur), 2:383 Temple of the Winged Lions (Petra), 1:193; 4:304, 305, 306-307 Temple of Venus (Baalbek), 1:248 Temple of Zerubbabel (Jerusalem). See Second Temple Temple of Zeus (Cilicia), 1:132 Temple of Zeus (Jerash), 1:190; 3:215-216 restoration of, 2:60 Temple of Zeus Plammon (Bosra), 1:352 Temple Oval (Khafajeh), 3:289, 290 Temples, 2:82-83; 4:358-359; 5:165-179 altars, 1:80, 81 Amathus, 1:88 Anatolia Aphrodisias, 1:152 Arslantepe, 1:214 Assos, 1:224 Hellenistic, 1:132 Hittite, 1:129 Ionic design tradition, 1:200; 2:253-254 Roman Empire, 1:133; 2:252-254 Arabian Peninsula, 1:161, 163; 5:215-216 broad-room, 4:358-359 drainage systems for, 5:10 Egypt, 1:327, 328; 5:174-179 Abu Simbel, 1:10-11 Alexandria, 1:67, 68, 192 Amarna, Tell el-, 1:83, 84 architectural decoration, 1:192; 5:177-178 Heliopolis,3:15; 5:177 Karnak, 5:177, 178 Ptolemaic, 5:175-176
544
INDEX
Temples, continued Egypt, continued solar, 5 : 1 7 7 Timna', 5:218 Elamites, 487-488 Ephesus, 2:252-254 gardens, 2:383, 384 Halikarnassos, 2:464 Ionians, 1:200; 4:351-352 Jerusalem, 1:324-330. See also First Temple; Second Temple long-room, 2:23; 4:359 Mesopotamia, 5 : 1 6 5 - 1 6 9 'AqarQuf, 1:156 ASSur, 1:140, 226, 227-228, 230; 3:270; 5:167, 311 Assyrians, 1:231-32 Babylonians, 1:254, 260, 261; 5:167-168 constituent parts, 5:165-166 Eshnunna, 2:262-265 Hatra, 2:484-485 Hiba, al-, 2:409 Khafajeh, 3:289-290 Khorsabad, 3:296-298 megaron, 5:166-167 Nippur, 4:150-151 Sumerians, 2:259; 5:166, 167 Terqa, 3:45; 5:189 Uruk, 5:166, 167 Syria-Palestine, 5 : 1 6 9 - 1 7 4 'Ain Dara', 1:34-35 Akkadians, 1:52 'Amrit, 1 : 1 1 1 , 113 Arad, 1:171-172, 175 architectural decoration, 1:193, 194-195 Avdat, 1:237 Baalbek, 1:191, 195, 247, 248 Betii-Shean, 1:306, 307-308; 5:171,172 Byblos, 1:391-392, 393; 5:170 Canaanites, 5:169-171 Chuera, Tell, 1:35, 491-492 Damascus, 2:104 Dura-Europos, 2:174-175 Ebla, 1:35; 2:182; 5:170 Emar, 2:237 Habuba Kabira, 2:448 Hazor, 1:35; 3:3; 5:171, 172, 173 Jerash, 3:215-216, 217, 218 Lachish, 5:172-173 Mari, 5:166, 168, 170 Megiddo, 5:171, 173 Shechem, 5:171, 172 Tannur, Khirbet et-, 5:153-155 Ugarit, 5:170, 173, 257, 258, 260 Transjordan Amman, 1:99, 1 0 1 , 102 Amman Airport, 1:102-103 See also Architectural decoration; Funerary monuments; Ziggurat; specific deities and temples Temple Scroll, 2:120; 5 : 1 6 3 - 1 6 5 on Second Temple, 1:325, 326, 329 Teacher of Righteousness as author of, 5:164 Temples in Jerusalem. See Biblical temple; First Temple; Second Temple Tempus (journal), 4 : 2 6 7 Tenta, 2:91; 3:262-263 Tenth Roman Legion. See Roman Legion Tents, 5 : 1 7 9 - 1 8 1 Tent Work in Palestine (Conder), 2:59 Tepe Aliabad, 2:135; 5:186 Tepe Farukhabad, 2:135; 5 : 1 8 1 - 1 8 3
Tepe Ganj Dareh, 1:141; 4:279 Tepe Gawra, 1:93, 95, 456; 2:19; 5 : 1 8 3 - 1 8 6 ceramics, 3:478; 5:183 Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 2:266 Round House, 4:197; 5:184 Tepe Ghabristan, 4:6 Tepe Guran. See Luristan Tepe Hissar, 3:62; 4:280; 5:343 Tepe Khazineh, 2:134-135, 297, 298; 5:186 Tepe Mahmud Agha, 5:158 Tepe Mussian, 2:134, 135; 5:181, 182,
Egypt, 5:191, 192, 193 Eshnunna, 2:264 fibers, 5:191-192 patterned cloth, 5:193-194 See also Clothing Thabane, 5:254 Thaj (Gerrha), 1:163; 4:385; 5:197-198 Thalj, Jebel eth-, 3:16 Thalmann, Jean Paul, 1:295 Thamudic inscriptions. .See Safaitic-Thamudic inscriptions 1S6-1S7 Thantia, 5:276 Tepe Nush-i Jan, 2:43; 4:11 Thapsus (Ras Dimass), 4:161 Tepe Patak, 2:135 Tharthar, Wadi, 5:158 Tepe Sabz, 2:135 Thaumagusta, 1:277 Tepe Sialk, 4:280, 282 Thawr, Jabal, 3:445 Tepe Yahya, 2:231; 3:61; 4:278, 282; Thawra, al-, 2:290 5:187-188 Thayer, Joseph Henry, 5:198-199 Tepti-ahar, 2:232, 455, 456 American Palestine Exploration Society, 1:91 Tepti-Humban-Inshushinak, 3:202 American Schools of Oriental Research, 1:94; Terentius, Julius, 2:175 5:198 Terian, Abraham, as contributor, 1:207-211 Thayyilah, Wadi ath-, 3:291 Termessos, hero cult, 2:347 Theaters, 5:199-203 Terqa (Ashara), 5 : 1 8 8 - 1 9 0 Alexandria, 1:67, 68 Amorites, 1:107, 110; 5:188 Amman, 1:101 excavations, 3:45; 5:188 Anatolia, 1:132, 133; 5:199-200 Mari, 5:188-189 Aphrodisias, 1:152 Mari texts, 3:420 arches, 1:190 temple, 3:45; 5:189 architectural decoration, 1:191 Terraced agriculture, 1:27-28, 29, 33 Aspendos, 1:133; 5:200, 201 Terraced architecture, 1:231 Assos, 1:224 Haft Tepe, 2:455 Caesarea, 1:402; 5:200, 201 Mesopotamian temples, 5:168 Halikarnassos, 2:464-465 Persepolis, 4:274, 275, 276, 299, 300 Halusa, 2:466 Ubaid, 5:252 Hammath-Gader, 2:469 Terra cotta Hellenistic, 5:199, 200-201 architectural decoration, 1:194 Herodian, 5:201 sickles, 4:194 historical geography, 3:32 Terracotta Workshop (Failaka), 2:297 Jerash, 3:218 Tessup, 3:128, 129 Nabatean, 5:201 cult of, 4:173-174 odeum, 1:151; 2:381; 4:177-178 Testament of Abraham, 4:246 Roman, 2:381; 5:199-202 Testament of Amram, 2:123 Sepphoris, 4:533 Testament of I^vi, 1:183; 2:123 Tiberias, 5:205 Testament of Naphtali, 2:123 Thebes, 2:200 Testament of St. Ephraim, 3:148-149 palace (representational), 3:118 Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, 1:209; 2:123 tombs, 4:363-364; 5:31 Testimonia (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:121 Theodore, St., 1:147 Tesub, 1:129 Theodosian capital, 1:191 Tethys, 2:225 Theodosian Wall, 1:431 Teti, funerary complex of, 4:363 Theodosius 1, 1:146, 247, 248, 394; 2:204 Tetisheri, 4:363 Theodosius II, 2:61 Texas, University of. See University of Texas Theophrastus, 1:267 Texas A&M University Theophylact Simocatta, 2:79 Serfe Limani excavations, 5:2 Theopolis. See Antioch on Orontes Uluburun excavations, 5:266 Theotokos, Maty, 2:4 Yassiada excavations, 5:373 Thera, 1:18, 20 Texier, Charles, 1:224, 333; 3:64 excavations, 3:76 Textiles, 5 : 1 9 0 - 1 9 7 Fouque discoveries, 3:73-74 Classical period, 5 : 1 9 5 - 1 9 7 Therans, 2:97 Coptic, 2:361 Thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS), distribution, 5:196-197 1:120-121; 2:115 Palestine, 5:195 Thermoluminescence (TL) dating, 2:115; production, 5:195-196 4:208 Roman, 5:197 Thesiger, Wilfred, 5:253 furnishings, 2:361, 363, 364 Thessalonians, Book of, 1:322, 323 Neolithic through Iron Ages, 5 : 1 9 1 - 1 9 5 Thessalonike synagogue, 4:471 Anatolia, 1:133; 5:191, 192, 193, 194 Thiersch, Hermann, 3:412; 5:19 Assurian-Anatolian trade, 1:128 Thietmar, Magister, 3:51 Assyrians, 1:231; 5:193 Third Crusade. See Crusader period Babylonians, 1:259 Third Legion Cyrenaica, 1:352; 5:237
INDEX Third Wail (Jerusalem), 3:230 Thirst Market (Baghdad), 1:265 This, 5:286 Thomas, Bertram, 5:253 Thomas, David H., 1:460 Thomas, Felix, 3:295 Thomas, Gospel of, 1:323 Thompson, Henry, 1:89 Thompson, Reginald Campbell, 1:331, 423 Eridu excavations, 2:259 Nineveh excavations, 4:145 Ur, 5:288 Thomsen, Christian J., 4:5, 267-268 Thor, Jebel, 1:165 ThorleyJ. Palin, 1:452 Thoth, 3:367 Thousand and One Churches. See Bin Bir Kilisse Thrace, 1:131,481 Three Tongues of Fire, 2:122 Throckmorton, Peter, 1:415; 5:282-283, 372 Throne of IChusrau (Ctesiphon), 2:78 Through the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology (Rast), 4:417 Thucydides, 2:29 Thuesen, Ingolf, as contributor, 2:163-166 Thureau-Dangin, Francois, 3:42; 5 : 2 0 3 Mari texts, 3:420 Terqa excavations, 5:188 Til Barsip excavations, 5:209 Thuthotep, 4:433 Thutinose (Thutmosis; sculptor), 1:83, 84-85 Thutmose (Thutmosis) I, 2:199 Thutmose (Thutmosis) III, 1:40, 147, 243, 273; 2:199 inscriptions of, 2:397; 3:463 statue, 2:799 Ti, 4:480 Tiberias, 5 : 2 0 3 - 2 0 6 Plammath Tiberias, 2:470 stadium, 5:75 water supply, 1:158; 3:132; 4:422 Tiberius, 1:144, 194 Tiberias and, 5:203 Tidnum. See Amorites Tiglath-Pileser I, 1:218, 227; 2:145 Arameans, 5:131 Assur clay prism, 1:225 Kutmuhi campaign, 4:433 park, 2:383 unprecedented power of, 1:229 Tiglath-Pileser III, 1:100, 104, 162, 177, 184, 220 Tigran 11,1:205,206, 208 Tigranakert, 1:205 Tigris, 5 : 2 0 6 - 2 0 9 Akkadians, 1:43, 50, 52 Arameans, 5:207, 208 Assur site, 1:225, 227; 5:208 in Assyrian territory, 1:229; 5:207-208 drainage, 5:207 Eski Mosul Dam, 2:265 irrigation, 1:3, 24, 264; 2:250; 3:182; 5:207 Tikni, 2:454 Til-Abnu. See Qitar, elTil Barsip (Tell Ahmar; Kar Shalmaneser), 1:186; 2:104, 292; 3:42; 5 : 2 0 9 - 2 1 0 drainage system, 5:10 excavations, 4:126; 5:209 Hypogeum Tomb, 2:291; 5:209 wall paintings, 5:327, .929, 360
Tile, 5 : 2 1 0 - 2 1 5 building, 5 : 2 1 0 - 2 1 2 Anatolian, 5:210-211, 212 Greek, 5:210-212 decorative, 5 : 2 1 2 - 2 1 5 Anatolian, 5:213-214 Babylonian, 5:212 Persian, 5:212, 213, 214 Tilia, Ann B., 3:60 Tilia, Giuseppe, 3:60 Tilla, 3:325 Tilley, Christopher, 3:141 Til Tuba, battle of (635 BCE), 1 : 2 3 2 Timaeus of Tauromenium, 3:33 Timber. See Wood Timna' (Arabia; Hajar Kohlan), 1:153, 162; 4:383, 384; 5 : 2 1 5 - 2 1 7 Timna' (Negev; Wadi Mene'iyeh), 1:218; 4:397; 5 : 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 Timnah. See Batash, Tel Timonium palace (Alexandria), 1:66, 67 Timothy (disciple of Paul), 1:322 TIMS. See Thermal ionization mass spectrometry Timurids, 5:214 Tin as bronze additive, 2:424-425 Bronze Age deposits, 4:8-9 Kestel mine, 2:424; 3:283-284 pottery glaze, 5 : 3 0 9 processing of, 2:425 trade, 4:11 Tinaja, La (newsletter), 4:262 Tindel, Raymond D„ 5:386 as contributor, 3:27-28; 5:386-387 Tingis (Tangier), 4:162 Tinh, Tran Tarn, 5:59 Tinnit. See Tannit Tipasa (Zeralda), 4:162 Tiraios, 2:48 Tirat ha-Carmel, 4:462; 5:104 Tirutur, 3:202 Tirzah. See Far'ah, Tell el- (North) Tis-atal (Tish-atal), 3:127 bronze lions, 4:60 Tishreen dam, 2:290; 4:389 Titles (Nortii Semitic seal inscriptions), 4:168-169 Titus (disciple of Paul), 1:322 Titus (Roman emperor) Ephesus temple, 2:254 First Jewish Revolt, 2:314 Second Temple destruction, 1:324 Tixier, Jacques Ksar 'Akil excavations, 3:307 Qatar excavations, 4:384 Tjeker, 5:131 Tkach, J., 5:252 TL. See Thermoluminescence Tob, 5:133 Tobiad family, 1:100; 3:177-178 Tobiah (Tobyah), 1:104; 3:177 Tobit, Book of, 1:183; 2:124 Tobler, Titus, 3:52 Tobyah. See Tobiah Tocharian, 3:152 Todd, Ian A., 2:96; 4:478 as contributor, 1:438-440; 3:262-265; 4:478 Toharot (Dead Sea Scrolls), 2:120 Toilet articles, 4:17. See also Bathrooms; Cosmetics
545
Tokah Rilise, 1:427 Tokat, 1:136 Tokens, 5:352 Toledo, 2:35 Tomb of Absalom (Kidron Valley), 1:192; 2:347-348 Tomb of Caiaphas (Jerusalem), 4:461 Tomb of Cyrus (Pasargadae), 4:250, 251 Tomb of Esther and Mordechai (Ecbatana), 2:186-187 Tomb of Hamrath (Suweida), 2:348 Tomb of Jacob's Daughters (Sepphoris), 4:536 Tomb ofMausolus (Halikarnassos), 1:200; 2:347, 463-464; 3:441 Tomb of Nefertari (Thebes), 2:152 Tomb of the Christian Woman, 2:349 Tomb of die Cisterns (Ebla), 2:182 Tomb of the Lord of die Goats (Ebla), 2:182 Tomb of die Princess (Ebla), 2:182 Tomb of the Prophets (Jerusalem), 1:435, 437-438; 5:269 Tomb of die Virgin (Jerusalem), 5:269 Tomb of Tutankhamun Carter (Howard) discovery of, 1:428-429 chariots and, 1:485 political repercussions following discovery of, 4:107 tourism, 5:222 Tomb of Zechariah (Kidron Valley), 1:192; 2:347, 349; 3:442 Tombs, 1:384-386; 5:218-221 'Ain es-Samiyeh, 1:35, 36 Akko, 1:54-55 Alexandria, 1:68, 200-201, 435; 2:349 Armenia, 1:204, 205 Beit Mirsim, Tell, 1:295, 297 cist graves, 1:384, 385; 2:13-14, 108-109; 5:220 Egypt (dynastic), 2:197; 5:287 Egypt (Islamic period), 2:206 Egypt (predynastic), 2:195 Far'ah, Tell el- (North), 2:303 Far'ah, Tell el- (South), 2:305 gardens, 2:384 Hellenistic, 1:72; 2:347-349; 5:220-221 Jerusalem, 1:192 Judah, 5:220 Ketef Hinnom, 3:285-286 Marlik, 3:422-423 Naqsh-i Rustam, 4:99-101 North Africa, 2:349-350 Pasargadae, 4:250-251 Persia, 5:220 Petra, 2:348 Qa'aqir, Jebel, 3:210-211 rock-cut, 2:348; 5:219 rock reliefs, 1:218; 4:99-101 Roman Empire, 2:347-350; 5:221 Saqqara, 2:197 Suweida, 2:348 Thebes, 4:363-364; 5:31 Umm en-Nar, 1:161 Ur, 5:288-289 See also Architectural decoration; Burial sites; Burial techniques; Catacombs; Cave tombs; Dolmen; Hypogea; Mausoleum; Necropolis; Shaft tombs Tools (artifacts). See Lithics; Metals Tools, archaeological. See Artifact drafting and drawing; Computer mapping; Computer recording, analysis, and interpretation;
546
INDEX
Tools, continued Dating techniques; Excavation strategy; Excavation tools; Microscopy; New Archaeology; Photography; Recording techniques Tophet, 1:14; 4:158-160,330 Topographic mapping, 5:50 Toponyms, 4:92-93 Toprakkale, 5:292 Tor Aeid, 4:410 Torah. See Pentateuch Torah shrine. See Ark of the Covenant Torczyner, Harry, 3:323 TorFaraj, 4:410 TorHamar, 4:410 Toronto, University of. See University of Toronto Torrey, Charles C , 1:94, 95 TorSabiha, 4:410 Tortose, 1:218 Tosefta, 3:11; 4:430; 5:118-119, 120 Tosk (Albanian dialect), 3:152 Total Station, 5:50 Toueir, Kassem, 4:405 as contributor, 4:404-407; 5:141-145 Touqan, Fawwaz, 4:376 Tourism and archaeology, 5:222-226 Cartilage, 2:152 Cyprus, 2:90, 152 economic development and, 2:151-152, 155; 5:223-224 Egypt, 2:151-152; 5:222, 224 Holy Land, 5:222 Jordan, 2:152 nationalism, 5:225 Turkey, 2:152 Tournay, Raymond, 2:187 Tou Tseleve he Kephala, 2:292 Touzla River, 1:224 Tov, Emanuel, 2:120 Tov, Horvat, 4:121 T'ovmas Arcruni, 1:210 Tower. See Ziggurat Tower of Babel Babylon, 1:251, 252 Entemenanki, 5:391 excavation, 1:254 Tower of David (Jerusalem), 3 229 Tower of Shechem, Mount Ebal as, 2:180 Toys. See Games Trachonitis, 5:201, 202 Tracy, Destutt de, 3:139 Trade Aegean Islands, 1:19, 21, 28 Alexandrian Empire, 1:73, 131 Anatolia, 1:128, 133, 136, 226, 228; 3:308-309; 4:11 Arabian Peninsula, 1:160, 161, 162, 163; 3:147, 148; 4:91; 5:236, 377 Assyrians, 1:231; 3:308-309; 4:11 Carthage, 1:429 colonies, 2:52-53 Far Eastern, 5:190 Kanes, 3:266 Magan, 1:266 Mediterranean mixed economy, 1:25, 28 Mesopotamia, 1:4, 226, 228, 231, 259; 3:308-309; 4:9, 11 metal artifacts, 4:17-18 Nabateans, 4:82 pastoral nomadism, 4:254-255 :
Phoenicians, 1:28; 3:435; 4:163, 315, 325-326 Roman Empire, 4:439 Sasanians, 1:4; 3:486-487; 4:494 Sumerians, 1:160, 161; 4:9 Taurus Mountains, 5:155-156 texdles, 5:197 timber, 5:347-348 transportation, 5:243 urbanization and, 2:19 between villages, 5:302 See also Seafaring Trajan Amman, 1:100 Antioch earthquake, 1:144-145 Arabia Petraea, 1:447 Armenia, 1:205 Babylon visit, 1:255 Cappadocia, 1:420 Nabatean kingdom annexation, 5:237 Provincia Arabia, 5:137 Trajaneum of Pergamon, 4:260 Tranchard, Gabriel, 3:295 Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 2:131, 132 Transarabian Expedition, 4:184 Transhumance, 4:410 Transjordan, 5:226-243 American archaeologists, 1:316, 317 animal husbandry, 1:141, 142 Aramaic inscriptions, 1:181-182 architectural decoration, 1:192-194 ASOR fieldwork, 1:97 Ayyubid-Mamluk dynasties, 1:241-242; 5:242-243 Bronze and Iron Ages, 5:231-235 burials, 5:232 ceramics industry, 5:232-233 climate, 5:231, 233 Byzantine period, 5:238-241 architectural decoration, 5:240 ceramics industry, 1:473; 5:240 ceramics industry, modern, 1:449 churches, 2:2; 5:239 economic development, 2:152-153 fortifications, 2:28; 5:238 Glueck archaeological survey, 1:62, 99, 272; 2:416; 3:53; 5:231, 232 Islamic period, 5:241-243 martyrial buildings, 3:427 Nabatean language, 1:182 Persian through Roman periods, 5:235-238 prehistoric, 5:226-231 animal husbandry, 5:228, 229 burials, 5:227-228, 229 ceramics industry, 5:228 climate, 5:226 rock painting, 1:218 See also Department of Antiquities (Jordan); Flistory of the field, archaeology in Jordan; specific sites and subregions Transportation, 5:243-244 animal domestication to provide, 1:142, 433-434; 5:244 chariotry, 1:229, 485-487; 3:320; 5:244 cities' interdependence, 2:15 for messengers, 5:243 under Roman Empire, 4:439; 5:244 See also Camels; Equids; Roads Transverse arches, 1:190 Trastevere, church, 2:2
Travelers. See Tourism and archaeology Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt during the Campaigns of General Bonaparte (Denon), 3:38 Trdat, 1:205, 208 Trdatlll, 1:209 Treasure Copper Scroll description, 2:64, 65 of Curium, 2:159 Treasuries, 4:360 Trebizond, 1:136 Tree-ring dating. See Dendrochronology Trees. See Forests; Wood Treres, 2:11 Tres Eparchiae, 1:132 Trever, John C , 4:443 Trianda, 1:20, 21; 3:76-77 Tribute Assyrian collection of, 1:28-29, 220, 230, 231 Mongol collection of, 1:136 Trier, 1:277 Trigger, Bruce, 3:69 Trilithon. See Dolmen Triple Gate (Jerusalem), 3:232 Tripoli (Lebanon) Baalbek and, 1:247 as Crusader state, 2:76 Salah ad-Din's conquest of, 1:241 Tripolitania, 3:358; 4:162 Tristram, Henry Baker, 1:447; 3:52; 4:380 Trocmai, 1:335 Trojan War, 1:21 Troodos Mountains, 1:152; 2:90 Troy (Hisarlik) Alexander the Great, 1:131 Blegen excavations, 1:332; 3:65 material culture of, 1:127 Trump, David H., 3:403 as contributor, 3:402-405 Trumpets, 4:75-76 Truss (architecture), 1:188 Tsafrir, Yoram, 4:420 Tsountas, Christos, 3:76 Tsuk, Tsvika as contributor, 1:157-158; 2:12-13; 3:130-132, 132-133; 4:350-351 Gerisa, Tel, well, 2:395 Sepphoris surveys, 4:529 Tubb, Jonatiian N. as contributor, 4:67-70, 452-455 Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-, excavations, 4:452 Tubbs, H. A„ 4:457 Tubeiqah, Khirbet et-. See Beth-Zur Tubingen, University of, 5:388 Tubna (al-Kura), 5:392 Tucci, Giuseppe, 3:197 Tuchelt, Klaus, as contributor, 2:159-161 Tucker, D. J., 1:268 Tudaliya, 2:93 Tudhaliya, 1:58; 3:85 Tudhaliya IV, 3:85 Tuesday Market (Baghdad), 1:264 Tufnell, Olga, 1:39; 2:27, 474; 3:31; 5:244-24 Tugdammu (Lygdamis), 2:12 Tukulti-Ninurta I, 1:227, 229; 4:433; 5:326 Tukulti-Ninurta II, 2:460 Tulul al-'Aqir. See Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta Tulunids, 1:247; 5:241 Tumilat, Wadi, Project, 3:432; 4:136 Tumulus, 5:245-246 Bronze Age, 1:385; 5:245
INDEX dolmen, 2:168; 5:245 Phrygian, 1:130; 2:427, 429-430; 5:245, 246 Rujm el-Hiri, 2:419; 5:245, 246 Tuneinir, Tell, 3:44-45 Tunisia. See Cardiage; North Africa Tunisian Minisuy of Higher Education and Scientific Research, 1:90 Tunis Lake. See Lake of Tunis Tunnels. See Water tunnels Tur, Jebel et-. See Gerizim, Mount Tur 'Abdin monastic chapels, 4:45 Syriac language, 5:146 Tureng Tepe, 3:62; 4:284 Turin (Torino), University of, 2:78, 4:513 Turkey. See Anatolia; Ottoman Empire; Turks; specific sites Turkish Aerial Geodetic Survey, 4:123 Turkish Geological Survey, 5:156 Turkish Historical Foundation, 3:266 Turks, 1:265 as 'Abbasid mercenaries, 1:1, 3 Anatolian beyliks, 1:135, 136 Khwarazmian, 2:75 See also Ottoman Empire; Seljuk Turks Turville-Petre, Francis, 5:246 Carmel, Mount, excavations, 1:424, 426, 427; 5:246 Tuscan order, 1:194 Tushingham, A. D. as contributor, 2:156-158; 3:279-280 Jerusalem excavadons, 3:238 Tuspa, 2:12 Tusratta, letter by, 3:125, 126 Tutankhamun, 1:39, 40, 82, 83, 85; 2:101, 199 as hunter, 3:122 tapestry tunics of, 5:193 tomb of, 1:428-429, 485; 5:222 Tutankhaten. See Tutankhamun Tuttul (Tell Bi'a), 3:46; 4:405, 407 houses, 3:103, 104 Tutub. See Khafajeh Tuwanuwa, 5:246-247 Twelfth Legion. See Roman Legion Twentiedi Palmyrene Cohort, 2:175 Tyana, 5:246-247 Tyche, 1:402; 2:421 Tylissos, 3:75 Tylos, 1:267 Tyre, 1:413; 5:247-250 Achziv, 1:13 Alexandrian siege of, 1:70 Anafa.Tel, 1:117, 118 aqueduct, 1:158 under Assyrians, 5:249 Carthage, 1:429 coinage, 2:374; 4:393 garden, 2:386 pantheon of, 4:316 as Phoenician city, 5:248-249 under Roman Empire, 2:32; 5:249 trade, 1:28; 5:248 wall paintings, 5:329 Tyros. See 'Iraq el-Amir Tzaferis, Vassilios as contributor, 1:270-27'1; 3:314-315 Capernaum excavadons, 1:417 Jerusalem excavations, 4:461 Kursi excavations, 3:314 Tzori, Nehamiah, 3:300
U
Ubaid, 3:477-478; 5:251-252, 350 Arabian Peninsula prehistoric contacts, 1:159 architectural decoration, 4:4; 5:252 Assur, 1:226 burial techniques, 5:288 ceramics, 1:455-456; 3:477 cult sites, 1:260 Diyala remains, 2:164-165 Euphrates dams survey, 2:290 Hamrin basin, 2:472 houses, 3:92, 478 origins of, 5:126 periodization, 2:259; 5:251 Tepe Gawra, 5:184 urban settlements, 5:302 Ubar (Wabar), 5:252-254 'Ubayd Allah, 2:307; 5:145 'Ubeidiya, 5:254-255 early hominids, 4:207-208; 5:255 Ucayak, 1:135 Udeinah, 1:106 Udruh fortifications, 3:360-361 UESI. See Undersea Exploration Society of Israel Ugarit (Ras Shamra), 5:255-262 Aegean Islands, 1:21, 129 agricultural-use ceramics, 1:25 Akkadian texts, 3:160 anchors, 1:137; 5:260 Aphek, 1:150 archives, 5:259 Bassit, 1:278 coin hoards, 2:43 drainage system, 5:10 Emar, 2:236, 237 fortifications, 5:258-259, 335 French excavations, 2:345; 3:43; 5:256-257, 304 as Hittite port, 1:129 houses, 3:104, 106 Hurrian texts, 3:125 musical notation, 5:130 plan of, 5:256 scribal activities, 4:500; 5:261 temples, 5:170, 173, 257, 258, 260 Ugarit-Forschungen (journal), 4:266 Ugaritic (language), 2:132; 4:517-518; 5:262-264, 356 alphabet, 1:76-77; 3:6, 365; 5:130, 262, 264, 304 Canaanites and, 1:412 cuneiform, 2:89; 5:262, 304 onomastica, 4:93 religious literature, 1:413; 2:80, 81-82, 83, 85; 5:265-266 Ugarit inscriptions, 5:264-266 Akkadian texts, 1:45, 107; 5:264-265 Albright and, 1:61 Virolleaud decipherment, 5:304 Uhaimir, Tell, 3:298, 299 Ukhaidir, 2:336 Ukhdud, al-. See Najran 'Ula, al-. See Dedan Ulbert, Tilo as contributor, 2:149-150; 4:445-446 Rusafa excavations, 4:445 Uluburun (Great Cape), 5:266-268 anchors, 1:137; 5:268
547
shipwreck, 2:93; 5:32, 266-268 underwater archaeology, 5:283 'Umar, Tell, 2:78; 3:484; 4:513, 514 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-Majid al'Adwi, 1:166 'Umar ibn Abdul Aziz, 1:166 'Umar ibn al-Khattab ('Umar I), 1:165, 166; 2:365; 5:241 Umayyad caliphate, 5:268-273 'Abbasid caliphate, 1:1; 5:271-272 Aleppo, 1:65 Amman, 1:101; 5:270 Arabian under, 1:165-166 architectural arches, 1:190 Baalbek under, 1:247, 248 ceramics, 1:474, 475, 477 coinage, 2:50 extent of, 5:269 mosaics, 5:270, 271 mosques, 4:56; 5:269-270 palaces, 2:334-335; 5:270, 271 Palestine under, 4:233 in Spain, 5:272 Syrian desert urbanization, 5:142-143 Transjordanian constructions, 5:241 Umbrian (language), 3:150, 334, 336 'Umeiri, Tell el-, 1:98, 99; 2:306; 5:232, 233, 273-274 administrative compound, 5:234, 274 Ammonite settlements, 1:103, 104, 105, 106; 5:274 computer mapping, 2:56 Umma Akkade, 1:53 excavations, 1:258 Lagash border conflicts, 5:98 Umm ad-Dananir, 1:104, 106 Baq'ah Valley, 1:273 Umm ad-Dananir, Khirbet, 1:273 Umm ad-Dananir, Wadi, 1:273 Umm al-Ma', 4:384 Umm al-Qaiwain, 5:284 Umm al-Qura. See Mecca Umm al-Walid, 4:56 Umm an-Nammal, 3:315-316 Umm an-Nar, 3:80; 5:284, 285 Umm Dabaghiyeh, 1:142, 454; 2:484; 5:325 Umm el-'Amad, 1:6, 7, 194 Umm el-Biyara, 2:190; 4:304; 5:274-276 Umm el-Jimal, 5:276-279 arches, U 1 8 9 , 190 basilica, 2:1 excavations, 3:55; 5:270, 276-278 Umm el-Qa'ab, 1 : 1 1 , 12 lion skeletons, 3:362 Umm el-Tlel, 3:42 Umm en-Nahr culture, 1:161 Umm er-Rasas (Kaslron Mefaa; Mephaath), 1:278; 5:279-281 churches, 2:8, 333, 343; 5:279-280 Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land excavations, 2:343; 5:279-280 Umm er-Rihan, 5:105 Umm et-Tawabin, 5:63 Umm Qeis (Gadara), 5:281-282 aqueducts, 1:158; 2:3] bath building, 5:281, 282 excavations, 3:55; 5:281, 282 mosaics, 2:406; 5:281 Unas, 4:480 Undersea Exploration Society of Israel, 5:282-283 Shavei-Zion survey, 5:17
548
INDEX
Underwater archaeology, 5 : 2 8 3 - 2 8 4 'Adit ram, 1:234-236 Galilee boat, 2:317, 377-379; 3:399; 4:18; 5:283 Kyrenia shipwreck, 5:284 photography, 4:333 Serce Limam excavations, 5:2, 283, 284 Seytan Deresi, 5:11-12 Shavei-Zion, 4:17-18; 5:283 Uluburun excavations, 5:266-268, 283 UNESCO. See United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Unis (Wenis), 4:363 United Arab Emirates, 5:284-286 Islamic period remains, 1:166 prehistoric remains, 1:159; 5:284 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Associated Schools Project, 2:271 Beirut soundings, 1:295 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 2:272 Libyan Valleys Survey, 3:358 "Save Carthage" campaign, 1:432; 2:152; 4:156 site conservation, 2:60, 151 tourism, 5:223 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 1:89; 2:152 United States Information Agency (USIA), 1:89 United States National Science Foundation, 2:135; 4:136; 5:181 Universite St.-Joseph (USJ), 1:293; 2:346 University. For institutions not found below, see place name University of Aarhus, 1:266 Qal'at al-Bahrain excavations, 4:367 Qatar excavations, 4:384 University of Amsterdam, 2:344 University of Arizona Be'er Resisim excavation, 1:285 Tabun cave excavations, 5:152 Wawiyat, Tell el-, excavations, 5:333 University of Baghdad, 2:471; 5:48 University of California African Expedition, 4:313 Terqa excavations, 5:188 University of California (Berkeley), Nineveh excavations, 4:145 University of California (San Diego), Shiqmim excavations, 5:35 University of Chicago Breasted, James Henry, 1:355, 356 Jacobsen, Thorkild, 3:205 See also Oriental Institute University of Connecticut (Storrs), 2:227 University of Copenhagen, 4:126 University of Edinburgh, 2:266 University of Haifa, 1:54, 234 Bethsaida excavations, 1:303 Center for Maritime Studies, 5:283 Caesarea, 1:403 Ma'agan Mikha'el, 3:389 Shavei-Zion, 5:16, 17 Ebal, Mount, excavations, 2:179 Land and Sea Project, 4:97 specialization, 3:50 Tabun cave excavations, 5:152 University of Hamburg, 4:156
University of Heidelberg, 4:131 University of Jordan, 1:89 Ghrubba surveys, 2:402 Mazar, Tell el-, excavations, 3:443 University of Kansas, 1:36 University of Karlsruhe, 5:388 University of Leeds, 3:206 University of Leiden Deir 'Alia, Tell, excavations, 2:137 Hadidi, Tell, excavations, 2:453 Nederlands Historisch-Archeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 4:119 University of London, 1:358 Institute of Archaeology, 1:56; 3:80 Brak, Tell, excavations, 1:355 Nebi Mend, Tell, excavations, 4:114 Qurayyah survey, 4:396 Rifa'at, Tell, excavations, 4:428 Murray, Margaret Alice, 4:66, 67 School of Oriental and African Studies bulletin, 4:265 University of Lund, 2:412 University of Mainz, 3:437 University of Manchester, 2:266 University of Marburg, 1:54 University of Maryland, 4:420 University of Melbourne, 1:56; 4:389 University of Miami, 2:311 University of Michigan Carthage excavations, 1:432 Hadidi, Tell, excavations, 2:453 Kelsey Museum, 1:117 Petra scrolls, 4:308 Qasr al-Hayr ash-Sharqi excavations, 4:379 Seleucia on the Tigris excavations, 4:513 Sepphoris excavations, 4:528 Tepe Farukhabad excavations, 5:181 University of Minnesota, 4:20 University of Missouri Kourion excavations, 3:305 Museum of Art and Archaeology, 1:117 University of Mosul, 2:266 Hamrin Dam Salvage Project, 2:471 University of Munich, 1:225; 3:186 University of Nevada, Desert Research Institute, 1:36 University of the Orange Free State, 2:443 University of Oxford Crowfoot, John Winter, 2:73 Evans, Arthur, 2:292 Faris, Khirbet, excavations, 2:306 Kish excavations, 3:298 Salamis excavations, 4:457 See also Ashmolean Museum University of Pennsylvania Abydos, 1:12 Beth-Shean excavations, 1:306; 2:315 Caesarea, 1:403 Cape Gelidonya excavations, 1:415 Fara excavations, 2:302 Gibeon excavations, 2:403 Gordion Project, 2:427-428 Hasanlu Project, 2:480; 3:61 Iraq (northern) survey, 5:183 Khafajeh excavations, 3:288 Kourion excavations, 3:305 Lapithos excavations, 3:330 Malyan excavations, 3:406 Michal, Tel, excavations, 4:20 Nippur excavations, 4:149, 150, 151 Rimah, Tell er-, survey, 4:428 Sa'idiyeh, Tell es-, excavations, 4:452
University Museum, 1:272 Ur excavations, 5:288 University of Rome Instituto de Vicino Oriente, 1:13 Ramat Rahel excavations, 4:402 Shavei-Zion excavations, 5:16 University of Saarbrucken, 3:265 University of South Florida, 4:528-529 University of Sydney Alalakh, Tell, excavations, 1:56 Pella excavations, 4:257 Teleilat el-Ghassul excavations, 5:161 University of Tehran, 2:455; 3:422 University of Tel Aviv. See Tel Aviv University University of Texas Beth-Gan soundings, 1:301 Yin'am, Tel, excavations, 5:380 University of Toronto Wadi Tumilat Project, 3:432 Winnett, Frederick Victor, 5:346 University of Tubingen, 5:388 University of Turin (Torino), 2:78, 4:513 University of Vienna, 5:149 University of Western Australia, 3:56 University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), 2:453 University of Zurich, 4:245 Unqi (Pattina), 1:186 Untash-Napirisha. See Chogha Zanbil Upper Egypt, 5 : 2 8 6 - 2 8 8 Badarian phase, 2:193-194 ceramics, 2:195 'Uqair, Tell, 5:325 Uqlidisi, Abu al-Hasan al-, 5:145 Ur (Tell el-Muqayyar), 2:19; 5 : 2 8 8 - 2 9 1 agriculture, 1 : 2 4 Akkadians, 1:53, 54; 5:99, 289 Amorites, 1:109 Arabian Peninsula prehistoric contacts, 25.1:159 Assur, 1:226 Babylon, 1:254, 256, 259, 260; 5:290 cloth, 5:193 Elam, 2:231 Eshnunna, 2:265 excavations, 1:258, 261; 3:59; 4:3; 5:288 houses, 3:93, 111; 5:290 literacy, 3:481 Ura Baba, 4:123 Urahilina, 2:468 Uralic languages, 3:155 Uranium-series dating, 2:115 Urartian (language) Hurrian and, 3:125, 126; 5:292 interpretation of, 2:133 onomastica, 4:96 Urartu (Ararat), 5 : 2 9 1 - 2 9 4 Armenia, 1 : 2 0 5 art, 5:293 inscriptions, 2:131; 5:292 irrigation, 1:157; 5:292 origins and development of, 1:129-130; 5:291-292 pantheon of, 5:293 Qadar Valley, 2:480 Urban II (pope), 2:73 Urbanization. See Cities Urfa. See Edessene inscriptions Urhilina, 1:146 Urikki, 3:269 Urkes. See Mozan, Tell Urman, Dan Golan survey, 2:371-372; 4:230
INDEX Kursi excavations, 3:314 Nessana excavations, 4:129 Qasrin, 4:381 Urmia. See Lake Urmia Ur-Nammu, 3:481; 5:99 building program, 5:289 stela, 5:290 Ur-Nanshe, 2:407 Urua (Arawa), 2:134; 5:186 Uruinimgina (Urukagina), 2:407 Uruk. See Uruk-Warka Urukagina (Uruinimgina), 2:407 Uruk Mound (Abu Salabakh), 1:9, 10 Uruk Road, 4:433 Uruk-Warka, 3:44, 478-480; 5:294-298 Akkade, 1:41, 52, 53, 54; 5:296 Anatolian settlements by, 1:125 Aramaic text, 1:182 Arslantepe, 1:214, 215 art, 5:295 ceramics, 1:456; 5:295 cities, 2:16-17, 19 colonial expansion, 2:53 cult sites, 1:260 cuneiform texts from, 2:88; 5:295 Diyala remains, 2:165 Eski Mosul Dam Salvage Project, 2:266 Euphrates dams survey, 2:290-291 excavations, 1:258, 261; 3:59; 5:294 fortifications, 5:334 Habuba Kabira, 1:125; 2:53, 290-291, 446-448 Hamrin basin, 2:472 Khuzistan, 4:281 metals, 4:8 palace, 4:198 Persia (prehistoric), 4:278-279 seals, 4:510; 5:295 Tepe Gawra, 5:184-185 White Temple, 5:166, 167, 294 Ur-Utu, 2:146; 3:355 Ur-zababa (king of Kish), 1:42 USAID. See United States Agency for International Development Ushebtis (Egyptian funerary statuettes), 1:114 'Ush es-Saqra, 4:401 Ushnu-Solduz Valley, settlement of, 2:459 Ushu, 5:247, 248 USIA. See United States Information Agency USJ. See Universite St.-Joseph Ussishkin, David, 1:296-297; 2:256; 3:227 as contributor, 3:246-247, 317-323, 460-469; 5:76-77, 244-245 Jezreel, Tel, excavations, 3:246 Lachish excavations, 3:317, 323 Megiddo excavations, 3:461 Ustinova, Yulia, 4:462 'Uthman ibn 'Affan, 1:154, 165; 5:268 Utnapishtim, 4:507 Utu, 5:100 Utuhegal, 3:481; 5:296 UV-VIS spectroscopy, 1:119 'Uza, Horvat, fortifications, 2:326 V Vagharchapat, church, 3:426 Vahan Mamikonean, 1:209 Vaissals blanches (white wares), 1:463 Valbelle, Dominique, 5:44
Valencia, 2:35 Valens, Flavius, 1:482 Valentinus, Antonius, 2:175, 176 Valerius Maximus, 3:34 Valkash, 4:290 Valla, Francois R. as contributor, 4:130-131 'Einan excavations, 2:219 El-Wad Cave, 1:425 Hayonim excavations, 2:486 Valle, Pietro della, 1:251; 3:42 Valley of Achor, Copper Scroll, 2:64 Valley of the Kings, 2:199; 5:287 Van. See Lake Van Van, kingdom of, 5:292, 293 Van Beek, Gus W. as contributor, 2:452-453, 457-458; 3:124-125, 213-215, 417-419; 4:383-384; 5:18-19, 215-217 Hadhramaut survey, 2:452 Hajar Bin Humeid excavations, 2:457, 458 Jemmeh, Tell, excavations, 2:431; 3:213, 214 Marib, 3:417 Najran, 4:90 Timna', 5:215 Vandals, 1:431 Vandermeersch, Bernard Carmel, Mount, excavations, 1:424, 426 Hayonim excavations, 2:486 Van der Meulen, Daniel, 2:452 Vandiver, Pamela B„ 5:307, 309 Van Elderen, Bastiaan as contributor, 4:87-89 Nag Hammadi excavations, 4:87 Van Loon, Maurits N. Habuba Kabira surveys, 2:446 Hadidi, Tell, survey, 2:453 Hammam et-Turkman, Tell, excavations, 3:46 Mureybet excavations, 4:66 Vann, R. Lindley, 1:403 Vardaman, Joseph, 3:391 Vardanes II, 4:288 Vardanes III, 4:288 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 3:336 Varuna, 4:36 Vases. See Amphorae Vasilikos Valley, 3:72; 4:478 Vattioni, Francesco, 4:166 Vaults, Byzantine and Islamic, 1:382 Vaux, Roland de, 2:187; 5:299-300 Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise directorship, 2:188 Far'ah, Tell el-, excavations, 2:303, 304; 5:299 on Kenyon's ceramic phases, 4:464 Nobah, 4:449 Qumran excavations, 2:118; 4:393-395; 5:299 on term Teman, 5:156 Vedas, 3:150 Veenhof, Klaas R., as contributor, 3:308-310, 351-357 Veh-Antiokh-Khusrau, 2:79 Veh Ardashir, 2:78, 79 Veii, sewer system, 2:31 Velleius Paterculus, 3:34 Venetian (language), 3:150 Venice, glassmaking, 2:415 Venus. See Aphrodite Venus di Milo, 3:74
549
Venus tablets of Ammisaduqa, 1:56 Verdier, Abbe Henri dti, 2:345 Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 3:336 Vergina, 5:194 Verina (empress), 2:63 Verney, Tessa, 5:344 Verus, Lucius Aurelius, 1:101 Vespasian, 25.1:133 Aphek destroyed by, 1:151 Caesarea, 1:399 Cappadocia, 1:420 First Jewish Revolt, 2:314; 3:143 Tarichea, 1:312 Vestibule, in Mesopotamian temples, 5:166 Via Maris (Tyre-Akko), 1:13, 147, 151; 4:439 Via Nova Trajana (Syria-Red Sea), 1:100, 154; 4:439 Viaud, Prosper, 2:343 Nazareth excavations, 4:113 Sepphoris excavations, 4:527 Victoria and Albert Museum (London, England), 4:457 Victory Stela, 1:50 Vidal, F. S., 5:346 Videvdad, 3:453-454 Vienna, University of. See University of Vienna Villa, 5:300-301 Antioch, 5:300, 301 'Ein-Ya'el, 2:225-227 Emmaus, 2:240 Halikarnassos, 2:465 Nea Paphos, 2:95 Sepphoris, 4:533-534 Villages, 5:301-303 agricultural, 1:23, 29, 122; 5:302 Anatolia, 1:122, 134 houses, 5:302 plan patterns (Golan), 2:422 Sec also specific sites Villa of Theseus, 2:95 Ville des Artisans (Susa), 5:110 Villeneuve, Francois, 2:478; 3:173 Ville Royale (Susa), 2:231, 232; 5:107-108, 109, 110 Vinca script, 5:352 Vincent, Louis-Hugues, 2:187; 5:303-304 Abel collaboration, 1:5; 5:304 Avdat excavation, 1:236 Church of the Nativity, 2:188 Hammath Tiberias synagogue, 2:470 Haram el-Khalil, 2:188 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225; 5:304 Mizpah identification, 4:102 Vinitzky, Lipaz, 2:168 Viollet, Henri, 4:473 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene, 4:424, 425 Viri Galilei, catacomb, 1:436, 437-438 Virolleaud, Charles, 2:132; 5:257, 304 ViSaps (Armenian monuments), 1:205 Visigoths, tribal migrations of, 3:151 Vitali, Vanda, as contributor, 5:77-79 Viticulture, 5:304-306 agricultural development and, 1:24, 25, 27, 28 Ammonites, 1:104 Anatolia, 1:133 Ashkelon wine trade, 1:223 Assyrians, 1:231; 5:305 Avdat, 1:236, 238 Palestine, 1:29 wine presses, 4:21, 22 Vitreous materials, 5:306-321 Aden, 1:15
550
INDEX
Wainwright, Gerald, 1:234 Wakalas, 1:422-423 Wake Forest University, 2:227 Walid I, al-, 1:166; 4:381 Aleppo, 1:64, 65 "Anjar, 1:143 constructions by, 4:55, 58; 5:269, 270 Damascus, 2:105 Walid II, al-, 3:399; 4:380; 5:271 Walker, Anita, 1:97; 2:96 Walker, James H., 4:66 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 2:291 Wallin, Augustus, 4:396 Wall paintings, 5 : 3 2 5 - 3 3 0 Abu Hamid, Tell, 1:8 Anatolia, Hellenistic, 1:132; 5:328-329 Anatolia, prehistoric, 1:124; 5:325 Arslantepe, 1:214 Assyrians, 5:209, 326-328 baptisteries, 1:271 clouting documentation, 2:39-40 Dab'a, Tell ed-, 2:100 Dura-Europos, 2:358, 359, 360; 4:437; 5:329 Egypt, 2:195, 354; 5:327-328 furnishings documentation, 2:358, 359, 360 Greco-Syrian, 4:398 Hellenistic, 1:132, 192; 5:328-329 metalwork documentation, 4:12 Minoans, 2:71, 100 as musical instrument documentation, 4:73, 75-76 Pompeii, 2:361 Roman Empire, 2:32, 358, 359; 4:437; 5:329-330 Second Pompeiian style, 1:193, 200 Sumerians, 5:325 synagogue, 1:194; 5:329 Teleilat el-Ghassul, 5:229, 325 Til Barsip, 5:327, 3 2 9 , 360 warship documentation, 5:32-33 Walter, Hans, 3:77 Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore), 3:305 Wampler, Joseph C , 1:262; 2:28 Wapnish, Paula as contributor, 1:335-340, 407-408, 441-442; 2:166-167, 255-256, 284-285; 3:361-362; 4:206-207 lion bones, 3:361 Warburton, David A., as contributor, 1:15-16; 4:477-478; 5:375-378 Ward, William A., 1:93 as contributor, 4:313-317; 5:247-250 Ward, William Hayes, 2:302; 5:47 Ward-Perkins, John, 3:279 Warfare. See Weapons and warfare; specific wars W Warka. See Uruk-Warka War of Labienus (41-40 BCE), 1:152 Warpalawa, 5:246, 247 Wabar. See Ubar Warren, Charles, 5 : 3 3 0 - 3 3 1 WAC. Sec World Archaeological Congress Ful, Tell el-, excavations, 2:346 Wace, A. J. B„ 1:332 Jericho excavations, 3:16, 220 Wachsmann, Shelley, 3:389, 399 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225, 226, 230, 232, as contributor, 1:137-140; 2:377-379; 233; 4:235; 5:330 4:505-509; 5:27-28, 30-34 'Umeiri, Tell el-, 5:273 Wad, el-, Cave (Mount Carmel), 1:425-426 Warren's Shaft, 3:226; 5:332 Waddington, William H., 3:405; 4:457; 5:276 Wadi. For toponyms beginning with this element,Warren, Peter, 3:75 Warren's Shaft (Jerusalem), 3:226; 5:332 see under latter part of name War Scroll, 2:124; 5 : 3 3 1 Waechter, John d'A., 3:247 Waseda University, 2:367 Waefler, Markus, 3:46 Waset, 5:287 Wagner-Lux, Ute. See Lux, Ute Wasit, al-, 5:269, 270 Wagons. See Carts Wassukanni, 2:300; 3:287; 4:36 Wa'il (priest), 5:280 Watelin, Louis, 3:212, 298
Vitreous materials, continued Alalakh, 1:58-59 amulets, 1:114; 5:310 artifacts of Bronze and Iron Ages, 5:309-314 faience, 5:309-311 glass, 5:312 glazed pottery, 5:312-313 artifacts of Byzantine and Islamic periods, 1:380; 5:318-321 ardfacts of Persian drrough Roman periods, 5:314-317 typology and technology, 5:306-309 glaze technology, 1:457-458,478; 5:306-309 identification of, 5:306 manufacture and fabrication, 5:307-308 See also Glass Vitto, Fanny, 5:205, 374 Viviano, Benedict T., as contributor, 4:458-459 Vlaminck, Benedict, 4:113 Vocalization system. See Cantillation system Vogel, Eleanor K„ 4:418-419 Vogue, Melchior de, 4:45; 5:321 'Iraq el-Amir, 3:177 Kition, 3:301 Qal'at Sim'an, 4:368 Salamis, 4:457 Sergilla, 5 : 5 Voigt, Mary M. as contributor, 2:426-431, 458-460 Gordion excavations, 2:428 Hajji Firuz excavations, 2:458, 459 Volcanic emptions, 3:76 Volkman, P., 3:307 Volney, Constantin, 5:38 Vologases I, 4:288 Volubiiis, furnishings, 2:359 Von Gall, Hubertus, 4:101 Von Rabenau, K., 5:273 Vorderasiatisches Museum (Berlin), 1:253 Vouni, 1:88; 2:91, 95; 5:321-322 Vounous, 5:322-323 Vowel notation, 1:78, 186-187; 5:353, 354, 356 Arabic, 1:178, 179 Egyptian, 2:210 Ethiopic, 2:279; 5:354 Greek, 2:438-439 Hebrew, 3:5, 6-8 Flittite, 3:81 Phoenician-Punic, 4:318 Syriac, 1:178; 5:354 Vrysi, 2:91 Vyhmeister, Werner, 3:19
Water. See Aqueducts; Baths; Cisterns; Hydraulics; Hydrology; Irrigation; Pools; Reservoirs; Sewers; Water tunnels; Wells Water buffalo, 1:142 Water Gate (Carchemish), 1:423 Waterman, Leroy, 2:78; 4:513, 528 Water tanks. See Cisterns Water tunnels, 5 : 3 3 1 - 3 3 2 for aqueducts, 1:157, 158; 2:31 Arad, 1:174-175 Beersheba, 1:290 'Ein-Ya'el, 2:225 Gibeon, 2:403; 5:331-332 Jerusalem, 3:131, 132, 226; 5:41, 331-332 Megiddo, 3:130; 5:331-332 Watkins, Leslie, as contributor, 3:198-199; 5:28-29, 66-68 Watrous, L. Vance, 3:75 Watson, Patty Jo, 2:281, 339 as contributor, 3:208-209 Watson, Richard, 1:75 Watzinger, Carl, 1:274; 2:27, 148; 5 : 3 3 2 - 3 3 3 Capernaum excavations, 1:417 Chorazin excavations, 1:491 Gush Halav excavations, 2:443 Jemmeh, Tell, 2:26 Jericho excavations, 3:16, 220; 5:333 on Judah, 2:25 Meiron survey, 3:469 Wawiyat, Tell el-, 5 : 3 3 3 - 3 3 4 Way Flouse, 1:360 Ways of Horus, 5:42 Weapons and warfare, 5 : 3 3 4 - 3 3 9 arrowheads, 2:379; 4:18, 353; 5:267 Assyrian, 1:229-230, 232; 3:482; 5:338 axes, 4:3-4, 9; 5:336, 365 Batash, Tel, building, 3:107 boats. See subhead warships below bone weaponry, 1:345, 346 bows, 5:336, 337 cantonments (Islamic), 4:475 chariots, 1:485-487; 5:244, 337 Cypriot, 2:244 daggers, 4:8; 5:267, 336 Golan, 2:419 grave goods, 2:433; 5:336 Greek tactics, 5:338-339 hand-to-hand combat, 5:336 helmets, 4:18; 5:373 Hurrian, 3:129 maces, 5:336 Marlik, 3:423 rams, 1:234-236; 4:509; 5:32-33, 338 Roman, 2:175 Scythian, 4:504 siege tower, 5:338 spears, 4:3; 5:267, 338 storage, 4:360 swords, 5:267, 336 tents, 5:179 warships, 2:378-379; 4:508-509; 5:32-33 See also Fortifications; Military Weather. See Climatology Weaving, 5:191, 192, 196, 197 Webb, J., 2:92 Weber, Otto, 1:86 Weeks, Kent R., as contributor, 3:67-70 Wegner, Max, 4:71 Weickert, I. Carl, 4:26 Weights and measures, 5 : 3 3 9 - 3 4 2 Islamic glass, 5:3 olive oil production, 4:180-181, 182 Persian, 4:18
INDEX Roman, 4:18 unit values, 5:340-341 zoomorphic, 5:267 Weill, Raymond, 5:342-343 Greek synagogue inscription, 5:114, 343 Jerusalem excavations, 3:225; 5:343 Weinberg, SolC, 1:117, 316 Weinfeld, Moshe, 2:125 Weinstein, James M., as contributor, 2:141-142, 196-201, 304-305;3:133-136; 4:361-364; 5:368-369 Weinstein-Evron, Mina, 1:424, 425 Weippert, Manfred, 2:477 Weisgerber, Gerd, 5:65 Weiss, Harvey as contributor, 1:41-44; 3:341-347 on Islamic conquest, 5:141 Leilan, Tell, 2:38; 3:46, 287 Weiss, Zeev, 4:529 Weitzmann, IC, 2:76 Welch, Anthony, as contributor, 2:387-389 Wellcome, Henry, 5:77 Wellhausen, Julius, 1:320; 4:235 Wells, 3:130-131, 132 Beersheba, 1:289 Gerisa, Tel, 2:395 Rehovot, 4:420 Wells, Calvin, 4:205 Wells, Colin M., as contributor, 1:429-433 Wellsted, James R„ 3:78 Welsh (language), 3:151 Welter, Gabriel, 5:20 Wenamun, 2:85, 463; 5:348 Wendorf, Fred, as contributor, 2:191-194 Wenis (Unis), 4:363 Wenke, Robert J., as contributor, 2:299 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 4:136 Wepwawet, 1:233 Werker, E„ 2:377 Werr, Lamia al-Gailani, as contributor, 4:448 Wescoat, Bonna D., as contributor, 1:223-225 Weshesh, 5:131 West Bank. Sec Palestine Western Australia, University of. See University of Western Austtalia Westholm, Alfred, 2:412 West Semitic alphabet, 1:76, 77, 78; 4:352-353, 354 W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. See Albright Institute of Archaeological Research What Mean These Stones? (Burrows), 1:387 Wheat, 1:23, 24, 480-481 Wheel, 5:343-344 chariotry, 1:485 spoked, 5:343-344 Wheeler, Robert Eric Mortimer, 3:279; 5:344-345 on archaeological photography, 4:331, 333 methodology of, 1:31; 3:50; 5:11 Wheeler, Tessa, 3:279 Wheeler-Kenyon method, 1:31 Whitcomb, Donald S. 'Aqaba excavation, 1:154, 478 as contributor, 1:153-156 Ra's al-Hadd, 4:409 White, Donald, as contributor, 2:97-98; 4:355-356 White, Leslie, 4:134. White, L. Michael as contributor, 1:271-272, 322-324; 2:173-178, 484-485; 3:118-121
551
Building God's House in the Roman World, Wissmann, Hermann von, 2:452; 3:78; 5:18 4:420 Wissowa, Georg, 4:419 Wisdioff, Bonnie L., 5:333 on churches, 2:1-2 Witten, Alan, 5:103 White Building (Tel Yarmut), 5:371 Wittfogel, Karl, 1:24 Whitehouse, David, 2:38 Wolcutt, Samuel W., 3:428 as contributor, 2:413-415 Wolfe, Catherine Lorillard, 4:302 White Monastery (Sohag), 4:43-44 Wolff, Samuel R., 5:105 White Mosque (Ramla), 4:404 White Slip (ceramics) as contributor, 5:68 Wolseley, Garnet, 5:345 'Ein-Zippori, Tel, 2:228 Wolters, Al, as contributor, 2:64-65 Sanidha, 4:478 Wood, 5:347-349 White Temple (Uruk-Warka), 5:166, i67, 294, 390 anchors, 1:138, 139 "White wares." See Vaissals blanches as building material, 1:361, 363, 379; 5:348-349 Whiting, Robert M., 5:360 Wicked Priest, possible candidates for, 2:269 dating of, 2:114-115 Wieder, Moshe, 3:277 forests, 5:347 Wiegand, Theodor, 1:236; 2:161; 4:26; 5:333 furniaire, 2:353; 5:349 Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes in Galilee boat, 2:377-378 (journal), 4:266 timber trade, 5:347-349 Wiet, Gaston, 3:169 Wood, John Turtle, 2:252 Wood, Robert, 2:131 Wilayah, Tell al-, 1:53 Woodhead, John Wildesen, Leslie, 2:270 Wilenski, E., 5:183 Jezreel, Tel, excavations, 3:246 Wilfong, Terry G., as contributor, 2:65-67; Lachish excavations, 3:317 4:195-196 Wool, 5:191, 195 Woolley, C. Leonard, 5:349-350 Wilken, Robert L., 4:228 Wilkinson, Sir John Gardner, 1:82; 3:68 Alalakh excavation, 1:55-59, 59-61; 5:350 Will, Ernest, 1:295; 3:55, 172-173; 4:242 'Amuq excavation, 1:116 Williams, Caroline Ransom, 1:356 Avdat excavation, 1:236 Williamson, Andrew, 3:80 Carchemish excavations, 1:423 Willies, Lynn, 3:283 Qadesh-Barnea, 4:365 Willis, Lloyd A., as contributor, 3:51-56 Ubaid excavations, 5:251, 252 Wilson, Charles William, 5:345-346 Ur excavations, 2:162; 3:59; 4:3; 5:193, 288, Capernaum, 1:417 289, 290, 350 Wooster College, 4:257 Chorazin, 1:491 Word processing, 2:57 Jerusalem survey, 3:225; 4:235; 5:345 Words of Ahiqar, 1:182 photography of, 4:332 Words of Moses, 2:122 Ras, Tell er-, 4:407 Words of the Luminaries, 2:123 Schick, Conrad, 4:497 World Archaeological Congress (WAC), 2:273 Wilson, John A., 1:356 World Archaeology (journal), 4:267 Wilson, Karen L., as contributor, 2:344 World Biblical Commentary, 4:416 Wilson, Robert McL., 4:419 World War II (1939-1945), 1:187 Wimmer, Donald, 4:449 Worrell, William H., 1:95 as contributor, 4:448-450 WorsaaeJ. J. A., 4:201 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 4:138 Worschech, Udo, 1:447 Winckler, Hugo, 1:333; 3:64 as contributor, 1:269-270 Windfuhr, Gemot L., os contributor, 3:149-158; Paris, Khirbet, survey, 2:306 4:292-295 Kerak, Wadi, 5:63 Wine. See Viticulture Wineland, John D., as contributor, 2:70; 5:56-57 Wbrterbuch der Aegyplischen Sprache, 1:356 Wright, Emily DeNyse, 5:351 Winged Lions Temple (Petra), 1:193; 4:304, Wright, George Ernest, 1:62, 89, 95, 96, 97, 305,306-307 315-316; 2:96; 5:350-352 Winged Victory of Samodirace, 3:74 Beth-Shemesh excavations, 1 : 3 1 1 , 3 1 2 Winkler, Hugo, 3:39 chronological ceramic typologies, 1:452, 459; Winnett, Frederick Victor, 2:133; 134; 4:464 5:346-347 comments on Glueck, Nelson, 2:416 Dibon excavations, 2:157-158 Gezer excavations, 2:396; 4:122 Jawa, 3:210 historical geography, 3:30 Tayma', 5:160 Shechem excavations, 5:21, 351 Tharnudic texts, 4:447; 5:346 Wright, G. R. H., 4:304 Winter, Irene J., 1:343 architectural plans for First Temple, 1:325 Wisconsin, University of. See University of as contributor, 1:363-367, 367-379; Wisconsin 4:424-427 Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary, 4:20 Wright, Henry T., Ill, 2:135 Wisdom literture. See Dead Sea Scrolls Wisdom of Solomon, 1:324 as contributor, 5:181-183 Wright, J. Edward, as contributor, 3:258-259 Wise, Michael O. as contributor, 2:118-127, 390-391; 4:64-65, Wright, Katherine I., as contributor, 5:37-38 Wright, Kay. See Prag, Kay 237-238;5:163-165 Wright, Robert B., as contributor, 4:331-336 Genesis Apocryphon, 2:391 Writing and writing systems, 5:352-358 Wiseman, Donald J., 1:56, 59 Akkadian, 1:45-46, 128, 232, 258 Wiseman, Elizabeth F., 2:458
552
INDEX
Writing and writing systems, continued alphabet, 1:75-79 Ammonite, 1:104, 105-106 Anatolian, 1:127 Arabic, 1:166-167, 168, 178, 182 Aramaic, 1:178, 182, 186-187; 5:355-356 Armenian, 1:208 Babylonian, 1:260, 261 Canaanite, 1:412-413 decipherment, 2:130 Egyptian, 2:209-210; 5:355 Elamite, 2:229 Elhiopic, 2:279 Greek, 1:77-78 Hebrew, 3:6-7 Hittite, 1:128 Korean, 5:353, 354 Latin, 3:334 logosyllabaries, 5:353, 354-355 Mandaic, 3:410 origins of, 3:158-159, 362; 5:352-353 paleography, 2:88; 5:356-357 Persian, 4:294 Phoenician, 3:310-312 South Arabian, 5:61 Sumerian, 1:258 typology, 5:353-354 Ugaritic, 5:262 urbanization and, 2:19 uses of, 3:364 See also Cuneiform; Hieroglyphs; Inscriptions; Literacy Writing materials, 3:159; 5:358-361 Ammonite inscriptions, 1:105 animal substances, 5:360-361 archival collections and, 3:352-353 clay, 5:358 ink, 5:358-359 Mesopotamian, 3:159, 362, 485 metal, 5:358 photography of, 4:336-347 stone, 5:358 vegetal substances, 5:359-360 West Semitic alphabet and, 1:76 See also Papyrus; Parchment; Tablet Writings (Hebrew Scripture), 1:320, 321 Writings from Ancient Israel: A Handbook of Historical and Religious Documents (Smelik), 4:415 Wud, 4:372 Wulzinger, Karl, 5:333 Wylie, Alison, 2:281 X Xacatryan, T. S., 1:204 Xanthoudides, Stephanos, 3:75 Xella, Paolo, as contributor, 3:424-425 Xenia Theological Seminary, 1:295 Xenokrates, 1:224 Xenophon, 1:205; 2:328 Xerxes, 1:70, 219; 4:297 Babylon, 1:255; 2:327 Persepolis constructions, 4:276-277 Xiphilinus, 1:275 X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD), 1:120-121; 5:363 tin processing, 2:425 vitreous materials identification, 5:306 X-rayfluorescence(XRF), 5:68 X-ray photography, 4:334-335
Y Yaa, 4:181 Yaba, 4:143 Yabis, Wadi el-, 5:227, 365-367 Yableam, waterworks, 3:130 Yabrudian industry, 3:372; 4:208 Yadin, Yigael, 1:30, 238, 289, 290; 3:48; 5:367-368 Beth-Shean excavations, 1:306 on chariots, 5:337 on composite bows, 5:336 'Ein-Gedi survey, 2:222 fortifications, 2:321, 325 Genesis Apocryphon, 2:391 Gerisa, Tel, excavations, 2:394 on Gezer fortifications, 2:399 Hazor excavations, 3:1-4; 5:367 Ira, Tel, identification of, 3:175 on Lachish letters, 3:322 Masada excavations, 2:119; 3:428-430; 4:430; 5:367 Megiddo, 3:461, 464, 465, 467; 5:367 Samaria Ostraca, 4:468 Temple Scroll, 5:163, 164 War Scroll, 5:331 Yadnana. See Cyprus Yafa'am House (Timna'), 5:215 Yafash House (Timna'), 5:215 Yaghnobi (language), 3:150; 4:294 Yahan. See Bit-Agusi Yahud, Khirbet. See Qumran Yahudiyeh, Tell el-, 1:313; 3:134, 135; 5:368-369 Jewish settlement, 3:185 pottery, 5:368, 369 synagogue, 2:422; 5:369 Yahweh Asherah and, 2:80, 83; 4:391-392 bull symbol, 1:384 as creator, 2:80 divine councils, 2:80-81 Edom, 2:190 First Temple, 1:326, 327 "of Samaria," 3:311-312 priesthood of, 2:85 pronunciation of, 2:215 sacrifices to, 2:84 Yahweh Alone Party, 4:465 Yahya. See Tepe Yahya Yakar, Jak, 3:66 as contributor, 2:448-449; 3:63-67, 303-304 Yakto, 5:139 Yala, Wadi, 3:292 Yale University Abydos expeditions, 1:12 Dura-Europos excavations, 2:174 Jerash excavations, 3:215 Yahkavak wreck, 5:283 Yamamah, al-, 1:165 Yaman. See Ionia Yamhad. See Aleppo Yamm, 1:413; 2:82 Yamma, Khirbet, 5:380 Yankelevitch, Shalom, 4:462 Yaramu, 5:369 Yardeni, Ada, 2:217 Yarhibol, 4:243 Yarih, 2:80 Yarih-Ezer, 1:104 Yanmburgaz, 1:125
Yarimlim. See Alalakh Yarim Tepe, 1:454; 2:484 Yarkon River and springs, 1:147, 149; 3:132 Yarmouk University, 1:7, 36 Deir 'Alia, Tell, excavations, 2:137 Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-, excavations, 5:388 Yarmuk, battle of (636 CE), 1:247; 5:142 Yarmuk, Khirbet el-. See Yarmut, Tel Yarmuldan culture, 4:211, 269 Ghrubba, 2:403 Munhata, 4:63-64 Sha'a'r ha-Golan, 5:12-13 Transjordan, 5:228 Yarmuk University, 3:56 Yarmut, Tel (Khirbet el-Yarmuk), 1:243; 5:369-372 fortifications, 2:321, 322, 323; 4:213, 214; 5:371 houses, 3:100 palace, 4:197, 359 plan of, 5:370 size of, 2:20 Yashkur, Jabal, 2:366 Yassiada (Lodo) wrecks, 5:283, 372-374 iron anchor, 1:139 underwater archaeology, 5:283 Yassihoyiik. See Citadel Mound Yassine, Khair N , 2:402; 3:443 as contributor, 3:443-444 Nimrin, Tell, excavations, 4:140 Yathrib. See Medina Yavne'el, 5:379-380 Yavne'el Valley, 1:301 Yavneh-Yam (Jamnia; Mahu Yubna; Miner Rubin), 2:22; 5:374-375 fortifications, 2:323, 324; 5:374 inscription, 4:225 Yazdigird I, 4:289, 493 Yazdigird II, 1:209 Yazdigird III, 2:48; 4:493 Yazihkaya rock sanctuary, 1:129; 3:128 Yeb. See Elephantine Yediot: Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, 3:191 Yegtil, Fikret, 1:285 Yehawmilk, 1:392 Yehawmilk inscription (Byblos), 4:323 Yeivin, Ephrat, 2:256 Yeivin, Shmuel, 1:243; 5:375 Caesarea, 1:402 'Erani, Tel, excavations, 2:256, 257; 5:375 Israel Antiquities Authority, 3:189 Yeivin, Zeev Chorazin surveys, 1:491 Dan excavations, 2:108 Jerusalem survey, 5:104 Susiya excavations, 5:111 Yelkhi, Tell, 2:473 Yellin, David, 3:190 Yellin, Joseph, as contributor, 4:130 Yemen, 5:375-378 Aden, 1:15-16 American Institute for Yemeni Studies, 1:90 archaeological nationalism, 4:108 geography of, 5:375-376 mining, 1:4 Phillips (Wendell) expedition, 4:313 prehistoric remains, 1:159; 5:376, 377 pre-Islamic culture, 1:160, 161-162; 5:376-377 Salah ad-Din's conquest of, 1:241 Umayyad period, 1:165, 166
INDEX Yemen Update (publication), 1:90 Yener, K. Ashhan as contributor, 2:424-426; 3:283-285; 5:155-156 GSltepe excavations, 2:424 Kestel tin mine, 3:283 Taurus Mountains surveys, 5:156 Yeno'am, 5:380 Yeroham, 3:101, 188 Yiddish (language), 1:178 Yiftahel, 1:23; 5:378-379 Yigal'Allon Center, 2:377 Yin'am, Tel (Tell en-Na'am), 5:379-381 Yith"amara, 1:162 Yizraeli-Noy, Tamar, 4:89 Yoab, 2:80 Yodefat. See Jotapata Yodpat, 3:251 Yohanan (rabbi), 5:204 Yon, Marguerite as contributor, 2:344-346; 3:301-303; 5:79-82, 255-262 Bamboula excavations, 3:301 Ugarit excavations, 5:257 on Ugaritic insula, 3:104 Yoqne'am (Tell Qeimun), 4:387, 388; 5:381-383 Archaeological Survey of Israel, 5:104 waterworks, 3:130 Yoqne'am Regional Project, 4:387; 5:381 Yorgan Tepe. See Nuzi Yorke, Vincent, 4:476 Yotva, 3:251 Young, G. Douglas, 3:172 Young, Rodney S., 2:427-428, 430 Young, T. Cuyler, Jr. as contributor, 2:416-417; 3:448-450; 4:295-300 Godin Tepe excavations, 2:229, 416 Hajji Firuz, 2:458, 459 Young, Thomas, 1:485 Youttie, PI. C , 3:366 Yovhannes V Drasxanakertc'i, 1:210 Yurza. See Jemmeh, Tell Yutil el-Hasa, 2:478
Z
Za'arta, fortifications, 2:418 Zababa, 1:53; 3:299 Zabadi, weight press, 4:180 Zabaya, 3:430 Zabid, 1:90; 5:385-386 Zab River, 1 : 1 ; 5:15 Zachos, Kostas, 3:76 Zadok (sons of), 2:106 Zadok, Ran, as contributor, 4:91-96 Zadokile Fragments. See Damascus Document Zafar (Sapphar; Tapharon), 1:162; 3:27, 78; 5:386-387 Zagros Mountains, 1:23, 75; 2:228-229 Neolithic communities, 4:279 sheep and goats, 5:24 Zakariya, Tell. See 'Azekah Zakkur, 1:181; 2:468; 5:133, 387 Zakkur inscription, 5:387-388 Zakros, 3:75 Zalabeh, fortifications, 2:418 Zangezur, 1:205 Zangids, 1:241, 242; 5:242 Zanj revolt (868-883), 1 : 1 , 4; 5:144
Zapheiropoulos, Nikos, 3:76 Zaragoza, 2:35 Zarehawan, 1:205 Zarephath. See Sarepta Zarethan, 4:452 Zarins, Juris as contributor, 2:287-290; 4:90-91, 184-187; 5:57-58, 252-254 Najran, 4:90 Transarabian Expedition, 4:184; 5:253 Zariqum, 1:226 Zarisat, 1:205 Zarzi cave, 5:15 Zas cave, 3:76 Zawi Chemi, 1:141; 5:15 Zayadine, Fawzi, 1:447 as contributor, 3:177-181 Petra excavations, 3:55 Tannur, Khirbet et-, 5:155 Zayd ibn 'Amr, 5:279 ZDPV. See Zeitschrifl des Deuischcn PalastinaVereins Zealots Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:126 First Jewish Revolt, 2:313, 314; 3:143 Zebu. See Cattle and oxen Zechariah, tomb of, 1:192; 2:347, 349; 3:442 Zeder, Melinda A., as contributor, 5:23-25 Ze'evim, Tel, 5:105 Zeist, Willem van, 2:37 Zeitan, Wadi, 5:89 Zeitschrifl der Deuischcn Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (journal), 4:266 Zeitschrifl des Deuischcn Paldstina-Vereins (ZDPV) (journal), 4:264 Zeitschrifl fur Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archaologie (journal), 4:264 Zeitschrifl fur die Altlestamenlliche Wissenschaft, 4:418 Zemel, Horvat, 2:421 Zendan-i Suleiman (Pasargadae), 4:252 Zeno (architect), 5:200 Zenobia (queen), 2:203; 4:241 Zenobia on the Euphrates, 2:333 Zenon papyri, 4:224 Zephath, 3:175 Zeralda (Tipasa), 4:162 Zeraqun, Khirbet ez-, 2:405; 5:231-232, 388-389 Zeribar. See Lake Zeribar Zeror, Tel (Khirbet et-Tell Dhurur), 5:389-390 fortifications, 2:324 jar burials, 3:207 Zerqa, Wadi, 1:36-38, 100, 104 Zertal, Adam as contributor, 2:179-180; 4:164-166 Ebal, Mount, 2:179 Manasseh, Mount, survey, 4:164 Zerubbabel Temple (Jerusalem). See Second Temple Zettler, Richard L., as contributor, 2:258-260; 3:26-27; 4:148-152, 302-303 Zeus, 2:46 Apamea sanctuary, 5:140 Cilician temple, 1:132 Jerash temple, 1:190; 2:60; 3:215-216 Leto and, 2:159 Pergamon altar, 4:260, 261 Ras, Tell er-, temple, 4:408 Zeus-Ammon, 1:70 Zeus Baradates, 4:486 Zeus Hammon, 1:352 Zeus Kasion, 5:44
553
Zeus Kyrios, 2:174 Zeus Kydmios, 3:76 Zeus Megistos, 2:174 Zeus Savior, 2:297 Zeus Theos, 2:174 Zevit, Ziony, as contributor, 2:440-441 Zheir,TeU, 5:111 Zias, Joseph, as contributor, 4:205-206 Ziggurat, 5:390-391 'Aqar Quf, 1:156 Assur, 1:226, 227, 228; 3:270 Assyrians, 1:226, 227, 228, 231; 3:270; 5:390-391 Chogha Zanbil, 1:487-488 Mesopotamia, 1:254, 261; 5:168, 288, 294, 296, 390, 391 Ur, 5:289, 291 Ziklag, 1:149; 3:325; 5:1 Zimansky, Paul E., 1:34 as contributor, 5:291-294 on tokens as early recording system, 5:352 Zimhoni, Orna, 3:317 Zimmerman, Larry J., as contributor, 2:269-273 Zimmermann, Carl Ferdinand, 2:147 Zimrilim, 1:56; 3:420, 421 Zincirli. See Sam'al Zion, Mount, 2:342 Zionism archaeological nationalism, 4:107 Hebrew language, 3:12 Zippori. See Sepphoris Ziqlab, Wadi, 5:228-229, 391-392 Zither, 4:78 Zivie, Alain, 4:480 Zivie-Coche, Christiane, as contributor, 2:409-412 Ziyad ibn Aflah, 1:349 Zoar, 5:63-64 Zobah, 5:133 Zodiac, in synagogue mosaics, 1:299; 4:54; 5:111, 115, 121 Zohar, Mattanyah, 2:167-168 Zohary, Michael, 4:418 Zoilos, C.Julius, 1:152 Zondcwan NJV Atlas of the Bible (Rasmussen), 4:416 Zoology. See Ethnozoology; Paleozoolagy Zor, ez-, 3:248 Zora, Wadi, 4:35 Zorn, Jeffrey R., as contributor, 1:262; 4:101-103 Zoroaster, 4:299 Zoroastrianism, 1:208, 209; 4:299 purity laws of, 3:453-454 Sasanian dynasty and, 2:48; 4:289, 493 temples of, 2:36 Zoskales, 1:16 Zournatzi, Antigoni, as contributor, 1:330-331 Zschietzschmann, Willy, 1:143 Zuartnoc' (Zvart'nots), 1:206; 3:426 Zubaydah (queen), 2:112, 113 Zubaydi, Tell, 2:473 Zuckerman, Bruce, 2:391 as contributor, 4:336-347 Zuckerman, Kenneth, as contributor, 4:336-347 Zughar, 5:64 Zulkadir Ogullari, 1:335 Zurghul (Nina-Sirara), 2:406, 409 Zurich, University of. See University of Zurich Zurvanism, 4:493 Zuttiyeh cave, 4:208; 5:246 Zvart'nots, church, 3:426 Zygouries, 1:332